microsoft word clarkin-phillips, jeanette book review (ana's layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.45 | vol. 1 (2013) b7     dialogue-based teaching: the art museum as a learning space jeanette clarkin-phillips the university of waikato, new zealand abstract book review: olga dysthe, nana bernhardt & line esbjørn (2013). dialogue-based teaching. the art museum as a learning space. copenhagen, denmark: skoletjenesten. dialogue-based teaching: the art museum as learning space by authors dysthe, bernhardt and esbjørn opens up opportunities for museum educators, in particular, to engage with ideas based on dialogue –based teaching. using concepts from a range of dialogic theorists, case studies of teaching sequences in seven different museums are presented and analysed. the purpose of the book is to promote good teaching practice and encourage the use of museums and art galleries as alternative learning spaces for promoting citizenship. not being particularly familiar with dialogic theories and philosophies, i found the outlining of the significant contributors to this field near the outset was helpful, as was the description of the common or central concepts identified by the research that exemplified dialogic conversations. using martin nystrand’s dialogic concept of authentic questions and uptake as well as dysthe’s multivoicedness the authors show how these concepts can provide rich learning opportunities in the museum space. the most telling comment in the book, for me was “dialogue-based teaching functions as well as it does even though it is subject to the limitations of a museum visit” (p.189). even though this comment was in relation to a specific case study it illustrates the careful and thorough description and analysis of the seven case studies. there is no attempt to sanitise what happens in the interactions between museum educators and students but highlights the dialogue-based strategies employed by the educator to maximise the opportunities despite the constraints of the context. the case studies demonstrate the potential of dialogue to engage students in learning, solicit responses and conscript participation in a situation that is time bound and contextually foreign to many of the students. although as classroom teachers or teachers in early childhood centres we may have multitude opportunities throughout the day to dialogue with children and in many respects may be in an almost ideal situation to employ dialogic practices, the museum visit requires skilled educators to develop a dialogic relationship with students. research carried out by myself and a colleague with preschool children and their teachers developing a relationship with a museum, has found that it is the dialogue and reciprocal listening and issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogue-based teaching: the art museum as a learning space jeanette clarkin-phillips dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/ dpj.2013.45 | vol. 1 (2013) b8 conversing between teacher and children that provides the opportunities for meaning-making, expressing ideas and taking others’ points of view (carr, clarkin-phillips, beer, thomas & waitai, 2012). these conversations make interesting and unpredictable deviations depending on the working theories of the young children but it is the skill of the teacher that allows for dialogue to continue rather than hijacking the children’s interest. this tension is highlighted in the book in the discussion about time constraints, student’s familiarity with the context and preparedness for the visit as well as the purpose of the visit. the last chapter of the book was significant in allaying my unease about how the case studies might be useful for further dialogue amongst a range of educators. in its provision of recommendations for dialogue-based teaching there is the potential for the future dialogue about the nature, structure and characteristics of such an approach to teaching. it may be that some supporters of dialogic pedagogy would disregard the inclusion of multi-modal forms of expression in favour of a purist view of ‘conversation’ as dialogue. this is worth further debate. this book has much to offer museum educators and teachers who are committed to dialoguebased pedagogies offering a range of examples for practice and discussion. the book is a useful reminder of the power of dialogue to engage, stimulate curiosity and creativity while providing authentic opportunities for the multivoicedness of a group to be heard. for those educators who may be unfamiliar with the concepts and theories of dialogue-based teaching and their relationship to citizenship, this book is a worthwhile resource for developing an understanding of both theory and practice. in outlining the power of dialogue-based teaching within the museum as a learning space for students, i wondered how this approach might be employed generally in the museum to enhance the public’s interactions with the museum. i am left with the question: how might dialogue be encouraged in a public space to enhance democratic citizenship and create opportunities for listening to other’s perspectives? articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84 | vol. 2 (2014) s1 education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter theses in english and russian, long-distance video conference 1 and 2 (тезисы на английском и на русском, дистанционные видео конференции 1 и 2) alexander lobok doctor of psychology, professor, department of general psychology, ural state pedagogical university, yekaterinburg, russia александр лобок, доктор психологических наук, профессор кафедры общей психологии уральского государственного педагогического университета, г. екатеринбург abstract experience is something which cannot be received like knowledge from someone else. experience is what you live through yourself. therefore experience is something that belongs only to the person him/herself. it is his/her absolutely individual and irreplaceable testament to reality. every person without exception has his/her absolutely unique experience of the encounter with culture (= experience of education/obrazovanie). the multiple trajectories of this inner experience are the most profound and significant result of the educational process. and the increase in the diversity of such trajectories of inner experience can be seen as a key indicator of what we call the quality of education/obrazovanie. video 1 https://vimeo.com/88029209 video 2 https://vimeo.com/88032506 “the dialogic meeting of two consciousnesses in the human sciences [and education/obrazovanie].” bakhtin (1986, p.123) 1. the russian term for education, obrazovanie, is literally a process of forming a new reality, a new entity. it is precisely in this sense that we talk about the formation of mountains, continents, planets… but also with regard to the formation of a person, i.e., education. the education/obrazovanie of a person is the formation of his/her personality, his/her “i”, his/her individuality in relation to culture. thanks to the process of education/obrazovanie a person discovers the ability to see and feel the pulsation of his/her “i”, his/her individuality within the dimension of one or another culture. not “to appropriate culture” (culture, fortunately, cannot be “appropriated” or “acquired”), but to discover oneself in relation to a culture. and this means to enter into a dialogue with the culture. not to subordinate oneself to a culture, not to reproduce a culture, but to build relations of partnership with a culture. such is the nature of encounter. 2. an educated (obrazovanny, formed) person is one who has established him/herself as an individual personality within the dimensions of a given culture or cultures. this is a person who has had an encounter with the given culture in one way or another. in other words, an educated person is one who has acquired the ability to enter into a dialogue with culture (as a different subjectivity/agency). the experience of encounter is nothing more than the experience of issn: 2325-3290 (online) https://vimeo.com/88029209 https://vimeo.com/88032506 education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter alexander lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84 | vol. 2 (2014) s2 dialogue, i.e., experience of the distance at which two subjectivities/agencies are being cultivated: the subjectivity/agency of a person and the subjectivity/agency of culture. an educated (obrazovanny, formed) person is not one who tries to identify with the culture, in which [s]he is immersing, not one who subordinates him/herself to the culture, not one who reproduces the culture, not one who acquires the culture, but one who tries to create a certain self-distance from the culture which [s]he is entering into dialogue with. that is why an encounter with the culture becomes for him/her a condition for the development of his/her self, his/her personality. but, on the other hand, an encounter with each individual self becomes significant for the culture as well. it is because the culture encounters a multitude of personal worlds that the culture stays alive and, in each of these worlds, is refracted in its own way. the culture remains alive through the diversity of the personal mirrors in which it is reflected; the greater the number of such personal mirrors, the more voluminous and productive is the life of the culture. 3. the education, obrazovanie, (or formation) of a person always involves experience. it is experience in existentially living through (prozhivanie) those “formational conditions” (i.e., “educational conditions”) in which a person turns out to be placed. adults think that the point of education is to “teach” a child something. or to create conditions for him/her to “learn” something. however, in actual fact the “dry residue” of the educational movement (and, in this sense, the real result of the educational movement) does not in any way involve what the child “has learned” (not, at least, in the sense of mastering or acquiring as a result of any initiatives). rather, it comprises what existential experience of living in the world of education/obrazovanie he has been through what experience in venturing beyond the limits of cognition of his/her own self, essence or identity. of course, education/obrazovanie is the experience whereby a person constructs his/her “cultural body”, his/her “cultural shell”. but at the same time – and this is possibly the main point of education/obrazovanie – it involves experience of existentially inhabiting one’s cultural body in the process of its formation, experience of enduring the profound conflict between the uneducated self and the educated self, experience of discovering one’s self within the dimensions of the educational (obrazovatel’ny, forming) process under way, and experience of reflecting oneself in this process of personal educational (obrazovatel’ny, forming) development. 4. experience is something which cannot be received like knowledge from someone else. experience is what you live through yourself. therefore experience is something that belongs only to the person him/herself. it is his/her absolutely individual and irreplaceable testament to reality. every person without exception has his/her absolutely unique experience of the encounter with culture (= experience of education/obrazovanie). the multiple trajectories of this inner experience are the most profound and significant result of the educational process. and the increase in the diversity of such trajectories of inner experience can be seen as a key indicator of what we call the quality of education/obrazovanie. translated from russian by david foreman, university of waikato, new zealand edited in english by eugene matusov, university of delaware, usa and mikhail gradovski, university college of telemark, norway education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter alexander lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84 | vol. 2 (2014) s3 образование как опыт встречи «диалогическая встреча двух сознаний в гуманитарных науках [и в образовании].», м.м. бахтин, «к методологии гуманитарных наук» 1. образование – это процесс формирования некоей новой реальности, некоей новой сущности. именно в этом смысле мы говорим об образовании гор, материков, планет… но и об образовании человека тоже. образование человека – это образование его личности, его я, его индивидуальности по отношению к культуре. благодаря процессу образования человек обнаруживает способность увидеть и почувствовать пульсацию своего я, своей индивидуальности в пространстве той или иной культуры. не «присвоить культуру» (культуру, к счастью, «присвоить» нельзя) но обнаружить себя по отношению к культуре. а это значит – вступить с культурой в диалог. не подчинить себя культуре, но построить с культурой партнерские отношения. это и есть состояние встречи, 2. «образованный человек» это человек, который состоялся как личность в пространстве той или иной культуры, тех или иных культур. это человек, который в той или иной мере встретился с культурой. это значит, что образованный человек – это человек, который обрел способность вступить с культурой (как иной субъектностью) в некий диалог. опыт встречи – это именно опыт диалога. то есть опыт дистанции, на которой возделываются две субъектности: субъектность человека и субъектность культуры. образованный человек – это не человек, который пытается отождествиться с культурой, в которую он погружается, не человек, который подчиняет себя культуре, но человек, который пытается простроить некую я-дистанцию с той культурой, с которой он вступает в диалог. именно потому встреча с культурой оказывается для него условием развития его я, его персональности. но, с другой стороны, и для культуры оказывается значимой встреча со всяким отдельным я. культура жива именно тем, что она встречается с множеством личностных миров, и в каждом из этих миров преломляется посвоему. культура жива многообразием личностных зеркал, в которых она отражается, и чем больше такого рода личностных зеркал, тем объемнее и продуктивнее жизнь культуры. 3. образование человека – это всегда опыт. опыт экзистенциального проживания тех «образовательных условий», в которые оказывается поставлен человек. взрослые думают, что смысл образования заключается в том, чтобы ребенка чему-то «научить». либо создать условия для того, чтобы он чему-то «научился». однако на самом деле «сухой остаток» образовательного движения (и, в этом смысле, истинный результат образовательного движения) заключается вовсе не в том, чему ребенок «научился» (то есть не в том, что он освоил или усвоил в результате чьих бы то ни было инициатив), но в том, какой экзистенциальный опыт проживания себя в мире образования он осуществил. какой опыт выхода на пределы осознания своего я, своей сущности, своей «самости». конечно, образование – это опыт строительства человеком своего «культурного тела», строительства своей «культурной оболочки». но одновременно с этим – и, возможно, это и есть самое главное в образовании – это опыт экзистенциального проживания своего становящегося культурного тела, опыт проживания глубинного конфликта себя-необразованного с собой-образованным, опыт обнаружения своего я в пространстве происходящего образования и опыт рефлексии себя в этом процессе своего образовательного развития. опыт – это то, что нельзя получить как знание от кого-то другого. 4. опыт – это то, что ты проживаешь ты сам. поэтому опыт – это то, что принадлежит только самому человеку. это его абсолютно индивидуальное и незаёмное проживание реальности. у каждого без исключения человека свой, абсолютно уникальный опыт встречи с культурой (=опыт education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter alexander lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84 | vol. 2 (2014) s4 образования). множество траекторий этих внутренних опытов – это и есть наиболее глубокий и значительный результат образовательного процесса. а увеличение многообразия такого рода траекторий внутреннего опыта можно рассматривать как ключевой показатель того, что мы называем качеством образования. articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter alexander lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84 | vol. 2 (2014) s5 long-distance video conference#1 the bakhtinian international conference, hopuhopu, new zealand, january 15, 2014 participants: alexander lobok (presenter, from yekaterinburg, russia), eugene matusov (usa, interpreter), pam harding (chair, new zealand), mikhail gradovski (norway), jeremy (jay) kedian (new zealand), craig brandist (uk), theodor taptiklis (new zealand). duration: 01:26:01 video 3 https://vimeo.com/88029209 (click to watch) long-distance video conference#2 university of waikato, hamilton, new zealand, february 12, 2014 participants: alexander lobok (presenter, from yekaterinburg, russia), eugene matusov (usa, interpreter), pam harding (new zealand), jeremy (jay) kedian (new zealand), richard heraud (new zealand), theodor taptiklis (new zealand), charles bisley (new zealand), jayne white (new zealand), ana marjanovic-shane (usa, from philadelphia). video 4 https://vimeo.com/88032506 (click to watch) https://vimeo.com/88029209 https://vimeo.com/88032506 https://vimeo.com/88029209 https://vimeo.com/88032506 microsoft word ferholt bakhtin for preschool teachers (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.162 | vol. 3 (2015) r6 bakhtin for preschool teachers beth ferholt brooklyn college, city university of new york, usa abstract book review: white, e. j. (2015). introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years: routledge. i am impressed by the depth of white’s understanding of bakhtin’s work and by her innovated uses of bakhtinian concepts such as answerability, becoming, aesthetics, authorship and polyphony. white’s book represents a very important effort to bring these concepts to early childhood education practitioners. in this review i discuss white’s ways of making these bakhtinian concepts accessible to ece teachers and i provide the necessary context for appreciating the significance of white’s contribution. keywords early childhood education, dialogue, bakhtinian concepts beth ferholt is an assistant professor in the department of early childhood and art education at brooklyn college, city university of new york. her areas of research broadly stated are development, learning and imagination. her research builds upon the tradition of cultural-historical activity theories. consistent foci of her research include the methodological project of challenging the divide between method and object in conventional social science; playworlds; the concept of perezhivanie, which is useful in challenging divides between emotion and cognition, and individual and environment; and practices of early childhood education in which children are understood as culture and knowledge creators. ��� e. jayne white’s introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years takes on the ambitious task of making theoretically dense and complicated written material accessible to a group of professionals who, in many countries, are not required to have attained a bachelors degree to pursue their profession.1 white’s book has, for the most part, accomplished this difficult task, and because of this achievement it may become a staple of many early childhood education programs. however, as white points out in her conclusion to the book, the proof of the book’s success will be the dialogue it sparks among its intended audience. if a rich dialogue, which shows that preschool teachers find bakhtin’s ideas 1 whatever the uses of studying for a bachelors degree, preparation for, participation in and completion of a bachelors degree program increases and/or raises the probability of one having various reading competencies. issn: 2325-3290 (online) bakhtin for preschool teachers beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.162 | vol. 3 (2015) r7 to be useful as they develop their practice, is generated, then white will have made an extremely important contribution to the field. white has taken the innovative step of providing a website for this anticipated dialogue2, and also promising her online presence on this website. my guess is that the majority of the teachers and students of early childhood education who read this book will not be intimidated by the material that white’s book presents, in part because of the varied modes through which this material is presented. therefore, i do not expect to see a list of questions for dr. white, the authority, on this website. instead, when i join this online discussion in the coming months and years, what i will be looking for is the ways in which the readers of this book are engaging with those of white’s arguments that are potentially most disruptive to the status quo in the field. i will be focusing particularly on the posts that engage white’s discussion of love in early childhood education, and her innovative use of video cameras and footage. i am impressed by the depth of white’s understanding of bakhtin’s work as well as by her innovated uses of several of bakhtin’s concepts (i.e. answerability, becoming, aesthetics, authorship and polyphony). from the perspective of early childhood education, white’s bringing bakhtin to early childhood teachers in the form of a book falls within a larger effort to create/recreate, or at least define and support, the field of early childhood education. this is a very important effort and i will discuss it briefly and broadly, below, in order to provide the necessary context for appreciating the significance of white’s contribution. the care and education of young children is often treated as an activity that most adults could do well with minimal training. this is in part because early childhood education appears to many people to be closely related to parenting, something that most adults, or at least most women (in many cultures), do, and for which little or no formal academic training is provided. however, any parent who has worked as a preschool teacher understands that while parenting is difficult and the rights of children within their families of origin must be protected, early childhood teaching requires a calling, intense education and ample experience. being a preschool teacher is as closely related to parenting as being a doctor is to giving someone cpr on the street. in one you develop within an art that includes science, craft and particularly constructed and supported systems of thought and action. in the other you do your best at the time because you are sharing the street with a fellow human being and have found time to learn a few necessary skills. white has made an important contribution to the work of creating a significant body of literature for early childhood teachers, with this book. all around the world preschool teachers are working in innovative ways, sharing knowledge of the field through practice with other teachers, and reflecting upon and theorizing their work with young children. in only a few nations are preschool teachers given sufficient resources to educate themselves using written texts. the work of creating a rich, diverse, current and relevant body of english language literature for early childhood teachers and teachers in training (one such as exists in swedish, for instance) goes hand and hand with all of the other aspects of the effort to give early childhood teachers the resources that they need to care for, raise and educate the next generation of human beings: living wages, reasonable benefits, workable hours, environments that are designed by early childhood teachers, sufficient teacher-to-student ratios, sufficient professional development, checks and balances in preschool administration, etc. white organizes her book into two prongs, first working from dialogic pedagogy and then addressing dialogic pedagogy to early childhood education. she begins with the life of bakhtin and his 2 https://education.waikato.ac.nz/dialogicpedagogy/ bakhtin for preschool teachers beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.162 | vol. 3 (2015) r8 “overarching theory of dialogism” (p. 12), characterizing his original orientation as being “towards a philosophy of human development” (p. 12). she includes in her initial discussion of bakhtin’s work introductions to his “informants” and influences, and to what she identifies as the key principles of dialogism: answerability, becoming, aesthetics, authorship and polyphony. white also grounds her readers in bakhtin’s “five strategies for a dialogic interrogation of language events” (p. 24): utterance, speech genre, chronotope, visual surplus and heteroglossia. from this first chapter on, white engages her readers by representing the abstract concepts that she presents using video footage on a companion website, and through questions about the footage which she asks of the reader/viewer. this video footage is in a form white calls “polyphonic video,” which is usually “time-synchronized split-screens to convey the multiple visual standpoints of each event” (p. 6). footage is often collected, in part, using small cameras strapped to adults and children’s foreheads, a method that i have never heard of before being introduced to white’s work and that may prove to be useful for other areas of research in the field. for instance, this method might be useful in the study of environments and materials in the early childhood classroom. there is, of course, the danger that this method could lead people to believe that they are able to “see” from a child or teacher’s point of view. white next provides an overview of dialogic pedagogy. this includes a list of the principles of dialogic pedagogy. coming as this does before examples are provided, this list is useful to refer back to as one reads the rest of the book. dialogic pedagogy in the early years is white’s next focus. here white questions the role of pedagogy in early childhood education and discusses “loving contemplation” (p. 55, see sullivan and mccarthy, 2003), “a serious act of lovingly lingering with another” (p. 55). the nuances and exciting prospects of bringing the concept of dialogic pedagogy to the field of early childhood education begin to become apparent in this chapter, and this momentum carries us to what i consider to be the heart of the book, in the next chapter, titled “teaching with love.” in this chapter white writes of bakhtin’s theory of (aesthetic) love in relation to the idea that when a teacher enters into a relationship, love can be conceptualized as a value. two extremes are to be avoided in the relationship: the first, to mould the child into an image of the self … or a desirable outcome … ; the second to adopt an impartial stance that professes to have no evaluative opinion … . if neither extreme is advised, what is the adult to do within intimate relationships that characterize early years pedagogy (even if they are not always acknowledged)? it is here where bakhtin’s janus-like attention to language and its meaning takes centre stage – reminding us to recognize and embrace the impact we have on others as creative potential. (pp. 76-77) following bakhtin allows white to challenge the taboo against discussing love within the field of early childhood education, a discussion that, she claims, is fully accepted in disciplines such as religion and philosophy. although she does not support this claim extensively, i suspect that she is correct. in her discussion of “teaching with love” white adds an important perspective to the small body of literature discussing love and early childhood education. neither noddings (2010) nor work that uses levinas is sufficient, white explains. instead, white argues, bakhtin offers us love as a deed not an emotion and, furthermore, gives us tools with which we can view early childhood teachers in two interrelated ways: as an intimate partner in the life of the child; and as having an evaluative distance from the child “in order to separate one’s own consciousness from theirs” (p. 103). again, white gives us many examples to illustrate her points, using descriptive text, stills and video. bakhtin for preschool teachers beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.162 | vol. 3 (2015) r9 next white addresses play. she argues that play is a special kind of postupok, a postupok being “an action or act that i myself choose to perform and am responsible for” (p. 174). this concept, as it is presented here, does not take us far in understanding play’s specialness within the larger category of postupok, although this work is presented in more depth elsewhere in white’s work (marjanovic-shane and white, 2014). however, it is wonderful to have ana marjanovic-shane’s (2011) use of the concept of chronotope brought to early childhood teachers in this chapter. marjanovic-shane (2011) identifies four chronotopes of play: the reality chronotope, the imaginary chronotope, the community of players chronotope, and the audience chronotope. these four chronotopes of play push those of us who think about play to challenge many assumptions that are prevalent in the study of play. white uses the audience chronotope to discuss an audience of teachers versus an audience of peers chronotope. the final chapters of the book concern laughter and accountability. the first, laughter, white identifies as a special kind of playfulness. she writes of the carnivalesque in the early childhood classroom and the dialogic loophole: “ … the retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final, meaning of one’s words” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 233 as quoted by white on p. 143). as for accountability, white writes that it is when addressing this topic that she is most profoundly challenging early childhood teachers who “espouse ‘communities of practice’ and naïve forms of ‘democracy’ based on one cultural standpoint as a sole means of creating harmony at the centre of their pedagogy” (p. 163). it will be very interesting to see on the companion website if teachers agree that this is a significant challenge to their thinking about democracy, which is central to most early childhood education. white leaves us with a final chapter that brings to the fore the scope of her book’s goal. the book attempts to capture much of bakhtin’s work and present it coherently, accurately and in less than two hundred pages for people who will likely not read much of the original text. the book attempts to do all this while introducing bakhtinian concepts to early childhood education, thus challenging the field. white leaves her reader with a concise summary of “dialogic pedagogy in the early years” which includes the following points: “dialogue is learning”; “teaching is a dialogic imperative”; “teachers are the curriculum”; “pedagogy is an appreciative process”; “pedagogy is interactive, responsive and oriented toward other”; “children are the author of their own learning”; “meaning is never fixed”; “learning is a transgradient process”; “ideology underpins practice”; “pedagogy can now speak boldly of love!” (pp. 169-170). however, this book strives for more. white concludes with the thought that not only are there “no better principles and practices for teachers to acquire than these” (p. 170) (listed above), but also that these are “qualities through which we might live life to its fullest extent” (p. 170). she refers to bakhtin’s use of the term lebensphilosophie, philosophy of life, in this context. early childhood teachers are not parenting but they are working daily, in and out of each hour and across a year or years, to co-create new human beings with the children who are being created. the thought that these teachers might benefit from reading about lebensphilosophie as well as about development is long overdue. preschool teachers do not, after all, talk amongst themselves about how to help the children in their classrooms to develop into adults who are capable of doing x, y and z, nearly as frequently as they talk about how to help the small people, whom they have come to love, and who have their whole lives ahead of them, to live life to its fullest. it will be very exciting for all readers of white’s book who concern themselves with such matters in their work to continue their dialogue with introducing dialogic pedagogy in the company of the people to whom, considering the nature of their profession, we should be looking for further “provocations” in this area. this book is in many ways an invitation to a dialogue about dialogic pedagogy with and amongst early childhood teachers. bakhtin for preschool teachers beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.162 | vol. 3 (2015) r10 references marjanovic-shane, a. (2011). you are ‘nobody’! the three chronotopes of play. in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and education across the globe (pp. 201-226). new york, ny: peter lang. marjanovic-shane, a. & white, e. j. (2014). when the footlights are off: a bakhtinian interrogation of play-as-postupok. international journal of play, 3(2), 119-135. noddings, n. (2010). moral education in the age of globalization. educational philosophy and theory, 42,(4), 390-396. sullivan and mccarthy, j. (2003). towards a dialogic perspective on agency. journal for the father. abingdon: routledge. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word tallant 147-490-1-ce (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.147 | vol. 3 (2015) r1     reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations within early childhood research laura tallant university of east anglia, uk abstract book review: albon, d. & rosen, r. (2014) negotiating adult child relationships in early childhood research, london: routledge. this review focuses on a number of themes highlighted within the book. firstly, it discusses the authors’ suggestion that bakhtin can assist researchers in addressing entrenched, authoritative assumptions in an attempt to gain fresh perspectives. it moves on to consider the authors’ view on how researchers might valuably reframe common research activities, in order that research with young children reflects the dialogic nature of research relationships. keywords bakhtin, relationships, dialogue, carnivalesque laura tallant is a phd researcher and associate tutor within the school of education and lifelong learning at the university of east anglia. her phd research focuses on viewing young children's humour, as it occurs in a nursery environment, through a carnivalesque lens. further, she is interested in how a bakhtinian perspective on young children's humour might help early childhood practitioners to support young children's experiences in nursery settings more effectively, and subsequently facilitate and enhance adult/child relationships. ��� negotiating adult–child relationships in early childhood research offers a thorough discussion of two main approaches to ethics: the neoliberal and the technicist, and explores a range of, sometimes unanticipated, situations that early childhood researchers can be confronted with when developing relationships with young children. the book presents myriad reflections on adult–child research relationships and addresses a range of topical issues, some of which have been neglected in early childhood research literature to date. issn: 2325-3290 (online) reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations laura tallant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.147 | vol. 3 (2015) r2 this review discusses a number of features of the book, firstly addressing the way that the book attempts to unravel entrenched assumptions often held by researchers. it moves on to explore how the authors approach bakhtinian ideas and, in doing so, approach commonplace concepts from a refreshing angle. finally, the prospective appeal of the book is discussed, as well as how the book highlights further gaps in current early childhood research literature. via what the authors describe as a ‘bricolage’ approach that engages a variety of perspectives and theories in dialogue with one another, the book examines what research relationships look like, and problematises ‘entrenched assumptions’, addressing the question of how to ‘be’ a researcher in early childhood research. the authors address this issue provocatively, starting with practicalities and routine ethical questions that researchers ask before entering research with young children, and moving on to consider a range of less commonly considered issues. for example, they consider where relationships fit within the research process, the influence of power relations between children and researchers, and the potential ramifications of researcher intervention. the book also moves through discussions that examine, unravel and provide fresh insight into what are arguably common-place concepts within early childhood research and practice: concepts such as observation an everyday and perhaps taken-for-granted occurrence in many early years settings; and reciprocity, a familiar idea within the uk early years sector, particularly within family work, thanks to the influence of brazelton et al, (1975) but one that it is possible to overlook. the authors reframe observation, challenging those who observe young children to consider it as a multi-directional ‘context for interactions’, instead of the more mechanistic view of it as a ‘method’. they remind us that children are always observing, and that children engage in ‘sensing practices’ (p. 9597), demonstrating an awareness of and engagement with ‘others in the world’. the notion of children demonstrating ‘sensing practices’ stimulates reflection on the impact of researchers’, not always successful, attempts to inhabit the role of ‘least educator’ in research; a position albon and rosen suggest as an alternative to mandell’s (1991) ‘least adult’ because it recognises the flaws in assuming that ‘children can be duped into a belief that an adult-researcher is a child’ (p. 36). with regard to reciprocity, the authors of this book valuably present it as ‘researching in common cause with children’. they suggest that exploring both bakhtin’s thoughts about ethics (bakhtin, 1981) and the ideas of answerability and relational ethics, is fundamental to developing meaningful reciprocity in relationships with children, and in facilitating the appreciation of the complex and complicated practice of realising this reciprocity. the authors’ comprehensive engagement with a range of bakhtinian dialogic research concepts brings them, potentially, to a new audience via a wide range of examples and proposals. as well as drawing on bakhtinian theory to present fresh perspectives, the authors disentangle everyday concepts and challenge the way researchers may approach them. for example, they suggest that instead of viewing research relationships as a collection of dyadic interactions, it may be more effective to reconceptualise them as a complex network or ‘web’. this simple yet powerful imagery prompts consideration of the ways that relationships are approached within research with children. it seems possible that many researchers approach relationships in a familiar dyadic manner but may experience them, unwittingly, as a network or web, resulting in a conflict between perception and experience. further, approaches to relationships may change as a result of an initial mismatch between perception and experience. the book encourages the reader to ask whether those conducting research with young children consistently have a clear and comprehensive idea of the effect that the transformative nature of research and its propensity to change people, can have upon research. that research initiates change seems to be a common consideration among researchers, whether the change is intended or not, but perhaps we may be under the misconception that we have the necessary capacity to embrace a holistic view of the relational nature of our research? conceptualising relationships as a complex web may reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations laura tallant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.147 | vol. 3 (2015) r3 enable researchers to gain a more meaningful overview of how research induces change. in essence, researchers may come to understand and appreciate the complexity of the dialogue between child participants, adult participants, the children’s parents/carers, those who were present but not involved in the research, the research process and ourselves, and the influence that each of these elements has on the others. ultimately then, we might consider, as the authors did, how the chronotopes (bakhtin, 1981) or bakhtin’s theory of configurations of space and time present within research affect the web of relationships. the book prompts the question of whether it is possible to generalise findings when myriad chronotopes exist within the field of early childhood practice and education more generally. as the authors argue, the almost tangible ‘porosity’ of early childhood settings presents a kind of multi-contextual ‘recognisability’ that suggests cross-cultural settings have commonalities, an idea which may, at least in part, facilitate generalisation. this book may be of particular interest to researchers within and outside of early childhood whose studies have adopted a dialogic methodology and have operationalised a range of concepts to analyse data. it may also be significant for those interested in the place of bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque (bakhtin, 1984) within children’s lives and experiences. as one such researcher, the book inspired me to reflect in myriad ways and assisted my consideration of the research process through a bakhtinian lens. the authors address all of the bakhtinian ideas included within the book in a clear, comprehensive and thoughtful manner. the body, particularly the grotesque body and the ‘lower bodily stratum’, has a significant place within the carnivalesque (bakhtin, 1984). the authors discuss the significance of ‘bodied relationships’ and children’s interest in and both earnest and humorous enjoyment of the body within their research. they suggest that there is a place firstly, for considering and embracing humour when thinking about relationships in early childhood research and secondly, for unraveling our response to children’s actions and humour that may make us feel uncomfortable. the notion that practitioners view early childhood settings as being necessarily rational places where young children learn to become ‘civilised’ is a concept that the authors revisit throughout the book. they suggest that practitioners can view children as ‘pre-rational as opposed to fully developed deliberative adults’ (p. 103). if practitioners do view young children as pre-rational beings in a rational space, or to use qvortrup’s term (2009) as human becomings in a place that has ‘become’, it makes sense that children, as ‘not yet’ and pre-rational beings, may be expected to enjoy humour that offends adults’ rational sensibilities. potentially, this expectation could have a detrimental effect on the research relationships that practitioner researchers, and even academic researchers coming in to settings, form with young children in research. directly related to this, it is very positive that one of the subtitles in the book is ‘bums matter’ and the sub-section goes on to discuss the place of ‘bums’ within one of rachel rosen’s research experiences and how children drawing attention to this area of the body in a research context made her feel ‘desperately uncomfortable’ (p. 46). as the authors suggest, one of the potential reasons for this discomfort is that situations such as this can be at odds with dominant discourses that frame young children as natural, innocent and pure. as early childhood practitioners and researchers we need to engage in dialogue about dominant discourses and the things that trouble us, challenge us, and make us feel uncomfortable and uneasy. we continue to ignore these things to the detriment of our relationships with young children and the value of the experiences we can offer them, and, critically, to the detriment of appreciating the scope of what children can teach us. bernard donals (1998, p. 117) suggests that it is ‘the transition…from laughter and the overturning of sense to recognition and ethical activity, that is implicit in bakhtin’s tract on carnival’. it is for this reason that it is important for us to consider carnival and the carnivalesque carefully in research with young children, and why a book such as this that addresses these concepts in a research context is valuable. as part of the discussion on the role of the carnivalesque in their research, the authors’ refer to bakhtin’s concept of ‘excess of seeing’ (bakhtin, 1981). they address it through their reflections on the importance and significance of corporeality in early childhood research. they ask us to consider how reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations laura tallant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.147 | vol. 3 (2015) r4 children are able to view us in ways that we could never view ourselves, and to think about how this affects the research process. highlighted, is the idea that the position of bodies within the research space has an impact on the research, a point that i think could be particularly appreciated by readers as it seems so prevalent given children’s interest in bodies, yet is often not satisfactorily addressed in research with children. as previously mentioned, the book is presented provocatively but has the scope for wide-ranging appeal. this is due, partly, to the way the authors use their own research experiences and detailed research-journal entries to highlight and facilitate their reflections on research relationships. this candid approach, along with the skillful presentation of a range of complex theoretical and philosophical ideas, appear to make the authors’ reflections particularly accessible to practitioner researchers who may not know how to address the complexities of research with young children. in addition, the authors’ thoughts from the field or reflections ‘on action’ act as a conduit between the complex theoretical ideas highlighted and day-to-day actions and interactions within early childhood research, making the book valuable for both researchers going in to an early years setting and practitioners engaging in a more praxeological process. this can be seen particularly in chapter five which explores the idea of ‘the educator as researcher’. that said, the book may not be as accessible to practitioners who are unfamiliar with academic research or, in particular, unfamiliar with researching praxis as ‘a grounded and reasoned, situated and contextualised practice (formosinho and formosinho, 2012, p. 597). arguably, the book does speak more directly to those who are qualified to at least degree level, seeming to assume a basic knowledge of research processes and vernacular. however, that the authors managed to write a book that speaks to both academic and practitioner researchers, i think, emphasises their skill, as i have not encountered many (if any) books on early childhood research that have been so successful in connecting with both groups. this book closes the gap created by a lack of research literature for practitioner and academic researchers to an extent, however, there is still room for work aimed at both seasoned practitioner researchers and practitioners who are interested in research but have little or no experience of it. this book contributes to current debates about early childhood research in a fresh and inspiring way, and addresses a wide range of issues that may appeal to audiences beyond the early childhood field, through revitalizing perspectives. it draws expertly on the works of bakhtin making connections that prompt deep reflection. whilst recognizing that it is not possible for a book to be all-inclusive, the book highlights a gap in research literature on bakhtinian concepts in research with children: concepts such as double-voiced discourse (bakhtin, 1981), highlighted by cohen (2011) in her research into the carnivalesque nature of children’s role play. cohen emphasizes the presence and nature children’s double-voiced discourses within pretend play. as yet, however, there does not appear to be any literature concerning the place, nature and implications of double-voiced discourse in the context of research with children, and i argue this may be of interest to researchers of early childhood. inherent within the book is the idea that in as much as matusov suggests education ‘is always dialogic’ (2009: 1), so too are research relationships. perhaps this is not news for some but, nonetheless, i think it is an exciting idea to bring to the wider early childhood research table. ultimately, the book left me ruminating over the place of dialogue, but more specifically, ’radical and transformative’ (p. 134) dialogue in reaching meaningful responses to the question of how to ‘be’ in research with young children. crucially, the book also left me thinking about the significance of the motivations that underpin educators’ and researchers quest for meaningful dialogue in pedagogy and research, as it seems that capturing the essence of what drives dialogue may help us to understand and appreciate our state of being ‘locked within dialogic relations’ (matusov, 2009, p. 1) reflecting on the place of dialogue and the nature of adult motivations laura tallant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.147 | vol. 3 (2015) r5 references bakhtin, m. m., & holquist, m. (1981). the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m.m. (1984) rabelais and his world, bloomington: indiana university press bernard-donals, m. (1998) knowing the subaltern: bakhitn, carnival and the other voices of the human sciences. in m. m bell & m. gardiner (eds), bakhtin and the human sciences. london: sage brazelton, t. b., tronick, e., adamson, l., als, h. & wise, s. (1975) early mother-infant reciprocity. ‘pubmed’ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1045978 cohen, l. (2011) bakhtin’s carnival and pretend role play: a comparison of contexts, in american journal of play, vol 4, no 2 mandell, n. (1991) the least-adult role in studying children, in f.c waksler (ed.) studying the social worlds of children: social readings (p 38-59), london: falmer press matusov, e. (2009) journey into dialogic pedagogy, new york: nova science publishers inc: new york qvortrup, j. (2009). are children human beings or human becomings? a critical assessment of outcome thinking. ‘rivista internazionale di scienze sociali’ http://www.jstor.org/stable/41625246 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 11 groys my bakhtin reply to the commentaries.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.213 | vol. 5 (2017) db:75 my bakhtin: a reply to the commentaries boris groys new york university, usa first of all, i am grateful to eugene matusov for organizing this forum. and i am grateful to the participants for their analysis of my text. especially, i am grateful to caryl emerson who summarized this forum in such a clear and elegant manner that for a moment i thought that i just should refer to her text instead of writing anything in response. however, i decided to say something after all. some respondents did not limit their responses to the analysis of my text but questioned the motives that moved me to write this text. the explanations of these motives go from the pseudo-elitist hate of the simple people to the evil envy of the true elites (of bakhtin in this case). of course, i am not in a position to question these deep psychological insights. instead, i will present my own, purely subjective and unscientific memories of my state of mind as i wrote the bakhtin essay. the goal of this text was not to criticize or to denigrate bakhtin. on the contrary, the goal was to write a complimentary text praising bakhtin. particularly, i wanted to praise bakhtin for three things that he has done. 1. i agree with hegel that the highest achievement of the thinking is to grasp one’s own time. so, i wanted to show that bakhtin’s text is not simply another book on carnival or rabelais but an attempt to achieve more: to grasp its own time, the stalinist culture in the middle of which he was living. it would be wrong to see the stalinist culture as an absolutist (apollonian) order. this culture wanted to achieve a unity between order and chaos – otherwise it would not be totalistic or, let say, totalitarian. this is characteristic for all the modern totalitarian projects. thus, hannah arendt shows very well in her book on the totalitarianism that the hitler regime permanently negated and deconstructed its own order. the same we could see in the case of the chinese cultural revolution that also took very obvious carnivalistic character. bakhtin saw that very early – more or less at the same time as roger caillois and georges bataille. that is why i tried to draw the attention of the reader to this bakhtin’s achievement. 2. in a time i wrote this text the cold war was – at least ideologically not at the end. one could be only for the soviets or against them, loyalist or dissident etc. it always seemed to me that to simply reject the soviet power does not mean to transcend it because a possibility of such a rejection was already included in the soviet ideology (that had a place for the anti-communism in its own world view.) so for me to transcend the soviet ideology meant to transcend the whole system of oppositions by which this ideology operated. now in my view bakhtin made precisely that. so, i proposed his thinking as a model for my own thinking – and also thinking of my friends. 3. bakhtin’s text belongs in a great tradition of the gesamtkunstwerk. every gesamtkunstwerk is issn: 2325-3290 (online) my bakhtin: a reply to the commentaries boris groys dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.213 | vol. 5 (2017) db:76 an effect of secularization of the christian church – pavel florensky wrote already about it. the bakhtinian “polyphonic novel” describes the society dominated by the class division (as it was the case during the soviet 1920s) and the carnival book describes the classless society of the people (narod) as it was proclaimed by stalin in the 1930s. in both cases bakhtin applies christological dogmat on the figure of the author: the author has one personality but two essences – he is in the heaven above the earth (as god-father) and suffers on earth (as godson). the 1930s was a time of the political theology that tried to find in the theological tradition the genealogy of the secular political notions and categories (carl schmitt, walter benjamin). i find that bakhtin made a very deep and original contribution to the political theology too because the figures of author and authority are genuinely modern political figures. and now the last point. in the text itself and now in my explanations of it i permanently go back to the 1930s. so, a question may arise: does the bakhtinian theory remain valid for our own time? i think yes – because the modern condition has not changed so radically. it is enough to look at the internet which is the best example of bakhtinian totalistic and carnevalistic unity between order and disorder. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e1 dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov dpj editor-in-chief university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane dpj deputy editor-in-chief chestnut hill college, usa yifat ben-david kolikant dpj deputy editor-in-chief hebrew university, israel /this editorial is not necessary the voice of the journal but the voices of the particular dpj editors at the given moment/ welcome: why do we need another journal? dear reader, welcome to “dialogic pedagogy: an international on-line journal” (dpj)! we are happy to announce a new academic open access online polyphonic journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary field of dialogic pedagogy. you may ask, “why to have another journal? don’t we have enough already?” indeed, currently many journals appear as mushrooms after a rain and some of them disappear as quickly as they appear because they don’t have readership, authorship, reveiwership, or even editorship. this is a good concern that we are going to address below. we have started dpj for several reasons. one is that there are no journals dedicated to “dialogic pedagogy” (or “dialogic teaching” or “dialogic learning” or “dialogic education” or “dialogue and education”). at the same time, in our view, dialogic pedagogy cannot be reduced to any other existing educational approach (or method, or strategy, or educational philosophy). second, we had a hunger for a place for a vivid discussion, for learning with, from, and against our peers. we envision this journal as such a forum. in this journal we intend to “do as we preach”, issn: 2325-3290 (online) dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj. 2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e2 namely the review and decision making processes will be dialogical. two of us, eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane, how to say it politely, have been sick and tired of rather unwelcoming practices that we have experienced in many other academic journals and conferences focusing on creating “similarminded clubs and circles,” in which agreement is proxy for academic quality and even the truth. for ana and eugene, this was a third reason to start this journal. the third editor, yifat ben-david kolikant does not share this emotional state. thus, the three of us thought –though for different reasons --that the journal should be a dialogical venue to discuss dialogicality. we also say on this outset that we intend want to embrace disagreement and controversy. we believe it is an important engine for learning and scholarship. so, “will this journal be for you?” what is dialogic pedagogy and who belongs to the dpj international community the terms like “dialogue” and “dialogic” are heard a lot in the education arena. they encompass a variety of meanings. some educationalists may say that dialogic pedagogy is about using interaction in a classroom rather than lecturing students. others may say that using some kind natural conversation in the classroom over contrived known-answer questions is dialogic pedagogy (e.g., “instructional conversation”). some others may say that dialogic pedagogy is a socratic method of challenging students’ misconceptional opinions, attitudes, and worldviews. in contrast, some other people think that dialogic pedagogy is an educational philosophy rather than a method, strategy, or a tool that can be switched on and off, involving meaning making process, relating to other people, and certain way of being in the world. in another divide about domain, some educationalists interested in dialogic pedagogy may focus more on teacher’s teaching, some on students’ learning, some on students’ self-studies, some on educational environment outside of schooling, and yet some on conditions that canalize education to shape it in one way over another. educators may differ about promises of dialogic pedagogy. some educators passionately argue that dialogic pedagogy is the pathway and the tool for social justice, equity, democratic participation, and critical thinking. while others focus on rationality, search for truth, and intellectual rigor that dialogic pedagogy promises. some may be interested in using dialogic pedagogy for making students deeper understand the academic curriculum while others may be more interested in promoting students’ agency and activism in targeted practices. finally, some people may criticize dialogic pedagogy all together as being unrealistic, culturally biased, ineffective, educationally misleading, limited, and so on. in our view, all of these educationalists belong to the dpj community and are very welcomed to participate in the journal. whoever has found any relevance in the notion of “dialogic pedagogy” (and synonymous terms and concepts) in their attraction or repellence to it is welcomed. those who are indifferent may pass by. dialogic nature of dpj, its governance, and its processes a reader may be surprised, “why is that? why can’t you define what is ‘dialogic pedagogy’? why is it so loose? why do you want to invite a cacophony of voices? don’t you, yourself, have a vision for dialogic pedagogy? aren’t you afraid of losing a focus for a journal that invites everybody but stands for nobody?” yes, we agree that it can be risky as centrifugal forces can tear the journal apart. however, dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e3 we do not see an alternative because dialogue always starts with diversity, heterogeneity, dissonance, dissent, and, yes, with disagreement. in contrast to many mainstream academic journals, conferences, and societies, we believe that it is dialogue, and not agreement, that is a proxy for truth or academic quality. truth does not have internal territory but lives on a boundary. truth lives not in statements but on boundaries of statements of tension, pronounced by different people with diverse, and at times incompatible, ideas and positions. thus, the definition of what is dialogic pedagogy lives in the dp community (in a broader sense) as whole, in its dialogue, and does not belong to anyone who can authoritatively talk on its behalf. yes, we have our own visions of dialogic pedagogy but they make sense only in dialogue with other people having different visions than ours. that is why we believe in democratic, polyphonic, and dialogic government of our journal. we think that everyone who wants to be a dpj editor can and should join the dpj editorial board. the dpj editorial board is actively involved in strategic decision making about the journal. currently, it has about 100 volunteers with diverse and dynamic levels of activism and participation, which is ok and how it should be, in our view. the decision making process is democratic, participatory, and dialogic. we discuss issues first and then vote on them. any member of the dpj editorial board can offer an agenda for discussion and voting. history of the development of the journal the dpj has started in 2010 when mark smith and eugene matusov started exploring how to develop an alternative open access online journal on dialogic pedagogy. the focus on open access and online has come from a concern that we need to make academia more accessible, open, reaching out and reaching further internationally, democratic, and free from for-profit businesses of publishers as much as possible. in the summer 2010, eugene matusov has launched a website on dialogic pedagogy that included the proposal for the journal. by now several similar sites have been started: the school of the dialogue of cultures (in russian, by followers of a russian/soviet philosopher vladimir bibler, - probably, the oldest website on dialogic pedagogy), dialogic teaching (by robin alexander), dialogic learning (wikipedia), dialogic education for the internet age (by rupert wegerif). our next impetus has come from the mini-bakhtinian conference on dialogic pedagogy, delaware, usa, in march-april 2012, where many participants (e.g., ana marjanovic-shane, yifat bendavid kolikant, jayne white) called for establishment of a new journal on dialogic pedagogy. one concern that some participants had was whether the new journal would have enough readers, authors, reviewers, and editors. to address this issue ana (marjanovic-shane) and eugene (matusov) launched an international survey about a potential interest in a new journal in the mid april 2012 for 2 months. we sent about 1000 emails. 278 people from 36 countries have responded. out of them 180 people want to serve as reviewers and 113 people plan to be authors. in june 2012, we, ana and eugene, launched a google forum group of the dpj editorial board discussing and making decisions about the organization and policies of the new journal (you can find the results of this decision making process here). at the end of june 2012, we engaged in a fundraising campaign (with a goal of raising $2000) and negotiations with several university libraries about publishing and hosting our open access online journal. at the end of july, the dpj editorial board elected its first officers. by the end of july, we raised $2,789 (yes! – it’s incredible, thanks!). on september 1st 2012, we signed a contract with the university of pittsburgh digital library for publishing and hosting our journal. our remaining step is to incorporate the journal. http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?reload=1&page_id=881 http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?reload=1&page_id=881 http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map http://www.bibler.ru/shdkom_bi_os.html http://www.bibler.ru/shdkom_bi_os.html http://www.robinalexander.org.uk/index.php/dialogic-teaching/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dialogic_learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dialogic_learning http://www.dialogiceducation.net/ https://delaware.qualtrics.com/cp/report.php?rp=rp_ac3d5qqeoi6xdlu http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?page_id=566 http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?page_id=566#fundraising http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?page_id=566#fundraising http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?page_id=881 http://www.library.pitt.edu/ dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj. 2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e4 instead of establishing a journal around an existing society, we have decided to build a society around a new journal. let’s see if this model works! the past, present and future in the society and dp/education we live in interesting times! almost everywhere we see several trends in the society across the globe affecting education that sometimes support and sometime fight with each other (let’s see if you and how you would disagree ;-). one big trend – a more dialogic trend -is increasing contact among diverse people, ideas, cultures, values, worldviews, perceptions, social groups, and desires through internet, social networking, commerce, economy, professional organizations, technology, art, entertainment, science, and political actions. there seems to be growing tolerance to this diversity and even appreciation of it. we also see is increasing demand, appreciation, desire, and need for human creativity, agency, design, eventfulness, postupok (i.e., in russian “ethical deed”), uniqueness, authorship, meaningfulness, irreplaceability, immeasurability, particularism, embodiment, and responsibility in economy, politics, design, and definition of “good life”. at the same time, there is an opposite, and more monologic, trend coming from a strong opposition if not fight of this diversity through the religious, ideological, patriarchal, and nationalist fundamentalism, the bureaucratic standardization, the cultural assimilation, and the accountability “quality control”. in addition and, arguably, concord with it, there is also an increasing focus on measurement (especially, summative assessment but not only), metrics, accountability, automatization, robotization, certainty, compliance, replaceability, conformity, predictability, finalizing, universalism, decontextualization, alienation, reification, and disembodiment – all in support of conventional education. in our view, these two societal trends – dialogic and monologic -are opposing and irreconcilable (in contrast to some of dialogic pedagogy colleagues of ours). these opposing trends have very different and, we strongly argue, antithetical visions for education. according to one type of the trends, education is defined by moving the students’ consciousness to the curricular endpoints preset by the society (and/or educators) – aristotle called this type of practice poiésis (ποίησις). according to the other type of the trends, education is defined by developing new meanings, new qualities, new values that have not been before for the practice and/or its participants – aristotle called this type of practice praxis (πρᾶξις). although we, personally, can be wrong, we think that dialogic pedagogy belongs to the second definition of education – this is our particular, partisan position, of course. historically and currently, education is overwhelmingly defined as poiésis. however, we think that the future is after the praxis definition of education. we see these opposing societal visions as defining the current moment of education, and as the key forces that determine almost every aspect of educational practice, its potentials and its limits. we invite you, reader, and all dpj community to explore these and other important and interesting issues in our journal. what major challenges do we, dpj editors, see in and for the field of dialogic pedagogy? here is our particular and parochial list of important tensions in and for the field of dialogic pedagogy:  what is dialogue? why is it important for education and elsewhere? is dialogue for raising test scores in school? is it about having social interaction in the classroom? is it about learning better and deeper dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e5 standardized curriculum? is it about challenging students’ misconceptions? is it about searching for truth? is dialogue for the students to achieve rationality and objectivity? is dialogue about humanity of human relations? is it about giving students’ their voice and promoting their agency? is it about a meaning making process? is it about testing ideas? something else? are these possible pedagogical goals and functions compatible or incompatible with each other (some, all, which ones)? are some of them undesirable? if so, which ones and why?  what is dialogic pedagogy? is dialogic pedagogy some kind of teaching method aimed at the teaching efficiency or is it a philosophical, value-based, approach? why dialogic pedagogy? what is dialogic learning? dialogic teaching? dialogic educational chronotope?  what is the overall principle of dialogic pedagogy: search for truth, or promotion of social justice, or establishment of social peace and stability, or non-violence, or tolerance to the other, or rationality, or objectivity, or humanity, or production of knowledge, or deep learning, or authorship, or effective instruction? do we need the overarching principle in dialogic pedagogy? what should we, dialogic educators, do when these priorities are in conflict with each other?  what are voice, agency, polyphony, and authorship in dialogic pedagogy? why are these concepts important for dialogic pedagogy? are they? what is bakhtin’s notion of “consciousnesses with equal rights” in the context of dialogic pedagogy (e.g., the relationship between the teacher and the student)? can consciousnesses be transparent to each other in principle (i.e., can people fully understand each other)? if not, what are the implications for education? can the teacher be in genuine dialogue, interested in discussed ideas, with the student when the teacher knows more than the student? is pedagogical dialogue possible?  can dialogic pedagogy and conventional institutional pedagogical practices somewhat comfortably live together? can dialogic pedagogy fit conventional educational chronotope or not? if not why not? if so, how and under what conditions?  what is role, if any, of teacher’s unilateral, non-negotiable, impositions on students, demanding them to engage in certain learning activities, so common in conventional monologic pedagogy, in dialogic pedagogy?  what is dialogic pedagogy scholarship? should it be solely based on rationalist objectivist necessity-based internally persuasive discourse (ipd)? or should it also involve some other forms of internally persuasive discourses, like, for example, authorial, phrônēsis-based (i.e., practical, situated wisdom), sophia-based (i.e., evaluation of goodness, values, and desires)?  what is dialogic pedagogy empirical research? should it be methodology-based as in exact, natural sciences, in which the quality of research is decided by a method used, -method that pre-exist a particular research, its material and goals? or should it be anti-methodological, in which a way of researching is grounded in the material and emerging goals and research questions and its quality is defined by a dialogue in an internally persuasive discourse (but not necessarily exclusively rationalist ipd)?  what are diverse forms of dialogic educational authorship by learners and how to promote them? can these forms of dialogic educational authorship be in conflict with each other? if so, how to manage these conflicts?  what are limitations and biases of dialogic pedagogy education and even education per se? is education universally good for all, all places, all times, and all circumstances? what is the limit of education in itself: when must education stop and politics, and/or law, and/or technology, and/or medicine, and/or division of labor begin to address certain personal and societal problems? how to address these limitations? is dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj. 2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e6 dialogic pedagogy biased and limited: culturally, socio-economically, communicationally (verbally), by age of the participants, emotionally, by the academic subject, politically, by the level of acuteness of political conflict or oppression the participants are engaged, by cognitive ability, by the degree of (un)familiarity of the material, by gender, etc.? if so, why, in what ways, and how to address it? if not, why not?  what is the relationship of dialogic pedagogy and instructional and interactional formats? for example, can lecture be dialogic? can instructional conversation be monologic? are all information seeking question dialogic? are all information-known questions monologic?  can learning be measured from dialogic pedagogy view? why should it be measured? if learning cannot be measured, how can and should we deal with immeasurable important concepts in dialogic pedagogy practice and scholarship?  how should the quality of education be defined in dialogic pedagogy? is it through accountability, as it is in conventional pedagogy? is it through answerability, as it is in conventional pedagogy? (how is answerability different from accountability?) is it through self-correcting processes (i.e., negotiable through ethical acts), if so, what are they and how to design-launch them? does the issue of the quality of education in dialogic pedagogy have to be in itself a part of education, engaging students/learners in critical dialogue about what good education is for them? other dialogic alternatives?  what are economic, social, technological, and political costs of dialogic pedagogy? how can we address the issues of dialogic pedagogy’s costs?  what is the relationship between dialogic pedagogy and non-dialogic pedagogy practices from the dialogic pedagogy point of view? should dialogic pedagogy impose itself on all institutions, educators, learners, families, and communities who may oppose dialogic pedagogy? if not, what the relationship to the educational other should be? we hope this list is a good invitation for us to start our professional discourse on dialogic pedagogy. feel free, however, to bring your important tensions, dilemma, and agendas that may be not on our list. call for participation in dpj so, is this new journal for you or not, dear reader? it is for you to decide, of course. but if you decide positively, let us list possible diverse participations that are currently available in the dpj. first, you can be a casual or systematic reader. for that you do not need to do anything, except making a bookmark of the journal on your browser. second, you may want to provide your comments on published articles or even discuss submitted manuscripts or participate in forums. for that you need to register (free of charge, of course). you will also receive notifications and announcements about new publications, submissions, conferences and so on. third, you can become an author and submit a manuscript for a dpj publication. your manuscript will go to reviewers and will be posted on the dpj community space only available for the registered dpj community members. you can choose to be anonymous or attributed for the reviewing process. you can also participate in discussion of your own manuscript online. for that, of course, you need to register and submit a manuscript. http://dpj.pitt.edu/ http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/user/register http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/author http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj2/issue/current dpj editorial: launching the new journal eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, yifat ben-david kolikant dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.14 | vol. 1 (2013) e7 fourth, you may want to serve as a reviewer. for that you need to register and indicate in your profile this service. fifth, finally, you can become a member of the dpj editorial board. members of the editorial board are engaged in strategic decision making and will constitute a pool of managing editors who will be assigned submitted manuscript. for that you need to register and send us an email with your intent linked on the dpj front splash page. we hope that you will find participation in dialogic pedagogy journal and dpj community exciting, productive, inspiring, and enjoyable experiences. see you on the dpj website! we want to thank and congratulate all of those who have been contributing in the establishment of the journal and encourage new members to join the process! information about the authors: eugene matusov, ph.d. editor-in-chief is a professor of education at the university of delaware, usa. he was born in the soviet union. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. email: ematusov@udel.edu ana marjanovic-shane, ph.d. deputy editor-in-chief is an assistant professor of education at chestnut hill college, philadelphia, pa, usa. before immigrating to the usa she worked as a researcher in the institute for educational research in belgrade, yugoslavia using the socio-cultural approach to study meaning making and creativity in education. she uses a bakhtinian orientation to understand the dynamics of play and educational events. email: anamshane@gmail.com. yifat ben-david kolikant, ph.d. deputy editor-in-chief is an associate professor in the school of education, hebrew university of jerusalem, israel. her research interests are the inter-relations among technology, schooling, and learning and the characterization of effective educational environments in an age of globalization and rapid changes. email: yifat.kolikant@mail.huji.ac.il articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. mailto:dpjournal@mail.pitt.edu http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ microsoft word 9 lensmire and snaza saint bakhtin (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:53 saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire university of minnesota, usa nathan snaza university of richmond, usa timothy j. lensmire is professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the university of minnesota, where he teaches courses in literacy, race, and critical pedagogy. for his most recent book, white folks: race and identity in rural america (routledge), lensmire talked with white people in the small farming community where he grew up, in order to explore and theorize the complex social production of white racial identities. nathan snaza teaches modern english literature, educational foundations, and contemporary theory at the university of richmond. he is the co-editor of posthumanism and educational research (routledge, 2014) and pedagogical matters: new materialisms and curriculum studies (peter lang, 2016). his articles have appeared in journals such as journal of curriculum theorizing, journal of curriculum and pedagogy, educational philosophy and theory, educational researcher, angelaki, parallax, cultural critique, and symploke. ��� introduction boris groys seems pretty serious. not much of a laugher. not a member of the laughing folk. maybe that’s why what groys says about bakhtin and his theory of carnival feels so stunningly, almost unfathomably, wrong to us. for although we grew up centuries and an ocean away from the carnivals and popular festivals of the middle ages and renaissance that bakhtin evokes and idealizes, we did grow up—we first became our selves—among the laughing folk of the rural midwest of the united states. however serious we have since become as scholars and professors, bakhtin’s writing on carnival reminds us of home—of families and communities with their own limits and violences, certainly, but also with a life-sustaining laughter that we’ve needed in the academy and other spaces dominated by fear and an official truth. groys seems pretty serious, so it is at least a little funny that his piece performs a key carnival ritual, the decrowning of the carnival king, which bakhtin (1984a) thought expressed the “very core of the carnival sense of the world—the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal” (p. 125). in groys’s text, it is not so much a king who is decrowned, but a saint bakhtin who gets his halo knocked off. groys complains that, even though acolytes of bakhtin sometimes admit that carnival might actually reinforce the official order by providing a safety valve for the folks’ wild energies, saint bakhtin is allowed to keep issn: 2325-3290 (online) saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:54 wearing his “halo of a consistently anti-totalitarian thinker” because it is assumed that he would have been more forthrightly revolutionary if not for the “censorship burden of that time” (p. 2). groys is having none of that and his way of bringing saint bakhtin down to earth is by associating him and his carnival with stalin. groys writes that “obviously” bakhtin was not a stalinist, but that “he was not an anti-stalinist either” (p. 2). if we invoke another of bakhtin’s preoccupations—dostoevsky’s novels—and especially that scene in the brothers karamazov in which the people in town and the monastery are waiting anxiously to find out whether the body of a deceased holy man, father zosima, will stink as it decomposes, then we can summarize groys’s conclusion thusly: as with the decaying father zosima, bakhtin’s carnival corpus stinks. and saint bakhtin is no saint. we agree. bakhtin is not a saint. and given the positive valuation in bakhtin’s carnival of shit and urine, of the folk running around with underwear on their heads, of childbearing and dying bodies, of the lower bodily stratum in general, then it’s fair to say that carnival stinks, too. in what follows, we try to make sense of how we can read bakhtin’s work on carnival so differently than groys and why this might matter to us as education scholars. first, we conjecture that we position ourselves in relation to and within bakhtin’s writing on carnival, as readers, quite differently than groys does. groys seems to imagine carnival as more totalizing than we do; furthermore, he seems nervous about associating with the folk and about being tested, as a representative of the official culture, by carnival laughter. then, we try to make sense of how our different way of reading carnival opens onto a larger, more conceptual beef about rigidity and border policing. at a number of key moments, we find groys wanting to posit neat boxes around things—language and politics in particular—and then judging bakhtin for not fitting into them. we sketch how we read bakhtin entirely differently: as a thinker who assumes, ontologically, that borders are never neat and categories are never pure. finally, we explore an alternative way to understand what groys thought of as bakhtin’s need to “justify” and “grasp” the revolution and stalin’s terror in terms of an “a-historic space of pure and universal laughter,” as “eternal cosmic tragedy” (p. 4). as educators oriented toward a better future that we’ll never live to see, we instead read bakhtin as understanding how awful and big the world is, how small our efforts, and the dignity and joy of proceeding, nonetheless, in laughing solidarity with others. reading positions six years before groys’s text was originally published, intellectual historian dominick lacapra (1983) noted that a “minor cult is presently forming around bakhtin” (p. 293). however, lacapra did not think that this fact required the sort of “backlash” that we see performed by groys, where the importance of bakhtin’s work on carnival is “ignored or denied” (p. 294). one of lacapra’s key contributions to our understanding of bakhtin’s carnival is his argument that carnival and carnivalization are for [bakhtin] crucial dimensions of life that must coexist and interact with other dimensions. that they are the people’s ‘second life,’ as he often puts it, invalidates purely instrumental or functionalist interpretations marked by a spirit of gravity and geared exclusively to questions of political power, social hierarchy, and economic organization. . . . the fact that carnival is never a total social environment implies that it is not a self-sufficient entity either in existence or in analysis. . . . it tests and contests all aspects of society and culture through saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:55 festive laughter: those that are questionable may be readied for change; those that are deemed legitimate may be reinforced. (pp. 305, 306) groys often seems, in opposition to lacapra’s argument, to imagine bakhtin’s carnival as a “total social environment.” when groys writes “simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is horrible—god forbid being part of it” (p. 3), it certainly sounds like someone trapped in something from which there is no escape. later, groys claims that bakhtin’s descriptions of carnival were “without a doubt inspired by his experience of the revolution and civil war” and that they “reproduce the atmosphere of stalin’s terror with its unbelievable eulogies and vilifications, and also with unexpected crownings and dethronings” (p. 4). this explicit linking of bakhtin’s carnival with stalin’s terror makes it difficult to talk back to groys without it seeming as if we are making light of the misery and death referenced here. but whatever its inspirations (and we see no reason not to take bakhtin at his many words that at least some of this was inspired by rabelais-channeling-aspects-of-folk-culture), bakhtin’s carnival—“a model ... a philosophical and cultural ideal with important contestatory functions in his own and other modern societies” (lacapra, 1983, p. 295)—bakhtin’s carnival does not seem horrible to us. indeed, in our initial readings and attempts to make sense of groys’s piece, we were baffled by his “simply put” assertion—an assertion he makes as if it is (or should be) self-evident to any and all readers. in previous work by one of the authors, four crucial features of bakhtin’s carnival were identified: the participation of all; free and familiar contact among people; a playful, familiar relation to the world; and carnival abuse or profanation (lensmire, 1994). groys interprets all of these features negatively. where lensmire interprets the first as signaling inclusion and a rejection of enforced passivity/spectatorship, groys writes that “nobody is given the democratic right to avoid the total carnival duty” (p. 3). where lensmire argues that the second and third features embrace, as bakhtin (1984b) put it, a “gay and free play [meant] to dispel the atmosphere of gloomy and false seriousness enveloping the world and all its phenomena” (p. 380), groys sees only the folks’ “bodily idiocy” (p. 3). however, it is probably the fourth feature that best helps us contrast our own reading position to that of groys. for groys, bakhtin’s carnival is, in the end, nothing but abuse, a sort of war by everyone against everyone else. but in order to interpret carnival abuse this way, groys must ignore everything that bakhtin actually said about it. for bakhtin (1984a), carnival abuse was antiofficial. the official truth was held in place by fear. carnival abuse targeted and laughed at the old truth in order to kill it and make space for the new. a “carnival sense of the world” was one with “shifts and changes” and “death and renewal”—carnival, then, was the “festival of all-annihilating and all-renewing time” (p. 125). we read bakhtin’s carnival among and alongside the folk. groys does not. his text expresses continual anxiety about being with the folk. whatever groys’s actual social standing as a person or his everyday perceptions of those below him in social hierarchies, the character of “groys” in the text who interprets bakhtin’s carnival is an elitist who is afraid of and repulsed by the folk. this “groys” seems to continually imagine himself as a representative of the official truth who will be laughed at and attacked by the folk (and presumably found wanting). we cannot imagine this “groys” thinking that there is anything to be learned from or with the folk, cannot imagine him writing, as bakhtin (1984b) did, that the culture of folk humor developed through thousands of years [and] has a depth of meaning which is far from naïve. humor and cynicism may least of all be defined as naïve and do not need our indulgence. instead they demand our careful and attentive analysis. (p. 152) saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:56 simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is wonderful. or as lensmire (1994) put it: in carnival, the people laughed at ideas and practices supposed to be universal and eternal and saw them for what they were—partial and contingent. and for the folk, for everyday people worn down by oppressive conditions, this was a hopeful lesson. (p. 375) porous theorizing it seems to us that in his interpretations of carnival, groys constantly seeks rigid boundaries and insists upon purity within his categories. this quest for rigidity also drives his accounts of bakhtin’s writings on politics and language. we just don’t read bakhtin this way, and for us bakhtin is a thinker who resists the drawing of clear boundaries and the corollary politics of purity. partly, this is due to our commitments to feminist and queer theories that eschew the erection and policing of impassable boundaries, even as they focus on the relatively stable or “viscously porous” boundary work that makes bodies and cultures possible (haraway, 1991; tuana, 2008). we actually prefer approaches that don’t posit a binary opposition between boundaries and formless chaos, and we think approaches that do end up offering readers a kind of ultimatum that tends toward bullying, or even, at times, fascism. since groys’s main concern seems to be with politics, we’ll start there although most of bakhtin’s writing presumes a particular relation between those politics and language (a relation concretized in what he calls the “verbal-ideological world” in “discourse in the novel” [bakhtin, 1981, p. 270]). groys’s most direct assessment of bakhtin’s politics is, to repeat: “obviously, bakhtin was not a stalinist. but he was not an anti-stalinist either” (p. 4). why is groys so unsatisfied with this? in terms of the immediate context of the 1930s in europe, we think groys is quite correct to draw comparisons here to georges bataille and roger caillois (we might also include other figures loosely associated with the collége de sociologie/acéphale group, such as maurice blanchot). groys calls these relations “the most direct analogies” possible “in the west” (4). writing of bataille, allen stoekl (1985) says that “what is crucial to bataille—and to us—is the troubled nature of his opposition to fascism” (p. 4). in stoekl’s account, and that given by denis hollier (1997), what you see is a grappling with “extreme” ways of thinking the social and the political that cannot be understood within contemporary categories of right and left, conservative and progressive. indeed, what these french thinkers, and bakhtin, offer us that is crucial is a way of trying to ask about politics, community, and subjectivity that returns them to being questions, not presuppositions within pre-established worldviews. groys, then, has his own politics (seemingly) sorted out, and holds bakhtin up to what he takes to be the only proper categories. this concern with extreme forces and changes in social structures, which took on a particular intensity between the two world wars, opens onto a more general conceptual problem involving the terms through which we consider politics. for the sake of posing this problem well, we could say that groys wants to consider bakhtin’s politics, not his conception of the political. we think bakhtin’s writings (we cannot speak to his personal stands on political issues) are best understood as intervening in the political, not in politics. he asks us to consider how languages, ideologies, bodies, and identities interpenetrate, converge, and diverge. he is interested in the “verbal-ideological” becoming of the world as a conceptual, theoretical, and political matter that can only ever be poorly thought within “politics” understood as economic and state practices, or concerns of specific parties or factions. this is apparent in groys’s subsequent comparison of bakhtin to the nietzsche of the birth of tragedy. groys accuses bakhtin, like nietzsche, of valorizing the “unconscious and impersonal” saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:57 dissolution that adheres in the dionysian (p. 5). while it is unmistakably true that nietzsche does valorize this, and that bakhtin’s notion of carnival has echoes of this, we cannot forget that nietzsche polemically valorizes the dionyisan in a context where the appolonian is considered all important. against the belief in only rationality, enlightenment, and distanced judgement, nietzsche returns us to the importance of emotion, the animality and naturalness of the human, and the joys of ecstatic communion (which is always more-than-human). but nietzsche (1956) is very clear that what makes greek civilization so important is that it understood the necessity of both: “they could not maintain [a “third mode” of existence between apollo and dionysus] for long themselves, but for that very reason it endures for all time” (p. 125). that is, nietzsche, and bakhtin, sought conceptions of the political that were not strictly apollonian, rational, hierarchized, and driven by forms of knowledge predicated on distance from the world. whatever forms politics take in a particular moment, bakhtin and nietzsche would always remind us that they rely upon and are impossible without a messier world of touch, encounter, and contamination that always already takes place. and we like that messy world. it can be violent and it stinks, sure, but it’s also full of joyful laughter and unexpected possibilities. this same disavowal of the messy world of the political appears in groys’s most direct engagements with bakhtin’s writings on language and literature. using his (for us, mistaken) reading of carnival as the point of departure, groys claims that “this means the destruction of isolation, independence, and individuality of the word and the removal of the author’s rights to private discourse diffused in the general polyphony of the language, which belongs collectively to ‘the people’” (p. 2). important here is that groys does indeed note what is bakhtin’s basic ontological claim: that language is dispersed and impersonal, circulating in ways that make it impossible for any individual to claim it as his/her/their own. but groys seems to mistake this claim about language’s mode of being for a political claim: bakhtin violates a “right” that groys believes subjects ought to enjoy (which means that groys ultimately thinks about politics as a kind of necessary taming or disciplining of the messy becoming of the world). but we have never read bakhtin as a thinker who demands the elimination of boundaries, although what we love about him is that he is highly attentive to their porosity (to keep using tuana’s word). he in no way rejects individual claims to speech, nor private discourse. in problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, bakhtin (1984a) writes: “the consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness” (p. 6). here, bakhtin clearly says characters are and are not closed, are and are not separate from their verbal-ideological surroundings. there is not so much a “destruction of isolation” (as groys puts it), but a profound pressuring of what “isolation” means: it is not the opposite of community, or something that only appears in the absence of connection, communication, and community. there is, instead, blurring, porosity, and the emergence of relatively stable but ontologically shifting and open boundaries. if it seems strange here to begin with bakhtin’s writings about literature instead of language in “real” human communities, this is because we want to address groys’s own claims about how these two realms relate. groys writes that “for bakhtin, ‘other’ is always someone inside a novel, and never can it be someone outside of the novel” (p. 4). this is the conclusion of a paragraph that seeks to pitch the “polyphonic novel” as total and totalizing, just as groys understands carnival to be. in effect, groys would seem to be claiming that bakhtin’s conception of literature is so totalizing that it swallows reality (something many poorly considered readings of poststructuralist thought also posited; see coole & frost, 2010; barad, 2007), but this has to forget bakhtin’s conception of “speech genres” (the novel, for him, is one such genre). saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:58 in “the problem of speech genres,” bakhtin (1986) is proposing that stylistics eschew units of analysis that have clearly and easily determined borders (the word, the sentence) in order to focus instead on “the utterance.” while the utterance has a very real, material existence, it is conceptually indeterminate. in fact, the only way to know its boundary is to analyze a particular, concrete utterance. this is because its unity is not found in language itself (understood as a set of marks on paper or spoken sounds) but in language’s insoluble links to life. talking about existing systems for categorizing types of language use in russia at his time (and we might note that this could be applied to so much of what has come to be called “critical discourse analysis” in its more systematic and pseudo-scientific modes), bakhtin (1986) writes: “all this [confusion and random border drawing] is a direct result of an inadequate understanding of the generic nature of linguistic styles, and the absence of a well-thought-out classification of speech genres in terms of spheres of human activity” (p. 65). that is, for bakhtin “genres” are direct, concrete, material expressions of “verbal-ideological” worldviews and specific modes of human activity. this conception of the utterance as something bounded and analyzable only makes sense when positing a real world of touching, of messy relations. even speaking and listening, the so-called “empirically” separable ends of a linguistic event, blur for bakhtin (1986): “any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely. any understanding is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker” (p. 68). activity/passivity and listener/speaker are, for bakhtin, inescapably necessary distinctions which nevertheless are ontologically and methodologically indistinct. there “are” boundaries, but they are not absolute, not total, not even stable. we have something like consistencies, or intensities, or relatively stable entities, not absolutes. which is why groys’s attempt to see bakhtin as “reducing” the world to a novel is so baffling to us: for bakhtin the novel is in no way separate from the world. it is a “speech genre,” one that like, say, ordering a meal in a restaurant or saying “hello” to a passerby, cannot be understood except as an expression of concrete, material human action and movement through the world. and that world, for bakhtin as for us, is uncertain, shifting, constantly becoming. conclusion: stinky pedagogies if groys dislikes carnival because it stinks, that’s exactly why we love it. we can think about this in two ways. first, as a complaint, the world often stinks: we face political problems—racism, capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, etc.—that mostly feel overwhelming, violent, and immovable. as educators and educational theorists, we seek out ways to bring that immensity down, to see limits as what paulo freire (2000) calls “limit-situations”: nothing is stable, eternal, immovable. what is, has become, and this implies, of necessity, that it can become otherwise. for us, part of this work is learning, with bakhtin, to laugh, to take the official down a peg (or two or three), to loosen our grip on thinking that we know the right answers, the right concepts, the “best practices.” we don’t, and for us this uncertainty – the need to pragmatically and processually pose concepts that we test in action and thought without mistaking them for “real” things—is precisely where pedagogy unfolds. purity and rigidity don’t do anything for us. we could say again something we wrote a decade ago now: “students, like teachers, are always directly part of the global economy through their production of communication, affect, and forms of subjectivity. school ‘and’ society is a false dichotomy; school is society” (snaza and lensmire, 2006, p. 14). there is no position outside of the systems we seek to transform, no “purity.” like bakhtin, we aren’t terribly interested in revolutions, but in learning how to better live—with each other, with ourselves—where we are. our political, and pedagogical, responses to the stinkiness of the world have to stand in the muck. saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:59 and this isn’t, for us, a kind of resignation. growing up around farms, we know intimately how what stinks—manure, compost—is what generates life. the stench of decay reminds us that everything that “is” now, or appears stable, will eventually transform into other things, other forms (and, just as importantly, nothing “is” except as the reconfiguration of other things that have disintegrated). nothing is permanent. thus, a second way to think about the stinkiness of carnival is that it helps us to take the long view. all of those things that seem too big to change: they too will dissolve. as educators, we teach, we agitate, we laugh. we go on, together, as best we can. in our stinky pedagogies what we seek is something banal, and something that we think groys might find too small: experiences, fleeting though they are, of feeling the instability, the impermanence, the constant becoming of the world. references bakhtin, m. (1981). the dialogic imagination: four essays. ed. m. holquist. trans c. emerson & m. holquist. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. (1984a). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. ed. & trans. c. emerson. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. (1984b). rabelais and his world. trans. h. iswolsky. bloomington: indiana university press. bakhtin, m. (1986). speech genres & other essays. trans. v.w. mcgee. austin: university of texas press. barad, k. (2007). meeting the universe halfway. durham: duke university press. coole, d. & frost, s., eds. (2010). new materialisms. durham: duke university press. freire, p. (2000). pedagogy of the oppressed. trans. m. b. ramos. new york: continuum. haraway, d. (1991). simians, cyborgs, & women. new york: routledge. hollier, d. (1997). absent without leave: french literature under the threat of war. trans. c. porter. cambridge: harvard university press. lacapra, d. (1983). rethinking intellectual history: texts, contexts, language. ithaca, ny: cornell university press. lensmire, t. (1994). writing workshop as carnival: reflections on an alternative learning environment. harvard educational review, 64(4), 371-391. nietzsche, f. (1956). the birth of tragedy & the genealogy of morals. trans. f. golfing. new york: anchor. snaza, n. & lensmire, t. (2016). abandon voice? pedagogy, the body, and late capitalism. interactions 2(2): pp. 1-23. stoekl, a. (1985). politics, writing, mutilation: the cases of bataille, blanchot, roussel, leiris, and ponge. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. tuana, n. (2008). viscous porosity. in s. alaimo & s. hekman, eds, material feminisms (pp. 188-213). bloomington: indiana university press. saint bakhtin, porous theorizing, and proceeding nonetheless timothy j. lensmire and nathan snaza dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.221 | vol. 5 (2017) db:60 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word jayne white concluding commentary.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-64     concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white university of waikato, nz abstract at the risk of speaking on his behalf i could almost swear i heard bakhtin laughing gleefully over my shoulder as i read this fascinating dialogue between eugene and kiyo. his reason for this might be partly inspired by the glaring misunderstandings both men reveal through their associated interplay with key pedagogical concepts. while polemic in nature, it occurs to me, somewhat ironically, that each man makes the same careful, empirically located, argument from different cultural and philosophical standpoints. at the centre of their debate is the concept of pedagogy and its capacity to promote ‘authentic’ learning. despite this shared agenda their interpretations of key terms are often at variance and, as a result, they passionately bang their heads against each other in vehement misunderstanding that makes for what bakhtin (2004) would describe as “lively and expressive” debate (p. 24) on this topic. at its essence, i suggest that their points of difference can be lodged within the realms of epistemology and ontology, and associated concepts that warrant further exploration such as aesthetics, freedom, agency and education. each are laid bare according to the interpretations of both kiyo and eugene who clearly draw from different sources to make their claims. kiyo is clearly influenced by social psychology, philosophers such as gadamer and the traditions of his own society while eugene takes a stance that radically challenges these approaches, summoning bakhtinian dialogism as a central orientation. in this location the posed frame is negotiated and the endpoint suspended as purpose takes precedence over ‘outcome’. what takes precedence in classrooms will not be determined by a set curriculum but by the relationship between teacher and learners, arising out of a dialogic event. the same is not true for kiyo, who argues for specific practices of argumentation as a route to the discovery of valued knowledge as the central tenet of the teacher. taking such different stances it is hardly surprising, therefore, that the views of kiyo and eugene are often at odds – eugene is interested in an unending dialogue while kiyo seeks fusion, albeit in a hermeneutic sense. pedagogy is at once suspended in a tugof-war between dialogic and dialectic orientations – a point both eugene and others have made elsewhere (matusov, 2011; sullivan, 2010; sullivan, smith, & matusov, 2009; white, 2014). it is, therefore, hardly surprising, that in the end kiyo is led to ask if eugene is really talking about pedagogy at all! they are, in essence, singing completely different tunes! issn: 2325-3290 (online) concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-65 throughout this discussion, i was reminded of the little boy in “the emperor’s new clothes” who is the first to realise that the king is actually naked. kiyo’s revelation that ontological non-instrumental dialogic approaches, as eugene describes, do not represent pedagogy betrays his own ideological position that pedagogy must involve “active” engagement “in order to facilitate the learning and development of their (that is, the students’) agency” (p.?). it is here where their positions take flight, since eugene makes the consistent argument that engagement takes many forms, and orients from both learner and teacher, while kiyo appears to be suggesting that it must be framed around important questions that are always constructed by the teacher as someone who transmits knowledge from the lofty heights of the academy. the positioning of the teacher and student by kiyo and eugene, respectfully, serve to raise important critiques around the notion of dialogism and its place within pedagogical approaches in education across cultures and classrooms. does it have a place within scholastic regimes of truth in the contemporary classroom or is it only possible in the unending optimism of bakhtin’s novelistic inquiries that form the basis of his approaches? yet it seems to me that an examination of dialogic pedagogy in contemporary societies is a very important exploration to take for this very reason. the concept of dialogic pedagogy is now employed across diverse approaches to teaching and learning. in my view there is much misunderstanding of the term and its outcry in practice. the term ‘dialogic pedagogy’ has come to serve as a broad category for any learning and teaching practice that involves ‘dialogue’ and, to some extent or other, implicates learning relationships (white, 2011a). for this reason eugene’s model, and kiyo’s critique, is of great importance – for me this is not because it offers a conclusive portrayal of all pedagogy (this would be antithetical in a bakhtinian sense), nor because it dichotomises specific approaches such as non-dialogic from instrumental (a point i concur with kiyo on in this regard) but because it provides a beginning means of examining approaches. eugene does so by interrogating their origins, orientations and intended purposes of each as a form of categorisation. in this sense, eugene makes pedagogy accountable (or in bakhtin’s terms ‘answerable’) to itself – in terms of its genesis, its focus and its outcome. in my reading kiyo appears to ignore the first two of these – emphasising the intended purpose and advocating for a method of achieving this agreed purpose. in this respect i would suggest he aids eugene’s argument because he locates desirable pedagogy within eugene’s “epistemological ii” category without recognising this orientation for what it is. he does this through his unceasing loyalty and conviction towards the expertise of the teacher, enshrined within the method of saitou he promotes. in doing so, he highlights the very point eugene is at pains to make – that pedagogy should be much more than poiesis, embracing phronesis and sophia (see matusov & brobst, 2013). in the case of kiyo it seems that the learner is to be shaped towards a wisdom that is passed over to them by the teacher, who acts as the agent of valued cultural knowledge. here phronesis is not considered because there is no need to consider knowledge beyond that which is received from the academy. much ground is covered in the discussion between kiyo and eugene. a beginning place for my response lies in an interrogation of the agreements and disagreements that exist between the two. taking eugene’s lead, based on the inspiration of his model of dialogic and conventional pedagogies, i summarise these in the form of a set of scales that situate learners and teachers as interchangeable heroes and/or authors; teachers or learners; instructors or collaborators in terms of their ideological stance. the status of both embeds itself within the horizontal and vertical axis that privilege or suspend approaches of knowing versus those that respond to the internally persuasive discourses, and which are suspended in the classroom heteroglot. these include attitudes and approaches of ‘wonderment’ and uncertainty on the part of teacher and student alike. both eugene and kiyo bring these concepts into view throughout their polemic, and in doing so, illuminate the point that pedagogies are not simply methods of practice, but arise out of specific ontological and epistemological domains. as portrayed in figure 1 concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-66 below, kiyo, appears to situate pedagogy at the foundation of the scales, as received knowledge that is epistemologically oriented to author-hero binaries, suggesting balance; while eugene brings all parts of the ontological and epistemological frame into view. in this conception the scales may tip towards one end or the other at any moment, depending on the orientation of the event, and its chronotope. pedagogy, in this view, is fluid, with transient potential towards ‘other’. figure 1: ballancing the scales heroes and authors in pedagogy central to interpreting this model is the interesting debate that takes place between kiyo and eugene regarding authors and heroes. it is one that i recall took root during our symposium in italy three years ago (matusov, miyazaki, dysthe & white, 2011). at that time i was deeply immersed in bakhtin’s earliest works, particularly his essay “author and hero in aesthetic activity” (in bakhtin, 1990) where the author-hero relationship could be interpreted in a somewhat binary fashion. here bakhtin describes the author as “a participant of the event and as an authoritative guide” (p. 207). to the extent of this depiction kiyo is right to highlight the classroom teacher as author. however when bakhtin’s accompanying statements are considered in tandem with his later work, a strong moral purpose is brought to bear on this relationship. bakhtin states that the author “cannot and must not assume for us the determinateness of a person, for we are in him, we enter into and adapt his active seeing” (p. 207). concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-67 seen in light of goethe’s bildungsroman (a novelistic genre keenly adopted by bakhtin in his analysis and which influenced his theory of ‘visual surplus’, the author is drawn into a position of “outsidedness” (p. 205) with obligations to offer insight to the hero but to do so within an “unmediated axiological relationship” (p. 197). in bakhtin's (1943) short text "the man in the mirror" this complex relationship between self and other is expanded to a relational 'with-ness' that collapses the author-hero binary. here, the author is also authored, and the hero is equally an author through the visual surplus of both parties that image the 'other'. as bakhtin explains: it is not that i look from the inside with my own eyes at the world, but rather it i look at myself through the eyes of the world, through alien eyes; i am possessed with the other. there is not the naïve oneness of the external and internal here. to peep at how i am seen behind my back. the naïve nature of the merger of self and other in the mirror image. the surplus of the other. i have no point of view on myself from the outside, i have no access to my own inner image. alien eyes look through my eyes. (bakhtin, 1943, p. 71) in my view this is a very significant point in understanding the author-hero relationship in teaching too. i think it may be this complex relationship that eugene gives weight to in his discussion, whilst kiyo emphasises the notion of author as ‘guide’ without recognising the important role that the author also plays in such guidance– thus orienting towards a subjectivity of selfhood rather than a logic of otherness (see petrelli, 2013, for a fuller description of this idea). his literal interpretation of the dostoevskian author takes this deeply into the domain of authority (see for instance his depiction of the “author who controls the heroes’ behaviour”). kiyo’s position here, suggests a misappropriation of bakhtin’s polyphonic entreaty – a point i return to later. what appears to be largely absent in both men’s discussion is bakhtin’s portrayal of the hero as a character, a body and a soul that exists only in relationship with others across time and space – concepts that were to later form part of bakhtin’s chronotope (morson & emerson, 1990). central to dialogism is the principle that form can only have meaning when enjoined with content – that is, meaning arises out of social interaction. arising out of these early depictions, a positioning of the student as hero also has merit, in my view, because at once the student is upheld as an agentic subject who operates on “two planes of axiological perception” – both [1] “within that horizon for the hero himself; and [2] the context of the author-contemplator” (p. 174). thus the hero is viewed in a much broader sense rather than merely as an object for intervention or instruction (a point that i would urge eugene to consider in any dismissal of this early work). viewed in this way eugene’s claim that students ought to be able to surprise their teacher is upheld and, of course, the reverse is true if there is a balance, as the teacher may deliberately invite a “frame clash” to orient dialogue in a particular direction. i would go one step further to suggest that, on this basis, students should also be able to retain their own ‘authorial loophole’ (a dostoevskian tenet) as a means of escaping the phenomenon of being fully known (an aesthetic position that, from this perspective, can never be claimed by an author who is dealing with characters in a novel, let alone real people in the classroom). i suggest that this is a fuller appreciation of the bakhtinian hero who retains the chameleon-like potential to be other, transforming and transgressing interpretation (a point i have been at pains to make in my own writing – see white, 2011b, 2013a); while at the same time remaining answerable to others for his or her acts in the social milieu. taking this stance the author-hero relationship plays a vital role in a view of learning as meaning-making – an event-of-being that can now be conceptualised as an act of knowledge generation based on an understanding of oneself and other in the world. concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-68 what is important for interpreting the author-hero binary, therefore, is the point that bakhtin consistently makes about the authors relationship as “unmediated and axiological” (p. 197) orientation towards the hero as a boundary encounter (white, 2013b). here bakhtin offers a strong cautionary note to the relationship as one that must be encountered with care, respect and morality such that the hero is not “consummated” (p. 121) by the author in their encounters. it is here where i take issue with kiyo’s interpretation since the saitou teacher is determining what is of value, and what is mundane. kiyo’s example of questioning techniques to students in their analysis of the poem, in my view, serve as a device of consummation because the student is first asked a closed question and then told that their answer is incorrect. that the teacher then proceeds to congratulate them on their ‘efforts’ (ie “your thought is very good” spoken, “but it is still wrong” unspoken) does little to ameliorate the finalising impact of this statement. the dilemma, such approaches represent for learners, are well described by eugene as “pedagogical violence” at their extreme and provide an example of the epistemological ii pedagogy i have already suggested this form of pedagogy represents. a less delineated approach to the author-hero relationship is examined by bakhtin (1984; 1968) in his later works (published earlier) that were clearly influenced, as kiyo points out, by dostoevsky. rabelais and others (see for example goethe) play a significant role in this regard also. here the authorhero divide is suspended because bakhtin encounters the interanimation of roles and associated notions of discursion in terms of heteroglossia and polyphony. it is at this later period that eugene’s ontological approach to dialogic pedagogy gains momentum and the hero-author divide is cleanly severed. eugene offers an example of this in his depiction of a family dialogue. through an appreciation of grandaunt klara’s perspective, arising out of her “love of truth” (p. 13), and its impact on rosa, eugene gained a richer interpretation of what might be construed as an insult on one level, or as a helpful commentary on another. the puzzlement that arose from this irreconcilable encounter – between “mama-truth” and “gricean maxims of good communication” – provided a means of understanding the participants, the boundaries of their ontological positions, but also of understanding themselves. at once logic and axiology is entwined. the author and hero binary of this encounter is thus suspended because both parties are actively engaging with each other, shaping and re-shaping the experience as an event-ofbeing or chronotopic threshold (white, 2013b). in this locale questions arise out of asking genuine questions of significance or matters of urgency to the learner and the potential for counter-point debate and dialogue. we are not told whether klara accepted eugene’s position (or vice versa), nor do we know if the debates were resolved, but from a dialogic standpoint it does not matter – here emphasis lies in the dialogic exchange as an opportunity to examine points-of-view rather than a resolution of what is right or wrong. yet, eugene does not explore the necessary conditions for ontological non-instrumental dialogic approaches to take place. in the many examples he has provided over recent years (see, for example, teenager hannah’s scientific examination of big bang theory or zion’s study of compound words in matusov, 2011) eugene presents personal examples of dialogic pedagogy where he is the teacher. unlike kiyo’s classroom descriptions of tsukamoto, eugene is not committed to pre-established questioning as the primary activity in the classroom but, instead, to the maintenance of dialogues of difference. questions are not set in advance of the dialogue in this approach, but arise out of inquiring dialogues that take the form of prompts such as “why” and “how”? elsewhere eugene examines these approaches and the conditions that give rise to them as discrete pedagogical chronotopes (matusov, 2009) but eugene, perhaps modestly, does not acknowledge the tremendous skill that is required for such pedagogy – and the constant vigilance required of the teacher in ensuring that the students internally persuasive discourses are not lost in the learning experience. these ontological dialogues are founded on the principle that learning is an event-of-being rather than an end-point quest. what this concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-69 means for pedagogy is deeply implicated in eugene and kiyo’s debates, and seem to suggest that a completely different set of skills are needed for dialogic pedagogies based on their associated orientations – these invoke a moral response to teaching and learning, as a movement away from instrumentalisation towards open-ness and encounter with other-ness (a point explicitly raised by bakhtin, 2004 in relation to pedagogy). in this regard eugene is right, i think, to differentiate between epistemological and social justice pedagogical agendas but i would also see a relationship between these and epistemological ii orientations examined as i am not yet convinced of their non-instrumental location. having revealed what i believe to be the source of their polemic i also want to point out other potential origins and orientations that have, in my view, been neglected in this discussion. these include the rich legacy bakhtin brings educationalists in relation to aesthetics and its role in pedagogy. in making this claim i draw from bakhtin’s (2004) own writing on classroom practice where he sets a very clear agenda for pedagogy beyond what he describes as ‘schoolification’. it is in this work that i suggest kiyo’s dilemma regarding the existence of pedagogy may be reconciled. here bakhtin presents the teacher with responsibility as author for the hero. his statement “hero is the duty of teachers of writing” implicates the teacher as pedagogically responsible. while i agree with eugene that the learner brings agency with them (that is, that the teacher or classroom cannot create agency in a learner) the potential of this agency to be unleashed is directly related to the kinds of pedagogies in which the learner is located when this author is considered to its fullest potential. agency might be brought to bear on processes or events that are situated outside of the teacher’s composition, such as those that are evident in carnivalesque moments of engagement or disengagement (white, 2012; 2013b), or in events that are intended for a different author (such as the authorial “i”). the extent to which agency is brought to bear on any learning experience is much more complicated than a comparison of epistemology and ontology in a binaric sense. kiyo’s statements regarding the epistemological aspects of ontology highlight this complexity but do not resolve their interplay. his neglect of ‘becoming’ – a central position for bakhtin containing a greater degree of uncertainty and potential for heroes to become authors themselves – reduces his argument to rhetoric. perhaps, therefore, it is not by chance that kiyo returns to psychology to summon notions of consciousness and unconsciousness in making his claim. in my view bakhtin would not make such a distinction (indeed he would take issue with the suggestion that humans are ‘animals’) – since his emphasis was always on the conscious interlocutor in the event rather than any form of reflection in its aftermath. as a ‘product,’ knowledge ceases to exist for bakhtin. instead, it lives in the ontological and epistemological encounter, a point further embellished by skukauskaite & green (2004): “students are named as, and become, authors, authors can argue with the editor, and the editor is not the final arbiter of perspective”. (p. 69). this stance further challenges kiyo’s attention to the dostoevskian author who has authority over the text. in this complex view of authors and heroes, authority belongs to the hero who asserts their own bildung1 and, in so doing, claims their status as author of their own learning. my argument rests, therefore, on the living nature of learning and the endless potential of learners – both student and teacher. on this basis it becomes difficult to determine, from the lofty heights of academia, what kinds of pedagogy will generate learning, for whom and how. kiyo’s claim that “for a lesson to be dialogic, there should be a genuine question at the beginning” creates, in my view, another monologic approach to pedagogy by prescribing one method. what eugene offers, on the other hand, is the possibility for teachers to analyse methods in terms of their orientation, and purpose. in my view his model should therefore be interpreted as an analytic device rather than some form of judgment or preferred practice model. dialogic pedagogy is not pre-determined by establishing parameters around classroom experience by those who sit outside of the experience, in my view. instead it generates itself 1 the notion of bildung places emphasis in learning as a life-long process of becoming. for a fuller discussion see brandist, 2014. concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-70 out of intense curiosity for individual learners their interests, priorities and ideological orientations in tandem with knowledge that is valued by the academy (here i invoke bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia as another analytic tool). for diverse learners (and here i include infants, and other groups of people who may not share the same semiotic approaches) what constitutes dialogic pedagogy rests in the event itself, and its potential to open up spaces for ontologic engagement with knowledge. thus what is deemed ‘good pedagogy’ is less oriented by its outcome or its orientation alone (although of course these are significant factors for classroom teachers that cannot be ignored – as olga dysthe, 2011, points out) than its potential to open up meaningful dialogue about matters of importance to 21st century learners. in taking this stance i believe the teacher can take up an authorship role bakhtin promoted – by recognising that heroes determine their own learning with the help (or hindrance) of others. all the teacher can do, and it is no trivial event, is to remain open to the endless potential and possibility for dialogue to orient meaning. seen in this light perhaps kiyo is right to challenge traditional (socratic) notions of pedagogy that assume orientation lies in the hands of the teacher, as midwife. while the term may be anachronistic, when viewed as a certain and embedded discourse drawing from plato’s paidea, broader attention to ‘pedagogy’ as a means of talking about teaching and learning acts offers a useful framework to consider how teachers might author the learner, as hero, with the goal of hero-as-author. this, i believe, is the central quest both kiyo and eugene seek to promote albeit in different ways and, to this end, i thank them for their discussion. it has, indeed, been most lively! references bakhtin, m.m. (1990). art and answerability. (k. brostrom, trans.). austin, texas: university of texas. bakhtin, m.m. (1943). “chelovek u zerkala [man at the mirror],” in id., sobranie sochineniy [collected works], moscow: russkie slovari, 1996, vol. 5, p. 71. bakhtin, m.m. (2004). dialogic origin and dialogic pedagogy of grammar, journal of russian and east european psychology, 42, (6), 12-49. brandist, c. (2014). bakhtinian pedagogy: an historical perspective. keynote address for fourth international interdisciplinary conference on the limits and perspectives of mikhail bakhtin, ngaurawahia, new zealand, january 15-19. retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clmdgmoqhi4&list=plgnurfj6pkk6tx3q1v7muzwbv50_17dz matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers, inc. matusov, e. (2011). irreconcilable differences in vygotsky’s and bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: an educational perspecrive, culture & psychology, 17, 99-119 matusov, e., & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centaur failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. petrelli, s. (2013). the self as a sign, the world, and the other: living semiotics, transaction publishers: new brunwick, usa & london. sullivan, p. (2010). vygotskian dialectics and bakhtinian dialogics. theory & psychology, 20, (3), p 362378. sullivan, p., smith, m., & matusov, e. (2009). bakhtin, socrates and the carnivalesque in education, new ideas in psychology, 27, 326-342 morson, g. s., and emerson, c. (1990), mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. stanford, ca: stanford university press. odegaard, e. (2011), “on the track of cultural formative practice,” in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. peter lang: new york, 179–200. concluding commentary: response to eugene and kiyo e. jayne white dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.126 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-71 skukauskaite, a, & green, j. (2004). a conversation with bakhtin: on inquiry and dialogic thinking, journal of russian and east european psychology, 42, (6), 59-75. white, e j. (2011). bakhtinian dialogic and vygotskian dialectic: compatabilities and contradictions in the classroom?. educational philosophy and theory. v_online, blackwell publishing, doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00814.x, 2011. p.1-17. white, e.j. (2012). cry, baby, cry: a dialogic response to emotion. mind, culture and activity, 20. (1), 6278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2012.692107. white, e.j. (2013a). 'are you 'avin a laff?': a pedagogical response to bakhtinian carnivalesque in early childhood education, educational philosophy and theory, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.781497 white, e.j. (2013b). circles, borders and chronotope: education at the boundary? knowledge cultures, 1 (2), 25-32. white, e.j. (2014). bakhtinian dialogic and vygotskian dialectic: compatabilities and contradictions in the classroom? educational philosophy and theory, 46, (3), 215-220. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. wegerif's 21st century advance on dialogic space e. jayne white university of waikato, nz abstract book review for dialogic pedagogy journal: wegerif, r. (2013). dialogic: education for the internet age, london routledge a timely book indeed, rupert wegerif’s latest contribution to the field of dialogic pedagogy heralds a new era in education described as “the internet age”. arguing that the internet disrupts oral and literacy cultures, wegerif produces a carefully constructed text that sets the scene for a re-visioned look at pedagogy by shifting emphasis from text (literacy) or verbal communication to spatial concepts of glocalisation (a notion that pays attention to the local and the global contexts for learning). from this standpoint he builds a case for education as an open event of being rather than a set of discreet subjects. he does this through the route of dialogism. i think that bakhtin would be most pleased to see his work brought into this contemporary space through an interanimation of theory and practice – both traditional and contemporary. what strikes the reader throughout this book is the expansive view wegerif takes to the application of dialogism to education. he draws from contemporary fields of understanding such as neurological science, educational practice in virtual and real classrooms, and philosophy. no stone is unturned in this regard as the reader is drawn into familiar and unfamiliar terrain ranging from the traditions of socrates, to oakeshott’s contemporary notion of ‘conversation of mankind’ – each are critically considered as contributors to wegerif’s interpretation of dialogic pedagogy and its contemporary significance. of particular note is the fruitful attention paid to buber's “i-thou”, as an alliance with bakhtin’s dialogic imperatives; and to merleau-ponty’s “chiasm” as a means of expanding bakhtin’s authorial position of insider-outsider. taken together, these allegiances provide points of connection and, in doing so, expand on dialogic principles and their application to the internet by purporting for education that is unbounded, spatially complex and connected to others – seen and unseen. in this conceptualisation education is no longer limited to classroom, individual, dyad or even culture, but represents an opportunity to engage in difference as a route to creativity. notwithstanding the important contribution to education and the internet, wegerif provides a remarkable synthesis of dialogic pedagogy in this book. in perhaps the most comprehensive text i have read on the subject, dialogic pedagogy is summarised as “education for dialogue as well as through dialogue in which dialogue is not only treated as a means to an end but also treated as an end in itself” (p. issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.15 | vol. 1 (2013) b1 wegerif's 21st century advance on dialogic space e.jayne white 33). in accordance with this view, wegerif offers a means of thinking about dialogue as a way of opening, widening and deepening space. here he offers specific pedagogical strategies such as reflective questioning, bringing in new voices and challenging assumptions through processes such as deconstruction, degrees of difference, intersubjectivity and self-hood. an important contribution to the field, in this regard, is the shift from individuals and even cultures to pay attention to bakhtin’s ‘superaddressee’ (also levinas’ ‘infinite other’) and the significance of silent voices in dialogues. the important point is made here that dialogue is at its best when there are gaps and differences. wegerif provides several examples from his own research and (to a lesser extent) that of others in the field, to embellish this idea. in doing so he provides significant and much needed challenge to sociocultural strongholds in education that, according to this view, limit learning to a particular setting, agenda or domain. his attention to modern technologies as a way of engaging with other, through the use of avatars, blogs and facebook, suggest that there is much potential in this regard. perhaps the greatest contribution this book makes, for any teacher or learner, is in the simple pedagogical message that dialogues alone do not make a difference. learning takes place in terms wegerif borrows from neuroscience, global workspace theory and kant’s transcendence principle that are aligned to consciousness. “consciousness is not only the lit up stage at the centre of the theatre but includes the audience,” says wegerif (p. 156). according to this principle meaning is found in relationship with other (people, spaces and concepts) only when one is able to make sense of what they experience. thus meaning exists in encounters that exist well beyond the immediate context or time; they also take place in the unconscious (or sentient) spaces of experience. wegerif calls upon contemporary early years research to exemplify the claim that dialogic experience of this nature is central to learning. his attention to connected thinking of human beings as a requisite for creativity offers a stark contrast to the impact of scientism that wegerif argues against in contemporary education, suggesting it is “not a fixed world of stable things but more like a horizon cast by a gaze” (p. 160). here wegerif invokes bakhtins notion of “great time” as a means of interpreting the experience of dialogue for learning in the global community that characterises the internet. in this regard, the reader is invited to contemplate the affordances offered in this unbounded space. thus, the book takes us full circle, since the unbounded space of the internet sets the scene for dialogic ways of teaching. wegerif concludes by asking the perilous question “what, then, and how should we teach” and completes his insightful analysis by calling for greater attention to the explicit methods of dialogue itself – critical, creative thinking, collaboration and communication. in essence, wegerif suggests that to be an effective teacher one must learn to be an effective learner. this book offers an important challenge to educators who frequently struggle to work with learners who are natives in the digital era, when they themselves are not. classrooms continue to be conceptualised typically as a building space with desks, bells and set curriculum yet wegerif proposes a very different view. his challenge is salved by numerous examples of possible practice, building on what is already known to educators and gently pushing the field into this new era. i suspect this book heralds the advent of educational research as well as practice that foregrounds dialogue in the contexts of consciousness, creativity, science and technology. in this, there are multiple provocations for all and i, for one, look forward to exploring these in the wake of this fabulous contribution to the field. articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.15 | vol. 1 (2013) b2 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ wegerif's 21st century advance on dialogic space e.jayne white this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.15 | vol. 1 (2013) b3 http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx wegerif's 21st century advance on dialogic space microsoft word ideological becoming in postsocialist childhood instroduction.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.246 | vol. 6 (2018) sc1 ideological becoming in socialist and post-socialist childhood and schooling from a dialogic framework eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa lei chen shaanxi normal university, china marek tesar the university of auckland, new zealand abstract this special dpj issue aims to bring together those who had first-hand experiences with or conduct educational and/or historical research with children and schooling in socialist and post-socialist societies. socialist and post-socialist childhood and schooling in socialist and post-socialist education systems are usually assumed to be monolithic and authoritarian, far from dialogic. however, by reflecting on our own or others’ experiences, narratives and observations regarding the socialist and post-socialist childhood, we realized that our memories, experiences and observations might offer unique and enriching soil for understanding, exploring, reflecting, and critiquing dialogic pedagogical theories. through this special issue, we hope to expand the scholarship of this community to the territory of a space and time that were not previously examined (sufficiently) for dialogic pedagogy by creating interests and forums for dialogues. ��� introduction according to bakhtin (1986) and medvedev (1985), “ideological becoming” is the formation of ideological subjectivity within the historical, political and cultural “ideological environment,’’ in which an individual lives. this formation is both reactive, emergent, and proactive, dialogic. individual ideological subjectivity is shaped and constrained by its historical, political and cultural ideological environment. however, at the same time an individual creatively and at times dangerously transcends her/his ideological environment in her/his ideological becoming. among other things, the xx century was characterized by the emergence and then decline of the so-called real socialism political and economic regimes. we feel it is important to document and analyze ideological becoming in socialist and post-socialist childhood and schooling from a dialogic framework, while participants are still available. this special dpj issue aims to bring together those who had first-hand experiences with or conduct educational and/or historical research with children and schooling in socialist and post-socialist societies. socialist and post-socialist childhood and schooling in socialist and post-socialist education systems are issn: 2325-3290 (online) ideological becoming in socialist and post-socialist childhood eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, lei chen, marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.246 | vol. 6 (2018) sc2 usually assumed to be monolithic and authoritarian, far from dialogic. however, by reflecting on our own or others’ experiences, narratives and observations of socialist and post-socialist childhood, we realized that our memories, experiences and observations might offer unique and enriching soil for understanding, exploring, reflecting, and critiquing dialogic pedagogical theories. through this special issue, we hope to expand the scholarship of this community to the territory of a space and time that were not previously examined (sufficiently) for dialogic pedagogy by creating interests and forums for dialogues. following are a few exemplary (non-exclusive) questions that we are interested to explore in this special issue: 1. how did the dialogical (monological) schooling, parenting and child-caring made children social and political? 2. how did children (students) and teachers construct dialogues with the confinements of and the opportunities provided by the space, time and everyday lives in (post)socialist childhood (including family lives, parenting and school lives, museums, specialized/elite schools, camps, collective farms, after-school activities, etc.)? 3. how did diversity—language, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, (dis)ability, and other factors of diversity influence the construction and people’s participation of dialogues in (post)socialist schooling? 4. what lessons can be learned from (post)socialist childhood that might challenge our understanding of how learning, schooling, and dialogues are influenced by the political regimes in the past and today’s world? we understand that there are as many contradictions, complexities and dualisms in (post)socialist childhood as in dialogic pedagogy, we welcome scholars in a diversity of fields of studies to contribute to this special issue. thereby, we loosely define “dialogic pedagogy” as any scholarship and pedagogical practice, from educational researchers, philosophers, and practitioners, which values and gives priority to “dialogue” in learning/teaching/educating across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional learning settings. we welcomed authors’ experimentation and creativity in genres and approaches to their autobiographical research and writing – a variety of sources of narratives including (but not limited to) autoethnographic accounts, collective biography, qualitative interviews, historical analysis, and discourse analysis. the following authors approached their auto-ethnographies in multidisciplinary ways emphasizing diverse disciplines of social studies such as history, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, social work, psychology, political science, gender studies, philosophy, and so on. ideological becoming in socialist and post-socialist childhood eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, lei chen, marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.246 | vol. 6 (2018) sc3 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press microsoft word the use value of real wolrd projects.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a1 the use-value of real-world projects: children and local experts connecting through school work alison rheingold christa mcauliffe charter school jayson seaman university of new hampshire abstract in this paper we discuss how the products of student work during long-term, interdisciplinary curricular units at king middle school, a grades 6-8 public school in portland, maine, through their aesthetic qualities, transformed people’s understanding of what children were capable of. we argue that, to effectively understand student work of this type, ‘cognitive’ and ‘practical’ criteria for evaluation – i.e., as a supposed indicator of what students need to know and be able to do – fail to convey the actual, substantive value of the work, rendering it relatively static and meaningless like much conventional schoolwork. instead, we argue that aesthetic criteria can help to adequately understand and assess community-based, project work. moreover, focusing only on student learning throughout the production process occludes the importance of collaboration, communication, and dialogue with an audience: in this case, community experts whose goals and interests must be accommodated as students do their work. the aim of the article is twofold: 1) to present a coherent picture of student project work that adequately captures its complexity both in the process of its production, and in its use-value upon completion; and 2) to argue for the importance of aesthetic criteria in planning and assessing student projects. dr. alison rheingold is the director of professional learning at the christa mcauliffe charter school in framingham, massachusetts. her primary role is to develop teachers’ passion for designing and implementing community-based, interdisciplinary curriculum for middle school children. jayson seaman is associate professor of kinesiology and affiliate associate professor of education at the university of new hampshire. his research interests include the historical foundations of experiential education, youth development, learning in informal settings, and adolescent identity formation. he is the co-author (with john quay) of john dewey and education outdoors (sense, 2013). ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a2 introduction the function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness (john dewey, 1927/1954, p. 183) something almost indescribable happens when adults see beautiful work created by children, or when an audience watches a child’s top-notch performance; they become overtly emotional, perhaps wondering, “how can a child of this age have produced something that good?” or they might observe: “i am impressed that the child cared enough to work that hard on the project.” when children’s academic work embodies certain qualities, it can be much more than a demonstration of content knowledge and skills – it can transform students and audiences, functioning as art in the sense john dewey describes. this paper discusses how the products of student work during long-term curricular units at one public middle school demonstrated this kind of aesthetic quality. we argue that, to effectively understand student work of this type, ‘cognitive’ and ‘practical’ criteria for evaluation– i.e., as a supposed indicator of what students need to know and be able to do – fail to convey the actual, substantive value of the work, rendering it relatively static and meaningless like much conventional schoolwork. we argue that aesthetic criteria helps to adequately understand and assess project work, particularly when it communicates meaning and value to people outside of the school. moreover, focusing only on student learning during project work obscures the importance of collaboration, communication, and dialogue with an audience: in this case, local experts whose goals and interests must be accommodated throughout the production process. we therefore also argue for seeing student labor on real world projects as “boundary work” (star & griesemer, 1989) crucial to understanding the ultimate value of what they produce. the purpose of the article is twofold: 1) to present a coherent picture of student project work that captures its complexity both in the process of its production, and in its use-value upon completion; and 2) to argue for the importance of aesthetic criteria in planning and assessing student projects. our broader aim is to show the provocative nature of aesthetic criteria for assessing the quality of educational outcomes. overview of the study for over 20 years, children at king middle school, a school serving grades 6-8 in portland, maine (“king”) have created high-quality products and performances of academic work through a model of school reform that focuses on heterogeneous grouping, extended, interdisciplinary, community-based research projects, and sharing student work with audiences. because of the type of academic inquiry, the quality of student work, and the recognition this school has received over time, students’ products and performances have been seen and used by people throughout the united states and elsewhere in the world. for example, king was profiled on edutopia.com as a ‘school that works’ and was featured in 2010 on korean public television program as a ‘school of the future.’ much of students’ academic work at king, especially the kind of long-term, interdisciplinary projects that provided the context of this study, is done alongside local partners people from the portland area who actively participate in the planning and execution of academic projects. students engage in research that often stems from expressed needs of these outside experts. examples include scientists, journalists, architects, graphic designers, artists, and city council members. sometimes these experts are also parents of students at king. through their joint work, students, teachers, and local experts negotiate their understanding of the work, each other, and the broader region. (for specific examples of projects, see dobbertin (2010)). the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a3 what students produce at this school is radically different from ordinary schoolwork. in many schools, students’ work (literally) falls into what sidorkin (2001) calls the “wastebasket economy.” sidorkin urges a focus on the use value of student products. he argues that the value of student work – what they make through their labor – at any school depends on many factors including what students produce, why it was created, and who ‘uses’ or ‘consumes’ it. based on these criteria, unlike consumer commodities, most student work has no use value at all. imagine a worksheet or test: children labor to produce them but cannot use them, parents cannot use them, and even teachers cannot use them except as a rationale for doing and keeping their jobs (they require grading). therefore the ‘use value’ of most student work is nil: at best, it might end up on a parent’s refrigerator as a nostalgic artifact, but most ends up in the recycle bin. in school, “learning is a byproduct of making useless things,” sidorkin writes (2001, p. 94). the psychological consequences of endlessly making useless things are predictably severe, resulting in de-motivation and alienation from one’s creative potential as well as from the social communities that confer value on one’s work (lave, 1990; lave & mcdermott, 2002). advocates of project-based learning have compellingly argued that projects disrupt the typical disutility of schoolwork and therefore possess much stronger motivational potential (e.g., blumenfeld et al., 1991). two elements are central to this line of argument: projects’ collaborative nature (poortvliet & darnon, 2010) and the use value of what students actually produce (wardekker, boersma, ten dame, & volman, 2011). these ‘affordances’ give project work a kind of dual valence: their work is born from a desire to associate with peers as well as a sense that what one produces will mean something to someone other than the teacher. and, awareness that one’s work will receive scrutiny by an outside audience can add additional motivational force (magnifico, 2010). rarely considered in these arguments, however, is what student work does for its recipients outside the school: the group, ostensibly, who ultimately will confer value. some authors have focused on the potential benefit of service learning, asking, “how did community partners perceive the program?” (baker & murray, 2011, p. 125). likewise, sanders (2006) lays out a range of successful school partnerships, which on the “extensive” end include “long term, bi or multidirectional, high level of interaction, extensive planning and coordination” (p. 8) but what is the actual value of student work – the things children produce? moreover, how should this value be considered? we believe this is a crucial question that, as our analysis will show, affects how project work might be more fully understood, as well as having implications for the dialogic potential of this work in educational settings. at king, for example, a significant amount of students’ work possesses the above affordances. it is very different from work that more typically earns only a teacher’s, and perhaps a parent’s, scrutiny. teachers in all content areas at king purposefully aim students toward work modeled after a professional’s, and student products are indeed of such a high degree of quality to be worthy of genuine praise (u.s. secretary of education arne duncan lauded compliments on it in a 2010 visit). but, there is quality work and then there is quality work; at the middle school level, it is quite rare for students to produce work that approaches that of professionals – and, importantly, no one really expects this. nonetheless, the animating discourse at king is for students to approximate the work of professionals, for students to experience application of their work outside of the school, and to shift learning outcomes to align with what people do in the ‘real’ world, rather than just developing abstract skills and knowledge as they produce things bound for the wastebasket. and, student work is more than token, because the response from students and community members alike is usually overwhelmingly positive (judging by its continuation now over decades). if students repeatedly create products and performances that relate to tangible outcomes outside of the school, then it follows that there is ongoing value to the students and to communities of practice the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a4 outside the school. but what is the nature of this ‘value?’ is what local individuals and groups value the same as what school members intend? upon inspection, it becomes apparent that the value of student work is likely discontinuous across involved parties – students might perceive use value in products of their labor that local professionals would never use. the concepts of ‘exchange value’ and ‘use value’ as in critical theories (e.g., apple, 1990; roth, 2011; wardekker et al., 2011) do not alone explain how projects sustain meaningful collaboration and dialogue across the schooling and local/professional domains. in this study, we asked: what can be learned from investigating value in this kind of project work, and what might the findings mean to questions of curriculum design and assessment, and, more deeply, the nature of student work in school? the research described in the remainder of the paper sought to understand the ‘use value’ of student work at king middle school by soliciting the perspectives of local experts involved in it. a starting example – the field guide here we provide an exemplar to illustrate qualities of student artifacts produced alongside local experts. over the years, students at king have created numerous field guides to surrounding natural areas. field guides, as a type of academic product, have two inherent qualities that are critical to our research: field guides can be both useful and beautiful. the process of creating a field guide involves extensive fieldwork with local partners, research into the items to be included in the guide, scientific writing, and artwork (in these cases, drawing of the species displayed in the guide – originally done in color). see figure 1 on next page for an example of work from a field guide that students created in 1995, examining plants and animals living in the intertidal zone of local casco bay. no field guide of this sort existed. students, with local experts and teachers, worked tirelessly on each entry, starting by examining plants or animals in the field (in this case actually in the water, using snorkels and wetsuits), and ending with extensive drafts and critiques of their writing and scientific drawings. the book, when complete, was bound, published, and sold around the area. more than just being a useful book, the artifact (the field guide) and project (the process through which students learned about the species in the intertidal zone) launched field-guide projects both at king and at other schools around the country. this project was also used during a keynote speech as a model at expeditionary learning’s 2010 annual conference1. as discussed throughout this paper, the beauty and usefulness of students’ work (even when ‘useful’ is defined differently for different players) propels the artifacts and students into future, meaning-making roles. conceptual framework boundary objects and boundary crossing our research was informed by a social practice perspective on learning, specifically cultural historical activity theory (chat) and deweyan pragmatism, two frameworks that have been combined elsewhere (miettinen, 2001; miettinen, 2006). in this section, we discuss a main principle in chat – artifact mediation – and introduce the concepts of boundary objects and boundary crossings as a way to examine both the process and the products of student work in real-world curriculum projects. these concepts alone, however, do not explain why student projects – few of which, we surmise, actually 1 as of 2015, expeditionary learning is known as el education. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a5 figure 1: shown here are two pages of a field guide called “into the zone: where land meets the water – a field guide to the marine life in the tidal zone of northern new england.” provide the kind of use-value expected from professional-quality products – are often immensely satisfying for students, school personnel, and local stakeholders, defying understanding in terms of narrow utility. artifact mediation and boundary objects. in a chat framework, knowledge and knowing are distributed among people and objects and across time, rather than being seen as static, individual properties. ‘things’ are mediators; people learn through the creation and use of tools – whether material or conceptual. as chat perspectives have evolved (i.e., third generation chat) the unit of analysis is thought of as the interaction between and across activity systems, such as schools and professional domains of paid, scientific, or civic work, the contradictions that are negotiated in this ‘zone’ are of interest methodologically and empirically as they form the basis for development (engeström, 1987; roth, 2007). in an article that describes how school-based learning can approach the work of professional scientists, ford and forman (2006) write: “the material aspect is intertwined with the social aspect, because it characterizes what the public discussions are about and why” (p. 13). ford and forman go on the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a6 to say that “dialogic speech makes the creation of a third space possible” (p. 9). the ‘third space’ a concept introduced by gutierrez and rymes (1995) – describes how meaning other than what was originally intended is created through the dialogue/negotiation that occurs between activity systems. as we later show, student work has the ability to function dialogically in the so-called third space, as a boundary object. star and greiesmer (1989) introduced the notion of boundary objects based on an in-depth study of the establishment and ongoing work of a natural history museum. they define boundary objects as the means through which people from different social worlds negotiate meaning despite different perspectives and/or different motives. the actual object may have “different meanings in different social worlds but at the same time have a structure that is common enough to make them recognizable across these worlds” (akkerman and bakker, 2011, p. 141). it is through negotiation and sense-making of these objects – particular kinds of objects that resonate within diverse social worlds and support dialog about, and progress toward, non-overlapping goals – that learning occurs. akkerman and bakker (2011) link the idea of third space with boundary objects – employing the term ‘hybridity’ which they describe as the “production of new cultural forms of dialogue” (p. 135). in their review of the literature on boundary objects, they explicitly ask the question, “what dialogical learning mechanisms take place at the boundaries?” (p. 137). materially populating these third spaces are artifacts, which take up meaning in cultural practices: how people create and use them. artifacts of student work both generate meaning through their use and develop meaning along the way significance that is different to different people. as miettinen (2006) says, “the objective meaning of money has nothing to do with the material constitution of notes and coins” (p. 399); it is how money is used through cultural understandings that the objects themselves have importance. in our research, for the communitybased experts who have worked with king, what was transformed through their involvement in student work was not their understanding of subject matter (as it was for students) but their notion of children’s capabilities. in other words, boundary objects can function to align efforts and communicate value across social worlds without depending on the equivalency of motives or salience boundary objects function also as boundary crossings, and create a leading edge for development: “boundaries create a need for dialogue, in which meanings have to be negotiated and from which something new may emerge” (akkerman and bakker, 2011, p. 142). how does student work function in this way? and by ‘work’ we mean not just the products and performances that students create, but the process during which the work is carried out. the answer lies partly in defining what the dilemmas are that are negotiated between local experts and students during their “continuous joint work at the boundary” (akkerman & bakker, 2011, p. 149). from our data, we noticed that students, teachers and local experts work together at the boundary, but via different motives and different dilemmas. for example, when being interviewed by a student about his role in the civil rights movement, an interviewee described the tension for him as whether or not his actions 50 years ago mattered, how students might interpret his actions, and his own emotional response to these students caring about civil rights. students, at the same time, negotiated the dilemmas of how to act like a historian, how to adequately complete the assignment, and how not to embarrass themselves in front of their peers and the interviewee. the fact that dilemmas were not shared by the individuals did not obstruct joint effort toward producing an object that had value. finally, advocates and researchers of project-based curricular designs face the problem of defining value. even at a school like king, with its extensive history of producing extraordinarily highquality student work, student products (including performances and presentations) are not used or circulated in the way commercially available products or professional presentations would be. in other the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a7 words, things produced by students would, only in rare instances, possess the same degree of use or exchange value as artifacts that are central to professional communities of practice. to appreciate the form of value articulated by participants in our study, and to conceive of the ‘zone’ that exists when students work with local residents and experts in project-based curricula, we draw on dewey’s (1925/1964) materialist theory of aesthetic value, and in particular, his comments on art and experience. we explain dewey’s theory more fully after working with the ideas of boundary objects in our primary research themes. methods data sources king middle school was selected because: 1) it adopted a whole-school reform model called expeditionary learning in 1993 and it is considered exemplary within this national network of over 160 schools; 2) king, the most diverse middle school in maine, serves a socioeconomically, culturally, and linguistically diverse student population2, providing a context in which to explore school reform from an ‘opportunity to learn’ perspective (moss, pullin, gee, haertel, & young, 2008); and 3) students consistently perform higher on standardized tests than other schools serving similar populations while also outpacing state averages, though the main engine for student activity is project-based work. our research consisted of ethnographic fieldwork that spanned from january, 2010 until june, 2012. one aspect of this project involved following a three-month-long interdisciplinary 7th grade project on the civil rights movement, called small acts of courage, and traced the use-value of what students produced: 1) bound books containing written narratives based on in-person interviews with local people who had played a role in the civil rights movement; and 2) a culminating event during which all 80 7th graders took the stage in front of over a hundred people in a well-rehearsed performance of their learning. this investigation was conducted in the historical context of students creating and sharing high-quality work with audiences across the 25-year history of school reform at king. data collection included: 1) interviews with teachers, administrators, students and local experts; 2) supporting material artifacts; 3) video and audio recordings of whole-class and small-group work and 4) extensive fieldnotes. as is most relevant to this paper, the following are short descriptions of each of the five local experts who were interviewed. interviewees were selected through recommendations by king staff, connections to long-standing projects at the school, and by picking a representative range of project types and roles in the community. • john – although knowledgeable about king for many years, it wasn’t until john was asked in 2010 to be an interviewee for the small acts project that he became more involved in this school. a minister of a socially and politically progressive local church, john had been involved in civil rights since a teenager in the early 1960s. • jeff – in the late 1990s, jeff was first asked to collaborate with teachers from king to design academic projects. as the city arborist, jeff has been involved in a range of projects with students including creating field guides to local natural areas and inventorying the health of trees planted in public spaces. • susie – as the head of special collections at a local university, susie got involved with king when contacted by a teacher who wanted to bring students in to look at artifacts from the african american special collections. • ed – ed’s involvement with king spans multiple perspectives: former mayor of portland, city councilor, parent of two king students, and public school advocate. he worked with students on several projects, including inviting 2 in the 2010-2011 school year, king’s student population was 55% free and reduced lunch, 51% minority, 36% english language learners, with 25 different languages spoken. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a8 students to testify at a public hearing about reducing pollution in casco bay. • fred – a water quality specialist, fred has worked with teachers and students at king on a longitudinal study of the presumscott river. fred was a student at king in the 1980s and was a parent of a student at the time of the interview. he has noticed a dramatic difference in the school he went to as compared to today. data analysis we adopted a grounded theory approach to data collection and analysis. the process consisted of: 1) interpreting data by generating theoretical concepts about the meaning of ‘making student work public’ at king over time; 2) coding relevant episodes of interviews, fieldnotes, artifacts and audio/video – in part using in-vivo codes that relied on people’s actual words (saldana, 2009); and 3) using focused coding to build categories and using the constant comparative method during initial rounds of open coding (i.e., comparing data with data and then comparing data to codes). the strategy of collecting multiple types of data was critical; it allowed us to compare within and across types of data (seaman, 2008). throughout, we used clarke’s (2005) notion of situational analysis to assist in “‘opening up’ the data and interrogating it in fresh ways” (p. 83). as shown in the next section, major coding themes, as established through the larger research project, were specifically corroborated and expanded upon given the interviews with local experts. analysis/findings in this section, we discuss three themes that emerged from our analysis of the data as they relate to our questions about local experts and student-work-as-boundary-objects: 1) being peered into; 2) performing student work; and 3) getting all students to the top of the mountain. although other themes emerged from the larger research study, these three intersect with students working with local experts. here we explain the three themes broadly and their relationship to each other. each theme is then explored in depth, after which we discuss implications. historically, king moved from tracking to heterogeneous grouping, a process that started in the late 1980s. consciously transforming to a school where all students were given the opportunity to succeed meant adopting a philosophy of “all students getting to the top of the mountain.” this entailed dramatic shifts in approaches to curriculum design, teaching practices, and collaboration among staff and students. at the heart of these reform efforts, were projects that had relevance to people outside of the school and the notion of ‘making student work public’ – sharing results of student learning in front of local audiences. preparing for and sharing performances of student work created a way that students, teachers, community partners, and the school-as-a-whole where “peered into.” being peered into students ‘sharing their work with an audience’ created an inherent mechanism for students, teachers, and the school-as-a-whole to be peered into. putting work up on a stage having people outside of the school witness students’ academic learning invited scrutiny (usually positive, though potentially negative) across stakeholders. however, by being part of the process of students’ work, local partners also were ‘peered into’ in interesting ways. by sharing their work with students, young people bore witness to the professional lives of the local experts. this mattered to these adults, and each spoke about it in different ways. john, who was interviewed for the small acts project, had an emotional experience while recounting his experiences during his interview with students and at the culminating event. john said that the work that students produced was so important to him that, “i have it in my archive of things to keep the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a9 forever.” he also said, “part of the emotion that i felt was that this was exactly what the whole civil rights movement was about and there it is right in front of me;” in other words, that this diverse group of students was learning together and caring about civil rights. he also described what it was like for him to watch students react to his stories, for them to listen to his involvement in the civil rights movement and write about them. he said, “to them, of course, 1965 is ancient history, and to me, i was a pretty young man in ’65… but there was almost a jaw drop from the kid who was asking the question. like, ‘oh my gosh, really?’” in detail, john described the historical moment3, as he had told it to students, “…but there was also this undergirding sense that history was being made. this was the right thing that and this was the right place and that i, in that moment, not only was u.s. history being shaped, but i was being shaped. it was big.” john re-contextualized his own memory of this moment, by telling it to students, by having students be in awe of these details. he said, i was feeling it again too. i’m an emotional person and my compassion for that experience and telling it to the kids was just very moving. it’s very powerful and of course there’s a bond that happens in that when someone’s giving their own testimony of anything and those listening can feel the emotion of re-visiting that time and place. it was very special…i would never have thought of myself as a history maker or anything particularly notable. just ‘[john] doing what he’s able to do.’ but recognizing in the kids and the project helped me perhaps to better value what was going on and the fact that i was there. other local partners described the value of working with students because they could see their own professional interests being passed to a new generation – some of whom may choose their profession as their own. for instance, it was inspiring to think that their passion for environmental protection could potentially live on through students’ work, not just in these projects, but following them into high school and beyond. additionally, each of the interviewees compared themselves to king students, saying that they could not imagine themselves as middle schoolers producing the quality of work of these students. working with students gave the local experts the opportunity to examine their own experience as students: king students seemed to care so much more about their work than they ever did. the kinds of things students and local partners worked on together, created a reciprocal nature of ‘being peered into.’ not just students – but also adults in the community – had the chance “to look at oneself through the eyes of other worlds” (akkerman & bakker, 2011, p. 146). as shown in the next theme, the students performing their work was the vehicle through which this ‘being peered into’ occurred. performing student work the type of work that students did alongside local experts was important – it often stemmed from local needs and questions. some of this work generated lasting material artifacts – such as the field guide depicted earlier – and some was performed for audiences. students and local experts performed their work during the process and as an end result. as stated in the introduction, adults often have an emotional response when watching children share their work. each interviewee described the tears they shed when watching students perform their work up on a stage or give a speech to the city council. john said he was on the edge of his seat during students’ culminating performance of small acts. he said he “felt himself leaning into” the students’ 3 the ‘historical moment’ john referred to was marching with martin luther king jr. in selma, alabama – specifically crossing the edmund pettus bridge. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a10 performance, willing them along, rooting for their success with his body language, “sending energy their way.” connecting back to notions of aesthetic experiences, greene (2001, p. 10) echoes this idea saying, you are going to discover, sometimes with a veritable shock of awareness, the degree to which such understanding enables you to move out toward, to be present at performances and created works, the degree to which knowing can open perceptual possibilities and, indeed, enable us to feel more, to sense more, to be more consciously in the world. ed described a scene from king’s annual celebration of learning, held at the city’s expo center each spring, at which students displayed and discussed their work from throughout the school year to people outside of the school: ... there were 15 or 20 adult educators clustered around this young boy and he just with confidence and poise... i was almost in tears watching that and afterwards talking with him...man, you reached in you grabbed that kid, you challenged him, but you also supported him. and now look at him. that to me is what i would call a trajectory changer. to ed, it was moving to witness a student transformed through the process of performing his work. ed believed that this kind of experience positively shaped the direction of some middle school student’s lives. local experts also described what it was like not just to be an expert – a resource for students – but to work alongside students, as john said, “crafting something together.” jeff, spoke at length about the quality of work that students did alongside him during their citywide inventory of the health of publicly planted trees. to have students doing legitimate work – contributing to a real database – with him and not just for him, mattered to jeff. he was deeply proud of the work they did together. as previously stated, performances were not just the end result, but constituted the process itself: local experts were asked to assess student work and provide feedback. for example, in small acts, the interviewees read through near-final drafts of students’ writing. john described the experience saying, it was much more an experience of reading and saying, “wow.” observing and feeling the difference attributable to who the kids are and each of them hearing me as i said earlier, through their own lens, their own experience and it was just this... well for me, it’s a holy moment. it’s the sense of, “oh my goodness,” that you know the spirit moves in times like that...i didn’t just read through it quickly. i really savored it. sat with the four drafts. although difficult to describe the nature of having a “holy moment,” it was clear that he had an intense experience working with students’ writing, that he took their work seriously, and that their work was deeply moving. fostering this was a combination of the quality of students’ work and that students cared specifically about his story and more broadly about civil rights. each of the interviewees discussed how they were impressed by the quality of students’ work and students’ level of preparedness for all types of performances. it was clear to them how hard students worked; they all remarked on students’ poise and professionalism. when asked about the quality of students’ work john said: it’s stunning. it’s really both the format and then the actual narrative that the kids created...that’s a remarkable piece of work. and to have it…presented in this way gives the kids that additional sense of ‘this is very special, the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a11 it really matters.’… it’s not just … quickly produced like the things that you and i had when we were in school. this is a keepsake and it’s really a very beautiful rendering of the stories and i think for the kids to have the experience not only of doing … every step of the project, but seeing this as the outcome and having a sense that they, the students, the teachers were in this project together and that it created something of lasting value and lasting significance is just huge. i mean it’s remarkable. i admire and affirm that so much that they were able to create something like this. as stated here, that students produced lasting artifacts of their work – bound books, websites, videos – mattered. these material objects acted as ongoing mediators of local partners’ understanding of the work, as well as created the possibility for others to understand. with little prompting, interviewees excitedly showed us what kids had produced. one person hurried to every corner of his office grabbing pieces of students’ work. the interviewees were proud of these artifacts. during the interview, artifacts of student work became mediators between us-asresearchers and the interviewee. through local experts describing and showing the features/qualities of students’ work, they recounted the process they went through, the use of that product afterwards, and their beliefs about the value of student work. in a notable exception, when asked about the quality of student work, one person said that she had not read what students had written. although she expected the quality of the writing to be high, she thought “it was a symbolic gesture” that the students’ work was placed in her archive. she did think that students’ work would be used in the future; however, she saw the value more “as an example of an educational process.” (see the next section for more examples of how student work was a means for adults understanding the possibilities of schooling). as described in the above examples, students’ artifacts and performances served different needs and fulfilled different roles, depending on one’s frame of reference. from the local experts’ perspective, the products and performances sometimes served an instrumental role, having direct use value as intended. the city arborist said that what students produced in one project (in the form of a short video) was better promotion for his office and his work than anything he or other adults possibly could have generated. ed, former mayor, described how students were by far the best advocates for an initiative he tried to get support for from city council. he said: one of the reasons why the king students were so effective in addition to their knowledge, content, and presentation skills was in fact their very presence was a very visible statement that this really wasn’t so much about us, about people my age (as i call it ‘the old farts’) this is about the future and that it is the young people in portland who will be the greatest beneficiaries of the investment we make now. he also said: it was out of rational self-interest on my part as mayor at the time that i asked the students, “would any of you be willing to volunteer to come to the city council?” and my primary motivation was, i needed their help. so, i think that is testament to the quality of their work and the quality of their presentation skills and that when they came, as i said, they were the most effective advocates. more so than the folks from the state department of environmental protection of the other environmental advocacy groups. in this case, it was only partly what students created or produced that had value; to ed, it was also the students themselves that had use value to his mayoral initiative. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a12 as conveyed more specifically in the next theme, part of the impact of students’ performances on local experts was that all students participated, together, and with high quality. one interviewee said that witnessing king students’ performances helped him have ‘elevated aspirations’ not just for schooling, but for the entire city of portland. he said, “i mean, you couldn’t sit through the culminating events…and not, in my opinion, have elevated aspirations for how our community should be able to relate to one another.” getting all students to the top of the mountain when the principal (who stayed on until 2016) took over in 1988, king middle school was a tracked school, with seven levels of students grouped according to purported ability. in an effort to detrack king and to create a school with heterogeneous grouping, the principal was inspired by an outward bound metaphor: instead of getting a few students to reach academic heights, the school instead would help all students reach the top of the mountain. the metaphor of “getting all students to the top of the mountain” pervaded teaching and learning at king and was resoundingly heard in the words of the local experts. here we explore two sub-themes: 1) how working with students shaped community experts’ notions of what diverse groups of students were capable of; and 2) how this work also shaped their understanding of the possibilities of schooling. interviewees spoke about their newfound knowledge of what it took to pull off a school like king. several worked with other schools, and they said there was a notable difference. this partly related to how hard teachers at king worked, but it was also about teachers’ ability to collaborate with people inside and outside the school – that instead of simply seeing the expert as a guest/invited speaker, they saw them as a partner. for example, ed saw teachers as leaders alongside the school’s principal, saying that, “the power of collaborative leadership is evident at king.” the quality of students’ products and performances shifted each person’s understanding of not just what any one student was capable of, but the possible accomplishments of racially, linguistically, and socio-economically diverse groups of students. one person said, “a strong mix of all sorts of students that it wasn't just the kids who were from affluent families that excelled.” he went on to say, …my own bias that when i first met the students – i met them all [90] at once and so it was really my first impression…kids from all walks of life, different socio-economic backgrounds and i was really impressed that they all achieved at the same level and when i got the final product i couldn't pick out any of the individuals…because they all excelled and i think that part really surprised me the most. in describing king, one interviewee said, “i reduce it actually to one very short phrase, which is what king does really well, is they challenge every single student.” he said each of these last three words slowly and deliberately, hitting the table with his hand for emphasis…every (bam!) – single (bam!) – student (bam!). seeing ‘all students get to the top of the mountain’ led several people to become champions of public school reform. as ed said, “one of the downsides of being a king parent, and i mean this seriously, is it makes you a lot less tolerant of the mediocrity elsewhere in the school system.” ed was very vocal in his view of public schooling, saying that since he has seen the possibility of excellent schooling, “less than king” was intolerable. related to the previous ‘elevated aspirations’ quote, seeing all students ‘get to the top of the mountain’ prompted one person to say, “this is the way we want portland to be.” students at king, performing their work publically, showed people outside the school that diversity was an asset and gave people “a glimpse of what portland can be.” the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a13 discussion the importance of aesthetics it could be argued – as star and griesemer (1989) did – that the effectiveness of boundary objects lies in their ability to facilitate alignment of use values. examples in our data support this, as when ed invited students to make a presentation because it would more effectively sway opinion than hiring paid professionals. in our view, however, student work cannot be understood only in this way, given the disparities of value across stakeholders’ social worlds and the often sentimental – even spiritual – language interviewees used when speaking about student projects and performances. for projects to achieve maximum motivational potential – or so the arguments go – students must perceive that their products have utility for some other audience. often this means a community organization or interest. however, actual utility is only rarely true, and becomes increasingly unlikely earlier down in the k-12 range. even if students do occasionally produce something that approaches professional work, this does not hold systematically across all instances of student projects. the rarity of students (a) working on something efficiently, and (b) producing something truly of professional quality would not be sufficient to sustain the claims or the enthusiasm of project advocates. finally, teachers and administrators are likely both unqualified to determine use-value at a professional caliber (say, judging architectural plans) and unmotivated to do so: their qualifications lie in promoting and assessing learning. the ‘use-value’ of student work for them lies therefore in its ability to demonstrate that learning occurred. despite these discontinuities, project work continues to captivate and satisfy all parties. so how might analysts fruitfully understand value? first, it is helpful to consider student products and performances as mediating artifacts that dialogically enable boundary crossing. mediating artifacts are central to sociocultural perspectives on human growth and development. not all artifacts promote boundary crossings and so it is important to consider what qualities contribute to negotiation/new understandings across diverse perspectives. and, in our case, when examining students’ products and performance, how can we understand the ‘quality’ of these creations, how local experts interact with them, and why this work seems so important to children, teachers, and people outside of the school? a possible answer lies in the aesthetic domain. several scholars have made connections between what is broadly thought of as sociocultural perspectives on learning chat in particular and the work of john dewey. notably, miettinen (2001) makes connections between dewey and chat that revolve around a materialist epistemology, focusing on the use of tools. mietinnen represents dewey as believing that, “the world is known only in purposeful transformation of objects” (2001, p. 302). dewey is known as an instrumentalist, giving material items and labor a central role in in expanding human culture and capability. but he was also supremely concerned with aesthetic value. in what follows, we turn to the periodic instances where dewey’s materialism and aesthetic sensibility intersect with his educational prescriptions. dewey’s notion of a “genuinely aesthetic object” serves as a starting place to make sense of student work as boundary objects, what occurs at the boundary between the social worlds of students/teachers/school and out-of-school experts. in his later works, dewey (1925/1964, p. 161) discussed aesthetic objects as being both instrumental and consummatory. he wrote, … a sure demonstration that a genuinely aesthetic object is not exclusively consummatory, but is causally productive as well. a consummatory object that is not also instrumental turns in time to the dust and ashes of boredom. the ‘eternal’ quality of great art is its renewed instrumentality for further consummatory experiences. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a14 dewey further argues that true art is not an item of beauty that only a few elite specialists enjoy, but rather is “a union of the serviceable and the immediately enjoyable, of the instrumental and the consummatory” (p. 161). by ‘consummatory’ dewey meant the inherent qualities of art taken in by a person; by ‘instrumental’ he meant the role the work played in experiential conditions (westbrook, 1993). he desires ‘art’ that embodies both qualities, allowing the object to endure over time and propel future experiences; it does not turn into ‘the dust and ashes of boredom.’ additionally, dewey argued that art was more than a static object hanging on a wall, but it was through a person’s experience with that artifact that the significance came alive, largely through the cultural notions that shaped that experience. along these lines, dewey argued that art should not be separated from everyday life but rather infused as a sensibility in experience (westbrook, 1993). westbrook says about dewey, “at the heart of dewey’s aesthetics…to trace the continuities between the work of art and the doings and undergoings of everyday life” (p. 390). for dewey, aesthetic experience was its highest form, uniting instrumental and consummatory values, and enlarging subjects’ emotional and intellectual capacities for appreciating and reconstructing culture. as wong (2007) writes, citing rosenblatt (1978), “in the end, we construct efferent meaning to be ‘carried away’ from the immediate, aesthetic situation. the experience becomes ‘meaningful’ as the aesthetic and efferent are inextricably related to one another. the value of an educative experience is the enrichment in our lives both in that moment and in subsequent experiences” (p. 207). what student produce through their school work can be instrumental – it can serve a specific purpose whether in exchange for a grade (lave, 1991) or reducing the amount of solid waste generated by students’ school. it can, in other words, have exchange value or it can have use value. in actuality, student projects are likely often constituted by varying degrees of both. student work can also be consummatory. for example, when students create and perform a play in front of a live audience, the audience is emotionally and intellectually rapt. but, when student work contains both instrumental and consummatory qualities, it is both serviceable and beautiful – artful, in the deweyan sense. it is this work that climbs out of the ‘economy of the wastebasket’ and has the potential to serve as boundary objects. seeing student work in this way also allows us to reconcile the discontinuity of value that constitutes most project-based work, providing an explanation of how and why it sustains and satisfies so many diverse stakeholders. moreover, it helps to derive criteria for evaluation that places some stringent requirements on the kinds of work that schools have students do. from this vantage point, most of what students do – including seemingly unending standardized tests – falls far short of having worthy value. one teacher described small acts of courage as the ‘never ending expedition,’ because what students created had a life of its own, in unpredictable ways, after the purported ‘end’ of the project. artifacts of student work were passed among community members; sat on the shelves of the local university’s special collections library; were shared as pdfs on the school’s website. that students created this work was not enough for these objects to continue to ‘act’ or promote dialogue; it was the aesthetic quality of student work, the ways in which students conducted themselves during their interviews and at their public performance of their work that caught the attention of audience members. these beautiful moments propelled their work into enduring, active, meaning-making, dialogic roles. implications for the dialogic potential of student work as discussed throughout this paper, there are specific features of the work that students produce at king that foster boundary crossings, including: 1) the aesthetic quality of the products and performances that students create alongside local partners; 2) that students produce artifacts that have and create social meaning; and 3) that king has a history of this type of work that has endured over 20 years. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a15 in our case, why exactly does aesthetics matter? why work with children to create products and performances of academic work that are both instrumental and consummatory, that have use value and continue to give pleasure after the consummatory event – indeed, whose meanings continue to evolve? why connect children and local experts through this kind of work, or more provocatively, use it as criteria for curriculum design and assessment? greene (2001), in discussing dewey’s notion of aesthetic education says, “that meant removing arts from their pedestals and equipping all kinds of people to engage with them, to lend them their lives. and it meant enlarging the domain of the arts so that all kinds of silenced voices could be heard…” (p. 107). as shown in our analytical themes, part of how local experts described the value of their work with students was in witnessing students finding their voice – that students who typically might not have the opportunity to shine, were standing up in front of the world and proudly displaying their work. in this paper we have discussed the dialogic possibility of student work as framed by the notion of boundary objects. the quality of student work shaped our interviewees interpretation of what diverse groups of students were capable of. that they had ‘elevated aspirations’ for individual students (and for schooling in general) is critical; however, that they also transferred this idea to ‘the way portland should be’ is demonstrative of boundary objects not just negotiating meaning between social worlds, but actually being the leading edge of development. these descriptions suggest a certain type of dialogue, one in which children not only claim a personal voice through their work but contribute to shared worlds that are imbued with social meaning. conclusion – “planting trees in public spaces” although speaking about the actual value of students’ work as “planting trees in public spaces,” this comment from the city arborist serves as an apt metaphor for the life span of students’ products and performances. first, student work is quite literally rooted in the local community – it exists because it has emerged from expressed needs of people outside of the school and it is presented in public spaces (i.e., the public library’s art gallery, in front of city council, books donated to the special collections library). second, student work lives beyond the completion of the actual product or final performance: it exists in the public sphere, shaping local partners’ notions of what it means to do school, of the power of students finding their voices. for student work to be considered dialogic is a radical departure from how typical student work functions. evidence of academic achievement that is reduced to test scores (as is increasingly present in the current climate of standards and accountability) truncates the possibility of school-community partnerships. rather than leveraging school-community partnerships in service of improved test scores, we argue for work that is mutually beneficial, that opens up possibilities for new understandings and possible trajectory changers for both students and local partners. references akkerman, s. f., & bakker, a. (2011). boundary crossing and boundary objects. review of educational research, 81(2), 132-169. apple, m. (1990). ideology and curriculum. new york, ny: routledge. baker, p. h., & murray, m. m. (2011). building community parterships: learning to serve while learning to teach. the school community journal, 21(1), 113-127. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a16 blumenfeld, p. c., soloway, e., marx, r. w., krajcik, j. s., guzdial, m., & palincsar, a. (1991). motivating project-based learning: sustaining the doing, supporting the learning. educational psychologist, 26(3/4), 369. clarke, a. e. (2005). situational analysis. thousand oaks: sage publications. dewey, j. (1925/1964). experience, nature, and art. in r. archambault (ed.), john dewey on education (pp. 157-165). new york: the modern library. dewey, j. (1927/1954). the pubic & its problems. athens, oh: swallow press-ohio university press. dobbertin, c. b. (2010). what kids learn from experts. educational leadership, 68(1), 64-67. engeström, y. (1987). learning by expanding: an activity-theoretical approach to developmental research. helsinki: orienta-konsultit oy. ford, m. j., & forman, e. a. (2006). redefining disciplinary learning in classroom contexts. review of research in education, 30, 1-32. greene, m. (2001). variations on a blue guitar: the lincoln center institute lectures on aesthetic education. new york: teachers college press. gutierrez, k. d., & rymes, b. (1995). script, counterscript, and underlife in the classroom: james brown versus brown v. board of education. harvard educational review, 65(3), 445-471. lave, j. 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(2010). toward a more social understanding of achievement goals: the interpersonal effects of mastery and performance goals. current directions i psychological science, 19(5), 324-328. roth, w.-m., & lee, y.-j. (2007). "vygotsky's neglected legacy": cultural-historical activity theory. review of educational research, 77(2), 186-232. saldana, j. (2009). the coding manual for qualitative researchers. los angeles: sage. sanders, m. g. (2006). building school-community partnerships: collaboration for student success. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. seaman, j. (2008). adopting a grounded theory approach to cultural-historical research: conflicting methodologies or complementary methods? international journal of qualitative methods, 7(1). sidorkin, a. m. (2001). labor of learning. faculty publications, paper 16. the use-value and real-world projects alison rheingold and jayson seaman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.165 | vol. 5 (2017) a17 star, s. l., & griesemer, j. r. (1989). institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley's museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. social studies of science, 19, 387-420. wardekker, w., boersma, a., ten dame, g., & volman, m. (2011). motivation for school learning: enhancing the meaningfulness of learning in communities of learners. in m. hedegaard, a. edwards & m. fleer (eds.), motives in children's development: cultural-historical approaches (pp. 153-169). cambridge, u.k.: cambridge university press. westbrook, r. (1993). john dewey and american democracy. ithaca: cornell university press. wong, d. (2007). beyond control and rationality: dewey, aesthetics, motivation, and educative experiences. teachers college record, 109(1), 192-220. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word paul sullivan, dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy (layed out).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-77     dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan university of bradford, uk abstract it appears that in september, 2011, rome experienced much more than a dialogue on dialogic pedagogy but a gladiatorial clash of personalities and ideas. heat, we are told, was generated (above, p.1) and in the dissipation of this heat on to the page, even the reader gets hot and flushed. we are told that arguments “fail” (above, p.16); that terms “are not clearly defined” (p.21), breakthroughs in classification (e.g. epistemological dialogical pedagogy) are tackled and dragged down to personal eccentricities “his so-called epistemological dialogical pedagogy” (p.22), politeness tries to get a grip periodically, “i agree. but maybe i agree with kiyo only to a point” but shouting (e.g. capital letters/underlining terms – e.g. “not the exclusive practice” (p.26)) and assertions take over. accusation fly sometimes to the point of legal charges “i charge the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii with...” (p.29).       as a spectator, the strength of these emotions and the depth of intellect are compelling and enjoyable. these are “idea-heroes” (bakhtin, 1999). we can hear the banging of swords against shields, we flinch at the violence of the thrusts but we empathise with the heroes’ odyssey. many disagreements are at stake and some are more “crucial” (p.40) than others, as the authors argue. as a reader, we experience this too because the authors have created the plot and are to be congratulated on living us through it. after raging through the pages and sharing this journey, however, the resolution ends with another dialogic disagreement. we sense that there is no exhaustion that has brought it to an end but rather a pragmatic decision to just end it. so, too, with dostoevsky’s novels. he doesn’t do endings well, bakhtin tells us. yet, this is not the typical consummation experience that the reader would have hoped for – in my case, from years of watching american movies. there is no happy ending, there is no joint epiphany or learning moment, there is no arm around the shoulder. so, i will attempt here, in an effort to satisfy my own cultural leanings, not to arbitrate between these disagreements but instead to find common ground and will try for a happy ending. at the end of the day, are not these differences very minor? obviously in the heat of the battle they are crucial, as kiyo points out, but shouldn’t there be some common ground here? don’t worry, however, i will try not to bore with pat togetherness or with saccharine aspirations or worse, with already-acknowledged areas of agreement (such as some of the partial agreements around polyphonic authorship). i will start with the form of the dialogues and what this form tells us about the issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-78 implicit epistemology before moving to discuss ontology. i will end with another ology, hopefully not a tautology, which is “axiology.” the epistemological issue –dichotomies, classification systems and hierarchies a key issue of debate through these two commentaries is whether eugene’s thinking is dichotomous. kiyo suggests it is while eugene argues that it is not at all dichotomous. in the first debate, eugene really gets the ball rolling in this series with a set of classifications around dialogic pedagogy – particularly epistemological, ontological and variations of these such as instrumental and noninstrumental. kiyo tells us that he is unable to agree with these as being mutually exclusive dichotomies. this leads to some puzzlement on eugene’s part and he suggests that there must have been a misunderstanding: “i think i tried to make it clear that any ontological approach has an epistemological aspect while any epistemological approach has an ontological aspect” (p.26). still, kiyo appears unconvinced as he repeats the claim on the last page, “as i have already noted in my response to your description of ontological dialogue and epistemological dialogue as mutually exclusive categories…” (p.42). so, kiyo, are these mutually exclusive, as you suggest? in theory, they are not. it makes sense for these to be conceptualised as tendencies that characterise dialogue. in practice, however, there also appears to be at least a hint of mutual exclusivity. from looking at the diagram on p.5, representatives are proposed of each, which are then assigned to one particular box. freire is a representative of the instrumental dialogic but lakatos is a “good representative” (p.9) of non-instrumental dialogic, epistemological ii. the representatives of each approach should probably appear more than once (socrates appears twice but this is unsurprising as there are two socrates (plato’s and socrates’ version of socrates). hopefully, this is more than just a shallow point. it is people, including eugene, rather than ideas, that have ended up in these boxes as representatives of particular kinds of dialogue. later, kiyo is suspected as being a member of epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii (p.27). there is authorial power in this – a kind of aestheticisation of the characters that does not cover the polyphony that kiyo so admires. with this system, and while clearly outside of the spirit of eugene’s discourse, there is also great potential for abuse – e.g. by performance managers – where suspicion can indeed be bred (“makes me suspect that he is a proponent of…” (p.27). in the second, kiyo-led dialogue, this same issue pops up again but in a different guise. eugene makes a distinction between “responsive” and “self-generated” dialogue and kiyo suggests that it is another dichotomy, “first issue is about your dichotomy between the responsive authorship and the selfgenerated authorship” and although eugene does not reply, i’m gathering from his comment on p.37 that he anticipated this objection and moved to inoculate against it, “there is no clear-cut distinction between these types of students’ dialogic authorship” (p.38). kiyo takes this inoculation as a smokescreen, however, and argues, “though you argue that there is no clear-cut distinction between these types of students’ dialogic authorship, you substantially describe these two types as mutually exclusive opponents” (p.40). to suspend the question of disagreement for a moment on whether eugene’s thinking is or is not unwittingly dichotomous, we can immediately see that both eugene and kiyo are united in viewing dichotomous thinking as a vice and that they both have a desire to be anything but dichotomous. eugene is puzzled by the suggestion he is dichotomous and takes pains to detail why it is not dichotomous but kiyo remains unconvinced throughout and keeps pressing this point. to echo a point that eugene makes with regard to the klara dialogue, kiyo is pressing an unpleasant “mama-truth.” for me, the ontological dialogue that it sparks is whether it is indeed all that unpleasant? dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-79 this common ground against dichotomous thinking makes a lot of sense as both thinkers are persuaded by dialogical pedagogy. both are inspired by bakhtin (kiyo particularly in terms of polyphonic authorship; eugene in terms of learning as a form of living). why are they attracted to bakhtin? is it because he presents us with a world where people can change and that even when they inhabit a role, they are not defined by it but rather the role looks “comical” on them? dichotomies suggest a drab world of finalities and rigid thinking, where concepts may not touch each other (they are separated by clear water with no bridge) in comparison. what does epistemology mean? it is a theory of knowledge. here, the theory goes that we cannot know very much by being dichotomous. perhaps it is ‘closed-circuit’ to again echo one of eugene’s points. this theory, in itself, appears to build on a set of values. in the world of practice, dichotomous thinking occupies as legitimate a place as the world of non-dichotomous thinking. dichotomous thinking finds a heritage in aristotle’s laws (particularly the law of non-contradiction) and it is an everyday cognitive heuristic used to simplify complexity. cognitively, its full of errors, of course, like prejudices and stereotypes but it works pragmatically, even instrumentally and many great insights in logic are attributable to the law of non-contradiction. many of bakhtin’s concepts appear dichotomous, even mutually exclusive in any one moment in time – self and other; author and hero; spirit and soul and much of the argument here revolves around the “teacher-student” dichotomy. perhaps dichotomies allow some stability, a reference point, in a world of flux; and aloofness in a world where things/people/ideas constantly touch each other. my broader point here is that eugene and kiyo are united not only against dichotomous thinking (maybe a negative freedom) but also in a using a value-hierarchy to get at knowledge. it is a hierarchy where dialogical thinking is the master and dichotomous thinking is the sub-altern – to be run out of town. this makes sense to me, in education, and i believe in the pedagogy but getting back to a theory of knowledge, it is difficult not to privilege certain ways of knowing over other ways of knowing, which ironically appears to be the very thing both of these authors argue against in the classroom. later i will ask if it is fair to ask teachers not to privilege traditional, safe ways of knowing over students’ ways of knowing, when these conflict. this value-hierarchy, from an epistemological standpoint, finds a second expression in the use of classification systems by both kiyo and eugene. kiyo classifies polyphonic and non-polyphonic teaching or teacher as author/teacher as dialogic author and student as hero/student as dialogic hero. for eugene, we have a more extensive form of classification. these find graphical representation on an equal plane in eugene’s case but it is clear that he places a higher value on the “non-instrumental dialogical ontological.” perhaps it is his eloquent style, and my own journey in academia, or the fact that i like eugene and he is a named representative/hero of the “non-instrumental, dialogical” but i find myself rooting for this hero, of all the protagonists, that he outlines. i think there are two adventure-struggles for eugene’s ontological dialogue that are not picked up by kiyo. one is his insistence that it moves us beyond high-culture and a fascination with high culture of the sort we find in epistemological dialogue. yet at the same time, its name: “non-instrumental ontological dialogue” is not exactly from ‘the street’ and i wonder if teacher-practitioners would experience this as high academic culture. obviously, its message, that being has priority over knowing and that as a consequence, we ought not to bracket and disvalue the mundane from teaching, makes a lot of sense and i think in broad terms, kiyo is in general agreement with this. secondly and relatedly, however, what catapults ‘non-instrumental dialogical ontological’ into the realm of high-culture is the mysticism and reverence that accompanies it, and which eugene dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-80 acknowledges but is keen to avoid. from the mysticism point of view, such dialogue permeates existence, although it is hard to specify and, while the klara example is useful, there’s no way of knowing if it has taken place. maybe it may have only taken place when one looks back. what appeared to be pedagogical violence at one point, on mature reflection, could have turned out to be ontological dialogue. that’s not to say that eugene is not on to something. he is picking up on an aspect of dialogue – its decentering of taken-for-granted ‘constants’ such as time and space– via a connection to physics – that also intrigued bakhtin and was built into his theory of dialogue. in social theory, however, without the hard maths, it is difficult to shed the mysticism. from a “reverence” point of view, this kind of dialogue is “higher”/holy, maybe making high culture out of low culture. it reads here as an ultimate, transformative, high-octane learning experience. to me, “high” culture and “low” culture is difficult to define by the contents (for instance when so many “highculture” novelists were serialised for the masses originally) and marginally easier to define synchronically or in the moment of interaction by the beholder’s degree of reverence. to help the protagonist (non-instrumental ontological dialogue) to overcome these challenges, i would suggest drawing again on epistemology. the theory of knowledge that ontological dialogue suggests is that some experiences are beyond the reach of knowledge (we may not know it has taken place for our interlocutor or students and in ourselves only after a lapse of time). in other words, knowledge (self-knowledge/other knowledge) can meet a limit. this is quite a kierkegaardian point. we have to take a “leap of faith” that ontological dialogue may take place or may have taken place. this brings us back to the use-value of ontological dialogue. it will resist the best-laid lesson plans but the practitioner has to take the odd leap of faith that maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow but at some point they will have had such a dialogue. maybe this is an aspect of eugene’s epistemology that is a little buried in there and which is worth drawing out. following from this, it is no surprise that eugene privileges ontology over epistemology (just as kierkegaard would – substituting hope and faith for knowledge) and nor is it a surprise that kiyo refuses to make this move. for kiyo, “animals must act in order to know” (p.19). if this is the case, then there can be no suspension of knowing or substituting knowing for ‘faith’ for if one does, then it is pointless to act. kiyo’s value-hierarchy (in the classification system outlined in his initiated dialogue) privileges knowledge in yet another way. while eugene provides a number of transitional steps up the hierarchy towards ontological dialogue, kiyo appears to be much more dramatic. teachers are authors, students are heroes, and there is just one big step – from non-being to being – dialogical. here, in this elevated sphere, we can meet a dialogic author (teacher) and a dialogic hero (student). although wary of the potential of this hierarchy for abuse, like eugene’s value-hierarchy, it is an analogy that resonates with my reading of polyphony and i am not surprised that eugene also finds much of value here and largely endorses many of its implications. it is worth noting, however that knowledge that is generated in this dialogic way appears to be privileged by kiyo over knowledge that is generated in a non-dialogic way – e.g. non-dialogics (to coin a term for a group of teachers and students) take teaching material as easy and straightforward, “dialogics” take teaching material as profoundly challenging; non-dialogics may place a value on listening but (stupidly?) “the nature of teacher’s listening to students has not been fully understood” (p.33). dialogics understand this relationship very well. the frame of debate from here, in kiyo’s initiated dialogue, puzzles me a little. if you like, the protagonists (eugene and kiyo) have taken the battle up into the clouds of the highest point of the valuehierarchy. on this ground, it is clearly better to be a dialogic teacher/student – that is the ground. the battle concerns whether the students have enough freedom to initiate their own inquiry from underneath dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-81 the author’s nose or whether the students really can be treated aesthetically rather than as embodied, complicated beings. i sense that eugene wishes to radicalise the polyphony analogy to the ultimate freedom (to not only initiate their own dialogues but also to walk away), which in a way brings it to its ‘logical’ conclusion, rather than dispensing with it entirely – (although i don’t think he would agree). but eugene, polyphony is the capacity to surprise the author and what greater surprise could the author have than to have their hero bow out? to put this in another way, i read the disagreement here as one regarding two different readings of polyphony – a traditional one (kiyo) and a radical one (eugene). i don’t think the debate is about the distinction of art and life and the ethics of treating life as art – which only masquerades as a fault line. it is clear that for both eugene and kiyo, art (whether high or low) and life can be read as mutually answerable to each other, just as bakhtin (1990) tells us is the key to reading his social theory. what puzzles me about this debate is why the question of teacher-student learning has become subsumed to a more high-academic-culture question of specifying the most authentic form of dialogue – (e.g. self or other initiated). with a quest for authenticity the principles that are being defended may possibly be undermined. what concerns me even more about kiyo’s polyphony analogy is the displacement of the carnivalesque in this polyphony. carnival is great at turning hierarchies upside down and at giving voice to the subaltern. at one level, this clearly happens in the analogy insofar as the teacher (as traditionally understood) is decrowned and simply a participant among others. at a broader level, however, the epistemology that eugene and kiyo leave us with is also a hierarchical one. what will happen, in this value-hierarchy, to the “old-school” teachers, the unreconstructed teachers and students (e.g. the students with no eros) and the macho or those who just don’t share these values? would a terrifying fate await them or is this hierarchy also open to a laugh? then again, maybe this is a misplaced question considering the dominance of other hierarchies outside of dialogic pedagogy. maybe it is an unfair question to an oppressed pedagogy, fighting its corner. ontology: the christ-like figure of the teacher and the threat of pedagogical violence so, i’ve just given a brief account of what i see as the epistemology that underpins the dialogues. in this next section, i’ll outline a bit of the ontology. here, i’ll make a simple point that follows on from the epistemology. this is, both kiyo and eugene appear to present us with an ontology that is profoundly christian in spirit. kiyo is quite clear about this. when i read of kihaku saitou, i was reminded of christ immediately. there is the “garden of eden” vulnerability to being betrayed by judas students; the very students with whom the teacher has worked with “all her/his heart.” yet, strength arises from weakness “when the teacher becomes aware of her/his work’s frailness, powerlessness and loneliness, she/he will acquire new strength” (saitou, 1963, p.13). nietzsche would tell us that this is a “slave-morality,” embodied by christ. the meek shall inherit the earth. he is who is last shall be first. turn the other cheek. the virtuous is the weak. it is in this ontology that it seems to be kiyo’s turn to get all mystical and transcendent on us. i enjoy it, i have to say, and i’m guessing that many would agree with the sentiments. in my own teaching, i constantly try to efface an almost primal desire to loudly assert institutional authority (like telling students that talking while i’m talking/texting or coming in to the class very late is all “against the rules”). i try to make these points in a gentle and loving way or maybe not make them at all. i definitely feel frail and at dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-82 the end of the day, i’m shattered. at the same time, i keep something back for myself, a little detachment from some of the double-binds of the classroom and a modicum of indifference regarding student progress (shock-horror). otherwise, i feel i would have no home life. what i am questioning here is the ontology where the teacher teaches with “all their heart” such that it is open and vulnerable to betrayal and exhaustion. should they “commit themselves to the teacher’s work” (p.42)? is there any place for irony in this system or in this community? just for a moment, it is worth considering richard rorty’s (1989) argument (building on kierkegaard and others) that the public community stands apart from private self-creation: this book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. it sketches a figure whom i call the “liberal ironist.” i borrow my definition of “liberal” from judith shklar, who says that liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do. i use “ironist” to name the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires – someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance” (p.xv). i find this distinction interesting and relevant for the debate at hand insofar as it permits a space for the teacher to be a little indifferent, a little ironic and a little less committed to the great teaching project. in kiyo’s ontology and in the examples he uses, i can see a commitment to the public sphere and to solidarity with a deeply non-ironic teaching project (“they believe that they can do something for the learners only in a lesson” (p.42), “to have rich dialogic experience,” (p.43).). it is polyphonic but non-ironic – just as dostoevsky’s characters were non-ironic, hastily committing suicide or to self-torturing dialogue. i think this is why kiyo ends his dialogue response with such a powerful “final remark” (p.43). of course he will find eugene’s position disturbing. why would eugene have a pedagogy? to me the answer to that question is that eugene develops, a bit like the early socrates and kierkegaard again, the position of the ironist in education. he is committed to a position where learners may not care about the teacher and the teachers’ projects and i think, although it is understated, a position where the teacher may not care particularly about the students and their projects. teaching is “secondary” in education and the teacher may structure and facilitate but it is the students who are autonomous beings. for me, a logical implication of this position is that teachers mirror students’ attitudes. they should not worry so much about what the student engages with in their self-learning and in their project of self-creation (the liberal ironic position, as rorty describes it). perhaps recognising a non-dichotomous tension between the pedagogy of public dialogic experience amidst private irony and indifference would help us to see the threats to dialogic pedagogy (the threat from a broken heart after an epic public struggle or the threat of alienation from private projects of self-creation). in a sense, eugene and kiyo epitomise the tension in the liberal-ironist position and the incommensurability attached to it. on the other hand, however, looking at these dialogues from afar, kiyo provides the liberal and eugene provides the ironist to a liberal ironic dialogic pedagogy (at least ontologically). however, this is actually another dichotomy in a way, as there is already a fair streak of liberalism (in the sense above, as cruelty is the worst thing we do) that runs through eugene’s earlier comments. it is with this part of the liberal-ironic ontology that i’ll wrap up my comments and my broader project to draw these epic heroes together. dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-83 a “superaddressee” in eugene’s ontology is the figure of the violent pedagogue or the threat of “pedagogical violence.” it is this quality of both recognising the contingency and chance attached to values but also that violence is the worst thing we do, that marks this discourse around ontology as liberal-ironic – at least for me. this moral value or “slave morality,” in nietzsche’s terms, acts as a foundation for judging particular frameworks: however, modelling classroom discussion after an epistemological dialogue can lead to pedagogical violence (p.8); an assumption or an expectation that all participants are automatically and non-problematically interested in a problem can lead to big pedagogical disasters and eventually to oppressive pedagogical violence (p.10); i suspect that establishment and maintenance of the teaching taboos regime promoted by the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii requires pedagogical violence (p.29). so, here we do not have the “christ-like” figure that kiyo presents us with but instead its doppelganger (they are both on the same page here): the ominous threat of pedagogical violence and the aristocratic, violent teacher? actually, i would like to read a bit more about what constitutes pedagogical violence and who the perpetrators of it are. for example, the students who betray, those students that kihaku saitou appeared to have some experience of, are they pedagogically violent. if we grant the students equality, then presumably they have equal rights to terrorise? perhaps even persuading others is pedagogically violent and maybe privileging “high-culture” over “low-culture” is also a form of pedagogical violence. it seems that even the “mono-topic development of an idea” has to be supported by pedagogical violence (p.11). following nietzche can we “re-value” this value? i think we can if we follow foucault’s tack that power is productive as well as repressive. it can have a double-edged quality. so, while pedagogical violence appears as a form of “sovereign power” (power attached to the sovereign) here, perhaps it could be viewed also as part of a diffuse network of relationships. we know that in many senses, violence leads to cruelty and this is the worst thing we can do. what about masochism as opposed to sadism or a situation where sadistic teaching leads to masochistic learning? that is, what if pedagogical violence is experienced as a painful mental workout, a torture-rack? a situation where the teacher forces the “development of one theme” (p.12). its not the kind of learning style that i would personally like to enjoy or encourage. then again, i’m not into s+m (sadomasochism) but if that’s how people get their kicks, that’s how they get their kicks and i’m a little reluctant to use it as a foundational judgement value. perhaps in this regard i’m more ironic than eugene or maybe, as i say, i need to read more of eugene’s thoughts on pedagogical violence. i think this thought brings me crashing back to the world of practice. throughout my re-readings of this dialogue, i kept trying to put myself in the place of a teacher in a classroom and to recall my days as a trainee school teacher and the kinds of resentment i encountered against academics in ‘ivory towers’ in the staff room. throughout these dialogues there is something immensely appealing in the ontology that we are presented with but it also smacks of the same kind of ethereal religiousness that commentators have identified in bakthin’s work (e.g. hirschkop, 1999). that’s not bad, in itself, of course. i just struggle to match it with my experience of the ordinary person wanting to make a living out of being a teacher. eugene identifies a descriptive and prescriptive dimension to ontological dialogue. i would love to see more of a connection between these two aspects of dialogical pedagogy in any future dialogue. dialogue on dialogue on dialogic pedagogy paul sullivan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.123 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-84 a brief conclusion – the third ‘ology’ there are many ‘ologies’ in these dialogues but one ‘ology’ that is missing, one that is immensely important to bakhtin, is axiology. axiology is a system of values. in this commentary, i have tried to tackle the values that underpin the epistemological and ontological debates. in doing this, i have encountered some overlaps in sharing this journey. to articulate these – i see a common thread in a commitment to a traditional naturalistic epistemology in classification and hierarchy in the organisation of the knowledge. at the top of this hierarchy, however, i see eugene as committed to a mystical “leap of faith” in his epistemology while kiyo has no desire to break the link between knowledge and being. i am curious about how those at the bottom of the value-hierarchy should be conceived. in ontological terms however, kiyo betrays a mystique to the dialogic teacher that brings us into the realm of vocational spiritualism while eugene maintains an ironic distance. both, however, appear to be united in what nietzsche refers to as a “slave morality.” again, this is unsurprising considering bakhtin’s influence here and in particular his christian leanings (one that i too am drawn to as a liberal, ironic non-believer). the ontology in other words, like the epistemology, arises naturally from a foundational axiology. maybe we don’t need to be ironic about this foundational axiology but some distance and re-evaluation of the value, (e.g. for the christ-like teacher and pedagogical violence) may be helpful. to conclude on a less ironic note, i would say that the “eros” behind these dialogues is immense. these authors saturate their thinking with their emotion and feeling and most importantly, their attraction to dialogic pedagogy. in doing so, and to carelessly break my promise against pat togetherness, they inspire the dialogue to go on… sorry, they highlight the challenges and the potential of dialogic pedagogy as an idea with a rich texture. references hirschkop, k. (1999). mikhail bakhtin: an aesthetic for democracy. oxford. oxford university press. rorty, r. (1989). contingency, irony and solidarity. cambridge. cambridge university press. saitou, k. (1963) jugyo. (the classroom lesson), kokudo-sha. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word matusov, severe limitations of the poietic individual mind layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r1 severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract review of the 2011 book thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman published by new york: farrar, straus and giroux (isbn: 9780374533557; 499pp.) ��� the better a person understands his/her own determinism (his/her own objectness), the closer he/she comes to understanding and realization of his/her own genuine freedom. (bakhtin, 2002, vol. 6, p. 398 (translation from russian is mine). daniel kahneman, an israeli cognitivist psychologist and a nobel prize winner in economics in 2002, delivers bad news for the humanity. our human individual mind makes very poor judgments. but even more, not only we are cognitively deficient and are unaware of these deficiencies but we rarely change our judgments even when we have learned about these deficiencies. according to kahneman, who worked closely with another famous american cognitive psychologist amos tversky, our individual mind consists of two systems. system#1 involves a mostly invisible intuitive inductive uncritical mind based on pattern recognition, association making, making consistent coherent stories, simplifying and so on. system#2 involves mostly familiar deductive, logical, deliberate, reasonand argument-based, critical, calculative, rational mind. through various clever lab and natural experiments and personal stories. kahneman convincingly demonstrates how often the quick system#1 makes judgments and decisions instead of the slow system#2. but even when system#2 is activated, more often than not, it uncritically swallows the data, provided by system#1. in itself, it may not have been necessary bad, if only system#1 had been accurate and smart – the problem is that it is not the case, according to the intensive empirical evidence provided by the author. people’s mind is much less self-conscious about its own work, less rational, and more susceptive to fallacies and manipulation. in this book review, i, as a dialogic educator and researcher, want to share my excitement and appreciation as well as critique of this wonderful new book. let me share a few of my favorite examples from the book. the most striking evidence for me of how system#1 tacitly guides our behavior is a case of so-called “priming.” the psychologist john bargh and his collaborators asked undergraduate 18-22-old students at new york university to assemble sentences from a set of 5 given words. in the experimental group of the students, the word sets included words associated with elderly such as “florida,” “forgetful,” “bald,” “gray,” or “wrinkle.” the control group did not have words associated with elderly. after this task, the research participants were asked to go down issn: 2325-3290 (online) severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r2 the hall to continue the experiments. however, the true focus of the researchers was on measuring the time for the participants to get across the hall. the young participants from the experimental group walked significantly slower through the hall than the participants from the control group. kahneman explains that first, system#1 tacitly triggered thoughts and associations about old ages, which then primed a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. both stages of the priming occur without any awareness of the participants. interestingly, as the cognitive researchers showed, the effect can be reversed if the participants developed negative attitude to elderly – they would walk faster than the control group. the tacit system#1 can be easily manipulated exactly because its work is not under control of the actor. my other favorite case about the faulty system#1 involves the author’s experiments about fictitious lady named linda, linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. she majored in philosophy. as a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations (p. 156). graduate students were presented with the question, what is more probable: linda is a bank teller or linda is a bank teller who actively participates in the feminist movement. ninety percent of the research participants chose the latter answer, despite the “obvious” fact that active feminist bank tellers are a subset of the total bank tellers pool. a subset of a pool automatically reduces the probability, regardless of a description of a particular case. kahneman argues that in this case, the fast institutive system#1 tacitly replaces the presented question about probability with a question about representativeness: based on linda’s description, she better matches to an active feminist, who happens to be a bank teller, than to a generic bank teller. as kahneman convincingly demonstrates, system#1 is notoriously bad about probabilistic judgments. in contrast to visual illusions, awareness of the cognitive fallacies caused by system#1, does not necessarily help to correct them. so, what should we do to address cognitive fallacies caused by the fast intuitive tacit system#1 that often lets us jump to wrong conclusions? as kahneman points out, mere awareness of these fallacies is not very helpful. the author proposes using special formal procedures and/or replacing human judgments with objective formulae. for example, kahneman recommends employers, who seek to hire new employees, to develop no more than 6 independent factors that define the success of the job, operationalize each of these factors with 2-3 interview questions, and rate each job candidate on the questions using 5point scale, trying to make sure that rating on one question does not influence rating on another question. than a simple formula should be developed adding all the rates that will allow to rank the candidates. the employer must stick to the result of the ranking, resisting any temptations to use his or her holistic judgment because the latter will be shaped by the cognitive and perceptual fallacies by system#1. the author goes even so far to suggest that a simple formula of the frequency of sexual intercourse minus the frequency of marital disputes can predict more accurately the marriage stability or divorce rather than any clinical judgment by a marital expert. he believes that the increasing proliferation of the objective formulae based on research evidence (i.e., “evidence-based practice”) will improve the practices by eliminating the subjective human judgment based on cognitive fallacies of system#1 and, thus, will make a victory of system#2 (rational objective calculation) over system#1 (pattern recognition) possible. to the author’s credit, he provides self-criticism to his cognitivist research and argumentation. he admits that his research focuses on documentation of cognitive fallacies rather than to study successes of the system#1, which might have skewed his conclusions. also, the author admits that he has been predominately interested in human judgments involving so-called “low-validity practices.” low-validity severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r3 practices involve a high degree of probability and/or lack of any regularity rule. kahneman’s research collaboration with gary klein, another reknown cognitivist psychologist and a scholarly opponent of kahneman, helps to explore limitations of kahneman’s research, argumentation, and conclusions. klein has found system#1 to be much more powerful, successful, and useful. in contrast to kahneman, klein has studied human intuitive expert judgments in high-validity practices with immediate feedback and high deterministic regularities like firefighting or chess playing. kahneman agrees that in these “high-validity practices,” human intuitive expert judgment, based on pattern recognition, grounded in the participant’s extensive experience, can be very accurate and valuable. however, as chess playing shows, smart computers (and smart programs) can outsmart human pattern recognition and thus human intuitive expert judgment. throughout his book, daniel kahneman discusses hostile reception of his research, argumentation, and conclusions. he points out that in a part, this hostility comes from our system#2, who has difficulty to come to terms that it is not always or even not much in the driving seat of the mind. many critics accuse kahneman of being mechanical, rigid, non-contextual, and so on. in my authorial judgment (sic!), this critique is both unfair and fair. i judge it unfair because i agree with cognitivist psychologist kahneman that our mind can function like a smart machine, based on a pattern recognition, and also it has limitations and fallacies, worth of studying. recent exciting advances in smart machines based on pattern-recognition, complexity, and self-organization – such as chess playing, voice recognition, writing recognition, self-driving cars, and so on – have left no doubts that smart machines can outperform human intuitive and rational expert judgment. furthermore, i agree with the author that formulae and smart machines should replace human intuitive expert judgment whenever it is possible. my argument in agreement with kahneman is based not only on effectiveness, accuracy, fallacy-free, and efficiency, as kahneman convincingly argues, but also on a moral argument that this labor and work (cf. arendt, 1958) may not necessary be human endeavor in the first place. this brings me to my critique of kahneman. i argue that his mechanistic vision of human mind is based on mechanistic practices (both low and high validity practices that he considered), in which this human mind operates. aristotle named these mechanistic practices as “poiesis.” in poiesis, the goal, the definition of success, and the definition of the quality of the activity pre-exists and is predefined explicitly or implicitly before the activity takes place. in contrast to poiesis, there is “praxis”, defined by aristotle as practice, in which the goal, the definition of success, the definition of problem, and the definition of the quality (i.e., values) emerge and are negotiated in the practice itself. i argue that many cognitivist psychologists like kahneman, tversky, and klein have studied mind in poietic practices. it is no surprise that in many (if not all!) kahneman’s examples and experiments, the goal, success, and quality of the activities were predefined or could be predefined in advance. if this is the case, i believe that in poiesis-like practices, human mind can be viewed as an imperfect smart machine, can be modeled by a smart machine, can be improved by a better formula and smart machine, and, thus, can be legitimately replaced by a smart machine as more accurate, reliable, effective, and efficient, regardless of how upsetting it may sound for us, humans. while highly appreciating kahneman’s innovative approaches to study human mind and important consequential findings, i argue that the human nature cannot be reduced to predictable outcomes of behavior, judgment, and action. boesch argued that “a main trait of human reality is to transcend itself” (1993, p. 15). this suggests that the human nature reveals itself not when human behavior, action, and judgment are governed by system#1 (pattern recognition) or system#2 (rational objective calculations), so nicely studied and described by kahneman, but when humans transcend these systems, using these systems as the building material for this transcendence. thus, patternless outliers, rather than statistically severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r4 significant patterns, should be studied to reveal this transcending essence of the human nature (gladwell, 2008). the outliers often creatively redefine the situation, the purpose of the activity, the normative relations in which they find themselves, transforming the poiesis of the psychological experiments into praxis. the issue of desirability becomes for us of how we can promote an authorial judgment, which is responsible – i.e., answerable to other people and the actor him/herself, – rather than how we can subordinate the system#1 (pattern recognition) to system#2 (rational objective calculation). the authorial responsible judgment does not annihilate nor does it put aside system#1 and system#2 – pattern recognition and rational calculations – but, it rather uses them as the material for their transcendence. this is especially important in education. let’s consider the following example. matusov (2015) describes a case, in which an educator, named in his article as mr. jim, faced an important educational dilemma. mr. jim worked in an afterschool program with latino/a children at a local latin-american center in the us in the early 2000s. he organized an activity, in which 7-14 years old children had an opportunity to create their “digital stories.” mr. jim got two expensive digital cameras from a local state university that the children, who wanted to participate in the activity, could borrow for a day or two to shoot a video of their choice. then, they edited their raw footage and added narration and music through mr. jim’s guidance and peer mutual help. mr. jim designed an online prototype of youtube (it was before video sharing was available on the internet), the center’s children, staff, and parents could rate the children’s videos and make comments on them. since, there were more children who wanted to participate in the activity than the cameras, mr. jim developed a waiting list. pedro, a 12-year old mexican boy, signed for the activity. pedro had very negative reputation at the center. he was known to the center children and staff as a thief. he was caught twice by the police for shoplifting and was suspected in stealing a cellular phone from the center. he had countless suspensions and detentions from his school and he had problems with his behavior at the center. many children at the center did not like him because of his stealing and involvement in fights. when his turn came to borrow an expensive digital camera, not only the center staff but also many children objected because they were sure that pedro would simply steal the $1000-worth camera. pedro also expected that he would not get the camera and started his objection arguments in a whining and increasingly aggressive tone. to surprise of all, mr. jim offered a camera to pedro. pedro could not believe in what happened and tried to make sense of it. he asked mr. jim if he had many cameras. mr. jim said that he had only two. pedro asked how expensive the cameras were. mr. jim replied that each costed $1000. pedro asked what would happen if a camera disappeared. mr. jim replied that the center would become a less exciting place, the university would probably stop giving money to support the center’s exciting activities. then pedro directly asked mr. jim of why he was trusting the expensive digital camera to him. mr. jim replied because he was next and because he wanted to make a digital story. pedro took the camera. next day, he was suspended from the center for a fight for a few days. however, he asked his father, who had three jobs, to come to the center after his third job to return the camera on time. pedro’s digital story about his drug infested neighborhood was the winner – it had the highest rating on the videosharing site designed by mr. jim. in argument with mr. jim, mr. david, another instructor at the center, provided a very good rational evidence-based argument guided by system#1 and system#2 of why pedro should not be trusted with an expensive digital camera. the risk was high. mr. jim did not have much rational, objective, evidence-based counter-argument to offer. it was not a case that mr. jim had known something about pedro that mr. david or the rest of the community had not known. it was not a case that mr. jim calculated pedro better than the rest (bakhtin, 1999), foreseeing that his trusting defenseless offer of the expensive camera would transform pedro’s vile nature through this random act of kindness. no. although mr. jim was very glad that pedro returned the expensive camera back and won the digital story competition with his brilliant socially-charged video, it was not his goal either. what was it? severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r5 at the time, during the events, mr. jim did not know what was the goal of his trusting offer to pedro. it took several years for him to fully realize and articulate it. mr. jim realized that he wanted to disrupt the toxic careless environment and predictable dysfunctional social relations in which pedro had been trapped back then, in order to create a space for pedro’s authorial responsible action (and judgment). this authorial responsible action might or might not involve returning camera. for example, pedro might have decided to sell it in order to buy medicine and toys for his sick younger brother, unilaterally prioritizing the acute needs of his family over educational and entertaining needs of the center. this arguably could also have been an authorial responsible action but its responsibility unilaterally prioritizing family over the community center, would have been contested. the dialogue, initiated by pedro, between pedro and mr. jim about the meaning of his action was very important for creating this space for authorial responsible action because with a high probability this dialogue continued for pedro internally and externally perhaps in his family. citing famous german poet of the xix century goethe, viktor frankl argued, if we take man as he is, we make him worse, but if we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be … so if you don’t recognize a young man’s will to meaning, man’s search for meaning, you make him worse: you make him dull, you make him frustrated. while if you presuppose in this man, there must be a spark for meaning. let’s presuppose it and then you will elicit it from him, you will make him capable of becoming what he in principle is capable of becoming (frankl, 1972,). again, the issue is not to calculate pedro into a desirable action or an attitude, but rather to create an opportunity for a human-to-human encounter be able to occur (bakhtin, 1999; buber, 2000), the encounter/meeting is the ultimate opportunity to hear yourself in the other. this other can be a physical interlocutor or it can be an encounter with a text or with some phenomenon of culture, which forces me to make that very effort. the encounter/meeting, which i am talking about, is that what presupposes my great effort to encounter the other who is not overlapping with me (i.e., opaque to me), but who is interesting for me. [this meeting generates] a point of puzzlement/surprise and at the same time it is a point of some kind of unusual joy of discovery of myself in the [other] unexpected for me. this is as if [the other] talks about something that is deeply intuitively clear to me. and at the same time, [the other] creates the space, in which these deep intuitions of mine begin to live and begin the fireworks of my own creative thinking … [the other] capture[s]/hook[s] something in me, which is essential about me. to “capture/ hook” something in me, means to provoke, spark, self-actualize, and initiate some kind of my own activity. and this situation of the encounter/meeting that i am describing here is, as a matter of fact, an educational situation. the genuine education unavoidably involves an element of provocation. what is important for me, as a teacher, is that my encounter with the students is the space of my own personal self-growth, my own self-actualization. the encounter with my students is the process of my own selfmaking/self-creation/self-becoming and, thus, my own self-education (originally in lobok, 2014; cited in matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 216). in case of mr. jim and pedro, this encounter occurred, making both of them outliers of the given past relations. however, this encounter is not and never can be guaranteed. arguably, the purpose of education (among some others) is to create possibilities for such human-to-human encounters. an educator cannot design an encounter but only favorable conditions for it. kahneman can be wrong because he equates the human mind-in-poiesis, i.e., “taking man as he is” (cf. frankl’s quote above), with the human per se. human mind in praxis-like practices, where goals, problems, values, successes, qualities emerge, are defined by and negotiated with the immediate and remote participants, may not be studied and approached in the same way kahneman has studied and severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r6 approached mind-in-poiesis because an observed phenomenon does not exist independently of the observer, who is just another participant in defining and negotiation of the goals, values, problems, and so on (this is just one of many reasons, see other reasons here: matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016, in pressa). for example, judgement of a pedagogical success is always contested and is in the eye of the beholder. thus, sigmund ongstad (2007) presented an interesting, but sad, story illustrating how mainstream school does not appreciate and care about students engaging in big dialogue about ideas and testing limits of knowledge, if not actively discourages them, the following task was given as one in a set at the official national exam in ‘norwegian’ for all upper secondary schools (high schools) in 1973 in norway, ‘the number of youngsters who marry already in their teen ages has increased heavily the last years. there are especially many girls who marry that early. what can be the causes for this development, and what is your view upon that so many marry so young?’ later the same year a class at a local school got the same task. however, one of the students contested the very premise for the task and wrote, as his assignment, a harsh critique of the whole task, arguing why the premise is invalid. the local lecturer gave him a bad mark (for not having answered the given task). the student then contacted the central statistical office, who could confirm that he was actually right. the premise was not valid. he then approached the teacher and the norwegian department of education again, without result. he even challenged the school’s headmaster, who was a mte teacher as well, in the hope that this ‘sensible man’ would support his claim. however, neither the headmaster nor the norwegian department of education would admit any mistake. the task had even been given at the national exam the same year and had not caused problems. and one crucial argument was: you are bristling up against the task instead of trying to come to grips with the problem (retold in english based on an article in aftenposten (newspaper), oslo october 1973 by sigmund onstad). this reminds us of a confrontation between soviet psychologist luria and illiterate adult uzbeks, who rejected the premises of luria’s syllogisms in his famous experiments in central asia in the early 1930s (luria, 1976; matusov & st. julien, 2004; scribner, 1977). authorial judgements by outliers can be judged by other outliers, whose judgment will have to be also authorial, thus, contested and not objective because the purpose, the definition of quality, and the criteria for judgment emerge in the judgment itself and do not pre-exist it as it is in school tests and kahneman’s and luria’s psychological experiments. another, but related, limitation of kahneman’s research ontology is his interest in isolated, selfcontained, monologic mind. again, this interest may be legitimate in poiesis-like practices divorced from other aspects of human life. however, in praxis-like activities, where new meanings, new goals, new quality, new judgment criterions emerge, mind should be viewed as connected, transactional, and dialogic. in praxis-like activities, meaning emerges not as a pattern or rational calculation but as a serious answer to a genuine, information-seeking question asked primary by the other and secondary by the self (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016, in press-b). thus, it is important to point out the limitations of the cognitive studies of human mind that can never be reduced to system#1 or system#2. we need a new science of human mind as authorial dialogic outliers, moving away from poiesis-like objective voiceless methodologies (cf. bakhtin, 1986, who made a similar call). psychology of judgment is viewed by kahneman either as a deviation from the classical rationalism or as an illegitimate shortcut to the classical rationalism. these psychological deviations and shortcuts have their own regularities that cognitivist psychologists, like kahneman, study by using a big number of subjects. classical rationalists view people as perfect, or, at least, desired machines. cognitivist psychologists view humans as imperfect machines, although not without their own heuristic advantages in “high-validity” practices. in both cases, humans are given and calculable (at least in a statistical sense of the big number). my criticism here is not that the classical rationalism and cognitive psychologism are wrong but rather that severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r7 their truth is limited and they do not know and do not seek to know their own limits. i agree with classical rationalists and cognitive psychologists, like kahneman, tversky, and klein, that humans are and can be both perfect and imperfect machines in their thinking and acting. this makes their studies of humans as imperfect predictable calculable machines very useful and consequential. however, i disagree with kahneman’s approach to mind reducing humans to perfect or imperfect predictable calculable machines and defining the human nature as such. i see the most important usefulness of studying humans as (im)perfect machines in helping us stop acting like rational or irrational machines when we wish so and, thus, to claim our non-machine-like, unpredictable, incalculable, dialogic humanity. i think it is extremely useful to consider humans as being both (im)perfect machines and as authorial dialogic agencies. in this sense, my view of humans is unapologetically dualistic. acknowledgement i want to thank my colleagues bob hampel and ana marjanovic-shane for their critical feedback and suggestions for improvements on my earlier drafts of the review. also, i want to thank mikhail gradovski for encouraging writing the book review and ricardo freire for suggesting reading this book. references arendt, h. (1958). the human condition. chicago: university of chicago press. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. boesch, e. e. (1993). the sound of the violin. the quarterly newsletter of the laboratory of comparative human cognition, 15(1), 6-16. buber, m. (2000). i and thou (r. g. smith, trans. 1st scribner classics ed.). new york: scribner. gladwell, m. (2008). outliers: the story of success (1st ed.). new york: little brown and co. frankl, v. (1972).frankl’s speech, ‘why to believe in others?’. retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/viktor_frankl_youth_in_search_of_meaning lobok, a. (2014). education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 2, s1-s5. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/84 doi:10.5195/dpj.2014.84 luria, a. r. (1976). cognitive development, its cultural and social foundations. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. matusov, e. (2015). four ages of our relationship with the reality: an educationalist perspective. educational philosophy and theory, 47(1), 61-83. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2013.860369 matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2015). typology of critical dialogue and power relations in democratic dialogic education. in k. jezierska & l. koczanowicz (eds.), democracy in dialogue, dialogue in democracy (pp. 211-229). farnham, uk: ashgate publishing ltd. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016, in press-a). dialogic authorial approach to creativity in education: transforming a deadly homework into a creative activity. in v. p. glăveanu (ed.), the severe limitations of the poietic individual mind eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.178 | vol. 5 (2017) r8 palgrave handbook of creativity and culture research. hampshire, uk: palgrave macmillan publishers ltd. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016, in press-b). many faces of the concept of culture (and education). culture & pcychology, 1-28. doi: 10.1177/1354067x16655460 matusov, e., & st. julien, j. (2004). print literacy as oppression: cases of bureaucratic, colonial, totalitarian literacies and their implications for schooling. text: international journal, 24(2), 197244. ongstad, s. (2007). argument(s) and/as utterances, genres and context. paper presented at the argumentation in (con)text. january 2007. university of bergen, norway: bergen. scribner, s. (1977). modes of thinking and ways of speaking: culture and logic reconsidered. in p. n. johnson-laird & p. c. wason (eds.), thinking (pp. 483-500). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a19 socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri malayer university, iran ann pihlgren ignite research institute, sweden abstract this paper explores the possibilities of the pedagogical use of socratic dialogue as a basis for educating students diagnosed with autism. the socratic dialogue is a particular pedagogical method used in educational settings to enhance student’s thinking and dialogic abilities. research has proven that socratic dialogue may result in improved language, interactive, and critical thinking abilities, as well as have effect on students’ self-evaluation. the social nature of dialogic learning may scaffold children with specific abilities to effectively interact with others and perceive those others’ emotions. presently, education of students diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorders (asds) use a variety of educational interventions, mostly inspired by behaviorist theory. these include little or no systematic use of dialogue as a pedagogical means of scaffolding students' abilities. however, several of these behaviorist methods have been tried out for a long period, educating students with asds, and have also proved to be successful to certain extents. in this article, we explore why and how socratic dialogue can be used as an effective strategy for educating individuals diagnosed with autism. hence, the investigation ends by introducing a dialogue-based teaching design that is compatible for children diagnosed with asds, to be explored and evaluated. ali nouri is an assistant professor in department of educational studies at malayer university, iran. his research interests are dialogic pedagogy, neuroscientific foundation of curriculum, theories of learning and teaching, educational neuroscience and neuroedcational research. he is involved in several projects concerning the implications of brain research for educational policy and practice. ali is now the director of neuroeducation studies sig which works under the supervision of iranian curriculum studies association. the sig aim is to reflect the recent advances in the field of neuroeducation studies. ann s. pihlgren, phd, research director at ignite research institute has worked as supervisor, principal, teacher, quality controller, chairman of the political school board, and vice principal and educator at stockholm university. she is involved in several projects concerning school development, pedagogical improvement, and leadership training, in sweden, europe, and the usa. her doctoral dissertation “socrates in the classroom” was a thorough investigation of the socratic traditions in education, and a phenomenological analysis of the interplay of youngsters philosophizing as part of their classroom syllabus. it was awarded “swedish dissertation of the year” 2008. ann has also received the swedish award for enhancing school democracy, daks. her literary book production includes: “socratic dialogue in education”, “democratic educational methods”, and “the thinking classroom”. her research interests concern thinking, cooperative learning, democratic education, and consequences in teaching. issn: 2325-3290 (online) socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a20 introduction the ideal pedagogical dialogue could be described as an activity directed towards discovery, new understanding, teaching, and learning in a decentered and non-authoritarian way (burbules, 1993), even though this ideal might be difficult to reach in classrooms (burbules, 2000). educational dialogue is in some ways a specific genre that partly differs from the everyday conversations or critical and emancipative dialogue. in the school context, the dialogue is aimed at students learning a particular knowledge or developing abilities that they can use in interaction with others, when undertaking a learning project, or when participating in democratic processes (pihlgren, 2016). burbules (1993) identifies four types of pedagogical dialogue, based on two kinds of distinctions. the first distinction concerns the relation between dialogue and knowledge construction. a dialogue is either convergent, looking for a final answer or conclusion, or it is divergent, where no final answer is sought but rather a plurality of points of views. the second distinction regards the participants’ dialogical relation toward each other. this can either be inclusive (playing “the believing game”) or critical (playing “the doubting game”) (cf. elbow, 1986). the four types are defined as follows: • conversation – inclusive and divergent • inquiry – inclusive and convergent • debate – critical and divergent • instruction – critical and convergent most common in classrooms is the instructional dialogue, followed by conversation, and to some extent debate (liljestrand, 2002; pihlgren, 2016). however, teachers initiating inquiring dialogues, using analyzing questions, have shown to have important impact on students’ learning results (hattie & timperley, 2007). socratic seminars and closely related educational activities like philosophy for children (p4c), or deliberative dialogues have traditionally been practices in various countries to teach thinking skills, and as a supplement to classroom education (pihlgren, 2008). the socratic seminar – a german and swedish tradition, and the paideia seminar – an american tradition, are a particular pedagogical method for preschools and classroom learning using inquiring dialogue to enhance student’s thinking and dialogic abilities. it is an educational approach, that consists of certain steps, where the teacher will help a group of students to build a respectful climate for dialogue, and the seminar will consist of the following steps (adler, 1984): 1. taking part of textual a material that the seminar will focus on (text, picture, film, diagrams). 2. setting a group mode of dialogue (talk to each other, present counterarguments, ask questions, cooperate to find answers), and each participant setting a personal goal. 3. starting question, asking each participant to consider an evaluative question concerning the textual material, starting the dialogue. 4. analyzing the ideas in the textual material and ideas presented by participants and evaluating the analyzed ideas. 5. evaluating the dialogue and setting the goals. the length of the seminar will vary depending on the students’ group age, experience, and endurance, somewhere between 15-30 minutes. the teacher will function as a facilitator, asking openended questions and promoting the cooperative dialogue among the students but without presenting answers or rectifying what is said. the seminar, at its best, is a mutual search for better understanding, but not always resulting in group consensus. instead, different ideas are encouraged to enhance thinking and understanding. research has proven that the seminars may result in improved language, interactive, and critical thinking abilities, as well as to have effect on students’ self-evaluation (billings & fitzgerald, 2002; pihlgren 2008; orellana, 2008). socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a21 research objectives presently, education of students diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorders (asds) use a variety of educational interventions, mostly inspired by behaviorist theory. these include little or no systematic use of dialogue as a pedagogical means of scaffolding students' abilities. however, designing adequate teaching programs for students with autism requires an appropriate knowledge of their unique educational needs. children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (asds) are shown to demonstrate problems with social communication, emotional regulation, imitation and imagination, sensory integration, problem solving, attention, and motivation. several of the methods in use have been tried out for a long period, educating students with asds, and have also proved to be successful to certain extents, but not to other. we have in our practice, as well as in our research, seen substantial progress of social abilities, as well as critical thinking and language, with students in preschools and compulsory schools using socratic, paideia seminars. in dialogic seminars contexts, interaction with other people is methodically facilitated and encouraged, helping both teachers and students co-construct their knowledge and develop their understandings in flexible ways. the social nature of dialogic learning may serve as a scaffold for children with specific abilities to effectively interact with others and perceive those others’ emotions. our interest for using the method with groups of students diagnosed with asds, and evaluating the results, led to the assumption that the students might benefit from participating in systematic dialogic training. this paper is, thus, the starting point of this work, discussing why and how a dialogue based teaching is compatible with the educational needs of children with asds. research methodology we used a structured literature examination method, integrative research review (backman, 1998; cooper & cooper, 1989), where the goal is to make a research synthesis, comparing findings in literature on autism, social and emotional abilities, and the use of dialogue in socratic, paideia, seminars. we have searched in data bases and purposefully reviewing and integrating the relevant literature to categorize the insights supporting our conclusions and to construct a dialogue-based teaching method that is fitting for children diagnosed with asd (starrin et al., 1991). the focus population are children diagnosed with asds, and with social and communication difficulties, but without severe communication or cognitive deficits. this primarily includes children with asperger’s disorder. although these children are of normal intelligence, they are often faced with life-long problems coping with reciprocal social interaction and emotional behavior (critchley et al., 2000). however, children diagnosed with other asds may also benefit from this model, since social and emotional difficulties seem to be the most prominently described common characteristic among all children diagnosed with asds. a review of the definitions of asds the term “autism” is derived from the greek root “auto” which means “self”. though “autism” is a familiar term in the early twenty first century, it was only recognized in the 1940s as a severe disability (snell, 2002). in 1908, eugen bleuler first used the term “autism” to describe a specific type of social withdrawal that he observed in schizophrenia (cotugno, 2009). leo kanner (1943) borrowed the term “autism” to refer to a group of children with inability to relate to people and situations, failure to use language for the purpose of communication, and obsessive desire for the maintenance of sameness in the environment. one year later, hans asperger (1944) published a report describing a group of children and adolescents with characteristics similar to kanner’s description; but with no significant delays in early socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a22 intellectual development or language skills. he used the term “autistic psychopathy” to describe this condition. almost forty years later, in 1981, lorna wing used the term “asperger’s syndrome” for the first time and referred to it in her research on autism. in 1988, wing used the term autistic continuum to define the range of possible autism disorders, from profound to mild (cotugno, 2009). following then, in 1994, the american psychiatric association’s diagnostic and statistical manual: fourth edition (dsm iv) used the term pervasive developmental disorder (pdd) to cover a group of developmental disorders that are characterized by impaired development across the social, cognitive, emotional and language domains. (american psychiatric association, 1994). the american psychiatric association (apa) has updated the standards for diagnosing autism spectrum disorder in 2013 in the fifth edition of the apa's diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. the dsm-5 uses the term autism spectrum disorders (asds) the two broad categories of symptoms, social communication and restricted repetitive behavior, to diagnose the disorder. other conditions for a valid diagnosis of asds include presence of symptoms from early childhood, a significant impact of symptoms on a child's day-to-day functioning and the absence of any diagnosis of intellectual disability or developmental delay. autism spectrum disorders (asds) is thus a developmental disorder with a range of severity and impairments, characterized by deficits in social communication and repetitive and stereotyped interests and behaviors (apa, 2013). the recent studies suggest that children meeting the “autistic disorder” criteria range in numbers up to 12 per 1,000 children (kopetz & endowed, 2012). in addition, about 80 percent of children with autism also meet the criteria for mental retardation, with significant limitations in iq and adaptive behavior scores (snell, 2002). recent studies suggest that most of the risk of developing asds is due to variations in genetic structure (auerbach et al., 2011; gerdts et al., 2013). it has been well-established that developmental abnormalities associated with autism become apparent by 12 months of age (osterling et al., 2002). there are also studies which suggest that infants with older siblings with autism spectrum disorders (asds) are at increased risk for developing an asd or subtle, inconsistent, but multi-faceted deficits in emotional expression and referential communication (cassel et al., 2006). in addition to investigating the role that genes play in asds, several studies have reported functional and/or structural abnormalities of the neural system in autistic populations. it is demonstrated that the “social brain” areas of autistic individuals are less active compared to those of control groups. these social areas (e.g. amygdale, anterior cingulated, insula, temporal parietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex) are responsible for processing “mind-reading” tasks (baron-cohen, 2009). a functional mri (fmri) study reported abnormalities in regional brain activity of adults with autistic disorder during the explicit and implicit processing of emotional facial expressions. autistic subjects in this study did not activate a cortical “face area” when explicitly appraising expressions, or the left amygdala region and left cerebellum when implicitly processing emotional facial expressions (critchley et al., 2000). children diagnosed with autism also experience depletion in serotonin synthesis in the first few months after birth that contributes to hemispheric asymmetries in global and local connections, compromising language development (dalton & bergenn, 2007). while autism is generally defined by a suite of negative characteristics, recent studies are emphasizing the abilities and strengths of people diagnosed with autism. for instance, perceptual regions of the brain seem to be activated more among people diagnosed with autism during a non-verbal intelligence test. while, non-autistics individuals typically perform equally well in tests of verbal and nonverbal intelligence, people diagnosed with asd score much higher in non-verbal tests, such as raven’s matrices that need no verbal instructions and no verbal response to complete, than in verbal ones, such as wechsler’s scales that rely on verbal instructions and answers (mottron, 2011). socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a23 furthermore, the asds are, as shown, quite a divergent group, with great variations within what is considered to belong to the diagnoses. it has been documented that 10-25% of children diagnosed with autism fail to develop speech (koegel et al., 2009). it, therefore, seems incorrect to consider the nearly 75% of children diagnosed with autism as mentally retarded, because although they do develop speech, they are having problems expressing and articulating their needs and communicating with others (dalton & bergenn, 2007). taking all the research presented above, it would be logical to conclude that a combination of various factors may be responsible for ineffective social interaction in children diagnosed with autism. however, the intent of this paper is not to prove that asd does or doesn’t exist as a proper diagnosis but to find an educational model, helping children with the type of problems targeted. and it is hypothesized that effective training programs can be used to influence, regulate, and even remedy the symptoms categorized as asds. a review of current educational interventions for children with asd students with autism spectrum disorders typically qualify for special education services. therefore, research and program development in the area of educational intervention for children with asds have focused largely on the early years of development; the earlier intensive interventions are made, the higher the likelihood of positive outcomes (scott & chris, 2007; myers & johnson, 2007; koegel et al., 2009). there are several different approaches to educating children with autism. the current educational programs can be classified and discussed under three main categories: educational/behavioral, pharmacological, and biomedical-neuroscience approaches. the educational/behavioral approaches have the strongest research basis. pharmacological approaches are not viewed as being appropriate or effective for all, and must be used cautiously, and in combination with educational treatments. biomedical-neuroscience approaches are experimental with no existing validation at this point (snell, 2002). there are several evidence-based methods and strategies often used in educational programs for children with asds including: • applied behavior analysis (aba) is the process of systematically applying principles of behavioral theory to promote positive and adaptive behavior in students with autism. there are several studies presenting data on the impact of aba on reducing inappropriate behavior and in increasing communication, learning, and appropriate social behavior in students diagnosed with autism (baer, wolf & risley, 1968; u.s. department of health and human services, 1999). • discrete trial teaching (dtt) uses applied behavior analysis techniques to eliminate skill deficiencies of students with autism (lovaas, 1987). the basic skills are broken down into small steps and are taught using discrete trials at a time (smith, 2001). discrete trial teaching procedures have proven effective in many areas such as receptive language, gestural communication, play skills, prevention of problem behaviors, sentence structure and functional communication skills (ünlü & vuran, 2012). • picture exchange communication system (pecs) is a visual communication training program that has been developed to educate children with social-communication deficits. the system seeks to teach spontaneous social-communication skills by means of symbols or pictures (charlop-christy et al., 2002; howlin et al., 2007). this program involves non-vocal methods of communication including sign language, picture-point systems, electronic devices, and other picture-communication systems using basic behavioral principles and techniques such as shaping, differential reinforcement, and transfer of stimulus control via delay to teach children functional communication (charlop-christy et al., 2002). • pivotal response treatment (prt) is an evidence-based intervention program, built on the socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a24 principles of applied behavior analysis (aba) to address the behavioral, communicative, social, and academic impairments of children with autism (genc & vuran, 2013; renshaw & kuriakose, 2011). prt aims to address the core deficits in social motivation and alter the child’s developmental trajectory toward a more typical path by providing supplemental learning opportunities which enhance the reward properties of social communication interactions (steiner et al., 2013(. • relationship development intervention (rdi) is a parent-based, cognitive-developmental approach to improve social-emotional, cognitive, and functioning abilities in students with autism. the primary caregivers of children are trained through workshop sessions to provide daily opportunities for successful functioning in increasingly challenging dynamic systems (gutstein et al., 2007). following the training sessions, parents plan regular weekly or biweekly meetings with a certified rdi consultant to address goal setting, program planning, and progress updates. parents and their children both participate in re-evaluation every six months to monitor and adjust intervention (gutstein et al., 2007(. • social communication/emotional regulation/transactional support (scerts) is a program intervention to develop the ability of autistic children to learn and spontaneously apply functional communication, emotional expression and trusting relationships with others (prizant et al., 2006). • verbal behavior (vb) approach employs specific behavioral research on the development of language and functional account of language to teach children multiple functions of language (e.g. mand, tact, intraverbal), and to teach each function using the ultimate controlling variables specific to that function (carr & firth, 2005). • occupational therapy (ot) is often provided to promote development of self-care skills (e.g., dressing, manipulating fasteners, using utensils, personal hygiene) and academic skills (e.g., cutting with scissors, writing). it also may assist in promoting development of play skills, modifying classroom materials and routines to improve attention and organization, and providing prevocational training (scott & chris, 2007). • sensory integration therapy (sit) is based on principles from neuroscience, biology, psychology, and education, and hypothesizes that some children with learning disorders experience difficulty processing and integrating sensory information and that this, in turn, affects their behavior and learning (schaaf & miller, 2005). the goal of this program is to facilitate the development of the nervous system's ability in organizing responses to sensory input in a more productive way (williamson & anzalone, 1997). • training and education of autistic and related communication handicapped children (teacch) is a differentiated and family-centered curriculum developed for individuals with autism of all ages and developmental levels (schopler, mesibov & baker, 1982). this program uses visual supports to capitalize on the visual strength and preference for processing information to meet the individual needs of children with autism and communication disabilities. teacch focuses on structuring the physical environment to assist students with autism to successfully interact in the environment and understand meaning (schopler, mesibov & hearsey, 1995). educational methods such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (cbt), incidental teaching, mandmodeling, time delay, activity-based teaching, peer tutoring, self-management, and social stories are other scientifically grounded strategies that have been recommended for teaching students with autism. in addition, there are special projects for individuals with autism and their families. the global autism project, for example, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing resources, awareness and greater understanding of autism, is on a quest to provide services to individuals with autism in underserved communities throughout the world. the autism awareness care and training centre (aact) of accra, ghana, helps parents of children with autism improve their understanding of the disability and provide them a safe, supportive place for help. the society for rehabilitation of mentally challenged (sorem) is another project which provides programs that foster “societal interaction,” and they regard physical fitness as critical for individuals with autism (kopetz & endowed, 2012). socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a25 a critical evaluation of current educational interventions for asds although there are some reports on the effectiveness of the above presented programs on development or on modifying behavior for children with asds, they have come under criticism in recent years for a variety of reasons. the usual criticism is that the research upon which they were based is not valid or reliable. there have been no controlled comparisons of educational or combined interventions to support claims of their efficiency (snell, 2002; myers & johnson, 2007). moreover, evaluations of most of these interventions rely mainly on single case or on case series studies or on non-randomized group trials (howlin, et al., 2007). critical aspects of interventions also remain unknown, including the impact of family factors on outcomes, and the relationship between an individual with autism, the appropriate treatment protocol, and the expected outcomes. finally, there is a vast discrepancy between what is known about effective educational interventions, and what is available for children diagnosed with autism across settings, cultures, and income levels (snell, 2002). as we have seen earlier, children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (asds) demonstrate difficulties with social communication, emotional regulation, imitation and imagination, sensory integration, problem solving, attention, and motivation. the current interventions address every-day communication, social skills, daily-living skills, play and leisure skills, academic achievement, and maladaptive behaviors as children having problems to answer to stimuli with an accurate response (myers & johnson, 2007). most of the educational methods build on principles aiming to change the behavior of the student, and not focusing on their higher intellectual capacities and their reflection on self or situation. they are almost solely built on a behaviorist educational theory, with short, teacher controlled activities, including rewards or corrections depending on how the student preform. taken together, the current interventions do not address more complicated abilities like engaging in dialogue, inquiring processes leading to a deeper understanding of what is discussed, or intricate social interaction. a review on socratic dialogue as an educational strategy inquiring dialogue, as defined by burbules (1993), can be a comprehensive, systematic, and structured pedagogical method within the school curriculum (pihlgren, 2010). positive results on social and emotional abilities have been found when systematically using socratic, or paideia, seminars in groups of students. the socratic, paideia seminars employ cooperative dialogue to investigate ideas and textual material for the group to mutually come to a better understanding with the help of a facilitating teacher, asking open-ended questions, but not giving answers or dictating what should be understood. this is one of the most thoroughly investigated classroom methods using inquiring dialogue. it is also more structured than, for example, deliberative dialogues. these two factors were important when choosing this method here. studies show that participating in systematic and recurrent socratic (paidiea) seminars can improve students’ social and emotional abilities. it encourages and motivates them to express their viewpoints, and to realize the difference between personal and idea conflicts (billings & fitzgerald, 2002; pihlgren, 2008). it is reported that students participating in socratic, paideia seminars develop their language skills and ability to interact and cooperate with others (robinson, 2006). in addition, there is evidence on the positive effects of using socratic questioning in cognitive therapy to sort out difficulties and complicated emotions (kennerley, 2007). the swedish national agency of education (skolverket, 2011) has recently published an extensive research-based evaluation of the methods and materials used in swedish schools to better socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a26 understand which ones enhance social and emotional abilities among typical students. large amounts of quantitative and qualitative data were collected from more than 40 schools; the data were analyzed and interpreted by acknowledged researchers. programs and lessons aiming at training empathy, emotional and social competence were proven to have no positive effects, and some of the programs even proved to have opposite effects – increasing bullying among the students. the students often found these lessons boring and sometimes even offensive. the lessons became a “school activity” – the student answered what the teacher was expecting, instead of reaching a higher ability of social and emotional competence. interestingly, this study indicated that, students showed improved skills and abilities in social and emotional domains, when structured inquiring dialogues were used in teaching. it makes clear that inquiring dialogue has more positive effects on learning, compared to other methods. using systematic socratic dialogues in education facilitates and encourages flexibility in thinking, as well as critical thinking skills (orellana, 2008; pihlgren, 2008). particularly young children use the seminar facilitator as a role-model to understand and be able to perform the particular respectful and critically examining mode of interaction (pihlgren, 2008, cf. rogoff, 1990). the group agreeing on and evaluating individual and group goals for the dialogue before and after the socratic seminar can help participants to visualize the cooperative dialogue (robinsson, 2006). the seminars are highly structured, evolving through a series of set stages, helping the students to keep on track, and to navigate into problem solving and deeper thinking by hearing other students’ thoughts. the students need to concentrate to be able to build on other participants’ ideas and to be able to go on to new ideas when necessary (pihlgren, 2008). the teacher will encourage the dialogue between the students by asking interpreting, analyzing or evaluative questions like “why does this happen? how can we interpret this? what are the pros and cons?” this questioning nature of the socratic seminar may shift students’ attention toward a focus on the learning situation and intrinsically motivates them to actively engage in a mutually reciprocal interaction (nouri, 2014). children diagnosed with asds in socratic dialogue seminars according to a vast amount of literature, the following characteristics are the most put forward interventions for autistics children: (1) behaviorally based; (2) carefully planned and monitored instruction involving task analyses of skills, individualized incentives, goals embedded in routines and activities, and adequate intensity and quality; (3) ongoing, planned opportunities for interaction with typical peers; (4) need-based supports and intervention for families; (5) services delivered in many different settings to meet support needs and promote generalization; (6) broad curricular content that addresses all developmental needs; and (7) proactive use of positive behavior support for challenging behavior (snell, 2002). most notably, myers & johnson (2007) have summarized the important principles and components of effective early intervention for children with asds as following: • entry into intervention as soon as an asd diagnosis is seriously considered; • provision of intensive intervention, with active engagement of the child at least 25 hours per week; • low student-to-teacher ratio to allow sufficient amounts of 1-on-1 time and small-group instruction to meet specific individualized goals; • inclusion of a family component (including parent training as indicated); • promotion of opportunities for interaction with typically developing peers; • ongoing measurement and documentation of the individual child’s progress toward educational objectives; • incorporation of a high degree of structure through elements such as predictable routine, visual activity schedules, and clear physical boundaries to minimize distractions; • implementation of strategies to apply learned skills to new environments and situations socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a27 (generalization) and to maintain functional use of these skills; • use of assessment-based curricula that address: functional, spontaneous communication, social skills, including joint attention, imitation, reciprocal interaction, initiation, selfmanagement; and functional adaptive skills that prepare the child for increased responsibility and independence; • reduction of disruptive or maladaptive behavior by using empirically supported strategies, including functional assessment; cognitive skills, such as symbolic play and perspective taking, traditional readiness skills and academic skills as developmentally indicated. helping the students to develop their social and emotional skills, and intellectual abilities are important educational aims in teaching students with autism, as well as other students (snell, 2002). such objectives encourage students to make and keep friends, read and interpret social situations, understand body language and proximity make accurate judgments of specific people-to-people interactions (cf. mehring & dow, 2001), extract social information from faces and regulate emotional responses during mutual interactions. how the above stated objectives are best reached? it has been reported that autistic individuals have good or even exceptional memory for facts that can be developed and used to bolster existing deficits (frith & happé, 1995). it has encouraged some leaders in the field to point out that educational programs for students diagnosed with asds should be grounded in the unique ways they learn, instead of suppressing their behaviors, and to make them follow a typical developmental trajectory (mottron, 2011). the use of cooperative dialogue and open-ended questions, as used in the socratic, paideia seminar, might present an alternative where this might be achieved. the following section will reflect on some important factors considered in the current literature for asds education and relate them to the features of the socratic, paideia seminar to show the potential of dialogic seminars for improving the education for these children the potential of dialogue in social communication behaviour individuals diagnosed with asds are thought to demonstrate rigidity or inflexibility in their thinking and behavior, something often attributed to severe deficits in their ability to communicate and interact effectively with other individuals (cotugno, 2009; mcevoy et al., 1993). inflexible, rigid behaviors are supposed to include several difficulties such as isolation, noncompliance, aggression, stereotypic movements or activities, transition problems, and tantrums which may ultimately limit the asds individual’s independence (cotugno, 2009). however, all humans are social beings who are innately preprogrammed and biologically wired to communicate with others and themselves (nouri, 2014). according to nouri (2014), dialogue is a unique feature of humans; no other animal is able to interact in dialogue as humans do. accordingly, it is quite possible that social interaction plays an important role in development of children diagnosed with asds, as it plays in development of all children, and it is fair to consider that knowledge of dialogic strategies and techniques is important to their development. this might presuppose that students diagnosed with asds will benefit from participating in systematic seminars where interaction with other people is methodically facilitated and encouraged, and by which both teachers and students co-construct their knowledge and develop their understandings in flexible ways the potential of dialogue in emotional regulation children with autism are often reported to lack appropriate means to communicate and may rely on aggression and other disruptive behaviors to express their needs (koegel, koegel, & steibel, 1998). self-modeling is used to strengthen their social, vocational, motor, cognitive, and instructional skills socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a28 (bellini & akullian, 2007; koegel & koegel, 1990). self-management is also used as a technique for reduction or elimination of stereotypic behavior (koegel et al., 1992). the observed social and communication deficit of children with asds is thought to be attributed to their impaired “theory of mind” (frith & happé, 1995, 1998; baron-cohen, 2000). they are, thus, thought to have an impaired capacity to understand mental and emotional states of others and are thought not able to detect explicit or implicit intentions of others. recent findings show that social processing in the brain is strongly interrelated with the processing of emotions (nouri, 2014). we have earlier concluded that programs, aimed at training the social and emotional abilities of students in general often fail to do so. however, systematic dialogues in seminars enhance emotional and cooperative skills (pihlgren, 2010; robinsson, 2006; skolverket, 2011) as well as sorting out difficulties and complex emotions (kennerley, 2007). a notable finding here is that active engagement in social interactions (e.g., use of verbal language) is one of the best predictors of long-term positive outcomes in programs for children diagnosed with autism (iovannone et al., 2003). this would imply that engaging in seminar dialogues may positively improve the social interaction abilities of children diagnosed with autism. the emotional involvement in seminars might encourage them to act and react to the emotions of others. they would be assisted to regulate their own emotions through verbalizing their feelings and interpreting other’s emotional expressions. the potential of dialogue in imagination and imitation abilities role-modeling in learning plays a key role, and human infants have a specific sensitivity to imitate facial expressions within their first hour of life (csibra & gergely, 2006; meltzoff & prinz, 2002). recent studies on humans’ brain also indicate that the human brain is equipped with a neural system that specializes in understanding both the actions of others and their emotions and intentions. researchers have named these neurons “mirror neurons”, because they “mirror the behavior of others” (gallese et al., 1996, p. 995). evidence has been presented that the mirror neurons system of autistic individuals is less actively reading the movements of others (enticott et al., 2012; theoret et al., 2005), or their facial expressions of basic emotions (dapretto et al., 2006; sato et al., 2013). these findings are supposed to explain the structural and functional difficulties in the brain of children diagnosed with autism to imitate others’ actions and to respond to social interaction. an important potential of socratic seminar learning is related to its possibility to facilitate learning by role-modeling (pihlgren, 2008). the open-ended, questioning, and probing approach to problemsolving and analysis, as well as the respectful approach to fellow participants is learnt when practicing with others (orellana, 2008; pihlgren, 2008). as we have concluded from previous research, this has shown to be particularly effective with younger children where the facilitator is working as a role-model during the dialogue, and when the events in the dialogue are openly discussed and assessed by the participating students in the goal-setting and evaluating process. hence, we claim that socratic, paideia seminars might help the autistic students to understand how to communicate emotion, thought, and to take actions similar to those that the teacher and other students display during the seminar, if the teacher is actively working as a role model, facilitating the cooperative dialogue and allowing the seminar process to be discussed and assessed by the participants. the potential of dialogue in multi-sensory integration it is generally believed and extensively reported that the majority of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (asds) experience severe difficulties in modulating and integrating multiple socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a29 sensory inputs, especially visual, auditory, and tactile inputs (dalton & bergenn, 2007; baranek, 2002). they are said to frequently having difficulties with modulating motor skills such as sitting, switching, walking, stopping, running, jumping, balance and coordination. these sensory and motor problems in children diagnosed with autism seem to be associated with self-absorbed behaviors such as rocking, spinning, or hand flapping (greenspan & wieder, 1997). it has also been suggested that these behaviors occur because individuals diagnosed with autism try to cope with the multiplicity of sensory inputs that they have difficulty modulating and integrating, by finding repetitive ways to distract the brain, or even connect to the surrounding context (maiese, 2013; stubblefieds, 2013). several programs based on sensory integration theory (si) have been designed to engage children in active sensory and motor challenges involving multimodal sources of stimulation, but sensory integration alone is not purported to produce gains in cognitive achievement; instead, it is designed to remove neurobehavioral obstacles that prevent learning (dalton & bergenn, 2007). one suggestion is that educational programs for young children diagnosed with autism should incorporate appropriately structured physical and sensory environments, such as “creative movement therapy” (hartshorn et al., 2001), that accommodate these unique sensory processing patterns and provide opportunities for developmentally appropriate sensory-motor experiences within the context of functional educational goals (baranek, 2002). in the socratic seminar, learning process’ cognitive, physical and motor skills to some extent are brought together when the students share knowledge and experiences in multiple and productive ways (jenkins et al., 2008). multiple modes of representation (oral, facial, visual, auditorial) are included, but the content discussed is more important than the way an idea is delivered during dialogue. the socratic seminar provides a highly predictable structure, helping students to practice their skills in a safe environment. these factors imply that students diagnosed with autism, who display deficits in sensorimotor integration and recognition of facial emotions, tone of voice, and gesture (cf. dalton & bergenn, 2007), still might participate intellectually. the potential of dialogue in problem solving abilities while individuals diagnosed with asds are reported to show delays on tasks that require global processing, they may perform better on the tasks that require detail-focused processing (frith, 2003; shah & frith, 1993). this observed failure to process global features is supposed to be attributed to weak central coherence, whereby general, decontextualized meaning is thought to be missed due to an obsessive attention to detail (happe & frith, 2006). consequently, children diagnosed with asds are said to exhibit limited capability in generalization of knowledge and skills to new situations (pierce et al., 1997). it is therefore thought to be necessary to provide increased structure and task-analyzed goals in designing curriculum for children diagnosed with asds (erba, 2000). previous research suggests that teaching children diagnosed with autism “question-asking” strategies has a significant role in enhancing spontaneous child-initiated social interactions and expressive language development (koegel, et al., 1998). exposed to real-life opportunities through dialogue, they might learn how to act in school and in society. in socratic seminars, open-ended questioning embedded in the process of learning has been shown in extensive research to help students to find new solutions, analyze, understand emotions, and see new possibilities (cf. andersen, 1987, billings & fitzgerald, 2002; 1994; orellana, 2008; pihlgren, 2008). this is shown to be partly due to the highly regulated structure of the seminar and the teachers questioning, helping the students to learn how to navigate within the structure to come to an understanding of the more complex and intricate ideas discussed during the dialogue (pihlgren, 2008; orellana, 2008). socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a30 the structured socratic, paideia seminars might allow children diagnosed with autism to go from seeing specific details in a textual material or to focus on a specific aspect of a discussed idea to eventually achieve an understanding of a whole system, as it is in fact a part of how the investigation during the seminar is done – analyzing the parts to understand the whole. this understanding may eventually allow children to combine and apply their understanding into new settings and situations. the potential of dialogue in motivation to learn a major problem reported in the field of autism is a lack of motivation that is said to be especially apparent when students attempt to complete learning tasks (koegel & egel, 1979). they are reported to show very little interest in academic assignments and exhibit disruptive behavior when assignments are presented. one possible explanation presented in literature is that children with autism are capable of producing joint attention, but lack the social motivation to share their interests with others (vismara & lyons, 2007). however, a research overview suggests that incorporating specific motivational variables such as choice, combining of tasks, and natural reinforces during intervention leads to improvements in core symptoms of autism and may possibly be effective in academic areas (koegel, singh, & koegel, 2010). participating in the process of open-ended questions, as well as in group interaction, motivates the students to actively engage in actions (jensen, 2015, pihlgren, 2013). in the socratic seminar, the participants work together to solve problems and cooperate to find better solutions, hopefully motivating the children diagnosed with autism to participating in reaching a common goal – to explore and come to a better understanding, if not come to the same conclusions. a dialogic based model: weekly socratic seminars for children with asds our firm belief is, as stubblefield (2013) states, that many of the individuals diagnosed with asds are able to think and also make conclusions about other people’s feelings and about intellectual ideas. the above insights from relevant literature highlight the potential of dialogic learning as a basis for a pedagogical approach in the teaching, learning and schooling of children diagnosed with asds. taken as a whole, educational interventions should focus on the abilities that might promote the students’ understanding of, and interaction with, other people. one of the insights from this literature is that learning, understanding, practicing and sharing with others, are abilities that enable individuals with autism to cope, thrive and excel in environments that are safe and accepting of diversity (kopetz & endowed, 2012). we propose a dialogic based educational model; we call weekly socratic seminars for children with asds. it is a model built on the recurrent structure in the socratic seminar, where the development of social, emotional and cognitive functioning are considered as critical components. as mentioned, this model takes into account the unique characteristics of the effective educational intervention for children with asds, along with the principles of dialogic seminars. weekly socratic seminars for children with asds aim to fulfill the following objectives: • to understand and appreciate their own viewpoints and others’ perspectives; • to work well with others and comprehend how the self is perceived by others; • to actively question, discuss and individually construct new knowledge; • to encourage self-esteem and self-confidence; • to engage in authentic experiences in situated learning settings; • to take more responsibility for making decisions and activities; • to understand and appropriately react to the emotional intentions of others; • to understand and use verbal as well as non-verbal language; • and, to reduce dependence on others and extend the abilities for supported functioning at socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a31 home, in school, and in society. such a model should be based on recurrent, weekly socratic seminars. the seminar will follow the steps of the socratic, paideia seminar as presented in the introduction. the instructional materials including (but not limited to) texts, pictures, films, metaphors, idioms discussed in the seminars need to be organized from the following four aspects • developmentally appropriate; • of interest to students; • stress on the problems related to human social interactions, emotions, or dilemmas; • encourage students to search for solutions and dynamic discussion. given the challenges with language and shifting attention, visual supports can help students to make the sequence of school tasks and daily activities understandable and predictable. individuals with asds have difficulties with the linguistic structure, and social use of language. children diagnosed with asperger’s syndrome by definition display fewer problems with linguistic structure, but do manifest pragmatic difficulties, and deficits in the effective social use of language (brentani et al., 2013). collaborative projects thus are useful tools that provide students with authentic social experiences they need to live in their society. the teacher needs to engage all students in dialogue and keep conversations confidential, and within the group, to create a secure room for “brave exploring” (pihlgren, 2008). he or she must be a willing partner, not only questioning, but also listening, supporting, and giving constructive feedback emotionally. the teacher will work as a facilitator, facilitating the discussion by asking questions to the students and by pointing out connections or differences in different participants’ ideas, and by functioning as a role-model in thinking, reasoning, listening and by showing respect of other participants’ ideas. physical organization of the classroom should facilitate reciprocal interaction and communication. the 6-8 participants are seated round a table, where everyone can see each other. the facilitating teacher is placed as one in the group. the classroom is sparsely furnished and decorated. the only thing on the table is the subject of dialogue which can be presented through pictures, signs, drawings, symbols or objects. the initial goal setting and evaluation will function as a way to promote the rules of the seminar. the following dialogic rules will also be presented to the participants, in order to clarify the social interaction and its system: • think carefully • help others to think better • listen to others’ ideas • be prepared to change your mind if you hear a better idea students’ insights and ideas are respected and teacher adopts creative and innovative ways with positive attitude to help them to make choices. the students are encouraged to engage in discussion with their peers and to take an interest in other children, to learn how to interact with others and to read other children’s behavior. assessment techniques and procedures assessment in teaching is a continuous and integral part of the learning-teaching process of every seminar. assessment has proven to enhance the students’ understanding of the process as well as socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a32 of the content (hattie & timperley, 2007; robinsson 2006). the purpose of assessment is to recognize the various strengths and needs of the group as well as of individual students. it is of vital importance that assessment of students' work be conducted in a safe and supportive context where their problems and concerns related to knowledge, attitudes and skills can be addressed. effective assessment demands a broad range of challenges by which children with autism could explore their needs, feelings, knowledge and skills. assessment should consist of self-assessment as well as provide specific and formative feedback, unveiling to the student how to progress. this will be done after every 3rd seminar, using rubrics (designed around criteria like listening, thinking, talking, and understanding) for formative assessment, concentrated on self-evaluation, and supported by the teacher. later in the process rubrics might be used as a material for peer-evaluation and discussions. parental involvement students diagnosed with autism often require support from their home and their community. hence, a positive and collaborative relationship with the family is beneficial to children. parents will be kept informed of the program and how it progresses, and they will also be trained through workshops how to support their child’s development through techniques such as open questions, productive discussions while reading, listening to music, watching films, and playing computer games at home. they will also be invited to participate in socratic sessions and dialogue with teacher and students in the classroom. the overview of relevant literature discussing asds suggests that children with asds have extensive, long-term educational needs and the individualized education programs (ieps) for these students need to be planed, implemented, and evaluated by an interdisciplinary team of special educators, general educators, and speech and language pathologists (snell, 2002). furthermore, weekly socratic seminars for children with asds should be designed and implemented through authentic dialogue with a team of professionals. conclusion drawing on a body of evidence, the outline provided here is based on an assumption that humans are biologically wired for dialogue and interaction with one another in socially and culturally shaped contexts. children are social learners who will actively construct meaning and knowledge as they interact with their cultural and social environment through dialogue (nouri, 2014). we have concluded that this also is true for children diagnosed with autism. we have considered positive effects of using socratic seminar in ordinary classrooms, and the potential of dialogue in developing social and emotional skills of children. accordingly, we proposed and introduced "weekly socratic seminars" as an educational program for children diagnosed with asds. this dialogic based model could contribute to construct a novel and strength-based methodological resource and professional paradigm for educating children diagnosed with asds. we hypothesize that, children's social and emotional skills as well as their intellectual abilities could be developed by providing them with learning opportunities that facilitate and encourage discussion and mutual understanding. in this model, the teacher should promote learning by being a role-model and by structuring the seminar and its context to support it. our model also includes authentic dialogues with parents about what can be done to improve this process. further research however, is clearly needed to establish the impact of dialogic based interventions on social and academic success of children with autism. the interested scholars are suggested to test and evaluate the proposed dialogic based model of this study in future studies across different cultures. socratic seminars for students with autism spectrum disorders ali nouri and ann pihlgren dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.173 | vol. 6 (2018) a33 references adler, m. j. 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(1997). sensory integration: a key component of the evaluation and treatment of young children with severe difficulties in relating and communicating. zero to three, 17(5), pp. 29–36. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word stewart and boggs, emerging dialogic structures in education reform (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a142 emerging dialogic structures in education reform: an analysis of urban teachers’ online compositions trevor thomas stewart virginia tech, usa george l. boggs florida state university, usa abstract this paper contextualizes contemporary urban teachers’ online dissent in public discussions of education reform in relation to past educational crisis narratives to interpret recent shifts in the structure of education reform dialogue in the united states. it does so by examining the form and content of compositions in which teachers respond to education reform. the analysis is intended to describe the digitally mediated roles teachers are asserting in a complex public debate over the future of education in the united states. the structure and content of education reform discourse has often cast teachers in static roles, which inhibits their active participation in discussions of educational policy. using mikhail bakhtin’s position that language choices serve to stifle and/or reinvigorate dialogue, we examine contributions to online discussions and debate composed ostensibly by urban teachers in response to dominant discourses. the data were analyzed with respect to discursive choices and grouped subsequently as themed arguments and rhetorical moves. we argue that teachers’ strategic responses to education reform challenge stifling truisms that seek to suspend discussion of all other factors besides teacher quality. teachers’ critical digital compositions thus re-create critical, multi-voiced conversations in place of monologues about school improvement. the online, public compositions point to the dynamic structure of reform discourse that has the potential to benefit those currently faulted for a variety of social problems. nurturing and even exploiting the dynamic potential of educational reform discourse can create opportunities for teachers, policymakers, and educational researchers to mutually inform one another’s shared interest in educational improvement. keywords: education reform; teacher activism; dialogism; teachers as writers; dissent; online civic participation trevor thomas stewart is an assistant professor and the program leader for english education at virginia tech. his research draws on sociocultural theory and bakhtin’s dialogic framework for language to explore the influences of educational policy and high-stakes testing on english teachers' instructional practices and efforts to bring content into dialogue with students’ lives. george l. boggs is assistant professor in english education at florida state university. his research is grounded in sociocultural theory and focuses on literacies that help people think about and engage in communities, particularly 21st century literacies and authentic writing in and out of school. acknowledgements: we would like to acknowledge bob fecho for facilitating our inquiry into bakhtin’s work and the lives of teachers; the aera writing and literacies special interest group for encouraging our study of teachers’ compositions and offering us a place to develop our ideas; the teachers who are issn: 2325-3290 (online) emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a143 making public advocacy a part of their professional lives; and the editors at dialogic pedagogy journal for their careful feedback and support. ��� in the realm of educational policy debate, teachers often feel powerless and excluded from discussions about how to best approach teaching and learning (stewart, 2012; rud, 1993). as education reform directives emanate from centralized education reform sources (e.g. school administrators, district policies, state legislation), contemporary management systems are being applied to the teaching profession (au, 2011). our work examines the digital speech being produced in the conflict-laden environment of education reform debates in the united states. in this paper, we focus on teachers’ online print compositions to interpret patterns of dissent that suggest the potential for contemporary education reform discourse to admit new voices. urban teachers’ critical digital compositions regarding education reform exemplify the way information and communication technologies (ict) are used to critique, interpret, distribute, and comment on a variety of issues (leu, kinzer, coiro, & cammack, 2004; jenkins, purushotma, weigel, clinton, robison, 2009). critical digital compositions are reading and composing practices that position people as active agents capable of altering a setting, including human activity, via digital means (boggs & stewart, 2014). digitally mediated compositions enable teachers to take a more active and prominent role in the discussion of u.s. educational policy. for example, a digital composition published by national board certified teacher and blogger renee moore (2009) appears on a discussion board extending teacher-activist anthony cody’s ed week blog post, in which he highlighted an oakland area teacher’s education reform concerns. in her comment, moore problematizes the lack of communication in existing education reform debates: administrators randomly jumping from one reform idea to another without strategic thinking or teacher input: been there too. interventions to help disruptive or troubled students--starting with those used by the teacher-should be in place. suspensions can only be one tool in a plan, not the only tool. what i hear in this story though is a lot of miscommunication or no communication. not all the students are disruptive; not all the parents show up to fight in public; surely not every administrator in the district is ineffective--so what's the rest of the story? like cody, valerie strauss (2015) has also used her washington post blog to publicize teachers’ existing online dissent. as is the case with much user-generated content (ugc) online, strauss and cody’s sites include opportunities for the general public, including teachers like renee moore, to engage in digitally produced open debate about education reform. we seek to describe the dialogic character of teachers’ compositions to portray their emerging role in education reform dialogue. this paper considers the changing structure of education reform dialogue by focusing on teachers’ rhetoric concerning their professional and civic roles against a backdrop of education reform. we examine teachers’ efforts to replace familiar patterns of teachers being spoken for with new ones in which urban teachers’ public, online statements demand a more inclusive discussion. to support this work, we offer historical examples of unilateral education reform discourse. the dialogic character is interpreted through thematic, logical dimensions and by the ways speakers manipulate language mechanically to persuasively offer prospective readers valid alternatives to popular messages in education reform. describing teachers’ compositions is vital to understanding the complex democratization of education reform discourse. emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a144 bakhtin and dialogue structures participation through discourses changes in the education reform dialogue might be summed up by simplistically acknowledging the participation of teachers, parents, popular media, and other newcomers to a discourse previously reserved for policy makers and school administrators. because this participation is occurring in large part through user-generated online media, it is not enough to simply say that changes in the cast of characters struggling over education reform has altered that discourse. a discourse, in the sociocultural sense of ways of living and organizing social action, (gee, 2008) includes discourses—patterns of interaction among members of a group. a discourse changes when its component practices, such as its discourses, are challenged and altered. these challenges often originate in evolving membership, in community responses to economic pressures, and in the process of appropriating new tools (gee, hull, & lankshear, 1996). the discursive challenges and changes we are discussing in this paper are occurring through new forms of participation manifested in strategic manipulation of language online situated in relation to education reform discourses governed by neoliberal economic policies (au, 2011). an awareness of the potential of new literacies and user-generated content to carry out new purposes and actively and intentionally modify recurring dialogue flows from the notion of speech as inherently dialogic and alive. bakhtin (1981) was interested in language’s potential to overcome the unitary tendency of every speech pattern in a community (i.e. profession). he argued that “language is stratified… into languages that are socio-ideological” (p. 199) and can function restrictively as “a sealedoff and impermeable monoglossia” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 61). we conceptualize education reform discourse as a stratified language occurring in a social and historical context that excludes certain members in part by presenting teachers as culpable for school failure (hattie, 2009, 2011; karp, 2012). bakhtin (1981) saw centrifugal forces in language eroding the centripetal, specifically weakening the seals limiting who can participate and who can produce knowledge within certain speech genres. we draw on bakhtin’s work to illustrate how language in use—even stratified language—provides conditions for multiple voices to engage in dialogue. in the case of the education reform speech genre, teachers’ compositions are producing fractures in the barriers to participation. we see teachers’ compositions as means of superseding the stratified language of education reform and restricted access to participation in policy dialogue. addressivity in stratified language we theorize language, despite its stratification, as exhibiting both centrifugal and centripetal forces (bakhtin, 1981). live speech occurs in strategic relation to an audience. utterances are crafted with every word “born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it” (p. 279). the concept of addressivity in bakhtin’s (1986) work positions living speech as a form of strategic social action because “from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions” (p. 94). addressivity calls attention to compositions as interpersonal struggles: every statement responds to prior utterances, anticipates future utterances, and enacts a speech plan, which seeks to “take into account the apperceptive background of the addressee’s perception” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 95) of the utterance. as bakhtin noted, accounting for an addressee’s potential response involves attention to class structure and power dynamics when speakers confront restricted speech genres. a speaker’s semantic choices may be interrogated as stratagems and investigated as a means of locating and understanding the rhetorical choices employed in the socio-ideological structure of stratified language. speech represents speakers’ planning and efforts to control others’ responses, or as bakhtin (1981) put it, “to infect with its own intention” (p. 90) and impose sematic nuances designed to elicit particular responses from potential emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a145 addressees. this process of evoking responses depends upon people’s ability to manipulate language to impose and undo restrictions on meaning. new literacies and social action examining stratified communication settings, such as education reform debates, where some members’ opportunities for response have been restricted, involves recognizing power dynamics and speech plans constructed to modify existing linguistic conditions—in other words—speakers’ efforts to make room for themselves to speak and be heard. in order to do so, speakers are drawing on the centrifugal forces of language to “wrest new answers” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 346) from prior utterances as they construct utterances in anticipation of possible responses. bakhtin’s (1986) account of language as an interindividual struggle is anchored in the religious, social, and technological upheaval known collectively as the renaissance. religious non-conformism, inexpensive printing, and the shift toward social contracts from the divine right of kings exemplify the “rebirth” of human civilization through profound revision of the speech events that order human life. bakhtin sought to explain the production of texts as means of organizing (re-organizing) the world. this explanatory effort is particularly relevant in the digital age. internet users have almost limitless capacity to contest not only religious and political scripts, but create their own at very little cost. brandt (2014) points to ubiquitous digital composition in everyday personal civic and economic life as an epochal shift towards writing, as opposed to reading, as the foundational literacy practice of myriad discourses. digital composition on the world wide web super-affords the text-producing work bakhtin associated with renaissance upheaval. social networks, hyperlinks, cutting-and-pasting, memes, instantaneous messaging, and multigenre texts enable users to find new religions, press for legal protection, publish unfathomable oceans of text for pennies, and strip sovereign governments of their capacity to rule. with digital composition as the new normal for personal, civic, and economic life, resistance to stratified language and the process of dragging previous utterances into live speech very likely involves screens and keystrokes. education reform and the role of teachers long before internet and communication technologies enabled civic action as they do today, education reform has served centralized political goals. as far back as aristotle’s politics, schools have been presented as obligated to protect the state by replicating the actions, knowledge, and relationships that are the foundation of the state. the classical notion that schools should prevent social problems has morphed over time into a kind of trap that blames schools for longstanding social problems. in the kerner report following urban unrest in the mid-1960s, schools were left holding the bag for “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (1968, p. 1). with the launch of sputnik and cold war fears that u.s. global preeminence was waning, a nation at risk (1983) dramatized a crisis in which schools were making the nation vulnerable. decades of neoliberal reforms in the u.s. have since privileged numerous reform measures, such as high-stakes testing, as means of regulating teacher performance (goldstein, 2014; kohn, 2011; ravitch, 2013). the blame for the perceived crisis is being laid at the feet of teachers. as the rhetoric has intensified to portray teachers as the problem plaguing u.s. schools, teachers have employed critical digital literacies to disrupt and challenge prevailing narratives (boggs & stewart, 2014) and materially alter the structure of education reform debate. emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a146 persuasive language, the social world, and education reform the language of education reform draws upon a social history linking the problems of society and the mandate that schools should function to fix those problems. from aristotle to the kerner commission, schools have been assigned the civic role of preserving the state and curing societal problems. this perspective has made it easy for education reform rhetoric to frame teachers as culpable for persistent social problems. in this way, schools become theatres whose stages are populated by static characters who only have one civic role to play: teaching the students in their charge—while magically banishing society’s problems in the process. in this static role, teachers are not expected to take civic action divergent from that prescribed to them by virtue of their institutionally assigned role. the notion of teacher accountability drives the rhetoric in the education reform debate. the rhetoric of dominant school reform narratives locates teachers as the most important factor in school effectiveness (carnegie, 2007). however, this fixation on teachers as the key to school improvement places teachers in what has been described as a double bind (achinstein & ogawa, 2012). they are relegated to acting only in the context of their classrooms within traditional dialogue structures yet held responsible for pervasive problems. in the context of education reform, crisis narratives dramatize the need for action oftentimes by framing what is happening metaphorically. the kerner commission report of the 1960s presented a crisis narrative couched in sociopolitical catastrophe, making analogies and metaphors that connect to negative, dangerous, and unwanted social memories. its rationale for educational reform confronts readers with a picture of a segregated, economically stagnant united states almost exactly 100 years after the bloodiest war in u.s. history was waged to preserve unity. in hopes for social unity, the kerner commission report (1968) threatens “polarization of the american community” (p. 1) and positions artificially integrated schools as a straightforward solution. the commission positioned schools as responsible for urban unrest because they have failed to produce a nation united. in 1983, a nation at risk repeated the school failure line, this time blaming schools for the loss of “once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation” (p. 1). from the opening pages, the document enacts a speech plan that seeks to incite fear by creating the sense that the nation is under attack. if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on america the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. as it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. we have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the sputnik challenge (p. 3). acts of war and educational disarmament metaphorically underwrite educational reform as a cold war necessity. this manufactured crisis (berliner & biddle, 1995) encouraged americans to seek security through seemingly straightforward measurements of student achievement. for a nation that had followed with great anxiety the price of oil and value of u.s. enterprises in the midst of the oil crisis of the late 1970s, school failure could be understood as placing the nation at risk and strictly numerical assessment could be understood as an absolute necessity. the report hailed standardized testing data as “rocks of stability in a sea of unanchored opinions” (berliner & biddle, 1995, p. 14). evoking a stock’s potential for losing value, standardized testing data were used to sound the alarm and rally the reform movement to stop what appeared to be steep declines in student achievement. this line of rhetoric cleared the way for the no child left behind act (nclb) to be passed in 2001. the logic asserted by official reformers was that education could be most effectively improved by creating consequences for schools’ collective scores on standardized tests (nichols & berliner, 2007). current emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a147 initiatives extend those consequences to individual teachers. this can be clearly in seen the use of valueadded models (vam) that evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students. the statistical validity problems associated with vam (rush & scherff, 2015) punctuate a long history of political propaganda that position schools and teachers as the saviors of society. critical digital compositions and teacher voice teachers are using information and communication technologies to drag stratified language of education reform into live speech, adding their own perspectives and building new networks to challenge reform narratives and question the reform narratives that have emerged as simplistic solutions to complex problems. with a perspective theoretically linking the crafting of online statements to quality of the discursive process employed, we asked how critical digital compositions facilitate teachers’ efforts to challenge the status quo and assert themselves in educational policy debates? we used the following subquestions: 1) what arguments characterizing urban education reform appear in online posts purporting to represent the perspectives of urban teachers? 2) how does the construction or presentation of these arguments seek to manage or evoke responses among potential addressees? 3) what goals are evident in these speech plans? methodology in order to interpret possible changes in the structure of dialogue, we focused on how the arguments and rhetorical moves contained in the teachers’ compositions suggest divergent dialogue structure. bakhtin’s (1981) idea of “socially typifying languages” (p. 290) points to a linguistic phenomenon in which interactions within a particular group may be seen as a representation of the group itself. ethnography of communication (eoc) (hymes, 1964; saville-troike, 2003) is a socio-linguistic methodology that draws attention to patterned language use in speech communities. eoc is unique in that it takes acts of speech as the starting point for understanding how society is organized. in eoc, acts of speech rather than observed behavior or social relationships are the vehicle for making an account of a community. patterns occur in communication situations among members of speech communities in ways that serve to regulate who speaks when and how. this ethnographic perspective asserts that what is said and who says what in such situations has much to teach us about how human life is ordered through language in particular contexts. patterned speech that diverges from established discourses can thus suggest altered social settings. this process of interaction among languages and social groups is at the heart of bakhtin’s theory of language. we employed theoretical and methodological tools that would facilitate examination of intersecting discourses. methods we see this methodological perspective as important for helping us apply bakhtin’s (1981) theory of language to develop a method for collecting data in an internet communication setting. specifically, our methods were designed to capture empirically the restructuring of education reform discussions. our method consisted of collecting and curating what urban teachers are saying online about urban education reform, making sense of the variety and commonalities among their compositions, and interpreting them in socio-historical and sociolinguistic contexts. emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a148 data collection u.s. teachers’ civic action has gained notoriety and prominence in the public eye, from large scale teacher strikes and other actions in chicago, madison, and detroit of the mid-western u.s. to academic discussions of teachers’ online grassroots activism (heron-hruby & landon-hays, 2014). as the concerns of teachers and parents became pervasive on social media, we grew interested in teachers’ public responses to education reform rhetoric. with a sense of disproportional effects of education reform on urban settings, we were especially interested in how urban teachers were speaking out. our goal was to examine teachers’ efforts to engage in public dissent by reading their compositions occurring in public dialogue settings not mediated by an interview setting or a discussion forum set up specifically for the purposes of a research study. drawing on the methods we employed in an earlier report related to teachers’ rights to participate in the organization of urban spaces (boggs & stewart, in press), we collected teachers’ public digital compositions about educational reform as elements of a highly politicized struggle over school and teacher quality. urban teachers receive significant blame for school failure (anyon, 2014; dematthews & mawhinney, 2014; warren, 2005); therefore it is important to listen to the efforts of those teachers to respond to criticism being leveled at them. our interest in the potential for critical digital compositions to facilitate the teachers’ efforts to participate in the education reform speech community (boggs & stewart, 2014) led us to focus on published urban teachers’ compositions related to neoliberal reform policies and practices (e.g. highstakes testing). we employed a graduate student who is a practicing teacher to collect the teachers’ compositions using focused search terms (i.e., urban teacher blog, blog on teacher evaluations, why inner-city school teachers have it harder, teacher evaluations aren't fair). we stipulated that the data should be gathered from internet platforms in which urban teachers’ compositions addressed education reform. by collecting selections from already existing compositions, we were able to capture teachers’ self-motivated compositions instead of responses produced specifically for a research study. this process involved using search engines to access a variety of urban teachers’ online, public statements from online public discussion spaces: individual blogs, blogs that feature multiple contributors, blog comment sections, activist networks, and popular news outlets including their discussion sections such as time magazine and edweek. statements crafted by those who we believed presented themselves as urban teachers were compiled in a single table containing excerpts and hyperlinks to source texts and contexts online. we then read the text selections in their published contexts (e.g. blog posts; popular media articles). data analysis we reviewed the data individually and used thematic analysis (maxwell, 2005) to identify trends in the urban teachers’ compositions and code the data. we sampled cohesive units of speech mindful of bakhtin’s (1986) stipulation that “concrete utterances” have the possibility of response yet vary by “their length, their content, and their rhetorical structure” (p. 71). we sought to identify salient themes in these cogent blocks of online published compositions to understand the kinds of potential for response (i.e. understanding and/or action) teachers were producing. in order to foster awareness of the subjectivities influencing our responses, we worked individually as we organized the data into broad, theoretical categories for further analysis. the opportunity to describe the phenomenon of teachers’ critical digital compositions inspired multiple positions from which to read and respond to teachers’ words. we each created lists of individual codes that helped organize the rhetorical work we saw occurring within these compositions. once we emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a149 completed our individual reading and categorizing of the data, we engaged in a dialogue focused on reflective comparison of our lists of tentative codes to clarify areas of agreement, reconcile areas of departure, and attend to our positionalities as readers. we affirm that our apperceptive backgrounds as potential addressees mediated our “active responsive understanding” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 96) of each composition we read. we sought to reconcile our positions as teachers and teacher advocates with our postionalities as teacher educators and researchers. our efforts to negotiate this complex collision of ways of being and seeing the world were facilitated by our dialogue in which we interrogated and explored these positionalities. to illustrate one tense moment in this dialogue, one of us argued that the other was funneling a variety issues affecting urban education into a single pool defined in the end by their relationship to poverty. he had connected phrases in one composition lamenting a school “filled with student apathy” and “lack of parent involvement” to issues of poverty and inequality because of his experiences teaching in a school district with a high percentage of low-income families where he experienced these issues as interrelated. without discounting the interrelationship among issues teachers had raised and poverty, the conversation evolved toward awareness of the need to describe teachers’ compositions in ways that maximize face validity and the likelihood that another reader might use similar language to describe the rhetorical work occurring within and across compositions. we wanted to organize the data in ways that did not foreclose on a reader’s ability to see the complexities contained in the teachers’ compositions. our dialogue resulted in the creation of codes that function as conceptual interpretations of the data and, in conjunction with diverse sampling of teachers’ compositions included throughout the manuscript, allowed the compositions to speak for themselves. our codes reflect the influence of our own positionalities and bakhtin’s influence on our reading of the teachers’ compositions. the stratification of language that bakhtin (1981) described guided our analysis of the data. he argued that elements of an author’s “semantic and expressive intentions are refracted within” (p. 311) different linguistic planes. our analysis examined three dimensions of the teachers’ compositions to facilitate our understanding of the intersection of linguistic resources contained in teachers’ compositions. we called those dimensions: themed arguments, rhetorical moves, and word choice. we offer this excerpt from one teacher’s composition below to demonstrate the way the first two dimensions (themed arguments and rhetorical moves were used to analyze and describe teachers’ rhetorical work: they are so angry and disempowered and cynical. they never got the training they needed, they don't get the on-going support they need, and the pressures and demands of their daily jobs are overwhelming. i also work with and try to support administrators who never got the training or support they needed and who are overwhelmed by the incredible pressures of nclb. the first dimension these compositions included was logical or argumentative focus, which we called themed arguments. in the excerpt above we used the code labor issues to identify the excerpt’s argumentative focus (see fig. 1), which lamented a lack of support for teachers. the other themed arguments codes we utilized to describe and organize teachers’ compositions were failed mandate, neoliberal agenda, testing, and diversity issues. the second dimension (rhetorical moves) had to do with the rhetorical effect of the semantic and verbal choices occurring in the compositions in a complimentary relationship with the argumentative focus. in the composition excerpt example above, the teacher knew those whom she referred to as “they,” and she positioned herself as a local authority to comment on the clash between insider and outsider interests. we assigned the second dimension code insider vs. outsider status as a rhetorical move emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a150 occurring within this selection based the writer’s juxtaposition of local people’s work with external “pressures” (see fig. 1). the other rhetorical move codes we utilized were intertextuality, text features, critiquing narrative, personal anecdote/indirect speech, historicizing, rhetorical question, and gesture to authority. the criteria for the application of all of the codes reflective of the first two dimensions are summarized in figure 1 (see below). figure 1. coding categories and criteria themed arguments codes criteria (argument asserts that…) failed mandate mismanagement or conflicts of interest have undermined established authorities’ right to govern policy and practice. neoliberal agenda state-sponsored contraction of public services accommodates private capital development. testing inappropriate shifts in curriculum toward test preparation, standardization, and measurement of students impede teachers’ work. labor issues local school and district leadership distracts teachers from doing their jobs effectively. diversity issues students in urban and other settings face many challenges that teachers must understand and address; failure to do so results in ineffective education. rhetorical move codes criteria intertextuality explicitly includes or references other texts. insider vs. outsider status imputes or denies credibility of an argument or speaker based on their position within or outside urban or other school. text features includes hyperlinks, underlining, boldface type, non-grammatical punctuation. critiquing narrative explicitly acknowledges, through references to familiar language, spokespersons, or other metonyms, a popular or established message about teachers or education reform. personal anecdote/ indirect speech elaborates or contests an argument through the use of personal testimony or by giving voice to purported colleagues’ words or stories. historicizing purports to place a situation in historical context, referring explicitly to historical events or settings (e.g., segregation, civil rights movement). rhetorical question includes a question with an expected answer that aligns with an argument put forward in the composition. gesture to authority cites purportedly authoritative or reliable sources to bolster a claim. word choice. assessing these first two dimensions helped us understand and describe teachers’ contributions to education reform dialogue. as we processed that data, we read, in these compositions, criticisms of the dialogue structure. some of these criticisms are captured in the themed arguments and rhetorical move codes, such as failed mandate, neoliberal agenda, and insider vs outsider status. our interest in the strategic selection of language to evoke audience responses drew our attention to word choices occurring as a feature of teachers’ argumentative and rhetorical work. teachers’ efforts to protest both the problems with education reform itself and the problematic structure of education reform dialogue relied on the use of socio-culturally charged language. word choice draws attention to a third interrelated dimension of teachers’ online speech where they were “making use of words that are already populated emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a151 with the social intentions of others” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 300) to serve their own speech plans. we examined word choices already coded in the themed arguments and rhetorical move dimensions in an effort to triangulate possible or prospective efforts to restructure education reform debate. we paid special attention to teachers’ word choices directed at the debate itself. to illustrate the importance of word choice in teachers’ dissent, we return to the teacher’s composition used to illustrate themed arguments and rhetorical moves: they are so angry and disempowered and cynical. they never got the training they needed, they don't get the on-going support they need, and the pressures and demands of their daily jobs are overwhelming. i also work with and try to support administrators who never got the training or support they needed and who are overwhelmed by the incredible pressures of nclb (emphasis added). in the excerpt above, we highlight teacher’s selection of words called upon to help her express her criticism of failures to communicate effectively with teachers. analysis of word choice can help connect an understanding of teachers’ dissent with their critiques of the structure of education reform debate. findings in the following sections, we describe how urban teachers’ critical digital compositions offer multiple points of connection for readers to participate in a public examination of the issues facing schools and, especially, of the undemocratic approach characterizing much contemporary reform. these compositions point to issues and concepts that the teachers see as missing in the dominant narratives. first, we examine the themed arguments contained in the compositions. second, we describe the rhetorical moves that facilitate teachers’ efforts to participate in the education reform dialogue and deflect the blame for school failure that has been laid at their feet. third, we examine the word choices directed at critiquing and altering education reform dialogue. themed arguments we paid particular attention to the logical, argumentative dimension of teachers’ compositions because the dialogue structure we seek to understand relies on rational propositions framing teachers as culpable for school failure (hattie, 2011). the use of arguments that offer alternative explanations for school failure points to a creative effort to re-present the education reform dialogue in which previously urban teachers had been tried, convicted, and sentenced in absentia. the argumentative dimension undermines the dominant logical premise of teachers as culpable for school failure. the teachers’ compositions represent a kind of appeals process or retrial, in which new evidence is submitted, alternative explanations offered, and, most importantly, a self-defense is offered. of 65 published online statements by internet users identifiable as distinct urban teachers discussing education reform, 60 included one or more prototypical arguments that deflect blame from teachers for the problems attributed to education. an abbreviated table of compositions grouped by argument theme is included (see appendix). counter claims using socioeconomic arguments were a prominent feature of the themed arguments category in teachers’ compositions. we categorized these argumentative constructs using the label diversity issues to organize elements of teachers’ compositions that pointed to issues related to socioeconomic inequality (see fig. 1 above). across the data set, teachers argued that students’ lived experiences—and especially the lived experiences of students living in poverty—must be part of the emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a152 discussion of educational reform. for example, one teacher pointed to a key flaw in the education reform debate by saying: if you claim you’re interested in education reform but you’re not addressing child poverty, then you’re just blowing smoke. poverty is the biggest problem facing public education, and almost no one is talking about it. the category diversity issues especially captures arguments in which teachers deflect blame by arguing that education reform ignores the reality that the children and families they work with are not white, middle class speakers of standard english who have equitable access to the secondary discourses (gee, 2008) of schools and other professional communities. similar issues are incorporated across themed arguments categories. one teacher’s composition uses diversity issues as she presents “poor and low-income children” as targets of a fundamentally unfair testing regime, in which a system designed to sort by merit actually sorts by socioeconomic status. another composition discusses diversity issues as a supporting feature of an argument that charges those in positions of power with a failed mandate, in which those who had been invested with the responsibility to safeguard the welfare of children had exploited those in their care. she wrote: [new jersey governor chris] christie, like every other republican governor, is scamming the middle-& uppermiddle-class taxpayers with the promise of lowering their taxes by privatizing public education for the poor, while raking in campaign monies from for-profit education corporations. the alleged use of public office for ‘scamming’ people evoked this theme of a failed mandate. however, the means of exploitation (privatizing) was specifically aligned with other criticisms of economic theories informing both education reform and political maneuvering, which we grouped under the heading neoliberal agenda. the data include many compositions that construct blame-deflecting arguments without reference to students living in poverty. with so many compositions couching their arguments responding to educational reform in terms related to poverty, alternative approaches stand out. one composition we coded under the theme failed mandate sought to crack the code of education reform language and sought to juxtapose true from false reforms: it is easy to distinguish education reform and education reformers from education reform and people working to reform education. one serves the reformers and the other serves the students and the community. while its thematic orientation places it among failed mandate compositions, at greater magnification this statement critiques reform language and thinking, offering a fascinating shibboleth that purports to reveal reformers’ allegiance: the first are top-down, include the words "for all students", and are interested in teacher quality. the latter are bottom-up, include the words "for each student", and are interested in quality teaching. one gives more authority to the management and executive class without any accountability, the other empowers teachers and students. in this statement, the teacher is separating the sheep from the wolves and making it very clear that she does not believe that reformers have students’ or teachers’ best interests in mind. she concretely emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a153 illustrates what we coded as a failed mandate argument by treating language and the management of the teaching profession as inseparable and mutually constituting one another. we found a similar pattern in compositions coded neoliberal agenda, where teachers critically recontextualized reform language and sought to expose its flaws. in the following composition, one can see the teacher drawing on historical context to critique the neoliberal agenda: these perspectives sound eerily similar to the countless failed “urban renewal” projects done in cities over the past 60 years—technocrats wanting to demolish what exists and instill their unproven vision of what is best instead of engaging with the people who are already there. such compositions critically positioned the language of education reform itself as a means of raising readers’ consciousness of educational reform as fundamentally flawed impositions. these critical and resistant readings of education reform texts dismantle monologues seeking to exclude teachers’ voices. numerous such arguments freeze (alinsky, 1971) reform rhetoric that seeks to proceed on the basis that teachers must bear responsibility for a range of social problems. online argumentation affords teachers an opportunity to turn back the clock, contest the often-used blame rhetoric, and appeal to a broad, popular audience. we see consistent evidence of teachers’ argumentative efforts to question reform narratives that position teachers as the main cause of school failure and supply counter narratives. rhetorical moves strategically and mechanically, the rhetorical moves in the compositions serve a multitude of roles. several codes for rhetorical moves, such as text features, index verbal and syntactical choices geared toward adding emphasis and directing readers’ attention in general. other rhetorical moves— hyperlink, rhetorical question, intertextuality, critiquing narrative, and insider vs. outsider status— function differently by juxtaposing past and present compositions (see fig. 1). in the following subsections, we describe the rhetorical moves we assigned to the data and use examples from the compositions to show how these rhetorical moves help teachers assert their a place in the conversation. insider vs. outsider. to illustrate the role of rhetorical moves in re-presenting education reform dialogue, the following composition was coded rhetorically as an invocation of insider status: “i challenge anyone to spend one week in an inner city school to see what the reality is because lawmakers and decision makers are out of touch.” we regard the teacher’s challenge as a strategic move to validate her prospective contributions to one or more speech events she views as fundamentally flawed. she positions lawmakers and decision makers as “out of touch” because they lack insider knowledge. another composition exemplifies the way insider status levels an attack on dominant patterns in education reform: “few people outside of schools understand exactly how destructive these changes are.” numerous compositions invoked insider/outsider rhetoric, conveying a sense that reform that does not grow out of conversations with teachers is part of the problem, not the simple solution. critiquing the narrative. to further illustrate the role of rhetorical moves in dragging prior speech events back into living discussion, we discuss examples of compositions coded as critiquing the narrative. while working in tandem with explicit intertextual linkages, these compositions often relied heavily upon the content and structure of existing narratives as they sought to rob those narratives of their power. compositions coded as critiquing the narrative strategically re-presented parts of education reform debate only to scorn them by pointing out their narrowness, naïveté, or misappropriation. “no matter what measure of ‘quality’ you look at,” wrote one teacher, “poor and minority students—and not emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a154 just those in inner-city schools—are much less likely to be assigned better-qualified and more-effective teachers.” this act of objectifying and interrogating existing discourse—a fundamental feature of legal proceedings—is ubiquitous in the data. the phrase “junk science,” appears in one composition an aggressive assault on the validity of the teacher quality reform narrative. it is hyperlinked in the sentence: “value-added measures, as these are often called, have been labeled junk science by national statistical organizations.” the link leads the reader to an article attacking the validity of value added measures. the composition has indirect speech (“has been labeled”) and a bandwagon appeal in its arsenal among its tactics, yet we find the effort to call up and contest existing narratives particularly important in terms of the struggle over who controls teachers’ voices. these efforts bring previous utterances into live speech and call upon the centrifugal forces of language to wrest new meaning and elicit desired responses (bakhtin, 1981). word choice and the structure of the debate our analysis of the themed arguments and rhetorical moves dimensions of the teachers’ compositions provided answers to the research questions we asked. we were able to see what arguments appeared, how they were presented, and, in part, what goals were reflected in the teachers’ compositions. the teachers’ counter claims were designed to complicate the naïve blame game. word choices throughout the compositions point to teachers’ awareness that part of their response to education reform needed to include a challenge to the way education reform discussions occur. this thread was present in both the themed arguments and the rhetorical moves dimensions, and it drew our attention to a particular goal shared widely across the data set where word choices in urban teachers’ compositions challenged the structure of education reform dialogue. it must be said that teachers’ work in publishing the compositions we collected as well as many others we did not collect constitutes a dramatic challenge to the way education reform is discussed and produced. they are arguing implicitly for a place at the table by publishing their own viewpoints. words choices within these compositions elaborate on and inform a trenchant critique of the education reform debate. using what gee (2008) termed “mushfake discourse” (p. 251) to describe “evading the gatekeeping efforts of elites in our society” (p. 251), urban teachers selected words that highlighted their exclusion and presented arguments for their future inclusion in education reform debates. the teachers’ compositions strategically represented education reform speech as flawed due to the form of discussion (or lack of discussion) it conveyed. across the data, teachers chose words such as “recipe for mediocrity and bias,” “promise,” “deficit discourse,” and “unproven vision” to note restricted, monologic speech encountered in education reform debates. these word choices contest the foreclosure of dialogue. teachers further upset one-sided dialogue structure with a variety of verbal constructions in their compositions. reformers are challenged to incorporate discussions of poverty as a feature of the complex causes of social problems as discussed above as an example of diversity issues (see above). other teachers degraded the authority of reform language by imputing a kind of recycling of misguided policies, as in the teacher’s composition discussed earlier to critique the neoliberal agenda (see p.13 above, “eerily similar”). many compositions asserted a destructive combination of dictatorial leadership and incompetence, as illustrated in the use of the following phrases: • “wants total power” • “system…designed to hold them back” • “decision makers out of touch” • “control over our…children” emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a155 • “instill their unproven vision” • “think they know all when they know nothing” (see appendix). these phrases do more than merely contest reformers’ claims or the consequences reform may have on schools and teachers. indeed, such phrases assert an active role for teachers and others as eyewitnesses of education. in the composition below, one can see the groundswell of desire for participation coupled with layered critiques: a growing number of parents, school boards, teachers and civil rights organizations are beginning to question the fairness of our overreliance on standardized tests and recently over 300 groups, including the naacp legal defense fund, signed a petition to ask congress to ban the use of such tests. these semantic choices were strategic in arguing that the dialogue structure has been changing to represent the interests of a broader group of stakeholders. across the data, the teachers used layered rhetorical tools that work in concert to redirect negative attention focused on urban education. we do not suggest that teachers are now speaking with a collective voice to say the same things. however, information and communication technologies and usergenerated content tools facilitate the exchange of diverse ideas, ideological stances, and rhetorical practices. the data set did not suggest one ideological orientation. our claim is that themed arguments, rhetorical moves, and word choices directed at the structure of education reform debates represent teachers as active agents in a dialogue that they feel qualified and compelled to join. in the following sections, we discuss the significance of teachers’ efforts to discount the blame narrative leveled at them. discussion examples of changes in the structure of large-scale social dialogues can be seen throughout recorded history. the rediscovery of classical greek texts in europe via islamic civilizations at the turn of the 1st millennium is an important feature of any study of european civilization. access to the work of aristotle and others afforded european participation in discussions of science and philosophy. mass production of such texts fueled significant increases in who could participate in discipline-specific discussions long confined to elite scholars. the most relevant example of change in large-scale social dialogue to our discussion would be the formation and growth of teachers’ unions. unions exert power in part in relation to the size of their membership. unions purport to represent the interests of their membership, unifying members to assert collective power. in so doing they speak for individual teachers who ostensibly would have great difficulty being ‘heard.’ in the turmoil of the 1960s, in which the kerner commission report (1968) blamed schools and teachers for contributing to “racial isolation” (p. 22) membership in the smaller of the two major national u.s. unions rose from 65,000 to over 400,000 (american federation of teachers, 2004). public discussion of education reform follows the pattern bakhtin (1986) set out for stratified languages where “alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward” (p. 272). such changes in dialogue structure may be and have been interpreted in a variety of ways. we do not see emerging dialogue structures or teachers’ active participation as indicative of neat battles between good and evil, freedom and oppression, or democracy and totalitarianism. graff (1987) and gee (2014) recognize to the sociopolitical complexities of literacy in their discussions of sweden’s church law of 1686, which legally mandated that all people, irrespective of class or gender, “learn to read and see with their own eyes what god bids and commands in his holy word” (cited in graff 1987, p. 150). in sweden, the people might well have been reading and seeing precisely what those in power wanted them to see; however, the ability to read and see on one’s emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a156 own opens the door for interpretation as myriad readers join the dialogue. when people enter a public discussion whether through acquiring print literacy or composing dissent online, unilateral discourse becomes harder to enforce. teachers’ compositions & restructuring dialogue while acquisition of forms of literacy judged to be powerful in a given time and place has often been treated as a means of safeguarding civilization, democracy, and all kinds of notions of progress (graff, 1979), our work focused on the lived experience of literacy in the context of the education reform speech community. ultimately, changes in how we communicate can reflect radical changes in human civilization. however, we see these phenomena as more complicated than traditional myths of literacy would have us believe. we noticed rhetorical similarities in union and grassroots teacher activism: differences are likely to be constructed as conflicts and confrontations, for example. the decentralized, varied, and personal flavor of teachers’ online compositions leads us to ask what differences matter in teachers’ processes of reaching consensus in this evolving dialogue. the characteristics of the union’s dialogic process seem to favor unity among teachers in anticipation of conflict-laden negotiations with distinct opponents. in reference to union representation of teachers’ interests, we wonder at the iterative process of teachers’ online activism and the role of the internet in building consensus, destroying consensus (i.e. critiquing the narrative), and otherwise aiding teachers’ efforts to assert themselves in the education reform debate. individual teachers’ speech, mediated by the internet, affords extension and rejoinder through hyperlinking, quotations, memes, remixes, and caricatures. the teachers’ compositions that we examined advance multiple points of view and arguments suggesting an online dialogic collaboration. teachers’ critical digital compositions assert a stake in the education reform debate, diverging from past reform dialogue structures in which teachers were spoken for by others. we have extended bakhtin’s theory of language to the education reform debate in order to understand its emerging structure and its consequences for teachers as civic actors. in previous work talking with teachers and writing about education reform (boggs & stewart, 2014; stewart, 2012), we wrestled with representations of teacher voice in an effort to understand their dynamic roles. in the process, a concept of education reform as a socially constructed discourse has coalesced. this concept helps us recognize the dynamic, interpersonal potential of language as a mediating feature of the discourse. it underpins the following principle assertions about education reform: • teachers’ online compositions revisit and challenge sanctioned narratives, which is a process bakhtin (1981) framed as bringing authoritative language into live speech to wrest new answers from it in the process of ideological becoming. • human struggles are predicted, accomplished, and transformed in, alongside, and through conventionrich forms of speaking. dissent is possible when people pick up existing speech genres and strategically adapt them. • the education reform debate gains new voices as teachers seek to muster public support. teachers’ online compositions resonate with popular movements word-wide. the concept of education reform as a socially constructed discourse helps us understand how the socio-ideological language of education reform, and its corresponding discourse communities may be at once highly stratified and subject to popular challenges and restructuring. the concept connects discourse to social change. our approach is analogous to bakhtin’s (1984) study of the modern novel: discourses once controlled by a unitary (single author) voice are now sites of struggle among many voices. we are listening to teachers’ voices and attempting to weigh the collateral effect of their digital emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a157 compositions on the education reform debate. teachers’ efforts to shift blame and attack narratives of school failure are features of dynamic dialogue structures that are no longer controlled by interlocking unitary voices. the data presented in this paper suggest that themed arguments, rhetorical moves, and word choice constitute part of the creative reconstruction of education reform dialogue. coda digital media’s affordances should not be read as straightforwardly democratic. on the contrary, urban teachers’ digital dissent shares bandwidth with messages presenting teacher improvement as the simplistic key to education reform that makes dissent appear futile. to characterize digital media tools as a panacea that guarantees meaningful participation would be missing the point of language as site of social struggle. the overarching questions this study raises pertain to historical and political struggle over teachers’ roles in education reform. a deep historical view of education reform counteracts the sway of contemporary crisis narratives. interrogating the kerner report (1968) and a nation at risk (1983) as source texts for educational crisis thinking strengthens critical awareness of contemporary calls to action, which may mask hasty and simplistic solutions with metaphors that appeal to society’s imagination. taking a long historical view of education reform exposes vulnerabilities of building education reform on the “rocks of stability” (berliner & biddle, 1995, p. 14) of standardized tests and, we would add, the myth of the bad urban teacher. urban teachers’ compositions warrant careful attention because they are actively challenging that myth. teachers are active and sophisticated curators of institutional histories, and their compositions are historicizing education reform in ways that undermine simplistic fusions of data-driven school reforms and social progress. as we look at teachers’ efforts to participate in education reform debates, we see teachers and others destabilizing the manufactured crisis of the now. references achinstein, b. & ogawa, r. t. 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[renee moore /teach moore] (2009, march 2). this frustrated young teacher sounds like many i have mentored or worked with over the years. they come bright-eyed, eager to do good, and most of them woefully underprepared for the realities of the modern classroom. this teacher mentions majoring [blog post comment]. retrieved 4/28/2016 from: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2009/03/an_urban_teacher_tells_us_why.html nichols, s. l. & berliner, d. c. (2007). collateral damage: how high stakes testing corrupts america’s schools. cambridge, ma: harvard education press. ravitch, d. (2013). reign of error: the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to america’s public schools. new york, ny: alfred a. knopf. rud. a. g. (1993). breaking the egg crate. educational theory, 43(1), 71-83. rush, l. s. & scherff, l. (2015). value-added models and why we should all be worried.english education, 47(3), 195-203. saville-troike, m. (2003). the ethnography of communication. an introduction (3rd ed.). oxford, uk: blackwell. strauss, v. (2015, february 7). teacher tells congress: ‘we simply cannot ignore the stunning impact of income inequality and high child poverty’. washington post, retrieved 4/28/2016 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/07/teacher-tells-congress-wesimply-cannot-ignore-the-stunning-impact-of-income-inequality-and-high-child-poverty/ stewart, t. t. (2012). english teachers, adminstrators, and dialogue: transcending the asymmetry of power in the discourse of educational policy. english education, 44(4), 375-393. warren, m. r. (2005). communities and schools: a new view of urban education reform. harvard educational review, (75)2, 133-173. emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a160 appendix: abbreviated presentation of themed arguments with codes compositions codes we fought against this in the civil rights era because the people in charge of educating our kids, the same structure who wants total power now, abused their power back then and failed to properly and equally educate our children. ------ where there is money, there is education. where there isn’t money, there is excessive testing, lack of curricular options, and struggle. there is the struggle to give students the tools they need to fight their way through a system that is designed to hold them back from the moment they take their first breath, from the moment they try to write their first paragraph. ------- i challenge anyone to spend one week in an inner city school to see what the reality is because the lawmakers and decision makers are out of touch. i challenge anyone to spend one week in an inner city school to see what the reality is because the lawmakers and decision makers are out of touch ------- the culprit is the american education system period. it is a national tragedy that all schools are not equal; equal in terms of classes offered, rigor, quality of facilities, books, teachers and support staff. poor and low-income children are unfairly punished for their socioeconomic circumstances that they have nothing to do with; likewise, wealthier students are rewarded for their socioeconomic circumstances, of which they have nothing to do with. yet, both sets of students are expected to compete for the same seats in college admission. how does this make sense??? quality education must be equal for all students, beginning in pre-k. -------- it's not easy for non-white students to "crack down" and succeed in north american schools, because the school system and curriculum is tailored to meet the needs of white, middle class students. eurocentric curriculum and deficit discourse around non-white students prevails, and i don't blame certain students for not "buying in" to an education system that undervalues or even condemns their lived experiences. -------- finally, high stakes testing promotes segregation and stratification. high stakes testing allows students to be divided into two camps based on test scores. those who do not test well find themselves pushed to the side. since many students of color do not perform well on standardized tests, they are routinely marginalized within the system. more importantly, school closures further penalize those students who most benefit from a broad curriculum but are saddled with testing mandates that jeopardize not only their own future but also the future of the schools they attend. failed m andate so what we have is a political and corporate power structure using federal dollars to gain access and control over our black and brown children from the time they enter school until they leave. --------- the point being: christie, like every other republican governor, is scamming the middle-& upper-middle-class taxpayers with the promise of lowering their taxes by privatizing public education for the poor, while raking in campaign monies from for-profit education corporations ---------- now, i'm tired of bloomberg, black, gates, rhee, whitney tilson, etc, who think they know all when they know nothing. i am grateful that my husband and i can afford for me to make a career change, as i will almost certainly be taking a pay cut. and i don't carethe next school year will be my last, and i am so done ---------- these perspectives sound eerily similar to the countless failed “urban renewal” projects done in cities over the past 60 years – technocrats wanting to demolish what exists and instill their unproven vision of what is best instead of engaging with the people who are already there. n eoliberal a genda if every favorite teacher would disappear tomorrow the whole nation would mourn. if every standardized test disappeared tomorrow…yeah, not so much --------- add into this a standardized test which says every child must acquire the same skills at the same time and you have the recipe for mediocrity and bias. ----------- a growing number of parents, school boards, teachers and civil rights organizations are beginning to question the fairness of our overreliance on standardized tests and recently over 300 groups, including the naacp legal defense fund signed a petition to ask congress to ban the use of such tests. ----------- since 2001 public education has been the target of education reformers who believe that more testing especially high stakes testing, and firing teachers based on test scores is what low-income, minority, and special needs children need to succeed. -------- teachers are evaluated based on student test scores. this is ridiculously inaccurate and unfair. standardized tests do not effectively measure student learning. they measure family income. so teachers who have richer students have generally more favorable evaluations than those who teach the poorest and most difficult children. value-added measures, as these are often called, have been labeled junk science by national statistical organizations. they violate a basic principle of the field that you cannot use a test designed to evaluate one factor as a way to evaluate an entirely different factor. removing due process would make the teachers who serve the most at-risk students, themselves, unfairly at risk of losing their jobs. testing emerging dialogic structures in education reform trevor thomas stewart, george l. boggs dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.148 | vol. 4 (2016) a161 teaching in the inner city is an entirely different animal. i've seen teachers injured by first and second graders, cursed at, chased around the room. and this is acceptable, because the children are not receiving the help they need right away, and teachers are not trained or supported to handle these children, and administrators usually don't want to be bothered. ------- as a teacher, i have seen huge changes in the past 20 years. kids are having kids and raising them with little or no parenting skills. those kids are growing up in chaos and they are coming to school not able to think about education...they are too worried about mama's new boyfriend, or drugs, or gangs, or neighborhood violence, or poverty, or a million other aspects of life in the inner city. who the hell cares about math and reading when you've got the kind of problems most people can't even imagine? teachers can only do so much. we are constantly trying to learn the best way to teach these kids, and it's tough. they often come from parents who see teachers as the enemy, because they didn't have good experiences in school. ------- if you've ever tried to work as a teacher in a predominantly minority high school anywhere, in or out of the city, you'd know. it is impossible to teach anybody anything there. everybody acts like you're committing a crime against humanity by trying to teach math. ------- what i hear in this story though is a lot of miscommunication or no communication. not all the students are disruptive; not all the parents show up to fight in public; surely not every administrator in the district is ineffective--so what's the rest of the story? ------- it is a false idea that the teachers drive the students’ learning based solely upon standardized test scores. i have been a highly effective teacher in several schools and a very ineffective teacher in two high schools that have failed for years before i arrived and will continue to fail long after i depart. districts have tried placing their highly qualified and highly effective teachers in their lowest performing schools as measured by standardized test scores. it did not work. the students’ poor performance on standardized tests are linked more to high absentee rates than teaching abilities. in my district, teachers in the poorest performing schools are now being evaluated on student behavior and attendance. however, the students who fail to come to school have the lowest standardized test scores in the state. it is very difficult to teach someone who does not come to school. ------- in the u.s., if you can believe it, approximately 1.3 million students were homeless during the 2012-2013 year. how can a child learn if he or she is homeless or hungry? it is time to invest in our kids--who are the future of this country. we don’t need huge tax breaks for billionaires and large corporations. we need to end child poverty. d iversity issues new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 101-443-1-layout proofread.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a43     avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery1 kendall richards edinburgh napier university, uk nick pilcher edinburgh napier university, uk   abstract international students and direct entrants—those entering a higher year of a degree—often come from socioeconomic or cultural backgrounds different from traditional students, and have different educational backgrounds. it is assumed such students need help with unfamiliar assessment tasks such as essays, reports, and so on, and many sources aim to help with these elements. further assumptions are that dialogue helps, and that the words used in such dialogue will be understood similarly. yet, if the assumed meanings of the words actually differ, then such dialogue is based on a false assumption; rather than genuine dialogue, what actually occurs is an exchange of monologic utterances. this article is a structured narrative of our ongoing research into how key assessment task words such as ‘discuss,’ ‘analyse,’ and ‘critically evaluate’ are understood differently in higher education. we describe how such differences are perpetuated through martin buber’s (1947) ideas of monologic utterances, and what we call ‘dialogues of non-discovery’. here we detail a research-based approach to promote genuine and technical dialogue: what we call ‘dialogues of discovery.’ we first introduce a dialogue that led to the genesis of the study and theoretical context of our dialogues with the literature. we then detail our methods of data collection in a section of ‘dialogues of exploration’. we present our findings in the form of categorizations of the different elements underpinning people’s understandings of ‘the word.’ our own categorizations of these elements encourage dialogue around the elements of language, culture, stakeholder, subject, weight, and development over time. this is an approach we term an ‘antiglossary approach’ in that it is opposite to, and against, ‘fixing’ or ‘ossifying’ the language in a glossary. in the bakhtinian tradition of ‘incompletedness,’ we conclude by encouraging readers to take and adapt our findings as an ‘anti-glossary’ approach to engage in genuine and technical dialogue with their students. in this way, we believe the quality and depth of student work can improve. kendall richards is a lecturer with the role of academic support adviser in the faculty of engineering, computing and creative industries at edinburgh napier university (uk) with a focus on addressing academic support, retention, progression and widening access. he works with a significant proportion of non-traditional, international, mature and direct entrants and his research interests are in education as social justice and language. he has presented globally and is published in the international journal of qualitative studies in education and elsewhere such as in the book researching intercultural learning (edited by lixian jin and martin cortazzi). 1 this article was presented at the dialogic pedagogy institute, waikato, new zealand, january 18-19, 2014 issn: 2325-3290 (online) avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a44 nick pilcher is a lecturer in the school of marketing, tourism and languages at edinburgh napier university (uk) and teaches english for academic purposes. his research interests centre around education, language and qualitative research methods. he has published and contributed to work published in journals such as qualitative research, psychology of music, teaching in higher education and quality in higher education, and books such as researching chinese learners and researching intercultural learning (both edited by lixian jin and martin cortazzi).   ���   introduction: dialogues of non-discovery and dialogues of discovery at our uk institution, as with many uk institutions, many students either start their studies after a period of time away from education, or come from overseas. these students often directly enter the third or fourth year of an undergraduate degree (degrees are four years long in scotland at the undergraduate level), or go directly to a postgraduate master’s course. these students cross very real national boundaries and also the boundaries of education, language, culture, and different pedagogical approaches. such students have to negotiate entry into the academy and yet, even after crossing the boundaries, they may be stopped by further ‘border controls’ such as the specific discourses used within disciplines, within programmes and within particular assessment types. many sources exist to support students with these different assessment types, but the sources contain glossaries with ‘fixed’ definitions of key words (e.g. cottrell, 2008; tracy, 2002; turner, ireland, krenus & pointon, 2008), thus assuming these definitions will suffice for all subjects and contexts. this assumption is itself grounded in the belief that words will be understood and used similarly in higher education. for the authors of this article, a chance encounter with students shattered these assumptions. we approach this article as a narrative that aims to convey to readers our experiences of dialogues of discovery and of non-discovery in relation to helping students become familiar with key assessment task words. our aim is to help promote the former and help avoid the latter. as authors, researchers, and lecturers, our roles comprise academic advisor within a faculty of engineering, computing and creative industries and programme leader of an msc in intercultural business communication with a background in english for academic purposes. as such, our subjectivities were biased towards the linguistic angle of helping students interpret and engage with assessment, rather than the angle of the subject specific content. the first dialogue presented immediately below represents a turning point in our thinking of how to help students, and shows how we moved forward from our previous subjectivities to help promote dialogues of discovery. the first dialogue we present here describes an encounter between students from china and a western academic advisor, who spoke chinese. we present this dialogue as data to show the genesis of, and stimulus for, the later, intentional data collection, although we did not expect it to be data, as it arose by chance. the encounter first followed what we term here to be a typical ‘dialogue of non-discovery;’ by this term we mean that dialogue takes place, but nothing new or useful to the participants is discovered. at the level of the utterance and the word, the language used in such dialogues is similar to what bakhtin (1986, p.88) would call “neutral” in the sense of belonging to “nobody.” although the word may give the impression of being “an other’s word” and “my word” (bakhtin, 1986, p.88), it is nevertheless removed from its “actual context” (voloshinov, 1973, p. 35) of subject and task with the subject lecturer and assessment task setter. in the dialogue described here, the students and advisor talked through the avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a45 coursework, considered structure and analysis, and advice was given about the best way to proceed with regard to completing the work on time. this was a dialogue that followed a template where the language and utterances used were neutral, and assumptions were not suspended (contra. bohm, 1996). the students asked about what they needed to ask about after having been sent to the advisor by their lecturer to ask about these things, and the advisor told them what they needed to be told—in order to meet the requirements of the subject lecturer). then, at the end of the meeting, in the time-space between this template meeting and the outside geographical space, as the students were leaving, almost off-hand utterances were made that formed a dialogue of discovery. by ‘dialogue of discovery,’ we mean one where the words and utterances are relevant to the addresser and addressee and both are actively listening and engaging in dialogue (bakhtin, 1986). the words and utterances are thus genuine (buber, 1947) and lead to the questioning of previously held assumptions, which are essential for dialogue (bohm, 1996). in this dialogue, the two students chatted with each other in chinese, in a conversation that went roughly as follows: student 1: ‘critically analyse means to criticise and or find fault doesn’t it?’ student 2: ‘yes.’ next, student 1 asked the advisor “by the way, what exactly does ‘critically discuss’ mean anyway”? is it ‘批评’? [批评 pīpíng: to criticize / criticism? or is it 批判 pīpàn: to criticize / critique?]”. we should say here, that the chinese students knew that the academic advisor could speak chinese; we should also say that in chinese, for one english word there could be multiple chinese definitions with a gulf of difference between them (cf. saussure, 1959). knowing that the academic advisor spoke chinese was critical, as it provided the basis of the dialogue. this dialogue revealed the existence of multiple linguistic and cultural understandings of assessment terms that could only be understood through dialogue that was genuine and technical (buber, 1947) and where previous assumptions had been suspended (bohm, 1996). the dialogue thus came to be one of discovery as the words came to be owned more by both the students and the advisor rather than being neutral (cf. bakhtin, 1986). furthermore, these themes arose with mature uk direct entrant students who asked almost the same question: “what exactly is ‘discuss’ in this coursework?” this further showed us students’ active attempt to take personal (cf. stern & backhouse, 2011) ownership of the word from its neutral space. critically for us, these dialogues of discovery led us to question the whole discourse used for assessment at the level of the word. in the next section, a theoretical context describes dialogues we had with the literature. we then detail our methods of data collection in a section of ‘dialogues of exploration.’ in focus groups, we asked uk lecturers, uk home students, uk based chinese background lecturers, and chinese students studying in the uk to consider words such as ‘discuss,’ ‘analyse,’ and ‘critically evaluate.’ following this section, we present our findings in the form of categorizations of the different elements underpinning people’s understandings of the word. our own categorizations of these elements encourage dialogue around the areas of language, culture, stakeholder, subject, weight, and development over time. this is an approach we term an ‘anti-glossary approach’ in that it is opposite to, and against, fixing or ossifying the language in a glossary. in the bakhtinian tradition of dialogue never being completed (bakhtin, 1981) we conclude by encouraging readers to take and adapt our findings (from appendices 1 and 2) and anti-glossary approach to engage in genuine and technical dialogue with their students. by genuine, we mean an authentic, transactional negotiation (fecho 2011) by technical we avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a46 mean focused on the content required to complete the task (cf. buber 1947). in this way, we believe the quality and depth of student work can improve. theoretical frame once we decided to investigate this topic further, we engaged in dialogue with the literature. in order to categorise this dialogue into different areas, we drew on our sociological imaginations, which wright mills (1959) describes as consisting of the capacity “to shift from one perspective to another” (p. 232). by drawing on our sociological imagination, we were able to conceptualise the idea that from one perspective, dialogue would lead to ‘discovery,’ but from another perspective, it could be a process of ‘non-discovery.’ dialogues of discovery could be categorised into the following areas: educational and literacy based, socioeconomic, linguistic, and philosophical. we do not, however, wish to do this process hermeneutically, as there is much crossover at the boundaries between each category, evidenced not least by the fact that each area led us into the next. in terms of dialogues of ‘non-discovery,’ we categorized these under the umbrella term, study skills, which includes what we would term boundaried entombed vehicles or objects such as dictionaries and glossaries. in these objects, words are, according to bakhtin (1986, p.88), “neutral” in that they are removed from any meaning for the addresser or the addressee, and that therefore no dialogue occurs between those for whom the word’s meaning can be negotiated and contextualised. no assumptions that the definitions may be inappropriate are suspended (cf. bohm, 1996). yet, a dialogue of non-discovery— or monologue disguised as dialogue (buber, 1947)—occurs, as the addresser (lecturer) can direct the addressee (student) to the object of this neutral meaning. we would even go so far as to extend what bakhtin describes as neutral to ‘neutralized.’ dialogues o f discovery dialogues of discovery are genuine and technical (cf. buber, 1947) dialogues based in a relevant context, where we discover information of use to our own practice supporting non-traditional and international students with their writing. we classify these into a number of categories and deal with each in turn below: educational and literacy, socioeconomic—sociocultural, linguistic, and philosophical based. educational and literacy based our first dialogue of discovery was with sources contextualised in our own subject areas that were educational and academic literacy related. the general message was that non-traditional students with whom we had engaged in dialogue, both international (from china) and advanced entry (mature direct entrant student) would find challenges with uk higher education academic literacies. these challenges would be more so for mature direct entrants (lillis, 2003; lillis & turner, 2001; williams, 2005) and international students (horowitz, 1986; skyrme, 2007) from a diverse body (au, 1998) who may lack the confidence (yorke, 2003) or feel disempowered (cummins, 1986) in such an alien environment, even if commonalities across borders and times can be found (cf. stern & backhouse, 2011). moreover, if such students were entering a third or fourth year of a degree, as many of our students do, these challenges would be even greater (cf. elton, 2010; lillis, 2003). there would also be an even greater difference in perceiving instructions and goals between these students compared to more traditional students, something that is problematic to any students (lillis, 2003; nelson, 1990; 1995; scaife & wellington, 2010; williams, 2005). the literature also noted that students would not be aware that the university itself was a cultural construct (bartholomae, 1985; tran, 2008) where writing is a performance of an institutional ritual to provide access to the academic literacy of a disciplinary avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a47 community (bartholomae, 1985; lillis, 2003; lillis & turner, 2001). in particular, if these students have not had the previous dialogue (bakhtin, 1981) that ‘traditional’ students will have had (see below), they will lack the advantage of having the spirit of assessment (stern & backhouse, 2011) promoted through dialogue. nor will they have had dialogue used to help them work well during assessments (hamp-lyons & tavares, 2011). socioeconomic—sociocultural based socioeconomic and sociocultural aspects can affect vocabulary learning and use (corson, 1997), and within a diverse body of students there may be differences in tacit knowledge (rust, donovan & price 2005). therefore, to make assumptions of academic transparency (lillis, 2003) may be an act of prejudice to a form of institutional discrimination by privileged dominant groups (mackinnon & manathunga, 2003). it may even be the case that uk higher education culture reflects the “dominant discourse of the student learner as white, middle-class, and male” (read, archer & leathwood, 2003, p. 261). dialogue, however, can help redress this power balance (rowland, 2006) by engaging all learners in the process of negotiating and thereby demonstrating meaning, and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty (fecho, 2013) and questioning of assumption (bohm, 1996) around the words through dialogue from which learning can proceed. linguistic based in linguistics, underpinning much of what we read in other areas was the work of saussure (1959). saussure highlighted that the essence of language is form and not substance in that what language is used for relates to people’s experiences within their linguistic systems. such experiences are form only in that they are culturally context-dependent. significantly, saussure’s noted assumption that language was more substantial is the origin of many misunderstandings: “this truth could not be overstressed, for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance” (saussure, 1959, p. 89; cf. bohm, 1996; buber, 1947). in addition, and critically with regard to the work of saussure, bakhtin noted that, rather than look at words and sentences at a purely linguistic and grammatical level, as saussure did, the words and sentences need to be considered as utterances (bakhtin, 1986). a sentence could be individual and fully formed grammatically, but if not formed as an utterance it would have little context, or value, to the addresser or addressee, and would not be complete (bakhtin, 1986); it would instead be neutral. we also were able to apply much from our own previous work in the linguistic area of english for academic purposes at a discourse level, the idea of specific genres (swales, 1990) of texts and subjects (becher, 1989) and also of the idea that language has a function, and that these functions can both differ, and be subject specific (cf. halliday, 1985). further, that the language could be used within a specific ethnography of communication (hymes, 1964) that may differ according to students’ backgrounds. on the basis of such linguistic literature we next turned to the more philosophical angle. philosophical based the linguistic dialogue led us deeper into the philosophical literature. we were drawn then to bakhtin, as “in bakhtin there is no one meaning being striven for: the world is a vast congeries of contesting meanings, a heteroglossia so varied that no single term capable of unifying purist diversifying energy is possible” (holquist, 1994, p. 24). the later works of bakhtin develop the idea of heteroglossia, noting that the meaning of words alters according to context, and that many meanings exist. the idea of heteroglossia goes hand in hand with the idea of the word being neutral if it is placed in a dictionary (or avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a48 glossary) as it stands outside the context (cf. bakhtin, 1986; voloshinov, 1973). in addition, the language games of wittgenstein (1953) resonate with the games of completing assessments that students had to play but into which they may not have been apprenticed (cf. saussure, 1959; wenger, 2002; wittgenstein, 1953). also, vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development theorises that students require input of a ‘goldilocks’ nature’, i.e. not too ‘difficult,’ not too ‘easy,’ but ‘just right’. we realised that when applied to our students, the material may in fact be too difficult, not because of any connection with their ability, but more to do with the fact that they had not had the similar dialogic experiences that traditional students experienced, and it was therefore unfamiliar. we first entered the idea of dialogue both through bakhtin, who we were led to through the angle of academic literacies, and also through aristotle. aristotle’s concept of questioner and answerer struck us as fitting perfectly with bakhtin’s dialogicality in a pedagogical context, given its emphasis on stimulating learning and discovery through dialogue. by coincidence, we also happened to be reading the work of jorge luis borges, whose phrase, “words are symbols that assume a shared memory” (borges, 1979, p. 33) brought everything together and led us to the idea of a new anti-glossary approach (described below). we arrived through all this dialogue to the point where we realised that individual understandings would be based upon different backgrounds and assumed shared memories (cf. borges, 1979). further guided reading of work related to dialogue helped align and contextualise our own approaches to dialogue (bohm, 1996; buber, 1947). our thoughts resonated with the words of holquist (1994): the word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile (p. 276). we realised that our traditional students would have the experience of, and thereby have acquired the tacit knowledge of, the academic assessment words they were given in their questions. this knowledge they would have acquired through dialogue within the context of traditional uk education within the academic subject being studied, and may assume that even if the word was taken out of the subject context, it would still mean the same thing to them because of their experiences. however, they would be blind to the neutral angle of the word in a dictionary context (bakhtin, 1986) and not realise that the word to others may not have the same meaning. indeed, and crucially, all the above led us to realise that many academics (including ourselves) assumed that the memories of such words would be shared. further, we previously assumed that all bodies entering such an environment would have the same experience at the level of the word. yet, we learned that such an assumption was false, and that the traditional dialogic approaches within the classroom did not account for this nor help the nontraditional students we were dealing with acquire the knowledge needed to succeed. the literature affirmed that this assumption was false. evidence o f dialogues o f non-discovery in the literature much of the literature we engaged with actually confirmed the existence of dialogues of nondiscovery. we read that the writer of the first english dictionary published in 1755, dr. johnson, himself realised that any attempt to “fix” the english language was “folly” (mullan, 2010, p. 3), and that language was mutable (hitchings, 2006). we learned that without engagement with the discursive literature practices of the west, such words would not be known (corson, 1997). thus, to direct students to avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a49 dictionaries where the definitions are independent of the context would be promoting a dialogue of nondiscovery, (cf. buber, 1947) and yet we learned that almost every institution actually has materials of this very type: glossaries of key task assessment words in their libraries (e.g. cottrell, 2008; tracy, 2002; turner, ireland, krenus & pointon, 2008). through all the above dialogues of discovery and non-discovery, we decided to study different people’s perceptions in a cascading, or progressively merged focus-group dialogue. content wise we did this in the context of exploring uk lecturer and student—and uk based chinese lecturer and student— perceptions regarding the meanings and expectations of key assessment task words such as ‘discuss,’ ‘analyse,’ and ‘critically evaluate.’ methodology: dialogues of exploration our dialogues of exploration consist of two dialogues. firstly, a dialogue involving data collection that explored our research questions in our initial project, and secondly, an ongoing discursive and reflective dialogue within the academic community exploring their reactions to the results. in this section we detail the dialogues of data collection and what they revealed, and later we describe the ongoing discursive and reflective dialogue. there were three stages in our initial project involving both englishlanguage and chinese language focus groups. in the first stage, we had four different focus groups, all invited by email, and all either employed by, or studying at, the university: a) uk mature students; b) students from china; c) uk lecturers; and d) uk based chinese lecturers. in the second stage, we had one group of lecturers and students from the uk that we facilitated; and one group of lecturers and students from china that the chinese lecturers facilitated. in the final stage we had one group of all participants that we facilitated. in terms of language, the english speaking groups were conducted in english, and the chinese groups in chinese, the final group was conducted in english, but the participants who were chinese speakers were able to use chinese when they wanted to (cf. cortazzi, pilcher & jin, 2011). procedurally, each focus group meeting was first transcribed—and in the case of the chinese interviews also translated—and the empirical data created was used to inform the next stage. in terms of the methodological literature we consulted, the approach focused on specific areas (bryman, 2008; shamdasani & stewart, 1990), was somewhat similar to delphi in that each stage informed the next (cf. brown, 1968). analysis of the data was done using a constructivist grounded theory approach whereby themes emerged from the data rather than through the use of a predetermined code, as would have been the case with an objectivist grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2011). further, the aim was to generate content of benefit for all (freire & ramos 1970; kamberelis & dimitriadis, 2011; padilla, 1993) through dialogue (bakhtin, 1981, marková & linell, 2006) that was genuine and technical (buber, 1947). we created the space for and explored dialogue around the specific assessment terms such as ‘describe’, ‘discuss’ and ‘critically evaluate’. we then took this dialogue in the form of key quotes (included in appendix 2) and categorised them into areas for further dialogue with the academic community. stage 4, which we describe in more detail in the concluding section below, is an ongoing discursive and reflective debate in which we use our empirical data gained from the three focus group stages of data collection to present and model a new approach theoretically grounded in bakhtin (for the dialogue), vygotsky (for his work in the zone of proximal development), aristotle (for his work in topics with questioner and answerer), bohm (to encourage the suspension of assumptions), and buber (to focus the dialogue as being genuine and technical). we term this approach an ‘anti’-glossary approach given its opposition to the use of glossaries, and we situate it within the educational context of scaffolding (wood, bruner & ross, 1976) in a face to face context (palincsar, 1998) using something similar to a avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a50 conversational framework (laurillard, 2012). we now present and discuss key participant quotes and throughout explain this ‘anti’-glossary approach to encouraging dialogue. data and analysis we categorized the different elements of the participants’ understanding the terms into the categories of culture and language, stakeholder, subject, development over time, and level and weight. we do the same here but write our discussion afresh, building on what we have learned since previous publication (richards & pilcher, 2013a; 2013b), from presenting at conferences, running workshops, and from further reading. figure 1: stages of dialogue, extended from richards & pilcher (2013a) culture and language we found differing cultural interpretations of the intended meaning of the words. for example, one chinese student felt the verb ‘discuss’ implied verbal dialogue, and would not be used for written text: “in chinese discuss means to exchange your opinion with another or much more other people. so we can never discuss by yourself...if we say discuss it is weird because you cannot discuss by yourself.” further, we found evidence of different cultural perspectives to what was brought to the table in an academic dialogue, thereby giving differing perceptions of what dialogue actually is in a uk higher home and chinese lecturer and student focus group stage 2 – 2 groups stage 1 – 4 groups stage 3 – 1 group chinese student focus group chinese lecturer focus group chinese lecturer and student focus group home student focus group home lecturer and student focus group home lecturer focus group time academic community qse hea chapter heriot watt de montfort gcu st andrews taiwan nz stage 4 – ? groups avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a51 education context. for example, for the term ‘critically evaluate,’ one chinese lecturer had the following to say: “chinese students and british students use this word very differently. british students would know it’s to make comments, to “critically analyse” or “discuss,” while chinese students’ often write completely based on what is given, descriptive, without their own understanding and views, or just criticise, list all the negative points without including any positive points. therefore, this is a very important word.” further, there could also have been the difference in perceptions of different lecturers from different cultures. for example with the term ‘summarise,’ a chinese lecturer said, “there shouldn’t be any ambiguity in this one.” yet, for a uk lecturer this was a very challenging term to deal with: “it’s a difficult one because it’s synthesising stuff.” somewhat similarly, there was also evidence of the fact that a dictionary or a glossary would not help. words needed to be seen in their contexts, however, the contexts would be very culture dependent. in the words of one chinese lecturer: “a precise meaning can only be determined when it is put in the real situation…different cultures mean different intentions.” we also found surprising perspectives with regard to cultural approaches to words. what may well be assumed to be the deferential perspective of a chinese student from a confucian heritage culture (jin and cortazzi, 2006) was actually expressed by a uk student whose previous education had been in a different era and culture to the contemporary uk one: “i’ve been brought up in a culture that you respect these people because they’ve got where they are today and my first reaction would be not to even question them…because i would just think, ‘oh right, they must know what they’re talking about’ so it’s changing but god it’s hard.” we also found evidence, although we did not realise this at the time, of the active fostering and creation of what we would call strategies leading to dialogues of non-discovery. for instance, an international english language testing system (ielts) strategy would be to just skip a word. the following comment was from a chinese lecturer reading what one chinese student said with regard to how they skipped certain terms: “for ‘comment on,’ if you don’t understand it, you would just pass it, and earlier for ‘account for,’ you also said if you don’t understand it, you would just skip it [all laugh] an ielts strategy.” another lecturer from china noted that such ielts strategies what we would call dialogues of non-discovery -would lead to a lowering of students’ understanding of academic words, but that students were not responsible for this, as “they were told to do this. they were educated to do this.” stakeholder in our original analyses (richards & pilcher, 2013a; 2013b) we wanted to highlight the difference between the perspectives of the different ‘stakeholders’: students and lecturers specifically. however, now we are revisiting the quotes afresh, and are looking at them from a dialogic lens. what we see are different, more layered themes. for example, we now see a theme of a wish for confirmation that the perspectives are not too different. in the words of one uk lecturer: when reading, the first two focus groups were “pleased to see there’s no real gap there between students and lecturers.” equally, we see evidence of worry when the views did differ. in the words of one uk lecturer regarding the word ‘discuss’: “it makes me feel…slightly worried…reading the feedback on the other side…it worries me that students would feel like that [strongly against it] about it because i think it gives a lot of latitude to students to be able to talk about what they’d like to talk about.” clearly then, there was a concern on the part of the lecturers that students did not understand some of the terms, and that there was perhaps a concern of a previous (false) assumption that they did avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a52 (cf. bohm, 1996). we can illustrate that this assumption was false by showing two perspectives regarding the word ‘discuss’ from the stage 1 focus groups where lecturers and students were apart. from a uk student: “ohh i hate this one…i don’t really know what it means to ‘discuss’ and i often failed on it...well not fail but ahh you know not do so well…i read somewhere in one book, that discuss means that you have to highlight the most important points of certain arguments and either compare or contrast them [i and does that make sense to you?] no! [laughter].” conversely, from a lecturer: “that’s good un, use it all the time…‘discuss’ must contain the elements of ‘critically appraise’… ‘analyse’ ‘review’ it’s got ‘synthesis’ it’s got ‘scholarship’ it’s got the lot in ‘discuss.’” we also found evidence that the lecturers believed they differed in their understandings of these terms. for example, echoing bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia, one uk lecturer noted that with regard to the word analysis: “two different lecturers will have a different use of the word.” we also found evidence of a desire from students for more dialogue about the words. not only was the importance of having confidence mentioned frequently, one student also said: “i agree with what you’re saying it is opening up like, but for me i prefer to have it just clear to know this is what you’ve done this is what you want to talk about.” clearly then, to direct students to a glossary is not only fruitless, but is counterproductive. it constitutes a dialogue of non-discovery. subjec t , l eve l and weight in direct contrast to directing students to a glossary and thereby facilitating a dialogue of nondiscovery, would be a dialogue where the word was placed in the context of the subject and specific level of assignment, i.e. genuine and technical (buber, 1947), and personalised to the student (stern & backhouse, 2011). we became more aware of this point through hints of subject specificity at the level of the word. for example, with the word ‘describe’, one uk lecturer said: “to actually get an engineer’s ‘description’ of soil requires certain tests, requires certain calculations,” and if engineering students were asked to ‘trace,’ “they’ll be out with the greaseproof paper drawing pictures.” similarly, an english and film studies lecturer said with regard to the word ‘prove’ that “obviously coming from english and film studies ‘prove’ is not really a word that we…really use, it would be more... ‘justify’ your argument.” in terms of words in the context of questions, different words would be used at different levels of the students’ programs of study. for instance, one uk lecturer said of ‘outline’ and ‘summarise’ that “i would use ‘outline’ for a 5 mark question or for 2nd year where i would use ‘summarise’ with the 4th years because i think ‘summarise’ is a really tricky thing to get students to do.” in addition, for uk lecturers, certain words would be used for certain weights of marks, implying some are more complex than others: “i find that ‘define’ the word for the 5 mark question or for summary and the ‘discuss’ is for 20 marks.” further, certain words themselves would have very different expectations depending on the number of marks accorded to them: “‘describe’ if it’s worth 1 is very different from ‘describe’ if it’s worth 5.” again, none of these clarifications could be known by a student from a dictionary or a glossary, and any such dialogue would be one of non-discovery. it is straightforward to read a definition of describe, but without that then being placed through dialogue within the context of the subject, the question and the weight, it would be hard to apply its specific intended meaning. development over t ime there were also many quotes and even a dialogue in situ that showed both the power of dialogue and how people felt their understanding of the words had developed over a period of time; through avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a53 experience, and through dialogue. lecturers and students both commented on how their understandings of, and approaches to, these words had developed. one uk lecturer said, “i think…my understanding of all of these words has changed hugely since i was at university.” a chinese lecturer even commented on how it would be better for students if they had not had any non-uk dialogue regarding the words before arriving here: “i tell our students, it may be better if you haven’t learnt it in china, so that you would learnt in english first hand, there won’t be misunderstanding...[and] if you know a little in chinese but don’t thoroughly understand it, that would be worse. many words can’t be converted, misunderstanding can easily happen. it would be better if it’s a blank slate.” this statement clearly has implications for advanced level (or direct) entrants into programmes, particularly from overseas, as not only will they have lacked the necessary dialogue before, but they may well have had dialogues of a kind that did not help them with how such words could be used in the uk. in the words of one student from china that illustrates this sentiment perfectly: “i think i was memorising vocabulary before, and felt the meanings of the words are similar. since i came here, i see them in context, and can feel the subtle differences between them, and not like when i was in china.” amongst the uk students there was also the feeling that the words had a certain mystery to them, that they were unsure of how to use them, but that this uncertainty would be replaced with confidence as they used them. one uk student said, “when it comes to me i’m like no, that’s a stupid question he’s gonna think i’m stupid, i think it’s a whole confidence thing [general agreement].” echoing this, a uk lecturer further noted that “it’s a confidence thing...a confidence issue of having the courage of your student convictions…‘justify’ ‘discuss’ ‘critically evaluate’ ‘analyse’ they’re confidence issues it’s having the confidence to just to go for it [general agreement].” we finish this section with two episodes. the first illustrates the extent of the current paradigm we are trying to challenge (cf. saussure, 1959), the second illustrates the huge potential of dialogue. the first episode is an email from a student in response to a request to participate in the focus groups to talk about the meanings of the words (stage 1 above). this student was a fourth year, traditional student, i.e. one who had been through all the standard years and practices the system had and so could assume such dialogue was unnecessary, perhaps because they were unaware of any different understandings. here is their response to the initial email we sent out inviting students to take part in a focus group to talk about the assessment terms: “sound like stupid crap, no... p.s try dictionary.com” although (we presume) in jest, the response clearly shows how the student felt that such dialogue was unnecessary and also that such answers could easily be found in a dictionary. we should also mention that we repeatedly invited this student to a focus group but we received no further response. this student therefore did not take part in the study. this was a great pity as to have had insight into this student’s perspective may well have been of great benefit. the second episode is from stage three of the focus groups, and again shows the ingrained assumption that a dictionary or equivalent could provide students with the answers they needed, but more importantly, shows the power of dialogue to change that perspective and lead the lecturer to realise that a contextualised definition within the subject was needed far more than just a neutralised dictionary definition. the dialogue starts with the lecturer recommending students go to a dictionary, then follows with the counter-perspectives of students regarding this approach, and then ends finally with the same lecturer acknowledging that yes, a dictionary may not be the best approach: avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a54 “l – dictionary’s a hell of a powerful study... it’s a magic book it tells you the meaning of stuff, and in that respect it’s brilliant and it forces me to then think... if i’ve written down ‘discuss’ would i have written what the dictionary said? and it’s written by far cleverer people than me, sta – well what i find i’ve i’ve started to do... i’m finding words and say small phrases and... actually just copy and paste them onto google or wikipedia…and reading through what their understanding of it is coz... rather than one sentence you’ll get a whole paragraph on it, and it actually it helps me understand what actually the word means [general agreement] within the sense of what i’ve originally seen it like stb – you see the thing is with me i would, i would actually disagree with you [the lecturer] with the dictionary erm because the dictionary’ll tell you what it means... but it... doesn’t tell you how to put it into context it might give you... maybe one sentence containing the word but it’ll no turn round to me and say... i need to use ethnography in this kind of context l – yeh i know what you mean i could look up ethnography and i wouldn’t know when to use it exactly yeh uh huh fair point.” holquist noted (1994, p. 69) that dialogism assumes that “at any given time, in any given place, there is a set of powerful but highly unstable conditions at work that will give a word uttered then and there a meaning that is different from what it would be at other times and other places.” he further noted that, “dialogism argues that we make sense of existence by defining our specific place in an operation performed in cognitive time and space, the basic categories of perception. important as these categories are, they themselves are shaped by the even more fundamental set of self and other” (holquist, 1994, p. 35). we believe our extract of focus group dialogue immediately above illustrates how the time and space influence people’s approaches to understanding particular words in focus, and how this transformation of their understanding is achieved through dialogue. however, it also, worryingly, illustrates that speakers may well be unaware of the need for such dialogue and that, unless it is shown to them, they may not suspend their assumptions (bohm, 1996) or, as we showed at the very start of the article, we ourselves were completely unaware of its existence. here then, the dialogue would be one of non-discovery or monologue (buber, 1947) and removed from personalization (stern & backhouse, 2011). we argue that what students really need in order to fully understand what is expected of them from the term is dialogue within the specific subject and task context of the question set by the lecturer (cf. voloshinov, 1973). this would then be genuine and technical (buber, 1947) dialogue. further, the lecturer also needs to understand what their own understanding of the word is and that this understanding may not be shared by the students, or by other lecturers; in other words, the lecturers need to suspend their assumptions (bohm, 1996). it is these more recent reflections that have led us to the conclusion that we are not simply proposing something that is procedurally ‘opposite to’ glossaries, but one that is paradigmatically against them. by ‘anti-’ we originally meant ‘opposite to,’ and previously (richards & pilcher, 2013a) we argued this. however, on further reflection, we wonder whether we in actual fact mean both ‘opposite to’ and ‘against.’ what the ‘anti-’ that we propose is opposite to and against is the traditional approach of directing students to dictionaries and glossaries in study skills guides. we arrived at this point through realising the existence of what we term dialogues of non-discovery (cf. buber, 1947, monologue disguised as dialogue). although described above, in this context we would term such dialogues ‘nondiscovery’ in the sense that, if students (or staff) were to be directed to such sources for information, they avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a55 would actually discover nothing of any specific use, in spite of having the sense of discovering something, thus giving both the director and the directed a false sense of having had a dialogue and discovered something (bakhtin, 1986; buber, 1947) when in fact arriving to a neutralised ‘meaning’ of use to everyone but, by implication, of use to no one. the anti-glossary approach we envision as breaking down the terms according to the categories stated above (culture, language, stakeholder, level, weight, subject and development over time) and is represented visually (richards & pilcher, 2013a) in the following figure: figure 2: anti-glossary approach, from richards and pilcher, 2013a in this approach, we envision dialogue being guided by the teacher to ask questions of the students on the basis of the categories on the individual pieces so that the students form a complete picture of what is required of them by the term used. (see appendix 1 for an example). however, we stress that this is only our own categorization. in a fourth, ongoing stage (see figure 1), we have taken quotes from our data and asked others to categorize them, not for triangulation of data as such but rather to move the dialogue forward. we visually represent some of the categories they have chosen to describe the words in the implications section below, as a way to encourage others to use the quotes in a similar fashion to generate dialogue. implications our conclusion is intended to be an extension of the contents here for others to take away and use in dialogue with students and staff. it is therefore, a stopping point or a pause (appelbaum, 1995), with the aim for reflection and future continuation. our research questions were to explore uk lecturer and student—and uk based chinese lecturer and student—perceptions regarding the meanings and expectations of key assessment task words such as ‘discuss,’ ‘analyse,’ and ‘critically evaluate.’ what we take from this project is that it is often wrongly assumed that students will know, and should know, what is expected of them from assessment terms. we further conclude that the worst approach to helping students who ask about such terms is to direct them to a glossary or a dictionary in order to find out about such terms. this action would mean that any avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a56 dialogue was one of non-discovery and would consist of monologic utterances (buber, 1947). the dialogue would not be genuine or technical (buber, 1947), because no assumptions had been suspended (bohm, 1996). we believe that directing students to such ‘resources’ is decontextualised monologue using neutralised words (bakhtin, 1981) and that, paradoxically, this is why it is often assumed to work, because: a. the lack of dialogue allows it to continue onwards and b. its non-subject specificity allows it continue under the auspices of a 'why would we have an engineering one coz that would not suit the business folk?' guise. both parties can believe they have said something or read something to help them, but they are still reliant on their own resources and have thus engaged in monologic utterances rather than genuine or technical dialogue (buber, 1947). we argue that such an approach does not promote genuine or technical dialogue, and that what students need to have is dialogue that explores the terms regarding the specific subject content, and context, required. we see this piece as one that can help students and lecturers engage in genuine and technical dialogue about assessment terms to help produce higher quality work. we suggest this can be achieved if lecturers and students leave the comfort zone of their standard spatial and environmental context through engaging in exploratory and genuine and technical dialogue. to encourage this action, we suggest that colleagues use our quotes (see appendix 2) in workshops or classes with both students and staff and urge participants to categorize the quotes as they see appropriate, and to engage in dialogue using them. as mentioned above, in an ongoing fourth stage of our exploration of these words, we take them to workshops and ask other lecturers to categorise the quotes from our focus group participants. we represent this here (figure 3) as a word cloud (via wordle.net) to show the types of categories that have been generated. figure 3: word cloud of others’ categories in the workshops, we suggest that such categorizations are then compared to our own ‘antiglossary’ approach (see appendix 1) and that guiding questions be written by the lecturers for their own avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a57 assessment questions. such dialogue should not be reified and completed as a task each year, but should be visited afresh. to be genuine, it must have that quality of incompletedness, or nezaveršennot (bakhtin, 1981). we hope this paper and the suggestions within it lead to further dialogue amongst students and staff to help students learn more and to help staff teach them to learn more as well. we also very much welcome any dialogue with us at the contact email address above. references appelbaum, d. 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(2003). formative assessment in higher education: moves towards theory and the enhancement of pedagogic practice. higher education, 45, 477–501. avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a61 appendix a anti-glossary approach we use the following year 2 question from a design module ‘debating design 2’ to show how the ‘antiglossary’ approach can be used ‘critically compare your chosen design / designers ‘viewpoint’ to that of the concurrent ‘consumer culture’’ • culture and language ‘what does ‘critically compare’ mean to you?’ ‘how do you think ‘critically compare’ is used here? ‘in this assessment?’ ‘in china/school/college, if you are asked to be ‘critical’ what are you expected to do? ‘do you think the way you use ‘discuss’ is different in china/college/school?’ ‘what theories or concepts would you use from the course to ‘critically compare’ in this question’? • stakeholder ‘is it possible for students of your generation to ‘critically compare’ the work of professors and other researchers?’ ‘are you confident that you can ‘critically compare’ a researchers/designers work?’ ‘how would you ‘critically discuss’ without attacking them?’ ‘do you think lecturers ‘critically discuss/compare’ other lecturers’ work and ideas?’ ‘thinking of this question, how could you ‘critically compare’ what designers are doing?’ ‘what would you look for?’ ‘where would you find sources to support the points in any ‘critical discussion/comparison’?’ how will you justify your choice of design/designer? • subject ‘what topics covered in your lectures and reading will help you ‘critically compare’? ‘what theory can be used to support your ‘critical comparison’ of design/designers?’ ‘what percentage of your answer needs to be ‘critical’ and ‘discussion/comparison’?’ how would you define a ‘consumer culture’ is there a specific design consumer culture? avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a62 • development over time ‘were you asked to ‘critically compare’ at school or college? if yes, do you think you have to write something different at university?’ ‘do you think your understanding of ‘critically compare’ is stronger now? how?’ level and weight ‘is the answer you need to write for ‘critically compare’ at this level different to one at a previous level?’ ‘if the question with the word ‘critically compare’ in it is worth 5 marks how is it different from one where it is worth 20 marks? how?’ avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a63 appendix b quotes to use in workshops “in  chinese  discuss  means  to  exchange  your  opinion  with  another  or  much  more  other  people.  so  we  can   never  discuss  by  yourself...if  we  say  discuss  it  is  weird  because  you  cannot  discuss  by  yourself.”   critically  evaluate  –  uk  based  chinese  lecturers  -­‐  “chinese  students  and  british  students  use  this  word   very  differently.  british  students  would  know  it’s  to  make  comments,  to  “critically  analyse”  or  “discuss”, while  chinese  students’  often  write  completely  based  on  what  is  given,  descriptive,  without  their  own   understanding  and  views,  or  just  criticise,  list  all  the  negative  points  without  including  any  positive   points.  therefore,  this  is  a  very  important  word.”   ‘summarise’-­‐  uk  based  chinese  lecturers  -­‐-­‐  “there  shouldn’t  be  any  ambiguity  in  this  one.” uk  lecturers  -­‐  “‘summarise’  is  a  really  tricky  thing  to  get  students  to  do.”   uk  based  chinese  lecturers  -­‐-­‐  “a  precise  meaning  [of  critically  evaluate]  can  only  be  determined  when  it   is  put  in  the  real  situation…  different  cultures  mean  different  intentions.”   uk  students  -­‐“i’ve  been  brought  up  in  a  culture  that  you  respect  these  people  because  they’ve  got  where   they  are  today  and  my  first  reaction  would  be  not  to  even  question  them.” uk  student  “ohh  i  hate  this  one…i  don’t  really  know  what  it  means  to  ‘discuss’  and  i  often  failed  on   it...well  not  fail  but  ahh  you  know  not  do  so  well…i  read  somewhere  in  one  book,  that  discuss  means  that   you  have  to  highlight  the  most  important  points  of  certain  arguments  and  either  compare  or  contrast   them  [i  -­‐  and  does  that  make  sense  to  you?]  no!  (laughter)” uk  lecturer  “that’s  good  un  use  it  all  the  time…‘discuss’  must  contain  the  elements  of  ‘critically   appraise’…  ‘analyse’  ‘review’  it’s  got  ‘synthesis’  it’s  got  ‘scholarship’  it’s  got  the  lot  in  ‘discuss’.” “obviously  coming  from  english  and  film  studies  ‘prove’  is  not  really  a  word  that  we…really  use,  it  would   be  more...  ‘justify’  your  argument.” “to  actually  get  an  engineer’s  ‘description’  of  soil  requires  certain  tests  requires  certain  calculations.”   ask  engineers  to  ‘trace’  and  “they’ll  be  out  with  the  greaseproof  paper  drawing  pictures.” “‘describe’  if  it’s  worth  1  is  very  different  from  ‘describe’  if  it’s  worth  5.”   “i  would  use  ‘outline’  for  a  5  mark  question  or  for  2 nd  year  where  i  would  use  ‘summarise’  with  the  4 th   years  because  i  think  ‘summarise’  is  a  really  tricky  thing  to  get  students  to  do.”   “i  find  that  ‘define’  the  word  for  the  5  mark  question  or  for  summary  and  the  ‘discuss  ‘is  for  20  marks.”   uk  based  chinese  lecturer  -­‐  “i  tell  our  students,  it  may  be  better  if  you  haven’t  learnt  it  in  china,  so  that   you  would  learnt  in  english  first  hand,  there  won’t  be  misunderstanding...  [and]  if  you  know  a  little  in   avoiding dialogues of non-discovery through promoting dialogues of discovery kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.101 | vol. 3 (2015) a64 chinese  but  don’t  thoroughly  understand  it,  that  would  be  worse.  many  words  can’t  be  converted,   misunderstanding  can  easily  happen.  it  would  be  better  if  it’s  a  blank  slate.”   chinese  student  -­‐  “i  think  i  was  memorising  vocabulary  before,  and  felt  the  meanings  of  the  words  are   similar.  since  i  came  here,  i  see  them  in  context,  and  can  feel  the  subtle  differences  between  them,  and   not  like  when  i  was  in  china.”   uk  direct  entrant  student  -­‐  “when  it  comes  to  me  i’m  like  no,  that’s  a  stupid  question  he’s  gonna  think   i’m  stupid,  i  think  it’s  a  whole  confidence  thing  [general  agreement].”   uk  lecturer  -­‐  “‘justify’  ‘discuss’  ‘critically  evaluate’  ‘analyse’  they’re  confidence  issues  it’s  having  the   confidence  to  just  to  go  for  it  [general  agreement].”   uk  lecturer  -­‐  “i  think…my  understanding  of  all  of  these  words  has  changed  hugely  since  i  was  at   university.”     new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 163-an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a122 an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics to inform pedagogical materials kendall richards1 edinburgh napier university, uk nick pilcher edinburgh napier university, uk abstract corpus linguistics, or the gathering together of language into a body for analysis and development of materials, is claimed to be an assured, established method (or field) that valuably informs pedagogical materials and knowledge of language (e.g. ädel 2010; gardner & nesi, 2013). the fundamental validity of corpus linguistics is rarely, if ever, critiqued. in this empirical paper we critically consider the foundations of corpus linguistics as being based on an abstract objectivist view of language. we critique this foundation through the lens of an individual subjectivist view of language. our introduction outlines abstract objectivist and individual subjectivist views of language described by voloshinov (1973). we then present what is claimed regarding corpus linguistics, and consider contemporary critiques of these claims . we then critique the foundations of corpus linguistics from an individual subjectivist view of language. we illustrate this critique by drawing on data from interviews and focus groups with content material lecturers and students in the subject areas of ‘business’; ‘nursing’; ‘design’ and ‘computing’. these data question the fundamental assumption about how corpus linguistics operates: that what is counted is indeed countable. the data show how ostensibly similar words are understood in very different ways with very different underpinning psychological elements. we argue that corpus linguistics thus informs pedagogical materials with a merely passive understanding of the language. this view can only gain access to the inert crust of previous language, because it removes language from its individual subjective context. this context is fundamental to giving language the conscious and psychological elements that underpin its use. we argue the language should be taught through dialogue in this subject context and not removed from it. keywords: corpus linguistics; critique; individual subjectivism. kendall richards is a lecturer in the school of computing at edinburgh napier university (uk) with a focus on addressing academic support, retention, progression and widening access. he works with a significant proportion of non-traditional, international, mature and direct entrants and his research interests are in education as social justice and language. he has presented globally and is published in the international journal of qualitative studies in education, higher education research and 1 correspondence: kendall richards, school of computing, edinburgh napier university, edinburgh, eh10 5dt, uk., tel: (00)44 131 455 2659 email: k.richards@napier.ac.uk nick pilcher, the business school, edinburgh napier university, edinburgh, eh14 1dj uk., tel: (00)44 131 455 4731 email: n.pilcher@napier.ac.uk issn: 2325-3290 (online) an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a123 development, dialogic pedagogy, and elsewhere such as in the book researching intercultural learning (edited by lixian jin and martin cortazzi). nick pilcher is a lecturer in the business school at edinburgh napier university (uk). he is the programme leader for the msc in intercultural business communication and also helps students with writing in academic subjects. his research interests centre around education, language and qualitative research methods. he has published and contributed to work published in journals such as qualitative research, psychology of music, the qualitative report, research in transportation business and management, the international journal of shipping and transport logistics, and the journal of education and work. acknowledgements. we would like to acknowledge the work and feedback from the editors, the managing editors and the reviewers. in particular we would like to acknowledge the reviewer who stated that corpus linguistics assumes that what it counts is countable. we found this echoed our thinking perfectly and have incorporated it into the final draft. ��� introduction “… linguistics has always taken as its point of departure the finished monologic utterance – the ancient written monument considering it the ultimate realium. all its methods and categories were elaborated in its work on this kind of defunct, monologic utterance or, rather, on a series of such utterances constituting a corpus for linguistics by virtue of common language alone” (voloshinov2, 1973, p.73). “english is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in connection with one another, which yet have many words in common, so that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom this author is writing” (empson, 1930, p. 236). in 1929, voloshinov published marxism and the philosophy of language. in it, he argued that two key trends can be identified in linguistic thought: individual subjectivist approaches to language, and abstract objectivist approaches to language. the latter is grounded in the idea that language is objective and can be detached for analysis and teaching, whereas the former is grounded in the idea that language is subjective and individual, living only within its specific context. voloshinov outlines each of these approaches as having four key trends which are antithetical to each other. we quote these four trends of the abstract objectivist approach (voloshinov, 1973, p. 57) and those of the individual subjectivist approach (ibid, p.48) and we place them side by side (table 1) for the purposes of illustration of their antithetical nature. we also code them and use these codes to illustrate the relevance of the examples of literature and data we use throughout the article. although we use these four trends in our coded examples throughout the article, in the table we briefly note their significance in terms of what they imply for the possibilities of language analysis. we draw on both this literature and also empirical data from interviews and focus groups to argue that corpus linguistics is based upon, and justified by, an abstract objectivist view of language. the whole approach of corpus linguistics (see immediately below) is based upon this view as it collects together 2 we use the name voloshinov throughout but are aware that much debate surrounds the issue of whether the author of works ascribed to voloshinov may in fact be mikhail bakhtin (morris, 1994). an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a124 language from different contexts and deposits it into a bank which it uses for later analyses. it is based on the fundamental assumption that the counted words are in fact countable. however, here we raise the following questions: does this view only gain access to the inert crust of previous language? consequently, does this remove language from its individual subjective context which gives it the conscious and psychological elements underpinning its use? abstract objectivist approaches individual subjectivist approaches 1. language is a stable, immutable system of normatively identical linguistic forms which the individual consciousness finds ready-made and which is incontestable for that consciousness; [ao1] i.e. words form a system that can be presented for a scientific study and they can be counted as having one or more stable meanings, even if they come from different places (and contexts). 1. language is activity, an unceasing process of creation (energeia) realized in individual speech acts; [is1] i.e. words are individual, unique to context, and cannot be removed for objective study. 2. the laws of language are the specifically linguistic laws of connection between linguistic signs within a given, closed linguistic system. these laws are objective with respect to any subjective consciousness; [ao2] i.e. individuals use words according to a closed objective system, thus words represent equal items. 2. the laws of language creativity are the laws of individual psychology; [is2] i.e. words are used individually, their meaning is unique to each individual, and they do not represent equal items in a system. 3. specifically linguistic connections have nothing in common with ideological values (artistic, cognitive, or other). language phenomena are not grounded in ideological motives. no connection of a kind natural and comprehensible to the consciousness or of an artistic kind obtains between the word and its meaning; [ao3] i.e. language is neutral, objective and can be scientifically studied. 3. creativity of language is meaningful creativity, analogous to creative art; [is3] i.e. language is individual and subjective, and used in a unique creative way by individuals at the time of usage. 4. individual acts of speaking are, from the viewpoint of language, merely fortuitous refractions and variations or plain and simple distortions of normatively identical forms; but precisely these acts of individual discourse explain the historical changeability of linguistic forms, a changeability in itself, from the standpoint of the language system, is irrational and senseless. there is no connection, no sharing of motives, between the system of language and its history. they are alien to one another; [ao4] i.e., individual variations are anomalies or errors in individual usage of the objective system, only important when embedded in diachronic variation over time. 4. language as a ready-made product (ergon), as a stable system (lexicon, grammar, phonetics), is, so to speak, the inert crust, the hardened lava of language creativity, of which linguistics makes an abstract construct in the interests of the practical teaching of language as a ready-made instrument; [is4] i.e. words cannot be counted and accorded importance by frequency, since words only represent a hardened crust of the live acts of speaking. table 1. abstract objectivist and individual subjectivist approaches to language an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a125 thus, from an abstract objectivist perspective, language is fixed, immutable and disconnected from consciousness, whereas from an individual subjectivist viewpoint, language is continually evolving, is individual and rooted in ideology and consciousness. arguably, these two views of language are paradigmatically different (cf. kuhn, 1970) in that they represent two opposite frames of seeing language. the individual subjective view also approaches language through its ontological (cf. lafford, 2007) or emic and individual perspective, while the abstract objectivist view approaches language through its etic and structural characteristics. such paradigmatically different views in turn govern how language is approached and taught. in other words, such views will underpin how certain fields or methods both view language and how it can be analysed and taught. from an individual subjectivist view of language, language must be taught through dialogue within its context of use, as the meaning and usage of the language is individual and underpinned by creative ideological and psychological elements. conversely, from an abstract objectivist perspective of language, as the system of language is closed, stable and immutable, language can be taken from a range of different contexts and assembled for study of frequency and usage, and then packaged to be delivered in any context, such as the language classroom. this latter view is very much true of corpus linguistics, which assumes that what it counts is indeed countable. corpus linguistics and what it claims to do corpus linguistics has been described as the method (cf. mcenery & hardie, 2012) or research field (andor 2004) whereby a corpus of texts is gathered together for linguistic analysis. it has a number of major schools in lancaster, birmingham, nottingham, and arizona; and specific academic journals (e.g. the international journal of corpus linguistics and corpus linguistics and linguistic theory). regarding how it is defined, generally speaking, “we could reasonably define corpus linguistics as dealing with some set of machine-readable texts which is deemed an appropriate basis on which to study a specific set of research questions” (mcenery & hardie, 2012, p.1). such research questions can generally be divided into ones that ask about language diachronically [i.e. over a period of time], and about language synchronically [i.e. at the same point in time] (mcenery & hardie 2012). with a suitable corpus, it is argued, “we would have at our disposal many thousands of words with which to conduct our study” (mcenery & hardie, 2012, p. 27-8) and that with current tools and computer analysis, it is claimed that, “there is no good excuse for failing to test theoretical work against corpora” (wasow, 2002, p.163). corpora consist of texts, rather than words as it is argued that “experience of the human world is largely a textually mediated experience, and, to that extent, human beings live in a textually mediated world” (mcenery & hardie, 2012, p.230). as a result of its reliance on texts rather than words, “corpus linguistics questions the position of the word as the core unit of language” (teubert & cermáková, 2007, p.49-50). thus, corpus linguistics is clearly founded on the idea that language is stable and immutable [ao1] and can be removed from its original contexts for the purposes of objective study. although corpus linguistics gives prominence to texts rather than words, the key way that corpora answer questions is through their affordability to generate frequency counts of words, multi-word phrases or stylistic occurrences within these texts. this is believed to allow linguists to count the frequency of certain words and phrases in order to create lists of words, phrases, or grammatical items, to study or to inform pedagogical materials. further, lines of text can be extracted from a corpus to form concordance lines, again for study or to inform pedagogical materials. such approaches are used extensively in english language teaching (e.g. campoy, cubillo, belles-fortuno, & gea-valor, 2010) to create lists of words or lexical bundles for general (west, 1953), academic (e.g. coxhead, 2000, 2010, mccarthy & an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a126 o’dell, 2008, gardner & nesi, 2013) and specific (e.g. lee & swales, 2006, hyland 2008; cheng, 2010) purposes. further, it is also used increasingly in other fields. for example, literary analysis is undertaken with corpus stylistics (fischer-starcke, 2010), and corpora are used extensively in applied linguistics (hunston, 2002). again, this could only be done guided by the fundamental abstract objectivist belief that language is comprised of a closed linguistic system [ao2] with the only connections being linguistic ones between the words and the text. many claims are made regarding what corpora, and the lists of frequently occurring words or phrases they generate, can do. it is claimed, for instance in terms of the meanings of words, that “if we want to find out what words, sentences and texts mean, we should opt for corpus linguistics” (teubert & cermáková, 2007, p.37) as only after gathering all usages of a word in texts can we see what its meaning is, and in fact, “there is nothing else that could tell us what this word means. and all of it is verbal communication” (ibid, p.38). thus, there is little connection between the word and individual consciousness [ao3] and the word only represents an inert crust [contra is4] which must be compiled in its numerous occurrences to fully understand its meaning. overall, it is generally accepted as a priori that corpus linguistics is correct, valuable, assured, and established (e.g. chang & kuo, 2011; gilquin, granger & paquot, 2007; hafner & candlin, 2007; walker, 2011; gardner & nesi, 2013). there does indeed need to be no dialogue on the matter. as ädel (2010, p. 39-40) notes in the introduction to a chapter related to how corpus linguistics can help with the teaching of writing: “one thing which will not be discussed is why we might want to use corpora in teaching in the first place. others have already presented very good reasons (e.g. gavioli & aston, 2001; sinclair 2004; yoon & hirvela 2004; o’sullivan & chambers, 2006).” further, as noted elsewhere by corpus linguistic researchers, “there are few areas of linguistics where there is no possible role for corpus methods …, it is safe to say that the place of corpus analysis in linguistics is assured” (mcenery & hardie 2012, p 236-7), and that corpus linguistics, “has to be accepted as an outstanding research field of empirical importance” (andor 2004, p.97, cf. baker, 2013). such claims can only be made if language is assumed immutable [ao1], and existing within a closed linguistic system [ao2] that has no connection with ideology [ao3] or history [ao4]. nevertheless, despite its widespread acceptance, corpus linguistics has not been without its detractors or its critics. one key critic who is considered in recent corpus linguistics literature is noam chomsky. chomsky’s critique is levelled from a strong foundational basis of linguistics and he argues that, “corpus linguistics doesn’t mean anything” (cited in andor, 2004, p.97) from a language perspective as it is concerned not with how language works, but with how language is observed. it is, therefore, external remnants of language [cf. is4] rather than illustrations of its inner workings (cited in andor, 2004). thus, it is not scientific. in response, corpus linguists have argued that “chomsky’s view is at best somewhat naïve and at worst deliberately misleading… just as observation of the universe through astronomy can help to prove the hypotheses of physicists such as einstein, so observation of language through corpora can help linguists to understand language” (mcenery & hardie, 2012). indeed, it has even been argued that “corpus linguistics is concerned with language use in real contexts [and] therefore, it is often contrasted with chomskyan linguistics, which emphasizes language competence and often involves made-up examples as the basis of its exploration of language” (adolphs & lin, 2013, p. 597; cf. mcenery & wilson, 2001). in order for such observations to allow an understanding of language, the language being observed must be abstract, and must be part of a stable and immutable system. thus, the language use takes precedence over the language structure, and this use is stable and has a fixed meaning [ao1, ao2]. such an underpinning assumption would afford the argument that the ‘real an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a127 contexts’ (adolphs & lin, 2013) of the language can be used by corpus linguistics to remove language for analysis. another critique of corpus linguistics, despite some corpus linguists claiming it is concerned with ‘language use in real contexts’, is that the process of compiling texts and then extracting words from them ‘decontextualises’ the language in that it removes the language from its ‘context’ (e.g. widdowson, 2000) and also removes it from an ethnography of communication (hymes, 1964). yet, from an abstract objectivist view of language, this context involves elements of a closed immutable system [ao1, ao2] which can be analysed by the linguist, such as communicative context, typical writer-reader roles, cultural values and intertextual knowledge (ädel, 2010). from an abstract objectivist view of language, the context is social and cultural (koester, 2010), or possibly linguistic, as illustrated by mcenery & hardie’s (2012, p.35) reference to “key word in context (kwic) concordancing” showing the “context in use” (ibid) of the nominalizing suffix ‘ness’ by showing a number of lines with words ending in ‘ness’ situated amongst other words. only in a closed system [ao2] removed from ideology [ao3] and containing normatively identical forms [ao1] can such a context reveal the inner workings of the language. in addition to such lines providing a ‘context in use’ of words, context itself can be provided, according to corpus linguists, by reducing the size of the corpus, so the smaller corpora provide more specific data for analysis (koester, 2010; hyland, 2008). in such small corpora, where “the analyst is more often than not also the compiler, the analyst often has recourse to the original context, and the corpus can be marked up for these different contextual features, e.g. setting, text type, communicative purpose, etc” (flowerdew, 2011, p.31, see also flowerdew, 2005). furthermore, context in the genre can be provided by the students if they have the genre knowledge of the subject being studied (cf. lee & swales, 2006). it has even been argued, that such ostensible ‘de’contextualization can help with contextualization, as “students are stimulated to look further into the context, to expand the lines as far as necessary or to consult the source text” (charles, 2007, p. 298). thus, according to the claims of charles (2007), the paradox exists that by ‘de’contextualizing, contextualization is actually enhanced, in that students are encouraged to return to the original source of the language after being shown its salience through its removal. thus, from the abstract objectivist point of view, the language can be studied, but only on the basis that the linguist can provide the context, and this can only be done where the language is believed to be analyzable. this in turn is only possible if language is believed to be disconnected from individual ideology [ao3] and part of a closed linguistic system [ao2] of normatively identical forms [ao1]. only if such a view of language exists can it be removed for study and the linguist be able to analyze it, and students be able to learn about it in such a context. such a view forms the foundation for all structuralist research, including corpus linguistics. not surprisingly then, in the field of corpus linguistics, even when it is acknowledged as a drawback, decontextualization, “should not cause us to abandon corpus-informed teaching” and that corpora work best as a “complement” (ädel, 2010, p.28). what is more, it is often the case that corpus linguists wish to access a large body of corpora to reach wider coverage, for example, when developing the phrase list, martinez and schmitt (2015) note that “the full 100-million word bnc [british national corpus] was deemed the best choice from among the publicly available large corpora for a number of reasons, including its size, diversity, and reputation” (martinez & schmitt, 2015, p. 452). further, when compiling the academic word list, a total of 3.5 million running words were used (coxhead, 2000) and the student textbook academic vocabulary in use (mccarthy & o’dell, 2008) was prepared “by identifying academic vocabulary in the cambridge international corpus of written and spoken english and the cancode corpus, as well as checking the cambridge learner corpus for common learner errors” (coxhead, 2010, p. 463). for such large corpora to be accepted as valid and useful, and for it to be an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a128 accepted that the words can be counted as being the same from such a wide range of contexts (i.e. countable), the words in them can only be assumed to be from a closed system [ao2] of normatively identical forms [ao1] removed from individual ideology [ao3]. other critiques of corpus linguistics are also dealt with through recourse to an abstract objectivist view of language. for example, what is said to be one of the most serious critiques of corpus linguistics is, “the inevitable focus on surface forms in corpus work” (ädel, 2010, p.48) [cf. is4] which means that there is “the risk of focusing exclusively on the word and the phrase level when using computer-assisted methods” (ibid, p.49). this results in the challenge for corpus linguists that they need to connect these “surface forms (which are easy to search for by computer) to meaning (which tends to require human analysis) – whether lexical, collocational, pragmatic or discursive” (ibid, p.49). it is, however, argued that such connection can be provided by the linguist, who can help analyze hedging and modal verbs, for example, and that “the challenge for corpus work is to find mappings between functional categories (such as politeness, evaluation or metadiscourse), which are very important in writing, and surface forms” (ibid, p.50). thus, according to corpus linguists, linguistic analysis can reveal such connections through knowledge about the language held by the linguist, for example, through the linguist’s ability to identify homographs of words (bambrook, 1996, cited in flowerdew, 2011). here again, such a connection can only be made by the linguist if language is viewed through an abstract objectivist lens, only if language is seen as a closed system [ao2] of normatively identical items [ao1] removed from individual ideology [ao3] can the linguist make such connections. if it was, in contrast, accepted that the usage and meaning of the language was creative [is2], individual [is1], and only represented the inert hardened crust of the language [is4] then the linguist would be unable to analyse it isolated from the context in which it was used. instead, it could only be understood and used in its unique individual context, and such seemingly similar words would in fact be completely different in specific contexts, and, therefore, could not be counted, as they would be individual and psychologically unique [is3]. in addition to such critiques, there are also a number of qualifications made by linguists about corpora and their uses. yet, as language is viewed as a closed system [ao2] of normatively identical forms [ao1] unconnected with individual consciousness [ao3], these critiques are framed within this abstract objectivist view. for example, one critique is that the indirect use of corpora, where they inform materials, is generally agreed to be of value, but the direct use of corpora where students do the analysis, is more controversial (ädel, 2010). thus, it is not the foundations of the approach that are wrong, merely how it should be used. further, as mcenery and hardie (2012, p.26) note, not only do many other tools to study language exist, but it should also be remembered that although “corpora allow us to observe language… they are not language itself.” therefore, we need to analyze the language, but we can do this through corpora. consequently, the foundations of the approach are sound. in another qualification, computer corpora are noted by linguists to be “incomplete” in that they “say nothing about how many people have read or heard a text or utterance, or how many times…some phrases pass unnoticed precisely because of their frequency, others strike and stay in the mind, though they may occur only once. and because different individuals notice different things, such saliency can never be included in a corpus” (cook, 1998, p. 59, cited in flowerdew, 2011, p. 16). it is also possible that, “a word or expression may be possible, but not recorded in the corpus” (flowerdew, 2011, p. 32). yet, such qualifications are more problems with specific corpora rather than with the fundamental basis of corpus linguistics as a field and method. thus, despite these qualifications, and the acknowledgement and recognition of critiques of corpus linguistics, as its foundation is grounded in an abstract objectivist paradigm of language, corpus linguistics gathers pace, expands, and continues unabated. it is assumed that what can be counted is indeed countable. an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a129 corpus linguistics seen through an individual subjectivist lens in an individualist subjective view of language, rather than being an immutable set of normatively identical linguistic forms [contra ao1] language is an unceasing process of creation realized in individual speech acts [is1]. fundamental to the meaning of language in such a view, and therefore how it is approached pedagogically, are dialogue and context. the importance of dialogue (bakhtin 1981, 1986) means that language consists of a stream of unfinished utterances that is continually evolving and is never completed. context is fundamentally important to language, as what context provides is a ‘password’ known only to the individual users of the language [cf. is2]. the specific context shows the meaning of the language as part of a chain of utterances in a dialogue: “any utterance is a link in a complexly organized chain of other utterances” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 69). in this context, a fundamental role is played by elements such as intonation in the underpinning creative nature of language [cf is3]. this is illustrated by voloshinov in ‘literature as ideological form’ (cited in morris, 1994) with regard to how the intonation around the word ‘well’ is of fundamental importance to its meaning. such intonation is, critically, only known by the individuals using the word (cited in morris, 1994), and used by these individuals to imbue the word with individual meaning unique to a specific context. there are, therefore, non-linguistic elements that are only seen in the context the word is used in, and such contexts may differ so greatly that each word will have a different meaning in each context, which will be linked very much to individual psychology [is2] and be at times highly creative [is3]. as empson wrote in 1930, “english is becoming an aggregate of vocabularies only loosely in connection with one another, which yet have many words in common, so that there is much danger of accidental ambiguity, and you have to bear firmly in mind the small clique for whom this author is writing” (p. 236). such ambiguities could be ones of meaning, of grammar, or changes in meaning over a period of time, and others, a total of seven types (empson, 1930). what this means is that the structure of words is indeed highly complex (empson, 1951) and highly individual in nature [cf. is1]. for bakhtin (1986), the word is of fundamental importance to giving meaning to language, and each word has three owners: the addresser, the addressee, and nobody (1986). for bakhtin, nobody owns the word when it is removed from its context, and it becomes neutralised, and similar to a dictionary definition (1986). if this is the case, then it can be expected that there will be elements within the context and dialogue of the word in usage that are critical to its meaning, and that cannot be accessed through an abstract objectivist approach, even though this is precisely what structural linguistics does. such examples if they exist would have to be only examples and cannot be taken as being reified tangible occurrences to be repeated, rather, they would simply be excerpts glimpsed from another context. once again, this is assuming that what can be counted is in fact countable. however, a key question from an individual subjectivist view that asks whether such words are countable by corpus linguistics is: how will future usage of a word be known from studying its usage in the past? from an individual subjectivist perspective, language has an essentially individualised nature [is1] only realizable in the specific context it is used. as vygotsky wrote, “the meaning of a word represents such a close amalgam of thought and language that it is hard to tell whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought” (1962, p.120, [cf is2]). although a dictionary definition of a word is both neutral and neutralised, ostensibly giving common generic features for all to recognise, “the use of words in live speech communication is always individual and contextual in nature” (bakhtin 1986, p.87). thus, words are, from an individual subjectivist perspective, only the ‘inert crust’ [is4] of language activity, a system of forms (saussure’s langue (1959)). words are, as borges wrote, “symbols that assume a shared memory” (1979, p. 33), they are highly ambiguous (empson, 1930), complex (empson, 1951), individual in nature, and inextricable from their context (bakhtin, 1981, 1986; voloshinov, 1973). critically, they resist being ‘fixed’ or set in stone. samuel johnson, when reflecting on an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a130 the first dictionary he had written, nine years later commented on how he realized it was folly to attempt to fix the language and that in fact language was in a lively state of mutability (mullan, 2010). as fecho (2011) observes, “to expect that just because you and i are using the same term or phrase that we have a consensus understanding of its meanings is to deny that context and experience having anything to do with our understandings” (fecho, 2011, p. 19). as saussure notes, “all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance” (saussure 1959, p. 89). thus, from an individual subjectivist perspective, a key question to ask is: how does word usage in context show its individual and subjective nature? from an individual subjective perspective of language, the linguistic point of view cannot gain access to these contextual details as “the linguistic point of view deals with abstract, bare words and their equally abstract components (phonetic, morphological, and so on). therefore, the total import of discourse and its ideological value – the cognitive, political, aesthetic, or other – are inaccessible to it” (voloshinov, cited in morris, 1994, p.169). such an understanding of the language can only be passive, not active (voloshinov, 1973). from an individual subjectivist view of language therefore, what corpus linguistics is doing when it removes texts and words from their context to compile a list of ostensibly ‘frequent’ words is actually compiling not a frequency of words at all, rather, it is compiling a frequency of ‘signs’, what saussure (1959) would call ‘parole’, what chomsky (1988) would call ‘e-language’ and what voloshinov (1973) would refer to as the inert crust of the language [cf is4]. thus, instead of representing equivalents, these signs represent decontextualized signifiers, which in turn are only evidence of past thoughts. in other words, what corpus linguistics claims to count, is, from this perspective, uncountable. in context, individuals will have a non-neutral, individualized definition of many words, one which is continually changing through dialogue and based in the context. thus, from an individual subjectivist perspective, a key question to ask is: is word usage in context influenced by psychological and ideological elements to allow for individual expression in the specific context? based on this critique of corpus linguistics from an individual subjectivist view of language, the following questions should be asked of corpus linguistics: • how will future usage of a word be known from studying its usage in the past? • how does word usage in context show its individual and subjective nature? • is word usage in context influenced by psychological and ideological elements to allow for individual expression in the specific context? we now describe the source of our data and methodological approaches before we discuss these questions in our results and discussion section. methodology our ontological and methodological approach involved exploring language from a non-text-based, and deliberately simplistic, perspective that involved asking students and lecturers what was needed for understanding and success in the subject. this approach was simplistic because there were very few questions and we did not ask for any texts, we just let participants speak. our rationale for this approach was to complement existing text-based studies in the area of student support. we therefore approached our collection of data from a perspective of stimulating dialogue around the subject based understandings and usages of the ‘english’ needed by students to succeed, and of assessment task words. in this way, an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a131 our methodological approach was qualitative, subjective, and dialogic, in that it explored the language through dialogue and context. our dialogues were with students and lecturers in interviews (in 2012) and focus groups (in 2013) that took place in classrooms and offices and looked at the role of ‘english’ in the contexts of different subjects and perceptions of key assessment terms. this entailed asking participants about what speaking, listening, reading and writing students needed to do in english, and then gathering together lecturers in focus groups (average 90 minutes) to compare and contrast the results from these interviews. the focus groups discussed aspects we had identified such as the role of silence in nursing, and the use of video assignments in mandarin in interactive media design. we interviewed 21 subject lecturers (average 30 minutes) in the subject areas of nursing, design, computing, and business. these subjects were chosen simply because we considered them to represent a broad range and also because we helped students studying them. previously, in a related area, focus groups with students and lecturers from the uk and china had been set up (in 2010) where participants discussed their perceptions of key assessment terms such as ‘critically evaluate’ and ‘analyse’ (for average 90 minutes). all interviews were reflexive and active (holstein & gubrium, 1995) to allow for discussion. focus groups (12 in total) contained a maximum of twelve participants and a minimum of three (shamdasani & stewart, 1990; barbour, 2007). all procedures were approved by the relevant ethics committees and all data is anonymised (christians, 2011). all interviews and focus groups were audio recorded digitally and then transcribed by the authors. these were usually in english but sometimes in chinese. when conducted in english these were facilitated by the authors, and when in chinese by native chinese speaking colleagues. the chinese focus groups were transcribed and translated manually by a professional translator using a ‘skopos’, or goal oriented approach (vermeer, 2004) that aimed to achieve as readable a translation in the target language as the source language. to achieve this one of the authors discussed and compared the chinese and translated transcripts with the translator. our approach to analysing the data was also dialogic in that we as researchers engaged in close dialogue with the interview and focus group transcripts. this dialogue involved two researchers discussing and continually revisiting the data to analyse it diffractively (mazzei, 2014) using a constructivist grounded theory approach (charmaz, 2011) of continual re-reading for emergent themes. this was in contrast to a more objectivist grounded theory approach that would have specified the themes to identify in advance of the analysis. such diffractions allowed us to go beyond the surface of the words, to consider them in their context and to identify and isolate individual and psychological elements which underpinned the usage of the words and language (cf. pilcher & richards, 2016). we then took these results to focus groups with the lecturers we had interviewed and used the data as the basis of a further dialogue. the initial aim of this further dialogue was to generate words and phrases students would need to use in their subject context. yet, what we found (as we further detail and discuss below) was that in fact, when removed from the subject context and placed in the decontextualized focus groups, lecturers were unable to provide us with any words. instead, they merely agreed with the ideological and psychological elements we had isolated, such as the importance of the emotional in nursing and of the visual in design (see below). results and discussion an outline of our understanding and approach to these results and discussion before we respond to the questions as outlined above, using the data we have, and approaching it from an individual subjectivist position, we stress two points: firstly what we are not doing and what we believe the data do not show; and secondly what we are doing and what we believe the data does show. an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a132 in terms of the first, what we are not doing: we are not conducting a linguistic analysis, and we do not believe the data we have allow us to gain access to the meanings of the words and the meanings of language we discuss. if we were to argue this were possible, then we would have to do so on the basis of an abstract objectivist view of language. this, however, as we have argued above, cannot convey the psychological and ideological elements underpinning language usage that an individual subjectivist view of language shows to exist, as demonstrated through our data below. an abstract objectivist view can only convey a passive linguistic understanding of the inert crust of words, when they are removed from their context. instead, and in terms of the second point, what we are doing, and what we believe the data do show, is the operation of individual and psychological aspects behind the language. these elements underpin its usage and underline the importance of its usage in context, as part of a dialogue, to help give the language life. we now respond to the questions we outlined above through recourse to our data. we present and discuss the results here together in one section as we want to discuss how the results relate to our arguments in response to each question during the narrative. how will future usage of words be known from studying past usage of words? for a student, or teacher, to use corpus linguistics concordance lines to study a word for future use, they would, from an individual subjectivist perspective, need to know which context the word was used in. however, they will not know which corpora to choose. this is because the corpora are detached from their original context, and a huge range of possible choices of corpora exist. for example, the lextutor site (lextutor, 2015) has 22 different corpora to choose from. so which should be chosen? furthermore, how can the selected corpora reflect correct future usage of the word if it is removed from its original context? for example, if it is a nursing student who wants to know how to use the word ‘sick’ – they would then choose (or perhaps be directed to) the ‘med corpus’, but the variety in the usage of ‘sick’ in the sentences is so wide it would not help. they could undoubtedly see how it had been previously used, but not how it should be used in a future context, nor the importance of the individual nature of language. as an illustration of changing usages from our data, in mental health nursing, one lecturer we interviewed noted that their job title had frequently changed over time: “i am a ‘registered nurse for mental handicap’, the qualification now is a ‘registered nurse in learning disabilities’ and in the future it will be a ‘registered nurse in intellectual disabilities’. because ‘mental handicap’ is now [a] derogatory term and you’ve got other labels you know, like older people with disabilities may have been diagnosed at the time as ‘cretin’ and ‘mongol’. these were medical labels that now evoke very different feelings. but it is in writing and is in older people’s files.” notably, to type in ‘mongol’ and ‘cretin’ to the bnc med corpus generates no matches, but this does not mean these words are not important. they are very important, but they are not used anymore to refer to patients, so they are not in a corpus. nurses therefore, know not to use these words, they know when to hold their tongue (see below) and of the importance of the role of silence (see below). corpus linguistics could not relay this, nor could a linguistic analysis through a corpora reveal the power behind these words and their usage, simply because they are no longer used. similarly, in design, certain words were ‘banned’ due to having been overused. in the words of one lecturer: “when i first started working here… we used to ban words like nice, minimal; minimal you might think… that’s minimalism which is an approach and term but when you end up with it being overused you get nothing out of that at all.” here therefore, studying the past usage of the word through a corpora would not reveal its meaning nor how it would be used in the future. what a corpus may show was how frequently the ‘word’ was used, but not how its meaning was understood, nor how in fact, its high frequency actually is a negative aspect. an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a133 our data also contained examples to show how language was not fixed and how it changed over time for individuals, thus making it impossible to determine future usage from past. in the words of one student from china about the assessment task words they were expected to use: “do you think our understandings of these words changed since we learnt them? i feel they must be changing naturally and gradually. you wouldn’t notice it. the most obvious one is, for example “justify”, our initial understanding was “prove”, later we know it has more meanings, it is a gradual process.” thus, with regard to the question ‘how will future usage of words be known from studying past usage of words?’ our data shows how language is underpinned, from an individual subjectivist position, by flux, by change, by its link in a chain of time-determined dialogue (bakhtin, 1981, 1986). we could not, we stress again here, actually witness the usage of the language itself from our focus groups and interviews, rather, we could only witness the fact that it had underpinning individual psychological elements and meanings. we could not study this usage in context, and the individual subjectivist perspective underlines how the language could not be removed from this context. this underlines how language was not abstract and objectivist, and how language must be delivered and used in context for its meaning to be known. thus, studying the past usage of words does not inform how they should be used in the present, or the future, simply because such study removes the words from their context, and places them in contexts that are different from ones of their future use. as corpus linguistics views language to be abstract and objectivist, it believes this can be done, yet, this fails to account for individual and psychological elements. how does word usage in context show its individual and subjective nature? from an individual subjectivist view of language, the specific contextual nature of words is fundamental to what they mean, what they convey, and how they are used. in our data there are many illustrations of this in terms of how specific contexts would influence how words were used. for example, regarding the word ‘analyse’, one student commented this would contextually relate to the task involved, that, “when i am doing quantity surveying it’s more analysing results, cost ranges or... facts and figures… rather than statements”. for ‘discuss’ another student commented that, “it all, all depends on the question, or what it actually is you’ve been asked to do” and also for ‘examine’ that it “depends on the question.” for a lecturer in engineering, to show ‘analysis’, students need to “intercept what happens at naught, negative infinity, positive infinity… [put] error bars on it, at least that’s a first, only a very small incremental step to analysis.” further, to ‘describe’, this lecturer commented that, “if i say ‘describe’ the soil, my lawyer sister would say well it’s wet and muddy and grey or brown or maybe white if it’s a china clay, but to actually get an engineer’s ‘description’ of soil requires certain tests, requires certain calculations and you plot that on the chart and that gives you your description.” the critical role of the subject context is highlighted by another lecturer for the term ‘discuss’: “when you ‘discuss’ something… the student needs to be able to place it within its subject domain… and… include things like ‘define’ if we ask a student to ‘discuss’… the role of erp3 systems integrating data in organizations, first of all i would expect them to ‘define’ an erp system.” similarly, the way that ‘critical’ operates in a design context is “being able to test the relationship between design and culture and economics and politics and so on. why is it that design had the form it did in the 1950’s?... i would expect them to look at post-war issues of austerity, relationships, international relationships and today i would expect global relationships… it’s that ability to contextualise and see shifts in time. and offer interpretation.” thus, for ‘words’ context is absolutely fundamental, and often, words cannot be bounded or isolated, but incorporate other words as part of a chain of utterances (bakhtin, 1981). to remove these 3 erp = enterprise resource planning an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a134 words from individual contexts would therefore be taking them away from this context. we argue that a linguistic analysis done under the assumption that language is abstract and objectivist cannot gain access to these contexts. thus, corpus linguistics cannot gain access to how language operates individually underneath the inert hardened crust of the word. what is more, lecturers said they developed understandings of words integrally with the context and the subject, and that a dictionary definition (a neutral definition for bakhtin (1986)) of the term ‘value’ for instance would give only “a very narrow interpretation of the term. we find that students from different parts of the world come to these concepts in different ways and i find myself developing an understanding of the vocabulary in the class. we do that through discussing the terms and what they mean, operationalising or actually using the term in a business case study. putting them in context, putting them into operation. carrying out a value analysis… working at establishing that ‘value’ is not just economic there are different levels of service value and quality aspects as well.” lecturers stressed that words were specific to the level and degree both of the year and specific module students were studying: “don’t forget… every single module is different… it’s so specifically situational.” the importance of subject content knowledge was also noted by a student, that using the words without such knowledge was impossible: “i’m told to ‘critically evaluate’ what i’ve learned so far and i haven’t been able to transfer that because i haven’t learnt anything so far.” indeed, as another lecturer commented: “i’m teaching students a lot of stuff. some of that they can acquire but you know what? they really, really need to know their subject.” in nursing as well, terms required contextualisation beyond their neutral dictionary definitions. for example, with the terms ‘attachment’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘resilience’: “there are clearly defined definitions and theories… so they may have had an understanding of what the term means but not necessarily the concept of the theory within the profession … they would come up with a sort of dictionary type definition… so attachment means to be attached… and then you say yes, but actually; then you introduce the theory and there are key concepts within that theory that then they will develop an understanding of… vulnerability and resilience…. they may have an understanding of… what’s meant by vulnerability but there’s a clearly defined definition around child development.” one design lecturer commented on how a student’s experience of language usage in design was ‘completely different’ to engineering, saying that the “use of language in art design has been completely different to the experience they have in engineering... it’s how you explain and discuss a project and how that relates to people and the scenario that’s been created… so sometimes words change, not completely changed meaning, but change as a result of the perspective of their learning.” the complexity and critical importance of context was also highlighted by a nursing lecturer, describing their need to speak completely differently with different sets of parents, that “if i was talking to parents in a deprived area i had to speak at their level… i couldn't put on my [posh] accent because… they wouldn't have listened to me… i had to [be]… somebody that they could understand and felt that understood them, but then… in… other areas, i would have more educated parents coming to speak to me…. so i would have to then adapt to that so it was quite a shift really you know in all aspects.” the importance of this context was also the case with learning disability (ld) nursing: “they’re having to speak and construct effective relationships with a huge amount of people and… that language is different for different people so if you’re speaking to a speech and language therapist… you’ll be using nursing terminology… to the parent you might be describing the same condition but in a very different way, it’s not “hydro-cephalis” it’s “there’s some fluid on the brain”… then to the person with the learning disability it’ll be “you got a sore head”.” an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a135 when different subject lecturers came together in a focus group context, such differences could be even more marked, as the following dialogue between a design lecturer and a nursing lecturer regarding the word ‘empathy’ illustrates: design – i find it quite interesting you use the word ‘empathy’, i was just thinking the way empathy is probably thought about or linked to from subjects would be completely different as well… empathy within design is usually with the idea of having some sort of resolution at the end of it, and yet… in especially nursing it might be more to do with merely being willing to understand and listen… nursing – yeh, absolutely and i think within nursing we would see ‘empathy’ as a professional quality and a skill, something that could be learnt… you have to employ that as part of your work and is very core and maybe again that’s very different in other disciplines. critically, this nursing lecturer later emphasized the importance of context: “that issue of context is really important isn’t it, i’d agree absolutely that context changes all the time you’ve got to get the concept in context if you’re gonna really understand what’s going on and what the person is saying.” all the above data support the individual and subjective view on the nature of language for the speakers. again we stress that what we were being told was not so much how the words were used, rather it was evidence of the underpinning individual psychological and ideological elements. what we attempt to show here though, is that this data underlines how a linguistic analysis that is underpinned by an abstract objectivist view cannot gain access to these meanings. thus, not only is it not possible for corpus linguistics to convey these meanings, but, that given it is a purely text-based method and approach it is also impossible for it to gain access to understandings of these individual elements. in contrast, considering language through an individual subjectivist lens, shows that it is only when used in their true context can active conscious meaning be given to the words. pedagogically therefore, the teaching of language and words needs to be approached and practiced through dialogue (bakhtin, 1981) in the individual subject context they will be used in (cf. pilcher & richards, 2016). is word usage in context influenced by psychological and ideological elements to allow for individual expression in the specific context? from an individual subjectivist perspective, language is underpinned with non-verbalised psychological elements of individual consciousness that are expressed in para-linguistic elements such as intonation (voloshinov, 1973). we found many examples of individual psychological and ideological elements (cf. pilcher & richards, 2016) underpinning the words and usage of language in specific subject contexts. of design, one lecturer noted that “i think in design… students sign up for a kind of non-verbal, non-written degree actually.” further, a key non-verbalised element of both business and also computing was, unsurprisingly, mathematics. in computing, one lecturer noted that “you’re talking about the theory of databases… about set theory… statistics and physics of games and so on now that is mathematical and that is something students would have to be familiar with to be able to… to wrap the local vocabulary around it.” critically, this idea of wrapping the words of the subject around the mathematics of the subject was commented on by an accounting lecturer, who said that although not totally numerical, accounting’s numeracy was tied in with the words: “not every question’s numerical… we aren’t totally numeric driven… it probably only makes up 25% maybe… obviously the numbers can help the students… they can actually, sort of, then, sort of, tie their words into it”. an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a136 another fundamentally important non-verbalised element to computing and to design was the ‘visual’. one interactive media lecturer asked students to make a video in their original language and provide subtitles and explanations as “we are not interested in whether your english is perfect. it’s not what this module is about, it’s about your ability to take media and tell stories through it.” this idea of the ‘visual’ was fundamental. one lecturer noted that “it’s very cinematic, very visual and that’s where you go over the language. you can explain visually what utopia is and what dystopia is and then it allows you to start to talk about the culture, the politics of utopias and dystopias.” another design lecturer underlined the importance of the visual: “we are teaching a visual subject, referencing lots of visual language, if you are referencing great cinema or literature.” this same lecturer, critically, intertwined the idea of the visual with the verbal, saying that, “a visual english, yes. you’ve got the semiotics of that.” in nursing, an essential psychological and conscious element underpinning any verbal usage (or non-usage) of language was the emotional, the reflective, feeling focused ‘total communication’. one learning disability (ld) lecturer described communication as “about active listening… about the whole… body language and attending to people… people have to actively listen and interpret what the person’s saying… ld nurses in particular, communication is 90% of our job… we have to be skilled in actually attending to people and interpreting information and again because a lot of our guys have communication problems… it’s integrated you know in a kind of total communication.” in mental health nursing, listening would involve the ability to almost listen to feelings: “you know skilled listening is a real art… to listen not just to the words but to the feelings that are being communicated.” further, in mental health nursing, the words were intertwined with emotion, and students would “have to be able to deal with kind of abstract concepts… describe human emotion, kind of thinking processes and i guess you would also look for an ability to language that can describe yourself… so language that’s got to do with reflection… self-awareness.” for learning disability (ld) nurses as well, the verbal and non-verbal were intertwined: “it’s the tone of voice… but it also, with our guys, the people we care for, we have to give as many clues as possible as to our meaning so it’s not just the speech, it’s the face, it’s the proximity, it’s the gestures you know… and it’s getting that across to people that it’s total communication, and speech is really only one part of it… that’s hugely important… that’s crucial there they have to learn to integrate all those elements.” with regard to the actual power of such psychological and emotional elements in communication, the lecturer gave the following example: “one of the guys i worked with was profoundly learning disabled. i love this man for years and years and initially, the first two years he would never give me eye contact. and then one day he gave me eye contact for about a minute and see the power in that, totally non-verbal nothing… nothing to do with english or anything like that it was a communication at a very basic level but a very powerful level as well. incredible.” such elements were not just important for mental health nursing or learning disability (ld) nursing, they were also key for nursing in general: “your non-verbal skills, communication skills are almost as important as verbal communication skills in nursing and that’s the thing that we kind of concentrate on… before we let them out into practice. when they are on the ward especially, you know, visitors will be in and … watching… how they interact with each other if they’re standing around… if they have got their hands in their pocket, all of these non-verbal, you know, ways of communicating are being observed by everyone… even the basic one like how they are dressed, how they portray themselves to the patient… that is a form of communication, you are actually communicating to the patient that i am a professional and i am going to be here to look after you and you are safe with me… for nurses it is not so much the language they use verbally it is their non-verbal communication.” an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a137 also, for nurses, critical to the ability to communicate non-verbally, was the role of silence, of not using words, and that this too was very much linked with facial communications: “in nursing there are lots of instances when you have got… to hold your tongue. when working with sick kids for example you have got children coming in with no-accidental injuries… you suspect the parents have done it, everybody suspects the parents… but it’s not up to us to be judgmental… it is not up to us to discuss and it is very difficult to show in your face that you are not disgusted by it or, you know, upset by it. you have just got to act as if everything is normal and that is quite difficult.” thus, the answer to the question is word usage in context influenced by psychological and ideological elements to allow for individual expression in the specific context? is ‘yes’. when talking about the living context of the subject, what these lecturers said, reveals, through an individual subjectivist view of language, a range of psychological, non-verbalised, conscious elements that both underpinned and were integral to verbal language usage. an abstract objectivist view of language would not be able to access these elements, nor would a linguistic analysis be able to reveal them. an abstract objectivist analysis could only reveal a passive understanding of the inert crusts of the words (voloshinov, 1973). thus, using corpus linguistics to inform pedagogical praxis will not be able to access or convey these elements. instead, only by placing and teaching these words in the individual context of the subject can these psychological and ideological elements be conveyed. conclusion in this article, we have argued that using corpus linguistics to inform pedagogical materials for language use is based on an abstract objectivist view of language which assumes that what it is counting is countable. we argued that such a view is based on the foundation that language consists of a normatively identical closed linguistic system, one that is removed from any individual consciousness. further, that such a view is based on the assumption that language can be taken out of its context, removed from its dialogue, and compiled into an objective body of texts from which lists of normatively identical words can be compiled for study and to inform pedagogical materials. critically, such an approach and view is unable to convey or appreciate the fundamentally important psychological and ideological elements underneath the language that are key to pedagogical praxis. instead, when viewed from an individual subjectivist perspective, language is inseparable from an individual consciousness: both its psychological and ideological elements. we presented data to illustrate these arguments. we showed that in the four subject areas of ‘nursing’; ‘business’; ‘computing’; and ‘design’ the language used is inextricably linked with context. further, we showed that removing words and language from the subject contexts takes them away from a number of key elements that give life and meaning to the language. we stressed that the data we had, rather than show the meanings of words per se, instead showed the following: the words and language these lecturers used were inextricably connected to the individual psychological aspects of dialogues, i.e. ideological and conscious elements that could be talked about but not necessarily absorbed or observed, and certainly not rendered visible through any purely linguistic analysis. instead, our data showed that words and language are intertwined with specific contexts, and consist of many subject specific elements such as the visual for design discourses, the emotional for nursing discourses, including the role of silence, and the mathematical for the accounting discourses. as saussure noted; “all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language, stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance” (saussure 1959, p. 89). yet, the use of corpus linguistics to inform pedagogical materials and praxis is an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a138 based on an abstract objectivist paradigm of language that does precisely this. it assumes that there must be substance to the linguistic phenomenon, that what it counts is indeed countable. however, by removing these ‘words’ from their contextually based usage and ‘teaching’ them outside the living context of the subject means that not only will we be teaching students neutralised passive meanings which will differ from those they will be taught and need to know for their subjects, we will be inevitably cutting the words and language from their living non-verbal, and sometimes silent, context. in other words, what counts in a living language is in fact not countable. we highlight here that we have only looked at a few subjects: nursing, business, computing and design. we would imagine that in other subjects such as physics, chemistry, music, art, and literary criticism, there would be both specific contextual language usage and also specific contextual non-verbal communicative elements that a corpus linguistics approach again could not convey when used to inform pedagogical materials and practice. at the outset of this paper we presented two quotes from quite different fields, one from language philosophy (voloshinov, 1973) and one from literary criticism (empson, 1930). we would highlight here that despite being from different fields we believe both quotes clearly illustrate the underpinning individual subjectivism approach to language and how language should be studied in specific contexts. it is notable that both quotes are from works that were from a similar period of time, and that that period of time is over 80 years ago. in spite of that, since that time, corpus linguistics has been used to develop and inform pedagogical materials based on an abstract objectivist view of language, assuming that a passive linguistic analysis can reveal the true 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(original 1929) an individual subjectivist critique of the use of corpus linguistics kendall richards and nick pilcher dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.163 | vol. 4 (2016) a141 vygotsky, l. s. (1962). thought and language. trans. e. hanfmann and g. vakar. cambridge: mit press. walker, c. (2011). how a corpus-based study of the factors which influence collocation can help in the teaching of business english. english for specific purposes, 30(2), 101-112. wasow, t. (2002, p.163). postverbal behavior. center for the study of language and inf. west, m. (1953). a general service list of english words. london: longman, green. widdowson, h. g. (2000). on the limitations of linguistics applied. applied linguistics, 21(1), 3-25. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word values in dialogic pedagogy (layout), 2015-02-04 (e).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e1     values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov professor of education university of delaware, usa jay lemke senior research scientist university of california at san diego, usa abstract in november 2014 on the dialogic pedagogy journal facebook page, there was an interesting discussion of the issue of values in dialogic pedagogy1. the main issue can be characterized as the following. should dialogic pedagogy teach values? should it avoid teaching values? is there some kind of a third approach? the participants of the facebook discussions were focusing on teaching values in dialogic pedagogy and not about teaching aboutvalues. on the one hand, it seems to be impossible to avoid teaching values. however, on the other hand, shaping students in some preset molding is apparently non-dialogic and uncritical (matusov, 2009). in the former case, successful teaching is defined by how well and deeply the students accept and commit to the taught values. in the latter case, successful dialogic teaching may be defined by students’ critical examination of their own values against alternative values in a critical dialogue. below, eugene matusov and jay lemke, active participants of this facebook dialogue, provide their reflection on this important issue and encourage readers to join their reflective dialogue. eugene matusov, ph.d., dpj editor-in-chief, is a professor of education at the university of delaware, usa. he was born in the soviet union. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. email: ematusov@udel.edu jay lemke is senior research scientist in the laboratory for comparative human cognition and adjunct professor in the department of communication at the university of california san diego. he was formerly professor at the university of michigan school of education and is emeritus professor at the city university of new york, where he was the founding executive officer of the phd program in urban education. he is the author of talking science: language, learning, and values and textual politics: discourse and social dynamics. jay's current research concerns emotion, play, and learning. email: lemke.jay@gmail.com 1 see in a public facebook domain: https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/894734337204533, https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/896916850319615 issn: 2325-3290 (online) values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e2 introduction in november 2014 on the dialogic pedagogy journal facebook page, there was an interesting discussion of the issue of values in dialogic pedagogy2. the main issue can be characterized as the following. should dialogic pedagogy teach values? should it avoid teaching values? is there some kind of a third approach? the participants of the facebook discussions were focusing on teaching values in dialogic pedagogy and not about teaching about values. on the one hand, it seems to be impossible to avoid teaching values. however, on the other hand, shaping students in some preset molding is apparently non-dialogic and uncritical (matusov, 2009). in the former case, successful teaching is defined by how well and deeply the students accept and commit to the taught values. in the latter case, successful dialogic teaching may be defined by students’ critical examination of their own values against alternative values in a critical dialogue. below, eugene matusov and jay lemke, active participants of this facebook dialogue, provide their reflection on this important issue and encourage readers to join their reflective dialogue. education as praxis of praxis3 eugene matusov below i describe my particular dialogic pedagogy approach in its dialogic opposition to the two traditional approaches to teaching values. from my version of dialogic pedagogy, i assume that the overall goal of education is leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, the life, and the world. from this perspective all values, including and especially values on which the educational practices are based and/or to which the students subscribe, have to undergo a critical evaluation by the student. tradit ional approaches to teaching values in my observation, there are two major traditional approaches to teaching values in education, oppositional to each other: embracing and rejecting teaching values. the first major approach is an affirmative approach to teaching values that is widespread in conventional education. it embraces teaching values by focusing on two issues. first is what kind of good social values should be preset in advance and taught (i.e., curricular standards). second is how teachers and school should teach these values more effectively and correctly. historically, there have been many values that conventional education has preset to teach such as: patriotism, nationalism, respect for authority, social justice, capitalism/socialism/nazism/fascism/democracy/theocracy (depending on a country’s political and its economic regime), care of the environment, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, tolerance, respect of others, critical thinking, democracy, liberalism, diligence, reliability, entrepreneurship, honesty, sympathy for others, individualism/collectivism, autonomy, collaboration, non-conformism, teamwork, selflessness, respect for elders, and so on. many of these values are apparently contradictory as there is often a little consensus in the society about these values. the main, but not the only, argument for this affirmative approach to teaching values is that education should help the society reproduce its own most essential and core values and practices and protect these values from deterioration or attack from inside and outside. for conventional monologic education with its focus on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints, a set of the core societal values is just another preset curricular endpoint — an educational standard among other educational standards (e.g., epistemological, cultural). in my view, the 2 see in a public facebook domain: https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/894734337204533, https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/896916850319615 3 i’m thankful to ana marjanovic-shane, maren aukerman, jim cresswell, jay lemke, and mikhail gradovski for providing their critical feedback on earlier versions of my essay as well as all participants of the facebook discussion. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e3 societal call for teaching values reflects the societal distrust of a “natural” and informal process of students’ socialization and enculturation in local traditional values available to them. as the society becomes more and more multi-communal, multi-cultural, multi-religious and liberal (i.e., tolerant to its conflicting diversity), this distrust increases. the second major approach is a dismissive approach to teaching values. it argues that education has to be value-free and must focus on teaching facts to the students. then the students can and must make their own decisions based on these facts autonomously by themselves. this dismissive approach distrusts values — any values — as arbitrary, unless rooted in facts and rationality, which, in essence, replace the values as such. it places respect for an individual autonomous rational and informed authority to make decisions on its own, regardless the societal traditions, its need to reproduce, or any other needs outside of the universal informed rationality. a value is good not because the society is based on it or needs it but because it can be logically and rationally deduced from the hard proven facts. education serves to make students autonomous rational informed agents. this vision of unbiased rational education rejecting teaching values is rooted in kant’s philosophy of universal rationality (and enlightenment modernism, see jay’s essay below). in my judgment, this educational approach is also monologic because it is based on transparency and replaceability of consciousnesses and monopoly of the rational discourse (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, in press-a). there can be a combination of these two major approaches affirming teaching some kind of values (e.g., intellectual and moral) and rejecting some others (e.g., political or religious). now i will turn to critique of these two major traditional approaches. critique of teaching values i can think of seven main arguments against teaching values. first is a political argument. as we can see from a list of historically taught values, these values are contradictory. for example, in the modern us society, it is possible to hear calls for teaching students respect for authority (bennett, finn, & cribb, 1999) and for teaching non-conformism (kohn, 2014). in my view, these axiological controversies reflect a political split in the society. in any society, even a totalitarian one, there is always a political struggle of diverse opposing interests and diverse opposing values. thus, teaching values in school becomes an illegitimate political move to impose interests and values of one part of the society on the other part of the society. this move is illegitimate because it manufactures an appearance of a consensus where it is actually absent and abuses education by making it a mere political tool of axiological imposition (i.e., forcing people to accept some particular values). even more, i argue that a societal consensus about any value is illusory because for any value there will be always a situation, in which some part of the society will disagree, demanding opposite values, limitation of this value, or subordination of this value to other values. this political illegitimacy of teaching values is especially true when institutional education is funded by public taxes. thus, taxes of a part of the society that opposes a particular value taught in public schools are used to impose this contested value on its opposition and the entire society. arguably, public, state funded, education should neither promote nor suppress values, which are legally allowed in the society, and should not become a tool of political imposition and monopoly of values (which is somewhat similar to separation of the state and the church in the us). education, at least, public education should either not be politically partisan at all or allow a political and axiological diversity. the second argument is logical-dialectical. besides all values being always politically contested, they are also always dialectically controversial. this means that the more one commits to one particular value, the more one start enacting the opposite value because the opposite values mutually constitute each other. for example, as hegel convincingly showed in his essay on the master-slave relationship, a slave’s total dedication to the master (i.e., total obedience) leads the slave to disobey the master when values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e4 the slave foresees consequences of the master’s desires as being harmful for the master himself (hegel & baillie, 1967). similar, total individualism does not deny collectivity (as its oppositional value and a value among other possible values) but demands a particular collectivity that recognizes and respects individualism and, thus, limits this individualism to promote the value of individualism in the self and others. hence, to teach values is impossible without legitimate teaching the opposite values, which dialectically constitute the primary values. thus, to teach respect for authority well, rebellion to authority has to be taught as well. the reverse is true as well: teaching non-conformism requires teaching respect for authority. in another example, using recent educational development in the us, the “zero tolerance” (i.e., intolerance, violence) school policies are aimed at protection of tolerance and peace in school through intolerance (and institutional violence) to violators of tolerance and peace. the dialectical argument leads to a paradoxical conclusion for teaching all values without exception, although not necessarily in a symmetrical way. the third argument is dialogic. a value has its meaning only in address and in response to other, alternative, values that other people have or may have. thus, from a dialogic point of view, teaching values may involve suppressing the voices of others. molding minds and hearts in a preset way is antidialogic, monologic pedagogical goal. it leads to brainwashing and extreme propaganda, which are arguably anti-educational. the fourth argument is historical. teaching value involves a conservative viewpoint that people in a given time and a given society want to perpetuate what they think is good for them and others. although this desire is understandable, it is limited as it disrespects possibilities that a future generation may also come to good values, different from the current generation has. looking back, it is clear even for the current generation that the “good” values of the past generations were quite different and at times even repelling and appalling for the current generation sensitivities (e.g., values of slavery, aristocracy, racism, homophobia, and so on). a new generation should have a right to explore alternative values that the current generation may despise. since education is a future-oriented practice, conservatism of teaching values can be seen as anti-educational. the fifth argument is ontological about freedom of will to make a judgment about self, life and the world. by teaching values, the society wants to make all students good: patriots, democrats, nationalists, socialists, tolerant, critical and so on in the same way as, for example, it wants all students to solve arithmetic problems correctly. i remember an important debate in one of my undergraduate classes for future teachers about whether or not a teacher is responsible if one of his or her former students has become a terrible antisocial criminal. a majority of my students thought that the teacher is always partially responsible for his/her former student’s crimes because if the teacher taught really well this student, he or she would not become a criminal. in my view, this reveals the enlightenment modernist belief that all vices are rooted in ignorance and the societal order for education to make students good people predictably and deterministically. according to this belief, a failure to do so is the teacher’s flaw. a minority of my students and i respectfully disagreed. my disagreement is based not so much on impossibility of such goal, although it is true as well, but on undesirability of this pedagogical goal. making students “good people” predictably by education robs these students from their freedom and responsibility for their own deeds. paradoxically, people who do predictably “good things” without choosing these things freely are not free and, arguably, are not good. goodness is rooted not in the act or behavior but in a person’s free choice for a good act or behavior with consideration of all other, presumably bad, choices. freedom is impossible without a possibility for abuse of this freedom. thus, good education can produce evil scientists, evil politicians, and evil people in general and i'm ok with that! in theological discussions, even god couldn't (or should not?) make all people good and i think it is great that god couldn't. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e5 responsibility for our own deeds implies a possibility of being evil for us. i argue that without our free will, involving a choice to be evil, with or without excellent education, we cannot be human. education is not about molding people in some preset form of goodness but critical consideration of what constitutes “good” in each particular case against all other possible values in a critical dialogue. in the 20th century, the idea of molding people into “good citizens” through education led to genocide of concentration death camps that were called "re-education" (e.g., in the stalinist soviet union, maoist communist china, nazi germany). goodness is a self-reflective notion, which means that goodness involves constant deciding what good is in each particular case and deed — it does not pre-exist the deed and the particular situation. this is what aristotle (2000) called praxis, in contrast to poïesis. in praxis, the values emerge in the activity itself, while in poïesis the values pre-exist the activity. the affirmative teaching values approach is poïesis-based. from an ontological point of view, it robs students from learning how to generate and judge values by themselves and, thus, ironically, this approach is arguably anti-value, antiaxiological. teaching values becomes destruction of values. students become either slaves of the taught values (i.e., uncritical acceptance of the values), indifferent to these values (i.e., uncritical neglect of the values), or rebels of the taught values (i.e., uncritical rejection of values). anything else — i.e., critical acceptance of taught values or critical rejection of the taught values — requires legitimation of alternative values. the sixth argument is liberal and specific for liberal societies. liberalism accepts plurality of diverse and even opposing values, including even illiberal values. however, teaching a particular set of values — however good intentions of the educators and the society are — is illiberal. it makes education an illiberal practice contradicting the spirit of liberal society. although, it is true that any liberal society sets limitations for its liberalism to protect itself from illiberal communities that may try to take over the society and establish an illiberal regime; it is not clear why education has to join this defensive police role and completely sacrifice its own mission for it. the seventh argument is internally educational. despite the fact that the society at large may have an important and legitimate desire to impose some values on the entire society as it is often done through law and law enforcement agencies, as i said before, it is not clear why education should be subordinated to and sacrificed for this goal. in the history of institutionalized education, there has been a strong trend to assign non-educational goals to education. such non-educational goals have historically involved: eradicating economic inequality, getting ahead of international economic competition, promoting national security, keeping minors off the streets, child care while parents work, keeping minors from a labor market in competition with adults, providing social cohesion in the society, addressing racial and economic (de)segregation, contributing to economic reproduction, getting professional training, providing personal income, contributing to economic welfare of the society, developing political competence, promoting political and national loyalty, building the nation, spreading the quality of healthcare, and so on. i have several challenging questions about assigning societal goals to education. can these goals be achieved through education: is it partially or fully possible? my answer is mostly no (although occasionally there can be some synergy of non-educational and educational goals or at least minimum harm to inherently educational goals). i think that the enlightenment, modernist, dream that all societal ills are deeply down rooted in ignorance that can be eradicated by education is wrong. is it desirable to view education mainly or even entirely as a societal servant/tool for solving its ills? my answer is also no, because education as a practice has its own inherent and intrinsic goal that, in general, should be prioritized over its instrumental goals coming from other practices, unless, probably, there is some kind of emergency. i argue that it is time for the education practice to liberate itself from the tyranny of other societal spheres and establish itself as an autonomous societal sphere among other autonomous societal spheres. education has its own inherent sphere besides being instrumental for other spheres. thus, for values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e6 example, i'm against prioritization of social justice in education. even more, my analysis of this phenomenon (2009, ch. 4, analyzing paolo freire's "pedagogy of oppressed" that prioritizes social justice) shows that prioritization of social justice in education unavoidably leads to totalitarianism (despite the designers’ claims of the contrary) because educators have preset ideas how social justice looks like. in my book, i argue that social justice should be subordinated to “internally persuasive discourse” (ipd, bakhtin, 1991) – critical examination of the self, life, and the world in a public discourse, i.e., education in my version. humanity is rooted in ipd and not in pursue of social justice outside of ipd. the tragedies and crimes made in the name of social justice -by communism, fascism, and fundamentalist totalitarian islam, to name a few -show that the prioritization of social justice over ipd unavoidably leads to totalitarianism, genocide, and societal suicide. in sum, teaching values leads to monologic imposition of values, their uncritical acceptance or rejection of these values, conservatism, anti-liberalism (i.e., intolerance to diversity and opposition), dogmatism, and anti-education. critique of unbiased, value-free, objective rational education now let me turn to my critique of the teaching value dismissive approach that argues for teaching hard facts and rationality instead of values. my first argument is philosophical. life distinguishes itself from non-life by an organism having values and biases. any living organism, even biologically very primitive one, has three major biases: attraction, repellence, and neutrality. dead or non-living objects do not have biases remaining indifferent. objectivity is a metaphor. at its best, it is a call for a justification of values and biases. at its worst, it is an illusion or manipulation of power. all values are subjective. they define our subjectivity — our subjective, living, relationship and attitude to the world. being alive and being in the world is to be subjectively biased. thus, value-free, objective, education is impossible (or suicidal). my second argument is practice-based. any particular practice is value-based. any particular educational practice is value-based. for example, the value-free objectivist educational approach values rationalism (and rational discourse), logic, autonomy, evidence (hard proven), consensus, transparency of consciousness, proof, rational testing ideas, objectivity, valuelessness, and so on. it is not difficult to show from philosophical, dialectical, dialogic, mathematical, and historical arguments and vistas that its rationalism is irrational, meaning that the rationalism is either circular or deeply down justified by nonrational arguments, cf. famous kurt gödel's incompleteness theorems4 (hofstadter, 1999). any pedagogical approach has its particular values that the teacher cannot escape (or be rationally proven, based on logic and evidence). on the top of that, the pedagogical practice is not only shaped by the teacher but also by other direct and indirect participants, players, and institutions including students, parents, school administrators, local school board members, politicians, taxpayers, and so on and shaped by circumstances. all pedagogical practices are full of values and cannot be above values. a process of socialization and enculturation in particular values is unavoidable in any practice. in education, students unavoidably socialize in pedagogical values: what is considered and counts as education, learning, and teaching. this socialization does not necessary involve only acceptance of the particular pedagogical values but also their rejection. what pure socialization and enculturation, without critical reflection, makes difficult is learning about existing and/or possible alternatives, making the participants entrapped by the socialized values. objectivist and rationalist approach to education smuggles its pedagogical and 4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/g%c3%b6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e7 philosophical values in its approach and, thus, tries to teach these values covertly. value of objectivism and rationalism is a hidden curriculum of the value-free pedagogy. my third argument is evaluative. not only any practice, including educational one, is charged with values but also the participants constantly take an evaluative stand toward these values: are these values emergent in the practice as good or bad. the objectivist approach tries to replace axiology with rationalism but as i argued above, that is impossible. subjective values penetrate not only their practice but also the process of evaluation of the practice’s values itself. my fourth argument is ethical. any practice involves ethical tensions among its participants. resolution of these ethical tensions is guided and evaluated by the participants’ values. what is fair or unfair in treating each other and especially the students by the teacher is defined heavily, but not exclusively, by the teachers’ values. through this process of ethical tensions and, at times, conflicts, the participants unavoidably (but in an unpredicted way) socialize in each other values. my fifth argument is communal and political. the community life involves decision making about the community. who and how makes these decisions, how to resolve disagreements, and who and how decides how to make these decisions and change the decision-making process is a political and communal process unavoidably based on values. in a rationalistic learning community, political decisionmaking remains authoritarian masquerading as rational. in sum, values are unavoidable in any practice, including in education. any attempt to make education value-free does not eliminate the dependence on values but rather it masks and hides values to make them difficult to critique and analyze. thus, i conclude that this “value free”, rationalist approach is also monologic and anti-educational. crit i ca l examinat ion o f values : praxis o f praxis my educational value defines my vision of education is critical examination of life, self and the world. in my view, education is not about transmission of values, including my own educational value that i have just spelled out. education is total critical examination, including education itself and its own values. the enlightenment goal of making people good is not a legitimate goal of education (and, fortunately, it is not possible anyway). values as virtues, accepted norms, traditions, habits, desires, or tastes can reach their human potentials only in a critical dialogue. in themselves, values have the dialogic nature as they have to be filled with meaning, understood, evaluated, justified, responded, and be taken with responsibility, against alternative meanings, understandings, values, justifications, voices, and responsibilities. i see the main challenge of a dialogic pedagogy in its accepting unavoidability of imposition of particular values in education while opening them up for transformation, liberalism (i.e., tolerance to diversity and opposition), and open-ended critique. i think that this challenge can be addressed through the following three principles: 1) critical dialogism (i.e., internally persuasive discourse), 2) axiological dualism, 3) setting boundaries of education (i.e., critical dialogic postmodernism). internally persuasive discourse bakhtin (1991) coined the notion of “the internally persuasive discourse” (ipd) in his opposition to “the authoritative discourse” (ad) to contrast a discursive process of free persuasion versus a discourse process of imposition and coercion. there have been different interpretations among educationalists of what ipd exactly means. specifically, what “internal” means in “the internally persuasive discourse”? “internal” to what? some educationalists assume that “internal” defines the values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e8 individual, the psychological, internal to the individual: the individual’s cognition and psyche (see many examples of this interpretations here, in ball & freedman, 2004). in this interpretation, the most salient characteristic of ipd is that its demand for and recognition of the autonomous individual. in contrast, my colleague and i (matusov & von duyke, 2010) argue that “internal” defines the discourse itself, internal to the discourse, — both localized in time, space, and among the immediate participants and distributed in time, space, and among diverse remote participants. in our interpretation, the most salient characteristic of ipd is that it is dialogically critical and critically dialogic. this means that any critique (e.g., of values) should be embedded in a never-ending public, interpersonal and intrapersonal, historical dialogue. also, any of such dialogue has to challenge any opinions, positions, paradigms, worldviews, and values. as morson (2004) characterizes ipd similar to our interpretation, in ipd “truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (p. 319). paraphrasing morson’s statement about truth in ipd for values, we can state, “in ipd, values become dialogically tested and forever testable.” based on my pedagogical practice, i see three types of values in education: 1) discussed values — educational and non-educational values that are brought for public forum among students and the teachers5 (and beyond them), 2) espoused values — values that the participants claim as their own ones aimed to guide their practices and deeds inside and outside of education, and 3) in-action values — values that emerge and actually guide their actions and deeds inside and outside of education. i argue that all these three types of values have to be a part of ipd testing. dialogic ipd testing of values both involves and extends “self-contained rationality” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, in press-b). marjanovic-shane and i define “self-contained rationality” as a self-contained discourse limited by the universal logic and the consideration of relations in one sphere at expense of all others. we contrast selfcontained rationality with dialogic testing where “…what has been tacitly naturalized in self-contained rationality of one paradigm becomes problematized, replied, and, thus, relativized (‘ratio’ — brought in the relationship with an alien other)….” dialogic testing involves “diverse spheres of life, diverse opaque consciousnesses, and personal mediated or unmediated biases — rational or not — come together in a dramatic tension of critical deconstruction of values and power relations through dialogue. we believe that an unmediated personal bias — an initial personal emotional relationship of attraction, repulsion, disorientation, or indifference — is the basis of any rationality. however, we think that only public critical dialogue can justify rationality and point at its limits.” of course, education defined as the ipd — critical examination of the self, the life, and the world (and values) — is a value in itself promoted and imposed on the students by dialogically minded educators. however, rather than simply socializing students in this value, dialogic pedagogy should engage this value in the ipd itself. for example, in one of my classes on cultural diversity in education for future teachers my students discuss three axiological approaches to multiculturalism: educationally conservative, progressive and radical (liston & zeichner, 1996). after considering pros and cons of each approach, i asked the students to develop “formulae” their preferable multicultural approaches for their learning (i.e., being a student) and their teaching (i.e., being a future teacher) and justify their approaches (the students could mix the 3 approaches with some weights in their formulae). between mostly “conservative” students, insisting on transmission of non-problematic hard facts, and mostly “progressive-radical” students, insisting on attending to students’ interests and painful problems of the society, emerged polemics. at some point of the polemics, a “radical” student accused “conservative” peers in a hypocrisy, “look, you want to transmit your future students hard, non-controversial facts, but admit that you enjoy discussions in our class. if eugene did not have ‘progressive-radical’ pedagogy, we won’t have these discussions and you’d have forced to learn his facts. i think you’d have been the first 5 there is nothing wrong for a teacher to share her/his values with the students in dialogic pedagogy, if the teacher is not aimed at making the students to accept them. teacher's values are just some particular values among other values worth of investigation. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e9 who complained that the class was boring and sucked! admit it, admit!” the “conservative” students laughed and agreed but they counter-argued that teaching adult undergraduate students, who pay for their education, like them, is different than teaching their future elementary school students, young children, who do not have good discussion skills yet and must succeed on standardized tests. our critical discussion continued. in my view, the “radical” and “conservative” students engaged the class in ontological dialogic testing of values based on reflective consideration of their own experiences of our dialogic class in relationship with their espoused ideas and values. currently, i am engaging my students in critical reflecting on the class in every class meeting and in making suggestions for its improvement. eventually, we make collective decisions about changing our class and about how to make the decision through in class and online voting and a town hall class meeting. my colleague marjanovic-shane and i argue that educational practice should not just be viewed as praxis (in contrast to poïesis), where values, qualities, and goals emerge in the practice itself and not preset but also it should be viewed as praxis of praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). in praxis of praxis, students should be engaged in critical defining and evaluating their own education. they should critically evaluate their own desires, values, and beliefs about their own education. they should test desirability of their own educational values and values of the educational practice, in which they are involved. no stone should be unturned in this critical examination of the educational practice and their own and the teachers’ values. this process can be possible only when the students express, and are exposed to, and, at times, experience educational values alternative to their own dear values and the values of the educational practice. for example, at the beginning of some of my classes, i often share one of my teaching dilemma: should i call on the students only when they raise their hand or should i also randomly pick up on students, who do not raise their hand? after considering other alternative ideas and their pros and cons, we usually vote for one among several alternatives that we generate (about 8-10). in one of my classes, a high majority of the students voted for the former option of me calling only on students who raise their hand. they prioritized the value of their own comfort over the quality of our learning discourse and their own learning how to participate in it. however, in a few weeks many students in this class started complaining that there had emerged a small group of talkative students and a silent majority. after this ontological experience, we returned back to a discussion of alternative options and voting. this time we selected “the 5th amendment” option: i, as their teacher, had a right to call randomly on a student who does not raise his/her hand but the student has right to “remain silent” (like in the us constitution, 5th amendment) by saying “pass” without any explanation (cf. shor, 1996). in a few weeks, we reflected that almost all students spoke up in the class and more students felt comfortable raising their hands. of course, not all values are always visible to their participants but this fact should not discourage dialogic educators from the process of critical examination of the values underlining the educational practice. axiological dualism dialogism leads to axiological dualism. in a dialogical bakhtinian approach, alternative and even opposing ideas and values involve meaning making of these ideas or values. an idea is meaningful only in response and address to an alternative idea or value. thus, in dialogism, not only a particular value is put forward but also alternative values are appreciated, although not at the same way as the aspired particular value. the alternative ideas are dialogically and agonistically appreciated because they provide necessary boundaries and perspectives of the idea/value that became valued as a part of the truth and meaning (partisan-visionary approach) – because then, such perceived truth has a perspective and stands (paradoxically) stronger (has more power!) (marjanovic-shane, personal communication, january 26, 2015). in our radical proposal for education based on the state’s educational neutrality, marjanovicshane and i (2011) have introduced this axiological dualism rooted in the bakhtinian dialogism. we have values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e10 defined first type of values as “partisan-visionary” while the second type of values as “relationship-power”. the partisan-visionary values may include particular educational philosophies defining educational actions and their goals such as conventional transmission of knowledge, constructivism, progressivism, democratic education (e.g., summerhill school), dialogic pedagogy, and so on. the relationship-power values involve particular power relationships with alternative and competing partisan-visionary values and can involve such values as: exclusive monopoly, intolerance, pluralism, polyphony, competition, and so on. in our proposal, we argue that these two types of values constitute axiological “dimensions” of educational philosophies. the problem with the term “dimension” is dimensions imply the orthogonal relations among the factors, being indifferent and not affecting each other. in contrast, the relationship between the partisan-visionary and relationship-power types of values is dualistic, often (but not always) involving synergetic or oppositional relations at times. thus, in contrast to visionary dialogic pedagogy, pluralistic dialogic pedagogy has to tolerate and appreciate monologic or even anti-dialogic values. in practice, a pluralistically dialogic teacher has to tolerate and appreciate (if not even support) students with monologic and anti-dialogic values. where if not in education, can values, however marginal, offensive, and extreme, be legitimately and critically examined through a learning safety of a public forum?! response and address to these marginal, offensive, and extreme values constitute critical dialogic meaning of any value. paraphrasing famous statement about pluralism and freedom of speech wrongly attributed to voltaire, “i do not agree with your values and pedagogy, but i'll defend to the death your right to express and explore these values and practice your pedagogy." in my book (matusov, 2009), i discussed a case where i was guiding my undergraduate student, future teacher, working on her final project while our values collided. as a highly religious protestant christian, she tried to advocate for teaching intelligent design in public schools in her learning project. i, religiously indifferent, was guiding her to finding diverse voices on the internet (e.g., differently minded protestants, catholics, buddhists, jews, atheists, agnostics, religiously indifferent, constitutional lawyers, evolutionary biologists) to address and respond to their concerns about her proposal. fortunately, she accepted my overall guidance (but not every aspect of it) and got excited in trying to reply to alternative concerns and values. in her final draft, she came to a conclusion that either she needed to teach in a private religious school or to engage herself in a political fight for changing the us laws and the constitution. she considered but rejected the tempting idea of smuggling teaching intelligent design, her own dear religious truth, in a public school because it was illegal and dishonest approach, in her view. i was able to provide my pluralistic dialogic guidance through her recursive revisions and my feedback despite our axiological discord. in my judgment, the student became informed and educated about her own values and educational issues related to them and deepened her understanding of biology, evolution, and her own religious beliefs. dialogic pluralism demands dialogic testing values not only purely intellectually but often also ontologically. students should have an opportunity to try out their actions guided by alternative, even monologic and anti-dialogic, values. students should be encouraged by pluralistic dialogic teachers in active exploration of their educational values by trying them out, experiencing them, and critically reflecting about these experiences in a public forum. in the past, i had students who insisted on learning through transmission of rigidly designed curriculum by me and i followed this desire. often they demanded the same regime for the rest of the class. i agreed to follow this idea only if these students would convince the rest of the class to accept this pedagogical design. for some interesting reason, so far, this made these students to abandon the demand of transmission of knowledge. when students reject my dialogic guidance, i respect their rejection and ask them to justify their rejection and reveal their educational values. thus, a pluralistic dialogic approach always remains axiological hybrid of mixture of many values. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e11 one may object that despite me trying to be pluralistic dialogic teacher, i impose my pluralistic dialogism on my students through the practices described above. is it not cunning and hidden socialization-enculturation of my students into dialogic pedagogy and its values?! yes, i have to admit that this critique is a fair description in what i am trying to do. it is true that any particular educational practice unavoidably socializes students in certain values by just the very fact of its own practice and culture. any practice requires building its own culture, its own community, its own norms, and its own socialization-enculturation. my pluralistic dialogic pedagogy is not an exception. an interesting issue is how much students should co-participate in design and transformation of the educational culture. in a conventional pedagogy, the responsibility for the pedagogical culture is mostly designed and maintained by the teacher. i argue that in dialogic pedagogy it has to be, in some way, democratic (but not necessarily collaborative as democracy involves legitimate agonistic and even antagonistic relations). the question emerges what role this educational culture and its particular values should have in the educational process in dialogic pedagogy. some of dialogic pedagogy colleagues argue that there is the core cultural values — tolerance, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, anti-sexism and so on — that should be taught the students in dialogic pedagogy, as citizens and professionals, we have a collective stake in what that culture is -both locally in any classroom/school environment and as a nation with citizens. i respectfully disagree because some participants can desire not to be a part of any manufactured “we”. whose values are we talking about? this is where "we-discourse" (i.e., "our values", "societal values", "human values", "state values", "values of good people") creates illegitimate hegemonies and makes it difficult to challenge them, in my view. i suspect any "we" that is forcefully imposed on me. i suspect any forced collectivism and forced collectivity, however good it may sound. however, i am not afraid of freely chosen "we" and collectivity, or collectivity that can be freely tried and freely left (kukathas, 2003). i prefer being asked first if i feel or want to be a part of any "we" and consider alternative “we”. i do not assume or desire that my students must be part of my "we", however good i see this "we". of course, i have values, commitments, and stakes in many endeavors but again i do not assume that my students must have the same values, commitments, and stakes, however good i see them. i see education as helping students to decide what good is for them and why. i can share my stakes, values, and so on with my students and explain why i like them but i want my students treat my values as an option of their critical consideration among other alternative options. in my view, it is not goal of education to socialize students in any particular values, even if this socialization is unavoidable, but rather to confront them for a critical investigation. in this sense, education is anti-enculturation, anti-culture, and anti-socialization. education is a spoilsport (marjanovic-shane, 2015, in preparation). it is very annoying, rebelling, disagreeing, and disruptive. education unavoidably builds some particular culture but it should aim at undermining, if not destroying, its own culture as well (at least as uncritically immediate, “natural”). my pedagogical goal is not to try to avoid value impositions but to make them the object of my students’ reflection and critique through the ipd. i want to turn teaching values (through socialization-enculturation) into teaching about values – through critical testing of these values and other alternatives (marjanovic-shane, personal communication, january 26, 2015). i want to choose such values in my pedagogy that enable my students’ critical evaluation of these and other values (and my own pedagogical desires that start with “i want”). imposition of values is unavoidable, but there exists an option for their critical examination — the option that my pluralistic dialogic approach embraces. thus, for example, in my classes we often critically discuss whether socratic definition of education as “an unexamined life is not worth living”, which is very close to my own definition of education, should be contested: can an unexamined life be worth living, and can an examined life be not worth living (kukathas, 2001, 2003)? values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e12 or, to take a less trivial case, a muslim fisherman in kelantan may not have a basic interest in being able to revise his ends. he has been a muslim since birth, takes his religion on faith and believes its commands oblige him to pray five times daily, to abstain from alcohol, and various forbidden foods and practices, to regard mohammed as god's prophet, and to view apostasy as a sin. he is unlikely to be able ‘rationally to assess his ends’ since there is no opportunity to do so: he is, if literate, not well-read outside the quran; he has little knowledge of the world—even of the islamic world—beyond his own locality; indeed, he has little ability to explore his own religious tradition to judge which parts are ‘worthy of [his continued] allegiance’. yet he may live a life he considers, and even we might recognize as, good. although not wealthy, he may live a life which is physically comfortable, enjoy the love and affection of his family and friends, be able to take pride in his skills and satisfaction from success in providing for his children; and he may be able to find in his religion explanations which not only account for his place in the order of things but also give meaning to his life. why should he, or we, think he has any kind of interest (let alone a more fundamental interest) in being able rationally to assess and revise his conception of the good? in this case it might even make more sense to say that he has an interest in being able to insulate himself from influences which could damage his world-view. and in practice, individuals and societies do attempt to do this— sometimes deliberately. odysseus had himself bound to the mast so that, when he heard the song of the sirens, he would not be tempted to revise his ends (and swim to his death); equally importantly, he had his crew block their ears with wax so that they too would not be tempted to revise their ends, and he instructed them not to obey him when he was spellbound. the critical point here is that the unexamined life may well be worth living (kukathas, 2001). and if it is worth living unexamined, there is no reason to think that our interests are necessarily served by our having the opportunity to examine and revise it. nor, of course, is there reason to think that it is necessarily against our interests to have such opportunities (kukathas, 2003, p. 59). by saying that education is rebellious and destructive by its very nature, i do not mean to say that any rebellions and every destruction are educational, not at all. recently, alfie kohn (2014) articulates an apparently similar idea by calling for "raising critical rebels", "encourage young people to focus on the needs and rights of others, to examine the practices and institutions that get in the way of making everyone’s lives better, to summon the courage to question what one is told and be willing to break the rules sometimes.... one should be 'critical' in both senses of that word: willing to find fault but also dependent on careful analysis. it’s not 'if you say yes, i’ll say no,' but rather 'if you say or do something that doesn’t make sense, i’ll ask why—then, if necessary, say no (and suggest that other people do the same).'" in my view, pluralistic dialogic pedagogy calls for responsibility rather than abdicate it. however, this call is not absolute either as education is willing to investigate irresponsibility, as its alternative possibility as well. whose and what values can legitimately shape education? since imposition of certain values is unavoidable in education, a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy of some axiological impositions have to be considered. in my view, the public has a compelling and legitimate interest in promoting a universal opportunity for education. this public interest is both existential and instrumental. the existential public interest is about giving an opportunity for critical self-actualization for all as an unalienated right. the instrumental interest can be economic, political, national, and social — this is how public interest in education is often discussed. currently, it is a common belief around the globe that just because the public has a legitimate interest in education, it is necessarily means that the public, through its national and local government, has a legitimate right to shape the education: to define its curriculum, instruction, assessment, and organization. in contrast, my colleague marjanovic-shane and i (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2011) disagree. we argue that there is the public values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e13 interest in promoting private, not public, education. we argue that any education is essentially private and has to be recognized as such, from a point of view of values. by “private”, we do not mean the source of funding or the nature of educational providers. rather, it is private in an axiological pedagogical sense that any education is autodidact and authorial — personal and unique self-education. it is the role of the state to provide resources for such education for all. we argue that the public does not have a legitimate right to shape education and define it is curriculum, instruction, assessment, and organization. while providing funding for educational resources for all through public taxation, the state must declare the educational neutrality regarding educational values, permitted by the law. the state may also have legitimate rights to regulate educational practices such as preventing and punishing of possible abuses: sexual abuses, financial abuses, misleading advertisement by educational providers, not delivering promised services, and so on within this educational neutrality. in addition, the state has the legitimate right of self-protection, limiting educational freedoms at times. as i argued above, definitely, the principle, “he who pays the piper calls the tune” is a wrong justification for the state to shape legitimately publically (through taxing people of different creeds and values) funded schools and education in general. currently there are concentric circles of power shaping educational values. across the globe, with the relatively recent exception of the us, on the top of this hierarchical power pyramid is the national state government, then the local government, then the educational institution, then teachers, and finally at the bottom are parents of young students and, for adults, students themselves. however, in our view, on the top of the power pyramid shaping educational values must be the student (mediated by guardians for very young or severely mentally challenged students) followed by the student’s teachers (and other educational providers). i do not see legitimacy of anybody else shaping educational values for individual students. another issue is what particular values shape education. currently, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and organization of education are defined by powerful others for the student. for manymany forming years, students must be engaged in values, activities, communication, and norms defined and constrained by other people. these pedagogical activities often have intrinsic values neither for the students nor for anybody else, constituting alienation and boredom and inhibiting students’ ownership for their own education and life (nilsson & wihlborg, 2011; sidorkin, 2002). to keep these academic pedagogical impositions, conventional schools create a pedagogical regime of survival for the students (and sometimes even for the teachers), often making students feel overwhelmed and burden with their academic life, being happy when the school and education are over. i argue that curriculum, instruction, assessment, and organization of education have to be defined by the students themselves with help of their teachers. the student-teacher relationship is sacred and intimate with the primacy for the student, similar to the patient-doctor or client-lawyer relationships. teacher exists for the student — facilitation of the student’s autodidact educational process and not the other way around. in dialogic pedagogy, i see the overall goal of education in leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the life, the self, and the world. the student should be able to bring whatever values they subscribe to and are familiar with to education for their critical examination freely and safely. in addition, educational time should be entirely defined by the student, free from any survival burden, any assignment by others, or any social stigma (greenberg, 1992; llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960). testing boundaries of the pluralistic dialogic approach like any approach, our praxis of praxis pluralistic dialogic approach has its own limitations that are important to discuss. so far, i have heard four major objections against the pluralistic dialogic approach described above. the first objection is about having students who, because of their values, are values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e14 not suitable for the aspired profession. thus, for example, my colleague, teacher educator, scott richardson wrote on his facebook page, “wonderment: which is worse (as i grade papers and watch the news on eric garner6) that we allow racists to become teachers or police?” (december 3rd, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/scott.richardson.9250/posts/10204842806606550). i think it is not a business of teachers to be gatekeepers for their students. i think that any summative assessment, sorting people on those who will get some social goodies and on those who will not (e.g., grading), betrays the student-teacher relations and thus is anti-educational. in my view, any mistake in the context of education is a learning-teaching opportunity and never should be taken against the student as it is done in a summative assessment. education should be a safe learning environment. it is not the role of the teacher to decide to who deserve to be a teacher, or a politician, or a doctor, or a lawyer and who does not, even if a teacher thinks that his/her student is a racist or an incompetent or a bad person. i think many lawyers may feel more than uncomfortable to defend, counsel, and represent some of their clients but they find compelling professionally to do so despite how they feel and judge them. i suspect that we, educators, have a similar professional obligation and cannot be legitimately gatekeepers for our students. of course, as human beings, both lawyers and teachers may have limitations of how much their own despise they can tolerate directed against their clients or students. but if their sense of repelling becomes intervening with their professional practice, they should excuse themselves from either legal representation of this particular client or teaching this particular student. on the other hand, it does not mean that gatekeeping of weeding out unprofessional, incompetent and ill-minded participants is bad or unnecessary -it just should be done outside of education, in my view. the legitimate gatekeeper role may belong to the managers of the targeted practice. for the teachers, gatekeeping and sorting their students is a conflict of interests that the teachers should try to avoid. education has to be a safe place for learning where students can reveal and discuss their values that others may find objectionable or even offensive. second, what if teachers and students’ values make other students uncomfortable, offended, or even harmed? since i believe that education inherently involves of a discomfort through challenge and unfamiliarity as its inherent curriculum, i focus my discussion here on consideration of offense and harm rather on frustration and discomfort. in general, i think that protection of students against harm should be prioritized over their education. for example, in one of my classes on dialogic pedagogy, i planned to show a fragment from a japanese movie involving a reference to rape (not a graphic scene) to discuss how a voice of a person gets silenced or promoted. a female student traumatized by rape in her past asked to be excused from watching this video clip. she agreed that the watching this video was very important for our class discussion of the topic at hand but she could not stand even slightest mentioning rape. in my judgment, her well-being was more important than her education. even a bigger teaching dilemma may involve inter-students conflict concerning values. i had a class while teaching in california, in which a mexican-american aztec-descent student considered all white american people (with surprising exception of me, maybe because i am an immigrant in the us) as enemies of native americans to be physically fought out, if not eliminated, from the two american continents. in the class, majority of the students were white caucasian with a rather visible and vocal minority of latino/a students (mostly mexican decent but not necessary native americans). my teaching assistant was a mayan guatemalan graduate student. in my observation and judgment, the aztec student 6 “on july 17, 2014, eric garner died in staten island, new york, after a police officer put him in a chokehold. the new york city medical examiner's office concluded that garner died partly as a result of the chokehold. new york city police department (nypd) policy prohibits the use of chokeholds, and law enforcement personnel contend that it was a headlock and that no choking took place…. on december 3, 2014, a grand jury decided not to indict pantaleo. the event stirred public protests and rallies with charges of police brutality. as of december 28, 2014, at least 50 demonstrations had been held nationwide specifically for garner while hundreds of demonstrations against general police brutality counted garner as a focal point. the justice department announced an independent federal investigation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/death_of_eric_garner values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e15 unfairly attacked white students both as a social group and personally. for example, the aztec student made a rather mean and ill-hearted remark when an older white european-descent student revealed in the class that her daughter committed suicide. i tried to talk privately and in class with him. among other things, we discussed that there is no such thing as historically innocent ethnicity — revealing among other historical facts, a rather oppressive past of the aztec empire based on slavery and enslaving some mayan tribes (evidently, the aztec student did not know that). however, it did not help as the student acclaimed to be a native american radical nationalist aiming to liberate americas from white caucasian people. at some point, i considered expelling him from my class but the rest of the students and especially the older white student asked me not to do that. the students provided support to each in dealing with the ultra-nationalist student and they decided that they could manage the harm that he caused to them. however, i called him on and set limits for his personal attacks on the white students. at the same time, my students and i appreciated the educational benefits and challenges that the aztec student provided for all of us and to himself. in this example, educational freedom of exploring ideas (ipd) collided with the students’ well-being and i was prioritizing the students’ well-being over ipd (i.e., education in my definition). i think that it is the teacher and students’ responsibility to maintain peace and avoid mutual harm in the space of education. occasionally, this may put limits on the ipd, exploration of ideas, and education itself. policing can be prioritized over education at times. teachers may have strong commitment to their own values of protecting societally oppressed minorities, “as a classroom teacher many years ago, i made it very clear that i believed that homosexuality was something that was a choice i respected, that i had gay and lesbian friends, that gay jokes were unacceptable in the classroom, etc. i do not naively believe that my students somehow internalized my beliefs (though i was probably more transmissionist then than i am now), but i still think that encountering those beliefs was important, certainly for the closeted kids undoubtedly in the room, but also for everyone else7.” i agree that policing can be necessary in class but: 1) the policing in education should not be confused with education itself and 2) this policing has to be the object of education itself — it has to be involved in the ipd of educational public forum with the students as much as possible (i foresee some rare cases that i may be not fully or totally impossible due to some privacy, safety, or legality considerations). the practice of education has not one but many goals that should guide educational practitioners. educators have manymany goals (sometimes too many): police-person keeping peace and safety, organizer, social worker, lawmaker, judge, advocate, propagandist, politician, caregiver, citizen, and so on and so forth. somewhat similar can be said about diverse and polymorphic roles of students. education, and educator in a narrow sense of being concern with education, is only one of many roles of the teacher (and students). even more, sometimes the non-educational roles have to be legitimately prioritized. for example, when a person crosses a street without watching for a car traffic, the best immediate action is to pull the person physically back on the walking pavement rather than to try to educate him or her. sometimes noneducational and/or educational instrumental goals have to take an emergency priority or even completely replace educational goals. metaphorically speaking, at times, a teacher should prioritize safety and violently pull the student back to the pavement, without trying to educate the student about the danger of crossing road without looking around. yes, all this is true. however, it is important to abstract the unique sphere of education and claim that in the educational practice this sphere has to be prioritize on average (but not necessarily in each and every case). 7 https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/894734337204533?reply_comment_id=894765173868116&total_comm ents=12, november 7, 2014. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e16 the third challenge for the pluralistic dialogic approach is coming from a conventional school institution and the entire society, promoting technological monologic paradigm of education. conventional schooling and the society imposes constrains, conditions, and demands that promote non-dialogic and non-pluralistic values. in my view, the educators should fight these impositions by diverse political means negotiating professional flexibility, pushing back, smuggling alternative values, and, what is probably most important, engaging the students in critical dialogue about these values, impositions and consequences. the fourth challenge for the pluralistic dialogic approach is coming from a possibility that dialogic critical education can undermine family and local community values in the student and, thus, may ostracize the student from these communities. as our colleague, jay lemke wrote, “i agree that liberation from uncritical traditional values can be of benefit. but not always. for example when it leads to ostracism from conservative family or community/church. bigger problem is anomie. it is easy to break from old values because all values have flaws, but hard then to construct new values that feel solid. for all values to remain contingent, like truth propositions, is often too alienating and frightening for people. when the ground gives way, on what will you stand? very few people can simply fly” (december 22, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/dialogicpedagogyjournal/posts/917787528232547?reply_comment_id=92018 2844659682&total_comments=6). i think that this concern is very legitimate and it is up to the student to decide whether and where to draw the line between his/her well-being and education in general and dialogic pedagogy in specific. finally, there is a related issue of the essentially voluntary nature of education that cannot be forced on the students, “you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.” this means that if a student desires to remain uneducated, this desire is legitimate (neill, 1960). what do you think? values and dilemmas of pedagogy jay lemke as a latecomer to the online facebook dialogue about the teaching of values and values for teaching cited above, i was asked to comment further on the issues and arguments, which are well presented and summarized, i think, in his editorial essay. i want to comment briefly on several of the issues and then extend the dialogue into a critical discussion about the role of modernism in framing our own values of diversity and critique. i want to ask what might come next? what might be better than liberal, democratic values of critical inquiry? as eugene points out, and most of us know, it’s unrealistic to imagine an education that is “valuefree”. the mere fact that schools exist and are paid for by taxes, much less that they are everywhere compulsory, embodies liberal democratic values in the broad sense. the selection of what is studied in schools, what is tested, what is required for college admission – all of these implicitly define very specific values. they are a mix of traditional dominant values (e.g. elite literature, canonical history) from the 18th and 19th centuries and late modernist values (science, mathematics, computer education, vocational education), which are pretty explicitly also economic values of productive labor and wealth accumulation. each required school discipline or subject brings its own value traditions to the classroom. in schools, if not in their professional fields, literature advocates for humanist and esthetic values and history for values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e17 patriotic and progressive values. mathematics favors logical values, abstraction, and universal generalization. science favors empiricism, materialism, and the value of progress. merely pointing this out raises the question of the responsibility of teachers to identify and critique the implicit and taken-for-granted values of their subject and their teaching methods. should they be made explicit for students? should alternatives be fairly presented? should the disciplines’ values be subjected to sharp critique and debate? and if not, what kind of values does that choice represent? nowhere in the school curriculum are the wider values of our dominant secular culture critiqued: democracy, individualism, capitalism, growth, tolerance, diversity. much less those of the still prevalent religious traditions. there is a social and political taboo on criticism or even discussion of such issues in schools. those taboos and exclusions also represent values. in the online discussion and eugene’s essay, it is also fairly clear that most of us accept that teachers’ own values necessarily find their way into the classroom: whether in our enthusiasm for the values inherent in our subjects, in explicit expressions of personal opinions, or in our deliberate silences and self-censorship (readily noticed by students). but it should also be clear that there is a cline of power and coercion present here: from humble contributions of identified-as-personal opinion, to normative presentations of (explicit and implicit) values as ones that students are expected to accept, to coercive threats and punishments (from embarrassment to grades to disciplinary actions). morally, i believe, the bar is raised as we move along this cline, requiring us to more explicitly identify and defend the value basis of an action, and to subject it to public critique and debate. of course, in practice we usually find just the reverse: those transgressions of values subjected to the most severe sanctions are precisely the ones where the values themselves are not open to challenge. at the end of his essay, eugene kindly quotes one of my core concerns about dialogic and especially critical pedagogy that aims to act as a “spoilsport” and interrupt the usual processes of implicit socialization into community values by promoting, and even requiring, explicit critique and dialogic debate. i wrote: i agree that liberation from uncritical traditional values can be of benefit. but not always. for example when it leads to ostracism from conservative family or community/church. bigger problem is anomie. it is easy to break from old values because all values have flaws, but hard then to construct new values that feel solid. for all values to remain contingent, like truth propositions, is often too alienating and frightening for people. when the ground gives way, on what will you stand? very few people can simply fly. here i remind us of the potential harms of the critical interrogation of values. what are the personal and social costs to a student who becomes convinced of scientific values regarding evidence and truth, say in the case of darwinian evolutionary theory, and brings these home to a fundamentalist christian family which regards them as the work of the devil and destructive of biblical family and moral values? what of the family of his girlfriend who won’t let her see him anymore? what of the young man who becomes convinced he should be proud to be gay and comes out to his conservative family and is disowned and thrown out on the street? what of the student who loses all faith in traditional moral values as groundless and indefensible and is lost either to anomie or sociopathic behavior? our classic myth about this tells of socrates, the gadfly (spoilsport?), who corrupted the youth of athens by undermining their faith in the god and traditional morals and producing students like the infamous alcibiades, who worked to overthrow the athenian democratic constitution. we’re all taught that values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e18 socrates was right, that he was a christ-like martyr. who tells the other side of this story? who seriously thinks about the other side? modern liberal values were forged over a century or two as part of the historical project of overcoming traditional values and the social-political order they supported. our myth here is the not-veryfactual account of galileo’s “martyrdom” by the catholic church and the eventual triumph of reason over faith, of science over superstition. historical analysis paints a much more complex and ambivalent picture. traditional values, which are today in many parts of the world re-asserting themselves, included the priority of the family and community over the desires of the individual, and a stable social order in which religious, moral, and political authority were all mutually supporting. traditional islam rejects the separation of church and state and moral arguments that are not consistent with their religious beliefs. our own modern separation of political from religious authority was the result of centuries of destructive civil wars once our own european medieval unity was broken by diversity of beliefs. even now, many fundamentalist christians in the united states do not accept the separation and believe that religious belief should be the basis of political action, and indeed of intolerance (no gay teachers, no atheists in political office). fundamentalist jews in israel advocate for an intolerant theocratic state. traditionalist hindus in india are also often nationalists looking to undo the liberalism imported from europe. even normally pacific buddhists have turned to violence in myanmar and sri lanka, in part to insure that their traditions, not those of islam or christianity, will be the successors to western modernism. african christians, russian orthodox nationalists, and many other illiberal ideological movements around the world, deeply disenchanted with liberal rationalist modernism, are showing that its 19th and 20th century victory was only a limited political and economic one, and far from irreversible. the modern liberal (and scientific) value that everything should be subject to critique was part of the arsenal of the war against premodern traditional society and its moral-religious culture. so was the emphasis on individual liberty, autonomy, freedom of speech, and eventually pluralist diversity and tolerance. these values were born first in the rhetoric of the religious dissenters who broke the nominal unity of the christian world. then by the scientists and enlightenment thinkers who did not wish to be limited by official unity of belief (and by and large they were also religious believers and dissenters, famously newton). in the canon, the other voice is represented by thomas hobbes and leviathan, which appeals to community and tradition, and makes the argument that unless all public expressions of belief - religious, political, or scientific – are governed by a unity embodied in the sovereign (who speaks for the community, as the caliph does in islamic theory), there will be nothing but endless civil war. that period of history (17th century) was such a period of civil war, far more pervasive, lasting, and horrifying than our cool textbook accounts portray it. and i think it’s coming back today on a global scale. the modernist liberal detente is falling apart as non-western societies break free of european cultural hegemony, and all the traditionalist value communities, including the judeo-christian ones, challenge liberalism again. in societies that were more culturally homogeneous than our modern urban ones, traditionalist values worked relatively well. liberal values sold themselves first as freedom for progress (economic, social, technological) and later as the only basis of mutually tolerant peaceful co-existence in a diverse world. but they have also become associated in the minds of many throughout the world with capitalist economic exploitation and wealth inequality, western political imperialism and neo-colonialism, and the moral degeneracy of a hedonistic, consumer-pandering, world-polluting, de-spiritualized worldsystem. values in dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov and jay lemke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.141 | vol. 3 (2015) e19 it seems to me to be imperative in the present moment of history for those of us who are the children of liberal modernism to ask: what comes after? and by this i mean to hope that what comes after can be better. better adapted to global ecological sustainability, more supportive of social and economic justice, better able to avoid endemic violence on every scale. better than what the historical values of liberal modernism espouse: • if the human species manages to survive on this planet, and perhaps others, for thousands of years into the future, it is impossible that no better political system than representative democracy will ever arise. what will it be? • it already seems clear to many of us that we urgently need to develop better social supports for learning and education than can be provided by the institution of isolated school buildings with classrooms of 30 students to one teacher, and uniform standardized curricula and testing. what will it be? • individual freedom has become the shield behind which a few individuals and corporations pursue narrow interests inimical to the wider society and the sustainability of the species. how will we rebalance individual and community needs? • the consumer capitalist political economy has become addicted to unlimited growth -of population, markets, sales, wealth, and tax revenues – that is inevitably destructive of the planetary systems that sustain life. under what new worldsystem can we avoid the catastrophe that social and economic justice on a global scale will kill us all? what does this have to do with values and dialogic pedagogy? first, it asks us to understand the ways in which the value of unlimited critique of values itself arose as a specific response to historical conditions. it asks us to consider what is different about the historical moment of today. and it asks us to take a step to move beyond where we have been. can we take this step in the classroom? can we take it together with our students? our students will have to face the challenges of a less hopeful world, a less peaceful world. they will need to move beyond us towards values suited to their times and their needs. how can we help? what do you think? references aristotle.  (2000).  nicomachean  ethics  (r.  crisp,  trans.).  cambridge,  uk:  cambridge  university  press.   bakhtin,  m.  m.  (1991).  dialogic  imagination:  four  essays  by  m.  m.  bakhtin  (c.  emerson  &  m.  holquist,   trans.).  austin,  tx:  university  of  texas  press.   ball,  a.  f.,  &  freedman,  s.  w.  (2004).  bakhtinian  perspectives  on  language,  literacy,  and  learning.   cambridge,  uk  ;  new  york:  cambridge  university  press.   bennett,  w.  j.,  finn,  c.  e.,  &  cribb,  j.  t.  e.  (1999).  the  educated 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 schools,  &  dialogue  with  evil.   new  york:  p.  lang.   new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 195-855-6-ed layed out.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a1 initiation, response, follow-up and beyond: analyzing dialogue around difficulty in a tutorial setting elizabeth l. jaeger university of arizona, usa abstract with the advent of common core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords. the extent of knowledge regarding the discourse that occurs within the tutoring context is, however, limited. as a result, it is difficult to envision and implement a protocol that incorporates responsive tutor/tutee interaction. this article describes an analysis of discourse patterns that occur as a tutor responded to student difficulty. the study is framed using bakhtin’s concept of dialogue— the ways in which interactions are influenced by the joint speaker/listener identity that is characteristic of interlocutors— and the way this played out in a dialogic instructional context. excerpts from eight previous tutoring studies served as a foundation for the present research. the primary data source for the analysis was start-to-finish audio-recordings of 40 hours of instruction with two fourth grade readers. after preliminary open coding, overarching categories such as questioning, providing information, and demonstrating strategy use—and more detailed codes within these categories—were applied to the transcripts. major findings demonstrated that: (a) the tutor’s moves were varied and balanced and differed somewhat from child to child, (b) some interactional sequences appeared more effective than others depending on the topic and child, and (c) interactions in this setting differed in important ways from those found in the research literature. i argue here that the dialogic characteristics of tutor/tutee interactions served the children involved and should serve as the basis for additional tutoring protocols. key words: dialogue, dialogic pedagogy/teaching, discourse analysis, struggling readers, triadic discourse, tutoring dr. elizabeth l. jaeger is an associate professor in the department of teaching, learning, and sociocultural studies at the university of arizona. she has two primary research interests: (a) understanding and supporting vulnerable readers—that is, those readers who, for a range of reasons including macro-system factors such as race and class, are challenged to learn to read in schools, and (b) exploring the work and experience of “unexpected writers”—from toddlers to academically challenged students to adults dealing with mental illness—who engage in writing for personal fulfillment. dr. jaeger has published in a diverse range of journals such as human development, british journal of sociology of education, and literacy research and instruction. she can be reached at elizabethjaeger@email.arizona.edu. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a2 when instruction is differentiated to meet a child’s academic and personal needs, tutoring has the potential to offer the most intense and efficacious learning for readers who struggle (cohen, kulik, and kulik, 1982; shenderovich, thurston, & miller, 2016). a good deal is known about effective tutoring protocols. tutors need to collect detailed information about the child’s strengths, challenges, and opinions, including informal assessment data (timmons & morgan, 2010) and interviews (massey, 2007). also important is basing lessons on student data (leal, johanson, toth, & huang, 2004), allowing students to select texts for reading (mokhtari, hutchison, & edwards, 2010), and employing mediational tools such as lists of steps that support children as they begin to internalize reading strategies (jaeger, 2017). historically, however, these studies have failed to forge a link between the results obtained and the quality of tutoring discourse. this is problematic because, as a result, it is difficult to imagine in any detail what quality tutoring looks and sounds like and, therefore, to replicate it. with more students failing assessments based on the common core state standards (ccss), it is important to offer tutoring for those students who need it, and to carefully craft tutor-student dialogue, with increased achievement and engagement as the goal. the purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the discourse occurring between a tutor and two students. specifically, the research study serving as the foundation for this paper examined the difficulties exhibited by vulnerable readers1 as they read extended text during tutoring, the responses made by the tutor to those difficulties, and how these responses influenced the tutoring path moving forward. as such, it addresses the following research questions: • what are the characteristics of dialogue occurring between two fourth grade students and an adult in a study of tutoring interactions? does this dialogue vary by student? • in what ways are these dialogue characteristics linked to instructional sequences that end with the child coming to an understanding of the content with which s/he originally struggled? do these characteristics vary by student? • in what ways is the instructional context and the dialogue that characterizes the tutoring sessions studied similar to and different from that exhibited in the reviewed theoretical and research literature? i argue here that the dialogic characteristics of these interactions served the children involved, and differ from that of most tutoring protocols described in the research literature. bakhtin’s (1986) construct of dialogue—a responsive, tension-filled, and collaborative speech genre—is the theoretical frame for this paper; connected to it are the related practices of instructional dialogicality. theoretical framework dialogue the term dialogue features prominently in bakhtin’s (1986) seminal essay, the problem of speech genres. he defines dialogue as a responsive exchange between/among interlocutors resulting in shared meaning-making and describes four primary principles of dialogue. first, dialogue is a speech genre. as such, dialogic structures are relatively stable; even specific language is commonly “borrowed” from other utterances. were this not the case—if speakers and listeners were forced to create new genres for each occasion—communication would be challenging, if not impossible (bakhtin, 1986). dialogue serves to craft and re-craft the conditions of a given setting by establishing typical patterns of communication. second, addressivity and responsivity characterize dialogic chains. utterances—that is, single speech turns that 1 i use this term when referring to readers who are unusually sensitive to disruptions in their literacy ecology such as uninteresting texts, inauthentic tasks, and potentially oppressive class, race, and gender factors (jaeger, 2015). initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a3 serve as the fundamental unit of analysis in human communication—are always directed toward someone (bakhtin, 1986), and dialogue is, from the outset, a two-way street. a speaker moves from the prior history of utterances on a given topic to her/his own utterance which occurs in anticipation of the listener’s response (wells, 1999). when a remark is made, the person addressed replies in some way (even sitting silently is a response), the initiator follows up, and so on; dialogue has, as such, no beginning or end. as wegerif (2011) asserted, “(t)he exact meaning of each position in a dialogue depends on succeeding utterances and so can never be closed down” (p. 180). third, dialogue is fraught with tension and those attempting to communicate need to work with this tension rather than wishing it away. the assumption that the primary goal of dialogue is intersubjectivity without disagreement is erroneous. conflict is not some unfortunate nuisance, but rather serves to propel dialogue forward (matusov, 1996). finally, the purpose of dialogue is collaborative meaning-making. in bakhtin’s (1973) view, “truth” emerges from dialogic practice, rather than residing in the mind of a single individual. as interlocutors interact, they move ever-closer to a shared reality. dialogicality in instructional spaces educational spaces present as more or less dialogic, so bakhtin’s theoretical work has implications for instruction. referencing typical classroom instruction, johnstone (2002) stated that, teachers “decide what will be talked about in what way, and for what purpose” (p. 121). they select content standards and the curriculum employed to facilitate mastery of these standards. they control “the floor” during discussion: proposing topics, asking questions, nominating respondents, and accepting, extending, or rejecting what is said. this type of environment strays far from bakhtin’s (1986) aspects of dialogue. the speech genres characteristics of these spaces constrain, rather than facilitate, generative interaction. in an effort to support children on the path from lesser to greater academic proficiency, tension surfaces, but it is uncommon for this tension to be explicitly noted or effectively employed to promote development. teachers often anticipate what students will say during an exchange—a form of addressivity—but replies to students’ statements tend to be limited in number and unrelated to student comments (mehan, 1979). finally, teachers may have thoughtful goals for these discussions, but do not always build a shared meaning with students. this view of the instructional context may be the most familiar, but we might imagine a classroom or tutoring environment differing, in many respects, from the one johnstone (2002) described: an environment defined by dialogicality. such a context is facilitated by a teacher’s decision to adopt what boyd and markarian (2015) refer to as a dialogic stance. this stance requires of the teacher the ability and willingness to acknowledge the tension associated with classroom power differentials, access students’ opinions about the support they need, and engage in self-critique and self-correction. it entails practices of careful listening and purposeful, back-and-forth patterns of leading and following, thereby assisting students to elaborate, analyze, and critique topics of concern. such talk patterns open spaces for the free-flow of ideas and the inclusion of varied perspectives. this stance facilitates student agency based on “improvisation, creativity, originality, diversity, and uniqueness” (matusov, 2011). when teachers adopt a dialogic stance, their teaching practice reflects that stance. the primary interactional genre includes question structures to provoke thoughtful answers, answers that provoke student questions, and a question/answer chain supporting a coherent and responsive line of inquiry (alexander, 2004). teachers and students embrace tension in this space where problems are posed, disagreements expressed, and paradoxes explored (matusov, 2009). the overarching goal of instructional practice is collaborative meaning-making (english, 2016). literature review in 2014, mercer produced a review claiming that common instructional talk patterns have the potential to undermine collaborative meaning-making, but that, when teachers adjust their interactive initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a4 patterns to cultivate rather than just assess thinking, student understanding and engagement is positively affected. this claim—that teachers can intentionally alter their instructional discourse— offers important implications for the study of teacher-student talk in general and of this study in particular. in this literature review, i include classroom discourse research both because the literature on tutoring discourse is sparse and because many of the findings about classroom discourse are also relevant for the tutoring setting. then, i focus on what is known about discourse between tutors and their students. discourse and dialogue in the classroom setting tri-fold discourse pattern. an oft-addressed genre of classroom interaction is the ubiquitous trifold pattern referred to by mehan (1979) as initiation-response-evaluation (ire) and, by sinclair and coulthard (1975), as initiation-response-follow-up (irf). researchers have demonstrated that this discourse pattern predominates in classrooms today, as it did at the time of sinclair and couthard’s original work (howe & abedin, 2013). beliefs about the efficacy of this interaction pattern vary. sinclair and coulthard (1975) took a descriptive stance toward the phenomenon and chose not to evaluate its effectiveness. in contrast, others adopted a normative position. advocating for the usefulness of this discoursal genre, lee (2007) noted that triadic discourse surfaces issues in teaching and learning which require attention; student misunderstandings are, for example, displayed in these interactions and can then be addressed. nystrand, wu, gamoran, zeiser, and long (2003) argued that although an evaluative move may hinder dialogue, asking a follow-up question instead facilitates shared understanding and adds coherence to the discussion. other researchers, however, insisted that, in the triadic model, teachers act as inquisitors (wood, 1992) and the potential richness of instructional dialogue is inhibited (mehan, 1979). assuming a more balanced stance, wells (1999) asserted that discussions of talk patterns have been over-simplified and there is room for opened-ended dialogue within an irf interaction. in a study of classroom interaction characterized by a predominance of triadic dialogue, wells (1993) found that most discussion topics were, nevertheless, co-constructed. boyd and markarian (2015) noted that even if the potential drawbacks of tri-fold discourse are acknowledged, it appears studying the functions of classroom talk rather than just the presence or absence of specific dialogic features, better supports teachers as they strive to listen carefully and respond accordingly, thereby cultivating a collaborative and productive discourse community. they state, “a dialogic instructional stance . . . is a function of how patterns of talk may open up discourse space for exploration and varied opinions” (p. 273), thereby emphasizing the content of the talk (e.g., opinions) as well as its form. in short, it is not the presence of the trifold pattern per se, but its rigid and restrictive implementation that is the issue. if teachers employ irf in its most openended and dialogic iteration, it can, in fact, facilitate rich discussion. types of follow-up moves. researchers have noted a variety of follow-up moves within the triadic structure; these moves range from less to more interventionist in nature. edwards (1992) suggested that remaining silent for a few seconds after a child’s comment allows for the greatest freedom and agency. the adult can simply repeat or recap what children say (mercer, 1995) or acknowledge the contribution made (boyd, 2015), again leaving the door open for children to proceed as desired. other follow-up options include reformulating or extending a child’s response (mercer, 2004), admitting confusion, or inviting the child to expand upon or inquire about what has been said (edwards, 1992). more directive moves include asking the child additional questions (boyd, 2015) and providing hints (mercer, 2004). finally, the adult can instruct by providing visual or sentence context support, modeling strategy use or academic language, adding new information, and offering examples. wells (1999) noted that, whereas third-turn moves are typically unconscious, teachers can consciously attend to these moves and work to alter patterns that initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a5 undermine rather than encourage student participation. this statement is also true in the tutoring setting where both more and less directive moves are appropriate at particular times. discourse and dialogue in the reading tutorial setting recent studies offer recommendations for effective tutoring and the ways in which carefully crafted first-turn moves, attentive listening, and later-turn moves linked to the child’s response facilitate meaningmaking in that context. the foundation of these actions includes the importance of detailed knowledge about the tutee (wittwer, nuckles, landmann, & renkl, 2010) and the crucial role of differentiated teaching based on that knowledge (herppich, wittwer, nuckles, & renkl, 2016). in the tutoring context, teaching and learning can be more closely tailored to meet the individual needs of the child involved and the possibility for true responsivity is more likely. this practice is, however, easier theorized than executed. referencing work with students in the intermediate grades and beyond, clay (1987) stated: “(t)he failure of teachers to make marked progress with older failing readers is because they are not able to deliver contingent responses to the pupils’ effort. they cannot imagine the response systems the children are working from” (p. 162). this work requires imagination as well as teaching skill. to explore a possible link between what the literature says about tutoring with what it says about teacher/student dialogue, i reviewed eleven studies, accessed with the search terms tutor and dialogue/dialogic. each of these studies examined reading tutoring for elementary students with one adult for each one or two children2 and included quotes from their interactions. three studies were subsequently eliminated because they differed in important ways from the protocol for this study; they (a) focused on teaching isolated skills (juel, 1996), (b) offered no discussion of extended text (triplett, 2004), or (c) included excerpts dealing with responses to success, but not difficulty (sableski, 2009). i conducted an analysis of the remaining eight studies (see table 1), focusing on the degree to which the tutors and students engaged in dialogue as theorized by bakhtin (1986): patterned yet responsive, sometimes tensionfilled, and conducted in the service of collaborative meaning-making. in some settings, tutors controlled the interactions; in others, the two parties shared responsibility; and in others, students demonstrated considerable agency. table 1 characteristics of tutoring studies that include excerpts of discourse about student difficulty study population number of children tutoring interactions quoted other pinnell, et al. (1994) grade 1 403 1 study of reading recovery rodgers (2004/2005) grade 1 4 2 study of reading recovery timmons & morgan (2010) grade 1 4 2 tutors were pre-service teachers dawes (2007) elementary 3 3 volunteers read aloud to children; they were not positioned as “tutors” newcomer (2010) upper elementary 3 3 study of reading partners, staffed by community volunteers 2 in one case, it was referred to as a “small group” with an unspecified number of children. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a6 hedin & gaffney (2013) grade 6 unclear 7 small group tutoring almazrouhi (2007) grade 3 1 2 tutor was also researcher lewis (1993) grade 4 1 3 tutor was also researcher tutor-controlled interaction. interaction within four of the studies and a subset of a fifth was controlled almost exclusively by the tutor. the first two described research on reading recovery, the wellknown tutoring program with an explicit lesson structure. pinnell, lyons, deford, bryk, and selzer (1994) included a single quote from tutoring interactions. in response to her struggling student, the tutor provided encouragement and asked the child whether what she had read made sense in context. the other author (rodgers, 2004/2005) analyzed reading recovery lessons by two tutors. she noted that the tutors employed two types of prompts: those focusing on individual words and those directing the student to apply a strategy, such as reading ahead; they varied the help provided in response to student need. timmons and morgan (2010) studied pre-service teachers and their tutees. after noting a child’s decoding strategy, a less able tutor continued to emphasize that single strategy as she asked one question after another and corrected the child’s attempts. hedin and gaffney (2013) investigated sixth grade tutees working with doctoral students. lesson analysis demonstrated that tutors tended to follow set patterns of interaction, rather than responding to what students said and did. dawes (2007) studied volunteers who read aloud to elementary children during their lunch break, reviewing one hour-long session for each of three partnerships. one of the tutors carefully controlled the academically-oriented interactions and struggled to maintain student engagement. balanced interactions. tutor/tutee discourse within three of the studies was somewhat more balanced. the second partnership in the dawes (2007) study was one of these. tutoring excerpts demonstrated that both partners viewed reading as a source of meaning reached through collaboration. newcomer (2010) studied a tutoring program staffed by community volunteers. students whose tutors balanced reading and talk and varied feedback as needed posted the greatest gains in reading comprehension. almazrouhi (2007) tutored a third-grade student, employing a variety of practices to support the boy’s literacy growth. in this study, tutor-student dialogue facilitated the use of syntactic and semantic cuing systems and meaning-making. student agency in interactions. finally, two researchers allowed the child more agency in determining the course of their dialogue. the third partnerships in the dawes (2007) study included a kindergarten child. his tutor allowed him to select the texts they read together and, as a team, they interacted playfully with both the texts and each other. lewis (1993) recounted interactions with a fourthgrade boy who struggled to make meaning from text. they read and discussed a fable together. lewis initially rejected the child’s interpretation of the moral of the story, but by attending carefully to his explanations, she eventually understood that both she and the child had accomplished what she called “selective reading”: attending to the storyline that was easiest for them to follow while discounting other options. the research literature provides glimpses of what tutoring dialogue looks like. tutor-child interactions within these studies exhibited some aspects of bakhtin’s (1986) construct of dialogue: most evidenced predictable speech genres, the exchanges ranged from more to less responsive, tension was sometimes present (although it seemed to interfere with, rather than facilitate, communication), and the initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a7 more effective tutors collaborated with the children to construct meaning. there are methodological gaps in this literature, however. none of the studies described above included a full corpus of transcripts nor employed frequency counts and percentages to ensure that the quoted excerpts accurately represented the corpus. in addition, none focus on data excerpts of tutoring discourse occurring in response to student difficulty. most importantly, the tutoring study described in this paper is the only one i could find that includes a thorough and systematic analysis of the characteristics proposed by bakhtin (1986) and an explanation of how particular discourse moves led to successful instructional sequences. the study described here reflects this view. method guided by (a) findings from the literature, as well as the gaps within them, (b) studies of effective tutoring protocols (massey, 2007; mokhtari, hutchison, & edwards, 2010), and (c) the tenets of instructional dialogicality, i developed and implemented a tutoring protocol and conducted an analysis of tutor/tutee interactions. the site for this exploratory, irb-approved study was an elementary school in a large urban district in a western state which enrolled 350 students. of these students, 52% were latino, 20% africanamerican, 12% asian, and 16% other ethnicities/no response given; 59.8% were english learners and 92.7% of students received free or reduced-price meals. the administrator was fully committed to serving learners who struggle and invited me to support these students. in addition, the students were receiving solid classroom instruction that served as a strong base for my tutoring work. participants four fourth-grade students for whom i was the assigned tutor participated in this study. prior to beginning our work together, i explained the process of tutoring and data collection to the children and their parents and obtained signed consent/assent documents from each of them. each child was reading about two years below grade level according to the critical reading inventory (cri) (applegate, quinn, & applegate, 2008) when the study began in october. this assessment tool which involved a modified miscue analysis procedure was also used to determine the readers’ particular literacy needs (e.g., comprehension, decoding, fluency). tutor-developed follow-up assessments were employed to confirm results from the cri and to track progress. while i collected and transcribed data for all the students, i selected two, sam and bella (pseudonyms), for the analysis that served as the foundation for this paper because they had very different literacy profiles, personalities, and communication styles: bella was exuberant and chatty, whereas sam was reserved. sam was a chinese-american child, recently reclassified as english proficient. he was a fluent decoder who struggled to construct meaning from what he read. bella was a mexican-american english learner. her decoding and literal comprehension skills were more than adequate, but she struggled with academic vocabulary. instructional design the instructional design reflected recommendations from the research literature. it was intended to meet individual student needs and to facilitate dialogue that was responsive and focused on meaningmaking. the design process and session protocol is outlined below (see jaeger, 2017, for a more detailed description). i incorporated four major elements in the tutoring design, all of which reflect the construct of instructional dialogicality. first, the instructional design was data-based and differentiated, allowing for dialogue specifically suited to each child (massey, 2007; timmons & morgan, 2010). an analysis of miscues and retellings from the cri helped me better understand each child’s strengths and challenges (e.g., sam decoded fluently, but struggled with comprehension, whereas bella’s low-inference comprehension was initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a8 strong, but academic vocabulary and high-inference comprehension proved difficult). an interest inventory facilitated incorporation of students’ interests. this assessment data informed the initial differentiated instruction i provided (leal, johanson, toth, & chuang, 2004). second, a stable, structure with predictable procedures—a speech genre, of sorts—supported our joint efforts to build a safe space for teaching and learning (lefstein, 2010). a typical tutoring session had two parts. for the first 30 minutes or so, we worked on the goal we had both agreed to, employing a gradual release of responsibility approach (pearson & gallagher, 1983) and a strategy-instruction model similar to that developed by baumann, jones, and seifert-kessel (1993). for example, sam and i both agreed he would benefit from work on generating predictions supported by evidence from the text. then, about 10 minutes’ time was allotted for self-selected reading. because the students did not have a regular ssr time in their classrooms, i felt it was important to provide such a time during our tutorial sessions, allowing them to integrate what they had learned in a given session while reading without interruption. tutorial sessions occurred two times per week for 40 minutes each, for a total of 30 sessions (20 hours) per child. third, the protocol was collaborative, goal-directed, and responsive. we made joint decisions about what we would work on when, how, and with what texts (turner & paris, 1995). then we discussed what “counted” as improvement in that area, set specific goals (kohn, 1993; sanacore, 1999), and estimated how long it would take to reach them. as such, these were smart goals: straightforward, measurable, attainable, relevant (to the child’s needs), and time-bound (mindtools, 2017). we regularly revisited these decisions as needed in response to evidence from the ongoing tutorial process (massey, 2007). while i established this protocol, student cooperation and general enthusiasm confirmed their willingness to engage in it, despite (or because of) the fact that these types of instructional interactions were not part of their prior experience. there were times when sam withdrew from interaction; i attribute this to his concern about being away from classroom lessons and i took care that he never missed a lesson that particularly grabbed his interest. bella questioned the structure when she wanted more time for self-select reading; on most occasions, i allowed for this change. finally, our sessions were uniformly meaning-focused (baumann, jones, & seifert, 1993; fitts & gross, 2012; massey, 2007). even when the child’s goal involved decoding or fluency, our work was contextualized in the reading of extended text. as we read together, i regularly asked whether the text, as read, made sense and, if not, what we might do so we could both understand. data collection i collected a range of data including assessments and interviews with the two students, their parents, and teachers (see jaeger, 2015, for the full interview protocol). discourse analysis of tutoring interactions is the focus for this paper, however, so the primary data source employed here is start-to-finish audio-recordings of each of our tutoring sessions, transcribed for closer analysis. these tapes provided a rich and relatively objective source of data. they allowed me to hear and analyze aspects of our interaction of which i, as the tutor, might otherwise have been unaware, and bring a critical eye to the analysis process. i consulted interview transcripts and notes taken immediately after tutoring sessions as needed to triangulate findings and shed light on aspects of the session transcripts. for example, during her fall interview, bella said that she was not a good reader; by spring, she stated that she “sounds like anyone else.” this data supported evidence of greater confidence during the tutoring sessions. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a9 data analysis informal analysis of data began immediately after the first tutoring sessions in order to facilitate decisions about lesson planning. i listened to audio within a day or two of each session and developed upcoming lesson plans based on what i heard and saw. transcription. once all tutoring sessions had ended, i formally transcribed the audio-recordings. cameron (2001) recommends that researchers follow “an approach to transcription that reflects the purposes for which the data has been collected” (p. 39). for example, if the research focus is to describe the tenor of an interaction, conversation analysis, including pauses and voice tone, would serve a crucial function (sacks, schegloff, & jefferson, 1974). transcription characteristic of conversation analysis commits the researcher to a fine-grained linguistics analysis. it was my intent to focus primarily on the content rather than the delivery of the tutoring interactions, so as to fully attend to the four aspects of bakhtin’s (1986) construct of dialogue as highlighted in the theoretical frame. to this end, i took johnstone’s (2002) advice that conversation analysis markings might, in the end, distract readers as they explored the content of the exchange. rather, i produced a word-for-word transcription, adding notes regarding: actions (e.g., reading, writes down a prediction, pauses, laughs), parts of the audio that were indecipherable, and thoughts about what might be going on (e.g., times when i felt a student might be confused). initial coding. after transcription was complete i began systematic coding which was, initially, databased (gibbs, 2007). the unit of analysis was the “conversational turn of talk” (boyd & markarian, 2015). during this open-coding process, i noted several interesting patterns in the ways in which i, as tutor, responded to student difficulty in the follow-up aspect of the irf sequence. the next step was to decide where the follow-up move actually began. attending to johnstone’s (2002) admonishment that choices about discourse boundaries have important implications, i made a strategic decision: although repetitions and discourse elements such “uh-huh” are usually coded in the discourse literature, i chose not to include these aspects in the analysis in the belief that they drew attention away from the heart of the follow-up move. in the following example, “ok, the first place . . .” rather than “which one?” was coded as the third-turn move because “colony” was the true answer to the question “any problems?” (turn 1) elizabeth: how about words on that page? any problems? bella: uh-hmm. elizabeth: which one? (turn 2) bella: colony. (turn 3) elizabeth: ok, the first place we see colony is right there and this sentence tells you what it means. during this initial round of coding, i randomly selected and reviewed 15 of the transcripts (25%), coding for follow-up moves and for the way in which the interaction ended: (a) with the student coming to an understanding of the strategy or concept with which s/he originally struggled, (b) with me offering a possible answer, or (c) by abandoning an exchange that appeared fruitless. i revisited this subset of transcripts, as well as those remaining, once codes stabilized. discourse theory and coding. the second round of coding was concept-driven (gibbs, 2007). i used terminology as defined by other discourse analysts (halliday, 1978; sinclair & coulthard, 1975; wells, 1996). these terms are defined and exemplified in table 2. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a10 table 2 discourse terms, definitions, and examples term definition example course a collection of lesson units all tutoring lessons conducted for this study lesson/session instruction in one subject (e.g., reading) on one day one tutoring session topic a part of a lesson focusing on one particular reading process objective the part of a lesson focused on inferential thinking sequence or exchange all the moves required to fulfill, or abandon, the expectations set up by the initiating move reading a segment of text, discussing its content, and inferring from that segment move/turn a contribution to an exchange made by a participant in a single utterance initiation move: tutor’s question (e.g., do you have a prediction there?) response move: child’s reply (e.g., i think he will tell his friend the truth.) follow-up move: tutor’s next move (e.g., what makes you think that?) codes and categories were justified in three of the ways delineated by constas (1992): (a) rational (have a logical, usually hierarchical, relationship), (b) referential (employed by other researchers), and (c) empirical (exhaustive and mutually exclusive). listed in order of less to more interventionist, the categories were: moving to a new sub-topic, asking questions, providing information, and teaching. these codes, described in detail in table 3, were employed to answer all of the research questions. it should be noted here that, while the overarching categories (e.g., information) emphasized the form of turns, the codes themselves (e.g., visual information) are distinguished by content as well. this focus on content forms the link between traditional discourse analysis and dialogic theory. table 3 codebook of dialogic moves code definition example(s) moving on ma moving on after acknowledgement after a child’s adequate response: “ah, ok.” maf moving on, failure to acknowledge after child’s inadequate response: “ok” –ortutor just continues to read aloud question qr question: repeat or paraphrase after asking “what if the warm water gets up there and the cold air comes in?” and the child’s inadequate response: “it’s warm when it goes up, but when the cold air comes in, what happens?” initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a11 qn question: narrow it after asking “any inference there?” and child’s inadequate response: “any idea why he might not look happy?” qc question: clarification requested from child after the child talks about a character she (erroneously) believes to be a daughter: “what is the ‘her daughter’ part?” information ig information—general when child thinks a pilot is a plane: “it’s a type of person.” ie information—example when child cannot think of an emotion: “well, one example is angry.” iv information—visual “i bet you can find it right here in the picture.” ic information—context “it turns back into . . .” teach ts teach—demonstrates/ discusses strategy use “so, let’s try reading ahead.” -ortutor re-reads section for child tt teach—telling an answer tutor asks, “do you know what surface means?” child replies, “it’s high up.” tutor says, “when surface water is frozen, water on top is frozen.” -orchild asks if she can read aloud and tutor says she can to answer rq 2, outcomes at the end of a sequence were coded for level of success, with “success” defined as approximating the answer to a closed initiation or responding in a reasonable way to an open-ended initiation. these supplementary codes reflecting sequence outcome were added to the primary codes when they fell at the end of an exchange: • (es) = interaction comes to successful conclusion • (et) = tutor provides answer after additional moves • (eu) = difficulty remains unresolved i was interested in the variation among moves within longer sequences: sequences that, i believe, provided a more valid assessment of the nature of the dialogue than three-move exchanges. i calculated variation in two ways. • to figure overall variety, i compared the number of move types within a sequence and the possible number of types of moves; so, if there were two qr codes, two ts codes, and one tt code in a sequence, the ratio would be 3/5 or .6. • to figure alternation variety, i compared the potential and actual shifts between each tutor move and the ones preceding and following it. if the exchange included seven moves, there would be at least two possibilities for variety, one between move 3 and move 5 and one between move 5 and move 7. if move 3 was a narrower question (qn), move 5 was another narrower question, and move 7 was providing visual information (ic), the potential move initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a12 changes were three but the actual changes were only two and the variation ratio was .67. • to answer rq 3, excerpts from the articles included in the literature review were coded in the same way. trustworthiness. threats to validity and reliability were mitigated by intensive involvement at the research site over the course of a full school year, audio-recording and transcription of 40 hours of tutoring time, a systematic search for discrepant evidence (in this case, attending to both more and less successful interactions), the use of frequency counts and percentages to insure that quoted excerpts were representative of the data corpus as a whole, and comparison between collected data and that from similar studies in the research literature. reliability was established via both intraand inter-rater coding. as recommended by hedin and gaffney (2013), 25% of the tutoring sequences were randomly selected and recoded after a week’s delay; intra-rater reliability was .99. an additional 25% were also selected at random and re-coded by a trained graduate student, resulting in inter-rater reliability of .91. these supports for validity and reliability added to the trustworthiness of the findings obtained. findings and discussion findings for the three research questions are presented in this section. each claim is supported by excerpts from the transcribed data and, in the case of rq 3, from the tutoring dialogue reported in the reviewed research literature. i employed four criteria when selecting quotes that would best serve my analytic focus (jacob, 1987): (a) first and foremost, the excerpts were reflective of the data as a whole; (b) on average, quotes included approximately five moves which was the mean for all sequences in the data; (c) on the other hand, the excerpts were long enough to capture the essence of each interaction; and (d) the number of quotes selected from each child is similar. findings from the three research questions reflect bakhtin’s (1986) construct of dialogue. the tutoring i conducted for this study exhibited all aspects of this construct (rq1). the instructional interactions served as a form of speech genre in that the types of moves were finite—only ten in number—and nearly all sequences were three to nine moves in length. the exchanges were, by definition, responsive; until the beginning of a new sequence, each partner replied directly to the other’s question or comment. because the analysis process focused on response to student difficulty, our interactions included an inherent tension, and disagreements about these difficulties surfaced in the interactions. most importantly, efforts at meaningmaking drove all our work together. many of these exchanges ended successfully (rq 2). sequences from studies in the literature tended to be less dialogic than those in the study described here (rq 3). what are the characteristics of dialogue occurring in the tutoring sessions? across the tutoring interactions from this study, commonalities existed among third-turn and later moves, sequence lengths, and turn variety. nevertheless, there were differences between interactions with the two students. third-turn and later moves. third-turn and later moves varied depending on the type of move found in the first-turn position; this finding highlights their responsive quality. when first-turn moves were relatively broad in scope (e.g., during a story in which mysterious noises frightened the main character, “do you have a [personal] connection to that part?”), follow-up questions were often narrower (qn) (e.g., “have you ever heard strange noises and not known what they were?). this quality served the meaning-driven objective of the exchange. providing an answer for the child (tt) was more common than i might have hoped, but this practice served to advance the dialogue at points where earlier moves had been less effective and becoming bogged down in detail was a clear risk. on the other hand, given that increased strategy awareness and use was a major goal for the tutoring project, additional strategy demonstrations— initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a13 or more frequently asking the child what strategy was appropriate for a given situation—might have increased the likelihood that the child would have achieved the goal with less direct help. repeated/paraphrased questions (qr) were much more common in move 5 or higher (51 versus 12 instances in move 3). they were typically employed after information was provided, allowing the child to return to the same or similar question with new knowledge. except for the maf move (no verbal acknowledgement—moving on in the sequence—4%), third move responses were relatively balanced. offering the child further information (“this is an example of not a confusing word but a confusing idea.”) accounted for 28% of responses, followed by asking a follow-up question (“so, how does egg sack relate to the word mate?”—25%), providing an answer (“it’s a kind of knife.”—22%), and demonstrating/ commenting on strategy use (“let’s read to the end of the sentence.”— 21%). among information types, general verbal information predominated and narrowing questions were more common than other types of questions (see table 5). the balanced nature of these follow-up moves reflects wegerif’s (2011) assertion that “in lived reality we experience a continuum between more monologic and more dialogic voices” (p. 188). an example of the former would be providing an answer and of the latter asking the student to clarify her/his remarks before proceeding. table 5 frequency of third moves ma(f) qr qn qc ig ie iv ic ts tt 4% 6% 17% 2% 17% 3% 5% 3% 21% 22% sequence length. in a nod to the genre-driven aspect of dialogue, the average number of moves per sequence was 4.8, with a range of 3 to 15. that is, a typical sequence consisted of a tutor or child initiation, followed by a response, a follow-up, another response, and a final follow-up. by the end of the sequence, the student offered an appropriate response, the tutor provided a possible answer, or the conversation was abandoned. the 4.8 figure contrasts quite dramatically with that found by cromley (2005), the only other researcher who measured numbers of moves. she found an average of 19.6 moves in response to student difficulty, but this difference may be due to the fact that the tutors in cromley’s research were working with adults who were, potentially, more reflective and communicative than the fourth graders in this study. sequence variety. when measured in two different ways, interactions had high rates of variety, further evidence of responsivity. first, moves varied across sequences. it was unusual to see one type of move repeated over and over. when comparing the actual to the possible level of variety across moves (explained in more detail in the method section), the mean rate of overall variation was .67; that is, if a sequence involved three tutor moves, it was uncommon for more than two to be of the same type. second, frequent changes occurred from move to move. the mean number of changes across sequences was .79; in other words, when shifting from one tutor move to the next, 79% of the time, on average, the next move was of a different type than the previous move. it was highly unlikely that the child would be, for example, asked one narrow question after another. this excerpt is an example of a high-variety sequence in which bella recognized the lack of helpful context for a word she wanted to learn: elizabeth: (implied first move)3 are you having any trouble? 3 for purposes of this analysis, the tutor always has the odd and the child the even turns. in this system, when the child initiates there is always an implied first move—generally the primary focus for the sequence. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a14 bella: i don’t know what aphids (are). elizabeth: let’s keep going to the end of the sentence. (move 3—ts) bella: [reads on] elizabeth: so if we say aphids (are kept) the way human farmers keep cows, does that tell you what an aphid is? (move 5—ig and then qr) bella: i don’t know. elizabeth: right, it doesn’t. so, let’s go back and try re-reading. (move 7—ts) bella: [re-reads] elizabeth: so, an aphid is . . . (move 9—ic) bella: [pause] an insect. in this sequence, tutor moves shifted from strategy demonstration to general information, paraphrased question, strategy demonstration, and providing sentence context. thus, the sequence exhibited a more conversational tone than would have been the case if tutor moves were less varied (see negative examples in the findings section for the third research question). variations by student. my third-turn and ensuing moves differed in response to each student’s needs. it was more common for me to provide bella with an answer after she expressed confusion than was the case for sam (28% of the time as compared to 16%). it is likely that i responded in this way because she struggled more with academic vocabulary, both on the cri and in our ongoing work together; when vocabulary was the focus of our work, our conversations went on at greater length, but at other times, helping her with a word meaning allowed her to focus on the topic at hand. for example: elizabeth: (implied first move) any words you are struggling with? bella: [reads] clouds sweep across the sky. clouds sweep? elizabeth: because there’s nobody sweeping, is there? it just means moving. (move 3— ig and then tt) note: the primary instructional focus at this point was reading to [dis]confirm prior knowledge, rather than vocabulary; as such, providing an answer to a word meaning query seemed appropriate. with an alternative meaning for sweep in hand, bella could grasp the remainder of the description. connecting personal experiences to the text he was reading was an area of focus for sam but not for bella. this finding may explain why narrow questions, used to focus his thinking, and non-responses, signaling that further discussion would not be beneficial, were more common in my follow-ups with sam than with bella. for example, this sequence in which a more specific question assisted him to access prior experience: elizabeth: is there anything in the story that reminds you of something in your own life? sam: . . . no. elizabeth: has there ever been something that you should have known that no one told you about . . . like they kept a secret from you? (move 3—qn) sam: my friend he kept the secret that he was going to move? the success sam achieved in this sequence allowed him to better understand the motivations of the character in the story he was reading. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a15 the two children also differed somewhat in the average length of interactional sequence. bella, a more talkative child, averaged 5.2 moves per sequence. sam, on the other hand, was more reserved and averaged 4.2. as he warmed to our work together, however, sam—like the child in almazrouhi’s (2007) study—became more communicative. his average sequence length during the first half of our lessons was 3.7 turns; this number rose to 4.9 in the second half. the following two sequences demonstrate the difference in our interactions over time: from lesson 4: elizabeth: what makes you think that (the ghost would appear)? sam: uh, because i think the ghost was hiding somewhere else. elizabeth: ah, ok [writes down his response before moving on] (move 3—ma) from lesson 24: elizabeth: how do you think they know that the moon was once part of earth? sam: . . . i don’t know. elizabeth: well, let’s say i hit the bottom of my shoe with a knife and a chunk flew off [demonstrates]. that’s kind of what happened with the moon, right? how would we know that that chunk was once part of my shoe? (move 3—iv and then ig and then qn) sam: uh, because it got off your shoe? elizabeth: ok, but let’s say all we had was the shoe and my chunk? how would we know that that chunk was once part of my shoe? (move 5—qn and then another qn) sam: because it’s made of your shoe? in seeking an answer to the first research question, i found that follow-ups, at the third-turn juncture and beyond, were both varied and relatively balanced. on average, sequences lasted about five turns, and it was unusual for moves to be repeated over and over. these findings should inform the crafting of instructional sequences. nevertheless, follow-ups differed somewhat by child and by area of focus, as did mean sequence length, so it is also important to vary those sequences as needed to meet the needs of individual students. for example, more “telling” might be appropriate for a child who is working to strengthen academic vocabulary and probing questions for less expressive students. interactions in our tutoring sessions reflected instructional dialogicality. on one hand, they demonstrated the overall predictability characteristic of a speech genre and this quality provided a dependable framework for learning. although our conversations demonstrated variety, certain kinds of exchanges—question-after-question-after-question sequences, for example—did not occur. likewise, the students’ overall attentiveness evidenced, i believe, their sense that i was there to listen to them and respond accordingly, even (maybe especially) when tension around the difficulty they were experiencing occurred. teachers and researchers often view vulnerable readers as a monolithic group (buly & valencia, 2002) and this attitude undermines their progress. sam and bella were very different children and responsiveness to those differences supported their growth in the tutorial setting. finally, the meaningdriven nature of our work together offered an approach to reading that focused on understanding texts at deep levels rather than overemphasizing mastery of isolated skills as is common in many tutoring contexts (samson, hines, & li, 2015); this is a key piece in grasping why our collaboration was productive. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a16 in what ways are dialogue characteristics linked to more and less successful instructional sequences? some tutoring sequences were more successful than others. a sequence was considered successful if, for example, the child figured out the meaning of an unknown word, generated a reasonable inference, employed a helpful reading strategy, offered a prediction or an opinion, or logically justified those responses. a less successful sequence ended when i provided an answer for the child or went on to another sequence, leaving the discussion unresolved. the length of interactional sequences and the type of third-turn move seemed to affect the likelihood of end-of-exchange success. too few (three moves) or too many (13 or more moves) were less likely to end successfully. overall, follow-up questions were more likely, and providing further information was less likely, to lead to success. differences existed, however, between the two children. for bella, providing examples and visuals (e.g., referencing pictures in the text) and asking her to clarify comments i failed to understand was particularly helpful. sam was most responsive to follow-up questions, especially those reflecting a movement from a more abstract initial move (e.g., does this part remind you of something?) to more concrete one (e.g., have you ever . . .?). but a key calculation called the import of end-of-sequence success into question. only 51% of tutoring sequences ended with students coming to a reasonable conclusion on their own. this finding was surprising given that both children made over two year’s growth on the cri (jaeger, 2017). predictably, students experienced the least success during sequences addressing their areas of greatest challenge. for example, sam’s success rate in sequences dealing with comprehension monitoring, his greatest challenge, were at 28% as compared with 55% overall. including work with topics that came more easily (e.g., distinguishing important information for bella and generating opinions for sam) was important, but it would have been inappropriate to abandon work in areas of greater challenge to produce a higher sequence success rate, because it was in these moments of struggle that we built meaning together. some of our most valuable interactions, like that below, ended with a telling (tt) move; in fact, awareness that there are times when seeking information elsewhere is a necessary choice was the intent of this conversation: elizabeth: what is a rodent? bella: is these baby rodents? elizabeth: those are rodents. let me give you, let me draw you one of my little diagrams here [draws a concentric circle diagram]. so, here’s capybaras (in the inner circle) and here’s rodents (in the outer circle). all capybaras are rodents. (move 3—ig and then iv and then ig) bella: all. elizabeth: uh-hmm. just like all dogs are mammals. every dog is also a mammal, but is every mammal a dog? (move 5—ig and then qn) bella: no. elizabeth: but there’s nothing (in the text) that tells us what a rodent is and it doesn’t work to skip it. so, this is a time that if you needed the meaning of that (rodents) you’d just have to get help. a rodent is an animal that chews on things like mice, rats, rabbits—those are the ones i can think of. (move 7— ig and then ts and then tt) in this example, absent helpful context clues, we worked hard together to co-construct a potential meaning. i provided the specific word meaning not evident in the text. initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a17 some conclusions can be drawn about which types of interactions were most beneficial. sequences of moderate length were more likely to end successfully than short or long ones. i infer that a brief sequence of interactions failed to allow for the extensive thought necessary to come to a reasoned conclusion, whereas it was difficult for students to follow the chain of thought in a very long sequence; both types of sequences, then, interfered with collaborative meaning-making. in general, follow-up questions were the most effective third-turn move, likely because these questions prompted students to think more carefully about their initial responses. the two students differed as to which third-turn moves seemed more effective. bella made best use of visuals and examples. this preference is likely to be related to her vocabulary challenges, as defining new words might benefit most from these types of moves. sam benefitted most from questions, especially those that were narrower and more concrete than the initial move had been; these turns were most likely to push him toward an understanding of the text, his greatest challenge. in the end, however, the concept of “sequence success” had less explanatory power than expected. i came to understand that the result of any individual sequence was not crucial. of course, repeated lack of success at the sequence level would have undermined morale, but the children rarely demonstrated frustration and remained engaged and motivated in the face of “failure.” that is, the tension in our dialogue did not seem to bother them. even if unsuccessful by traditional standards, our responsive instructional conversations facilitated deeper understanding, the primary purpose of the tutoring. in what ways is the instructional context and the dialogue that characterizes the tutoring sessions studied similar to and different from that exhibited in the reviewed theoretical and research literature? similarities. the protocol for this study reflected both theoretical and research literature. it was designed to explicitly acknowledge the tension resulting from the power differential between tutor and student (bakhtin, 1986)—and including efforts to diminish that differential by co-developing lesson content—with the intent to foster student agency. for example, we co-selected texts for the instructional sequence and the children chose the texts they wished to read during self-select reading time (dawes, 2007). instruction was differentiated based on initial and follow-up assessments (herppich, witwer, nuckles, & renkl, 2016). listening to lesson audio immediately after each session, allowed for self-critique and self-correction in my practice (boyd & markarian, 2015). it appeared that the enacted curriculum largely reflected the plan’s intent. there is evidence in the data for many of the instructional aspects which boyd and markarian (2015) argue are part of what they term the dialogic stance. as evidenced from tutorial excerpts: • within the irf sequence that characterized the dialogue, most was co-constructed (with sam on p. 14; wells, 1999) • chains of questions and answers led to responsive interactions (with bella on p. 13; alexander, 2004) • follow-up moves ranged from silence (p. 21; edwards, 1992) to asking additional questions (with sam on p. 14; boyd, 2015) to providing hints (with bella on p. 15; mercer, 2004) differences. important differences exist between the excerpts included in the studies cited in the tutoring literature and those found in data from the current study. in the study described here, third-turn moves were more closely balanced (see table 6). “telling” moves appeared less facilitative than others and one might imagine that a lower percentage of such moves would be ideal; but, when used in moderation (as was the case in this study), they were useful. this finding was particularly true in the case of word meanings (chazan & ball, 1999) which were, along with literal comprehension, the topics in which i initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a18 employed telling most frequently. in the case of the reviewed literature, moves were less balanced, with asking questions and providing information predominating. table 6 percentages of third-turn moves in current study and research literature questions information strategy instruction telling an answer moving on w/out closure current study 25% 28% 21% 22% 4% literature 39% 32% 18% 11% 0% further, although the amount of change from move to move was similar (.79 in this study as compared with .75 in the literature) the overall variety differed (.67 in this study and .54 in other research). in other words, in the study described here, only about one-third of the moves in a given sequence were repeated again in that sequence; about half of the moves were repeated in studies described in the research literature (see the method section for more detailed explanations). these repeated follow-up moves resulted in discourse that read more like an interrogation, as is the case in this excerpt from a tutor in newcomer’s (2010) study: volunteer: what are these called [pointing to the picture]? do you know? student: channels. volunteer: they could be . . . but what is this channel called? student: canals. volunteer: that’s right, but where would you see canals? student: france. volunteer: where is another place you would see canals? student: it’s venice. volunteer: that’s right. you’re on today, you’re on. in this exchange, the student exhibited an understanding of isolated facts, but did not experience actual dialogue. the primary goal of the study reported here was to cultivate strategy use leading to more thoughtful reading. the ratio of closed to total interactions (.68) appeared to emphasize the former over the latter and the overall tutoring process would, no doubt, have been improved by including more open-ended and responsive discussions. this imbalance was, however, more extreme in the reviewed literature: 85% of sequences were closed interactions, with only one excerpt focusing on predicting and three on formulating opinions. typical were interactions such as the following from hedin and gaffney (2013), consisting of one closed question after another (line structure changed to fit my analytic model): ms. hester: can you explain what the phases of the moon are? marcus: [30 second pause] ms. hester: what would be a different word than phases that you could use there? marcus: rotate? ms. hester: could it be rotate of the moon? marcus: [15 second pause] ms. hester: which would work better, the rotate of the moon, or the shapes of the moon? initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a19 marcus: shapes. in comparing the study described here to those in the tutoring literature, two major differences emerged. first, moves in this study exhibited greater variety, whereas excerpts from the literature often had an inquisitional quality to them. the interaction quoted above between student and volunteer is a prime example of a constraining speech genre which undermined any responsiveness that might have occurred. despite the tutor’s concluding praise, the student’s single-word replies seemed to exhibit an unproductive tension. second, open exchanges were more evident in this study than in the reviewed literature. as was the case in the exchange between marcus and ms. hestor, there was no room here for inference, interpretation, or creative exploration, but plenty of unresolved tension. in combination, the tutoring interactions with bella and sam exhibited a more meaning-driven, responsive, and conversational tone. conclusion the research literature describes successful tutoring protocols. such protocols typically involve the collection and application of student data, collaborative text selection, and use of mediational tools. nevertheless, researchers have failed to analyze, in any substantive and systematic way, instructional conversations occurring during tutor-tutee interactions—the gap addressed in this paper. absent from the literature are studies including an analysis—employing frequency counts to insure accurate representation—of a full corpus of tutoring transcripts, as well as studies accounting for student differences and the affect these differences have on tutor-tutee interactions. as a result, readers of such research may struggle to gain a clear sense of what these conversations sound like and to craft future interactions more effectively. framed by the bakhtinian (1986) construct of dialogue, this paper describes an analysis of instructional interactions during tutoring, specifically those occurring in response to student difficulty. consistent with traditional discourse analysis procedures, i analyzed forms of interaction (e.g., providing information). to more clearly connect to the construct of dialogue—and to resolve the tension between the sometimes problematic tri-fold discourse pattern and the theory of dialogic stance—the content of such forms (e.g., providing visual information) was also addressed. i argue that these exchanges exemplified key aspects of dialogue: they were genre-based, responsive, tension-laden, and meaning-driven. as such, the interactions supported two vulnerable readers as they constructed meaning from text. due to the ccss’s higher achievement expectations, more and more students will require tutoring if they are to meet those expectations. the merit of the study lies in the way it presents a detailed picture of instructional dialogue, a picture that aids in the development of more valuable tutoring practices for a range of students. in fulfilling this purpose and defending this argument, the study contributes several findings to the literature. in the model presented here of a tutoring protocol resulting in strong gains for the children who participated, moves that came as follow-ups to the child’s initial response—acknowledgement of student response (or lack of same), questions, information, strategy demonstrations/discussion, and provision of a possible answer—varied based on the first-turn move; for example, initially broad questions tended to precipitate narrower questions after the child struggled to respond. other than continuing with no response, the frequency of moves was nearly equal. the average number of moves within a single sequence was approximately five; in most cases, it did not take long to resolve our discussion or, if conversation stalled, to move on. when looking across the whole range of moves making up a sequence, i discovered considerable variety; it was uncommon for a child to be peppered with question after question or provided with more information than s/he could constructively employ; thus, the interactions took on the flavor of initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a20 dialogue. as tutor, i tended to reply to each child’s response in different ways: typically, questions for sam and information for bella. because just over half of all sequences ended with the child coming to an appropriate resolution—or, in many cases, one of several appropriate resolutions—it seems that finding the perfect way to react to a child’s comment is less crucial than expected. attending carefully and replying in ways reflecting interest and attention appear more important. this conclusion confirms newcomer’s (2010) finding that students whose tutors varied their replies to students’ statements achieved stronger comprehension gains. in comparison to the tutoring excerpts found in the research literature, those in this study were more varied, more balanced, and more open in orientation. gee (2011) recommends an approach to discourse analysis that looks at the narrative of a given setting; he suggests, “for any communication, we want to ask what typical stories . . . the words and phrases of the communication are assuming and inviting listeners to assume” (p. 171). the instructional context most evident as one reads the research literature is one in which tutors unilaterally decide what is studied and how. such environments diminish student agency and may lead to a passive reader identity. they exhibit a limited range of follow-up moves, falling into a sort of tutoring script rather than responding intentionally to what children say in the moment. almost without exception, interactions progress, without wavering, toward a pre-determined outcome with little room for inference, opinion, or personal connection. it is as if the fact that children are struggling with the so-called “basics” supersedes any notion that they might have something interesting to say. the instructional context embraced by this study is, by and large, quite different. the overarching goal of strategy use as a bridge to powerful thinking is clearly established by the tutor, but sub-goals—the ability to infer, gain word meaning from context, or offer justifiable reasons—are negotiated with students. follow-up moves, at the third-turn position and beyond, come in response to what children say and what they do not say, depending both on what the tutor hears in the moment and what s/he has come to learn about the child over time. as educators, we learn these moves from studying the instructional conversations around us. this is the tutoring “story” vulnerable readers deserve: one that supports their agency and positions them as engaged readers and conforms to a rich definition of dialogue. the study provides instances of dialogue conforming to bakhtin’s (1986) principles. the tutoring interactions reflected a speech genre of sorts. there occurred few lengthy monologues and, whereas exchanges differed by child, with bella assuming a more equitable role in the dialogue than did sam, the bits of transcripts included here exhibited a relatively conversational tone. as i spoke to the students, i often anticipated what they might say in reply— exemplifying the characteristic of addressivity—but i attempted to respond to what the child actually said, rather what i imagined s/he would say. our interactions were, at times, tension-filled. there were moments when students felt frustrated by my lack of clarity and i by their failure to assert what they knew or felt, but this tension was often generative. students could surface confusion and expect me to allay that confusion—either by answering questions directly if they were stymied or leading them down a path intended to support them in finding answers of their own. these interactions serve as evidence of collaborative meaning-making. limitations these findings are limited in several ways. first, and foremost, tutoring sessions for only two participants were reviewed for this study and, as such, findings remain exploratory rather than readily generalizable. second, there are limitations associated with my dual role as both tutor and researcher and, as a result, the need to depend heavily on audio-recordings for data analysis. although these recordings were useful, they captured only language-based exchanges; i attempted to take notes about facial expressions and body language but my ability to do so was limited. as such, i certainly missed some of the initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a21 nuances of these interactions, nuances that might affect study findings. on the other hand, i brought to tutoring a wealth of experience helping vulnerable readers: experiences that allowed me to design a protocol which built on students’ strengths and supported their agency as learners. in the end, i decided that conducting the tutoring myself was the best choice. the remaining limitations reflect coding decisions. i might also have: • analyzed the role of silence in the tutoring interactions. as johnstone (2002) noted, “the worlds that shape and are shaped in discourse involve absences as well as presences. noticing silences, things that are not present, is more difficult than noticing things that are present, but it is equally important” (p. 58). when given time, students often came around to an answer that worked for both of us. in fact, a full 15% of appropriate student responses immediately followed substantive pauses in the interaction. a further analysis of the link between silence and other moves would, no doubt, have offered deeper insight. • explored more fully the role of power dynamics. this is a concern because, as lefstein (2010) noted, “power relations are implicated in all human intercourse, and . . . serve some interests while harming others” (p. 179). there was some evidence that i assumed more power than necessary, as when i interrupted a student as in the following example: bella: like they, um, my opinion is that they like to, they like elizabeth: who’s they? the kids? or rejected a response, in a way which may have served to dominate as well as to correct (razfar, 2005): bella: a tide is like there’s a little hole and there’s water in it? elizabeth: nope, let’s see. three approaches appeared to foster a more equal and collaborative relationship. the first involved employing more tentative language. rather than agreeing or disagreeing forcefully, i said, “in a way,” after a not fully accurate response. another approach involved the use of supportive language. this response took the form of acknowledging difficulty—“that is a challenging word.” finishing my sentences with, for example, “right?” or “ok?” was a third approach that prompted the students to self-assess their understanding or evaluate the text they were reading. but whether these moves affected the inherent power differential in any substantive way remains unknown. • coded specifically for tutor or student emotions. there were times when i expressed frustration and children showed evidence of lethargy or delight. occasionally, students said or did something wholly unexpected such as the day bella requested that we read more difficult books or usually-solemn sam laughed so hard during a retelling that he had to take time to compose himself before moving forward. implications despite these limitations, the findings reported here have potential implications for theory, practice and research. to my knowledge, this is the first time the theoretical construct of instructional dialogicality has been employed to frame a tutoring study. what dialogue theory brings to tutoring research is a focus on the less tangible aspects of interaction in the tutoring context. without doubt, the content of this intervention was important, but dialogue theory also considers (a) the structures of linguistic interaction; (b) the way in which speakers not only respond to what others say but also “take into account how they think initiation, response, follow-up and beyond elizabeth jaeger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.195 | vol. 7 (2019) a22 other people are going to respond to them” (wegerif, 2008); (c) the expression of tension, and (d) the drive for collaborative meaning-making. these are the aspects that surface in an analysis of tutoring discourse. there are also implications for practice. all else being equal, it behooves a tutor to consider a question or strategy demonstration as the first line of response to student difficulty because these replies tended to lead to more productive dialogue than did providing information. ensuing turns should demonstrate both variety and balance; any effort to avoid doing one thing over and over—questioning, information giving, or modeling—is worth the extra effort. it is also important to consider that, under some circumstances such as dealing with an unknown vocabulary word, simply providing the student with an answer and moving on is the best approach; lengthening dialogue sequences as an attempt to avoid “telling” may be counter-productive. maintaining positive morale is a worthy goal, but, as evidenced by the excerpts included here, a balance of more and less successful instructional sequences appears adequate; alternating work on more and less challenging topics may prove effective. because individual children respond differently to different moves, learning as much as possible about the child is beneficial. bella, for example, was well-tuned to the physical environment around her, so it was no surprise that she responded especially well to visual cues. regarding teacher education, providing pre-service and practicing teachers with tutoring opportunities and feedback—as occurred in the study by timmons and morgan (2010)—will support teachers in crafting productive interactions with students. finally, there are implications for future research. this study presents, of course, only half of the picture of tutor/student interaction. analysis of data on response to student success would supplement that on student difficulty; tutors need to understand what moves occurring after an effective and/or interesting response from the child are most likely to further rich discussion. as noted in the limitations section, i did not investigate evidence of power dynamics. such an investigation would contribute to the critical discourse analysis literature, as well as exploring this important aspect of the tutoring relationship. a replication study might include video-recordings of tutoring sessions so that body language and other non-linguistic forms of communication could be analyzed. finally, future research might investigate the effects of teaching tutors to analyze audioor video-recordings of their tutoring sessions, selecting one area of improvement they wish to work on, and noting the apparent influence of those changes on the relationships they build with the children they serve. as wells (1996) argues, when teachers are aware of the dialogues in which they participate, they can change instruction for the better. references alexander, r. 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(1992). teaching talk. in k. norman (ed.), thinking voices: the work of the national oracy project (pp. 203-214). london, uk: hodder and stoughton for the national curriculum council. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. forced choices (layout) dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a1     forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax1 david kellogg hankuk university of foreign studies, republic of korea abstract we begin with the observation that some korean elementary school children in english class, confined to a single situation and even a single language exponent in a role play, appear to produce far more coherent dialogue than the previous week when they were allowed completely free choices in language. we note that at the same time as their dialogue becomes longer, their sentences become shorter (tall and thinner on the printed page), and we suggest that the grammatical complexity is consciously unpacked as discourse complexity. when we turn to a large corpus of longitudinal and cross sectional data, we see, however, that “thinner” dialogue with short utterances is not always more creative, at least not grammatically. we see that the children are deliberately and consciously choosing more elliptical and less creative expressions when they speak. we generalize from this data to show that the problem is no mere artifact of the data sample. we theorize from this generalization to show that the development of the child’s free will in syntax is related to a long chain of such constraints, leading from instincts to habits to intelligent choices oriented toward the immediate environment to acts of free will which are genuinely voluntary and which admit no sovereign but the child’s developing self. indeed, we shall argue that the exercise of this sovereignty is precisely how the child develops a self in the first place. keywords: dialogue; syntax; self david kellogg is an associate professor at the graduate school of tesol in hankuk university of foreign studies, where he teaches research methods, thesis writing, and a class on narrative and discourse on story-telling. he is currently involved in issuing the collected works of vygotsky in the korean language. his publications include more than two dozen articles in academic journals, including modern language journal, applied linguistics, language teaching research, language and education, language awareness, and psyanima psychological journal. his forthcoming book, on sense publications, is "the great globe and all who it inherit", a book on narrative, discourse and story-telling. 1 this research was made possible by a grant from the hankuk university of foreign studies research fund, 2014. issn: 2325-3290 (online) forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a2 a paradox our problem, even if it were not very familiar to teachers already, is easily stated in numbers. we take an english book from a korean classroom. we divide each dialogue into “utterances”, defined, as bakhtin would define them, as the stretches of dialogue between the moments when the speaker becomes the hearer (1986, p. 63). we then count the number of words in each utterance, and we find that the mean length of the utterance in each lesson increases on the average .5 words per year, from 3.2 words per utterance in third grade to 4.0 words per utterance in fifth grade. yet when we actually talk to the children, we find a curious paradox. on the one hand, they grow more and more reliant on the textbook for fixed phrases as they age. this ought to make their utterances longer and longer. but on the other, we find them growing more and more laconic in replies. in some cases, syntax disappears, and the child will say very little beyond “yes”, “no” and perhaps “fine-thanks-and-how-are-you”. in this paper, we shall explain this paradox and consider some solutions to this problem of disappearing syntax. we begin with two short extracts that show the children using “free choices” in improvising a dialogue and “forced choices” where they are constrained to use a single setting, a single set of characters, and even a single communicative function. in the former extract, the children do little but remember, and remember little but titles of lessons and other fixed phrases from their textbook. in the latter, there is much more creativity and imagination—but there are also much shorter and less accurate utterances. so, as we shall see, the solution to the problem of disappearing syntax cannot simply be more freedom of choice—there must, instead, be a concerted effort to seize power over the very system of constraint. a one-week miracle? consider the following class of children studying english in third grade in a seoul public school. two forty-minute lessons a week are required by the state syllabus, which at the time that the data was gathered, also designated a single textbook for the whole country, with an accompanying manual stipulating how lessons are to be conducted. each lesson has a graduated set of activities from “look and listen”, to “listen and repeat”, to “let’s sing/chant”, culminating in “let’s play” (usually a rule based game) or “let’s role play” (based on an imaginary situation). the activity from which the data is drawn is a combination of the last two. the children are placed into teams, and the teacher places an imaginary volleyball net down the middle of the class. each "volleyball team” takes on an imaginary persona from the textbook, and they take turns volunteering utterances, which are then written, by the teacher, on the board. teams score points when the other team makes an error or when the other team “drops the ball” by not being able to come up with a rejoinder before the count of three (for more details on this game, see kwon and kellogg, 2005). here, the team names are “minsu” and “mina”, two korean siblings from the “look and listen” exercise in the textbook. the children are completely free to use any language they know, and they can make up the content of the imaginary characters as they go along. the lesson is recorded using a voice recorder carried by the teacher, and the white board is photographed using a digital camera after it is filled up. minsu: can you fly? mina: no, i can’t. minsu: can you skate? mina: no, i can't. minsu: what time is it? forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a3 mina: it's eleven twenty five. minsu: how many cow? (sic) mina: two cow. minsu: how old are you? mina: i'm ten. minsu: what day is it? mina: tuesday. minsu: can you ski? mina: yes, i can. (data from ms. yun huijeong) why doesn’t minsu know how old his sister is? why, for that matter, doesn’t he know whether or not his sister can skate or fly? the apparently mysterious lack of sibling familiarity is easy to explain. what the children are really doing is neither playing a game nor doing a role play, but reciting the titles and kernel dialogues of almost all of their previous lessons and some of the upcoming ones: “how many cows?”, “how old are you?”, “what time is it?”, and the lesson of the week, which is “can you swim?” now consider the following, recorded just one week later. here the children are forced to use a single situation (the week’s lesson) and even a single language exponent (“put on your [article of clothing]”). on the other hand, they have been given more discretion in determining the roles. so they have decided that minsu is an older brother rather than a younger one, and that mina, the little sister, is attracted to a boy in her class and wants to show off how slim she is. minsu, already somewhat inclined to sartorial conservatism and somewhat protective, would rather she cover up. minsu: put on your coat. mina: no. minsu: outside, cold! (i.e. “it’s cold outside.”) mina: no! minsu: what! mina: i'm sorry. minsu: put on your glove. (sic) mina: yes. minsu: put on your cap. mina: too big. minsu: put on your sweater. mina: too small. minsu (holding up a beautiful scarf): put on your scarf. mina: yes, please! minsu: put on your pants. mina: no, i'm skirt. (i.e. “i want to wear a skirt.”) minsu: you, inside, play! (i.e. “you must stay inside and play and cannot go out.”) mina: no! (data from ms. yun huijeong) the incoherence has all but disappeared. every utterance now appears well motivated and contributes to the developing imaginary situation: at each point it is clear who is saying what to whom and why. we can’t attribute this to a miraculous one week increase in english proficiency—not least because a lot of the grammatical well-formedness has disappeared along with the pointlessness. what appears to have occurred is in some ways far more miraculous: instead of precision and grammatical accuracy (“it’s eleven twenty-five”) we have relevance and cogency (“outside, cold!”). where once there was clausal elaboration (“how old are you?”), we now have what vygotsky would call purely predicative speech (“too forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a4 small!”). negation plays a less prominent grammatical but a more prominent pragmatic role (“no!” in lieu of “no, i can’t”). in sum, the sentences have become shorter and the dialogue itself has become longer—that is, the intra-utterance grammatical complexity, which was never fully internalized by the children as meaning, has been unpacked as inter-utterance discourse complexity. only then can it be folded back into wordings and even sound that are meaningful to the child, and only when this has been done can the wording and sounding be taken for granted, and the whole episode compressed into the now verbalized word meaning “put on your….” we may easily imagine that henceforth the child’s inner voice may lend a somewhat gruff note to this particular utterance. the problem of disappearing syntax alongside this beautiful picture of the unpacking of meaning as dialogue, we need to look at some baffling, and even terrifying, statistics. we collected texts created by students when they improvised (totaling 1,745 turns) and compared them with the texts created when they simply repeated textbook dialogues (totaling 399 turns). consent was obtained and data duly recorded from third, fourth, and fifth grade classes for comparison, and then data was taken from every fifth grade class for a whole year. the data was then transcribed. using a t-test, we found that the textbook dialogues tended to have longer utterances (a mean of 3.6792 words vs. 2.8487 for the improvised dialogues, significant at the level p < .001). improvised dialogues, on the other hand, had a significantly higher proportion of closed class functor words (e.g. “this” and “your”) to total words (“is this your cap?”). this difference (.6224 vs. .5876) was also significant at the p < .05 level. cohen’s d was 0.30703, which is considered a small or medium effect size. the table below shows the mean length in words per utterance and the standard deviations by grade (df = 398). table 1 grade mean length in words per utterance n standard deviation 3 3.1705 346 1.1831 4 2.8828 273 1.4249 5 2.7416 1126 1.5921 (data courtesy of ms. yun huijeong, gathered in the years 2007-2009). we now return to the transcripts with a qualitative eye. in our subsequent discussion of the transcripts, we take as our definition of “creativity” the ability to say things that the child has never heard before: creative utterances are utterances, which do not appear in the textbook or in the recorded transcript of the lesson. we immediately notice that there is a decrease in the kind of variations on the textbook language and creative constructions that we saw in our second dialogue above and that the children become increasingly reliant upon the fixed expressions taken straight from the book that we saw in the first dialogue. but this seems highly contradictory. since the children are using more fixed expressions from the book, and the fixed expressions are growing longer from year to year, shouldn’t the children’s sentences be growing? forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a5 to resolve this apparent paradox, let us begin by simply trying to describe it more precisely than simply calling utterances either “creative” or “uncreative”. at the beginning of the very first dialogue, we saw that the children appear to be repeating whole lesson titles word for word. the first two utterances are the title of the week’s lesson and the response that the children have been taught. minsu: can you fly? (lesson seven) mina: no, i can't. (lesson seven) following tomasello’s work in first language learning (2003), we might call this use of whole utterances “fixed expressions”, though of course we must alter the meaning of the category to fit this foreign language learning context. in this context, we use “fixed expressions” to mean expressions that appear literally, word for word, in the textbook; the child takes them over as they are without changing a single word. the next two expressions are a little different: minsu: can you skate? mina: no, i can’t. although “can you swim?” appears in the textbook, there is no use of “can you skate?” we will call this repetition of a fixed expression with one point of variation an “item-based combination”. while “no, i can’t” appears in the textbook, it is in the context of swimming and not in the context of skating. so we can see that there is one point of variation. tomasello (2005) notes that such half-fixed and half-free expressions are a very important step, at least in first language learning. but he also notes that they are limited. because variation only takes place at a single node, the child can only say things like “put on your shoes” and not “take off your gloves”. these expressions do not generalize to become a system, and that is why he refers to them as “developmental islands”. viewed qualitatively, we see that our first dialogue contains only fixed expressions and itembased combinations. however, our second dialogue contains four expressions which are neither fixed expressions nor item-based constructions, namely, “what!”, “no, i’m scarf”, “outside, cold!” and “you, inside, play!” of course, on some level, these are just variations too: “what!” is a variation on “what’s this?” “no, i’m scarf” is a variation on “no, i can’t” and perhaps also “i’m sorry”, “outside, cold” might come from “let’s go outside” and “it’s cold”, both of which appear in the lesson, and of course “you, inside, play!” is a funny twist on “outside, cold!” but they are larger, freer variations, involving more than one node of variation. so, again following tomasello’s work in first language acquisition, we will call these apparently original utterances “abstract constructions”. of course, they are not necessarily abstract in their origins. the creation of a completely original construction by multiple transformations from a memorized chunk of language is possible, and this may indeed be the mechanism by which some abstract constructions might first arise. but when a child says “what!” instead of “what’s this?” there is potentially more than mere generalization: there are (at least) two acts of abstraction. first of all, the child is abstracting away the verb phrase “is this”, turning a full clause into a minor clause. secondly, the child is abstracting away intonation as a separate quality, and this act of abstraction allows the child to turn “what’s this?” which canonically has a sharply rising (what halliday and greaves, 2008 call tone 2) into “what!” which has a falling, downward intonation (what halliday and greaves term tone 1). this tonal difference turns a question into an indignant exclamation— it is an instance of interpersonal metaphor, like the use of a question like “may i have your attention please?” as a command, except in this case it is rather the other way around. here the child has created forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a6 a system of intonation which will eventually correspond to the lexicogrammatical difference between an interrogative and an exclamative (for an interesting account of how this might take place in first language learning, see halliday, 2004, p. 44). similarly, when the child creates “”no, i’m scarf” from “no, i can’t” and “i’m sorry” (if that is how it is indeed created), we have at least potentially more than a set of concrete generalizations. first of all, the child abstracts away “no” from its position as modal adjunct in “no, i can’t”. secondly the child abstracts away “sorry” and replaces it with a noun, and to do this the child must also get rid of an article “a” on the noun “scarf”. when the child creates “outside, cold!” from “let’s go outside” and “it’s cold” the child is not simply eliding “let’s go” and “it’s”, the child is also moving “outside” to what halliday would call the thematic position at the beginning of the sentence and giving “cold” the status of rheme, or comment (see halliday 2014, pp. 88-92 for more details on theme and rheme). as these examples above indicate, they appear to have their own grammar, and involve some abstract notion of “subject”, “verb”, or “object”, or a formula with at least two variables (e.g. “x is y”). of course, one could argue—and many linguists will argue—that this is not abstraction but merely elision, and that the result is not a construction but an omission. but this argument assumes that what the child is in the business of constructing is some replica of the adult language. as halliday points out (2004, p. 29), this is not necessarily the case. what seems much more probable is that replication of the adult language is (as we can see in the fixed expressions and item-based combinations) a subordinate part of a much wider enterprise, namely learning how to mean. this gives us three categories with which to analyze a larger data base—fixed expressions, itembased combinations, and creative abstract constructions. our data base is somewhat slanted towards fifth graders, because we collected data every lesson in fifth grade for a whole year in order to see if there was any longitudinal change in the proportions of fixed expressions, item-based combinations, and abstract constructions (there was not). the major categories of interest are given first, followed by “incoherent” contributions which did not make sense and which were ruled out of the game (e.g. “how old are you?” between siblings, already discussed above), “indexical” expressions (mostly “wow” or “ha ha!”) and “precocious” expressions apparently mined from future lessons in the textbook by hardworking students looking ahead. here is a breakdown of the data base by grade. table 2 grade form utterances percentage 3 fixed expression 163 47.1% item-based combination 109 31.5% creative abstract construction 30 8.7% incoherent 11 3.2% indexical 2 .6% korean 7 2.0% precocious 24 6.9% total 346 100.0% 4 fixed expression 149 54.6% item-based combination 48 17.6% creative abstract construction 40 14.7% incoherent 3 1.1% indexical 1 .4% precocious 32 11.7% forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a7 total 273 100.0% 5 fixed expression 767 68.1% item-based combination 124 11.0% creative abstract construction 148 13.1% incoherent 3 .3% indexical 11 1.0% korean 2 .2% precocious 71 6.3% total 1126 100.0% as can be seen, the incoherent sentences almost disappear in fourth grade, and so does korean. but fixed expressions do not; proportionally, they increase rather than decrease, while creative constructions increase from third to fourth grade and then stabilize at about fourteen percent of total utterances. the proportion of item-based combinations declines from nearly a third to under eighteen percent in fourth grade and only eleven percent by fifth. the non-existence of korean in fourth grade is probably due to the small sample. but we have our paradox: shorter sentences, on the one hand, and more fixed expressions on the other. if the children are adhering more closely to the book, and the utterances in the book are growing longer from year to year, why are the children’s utterances growing shorter? we can explain the paradox of shorter sentences and more fixed expressions quite easily when we look at the most common expressions that the children use in the course of the game, broken down by grade. (see appendix.) as the children age, they appear to favor shorter and simpler fixed expressions rather than longer and more complex creative constructions. it seems that they have learned to pursue a fairly conservative strategy, which is, from the point of view grammatical complexity, not very developmental. now, it might appear, at first glance, that this conservative, non-developmental strategy is simply an artifact of the game itself, since creative constructions frequently contain errors and these are penalized by the rules of the game. there are two reasons why we doubt this. first of all, if the children were simply responding to learning the rules of the game, we would expect to see a significant change as soon as the children realize that creative constructions often lead to errors and to losing the point. with data gathered over a whole year’s time, we should observe a major change. but we observed no significant change in the fifth grade data that we gathered every week from march until december. secondly, if the shortening of the utterances was simply a result of the rules of the game then we would expect that the children would go for fixed expressions first—since they are always error free and only resort to an item-based combination when there is no fixed expression that fits. we would also expect that the children would choose item-based combinations before abstract constructions and only resort to the latter when they cannot think of an item-based combination. this is not what we observe. we number the contributions that the children make from one to fourteen, which is the maximum number of utterances in a dialogue, due to the way the game is structured with the teacher recording utterances on a whiteboard. we then calculate the mean utterance of emergence for each type of expression. this produces a rather surprising result. in spite of the fact that the children are forced, by the rules of the game, to begin with at least one fixed expression from the textbook (because the exercise is one of dialogue continuation rather than complete improvisation), we forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a8 find that item-based combinations appear, on the average, somewhat earlier than fixed expressions; the children do appear to be more eager to use them. table 3 form mean utterance of emergence standard deviation fixed expressions 9.21 6.28 item-based combinations 8.61 6.42 abstract constructions 13.84 7.83 according to the t-test, the difference between the mean turn of the fixed expression and the item-based combinations is not significant (p > .1), but that between the fixed expressions and the abstract constructions is statistically significant at p < .001. abstract constructions, therefore, do tend to occur significantly later in the improvisation. it appears that while children tend to only resort to creative constructions under pressure and at the very end of the game, they actually tend to use item-based combinations at the same time or even before they employ fixed expressions. so a better explanation for our paradox of greater reliance on fixed expressions and shrinking sentences is this: the shortening sentences are actually the result of the growing volitional control that we see as the child goes from tomasello’s “fixed expressions” to his “creative abstract constructions”. but why would this growing volitional control result in shorter sentences year after year? one possible explanation is this. the influence of standardized examinations grows stronger and stronger as the child matures, and these tests reward short answers that are 100% accurate. longer, more creative answers are far less likely to be error-free, and are therefore not the optimal choice for the child. of course, in the long run, this is a disastrous choice for everybody. since we cannot seriously expect children to operate in english with a repertoire of less than a thousand words and only a few hundred basic sentence patterns, our pedagogy may be punishing precisely the item-based combinations and the abstract creative constructions that will be most useful in the wide world outside the classroom. local solutions: complexity out of rebellion korea has a highly centralized educational system which is remarkable impervious to learner needs, teacher demands, empirical research, and sometimes even simple logic (during a heady few months early in the reign of the previous president, it was announced that english would become an official language and all secondary education would be conducted in that medium; this was halted only when it was abruptly realized that nobody would be able to understand anything!). so it would be otiose to propose curricular change in this paper. yet we cannot help but note that there are quite simple solutions to the problem of disappearing syntax that emerge on the margins of the data itself, and whose origins lie precisely in the kinds of rebellious, dispreferred responses that the children seem to prefer. dispreferred responses—that is, responses which are unexpected in some way and need to be accounted for—do tend to be longer and more complex in themselves and require follow ups in ways that preferred responses—that is, responses which are expected and therefore not worth accounting for—do not. (for example, the dispreferred response “terrible” in response to “how are you?” requires following up in a way that the preferred response “fine” does not.) forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a9 there are six examples of abstract constructions containing more than one verb, of which two involve subordination (the others are compound sentences constructed using “and” or “but”). let’s look at them. here julie is arguing with a talking puppy that has wet her dress: puppy’s team: let's go home. julie’s team: i cannot go home! puppy’s team: no, go! julie’s team: no. puppy’s team: go, go, go! julie’s team: i cannot go home. puppy’s team: why? julie’s team: i cannot go home because i'm hungry. the complex final sentence emerges from the joint elaboration of the word “no!” what happens when the children do not give a negative response, but instead simply refuse to hear the suggestion? here one team is playing mrs. smith, the teacher, who attempts to detain jinho. jinho has a cold and is fleeing to the doctor’s office. jinho’s team: bye, mrs. smith. mrs. smith’s team: wait, jinho. jinho’s team: what? mrs. smith’s team: i says 'wait'. our first example of reported speech! again, it happens because the children are elaborating a dispreferred response. and once again we see that the complexity is a joint construction, not exactly collaborative since it is founded in negation, but certainly highly interactive. naturally, moments like these are far from typical, but for that very reason we may suppose that they lie on the cutting edge of the child’s development. in next section of this paper, we wish to consider what it is that is developing and how. forced choices, free choices traditionally, the development of fluency in a foreign language has been conceptualized in one of two ways: either as the unfolding of the same completely natural “language instinct” that was hypothesized by nativists for first language acquisition (pinker, 1994) or as the entrainment of habits of behavior, subject to power laws of practice (see especially the work of nick ellis, 2002). these two traditional ways have largely defined the discussion of child foreign language learning, even when the century-long marriage of structuralism and behaviorism that followed upon the “reform” movement of the 1870s fell apart (for an excellent discussion, see a.p.r. howatt, 1984, pp. 212-228). on one side of the atlantic, a form of communicative teaching based on structuralism and the innatist ideas of chomsky developed (e.g. dulay, burt, & krashen, 1982). on the other, a form of teaching also called “communicative” developed along the lines of “can do” specifications and behavioral bands (e.g. council of europe, 2001, p. 24). little noticed, alongside these traditional ways of regarding what the children are doing in our data as either the unfolding of a natural process or the entrainment of cultural habits, a third choice emerged, that of halliday’s systemic-functional grammar (halliday with matthiessen, 2014). in a systemicforced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a10 functional grammar, we understand the data as reflective of sets of choices from a fairly narrow “menu”, called a system network. for example, when the child seeks to interact in a role play, the child chooses between talking and acting (or between exchanges of information and exchanges of goods and services). if the child chooses to talk, he or she faces a choice between giving information (canonically by making declarative statements) or getting it (through interrogatives), and if the child chooses to get information, the child then has a choice between asking about polarity (yes-no questions) or requesting missing information (wh-questions). similar systems networks have been worked out for transitivity structures (that is, material, mental, verbal, and relational processes enacted by the verb and its companions and circumstances) and even for the ordering of elements in a message (that is, their ordering from a theme that represents the speaker’s point of view to a rheme that represents the hearer-orientation of the message). but these choices are neither natural nor entrained. they are made quite consciously and deliberately, even creatively, as we see in the “forced choices” of our data. they are then refined, particularly as the child compares them with data in the immediate cultural environment, and it is only here that the “can do” descriptors beloved of social-behaviorist approaches become at all relevant, creating solutions, which are intelligent, but no longer novel. the basic contradiction is this. on the one hand, creativity is not creativity if it comes from outside the child—as we’ve seen, the “fixed expressions” are merely rote repetitions, word for word, from textbook materials, and they are worlds away, structurally, functionally and genetically, from creative abstract constructions. on the other, to ascribe creativity to some inner pre-existing inner creative force is essentially circular: we are explaining creativity by some innate form of creativity, some essentially homuncular form of free will that exists at birth or even before. in order to trace the true history of creativity in a non-tautological way we must necessarily begin with something that is not creativity. but for vygotsky, that something is not imitation—or rather, not only imitation—but rather constraint. it is true that initially the constraints do come from the environment; the child is dependent on others for food, warmth, and even transportation, and it is in this way that the child’s pragmatic use of language is constructed (halliday 2004, p. 23). but that is really only half the story; in addition to the pragmatic use of language, the child is reflecting upon and construing representations of his or her own needs, the affordances in her or his environment, and relations between objects and events. this function, which is not strictly pragmatic, is what halliday (2004) terms the “mathetic” function. initially, it simply allows the child a different way of acting on the environment, because the child’s utterances, instead of being directed only to others, can be self-directed and can take on a planning function instead (выготский, 1983, p. 268). but like many new functions (indeed, like the pragmatic function of language which was taken over for mathetic purposes) this new mathetic function does not simply follow along, adapting to reality like an instinct or a habit. this function is capable of anticipating, evading, and even changing reality; it is what makes possible the child’s construction of imaginary worlds, one of whose denizens is the child’s own idealized behavior, and even the child’s sense of self. this is, in turn, exactly how vygotsky resolves the great paradox: how we can teach creativity through imitation (or, to take an example from moral/ethical education, how we can teach free behavior through telling other people what to do)? we don’t. instead, what happens is the kind of rebellion that we saw in our data. the child takes control of the means of creativity (or the means of telling other people what to do) and wields them for her forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a11 or his own purposes. these purposes are often quite different from the purposes others may have in teaching the child but which can nevertheless be guided by others through the artificial culture we call play. this guidance cannot, however, take place exclusively through imitation, e.g. the replication of fixed expressions. first of all, as vygotsky knew, intelligent imitation even in animals requires that the imitator share the goal of the imitated (выготский, 1983, p. 131), and when children seize control of the means of creativity they do so for their own purposes and not for the teacher's (e.g. they do so in order to win the game and defeat the other team and not in order to develop their grammar). secondly, as every child knows, a slavish imitator may be able to play the game but the real goal is not simply to play but to win, and winning a game necessarily involves doing something differently from the loser. the process of developing free will (in language, in art, and even in moral decision making) has certain stages, each of which is divided from the previous stage by a process of selection. it is only at the very bottom of this process, in natural responses and conditioned habits, that we can really talk of natural, that is, unfree selection, viz. constraint. yet it is precisely on the basis of these unfree selections that higher, freer selections can arise. when a child, for example stands up for another child being bullied on the playground, we cannot say that the child is obeying instinct—because instinct would make the child run away. nor can we call this a habit; it may go directly against the grain of getting along with others and avoiding trouble. we cannot say it is intelligent either; the risks are high and the chance of any payoff quite low. what we have to say is that this is an act of free will. in ontogenetic terms, at least for the first language, development appears to be largely from the bottom up: the child is born into a semiotic world of natural responses (tears and laughter), which provide the raw material for the conditioned habits of early language: but as halliday (2004) describes the process, it is neither instinct nor adaptation to the external environment that enables this to happen; the child does not unfold a pre-made sound system or imitate a ready-made one from the environment but instead constructs his or her own “child tongue”: the naseopharyngealized vowels of crying, for example, become differentiated into vowels on the one hand and consonants on the other, and the prosodics of natural cries become differentiated into the rising intonation of the pragmatic request and the falling intonation of the mathetic statement (halliday, 2004, p. 145). as the child breaks into lexicogrammar, imitation as a strategy fails even more spectacularly; the utterances the child wants are never the ones that he or she hears or hears and remembers, and only intelligence can help the child in each novel pragmatic situation. finally, with the mathetic function, we have the ontogenesis of the imaginary situation and of the imaginary self (for the self, like any other meaning-made thing, can neither be inherited nor imitated; it can only be imagined). these ontogenetic moments in halliday’s account of language construction have equivalents in our microgenetic (halliday would say logogenetic) data. the natural basis of language is highly conspicuous in the form of the “indexical” expressions (e.g. “wow!” “aha!” “oh!”, “ha ha!” etc.) and above all in the form of laughter. alongside the sounds of the mother tongue, by now acquired as conditioned habits, laughing, squealing, shouting and shrieking provide the stuff of english prosodics, the intonational tunes which the children use to animate the rote, fixed expressions from the textbook. but just as instinct and even habit failed the child in the acquisition of fixed expressions (english habits are not at all like korean ones), the imitation of fixed expressions in turn fails the child in the game. forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a12 borrowing a little from abraham maslow’s famous “pyramid of needs” (1943), we might portray the vygotskyan view of what is happening in our data something like this: in order to create a coherent dialogue, the minsu team and the mina team cannot rely on the conditioned habits memorized from previous and subsequent lesson titles in the book. they must, instead, re-invent the imaginary situation in the book: mina is now a frolicsome younger sister and minsu is now an older brother, very conservative and all too familiar with his sibling’s flirtatious ways. this imaginary situation is undoubtedly based on the characters, the situation, and even the specific language (“put on your ....”) that we find in the textbook; but it cannot be said to be a conditioned habit; since the specific problem is novel. by reimagining the characters the children have created a problem that cannot solved by rote methods and instead requires, at the very least, the use of item-based combination (“put on your coat/glove/cap/sweater/scarf/pants!”). the other team is now confronted with one item-based combination after another. because her negative response is repeated, it can be truncated (not “no, i won’t” but simply “no!”). but nay-saying is a passive exercise that ill suits the vivacious character mina, and she begins to give reasons for her refusal (“too small”, “too big”). she even responds to the beautiful scarf with an enthusiastic “yes, please!”, which is hardly an example of truncation. but none of this allows her what she really wants from the dialogue, which is the opportunity to show off her attractive legs. only the creative abstract construction “no, i’m skirt” has the power to do this. “no, i’m skirt” is of course not a habit; still less is it an instinct. but it is also not exactly an “intelligent” solution. first of all, it’s not economical; a fixed “no!” would suffice and an item-based combination like “i don’t like pants” could be reused in subsequent utterances (and, as we’ve seen, economical solutions like these do account for the problem of disappearing syntax). secondly, it’s not forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a13 adaptative: the chance of error is high (and in fact mina does make an error which, if the teacher were not enjoying the repartee so much, would put an end to the game and award the other side a point). thirdly, it is not strategic; it lays mina open to a very simple follow-up “why?” which would require some difficult explaining (and in fact the children often do use “why?” or “why not?” as a way of “spiking” in this game of verbal volleyball, precisely because it requires a full clause in reply). what we have to say is that “no, i’m skirt” is not only a creative abstract construction, in that it has its own model of a grammar that is quite different from english grammar, but also an act of free will. more, what we may say is that this act of free will emerges precisely out of the forced choices imposed on poor mina by her tyrannical brother and by the difficult language game she is learning to play with such creativity and with such imagination. in his book “the history of the development of the higher psychological functions”, recently translated into korean as 어린의  자기행동  숙달의  역사와  발달 (‘history and development in the child’s self-mastery of behavior”, 비고츠키, 2013, 2014), vygotsky presents a series of experiments in which the child is given a long list of words to memorize. the child is offered a set of pictures, which may offer some kind of mnemonic structure. some of the mnemonic structures are quite obvious (e.g. a picture of a camel will help the child remember the noun “death”, and a picture of a lion will help the child remember the word “shoot”). when the child is given a “free choice” of pictures, these are the choices that the child appears inclined to make. but in other cases the child is forced to create his or her own mnemonic structure (e.g. the child must use a picture of a crab in order to remember the word “theatre”). in these cases, vygotsky discovers, children can come up with highly innovative structures (e.g. the child imagines the crab admiring beautiful stones at the bottom of the sea as if at the theatre) and these turn out to be more durable—and even more efficient in recovering the precise word—than the more conventional sort (выготский, 1983, p. 242). vygotsky explains. the “free choice” offered the child is in fact not free at all; the child is only given a menu of conventional associations from which to choose. the story of the camel’s death and the shooting of the lion are not the child’s stories but only linguistic habits recollected from other stories. in contrast, the choice forced upon the child is truly free: the child can create his or her own mnemonic link. the story of the crab’s theatre is a story, which the child freely made up, and so the link between the crab and the theatre gives the child a more active form of remembering. it seems plausible that this more active form of remembering is agnatic to the kind of linguistic creativity we see when the children in our data are forced to use a single structure such as “put on your…” rather than given a free choice of structures from which to choose, and when they respond by experimentally enacting an internal function, in this case the pragmatic use of the language, as an experimental drama between imaginary people. a final, somewhat self-reflexive note: this paper has, in the course of the normal process of peer review at this journal, passed through many forced choices, some of which were voluntarily undertaken, and some of which were made under pressure from the editors. for example, in their lengthy decision over-ruling the majority of the reviewers and rejecting this manuscript, the managing editors insisted that “the whole ‘fun’ of play lies in the fact that the rules that are upheld are devised by the players.”2 since the 2 editors' note: the above is a quote from my (ana marjanovic-shane) editorial comments on the margins of the manuscript (draft #1), dated 2014-02-28. the full comment reads: “hm, the term ‘forced’ is problematic for me here – because it usually implies force that comes not from intrinsic motivation but an outside force. however, the whole ‘fun’ of play is in the fact that the rules that are upheld are devised by the players. yes, there is a fact that each situation ‘affords’ some and does not ‘afford’ other patterns of behavior and decision (gibson), but since in play, these situations are imaginary, the ‘affordance’ is not quite ‘forced’ – what do you think? ... so in itself, to say ‘forced’ is a particular interpretation of what play means – and it might be great for you to discuss it – since you are using it in that way. otherwise, it is not quite justified, from our point of view.” thoughts expressed in that remark, were finalized in the following paragraph in the editorial decision dated 2014-02-28: “another concept that we find very promising is the concept of the tension between what you call ‘forced choices’ afforded by the context of an imagined situation (as in gibson's view of affordance) on one side; and on the other, the feeling of freedom that makes play so forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a14 rules of this game were not devised by the players but rather by the author, this would suggest that the play was not fun, something that is really at variance with the fact that the game continued to be demanded by the children in every single lesson for the rest of the year. in their second, conditional acceptance of this paper, the editors wrote that our analysis of the data has tended to obscure “the feeling of freedom that makes play so appealing to the players”.3 it appears, therefore, that the editors would like us to emphasize the “free” in free will: that it is freedom which makes play attractive to the players. this recommendation is marked “optional” by the managing editors, which has the unfortunate effect of making all of their other recommendations appear binding. but this optional recommendation seems unwarranted to us: it seems to us more likely that it is the “will” in free will that motivates the children; it is the skillful exercise of will which allows them to win the game. we saw that in the first data extract, when the children were absolutely free to choose any language they knew and when they were able to build up the characters and the situation as they went along, the game was nonsensical and not motivating; in the second data extract, when the children forced themselves to stick to the situation in the textbook and to relatively fixed characters (and when minsu forced sartorial choices on poor mina), the game became much more creative, both in a literary and in a linguistic sense. like the rules the game imposed on our learners, none of the recommendations made by the reviewers or editors were devised by the author. nevertheless, some of them we undertook readily and willingly. others we accepted only after our paper was rejected and with the understanding that our voice would not be heard unless it could be brought more into harmony with that of the editors. here, perhaps perversely, we do find ourselves in full agreement on the essential inseparability of freedom and will. some forced choices, voluntarily taken and mastered from within, may be immensely fruitful, while others, merely submitted to and imposed from afar, are stifling and sterile, and may even strangle the very syntax that they purport to promote. references 비고츠키, l.s. (2013). 어린의 자기행동 숙달의 역사와 발달, i. 서울: 살림터. 비고츠키, l.s. (2014). 어린의 자기행동 숙달의 역사와 발달, ii. 서울: 살림터 выготский л. с. 1983. собрание сочинений т.з. под ред. а. м. матюшкина. м.: педагогика. council of europe, (2001). common european framework for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. cambridge: cambridge university press. dulay, h., burt, m., and krashen, s.d. (1982). language two. new york: oxford university press. appealing to the players. this tension between the ‘enforced’ rules and the feeling of freedom is an incredibly fruitful field for exploration in education and we would encourage you to develop this concept further based on the data you collected.” the full text of the editors’ letter of decision dated 2014-02-28 can be found on the dialogic pedagogy journal community space. it is visible only to the dpj members at http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj2/comment/view/66/0/84. furthermore, all peer reviews are also accessible to the journal members at the dpj community space at http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj2/article/view/66. 3 editor’s note: the full paragraph in the editors’ letter of decision dated 2014-05-16 from which the author quotes, reads as follows: “[optional – but potentially enhancing your manuscript]. we stay with our earlier remark that we find very promising your emerging analysis of the tension between what you call ‘forced choices’ afforded by the context of an imagined situation (as in gibson's view of affordance) on one side; and on the other, the feeling of freedom that makes play so appealing to the players. this tension between the ‘enforced’ rules and the feeling of freedom is an incredibly fruitful field for exploration in education and it seems to be very relevant for the data that you describe. this is especially interesting in the light of your analysis of ‘rebellion’ and ‘free will’, that at this point seem to be somewhat obscured by other aspects of your analysis. of course, it will be up to you if you want to add more discussion of this issue.” the editors’ letter of decision dated 2014-05-16 can be found on the dialogic pedagogy journal community space. it is visible to the dpj members at http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj2/comment/view/96/0/136. furthermore, all peer reviews are also accessible to the journal members at the dpj community space at http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj2/article/view/96. forced choices: role play and the problem of disappearing syntax david kellogg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.65 | vol. 2 (2014) a15 ellis, n. c. (2002). frequency effects in language acquisition: a review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. studies in second language acquisition, 24, 143-188. halliday, m.a.k. (2004). the language of early childhood. london: continuum. halliday, m.a.k. and greaves, w.s. (2008). intonation in the grammar of english. london: continuum. halliday, m.a.k. with matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (2014). halliday’s introduction to functional grammar. london: routledge. howatt, a.p.r. (1984). a history of english language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. kwon, m.-s. and kellogg, d. (2005). teacher talk as a game of catch. the canadian modern language review / la revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 62 (2) 335-348. maslow, a.h. (1943). ‘a theory of human motivation.’ psychological review, 50 370-396. pinker, s. (1994). the language instinct. new york: harper collins. tomasello, m. (2003). constructing a language: a usage based theory of language acquisition. cambridge, ma and london: harvard university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a18 interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees thompson rivers university, bc, canada wolff-michael roth university of victoria, bc, canada abstract triadic dialogue, the initiation, response, evaluation sequence typical of teacher /student interactions in classrooms, has long been identified as a barrier to students’ access to learning, including science learning. a large body of research on the subject has over the years led to projects and policies aimed at increasing opportunities for students to learn through interactive dialogue in classrooms. however, the triadic dialogue pattern continues to dominate, even when teachers intend changing this. prior quantitative research on the subject has focused on identifying independent variables such as style of teacher questioning that have an impact, while qualitative researchers have worked to interpret the use of dialogue within the whole context of work in the classroom. a recent paper offers an alternative way to view the triadic dialogue pattern and its origin; the triadic dialogue pattern is an irreducible social phenomenon that arises in a particular situation regardless of the identity of the players who inhabit the roles in the turn-taking sequence (roth & gardner, 2012). according to this perspective, alternative patterns of dialogue would exist which are alternative irreducible social phenomena that arise in association with different situations. the aim of this paper is to examine as precisely as possible, the characteristics of dialogue patterns in a seventh-eighth grade classroom during science inquiry, and the precise situations from which these dialogue patterns emerge, regardless of the staffing (teacher or students) in the turn-taking sequence. three different patterns were identified each predominating in a particular situation. this fine-grained analysis could offer valuable insights into ways to support teachers working to alter the kinds of dialogue patterns that arise in their classrooms. carol rees is an associate professor at thompson rivers university conducting research in the area on science inquiry education and classroom talk, both in schools and informal settings. she investigates ways that science inquiry experiences are student-led and how best to help teachers provide such experiences for their students. wolff-michael roth is a learning scientist at the university of victoria conducting research on how people across the life span know and learn mathematics and science. he has contributed to numerous fields of research: learning science in learning communities, co-teaching, authentic school science education, cultural-historical activity theory, social studies of science, gesture studies, qualitative research methods, embodied cognition, situated cognition, and the role of language in learning science and mathematics. issn: 2325-3290 (online) interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a19 introduction many classrooms still are characterized by the expositions of subject-matter-related truths that students are to repeat in (high-stakes) examinations (e.g. hurst, 2013); presentations are monologic, in the sense that their purpose is to expound pre-established truths (bakhtin, 1981). that is, even when lecture-type presentations involve exchanges with students, they remain as monologic as the latesocratic “dialogues.” a shift to more participatory dialogic forms of teaching | learning, therefore, may be made difficult by the fact that this requires the possibility to arrive at truths that were not previously established (bakhtin, 1984). in a dialogue, we may identify pairs of utterances, such as question/answer, agreement/disagreement, or affirmation/supplementation. but these relationships are not to be found in language—“relations between question and answer, assertion and objection, assertion and agreement … are impossible among units of language (words and sentences), either in the system of language … or within the utterance” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 72). such relations are not linguistic at all; they are social. the socratic dialogues show how the parts of the conversation—e.g., question and answer—are related to the role of participants. thus, socrates tends to ask questions, some respondent, which may be a learner, gives the answer, and socrates evaluates in one form or another. here, then, particular grammatical forms come to be associated with social, teacher–student distinctions. in the literature, one of the best well-known verbal exchange patterns is known as ire, short for initiation, reply, and evaluation; the three slots of the pattern are filled by the teacher (who asks a question), a student (who responds), and the teacher (who evaluates), respectively (lemke, 1990; mehan, 1979). however, one more recent study suggests that the phenomenon is much more widespread and can be found, for example, in nature centers, where the ire phenomenon is staffed by nature guide, visitor, and nature guide, respectively (roth & gardner, 2012). moreover, the pattern has been identified in impromptu tutoring sessions on reading science graphs (roth & middleton, 2006) where the first and third slots are staffed by person(s) who are in the know (an undergraduate student in physics) and others (physics professors) staff the middle slot. that is, the ire pattern appears to be a cultural phenomenon that reproduces itself in various places, staffed by very different people sometimes taking an unexpected place. might it be that even in schools, the staffing does not involve the teacherstudent-teacher sequence? this study was designed to investigate the relationship between grammatical forms, institutional position (teacher, student), and topic-specific situations in the context of classrooms where teachers aspire to more dialogical (in the bakhtinian sense) forms of verbal exchange. background much has been written about unequal access to science learning in classrooms, and one feature that can make a difference is the style of classroom talk (e.g. lemke, 1990). the way that teacher and student talk unfolds has a bearing upon students’ decisions about whether to engage in learning science, what they might learn, how empowered they might feel in relation to science, and how likely they are to identify themselves as science learners (hanrahan, 2005). studies of discourse patterns in science classrooms can help researchers understand possible mechanisms that impose barriers to access and mechanisms that can draw students in. such studies indicate that the triadic ire pattern predominates in classroom talk (lemke, 1990). take fragment 1 from a seventh-/eighth-grade science classroom. fragment 1 i> 01 p1: what did you guys put in first? the water– r> 02 p2: the rocks. i,e> 03 p1: the blue rocks? or the big rocks?= e,r> 04 p3: =>you’re s’posed to< put the filter in fir::st. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a20 in this fragment, there is an initiation, which includes a query and the offer of an item (“the water”) that might be part of a reply (turn 01). there is what we can hear as a reply (turn 02), which then becomes the subject of the initiation of a repair seeking a specification of the preceding reply (“the rocks”) in terms of some blue or big rocks (turn 03). turn 03 does not only seek further specification of the answer, that is, initiate a repair, but also it is a form of evaluation. this is so because in seeking to find out whether the respondent meant the blue or the big rocks, turn 03 also evaluated the reply as insufficient. turn 03 also shows that the person is in the know about the situation that the participants are talking about. turn 04 can be heard both as an evaluation of turn 02: not the rocks but the filter should have been placed first. turn 04 therefore also constitutes the norm against which the reply (turn 02) and the actions to which it corresponds are evaluated. this ordered form of turn-taking in classroom talk is often seen as a barrier that teachers present for many students because it can require students to perform according to a certain conception of science, taking away the possibility for them to propose alternative explanations or interpretations, take initiative, ask questions, or direct the conversation (lemke, 1990; bleicher, tobin & mcrobbie, 2003; van eijck & roth, 2011). however, what is interesting about the preceding example (fragment 1) of triadic turn-taking is that it did not occur between a teacher and her students: all four participants in the talk are students. in fact, the sequence occurred while the teacher was busy helping other students in a different part of the classroom. as suggested by roth & gardner (2012), regardless of the identity of the players who take the slots in the turn-taking routine, a similar dialogue pattern emerges when a person in the know is asking the questions. the triadic dialogue pattern is a social phenomenon that arises in particular situations, regardless of the staffing. this is important in the context of science classrooms because it suggests that rather than teachers intentionally imposing particular dialogue patterns, the patterns may be arising out of the particular situations in the classroom, regardless of the staffing of the dialogue patterns. if this is the case it may be that changing dialogue patterns depends more on changing situations than it does on changing teachers’ intentions. since the 1970s and the advent of easy access to recording equipment, there has been an interest in the study of classroom talk. numerous studies pointed out the prevalence in teacher/student discourse of a pattern termed irf, short for initiate, respond, feedback (sinclair & coulthard, 1975) or ire, short for initiate, respond, evaluate (mehan, 1979). over the decades since then, many researchers have investigated and agreed upon the barriers that this pattern of classroom talk can present (cazden, 1988; heath, 1983; mercer & dawes, 2014). it limits students to only speaking when answering test questions that teachers provide and evaluate; it presents a situation where teachers talk on average twothirds of the time; it prevents students themselves from deciding when to speak; and it inhibits students from speaking to each other directly (cazden, 1988). although there are studies suggesting some positive value of the ire pattern in the reproduction of cultural forms (roth & radford, 2010), the pattern tends to be considered as a barrier to learning. it continues dominating classroom talk today, even though the desire for alternatives is often expressed (hardman, smith & wall, 2003). projects designed to encourage alternatives have of course made good progress. for example, the fostering learning communities project (brown, 1992) has proven to support such opportunities for extended interactive and equitable exchanges between teachers and students that are effective learning opportunities (engle & conant, 2002). even though the body of literature on classroom talk has driving policy to implement change (mercer & dawes, 2014), for many teachers, creating such alternatives for classroom talk continues to prove difficult even when they have the intention to make such changes (lyle, 2008). in the literature, teachers themselves often are portrayed as the barrier (sedova, sedlacek & svaricek, 2016). it has been suggested that teachers sometimes purposefully hold on to the triadic interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a21 dialogue mode of discourse because it places them in a position of control (hanrahan, 2005). more recently, several authors have proposed that triadic dialogue may be continuing because it serves some useful purposes in science education (e.g. scott, mortimer & aguiar, 2006; wells & arauz, 2006). one recent study suggests that triadic dialogue is an irreducible cultural phenomenon that emerges in certain situations regardless of the players involved (roth & gardner, 2012a). from the perspective of irreducibly social phenomena, the ire sequence transcends the teacher’s intentions; the sequence is a social phenomenon staffed in this case by mrs. turner. it is staffed differently in other situations, such as in the driver’s license bureau or in our university’s annual fire-training certification, where the computer initiates, the want-to-be-licensed individual responds, and the computer evaluates. (roth & gardner, 2012, p. 340.) it is easy to see in the quotation that the ire pattern is arising in situations where someone who is in the know is testing another person. alternative dialogue patterns can also be seen as irreducible social phenomena that arise in particular situations. other discourse patterns have been identified, such as the initiate-clarify-reply and initiate-reply-clarify-reply sequences found in natural pedagogical conversations between a technician and high school students during a science internship (hsu, roth & mazumder, 2009). the patterns arose in situations where one participant, in this case the laboratory technician, was demonstrating how to use a machine or perform a procedure that the high school student will practice. it is easy to see how such patterns might arise and to anticipate situations where they are staffed differently, such a when one family member is teaching another how to use the lawn mower or how to reproduce a recipe. this way of viewing dialogue patters as irreducible social phenomena that arise in particular situations regardless of the staffing of those situations could be helpful in our efforts to developing understanding of why particular dialogue patterns persist and others are elusive in classrooms. it may help explain why the best intentions of teachers can be foiled. methods the aim of the study was to investigate (a) patterns of talk in the classroom, (b) the players involved in the turn-taking sequences, and (c) the precise situations from which these patterns arise. context the study took place in a seventh-/eighth-grade classroom during a science inquiry unit on water filtration. the class had already participated for one year in the steps to inquiry project. during that year, the teacher, together with several peers, engaged in a series of professional development workshops designed to change their approach to science teaching. following the workshop, the teacher had been a member of a community of teacher-learners, which was provided with release time to develop curriculum. the steps to inquiry project was designed to support teachers and students moving toward student-centered science inquiry. in the project teachers and students learn to conduct student-centered science inquiry through the use of the steps to inquiry framework that a team of teachers had developed (pardo & parker, 2010). the framework assists teachers in relinquishing some responsibility for science investigations to students. the steps follow the levels of inquiry described in the literature (bell, smetana, & binns, 2005). the framework provides materials to teachers including a series of interactive posters and graphic organizers that teachers and students use to scaffold the framing of student-centered science investigations. using the interactive posters and graphic organizers, teacher and students work together to collect ideas and questions, support the phrasing of testable questions for science inquiry, interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a22 identifying variables, designing procedures, and conducting independent, small-group science investigations (cf. buttemer, 2006; goldsworthy & feasy, 1997). participants participants include the teacher (ms. a.), a guest expert (mr. g.), the researcher (cr), and students from the seventh-/eighth-grade classroom.1 teacher. at the time of the study, ms. a, the teacher had eleven years teaching experience. she had completed a non-science major prior to entering an elementary teacher education program. she had completed professional development workshops with the steps to inquiry framework during the academic year preceding the study; and throughout the year attended monthly meetings with the teacher group. guest expert. mr. g. was the science resource teacher for the school district. he had a master’s degree in science and over ten years experience as a secondary school science teacher. mr. g. was involved in the creation of the course materials and was one of the initiators and leaders of the steps to inquiry project. researcher. the principal researcher (cr) attended the professional development workshops with the teacher. she visited the classroom and attended several monthly meetings with the teacher group throughout the academic year in which the data were collected. in addition she has visited other classrooms that are part of the steps to inquiry project and introduced the associated materials in her university courses for pre-services teachers. students. the school was located in a low socioeconomic neighborhood in a mid-sized city in canada. in the participating class, 12 students were in seventh grade (6 boys and 6 girls) and 14 students were in eighth grade (8 boys and 6 girls). the class was highly diverse in that (a) visible minorities included 3 african american students, 1 east indian student, 3 first nations students, 1 latino student, and 1 asian student and (b) special needs students included 8 students with individual education plans and 1 student with a behavioral safety plan. there were also 2 english language learners (defined as students who are learning english at the same time as they are learning the curriculum, ontario ministry of education n.d.)). curriculum unit the unit on water filtration was part of a larger unit on water systems in the grade 8 ontario curriculum for science and technology. the central idea of the water filtration unit is captured in the statement: “water is an important resource that needs to be managed sustainably.” to construct the pop bottle water filter, a 2l pop bottle was cut in half. the top part was inverted and placed in a ring clamp on a retort stand. a coffee filter, sand, aquarium stones and larger stones were used to construct the water filter. pond water was filtered through the popbottle water filter. a beaker was placed beneath to collect the filtered water sample. 1 the study followed the standard research ethics protocols of the country: data were collected following research ethics approval and signing of consent forms by the teacher, visiting expert, students and guardians. figure 1. the pop bottle water filter interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a23 the steps to inquiry materials (youth science canada, n.d.) were used to guide the teacher and students through the process of collecting their observations, deciding on variables to change, and phrasing a testable question (rees, pardo & parker, 2013). table 1 is an event map of the water filtration science inquiry. table 1 event map of the water filtration unit day event map time (min) 1 teacher demonstration of water filter construction (whole class) 7 student recollection of sequence of construction (whole class) 11 student replication to construct ‘control’ water filters (small groups) 14 ranking of filtered water samples by eye (whole class) 21 2 introduction to turbidity measurement (mixed) 27 turbidity measurement (small groups) 10 discussion of sources of error (whole class) 8 identification of variables to change (whole class) 10 making predictions of effect of changing one variable (small groups) 19 3 conducting experiments to determine effect of changing one variable (small groups) 32 turbidity measurement of water samples (small groups) 26 discussion of results (whole class) 9 recording and interpreting results (small groups) 9 14. real filtration system discussion (whole class) 7 total 210 in the first part of the inquiry, students observed a teacher demonstration on how to construct a pop bottle water filter. they reproduced the teacher’s demonstration to construct their own water filters. they then designed an experiment to test the effect of changing one variable of the pop bottle water filter on the filtered water. students framed a testable question, decided on a dependent variable to measure, an independent variable to change and control variables to keep the same. they conducted their experiment, collected relevant data, and interpreted the results obtained. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a24 data one video camera was used to record video and audio recordings throughout the water filtration unit. these recordings provide the data for detailed conversation analysis in this study. all recordings were transcribed. the total time of recordings was 210 minutes. analyses this study is concerned with patterns emerging from sequentially ordered turn-taking during science classroom talk. conversation analysis is the method of choice in this study because it focuses on the structure and dynamics of conversational patterns that emerge in contexts of action and interaction (sacks, schegloff, & jefferson, 1974). conversation analysis follows how agents in a conversation take up what has been done and said on the part of others. this approach reveals participants’ take-up of what has been said reflecting the analyst’s inferences. to hear the participants in the way they hear each other requires the analysts to be as competent as participants in the topic and cultural practices. the first step in the analysis involved viewing and listening to video recordings, and examining corresponding transcripts to identify fragments that contained patterns of particular interest to the study (roth & hsu, 2010, 2012). the identity of the persons staffing positions in the patterns were removed from the transcripts so that the focus was on the pattern and the situation where the pattern emerged. the term person 1 (p1) and person 2 (p2) were used. in the analysis step, we made use of interaction analysis, a form of analysis where the researchers meet with interested colleagues and graduate students to analyze the data (jordan & henderson, 1995). the “data owner” plays the video until someone requests stopping the play for the purpose of analyzing the sequence seen. all those present hold each other accountable to the data, that is, the analysts must not speculate about the contents of peoples’ minds but formulate claims that can be supported in the data. the second step involved examination of these fragments and detailed transcription (atkinson & heritage, 1984; sacks et al., 1974), including annotation of the following (see appendix): overlapping speech (and duration of overlap), pause (including duration), changes of intonation and speech volume, and any pertinent non-verbal communicative features (hsu, roth & mazumder, 2009). in this analysis, the function of a turn is determined from the turn pair. thus, for example, it is not our interpretation that something is a question, instead, a turn (statement) is a question because the next turn treats is as such. the next turn indeed constitutes both the nature of itself and the nature of the preceding turn. findings relationship between situations, dialogue patterns, and their staffing this study was designed to investigate dialogue patterns in particular situations in a seventh/eight-grade classroom and the staffing of these patterns. the specific context of the inquiry is a seventh/eighth grade classroom during a water-filtration science inquiry. in the first subsection, we introduce three particular situations and the discourse patterns that arise in these situations; in the second subsection, we focus on the staffing of the discourse patterns. dialogue patterns and situations the three situations are: situation 1 where observations, recollections or ideas were being collected; situation 2 where new equipment or skills were being demonstrated and practiced; and situation 3 where problems were being discussed and solved. three pattern types identified from the literature were found. these patterns, evident as basic units, were often repeated in chains. in this section we describe the patterns and their distribution across the three different situations. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a25 dialogue patterns. the three dialogue patterns types are: type a patterns (ire / ira); type b patterns (icr / ircr); and type c patterns (inir / irn-ir). these dialogue pattern types are further described below. type a patterns (ire / ira). the first was the ire (initiate, respond, evaluate) pattern, also know as triadic dialogue, reported in the literature to be common in classrooms, including science classrooms (lemke, 1990), where the third evaluative turn in the pattern indicates that the answer to the question posed in the initiate turn was already known. a variant of this pattern that we called ira, was also evident. in ira (initiate, respond, acknowledge), instead of the third turn being an evaluative turn it indicated an acknowledgement. type b patterns (icr/ircr). the second pattern type was the icr / ircr pattern (initiate, clarification, respond; or initiate, respond, clarification, respond), reported in the literature to occur during natural pedagogical conversations, in a study that analyzed conversations during an internship for high school students’ in a professional science laboratory (hsu et al., 2009). in the earlier study, this pattern had emerged during conversations between the laboratory technician and the high school students. type c patterns (inir / irn-ir). the third pattern type inir / irn-ir (initiate turns originating from different speakers often overlapping, followed by an initiate turn that brings the contributions together, followed by a response turn of agreement; or an initiate turn followed by response turns originating from different speakers and often overlapping followed by an initiate turn that brings the contributions together, followed by a response turn of agreement). this type of pattern has not been reported in the literature but can be seen in transcripts reported in the literature during occasions such as cumulative talk (mercer, 2000). table 2 indicates the relative frequency of these pattern types in the three different situation types observed. table 2 frequency of discourse patterns in particular situations pattern situation gathering observations, recollections and ideas (n = 182 turns) situation 2 demonstration/practice (n = 174 turns) situation 3 problem solving (66 turns) type a patterns ire / ira (triadic talk) 152 (84%) 28 (16%) 26 (40%) type b patterns icr / ircr (natural pedagogical talk) 25 (14%) 123 (71%) type c patterns inir /irnir (distributed talk) 5 (2%) 23 (13%) 40 (60%) interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a26 relationship between dialogue patterns and situations. as table 2 shows, type a patterns predominate in situation type 1, when students made observations, recollected, and produced ideas; type b patterns predominate in situation type 2 when there is demonstration / practice of a new machine or a new skill; and type c patterns predominate in situation type 3 when there is problem-solving. further details of the dialogue patterns found in each situation are presented below. gathering observations, recollections and ideas (situation 1). type a patterns (the ire/ira patterns) were predominant in the classroom and they were found primarily in situation 1 where observations, recollections and ideas were being gathered. ire patterns ended in an evaluative turn while ira patterns ended with a turn of acknowledgment. ire patterns predominated in situation 1a when recollections of past events were being collected. for example, when the teacher was asking the students to recall what she had done and the exact sequence in her demonstration of how to build a water filter (see example in fragment 2 below). in this situation (1a) out of 18 iterations of type a patterns, 15 ended in an evaluative turn (ire). this pattern was also observed between students when recollections of past events were being collected (fragment 1 in the background section). in situation 1a there was a “correct” answer regarding what came next in the sequence of events that were being recalled. in contrast, ira patterns predominated when ideas were being collected (situation 1b) and there was not a “correct” answer. for example, when the teacher was collecting the students responses to the question “what is one thing you could change about the water filter.” in this situation (type 1b) 8 out of 11 iterations of type a patterns did not include an evaluative turn (ira). the teacher repeated the idea and wrote the idea on a sticky note, and attached it to the poster. the other three iterations ended with repeating the idea and the addition of a word that could have been evaluative (okay) (ire). in situation type 1b, the teacher was accepting all ideas. type a patterns were not the only pattern types found in situation 1, type b patterns (icr / ircr patterns) were found when students were making observations of what the teacher was doing during a demonstration, and taking notes. in this situation type 1c, the teacher initiated by asking “do you have any questions?” students asked clarification questions such as “what is that called?” or “how much water did you put in?” the teacher responded by answering the student’s question and the students wrote the responses in their notes. as well, in situation type 1 there was one example (situation 1d) of the type c patterns (inr /irnir patterns). it occurred when a student initiated by interrupting the teacher who was at the time writing down student recollections of a past activity. the student pointed out a problem of missing information in what the teacher had written. several other students interrupted and contributed and through the joint work of different contributors a decision was made about the substance of the missing information, the teacher repeated the information and added this to her sticky note. situation 2: demonstration/practice. type b patterns (icr / ircr patterns) were less frequent overall but they predominated (71%) in the situation when new equipment or skills were demonstrated and practiced, for example, when a guest expert was showing the students how to use a turbidity meter to measure the turbidity of their water samples and the students were following through on measuring. the guest expert explained to the students how to set up the samples and place them in the turbidity meter, students asked clarification questions, and the guest expert responded. fragment 3 below is an example of this type of pattern that occurred when the guest expert was explaining how to make a dilution; and fragment 4 below is an example that occurred when students were working together to make dilutions. as well as type b patterns, type a patterns (the ire/ira patterns) were found in situation type 2 but at a lower frequency (16%). type a patterns were found when the teacher asked students to recall their knowledge of past events; for example, when she asked them to recall what came next in the interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a27 experimental procedure. in situation 2 there were also several instances (13%) of type c patterns (inir /irnir patterns). these were seen when a problem arose. for example, when the guest expert and teacher realized the samples were too cloudy to get a reading on the turbidity meter (see fragment 5 below). through several contributions from different speakers, and the joining of contributions from several speakers, a plan emerged to dilute the samples, a participant stated the course of action, and the participants agreed upon it (r). situation 3: collaborative problem solving. type c patterns (inir /irnir patterns) predominated when the class was collectively working to solve a problem (60%). for example, when the teacher asked the class how they might rank the water samples a student suggested they rank them according to color, a second student interrupted to point out a problem, which was that the volume of water in the containers were different in some cases and this could affect the color (see fragment 6 below). through the joining of different contributions from different speakers a solution was proposed to make all samples the same volume that was accepted by the group. as already indicated, type c patterns were also found when problems arose unintentionally such as when the teacher and guest discovered that the samples were too cloudy to read with the turbidity meter. in situation type 3, type a patterns were also found when the teacher was asking the class to supply ideas of what they could measure or observe (dependent variable) about the water to make their decision about the impact of the altered variable (independent variable). staffing of the discourse patterns: players in the turn-taking sequences in the literature, the existence of particular dialogue patterns in classrooms is usually seen as a reflection of the intention of teachers. in the case of the ire dialogue pattern for example, teachers are sometimes portrayed as hanging on to the ire pattern because it allows them to maintain a position of authority (hanrahan, 2005). analyses such as hanrahan’s, however, could be problematic because they fail to take into account a power–knowledge dialectic (e.g. foucault, 1975), and exactly who is in the know always is worked out situationally such that the tables are turned when an undergraduate student is treated as knowing more than his physics professors (roth & middleton, 2006). however, if dialogue patterns are cultural phenomena that arise from particular situations (roth & gardner, 2012), then their frequency in classrooms might be due to the frequency of those situation types, rather than being due to teachers’ intentions. the data in the previous section indicate that particular dialogue patterns types predominate in particular situations. in this section of the paper, we show that these three dialogue pattern types, in their particular situations, can be staffed differently; the identity of the players at the posts in the turn-taking sequences does not depend upon their institutional position (teacher, student). for example, it is not always the institutional teacher who takes the first and third positions in the triadic dialogue (ire) sequence. type a patterns (ire/ira). analysis of the two dialogue fragments (fragment 1, which opens this paper, and fragment 2) indicates that they follow the same triadic dialogue pattern even though different players (teacher or students) inhabit the roles in the turn taking sequence. the example in fragment 1 that occurred between students has already been described. the example in fragment 2 is more typical of ire patterns in classrooms. p1 is the teacher and p2, p3, and p4 are students. the example occurred when the teacher was collecting recollections (situation 1b) of the sequence of steps she had taken in the construction of the water filter, something she had just completed demonstrating to the class. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a28 fragment 2 i> 01 p1 a::nd. then what did i do (.) trent? (leaning over the desk, writing on a notepad) r> 02 p2 then you took the bottle you put the lid down first through the ring clamp= e/i> 03 p1 =after i touched the retort stand ↓what did i have to do (stops writing sits up straight puts hand under chin and finger to lips) r> 04 p2 uh, you put it down on the desk e/i> 05 p1 and thenˀ (nodding and smiling p1 leans toward her notepad with her pen in her hand) r> 06 p2 [you put the two liter (.) ] put the lid down [(………………..)] e> 07 p1 [sits back up shaking head] r> 08 p3 [u:m, she didn’t ] r> 09 p4 [put in the ring ] clamp= r 10 p2 =i just said that e> 11 p1 i added a ring clamp (.) good (resumes writing on a note pad) in fragment 2, in the turn 1 | turn 2 query | reply turn pair, a query initiates and addresses the next step in the sequence of addition of elements in the building of the pop-bottle water filter. the reply in turn 2 is a description of an action taken. that the answer offered in turn 2 is evaluated as not satisfactory or correct is indicated in turn 3 by a halt in writing on the notepad and a prompting for a different answer. the prompt is to consider a step in the sequence of addition of elements that had to be done next. turn 4, in response to the prompt in turn 3 describes a prior action taken. that writing on the notepad does not resume in turn 5 indicates an evaluative turn again, where the response in turn 4 is not judged as sufficient, and the query in turn 5 “and then” is a prompt for elaboration. turn 6 in response to turn 5 is another proposal for what the next step was. that turn 6 is not taken as correct is indicated in turn 7 by the shaking of the head and by the shift to an upright body position, away from the leaning forward writing position. turns 8, 9 and 10 are offered by three different speakers and are also responses to turn 5. that turn 9 is taken as the correct response and the next step in the sequence is indicated in the evaluative turn 11 that repeats turn 9—“added a ring clamp” and evaluates by saying “good” and by the resumption of the writing in the notepad. in fragments 1 and 2 there is a person or people at the initiating turns, who, as shown by his/her filling the third slot (staffing the first and third turns), already is in the position of knowing the answer. regardless of the players that inhabit (staff) the roles in the turn-taking sequence, a similar pattern emerges. type b patterns (icr/ircr). analysis of the two dialogue fragments (fragment 3 and fragment 4) indicates that they follow the icr/ircr pattern even though in each case different players (teacher or students) inhabit (staff) the roles in the turn taking sequence. in our study, we first found the icr pattern when an expert demonstrated a new skill and learners then practiced. an example of an icr pattern (fragment 3) from this situation is shared below. this fragment occurred when the person p1 staffing the initiate (i) position of the icr sequence was demonstrating how to make a dilution of the water samples in preparation for measuring turbidity using the turbidity meter. fragment 3 i> 01 p1 you’re going to take your sample and you’re going to put one pipette in into the beaker. so your sample of blue stuff goes in the beaker. hang on one. then you’re gonna add 10 of the clear water (.) afterwards. then you’re gonna put one of the blue and ten of the clear. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a29 c> 02 p2 how many times do you want us to do that? r> 03 p1 well let’s see how much volume we get at the end of that. you need enough, you need enough to fill one of these. fragment 3 begins with an initiation (turn 01) where p1 is explaining and showing that to make a dilution of the water sample participants need to take one pipette-full of the sample and put it in the beaker and then add 10 pipettes full of clear water and then repeat. in turn 02, the clarification turn, p2 asks a clarification question regarding how many times they need to repeat that step. in turn 03, the response turn, p1 answers that they will need to see whether the final volume is enough to fill the vial that is used in the turbidity meter. in fragment 3, like the technician in the hsu et al. (2009) study, p1 is an expert (mr. g.) who is visiting the class. p2 is a student. further examples of this type of pattern were seen whenever the expert and the students were involved in similar demonstration-practice activities learning to conduct other science techniques, including learning to use the turbidity meter. there were other times that this pattern type was seen when mr. g. was not involved in the conversation. the initiate position was staffed by a person other than mr. g. one such example of the ircr pattern is provided in fragment 4. fragment 4 i> 01 p1 then do the finger squeeze r> 02 p2 okay c> 03 p1 same thing with water↑ r> 04 p3 (2) same turn 01 initiates (i) with a direction “then do the finger squeeze” indicating the squeezing of the bulb of the pipette needed to expel the liquid into the beaker. the affirmative response “okay” follows in turn 2. turn 03 is a clarification question whether the same thing (is done with water) that is answered in the affirmative response in turn 04 by the repeat of the word “same.” in this example (fragment 4) p1, p2, and p3 are all students. the students are working on their own in the practice phase following a demonstration by the guest expert of how to make dilutions. what is relevant to the argument in this paper is that the ircr pattern is emerging in association with the situation of demonstration and practice, regardless of the players involved in staffing the positions. type c patterns (inir/ irnir). the distributed contributions pattern was seen in situation type 3, when the whole class was intentionally engaged in problem solving and also when a problem emerged that interrupted the course of a situation when other patterns where predominant. the first example (fragment 5), a pattern consisting of a series of distributed initiations followed by an initiation/response turn pair (inir), occurred when a problem arose during the activity of turbidity measurement (situation 2). the inir pattern is seen in turns 9–14. the earlier turns that follow the icr pattern are included to show the emergence of the problem to which the suggested solutions are addressed. the group is preparing their water filter samples from their pop-bottle water filters for turbidity measurement. the problem that is unfolding is that the turbidity of the samples is so high that the values are off the scale of the turbidity meter—all measurements of all samples are of greater turbidity than the maximum that the turbidity meter can measure. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a30 fragment 5 i> 01 p1 that seems to be (.) that’s maxed out ↓ (.) so let’s see what we get [let’s try some more] c> 02 p2 [mine’s maxed out now↑] r> 03 p1 it’s still (.) everything is maxed in turn 1 the problem unfolds in the statement “that’s maxed out” uttered during the reading of the value on the turbidity meter. this is followed by a query | reply pair in turn 2 | turn 3. the query in turn 2 is with regard to whether that individual’s sample is maxed out and the reply in turn 3 indicates that everything is maxed. the group continues to test the different water filter samples. forty seconds later, in a query/reply turn pair (turn 4 | turn 5) an initiation in turn 4 is a suggested solution to the problem that has emerged. this suggested solution is to dilute the samples by the same amount. fragment 5 (continued) i> 04 p1 um (2) what if we diluted them all the same↓ r> 05 p2 yeah we may have to (3) yes (.) we’ll::: (2) c> 06 p1 that wasn’t my idea↓= e> 07 p2 =it’s a good idea= 08 p1 =laughter i> 09 p2 i would say we’re probably going to have to dilute these by:::↑ i> 10 p1 =cos i thought pipettes we could fill them to::: i> 11 p2 = five to one i’d go five to one (.) just to start off with↑ i> 12 p1 do you want to do that↑ = r> 13 p2 = yeah r> 14 p1 okay e> 15 p2 that’s a good plan i think that’s >what we’re gonna have to do↓ < the reply in turn 5 is an affirmative response to the suggestion in turn 4. two seconds later in turn 06 | turn 07 the high quality of the idea is established followed by laughter in turn 8. the distributed pattern that we identify as (inir) begins with a series of iterations in turns 9–11, distributed across individuals. these initiations are suggestions regarding the action to be taken in response to the problem. the first concerns the amount to dilute the sample by (turns 9 and 11) and turn 10 concerns the means by which to achieve the dilution (the use of pipettes). the series of iterations is followed by turn 12 which is an initiation query proposing a decision regarding the action that should be taken. turn 13 is an affirmative response that is accepted in turn 14. the quality of the proposed plan is attested to in turn 15 and the proposition that this is the required course of action. in this example (inir), the persons staffing the positions are p2, the teacher and p1, the expert guest. the pair reach a final decision to use pipettes to measure and set up 5:1 dilutions to solve the problem of the samples beings too cloudy for the turbidity meter. this appears to be a collaborative decision where p1 and p2 each offer contributions that are a series of initiations that are brought together to form the planned course of action. in the second example (fragment 6) the distributed contributions pattern (this time irnir) occurs in situation 3 when the class is working together to solve a problem that has been presented, that of whether colour can be used as the characteristic to compared the filtered water samples. turns 02–07 constitute the pattern irnir. interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a31 fragment 6 i> 01 p1: =but some they have more in to make it look um: darker or lighter or something r/i> 02 p2: okay (1) how do you mean darker and lighter r> 03 p1: like – like like (2) ˚i don’t [know˚(……..)] r> 04 p3 [the more we’re] r> 05 p4: =seeing different colour than the others r> 06 p3: = like more your seeing or something i> 07 p2: = oh okay so p3 is saying if this one has fifty mils and another one has two hundred mils (pause) r> 08 p1: =it might look different r> 09 p2 = it might look differentˀ i> 10 p1 =we should all put them in the two hundred cup or fifty mils or like how much ever the problem is addressed in the sequence of turn 1| turn 2. it relates to the fact that the samples were of different volumes and therefore could appear to be different colors because of that (rather than because of differences in cleanliness). the second member of the pair treats the opening statement as incomplete with respect to the degree of darkness or lightness. turns 3, 4, 5 and 6 constitute replies to the query in turn 2 (“what do you mean darker or lighter”) that is a query for clarification of the problem that unfolded in turn 1. turn 3, after a pause, adds, “i don’t know.” turns 4 is the beginning of a reply and turn 5, is an interjection followed immediately by turn 6. both turn 5 and turn 6 contribute suggestions to help clarify the problem. turn 5 concerns the difference in the color and turn 6 refers to the difference in the amount “the more you’re seeing.” in turn 7 these suggestions that were distributed across turns 4, 5 and 6 come together in the connection of the amount and the appearance using an example “if one has 50 milliliters and the other has 200 milliliters they might look different.” the example is restating the problem that has unfolded in the conversation (turn 1), and clarifying it. in turn 8 the phrase “it might look different” is repeated and this is followed by an initiation that is a suggestion that is a plan of action to put the samples in the same size cup. fragment 6 continues through to final agreement of the group in turns 16–18. fragment 6 (continued) r> 09 p4: =but this like (.) that person has only a tiny bit not even two hundred or fifty: = r> 10 p1: =yeah, but like i> 11 p2: so what do we want to do? how do we want to make that a fair test thenˀ r> 12 p4: make them all fifty mils i> 13 p2: so we want to make them all fifty mils? r> 14 p4: yeah i> 15 p1: who agrees? i> 16 p2: does that sound (2) fairˀ r> 17 p1: yeah= r> 18 p3: yeah= r> 19 p4: yeah= e> 20 p2: =because then we’re measuring the same thing, right? turn 9 is a response to the suggestion made in turn 8 that is the unfolding of another problem— the problem that some samples are too small, not even 200 or 50 milliliters “that person has only a tiny bit.” turn 10 acknowledges that a solution is needed in the statement “yeah but like” and turn 11 brings the question to the whole group about the course of action to be taken. turn 11 also phrases the question interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a32 as being one of how to compare the samples through “a fair test.” turn 12 constitutes a reply to turn 11, in stating that they should all be made 50 milliliters. in turn 13 this potential solution is offered up to the whole group in response to turn 12. turn 14 is an affirmative reply. turn 15 invites statements of agreement. turn 16 returns to the issue of the fairness of the comparison that was previously raised by asking, “does that sound fair?” turns 17,18, and 19 are affirmative responses. turn 20 is also a response to the question in turn 16 “because then we’re measuring the same thing, right?” the distributed contributions patterns in fragments 5 and 6 are similar in that there are contributions distributed across individuals that are brought together in a following initiate-response turn pair. in fragment 5 (inir) we saw initiations distributed across individuals that were proposing suggestions for courses of action to solve a problem and in fragment 6 (irnir) we saw responses that were distributed across individuals that were clarifications of a problem. of particular relevance to the argument in this paper is that the distributed contribution patterns occurred during collaborative problem solving regardless of the players involved in staffing the positions in the turn-taking sequence. in fragment 5 the players who staffed the positions were the teacher and the expert and in fragment 6 the players who staffed the positions in the turn-taking sequence were the teacher and students. discussion this study was designed to investigate the relationship between grammatical forms, institutional position (teacher, student), and topic-specific situations in lesson forms other than teacher-directed whole-classroom talk, specifically during different parts of a scientific investigation. the particular context of the investigation was a project designed to assist teachers in developing more dialogic forms of verbal intercourse (in the sense of bakhtin), that is, forms of exchange that do not merely expound truths (as in the late socratic dialogues) or ascertain whether the person tested knows the truth (as in the ire pattern). the situations, distribution of discourse patterns and examples reported above are consistent with the suggestion that it is not the identity of the players who staff the posts of the turn-taking sequence that determine discourse patterns (roth & gardner, 2012). discourse patterns are cultural features that participants recognize, orient to, and contribute to reproduce. our study shows that the type of turn-taking pattern emerges in direct association with the particular situation type. that is, there is no one pattern dominating within the classroom, which could have led to the inference that the teacher implemented the form. instead, the patterns arose in types of situations and independent of the specific staffing. the ire pattern emerged in association with the situation where recollections are being gathered, the ira pattern emerging in association with the situation where ideas are being gathered; the icr/ircr pattern emerged in association with demonstrating and practicing a skill; and the inir / rnir patterns emerged in association with the situation of collaborative problem solving. these findings suggest a reorientation in the way observed behaviors are attributed. here, the situation type appeared to call for discourse type. the specific participants staffing the slots in interaction types are not only subjects of the situation, but also subject to and subjected to the condition. we might therefore say that the social phenomena (i.e., the situated discourse patterns) reproduce themselves by “capturing” their staff—much as others have described “learning disability” as a phenomenon that “acquires” children (mcdermott, 1993). it has been suggested that the tension between teacher authoritative (triadic dialogue) and true dialogic discourse is inevitable and indeed appropriate for “the support of meaningful learning of scientific knowledge” (scott et al., 2006, p. 605), that open dialogue and ire patterns can coexist harmoniously (wells & arauz, 2006) and that each pattern has a function in the cultural production and reproduction of science talk (roth & radford, 2010). a shift to more participatory dialogic forms of teaching | learning, may be made difficult by the fact that this requires the possibility to arrive at truths that were not previously established (bakhtin, 1984). the present work suggests ways that teachers could be interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a33 supported within the classroom through the provision of guiding materials that create new situations and therefore allow new patterns to arise. for example, in the case of type a patterns described here, the materials might shift the class further away from the predominance of ire patterns to ira patterns by focusing more frequently on the collection of student ideas (situation 1b), rather than collection of student recollections of past events (situation 1a). it is generally assumed that teachers hold on to the ire pattern for control reasons and efforts to make classrooms more equitable places often involve teachers in professional development that aims to change their intentions, and ultimately classroom talk (sedovak et al., 2016). this study supports the idea that more than good intentions are needed. if patterns of classroom talk are cultural phenomena that emerge out of particular situations in classrooms (roth & radford, 2012), then one way to help bring about an alteration in the patterns of classroom talk might be to focus on changing the particular situations that teachers and students are engaged in. support materials like those used in the steps to inquiry project could be refined to create particular situations from which a range of discourse patterns can emerge. the materials could more specifically ask teachers to collect the ideas of the students and to acknowledge them by writing them on sticky notes and attaching them to a poster; to demonstrate skills and give students opportunities to practice them; and to solve problems such as deciding on a dependent variable to measure. our future work focuses on temporally changing dialogue patterns in classrooms where teachers and students are supported in the transition to student-centered inquiry by the tools of the steps to inquiry framework. we propose that just as classroom discourse is affected by classroom artifacts (roth, mcginn, woszczyna, boutonné, 1999), or the physical space of the classroom (roth & hsu, 2014), tools of the framework organize the situations of teachers and students and through engaging in these situations, more equitable dialogue patterns can emerge. acknowledgements thank-you to melissa lindsay for her many hours of work on transcription; and to erica alexander, richard pardo, jennifer parker, susan lindsay, and michael newnham for their support and for their work on the creation of the steps to inquiry materials. this research was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. references atkinson, j. m., & heritage, j. 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(2006). dialogue in the classroom. journal of the learning sciences. 15, 379– 428. youth science canada (nd). smarter science posters and pdfs. http://smarterscience.youthscience.ca/posters-and-pdfs interchangeable positions in interaction sequences in science classrooms carol rees and wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.184 | vol. 5 (2017) a36 appendix list of transcript notation symbols modified from atkinson and heritage (1984) transcript notation symbols definition . a period indicates a stopping fall in tone, not necessarily the end of a sentence , a comma indicates a continuing intonation not necessarily between clauses of sentences ? a question mark indicates a rising inflection, not necessarily a question ! an exclamation point indicates an animated tone : a colon indicates an extension of the sound or syllable it follows ( more colons prolongs the stretch) = when there is no interval between adjacent utterances , the second being latched immediately to the first(without overlapping it), the utterances are linked together with equal signs > < when part of the utterance is delivered at a pace quicker than the surrounding talk, it is indicated by being enclosed between “ less than” signs o o a degree sign is used to indicate a passage of talk which is quieter than the surrounding talk [[ ]] [[ ]] utterances starting simultaneously are linked together with either double or single left hand brackets [ ] [ ] when overlapping utterances do not start simultaneously, the point at which the ongoing utterance is joined by another is marked with a single left hand bracket , linking an ongoing with an overlapping utterance at the point where overlap begins a short untimed pause within an utterance is indicated by a dash ↑ ↓ marked rising and falling shifts in intonation are indicated by upward and downward pointing arrows immediately prior to the rise or fall (2) the duration of a pause is indicated by a number (of seconds) inside parenthesis new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word hurley, dialogic pedagogy and semiotic (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a60 dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley zayed university, dubai abstract technological determinism has been driving conceptions of technology enhanced learning for the last two decades at least. the abrupt shift to the emergency delivery of online courses during covid-19 has accelerated big tech’s coup d’état of higher education, perhaps irrevocably. yet, commercial technologies are not necessarily aligned with dialogic conceptions of learning while a technological transmission model negates learners’ input and interactions. mikhail bakhtin viewed words as the multivocal bridge to social thought. his theory of the polysemy of language, that has subsequently been termed dialogism, has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of american pragmatist charles sanders peirce. peirce’s semiotic philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistics, literary genres, and/or indeed human activity. this study traces links between bakhtin’s dialogism with peirce’s semiotics. conceptual synthesis develops the semiotic-dialogic framework. taking augmented reality as a theoretical case, inquiry illustrates that while technologies are subsuming traditional pedagogies, teachers and learners, this does not necessarily open dialogic learning. this is because technologies are never dialogic, in and of themselves, although semiotic learning always involves social actors’ interpretations of signs. crucially, semiotic-dialogism generates theorising of the visual literacies required by learners to optimise technologies for dialogic learning. key words: dialogism / signs / semiotics / questioning / opening / augmented reality / technologies zoe hurley (phd, lancaster university, uk) is the assistant dean for student affairs in the college of communication and media sciences at zayed university, dubai, united arab emirates. zoe teaches undergraduate courses in social media and new media writing. she is interested in semiotics, dialogism and questions of power in technology enhanced learning. she has published academic papers on arab women’s social media, postdigital living and online learning during covid-19. ïïò introduction dialogism, semiotics and signs technological tools come and go. according to big tech, augmented reality (ar) is the latest application to enhance pedagogy (adobe, 2020). but this theoretical inquiry responds to the need for philosophically grounded perspectives of what we mean by learning and the extent to which pedagogies involve visualities. visuality is a central aspect of human consciousness, for those who can see in physical terms, but also for those are partially sighted or blind and ‘see’ at abstract, conceptual and imaginary levels. visuality represents a gap in western philosophical traditions, which tend to be logocentric and glottocentric accounts of knowledge, fixated on the spoken and/or written word. to address the lacuna, i draw on the issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a61 dialogic perspective of the literary scholar mikhail bakhtin (1984) suggesting that language is multivocal, social and in process. while bakhtin saw the word as a bridge to thought, his theory of dialogism has strong correlations with the semiotic philosophy of the american pragmatist charles sanders peirce (1839 – 1914) (petrilli, 2017). semiotics is the theory of meaning making occurring through signs. signs include the codes, images, sounds, texts, gestures, hashtags, or anything conveying meaning and so visuality is central (semetsky & stables, 2014). while neither bakhtin nor peirce developed a specific theory of dialogic education, both provide a strong dialogic philosophy of living via the heteroglossia of signs. to trace the links between bakhtin’s dialogism with peirce’s semiotics, as well as their promise for facilitating dialogic pedagogy for visual literacies, this paper develops theorising of visual dialogic perspectives of learning. inquiry explores notions of visual literacies conceptualised through the dialogism of semiotics. this is important because it problematises assumptions that literacies and technologies are necessarily dialogic. the specifically semiotic-dialogic framework takes augmented reality as a theoretical case and asks: to what extent does semiotic-dialogism help to conceive of the visual literacies of augmented reality? this is a complex theoretical question spanning semiotics, dialogism, visual literacies and augmented reality. consequently, this complexity could generate conceptual insights into the types of visual literacies required by learners using technologies like ar. these are vital for developing new vocabulary, discussions and frameworks for semiotic-dialogism. to illustrate further, i begin with a review of relevant literature. literature review the review of literature is organised across these domains of dialogism, semiotics, visual literacies and ar. this thematic theoretical review helps to conceptualise semiotic-dialogism and its theoretical scope for inquiry into visual literacies, ar and the role of immersive visual technologies in learning. thematic searches were carried out in databases and google scholar’s search engines. presentation of the literature is thematic, rather than chronological, since the study is not concerned with a teleological perspective of visual literacies and augmented reality but rather the potential of semiotic-dialogic inquiry for disrupting earlier normative theorising. dialogism dialogism is defined as the exchange of perspectives and voices (bakhtin, 1986). it involves the interaction of texts, aesthetic genres and interpretors and has also been developed to conceive of learning as a range of perspectives and voices in social interaction (matusov, 2009). the term ‘dialogue’ is derived from two words in classical greek, ‘dia’ meaning ‘through’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’ or 'discourse.' dialogic education has been defined as engaging students in an ongoing process of shared inquiry (series of questions) through dialogue (wegerif, 2017). learning can be understood as shared dialogic space, coconstruction of knowledge through questioning. as argued by bakhtin, “if an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue” (1986, p.168). this suggests that dialogic education is an ongoing process, series of interactions for different points of view rather than a transmission of facts. freire, another key figure of dialogic pedagogy, suggests that dialogue is an “essential necessity” facilitating humans in achieving “significance” (1970, p.69). to engage in dialogue, words play a dualistic role that involves the enunciator in both reflection and action. freire says, “there is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. thus, to speak a word is to transform the world” (1970, p.68). this indicates that dialogic pedagogy promotes learners’ agency critical examination of the self, life and the world (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017; matusov, von duyke & kayumova, 2015). from a dialogic pedagogy perspective, dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a62 theorists like freire (1970) suggest that education can only be considered dialogic, and thereby as having significance, when learning is collaborative and provides openings for transformation and praxis. freire (1970) views the social systems and processes of learning as ontologically inseparable to the individual and learning and subjectivity are inter-subjective. this is a constructivist position viewing learning as occurring when social actors collaborate to construct meaning via multidirectional dialogue. freire (1970) contested individualised accounts of education, that are intra-subjective and assume knowledge can be downloaded, as a banking or deposit approach to learning. in terms of deconstructing dialogism at the level of words, signs or codes, freire explains: dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s ‘depositing’ ideas in another, nor can it be a simple exchange of ideas to be ‘consumed’.…because dialogue is an encounter among men and women who name the world, it must not be a situation where some name on behalf of others (1970, p.70). matusov, however, asks significant questions about freire for “uncritically and willingly” participating in totalitarian communist regimes in africa, including guinea-bissau and in sao tome and principle in the 1970s, while failing to adequately challenge these regimes (freire, 1978; freire & macedo, 1987)” (2009, p.73). matusov describes freire’s approach as “weak dialogism” since it is an instrumental approach, that can be “dosed, scheduled, and well located in the classroom” (2009, p.75). while for matusov there is nothing inherently wrong with dialogic instrumentalism he suggests the issue is confusing “dialogicity, how dialogic the discourse is, with the genre of discourse” (2009, p.75), since this could lead to prescriptive pedagogy that has no implications beyond the classroom. alternatively, “strong dialogism” indicates that “genuine education cannot survive without dialogue” (matusov 2009, p.76). within radical strong dialogism, pedagogy is epistemologically underpinned by reflective knowledge rooted in dialogue and ontologically through locating dialogue at the centre of human activity. matusov (2009) suggests freire’s dialogic pedagogy does not go far enough in integrating a reflective epistemology with a dialogic ontology. while i do not disagree with matusov’s critique of freire’s evident theoretical and political inconsistencies, freire also spoke many times of the need to contextualise his ideas while never claiming to have a specific ‘method,’ or even a set of methods with universal applicability (roberts, 2003). in his later works, for example pedagogy of freedom, freire (1998) also provides a distinctive approach to the politics of education and a voice of hope for teachers who remain committed to their vocation under less-than-ideal circumstances (aronowitz, 2015; roberts, 2003). nevertheless, matusov (2009; 2020) attunes us to the multicultural hybridity of varying pedagogical situations. this indicates the importance of considering the extent to which learners and theorists are always constrained within broader socio-political contexts and that agency is entangled within a series of cultural, historical, political, material and technological phenomena. this could enable us to explore a spectrum of learners across a variety of geo-political environments rather than exclusively in terms of apparently ideal learning environments that are already optimised for dialogism. bakhtin (1999) also articulates that the diverse multicultural aspects of human activity that involve dialogic language. he suggests that these aspects are utterances that are shaped by the conditions in which they are produced and, simultaneously, by the goal of these structures. the compositional aspects of speech genres are therefore determined via their thematic content, structure and purpose. in other words, speech genres are a dynamic interplay of what is being said, how it is presented and to what purpose. these genres are thus also infinitely heterogenous since social actors and the boundaries of human activity are in constant process, change and interpretation. bakhtin’s (1999) theory of speech genres has specific parallels with peirce’s (1908) theory of semiosis. both theorists define meaning making as occurring dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a63 through the interconnections of form, content, purpose and the further generation of chains of meaning and action. peircean semiosis for peirce (1908) the semiosis of meaning involves the triadic sign-action of representamen (signs or words, pictures, gestures, mental images or any phenomena communicating meaning) with object(s) (what the signs refer to) and processes of interpretant (practices of interpretation and orientation towards further meaning production) (stables et al., 2018). this offers a sophisticated framework for exploring the dynamic relations of knowledge and learning in terms of processes of dialogic communication (having information as a product and understanding as an effect), a universe of discourse or common sense (having community as a product and sensibility and comprehensibility as effects), and processes of enquiry (having consensus as a product and reasonableness as an effect). for peirce (1931), knowledge is “a living historic entity.” it is acquired through experience and mediated through the dialogism of signs (strand, 2010). both bakhtin and peirce are therefore aligned through their dialogic epistemology suggesting how knowledge occurs within fluid and dynamic processes of communication. susan petrilli, (2017) also suggests that peircean semiotics corresponds with bakhtin’s (1986; 1999) theory of dialogism since it suggests that signs, and their interpreters, enter a process of dialogic or hybrid interaction. in this paper, i build on these alignments to suggest that peirce’s triadic conception of meaning making is a dialogic theory. this is because it conceives of social actors’ sign-actions occurring through intertextual semiosis and dialogic interpretation. i propose that understanding the sign-driven processes of semiosis, as specifically dialogic, could contribute to expanding our conceptions of dialogic pedagogy in semiotic terms. this might help to go beyond transcendental perspectives of what ‘true dialogic pedagogy’ should be while situating variations of weak and strong dialogisms in terms of their cultural historical context (matusov, 2009). however, peirce’s philosophy of signs extends far beyond words, speech acts, linguistic and literary genres and indeed human activity. for peirce, meaning through signs is constituted via the triadic semiosis of signs, objects and interpretations occurring consecutively. this sense of semiosis cuts across the cartesian divide of mind and body through locating signs as the defining vehicle and mediators of social consciousness within a broader semiosphere or universe of signs (lotman, 2005 1990; olteanu, 2015). furthermore, social actors are themselves signs who incorporate a language of signs, via and as signs, within a biosemiotic or sign-driven environment. learning involves the interpretation of abstract, conceptual, material, social, emotional, physical and technological signs. signs are all around, within and in-between social actors and sign-driven consciousness of, about, embedded and embodied within the world. bringing a peircean semiotic perspective to dialogic pedagogy therefore broadens the discussion from linguistics, culture and constructivism to consider the dialogism of a sign universe. nevertheless, this framework retains the bakhtinian structure of content, form and purpose as meanings are understood as semiotic-dialogic interplays while also helping to extend sign-actions within a varying range of contexts, environments and technological locales. the semiotic-dialogic framework therefore has great potential for conceptual multicultural hybridity (olteanu, 2019). furthermore, it departs from a transcendental, universal or idealist perspective about what dialogism and dialogic pedagogy should, could or would be. in the next section, i will discuss the significance of the semiotic-dialogic pedagogic framework for theorising the concept of visual literacy and ar in this case study. dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a64 visual literacies in terms of visuality, what we see and do not see are mediated via histories, cultural values, ideologies, social practices and technologies (mirzoeff, 2006). this indicates that seeing is not simply the ability of an individual, all seeing cartesian subject (jay, 1988). consequently, there has been a visual turn in scholarship and a growing interest in visuality due to the increasing proliferation of images across visual mediums like social media. yet, as scholars of visual arts, cinema, cultural studies media and communications have been arguing for decades, visuality and the role that it plays in our society is arguably nothing new. however, theories of visuality within educational research represent a longstanding gap within scholarship (lacković, 2020). but to understand the impact of visual technologies, for instance ar, we need to take visuality and its role within pedagogy seriously. taking visuality seriously involves thinking about contemporary ways to definine visual literacy which in turn will help to consider ar in visual terms as well as the visual literacies involved. visual artefacts have been used throughout human histories. the concept of ‘visual literacy,’ despite the terms’ modern connotations, is nothing new (pettersson, 1989). ancient philosophers, including aristotle, socrates, and plato used images for visual communication. across all religions, teachers and prophets have used metaphors to help their listeners create inner images (pettersson, 1989). in the twentieth century, the need to take the role of visuals seriously in education has been a concern since the 1930s (e.g., hoban, hoban and zissman’s, 1937, visualising the curriculum). the term visual literacy has been debated since the 1960s. it is considered to have been coined by john debes, co-founder of the international visual literacy association. debes explained: visual literacy refers to a group of vision competencies a human being can develop by seeing and at the same time having and integrating other sensory experiences. the development of these competencies is fundamental to normal human learning. when developed, they enable a visually literate person to discriminate and interprete the visible actions, objects, and symbols natural or man-made, that he encounters in his environment. through the creative use of these competencies, he is able to communicate with others. through the appreciative use of these competencies, he is able to comprehend and enjoy the masterworks of visual communication (1969, p.26). this citation indicates that debes viewed visual literacy as “competencies,” and as something possibly fluid while the definition unwittingly reinscribes aesthetic judgements about ways of seeing. but aesthetic judgements may conflate with technological determinism and solutionism, which influences notions of visual literacies. simultaneously, the definition alludes to the complexity of visuality and density of visual regimes in anthropocentric societies. however, it tacitly implies a top-down visual hierarchy, or that there are certain visual forms or “masterworks” that the visually literate subject should aspire to “comprehend and enjoy” (debes, 1969, p.26). the role of visuality within learning and higher education is also not necessarily something topdown or to be developed in order to ‘read’ aesthetically dominant social values. alternatively, visual literacy can be conceived in semiotic-dialogic terms, coming from within and outside the academy. conceptions of visual literacy could thus differ, not only according to the cultural, geopolitical and environmental learning context, but in terms of academic discipline, vernacular practices and expressions, social actors’ individual differences, modes and architectures of technologies. other visual scholars indicate that our gaze is trained in psychological, cultural and historical terms and thus visual literacy is not a naturally occurring competency, acquired through frequently encountering images of various kinds (mirzoeff, 2006). however, while visual literacy definitions mostly use a metaphor of visual reading dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a65 and writing, not all visual skills easily undergo this categorization (kędra, 2018). this tendency may further indicate that visual literacy is a failed metaphor, as already suggested by cassidy and knowlton (1983). from a semiotic-dialogic perspective, it is also rooted in essentialist notions of what visual literacy already is, could and should be. conversely, semiotic-dialogic theorising suggests that meaning occurs through semiosis as the learner simultaneously processes the signs (words, images, visual, multimodal components); objects (sign references); and interpretants (immediate, dynamical and final interpretations). the learners’ interaction with the signs, words and images, within their environments, are the mediating trigger for the interpretive process. next, i discuss the implications of these theorisations for considering ar and its potential role in pedagogies. augmented reality ar is currently configured through a range of technological codes, semiotic and multimodal resources. this includes the combinations of video, text, visual effects, animated objects, shapes, emojis and filters that can be overlaid on surfaces and objects and viewed via mobile devices. virtual reality (vr) involving headsets and ar which can be used on mobile devices) tend to be marketed as similar visual attractions although they are slightly different. semiotic-dialogic perspectives of visual literacy might help to review and critique how ar is understood. approaching visual literacy from a semiotic-dialogic perspective can help to embed visual artefacts within social and material practices. semiotic approaches have been used in film studies and audio-visuality studies. in terms of ar, it helps to locate it as a novel artefact that generates visual curiosity. this is like the curiosities found at fairgrounds and theatres in the 19th century, whereby spectators would view visual attractions or marvels for the eye which seemed to challenge our entire concept of reality and visual perception. the first example of ar (like vr) was developed as a headset. it was called the ‘sword of damocles’ and created in 1968 by computer scientist ivan sutherland, with the help of his students at mit. in 1966, sutherland and his colleagues performed what are widely believed to be the first experiments with head-mounted displays of different kinds. they called the ar headset the sword of damocles to refer to the allegory of cicero’s tale of dionysius and damocles. this is the story of the king who gave his riches and privileges to his courtier. once the courtier was in a position of power, he noticed the razor sharp sword hanging from the ceiling. this represents the idea that those in power always labour under the specter of anxiety and the burden of power in being an all seeing all knowing social actor. this view of ar, as having huge empowering potency, has been aggressively promoted by the tech industry and marketeers. for instance, ar and emerging tech expert john werner explains “why this emerging field has the power to give all of us superpowers.” in a ted talk werner (2019) suggests that instead of being presented on flat screens, people could be rendered in ar. this closely resembles the famous star wars hologram scene featuring princess leia decades ago, when she is rendered for obiwan kenobi. werner tells audiences that ar rendering will increase productivity and “make sure people are paying attention.” coincidently, werner serves as managing director and partner at link ventures, and as chief network officer, svp corporate development of cogo labs. co-founder of citizen schools, an advisor for photobutler, vestigo ventures and founders forum (boston). werner is strategically positioned to promote technology driven education and citizen schools has recently partnered with major financial institutions including the bank of america and technology corporations like google who have made major financial investments in addition to leading a variety of apprenticeships (mit, 2021). while werner has direct economic interests in promoting ar pedagogies, researchers without vested incentives, including maximilian speicher working out of the ar research lab at university of dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a66 michigan. speicher (2018) suggests ar has been overly hyped, and there is a lack of real uses so far. speicher says, just as people turn off ar in “pokémon go,” he has “never seen or heard of anyone actually using ar applications such as ikea’s furniture app as it’s allegedly intended; the app has just 3,100 reviews in apple’s app store, far fewer than the 104,000 for pokémon go.” speicher (2018) questions whether ar will be commonplace in five years, or whether ar glasses will replace smartphones within a decade. semiotic-dialogism could therefore be vital in helping to develop critical and pedagogically informed responses to corporations’ aggressive promotion of technology driven learning. this is important because as educators we should not facilitate tech companies’ profit driven encroachment on education at the cost of learners and learning, especially when these views are not underpinned by pedagogy. as ar is likely to be established within education, pedagogical theorising needs to get a handle on what it is and explore theoretical frameworks for responding and shaping a critical response. one such possible response is semiotic-dialogic pedagogy. as the author of this article, i realise that the term and configuration seem loaded with jargon. but complex theorisations are necessary for grasping the oblique visual and social aspects of ar and what it means for learning. this brings us back to the central questions of the study asking: to what extent does semiotic-dialogism help to conceive of the visual literacies of augmented reality? to address this question, i outline the theoretical framework of the study. semiotic-dialogism theorising ar from the semiotic-dialogic perspective suggests that meaning making via ar technologies would involve not only the technological or fixed affordances of ar but also processes of semiosis. once the learner activates the ar trigger, through their mobile phone or another device, the semiosis of sign-driven meaning making is also triggered. yet, this is never a purely technological mediation or one-way transmission since it involves the interplay of signs, ar technological features, dynamics and interpretative mediations of the ar user or learner. this view suggests that neither ar technologies nor learners exclusively mediate meanings but, rather, that learners and technologies simultaneously engage as, with and through living codes (freire, 1970). semiosis could therefore be considered as a dialogic opening whereby technological, sign-driven, social actors and textual mediations interconnect through, with and around ar or other technologies. the interplay of learners, text, ar, or living code, interconnecting through dialogic semiosis are illustrated in figure 1: figure 1: dialogic semiosis objects interpretants ar learners signs dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a67 in terms of semiotic-dialogic theorising, figure 1 indicates that the circular and multidirectional interactions of learners, ar, sign, object and interpretant occurring simultaneously. dialogic semiosis is represented here as technological, semiotic and dialogic interconnections of living codes. this semioticdialogic framework also illustrates dialogic semiosis as a possible pedagogic opening of living codes that could be defined, not only in constructivist terms, but also as assemblage of linguistic, cultural, technological and situated meanings that social actors make out of sign phenomena. this semiotic-dialogic approach could possibly go beyond the pitfalls of objectivism and constructivism, rendering the sign-user as either passive recipient or an omnipotent creator of meaning (bergman, 2009). the semiotic-dialogic conceptual framework is broad enough to theorise the intersecting issues of semiotic-dialogic agency in relation to uses of ar visual literacies and pedagogies. semiotic-dialogism also suggests that all constructions of knowledge are socially located, simultaneously, i am self-reflexive of my role as the analytic instrument in constructing this theoretical narrative. next, i briefly discuss some of the issues of author self-reflexivity and its role in this theoretical inquiry. self-reflexivity the concept of self-reflexivity stems from the early twentieth century american pragmatist philosophy (dewey, 1922). self-reflexivity as a sociological theory was developed to understand the social individual (mead, 1934). it is also a prescient value of qualitative research, requiring authors to reveal their subjectivity and motivation for conducting studies. i am thus self-reflexive that all research can be considered as a narrative that occurs within the social context but also gender, racial and socioeconomic positioning of the researcher (denzin, 2001). scholars need to have self-reflexivity and ask questions about their own positionality and i therefore discuss my positionality next. originally from the united kingdom, i am international woman academic who has been teaching at a university in dubai since 2013. i began researching augmented reality in 2014, while embedding ar as part of undergraduates’ project-based learning in media studies and literacy classes in dubai (hurley, 2016). teaching students for whom english is a second language raises my awareness of the need to develop deeper understandings of visual literacies as well as dialogic conceptions of technology enhanced learning. iterations of my research included empirical research into the uses of ar applications like the now obsolete aurasma. in these empirical studies, i found aurasma difficult to use, and technical issues deflected from learners’ social interactions. i also struggled to learn and teach students how to use adobe’s ar software application aero. adobe’s marketing suggests aero is accessible and intuitive (adobe, 2020). but my students and i found aero’s technological tools challenging and confusing. as a result of these empirical observations, i became aware of the need to ask critical and theoretical questions about the visual literacies surrounding ar, especially in view of the disconnect between ar’s pedagogic challenges and aggressive marketing by big tech. next, i provide further discussion of the relevance of semiotic-dialogic perspectives of ar visual literacies. ar visual literacies a substantial area of the pedagogic literature emphasises the psychological and motivational factors of ar (solak & cakir, 2015; di serio et al., 2013). this indicates the value of entertaining learners through play, technology and the novelty value of ar. a number of these studies make the problematic generalisation that learners are “digital natives” (martín-gutiérrez et al., 2014). this assumption indicates their uptake of ar, and its integration with pedagogy, will be intuitive and automatic. other studies indicate the pedagogic affordances for increasing reading comprehension (ivanov & ivanov, 2015), concretizing abstract concepts (dori & belcher, 2005) and the development of critical thinking (dunleavy, dede, & mitchell, 2009). this positions ar technology as being a virtual black box of embedded affective factors and tools for improving academic reading and learning. however, from a dialogic pedagogy perspective, dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a68 what is the value of these technological affordances if they are not dialogic and do not contribute to further generation of questions or meanings? from a dialogic perspective, if there are no openings for critical reflections, praxis, transformation or further generation of meaning, semiotic-dialogic pedagogy is not occurring. these uses of ar could possibly, therefore, merely be reinforcing pedagogic hegemony as a one-directional transmission of information. these thin descriptions of pedagogy and ar in much of ar pedagogic scholarship also, arguably, lack detailed epistemological and theoretical frameworks for establishing specific understandings of learning, the integration of learning with ar or semiotic-dialogic pedagogy. nevertheless, mahadzir and phung (2013) attempt to provide a more substantial framework for discussing ar’s affordances for academic reading. they suggest ar increases students’ performances by providing an inspiring learning environment and contributes to, perceptual arousal, enquiry arousal, variability, goal orientation, motive matching, familiarity, learning requirements, success opportunities, personal control, intrinsic reinforcement, extrinsic rewards, and equity. while the ar contribution to perceptual arousal and enquiry arousal could potentially lead to semiotic-dialogic question formations, mahadzir and phung’s (2013) focus on fixed affordances leaves little scrutiny or discussion of the limitations, cultural or individual differences or the ways in which ar could contribute to dialogic pedagogy. dunleavy, dede and mitchell’s (2014) perspective of ar rectifies this to a certain extent. they suggest that ar can be viewed as a cognitive tool, when combined with pedagogical approaches, and situated within constructivist learning theory. however, they acknowledge that although ar has cognitive and constructivist affordances, its limitations include cognitive overload and the challenge of integrating and managing the overall ar experience from teachers’ perspectives. i therefore suggest that this perspective does not necessarily provide a convincing rationale for a constructivist stance and privileging the teacher’s role in pedagogy cannot be aligned with dialogic pedagogy (matusov, 2009). semiotic-dialogic theorising of multimodality, and sign-driven interconnections of ar, could be crucial for conceptualising its impact upon pedagogy (hurley, 2018). means (2018) contests the discourses of technological solutionism surrounding higher education or the idea that merely having technology in the classroom is making it better. readers of the dialogic pedagogy journal (dpj) will be aware that learning involves more than a direct transmission of information from a teacher and nor is it one-way (cresswell, 2016). however, too much of the literature surrounding ar is underpinned by versions of technological solutionism which invests tech with the power to transmit knowledge. similarly, across scholarship surrounding the role of technologies in higher education, there are underlying assumptions that technology, while potentially removing the teacher from the learning equation, can digitally deposit knowledge much like buying a product from a vending machine (hurley, 2021). this implies that cognitively complex and social processes of learning are somehow downloadable and consumable. however, while this narrative helps tech companies to capitalise on higher education, schooling and social learning, dialogic pedagogy could provide an increasingly important counter narrative to technological solutionism and marketized versions of learning. it could also help to theorise some of the limitations of technologies in higher education. for example, how they might inhibit learner agency and critical examination of the self, life and the world. ar enables a combination of audio-visual elements to be captured through a camera on a mobile phone and combined with multi-media elements including texts, images, video, 3d models and animations (martín-gutiérrez et al., 2014). the ways in which ar are currently configured through a range of technological semiotic resources, including audio, video, text, hashtags, hyperlinks and filters, technologies provide learners with a mixture of communication tools and meanings that require clearer articulations of the impacts upon learning, agency and the extent to which they are semiotic and dialogic. martín-gutiérrez et al., (2014), for example, suggest that ar contributes to computer supported collaborative learning which is a pedagogical approach that can be used for deploying educational apps based on ar in higher dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a69 education. they suggest that “outdated teaching creates barriers for some students that are used to interacting with modern technological gadgets and computers” (martín-gutiérrez et al., 2014, p.760). however, their definition of collaborative learning, why ar could support it or what they mean by pedagogic ‘barriers’ remains thin. conversely, this study’s semiotic-dialogic framework offers a redefinition of ar technologies within higher education. this articulates semiotic-dialogic learning as diverse generations of meaning making that are central to learners’ agential interpretations of living codes. the next section applies semiotic-dialogism theorising to first-hand experience with ar. first-hand experience with ar in a classroom first, my experiences with ar in classrooms in dubai indicate that semiotic-dialogism contradicts the literature surrounding ar pedagogy and claims that learners are highly motivated by ar technologies (solak & cikir, 2015; di serio et al.,2013). this discrepancy could possibly be because the novelty of technologies is reaching a saturation point in the lives of these participants. nevertheless, ar pedagogy appears black boxed in most of the literature since there are limited insights into specific learning strategies or thin descriptions of how ar actually promotes the development of vocabulary, new concepts, dialogue and further generation of meanings. second, semiotic-dialogic theorising suggests that the platform architectures, and mediations of the ar apps, like the now obsolete aurasma, are not necessarily intuitive for learners and technological mediations can take precedence over semiotic-dialogue, transformation, praxis and new meanings. my experiences with students suggest that ar does not automatically facilitate semiotic-dialogic hybridity or agency. on the contrary, ar could limit opportunities for learners’ dialogic interpretants. this is because ar could atomise or distance learners from one another while users are technologically sealed off in their own immersive ar bubbles. these experiences can be summarised as pointing towards the lack of understandings of the motivations and applications of ar within pedagogy; the non-intuitive aspects of ar for learners; and possible barriers that ar pedagogy presents to semiotic-dialogic pedagogy. a further strong feature, coming through the aligned perspectives of bakhtin (1986) and peirce (1878), is that dialogic learning should involve questions, new words and generation of meaning making. however, ar is not necessarily intuitive for learners as not all young people can be considered ‘digital natives.’ moreover, we cannot assume that learners intuitively know how to ask dialogic questions. ar, like other technologies, involves trial and error but this does not necessarily provide dialogic in-roads to developing critical and conceptual questions about the world. conversely, for pedagogy to facilitate semiotic-dialogism it should be motivated by learners’ dialogues that expand agency, critical examination of the self, life and the world. uses of ar, or other technologies, in and of themselves, are not necessarily dialogic pedagogic solutions since they can also be barriers to semiotic-dialogism. next, i offer some conclusions, limitations and recommendations of the inquiry conclusions, limitations and questions for future semiotic-dialogic studies the study explored semiotic-dialogism’s scope for conceiving ar visual literacies. theorising indicates that technologies, including ar, are not necessarily dialogic in and of themselves. arguably, merely putting the ar technology into learners’ hands does not simply facilitate critical examination of the self, life and the world. this, however, does not imply that ar cannot be integrated with dialogic pedagogy but rather learners and teachers need to develop semiotic-dialogic vocabularies surrounding technologies. the semiotic-dialogic framework therefore returns the reader to some of the pivotal tensions or gaps dialogic pedagogy and semiotic-dialogic inquiry into visual literacies and augmented reality zoe hurley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.280 | vol. 9 (2021) a70 underlying ar scholarship from a dialogic pedagogy perspective. theorising reveals the need to go beyond some of the broad-brush assumptions surrounding learning in ar pedagogic literature. it also problematises the automatic promotion of technologies, whether in the classroom or beyond, when learning is perceived as transmission of knowledge. alternatively, the semiotic-dialogic perspective of semiosis suggests learning is always interpretive. importantly, theorising indicates that expanding conceptions of dialogic pedagogy, from a semiotic perspective, could expand a consideration of learners’ mediations through sign practices. this extends notions of visual literacies as written and spoken discourse and helps to locate semiotic-dialogic pedagogy within situated contexts. it considers the hybridity of dialogism across multicultural spectrums, in relation to a variety of learners and beyond anthropocentrism (hurley, 2019a; 2019b; 2021). however, i am also aware that i have not provided the reader with a discussion of the role of power in peircean semiotics and that pragmatist philosophy is not considered as being aligned with critical theory (olteanu, 2019). yet, theorising develops semiotic-dialogic insights into visual literacies of ar through engaging with some of the key theorists of dialogic pedagogy. in the spirit of dialogism, i hope that it might also contribute to posing new questions, further generation of meaning and new naming of the world. semiotic-dialogism adheres to bakhtin’s (1986) commitment to an infinite chain of questioning within dialogue and peirce’s (1878) perpetual enquiry within the ongoing meaning making of collaboration and semiosis. the study thus contributes a further chain of theorising and questioning, surrounding semiotic-dialogic pedagogy, to you, a reader. learners, teachers, researchers and theorists therefore intersect as critical co-investigators and through dialogue. for future studies, semiotic-dialogism could explore the power-driven dimension of language, speech and dialogism and nurture the study’s embryonic questions. these questions might consider the extent to which dialogic pedagogy develop vocabulary and critical conversations to challenge patriarchy, (neo)colonial discourses and the nexus of hyper-inequalities. developing critical visual literacies might also give voice, albeit verbal, visual or technological, to learners on the margins of power. admittedly, this theoretical study leaves a great number of questions unanswered. nevertheless, i would like to emphasise that an important aspect of the semiotic-dialogic theorising is the process of semiosis for establishing questions surrounding dialogic-pedagogy. but gaps and the lack of adequate theorising of the multimodality of ar or semiotic-dialogic perspectives of technology more generally remain. these gaps mitigate against the formation of critical questions at various levels of learning and theorising. nevertheless, theorising in this study begins to develop discussion about the visual turn in dialogic pedagogies. it offers a counter narrative to understanding technologies, including ar, in terms of technological solutionism, individualised learning and the one-directional transmission of knowledge. finally, semiotic-dialogic inquiry considers the signs, filters, form, living codes of learning. these filters, or sign vehicles, include histories, cultures, languages, images, modalities but also teachers, learners, technologies, researchers, 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(2019). how augmented reality can give us superpowers | john werner | tedxmidatlantic. retrieved 7 july 2021, from https://www.youtubei: 10.1016/j.procs.2015.09.277 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 170-637-1-ce.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e1 radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa abstract currently, in institutionalized education, the balance between global and local forces is skewed in favor of the global through the state (and university) monopoly on educational philosophy. we think that the local has to be prioritized over the global in the balance of these forces. in our view, this promotion should occur both in depth (through open pedagogical experimentation and democratization, defining local values, creating a global dialogue), and in breadth (through providing opportunities for students and parents to join and financially afford it). we propose that education has to be separated from the state. in our proposal, the state should focus on providing financial access to k-12 education for all citizens through redistribution of taxes while constraining itself through pedagogical neutrality: accepting any educational philosophy for public funding. in our paper, we will consider some of many diverse concerns raised by our colleagues in response to our radical proposal of the state’s educational neutrality, organized in a question-answer format. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. contact address: school of education, 16 w main st. university of delaware, newark, de 19716, usa ana marjanovic-shane, is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college, philadelphia. she studies meaning making, imagination and creativity in children's play, language and in education from the bakhtinian sociocultural perspective. her recent focus are dialogic relationships and democracy in education. contact address: 1906 germantown ave, philadelphia, pa 19118, usa acknowledgements we are greatly thankful to many our colleagues who read previous drafts of our radical proposal for the educational pluralism (aka education 2.0) and raised their concerns and questions: jayne white, jay lemke, alexander sidorkin, paul sullivan, beth ferholt, anna rainio, yifat ben david kolikant, iris ben david-hadar, david blacker, michal zellermayer, peter rule, brian edmiston, ruth arber, ulrike wolff-jontofsohn, werner wintersteiner, mariam orkodashvili, gail weinstein, michalinos zembylas, terrie epstein, and zvi bekerman. we want to thank zvi bekerman for inviting us to present and discuss our proposal at the cultural sustainability, social cohesion, and glocal education, jerusalem, israel, june 16-18, 2013. we also want to thank to jim rietmulder and kathy von issn: 2325-3290 (online) radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e2 duyke for supporting our proposal and kevin currie-knight who helped us to develop some of replies in dialogue with his libertarian position on education. we also want to disclose that we have not cherry picked nor weeded out any concern about our state’s educational neutrality introduced by our generous colleagues: we either tried to modify our proposal or honestly addressed the concern. finally, we want to thank mark smith and carolina correa for their editing and feedback on our earlier version of the manuscript. ��� radical proposal for the state’s educational neutrality currently, in institutionalized education, the balance between global and local forces is skewed in favor of the global through the state (and university) monopoly on educational philosophy. out of all public institutions in democratic societies, educational institutions (public and private, with a few exceptions) remains probably most undemocratic and illiberal. we think that the local has to be prioritized over the global in the balance of these forces. in our view, this promotion should occur both in depth (through open pedagogical experimentation and democratization, defining local values, creating a global dialogue), and in breadth (through providing opportunities for students and parents to join and financially afford it). we propose that education has to be separated from the state. in our proposal, the state should focus on providing financial access to k-12 education for all citizens through redistribution of taxes while constraining itself through pedagogical neutrality: accepting any educational philosophy for public funding. in our controversial editorial, we will consider some of many diverse concerns raised by our colleagues in response to our radical proposal of the state’s educational neutrality, organized in a question-answer format. we invite our readers to join the critical discussion of our controversial proposal for educational pluralism and policy of the state’s educational neutrality to support it. setting the problem with current educational philosophy monopoly we argue that the balance of the local and the global forces in formal educational institutions has to be promoted in depth and in breadth through educational tolerance and pluralism. it has to be promoted in depth through open legitimate pedagogical experimentation, defining local values, and creating a global and local dialogue. also, it has to be promoted in breadth through providing educationally diverse opportunities for students and parents to join and financially afford it. currently, in mainstream institutionalized education, the balance between the global and the local forces is skewed in favor of the global through the state (and university) monopoly on the educational philosophy and prioritization of non-educational goals such as, for example, social cohesion (e.g., green, preston, & janmaat, 2006). we1 argue that the educationally local has to be prioritized over the educationally and non-educationally global in the balance of these forces. the global educational monopoly on institutional educational practice has to be broken. currently, this global educational monopoly is shaped by a particular educational philosophy of standards-based education (sbe), based on the predefined notion of quality of education and its goals and on the preset and prescribed curriculum. however, even the alternative and innovative educational movements (e.g., constructivist, progressivist, dialogic) view themselves as benevolent dictators in their fight for this global educational monopoly to impose their dear educational philosophies on all educational institutions. coming from the democratic dialogic education for and from authorial agency (ddeffaa) (matusov & marjanovicshane, 2014), we think this is a wrong-headed political and educational goal. instead, we think the global educational monopoly itself has to be abandoned in favor of educational pluralism. in our view, each educational philosophy has two independent dimensions: 1) partisan-visionary (i.e., how it defines its educational values of “good education”) and 2) relationship-power (i.e., how it 1 here and further on in the essay, “we” is referred to the authors of this article. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e3 views its relationship with other educational philosophies of a diverse degree of disagreement). at the current point in time, it seems that almost all existing educational philosophies, – with a possible exception of the democratic education philosophy2, – seek to impose a monopoly on institutional educational power through convincing all educators and the general public of its value and appealing to the state to enforce and impose its vision on all educational institutions (see table 1). we implore both all the educational philosophies and the state to abandon their insistence on educational monopoly in favor of educational pluralism. the role of the global has to be mainly limited to providing access to diverse education for all and for protecting the educational pluralism. the global must be educationally neutral and pluralist. the local can and should be educationally partisan and visionary. table 1. two dimensions of educational philosophies relationship-power partisan-visionary monopolist pluralist transmission of knowledge x constructivist x progressivist x ddeffaa x —> ? democratic education x proposal for educational pluralism the key notion of the global pluralistic approach to education is democratic respect for, tolerance of, and appreciation of others in face of disagreement and misunderstanding. from a dialogic perspective, educational pluralism is based on the notion of inherent dialogism of meaning making (bakhtin, 1986, 1999; matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999). meaning is located not in statements but in the relationship between the interested information seeking questions and serious answers, between diverse ideas and approaches. paraphrasing bakhtin’s famous statement about the notion of culture (bakhtin, 1999, p. 301), “educational approach does not have internal territory but exists on the boundaries with other, often opposing, educational approaches.” thus, meaning of one educational approach exists in a dialogic opposition to another, often conflicting, educational approach. another argument for educational pluralism coming from ddeffaa is that overall goal of education is a critical examination of the self, life, world and society, which includes education itself. critical examination and defining “good education” is a part of education itself – praxis of praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) – it cannot be predefined. morson defined critical dialogue as a dialogue, in which everything is “dialogically tested and forever testable.” education, based on the critical dialogue, should test itself and its alternatives, which should be kept as legitimate. finally, dialogue inherently opposes any actions that are not based on “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). paraphrasing the famous motto, wrongly attributed to voltaire (guterman, 1990; hall, 1906), education should hold both partisan and pluralist positions, “i disapprove of your educational philosophy, but i will defend to the death your right to use it in your (publically-funded) school” (matusov & marjanovicshane, 2011). thus, we maintain both a globalized pluralistic position in policymaking to include all educational philosophies and approaches that are valued and also our own localized particular partisan position – democratic dialogic education from and for authorial agency3 (ddeffaa) (matusov, 2011; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2014) – as our goal to further develop and practice our own ideas, beliefs and positions. 2 see summerhill (neill, 1960), sudbury valley school (greenberg, 1992), the circle school (rietmulder, 2009). 3 a version of dialogic pedagogy. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e4 charles leslie glenn raised a rhetorical question underlining this problem of the state’s educational monopoly, “how can the pluralism [and democracy] that we claim to value, the liberty that we prize, be reconciled with a ‘state pedagogy’ designed to serve state purposes?” (glenn, 1988, p. 12). in our view, publically-supported institutional educational practice should be democratized and pluralized around the globe. to achieve this, education has to be separated from the state in a somewhat similar way as religion has been separated from the state in many democratic countries (illich & cayley, 1992)4. the state should focus on providing financial access to k-12 education for all citizens through redistribution of taxes, while simultaneously constraining itself through pedagogical neutrality: accepting any educational philosophy (including sbe, constructivism, dialogic pedagogy, transmission of knowledge, and even religious doctrine) for public funding (kukathas, 2003). the state’s educational neutrality policy we insist that the final judge of the quality and usefulness of education should be the learner as much as possible5, including her/his right to move away from the enrolled educational services when the learner finds these educational services insensitive to his/her educational needs. thus, education can become a self-correcting practice, in which the learners vote with their feet in a response to their own authorial judgment of the quality of this educational practice. a practice that is judged and evaluated by its participants, based on their evolving needs, opinions, ideas, desires, and interests, has a non-guaranteed potential to become an open, critical, creative and responsive praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). to make quality education affordable for all, while promoting self-correcting educational practices through direct negotiations among students, guardians of younger children and students with some mental disabilities, and educators, it should be supported by public educational neutrality vouchers6 funded by the taxpayers. we see good quality education as a basic human right. good education requires some minimum funding while funding alone does not guarantee good education (actually nothing guarantees good education). in the context of the state's educational neutrality, the only indicator of the educational quality is students' satisfaction of their education (mediated by the guardians’ satisfaction for young children or mentally disabled students). thus, the priority is to provide enough funding for quality education, rather than to equalize funding (mouffe, 2000). to promote universal financial access to quality education as defined by students, the amount of public educational neutrality vouchers will be determined in the following way. an annual education satisfaction survey will be given to two groups of students: the "poorest" – those who receive only public educational neutrality vouchers; and the "richest" – those who, in addition to the vouchers, also obtain private or public contributions. roughly speaking, if the average satisfaction of the "poorest" students does not reach a "good level", while the average satisfaction of the "richest" students does, then an adjustment of the vouchers will be needed. when public educational neutrality voucher has to be adjusted, the federal government, state government, and/or local county government have to increase the public voucher amount, pending on taxpayers’ and representatives’ political willingness, other demands, availability of resources, and the priorities of the society (see appendix below and http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/sen/?page_id=56 for details and calculations). for students with special needs, additional special education vouchers have to be issued. 4 the important discussion of how our radical proposal of reforming institutionalized mass education is similar to and different from other radical proposals like illich’s (1983), sidorkin’s (2009), dewey’s (1966), holt (1976), and so on is out of scope of this paper. 5 we propose legal guardians for very young children and students with severe mental disabilities; for details, see (http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/sen/?page_id=49) 6 the important discussion of how our educational neutrality voucher proposal is different from market-based voucher proposals (e.g., friedman, 1955; mill & collini, 1989) and their practical realizations such the gi bill in the uk and the usa is outside of the scope of this paper. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e5 furthermore, all legitimate non-educational functions of the current educational institutions should be separated and financed separately in order not to divert the purpose of education – e.g., baby-sitting, teenage supervision, preventing children gangs and delinquency, comprehensive immunization, sorting people for proficiency or other purposes (i.e., summative assessments), providing health care, and so on. for example, if a student decides not to get education, his/her parents have to be provided by another, non-educational, voucher for some non-educational functions valued by the society. since educational pluralism respects and values students’ freedom of non-participation and noncooperation, genuine education cannot be mandatory and, thus, cannot be forced on students by the state. on the other hand, if a local community values and requires forced, mandatory, education, the state should not interfere by opposing this value either, except in protecting individual students’ right to leave these illiberal communities (kukathas, 2003). freeing education practices from non-educational functions and goals, regardless of how important and legitimate these functions are,7 will ease the societal pressure to make education mandatory (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2011). we hope that the global societal reorganization and democratization of education supported by public funding will promote culturally diverse and innovative educational philosophies, some of which will be rooted in local cultural traditions, new educational values, and experimentation with both institutionalized and non-institutionalized education (e.g., homeschooling, apprenticeship, traditional cultural forms of guidance, student-run educational organizations). we suspect that in the long run, the global societal support for and spread of the educational pluralism will depend on recognition of its humanistic values, democratization of education, and the growing global economic trends of a shift from skilland knowledge-based labor/work to agency-based labor/work and leisure (arendt, 1958; gorz, 1989; keynes, 1963). the latter demands and seeks from workers creativity, imagination, innovations, participation in design, consistent exposure to and expectations of the unpredictability inherent in ongoing projects, originality, uniqueness, improvisation, critical thinking, out-of-box thinking, experience with relational dynamics, responsibility, the acceptance of risk, the taking of initiatives, a spirit of entrepreneurship, goal defining, developing new values and new desires, experience with dealing with conflicts of desires, and so on (anderson, 2010; collins & halverson, 2009; ford, 2015; kaku, 2011; pink, 2005; zhao, 2009). it appears that finally the society will be able to afford democratization of creativity, making legitimate meaning-making a lifestyle for all rather than just for the elite. in the rest of our paper, we will consider some of many diverse concerns and challenges raised by our colleagues — 23 diverse international educational scholars — in response to our radical proposal of the state’s educational neutrality, organized in question-answer format. we grouped these concerns and questions by eight major topics: 1. distrust in students and their parents/guardians 2. fear of the "unfit" other 3. collapse of social cohesion (charles, contreras, demuijnck, carranza, & linden, 2012) 4. pains of the transition to educational pluralism 5. socialist concerns about inequality in and marketization of education 6. societal imposition on education 7. libertarians’ concerns: “the state who pays the piper, calls the education tune” 8. contradictions in your proposal for the educational pluralism 7 e.g. school as custodian, day care, health provider, and so on. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e6 questions and answers: concerns about our state’s educational neutrality proposal 1. distrust in students’ and their guardians’ authorial judgments about education 1.1. question: what about some/all students' (and their guardians’) incompetence to judge the quality and the usefulness of their education before they even possess sufficient knowledge for such authorial judgment? wouldn't this lack of knowledge make them vulnerable to a bad judgment about their own education, and, subsequently, a lack of guidance as the students move away from it? what if students decide to only play videogames, masquerading as their education? what if students from traditional societies choose to learn only about, for example, milking camels? wouldn't it create a possibility that later in life students may regret that they made the wrong decisions about their own education? will the students’ initial ignorance lock them in their ignorance even more? answer: yes, by definition students are ignorant. that is why they need education. even more, students are not only ignorant but also do not know exactly how they are ignorant. a medieval german monk nicolas from cusa argued that education is not about elimination of one’s own ignorance, but rather about illumination of one’s ignorance by learning the boundary of one’s own ignorance (what he called “learned ignorance”) (nicholas, 1954). in our view, one of the most important areas for this illumination is the education itself and its quality. in our opinion, radical educational pluralism invites the students to engage in investigation of their own educational desires and values by providing existing ready-made educational options and by encouraging students to create new options and modify the existing ones. the uniqueness of educational practice — as critical examination of the self, life, world and society — in comparison with many other practices is that education begins with a question "what is good for me?" including "what is good education for me?" (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). this kind of education is about making decisions not based on pre-existing ready-made answers, but on generating new questions, critically evaluating different possible answers, and developing new approaches. we believe that conditions, in which education begins with generating questions and problems, have a better chance to create real opportunities for learning than any state educational monopoly. the state’s educational monopoly promotes only one type of answer to the question, “why do i need this education” – “because it is mandatory” and “because it will be useful for you in the future, trust us!” we argue that genuine education only occurs when students are engaged in meta-inquiries of why they need education and what is good education for them. these meta-inquiries about education itself are only possible when students make decisions about their own education, when they are free to participate and, thus, to not participate in it, – when they are the final authority for their own learning, and when education is free from pedagogical coercion and pedagogical violence. “you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink!... forcing students to learn is a lost cause…” (klag, 1994, p. 1). still, what about a situation, in which students’ ignorance would lead them in bad decision making about their own education, an educational “dead end” of dogmatic, ignorant, brainwashing, or just shallow transmissionist “education”?! we think that neither the status quo of educational monopoly nor educational pluralism can predictably guarantee success in education in this regard. however, we argue that educational pluralism is a better solution. it is because authoritarian and shallow “education,” imposed on students, often (but not always) robs students from their educational activism and/or creates students’ resistance even in ignorant students. and with the help of resources that educational pluralism provides, students would be able to escape these oppressive educational establishments at any point. in these cases, the self-correcting feedback loop of the practice will work. we expect that when the educational pluralism becomes a culture, the meta-inquiries of “why i need education” and “what education is good for me” would involve people in examination of diverse educational alternatives before they make their educational choices. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e7 however, what about students who enthusiastically and actively embrace socialization in authoritarian and shallow “education,” embrace “pure entertainment”, or develop apathy which paralyzed their ability to escape from these authoritarian and/or shallow educational environments?! in our view, we have to live with this possibility. nothing can be done to completely prevent all negative consequences of students/guardians’ bad decisions. the price of freedom and the essence of the freedom are in the people’s right to make their own mistakes and even to experience abuses of their freedom. risk-free, abuse-free, and mistake-free freedom is a misnomer, it does not exist. unfortunately, bad decisions can and will still happen in our proposal for educational pluralism. people can become remorseful due to their missed educational opportunities. in our view, it is just that there is no alternative to freedom to learn. it is better to miss an available educational opportunity than to close an educational opportunity though alienation to academic learning as happens far too often now. remorse for missed educational opportunities is in itself already education in action, although it is not necessarily safe and ideal learning. we see two types of student ignorance that have to be treated in different ways. one type of ignorance may be threatening to students’ life and well-bring. this concern is important and legitimate but, we argue, it is not educational and has to be separated from education. we think that not just any learning is educational. for instance, if one saw a group of children reaching to eat something poisonous (e.g. a good looking, but a poisonous mushroom), it would not be safe to just leave them to their own authorial judgment – they should be prevented from making a fatal mistake even by force. this kind of life-threatening ignorance should be a matter of ethical and responsible treatment of young children, youth and other people who for any reason are not in a position to make a good authorial informed judgment in a lifeor wellbeing-threatening situation. guardians who provide protection (baby-sitting, teen supervision, etc.) need to create safe environments to prevent physical and psychological harm. it is sometimes necessary for a child (youth and or adult) to trust someone else to guard and guide them, before they know better. however, we do not see this kind of epistemological trust and almost unconditional obedience ("just do what others tell you to do!") as having an educational value in itself unless it becomes a subject of educational questioning. learning safe and appropriate behavior without understanding the reasons for it is a matter of training, rather than education. but, it can become education when life safety is investigated with the student. in general, there are many legitimate and important social functions and needs that are non-educational in their nature — they can be promoted and even prioritized at times by the society but should be separated from education. on the other hand, another type of ignorance may lead a student to experience no life threatening "errors" and/or "mistakes." we see that kind of ignorance as an excellent material or condition for education. when a person notices that their knowledge, beliefs or opinions are not anymore "correct", and starts to doubt that he or she "knows better", it is an exact moment when education begins, i.e. he or she is suddenly moved to learn more about a particular issue, contemporary pedagogy, the ‘active school’, and innumerable experiences in this subject teach us that if something is not acquired by experience and personal reflection it is acquired only superficially, with no change in our thought. it is in spite of adult authority, and not because of it, that the infant learns. hence it is to the extent that the intelligent teacher knows when to step down as a superior and to become an equal, when to engage in discussion and to require proof rather than merely to make assertions and compel morally, that the traditional school has rendered its services (piaget & smith, 1995, p. 204). it is never too early or too late for education – education happens when a student recognizes her or his ignorance and asks a real question to which he or she is interested to get a relevant answer. education is about learning about one’s own ignorance and its limits. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e8 there is also a possibility of misjudging students’ ignorance. outside observers may disvalue certain activities — for example, students’ exclusive playing of videogames, fishing, partying and having fun, being interested in fashion or pop culture, playing soccer, and so on. some proponents of the democratic education movement (e.g., a founder of the sudbury valley school, dan greenberg, 1992) argue that these students will eventually get tired and get over these unproductive activities in the long run. we respectfully disagree, however, that this will always be the case for all students. indeed, there may well be educational value in students’ exclusive engagement in practices that many outside observers may disvalue. these observers may change their mind about the value of the students’ prior activities later on, when they learn that the former students became designers of videogames, soccer players, or famous entertainers with multimillion incomes. similarly, exclusive learning of some traditional cultural practices like milking camels is a legitimate educational activity chosen by students. learning is a future-oriented process and the future is always unknown, diverse, and unpredictable. learning has to be meaningful for the students or it stops being learning at all. we argue that learning is a by-product of students’ ontological engagement in socially valuable (but at times contested) practices (matusov, 2009). deciding what social activities are valuable or not is a part of education itself for each student and should not be regulated. in our view, although these negative developments cannot be completely prevented, we see some corrective counter forces at work that can minimize the negative power of this development. these students will live in a broader society with educational, informational, social, and political pluralisms that may penetrate both the students’ consciousnesses and their oppressive educational environments. another self-correcting mechanism is “the ontological tests8” of these oppressive educational environments by the life itself. finally, neither students nor the guardians of young children need to make their educational decisions in solitude without an emerging culture of assistance of other people and sources, although the “epistemological authority” of these “expert sources” about quality education is never guaranteed either. thus, again we hope and rely here on “an invisible hand” of critical dialogue and the attraction for people to participate in it (bakhtin, 1999). 2. fear of the “unfit” other 2.1. q: what about the separation of church and state? educational neutrality vouchers could promote religious education and break this separation. a: first of all, we think that the majority of conventional public schools are essentially religious because they promote a “civic religion” of authoritative dogmatism (collins & halverson, 2009). for example, when we asked many of our undergraduate students how they know that the earth is round they said, “it is written in the textbook.” yes, it’s not jesus or moses but it is science and school authority. in our view, the intellectual and pedagogical result can be nearly the same: truth is based on a belief in the authority. second, religious people pay the same taxes as secular ones. they have to have the right for education in whatever way they define it. they should have right to live according to their conscience, guaranteed by a liberal state (kukathas, 2003). why should they have to subsidize those with secular beliefs? is it because secular people are right and religious people are wrong?! let’s have equal rights for education to be “delusional” or “righteous,” and have the public pay for it (i.e., all of us!). since it is up to the students to make a decision about their education, there should be neither any discrimination by the state nor support for any particular religion or its absence (in accordance with the us constitution, for example). 8 i.e., a test that comes from a person experiencing the negative situation and critically evaluating the experiences rather than an intellectual contemplation and critical evaluation of a hypothetical possibility. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e9 2.2. q: what about hate groups like kkk, terrorists, or nazi education? a: although we agree that some or all hate groups, plain criminals, and terrorists are a great problem for the society, in our opinion, this should be solved on the level of laws and legality and not through limiting educational pluralism for all. in defense of the liberal democratic society, it is ok to limit educational rights for groups that are outlawed. unless these groups are outlawed and their practices proclaimed illegal, the principle of educational pluralism has to be preserved for all – i.e., no discrimination against such groups’ education can be or should be made. 2.3. q: what about illiberal, undemocratic elements, who are legal, like religious fundamentalists, racists, nationalists, neo-nazi, fanatics, totalitarianists -people whom "liberal, democratic, we" fear and loathe, whom "liberal, democratic, we” want to limit and suppress (at least), with whom "liberal, democratic, we" think any dialogue is impossible (i.e., the ultimate other, with whom dialogue is absolutely impossible)? will they take advantage of educational pluralism? will your pluralist proposal help them ultimately take control over the society like what historically happened in germany in 1933, when the national socialists (nazis) came to power through the democratic pluralism of the weimar republic, ultimately leading to the nazis abolishing the weimar democracy? can educational pluralism weaken and eventually kill a liberal democratic society and state, and your own liberal democratic educational project? a: on the contrary, we see the main role of the (liberal, democratic) state in our proposal to protect educational (and political) pluralism by repressive force and means (i.e., legislation, courts, police, army). in our view, it is not the role of educational institution to engage in an oppressive function of the state. as the history shows, the political fear and threat coming from totalitarian groups are real but educational pluralism should not be sacrificed preemptively in addressing it. our defense of the educational pluralism in face of a totalitarian threat is similar to defense of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and freedom of political discourse that can also be abused by totalitarian groups and have to be protected by the state. on the other hand, we see defensive powers of a liberal democratic state as legitimate, which may legitimately interfere with education. this conflict must be resolved by democratic legislative and judicial processes with the framework of a national liberal democratic constitution. 3. collapse of social cohesion glenn defined historical public school agenda, supported by the political left and the right, as, “the deliberate effort to create in the entire youth of a nation common attitudes, loyalties, and values, and to do so under direction by the state” (1988, p. 4). since our proposal for the state’s educational neutrality rejects this agenda, what if the unity in a larger society collapses under the condition of educational pluralism, leading to fragmentation of the society through various types of segregation? we see a few different concerns within this larger category regarding the types of segregation and conditions for the collapse of social cohesion. let us analyze them one by one. 3.1. q: what about fragmentation of the society through voluntary segregation (coming from students)? a: well, fragmentation and voluntary segregation -guaranteed freedom of assembly and freedom to leave an assembly -is an essential part of any liberal, democratic society (kukathas, 2003). concerns about promoting social cohesion, as valid societal concerns, are contested and outside of the function of education (at least from our partisan ddeffaa vision of education). in our view, self-segregation of educational institutions based on a particular educational philosophy is legitimate, e.g. all-girl (or all-boy) schools, black universities, athletic schools, religious schools, montessori schools, democratic schools. etc. we acknowledge that school choice and market vouchers were historically used to oppose forced racial integration in the united states by several southern states’ racist governments (carl, 2011). these radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e10 states provided vouchers to all parents (both white and black) so they could submit them to private schools. it gave opportunities for some white parents to place their children in private racially segregated schools. these choice policies allowed parents (and students) who wanted to be racially segregated to remain segregated. in our view, a democratic liberal society always allows voluntary segregation. currently, predominately black educational institutions based on voluntary racial segregation still exist in the us. the voluntary segregation always present societal challenges and benefits. it is the forced segregation (and forced integration) that present bigger problems, in our view. 3.2. q: what about forced segregation coming from the educational organization and providers (e.g., potential students are weeded out via testing, age, entrance exams, or social group filters)? a: we don’t know. this is a tough call! we need advice from legal scholars, from court decisions, and/or from democracy (e.g., people vote for a solution) on a case-by-case basis taking into consideration the severity of the societal problems and their history. 3.3. q: will educational neutrality vouchers and educational choices promote homogeneity, fragmentation, and voluntary segregation? a: yes, probably, in some cases. this is a good concern. the problem is that the price of forced integration is alienation and violence. in our view, the issue is in the price of social engineering, coercion, and violence behind it. some voucher schools will be geographically based, probably creating “bubbles” of certain comforts and homogeneities, and some not. that is ok, as some people are “dwellers” interested in comfort provided by homogeneity, some are “nomads” interested in challenges and opportunities provided by diversity, and some are in between. 3.4. q: political democracy and political pluralism force diverse people in a contact zone with each other through their fight for power and control over the state, which promotes a dialogue among them (but does not guarantee it). in contrast, your pedagogical democracy and pedagogical pluralism educationally fragments the society into opinionated, self-contained, at times even aggressive, ideological “bubbles” and, thus, diminishes opportunities for a dialogue, no? for example, some muslim communities in germany do not want their children to study about the holocaust and socialize their children in antisemitism (wolff-jontofsohn, 2013). shouldn't these problems be remedied by an imposed core curriculum in public education? a: we agree that fragmentation in society is a potentially serious problem and that some but, by no means all, educational practices under our educational pluralism may lead to fragmentation. however, we have two main issues with this critique of educational pluralism: 1) would alternatives to educational pluralism based on forced educational integration better solve the problem of societal fragmentation? and 2) if so, should educational pluralism and, thus, genuine education examining life and the world (in our definition of education), be sacrificed for a legitimate societal concern with societal fragmentation? in our view, the first question is really empirical and not as obvious as it seems. there has been some empirical evidence that voluntary educational integration of magnet schools9 is more effective than forced educational integration based on school desegregation busing policies10 in the us (rossell, 1990). we think, but it should be studied further, that on average forced educational integration creates more societal fragmentation than educational pluralism will create. forced educational integration creates alienation, disinterest, resistance, repulsion, and, thus, strong disengagement from imposed education – disengagement with its mighty centrifugal forces as students’ agencies search for their creative meaning 9 in the u.s. education system, magnet schools are public schools with specialized courses or curricula to attract diverse population of students for volunteer integration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/magnet_school. 10 “desegregation busing in the united states (also known as forced busing or simply busing) is the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools in such a manner as to redress prior racial segregation of schools, or to overcome the effects of residential segregation on local school demographics” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/desegregation_busing. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e11 of self-realization and move away from each other (e.g., willis, 1981). in contrast, educational pluralism promotes centripetal forces by creating conditions for freedom of exploration and interests in others – conditions that may or may not realize. our educational libertarian colleague kevin currie-knight made the following important argument in response to this concern, “even if fragmentation is a bad thing, there is a tradeoff here between allowing individual liberty (and the possibility of fragmentation) and disallowing individual liberty so that we can ensure homogeneity. so, at very least, anyone who argues that we want to educate so that we all have certain educational experiences in common must be prepared to argue that individual liberty is less important than homogeneity.” let's bring another political example. based on the historic fears, both states of germany and austria have banned neo-nazi parties, their public political discourses, and literature. in contrast, in the united states these neo-nazi parties, public political discourses, and literature are legal, which allows, but does not require, a public dialogue between “us” and “them” about ideological and moral tensions. in the united states, neo-nazi groups are relatively weak, while in germany and austria they are relatively strong. we wonder if free, non-forced, public discourse glues society together and deals better with distractive forces of totalitarianism and bigotry. thus, educational pluralism and freely minded education itself do not need to be sacrificed preemptively, before being tried and carefully studied, for fear of societal fragmentation. in our view, social cohesion must not be imposed through education. 4. pains of transitions to the educational pluralism 4.1 q: how can the society start the transition from the current authoritarian system based on accountability to the new democratic system based on the state’s education neutrality, educational pluralism, and self-correcting practice? a: this question should be better addressed by public policy analysts and educational economists. we roughly envision this process in the following way. there should be preparation time allocated after the congress and the president (e.g., in the us) sign a new education bill authorizing the new democratic system based on the state’s education neutrality. this time will be used on building new (very small) governmental bureaucracy for educational neutrality vouchers and diverse public schools – regular, magnet, charter and so on – should use this time for planning what they want to do. then, all public schools and school bureaucracies will be closed and some will be reopened if they get enough educational neutrality vouchers from students and parents of younger kids. also, new educational organizations and providers will emerge. however, there can be a transitional period of running two system in parallel, with one fading and the other growing. during this period all schools and educational providers will be asked to write their educational charter in preparation for the transition if they want to receive the public educational neutrality vouchers. there is an important and interesting empirical question of whether the existing public funding is enough for our proposal. on the one hand, it may be not because probably more students become covered by the public education fund then now because public educational neutrality vouchers can be used by private providers and private schools. but on the other hand, we and some other scholars expect big saving on cutting the state educational bureaucracies on different levels (sidorkin, 2009). we think that economists and social scientists can help to assess the total costs. additional funding resources may be needed to be allocated by government assemblies for the transition process and/or possible deficit after the transition. 4.2. q: will this radical transformation based on the state’s education neutrality kill public schools (in their current form as state-run bureaucracies)? radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e12 a: all voucher-based educational institutions (e.g., schools, homeschooling, educational agencies, educational cooperatives, learning circles, self-studies, and so on) will become public because they will be financed by public money of taxpayers. public schools, — i.e., publically financed schools, — do not need state bureaucracies to run. however, some current public schools will probably have to transform one way or another from being a part of a larger state-run bureaucracy to becoming a self-standing and self-governing school, based on negotiation with the students (mediated by parents for younger children) and on the self-correction processes answering to the students. not all of the current public schools will probably be able to survive. if existing public schools are perceived by a financially sufficient number of students as good, these public schools will probably survive. if not, they will not be able to keep up with student-choice education — the students will pull out their public educational neutrality vouchers from them. those public/state-run (and private-run!) schools will be forced to choose either to change or to close. but, is this social darwinism of survival of the fittest? in our view, it is not because it is about good and not the fittest (or strongest). does anyone want his or her children to attend a bad school? we do not think so. as dewey (1915, p. 19) wrote, “what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” of course, what is good or bad can be contested, which is fine in our proposal since we insist on educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality. if the students find a school to be good, it will be fine. however, if nobody or very few people like it, it will die without funding. in our view, it is a self-correcting process embedded in educational pluralism rather than social darwinism leading to monopoly and monologism. in fact, all existing systems of public education are based on public vouchers, — i.e., a redistribution of funds for education through taxation. the issue is who exactly gets these public vouchers. currently, these public vouchers go to school district bureaucracies. in the state’s educational neutrality policy, the public educational neutrality vouchers will be going to directly to students (or their guardians). costs calculated per child, the public vouchers go to school district bureaucracies that channel them to particular schools (in the us). we suspect that in other countries it is somewhat similar. we think that the public is people and not the state or the state bureaucracies. so, why not trust people with their decisions of what is good for them using their money?! we want to abolish totalitarian schools, not public schools11. all schools are public in that they are supported with public money. we want to abolish the current state of imposition of technological standards-based education on all except the rich, who can pay for their own schools. we want to abolish any educational monopoly driven by any educational partisan philosophy (including our own favorite ddeffaa) and promote the right of access to good education for all — not imposed equality of mediocrity and misery. we see much more fairness and democracy in our educational neutrality voucher proposal than in the existing totalitarian standard-based school system of accountability and alienated learning. 4.3. q: what about teachers? their professionalism? their position and protection of their job and conditions of work (i.e. what about teacher unions)? will the revolution of the state’s education neutrality worsen the teachers’ professionalism and conditions of teachers' jobs? a: we suspect good teachers will flourish and the state's education neutrality will raise teachers’ professionalism — based on the real life feedback about their teaching that will come from the students. however, the same feedback also may and will worsen conditions of teachers' job stability rather strongly. some teachers will lose their jobs if there is no demand or they won’t be appreciated by the students. to ease the transition, the state may need to assist willing teachers to educate themselves in a new 11 currently in the usa, we see two opposing trends of public education: top-down standardization (e.g., the “no child left behind”, “rise to the top”, “common core” reforms) and bottom-up diversification with the spread of charter and magnet schools, especially in cities. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e13 educational environment with providing teacher education vouchers to preserve their jobs or find new ones (although it will never guarantee the preservation of the jobs in each and every case). the teacher tenure may or may not be destroyed, depending on the educational institution and its resources and philosophy. as to teachers’ salaries, this issue has to be studied by educational economists. the salaries may even be raised (see 4.1), but we don’t know that for sure. as to the teachers’ unions, they will be forced to reorganize, no question about that, but they probably will survive (like actors’ union without protection of job but fairness, pensions, legal matters, and so on). in our view, in addition to teachers’ unions guarding their job conditions and well-being, teachers need to develop professional organizations with different and at time conflicting agendas: 1) a teacher union focusing on the teachers’ rights, job security, benefits, salary negotiation, safe job conditions, legal protection of teachers, and so on and 2) a teacher professional organizations focusing on professional improvement and advances of the teaching practice. these two important functions can be at time in accord and at time in contradiction with each other and require separation of their legitimate agendas (goldstein, 2014). currently, the teachers’ unions include the second functions and they have secondary priorities in the hierarchy of concerns and are often overruled by the first functions. that is, in our view, why we may see cases of an excellent novice teacher being laid off to secure the seniority even of a mediocre teacher. 4.4. q: can we accept your pluralist theory of dialogic pedagogy but develop a different proposal, keeping a safeguard of benevolent monopoly on educational philosophy or some kind of limited educational pluralism or gradual educational pluralism without committing to your radical, sweeping, untested, and scary proposal for your “educational pluralism” full of potentially bad, painful consequences? why don’t you use your intellectual muscle to develop a way of spreading your democratic dialogic education for and from authorial agency (ddeffaa) that we like as the best way (or, let’s say in a politically correct way, “a better way”) of education on more and more students? why do we need to willingly give “them” resources for education to the pedagogical practices that we dislike and despise and, thus, promoting monologic and oppressive types of “education”? a: we envision “limited educational pluralism” (lep) as a situation when certain “legitimate” educational philosophies will be allowed and supported by the state but some others will be not. students or their parents will be financed by taxpayers’ dollars to attend educational institutions and settings (e.g., homeschools) that have committed to the legitimate educational philosophies. however, other educational institutions and settings will be not approved for funding (e.g., “dogmatic” educational philosophies, the religious, the “intolerant”, and so on). special federal, state, and local governmental educational boards can make these political decisions on behalf of their taxpayers’ constituencies: a) which educational philosophy to finance and which not and b) whether an educational institution or setting complies with legitimate educational philosophy or not in its practice. this differs from our “unfettered” educational pluralism that is limited by the legal system, not by an arbitrary political decision of public philosophical preferences. first of all, we definitely see a step forward in this limited educational pluralism from the current stage of the state educational monopoly. it will also promote more debates on educational values and engage students in decision making about their education (if this version of lep directly gives students the decision making power and not their guardians – especially for older students, of course). in our view, lep is an acceptable temporary compromise and a significant improvement in the educational practice, moving it in “the right direction.” lep could be a transitional phase toward full educational pluralism. however, we see at least three major objections against the lep approach if permanently established. first, in lep, political boards and taxpayers will limit students’ decision making about “good” and “bad” to legally allowed educational philosophies and practices and thus limit the quality of their education as understood through praxis of praxis – i.e., the student’s examination of values of his or her radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e14 own educational values and deciding what is the best for the student him or herself (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). second, all taxpayers should be allowed to use benefits of their educational tax within the limits of the law. third, lep creates a disparity between rich students, who have more educational choices outside of public schools, and poor students, who do not have them. thus, by default, rich students are engaged in higher quality of education defined as praxis of praxis. regarding this proposal for a “gradual transition to educational pluralism”, we think that as political conditions in a country mature for educational pluralism, it is fine to transition gradually when the state educational monopoly becomes weakened and the overall educational practice is moving toward educational pluralism through creative experimentation. 4.5. q: is "our" society (e.g., us, uk, russia, israel, south africa, new zealand, china, vietnam, etc.) really ready for unfettered educational pluralism? if not, what are right conditions, traditions, and transitions for educational pluralism? is educational pluralism right and doable for all societies? a: we agree that the right historical, political, cultural, economic, and social conditions are needed for the state’s educational neutrality. educational pluralism is doable when it can be established through democratic and liberal political processes: voting, judicial decisions, legislation, rule of law, and free political dialogue. it should also have enough economic resources for good quality of education for all. in our view, educational pluralism is the only educational principle that is compatible with a constitution in a democratic society (but other people may disagree) and with a liberal society and a liberal state. we think that ideas of the educational pluralism will be more supported in societies with long democratic traditions and liberal tolerance with dissent of the ultimate illiberal, undemocratic, other. we suspect that educational pluralism will be more supported in post-skill and post-knowledge, agency-based societies and economies (zhao, 2009) with open access information, and we see trends toward this development around the globe (especially in “economically developed” societies, although this is a painful process). 5. socialist concerns about inequality in and marketization of education 5.1. q: will education be commercialized, treating students as consumers? will a capitalist market economy distort your vision of education with its educational neutrality vouchers and self-correcting educational practices? a: yes. there is no doubt about that, as the capitalist market economy does this corruption with art, health care, and other practices. however, capitalist market distortion and corruption of the education is better than the feudalistic pedagogical coercion and violence of the current totalitarian school system (sidorkin, 2002, 2009). we see at least two dangers of commercialization. one is deceptive advertising, which can be curtailed by lawsuits, students walking away, and bad publicity and reputation. the other danger is more serious; some educators may try to please students without educating them much. this could create a feel-good industry of junk education (e.g., “edutainment12”). this is by far more serious problem because it disrupts a self-correcting feedback loop. this problem is not new. it exists in art, food, medicine, and other industries and practices. what usually curtails (but not eliminates) this parasitic tendency of capitalism are two counter-currents: 1) people often get tired and bored with empty pleasures, 2) people get exposed to something outside of their immediate “bubble” and they want to move there and experience some new aspects of life. also, this problem can and should be a part of a public political debate as it is in other industries and practices, like, for example, in the current health care debates in the us. 12 see, for example, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/education/turning-to-education-for-fun.html?_r=0 radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e15 5.2. q: how is this educational pluralism proposal different from the market-based school-choice voucher reform that has been tried on a local basis in many countries? a: in our view, there is a huge difference between our radical proposal for the educational pluralism, on the one hand, and existing market-based voucher-choice school experiments (e.g., friedman, 1955) and the past practices, on the other hand. as far as we know, all tried experiments have so far been embedded in the existing imposition of the technological standards-based and accountability-based education through the state’s monopoly on education. in the existing market-based voucher schoolchoice reform, parents often make choices of schools with their vouchers that lead to better outcomes for their children – in terms of societal currencies such as examinations, employment prospects, upward social mobility, grades, test scores, etc. it is still a monologic system of imposed values – the freedom is about how to get a better pathway to these imposed preset values (bolick, 2003; friedman, 1955; lauder, 1999; nock, 1949)13. usually educational voucher reforms are supposed to provide instructional diversity and flexibility to better serve to and to better achieve the goals of the educational monopoly on educational values through the system of compulsory education. currently, this educational monopoly is defined by the standards-based education. in our radical proposal, we argue for plurality of educational values that allows both freedom of educational path (i.e., instruction) and freedom of educational destination (i.e., curriculum). finally, proponents of the voucher and school choice market-based reform often argue that the quality of education will be established by market competition (e.g., friedman, 1955). we disagree with that since a plurality of educational values establishes plurality of what quality in education may mean, thus eliminating competition and promoting diversity. we do agree that the market can be useful for creating a self-correcting loop but we think that it can happen only in a regulated market. for example, currently, many universities have established educational monopolies within "free" educational markets of higher education. we think that like in economy, unregulated or poorly regulated educational markets can lead to cartel-like monopolies. state regulation protecting and defending educational pluralism is needed. for this reason, we are not unfettered market libertarians. 5.3. q: will this proposal for the state’s education neutrality destroy equal opportunity for education? isn’t liberty a prize that we only achieve after winning the battle for equality? a: in our view, the state should not be in the business of equalizing financial opportunities for education. we are against equality or even equity as the primary concern guiding education. not only it is unrealistic, but it is really dangerous. excessive equality is often even more dangerous than excesses of inequality, leading to suicidal and homicidal totalitarianisms because at least the former breads diversity. we think that liberty does not start with equality or even equity – the old left is wrong about that (mouffe, 2000) as it has not learned much from the tragic lessons of the 20th century yet. as the 20th century has painfully shown us, oppression by excessive equality is much worse than oppression by excessive inequality, judged by the unprecedented scale of misery, crime, and death by the totalitarian communist and fascist regimes, which tried and successfully reduced inequality on a mass scale (both economically and politically). liberty does not come or start with equality (or equity) but with respect for and appreciation of diversity/otherness and respect for the broadening of minimum universal human rights (kukathas, 2003). both extreme equality and inequality are oppressive and have to be avoided as our proposal suggests. however, our proposal does not make the situation perfect or eliminate all terrible abuses but rather jumpstarts a process of making the situation a bit or a lot better (although, probably, still messy and unjust) by empowering people for action. we are not concerned about “equality-based fairness” or everybody having “the same funding” or “the same opportunities” (i.e., equity). not only is this an impossible myth, in our view, but it is not 13 for an exception see goodway (2006), who argues for the participants defining their own education in a market-based schoolchoice voucher proposals. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e16 desirable either. we are concerned about the minimum being good enough and moving up — raising minimum human rights (gorz, 1989; markoff, 2015; rifkin, 2014). if somebody has more than the minimum – great, as it promotes further innovations and experimentations! it can set the goal for others and redefine what “being good enough” means. as a writer william gibson said, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” fighting with an unevenly distributed new good is fighting with the future of this good. the issue is not to eliminate the future from the present by making everybody equal (i.e., misery for all) but to make it more evenly distributed as soon as possible by moving the minimum up. we try to address the issue of the growing gap between the poor and the rich in our proposal by raising minimum voucher funding based on the assessment of the expenses of satisfied students. when it comes to access to quality education, it is not a matter of equality or degrees of variability, but a matter of a basic human right and this right must be defined by the student as education that is meaningful to her or him!!! after all, in our opinion, meaningfulness (to the student) is the only measure of the educational quality. today, while many students have access to "education," a very small number of students have an access to education that is to a certain degree more meaningful to them. but, many, many more students can only access what to them amounts to less meaningful or even completely meaningless "education". the majority of the students have to spend a good part of their lives (12 years +) in situations that are not only meaningless and distressing but are socially and psychologically harmful in situations of psychological and social suppression equivalent to a psycho-social desert (i.e. total personal meaninglessness, becoming "academic zombies", matusov & brobst, 2013). 5.4. q: what about persisting inequality? richer states, richer counties, richer parents can pay for better education (although, what does it mean “better education”?) or at least for more educational resources. a: yes, we live in a capitalist society based on economic, social, and political inequality and, thus, education will be affected by it. the question is if this proposal will decrease or increase the existing inequality and in what way. we suspect that based on our proposal, when rich parents raise funding for their children’s education, they may push for increasing value of educational vouchers (see appendix), pending on the political will and economic resources of the democratic liberal society. 5.5. q: education is a public affair in the interest of the society. it’s curriculum and instruction have been decided by democratically elected public representatives (e.g., by local school board in the us). what is wrong with that? a: we argue that education and learning (which are not the same according to our ddeffaa partisan vision) are always primary private business of the learner because it is the fundamental human right based on personal meaning making. pedagogical decisions cannot be delegated to a democratically elected representatives, in our view. neither the society nor its democratically elected representative cannot and must not decide what is good for each individual learner to learn and how to learn it to make this learning meaningful for the learner. the social concerns and pressures (e.g., job availability, credentialism) can be communicated to the learner but must not be imposed on him or her. nobody can know what is best for a particular learner in the unknown future. 6. societal imposition on education 6.1. q: shouldn’t forces and players outside of education legitimately shape education? what about legitimate concerns by employers and/or by the general public about students' competences necessary for: workplaces, skillful and informed democratic participation in the society, competition for getting good jobs, upward social mobility, and so on (see labaree, 1997)? radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e17 a: first, we insist that all social demands on personal education -at the end of the day, education is always personal and particular -should be viewed as contested and problematic for many reasons. the primary reason, in our view, is that education involves meaning making process, which is always personal and it is a fundamental human right. the secondary reason is that considering what is good for a particular student in the past, present, and future is the primary business of the education process itself. the tertiary reasons are that: a) social forces and players can never know well what is good for a particular student or even for the societal future itself (the future is never fully predictable, unified, or known) and b) on close analysis, societal forces and players often disagree with each other about their conflicting demands on education (e.g., democratic participation may demand social equality while upward social mobility may demand social inequality, cf. labaree, 1997). second, we strongly argue that outside social forces and players must not impose their demands on education via financial resources, regulations, and policies beyond the safety and legal protection concerns for students and education providers for the reasons stated above. they also should be concerned with preservation of the overall educational pluralism and educational opportunities. third, outside social forces and players can and even should legitimately set safeguards and establish summative assessments, aiming at sorting education alumni based on their competencies. however, these safeguards and impositions should be done outside of education. outside social forces and players may want to communicate about the consequential importance of their demands directly to the students or through education providers. they also can be legitimate competence safeguards of the practice. however, it is up to students (mediated by guardians for young and psychologically disabled students) to attend or not to attend to these social demands (which can be wrong in the long-run anyway). the priority of educational curriculum – what to study – has to be always under control of a student (the latter is our partisan ddeffaa view, of course; a particular student may disagree with that giving the control for his/her curriculum to somebody else). 6.2. q: wouldn't your educational pluralism undermine educating a well-rounded person at least for some schools who choose not to push all academic curricula? a: we always have two positions: one is pluralistic and the other one is our visionary position. according to our pluralistic position, if students and educators want to do education to be a “well-rounded person” – this is fine within our proposal. but if not, then they should not. the other is our partisan position, democratic dialogic education from and for authorial agency. according to that position, the “well-rounded” pedagogical objective is both unachievable and undesirable. it is unachievable because human agency cannot exist in a decontextualized, "all purpose", passive, "wait-to-be-used", universal, "do-it-all" form. human agency is always focused, specialized, purposeful and relational to particular personal desires and situations. in this view, it is impossible, and even harmful to teach subject matters or skills that are not within the student's actual “here-and-now” interests (personally persistent or emergent), and meaningful and important aspects of a practice, in which he or she is involved. all alive creatures have biases in order to be alive. they are attracted to certain things in the environment and repelled from others. forcing them to become “well-rounded,” means making them indifferent and, thus, dead, – killing their interests, attractions, and inquires! furthermore, in reality, on a closer look, the so-called “well-rounded curriculum” programs are not so well-rounded, prioritizing a high culture over a low culture, intellectual labor vs. manual labor, wellpaid vs. low–paid jobs and professions, and so forth. a “well-rounded” person, a so-called “a renaissance man,” as a pedagogical goal, is also undesirable. human agency is at its strongest, most satisfying and most creative when it is well focused and spirited in particular practices. achieving mastery in one area is always done at expense of another area and, thus, handicaps it. the reverse is also usually true: a handicap in one area of human mastery radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e18 can become an advantage in another area (e.g., colorblind people are good in uncovering military camouflaged weapons and troops14). any personal investment in one area of human mastery comes at expense of another. trying to achieve everything often leads to mediocrity in all fields. 6.3. q: don't we need a common educational base? a common cultural capital (hirsch, trefil, & kett, 1988)? is there no value in providing all students with the same foundation of knowledge, the basics? even some required minimum? the common core curriculum? shouldn't all students know about george washington or rosa parks (in the us context), or to be able to read, or to appreciate "romeo and juliet", or to be able to do basic math, algebra, and financial literacy, and to understand statistical information presented in newspapers? a: based on our pluralist position, if some students and teachers want to implement a “common core of knowledge” and similar ideas that will be perfectly fine. our partisan position as the proponents of democratic dialogic education from and for authorial agency however, opposes the educational notion of a “common core knowledge” because it undermines a person’s freedom of learning choice. one has to have a freedom of learning choice of what to study, when to study it, with whom, and for what purpose to study it. freedom of learning choice is an all-ornone position and it comes with the freedom not to study anything that the person does not desire. "freedom is indivisible. it means you must never influence the choices children make. it’s all or nothing" (neill, 1960). not only it is unnecessary to require a "common core of knowledge", but also it undermines the "absolute trust" (neill, summerhill) in child's agency. human agency does not recognize decontextualized, pre-existing, personally non-significant knowledge as genuine knowledge. not learning something, as a young child, admittedly, can be a handicap for the adult in the child’s future. a person might wish to have learned something before. but, the greatest gift that education can give a person is to be open to learning when the person needs it. preparation for unknown future occurs through the person's intense interaction with the present. 7. libertarians’ concerns: “the state who pays the piper, calls the education tune” 7.1 q: are you too naïve and too optimistic to expect benevolence and self-restrain from the state not to engage itself in regulation and defining educational philosophy for education the state pays? are you saying that as long as the state is regulating educational forms that act outside of accordance with the law, then this is sufficient to justify such legislation? really, at some point, allowing the state to stomp out all educational forms that engage in activities it has judged (by legislation) to be corrosive to order and peace really puts the idea of educational neutrality by the state at risk. in some states – most closely, canada – it is illegal to engage in holocaust denial, but it is not clear that because states feel that this is pertinent to national security (or, really, civic well-being), that stamping out all educational forms that teach the practice of holocaust denial (not about holocaust denial) is not just run-of-the-mill viewpoint discrimination. would you place a great bit of faith (ironically enough) in the state to restrain its own powers and hold to a distinction (between regulating for public safety but nothing else) that is delicate at best? a: we think we are not as naïve as to assume that just because the state’s educational neutrality will be morally and legally recognized and accepted by the society in the future (unfortunately, currently, we are far from that yet), it will be enough for the state to behave in accordance with this principle. there are the following several reasons that we doubt in the state’s automatic compliance: 1. there will be always grey areas between the legitimate and illegitimate interference of the state using its protective and supportive regulatory power that may interfere with the state educational neutrality principle. these grey areas will require case-by-case judgments, which will be contested across diverse 14 see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,772387,00.html. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e19 communities and across time. 2. different communities and individuals may have both legitimate and illegitimate interests in imposing educational philosophies on each other through use of the oppressive state power. the examples of polygamy in us, holocaust denial in canada, 2012-2013 failed attempts to regulate the size of “junk drinks” in new york city by major blumberg, and so on are very good ones. 3. unfortunately, the pure abuse of and corruption by power based on the limitless based on the motto, “we can therefore we will,” will be with us regardless people in power. we agree with political libertarians and anarchists and the founders of the usa republic that it is much better to expect and normalize this evil intend of power abuse even in good folks and develop processes and structures counteracting it as much as possible rather than expect automatic goodness from all people. as history shows again and again, the expectation of the universal goodness from all “good folks” universally leads to terror (e.g., revolutionary france, russia, china, and so on). although we are not scholars of the statehood, we have found the current situation and practices in liberal democratic states are more or less satisfactory and being “good enough.” this success is based on having many sources of power, diversification of the nature and types of power, divisions of power, vertical and horizontal power, self-correcting processes, freedom of public speech, diverse institutional and informal power, and so on. what liberal democratic society can or cannot legally tolerate remains contested and negotiated. there have been hopeful historical trends of liberalization of the usa and other liberal democratic societies (e.g., gay marriage, open gay military service, gender equality, legalization of marijuana, decriminalization of prostitution, race civil rights). in short, in many ways, we think the situation with the state educational neutrality is not unique challenge for a liberal democratic state. it is a challenge along with many other challenges. and we think that a historically liberal democratic state will deal with these challenges in a “good enough” way (and increasingly better). we do not expect and do not want “the perfect” solution for a liberal democratic state. nothing is guaranteed in a liberal democratic state — even such an arguably unproblematic issue as a state’s ban on torture can suddenly become an issue of a public political debate (e.g., in the 21st century in the usa). deeply down, the society is regulated by consciences of its participants and not just by its laws and constitution (dershowitz, 2002). everything remains problematic and contested and will remain contested. for example, although the state and the church are constitutionally separated in the usa, the relationship between the state and the church remain problematic and this is not necessary a bad thing. we expect that the relationship between the state and the education will remain bumpy under our revolutionary proposal of the state educational neutrality. in our revolutionary proposal insisting on providing the minimum financial resources for good enough education by the state to all as a human right, we challenge a rather common (wrong) assumption that the state may have additional moral and legal rights in areas of practice and life where the state redistributes taxpayers’ funds. in our view, the state’s moral and legal rights, when these rights exist legitimately, must be independent of the fact whether a state contributes the taxpayers’ money or not. for example, if a state finds out that a particular medicine is poisonous or useless, it should legitimately ban by force this medicine regardless whether the state financially contributes or not to the pharmaceutical industry. unfortunately, currently this important principle is not widely recognized by the public and by moral and legal foundations of a liberal democratic state. redistribution of taxpayers’ money does not give any additional moral or legal right to the state to interfere. publically funded enterprise does not give any additional right to run this enterprise. publically and privately funded enterprises and practices must be regulated in the same way, essentially remaining autonomous, sovereign, and independent from the state. only state-run enterprises can be different in this regard. this is important for all practices but, especially, important for education for the following reason. based on our partisan ddeffaa position, we argue that education has its unique feature of being praxis of praxis, in which defining what “good education” is a necessary part of “good education” for its participants. this provides additional demand for the state educational neutrality in contrast to other practices and enterprises. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e20 in general, we accept the double nature of the state: the state being a safeguard and enabler of liberalism and democracy and, at the same time, being one of the biggest threats and abusers of liberalism and democracy. unfortunately, in our view, these two tendencies are inseparable and we need to maximize the former and minimize the latter. this is why we are not political anarchists or political libertarians. we are not for minimization or elimination of the role of the state. but we are not political socialists either, hoping that the state will be able to solve all or even major societal problems, either. finally, we want to emphasize that the state monopoly is not the only threat for the educational pluralism. private and public universities, embedded in the capitalist market economy, have managed to establish their own educational monopolies without much help by the state, at least in the usa. the higher education has been monopolized without support of the state and within the capitalist market forces. we must use legal, moral, formal, and informal diverse types of powers on diverse levels to promote the educational pluralism and to resist educational monopolies regardless their origin. 8. contradictions in your proposal for the educational pluralism 8.1 q: why doesn’t your "revolution proposal" for the state's educational neutrality apparently work in higher education? university and college students have their "private vouchers" to pay tuition but it does not lead to negotiation of pedagogy and curriculum and does not create “a self-correcting practice.” why is that? the institutions of higher education remain to be monopolists of defining education for their students and in-tune to the state monopoly. why doesn't your proposal work for higher education? a: we agree that higher education is monopolized by a technological standards-based educational philosophy similar to the state's educational monopoly but using a different means for this monopoly. the current monopoly on educational philosophy by the state is established through funding and regulations — by dictating educational values through public vouchers usually send to the school districts, through regulations, and through accountability policies. in contrast, the higher education monopoly is realized in the us mostly through universities and colleges requiring/forcing students to take particular courses for their successful graduation to get educational credentials valued by businesses and institutions outside of education (i.e., diplomas, certificates, degrees). this conveniently ensures that professors always will have enough number of students in their required classes and release them from anxiety about whether their class will make it or not. these professors do not need to advertise their course to students, or to convince their potential students in value of the course for them, or to be concerned about their teaching reputation among the past, current, and future students. thus, students cannot vote by their feet (and, thus, tuition dollar) when they find a course or a professor to be insensitive for their educational needs. also, increasingly the state interferes in higher education by imposing its educational standards. our proposal forbids universities and colleges, accepting public educational neutrality vouchers, to dictate students what particular courses they must take for successful graduation. this is one of many possible legitimate regulative state safeguards against educational monopoly by educational providers. although, in our view, it may be ok for universities to set a minimum number of courses for graduation and their general nature as well as particular non-course learning experiences (e.g., theses defense, internships). we think that forbidding universities, accepting educational neutrality voucers, to force the students to sign up for classes that the students may not want to take will take care of the problem, destroy higher education monopoly on educational philosophy, promote students-professors-employers negotiation of pedagogy and curriculum, make professors answerable to their students, and, thus, democratize professional and liberal higher education. we hope that it will also force to take any "experts" of accreditation and professional guilds out of business of dictating pedagogy and curriculum to universities and colleagues. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e21 8.2 q: there is an apparent contradiction between your educational pluralism and your own current version of your particular educational position for "the best education" that you have defined as “dialogic education for agency” (ddeffaa) (e.g., currently in your classes you are imposing your dialogic values on your students through your ddeffaa educational practices). can you address it, please? a: we think that there is a real tension between our educational pluralism and our particular educational approach, democratic dialogic education for and from authorial agency (ddeffaa), as "the best educational approach," which we have been developing now. although ddeffaa is pregnant with educational pluralism in itself – in a sense it values diverse ideas, desires, and values; – it is true that ddeffaa also tacitly, but forcefully, socializes the participants in critical dialogue. in our view rooted in bakhtinian (1999) dialogic framework, the forceful power of socialization in critical dialogue comes from the dialogic nature of humanity. when a teacher is genuinely interested in a student’s ideas, feelings, desires, values, opinions, and goals – not to exploit the student’s subjectivity, not to “teach” the prescribed curricula, but to understand the student and take the student seriously as another human being, – this interest of one person in another often creates power of dialogic ontological engagement and later even nostalgia for critical dialogue in a student (i.e., “education for nostalgia”, although not any nostalgia is good, in our partisan view, – only one about critical dialogue. for example, nostalgia for totalitarian camaraderie is not necessarily good in education). our partisan ddeffaa educational approach seems to be rooted in socrates' statement that "unexamined life is not worth living". this statement is a contested statement. thus, kukathas (2003) convincingly argues that: 1. unexamined life may be worth living; 2. examined life may not be worth living; 3. examining life may ruin "good life" as defined by the criterion of "living according to one's conscience"; 4. imposing examining life on others may deprive them from both their "good life" and their meaningful examination of their lives. we recognize a contradiction between our particular educational ddeffaa approach and our educational pluralist approach and we are committed to both (which means we are committed to a contradiction). although, we claim that ddeffaa is better than any other educational approach, we also recognize that education is a self-defining endeavor for the students (i.e., praxis of praxis), which means that students have to be on a path of defining their own education – even if this path is not ddeffaa. we argue that ddeffaa’s critical dialogue has to be critical to all values, including the value of critical dialogue itself (matusov & lemke, 2015). conclusion we think that currently the educational and non-educational global has illegitimately taken over the educational local in the modern institutionalized educational practices. the global imposes the educational monopoly over the local via the standards-based education. we see the solution not in changing the particular educational content of this educational monopoly, but rather to declare global educational neutrality. we see the legitimate role of the global in education in promoting educational pluralism and access to good education for all as a fundamental human right. we see the educational role of the state in: 1. promoting financial conditions for the minimum human right of the universal access to good education as defined by students; 2. safeguarding of educational philosophical pluralism; 3. safeguarding of students’ educational interests; 4. safeguarding of democracy in the society, which at times may interfere with the goal of education. radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e22 we do not think that the education has to be in the business of creation of “the social cohesion agenda of education” (bekerman, ben peretz, & zisenwine, 2013) and/or “diverse groups’ integration” and/or nation-state building. rather we argue that defining goals and quality of education belong to the local, private, sphere and is the primary business of education itself (dahlberg & moss, 2005; neill, 1960). furthermore, we argue that freedom of defining and pursuing one’s own education is a part of any liberal project along with freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and freedom to leave any assembly. we argue that freedom of defining and pursuing one’s own education is a part of any liberal project along with freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, and freedom to leave any assembly. we are against balancing the forces of the global and the local but rather for prioritization of the local in defining education. in our view, education is always local and personal. we respectfully disagree with the goal of education as “creating shared meanings, while validating diversity, which is a pre-condition to securing the world guaranteeing our co-existence” (bekerman, et al., 2013). rather, we think that the goal of education has to remain open, negotiated, and contested, being the object education itself. we encourage readers to read our full-scale educational pluralism proposal and more discussion of it here: (http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/sen) to engage in its critical dialogue. appendix: calculating public educational neutrality voucher amount for minimum good education let us start calculating public educational neutrality voucher amount for minimum good education with providing an incomplete formula of the public education funding per student (efps) based on the us situation: efps = federal voucher + state voucher + local government voucher + grants + public sources + parent investment; federal voucher per student= the same amount for all students in the us based on federal taxes (the only amount that is the same for all students); state voucher per student= the same amount for all students of a particular state but different among states, based on state taxes; local government voucher per student= the same amount for all students of a particular locality but different among localities, based on local taxes; grants per student = public (=taxes) and/or private money provided for certain causes or conditions that a particular student gets — can be different for across different places or students; public sources per student = involve public sources of education (e.g., publically financed internet sources, internet infrastructure, libraries, public tv and radio, museums) used by a particular student; parent investment per student = parents’ and families’ contributions to their child’s education (e.g., bought books, paid cable tv, travel abroad, paid access to the internet). hence, with exception of the federal voucher, all other education finance sources create financial inequalities in education, which may or may not contribute to educational inequalities. note: besides financial contributions to education there are non-financial contributions involving broadly defined cultural practices (e.g., parents’ bed night reading, parental cultural practices of constant discussions and justifications their decisions with their children, learning activism of students, safe and secure state conditions from violence, good general economic conditions, strong public democratic discourse, children free from abuses). although these non-financial factors may greatly contribute to radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e23 education, we do not include them directly in our financial calculation while they may influence indirectly our educational neutrality voucher formula: 1. the minimum sufficient amount of the public educational neutrality voucher will be defined through a special annual survey by an independent agency financed by the state (at each level — federal, state, and local governments for the usa). 2. the annual survey will collect and publicize the information about: a. all students' satisfaction with their education on a 10-point scale (mediated by legal guardian’s satisfaction for young and/or psychologically disabled children), b. we interpret the point 6 out of 10 and above as “good enough education,” and c. all total educational expenses per each student (including all extra contributions by parents, teachers, grants, loans, and so on). 3. we can foresee the following possible scenarios here: a. “poorest students” (ps), the students whose education is almost entirely financed by the public educational neutrality vouchers, have the education satisfaction index above or equal 6 on average (ps>=6), no adjustment is necessary. the amount of the educational public voucher seems to be enough to provide the quality of education. there can be a financial investigation for possible decreasing the amount of the 3 vouchers; b. “poorest students” have the education satisfaction index below 6 on average but above “the richer students” (rs), i.e., students whose education funding much exceeds the ps education funding, (rs<=ps<=6), no adjustment is needed. although students do not seem to access to "the good enough education" on average, funding does not seem to be a factor. we expect that self-correcting processes of students moving away from unsatisfactory education, informed by educational research, will kick in to fix the problem. if the problem persists a special public ad hoc committee is due to investigate the problem (probably along with an academic research); c. “poorest students” have the education satisfaction index below 6 on average and below “the richer students’” satisfaction index which is below 6 (ps<rs<=6), adjustment is needed. the adjustment amount for increasing the educational public voucher has to be statistically calculated to allow the average point of the students' satisfaction to reach point 6, the minimum point defining "the good enough education"; d. “poorest students” have the education satisfaction index below 6 on average and “the richer students’” satisfaction index above or equal 6 (ps<6<=rs), adjustment is needed. the adjustment amount for increasing the educational public voucher has to be statistically calculated to allow the average point of the students' satisfaction to reach the average point of the students' satisfaction of their education from the second group. 4. when public educational neutrality voucher has to be adjusted, the federal government, state government, and/or local county government have to increase their public educational neutrality voucher amounts, pending on taxpayers’ and representatives’ willingness, other demands, and priorities. 5. special education vouchers have to be issued by the federal government, state, and local county regulated by the same principle as described above; 6. all legitimate non-educational functions of the current educational institutions should be separated and financed separately in order not to divert the purpose of education — e.g., babysitting, teenage supervision, preventing children gangs and delinquency, comprehensive immunization, sorting people for proficiency or other purposes (i.e., summative assessments), providing health care, and so on. for example, if a student decides not to get education, his/her radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170 | vol. 4 (2016) e24 parents have to be provided by another, non-educational, voucher for some non-educational functions valued by the society; the transition from funding the current state’s educational monopoly system based on accountability to funding the new educational pluralism system based on self-correcting practice has to be investigated by educational economists and policy analysts. currently, only students in so-called “public” education schools get taxpayers’ money. will the new system and transition require much more money and taxes? maybe. on the other hand, although we do not know for sure, our suspicion is that a lot educational money is wasted on bureaucracy, testing, accountability, educational design, textbooks, audits, and so on. the state's current educational monopoly and distrust in students' (and their guardians') educational decision-making are very costly, in our view, in financial, pedagogical, and human agency waste and suffering. we wonder if we do not need to add much money to start the new system (sidorkin, 2009). the new democratic educational pluralism system of self-correcting practice will need minimum 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(1981). learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs (morningside ed.). new york: columbia university press. wolff-jontofsohn, u. (2013). berlin: the inner city school initiative "learning and living diversity (20092012)". paper presented at the cultural sustainability, social cohesion and glocal education, jerusalem, israel. zhao, y. (2009). catching up or leading the way: american education in the age of globalization. alexandria, va: ascd. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.16 | vol. 1 (2013) b4 bakhtinian pedagogy is needed in our postmodern world mikhail gradovski university college of telemark, norway abstract book review: e. jayne white & michael a. peters (eds) (2011) bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. peter lang publishing. pascal bruckner, one of france’s leading public intellectuals, writes in his tyranny of guilt that the worst that threatens us is indifference: not arousing either enough interest or enough anger in others to justify their malice. for the sphere of education in the western world there exists a danger. this danger is a regime of management, which is based on a present-day positivistic (postpositivistic) idea of a human being. this regime among other things is characterized in some western countries by an accountability craze, which understands almost any form of relation between a teacher and a learner that leads to learning to be a service. sometimes this service is even understood as being the same as a very benign and purely instrumental act of selling toothpaste to a customer in a convenience store. in the case of education, we are talking about the service of selling learning as a commodity. the current regime of institutionalized education requires everything about learning to be counted and phenomena that cannot be counted are required to be reported using prearranged forms. the educationalists and teachers’ indifference to this regime is this regime’s best helping hand. the contributors to this anthology are anything but indifferent to the regime. i see a parallel between the authors of this anthology and mikhail bakhtin, who being in opposition to the soviet indoctrination continued writing his papers understanding that there was small, if any, chance to see them published and read by a wider public in his lifetime. similarly, the contributors to this book have produced an anthology, which challenges many of the conventional ideas about learning and human being that this regime of educational management is based upon. the contributions in this anthology provide consistent arguments and deeper understanding of the relations between people that result in learning. these arguments and understandings are manifested in the valid pieces of research that show that not everything in the relations that nurtures learning can and should be counted. the authors of the chapters have produced very compulsive and overwhelming evidence on why bakhtinian pedagogy is needed in our postmodern world. the chapters cover the main themes of bakhtin’s thought that could be related to education as an area of theory and practice: the role of laughter, authorship, dialogue, heteroglossia, chronotope and carnival. the chapters vary in quality and style of writing but their scope and overall quality is convincing enough. for me, this anthology appears to issn: 2325-3290 (online) bakhtinian pedagogy is needed in our postmodern world mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.16 | vol. 1 (2013) b5 be a must read for everyone who wants to get knowledge on the current use of bakhtin’s ideas in the sphere of education. by not being indifferent the contributors have given us, educationalists and teachers, hope and made us thirsty for more. the hope what makes a good anthology? in my opinion, there should be at least three ingredients: sophisticated research, well founded points of view and sets of argumentation that shed light on a topic in a thought-provoking way providing an opportunity for a dialogue, and content that inspires a reader interested in the topic to desire to get more knowledge. all these ingredients are present in this anthology. the anthology contains introduction, three parts and information about the authors of the chapters. in the introduction the editors give a more or less detailed presentation of the themes touched upon in each part and present a short overview of the main works of inspired by bakhtin’s ideas. this overview is a wellcrafted piece of the historiographical research on bakhtin. the overview provides information on bakhtin’s theoretical heritage as it has been understood and used in the sphere of education in the western culture during the last decade. the anthology inspires, provokes and makes one want to get more knowledge and ask questions. among these the most pronounced is the question of what should be done in practice in order to make bakhtinian pedagogy to be a part of our everyday educational practice. the thirst for more among the most inspiring is the chapter “too serious: learning, schools, and bakhtin’s carnival” by timothy j. lensmire on the use of laughter in educational practice. the author has provided a convincing argument for why the laughter should be a part of pupils’ classroom experience. however, the question of how it should be done in practice remains. another important piece of research in the anthology is a chapter by jayne e. white “aesthetics of the beautiful: ideologic tensions in contemporary assessment”. it is one of the most convincing and beautifully written pieces on the use of assessment and the need of inclusion of the subjective view into the assessment practices in schools and pre-school educational establishments. this chapter contains arguments that empower and inspire, and above all, makes one wanting more. it creates the thirst for more research and knowledge on the subject. eugene matusov’s chapter “authorial teaching and learning” describes the concept of the authorial learning in a fresh and unconventional yet convincing way. matusov and white’s chapters both inspired me the most and provoked me to ask questions. the very questions and answers to these questions are to be found at the end of this review. among the chapters that can provoke in a positive way is “the bakhtin circle, philosophy of language, and educational theory” written by michael peters. the author has taken upon himself a very uneasy and demanding task of considering the claim whether bakhtin is the one of (co)-authors behind voloshinov’s texts. i do believe the results of the brilliant analysis peters has produced. at the same time, the analysis by peters is not enough. there is a need for an analysis where bakhtin, medvedev and voloshinov’s ideas and theories are considered on, at least, three levels: epistemological, ontological and axiological. only after such analysis is carried out can the claims of bakhtin’s authorship or co-authorship of the texts by voloshinov and medvedev be put to rest. i also have problems agreeing with peters about an existence of the philosophy of education by voloshinov and, consequently, bakhtin. neither voloshinov nor bakhtin were interested in creating their own philosoph(y)ies of education. the bakhtinian philosophy of education does exist. this philosophy is created and developed not by bakhtin himself, as he wrote only one piece devoted specifically to bakhtinian pedagogy is needed in our postmodern world mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.16 | vol. 1 (2013) b6 education, but by those who got inspired by bakhtin’s ideas and analysis of human existence, culture and language. this well-crafted anthology, in my opinion, is one of the most important contributions to the body of the bakhtinian philosophy of education, in particular, and bakhtinian pedagogy in general. articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ microsoft word reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a98 reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin: an account of the experience of two professors working together in the classroom anselmo lima universidade tecnológica federal do paraná, brazil katherine von duyke university of delaware, usa abstract the practice of a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin is increasingly popular in different parts of the world. this article is an account produced in the spirit of such pedagogy. two professors (one from brazil, the other from the united states), both members of an international dialogic pedagogy study group, write together to discuss the work they developed in partnership under this educational paradigm when teaching a course on “diversity in secondary education” in the school of education of the college of education and human development of the university of delaware, usa. after presenting brief introductory information on who they are, how they met and how they happened to work together, the two scholars present classroom interaction data followed by reflections on to what extent certain forms of classroom interaction they identified in the data promote or inhibit the practice of a truly bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy. in other words, what the readers will find in this article is not a traditional empirical study, but a telling case of two educators learning from one another about what counts as dialogic in the classroom, while at the same time using the aforementioned course as an anchor for multiple discussions. anselmo lima is a tenured professor of educational linguistics at universidade tecnológica federal do paraná utfpr (federal university of technology of parana state, brazil). phd in applied linguistics and language studies from pontifícia universidade católica de são paulo – puc-sp (pontifical catholic university of sao paulo, brazil); phd internship in occupational psychology at conservatoire national des arts et métiers de paris – cnam (national conservatory of arts and trades of paris, france) and post-doc in the college of education and human development of the university of delaware, usa. he is the author of “teacher education & teacher health”: www.formacaoesaudedoprofessor.com katherine von duyke received her ph.d. in sociocultural and communal approaches to education from the university of delaware under the guidance of dr. eugene matusov in 2013. her research has focused on innovative educational practices: she has critiqued open democratic schools, analyzed the way student agency is conceptualized in education, and evaluated educational discourses for their ability to connect with student thinking. deeply influenced by the works of l.s. vygotsky, and m. bakhtin she argues that education has traditionally focused on cultural transference, or an ideal of what culture should be. instead, she suggests education can support students’ meaning making participation in and reflective and creative reinterpretation of culture. issn: 2325-3290 (online) reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a99 acknowledgements: special thanks to cnpq, capes and fulbright, for their research funding; to vera franco, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, samanta lopez, lei chen, lakshimi bandlamudi, lara beaty, eduardo viana, beth brait, yves clot, for their support; to our two managing editors diana j. arya and azwihangwisi edward muthivhi as well as to our reviewers, for their help with revisions. ��� 1. first reflections on dialogic pedagogy anselmo lima: i came to the united states of america interested, among other things, in finding out more about the practice of a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin. my main interest was in the way teachers manage their classroom interactions with their students in as dialogic a manner as possible and in how dialogic they can be in and outside their classrooms. in other words, i expected to find out more about how a teacher could relate to his or her students similarly to the way the russian novelist dostoevsky was said to relate to his characters: on equal footing (cf. bakhtin, 1984). many educators and scholars who work under the paradigm of dialogic pedagogy resort to bakhtin´s writings in the field of literary scholarship in order to transpose the russian scholar´s ideas to the field of education so that they can think and rethink teacher-student interactions in a new light. this is the case, for example, of eugene matusov1. his procedure is very representative of this approach. i will take and briefly discuss one example extracted from one of his books as a strategy to clarify for the readers what can be understood by a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin. after referring to and being influenced by the following excerpt from the book “problems of dostoevsky’s poetics” (bakhtin, 1984): the hero as a point of view, as an opinion on the world and on himself, requires utterly special methods of discovery and artistic characterization. and this is so because what must be discovered and characterized here is not the specific existence of the hero, not his fixed image, but the sum total of his consciousness and self-consciousness, ultimately the hero´s final word on himself and on his world (bakhtin, 1984, p.48 – italics in the original), matusov (2009, p. 80) argues that a teacher´s approach to working with his or her students must be similar (but not equal!) to dostoevsky´s approach – as an author – to his heroes or characters. in this sense, he writes: “good teaching involves the teacher working with the student’s self-consciousness” (italics added) because the “student’s self-consciousness is the arena of the student’s subjectivity where learning occurs”. after this initial reflection, matusov (2009, p. 80), drawing now on the bakhtinian idea that “dostoevsky let his characters hear and respond to the author’s words about them”, goes on to explain that, similarly, “good teaching should be directed at the students’ self-consciousness as well” (italics added), especially if the educator responsibly takes into account that “the teacher’s monologic discourse 1 dr. eugene matusov was my faculty associate during the time i was in the united states. i would like to thank him for his prompt willingness to have me on his team. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a100 about the student that objectivizes and finalizes the student generates legitimate teacher-resistance or self-suppression in the student’s self-consciousness”. if this bakhtinian dialogic approach to education is coherently followed, matusov argues, the teacher cannot tell him or herself or the colleagues: “oh, this is the student’s misconception”, nor can the teacher tell the student: “oh, this is your misconception” because this would mean to objectivize and finalize the student according to the “deficit model”, a procedure that “has little pedagogical value but great ontological harm”! (matusov, 2009, p. 80). according to matusov, “instead, the teacher has to offer a counter-argument for the student’s selfconsciousness to consider” because “in good teaching, the teacher should not and cannot expect more than the student’s serious consideration of the teacher’s argument” [italics added] (and the arguments of other students, as well as those arguments of the texts offered by the teacher) as equal to the student’s own arguments and ideas about the world and him or herself. in this sense, the teacher’s consciousness is and must be viewed as just another consciousness, with rights equal to those of the student (matusov, 2009, p. 80; bakhtin, 1984, p.49-50). only under these conditions can the teacher and the student have equal rights and become dialogic partners or subjects: “good teaching [therefore] requires dialogue” (matusov, 2009, p. 80). having these ideas in mind and desiring to see for myself that kind of “good teaching” in action, i arrived in the united states at the beginning of december, 2013, to do research in the school of education of the university of delaware and i had just met professor katherine von duyke, who works under this educational paradigm (von duyke, k. s., 2013) and who i was just beginning to establish a professional collaboration with, when i learned that she would be teaching a winter course on “diversity in secondary education” (educ419) starting at the beginning of january, 2014. it was mid-december, 2013, then and i really felt like having the opportunity to sit in her classes – mostly as an observer – to learn from her both about her teaching approach and about matters of diversity in education. even though i knew professors do not normally feel comfortable when they have colleagues come and sit in their classes (cf. lima, 2013; lima, althaus & rodrigues, 2011) and despite the fact that i did not feel confident myself about the response i could get, i “dared” to write her the following e-mail message on dec 17, 2013, at 1:33 pm, anselmo lima <xxxx@hotmail.com> wrote: hello, kathy! how are you? i was taking a look at the courses that are going to be offered by the school of education in the winter and saw that you are going to offer a course whose name is "diversity in secondary school" and i became very interested. do you think it would be possible for me to attend your classes? would you be ok with that? i think i could also help you with whatever it is you may need help with for or during the course... i think it would be a great opportunity for me to learn more with you... please feel absolutely free to tell me what you think and feel, ok? see you! anselmo lima while i (anxiously!) waited for her reply, i felt unsure and uncomfortable myself because i did not know to what extent my request would bother her or put her to some discomfort: we had really just met after all! reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a101 and yet, at the same time, i felt very excited and looking forward to having her as one of my first dialogic partners to work with in the usa2. this excitement increased when i got the following reply from her: anselmo, it would be awesome to have you come to the course! don’t feel like you have to come to all of the classes because it will be quite an intense focus but sure heck yeah it would be great to have a colleague to reflect with, and for the students to hear about diverse cultural experiences. cheers, kathy only what she didn´t know at the time was that i really did mean to come to all the classes and to be a part of that intense focus. from her message i could tell that our expectations did not initially quite match: and how could they? as i mentioned before, i was thinking about sitting in her class to learn from her maybe just like any of her students, though i knew i would in a way also be a “qualified” observer interested in dialogic pedagogy, whereas she talked about “having a colleague to reflect with” and expected her students to be “hearing about diverse cultural experiences”. i thought to myself: that kind of answer can only come from a dialogic colleague! as the reader will notice along this text, my focus and hers were to merge gradually as we worked together, resulting in something at the same time richer than what she and i seemed to expect and to have in mind at first. on january 6th, from 3:00 to 5:00 pm, i sat in my first class with katherine (or should i say: “i sat in katherine´s first class”?). she briefly introduced me to her students as a fulbright visiting professor who would be teaching that course with her. i felt at the same time surprised, honored and concerned. i was surprised because that was a whole lot more than i was anticipating. that was an honor because the kind of professional relationship she was beginning to establish with me was one of equality, even though i was expecting and felt i was supposed to be just a visitor who would be there to learn from her. and i felt concerned because at that time i just wondered if i would really be up to the task of working with her to teach that course and her students3. as usual, i was equipped with my notebook and my mechanical pencil. since i knew that one of her expectations was to “have a colleague to reflect with”, i thought i would need to have something to talk to her about at the end of her class that first day. therefore i immediately and carefully started to observe and document her interaction with the students. since i wished to offer her an overview of her first class and to find out what she would have to say about it, especially from the standpoint of her stepby-step actions along time in the classroom, the result in my notebook was the following4: katherine von duyke´s class 1 – 01/06/14 14:55 – she calls the roll; 15:00 – she presents herself; 2 my faculty associate at the university of delaware was professor eugene matusov. for further information, please visit: http://www.cies.org/grantee/anselmo-pereira-de-lima#sthash.vezfkrhx.dpuf 3 i actually taught two classes in that course on the matter of bilingualism in education. however, in this text, we will focus on katherine von duyke´s teaching practice. we are currently working together on a text focusing on my own teaching practice as i taught those classes about bilingualism in education. 4 in order to make the understanding of my personal notes easier for the readers, as i transcribe them here, i also introduce a few comments, clarifications and adaptations. i am well aware of the fact that – to different extents – my voice, katherine von duyke´s and those of the students often inevitably get “mixed”. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a102 15:05 – seeking to introduce the course, she asks students: “what kind of diversity do you think affects education?” as they give her answers, she gradually writes them on the board, like this: “race”, “age”, “religious”, “disabilities”, “gender”, “styles”, “culture”, “personalities”, “socioeconomic status”, “educational philosophy5” as part of her explanations about how she expects the course to be in approaching those topics, she points out: “it has to be a safe environment for us to make mistakes”. 15:10 – she has an ipad mini in her left hand and looks at it from time to time as she talks. she asks: “how many of you are here because this course is required? raise your hands”. it turns out the vast majority of students are there because the course is required. she moves on to ask: “what is the difference between a learner and a student?”. as students share what they think, she writes what they say on the board: learner student “desire is something motivated”; contents are “not memorized”, they are a “tool”; there is “inquiry”; it is about you “making a half [on] your own”; you are “open to learn”; “the teacher fosters guidance”; “you can be autodidactic”; “do you need a teacher here?”; the role of the teacher is that of an “expert, of guidance, of providing foundations”. “grades”; “parents”; “trade-off: friends”, “expectations, economic pressures” [katherine von duyke´s translation of a student´s idea of “getting a job”]; “to get to the next level of the game” [katherine von duyke´s translation of a student´s idea of “going to college”] she then asks: “who do you want to be in this course?”. students´ unanimous answer is: “we want to be learners!”. she says: “good!” and goes on to explain, among other things: “our class will involve 1) reading; 2) giving you time at the end of the class to write on index cards for me: two things you have learned on the front and how you think we can improve our work on the back; 3) we will use a webtalk, which is for you to reflect on the class, to share materials among yourselves, etc. and the cards are for me. since you want to be learners, i will direct the class at first and then i will gradually shift it from me to you as learners. as a main learning project i will not ask you for written assignments. you are studying to be teachers and what teachers do most is ‘we talk’. so why would i have you write essays? you will be teaching the class at those times in fifteen-minute presentations. for our webtalk we will use canvas, from the university of delaware platform. remember: canvas is for us and we´re not for canvas”. 15:35 – also i would like you to know that “texting is ok in our class. there is no need to hide. if you hide: 1) you pay attention to me; 2) you pay attention to texting; and 3) you pay attention to hiding. if you don´t hide, you pay attention to me and to texting, but not to hiding and it makes your life and mine easier”. 15:40 – “if you miss a class, you must interview two classmates and post a webtalk about the class as compensation. and remember: we´re a community of learners. making mistakes is ok”. 15:45-16:00 – break. 5 for example schools can be diverse between themselves in terms of educational philosophy, and this often has an impact on students of diversity (cf. anyon, 1980). reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a103 16:00 – “all right, guys, let´s pull class back together!” (there are many voices from students and she speaks in a somewhat loud voice so as to be heard by all). she gives each student a handout about “learning styles” and asks them to take a look at it together. she then writes all the learning styles on the board and asks students one by one if they think they are “visual”, “auditory”, etc. she gradually writes the results on the board, promising to take that into consideration as she teaches: visualkinesthetic visual auditory kinesthetic depends on the subject ii (2) ii ii ii iii (9) ii ii (4) ii ii iii (7) iii (3) 16:30 “now… how do you want me to teach you? do you want challenge or comfort in this class? or you don´t know? those of you who would like challenge raise your hands... now those of you who would like comfort… and now those of you who do not know”. as she does it, she computes the results and writes them on the board, promising to take that into account: challenge comfort dunno 12.5 students 4 students 9.5 students 16:35 – “who among you is a shy student? raise your hands”. many students raise their hands. “how can i go about you? can i give you a lot of challenge? can i ask you a lot of questions?”. at this moment, i see many more hands being raised, one after the other, and the teacher starts to listen to what individual students have to say about it one by one. students seem all very excited and start talking among themselves even while there is one individual classmate talking to the teacher. 16:38 – katherine von duyke asks students: “is diversity good or bad?” 16:42 – she says “i think that´s enough for today´s class” and gives time for students to write their comments on the class in their index cards. from 16:42 to 17:00 – students gradually write on their cards, stand up, come to the teacher, hand in their cards and leave the classroom. right after 17:00, katherine von duyke and i sit together to talk about the class. she looks and sounds excited to know what i wrote in my notebook… this is basically what our dialogic encounter and the beginning of our work together consisted in. this account of her first class will feed our dialogue throughout this text. i now give the floor to her. katherine von duyke: when anselmo first suggested he might attend my class, i felt extremely nervous. perhaps because there’s a little bit of judgment present in conversations about dialogism, and i can be flooded by the shaming message that i, in failing to be dialogic, have failed to be humane6. on top of that, this class would be the first time i would work with secondary education students instead of elementary majors, and the first time in an intensive winter session format. i also struggled with guidance from our department and the ncate7 inspired rubric that defines an outcome in which students’ overcome their personal bias. as a newly minted phd in an adjunct position, i felt unsure about how much latitude with course goals i might take. 6 i’ve since resolved this sense of moral dilemma, both students and myself live within the tension of pragmatics and dialogism. 7 national council for accreditation of teacher education. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a104 also, i had read anselmo’s paper about his research with teachers, and his use of the term “selfconfrontation” troubled me (cf. lima, 2013). my churched experience of the term was for self-shaming. a whole course with an observer seemed daunting, i suspected i would flounder in multiple ways; i might get by with pulling a good class a session or two, but in the course of the whole semester i was sure to mess up some of the time. i wondered at the wisdom of adding additional anxiety to my workload. nevertheless, i agreed. i agreed because anselmo didn’t seem to be the judgmental type, and so i suspected that i misread the intention of his research. secondly, i have personally found that reflecting on my practice is beneficial because so much of what teachers do is “on the fly”. this very reality makes us both vulnerable to exposure: for the mistakes we might make in the heat of the moment, and yet reflection can provide valuable insights, and so i didn’t want to pass up this opportunity. i invited anselmo to not only observe my teaching, but to be in the dialogue – i presented him as a co-instructor to the class – because i felt that would give anselmo an entry point into the dialogue and to even challenge what i might say to students, allowing for both reflection and adjustment in the moment as well as afterwards and privately. should he choose to teach a class session, i would have the opportunity to observe and looked forward to learn from his approach8. i also felt a sense of responsibility for him as a researcher and colleague interested in dialogic education – for the same reason research subjects often sign on – to help him further science especially in this core area of my professional concern. 2. questions, answers and further reflections on dialogic pedagogy anselmo lima: writing students´ points of view on the board seems to be a very important part of your teaching practice. as students shared what they think the differences between “learners” and “students” are, you wrote their views on the board. i noticed that at times you didn´t actually write on the board precisely what the students were saying. for example, when some students explained what a “student” is in terms of someone concerned about “getting a job” and “going to college”, you wrote on the board: “expectations, economic pressures” and “to get to the next level of the game”. why did you choose to translate into other words what they said? why was it necessary or important? how do you think they felt when they saw on the board not what they had just said but what you considered they meant? do you think they would have felt differently if their words had been written on the board precisely as they said them? what are the consequences of this apparently unimportant detail for the promotion of a dialogic pedagogy in and outside the classroom? katherine von duyke: at first, this observation by anselmo really upset me about myself. here i am, a dialogic professor, taking over and monologizing my students’ words! indeed, from a certain point of view, what can initially count as dialogic in the classroom is not to try to summarize or rephrase what the students say. for a moment i was flooded with shame because i want to be a coherent dialogic educator and monologism is often thought to be "bad", even if this idea may be questionable (cf. matusov, 2009, p. 111-146). scenes of my potential silencing (by summarizing and/or rephrasing), offending, and manipulation of students ran through my mind. i know that intuitively at times it felt like rephrasing was the right move, but intuitive responses – with something as sacred as someone else’s words – can also be used unconsciously and clumsily – they can then suppress or even wound. this really drove me to think about the logic of this move so that i might make my use of it with students explicit and precise. anselmo noted: 8 as pointed out previously, anselmo did teach two classes on bilingualism in education in our class together. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a105 for example, when some students explained what a “student” is in terms of someone concerned about “getting a job” and “going to college”, you wrote on the board: “expectations, economic pressures” and “to get to the next level of the game”. as i was writing on the board, in my mind, i imagined a conversation between students and parents (get a job), students and society (economic pressures), and students and teachers (credentials to get to the next level). i was moving the dialogue from the experience of a single student’s personal dialogue within these societal pressures in order to make more explicit the societal discourse about schooling with whom the student is in internal dialogue. as i was writing these responses, i was shaking my head in a tired and yet authoritarian way mimicking the finger-wagging adult who might say these things to students to encourage complicity in their own suppression. i hoped that the students intuitively felt that i had switched to and represented these other voices rather than twisting the one student’s words, but i didn’t stop and ask what they thought making my process transparent and open for discussion. they maybe felt supported as such rephrasing could sometimes be viewed as validating one's thoughts or bringing community-level legitimacy to a student´s claim. they nodded, they did not object to the switch on their feedback cards, they might have simply been trying to make sense of my actions, been confused or disagreed. my intention was to generalize the responsive voice of the student who raised her hand to the level of dialogue on the social plane, so that student’s in their seats could relate to, not just the student who answered from her personal experience, but also their own internal dialogue in relation to these societal discourses about schooling. i am often writing students’ perspectives on the board in a way that maps a larger discourse about an issue, so i will ask for students’ perspectives, other societal perspectives, and what researchers have found in investigating various views or problems. we will use this map to think about what voices are in tension with each other, what values are represented behind them, what kinds of replies might be developed to them, and then how they might integrate them into their practice. i often ask students to select one issue in the semester for which they might develop their own course of teacher action. i ask, “what perspectives have we explored that are valuable and sensible for public education where, as teachers, we need to support the learning of all students and for whom our population is increasingly diverse?”. students develop greater internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1981; matusov & von duyke, 2010) (internal to the greater societal discourse on these issues) and prepare replies to those who might not agree with them while being mindful of the possible contraindications of their own positions. often, i also suggest that if the values that are needed in public settings are in significant conflict with a student’s own values, they might consider what would constitute the best context for their own professional work. for example, one strongly evangelical student decided that, because of the relative inclusiveness of lgbtq9 emerging in public schools, she would prefer to work in a religious school. another student decided that, because of her democratic values, she could not work in a school setting that imposed curriculum on students without their voice in its construction. both students decided they could not work in a public setting as they considered these issues for themselves. as a bakhtinian professor i am concerned that students consider their answerability10 as 9stands for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, queer as used by these communities. see: http://www.lgbtqnation.com/ 10 bakthin suggests: “art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself – in the unity of my answerability” (bakhtin, 1990, p. 2). our curriculum must answer to the lives of students and students must critically analyze the curriculum and its relationship to their lives. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a106 teachers within the context of their own lives, the lives of their students, the school setting, and the curriculum. at the same time, we witnessed in these classes many times when students did realize they held biases that could be harmful to their future students and changed their perspectives as they dialogized them within the context of these class discussions and their imagined future teacher actions. in having anselmo point this out to me, i have had time to reflect on my actions and especially came to the conclusion that i must make my actions of changing their words more explicit for students, but i don’t think i will change my method. i think it is important on two counts. the first is the need to both personalize my class and draw it out to the wider dialogue and concerns. i have noticed that people empathize with others first from their own perspective. perhaps this is why bakhtin disliked empathy on one level: it can be the aestheticizing of one’s own experience through the mirror of the painful experience of others (bakhtin, 1990, p. 25). for instance, in one of my current classes, a jewish student expressed that she experienced racism that was like that of african americans and an african-american student pointed out that she could never leave her color behind. there was quite a lot of tension in this class and i told the story of the murder of my first husband (many years ago) and how people often related their empathy to me by telling me stories of losing a loved grandparent or even a pet. these stories used to make me burn with impatience, until a man who had lost a daughter through a rape and murder reached out to me. her whereabouts was unknown for 9 months. his greater personal agony was evident to me, yet he was willing to hear and help me in my lesser story. he was a personal example to me of the forbearance i needed to accord others as they first experience my story through their own life pain, and then have the patience to draw for them the painful particularities that are different. in this way some would develop greater understanding about issues of grief, and even sometimes provide the the kind of thoughtful empathy that connected to the nuances of my story and my need for emotional connection. because of this experience, i know i need to do both. students need to understand issues of social justice11 not only at an abstract level, they need to feel it, but to feel it they must go through their own stories and then dialogize these with the stories and needs of others. the second is the following: if students think that they are learning of only each other’s opinions, they feel that they are not learning anything, not taking away a broader consciousness beyond their life situation, instructional tools, or values that will help them be effective as teachers in their future classrooms. they express frustration if they feel course content is a free for all of anyone’s perspective, and if that is the case, why take a class? why not just argue with peers in the dining hall? they need to see how these perspectives map to wider perspectives in society, how they answer to each other, and how researchers attempt to bring clarity, validity, and new perspective to these tensions. note to self, now more aware of the potential benefits and downfalls with this process – i will open dialogue around it. anselmo lima: your classroom interactions seem to consist basically in you asking your students questions about hot social issues, having them answer them and writing them on the board. but you almost never seem to tell your students what you yourself think about those issues, what your positions are. do you ever tell your students what you think and write it on the board? yes? no? why? why is it important or not for the promotion of a dialogic pedagogy in and outside the classroom? 11 for an interesting discussion on how a society might be both socially liberal and diverse see kukathas, (2007). reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a107 katherine von duyke: this concern to dialogize societal tensions in the context of my classroom is also why i don’t express my opinion on these issues, or i am loath too (but sometimes do). i am aware that the students can feel pressured by my power in the academy to adopt my position, or they can shorten the work of their own ipd12 by adopting mine. most importantly, my position may be totally inappropriate and problematic for them in the context of their teaching and so they need to be aware of possible teaching decisions and the values and history these actions carry. i often draw on personal experience and tell stories to illustrate the values behind one perspective or another, or the tensions produced by teaching decisions within a certain perspective. i have to use these illustrations carefully because sometimes they are powerful experiences for me and i can get thrown into the feeling of my own experience – so i am careful to ask myself what the story illustrates and where should i stop it! at the same time, the students must leave the class feeling that they have a handle on the major points of controversy and how to reflect on possible courses of action. indeed, this process itself may be revelatory for some students. anselmo lima: you said to students: our classroom “has to be a safe environment for us to make mistakes”. what does it mean? what do you mean by that? what is the connection of this idea with the promotion of a dialogic pedagogy? katherine von duyke: their imagination of their future teaching context is extremely important, in my view, to ensuring that our present classroom is a safe environment for them to express their current perspectives. these “as if” scenarios provide a distinct chronotope13 that exists apart from the students’ here and now; so that, rather than critique their lives, we are imagining certain views lived out in practice in a rather dostoevskian fashion14. when students are expressing their perspectives, the logic, concerns, and values behind their perspectives can be understood and appreciated even as the perspective might itself be highly problematic in a public school context. for instance, if a student doesn’t think that lgbtq concerns and issues should be part of public classrooms, there are values behind that statement that need to be understood. they may have concerns for the integrity of family life, etc. whatever these values, fears and concerns are, they need to be free to be voiced, otherwise they do not become dialogized in new contexts – such as public education. instead, they can go underground when threatened and this promotes people to dig in and seek solidarity and political power and alignment with others within an echo chamber. they are also important for students who deeply disagree with them to hear, to better understand how to reply to such voices. these discussions help students’ self-understanding about the kind of values in their future workplace they are likely to thrive in. when these ideas are mapped across a board, 12 internally persuasive discourse (ipd). 13 literally "time-space": a unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. the distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to most other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent (bakhtin, 1981, p. 425). i add the notion of “axiology” as described by matusov (2009). the students imagine their ideas carved in a previous time-space-axiology spoken in a future timespace-axiology. 14 bakhtin points out that the characters in dostoevsky’s novels embody differing ideological beliefs and work their ideas out with each other “authentically” and not towards the ideological ends of the author (bakhtin, 1984). reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a108 students begin to consider alternative values that undergird diverse perspectives, but also their own ideas now dialogized in the context of public schooling. suddenly, they may feel tensions and concerns within that context completely apart from their original contexts. this example leads to another issue of safety in an academic environment. grades cannot be tied to personal changes in students’ values. grades are, in one sense, a way of expressing how much alignment the student has achieved with the course content – at a college level it also often means using that content for critical analysis of problematic situations as well as reliably reproducing and showing mastery of core ideas in that analysis. in our u.s. environment we have the following new accreditation criteria from our national council for accreditation of teacher education (ncate): opportunities for candidates to reflect on personal biases, access appropriate resources to deepen their understanding, use this information and related experiences to build stronger relationships with p-12 learners15, and adapt their practices to meet the needs of each learner (school of education, internal memo, may, 7, 2013). to “reflect on personal biases” means students, in similar department coursework, are asked to write essays about how their biases have changed, and then they are graded on the essay according to a rubric that, in part, suggests they divulge their biases and then self-reform. the grading process puts professors in the position to assess the level of bias that their students have; erasing the line between accountability and education. i think, to have this objective is very dangerous for a class on diversity. the course readings and social expectations of the class are already quite values-oriented. if i were to grade students based on their alignment with the course objectives the university would like to institute, i feel i would damage their rights as citizens to have and express their own conceptions of the good and decide on the appropriate context for their expression of it. i think we often treat our pre-service teachers as if they are already professionals, and yet at the same time, they are baby adults barely out of their own ideological nests. the normal time and contexts accorded students in other disciplines to engage with liberal ideas and the time to mature into their own values and ideals is often denied to our pre-service teachers whose course load is highly structured by professional learning. the class must be safe for their emergent ipd – the authoring of themselves as hero-ideologists both personally and professionally16. i have written elsewhere how this process encourages the development of students’ professional voice (matusov & von duyke, 2009). what we do together in the class is reflective of the culture, but imaginary in terms of students’ future actions as teachers. this gap between their future selves and the present culture doesn’t ask students to reveal and/or change their personal biases, or try to pin down their present biases, though these obviously sometimes emerge. as a means to consider their views in terms of their future profession, i ask students to develop a main learning project (mlp)17 in which they reflect on a tension in education, discuss the diverse perspectives, and then come to a teaching decision and then address the pros and cons of their proposed decisions with classmates. for example, they might take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy towards lgbtq issues in their classrooms. what are the benefits of that position? for whom? and what are the contradictions of that position and for whom? how will they answer to the sector of their classroom for whom it is a con? 15 p-12: preschool to grade 12 learners. 16 “here also the internal open-endedness of the hero... the necessity of the appearance of a hero-ideologist who takes an ultimate position in the world, the type of person who takes an ultimate decision” (bakhtin, 1984, p.301). 17 my colleagues and i have changed the main classroom project from a “final” one (for us the teachers) to one focused on their inquiries. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a109 by positioning students as interlocutors in present societal discourses important in education and, simultaneously as professional teachers in their future imagined classrooms, they have a safe space to creatively author their role as teachers without consequences to their present selves or future children. within those two chronotopes – the given and the imagined – they can play with possible decision scenarios. they often do transcend their present perspectives, or sometimes they realize how much their values diverge from that of the climate in public education. this playful space allows students to change their ipd or not – importantly not determining what endpoint outcomes should be for their personal values that strip them of their agency as citizens in a democratic society. one student in this class suggested at the outset of his mlp that he suspected he might have bias as a white male teaching history. he wanted to investigate this possibility. later he concluded that when he teaches he will include the voices and cultures of his students in history classes. this example would be trite if it had been engineered in a classroom where students knew they would be graded and judged by “producing and overcoming” biases for the teacher and university’s consumption. his sincerity expressed the important tensions between cultural sensitivity and providing the keys of access to dominant culture (c.f. delpit, 2004). importantly, it would be hard to separate the student’s biases and the bias structurally part of his experiences as a teacher within the dominant culture – one that has provided him with a textbook and lesson plans that support structural inequity. i have tried to understand the interplay between these two spaces, the now and the future, analytically in conversations with my colleague ana marjanovic-shane, who developed a framework on three chronotopes she uses to compare drama education and dialogic education (marjanovic-shane, 2011). what is important in the present for me about her ideas is that she suggests more drama in dialogic education and more dialogism in drama education. for my purposes, adding imagination to our dialogic classroom creates a space in which students can move from societal ideas to their future selves and test these new perspectives without necessarily claiming a personal change in their views. in fact, it is reasonable for students to hold a set of personal views that differ from their professional views out of a sense of civic responsibility for their classrooms. it is in the tension between dialogic selves that ipd is continuously recreated. as an educator, i feel it is my goal that my students become aware of alternative views and values, not causing them to arrive at a particular pre-defined point. yet, i also want to protect the school system that my children go to from potentially biased teachers. but if our classroom is a safe space for students developing ipd, i have to be aware of this side of myself – this fear that they will be bad teachers – and try to make them over into what i think a good teacher will be. i have to remember my role as an educator, as a mentor teacher or school leader, and avoid inducting them into the culture or into a particular school. at that point, their professional obligation is towards the students they serve, just as at this point my professional obligation to them is primarily as students and not as teachers. more and more i am becoming conscious of how the ways in which i frame a semester, class, or feedback can close down a student’s sense of agency. and so this is also what i mean about a “safe” environment – that the current given discourses or even my ideas on the practice of pedagogy is not imposed on students, but that they are invited to transcend and create new pedagogical discourses, maybe even changing my practices and values. related to this, i have to give students the freedom to ignore me. for instance, i might say to students: “why don’t you include this author in your paper or presentation?” and if they don’t, i might become insulted or they may feel pressured. instead, i need to also add: “you don’t have to take my suggestion if it doesn’t work for you”, because i do not want reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a110 students to guess what i want and produce it. i want them to express their own ideas and sometimes in that process they can seem to go in one direction and then realize they are really more about another. the class must be safe for their agency. because of this danger to impose my ideas on students, grades are based on their submission of assignments and their reflection on their ideas from alternative points of views only. also, it is very easy to get an a. i expect that students will not be very articulate in these issues nor have much comfort with our classroom context initially, but will have more and more to say as the semester progresses. should i punish them for such growth or determine how it will proceed for students? i’m not comfortable with that. anselmo lima: many teachers – maybe even the vast majority of them – do not allow their students to use their computers or cell phones during the classes, alleging that those aren´t but distractions and disruptions of the teaching flow. contrary to that trend, you actually encouraged students to use those devices: “texting is ok in our class. there is no need to hide. if you hide: 1) you pay attention to me; 2) you pay attention to texting; and 3) you pay attention to hiding. if you don´t hide, you pay attention to me and to texting, but not to hiding and it makes your life and my life easier”. could you explain the impacts of this approach on the promotion of a dialogic pedagogy in and outside the classroom? katherine von duyke: along with this sense that my students are transcending the culture’s ideas about education even as we are discussing contemporary and historical discourses, there is the awareness that students bring their own contemporary position as members of society to the class. the classroom, in my view, has to recognize students’ lived experiences and accommodate them, not only as an issue of race, class or culture, but as an issue of generational diversity: the students and i are 35 years apart, nearly 2 generations. when i was growing up, the internet was the world book encyclopedia, and one’s family had to be fairly wealthy to own a set. phones were attached to walls so you had to stand next to one in order to talk to someone. when i first got a mobile phone, i would stay in one place and it took me a long time to move while talking. i am aware that how i experience and live out my existence in the world can be quite different from the way my students do it, even if on many other factors we seem similar. we now live in a time of abundant information and constant ongoing multiple conversations – this is the embodied experience of my students’ lives. i think it is useless to attempt to police this reality out of my classroom. not only do they have cell phones out; sometimes they are shopping on their laptops! this is not to say it doesn’t make me sweat with anxiety at times – i’m old school and when students aren’t paying attention, i’m afraid “someone” looking in the door will think my students are disengaged. sometimes “someone” is a student in my own classroom who feels that i have failed to take control of the class or their classmates are taking “advantage” of me. this is one reason why i choose to make this teaching decision explicit for students. the other reason for this decision is that it gives me a good sense of how engaged and engaging my material is; a technique i learned from my former advisor, dr. eugene matusov. it lets me query the class, in an indirect way: is our discussion reaching them at an ontological level? if so, students will spend more time attending to the class discussion than to their computers, or, when they look up and make a comment, it is clear that they have been following the dialogue even if they have been cruising for new shoes. ladson-billings (2001) suggests teaching in a culturally sensitive way has much to do with the meanings teachers make of students’ behaviors. i exhibit this orientation by not making assumptions about how students use their attention in my classes. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a111 anselmo lima: i noticed your concern about the students being there just because the course is required. and the majority of them actually were! then you moved on to discuss with them the difference between being “learners” and being “students” as well as the corresponding consequences for the role the teacher may play in working with them, depending on what they choose to be. can you elaborate on this idea and on why it is important to discuss this issue with students, especially when most of them are there just because of institutional requirements? katherine von duyke: i learned to contrast student versus learner from my former advisor, dr. eugene matusov, as a way to assess a particular class, and to raise some hope and desires in the students about their own learning. based on bakhtin (1990), i think students are answerable for their own lives for themselves, not just to the institutional demands or the demands of society. this discussion indicates to students they have another layer of safety to be themselves in the class and can connect to their own meanings and purposes and not just my own. students have repeatedly told me that one of the things they dislike about testing and grades is that they often find themselves reading and learning, and they would like to pursue an idea further, but to do so would take away from the material the teacher expects to have covered. additionally, they know they have to learn the material in terms of the meanings the teacher makes of it, and not their own. for this reason, they often end up learning the material in the way the teacher wants it to be learned and then mentally “eject it” to clear ground for the next unit or course of study. this is so prevalent that it is revelatory for students that their own meanings can have value and can be significantly educational without arriving at prescribed outcomes. one student recently wrote on an index card, which i am paraphrasing here somewhat: “you can’t define for students the end points of the meanings they will take from the course”. rather than give students one reading to respond to i provide an online file of multiple readings at multiple levels of difficulty and ask students to pick one to describe and respond to in one long continuous web chat. they read not only the readings but some of each other’s writings – yet another way to immerse them in the wider dialogue and invite their participation and increasing capability and agency in taking on these societal issues – but they also read what they want, as much as they want, and, from a recent survey i gave them, about a third suggest they often search for and read additional articles. students often post these findings to the class web. anselmo lima: after students shared their views on the difference between “learners” and “students”, you asked them: “who do you want to be in this course?”. their unanimous answer was: “we want to be learners!”. and you said: “good!”. i got the feeling that that´s the answer you had been meaning to lead them to all along because you actually wanted them to wish to be learners. to what extent can a teacher be dialogic or monologic in his or her teaching approach when he or she knows beforehand precisely where he wants to lead his or her students by means of a specific classroom discussion? katherine von duyke: my question was actually sincere, and i have asked it many times before and i usually get mixed responses. i was surprised by this response. many students want to be students and not learners for this course for many possible reasons: 1) they have mastered the game of being a student and are very reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a112 good at returning the least amount of work for the greatest amount of credential (labaree, 1997); 2) they don’t care about the course content for themselves: they either feel they know all they need to know about diversity already and have nothing to learn, and/or are sick to death of the diversity sensitivity lectures/training they have been forced to endure elsewhere; 3) they don’t see any reason to commit their free selves (as learners) to my agenda, which they suspect is my real objective; 4) they are worried that being a learner in this class will conflict with their pressures from other classes and so it is better to give up on their agency as learners in order to manage multiple demands; and 5) they expect that i will add value to their learning and provide a means of engaging them and so it is my job to make the course interesting apart from their efforts at becoming engaged. we old school hippies sometimes think that students are eager to learn in their own ways if we would just “free” them to do so. in fact, sometimes educators with this mindset are sadly disappointed to find that this is not true, and even can become angry at their students (matusov, 2012; shor, 1996). i think this anger and disappointment is rooted in our american ideology of individualism and our historically cognitive approach to education; we tend to decontextualize our students from their cultural and socio-institutional situations and we treat our political ideology as a pedagogical method. asking the students if they want to be “students” or “learners” gives me one way to index these factors in my classroom and develop a means for these conflicting agendas to be recognized. for example, all students who minimally respond to assignments and come to class will get an “a”. this “a” is clearly calibrated on their participation in class and on the web, and in turning in assignments. it is not predicated on their effort, nor a prescribed set of values as an outcome of their learning. if they want to play the credentials game, i make it easy for them; if they want to learn, i don’t punish them by, for example, insisting that they give equal attention and effort to all assignments. students can do as little as write “i disagree” or “interesting” as a response to every assignment and come to class and shop on their laptops the whole time, and still get an “a”. students “discover” that they can pursue their own ends without risking their grades; one student recently suggested that because i have no penalty for late assignments, she could explore more readings than i assigned to her own satisfaction and then comment on them when she felt ready. students in reality have to be students within our institution, but i try to structure my class in such a way as to give them breathing room to also be learners. their main learning project (mlp) asks them to be answerable to themselves and others for their teaching decisions – this adds value to their professional selves and they cannot avoid engagement as they are also answerable to their peers as future colleagues. often they carry these projects well beyond the parameters of the class, into future talks, research, or thesis papers. sometimes, not as often, students also do very limited work on their mlp. i choose not to judge them for that, i believe the process we have engaged in is a good one, but i recognize different students will be able to or want to access it differently. if students tell me they want to be students only, i feel they are telling me they want to be taught and not have their own lives be engaged, and so i begin with a lot of discussion about their own experiences. as they begin to engage in discussions about their experiences with peers, they discover a lot of diversity exists that they were not aware of and so begin to feel that there is more to know. if they want to be primarily learners, i have an indication that they have areas in mind already about diversity that they want to explore further. sometimes these arise in the form of fears – they want to research the number of times diverse students commit crimes against white teachers, or they have a sibling with special needs and they want to study the issue of inclusion more carefully. in my view, students are not only creating their own meanings from class topics – they are creating society by altering its meanings, values and practices through their own recreation as they act for reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a113 themselves at points where they articulate with society; as in the case of my white male student teaching history. the emphasis in dialectical materialism is often on societies´ writing of individuals, but we must also consider that society forms itself out of individuals who slightly or even broadly change society in the course of their participation, or even disrupt society. i think we cannot see and study much of how individuals change society through participation because institutions have focused so heavily on the reproduction of culture, but we can choose to reproduce or transcend institutional culture in any given moment. if we recognize that students are always recreating society by their participation in it, we can promote this aspect further by elevating their authorial agency (matusov, 2011) in the structure of the course. i believe that engagement comes not from extrinsic motivation, and not from some mysterious passionate interests thought to be intrinsic to the person, but rather from a person’s sense that they can bring something fresh to their interaction with societal practices. anselmo lima: when introducing and explaining what you expected for the students´ main learning project, you said “since you want to be learners, i will direct the class at first and then i will gradually shift it from me to you as learners”, “you will be teaching the class at those times in fifteen-minute presentations”. you pointed out that, as a main learning project, you would not ask them for written assignments because they are studying to be teachers and what teachers have to do most is to talk rather than to write. why did you choose to do it that way and how did you go about assessing the work that students did? how was it important for the promotion of a dialogic pedagogy in the classroom? katherine von duyke: this is a very good question! also not easy to answer! my original thought was that groups of students could present their ideas to each other in a series of two presentations. in the first they present the teaching dilemma, some background information, how they might investigate it, and ask for feedback from their peers. in their second round, they present a brief survey of the literature on the dilemma, a research – if they have investigated the views of stakeholders – and their subsequent teaching decisions, which may differ among group members. i ask the class to provide the presenters with feedback, and i provide feedback on a rubric that mainly checks for things like: clear description of the dilemma, personal connection to the issue, consideration of alternative views, and generation of a good discussion. i then provide feedback and comments on their ideas. i suggest to students that their exploration of ideas is more important than their construction of a coherent argument, something that might in fact take them several semesters of revisions to construct over several courses. i encouraged them to use their research as the basis for a paper in a subsequent class or for an independent study project. i think of assessment as built into the project. students are explaining their research and teaching decisions to colleagues who can ask them tough questions. assessment comes both from the influence their project has on others, and on how much responsive dialogue is generated. for instance, one student discussed her situation as a bi-sexual student with a transgender sibling. what classroom tensions can arise in that case? how might a teacher make decisions that ensure a safe community for such students? what have teachers/schools been doing and what has been the effect? her story and insights were riveting for students. it was evident that she had both taught them about the issue, and influenced them to think more deeply about how their teaching decisions can affect such students. did we think together about these important issues as a result of this student’s presentation? i would say yes. students were also supportive of growth, even if the topic was not altogether riveting or new for most of reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a114 the class. they sensed when an issue was important for a student and surprised even me with the supports they provided for personal transcendence. can we measure for personal or classroom wide transcendence? can we plan for it? if we plan for it, will we kill it? in dialogic pedagogy we are surprised by each other, we don’t know what others think or how their thinking will affect ourselves. can we plan for or measure such surprises? i heard a talk by a philosopher, ruth chang, recently discussing the difference between reasoning based on quantifiable information, and the kind of reasoning we sometimes have to do based on values that align with who we are and want to be. the first is not problematic beyond isolating accurate measures. once you have them, a decision can be made, and in fact is already given. in the second case, the world of values can’t be quantified nor can someone else give us a reason. this response in hard choices is a rational response, but it´s not dictated by reasons given to us. rather, it´s supported by reasons created by us. when we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. you might say that we become the authors of our own lives (chang, 2014, 11:43 min). i could measure the quality of their english writing, or their research, but i am not an english teacher, and this is not a research course. this is a course about ethics and their decisions as a hero-ideologists: their developing their own reasons for how they will live out their professional ethics. i could assess the approach they take to developing their reasoning, and i do somewhat, but this class is not about their reasoning processes, that belongs in philosophy or logic courses. this class is primarily about their engaging with the voice of the other. i think the dialogue within the class is a much more meaningful and rich formative assessment that develops conversations and relationships that move beyond the semester. if i start assessing their engagement with the voice of the other, aren’t i beginning to author their lives? can this assessment be quantified on a neutral scale with universal validity? if my students were teachers, i could assess their teaching by their actions towards various students, but this is an entirely different ontology in education. these are some of the dilemmas i have struggled with in teaching courses in diversity. on a minor scale, i find it a bit of a complication when too many students prefer to work individually on their own projects until we have many presentations that begin to overtake the deeper content of presentations and dialogue i have prepared for students. we developed table top presentations, somewhat like poster demonstrations, but with power points so that we could have 12-perclass sessions. this seemed to have many notable pluses, but became impossible for me to assess one by one. i think the solution might be to ask students to record them so that i can give each student feedback. anselmo lima: i noticed you often hold your ipad in your left hand and look at it from time to time as you teach. do you use your ipad to prepare your classes? how do you think the use of an ipad helps you (or does not help you…) as your classroom dialogic interactions unfold? katherine von duyke: the ipad allows me to show videos or presentations on the classroom screen from my laptop, while having a set of notes in my hands that are rather extensive and allow for flexibility. on the ipad i have a series of questions divided by tensions and issues that we might move through or jump to in our discussions. i have had a basic list approach, a lesson to follow – questions to ask to explore a topic more fully. i have found two problems with this approach of mine because not only do i want students to be free to speak and examine their own perspective and others, to test ideas presented by research, etc. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a115 but to also have some determination about the emerging curriculum, especially in defining the areas they want to explore and not only me. initially, when you joined my course i was trying to stick to a curricular plan, but very quickly i realized that i stopped listening to students and worried about getting my sets of points to discuss on the floor – which meant i was leading shallow discussions. i switched to an open curricular approach, changing the use of time in our class. this means i can ask students at the end of class if they want to continue with the topic or move onto something else. lately, i also discuss possible questions we can explore further for the topic we are on, as well as list topics we might move to. this then highlights the second struggle i have with my previous lesson format. in picking a topic students select a wider area, and i jumped on it with my prepared lesson. in discussing my discomfort with my approach with my friend and colleague ana marjanovicshane, i found that she ends her classes by both selecting a topic and making a web of possible subtopics that might be explored with students, and then vote together on where to start. i really wanted to do this, so i developed a web at the beginning of class and we discussed at length students concerns and i also included what i felt was important for me to share with them. i would like to better organize my questions and activities around a growing potential list of topics. these topics are always changing for students as the landscape of education changes. five years ago, issues of sexuality were hard to discuss, now new concerns have emerged. the context of our field, our university, etc. changes what becomes important to study. i also no longer believe that information is necessarily more meaningful or comprehensive when presented in linear form, and so i am not concerned about “covering” the curriculum. as rancière (1991, p.41) says, “everything is in everything”; delving deeply into one area always connects also with many other issues. finally, i think that our course format – being dialogic towards multiple perspectives – is at the heart of diversity, and so we are participating in a way of being open to diversity not just learning about its issues. so yes, the ipad allows me a lot of flexibility in attending to students concerns, and i am working at developing my course preparation to better enable me to bring important research to the students’ consideration. anselmo lima: what would you say is the function of the index cards and the webtalk in working with students? how do those resources help you promote a more dialogic classroom environment? what are some of the challenges and/or difficulties you face in using those resources? katherine von duyke: i give students a 5x7 index cards at the beginning of each class and i ask for two things – their impressions of the class topic on one side, and their evaluation of how the class has gone on the reverse. these have been invaluable! their criticisms are often painfully true and i have to work hard to correct them. i can sometimes use videos that are dense without stopping them and allowing time for discussion and questions. thanks to my students for pointing this out to me! also, they let me know if a lesson dragged or if time “flew by” and that has helped me develop techniques to increase the dialogue in my classroom. they have also let me know what they have taken from the class, which is a big boost for me. they become excited to share their new insights, sometimes they also share their painful relationship to a topic – this helps me to be supportive of students, and this reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a116 often enables them to feel safe to share their experiences with the wider class – peer experiences are very compelling for students. sometimes half the class will hate the topic and the other class will love it, sometimes only a few students really like the topic because they feel it relates to their concerns about teaching, while the rest of the class feels they have no such concerns (and may not). this gives me an idea of which topics are core, and which might be important for various majors. for instance, music education students find issues of gender extremely important for their practice. they also are extremely interested in culturally relevant pedagogy18, and also have often not thought much about the advantages they have for creating a culture in their classrooms as they often have a multi-grade environment that might have the same students for years – a very different situation for teachers who see students for a year or even only a semester. the cards have helped me attend to these concerns. another advantage of the cards is that it gives students a chance to change our classroom practices. students will point out difficulties in meeting classroom requirements, or how a requirement undercuts a more important concern, or if a practice has outlived its use value. because my students, mostly, are going to be doing what i am doing – i have decided that it is useful to make my decisionmaking and struggles explicit for them, and to even seek their advice. in a way, i am instituting a democratic classroom, without throwing all of my practices open to change without the students experiencing them first. one decision that came up with this course that you attended is that there was a lot of readings for any given evening, and the especially math content area majors did not like to read long tomes while the english content majors loved them; some students worked jobs and had two courses, others had more leisure. these struggles emerged on the cards, and so we discussed how to handle the reading assignments as a class in order to have them be meaningful for students. they decided that the english majors or others who wanted to would read and summarize the longer articles and book chapters, while those with short amounts of time or low reading patience could either read the shorter articles and do the same, or simply comment on someone else’s posting. the tension i struggled with, the fairness of reading distribution, was not a concern for the students. so i re-organized the class web so that all reading discussion occurred on a single discussion thread, and anyone who participated on that thread received credit. for me it is about being in the dialogue at any level, and not about how much is produced. some students may listen intently and read a great deal of their classmates’ writings and the articles, but produce little. they can be heavily engaged and learning a lot, but not yet able to articulate their thoughts well. i consider that some students are still at the “inarticulate phase” of their ability to participate in the speech genre for talking about diversity (cf. lima, 2013-2014). at the same time, students feel answerable to themselves and to their classmates for their learning and participation. i also reason that their main learning project pushes them and reveals their efforts in taking responsibility for their learning. in this way i feel i allow students to grow in their articulateness (cf. lima, 2013-2014) over the course of the semester and make their learning meaningful and nuanced for themselves, and yet also push them to grow publically. 18 culturally relevant pedagogy has several meanings, but at heart it’s about teaching with an awareness of student’s diverse perspectives and lived experiences (ladson-billings, 1995). reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a117 students do not respect a course that is too easy and doesn’t add value to their lives, or one that is disconnected from their life and concerns, or one that is so nit-picky with requirements, it hampers their efforts to learn and explore. my grading system is based on participation only. even with that, sometimes not all students receive “a’s”. it seems to be a reasonable measure of their ability to engage with the course – and if they can’t, for whatever reason, some standard of participation makes that clear for them as well. one of the difficulties students have pointed out to me with my requirement of the cards is that they feel they are having to do “double” when they are also asked to reflect on the class on our online discussion page. i have since suggested that the cards are optional but that their reflections on the card are very meaningful for my preparation and, at the same time, i would rather they said what they want to publically. i think in the future i will just keep the cards on the table. another difficulty is that sometimes the cards are painful for me to read: the criticisms aren’t always pleasant. especially these seem to occur at the beginning of semesters. i think it is not usual for students to feel they have a voice in lessons that is authentic, and this new opportunity may give them a chance to express their frustration with classes in general in mine. i have learned to become increasingly comfortable with discomfort. i strive to put on my researcher hat and understand what value to me might exist in the most negative of messages and also place them in the wider context of the students’ experiences. by the end of the semester, students are much more respectful and any criticism seems authentic to issues i create in the classroom itself. the “core content” knowledge of this class can’t begin and end with the class. students need to be aware of the problems of diversity in education – the tensions that might arise in their practice, they need to develop concern for the diverse other or low socio-economic student struggling in the american system in whatever schooling context our students choose to work in, and they need to be aware of the broader dialogue as well as research into these issues in education (as well as how to make use of these sources for their decision making). i can’t determine the outcome of students learning because they enter and leave from different places and with different concerns, but i can develop a form of practice that is appropriate to their career field in addressing these concerns, and to provide certain theoretical lenses that are useful ways of examining these often complex and messy issues. for example, all students, no matter their biases, benefit from having a sense of how pervasive and tacit culture is for all of us. 3. unfinalized last reflections on dialogic pedagogy anselmo lima: reading the literature on dialogic pedagogy, one can often remark that for many scholars who claim to be dialogic educators, even though some of them may write the contrary, monologism in classroom interactions is considered something bad that ought to be combated and eliminated at all costs and that, consequently, dialogism is something good that should be sought above everything else in order to replace each and every possible form of classroom monologism (cf. white & peters, 2011; matusov, 2009; 2013). it seems in fact, as if this was really possible to accomplish, that some educators actually “dream” of promoting in their classrooms what i have called “absolute dialogism”. what do i mean by that? i think bakhtin´s definition and discussion of speech genres can be useful to get this idea across. he speaks of speech genres in terms of relatively stable forms of utterances (bakhtin, 1986). in his definition, there are two essential aspects to be pointed out and reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a118 considered: one regarding the side of stability (the “given”, the “old”) and another regarding the side of relativity (the “created”, the “new”) of every utterance (bakhtin, 1984; lima, 2013). that which is stable can also be deemed monologic and remains the same from one moment to the other, therefore repeating itself identically along time. that which is relative can also, in its turn, be considered dialogic and can never be the same from one moment to the other, for it keeps changing, that is, it is continually (re)created or dialogized. thus, an utterance is indissolubly and at the same time repetition of previous utterances and their recreation. in other words, monologism and dialogism coexist and are always indissolubly present and linked at the same time and in different degrees in every utterance, as bakhtin (1984, p. 106) points out: “a genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously”. now, a whole course from its very beginning to its very end, can be viewed as an utterance and, as such, it will have its corresponding speech genre or variety of educational speech genre (lima, 2010). in that sense, in every class, part of the living patterns of teacher-student interactions will dialogically come from previous classes and another part, dependent on and impossible to be separated from the first part, will be new, (re)created at the unrepeatable moment at which the class is taking place so as to anticipate and prepare also for future classes. a class is therefore always relatively stable, given the fact that – from this standpoint – it is always repeated (“old”) and at the same time recreated (“new”) as a class in this never-ending chain or flow of classes. to consider the repetition-recreation ratio of a class or, in other words, its ratio of monologism-dialogism is important if we are concerned about how dialogic a class can be. following this line of reasoning, it turns out that the greater the side of recreation of a class the more dialogic it will be. however, this side of recreation or dialogism can never be so great as to outgrow its indissoluble side of repetition because that would mean to destroy the relative stability of the class educational speech genre by completely eliminating its side of monologism and trying to create something new out of nothing: in that case, only its side of relativity would remain. in this respect, from a bakhtinian point of view, “the single utterance [or class], with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language [or of teacher-student patterns of interaction]” (cf. bakhtin, 1986, p. 81). in other words, there can be no such thing as “absolute dialogism” in teaching a class and some degree of monologism in the classroom is nothing to be ashamed of at all, as katherine von duyke said she was, at first, when i pointed out to her that she was summarizing or rephrasing her student´s words at a certain point. as i sat in katherine von duyke´s classroom, i was – among other things – seeking to identify the relatively stable form of her dialogic teaching practice. of course, i was not able to identify it only by observing her on the first day of that course. i needed to sit in each and every one of her classes, from monday through thursday, from january 6, 2014 to february 6, 2014, in order to document her teaching practices in my notebook, using my mechanical pencil. as a result, as we sat down together after every class to reflect on how the classroom interactions were taking place, her relatively stable forms of dialogic interaction with students unfolded and revealed themselves right before our eyes. and i remember what she asked me: “well, is it good or bad?”. my answer was: “it doesn´t have to be good or bad. it simply is the way it is. it is neither good nor bad. it is necessary!” just as bakhtin (1986, p. 79) argues: “if [educational] speech genres did not exist and we [teachers and students] had not mastered them, if we [teachers and students] had to originate them during the speech process [in the reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a119 classroom] and construct each utterance [class] at will for the first time, speech communication [in the classroom] would be almost impossible”. therefore, it was from this point of view that i observed and commented on each of katherine von duyke´s classes and asked her questions every time we sat down together to talk after a day´s work. it was also exactly from this very point of view that i came up with the previous questions for her based at the same time on my observation notes about her first class in that course and about all the others classes that followed. katherine von duyke: i think having time to reflect with another dialogic practitioner was incredibly valuable for this course. first, it was important for me to understand the place of stable and unstable, changing aspects of the classroom – and to develop a living flow between the two. if my stable elements are too fixed for too long, the students become tired; yet, if i strip away everything that is routine they become disoriented, anxious and frustrated. there is a kind of breathing that occurs between; these poles of repetition and recreation, the intensity of discussion and topics we engage in, and how learning is constructed within our teaching institution. anselmo’s perspective was very useful to me. i felt in the past that perhaps these cycles of change indicated a problem – that the class was either too structured or too unstructured, that i had too little control or took too much, that students were too unfree or too unguided. i had begun to think of each course in the semester as a journey that begins with strangers and new concepts and ends with dialogue partners constructing new ways of being in the world, one in which the walls of the classroom fall away. now, i also think of each class as a lived event with it’s own breathing patterns. i learned to attend to the emotions in the classroom as a way to adjust my teaching to be more in the appropriate moment with students. these are metaphorical inferences at this point, but – through our research both now and in the future – i hope to understand these factors in deeper ways. time, as we also experienced it, changed over the course of the semester, it moved from quite slow to nearly breathless with so many ideas, projects, and inspirations of the students. i’ve come to think of the classroom as a series of chronotopes that changes in time/space and axiology throughout the course of the semester, one that even has multiple chronotopes in differing relations with each other as the semester progresses. this is an analysis for a next research project and article of course. it is incredibly valuable to be able to discuss these issues with another bakhtinian scholar who is able to devote time to sit for a whole semester in one’s class and provide that “surplus of vision” that sees what i cannot. it moved me out of the excessive monologism that teacher’s can sometimes experience – isolated in their heads about their teaching – to productive reflection. references bakhtin, m. m. (1990). art and answerability. trans. v. liapunov. in: holquist, m; liapunov, vadim. (ed.). art and answerability: early philosophical essays by m.m. bakhtin. austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres & other late essays. translated by vern w. mcgee. edited by caryl emerson and michael holquist. austin, tx: university of texas press. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a120 bakhtin, m. m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky´s poetics. edited and translated by caryl emerson. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. m. (1981). the dialogic imagination: four essays by m.m. bakhtin. trans. c. emerson & m. holquist. austin, tx: university of texas press. chang, r. how to make hard choices [transcript of video file], may, 2014. available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choices/transcript. access on: 10/30/2014. delpit, l. d. (1988). the silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. harvard educational review, (58) 3 . kukathas, c. (2007). the liberal archipelago: a theory of diversity and freedom. oxford: oxford university press. labaree, d. f. (1997). how to succeed in school without really learning: the credentials race in american education. new haven, conn.: yale university press. ladson-billings, g. (1995). but that's just good teaching! the case for culturally relevant pedagogy. theory into practice, (34) 3,pp. 159-165. ladson-billings, g. (2001). crossing over to canaan: the journey of new teachers in diverse classrooms. san francisco: jossey-bass. lima, a. p. dialogic pedagogy of life: the gradual process of conversion of generic inability into generic ability in the story of peter klaven. postdoc research project financed by capes-fulbright, 2013-2014. see more at: http://www.cies.org/grantee/anselmo-pereira-delima#sthash.vezfkrhx.dpuf lima, a. p. (2013). dialogism, argumentation and human development: an approach to teacher professional gestures by means of the self-confrontation method. bakhtiniana, (8) 1. available at: http://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/bakhtiniana/article/view/12830/11694 access on: 10/30/2014. lima, a. p. (2010) visitas técnicas: interação escola-empresa [technical visits: schoolcompany interaction]. curitiba: crv. available at: http://www.editoracrv.com.br/?f=produto_detalhes&pid=3031. access on: 10/30/2014. lima, a. p.; althaus, d.; rodrigues, c. l. s. (2011). formação docente continuada e desenvolvimento do protagonismo discente na universidade: faces de uma mesma moeda. synergismus scyentifica, (6)1. available at: http://revistas.utfpr.edu.br/pb/index.php/sysscy/article/view/1201/810. access on: 05/18/2013. marjanovic-shane, a. (2011). "you are “nobody”! the three chronotopes of play. in: e. j. white & m. peters (eds.). bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. new york: peter lang publishers, p. 201-226. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., kolikant, y. b.-d. (2013). dpj editorial: launching the new journal. dialogic pedagogy journal: an international online journal. matusov, e. (2009), journey into dialogic pedagogy. new york: nova science publishers, inc. matusov, e. (2011). authorial teaching and learning. in: e. j. white & m. peters (eds.). bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. new york: peter lang publishers, p. 21-46. reflections on a dialogic pedagogy inspired by the writings of bakhtin anselmo lima, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.159 | vol. 4 (2016) a121 matusov, e. (2012), radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, n.y.: nova science publishers. matusov, e., von duyke, k. (2009). bakhtin’s notion of the internally persuasive discourse in education: internal to what? (a case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). in: k. junefelt & p. nordin (eds.). proceedings from the second international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin, 2009, stockholm: stockholm university, p.174-199. rancière, j. (1991). the ignorant schoolmaster: five lessons in intellectual emancipation. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. shor, i. (1996). when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press. von duyke, k. s. (2013). students’ autonomy, agency and emergent learning interests in two open democratic schools, 545p. dissertation. (ph.d. in education) university of delaware, newark, delaware. white, e. j., & peters, m. (2011). bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. new york: p. lang, new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word chronotopes in education (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a65     chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur. here, in this conceptual paper, i expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that i abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around dialogic pedagogy. frist is the assignment chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. second is the dialogic provocation chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. third is the journey chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered. keywords: chronotopes, assignment-based, dialogic provocation, learning journey, critical authorship, responsive authorship, self-generated authorship eugene matusov, ph.d., dpj editor-in-chief, is a professor of education at the university of delaware, usa. he was born in the soviet union. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. email: ematusov@udel.edu acknowledgements i want to thank nermine elkader, katherine von duyke, mark smith, ana marjanovic-shane, anonymous peer reviewers for pedagogies: international journal, and dialogic pedagogy managing editors silviane barbato and maria beatrice ligorio for their critical feedback and helpful suggestions on the earlier drafts of this paper. my special thanks is to peter renshaw and giuseppe ritella, the dpj reviewers who later revealed their identities, for most thoughtful, detailed, critical, and supportive engagement in my manuscript, feedback, and help — i really appreciate this gift to me. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a66 many people, who experienced conventional schooling, have a sense of alienation in a grey and dull world of classroom lessons. yazzie-mintz (2006) found that 50% of us high school students are bored every day in their classes. hart (2006) reported that 82% of californian ninth and tenth graders perceived their overall school experiences as “boring or irrelevant” (p. 2). my undergraduate students, future teachers, overwhelmingly reported to me that their best memories of school are of recesses, social events with their friends and classmates (and sometimes even with their teachers), but rarely academic events with the school curricula and their teachers and peers (cf. sidorkin, 2002). i think the most poetical way this sense is induced is in a famous teacher joke by an unknown author. i read several versions of this joke once titled as “why jesus, the teacher, wept” on the internet and it is worth to reproduce it in its entirety here: why jesus, the teacher, wept then jesus took his disciples up the mountain and gathering them around, he taught them, saying, "blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. blessed are those that hunger and thirst for justice it shall be given unto them. blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake, their reward is great in heaven." then peter said: "do we have to learn all this?" and andrew said: "do we have to write all that down?" and james said: "are we having a test on it?" and john said, "i'm sorry, would you mind repeating that?" and andrew said, "john the baptist's disciples don't have to learn this stuff." and matthew said, "huh?" and philip said: "i haven't got any paper." and stephen said: "i've lost my pencil." and judas said: "lord, can you photocopy this to save us copying it out?" and matthew (again) said: "please, jesus, can i go to the toilet?” then one of the pharisees, who was present, asked to see jesus' lesson plan and enquired, "what are the instructional objectives of this lesson? is it research-based teaching? what do you expect your students will learn at the end of this lesson? do you follow the state standards? how are you going to assess them?" and thomas, who had missed the sermon, came to jesus privately and said, "did we do anything important today?" and jesus, the teacher, wept. unlike jesus in this joke, teachers in conventional schools usually do not share their mind and heart with their students but rather they “cover curriculum,” which is usually preset and described by them and/or other powerful agencies. in many conventional schools, the participants are engaged with not being “here and now” -they are not “ontologically engaged” (matusov, 2009a, ch. 11). the teachers and students of conventional schools often bracket their hearts and minds from what goes on in the lesson as if they were educational zombies (matusov & brobst, 2013). but what makes them like that? can we design a different school and different vision of education where the participants are not so alienated from life in this place? what is responsible for the status quo and what would provoke a possible change? the purpose of this conceptual paper is to address these questions with help of a concept of “chronotope” borrowed from dialogic literary scholar bakhtin. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a67 a few scholars (bloome & katz, 1997; jensen, 2009; leander & sheehy, 2004; renshaw, 2007) and i (2009) found bakhtin’s literary notion of “chronotope” a promising working concept for addressing these questions. bakhtin, who was a russian-soviet literary theoretician and philosopher of dialogism, defined chronotope as a unity of time and space (chronos and topos in greek) where events occur, “the chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied” (bakhtin, 1991, p. 250). bakhtin used the notion of chronotope to characterize diverse types of historically emerged novels. for example, he characterized the ancient greek novel as shaped by the adventure chronotope (i.e., time is abrupt, space is everywhere) while the german romantic novel as the ideological becoming chronotope (i.e., time is personal transformation, space is biographical). as some other educationalists listed above, i am inspired by bakhtin’s chronotopic analysis of historically diverse novels to develop chronotopic analysis of philosophically diverse classrooms (a type of novel ≈ a philosophical type of classroom)1 while expanding this notion beyond time and space. i want to use the following example to illustrate a need of the notion of chronotope in education (beyond its use in literary study of novel). in my graduate seminars, i often use an example of closedended schoolish questions, quizzing students, like “2+2 equals what?”. i ask my graduate students “2+2 equals what?” suddenly, out of blue, without providing any context or reason for this question. most of my students predictably and rather quickly reply, “four.” however, if i ask them this same question outside of class: in a café, or on a street or even during research seminars, they do not provide an immediate direct answer but look puzzled asking me, “what do you mean? why? what’s your point?” or just remain silent and puzzled. even when i tell them about this phenomenon in class and then again ask, “2+2 equals what?”, they either tell, “four”, or report (and visually show) their struggle not to say, “four.” what makes them feel that they are forced to answer out of context quizzing questions in the classroom but not outside? what constitutes “classroom”? in my view, bakhtin’s concept of “chronotope” can be useful to address this and other phenomena in education. chronotope does not determine the activity but rather provides affordances and limitations for the participants’ actions. however, i want to broaden it beyond issues of time and space2. the notion of chronotope addresses itself to organization of the classroom focusing on space, time, axiology, participation (forced vs. voluntary), relations, and agency3 that affords (cf. gibson & pick, 2000) a certain type of practice and discourse and while it makes other practices, discourses, axiology, time, space, participation, and relations4 more difficult (but never impossible). in different educational chronotopes, events are unfolding differently. i found the concept of “educational chronotope5” useful, promising, and attractive because unlike similar concepts like scheme, educational philosophy, model, and so on, it embraces both material and ideological conditions shaping the practice. as morson and 1 at the same time, so far i do not see usefulness in an association between bakhtin’s particular novelistic chronotopes and educational chronotopes (e.g., “ancient greek classroom chronotope”). 2 incidentally, in his early work before he introduced the notion of “chronotope”, borrowed from biology, bakhtin included the third aspect “axiology” besides “time” and “space” for his analysis of literary work (bakhtin, 1990). i argue here that even 3 aspects are 2 incidentally, in his early work before he introduced the notion of “chronotope”, borrowed from biology, bakhtin included the third aspect “axiology” besides “time” and “space” for his analysis of literary work (bakhtin, 1990). i argue here that even 3 aspects are not enough and it should also include “participation”, “social relations”, and “authorial agency”. in sum, i argue that educational chronotope should not be reduced to the issue of time-space only. 3 in conventional schools, the relational aspect of chronotope is often defined by “discipline” or “classroom management, while in dialogic chronotopes it is often defined by “community building” and “democratic self-governance.” 4 in conventional schools, the relational aspect of chronotope is often defined by “discipline” or “classroom management, while in dialogic chronotopes it is often defined by “community building” and “democratic self-governance.” 5 my notion of “educational chronotope” is different from renshaw’s use of the notion of chronotope in his analysis of educational practices mostly from teachers’ and students’ points of view. in my notion, i focus on pedagogical and educational aspects of the practice while renshaw focuses on organizational, policy, and managerial aspects from policymakers’, educational assessors’, and psychologists’ points of view (renshaw, 2013). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a68 emerson point out, ‘‘chronotopes are not so much visibly present in activity as they are the ground for activity’’ (1990, p. 369). i argue that the concept of educational chronotope provides new and useful lenses for analysis of educational practices and helps educators better understand what is wrong in conventional school and find new pathways to making schooling an exciting place for learning and teaching. it has both descriptive (in-use) and prescriptive (espoused) power. the concept of chronotope can help us understand, for example, what makes conventional monologic school so boring for many students most of the time (description, in-use chronotope) and what educators may try to do to address this issue and make school learning exciting for many students most of the time (prescription, espoused chronotope). this is mostly a conceptual and not empirical paper and i use reconstructed cases from dialogic pedagogy to illustrate my conceptual points as well as to show how these conceptual points can be useful for analysis and design of educational practices. methodologically, i recognize two types of chronotopic analysis: 1) “espoused chronotope” and 2) “in-use chronotope”6. espoused chronotope is a way that the institution and the teacher talk about how their pedagogical practice is organized, i.e., their ideological understanding of their practice. in-use chronotope is how the participants guide their own actions in the practice and how they perceive the practice. white seems to recognize this tension between these two chronotopes when she wrote, “in isolation of their lived experience, and location in time and space, chronotopes become mere categories for external analysis” (white, 2013, p. 166). i agree with white that espoused chronotope — a chronotope outside of the participants’ lived experiences — should not be confused with in-use chronotope (or lived chronotope), which may have very different from each other. also, there can be an interesting and important issue involving possible gaps between how designing participants and observers view an espoused chronotope. however, i respectfully disagree with white’s apparent criticism of the espoused chronotope as such — a chronotope in isolation of the participants’ lived experiences — as potentially empty and meaningless7. a particular espoused chronotope creates affordances or difficulties for emergence of particular in-use chronotopes. both congruency and gaps between the espoused and inuse chronotopes can be very fruitful for analysis of educational practices. the congruency and gaps may reflect diverse activism by the participants and their mutual relations. in this paper, i primarily focus on typology of espoused chronotopes while raising issues about what kind of in-use chronotopes most likely to emerge in them. elsewhere i argue that each type of educational chronotope involves two layers: the ontological and the didactic (matusov, 2009a, ch. 6). the teacher and the students are usually present simultaneously in the ontological time-space of their classroom where, for example, in a conventional school the students often sit at their desks and the teacher stays at the blackboard during the lesson term limited by the clock of the school timetable. in a conventional classroom, furniture, the position of the participants, sterile environment of the room, and so on are often served to restrict freedom of students’ movement: both physical and psychological, focusing them on the teacher, “classrooms, with their predictable, but not uniform, time schedules, spaces, furniture, artifacts, characters, and inherent goals and purposes arc powerful and readily understood chronotopes” (renshaw, 2013, p. 58). the immediate physical nature of the classroom environment, affording and limiting the participants’ actions, is actively perceived and interpreted by its participants, “chronotope is not just background or passive context in 6 i create these terms in a similar ways that argyris & schön (1978), scholars of organizational learning, did in their analysis of participants’ perception of their practice “espoused theory of practice” and “theory-in-use”. 7 white made her point in a certain context of her grounded discussion and, thus, i am not sure that she sees what i call espoused chronotope only negatively. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a69 which classroom activity occurs, but is active in forming the kinds of characters (teachers and students) and ideologies on which understanding and meaning-making are constructed” (renshaw, 2013, pp. 5859). the concept of ontology has had a long philosophical and psychological history and often operationalized as personal relevancy, interest, emotional charge, ownership, embodiment, and being in the world. thus, ontological aspects of chronotope may include diverse time, space, axiology, relational, discursive and participatory frames and scales like gendered, racialized, nationalized, classicized discourses among students and the teacher transcending immediate classroom surroundings. immediate physical space and time have diverse boundaries and also become a subject of the participants’ active and tacit interpretations and mutual interactions: the classroom-lesson, school-term, neighborhoodbiography, country-history, and so on. besides the ontological aspect of chronotope, the participants in the classroom find themselves also in the didactic chronotope of their lesson where the participants move through the didactic terrain of the curriculum (i.e., the didactic space) through the process of instruction (i.e., didactic time). when a teacher asks the students at the beginning of the lesson, “where are we?” he or she usually means not the perceived physical space of their ontological chronotope – i.e., “in the classroom” – but rather the perceived curricular space of the didactic chronotope as some students may reply, e.g., “we’ve studied addition of fractions.” in this educational two-layer chronotope, events occur in the classroom life: questions are answered, students are reprimanded, notes are passed, daydreams are made, grades are distributed, humiliations occur, jokes are cracked, friends are made, tests are prepared, the state standards are addressed (or ignored), and so on. didactics may or may not be ontological and similarly ontology may or may not be didactic. for example, in a conventional espoused (monologic) chronotope, didactics (e.g., curriculum) and ontology (e.g., social relations) are viewed as independent. however, in an espoused dialogic pedagogy chronotope, at least how i have experienced and understood it, didactics and ontology are viewed as being normatively intertwined: for example, the existing and emerging social relations should become curriculum while curriculum is viewed as reflection and guidance for the participants’ social relations. in an espoused dialogic pedagogy, students’ engagement in curriculum is viewed to be ontological. when a dialogic pedagogy classroom, a student agrees or disagrees with a position of another person — an immediate participant in the classroom or mediated participant in the classroom by a scholarly text, — the relationship between the student and his/her addressee becomes his/her curriculum while the intellectual content of the discourse will reflect guide this relationship. moreover, as i will argue below, even in a conventional monologic chronotope, the espoused divide between ontology and didactics cannot be sustainable in practice and it is only ideological in its nature (but still important for the practice!). lave (1992, april) has introduced notions of “teaching curriculum” (i.e., what the teacher tries to teach) and “learning curriculum” (i.e., what the student actually learns — e.g., “math is boring and irrelevant for me”). although teaching curriculum and teaching instruction (and teaching classroom relations) are often treated as independent by the conventional teacher, the learning curriculum and learning instruction are always integrated. the espoused divide between didactic and ontological educational chronotopes is the strongest in the espoused (conventional) assignment-chronotope (a-chronotope) and becomes blurry in espoused dialogic pedagogy chronotopes (d-chronotopes). in conventional pedagogy, espoused educational chronotope is ontological and didactic, while in dialogic pedagogy, espoused educational chronotope is holistically/inseparably onto-didactic. however, even in dialogic pedagogy, occasionally students may not be ontologically engaged in curriculum, which means that in an in-use dialogic pedagogy chronotope, the ontological and didactic chronotopic aspects may become separated. the opposite can also happen in an in-use conventional chronotope: occasionally, students’ engagement in learning material can become ontological. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a70 below i consider three major espoused distinctive educational chronotopes of conventional and dialogic innovative schools, with which i am mostly familiar. my major focus will be on dialogic pedagogy and discuss pedagogical consequences of them. my choice of the three distinctive educational chronotopes is empirical, reflecting my personal professional development and experimentation as an educator moving from traditional monologic pedagogy toward defining dialogic pedagogy. the scope of this paper is limited to description of an abstract typology of the educational chronotopes in dialogic pedagogy, as certain conceptual abstractions, and does not consider, in any depth, the institutional and/or cultural constraints and affordances for them and complexities of their interaction with each other. elsewhere (matusov, 2009a), i analyzed in detail the conventional school chronotope (both espoused and in-use) in its complexity. in this paper, i provide only sketch of espoused conventional schooling8 chronotope that serves me for providing important background and as primary dialogic opposition to chronotopes of dialogic pedagogy — the latter is my primary focus of this paper. the espoused conventional assignment-chronotope of a conventional school and why it makes academic learning so boring elsewhere (matusov, 2009a, ch. 6; matusov & brobst, 2013), i came to a conclusion that an educational chronotope of a conventional school can be characterized as an assignment-chronotope (or a-chronotope). in this a-chronotope, the ontological aspect of the chronotope (i.e., the physical timespace perceived by the participants) is characterized by the participants’ normative expectations about the students’ unconditional cooperation to the teacher’s demands that the teacher (and the school institution) define as appropriate and educational. this ontological aspect of the espoused a-chronotope shapes the arrangement of the classroom, its furniture, where students sit and where the teacher stays and walks in the classroom, freedom of movement (or the lack of it), control of public communication, management of the attention, and so on in such a way to make this unconditional cooperation easier. at the time, this ontological aspect cannot fully guarantee students’ unconditional cooperation. students actively interpret and respond to this ontological aspect by resistance, compliance, hijacking it for their own purposes, ignoring and so on. all students’ responses, strategies, and actions are contextualized by this ontological aspect of the espoused a-chronotope. for example, i have heard that teachers subscribing the a-chronotope complain on “acting out” or “attention angry” students maliciously violating their espoused a-chronotope’s insistence on the students’ unconditional cooperation. meanwhile, teachers subscribing to other educational chronotopes may view the actions and behaviors by these students in positive terms as legitimate and good responses to their particular circumstances. the teacher’s unilateral non-negotiable demands expecting students’ unconditional cooperation, that i call “assignments,” can vary from asking the students to pay attention to something of the teacher’s choice, to answer questions, to talk or not to talk, to walk or not to walk, to write or not to write, to solve a problem or to stop working on it, to define topics, and so on. in professional pedagogical literature, the term “assignment” is often referred to the realm of didactics — learning activity work assigned to the students to generate important learning experience. however, i want to broaden this term to totality of all demands, ontological and didactic, by the teacher (like in everyday life’s use of this term). students of conventional schools often perceive school assignments ontologically as some demands unconditionally 8 peter renshaw made a very keen observation about my paper, “there is slippage between ‘education’ ‘schooling’ and ‘classroom’ that could be addressed. the title of the paper focusses on education but the critique is about schooling. the conventional chronotope is located in mass schooling with its assumptions about mandated curriculum and conventional roles of teachers and students.” in my view, this “slippage” reflects the conventional education that is defined by the chronotope of schooling and classroom. there, the spatial aspect of chronotope is localized and well defined like the temporal aspect (e.g., lesson, semester, school term) or the axiological aspect (e.g., grade). from a dialogic chronotope, education is not bounded by any particular place like school or classroom. in a dialogic educational chronotope, the spatial aspect is not localized but distributed and fuzzy (like all other chronotopic aspects). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a71 imposed on them — “stuff to be done” (rather to have some learning experience important for them). this ontological aspect of the espoused a-chronotope – i.e., physical time-space perceived by the participants where events occur such as classroom-space, lesson-time, teacher’s approval-axiology, teacher’s classroom management-relations, obedience-participation, – involving students’ unconditional cooperation is not unique to a conventional school. it is common with some jobs and some bondages (e.g., military, bureaucracies, slavery, authoritarian patriarchic families). however, usually these institutions do not have the didactic aspect of the espoused a-chronotope (see below). the students’ unconditional cooperation in the espoused a-chronotope is achieved through diverse possible means such as (kohn, 2014): 1) reasoning with the students of why they must surrender their agency to the teacher’s arbitrary demands (e.g., because the teacher knows better what is good for the students, because the students will be thankful for this surrender in the future), 2) designing and implementing a system of rewards and punishments (e.g., the "token economy", sidorkin, 2009), and 3) designing and implementing a system of the classroom and school rules, regulations, policies, and norms (tacit or explicit). the didactic aspect of the espoused a-chronotope involves preset curricular endpoints to be covered (i.e., didactic space), preset instruction (i.e., didactic time), grades and test scores (i.e., didactic axiology), academic motivation to put high efforts in what teacher asks to do (i.e., didactic participation), monologic acceptance of taught (i.e., didactic relations). it can be characterized by the teacher’s focus on making the students arrive at the curricular endpoints, preset and pre-designed by the teacher (and/or by the commercial curricular packages and textbooks, by the state standards, by the testing agencies, and so on) by the end of the lesson, the curricular unit, the term, the course, the school, and so on. “by the end of the lesson, the students will be able to master the following skills and demonstrate the following knowledge,” – such is the standard statements that national council of accreditation of teacher education (ncate, http://www.ncate.org) and the teaching standards in many states direct the teachers to have in their syllabus or lesson plan (taubman, 2009). in the didactic a-chronotope, the teacher sets curricular endpoints in advance, before actual teaching: knowledge and/or skills and/or attitudes that the students have to learn to demonstrate at the end of the lesson to make the educational process institutionally successful and accountable. this teaching objective can be achieved through diverse instructional means. first, it is through conventional instructionism of “direct instruction” (e.g., straightforward scripted lecturing and demonstrating) with its well-defined universal learning trajectory to the preset curricular endpoints. second, it is through innovative constructivism so-called “discovery learning” with diverse individual pathways to the present curricular endpoint (e.g., hands-on experiences, enriched learning environments, cf. piaget) and “(co)-construction” with socially diverse pathways to the present curricular endpoints, (question-answer socratic discussions, scaffolding, “zone of proximal development”, cf. vygotsky), in which learning trajectories are ill-defined, even unique, and negotiated but the curricular endpoints are still preset9. the students’ success or failure in achievement of the preset curricular endpoints is defined by formal and informal tests, quizzes, and exams usually administered by the teacher or a testing agency. informal testing involves students’ replies to the teacher’s or textbook’s questions or their performance on classroom assignments that are often graded by the teacher. the recent well-meaning educational policies like the no child left behind by president bush or the race to 9 in this paper, i limit myself to an analysis of mostly conventional espoused a-chronotope and not of innovative constructivist ones, based on exploitation of student authorial agency to force the student to arrive at the preset curricular endpoints. i will briefly discuss progressive education that, in my view, based on this constructivist espoused a-chronotope at the end of paper. the analysis of innovative constructivist a-chronotopes is needed. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a72 the top by president obama provide support for the didactic aspect of the espoused a-chronotope (matusov, 2011b). there is no transactional relationship — i.e., relations that mutually constitute each other (altman & rogoff, 1987) — between didactic and ontological aspects of the espoused conventional a-chronotope (matusov, 2009a, ch. 6). this means that the classroom ontology does not constitute the didactics and the didactics does not constitute the classroom ontology in the espoused conventional a-chronotope. in a conventional school a-chronotope, the teacher-students social relationship (i.e., ontology) is not rooted in the studied curriculum (i.e., didactics). and the studied curriculum (i.e., didactics) is not rooted in the teacher-students social relations (i.e., ontology) (lampert, 2001). thus, by analyzing the classroom social relations among the participants, one can’t find out if they study fraction addition or the history of mesopotamia. similarly, an observer of the didactic chronotope alone won't see social relations in the classroom specific to the taught curriculum (e.g., whether the education is forced or voluntary for the students). as soon as the students’ unconditional cooperation with the teacher’s arbitrary demands is achieved – the unilateral classroom order is established – anything can be taught. similarly, the content and instruction are independent of the classroom order in the espoused a-chronotope. the firewall separation and the great divide of the ontology and didactics in the espoused a-chronotope is probably the most acute reason of why teachers and students feel so alienated in the classroom (matusov, 2009a; m. p. smith, 2010; whitson, 2007). however, despite being ideologically independent of its content, in practice (in-use) there is a complex interactional relationship (altman & rogoff, 1987) between the ontological and the didactic aspects of the espoused conventional a-chronotope to support each other. for example, through test outcomes and the teacher’s surveillance of the students’ work on the assignments, the ontological and didactic aspects of the espoused a-chronotope interact with each other: the tests’ outcomes provide assessment of the didactic success and also measurement of a student’s cooperation and activation of the reward-punishment system. i asked my teaching colleague of why she administers so many tests in her class and she replied to me that she does so to ensure students’ attention during her lecture and students’ reading the assigned literature. at the same time, the student’s unconditional cooperation with the teacher’s demands is supposed to ensure the student’s high performance on the test. there is even a suspicion among the general public and politicians, supported by ethnographic research, that many conventional teachers prioritize the students’ unconditional cooperation (i.e., obedience) over achieving the curricular endpoints –so called “defensive teaching” (jackson, 1968; kennedy, 2005; matusov, 2009a; waller, 1932), “…what might on the surface appear to be untrained teaching was in fact the active response of some of the best teachers observed as they confronted the organization which rewarded their ability to control students more than their ability to ‘really teach’” (mcneil, 1986, p. 211). the recent standard movements (see ncate, http://www.ncate.org/public/standards.asp) and the no child left behind school policies (http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/saa.html) reflect this concern. in the espoused a-chronotope, the students’ unconditional cooperation and setting and achieving the curricular endpoints by the teacher are assumed as possible and desirable. let’s consider these issues critically. is the espoused convent ional a-chronotope eco log i cal ly poss ib le? can students unconditionally cooperate with the teachers’ arbitrary demands and really forget or postpone their own needs, interests, desires, questions, problems, inquiries, and agency for k-16 school10, hour after hour, day after day, year after year in the classrooms as the espoused conventional a-chronotope requires from them? is it humanly possible? there is rather little research done in this area 10 this is at least 17 years in a row for many students or even more for preschool, college, and even graduate school. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a73 except that many students lose their interests in academic subjects while progressing in school (brandes, 1996). we do not know to what extent are emotional, intellectual, relational, personal, collective current and future well-being of the students (and, to a lesser degree, of teachers) impacted by the delegitimatization of the following processes in conventional school: 1) genuine dialogic meaning making of academic issues, 2) students’ setting their own goals, 3) their self-actualization, 4) collaboration, 5) interpersonal problem solving initiated and completed by the students, 6) the students’ ownership for engaged activities, 7) the students’ curricular and thematic initiatives, and 8) their creativity and originality, and so on… – in short, student “authorial agency” (matusov, 2011a). clearly the ontological chronotope of unconditional cooperation makes all these processes illegitimate and difficult (but, probably, never fully impossible). there is evidence that students’ perception of conventional school heavily involves feelings of being tired and bored (depalma, matusov, & smith, 2009; hart, 2006; jackson, 1968; waller, 1932; yazzie-mintz, 2006), which can be symptoms for this ecological impossibility for the espoused a-chronotope. majority of students of conventional schools look forward to times when school is over or canceled (matusov, 2009a). in the very extreme case, when the ontological regime of unconditional cooperation with the authority’s arbitrary demands is highly totalized, people seem to die because of some kind of breakdown in their immune system (bettelheim, 1960). scholars of concentration camps report that attempts by the totalitarian authority to “re-educate” their dissident and independently minded citizens to obey unconditionally, when successful, often led the “re-educated” people to become zombie-like and quickly die from some benign causes (bettelheim, 1960; kotek & rigoulot, 2000). of course, the goal of conventional school is not to break students in total submission, robbing them of any subjectivity as in concentration camps of totalitarian regimes, – the educational conventional a-chronotope involves some degree of negotiation of the teacher-students cooperation, leeway for students’ autonomy, and a lack of the totalizing surveillance11 over the students, -but the parallels and their limitations are worth studying, in my view (matusov, 2011a). besides the issue of its ill effects on the students (and teachers), there is another ecological question of the sustainability of the ontological regime of the students’ unconditional cooperation with the espoused conventional a-chronotope. can it be institutionally sustained more or less successfully? sociological and ethnographic research shows that the ontological regime of the espoused conventional a-chronotope is especially troublesome for minority and working class students through their resistance, disruption, disengagement, violence, and truancy (eckert, 1989; willis, 1981) probably because these social groups have overall less benefit from conventional monologic schools for their socioeconomic existence (labaree, 1997; varenne & mcdermott, 1998). sidorkin (2002) has claimed that overall sustainability of the unilateral regime of the espoused a-chronotope of conventional schools has deteriorated and is under assault. he cites statistics of increasing pedagogical violence in all schools caused by students’ non-cooperation with teachers’ and school demands (i.e., symbolic, relational, emotional, institutional, and physical teacher-students and peers’ violence) and teachers’ growing dissatisfaction and attrition. he explains this phenomenon by the school’s growing impotence in using 11 although, see the recent scandal over school surveillance of students’ homes using web cameras on the school laptops distributed among the students http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/harriton-high-school-spie_n_467491.html chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a74 previously legitimate (and legal) repressive measures, including school expulsion, corporal punishment, psychological humiliation, and so on. sidorkin claims that the sting of such repression was enhanced by the school’s exclusive nature, in an era before schooling became compulsory, when attendance in schools was a desired social privilege that almost automatically guaranteed good well-paid jobs and social stability for well-to-do social classes. now let me turn to the issue of the ecological (im)possibility of the didactic aspect of the espoused conventional a-chronotope. can the curricular endpoints, preset by the teacher, be achieved in a predictable fashion through some good instruction and organization of the classroom? although this question goes beyond the popular issues of whether achievement gaps in tests among social groups and individual students can be eliminated in principle, the issue of the achievement gap is still relevant for this inquiry. several sociocultural scholars have claimed that learning (and its “outcomes”) cannot be designed and controlled by teaching because learning is an aspect and by-product of any activity (lave, 1992, april; matusov, 2009a; wenger, 1998). people always learn, but what they learn remains an open question. however, they learn different things from each other and from what the teacher expects them to learn. learning cannot be socially engineered in a predictable guaranteed fashion through instruction, channeling conditions, or organizing experiences (lobok, 2001). scholars of the bakhtinian dialogic approach argue that the learning process, like understanding and meaning making, is unique to the individual and his or her experiences (matusov, 2011a; morson, 2011). also, as far as i know there is no developmental psychological theory predicting guaranteed learning in all students of the same curriculum. empirical evidence for predictable achievement of the preset curricular endpoints is mixed. even when in a particular classroom all students could pass some test, the validity, authenticity, and depth of this learning outcomes is often in question (varenne & mcdermott, 1998). two questions remain: 1) whether any instructional success remains uncertain and probabilistic in its nature – probabilistic in a broad, nonmathematical, sense (lobok, 2001; matusov, 2009a) and 2) whether “a learning outcome known in advance” is a misnomer fabricated by educational tests – can any two people know the exactly same thing and be able to master the exactly same thing in principle (are people replaceable with regard to knowledge and skills)? the espoused conventional a-chronotope is based on an untested assumption that knowledge and skills (and attitudes and dispositions) are “immutable and combinable mobiles” (latour, 1987, p. 227): 1) across people – different people can enact “the same” knowledge and “the same” skills and 2) across practices and situations – diverse practices consist of a set of “the same basic and essential skills” that can be triggered, combined, and applied based on certain conditions as needed (and learned separately in school). the sociocultural empirical research in diverse fields of the social sciences suggests that knowledge and skills cannot be separated from people and situations (hutchins, 1995; latour, 1987; wenger, 1998). people may not be containers of self-sufficient, standardized, independent knowledge and skill; but rather, as i suspect, they seem to “author” their unique knowledge and skills as they participate in their practices. from this point of view, only the recognition of uniqueness of people’s knowledge and skill defines them as human beings with personal responsibility and creativity within their personal deeds. if there are practices and social relations (like some jobs in the economy) for which people are replaceable, the issue emerges how much these jobs are for humans and, thus, humane, and whether these jobs might not be replaced by “smart” machines (now or in future) (zhao, 2009). thus, if the school focuses on chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a75 making students mutually replaceable with the same knowledge and skills, is the goal of school education to produce machine-like people (i.e., human zombie-robots)?! the espoused conventional a-chronotope seems to be based on another untested assumption that practices and people’s participations in them are assemblies of fundamentally simple, standard, selfcontained bits of knowledge and skill detached and always detachable from their goals, values, and uses. according to this untested technological assumption about the nature of human skills and knowledge, the diverse practices and complex participations can be disassembled to simple fundamental bits of knowledge and skill that can be taught in school. for example, since skillful bicycle riding requires balancing the bike, this skill detached from biking practice has to be learned in school as precursor of riding a bike. or in a more school related example, since fluent reading of an alphabetic based text requires phonetic and phonemic awareness, this awareness has to be taught in school as a precursor of reading. in this paradigm, to read fluently means to assemble unrelated standardized bits of skills and knowledge about the linguistic structure. however, as far as i know, there is no empirical evidence that practices and participations are assemblies of self-contained bits of knowledge and skill. balancing on a bike detached from biking might not be a precursor of riding a bike but its by-product transitionally emerging from learning to ride. similarly, phonetic and phonemic awareness might not be a precursor of reading but a transactional by-product of it (matusov, 2011a; f. smith, 1985). for the fact that there is a strong correlation between, for example, phonetic-phonemic awareness and fluency of reading does not mean that this awareness is a causal relationship with the awareness being the cause of reading (i.e., socalled “correlation fallacy” to assume a causal link solely from correlation evidence). at least, we have some evidence coming from sociocultural research that phonemic awareness can be a byproduct rather than a precursor of literacy (scribner & cole, 1981). the metaphor of “immutable and combinable mobile” regarding to self-contained and detached knowledge and skill can be simply wrong (matusov, 2011a) and the so-called problem of “transfer” – the students cannot apply what they learn in school -is one of the major symptoms of the false assumption on which the educational assignment chronotope is based (greeno, 1997). thus, despite its ideological claims, the espoused conventional a-chronotope is never fully feasible either for students or for teachers. sociocultural microanalysis may show that students’ and teachers’ agencies always transcend the preset nature of the curricula; students’ cooperation is never fully unconditional; dialogic meaning making and negotiation penetrate the espoused conventional achronotope, although often in rather distorted forms. no two students nor two teachers in the espoused conventional a-chronotope12 are exactly alike – they enact it differently. elsewhere i have discussed three major student responses to the espoused conventional a-chronotope: resistance, smuggling, and conformity and i argued that even conformity is a rather complex phenomenon involving student authorial agency (matusov, 2011a). in addition, a mixture of educational chronotopes can be in place. discussion and study of diversities and complexities of the espoused a-chronotope in-action is definitely worth of further empirical research beyond this paper. 12 some of the reviewers criticized previous drafts of my paper for “stark binaries” and “vilification/valorization” with regard to description of the a-chronotope. i feel both fairness and unfairness in this observation. i agree that the issue is complex but i also argue that this complexity does not necessary undermine legitimacy for “stark binaries.” let me provide an illustration (not an analogy) to clarify my point. i agree that slave-owners were very diverse in their relations to their slaves varying from pure sadism to patronizing to human sympathy to even truly romantic relations. this fact of diversity and complexity of slavery, however, does not preclude its critics from passing legitimate judgments of “stark binaries” and “vilification/valorization” of slavery (in its opposition to freedom and democracy for all). sometimes stark binaries and vilification/valorization are very legitimate in my view, and we should avoid decontextualized and unconditional condemnation of these, at times, useful analytical tools. similarly, excessive monologism of conventional pedagogy can be rather complex and contradictory but this should not necessary precludes us from passing a binary, yes, binary and dichotomous, judgment on it. in my view, a fashionable, total, and decontextualized ban on “stark binaries” and dichotomies can be as detrimental as unconditional and total acceptance of them (and ironically, such condemnation is, in itself, actually the same “stark binary”). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a76 is the espoused convent ional a-chronotope educat ional ly des irable? let’s assume that conventional schools based on the educational assignment-chronotope do the excellent job of teaching all students how to acquire standardized knowledge and skills as measured on national and international standardized tests (i.e., espoused conventional a-chronotope’s definition of educational success). let’s imagine that educationalist neuroscientists have managed to crack the brain’s learning code and develop research-based instruction that works for all students (cf. asimov, 1959). as a result, all of the students have passed with excellence, super challenging high-stakes state and national standard-based tests13 – no child, no student, is truly left behind. do we want to live in this utopia? i am not interested here, within the limited space of the paper, in a detailed discussion of the economic, social, and political consequences of this a-chronotope “paradise” (for instance, if everyone does so well on tests and assignments – who will deliver pizza and who will remain unemployed to serve the economic well-being of the society?!, see matusov, 2008; sidorkin, 2009). rather, i am interested in discussion of its educational consequences. as i have alluded above, the educational conventional achronotope does not intend to teach self-actualization, initiative, self-assignment, assignment to others, goal defining and prioritization, independent problem defining and problem solving of social conflicts, democracy, collaboration, teamwork, self-determination, responsibility, creativity, initiation and participation in complex enterprises, love of learning, self-directed learning, unique voice in practices, etc. (i.e. what greenberg called "real basics of education", see greenberg, 1992b). it does not support and enrich human agency, and as one student says, “it sucks life out of me” (depalma, et al., 2009). “everyone is busily grading, assessing, evaluating, ranking, rating, and of course preparing for the next test. every school will be graded on a scale of a–f . . . [a]ccountability destroys not only the joy of learning, but learning itself” (ravitch, 2007, february 25). in this sense, conventional schools fail all students those who institutionally succeed – usually, middle and upper class students – and those who institutionally fail – usually working class and minority students (but in different ways and with different institutional and economic consequences) (matusov, 2011b; varenne & mcdermott, 1998). the espoused conventional a-chronotope pushed to its limits creates ideal interchangeable and replaceable human machine, human zombie-robots (for the economy) that do not know what to do with their freedom when this freedom is offered or achieved (fromm, 1969). when knowledge and skills are not rooted in people’s immediate desires, interests and needs (their ontology), which is often bracketed by conventional monologic education, knowledge and skills become decontextualized (lave, 1988). separation of knowledge and skills from people’s ontology in the espoused a-chronotope generates the so-called “transfer problem” – the students may perform well on tests but poorly in the flow of practices where the “learned” knowledge and skills are required (beach, 1999; hunter, 1971; parker, 2001). of course, one can take an issue that the conventional monologic school actually fits current economic needs. the current economy in its huge part might not greatly need educational outcomes and processes involving people’s agency, creativity, self-actualization, and so on. only a small elite might need these agency-based learning (cf. estimation of percentage of "creative jobs" needed by modern economy, less then 20%, reich, 1992, 2001). still from an educational perspective (that i will fully develop below), the desirability of the educational a-chronotope remains questionable as well as its incessant, wide-spread, and institutional omnipotence. should people spend 17 years in their schools to learn how to behave like machines?! 13 although, how would educators assure “super challenging” quality of the tests, test criteria, and testing benchmarks when everybody succeeds?! usually tests are normalized in such a way that making it succeed by too many students “indicates” to the test designers that the test is “not challenging enough” which often leads to revision of the tests. let me leave this question to the brain learning scientists and the test designers and let’s stretch out our imagination in the educational utopia paradise of the achronotope. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a77 the espoused and in-use dialogic provocation and journey chronotopes of dialogic pedagogy here i focus on discussion of alternative educational chronotopes that have emerged in a dialogic pedagogy practice. dialogic pedagogy (e.g., adler, 1982; bibler, 2009; fecho, 2011; freire, 1986; matusov, 2009a; mercer & littleton, 2007; nystrand, 1997; plato & bluck, 1961; sidorkin, 1999; solomadin & kurganov, 2009; wegerif, 2007) focuses on promoting students’ critical authorship in the targeted practices they learn. i define critical authorship as such contribution to an activity that transcends ready-made norms and limitations – achieving transcendence that defines its own quality, is recognized by the self and relevant others, and is taken responsibly by the author (matusov, 2011a). for example, a student’s reply to the teacher’s question, 2+2=4 can be authored – a critically authored reply to the problem set by the teacher – only if a student knows how to evaluate and justify this answer as good or bad in diverse contexts and, thus, to be responsible for his or her answer (regardless of the correctness of this evaluation or justification by itself14). so, from this perspective, some replies by students might be non-authored because the student cannot evaluate these replies. or a student may author an answer but not critically – when the student does not involve the answer in a critical discourse (i.e., "internally persuasive discourse", see bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2007; matusov & von duyke, 2010) and hence the student is not responsible for his or her own transcendence – i.e., cannot answer for it15. strictly speaking, probably all contributions are authored to some degree, because all replies can be justified even in the worst-case scenario: e.g., “my answer is just a random guess forced by the teacher and her threat of punishment if i keep silent.” but, i argue, this ontological authorship has a very low didactic degree by being not very critical and/or academic in the subject matter. in the espoused conventional a-chronotope, described above, the degree of students’ educational authorship is usually very low. in case of student compliance, the student uncritically accepts authoritative discourse. in case of creative resistance, the student’s high degree critical authorship is often non-academic. in case, when the student smuggles his/her interests in the classroom, these learning interests are often not supported and not guided by the teacher. in contrast, critical educational authorship is achieved through students’ ownership and responsibility16 for their own contributions and actions. elsewhere, i argued that narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy values the responsive critical authorship while polyphonic pedagogy17 values the self-generated critical authorship (matusov, 2011a; matusov & brobst, 2013). the responsive critical authorship is the critical authorship in response to somebody else’s provocation. for example, students can be very creative, critical, and have a high degree of ownership for their work developed by them in response to their teacher’s (or other students’) 14 for example, a first grader justified 2+2=4 by drawing vertical lines ii+ii=iiii and claiming that this mediation by the vertical lines can be done for any addition of any two and two objects. this evaluation was contested by other children (i.e., adding 200 and 200) and by me (adding two friends and two friends) (matusov, 2009a). it does not matter that the first grader’s evaluation of mathematical equation did not survive the test because she and other participants were engaged in the authentic math discourse through deep understanding. the student was a true author of her math reasoning. 15 the german movie “the wave” (2008), a dramatization of real events occurring in palo alto, usa, in the late sixties (jones, 1972), shows how a social studies teacher promotes a high degree of non-critical authorship in his students by creating a neo-nazi organization. this raises an issue that authorship, agency, creativity, and participatory socialization alone, without critical dialogue of internally persuasive discourse in which everything is “dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319), cannot completely define education. 16 in conventional education, student responsibility is often understood as acting in according to the societal norms or even the teacher’s demands and desires. here, i understand student responsibility as a student’s own act of defining good and bad and replying to challenges by others and self about meaning, values, and intentions of his/her own actions (bakhtin, 1993). 17 i call this pedagogy “polyphonic” (matusov, 2009a) adapting morson and emerson’s definition of bakhtin’s notion of polyphony as, ““two closely related criteria are constitutive of polyphony: 1) a dialogic sense of truth and 2) a special position [by the teacher and the students] of the necessity for [promoting] this sense of truth [in the classroom community]. in fact, these two criteria are aspects of the same phenomenon, the polyphonic [classroom’s] ‘form-shaping ideology’. they can be separated only for purposes of analysis” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 234). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a78 dialogic provocations: the teacher’s open-ended questions, a shown video, a demonstration, the students’ reflection-provoking experiences organized by the teacher, by the students’ own learning experiences, or by peers. the teacher’s dialogic provocation differs from the teacher’s assignment of a-chronotope, described above, because the teaching provocation is aimed at revealing and provoking the students’ position, thinking, feeling, ideas, perception, creativity, collaboration, and “situational interest” (see, hidi & renninger, 2006) not fully known and predicted by the teacher – i.e., critical authorship, – rather than at making the student arrive to some curricular endpoint preset by the teacher. i call that the student’s responsive critical authorship because it emerges in response to the teacher’s, experiences’, or peers’ provocation. it is not self-initiated, self-generated by the student. although students may be very creative and responsible for their contributions, they do not produce their creative critical contributions on their own, without or outside of learning activities designed by the teacher. dialogic pedagogy (in its narrow sense) values promotion of responsive critical voice in the students, while polyphonic pedagogy values promotion of self-generated critical voice in the students. in my view, narrow dialogic pedagogy is based on dialogic provocation chronotope (dp-chronotope) in education; while polyphonic pedagogy is based on journey chronotope (j-chronotope) in education. in both dpand j-chronotopes what students learn is not expected to be known by the teacher and the students themselves prior to this learning. the self-generated critical authorship is characterized by the students’ (individual and collective) strategic goal-defining, self-determination, and their shortand/or long-term commitment to the learning practice through their self-initiated assignments — i.e., students’ short-term commitments to their selfinitiated interests, inquiries, and projects, — and the student’s curricular transformative self-initiated learning journeys — i.e., students’ long-term commitments to their self-initiated interests, inquiries, and projects (cf. renshaw, 2007). in polyphonic pedagogy, students are not creative, active, critical, and responsible only in response to the assignments set by others (usually by the teacher); but also they are creative, active, critical, and responsible for setting new assignments for themselves alone or in collaboration with others (e.g., the classmates, the teachers, the parents). in contrast to the responsive critical authorship, the self-generated critical authorship transforms and defines who the students are through the learning practice in relationship to themselves and other people – i.e., people who self-assign activities and who set themselves on long journeys. the self-generated authorship creates in participants new desires, new interests (i.e., "personal interests" in contrast to "situational interests", see alexander, 2005), and new needs to do something new. in polyphonic dialogic pedagogy, the participants become new dialogic agents. the main role of the teacher in the espoused j-chronotope is to support students’ self-assignments and journey. currently, i see four main aspects of this support: a) making unsolicited and solicited suggestions for what the student may do or try (i.e., alternative ideas and experiences), b) providing guidance by engaging in critical dialogue when and only when asked for this guidance by the student, c) providing “community behind” to strengthen the student’s voice by affirmation and validation of the student’s contributions (matusov, 2009a; mitra, 2013), and d) providing a rich learning environment for the student’s exploration and exposure. however, more investigation of the teacher’s legitimate role in the espoused j-chronotope is needed. the demarcation between the responsive critical authorship and the self-generated critical authorship is relative and not absolute. any responsive authorship involves an aspect of the selfgenerated authorship because it involves a student’s initiative that transcends and is not defined by the chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a79 teacher’s assignment but is rather provoked and encouraged by it. similarly, any self-generated authorship is inherently responsive – being social by its nature, any self-generated human authorship responds to and addresses other people, it takes certain things for granted and transforms other things: creativity and innovation never start from scratch (bakhtin, 1986). people’s self-initiated contributions are always located in a framework of “bigger assignments” that they accept, undertake and expand from and in response to other people. thus, the self-generated authorship is deeply responsive in its nature and it distinguishes itself from the responsive authorship by a degree, which however makes a qualitative difference when the student’s initiative expends and even negates the parameters of the teacher’s assignment itself so the latter stops shaping the former. even more, i argue that sometimes the selfgenerated authorship can grow out of the responsive authorship but, this is, probably, only one out of many possible developmental trajectories for the emergence of the self-generated authorship. the following example illustrates this possibility of the j-chronotope, emerging from the students’ responsive critical authorship, the dp-chronotope. elsewhere my colleagues and i (see, rogoff, bartlett, & goodman turkanis, 2001) described an innovative collaborative public elementary school running as a parents-teacher cooperative. primarily, i was a parent in this school. my son attended 1st and 2nd grades there. in my chapter (matusov, 2001), i described how as a parent volunteer (named “co-oper” in the school) responsible for the classroom math activities once a week for 3 hours, i was learning how to participate in an adult community of learners. here i want to expand and reconstruct the case as a participant in more details than i described in that chapter (and supported by fieldnotes at time). the event started (at least for me) from a parents-teacher meeting. at this meeting, a disagreement emerged among parents. at the meeting, some of the parents wanted to shift to a more traditional direct instruction based on the espoused conventional a-chronotope out of pragmatic reasons that certain subjects and/or curricular topics cannot be taught in a constructivist way through discovery and hands-on learning. as an example of such curricular topics that require conventional teaching based on the espoused conventional a-chronotope, these parents cited teaching the multiplication table (mt). according to these parents, mt can only be taught mostly through rote memorization using flash cards. their concerns were similar to those expressed by cohen, “contrary to what american romantics believed about learning, algebra and multiplication do not come naturally, even though they do come more easily to some than others…. the parallels in other practices may be useful here. patients often enter behavior therapy, for instance, in order to cope with problems of overeating. …it is probably less difficult to suppress overeating within a schedule of rewards and punishments than it is to probe personal history in order to locate the sources of gluttony, and, by understanding and working through, overcome them. physical punishments and rewards may be painful, but responding to them requires less emotional and intellectual investment than deep and sustained self-examination” (cohen, 1988, pp. 51-52). as in the argument presented by cohen, some parents argued that some learning, like learning multiplication table, goes outside of the students’ agency and, thus, different, non-agency, transmission of knowledge and memorization type of instruction is required. however, some other parents, including me, disagreed and since i was responsible for math curriculum among parents, i volunteered (and was assigned) to develop a constructivist curriculum to teach multiplication for our mixed 1st and 2nd grade classroom (the school was based on mixed-grade classrooms). the parents decided to allow me to experiment to see if constructivist teaching of the multiplication table was possible. to be short and skip details, i came to an idea of giving children printouts of partially filled 12x12 multiplication tables with an assignment for the children to find as many patterns of filling out the multiplication table as possible (matusov, 2001). the children were supposed to chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a80 find new patterns of mt while filling out the numbers in the table and they presented the patterns to the adults who were supposed to record them on a classroom easel. my pedagogical goal at that time was to engage the children in discovering and critical reflecting on a network of multiplication patterns that would build the foundation of their understanding and embodied mnemonics for remembering multiplication as a by-product of these patterns. i hoped that the children’s prolonged engagement in the numerous ways to fill out the table would require the children to discover the mt patterns and engage in critical dialogue of internally persuasive discourse about the mt. the children got immediately very excited with the assignment. below, through several reconstructed vignettes, i want to show how children’s self-generated critical authorship (i.e., the j-chronotope) emerged out of their responsive critical authorship (i.e., the dpchronotope). vignet te#1 (emergent r i ch responsive authorship) : steal ing patterns from a c lassmate a small group of students and two adult “co-opers”18 were sitting at a round table. the children chose to come to the activity that was advertised by me (one of the two co-opers) at the morning circle. the children had freedom to leave or join this activity at any time (there were other small group activities organized by several other adults or children might go to their own self-initiating activities or just browsing or wandering around the classroom). although the time of the activity was limited to the mid-day recess break, children could continue this activity during or after the break or on another day or even at home, if they wished (see rogoff, turkanis, & bartlett, 2001, for a detailed enthographic description of the school). alex19: eugene (a parent responsible for math activities, the author), lindsey stole my pattern! lindsey: nah-ah! my pattern is different. your pattern is adding by twos and my pattern is adding by threes and by fours. you’ve noticed only adding by twos, but i’ve noticed adding by whatever. paul (alex’s friend): but, lindsey, it’s the same. adding by twos, by threes, by fours, by fives, by millions. it’s the same. we shouldn’t put it [lindsey’s pattern] on the list [of all mt patterns]. mike (lindsey’s friend): no, it’s different. alex didn’t know (that one can add) by threes, by fours, by fives, -lindsey discovered it. alex was talking only about twos. eugene, put lindsey’s pattern on the [mt] list. lindsey: you’ve noticed only adding by twos, but i’ve noticed adding by whatever. alex: you stole it. without me, you’d have never noticed that! eugene (a parent, co-oper): this is an interesting thing. it sounds to me that both alex and lindsey have made big discoveries. alex has noticed the first mt addition pattern. lindsey has noticed a meta-pattern. “meta” means “above” or “over” in greek, i think. she has noticed a pattern of patterns. in greek, it is called “meta”, meta-pattern (eugene put lindsey’s pattern on the mt list and marked it as ‘meta-pattern’.) paul (repeats after eugene): “a pattern of patterns.” samantha (another parent in the classroom who eavesdropped on the conversation): i think that “meta” literally means something else, eugene, but let me check the dictionary and report next week (when she would come again). it doesn’t matter, though. jessica: ah, i’ve also noticed a new meta-pattern. you can subtract not only by twos, as mary has noticed, by also by threes, fours, and millions! write it down, eugene (eugene wrote). 18 this innovative public school required all parents contribute 3 hours per child per week, usually by designing and enacting learning activities. these parents were called “co-opers” (rogoff, bartlett, et al., 2001). 19 all names of the parents, children, and teachers, except mine, are pseudonyms. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a81 paul: there is not just one diagonal pattern, but many. it’s also a meta-pattern. lindsey: ‘kids’ is a meta-pattern for ‘boys’ and ‘girls’. ‘tree’ is a meta-pattern for ‘leaves’. mike: and ‘branches’. paul: friendship is a meta-pattern of the mt. eugene: what? “friendship”? how does it work? (everyone looked at paul with surprise.) paul: we do mt patterns and become friends. (eugene wrote it on the mt list. paul looked at the list). we need to check if the list already has other meta-patterns or we can develop new ones. in my judgment, this vignette represents the emergence of very rich “runaway” responsive critical authorship by the participating children based on the dp-chronotope. the evidence of the students’ authorship in response to the teacher’s (i.e., parent’s, eugene’s) original provocation to find mt patterns here is in the students’ engagement in public evaluation and justification of each other’s contributions deciding: 1) whether a proposed conjunction is a multiplication pattern (i.e., it predictably leads to the correct multiplication results) and 2) whether it is a truly new mt pattern that was not discovered previously by somebody else. the open-ended and multifaceted and multimedia nature of the assignment activity allows the children’s creativity and as the vignette shows, the children committed to the creativity by searching for new mt patterns. one can argue that there has been the presence of the self-generated critical authorship in this vignette when children started applying the notion of “meta” which emerged in lindsey’s pattern and was recognized by eugene (me) – to non-mathematical objects. this was arguably a new self-assignment, which extended eugene’s original assignment to the point of being a new activity. i conservatively call it the proto self-generated authorship, because, as far as i know, this new self-assigned activity was shortlived and did not spread in the classroom, probably, because eugene did not recognize and support it enough at that time. the ontological space of dp-chronotope is agora, a public forum and ontological time is unfolding critical dialogue initiated by the teacher (eugene). ontological axiology involves testing ideas. ontological participation involves teacher-student negotiation. didactic space is critical investigation of the big and small cultures and practices. didactic time involves dialogic provocations, bringing alternative ideas, and testing them. didactic axiology involves dialogic and collective evaluation of ideas. didactic participation involves diverse personal interests and interests emergent in dialogue. please notice that in this dialogic provocation chronotope, the ontological and didactic aspects of the educational chronotope are in the transactional relationship with each other: the ontology and the didactics mutually constitute each other. this means that the emotional tensions in social relations among the participants (i.e., the ontology) reflect the tensions in their intellectual curricular ideas (i.e., the didactics). for example, the relational conflict between alex and lindsey about originality and plagiarism of their mt patterns (ontology) was solved through transformation of curricular ideas – i.e., introduction of the notion of “meta-pattern” by eugene who recognized lindsey’s unique innovative contribution and distinguished her mt pattern from alex’s one (didactics). the ontology (e.g., relational conflict of accusation of stealing the original mt pattern) drives the didactics (e.g., discussion of “meta-patterns”) by provoking the latter while the didactics (e.g., discussion of “meta-patterns) drives the ontology by resolving the former (e.g., the notion of meta-pattern helped to resolve a conflict around “stealing” alex’s mt pattern by lindsey). the ontology and the didactics are united in the dialogic provocation chronotope (dp-chronotope) rather than separate like in the assignment chronotope. in the classroom activity above guided by the dp-chronotope, the alienation of a-chronotope is impossible because the curriculum is not alienated from the students (and the teacher). it took me many years to recognize this chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a82 property of the dialogic provocation chronotope but as you see second grader paul nicely formulated the transactional relation between the ontology and the didactics by saying that friendship is a meta-pattern of mt, “we do mt patterns and become friends.” in the following vignette, there is evidence of the students’ emergent self-assignments and thus, the j-chronotope. in this innovative school, there was no assigned homework. however, sometimes children moved classroom learning projects outside of the classrooms to home because they were so interested in doing them (and sometimes they also refused to go outside for a recess because they were so busy working on their classroom projects) (rogoff, bartlett, et al., 2001). in my view, this constitutes evidence of self-assignment because the students took ownership of the project from the adult who might initially assign this project to them. please notice here that the j-chronotope requires the legitimate free, non-assigned, assignmentfree, time-space that can be “wasted” by the students but can easily become a resource for the students’ self-assignments and curricular journeys. legitimate non-assigned time — free time for students that is solely decided by students of how to define and spend it — is an important component defining the espoused j-chronotope. rousseau reminded us, “may i venture at this point to state the greatest, the most important, the most useful rule of education? it is: do not save time, but lose it” (rousseau, 1979, p. 57). i wonder if this “spill out” nature of the teacher’s promoted learning projects – that the project can be so exciting for the students that they can take them over to expand and transform their own projects – is an important part of the j-chronotope. however, i also wonder if the j-chronotope (i.e., purely jchronotope) can emerge without its dp-chronotope precursor, when, for example, a students’ learning cooperative invites a teacher to help them with an already established educational journey or do it completely on their own (see, for example, students' "clubs" and "corporations" in democratic schools, greenberg, 1992b; "learning circles" described by mandela, 1995; or see description of learning in the "youth-based organizations", mclaughlin, irby, & langman, 2001). vignet te#2 (emergence o f se l f -ass ignments) : what is math pattern? first grade girl aisha showed a small group of children and eugene a finger pattern of multiplying of digits by nine that she learned from her older brother and asked eugene to add it to the mt list. aisha raised two hands with spreading all her 10 fingers. then she demonstrated that if one wants to multiply 9 by 7, the seventh finger has to be fold and the remaining 3 fingers on the right hand indicate the ending digit of the multiplication result: 9x7=63: six fingers on the left and right hands before the bended finger and 3 fingers on the right hand after bended finger. aisha claimed that this pattern works for any multiplication by the number 9. second grade boy harley objected: harley: it is not an mt pattern. you cannot write it down. you cannot see it in the (multiplication) table. it’s just a finger rule. jessica: yes, it is! it’s something that repeats (as a pattern) and gives the right answers. harley: you don’t see it. you don’t know why it’s. it’s like magic, like a calculator. magic isn’t a pattern. calculator isn’t a pattern. you click, click, and get a right number. but it’s not a pattern. aisha: nah-ah! [silence. impasse.] eugene: raise your hand, if you think that a finger rule is an mt pattern. (kids raised their hands. eugene counted 3 pro and 4 against). aisha: you cannot vote on math. chris: why not? we vote on many other things. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a83 aisha: you think math, not vote. harley: i agree with aisha. eugene, we cannot vote on math. even if all kids vote against 2+2=4, it’s still true. eugene: so, what should we do? how should we find out if the finger rule of multiplication by 9 is a math pattern or not? harley: we need to talk and think. aisha, why do you think that your rule is a math pattern? aisha: i don’t know (she sounds being upset, almost crying, her voice was breaking). (there is silence as the kids are thinking about the problem. some were looking at the mt, some drew something in the air. some repeating aisha’s manipulation with fingers. chris was walking around in circles, putting his hands on his head. suddenly,..). chris: i know! it’s because when (multiplying) by nine, the last digit decreases by one! (chris went in length describing that and connecting this discovery with the finger rule. the rest of the group, including eugene, got very excited). jessica: can we invent a finger rule for 8? harley: i’ll think about it really hard. maybe my mom will help me. aisha: we can think really hard together. we should tell this task to the whole class20. i also want to think really hard if there is an mt dance pattern. we can dance mt! (kids started dancing and laughing). samantha (another parent to eugene): it’s an interesting issue when we legitimately can and should vote and when we should not. i think we should discuss it with adults and kids. i’ll take a note of this. in my judgment, there is strong evidence for the full emergence of the j-chronotope here. let me list at least four self-assignments that i see here. first, it was aisha, who took the activity home and shared it with her older brother (and her parents). second, it was a collective inquiry of how to evaluate if a mt pattern is mathematical in its nature. third, it is a collective inquiry of finding mathematical understanding, if not a proof, behind each mt pattern. finally, fourth, it was samantha’s (adult) inquiry of when voting is legitimate and when it is not. although, these self-assignments were short-lived and did not lead to longterm projects, all four self-assignments affected the communal life in prolonged ways. aisha seemed to model her self-assignment of taking the mt activity home to some children. evaluation of the mathematical nature of patterns became a widespread activity in the classroom, children started searching for mathematical (and other) understanding of patterns (i.e., why they predictably lead to the correct answers), and the discussion of legitimate decision making and their limitations became a part of the community discourse (although among the community adults this issue had had some history and was well grounded21). the emergence of the j-chronotope apparently requires relinquishing unilateral power from the teacher for the public space of communication (ontology) and defining the collective goal of the learning activity (didactics). the leading adult in charge had to recognize, validate, and promote emerging protoself-assignments and curriculum journeys while tabling, postponing, or canceling all together his own assignments. this is often a tough prospective for the leading adult in charge because of his or her fear of dissipation of the ontological focus (i.e., a collective focus on some unified topic) or the didactic focus (i.e., losing educational value of the activity) or even both (cf. tharp & gallimore, 1988). in my view, the resolution of these real concerns, as the following vignette shows, lays in sharing the responsibility for the 20 later, aisha shared the problem with the entire class and the children did develop multiplication patterns for all other digits (matusov, 2001). 21 during our parent meetings, the parents and the teachers discussed both importance and limitations of collaborative decisionmaking with and among the children (see, matusov, 1999; rogoff, bartlett, et al., 2001, for more examples and discussion). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a84 community ontology and community didactics with the entire learning community that sets it on an educational long-term journey. vignet te#3 (emergence o f the curr i cular journey): time and place to ta lk and think about math two weeks after the events described in vignette#1, in the morning circle, the children shared their previous day home experiences and toys they brought from home. suddenly, alex raised his hand. when acknowledged by the teacher annabelle, he started talking about a math pattern that he discussed with his dad at home: alex: i want to talk about a new meta-pattern that my dad and i discovered yesterday. jessica: this is a sharing time. we share our toys. we do not talk about math. samantha (a parent): alex, why don’t you talk about your math pattern in eugene’s math group? annabelle (the teacher): we haven’t finished with lindsey’s presentation of her balancing bird yet. alex: but i need to talk to whole class, not just to eugene’s group. annabelle, the teacher: why don’t we have the whole class for eugene’s math activity today? aisha: no, alex is right. we need to talk about mt patterns in the sharing circle. because. sometimes we want to talk [about math patterns] and sometimes we don’t. it was what happened with alex yesterday. if he lost a tooth, he would talk [in the morning sharing circle]. if he found a new mt pattern or has a task for us, he should talk too. annabelle, the teacher: hmm, interesting. any other ideas? raise your hand, if you want to speak up. (many kids raised their hands. a girl raised her hand weaving it with passion, very eager to speak up). mary. mary: we shouldn’t talk about learning in the morning circle. because [otherwise] we’d nothing to do after that. harley: i agree with aisha. we need to think in small groups with eugene and we need to talk in a circle. but if there’s nothing to talk, we’ll talk about toys and yesterday’s experiences. (after more discussion, annabelle asked the kids and adults to vote. alex’s suggestion passed by a large majority.) in my analysis, this vignette presents the birth of the mathematical community, in which the participants develop math problems for each other and collectively solve them through a special public internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2009a; matusov & von duyke, 2010). this birth involves taking collective responsibility for the organization of the communal public space (ontology) – the morning circle and beyond – and the didactic space (e.g., “if he found a new mt pattern or has a task for us, he should talk too”) and freedom to participate or not to participate, to have a math discussion or not to have it. the latter is crucially important for the j-chronotope and can be acutely troublesome as i will discuss below. i have found it interesting that in order to illustrate a polyphonic learning dialogue i was forced to bring several vignettes rather than just one as in other types of classroom interaction (i.e., non-localized ontological and didactic time). in each of the three vignettes, new self-generated authorships have emerged through dialoguing with the other emerging authorships in the other vignettes. for example, in first vignette, eugene’s new authorship of a constructivist teacher who designs a new lesson of teaching the multiplication table in a constructivist way has emerged only through the emergence of the children’s voices and new authorships and his (and the other adults’) recognition of this phenomenon. his selfassignment is to provoke self-assignments of the students. paradoxically, the students’ self-assignments (e.g., friendship as a meta-pattern of mt, patterns of multiplication for other numbers than 9, dancing patterns of mt, redefining the morning circle) also promote each other and self-assignments in the adults chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a85 (e.g., samantha’s consideration when voting is and is not appropriate decision making process). this is polyphony of self-generated critical authorship. the authorship was critical as the participants demanded taking responsibility for each other’s transcendence through testing and replying on each other’s ideas. like in the dp-chronotope discussed above, in the j-chronotope, there are mutually related processes of critical mathematization of the participants’ social life and socialization of math practice (see, lave, 1992). math practice mediated the social relations and their transformation while social relations filled math practices with local and embedded meanings for the participants. however, i argue that in nonpolyphonic dialogue, these processes are responsive to the teacher’s assignment-investigation and do not generate new authorial agencies, at least not in a full-blown way. in contrast, polyphonic dialogue generates new authorial agencies in the students around the practice of math (brown & renshaw, 2000). cohen argues that the birthmark of any dialogic or polyphonic teaching (or what he called “adventurous teaching”) is the participants’ attraction to uncertainty, such work can be fascinating, and students could learn a great deal about mathematical reasoning22 from it. but in order to do so they would have to tolerate considerable uncertainty: about the nature of arithmetical problems; about the procedures for solving these problems; about what the answers are, and what an answer is; and about how implausible answers can be detected, and plausible answers defended. if done well, this would lead on to questions about the nature of arithmetic, and what it means to know it. that would be all to the good: if done carefully, such work can be immensely illuminating. but it requires that students find ways to embrace uncertainty, that they adopt trying out--that is, hypothesis framing and testing--as a way of life in learning. to do so, teachers and students must devise instructional strategies that enable them to manage and capitalize on the higher levels of uncertainty and the more demanding thought required to manage it. such strategies are available, but they make unusual demands on teachers and students. they have been little investigated, but there is no evidence that they are easy (cohen, 1988, p. 60). clearly, uncertainty is a part of the dpand j-chronotope for teaching and learning because it heavily involves the internally persuasive discourse of critically testing and examining truths (morson, 2004). the a-, dp-, and j-chronotopes reconsidered diverse educational foci generate diverse educational chronotopes. for example, as soon as a teacher (or a parent) sets a preset curricular endpoint as his or her educational goal, the espoused achronotope will be activated as the consequence and it will acquire the educator, regardless of other ideological orientations of the teacher. the espoused educational assignment-chronotope focuses on making all students achieve the preset curricular endpoints. a-chronotope organizes conventional and some innovative education. in addition to curriculum, conventional a-chronotope also predefines instruction. in contrast, innovative achronotope individualizes instruction while predefining curriculum. for example, progressive education rooted in writings of jean jacques rousseau (1979) and john dewey (1956) arguably involves espoused a-chronotope because progressive education presets societal curriculum for students. progressive education wants to “psychologize” the preset curricular endpoints (dewey, 1956) to make the students 22 incidentally, cohen considers a hypothetical example of teaching multiplication table that is somewhat similar to what really occurred in the classroom i described. unfortunately, cohen did not develop specifics or visualizations of his example and it would be interesting to know if the reconstructed ethnography here fits and to what degree his ideas. i did not know about his pedagogical ideas until my colleague katherine von duyke pointed them to me when provided her feedback on an earlier version of my paper. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a86 want to learn what the society, usually represented by progressive educational experts, wants them to learn. it actively tries to exploit and subjectize (using foucault’s term) student agency (cf. "educated subject", fendler, 1998). while dewey was apparently rather romantic about this exploitation, rousseau seemed to be rather cynical, take the opposite course with your pupil [in child-centered, proto-progressive, education that rousseau advocated in contrast to a conventional authoritarian teacher-centered education -em]; let him always think he is master while you are really master. there is no subjection so completed as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will [of the child] itself is taken captive [by the teacher’s hidden manipulation]. is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? cannot you make of him what you please? his work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell (rousseau, 1979, p. 120, italics are mine). psychologists supporting progressive education (e.g., rigby, deci, patrick, & ryan, 1992) try to develop notions like “internalized” or “identified” or “integrated” motivation to address the holy grail of progressive education: how to colonize student agency with a desire for their societal curriculum without student ever knowing about this colonization but rather believing that they freely accept it (see my detailed and nuanced critique of progressive education in matusov, 2015, submitted). if conventional monologic education tries to postpone the student authorial agency until the student is fully educated, progressive education tries to colonize the student authorial agency with the educational societal desires (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2015, submitted). in dialogic pedagogy, curriculum — the space of the didactic chronotope — emerges in dialogue between the student and the big culture, the culture of entire humanity in its past, present, and future (bibler, 2009) — it is not preset. dialogic pedagogy aims at promoting student critical authorial agency and it is rooted in the student authorial agency. it is viewed as being for and from authorial agency (matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2015, submitted). the dialogic provocation chronotope focuses on promoting responsive critical authorial agency in all students. meanwhile, the educational journey chronotope focuses on promoting self-generated critical authorial agency in all students. there can be a tension between dp-chronotope and j-chronotope. the strongest side of the dp-chronotope is its embeddedness into critical dialogue, which may come at expense of self-generated authorship (matusov, 2011a). in contrast, the strongest side of the j-chronotope is its self-generated authorship that may come at expense of being not very critical when a student’s learning journey is outside of critical dialogue. that is why, i wonder if some kind of combination of dpand jchronotopes, rather than exclusive reliance on only one of these chronotopes, is beneficial for dialogic pedagogy. in the currently relatively small field of dialogic pedagogy, there is a debate about whether the goal of dialogic education should be to promote the responsive critical authorship in the students (what i call “narrow dialogic pedagogy”) or to promote the self-generated critical authorship in the students (what i call “polyphonic pedagogy”). should school produce an educated “reader of the culture” based on the responsive critical authorship (narrow dialogic pedagogy) or an educated “writer of the culture” based on the self-generated critical authorship (polyphonic pedagogy) in each student (see berlyand, kurganov, osetinsky, solomadin, savvinykh, author debate on a russian electronic forum, june 2008, http://igorsolomadin.livejournal.com/40661.html?view=120533) (and see also, bibler, 2009; matusov, 2009b; miyazaki, 2011)? in the narrow dialogic pedagogy, the student’s authorship is seen as a response to the chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a87 teacher’s dialogic provocations and as moving the student into a big culture and a big critical discourse. for the proponents of responsive critical authorship as the goal of education (i.e., student as “an educated, critical reader” of culture), the student’s initial agency and areas of interests are often not validated as legitimate or may be even seen as disruptive and harmful, like watching tv, playing videogames, chatting on the internet, playing (see this debate among berlyand, miyazaki, and matusov in, matusov, 2009b; miyazaki, 2011). in contrast to the narrow dialogic pedagogy, the polyphonic pedagogy sees any student as an already capable author from the beginning, whose existing interests and areas of the authorship are legitimate and welcome in the classroom for expansion, critical deepening, and amendment (cf. gee, 2003). but in any case, dialogic education in a broader sense is dialogic education for agency by focusing on promoting either responsive and/or self-generated critical authorship in the students. in dialogic education, teaching is authorial and learning is authorial (i.e., creative, improvisational, responsible, critical, unique, situational, ontologized, personal, immobile, phronêtic, agencyand voice-based). meanwhile in the espoused a-chronotope of conventional pedagogy, teaching is instrumental and learning is instrumental (i.e., universal, decontextualized, deontologized, standardized, impersonal, mobile, technological, objectand tool-oriented) (for more detailed and nuanced discussion of authorial vs. instrumental/technological teaching/learning see, matusov, 2011a). the students’ educational critical authorship can be achieved by providing “negative” and “positive” freedoms for the students (here i am using the terms coined by berlin, 1969). the negative freedom involves setting opportunities – time, space, materials, model examples, provoking texts, and necessary guidance -for the students to get inspired, develop, and pursue their own (individual and/or collective) self-assignments, educational journeys, and self-initiated activities: both emergent and preexisting. the positive freedom involves setting exciting educational activities and projects, which the students can join through clubs and activity centers (matusov, 2009a, ch. 10). the negative and positive freedoms interact with each other: offered clubs and activity centers can spark the emergence of students’ new self-assignments and educational journeys while the students’ self-assignments and educational journeys recognized and supported by the teachers can create new clubs and activity centers for other students. in fact, recognizing, legitimatizing, validating, supporting, and extending through guidance all contributions by the students as important educational resources that have deep teachinglearning opportunities is one of the major tenets of dialogic pedagogy in a broad sense (bibler, 2009; osetinsky, 2009). below is the table, where i put my current tentative ideas about educational espoused chronotopes together. table 1. major espoused educational chronotopes chronotope aspect a-chronotope dp-chronotope j-chronotope conventional progressive ontological chronotope ontological time term assigned by educational experts (e.g., lesson, semester, grade, school) term assigned by educational experts and then psychologized by the students unfolding critical dialogue initiated by the teacher projectadventure ontological space sterile space imposed by educational experts to channel students’ attention and restrict movements (e.g., classroom) rich learning environment designed by educational experts and then psychologized by the students agora, forum, square, public space for dialogue life environment ontological axiology assigned and imposed norms of the society assigned norms of the society psychologized by the students teacher-student dialogically negotiated and tested self-judged, self-tested, self-assigned chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a88 participation in overall the endeavor forcedly assigned, mandatory forcedly assigned, mandatory but also justified and made attractive to the student teacher-student dialogically negotiated voluntary teacher-student ontological relationship hierarchical, authoritarian, unconditional cooperation hierarchical, manipulative, conditional negotiated cooperation conditional, authoritative, and dialogic initiated by the student and facilitated by the teacher student ontological authorial agency postponed exploited responsive self-generated didactic chronotope instruction (didactic time) the guiding pathway preset by educational experts (e.g., transmission of knowledge, research-based instruction, scaffolding) an individualized psychologized guiding path negotiated with the student to preset curricular endpoints (e.g., guided discovery) provocations, bringing alternative ideas, engaging in testing ideas autodidactic learning journey curriculum (didactic space) discrete, decontextualized curricular endpoints preset by educational experts holistic, contextualized, psychologized curricular endpoints preset by educational experts i-am-in-the-bigculture i-am-in-theworld assessment (didactic axiology) summative, preset by educational experts (e.g., tests, exams, credential, diploma) surveillance by educational experts (e.g., portfolio, dynamic assessment) collaboratively formative, answerability selfactualization, responsibility motivation (didactic participation) extrinsic (punishment and rewards) internalized, identified, integrated, selfregulated diverse personal interests and interests emergent in dialogue self-defined, self-actualized, interestand need-driven teacher-student epistemological relationship teacher as the expert for ignorant students who unconditionally accept the teacher’s truth guru, a wise person helping the student discover what have been discovered by him/her facilitator of dialogic community of learners a special resource for students’ selfassignments and learning journey student epistemological authorial agency unconditionally submit to the teacher’s assignments finding a personal interest in the curriculum defined by the society for them responding to critical dialogue in the learning community (culture making through response), “educated authorial reader” culture making through selfinitiated projects, “educated authorial writer” conclusion in this paper, i have discussed the three major espoused educational chronotopes: 1) the assignment chronotope, the most common in the conventional schools, focuses on making the students to arrive at the preset curricular endpoints; 2) the dialogic provocation chronotope, which is based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship; and 3) the journey chronotope based on polyphonic dialogic pedagogy that focuses on promoting the chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a89 students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). in a-chronotope of conventional schools, time is lesson, space is classroom, axiology is summative assessment of mark grades, participation is forced, and relationship is unconditional cooperation with the teacher. in dp-chronotope, time is responsive critical discussion testing ideas, desires, and values, space is space is the big culture — i.e., the culture of the entire humanity on all past, present, and future scales (bibler, 1991), -axiology is formative, participation is negotiated and constrained, and relationship is conditional collaboration with the teacher. in j-chronotope, time is a learning journey, space is the world, axiology is self-actualization and contribution to the society, participation is voluntary and negotiated, and relationship is respectful of non-participation and non-cooperation with the teacher (see table 1). i argue that in the contrast to dpand j-chronotopes, the espoused a-chronotope splits the ontological and didactic aspects of the educational chronotope and makes these aspects self-contained and independent of each other (although they can influence and interact with each other as independent entities). in the pand j-chronotopes, the ontology and didactics mutually constitute each other even, as i argued above, in the required learning experiences (although the required learning experiences can jeopardize the unity of the ontology and didactics). i have come to a conclusion that each of the educational chronotopes is defined by its generating goal that i call “teacher orientation”. as soon as, the educator sets this particular educational goal for him or herself, the corresponding chronotope starts emerging, generating, and unfolding through the educator’s consecutive decision making of how to promote and facilitate the accomplishment of this educational goal. for example, as soon as the teacher sets (i.e., rigidly prioritizes) his or her educational goal by requiring students to arrive at some particular preset curricular endpoints, the espoused achronotope (and, thus, a type of monologic pedagogy23) will emerge: the ontology and the didactics will spilt in the teaching curriculum, assignments will be designed, the learning activities will become purified, a punitive grading system based on summative assessment starts developing and so on. similarly, as soon as the teacher decides to focus on listening to the students’ subjectivities, the dp-chronotope will emerge with its series of curricular provocations based on exposing the students to alternative ideas, values, and perspectives. there has been a debate in educational literature (e.g., delpit, 1993) about whether authoritarian, monologic, education promoted by a-chronotope may be better than dialogic pedagogy for some students based on social class (e.g., working class) or culture (e.g., so-called “asian” culture). in my view, the key issue is “better” for what? for socialization in existing practices and institutions, for getting access to colleges, for getting high test scores, for engaging students in critical exploration of what is good for them, and so on. however, if the teacher prioritizes the students’ self-generated critical authorship, the jchronotope will emerge with its afterschool clubs of students’ choices (matusov, 2009a), the teacher’s suggestions (rather than requirements) (rancière, 1991), free-choice learning environment (falk & dierking, 2002), “free schools” (greenberg, 1992a, 1992b; holt, 1972; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2009), promotion of students’ self-government and self-initiated activities and projects. in my judgment, the espoused a-chronotope is supported by conventional school institutional constraints and western cultural traditions regarding what good guidance is about (de haan, 1999; rogoff, 2003). i hypothesize that these generating goals define the teacher’s theory-in-action (argyris & schön, 1978). their espoused theories involving ideologies of educational philosophies might be irrelevant for the actual practice or reflecting the 23 in my view, it is not by chance that bakhtin (1999) used pedagogical examples for illustrate extreme cases of excessive monologism. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a90 teacher’s struggle with their practice (i.e., wanting one thing but doing another thing). but this issue requires further investigation as well as ontological circumstances that support or hinder the diverse educational chronotopes. more sociocultural analysis of these chronotopes is needed: how institutions, cultures, power structure, economy, gender, and so on shape them and how these chronotopes shape these sociocultural aspects of human life. also, critique and limitations of the dpand j-chronotopes are needed as well in future both conceptual and empirical analysis. finally, search for other, alternative, possible educational chronotopes can be helpful. saying all that about generative goal jumpstarting an in-use pedagogical chronotope of teaching, i want to emphasize that an espoused particular pedagogical chronotope promoted by a teacher does not fully determine the nature of learning experiences by the students due to students’ activism, the teacher’s inconsistences, and emergent property of discourse. as sidorkin puts it and i agree with him, “no rules can guarantee that dialogue really happens, and dialogue may occur despite gravely monological forms of communication. once dialogue begins, no one can channel it, or manage it, or transform it, even for the noble aims of education” (sidorkin, 1999, p. 15). however, i argue that an espoused a-chronotope makes emergence of dialogic pedagogy more difficult than espoused dpand j-chronotopes as the latter facilitate (albeit never guarantee) dialogic pedagogy. the three major espoused educational chronotopes described in the paper are not the only possible scenarios. not only there is diversity inside of these three generic chronotopes (e.g., achronotope diversity: conventional education with preset curriculum and instruction vs. progressive education with preset curriculum and individualized psychologized instruction), but i am sure that there are more than 3 generic chronotopes. also, a teacher can have a mixture of espoused educational chronotopes while developing a complex and probably not very stable hybrid. this educational chronotopic diversity — both espoused and in-use — is worth of studying. currently, institutes of conventional schools have been organized to support the espoused achronotope because this chronotope serves well standards-based, skill-based, and knowledge-based modern economy, state bureaucracy, and prevalent public desires. however, like some observers, i see the beginning of a painful transition to agency-based economy and society through increasing prevalence computerization, robotization, telecommunication, and outsourcing both blue and white collar standardsbased labor (kaku, 2011; pink, 2009; zhao, 2009). may be i am too optimistic, but i see the recent us neo-liberal educational policy like bush’s “no child left behind” and obama’s “race to the top” as last, but very painful, kicks of dying horse. finally, recently several scholars (kukathas, 2003; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, submitted) challenge the educational value of critical dialogue rooted in ancient greek questionable assumption that “unexamined life is not worth living” (plato, 1997). in some cases, unexamined life is worth living and examined life is not worth living. thus, we could ask whether “promoting authorial agency rooted in critical dialogue” — the goal of dialogic pedagogy — represents a preset curricular endpoint in itself? my colleague and i (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) try to address this important issue by introducing the notion education as praxis of praxis24, according to which education differs from other practices by engaging students in investigating whether and what education is good for them. more investigation of this important issue is needed. 24 this notion is based on the conceptual opposition introduced by aristotle (2000). aristotle introduced the notions of poïesis — a practice, which goal, quality, and definition are predefined before the process of the practice, in advance, — and praxis — a practice, which goal, quality, and definition emerge in the practice itself. currently, with the standards-based reform movement, education is viewed as poïesis. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a91 references adler, m. j. 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(2009). catching up or leading the way: american education in the age of globalization. alexandria, va: ascd. chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.107 | vol. 3 (2015) a97 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word hip-hop hamlet (layout) final.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a41     hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin rockdale career academy peter smagorinsky the university of georgia abstract this study investigates the collaborative composing processes of a group of five high school seniors who constructed interpretations of each of the five acts of shakespeare’s hamlet through the medium of spoken word performances. the group composing processes were analyzed to identify how the students drew on conventions from the spoken word tradition to phrase and perform their interpretations. findings indicate that across the five spoken word performances, the retelling of the hamlet narrative involved a set of decisions that were both constrained and afforded by the rap medium. the students’ discussion of how to rewrite the story in the condensed poetic form of a rap required them to clarify events from shakespeare’s version and both summarize them and interpret them both in their discussion and in their own text. their interpretive work involved the incorporation of a variety of rap and other pop culture conventions such that their deliberation regarding word choice and accompanying performative elements necessitated careful consideration of the meaning that they found in shakespeare’s version of the story, itself an adaptation from extant cultural narratives. the study concludes with a consideration of their spoken word interpretations as comprising a hybrid discourse that enabled exploratory interpretive talk that contributed to their understanding of the drama through the collaborative composition of their own representational text. joanna l. anglin is an english teacher (rockdale career academy) and administrator in rockdale county, georgia, and a doctoral candidate in english education at the university of georgia. in 2011 she was awarded the georgia council of teachers of english state teacher of the year and has been chosen as a star teacher three times in the past decade, an award in which the student at each high school in georgia with the highest sat score is named the star student, and he or she then chooses the teacher who was most influential to him or her. she has also been chosen as an honor teacher several times, awarded when each student who is in the top 20 of his or her grade gets to choose a teacher to “honor” at honor’s night. in 2007, she was named the rockdale county technology integrating teacher of the year. anglin earned an ed.s. from piedmont college and her master of teaching and bachelor’s degrees from georgia college and state university and is also certified to teach gifted students and ap english. issn: 2325-3290 (online) hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a42 peter smagorinsky is distinguished research professor of english education at the university of georgia. he got his bachelor’s degree at kenyon college (1974) and taught high school english in the chicago area from 1976-1990 while earning his m.a.t (1977) and ph.d. (1989) from the university of chicago. his recent book, vygotsky and literacy research: a methodological framework (2011, sense) won the 2013 national council of teachers of english david h. russell research award for distinguished research in the teaching of english and the 2014 steve witte award from the special interest group in writing and literacies of the american educational research association. his newest book, the coedited (with valerie kinloch) volume from information age publishing, service-learning in literacy education: possibilities for teaching and learning, won the 2014 university of georgia servicelearning research excellence award. in 2014, corwin will publish his edited volume, teaching dilemmas and solutions in content-area literacy, grades 6-12. contact him at smago@uga.edu. �� vygotsky’s conflicting beliefs about the role of art in both society and human development reflect positions in a debate that continues to this day. in his earliest scholarly writing—his doctoral dissertation written in his early 20s as a work of literary criticism, with a focus on shakespeare’s hamlet—vygotsky (1971) took an elitist view of true art, whose status he restricted to only the greatest, most provocative work produced by a society. he spoke condescendingly of commonfolk expressions and creations as incapable of producing what he called an intelligent emotional response that may produce a higher level of realization in a reader who is cognizant of the conventions and codes through which the work is produced (see smagorinsky, 2011). toward the end of his brief career, vygotsky (2004) took a different tack, considering everyday art from a developmental standpoint. focused on the producer and not the product, as he had earlier, he asserted that the process of composing texts through cultural tools serves an expressive and representational role in a child’s development of concepts. from a developmental perspective, the product of this composing process need not meet standards for excellence, as is required in the german tradition of kultur—which values the greatest products of human creativity and intellect—that vygotsky (1971) appears previously to have endorsed in outlining the psychology of literary art. children’s drawings, for instance, might be crude in execution yet represent something of importance while simultaneously playing a role in the child’s appropriation of communicative symbol systems. developmentally, process supercedes product; aesthetically, the product has primacy. vygotsky’s (1971, 2004) contradictory perspectives on the status of artworks provide the template for intertextually-grounded debates in education about what should properly occupy the u.s. english/language arts curriculum; that is, the school subject dedicated to literature, writing, and language study. many (e.g., alvermann, 2010) have argued that works of popular culture—including such diverse texts as young adult literature, spoken word poetry, comic books, graphic novels, video games, and other media that are accessible to youth—should be central to the curriculum as a way to help adolescents voice their personal worlds in their academic work to the benefit of both. others (e.g., stotsky, 2000) assert that only those works that are part of the canonical dialogic stream that has withstood the scrutiny of the ages—particularly those that emerge from classical european traditions—are worthy as the basis for u. s. students’ school learning. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a43 this latter group argues that children’s education is debased when the curriculum is broadened beyond the traditional canon to include texts emerging from contemporary culture, particularly that which serves youth interests. rigorous scholarly studies further suffer, assert critics from both the popular press (malkin, 2004) and the research community (johnson, jackson, & gatto, 1995), when students compose texts in current, popular modes such as rap and anime. rather, they assert that only the traditional writing forms of narrative, exposition, persuasion, compare-and-contrast, and others historically required in school enable critical thinking and advanced academic work. in this research, we provide an analysis of five high school seniors enrolled in a suburban ap literature class who collaboratively created spoken word poetry as a means of understanding and interpreting hamlet. to study the processes through which they used the spoken word genre as a means for constructing and expressing their understanding of the canonical drama’s complexities, we inquired into the following questions. 1. which narrative perspective and plot elements did the students foreground in condensing each act’s action into a relatively brief spoken word poem? 2. what aspects of the play’s meaning potential did the students intend to depict, and through what symbolic means did they represent their interpretation of the play’s action? 3. what intertextual references did the students draw on, and how did they use those sources to represent their interpretive choices? 4. through the process of collaborative interpretation and composition, to what degree were the students’ discussions exploratory and generative? we assume that the classroom provided a hybrid setting in presenting the students the task of using a contemporary u.s. popular culture medium to engage with the language of a british play written in about 1601. this activity provided an occasion for white u.s. teens to revoice shakespeare’s action in a genre appropriated from the discourse practices of black u.s. cultural expression. our research questions are designed to direct our analytic attention to the manner in which the students undertook the assignment to engage interpretively with hamlet using the speech, sound, and expressive conventions of contemporary spoken word poetry. our inquiry takes place in an academic setting, the ap literature class, that has historically required college-level reading and writing of student, rather than interpretations through a medium of popular culture familiar to the students. theoretical framework we frame this study in terms of the social-cultural-historical theory outlined by vygotsky (e.g., 1987), which emphasizes the manner in which learning to think follows from immersion in cultural practices mediated by signs and tools, particularly speech. this mediation allows for appropriate ways of communicating to become established in particular settings (cf. bakhtin, 1981; wertsch, 1991). within these settings, idiosettings—settings within settings (fine, 1987)—may emerge in which established norms may be violated and reconstructed to accommodate genres typically excluded in such contexts. further, meaning emerges through joint social activity in relation to problems presented by the environment (tulviste, 1991). this activity may take on an exploratory and experimental dimension that enables imaginative projections of possible solutions. we focus first on youth culture and its classroom potential, then consider hybrid classroom spaces in which youth and popular culture take their place alongside the established “high culture” that since the time of matthew arnold (1869) has dominated u.s. college and high school literature curricula, especially that which governs the ap class. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a44 youth culture as mediat ional means “youth culture” refers to the norms, values, and practices recognized, shared, and acted upon by adolescents (rice, 1996). hagood, alvermann, and heron-hruby (2010) are among those who argue that allowing a wider range of textual forms, especially those from youth and popular culture, may provide possibilities for more students to have access to the curriculum than does a curriculum centered on canonical literature. youth culture incorporates texts from a variety of contemporary sources that appeal to and represent young people’s psychological need for differentiation from adults and their world (bartleharing, 1997). these texts have historically been characterized by a rejection or questioning of adult norms and values (schultze, anker, bratt, romanowski, worst, & zuidervaart, 1991; smagorinsky & taxel, 2005). those who view adolescent rebellion as part of the normal course of development understand young people’s acts of insubordination, such as suburban teenagers’ embrace of rap music, as a normative youth experience with strong intertextual roots. the medium of rap has grown from its origins in the black community to become standard fare for people of all heritages, in the u.s. and around the world. it has outgrown its roots in the spoken word performances of urban african american artists such as gil scott-heron, haki madhubuti, and others in the 1970s to become a genre that has transcended its origins. hip-hop routines have been appropriated beyond the world of rappers and into such diverse genres as jazz (herbie hancock), funk (maceo parker), pop (michael jackson), country and western (bubba sparxxx), fusion (bela fleck), celtic (manau), rai (khaled), klezmer (so called), and even the aryan supremacist movement, an ironic turn in which performers use hip-hop conventions to spread their message of racial hatred (e.g., the german musicians fler, bushido, and sido). in the study we are reporting, the students producing raps were not, like the hip-hop-oriented youth studied by kirkland (2008) and others, urban african americans. rather, they were suburban whites whose immersion in youth culture enabled them to know, understand, and be able to reproduce the conventions of rap music, while having little in common with the urban artists among whom the genre originated and flourished. their appropriation of these conventions illustrates the manner in which rap has become an important dimension of what young people of diverse backgrounds consider to be their musical heritage (huq, 2006). the degree to which rap conventions may be easily included in conventional school instruction is a matter of dispute, with many black scholars and practitioners (e.g., brown, 2005) concerned that rap may be “raped” by its appropriation by outsiders. on the other side of the cultural divide, traditionalists view rap as having a “retarding effect . . . on young black men through encouraging thuggish violence, misogyny, clownish behavior and crude materialism” (crouch, 2008). our interest in this study elides the concern that rap’s integrity might be threatened when used educationally in a predominantly white classroom, or that it is inherently vulgar and degrading and thus educationally inappropriate. rather, we investigate the possibility that rap, as a dimension of popular culture shared across racial and cultural groups, may provide a suitable poetic medium for literary interpretation for youth conversant with its conventions, scrubbed of sex and violence for the school setting – in spite of their centrality in hamlet and other shakespeare plays – that concern crouch and those who share his sense of propriety. hybrid classroom spaces for many years, educational researchers have criticized schools for operating according to dominant cultural values and practices (e.g., newman, griffin, & cole, 1989). amidst these critiques, the dominant culture in the u.s., that of upper and middle class whites, is reinforced from both scholarly hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a45 (hirsch, 2010) and policy (duncan, 2013) perspectives. dominant cultures use schools to impress their values on all learners (apple, 1996), often with the support of political and economic leaders (e.g., duncan, 2012). such policymakers view nondominant speakers and their speech as inferior to those of the dominant culture (see stotsky, 2000) and in need of continual remediation and testing to elevate them to the academic discursive norm. some have argued that hybrid classroom spaces provide one means of foregrounding students’ discursive conventions in classrooms so as to flatten power hierarchies and promote student learning (e.g., dyson, 1999). first author joanna constructed the hybrid zone in the current study to make the challenge of interpreting hamlet more accessible by assigning a task in which the students represented action in language and discourse forms from their youth culture’s musical heritage. this provision enabled interpretive expression in speech genres and social languages (bakhtin, 1986) with which they were familiar, as opposed to the conventions governing formal literary criticism that are expected on ap exams. this hybrid space—i.e., one that incorporates elements of more than one genre or community of practice—was designed under the assumption that when youth social and cultural values are encouraged and supported (even when they are not members of the cultural groups responsible for constructing new norms), students are more likely to find meaning in their schoolwork than when they are when confined to traditional academic discourse (cf. boaler, 1993; cribbs & linder, 2013). barton and tan (2009), relying on the work of moll, amanti, neff, and gonzalez (1992), created a conception of hybrid spaces that relies on two types of funds of knowledge and their related discourses: those drawn from family and those originating in peer groups. the peer, youth, and popular culture conventions available through rap served as the hybridizing discourse employed in this study’s focal classroom. the provision of this hybrid space fell within the tradition of teachers’ using popular culture to help students relate to the curriculum (alvermann, 2010) as a way to broaden the intertextual sources upon which students may draw to inform their thinking. intertextuality refers to the manner in which texts share characteristics that enable people to understand and use them through recognition of their formal traits and social purposes. each text serves as part of a chain that enables cognizance of codes and scripts, which in turn contributes to an approach to reading and writing strategically and knowledgeably within the expectations of the genre that the intertextuality provides. in this study, the use of rap conventions in shakespearean study in an ap literature course involves intertextual connections that are typically unavailable in such settings, thus our consideration of this class as providing a hybrid discursive space. popular culture is familiar to students in terms of its formal features and often involves themes that are consistent with those that run through canonical works, yet that are more specifically grounded in contemporary concerns (smagorinsky, 2008a). providing hybrid spaces in which adolescents undertake the study of classic texts by engaging them with popular culture forms thus has potential for promoting students’ connections with and understanding of both the range of textual forms employed and the social and cultural themes that afford them a meaning potential. the approach taken by joanna in her instruction was designed to provide access to interpretive possibilities of the conventional school curriculum for teens for whom shakespearean language and the discourse of literary criticism provided a barrier to understanding. other studies in this line of inquiry indicate that such deliberate instructional design can allow disaffected students from outside the cultural mainstream to engage with the school curriculum (smagorinsky, anglin, & o’donnell-allen, 2012) and enable new potential for students who affiliate with school to express their understandings of complex material in accessible forms (smagorinsky, cameron, & o’donnell-allen, 2007). hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a46 if thinking is social in origin and if cognitive development is promoted through engagement with people in conjunction with mediational tools (cole, 1996; vygotsky, 1987; wertsch, 1991), then hybrid spaces may serve as settings in which, through collective engagement with ideas, learners may experience growth by means of collaborative, generative, constructive, experimental, and developmental speech. this growth may be abetted by students’ use of exploratory talk (barnes, 1992); i.e., the emergent thinking afforded by the mediation of speech (vygotsky, 1987). intersubjec t iv i ty however, for collaboration to be beneficial to students, several conditions have to be in place. tudge (1992) argues that only when the students come to an “intersubjective understanding” is collaboration beneficial (p. 1366; cf. wertsch, 1985). intersubjectivity refers to the degree to which different people share a construction of a given setting and an understanding of how the setting is interpreted by others. in school, an intersubjective understanding requires similar conceptions of the goals, rules, and processes by which education is undertaken. for example, simply putting students in groups to work does not necessarily produce a hybrid space characterized by collaboration and its attendant benefits. rather, successful interactions follow from the development of a relational framework based on mutual understanding of the setting, goals, tasks, and procedures, and a disposition to support other group members (smagorinsky & o’donnell-allen, 2000). the success of any particular group activity typically derives from prior socialization to collaborative interpretation and composition in relation to strategic instruction (smagorinsky & fly, 1993). in our study, the task of collaboratively composing an interpretive spoken word performance based on the material provided by shakespeare in hamlet was framed by many months of preceding collaborative creative and multimodal interpretation. this social continuity characterizes intercontextuality (floriani, 1993), the succession of social arrangements and practices that, like intertextuality, links one episode to prior episodes such that fluency becomes available. the class activities that preceded the interpretive rap assignment relied on the individual students having a sufficient degree of intersubjectivity for engaging with the task and sharing a collective goal congruence with the teacher, even as other aspects of their knowledge and investment in the activity varied. the development of a relational framework based on intersubjectivity and requiring collaboration potentially enables students to engage in experimental play that helps them imagine new possibilities (vygotsky, 1978) for socially-situated discursive expression. vygotsky viewed play as rule-governed and thus not simply a source of unfettered pleasure or entertainment. indeed, as a process implicated in human development, he argued, play can be serious business indeed as learners of any age engage with a task imaginatively to envision new possibilities, many of which may not cohere into manageable plans but some of which emerge as durable and worth pursuing. central to this conception is the mediational role of speech (or, in some cases, other cultural tools) as students use generative exploratory talk. our goal with the research is to analyze the processes that emerged during one group’s composing processes in relation to the assignment to interpret hamlet through spoken word poetic performances. context of the investigation this study took place in joanna’s first-period senior ap english literature and composition class, which met every other day for 90 minutes on a block schedule. the school, one of four high schools in a county near a major southeastern u.s. metropolitan area, enrolled approximately 1,400 students. the course included the same students in both semesters, with data collection occurring between april 13 and may 13. enrolling only 14 students, the class, felt joanna, was more informal and conversational than hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a47 would be possible in a larger class. the makeup of the class was typical of the ap classes taught over a five-year period by joanna in this county: 50 percent white, 43 percent black, and 7 percent latin@. of these students, 71 percent were females and 43 percent were designated as gifted. the atmosphere of joanna’s classroom was informal by design. the students were allowed to bring breakfast to class, especially those who arrived late due to transportation issues and participated in the school’s free breakfast program. classroom discussions sometimes addressed real-world issues, such as the presentation of women in the media. joanna’s class represented an idioculture within the school’s more traditional interactive structure in that she made different hybrid spaces available for student talk that remained within the bounds of the teacher’s academic goals while affording students more vernacular speaking and interpretive opportunities. part i c ipants joanna chose to focus on this particular group of students—maggie, laurie, brianna, denny, and cameron (each white; all students’ names are pseudonyms)—because each student attended each class session recorded for the research, and because from among groups with perfect attendance, these students exhibited relatively low levels of off-task conflict, even as they frequently disagreed about how to compose their raps. the year of the data collection was the second in which joanna had taught all of the participants; she had previously taught them as tenth graders, although not all in the same class. even though the white students in the focal group might not appear diverse on the demographic surface, their experiences with school and in the ap english classroom were various. we next provide joanna’s brief profiles of each of these five students, based on her knowledge and impressions of them over a two-year period. maggie. maggie and laurie (described next) were binovular twins. maggie often spoke her mind in class discussions. during group work, she appeared comfortable giving the group her opinion, either about the task at hand or any other of a wide range of topics. maggie and laurie occasionally exhibited a sibling rivalry during class, including during the spoken word activity. in general, maggie was the more outspoken and dominant of the twins. laurie. laurie vacillated between being the quiet twin and trying to be heard. she often clashed with her sister in class about everything from borrowing maggie’s clothes without asking to whether or not she should break up with her boyfriend. to joanna’s surprise, they chose to room together at college the following fall. brianna. as the oldest of five children, the rest of whom were boys, brianna was used to acting as a parental figure, often chauffeuring her brothers from various practices even at the expense of her own education. this maternal stance was evident in her interactions with her group members, whom she often sought to keep on task. although she was balancing a busy schedule of ap courses and a part-time job, brianna remained the most focused member of her group. a people-pleaser in joanna’s view, brianna both attempted to keep the peace in her group and get the task done in a timely manner without being viewed as bossy. denny. denny was an anomaly in this group: he was the only male, he was not a high-performing student, he often skipped classes and did not turn in work, and he socialized primarily with students from outside the ap circle. his best friend, for example, was expelled earlier in the year for coming to school while under the influence of drugs—a behavior not, of course, specific to lower-track students, but one hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a48 perhaps more deftly managed by college-bound students within the school setting. still, denny offered constructive input to the group performances and took on a leadership role during later raps. cameron. probably the student with the busiest schedule, cameron seemed the least focused of all of the group members. she was juggling several ap courses during the time of the study, but her main concern was her boyfriend, who had enlisted in the military and was away at boot camp in anticipation of being shipped off to combat duty in iraq or afghanistan toward the end of obama’s first presidential term. she often came to class drowsy and seemed to have a difficult time staying awake due to conversing with him late at night. instruct ion prior to hamlet unit the unit on identity of which the hamlet study was included contained several works from different genres and time periods that concern a character who struggles to find him or herself in some way. in addition to hamlet, the selections included august wilson’s fences, ralph ellison’s invisible man, and a choice from among toni morrison’s the bluest eye and beloved, mary shelley’s frankenstein, aldous huxley’s brave new world, and khaled hosseini’s the kite runner. the instruction leading up to the spoken word poetry activity was designed to prepare students for succeeding on the ap exam, a requirement of teaching the course under the ap auspices. this exam requires literary interpretations based on “new criticism.” this approach to literary criticism, claimed to be “scientific,” emphasizes explication or "close reading" of the literary work irrespective of matters outside the text. rather, the goal is to come to an “objective determination” of “how a piece works” through close focus and analysis of the words on the page. the reader’s goal is to employ a formal, technical vocabulary (irony, denouement, etc.) to determine how a text’s form produces its self-contained meaning (olson, metzger, & ashton-jones, 1998). consistent with her hybrid approach, joanna tempered her fidelity to the ap curriculum and its values for the spoken word activity. from the beginning of the school year, joanna drew on the creativity of her students with activities designed to get them to engage with the texts in multiple ways, e.g., acting out excerpts from various plays to help students take on various characters’ perspectives (see smagorinsky, 1999; wagner, 1998). students often responded to journal prompts as a way to link their experiences reflexively to themes from the literature. additionally, students produced collaborative, creative projects, e.g., a symbolic object project in which they worked in groups to create an object that was both interactive and represented themes, characters, and concepts from the novel they had read. they also created body biographies (o’donnellallen, 2006) of major characters, i.e., full-sized human forms filled with pictures and words that represented a given character’s role and point of view in a literary work. students further created found poems, brought in songs from their own music collections that related to literary themes, created movie trailers for the novels, did journal writing in response to literary themes, and had other opportunities to work in multimodal and constructive ways in making meaning through textual, interpersonal, and intrapersonal engagement. the idea of interpreting hamlet through spoken word poetry thus represented one iteration of, and served as an intercontextual link in, joanna’s instructional approach of using multimodal and popular culture textual forms in conjunction with canonical texts as a way of enabling students to express their understandings through texts closer to their own experiences, even if the hip-hop world was not central to hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a49 their family and community practices but rather one of many mediational means appropriated from the broader youth culture. the hamlet unit joanna introduced hamlet as a “play full of questions,” framing their reading by asking them to identify the characteristics of a tragic hero, a genre they had experienced in the fall semester through their reading of othello. joanna tried to balance strong scaffolding to assist the students’ understanding of the most archaic aspects of the text with providing opportunities for students’ constructivist engagement with the play. the spoken word poetry activity provided a familiar and accessible genre through which students could make meaning collaboratively in relation to hamlet. to help students understand what was being asked of them, joanna showed the students a video of one of the raps her students had created the previous year. she asked the students what made this exemplar a good rap and what could have been better. she then had them split into groups and gave them the following directions for creating their own raps: 1. write a 10-20 line rap. it should have a rhythm and a rhyme scheme. 2. it should summarize act i. 3. it should include key characters, events, and ideas, and can include quotes from the play or famous songs. 4. the whole group must be involved in the performance in some way. after signing (or having their parents sign) informed consent forms to participate in the research and being issued audio recorders, the students were given roughly 20 minutes to summarize act i as a group and turn it into a rap, which they then performed for the class. this process was repeated for each of the remaining four acts. we make no pretense that the students’ performance of their interpretive poems came from their own initiative. we recognize that, in responding to an assignment, they might be viewed as simply giving the teacher what she wanted. we are comfortable with the idea that, in school, teachers often design instruction based on their beliefs about students’ needs, even if students don’t participate in the planning of activities (see hillocks, 1995, for a defense of reflective practice in the design of writing activities and instruction). we are also not claiming that the students participated in writing interpretive raps as part of their lived experience in a hip-hop community, as might urban african american youth. rather, we view rap as part of youth musical heritage and thus a cultural resource through which to construct an interpretive text that a reflective practitioner incorporated into a year-long exploration of texts through multiple means. method data col lec t ion during the four week unit on hamlet, which came right before the ap english literature and composition exam in may, joanna observed the students while they read, performed, and discussed each act of the play. she recorded her observations both during the class period using an audio recorder and after the class period in expanded field notes. during the composition of the raps, joanna recorded her observations of the group using the audio recorder and a research journal. she provided recorders by which the students captured the discussions involved in their process of composing, practicing, and performing their raps. joanna then transcribed these recordings into text files that were loaded in the qualitative data analysis software atlas.ti. this software enables researchers to organize and analyze hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a50 both verbal and nonverbal texts and to analyze data across corpi. each discussion transcript served as a single document on which to apply a coding scheme of our own construction, which we describe next. data analys is following initial informal reading of the data corpus, the transcripts of the composing sessions were collaboratively coded by both authors of this study (see smagorinsky, 2008b, for a rationale for the reliability available through collaborative and dialogic, rather than independent, coding). codes were applied to each student’s speaking turn. the coding system was based on a prototype developed from prior studies in this line of inquiry on multidimensional composing conducted by smagorinsky and various colleagues (e.g., smagorinsky & coppock, 1994, 1995a, 1995b; smagorinsky & o’donnell-allen, 1998a, 1998b; zoss, smagorinsky, & o’donnell-allen, 2007) and modified for this study during the process of analysis. each student speaking turn comprised the segment to which codes were applied. the prototype provided superordinate categories, such as the students’ composing processes, social processes, attention to the source text (hamlet), intertextual references, references to the research process, and the student performative text. the current study necessitated a specific set of subcodes developed dialogically and inductively in conjunction with preliminary and formal readings of the data. for instance, in the category of intertextual references, the students made many references to hip-hop conventions (e.g., signifying, call-and-response, sampling), a number of which have deeper roots in african american and west african cultures (gates, 1988). the codes and frequencies for each are available in table 1. table 1: codes and frequencies code   act  1   act  2   act  3   act  4   act  5   composing  process             prewriting:  content  analysis:  character   8   16   17   14   5   prewriting:  content  analysis:  global  planning   4   1   4   9   7   prewriting:  content  analysis:  narrative  structure   21   28   16   24   79   prewriting:  word  choice   13   15   19   22   27   prewriting:  word  choice:  affirmation   5   1   6   1   2   prewriting:  word  choice:  composing  through  play   0   19   4   9   7   prewriting:  word  choice:  critique   3   4   6   9   7   prewriting:  word  choice:  evaluation   6   7   1   2   10   prewriting:  word  choice:  repetition   15   11   2   7   8   prewriting:  word  choice:  rhyme   20   18   25   26   22   revision:  composing  through  play   1   4   1   1   0   revision:  word  choice   6   12   27   16   1   writing:  final  text   12   0   11   13   2   writing:  provisional  text   26   20   46   39   28   writing:  repetition   0   9   11   14   8   intertextual  references             canonical  literature:  conventions   2   3   0   0   0   hip-­‐hop  culture:  call  and  response   14   0   0   0   0   hip-­‐hop  culture:  conventions   16   2   32   11   2   hip-­‐hop  culture:  performance  convention   10   0   16   7   0   hip-­‐hop  culture:  sampling   11   0   26   1   0   hip-­‐hop  culture:  signifying   2   0   0   1   0   pop  culture   4   2   12   3   0   off  task   28   44   162   117   186   social  processes             affirmation   7   0   1   2   1   logistics   2   0   22   14   2   play   20   8   8   2   6   hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a51 play:  play  that  becomes  composition   3   1   0   3   0   request  clarification   6   4   11   6   4   role  assignment:  scribe:  request  clarification   4   2   3   6   1   role:  procedural  leader   23   15   39   48   31   role:  scribe   11   19   12   2   9   self-­‐assessment   1   3   1   3   3   self-­‐mockery   2   7   0   2   0   source  text             interpretation   16   31   43   31   36   summary   11   11   33   32   53   student  performative  text             rehearsal:  affirmation   11   0   1   0   0   rehearsal:  beat   0   0   5   13   1   rehearsal:  choreography   23   0   2   0   0   rehearsal:  coordination   11   0   6   2   34   rehearsal:  critique   10   0   1   0   5   rehearsal:  evaluation   13   0   0   4   0   rehearsal:  provisional  performance   33   5   12   12   13   rehearsal:  repetition   2   7   9   5   2   rehearsal:  revision   8   2   2   7   0   rehearsal:  self-­‐assessment   8   0   0   1   0   role  assignment:  beat   0   0   4   9   4   role  assignment:  character   5   1   0   0   0   role  assignment:  dancer   8   0   1   0   0   role  assignment:  evaluation   3   0   5   0   0   role  assignment:  music   11   0   7   0   0   role  assignment:  rapper   5   3   9   37   30   role  assignment:  role  approval   11   1   1   8   4   role  assignment:  role  rejection   5   2   4   14   2   role  assignment:  singers   6   0   2   0   0   role  playing   14   0   0   0   0   teacher-­‐imposed  framework   11   3   15   8   0   findings the students’ collaborative composition of interpretive raps incorporated both formal and procedural knowledge emerging from a variety of sources. they were produced within the constraints of the assignment and related school limitations, both structural and imposed (e.g., the length of class periods) and ethereal and constructed (issues of propriety in what was acceptable to include in the performance). the process of composing the raps enabled the students to generate new knowledge about the play through their efforts to represent it in a popular culture medium, a phenomenon noted in prior work in this line of inquiry (see smagorinsky & o’donnell-allen, 1998b, for an account of how the process of collaboratively composing an interpretive text can generate new insights). hybrid possibilities were afforded within this deliberately constructed environment, enabling the students to engage in exploratory talk that allowed for their vernacular language to work in dialogue with the formal language of shakespeare and the popular culture conventions of the rap genre. in order to produce their interpretive raps, the students engaged in dialogic processes in which they explored the play’s meaning, considered rap conventions through which to express their interpretation, called on additional cultural knowledge to include in their texts, and jointly composed their poetic texts. these processes were dialogic in both the historical and immediate senses outlined by bakhtin (1981): historical in that the students drew on a play written between 1599 and 1602 and based on antecedent versions of the hamlet tale, infused with students’ own instantiation of prior experiences hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a52 and embellished with rap and other popular culture conventions; and immediate in that they distributed their turns and made roughly equal contributions to the group composition during the class session itself. the students engaged in an extended prewriting discussion that produced provisional lines that the students then reconsidered and revised in light of both the play’s action and potential means of expression appropriated from the hip-hop genre. additionally, they needed to embellish and accessorize the text with performative elements, including sound effects, choral components, role assignments, choreography, music, beat, and related aspects of spoken word poetry (fisher, 2008). we next detail the processes engaged in by these students across the span of their five interpretive raps. narrat ive perspec t ive and plot focus the composition of each of the five interpretive raps required two essential decisions: which character should narrate the action, and thus which perspective to adopt in telling and interpret the story; and which story, from among the many possibilities available in each act, upon which to base their rap. in appendixes 1-5—one appendix dedicated to each of the play’s five acts—we provide brief summaries of the overall shakespearean action, followed by the raps composed by the students. we illustrate these processes with the group’s initial work in interpreting the play’s first act. in what follows, they launched their discussion with a set of possibilities that helped them focus on what they considered to be the most important plot elements to retell and the perspective that they felt best represented their understanding of the drama. maggie: i wanted to start with the king in the garden and talk about him getting bit by a snake, and then it wasn’t really a snake—psych! it was his brother, and then— laurie: my name is hamlet, what? my mom’s a harlot, what? maggie: my mom’s a whore. cameron: harlot rhymes. laurie: i know. that’s pretty much the point. [the students exchange 5 lines of joking about the topic, then 7 lines about rhyming possibilities.] maggie: you know you’re going to be hamlet, right? [to denny] denny: what? maggie: yeah, you’re the only boy. [the students exchange 6 lines about serving as backup dancers.] brianna: [singing] baby, you’ve got it—uh, huh— denny: yeah, just bust a move—that’s what it is. [starts snapping] just bust a move. maggie: and then, towards the end, when the ghost is talking to him, we can say “bust a move” instead of “go do something.” laurie: we need to write, “king hamlet was a poindexter.” maggie: whoa! denny: he got killed by a serpent brother. laurie: and then the guy went and married my mother. [the students exchange 4 lines about the lines they have generated.] denny: i’m king hamlet! cameron: my dad got killed—and then went a married my motha. [the students exchange 4 lines about the quality of these lines.] maggie: my dad got killed— hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a53 brianna: — by his serpent brother [prompting maggie, who is writing it down]. and then he went — maggie: i know—and then the guy went and married my motha. their exploration of the play’s meaning began with their identification of a starting point for their rap, which suggests their understanding of where the significant action of the play begins. the first possibility provided a metaphorical interpretation of the king’s death by his serpentine brother. the group then shifted the speaker’s role and narrative perspective to prince hamlet, opening his rendition of the story with his lament over his father’s death and his view that his mother has betrayed his family by marrying claudius. as the transcript indicates, the students attempted to provide their interpretation within the conventions of hip-hop’s rhyme structure and linguistic traditions, including several instances of signifying, i.e., a form of repartee originating in african american culture and typically involving ironically phrased insults (gates, 1988; lee, 1993); and their sampling of well-known raps, such as denny’s contribution of “yeah, just bust a move,” taken (like many of their rap sources) from a classic rather than contemporary performance, this one a 1989 rap by young mc. their attention to these factors involved considerable attention to diction, with 13% of the codes assigned to word choice categories. the interpretive raps for subsequent acts involved similar sorts of processes, with the narrative perspective shifting for each composition. their discussion of the second act began with the same central problems: which action to focus on, given denny’s observation that “the first [line is] the hardest,” and which character to narrate the action. after the group determined that the act involved, as maggie said, “everybody’s spying on people” and laurie’s observation that “everybody thinks hamlet’s crazy,” maggie said, “i can rap it, and i can be ophelia.” the play’s complexities did not call for easy or formulaic interpretive solutions, as evidenced by the fact that for each act, the group went through a unique process of determining the action’s speaker and perspective; and in relation to this decision, which action to feature and where that action would begin in their rap. for their composition of their act iii rap, the students began with a discussion of several issues of role and format—the beat they would follow, their individual roles within the performance—in conjunction with key decisions in terms of what action they should depict and which character to employ for the story’s narrative perspective. the following excerpt from their discussion illustrates these processes: denny: what’s the beat? brianna: i don’t know. that’s what i’m trying— maggie: we should just start with our usual—“so someone walked into some room—“ brianna: nah, i don’t want to do that. denny: “so, hamlet walked in today.” well, that wasn’t bad. um—something about hamlet being mad, i don’t know. cameron: like, crazy? or, like, mad? denny: like—crazy. this discussion ultimately led to the group’s decision to use prince hamlet as the narrator of their act iii rap. although shakespeare’s original text for act iii focuses mostly on other characters’ reactions to what they believe to be hamlet’s madness, the students’ rap focused on how those actions might have hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a54 affected hamlet as the rap’s narrator, a limited viewpoint in the original play. additionally, their positioning of hamlet as the speaker of the rap moved him into an active role, a deviation from conventional interpretations of shakespeare’s tragic hero as one plagued by indecision, a problem typified by the protagonist’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. the students framed their interpretive rap of act iv around an initial summary of the action provided by maggie, which the group drew on in their global planning for their rap. for the construction of their rap for act iv, the students deviated from the character-focused perspectives for acts i (prince hamlet), ii (ophelia), and iii (prince hamlet, again) to provide a third-person narrator for act iv, which produced a more summative rap with less emphasis on how each event affects the individual characters. brianna: well, what happened in this act? maggie: polonius got killed. denny: hamlet got captured by pirates. maggie: okay, polonius got killed, so hamlet got sent away. laertes found out, so he came back. now the pirates—are bringing hamlet back. and they’re going to fight. and laertes is going to kill hamlet. and ophelia’s dead. denny: it’s all about poison tips. umm—sword and the poison in the wine. maggie: too much poison. denny: [singing to the tune of the 90s song] heck of this poison. [the students exchange 5 lines of discussion about the recording device] brianna: okay. anyway. denny: so, our first line is gonna be—[pause] what? maggie: yeah, it is. something about polonius— brianna: “hamlet finally snaps—“ maggie: “and stabs the rat.” [laughs] just kidding, that doesn’t rhyme with “snaps.” “hamlet finally snapped, and he made this rap.” no, “and he started to rap.” [laughs] i’m gonna be like, “hamlet finally snapped and he made this rap.” denny: we always have a little intro thing. their summary was not chronological, instead devoting one couplet to each of a series of key events. their interpretive performance again departed from producing a literal account of the play and instead reconstructed the action within the conventions of the rap genre. the students’ rap for act v began with an homage to their rap for act i, after which they took the perspective of a third-person narrator to tell their story. the students focused on a set of key incidents while omitting others, such as hamlet’s conversation with horatio about his being sent to england and the arrival of fortinbras at the end of the play. by ending with a couplet centered on the “two who fought,” one of whom was hamlet, instead of fortinbras’ ascension to the throne of denmark, the students concentrated their interpretation on hamlet, the narrator of two of their five raps and the character most central to their attention during the discussion that produced this composition. although the students’ rap focused on what they considered to be the major plot events of act v, the order of events in their rap did not correspond to shakespeare’s. the condensed quality of their rap suggests their view of act v as a rapid-fire series of events, which they combined and edited to produce not just a summary but a new text of their own. the following excerpt follows their process of composition about two-thirds of the way into the session: hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a55 cameron: so, hamlet, like he found out in this act that ophelia died—in the last act. and they had to bury her. laurie: so, “laertes finds out his, um, father—” brianna: “laertes’ already—” um, sorry [for talking over laurie]. laurie: “his father and sister are dead. and he swears that he’ll harm hamlet’s head.” maggie: “that’s when he puts a ransom on hamlet’s head.” laurie: “and he puts a ransom on hamlet’s head.” yeah. cameron: okay. laurie: “laertes finds out his father and—his family is dead.” maggie: “and then he puts a ransom on hamlet’s head.” laurie: no. “he and the king put a ransom on hamlet’s head.” the actions referenced in this section—claudius and laertes plotting together to kill hamlet— actually occur in act iv. however, the students chose to highlight the duplicity of these two characters in reiterating their machinations against hamlet. although claudius’s role was eventually omitted from their final line, his inclusion in their discussion suggests their understanding of his role in the plot to kill hamlet. inter textual re f erences simply the process of interpreting one text (hamlet) through another (the raps) produced a set of intertextual relations. we next more specifically illustrate the intertextual nature of the group’s interpretive poems with illustrations from across the five raps they produced, detailing how the process of composing their rap both depicted their understanding of the play’s action and simultaneously provided a medium that fostered their engagement with the characters’ interactions. in doing so the process contributed to understandings that, we infer, would not otherwise be available, in that they emerged through the process of composition rather than residing whole in their memories. specific hip-hop conventions. from the earliest attempt to create the raps, the students included hip-hop culture with the call-and-response features of laurie’s line in their act i interpretation, “my name is hamlet, what? my mom’s a harlot, what?” the group engaged in sampling from hip-hop music, not only denny’s “bust a move” contribution but brianna’s “baby, you’ve got it, uh huh.” later in the act i rap, maggie suggested they “say ‘word’ at the end” of each line of their rap, which the students decided not to include but which served as part of their exploratory composing process. other suggestions did not make the final cut, including brianna’s sampling of “wiggety wiggety whak” from the kriss kross song “jump.” although sampling was not part of the requirements for the rap, the students incorporated this convention freely in borrowing archetypal rap phrasings in their construction of their act 1 poem. later raps in the series included additional sampling. the students considered, for instance, borrowing the tune of young mc’s “bust a move” and the theme song from the television show fresh prince of bel-air as vehicles for their own composition, without settling on either. the playful sampling later became part of the actual composition of the rap, as when brianna mirrored maggie’s comment, “yeah, that’s what he had said” with a phrase from hip-hop culture, “so, what had happened was,” which they eventually incorporated into their own rap. maggie followed suit by sampling rapper b.o.b.’s “nothin’ on you,” prompting brianna and laurie to then rap the song for the group. such exchanges did not always produce material included in their own rap, but suggest the exploratory, playful character of the hybrid space in which they worked and its potential for generating ideas that might or might not be included in their final text. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a56 the students’ rap involved parallel construction and repetition (“i told—“) to focus the listener on hamlet’s role in act iii. they achieved this emphasis through hip-hop conventions grounded in older forms of formal african american discourse, in particular the use of anaphora, the repetition of words at the beginning of adjacent clauses for amplified rhetorical effect. their choice of this device highlighted hamlet’s presumed ambivalence toward ophelia (“i can’t figure out why she’s complaining, i told her i’d write her a letter”) and his continued frustration with his mother’s “incestuous” marriage to claudius. the rap for act iv relied on more advanced rapping conventions, such as the notion of “flow” in order to provide their rap with authenticity. flow refers to the rhythms and rhymes of a rap’s lyrics and how they function together along with other elements of delivery such as pitch, timbre, and volume so that the performer stays on beat and amplifies points through the delivery (krims, 2001). during the coconstruction of their rap, the students made references to “flow” during both the prewriting (15 codes) and revision (31 codes) phases. the passage below illustrates their concern about how “flow” might affect the quality of their performance: brianna: it’s really hard to rap—try rapping that. maggie: “ophelia’s gone mad/ ‘cause hamlet killed her dad. laertes’ back from france/ to kill hamlet with a lance. ophelia slipped and fell/ the queen came to tell.” denny: that’s not hard to rap. maggie: yeah, i know. brianna: but it doesn’t flow. denny: yeah, it does. maggie: the last one didn’t either, though. i got up there and it was so hard. brianna: [emphatically] yeah, i know. later in their composing process, the group returned to the convention of “flow” in an attempt to reconcile the difficulties they were having with these lines: maggie: “ophelia’s gone mad”—six. “’cause hamlet killed her dad”—six. [repeats lines faster, as in an actual rap] “ophelia’s gone mad ‘cause hamlet killed her dad.” that’s six. okay. “laertes’ back from france.” “laertes is back from france”— seven. “to kill hamlet with a lance”—seven. [the students exchange 4 lines about who will perform the rap.] maggie: i’m not rapping again. [pause] well, [practicing the rap] “ophelia’s gone mad ‘cause hamlet killed her dad. laertes is back from france to kill hamlet with a lance.” those aren’t bad at all. okay. denny: um, that’s not going to work. maggie: “but got stopped by a pirate ship.” [pause] “hamlet was sent on a trip, but he got stopped by a pirate ship.” will that work? brianna: i thought it was just “got stopped by a pirate ship” not “but he got stopped by a pirate ship.” maggie: how about, “but got stopped”? [writing it down] “but got stopped by a pirate ship.” that’s nine. denny: can we just, like, make a new line instead of those? “he got stopped by a pirate ship.” [pauses, offers an alternative line] “the pirates took him captive, and now he’s not very active.” hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a57 although maggie was able to identify for the group what was causing the issue with the “flow” of the lines—the difference in the number of syllables between the individual lines—she was unable to correct the issue and maintain the integrity of the rap. both brianna and maggie offered suggestions, but it was not until denny suggested an entirely new line—“the pirates took him captive, and now he’s not very active”—that the group was able to conquer their issues with flow in these sets of lines. additionally, the discussion of flow, and the issues surrounding it, led the group into a consideration of one of the most contested motifs in shakespeare’s play, and an interpretive problem around which any reading of the play revolves: hamlet’s psychological paralysis. the group’s negotiation of how to interpret hamlet’s orientation to action was a critical dimension of their interpretation. composi t ion o f an interpret ive text reducing an act from a play of the complexity of hamlet to a short poetic rap requires decisions regarding what is most critical to the drama’s action. the play opens with a series of compelling incidents, from the king’s sudden death, to his ghost’s appearance, to hamlet’s lament over his mother’s hasty remarriage to claudius. the students quickly zeroed in on their chosen narrator hamlet’s bemoaning his mother’s marriage to his uncle and their characterization of claudius as a “serpent” and gertrude as a “harlot.” these characterizations were interpretive and symbolic and set the stage for their subsequent depictions of these characters and their roles in the drama. they further positioned hamlet as one victimized and manipulated by nefarious relatives and the endless plotting in which they engage for the remainder of the play and, by extension, in the rap. the students thus did not simply summarize act i, but engaged in a collaborative, interpretive composition that produced a new text in relation to shakespeare’s play, which itself was derived by the playwright from extant tales originating in scandinavia, the roman empire, and other ancient sources. like shakespeare, the students took an existing story and retold it on their own terms and in a new genre. their speaker characterized gertrude as a “whore” or “harlot” for what they saw as her betrayal of king hamlet and, by implication, prince hamlet and denmark. we do not bring to bear criteria for evaluating the quality of their rap in terms of hip-hop conventions or other literary values. our task is to document the social, dialogic, and cognitive work involved in their generation of their spoken word performance in the setting of this suburban classroom. we next detail more specifically the interpretive processes in which the group engaged, drawing on examples from across the five raps they produced in relation to the drama. moving from literal reading to figurative interpretation. we coded the students’ comments on the text of act iv almost evenly between summative (32) and interpretive (31). this ratio is not surprising considering the action-focused structure of the group’s rap. however, their composition centered on the nature of the action itself, as opposed to how the audience is presented with the action. this subtle difference focused the audience’s attention back on prince hamlet, even though he is absent from shakespeare’s rendition of the story for a large portion of this act: brianna: i thought it was just “got stopped by a pirate ship” not “but he got stopped by a pirate ship.” maggie: how about, “but got stopped”? [writing it down] “but got stopped by a pirate ship.” that’s nine [lines]. denny: can we just, like, make a new line instead of those? “he got stopped by a pirate ship.” [pause] “the pirates took him captive, and now he’s not very active.” hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a58 maggie: oh! “the pirates took him captive, but it doesn’t matter ‘cause he was never active.” denny: oh, my god. maggie: no, no. something about— denny: it’ll take forever to say that— maggie: something about him, you know, about how he never acts, like he never does anything. he always says he’s going to but he doesn’t. you know? denny: yeah. [pause] “the pirates took him captive—“ maggie: [joins in] “captive” denny: it’s act 4. maggie: “the pirates took him for ransom but it sucks ‘cause he’s really handsome.” denny: “he’s finally become active”? maggie: “the pirates took him captive, and he’s chosen to be active.” cameron: yeah, i think that’s a good one. the students attended to the role of the pirates, who were central to the plot of act iv in that they provided hamlet with a means of getting back to denmark after being sent to england. they used this development to shift their focus to the effect of this “trip” on hamlet—“he’s chosen to be active.” shakespeare’s hamlet does not try to kill claudius or plot against him. the students’ rap, however, infused the role of hamlet with a new commitment to intentional action. by manipulating the order of events toward the end of their rap, the students drew attention to hamlet and his change in motivation. this shift in narrative focus de-emphasized claudius’ manipulation of laertes, which is the key plot development in shakespeare’s version of the story, and featured instead this fundamental change in the play’s titular character’s disposition. their process of discussion took them from their initial reliance on conventional interpretation—“and now he’s not very active”—to their ultimate decision that hamlet has chosen to be active, an affordance available through the structure of the interpretive rap assignment. plot reconfiguration. we coded the group’s act ii rap as more interpretive (31 codes) than summative (11 codes). the group’s interpretive work was evident as they discussed claudius’s reaction to both hamlet’s behavior and polonius’s news that hamlet’s response followed from his love for ophelia: laurie: say, “my dad thinks he’s in love—“ brianna: “my dad thinks he’s in love.” laurie: “and the king takes push to shove.” maggie: that doesn’t make any sense. i don’t even know what that means. laurie: it does, too. denny: what does “push to shove” mean? maggie: yeah, i don’t know. cameron: when push comes to shove—like, that’s the thing she’s playing off of. denny: i still don’t know what that means, though. brianna: it’s hard to find— cameron: like, people would say, when push comes to shove, like, it’s what’s going to happen because it’s a last resort. denny: when push comes to shove. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a59 the opportunity to argue about rhymes and word choice enabled the students to decipher and interpret the finer points of the play. laurie’s suggestion for a closing line, “so, now he’s gonna go kill the king but won’t until he hears the actors sing,” deviated from the plot—the actors do not sing in shakespeare’s version—while holding true to the intent of hamlet’s plot to catch claudius. by this point in the creation of the rap, the students seemed to feel comfortable enough with both shakespeare’s text and their own to take such creative and interpretive license. as argued by smagorinsky and coppock (1995a), such reconfiguring of plots does not indicate a misunderstanding of the literal storyline. rather, it suggests attention to the emotional qualities of the action and how they may be depicted in new transmediational texts. we borrow this term from suhor’s (1984) conception of a semiotic curriculum to describe the use of a new medium in which to inscribe whatever meaning is understood in a source text. for suhor, this process involves transforming what is available from one textual form into a distinctly different sign system, such as interpreting a poem by means of a sculpture. in this group the students took one stage drama’s spoken action and retold it in a spoken word performance, working within the same symbol system, but reducing the text to a condensed poetic form and adding music, beat, and dance to supplement the words’ meaning. this process suggests that transmediation is not necessarily a strict mode-to-mode transformation but may involve more subtle manipulations within and around sign systems. discussion through this series of activities, the students collaborated to create five distinct yet interrelated raps that, while interpreting shakespeare’s play, also were unique texts themselves. just as shakespeare drew on existing stories to create hamlet, the students used hamlet as a vehicle for their own version of the story, at times manipulating such elements as the plot sequence to highlight particular developments that they found worthy of emphasis. their decisions required the identification of which point of view to take on the events, which plot elements to feature, which language through which to represent their understanding most precisely, which aspects of popular culture to include, and ultimately which story to tell. their raps thus served as interpretive mediums through which the students were able to take one of literature’s most challenging and compelling stories and retell it in a way that required them both to engage with shakespeare’s version of the hamlet story in order to agree on its meaning and to reconstruct their understanding in a new form. the hybrid space afforded by the activity enabled the students to integrate ideas, characters, and plot from hamlet with lyrics and conventions from popular culture, primarily rap. this incorporation of pop culture allowed them to draw on their personal experiences with youth culture to inform their school composing. other authors (alvermann, 2008; hagood et al., 2010; hill, 2009; low, 2011) have argued for the inclusion of popular culture texts within the official classroom space. simply incorporating these elements, however, would not be sufficient if they did not contribute to the students’ process of meaning construction. as the transcripts suggest, the requirement to work within the conventions of hip-hop performances in service of interpreting hamlet forced the students to compose poetically and thus use language economically so as to afford the greatest possible meaning for each term included in their rap. the requirement to cryptify a long and complex play into a series of relatively short raps produced discussions in which the students carefully considered each word choice so that it retained fidelity to the original, albeit with reconstructions of the plot line to foreground particular emphases that they felt overshadowed other plot developments. simultaneously, they needed to work within more contemporary hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a60 expressive conventions with which they were familiar. this process appeared to contribute to the meaning that they ultimately found in the play. perhaps simply requiring a poetic interpretation, one not attentive to rap conventions, would have provided the same opportunity to compose a meaningful text. in the absence of an available poetic contrast, we can only speculate that the rap requirement introduced an element that allowed for considerable playful discussion through which the students determined which conventions to employ. this quality is evidenced by our coding for occasions when the students engaged in composing process/prewriting/word choice/composing through play and social process/play/play that becomes composition. these playful processes served to enable experimental discussions that, while potentially veering off task, on occasions helped to shape the ultimate content of each rap. the availability of popular culture references appeared to help shape the parameters of the hybrid space as one that accommodated the students’ familiar youth worlds and attendant interests and means of expression. this playful setting appeared to provide students with the opportunity to experiment with interpretive possibilities, some of which they discarded and some of which they retained in their final versions of the poems. this process appears to be substantiate other arguments for including possibilities for exploratory talk in classrooms as a way of working through the meaning potential of different ideas and ways of expressing them (e.g., barnes, 1992). we see this study serving several purposes. first, it introduces a pedagogy for engaging with hamlet and other difficult works of literature that, at least in the setting of one ap course, appeared to enable students to advance their understanding of the drama. attempting the activity in less rarified settings would enable greater understanding of the manner in which such opportunities benefit students across the broader range of cultural heritage, investment, engagement, and academic achievement that typical school populations include. theoretically, this study contributes to work in various social-cultural-historical and dialogic epistemologies that consider the role of discourse in human development. this perspective has emphasized the potential of exploratory speech for trying out ideas during a process of talking and experimentation without concern for judgment regarding the form or content of the initial expression of a possibility. such affordances provide alternative idiosettings within the formal confines of school that enable students to bypass the restrictive, formal, official modes of speech that constrain the possibilities for learners to engage with ideas in social languages familiar to them. school is designed to promote learning opportunities, yet often limits learning by circumscribing the language through which ideas may be considered and explored. this problem becomes compounded when teachers assume authoritarian stances in relation to students, given their greater conversance with academic discourse and more formal understanding of canonical literature. our study demonstrates the possibilities available to white, college-bound suburban students when hybrid spaces are made available to advance their interpretive work, albeit in language that some might consider inferior due to its origins in popular culture (e.g., stotsky, 2000). the presence of conservative perspectives regarding which speech genres are appropriate for academic inquiry complicates any recommendation for wider use. indeed, the new common core state standards (ccss) recently imposed on u.s. schools specifically endorse the new critical value on reading like a detective in order to “focus on what lies within the four corners of the text” (coleman & pimental, n. d.). this emphasis undoubtedly works against the sort of constructivist possibilities available through the interpretive rap hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a61 activity, particularly when teachers’ work status becomes a function of how well students perform on assessments aligned with the ccss. our analysis, however, is designed to identify the socio-cognitive work undertaken in this setting, not to judge hip-hop conventions and references in relation to classic academic discourse. if anything, we conclude that the speech conventions of this popular culture medium enabled, rather than suppressed, intellectual work in the classroom for these students, suggesting that the narrow definition of “close reading” required by the ccss is woefully insufficient for tapping students’ prior knowledge and the intertextual, dialogic potential it affords. the students in this study engaged in a close reading that was informed by elements from outside the text, suggesting that knowledge of literary technique that is limited in application to the four corners of the text may well stultify students’ interpretive possibilities in the ambiguous world of literary analysis. the availability of phrasings and other expressive conventions from popular culture in colloquial and familiar speech appeared to contribute to the experimental, relaxed setting in which the students composed their interpretive raps. the results of their deliberations produced texts that, through the process of employing rap conventions, represented a serious interpretive effort and series of texts that, without the teacher’s direct guidance, appear to have helped the students arrive at a viable and defensible meaning for the drama. such possibilities, we believe, are at the heart of reading literature for meaningful engagement and could become accessible in more classrooms where hybrid spaces are made available for students in which to merge their own worlds of understanding with canonical school traditions to 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(2007). mask-making as representational process: the situated composition of an identity project in a senior english class. international journal of education & the arts, 8(10). retrieved from http://www.ijea.org/v8n10/v8n10.pdf new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a65 appendix 1: act i summary and rap summary the play is set in denmark and opens with the news that king hamlet has died, leading to the anticipation that fortinbras of norway will invade the country. king hamlet’s ghost appears in the castle to horatio and the sentinel marcellus, who are terrified at the sight. king hamlet’s brother claudius has promptly assumed the throne, and king hamlet’s wife, gertrude, immediately marries him and remains the queen. claudius sends ambassadors to norway to urge fortinbras to refrain from attacking denmark. young prince hamlet mourns his father’s death and resents his mother’s quick remarriage to his uncle, whom he distrusts. claudius’s chief counselor, polonius, and polonius’s son laertes advise polonius’s daughter ophelia not to fall in love with prince hamlet, fearing that he is manipulating her emotionally and politically. prince hamlet meets his father’s ghost, who tells him that claudius poisoned him. king hamlet’s ghost urges prince hamlet to kill claudius but not gertrude, who he believes will be judged by heaven. prince hamlet swears horatio (who emerges as his only trustworthy friend) and marcellus to secrecy over the encounter with king hamlet’s ghost. interpret ive rap my name is hamlet, what? my mom is a harlot, what? my dad got killed by his serpent brother then that guy went and married my mother! his ghost walked into the castle one day he spooked my friends and they ran away. they came and told me this disturbing news. my talk with this ghost sure gave me the blues. my friends took an oath to play their part. tomorrow’s when the plan against claudius starts. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a66 appendix 2: act ii summary and rap summary polonius sends his servant reynaldo to france to spy on his son laertes, setting the stage for a similar deployment of rosencrantz and guildenstern by claudius later in this act to spy on hamlet. polonius’s daughter ophelia tells polonius that hamlet has met her in a disheveled state and departed abruptly. polonius tells claudius that he believes that hamlet’s erratic behavior is a function of ophelia’s rejection of him. claudius then tells rosencrantz and guildenstern to learn the reason for hamlet’s transformation, which gertrude attributes to king hamlet’s death and her own remarriage to claudius. fortinbras continues to deploy his troops in norway. hamlet bewails the condition of humanity and recruits a troupe of traveling actors to perform a play that will reveal if claudius indeed murdered his father. interpret ive rap so the prince walked in to my chambers today his clothes were messed up like he wanted to play. my dad keeps saying he’s smitten with me but past his illusions i cannot see. poor hamlet, all his friends are spying on him. all he wanted was to go back to school again. but now he’s stuck—in this court he wants revenge to make the story short he invited actors for a play. is this a way to make claudius pay? hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a67 appendix 3: act iii summary and rap summary rosencrantz and guildenstern report back to claudius on their meeting with hamlet. hamlet contrives the production of a play to which he has added lines that will betray claudius as the murderer of his father. claudius and polonius eavesdrop on a conversation between hamlet and ophelia. hamlet tells ophelia that he believes she is spying on him, and he grows agitated and hostile to her. claudius and polonius then decide to eavesdrop on hamlet’s talk with his mother gertrude following the play in the hopes of understanding the cause of his tormented condition. that evening the play, the murder of gonzago, is performed, with a mime acting out the ghost’s version of king hamlet’s death as a prelude. claudius’s reaction to the play confirms to hamlet that his uncle was indeed his father’s murderer. hamlet feigns ignorance over claudius’s offense at the performance, and plans to speak with his mother. concerned that hamlet is becoming a threat, claudius decides to send hamlet to england. he reveals in a soliloquy that he has poisoned his brother king hamlet and will face divine justice. hamlet chooses not to kill claudius at this moment because he thinks claudius is praying for forgiveness, but he is not. gertrude and hamlet quarrel over their differences and when polonius, hiding behind a curtain, cries out inadvertently, hamlet stabs him to death through the curtain. the ghost appears to instruct hamlet to treat gertrude with kindness, and she agrees to terminate her relationship with claudius. interpret ive rap rosencrantz and guildenstern don’t know why i’m mad ophelia’s confused after that talk we had. i don’t know why she’s so upset, there’d really be none better. i can’t figure out why she’s complaining, i told her i’d write her a letter. evidently i ain’t crazy, but i gotta be watched? after watching that play, our friendship was botched. that night i told my mom what the ghost had said. and then i killed polonius dead. i told my mom not to go back to claudius’s bed ‘cause the two of them are already incestuously wed. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a68 appendix 4: act iv summary and rap summary claudius learns of polonius’s death from gertrude, expressing shock that he himself could easily have been killed had he too eavesdropped behind the partition. gertrude prevaricates, telling him that hamlet has become mad, which leads claudius to banish hamlet immediately to england and dispatch rosencrantz and guildenstern to learn from hamlet where he has hidden polonius’s body so that it can be taken to the chapel. hamlet refuses to comply and confronts the two spies regarding their fidelity, ultimately agreeing to meet with claudius. in a hostile confrontation, hamlet reveals to claudius the location of polonius’s body, and claudius orders hamlet to england, ostensibly as a safety precaution. hamlet departs, and claudius plans to have him murdered in england. meanwhile, fortinbras marches on poland, and hamlet regrets not having fortinbras’s fortitude in conducting a pointless if honorable war when hamlet cannot muster the courage to avenge his father’s death or confront what he considers to be his mother’s infidelity. ophelia goes mad in her grief over her father polonius’s death and ultimately drowns, and her brother laertes goes to the castle to confront claudius, who acknowledges his own grief over polonius’s murder. sailors deliver news of hamlet to horatio, and claudius informs laertes that hamlet is polonius’s killer, leading them to plot hamlet’s death in a fencing match. interpret ive rap ophelia’s gone mad ‘cause hamlet killed her dad laertes is back from france to kill hamlet with a lance ophelia slipped and fell the queen came to tell hamlet on a trip got stopped by a pirate ship the pirates took him captive and now he’s choosing to be active this is act four we ain’t rappin’ anymore. hip-hop hamlet: hybrid interpretive discourse in a suburban high school english class joanna l. anglin and peter smagorinsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.73 | vol. 2 (2014) a69 appendix 5: act v summary and rap summary hamlet and horatio converse with a gravedigger, and hamlet holds the exhumed skull of deceased jester yorick and speaks of the transience, insignificance, and impotence of humanity in controlling its fate. at ophelia’s funeral the priest declares her death a suicide, which angers her brother laertes and leads to a fight between hamlet and laertes over laertes’s embellished response and hamlet’s belief in his own greater love for her. hamlet tells horatio how he escaped the plot against his life and had rosencrantz and guildenstern killed instead, and expresses a desire to kill his uncle king claudius. hamlet and laertes meet in the castle and engage in a sword fight. during their fight gertrude drinks from a poisoned cup intended for hamlet and, while dying, tells the assembly that she has been poisoned. amidst much hostile repartee, hamlet and laertes fight three rounds with their swords, at the end of which laertes fatally stabs hamlet with a poisoned sword tip. hamlet in turn stabs laertes with laertes’s sword following an exchange of weapons during the fight. hamlet then stabs and kills claudius. as he expires, hamlet instructs horatio to name fortinbras as the next king of denmark. fortinbras assumes the crown, and horatio, as requested by hamlet, tells the story portrayed in the drama. interpret ive rap so we said we weren’t going to rap anymore but we came back cause we heard you wanted more. so hamlet walked up to bones being thrown and laertes’ true feelings were finally shown. laertes finds out his family is dead so he put a ransom on hamlet’s head. hamlet found out his friends weren’t true so he traded the letters to tell what to do. the king sent a man to play on hamlet’s pride. and during that duel the innocent died. the queen and the king drank from the cup nor will the two who fought ever get up. microsoft word beth ferholt, response to eugene and kiyo's dialogue disagreement layed out.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.125| vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-72     a response to eugene and kiyo’s dialogue-disagreement on dialogic pedagogy beth ferholt brooklyn college, city university of new york, usa abstract thank you for asking me to respond to the text that you have created, eugene and kiyo. i will write about the “freedom from,” which eugene raises and which kiyo addresses at the end of the text. kiyo points out that when the teacher’s primary active engagement with the learner is to respect the learner’s freedom from, then ‘engaging with others actively to facilitate their learning and the development of their agency’ (pedagogy itself) is hindering the development of self-generated authorship (or making people responsive). i am most interested not in the above argument against prioritizing freedom from in dialogic pedagogy, but in kiyo’s very last sentences. his whole last paragraph reads: still, i cannot accept your request to the teacher that the teacher should do nothing to the learner in the lesson except to show respect for the learner’s “freedom from.” such a request denies the dialogic teachers’ continual efforts to make the lesson dialogic so that they can help the learners to be dialogic agents in school, which is today, becoming tougher for both teachers and students to engage in rich dialogic experiences. and denial as such will make the situation in schools worse than it is, just allowing schools to become monologic arenas dominated by monologic teachers’ voices, and through it the monologic voice of the powers outside of classrooms” (above, p. 43). (i think i agree with kiyo, but someone could answer: ‘i am fine with throwing out the pedagogy, because i am really talking about dialogue.’ actually, eugene, what do you answer to that?) these sentences do not make a point about dialogic pedagogy. instead they are about the ‘situation in school’ and even the situation ‘outside of the classroom.’ it seems to me that a discussion about dialogic pedagogy that is not in dialogue with teachers and students is maybe a discussion for a field with which i am not very familiar, perhaps philosophy? as john shotter said to me when he introduced me to bakhtin, and i paraphrase: i am not a donkey – issn: 2325-3290 (online) a response to eugene’s and kiyo’s dialogue-disagreement on dialogic pedagogy beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.125 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-73 meaning, i think, that i am not confined by my field or any field. still, what i do like about the fields in which i am trained, communication and education, is that people in these fields may work from within academia but are obliged to listen hard to people outside of their profession. i do not mean that what we write about pedagogy should be accessible to teachers and students, although i do think that it should sometimes be so. i mean that i like to think about pedagogy in part because i care about teachers and students. but, equally, i like to think about pedagogy because it is a way for me to think about questions that i care about (for instance, why time and space moved differently for me while i played with children when i was a teacher, and how this shift somehow connected my experience of reading literature with my experience of negotiating politics in the world of adults in my preschool…) without becoming stuck in the “glass bead game” (hesse, 1969). i am not saying that you, eugene, are stuck in this game. if anyone is not stuck, it is you! however, even if i do not think that talking about something other than pedagogy is a problem, or even that talking about pedagogy without worrying about the situations in schools is a problem, i do think that asking questions, such as ‘what is dialogic pedagogy?’, with young children (or older children) and with the people who live their working day with these children (teachers), is very interesting. from here we can go to a discussion about how to have this discussion across professions and generations. or we can talk about what freedom from can mean from the point of view of the student. of course we cannot know this point of view, but anyhow, let us talk about this first and methods second. i know that eugene tells me again and again that i am not his student. well, i am not sure that he gets to decide. first, i will make my case that i am both eugene and kiyo’s student, but even if i am wrong, my use of the following example may be helpful for this discussion. kiyo and eugene, you have both been in academia longer than i have. i was a preschool teacher for ten years after i left college and during this time i only read and wrote a little bit, although i did spend a lot of time thinking about the things that i was seeing and doing in my classroom. when i first met you both i was a new graduate student, very much unfamiliar with reading and writing in academia and (and this second point is very important) i was not in role. i was feeling very stupid (which had not happened to me much, before). i will always think of you both as mentors/teachers who guided me into the field. i still remember many statements from each of you, and these statements guide me professionally. all this while also thinking of you as my colleagues… eugene, this is what you wrote to me when you asked me to join this conversation / debate: there is no peer pressure and i understand if you are too busy and/or simply not interested in this project, please, do not feel shy to say, “no”. for me it is not a question of peer pressure or being interested. i could, of course, say no. however, my wanting to say yes is connected to my history and current position, as i understand these, in relation to you both. you do not have the ability to give me the power to say no. i am very interested in students’ ability to access freedom from. and i do see how focusing on making a learning environment inviting can apply to a frighteningly horrible, as well as a great, learning environment. but, if we are going to bring in foucault, there is no freedom from. there is just power as far as you can see in all directions, and all we can do is shift it. a response to eugene’s and kiyo’s dialogue-disagreement on dialogic pedagogy beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.125 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-74 in any case, how does this power shift? i think this is a question that buber and children and teachers can help us to think about. i will now shift gears (or genres, or position) to talk about what i have learned from a child, a teacher and buber concerning this question, and in the process i will describe a bit about how i have learned about what i have learned. eeeeffff in many of the playworlds that i study, i enter into role intentionally. in one of the playworlds that i recently studied with monica nilsson, we filmed a good portion of the playworld but did not intentionally enter into roles. during this playworld i would sit in a corner of the room to film. because i speak very little swedish, as i filmed this playworld i rarely said anything. because the room was small, i rarely moved from place to place. i would sometimes say something in english to one of the teachers or to monica, or, very rarely, in response to a child who addressed me. this playworld was with two and three year old children. because their play with their teachers was very intense, and very slow, i often kept myself awake during these playworld sessions by thinking of other stories at the same time as i was observing and filming the play narrative. i simultaneously attended to the play and strengthened my attention by making my mind wander. during this experience, i could feel that my features would become very still with my efforts. after several months of playing in the playworld with me filming, one of the teachers, tove1, told us that one of the children, maya, had sometimes been standing very still, with her hands still in front of her, looking slightly downward without an expression on her face. maya was usually silent as she stood in this way, but she intermittently turned to the side and spoke a short bit of gibberish to an imaginary person. tove told us that she was perplexed and asked maya’s mother if she knew what maya was doing. maya’s mother explained that maya often did this at home. she said that maya was performing a role and that, when asked, maya told her mother that she was beth. maya was standing very still, concentrating so hard, holding her camera and occasionally speaking “english”. we understand this to mean that i had been unintentionally in role in this playworld for a long period of time. tove explained my having been in role as myself and unintentionally in this playworld using the concept of a firmament from a quote from martin buber: “as long as the firmament of the you is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals” (1970, p. 59). according to tove, a firmament was created in this playworld when the first person (a teacher, isabelle) went into role as the princess, and this firmament came to cover all who were participants in this playworld. i was a participant in this playworld when i filmed the playworld (for the teachers, as well as for maya, as the teachers said that they perform differently and often for longer periods of time when i filmed), and this was because of a firmament of a princess. monica and i understand what this student and teacher told us about the firmament using j. aspelin’s theory of co-existence (see ferholt et al., in press and accepted for publication). aspelin (2011) uses buber (1970) to present what he calls a two-dimensional conception of education, in which coexistence is opposed to co-operation: 1 with the exception of the researchers, all participant names have been changed to pseudonyms. a response to eugene’s and kiyo’s dialogue-disagreement on dialogic pedagogy beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.125 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-75 co-operation represents a process in which individuals coordinate their actions. the process is mediated by social patterns, such as linguistic and paralinguistic rules. co-operation has an external as well as an internal aspect. on the one hand, it stands for interpersonal communication; on the other, it covers interaction between a subject and his/her surrounding. in the domain of co-operation, people use tools or other means in order to attain different kinds of goals. the activity is defined by some degree of predictability and reticence. co-operation is created by purposeful action, i.e. it includes goals outside of the relationship. co-existence signifies a personal encounter between man and man. the term has ontological meaning, i.e. human essence is assumed to be realized in this event. co-existence cannot be defined using conventional behavioral concepts. it stands for an existential meeting in which one person is immediately present vis-à-vis another. in the domain of co-existence, no means are used and no medium stands between persons. co-existence is characterized by unpredictability and it lacks elements of planning and calculation. coexistence is a goal in itself; i.e. meaning is inherent in the relationship. (p. 10) what i am arguing is that when we think about freedom from we need to think about the context of this freedom, a context in which the relationship between or around the teacher and children/students and environment may be the pedagogy itself. in other words, i think freedom from may be something that exists only in theoretical spaces (in imagination?). instead, we should be working from the experience under the firmament, as both our topic and our method. i think that if one looks at dialogic pedagogy from inside dialogic pedagogy (dialogic pedagogy serving as the firmament?), such that one can be in dialogue with teachers and children, then dialogic pedagogy does not appear to depend on freedom from, and this freedom from is not some thing (three headed animal … ) that is very hard to find, but rather freedom from appears to be a quickly passing transitional state under a firmament which creates and recreates this and other freedoms and restraints. let me know if i have missed the point, somehow! i am trying to return to tsukamoto and gadamer. i want us to talk about dialogic pedagogy in such a way that we hear something a child/student has to say about this topic and ask ourselves about the horizon of the question. (embryos of future worldview?) it also might be both important and useful to ask if we are talking about preschool education/care/raising as well as childhood and older education pedagogy, in this discussion. thank you! beth p.s. i would like to add something that i wrote to ana marjanovic-shane in an email exchange, shortly after writing the above: i think freedom from is key but that in early childhood education / educare, at least, there needs to be a 'trapping under the firmament' ... one participates in dialogic pedagogy because one can leave and because there is a community created that makes one not want to leave: i think of the words of kiyo's retiring teacher to his students! references aspelin, j. (2011). co-existence and co-operation: the two-dimensional conception of education. education, 1(1), 6-11. buber, m. (1970). i and thou. new york: charles scribner’s sons. a response to eugene’s and kiyo’s dialogue-disagreement on dialogic pedagogy beth ferholt dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.125 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-76 ferholt, b., nilsson, m., jansson, a and alnervik, k. (in press). creativity in education: play and exploratory learning. in thomas hansson (ed.) contemporary approaches to activity theory. hershey, pennsylvania: igi global. ferholt, b., nilsson, m., jansson, a and alnervik, k. (accepted for publication). current playworld research in sweden: rethinking the role of young children and their teachers in the design and execution of early childhood research. in will parnell & jeanne marie iorio (eds.) disrupting through imagination: rethinking early childhood teacher research. new york: routledge, series: changing images of early childhood, series editor: dr. nicola yelland. hesse, h. (1969). the glass bead game, magister ludi. new york: holt new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word relating dialogue and dialectics layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a1 relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos university of crete, greece abstract dialectics and a dialogical approach constitute two distinct theoretical frameworks with long intellectual histories. the question of relations between dialogue and dialectics provokes discussions in academic communities. the present paper highlights the need to clarify the concepts ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectics’ and explore their origins in the history of human thought. the paper attempts to examine mutual relations between dialectics and dialogue in a historical perspective and develop a theoretical reconstruction of their philosophical underpinnings. it proposes to deal with challenges connected with the creation of spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics. manolis dafermos is an associate professor in the epistemology of psychology in the department of psychology at the university of crete. he holds a phd in philosophy from the lomonosov moscow state university. his interests include cultural historical psychology, critical psychology, the history of psychology, and methodological and epistemological issues in the social sciences. ��� introduction the question of the relations between dialogue and dialectics has been the topic of extensive debates in the international academic communities. diametrically opposite positions have been stated by different scholars (reigel, 1979; white, 2011; matusov, & hayes, 2000; sullivan, 2010; nikulin, 2010; matusov, 2011; rule, 2015). this question has been formulated by many of them as a question of relations between bakhtinian dialogic and vygotskian dialectic. the integration (or combination) between bakhtin's ideas of dialogism and vygotsky's cultural historical psychology has been presented as an attractive perspective in human and social sciences (wertsch, 1993; roth, 2013). other scholars focus on fundamental differences between vygotsky's and bakhtin's research programs and the theoretical incompatibility of their theories (cheyne, & tarulli, 1999; wegerif, 2008; white, 2011; matusov, 2011). from my perspective, the question of the relationship between vygotsky's and bakhtin's theories could be examined as a part of the wider issue of the relationship between dialogue and dialectics in the context of the history of human thought. under the influence of postmodern theories, an exceedingly hostile stance towards dialectics became dominant in the north atlantic academy. “recourse to dialectics is generally associated with grand, totalising social theory and a ‘foundationalist’ epistemology... ” (gardiner, 2000, p.119). the anti-dialectic stance is very strong in the field of bakhtin studies in which a dialogical approach has been developed. the representatives of the anti-dialectic ‘camp’ focus mainly on issn: 2325-3290 (online) relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a2 the conceptual incommensurability and incompatibility of dialectics and dialogism. in contrast to this dominant interpretation, several thinkers consider dialogue and dialectical thinking as compatible concepts (paul, 2012) and several attempts have been made to integrate dialogue and dialectics (for example, the theory of relational dialectic) (baxter, 2004). the present paper is an attempt to examine the complex and ambiguous relationship between dialogue and dialectics focusing mainly on their philosophical underpinnings. firstly, i concentrate on defining the concepts dialogue and dialectics, their origin and multiple meanings. this requires a reconstruction of the genesis of these concepts in the history of human thought. secondly, the present paper explores the relationships between dialectics and dialogue as well as several attempts to compare, contrast or integrate them. the underlying purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that despite their fundamental differences, the dialogical approach and dialectics can be brought closer together. it is important to understand that the relations between different approaches such as dialogical and dialectical approaches are not fixed and stable, but they change in the history of human thought. what may seem impossible in one particular stage of development in the history of human thought becomes possible in another. the paper explores the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks and the perspective of their mutual enrichment. a historical and philosophical account of the dynamic and changing relations between dialogue and dialectics can challenge the presently dominant idea about their total incompatibility and offer an insight into contemporary discussion in the field of dialogical pedagogy. in contrast to mainstream schooling, bringing together dialogue and dialectics may create the space for alternative and unpredictable encounters in the domain of education. βringing together dialogue and dialectics in the domain of education is a promising, open-ended issue, outside the scope of the present paper that focuses mainly on the philosophical examination of dialogue and dialectics as theoretical frameworks. the paper is intended to encourage scholars and practitioners to think seriously about the possibility of the creation of a common space between dialogue and dialectic that remains largely terra incognita. what is dialogue? dialogue in different forms (political, philosophical, and dramatic) historically emerged in ancient greece in the context of the polis as a community of actively participating citizens (dafermos, 2013a). plato's dialogues, the first written dialogical accounts in human history were formed in the context of ancient polis. after a long eclipse in the history of human thought dialogue was reborn in the twentieth century in the writings of russian literary theorist and philosopher mikhail bakhtin. he developed a multifaceted theory of dialogism based on a set of concepts such as dialogue, monologue, polyphony, heteroglossia, utterance, voice, speech genres and chronotope. bakhtin's writings inspired many scholars and practitioners to elaborate and apply various dialogical approaches in pedagogy (matusov, 2009; matusov, & miyazaki, 2014), psychology (shotter, 1995; hermans, & kempen, 1993), psychotherapy (seikkula, 2011; hermans, & dimaggio, 2004) and cultural studies (wertsch, 1993; thornton, 1994). one of the reasons for the apparent confusion in the emerging interdisciplinary field of dialogical studies is connected with the polysemy of the notion of dialogue and the multiple meanings of its use in different contexts. i will attempt to define several meanings of the term ‘dialogue’. in accordance with a first definition, dialogue is a live conversation between two or more people. in other words, dialogue can relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a3 be indentified with oral communication between two or more interlocutors. being with other people and responding to their voices is an essential feature of a conversation. however, a difficult question at once arises whether dialogue is every form of conversation or a specific type of deep communication between different subjectivities. nikulin (2010) defined four components that turn a conversation into a dialogue: a. the existence of personal other, b. voice, c. unfinalizability, d. allosensus (constant disagreement with other). the second meaning of the term ‘dialogue’ refers to dialogue as a genre or literary device. plato's dialogues are one of the most famous forms of using a dialogical form as a genre. plato's written dialogues historically appeared as an imitation of oral communication in times of heated debates about the transition from oral to written communication. dialogue as a genre has been used by many thinkers to formulate their ideas in various ways. however, the dialogical genre might be used as an external form for monological content. for example, dialogue might be used as a teaching method of catechesis. it refers to an instrumental approach to dialogue that tends to be considered as an “an effective means for nondialogic ends, which are understood outside of the notion of dialogue, within a monological framework” (matusov, & miyazaki, 2014, p.2). however, if there is a perfect, final and absolute truth as in catechesis, there is no place and need for genuine dialogue. in accordance with a third meaning, “...dialogue is the universal condition of using language at all” (womack, 2011, p.48). from this perspective both oral and written speech, moreover, language itself has a dialogical character. language can be considered mainly as an intersubjective communicative engagement, rather than a simple, formal, symbolic system. bakhtin offered a classic formulation of the dialogic nature of consciousness that can be regarded as the fourth meaning of the dialogue which goes beyond purely linguistic or literary phenomena: “i am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another. the most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness (toward a thou) … the very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion. to be means to communicate … to be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself” (bakhtin, 1981, p.287). dialogue is an essential characteristic of consciousness. the word ‘consciousness’ originates from the latin ‘conscius’ (con‘together’ + scientia‘to know’). ‘conscious’ means sharing knowledge. toulmin (1982) offers a brilliant interpretation of the etymology of the term ‘consciousness’: “etymologically, of course, the term ‘consciousness’ is a knowledge word. this is evidenced by the latin form, -sci-, in the middle of the word. but what are we to make of the prefix conthat precedes it? look at the usage in roman law, and the answer will be easy enough. two or more agents who act jointly—having formed a common intention, framed a shared plan, and concerted their actions—are as a result conscientes. they act as they do knowing one another’s plans: they are jointly knowing” (toulmin, 1982, p. 64). in latin “to be conscious of something was to share knowledge of it, with someone else, or with oneself” (zeman, 2001, p.1265). “when two or more men know of one and the same fact, they are said to be conscious of it one to another” (hobbes, 1660, leviathan, chapt. vii). however, the predominant use of the term ‘consciousness’ is connected with john locke's definition: “consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man's own mind” (locke, 1690, essay concerning human understanding, ii, i, 19). it relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a4 refers to ‘inner perceptions’ that are conceived by an individual. the understanding of consciousness as a private, internal awareness became dominant in contemporary scientific literature. however, it is interesting to note that the term ‘consciousness’ has similar etymology in different languages: in russian ‘сознание’ (со-знание), in greek ‘συνείδηση’ (συνειδέναι), in english ‘conscientia,’ in french ‘conscience’ (con-science), in italian ‘coscienza’ (co-scienza). the prefix ‘co’ refers to joint action, reciprocal interaction between people. the concept of ‘consciousness’ includes knowledge as its essential moment. however, consciousness is not reducible to simple knowledge but it refers to coproducing knowledge in the process of communication between different subjects. it refers to joining knowledge with another or shared knowledge. from this perspective, consciousness has dialogic structure and orientation. the understanding of the dialogic nature of consciousness enables the demonstration of the mirrors of cognitivism and scientism. one of the most powerful objections to cognitivism has been formulated by michael bakhtin: “truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 110). dialogue has been defined by bakhtin as opposed to monologism. individual consciousness cannot grasp the complexity and variety of the human world. in contrast to the single, isolated, monological consciousness, a dialogical coexistence of different irreducible consciousnesses develops. bakhtin argued that the idea is not developed in isolated individual consciousness but in dialogic communication between several consciousnesses. “...the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic communion between consciousnesses. the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses” (bakhtin, 2003, p.98). the meeting spaces and dramatic processes of making meaning between different and not reducible consciousnesses constitute the ontological foundation of dialogue. the “ontological dialogue” (sidorkin, 1999; matusov, & miyazaki, 2014) between consciousnesses penetrates the deeper and most important aspects of human existence. although dialogue has been defined as being contrary to monologue, the consideration of dialogue as a positive and monologue as a negative term leads inevitably to oversimplification of dialectic relationships between them. i totally agree with matusov's position that “bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and monologue is complementary” (matusov, 2009, p.112). matusov argues that the concepts of dialogicity and monologicity mutually constitute each other. “monologicity makes clear who is speaking (i.e., authorship and responsibility) and what is said (i.e., the message). in other words, monologicity objectivizes others and the themes of communication... monologicity reflects centripetal forces of language, communication, and community oriented on centralization, unification, unity with action, seriousness, cohesiveness and integrity of voice (and position), articulateness, globalization, decontextualization, exactness and correctness of meaning (finalizing the meaning)” (matusov, 2009, p. 131). however, many bakhtinian scholars tend to interpret the concepts ‘dialogue-monologue’ in terms of western post-modernism such as ‘the death of author’ (more generally, the ‘death of subject’), ‘deconstruction,’ ‘decentration,’ ‘intertextuality’ (bell, & gardiner, 1998; holquist, 2002). from the perspective of post-modernism, monologue is defined as a ‘grand narrative’ that should be ‘killed’ and ‘destroyed’. with the total ‘death of monologue’ any claims for ‘seriousness,’ ‘cohesiveness,’ ‘integrity of voice (and position),’ ‘articulateness’ and ‘correctness of meaning’ might disappear. the celebration of relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a5 post-modern, deconstructionist discourse tends to lead to the deconstruction not only of ‘old’ metaphysics and ‘grand’ monologic narratives, but also of scientific thinking and knowledge itself. “...the deconstruction of metaphysics is the deconstruction of the scientificity of science. the deconstructive strategy aims at the very source of science itself, at the kind of question that gives rise to scientific investigation” (evans, 1999, p.156). it could be argued that the destruction of reason itself may give rise to a new form of irrationalism. based on the analysis of post-hegelian philosophical tradition, lukács (1954) demonstrated that the destruction of reason and the advent of irrationalism prepared the ground for fascist ideas. flecha (1999) distinguishes two kinds of racism: modern racism is based on the idea of the existence of inferior or superior ethnicities and races, while postmodernist racism built on postmodern relativism, “...accepts diversity and difference but accords different groups a place in their own, distinctive contexts” (flecha, 1999, p. 153). postmodern relativism promotes proliferation of differences and fragmentation of social space. flecha proposes a dialogic approach as an alternative platform that can deal simultaneously with both forms of racism. dialogue as a dynamic and positive force offers the opportunity to stimulate unpredictable meetings between the participants and build bridges across differences. going beyond the tension between absolutism and postmodern relativism, dialogue can promote deep communication and encourage mutual recognition and understanding between the participants. what is dialectics? the concept ‘dialectics’ has acquired different forms and meanings in various historical contexts. in ancient greece dialectics emerged as an art of dialogue and a problem solving method through argumentation. the term ‘dialectics’ has a similar origin of the term ‘dialogue’. it refers to the art of conversation or debate that is connected with seeking truth through reasoning. “... someone tries, by means of dialectical discussion and without the aid of any sense-perceptions, to arrive through reason at the being of each thing itself” (plato, 2004, republic, 532a). by the power of discussions, dialectics provides genuine knowledge. dialectics as a method originates from the socratic elenchus, a method of hypothesis elimination that takes the form of a question-answer dialogue and brings out the contradictions in the interlocutor's arguments. dialectics constitutes a way of thinking based on the understanding of the contradictory nature of both reason and being. naive, spontaneous dialectics had been developed by ancient thinkers as an attempt to offer a living, sensory concrete perception of the world in the process of its change and becoming. “tao-te-ching” in ancient china as well as heraclitus’ philosophy in ancient greece were forms of ancient spontaneous dialectics that were expressed in the idea that “everything is in a state of flux” (skirbekk, & gilje, 2001, p.13). although heraclitus didn't use the term ‘dialectic,’ he developed a dialectical understanding that everything is becoming. however, a conceptual, categorical system for the representation of things as processes did not yet exist in the ancient world. becoming is expressed through metaphors, images of an aesthetic equivalent such as the image of a river: “you cannot step into the same river twice” (plato, 1997, cratylus, 402a). the meaning of the concept ‘dialectics’ was transformed by aristotle. for aristotle dialectic wasn’t a form of being but rather a method of logical argumentation. moreover, dialectic broke down its interconnection with dialogue and became mainly a method of building knowledge. in the middle ages dialectic was constructed as a method of argumentation on the basis of a set of logical rules (nikulin, 2010). relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a6 during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries an analytic method of knowledge production dominated in concrete sciences and a metaphysical mode of thinking in the field of philosophy (pavlidis, 2010). the metaphysical mode of thinking is based on the consideration of reality as a sum of separated, unconnected independent entities. a metaphysical outlook considers things as self-subsistent, isolated and abstracted from their context (sayers, 1976). it denies fundamentally both the internal relatedness of all things and their development. the concept of ‘dialectic’ was reborn and acquired new meanings and connotations in the context of german classical philosophy from kant to hegel and later in marxism. kant proposed “transcendental dialectic” as the logic of errors and illusions that arise when reason goes beyond its proper role in attempting to grasp the actual objects themselves (the thing-in-itself) (williams, 2014). kant demonstrated the structural necessity and inevitability of illusions. according to kant, thinking confronts antinomies and falls into conflict with itself. challenging kant’s concept of dialectic as a logic of illusions, hegel developed a “positive” dialectic based on the examination of a universal as a concrete unity of multiple determinations (hegel, 2010). dialectics was developed by hegel as a method of thought that included the process of expounding contradictions and their resolution in the corpus of a rational understanding of an object (ilyenkov, 1977). materialistic dialectics developed by k. marx as an attempt of the theoretical reconstruction of a concrete organic whole (the capitalist mode of production) through the creation of a system of interconnected concepts. the conscious (or systematic) dialectics stood against the metaphysical method of thinking. dialectics and metaphysics constitute two different ways of thinking about thinking. in contrast to the metaphysical method based on one-dimensional, abstract analysis of an object and its elements as unchanging and immutable, dialectical thinking examines an object in the process of its change. the dialectical method focuses on the examination of things in their mutual connections, movement and development. dialectics as a way of thinking grasps and represents the developmental process of a concrete object in its interconnections with other objects (pavlidis, 2010). in the late 19th century and early 20th century the tendency of the rejection of dialectic and the acceptance of other trends such as kantianism, philosophy of life and positivism became dominant in western academy. the bulk of research for a long period in the western academy was primarily associated with the assumptions of positivism and reductionism. in contrast to widespread reductionism in concrete disciplines which focuses on analysis of isolated elements of reality, the dialectic approach is oriented to grasp full complexity of interrelationships of reality and the contradictions that embody them (bidell, 1988). the famous formula ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ represents a very schematic and over simplistic description of the dialectical understanding of development. such kind of caricatured representation of dialectics can give rise to the negative stance (or total rejection) of dialectical thinking. laske (2009) argues that the dialectical mode of thinking “remains a closed book for the majority of adults in the western world, while in asian cultures nurtured by buddhism it more easily assumes a common sense form” (laske, 2009). although the explanation of the negative stance toward a dialectical mode of thinking is out of scope of the present paper, i would like only to note that the increasing individualization, fragmentation and commercialization of social life in north america and western europe is not unconnected to a lack of understanding of dialectic at the level of everyday life. the multiple crises (economic, political, ecological and scientific) as a result of the increasing social contradictions and asymmetries in a rapidly changing world may provoke interest in dialectics as a way of the conceptualization of contradictions. however, dialectics is not a given system of postulates that can be immediately applied as an external guiding system for investigating problems. the application relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a7 of dialectics to the concrete fields presupposes its essential development. the question of how to further develop dialectics in a rapidly changing world remains open for future investigation. bakhtin's dialogism and dialectics obviously, there are strong arguments for the incompatibility between dialectics and dialogism. it is possible to find several critical remarks on dialectics in bakhtin's works: in his book “problems of dostoevsky’s poetics” (pdp), and some writing included in the anthology “speech genres and other late essays” (sg). bakhtin's treatment of dialectics has fragmentary character and it did not include a systematic examination of the relationship between dialectics and dialogue. bakhtin focused mainly on incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. “take a dialogue and remove the voices…remove the intonations…carve out the abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness – and that’s how you get dialectics” (bakhtin, 1986a, p. 147). nevertheless, there is nothing more alien to dialectics than the idea of isolated, individual and abstract consciousness. dialectics as a way of thinking emphasizes internal, essential connections between people rather than a separated individual, an abstract consciousness. moreover, the concept ‘abstract’ has a different meaning in the dialectical theory of knowledge in relation to bakhtin's quotation. ilyenkov (1982b) brought into light the shortcoming of the view that the ‘concrete’ is a product of sensuous experience and the ‘abstract’ is a result of rational thinking. ilyenkov (1982b) demonstrated that the examination of the concrete as a synonym of an immediate sensual image, and the abstract, as a synonym of the conceptual follows the empiricist tradition. the repudiation of dialectics as a form of abstract thinking is based on the assumptions of empiricism that remains a dominant “paradigm” in the western academy. hegel in his wonderful text “who thinks abstractly” pointed out that in regarding all other people exclusively from a narrow pragmatic viewpoint, an undeveloped person thinks abstractly. he highlighted the essence of the abstract thinking: “this is abstract thinking: to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality” (hegel, 1808/1966). taking only one quality of a person and ignoring all of his (her) other qualities, not interested in the history of his (her) life is the essence of abstract thinking. in contrast to abstract thinking, hegelian dialectics attempts to look at an object as a concrete unity of multiple and interconnected determinations. bahktin's critical remarks on dialectics do not prove a replete incompatibility between dialectics and dialogue. firstly, it is important to take into account the polemical context in which bakhtin criticized the dominant, dogmatic version of dialectical materialism ("diamat") in the ussr. bakhtin's critique of hegelian dialectic served as a form of disguised criticism of the official ideology in the form of "diamat". additionally, going beyond explicit criticism of hegel's dialectic, it is possible to demonstrate that bakhtin was implicitly involved in dialogue with it. hegelian philosophy could not leave bakhtin indifferent. hegel’s philosophy was developed in dialogue with the main philosophical theories of his time as well as the previews stages in the history of philosophy. “... it is difficult to see how hegel’s philosophy could not be considered part of a dialogue taking place with other philosophies of his time (and a dialogue in the history of philosophy as well). it would be just as difficult to consider his ‘monologue’ to be unanswered or ‘unresponded’. it would be unfair, though, to reproach bakhtin for a failure to understand hegel’s voice, and to refuse to enter into a dialogue with it. rather, we can assume that beyond the superficial direct critique of hegel, bakhtin in fact responded actively and more often implicitly to hegelian philosophy in his own works...” (côté, 2000, p. 26). relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a8 several bakhtin's followers argue that dialectics is a synonym of the cartesian solitary consciousness or monological view of the world. “dialectics is a product of the old monological, newtonian view of the world” (morson, & emerson, 1990, p.57). however, dialectics had existed long before the appearance of the newtonian view of the world in direct connection with dialogue. hegel was far from accepting cartesian “cogito ergo sum” (“i think therefore i am”). from a hegelian perspective, man is not a solitary thinking being, a single individual. for hegel, knowledge is a constituent moment of consciousness and self-consciousness, rather than an independent entity. hegel's view that logical concepts cannot be derived from the individual mind provides a creative insight on the intersubjective nature of thinking. in contrast to the widespread reception of hegelian philosophy in terms of cartesian solitary consciousness and monologism, luther (2009) offers evidence of hegel's shift from kantian-cartesian “i” into “we”: “for descartes and kant, the individual subject is the source of knowledge; however, for hegel, knowledge is a collective achievement. this represents a crucial shift from the first person singular to first person plural standpoint, and it has much in common with the paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to the philosophy of intersubjectivity in the late twentieth century” (luther, 2009, p. 4) at the same time, the hegelian idea of absolute knowledge and hegel's representation of his own philosophical system as the completion of self-development of thinking in human history is a monologic as well as an anti-dialectical idea. it is possible to reveal a contradiction between hegel's dialectical thinking and his close, dogmatic system (as well as an internal contradiction in hegel's understanding of dialectics). however, totally rejecting hegelian dialectics means throwing out the baby with the bath water. the hegelian analysis of master–slave relations1 in “phenomenology of spirit” is especially important for understanding the interconnection between dialectics and dialogue. the dialogical concept of mutual recognition became an integral part of the dialectical process of the historical development of consciousness and self-consciousness. in other words, hegel incorporated the concept of dialogue in his dialectical odyssey of consciousness and self-consciousness toward knowledge. the hegelian analysis of master–slave relations provides a dialectical understanding of dialogue and the difficulties of promoting it in human history. hegel attempted to describe the relations between self and other in a world in which there is no pre-established harmony between different participants, but a struggle for recognition between them takes place. consciousness does not live in a self-sufficient isolation, but in a mutual relation with other consciousnesses. “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (hegel, 2004, p.111). for hegel, developing an independent self-consciousness goes through mutual recognition. hudson (2010) argues that despite their differences, it is possible to find some links between the hegelian concept of mutual recognition and buber's “i-thou” philosophy of dialogue. moreover, the hegelian idea of an incomplete form of recognition between master and slave as a result of the perception of slave as object bears striking similarities to buber's formulation of the i-it relation. the treatment of asymmetrical relations between master and slave is one the most important contributions of the hegelian investigation of the historical development of consciousness. 1 the german expression “herrschaft und knechtschaft” has been translated as “master and slave” (or “lordship and bondage”) (hegel, 2004). relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a9 unlike kant, hegel didn't examine the relationships between consciousnesses in terms of an idealized deontological norm, but as they are shaped in hard contradictory historical reality. hegel demonstrated that in human history the recognition between different consciousnesses is not mutual and reciprocal. human history is not a linear progression but a contradictory, dramatic process. the inequality between lordship and bondage has been expressed in the fact that one consciousness recognizes other without being recognized. one consciousness has been recognized as an ‘autonomous’ existence and another as a ‘dependent’ existence. hegel's analysis of dialectic of the dominance and servitude demonstrates in which way the hierarchical power relations reproduce distorted forms of consciousness. moreover, hegel brought to light the struggle for recognition as a crucial moment in the history of consciousness and self-consciousness. marx's account of alienation and commodity fetishism offers a deep understanding of the distortion (degradation) of human relationships in the capitalist society. the relations between people appear to be relations between ‘things’ (commodities). from this perspective, it is hard to develop dialogic spaces without taking into account challenges of the commodification of human relationships and asymmetrical power relationships. the commodification of human relationships reproduces a monological way of thinking, because other subjects have been reduced to the status of material objects. it is interesting to note that bakhtin linked monologism with “...absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself” (bakhtin, 1984, 18). obviously, it would be simplistic to equate the dialogic idea of multiple perspectives and voices with marxian materialistic dialectics. bakhtin's theory of dialogism has developed under the influence of fundamental ideas from neo-kantianism, philosophy of life, and phenomenology. especially important for the development of bakhtin's theory of dialogism was dilthey's understanding of human sciences as grounded in ‘lived experience’ (erleben), ‘expression’ (ausdruck), and ‘understanding’ (verstehen) (brandist, 2002, p.18). however, marxism was also one of the strong voices in bakhtin circle. the impact of marxism is felt in voloshinov's (1973, 1976) books “marxism and the philosophy of language” and “freudianism: a marxist critique”. bulavka and buzgalin (2004) consider dialectics as the basis of bakhtin's dialogical world. from their perspective, the subject-subject relationship of dialogue as a relationship of qualitatively different integral beings represents a dialectical process of breakdown of the world of alienation, in which people relate to one another primarily as objects (commodity and money fetishism, the fetishization of bureaucratic hierarchy). dialogue is presented as a window into a world of collaborative creativity, a joint creation of the participants themselves. bulavka and buzgalin (2004) distinguish two types of dialectics: the ‘old’ dialectical logic is oriented primarily toward the representation of objective processes, which do not depend on the will and activity of the subject. the ‘new’ dialectic is oriented to reflecting the subject-subject relationship, polyphony and collaborative creativity of the ‘realm of freedom’. the transition from the ‘old’ to new dialectics is examined through the prism of the shift from the ‘realm of necessity’ to the ‘realm of freedom’. a possible objection to this original interpretation of dialectics might be that the confrontation between the representation of objective processes and the reflection on subject-subject relationships reproduces an antidialectical subject-object dualism. the issue of the conceptualization of subject-subject and subjectobject relationships from a dialectical perspective remains at stake and provoke tensions. however, there is no doubt that resisting against the objectivation of human being, the adherents of the dialogical approach are focused mainly on understanding of subject-subject relationships. relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a10 interconnection between consciousness and knowledge dialectics and dialogue constitute two distinct traditions and each of them has its own logic of development in the history of human thought. nevertheless, there was not an absolute gap between these traditions and it is possible to find complex relationships between them. traditionally, dialectics has been conceived as a mode of thinking connected with a concrete form of knowledge production. “...modern dialectic still tends to become the organon of thinking...” (nikulin, 2010, p.71). dialogue, on the other hand, has been traditionally conceptualized as a particular type of communication that creates shared meanings between different subjects. the concept of dialogue is more connected with the communication between consciousnesses rather than with knowledge production. however, there is not a gap between consciousness and knowledge. dialectic connections develop in the interspace between consciousness and knowledge. on one side, consciousness includes knowledge as one of its moments. on the other side, reflective thinking has been involved in the dialogic communication between different subjects. thus, thinking is not a solitary activity of a purely autonomous subject but a dialogical act, unfolding between different subjects. the knowledge representation of an object is socially mediated and the path to knowledge passes through relationships between subjects. knowing with the other evidences the dialogical quality of consciousness (shotter, 2006). the investigation of developing interrelations between thinking and speech was examined by vygotsky (1987) as the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. the analysis of the internal relations between thinking and speaking as sides of human consciousness constitutes one of the most important foundations for linking dialectics and dialogue. vygotsky (1987) addressed this crucial issue from a psychological perspective, but it remains under-investigated. however, it is worth emphasizing that dialectical thinking is a specific type of thinking that develops at a concrete stage of the process of historical development of human consciousness. dialectical thinking offers the opportunity to overcome widespread positivism and reductionism in science (ilyenkov, 1982a, 1982b; dafermos, 2014). in contrast to monologism, the dominant ‘paradigm’ in social and human sciences, bakhtin revealed not only the dialogic nature of consciousness but also the perspective of conceptualization of thinking as a dialogue. “this mode of thinking makes available those sides of a human being, and above all the thinking human consciousness and the dialogic sphere of its existence, which are not subject to artistic assimilation from monologic positions” (bakhtin, 1984, p.270). dialogue was portrayed by bakhtin as a unique meeting between several consciousnesses in a concrete moment of a historical and cultural chronotope. bringing together dialectics and dialogue, feuerbach pointed out that “the true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself. it is a dialogue between “i” and “you” (feuerbach, 1843). criticizing hegelian philosophy, feuerbach demonstrated the shortcomings of a pure speculation, which a single thinker carries on by or with himself, and subsequently, he focused on dialogue between “i” and “you” as sensuous and concrete human beings. it is worth mentioning that feuerbach's ideas on dialogue inspired vygotsky to develop his theory of social education in the field of defectology: “only social education can lead severely retarded children through the process of becoming human by eliminating the solitude of idiocy and severe retardation. l. feuerbach’s wonderful phrase, might be taken as the motto to the study of development in abnormal children: ‘that which is impossible for one, is possible for two.’ let us add: that which is impossible on the level of individual development becomes possible on the level of social development” (vygotsky, 1993, pp. 218-219). relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a11 for vygotsky, dialogue and collaboration between people becomes the basis of their social development. however, the question as to whether dialogue and development are compatible raises objections. dialogue and development the issue of development provokes tensions between dialogic and dialectic approaches. dialectics historically emerged as a way of the conceptualization of change and development. from a dialectical perspective, development has been conceptualized as a process that occurs due to internal contradictions within an object. adherents of the dialogical approach tend to view the concept of development with an ambivalent attitude. roth (2013) notes that scholars who follow bakhtin's tradition often focus mainly on language use but not on the existence of different levels and forms of development (ontogenetic and phylogenetic). moreover, hegel's dialectical concept of development has been criticized by dialogical scholars for its monologism, determinism, and teleology (holquist, 2002). “hegel is often associated with a kind of postmodernist caricature of an abstract, hierarchical, decontextualised reason, but this is far from the truth” (derry, 2013, p.110-111). both piaget's and vygotsky's theories of development have been accused of universalism, decontextualization, ethnocentrism, and adultcentrism (matusov, & hayes, 2000). frequently, the critique of the dialectical concept of development has been implemented from the perspective of postmodernism that became a fashion trend in north atlantic academic communities. “postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. against these enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, ungrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of scepticism about the objectivity of truth, history and norms, the giveness of natures and the coherence of identities” (eangleton, 2003, vii). eagleton argues that postmodernism has as a material condition a shift to a new form of capitalism “to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics’” (eagleton, 2003, vii). however, in its attacks against ‘grand narratives of modernity’ postmodernism presupposes precisely these principles that it simultaneously rejects. “the hegelian reply to postmodern discourse theory is as powerful as it is simple. postmodern discourse theory presupposes exactly what it omits: the totality of an intersubjective rationality expressed in the medium of a shared language” (boucher, 2000). moreover, rejecting universalistic claims of developmentalism, cultural relativism leads to legitimation of the universalistic claims of diverse cultural communities and hierarchical relations of power within them. “the increasing globalization and homogenization of culture and its fragmentation and localization are in fact closely related. global universalism and postmodern particularism are actually two sides of the same coin” (dafermos, 2013b, p.8). cultural differences and local contexts tend to become new absolutes: “...if something is contextual, it cannot be universal’. interestingly enough, relativism seems to be based on such absolutes” (bang, 2008, p.51). in contrast to traditional developmental absolutism, a post-modernistic antidevelopment absolutism emerged with “its total acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic.... ” (harvey, 1989, p.44). anti-development absolutism is based on the relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a12 postmodern celebration of cultural differences, heterogeneity and plurality. promoting a post-modern celebration of particularity tends to turn into a fashionable monologue about difference based on the reception and assimilation of ‘otherness’ in terms of cultural difference. post-modern monologism of difference is connected with the strong tendencies toward fragmentation of social life that characterizes new form of capitalism. the idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between participants of a dialogue is based on the dominance of alienation. both the idea of the existence of irreconcilable differences between the participants of a dialogue and the legalistic concept of ‘consensus’ between them constitute two sides of the same coin of a society based on alienation, isolation and fragmentation. the concept of ‘consensus’ points to an external type of agreement between alienated people in the context of a legalistic approach to human relations. the post-modern celebration of irreconcilable differences between the participants of dialogue might give rise to the legalization of the fragmentation of social space as well as the alienation between people. contrary to the view about an absolute gap between a dialogical approach and a dialectical concept of development, it is possible to find in bakhtin's writings some ideas that seem unpredictably closer to dialectical understanding than to postmodernist celebration of the fragmentation of culture. “the study of culture (or some area of it) at the level of system and at the higher level of organic unity: open, becoming, unresolved and unpredetermined, capable of death and renewal, transcending itself, that is, exceeding its own boundaries” (bakhtin, 1986a, p.135). bakhtin's idea of an open, developing organic unity is a truly dialectical insight in the theorizing of human sciences. the contradictory coexistence of ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ constitutes a moment of a dialectical understanding of culture. i don't claim that bakhtin was a dialectical theorist, but only that it is possible to find influences of dialectics in his writings. in other words, there is no absolute gap or a rupture between dialogic and dialectic traditions but paradoxically, a dramatic relation between them might be detected. from a developmental perspective, dialogue cannot be reduced to a simple communicative interaction or a conversation. not every communicative interaction or conversation promotes human development. dialogue is such a conversation that does promote human development. dramatic tensions and collisions in a dialogue might become a source of personal growth for their participants. in other words, dialogue opens up the perspective of personal growth for subjects engaged in it (apatow, 1998). “...the discursive dynamics has as its central question the ways to critically negotiate/collaborate meanings, highlighting the contradiction as a driving force for the development between participants with different social, historical, cultural and political constitutions” (magalhães, ninin, & lessa, 2014, p.142). explaining the deep meaning of the general genetic law of cultural development as it was formulated by vygotsky, veresov notes: “dramatic character development, development through contradictory events (acts of development), category (dramatic collision) — this was vygotsky's formulation and emphasis” (veresov, 2010, p.88). the dramatic collision, conflicts and contradictory relations that emerge in a dialogue as they are experienced by its participants may promote their self reflection and personal growth. the dialectic of change constitutes an essential dimension of a dialogue. “...neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) – they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent development of the dialogue” (bakhtin, 1986a, p.170). relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a13 both dialogue and dialectics can be examined in terms of a drama that includes tensions, conflicts between opposing forces, contradictions and crises. bakhtin wrote about dostoevsky who was able to offer “a living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the cross-section of a single day...where others saw a single thought, he was able to find and feel out two thoughts, a bifurcation; where others saw a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a second and contradictory quality” (bakhtin, 1984, p.30). from this perspective, a dialectical understanding of the internal contradictions of society as they are expressed in everyday life means the dramatic relationships between people are an essential moment of a dialogue. dialogue without considering such kind of dramatic tensions and contradictions as they have been experienced by subjects involved in this process may be turned into an external lifeless form. οn the contrary, as i already mentioned, dramatic tensions and contradictions in the dialogical spaces may become a source of development for their participants. if dialogue wants to consider larger social dynamics, it has to talk to the dialectic tradition i will conclude by saying that the relationships between dialectics and dialogue are more complex and paradoxical than they are usually presented. the ‘horror of dialectics’ (gardiner, 2000) in the field of bakhtin studies constitutes an obstacle for developing a dialogue between these distinct but interrelated traditions in human sciences. although both dialogue and dialectic share a common origin in ancient greek philosophy, they historically developed as independent theoretical traditions with their own conceptual apparatus. the dialogic tradition is associated with the concepts of ‘voices,’ ‘utterance,’ speech genres, ‘polyphony’. the dialectic tradition is based on the concepts of ‘contradiction,’ ‘development,’ the distinction between ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’. in contrast to the dominance of positivism in the north atlantic academy, both dialectics and dialogism have been developed as attractive alternatives. however, while dialogism and dialectics as theoretical frameworks have essential differences, there is a common space between them and “they also mutually enrich each other” (sullivan, 2010, p.362). dialectics might offer in dialogical research a creative perspective for re-opening history (included the history of thought) as a contradictory process. for example, the lack of dialectical thinking constitutes an obstacle in the study of the historical development of bakhtin's works. many bakhtian scholars encounter difficulties in understanding “inconsistent positions”, “shifts in terminology” in writings of the founder of theory of dialogism, “...contradictory evidence regarding the authorship of the so-called disputed texts...”, “quite contradictory account of his life” (brandist, & shepherd, 1998, p.9,10). as a result of the dominance of a presentist and teleological mode of thinking and the absence of a dialectical understanding of the development of bakhtin works, many bakhtian scholars tend to “read the early texts through those of the central or later period, which were published first, and thus to read early concepts in terms of later ones” (brandist, & shepherd, 1998, p.10). a dialectical approach with its focus on contradictions, change, totality, development may offer insights on bakhtin’s creative laboratory and reveal its complexity. dialectical thinking can also contribute to an understanding of the difficulties in developing dialogue in hard reality of the overarching power relations (presented by hegel as ‘master–slave relations’), growing social inequalities and increasing commoditization of all aspects of human life and experience. οtherwise, dialogue may be turned into a noble and idealized deontological principle but unable to meet the challenges of hard historical reality. relating dialogue and dialectics: a philosophical perspective manolis dafermos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.189 | vol. 6 (2018) a14 dialogue offers a creative insight into going beyond truth as ‘istina’ (as a pure cognitive endeavor) toward truth as ‘pravda’ (as embodied and lived) (bakhtin, 1993; sullivan, 2010). “as we develop our consciousness through participation in social life, it is the potential of the other’s response and its affective impact upon our sense of what we are doing that makes consciousness more indeterminate and more experiential than the truth of the dialectic allows” (sullivan, 2010, p. 375). focusing on intersubjective and ethical dimensions of knowing, a dialogical approach allows intellectualism to be avoided and challenges of communication to be faced between unique personalities in complex and uncertain situations. dialectical thinking is ongoing and unfinalizable as is dialogue. both dialogue and dialectics historically change. opening up new spaces for sharing and mutual enrichment between dialogue and dialectics may give rise to their unpredictable transformations. perhaps, the initial starting point of the internal connection between ‘dialogue’ and ‘dialectic’ in ancient greece will be reborn in a new, unpredictable form in the future. “nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth” (bakhtin, 1986b, p. 393). despite his serious objections, noted above, bakhtin acknowledged that dialectics can give rise “a higher level dialogue” (matusov, 2009, p.385). bakhtin found a perspective of bridging dialectics and dialogue on the basis of a hegelian argument: “dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (bakhtin, 1986a, 166). acknowledgement i would like to gratefully and sincerely thank 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(2001). consciousness. brain, 124, 1263-1289. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word ana marjanovic-shane, spoilsport in drama in education vs dialogic pedagogy, 2016-02-07, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a45 “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa abstract in this paper i compare and contrast two educational paradigms that both attempt to overcome alienation often experienced by students in the conventional education. these two educational paradigms are embodied in different educational practices: first, drama in education in its widest definition, is based on the vygotskian views that human cognitive, semantic (meaning-making), and social-emotional development happens in or through play and/or imagination, thus within the imagined worlds. second, critical ontological dialogic pedagogy, is based in the bakhtin inspired approach to critical dialogue among the “consciousnesses of equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999), where education is assumed to be a practice of examination of the world, the others and the self. i reveal implicit and explicit conceptual similarities and differences between these two educational paradigms regarding their understanding the nature of learning; social values that they promote; the group dynamics, social relationships and the position of learners’ subjectivity. i aim to uncover the role and legitimacy of the learners’ disagreement with the positions of others, their dissensus with the educational events and settings, and the relationships of power within the social organization of educational communities in these two diverse educational approaches. i explore the legitimacy of dissensus in these two educational approaches regarding both the participants’ critical examination of the curriculum, and in regard to promoting the participants’ agency and its transformations. in spite of important similarities between the educational practices arranged by these two paradigms, the analysis of their differences points to the paradigmatically opposing views on human development, learning and education. although both drama in education and dialogic pedagogy claim to deeply, fully and ontologically engage the learners in the process of education, they do it for different purposes and with diametrically opposite ways of treating the students and their relationship to the world, each other and their own developing selves. ana marjanovic-shane is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college. she was born in yugoslavia where she studied psychology, development and linguistics. she greaduated at the university of pennsylvania in “interdisciplinary human development”, with a special focus on the role of play and imagination in the meaning making processes. her recent scolarly focus are dialogic relationships and meaning making in education. she is engaged in developing, practicing and studying dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. acknowledgements i want to express my gratitude to eugene matusov for a critical challenge of my initial views that set me on this path of inquiry, and for supporting me to resist pressures when my ideas encountered disbelief and disapproval from some scholars of drama in education. i want to thank beth ferholt for believing in the legitimacy of disagreement among the professionals and for supporting the legitimacy of my “spoilsport” voice in the professional publications. i want to thank kathy von duyke and ljubica beljanski-ristić for hours and hours of discussions and for providing invaluable feedback to many previous drafts of this article. issn: 2325-3290 (online) “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a46 the player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a "spoil-sport." the spoilsport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. it is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. this is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. by withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. he robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally "in-play" (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). therefore, he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community. … the spoil-sport breaks the magic world, therefore he is a coward and must be ejected. in the world of high seriousness, too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc. (huizinga, 1955, pp. 11-12). introduction i must have read this particular quote about the “spoilsport” by huizinga countless times before, never noticing anything unusual. of course! a spoilsport is an ultimate destroyer, a destroyer of children’s play and games. and being a destroyer of play, he/she, by extension, becomes a destroyer of story-telling, a destroyer of literature and theater; in fact, a destroyer of any endeavor undertaken by imagination, and, thus, a destroyer of our very subjectivities, our communities, our cultures, our lives as human beings! and, of course, something needs to be done to tame such a destroyer: either to convert such a destroyer into a player or to keep this destroyer away from play, so that play – this penultimate developmental activity, would be protected and given a safe space to proceed. the “spoilsport breaks the magic world,” says huizinga, the world in which “a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself. as in the focus of a magnifying glass, play contains all developmental tendencies in a condensed form and is itself a major source of development” (vygotsky, 1978, p. 102). like many scholars of play i, too, have been inspired by this vygotsky’s1 seminal insight. if play is a leading developmental activity of young children (duncan & tarulli, 2003), wouldn’t it be natural, then, to organize education in such a way to ground it in this natural developmental practice – creating many opportunities for children of all ages to play, to perform and to use imagination? more than that, vygotsky also claimed that play is nothing but imagination in action, which means that not only young children need to have their education organized on the play principles, but that imagination also needs to have a significant role in educational activities of older children, youth and adults. thus, i saw diverse forms of play, play-like activities and dramatic arts as an answer to the age-old major educational problem of how to design environments and activities that will authentically and ontologically engage students. it took an extraordinary confrontational and intense critique of my points of view, by a close colleague2, to re-awaken a few dormant traces of doubt i had almost forgotten from my past study of young children’s metaphors (marjanovic-shane, 1989). in that study, i was strongly influenced by bakhtinian thought, claiming not only that meaning-making always takes place between people and that it involves invoking the imagined worlds, but that meaning-making also is a redefinition of relationships, a redefinition that matters to the involved participants ontologically, rather than merely in the pretend worlds of play. thus, my colleague’s sharp critique of grounding education in play-like environments and activities, made me 1 for more scholars inspired by vygotsky’s view of play, see the literature on play, performance, creativity and drama in education (see, for instance, connery, john-steiner, & marjanovic-shane, 2010; davis, grainger clemson, ferholt, jansson, & marjanovicshane, 2015; fleer, 2009; holzman, 2000, 2009, 2010, 1999; john-steiner, 2000; lindqvist, 1995; marjanović, 1959, 1960, 1961; marjanovic-shane, 2010; marjanovic-shane, connery, & john-steiner, 2010; moran & john-steiner, 2003; sawyer et al., 2003; singer, golinkoff, & hirsh-pasek, 2006, and many more). 2 this event happened in a symposium i organized and presented in at a professional conference, and it was startling, dramatic and deeply unnerving. however, despite being very upset at the time of that confrontation, i became thankful to my colleague eugene matusov, whose critique set me on an adventure to reassess my views – to look beyond, behind, under and over all known sociocultural conceptualizations of the roles of play, dramatic arts and imagination in education and in development. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a47 highly sensitive to the tensions between the conceptions of play as leading and even dominant educational activity, on one hand; and, on the other, views of education grounded in critical dialogic meaning-making, guided by the bakhtinian philosophy. however, the fact that i became sensitive to these tensions was in a large measure disorienting, disconcerting and bewildering. it pointed to something larger taking place in the background, but i could not quite put my finger on what it is – until i saw huizinga’s statement above, again! in this article i attempt to answer important questions about these tensions that puzzled me over the past few years. here i explore, compare and contrast what i came to see as two educational paradigms embodied in different educational practices: a) one, based on the vygotskian views that human cognitive, semantic (meaning-making), and socialemotional development, happens in play or through play (i.e. imagination in action), thus within the imagined worlds. as cole and pelapart (2011) wrote, vygotsky “offers a nuanced reading [of] imagination-as-a-process through which the world is made and, at the same time, through which the self emerges to experience that world” (p. 399). i see many such educational approaches and activities that are based in play, games, role-playing, improv and drama guided by this paradigm. (see the references throughout the text). in this article i loosely call them “drama in education” (die). b) the other, based in the bakhtin inspired approach to critical dialogue among the “consciousnesses of equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 285) – in which education is assumed to be a practice of examination of the world, the others and the self in which the students arrive at their subjective, unpredictable and seldom identical truths, i.e. the internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1991, p. 349; matusov & von duyke, 2010). in the practice of critical dialogue, “people not only creatively transform the cultural practice, but also critically evaluate the practice itself, including practice of education” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2014a, p. 26). in this article i refer to this educational approach as dialogic pedagogy3. the purpose of making this contrast is to explore how these two paradigms define and guide innovative educational approaches, which attempt to overcome alienation often experienced by students in the conventional education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). here i attempt to reveal implicit and explicit conceptual similarities and differences between these two educational paradigms regarding their understanding the nature of learning; social values that they promote; and the group dynamics, social relationships and the position of learners’ subjectivity. i aim to uncover the role and legitimacy of the learners’ disagreement with the positions of others, their dissensus with the educational events and settings, and the possible power structure within the social organization of educational communities in these two diverse educational approaches. i explore the legitimacy of dissensus in the two approaches both in regard to the participants’ critical examination of the curriculum, and also, and more importantly the legitimacy of dissensus in regard to promoting the participants’ agency and its transformations. although i describe very important similarities and touching points between the two educational approaches, i argue that the differences between them are deeper and that the surface similarities have different meanings and roles within each paradigm. the analysis of differences between these educational approaches that lead me to conclude that they not only have divergent, even opposing views on human development, learning and education; but also that they promote different kinds of learning and transcendence of the self, based on their contrasting educational, social and political values. thus, although both drama in education and dialogic pedagogy claim to deeply, fully and ontologically engage the learners in the process of education, they do it for different purposes and with diametrically opposite ways of treating the students and their relationship to the world, each other and their own developing selves. for this reason, i see these 3 however, there are diverse and quite different understandings of what dialogic pedagogy is, but discussion of their differences is not in the scope of this article. for more discussion see for instance marjanovic-shane (2014); matusov and miyazaki (2014). “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a48 approaches not only to differ along several “dimensions”, but in fact, to represent two different educational paradigms. as such they are actually not directly comparable. the very nature of the paradigmatic differences is that what is sensible in one paradigm does not make any sense in another and vice versa. it is like trying to compare an orbit of one planet around the sun (in the heliocentric paradigm) with an orbit of another planet around the earth (in the geocentric paradigm): it just does not make any sense. in this article, therefore, i aim to show two different “beasts”, each in its own light – and i can compare directly only their outcomes, rather that their conceptual orientations – that can be only indirectly juxtaposed. i first describe a few important characteristics that both drama in education and dialogic pedagogy seem to share. after that i examine the key difference in the theoretical and ideological orientations of these two paradigms – their divergent approaches to the relationship between the reality and imagination. in the next part, i present two educational events and subject them to deeper and more detailed analysis, focusing on several outcomes of these educational practices, which can be more directly compared and contrasted. in the conclusion i claim that the differences between these approaches are deep and based on irreconcilable paradigmatic contrasts. before i start, let me briefly define and describe what i will call here “drama in education” (die) and “dialogic pedagogy” (dp) approaches. for the purposes of this analysis and easy referencing i use the term “drama in education” (die) to describe a wide variety of educational programs, procedures and techniques, all of which use either some form of dramatic arts or some form of children’s imaginative play for educational purposes – i.e. to teach a particular curriculum, to immerse students in particular experiences, etc. thus “drama in education” in this article refers to what in reality are diverse educational practices known respectively as: process drama (o'neill, 1995; o'toole, 1992; o'toole, stinson, & moore, 2009; taylor & warner, 2006); “the mantle of expert” or “role-play” (bolton, 2003; heathcote & bolton, 1995; heathcote, johnson, & o'neill, 1984); playworlds (baumer & radsliff, 2009; ferholt & lecusay, 2010; lindqvist, 1995; lobman & o'neill, 2011; marjanovic-shane & beljanski-ristić, 2008; marjanovic-shane et al., 2011; nilsson, 2009); improvisation based education (lobman & lundquist, 2007; sawyer, 1997; spolin, 1986) and "performative psychology" (holzman, 2000, 2010). in contrast to diversity of die approaches that coexist without much controversy among them, some dialogic pedagogy approaches oppose each other. in fact, there exist different and sometimes sharply opposing “strands” of dialogic pedagogy: instrumental dp and non-instrumental dp, epistemological dp, ontological dp and ecological dp, etc.4 in this paper, however, i use the term dialogic pedagogy (dp) to refer mostly to what has been characterized as critical ontological dialogic pedagogy (lobok, 2001; matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999; wegerif, 2007, and others). in this particular kind of dialogic pedagogy, the purpose of education is seen as “helping the learners in their own critical examination of their own living and evolving positions, testing their ideas regarding the values, purposes, interests, goals and journeys they want to undertake” and good education is “defined as praxis of praxis a ‘critical evaluation and problematizations of ready-made culture’ (cf. matusov & marjanovicshane, 2012) and of the very praxis of teaching and learning by all the participants; promoting learners' authorial stance toward their own learning and development by providing dialogic opportunities for testing ideas, desires, values, motivations, opinions; and promoting learners’ self-generated learning journeys” (marjanovic-shane, 2014, pp. si:ddp 52-53). i want to point out at the start, that what makes the contrasts between the two educational paradigms – die and dp – particularly striking is that they also seem to have a number of important characteristics in common. these common features may be viewed as reasons for some educators to believe that drama in education is either based on dialogic principles (edmiston, 2014; lindqvist, 1995), 4 there are other approaches to dialogic pedagogy that will not be discussed here. see http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dpmap/?reload=1&page_id=18 “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a49 and/or that it provokes dialogue (ewing, 2015; ferholt & lecusay, 2010; o'toole, 1992; taylor & warner, 2006), or even that drama in education fully encompasses dialogue as a particular way to communicate among other ways (e.g. “movement”) (edmiston, 2014). my following analysis convinces me otherwise. in brief, i argue that die and dp differently value a spoilsport in education. die views spoilsport negatively, as huizinga described it above, while dp views it positively. let me, then, before introducing and analyzing the contrast between them, provide a list of characteristics that seem to be shared by both educational approaches. similarities between die and dp first, both die and dp practitioners hope to engage the participating learners deeply, ontologically, authentically into an enfolding and emergent curriculum in order to overcome the problem of alienated learning that is so widely prevailing in the contemporary conventional schooling. alienated learning is criticized by many educationalists “for its disconnection with the students’ personal interests and goals, its alienation of students from intellectual engagement and culture, for being rather superficial, and for the lack of transfer of what students learn in school to activities outside of school (and even inside of school)” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, p. 160). both approaches desire to fully engage the learners in deep experiences that would lead to meaningful learning “necessary for the cultural development of human beings who want to participate in and contribute to the cultural practices of their community and live their lives as a creative process” (van oers, 2012, p. 137). it is believed that such meaningful learning would lead to transformations of the learners' subjectivity, knowledge and relation to life. for instance, heathcote and bolton (1995) proclaim that “drama is about making significant meaning” (p. 4) and o’neill states, “… unlike those working in theatre, one is teaching not for the aesthetic experience, but through it” (cf. in taylor & warner, 2006, p. 29, italics in the original). a meaningful engagement is an engagement of a whole person, like in the “playworlds” that “facilitate not only the cognitive but also the emotional development of children and adults” (marjanovic-shane et al., 2011). in a similar vein, in the dialogic pedagogy, students are being invited and engaged to deeply probe their subjective convictions, by testing their ideas, positions, desires, interests, views, relationships, stakes, etc. in order to construct their own "internally persuasive discourse" (matusov, 2009; matusov & von duyke, 2010; morson, 2004) and thus transcend the given by creating new possibilities, actions and initiatives in their lives. the notion of an "authentic experience", “ontological experience” or "deep experience", e.g. an exciting, engaging, often emotional and perhaps transformative experience, invokes the concept of perezhivanie. this slavic term implies "experiencing" as "living through" an event, "surviving" difficult, dramatic, or even just exhilarating circumstances, which are transformative, vividly felt and remembered. such "perezhivanie", i.e. authentic experience, is thought to be essential for a transforming impact that an educational event may have on a person (dewey, 1998). both drama in education and dialogic pedagogy hope to provide opportunities for students to deeply and authentically experience pedagogical events in which they will have an opportunity for personal transformation and transcendence. second, in contrast to conventional education, in both in die and dp approaches, education is understood as praxis and not as poiesis (aristotle, 2000). according to aristotle, poiesis is a practice which goal, definition, quality and outcome are pre-determined, pre-formed and preset in advance of the practice itself (e.g., preset goals, preset curricular standards, the preset, research-based, criteria of the activity quality, cf. “best practices”). in contrast, in praxis, the outcomes, the values, the goals, and the evaluations evolve and emerge from within the practice itself (carr, 2006). a scholar and, herself, a seminal practitioner of die, o’neill writes, “in suggesting ways in which process drama may be structured and organized, its immediacy and ephemerality must be respected. the process cannot be reduced to a series of predictable episodes or a fixed scenario. an effectively structured dramatic process will achieve development, articulation, and significance while avoiding the repetition of a carefully prearranged sequence, the “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a50 transformation of process into superficial product, and the destruction of the spontaneity that is at the heart of the work” (1995, p. xviii). similarly, a scholar of dp, matusov claims, “the dialogic learning outcome is defined by the discourse. it is future-oriented, not preset, and unpredictable…” (matusov, 2009, p. 308). third, again in contrast to conventional education, both die and dp rely on imagination, improvisation and creativity in generating educational events. in drama in education, the imagined worlds “allow participants to become ‘other’ or be ‘elsewhere’, exploring alternatives beyond the actual worlds they inhabit in their everyday lives” (dunn, 2011, p. 29). in dialogic pedagogy, imagining alternative points of view and/or alternative scenarios to the known events, is paramount for dialogic testing of one’s ideas, positions and desires (lobok, 2012). in both approaches, imagining other worlds (be it imaginary fantasies, or other people’s “real” ways of living, alternative social, political, ideological, scientific, etc., ways of existence), is believed to provide opportunities in which learners experience moments of “dual consciousness in which the real and the fictional worlds are held together in the mind” (o'neill, 1995, p. 159), or are able to have dual (even contradictory) emotional experiences, i.e. “dual affect” (vygotsky, 1971). being in a situation in which two points of view are held together, or two emotions are experienced simultaneously, creates illuminating perspectives, opens ways to compare, contrast, and critically test ones existing beliefs, positions, ideas, values and desires. fourth, in both practices, the participants are placed in situations in which they may experience moments of “defamiliarization” or “enstrangement” (shklovsky, 1990). this term (in russian остранение), coined by the russian literary scholar, victor shklovsky, describes a literary device of making something that is familiar unfamiliar; making ordinary things, events, relationships, actions, experiences, etc., to which we became “used to” or to which we became “numbed” – look and feel novel and strange, as if we were experiencing them for the first time. we see them in a new perspective, a new light, as if never experienced, seen or felt before. according to wittgenstein (1953) "the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (one is unable to notice something-because it is always before one's eyes)… and this means: we fail to be struck by what, when seen, is most striking and most powerful" (p. 50, para. 129). an experience of “enstrangement” provides the learners with new ways of looking at the familiar, and to be suddenly struck by potentially most powerful insights. these insights, in turn, are believed in both educational approaches to have a potential to leading students toward transformations of their subjectivity or to their 'ideological becoming' (bakhtin, 1991, p. 342). these common aspects of the two approaches often have lead educational practitioners and researchers to assume natural and intrinsic connections between various forms of drama/play in education and dialogic pedagogy. (edmiston, 2014; ferholt & lecusay, 2010; lindqvist, 1995; o'neill, 1995; o'toole, 1992; o'toole et al., 2009). however, differences between these two educational approaches reveal very disparate if not conflicting views on learning, development, intersubjectivity, agency and, even more importantly, they reveal oppositions in how the two educational philosophies perceive and define socially valuable transformations of the learner and of the learner’s relationships to the other, to the world and to the self. in the following analysis, i attempt to show that differences between die and dp approaches to education are paradigmatic, rather than a matter of a degree or differences along some continuum. in this article i take a critical perspective on drama in education from the point of view of the ontological dialogic pedagogy based on bakhtinian philosophy. my intention is to uncover hidden aspects of die practices that may put the students in "the state of being trapped, a state from which one can escape only by working through the situation" (heathcote et al., 1984, p. 91). “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a51 suspension of disbelief vs. suspension of belief – or why a "spoilsport" cannot survive in drama pedagogy, but is welcome in critical dialogue – huizinga wrote, "the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. by withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. he robs play of its illusion-a pregnant word, which means literally "in-play" (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). therefore, he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community" (huizinga, 1955, p. 11). however, the "spoil-sport" as the person "who trespasses against the rules or ignores them" is absolutely crucial for critical dialogue: this is the person who reveals different points of view, diverse, often opposing ideas and desires, who is able to transfigure, to shatter, even to annihilate what is assumed to be true and natural, and to carve new boundaries, thus, testing the limits of everyone’s reality. this is why, according to huizinga, “in the world of high seriousness, too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.” (huizinga, 1955, p. 12). therefore, while s/he may be a "spoil-sport" in play and in the “world of high seriousness”5, in critical dialogue this *player*6 is the spark that that ignites dialogue putting both the illusion and the truth to the test! both drama in education (die) and dialogic pedagogy (dp) create multidimensional events, allowing their participants to simultaneously experience more than one world with its particular values, rules and sense of time and space. the participants in such events play more than one role. here, i will analyze such multidimensional educational events that take place across several worlds at the same time, using bakhtinian concept of “chronotope”. bakhtin defined “chronotope” as the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed, "spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (bakhtin, 1994, p. 184). a chronotope is "a unity of time, space and axiology",7 i.e., set of values, relationships, rules and expectations that exist for the participants in a time-space. elsewhere i claim (marjanovic-shane, 2011) that one can abstract at least three chronotopes in play, performance and education: the imagined chronotope (ic) –the imagined, alternative world; the reality chronotope (rc) the ontologic world of the participants’ real lives, called by matusov (2003) ontological chronotope; and the community of players chronotope (copl) – an immediate local world of organizing the current participants’ practice. in this article, as the primary point of contrast between drama in education and dialogic pedagogy i look at their views, conceptualizations and use of the imagined worlds the imagined chronotopes; and at their views, conceptualizations and use of the participants’ reality/ontological chronotopes. i argue that although both die and dp invoke and summon up (one or more) imagined worlds, they do it based on different understanding of the role of these worlds in learning and development, and, therefore, for different educational purposes: in die the imagined chronotope dominates over and the participants’ life – the reality chronotope/ontological chronotope. in contrast, in dialogic pedagogy, this 5 at the end of this article i briefly come back to discussing the difference between education as a unique sphere of human practice, different from all other spheres of practice and activity, when understood as “critical examination of one’s understanding of the world, the other and the self” (matusov & wegerif, 2014) 6 i place the asterisks around the term "player" because although not "playing", per se – this participant is actually a player in a "dialogic" game. 7 bakhtin defined "chronotope" as a unity of space and time. it was matusov who added "axiology" to the definition of the chronotope, based on earlier works of bakhtin and his own development of this concept (matusov, 2003a). “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a52 relationship is completely opposite: it is the students’ lives, their reality/ontological chronotopes that dominate over the imagined chronotopes. most practitioners and researchers of play/drama in education assume that creating vivid, lively and animated imaginary worlds will have a full emotional and cognitive impact on their participants, and thus will enhance their learning (baumer, ferholt, & lecusay, 2005; ferholt, 2015; lindqvist, 1995; van oers, 2012, among many others). the assumption that a child’s mental development emerges from within the imaginary chronotope (ic) of play was originally developed in context the cultural-historical approach to early childhood. there, it is assumed that human development (cognitive, emotional, social, self-control, etc.) first occurs in play through building imaginary worlds, before it happens “in reality”. the assumption that play is the leading activity in early childhood development (duncan & tarulli, 2003; fleer, 2009) is based on lev vygotsky’s (1978) understanding that play “creates the zone of proximal development” (p. 102) and it is further grounded on vygotsky's claim that, "in play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as if he were a head taller than himself" (p. 102). inspired by vygotsky’s approach to the role of play in development, lindqvist designed what she called “the playworld pedagogy” where "the thinking process [as] a creative process – an imaginary process – […] develops in play because a real situation takes on a new and unfamiliar meaning" (lindqvist, 1995, p. 51). creating imagined worlds and dwelling in them as characters, enables the students to be engaged, active, and having a degree of freedom (sometimes even substantial) to explore and to make decisions in these imagined worlds. “the playing child creates a sphere of imagination where it as an active agent may explore and transform very impressive aspects of its own life” (schousboe & winter-lindquist, 2013, p. 2). this view has deeply influenced many contemporary genres of drama and play pedagogy: playworlds and play pedagogy in general, improvisation in education, performance psychology, process drama, and others (bolton & heathcote, 1999; cole, 2006; edmiston, 2015; ewing, 2015; holzman, 2009; lobman & lundquist, 2007; marjanovic-shane et al., 2011; o'toole et al., 2009; rainio, 2008; singer et al., 2006). according to o'neill (o'neill, 1995), the immediate and practical objective of process drama is to immerse the student in the medium of drama or play, i.e. in an imaginary chronotope (ic), where it is assumed that the development, the coming into being, actually takes place. in all genres of die, the imaginary chronotope (ic) has the highest priority: it is precisely in the ic, according to the drama/play pedagogues, where the students become active and take responsibility for their actions. in the words of heathcote and bolton (1995), “because the students are to be in role in a fictional context, they will bring a sense of responsibility to their learning, with the result that the teacher is able, through the drama, to make greater demands on the students than if this alternative trigger to learning were missing” (p. 46). thus the need to be immersed in “pretend”, to be in an “as-if” world, to sustain an illusion, is seen as one of the strongest determinations in play (see for isntance giffin, 1984). to be immersed in the pretense can only be achieved through suspension of disbelief8 (keeping an illusion)! moreover, it is the collective suspension of disbelief that is crucial in play and performing arts, as well as in drama in education, where the realization of the pretense, i.e. the “as-if” worlds, depends on the collaborative work of many participants. in fact, suspension of disbelief needs to be contracted by all participants – in order for a dramatic performance/play to be built, presented, viewed and appreciated. it is actually not possible to keep suspending disbelief when someone rejects “to play” and would rather not participate. such a person threatens the very possibility for the others to continue building an imaginary chronotope or to keep pretending to live in it “as if” its characters. such a person is a spoilsport and must 8 a term a "term coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher samuel taylor coleridge in his biographia literaria" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/suspension_of_disbelief “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a53 be cast out or disciplined! the necessity to contract an agreement to suspend disbelief in the ic by all the participants, is the first point of contrast between die and dp. in contrast to die, in the critical ontological dialogic pedagogy (dp), suspension of disbelief is not at all a prerequisite. in fact, and in the opposition to die, it is suspending belief – i.e. testing participants’ diverse ideas about their reality and their truth – that represents the modus operandi in dialogic pedagogy. this does not mean that there is no production of imagined worlds, imagined scenarios, possible or fantastic imaginary chronotopes (ics). but in critical dialogues, it is the participants’ actual, ontologic, reality chronotopes that are in the focus. in dialogic pedagogy, the truth touches upon an illusion and, thus, the truth (and therefore the “illusion”) “become(s) dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319). there is no presupposition in the critical ontologic dialogic pedagogy that the imaginary or imagined worlds (ic) need to be jointly constructed or jointly performed by the participants. any imagined chronotope (ic) is understood in dp not in terms of an “as-if” world of joint pretense, but rather as a one of potentially many hypothetical “what-if” worlds. moreover, these hypothetical “what-ifs”, are juxtaposed, compared and contrasted to each other in testing the participants ideas, positions, values, desires, etc. they do not have to be agreed upon, nor jointly realized, nor coordinated among the participants. on the contrary, what represents the “work” of the participants in critical dialogue is precisely the very discovery of the differences and contrasts between and among diverse participants’ actual ontologic positions, perspectives and ideas. in other words, in critical dialogue the focus is on the reality/ontological chronotope (rc). however, to become aware of one’s position in life, to become an author of one’s own reality, one needs to encounter, to discover and to face diverse alternatives. thus the imagined chronotopes (ic) – whether perceived as actual alternative lives of the others, or as conveniently constructed phantasies – are necessary to provide boundaries to one’s own reality chronotope (rc), to render it visible and palpable, ready to be deconstructed and tested in the perpetual transcendence of one’s own truths. thus, providing opportunities to encounter diverse possible and impossible alternative views and positions, bringing up the “what-if” scenarios, having diverse desires and ways of seeing and acting, comparing them and contrasting them, is the crux of critical dialogue and ontologic dialogic education. therefore, in dialogic pedagogy, based on the suspension of belief, the one who does not agree with premises of the “known truths”, but perpetuates and deepens critical examinations of any aspect of life is, in fact, the most valuable, legitimate, and necessary participant. “the prisoners of war camp” vs. “the magic wand” in order to explore the implications of this fundamental contrast between drama in education and dialogic pedagogy, in this section i present two educational events – one from drama in education and one from a dialogic pedagogy approach. i describe a part of drama in education workshop held by dorothy heathcote in england around 1970. the second event i present and describe took place in a graduate (master level) course on child development and education that i held in a small college in the us a few years ago with a dialogic pedagogy orientation. as mentioned at the start of this article, these two educational cases cannot be directly compared: belonging to two different educational paradigms, they are in many ways incompatible for comparing to each other. however, they are here to generate several specific characteristics of each of their paradigms, and to analyze their divergent educational outcomes. “prisoners of war camp workshop” – dorothy heathcote (“three looms waiting”, video by smedley, 1971) i chose to describe a start of a drama workshop held by one of the most known drama in education teachers and scholars, dorothy heathcote, because it portrays not only a highly skillful practitioner and the founder of this particular die approach, but also it provides a glimpse into the art of teaching in this genre, “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a54 at its best. this particular drama workshop was filmed and presented within a documentary movie about the work of dorothy heathcote, “three looms waiting” by the bbc producer ron smedley (1971) and is available on line9. this bbc program made heathcote’s work famous around the world. i describe the very start of a workshop that dorothy heathcote held with students, residents of a boarding school in durham, uk. the participants were 14 boys between 10 and 13 years old. besides these young students, there were also eight teachers sitting in the background, who came to learn more about die by observing the work of the already renowned practitioner. the video includes parts of an interview with heathcote that adds her comments on what she was doing with the boys throughout the workshop. i analyze these comments as heathcote’s “espoused theory” (argyris & schön, 1978) of drama in education that guided her moment-tomoment decisions in the drama workshops. the following is a description of the opening of the drama in education workshop based on the transcript of the part of the video. i am using a presentation mode that i elsewhere named “stop motion analysis” and interpretation (rainio & marjanovic-shane, 2013). while reading this die case, please focus on the following aspects of this event: the way heathcote introduces the imagined world (ic) and the way in which the imagined world dominates in the workshop; how she positions herself visa vie the students within the imagined chronotope (ic) and in their reality/ontological chronotope; the value and legitimacy of agreement and the role of the students’ subjectivity and agency. • • • dorothy heathcote (in further text i call her just dorothy or dh) entered a large hall of the boarding school. the school principal introduced her to a group of 14 male students. she was now standing in front of a semicircle of young teen boys, who were looking at her with their arms crossed, like a solid wall. some of them were as tall as her. she walked a few steps toward them with a smile on her face, and as she approached them, she suddenly lowered herself down and sat on her heels. as she lowered herself, all the boys also went down to sit on the floor, as if by command. now she appeared taller than any one of them, and dominated the group. 1 dh: well… you know my name, anyway… don’t you? [the boys nod and say, yes]. so… settle down! when they all settled down on the floor, dorothy first quickly explained the presence of the observing teachers. then she looked at her wrist watch and said, 2 dh: now! how long have we got? what time do we stop for dinner? 3 boys: twelve! 4 dh: twelve o’clock… so, we’ve got from twelve… from now to twelve to do the play! as she says, “we’ve got”, she makes a pause and glances around, looking at each boy briefly. finally she rests her glance on a boy on her left with a significant smile. doing that, she apparently addresses the boys as partners with whom she will work on a joint project. she slightly chuckles, looks again around the semi– 9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owkiuo99qrw “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a55 circle and asks in a very inviting and also a very casual tone, as if she had known these students all for a long time: 5 dh: what would you like to do? the boys start talking in low voices more to each other than to her. one boy’s voice stands out10: 6 boy #3: do you want us to give suggestions? 7 dh: well, c’mon now! let’s have a few! 8 boy #2 [makes a suggestion] “prisoners of war camp!” 9 dh: [echoes his suggestion] a prison camp! m-hm! 10 boy #5: [makes a suggestion] “stone age!” 11 dh: [echoes this suggestion]: “stone age!” [she nods.] dh comment – a video insert in the “prisoners of war” workshop: “when i meet a group for the first time, i don’t go in with definite ideas of what’s going to happen, because i think i must use their ideas. and i want them to see their ideas coming into this marvelous action they bring… so, i try to go in working almost… so, if you think of a gas cooker, and i’m… i’m set at nothing…” in this comment, which provides a first glimpse into her espoused theory, heathcote describes her teaching as open-ended and based on the student’s interests. she has not come to this workshop with a pre-set curriculum, but rather, she lets the students’ interests guide her, and she is ready to create this workshop as an aristotelian praxis. as heathcote and bolton claim elsewhere “drama is about making significant meaning” (1995, p. 4), she is attempting now to provide an opportunity for the boys to deeply engage in creating an experience meaningful to them. prisoners of war camp workshop (continues): 12 dh: what are we going to do? which do you fancy? 13 boys: [all talking at the same time, generating a few more proposals – but finally more and more of them say]: “prisoner of war camp”. 14 dh: [leaning forward into the circle of boys as if she wants to be closer to them, and less of an authority. she asks in a sincere tone] prisoners of war camp? 15 boys: [all together] yes. 16 dh: let’s try this then! [at this moment, she straightens herself out and again she towers over the boys, all the while sitting on the floor]. [she clears he throat] you are going to be captured as prisoners… 17 boys: [eagerly] yes! 18 dh: … because that’s what you want. 19 boys: [they are now looking at her very intently and with strong attention] 20 dh: and for this you will have to agree that i am cleverer than you… because there is only one of me, and there is fourteen of you! [she looks around capturing the eyes of almost every boy individually. she makes a pause to let her words sink.] 10 i have numbered the boys randomly, as their names are never mentioned during this workshop. also, giving them number instead of names seems fit, because we, as the audience, don’t know anything about the boys as themselves. we only know them in the roles they play in this dramatic world. i gave the #1 to the boy who in the drama assumes a role of a commander of the others. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a56 so, if you want to be in a prison camp, you’ll have to let me take you there!!! right? 21 boys: [some boys nod. some have put their heads on their arms and look at her both dreamily and with full concentration, as if they are getting in a trance.] this is a crucial moment in which heathcote creates a contract with the students – a contract in which they promise to follow her and listen to her commands. for heathcote, having such a contract – both explicitly and implicitly – is a condition for creating a dramatic workshop. “regarding the contract this is always about agreeing (a) to the particular context and (b) that 'we shall run it.’" (heathcote & bolton, 1995, p. 17) she must be the one to lead them into the imagined world – in which she will direct them to undertake different imagined actions. at this moment heathcote begins to assume a different role – a role of a commanding officer (co) in the imagined world – inviting the boys to follow her and step into this world themselves. 22 dh/co: now!!! pick up your guns!!! [she changes her voice completely – getting into a role, potentially of their army commander, giving orders in a firm, yet very friendly voice.] 23 boys: [start to pantomime picking up the guns as they still sit on the ground] 24 dh/co: now, every man get used to laying his gun down in a place where he knows and can put his hand on. so, find out how you pick up your gun and lay it down…. just go on! [she is again slightly hunched down, making herself closer to the boys, relating to them with confidence of close collaborators.] 25 boys: [continue to pantomime picking up guns and laying them down.] 26 dh: … just pick it up and get used to the feeling!... her tone now becomes more serious, significant, and solemn. it is this tone of voice that starts to spin the substance of the imagined war and the imagined soldiers, somewhere in the world of a war, potentially in danger. 27 dh/co: it matters! … it’s all there is between you and the germans with their guns, isn’t it? … really! 28 boys: [seem to be drawn into the scene. several voices confirm dorothy’s remark] yeah! 29 boy#5: [raises slightly in the back of the circle and offers an idea] what if you got a bazooka? 30 dh: [quickly and decisively eliminates his idea] we haven’t any bazooka! we have ordinary rifles! 31 boy #5: yeah! 32 dh: is that agreed? [she looks around the circle of boys with a fierce, but smiling face. she talks intensely and emphatically, punctuating every word with nods of her head!] nobody start pulling rank to getting bigger guns! is that agreed? 33 boys: [many voices] yes! yeah! 34 dh: [she stares into each one of their faces, making sure that this order is understood. it seems that she is doing that not in the role of a military commander but as herself, a drama teacher. [she adds] ordinary, standard rifles have been issued for this job… 35 boys: [adding some unintelligible comments, apparently naming particular brand of the rifles] 36 dh: well, “202”-s or whatever they are… dh comment – video insert in the prisoners of war workshop: “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a57 “the trick is to do something that: a) arrests the attention of the people you are working with; … b) focuses them as a group; and c) straight away tells them what’s up, … what’s happening! so, usually i try to take a role in such a way that straight away they grasp a lot…” in this comment, heathcote summarizes the meaning of what o’neill (1995) calls, “pretext” – an act that creates an entry point into an imagined world (ic). in the prisoners of war camp workshop – this crucial moment starts in line 22, when dorothy proclaims: “now!!! pick up your guns!!!” in a changed voice signaling that she took up a role of some sort of a commanding officer in the imagined worlds and that this commanding officer considers the boys to be soldiers under his/her command. dorothy creates an even stronger invitation, a forceful attractor, a “gravitational pull” into this world when she warns everyone that “it matters! (knowing where their guns are) … it’s all there is between you and the germans with their guns, isn’t it? … really! in line 27. it seemed that her invitation worked instantaneously, as the boys seem to be enchanted, and getting more and more excited. yet, at the same time – heathcote cannot let any dissensus with her happen. she made sure that all boys agreed with her as she proclaimed “and for this you will have to agree…” (line 20) – when she was securing a contract with the students that they will “have to let me take you there!!! right?” when boy #5 suggests, “what if you got a bazooka?” (line 29) she stops him immediately from developing his idea, “we haven’t any bazooka! we have ordinary rifles! (line 30) is that agreed?” (line 31). what boy #5 said was most probably not intended as an attempt to disagree, nor as a spoilsport attempt to destroy this imaginary world, but in fact, most probably as an offer of a new building-block for the imagined world. however, it would appear that his offer was not in agreement with dorothy’s vision of how this imaginary situation should develop. moreover, his gesture also seems to have clashed with dorothy’s sense of who should be unquestionably in charge of directing this imagined world – as we might conclude from her uttering, “nobody start pulling rank to getting bigger guns! is that agreed?” (line 32). prisoners of war camp workshop (continues): 37 dh: [as the video returns to the prisoner of war camp workshop, we see dh walking and yelling loudly in role – apparently impersonating a german officer (go in further text) yelling at the british captives who are hidden inside some kind of a building. she is walking back and forth and pretending to holding a rifle. she yells at the top of her lungs, in a rude and threatening voice] rouse, you britishers in there? one of the staples of drama in education is the notion of a “teacher in role”, i.e. a teacher who assumes a role of a character in the imagined chronotope. in this workshop, when dorothy steps in the roles a commanding officer and an enemy army’s officer is a part of the “pretext” a leading gesture that creates an entry-point into the imagined world. more than that, stepping into a role of a character in an imagined world seems to change the relationship between the teacher and the students, transforming them all into an ensemble of co-actors whose relationships are based on camaraderie. in this role, dorothy can also guide the development of the imaginary world from within – letting her character shape various opportunities for the others. prisoners of war camp workshop (continues): 38 boys: [they are lying on the ground pretending to hold their rifles.] we are just five! 39 dh/go: [in role of a german officer] i know how many there are in! 40 boy #11: [from the back of the group] oh, many. how many then? [boys’ faces are smiling, but they lie on the ground pretending to have rifles] “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a58 41 dh/go: the officer will stand up! 42 boy #1: [starts to get up] 43 boy #3: [whispers] stay down! [some boys are starting to get up] 44 boy#1: [he starts to rise and says to the rest of the boys] get down! 45 dh/go: [yells at the boy #1] stand up! 46 boy #1: [goes down in an attempt to not obey] 46 dh/go: [yells very harshly, increasingly authoritatively, and in a threatening tone] stand up! 47 boy #4: [says to boy #1] stay down! 48 boy #3: do you want to be killed? 49 boy #1: [waives boy #3 down in a gesture that signals him to stay out of this. he stands up and addresses dh] sir! [he gestures with his right hand to his “men” to be quiet and stay out of this.] 50 dh: [in a changed voice – friendly, almost like she is out of the role of a german officer] stop! this altercation about standing up or staying down takes place ostensibly within the imagined word between the characters of a german officer and his british captives. yet the tensions rise, and the dramatic scene has a feel of a real testing of each other’s powers and authority between the boys and dorothy. the tension at one point is almost threatening to explode and dorothy seems at this moment to want to relinquish it. she seems as if she is stepping out of the german commander role, softening her tone when she says, “stop!” (line 50). however, she quickly resumes it when she sees that the boys are sustaining their roles (see below). prisoners of war camp workshop (continues): 51 boy #1: [he is standing turned toward her, looking her directly in the eye – without fear in his expression] 52 dh/go: [resumes the role of a german officer. yells slowly and emphatically] you have thirteen men and yourself in the house! 53 boy #1: [he looks dismayed] 54 dh/go: we know! we have counted them! 55 boy #1: [with slight defiance] they are not coming out! 56 dh/go: you will send out… through this window! … 57 boy #1: no! 58 dh/go: thirteen guns, plus yours! 59 boy #1: [in an attempt to negotiate] instead of thirteen… 60 dh/go: [very insistently and without a room for negotiation. she raises her voice higher] fourteen british standard rifles! 61 boys: [they are starting to raise from the floor] 62 boy #1: [he puts his right arm out toward the rest of the “men” in a gesture to hold them and to stop them from “coming out of the house”.] boy #1 has now emerged as a leader, by taking upon himself the negotiations with the enemy (lines 55, 57) and by trying to protect “his men” (line 61). these negotiations continue for a while, with boy #1 building his role of a leader firmer, and dorothy helping that process out by entering in tough verbal clashes with them, like below (transcript continuing at line 97). “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a59 prisoners of war camp workshop (continues): 97 dh/go: [to boy #1] you will get your men out of this house lined up in the street, ready for the wagons! 98 boys: [they exclaim all together in many voices] no chance! no chance! no chance! 99 dh/go: [in a loud and threatening voice] is that understood? it is an order! because if you don’t, the place will be blown up… 100 boy #1: [to dh/go] don’t! i give the orders! 101 dh/go: i give the orders! 102 boy #1: [he is trying to get power and control] instead of telling me, talk to me! 103 dh/go: [in a threatening tone] i shall remember you later! dh comment – video insert in the prisoners of war workshop: “i won’t water down drama! so i use the situations the authors use! the real tense situations of life! [….] drama is real men in a mess!” although the drama workshop continues, we stop here. i analyze several aspects of this workshop and heathcote’s commentary further below by comparing and contrasting it with an event, which happened in a graduate course that i taught with an emerging dialogic pedagogy orientation a few years ago. “magic wand” – a dramatic transformational event in a critical ontologic dialogic pedagogy run class in two acts the event i describe here was an important transformational point for all participants in the dialogic pedagogy class including the professor (me, i will call myself emma11). this event involves socratic "torpedo’s touch" (matusov, 2009; plato, 1961), i.e. a student's intense lived through experience [perezhivanie] of being stunned or numbed by a penetrating, transformational pedagogical event. my description is based on the audio-recording of the class and the class participants’ writing on the electronic discussion forum. while reading this dp case, please focus on the following: the purpose and the way the professor emma introduces provocations to the students existing beliefs about teaching and learning; how she positions herself visa vie the students within their reality/ontological chronotope; the value and legitimacy of (dis)agreement and the role of the students’ and the professor’s subjectivity and agency. act i: provocation #1 skinner’s video about training pigeons that particular class meeting in a master’s graduate course on educational psychology for current and future teachers, was about "classroom management". the professor, emma, introduced a short video by the famous american behaviorist skinner on "operant conditioning"12. in the class of five graduate students, three current teachers used behaviorist classroom management with their own students. sarah13, a current preschool teacher, was working with very young children with autism using a behaviorist pedagogical technique known as applied behavior analysis (aba)14 (cooper, 1982). two other students, nora and adele, both current elementary school teachers, used behaviorist pedagogical strategy known as 11 i use a pseudonym "emma" for my then self – to distance my current authorial voice at the time i am writing this text from my then voice as a teacher – a practice i encountered in and adopted from matusov's book radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and it's centauric failure" (matusov & brobst, 2013). 12 this video can be found on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ctjqjlrha&list=plabg1zghpvypkbdhwqnqvmbd1uml5allx&index=2 13 all names are pseudonyms to protect the identity of the students. i also removed the year and the semester, as well as the course number – for further protection of the students. 14 http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism/treatment/applied-behavior-analysis-aba “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a60 token economy (kazdin & bootzin, 1972) in their classrooms. mona, a committed quaker15, was working in a quaker reggio emilia play-, art-, and community-based prekindergarten. cathy was preparing to become a teacher with emerging progressive liberal educational values (cf. dewey type). cathy had a threeyear-old child who, by the time of the event, had been diagnosed as “at risk for autism” by the child’s pediatrician, which might have led cathy to change her profession and become a teacher. cathy worried about the instrumental treatment of her son and was interested in learning about more humanist educational approaches through the course. the backgrounds of the five students and the professor set a stage for an educational ideological conflict: three (sarah, nora and adele) against three (mona, cathy, emma). professor emma was an emerging dialogic pedagogy teacher who was ideologically closer to mona and cathy. after watching the video, in which skinner described various aspects of operant conditioning on pigeons, the class instructor emma asked the students what they thought about skinner's explanation that in order for a reward to work the pigeons had to be kept hungry. the implication and tone of emma’s question was challenging behaviorism in education: whether behaviorist operant conditioning approach developed with caged pigeons can be applied pedagogically and morally to students (children). at that moment, sarah said emphatically: sarah: the function of the behavior has to be attention [by this sarah seemed to mean that as the pigeons were hungry for food, students/children are hungry for the teacher/adult’s attention]. the function of most behaviors is attention. the child will always want your attention. but if he is getting your attention in a way that is dangerous…. professor emma did not like sarah’s equalizing of skinner’s hungry caged pigeons with students in her class and wanted to challenge sarah. emma’s commitment to dialogic pedagogy (among other things) caused her to be disturbed by sarah’s behaviorism. prof e.: ok, so are you saying that…[…] you can use it to manipulate them [children] with that – [the children’s] primary need! just as you can say the pigeon has hunger, so you can use this primary need [for getting attention] to manipulate the child's behavior like this. mona also seemed to be upset by sarah’s behaviorist approach and tried to introduce ethics into the discussion. from my previous encounter with mona in the class, i knew that she was a strong advocate of children’s human rights, believing that they should be respected and not manipulated for the teacher’s own comfort and control. in addition, mona was apparently also concerned and worried about possibly positioning sarah as “a bad educator/person” as a result of her challenge. mona: (talking slowly and choosing words): which then… (coughs), comes down to… to morals! if… if you have a teacher, who is a good teacher, then they'll recognize when something like this needs to be… applied… you know, if the students are in harm… […] but if you have a teacher… (mona is breathing deeply. she seems to feel the tension with sarah, and is careful with her choice of words) … who just wants it [aba] for the… classroom management, to get through the day, and isn't really invested in their job… prof e.: (trying to "soften" the potential blow to sarah): or maybe they are invested but just don't see how else… sarah was apparently shocked. she seemed to recognize the moral issue of her aba practice and tried to distance herself from skinner’s behaviorism while struggling with the clear connection between behaviorism and her aba strategy. 15 quakers is a christian denomination with strong commitment to human rights, peace, and equality. quakers treat other people as “friends”, including children of all ages. philadelphia (the city of brotherly love, quaker influenced name), one of the strong centers of quaker religion in the usa, was where the event occurred. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a61 sarah: (in apparent distress and confusion, her voice was trembling): i think it [aba technique she was using with her students] is different than classroom management [i.e., from skinner’s operant conditioning of the hungry pigeon], that's my opinion… they [aba specialists] use it [behaviorist operant conditioning] to an extent, but they just don't use these phrases [skinner’s language], you know… (sarah, talks slowly trying to suppress feelings that are welling up, being at the edge of crying). two other students, nora and adele, who were practicing the behaviorist token economy classroom management strategy in their classrooms, apparently wanted to give comfort and support to sarah. they argued that at times punishment and manipulation are necessary, appropriate and justified treatments of students/children by the teacher/adults. they claimed that token economy and occasional punishment are their only way of keeping the class in order, which is a prerequisite for successful studying. sarah did not participate in this discussion, but attentively listened to it. neither mona nor cathy said much afterwards. i speculate that, for cathy, this discussion was especially personal because of her three-year old son. she was probably imaging her son under behaviorist treatments by teachers like sarah — and she was probably very terrified about this possibility. at the same time, like mona, cathy seemed to be very concerned about sarah’s feelings being hurt. professor emma saw the polarization of the perspectives, — which can be called: behaviorism vs. humanism — between sarah, nora and adele as behaviorists, and mona, cathy, and herself, as humanists. their, the humanist’s, silence and body language signaled disagreement, disapproval and even apparent ethical condemnation of the behaviorist position. sarah seemed to be caught between the two perspectives because she apparently recognized the negative ethical implications of her behaviorism (in contrast to nora and adele). at the very end of the class meeting, sarah burst out in protest and defended her position. in a shaky voice, holding back tears, she explained in a distressed and angry tone, addressing primarily professor emma, that in her practice, based on aba, she was "not cruel to my students!!! on the contrary!… you don’t know what you are talking about! you don’t know much about aba! how can you judge it?! i love my students — i feel like a mother to them! you don’t know my day-to-day problems! enough of this!!!" the class meeting was over and sarah left as fast as possible, avoiding looking at and talking to anyone. mona and cathy left the class together. nora and adele left separately — they had not been close to each other. act ii – distress deepens for sarah; emma seeks guidance for her own dialogic teacher orientation from her colleague professor emma was puzzled, distressed, and dissatisfied with her lesson: she liked her students to test their ideas but not morally condemn each other or themselves. she wanted to create “a safe learning environment,” in which it was safe for the students to raise any ideas and positions for class discussion and testing. emma was also concerned with her lack of dialogic guidance for the students: that she was not able to deepen the discussion on behaviorism and humanism. she was concerned that the students stayed only at the level of their personal and professional experiences and did not connect their perspectives and experiences with the professional discourses big historical dialogue (bibler, 2009), analyzing the concerns, implications, values, and pros and cons behind these two approaches. emma was concerned with her lack of guidance for the students. she was very concerned that sarah, nora, and adele would remain ignorant and continue harming their students by their behaviorist pedagogical techniques without understanding how bad was what they were doing. the next day, sarah, posted on the class web forum the following discussion (excerpts): sarah: i was rather embarrassed when i left class on wednesday and was surprised that i had engaged in such a, shall we call it, spirited discussion with the professor… “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a62 i believe that i reacted in such a single-minded fashion because it went straight to my heart rather than my head. with views so opposite to mine so readily expressed i felt that the care i feel and show for my students was seen by another as a disservice to the child. as a teacher, it makes my heart ache when it is thought that i am not trying to do all i can for students… i know that these strategies, if implemented with caring and respect, can help many students discover more about their world and themselves and to embrace school life in a more positive way for themselves. […] it is my opinion that children are motivated in much the same way as i am, and that sometimes when they need that extra boost to change their way of thinking or their behaviors … i should be able to assist them in this process. […] one of the most important roles of schools is to reach out to children and help them grow with the partnership of the child and the parents to do so. i hope that i did not offend anyone with my spirited outburst, or impolite argument with the professor at the close of class. i am sorry and hope that i will be able to control my own behaviors in the future so that i retain my respectful demeanor even when confronted with ideas or statements that are different than mine. hopefully this class will continue to allow me to learn to respectfully dissent, stand up for what i believe in with clear statements, and to keep and open mind about new techniques and ideas. thanks for listening. “humanists” mona and cathy responded to sarah with support, appreciation, and encouragement, stating, "i love to hear debates … what is education if not a free exchange of diverse viewpoints? your exchange with emma definitely contributed positively to the class" (mona), and "thank you for sharing your beliefs. it is clear how dedicated a teacher you are to your students, your school and to yourself!" (cathy). surprisingly, “behaviorists” nora and adele did not reply in support of sarah. emma became even more alarmed and upset when she saw sarah's posting on the class web forum. she saw the stinging and numbing "torpedo’s touch" effect (matusov, 2009, p. 25; plato, 1961) on sarah and worried that sarah would close up, that she had lost sarah's trust, and with that, potentially the trust of the rest of the students. for emma, sarah's silence during the first class meeting, her outburst at the end of that class meeting and her web posting became a signal. it was a powerful signal that she, emma, needed to make a change in her pedagogy, in order to restore the trust respect, and most of all, the ease everyone in the class had with each other – so that they could continue to freely test their ideas, opinions, positions and desires with each other. emma consulted with her educational and research colleague, eugene16. he directed emma’s attention to her own unexamined pedagogical desire to “educate” the “behaviorist” group of her students so that they would stop being behaviorists and became “humanists” like mona, cathy, and professor emma. he shared that his definition of dialogic education of teachers was in testing the teachers’ own pedagogical desires, rather than in molding the students in the preset way dear to the professor emma. he suggested that emma use “a magic wand” inquiry with her students. act iii: provocation #2 – the magic wand introduction of the metaphor of the “magic wand” inquiry reoriented everyone to new possibilities to explore their own pedagogical desires. on the class web forum, professor emma responded to sarah: dear sarah, i started thinking about your words and asking myself what are my desires as a teacher for my students. don't i wish that my students discovered more about their world and themselves? don't 16 i am grateful to my colleague eugene matusov for giving me an idea to use the metaphor of a "magic wand" for behavior management techniques when i discussed with him this difficult case and asked his advice of what to do in this situation. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a63 i wish that my students embraced more about important things that i teach? i started thinking about difficult situations that i have been sometimes challenged as a teacher: what do i want to achieve and in what way with my students. if there were a magic wand that i could use to make all my students behave and study exactly as i wanted them to do, would i use it? when would i use it? isn't aba (behavioral management) something like a magic wand, to help me as a teacher achieve exactly what i want, with all my students? […] let's examine different real and imaginary scenarios and test the limits of our own beliefs about behavioral management techniques. please post different difficult and problematic educational situations for all of us to think through whether to use or not to use behavioral management. what are the pros and what the cons? i apologize for hurting your feelings and making it unsafe for you to express your thoughts in the class. for some reason (and i am now interested in exploring it for my own sake), the behavioral management (aba) approach in education is really my hot button. i get a knee jerk reaction when it is touched. but i thank you for bringing this issue up and pushing me to start to think about it again. what do you think? our next class meeting was completely overtaken by the critical dialogue about the "magic wand". sarah, mona, cathy, and adele (all but nora) enthusiastically and safely explored and tested our own values, desires, and ideas about learning: when would we use “the magic wand” on ourselves? when would we use it as teachers – on our students? is it educational to make our students unconditionally conform to the teacher’s desire, however good or bad this desire might be? when would it be better and more efficient to learn using a "magic wand" to make the students well behaved? should students become involved in testing ideas about what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong? is it educationally worthwhile to let our students make their own decisions about their own behavior — moral decisions about what is right and what is wrong — and then reflect on them (this question was very important for mona)? what would make a difference in our own development and for our own subjectivities? what does it mean to be “educated?” do we want to raise citizens who unconditionally follow the authority, however good the authority may be? during this critical dialogue about the “magic wand” inquiry, “behaviorists” sarah, nora, and adele raised important issues about their institutional settings. they (but especially adele) said that they were concerned with the institutional pressure to use behaviorist classroom management aiming at active suppressing the students’ “bad” behavior. nora seemed to accept these institutional settings as a given that could not be changed, cynically seeing her professional responsibility as simply to follow institutional orders, although she did not mind most of these institutional orders. from nora’s professional position, the “magic wand” inquiry seemed to sound interesting but a bit frivolous and inconsequential exercise. however, both nora and sarah preferred “positive reinforcements” (something that other students defined as “bribery by rewards”) to “negative reinforcements” of punishments. sarah apparently badly wanted to be a “good teacher”, having a strong commitment to do only good to her students. for her, the “magic wand” inquiry, which tested her pedagogical desires, was apparently very professionally and personally important, exciting, and revealing. this potentially put her on a collision course with her conventional institution. but, this inquiry also baffled her: she saw the children with whom she worked – children “on the autism spectrum” – as “lacking” abilities of self-orientation, focusing attention and self control, so necessary, in her opinion, for learning. she believed that the aba training would provide exactly such skills to them. how could such a beneficial technique be un-ethical? at what point would it become un-ethical? as to the “humanists” mona and cathy, they were on their own territory being interested in finding the limits of their own humanism: when behaviorism can be legitimate (e.g., in quitting smoking). “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a64 the event seemed to have a lasting effect on the participants. afterwards, during the class and many months and years after the class was over, “behaviorist” adele contacted professor emma on several occasions. she said that she often felt as if little professor emma was sitting on her shoulder, asking whether adele liked her own pedagogical desires behind her pedagogical decisions and actions or not. mona, cathy, and adele often recommend new students to take professor emma’s class. cathy asked professor emma to be her academic advisor, and emma accepted this role. so far, i have not heard much from sarah and nora. contrasting aspects of drama in education and dialogic pedagogy practices as i claimed above, although both die and dp introduce (one or more) imagined worlds, they do for different educational purposes: in die the imagined chronotope (ic) dominates over and the participants’ life – the reality chronotope (rc); in contrast, in dialogic pedagogy, it is the students’ lives, their reality/ontological chronotopes that dominate over the imagined worlds. this key difference between the two educational events: the die workshop – prisoners of war camp, and the dp class – magic wand seems to be based on a deeper paradigmatic divergence in conceptualizing education which i explore in this section. the contrast regarding which chronotope is in focus and is prioritized over the other, leads to important differences in pedagogical guidance, in the dynamics of relationships among the participants and in the values prominent in the two approaches. i discuss the following major contrasts between the two educational approaches: 1. different purposes of the imagined chronotopes in drama in education and dialogic pedagogy and the ways of introducing them: pre-text vs. provocation; 2. contrasting positions of die and dp regarding the values and legitimacy of agreement and disagreement among the participants; 3. different social relationships in the die and dp communities of participants; 4. contrasting assumptions about the roles and the positions of the students’ subjectivity and agency in education in die and dp. purpose, role and construction of the imagined and reality chronotopes in drama in education and dialogic pedagogy: pre-text vs. provocation process drama is a complex dramatic encounter. like other theatre events, it evokes an immediate dramatic world bounded in space and time, a world that depends on the consensus of all those present for its existence. (o'neill, 1995, p. xiii) in order to set an immediate dramatic (imagined) world into motion – it is important for a die teacher to create such entry points that will attract the students’ attention and capture their imagination in a way that would induce their fast transition into the imagined world – and enable them to “suspend disbelief”. the first task of a die teacher is to create an opportunity for students’ rapid immersion into the imaginary world. this can be achieved by designing attractive, even irresistible entry points into the imaginary world, moreover, entry points that would already provide a “structure” and the defining elements of an imagined world. o’neill calls these entry points “pre-texts”. she writes, “the purpose of the pre-text, […] is to arouse anticipation in the group so that they begin to engage in and take responsibility for the development of the drama” (o'neill, 1995, p. 1). when heathcote changes her voice in line 22 above – “now!!! pick up your guns!!!” and when in line 27 she solemnly announces that knowing at all times where their gun is “… matters! … it’s all there is between you and the germans with their guns, isn’t it? … really!” she is creating a pre-text – an entry point that announces the imagined chronotope. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a65 these entry points can take many different forms. “the dramatic world may be activated by a word, a gesture, a location, a story, an idea, an object; or an image, as well as by a character or a play script. i have found it useful to describe these occasions for initiating dramatic action as pre-texts. it is the pre-text that will provide a firm base for the dramatic encounter of process drama” (o'neill, 1995, p. 19). a pre-text may take a form of direct teaching and information about how the imagined world is supposed to look like, what roles the students will play and what is expected from them in these roles (bolton & heathcote, 1999; edmiston, 2014; heathcote & bolton, 1995; smith, 2010). in other instances, a pretext may be organized as a guessing game activity that slowly draws the students into the imagined chronotope. heathcote and bolton (1995) describe such a pretext activity as starting a project they call “life in a medieval monastery”, “a plan carried out by dorothy heathcote with a student teacher who was about to begin three weeks of practice teaching” (p. 46). at other times, a teacher may speak to children “in role”17 from the imagined world (o'neill, 1995), or elicit other people to visit the classroom “in roles” of characters of the imagined world (baumer & radsliff, 2009; marjanovic-shane et al., 2011). we see dorothy heathcote speaking “in role” of a “commanding officer” and later as a “german officer”, from the very start of the prisoners of war workshop. a pretext leaves a lot of details of the imagined world unspecified and undefined. it’s role is just to “ring up the curtain” (taylor & warner, 2006, p. 6). this gives the students an opportunity to explore, create, improvise and build different aspects of the imagined world: its characters, relationships, events, artifacts, etc. however, a pre-text is always carefully planned and serves to firmly establish the pre-determined aspects of key characters, the focus themes and the “chronotopical genre” (bakhtin, 1991) of imagined worlds. heathcote aptly summarizes the role of the pretext and its purpose in her comment inserted into the video of the prisoners of war camp workshop (see above): “the trick is to do something that: a) arrests the attention of the people you are working with; … b) focuses them as a group; and c) straight away tells them what’s up, … what’s happening! so, usually i try to take a role in such a way that straight away they grasp a lot…” o’neil (1995) describes the nature and the purpose of the pre-text in the similar way. “in process drama the pre-text operates, first of all, to define the nature and limits of the dramatic world and, second, to imply roles for the participants. next, it switches on expectation and binds the group together in anticipation. … an effective pre-text or preliminary frame for process drama will carry clearly accessible intentions for the roles it suggests” (p. 20, italics mine). according to taylor and warner (2006, p. 10), a carefully chosen pre-text, “contains the seeds of inquiry”, “suggests clear purposes and tasks, … sets up expectations, establishes patterns, implies roles, suggests a setting” (p. 6). thus, the dual purpose of the pre-text is: 1. to create the entry-point into and the first glimpses of the imagined world; and 2. to transform the participants’ relationships by “binding them” into a cohesive group that agrees to work together on a shared goal. both of these are important – since it is the imagined world that is seen as being the central focus of the educational activity and of the students’ learning and transformation. a drama teacher’s educational desire may be described as a desire to engage the students in building this imagined world together. thus 17 usually, the literature on drama in education does not refer to “teacher” as being in-role when the teacher is acting as a teacher. however, elsewhere i wrote that being a “teacher” means assuming a very specific role in the classroom, a role that can be distinguished from the persona of the same individual outside of the classroom, and a role that can be based on different relationships towards and desires for the students (marjanovic-shane & matusov, 2012, october) “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a66 both the students’ focus on the imagined world and the spirit of agreed collaboration and working together, of becoming an ensemble (lobman & lundquist, 2007) are necessary. in contrast to die, in dialogic pedagogy, the imagined, alternative worlds are not invoked to “define the nature and limits of the dramatic world”, nor to “imply the roles for the participants” (o'neill, 1995, p. 20), but rather to provide the participants opportunities to test their own beliefs, assumptions, positions and desires in order to put their own subjectivities and agency to the test. thus, rather than “pre-texts”, dialogic pedagogy creates these opportunities by introducing “provocations”, alternative and provocative ways of seeing the participants’ real (ontological) worlds. in dp, teachers desire that the participants experience moments of “defamiliarization” or “enstrangement” (shklovsky, 1990), that would urge them to reexamine, deconstruct, and reconsider their existing beliefs and subjectivities. the teacher, as a guide, invites “the students for a journey into ‘a curricular land’ – a historically emerging discursive space on the subject matter (in a broad sense). the teacher designs a series of provocations that are aimed at surprising the students in order to generate questions in the participants. discussions of these questions lead to testing ideas and emergence of [ams: temporary, rather than end-] points in the participants” (matusov, 2009, p. 86). when the participants’ ideas, positions, opinions and desires are put to a test, in dialogic education, they might experience transcendence through more or less exciting, even dramatic, events. in the magic wand event described above, we see tensions brewing and erupting among the students, especially strong for sarah, with the first provocation – when an explicit connection is made between behaviorist training of a pigeon and the aba strategies of training and disciplining children with autism. we see the subsequent emergence of an ethical dilemma regarding the treatment of small children and dramatic polarization of opinions between the “humanist” and the “behaviorist” positions. in that, the students (and their professor) are focusing on their actual practices – testing their emerging ontological dilemmas regarding such practices. we can also see a different type of engagement and transcendence of their actual subjectivities with the second provocation – “the magic wand”. the “magic wand” establishes a dialogic contrast between the imaginary chronotope (of a magic wand) and the participants’ reality (ontological) chronotopes. it creates an legitimate opportunity for all the participants (including professor emma) to ask the question, “what if…” and to examine and consider a myriad of different situations, opinions, desires, conditions, etc. when a behaviorist operant conditioning would be welcome or not, for whom, and for what purposes. the “magic wand” is not a pretext that invites the students to enter and jointly build an imaginary chronotope, but rather a provocation to examine their own truths. furthermore, their truths do not have to become identical, they can differ from and oppose each other, and these differences of opinions are exactly what makes each one of the participants be able to search deeper, and to consider more different and surprising aspects of the issue. the value and legitimacy of (dis)agreement among the participants from the moment when a child plays ‘peekaboo’ with its parent or another adult, three of the foundations of drama are being laid: the (1) shared agreement to (2) pretend that produces (3) pleasure. (o'toole et al., 2009, p. 11, emphasis by the author) while die prioritizes agreement, cooperation, coordination, unity, unanimity and committed partnership in the joint endeavors, the dp gives legitimacy to dissensus, discord, argument, agonism, and the right of non-participation in the pedagogical events. the most cherished and indispensable principles in the community of players (copl) engaged in the construction of an imaginary world are agreement on the common goals, establishing shared ideas and collaboration in realizing these ideas. the agreement among the participants takes two major foci. one is an overall agreement among the participants to participate and share in the imagined worlds. “the basic “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a67 precondition of drama is that all the participants must voluntarily and together suspend their disbelief, and agree to enter a shared fictional world” writes o'toole et al. (2009, p. 106). and, according to o'neill, "agreement and cooperation among participants are fundamental before any kind of competitive or interactive encounter can take place… competition, opposition and display all provide aspects of the necessary tension of any game including the 'game' of theatre, but agreement to play the game and consensus about the kind of game that is being played are prerequisites for the activity" (o'neill, 1995, emphasis mine). before the participants can reach agreements, or, at least accept decisions, the joint construction of an imagined chronotope cannot start (ferholt & lecusay, 2010). dorothy heathcote wrote that “teachers have to be able to trap the people into an agreement that for now they will believe in 'the big lie' in order that they will fight through to the process of change and not say, 'i don't like this, miss', and go away. there is an awful lot of 'i don't like this, miss', unless you train people to lure their classes into traps” (heathcote et al., 1984, p. 115, highlight by me). we see how this “trap” of consensus works in the prisoners of war workshop. dorothy establishes agreement among all and with herself when she says to the boys: “you are going to be captured as prisoners… (boys: yes!) … because that’s what you want. and for this you will have to agree that i am cleverer than you… because there is only one of me, and there is fourteen of you! (she looks around capturing the eyes of almost every boy individually. she makes a pause to let her words sink.) so, if you want to be in a prison camp, you’ll have to let me take you there!!! right?” (lines 16-20). as mentioned before – in this moment, heathcote creates a pedagogical contract with the students who are all drawn into the imagined world. the other type of agreement is focused on building a sense of collaboration and ensemble. writing about practices for building community with the strong sense of "we", edmiston (2014) writes that "stories are told in which inevitably a strong sense of common agreement on goals is discovered" (p. 70). building a strong sense of collaboration and support for each other's ideas is an ongoing requirement that takes a lot of adjustments and personal subordination of each participant’s subjectivity to the group. like keeping a ball in the air, improvisation requires each participant constantly aiming to give personal offers to the group the for the sake of the play. "a careful observer of improvisational groups will recognize that the most skilled members of the ensemble are often not the ones who receive the most laughs or appear to contribute the most. the real talent in improvisation is expressed by supporting the ensemble. this is accomplished most effectively through the recognition, acceptance, and giving of offers" write lobman and lundquist (2007, p. 3, emphasis mine). in fact, the principles of improvisation that guide the relationships between the players in improvisational episodes, according to lobman and lundqvist, are: "the giving and receiving of offers; don’t negate; make the ensemble look good; and 'yes, and'"(2007, p. 13). the last one, "yes, and…" refers to the instruction to the players to say "yes, and…" to anything that precedes their own turn, accepting whatever came before as an "offer" to build the imaginary world. replying with a "no", or even with the “yes, but…” to an offer, ignoring it or denying it would take away the previous member's contribution, and lead toward breaking apart of the imaginary chronotope or running into too many obstacles and not being able to proceed with building it. in the prisoners of war workshop, heathcote forges this sense of working together and of being an ensemble from within the imagined world in which she positions herself first as their powerful commander and then as a dangerous enemy. at the very start of building the imagined scene, no one is allowed to be different. when the boy#5 suggests that someone could have a bazooka, dorothy quickly and decisively stops him: “we haven’t any bazooka! we have ordinary rifles! is that agreed? (she looks around the circle of boys with a fierce, but smiling face. she talks intensely and emphatically, punctuating every word with nods of her head!) nobody start pulling rank to getting bigger guns! is that agreed?” (lines 30 – 32). in addition, heathcote provides one after another opportunity for the boys to coordinate their actions against the “dangerous enemy” bonding with each other, supporting each other and taking clues from each “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a68 other in every action. as the scene progresses, they can keep it smoothly going as they negotiate with each other in roles: about staying down or getting up, whether to surrender the guns or not, recognize their emergent leader – boy#1 – and his desire to stand up against the enemy and protect them, etc. they don’t have to break out the scene to renegotiate any potential disagreements. they became an ensemble. if any of the participants had not played along with the others, it would have been seen as a disruption, as an “illegitimate” move, something to be either extinguished or the participant would need to be removed. in contrast to drama in education, disagreement and dissensus among the participants are perfectly legitimate in dialogic pedagogy. in critical dialogue that engages all participants in testing their ideas, positions, desires, truths, etc., to make disagreement illegitimate, i.e. to impose and demand agreement, would preclude and extinguish participants’ free and unhampered process of arriving to their own dialogically constructed internally persuasive discourse (ipd). in fact, “[a]n open-minded honest commitment to ideas, knowledge, and skills requires the meeting of alternative ideas, the genuine listening to others, testing ideas, taking one’s own and other people’s positions seriously, and a commitment to searching for truth rather than to spread one’s own dear ideas, manipulate others, and so on” (matusov & von duyke, 2010, p. 177, emphasis mine). in fact, without bringing up alternative ideas, positions, perspectives, it would be impossible to engage in a sincere critical dialogue that leads to testing participants’ own ideas, transcending their initial truths and developing their own internally persuasive discourse (ipd). thus, a participant who disagrees with the premises of the imagined chronotope and/or with other participants’ (including the teacher’s) offered truths does not have to be removed from an educational event. on the contrary, supporting dissensus is the premise of making every ones’ participation an important, legitimate and welcome: as a dialogic challenge for the community to examine and re-examine their existing truths and transcend them. in this sense, participating in dialogic pedagogy (dp) is about developing internally persuasive discourse (ipd) where “truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319). an act of disagreement can be seen as a contribution, an act of dialogic participation that pushes critical thinking further. in the magic wand event, we see the tensions building between the “humanist” and the “behaviorist” participants. we see sarah’s passionate burst in disagreement with the professor and mona’s and cathy’s attempts to be tactful and yet, condemn the “manipulation” of children as not ethical. introduction of the magic wand metaphor legitimizes such differences, and creates possibilities for each participant to examine different conditions, purposes, and values and to arrive at her own deeply convincing opinion through participating in a legitimately non-consensual dialogue. differences in the social regimes in the communities of participants another important difference between die and dp is in the types of the communities of learners/players they tend to create. above we saw that in drama and play pedagogies the relationships among the participants are constructed on the principle of the “agreement”, agreement both with the teacher and with the group – “the ensemble”. in the community of players/learners, disagreements are viewed as temporary and potentially unsafe, and all efforts are made to resolve them in a consensus. edmiston, for instance, describes one of the die sessions: “i paused at this moment [ams: with the ongoing scene] to shift back into the world of the classroom for two reasons. first, to agree with all the participants about what was going to happen so that they would feel physically and emotionally safe as we continued. second, to give instructions to the adults” (edmiston, 2014, p. 61). consensus among the participants is seen as a prerequisite for building the imagined chronotope. the teacher’s role is assumed to be the one of authority who keeps peace, order and harmony among the participants. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a69 i argue that the governance regime in drama in education communities is in some ways similar to the conventional authoritarian education. in both, the teacher plays the highest authority, even a dictator no matter how benevolent. however, while in the conventional education this authoritarian role is taken for granted and unquestioned, die is interested in having the students’ legitimize this role. in the prisoners of war, dorothy actually asks the students if they agree to let “… me take you there. right?” (line 20). thus, the teacher in die becomes a director of a drama production: it is the teacher who does conceptualizing, organizing, leading and guiding the students-participants. while providing some, even a lot of room for the participants to make creative decisions about and within the production, the teacher keeps the authority in all the “registers”. for instance, heathcote writes: for me the most secure authority has always been from within the drama situation rather than the teaching onethe authority of role. not only can i be more flexible in the use of registers, but i fear the teacher authority because i mistrust my ability to cope with a situation which may arise of teacher against class. the role-authority gives me shifting power and a variety of register to be at the service of the class. i may suddenly gather authority to deny or accede to requests, or be minus power but have strong opinions or resist a class in order to strengthen its opinions and decisions. my belief in my attitudes supports their belief in theirs, but this type of teaching takes courage at first and is always a calculated risk (heathcote et al., 1984, p. 69). each individual participant needs to work with and for "the group", the "ensemble". "the most important thing to know about improvisation is that it’s an ensemble art" (lobman & lundquist, 2007, p. xii). indeed, a work on drama "… entices the participants into acceptance and mental collaboration. there is a riddle that must be solved. […] as active engagement and interpretation are generated, we become kindred spirits caught in a web of collusion and this amiable community wrestles with the tasks of identification, discrimination and recognition that are necessary if the ironic conspiracy at the heart of the drama is to be disclosed" (taylor & warner, 2006, p. 147, stress mine). in this way, while arguing that it supports each person’s individual and unique meaning making and learning journey, paradoxically, die inadvertently may promote the values of communal solidarity, collectivism and deference to the group interests. in its in an extreme form it may even resemble totalitarian socialist or fascist communities, which practice the “collectivist control and direction” (hayek, 1948, p. 129). in one of the most extreme die cases of teaching through creating, enacting and living in an imaginary world, this authoritarian aspect of organizing a community of players/learners was strengthened by the fact that the community was organizing a “pedagogical experiment” in re-creating and experiencing a pretend neo-nazi society in the history class to study dictatorship as a political form of societal organization. the extreme “collective-petal” force among the participants was also exacerbated by the fact that the teacher kept the “lines” between the imaginary world (of the pretend neo-nazi society) and the community of learners somewhat blurred. this blurriness of the boundary between the imagined world and the participants actual learning community is highly a-typical for drama in education, and yet, many aspects of die were still present: the evolving and unpredictable aspect of a praxis; the full emotional and intellectual engagement of the participants, the opportunities for creative exploration, improvisation and imaginative ways of being in an alternative world – a manufactured imaginary chronotope; and a sense of defamiliarization, enstrangement from the participants’ own lives-until-then. however, at the same time, this imagined world (ic) “spilled” into and overpowered the actual realities and ontology of the participants. this original pedagogical experiment occurred at elwood p. cubberley senior high school in palo alto, california, in late march/early april 1967” (jones, 1972). their teacher, ron jones, introduced one after another various “experiences that characterized nazi germany” – “strength through discipline”, “strength through community”, “strength through action”, “strength through pride” and “strength through understanding” in order for his students to learn about authoritative regimes through their simulated “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a70 experiences. the authoritarian and totalitarian aspects of the nazi society the students were creating for an “experiment” quickly blended into their actual community of learners and their actual lives. the original intention of the teacher and the students was to answer the question how it was possible for a whole society to follow and support a criminal mind of a dictator like hitler. ron jones’ original was to create a simulation of a nazi society in order to test its internal rules, laws, relationships, values, possibilities, commitments, etc., as if in a “test-tube”. however, within a week, this runaway experiment started to threaten taking over the whole school forcing everyone in the school into living in the students’ newly minted totalitarian society “the third wave”. the experiment was stopped by ron jones, the teacher and the leader of the third wave, in a dramatic, cathartic event in which he revealed the extent to which their community had become like the nazi society in its extreme form, when they were annihilating every “dissenting” and “different” individual or group18. while this may be an extreme manifestation of an authoritarian community, examining other die projects and events (bolton & heathcote, 1999; edmiston, 2014; heathcote & bolton, 1995; heathcote et al., 1984; o'neill, 1995), often provides explicit and implicit descriptions of the indisputable authority of the teacher in directing the play/drama “production” and striving to create a community of players/learners based on promoting strong values of consensus, collaboration, cooperation and unity. we can certainly see this type of community building and governance in the prisoners of war workshop above. in contrast to the social regimes in the communities generated die, an ontologic dialogic community of learners (col) does not pressure its members for agreement, collaboration or cooperation. in fact, as the main purpose of dialogic education is in constant testing the truth – differences and deconstruction of views, opinions, desires, projects, etc. are welcome and taken as serious opportunities to learn something more about important topics of interest among the participants. agreement is neither a condition nor a goal of ontologic dialogic pedagogy, although it may become an emergent and temporary outcome. furthermore, promotion of the students' dialogic agency necessitates "legitimacy of and respect for the students’ non-participation and non-cooperation, at least at some point…" (matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012, p. 61). thus the ontologic dialogic pedagogy strives to create a democratic community in which the learners (including the teacher as the learner #1) become authors of their own development – they “feel ownership of their own learning initiatives, self-assignments, and learning journeys” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2014a, p. 17). in that type of community, there is no pressure for all students to participate in the same collaborative project, although they may choose to do so if they wish. in dp communities of learners, the internal relationships among the participants, decision-making and the governance regime also become negotiated subjects for the communal decision-making. recently, several practitioners of dialogic pedagogy have started to develop an “open/opening syllabus” approach to their courses (in college and graduate levels of higher education) where they engage the students to participate in making decisions about all aspects of the course, starting with the curriculum, instruction, assessments, class policies and decision making procedures in the community (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2014b; matusov et al., 2014). the magic wand event occurred in a class that was run with an open syllabus approach. it could be argued that the democratic regime of the class legitimized the emerging differences in the opinions, and that the introduction of the magic wand metaphor provided opportunities for the participants to further examine their distinctions and disagreements, without a need to suppress any of them. 18 besides the short story by ron jones, recently there have appeared many other documents and testimonies about this dramatic educational event. it inspired feature films. see more at: http://www.thewavehome.com/ “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a71 the roles and the positions of the students’ subjectivity and agency in die and dp but of course our students are not to be characters in the psychological sense that a playwright and an audience would expect, but rather as a collective, characterizing expertise, a group of people committed to a worldview of responsibility (heathcote & bolton, 1995, pp. 28, stress by the authors). there is a sharp contrast between die and dp in their conceptualizations of the students’ subjectivities, students’ development, and in general, the role of learners’ subjectivities in education. first of all, in spite of the common belief that students’ subjectivities should undergo some kind of a transformation in the process of education, the two approaches have opposing beliefs regarding the ways in which the participants should be involved and how they should be guided. on one hand, die approach believes that the students’ actual subjectivities should be taken as “raw material” or as “seedlings” – to be subjected to a process in which these subjectivities will be cultivated and shaped (“molded”) by the social expectations, values and knowledge. “art is the social technique of emotion, a tool of society which brings the most intimate and personal aspects of our being into the circle of social life,” wrote vygotsky (1971, p. 249). on the other hand, dp approach believes that the participant’s creative authorship of their own subjectivities should be given a chance to emerge as an unpredictable (and immeasurable) result of the participants’ testing their own ideas, positions and desires against the existing and imagined social expectations, knowledge, values and norms. in drama in education approach, the students are expected to enter into an imagined world (ic), often based on some existing and known past, present or imaginary worlds such as events from history; known myths and folklore; imagined or known lives of culturally known heroes, scientists or artists; written novels; or culturally known role-playing (mother, father, doctor, policemen, etc.). by playing characters in these worlds, it is assumed that the participants will gain experiences of different chronotopic forces and “patterns of activity” (vygotsky, 1971) that will help them “acquire” and “internalize” these socially valuable experiences, values, desires, etc., and eventually transfer them to their everyday lives and then creatively socialize into targeted socially valuable practices (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012; van oers, 2012). we can see this in the prisoners of war workshop: the characters in the imagined chronotope of a prison camp are not particular individuals with their unique personalities, histories and relationships. rather, they are nameless typical functional soldiers – prisoners in a generalized situation of being captured by a typical functional enemy. and while their particular idiosyncrasies as soldiers might eventually emerge within the imaginary world, this process would be carefully controlled and always subordinated to the ultimate learning goals designed by the teacher. in the short excerpt of the prisoners of war event, the subordination of the appearance of students’ subjectivity to the imposed teacher’s design is evident when dorothy heathcote stops boy#5 from introducing a bazooka. “nobody start pulling rank to getting bigger guns! is that agreed?” (line 32) in die, with this focus on the imaginary chronotope, the participants' actual subjectivities are either left out or used as material for constructing the ic. complex relationships between the dramatic worlds and the actors' lives, discussed by o'neill, are guided by the primary purpose "to allow the actors' insights to illuminate the characters they were preparing to play" (o'neill, 1995, p. 37). the students’ subjectivities are even further removed from the educational situation in heathcote’s “mantle of expert” approach to die. as heathcote and bolton (1995) write, “mantle of the expert work requires [ams: among other things] … an agreement between teacher and students to take on a functional role (i.e., not a character but rather someone who is expert in running something)” (p. 23). in fact, in die the student’s existing subjectivities are often seen as being “channeled” and formed by the experiences through which they go as figures in an ic – where they are not particular characters, but rather they perform certain functions, positions and “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a72 patterns of activity (vygotsky, 1971, p. 104) with largely predetermined “chronotopic” centers of subjectivity that are not based on “specific character traits”, but are shaped by “the properties and characteristics of [their] life” (pp. 104-105). elsewhere i wrote that a chronotope always “delineat[es] for the players their unique position in relation to others” (marjanovic-shane & white, 2014, p. 125). in this way, the students will become “captives” of the ic, where they will animate these characters in "the state of being trapped, a state from which one can escape only by working through the situation" (heathcote et al., 1984, p. 91). in the prisoners of war camp – one does not have a sense of particular personhood of the characters: what is important for development of the ic are their functional roles – they are timeless, universal, typical, generic soldiers/prisoners – not unique people. their tensions and relations are formed around generic situational issues – and not their personal dilemmas, desires and truths. in contrast, in dialogic pedagogy, the focus is on the students’ testing their own ideas, assumptions, positions and desires, understanding of the truth as themselves and their own subjectivities within their own ontologies (cf. “person-idea” in bakhtin, 1999). the dp approach attempts to create conditions and opportunities for the students to arrive to their own internally persuasive discourse (ipd) (matusov & von duyke, 2010; matusov et al., 2012). “this means that we are aware that our words cannot be understood without the consideration of the words of others – the meaning of our words emerge and exist on the border of our and others’ voices” (matusov & von duyke, 2010, p. 178). thus, the invoked, alternative world, the imagined chronotope (ic) functions not to take the focus away from the students’ subjectivities, but as a necessary spark, a contrast to the participants’ existing opinions – to generate a way for them to begin reexamining their positions, actual persuasions, understandings and desires in their actual reality (rc). rather than having to “animate” characters in an imagined chronotope (ic) as it is in die, the dp participants use the alternative imagined worlds (chronotopes) as springboards — dialogic provocations — for testing their actual ontological positions and thus free themselves from being trapped in their unexamined and “naturalized” selves. they may become aware of and potentially transcend their subjectivities, emerging from a pedagogical event with new insights and discoveries about themselves. in that sense the imagined alternative characters are not the locus of their transformation, but serve as “boundary objects” (star & griesemer, 1989) that help redefine the limits of the participants actual subjectivities. we see these transformations in almost all the participants of the magic wand event including the professor (with the potential exception of nora). magic wand as a metaphor for behaviorist conditioning, becomes that boundary object, interpreted by each participant in their own way, generates stories of real and hypothetical situations enriching, deepening and widening everyone’s reflective self-examination. the very purpose of dp is to involve the participants in a process of critical authoring of their own subjectivity. this stark difference in positioning the students’ subjectivity is part of the paradigmatic difference of the purpose of education between the die and dp. it is an indicator that drama in education assumes that the purpose of education is socialization of the learners into the socially valuable practices, in which they will become responsible members. on the other hand, the legitimacy of the authoring of one’s own subjectivity reveals that the purpose of education for the ontological dialogic pedagogy lies in each learner’s deep examination of life, of the others and the self. in other words, die approach assumes that the purpose of education is to teach socially valuable knowledge, skills and values to the students and that the students will grow into the responsible, socially accepted knowledgeable individuals. thus, the learners’ personalities, interests, opinions and desires are seen as material that in the process of education needs to be given a certain shape and form. in contrast, dp assumes that the purpose of education is to create opportunities for the learners to engage in meaningful and critical examination of life. the learner’s subjectivities are acknowledged as both the beginning and the end points of the process, as the learners are assumed to be consciousnesses of equal rights and the authors of their lives. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a73 conclusion in this article i argue that there are paradigmatic differences between the two educational approaches: drama in education and ontologic dialogic pedagogy. this does not make the actual educational events generated within these approaches less complex and intricate. in actual play episodes, children (and adults) may change focus many times, alternating between acting "as if" in an imagined world (ic) and negotiating their understanding, beliefs, ideas of truth (rc) (bonica, 1993; giffin, 1984; marjanovicshane & white, 2014; rainio & marjanovic-shane, 2013). within each educational situation in drama/play pedagogy and in the ontological dialogic approach, the dominance of the imaginary chronotope (ic) or the reality chronotope (rc) may switch, since one does not exist without the other, each growing from the encounter on the boundary of the other. many drama teachers feel this tension between their intended "drama" event and dialogue. "it may be that it is really this kind of challenge and the possibility of emancipation implied in the process that prevents some teachers from using drama, rather than the fears about losing control that are so often expressed by teachers. it may be more worrying for the teachers to lose control of the ideas in the classroom than to lose control of children's behaviour. but if teachers want to engage in genuine dialogue with their students they must be prepared for responses which are unpredictable, challenging and transformative", write (taylor & warner, 2006, p. 106, stress by me). there may be some drama in education genres (e.g. playworlds) where the focus may switch more often from the imaginary chronotope to the reality chronotope – leading the participants into genuine critical dialogues, periods of negotiation and probing (ferholt & lecusay, 2010; ferholt & rainio, 2004; lindqvist, 1995; miyazaki, 2007, 2011; rainio, 2010). however, these periods in drama in education may be considered to be “background” or a “break” from the actual educational practice. in arguing that die and dp approaches represent two paradigms, i claim that there are irreconcilable differences in conceptualization of these educational practices even though both represent aristotelian praxis (aristotle, 2000) – practices that are not pre-determined, pre-formed, nor have pre-set outcomes, but are evolving from within the practice itself. drama/play in education is an activity of building and construction, an activity that requires coordination, collaboration and agreement in order to achieve its purpose. it is ruled by the logic of joint activities – where the goals have to be shared, and decision-making requires reaching an agreement, cooperation and collaboration (engeström, 2008). the participants in die practice are invited to participate in jointly building an imagined world, most often (although not always) a world which is pre-conceived, preplanned and directed by the teacher (or another authority) – a world in which, it is assumed that the participants will experience complex and intricate problems, to which they will need to find solutions and discover ways to live, and in that process they will learn and develop as participants in socially meaningful and valuable practices. discussing vygotsky’s theory, ferholt and lecusay (2010) claim that “it is only in play that the child can be strictly subordinated to social rules, because it is in play that subordination to such rules leads to pleasure” (p. 59). in that sense, die is a pedagogical approach that falls in the range between the closed and the open participatory socialization (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). in this educational approach, the curriculum – i.e., what the students are supposed to learn from educational drama – ranges from being carefully chosen and pre-planed (heathcote & bolton, 1995; heathcote et al., 1984) through a design of an imagined world and the roles that the participants will have to inhabit and enact – to a more open one where the students can have opportunities to creatively coauthor many aspects of the imagined worlds (baumer et al., 2005; ferholt & lecusay, 2010). in that sense the curriculum ranges from closed and pre-formed pöiesis (aristotle, 2000) to the more or less open praxis. the openness and unpredictability of an evolving praxis in die is always found in its instruction – as the students begin their unforeseeable journeys and joint building of the imagined world: creating particular events, relationships and ways of living within its given frame. students are allowed and promoted to have their own unique “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a74 learning trajectories guided by the teacher toward the curricular endpoints (cf. "instructional constructivism", matusov, 2009). surprises and differences among the participants are welcome and even aesthetically, socially and educationally pleasing – but only as long as they are in the function of building this particular preplanned and agreed upon imagined world. however, questioning the imagined world itself, casting doubt on its existence or stepping outside its limits is seen as educationally irrelevant and/or illegitimate and, thus, disruptive. the participant who commits such deed: who disagrees with the very foundation of the imagined world, or refuses to participate in its building is seen as spoilsport who must be either brought back into play, or disciplined, or even removed from the educational event. in contrast, ontological dialogic pedagogy is not merely praxis in socially valuable open-ended activity. rather, it is a praxis of praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) – a critical deconstructive stance on the participants’ reality, its cultural practices, truths and values. there is no joint building of an imagined world. the participants’ critical meaning making is not bound by shared goals, and thus, dialogic pedagogy is not about socialization in the valuable social practices. contrary to die’s focus on collective construction of shared knowledge, the educational principle in dialogic pedagogy is deconstruction of the known reality, beliefs, opinions and desires everything can be put under scrutiny, without suppressing or looking away (derrida, 1984; rancière, 1999). dialogic pedagogy engages participants in dialogues in which truth is “dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319), where differences of opinions, perspectives, personal desires, etc. create tensions that enable deconstruction of the known boundaries, move the limits, create opportunities for the unpredictable transcendence of all existing subjectivities. this deconstruction of truths and subjectivities may not always be socially easy, pleasant or inconsequential. however, it is legitimized in dialogic pedagogy and the heretics – people who question the very order of the known world – are taken seriously as those whose visions may compel everyone to reexamine the well-known dear truths. and so, in the critical ontological dialogic pedagogy a "spoilsport" – i.e. a heretic, a potential visionary – is welcome. references argyris, c., & schön, d. a. 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(2012). meaningful cultural learning by imitative participation: the case of abstract thinking in primary school. human development, 55, 136–158. doi:10.1159/000339293 vygotsky, l. s. (1971). the psychology of art. cambridge, mass.,: m.i.t. press. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). the role of play in development. in m. cole, v. john-steiner, s. scribner, & e. souberman (eds.), mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes (pp. 93104). cambridge: harvard university press. wegerif, r. (2007). dialogic, educational and technology: expanding the space of learning. new york: springer-verlag. “spoilsport” in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.151 | vol. 4 (2016) a80 wittgenstein, l. (1953). philosophical investigations. new york,: macmillan. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word classroom community and discourse layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a81 classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown university of victoria, canada abstract literacy and language development is a central aspect of educational theory and practice. one area of literacy and rowlanguage research that has had a lot of attention is dialogic teaching (bakhtin, 1984; freire, 1970; murphey, wilkinson, soter, hennessey, & alexander, 2009; reznitskaya & gregory, 2013). however, there is limited research on how high school students use their classroom discourse to construct meaning, especially in argumentation. the purpose of this data analysis is to investigate the emergence of argumentation literacy in a socratic circle. socratic circles, a literacy practice consisting of two concentric circles of students focused around a piece of text, are used to provide students with the opportunity to co-construct meaning through classroom dialogue (copeland, 2005). the emergence and construction of argumentation is analyzed by applying discourse analysis to a video of a high school classroom,. findings from this analysis reveal that through the use of exploratory talk, three discourse patterns emerge that are in line with argumentation practices: (1) generalizations, (2) communicative struggles, and (3) coconstruction of ideas. results of the analysis are discussed to inform theory and instruction on dialogic teaching and the use of socratic circles to develop argumentation-related forms of literacy. keywords: dialogic teaching, exploratory talk, literacy, adolescents, argumentation, socratic circles alexis carmela brown is a phd student in the department of curriculum and instruction at the university of victoria, with a focus is in language and literacy. she is also a high school teacher and has worked in urban, rural and alternative classroom settings. her research topics of interest include dialogic pedagogy, socio-cultural theory, critical literacies, and content-area literacy instruction for adolescents and marginalized youth. acknowledgements i would like to express my sincere gratitude to the editors and peer reviewers who provided insightful and constructive feedback, opened up a dialogue, and encouraged me throughout the revising process. i would also like to thank deborah begoray and sylvia pantaleo who provided me with invaluable feedback as i worked through this manuscript. finally, i would like to acknowledge and thank wolff-michael roth for his endless support and encouragement during the analysis and writing process. issn: 2325-3290 (online) classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a82 introduction teaching critical literacy skills such as argumentation is fundamental to the purpose of student learning because these skills allow for students’ civic participation in a democratic society. researchers in the area of language and literacy have stressed the importance of discussion and dialogue to the formation of critical literacy skills such as argumentation (abrami et al., 2015; daniel & gagnon, 2011; jonassen & kim, 2010; reznitskaya & gregory, 2013). specifically, dialogic education, which emphasizes that students’ voices are equal to teachers’ voices in knowledge creation, is linked to critical literacy development through empowerment and engagement in learning (alexander, 2008; fecho et al., 2012; mercer & howe, 2012). recent studies on dialogic teaching and argumentation practices in the high school setting are primarily focused on students’ ability to provide evidence in support of a claim (reznitskaya et al., 2008; styslinger & overstreet, 2014; zhang & lu, 2014). scholars argue that the focus on students’ ability to provide evidence is the cornerstone to successful argumentation practice (jonasson & kim, 2010; osborne et al., 2013). however, there is a lack of research in how dialogic learning fosters other argumentation practices such as counter-argument, rebuttal, and evaluation of claims. the purpose of this analysis is to examine how argumentation literacy practices such as counterargument, rebuttal, and evaluation of claims emerge during a socratic circle. socratic circles foster “exploratory talk,” an important feature of dialogic learning (barnes, 1976; 2008). exploratory talk arises in socratic circles because socratic circles are designed to discuss openended questions in order for participants to further their understanding of a topic. in my analysis i present findings that demonstrate how exploratory talk during a socratic circle functions to aid argumentation practices that include counterargument, rebuttal, and evaluation of a claim. my analysis highlights three discourse patterns that emerge during exploratory talk – generalizations, communicative struggles, and co-constructions of ideas – all of which build on argumentation practices that are valued in academic settings. these discourse patterns demonstrate how students try out ideas, evaluate, co-construct, and adjust their thinking about texts. an illustrative data set illuminates my discussion about the value and function of exploratory talk in secondary level school settings, as well as implications for future research and practice. literature review dialogic teaching and exploratory talk dialogue, or speaking and listening, is a core component of the english language arts classroom. researchers in the field of language and literacy consistently focus on the various aspects of classroom discourse including what kind of discourse is valued in school settings (alexander, 2008; aukerman & pandya, 2013; barnes, 2008; cazden, 2001; mercer & howe, 2012; o’connor & michaels, 2007). for example, aukerman and pandya (2013) argue that academic discourse, which is typically seen as the language used within school, has been given primary attention by researchers making this the valued discourse in school. delpit (2006) terms academic discourse the “language of power” as it can create a problematic dichotomy between home and school discourses. giving privilege to academic discourse has led to the segregation of large populations of students. therefore, many researchers are now calling for a more dialogic approach to teaching, where multiple kinds of discourse are valued, discussion is collaborative, and the power of knowledge is shared between teacher and students, in order to help improve literacy and learning in the classroom (alexander, 2008; aukerman & pandya, 2013; fecho, coombs & mcauley, 2012; mercer & howe, 2012). classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a83 scholars such as alexander (2008), barnes (2008), and mercer and howe (2008) have extensively examined dialogic approaches to teaching, focusing on the types of talk that are fundamental to authentic dialogic learning. the strongest emphasis for enhancing dialogic learning in the classroom is on learning talk, which is how students themselves talk (alexander, 2008). an important type of learning talk is exploratory talk, defined as “[w]hen young people are trying out ideas and modifying them as they speak, it is to be expected that their delivery will be hesitant, broken, and full of dead-ends and changes in directions” (barnes, 2008, p. 5). exploratory talk directly contrasts with presentational talk, which is focused on a particular audience, content, and language to meet the needs of others rather than sorting out ideas for themselves (barnes, 2008). exploratory talk does not provide new information; rather students are able to make sense of something by sharing knowledge, explaining options, and examining ideas critically as they are being held publically accountable (barnes, 2008; mercer & howe, 2012). mercer and howe (2012) advocate for future research in the field of dialogic learning in order to examine conceptual change through the use of exploratory talk in classrooms. dialogic argumentation many scholars have also recognized the use of dialogic teaching approaches to enhance argumentation practices (jonassen & kim; kuhn, 2005; styslinger & overstreet, 2014; reznitskaya et al., 2008; zhang & lu, 2014). jonassen and kim (2010) define argumentation as “the means by which we rationally resolve questions, issues, and disputes and solve problems” (p. 439). to effectively participate in argumentation the following skills are necessary for formulating a reasoned argument: claim, evidence, justification, counterargument, and rebuttal (jonassen & kim; kuhn, 2005; styslinger & overstreet, 2014; reznitskaya et al., 2008; reznitskaya & gregory, 2013; zhang & lu, 2014). jonassen and kim (2010) advocate for dialogical forms of argumentation on the basis that it is better suited for education than monologic forms of instruction. dialogic forms of argumentation are better suited because dialogical learning involves multiple perspectives and occurs in discussion with a goal of convincing others of an opinion or seeking compromise. jonassen and kim (2010) also maintain that dialogical argumentation promotes productive ways of thinking, problem solving, and conceptual change. despite the benefits students gain through argumentation, research has indicated that argumentation skills and practices are lacking among adolescents (jonassen & kim, 2010; zhang & lu, 2014). in a study focused on improving argumentative writing through dialogue, styslinger and overstreet (2014) found that middle school learners struggled to support their claims with textual evidence. zhang and lu (2014) suggest that adolescents lack argumentation skills because they struggle to understand argumentation structure and discourse. as such, many scholars have advocated for the improvement of argumentation skills and practices in secondary level classrooms (jonassen & kim; kuhn, 2005; reznitskaya et al., 2008; sherry, 2014; zhang & lu, 2014). socratic circles in a recent meta-analysis on teaching students to think critically, abrami et al. (2015) found that opportunities for dialogue, especially in whole-class discussions, were the most notable in the enhancement of critical thinking skills. educators are using discussion-based activities such as socratic circles to increase both argumentation skills and dialogic learning (copeland, 2005; dunne, 2014; styslinger & overstreet, 2014). socratic circles are designed to examine open-ended questions in a whole-class discussion so that participants can seek better comprehension of a topic. the foundations of a socratic circle are structured around a piece of text that students have read critically. students sit in two concentric circles, where the inner circle focuses on examining and classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a84 discussing the text, and the outer circle listens and observes, and then provides feedback to the inner circle discussants. the feedback provided by the outer circle to the inner circle is meant to focus on the process of quality discussion rather than on the content of the discussion (copeland, 2005). both circles have a chance to reflect, and then the students change places and roles so that the process can repeat itself (copeland, 2005). socratic circles are aimed at turning the majority of ownership, conversation, and material over to students to increase learning and allow for true dialogue to occur. additionally, reznitskaya et al. (2008) note the importance of discussion that is not managed by the teacher through raising hands or selecting the speaker. thus, socratic circles function as a dialogic activity that can be included in the learning talk repertoire. although the use of socratic circles as a teaching tool has been previously advocated for in literacy and learning communities, there are a limited number of studies conducted using socratic circles to support dialogic teaching at the secondary school level (dunne, 2014; highman, brindley, & van de pol, 2014; styslinger & overstreet, 2014). highman, brindley, and van de pol (2014) argued that no studies have focused on “the distinct challenges and affordances of promoting dialogue in secondary context, nor exploring the notion that the nature of dialogues may be linked to subject epistemology” (p. 88). they further conducted research to determine why dialogic education research is predominantly in the primary school settings (highman et al., 2014). highman et al. (2014) advocate for more studies that explore dialogic teaching in secondary-level classrooms, while also acknowledging complications in dialogic teaching at the secondary-level such as organizational, psychological, and assessment pressures. in drawing on the concepts of dialogic teaching pedagogy, argumentation practices, and socratic circles, my analysis seeks to join theory and practice by examining how teachers can increase learning talk in the classroom to improve students’ critical literacy and argumentation practices. examining how teachers can increase learning talk in the classroom and improve student argumentation practices is especially significant to secondary level settings, where argumentation practices are a highly valued discourse, but students’ use of these practices are lacking. in this analysis, i provide evidence that the use of socratic circles as an appropriate dialogic teaching tool simultaneously increases learning talk and supports critical literacy and argumentation practices. theoretical framework there are two theoretical frameworks guiding this analysis. the first framework is socio-cultural theory as developed by vygotsky (1978) and expanded by gee (1992, 2002, 2003). the second framework is critical literacies as derived from freire’s (1970) work on critical theory, and later discussed by luke (2012). according to vygotsky (1978), language and learning is developed socially and through the use of cultural tools. it is through social activity, the use of tools, and guided practice, that an individual constitutes internal thoughts. cultural tools, which include dialogue, are developed out of ways of thinking, to aid in organizing thought and language development. gee (1992, 2002, 2003) articulates that socio-cultural theory contains underlying assumptions that the mind is social, learning is embedded in cultural practices, and meaning is always situated. gee (1992) uses the terms “discourse” with a capital d and “discourse” with a lower case d to explain how socio-cultural theory is applied to learning. in this context, “discourse” is the cultural group or community that one can participate as a member and “discourse” is how those members communicate. gee (1992) argues that, if meaning is always situated, then members participating within a particular community “discourse” have their own set of norms, values, beliefs, and ways of speaking “discourse”. being an active participant in a discourse also means classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a85 that the discourse being utilized is accessible and understood by the members. additionally, in order to be literate within a discourse one must be able to be an active participant and demonstrate competency. the second framework is critical literacies, based on freire’s (1970) critical theory and research. freire (1970) argued that learners’ lives and knowledge were not taken into consideration in learning situations. he advocated for a dialogical approach to literacy, in which a reciprocal exchange of information balances the relationship of teacher and learner. within a dialogic discussion, learners’ concerns can be addressed and then goals established for their education in concert with teachers. luke (2012), influenced by critical theory, uses the term critical literacies to define “the technologies of print and other media of communication to analyze, critique, and transform the norms, rule systems, and practices governing social fields of everyday life” (p. 5). luke (2012) argues that critical literacies are situated in the use of literacy for social justice as it functions as a critique of dominant ideologies, cultures, economies, institutions, and politics. the use of critical literacies is to bring a balance of power between learner, teacher and text (luke, 2012). method the purpose of this data analysis is to investigate the emergence of argumentation literacy practices during a socratic circle. two considerations were made in determining the type of data for this analysis: 1) preparation time for a socratic circle to occur; and, 2) length of a socratic circle discussion. first, the amount of preparation time it takes by the teacher and students in order for students to engage in a socratic circle will vary, depending on the amount of pre-activities and exposure students have previously had with dialogue in the classroom (copeland, 2005). copeland (2005) suggests that integrating some dialogue elements into pre-existing activities, as well as having students critically read text and prepare prior to a socratic circle discussion will enhance the dialogue that occurs. nonetheless, it is the assumption that some level of preparation will have occurred by the teacher and the students in order to make a socratic circle discussion happen. second, copeland (2005) suggests that a minimum of three to five minutes of time should be allocated to discuss one question, and that two questions should be made available so that the total socratic circle discussion time can be approximately ten minutes. as such, an analysis of a socratic circle discussion between five to ten minutes will sufficiently demonstrate the emergence of argumentation literacy practices. data collection in considering both preparation time and length of discussion, the data source used for this analysis was taken from youtube. the video entitled “ehs english 2p/1st socratic seminar q1” is seven minutes in length, and has been transcribed using expressscribe software (see appendix). the video clip includes the features of a socratic circle according to copeland (2005), with two concentric circles, and the use of an open-ended prompt for discussion. the video was recorded in a secondary level english language classroom. youtube, a social network website, provides opportunities for public interaction as a producer, viewer, or both. (boyd & ellison, 2007; giglietto et al.2012;. karpf, 2012; lange, 2007). giglietto et al.’s (2012) literature review on the uses of youtube as a data source suggest “youtube videos usually define particular communities producing specific contents for the members of a community”(p. 149). as such, the purpose of this particular video is for an education community, and more specifically to demonstrate the use of a socratic circle in an english language arts high-school classroom. the title “ehs english 2p / 1st socratic seminar q1” functions as tags and key words for searching. the video is also classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a86 categorized as “education,” and the description of the discussion question is made available as part of the video context. further, the producer of the video, msapigo, assumed to be the teacher who is recording and timing this particular discussion, has four other videos on her youtube site, each with the same group of students in a socratic circle. it is clear through viewing the other videos that the students have been prepared for a socratic circle discussion by the notes they are referring to on their desks (turns 1, 2, 3, 4, 38, 59, 72) and by the way they ask each other to participate (turns 9, 16, 30, 42) in the discussion during silent periods (copland, 2005). participants the participants in the video are grade 11 students in an english language arts classroom in the united states. they are set-up in a socratic circle formation, with an inner circle of 13 students, and an outer circle of 12 students. there are 14 boys and 11 girls. setting the students are in a classroom, sitting in desks, which have been arranged in two concentric circles. students in the inner circle have written speaking points and quotations in their notes. students are discussing the novel things fall apart by chinua achebe (1958). they have been provided with the following discussion prompt: analyze the ibo concept of male and female crimes and draw conclusions about the ibo notion of gender. what is assumed about women? what is assumed about men? go beyond the concept of crime to find at least two examples from other parts of the novel that support your ideas. lastly, state your opinion about how women and men should be viewed. students engaged in discussing the prompt for seven minutes. data analysis following the procedures suggested by roth and hsu (2010), i focused on the discourse that was being used by the students during a socratic circle. using open coding (corbin & strauss, 1990), i began my analysis by examining the conversational turns that were being produced by the students. in some cases i explored a single turn, whereas other instances i grouped turns together. the single turns were coded separately when the utterance offered a new idea to the topic. episodes were grouped together when the utterances being produced were making sense of an ongoing topic. an example of this can be found when looking at turns 3 to 7: s3: well umm, i have another quote on page 13, his wife especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fire-y temper, and so did his little children, and that shows that he really does rule in his household and that everyone under him is treated like they're not treated with enough respect in my point of view s4: and i also believe that men are also providers like umm yams are like an important crop in the ibo culture and a i have a quote umm and it says "yams stood for many of us and he could (survive on yams?) from one harvest to another to another wasn’t going to (mumbling word) s5: [umm i] actually disagree with [s3] with what [s3] was saying earlier, i don't think uh the lower the other people in the family besides okonkwo are disrespected i just think that if okonkwo gives off respect and if he feels he is disrespected back he lashes out and ah abusive classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a87 s3: so what makes you think that that's ok? s5: it's not ok i’m just saying that i don't really think they are disrespected in the sense of manners, i just think that like you know turns 3 and 4 were coded separately as utterances that offered a new idea or topic. in turn 3, s3 suggests that not everyone is treated with enough respect; while in turn 4, s4 argues that men are the providers. both of the topics brought up in turns 3 and 4 were new to the socratic circle discussion. however, turns 5 to 7 were grouped together because they were making sense of an on-going topic regarding respect which was previously mentioned in turn 3. i had two types of codes following the initial analysis and open coding: a single turn in which an idea was being spoken; and an episode, or group of turns, that were making sense of an idea that had previously been offered. i then started to focus on examples that included forms of exploratory talk. using barnes’ (2008) definition of exploratory talk, that is, “trying out ideas and modifying them as they speak. . . hesitant, broken, and full of dead-ends and changes in directions, (p.5)” i coded talk that used modifiers such as “i think,” “in my point of view,” “my idea is,” and “i don’t think that.” an example from the transcript that demonstrates the use of exploratory talk is as follows: s9: well i think that women are, well it seems that women are the least significant thing to ibo, and like the men are the most powerful and they control mostly everything just about everything and um they don't get penalized for what they do and they beat their women and stuff so . . . in this turn it can be recognized that “[w]ell i think that” and “well it seems that” are modifiers to an idea. as well, the turn contains broken speech and changes to the student’s position with utterances such as “and they control mostly everything just about everything and um. . .” finally, this turn also demonstrates a dead-end in thought during the utterance “and they beat their women and stuff so . . .” the single turns were subdivided into two categories after the forms of exploratory talk were coded: turns that used exploratory talk with a single idea, and turns that used exploratory talk with multiple ideas. from this point, i began to look for any patterns of discourse that had emerged during the two categories of single turns and the grouped episodes. further review of the data led to the recognition of three types of discourse patterns. these patterns were coded as generalizations, communicative struggles, and co-construction of ideas. generalizations came from the use of exploratory talk with a single idea; communicative struggles were grouped turns where utterances were making sense of the ideas; and co-construction of ideas came when exploratory talk was used to merge previous ideas, or merge a previous idea with a new idea. finally, i investigated how the exploratory talk discourse generally, and the use of the three discourse patterns specifically, had links to argumentation practices and schemes that are typically valued in academic communities (reznitskaya et al., 2008; sherry, 2014). these argumentation practices include claim, warrant, evaluation, evidence, counter-argument, and rebuttal. findings the findings from this analysis show that the use of exploratory talk during a socratic circle contributes to the development of more formal argumentation practices. formal argumentation practices can be linked to the three discourse patterns that emerged, including generalizations, communicative struggles, and co-construction of ideas. there were 78 turns in this discussion. of the 78 turns, 11 turns were generalizations (turns 5, 17, 19, 20, 23, 38, 43, 47, 49, 52, 60); 53 turns, or 9 episodes, were communicative struggles (turns 6 – 7, 9 – 15, 16, 25 – 37, 39 – 40, 44 – 50, 52 – 58, 62 – 72, 75 – 78); classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a88 and 10 turns were co-construction of ideas (turns 8, 16 – 17, 20, 38, 41, 51 – 52, 59, 73). below, each of the patterns of talk are discussed, demonstrating how they work together and produce discourse in line with argumentation practices such as the use of claims, warrants, evaluation, counter-argument, and rebuttal (jonassen & kim, 2010; reznitskaya et al., 2008; zhang & lu, 2014). generalizations prior to a socratic circle discussion students will have read a text as well as considered openended questions to guide the topic of the discussion. students are encouraged to bring notes on their ideas, and provide quotes for textual evidence to support their ideas (copeland, 2005). by having students prepare their ideas, socratic circles can allow for some elements of presentational talk, or more formal argumentation discourse. in dialogue, this is heard when students make a claim or present an idea and then back it up with evidence. although using evidence to support an idea is the primary goal of argumentation, most of the discourse used in this analysis was exploratory, informal, and general in nature. this is in line with styslinger and overstreet’s (2014) findings in that students often struggle to support their claims with textual evidence. however, generalizations of claims without the use of textual evidence do have an important place in dialogic exchanges as it encourages discussion and critical evaluation of a position. in the following series of conversational turns, we can see the function of exploratory talk and the use of generalizations to open up a dialogic exchange. this is especially pronounced when exploratory talk (turn 3) is juxtaposed with presentational talk (turns 1 and 2): s1: “angered by his wife who went to plait her hair at her friend’s house and did not return early enough to cook the afternoon meal” this shows that men are violent and boss of their family s2: well i have another quote, that shows that mean are violent, like in page 38, wait i think wait, yeah 38, onkonkwo's second wife merely cut a few leaves off the umm banana tree to make some food and she said "so without umm further agreement onkonkwo gave her a beating" which means that onkonkwo had like superior and he beats whoever he wants to beat s3: well umm, i have another quote on page 13, “his wife especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fire-y temper, and so did his little children”, and that shows that he really does rule in his household and that everyone under him is treated like they're not treated with enough respect in my point of view s4: and i also believe that men are also providers like umm yams are like an important crop in the ibo culture and a i have a quote umm and it says "yams stood for many of us and he could survive on yams from one harvest to another to another wasn’t going to (mumbling) s5: [umm i] actually disagree with [s3] with what [s3] was saying earlier, i don't think uh the lower the other people in the family besides okonkwo are disrespected i just think that if okonkwo gives off respect and if he feels he is disrespected back he lashes out and is ah abusive in the first 3 turns of the socratic circle, we see what barnes (2008) terms presentational talk. presentational talk is shown by s1, s2, and s3 making claims that are supported by text and in direct response to the original prompt. s1 starts the discussion by making a claim “that men are violent and the boss of their family,” using a reference from the text. s2, in response to s1, further supports the claim that “men are violent” by using a direct quote from the novel, and then provides an inference from the quote that men are superior because “he beats whoever he wants to beat.” in turn 3, s3 responds and further contributes to the original claim that men are violent by starting with “[w]ell umm, i have another quote.” at this point the first 3 turns have all contributed to each other, showing general agreement using text references to support their claim. classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a89 however, at the end of the turn 3, s3 adds to the claim of men are violent by saying “everyone under him is treated like they’re not treated with enough respect.” what is significant here is that s3 ends the turn by saying “in my point of view” which moderates the claim and starts the use of exploratory talk. s3 is testing an idea that she can change, retract, or back out of by stating “in my point of view.” the use of exploratory talk also opens up the dialogue, by signaling to others that there could be an alternative point of view; which an alternative point of view can be heard in turn 5. by the end of the first 5 turns in the discussion, we see that the first 3 turns have a direct claim and supporting textual evidence. the three claims that build upon and support each other would be presentational talk. there is no alternate perspective until the end of turn 3, when a new claim is introduced through a moderated speech utterance “in my point of view”. the moderated speech utterance changes the type of talk to exploratory talk. the dialogue then lends itself to introducing a counter-argument, and continues with exploratory discourse of “i believe” or “i think” using generalizations to create and open up dialogue. thus, generalizations function as the starting of claims, but allow the claims to be evaluated by others before considering whether the claim is valid. further, generalizations open up the dialogue to create space for students to engage in the argumentation practices such as counter-argument and rebuttal; both of which will be discussed in the next section. communicative struggles with generalizations being made available through exploratory talk, the dialogic exchange opens up further to allow for argumentation practices such as counter-arguments, rebuttals, and evaluations of claims. these argumentation practices emerge through communicative struggles. sherry (2014), drawing on bakhtin’s concepts of dialogic conflict, argues that a struggle emerges in language when diverse student perspectives and opinions occur during discussion. a communicative struggle between participants in this analysis usually began when a question was asked of another member seeking an explanation of that member’s thinking. these instances are where students seek to understand each other, and what barnes (2008) argued underpinned learning. in this analysis, communicative struggles consisted of the majority of turns in the discussion and typically occurred as a result of generalizations in the dialogue. an example of a communicative struggle occurs during turns 6 and 7, in response to turn 5, where s5 uttered a counter-argument using a generalization: s5: [umm i] actually disagree with [s3] with what [s3] was saying earlier, i don't think uh the lower the other people in the family besides okonkwo are disrespected i just think that if okonkwo gives off respect and if he feels he is disrespected back he lashes out and ah abusive s3: so what makes you think that that's ok? s5: it's not ok i’m just saying that i don't really think they are disrespected in the sense of manners, i just think that like you know s6: [well] it was ok in their culture, but it wasn't ok in our culture today in response to the counter-argument made in turn 5, s3 questions s5’s claim and asks for an explanation “what makes you think that that’s ok?” the discourse used in turn 6 functions to continue the exploratory dialogue by questioning s5’s thinking, and makes visible an evaluation of the claim by requesting evidence. this utterance by s3 in turn 6 is a significant feature not only of exploratory talk but also in regards to making argumentation practices accessible to all students participating. as such, argumentation structure becomes available because the discourse being used by the students is understood by each other as demonstrated in turn 7 and 8, where students begin to co-construct meaning. classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a90 in turn 7, s5 recognizes that s3 asked a question that is evaluative. the question being asked signals there has been a struggle for understanding with s5 saying “[i]t’s not ok,” using the discourse that s3 made available in the utterance “what makes you think that that’s ok?” s5 goes on to say “i’m just saying” and tries to test their idea again, by creating a counter-argument to the statement made in turn 3. s5 struggles to provide evidence to help justify the claim by saying “i just think that like you know. . .” under the questioning of s5’s idea from s3, s5 utters modifiers such as “i just think” or “i’m just saying” which continue the use of exploratory talk and functions of generalization to keep the dialogue open for the co-construction of meaning. in turn 8 another student, s6, signals understanding of the struggle and draws on the discourse made available by both s3 and s5. s6 says “well it was ok in their culture but it wasn’t ok in our culture today.” the first part of the utterance “well it was ok in their culture” draws on the claim made by s5, and then uses “but it wasn’t ok in our culture today” which shows the position of s3. s6 makes available that the struggle for understanding is one that involves different perspectives on culture. the statement made in turn 8 then redirects the discussion; where the next set of conversational turns examines the different cultural perspectives. the discussion will then move towards co-construction of meaning, which will be examined in the following section. the conversational exchange in turns 5 to 8 exemplifies the multiple voices that occur during a dialogic discussion. within these four turns, students engaged in a communicative struggle that brought together multiple ideas. the function of communicative struggle is one of seeking understanding through explanation, evidence, and evaluation. a communicative struggle makes the concepts of counterarguments, rebuttals, and evaluation of claims available to students. the counter-argument was made in turn 5 when s5 uttered “i actually disagree with . . . i don't think that . . . i just think . . . ,” which makes available a different idea or claim. an evaluation of a claim, where a student was asking for an explanation or evidence, was heard in turn 6 when s3 says, “what makes you think that that’s ok?” the question makes explicit the need to justify a generalization, but also functioning as a platform for creating a rebuttal. upon evaluating the validity of a counter-argument, a student can consider a rebuttal. in turns 5 to 8, exploratory talk and the function of generalizations leads to communicative struggles. these struggles help participants seek understanding and build meaning within the discussion. further, the multiple perspectives add to the dialogue making available argumentation practices such as counter-argument, rebuttal and evaluation of claims. co-construction of ideas through both generalizations and communicative struggles, participants are able to move into coconstruction of knowledge. as stated earlier, barnes (2008) argued that the function of exploratory talk is so students can make sense of something with the information they already have, co-construct meaning, and determine what can or cannot be done. it is within the act of co-construction that students gain an understanding of what they know and are able to use it to evaluate the relevance of claims. the following episode of conversational turns demonstrates how students co-construct meaning and knowledge through dialogue. the students draw on the discourse already made available to them in order to synthesize information. further, in this episode students continue to use exploratory talk, merging patterns of talk such as generalizations and struggles in order to achieve co-construction of meaning: s1: wait..ok..my idea builds upon [s5]’s idea because it's not it's not really about whether they getting disobeyed or not it's really about like head like it's like not that she is disrespecting them they just have in ibo culture they like have a head game and they like it's not about them being disrespected it's like classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a91 the principle of it and like while men are the boss women are weak and inferior they don't even own their own children but that like it's not about well respect [s3: what do you mean own your own children?] s1: they don't own their own children as in they don't get enough respect it's not about respect from the men, it's about like how the ibo culture and the men look at how other men look at them, they don't wanna, that's why they have more than one wife, and the wives barely get to do anything it's because like the oracle says so s3: and a man has to earn his respect he can't just get respect he has to earn it by doing something or prove it and that's how the wives come along in turn 38, s1 articulates that “my idea builds upon [s5]’s idea,” which was a claim made earlier in the discussion (turn 5). what is interesting in turn 38 is that s1 begins to define what something “is not” in order to help define what something “is”. using terms such as “it’s not really about,” “it’s not like,” “it’s not about,” shows that previous claims are being evaluated as not valid and that further testing of claims is needed. s1 suggests that “it’s not about whether [men] getting disobeyed” (referring to turn 5) and “it’s not about [women] being disrespected” (referring to turns 3, 19, 20, 23 – 37) it is about how “in the ibo culture they have like a head game” and it is “the principle of it and like while men are the boss women are weak and inferior they don’t even own their own children.” here s1 builds upon previous made claims by drawing on them to help define a different claim regarding the ibo culture, in that they have “a game” with “principle” and that women “don’t even own their own children.” this particular turn shows that s1 has co-constructed meaning of the text based on the discussion that is happening. in turn 38, s1 also uses exploratory talk in articulating “my idea” and a generalization when the new claim is being made, as there is no textual reference or evidence. in turns 39 and 40, a communicative struggle occurs when s3 asks a question of s1, “what do you mean by . . .” when s3 asks the question she makes available that an explanation and justification to the claim is needed. the recognition of the need for explanation and justification is shown when s1 responds to the question in turn 40. the first part of the utterance in turn 40 is an explanation saying that even though it appears women “do not get enough respect” because “they don’t own their own children,” the ibo culture is not concerned about women receiving respect from men, it is about “the men look at how other men look at them.” while the second half of the utterance in turn 40 becomes a justification by the fact that men “have more than one wife.” explanation, evaluation and co-construction of meaning all occur because of a communicative struggle that happens in turns 39 and 40. this co-construction of meaning continues in turn 41 as s3 signals her understanding by rephrasing the explanation given by s1, when she says “and a man has to earn his respect he can't just get respect he has to earn it by doing something . . .” s3 is drawing on the discourse and ideas about respect, not only made by s1, but throughout the entire discussion (turns 3, 5, 19, 20, 23 – 37). in the second half of the utterance by s3, she articulates her understanding of s1’s justification of the claim, that the respect issue being discussed is not about men respecting the women but rather men respecting the men, by saying “and that's how the wives come along,” referring to the end of turn 40. this turn shows co-constructing of meaning, as s3 builds on ideas that have been previously discussed, and then synthesizes the new claim made by s1. during turns 38 to 41 students co-construct meaning by building on previous discourse made available during the conversation. students continue with patterns of talk such as generalizations and communicative struggles in order to access co-construction of ideas. in following the discourse, students also make available argumentation practices such as justification and evaluation of claims. evaluating the relevance of claims is a difficult task for a student who does not know what other claims may exist. classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a92 through exploratory talk students make available to each other the multiple voices and therefore produce argumentation practices. it is during the process of co-construction that meaning is made of the information presented. this lends itself as a platform for students to evaluate claims, look for evidence, and construct both counter-arguments and rebuttals to their own ideas. discussion in the prior section i examined the function of exploratory talk as it led to three patterns of discourse used by the participants: generalizations, communicative struggles, and co-construction of ideas. further, i argued that each discourse pattern connects to argumentation practices that are often valued in school settings. below, i situate my findings with regards to previous research on dialogic teaching, socratic circles and argumentation practices. exploratory talk in high school classrooms is significant to argumentation practices in the socratic circle discussion excerpts presented above, the use of exploratory talk was significant in opening up dialogue and creating space for the use of argumentation practices. barnes (2008) argued that exploratory talk is a way for students to understand ideas in order to learn. exploratory talk also allows students to try out and explain ideas and position themselves safely so that ideas can be changed, modified, or disregarded. exploratory talk occurs in a community of learners, where students are using their own informal language to discuss ideas without the influence of the teacher (cazden, 2001). although exploratory talk is informal and leads to generalizations, it also calls for public accountability, thus linking it to argumentation practices. making knowledge publically accountable, sharing opinions, and examining information critically is part of explaining, justifying, and evaluating a claim. additionally, sharing relevant information is part of considering counter-arguments and rebuttals to claims. for example, it may be informal for students to ask “what makes you think that?” or “why do you think that?” instead of asking for them to present evidence from the text, but given that some formal argumentation practices have already been put in place, the students are informally asking for textual evidence. within the discussion, students did not accept many generalizations without a textual reference to support an idea. in addressing the concerns of highman et al. (2014) that dialogic education is mostly in primary settings, my analysis begins to demonstrate how exploratory talk has an important place in understanding and learning at the high school level. further, i suggest that exploratory talk functions as situated way for students to engage in argumentation practices, which is part of the english language arts epistemology. students’ discourse can be used to demonstrate argumentation structure previous research has pointed to the significance of student’s informal discourse to the learning of more formal academic discourse (cazden, 2001; delpit, 2006; gee, 1992; 2002; 2003). cazden (2001) and gee (1992, 2002, 2003), in their research on discourse/discourse, focused largely on classroom, community and student discourse. more specifically, both scholars highlight the significance of honouring and utilizing student discourse in a classroom setting (cazden, 2001; gee 2003). having students use their own discourse during discussions creates a balance of power in which students can equally contribute and learn from one another (delpit, 2006; freire, 1970). further, when students engage in exploratory talk they are able to draw on their out-of-school discourse to make meaning and interact within the classroom community (gee, 2002; vygotsky, 1978). for example, in this analysis turns 52 to 58 exhibited a communicative struggle and co-construction of ideas when the students were classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a93 determining whether women are equally respected in ibo culture, the conversation turns to women having to take a man’s last name in which one student (s2) claims that his wife will take his last name, while other students groan and disagree. by making connections between out-of-school discourse and the formal discourse of school, such as argumentation structure, students can become members of both in-school and out-of-school discourses. this analysis starts to address mercer and howe's (2012) call for more research that examined the use of exploratory talk for conceptual change. the discourse which students make available to one another can be used to aid in the construction of knowledge and understanding about argumentation discourse, structure and practice. this is demonstrated in the socratic circle discussion during turn 59 when s1 references back to textual evidence to support the informal discussion (turns 52 – 58) that previously occurred. the student (s1) recognized that there was a need to bridge the informal talk by bringing the conversation back to formal argumentation through presenting textual evidence. educators can mediate formal argumentation practices through dialogic learning such as socratic circles by having students make available to each other elements of argumentation discourse, teachers can use dialogic activities such as socratic circles to mediate formal argumentation practices. as previous research has identified, teachers’ lack of pedagogical skills to foster argumentation, pressure to cover material, and deficient prior knowledge on the part of the learners, are major causes as to why students struggle with understanding formal argumentation (jonassen & kim, 2010). however, some of the above issues can be resolved when teachers allow students to engage in exploratory talk, which uses students’ own discourse. by having the teacher record or film class discussions, teachers are then able to use the recording to mediate student learning about formal argumentation structure. in this discussion students were able to move between informal and formal practices, showing recognition of argumentation structure such as the example in turns 52 to 59. in other instances students may not have noticed the connections between formal and informal structure, but they have made available the discourse patterns of argumentation, which can be used as a tool to mediate language and understanding (vygotsky, 1978). having students listen to, and reflect on, their own discussion will help bring them into formal argumentation discourse. fecho et al.(2012) have observed that many students do not see the potential of dialogical educational moments because of the monologic system they are used to. it is through dialogic learning and practices such as socratic circles that teachers can highlight the value and importance of student discourse. by mediating formal argumentation practices through dialogic learning, there is an opportunity for students to see the potential of dialogic education. having students watch their own dialogue on a topic, and linking their own discourse to formal argumentation structure, will show students what they already know. thus dialogic learning, and its potential for students will not only be seen by the students, but will create empowering opportunities. implications i argued that the use of socratic circles as an appropriate dialogic teaching tool simultaneously increases teachers’ repertoires of learning talk and supports critical literacy and argumentation practices. my analysis of the above socratic circle discussion was aimed at addressing the research gap in dialogic teaching pedagogy at the secondary-level. through my analysis i sought to demonstrate the importance of exploratory talk as a function of socratic circles in helping bridge students’ discourse with argumentation discourse practices. further, my analysis revealed three patterns of discourse that were classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a94 utilized during exploratory talk – generalizations, communicative struggles, and co-construction of ideas. these patterns of talk functioned to open up dialogue, which led to argumentation practices. moreover, i have argued that students’ discourse can be used to demonstrate argumentation structure as students learn that they already have a situated understanding of argumentation practices. recognizing that students’ discourse is equally valid to academic discourse is important. students’ discourse can be used to structure more formal argumentation practices, helping students move more fluidly between the different discourses. by honoring both students’ discourse and academic discourse, it will help to close the gap between in-school and out-of-school language, and provide students with opportunities to participate in a democratic society. finally, i concluded that educators can mediate formal argumentation practices through dialogic learning such as socratic circles. dialogic education, in which students can engage in exploratory talk, makes discourse available to students that can be linked with argumentation practices. by having students participate in dialogic learning, and then using their discussion as a way to mediate understanding, educators could bring students into the discourse of argumentation by making explicit what argumentation looks like. dunne (2014) argues that schools have been slow to address the explicit teaching of speaking and listening skills, and that even though formative assessment practices are advocated for, many schools still take this practice as a form of tokenism. my analysis shows how educators can take up a dialogic approach to explicit teaching of argumentation skills that go beyond formative assessment in name only. socratic circles can help teachers extend learning talk in the classroom while enhancing critical literacy practices. the increase in learning talk will help to create a more dialogic classroom, where power is shared with the students and student discourse is valued as a tool for learning and understanding. further research needs to be done on 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(2010). analyzing communication: praxis of method. rotterdam, nl: sense publishers. zhang, z., & lu, j. (2014). assessing argumentative representation with bayesian network models in debatable social issues. international education studies, 7(11), 120 – 135. doi:10.5539/ies.v7n11p120 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. classroom community and discourse: how argumentation emerges during a socratic circle alexis carmela brown dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.160 | vol. 4 (2016) a97 this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 58-154-1-le.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.58 | vol. 1 (2013) b9     dialogic approaches to the study of subjectivity kathrin otrel-cass, aalborg university, denmark abstract book review: sullivan, p. (2012). qualitative data analysis: using a dialogic approach. los angeles: sage publications ltd. isbn 978-1-84920-609-9 paul sullivan prepared his book qualitative data analysis: using a dialogic approach for social science researchers who are interested in qualitative data analysis and who have an interest in a dialogical approach to data analysis. the book is in essence concerned with the nature of subjectivity and how to make sense of it. sullivan explains that from a dialogic position subjectivity can be seen as a conscious activity where the researcher anticipates the ideas and judgments expressed through dialogue from others by drawing on “a network of history, tradition and power” (p.44). through this sullivan (referring to gee, 2005) emphasizes the importance for the qualitative researcher to view discourse as language in action. sullivan writes that the dialogical approach ‘provides tools for the methodological analysis of subjectivity, being theorized as the changing and responding to others’ (p.4) and that by using bakhtin’s ideas discourse can be viewed as “embodied subjectivity” (p.44) and the conscious act of anticipation and judgment. sullivan declares at the very beginning clearly his position and particular interest in michael bakhtin’s dialogic ideas and how they shape qualitative methodologies. however, sullivan states that bakhtin’s ideas can be at times difficult to use in qualitative methodology and that the aim of this book to give ‘dialogue’ a methodology and place of its own within the qualitative paradigm. he writes that he sees three key contributions coming from bakhtin’s work: first, the ‘existential existence on a needy self ‘ (p.14), which refers to the notion that both the researcher as well as the participant bring attitudes of trust and suspicion to the interpretation of text material and with this, bakhtin is positioning the participant as being a valid knower, capable of interpreting his own data but also that there are more interpretations to the same experience and that a dialogic approach to analysis uncovers not the truth but rather the possibilities of truths. second, bakhtin’s ‘emphasis on ‘truth’ as ‘pravda’ in a dialogical approach’ (p.15) which refers to someone’s vested interest in their belief and that beliefs can be so strong that they become truth and be embodied by a person. third, the idea that ‘otherness and mystery can be built into the fabric of talk’ emphasizes bakhtin’s discussion about anticipated responses delineating boundaries between the self and other. i enjoyed reading sullivan’s description of dialogic analysis because he contrasts its philosophical and methodological underpinnings with other methods of discourse analysis. but more than that sullivan issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic approaches to the study of subjectivity kathrin otrel-cass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.58 | vol. 1 (2013) b10 cross-examines through this the dialogic approach to make an argument for it to be used in the analysis of discourse. i was drawn to paul sullivan’s book because he starts by reminding the reader of the importance of the philosophical framework a researcher needs to uncover truth and its interconnectedness with research methods and analysis procedures. all researchers interested in dialogue and discourse are eager to collect data in the search for answers but but not seldom overlook how much can be gained by finding out how different theories of knowledge shape research findings. sullivan reminds us that ‘by looking at the methodological ‘practices’, we can more clearly delineate the contours of a method’ (p.6). he is making this point throughout the book by discussing how other methodological positions such as grounded theory, discourse analyses, phenomenological analyses or narrative analyses shape the nature of meaning making of language in action and contrasts it with the contribution a dialogical approach can make. i found also that sullivan exemplifies his approach to dialogism by applying it to his own writing in this book, drawing attention to the conflicts, judgments and interpretative activities in the use, capture and analysis of language. he practices dialogism by interacting with the ideas he draws on and reviewing them critically. when he provides the reader with pragmatic and concrete examples, he uses them to explore theoretical aspects that shape the data analysis, echoing his appreciation for bakhtin’s focus on practical and usable theories. sullivan spends time drawing attention to different analytical methods including grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and phenomenological analysis being mindful of the various traditions and their analytical elements they bring to the analysis of dialogue. this is important because it creates the argument why a dialogic approach to data analysis is different but also how it is influenced by those traditions and where it can add new insights into the analysis of discourse. the book allows the readers to examine their own positions on the nature of dialogue, their struggles to identify intimate, emotional encounters in language and shows ways to uncover transformations. sullivan achieves this by sharing his own struggles and challenges for instance by reflecting “…i was unsure what the overview was or what the specific questions would be” (p.83), when he is writing on the presentation of a summary of the overview of the analysis. sullivan encourages his audience as well to develop their own voice through the joint creation between theory and data. sullivan is not uncritical about the dialogical approach to qualitative analysis. while he draws attention to its strengths he also explains that it may be used in addition to other approaches to gain new and different insights. he describes that the dialogic approach has optimistic views of conscious awareness and potential flaws in how power relations are perceived (p.62). however he reflects also to say that its particular suitability lies in making sense of subjectivity, lived experiences and authorship. at the end of the book sullivan reflects on theory and applications and his proposed ways forward. he also reminds the reader to take note of his position and the theoretical ideas that have influenced his thinking. he exemplifies here again bakhtin’s ideas he referred to at the beginning of the book that ‘ideas are lived rather than abstract and full of personal values and judgments’ (p.5). i appreciated the book’s pragmatic yet highly theoretical and critical approach to the topic. i believe this book can be very useful for social science researchers who are interested in the qualitative analysis of dialogue. sullivan skillfully provides the reader with tools both ontological and pragmatic. he uses an aesthetic approach to discourse that emphasizes how ‘discourse can shapes selves and how selves can respond to this shaping’ (p.43) and builds on bakhtin’s ideas of how identity is shaped by both the anticipation of what is to be expected and how this shapes the ‘authoring of our own identity’ (p.3). dialogic approaches to the study of subjectivity kathrin otrel-cass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.58 | vol. 1 (2013) b11 articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word gregory, theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r1 theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory st. anselm college, usa abstract a review of skidmore, d & k. murakami (eds). (2016). dialogic pedagogy: the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. bristol, united kingdom: multilingual matters. skidmore and murakami’s collection of essays takes on a dual theoretical and empirical project: first, to define and advocate for dialogical classroom pedagogy; and second, to unearth such practice through microstudies of classroom dialogue. this project divides itself neatly in half: the first six chapters trace the theory of dialogic pedagogy, including the history of discourse, coding, and practices, while the remaining seven are devoted to empirical studies marked by a careful microanalysis of dialogue. the work distinguishes itself from scholarship on the dialogical the past 20 years, during which works have either been single-authored, deeply-researched, and theoretical (matusov, 2009a; wegerif, 2013) or vast collections of essays organized conceptually (ball & freedman, 2004; white & peters, 2011; ligorio & cesar, 2013). while special journal editions have brought new focus to unexplored threads of the dialogical, such as the exploration of silence in the classroom or the history of the school of the dialogue of cultures (matusov 2009b), this collection affords considerable latitude to its theoretical and historical frame. a comparable work of conceptual breadth is that of white (2016), whose publication frames classroom research of lower school learners with concepts from bakhtin. like white’s work, skidmore and murakami paint at once in broad strokes and miniature: on the one hand, the collection situates dialogical pedagogy into its historical context, interweaving the work of early russian theorists; at the same time, it offers granular studies of classroom dialogue. since skidmore authors or co-authors seven of the 13 chapters, the collection somewhat serves as a project of singular intent, one that raises a persistent question as to whether the methodologies in the studies presented in the second half of the work, focused on conversational analysis (ca) and the discourse analysis (da), cohere to the ambitions of dialogical pedagogy offered in the first. in the end, the promise that ca affords greater magnification of classroom moments does not overcome what may be a limitation of the methodology to unearth dialogic pedagogy. christian george gregory is currently an assistant professor of education at saint anselm college and formerly a lecturer at teachers college, columbia university, where he received his ph.d. in english education. he holds two advanced degrees in literature from the bread loaf school of english at middlebury college and has written for varied journals, such as qed: a journal in glbtq worldmaking, and the journal of lgbtq youth, where he serves on the editorial board. his research interests include classroom discourse, identity theory, queer theory and pedagogy, young adult literature, and expanding the canon in english education. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r2 skidmore and murakami’s 2016 book new perspectives on language and education: vol. 51. dialogic pedagogy: the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning is a collection of essays that takes on a dual theoretical and empirical project: first, to define and advocate for dialogical classroom pedagogy; and second, to unearth such practice through microstudies of classroom dialogue. this project divides itself neatly in half: the first six chapters trace the theory of dialogic pedagogy, including the history of discourse, coding, and practices, while the remaining seven are devoted to empirical studies marked by a careful microanalysis of dialogue. the work distinguishes itself from scholarship on the dialogism of the past 20 years, during which works have either been single-authored, deeply-researched, and theoretical (cf. matusov, 2009a; wegerif, 2013) or vast collections of essays organized conceptually (cf. ball & freedman, 2004; white & peters, 2011; ligorio & cesar, 2013). while special journal editions have brought new focus to unexplored threads of the dialogic pedagogy, such as the exploration of listening in the classroom (teachers college record, 2011) or the history of the school of the dialogue of cultures (matusov 2009b), skidmore and murakami’s collection affords considerable latitude to its theoretical and historical frame. a comparable work of conceptual breadth is white’s introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years (2016), whose publication frames classroom research of lower school learners with concepts from bakhtin. like white’s work, co-editors skidmore and murakami paint at once in broad strokes and miniature: on the one hand, the collection situates dialogical pedagogy into its historical context, interweaving the work of early russian theorists; at the same time, it offers granular studies of classroom dialogue. since skidmore authors or co-authors 7 of the 13 chapters, the collection can be considered as a project of singular intent. his implicit argument, that conversational analysis (ca), as a methodology, affords greater magnification of classroom moments, raises the question as to whether such methods cohere to the ambitions of dialogical pedagogy. in the end, the promise of ca to unearth dialogic pedagogy does not overcome ca’s limitations. theoretical framing of the dialogical pedagogy the first half of the work offers a coherent, theoretical frame for dialogic pedagogy in both history and educational research. after a brief introduction to the collection in the first chapter, chapter 2 focuses on the early counterforces by russian linguistics against saussure's structuralism. chapter 2 author skidmore skillfully reviews the formative influence of vygotsky and bakhtin, notably sourcing dialogism to yakubinsky, who charges that each speaker brings an "apperceptive mass" (p.17) of past locutions and thoughts that may resemble or differ from the mass of another. skidmore here marks the “linguistic turn”1 at the start of the 20th century with yakubinsky’s proposition that language is a function of the socio-cultural contexts of speech and not, as structuralists might assert, the maker of the world (saussure, 1959)2. in chapter 3, author daniels (2016) elaborates this social-cultural proposition in a contributing work on vygotsky, which provides a theoretical base as to how the conceptions of dialogic theory laid the groundwork early for research in the post-structuralist years of the late 20th century. in chapter 4, brinn (2016) offers a welcome addition by outlining conceptions of dialogue by bohm (1996) and buber (1947). she writes that bohm proposed that, in an ideal exchange, participants suspend their opinions as they consider those of others. but such a practice, she warns, can lead to epistemological relativity, as if every position in the classroom is valid, even those that may be non-factual or in opposition 1 according to hacker (2013), “the expression ‘the linguistic turn’ was introduced by gustav bergmann in his review of peter strawson’s individuals in 1960.” 2 saussure (1959) makes the following claim: “without language thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. there are no preexisting ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language” (p.112). theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r3 to each other. in her review of buber (1947), brinn stresses the space between rather than within conversants, underscoring the covenant of genuine dialogue when each participant is fully conscious and will "turn towards" the other (p.74). introducing bohm and buber into the conversation about discourse, brinn fills a critical theoretical gap often disregarded by other works. while the first chapters of skidmore and murakami’s collection carefully diagram a history of discourse, their review is by no means exhaustive. the authors neglect to mention the important contributions of habermas (1984), among others, in the lineage of thought from russia to buber to bohm. like bohm, habermas expressed a view that dialogue was consensus-building. in contrast to the divergent, simultaneous voices of bakhtin, habermas (1984) suggested that people engaged in dialogue aim to resolve varied opinions in the room: “[t]he concept of communicative action presupposes the use of language as a medium for a kind of reaching understanding, in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise valid claims that can be accepted or contested” (p. 99). if one aim of the first half of the collection was to introduce a theoretical frame for dialogic pedagogy, then the editors might have contextualized the full history of work in the 20th century rather than offer the curated focus of chapters 2, 3, and 4. a recent brief article (peters & bisley, 2019) ably traces the lineage between the theorists mentioned in the collection (bakhtin, freire, buber, and bohm) and those left unmentioned (kierkegaard, heidegger, gadamer, apel, hegel, oakshott, and rorty). still, even without the integration of a more comprehensive history of dialogue, the initial chapters provide considerations for the second half of empirical micro-studies. chapters 5 and 6, each written by skidmore, shift from theory to a history of empirical studies of dialogue. chapter 5 reviews essential research examining classroom discourse: from the studies of sinclair and coulthard’s coding discourse (1979) to mehan’s “turn allocation apparatus” (1979) to the exploratory and final draft discourse of barnes (1976), ending with cazden’s reconsideration of the initiation-responsefollow-up sequence (irf) and more community-centered discourse practices. one missing thread through this section is the teasing out of cazden’s (1988) extension of the evaluation, the “e,” in the initiationresponse-evaluation exchange (ire), and how teachers subsequently recalibrate their replies to student commentary to move beyond approval or correction. though unmentioned, cazden’s uptake question is a crucial component of what skidmore deems the “spontaneous improvisation in the performance of a lesson” (p.96). still, skidmore reminds the reader that it was cazden who first likened the teacher to the jazz musician, a comparison used so often that many neglect the source. with its history of discourse coding, this chapter lays the groundwork for the skidmore's methodological move toward discourse microstudies in the classroom. the chapter that follows, chapter 6, traces essential research of classroom dialogue by wells (1989), nystrand (1997), and alexander (2001), and their respective work with dialogic instruction, dialogic inquiry, and dialogic teaching to clarify each study’s primary focus of research. for instance, nystrand’s work on what he deemed dialogic instruction considers an instructor’s authentic questioning, that is, questions with no prescribed answer. skidmore first reviews nystrand’s study of 400 lessons in 25 high schools revealing that dialogical instruction was “superior” to recitation. while nystrand’s work examines the relative openness of the teacher’s line of questioning, wells’s study shifts the focus of research to the teacher's response in the 'follow-up" of mehan’s irf “turn-taking apparatus” (1979) and bereiter’s “progressive discourse”(1994), where students extend, qualify, and amend each other’s arguments. in fact, the respective nomenclature of “turn-taking apparatus,” which implies a mechanistic, industrialized propulsion in dialogue, and the organic, evolutionary implications of “progressive discourse” traces a shift from structuralist to post-structuralist conceptions in research. perhaps the grandest work is that of theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r4 alexander, whose broad, intercontinental study picks up the generalized mantel of “dialogic teaching,” defined by a list of 61 indicators, some of which are contextual, such as quick lesson transitions, while the remainder falls into seven categories of exchange, including variations of interaction, questioning, monitoring, and feedback between the teacher and student and among students. while this summation is a helpful review of significant studies undertaken in the past decades of research, it reminds scholars of the stakeholding claim oft-cited research has and the need for additional study. this collection aims to add to this arc of research, as editors skidmore and murakami present seven chapters of empirical studies, each differing in context and age-level. chapter 7, for instance, focuses on dialogue in middle school writing conferences, while chapter 9 examines primary school responses to a story; still, another chapter, chapter 12, studies exchange in an english as a foreign language (efl) classroom. are these chapters no more than a loose patchwork of varied sites of study and diverse learners? would the collection have benefitted from studies limited to one age group or mode of study, such as efl? as diverse as these sites of study are, the work is united by a shift in methodology, in which the editors argue the benefits of conversational analysis (ca) over discourse analysis (da) in exploring dialogical spaces of classroom events. whether the methodology effectively delivers on the promise of theory is one consideration i would like to address here. a brief history of conversational analysis (ca) and discourse analysis (da) since the work aims to consider the benefits and limits of both conversational analysis (ca) and discourse analysis (da), it may be helpful to review the history of each here. proposed and formalized by sacks, schegloff, and jefferson (1974), ca introduced a system to examine conversation as a turn-taking system, a system they likened to other ordered “moves”: formal activities, such as meetings or debates; sociological engagements, such as the order of maneuvers in games or traffic; and everyday social interactions, such as customer service or informal conversation. their work provides a transcription protocol for conversation to notate sequencing (overlapping, latching, or lapses between units of exchange), the intonation, volume, pitch, explosive aspiration, and other forms of audio production, such as whispering, laughter, or coughing. while the notation protocols have expanded since its introduction, scholars admitted that ca was not intended to be a replacement for the nuance of recorded data (atkinson & heritage, 1985). even so, researchers maintained the scientific nature of recording and its transcription through ca, stressing that the "repeated and detailed examination of particular events in interaction . . . greatly enhances the range and precision of the observations that can be made” (atkinson & heritage, 1985, p. 4). in sum, by extending speech act theory’s examination of the semantic unit (austin, 1962; searle, 1969) to the turntaking unit or sequence of linked exchanges, ca expanded the gathering of data in both range and precision. contemporaneous with the research of sacks, schelgloff, and jefferson (1974) was the theoretical and sociological work on everyday discourse by goffman (1981). in one remarkable passage, goffman compares conversational exchange to a dance between partners, with the physical embodiment, of gesture, joint, stance, footing, frame, and play: and with that, the dance of talk might finally be available to us. without diffidence, we could attend fully to what it means to be in play, and we could gain appreciation of the considerable resources available to a speaker each time he holds the floor . . . his responses themselves he can present with hedges of various sorts, with routine reservations, so that he can withdraw from the standpoint, and thence the self . . . . part-way through his turn he can break frame and introduce an theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r5 aside, alluding to extraneous matters, or reflexivity to the effort at communication in progress—his own—in either case temporarily presenting himself to his listeners on a changed footing” (p.73, emphasis my own). goffman’s metaphor disabuses the notion that orality is bodiless. though not as permanent as writing, orality, nonetheless, is as physical as the movement in space between partners. his comparison lends substance and physicality to daily conversation, allowing us to envision the starts, hesitations, “holds,” reflexive adjustments, and quick shifts in “footing” in what seems at once both rehearsed and responsive. to goffman's linguistic-poetic tract, sacks, schelgloff, and jefferson (1974) provided what they coin as a “systematic” that bases ca on decisive, coded movements and sequences examined granularly. in this way, ca is linked historically and epistemologically to the structuralist position of viewing the text as an object of study, independent of the social context into which it is situated. discourse analysis academic terminology is often redefined or refined by scholars, which can lead to semantic conflation. “discourse” is an apt example. when sinclair and coulthard (1975) first introduced their research, titled “toward an analysis of discourse,” it came as no surprise that the method came to be known as “discourse analysis.” but when theorists redefined “discourse” (foucault, 1972), an understandable point of confusion occurred. initially, discourse denoted language used in oratory or writing, but this definition soon became energetically redefined by foucault, who situated discourse within the sociocultural and historical context that produced it. for foucault, discourse engendered “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 54). language was no longer a closed system of structural signs and signifiers, guided by rules, but rather an interpenetrating exchange between culture, knowledge, and power. as an extension of this theory into a method, discourse analysis (da) contended with the contextual and socio-historical, and hence, the linguistic confusion of da continued, even as it yielded branched methods, such as critical discourse analysis (wodack & mayer, 2009). according to fairclough (1992), who viewed language as an implement of power, discourse enfolds three dimensions: the text (speech, writing, or image), the discursive practice of analysis within the text, and the social practices and structures bound to notions of power and knowledge. years later, gee (1999) offered a toolkit for researchers using da, all the while admitting that he does “not want to suggest that there is any ‘lock step’ method to be followed in doing a discourse analysis” (p.119). still, gee’s da of working-class and uppermiddle-class teens provided a window into the "lifeworlds" (habermas, 1984) of each. by carefully examining the "i-statements," that is, utterances in which the subject is "i,” and dividing these statements categorically, gee concluded that “[t]he upper-middle-class teenagers are focused on knowledge claims, assessment, evaluation, their movement through achievement space, and the relationship between the present and the future. the working-class teens are focused on social, physical, and dialogic interactions” (1999, p. 129). gee’s work rests alongside critical discourse analysis (cda), which affords the researcher a "reflection on issues of mediation between language and social structure … absent from other linguistic approaches, for example from conversational analysis" (wodak & mayer, 2009, p.21). here, both da and cda function as a linguistic gateway to the exterior lifeworlds of power and knowledge. skidmore and murakami’s collection employs neither the post-structuralist knowledge of exterior lifeworlds of either fairclough and gee’s da or cda. instead, the chapters present sinclair and coulthard’s theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r6 structuralist analysis of discourse as “da,”3 setting this against sacks, schegloff, and jefferson’s ca (1974). thus, the underlying project of the collection, one with emerging clarity as one moves through the empirical studies, is the case that ca provides a more subtle measure of the classroom event than “da.” nevertheless, this examination prompts one to question whether either method of analysis adequately fulfills the task to describe and analyze dialogism. consequently, a pressing question persists: can structuralist-based methodologies, such as ca, reveal the complexity of dialogism? skidmore and murakami’s collection adheres to such structuralist methods, but there are other practitioners, which i will address later, who adopt post-modern, mixed-method approaches that may provide another solution (fecho, 2005; juzwik, borsheim-black, caughlan, & heintz, 2014; skaftun, 2019). is methodology a gateway or stumbling block to the dialogism? whether this shift to discourse methodology can unearth the realities of dialogical space in the classroom is something worth considering. unlike previous studies of duration, scope, and territories, these studies zoom in on the granular nature of classroom exchange, examining the subtle exchanges within the teacher-student dyad. in effect, these chapters advance the micro-research of prosody analysis in surprising ways. even primary school students, for instance, can be inspired by authentic questions that make them ponder. further, a teacher’s gesture and intonation in the classroom may engage in a form of communication in concert with utterance; and small group, student-to-student exchanges can lead a community of learners to affect real change through dialogical discourse. although not all classrooms may adhere to such ideals, some of the research presented provides some vision of the future of classroom discourse. in select chapters, however, the research only confirms that dialogical pedagogy is more often theory than practice. chapters 8, 11, and 12, for instance, reveal the disappointing persistence of dominant monological and recitation practices. for instance, chapter 8, authored by kremer (2016), focuses on a novice teacher of three classes in luxenberg who relies on recitation practices to conduct the lesson. in his analysis, kremer makes a bold claim that classroom discourse has "expanded" into the dialogic space. yet each example remains locked within the teacher-student dyad, showcasing one student’s abstracted response to a teacher’s prompt that does not represent the complexity of dialogism. although the study admirably presents a meticulous analysis of teaching turns, discourse, and cognitive activity, this work admits the absence of dialogic practice. in his conclusion, kremer notes the difficulty of dialogic pedagogy, conceding “that the study has revealed that creating a multi-voice classroom is a problematic undertaking” and the need for a “grid of descriptors of good practice . . . to optimize classroom discourse" (p.151). studies like these, which confirm what has for years been documented, passively bear witness to the lack of dialogical stances in the classroom. given the careful charting of the history of discourse analysis and dialogical research in the early chapters of the collection, are new dialogical approaches needed to enact some shift in practice? another chapter at odds with dialogical discourse is chapter 11, in which co-authors skidmore and murakami offer a granular microanalysis of teacher talk using prosody and ca. inspired by goffman’s ideas of the shifting footing of speech acts, this chapter adds nuance to the analysis of inflection in the follow-up, e.g., the "f" in the irf, yet still gathers no effective research into dialogic pedagogy. similar to the last chapter, the researchers contribute little to the overall aim of the collection; instead, they propose a method of examining the music of speech in discourse. in the end, this research focuses on the triad of recitation 3 to clarify the confusion around discourse analysis, i hereafter employ “da” in reference to the analysis of discourse proposed by sacks, schegloff, and jefferson (1974); in distinction to this, da will refer to discourse analysis, as proposed, post-foucault, by fairclough (1992) and gee (1999). theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r7 rather than the multiplicity of voices within the dialogical discourse. while not explicit, the inclusion of the chapter hints at the possible transferability of examining prosody onto dialogical space, as it would be of interest to examine a student’s change of footing with ca in the intersubjectivity of dialogue. in chapter 12, authors zhao, skidmore, and murakami (2016) argue that one may move beyond the limitations of the triadic structure in an english as a foreign language (efl) classroom in china using ca. they advocate for “conversational prosody” (p. 204), or the orientation of speakers to each other’s speech acts. they notate duration, rate, rhythm, and pause to analyze how teachers indicate shifts in footing and activity. further, the researchers coined the term "prosaic chopping" (p. 212), which refers to the up-and-down hand gesture used in the classroom for emphasis or as a non-verbal indicator that the teacher is addressing the whole and not an individual. yet while the application of ca and conversational prosody provides greater insight into working across languages in an efl classroom, this examination of ire does little to move dialogical classroom studies forward. as such, the chapter, while perhaps a legitimate offering in another journal, seems at odds with the overall dialogical project of the work. the slow course toward research on dialogic pedagogy is more at work in the studies of chapters 7, 9, and 13, as varied in scope and age as they are. in chapter 7’s micro-study of a writing group of three students, esiyok (2016) notes shifts in thought positions, reconsiderations of previous stances, and the mindful engagement of not only the instructor but also peers who exhibit “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1981). establishing the codes of discourse conduct bolstered by research, esiyok presents her research of 12 students ages 7 and 8 in a european school who have written a comparison essay of two mosques the class had visited. though the writing group comprised of three students and a teacher is deemed “dialogical,” the line of questioning is less informed by “authentic” questioning as it is by correcting misconceptions among peers. still, when the small group workshops a poem, the teacher guides students through the process of identifying a better word for "stunning" to describe music, this research offers an example of skidmore's proposition that dialogic pedagogy is transferable to creative acts and thinking. in this exchange, the teacher stays silent to allow the voices of the children to come forward, and, by doing so, materializes what she notes as mercer’s “interthinking” (2000). the innovation of this study is that it tracks thought, dialogue, and revision in the form of rewriting. in this way, one may trace the effect of dialogical pedagogy on reflective thinking and how that translates into the production of work. such dialogic patterns are seen as well in the gentle moves of primary school students in chapter 9 and the more complex and nuanced poetic interpretations of secondary school students in chapter 13. in chapter 9, for instance, skidmore (2016) carefully examined two exchanges in lower school classrooms of five students tested for reading comprehension. in the first, skidmore observes what he deems a “monological” exchange in which the discourse is a variation of ire, with the teacher questioning for the “correct” comprehension question of a test question. skidmore then posits more dialogical approaches to explore what might be deemed student “errors,” thereby envisioning various interventions and corrections as “critical turning points” to provide alternative departure routes for both student and teacher out of the limitations of monological discourse (p.170). the second exchange begins with an “authentic” or openended question as to which character was most to blame in “blue riding hood.” this exchange offers something approaching dialogism, with a “responsive-collaborative” script akin to that identified by guitierrez (1994) and collective engagement in a "problem solving" discourse. skidmore writes how joint discussions invite a bakhtinian community of literacy practices in dialogue: [b]y pooling their thinking and making it public, they were also encouraged to make it more explicit, and to open it up to modification through considering other points of view, with the result that theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r8 they attained a richer understanding of the story collectively than they would be likely to have achieved individually (p.164). skidmore’s juxtaposition of similar literacy groups weighs pedagogical dialogue, which he deems a “monological conception of truth” (p.37) against dialogic pedagogy, one characterized by continuous, recursive modifications amid varied external discourses subsequently internalized. he concludes that the practice of discourse emerges from the instructor’s line of questioning, though this may suggest a predetermined sense of the meaning of any given text. in light of bakhtin’s work with literature, skidmore underscores that literary texts invite a “non-algorithmic form of knowledge” (p.166). to reduce such complexity to a gathering of plot points is mere transmission-based pedagogy. instead, one may introduce a more cognitively weighted practice within any text by questioning, categorizing, ranking, and debating. to do so is to enter into the post-structural messiness of literature, where students, even at young ages, may construct with others intellectual identities through the intersubjective engagement. the question, however, remains as to whether “da” can clarify the dialogicity in the classroom discourse. some scholars have debated whether skidmore’s “da” method itself is deterministic, a false front of dialogism that is instead “a preset didactic strategy aimed to arrive at certain present curricular endpoints” (matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019, p. e59). the claim by these researchers is that those practicing “da,” though often reflexively skeptical, still maintain a strict researcher-subject relation. rarely are research subjects invited to construct meaning in the process of research itself. still, this chapter aims toward a break in the “inertia” of authoritative discourse, arguing that there can emerge “microeconomies” of dialogism (p.167). while the pedagogy in chapter 9 argues for a line of authentic questioning to induce, however incompletely, a dialogism, chapter 13 uses both ca and “da” as a method of comparative analysis to reveal the dialogicity in the classroom. in this chapter, authors skidmore and murakami examine the transcript of a whole classroom discussion of a poem with both “da” and ca to assess the value and limitations of each. according to the authors, the “da” framework constricts rather than reveals the complexity of exchange in an inquiry-based classroom. for instance, the “da” method allows the researcher to classify only four kinds of actions by students: the bid, reply, reaction, and elicitation. some responses, they argue, belie such categorization. in contrast, the use of ca with the same exchanges affords greater interpretative subtlety than “da.” with ca, researchers have magnified proximity to the nuanced exchange in which the gaps, pauses, markers of disagreement (well, for example) can be marked and coded. in this chapter, the authors’ highlight their commitment to micro-analysis, in which the “fine-grained analysis of the prosody of teacherstudent dialogue . . . reveal[s] aspects of the dynamic flux of classroom interaction which previous research in this area has left untouched” (p.199). though the authors conclude that the polyphonic arrangement of voices revealed by ca “do not completely mesh” into dialogism, the researchers still maintain that ca offers “a higher power of magnification” (p. 233, 235). still, “magnification” is mired in the positivist notion that truth may be found under the microscope— that videotaping classrooms represents all that transpires, and coding practices, like those in ca, will bring the researcher closer to a dialogic pedagogy. a post-structuralist practitioner of da (gee, 1999) or cda (wodack & mayer, 2009) may rightly question such an epistemological and ontological stance: one that seeks to render the complexities of the dialogism into a scientific process of magnification. latour (2014) warned of the lure of the zoom lens: theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r9 it is incorrect, moreover, to think that maps, for instance, prove the reality of the zoom effect: when one shifts from a map on a scale of 1 cm. to 1 km. to one on 1 cm. to 10 km., the latter does not contain the same information as the former: it contains other information that might (or might not) coincide with what appears in the former. in spite of appearances, the optical and cartographic metaphors do not overlap. it might even be said that the former has become so parasitical on the latter that it has rendered the very concept of cartography almost incomprehensible. optics has distorted cartography entirely. (p. 121) what we may now deem the google maps effect has become so commonplace that the postmodern mind has come to view the zoom as some verification of reality and the view from afar, a vague generalization of detail. is, then, the zooming in on the details of linguistic discourse through ca and or the patterns and structures of turns in “da” a false conception of truth? for latour, the microscope can mislead, and perhaps the same may be true of such methods in the classroom. a dialogical method for the dialogical classroom? what then is a methodology for the study of dialogic pedagogy? are these structuralist-based practices the most illuminating means to reveal the complexity of discourse? does the microstudy inhibit dialogism? consider how the studies of this collection, so finely limited in size and scope, compare to the work of juzwik, borsheim-black, caughlan, and heintz (2014). these researchers brought dialogical theory to its practical application for the working educator, recalling that dialogical work is a form of cumulation (juzwik, borsheim-black, caughlan, & heintz, 2014, citing alexander & mercer) since the educator-inpractice must consider work throughout the year and not merely for one lesson. other researchers have adopted a more subjective, post-positivistic stances of inquiry to capture the dialogism. qualitative, narrative methodologies may illuminate moments of wonder (bibler, 2009) or wobble (fecho, 2005), as researchers adopt a more self-consciously reflective practice in meaning-making (sullivan, 2011). some narrative researchers even invite their subject-participants into the co-construction of meaning. resultingly, some suggest mixed-methodologies that enfold micro-analysis, dialogical work overtime, and intersubjective collaboration between researcher-teacher-student, which may come closer to the heart of what may be happening in dialogical spaces (matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019; juzwik, borsheim-black, caughlan, & heintz, 2014). dialogic discourse analysis given the limitations of structuralist-based methods to describe and analyze dialogism in the classroom in this work, i would like to recall a recent work published in this journal by skaftun (2019), which introduces a methodology that may offer a glimpse into future practices. introducing dialogical discourse analysis (dda) as a toolkit for educational researchers, skaftun stressed the “dialogizing background” of each utterance, situating it in a chain of utterances both within and between agents in the classroom. a striking component of skaftun’s work is how he repositions himself as researcher with a post-modern skeptical self-awareness. in this way, his positionality is a correction to the hierarchies of past structuralist research methods. to his point, both ca and “da” are steeped in social scientific methodologies, which, combined with the structuralism of linguistic studies, still presupposes some untroubled truth in the transcript of a classroom. the researcher is a "decoder" of the text, and, much like the modern literary critic, an exegetical interpreter of the event of the classroom. while the researchers in skidmore and murakami’s collection admit the limitations of the studies, they do not question the methodology itself. they hold their methodology as a pillar of scientific truth. furthermore, though researchers bandy about the language of theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r10 dialogism, the work is not invested in a method that corresponds with the post-structuralist queries of dialogical research. as a point of comparison, skaftun positions himself in his project as an “alien researcher” (2019, p. a153), exterior to the history and habits of the classroom. as an outsider, he repeatedly discloses his subjectivity, which, though a limitation, is also a liberation. for instance, he admits to subjective interpretations of the first math classes he visited, noting that he used neither audio nor videotape. still, his subjective, “alien” stance affords an interpretative latitude of perception. he marks subversive forces at play in the discourse of a classroom, one to which teachers may have been tone-deaf. but rather than impose his “alien” research stance, he notes the “gap” between the teachers understanding and his own—an invitation for continued discourse and research, in full recognition that researcher, teacher, and students are engaged in a “field of discursive struggle” (p. a153). my point here is that some methodological needle has been moved from what i would deem as a structuralist-based methodology of ca to the bricolage of methods thereafter. what skaftun (2019) offers the field of discourse studies is an introduction to and affirmation of dda as a method, one in which both students, teachers, and researchers are authors and subjects in an interdependent construction of pedagogy. in doing so, skaftun wrests the researcher from “scientific” linguistic analysis and the event of the classroom as artifact. in its place, he considers the classroom itself as an unfinalizable text, co-authored by students and teachers and “read,” however subjectively, by the reflective practitioner. with skaftun’s work, dda, in the very least, is theorized, if not fully materialized, as a practice. one might envision what it could mean to engage with and return to a classroom over time, working dialogically with teachers and students. the great benefit of empirical studies, even those that admit a deficit of findings, is that they help conceptualize studies to come. as a recursive practice of constructing meaning, scholarship, in offering itself to the discipline for reflection and critique, invites practices, pedagogies, and methodologies for the future. as a point of distinction, skidmore and murakami’s collection theorizes about dialogism while adopting the structuralized methodologies formulated in the early 70s and 80s. this disjunction between the theory of dialogism and a method to reveal it cannot go unremarked. if, as i have pointed out in this review, many of the researchers in this collection concede to the lack of dialogism in the classroom, who is to say that the method of study itself or its duration are not to blame? given the reliance on microrather than long-term study and on da and ca, might there be dialogism in the gaps, margins, and days unobserved that went unnoticed and unmarked? there may be dialogism in the classroom, but are researchers ready and able to research, record, and write about it? references alexander, r. j. 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(1989). language in the classroom: literacy and collaborative talk. language and education. 3(4), 251-273. theoretical promises and methodological troubles capturing dialogical discourse in classroom research christian george gregory dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.313 | vol. 8 (2020) r13 white, e.j. & peters, m. (eds.). (2011). bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. new york, ny: peter lang. white, e.j. (2016). introducing dialogic pedagogy: provocations for the early years. new york, ny: routledge. wodak, r. & mayer, m. (2009). critical discourse analysis: history, agenda, theory, and methodology. in methods of critical discourse analysis (2nd edition). pp. 1-33. r. wodak & m. mayer (eds.). london, united kingdom: sage publications. zhao, x. skidmore, d. & murakami, k. (2016). prosaic chopping: a pedagogical tool to signal shifts in academic task structure. in d. skidmore & k. murakami (eds), dialogic pedagogy: the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. bristol, united kingdom: multilingual matters. retrieved from http://play.google.com. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word applying intersubjectivity for professional development (layout 1).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r1 applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina montoya janecek university of north texas at dallas glenda moss university of north texas at dallas yolanda graham university of north texas at dallas paula mason university of north texas at dallas abstract this is an intersubjective review of loewen, g. v. (2012). hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation. alcoa, tn, usa. old moon academic press. the four authors of the review used a reflectivereflexive, dialogic process to interpret and analyze loewen’s text. their review is presented in a dialogue format that resulted after analyzing a much longer set of narrative data.1 uvaldina montoya janecek is an educator with experience teaching students of all ages, from prekindergarten to adult. she has been a bilingual early childhood teacher and a college instructor of education courses and esl classes for adults. she has a commitment to leading organizations that serve students who have had challenges succeeding in traditional school settings. uvaldina participated in efforts to establish some of the first community health clinics in underserved areas of dallas county. e-mail: uvaldina.janecek@untdallas.edu glenda moss is a former middle school teacher, is a professor and interim dean of the school of education at the university of north texas at dallas. her research interests include critical narrative ethnography in pek-16 settings, critical pedagogy, and multicultural education. she is the author of crossing boundaries and building learning communities. e-mail: glenda.moss@untdallas.edu yolanda graham is a lecturer with extensive expertise in early childhood education. yolanda has an undergraduate degree in business and a master's degree in early childhood education. in addition to the many years of teaching grades prekindergarten to third grade, yolanda has served as an instructional and reading specialist in a large urban school district. she was hired at unt dallas specifically to train our students in instructional strategies for teaching mathematics concepts in the early grades. e-mail: yolanda.graham@untdallas.edu 1 editorial note: this is a very unusual review! there are four points of interest that make this review an interesting read. the first one concerns the subject of the review: the book on hermeneutics. the second point is the form of the review: it is dialogue between the authors presented in its development. the third point of interest is the personal nature of the contents: the authors masterly show how their work on the review of the book penetrates their lives thus showing the real life with its changes, happiness, sadness, struggles and tribulations. the last point of interest that makes this review worth to be read is the pioneering character of the work behind this review. glenda moss used this review as a tool for professional development for the colleagues in her department. in my humble opinion, this review is the result of the very courageous, pioneering and inspirational work! (mikhail gradovski) issn: 2325-3290 (online) applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r2 paula mason is a life-long learner and educator. her research interests include the school disengagement of african american boys, motivation to read, and teacher self-efficacy. she currently serves as manager, k-2 curriculum & instruction in for dallas isd and adjunct instructor for unt dallas. e-mail: paula.mason@untdallas.edu ��� glenda: in may 2013, i agreed to complete a book review of hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation for the dialogical pedagogy journal. i chose this book because it resonated with my perspective on teaching and learning. i am a former middle school language arts teacher. i primarily taught seventh grade students. in the school where i taught, most of my students spoke in an african-american dialect, which my colleagues called broken english. it took me a year to understand the patterns and not have to request that students constantly repeat themselves to support my need to understand them. also, most of my students were discouraged learners since most had failed at least one elementary grade. i quickly learned the importance of building relationship with my students and engaging them in real conversations. within the first three weeks, i called every home and engaged in a conversation with parents to seek knowledge from their experiences as the primary teacher of my students. i would ask parents what they could tell me that would help me to be successful with their student. within the first two weeks of class, i made sure i let my students know that i did second grade two times and still could not read very well. i kept my seventh and eighth grade report cards on my desk to remind me that my students were in progress just like me. being real with my students and engaging them in real conversations about learning played a significant role in creating space for my students and me to grow and learn. the key was conversation within a system of standardized curriculum and assessment. it was interesting to realize that the multiple choice part of the language arts test included the africanamerican dialectical response as one choice for every question. i initiated conversation around this realization by engaging students in understanding and interpreting the politics of standardized language that privileged one language over another. as students were given the space to talk about the politics of the testing system, they could interpret their own identities in relationship to the system and their peers in the class. this deep interpretation of the standardized curriculum resulted in their learning the patterns of their primary language and the patterns of the secondary language i was hired to teach to them. most passed the test, and none lost their dialect. perhaps that can help readers understand why hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation resonated with me and why i chose to use hermeneutic pedagogy for this book review. in 2014, mikhail gradovski2 inquired as to where i was on the review. i replied, “i know that i received the book in late may 2013. i read the first 70 pages as soon as i got the book, started the review, and have not been able to get back to it since then. i wrote the first paragraph of the review on june 10 and was never able to open the book again. i will try to get back to it and finish the job.” 2 one of the book reviews managing editors. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r3 the following is what i had written: hermeneutic pedagogy resonates with me because i, too, view teaching and learning as an interpretive process. dialogue in teaching for learning is a hermeneutical process as both instructor and students become participants in a reciprocal process through which human growth and development may occur in classrooms. loewen outlines the complexity of education in schools that both works to preserve the status quo and create space for thinking at the same time. he introduces the reader to the concepts of hexis, praxis, and phonesis, which offer a framework for understanding the existence of self in society. he defines hexis as conventional traditions and norms accepted in the majority of society. praxis is defined as the process of thinking critically about those traditions in ways that create potential for new ways of viewing that may become hexis over time. phronesis is defined as practical wisdom that results from living through reflective self-consciousness (praxis) to ever-changing senses of self, knowledge, and existence in relationship to others. when i came to the university of north texas at dallas in the summer 2011, all of the faculty were junior tenure track or lecturers. to get the six junior faculty on tenure track started, i brought several scholarly books to a faculty meeting and suggested they all sign up in groups of 3-4 to do a book study and write a review for publication. three completed one book and one faculty member completed one with me. my goal was to encourage the faculty to engage in reading scholarly works on teaching and learning, and engage in professional conversations for professional development and scholarly writing. i hoped this would open up space for developing learning relationships within our department. in the summer 2014, we hired three new education faculty members. two were hired as lecturers and one as tenure-track. in october 2014, i invited these new colleagues to review hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation with me. again, i thought this would create a dialogic setting for us to learn from a study of the book. i proposed that we all read parts of the text and meet to have a dialogue to interpret the text and reflexively examine our own experiences. we recorded our dialogue and transcribed it to create a dialogical review of the text, which we think is quite creative because we used hermeneutic pedagogy to learn from the text and each other. we engaged in learning and teaching together through dialogue and interpretation of the book. we hope you will enjoy and appreciate our creative approach. glenda: since this book is called hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation, my thinking is that we’re going to have a dialogue in an effort to interpret what we are reading and to dialogically come to an understanding of what this book is about and what hermeneutic pedagogy is. so, my thinking is that it would be a very creative way to do a book review of hermeneutic pedagogy by trying to use hermeneutic pedagogy to understand the book. to that end we are going to have a conversation about the text since we all read different parts of it. since i read the first 72 pages of the book, part one and the first chapter of part two, in which there were some key terms that the author defined that i think to a degree are important for us to have at least some common ground. the author says, silviane barbato3: i would like to know why you took this decision. glenda: after reading the first 72 pages of the book and beginning a traditional review of the book, i understood hexis, praxis, and phronesis as key terms the author introduces to frame the process of understanding the relationship of knowledge based on traditions, and the critical process through which knowledge grows out of experience and interpretation in a living society. therefore, i thought it would be 3 one of the book reviews managing editors. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r4 a good idea to begin the conversation with a few quotes that introduce these terms. did you have more thoughts on that? the author says, hermeneutics is the art and theory of interpretation, and thus its language is that of the landscape of learning. (p.1) the author also says, teaching and learning are simultaneously acts of interpretation and willing action, which affirms not only our present existence, but also our future, however unknown. (p. 1) and then, the author defines two terms—hexis and praxis. custom provides the original template of human diversity and society, while the practice of theory extends, overturns, and modifies what has been the case, what is customarily so. primary socialization provides the action of hexis, or what is taken for granted as the case, tradition, and norms. praxis challenges the status quo by opening the previously singular and insular world into its manifold and strange recesses. the world as it is confronts us, and its alien quality makes further customary action impossible. (p. 1-2) shortly after that, the author defines phronesis. yet, it is only a combination of the two of these, what has been the case and what is strange, that can create the hermeneutic environment of phronesis, the practical wisdom of living on. customs are reinterpreted, theory adjusted to suit reality, the social reality of tradition is reshaped, and the episteme of the serious business of constructing knowledge takes on its new historical task. the wisdom of experiential practice and reflective self-consciousness is phronetic in its character. (p. 2) i will stop there. there were many other terms, but those were critical terms we should begin by having a conversation about what they mean and maybe our own experiences with those concepts. uvaldina: there is a little clarification in the last chapter (chapter 6. remaining at large—the world authenticates the self) on hermeneutics. i thought it had something to do with the god hermes. and it does. it says that “in the classical period the gods were thought to have direct access to ‘logos, the word,’ because they “had created it,” and that their speech was perfect. they spoke in “perfect clarity” (p. 168). they didn’t need anybody to interpret it. but then it says that we do, that human beings are imperfect and so we need to clarify what we say. referencing grondin (1995), the author states, the unitary task of hermeneutics in antiquity seems to have consisted in going back from what was said to what is meant, to the vouloir dire beneath the language. this understanding of hermeneutics tacitly assumes that language is invested with a meaning that precedes or goes beyond the uttered word itself. (grondin, 1995, in loewen, 2012, p. 168) i thought it had something to do with hermes, and it did. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r5 glenda: so, what you just read, within that you used the word tacit. that was something i had written in my notes when i was reading the definition of hexis, and i wondered if that is the same thing that people mean when they refer to tacit knowledge. uvaldina: implied? glenda: well, tacit knowledge is usually what we… uvaldina: assumptions? glenda: what we automatically act out of tacit knowledge. we don’t question it. it is just how it is. i think that knowledge for most of us came during our formative years. you grow up with a set of beliefs and way of viewing, and if you don't ever question it, you just react out of that being truth. hexis was defined as "what is customarily so. primary socialization provides the action of hexis." it seems like the way the author is defining hexis that it's that knowledge that comes from uvaldina: traditions glenda: yeah, traditions, our cultural perspective uvaldina: habits glenda: yeah, our habits yolanda: couldn't we describe that as intuitive or maybe reflective to a certain degree? it's something that we do without; it's very automatic. it's something that we see and perceive; and as we said, we don't question it, but we function in it, and we accept it as true. in contrast to this, when you look at praxis. praxis is the idea that you see those ideas and in praxis is where we begin to question things. that's where your experience begins to help you look as what we define as hexis and question it. i think the author took those two terms and continued to let us look at them in a way that we can compare them, and yet we saw how they could work together, but at the same time it wasn't a linear relationship because in a linear relationship it would merge and the learner probably wouldn't see too much difference. but, if our understanding in terms of hexis is left to where it could be questioned, then your growth leaves two dimensional and becomes three dimensional because what happens is the two --i know this sounds kind of simplistic--like the two begin to dance. and, so what happens in the exploration of both, and i was reading chapter 2, they emerge and you have to put them both aside and then let them redevelop. the author at one point calls it a death, and that was very intriguing because in looking at our understanding of hermeneutics, understanding it from a philosophical standpoint and in some cases a spiritual and religious understanding, it’s taking the old and saying i'm going to let it go and become something new. and so, for me, it seems like the author was expressing the idea and looking at the two and how they work together, the learner can optimally develop phronesis. was when the two grew together to the point where you would let them both go and reemerge. it seemed very similar to me as when young children are developing schema, going through that process of assimilation versus accommodation. i saw some similarities there, but this is on a much broader scale. but the idea of when you take what you know and allow yourself to look at it differently, to the point where you question it, almost to the point of forsaking it; and at the same time, with your practice, you begin to examine it as well; to the point where you look at it, then question it, then examine it, to the point where you let it go. you question both what you know and what you practice to the point where they emerge, then you shift them and let them reemerge. and i think applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r6 the analogy of the death explains the depths to which you would do that – to such a degree that both would reemerge, and it would still have that same polarity, but yet it would still become cyclical. silviane barbato: maybe it should be interesting to mention here that “dance” is a term used by the author as it becomes clear in page 6. glenda: yolanda, were you aware that loewen used “dance” to describe the tension between hexis and praxis? yolanda: no, it was just the image that came to me as i read chapter 2. glenda: i don’t see the word “dance” on page 6. i don’t see it on pages 5-8. this was a great section. i underlined and highlighted and wrote margin notes because it was so engaging. i wrote at the bottom of page 5, “don’t separate self from being in the world with its messiness. teachers do this when they love the child but hate the behavior. the behavior is the child being. we must be with the child’s being to go on being together.” uvaldina: yes. i was looking for that word “cyclical” because i think that’s implied that the process is not ever finished; that you just go on to another level, or attack one of those other recesses. it is what she mentioned about those recesses in your implicit knowledge – in your hexis. silviane barbato: would it be possible to add some more information on this dynamics? uvaldina: yes. i was looking for that word “cyclical” because i think that’s implied that the process is not ever finished; that you just go on to another level, or attack one of those other “recesses.” “the tyche of mastery is the wisdom that sees living on as a work in progress, and the knowledge that such work cannot come to an end and yet, also, must nevertheless, end” (p. 1). it’s what she mentioned in the introduction about those recesses in your implicit knowledge – in your hexis, or the “status quo.” “praxis challenges the status quo by opening the previously singular and insular world into its manifold and strange recesses” (p. 2). glenda: so, yolanda, because your primary focus is early childhood, i can see why you would think in terms of little children, whereas my background experience was in teaching in middle school, so i immediately made a connection to when we try to interject something in our teaching that causes disequilibrium for students, and that’s why we teach our preservice teachers the importance of either introducing a new way of looking at something or a new concept that then temporarily puts students in disequilibrium and they have to process it. and so when i was reading this, i thought: is this the same kind of thing? and then i thought: or, is this a perfect example of how our tacit understandings are coming into play as we try to read this and interpret it? to what degree do we always see things out of some primary understandings that we already have; and is it too difficult to open up wide enough that there is something even more new in this? i kept asking myself: is there something more new in this that i’m not able to see because my lens is clouded by where i am right now? when you’ve been in the education business for forty years, how easy is it to really see something new? i don’t know if that’s making any sense. because i automatically connected these terms with other terms that i already am familiar with. then i would ask myself if i am missing something. is he talking about something that’s on an all new level? yolanda: i do think the author alludes to the idea of the willingness of the learner, so i think that what you’re saying is a very valid point. it does make you realize your own limitations; but at the same time, applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r7 just the awareness that there is a limitation, i think is a part of that dance. it’s a part of our understanding of hexis and practice working together; just the awareness in itself that there is something that can emerge. i think it’s like a stepping stone. paula: i think that’s right on point because in my chapter, chapter 5, it basically gives the definition of phronesis in a more simplified way as “the ability to reflect theoretically upon one’s experiences” (p. 143), and it talks about the hexis and the praxis, like you said how they go together and build on what the author calls “practical wisdom.” he’s saying that as learners and as teachers, we are trying to get to our own practical wisdom and then help our students find practical wisdom. and like what you said about the dance, in one part he says, hexis now no longer is naïve about its origins and its inertia, just as praxis cannot rest in technicalities and abstract models. in its turn, praxis, too is transformed, not by disdaining hexis in seeking to supplant it, and neither by merely extending it without being fundamentally logical and critical about it. praxis is transformed, rather, by deepening its understanding of where its own origins, the culture and historical roots of both custom and experience. (144) and then it talks about critical and theoretical thinking; the scientific and philosophical attitudes combined are yet practiced by human beings who also must exist in their various cultures as the day to day citizens of living on. it works together and we should transverse the boundaries of each. if we can do both of those things and take both of those things into account, then that’s where the practical wisdom comes in. (p. 144) it comes from us. we have to know how to take our experiences, like you said, and then take praxis and discover something new. in this chapter, he’s saying that you have to be open to learn from your students. you have to be the student and the teacher. you have to be a lifelong learner, and you have to know that what you know is not the be-all; end-all. that there is more to it, and that someone else know something that you don’t know – experiences and all that; and that it changes. it changes with where you are in life, your place of employment, your family structure. as all of that changes, your praxis and hexis changes as well. you have to be able to travel with that and know that this is changing, i’m moving, and this is something new. i’m learning; i’m still learning. yolanda: your points are well-taken in that, going back to chapter 2, the author gives examples of students that are talking about their teachers and the learning experience. at one point, the author talks about teaching, but not too well. i understood that to mean not too thoroughly. it’s being able to present the learning situation and being able to step back because you see your role as you’re not giving them everything, but you’re allowing enough exposure to step back and let the learner engage in reasoning through that idea of praxis and hexis, and them coming to their new understanding. and then you are a part of that as well because as they grow and learn, you take part in that growth and learning as well. uvaldina: so it’s not a matter necessarily, of not teaching thoroughly, it’s not being dogmatic; not being so pedantic that you convey to your students that this is the answer, this is the way, period, because chapter 3 addresses that. yolanda: yes, and in chapter 2 as well. uvaldina: but in universities that happens sometimes. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r8 glenda: it seems like one of the core ideas for me in the text is this idea that…he’s not really putting it out there and saying: “this is my thesis on education.” he doesn’t use that word, and i think that probably says a lot – the absence of that word, whereas, instead, the concept of teaching and learning is central, and it seems to me that one of the main points is that learning is human growth and development -that life, all of life is growing in our understanding of who we are and how we relate spiritually and physically in this world. it made me think about how standardized education – and we’ve been moving in that direction for thirty years now – and i think i have seen a demise of the spiritual development of children because of that process. it’s almost like society is wanting to define education within a body of knowledge and skills for producing and sustaining a capitalistic society. that’s the goal of education. whereas, i’m old enough that when i was in school it was about pure learning, and learning how to learn. i feel like i’m fortunate that when i went to college, i can remember making a conscious decision that i was going to allow myself to learn whatever i learned in every class that i took. and i look back on it, and i think: how naïve, living in a society that’s driven by capitalism; but yet, it’s been a great experience to be able to live that way -kind of in a pure state of just learning. and yet, he makes a point on page 11 about…i’m just going to read this one; this paragraph. i had to read this over and over. it’s only two sentences, but it’s very lengthy. he says, that praxis often stops well sort of coming to terms with hexis, as the vast majority of human thinking is both their tradition and in the world at large is one thing, but that it seeks to insulate itself against the world only further fosters the cloak of cultured invisibility that shields us from our existential condition and masks world as philosophical artifice, from an aberrant to instrumental rationality. [this next section is what i highlighted]. the teacher, or professor, is thus cast as an agent for a fashionable rationale of why the world works in this way and not others; or worse, why it must work only in this way, as it may be the best way. (p. 11) so i think that the whole thesis of this book is that hermeneutic pedagogy is alternative to transmission pedagogy. that transmission pedagogy has an authoritarian character, no matter how fostered with studentcentered activities so far resisted officially by student course evaluations [and then “dash”], one of the chief divide-and-conquer tools of a suspicious and always-threatened management [hyphen], disallow both the inventiveness of critical theory and the spontaneity of reflective thought. (p. 11) i just thought this was such a powerful statement. watch how here in our teacher education program, we’re always trying to teach the students about student-centered activities. and just this week, i read one student’s philosophy of education classroom management paper, and they connected to the philosophy of progressivism because they are going to do student-centered group activities among the students; but everything else in the paper talks about how they are going to set up these rules and the procedures. and i’m thinking: what’s going to happen in these classrooms when the students work together? does it mean they are going to copy each other’s work? she’s going to put the students in rows to give the lesson and then let them work together on student-centered collaborative activities? paula: in rows… glenda: well, they’re going to move into groups. then i think: where did we start defining studentcentered activities as the follow-up behind transmission; and then the part where they practice, instead of independent practice, you’re doing independent practice with three other people at the same table. uvaldina: and then you define the activity ahead of time. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r9 glenda: and then i put “the goal of student-centered activities is often static knowledge-based.” and still you have those teachers with a goal that in the end those students will have this formula down, or this body of knowledge and they can answer the multiple choice questions on a test. it doesn’t really allow for this creative, alternative ways to solve problems. yolanda: i have a “wondering” from this because in what you had discussed before… when i was reading this, i began to reflect on my own educational experiences, my own journey, of growing up and approaching school from the standpoint of i saw myself more in the role of understanding the praxis part of it more because i was getting information and i realized that i began to compartmentalize that information. i began to think in terms of: well, this is this world; but do you really understand my world? and i did not make the connection between the two until years later. but at that point in my life, as a younger person going to college for the first time, i saw that dichotomy, and it was probably self-created, this dichotomy -that that was this world, and i’m headed for this world. and i’m hoping to get some things here that will be a part of my world, but if i don’t, i’m not worried about it. it was later that i began to put the two together, so i wondered… it was like i was seeing a little reflection of myself in this – to see my own growth and journey and my own development, interpretation, and understanding. i thought it was interesting how the author said the two actually do a dance; or the two work together to where they both – it comes to a point where you reject both, only to bring them back together again – it recycles. and there was another reference (i actually had to look this word up), and this is another mythical character, this character j-a-n-u-s, janus. it refers to a character that is the god of beginnings, and i made the association with that cyclical process of learning, that learning is a process of constant new beginnings. so, you start with something; you begin to put the pieces of information together – your information; what you’re hearing and you let that permeate to where; you let it gel together, then you put it aside, or break it, or destroy it, only to let it resurface again into something different. it almost mirrors the rock cycle in science. you know how rocks will start out one way, and they will mix, and they will break apart, and they will re-mix. it’s kind of like the science of the earth. so, from an experiential standpoint, learning is similar, in that it starts off one way, and different factors – i guess metaphorically, you could call it different temperatures, and different conditions come. so what happens to rocks is that it breaks down and it reforms; and it breaks down and it re-forms. in the earth, we see that happening over thousands of years. similarly, in the human development, are we seeing that same process? i would also love to get insights from a historian because i think about the idea of hexis and praxis as i remember studying about the dark ages of 400 years in history class. they called it the dark ages because during that time, no new ideas were readily embraced. it was a time in history when there was such a connection to the status quo, that new ideas from someone such as galileo and others were heretical. you know, the earth is definitely flat. how dare you question that! of course, now we see. and even in your biblical readings, you can read some passages and realize that the writer’s perspective was from an idea that the world was flat, which is why you get references to – is god up there or down? – because the thought process is linear. so the message is still there interpretively, but when you dig deeper, you can see the perspective of the writings. so those are the things i was wondering about. glenda: i was wondering, as you were reading these, did any of you think about some major concept or belief or traditional way of looking at something that is critically important in society; that your perspective has changed as a result of your life experience in connection to that. uvaldina: yes, there’s a section here that says that change does not come without confrontation, and i hate confrontation. to me, it’s painful, but i am paired with someone who is a confrontationist because he’s a journalist and he questions everything; and that has been painful for me. but i have seen things – it has opened my eyes to some things that i was not willing to see before. and i shake my head and think: i applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r10 can’t believe i used to think that! the confrontation, the questioning has helped me break apart my hexis. and it’s very liberating. it’s very frightening, but it’s liberating. and now, as a result, i can see where other people are fossilized in their thinking and aren’t willing to be open and have this reflection, and to take advantage of the life experiences of others to see things in a different light. yolanda and i were discussing that the other day, because we always have open conversations. she was talking about how some african-american people now are willing to see hispanics and immigrants in a different light because it was so closed before, and she is beginning to see that transformation; and i am, too. they’re beginning to make the connection about how their struggles are so similar. and especially in this area, that’s been a big issue because people want to hold on to the progress that has been made and not let anyone take it away. it’s been very frightening to try let go of that even just a little bit. i don’t know how that has happened, but it has. yolanda: we see that in our students. uvaldina: yes, in the students. yolanda: it’s a beautiful thing. once our students are in class together and they get a chance to discuss culture in classes like foundations, where you’re developing your philosophy and we talk extensively about culture; we see the openness and we see the willingness to share and consider another viewpoint that at one time either was that was challenging, or was something you had not thought about before. uvaldina: it’s frightening. yolanda: it can be frightening, if you’ve thought about things a certain way, and you come into a public circle and it gets questioned. it can be frightening, but once you press through that and you stay open and you listen, you see the rewards in it yourself, and you see your students wrestle with it and then you see them show appreciation for having taken the time to look at it and not be frightened away. i think another aspect of it, too is in personal responsibility. as i was sharing before, looking at my own educational experiences, seeing myself question what seemed to be the norm and then realizing my own part in it. glenda: can you give an example? yolanda: yes. when i was a college student, i had come from an african-american poverty background, and i went to a university where there were students, from what i could tell, that came from families with means. i saw that situation initially as a situation that was against me; that i had to fight, and i realized later that at that time, that some of that fight was within myself. it was not all outer circumstances, and i realized: wait a minute! i can change the outer circumstances. what i’m perceiving to be against me is not against me at all. this is actually something that can benefit me if i choose to let it be a benefit to me. so that was a shift in my thinking, and it helped me to embrace what i perceived to be as mainstream thinking, but i embraced it differently in a way where i didn’t feel like it was something that was just being told to me; and you have to take it, just because it’s being told to me; but rather i can accept it as a part of society, and i can use this information to my benefit. uvaldina: that’s what we want for our students yolanda: exactly uvaldina: …to be able to see that. in chapter 3, the author demonizes professors. he kind of describes them as prima donnas – you know, you have your little visual aids just in case you forget something applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r11 you’re going to say. you plan all this out and everything– and i thought: geez! then he goes on to quote nietzsche. frequently the professor reads while he speaks. in general he wants to have as many listeners as possible; and indeed, he contents himself with a few and almost never with one. his authoritative scene is priestly, sermonic, hegemonic, and vastly outnumbering of other the modes of pedagogy still. (p. 106) glenda: you know, that’s a stereotypical professor as lecturer (sage on the stage); but that does not reflect at all what we’ve experienced in our faculty in our department of education. we don’t have anybody who’s that way. uvaldina: “transmissive pedagogy is perhaps, at its best, an operatic version of vaudeville meets televangelism” (p. 106). all: [spontaneous laughter and groans]. uvaldina: but you’re right, the premise of the book is that transmissive pedagogy dominates classrooms. glenda: that’s one reason why, whenever i had the opportunity to be the reviewer of this text, i picked it because i really believe in dialogical pedagogy. i used it with middle school kids, and i’ve used it ever since i’ve been in higher education; and from what i’ve observed in my faculty, there is a great deal of use of conversation in the style of pedagogy for most of my faculty, so i thought it would be a good read. uvaldina: well, that’s what’s missing from it, though. you know you said that your dissertation had stories? that’s what’s missing to make it internalize, or to it give meaning in our lives, is the telling of stories. you just asked yolanda to give a story, and i told one. that’s what’s missing. it’s very thick. glenda: right, but i think that what’s going to be useful about our dialogical review. i mean, in some ways i think: well, it will also show that it’s a good text that can lend itself… i mean, most texts can lend themselves to a dialogical interpretation if you set up an environment where you can have a conversation and where people can talk about their experiences. but i think this text in particular lends itself to deeper conversations about becoming, and about learning as becoming and to have critical conversations about how we continue to create environments. like for preservice teachers, especially in texas, to learn how to create environments where you can support children to have critical conversations about true becoming, and at the same time, make sure they understand the politics of state testing that can reduce their high levels of growth down to answering multiple choice questions so that they’re not held back. that’s the kind of critical pedagogy i used with african-american students on the writing test. whenever they could look at the answers and if they put what sounded right, it was going to be marked incorrect because it had two dialectical answers – one dialect and another. half of my students grew up in one dialect that would sound right – the right answer would sound right, and they would get it right. the other group of kids, if they put what sounded right, it was going to be marked wrong. so those children really had to become critical interpreters of the test, the politics of the test to understand who dominated the making and the cultural embeddedness of the test so they could look at it and say: oh, i see my dialect, but if i choose that answer, it’s going to be marked wrong because the dialect that is sanctioned by the school system, that’s some of my peers’ dialect. i’m going to have to mark that if i want to get it right. do i want to resist, or do i want to be able to go to college someday so i can get into power? and we’d have those conversations – seventh grade. and i had a high success rate on the test, but it was only because applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r12 of those critical conversations. and then we’d watch it happen with our preservice teachers being tested to become teachers. it’s the same politics, just at another level. uvaldina: chapter 3 addresses testing, too. it uses some of the same words you did. it says, its official sanction and prestige, its gate-keeping qualities and the sanctity of both its presentation and even the spaces in which it takes place – to enter the exam room is to enter both the military and the church at once akin to a private club where proof of one’s identity must be shown. it’s a rite of passage and race to be the most successful candidate. (p. 101) it eschews the testing culture as well. but you make a point. i even would explain to my second graders about the politics of testing. they would take a benchmark, and i would tell them, this isn’t based on the results of real teaching. it’s just a “thing,” a mechanism, a way that they can… glenda: yeah, that’s what i did with my students. we would do real learning for five weeks and then for one week we would look at how this knowledge would be reduced to another form for state testing so they could recognize what they knew. i would tell them: “you know, the government is not real smart. they can only recognize knowledge in one way – a multiple choice test. and so we have to work with the government. you have to make yourself real small for this test so you can help the government see that you’re very knowledgeable.” yolanda: i had to do similar things with third grade and again, my third graders just happened to be predominately african-american, and what caught their attention was telling them: this is something you have to beat. it is not for you; therefore, you have to outsmart it. i put in them that sense of fight and that’s what got their attention to help them achieve. i perceived that if i let them go into it passively, they would not have done as well. so i had to instill that sense of; you have to fight this! glenda: one year, one of my seventh-graders had the lowest practice test scores of any practice tests i ever gave, and was considered one of the lowest students in seventh grade. but there was something about him that gave me a sense that he had a whole lot more potential. and one day i told him: “you know, you love playing nintendo games” (that shows how long ago this was); and i said: “this test is just like a nintendo game. the government made the game. and you know how when you play your games, you learn the tricks of it, and you warp to other levels higher up, and when you play your games, you’ll do them over and over until you figure out all the tricks. that’s all this is – a game.” from that day forward, i don’t think he ever missed a question: and he got a perfect score on the state test. uvaldina: that’s a good story! glenda: no other kid got a perfect score, and he was just shocked. he said to me: “when you told me how it was just a game, it was so easy to do!” and i think there’s something wrong with the educational system when a little strategy like that which reduces it to a game gives a student the power to make a perfect score. uvaldina: so in my classroom with my students here, i teach my students to be critical of testing formats – that it’s okay to be critical. that’s part of one of their assignments – doing an analysis and critique of one of the testing instruments we use in the schools. and i tell them: “that’s fine. understand that it’s going to happen, but the real assessment of the students; the real teaching of the students happens between you and the student, and nothing can take that away.” i see a lot of teachers who get nervous about testing. it sets them on edge, and they just kind of give up. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r13 glenda: when i was reading the text, and a couple of you gave your stories of experience. the experience i had -and i’m not sure i want to include this in our review. we can decide when we actually write this because we’re going to write a professional review. but i thought about the disposition of most organized christian groups towards the idea of homosexuality that i grew up with, and right now it’s almost like there’s a revolution going on with regards to that issue. and i hate thinking about this, but nearly thirty years ago, a young man whose family was really close to me and i saw him at an event and realized in a moment that he was gay. and i’ll never forget saying to him: “oh, no. don’t tell me you’re a fag!” and i would give anything to take that away. i don’t know, it just came out, and when i think about that incident, i realize that none of us, i don’t think, are pure from having done hurtful things to other people. and anyway, my daughter is gay. and during a process of growing to understand her identity caused me to have a whole shift in my understanding of how people have even used scripture to develop the bias that homosexuality was unnatural. you know i had never even really thought about where we got the perspective we had. i just grew up thinking that in all of humanity that somehow that was unnatural, and it just seems like it’s an example almost as big as learning that the world is not flat; it’s round. it’s almost as big an issue in human society, at least in the united states. most of the time, if you ask somebody what their definition of what a christian is, it’s somebody who hates homosexuals. it’s almost reduced the identity of christianity to that one concept and position. i don’t know if that’s the kind of shift that this author would include in whatever this process that happens where you have a new way and you’re challenged to look at something that has just been totally accepted as a tradition – it’s like a gospel-type knowledge, and then you have experiences that totally shift that perspective. uvaldina: it confronts them. it’s a confrontation. glenda: it does. and it’s like that particular issue in particular has grown beyond just little tiny individual pockets. it has become a very big conversation in society. i don’t know anybody who’s not thinking about where they are on that issue. uvaldina: because they have friends, or family members, or somebody who is gay. glenda: yeah, and people are talking about it, and that’s what i think one of the keys in this is teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation. until people talk about issues, you cannot really get at the depth of truth. you know, we have kept silent on that issue. people have kept silent out of fear, and it seems like now, people are talking about it, and it’s opening it wide open for people to reinterpret; and that’s a good thing. it’s the same thing with racial issues. i mean there’s all these situations that are set up for people to have racial conversations. there’s something in that process that has a healing effect that you can’t get any other way. you can’t get it from reading books and knowing right answers. somehow, it has to happen in relationship to people. uvaldina: in your experiences, yeah. after the pain comes a relief. like you said, some sort of peace, a “thank you,” some sort of healing. you think back at the way you thought and you think: how could i have thought that way? how could i have been that way? yolanda: it is a healing, and it is a forgiveness because ultimately you learn how to forgive. uvaldina: a redemption. yolanda: a redemption because you forgive others, but then ultimately, when you face that uncomfortable feeling of having to change, then you have to not only forgive, you have to forgive yourself applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r14 and you have to accept that change. i understand what you mean about the painful part because when you have such a shift in your thinking and beliefs, that for you is so monumental… uvaldina: that’s a good word for it. it’s monumental. yolanda: it’s monumental and so it’s almost as if – for me i almost wanted an out-of-body experience. i wanted to put that old person outside of myself, and almost deny that that ever was me. i was so ashamed of it. but again, that cyclical process because you get to where you experience that pain; you reject that so briefly. and for me, i put it outside of myself, and then i had to go back and realize – no i’m going to still embrace that person because that’s who i was at that time. i see things differently, so in that shift of thinking, i had to forgive myself and forgive my thinking from before in terms of where it came from, and take all of that together, share my experience, hear other people’s experience, and then again it starts over. then you begin to grow. uvaldina: part three was called praxis: what attempts the overcoming of previous prejudice. so “prejudice” maybe is a good word for hexis? it’s a stronger one, but he uses it. glenda: yeah, it’s at least our biases – our world views; and that’s not to say that all of our views that we grow up with are totally misguided. paula: right. glenda: but there are aspects that are biased in a way that results in detrimental actions on our part to other people. i mean, the words that i said to that young man. uvaldina: he might still hear them, if you think about it. glenda: right. uvaldina: he says in the last chapter that going through this helps us live in the world we live in. that’s the purpose of it. we go through this and it helps us be in the present; to live in our cultural milieu wherever we are. paula: chapter 5 talks about what dr. moss said about turning over your thoughts. he begins talking about the idea of play, and says: all of this points to the direction not of ploy – for this seeks to use the known in a manner which sabotages the others’ self-understanding rather than aiding its maturing – but of play – which seeks rather the opening up of the self to the other in the risk of movement away from what has been as self. common to the ethical notions of the ‘neighbor’ and virtue, practical wisdom as a sudden abode of being in the language of learning appears but cannot root itself. even learning from one’s experiences means also and inevitably to apply them elsewhere in the form of understanding a new experience. in the encounter with the newness of what has the potential to become “hermeneutic” in the sense of both its demand that we interpret it and in doing so, its demand to overturn our prior prejudices, we are in a similar position as the child who learns in innocence, and hence the notion of playing has this added overtone of the absence of knowledge which is always to come: “in the greek expression paideia, there is an echo of the lightheartedness and innocence of children’s play. its authentic ‘object’, if we can apply this word at all, is the beautiful. but that just refers to everything that commends itself without being of use for applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r15 anything, so that nobody asks what is its purpose” (gadamer 1998:9). it is not that education has no purpose. its telos seeks itself, that is, just like play, love, or nature, the ever-renewing properties of learning allow it to become a perennial part of the human condition and take its place alongside these other forms of beauty. so learning and therefore teaching must have this hermeneutic character, and it is through the playful creativity and endlessly seeking curiosity that human learning take their particular form, and thus also that human intelligence takes on its characteristic manner of searching, whether it be for its own origins or for a benevolent future. (p. 148-149) uvaldina: you see, you made connections to early childhood, too. glenda: yeah, you did. i was thinking that’s totally early childhood. we can continue to be like children our whole life. yolanda: we could. you know, tying that to an adult perspective, though. when i was teaching in my early childhood class, we began to touch on issues related to behavior guidance, and we laughed about some of the things we experienced as children in the area of behavior guidance. how do we look at that now as we are practicing to be professionals who guide the behavior of young children? and so we talked about the role of humor; and how sometimes when a situation or a topic is difficult to discuss or explore, a lot of times in human nature, we’ll break the ice with humor. in my wondering about that – and i’d love to explore more – is that the adult way of playing? we come across concepts and beliefs that are uncomfortable. this is why we like to sit and hear comedians. a comedian will say things that we wouldn’t dare say. paula: and about very serious things – very serious things. yolanda: yes, they are serious things! and we’ll sit there and allow ourselves to be entertained by it, and then later think about it. so, it’s just a wondering. it just seems like an adult form of play. glenda: if it reaches the point of changing our way of viewing and acting. in my critical reading class, i always have my students read this article about john dewey on reflection, and if they really understand what the author is saying about john dewey and reflection, they will come to understand that you have not done reflection if it does not result in changed action. if there is no action following it, reflection has not taken place. in education, we’ve reduced most academic reflective activities to just saying what you’re thinking. it’s not true reflection. it’s just an academic analysis. when i was teaching in indiana, our students did part of their portfolio in one semester, and then the next semester they did the second part, similar to what we do here, except there, you didn’t totally start over and do a new portfolio; it was progressive. so, when i scored the portfolio in part two, what they put in during that section was much different from what was in the first section. most of their artifacts in the first section came from their ed. psych class. the professor in that class was pretty much a behaviorist – he lectured, you took notes, you memorized a lot of information, you had multiple choice tests, and the artifacts were just very perfunctory – i don’t really know what word to describe them. the reflections seemed more descriptive than deep thinking. and so for the first assignment in my class the next semester, they had to read this article, and then they had to look at all of their reflections that they had put in their portfolio and tell which ones, if any, met john dewey’s definition of reflection. and they would all come to class with such high anxiety – does that mean that they had to take all of these out of their portfolio because none of them had resulted in any action – they were just descriptive. i said, no, you can leave them. that’s baseline where you are on reflection. but what you do this semester should look very different with your new insight on what it means to be reflective. and it was phenomenal; you could see such a drastic difference in the portfolio, applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r16 and when people would score (a lot of outsiders would score the portfolio at the end of student teaching), and people would come and ask me, how did you get your students to reflect on the level that they were reading? and i said, well, i just created an opportunity for them to do that. and i really believe that’s true. it’s creating – i mean every class they came to there was critical dialogue with other people. they would read lots of texts in common, but when they came to class, they were not going to get the last word from me. sometimes, i didn’t speak at all. so they were really challenged when they would come and they had read this article, and they thought they knew exactly what it said. and then they’d listen to other people that read it who heard something totally different because they had different experiences and they gradually started realizing; when i go out there and teach in a high school, and i have over 100 students, i cannot assume that they’re going to all come thinking like the teacher. it’s not going to happen. uvaldina: none of them will. glenda: none of them will – yeah. so they started really rethinking what was going to be their role as a teacher. yolanda: understanding that you’re facilitating. i gave an assignment to my graduate students among the writing that we had to do – the discussions and reflections; and i had a journal reflection. and i found in their writing that there was such an avoidance of that particular project. they treated it as a report, so i had to redefine it: this is a journal reflection. and in that journal reflection i had prompts, but they were open-ended. and so i would get questions. what do you want us to write about? i would answer, i don’t want to restrict it that way. uvaldina: that’s a problem for students. yolanda: i don’t want to restrict it. then you had those that would say, what exactly should i say? what exactly do you want? uvaldina: or how long should it be? yolanda: so i would say, you know, i don’t want to put those restrictions on it. i’d like to leave it the way it is because if i give you a prompt, but your experience is different, then i’m putting you in a position to write something that really didn’t happen. so i would like it to be more open-ended. and then, there was a component in it that asked, what decisions did you make because of it? and i found that there were a few that were able to do it, but there were some that would complete other parts of the rubric, but when they got to that point, they either wanted to quote someone else, or they went back into report mode. uvaldina: nobody has given them the permission to do that. glenda: right. they don’t want to take responsibility for becoming and being real. any time i would give my students a journal reading assignment, they had to respond in five ways: they had to give a brief summary of the salient points. they could not regurgitate the article to me, so just in a few sentences tell what was the critical point of this article. then they had to put a few key quotes that struck them, and they had to write a reflection on why; so it was analytical. then they had to tell a reflexive personal narrative story of experience that connected to something in the article. and then they had to do the imaginary - imagine themselves teaching in the future, and what might they do as a result of having read this. and then they would do a creative response, and anything went on that. i’d get poems and pictures, and diagrams – all kinds of things. but students had a very hard time figuring out the difference between summary, reflection, and reflexive. for a few of them, it all looked the same. and i’d send it back and i’d applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r17 say, i don’t see the story. where are the characters in your reflexive story? who was involved in this? what was the critical incident? what did you learn from the incident? and they would have the hardest time because you’re never allowed to write in the first person in middle school and high school – and usually not in college. and so it was very different. but if they are going to ever take ownership of their identity as becoming teacher, at some point they have to know themselves in the “i am” as a teacher. uvaldina: you teach who you are. glenda: right. and so it seems to me that in some way it’s connected to hermeneutic pedagogy in that we create an environment where students do have to become conscious of who they are and what they believe and can make statements to claim their identity and recognize their biases and analyze those in terms of their job as teacher. is this is going to be in the best interest of my students if i come in and teach this one way because of my biases? uvaldina: i’ve got to share this part from chapter 6 because this addresses the question that students often ask us – why do i need to know this? it says, there is at least at first a paradox held within the ambit of curiosity as a human trait. the ‘desire’ for knowledge, and thus to have a new experience is not always identical with its ‘necessity’. this tension gives rise to the notorious and sometimes irresponsible refrain ‘need to know’, referring to the basis upon which the ongoing test of the validity of knowledge should rest. we hear this as a plaintiff amongst the children of each new generation; ‘why do i need to know this?’ and to this querulous query there’s an ambiguous response. we cannot be sure what our children will need to know because we do not know ourselves our own future, let alone theirs. phronesis can tell us what we have come to know and why, and that we have now such knowledge because we have found it to be necessary, or, at the very least, have understood it to be relevant to a problem or a misunderstanding that had previously gone unrecognized. but none of this can directly answer the question of the ‘need’ to know. we can only say to the child, and thus to ourselves, that we have found through experience that it is often the case that new knowledge ‘comes in handy’ in some way, and that the very uncertainty of the manner in which it may or may not be convenient or more than convenient to know something lends credit to the ability and desire to know about the world in general. (p. 164-5) so i guess there’s a promotion of phronesis as a way to live in the world, to have that skill because we don’t know what the future holds. we don’t know what we’re going to need to know or what the children are going to need to know. when you talked about rocks, i envisioned the layers – the sedimentary layers, and the different layers of rock. to me that represented wisdom, like the quote from the movie stand and deliver: “i’ve traveled the path you’ve yet to travel.” i think that’s what the principal told the kids. so i have something to contribute. so those layers of rock are wisdom. glenda: i remember my first semester in higher education, and i was using a dialogical set up in my classroom. i had students who were very frustrated because they wanted to know what i thought, and they started confronting me on it one night, and i said, “but everybody in here has knowledge of experience and can shed light on our reading.” and they said, “yeah, but you have a doctorate.” and i said, “three weeks ago i didn’t.” all: extended laughter uvaldina: that piece of paper gives a perception of authority about knowledge. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r18 glenda: and i’ve had that happen more than once, that a student feels like i’m cheating them because i’m not somehow pouring out information to them, you know. they paid for my input, so to speak. and i think; no, you paid to come and learn and learn how to learn. paula: and i think that’s the part that students don’t get. i think because of the standardized testing, they’re so programmed to get the right answer. in my language arts/social studies class, for their first essay, they had to pick a social justice topic. as we were talking, we started talking about the news and what was going on. we started talking about the two missionaries who had received the ebola vaccine, so i started asking questions about it. i asked, “well, what do you think about that? people have contracted ebola for a long time, and thousands of people have died; but then these two people, they bring them here, and all of a sudden they have a vaccine, and these people are well.” and they were like – “hmmm – well, so how did they figure out how to get the vaccine so fast?” and i said; how did they? and they were getting out their phones trying to figure it out. and i asked again, “well, what do you think?” and then somebody said, “well, duh, they already had the vaccine!” and this one student sitting in the back, all the blood rushed from her face; she was pale. i could see it all over her. and i asked, “are you afraid? you look like you’re about to faint.” she said, “this is really scaring me.” this poor girl looked like she was about to faint. it hit her that something wasn’t right. and then somebody said, “well, if they already had it, how did they get it?” and i said, “how do you think they got it? how do they make vaccines? we’ve studied vaccines. we’ve got vaccines for polio, mmr, and all that. where do vaccines come from?” and one of the students said, “well, you know you take whatever the disease is – that’s how you make the vaccine.” and then light bulbs just started going off! so, they were like: “if they already had the vaccine, they had to have had the virus!” i said, “okay, so where do you think the ebola virus came from?” and someone was like: “can you just tell us?” i don’t know where it came from, can you just tell us? and then they just went on and on, and someone was just like: “well, then if they had the cure to ebola, is there a cure for hiv somewhere?” uvaldina: or cancer. paula: or cancer. glenda: and where are they doing the testing for drugs? paula: and on whom? glenda: yes, on whom? and who is advantaged by that testing that is done? paula: and man, it just started popping around the room. “and what about this?” and somebody said, “hey, do ya’ll know the first malaysian plane that disappeared was full of the top researchers for hiv? and they were going to a conference.” uvaldina: they started questioning. paula: yes, they started questioning. and i said: “that’s why critical thinking and critical literacy is important. you should not let someone else tell you what to think.” and they were just like: wow! and then at the end of the class, one girl was like: “so, can you really tell me where?” i don’t know – i don’t know. so i don’t think students intentionally are that way, but i think they’ve been programmed that way, just because of the way this generation has had standardized testing – there’s one right answer. and now for us as professors, trying to get them to think; it’s like we’re working with kindergartners. applying intersubjectivity for professional development uvaldina janecek, glenda moss, yolanda graham, paula mason dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.171 | vol. 4 (2016) r19 glenda: it’s almost impossible. paula: you just have to take baby steps, just like you would with a kindergartner – just introducing them to learning – how to learn; how to learn on their own without someone force-feeding it to them. uvaldina: i had mentioned a writing assignment in my intro, my 3470 class, and i always tell my students that i enjoy reading their essays so much. i always say that, even to the little kids – i just love reading your journals because i want to encourage them to write. and i do, i really enjoy it because it gives me insight. i said to my class: i really enjoyed reading your papers. they were so good. it gave me so much insight. and this one girl said: “we weren’t taught to write! we were just taught to pass the test. we need to know how to write.” i said: “you’re here now; we can do that.” because she knew; even though i said that, and i meant it: she knew that she needed help. paula: a lot of them say that, coming from high school. they say that we just get a prompt and write, and the teacher gives a grade, and she gives it back. then we get another one the next week. yolanda: i’ve experienced that, too. paula: they didn’t know anything about the writing process; the traits, any of that. they said, we just write – get a prompt, write, then she gives it back; then do it again. glenda: i published an essay years ago in the national writing project quarterly (or whatever it was called), and the title of my essay was, the five-paragraph theme underprepares children for college because it was very formulaic for the test. we agree with loewen’s assessment of the current nature of classroom practice as transmission pedagogy that lacks critical thinking, reflexivity, or the advancement of wisdom. we would recommend hermeneutic pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation as a book study for a corpus of educators in any ec-16 setting. while we have not presented the practical strategies presented in the book, we modeled in this book review a dialogical process for interpreting the text, and our life and professional experiences. we each have the opportunity to apply the wisdom we gleamed from this learning experience in our classrooms and life. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word elkader, dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis, layout #3.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a1     dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis: dialogue and the problems of multicultural education in a pluralistic society nermine abd elkader university of delaware abstract the purpose of this theoretical article is to highlight the role that dialogic pedagogy can play in critical multicultural education for pre-service teachers. the article starts by discussing the problematic that critical multicultural education poses in a democratic society that claims freedom of speech and freedom of expression as a basic tenet of democracy. through investigating research findings in the field of critical multicultural education in higher education, the author argues that many of the educational approaches-including the ones that claim dialogue to be their main instructional toolcould be described as undemocratic, and thus have done more harm than good for the multicultural objectives. on the other hand, the author argues that dialogic pedagogy could be a better approach for critical multicultural education as it promises many opportunities for learning that do not violate the students’ rights of freedom of expression and freedom of association. throughout this article, the author tries to clarify the difference between dialogic pedagogy and other conceptualizations of dialogue in critical multicultural education arguing for the better suitability of dialogic pedagogy for providing a safer learning environment that encompasses differing and at times conflicting voices. nermine abd elkader has recently graduated with a ph.d. degree in the sociocultural and communal approaches in education at the university of delaware. she is currently working on a research project that involves the professional development of in-service teachers who wish to follow the dialogic approach in their classrooms. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a2 introduction: multicultural education as a democratic movement for education reform: could a movement that claims democracy as its basic tenet be anti-democratic? there is a dilemma that multicultural education for pre-service teachers has to deal with: it is that of democracy, pluralism, and the struggle among different voices in the society for and against multiculturalism. the dilemma is caused by the fact that while many educators regard the goal of multicultural education policies and practices to be social justice and equality for minorities (ladsonbillings, 1999; nieto, 2004; yosso, 2002), fulfilling the multicultural requirement in teacher education programs is a mandate for all students (yang & montgomery, 2013) even those who have no intention to work with minority students and those who might not believe in the multiculturism and pluralism of the society in the first place. as a policy that is imposed on all students, the multicultural objectives, especially those concerned with antiracist education (lee, 1995; sleeter & bernal, 2003), provoke the resistance of the majority of the students-especially those who are white and middle class (ladson-billings, 1999; solomon, portelli, daniel, & campbell, 2005). this is in addition to the fact that any success that the multicultural course might achieve in reducing prejudices and changing negative stereotypes about minorities during the time of the course is short lived and difficult to sustain in the long term (holins & guzman, 2005). this suggests that such superficial success only reflects students’ desire to give instructors the answers they are looking for without actual changes in the students’ convictions or perceptions. such findings raise red flags about the worth of a multicultural education that could not sustain its learning outcomes for long. moreover, besides the futility of multicultural education if students do not see its relevance or credibility, could multicultural education with its insistence on certain curricular endpoints that are already contested in the public discourse be anti-democratic obliterating the voices of students who do not agree with its learning objectives? could the multicultural curriculum be imposing on the students the pre-pondered and the pre-packaged answers of policy makers and teachers? finally, could a monolithic discourse in multicultural education, even if it were for a good cause such as social justice, be as oppressing to the pre-service teachers as conventional education is to minority students who do not conform to the school’s culture or to cultural codes as defined and approved by the school (delpit, 1995; fordham, 1993)? in this paper, i argue that dialogic pedagogy, as conceptualized by bakhtinian scholars, could potentially provide an answer to this dilemma. in a democratic and free multicultural class, the role of the educator is to encourage the students to explore, investigate, and examine different views and perspectives including both the authoritative word of politics, ideology, and religion, and the internally persuasive discourse arising from other class members’ subjectivities, opinions, experiences, and struggles with the topics. i propose that dialogic pedagogy is different from approaches that have been used in many multicultural classes that claimed dialogue or rather critical dialogue to be the main instrument of instruction (amos, 2010; delpit, 1988; martin, 2010; solomon et al., 2005). the alleged collapse of dialogue and the proclaimed failure or little success of the multicultural praxis in these classes could be due to a conceptualization of dialogue that radically differs from bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy. in what follows, i will examine historical and contemporary dialogic approaches in critical multicultural education highlighting the challenges that they posited for a free and democratic dialogue. dialogue in critical pedagogy much of the discourse on multicultural education has conceptualized it as an antiracist education (ladson-billings & tate, 1995; lee, 1995; nieto, 2004). by antiracist education, multicultural educators dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a3 emphasized the importance of advancing a social justice agenda in teacher education programs and invited educators to lead their pre-service teachers in an examination of their racial identity, the privileges of their white middle class status, and the subordination, socioeconomic disadvantage, and inequitable access to opportunities that such privilege caused to other groups (lee, 1995; sleeter, 1995). antiracist education not only challenges conservative views that call for assimilation to eurocentric norms, language, and culture (bennett, 1992; hirsch, 1987), but also liberal views that claim that all people groups in the society have access to equal opportunities in education and that hard work and meritocracy are the only basis for success in the american society (delgado & stefancic, 2011). in an attempt to target prejudices against minorities, different paradigms of multicultural education with antiracist orientation sought to discuss negative stereotypes about minorities that have been circulated in the public discourse by the aid of the media, the law, and the political arena (solorzano, 1997; stovall, 2004; taylor, gillborn, & ladson-billings, 2009). such paradigms were also meant to show pre-service teachers that stereotypes affected how teachers perceived their minority students in a way that impacted these students’ school success and achievement. despite the plethora of research studies that promote antiracist multicultural education in teacher education programs and that proclaim the value of the experiential knowledge of teachers and students of color in introducing white pre-service teachers to an alternative epistemology and alternative curriculum that their formal mainstream education never addressed (kohli, 2008; yosso, 2002), antiracist multicultural education has been faced with many challenges and many setbacks in teacher education to the extent that martin (2010) proclaims that faculty who teach such courses often feel disappointed, drained, and in need of self-replenishing after the courses are over. one of the biggest challenges of the anti-racist paradigm in multicultural education is the students’ resistance to it. such challenges were reported for anti-racist multicultural education, anti-sexist (depalma, 2007), and anti-homophobic multicultural education (whitlock, 2010); however, with the last two, students’ resistance was presented as being more vocal and more explicit than their resistance to racial conversations. for example, milner (2008) and ladson-billings and tate (2006) maintained that when racial issues were raised, white students often resolved to silence and disengagement. ladsonbillings et al. (2006) raised the concern that such silence could be deafening to the extent that it could in turn silence students and teachers of color on racial issues. however, by listening to some students talk about the racial discourse outside the classroom, ladson-billings et al. (2006) discovered that such silence hid behind it strong feelings of anger, resentment, and insecurity. these strong emotions were not just specific to white students. students of color, too – particularly black students – expressed the same feelings, though more explicitly, for being put in a position of having to teach whites about things they should have already known. likewise, milner (2008) explored the issue of white students’ silence on the discourse of racism and maintained that it often felt intimidating to the instructors especially those of color. ladson-billings et al. (2006) believed that educators should encourage their students to be more vocal and to voice their feelings and opinions and not to just assume that their silence emerged from a position of consent or ignorance of the topic. on the other hand, milner (2008) took a different stance calling for a political action and solidarity among likeminded educators to effect change in the multicultural curriculum of the entire academy. milner’s recommendations besides ladson-billings et al.’s (2006) findings bring up the question of which direction multicultural education policies should take in a democratic society, and if policy could be so radicalized that it could hinder democracy and pull in the other direction of traditionalist conservatives with both parties envisioning a reality in which only their version of a good citizen and a good society should exist. another question that presents itself is if students’ resistance to the critical multicultural discourse arises from a place of ignorance, strong emotions of guilt, and resentment and anger toward accusations dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a4 of racism and privilege (milner, 2008; solomon et al., 2005) or whether it arises from a place of personal convictions deeply rooted in political or even religious ideology? if the latter is the case, at least in some of these cases, could a multicultural curriculum that insists on producing the results of prejudice reduction, identity examination and re-construction, and social action be a totalitarian project calling for conformity rather than diversity and democracy? kukathas (2003) maintains that the problem of diversity in a free and liberal society emerges when the state is allowed any role in determining what a good life for its citizens should look like or should not look like. within the context of diversity, assuming that the state should have any authority in imposing equality among all groups is inherently anti-democratic. kukathas (2003) sets the social justice agenda against diversity and claims that striving for equality creates an egalitarian system that suppresses and intentionally oppresses diversity. according to kukathas (2003), diversity necessarily entails inequality; and the assumption that multiculturalism entails fighting for equality is unrealistic and erroneous. for example, equality might not be a value cherished by certain communities within a society that seeks it. to mention a few, kukathas illustrates that the amish in the us, the indians in brazil, and the aboriginal people of malaysia are more likely to be indifferent to political equality and sharing power; in fact, many of them have no desire to embrace it and are considered as victims of those who try to bring them forcibly into it. similarly, kukathas (2003) opposes a liberal theory that mandates the state to uphold justice because in such case, justice would be defined according to liberal values and thus eliminates any other definitions or conceptions of justice that do not agree with the liberal views which in turn affects diversity and suppresses it. case in point: while kukathas (2003) maintains that diversity should not and could not be sacrificed in any liberal and free society, he does not think that it is compatible with equality or with a single definition of what constitutes social justice. he would, thus, rather sacrifice these two for the sake of diversity. a theory in multiculturalism in this case would therefore look at diversity as a human condition that is reliant on individual and group characteristics and risk aversion. the two latter factors will create differences among individuals, groups, and societies making some wealthy, some bigger in size, and some die out completely. moreover, the role of the state in such case is not to ensure equality but to ensure tolerance and the freedom to associate with any group membership that an individual should desire. the concept of group association will present one plausible solution to the problem of minorities being ostracized by their own group members when they demonstrate cultural traits and cultural preferences that are more in congruence with the mainstream culture than with the culture of their own communities (fordham, 1993; fordham & ogbu, 1986; ogbu, 2008). in teacher education programs, however, multicultural education has often taken that trend that kukathas fears would be detrimental to diversity. many of the research studies that investigate undergraduate or even graduate students’ attitudes (amos, 2010) toward multicultural courses have not taken into consideration these students’ voices, personal growth, past experiences, subjectivities, or even the effect of the authoritative word of politics, religion, and past education on how they reflect on and process the controversial topics that the multicultural course exposes. for example, solomon et al. (2005), recommend that teacher educators in multicultural education should regard their role in effectuating an education for democracy as “equitable, socially just, and prepare society’s citizens to become active participants in the human community…as such, teachers’ conceptions of democracy as it relates to notions of citizenship (which are intricately linked to discourses of race, racialization and belongingness), need to be examined” (p. 148). the political undertone of the last statement cannot be overlooked and does not take into account the value of democracy as respecting differences and human agencies. similar language can be found in other paradigms of critical multicultural education that call for dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a5 identity deconstruction/reconstruction, interrogating whiteness, decentering whiteness (bergerson, 2003; holins & guzman, 2005). they all seem to impose a political and partisan agenda in multicultural courses that contradicts the tenets of democracy that multicultural education seems to be calling for especially when these courses are offered as a core requirement for a degree program. politicizing the multicultural curriculum could be a reason for the proclaimed ineffectiveness of the movement (mattai, 1992). however, considering any educational project as neutral and without political implication is both unrealistic and harmful. cuenca (2010) argues that apoliticizing education especially in the field of social subjects with their emphasis on civic and citizenship participation might lead to the apoliticization of democracy in schools reducing citizenship to mere “good” civic deeds and producing a form of citizenship unable to develop voice or to question the government on big issues such as federal spending and health care. in fact, any monolithic discourse-on either ends of the spectrummight lead to students’ resistance and might harm democratic education rather than reform it; thus emerges the importance of dialogic pedagogy in providing an answer for the problem of diversity and democracy. yet, bakhtinian dialogue should not be confused with freire’s dialogic philosophy, which could easily happen since both approaches emphasize the students’ role in dialogue as subjects who define their own goals and drive their own learning project. however, the author contends that while freire’s dialogic approach could proclaim democracy and emancipation, a clearer examination of this paradigm reveals it to be problematic and potentially oppressing to both teachers and students in a diverse setting. freirean vs. bakhtinian dialogue: for or against democratic education? a problem with any dialogic project that has an end goal is how power relations could limit and hinder its authenticity and the ability or even safety of the students and educators who engage in it. much of the discourse on multicultural education is grounded in the work of critical pedagogues such as freire and shor (nieto, 2004). both scholars claim dialogue as the basis for democratic and emancipatory education and argue against a banking education that treats students as vessels of the system’s attempts to use them according to the whims and needs of the dominant power (freire, 1993; freire & macedo, 1987; shor & freire, 1987). in the freirean dialogue, it is proclaimed that students should presume the role of subjects (freire & macedo, 1987) who partner with the educator to set the goals, directions, and even assessment criteria and procedures of the curriculum (shor, 1992). however, in reading freire, one could not overlook the wide gap between theory and practice. freire’s (1993) cultural circle was meant to raise the brazilian peasants’ critical awareness of their oppressed situation and the positions of dominance and privilege that the nobles had over them. these cultural conversations had the goal to create literacy among the peasants that would lead to revolution for liberation. in other words, freire’s literacy paradigm was meant to alert the peasants that their position under the oppressor was not pre-determined and that it was changeable relying on how they view themselves as historical humans and not as existential animals with no heritage (freire, 1993). however and despite the apparently empowering freirean literacy theory, a concern regarding it is that it does not have an answer for the issue of diversity especially that of students’ voices within such paradigm. freire’s failure in guinea bissau highlights the relevance of this issue: what happens when students and teachers do not agree with each other on the end goals of their dialogue? facundo (1984) ascertains that tens of ethnic groups existed in guinea bissau post the revolution, many of whom had a policy of complete segregation and thus did not have a direct contact with the colonizer and in turn with oppression as presumed by freire. besides, with freire’s persistence on reaching out to all people’s group in guinea bissau, he might have overlooked the economic reality of some of these groups which relied heavily on agriculture and thus might have not seen any value in literacy (facundo, 1984). freire proclaimed (freire & macedo, 1987) that his literacy program had failed in guinea bissau because of the government’s dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a6 insistence on using the portuguese language which was the language of the colonizer and thus might have sacrificed the interests of the larger student population in the society who spoke their ethnic languages and could not learn portuguese. however, such evaluation did not include the voices of the stakeholders in that project. we only hear a subtle voice for the country’s revolutionary leader and thinker, amical cabral, expressing his dilemma over the many ethnic languages that the country had, and emphasizing his belief that the only answer he could deem for the problem was to use portuguese as a unifying language for the nation. however, freire acknowledged cabral’s voice only after the program had already failed. freire himself (freire & macedo, 1987) confessed that at the time of his involvement in guinea bissau, he did not know cabral’s reasons for his insistence on portuguese as a language of instruction. besides, facundo (1984) worries that freire blamed the failure of the volunteer workers on their lack of training and motivation to help the oppressed without considering other minor reasons that had nothing to do with ideologies; for example simple logistics such as hard and unsafe transportation and lack of access to printing and copying material could have had negative effects on workers’ motivation and productivity and thus on the attrition rate. for all intents and purposes, although freire wanted to spend months in guinea bissau conducting interviews about amical cabral (freire & macedo, 1987), we hear no such similar desire on his part regarding the students of guinea bissau or their educators. all the above could suggest that some reasons for the gap between theory and practice in freire’s approach is his totalitarian approach to education that proclaims the subjectivity of the other in theory but ignores it in practice. in fact, when asked about how he could deal with the problem of diversity in the educational context, freire could not give a clear cut answer. in guinea bissau, he kept emphasizing the shortcoming of the country’s leadership in insisting on using portuguese. in the united states, freire refused to give what he proclaimed to be a prescription for educators, which suggests that he could have evaded a problem that he had no answer for. thus, while freire (freire & macedo, 1987) promoted his literacy model as universal, in practice, it did not work as was proposed when the context changed and became more diverse. from a dialogic pedagogy standpoint, one could anticipate that within the freirean paradigm, the student-teacher relationship broke down when the literacy project finalized the student population too early and treated them as predictable finalized beings who needed to attain a curricular end point predefined for them. since much of the work of critical multicultural educators in the united states have been impacted by freire (facundo, 1984; nieto, 2004), we can hypothesize that the monologism of the freirean paradigm has something to do with the challenges and acknowledged failures they met in their program (holins & guzman, 2005). dialogic pedagogy in multicultural education: theoretical framework many of the conceptualizations and pedagogical approaches of critical multicultural education could be viewed as monologic according to a bakhtinian conceptualization of dialogue (bakhtin, 1991). dialogic pedagogy scholars (sidorkin, 1999; sullivan, 2011) argue that a true human dialogue engages the other in a relationship where answers remain between the dialogic partners rather than outside them and where the author while interpreting the word of the other reflects on how he/she has been a part of this interpretation. sidorkin (1999) expresses this relationship as the self being at the boundaries of a social and dialogic relationship with another. dialogic pedagogy scholars have thus realized a deficit in multicultural education pedagogy that did not take into account the dialogic relationship that needed to exist between teachers and students for any learning to be humane, realistic, and transformative (madison, 2011; matusov & smith, 2007) ; hence, from a dialogic pedagogy perspective, there emerges a need for an approach in critical multicultural education that engages both teachers and students, as well as their future stakeholders, in a dialogue that respects their final stance on any issue even if or especially when this means disagreement among those involved. i contend that critical pedagogy that dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a7 seeks to prepare critical citizens for a democratic society should also accept learners who end up disagreeing and even acting against its own project. in doing so, educators could have the right to believe education to be a political project and to express their subjectivity within that project. however, they do not ignore that from an ethical and a democratic standpoint, no teacher should impose on the students any side or view; in fact, according to sidorkin (1999), a teacher should discourage a student from taking any side too early in life and they should leave it up to them to be the final judge of the truth. in sidorkin’s words, “learning in itself is an exposure to complexity. the school may teach the evolutionism and creationism; the variety of different religions and atheism; the ‘rainbow curriculum’ and ‘family values’. the double message is, in fact, the only truly educational message” (sidorkin, 1999, p. 125). according to this perspective, therefore, monologism could be a significant threat to any successfully free and democratic educational project whether it be in multicultural education or otherwise. monologism is two folded. it is the contention that there is one ultimate truth which can be attained through consensus in a free dialogue; and it is the conviction that truth pre-exists, is pre-defined, and has been previously achieved (sidorkin, 1999). therefore, freirean and critical pedagogy dialogues, despite their alleged promotion of students’ engagement in a free and open discussion, could represent an educational project that is anti-dialogic and that has major ontological harms (matusov, 2009). alternatively, matusov (2011) maintains that teachers need to bring to the discussion their personal convictions, passions, and ideologies as long as the discussion is a two-way or taking the nature of a diversity class into considerationa multiple way conversation where all voices are heard and legitimized as valid to exist outside the power or hierarchical relationships of the institution that might suppress differences and hinder the authenticity of the dialogue. based on the above, students’ resistance in the multicultural courses could be interpreted as a breakdown in the communication between students and teachers and students and one another. sidorkin (1999) maintains that although resistance in a classroom context could be interpreted as behavioral dysfunction, most of the time, resistance is some sort of students’ agency responding to those who through monologism deny students’ voices the right to exist. for example, skidmore (2000) found a breakdown in the dialogue between the teacher and one of her elementary school students in a reading class when the teacher tried to impose on that student an answer, which she [the teacher] perceived as the right answer. interestingly, when the breakdown took place, it was not just between the teacher and that specific student but it was between that teacher and the whole class. although the teacher herself blamed the class for behavioral problems that caused the breakdown, skidmore (2000) proclaimed that it was the teacher’s insistence on a monologic answer provided by the textbook as the only right answer that caused the breakdown. similar results were found in a study of a science class in which students’ power in dialogue was shown to combat the teacher’s authority and even the authoritative knowledge presented by the textbook (candela, 1999). in that lab experiment, the teacher asked the students to confirm certain results for an experiment she prepared for them to conduct. when a student challenged the results expected by the teacher, and the teacher insisted on her pre-set goals without listening to the student, the whole class ended up in a state of silence in which the students stopped talking to one another and to the teacher, and stopped responding to the teacher’s direct and indirect questions. matusov (2007) fears what he deems as teacher’s objectification of the students in which students become the objects of the teacher’s fantasies, aspirations, and expected or imagined outcomes. this issue is relevant when we consider that the goal of a critical multicultural project is mostly for social justice, transformation, and equity pedagogy (banks, 1994). when teachers take the approach of excessively objectifying their students without investigating their students’ subjectivity, perception of the world, and ways of knowing, they resemble a computer designer who complains about a problem with a dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a8 machine and not with actual human beings (matusov, 2007). such dehumanizing of students contradicts what freire’s emancipatory literacy project is proclaimed to set out to achieve i.e. the humanization of both the oppressed and their oppressors (freire, 1993). on a similar note, sidorkin (1999) maintains that while many studies might claim that the dialogue between teachers and students fails for cultural reasons, often the reason is more relational than cultural. matusov (2003) alerts us to the dualistic psychology of the discourse on culture; when people’s differences (and cultures) are ignored in dialogue, misunderstandings happen and dialogue breaks down, but also when dialogue breaks down because of misunderstandings, people are characterized as cultural. therefore, sidorkin (1999) maintains that reducing dialogue to the level of mere communication among people is counterproductive to its role in effectuating learning. sidorkin (1999) maintains that learning takes place when a tension happens between the authoritative word that people bring into the dialogue (this usually comes in a whole unit packaged by the authority of religion, ideology, political power, and cultural values) and the internally persuasive discourse which is the word re-told in one’s own word and thus appropriated and modified to reflect one’s own subjectivity in interacting with both the authoritative word and the word of another. thus, relationships among teachers and students and students and one another could not just be explained in simplistic terms as many of the studies of multicultural education have shown them to be i.e. in terms of racial tension and white privilege, but they also need to be investigated in terms of students’ agency, subjectivities, and past relationships with members of their own racial and ethnic groups, members of other groups, and the authority of the institutions and the educators. this kind of investigation reveals the complexity of students’ learning through participation in dialogue rather than homogenizing all white students as privileged due to their dominant status and as resistant to change the status quo. students’ agency and subjectivity thus emerge as an important opportunity that dialogic pedagogy can present for free, democratic, and authentic learning. i will explore this issue more in what follows highlighting why human agency is relevant to a democratic discourse on multicultural education. the relationship between human agency, dialogic pedagogy, and a democratic multicultural education ladson-billings (1999) proclaims that unless pre-service teachers see some significance for the multicultural project in their future careers, it is unlikely that multicultural education could affect any change in pre-service teachers’ learning and instructional practices. according to ladson-billings (1999), one of the most significant motivators for pre-service teachers to learn about multiculturalism is their desire to succeed with their future students and to avoid burnout and public embarrassment caused by problems of classroom management. thus, many pre-service teachers enter the multicultural course with a desire, at least a proclaimed one, to know and understand their diverse students (holins & guzman, 2005). teacher educators should, therefore, structure their multicultural courses to take advantage of this initial interest. matusov (2011) proclaims that this could be done by allowing students’ agency to author their own learning. according to matusov (2001), agency “involves processes of developing and prioritizing goals, problems and choices, problem solving, and making and realizing solutions (including moral ones). by this definition, the notion of agency has inherently a sociocultural nature, since the final cause of an individual's actions always has a distributed character in time, space, meaning, and among direct and indirect participants of the activity” (p. 369). for students to be able to collaborate together toward a successful learning experience, they need to form among one another a community of learners. the community of learners recognizes the need of its members for one another not to reach common goals, but rather, because they acknowledge one another’s dialogic agency in developing one’s views and dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a9 values even when in conflict. this is not to say that members of the community of learners will always disagree about their common goals; instead, this suggests that the teacher in this role will recognize his or her responsibility to provide guidance and to accept and even appreciate differences and disagreements. moreover, when the challenge arises with students who have no desire to learn and no interest in the multicultural course, an authentic dialogic project would recognize the students’ agency even if it were against participation (brown & renshaw, 2006), and so does democratic education according to kukathas’ (2003) liberal theory. besides, an authentic dialogue could not be limited to the time and space of the classroom. research studies (fecho, collier, friese, & wilson, 2010; matusov, hayes, & pluta, 2005) have shown that dialogic pedagogy, as a human activity, often times requires a dialogic space and time that goes beyond the chronotope (the intersection between time, space, and the approved values and traditions) of the classroom. ellsworth (1989) realized that need when she feared that dialogic pedagogy across differences might turn into mere rationalization but not ontological or ideological change (in the context of her study) or even worse into another form of repression where the participants become radicalized into an “us-ness” against “them-ness”. she also feared that voices in the class were similar to voices in the society and thus might have not carried equal legitimacy, sense of safety, and power in dialogue. in her study, affinity groups formed among students who did not feel empowered enough to “speak back” or tell of their own experiences with racism and oppressions. these affinity groups met outside the class time and shared potlucks, field trips, and cultural discussions of their experiences. then these groups decided to state their voice to the class not as individuals but as members of a social group and they decided that this would not be in a dialogue form but in a way of sharing while silencing the other as they had traditionally been silenced. bakhtinian scholars might disagree with the concept of silencing under any circumstances besides they might interpret affinity groups as excessive monologism which i will discuss later. nevertheless, ellsworth’s (1989) study confirms the realization that any authentic dialogue would need to continue beyond the time and space of the classroom and to engage members of a wider community than that of the class. elsewhere, matusov et al. (2005) and fecho et al. (2010) provided this space through class websites where students could “chat” about the topics of the curriculum. matusov et al. (2005) maintained through discourse analysis that students’ contributions were only 3% social in nature, and that most of the students’ postings were an extension of the topics discussed in class. however, the fact that students also used the class web for social communication indicated how the class dialogue penetrated their everyday activities as opposed to the traditional class discussion where the class space and time are separated from the wider activities of students’ lives. similarly, fecho et al. (2010), sharing students’ contribution during a class on critical literacy, suggested transformation in the students’ subjectivity through dialogic pedagogy that extended beyond the classroom setting. in this case, students’ own reflections on their students’ writings and on one another’s writing led to major life changing decisions for some. for example, one of the research subjects through dialogic pedagogy had her attention directed to the mutual lessons that could be learned by teachers and students as they engaged in the dialogic journey. while she criticized one of her middle eastern students for allowing her family to dictate her life, she discovered that within her own religious community, her lived experience might have not differed much from her student’s. that teacher thus had to embark on her own selfdiscovery and selfidentification journey that ended with her denouncing her religious organization and accepting a position in life that could be transient or permanent by putting her religious belief under investigation and thus separating herself from her own community. thus, providing a venue beyond the classroom boundaries ensured the continuity of dialogue through students’ authorial learning – an aspect of students’ agency (matusov, 2011). matusov (2011) defines students’ authorial learning as the opportunity that students have to “realize themselves, define dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a10 their own voices; address and respond to others; engage and transform the culture; define new goals; develop new desires and interests; take responsibility for their actions, opinions, views, and values; reply and address voices of relevant and important others (living in past and now)” (p. 36). students’ authorial learning can be both responsive authorship and self-generated authorship and the teachers should be able to promote and support both types of authorship for learning and teaching to be successful. both matusov at al. (2007) and depalma et al. (2006), therefore, believe with antiracist educators that minority students should be authors of the multicultural curriculum because they could teach pre-service teachers valuable knowledge about their lives and about their education; however, they might differ in their conceptualization of the role of opposing students in such paradigm. i would expect dialogic pedagogy authors to desire mainstream students as well to provide material for the curriculum even when this material is in direct opposition to the objectives of the multicultural course. the significance of educators’ legitimizing the voices of all students is that as an authentic human activity (matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999), dialogue cannot be turned on and off as the situation requires it. dialogue could be suppressed and students’ voices could be muffled by the dominance and sometimes tyranny of the authority but this does not mean that it is not taking place. one example of that is provided by sidorkin’s description of the three discourses that take place at a school setting. while the first two discourses reflect formal ways of communication that could start with lecture or presentation followed by a discussion that is usually instructional and highly structured by the teacher, the third discourse in which the class breaks up into clutter and chatter and students engage in unstructured and unguided conversations could be the time when true learning happens; it is this time that students informally author their own learning. this third discourse could be found whenever educators allow students to interact about the topics of the curriculum in a safe environment but it also takes place even when educators do not allow it. bakhtin analyzed the renaissance carnival with implications for education – though not directly linked. carnival was a time for birth, creation and rejuvenation (gardiner, 2002); it was also a time when language emerged into new forms away from its tight traditional structure to be rebirthed into new meanings even in its most conceivably obscene form. according to gardiner (2000), the success of this new birth was owing to it happening away from the eyes of the officialdom. in the context of conventional education, therefore, and despite the institution’s dire attempt to create structure, conformity, and standardization (caldéron, 2006; giroux, 2010), students can always find a time and place away from the eyes of “officialdom” (gardiner, 2002, p.51) where they could engage in a constant dialogue that leads to social critique and even perhaps rebellion against the conventional codes of etiquette, propriety, and the monolithic seriousness of officialdom. in the context of multicultural education, carnival could represent a significant challenge to any pre-defined multicultural objective, and could be why educators have found that resistance was not individualistic but rather more of a group resistance; besides even though researchers report that minority students felt either hurt or intimidated by their white peers’ attitude and comments (amos, 2010; solorzano, 1997), they did not feel that their white peers meant them any harm personally or intentionally (amos, 2010); which suggests that this kind of resistance among white students built in solidarity and unity (probably in private conversations outside the tight surveillance of the course instructor) was actually directed against attempts to muffle their voices or impose upon them an agenda they did not choose. matusov (2009) describes this group resistance as excessive monologism. excessive monologism could take place even when authority or, in this case, educators are not involved. members of the same community or who are likeminded could form alliances to affirm one another’s views and values and to have a strong voice. in the absence of other voices to counteract these alliances, one might wonder what learning, if any, could take place. depalma (2010) tried to deal with this issue by inviting members from the communities that the class discussed to be guest speakers. however, depalma’s dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a11 struggle to bring polyphony in her class was constant. despite the fact that a one-time opportunity to invite the lgbt group on campus offered fresh ideas and new perspectives on the topic of anti homophobic education that her authoritative word and that of the texts she chose did not reveal, depalma was aware that the fact that she was the one who chose the guest speakers and facilitated the logistics of their coming to class still reflected her authority rather than the students’. the second aspect of students’ authorial learning – namely students’ generative authorship could provide an answer to this problem. students’ generative authorship allows them to bring up issues and questions, and problematize conventional knowledge to allow for more provocations for the dialogue. however, the issue of voice and representation in dialogic multicultural education needs more investigation especially within the context of students’ generative authorship. in the context of multicultural education, a number of studies (depalma, santos rego, & del mar lorenzo moledo, 2006; matusov & smith, 2007) suggest that the most successful dialogic experiences took place in after school programs where hierarchy and authority among pre-service teachers faded away from the school context. this out of school context allowing pre-service teachers and school children to dialogue in a free setting away from the surveillance of the authority and the pressures of teaching for the test benefited the pre-service teachers in such a way that helped them learn about their future student population and reduced their prejudices against these students and their communities when they came to discover through collaboration in different projects that minority students might have certain strengths that they (the undergraduate students) and their peers did not have. for example, matusov and smith (2007) found that their pre-service teachers spoke about their latino population before meeting them as objects of their own imagination; they either romanticized them or demonized them but once they came into contact with them and had the opportunity to engage them in an authentic dialogue, they started to discover true problems that they might face with their future students apart from any imagined discourse. one of these problems was surprising to the undergraduate students because it was not talked about in the grand narrative about latino students; this was the problem of trust. undergraduate university students came to realize that the latino students in the center did not have much trust in the teachers and the school administration and thus would not go to their teachers if they needed help. they also came to realize that while peer pressure had an impact on that group of students, they usually would take their parents’ advice over their peers. depalma et al. (2006) assert that such out of school experiences could have a long term effect on pre-service teachers creating inside them nostalgia for success: one day when they graduate and get jobs in public schools, they could remember a time when they worked with students from a minority background, were successful with them, and were productive with outcomes that reflected true learning. moreover, i contend that such dialogic encounters offer a first step answer to the issue of representation away from the stress related to institutional power and students’ discussing absent communities in the artificial setting of the classroom. depalma et al. (2006) maintain that learning projects should be planned and structured by educators to allow for dialogue to occur naturally while pre-service students and school children collaborate, disagree, negotiate, and resolve their disagreements. in both of these studies, students’ voice and agency (whether these students were the pre-service teachers or the school children) were given priority over the curriculum. although educators designed these activities to engage both groups of students, the end point of learning was not pre-determined, but rather depended on students’ authorial learning. toward a theory of dialogic pedagogy in critical multicultural education dialogic pedagogy, from a bakhtinian perspective, and as outlined by bakhtinian scholars (gardiner, 2002; matusov, 2009; morson, 2004; sidorkin, 1999) offers a vehicle for different views and perspectives to be tested and contested without any party imposing their agenda, political or social, on the other. at the end of the day, making curricular and instructional decisions in a democratic society dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a12 should be in the hands of both teachers and students (shor & freire, 1987); however, as giroux (2010) maintains, whereas faculty should have the choice of promoting their political or social justice agenda while teaching, students should also have the choice to reject or accept this agenda. one of the most significant opportunities of such an approach is polyphony. dialogic pedagogy students participate in the dialogue in a way that encompasses the authoritative word of the text, the teacher, and their own ideologies while also have the opportunity to engage the word of another granted that they have enough access to that word. depalma (2010) is concerned that the instructor’s voice is hegemonic in the educational institution since textbooks and learning materials are chosen by him/her and are subject to his/her own subjectivity and curricular goals. the studies and approaches that have been previously discussed in this article suggest that critical multicultural education often represent the views and perspectives of the instructors conducting any specific course and they often reveal one side of multicultural education and ignore other sides that extend it or disagree with it. however, within dialogic pedagogy, this hegemony is counteracted by polyphony and students’ authorial learning. for example, depalma (2010) recommends using texts about similar topics that expose different viewpoints as well as inviting guest speakers to the class who are members of the communities that the class talks about. in this context, depalma’s (2010) guest speakers from the lgbt community provided a level of polyphony, in her study, exposing the broad diversity among members of that group. polyphony goes beyond the presence of multiple voices in the class. gardiner (2002) expresses bakhtin’s conceptualization of polyphony as follows: “just as no single voice can constitute polyphony, no one viewpoint can be adequate to the apprehension and understanding of the object. in order fully to conceptualize the object in its totality, that is to say, a multiplicity of perspectives or vantage-points is required” (p. 94). dialogic pedagogy, with its emphasis on polyphony and students’ agency deals with another challenge that critical multicultural educators reportedly faced in teaching these classes i.e. their concern with the power dynamic in such courses. some white instructors expressed their concerns about sharing their experiences for fear of recentering whiteness and preventing the voices of minorities already weakened by the society from receiving adequate and rightful focus (bergerson, 2003; ellsworth, 1989). however, in depalma’s study (2010), she maintained that she, being an instructor who shared the ethnic and socioeconomic background of her students, did not shy away from sharing her white experience because dialogic pedagogy allows for these experiences to interact and collide with those of the texts and the students. other educators from a minority background feared that their students had more power over them especially when they responded with an attitude of silence and resentment (chávez‐reyes, 2010; milner, 2008). the issue of polyphony and students’ authorial learning should move the burden of representation either of self or other from the instructor to multiple sources and thus minimize threat and students’ resistance. moreover, students’ authorial learning promises sustaining effects especially that students’ ontological engagement in the dialogue make it relevant to different aspects of their lives and their future practices. this directly challenges conventional methods of assessment that focuses on quantification, standardization, and measurement. in dialogic pedagogy, transformation to the objectives of the course might not happen or might happen as a byproduct of the learning that takes place within the internally persuasive discourse of the class. besides, transformation might not take place immediately but through continued dialogue in students’ subsequent field placements or even with other stakeholders and members of the wider society; however, matusov (2009) contends that the real achievement for learning is that the individual cannot claim innocence or ignorance for their practices. therefore, within the dialogic dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a13 project, the educators should regard their main role as facilitators of learning rather than as executives of the policies of the institutions, as trainers for the employer, or as leaders of their own social movement. finally, dialogic pedagogy safeguards critical pedagogy from appropriation into any specific political agenda. since dialogic pedagogy exists on the boundaries of the subjectivities of those involved in it, teachers cannot claim ownership of the educational outcomes, rather students are more authoritative in claiming that ownership and in guiding their own learning. hence, we can expect more sustainable effects for multicultural education since students’ engagement in such a project becomes ontological and develops within a process of becoming (morson, 2004). however, dialogic pedagogy is not void of challenges. these challenges together with the opportunities that such an approach present need to be investigated more closely to be able to fully theorize it. matusov (2009) poses the problem that dialogic pedagogy with its emphasis on language and speech could be potentially culturally insensitive favoring one culture that might be more vocal than another. depalma (2008) maintains that the one black student she had in one of her multicultural classes was uncomfortable to voice her opinions on race and racism in a class where she felt powerless and a numerical minority. moreover, casey (2005) warns that the ideology of dialogue in its current form of implementation in higher education through seminars is a middle class value that might stymie low class students who might come to the institution under-prepared to participate in a dialogue especially in the field of humanities. sharing about oneself and one’s communities among a majority of middle class students could also be embarrassing to members of that group. according to casey, not only students but faculty from a low class background as well might, in their struggle to advance their career by conforming to middle class norms and values, shy away in the dialogue from revealing their roots. while casey (2005) worries about the freedom and desire to share from a class perspective, ladson-billings (1999) worries about this issue from a racial perspective since the mode of communication is different among white students and black students and this could cause dissonance and misunderstanding in a way that is not conducive to learning. for example, ladson-billings (1999) maintains that when black students are angry, they become loud and vocal while white students resort to silence in such a way that can deceive the educator to think that they are in compliance with what is being taught while in reality they are hiding deep emotions within. matusov et al.’s study (2007) suggests latino students to be reticent because of their distrust of their white educators. furthermore, matusov (2009) worries about the issue of excessive dialogicity among certain marginalized ethnic groups whose identity has been obliterated by several forms of oppression historically and contemporarily that they have not learned to develop a clear and distinct voice backed by a community that affirms it and gives it legitimacy. in the context of dialogic multicultural education, the absence of the voices of minority students could be a problem in depriving the dialogue from the experiential knowledge of these students; however, could the presence of such minorities offer these experiences in light of their socialization and education within a society that could have masked their ethnic identity in favor of allowing them to pass as white and thus to succeed academically and socially (fordham, 1993; fordham & ogbu, 1986; gayles, 2005)? this issue requires more research in the context of dialogic pedagogy and multicultural education. the last challenge for dialogic pedagogy is the nature of the institution of conventional education. there seems to be skepticism among some bahktinian scholars and others (depalma, 2010; giroux, 2010; matusov, 2009) that such an approach could be possible in the setting of conventional education with its emphasis on hierarchical relationships among students and teachers, teachers and administrators, and teachers, administrators and the sociopolitical context of the wider society. despite claims in the field of education that dialogic class discussions could produce better school achievement and improve students’ performance and engagement, from a bakhtinian dialogic perspective, what takes dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a14 place in the majority of these studies is far from an authentic dialogue and is another attempt toward a banking education that places teachers and students in an erroneous role of experts and knowledge receptors. in the field of multicultural education and despite claims that multiculturalism is a reform movement that seeks equal educational opportunities, a monologic discourse has been prevalent in the policies, practices, and research regarding this area. however, in dialogic pedagogy, with its emphasis on freedom of expression and freedom of association, how could assessment take place or could it take place in any way that could satisfy institutional requirements? this is an issue for further investigation. conclusion bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy in critical multicultural education in the conventional higher institution is an educational approach that promises for learning to occur within a community of learners in which students contribute to the class discourse through their own subjectivity, histories, past educational experiences, and the authoritative word they bring to the discourse. the monologism of the standardized movement in education, the policies of the institution, and the hierarchical structure of conventional education represent major challenges for such dialogue. since dialogue is essentially relational (sidorkin, 1999), educators could expect that relationships among class members could hinder or enhance the class dialogue and in turn the quality of learning that takes place. thus, as opposed to conventional educational research that focuses on the relationship between teachers and students, more research needs to be conducted to investigate relationships among students and how it could be better developed to enhance learning. these relationships need to be investigated both within the classroom and beyond the classroom setting because in an authentic dialogic project, educators and researchers should expect the dialogue to continue and to penetrate students’ lives beyond the institution. furthermore, since dialogic pedagogy offers the opportunity for an internally persuasive discourse (matusov, 2009) in which knowledge becomes contextualized, historicized, and integrated within an interconnected network of relationships and propositions, dialogic pedagogy promises much learning to take place; 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(1997). images and words that wound: critical race theory, racial stereotyping, and teacher education. teacher education quarterly, 24(3), 5-19. stovall, d. (2004). school leader as negotiator: critical race theory, praxis, and the creation of productive space. multicultural education, 12(2), 8-12. sullivan, p. (2011). qualitative data analysis using a dialogical approach. thousand oaks, ca: sage. taylor, e., gillborn, d., & ladson-billings, g. (2009). foundations of critical race theory in education. new york: routledge. whitlock, r. u. (2010). getting queer: teacher education, gender studies, and the cross disciplinary quest for queer pedagogies. issues in teacher education, 19(2), 81-105. yang, y, & montgomery, d. (2013). gaps or bridges in multicultural teacher education: a q study of attitudes toward student diversity. teaching and teacher education, 30, 27-37. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2012.10.003 yosso, t. (2002). toward a critical race curriculum. equity and excellence in education, 35(2), 93-107. dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.71 | vol. 3 (2015) a18 acknowledgements i'd like to thank dr. eugene matusov, my dissertation advisor and academic mentor, for inspiring this work through his commitment to continued dialogue and non-hierarchical academic relationships. i'd also like to thank members of the professional inquiry group at the university of delaware especially dr. ana marjanovic-shane, dr. kathy von duyke, samanta lopez, bryan campbell, and lei chen for providing their viewpoints and for inciting dialogic provocations to think about and to reflect on the issues raised in this article. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word matusov, 110 legitimacy layout, 2015-11-30.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a174 legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract modern conventional education is full of impositions on its students. schools often impose on students where they must be, what they must do and learn, how they must behave and communicate in the places and the ways that the teacher and school define. however, the legitimacy of this imposition – how much of this imposition is necessary, useful, justified, and desirable for education itself – has not been specifically discussed and analyzed yet. the legitimacy of this imposition is especially important to do for innovative education, evaluating and reconsidering its goals and practices of education. analysis of imposition in education can help to address important questions of why oppression, alienation, if not pedagogical violence, are so prevalent in organized education and whether this is can be avoided or not. the goal of this paper is to consider different approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education, its legitimacy, and justifications and analyze their pros and cons. i consider totalizing conventional, capitalist, progressive, democratic, anarchist, and communitarian educational approaches to non-negotiable imposition and its legitimacy from an educational perspective. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he was born in the soviet union and studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm. he worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. address for correspondence: school of education, university of delaware, newark, de 19716, usa (ematusov@udel.edu). acknowledgments i am very thankful to jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane, kathy von duyke, nermine abd elkader, scott richardson, robert hampel, alexander sidorkin, and bryan campbell for providing constructive criticism, raising important questions and concerns, making fruitful suggestions, discussing issues, and providing editing on earlier versions of this paper. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a175 legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education modern organized education can be at times very exciting for some students but, for many others, it also can be felt as very oppressive, alienating, punitive, if not merely violent — psychologically, relationally, or even physically. this article is aimed on investigation of the latter relational aspect of organized education. the etymology of the majority of educational terms in diverse languages often refers to some level of (violent) imposition, whereby a teacher imposes on a student something that the student may not wish to do on his or her own. “[t]he root of the [hebrew] word for teach/learn (דמל) coincided with that for the goad, specifically the one used to prod cattle” (moore, 2009, p. 422). modern conventional education is full of impositions on its students such as what, how, and where students do, learn, behave, attend, participate, and communicate in the ways that the teacher and school define. for certain ages of students, schooling itself is compulsory in modern societies and, thus, imposed. however, the legitimacy of this imposition – how much of this imposition is necessary, useful, justified, and desirable for education itself – has not been specifically discussed and analyzed yet. this is especially important to do for innovative education, evaluating and reconsidering its goals and practices of education. i believe that analysis of imposition in education can help to address important questions of why oppression, alienation, if not pedagogical violence, are so prevalent in organized education and whether they is can be avoided or not. so far, i could not find an existing satisfactory theoretical framework for impositions in education by looking in the work on the power relations in marx, foucault, bourdieu, arendt, mouffe, and other political scholars. that is why i had to sketch my own theoretical framework that i developed based on my analysis of diverse educational practices that i discuss in this paper. my theoretical framework is rather empirical as it was inspired (but not followed) by grounded theory methodology (glaser & strauss, 1967). the described emergent patterns are informed by particular practices rather than philosophical consideration and do not have “the over-arching typology.” i see the validity of my patterns not in some “good method1” of study but in usefulness of them for other scholars and educators (including myself) and in a potentially emerging follow-up critical dialogue. considering how my emergent empirical theoretical framework relates to the existing theories of power can be an interesting endeavor but it is outside of the scope of this paper. imposition is an inherent part of social relations and communication. we constantly impose on each other when we talk to, act with, and relate with each other. people and life itself, – through its necessities and exposures, – constantly impose on an individual, contrasting with the individual’s selfinitiated and self-generated activities and spontaneous actions. impositions of other people’s desires and their lives on us constitute the very fabric of our relations with others. when accepted, legitimate, or negotiable impositions diminish and shrink, our relationship usually weakens and shrinks — to be in a relationship means to impose on each other legitimately2. we often say and do something that another person does not necessary expect or want us to say and do. we impose responses on other people. for example, by writing this text, i am imposing my ideas, themes, foci, reading on my readers. however, this type of imposition is arguably very different from the one used so often in conventional education. an everyday imposition is usually negotiable, while an imposition in conventional institutionalized education is not. in an everyday imposition, it is often legitimate for an addressee to negotiate, redefine, or even reject a bid for an action or a response, imposed on the addressee by the addressor. thus, using my example above, my readers (e.g., you) may legitimately interpret my ideas in their own ways, disagree 1 elsewhere i argue against positivistic notion of “research methodology” – an idea that some kind of research methods pre-exist research (i.e., given) – in favor of “research antimethodology” and “research mastery” – a unique, authorial, and contextual way of doing a particular research that fully emerges when research is completed (matusov & brobst, 2013, pp. 119-132). 2 a dear friend of mine often started her address to me, “sorry to bother you but...” my reply to her was, “friends are those who can freely bother each other. when you stop bothering me, our friendship will end. please keep bothering me….” legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a176 with them, change them, reject them, reply to them, praise them, adopt them, or even stop reading the text altogether and move to do something else. in contrast, in conventional schools, this negotiation of imposition is usually illegitimate: students often must do exactly what the teacher and school demands them to do with the teacher, who also judges the success of the students’ actions in response to the imposition. of course, both negotiable and nonnegotiable impositions occur in and out of schools. to be exact, in our everyday life, outside of schooling, we have been experiencing both types of imposition – negotiable and non-negotiable – but mostly negotiable impositions (unless, for example, one serves in the military or the police force). similarly, legitimate negotiable imposition happens in conventional schools as well – students can ask questions or permission or even initiate their own activity – but usually it occurs outside or on periphery of the official classroom time, space, and activity. students’ active attempts to negotiate or reject the teacher’s impositions are often viewed as illegitimate disruptions of teaching-learning processes. conventional schooling is defined by extensive and predominate use of non-negotiable imposition while this may not necessarily be true for life outside of school. non-negotiable imposition in education can be immediate, when the person imposing is present and in a direct face-to-face contact with the student. it also can be mediated, when the person or institution imposing is not immediately present and not in direct contact with the student. an example of mediated imposition is a kaplan test prep class where the instructors coach the students who chose to attend in order to do well on an external exam like gre. the latter example makes it necessary to consider the legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in education. thus, i consider the non-negotiable imposition (immediate or mediated) to be legitimate when it is accepted by the students. i want to clarify that in this paper, i discuss and consider the very legitimacy of diverse non-negotiable imposition approaches in education. my goal of the paper is to consider different approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education, its legitimacy, and justifications and analyze their pros and cons as i abstract them from these practices and espoused theories by the educators involved in these educational practices. studying education, i have abstracted the following distinct major educational practices and their approaches to non-negotiable impositions: totalizing conventional, capitalist, progressive, democratic, anarchist, and communitarian educational approaches to imposition. currently, i remain agnostic about whether some non-negotiable impositions can be good (i.e., legitimate) or not in general, but currently i’m leaning toward a point that some of them may be good under some conditions. pros and cons of non-negotiable imposition in education although conventional educators embraced non-negotiable imposition in education, many innovative educators often remain uneasy and indecisive (if not contradictory) on this issue. in her dissertation studying innovative schools, von duyke considered these uneasy attitudes toward impositions by innovative educators, for example, morrison (2007) writes about her experiences in what she describes as a progressive free school in albany, new york. she and the school staff seem to vacillate in terms of imposing curriculum or not on students. on the one hand there is the idea of not imposing a standard curriculum on students so they can follow their learning interests path; on the other hand, teachers often push academic subjects to ensure students’ ability at meaning making through developing the resource of broad areas of knowledge. on the one hand, there is a concern that students have autonomy; on the other hand, that they should be pushed into particular learning. below are some passages from the same book explaining the philosophy of the school, and i have highlighted several passages that either suggest that a teaching curriculum should not be imposed, or then suggest that some teaching curriculum should be imposed: legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a177 curriculum should not be imposed. teachers at the free school are not burdened by having to impose a curriculum on the students and students are not burdened with the expectation of unquestioningly accepting what is imposed on them (p. 117). teachers see a student show a spark of interest in something and from that encourage the child (p. 131). the progressive teacher, in that she has no set body of knowledge to transmit, is not interested in the students’ “performance” regarding knowledge retention; rather the teacher is more interested in the process of meaning making, which in her mind signifies growth and change (p. 117). thinking critically means imposing critical dialogue and specific learning on students. but free school teachers also recognize that some kids need more than gentle prodding—that, in fact, they require a push (p. 133). as i mentioned previously, critical consciousness involves not just being able to question and challenge, but also having the skills to negotiate in the world. by being available to student requests for academic teaching and gently prodding the students to develop their academic skills, the teachers are explicitly working to develop in students another aspect of critical consciousness (p. 94). the teachers knew full well that this pushing violated, in many ways, the free school’s core philosophy, but they also felt that not to do something would harm these particular children’s quest for meaning (p. 134) (von duyke, 2013, pp. 18-19). it is reasonable to assume that there should be reasons for extensive use of non-negotiable imposition in education, in contrast to everyday life. non-negotiable imposition seems attractive for conventional schools. but why? what are benefits of non-negotiable imposition for education? a big attractor of using non-negotiable imposition for many educators (and general public) is that it seems to engage all students in important learning activities on a systematic basis – despite the fact that students may not choose and wish to be engaged in these learning activities on their own. one of these educators’ major rationales is that the importance of the learning experiences resulting from the imposed engagement in these learning activities could be appreciated by the students later on, when the students may need to use the skills and knowledge learned in school. thus, although students may not use calculus in their everyday lives, some of them may find it useful when they become, for example, mechanical engineers. when the (social) life necessity for calculus emerges, the student will be ready to meet this challenge, thanks to the non-negotiable imposition of important learning activities designed in school. another reason for non-negotiable impositions is exposure and serendipity: sometimes being forcefully exposed and thrown in new experiences and activities, students may start liking them, which might not necessarily happen without this non-negotiable imposition. for instance, some students may find themselves liking history through history being imposed on these students in the first place in school. not being forcefully exposed to potentially exciting activities, in which a student might engage on his or her own, may rob the students from future (economic) opportunities, social mobility, self-actualization, and a more fulfilling life. similarly, non-negotiable imposition can promote serendipity – an exposure to certain experiences on the periphery of required learning activities that students may find attractive. without being engaged in a vast amount of required learning activities, this exposure might have been unlikely for many students. for example, when i asked a few graduate students of mine to give an example of their highly engaged learning that they did beyond required, they gave examples of such engagement stemming from assignments non-negotiably imposed by their professors, you [i.e., me – em] write, “where is in your actions, ‘i want to be a researcher’? i mean beyond survival... beyond professors asking you to do stuff for the classes... what is the evidence, colleague?” legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a178 the evidence is that i have locked myself away for over a week now working on putting together research that i have been collecting over the whole semester on issues that i feel passionate about. yes, this started as an assignment for rita's [another professor] class, but it's not anymore. it's my own work. i am bending her class rules, including by handing it in later than she wanted the rough draft because i still feel the need and desire to work on it more, you see, because i am not working on it for her, but i am working on it for me! this work is helping me shape what it is that i want to research for my thesis and how. and, although i'm over busting my ass, and i may be pissing her off as the instructor, i don't care because it's worth it for my own learning and for me following my passion! in addition, i am giving up social activities and what non-academics would call "life" because i care about this research so much. i'm sorry that it doesn't perfectly align with your research interest in dialogic pedagogy, but i do think that it is related, and i am going to explore the connection between my research interest and dialogic pedagogy in my final project for you – by my own choice. i could have not cared and done some bs final project just to turn in, but i can't and i won't because my interest and passion and life's work (so far) in ed research means too much to me (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 97). non-negotiable imposition in education can be also helpful for creating synchronization, coordination, and sharedness of learning experiences and, thus, a collective focus among the students so necessary for certain learning activities such as a classroom or online discussion, lecture, and cooperative learning. without the establishment of a shared collective focus a collective investigation or study of learning material becomes difficult if not impossible at times. although such a shared collective focus can emerge on negotiable and/or volunteer and/or self-initiated basis, it is not guaranteed on a systematic and predictable basis across all students, all the time, across all learning activities. from a long-run perspective, non-negotiable imposition in education feels attractive because it creates strong societal centripetal forces (bakhtin, 1991) by promising shared learning experiences across all citizens of the society and, thus, by increasing societal cohesion and reducing its fragmentation (hirsch, 1996). sidorkin (2009) argues that standardization, which i insist is based on educational nonnegotiable imposition, is responsible for the phenomenon of culture because without educational nonnegotiable imposition, reproduction of culture is impossible. he argues “the only way to understand curriculum [of organized, institutionalized, education], is to separate it from naturally occurring student interest. there is simply no point in educating otherwise” (personal communication, january 2013). educational non-negotiable imposition forces a new generation to acquire achievements of the past generations whether the new generation wants them or not. and by that creates continuity of passing down the values and allegiances to the family, the group, the party, the mainstream institutions, the mainstream practices, the nation, and the leaders of these groups (parents, local and national “education tsars” or officials, etc.). it also promises creation of an alland well-rounded person, a “renaissance man,” who is equipped with affluent “cultural capital” (bourdieu, 1990) that can empower a person’s economic, political, institutional, intellectual, aesthetic, and so on, life (hirsch, trefil, & kett, 1988). finally, non-negotiable imposition in education can create conditions for easily measured accountability for the students’ learning and teachers’ teaching by measuring how poorly and how well students succeed in complying with non-negotiable impositions and how reliably teachers impose them. standardized and non-standardized educational tests, quizzes, exams, and questions with well-defined pre-known answers seem to serve well for this purpose. the universality of non-negotiable imposition in education creates a sense of fairness, non-arbitrariness, objectivity, and meritocracy. it makes it easier to tokenize education into credentials (e.g., diplomas, certificates, degrees, grades, gpas, test scores) that can be easily compared and exchanged for qualifications, professions, jobs, salaries, permits, licenses, and promotions solely or in addition to other forms of assessment. these credentials become not only the best available proxy for competence but also for trainability. although a novice with valid educational credentials may lack a necessary experience or even competence required by a particular job, it is legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a179 assumed (but usually not tested!) that this novice would learn the targeted practice faster, easier, and better than a similar person without these educational credentials (labaree, 2010). however, non-negotiable imposition in education also apparently creates its own problems. it can suppress and discourage students’ negotiation, rejection, and activism — i.e., students’ meaningful active learning — by making it illegitimate. students’ attempts to negotiate or reject the teacher’s non-negotiable impositions, bring their own self-initiated activities, and/or introduce their own impositions on the teacher and/or other students are often viewed by the teacher as aggressive challenges, disrespectful disruptions, unprovoked resistance, immature acting out, wasteful “off-tasks”, irresponsible laziness, and unwelcomed “off-scripts” (kennedy, 2005). for at least 12, if not 16, of their most formative years, many students must spend most of the 5 days in a week being socialized in activities designed, defined, constrained, imposed, and judged by other people, unilaterally, at expense of their own activism, collaboration, and negotiation with others3. non-negotiable imposition in education apparently discourages, if not robs, students from guided and emergent development of their learning, personal, and social activism, collaboration, negotiation, agency, creativity, individualization, autonomy (i.e., just say “no” to impositions by others), goal-defining, value-defining, and self-actualization. grades, rewards, punishments, and power hierarchies promote conformity to the teachers’ and societal unconditional demands and diminish possibilities for critical thinking (kamii, 1991; kohn, 2014; trevino, 2004). as a result, non-negotiable imposition in education often feels oppressive and tiresome. it creates conditions for students’ resistance and teacher’s pedagogical violence – i.e., designing and enacting physical, emotional, institutional, relational, and symbolic pains for students to make them comply with the teachers’ non-negotiable educational impositions or to punish for non-compliance. it has a huge potential for creating vicious circles of distrust, aggression, and violence between the teacher and the students and among the students. it distracts students from learning and teachers from teaching by draining a lot of teachers’ and students’ energy and attention on enforcing and resisting the impositions, surveillance on the students’ actions and behavior, the system of rewards and punishments, and maintenance of the unilateral social order (see critique of the oppressive nature of conventional education in holt, 1972; jackson, 1968; mclaren, 1993; sidorkin, 2002; waller, 1932; willis, 1981). arguably, rather than academic curriculum, the non-negotiable imposition of conventional schools is its hidden and major curriculum. as farber (1970) wrote in a long text worth quoiting in its entirety, the medium in school truly is the message4. and the medium is, above all, coercive. you're forced to attend. the subjects are required. you have to do homework. you must observe school rules. and throughout, you're bullied into docility and submissiveness. even modern liberal refinements don't really help. so you're called an underachiever instead of a dummy. so they send you to a counselor instead of beating you. it's still not your choice to be there. they may pad the handcuffs – but the handcuffs stay on. which particular subject they happen to teach is far less important than the fact that it is required. we don't learn that much subject matter in school anyway in proportion to the huge part of our lives that we spend there. but what we do learn very well, thanks to the method, is to accept choices that have been made for us. which rule they make you follow is less important than the fact that there are rules. i hear about english teachers who won't allow their students to begin a sentence with "and." or about high schools where the male students are not permitted to wear a tshirt unless it has a pocket. i no longer dismiss such rules as merely pointless. the very point to such rules is their pointlessness. it's how you're taught that does the harm. you may only study geometry for a semester – or french for two years. but doing what you're told, whether or not it makes sense, is a lesson you get every blessed 3 for some us middle class children, this non-negotiable imposition may be extended to afterschool extracurricular activities imposed by their parents (lareau, 2003). 4 this seems to be a paraphrase of the famous quote “the medium is the message” from marshall mcluhan and his theory of media from the book “understanding media the extensions of man”, 1950. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a180 school day for twelve years or more. you know how malleable we humans are. and you know what good learners we are–how little time it takes us to learn to drive a car or a plane or to play passable guitar. so imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility. think about it. twelve years of tardy bells and hall passes; of graded homework, graded tests, graded conduct; of report cards, gpa's, honors lists, citizenship ratings; of dress codes, straight lines and silence. what is it that they're teaching you? twelve years pitted against your classmates in a daily roman circus. the game is doing what you're told. the winners get gold stars, affection, envy; they get a's and e's, honors, awards and college scholarships. the losers get humiliation and degradation. the fear of losing the game is a great fear: it's the fear of swats, of the principal's office, and above all the fear of failing. what if you fail and have to watch your friends move past you to glory? and, of course, the worst could happen: you could be expelled. not that very many kids get swats or fail or are expelled. but it doesn't take many for the message to get across. these few heavy losers are like severed heads displayed at the city gates to keep the populace in line. and, to make it worse, all of this pressure is augmented by those countless parents who are ego freaks and competition heads and who forcibly pass their addiction on to their kids. the pressure at school isn't enough; they pay the kids for a's and punish them for d's and f's. but can you feel any of this? can you understand what has been done to your mind? we get so used to the pressure that we scarcely are conscious of it without making some effort5 (farber, 1970, pp. 20-21). the following famous saying may be not completely inaccurate as applied to non-negotiable imposition in education, “you can take the horse to the river, but you can't force it to drink.” conventional teachers can manage to make some students learn academic subjects, although the quality, depth, personal meaningfulness, and longevity of such learning remain questionable. since learning is an essentially agentive process (matusov, 2011), requiring students’ efforts, goals, desires, and subjectivity, non-negotiable imposition in education makes learning difficult and shallow while teaching becomes blind, coercive, and ineffective. despite its promises, non-negotiable imposition in education rarely, if ever, can deliver the development of alland well-rounded persons, the defragmentation of society, and universal personal empowerment. the existence of non-negotiable imposition raises questions of how much things like: well-rounded person, defragmentation of society, and universal personal empowerment are possible or even desirable in education or even by themselves. specialization, exclusion, and particularity may be more realistic and more desirable educational and societal aspirations. another big, but related, problem with non-negotiable imposition in education is that it makes educational practices not self-correcting and, thus, hugely ineffective. when the teaching curriculum, the guidance, the organization of the classroom environment and the activities are all insensitive to a student, the results often are the student losing attention, interest, and engagement. in the absence of selfcorrecting loop, the teacher focuses usually on making the student comply with the teacher’s demands and expectations rather than on making the teaching curriculum and instruction more sensitive, relevant, and meaningful for the student’s educational needs, well-being, and interests. instead of focusing on how to become a better educator, the teacher often focuses on how to become a better police(wo)man, blaming the students for non-cooperation. in this case, the teacher does not treat signs of breakdowns in the teacher-student relation as a sign, calling for improvement of his or her pedagogy and the overall ecology of the classroom to make it more livable for the students, but rather as a sign of the students’ offensiveness. imagine a movie director who focuses on how to more efficiently discipline an audience bored with his or her movie, rather than considering the movie to be a flop and focus on the improvements in the future movies (or leaving the profession or finding a more suitable audience)?! but 5 “…not only that but our minds are colonized in such a way that we don't believe that there is a better way. one of my [undergraduate, education major] students, in her criticism of summerhill, said, ‘but you need to prepare the kids for authority in the workplace.’ she said and others in the class agreed, ‘imagine how those kids will treat their boss or even worse imagine how they will treat their employees’” (nermine abd elkader, personal communication, 2012-11-19). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a181 this is exactly what many conventional teachers, who use exclusively non-negotiable imposition in education, do. instead of reliance on a self-correcting process, as it is done in many practices, conventional schooling, based on non-negotiable imposition, relies excessively on accountability to promote its quality, which, arguably often is counter-productive in education. accountability creates additional problems for education in its own way. accountability is based on summative assessments necessary for evaluating the effectiveness of the non-negotiable imposition in education. summative assessments sort students to the institutionally “successful” and “failing” and, thus, distract students from their genuine learning. instead of focusing on genuine learning, the students focus on how to guess correctly what school wants from them and how to conform successfully to these arbitrary requirements. institutional failure promoted by summative assessments in education nonnegotiably imposes the deficit model (rogoff, 2003) on the “failing” students. meanwhile, institutional success based on summative assessment replaces genuine learning with conformity to the authority for the “successful” students. when a student-initiated negotiation enters into such a regime of nonnegotiable imposition, it is often a negotiation about a grade, not about learning (diederich & hampel, 2014; kohn, 2014). summative assessments disrupt the trust between the teacher and the student necessary for promoting sensitive guidance. indeed, for a teacher to guide sensitively, the teacher must access the students’ subjectivities – how they perceive the world and particular curricular issue at hand, what they think and why, and so on. however, in the context of summative assessments and accountability, it can be very costly for a student to reveal his or her own subjectivity, which can involve mistakes, ignorance, and misconceptions. the teacher and the students often become involved in a “double bind”: on the one hand, the teacher invites the students to reveal how they think and feel and act to make his or her guidance sensitive but on the other hand, the students must meet the teacher’s non-negotiable expectations and demands to avoid the teacher’s punishments. for a student to play safe often means to become silent, passive, and/or conformist. arguably, non-negotiable imposition in education is anti-educational in principle, although this may not necessarily be revealed in each and every particular application of non-negotiable imposition. non-negotiable imposition can establish an authoritarian (if not totalitarian) regime of truth because by definition of being non-negotiable, it does not invite independent evaluation of the imposition by the students (although the students still may engage in such evaluation). truth is something that the teacher, the textbook, and the test tell the student to be true. the students are not free and autonomous agents and participants in the establishment and judgment of truth. as bakhtin argued, schooling based on nonnegotiable imposition promotes excessive monologism and “authoritarian discourse” establishing truth through the institutional authority of the teacher, textbook, tests, and exams rather than through the testing of ideas, considering alternatives, raising genuine questions of the students’ interests, pursuing their own and each other’s inquiries, and critical examination of underlining values and assumptions (i.e., “internally persuasive discourse”) (bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2007, 2009; matusov & von duyke, 2010; morson, 2004). bakhtin wrote, in an environment of … monologism the genuine interaction of consciousness is impossible and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. in essence … [excessive monologism – em] knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue (bakhtin, 1999, p. 81). finally, compliance to the teachers’ non-negotiable imposition and focusing on obtaining credentials distracts students from their own agency as learners, from ownership of the students’ own lives legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a182 (rietmulder, personal communication, december 2012), from their own emergent interests, inquires, needs, and questions, from their own desires to learn and seek help for learning. the biggest hidden curriculum in conventional schools is often for the student to find a pattern of his or her own actions that lead to the teacher’s approval and success on the test. test-taking is a practice in itself, requiring its own mastery and learning, independent of academic learning. paradoxically, the deeper one learns and takes tests’ questions and problems seriously, the worse one does on a test as he or she transcends limited truths expected by the test designers and evaluators. similarly, one does not need to genuinely engage in academic learning to pass tests (gee, 1996). taking together all these pros and cons of non-negotiable imposition in education, i remain ambivalent about its legitimacy seeing both its potential usefulness, if not necessity, but also its potential damage, if not oppression. in the next section, i consider seven diverse approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education that i have extracted from current educational practices and literature. i examine how they address the pros and cons listed above, and discuss their strengths and limitations. i specifically focus on the legitimacy of non-negotiable impositions within each approach: how it justifies it, addresses its cons, and limits itself. i gave political labels to the educational approaches to describe them, which can be both revealing and misleading. it can be revealing because the issue of legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition is the issue of power and, thus, politics (kukathas, 2003). political labels can capture the nature of power relations within each approach. however, conventional political labels are polysemic and loaded with rich connotations – they can be misleading for the readers by promoting value-judgment associations with specific political regimes that i may have not intended. in my use of the political terms, i am coming not from conventional politics concerned with the question of “good society” (kukathas, 2003) but from educational politics concerned with the question of “good education.” although a conventional (purely) political approach may also be concerned with education, its concern about education is usually subordinated to the concern about a good society. in contrast, in an educational approach, the concern about good education is primary6. for example, a political anarchist approach may prioritize “social justice” or “tolerance to diversity” as his/her particular way of defining good society (kukathas, 2003) and develop a political anarchist approach to education – envisioning education that help to arrive at his/her vision of good society (e.g., ferrer guardia, 1972; suissa, 2010). political anarchists subordinate the goal of education to embetterment of the society (in their own vision of this embetterment) and, thus, treat education mainly instrumentally. in contrast, an educational anarchist approach (see below) uses some anarchist principles in defining a good education without necessary being concerned about a “good society” and does not subordinate the goal of educational practice to embetterment of the society7. i hope my discussion creates its own counter-connotations making misleading associations less likely (but never impossible). 6 my colleague and a scholar of libertarian approaches to education kevin currie-knight describes the tension between political and educational approaches based on similar power relations in the following way in his response to this paper, “educational libertarians (john holt, william godwin, ivan illich) want education to be free from authoritarianism, regardless of whether government is involved (even though government involvement makes it significantly less likely that education won't be used for subservience purposes; it is no mistake that the three figures i mentioned are both educational libertarians and political anarchists). political and economic libertarians ([ayn – em] rand, frank chodorov, milton friedman) seek to give families more educational choice and reduce government's role in education, even if that means allowing parents more freedom to choose authoritarian kinds of schooling for their children” (personal communication, november 2012). however, there can be also an overlap between these approaches, hybridization, and even application of both of them (like, for example, in plato’s writings). in some cases, the boundary between them can be very fuzzy. 7 although some educationalists, such as, for example, ira shor and ivan illich, who argue and/or practice an educational anarchist approach, are apparently also concerned about good society. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a183 approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education totalizing approach of conventional schooling non-negotiable imposition is usually comprehensive and totalizing for the students within conventional schools. i call this approach “totalizing” because it tries to eliminate or minimize any negotiation with the students about educational processes and their organization. elsewhere, i have defined it as “the assignment chronotope” (matusov, 2009, 2015; matusov & brobst, 2013), a pedagogical design in which physical and didactic space, time, communication, movements, and the system of values are organized by the teacher and the school through unconditional and non-negotiable assignments and demands. the teacher imposes education on the students: when to learn, what to learn, what is important, how to learn, what and how to do, when and how to move, when and how to talk, what to focus on, and so on. negotiation with students about these impositions is rarely considered to be legitimate or welcome. my point here is that conventional schools heavily embrace the totality of nonnegotiable impositions in education. saying all that, i’d also argue that, on average, in the middle-class suburban conventional schools this totality seems to be much softer than, in urban working conventional class schools. the primary legitimacy of this totalizing non-negotiable imposition seems to be rooted in the epistemological authority of the teacher as the expert#1 and, through the teacher8 (and/or school, government, business), in the entire society. it is assumed by many conventional schools’ participants and proponents that the teacher, the school, government, and society know better (if not the best) what is good for the student with regard to his or her education and how it is organized. since the student is often seen as ignorant, immature, and somewhat irresponsible, the student’s input into his or her own education is also viewed as counterproductive, distractive, and irresponsible. the second justification for the legitimacy of this totalizing non-negotiable imposition seems to be rooted in the societal needs for its own reproduction and development, as the entire society apparently needs skillful, well-informed, capable, and knowledgeable citizens of democracy, workers of economy, and clients of diverse institutions and bureaucracies (cf. the educational goal of "social effienciency", see labaree, 1997). arguably, education can help to achieve these important societal goals. since students are usually either non-participants or very peripheral participants in democracy, economy, institutions, and bureaucracies, they also are not allowed to decide or engage in negotiation about their own education. finally, since public education is funded mostly9 through federal, state, and local public money by taxpayers, it is assumed that the state, representing the taxpayers, has the legitimacy to dictate the goals, curricula, and instruction in at least public schools (cf. the saying, “he who pays the piper calls the tune”). however, these justifications of the legitimacy of the totalizing non-negotiable imposition in education seem problematic to me for several reasons. first, education is a future-oriented practice but the future is essentially unknown. conventional education extrapolates the future based on the somewhat known past and present, which in a rapidly changing and change-accelerating society apparently becomes very inaccurate already by the time of the student’s graduation from k-12 school but especially through the alumni’s life-time that is supposed to be targeted by the school education. for example, i remember how in the early 1980s the programming language basic was associated with “computer literacy” and was considered as the absolute-must part of the school mandated curriculum (e.g., see linn, 1985). basic became obsolete by the end of the 1980s. thus, in the contrast to arguably wasteful and 8 often a teacher can be a slavish token representative of other power sources, having very little freedom or flexibility of the curriculum and/or instruction and/or social relations with the students. 9 since affluent middle and upper class parents may heavily contribute financially and otherwise in education of the children attending public schools directly by giving extra money to schools through, for example, pta or indirectly by buying educational opportunities only to their own children, it is not clear if taxpayers money always constitute the biggest share of financial burden of public education for these students. more research is needed. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a184 counterproductive education rooted in the known past and present, the education-for-unknown-future should be based on promoting the student’s agency in the student’s present as a process of the constant transforming the present into the future. in such innovative pedagogical approach, rather than being passive and disinterested in the acquisition of the ready-made past, the students would actively and creatively engage in learning about the past through transformation of this past into the present (and the future) to address their own current needs, inquiries, and interests. however, development of the student’s agency, requiring student’s self-generated authorship, creativity, and initiation of new activities of the student’s own interests and needs, is rather problematic in the regime of the totalizing nonnegotiable imposition by the teacher, school, government, businesses, and the entire society. second, it is rather questionable to limit and reduce education to the students’ acceptance and mastery of the status quo as conventional schools seem to imply through their pedagogical practices of totalizing non-negotiable imposition. what seems to be necessary to fulfill the educational promise to make the students informed and empowered in reaching their own decisions rather than just being socialized into the status quo, is, in fact, students’ own critical examination of the existing practices and their underlining values, with and without teacher’s assistance, e.g. learning and considering known limitations, objections, and alternatives to the practices and their values, and engaging in collective and personal testing ideas. the tension among the competing definitions of education – 1) alienated training, 2) participatory socialization in the socially valuable practices, and 3) critical dialogic evaluation of the existing practices and their transcendence (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) – challenges the legitimacy of the totalizing non-negotiable imposition in education common to conventional schools. students’ engagement in participatory socialization in the existing practices and, especially, in critical dialogue about these practices requires negotiation of impositions, students’ (co)authorship in shaping educational practices, and students’ activism about their own education. even more, from a position of a critical dialogue as the major goal of education, the very deciding what is good for the students, including inquiry into what kind of education is good for the students, is arguably a part of critical education in itself. by excluding students from decisions about their education, the teacher, school, government, businesses, and the society arguably rob the students from genuine education. third, it seems to be paradoxically strange and politically suspicious to insist on students’ socialization in a totalitarian institution of school based predominately on non-negotiable imposition, for 12-16, if not more, of the students’ most formative years, all in the name of the students’ preparation for their future participation in a liberal democracy and capitalist economy based on active decision making and making smart and responsible choices. why cannot liberal democracy, active decision making, and making smart choices reproduce itself without the crutches of educational totalitarianism?! doesn’t dependency on educational totalitarianism undermine liberal democracy and the capitalist economy?! doesn’t totalitarian non-negotiable imposition of conventional schooling, where the teacher, textbook, or test is the last word of the institutionally recognized truth, hijack the educational goal of making students informed by making the students brainwashed (cf. characterization of mainstream conventional schools as "civic church", collins & halverson, 2009)?! capitalist approach by sidorkin10 although an educational philosopher, alexander sidorkin apparently accepts the societal legitimacy for a totalizing non-negotiable imposition of the academic curriculum in education, he at the same time rejects: 1) conventional schools’ focus on teaching as the main factor ensuring the quality of education, 10 the term “capitalist approach” in the reference to sidorkin’s educational approach is mine. it is aimed at capturing his approach to educational non-negotiable impositions and not other important aspects of his very interesting and thought-provoking educational analysis and suggestions. he read a previous draft of this paper and did not seem to object my term or portrayal of his position. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a185 2) reliance of conventional schools on pedagogical violence as the backbone of the totalizing nonnegotiable imposition, and 3) misleading and counterproductive ideology of conventional schooling that the education is primarily for the students’, rather than for the society’s benefit (sidorkin, 2002, 2009). sidorkin argues that although the teacher’s instruction can facilitate learning, it is not its primary engine. rather, the main engine of learning are the student's own studies – their extent, intensity, depth, and quality, – assisted or unassisted by the teacher. in conventional schools, students’ studies are shaped by the totalizing non-negotiable imposition, which is fine with sidorkin. what is not fine is the fact that these totalizing non-negotiable impositions are enforced by pedagogical violence and justified by a misleading idea that education is done to primarily benefit the students themselves. he continues that many students intuitively recognize that this ideology is misleading and not true, viewing their academic studies in conventional school as work that they have to do for their teachers and not for themselves. sidorkin insists that the society must recognize and admit that institutionalized education primarily exists for the good of the society and not for the sake of the students. like any consumer of its value-use produced by others, the society must pay to students their education. he argues that if this were true, most of students (but probably not all) would willingly surrender to the totalizing non-negotiable curricular impositions by teachers, schools, and society. neither mandatory school attendance nor pedagogical violence would be necessary. thus, sidorkin concludes, the students should be compensated for their labor of academic studies, as desired by the society (not necessarily by the students). he proposes two types of such compensation. the first type of compensation is what my colleague and i called “exchange of favors” (smith & matusov, 2010). sidorkin models it after sports coaching. coaches often ask student athletes to do unpleasant practice – i.e., non-negotiable imposition – but in exchange the coaches provide extracurricular friendship socialization and social mentoring, important for the student athletes. what is negotiable in this approach is what “compensation” in a form of desired socialization the athletes would get in return for the coach’s non-negotiable imposition of unpleasant and harsh drills and practices on them. sidorkin argues that some good teachers know that and do it as well and that all teachers should do the same. also, to some degree, his model of the “exchange of favors” already exists for many middle-class us children in form of extracurricular and afterschool activities and clubs, in which students have more choice, voice, and negotiation. some of these activities are conditional on the students’ cooperation with non-negotiable impositions of school and some of these activities are even run or facilitated by the same teachers (eckert, 1989; lareau, 2003; powell, farrar, & cohen, 1985). sidorkin’s second way of compensation is monetary11. like in a capitalist economy, if one party needs some alienated labor from the other party, the first party must pay for the labor as defined by the regulated market economy. the pay has to be determined by the exams measuring learning and set by the society. it is up to the students how they want to study for the exams with or without teachers. if students choose to study by themselves, they would have to work probably harder but they would get more compensation as they do not need to share it with their teachers. alternatively, the students may hire teachers either on an individual basis as their personal tutors (which would be probably more expensive) or on a shared basis by attending schools for which they would pay teachers. sidorkin estimates that the total price tag of this educational compensation paid by the society to the students (or 11 “it is very interesting to see that sidorkin's capitalist view of education is actually applied in egyptian public higher education. university students who are higher achievers are paid a monthly stipend to compensate them for their hard work. it is also noteworthy that this stipend is not restricted to top students but to anyone who achieves an 80% on their gpa throughout their university education career (and since public education is free, this stipend is considered to be making money since it is totally up to the students to use however they wish)” (nermine abd elkader, personal communication, 2012-11-19). also see the nyc ceo program’s efforts to monetary incentivize low income students and their families for academic achievements (http://www.mdrc.org/preliminary-look-early-educational-results-opportunity-nyc-%e2%80%93-family-rewards-program). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a186 their guardians for very young students) should be less than currently the society spends on public education. i labeled this approach as “capitalist” because like in a capitalist economy, alienated labor is compensated rather than forced through violence or a threat of violence as it is done in slavery or feudalism — this economic analysis of social relations in education was introduced by sidorkin himself (sidorkin, 2002). under the capitalist system, labor mainly remains alienated and non-negotiable to please other people (i.e., employer, customers) but compensation for and participation in this labor is negotiable. like in the totalitarian approach described above, student’s learning and study remain alienated from the student’s own interests, needs, inquiries, and so on. however, students are viewed as free, contractual, laborers in a free supply-demand labor market with a societal demand for the students to study. essentially, sidorkin wants to replace the primary enforcer of the totalizing non-negotiable imposition in education from punishments causing educational violence to rewards of incentives, exchange of favors, or monetary compensations desired by the students. this would make education based on the totalizing non-negotiable impositions less violent, more livable, and more effective. although sidorkin insists on totalizing non-negotiable impositions on curriculum and instruction, his call for attention to the students’ extracurricular desires or monetary compensations introduces a back channel for educational negotiation softening some of the negative consequences of non-negotiable imposition in education. however, since sidorkin seems to accept, if not strengthen, all justifications for the legitimacy of the totalizing non-negotiable curricular imposition (but not instructional or organizational!), my list above of challenges to this legitimacy remains applicable to his capitalist approach. progressive approach of the progressive school movement similar to sidorkin’s capitalist approach, the progressive approach also accepts the totalizing legitimacy of the society’s right to define academic curriculum for the students. as one of the most influential proponents of the progressive movement john dewey wrote in his famous essay the child and the curriculum, “we get the case of the child vs. the curriculum; of the individual nature vs. social culture” (dewey, 1956, p. 5). according to dewey heavily influenced by hegel, the curriculum is firmly and mainly defined by the society. he went to great lengths to explain the differences between students’ experiences and societal curriculum. in short, the societal curriculum involves reified, decontextualized, and universalized societal experience and reflection. dewey gave an example of a geographical map as such a societal academic curriculum, “the map orders individual experiences, connecting them with one another irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances and accidents of their original discovery” (p. 20). dewey saw the goal of genuine academic school learning as subjectivizing, psychologizing, and personalizing the curriculum (unilaterally defined by the society without the student’s input), “hence the need of reinstating into experience the subject matter of the studies, or branches of learning. it must be restored to the experience from which it has been abstracted. it needs to be psychologized; turned over, translated into the immediate and individual experiencing within which it has its origin and significance” (dewey, 1956, p. 22). this process of personalization must start with the student’s own pre-existing experiences and interests and expands into the curriculum predefined by the society, “if the subjectmatter of the lessons be such as to have an appropriate place within the expanding consciousness of the child [i.e., so-called “developmentally appropriate curriculum” – em], if it grows out of his own past doings, thinkings, and sufferings, and grows into application in further achievements and receptivities, then no device or trick of method has to be resorted to in order to enlist ‘interest.’ the psychologized is of interest that is, it is placed in the whole of conscious life so that it shares the worth of that life” (dewey, 1956, p. 27). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a187 dewey criticized both conventional schools and some innovative educators for two opposite pitfalls, “’guidance and control’ are the catchwords of one school; ‘freedom and initiative’ of the other” (p. 10). in his view, conventional schools neglect personalization of the societal curriculum, while some innovative educators neglect the societal curriculum, unilaterally defined by the society (probably, through the state). dewey also criticized the content of the academic curriculum selected by conventional schools but like conventional schools, although probably using a different reason, he accepted the legitimacy of the society to unilaterally define the curriculum and, thus, to impose the curriculum on the students. thus, conventional schools make academic learning boring and alienated for the students, while narrowly childcentered innovative education makes learning shallow for the students, there are those who see no alternative between forcing the child from without, or leaving him entirely alone. seeing no alternative, some choose one mode, some another. both fall into the same fundamental error. both fail to see that development is a definite process, having its own law which can be fulfilled only when adequate and normal conditions are provided. really to interpret the child's present crude impulses in counting, measuring, and arranging things in rhythmic series involves mathematical scholarship a knowledge of the mathematical formulae and relations which have, in the history of the race, grown out of just such crude beginnings. to see the whole history of development which intervenes between these two terms is simply to see what step the child needs to take just here and now; to what use he needs to put his blind impulse in order that it may get clarity and gain force (dewey, 1956, p. 17). in the progressive approach, instruction should be negotiated with the student – the student’s past and present experiences and interests, – while the curriculum is apparently and non-negotiably imposed on the essentially deficient and ignorant students. the totalizing non-negotiable imposition of the academic curriculum on the students, – i.e., what the students must study, – is fraught with the teacher’s pedagogical violence and the student’s resistance. dewey seemed to sense this possibility and objection in his essay and rushed to a counter-argument by claiming that negotiable instruction can always negate these negative possibilities of the non-negotiable totalizing imposition of curriculum. of course, if this negotiable instruction is done in the right way, “guidance is not external imposition. it is freeing the lifeprocess for its own most adequate fulfillment” (dewey, 1956, p. 17). progressive educators are firmly convinced that for any good curriculum unilaterally defined by the society and for any particular student in any particular time, there is always a sensitive negotiable guidance that makes the societal curriculum accepted, if not desirable, by the student, “...any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (bruner, 1986, p. 129). well, some progressive educators, probably including dewey, may not go so far to claim about “at any age” because these educators would argue that for a particular (psychological rather than chronological) age, certain non-negotiable societal curriculum can be “developmentally appropriate” while others cannot. sidorkin (2002, 2009) criticizes progressive educators for being romantic, unrealistic, and dead wrong in this belief about the unlimited power of instructional negotiation being able to make all societal “developmentally appropriate” curriculum non-negotiably imposed on the students, also acceptable and desirable by the students. he claims that from the fact that it can occur with some students at some time does not mean that it can be done all the time with all the students with any imposed curricula. the negotiable instruction has its limits. paradoxically, the forerunner of the progressive education, french writer jean-jacques rousseau, rather cynically placed manipulation in the place of negotiable instruction to ensure that the societal curriculum non-negotiably imposed on the students is acceptable and desired by them, legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a188 take the opposite course with your pupil [in child-centered, proto-progressive, education that rousseau advocated in contrast to a conventional authoritarian teacher-centered education – em]; let him always think he is master while you are really master. there is no subjection so completed as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will [of the child] itself is taken captive [by the teacher’s hidden manipulation]. is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? cannot you make of him what you please? his work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell (rousseau, 1979, p. 120, italics is mine). like dewey, rousseau wanted to save the child from his/her capricious, arbitrary, ignorant, and wild freedom by non-negotiable imposition of the societal curriculum that will eventually give the child power to master his or her physical and social environment. romantic dewey believed, as many progressive educators still do, that instructional negotiable, developmentally appropriate, instruction can make any societal curriculum imposed on the students acceptable and desirable for the students, “a broad vein of romanticism runs through this form of progressivism, which saw learning as a natural process that would occur best if artificial mechanisms like schools and curricula would just get out of the way of children’s natural urge to learn” (labaree, 2010, p. 92). meanwhile, a somewhat cynical realist rousseau called for use of skillful manipulation of the student’s consciousness by the teacher to achieve the same goal. using foucault's analysis of power, fendler (1998) criticizes progressive educators for their pedagogical desire to discipline their students into “the educated subject” – making the students desire to learn what their teacher and the society desire for them to learn. similarly, dan greenberg, a founder of the sudbury valley school, representing the democratic school movement that i am going to discuss in the next section, eloquently and critically points out the crucial difference between the progressive education and the democratic school movement by saying that the progressive education wants to make students like what they are supposed to do and learn in school, while in the democratic school movement, students do and learn what they like (greenberg, 1991, p. 101). despite the strong desire by progressive educators to eliminate teachers’ pedagogical violence and students’ resistance to non-negotiable imposition of the societal “developmentally appropriate” curriculum through negotiable instruction, “double psychologizing,” or (if not and!) skillful manipulation of the students’ consciousness, the very desire of a progressive teacher and the effectiveness and legitimacy of the means seem to be questionable. another problem with the progressive approach is its insistence on the separation of the societal curriculum from the student’s (or any human) desire. situated cognition scholars show that universal and decontextualized knowledge, tools, and skills existing “irrespective of the local and temporal circumstances and accidents of their” usage, human desire, social relations and values are empty abstractions (lave, 1988, 1992). reification of human experiences and reflections remains participatory, contextualized, situated, authorial, and value-driven. progressive educators seem to recognize the need for student’s desires in learning the societal curriculum, as they criticized desireless, alienated learning in conventional schools, but they are apparently afraid that the students’ desires may take over academic learning process, leading away from the well-thought preset societal curriculum. to address the latter concern, progressive educators try to exploit students’ existing desires for “psychologizing” the preset societal curriculum (e.g., “the big ideas”), unilaterally defined and non-negotiably imposed on the students, legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a189 when the subject-matter has been psychologized, that is, viewed as an out growth of present tendencies and activities, it is easy to locate in the present some obstacle, intellectual, practical, or ethical, which can be handled more adequately if the truth in question be mastered. this need supplies motive for the learning. an end which is the child's own carries him on to possess the means of its accomplishment. but when material is directly supplied in the form of a lesson to be learned as a lesson, the connecting links of need and aim are conspicuous for their absence! what we mean by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result of this lack of motivation. the organic and vital mean interaction — they mean play of mental demand and material supply (dewey, 1956, pp. 25-26). participation and socialization in reified ready-made culture requires more than just “psychologizing” but also its active negotiation, redefining, transcendence, and even rejection of the existing ready-made culture and, thus, the students’ rejection of any preset societal curriculum. libertarian approach of the democratic school movement although it can be probably contested, i think that the democratic school movement (dsm)12 started with the summerhill school, now located in great britain (neill, 1960). the core principle of the dsm is to avoid any imposition on students’ desire to study or not to study, freedom is indivisible. it means you can never influence choice the children make. it is all or nothing. if trust in child is not absolute, the principle of summerhill, the principle of freedom choice will lose its value (kleindienst, 1998). in a famous example, one of summerhill students, named freer, chose not to go to a single class because he was not interested in academics; rather he was interested in pottery, carpentry, and other hands-on manual activities. as a result, freer left the school scarcely knowing how to read or write. in a later videotaped interview, the summerhill alumnus, as an adult, he admitted that at some point of his life that required mastery of reading and writing from him, he had been angry with the school, neill, and his father for allowing him to remain mainly illiterate but afterwards he changed his mind. he learned how to read and write rather quickly in his adult life and exactly when he needed it. all in all, he praised summerhill for promoting his own agency and not forcing him to learn something that he did not wish to be learning at that moment. being confident in his own agency as a free learner and trusting in his own judgment and feelings, freer became a successful active adult having a degree in economics and he credited summerhill for that13 (kleindienst, 1998). education, especially its curriculum – what students study, – has to be a free choice of the student without any pressure from the parents, teachers and society. curricular imposition, even if negotiable but still initiated by an adult, is usually an anathema in a dsm school, and seen as preventing students from owning their own lives. even an attempt by a dsm student newcomer to sign him or herself in voluntarily formed classes is often viewed by the dsm school staff with suspicion of hidden pressure from parents or of the student’s internalized imposition from the previous school experiences. often the dsm school staff try to dissuade the dsm novice students from any premature and untested commitment to their academic education. only after a newcomer has experienced the freedom of making his or her 12 however, i should caution a reader against overgeneralizations. i know some dsm schools that i would not call as driven by a libertarian approach described here. i think dsm like any organic movement involves probably a family of diverse approaches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/democratic_education. 13 although in the interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58xthgyziy), he admitted that he would not let his own children have the same schooling experience leaving the school without learning reading and writing. unfortunately, freer did not elaborate in the video on reasons for his claim somewhat contradicting this current praise of summerhill and its positive influence on his life. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a190 own choices for some time, can his or her choice to engage in academic studies be trusted by the dsm staff as being truly the student’s own. however, a close look at the dsm and its organization suggests that dsm students are still subjects of impositions both negotiable and non-negotiable in diverse areas of their lives at a dsm school. these impositions are apparently viewed as legitimate by the founders of the dsm schools. first of all, dsm students are subjects of legitimate and mostly negotiable impositions coming from their peers. dsm students are openly exposed and often invited to academic and non-academic activities initiated by their peers. in classical descriptions of summerhill school, these peer negotiable impositions remain unregulated by the school. however, in some other dsm schools in the us like the sudbury valley (svs) and the circle schools (tcs) some of their activities may involve impositions by school staff and other students are regulated by “corporation charters” granted by the school government through negotiation with the involved students (greenberg, 1992b; rietmulder, 2009). corporations (at tcs but not necessarily elsewhere) are chartered (and limited) to regulate certain equipment, space, or activities, but nobody is required to engage. impositions are not curricular (i.e., learn it because we think it's good for you) but practical. it is true that one must do what the corporations impose if you want to participate in whatever they regulate… i don't see how any corporation ‘impositions’ could be in the same category with curricular coercion. here are some examples of corporation rules: ‘the science corporation requires that you wear goggles when you mix chemicals’, ‘the art corporation requires that you wash your brushes after painting with them’ (rietmulder, personal communication, november 2012). at the dsm schools, there are often attempts to prevent non-negotiable peer impositions in a form of peer pressure or peer violence through the school collective and democratic governance and judicial procedures, which bring us to the second form of a mixture of negotiable and non-negotiable legitimate imposition at the dsm. the dsm schools are governed by participatory democracies involving all students even very young ones, although these participatory democracies have different forms. in a british version of dsm (summerhill), this democracy is ontological, experiential, based on discussion of immediately experienced problems in the community and addressing them through immediate democratic decision making during the general assembly. meanwhile in an us version, it is mostly codified, procedural, and bureaucratized. in summerhill school, the communal decisions are often not codified and more fluent, giving an opportunity for the summerhill students to be governed by decisions the students made by themselves in the eventfulness of the moment. thus, in summerhill, there have been cycles of students abandoning all existing rules and starting all over again, moving from the turbulence of chaos to eventually alienated rules, as a new generation of students joins the school. the new generation “forgets” the experiential (i.e., ontological) reasons for the old rules and the old rules begin to be felt as alienated and oppressive. these cycles often occur to the acute annoyance of the old-time summerhill staff of the school creating a sense of déjà vu as the headache that returns (neill, 1960). that is why i call this participatory democracy of summerhill experiential or ontological democracy. in contrast, in the us dsm, democratic decisions are codified, bureaucratized, and rather seamlessly passed to further generations without being renegotiated on a big scale. often us dsm students live under a regime of the rules created in the past by the students who are already remote school alumni. the reasons and practical wisdom of these rules is often lost for some rules14, which nevertheless remain on the book (there are literally hundreds of rules on the school book). the legitimacy of these rules seems to remain in the fact that the rules can be amended, modified, or removed by the school community. 14 when i visited us dsm schools, i often asked students about reasons for the rules on their books and they could not explain or even guess about the reasons. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a191 in the uk summerhill school, experiential democracy, social problem solving is organized through communal experiential (ontological), if not therapeutic, justice, in which community members (i.e., the students and school staff) decide what is just or unjust in every particular contested case brought by particular community members to the school’s general assembly. for example, when some teen female students complained about stolen makeup kits, the summerhill general assembly decided to select a committee to search all private drawers. however, after experiencing this decision many female members of the school including the female school staff and the girls who brought the case objected to the decision, argued against it and finally managed to persuade the community to change their mind about the searches violating privacy of the community members (allen, getzels, & getzels, 1992). in contrast, us dsm – mostly modeled after the sudbury valley school– codified, procedural democracy focuses on the rule of law, in which a student is punished or restricted by the school only in a case of infractions of the democratically established school rules, when a pre-existing rule is broken as established by a special “judicial committee” (tcs) presenting by the students and the staff. there are formal procedures of interrogating accusers, accused, and witnesses to establish what exactly happened, what exact rule might be broken, whether it is broken, and if so, what punishment if any has to be applied to the breaker of the rule. as i observed this process at the circle school in the us, i was astonished at how little focus was developed there around the issues of justice, sympathy, meaning, and the consequences of the events for the participants and the community at large. it felt very procedural and formalistic to me. the school staff consider these emotional, relational, ethic, moral, and meaning-making issues as to be private and interpersonal and thus inappropriate for the public governmental duty and potentially impositional and oppressive for the students. only after reading libertarian philosopher hayek, i became more understanding and appreciating of their argument for procedural democracy focusing on developing boundaries and conditions for individuals’ activism without interference in it. the distinction we have drawn before between the creation of a permanent framework of laws within which the productive activity is guided by individual decisions and the direction of economic activity by a central authority is thus really a particular case of the more general distinction between the rule of law and arbitrary government. under the first the government confines itself to fixing rules determining the conditions under which the available resources may be used, leaving to the individuals the decision for what ends they are to be used. under the second the government directs the use of the means of production to particular ends. the first type of rules can be made in advance, in the shape of formal rules which do not aim at the wants and needs of particular people. they are intended to be merely instrumental in the pursuit of people's various individual ends. and they are, or ought to be, intended for such long periods that it is impossible to know whether they will assist particular people more than others. they could almost be described as a kind of instrument of production, helping people to predict the behavior of those with whom they must collaborate, rather than as efforts toward the satisfaction of particular needs (hayek, 1994, p. 113, italics is original). it seems that many us dsm schools do not want to interfere in activity decision making, educational choices, and interpersonal relations among the students (and the students and the school staff) but rather to set limits and boundaries for the students’ actions. i have to conclude that the imposition in the us dsm procedural democracy is much less negotiable than in the uk dsm ontological democracy. paradoxically, some dsm schools,15 both in the uk and us, almost brag about how conventional their academic instruction is, 15 i am thankful to jim rietmulder, a founder of tcs, cautioning me of overgeneralization of this phenomenon to all dsm schools. more research of this phenomenon is needed. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a192 we have no new methods of teaching, because we do not consider that teaching in itself matters very much. whether a school has or has not a special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long division is of no importance except to those who want to learn it. and the child who wants to learn long division will learn it no matter how it is taught (neill, 1960, pp. 4-5, emphasis is mine). i learned latin as a boy–rather i was given latin books to learn from. as a boy, i could never learn the stuff because my interests were elsewhere. at the age of twenty-one, i found that i could not enter the university without latin. in less than a year, i learned enough latin to pass the entrance exam. self-interest made me learn latin (neill, 1960, p. 81). it seems to me that dsm is similar to sidorkin in arguing that teaching and curriculum are not important for the students’ education. what seems important is the fact that students can voluntary and freely choose to study. my colleagues and i explained this interesting pedagogical idea in the following matter in our paper, when the summerhill students become active learners, they use the teacher’s instruction as a resource for their self-initiated learning. this can be similar to a scholar’s attendance at a monotonous presentation on a topic of the scholar’s interest at a professional conference. it does not matter how insensitive the presentation to the audience is – as soon as the attending scholar finds the presentation relevant, the scholar puts in his or her own efforts to engage him/herself in the monotonous presentation in order to learn (matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012, p. 46). i think that dan greenberg, a founder of the sudbury valley school (svs), pushes this idea a bit farther. in his version of voluntary education, as soon as students want to study something they must voluntarily submit themselves and freely commit themselves to whatever pedagogical regime is designed by their teacher. of course, students may reject this instruction and the whole class offered by an adult and this rejection will be legitimate in a dsm school – but, at least from greenberg’s description, it sounds like a teacher instruction is non-negotiable, “either my way or highway.” greenberg even brags that he uses a very old and very traditional arithmetic textbook for his sudbury valley school young students and imposes the most conventional pedagogical regime with rigid timetable on them while the students enthusiastically accept it, sitting before me were a dozen boys and girls, aged nine to twelve. a week earlier, they had asked me to teach them arithmetic. they wanted to learn to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and all the rest. … my biggest problem was a textbook to use as a guide. … i found a book in our library, perfectly suited to the job at hand. it was a math primer written in 1898. small and thick, it was brimming with thousands of exercises, meant to train young minds to perform the basic tasks accurately and swiftly. class began – on time. that was part of the deal. "you say you are serious?" i had asked, challenging them; "then i expect to see you in the room on time – 11:00am sharp, every tuesday and thursday. if you are five minutes late, no class. if you blow two classes – no more teaching." "it's a deal," they had said, with a glint of pleasure in their eyes. basic addition took two classes. they learned to add everything – long thin columns, short fat columns, long fat columns. they did dozens of exercises. subtraction took another two classes. it might have taken one, but "borrowing" needed some extra explanation. on to multiplication, and the tables. everyone had to memorize the tables. each person was quizzed again and again in class. then the rules. then the practice. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a193 they were high, all of them. sailing along, mastering all the techniques and algorithms, they could feel the material entering their bones. hundreds and hundreds of exercises, class quizzes, oral tests, pounded the material into their heads. still they continued to come, all of them. they helped each other when they had to, to keep the class moving. the twelve year olds and the nine year olds, the lions and the lambs, sat peacefully together in harmonious cooperation – no teasing, no shame. division – long division. fractions. decimals. percentages. square roots. they came at 11:00 sharp, stayed half an hour, and left with homework. they came back next time with all the homework done. all of them. in twenty weeks, after twenty contact hours, they had covered it all. six years' worth. everyone of them knew the material cold (greenberg, 1991, pp. 15-17). greenberg’s description of his svs math instruction is uneventful. it is purely technological. there is no description of any depth of understanding or students’ exciting inquires and discoveries but rather rote memorization, rules, algorithms, drills, textbook exercises, quizzes, tests, and exams – the recognizable pedagogical attributes and means of the conventional education based on totalizing nonnegotiable impositions. i have abstracted three related benefits of the svs math instruction from greenberg’s description and discussion of his svs math instruction that greenberg values: 1) a higher speed of the svs students’ learning the preset curricular standards in comparison with similar math instruction in conventional schools, 2) the svs students’ high-level unconditional cooperation with the teacher’s demands once the class is freely chosen, and 3) the svs students’ own intense study efforts, high engagement, and enthusiasm to study. the students’ own purposes for these academic studies are not important: they may decide to study because of their genuine interest in subject, because of their friends go there, because they want to attend a college and do well on tests, because they want to get credentials and so on – it does not matter for greenberg. but, as soon as they make their decision, they must submit themselves to the teacher’s totalizing non-negotiable impositions. greenberg mentions some svs students who eventually became professional mathematicians but from his descriptions it looks like they studied mostly by themselves. the nature of their studies – how close in their self-studies these students followed greenberg’s math instruction, based on the totalizing non-negotiable impositions, – was not clear for me, as a reader of his texts. of course, other svs teachers may teach math or other subject differently, but that is true even in conventional schools. the issue is what is ideologically legitimate and defendable. it is not my goal here to explore the complexity of the actual practice at svs or elsewhere but rather to focus on issues of legitimacy of non-negotiable impositions and their justifications by the educators. in general, the libertarian approach to non-negotiable imposition in education is not very much interested in instruction or promoting critical investigation of ideas among the students. this is not apparently where the libertarian approach sees its pedagogical excitement and creative investment. as one of the tcs staff member told my colleague studying the school, “’the focus of your analysis is learning, something important to educators, but we don’t share your concern’ (alan, [tcs] staff, july 2012)” (von duyke, 2013, p. 499). the libertarian educators seem to be more interested in schooling experimentation focusing on children’s self-initiated leisurely activities, “scaled down society,” democratic governance, and/or communal problem solving rather than in experimentation with instruction or curriculum. the role of the adults (often referred as “staff” and not as “educators”) is to guard and maintain this leisurely environment, while staying away from children’s activities and autodidact unless being asked to help16. 16 jim rietmulder, a founder of tcs, has criticized my paper for overgeneralization and distortion of dsm in general and his school in specific. he wrote, “i think you approach an important truth when you talk about a difference in ‘pedagogical excitement and creative investment’. it seems fair to say that the circle school's ‘pedagogical excitement and creative investment’ have more to do legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a194 in sum, in my observation, the libertarian approach of the dsm has three areas for what they accept as legitimate non-negotiable impositions on its students: 1) submission to democratically elected school rules, even though these rules might be voted in by previous generations of the students and/or a student might not fully or at all understand the rationale for this rule. the legitimacy of this non-negotiable imposition is justified by democratic collective decision making, by a possibility for each student to initiate changing or repealing any existing school rule, by preventing (adult, peer, or collective) unilateralism and arbitrarism, and by the rules being constrains as well as spaces for students’ creativity and activism – i.e., anything that is not explicitly forbidden by the democratically accepted school rule is permitted. 2) acceptance of the punishment as a result of a participant’s transgression of the school rules passed by the school’s general assembly (summerhill) or by judicial committee consisting of peers and teachers (svs and tcs) even though the student might not understand the broken rule or feel that the punishment is fair or unjust. the justification of the legitimacy seems the same as in above in point 1. 3) voluntary submission to the teacher’s epistemological and pedagogical authority – almost like, “if you come to me to learn, do it my way or else find another teacher or another way to study.” if a student wants to study something and asks the teacher for help, the teacher can legitimately impose non-negotiable ways of study – a detailed curriculum, and instruction, – as neill and greenberg argue. the libertarian approach to non-negotiable imposition in education focuses on promoting the individual agency of a student by promoting the students’ self-generated activism constrained by communal non-negotiable impositions. also, it apparently rejects the notion of the sociocultural origin of human agency (dewey, 1956; suissa, 2010). the libertarian approach emphasizes their belief in: 1) the natural individual growth of students (and people in general), 2) individual autonomy, and 3) the priority of non-educational goals like psychotherapy (summerhill), socialization in a scaled-down democratic society, “owning one’s own life”, and “practicing life” (sudbury valley school and the circle school) over education per se (as dealing primarily with learning, as critical examination of the life, self, and the world, and secondary with guidance). adult-initiated guidance on academic matters, outside of social and communal conflicts and governance, is often viewed as exclusively driven by non-negotiable imposition that can be legitimate only when the demand for such unilateral guidance is genuinely requested by the students themselves. at times some dsm famous educators seem to equate academic education with transmission of knowledge of the totalizing approach and/or socialization in the preexisting practices (the charge brought by dewey, 1956) and/or constructivist teaching associated with the progressive approach17. in many dsm schools, critical examination of ideas and values in what can be called “academic” areas (e.g., math, science, art, and just existing sociocultural practices) remain non-imposed. rather they are private, accidental, responsive, and unguided by adults, at least, not purposefully, (and, even, undervalued sometimes). in dsm, critical examination of ideas can be communal, discursive, collaborative, and purposefully guided by adults but it is usually limited to solving interpersonal problems with democratic schooling, and less to do with the particular instructional methods that are practiced within the school. on the other hand, ose's [open syllabus education, see below in the paper] "pedagogical excitement and creative investment" have more to do with the process that takes place between teachers and students within a class. tcs is more concerned with conducting a school, and ose is more concerned with conducting a class. i think this correctly identifies a difference in focus, between tcs and ose. but i think you may draw too much from it. the difference in ‘pedagogical excitement and creative investment’ does not imply ‘disinterest in academic learning’” (personal communication, 2012-11-19). i welcome and highly appreciate his criticism (and patience with me as an outsider observing and questioning tcs and dsm in general). i still feel that i both capture important aspects of the libertarian dsm approach but also need to work more on nuancing my portrayal and critique of it. 17 this is not always true for all dsm and all the time. see more nuanced discussion in von duyke research report (2013). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a195 in the community and/or about democratic governance. my impression of the libertarian approach so far is that it seems to disregard and if not to actively reject collaborative guidance that is actively and purposefully initiated by adults. this also includes adult initiated critical investigation of ideas and considering alternatives in the academic sphere (but is often ok for certain social and communal problems and governance), which are considered to be illegitimate non-negotiable or even illegitimate negotiable impositions by adults, messing with the students’ natural agency and its growth. thus, in my analysis, the libertarian approach provides freedom, but not necessary resources and sufficient support for developing students’ agency when they are not yet at a level of self-generated authorship. thus, von duyke reports that some dsm students may temporarily go to conventional schools to get exposure and responsive authorship for diverse academic practices to nurture their own academic interests. after getting sufficient exposure that sparks their own self-generated authorship in these practices they may return back to a dsm school (von duyke, 2013). responsive and critical authorships beyond communal life (summerhill) seem to be neglected and depreciated in certain libertarian dsm schools. finally, i wonder if the success of dsm schools, evident in critical thinking of many dsm students and alumni, may in part be based on utilization and complementation of the middle class parenting famously studied by lareau. lareau found that while working class parents view their goal in supporting their children’s “natural growth”, middle class parents define their parenting goals as “concerted cultivation” through organizing special extracurricular activities for their children (lareau, 2003). it seems that dsm schools promote the natural growth in a rich learning environment at their schools, while the middle class parents of their students provide the concerted cultivation at home. although the libertarian approach subordinates education to the natural growth of agency and socialization into a democratic society18, it is still amazing that almost all of its students eventually and voluntarily choose some form of engagement in academic learning. this sharply contrasts with the working class cultural upbringing described by lareau who characterizes it as “accomplishment of natural growth” (lareau, 2003), which is somewhat similar to the libertarian approach focusing on promotion of natural agency through autonomy. however, the working class cultural upbringing does not lead to children’s voluntary engagement in academic studies on any systematic basis, while the students’ voluntary engagement in academic studies has been demonstrated by the libertarian approach. the biggest difference between them is that the libertarian approach promotes students’ democratic self-governance heavily shaped by the adults while a working class cultural upbringing does not. however, it is unclear whether and if so how this difference may contribute to the difference in children’s self-engagement and self-commitment to academic learning. i wonder if the libertarian approach and/or middle-class cultural upbringing of most of its students, which is focused on “concerted cultivation” (lareau, 2003), have hidden non-negotiable impositions exploited by the dsm schools. it can be possible (and verified by at least one tcs high school student) that peers, college expectations (and anxieties), and the fact that the place is called “school” creates hidden nonnegotiable impositions about academic learning and even academic curricula in the dsm for mostly middle-class students who may set the communal culture of the place. more research is needed to address this interesting phenomenon. anarchist approach of the open syllabus education i the concept of the open syllabus education (ose) is relatively simple. instead of having all educational decisions being made by the teacher, school, and state as it is normally done in the close syllabus education (cse), in ose all educational decisions – what to study, when, how, why, how to 18 cf. greenberg, “in effect, we have designed our ideal information age school – the sudbury model school. it’s a place where, in order to provide an environment where children can grow to be effective adults, we allow nature to take its course. we allow kids to grow up freely, and do everything we can to get out of the way, giving support only when they ask for it. it’s a place where children are allowed to do whatever they want, because we know that they’re trying with all their might to become independent adults.” http://www.sudval.com/essays/092011.shtml legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a196 assess it if at all, and how to organize it (including the decision of whether or not to use ose) – are made by the students themselves, “a good school is the freedom to establish its own direction” (farber, 1970, p. 39). the ose approach is not new and apparently runs rather long in history and in diverse places and settings from socratic dialogues, especially in meno, (plato & bluck, 1961), to modern “socrates café” (phillips, 2002), “learning circles” organized by prisoners of the south african apartheid (mandela, 1995), calls for “deschooling society” and “educational networks” (illich, 1983), calls for learning from and with students (rancière, 1991), homeschooling (llewellyn, 1998), “empowerment of students” (farber, 1970; shor, 1996), and so on. recently my colleagues ana marjanovic-shane, mark smith, and i have joined similar efforts by scott richardson, who started his ose pedagogical experimentation before us (marjanovic-shane & matusov, 2012, october; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, march; smith & correa, 2012, february). so far, in our own ose practice in higher education, my colleagues and i have distinguished two forms of ose: anarchist and communitarian. in contrast to the libertarian approach of the democratic school movement, in the anarchist approach, the role of the teacher is viewed as more active, more collaborative, more dialogic, more critical, and more educational. the ose teacher is seen as a tour guide to a foreign country on an invited journey with the students. the ose teacher feels responsible for providing an initial curricular map of what is possible to study, supporting the students’ inquiries and choices, bringing alternative ideas and their sources, engaging the students in testing their own and other people’s ideas, evaluating their own values, validating their contributions, offering his or her suggestions, and so on. in other words, the ose teacher is not afraid to impose his or her guidance; however, this imposition is mostly negotiable and suggestive. the final word always remains with the students, seeing the students as the ultimate and “final authority for their own learning” (klag, 1994). in the libertarian approach, educational suggestions initiated by the teacher often seen as inappropriate curricular impositions or calling for “entertainment” of the students (von duyke, 2013). also, in contrast to the libertarian approach, in the anarchist approach, ose students may opt out from the ose and demand a closed curriculum unilaterally designed by the teacher, which will be still ok in the anarchist ose. although libertarian educators may support non-libertarian educational institutions as legitimate educational alternatives to their own schools for those students (and parents) who have chosen them, it is doubtful that libertarian educators of dsm would allow their students to impose non-libertarian practices in their school such as grades, mandatory attendance of classes not freely chosen by the students, no democratic government, and so on (at least, these libertarian educators would probably move away). as an anarchist educationalist, farber points out, “if schools are free, some of them may choose to renounce a part of their freedom. there may be students who prefer to be dictated to. for all i know there may always be students who want to be graded daily and threatened with probation, dismissal and so on, just as there may always be persons who want to be flogged and will no doubt always find other persons willing to do it. it is certainly not my wish to prevent them” (farber, 1970, p. 42). students who choose to opt out from ose by demanding a conventional education (or some other) are still viewed as being a part of (anarchist) ose as they design their education in that way. i call this approach “anarchist” because of its belief against any non-negotiable impositions, in self-organization, in the students as being the ultimate and final authority of their own learning, in dialogic and critical testing ideas, including values of the students’ own education, in its respect for the students’ non-cooperation and non-participation, and, finally, in its high value of guiding negotiable impositionssuggestions provided by ose teachers to their students. in contrast to the educational libertarian approach that sees student agency as mostly individual and natural, the educational anarchist approach views student agency as sociocultural and socially constructed, rooted in critical dialogue. i see an important difference between educational anarchist and educational libertarian positions: the educational libertarian position is much more insisting on students’ epistemological autonomy, while educational anarchism is not, focusing on critical dialogue. this legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a197 anarchist approach of the ose tries to avoid or minimize any non-negotiable impositions in education coming from the society, institution, economy, teacher, and peers as much as possible19 while promoting negotiable educational impositions in a form of suggestive initiatives brought by the ose teacher for the students’ own considerations. of course, the students are free to add their own suggestions – negotiable impositions. thus, at the end of each class meeting, ose students decide what topic they want to discuss next time: to stay longer on the same topic, to select a new topic on the curriculum map list, or propose a new topic that is not on the list. the collective decision-making, in itself, is a result of collective negotiation – it can be done by voting or by consensus or by dissenting individual students pursuing their own topics, which is another decision that has to be made by the ose students. the student attendance, grades, preparation, homework are all ultimate decisions by the ose students within the institutional constrains that the ose teachers and students find themselves. like shor (1996) and ferber (1970), our ose pedagogical experimentation has occurred in the context of conventional institution20 of higher education mostly at the undergraduate level with a high degree and long history of non-negotiable impositions on the students (and the teachers) (avila, et al., 2001). we have “lessons” (i.e., clock-based time), “classrooms” (i.e., sterile physical environment), “grades” (i.e., summative assessment), forced enrollments (i.e., forcing the students to take our classes), and students’ engagement in other, non-ose, classes in parallel to our ose classes. this is very different from the libertarian dsm many of which are private schools with much more leeway (i.e., “freerange” or “bigger cage” ose). however, surprisingly our institutions provide substantial leeway for how most oppressive educational practices can be organized. for example, these institutions may require final grades but often do not specify how these grades must be organized leaving this decision entirely to the instructors, which the ose teachers can pass to their own students who may decide to pre-emptively assign unconditional as to themselves and, thus, essentially annihilate the conventional educational practice of summative assessment. currently, after about four years of experimenting with the ose21, i have experienced several concerns with this anarchist approach. in my not very long pedagogical experience and observations, the ose generates diverse forms of learning activism, initiatives, collective decision-making, critical dialogue, and self-governance in students. it also generates diverse forms of participation and non-participation. in this regard, i see several major related pedagogical concerns with ose. first, when all learning activities are suggested and not required by the instructor and/or by peers, some or even all students may not try new learning experiences that they might find important if they had been imposed upon to try them. as one student reflected on ose after the class of mine in a solicited anonymous survey (june 2012), she had ambivalent feelings about ose, “i liked the open syllabus, but i thought it took away from some of the learning opportunities. i took a class with eugene last fall, which had more non-negotiable learning activities. i thought that the index cards, webtalk, questions, and course assignments were more useful with non-negotiable assignments, because there was more engagement with us all doing the same assignments. however, i really liked the open syllabus, because i could pick and choose which learning opportunities would benefit me for my own research interests. however, i still engaged around all the course content, because i wanted to expose myself and learn 19 in general, the ose agrees with non-negotiable impositions when the issue of the participants’ survival is at stake: be it institutional, physical, emotional, relational. of course, ose teachers would grab a student on a street to save him or her from getting hit by a car while trying to cross a street. however, they would hesitate engaging in non-negotiable impositions around educational issues unless they put the limits to their anarchist approach to impositions. 20 jim rietmulder, a founder of tcs, convincingly argues that this context of totalizing conventional educational institution in which ose educators work creates unescapable conditions of ose teachers being “benevolent dictators” who grant their students pedagogical freedoms on their own wish. these freedoms remain on the mercy of ose teachers, complicated by ose teachers’ personalities, their good will, students’ trusts in the ose teacher’s promise not to revoke their rights, and the teachers’ pedagogical mistakes that may undermine this trust (personal communication, january 2013). i tend to agree with this claim. 21 this pedagogical experimentation with ose has included deviation from the anarchist approach at times by introducing nonnegotiable learning activities unilaterally designed and imposed by the ose teachers in some of my ose classes (but not in all of them). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a198 about topics i was not familiar with.” it seems that the anarchist ose may rob students of important and valuable learning opportunities, emerging from serendipity and the teacher’s epistemological and pedagogical authority (matusov, 2007, 2009; morson, 2004), which they might experience in the conventional closed syllabus classroom or in the opening syllabus22 pedagogical designs, involving nonnegotiable imposition. at the same time, the students do not want to have these important learning experiences imposed on them anymore – i suggested that but they rejected my suggestion. some may argue that this sentiment of missed learning opportunities may be an important learning experience in itself, waking up the student’s learning agency. second, coming from conventional monologic schooling shaped by closed syllabus education, many students have been tired of “performing academics” (a student’s term) rather than learning for their own sake. in the anarchist ose environment of suggestions and learning opportunities, they may require or be tempted to take an “alienation vacation” (matusov & brobst, 2013) – i.e., minimum participation in the classroom. some educators of the free school and homeschooling movements (greenberg, 1991, 1992b; llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960) have noticed that and suggest letting students go on these alienation vacations for a while as a necessary process of school detoxification, when you quit school, do nothing academic for at least, at the absolute minimum, a week. if you wish, however, write stories or journal entries about your past and your future. dream, dream, dream. if you crave tv, watch it. if you crave sleep, indulge. allow yourself to go through withdrawal. pass no judgments. if you want to “work” on anything, work on forgiving and forgetting. forgive yourself for everything. forgive your teachers for everything. forgive your parents for everything. forget the lies school taught-forget that learning is separate from your life, that you can’t teach yourself, that you are defined by your grades, and all other such nonsense. detoxify. purge (llewellyn, 1998, p. 126). this is a difficult, if not impossible, advice to follow for a student and an instructor in the context of 15-week semester with other conventional classes demanding “academic performance” rather than selfinitiated learning, especially when it may take months and years before full school detoxification and recovery occurs for some students as neill reported in one case (neill, 1960, p. 2). meanwhile, in the context of the anarchist ose, the need for school detoxification and alienation vacation may rob some students of important learning opportunities and i seemed to observe these cases. third, i wrote “i seemed to observe” my students in their alienation vacation because coming from traditional monologic teaching where all students are expected to participate in the same required learning activities at high levels of engagement, i am not sure if i may have wrong pedagogical expectations and desires about students’ self-generated participation in their own learning when such opportunities are given to them. at the time of taking the class or just because of the students overall learning trajectory and interests, some students may require more peripheral participation (if at all) than other students. life outside of formal education institutions encourages and often legitimizes learners’ diverse forms and intensities of participation and non-participation in activities. as one ose student wrote to me in an email explaining her frequent missing the class, in short, i am having a terrible semester. i have bit off more than i can chew in having a part time job and taking 2 honors classes as well as extracurricular activities. when i miss class it is because i am either working extra hours at work or i am cramming for my next exam. i realize i have not been the ideal participant in our class but i can assure you i do really enjoy our educxxx class and the topics we discuss. urban education is a passion of mine and i looked forward to this class until i became so stressed this semester. it probably obvious to you, 22 this pedagogical design involves a gradual or abrupt transition from closed syllabus education to, or in direction to, open syllabus education within a class term without directly starting with ose. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a199 as well as to myself, that because of our open syllabus and "no grades" policy, that i have used this class as a cushion for my heavy workload. i apologize because i know i have taken advantage of what was supposed to beneficial to my learning and our class. i don't know how to make up for the class time that i have missed except to tell you that i really have enjoyed what i have been there for and that i have tried to use webtalk to understand the days i missed. i hope you see that when i am in class i enjoy participating and have a lot to offer23 (email, november, 2012). on the one hand, i try to work hard on breaking the conventional assignment-based chronotope of education by diversifying mediums and forums of education to incorporate students with diverse educational needs and life circumstances. on the other hand, i remain torn between these possibilities legitimizing low involvement of some students and my concern that i need to improve my guidance to engage these students (and stop rationalizing my teaching failures) or that the anarchist ose may not work for some students with low will – but, alternatively, how can a student’s will be developed if his or her opportunities for taking control of his or her learning is constantly taken away by imposed requirements?! am i accepting and respecting students’ non-participation and non-cooperation or am i accepting my own pedagogical laziness, conservatism, and impotence? do i have a wrong pedagogical desire of making all of my students like and highly engage in our class or am i trapped by conventional educational institutional practices and relations that i uncritically accept? am i trapped by my educational anarchist ideology, dear to my ideological heart, that i am in denial of its insensitivity and ineffectiveness for some of my ose students? where are limitations of my responsibility for students’ education when i accept that the students are the highest authority for their own learning? should some graduate approaches like opening syllabus education, where learning freedoms increase gradually through the course by promoting choices and engaging students in decision making about the organization of the class and their learning, be used for these students? giving a lot of freedom at once to people with a long history of educational oppression by the totalizing non-negotiable impositions may be as detrimental, if not deadly, for the students’ learning agency as giving unlimited food to people who experienced prolonged and intense starvation. as we do not give too much food to starving people, should initial freedom of learning be limited for students who are severely traumatized by conventional oppressive schooling? some students may desire to be forced while disliking being forced or imposed, which can be a paradox in itself (or, alternatively, a vicious circle of distrust in and surrendering one’s own agency). genuine education may require leisure from the students as a way of their living free from most necessities. as the student’s quote above shows, when even highly willing and motivated students get freedom from imposition they may use this freedom to do things that are imposed on them by somewhere else and by somebody else rather for their own educational self-actualization that they may highly desire. the ancient greeks, who invented the term “school,” defined it as “leisure”. “school” means “leisure” in greek (arendt, 1958). ancient greek citizens were free from major necessities and labor thanks to slavery. to be a citizen of a greek city-polis, one should not be just a free citizen (i.e. not a slave) but also be free from labor (arendt, 1958; gorz, 1989). in contrast, modern society and modern schools are necessity-based. we do many things in our everyday life because often it is required by circumstances of our life or by other people. although conventional education has freed children from physical labor and chores, it invented imposed assignments that colonize a huge part of the students’ lives. it may be that the anarchist open syllabus is incompatible with our current society. however, there are signs that the modern economy with its increasing robotization and automation leads to diminishing need for human 23 in my view, the student’s experience of deprioritizing her desired learning and reflection on it, promoted and supported by the instructor, is very important for students’ development of her learning agency as an active learner. the student volunteered to discuss this point in class at the end of the semester when a visitor came and asked the ose students about their experiences with the ose. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a200 labor and that a leisure-based society may again emerge but this time without slavery (ford, 2015). it may be that the anarchist open syllabus is an education of the future. fourth, by encouraging the students’ personal learning activism and meaningfulness of their learning, the anarchist ose pedagogical design encourages the students to initiate personal learning journey and self-assignments that may not have a collective focus for the class. as one of my former ose students, who took two of my classes – one, first, with an opening syllabus education design (educxxx) and the other, second, with an open syllabus education design – wrote in his/her anonymous survey after the class (2012-06), i believe my answer (limited open syllabus) was the way educxxx was run (if not, that what i intended my answer to be). in educxxx i like that we had certain assignments "forced" on us, but the topic, scope, etc. was always at our discretion. i think "forcing" some assignments provides an opportunity for shared experiences and classroom culture. this semester seems a little disorganized in the sense that everyone was doing what was best for them (which i like), but what is best for you might not necessarily be what is best for the group. i guess i am struggling with how best to balance the individual as a member of a group?? i also like voting on the topics from a wide variety of possibilities so we could explore what interested us instead of what you thought would interest us. i wish more professors provided that opportunity (but i understand why they don’t b/c it's a lot of work for you!) i missed webtalk this semester as well, so i wish that was "forced" in some way. some successes of the anarchist ose may lead to diffusion of the collective focus of the class, which by itself can be less problematic as individual foci may be no less important – actually some of my ose students complain of too much collective pressure in our class demanding the shared focus on a particular curricular topic that they might not be interested in or prioritized24 (for this reason i envy the libertarian approach of dsm in which students do not seem to have this collective curricular pressure). however, as the student pointed out, some learning activities and practices may require a critical number of participants for its success (e.g., forum work, providing peer reviews and peer feedback, discussions). there seems to be a need for this student for impositions that create social possibilities for dialogue and also for freedom of content. more experimentation and investigation of ose is needed, in my view. finally, the ose students are mostly involved in intellectual internally persuasive discourse about their education rather than ontological internally persuasive discourse. the anarchist approach of the ose presents decision making processes and testing ideas mostly as intellectual choices about their own education for the students to consider before their ontological experiences, “do you want to study this topic or that next time? do you want to do a particular project or not? how do you want to make decisions in our class?” and so on. i call these choices “intellectual” because, although ose students may have past experiences with some of these choices, often these are hypothetical possibilities for them to consider25. of course, in the anarchist approach, the students ontologically experience the consequences of their intellectual decision making but they do not experience and compare diverse ontological possibilities. ontological choices of comparing and testing lived experiences of diverse educational organization by the students are usually peripheral for the students. in the anarchist approach, the ose students are usually faced with making decisions about alternative organization of their educational experiences before their alternative experiences. 24 some of my ose students started their own individual studies not unlike i saw in dsm. i encourage and academically support these studies with my guidance. 25 cf. oscar wilde’s similar criticism of (anarchist) socialism, “the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings [for constant decision making]." legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a201 communitarian approach of the ose ii visiting my ose colleague scott richardson’s graduate seminar in early december 2012 (almost at the end of scott’s university semester) made me realize that our ose approaches to non-negotiable imposition in education were somewhat different rather than simply being variations on more or less the same anarchist approach. i call the approach i saw in his ose class communitarian. i see as the most important, but not the only, difference between the anarchist and communitarian ose approaches, the fact that in the anarchist ose, the individual students’ educational and organizational decisions are mostly not imposing on each other while in the communitarian ose they are. i started suspecting the difference in our approaches when one of scott’s students shared that she found the ose organization of the class unhelpful and ineffective for her as a learner who “needs more structure and rewards.” i asked the student if she shared her concerns with the class and the instructor at some point during the semester. based on my own (anarchist) pedagogical experience with ose, i expected scott to be willing to design a more conventional educational regime for this student at her request. in the past, when i sensed similar dissatisfaction in my ose students with the ose pedagogical regime of our class, i privately offered to these students (and everybody else) an opportunity to change the pedagogical regime in whatever way the students felt comfortable with. i explicitly offer an option in which i (the teacher) impose assignments and grading on the students if this is what an individual student wants to return to, i.e. an option of conventional pedagogical regime. so far, none of my students chose this option because, according to them, even when they leaned toward it, they did not want to lose the obtained freedom of our class. however, i am always ready to create individualized plans26 as a part of the anarchist ose that almost demands the individualization of the pedagogical regime for the needs and wants of individual students. however, to my surprise scott’s students did not find my ose pedagogical practice as a “natural” response to this student’s complaints. rather they tried to convince the complaining student that she had learned in their ose class much more than she might perceive at the moment. the student replied to my suggestion for a possible individualized plan negotiated with the instructor that she did not want to be an “asshole” who would hold back the entire class from being enthusiastic about the ose27. 26 other individualized organizational variations do occur in my ose classes. 27 my colleague jim rietmulder, a founder of tcs, wrote while reading this passage, “this was a class of educators and educatorsto-be. i wonder if everybody's expectations would have been different if the class had been, say, molecular biology instead. i think education classes tend to operate on two levels, in a way that is not true of non-education classes. like all classes, education classes highlight the course material, but education classes are also self-referential or at least self-conscious. in addition to highlighting course material, they are living examples of the material under study. i wonder if that's relevant.” in my view, it is both relevant and not. it is relevant because the educational practice of our ose classes is its curriculum, in contrast to a class, let’s say, on molecular biology. in our ose classes, the students’ ontology (i.e., how they experience the class) matches the class epistemology (i.e., the students’ intellectual focus). it is not relevant as i believe that a molecular biology class can be run as ose on any level (i.e., grad, undergrad, high school or elementary school) because i believe any class can be involved in the practice of its study. somewhat similarly, my colleague robert hampel raised another related important concern, “you draw examples [of ose classes] from courses where the curriculum seems much more flexible than it is (imho!) in the science (and a few social sciences like economics). if i want to follow my own interests in physics, could i?” (personal communication, january 2013). interestingly, i personally experienced and learned about proto-ose in math and physics courses in my innovative high school in the soviet union (famous moscow school 91), probably because these subjects were under lesser ideological communist control. in those course, my teachers used ontological provocations that led students to explore the math and science curriculum (see a similar innovative pedagogical practice in teaching physics, mazur, 1997). usually, educators are concerned about the subject systematicity versus fragmentation. i see at least two issues in this concern. one issue is about the source and the nature of the subject systematicity: imposed systematicity versus emergent systematicity. the conventional pedagogical view is that the subject systematicity is rooted in the curricular subject itself (i.e., the logic of the curricular unfolding), especially when the subject is fact-based (like sciences) and not opinion-based (like humanities and art). a dialogic pedagogy view is that any curricular subject is meaning-based and thus authorial and requires emergent student-based systematicity. another issue is about the structure of the systematicity (i.e., curricular narrative — how the subject curriculum is unfolding in time of the study). a conventional pedagogical view on the systematicity structure as a linear progression from concrete to abstract (or vice versa), from simple to complex, from the fundamental (e.g., math axioms) to differentiated (e.g., math theorems), and so on. a dialogic pedagogy views the curricular narrative as biographical that is unfolding within personal interests, needs, and events. more research on this is needed. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a202 it turns out that in contrast to my anarchist ose classes where each student can legitimately make a decision only about him/herself and, thus, are viewed as individual pathfinders; in scott’s communitarian ose classes, the student group’s decisions are binding on all students. scott and his students call it, “being accountable to each other.” scott’s students imposed on each other assignments, summative assessments (i.e., real grades), attendance requirements, retributions (e.g., a student who missed a class must bring food to a next class), and so on. in the communitarian ose, educational nonnegotiable impositions are horizontal coming mostly from peers rather than being vertical coming from the school institution and/or teacher as in conventional schools. the collectively organized educational student communes of the communitarian ose remind me of the pedagogical experiments in the soviet union by anton makarenko in the 1920-1930s (makarenko, 1973) and by the communard movement in the 1970-1980s (sidorkin, 1995). one striking difference, which i have noticed, between scott’s communitarian ose class and my anarchist ose classes (both graduate and undergraduate) is a much higher degree of students’ activism, social engagement, and ownership in scott’s classes. scott starts the class with asking his students, “what are we going to do today?” after which his students take over the discussion and investigation of the inquiries at hand while scott provides important guiding challenges, exposures, and summaries. in contrast, in my anarchist ose classes, although a topic for the class is chosen by my students, they expect me to prepare a lesson for them, provoking a critical discussion and investigation of emerging inquiries with me having a firm role of the leader of the discussion. in my judgment, on average, his students, having more commitment to their own education probably through “mutual accountability,” come to class much more actively prepared than my students. i sensed their attitude demanding their own education from themselves, each other, and scott, while my ose students’ attitude is often more expecting me to provide education to them for their consumption. i envy scott’s role in his class and learning activism by his students. my anarchist ose classes seem to be focused on promoting more students’ responsive authorship through my dialogic provocations while scott’s communitarian classes seem to be focused on promoting more students’ self-generated authorship, although both types of dialogic authorship are apparently present in both types of ose classes (matusov, 2011; matusov & brobst, 2013). it can be that i’m doing my anarchist ose instruction poorly by taking over from my students and frankly talking too much in class. alternatively (or in addition), the difference may be rooted in the approaches themselves. in the anarchist ose, the teacher is equal to the students in terms of his/her power only to suggest and not to impose – students cannot impose on each other in the same way as the instructor cannot impose on them. in contrast, in the communitarian ose approach, the teacher seems to have lesser official power than the students who can impose on each other while the teacher cannot. also, peer impositions may throw the students more in social engagement and organizational and learning activism. finally (another alternative), student learning activism may take more time for development in the anarchist ose. however, i suspect that a communitarian ose teacher may have more tacit power than an anarchist ose teacher than it looks like by becoming a charismatic leader, as it happened with makarenko and the soviet communard movement, curtailing students’ independence, critical thinking, and autonomy, independence in thought and action is curtailed in makarenko's conception of the collective to such an extent that creativity ultimately is denied its most fundamental outlet-art... when one of makarenko's charges expressed a real desire to become an actor, makarenko felt duty bound to dissuade the youth. it is likely that makarenko distrusted those activities he could not control personally; his heavy hand is seen in many of the decisions made by the nominally autonomous commander's council (caskey, 1979, p. 281). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a203 having the epistemological authority of a tour guide in a foreign country (or “a bus driver,” scott’s metaphor) in the context of another authority based on peer collectivity for non-negotiable impositions, a communitarian ose teacher can quickly jeopardize check and balance of power by tacitly controlling the class and making the students “educated subjects” (i.e., making students want what the teacher wants them to want) similar to the progressive approach. in other words, in my view, a communitarian ose may not provide a check on “majority despotism,” or better to say since it does not need to be based on majority, “collectivity despotism” either shaped by the ose teacher or flying by itself coming mostly from the students as peer pressure, in which a dissenter may feel like an “asshole” and “spoilsport,” holding back the community (cf. golding, 1999; huizinga, 2009). the anarchist ose approach may also have a communitarian flavor if students choose to accept bounding democratic decision making. however, in contrast to the communitarian ose approach, in the anarchist ose approach any student can withdraw his or her consent to binding collective decision making at any time without much hassle as it happened in one of my anarchist ose classes. a spoilsport dissenter is welcomed and valued in the anarchist ose for promoting liberal democracy and critical education (marjanovic-shane, 2015, in preparation). this right of students for their own path finding creates its own, educational anarchist, collectivity based on critical dialogue of everything “becomes dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319), in which voting or a past rule can never replace critical persuasion. the right to be different, to be the other, and, thus, to leave the collectivity bind of “mutual accountability” at any time for any reason, no question asked, is the inalienable right in the anarchist ose approach and this right is probably what defines the educational anarchist approach (kukathas, 2003). why are my ose classes driven by the anarchist approach while scott’s ose classes driven by the communitarian approach? is it coming from the ose instructor or from the ose students or from both? i can be wrong in my guess to this inquiry that requires more systematic investigation but i think it is both with more responsibility coming from the ose instructor. looking back, i have noticed that scott has been using a more communitarian philosophical discourse in justifying his ose pedagogical approach while i have been using a more anarchist philosophical discourse. also, on several occasions some of my ose students wanted to punish their classmates for a lack of their engagement in the class (e.g., many absences). however, my other ose students and i actively, and so far successfully, resist this idea arguing that it would be the end of the ose because “we cannot make decisions about other people without their consent.” looking back, i have also noticed occasions when the anarchist nature of my ose classes was defined by my students first. in one of my graduate ose seminars, a student refused to accept a prior collective class decision voted in by a majority and demanded a vote (with my support28) on making all collective decisions to be suggestive and not binding. the class voted on her proposal unanimously approving it and, thus, inaugurated the anarchist ose, turning away from an essentially communitarian ose. since these tensions usually occur later in the semester, when anarchist decision making processes are firmly installed, – by seeking quaker-like consensus with everybody having the right to 28 my support was basically limited to a suggestion when the class erupted in frustration and turned to me for help, “i guess we need to make a decision on rita’s proposal.” thus, i framed it as a legitimate proposal (rather than an “illegitimate coup or rebellion” or “illegitimate insubordination” to a previously adopted collective decision). i wonder what scott would do in a similar situation. scott replied, “hmmm...not sure i understand everything...my general stance in any sort of chaos (as perceived by students) is to 1) simply narrate the tensions – tell a history of sorts as to the situation they are in (so they can simply ‘see’ the situation) and 2) then throw my hands in the air and say, ‘it's your education, i think it's important for you to work out how you'll best learn...’ 3) step back say very little more in class 4) individually check-in later (not to undermine the agreements made or others, but just to reassure them that this frustrating work is worthwhile and to continue to find the best ways to advocate/articulate their learning needs), 5) make ‘light’ of the conflict by sending an email— ‘i'm so impressed with the sophistication of this issue...what you are doing is important because...’ (it is my attempt to not make it ‘personal’ between students, but ‘intellectual’). i found my role has to be positive, intellectual, and committed to each student individually as well as the community as a whole” (personal email communication, 2013-01-08). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a204 veto or by deciding only for yourself or by some other form – so far these tensions have not led to splitting the class but i can imagine this possibility in the future in the anarchist ose. in my view, this possible development is not necessary a big deal in an anarchist ose class although it may require development of new organizational and instructional forms. even more, an anarchist ose teacher may actively suggest the students splitting their learning community as the existing collectivity may be atavistic of totalizing non-negotiable imposition remained unrevised from a conventional education. i think that the communitarian ose may have a potential for more spreading and for more stability in the future as it may have easier life of being accepted by conventional educational institutions [unless it can erupt into excesses of the cult of teacher personality or totalitarian tendencies (see, for example, jones, 1972)] than the anarchist ose. in the context of conventional educational institution, the communitarian ose has much more chances to survive than the anarchist ose because, on the one hand, it provides a high quality of critical dialogue and a high level student learning activism but, on the other hand, it can be shaped by the same educational practices as the conventional educational institutions but coming from the ose students’ democratic decision making. in contrast to the anarchist ose and in accord with conventional institutions, the communitarian ose non-negotiably imposes important learning activities on all students through its peer communal pressure and demands. to some degree, the communitarian ose looks like an organic hybrid between a conventional education and democratic education focusing on critical dialogue. the question that i have is at what point the imposed collectivity of “mutual accountability” starts limiting critical dialogue, shielding some truths from being testable, – is it unavoidable in the communitarian ose? does it happen in scott’s classes as it did happen in makarenko’s institutions and the communard education movement in the soviet union? dialogic objectivizing approach: a proposal finally, i want to share and propose for your consideration my half-baked ideas about another promising approach to the issue of non-negotiable imposition in education that my colleague mark smith and i (matusov, 2009, ch. 8) have developed in our critical response to vivian paley’s thought-provoking and insightful book you can’t say you can’t play (paley, 1992). paley, a teacher of 4-year old preschoolers was concerned with some of her, mostly minority, kids being systematically excluded from other children’s play. she masterfully engaged her children in a discussion of this problem but then suddenly abandoned the collective search for a solution because she realized her urgent responsibility for social justice as a preschool teacher. criticizing paley’s abrupt and, arguably, authoritarian shift to totalizing non-negotiable imposition of the forced inclusion rule, “you can’t say you can’t play” on her preschoolers, we proposed more acceptable alternatives that we called “dialogic objectivizing.” bakhtin defined objectivizing by treating other people as objects of one’s actions rather than as addressees in a dialogue (bakhtin, 1999). thus, on the first glance, our concept of “dialogic objectivizing” sounds like a misnomer, a contradiction in terms. dialogic objectivizing involves non-negotiable imposition in order for the person to evaluate ontologically, through his or her experiences, what diverse ontological conditions he or she prefers and why, dialogic objectivizing is tricking (manipulative forcing) a person into testing his or her person-idea. for example, when i (eugene matusov, the first author of this chapter) was a 5-year old child my parents wanted me to taste smoked fish that smelled and looked not appealing for me. so i refused to try. then, my parents decided to bribe me by offering a chocolate candy, i liked a lot, if i ate one smoked fish. after some hesitation, i made a bite and… i found that i liked the smoked fish. i ate one fish after another without any bribe. this case is arguably dialogic objectivizing. although i was forced into a new ontological situation of tasting initially unattractive food, my parents gave me safe retreat if the experiment had failed and i would not have liked the legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a205 smoked fish. this is very different than in a case of monologic social engineering29 when people are tricked or manipulatively forced into a new ontological situation from which they do not have a safe escape anymore. for example, in sánta’s (1986) fiction novel “the fifth seal” the action occurred during the wwii hungarian nazi terror in the fall of 1944. one character, a photographer and a former soldier from the russian front injured in the war, decided to “trick” four local “lay” people whom he met occasionally in a pub into moral consideration of their own “empty” being. he wanted them to stop mental chewing of their everyday prosaic trifle issues (or at least this was how he perceived their conversations) that highly irritated him and instead to turn themselves toward consideration of “ultimate questions” of morality. for this purpose, he socially engineered their ontological being – he reported on them to the hungarian version of german gestapo that they had shared several anti-government jokes and spoken disrespectfully about the hungarian nazi regime. the four pub attendees were immediately arrested. they indeed faced with ultimate questions of morality in the nazi prison and were forced to make their moral choices on a threshold of their physical and moral life. in this extreme case, photographer’s social engineering was very successful. monologic social engineering canalizes ontological being of people to pattern their person-ideas in a certain, often predesigned, way (cf. building a "new soviet man" as a project of social engineering in the stalinist ussr, van der veer & valsiner, 1991). it does not provide any choice to people (or provides only fake choices). it is important to notice that the photographer trapped his victims without any loophole of a safe escape or return to the previous circumstance of their prosaic everyday life which always gives a genuine choice (unfinalizing) to the participants. in our view, in this important moment of absence of any trap dialogic objectivizing is different from monologic social engineering (matusov, 2009, pp. 250-251). smith and i suggest two types of dialogic objectivizing: 1) temporal, in which students are imposed to experience two or more different ontological conditions for their future evaluation sequentially in time (my fish example is like that) and 2) spatial, in which students are presented with two or more different ontological conditions for their future evaluation in diverse spaces, “when people are tricked [or made] into a new ontological locale so they can freely compare and choose lives in the old and new ontological locales” (p. 260). the latter is illustrated in paley’s book by her teaching aide, “who set a play inclusive rule in her backyard for neighborhood children: the children could come and play in her backyard only if they allow other kids to play. thus, they had a choice either to accept the inclusive rule or to go elsewhere to play having their exclusion right” (matusov, 2009, p. 274). thus, in dialogic objectivizing, imposition is non-negotiable locally by making students try alternative ontological conditions; while globally it remains negotiable because at the end of the day, the students remain the final authority for their own education as they made an informative decision about their preferences for these alternative conditions (or for moving away from all of them or for designing new ontological conditions). non-negotiable imposition of dialogic objectivizing seems to help to overcome the limitations of exclusively negotiable impositions of the anarchist, communitarian, and libertarian approaches as it can provide students with opportunities to try something new that they may not try otherwise, with serendipity of discovering something important and attractive on the periphery of their new experiences, with making ontological choices, with experiencing collective focus in learning activities, and with utilizing the teacher’s epistemological and ontological authority. it seems also to overcome limitations of the totalitarian and capitalist approaches as it promotes ontological and intellectual internally persuasive discourse in education and about the students’ education and nurtures the students’ agency and respects the students’ autonomy (on the global, but not local, scale). one big challenge i see on a way of implementing and trying the dialogic objectivizing approach is to design positive incentives, attractive to the students (like my parents bribing me with chocolate candies to make me try smoked fish when i was little), that can trick and make all (or some?) students all 29 cf. rousseau. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a206 the time (often? sometimes?) accept temporal or spatial non-negotiable impositions. currently, in conventional education, incentives are either negative — involving disruption of students’ relations with their parents, pressure by peers or the teacher, limiting access to the next level of educational institutions, denying credentials necessary for desired jobs, expulsion, retention, threats, suspensions, and so on, — or positive but limited in effectiveness – praises, stickers, token economy, and so on (sidorkin, 2002, 2009). to address this problem, sidorkin suggests using two major positive incentives: a) teachers can offer their students extra-curricular socialization, as many sport coaches and some teachers do, and b) monetary compensation for students’ cooperation with the teacher’s unconditional and unilateral demands. although i am very sympathetic with sidorkin’s search for positive and effective incentives for teachers’ non-negotiable imposition in education, so far i have found his interesting suggestions impractical for my particular teaching circumstances of conventional university education. based on the student’s comments above i would incentivize collective action/assignments and even some content areas, but like my fish example, there ought to be a loophole so if students don’t like it after a period of forced engagement, they can drop it. equally, if taken up, the incentives should drop off as unnecessary. unfortunately, so far i cannot think of good alternatives as i am eager to start designing and testing the dialogic objectivizing approach to non-negotiable imposition in education in my own pedagogical practice. conclusions it is apparent that there are diverse approaches that define and promote the particular values of good education. thus, for example, the totalizing, capitalist, and progressive approaches to nonnegotiable imposition to education assume the societal unilateral control over the educational curriculum; while the libertarian approach insists on the student’s autonomous decision on the curriculum (unless the student chooses to surrender it to the teacher). the anarchist, communitarian, and dialogic objectivizing approaches focus more on collaboration between the teacher and the students. in contrast to the three former approaches, the three latter approaches – the libertarian, anarchist, communitarian, and dialogic objectivizing – imply more diversification of education with its overall goals focusing on education as praxis (i.e., aristotle’s term for activity in which its final goals, values, and qualities are defined and emerge in the activity itself) and argue for philosophical pluralism in education. the totalizing, capitalist, and progressive approaches apparently view education as poïesis (i.e., aristotle’s term for activity in which its final goals, values, qualities, and curricula are pre-defined in advance of the activity itself) and fight for their own philosophical monopoly on education. the anarchist and dialogic objectivizing approaches highly value unfettered critical dialogue among the students and the teacher about value of the education itself and involved studied practices of what marjanovic-shane and i call praxis of praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). in contrast to the totalizing approach (and to some degree communitarian approach), the capitalist and progressive approaches (and the other three) call for more sensitivity for students’ needs and against pedagogical violence. the progressive, libertarian, anarchist, communitarian, and dialogic objectivizing approaches are concerned with students’ alienation from their learning and, in contrast to sidorkin’s capitalist approach, agree that this alienation can be successfully addressed. these disagreements and alliances among the approaches may arguably constitute the complex politics in the educational sphere and can also create interesting hybrids and synergies as well as tensions – to be studied in the future. another related issue is how all these approaches interact with local and global cultures and cultural tensions, “is non-negotiable imposition in education a must for certain kinds of societies, certain modes of production, and the need of certain kind of laborers? could attempts to resist a different kind of education be attempts to resist a certain direction to which policy makers want education to go for the benefit of certain structures?” (nermine abd elkader, personal communication, 2012-11-19). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a207 finally, one important and relevant issue left out by the article, but still demanding our discussion, is non-negotiable imposition of education on people per se. the majority of modern societies nonnegotiably impose education on all of its citizens. socrates famously insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living (plato, 1997). kukathas disagrees, arguing that people may have a good life, defined by living according to their conscience, without critical examination of their life, practices, or the world and that non-negotiable imposition of education on these people constitutes illegitimate violence. even more, critical education may undermine and destroy their good life (kukathas, 2001b, 2003). in contrast to the totalizing, capitalist, progressive, and communitarian approaches, the libertarian, anarchist, and dialogic objectivizing approaches all value the legitimacy of students’ non-participation and noncollaboration with the teacher and with the idea of education. however, so far and as far as i know, only the libertarian approach has fully practiced this principle in life (greenberg, 1991, 1992b; neill, 1960). even more, i have sensed that the libertarian approach is less concerned with the education project altogether focusing instead on “a radical approach to child rearing” (summerhill, neill, 1960), participation in democracy, democratic institutions, and democratic governance (sudbury valley school, greenberg, 1992a), or civic engagement in “scaled down society” (the circle school, rietmulder, 2009). arguably, the value and need for “education” can be overrated and artificially30 and illegitimately imposed on all people in modern society. the society may need to provide resources for education for all but not necessarily educational control or overall non-negotiable imposition of education (kukathas, 2001a; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2011). more discussion and investigation of this important issue of limitations and (un)desirability of education is needed. references allen, b., getzels, p., & getzels, h. g. 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(1981). learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs (morningside ed.). new york: columbia university press. legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110 | vol. 3 (2015) a211 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a32 an integrated theory of thinking and speaking that draws on vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth university of victoria, canada abstract vygotsky’s social-psychological theory of human development and bakhtin/vološinov’s theory of language and the dialogical nature of thought have received increasing interest in the educational research literature but tend to remain unrelated even where co-citation occurs. in this article, i first present a model that integrates the fundamentally common features in the two approaches and present a table with the correspondences of the theoretical terms across four european languages; the model thereby integrates the psychological and sociological dimensions at the heart of the two approaches. i then articulate and elaborate on six main issues that are relevant to and have implications for research: (a) sensual life as integrative unit, (b) self-movement and development, (c) the nested relations between activity and living utterance, (d) signification, (e) vernacular as the origin and locus of development, and (f) unit analysis. keywords: vygotsky; bakhtin circle; cultural-historical activity theory; sociocultural theory; socio-historical theory; dialogism; materialist dialectics; unit analysis wolff-michael roth is lansdowne professor of applied cognitive science in the faculty of education at the university of victoria. his research is concerned with knowing and learning across the life span, especially as it relates to mathematics and science. his research approach is transdisciplinary, and he publishes his research in many different scholarly fields. recent publications include what first-person method (sense, 2012), passibility: at the limits of the constructivist metaphor (springer, 2011), and geometry as objective science in elementary classrooms (routledge, 2010). he can be contacted at: maclaurin building a567, university of victoria, victoria, bc, v8p 5c2, canada. email: mroth@uvic.ca issn: 2325-3290 (online) integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a33 introduction the relation of thought to word is not primarily a thing but a process, a movement from thought to word and back—from word to thought. this relationship represents, in the light of psychological analysis, as a developing process, which moves through a series of phases and stages and undergoes all those changes that, due to the essential characteristics, may be called as development in the true sense of this word (vygotskij, 2005, p. 962). the purpose of this article is to articulate a model of cognition, thinking and speaking, and its grounding in cultural-historical activity theory (a. n. leont’ev, 1983), dialogism (vološinov, 1930), social psychology (vygotskij, 2005), and psycholinguistics (a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971; mikhailov, 1976). the model is intended to provide a framework for scholars working in different european countries and root languages for the translation and integration of discourses all too often difficult to make because of linguistic boundaries and differences. whereas scholars already recognize the integral relation between communication and cognition (e.g., sfard, 2008), neologisms such as “commognition” may not at all be required given that the field has inherited a common framework for understanding communication as cognition. moreover, the commognition framework lacks some essential features for understanding cognition that are already present in its historical antecedents. what is more, the model integrates ideas from scholars that are sometimes placed in opposing camps: vygotsky, grounded in dialectics, and bakhtin, emphasizing dialogue. although assigned to different camps, vygotsky and bakhtin do not appear to be so far apart on many issues. in a section of thought and language (vygotskij, 2005) where the scholar focuses on the changes of signification in the living process of verbal thinking, he provides a description of a continuous coming and going that relates two processes, thinking and speaking, themselves manifestations of a higher process, word-signification [značenie slova]. vygotsky does not say that one of the processes constitutes a dialectical inversion of the other; instead he emphasis the back and forth between the processes. this back and forth itself is a developing (rather than constant) process. as a result of this coming and going, a thought, which begins as something vague, develops into a fully articulated idea. the word, for vygotsky, is not an expression of thought; rather, thought becomes itself only in speaking, with the word. this is to say, in vygotsky, speaking, the voice, never is cut off from the idea. and this is fundamentally the position bakhtin expounds generally but specifically in the work dedicated to the russian author dostoevsky: the idea, in dostoyevsky, never is cut of from the voice” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 177). the idea develops out of the dialogical relation of voices. in this initial sketch, we therefore see the same fundamental idea underlying the way in which vygotsky and bakhtin conceive of the relationship between thinking and speaking. it has been suggested that the educational research literature has forgotten the legacy of l. s. vygotsky—the role of his work in shaping cultural-historical activity theory (roth & lee, 2007). but, i suggest here, much more has been forgotten: the fundamental commonalities that exist between his work and the work of the circle around m. m. bakhtin (including v. n. vološinov and p. n. medvedev). there are scholars who dispute these commonalities (e.g., matusov, 2011), which, because it is cutting off an important voice, leads to a missing out on the implications thereof for educational research and the study of learning, cognition, development, personality (identity), motivation, interest, and so on. rather integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a34 than expounding on the incompatibility of the ideas and theories that were developed, on the one hand, in the social psychology founded by vygotsky and a. n. leont’ev, and, on the other hand, among those scholars emerging from literary theory in the bakhtin circle, we might be better off allowing their voices to speak to each other1. perhaps because of the view that these sets of ideas and theories do not sit together quite easily, there appears to be little development-generating dialogue between the two strands. this position may have been substantiated by a most cogent analysis of the ontological differences between the dialectical position of vygotsky and the dialogical position of bakhtin (wegerif, 2008)2. that study provides textual evidence that apparently points to a monologic ontology of vygotsky, which, if this were the case, would be positioned diametrically opposite to the fundamentally dialogical position that bakhtin espouses. however, the article considerably underestimates the role of societal relations— always two-sided phenomena—in the work of vygotsky and his recognition that every beginning is dialogical. moreover, the ever-changing overarching process that vygotsky denotes by “wordsignification3 [značenie slova]” (vygotskij, 2005) is a continuous coming and going between the two everchanging processes of thinking and speaking4. his fundamentally spinozist position “was not understood by the majority of his followers,” so that it is “especially sad and tragic” that it “was never developed by the author himself” (mikhailov, 2001, p. 19). the result of it would have been a theoretical framework that recognizes a single process of mutual generation and determination of self and other: “for the very existence of mind is possible only at the borderline where there is a continual coming and going of one into the other” (p. 20, original emphasis). thus, vygotsky’s “work coincided in no way by accident with revolutionary breakthroughs in the theory of language . . . and in the theory of verbal creativity (m. m. bakhtin)” (p. 15, emphasis added). 1 within the text, the names of russian authors are spelled as is common in english; in-text references use the name as it appears on the book title or in the scholarly form of the romanization of russian. russian words in the text also use the scholarly form (e.g., š for ш instead of sh, č for ц instead of ch). 2 much is being said about bakhtin’s own statements concerning the incompatibility between dialectics and dialogism. this artic le is not the place for developing a full argument that bakhtin himself did not truly appreciate dialectics and its underlying commonality with his ideas denoted by the adjective “dialogic.” it may be noted parenthetically however that in one of his examples, bakhtin (1929/1994) opposes two contradictory statements, “life is good” and “life is not good” (p. 183 in the english translation). he suggests that these statements constitute logical, dialectical oppositions between which there cannot be a dialogue. bakhtin does not appear to realize that neither hegel nor the most eminent specialist on dialectical logic, e. il’enkov, would have expected there to be a dialogical relation. a logical contradiction is an external contradiction, not a dialectical relation of an internal contradiction (il’enkov, 1974). in dialectics, there cannot be a relation between things that are external to each other. thus, in dialectics, the point “is not to reduce an external contradiction to an inner one,” which is exactly what bakhtin does in his example, “but in deriving the former from the latter and thus to understand both in their objective necessity.” chapter 2 of dialectical logic (il’enkov, 1974) would be especially instructive to readers interested in pursuing these ideas. most likely, bakhtin is confusing the internal contradiction of a thing with the external contradiction between its manifestations. physicists, too, made this confusion until the advent of quantum mechanics, when they opposed the wave and particular manifestations of light (e.g., sève, 2005). wave and particle cannot be just stuck together “in the same statement” to lead to a dialectical model. the unit lies elsewhere—in the quantum mechanical formulation—and the wave and particle characters are but external manifestations of the inner difference of the phenomenon of light with itself. physicists talk about the “complementarity” of the two descriptions, which is also the developing theme of the conversation involving the three physics students reported here. 3 the russian značenie often is translated as “meaning.” “meaning,” however, is a highly problematic word not in the least because more than 20 different “meanings of ‘meaning’” have been identified (nöth, 1990). moreover, from a pragmatic perspective, the going usage of the term frequently is more consistent with a primitive understanding of the way language functions (wittgenstein, 1953/1997) so that it may just as well be stricken from use (wittgenstein, 2000). in this article, i follow the conventions of many translators to use the following english, german, russian, and french equivalence: signification <> bedeutung <> značenie <> signification (see table 1). 4 in this article, i draw on original works where possible. there is great variation in the quality of these translations, and not all of them do justice to the original. thus, the german translation of a vygotsky text, published in different versions entitled thought and language and thinking and speaking, corresponds much more closely to the original than the two english versions (which omit many passages). the french translation of a book originally published under the name of vološinov—marxism and the philosophy of language—but also attributed to bakhtin (french publication) is considered far better than the english translation (which, again, implements many modifications). integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a35 dialogical relations in conversation: a concrete case there is little research that integrates bakhtin’s dialogism and vygotsky’s cultural-historical position—although there has been at least one attempt to bring together cultural-historical activity theory and dialogism (r. engeström, 1995). another scholar, while recognizing the importance of the cultural and historical in vygotsky’s work, goes a different route emphasizing the “social” rather than the “societal” in the line of work that vygotsky legacied (wertsch, 1994). those scholars who do employ culturalhistorical activity theory—especially as it has been presented in the west through the work of y. engeström (1987)—rarely produce the kinds of analysis that are typical for those interested in linguistic aspects that are the focus of the bakhtin group. the reverse is also true—as exemplified in the studies by ford and wargo (2012), olry-louis, capucine, and pouliot (2012), or solomon (2012). an ethnographer interested in these issues would find that there are also differences in the cultural practices of those who conduct sociological or social-psychological or discursive psychological analyses and those interested in purely psychological analyses (conceptual frameworks, conceptual change). as a result, we have two (perhaps three, if the ideas of bakhtin and vološinov are held to be distinct) largely disconnected frameworks that appear to have very little in common and that do not appear to relate each other. not only are there deep relations between these works, but also that these relations may be the truly forgotten legacies of both traditions. most important, perhaps, is the fact that those who draw on bakhtin do not tend to use a form of data analysis consistent with the dialogical presuppositions in the work of both scholars. to ground the proposed model concretely, let us take a look at the following apparently innocuous fragment from a concept-mapping session in a high school physics class. it exhibits some fundamental features that must not be omitted from analytic consideration given the importance of the common features in the theories of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle. early on in a concept-mapping session, where three 12th-grade physics students (ken, miles, and ralf) establish the semantic relations between 16 concept words from quantum theory, we observe an exchange that consists, apart from an unrelated statement about some other aspect of classroom life, of three iterations of the same one-word locution. fragment 1  029 k: `complementarity? 030 (.)  031 r: complementary? 032 m: look around the guy  033 k: complementarity. in this fragment, we observe (hear) three occurrences of the same sound-word, twice in noun form (turns 29, 33), once as adjective (turn 31)5. we may ask what this “means,” what the purpose/function is in the conversation, or whether the signification of the word changes/remains the same? let us take a closer look. the question mark in turn 29 indicates that the pitch (intonation) is rising toward the end of the locution, which is typical for the first part of question–reply pairs. the second part of the pair contains the same sound-word also with rising pitch. that is, a question would have been followed by another question. in turn 33, we find a second part to the offered question in turn 31. it 5 turn 32 is part of parallel conversations that these students have at the time, about having been playing sports, sweating, and racism. interested readers will find extensive, bakhtinian analyses of these conversations elsewhere (roth, 2009). integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a36 consists of the same sound-word but this time articulated with falling pitch (indicated by a period “.”), as this is typical for constative statements. we may gloss a possible hearing of this conversational fragment in this way: – what is complementarity? – are you asking me about complementary? – yes, i am asking you what is complementarity. in this situation, we have what conversation analysts refer to as a repair sequence. it is part of a larger conversation, itself integral to the task at hand: produce a concept map using given concepts inscribed on paper slips. this task, as task, is itself situated within a larger activity relevant to society: its reproduction (roth & lee, 2007). to understand what is going on in fragment 1, we need to bring into the analysis—and, therefore, into the theory of speech activity—the situation: we cannot merely do a linguistic (structural, content) analysis of the words that appear in the transcribed text. from the latter perspective, nothing is happening as the same word has been said three times. but the formal properties of the word, the significations indicated in a dictionary, are actually much less of relevance here than are other aspects. only the first aspect may be said to be about the objective signification of the word, which their task asks these students to determine through (some of) the ways in which the word can be combined into statements with the other terms that they have been provided with at the beginning of the task. in uttering the sound-word with rising intonation (turn 29), ken is articulating the first part of a question–reply sequence—here concerning the signification of the word (bakhtin, 1965/1990). ralf, in articulating the same word, both replies and raises a question; ken, in articulating the same word, replies and thereby opens up for the continuation of the conversation, which may be the search for how to relate “complementarity” to other words. here we observe one of the crucial roles of intonation: it tells us how we have to hear a locution—as question, statement, command, complaint, or in some other situationally relevant way. this aspect tends to get lost when researchers use their own competencies to hear something as a question—even if the interaction participants were not treating it as such—and place a question mark at the relevant place. educational researchers further tend to neglect that ralf is not just dumping the contents of his mind into the public forum but that he is taking up, and therefore evaluating, the preceding locution (bakhtin [medvedev], 1978), which is in fact the internal engine that drives the development of speech activity generally and its moments, the individual utterances (understood as an irreducible social phenomenon) specifically (vološinov, 1930; vygotskij, 2005). moreover, the same locution also sets up the next contribution, which, again, constitutes a reply and evaluation. each locution, therefore, is a constitutive and irreducible moment of two turns at talk: the turn pair it completes and the turn pair it begins6. we observe the movement internal to the conversation: it develops as each locution spawns a reply. in fact, locution and reply belong together, because we do not understand the inner dynamic of the conversation unless we investigate how a second member of a turn pair relates to the first: a locution is a question only when there is a reply; it is an invitation if there is an acceptance; and it is an insult when the recipient expresses being hurt. thus, the pairs 29/31 and 31/33 are different: the first pair rendering problematic what is at issue (the theme), and the second settling the issue. from the perspective that vygotsky and the bakhtin circle apparently have developed independently—but based on the same marxist underpinnings—this movement is the most central aspect that characterizes life and living phenomena: activity, speaking, thinking, and individual and cultural-historical development. ultimately, 6 in holistic reasoning, the moment is a constitutive and irreducible part of a whole, which it manifests in a one-sided way. integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a37 even though there appears to be said very little in terms of science content, classroom episodes such as this one are important because, in the end, they are integral and constitutive parts of the whole process by means of which students will have developed a discourse both collectively (discourse at the classroom level) and individual psychologically (such as exhibited, for example, during examinations). scholars who situate themselves in a “socio-cultural” tradition—frequently drawing on the work of vygotsky, who rarely if ever used the term (wertsch, 1994)—often explain learning and development in terms of “‘social’ ‘constructions’” in the group or at the classroom level; such constructions are said to precede the individual construction. however, if the processes of learning and development were to occur in this manner, we would not be able to understand why students (e.g., ken, miles, and ralf), in the course of interacting, already use words or expressions or why in interaction they contribute to realizing higher psychological functions in a concrete manner. that is, we would not understand that in the very participation in a relation, learners are engaged in realizing psychological functions that socio-cultural scholars tend to ascribe to them subsequent to an intra-psychological construction. in the theoretical underpinning common to the bakhtin circle and vygotsky, however, taking and having a part in a dialogical relation with others is the origin of personal speech (ability) specifically and all higher psychological functions more generally (a. n. leont’ev, 1983; vygotskij, 2005). aphoristically we may say that the relation is the higher psychological function. scholars who ground their work in bakhtin (or his circle) often focus on language use but not on development at the situational, individual (ontogenetic), and cultural-historical (phylogenetic) levels. yet there are fundamental commonalities between the bakhtin circle and vygotsky (a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971), between the psychological ideas of the latter and the linguistic ideas of the former. understanding these commonalities is important, because the relation between the three levels is crucial for theorizing language, speech, and thought; and the flow and development of language at the individual and cultural-historical levels are the key issues to be modeled for understanding consciousness (vološinov, 1930; vygotskij, 2005). thus, for example, we have to ask three questions that, from the perspective articulated here, not only are interrelated but also mutually constitute each other: how does individual development of speech capacity arise from the unfolding classroom conversation? how does the unfolding classroom conversation develop the discourse? how are the two forms of development related not only to the present state of language but also to its historical development? how are the developments of individual speech capacities and cultural-historical development of language related? in the next section, i articulate a theoretical position built on fundamentally common aspects from the work of both scholars. details of the common conception are elaborated in the section that follows. towards a relation-based, developmental theory of thinking and speaking as a learning scientist, i am interested in understanding the relation between thinking (idea generation) and speaking in episodes such as the one presented in the preceding section. i am interested in understanding not only what the three physics students arrive at but also how they arrive at it in and through speaking to and with each other. but i am also interested in the cultural-historical evolution of living language, which arises from the fact that people actually speak it, including students (e.g., roth, 2013). how is language changed even while school students are speaking it? how are speaking, comprehension, productive activity, speech activity, individual language ability, and cultural-historical language related? the following model (figure 1) emerges when the terminologies of de saussure, vygotsky, bakhtin, vološinov, a. n. leont’ev, and a. a. leont’ev are mapped onto the same plane. table 1 provides the correspondences between key terms in the languages of the four scholars plus that of k. marx, whose ideas are taken up and explicitly referenced by vygotsky, a. n. leont’ev, a. a. leont’ev, and vološinov. the french is important, because much of what the bakhtin circle produced was a critical integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a38 reaction to the work of de saussure, which provides for the correspondences between the two languages (e.g., bakhtin, 1979; vološinov, 1930). the integration of de saussure’s linguistic terms and culturalhistorical activity theory (i.e., vygotsky, a. n. leont’ev) is provided by a. a. leont’ev in russian; he also provides the connections to marx’s german. the russian, thereby, becomes the linguistic hub for making the theoretical connections between vygotsky’s social psychology, the sociological method in linguistics (vološinov), and literature theory (bakhtin). figure 1. model of the relation between the different components in speaking and language. table 1. correspondence of key theoretical terms in the traditions of cultural-historical activity theory and dialogism russian english german french značenie signification bedeutung signification tema theme (subject, topic) thema thème (sujet) smysl sense sinn sens jazyk language sprache langue jazyk sposobnost’ (rečevix vystuplenij)a language ability sprechfähigkeit faculté de langage, parole reč' speaking sprechen dire rečevaja dejatel’nost’ speech activity sprechtätigkeit langage soznanie consciousness bewußtsein conscience dejatel’nost’ aktivnost’ activity activity tätigkeit aktivität activité activité vyskazyvanie utterance äußerung énonciation vyrašenie expression ausdruck expression obobščenie generalization (summary, abstract, brief, compilation) verallgemeinerung (zusammenfassung, auswertung, idealisierung) généralisation avološinov (1930) uses the term “otdel’nix rečevix vystuplenij [individual speech ability].” integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a39 pertaining to language, its use, comprehension, and development, everything is happening in real, affective-emotive societal relations where concrete speech activity takes place (see figure 1). speech activity itself is subordinated to and constitutive of activity (in the sense of dejatel’nost’/tätigkeit), which is societally motivated, serving a generalized, collective need (e.g., roth & lee, 2007). typical activities include farming, fishing, producing instruments, and, pertinent to the present context, schooling. activity generates and drives speech activity, which, in turn, generates and drives societally motivated activity (a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971): there is a mutually constitutive relation. it is precisely here that we find the utterance, a phenomenon that integrates interlocutors: speakers and listeners. the three physics students are realizing the activity of schooling. to understand what they say we need to view it within this minimum category that retains the qualities of societal life as a whole. when the students speak, they do not only change their own language ability but also language as a whole—as amply documented in a recent study of swiss students’ talk about technology (roth, 2013). speech activity is concretely realized through speaking and replying, which is based on comprehending, including that of the speaker who comes to know his/her thought (after the fact) in the expressions used (merleau-ponty, 1945; vološinov, 1930; vygotskij, 2005). again, there is a mutually constitutive relation, as speaking concretely realizes speech activity, but is produced in the service of the latter. in a conversation, there are interlocutors, who not merely externalize what is their own but who speak for the others using language that is not their own but has come to them from the other (derrida, 1996). to properly understand the phenomenon of speaking in the episode of the preceding section, it needs to be analyzed from the perspective of hearing, which implies comprehension. every time that the word “complementarity” is said in the episode, it is also heard; if it is not heard, then it will not affect the development of the conversation. hearing and comprehension go together: “i hear you” also is an expression that i comprehend the other. this comprehension is not simply the reception of a signal, as in information processing theories, but it is a dialogical process on the internal plane (vološinov, 1930); and, in fact, all speaking has its genetic origin in dialogical speech (vygotskij, 2005). but that hearing is simultaneous with speaking does not tend to get theorized in research focusing on language use in classroom. yet we need such a focus because inner dialogue is the psychological reflection of outer dialogue, where it has its origin both at the cultural-historical (phylogenetic) and individual developmental (ontogenetic) levels. mikhailov (2001) summarizes vygotsky’s position on language: “the subjective reality of an inner voice, born of its externalization for the other, and thus also for oneself as for the other within oneself” (p. 17, original emphasis). the generative role of speech activity in societal relations is shown in the model as the arrow from speech activity to language ability, whereby participation in the former is the origin of the latter. at the same time, language ability is a requisite in speech activity. to speak about complementarity of wave and particle in the theory of light, the three physics students require language ability; but such language ability arises in speech activity. the relation between the two is therefore constitutive. the same type of constitutive relation exists between (everyday) speech activity and language. any change in language— everyday (bakhtin, 1979, 1981), scholarly (husserl, 1939; a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971; mannheim, 2004), and aesthetic (bakhtin, rabelais)—emerges in and arises from the common speech activity in societal relations, becoming a feature of language as a structured system. simultaneously, there is always already language that serves as a resource in speech activity. as a result, we obtain a relation between language ability and language: “the relation between language as a societal phenomenon and language as a psychological phenomenon, between language as a system and language as a capacity is a dynamic relation, which manifests itself in the mutual transitions of the phenomena” (a. a. leont’ev, integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a40 1969/1971, p. 61). in cultural-historical terms, speech activity is the category that sublates and therefore mediates the two, each of which is a (one-sided) manifestation of the overarching whole. contextualizing and elaborating the model in this section, i articulate and elaborate on several theoretical underpinnings that appear in the works of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle and are implemented in the model (see figure 1). in the following, i discuss the commonalities under the aspects of (a) sensual life as integrative unit; (b) the selfmovement of life, entailing its and society’s (cultural-historical) evolution and individual development; (c) the nested relations between activity (dejatel’nost’), speech activity (rečevaja dejatel’nost’), and the living utterance, and social intercourse (relations); (d) signification, generalization, and comprehension; (e) the role of the vernacular as locus of cultural-historical and individual genetic development; and (f) unit analysis as the methodological consequence of a holistic approach to human knowing, learning, development, thinking, and speaking. the discussion of these dimensions elaborates the model proposed in the preceding section. sensual, affective life activity as holistic, integrative unit to understand a classroom situation such as the conversation of the three physics students, we require a more expansive unit than this is normally done. this unit is schooling activity, which is realized by, and constitutive of, the speech activity that we observe. as an extensive study showed, there are in this class as in any other class dimensions that exhibit the sensual, affective life; but these aspects, as a bakhtinian analysis shows, have been and continue to be suppressed (roth, 2009). affective expressions, bodily functions, humor, and other dimensions characteristic of everyday life are integral to what we know as schooling activity. undergirding the efforts of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle is the attempt to establish holistic theories of cognition, language, life, and personality, where “the relation [between intellect and affect] ‘is not as a thing but a process’” (a. a. leont’ev, in vygotskij, 2005, p. 13): actual act-performing thinking is an emotional-volitional [èmocional’no-volevoe] thinking, a thinking that intonates, and this intonation permeates in an essential manner all moments of a thought’s content. (bakhtin, 1919/1993, p. 34, original emphasis) the one who begins by separating thinking from affect forever closes the way to an explication of the causes of thinking . . . and makes conversely also impossible the investigation of the reverse action of though on the affective-volitive side [affektivnoj, volevoj storony] of psychological life. (vygotskij, 2005, pp. 678–679) both scholars agree that the word in consciousness, indissociably fused with affect, is impossible for one individual but a reality for two persons. when the analysis of speech focuses solely on the semantic aspects of speech, the emotive-affective moments of speech, “its charm, its sacred, authoritative character has become lost” (vološinov, 1930, p. 79). this also means that the purely formal analysis of speech performance “is incompatible with a historical and living understanding of language” (p. 79). thus, whereas there is recognition on the part of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle of the formal aspects of language and its relation to thinking, a true understanding of both requires situating the analysis in the fullness of life, where real people think and speak oriented by their interests, motives, and needs. the fullness of human life is expressed in society; and productive activity—which includes leisure, a form of consumption—is the minimum unit of analysis (figure 1). it is only in the context of a societally relevant activity that we can make sense of speech activity. integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a41 the underlying relations in the work of the two russian scholars derive from their common marxian underpinning of life as realized “in human sensual activity, praxis” (marx/engels, 1958, p. 533, original emphasis, underline added). thus, the essay on the philosophy of language bears marx’s name in its title (vološinov, 1930). the preface to the german translation of leont’ev (1983) states “that the marxist foundation of leont’ev’s psychological conception is not . . . merely an outer lip service and ideological accessory that could be left out without changing the substance” (p. 6). rather, this foundation “constitutes the theoretical and methodical foundation . . . that alone makes [the theory] intelligible” (p. 6). in vygotsky’s text on the crisis of psychology, there are 151 [130 in the english version] references to marx, including that psychology needs “to create its own das kapital” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 173) and that this work “is written by the method” (p. 160) to be used in psychology. his fundamental idea of a concrete human psychology is based on the marxian concept of the social nature of personality as the “set of societal relations [sobokupnost’ obščestvenn’ix otnošenij]” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 1028, original emphasis) and the societal relation as the locus and genetic origin of higher psychological functions. the name of marx does not merely figure in these works (as wegerif, 2008, recognizes): he articulates the very nature of the materialist dialectical categories. unrecognized by many western scholars is the fact that the dialectical approach is fundamentally dialogical because based on the same form of “living unresolved antagonism [čušoj nerazrešennyj antagonizm]” (il’enkov, 1959, p. 245) that characterizes dialogism, where “the other’s words are treated antagonistically [čušoe slovo ottalkivajut]” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 95) leading to a “dialogue of ‘conflicting truths’” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 75). in fact, the dialectical and the dialogical approach both model exactly the same phenomenon: change in itself rather than through outside forces, as shown below in the subsection on movement, evolution, and development. the source, in the dialectical and dialogical formulations, always is an “inner conflict [vnutrennij konflikt]” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 432), “internal contradictions [vnutrennij protivorečija]” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 233), and “internal contradictions” [vnutrennego protivorečija] (il’enkov, 1959, p. 245) that drive the “inner stages of development” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 233–234) that drive “development through inner contradictions [razvitie čerz vnutrennij protivorečija]” (il’enkov, 1959, p.270). activity, speech activity, social intercourse (relations) language lives and historically evolves in concrete verbal communication/ intercourse, neither in the abstract linguistic forms of language nor in the individual psyche of the speakers. (vološinov, 1930, p. 98, original emphasis) in the exemplifying episode, we see the conversation unfold. the three physics students manage their relations, and simultaneously are subject and subjected to these relations, by speaking and using language. their speaking does not only have one or more topics but essentially produces the relations that also are the conditions under which the activity unfolds. for example, in the little episode, they also ascertain that they are “on the same page” concerning what exactly they are talking about, here complementarity. that is, they are not just talking content; they realize schooling generally and the current task specifically. in education generally and in mathematics and science education specifically, one can notice an orientation toward the content aspect of speech. thus, educational research focuses on what is said in classrooms or on what research participants say during (clinical) interviews. this content is used to make inferences about the contents of mind (i.e., conceptions, beliefs, or interests). very little, if any, attention is given to the fact that speech is above all in order to get the attendant work done and to its role in the making of the societal situation (but see, e.g., roth, 2008). speech activity and intercourse, which realize integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a42 the societal activity at hand—rather than the content of speech—are the points of departure for understanding speaking, on the one hand, and language (ability) and their development, on the other hand (see figure 1). speech activity is the beginning and end of language in the theories of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle: without speech activity, language is dead (bakhtin) and there is no individual (cognitive) development (vygotsky). it is important to know whether speech activity realizes educational research, schooling, or a leisure activity such as an informal visit to a science museum. before it is about something, speaking is a means of intercourse in societally specific, productive activities that serve a generalized collective need: “the original function of speaking is communication. speaking is first a means of social intercourse, a means of utterance and understanding” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 675). language as a living phenomenon, which develops on both cultural-historical and individual-ontogenetic grounds, exists only in concrete verbal communication and intercourse, as vološinov states in the introductory quotation to this subsection. it is only in the role of the word in living relations that we can come to understand its role in communicating and thinking: “k. marx said that it is only when articulated in the word that a thought becomes real for another and, in parting, to oneself” (bakhtin, 1979, p. 306). moreover, it is in concrete speech activity that we find the evaluative moments of the utterance and its uptake on the part of the interlocutor, which are unavailable in the text itself but are rendered public and are communicated by means of intonation and other non-verbal communicative dimensions (bakhtin [medvedev], 1978). speech activity, itself an integral and constitutive aspect of productive (societally motivated) activity, is the hub that mediates between the individual psychological and the societal dimensions of speech. it inherently and irreducibly is a collective phenomenon, concretely realized in speaking/actively receiving (understanding). genetically, speech activity is the origin of both speech capacity and language (see figure 1). the developmental and evolutionary changes in both, however, derive from speech activity, the actual process of speaking, in the concrete utterance (vološinov, 1930). speaking, therefore, is “a means of social intercourse, a means of utterance and understanding [sredstvo vyskazyvanija i ponimanija]” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 675, original emphasis). this is why the psychologist notes at the end of his chapter on thinking and speaking that the word is impossible for the individual but a reality for two. the important dimension of speech activity is its situatedness so that speaking is a function of the situation, of concrete praxis oriented toward the realization of an object/motive [predmet] (a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971). it is in speech activity that the sense (smysl, for vygotsky; tema, for vološinov) of the word, a moment of language, is realized and that the latter depends on. within language, there are in fact stable significations (značenija) given by dictionary definitions. but these do not tend to be relevant in speech activity and the pertinent societal relations: sense (smysl) or theme (tema), however, is the relevant issue. the stable signification (značenie) is the lower limit of a word’s signifying capacity, whereas the theme is its upper limit (vološinov, 1930). the word is part of a living societal relation and can be understood as such. therefore, “the nervous center of every utterance, every expression, is not at the interior but exterior: it is situated in the social milieu that surrounds the individual” (vološinov, 1930, p. 95, original emphasis). for vygotsky, too, the societal relation is the center of everything specifically human. it does not therefore surprise that to him every higher order psychological function has been a relation in, and constative of, society. he insists on the irreducible relation between the physical sound, which is the object of phonetics, and signification, which is the object of semantics. the result of the traditional separation between the two areas led to the fact that phonetics fails to understand what makes certain sounds specifically human, that is, specifically psychological in character. on the other hand, signification became separated from the physical sound and led to the study of the pure act of thought, which somehow was said to exist independently of the “material carrier [material’nyj nositel’]” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 672). the fruitlessness and futility of classical integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a43 semantics and phonetics derives from the fact that these fields separate the material sound and signification, that is, that they decompose the word into elements—as physical chemists might decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. using the decomposition of water as an analogy, vygotsky suggests that a theoretical understanding of the word gets lost when its material basis is separated from signification just as with the properties of water when we look at hydrogen and oxygen7. the inseparability between the material and the ideal, between the societal and the psychological, is one of the fundamental characteristics of vygotsky’s approach. he understands “development as a process characterized by the unity of the material and psychological, the unity of the societal [obščestvennogo] and the personal, in the child’s ascent of the steps of development” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 11, emphasis added). it is precisely because speech has two related moments, an inner semantic movement and an outer grammatical movement, that we can understand not only the development of thinking in situation but also the development of thinking in the child and in society. in the first subsection, i suggest that vygotsky, as bakhtin, is ultimately interested in continuously unfolding life. the word is part of life, integral part of speech activity that is a moment of societal activity as a whole (figure 1); and it is therefore living only when it is used. in fact, “the word is a living unit of sound and signification” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 672). it is through signification in and with respect to the situated, concrete speech activity that concrete sound and ideal thought come to be united. in this way, we overcome the problem of the gap between knowledge and application that is pervasive in educational research literature. in the real speech setting, the uptake of the speech of others is critical for the further development of the former. the dehiscence in situated signification (sense, theme) between articulation and uptake constitutes change and movement. thus, “authentic active comprehension already contains the embryo of a response. only active comprehension allows us to comprehend the theme, for evolution can be apprehended only by evolution itself” (vološinov, 1930, p. 104). speech activity relates the word and its comprehension, because, when we investigate the function of the word in living speech, it is a feature of the relation of the interlocutors and therefore cannot be reduced to speaker or recipient. this is why thinking needs to be theorized from this relation rather than the relation from individual thinking. even for the individual speaker, the recognition of the thought follows speech rather than preceding it. thus, “in its structure, speech is not a mirror-like image of the structure of thought” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 964). speech does not serve the externalization of thought: “thinking does not express but accomplishes itself in the word” (p. 964). the position in the bakhtin circle on the relation between thinking and speaking is precisely the same: “it is not mental activity that organizes expression, but, to the contrary, it is expression that organizes mental activity, which models it and determines its direction” (vološinov, 1930, p. 86). thus, speaking brings thought to life but, in the process, changes it: “as thought changes into speech, it restructures itself, changes” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 964). (self-) movement, evolution, development only this whole act is alive, exists fully and inescapably . . . is an actual living participant in the ongoing event of being. (bakhtin, 1919/1993, p. 2, original emphasis) in the episode from the physics course, the conversation apparently develops on its own. there is no external force that moves the activity from one stage to another. rather, each contribution is both 7 this analogy may actually be used to understand a differentiated position on dialectics and dialogism. mixed in a single container, the elements oxygen and hydrogen—gases at room temperature—stand in an external relation in the same way as the statements “life is good” and “life is not good” “united in a single statement of a single subject” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 397). they do not communicate with each other. it is only within the (“dialogical”) relation of the water molecule that oxygen and hydrogen explain water (e.g., the polarity of water molecules, surface tension, water droplet formation, or heating of food in microwave oven). integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a44 generated by and generates the speech activity. in fact, the individual contributions are not the appropriate unit of analysis. because the conversation is a social phenomenon, the appropriate category (minimum unit) has to be a social one (durkheim, 1919). life generally and society through which the specifically human life form is realized particularly are self-moving phenomena. language, too, is such a phenomenon: as long as it is spoken, it lives and therefore changes. once a language no longer is spoken, it is a dead language and inherently does not change. both vygotsky and bakhtin are interested in self-moving phenomena and, therefore, in evolution and development. in educational and psychological theories, change (i.e., learning, development) occurs because of forces external to the thing that changes (lave, 1993); and thought is treated as separated from life, making it appear as if it was thinking itself (vygotskij, 2005). in the work of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle, however, self-movement and development of societal life, a network of human activities (a. n. leont’ev, 1983), is the source of all change. “human activity [dejatel’nost’ čeloveka],” the overarching, integrated unit in figure 1, “is a process in a system of relations . . . that realizes the societal nature of man” (p. 170, emphasis added). in figure 1, mutual constitution and process, as evident in the works of vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov, are implemented in all relations of neighboring terms and levels. in vygotsky’s work, human development generally and the development of language ability specifically is central (bottom left, figure 1). in the work of the bakhtin circle, the development of language and life is of central interest (bottom right, figure 1). in the novel, one of the many different forms of the utterance, we have a perfect example: “every novel depicts a ‘self-developing life,’ ‘recreates it.’ this self-development of life is independent of the author” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 185). the idea comes out of the tradition of hegelian and marxian thought. the latter constructs, in the value characteristic of a commodity, a fundamental unit that models the historical evolution of economy. to model development that comes from within a system (life, society)—that is, self-determination [samoopredelenie]—the most fundamental category has to be one of change itself (il’enkov, 1974). but a unit of change embodies an inner contradiction that manifests itself in outer contradictions—both in the social world (e.g., each commodity in an exchange being use-value and exchange-value simultaneously (il’enkov, 1974)—and in the material world (e.g., light exhibiting particle and wave character). in bakhtin, the two voices within speech activity play the role of the two antagonistic poles within the same unit of dialogue; in vygotsky, the mutually constitutive processes of thinking and speaking—for example, between adult and child—constitute the development of the same unit of word-signification in situation, in ontogeny, as in phylogeny. to model the mutually constitutive moments of cultural history and individual development, vygotsky, in a chapter on the crisis of the psychological sciences, therefore suggests that psychology needs its own das kapital (capital) that has psychological equivalent concepts of class, value, commodity, basis, interest, and superstructure. these very same concepts are brought into the philosophy of language by the bakhtin circle (vološinov, 1930). in his foreword to the russian collection of vygotsky’s key works, a. a. leont’ev highlights the “dynamic, process character of consciousness” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 9, original emphasis) as their core feature. process also is central to the work of the bakhtin circle, both with respect to the development of signification in societal interaction (vološinov, 1930) as well as in a broader conception of life and activity (bakhtin, 1919/1993). the non-coincidence of the material (phasic, syntactic) and semantic dimensions of the word, represented on the left in figure 1, is “a necessary condition for the realization of the movement from thought to word” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 967). for the bakhtin circle, the non-coincidence of signification in speaking and active listening (found on the left in figure 1) constitutes the fundamental, inner difference in the utterance that is required for understanding the movement of the dialogical process. it is precisely the dialogue—that is, the interaction of different voices, even if it occurs in the same mind—that integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a45 produces the movement of thought (bakhtin, 1929/1994); it is precisely the inner difference within each of the two commodities in a commodity exchange that produces the movement of economy (il’enkov, 1959). for vygotsky, ideas (themes) are unfolding, evolving, and developing (a movement) because of the double movement of thinking to speaking and speaking to thinking, whether the dialogue occurs between real people or internally between two voices in the same mind. thus, “the relation of thought to word is above all not a thing, but a process—the movement from thought to word and, reversely, from word to thought” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 963). thought is a process by means of which a task or problem is solved: thought accomplishes work. the development of thought is an inner movement, across a whole series of planes, a transition of thought into word and word into thought. for bakhtin, novels, ideas, conversations, and ideas develop because of different voices that “listen to each other constantly, call back and forth to each other and are reflected in one another” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 283). this work is an integral part of practical activity, itself constituting and constituted by speech activity. because practical activity is in the service of sustaining society and human life, evolution, development, and history never end, or life would be at its end (bakhtin, 1919/1993). bakhtin refers to open-endedness and unfinalizability, which finds its appropriate model in the dialogue in which the self-other relation, its unity and differentiation, is produced and “draw into the movement of a perpetuum mobile, as are all anticipated replies” (bakhtin, 1929/1994, p. 162). in the integrated model (figure 1), we come to theorize the different temporal aspects to the relation between thinking and speaking or thought and language. historically, language (bottom right, figure 1) evolves and, thereby, provides a changing reservoir of semantic and syntactic possibilities. ontogenetically, language ability (bottom left, figure 1) changes, which results in a change of the relation between thinking and speaking (far right, figure 1). this is so because the repertoires of words and situations in the experience of the child change, and because, concomitantly, the relation between the processes of thinking and speaking changes. in adult thought, the situational development of signification in speech activity (center, figure 1) is above all a “functional development—the movement of the thought process itself from thought to word is development” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 963). this allows vygotsky to speak of the becoming of thought (as unit of being and non-being) in the word. thought exhibits a movement, which seeks to establish a relation between one thing and another. it is a movement, an unfolding process, a development. signification and generalization—comprehension in the conversation, the three physics students comprehend each other; and when they do not comprehend, as shown in the episode; their talking contributes to repair the absence of comprehension. without comprehension and the associated signification, there would not be conversation and dialogue, as we know them, because speakers would talk past rather than with (con-) each other. in the model, speech activity produces and is produced by speaking and actively receiving, which are based on signification and comprehension (at left in figure 1). statements that attribute “meanings” to words that lie behind these words are replete in the educational research literature (e.g., in the 2011 volume of the journal of research in science education, there are 626 uses of the noun, adjectival, and verb forms of the stem “mean”). in a cultural-historical approach, such an attribution cannot be made: “there is no place saying that a signification [značenie] belongs to the word as such” (vološinov, 1930, p. 104). for vygotsky, the signification changes in the course of child development (ontogenesis), where the structure and nature of the connection between the word and signification changes; there are also functional changes in signification in social interaction, which make it that the same sound-word does not mean to say the same when it is uttered repeatedly in the same setting. this leads to the realization that integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a46 signification is “not in the word, and not in the soul of the speaker, and not in the soul of the listener. signification is the effect of the interaction between speaker and receiver, acting upon the material of a given sound complex” (vološinov, 1930, p. 104, original emphasis). the concrete, situated nature of speech activity has as a consequence that upper limit of signification—that is, the theme [tema] for vološinov, sense [smysl] for vygotskij—cannot be considered independent of the situation. as a. a. leont’ev points out in the foreword to the russian edition of psychology of human development (vygotskij, 2005), even before the object-oriented nature of activity became an important aspect in the theories of usnadse, rubinstein, and a. n. leont’ev, vygotsky provided the first sketch of the object-oriented nature of signification. each person relates to the situation by means of affect, a valuative moment in communication that is communicated in and through intonation. “intonation reveals the inner psychological context of the speaker, which determines the sense of the word” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 996). speaking is different from writing, because the latter has to articulate what in the oral form is transmitted by means of intonation and immediate perception of the setting. for vygotsky, vološinov, and bakhtin, therefore, situated appreciation is communicated by means of intonation and the situational determinants. vygotsky refers to this as sense (smysl), vološinov as theme (tema). both quote the same lengthy passage from dostoevsky’s diary of an author, in which six drunken craftsmen articulate the same curse word one after the other. however, situated signification (theme, sense) changes each time the sound-word is pronounced, due to the intonation that has changed. vygotsky suggests that it is a quintessential example of the contraction that occurs in verbal speech, where the signification is (a) available in understanding of the situation as a whole and the going theme in particular—similar to heidegger’s (1927/1977) idea of words that accrue to rather than having significations, and (b) where intonation expresses “the inner psychological context of the speaker” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 996). both moments are integral to situated signification (sense, theme). analyzing the same situation, vološinov suggests that the word constitutes but the material support for the intonation, which really expresses the situated signification (theme [tema]). in all six utterances of the craftsmen, “the theme inherent in every utterance (because the utterances of each of the six craftsmen has its own theme) realizes itself entirely by the sole means of the intonation” (vološinov, 1930, p. 106). the dictionary signification is, here, entirely irrelevant, and the understanding of what is going on and communicated about comes from somewhere else: the situation. thus, “the appreciations and the corresponding intonations are entirely determined by the immediate social situation” (p. 106). in speaking, there is therefore a real dialectic at work between more or less stable historically evolving, cultural-historical significations of a word that can be found in dictionaries, and the current theme, the relation of the word to the utterly situated, emotional-affective dimensions of concrete speech situation. signification is the fundamental, indivisible and therefore irreducible unit that characterizes the unity of communication and generalization/ compilation [obobščenie], that is, it characterizes whole, which, for vygotsky, is consciousness and its relation to the material world: “consciousness reflects itself in the word like the sun in a water droplet. the word relates to consciousness as a small to a large world, a living cell to the organism, like an atom to the universe. it is a small world of consciousness” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 1018). consciousness is where material reality is reflected on an ideal (inner) plane. the two planes, the material and ideal, cannot be understood independently of each other. vygotsky points this out time and again, including in his emphasis that it is not the brain that thinks but man, who stimulates the brain by means of external, material signs. integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a47 signification cannot be theorized independently of generalization. vygotsky approvingly quotes tolstoy to say that the word is ready when the generalization (concept) is formed. signification therefore not only constitutes the “unity of thinking and speaking but also the unity of generalizations and intercourse, of communication and thinking” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 676, original emphasis). moreover, generalization is a direct consequence of interaction with others: intercourse necessarily presupposes a generalization and therefore the development of the signification of the word, that is, the generalization is enabled by the development of intercourse” (p. 676). generalization constitutes a speech-thought act that reflects reality very differently than immediate sensations and perceptions: the signification of the word “reveals itself above all in generalization, which is contained in each word as fundamental and central moment, for every word generalizes” (p. 961). thought reflects reality in consciousness in a qualitatively different way than immediate sensations and perceptions. generalization, as vygotsky describes it, derives from the fact that in communication of something, a feeling, belief, or content of consciousness, there is no other way than attributing the content to a class of phenomena, which necessarily requires generalization. generalization here does not have to mean abstraction in the kantian sense. rather, consistent with the focus on the concrete situation, we may understand generalization in the sense of the documentary method (mannheim, 2004), where a word refers to the ensemble of situations in which it may be used appropriately. in the documentary method, each concrete instance is taken as a document or manifestation of a whole. this whole only exists in a concrete way and, therefore. in contrast to a generalization in the kantian sense, where the overarching concept only contains what is common to all the things it combines, that is, from which the general has been abstracted consisting only of those features common to all—as in the classical concept learning paradigm by bruner and colleagues—the overarching whole is just as concrete as all its manifestations. but the whole is not a simple sum, for there are part-whole relations such that each part, being part of the whole, also is determined by all other parts8. applied in the present context, the generalization of the world is theorized in terms of all the concrete situations in which it is used. the word is a document of all the different situations in which it is used, all the phrases that can be made with it, all the claims formulated, and so on. this form of generalization does not abstract from the situation, nor is it the sum or the common element across situation. rather, it is the relation between part and whole, the word being the part that refers us to all the different situations in which it finds appropriate use. the vernacular as the genetic origin of cultural-historical and ontogenetic development speech activity in societal relation, the hub of the model in figure 1, constitutes the culturalhistorical, ontogenetic, and situational origin of all language. in educational and psychological research, common knowledge and everyday vernacular are often regarded as deficient—for example, the source of “misconceptions.” however, there also exists recognition of the vernacular as the fundamental basis of formal (scientific, mathematical) knowledge—among cultural-historical and scholars of other fields alike— not only on a cultural-historical (phylogenetic) level but also for individual development (ontogenesis) (bakhtin, 1965/1990; husserl, 1976; mannheim, 2004; vygotskij, 2005). moreover, the scholars recognize that the vernacular not only is the genetic origin of knowledge and discourse but also the locus where change occurs and drives the changes in the academic and cultural fields, which reflect the changes in the broader cultural worldview or zeitgeist. first, and based on the grounds of plausibility, any more advanced cultural knowledge has emerged from simpler forms of knowledge. thus, for example, the greek understanding of geometry was 8 a constraint satisfaction network is perhaps the easiest way to conceptualize this relation, as the development of each and every part is determined not only by its own state but also by those of all other parts that figure into the whole. integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a48 the result of increasing technical and technological refinements of everyday objects, which led to the emergence of the idea of ideal objects that were not plagued with the inaccuracies and differences of actual material objects (husserl, 1939). the emerging new forms of (mathematics-related) speech activity provided for relations that themselves were the origin of higher psychological functions of subsequent generations, such as cultural-historical scholars describe them and provide examples for (meshcheryakov, 1974; vygotskij, 2005). because children first and foremost find themselves and develop understandings in the vernacular, it is the basis for their participation, for example, in scientific and mathematical argumentation in the school (e.g., moje et al., 2004; schwarz, dreyfus, & hershkowitz, 2009) and, therefore, to the understandings that develop from such speech activity. it is in popular culture that we find the ground for the changes not only in vernacular discourse and culture but also in other discourses (bakhtin, 1965/1990). this is so because “all secondary genres (artistic and scientific) incorporate diversely the primary speech genres in the construction of utterances as well as the relation between them” (p. 251). vygotsky, too, recognizes the vernacular as the source of “incessant movement.” thus, as a result “of its own fluctuations and non-correspondences between the grammatical and the psychological,” “our common vernacular exists . . . in a state of dynamic equilibrium between the ideals of mathematical and fantastic harmony, and in an incessant movement that we call evolution” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 967). thus, vernacular, as the root and ultimate fallback language, brings about the developmental changes in genres—for example, the evolution of the novel from greek antiquity to the modern day—and the style in literature (bakhtin, 1975; a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971). every secondary genre is built upon, transformed by, and transforms—for example, via popularization of scientific and mathematical writing, the primary genre, the vernacular (husserl, 1976; mannheim, 2004). but in the process, the fragments that come from the vernacular lose, in a dialectical inversion, their vernacular characteristics. the development of language therefore requires in the totality of factors that bring about change, that is, to conduct an analysis of speech activity. thus, language as a formal system “appears in real development of language as a form of interaction of the constituents of the developmental process—its formants, as its conditions” (a. a. leont’ev 1969/1971, p. 60, original emphasis). the vernacular is fundamentally dialogical, a point that is especially brought forth in the analysis of popular culture and the artistic work of françois rabelais during the renaissance (bakhtin, 1965/1990). thus, the feast, laughter, and carnival all are features of the popular culture where the seriousness of life becomes dialectically inverted, and, in this inversion, it also becomes reasserted. one recent study showed that in science classrooms, laughter has the same function, because it comes with a break from the seriousness of science lessons and, in so doing, reasserts the seriousness of science, which is only interrupted by the non-serious (roth, ritchie, hudson, & mergard, 2011). vygotsky recognizes the “incessant movement” that comes from the vernacular and locates there the psychological origin of speaking: “from a psychological perspective, dialogical speaking is the original form of speaking” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 996, emphasis added). this dialogical speaking is situated in the societal relations where all higher psychological functions originate. the members of the bakhtin circle recognize societal relations as the fundamental ground upon which language rests. thus, the social relations evolve (as a function of the infra-structures), then the communication and verbal interactions evolve in the context of the social relations, the forms of speech acts evolve from the fact of verbal interaction, and the process of the evolution is reflected, finally, in the changes of the forms of language. (vološinov, 1930, p. 98) integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a49 toward unit analysis the bakhtin/vygotsky model (see figure 1) has methodological implications: any analysis of language use and comprehension, signification, learning, or development has to begin with (speech) activity, the smallest, non-additive unit of life of the embodied material subject (leont’ev, 1983; roth & lee, 2007). however, in the current educational research literature, as noted above, there is an almost exclusive focus on the (semantic) content of speech. moreover, whether the analyses focus on classroom talk or on interviews, there is a tendency to identify thought and speech. but if we do so, we are no longer in a position to ask the question about the relation between the two phenomena and, therefore, fail to resolve the problem of thought and speech from the outset (vygotskij, 2005). as a result, we simply avoid the problem or choose not to see it. moreover, the traditional approaches to the analysis of language in situation, therefore, as the foregoing subsections make evident, do not allow us to understand the significance of what has been said. vygotsky discusses cases where the psychological subject and predicate do not coincide with the grammatical subject and predicate. as a result of his analysis, he concludes that “we may speak not only of psychological subjects and predicates, but also, with the same right, of psychological number, gender, case, pronoun, superlative, future etc.” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 967). however, what matters to the situation is the “psychological aspect” rather than the dictionary signification of the word. this may lead to the situation that what is an error from the perspective of formal language may have productive and artistic value. this has consequences for consciousness and for the psychology of learning and development. this is quite in contrast to much educational research, where “meaning” is of primary, sociolinguistic importance (e.g., lemke, 1990). in the introductory chapter to his book on the relation between thinking and speaking, vygotsky is requesting us to move from the analysis of elements to the analysis of units. the appropriate unit in the study of speaking he proposes is that of the “significance of the word [značenie slova]” (vygotskij, 2005, p. 675). because speaking is a means of social interaction, the word cannot be abstracted from the relation between speaker and recipient. the word must be analyzed in its functional relation to the situation. the work of the bakhtin circle completely maps onto a cultural-historical activity theoretic approach to language (a. a. leont’ev, 1969/1971). thus, the scholar quotes a longer passage from marxism and the philosophy of language (vološinov, 1930) in which the following methodical sequence in the study of language is articulated: (1) forms and types of verbal interaction in connection with their concrete conditions; (2) forms of individual statements [vyskazyvanie], in close connection with isolated speech capacities, of which they constitute elements that lends itself to a determination by verbal interaction, that is, the categories of speech genres in life and in the ideological creation; (3) from there, revision of the forms of language in their habitual linguistic interpretation. (p. 98) this sequence emphasizes the same dimensions that are also of importance in the culturalhistorical perspective, including the “concrete conditions” (i.e., productive activity) in the context of which verbal interaction (i.e., speech activity) takes place. individual statements and speech capacities are the converse of verbal interactions: the two mutually constitute each other. for the bakhtin circle, the fundamental notions concerning language constitute a complete system of irreducible and unified pairs: recognition and comprehension, cognition and exchange, dialogue and monologue, whether they are internal or external, every sign provided with a signification and every signification attached to a word, identity integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a50 and variability, universal and particular, social and individual, cohesion and divisibility, utterance and uttered. (jakobson, 1977, p. 8) for vygotsky, too, methodological issues arise from two key problems that require to be addressed: (a) the relationship of thought and word, and (b) the relationship of generalization and intercourse. that is, we cannot “tear” the word from the relation with other people and from the way it reflects the reality of the situation in consciousness (“generalization”). signification, as his analysis of the episode from dostoevsky’s diary of an author shows, depends on the situation and qualities other than the sound-word itself, for example, on intonation. when we are interested in the analysis of a real conversation, then each word has to be analyzed from the double perspective of the speaker and the recipient. this double perspective does not exist in the language but is a function of the exchange, which irreducibly involves multiple parties. the replies, which alternate between the participants in the exchange, are interrelated. the relations that establish themselves between the corresponding parts of a dialogue—question-response, assertion-objection, affirmation-accord, offer-acceptance, or order-execution—“are impossible between the unities of language . . . but are possible only between the utterances emanating from distinct speaking subjects” (bakhtin, 1979/1984, p. 250). each interlocutor presupposes the other such that the relation between the locutions cannot be grammaticalized. there is a relation between the utterances of two or more participants in a dialogue that goes beyond the word. this relation, between the proposition and context, between the utterances of the different speakers, is “mediated by the entire environing context, that is, by the utterance in its entirety” (p. 252). this has implications for the analysis of speech activity, for example, for analyzing lessons and transcript fragments such as that provided in the introductory analysis. it is clear that this exchange constitutes an integral part of the totality of exchanges from which the conceptualization, sedimented in the concept map the students produced, emerged. whereas research in education and educational psychology tends to abstract speech from the situation, attributing words to individuals and their mental structure (or some other attribute of the person), vygotsky and the bakhtin circle force us to consider the larger context: clinical interview, classroom talk, conversation in informal setting, and so on. these settings are themselves part of larger, societally relevant contexts that need to be considered to understand the form, content, and emotional dimensions of speech: it matters whether speakers participate voluntarily in research, in compulsory schooling, or a jointly planned family visit to the science museum. it is precisely this larger activity—characterized by a societal motive—that mediates how thinking reflects reality in consciousness. coda in this paper, i propose a model of speaking, thinking, and the development of language at the individual and collective levels that is grounded in the work of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle. realizing the compatible contributions of vygotsky and the bakhtin circle in one model of speaking and thinking allows educational researchers to theorize together what often is held separate: individual development of language ability and the cultural-historical, ideological (dialogical, discursive) functions of language. existing attempts to theorize the individual and social, because of their primacy of the individual (e.g., vosniadou, 2007), are inconsistent with both vygotsky and bakhtin. a coherent unified model, however, allows researchers to integrate the often-distinct sociological and psychological perspectives on classroom learning that tend to be kept separate in much of educational research (e.g., roth, 2010). the table of correspondences (table 1) should assist scholars from different languages in thinking the works integrating vygotsky and bakhtin/vološinov wolff-michael roth dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.20 | vol. 1 (2013) a51 of these scholars more coherently and in working with the model across language barriers. this may allow for more discussions across the different groups within the educational research community. references bakhtin, m. m. 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(2000). bergen text edition: big typescript. accessed march 8, 2011 at: http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/texts/bten/ts-213 articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/texts/bten/ts-213 http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ microsoft word marjanovic-shane article layed out with full parameters.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-48     a paradigmatic disagreement in "dialogue on dialogic pedagogy" by eugene matusov and kiyotaka miyazaki ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa abstract i read with a great pleasure the heated dialogue on dialogic pedagogy between eugene matusov and kiyotaka miyazaki. it provided me with one of those rare occasions where i could both witness, and also join, the workings of two minds as they struggled with and against each other to construct, de-construct, and reconstruct their visions of dialogic pedagogical approaches to education. as i was reading, i had a lot of questions and remarks. i try to summarize them here – while many are still left on the margins of the original manuscript. let me first explain the way that i have framed my response. first of all, from now on, i will address you, eugene and kiyo, directly, instead of addressing your concepts impersonally and talking about you in the third person. using first person will set the tone of my dialogue with the two of you, together or separately, and will help me introduce some of my questions, ideas, and perspectives in a more dialogic fashion. second, my current understanding of, and position on, the issues are closer to yours, eugene, than yours, kiyo. thus, my views are biased, yet they are based on my own “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991). on the other hand, i arrived at my current position by going through many transformations, starting out with views that were relatively more similar to yours, kiyo. and, the road i have traveled on this journey is still fresh in my mind. thus, i think i recognize at least some of your perspectives, kiyo, with a nod of the head, despite my current critique. third, i will discuss here only a few issues that stand out for me from your dialogue, without describing all parts of the debate, as i assume that readers are already familiar with your debate. my discussion includes a summary of the two paradigms you develop, their boundaries, and the wonderful examples you shared to support your arguments. i also discuss the struggles between eugene’s and kiyo’s paradigms that i see as bridgeable and not bridgeable. no shared boundaries first of all, it is obvious that the two of you conceptualize very differently the vital notions of this discussion: the "epistemological," "ontological," "instrumental," "dialogic," and "monologic." i want to point out, that i see your conceptualizations as not sharing boundaries. instead, you are each engaged in issn: 2325-3290 (online) a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-49 creating a paradigmatically different, internally systematic perspective. in his book, the structure of scientific revolutions, thomas kuhn writes, "what differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method: they were all ’scientific’ but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practicing science in it" (kuhn, 1996, p. 4). i will try to discuss some of the major points of your paradigmatic disagreement that make your positions "incommensurable", i.e. not sharing boundaries, but still providing enough tension that makes each position sharply delineated against the background of the other. let me start with the notion of "epistemological." eugene, i see your use of the term "epistemology" and "epistemological" as potentially polysemic. when you use the term "epistemology/epistemological" it seems that you actually refer to two different concepts depending on the particular context. on one hand, when contrasted to "ontology," "epistemology" is about the "ways of knowing" in general, while "ontology" is about the "ways of being". thus, in this use, "epistemology" is a very general concept of all "ways of knowing" in contrast to the "ways of being." seen that way, epistemology and ontology are two distinct aspects of the human life. distinct, but seen as necessarily connected, inter-related, having effect on each other. in other words, possibly even "two sides of the same coin." i think that this is what you, kiyo, have in mind when you discuss the interrelatedness of the two. on the other hand, however, you use the term "epistemological" to refer to one of the four ways knowing described by aristotle (2000): techne, epistêmê, phronêsis and sophia. in this sense, you use the concept of "epistêmê" for a very specific type of knowing and a very specific kind of knowledge. using it in this way, you inevitably also include and imply specific beliefs about the value of that way of knowing, describing it as “epistemological positivism” where it is assumed that “epistêmê” is universal, impersonal, ahistorical, decontextualized, objective, universally true, of a higher order than any personal, subjective, local, limited, even biased point of view. for instance, you say, elsewhere i argued (matusov, 2009a, ch. 2) that plato’s socratic dialogic method is a bizarre combination of radical pedagogical constructivism, based on dialogic investigation of truth though revealing contradictions in people’s thinking, and radical philosophical positivism, based on the preset curricular endpoints reflecting the eternal, universal ideas (page 8). eugene, you move between the two meanings of this concept very easily and smoothly, but without explanation, and i think that the way you switch from one to another may potentially create confusion. i think, kiyo, that you use the concept of "epistemological" in the first, more general way, in contrast with "ontological." it seems that this general meaning absorbs other potential meanings like an "umbrella" concept. from that point of view (as i pointed out above) the interrelatedness between the "being" (ontology) and the “knowing” (epistemology), is crucial to stress. your insistence regarding the interconnectedness between the epistemological and ontological is wonderfully illustrated in your example of yukio tsukamoto's search for meaning in a japanese poem about a butterfly, a meaning that he can connect to his own life, thereby simultaneously pursuing epistemological understanding and ontological relevance. thus, from your point of view, it may seem unreasonable when eugene discusses a sharp contrast between ontological and epistemological pedagogy. it seems to me that you see the boundary between them as "bridgeable" because the two aspects of human life (ontology and epistemology) are interrelated and it should always be possible to find a connection. a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-50 however, it also seems to me, kiyo, that the gibsonian analogy mapping "perception-action loop" on the epistemological-ontological relationship is a trap for your way of conceptualizing this relationship. the "perception-action" loop comes from reductionist theories and research – that attempt to reduce allliving beings to a mechanical type of functioning, describable by the flow of neurological currents. in my view, there is no way to connect the theory that humans develop via the mechanics of "perception-action" with an acknowledgment that being and knowing is ontological. having said that, kiyo, i still see your disagreement with eugene's sharp contrast between the epistemological (i and ii) and the ontological as your way of insisting on the relevance of the aristotelian “epistêmê” — a generic, universalist, concept of "knowing", for the "being." the second important concept in your dialogue is the concept of instrumentality. the two of you conceptualize "instrumental" in two different ways, and furthermore, this concept plays different roles in supporting your two contrasting views. for you, eugene, it is important to make a distinction between the instrumental and non-instrumental dialogue, because it describes the ultimate power relationship between the teacher and the student. when a teacher uses dialogue as an instrument to achieve certain pedagogical goals, the teacher "highjacks" the very human need to participate in an internally persuasive discourse. in this way, teachers then manipulate the dialogue to stir it toward his/her preset curricular endpoints; potentially, even to send someone on the teacher pre-conceived curricular journey (as in predominantly responsive authorship). eugene, you say that the instrumental epistemological pedagogy is … characterized by the use of dialogue between the teacher and the students and among the students to achieve some particular intellectual curricular endpoints preset by the teacher. dialogue here is a pedagogical method. … thus, the epistemological instrumental pedagogy is primary concerned with deepening students’ intellectual understanding about something but this deepening has some curricular endpoints (p. 7). however, kiyo, for you, eugene's distinction between epistemological instrumental and epistemological non-instrumental pedagogies does not make much sense. you say: "though eugene divides epistemological pedagogy to instrumental and non-instrumental, i do not distinguish these two here" (p. 20). i think that the reason you do not see such a distinction as important, is a result of two related aspects of your conceptualizations. i will try to revoice them here, but please, correct me if i am wrong. first, you, kiyo, are mainly focused on eugene's distinction between the epistemological and ontological dialogues – where you conceptualize "epistemological" in its more generic sense. thus, you are trying to solve this epistemology-ontology relationship, rather than address the two types of epistemological dialogues described by eugene. second, it seems to me, kiyo, that for you, the crucial difference between the two types of dialogues, (epistemological and ontological), is in their content, i.e. spheres of knowing: high culture or mundane life, and how these spheres of knowing are related. it seems that you are trying to conceptualize the connection between the epistemological dialogue (about high culture, or socially valued content) and the ontological dialogue (about the mundane life of a person) – in a way that is noninstrumental, but rather more intrinsically interrelated – or at least that it can be pedagogically achieved such as through your beautiful example of the butterfly poem. however, i think that "instrumentality" for you, eugene, is not about the content of dialogue. it is not about whether an intellectual (epistemological) content of a dialogue can "serve" student's ontological a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-51 needs, interests and desires, or not. instead, i interpret your notion of "instrumentality" of an epistemological dialogue, as a defining characteristic of the power relationships between the participants. in other words, if the teacher's goal is that students arrive at some (any) preset curricular endpoints, then any dialogue (regardless of its content) is an instrument of that goal. in my view, eugene, your distinction between instrumental and non-instrumental epistemological dialogue is in the teacher's use of his or her power to impose certain pre-determined, universal truths by manipulating dialogue – as you described in the four steps of socratic dialogue. on the other hand, what you call non-instrumental epistemological dialogue does not impose final "truths" (a.k.a. philosophical positivism), yet it does impose "final" values, for example, what is considered to be universally (or at least culturally and socially) valuable in its dealing with the highest questions about human existence. thus, instrumental epistemological dialogue is about (correct) answers (truths), and the non-instrumental epistemological dialogue is about the (right) choice of questions to consider. i think that you, kiyo, has sensed this aspect of eugene's views in your analysis of a teacher stimulating her own and children's intellectual curiosity and creating connections between the participant's life and the culturally valuable intellectual content. however, kiyo, it seems to me that because you focus on the content of the epistemological and ontological dialogues, you must prioritize the culturally valuable (high) content, and you emphasize not merely the possibility, but also the need and value of making the connections between the two (epistemological and ontological contents). because of your view, i do not think you see any relevancy in distinguishing the instrumentality of dialogue. however, what eugene criticizes is not the content of epistemological inquiries, but the power relationship between the participants in which the teacher's agency, authorship, interests, and beliefs dominate and eclipse students' agency, authorship, interests, and beliefs. in the epistemological noninstrumental dialogue, described by eugene, i see the teacher’s monologism not in the teacher’s use of the dialogue but in the teacher’s subordination of students' ontology to universal truths (epistêmê) and the (high) cultural axiology (i.e., a system of values) that are prioritized. the real point of departure between your two views becomes palpably sharp during your discussion of teacher-student relationships. it seems to me, kiyo, that your vision of a teacher as a dialogic author of students’ education is motivated by your view of dialogue as the primary mode of the learners’ transformation and, at the same time, your belief in the priority of the known epistemological truths and cultural values. because of that, learners' agency in your understanding, their ontological needs, interests, ways of relating to others and the world, immediate life events cannot be left without guidance; students cannot drive their learning journey. learners' agency, according to your view, kiyo, must be encompassed within the teacher's authorial dialogic teaching. you see students’ agency only as developing during dialogues with the teacher, and you criticize eugene's distinction of the responsive and self-generated agency. for instance, you, kiyo, share, i do not think that the learner, or the human being in general, has two types of the authorship, or agency. human being is an agent by nature. in the sense that no one can put agency into some other, agency of human being is self-generated. simultaneously, agency in human being grows up by interacting with other people. the learner can enter into the dialogic lesson and act as the dialogic heroine/hero because she/he is originally an agent. her/his experience of being the dialogic heroine/hero in the dialogic lesson helps her/his agency grow up (p. 41). what eugene describes as a possibility that a learner takes over the navigation and the driving of his/her agency in a case of self-generated learning journey, seems inconceivable and anti-educational from your point of view, kiyo. as you say, "the learners who can leave the lesson by themselves and ask a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-52 the ‘teacher’s’ help will no longer need someone who tries to have the pedagogical relationship with them. they will be able to make use of anyone to get some help she/he needs when necessary. so, she/he does not need ‘the teacher’, much less ‘the pedagogy’. then, why do you need pedagogy? (p. 42)” on that note, eugene, kiyo's questions have legitimacy. if learning is only about the learners, then what is the role of the educators? your conception of pedagogy, eugene, from kiyo's point of view looks incommensurable, potentially needless, almost pointless. and from eugene's point of view, kiyo, your insistence that the teacher needs to retain the epistemological authority, and with it potentially other kinds of authority: legal, moral, and agentive, seems also to be a legitimate objection, since it is incommensurable with a dialogicity as a meeting of people with equal rights (cf. bakhtin, 1999). this is why, kiyo and eugene, i see your arguments as not simply opposed to each other on the same continuum, but rather, as being on two incompatible planes: they are from two different paradigms. i have to stress that paradigmatic boundaries are not boundaries "between" two paradigms, as some kind of a border that provides a line separating their territories. paradigmatic boundaries are not like the cultural boundaries where the cultures are constructed in the contrasting light of the other cultures. paradigmatic differences create no "touch" between the two – and from the point of view of each one, the other one is disorienting and looks potentially like nonsense. here is my first and not completed attempt to sketch a comparison between your two paradigms. table 1: two paradigms of dialogic pedagogy epistemological noninstrumental dialogic pedagogy paradigm (kiyo) ontological dialogic pedagogy paradigm (eugene) focus of the scholarship examining the universal, essential principles of the dialogic approach to education. examining the views of the participants in dialogic approaches to education about their own praxis, their motivations, values, ways to relate to others, addressivity, power relations, and so on. purpose of pedagogy (education) connecting the learner's whole being with the socially, culturally, and universally valuable contents of knowledge to enrich their life and develop their ideas. helping the learners in their own critical examination of their own living and evolving positions, testing their ideas regarding the values, purposes, interests, goals and journeys they want to undertake. a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-53 espoused conception of a "good" pedagogical approach pedagogy is seen as praxis – a practice that evolves in unpredictable ways based on the (self) evaluations (by teachers) – of guiding learners' development through promoting and arranging opportunities for the learners to participate in important dialogues, following rich, illdefined and unpredictable process that will engage them with culturally and socially valued knowledge and practices. pedagogy is seen as praxis of praxis a "critical evaluation and problematizations of ready-made of culture" (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) and of the very praxis of teaching and learning by all the participants; promoting learners' authorial stance toward their own learning and development by providing dialogic opportunities for testing ideas, desires, values, motivations, opinions; and promoting learners’ self-generated learning journeys. powers of authority of the teacher and the student teacher has both epistemological and ontological authority over his/her students. teacher as author and student as hero. learners' agency must be encompassed by the teacher's authorial dialogic teaching, which is the source of guidance and growth of student's agency. teacher has limited epistemological authority (as a good consultant or a tour guide when asked for help by the student); but the student has ontological authority and epistemological authority: i.e. the student is the final author of his/her learning and life. characterization of the type of dialogic pedagogy using eugene's classification epistemological non-instrumental dialogic pedagogy ontological dialogic pedagogy seen as promoting praxis of praxis. characterization of the type of dialogic pedagogy using kiyo's conceptualization authorial creating of dialogic (as opposed to monologic) "lessons" by the teacher who examines and finds new and exciting perspectives to entice and guide the students' dialogic participation in learning. potentially a selfdestructive endeavor when promoting students’ selfgenerated authorship that may be in opposition to the students’ responsive authorial learning, since "the learners who can leave the lesson by themselves and ask the “teacher’s” help will no longer need someone who tries to have the pedagogical relationship with them." a paradigmatic disagreement in “dialogue on dialogic pedagogy” ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.122 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-54 instead of a conclusion dear eugene and kiyo, i have learned a lot form both of you in this wonderful dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. i thank you both! there is no conclusion! i think we are all in a process of dialogic change. i see things with different eyes today than i saw them yesterday. and i am even more puzzled now! ana references aristotle. (2000). nicomachean ethics (r. crisp, trans.). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. bakhtin, m. m. (1991). dialogic imagination: four essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (c. emerson, trans.). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kuhn, t. s. (1996). the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago, il: university of chicago press. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2012). diverse approaches to education: alienated learning, closed and open participatory socialization, and critical dialogue. human development, 55, 159–166. doi: 10.1159/000339594 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word beach, students use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a37 students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach university of minnesota, usa abstract this article describes high school students’ responses to events in the novel, the things they carried, leading to their collaborative rewriting to create their own narrative versions of these events. it draws on “enactivist” theory of languaging, an approach to language that focuses on its use as social actions to enact and build relationships with others (cowley, 2011; linell, 2009). the focus is on “in-between” meanings constituted by “shared intentionality” (di paolo & de jaegher, 2012) in readers’ transactions with authors’ portrayals of events in texts as well as in responding to uses of languaging in characters’ interactions. analysis of four students’ rewriting events from the novel indicated that they drew on their responses to the novel to portray tensions in their characters’ interactions as well as their own experiences of coping with these tensions. students also benefitted from collaboratively creating their narratives through sharing their different perspectives on events in the texts, suggesting the value of using collaborative rewriting activities to enhance students’ literary responses and awareness of how languaging functions to enact relationships. key words: reader response, narratives, events, storywriting, languaging, sense-making, interactions, collaboration, composition. richard beach is professor emeritus of literacy education at the university of minnesota. his research focuses on literary response, digital writing, and uses of language. he is co-author of teaching climate change to adolescents: reading, writing, and making a difference (http://climatechangeela.pbworks.com); teaching literature to adolescents, 3rd ed. (http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com); understanding and creating digital texts: an activitybased approach (http://digitalwriting.pbworks.com); literacy tools in the classroom: teaching through critical inquiry, grades 5-12 (http://literacytooluses.pbworks.com), and high school students’ competing social worlds: negotiating identities and allegiances through responding to multicultural literature. he served as organizing editor for the annual annotated bibliography of research for research in the teaching of english from 2003 to 2012, former president of the national conference on research in language, and former president of the literacy research association. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a38 introduction in responding to literature, students often engage in literary response writing activities based on the instruction to interpret the meaning of a text according to “what the text says explicitly.” such guidance may lead to students adopting of a “strong text” model (brandt, 1990, p. 35). however, adopting this “strong text” model, which comes with an implicit assumption that the meaning of a text resides “in” the text, positions students to adopt a relatively passive stance to extract this predetermined meaning. fostering students’ construction of their own meanings through a dialogic, sense-making transaction between themselves and the text (rosenblatt, 1978; masny, 2014) avoids their adopting a passive stance in responding to a text. this reader-text transaction is mediated through language. to understand how readers use language in this transaction for responding to texts and rewriting events from a text, in this article, i draw on enactivisit theories of “languaging” (cowley, 2011; linell, 2009) that go beyond structuralist theories of language as a code system to focus on how language is used to create relationships through collaborative interactions with others (agha, 2007; cappuccio & froese, 2016; garcia & wei, 2014; linell, 2009; madsen, 2016). i illustrated the application of a “languaging” perspective to analyze examples of four high school students’ rewriting of events in different stories from the things they carried (o’brien, 1990). a “languaging” perspective provides insights into how the students employed language in their use of dialogue and descriptions to portray characters’ actions as reflecting certain practices and ideological stances associated with larger thematic meanings addressed in the novel. in applying this languaging perspective to analyze the students’ rewriting events from the things they carried, i was interested in how the students would dramatize the characters’ interactions using language as social actions to portray dialogic tensions in the characters’ interactions. the teachers’ response and rewriting activities in my work with teachers in a suburban midwestern high school, i learned that one of the teachers, ms. bianchi, who was teaching the things they carried (o’brien, 1990) in an 11th grade american literature ap class, had employed a series of activities for rewriting events in the novel. prior to this rewriting assignment, ms. bianchi asked all of her students to read the story “on the rainy river” from the novel. in that story, the main character of the novel, tim, having been drafted to serve in the vietnam war, must decide on whether to avoid going to vietnam by going canada as a sign of support for the anti-war movement or whether to go and serve in vietnam, something he knows would please his patriotic family and friends in his small minnesota town. in the story, tim goes to a lodge on the rainy river on the minnesota/canadian border to contemplate whether or not he should risk crossing into canada. he establishes a relationship with the lodge owner, elroy, and the final day of his stay at the lodge, elroy takes tim fishing in a boat out on the river, which tim perceives as a test to determine if he would swim from the boat to escape to canada: i think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as i chose a life for myself…. my whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything i had ever been or ever wanted to be. i couldn’t get my breath; i couldn’t stay afloat; i couldn’t tell which way to swim (o’brien, 1990, pp. 53-54). he then imagines his family members, school friends, teachers, and townspeople, as well as antiwar protesters standing on the shoreline— students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a39 a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors— people in hard hats, people in headbands— they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other (p. 56)…. “traitor!” they yelled. “turncoat! pussy!” i felt myself blush. i couldn’t tolerate it. i couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule (p. 57). tim is also aware of the owner, sitting in the boat watching him as he contemplates making his decision as the true audience. he was a witness, like god, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them. “ain’t biting,” he said. then after a time the old man pulled in his line and turned the boat back toward minnesota (p. 57). ms. bianchi asked the students to write their responses to the story by examining how “location can influence one’s views about the world and one’s place in it. because our main character is so deliberate in his wanting to make a decision, it becomes clear to see how ‘space’ influences him.” in reflecting on the purpose for her assignment, ms. bianchi noted that she wanted her students to understand how tim’s beliefs are challenged or shaped. we can see that old man presents a calm and judgment-free zone in the canoe. tim’s values surface. part ii of the activity asks students to look at themselves. it is harder for them to see where they might be influenced. i use the space of church to show how they may be influenced. some behave differently there than at school. i ask them to look at different places they go—cabins, church/temple/mosque, school, shopping malls, work, home, etc., before they begin answering the questions (ms. bianchi’s written reflection on this assignment). her assignment served to encourage students to examine how characters’ beliefs and values influence their actions within certain situations or spaces. she was also having students consider how they draw on their own experiences within these situations or spaces to apply to their responses to literature, i.e., she conceptualized this as the use of transfer that would be useful for engaging students in rewriting activities. she then had the students select a specific event from a story in the novel to collaboratively work in pairs to re-write that event based on adopting one of the character’s perspectives to create their own version of the event (beach, 2017). this engaged the students in rewriting activities that involve students in employing their own languaging to portray interactions between characters (fjällström & kokkola, 2015; yang, 2016). ms. bianchi then gave the students this assignment for rewriting events from a story of their choice from the novel: please look at your short story through another character in the story’s perspective. perhaps it is the father, or girlfriend, or another character that is mentioned who may or may not have as much insight as you do in the story. students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a40 retell one of/or the major event suggested from the short story in that character’s perspective. you need to consider how your new character is shaped by what has occurred. please consider these areas where it is appropriate: their level of direct versus indirect involvement in an event as participant or bystander the degree to which there were positive or negative consequences for them due to their participation in an event their emotional/attitudinal stance on an event their relationship with or empathy for participants in an event you will create a shared document with one other person who also has your story. you will retell the event or story from the other character’s point of view (ms. bianchi’s assignment). to foster reflection on their composing processes, ms. bianchi and i developed the following questions to have students write about their rewriting experience: how would you describe a’s perspective about their past relationship with b and b’s perspective on a? how did you employ certain points of view to portray these perspectives? what traits, needs, perspectives, emotions, and agendas did you draw on from the text to create your characters’ interactions? as the event unfolds, what alternative things could have happened at this point and why? did those things happen or not happen? what specific experiences and/or relationships in your own life, if any, did you draw on to portray their relationship through your use of dialogue? what overall meaning(s) did you want your readers to draw from reading your version of this event? ms. bianchi noted that her objective for this rewriting assignment was to foster students’ empathy related to understanding “the actions of the characters and be able to provide some sort of explanation or ‘other side’ to work with. robust discussion around the actions/empathy was the motivation for having them work in small groups.” she encouraged students to draw on their own experiences with conflicts in their own relationships to portray conflicts between their characters, encouraging them to use both dialogue and their own perceptions in writing their narratives. using languaging in responding to and rewriting events from literary texts a languaging perspective provides useful insights to examine the students responding to and rewriting of characters’ actions in events from the novel. focusing on languaging means focusing on how language is used as social action to interact with others to create or maintain certain kinds of relationships, for example, a “teacher-student” relationship acquired through “doing things together” in joint activities (raimondi, 2014). responding to and portraying how characters use languaging assumes that language is “inseparable from and constitutive of the actions and reactions of people in response to each other. it is through languaging that people act on each other, performative and commissive acts through which people establish their and others’ personhood” (bloome & beauchemin, 2016, p. 152). when people use language to engage in specific actions to accomplish certain goals in interacting with another person, we describe it as “languaging”. the other person perceives these actions students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a41 as having certain intended uptakes or effects, for example, the statement, “i didn’t find the mail on the kitchen table” may be perceived as an action of describing, judging, or complaining. n. j. enfield (2013) posits that audiences infer these actions’ uptakes or effects as enacting certain social practices as conventionalized tools for interacting with others. moreover, the meanings of these social practices are identifiable across different contexts. an audience may infer that “i didn’t find the mail on the kitchen table” as making a complaint based on previous interactions between the speaker and audience—given that in their previous interactions, the speaker consistently engaged in the practice of complaining about the audience’s behavior. because both speaker and audience are inferring the meaning of actions as implying certain practices, the meaning of these actions resides in the “in-between” space constituted by participants’ constructing a “shared intentionality” through “participatory sense-making” (di paolo & de jaegher, 2012, p. 2). this assumes that “social understanding is as much an interactional as an individual affair” (fuchs & de jaegher, 2009, p. 4), requiring some joint, shared agreement regarding the “in-between” meaning of an interaction. if a speaker is employing romantic “sweet talk” to impress their hearer, any positive meaning or uptake associated with that “sweet talk” depends on both the speaker and hearer reciprocally sharing the same “in-between” meanings—that the “sweet talk” is being used to impress the hearer and the hearer responds accordingly. breakdowns in interactions occur when participants do not share the same “in-between” meanings resulting in interactions with another person being challenged, supported, extended, or revised depending on the interaction (cuffari et al., 2015). if the hearer perceives the “sweet talk” as inauthentic— as actions based on the practice of deceiving the hearer – the hearer may then challenge the speaker’s motives. it is also the case that speakers’ and hearers’ identities are constituted by and through languaging—that “identities are not fixed and stable attributes of individuals, but are produced through language (and other) activities…. language and identity, therefore, are the products rather than the precursors of our language activities” (pennycook, 2011 p. 125). in responding to tim and elroy’s use of languaging in “on the rainy river,” the students were inferring these “in-between” meanings. these “in-between” meanings were becoming a part of tim’s identity in his contentious relationships to the imagined audiences on the shoreline, as well as to elroy’s identity constituted through his laconic interactions with tim. in rewriting material from the novel, students were drawing on their responses while actively creating or enacting their own versions of those events. as popova (2014) notes, in responding to events in texts we enact them; we invest them with a speaker that we treat as a conversational participant; we become willing partakers in their worlds, but they also become part of ours. narratives constitute both interventions in our sense-making powers as readers, and are, reciprocally, the dynamic constructs of the intervention itself (p. 8). this enactment of the reader with a character involves a “relationship between the actual present reading subject (“i”), and the subject’s position as “in-between” in the interpretation of the text (“me” + “text”)” (lysaker, 2014, p. 587). students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a42 to rewrite events from the text, the students drew on their responses to o’brien’s original language and created their own version of the events to convey their intended meanings. rather than frame this reader-text transaction in terms of a cognitivist “theory-of-mind” perspective based on mentalist notions of an autonomous reader intuiting characters’ minds (zunshine, 2006), a languaging perspective focuses on readers’ enacting a “shared intentionality” (tomasello, 2014) constituted through and by their “in-between” interactions with the text (popova, 2014; 2015). while a “theory-of-mind” perspective assumes that readers can infer writers’ or characters’ autonomous, private mental states, a languaging perspective frames responding as an unfolding, intersubjective process of collaborative sense-making between readers and narrators or characters. in contrast with a mentalist “theory-of-mind” perspective, this focus on readers’ sense-making as enactive intersubjectivity assumes that 1. social understanding is as much an interactional as an individual affair. 2. intersubjectivity relies heavily on embodiment in a rich sense of the word, i.e. on dynamical and embedded whole-body actions. 3. intentions are not opaque and hidden but are expressed in action and can be perceptible to others. 4. intentions are not pregiven and static but can be generated and transformed in the process of interacting. (fuchs & de jaegher, 2009, p. 469) i was therefore interested in how the students drew on their intersubjective sense-making to rewrite events from the novel to portray tensions in their characters’ relationships, tensions associated with the practices of “‘opening up’ or ‘closing down,’ being responsive or reticent, making signs of approach or withdrawal” (jensen, 2014, p. 11). to portray these practices, students were drawing on their knowledge of causal connections between previous, current, and subsequent events from the novel as well as their experiences of coping with tensions and conflicts in their own personal relationships. rewriting the “love” story two students, samantha and elizabeth (all student names are pseudonyms), collaboratively created a narrative version of a college reunion event in the “love” story from the things they carried. in that story, lieutenant jimmy cross, a soldier who served with tim in the vietnam war, is now visiting with tim after the war. he describes his experiences of attending a college reunion to reunite with martha, his former college girlfriend, who had continued to write him letters during the war. jimmy is still in love with martha while she is uneasy about being with him, given her previous encounters with him when they were dating in college. in the novel, when he is in vietnam, jimmy recalls his previous college relationship with martha, his perceptions of her loneliness, and the fact that she did not reciprocate his love: “he wanted to know her. intimate secrets: why poetry? why so sad? why that grayness in her eyes? why so alone? not lonely, just alone— riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria— even dancing, she danced alone— and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. he remembered telling her that one evening. how she nodded and looked away. and how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved” (o’brien, 1990, p. 11). when they reunite at their college reunion, jimmy learned that she was “a lutheran missionary now. a trained nurse, although nursing wasn’t the point, and she had done service in ethiopia and guatemala and mexico. she had never married, she said, and probably students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a43 never would. she didn’t know why. but as she said this, her eyes seemed to slide sideways, and it occurred to him that there were things about her he would never know. her eyes were gray and neutral. later, when he took her hand, there was no pressure in return, and later still, when he told her he still loved her, she kept walking and didn’t answer and then after several minutes looked at her wristwatch and said it was getting late” (o’brien, 1990, p. 27). in these descriptions of their interactions, o’brien highlights martha’s embodied responses to jimmy as implying her not reciprocating his love for her. in their own story, “martha’s perspective: love,” the students employ martha’s first-person pointof-view to portray her growing anxiety about re-uniting with “jim” (used by the students in lieu of “jimmy”) after his experience of being in vietnam: walking into my college reunion, my heart was racing and i was filled with numerous emotions: worried, excited, hopeful, and confused. the reason behind this was because the man i had history with would be there. i didn’t know what would happen between us throughout the night, or if anything even would happen. the moment our eyes connected from across the room, i was taken back. i noticed from the corner of my eye him walking towards me. “martha, nice to see you again! it has been ages, you look as beautiful as ever,” jim exclaimed. “hello jim! yes, it has been awhile, hasn’t it?” i could tell right at the beginning of this conversation that he was still in love with me since college. he must have never stopped. the look in his eyes and the way his voice was shaking gave this away. it was almost like no time had passed. i didn’t know if i could reciprocate this feeling, but i decided to spend the evening with him. (samantha and elizabeth’s narrative writing) in portraying martha’s not knowing “if i could reciprocate” jim’s love as a larger practice reflected in her actions, the students are dramatizing tensions between jim and martha as possibly having significant implications for what would happen as their interaction unfolds. dramatizing the significance of key events in their stories involves what bakhtin (2011) describes as portraying “eventness” through implying that certain significant potential consequences may occur depending on what happens in an event (köppe, 2014). dramatizing the unpredictability of unfolding “events-in-the-making” (roth, 2014) “restores the possibility of possibility” (morson, 2010, p. 118), in ways that “redirects our attention to the present moment, its multiple conflicts, its multiple possibilities” (welch, 1998, p. 377), thereby heightening the suspense associated with the narrative significance of an event. by having martha state that she “‘didn’t know if i could reciprocate,’” the students are dramatizing the “eventness” of her encounter with jim through portraying the unpredictability of what may or could happen in their interaction. in her reflection, elizabeth noted that martha is “nervous and didn’t know what to expect. i also wanted the readers to think that there could be a possibility of them ending up together in the end…but martha doesn’t necessarily love him back the same way. she is almost incapable of love you could say; she is confused and just doesn’t share the same feelings.” the students drew on information about jimmy and martha from the novel to portray tensions in their characters’ interactions. in the novel, jimmy is portrayed as blaming himself over the loss of a soldier in his platoon, as well as assuming that martha loves him based on the fact that the letters he was receiving from martha during the war were signed, “love, martha.” martha is portrayed as having had a previous negative interaction with jim on a movie date as an allusion to previous sexual abuse shaping her current stances towards jim. students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a44 in drawing on their responses to these previous events in the novel, the students are using these past events to portray jim and martha’s current perceptions of each other. in bakhtin’s words, “relationships of family, or life-story and biography, or social status and social class are the stable alldetermining basis for all plot connections; contingency has no place here” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 104). in her reflection on their portrayal of this interaction, samantha noted: their relationship was left with things unsaid and unresolved. jim made her feel a whole range of emotions that made her uncertain of her true feelings…. they never had an official relationship. jim had been in love with her since college but martha never indicated her love for jim (samantha’s written reflection). the students then portray jim and martha walking back to their dorm when martha envisions the possibility that jim might propose marriage, a possibility enhancing the “eventness” of their interaction given martha’s resistance to any thought of marriage: the night started out with a banquet, we had a nice meal together. later, we danced together for what seemed like hours, but it was probably only a few minutes. lastly, we went for a walk. he asked me about my life, i explained to him how i am a lutheran missionary, and how i trained for nursing but that was beside the point. i told him i wasn’t married but then immediately looked away in discomfort just in case he got the idea that i was hoping for a future with him. i didn’t know exactly what i wanted in life, but for some reason, i cannot explain, marriage was not one of my plans (samantha and elizabeth’s narrative writing). samantha noted that in portraying this event, they “wanted to make it clear that martha didn’t want to give jim the wrong impression or lead him on…. we showed the feeling of discomfort and unease when martha looked away after saying she wasn’t married.” elizabeth described different possibilities for martha’s potential actions, that she could have hinted that she was looking for something more serious. she could have gotten him back because it is obvious he still loves her. she could have made a move and showed she wanted something more like marriage. the reason it did not happen was because she didn’t like him in that way and didn’t want to steer him in the wrong direction. she wanted to keep things friendly and not do anything she would later on regret (elizabeth’s written reflection). in their reflections on this interaction, the students are noting that they wanted to portray martha as being reluctant to openly express her resistance to jim’s agenda. they therefore employ actions reflecting the larger practice of what samantha identifies as “martha not wanting to lead him on.” elizabeth noted that they portrayed martha as not making a move because they wanted to portray martha’s inner thoughts about her use of language in responding to jim’s expression of love. the students’ use of metaphors of “leading,” “moving,” and “steering” suggest how they used the characters’ languaging as social actions to portray the practices of martha’s physical and psychological positioning of jim to avoid his advances. in samantha and elizabeth’s story ending, jim and martha are standing outside a college dorm: at this point in the night he grasped my hand, waiting for me to squeeze it back. i did not want to give him any ideas so my hand just sat there limp. “martha, i love you!” he confessed to me. students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a45 “um, it’s getting late, i need to get home.” i nervously responded, while looking at the time on my wrist. “wait, i regretted letting you go the last date we went on. i wanted to tie you to my bed and never let you go.” i turned away, very uncomfortable by his statement. i never will understand why men act this way towards women. for some reason a part of me feels bad for responding the way that i did (samantha and elizabeth’s narrative writing). as in the previous interactions, the students portray jim and martha as having conflicting expectations for this final interaction, leading to a breakdown. they have jim engaging in the practice of proposing by expressing his love for her while also describing his recollection that “i wanted to tie you to my bed and never let you go,” resulting in negative uptake from martha who is “very uncomfortable, by his statement.” the students also employ descriptions of emotions to dramatize the “eventness” of this breakdown in any mutually shared understanding. samantha notes how “jim was desperate for martha’s love. he didn’t know how to express it and said too much; [martha] was also very uncomfortable and confused by jim’s efforts.” elizabeth notes that martha just feels disgusted as would many girls. at the very end when martha felt bad for responding the way that she did it shows that girls are submissive in society and almost let men control their feelings. she had no reason to feel bad for turning away when he made her feel uncomfortable but thinking about what happened later on she thought she did the wrong thing (elizabeth’s written reflection). elizabeth is referring to how martha recognizes jim’s mode of interacting with her as an embodied manifestation of his patriarchic stance, a reflection of how certain beliefs are shaping the characters’ interactions. at the same time, elizabeth alludes to martha’s dialogic tension related to the possibility that she might have helped jim, a reflection that their story ending was ambiguous associated with defying use of any easy narrative closure. rewriting the “ambush” story two other students, sharon and michelle, created their story, “it didn’t kill us, but it changed us,” based on the story, “ambush” in the novel. in the “ambush” story, tim, while on watch for his platoon, kills a vietnamese soldier. in the original story, tim expresses his guilt about doing so to kiowa, the first-person narrator of the story (both in the original and in the rewrite by the students). in the novel, kiowa attempts to help tim cope with his guilt in killing this soldier, by formulating a justification for killing the soldier given that “it’s a war. the guy wasn’t heidi— he had a weapon, right? it’s a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring” (p. 120)…”the guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail. understand me? we all had him zeroed. a good kill— weapon, ammunition, everything. so listen, you best pull your shit together. can’t just sit here all day” (o’brien, 1990, pp. 120; 123). the students employ languaging to portray kiowa’s and tim’s interactions related to kiowa’s justification for killing and tim’s sense of guilt about the killing as reflecting larger thematic meanings students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a46 about the influence of war on humans. sharon describes her sense of the “eventness” of this event given that it was a decisive moment in the relationship between kiowa and tim. kiowa’s concern for tim shows that the two are friends as well as soldiers. they look out for each other and care about how the war affects one another. kiowa’s realization hints at the negative side of war. the passing of soldiers leaves families and friends behind to grieve without saying goodbye. tim recalls that the soldier was “not a communist. he was a citizen and a soldier [so that] he didn’t belong in a war.” we wanted to continue this story to show how that realization spread from one soldier to another. although they are fighting on opposite sides, they are still the same (sharon’s written reflection). michelle noted that: it was very significant for kiowa and tim in different ways. for tim it was traumatizing because he had killed a man. for kiowa it began as a traumatizing experience because he was worried about his friend, but eventually he was able to turn that worry into a respect for his friend, which shows a significant growth in his character through this event (michelle’s written reflection). in their narrative, the students portray how kiowa’s own experience with war is shaping his psychological orientation in which he imagines being in a battle. in the first section of the students’ narrative, kiowa has been on patrol and then goes to wake up tim: “tim, hey tim, wake up!” i said while aggressively shaking my sleeping counterpart. i was exhausted from my watch and was focused on going to sleep. “okay, okay, calm down i’m waking up.” tim groggily responded. “anything happen during your watch?” “no, nothing worth repeating. haven’t seen anything along the trail for the past two hours. it’s quite warm and hard to see though, just so you know.” “alright, i’ll take over. you can sleep now.” as i laid down on the rough ground in the hot tent, my mind would not stop wandering. i began to think about the empty trail. after staring at the same dense brush for two hours, i had begun to imagine things, my mind began to play tricks on me. i would think someone would come along and then i would pick up the grenade and look back and realize it was just a bush. this was good practice for if a soldier really did come along, hopefully my reflexes would beat theirs and we wouldn’t be spotted. (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing) in reflecting on their portrayals of kiowa’s experience of exhaustion, fear, and anxiety, sharon notes that his experience of war “causes his mind to imagine threats that are not actually there. he is afraid of something happening so he imagines that it happens.” the students then portray kiowa dreaming about going to his grandmother’s house and embracing her. they portray their interaction as constituted by emotions of love and comfort distinct from his current emotions of exhaustion, fear, and anxiety in the war: i saw that smile from the tiny little woman for the first time in months and emotion overflowed in my chest and eyes. i felt joy rush into me as i came face to face with my loving, nurturing grandmother. all the fear and worry i had felt over the past months instantly left me. i hugged my grandmother, feeling contentment, comfort, and safety, something that now felt foreign to me, but relief students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a47 nonetheless. suddenly i heard a popping noise that jolted me out of my slumber (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing). sharon described how their descriptions of kiowa’s emotions constituting his interactions with his grandmother served to evoke their audience’s experiences with similar emotions of love and nurturance in their own relationships: we used words such as “loving” and “nurturing” to contrast the horror that kiowa is about to experience. we also tried to use descriptions such as “emotion overflowed in my chest and eyes” in a way that readers could relate to. many people have experienced an overwhelming amount of happiness that they start to cry; we hope that when readers read that description, they can relate to that feeling…one minute kiowa feels relief with his grandmother, the next he is back in the war surrounded by his fears (sharon’s written reflection). in the next section of the students’ narrative, kiowa discovers that tim has killed a vietcong soldier and realizes that this would be hard on tim, i could see it on his face. the same face i’d seen on lieutenant cross after he felt responsible for ted lavender’s death. after that, lieutenant cross was never the same. i couldn’t let that happen to tim; he was a great soldier. anyone on watch would have killed the man, otherwise we would have all been dead.… it was a horrific site and tim knew this. i could practically read his thoughts. he knew he had killed a man and was thinking of the life he took away. i would have done it too, and tim needed to understand that. he needed to remember the people he loved and the people who loved him in order to get out of his deep pit of despair (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing). in portraying kiowa’s first-person point-of-view perspective on the war and his need to help tim cope with his guilt, the students are inviting readers to consider how this perspective will shape his interactions with tim given that “there is always interplay between the past, the here and now, and the possible and imagined” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 251, italics added). they portray kiowa as recognizing tim’s struggle between his actions of killing and his past identity as resisting going to vietnam as part of the anti-war movement. their portrayal of tim’s struggle reflects the fact that his “ideological development is an intense struggle within us among various verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions, and values” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 346, italics added). michelle noted how they wanted to portray kiowa’s helplessness and his worry for tim and it also shows how much emotional distress tim is in. we also used the description of tim’s eyes and the comparison to lieutenant cross to show tim’s emotions. we showed kiowa’s worry turn into fear when he snapped and got slightly angry. that shows that he was losing hope in tim’s recovering because he became impatient and angry (michelle’s written reflection). through portraying kiowa’s conflicted perspectives on how the war is shaping tim and himself, the students are using languaging to “double-voice” (bakhtin, 1981) discourses of patriarchy, power, stoicism, and patriotism operating in the military system. sharon indicated that they contrasted kiowa’s adoption of the stance of stoicism with the statement that “‘anyone on watch would have killed the man’” and tim’s reaction of shock that is in “contrast the typical image of a soldier.” she also notes that they referenced “the death of ted lavender [that] affected lieutenant cross more than the other soldiers students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a48 because he felt it had been his fault…this is where we drew on the kiowa’s caring nature towards both lieutenant and tim.” in sharon and michelle’s next section of their narrative, they introduce another soldier, azar, who praises tim for killing vietcong soldier, much to the kiowa’s irritation: “man, you killed that kill!” azar said. “come on, get it? you killed it and you actually killed him,” he continued. “shut up,” i said. “aw, come on it’s funny!” azar said. “go away,” i demanded. azar, still laughing to himself, walked up the trail toward the village, disappearing behind the trees. “just ignore him, he’s not worth listening to,” i said kneeling towards tim. “really you should just try and forget about this, it’s what anyone would’ve done” (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing). portraying the differences in azar’s and tim’s perceptions of the event reflects how, as sharon notes, “azar uses humor as a defense mechanism” constituting a rationalization for killing in war, while kiowa tries to rationalize the situation in order to justify tim’s actions. he regrets the loss of this man’s life; however he tries to explain to tim that it was necessary for the survival of their rank. tim, on the other hand, forgets the purpose of the war entirely. he succumbs to the guilt and shock he feels from killing this man, unable to escape his shock as kiowa tries to reassure him (sharon’s written reflection). michelle noted how they were aware of their readers’ perceptions of azar: some could think of him as very rude and insensitive, while others could believe that his way of coping and trying to make people feel better is through humor. we were trying to make readers see that azar coped with tragedies through humor (michelle’s written reflection). the students use azar’s languaging as double-voicing ways of being and becoming (bakhtin, 1981) through use of ironic humor for coping with the effects of war. having azar parody or double voice kiowa’s admonition serves to critique kiowa’s languaging actions constituting use of his practice of impersonal dismissal of tim’s guilt. the students are therefore portraying azar as adopting the role of what nodeh (2013) describes as the “bakhtinian fool [who] is a comic character who is extremely mocked by the objective narrator but, as a matter of fact, is used as a mask for the author to criticize society” (p. 404). they are also portraying dialogic tensions associated with kiowa’s admonishing tim to “just try and forget about this, it’s what anyone would’ve done,” as opposed to his empathizing with tim’s guilt. in the next section, the students portray kiowa’s further attempts to help tim break out of his shock: “look at him. he was bound to be killed anyway. he’s not a soldier, he looks like another civilian.” i said in a desperate attempt to make him snap out of his shock. no matter what comforting words i attempted to give, his shock didn’t waver. students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a49 “snap out of it! he’s dead, staring at his body isn’t going to change that. come on we got a lot of work to do today,” i insisted (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing). sharon notes that in they wanted to portray kiowa’s emotions of “frustration, regret, and realization. kiowa is originally frustrated when he cannot get tim to snap out of his daze.” she also suggests “the potential that kiowa could have gotten extremely upset, he could have lost all hope, or even tim could have had a meltdown.” in the final section of sharon and michelle’s narrative, in removing items from the dead soldier’s body, kiowa finds: a picture of a beautiful young woman. the image of her beautiful, young face twisted into sorrowful despair upon hearing the news of her loved one’s death slowly crept into my mind. i instantly started to regret my rash outburst of frustration i had unleashed on tim. it became clear to me that the war had not affected tim enough to turn him inhumane. i picked up a nearby poncho to place over the young soldier, symbolically placing him to rest as if we had just held a funeral ceremony for him. i prayed for only one thing: to be able to be considered as righteous and thoughtful of a human being as my wonderful friend, tim o’brien (sharon and michelle’s narrative writing). through describing kiowa’s regrets about how his earlier use of dismissive language was counter-productive, the students are portraying kiowa’s awareness of his own use of languaging in impacting his relationship with tim. as sharon notes: kiowa realizes that the soldier, much like himself, has a family at his home that miss him and that he had a life separate from the one he had been living in the war. this causes kiowa to also realize that this is what caused tim’s shock and kiowa regrets bursting out at tim (sharon’s written reflection). when asked about the overall meaning(s) the students wanted to convey in their narrative, sharon noted that they wanted their readers to recognize tensions related to societal expectations about soldiers in war, that soldiers are people to be respected because they do the most difficult job in the world. they are brave, tough, and selfless. we wanted to show that, although all this may be true, they are also human beings, not superheroes from comic books. soldiers, just like everyone else, are affected by what they witness, can be haunted from living their nightmares, and need to be treated with compassion by those around them (sharon’s written reflection). michelle noted that they wanted to portray the differences in the effects of war on the characters: that azar struggled with how to handle difficult situations, kiowa constantly longed to be home, lieutenant cross buried himself inside, and tim struggled to cope with killing a man. not all of these effects were bad things, often times they showed that soldiers are human too (michelle’s written reflection). the students’ reflections suggest that they were portraying the impact of war and the military on kiowa, shifting between an impersonal “i-it” (buber, 2004) relationship with tim to adopting an “i-thou” caring relationship associated with kiowa’s willingness to take responsibility for helping tim, responsibility as defined by bakhtin as carrying “two intertwined meanings: being is a matter of responding to students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a50 situational demands and possibilities, and the individual is responsible for the responses he or she makes” (skaftun, 2011, p. 48). applying lived-world experiences to rewriting events in creating their narratives, the students drew on their lived-world, personal experiences, reflecting bakhtin’s description that behind the narrator's story we read a second story, the author's story; he [sic] is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself. we acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief system filled with his objects, meaning and emotional expressions; and the other, the level of the author, who speaks (albeit in a refracted way) by means of this story and through this story (bakhtin, 1981, p. 314) (quoted in nodeh, 2013, p. 2). to portray the tensions between their characters, the students were drawing on their beliefs or discourses to “double-voice” (bakhtin, 2011) those beliefs or discourses through use of languaging. they portrayed martha’s rejection of jim’s expression of love not as an outright, explicit rejection, but rather as a reflection of their own perceptions of sexist gendered discourses shaping relationships, as well as their sense of ambiguity about how to cope with power differentials in these relationships. samantha described how she drew on experiences of adopting ambiguous stances in her own relationships to portray how martha: wanted to be treated with respect and jim did not indicate that it was how he would treat her. with someone liking me more than i like them and vice versa, can be hard to deal with in both circumstances. in the situation with jim loving more, i can understand how it hurts to put everything on the table and like a person so much but not have it be mutual (samatha’s written reflection). elizabeth reflected on how she drew on her own experiences of being positioned as a sex object to portray jim’s perceptions of martha: sometimes when at a public place like the mall, men catcall or street harass women and they always ignore or just find a way to leave without submitting to them. this has happened to me as it has to almost every female. like martha when jim says he wants to tie her to the bed all night, she feels uncomfortable and disgusted and wants to leave the situation just like women feel like when getting catcalled (elizabeth’s written reflection). in describing how they drew on lived-world experiences for writing their story, michelle and sharon noted their portrayals of kiowa’s regret in initially failing “to explain and describe how tim was feeling” over killing the vietcong soldier were based on their own experiences of regret. sharon cited her experience of regret with situations in which i didn’t look deep enough into and ended up regretting my ignorance. at times i have jumped to conclusions or irrationally released my frustration on the wrong person and in the end i regret not looking at the broader picture, instead of focusing on just my situation (sharon’s written reflection). michelle noted this sense of regret stems from not knowing how to effectively communicate support in students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a51 trying to help my friends when they are in need…it can be hard to figure out the right thing to say and when you cannot help it can be frustrating which is what happened between kiowa and tim (michelle’s written reflection). by drawing on their own experiences of dialogic tensions in relationships, the students recognized the need to capture the complexity of their characters’ interactions associated with martha’s reticence in reuniting with jim and kiowa’s difficulties in assisting tim. the benefits of rewriting events in texts for responding to literature these four students’ work suggests that there are a number of benefits in having students engage in rewriting stories to enhance their understanding of how languaging serves to construct characters’ relationships in literature. in rewriting events from the texts, the students were going beyond simply responding to a text to employing languaging to portray actions constituting practices shaping characters’ relationships. adopting and creating martha’s and kiowa’s first-person perspectives required that the students draw on their interpretations of these characters’ beliefs, history, and identities to portray how those beliefs, history, and identities shaped their characters’ use of languaging constituting their “inbetween” “shared intentionality” (di paolo & de jaegher, 2012, p 2) for portraying their relationships with jim and tim. students also benefitted from engaging in the rewriting through their use of their collaboration for sharing ideas and revising their texts, benefits consistent with research on the value of collaborative writing (dobao, & blum, 2013; fjällström & kokkola; shehadeh, 2011; wigglesworth & storch, 2012). through their collaboration, the students engaged in “collective scaffolding” by drawing on each other’s knowledge and perspectives in their interactions (donato, 1994). as michelle noted, “our story would have been much different if we hadn’t worked together.” in their collaboration, students tested out alternative revisions to determine what options would best serve to convey their overall thematic meanings; for example, as sharon describes, “we decided that having kiowa get frustrated with tim’s lack of response was the most realistic and relatable. i believe that if we had written this story separately, the general purpose of the story would be lost.” this included collaboratively rehearsing oral interactions to create characters’ dialogue by translating oral language into a written mode (kravchenko, 2016), reflecting the students use of “participatory sense-making” (di paolo & de jaegher, 2012, p. 2). elizabeth described talking “about different ideas and whatever sounded the best we typed up.” as samantha noted “elizabeth and i were able to incorporate both of our styles of writing. we bounced ideas off of each other to make sure that we equally had a part and it flowed coherently.” the students’ awareness that they employed different writing styles, resulting in the need, as elizabeth noted, to make “sure it all flowed together nicely and made sense so it had the same writing style throughout,” reflects an awareness that use of languaging itself mediated their collaboration. in a related study, analysis of four efl chinese college students collaborative rewriting of a story written in english found that the students employed languaging to mediate their own interactions (yang, 2016). this use of languaging helped them cope with issues of translation and portrayal of characters’ interactions so that “languaging served as a means and a platform for the participants to exchange their ideas and talk about the language they were learning” (p. 253). such collaborative interaction may also benefit students engaged in argumentative writing through engaging in exploratory talk to grapple with communicative students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a52 struggles to make explicit students’ thinking about an issue or topic (brown, 2016; cervetti et al, 2014; sherry, 2014). fostering “participatory sense-making” in classroom spaces one advantage of ms. bianchi’s rewriting assignment was that she did not limit the students to having to conform to generating a particular type of rewriting consistent with a predetermined outcome or having to employ a particular strategy in their rewriting. aukerman (2013) contrasts the pedagogical approach of “comprehension as sense-making” in responding to texts as distinct from a “comprehensionas-outcome” pedagogy in which students need to conform to achieving certain predetermined outcomes or a “comprehension as procedures” pedagogy requiring students’ demonstration of use of specific procedures. in contrast, the “comprehension as sense-making” approach reflected in ms. bianchi’s assignment supports students’ open-ended grappling with uncertainties in characters’ relationships, leading to rewriting of events (aukerman, 2013). the fact that the students were puzzled by martha’s ambiguous stance towards jim as well as kiowa’s initial impersonal response to tim’s grief reflects their willingness to grapple with their own uncertainties about seemingly complex events, a reflection of “comprehension as sense-making.” one approach to encouraging students to acknowledge and share their own misunderstandings or uncertainties in discussions about characters’ languaging is to encourage students to frame their responses as tentative hypotheses or speculations—as “i’m-not-so-sure-about-this” “passing theories” (kent, 1993) as opposed to honoring definitive, authoritative statements. voicing responses as tentative hypotheses or speculations serves to invite others to engage in “participatory sense-making” to collaboratively explore hypotheses or speculations (cappuccio & froese, 2016; kamberelis, mcginley, & welker, 2015). in an analysis of an adult book club’s discussions, participants were more likely to extend discussion of a topic across a series of turns when that topic was initiated as a “passing theory” (kent, 1993) that served to invite others to share their responses (beach & yussen, 2013). sensing that a member of the book club was grappling with a challenging issue or topic encouraged other members to collaboratively grapple with that issue or topic. in rewriting events from texts, students may be concerned about the degree to which they can deviate from the original text in creating their own versions of events from the text. addressing these concerns of verisimilitude can lead to discussions of the larger epistemological issue of whether it is possible to derive a definitive understanding of any lived-world or fictional event (baxter, 2011). for example, in responding to the things they carried, students may discuss reasons for o’brien’s references to his own issues involved in creating fictional versions of events that may have had no basis in any factual reality (calloway, 1995; clarke, 2013). throughout the book, o’brien references the challenge of representing the reality of an event through fiction which is paradoxically employed to portray the reality of “what happened (in vietnam) . . . what might have happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, and maybe also what can be kept from happening or what can be made to happen” (beidler, 1982, p. 87). as o’brien noted, “you start sometimes with an incident that truly happened . . . and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (o’brien, 1990, p. 158), competing perspectives that defy definitive understanding of an event. conclusion in conclusion, the four students benefitted from rewriting events in texts using languaging to portray the “eventness” of characters’ interactions by drawing on their own experiences and emotions in students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a53 interacting with others. collaboratively creating their own versions of events in texts, helped these students engage in a rich transaction with the text given that they needed to employ languaging to portray dialogic tensions and complexities constituting their characters’ relationships, suggesting the value of teachers’ employing rewriting activities as supporting dialogic pedagogy. through collaboratively interacting to engage in rewriting, students were employing their own languaging to share and revise text as itself an important collaborative practice (fjällström & kokkola, 2015; yang, 2016). by drawing on and perceiving connections between their own interactions with others in relationships to 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(2006). why we read fiction: theory of mind and the novel. columbus, oh: ohio state university press. students’ use of languaging in rewriting events from the things they carried richard beach dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.181 | vol. 5 (2017) a56 acknowledgements i wish to thank ms. mary bianchi, the teacher in this project, for generating these engaging rewriting activities; the four students for their creative work; and ana marjanovic-shane and reviewers for their helpful suggestions for revisions. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a19     meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen aarhus university, denmark abstract the article articulates an educational motto – expressed in the title – found in a ‘prototypical narrative’ of social youth work carried out by activists in copenhagen in the 1990s. this way of modeling pedagogical practice is first outlined as different from the standardizing approach dominant in science. as a prototypical narrative, the story alternates between descriptions and contextualizations of events, theoretical debate, and analytical suggestions. the key idea that is unfolded is the ‘critical trans-pedagogy’ of a creation and tinkering of collectives and their participants in struggles for recognition, and for the democratic social engineering of a responsive welfare state. it is suggested that a singular historical situation spurred this development, both in the practical youth work, and in the theoretical traditions with which i could articulate it. this included the post-industrial crisis of labor, the post-cold-war shaking of state forms, new public management, and the simultaneous expansion and attack on the welfare state. it also included how the foucauldian rethinking of power and the performative turn in the social sciences informed the broadly vygotskian traditions. on these backgrounds, the youth work practices could be approached as generalizing, performative reenactments of social problems. the approach is finally spelled out in and around the story of one participant, before the concluding remarks return to the issue of how a prototypical narrative deals with theory. morten nissen is professor at the danish school of education (aarhus university) in copenhagen (http://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/morten-nissen(32db3c54-6233-4faa-b12a-2e031c1fa8dc).html). his research areas are: theories of subjectivity, collectivity, standards and participation. practices of education, social work, health, prevention, and motivation. psycho-social issues and approaches and methodologies and epistemologies of practice. he currently heads the research program “substance – subjects and standards” (http://substance.ku.dk/english/). in addition, he is attached to the ostfold university college in fredrikstad, norway. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a20 introduction the article represents an elaboration of a lecture given to the “active citizens symposium” at the pontifica universitate do sao paulo, in november 2012. the lecture tried to represent and discuss lessons learnt from collaborating with a community of youth workers in copenhagen in the 1990s. “meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground” was a motto of that community that neatly captured some key aspects of their form of youth / social work / education, which i came to articulate as a ‘critical trans-pedagogy’. although i recently published a book that unfolds and explains that articulation to an international readership (nissen, 2012a), the question whether and how standards of educational practice can be transferred across great spatio-temporal and socio-cultural distances is far from straightforward and simple: addressing a brazilian audience with danish experience, i was impelled to reconsider it. after all, as readers of a journal of dialogical pedagogy will appreciate, i was not exactly out to standardize education or youth work, urging my sao paulo colleagues to buy (into) ‘critical trans-pedagogy®’ as an evidence-based program. that consideration, however, was not an obstacle or a detour, since the questions of standards and standardization are both very contemporary and at the same time at the heart of why it makes sense to work with theory1. the globalized empiricism of standard educational methodology sets the scene for a renewed meta-scientific and trans-disciplinary reflexivity, once we realize that rejecting standards by invoking idiographic situated complexity in a text (or in a lecture two decades and 10.000 km away from those situations) is necessarily self-refuting2. accordingly, the issue of standards frames the present argument: theory is considered in the light of standards, that is to say: how practices may be articulated as relevant across important differences. we come across that frame as we enter and as we exit this article. still, the narrative form, which derived, first, from the genre of an oral address, is retained at several levels in this text. indeed, it is argued that some narrative structure must be crafted to connect the temporalities and tensions of individual, socio-cultural and theoretical developments, and thus to facilitate the reflection of the singular historicities of experiences, concepts, and standards. however, this does not imply or suggest any immediate common-sense, i.e. everyday sense-making as the counterpart to standards. it is true that narrativity sometimes serves as a vehicle for a critique of ‘abstractions’ and a claim to what is then cherished as ‘concrete’, while, in the same moment, veiling its own work of abstractions. but instead of this ideological trope, i intend to mobilize narrative as explicitly prototypical, as carrying standards, and thus as a way to accentuate the irreverence and dialogicality that is inherent to theoretical analyses, and cultivated by their textual form, which cannot help but continuously defer sense into meaning, in something like what fernanda liberali (2009) calls a ‘creative chain’. forming persons: standards and concrete universals how is the practice of forming persons – pedagogical practice – transferred? two simple answers to this question are dominant: there is a) the blank rejection of standards that i have just rejected (and which will not occupy us more in this text), but the general scientific understanding is that b) this is a job of abstracting and focusing on specific causal relations by clearing away differences: ceteris paribus, all other things being equal. 1 that whole issue is the topic of a research program i am currently involved with on “substance – subjects and standards”. see http://substance.ku.dk/english (april, 2014). 2 derrida (1981) makes this point nicely in his discussion of plato’s (textual) critique of textuality in phaedrus – so the issue is not only contemporary, but also very old. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a21 thus, for instance, the world’s most cited living psychologist, albert bandura, staged experiments that sought to strip away everything else so that only universal psychological mechanisms appeared; he famously proved that people can learn from observing each other (‘social learning’), and that you’ll be more motivated to do things if you believe you are able to do them (‘self-efficacy’). banal as it may look, this mock rephrasing comes quite close to the actual scientific findings, precisely because bandura did such a good job of clearing away complexities. for the same reason, they seem to be easily applicable to all kinds of situations. at a closer look, it takes quite some effort to make these generalized statements in ways that will be accepted as relevant and significant, rather than as signs of utter simple-mindedness. as in many crafts, the art is to conceal the effort – not the effort of scientific abstraction, but the effort of making it relevant. the great effort of standardizing psychology lies in restructuring the practical field of relevance – in this case into one where learning is conceivable as an individual’s collecting of information (even when it is ‘social’), and where the presumed feasibility of actions appears as stable patterns of that same individual’s way of dealing with herself. in many parts of the world, that has taken, and may still take, some very hard work. typically, though, it forms part of the establishment of larger institutional structures, and it is rewarded with the authority of expertise that comes from referencing ‘the world’s greatest’ psychologist. it is a general point about standardization that there is a lot of work of providing the conditions necessary for the standard to be relevant and to work; and that, once it is in place, that work is typically overlooked, because the standard also directs the gaze (see e.g. bowker & star, 1999; busch, 2011; timmermans & berg, 2003). indeed, that is often part of the point in standardization: to allow us to focus and forget. in many cases, this is achieved mostly through a material and technological automatization in a global division of labor (as with e.g. computers, smartphones and cars); in other cases, it is more of an imposition of habits and institutional structures that have to be reaffirmed each time anew (as with e.g. forms of pedagogy). all cases, indeed, include both these aspects. further, in all cases – but more obvious and immediately pertinent in the latter type of cases – simplifications are not achieved by eliminating differences, since they cannot be removed, but rather by pushing them aside and covering them, paradoxically adding to the complexity they appear to reduce. it is typically easy to let one’s gaze be directed by the standards of a car, and forget about the complexities of carbon emission, health issues etc. but in the case of pedagogical standards – standards for the practice of forming persons – the complex ecology of the imposition of the standard remains in view in a different way. this makes the choice between a standardizing and a reflexive standpoint especially acute: although institutional power is invested in such standards – as we shall discuss further below – they are never quite taken for granted, since pedagogy itself necessarily includes a precarious imposition, adoption, and recreation of standards. for this reason, the tradition of conceiving of general relevance within the framework of standardization – the scientific ceteris paribus – has never achieved a complete hegemony in pedagogy. there is room for an alternative. this alternative does not, of course, imply a denial of standards, but a kind of modelling of standards that does not conceal, but includes a reflection of their concrete conditions, realizations, and relevance. it creates vulnerable and contestable prototypes rather than clear-cut blueprints. it thinks in, and with standards, but, crucially, also about, around, and sometimes against them3. 3 this paraphrases and expands wolf haug’s characterization of critical theory as thinking about, rather than in, the thought-forms of a bourgeois society (haug, 1977). meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a22 as an example, paulo freire’s concept of conscientization (freire, 1996) models a standard of pedagogical practice. but if one looks into freire’s texts (or secondary texts about them) for simple and transferrable cause-effect formula, one does not find any. freire’s legacy remains bound to his time and place. for this reason, one might guess that his texts would be relevant only for specialists in brazilian educational history. but this is, as is well-known, far from true. rather, they are taken up world-wide as a key reference in a critical pedagogy that seeks relevance in conditions that differ widely from freire’s. parts of this bid for relevance are disputed – as, for instance, the question whether the concept of ‘empowerment’ in a mostly north american community education should be referred back to freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’, or should rather be described as a form of psychologization of issues of power and privilege that freire would probably detest (see, e.g. cruikshank, 1999 and below). but, precisely since the context of relevance is itself part of the knowledge, that dispute is, too. the reason a work like freire’s can be transferred is not that it is simplified and appears to be easily applied. on the contrary, it is that, with all its complexities, it can be seen to address fundamental issues. freire’s pedagogy was revolutionary, not only in a direct political sense, but also in the sense of ground-breaking contributions to an ongoing discussion of applied philosophy. although freire’s texts, as any model must, works with abstractions, they visibly and reflectively add to the complexities of any pedagogy by posing the question of how it connects to social transformation in a wider political meaning. they pose this question while maintaining that it must be a rich and complex question, in freire’s brazil as in, for instance, copenhagen 40 years later. but they also suggest that this troublesome work is worth the effort, since it addresses core issues. learning from one of freire’s favorite philosophers, hegel, we can call such issues concrete universals: issues that can never quite be abstracted from their time and place, but still useful to learn about at other times and places. to learn from them, we have to engage with specifics. the more we engage with different specifics, the deeper we can understand the universal concepts. again and again, this movement requires us to reflect on the concepts. as we reflect on their differential referents, this implies that we also reflect how they are distinguished from and related to other concepts, as proposed and carried by different traditions. for instance, how did conscientization develop from christian conscience and enlightenment consciousness, and how did it later transform into a psychologized empowerment? thus, to the complexities of reference and relevance are added those of cultural and scholarly traditions. in other words, concrete universals are theoretical. they do not easily translate to an immediate common sense as do the simplistic and reductionist standardized concepts. that is to say, they do not lend themselves to ways of hiding complexities of transfer. to use them, we need time and effort to first take them seriously, in their own right, and then time and effort to make them relevant. thus, we need some kind of academia – some kind of school. but this does not mean we need the school as we mostly know it – an institution which typically, by not addressing relevance as problematic, sanctions the unreflective imposition of standards, and pretends to ignore it. although it may appear paradoxical, empiricism and scholasticism are two sides of the same coin, and conversely, theoretical work is closely related to practice and social transformation. recently, anna stetsenko has coined the term transformative activist stance for this epistemology of practice (stetsenko, 2013), which originates in the philosophical tradition going from spinoza through hegel to marx, explicitly stated in marx’ theses on feuerbach (marx, 2003, see also jensen, 1999). freire was one of the most important in a line of pedagogical theorists who drew out the implications of this general epistemology for education: working with concrete universals, engaged in transforming fundamental socio-cultural standards and conditions, is formative of persons as well as of theories. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a23 we could say that this work of changing standards, conditions, persons and theories, is basically what ’meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground’ means. but spelling out the implications of this pedagogy is more than merely exemplifying freire with copenhagen social youth work. forming and rethinking collectives my collaboration with the experimental social youth workers in copenhagen took the shape of a ‘joint venture’ where our different, but ethically allied projects met and exchanged, transforming references from their experience and from my theoretical traditions. i did general ethnographic fieldwork, interviewed all kinds of participants and stakeholders, and participated in more or less formalized discussions; i fed back my analyses in numerous ways, including lectures, webpages, and various other genres. twice, i was formally appointed evaluator on behalf of the state. overall, i worked to articulate the standards of their collective practices by modelling those practices as prototypical, that is, as embodying concrete universals4. when i engaged with them in 1990, i was soon impressed with their skills in mobilizing and organizing. this was not surprising, since many of them, like myself, had experience and schooling from organized political work. and of course, if you are trying to do practical experiments in pedagogy, that is a good deal of what you will be doing: you must create, maintain, modify, develop etc. not only participants, but also what they participate in – arrange meetings, provide venues, establish groups and activities, secure funding, decide on names and logos, etc. that is not usually considered part of education itself. but in this community, and in our discussions, it was deemed crucial. one important reason for this was that, although we shared a tradition of political organizing, that tradition was changing. even before 1989, and even in the most militant quarters – such as communists and maoists – the hierarchical and rationalistic organizational traditions were crumbling on the european left, not least through the demise of industrial labor, and the rise of the peace, environment, feminist and student movements. notions of ‘grass-roots’ or ‘flat democracy’ were ready at hand, but they were obviously simplistic and did not much address the key issues of pedagogical design and development of collectives. this set of practical problems matched a problem in the theoretical traditions that i had been working with. contrary to the individualism of the standardized psychology exemplified above with bandura, the cultural-historical psychology, from lev vygotsky (1962) and on, was broadly speaking collectivist, maintaining that people develop through the appropriation of culture in social interaction. but it was not easy to take the step from that psychology to the question of the formation of collectives. the social psychology of the time, even in off-mainstream versions, was dominated by the agency/structure model that blocked attempts to overcome divisions between disciplines. thus, regarding individuals as social almost certainly implied their more or less smooth fusion into given structures or systems, which, in turn, formed part of the reproduction of society5. in the vygotskian tradition, those theorists who were most keen to take up the radical implication that human subjectivity arises through participation – rather than mere interaction – were struggling with that functionalism, in different ways and with different solutions. leontiev’s activity theory (leontiev, 1978) presented a bluntly functionalist sociology, from which he tried to shelter subjective agency by insisting that personal sense could not be reduced to objective meaning – although he could not quite explain why, since he saw sense as anchored 4 i have unfolded this methodology in nissen (2009a) and of course in the above-mentioned monograph (nissen, 2012). 5 some theorists – most prominently, at the time, giddens and bourdieu – declared agency and structure to be mutually constitutive or internally related, but since they could not escape the model, they had to declare that intention over and over. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a24 in motives that were socially produced. engeström and his colleagues solved the problem by fusing sense into meaning and focusing on ‘activity systems’, hoping instead to avert functionalism by seeking out their ‘contradictions’ (engeström, 1987). holzkamp (2013) and his followers, by contrast, developed a ‘subject-science’ by reducing meaning to sense; this increasingly phenomenological approach then merged in many ways with lave and wenger’s theory of ‘communities of practice’ (1991), most characteristically in dreier’s work (2008). whereas engeström ends in functionalism each time he proposes an ‘activity system’, lave (2008) refuses it by denying the ontic reality of collectives as singular entities at all (see, on this issue, nissen, 2011, or 2012, ch. 5). this may all appear a quagmire very ‘internal’ to a particular theoretical tradition in psychology. but, in fact, these were broader ideological issues as well. the privatization of agency is a cornerstone of capitalism, and functionalism is deeply rooted in the constitution of social sciences as practices of social regulation that claim political neutrality. further, as could become clearer as the dust settled on the rubbles of the cold war, even the marxist traditions that tried to overcome just those ideologies, practically and theoretically, had severe problems with collectives from the start. through many years of interdisciplinary collaboration, i have learned to wonder about how so many vygotskian and otherwise marxist psychologists could insist that “society” is vital to understanding persons, yet give it so little attention. a part of this could be attributed to divisions between scientific disciplines, as mentioned. but it is not only in psychology. sociology, right from its foundation by durkheim, tönnies and others, outlined ‘society’ as a strangely fuzzy unit of analysis, sometimes covering the entire globe in all its history, at other times only the territories of present nation-states or even smaller units. how one ‘society’ was constituted as distinct from another was considered a minor practicality and largely ignored. this, in turn, can be seen as a result of sociology’s place within an unchallenged political territory6, and the identity of society and politics are of course obscured also by another division of disciplines, the border onto political science. of course, we would expect something radically different from a marxist social theory that was trans-disciplinary and allied with projects of socio-political change from the beginning. but it turns out the problem is even deeper. marx himself and his followers would largely think of those projects of sociopolitical change as the dissolution of social units, most famously in the communist manifesto’s utopia of the withering away of the state. this was probably a reaction both to hegel, for whom the given (prussian) state was the epitome of a concrete-universal collective formation, and to the grim realities (largely unaddressed by hegel) of the ‘night-watch states’ of the time. societies were formed as distinct units, as states, in processes of alienation, in dirty wars that unfailingly served the interests of the privileged, even as they presented themselves as embodiments of universals values. the marxist utopia was one of an emancipation of the true substance of society, “the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live” (marx & engels, 2000), and this emancipation would finally free the universal from the impurities and distortions of its particular and singular formations. from this perspective, concrete collective formations were either considered purely instrumental to the higher cause of a revolutionary vanguard – as in lenin’s political theory and practice – or rejected as false and oppressive (by an even more revolutionary vanguard – such as the trotskian opposition). as the soviet union consolidated itself in a very concrete and bloody state formation, this ‘eschatological’ ideological dynamic contributed to the emergent stalinism (cf. zizek, 2001). no wonder that vygotsky and his colleagues, although in the early soviet years eager to contribute to forming the ‘new man’ of the ‘new society’ (stetsenko & arievitch, 2004), stepped back from explicitly engaging with the political formation 6 so, for instance, tönnies declares explicitly on page 1 of his seminal ‘community and society’ (tönnies, 2001) that his theory exclusively concerns social relations that are mutually beneficial, that is, both community and society are abstracted from power. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a25 of collectives and finally accepted the functionalist division of knowledge. understandable, also, that many theoretical reflections on collectivity, after the fall of communism, would be attracted to the idea of a truly ‘inoperative community’ (nancy, 1991), or accept as inescapable the modern paradox that we can only define ourselves as “the community of those without community” (derrida, 2005). in other words, the split in the vygotskian traditions between functionalist (engeström) and utopian (lave) collectivity that i found around 1990 was far from accidental. but there were two elements of that historical situation which suggested ways toward overcoming it. first, the acute dilemma that the political struggle in western europe for more democratic forms of welfare state took place at a time when this welfare state was under increasing pressure from global neo-liberal deregulation and dismantling. this nurtured an appreciation of the concrete state formations that had come out of the political struggles of the 20th century, even as those formations were also obviously problematic. it taught (some of) us that a successful revolution is one that cultivates the state, not one that tears it down. it also helped to make clear the difference (and thus, the dialectics) between the negative and the positive aspects of political transformation7. secondly, and in partial contradiction to this, there was the rethinking of power in the increasingly influencial foucauldian tradition in social theory. although foucault certainly represented a ‘negativist’ ethics – an ethics of ‘refusing what we are’ rather than one of collective construction (even if he does, vaguely, open to a positivity of self-creation in his later writings) – his generalization of power to being a fundamental and productive expression of the objectification implied in inter-subjectivity provided a way of approaching the ‘politics’ of practices that are not defined as political, as well as that of the discourses with which they are regulated. this helped to escape the functionalism/utopianism oscillations by making it evident that society’s various collectives and their participants are neither cogs in well-greased machineries nor innocent and free. it did not provide an approach to how collectives are constituted, let alone how this might be conceivable and cultivated as a kind of empowerment, but it pushed toward a rethinking of power as a way of approaching it. for this, it was necessary to dive even deeper into the theoretical relations of power and subjectivity. foucault’s concept of subjectification could be seen as one development of a tradition of theorizing agency and selfhood that goes back to spinoza and crucially includes hegel’s theory of the emergence of consciousness as the self-consciousness of a subject in a dialectics of recognition (hegel, 1977). theories of recognition have formed a curious side-current, spanning versions of marxism, pragmatism and critical psychoanalysis, but they never much influenced the vygotskians. seen from the vantage point of recognition, the foucauldian narrative of the diffusion of sovereign power into societies of loosely coupled governmentalities – from which we can pick technologies to build ourselves – appears, after all, ideologically affirmative and a continuation of the sociological evasion of politics. recognition provides a much more troublesome and fertile general approach. to be sure, this presupposes a reading of recognition which takes off from an epistemology of practice and social transformation. in my 2012 book, i suggest the concept of ‘collective’ as a kind of subject: a community whose singular existence is no longer accidental, nor simply a function of a shared project, but self-constituted and self-conscious, mediated by its precarious relations to other subjects – including, importantly, participants – as these relations are formed in and with cultural standards under singular circumstances. recognizing itself as recognized by these others. in the terms of hegel’s dialectics, it is a singular ‘we’ that exists in and for itself as an ‘us’ (nissen, 2012, ch. 7). the implication is that true empowerment involves recognition as participant of recognized collectives. 7 one expression of this is the ‘state and life-mode theory’ developed by thomas højrup and colleagues, see (højrup, 2003) meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a26 let us return to the pedagogical practices and see how this spells out. the ama’r total theater project my community of copenhagen ‘wild’ social youth workers originated in the middle 1980’s, when a small group of students formed a youth work project called the ama’r total theater (att)8. they had, as mentioned, a background in union work, peace movement, and youth politics, and they knew how to mobilize and organize people. now they wanted to use their know-how to help young people who had dropped out of school and faced the high levels of youth unemployment of the time, and who were vulnerable to various social problems such as crime and drugs. in denmark, it is not that there are no institutions or that children are not allowed into decent schools because they are too poor. we danes have been luckier than most. by the 1980s, denmark had developed quite far in the direction of a universalist welfare state. to a large extent, schools were tax-paid and free and the same for all, as were child care, hospitals, and many other welfare institutions. youth clubs were universal and almost free of charge, established as a crime prevention measure, to help first of all those young people who dropped out of schools. but the fact was, as the att activists saw it, still many young people in copenhagen city could or would not use these clubs. they were often half-empty, and the kids were bored with them and would often vandalize them. they were not very well-equipped (by danish standards), but even the resources they had seemed to be in the wrong place, useless. the ama’r total theater activists were not very keen to see themselves as future staff in those places. now, they could finish their training, get jobs there and suggest changes: table football instead of leather workshop; computer games instead of basketball; dance instead of sewing etc. and hope for that to appeal to young people more than drug dealing; for a time… but they did something else. they established the ama’r total theater, in a way that they would later refer to as “meeting youth on neutral ground and in movement”. the total theater was never established as a standard institution. instead, it had the form of a social movement. grass-root democracy decided everything. no structures existed except the ongoing campaign for the next event (no staff, no executive). these events were street theater happenings, musicals, festivals, parties etc., culminating in a grand-scale participation in the “next stop soviet” antinuclear movement in 1989, where they went to moscow and performed a big total theater event. funding, recruitment, targets, and all kinds of resources and defining elements were debated, worked and fought for, in a kind of tinkering, from event to event. the concept of tinkering, or ‘bricolage’, taken from science and technology studies in the ‘actor network theory’ tradition (e.g. callon & law, 1997; latour, 2005; mol, 2002), conveys how an ongoing process can imply an emergent and heterogenous collection of all kinds of elements, e.g. who are we, what are we doing, for which purposes, using which tools, in the interest of whom etc. 9 this was neutral ground, not only because all positions were precarious, at stake, but also because one of the most vital resources was always the participation of the young people who were otherwise marginalized. some of the activists of the total theater later went on to target even more excluded young people, like street kids and drug users, in other communities and projects that i shall 8 ama’r is a copenhagen neighborhood. 9 note, however, that my use of the concept is itself a tinkering, in the sense that i don’t accept the more general ontological premise in the ant that such a ‘dynamic ontology’ necessarily implies a rejection of more encompassing concepts such as not least those that carry the differences between human agency and other kinds of effects. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a27 return to below. still with the same, or almost the same, basic method, of meeting young people on neutral ground and in movement. without the visible success in mobilizing trouble-making youths (delinquents, drug users, gang-members etc.), the att activists would not be able to persuade authorities and funding bodies that they should be supported. and conversely, without the visible success in securing that support, they could not persuade the young people that here was something really powerful going on, something that could form their motives and their dreams. this was politics and education at once. in a way, this is well-known from most political organizations. there is always an issue of leadership, ‘cadre work’ etc., of making sure that newcomers can learn and grow. but the difference was that here, the organization deliberately and successfully reached out to include the socially excluded, while still doing politics. all through the many shifting constellations of their ‘bricolage’, the radical inclusion of the socially excluded as participants was one of the main ethical and political values with which they defined who they were. in this, they were different from many others who took up the ‘entrepreneurial’, neo-liberal spirit of new public management (see du gay, 2000, rose, 1999) at the time, and were funded by the state or the eu to organize social development projects. these would typically end up either recruiting more resourceful participants, or returning to more traditional institutional forms with more rigid divisions between positions (staff / inmate, teacher / student etc.). of course, this intention is ubiquitous. we are many who wish to flag a social responsibility and blame social exclusion on external forces. but in order to articulate what i came to regard as the exceptional inclusive success of the att collectives and their successors, it is necessary to go deeper into the harsh power dynamics of how each “we” is constituted. the first part of this route we can follow a foucauldian track. foucault’s lesson politics have been traditionally understood as a set of institutions and practices that provide the macro structures that in turn give us the foundations, or the overall frameworks for our practices and our everyday lives. for instance, educational politics lead to the building and regulation of schools, as a civil right and a requirement for post-industrial production. once these macro structures are in place, the politicians can attend to other matters, and the teachers and pupils can begin their peaceful work in harmony. in the ideal liberal society, power is only relevant in exceptional and unfortunate instances; with freudian metaphors, we can say that it is repressed and returns as phantasy through hollywood. but foucault taught us that power and politics are everywhere. his analysis of clinics, prisons and mental hospitals gave us crucial keys to how all institutions work, including schools and social work projects (foucault, 1967; 1973; 1997). first of all, these institutions perform a kind of power of distribution. people are moved between institutions, and inside institutions, they are moved between wards, cells, classes, positions etc. secondly, this kind of micro-power is based on a more or less scientific assessment of individuals. participants are tested and classified so that they can be put in the right positions. thirdly, this power is often almost invisible and uncontested, since participants mostly do what is required in order to achieve or maintain desirable positions. finally, this implies that their subjection to the power of potential exclusion leads people to participate reflexively, or we could say, responsibly, in their own normatively governed development. so the power mechanism that appears to be external and is typically disregarded, ignored, is in reality at the core, crucial to the forming of self-reflexive and ‘responsible’ subjectivity. this takes place even in very rich societies in states with a highly developed structure of welfare institutions. one of meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a28 foucault’s main points is that this should not be seen as violently repressive and irrational, but rather to the contrary, it is economic and productive. this is ‘bio-power’, the power of life – which takes ‘life’ as its object, its instrument, and its aim. this is where many readers of foucault (e.g. dean, 1999) conjure up an image of a total system, a smoothly functioning apparatus of subtle power mechanisms that transform all kinds of resistance into affirmative self-care. thus, as i hinted at above, the reception of freire’s pedagogy as “empowerment” into the “war on poverty” in the us in the 1960s can be interpreted as a “will to empower”, a new way of subjecting and subjectifying democratic citizens (cruikshank, 1999), by representing and amplifying those parts of the discourse that merged into us liberal traditions and emphasized individual growth. this ‘totalizing’ reading of foucault has come to be dominant, even though foucault actually warned, at the end of his book on discipline and punish, that everything is precarious, and behind it all “we must hear the distant roar of battle” (foucault, 1997, p. 308). in fact, foucault himself never focused much on that battle, probably out of a wish to escape from certain restrictive forms of marxist partisanship. so, struggle and antagonism diluted into differences, heterogeneity and paradoxes that never did much to challenge the idea of a “system”. foucault’s main project was to describe the machinery, after all, with the roar of the battle quite distant. but if we take his warning seriously, we can tune in to the battle cry. we can begin to notice that every time an individual is excluded, there is possible alternative which is to turn the gaze the opposite way and ask ourselves how we can change the institution, or even build new institutions. and often, we should do this because the problem of the excluded is always somehow also a problem for the rest of us: a general issue. the social problem for instance, if some students are too restless to concentrate and be quiet in the classroom, we might diagnose them with adhd and see if we can get a doctor to prescribe some ritalin. but we might also think of such things as: how are their relations to the other students who bully them, and how do these relations form part of the way formal and informal collectives interact at the school? what kind of problems do they face when they go home, in terms not only of family dynamics, but also of (often problematic) relations between the institutions of family and school? and not least, how can we change ourselves as school collectives and practices so that they – and, most likely, in the long run, the rest of us, too – can better participate (etc. cf. kristensen & mørck, 2014; mathiassen, 2013; varenne & mcdermott, 1998)? these lines of questioning and action are generalizing in a sense described by haug (1999), holzkamp (2013) and others: they reach out to general conditions in a move that is at once epistemological and ethical, establishing an approach based on participation, as a larger framework within which the singular events and individual actions can be approached. whenever this generalizing alternative is taken up, the political struggle over conditions that had been hidden as premises for individuals’ choices and actions comes to the surface. in fact, a good part of the history of the emergence of welfare state institutions is a history of that struggle. this has often emerged in the shape of what has been called the social problem. when too many individuals have been excluded, they tend to make various kinds of trouble and disturb the society of normal people. something has to be done. this is the historical origin of social work, and in many ways, this history is ongoing: social work is often ‘reinvented’ as reactions to social problems that do not quite match existing institutions (see e.g. philp, 1979, and nissen, 2012, ch.3). the story of the trouble-making youth that the att activists could mobilize in meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a29 copenhagen in the 1980s is one among countless such ‘reinventions of the wheel’ that characterize social work. often, what has been reinvented as social work can be looked back on in a foucauldian way as a gentle kind of policing (as does most famously donzelot, 1979). but if we tune in to the roar of the battle, and remind ourselves to appreciate the historical cultivation of welfare state institutions that came out of it, there is a different kind of story to be told. for instance, in danish and scandinavian social history, we have the story of how youth clubs emerged in the 1950s, at a time of rapid industrialization and expanding educational institutions, when many working-class kids had trouble with the often contradictory demands of school and industry (much like it is described in willis, 1977), and when the powerful labor organizations were keen to prevent the development of a lumpen-proletariat. or, how pre-school child care institutions were established in the 1960s, when feminists such as my own mother struggled for the idea that combining career and family should not be the problem of the individual woman and the individual child. now, more than 90% of scandinavian children attend pre-school child care, and their mothers are all on the labor market. this understanding of the welfare state as emergent in response to social problems as these have been defined and struggled over has been described as the ‘responsive state’ (tilly, 1975). when the state becomes responsive as the result of political struggle allied with social sciences adopting a ‘transformative activist stance’, there is a possibility of a democratic version of ‘social engineering’ (nissen, 2009b). not all conditions are available for transformation, of course. in both these latter cases, part of what made it possible was a growing economy, a strong labor movement, and a position as a cold war front-line state that would make it seem reasonable for the ruling classes and for the us led allies to buy loyalty with welfare provisions (højrup, 2003). this was not quite the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, and even far less today. performing history still, the copenhagen youth workers precisely took up that kind of struggle, facing the social problem of unemployed young people and street kids in the 80s and the 90s. but they did not only do what historically has been done most often: fight for the establishment of a specific kind of standardized institution to secure the provisions for a particular target group. instead, they made the historical process itself into the principle of their own way of doing youth work. the slogan of holzman & polk’s book: “history is the cure!” (1988) captures this version of empowerment: ‘curing’ social problems requires the creation of intensified events or performances where people can become participants in relevant historical processes of transformation. similarly, when the att activists talked about meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground, they spoke of their ‘bricolage’ or tinkering practice of continuously forming and shaping ever new events and collectives, according to the social issues they proposed to identify, and depending on what and whom they could mobilize. but, in distinction from holzman and colleagues who went on to claim that performance in and of itself is identical to development and enough to create history (newman & holzman, 1996; 1997, see also our review in nissen, axel, & bechmann, 1999), the att activists and their followers in the subsequent years – as i and my colleagues came to articulate their work – took on the challenge of the coincidence of social and personal transformation in the creation of collectives in a much wider sense, far beyond the meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a30 stage. this is why their story can be a general story of collectivity – why they can be modeled as a prototype of the general problem of creating collectives and forming participants: this was in fact the kind of know-how they developed. yet, it should be noted that this generalizing modeling of their ‘know-how’ could not have been done without learning from the ‘performative turn’ in the social sciences. it is not only the case that people ‘do things with words’ (austin, 1962), but, more widely, any practice is itself a performance and a production (a creation and a display) of ontologies (mol, 2002). the ‘tinkering’ of elements to form events and collectives is crucially an enactment of categories. in itself, this can be reconstructed as implications of a hegelian-marxist epistemology of practice (jensen, 1987; 1999). but this way of reading the performative turn highlights in a new way the question of how any one situated practice or performance connects with praxis, conditions, and history in a larger sense – precisely since it sets off at a point beyond the agency/structure dichotomy described above. that is, ‘performance’ can be taken as a way of rejecting the whole issue as moot, as newman and holzman exemplify. but it is much more productive to take the hegelian-marxist insistence on objectivity as an impetus for theorizing about performances as relations between practices, mediated by standards and models. in fact, this connects with another side of the ‘performative turn’, developed in interactionist sociology (goffman, 1981; 1986; 1990) and anthropology (geertz, 1973; schechner, 1985; turner, 1987): when “all the world’s a stage” (as shakespeare already noted), this is because everyday action routinely implies creating and recreating relations between practices, mediated by models. if one looks closely into the composition of routine interaction, one finds complex and continuously revised structures of actions that produce (create and display) certain standards, and actions that are to be taken as citations of, or dialogic objections to, such standards. if performance is doing, an important part of doing is modeling. the abstraction of standard ‘acts’ to be perhaps transferred to other situations was not invented by western psychology in the late 19th century; it emerges in everyday interaction and was cultivated and stylized in ritual, ceremony and theater long before and elsewhere. thus taking performance seriously also implies acknowledging that performance does not rule out, nor even bracket, power, but rather, mediates it. children’s play (winther-lindqvist, 2009) and school teaching/learning (davies, 1990) can thus be seen as particular performances that mediate demands, authority, and exclusion, and thereby enforce certain subjectivities. more generally, performing as citation implies submission or resistance to standard categories and identities (butler, 1993; 1997). as nicely described by emily martin (2007), in today’s america (and, let me add, elsewhere), ‘being bipolar’ is inevitably performing and quoting versions or subject positions available from, say, commercials, popular psychiatry, mutual-help fellowships, cinema, etc., perhaps confirming, perhaps rejecting certain of their implications. this is no different from e.g. ‘being melancholic’ 100 years ago, except perhaps that in today’s culture, performative reflexivity is more ready at hand. the self-help culture, with its autobiographies – martin’s book is actually one of these as well – has helped make identities like ‘bipolar’ be recognized as something one can be – in particular forms and under particular conditions; and at the same time, ‘being’ bipolar, at least potentially, becomes something one can externalize – display, quote, control, ‘act out’ etc. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a31 the crew it is this performative reflexivity which was utilized and cultivated in a project that developed from the ama’r total theater, and which is the main community discussed in my book: the crew. in the early 1990s, a new social problem was designated in copenhagen: street kids. in a danish landscape, this is far from what is known from, e.g. latin american cities, as street kids: survival was rarely at issue. but these were young people out of reach of existing institutions, often involved with drugs, crime, or prostitution. the crew, inspired or influenced by the growing self-help culture, developed the att’s mobilizing and tinkering approach by putting up the words “street kids”, “socially excluded youth”, and later “wild youth” as signals that defined the collective and its participants, and this was typically done in activities that included elements of display and performance. with the crew, the youths ‘came out’ as ‘street kids’ etc., directly and publicly addressing and articulating their own situation as part of a social problem, and as part of its solution. the crew quickly attracted media attention with events like hearings, theater shows, and street happenings, and from then on, their fame created a demand for them to give interviews and lectures to journalists, researchers, students and school classes, as an ongoing activity. it also made it fashionable for politicians to support them, which resulted in grants and other kinds of recognition and material resources, including my own participation as researcher. there were two typical reactions to the crew’s version of the performative turn in social youth work. the dominant reaction was to embrace the apparent success visible on the surface, perhaps with the recognition that, no matter what happened to the youths on the longer term, at least now they were within reach. the opposite reaction was to reject it all as a case of ‘the emperor’s new clothes’: a community of people who keep confirming to each other the illusion that this works for real. in my analyses, i took up the performative side of althusser’s concept of interpellation (1994): ideology is first of all practiced, then perhaps reflected – also present as wisdom in the mutual-help movement: fake it till you make it, as the aa motto goes. but, even if i granted that both phases are important, including the phase of ‘faking it’ wearing ‘the emperor’s new clothes’, it necessarily led to the question: what constitutes ‘making it’? how does performance achieve objectivity – resources, power, and recognition – beyond the stage? one kind of answer – increasingly important in today’s post-industrial societies – lies in the sociomateriality of the stage itself. resources, power and recognition obviously concentrated in the crew itself, even as it ‘merely’ staged social problems. the youth who might talk with a therapist about her loneliness could instead get new friends by participating in the crew’s staging of a performance about loneliness; rather than complain about being disenfranchised she might represent the crew in negotiations with city officials about an eu-funded project for youth participation, or witness unskilled self-helpers barely older than herself giving interviews and lectures to respectfully listening social workers; or she could simply participate in refurbishing the most recently acquired venue for the crew’s activities by painting “the crew man”, an iconic representation of ‘wild youth’, on the wall. the stage itself, as it were, goes far beyond the stage. figure 1: the crew man logo, 1993 meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a32 still, there are obvious limits to this kind of answer. these were expressed in educational terms as the reality that very few of the participating youths would develop careers in either the crew itself or in the entertainment business, and even those who would, would at some point be faced with the kinds of institutional demands that had excluded them in the first place (see langager, 2003). they could also be backed by references to much of the performance literature (turner, goffman, willis), according to which reflexive performance is generally a liminal experience that eventually gives way to a normal state of affairs, or at least only marginally challenges it. further, could it be the case that the ‘neutral ground’ and the ‘movement’, and thus the tinkering approach that provided for inclusion and generalization in the first place, in fact depended on the liminality, and thus exceptionality, that was only ever meant to be a fleeting glimpse? and thus, that, rather than really ‘making it’, the pedagogy of the crew consisted in the ‘road runner’ habit of not looking down to see that there is no ground under one’s feet? another kind of answer would point to the general historical tendency toward more frequent and more reflective reorganization which is also a feature of post-industrial societies. important parts of the crew’s resources came from various state development grants; could the crew perhaps be regarded as achievements of a class struggle in the sense that here, such post-industrial resources flowed into tinkering and self-constituting collectives, ‘ad-hocrasies’ (mintzberg, 1993), that realized social inclusion instead of, say, new niches in marketing? if this was the case, the tradition of ‘reinventing the wheel’ in social work could be reframed as a vital resource for a welfare state that could now be ‘responsive’ in a greatly accelerated meaning. this interpretation was very ambitious and in its own way also a radical break with the legacy of the building of welfare state. traditionally, knowledge and resources come with stability. under poor conditions, flexibility equals poverty and oblivion. the homeless are those who can most effortlessly move their home. you can easily change directions of you are not burdened by resources and by the concerns of those who provide them. and above all, those directions and dwellings will not seem important to remember. on the other hand, if you want to secure reasonable social conditions, you must fight for standardized rights. if you win, you have a clear hallmark of social change. social equality is achieved as a kind of standardization, and this is where the generalized knowledge lies – even in a ‘democratic social engineering’. thus, it is no coincidence that political struggles for welfare for many decades had to take the form of demands for bureaucratic state institutions driven by professionals. but the downside of this has been precisely the power structure of social exclusion that foucault described. this is why it made such an important difference when the activists of the ama’r total theater invented the ad-hoc institution that continuously reinvented the wheel, so that the processes of building and re-building institutions could be part of the know-how of pedagogy itself. but it was only in the crew’s performative development of the approach that this was taken to its full implication. the traditional formation of institutions as described by foucault and others was always closely connected to specific forms of problematization, standards, and discursive categories which were more or less taken as essences. thus, the framing of clinical wards embodied diseases; school divisions anchored standards of qualifications; and mutual-help fellowships such as the aa defined themselves by their disease, etc. but the 'performative' interplay of category with collective, and thus, the very ‘enactedness’ of these categories, was rarely reflected as such. this is not only because of a certain cultural inertia of organizational forms – often lamented in post-industrial management but first of all because the founding category was always at the core of each institutional collective's constitution in power relations and identities; essentialism comes both from habit and from ideology (see, to this derrida, 1981, højrup, 2003). meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a33 thus, the crew’s adoption of performance as fashionable self-display could be articulated as far more wide-reaching than as a culturally obvious way of securing funding. what these reflexive performances enacted was a democratization of the emergent post-industrial practice of ‘tinkering’ pedagogical collectives. senko’s story let us finally unfold these suggestions by engaging briefly with the story of senko, one of the characters in my 2012 book. this is roughly how he presented himself when i interviewed him, and when later my colleague line lerche mørck took over and developed a closer collaboration with him (mørck, 2000, 2006; 2007; 2010). senko was an immigrant boy who in 1994 was dealing drugs with his friends. bored from sitting around smoking weed all day, they would find adventure in nightly burglaries. some of the activists from the crew approached senko, and it was arranged so that he could be officially recognized as a ‘client’, as participant in the crew. this way, he could keep the social workers off his back, and he had a place to relax, with a small but steady income. in other words – still of senko’s own – he used the crew for his own purposes. but when the crew arranged a big street festival on the central neighborhood square, in collaboration with various local groups, they made sure to invite senko and his group and involve them as figure 2: the poster for the "know your place" festival meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a34 activists. senko took charge of the falafel booth. as senko described it, he and his friends got involved because it was easy. the festival was inclusive. even very marginalized groups such as the homeless were there, doing something to contribute, even while still drinking their beers, because that was how the neighborhood community, as organized by the crew, wanted to see itself. the “seeing itself” of the community was a key idea of the festival, expressed in the title kend din plads (know your place) – the danish ‘plads’ means both ‘square’ and ‘place’, so the title used an ironic allusion to a classic conservative motto to express the opposite: the aim was for different groups “around the square” to ‘come out’ from their ‘place’ and see themselves in new ways as participants in a community that cared for itself. they also got involved because it was not a shame to be part of the crew. it was not just a place for losers, for people whom you pity. on the contrary, it was in fact a powerful agent in local politics, as the great mobilization to the festival would testify. finally, they got involved because it was fun. the event itself was tailored to participants’ ideas of having fun – featuring a ‘stunt’ performance, a “funny smoking instruments contest”, popular live music, etc. – and these activities had promising future perspectives and made sense in terms of these, even if vaguely. senko could see himself as that kind of organizer; he was already a somewhat leading figure – if at a small level – in the criminal business, and he liked being recognized also for organizing other things. senko’s involvement was to be a turning point for him. not long after, he would be recruited as key activist in a project for sports and other youth activities in a nearby park – the very place where he had himself been selling drugs. the next year he was already one of the founders of a youth club called the street pulse. later still, he developed into a so-called “wild social youth worker”, responsible for recruiting and training other youth workers. for senko and many others around him, one crucial kind of condition of development were what my colleague line lerche mørck called the ‘boundary communities’, where he could participate in undecided or double-faced identities (ibid.). he could belong both to the marginalized criminal communities and those of youth work, at the same time. in fact, this is another relevant meaning of the term ‘neutral ground’. of course, this was not all. stories like this, with real people, are always many-sided. there was also the fact that his girlfriend got pregnant at just the right moment; there were the childhood friendships he happened to have in the neighborhood, the lessons he had learnt from spending a few years in a different country, and much more. and just like it was the case with the youth clubs and the child care institution on a national level, political conditions made it possible. this story is in fact also part of the story of the emerging social and youth policies of a city district council that elected a new progressive leadership who invited senko and others to provide ideas about how they should deal with the social problem of gangs of young immigrants in the neighborhood. but the collectives they made and maintained were important nonetheless, right on the boundary between the different social worlds. mørck uses the term “boundary communities”, but i still suggest we talk of collectives rather than communities, because they were deliberately established; they established themselves in a deliberate design that included a concern for, and a recognition of, participants – and because this self-constitution was always a precarious matter of recognition by relevant others, including youth, local agencies, and of course various state authorities. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a35 the concern for and recognition of participants were crucial to senko’s development, and they were clear for him to see, and eventually to take part in himself. through that participation, he learnt specific kinds of self-reflection, a.k.a. responsibilities. in vygotsky’s terms, here was a crucial ‘zone of proximal development’ of self-hood: in the crew, senko could perform a new kind and level of care for himself. because the crew and the street pulse were broad-scoped, open-ended collectives, the responsibility that senko learned through participating was of the flexible kind that he could tentatively generalize to other places as he learned about them. and because they were constantly engaged in struggles in which senko’s own identity was at stake, it was also disciplined. for, of course, as we have learnt from foucault, power is still everywhere. empowerment is never a one-sided process, and growing as a subject implies not only expanding agency, but also moments of subjection. this may sound paradoxical, but it makes sense when we remember that agency is always developed though participation (see, to this, nissen, 2002; 2013). senko only won his recognition through a process where, being met in movement and on neutral ground, he surrendered to the powers of the crew and the district council. for instance, as part of the disciplined care for himself, he gradually stopped doing burglaries and reduced his cannabis smoking. this submission was implied in the processes of development that led to senko’s increasing agency, as he co-constructed the park project, the street pulse youth club, and more. around the turn of the millennium, mørck and i focused our research on the issue of power, in part because there were intense political discussions about how to confront the rising neo-conservative and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies. activists like senko, constantly engaged in ‘street-level politics’, were not happy with the general liberal appeal to a beneficial human nature that they would learn from most of their friends in the social or youth work professions. so, senko became one of our key informants, with many dramatic stories to tell us. often, neighborhood boys or groups of them challenged him and his authority as leader of the street pulse, perhaps more or less consciously jealous with what he had achieved and how his collectives competed with their gangs for the kids’ attention. it took some intense and even, at moments, violent confrontations to assert the street pulse as gang-neutral and non-violent territory, especially since senko kept pushing for generalization across boundaries that existed between gangs, communities, neighborhoods etc. often, he had to walk a tight-rope to secure alliances, including some with family networks that more or less overlapped with criminal gangs. sometimes, he also struggled with younger colleagues who would keep a low profile to postpone what they perceived as a radical break with their past. at the same time, senko struggled with the welfare bureaucracy. in his work of tinkering to get any other funding than the – after all, limited – development funds, he kept encountering one great barrier. this was the way that social work with marginalized youth always had to be accounted for in terms of particular individuals with specified diagnoses or social issues, in the bureaucracy of welfare institutions. senko and his street pulse group would often sketch projects that could mobilize groups of youths to divert them from criminal careers, but in vain, since he could not refer to individual case-files with sufficiently well-described criminal or psychiatric problems. through this activism, it was made apparent that, even as a great collective achievement in welfare states, the institutions of social work – such as those of education and health – also work as individualizing machineries. as mørck documented in her further studies, this was finally also a great problem for senko and the other ‘wild social workers’ in their ensuing struggles for recognition and learning in a trade that could not be helpfully articulated as meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a36 either standard self-help or standard professional youth work, and where the standards of their education were abstracted from their relevance and attached to them as individuals (mørck, 2007; 2010). i was increasingly clear that the leverage of the forces and resources that the ama’r total theater and the crew had been able to mobilize, and which the street pulse could still exploit, was finite. the unique historical situation of the 1980-90s changed, with not only a marked growth in the standardized governance of new public management and a general political push to the right, but also a sharp decrease in local autonomy. in the present century, even in denmark, the post-industrial increase in wealth and productivity has been all but reserved for high-tech commercial enterprise and the economic elite, while public sector development is all about cutbacks and re-bureaucratization. as even the left is driven to defend the welfare state in liberal rather than social terms – minimal standard provisions, consumer rights, harm reduction etc. – the hope of an accelerated responsiveness of the universalist welfare state fades away. those who wish to learn from the unique nordic welfare state experience had better hurry up. in conclusion: theory as prototypical narrative this somewhat unhappy ending of the story is probably partly unfair, but it serves to once again highlight the historical singularity of any pedagogical practice. writing this text is to maintain that there are important lessons to be derived about possible forms and preconditions of a critical trans-pedagogy that implies a creative and performative tinkering of collectives, even if that particular historical window of opportunity is closing. the theoretical work of articulation has addressed deep and far-reaching issues, issues of general relevance, but precisely prompted by a situation that turned out to be more one-of-a-kind than immediately expected. while our spontaneous ideology tends to assume an easy relevance of empirical experience in a static world of variation, we only arrive at concrete universals by a process of enstrangement (a.k.a. defamiliarization or exotization; or in bertolt brecht’s german, verfremdung). although i was partly prepared for this task by some dialectical training, it was mostly through the repeated trouble with describing and explaining the idea of “meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground” that i gradually realized how utterly eccentric yet widely relevant it is, or could be. in this text, i have tried to highlight some of the connections between the singularity of the historical situation and the profundity of the questions it poses. as an alternative, we might briefly consider a different way to articulate much of this. as mentioned, senko initially spent much of his time intoxicated, and in his own recollection, part of what spurred his criminal behavior then was the edginess he felt from doing nothing much beside smoking cannabis. he could easily have been treated in some addiction treatment facility, like many others from the crew. thus, it would have seemed quite easy to frame senko’s as a story of addiction, and the crew as a new form of addiction treatment (although perhaps i would have then chosen a different venue for publishing). is not cannabis, and the chemistry of our brains, much the same all over the world? to some extent yes, i could argue, and so are treatment clinics, and even self-help groups like narcotics anonymous10. but precisely the discipline of keeping to that standardized framework would have encouraged us to create collectives that were not so good at meeting senko on neutral ground and in movement; and not so easy to move and recreate. there would have been a much stronger focus on failure and choice. it would have been much harder to see senko as a participant in collectives. the 10i could argue, that is: i could perform that ceteris paribus manoeuver, even though it would gloss over many contradictions – such as the fact that despite appearances, the na does not at all address the same ‘disease’ as the professional clinics (cf. e.g. keane, 2011). meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a37 drama would have been almost exclusively about his struggle with himself, his addiction and his level of motivation, and perhaps about how we, as therapists, could or could not cure him in ways that are based on calculated evidence and described in standard textbooks. instead, senko’s story, here, is a story of social transformation, of politics at many levels, and of concrete pedagogical universals, precisely because it does not begin or stay with a disease category that is easily computed through the machineries of measurement and management of individuals in standardized institutions. articulating a pedagogical practice as a prototypical narrative is a ‘normative’ modelling, the setting of a standard as against other possible standards, even when it does not standardize. this articulation of the crew’s pedagogy as part of a radical transformation of institutional forms and forms of knowledge is an expression of what i referred to above (with stetsenko, 2013) as the “transformative activist stance” which is implied in an epistemology of practice. thus, i am not claiming that this is the only possible way to articulate it; when i suggest this articulation as prototypical, it is because i believe that learning from it can be relevant in practices and struggles that aim for a democratic kind of social engineering. in other words, it is an expression of hope. in fact, looking back on the historical situation in copenhagen in the 1980s and 1990s, it is debatable whether what was going on, in general, was a democratization of welfare institutions, or rather a neoliberal dissolution of them. most likely, it was partly one, partly the other. this is a general point in the methodology of social science: there is always more than one thing going on, more than one tendency. if we regard practices and collectives in their historical context, they are contradictory. and it makes a difference what we choose to articulate – sometimes the difference between despair and hope (for this idea of contradictory articulation, see jensen, 1999, and mol, 2008). i am aware that the term ‘hope’ is sometimes read as implying passivity, perhaps especially on the background of a latin etymology that brings it close to waiting and expecting. my use of the term, on the contrary, derives from practice-based philosophy and cultural anthropology, in which it designates the possible futures we actively and performatively imagine and strive for; the projects that co-define who we are and the meaning of what we do (bloch, 1995; crapanzano, 2004; mattingly, 2010). what i am doing here, then, is articulating the hope, the possibility, the deeply historical emergent narrative, still very much unfinished – and perhaps temporarily halted – of a trans-pedagogical tinkering of collectives as part of an expanding and responsive welfare state. the precarious nature of this possibility, the way it points to requirements that are far from given or simple, and thus connects with and demands much wider social transformations, makes this a ‘blues hope’ in cheryl mattingly’s sense of the term (2010) – the kind of hope that remains close to its dialectical counterpart, despair. it shares with certain religious utopia a counterintuitive radicalism that calls forth doubt. but, contrary to religious versions of blues hope, this is written as inherently contestable, in the way that it still claims to present a real possibility, a concrete utopia in bloch’s sense (1995). this combination of radicalism with realism is what calls forth theory. it is to this end that a narrative form is used. a prototypical narrative presupposes theoretical reflection in its very genre – that is, in how its form works to fix a chronotope (a unique structure of past, present and future), and a constellation of author and reader positions (bakhtin, 1986; holquist, 1990). these inter-subjectivities and inter-temporalities are disputable at every point. engaging with them requires problematizing concepts and knowledges, because it shows how these are contingent and invites the reader to reflect on that contingency in order to harness the gains of the text. by implication, the narrative form, when used as prototypical, presents a version of theory that accentuates its dialogicality in a way that is very different from the authoritative argument, in which the final word is always the aim. thus, for instance, reading this meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a38 text might make you wonder about other possible ways to think of power and collectivity, as relevant both to education and to post-communist marxism, or think about the meaning of ‘performativity’ in relation to standards of youth work, etc. it is also important to note how a story like this assumes a spatial or geographical instantiation. although ‘movement’ and ‘neutral ground’, like vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (and many other theoretical constructs), addresses space metaphorically, it is at the same time quite corporeal. the ama’r total theater simply had no permanent residence. the crew settled as a place of an open youth gathering, with locks only on rooms with expensive machines and important documents. with the festival that sent senko’s development in a new direction, the city square was reclaimed for a redefined neighborhood in which the crew was an important hub. the drug dealers’ park was later refurbished into a sports park that displayed the crew’s and senko’s achievement. and the street pulse youth club was the domicile, or home, of a boundary collective, precariously upheld as gang-neutral territory. this physical spatiality interacts in interesting ways with the standards they contain, house or embody. in the ceteris paribus approach, a location may or may not hold properties conducive to adapting a given standard, much as american soil, once cleared, leveled and plowed, could or could not uphold standard european colonies. with our prototypical approach, we do not only expand and complicate the range of relevant conditions on the ground to the point where adaptation exceeds standard, we also point to the ways that the standard is taken to shape and even create the location itself, and the ways that those who do it are indexed as collectives by those locations. the street pulse was created with an awareness of the ‘neutral ground’ of att and the crew, as a place beyond the institutional home ground of professionals, yet also different from ‘street corner society’ youth venues. and it was constituted in a struggle for recognition that implied universalizing ideological claims. the awareness that the crew was quite famous in denmark, and that the street pulse contributed to its reputation, was a direct concern on the minds of senko and his friends, a concrete shape of the ethics they cultivated. precisely as such, it was ethically and politically accountable in a wide sense, as a ‘public space’ (harvey, 2005). of course, if we zoom out from there, much the same can be said of a place like copenhagen, denmark. in danish debates over social youth work around 2000, my writings contributed to articulating what was called the ‘copenhagen model’ as against approaches developed in other towns, and, as most danes know, copenhagen has a singular legacy as crown capital, as historical stronghold of both labor and the radical left, and, more specifically, as a site of social experiments. further, the present text is written in english in the hope that an international readership might find something useful coming from such a place, mediated by the differences between places that are often hidden by the scientific lingua franca, but sometimes becomes visible, when the limits of a second language shows in strange formulations, or in the scarcity of accessible references. can we still hope for the danish polity to show concern for how the ‘society’ on its territory can be upheld internationally as a ‘scandinavian model’? all in all, this prototypical narrative exemplifies the old anthropological lesson that really understanding such a model always requires a deep, complex, ‘thick’ historical description of its place and time – and that this investigation is at the same time a journey that will make us question and perhaps revise what we thought we knew about our own society, its spaces and its models. this is how people in the amar total theater and the crew would read freire’s account of his pedagogy of the oppressed. they knew well that they were not working with the literacy of poor brazilian land workers. but just for that reason, they could perhaps better approach the freirian lessons, in a proper skeptical, respectful, and creative manner. meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground morten nissen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.34 | vol. 3 (2015) a39 i can only hope for some of my texts to achieve, in small parts, the same kind of – as it were (with derrida): endlessly postponed – meaning and relevance, for people to make sense of them in ways that i could not predict. references althusser, l. 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(2001). the fragile absolute. or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? london: verso books. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word wegeriff commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-55     commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif university of exeter, uk abstract this fascinating dialogue raised many questions. in this commentary i will focus on just three questions that particularly stimulated me to further reflection: ‘why classification?’; ‘what is ontology?’ and ‘where does agency come from?’ why classification? eugene starts with a complex classification of types of dialogic pedagogy and it is this that sparks kiyo’s disagreement. for kiyo the division of ontological from epistemological dialogic pedagogy seems too constraining and the whole idea of classification does not seem very dialogic. he prefers to see the terms as related in the way that voices in a dialogue are related. in a dialogue voices are both separate and united, participating in each other. perhaps terms like ‘ontological dialogic pedagogy’ and ‘epistemological dialogic pedagogy’ are more like perspectives on pedagogy than separate practices? whenever i see a classification system listing everything into clear relationships i think of borges’ famous alternative taxonomy, which he claimed to have taken from an ancient chinese encyclopædia entitled ‘celestial emporium of benevolent knowledge’: the list divides all animals into one of 14 categories: those that belong to the emperor embalmed ones those that are trained suckling pigs mermaids (or sirens) fabulous ones stray dogs those that are included in this classification those that tremble as if they were mad issn: 2325-3290 (online) commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-56 innumerable ones those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush et cetera those that have just broken the flower vase those that, at a distance, resemble flies (borges, 1999, p. 231). this is an amusing illustration of why the spirit of taxonomy is not compatible with a dialogic world view. taxonomy implies that there is only one true way of representing the world, often reduced to a flat two-dimensional map, whereas bakhtin’s dialogic world view leads him to ‘hear voices in everything’ as he puts it and ‘dialogic relations among them’ (bakhtin, 1986, p169). as borges story illustrates, the resultant polyphony of perspectives makes any attempt to produce one universal taxonomy impossible. we are often quite unconscious of the impact that the medium of communication has on our thinking. the social anthropologist jack goody has a chapter on classification in his 1977 book ‘the domestication of the savage mind’ (goody, 1977). his main argument in this chapter is that classification, as western social scientists practice it, is very much a product of literacy and leads to misunderstanding when we apply it to oral cultures. classification is the sort of thing you do with pens on paper and, after linnaeus, it suggests universality and truth. oral people tend to respond to things in contexts. when anthropologists produce tables representing indigenous classifications of the world, as they often do, these always end up grossly simplifying a complex lived reality. so why do we classify? in some areas of science, tables have been a valuable tool for research. in chemistry, the periodic table has helped predict the existence of elements before they were discovered, and in biology, now we can add dna code to linnaeus’s original tree of life and show in a table how every animal is both unique and yet related to every other animal. but in social science classifications have often been linked to less benign forms of domination and control. in a mexican museum i recently saw a 19th century table of types of “half-breed” each category with names like ‘mulatto’ and ‘zambo’ defined by a particular mixture of european, indian and african parentage. why was that table felt to be useful? the ethical issue raised by the classification of people should alert us to the question of why people are producing classification schemes. the desire to define others is linked to the desire to control others. this does not seem to raise ethical issues when applied to atoms in the periodic table. however, i think it does raise issues when applied to types of pedagogical practice because practices are conducted by people and the people who find their practices labelled from the outside by social science researchers might not like the labels that are applied. why is a figure listing types of dialogic pedagogy useful? who is it useful for? if it is in order to be able to define a practice from the outside, without the need to enter into dialogue with the practitioner, then it is easy to see why this enterprise might annoy the people who find themselves labelled and defined within the figure. clearly, kiyo did not feel that the practice of ‘dialogic’ teachers in japan was well described by the labels in eugene’s classification system. why ontological? definitions of ontology and epistemology and questions of the relationship between them, feature prominently in the dialogue. like eugene i think it is important to stress the ontological nature of dialogic and i tend to agree that ontology is more fundamental than epistemology. however, there seem to be a range of views as to what is meant by calling dialogic, ontological. in the uk tradition of research on classroom talk, dialogues are often discussed in terms of epistemology as a form of ‘shared inquiry’ and a way of helping in the ‘collaborative construction of commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-57 knowledge’ (alexander, 2000, mercer, 2000). in my own earlier research on talk in primary classrooms i found that this missed something important which i described as children entering into ‘the space of dialogue’, a phrase i now realise that i had picked up from buber (1947) but that, at the time, i thought was my own (wegerif & mercer, 1999). the idea of ‘dialogic space’ suggests ontology. using the term ontology suggests that dialogic space, is not just an analytic construct but is pointing to something real. to call something ‘real’ is another way to say that it can have a causal impact on the world. talk is something that can be recorded and measured, everyone agrees that it is ‘real’, but the space of dialogue that surrounds the talk is harder to pin down. i found that the dialogic space that some groups created in classrooms had a certain reality that could be felt in their long shared silences and the way in which the group members could finish each other’s utterances. this ‘dialogic space’ had a causal impact on their improved problem-solving. one issue for me is understanding how the use of different communication technologies frames and shapes the way in which we make meaning together and so influences the meanings that we make. the ontological idea of dialogic space might help understand the changing experience of reality in the internet age. i heard recently that immigrants to the uk from the philippines spent on average several hours every day in skype calls to relatives, often leaving the skype on whilst they did everyday tasks. does it make sense to think of these people as living in england or as living in the philippines when so much of their lives is spent living together in the new ‘space’ of the internet? what kind of space is that? the term ontology is useful to suggest that the aim of education is not simply knowledge or ways of knowing but might also be about new ways of being. dialogic is not simply a way for a subject to know about a world out there beyond the subject (epistemology) but it is also about a way of being in the world (ontology). an epistemological interpretation of dialogic leaves the subject unchanged but an ontological interpretation of dialogic allows us to think about the subject changing to become the space of dialogue (in the moment of openness) and to become more dialogical (over time). referring to an ontological interpretation of dialogic makes it possible to claim that dialogic education is education for dialogue as well as through dialogue in which dialogue is not only treated as a means to an end (epistemological) but also treated as an end in itself (ontological). like eugene, i picked up the phrase ‘dialogue as an end in itself’ from sidorkin (1999) and i associated this phrase with the claim that the dialogic in dialogic education is an ontological and not just an epistemological category. however, as eugene presents that claim here, i now have some misgivings that in place of what i understood by ontology we have some sort of humanist existentialism (sartre, 1947/2007). eugene writes, perhaps following sidorkin, that dialogic is ontological because it defines being human and human meaning making. the problem with this, in my view, is that the distinction between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ is one that can only be made after the opening of dialogic space (a space of infinite possible meaning within which identities are constructed) and not before. for me a dialogic ontology is making a bigger claim than that. let me explain. (and let me also note the irony that earlier i accused eugene of trying to locate others within his classification of dialogic in a way which does not respect their unique perspective on the world but here i am labelling eugene’s version of dialogic as ‘existential humanism’ within my own way of seeing the world.) in heidegger’s 1957 lecture on ‘identity and difference’ (heidegger, 1969) he interrogates what he calls the ‘a = a’ principle of identity thinking and finds the origin of meaning in an unmediated ‘ontological difference’, which he refers to as the difference between being and beings. heidegger’s account of this ontological difference is also an account of how ‘mankind’ and being belong together in what he calls ‘the event of appropriation’ (ereignis) which he describes as a movement of ‘overwhelming’ commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-58 and ‘arrival’ and as the circling (his word is ‘ineinander’) of the being of beings and the beings of being around the invisible unmediated difference between them (heidegger, 1969, p69). one possible way that i have found to make sense of heideggers’ distinction between beings and being is through merleau-ponty’s more visual account of the difference between figure and ground, the idea here is that explicit things or objects always stand-out from and are defined against an implicit background. merleau-ponty, whose later work was strongly influenced by heidegger, offers an account of perception that shares some of the structure of heidegger’s account of ‘ereignis’. when a person stands forth in a landscape, a horizon instantly forms around them stretching away in every direction as far as the eye can see (perhaps heidegger’s concept of ‘arrival’) but at the same time as the person’s gaze precipitates this horizon they also experience themselves placed as an object within their horizon as if the gaze of the horizon was looking at them and locating them within it (a possible picture of heidegger’s concept of ‘overwhelming’?). merleau-ponty refers to these two sides, the looking out and the looking in, together as a ‘chiasm’. ‘chiasm’ is a term borrowed from grammar where it refers to the reversability of the subject and the object in a sentence and is used by merleau-ponty to refer to the mutual envelopment (a translation of heidegger’s term ‘ineinander’) and reversibility between two total perspectives on the world around an ‘unbridgeable gap’ or ‘hinge’ which is also, he writes, an opening or ‘déhiscence’ of meaning (merleau-ponty, 1964, p 194, 201: 1968, p 148, 153). this idea that meaning depends upon a gap of difference is also found in bakhtin. at times he goes further and applies dialogic to reality as a whole. in his notes on ‘methodology for the human sciences’ bakhtin appears to reach towards a similar view to that of merleau-ponty’s chiasm writing: thought about the world and thought in the world. thought striving to embrace the world and thought experiencing itself in the world (as part of it). an event in the world and participation in it. the world as an event (and not as existence in ready-made form)(bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). by ‘event’ bakhtin means something like an act of paying attention. he is claiming here that the world does not exist until an act of differentiation separates a self (or perspective) from a world. in this passage bakhtin comes out explicitly against the ontology of selves in worlds trying to understand them through dialogues which is implicit in the epistemological interpretation of dialogic referred to earlier. here he is suggesting that our sense of the world, and of our own perspective within it, are constructions within a kind of dialogue that unites ‘us’ and ‘world’. this passage reinforces the interpretation that bakhtin’s dialogic joins heidegger’s ereignis, derrida’s différance (1968) and merleau-ponty’s chiasm as a variation on the theme of ontological difference. eugene and others might respond to this way of thinking about a dialogic ontology by saying that it all sounds very abstract and philosophical and not much to do with real dialogues between real people. the tradition of thinking about ontology from heidegger through merleau-ponty to derrida seems different from much of bakhtin and the concern about human essence that eugene seems to express. however, i think that the dialogic relation explored by merleau-ponty is precisely what underlies the opening of meaning in a dialogue. a dialogue cannot be viewed from outside. it cannot be represented on a twodimensional table. to be in dialogue is to be inside a dialogic space that opens on infinite potential precisely because of its dialogic structure. in any dialogue with another person, let us take this dialogue between you and me now, i am outside the other and contain them, they are outside me and contain me and yet, in the dialogue, we are linked and cannot escape each other. this is the ‘ineinander’ relation of ‘ontological difference’ exposed by heidegger. it is because i am outside you and locate you as an image commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-59 in my world that i transcend your understanding and it is because i am, at the same time, located as an image within your world that you transcend my understanding and out of this mutual transcendence and mutual envelopment an infinite potential for new meaning is born. ontology is about being, not just about human being. this interpretation of ontologic dialogic fits better with kiyo’s claim that the dialogic relation is not just between voices within a world but also between voices and the world that surrounds and apparently contains them. this bigger sense of dialogic ontology is significant in this debate because it rejects humanism. humanism depends on assuming a distinction between the human and the non-human. in my view, dialogic ontology says that this distinction is just another way of dividing dialogic space. the ‘human’ is always in a dialogic relationship, a relationship of mutual intertwining, with the ‘non-human’. humans are always more than human (and less than human). we do not only need to identify ourselves with our animal bodies but also with the trees, the stars and the awesome extensions of our capacities made possible modern communications technologies. to quote the upanishads: ‘thou art that’. this is because each one of us really is the dialogic space and not simply the image of ourselves that we construct within the space by dividing ‘me’ from ‘you’ and ‘my body’ from ‘the world’. where does agency come from? this question occurs in the dialogue between eugene and kiyo in the form, should students decide what they want to learn or should teachers decide what they should learn? this seems to be one of the issues at stake in the dialogue between eugene and kiyo. when lakatos describes a class as interested in a maths problem eugene is concerned that really they were not interested but that the teacher imposed this interest upon them: what if some of the participants had not cared about this math problem in particular or math in general – how did lakatos made them interested or, at least, cooperate with his dialogue? was pedagogical violence (matusov, 2009a; sidorkin, 2002) involved in that process and if so, how? (eugene matusov, above, p. 10) kiyo’s notion of the teacher as an author of the classroom text and the students as like the heroes in a dialogic novel also raises eugene’s concern. yes, the students can show some agency in this scenario, he writes, but their agency is constrained to being responsive to the teacher who has the dominant and controlling agency. in response to this kiyo, raises the question of how students become agentive in the first place and points out that this is an educational question. in the sense that no one can put agency into some other, agency of human being is self-generated. simultaneously, agency in human being grows up by interacting with other people. the learner can enter into the dialogic lesson and act as the dialogic heroine/hero because she/he is originally an agent. her/his experience of being the dialogic heroine/hero in the dialogic lesson helps her/his agency grow up (kiyo miyazaki, above, p. 41). i think it is significant that kiyo draws examples from primary education with young children in japan whereas eugene tends to draw examples from older students and adults in russian and the usa. agency is not just a given fact but it is something that develops over a lifetime and it develops in different ways in different cultures. earlier kiyo had pointed to the importance of recent developmental psychology in helping us understanding the role of dialogic in early years development. i think this same area of research literature can help us understand where the apparent agency of children comes from in the first commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-60 place. understanding where agency comes from can help us understand more deeply what agency really is. perhaps understanding agency will help to re-frame and even dissolve the apparent contradiction between eugene’s view of the student as agent of their own learning and kiyo’s greater focus on the role of the teacher and the curriculum. both kiyo and eugene acknowledge that agency is ‘self-generated’ and seem to associate this ‘self’ that is at the source of agency with individual human beings. presumably they are referring, if only implicitly, to our apparent physical separateness each one of us having (or being?) a different body with a unique location in physical space. i think this way of thinking about ‘self’ and ‘agency’ is problematic from the ontologic-dialogic point of view i sketched above. the kind of agentive self i think that eugene is referring to is a self that is able to make conscious choices. but where did this separate agentive self come from? at some point each individual human being emerged from a situation without agency. the very beginning of separation lies in conception. the relationship between the egg and the surrounding mother moves at conception from being an external or mechanical relationship between physical objective external things to becoming, at least in part, an internal relationship. i mean by this that the growing foetus behaves in ways that are not totally determined by the mother’s body around it but could be said to respond to the movements of that body (gallagher, 2011). but of course this proto-dialogue between bodies is not yet ‘agency’ as there is no conscious separate sense of self. in fact a conscious separate sense of self only emerges much later in the developmental process. this means that before there is a separate self there is a relationship. the sense of self as the source of agency is something that only emerges within the context of a prior relationship. search ‘you tube’ for illustrations of ‘the still face’ experiment and you will see just how unhappy very young babies get if their mothers do not respond to them. when mothers keep their faces still, babies seek their attention, becoming more and more desperate until, eventually, they turn away in obvious distress. it seems natural to think, as i wrote just above, that the ‘baby’ is relating to its ‘mother’ but the baby does not really exist as a separate person with a separate sense of agency at this point. when the baby smiles the mother smiles and when the mother smiles the baby smiles but the baby does not smile with an intention nor is it aware that it is smiling. the baby does not cause the mother to smile and the mother does not cause the baby to smile, both are caused to smile by the relationship between them. dialogic relationships, in this case the dialogic couple between mother and child, are real, albeit invisible, ‘mechanisms’ that have causal agency. this is perhaps obvious but is worth stressing only to correct for the tendency of those who hold a, often implicit, physicalist world view, to ascribe reality and causal agency only to visible material objects like bodies and to see relationships as always secondary to these physical bodies. a dialogic ontology is precisely the claim that dialogues are just as real, and perhaps even more fundamentally real, as visible physical bodies. i think this failure to take full account of the causal agency of dialogues might be a trap that eugene, and to a lesser extent, kiyo, are falling into in their disagreement over where the agency lies within education. once we recognise that dialogues are agents, not individual human bodies, then i think that the agency at work within education becomes easier to understand. we all tend to find the notion of an individual self with individual agency easy to grasp and we all tend to think that we have a self and free will to decide and act but where did this sense of self, this commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-61 agentive ‘i’ of ours actually come from? peter hobson (2002) describes how the separation of ‘consciousnesses’ arises in the context of the to and fro of imitation, role-taking and joint attention found in secondary intersubjectivity (an area of research that kiyo refers to in the dialogue above). if a child looks at a strange new toy, shall we say a robot buzz lightyear toy that says “to infinity and beyond”; she might be concerned and so checks with her mother to see what her reaction should be to the new toy, perhaps amusement, surprise or the mother may even note the child’s anxiety and show mild feigned anxiety to help the child cope with her anxiety, at the same time reassuring the child about the toy. in this way the child relates to her mother relating to the world and looks back at the toy with modified feelings. through this sort of encounter, the child learns to take on another’s point of view and to take on two points of view about the same object at the same time. having two perspectives on the world, ones own and someone else’s, implies a third perspective, the perspective of the relationship itself from within which the child can see her mother and, in return can see herself. perhaps this is what kiyo refers to as the third relationship in dialogues, the relationship with the surrounding world. the child does not learn to see herself only by seeing herself reflected in the eyes of her mother, she also learns to see herself from the perspective of her relationship with her mother. when, playing alone, the child says ‘i can’. this means that she is seeing herself as a separate person, just as she has learnt to see her mother as a separate person. to be self-conscious is to be able to take the perspective of another person towards oneself. but this is not a specific person, this is a dialogic relationship with the ‘world’ understood as the space of relationship that preceded the separation of two consciousnesses and that continues to envelop the apparent separateness of different selves. i am arguing here that ‘consciousness’, ‘self’ and ‘agency’ are properties of dialogues and not of separate individuals (wegerif, 2013). agency only appears to be a property of an individual through a kind of illusion that attaches the self-awareness of dialogues to particular physical bodies or even physical organs like eyes. this illusion is to some extent historically and culturally specific and has been linked to the practice of reading alone and silently made possible by the advent of print literacy (ong, 1982). it seems obvious from experience that relationships with real people; mothers, fathers, teachers, scientists, role-models, have a huge influence on motivation for education. but what are these ‘real people’? in what does their ‘reality’ subsist? i would argue that they are voices rather than bodies and voices are cultural. in the nice quotation offered by kiyo it is clear that bakhtin’s concept of voice was not limited to ‘real people’ in the sense of physically embodied individuals. i remind you here: [dostoevsky] heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, and ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews. (kiyo miyazaki above quoting morson and emerson quoting bakhtin referring to dostoevsky – and the claim in bakhtin is that this fractal chain of voices within voices within voices goes on forever). cultural voices are not the same as individual bodies even if they have to use them in order to exist by speaking through them. eugene is concerned that the children in lakatos’s classroom might not have been really interested in the problem but that the teacher imposed this interest on them. but why would the teacher be interested in the maths problem in the first place? where does the agency in education really originate? mathematic problems are interesting for mathematics. mathematicians are people who have allowed themselves to be to some extent possessed or taken over by the spirit of mathematics. it is not commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-62 the teachers in themselves that find the problem interesting, but it is the voice of mathematics within them that responds to the call of the problem. this ‘voice’ is a moment in a dialogue. eugene is concerned to defend the agency of the children here but perhaps we should also be concerned about the agency of the mathematics. mathematics is a long-term global dialogue that needs to recruit voices to survive and to expand. if it fails to recruit bodies to carry it forward then it will die. why is eugene so concerned about the children here and not about the mathematics? after all there are billions of children in the world, more are born every minute, but there is only one mathematics. from one perspective, we might say that while human lives are short and mostly insignificant, mathematics is eternal and magnificent. so perhaps what we call education can also be understood as how long-term cultural dialogues recruit participants? of course, there are many dialogues at many levels and it would be wrong to allow the long-term dialogues of culture to dominate and suppress the short-term dialogues of everyday experience. but realising that agency is an effect of dialogues and that all dialogues inter-communicate can help us to understand why ‘dialogic’ education is bigger than the question of what students want or what teachers want. dialogues are not limited things like pebbles – they are open to the outside and inter-penetrate each other, which means that there is ultimately only one dialogue and we are voices within it now. we always already discover ourselves within relationship, not only in relationship with individuals and with communities but also in relationship with the world as kiyo puts it. another way of saying the same thing is that we find ourselves in relationship with otherness as well as with specific others and with specific communities. we experience all these relationships in the form of a call, not just a call to respond ethically but also a call to find some things, like maths problems, ‘interesting’. perhaps dialogic education, which is, as kiyo mentions, the kind of education that multiplies questions just as fast or faster than it answers them, can be understood as one aspect of our response to the call of others and, above all, to the call of infinite otherness. references alexander, r. (2000). culture and pedagogy, oxford, blackwell. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. austin: university of texas press. borges, j. l. (1999), john wilkins' analytical language". in e. weinberger, ed, selected nonfictions. new york: viking. buber, m. (1947). i. london: kegan paul. deridda, j. (1968). la différance in: théorie d’ensemble. paris: éditions de seuil. gallagher, s. 2011. strong interaction and self-agency. journal of philosophical studies, 15, 55-76. goody, j. (1977). the domestication of the savage mind. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. heidegger, m. (1969). identity and difference, (bilingual ed., trans. j. stambaugh). new york: harper and row. hobson, r. p. (2002). the cradle of thought: exploring the origins of thinking. london: macmillan. mercer, n. (2000). words and minds: how we use language to think together. london: routledge. merleau-ponty, m. (1964). le visible et l'invisible. paris: gallimard. merleau-ponty, m. (1968). the visible and the invisible, (ed. by claude lefort. trans. by alphonso lingis). evanston, il, northwestern university press. ong, w. (1982) orality and literacy: the technologizing the word. new york: methuen commentary on eugene and kiyo’s dialogue on dialogic pedagogy rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.124 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-63 sartre, j-p. (1947/2007). existentialism is a humanism. new haven: yale university press. sidorkin, a. m. (1999). beyond discourse: education, the self and dialogue. new york, state university of new york press. trevarthen, c. (1979). communication and cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity, in m. bullowa (ed.), before speech. the beginning of interpersonal communication. cambridge: cambridge university press. wegerif, r (2008). dialogic or dialectic? the significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. british educational research journal, 34(3), 347-361. wegerif, r. (2007). dialogic, education and technology: expanding the space of learning. new york and berlin: springer. wegerif, r. (2013). dialogic: education for the internet age. london: routledge. wegerif, r. and mercer, n. (1997). a dialogical framework for investigating talk. in computers and talk in the primary classroom, edited by wegerif, r. and scrimshaw, p. clevedon: multilingual matters. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 10 matusov and marjanovic-shane bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:61 bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college in philadelphia. she studies meaning making in education and play, dialogic educational relationships and events, dialogic teacher orientation, and the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. she uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic orientation in her studies. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play and education. her most recent publication is: marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). "spoilsport" in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4. ��� “to the grief of all bourgeois we’ll fan a worldwide conflagration, a conflagration drenched in blood – give us your blessing, o lord! … crowned with a wreath of roses white, ahead of them – goes jesus christ.” “the twelve”, a poem by alexander blok (january, 1918)1 when i (the first author) read boris groys’ essay back in 1998, i was shocked. i was reading about bakhtin flirting with totalitarianism. my first reaction was denial. i recited many places in bakhtin that contradict boris groys’ claims. however, deeply down i knew that groys pointed at something real and important – something that should not be overlooked. late, in 2002, when i read bakhtin’s interview 1 translated by maria carlson, http://russiasgreatwar.org/docs/twelve_notes.pdf issn: 2325-3290 (online) bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:62 with victor duvakin (bakhtin, duvakin, & bocharov, 2002), groys’ essay immediately came to my mind. in this interview, bakhtin bragged about his remote ancestor, who as a russian aristocrat, rich slave owner, sold many of his slaves to fund one of the first russian cadet corps. although this story was contested by bakhtin’s own brother (bakhtin et al., 2002, pp. 319-320), his neglect of humane values communicated by the story seemed to be rather clear2. he praised the tsarist government for firing many of russian professors who protested the government’s violation of human rights because students should be involved in only one business – i.e., “to study seriously” (bakhtin et al., 2002, pp. 74-78). of course, this is only one side of bakhtin as a person with particular right-wing conservative political values (bakhtin seemed to sympathize the russian monarchy and did not approve the february liberal-democratic revolution of 1917 (bakhtin et al., 2002, pp. 132-136)3) but this side did not fit my image of bakhtin emerging from his literary and philosophical writing. was bakhtin little bit like dostoevsky, who was a very reactionary journalist and a rather monologic public figure but simultaneously a great humanist, dialogist, and polyphonist (bakhtin, 1999)? did bakhtin’s political monologism penetrate his philosophy? boris groys answers “yes.” boris groys charges that in similar veins like nietzsche before him, bakhtin was attracted to the dionysian mystery of the eros-thanatos cosmic holism by equating literature to life, embracing violence of carnival, disregarding human privacy, individuality, and dignity, searching for fusion of cosmic voices and forces, and accepting the unified truth, requiring a plurality of consciousnesses that is above an individual consciousness. groys wrote, a “polyphonic novel” (bakhtin, 1999) transcends individual authorship and, therefore, is rooted, according to bakhtin, in carnival, which refutes all individualization: a “polyphonic novel” is interpreted by bakhtin as a result of “carnivalization of literature.” this means the destruction of the isolation, independence, and individuality of the word and the removal of the author’s rights to private discourse diffused in the general polyphony of the language, which belongs collectively to the “people.” bakhtin’s theory, in fact, equates literature to life – and, therefore, it invites its reader to see this theory as a life program... at the same time, if there is something bakhtin insists upon, then it is this totality of carnival, which destroys and absorbs each individual body: for bakhtin, carnival is first and foremost a manifestation of the belonging to the folk (narodnost’). the belonging to the folk was, by the way, the characteristic core of the stalinist culture, which followed the period of avant-gardist “belonging to the class” (classovost’)) (groys, db:3). bakhtin seemed to deeply distrust human procedures, rules, laws, structures, authority, even if they were produced by liberal democracy, in which the dionysian carnival does not have a place. groys argues that bakhtin despised liberal democracy in the name of the cosmic carnivalistic violent unity, 2 mikhail bakhtin, “… my great-great-grandfather… was a brigadier of the katherine the great times… i mean he was a brigadiergeneral,… who specially sacrificed three thousand of his own [slaves’] souls for the creation of one of the first russian cadet corps. this cadet crops existed until the revolution.” victor duvakin, “did this cadet corps have his name? no?” bakhtin, “yes, it did. it was named… the bakhtin orlov cadet corps. even more, for some time, there was also a military cadet school named after bakhtin. [h]e sacrificed three thousand [slaves’] souls of his own – this was a sort of account. of course, the [slaves’] souls were not literally sacrificed but they were obviously sold or leased to a bank and so on – as it was done usually then. back then they counted by [slaves’] souls” (bakhtin et al., 2002, pp. 19-20, translation from russian by the first author). 3 bakhtin praised peter stolypin, a tsarist minister, a monarchist brutally supressing the revolutionary movement in russia after the revolution of 1905, “stolypin was a very big political leader, much bigger than many people imagine, and much more far-sighted. he offered the only correct way to save russia from the revolution by creation of middle-class rich peasants, economically selfsustained farmers [khutorian], with their own property, small property. he thought that only private property makes a person reliable and… stable. but it didn’t work because he could not finish his reform of creation of self-sustained farmers” (bakhtin et al., 2002, p. 136, translation from russian by the first author) [stolypin was assassinated by a revolutionary in 1911], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pyotr_stolypin. bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:63 bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy: for him, they are synonymous to alienation, autonomization, clamming up of individuality, the separation of the latter from the natural unity of cosmic and people’s life – and, consequently, they become the historical reasons for the emergence of the pathos of seriousness, sentimentality, moralizing, and, also, of the devolution of the people’s carnivalesque laughter into individualistic criticism and satire. it is in jubilant expressions that bakhtin refers to the rabelaisian descriptions of atrocious carnival battles, stoning people with “funny matter” (feces) and splashing them with urine, the rituals of carnival insults, “dethroning and crowning,” the images of the triumphal carnivalesque death, symbolizing people’s joy about the “demise of everything obsolete and already dead.” bakhtin welcomes the carnivalesque pathos of the “final death” of everything individual and the victory of the purely material, bodily principle over everything transcendental, ideal, individually immortal. simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is horrible – god forbid being part of it. there is no place for democracy in it – nobody is given the democratic right to avoid the total carnival duty, to abscond the carnival, to stay away from it. on the contrary, those who try to do so are the first to be subjected to “funny insults and beatings.” all this grotesque horror, according to bakhtin, turns into a joyful carnival thanks to people’s continuous laughter, by which it is surrounded (db:3). was bakhtin a totalitarian, a crypto-stalinist? groys answers, “no,” but groys stops short of qualifying who bakhtin was beyond saying that bakhtin was neither totalitarian nor anti-totalitarian. groys argues that bakhtin developed cosmic aesthetic of life to address the historical and personal tragic events, “the tragedy of revolution – and his own personal tragedy – was understood by bakhtin as a manifestation of the eternal cosmic tragedy, constantly and ritualistically replaying itself, which can and must be “aesthetically justified,” in order not to be futile” (db:4). we agree with groys that bakhtin was neither totalitarian nor anti-totalitarian but rather he subscribed to the mystical collective organic cosmic holism existed in his zeitgeist. many thinkers of his time – such russian poet alexander blok quoted in our epigraph, german philosopher fredrick nietzsche, german philosopher of existentialism martin heidegger, french existentialist jean paul sartre among many other intellectuals of the first part of the 20th century, – subscribed to the mystical collective organic cosmic whole. in contrast to the totalitarianism, the mystical collective organic cosmic holism denies an ideological imposition of one idea – it believes that one consciousness can only sense but can never grasp the mystical collective organic cosmic whole, “not the ascent of the individual soul into the higher sphere but the movement forward of all mankind, along the horizontal of historic time, becomes the basic criterion of all evaluations. having done its part upon earth, the individual soul fades and dies together with the individual body; but the body of the people and of mankind, fertilized by the dead, is eternally renewed and moves forever forward along the historic path of progress” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 404). one can only trust and then willingly surrender to this whole to become one with it, “it should be pointed out that the single and unified consciousness is by no means an inevitable consequence of the concept of a unified truth. it is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unified truth that requires a plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be fitted into the bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, by its very nature full of event potential and is born at a point of contact among various consciousnesses” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 81). we suspect that not only the communist revolution, civil war, bakhtin’s own illness, but also his exile, his christianity, and stalinist purges probably contributed to bakhtin’s the mystical collective organic cosmic holism. however, we argue that bakhtin cannot and should not be reduced only to his mystical collective organic cosmic holism. at least, there is another, opposing side in bakhtin, denying the mystical collective organic cosmic holism, and focusing on respect for an individual person, human dignity, bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:64 responsibility, dialogue, postupok (i.e., ethic deed), non-alibi-in-being, unfinalizability, boundary, unmerging, principle opaqueness of consciousnesses, equal rights of consciousness, internally persuasive discourse, prioritization of pravda-truth over istina-truth, interaddressivity, and so on. the other bakhtin denied the mysticism of supra-consciousness. we do not know if boris groys agrees with us about the co-existence of another, humane, bakhtin or not. in our view, the mystical collective organic cosmic holism can be useful for polyphonic novel where hero-ideas are brought in collision with a carnivalistic plot by the author to let them test their pravda-truths with their life (and death). thus bakhtin argued, the following conclusion can now be drawn. we have uncovered in the menippea [i.e., carnivalistic genre in literature – the authors] a striking combination of what would seem to be absolutely heterogeneous and incompatible elements: philosophical dialogue, adventure and fantasticality, slum naturalism, utopia, and so forth. we can now say that the clamping principle that bound all these heterogeneous elements into the organic whole of a genre, a principle of extraordinary strength and tenacity, was carnival and a carnival sense of the world (bakhtin, 1999, p. 134). however, this principle becomes very problematic in the life and especially in education. what can be a creative, aesthetically smart, plot turn in a make-belief novel (e.g., killing the father in brothers karamazov) is a horrible crime in real life. in the polyphonic life, a demand for the idea-postupok integrity is possible but rarely achievable or sustainable (and always contested). in the polyphonic education4, when beliefs, commitments, and the life itself are suspended, any idea (and its underlining value) can be legitimately examined and deconstructed. while in art, disbeliefs are suspended, in education, beliefs are suspended (marjanovic-shane, 2016). in education, ideas have to become detached from the participants – the people’s dear ideas can be deconstructed but not people, themselves (in contrast to polyphonic novels). the polyphonic education, rooted in internally persuasive deconstructive discourse (i.e., big dialogue), frees people from the tyranny of their dear ideas that colonize them – it follows neither rationalistic, atomistic, individualist apollo nor orgiastic, cosmic, collectivist dionysus. an important question for us, educationalists, emerging from boris groys’ provocative claim of bakhtin’s mystical collective organic holism, is whether it affects bakhtinian approaches in education and if so, how. in our view, the answer is positive – the influences of mystical collective organic holism seem to be present. so far, we have noticed at least 3 areas, where the bakhtinian mystical collective organic holism may penetrate bakhtinian approaches to education. the first area is application of bakhtin’s notion of a hands-off carnival in education. the second area, also influenced by socrates, is forceful engaging students in critical examination of their lives by raising “ultimate questions on life and death” (p. 144) “at the threshold of great [life] internal decisions and crises” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 62) by promoting existential crises in the students. the third area is a claim that in polyphonic education, the teacher-student relations are akin to the author-character relations in a polyphonic novel – the polyphonic teacher is an author of his/her students, who are viewed as “heroes” of the teacher-orchestrated dialogue. 4 “slightly paraphrasing morson and emerson’s (1990, p. 234) definition of bakhtin’s notion of polyphony, we can define polyphonic classroom, as ‘two closely related criteria are constitutive of polyphony: 1) a dialogic sense of truth and 2) a special position of the [teacher] necessary for [promoting] this sense of truth [in the classroom community]. in fact, these two criteria are aspects of the same phenomenon, the polyphonic [classroom’s] ‘form-shaping ideology’’” (matusov, 2009, p. 286). bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:65 education as a hands-off carnival american bakhtinian educationalist timothy lensmire, inspired by bakhtin’s notion of carnival (lensmire, 1994b), conducted a pedagogical experiment in a third grade classroom, specifically in his writing workshop, to promote the students’ voices through “private projects” and students’ active participation in the world (lensmire, 1994a, p. 13). the purpose of the workshop was to address alienation and meaninglessness of students’ writing in conventional school by promoting students’ authorial writing, in my classroom, i wanted students to come to voice, in both the sense of a private exploration and ordering of experience in the expression of a unique self, and the sense of greater public participation in the cultural work of naming and renaming the world and their places within it. both senses of voice suggest resistance the first resistance to dewey's "crust of convention," the second to power relations that silence. … my classroom, like dostoevsky's novels, would celebrate heteroglossia: unofficial voices, the polyphonic confusion of voices sounding with the characteristic words and intonations of different social groups, and the idiosyncratic twists of speakers and writers attempting to force shared, given words to individual, particular purposes and situations (pechey, 1986; bakhtin, 1981). … my role as the teacher was to encourage, orchestrate, and support this heteroglossia, finding ways to help each student sound and be heard (lensmire, 1994a, p. 14) the workshop involved three parts. the first 10-min part was whole class brainstorming. the second 30-min part autonomous writing on whatever meaningful was for the students. the third 10-min was sharing time, where the students publicized their texts to the entire class to get their responses and feedback. with reference to bakhtin, the teacher, timothy lensmire, tried to reduce, if not entirely eliminate, his vertical power, vertical violence, the teacher-student hierarchy in his workshop to create horizontal relations (p.41). in a spirit of bakhtin’s carnival, lensmire wanted, “a playful, familiar relation to the world” (lensmire, 1994b, p. 375). despite this commitment to the horizontal relations, the teacher felt legitimate to force children to write even when they did not want. however, what they could write was completely up to them. with encouragement from the teacher, the students started using their half-fictional, half-true humorous writing as a weapon for scoring their interpersonal conflicts and dramas by soliciting laughter targeting their victims from their peer audience. initially, the teacher was pretty satisfied with his pedagogical experiment, noticing how authentic, meaningful, and real the children’s writing became – they were writing what was important for them, their writing was directed at real audience, the audience responses shaped by the audience. children’s heteroglossic texts “had very ‘social’ origins (beyond social origins in shared language, conceptions of story and particular genres, etc.)” (lensmire, 1994a, p. 49). lensmire argues that, “the dialogically agitated environment of our writing workshop was a site of struggle over identity, participation, meaning, and values. in their talk and texts, children took up conflicting positions on questions of who should tell whose stories, who should speak and be listened to, whose interpretations are valid, how it is we should treat one another” (lensmire, 1994a, p. 139). inspired by bakhtin, lensmire also liked “carnival abuse or profanation, and that is expressed … in the loud blasphemies, obscenities, and parodies that sound in the carnival square” (lensmire, 1994b, p. 375) that was also evident in his children’s writing. bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:66 however, after a while, the teacher noticed that the children’s stories generated a lot of laughter in many children but not in all. even more, the targets of the humorous stories often involved unpopular, marginalized, children (e.g., minorities, physically weak, unattractive, low ses). the stories themselves were strategically hurtful and involved a lot of sexism, sexual exploits, classism, and even racism. thus, two girls, victims of the stories, noticed the powerful trope of producing peer carnivalesque laughter, “one way to tease a classmate was to name him or her in a story, and then to link the person to someone of the other sex” (lensmire, 1994a, p. 53). this “upside down” carnivalesque trope is very similar to one described by bakhtin, “the carnivalistic logic of ‘a world upside down’: an emperor in the nether world becomes a slave, a slave an emperor, and so forth. the carnivalized nether world of the menippea determined the medieval tradition of representations of joyful hell, a tradition which found its culmination in rabelais… behind almost all scenes and events of real life, most of which are portrayed in a naturalistic manner, there glimmers more or less distinctly the carnival square with its specific carnivalistic logic of familiar contacts, mésalliances, disguises and mystifications, contrasting paired images, scandals, crownings/decrownings, and so forth” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 133). the vertical, institutionally sanctioned, teacher-student relationship became broken, “through student selection of topics, the child makes the first move in an interaction that places the teacher, ideally, in the position of response. …workshop approaches also break a teacher dominated discourse by allowing and encouraging children to turn away from the teacher, front and center, to each other. in place of a traditionally unauthentic, fault-finding teacher-audience, workshops promote an authentic, meaningfinding one, and peers are a significant part of that audience” (lensmire, 1994a, pp. 139-140). however, the vertical power hierarchy and vertical coercion by the teacher was replaced by horizontal power and coercion by the “popular” children and the mainstream oppressive culture behind those “popular” children. at the end of the book, lensmire formulates his lesson from his pedagogical experiment, criticizing his laissez-faire pedagogical approach, promoting students’ carnivalesque meaningful writing, my stories of [my students at the writing workshop], were stories about textual power put to various ends. one moral of those stories is that teachers must participate in shaping the ends toward which textual power is put by children. a laissez-faire attitude may very well allow status and power differences from the playground and society to assert themselves in the official work of the writing workshop. children who are still learning about the consequences of their actions may hurt themselves and others in the process. teacher response to children's texts is one way to influence the ends of children's textual power. another is through collective writing projects (lensmire, 1994a, p. 150). bakhtin’s carnival is not necessarily liberating. while, it can be liberating from the vertical oppression by the officialdom as bakhtin pointed out, it can be even more oppressive by the horizontal informal peer power of the dominate culture5. we agree with lensmire concluding that critical dialogue promoted by the teacher is absolutely necessary, “critical work with the content, the messages of texts” (lensmire, 1994a, p. 151). it is interesting that lensmire insisted that his workshop did not live to the promise and potential of bakhtin’s carnival, “…i must immediately admit that if workshop is carnival, it is a rather pale, subdued one--a carnival without bite, without the critical, radical edge of bakhtin's carnival. in the following section, i contrast workshops to carnival” (lensmire, 1994b, pp. 379-380). in our view, lensmire overlooked that bakhtin insisted on the critical nature of carnival, directed only against the vertical oppression of the officialdom. however, bakhtin did not consider the horizontal oppression, 5 william golding’s fictional novel “the lord of flies” is a good illustration of the horizontal power, horizontal oppression, and horizontal violence (golding, 1999). bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:67 existing in dominant informal culture, and its relationship with carnival. we argue that lensmire’s workshop was a clear realization of the bakhtinian carnival in an educational context and not a deviation from it. lensmire also seemed to overlook the students’ critical carnivalesque resistance of the teachers’ impositions by at times caricaturing what the teachers wanted from them in his workshop. this inherent problem of horizontal oppression by carnival caused by the dominant informal culture adds another critical aspect to boris groys’ argument against bakhtin’s mystical collective organic holism in addition to groys’ critique of violation of personal dignity, privacy, and freedoms in a bakhtinian carnival. forcing students into dialogue on the threshold bakhtin insisted that a polyphonic novel has to involve “dialogue on the threshold” of people facing their “ultimate questions” when they are faced with existential life and death crises, ...for in fact dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminate—turning point for his soul (p. 61). ...the great dialogue in dostoevsky is organized as an unclosed whole of life itself, life poised on the threshold. ...the menippea is a genre of "ultimate questions." in it[s] ultimate philosophical positions are put to the test. the menippea strives to provide, as it were, the ultimate and decisive words and acts of a person, each of which contains the whole man, the whole of his life in its entirety. (p. 115) … everywhere one meets the stripped-down pro et contra of life's ultimate questions (bakhtin, 1999, p. 116). inspired by bakhtin’s notion of “dialogue on the threshold” in a polyphonic novel and by socrates’ insistence that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” educationalist eugene matusov (the first author) redefined education as forceful engagement of the students in a critical dialogue “at the threshold of great [life] internal decisions and crises” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 62) by promoting their existential crises (matusov & brobst, 2013). matusov observed in his graduate seminar for future doctoral educational researchers that they were reluctant to participate in his assignments despite the fact they found these learning activities very useful for their professional and personal development (matusov & brobst, 2013). in his pedagogical experiment, he abandoned enforcing his assignments, making these assignments suggestive and voluntary – the learning activities were highly recommended by the professor but it was up to the students to do them (no negative consequences would be imposed). immediately, his students stopped preparing for the class meetings. their participation was reduced to their attendance and engagement in the class online forum. on the class forum, matusov challenged the students by asking the students when they were engaging in the academic activities on their own initiatives. it turned out that the students felt ownership for their own academic activities only within confines of some assignments, enforced by their professors, but never initiated their own educational activities, despite having their own strong interests. the critical dialogue about their learning habits, pursued by matusov, quickly escalated to the existential questions posed to the students about the purpose of their education, its place in their lives, and, ultimately, about their lives itself. matusov insisted that the students should answer these “ultimate,” “internally penetrating” (bakhtin, 1999), “stinging torpedo touch questions” (plato & bluck, 1961) to themselves and not to him. this led the students to deep existential crises, they could not resolve. they bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:68 could not stop thinking about these questions, could not stop participating on the class forum replying to the professor, and some even stopped sleeping. the polyphonic education, deeply engaging the students’ subjectivities and ontologies, seemed to be flourishing in the truly bakhtinian spirit. however, matusov had felt then and later reflected in his book (matusov & brobst, 2013) that he overstepped his role by arrogantly assuming “god’s position” or a position of an author of a polyphonic novel, confusing literature and art. this accusation was also directed against socrates and the socratic method for illegitimate messing up with the students’ lives (rud, 1997). knowledge can be painful. some educators view pain of knowledge as a desirable instruction for students’ intellectual and personal growth. this new knowledge (new epistemological vista, new paradigm) can undermine one’s existing comfort, one’s existing ontology, one’s existing being, and even one’s existing well-being. consider, for example, socrates' notion of "torpedo touch", as one of the most sophisticated pedagogical violence that was described: meno: if i may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, i think. (plato & jowett, 1937) we call the pain that socrates caused by creating disorientation in the student “epistemological pain.” this pain is very real. the question is whether epistemological violence, promoted by the teacher against the students in the name of critical examination of the students’ own life, legitimate in education? matusov’s student, michele (a pseudonym) a participant of his pedagogical experiment who experienced epistemological pain caused by her professor matusov, strongly disagrees (in a year after matusov’s pedagogical experiment was over), michele: i guess it [this critical dialogue] becomes obsessive such that it interferes with other aspects of life… i dunno [eugene], it's so weird and hard to explain but it feels like a ball and chain like a drug or an addiction or something… maybe it's just me though? maybe i'm too sensitive? like with my lack of community behind and other [personal] issues i have in my life… [these internal dialogues prompted by eugene are] like all related to all this stuff… it's all so very penetrating… excuse the french, but it's like a mindfuck. because maybe it does conflate with personal issues i have, but i'm sure other people have similar issues, so some of your other students could have or could be suffering like me…. but i'm sure it's worse on grad students than undergrads… i think you are very good at asking very important and penetrating questions… and sometimes you can get people to question their existence or their ways of living or why they're doing what they're doing, etc etc… you have that blessing that is a curse maybe… edward [i.e., eugene]: of course, by now you can imagine me asking, "what is wrong with that - i.e., asking about life?”... michele: because i wonder if you could question someone to despair or death? (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 82). other type of pedagogical pain may involve intentional humiliation to promote desired learning in a student. for example, in accordance to this socratic pedagogical method, a famous us educator jane elliott humiliates a white female college student to learn about a systemic problem of racism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neevofodqoe. the student does not appreciate this learning but bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:69 her white peers seem to do, despite by the observable pains caused by elliott in them. in contrast to matusov, who forcefully threw his students into their existential crises to let them struggle with these crises internally, elliott wanted to cure her students from racism by her intentional pedagogical use of humiliation. rud (1997) calls pedagogical use of humiliation as “the dark side” of the socratic method, commonly used in teaching law6. although elliott and the law professors using this socratic method are not bakhtinian educators, they employ the idea rooted in bakhtin (and socrates) to throw the students into existential crises and legitimatize the pedagogically-induced pain in education without any student consent. the issue here is not the use of humiliation but purposeful pedagogical use of pain without students’ consent7. we think that boris groys is right that bakhtin confused literature and life. in literature, it is legitimate for an author of a polyphonic novel to bring his/her heroes to a dialogue on the threshold of their life and death existential crises to test their deep ontological ideas. but for an educator (or anybody else for that matter), it becomes illegitimate and irresponsible playing god with his/her students. we argue that only students (persons) themselves have the right to throw themselves into their own existential crises and question themselves and no one else8. the role of a dialogic educator may be to create a safe learning dialogic environment, in which students can explore, experiment, examine, and test diverse possibility without jeopardizing their life and well-being by pushing them into their existential abyss. and, like a good dentist, the dialogic educator may need to warn the students that they may experience existential crises and give them a choice of not to go into them. teacher as a dostoevskian polyphonic novelist in their attempts to translate the bakhtinian polyphonic framework into education, several bakhtinian educationalists argue that a polyphonic teacher is akin to dostoevsky as a polyphonic novelist, while students in a polyphonic classroom are akin to the idea-hero characters of dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels. most notably, this approach has been developed by timothy lensmire (1997) and kiyotaka miyazaki (matusov & miyazaki, 2014; miyazaki, 2009). thus, lensmire being dissatisfied of his laissezfaire carnivalesque writing workshop, described above, searches for re-introduction and rehabilitation of the teacher authority, in this article i examine how teaching and the teacher’s role in elementary and secondary school writing classes have been conceptualized…. to do this, i develop the metaphor of the writing teacher as dostoevskian novelist. that is, i imagine the teacher as a novelist who creates a classroom-novel and takes up relations with student-characters. a dostoevskian novelist, and not some other sort, because of the instructive similarities and differences between the project that dostoevsky pursued in his novels and the project that workshop advocates want teachers to embrace in the writing classroom. at the heart of these projects and a primary theme of this article is the rejection of traditional relations between novelist and character, teacher and student, and the embrace of new ones. … dostoevsky’s method of freeing his characters… was based on approaching characters not as objects to be manipulated, but as subjects to be dialogued with. 6 rud provides a very good illustration of such socratic method, based on intentional humiliation of students, in the 1973 movie “the paper chase.” 7 pain and existential crises in a student can be an unfortunate by-product of education that an educator can try to ameliorate, eliminate, and warn about (like a dentist does, while treating a patient). this is a very different from purposeful causing pain and existential crises in the student as instruction and learning (like use of shock therapy in mental health – pain itself as a way of treatment). under current guidance, the latter can be used only with the consent of the patient. 8 in a hungarian fictional novel “the fifth seal,” a photographer sent a group of ordinary, “little,” people to the hungarian gestapo in 1944, during the terror by the nazi hungarian government of ferenc szálasi, for them to experience existential crisis and engage in the critical dialogue on the threshold (fábri, 1976; sánta, 1986). bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:70 how students’ freedom is imagined and achieved in writing workshops is a second important theme in this article…. a third theme is teacher authority and power in the workshop…. i argue that students' relative control over their own writing in the workshop is a function of teacher design and power. that is, rather than being antithetical to student freedom, teacher power is necessary to assure it (lensmire, 1997, pp. 368-369). with a reference to bakhtin, lensmire argues that, “the [polyphonic] novelist’s [and thus polyphonic teacher’s] power is used to develop, as much as possible, the ‘inner logic and independence’ of an other’s voice and perspective” (lensmire, 1997, p. 375). lensmire seems to want to expand the traditional laissez-faire writing workshop, where students have an opportunity to voice their dear interests, tensions, and ideas, however oppressive they can be – “sexist, classiest points of view expressed in student text” (p. 385). after the tensions and oppressions are revealed in the students’ texts, lensmire apparently wants to engage the students in adventurous collisions of their dear ideas to promote the emergence of their critical consciousness, in order to free student-characters from the stifling restrictions of the traditional school plot, the teacher-as-novelist writes them into an adventure story. within that story, the student-characters pursue their interests and come to express themselves in a rough-and-tumble mix of people and ideas” (lensmire, 1997, p. 378). the workshop functions similarly for the student: in contrast to the traditional classroom plot, the workshop-as-adventure-plot ‘connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions’ (bakhtin, 1984a, p. 105). in other words the student's social position, as student, does not exhaust who he is within the workshop, nor does it dictate his interactions with the world and others (lensmire, 1997, p. 379). we can expect that pursuing such work with students will make workshop teaching and learning harder, not easier. to examine and call into question important aspects of our identities and worldviews is a complicated and often distressing task. as we make workshops into sites of serious moral and political deliberation as teacher and student questions and reflections focus attention (and sometimes criticism) on meanings and values held dear by workshop participants the work of the writing workshop will become both more meaningful and more difficult and riskier (lensmire, 1997, p. 389). however, exactly how the polyphonic teacher has to design the adventure plot among his student-characters that promotes a critical dialogue among them remains very scratchy. japanese educationalist kiyotaka miyazaki starts where american educationalist timothy lensmire ends. miyazaki unpacks, operationalizes, and further conceptualizes lensmire’s notion of a “teacher as a dostoevskian polyphonic novelist.” he develops a pedagogical example using a teaching literature lesson by a japanese fourth-grade teacher yoko nishioka, inspired by saitou’s pedagogy. miyazaki shows that the polyphonic novelist teacher’s authorship involves developing a drama of ideas using students’ contributions and exposing the students to this drama. students’ ideas are characters in the teacher’s drama. thus, miyazaki describes an episode of dialogic teaching in a polyphonic classroom in which the teacher designs the dialogic “arena” and then guides her/his student-heroes in testing various ideas about a provocative dialogic problem. the teacher engaged 4th grade students in this episode in an analysis of a folk tale about a mischievous fox and a poor fisherman. in the story, the fox stole the fish that the bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:71 fisherman caught inadvertently causing the fisherman’s old and sick mother to die of starvation. when the fox realized how much his actions hurt the fisherman, the fox decided to nurture the bereaved fisherman by daily gifts fruit and nuts which he secretly left at the fisherman’s door. the teacher engaged the students in brainstorming about the fox’s motivation for secretly bringing food to the fisherman. the children offered many different explanations and the teacher engaged them to compare and contrast them, to make judgments about their plausibility. in addition, the teacher also strengthened some weaker ideas held by a minority of the students, challenging the dominant positions and leaving the discussion open. in this episode, miyazaki stresses that the teacher as a polyphonic novelist author designs such a polyphonic classroom by “setting the stage” and “make[ing] children [into] polyphonic heroes” who could generate “their new, unexpected views …the key for setting the stage is to generate a dialogic problem for children…” (miyazaki, 2009, p. 8). the role of the polyphonic novelist teacher should start with advance preparation by developing a smart spider-web of provocations, rooted in the material and in the internal dialogue between the teacher as a critical person of culture and the material. by doing that the teacher makes the taught material exciting, interesting, and problematic for the teacher him/herself. miyazaki quotes the famous japanese educator kihaku saitou (1911-1981) to describe this process of preparation, first of all, a teacher should encounter and confront wholeheartedly with the teaching material in all its respects as one person. a teacher should wholeheartedly interact with the teaching material, analyze it, have questions on it, ask himself, discover something, and create something, as one person. though these endeavors, he should accumulate new thinking, new logic, and new development. only after the teacher has done such interpretative works on the teaching material and encountered with it, a lesson can have a definite direction, intention and an explicit construction. it is because the teacher’s knowledge about the teaching material stops being a collection of random pieces, but becomes a lively one, acquired by his own, sweaty efforts, only after such encounters. it is because the teacher can confront children with the lively knowledge which he acquired by surprised of it, by doubting it, or by discover it afresh (saitou 1964) (cited in miyazaki, 2009, p. 9). then, the polyphonic novelist teacher should engage them in a meaningful exchange of ideas, to solicit the students’ contributions, to abstract the tensions among these ideas by cleverly revoking them, to make the tensions visible to the students, to ask the students for the resolution of these tensions, and to occasionally challenge the students’ ideas, when they cannot challenge these ideas themselves. miyazaki forcefully argues that, “the [polyphonic novelist] teacher should generate such kind of problems to have a dialogic classroom. it is teacher’s responsibility, not children’s to discover the dialogic problems in the learning content in front of children. the discovery of the dialogic problem becomes possible by teacher’s learning of children’s learning content” (miyazaki, 2009, p. 8). yes, students can occasionally ask questions but it is the role of the polyphonic novelist teacher to define the problematics of the classroom critical dialogue. finally, miyazaki argues that the unity of the polyphonic novelist teacher’s dramatic problematics remains open and unfinalized and the critical classroom dialogue remains open to continue. we respectfully disagree with this vision of teacher as a dostoevskian polyphonic novelist. we disagree that “the teacher as a person who is responsible for other [students’] learning” (miyazaki, 2009, p. 4). we believe that the students are most and foremost responsible for their own education and they are the final authority of their own education (klag, 1994; matusov, 1999). we think that the teacher’s bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:72 pedagogical authorship has to be subordinated and to serve to the students’ own educational authorship. it is the students’ own diverse problematics, which is important and not the teacher’s one. students are not dialogic characters in the polyphonic idea-adventure novel built by the polyphonic novelist teacher. students are authors of their own polyphonic novels and the main role of the teacher to help them with their own educational authorship. we think that the educational design – curriculum, instruction, class governance, resolving interpersonal relations – has to be open to the students, rather than to be the solo or even primary the domain of the polyphonic novelist teacher’s responsibility. placing people (e.g., students) as actors or characters of somebody else’s play (e.g., novel, classroom) or adventurous drama of ideas is ultimately disrespectful to the human agency. thus, we respectfully disagree with timothy lensmire arguing that, “for the opposing moments of art and education are not, ultimately, opposing” (1997, p. 390). the art and the life (and education) are very different, opposing, and cannot be treated similarly. in novelistic art, the writer ultimately keeps power of creation and design and cannot share it with the characters. when education follows art, the power to design an adventurous drama of ideas, in which the students actively and dialogically participate as characters, promotes the teacher’s mystery, as the ultimate puppeteer, catching the students’ subjectivity in the sticky spider-web of provocations, problematization, and adventurous drama of ideas. the teacher’s unfolding problematization of the students’ contributions creates the organic cosmic holism, rooted in bakhtin’s polyphonic and carnivalesque framework. in contrast, in genuinely polyphonic education, the teacher should be ultimately dethroned from the position of the almighty and all-comprehensive god, the wizard, who organizes the intellectual and ontological being of the students. the students should have the authorial power to design their own education. the teacher must serve the students’ power. conclusions we agree with groys that art, life, and education have to be kept separate – attempts to combine them lead to holism, if not to totalitarianism. while art may welcome unity and holism, life may embrace it as temporary and contested moment. holism in education is deadly and oppressive. students are not idea-characters of the teacher’s polyphonic pedagogical authorship but rather are full-fledged authors of their own education, ideas, and life. pedagogical responsibility and authorship of the teacher should be aimed at supporting the critical authorship of the students, as the students wish it, – ultimately education cannot be forced. in contrast to art, carnival and/or dialogue on the threshold should not be an alibi for the teacher to throw their students into existential crises or epistemological pains. in literature, a writer can kill characters or dramatize their life to reveal the truth of their ideas. but in life, this would be a condemned crime or, at least, an unethical behavior. bakhtin’s literary dialogic and carnivalistic framework cannot and should not be directly translated into the life and education. indeed, for whatever historical and biographical reasons, one of the big ontological attractions for bakhtin seems to be toward this mystical, collective, organic, cosmic holism (monism). being one with the cosmos, being one with the unity, being one with cycle of death and rebirth, being one with cosmic laughter on “human comedy” might help bakhtin to be above the life with all its tragedies, pains, crimes and betrayals. bakhtin the conservative, clearly had distrust in the people’s ability to govern their own lives. as a consequence, the attraction to monism made bakhtin’s political and philosophical stance somewhat reactionary, illiberal, undemocratic and in some way even flirting with totalitarianism. we agree with groys’ critique of bakhtin that “bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy: for him, they are synonymous to alienation, autonomization, clamming up of individuality, the separation of the latter from the natural unity of cosmic and people’s life – and, bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:73 consequently, they become the historical reasons for the emergence of the pathos of seriousness, sentimentality, moralizing, and, also, of the devolution of the people’s carnivalesque laughter into individualistic criticism and satire” (groys, p. db:3). strangely enough, for maybe different reasons, we found attractions to bakhtin’s conservative monistic ontological project among contemporary bakhtinian educationalists. of course, bakhtin the conservative was not the only bakhtin. another bakhtin was bakhtin the humanist, who criticized monism, unity, mysticism, and disrespect of human agency, as a person-lichnost (not a member of class, classovost, or ethnic people, nardonost). we want to appeal to the other bakhtin, bakhtin-the-humanist. the core of bakhtin-the-humanist can probably be defined by his insistence on “consciousnesses with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999), which means that all participants have the right to be taken seriously regardless their social, institutional, political, epistemological, cultural, or age status. bakhtin-the-humanist defined excessive monologism as, “a denial of the equal rights of consciousnesses vis-a-vis truth (understood abstractly and systemically). god can get along without man, but man cannot get along without him. the teacher and the disciple (socratic dialogue)” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 285). without the teacher’s assumption that the student is the final authority for his/her own education, life, ideas, and ontology; without the teacher’s respect the student’s final authority; without the teacher’s acceptance of consciousnesses with equal rights; – genuine polyphonic education is impossible. references bakhtin, m. m. (1984). rabelais and his world (h. iswolsky, trans. 1st midland book ed.). bloomington: indiana university press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. m., duvakin, v. d., & bocharov, s. g. (2002). m.m. bakhtin: besedy s vd duvakinym [m.m. bakhtin: conversations with v.d. duvakin]: soglasie. fábri, z. (writer). (1976). the fifth seal [vhs]. in mafilm (producer). hungry: facets video. golding, w. (1999). lord of the flies: a novel. new york: penguin. klag, p. (1994). a new look at invitational education. the collaborator, 5(14), 1-2. lensmire, t. j. (1994a). when children write: critical re-visions of the writing workshop. new york: teacher college press. lensmire, t. j. (1994b). writing workshop as carnival: reflections on an alternative learning environment. harvard educational review, 64(4), 371-391. lensmire, t. j. (1997). the teacher as dostoevskian novelist. research in the teaching of english, 31(3), 367-392. marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). “spoilsport” in drama education vs. dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4, a45-a80. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/151/113 doi:10.5195/dpj.2016.151 matusov, e. (1999). how does a community of learners maintain itself? ecology of an innovative school. anthropology & education quarterly, 30(2), 161-186. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. bakhtin’s mystical organic holism and its consequences for education eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.222 | vol. 5 (2017) db:74 matusov, e., & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centaur failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. matusov, e., & miyazaki, k. (2014). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 2, si:ddp-1 si:ddp-47. doi:10.5195/dpj.2014.121 miyazaki, k. (2009). teacher as the author of polyphonic novel: bakhtinian analysis of a japanese view on dialogic education. paper presented at the 2nd international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin, stockholm university, sweden. morson, g. s., & emerson, c. (1990). mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. stanford, ca: stanford university press. plato, & bluck, r. s. (1961). meno. cambridge, uk: university press. plato, & jowett, b. (1937). the dialogues of plato. new york,: random house. rud, a. g. (1997). the use and abuse of socrates in present day teaching. education policy analysis archives, 5(20), available: http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v5n20.html. sánta, f. (1986). the fifth seal: a novel (a. tezla, trans.). budapest: corvina. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a98 literature discussions as mangles of practice: sociological theories of emergence and/in dialogic learning events george kamberelis william mcginley colorado state university university of colorado alyson welker colorado state university abstract in this report, we argue that some of the most productive and edifying kinds of literature discussions among certain ages/grade levels may be best understood as “mangles of practice” (pickering, 1995). mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing transformations of ongoing social activities, as well as unpredictable outcomes or products. indeed, the discussions we studied had these characteristics. they often involved both planned and contingent actions and reactions by individual, social, cultural, and material agents and agencies. as such, they were emergent phenomena about which we could seldom predict what precise collections, collisions, and collusions of actions and reactions would occur within them or what the effects of these collections, collisions, and collusions would be. in spite of (or more likely because of) their unpredictability, these discussions were extremely dynamic knowledge-producing activities. given this social fact, we think our findings contribute significantly to understanding the lineaments and potentials of dialogic pedagogy, which deepens students’ learning and development. more specifically, when teachers successfully prompt and engage students in more robustly dialogic talk that promotes text-to-life connections, life-to text connections, linkages to non school knowledge (like that of popular culture), etc., then students often reap a wide variety of benefits with respect to their abilities to engage in genuine inquiry, to reason and argue for particular interpretations, to evaluate complex human actions and decisions, and to develop principled social, cultural, and moral equipment for living their own lives. george kamberelis is professor and director of the school of education at colorado state university. he received a ph.d. in education and psychology and an m.s. in psychology from the university of michigan, an m.a. in religious studies from the university of chicago, and a b.a. in issn: 2325-3290 (online) literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a99 philosophy and religion from bates college. professor kamberelis’ research is resolutely interdisciplinary, integrating intellectual perspectives from anthropology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, cultural studies, and literary studies. his work also embodies a deep commitment to theory (especially critical social theory). over the years professor kamberelis has conducted research and taught courses on critical social theory, interpretive research methods, theoretical foundations of reading and writing, literacy and society, classroom discourse, and media literacy. william mcginley is a professor of literacy studies at the university of colorado-boulder. he received a ph.d. in literacy education from the university of illinois at urbana-champaign, an m.a. in english education from idaho state university, and a b.a. in english from st. joseph’s college. professor mcginley’s research addresses various issues related to learning and teaching literacy land literature. he has examined how theories of emotion and sentimentality in democratic politics can inform literary understanding. he has investigated how teachers-in-preparation draw upon improvisational narrative models to organize and understand their initial teaching experiences. and he has conducted research on how middle school students deploy the creative power of writing and visual art to envision a sense of shared community designed to inspire others to act on challenges their communities face. alyson welker is an instructor in the english department and a doctoral student in the school of education at colorado state university. she received an m.a. in rhetoric and a b.a. in english from the university of colorado denver. ms. welker’s central research interests focus on enhancing learning processes across disciplines and learning-teaching environments. she has conducted research on the effects of deploying innovative technologies in both online and on-campus courses. inspired by narrative theories and critical social theories, ms. welker is currently investigating multimodal literacy practices designed to promote civic engagement and enact social change.  introduction the study from which this report was generated was guided by the following research questions: what human and non-human agents are involved in student-led, student-generated discussions about literature? what are the nature and effects of inquiry-based, student-led, student-generated literature discussions? what can teachers learn from these discussions about how they might facilitate classroom talk and social interaction in ways that promote deeper forms of inquiry, more responsive or dialogic forms of classroom talk, and more genuinely co-constructed forms of knowledge about literature and its relation to life? by student-led, student-generated discourse in inquiry-based language arts activities, we mean to include small group discussion, collaborative work, responsive writing, and all manner of collaborative interpretative activity. by genuinely, co-constructed forms and knowledge, we mean to index ways of imagining self, others, and world that become valuable democratic resources that, as nussbaum (1995) has explained, cultivate our poetic, metaphoric, and imaginative sensibilities, thus opening up ways of seeing beyond the “facts” and into the minds and hearts of others as they negotiate the exigencies of their lives and engage in forms of social interaction that lead toward increased self awareness, the development of more sophisticated interpretive practices, greater understanding of the lived experiences literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a100 of others, and more robust participation in community-based projects, initiatives, or movements (ganz, 2010; nikitina, 2009). to frame the findings from our study, we drew upon pickering’s (1995) “mangles of practice” construct or metaphor. mangles of practice involve both planned and contingent actions and reactions byindividual, social, cultural, and material agents and agencies. as such, they are emergent phenomena about which one can seldom (if ever) predict what precise collections/collisions/collusions of actions and reactions would occur within them or what the effects of these collections/collisions/collusions might be. indeed, this characterization of activity mapped beautifully onto what we saw when we watched the videotapes of the student-led, student-generated discourse about literature. besides being useful in characterizing the nature and effects of the activity we studied, the mangles of practice construct is also useful for re-imagining what happens (or could happen) when students engage in discussions about books they read in their english language arts (ela) classrooms. in turn, these insights could help ela teachers imagine and facilitate forms of dialogues about literature that nystrand (1997) and others have argued should but seldom occur in ela classrooms. importantly, especially for the audience of dialogic pedagogy, pickering’s mangle practice metaphor can be viewed as a practical operationalization of bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. drawing from bakhtin (1981), we can imagine discourse on a continuum from more recitative to more carnivalesque. more recitative forms are like the traditional initiation-response-evaluation (i-r-e) genre in which an ela teacher asks a text-based question, a student answers the question, and the teacher ultimately evaluates this answer (e.g., cazden, 1988). discourse at this end of the continuum limits possibilities for the co construction of knowledge, deeper modes of inquiry, and students’ ideas about what it means to read and respond to literature. more carnivalesque forms of classroom discourse have much fewer rules or conventions about purposes for reading and responding to literature, the meaning potentials of literary texts, who may initiate discussions, who may ask and answer questions, who may evaluate responses, and how text-based discussions must unfold, etc. thus, these forms of discourse expand the meaning potentials of literary texts, increase possibilities for inquiry-based teaching and learning, and cultivate the co-construction of knowledge about literature and literary interpretation. the remainder of the report is organized in the following way: first, we elaborate on our conceptual framework by unpacking key constructs and arguments central to the mangles of practice metaphor and other ways sociologists have theorized emergence, especially ones that have focused on communication practices and activities. next, because the data analyzed were drawn from a collaborative action research project, we outline the research methods of the study (i.e. the context and participants, the classroom activities involved, the data collected, and our data analysis strategies). we then present key findings derived from analyses of several segments of interaction from our data that illustrate how interactional activity produced text genres, activity genres, and other relevant structures, meanings, and subject positions in contingent but productive ways. importantly, we contextualize these discourse analyses of interactional segments with relevant contextual information, insisting all along that context itself is a dynamic, social fact that is produced over time just like our focal objects. finally, we offer some conclusions drawn from this work and suggest some implications for research and pedagogy. conceptual framework although theories of emergence or dialogism or improvisation are not very commonly used to frame psychological or educational research, they have been developed and used within sociology and literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a101 communication studies for many years to understand and explain phenomena as diverse as microand macrosocial structure, computer mediated communication, conversation, oral narrative production, laboratory work, and children’ pretend play (giddens, 1984; latour & woolgar, 1984; pickering, 1995; sawyer, 1997). although most theories of emergence could be used to frame this work, we found andrew pickering’s ideas about what he calls “mangles of practice” to be particularly useful because of its focus on moment-to-moment activity and the specifics of social interaction. mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing transformations of ongoing social activities and the products (including knowledge products) of these activities. this construct was the outcome of pickering’s efforts to explain social practice in real time. pickering insisted that representational idioms are synchronic and, in the end, fail to explain dynamic, ongoing processes. unlike representational idioms, performative idioms—ones based on descriptions and explanations of actual social practice in real time—more accurately capture the nature and functions of social activity and have considerably more explanatory power. to warrant these claims, pickering offered painstakingly detailed accounts of several “big” events in the history of science, mathematics, and technology. for example, he chronicled donald glaser’s attempts to build a bubble chamber and eventually a quenched xenon chamber to study the “strange particles” that were noticed in cosmic ray experiments using cloud chambers during the 1950s and bedeviled physicists ever since that time. pickering also chronicled giacomo morpurgo’s efforts to find particles (eventually called quarks) that could explain third integral electric charges (e/3 or 2e/3). in these and other examples, pickering argued quite convincingly that scientific processes and products emerge in the complex, real-time interactions among human, material, and social factors. in his analysis of glaser’s work for example, he showed how the reconfiguration of different material set-ups of bubble chambers affected how strange particles were conceptualized, how experimental goals were developed and achieved or abandoned, how glaser interacted with his laboratory partners, and even how social life among the larger particle physics community was organized and reorganized over time and as a function of many unforeseen events and forces. pickering’s theory of emergence pivots on two key ideas: (a) re-imagining agency and (b) taking the temporal flow of activity very seriously. unlike most theories of agency based in enlightenment conceptual frameworks, pickering views agency as much more complex involving human, material, conceptual, and disciplinary agents. frustrated with the complete absence of time as a constitutive force within the representational idiom, and because emergence is predicated on the flow of time, pickering places time at the very center of this theory of the mangle of practice. with its resolutely diachronic focus, all forms of agency, all activity, and all products of activity are seen as emerging in time. examples that support this position abound with respect to theories (e.g., newtonian physics), the organization of disciplines (e.g., dsm i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi), the organization of institutions like school (e.g., progressivism, traditionalism, no child left behind), and so on. time really matters! within a performative idiom, explanations that appeal to laws or rules are always problematic. we cannot predict social activity or the unfolding of any phenomenon even though we can explain it and its effects quite well after the fact. everything emerges or becomes continuously in time. the contours of all forms of agency emerge in the temporality of practice; they partially define each other; and they sustain or destroy each other. based on these two key ideas and painstaking analyses of several very important research programs in science, mathematics, and technology during the latter half of the 20 th century, pickering theorized the mangle of practice in more or less the following way. individual or collective actors (scientists, managers, teachers) begin with problems, plans, and goals in a disciplinary context. these literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a102 plans and goals are pursued in a field constituted by multiple forms of agency. pickering calls this a dance of agency. a dialogue of resistance and accommodation ensues where some forms of agency create resistances and human actors accommodate to these resistances. this dance of agency results in a series of interactive stabilizations. the last interactive stabilization is a topographical configuration that defines the state of the art of the field—a particular capture of the various forms of agency involved. the dance of agency and the process of resistance and accommodation, however, could continue and other, different captures could emerge. in other words, this pattern repeats itself endlessly with the precise interactions between resistances and accommodations within it emerging unpredictably. although the examples pickering used to support his argument for the purchase of the mangle of practice as an explanatory framework unfolded over years or decades, we think that the mangle of practice as an explanatory framework is scale variant. it is useful for explaining phenomena that are both much smaller in scale and much larger in scale than those pickering explained. literature discussions are smaller in scale. additionally, we believe that the predominant forms of agency that matter the most in different contexts and in relation to different emergent processes vary considerably. in our study, human agents, textual material, and disciplinary practices mattered most. in this sense, we argue for the importance of re-imagining agency within dialogic discussions to allow for educational frameworks that promote active ownership of the reasoning and evaluation necessary for critical thinking and engaged citizenship. therefore, to operationalize the mangle of practice construct for our work here we appealed to theories that have focused on talk and social interaction. according to most of these theories, all ongoing social interactions occur at the intersection of several forces: (a) participants (speakers, performers, interlocutors, etc.) who contribute to an ongoing stream of action and interaction (e.g., wortham, 1994); (b) the meaning potentials of the texts under construction, and (c) the enablements and constraints of disciplinary resources and practices for text interpretation and knowledge building (e.g., activity genres, text genres, disciplinary conventions, interpretive codes). as bakhtin (1981) taught us long ago and practiced in his own work, language events such as literature discussions are dynamic processes that do not derive from a particular participant (no matter how powerful), a particular framing device (e.g., a genre), a tradition (e.g., new criticism), or any other structural or contextual constraint. instead, language events unfold with each new contribution and are thus constantly being produced anew. to maintain the developing coherence of any activity, participants need to be keyed into the unfolding discussion. of course, what counts as coherence may vary as well, so some contributions that seem to be “off-task” can actually rearticulate the coherence structure of an activity. similarly, some forces one might expect to have powerful effects may go nowhere. in more concrete terms, discussions (or social activity) generally that are not heavily constrained by “rules” usually unfold something like this: a participant makes a contribution to ongoing discursive/social activity. it is expected that this contribution will be relatively original in relation to what has occurred before it. other participants then evaluate the contribution’s relevance to the unfolding discussion. this evaluation is typically immediate and not particularly premeditated. the evaluation process is informed by many factors including but not limited to the content of the contribution, any intertextual connections either stated or implied, whether these connections are understood by other participants, the social status of the contributor, the rhetorical skill of the contributor, etc. the new contribution rearticulates the interpretive process to some degree. another contribution is then made by another participant, and the process continues. each participant contributes to the ongoing stream of interaction, and each contribution is partially informed by the prior flow of the stream. literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a103 importantly, participants (or the human agents involved in this process) do so within a rich, historical context comprised of equally rich, sedimented disciplinary traditions (e.g., new criticism, new historicism, reader-response theory) with unique assumptions, norms, discourses and practices that privilege the content and style of some forms of interpretive work over others. in other words, each framework can contribute to the dance of agency within discussions about literature, exerting “real” effects on how literature is approached and understood. having and deploying knowledge of genres and sub-genres can exert “real” effects as well. for example, there are many narrative sub-genres. the ones most relevant to this study are the annal, the chronicle, and the full-blown narrative (in this case historical fiction). a full-blown narrative includes a setting, rich character development, a series of problems to solve, successful or unsuccessful attempts to solve those problems, a climax or high point, and some kind of final resolution. among other things, people construct and share narratives to make sense of the non-canonical, to develop and maintain social relationships, and to project themselves into possible selves and possible worlds (e.g., bruner, 1986, 1990; carroll, 2004; nussbaum, 1995). a chronicle is a bit more complex. it aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it because it neither infers/explains characters’ goals and motivations nor reaches a highpoint that gets resolve in some sensible way. an annal is simply list of events in chronological order. depending on which of these (or other) sub-genres are invoked, a literature discussion will unfold different meaning potentials and achieve different levels of depth, complexity, and nuance. if we consider that the dance of agency in literature discussions involves contributions of individuals, cultural tools such as genres, cultural traditions such as new historicism, and other tools and structures that are invoked in the ongoing flow of activity, then heteroglossic social events—from everyday conversations to literature discussions—are perhaps best viewed as interactional spaces in which both individual selves and the social order are continuously and dynamically created or produced. although historically sedimented, conventional practices act as meta-constraints in this process, they are not determinative for several reasons. first, there are many competing traditions of interpretation. second, these traditions themselves are dynamic and change over time. third, the tools of these traditions are appropriated and deployed in unpredictable ways by participants. finally, as participants interact—deploying the tools of various traditions in various ways—how meaning is constructed and which meanings prevail are open questions. central to our way if thinking here is the difference between explanations of talk and social interaction rooted in structuralism versus explanations rooted in sociological theories of emergence. structural (or formal-theoretical) explanations and processual (or emergence) explanations belong to different orders of reality. structural explanations purport to discover things that are already there, that have an a priori existence such as reducing dreams to oedipal impulses. such explanations transform dynamic activity into fixed meanings, thereby eliminating what is most essential to social life when viewed from another perspective—its contingency and its social and collaborative nature (e.g., pickering, 1995; sawyer 2001b; wolf & hicks, 1989). sociological theories of emergence offer a starting point for the development of these latter explanations. these theories view knowledge as distributed and largely non representational involving multiple participants in complex social systems. knowing is reconceived as the ability to participate productively in shared cultural practices that are constantly producing new knowledge. with respect to literature discussions, constructing the meaning of a literary text would seem to emerge from collaborative improvisations that involve the contingent coalescence of multiple agentic forces—some individual, some collective, some institutional. literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a104 method the study from which this report was generated used a collaborative action research design in which the first author and a fifth-grade teacher worked together for an entire school year, specifically on student-led literature discussions embedded within a two year study of disciplinary literacies, to explore the nature and effects of small group discussions (including literature discussions) in which students were given increasing responsibility to orchestrate the discussions’ content and process. collaborative action research is a hybrid approach that integrates strategies from action research and formative experiments. action research in educational settings (mills, 2010) is systematic inquiry conducted by teachers or other stakeholders to assess the viability and effectiveness of learning activities or interventions. the ultimate goal of such research is to gain insight into and to develop increasingly reflective practice that leads to improving student outcomes relevant to these activities or interventions, thus offering guidelines for best practice. formative experiments (reinking & bradley, 2007) are designed rather than naturalistic. researchers introduce innovations; they monitor the nature and effects of these innovations; and they adapt or modify the innovations based on their assessments about effectiveness. combining strategies from these two approaches to conduct collaborative action research, the teachers and researchers combine their complementary skills and expertise as they work together to create learning experiences for students and to study the effectiveness of these experiences in rigorous, principled, systematic ways. context, participants, and discourse framing to contextualize the analyses we present in the next section, we begin by offering a summary of how literature discussions evolved in the classroom we studied, as well as a brief summary of the book the children were discussing. the teacher we worked with, ms. g, was known in the district for her teaching excellence and her continual efforts to improve her classroom practice. many parents requested that their children be in her class even though such requests were not honored due to district policies. otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about this teacher. the teacher in this study agreed to work with us over a period of two years on various projects to understand the nature and differences of how she facilitated talk and social interaction in three different subject areas: english language arts, science, and social studies. for this article, we focus primarily on the english language arts (ela) portion of the research. however, even though each subject had its own time block each day, content from one subject was often related to content from another. for example, learning related to the piece of historical fiction used in ela instruction (my brother sam is dead) at this point in the year sometimes overlapped with and was connected to learning about the revolutionary war, which was the focus of the history block. literature discussions took place in small, student-facilitated reading groups composed of five or six students. all class members were placed in one of three groups. students were placed in reading groups early in the year based on various reading assessments. membership in groups was fluid, however. as the teacher assessed students’ abilities and performance within groups across the year, some students were moved “up” and “down” as she saw fit. it is important to note that although the groups were ostensibly ability-groups, because there were only three groups, each group was actually quite heterogeneous with respect to students’ comprehension and interpretation abilities. although exceptions arose on some days, literature discussion groups met almost daily for about 25 minutes. each group read approximately six to eight books in a year. at the end of each book, students completed, individually or with peers, projects that related to the books. students were given a literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a105 list of possible options and were able to choose their own projects. for instance, in response to one book, three students completed a board game whose design incorporated many themes of the text. for another book, a student wrote a set of obituaries for its characters. students always presented their projects to their group members (or the whole class). guided by rubrics developed by the teacher, students also helped the teacher determine project grades. early in the year, the teacher led the discussions, maintaining the responsibility for generating questions that addressed students’ comprehension of what they were reading, how they were interpreting the texts, and what their personal responses to the texts were. following completion of the first book (and based on her assessment of students’ readiness) she worked with students to help them learn how to engage in and facilitate rich dialogic interactions around books. at first, she began to make more explicit what she was doing as a model for students to follow. for instance, she sometimes would ask a question and then ask students why she asked such a question. as students began to think and talk about the pedagogical reasoning behind different types of questions, she began to introduce questions she derived from bloom’s taxonomy of higher order thinking. to do so, she introduced one type of question at a time beginning with knowledge-type questions. for each night’s readings, students were asked to complete two or three questions of the type focused on (e.g., knowledge, evaluation). much of the literature discussion that took place the following day focused on the questions students generated. as this continued, the teacher would ask students to compare the various questions, specifically, as well as the types of questions to understand what type of knowledge was needed to generate responses to each. for instance, students began to recognize that analysis-type questions meant that students had to understand the content they had read; that they needed to be able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information; and that they needed to be able to construct a question whose answer required both textual knowledge and inferential thinking. as students became more comfortable with the process and as their abilities to generate questions and to deconstruct the skills required for answering them, students began to take on more responsibility for generating and engaging with one another’s questions and also for interjecting more spontaneous questions and comments as they discussed the texts. for instance, students became critical of questions that could be answered without actually ever reading the text (e.g., did you like the chapter?). once the teacher believed she had adequately modeled questions for group members and that they were thinking in more sophisticated ways about how to generate questions, she began to turn over more responsibility to students for leading literature discussions. students took successive turns being the “leader” for a day’s discussion. the discussion leader within each group was responsible for writing a summary of the assigned chapters and generating a list of questions the group would answer. the teacher made copies of all questions and handed them out to students. on most days, groups were able to get through all of the questions. sometimes, more than one student was able to respond to a particular question. on some days, however, students became so invested in a particular question or two that the group was unable to get to all of the questions. although the readings (and the amount of reading) were assigned by the teacher, leaders were also responsible for assigning additional homework. often, students assigned predictions of the chapters they were supposed to read. after a while, students began to criticize the assignment and suggest that different assignments were necessary. some students also took on the role of the discussion leader to mean that they were “the teacher.” for instance, one student assigned students to generate discussion questions and cautioned them that the questions must require students to show evidence that they had read the assigned chapters and could not simply require that others share how they felt about what they literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a106 had read. each discussion group would then begin by addressing the previous night’s homework before the next leader took over. although students took more responsibility for discussions, the teacher continued to participate in discussions in various ways. sometimes she would do so by attending primarily to discipline or group management. sometimes she tried to control turn-taking activity. sometimes she interjected her own questions and responses. the interactions we showcase in this article come from two consecutive days of discussion that occurred at the end of the first year of the study. although the teacher was present during a portion of the discussions that occurred on these days, students assumed primary responsibility for orchestrating the discussions. the book that students were reading and discussing was my brother sam is dead (collier & collier, 1974). this book is a piece of historical fiction, a fact that students did not fully understand until they had completed the book. set during the revolutionary war, my brother sam is dead introduces readers to a family’s struggles as one member, sam, chooses to fight for the rebels while the rest of the family and the majority of the community they live in, oppose the war. throughout the book, students learn of how the family copes with this political divide, with hunger, and with death. despite the students’ expectations, sam’s death comes at the end of the book and is not a result of being killed by the enemy. sam is shot after he is found guilty of stealing cattle that belonged to his family. in the final chapters of the book, sam is questioning whether or not the war will be won. the troops have settled in his hometown. because he knows the community, he is often responsible for taking military officers to various places. during these times, he often takes the opportunity to spend time with his family. in one chapter, he repeatedly warns his brother, tim, of the need to butcher their cattle because soldiers, including himself when desperate, will steal for their survival. because the community is known to oppose the rebel’s cause, soldiers may not even think twice about such a theft. one evening, while sam and tim are talking, they hear noises coming from the barn. they run out to find that sam’s warnings are coming true. soldiers are stealing the cattle. sam tells tim to rustle up the cattle that remain as he chases away the shadowy thieves. a little while later, tim finds that sam has been tied up and that the thieves are claiming that he was stealing the cattle. tim runs to get help, but after several attempts, learns that the fate of his brother is death. the colonel tells him that, whether sam is actually guilty is not as important as the need for the general to make an example of someone. data, data preparation, and data analysis the data for this report came from observations of discussions of my brother sam is dead conducted by one group of six students. these discussions were audiotaped and field notes were composed. audiotapes were transcribed using an adapted version of atkinson and heritage (1984). transcription conventions are contained in the appendix. field notes were typed and annotated with summary comments, reflections, and preliminary analyses. all relevant student-generated artifacts were photocopied or saved electronically. all of these data were used as context for conducting fine-grained discourse analyses, which we describe below. these discourse analyses were both theory-driven and thoroughly grounded in data. first, we coded all transcripts for the extent to which segments of discussion varied on a continuum from being more recitative to more dialogic, as well as how these different forms of talk afforded different kinds of participation and different kinds of learning. the dialogicality of the literature discussions refers to a more imaginative activity genre aimed at exploring and constructing a range of other imaginative narratives. literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a107 recitative contributions tend to include facts and interpretations from the story to support one position. in effect, a more open and potentially interpretative literary discussion is desired for the beneficial nature of this kind of learning to occur. next, informed by our reading of sociological theories of emergence and using strategies adapted from gee’s (2011) form of discourse analysis and fairclough’s (1992) form of critical discourse analysis, we analyzed data to interpret the nature and effects of specific segments of talk and social interaction in the discussions that were located toward the dialogic end of the recitative— dialogic continuum. we focused on these segments because they seemed to represent the phenomenon of “emergence” or “mangles of practice” most fully and explicitly. these analytic strategies allowed us to construct inferences and interpretations about (a) the nature and effects of participants’ contributions to the ongoing talk and social interaction, (b) the nature and effects of the statuses of individuals within the discussion and the larger activity systems in which it was embedded, (c) the development of the meaning potentials of the text being discussed, and (d) the enablements and constraints of disciplinary resources and practices for text interpretation and knowledge building (e.g., activity genres, text genres, disciplinary conventions, interpretive codes). together, these dimensions and their interactions constituted this discussion as a unique and uniquely interesting “mangle of practice.” by analyzing these dimensions of discourse in relation to each other, we were be able to interpret how participants produced, reproduced, and transformed their knowledge and social identities within the complex and sometimes contradictory landscape of classroom activity. findings our findings were constructed by analyzing a lengthy transcript of the two-day discussion of my brother sam is dead. because the transcript is quite long, we have separated the transcript (and our analyses of it) into four segments. each segment constitutes a sub-event within the overall discussion event. however, because the event was coherent as a whole, we also invite readers to read it (without our analyses) in its entirety. through our analyses, we try to show the ways in which student-led, student-generated discourse had powerful impacts on students’ learning, especially with respect to making text-to-life and life-to-text connections. as such, our findings help us consider and prepare for the unpredictable nature of this type of learning/teaching, while being especially mindful of the ways in which teachers can generate the tremendous potential of new connections and possibilities for student learning made available in the kinds of discursive spaces we call “mangles of practice.” more specifically, our findings offer insights about ways in which teachers might promote more dialogic forms of inquiry within classroom discussions. segment 1: findings the following discussion segment begins with the teacher nominating a student to read the summary of the chapter he had written for homework. while he is presenting his summary, both the teacher and students ask many questions and interject ideas. in effect, the summary is co-constructed by the group. parenthetically, at this point in the year, and probably related to the fact that the reading groups were well established, co-constructing knowledge together was a common activity. 1. ms. g: ok, what was our assignment? chapter 13. and edward said his prediction was right. 2. jen: pretty much. 3. tanya: yeah, cuz he read ahead. [ 4. edward: no i did not literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a108 [ 5. ali: no he did not. [ 6. ms. g: okay, edward, you wanna read your summary [ 7. ali: there are only 2 chapters left// 8. jen: one chapter left. [ 9. ?: you’re accusing him of reading ahead. 10. ?: she does [ 11. ss: (xxx) [ 12. edward: awright, what happened was tim went to (.5) the colonel// 13. ms. g: colonel parsons? 14. edward: yeah. and he was asleep and so he came back the next day and (.5) 15. tanya: [why’s he giving a summary if we have to (x) 16. ?: yeah [ 17. ?: yeah, cause that was the assignment.// 18. jen: that was the assignment today. 19. ms. g: i thought, i thought that, that that’s what he was doing. 20. jen: he wasn’t reading his summary. 21. ms. g: oh. 22. ss: ((some giggling)) 23. edward: what happened was (.5) ‘tim went to colonel parson’s but he was told to go home because of the nighttime and come back in the morning// ((noise from other ss in classroom increasing.)) 24. ms. g: ((speaking to s not in group) umm. (1) violet (.5) [ 25. edward: and he did, then// 26. ms. g: ((still talking to students outside of group)) you have a contract now ‘cause i told you to put that away. that has been out all morning and you are supposed to be doing work. y, what are you doing violet? 27. violet: (xx) look at it 28. ms. g: and you’re not supposed to be doing that violet. ok, sorry edward. 29. edward: and so then he like went back to his house after he was told to go home and like later in the chapter colonial, uh, col-on-el read, i think (1) 30. ms. g: ((speaking to someone not in group)) at about 10 till, 10 till 10. (1) ok 31. edward: came and told them that// 32. ms. g: who came? 33. edward: colonial, colonial read, i think, 34. ms. g and ss: colonel, colonel. literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a109 35. edward: and, uh, (.5) [ 36. ms. g: it looks like colonial, but it’s colonel 37. edward: and he said that sam was going to be trialed, and uh, [ 38. ms. g: tried 39. edward: yeah, tried, in february, february 6 th , and he// 40. ms. g: for what? 41. edward: for um, uh, for can, for act, for thieve, for, um, stealing 42. ms. g: stealing the cattle? 43. edward: and so then he went to, uh, so the trial ((noise from ss not in group rises)) so he was found guilty in the trial and he was gonna, uh, be shot, and he went to the// 44. ms. g: he didn’t have the trial yet. 45. tanya: yeah they did. [ 46. jen: yeah, he did. [ 47. ss: yeah they did [ 48. ?: because they (xx) [ 49. tanya: he was convicted guilty [ 50. ?: yeah, sam was convicted guilty. [ 51. ?: yeah [ 52. edward: two men were going to get 100 lashes (?); one man was going to be hanged, and one man was going to be shot. [ 53. ms. g: i thought that’s what they said was going to happen but they didn’t have the trial yet.// 54. jen: yeah, they had the trial. [ 55. ?: they had the trial 56. ss: (xx) ((lots of discussion about details)) 57. ms. g: ok 58. ?: one man got 50, i thought one of them got 50 lashes [ 59. ss: (xx) were going to get shot// 60. ms. g: ok, go, edward. 61. edward: and so then they, uh, then they went to colonel parsons and// 62. ms. g: putnam literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a110 63. edward: no. he went to colonel parsons and that’s why he// 64. ms. g: oh, to see general putnam. 65. edward: and then to see if he could see general putnam, and he gave him a note, and he waited and waited, and finally he was able to go see the general, and he told the general the story, and he, the general let him see sam, and then sam, uh, sam and then sam and him talked for a while, and then he had to go. as the discussion group activity begins and students are settling down, they are challenging one another about aspects of the book and their assignment. as was often the case, this discussion began with a request from the teacher to summarize the chapter students had read for homework (turn 6). ms. g asks edward, whose previous day’s prediction was correct, to read his summary. importantly, because the teacher often focused on reading-writing relations, the request to read a summary as opposed to orally summarize the chapter was related to the fact that students’ homework assignment for the previous night was to write a summary for the chapter. rather than read his summary, edward begins to deliver an oral summary of the chapter. the text genre he produces is a chronicle, and its attendant meanings are constrained by this genre. recall that a chronicle aspires to narrativity, but it falls short of achieving it because character motivations and goals are not explained or inferred; nor is a high point or a resolution included. although it is more complex than an annal (a simple list of chronological events), a chronicle does little more than announce what happened, and it often ends at some arbitrary point. beginning in turn 15, students point out that edward is delivering an oral summary rather than reading his written summary. apparently unaware that edward isn’t reading (turn 19), ms. g expresses she thought he was doing as she asked. in turn 20, jen clarifies that edward’s summary is spoken rather than read. edward continues, this time apparently reading from his homework assignment. the text he delivers remains a chronicle. beginning at turn 24, ms. g’s attention is diverted from the group as she attends to students not in this particular reading group who have become quite noisy. edward stops reading momentarily and continues again once the teacher’s attention returns to the group. however, he is no longer simply reading his text; he is constructing his account of the chapter partially based on the text he wrote and partially from memory. the activity genre, then, has shifted from reading a summary to producing an oral summary based on a written text. this seems to occur partly because he is not confident that what he has written is adequate, and partly because ms. g repeatedly questions and corrects him. however, for reasons we outline below, the spoken/read summary text and the activity genre it elicits become progressively incongruous with the conversational norms and expectations of “discussing,” especially discussing literature, an activity that encourages students to make connections with personal experience, to imaginatively participate in the lives and worlds of characters, to forge intertextual linkages, and to engage in any number of cognitive and affective practices that narrative theorists have argued are uniquely afforded by stories. in this regard, a very interesting tension characterizes the entire remainder of the discussion between the teacher’s continual efforts to have students enact an annal or chronicle genre based on their summaries (a “just the facts, ma’am” orientation) and the students’ efforts to explore the much richer affordances of the narrative genre. indeed, students try to co-opt or revise the genre-based expectations of the annal or chronicle quite often and in ways that offer them opportunities for conjecture about the ambiguity of meaning, and to imagine what it might feel like for tim (sam’s brother) and others to experience the prospect that sam literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a111 may be facing death. for example, their efforts to discuss whether sam is guilty and whether there has been (or would be) a trial index their interest in the emotional lives of the characters and seriousness of situations about which they read. in doing so, they threaten to breach the teacher-anticipated chronicle discussion. they get some traction in this regard by the interruptions from another group to which the teacher has to attend. they can follow their own interpretive inclinations for a short time but are soon brought back to a plot-dominated focus by the teacher. the also create some traction for themselves by continually coming back to inferences about sam’s fate that the guilty verdict implies. it is plausible that the teacher’s attempt to perpetuate a chronicle genre is breached because students recognize and respond emotionally to complexities of circumstance, motivation, and fate embodied in the novel, especially in relation to the meaning of tim’s (sam’s brother) conversation with general putnam and his subsequent visit to sam. still, the text genre remains a chronicle although these breaches continue to disrupt and transform its unfolding. students’ corrections regarding the timing of the trial and their statements in line 52, with allusions to “death” and “hanging” and “50 lashes” are examples of this press toward narrative understanding. this is relevant because the chronicle text genre still exerts some waning power as a conversational constraint at this point in the literature discussion. it is clearly not capable of affording students the kind of space for discussion and engagement that they want (and need) with respect to the prospect of sam’s death. paradoxically, all of the teacher’s questions and corrections, and especially those offered by students (turns 44-60), can be viewed as awkward attempts to exploit the affordances of the narrative genre within a literacy event that has come to be defined more by the affordances of a chronicle with its focus on literal facts and the precise recounting of events. as the transcript reveals, students continually and in various ways express their desire to ask questions and offer commentary that is more speculative or inferential. every once in a while, the teacher plays into this apparent desire, but more often she enforces a more plot-based reading of the text. particularly important here is the fact that ms. g challenges whether edward has rendered events in the correct, temporal sequence (turn 44). apparently remembering the chronology as edward had, many students argue against the teacher’s recollection of events, a conversational move that also functions to prefigure their attempts to enact a genre that would allow them to explore affective, motivational, and situational aspects of the text more fully. for a short time, the discussion shifts from a combination of two recitative activity genres (initiation response-evaluation and summary reading) to a dialogue in which students explore the emotional worlds that sam and tim inhabit at this point in the story. although ms. g does not explicitly acknowledge that the students are right, she does so implicitly, in turn 60 when she says, “ok, go edward” which reinstates the activity genre of reading a summary. as she had done before the emergence of the debate about the story’s precise chronology, she continues to focus on the literal facts of the story (turns 62 and 64) thus drawing their attention away from the internal lives of the characters, which from a narrative theory perspective, is much more interesting and important. drawing attention to this segment of dialogue provides and example of how educators can learn to identify these dialogue shifts as important strategies for learning and teaching. if we can recognize the meaning of these shifts, we can then employ this type of learning successfully within the classroom. we would like to reiterate here that the focus of the debate was about precisely when the trial occurred and that this focus instantiated the chronicle as a powerful genre constraint. although this constraint continues to exert its influence, it does so in the shadow of the breach and subsequent student improvisational contributions, because it failed to afford the invitation to participate in tim’s state of mind, especially the reason he so needed to meet with general putnam. the chronological corrections are urgent and numerous, signaling students attempts to “feel” for tim and his literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a112 brother sam. and this, writes weinstein (2002), is reflective of the affective domain that literature and art so readily invite us to occupy, as it is “always telling us about human feeling, about what is deepest and most enduring in our lives” (p. xx). therefore, the enforcement of the chronicle genre constrains the discussion, but it is also opens up discursive possibilities because it creates solidarity among the students that leads them to introduce new and more complex text and activity genres. the importance of this fact will become more apparent in our analysis of the next segment of the literature discussion where the enablements and constraints of different text and activity genres exert powerful effects. segment 2: findings in the next segment of the discussion, which followed directly on the heels of the last segment, ms. g asks a relatively simple but very important question (turn 66), which functions as an invitation for students to engage with the story they are reading at much higher levels of abstraction and inference. as the transcript reveals, it is difficult to know if the teacher’s invitation comes in response to recognizing students’ expressed interests in discussing sam’s future or from a pre-planned instructional decision. however, as we will show in our analysis, this question and the ways in which it is taken up by students has important consequences for the text and activity genres enacted by the group. quite possibly—and probably tacitly—the flow of the discussion toward more motivational, affective, and situational dimensions of the story was nobody’s decision but an effect of the “mangle of practice” constituted by the contingent contributions to the discussion itself, an unintentional but powerful form of collective agency. 66. ms. g: how was he acting? 67. ali: like he was going to di::::e ((in playful voice)) 68. ss: (xx) 69. ms. g: (x) was he acting, really, that sad for a person who is going to be killed? 70. tanya: no, i don’t think so. 71. ?: (x) seemed happy [ 72. jen: like, i’m ok for a person whose just going to be shot. 73. katharine: i think that’s what he, i think he really kinda wanted to be killed during the war. 74. ali: they made a typo. 75. ms. g: why? ((to katharine)) ((lots of noise coming from people from outside of group)) 76. katharine: so, he could like, well i don’t know, cause it kind of like, cause he wouldn’t, um, like, he was going to sign up again in the war and everybody was telling him that he was going to die and stuff like that so it kind of seems like he really wants to die. 77. ?: (xx) [ 78. ?: like lieutenant (xx) 79. ms. g: why, why does he have to die? 80. ?: cause of what he believes in. 81. ?: cause no one believes him. 82. ms. g: do you think that? you think that no one believes him? 83. ?: i think that// [ literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a113 84. ?: i think he// [ 85. aj?: i think that he just doesn’t want to go home. otherwise he’d be, ‘cause if he goes home now, he’ll just be yelled at. [ 86. edward: e.t. go home. [ 87. ss: (xx) ((also lots of noise from other groups in the room)) [ 88. ms. g: how many people said that ((to reading group))//ok, violet, get in your seat, get in your seat. your work is not, people that do not have work done are not allowed to get up. mike, i do not want to see you up. graham. violet. ((addressing students not in reading group)) 89. edward: (voice over while ms. g reprimanding ss.) e.t. go:: ho::me. . . e.t. go:: ho::me. . . sam don’t go:: ho::me. . . sam don’t go:: ho::me. . . 90. ?: he said e.t. go home and then sam don’t go:: ho::me. ((to ms. g who has, apparently, returned her attention to the group)) when edward finishes his summary (turn 65), ms. g asks the group how sam was acting (turn 66). based on the content of the book, ms. g seems to have a specific goal in mind here, namely, to explore why it might be that sam does not seem distraught about the possibility of capital punishment. importantly, according to narrative theory (e.g., bruner, 1986; macintyre, 1981) a creative text such a my brother sam is dead is well suited to explorations of the inner lives and moral sensibilities of characters. as this phase of the discussion unfolds, ms. g participates with the students in moving the discussion to a more inferential level and to explore sam’s emotional world. however, her question is so vague that it could elicit any number of responses from more literal to more speculative, which might elicit the enactment of text and activity genres that pull for a range of readings, some more plot-based and others more intensely psychological and sociological. interestingly, and continuing the earlier inclination to move beyond ms. g’s emphasis on summarizing, several students comment on sam’s possible state of mind. beginning in turn 73, katharine, offers an explanatory or dispositional account of sam’s demeanor by inviting others to explore his thoughts, feeling, and probable motivations. more specifically, she suggests that he might have wanted to die a martyr and is resolved to his fate. her contribution shifts the discussion’s focus away from literal facts, precise chronologies, and factors external to sam’s life world and toward more speculative, inferential, and qualitative dimensions of characters and text such as the emotions, motivations, and the complex inner life of a main character. in other words, her questions invite a paradigm shift of sorts as it pertains to the nature and quality of a literary discussion. in so doing she moves the group out of the activity genre of summarizing and into the activity genre focused on the life-informing dimensions of literary interpretation, a trajectory that, if you recall, was perhaps initiated by ms. g’s question in turn 66: “how was he acting?” concomitantly, the genre of the text the group is co constructing begins to change from chronicle to full-blown narrative. in this regard, ms. g’s question encourages the students to co-create a narrative designed to examine and understand sam’s inner life as emotionally complex, even turbulent. by exploring the inner worlds of sam and other characters, the students gain a better understanding of the richness, complexity, and even contradictory nature of human experience generally (e.g., nussbaum, 1995; weinstein, 2003). literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a114 rather than following katharine’s more personal line of questioning aimed at exploring sam’s complex inner life, ms. g once again makes a contribution that shifts the discussion back to reasoning about factual aspects of the novel by asking, “why, why does he have to die?” (turn 79). however, continuing katharine’s personally and morally investigative approach to reading sam’s life, another student directs the question back toward inner life by saying that sam has to die because of what he believes (turn 80). ms. g elects not to pursue the question about sam’s beliefs. another student returns the discussion to an exploration of external factors as a way to respond to ms. g’s question about “why” sam has to die by suggesting that he has to die because no one believes that he is innocent. ms. g continues to pull for an explanation involving social structures and forces that are determining why sam has to die by asking, “do you think that? you think that no one believes him?” (turn 82). understanding such forces is privileged over understanding and imaginatively participating in the inner lives of sam and the other characters in the story (i.e., like the kind of reading katherine encouraged). importantly, based on the content of the novel, both readings are quite possible. in this regard, at several points in this chapter, other characters suggest that sam must die, whether he is guilty or not, because general putnam needs to maintain his authority and one way of doing that is to enforce a zero tolerance policy. for instance, colonel read offered the following rationale to sam’s brother, tim: do you want to know what general putnam is thinking? it’s this. he’s thinking that he can’t win the war if he doesn’t keep the people on his side. he’s thinking that he can’t keep the people on his side if the troops are running amok among the civilian population. . . . he is determined to scare the wits out of the troops to keep them in line. and he’s thinking that it doesn’t matter very much who he executes to do it. . . . [o]ne man’s agony is like another’s; one woman’s tears are no wetter than anybody else’s. and that’s why he’s going to have sam shot. (p. 194) by asking “you think no one believes him?” (turn 82), ms. g betrays that she was committed to answering the question of sam’s guilt or innocence based on empirical evidence from the text. additionally, she betrays here her initial commitment to helping students explore his inner life that she initiated with the question, in turn 66: “how was he acting?” this is important with respect to the potentials of the interpretive process because it maintains a tension between two competing genres: chronicle, which foregrounds external factors and factual evidence and narrative, which foregrounds people’s inner lives and personal struggles. although ms. g encourages the exploitation of both potentials, she more often encourages the former. in contrast, the students more often encourage the latter. the tension between competing orientations creates a unique “mangle of practice” within which the students explore the idea that there is some kind of moral relevance to understanding sam’s life by analyzing his various actions in relation to their concrete, cultural-social-historical contexts. indeed, all “real-life” understanding requires thinking about the lives of people in this way. art and its interpretation both recapitulate and compose life here. in relation to this point, the genres enacted are not just literary genres but specific kinds of literate work— work that dissolves boundaries between text and life. to us, this kind of literate work is very powerful and embodies everything that many humanities scholars have said about the life-enhancing power of narratives (macintyre,1981; weinstein, 2003). at the end of this segment, edward offers a contribution that further signals the weakening of the prevailing embodiment of summary/chronicle endorsed by ms. g. inspired by aj’s suggestion that sam didn’t want to go home, he begins to chant, “e.t. go home” (turn 89) which later becomes “sam don’t go home” (turn 90). importantly, edward’s chanting has the potential to take the discussion in a different literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a115 interpretive direction, yet it is not taken up by anyone in the group as a serious contribution to the discussion. this is somewhat surprising because it constitutes a gentle assault on the activity genre privileged by ms. g, a move that students both initiated and extended throughout the discussion. segment 3: findings the tension that emerges in this next section produces talk and social interaction that are more dialogic and inferential. this dialogicality continues, and even increases at times, for the remainder of the discussion (segments 2 and 3; turns 86-198). more people talk over each other. more people ask questions. the discussion’s flow is less controlled by the teacher alone. discussions parallel to the main discussion erupt (e.g., turn 86). and the general energy level of the discussion escalates. in listening to the audiotape of the discussion, it is often difficult to determine who is saying what and who is responding to whom. contributions of all sorts, including disruptions to interpretive preferences only contribute to the production of meaning-making activity when they are ratified and developed by other participants, and their ratification of contributions inspires or at least invites the possibility of further “mangles” – contingent, generative blendings of text and activity genres. by virtue of its mild ridicule of the teacher’s authority and perhaps her discussion preferences, these disruptions serve as reminders of the possibility that other, more dialogic participation structures might be enacted as the discussion unfolds. 91. ms. g: how many people said sam did it? 92. katharine: oh, the more i thought about it, the more// 93. ms. g: sam was the only person that said (x) did it, so it’s two against one.// 94. ?: i know but// 95. ms. g: even though it doesn’t make sense, stealing your own stuff. 96. ?: ((giggle)) 97. ?: yeah, i know 98. katharine: yeah, but actually, once they, once, at first i was like why would he steal his own cows? it didn’t fit. but then once when tim was talking to general putnam it kind of sounded like, maybe, like he did, like maybe they needed the meat so he said he (x) he lived there so that he could tell those people. but then it kind of backfired on him because then he was gonna get shot or something like that. but i don’t know// 99. ss: (xx) 100. ms. g: how many of you think, how many of you think sam really did steal it? 101. ?: why would he steal the cow? [ 102. ?: no he couldn’t have because he was with tim. 103. ali: yeah, but like they said in the chapter he could have organized it with the other two guys. [ 104. ss: yeah [ 105. ali: and then they beat him up and then he’d be shot because that way he’d be famous and be a revolutionary war hero. [ 106. ?: no because// 107. timothy?: (x) because almost the whole last chapter he was saying “you better literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a116 butcher the cows, tim, you better butcher the cows.” that’s what he said the whole time [ 108. ali: yeah so he could steal the meat. 109. ?: how could he have stole them? (1) {st} whatever. 110. ms. g: stolen them. 111. ?: he didn’t steal them, he organized (x) [ 112. ?: he was there 113. jen: no, but he, but he told people that, you know, i live there so like steal the cows from// 114. ali: why did he, why did he [ 115. ss: (xx) 116. ali: why did he stop, why did he stop, leave his post? he probably left his post so he could keep tim and his brother busy// 117. tanya? katharine?: but he would not steal (x) 118. ali: how do you kno:::w? 119. jen: he could’ve ‘cause his mother, his family was (x) tories. [ 120. ms. g: ok, now tanya raised her hand, tanya raised her hand. 121. tanya: (xx) [ 122. jen: he was a rebel. 123. ms. g: i can’t hear you tanya 124. tanya: sam kept saying to tim that somebody was probably going to kill (x) cows (xx) 125. ms. g: so what, what is your point then? that// 126. tanya: that sam could have [ 127. ss: (xx) 128. jen: the meeker family is// 129. ms. g: oka::y. timothy? what do you think? 130. timothy: i think he probably, he probably could’ve because um// 131. ms. g: could’ve what? 132. timothy: well um, conspired with the two men to kill the cows 133. ms. g: cause why? 134. timothy: otherwise he might’ve wanted to get caught, cause he, i don’t think that tim and susannah would let him go out of redding with the troops. 135. ms. g: you don’t think so? how could they have stopped him? 136. timothy: well they could have killed him. 137. ms. g: you think his own mom would’ve killed him? 138. timothy: good point. but, they could have tied him [ 139. ?: (xx) siege [ 140. timothy: tied him somewhere down so um, literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a117 but they won’t miss one man from the army.// 141. jen: they cou::ld. 142. ms. g: ok, katharine. 143. katharine: well, what i think happened is what i think maybe sam did tell other people to go steal them, but then he didn’t think they were going to tell (laughing). he didn’t think people were going to tell or anything like that and that he wouldn’t be shot or anything but his plan kind of backfired on him because then he um [ 144. jen: well that wasn’t so (xx) 145. katharine: don’t know why the plan backfired on him. 146. ms. g: because he’s going to end up getting killed, isn’t he? 147. ss: yeah, he was. 148. katharine: well, yeah, that’s how, that’s how it ended up backfiring on him because they told, and he told them that . . . 149. ms. g: if they all agreed to keep it secret, then the plan// [ 150. ?: (xxx) 151. ms. g: excuse me, i’m talking. then the plan would not have backfired, would it? (1) if they all agreed, but obviously, either they turned on him or he caught (x). ali? 152. ali: i have two things to say. one thing is i think it’s a conspiracy:: 153. ?: (x) (ss laughing) 154. ms. g: ok, tell us why. 155. ali: ali: second of all, why? oh, i think it’s a conspiracy. why? i’m not sure, but i like to say that. second of all, the thing is, ok, it was really funny. i was watching a movie, and it was really funny, um. it wasn’t really around the revolutionary war, but uh, the uss enterprise, the original one, went back into time and then they call him colonel kirk, colonel kirk and the guy says, uh, it’s ((ali pronounces colonel as ka-lo-nel). (x) it’s colonel, he, he, he, he. 156. ms. g: ok. edward? 157. edward: (laughing at first) all right. um, you know when they were, when tim was visiting sam, sam said that he was running. he had the shovel, and when the men were, one man, one man, one man was standing there like this just looking around, and he came up and like hit him.// 158. ms. g: hit who? 159. edward: hit the man who was just standing there like guarding it, and the man that he didn’t see was like cutting the cows open, and then he was like, um, one man was on the ground and the guy who was on the ground probably said that sam said that. then he came up and like grabbed him, and they started punching him and stuff, and they tied his back to make it look like [ 160. jen: tied his hands behind his back 161. ms. g: so your point is? ((to edward)) 162. edward: sam didn’t do it. 163. ms. g: sam didn’t do it. 164. edward: (x) when it hits him. 165. ms. g: did you want to say something, grace? literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a118 166. grace: no. 167. ms. g: aj? 168. aj: if sam, if sam planned it out, then why did they capture the other three, um, then why did they capture the other four cows, and they only cut up one. and they didn’t even take that meat. 169. ?: they didn’t have time to. [ 170. jen: they didn’t have time to ‘cause it takes a long time to herd a cow// 171. ms. g: but he’s got a good point… [ 172. ?: yeah [ 173. mrs. g. … if sam planned it out, would they have waited ‘til they got the meat before they took him in? 174. ss: yeah. they didn’t even get any meat. 175. ms. g: they didn’t get any meat out of it, and they’re getting sam killed, so if they would’ve planned it, then they could’ve set up [ 176. ?: the cows mooing [ 177. ms. g: set up sam but they already would’ve gotten their meat and they could’ve actually cooked it. [ 178. ?: ms. g, ms. g 179. ms. g: could they have kept it, could they have kept it? [ 180. ?: the cows would’ve started mooing. [ 181. ms. g: excuse me, could they have kept it, um, like in a sort of [ 182. ?: yeah [ 183. ms. g: hostage sort of like they could’ve. 184. jen: they did that with the, the little, oh, never mind. 185. ?: jerry 186. ms. g: jerry 187. jen: oh yeah, jerry. 188. aj: so that’s kind of proof that he didn’t do it 189. ms. g: ok, katharine? 190. katharine: ok, i am so good. ok, what i think [ 191. ms. g: you are? [ literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a119 192. katharine: happened now is because you made a good point and that they showed like (xx), and i think i know now why the reason it kind of backfired on them. because sam probably wasn’t supposed to go chase after him until they had a chance to get the meat, but he went too soon. and then so they went, they probably thought that we didn’t have any meat so they went and told on sam. 193. ?: that’s so (x). . . 194. ms. g: ok, so how many people think that tam, that sam is guilty? that he was a part of it? (1) ((no audio response)) 195. ms. g: how many of you think that sam is not guilty. 196. ss: ooh, oh. 197. jen: cause sam was like// 198. ms. g: ok, katharine why don’t you read your summary. recall that in segment 2, ms. g had initiated a conversation with students centered around how many of them thought sam had stolen the cows. however, she was distracted by students outside of the reading group and stopped to discipline them. when she returned to the discussion, she finished asking her question, “how many people said sam did it?” importantly, how the students took up her question redirected the discussion to focus on more literal dimensions of the text. even more importantly, it also led to the abandonment of discussion about the very important and more morally focused question she had asked just seconds earlier about why sam had to die? (turn 79). in the beginning of segment 3, ms. g asks the students, “how many people said sam did it?” this question, however, is ambiguous. is she asking about what the students think or what the characters in the novel thought? the question is taken up by katharine, who abandons her inquiry into sam’s internal struggle and motivation, suggesting that she thinks the teacher wants to know how many people in the reading group think sam was guilty. the teacher clarifies that she had asked about how many characters in the novel thought sam was guilty (turn 93). ms. g follows up her clarification suggesting that it may be illogical to steal one’s own possessions (turn 95). whether she intends to or not, this comment provides an invitation for students to return to more speculative/inferential activity, and they subsequently draw upon activity genres that tend to support inquiry into the characters’ motivations and state of mind. the remaining discussion is a combination of overlapping activity genres that range from providing evidence for beliefs (a genre that ms. g endorses) to more discursively risky poetic/imaginative genres that require discussion designed to support further conjecture about sam’s cognitive and emotional states. katharine takes up this invitation by offering an interpretation in which it might make sense that sam was involved in the cow theft. parenthetically, the transcript suggests that katharine had actually tried to begin to offer this interpretation several turns earlier (turn 92), but was cut off when the teacher answered her own question (turn 93). because katharine had suggested earlier that sam might have wanted to “die a martyr” but is now suggesting that he might have been guilty, we wonder whether the teacher’s persistent text-verifiable/dependent questions about sam’s innocence or guilt has begun to persuade some students to think along those less existential lines, even students like katharine, who have been actively engaged with the text at multiple interpretative and imaginative levels throughout. however, further revealing the unstable, dynamic, and mangled nature of the conversation, the teacher’s almost random comment about the illogicality of stealing one’s own possessions and literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a120 katharine’s response to this comment escalate the dialogicality of the literature discussion. this interchange leads to a return to a more free-wheeling, poetic/imaginative activity genre aimed at exploring and constructing a range of other imaginative narratives in response to sam’s life, his reasoning, motives, and evaluating the possibility of his guilt or innocence. many students contribute facts and interpretations from the story to support one position or another with respect to whether sam had been involved in stealing the cows. in effect, a more open and potentially interpretative literary discussion has emerged. this discussion is shut down, however, when the teacher, for whatever reasons, notes that tanya has her hand raised, implicitly signaling that it is tanya’s turn to talk. the effect of this indirect speech act is to change the rules for discussion participation. now, instead of speaking when one has something to say, one is expected to raise one’s hand and speak only when called on. the activity genre quickly shifts from a literary discussion characterized by interpretative and creative explorations into the life, thoughts, motivations, and complex circumstances of a character to an i-r-e more focused on historical facts. interestingly, however, and even though they are not officially nominated by the teacher, jen and timothy continue to play by the rules of open discussion, interjecting ideas and interpretations relevant to the topic at hand (e.g., turns 122, 128, 140). however, jen is edged out by comments such as “i can’t hear you, tanya” uttered by the teacher (turn 123), another indirect speech act designed for disciplining students not nominated to talk. importantly, more dialogic participation structures continue to exert strong effects on how ms. g actually implements the ire. in this regard, gordon wells (1993) demonstrated that i-r-e is actually an overgeneralization that is used to talk about many different participation structures that are tightly or loosely managed by teachers, often with quite different outcomes both in terms of students’ opportunities for participation and for collective meaning making. in the case at hand, instead of defaulting to known answer questions, ms. g poses more open-ended questions that support students’ efforts to offer interpretive claims and to search for evidence and warrants to support them, especially with respect to inquiry into sam’s life and times. thus students’ contributions continue to rely largely upon more creative and poetic activity genres marked by speculative and inferential dimensions of the text rather than literal dimensions. in other words, the transcripts show evidence of students’ commitment to co-construct an ethical, yet compassionate and imaginative narrative about sam even though the shift to i-r-e might have led them back to a chronicle or other summary-like genre and a focus on verifiable facts. as they seek to understand sam’s involvement in killing the cows, they engage in deliberations that are a mix of reasoned analysis and emotional travail. indeed, one of the key affordances of literature is to invite/engage readers in moral deliberations and to judge others only after knowing the particulars of their richly contextualized lives (nussbaum, 1995). that students are engaged in moral deliberations and character evaluations are evidenced in the wide range of text and activity genres they invoke—from more argumentative ones to more narrative ones to more poetic ones. eventually, even ms. g is drawn into contributing speculative ideas to the ongoing efforts to co construct the meaning of the text around the prospect of sam’s criminal involvement (beginning at turn 147). this social fact is brought into high relief in turn 151 when she utters, “excuse me, i’m talking” and again in turn 181, when she utters, “excuse me, could they have kept [the meat] . . .” ms. g’s eagerness to be a full participant in the discussion and not just a facilitator, as well as the speculative nature of her contributions, seem at least partially an effect of students’ continual returns to dialogue, inference, moral deliberation, etc. her comments also speak to the authenticity of the imaginative and perhaps ethical work in which students are engaged. katharine’s contributions are especially critical here, but so are the ways in which they are ratified and elaborated by other students. literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a121 after a series of student and teacher turns, ali offers an original contribution that disrupts the direction and pace of the discussion (turn 152). first, he suggests that sam’s arrest may have been part of a conspiracy. when ms. g asks him to support his position, ali makes it clear that he did not offer his conspiracy theory because he really believed it but because he liked to say the word “conspiracy.” he then adds a second contribution related to a star trek episode he has seen (turn 155), which, while entertaining, does not contribute in any substantive ways to the group’s efforts to understand important meanings associated with the story. interestingly, neither the students nor the teacher follows up on what he says. in fact, the teacher dismisses his comments by immediately calling on edward. recall that the power of participants’ contributions to produce collective activity is largely dependent on whether and how they are taken up by the participants involved. such contributions do not always lead to changes in text interpretations or activity genres. in turn 157, and in continuing the analysis of sam’s choices and moral demeanor, edward attempts to argue for sam’s innocence by drawing upon evidence from the text. to accomplish this, he draws upon a mix of narrative/imaginative genres and evidenced-based analysis much like thurgood marshall did in his rhetorically powerful and legally effective closing statement in the brown v. board of education of topeka trial. however, edward is not particularly effective at making explicit links between his interpretive goal and the events he is describing. ms. g doesn’t seem to understand where he is going with these comments and asks him what his point is. edward’s response, “sam didn’t do it” indexes the fact that he has been offering evidence for sam’s innocence. whereas up until now (turn 163), ms. g supported the idea that sam was guilty, her acceptance of edward’s claim suggests that she is now more willing to entertain evidence-based claims of sam’s innocence. aj continues the line of argument that edward began, offering more evidence from the text that supports sam’s innocence and the subsequent line of moral inquiry they pursue (turn 168). more specifically, he argues that if sam was involved in stealing the cows, he and his partners would have harvested the meat for themselves. importantly, aj suggests that if sam had been involved in the theft, not allowing his partners sufficient time to steal and butcher the cattle before turning on them, would have been illogical. two students suggest a logical explanation for why they did not harvest the meat. what remains unclear, however, is whether the students offer these explanations to support aj’s reasoning or to challenge it. the teacher seems to think that they are challenging aj, and she argues for the cogency of his interpretation. a series of turns ensue that produce a hybrid activity genre constituted as a struggle between the students’ efforts to enact a compassionate yet critical dialogic debate about sam’s guilt or innocence and the teacher’s efforts to enforce an i-r-e frame. effectively controlling the floor, the teacher elaborates aj’s position. in contrast, several students offer evidence that cast doubt upon this position. for example, they mention the issue of mooing cows. however, ms. g surrenders neither the floor nor the i r-e frame so that the students can further develop their argument. we suspect that they want to argue that the noise of the mooing cows forced sam, who was talking with tim, his presumed alibi, to chase after his partners sooner than they had initially planned. this constitutes a logical explanation to what aj and ms. g have been claiming is illogical. aj implies that there is no need to continue the debate when he says, “so, that’s kind of proof that he didn’t do it” (turn 188). the teacher then calls on katharine who begins by acknowledging that the teacher (or aj) made a good point (turn 192). however, katharine then challenges aj’s assumption that the debate is over when she refers back to the counter arguments that many students have been trying to interject while the teacher has been controlling the floor. she also re-introduces some claims that she had begun to develop and work through much earlier in the discussion (i.e., in turns 98, 143). more specifically, she re-introduces the idea that sam and his literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a122 partners’ plan backfired. each time she returns to this idea, she presents it with more complexity, nuance, and explanatory power. apparently wanting to put closure on the debate about sam’s guilt or innocence, ms. g calls for a vote. because we do not have video data for this particular discussion and because students cast their votes by raising their hands, we do not know the final count. the results of the vote, however, do not seem to matter much to the teacher. she cuts off one student who attempts to explain her vote, and she immediately reinstates the activity genre that had begun this literature discussion by asking another student (katharine) to read her summary of the chapter completed for homework. in a way, this conversational move by the teacher both acknowledges the authority of her own perspectives regarding sam, and it works to sanction and authorize ways of “reading” and discussing the novel that continue to prioritize the value of sticking to the available facts. in other words, this final turn by ms. g suggests that things must end as they began. such a move has a way of remaking the previous interpretative discussion as something that is valued, but left us wondering about the possibility that, within a particular instructional framework, such a discussion might also be thought of as little more than an academic “interlude.” looking back over how the discussion unfolds, we wonder about the nature and possible effects of literary discussions, especially how their affordances might be exploited to help students experience, value, and legitimize the epistemological and ethical benefits that so many humanities scholars have discovered and written about (mcginley & kamberelis, 1997; 2006; bruner, 1986; carroll, 2004; edmundson, 2004; spellmeyer, 2003; weinstein, 2003). we also wonder why ms. g did not allow the debate to continue, especially since there were only a few minutes left for this activity, and because the group had already heard edward’s summary. segment 4: findings a few minutes later, at the very end of this day’s discussion of my brother sam is dead, ms. g signals closure of the discussion by segueing into the students’ homework assignment for the evening. throughout this strip of activity it is important to note how the shifting terrain of text (summary) and multiple activity genres creates (and thus describes) book discussions as co-constructed processes of overlapping struggles and tensions between the students and the teacher. in other words, as “mangles of practice.” 272. ms. g: ok, for your assignment to write// 273. jen: oh, but you said two predictions. i want to make a prediction 274. ms. g: we don’t have time because ali made a long prediction. we are going to write a different ending [ 275. ss: yes!! [ 276. ms. g: either from the author’s point of view, which would mean you’d say “and then tim said ‘sam fell to the ground.’” 277. ss: (xx) [ 278. katharine: no, it’d be more detailed, [ 279. ?: i thought [ literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a123 280. katharine: see, i’m doing it in this writing. 281. ms. g: ok, katharine, as long as you can read it. now listen, or you can write it in summary form. the ending should be longer than a couple of sentences. 282. ss: (xx) end of lesson importantly, ms. g’s instructions about the homework assignment are both sparse and ambiguous, perhaps because students interjected examples and comments, and perhaps because she had to rush through them quickly because language arts time was over. we have no evidence in any of the data that she made any attempts to expand on these instructions or to mitigate the ambiguity in her message. however, based on her actual utterances (turns 274, 276, and, 281), the endings produced by students, and ms. g’s questions about and comments on these endings, she seems to be asking students to rewrite the endings of the story either in third-person or first-person narration. given the rich potentials for exploring the epistemological affordances of engaging with literary works that prioritize human feeling as a way of knowing and cultivate the imagination necessary for empathetic understanding and democratic life, we wonder why ms. g chose to direct students’ attention to different forms of narration. such ways of reading and discussing might have offered possibilities for understanding the complex exigencies of characters’ lives, examining the affective and at times visceral underlife of the “people” encountered in creative narratives, thinking about the significance of narrative events, and reflecting on characters' moral dilemmas and choices. we also wonder what kind of “mangle” might have emerged had she directed them to pursue other issues or tropes. finally, looking back at all of the discussion snippets we have unpacked here, it is really interesting to contrast their improvisational and contingent qualities with the dominant models and practices of literature discussions in the extant research literature (e.g., appleman, 2000; daniels, 2002; gillespie, 2010; mellor & patterson, 2011; soter et al., 2008) that often argue exclusively for more theoretically staged ways of reading or discursively prescribed instructional approaches. most of these models and practices are far more authority driven and define what counts as legitimate transactions with literature in much narrower ways than what we have seen here. what if more literature discussions in more ela and english classrooms offered students more freedom to pursue interpretive pathways they found compelling? what if their teachers were more interested in and equipped to help them mine the affordances of reading and examining literary texts in ways that were framed or more congruent with recent perspectives offering important insight into some of the imaginative, emotional, and democratic possibilities for reading literature in schools? we believe that teacher-actions such as these will help students create more genuinely co-constructed forms of knowledge regarding the literature they read and its relation to life. summary, conclusions, and implications through these transcript analyses mangles, we have tried to demonstrate how literature discussions may be usefully described and theorized as of practice both in the nature of social interactions students were encouraged to take up, as well as in the actual content that discussions engender. mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing transformations of ongoing social activities and outcomes. the discussions we analyzed did indeed involve both planned and contingent forces deriving from individuals, the group, the novel the children were discussing, various cultural artifacts that were imported into discussions, and a host of other forces. as such, the discussions were emergent phenomena about literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a124 which we could almost never predict what precise collections/collisions/collusions of actions and reactions would occur within them or what the effects of these collections/collisions/collusions would be. in this regard, our findings disclose immense potentials for talk and social interaction that align with recent proposals for re-imagining humanities-based learning that contrast sharply with many prevailing models of what literature study and analysis (or humanities education, more broadly conceived) can and should be and do. in this regard, we were able to explain, at least partially, how texts (their genres and meaning potentials) and activity of literary interpretation were collaboratively produced over time. central to this production process were (a) the nature and effects of participants’ contributions to the ongoing talk and social interaction, (b) the nature and effects of the statuses of individuals within the discussion and the larger activity systems in which it was embedded, (c) the development of the meaning potentials of the narrative text being discussed, and (d) the enablements and constraints of disciplinary resources and practices for knowledge building and the interpretation of text and life (e.g., activity genres, text genres, disciplinary conventions, interpretive codes). two text genres (chronicle and narrative) and several activity genres (summarizing, ire, dialogue, and inferential/poetic/imaginative/moral deliberation) functioned as key enablements and constraints in these discussions. when engaged in summarizing, children typically produced my brother sam is dead as a chronicle. when engaged in inferential/poetic/imaginative reasoning (especially about potential psychological and sociological causes), the children typically produced the text as a narrative. a more abstract or speculative question or response could catalyze the shift from summarizing to more inferential/poetic and moral reasoning and thus from producing chronicle to producing narrative. similarly, a more factual, literal question or response could catalyze the shift from inferential and moral reasoning to summarizing and thus from producing narrative to producing chronicle. when the group was producing narrative, the activity genre was much less stable than when they were producing chronicle, often shifting from literary interpretation to debate. finally, the meaning and import of my brother sam is dead was different—often dramatically different—depending on the activity genres at play and the concomitant text genres produced at any given time. this is an important point. narrative production as an activity genre was necessarily related to literary interpretation of a very specific kind. as the students—largely on their own—investigated and imagined the emotional and intellectual lives of characters, they simultaneously engaged in moral and ethical evaluations of the lives of others in ways that perhaps creative narratives, like novels, afford more than other kinds of texts (e.g., mcintyre, 1981 nussbaum, 1995). the students— again, largely on their own—figured out that stories uniquely enable, invite, or cultivate a style of imagination and a way of seeing beyond the “facts” (for example, what we might accept as given or real in the case of sam’s character and key events in the story). these ways of imagining self, others, and world are valuable democratic resources because, as nussbaum (1995) has explained, they cultivate our poetic, metaphoric, and imaginative sensibilities, thus opening up ways of seeing beyond the “facts” an into the minds and hearts of others as they negotiate the exigencies of their lives. another important insight about the flow of these discussions is that it was produced to a large extent by the specific kinds of contributions introduced and the specific ways in which these contributions were taken up. moreover, within certain limits, the productive potential of contributions did not always depend on who offered them. in this regard, certain contributions made by students (especially katharine and jen), as well as some made by ms. g were especially effective with respect to what topics were taken up, whether trafficking in facts or inferences about emotions and motivations had more purchase, and whether certain inferences and interpretations were validated. for example, for whatever reasons, katherine and jen occupied high status positions in the classroom in terms of the validity of their literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a125 knowledge and interpretations. also worth noting is the fact that many of the teacher’s questions and comments about literal facts drew out exchanges that involved summarizing and producing chronicles. however, when ms. g was drawn into the dialogic debate about sam’s possible role in stealing the cows, she reframed her typical mode of engagement and perpetuated the dialogicality of the interactions and the production of narrative. without being the least bit pushy (though perhaps somewhat privileged with respect to how often she was nominated by the teacher), katharine often asked questions or offered interpretations that moved the discussion to higher and higher levels of abstraction, speculation, and inference, especially about emotional and moral dimensions of characters. in fact, her contributions, and the ways in which they were taken up, often resulted in major shifts in activity genre (e.g., from individual summary to collective debate) and text genre (e.g., from chronicle to narrative). indeed, we were often amazed by her “power” and the effects that her contributions exerted on the flow of talk and social interaction. jen, too, offered several ideas, often in the way of pivotal questions, that were taken up by the group and exerted powerful effects on the direction and flow of discussions. for instance, katherine requested to read her new ending. ms. g agreed to this shift in activity but nominated a different student to read his new ending, in effect ending what had been a productive discussion. however, before the student began to read, jen asked a key question that re-ignited the discussion and put the reading of homework on hold. in contrast, some original contributions, such as edward’s “et go home” chanting and ali’s star trek stories were not taken up by the group and thus went nowhere. understanding the dialogical potentials of literature discussions is an important step towards successfully implementing more effective learning interactions in classrooms. although the process can be messy and unpredictable, the learning potentials of these messy processes are enormous. the various unique contributions of participants and the specific ways in which they were taken up and evaluated by others were also extremely important factors in governing the direction and flow of discussions. for example, it was often topics that were introduced and pursued by students that produced shifts it text and activity genres. chief among these were questions and comments that moved the discussion away from focusing on literal facts and precise chronologies and toward more inferential aspects of the text such as characters’ emotional states, goals and motivations, complex or ambiguous actions and events, and the juggling of multiple perspectives. also important were the tasks that students thought were expected or allowable. how, for example, the task of reading a summary was understood by different members of the group exerted powerful effects on the nature and flow of social interactions— calling attention to violations, the relative kinds and amounts of interruptions, etc. how particular students engaged in producing summaries also affected whether my brother sam is dead was produced as a chronicle or a narrative. additionally, the accumulation of more inferential questions and commentary by some students (especially katharine and jen) helped to produce a discussion that, with a few exceptions, became more and more inferential and thus a text that became more and more narrative in nature. in short, the unique flows of contributions and their update and evaluation constituted the discussion as an increasingly “distributed” affair focused largely on literary matters often defined by attention to character intentions, motivations, and complex actions. finally, several participants in the discussion stand out for the ways in which their contributions— which were often afforded by the roles and status assignments of these participants—affected the direction and flow of discussions. we have already mentioned katharine’s power in this regard. throughout the discussions of my brother sam is dead, katharine was nominated by the teacher to make contributions more often than many other students. perhaps this was because she always had her hand raised. perhaps it was because she fully engaged in almost every discussion topic. perhaps, at this time in the year, she was a “favorite” of the teacher for whatever reasons (we specify “this time in the literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a126 year” because at other times during the year, katharine was not nominated to speak as often). or perhaps, for whatever reasons, katharine was simply on a roll during discussions of this particular book. we really are not sure. this uncertainty notwithstanding, the roles and status assignments ascribed to katharine in these discussions contributed in significant ways to how the discussions themselves unfolded. jen’s roles and status assignments stand out as well. perhaps more than any other student, she repeatedly tried to enter the discussions but was edged out. when she did manage to get in a question or comment, they were usually pithy: they were often taken up by the group, and they often changed nature and flow of the discussions in significant ways. why was it so difficult for her to enter into the discussions more often? what if she had managed to have voice more often? where might have the discussions gone then? finally, at this point in the year and largely because his creative entailments were often so far a field, ali’s contributions were almost always momentary perturbations that were almost always followed by the equivalent of “o. k., next” and hardly ever changed the nature and flow of the discussions. in many ways this is ironic because ali was extremely bright; he almost always read the texts very carefully; and he was very gifted at literary interpretation, so his status in this regard was never in jeopardy. yet his self-nominated jester role and his off-center and sidelong ways of participating seldom captured the attention or imagination of other group members. these examples suggest both positive and negative potentials with respect to how emergent talk and social interaction produce text and activity structures and meanings. on the one hand, they have tremendous potential for generating new meanings, new connections, new insights, and new interpretive practices in relation to literature and dialogues about literature. on the other hand, they can readily get off track or out of control, producing text and activity structures and meanings that are neither particularly coherent nor generative of new, richer, more complex forms of knowledge and practice. moreover, they also hold dangerous potentials for reinforcing various hegemonic structures and practices because emergence is unpredictable—always a coalescing unknown. thus, a key question for future research is how to create activity spaces with an optimal balance between open, dialogic interaction and orchestration/scaffolding to produce structures and meanings that are maximally generative without degenerating into off-task activity or the hegemony reinforcing discourse. as paradoxical as it may seem, some sort of dynamic and loosely scaffolded improvisation may produce the most effective forms of emergent activity (e.g., baker-sennett, matsuov, & rogoff, 1993). in this regard, we think that understanding literature discussions (and other pedagogic activities) as “mangles of practice” can allow us to become more in touch with and more mindful of the various forms of agency involved in them and how they might emerge given one action or another. we have begun to explore this issue with several teachers with whom we are currently working. these teachers have found that videotaping and collaboratively analyzing the moment-to-moment unfolding of their classroom activities is incredibly illuminating. they have also found that they have become much more mindful of the fact that how they interact with various forms of agency that populate their classrooms has important consequences for what happens in them and what is learned in them. indeed, much more research remains to be done on this topic. now for some more general (and more theoretical) conclusions and implications. we have tried to demonstrate through our analyses how theories of collaborative emergence are useful for describing (and to some extent explaining) the relations between emergent processes of talk and social interaction and genres (both text genres and activity genres) as emergent phenomena at play during literature discussions. such a perspective requires that we focus on collective action as our unit of analysis and that we map the turn-by-turn activities of the collective. as individuals work together to co-construct activity and meaning, they co-construct frames that give form to and partially constrain future literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a127 contributions of individuals (e.g., giddens, 1984; sawyer, 2001a, 2002). but they do not do this alone. their actions are also enabled and constrained by various material, disciplinary, and conceptual forms of agency that exert invisible effects on the emergence process. given this notion of structures as structuring structures, until a particular activity is over, researchers really cannot know what any final structures or meanings will be because these structures and meanings are dynamic and always open to negotiation. this means that we must deploy specific kinds of analytic tools, especially various forms of critical discourse analysis (e.g., gee, 2011; fairclough, 1992) to show how higher-level structures (e.g., text meanings, activity structures, disciplinary practices, etc.) emerge as a function of the moment-to moment emergence of talk and social interaction. this study also suggests that there might be considerable purchase in thinking about both text and activity genres according to a conception of global coherence that is quite different from conceptions offered by most text or activity grammars. such a conception would be based not on static organization but on processual organization—how text and activity genres as processes rather than entities are organized or in the process of being organized. finally, the “mangle of practice” metaphor suggests the value of being more self-reflexive about our disciplinary locations and their effects. in our work with ela teachers, we have talked about this a lot and come to think about literary interpretation differently. most of us have durable dispositions rooted in our own educational training (usually new criticism), and these disciplinary dispositions exert powerful effects on our practice. as we study the various “mangles” that constitute different kinds of literature discussions (especially of the same book), we are moving toward a position that is somewhere between new criticism (an overdetermined objectivist position), deconstruction (an overdetermined relativist position), and new historicism (an overdetermined determinist position). we call this form of interpretation a non-correspondence realism or pragmatic realism. here, the real—whether, genres, meanings, or whatever—is not defined by rules or laws but by what emerges in disciplined practice. these genres and meanings might not be the only or the last genres and practices that emerge, but they are grounded in a real dance of agency among human, material, disciplinary, and conceptual resources. literature discussions, then, can be re-imagined as surfaces of emergence through which participants might imaginatively participate in the lives and worlds of others, thus expanding the horizons of their possible selves and possible worlds (bruner, 1986). indeed, motivated by the desire to restore the humanities to its liberal educational mission of fostering engaged citizenship and active ownership of ideas, several scholars have recently sought to re-imagine the humanities and humanities-based educational frameworks as vehicles for building socially engaged and tangible relations with the real world (e.g., ellison & eatman, 2008; hersh & schneider, 2005; klein, 2005; spellmeyer, 2003). as nikitina (2009) and others have made clear, “fostering the ability to own (enact and embody) a literary, philosophical, or historical insight should be central to humanities learning.” as it pertains to literature discussion and the teaching of literature, instructional approaches that encourage an exclusive focus on literal facts or theoretical readings or the rote transmission of conceptual information without a complementary focus on the exploration of how such ideas might translate into tangible action or application is thought to be a serious failure of humanities education in the current era. although tangible action or enactment can take many forms, including the embodiment of abstract concepts through media and the arts, it may also involve providing students with opportunities to cultivate critical sensibilities for engaged citizenship through engaged forms of social interaction that might lead towards social action and participation in community-based projects, initiatives, or movements (ganz, 2010; nikitina, 2009). literature discussions as mangles of practice george kamberelis, william mcginley, & alyson welker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.69 | vol. 3 (2015) a128 within this new imaginal, the knowledge produced within them is simultaneously objective, relative, and historical. indeed, at this historical juncture of theorizing and researching literature discussions, we think it would be productive to move beyond all forms of criticism and interpretation grounded in a representational idiom—whether new criticism, deconstruction, new historicism, and even reader response theory—and toward a more performative approach to understanding the complex activity of reading and talking about texts. such an approach would be based neither on a priori (and thus discoverable) organizational schemes, nor on endless chains of deferrals, but on real time processual organization itself: how material, conceptual, disciplinary, and human forms of agency come to be organized in real time 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(1989). the voices within narratives: the development of intertextuality in young children’s stories. discourse processes, 12, 329-351. wortham, s. (1994). acting out participant examples in the classroom. philadelphia: john benjamins. appendix: transcription key (adapted from atkinson & heritage, 1984) underline marks emphatic stress caps mark very emphatic stress : indicates a lengthened vowel sound (extra colons indicate greater lengthening) (x) indicates a word we could not decipher (extra xs indicate additional words) ((double parentheses)) contain contextualization commentary = indicates utterances latched on to one another, without perceptible pauses [ brackets between lines indicate overlapping speech ?: indicates unidentified speaker // indicates that speaker never finished her/his utterance; quite often another speaker will initiate a turn soon thereafter new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ microsoft word developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and post layout-2.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a16     developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and post-secondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk wested and university of northern colorado allison toney university of north carolina billy jackson university of west georgia reshmi nair university of northern colorado jenq-jong tsay u. texas – pan american abstract the accepted framing of mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (pck) as part of mathematical knowledge for teaching has centered on the question: what mathematical reasoning, insight, understanding, and skills are required for a person to teach elementary mathematics? many have worked to address this question in k-8 teaching. yet, there remains a call for examples and theory in the context of teachers with greater mathematical preparation and older students with varied and complex experiences in learning mathematics. in this theory development report we offer background and examples for an extended model of pck – as the interplay among conceptually-rich mathematical understandings, experience in and of teaching, and multiple culturally-mediated classroom interactions. keywords: pedagogical content knowledge; discourse; intercultural awareness shandy hauk, an experienced secondary and post-secondary teacher, is a senior researcher at wested and affiliate professor in mathematical sciences at the university of northern colorado graduate school. her phd is in mathematics with post-doctorate in mathematics education. centered in culturally and linguistically attentive mathematics and science education, her research and development work includes mentoring doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers. she is principal investigator on several projects that use web-based technologies in support of professional learning among middle school, high school, and college mathematics instructors. she can be contacted at: wested stem program, 400 seaport court – ste 222, redwood city, ca 94063. email: shauk@wested.org allison f. toney is an associate professor of mathematics education at the university of north carolina wilmington. her research focuses on post-secondary student experiences in learning mathematics and mathematics teacher professional development. a specialist in qualitative research methods, her issn: 2325-3290 (online) developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a17 secondary research interest is in narrative research techniques, including autoethnography and narrative inquiry. she can be contacted at: department of mathematics and statistics, university of north carolina wilmington, 601 s. college rd., wilmington, nc 28403. email: toneyaf@uncw.edu dr. billy jackson is a mathematician with 6 years of experience in teacher education. he has worked with preservice and in service teachers during his tenure in mathematics education and has contributed to several works on pedagogical content knowledge for teaching mathematics. reshmi nair, previously a high school teacher in india, is a post-doc with the mathematics teacher leadership center at the university of northern colorado. she received her phd in mathematics from the university of wyoming. her mathematics education research interests are in teacher leader development, pedagogical content knowledge of teachers and teacher leaders, distance teaching in mathematics, mathematical content knowledge for pre-service and in-service teacher development, and intercultural awareness of teacher educators, teachers and students. she can be contacted via email at reshmi.nair@unco.edu jenqjong tsay is associate professor of mathematics education at university of texas-pan american. his research specialty areas are teaching, learning, teacher preparation and professional development. he is project director on several programs for professional development among middle school and high school instructors. he can be contacted at: 1201 w university drive, edinburg, tx 78539 magc 3.738. email: jtsay@utpa.edu �� since shulman’s (1986) seminal statement on the blends of pedagogical and content knowledge needed for teaching, a rich collection of theories, models, and measures of it has grown in mathematics education (depaepe, verschaffel, & kelchtermans, 2013). however, work to date has focused on early grades (k-8) teacher development. current models of knowledge for teaching include little in the way of the classroom sociology and advanced mathematical understandings that are found in high school and post-secondary settings. there is a need for examples and theory in the context of teachers with greater mathematical preparation and older students with varied and complex experiences in learning mathematics (hauk, toney, jackson, nair, & tsay, 2013; speer & king, 2009). the framing of knowledge for teaching mathematics has centered on the question: what mathematical reasoning, insight, understanding, and skills are required for a person to teach mathematics? many have worked to develop theoretical models and measures to address this question, most notably ball and colleagues (ball, thames, & phelps, 2008; hill, ball, & schilling, 2008). in their work they have proposed three types of subject matter knowledge (smk) and three types of pedagogical content knowledge (pck) as non-overlapping categories in the domain of mathematical knowledge for teaching (mkt; figure 1). with this carefully developed model, and the expectation that the six types of knowledge are distinct, these authors report challenges in identifying and measuring mkt (hill et al., 2008, pp. 396-398). despite the challenges, their efforts to create tests to measure (some of) the categories of knowledge have found some success. the practical demands of the current education policy climate in the us call for evidence-based decisions about teacher preparation, induction, and development. meeting this need requires models and measures of teacher knowledge that are credible developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a18 and transferable across at least some small range of contexts. the mkt model and related instrument development for k-8 teachers have provided a reliable and useful foundation at the lower grades.   figure 1. dimensions of mathematical knowledge for teaching (mkt) from hill, ball, and schilling (2008). speer and colleagues (2009, in press) have offered insight into the differing demands of modeling and measuring mkt in secondary and post-secondary contexts. the mkt construct is based on research among k-8 teachers in the united states. most k-8 teachers have completed few (if any) courses in advanced mathematics whereas secondary teachers typically complete the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in mathematics. for those who teach at the college level, preparation in advanced mathematics is much greater. many university mathematics teachers are themselves mathematicians, generating new mathematical insights to add to the knowledge base of what constitutes mathematics itself. using examination of authentic classroom practice, like that behind the development of the mkt model, speer and colleagues demonstrate that the nature of subject matter knowledge (smk – the left side of figure 1) for secondary and post-secondary teachers is different from that of k-8 teachers. they also add to the call for more interview and observation-based investigation into smk related questions, such as how experiences with pre-publication review of a mathematical peer’s work contribute to a university professor’s validation and feedback (grading) on student work. they and others continue to explore the nature of smk in real classrooms, working on how to go about describing and assessing it (e.g., gitomer, phelps, weren, howell, & croft, in press). emergent from our own teaching and research in secondary and college settings, we extend the exploration of secondary and post-secondary demands and focus on the right half of the picture in figure 1, the pedagogical content knowledge components, including knowledge of curriculum, of content and students (kcs), and of content and teaching (kct). preparatory to clarifying what "pedagogical content knowledge" means, we frame our use of some terms. knowledge , understanding, and thinking in the modern constructivist interpretation of the classical definition, knowledge is the linked collection of mental structures that encode and connect what someone "knows." we say "a knows p" to mean that (1) a accepts p, (2) a has adequate evidence for p, and (3) p is true (hilpinen, 1970). for a constructivist, this definition now begs the questions: what does accept mean? what constitutes evidence (to whom) and who determines its adequacy? and, of course, what does true mean? for our purposes, the answer to each of these questions is: it depends on context. in this report, the context is secondary and post-secondary mathematics teaching and learning in the united states in the early 21st century. while that limits the terrain a bit, we recognize that interpretations of accept, evidence, and truth developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a19 we use (and encounter among our teacher colleagues) are constrained by the authoritarian and largely individualistic context of us educational policy and school cultures about mathematics. in these contexts, mathematical knowledge is assumed to be precise and unambiguous, where "any possibility of more than one interpretation for a mathematical expression arises from sloppy use of language rather than any uncertainty of mathematical ideas." (barwell, 2005, p. 118). yet, from the constructivist perspective, the cognitive disequilibration needed for learning relies on discursive ambiguity as a resource. it opens the door for meaningand sense-making activity. in the process of developing knowledge, teachers and learners direct their attention in purposeful ways as interpretations evolve and the complexity of linking grows – sometimes tuning or revising previously connected "knowns" sometimes trimming them, and sometimes de-linking them. in this setting for knowledge, understanding is a relational dynamic of knowing and purpose, "knowing both what to do and why" (skemp, 1976, p. 21). for us, understanding is skemp’s "relational understanding." this is distinct from "instrumental understanding," used to describe declarative knowledge, of facts and formulas for instance, unconnected to why to use them. for example, depending on the question, having a correct answer to the question may be evidence of certain kinds of knowledge but may not provide insight into a person’s understanding. by thinking we mean the mental, sometimes embodied, activity of organizing ideas and using knowledge. so, thinking requires and may generate or reconfigure knowledge (e.g., when reasoning), while it may or may not generate understanding. current views of pedagogical content knowledge (pck) pedagogical content knowledge is more than an overlap of knowledge that is both pedagogically connected and mathematically connected. it is an inextricable blending that is "predicated on coherent and generative understandings of the big mathematical ideas that make up the curriculum." (silverman & thompson, 2008, p. 502). while smk is about a teacher’s understanding of big ideas, pck is about how that understanding informs thinking and knowledge building about content and students, about content and teaching implementations, and about content of the curriculum. pck grows when a teacher gets better at the transformation of personal and intimate forms of mathematical knowing into ways of understanding that include how to orchestrate purposeful exploration of that mathematical knowledge among others. our aim in building a model of pck is to describe and illustrate an unpacking of these ideas – attending to people’s ways of understanding and thinking about and through mathematics in order to teach, while also attending to the reality of cultural heterogeneity in the classroom. in investigating correlation between k-8 teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching and quality of instruction, hill et al. (2008) concluded the existence of powerful relationships among what and how teachers know about mathematics and what occurs during instruction. in addition to the categories in figure 1, the authors identified (1) beliefs about mathematics, (2) perceptions of mathematics learning and teaching, and (3) decision-making around adoption of teaching material, as significant factors in mediating teachers’ instructional performance. although an incorporation of the interplay among content, beliefs, culture, and values in pedagogical content knowledge might be relatively new to mathematics education, existing work on science pck has long included a component of "orientation" (anderson & smith, 1987; magnusson, krajcik, & borko, 1999) or "disposition" (park & chen, 2012). that is, science pck models include a melding of knowledge and beliefs about the teaching and learning of the discipline itself, a teacher’s personal conceptual map about what is valuable in science as well as in its learning and teaching. a developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a20 common model for teacher orientation towards the discipline spotlights two features: goals and strategies. the variety of orientations that have been identified and named include academic rigor (lantz & kass, 1987), conceptual change (roth, anderson & smith, 1987), discovery (karplus & thier, 1967), inquiry (tamir, 1983), and guided inquiry (magnusson & palincsar, 1995). for each of these orientations, magnusson and colleagues (1999) identified the associated goal(s) for teaching science and core characteristic(s) of instructional strategy. different goals may be realized with similar strategies (e.g., discovery, inquiry, and conceptual change all involve students exploring and generating ideas, but the goals of each of these orientations towards the discipline differ and the purpose of student activity varies). as currently used in science education, the goals associated with each orientation represent a set of valued ways of seeing the world and of favored tools and artifacts for interacting with the world using science. the characteristics of instruction associated with each orientation include preferred forms of communication, uses of tools and artifacts, and methods for inter-generational transfer (teaching) of these. that is, each named orientation is an instantiation of a culture in a broad sense. and, as currently conceived in the literature, each orientation presumes a particular way of noticing and handling an intercultural difference: between the presumed distinct formal and informal cultures of teacher and student. teacher orientations are assumed to be close or far from a "formal" or normative academic culture of science while students are viewed as bringing to learning a non-standard or "informal" home culture of science (individually or collectively). a simultaneous thread in mathematics and science education over the last 30 years has been work that looks at student orientations towards the learning and teaching of the discipline. steeped in concerns of cultural relevance, responsiveness, and situated cognition, this work has paralleled that of teacher orientation in looking at goals and characteristics of learning and its measurement, but with a focus on students (e.g., gay, 2010; greeno, 1998; solano-flores & nelson-barber, 2001). only recently have mathematics and science education begun to consider the intercultural differences and, to our knowledge, very little work has been done on teacher orientation to the difference – not orientation toward teaching and learning of science or mathematics, but orientation toward the differences between teacher and student orientations about a discipline’s teaching and learning. evidence of both orientation towards the discipline and orientation towards the difference manifests in the secondary and college classroom in myriad ways. researchers have investigated the vocabulary (e.g., the mathematical register, wells, 1993), discourse practices (e.g., moschkovich, 2007; ryve, 2011), gestures (alibali et al., 2012), and setting of norms for talking about the discipline (e.g., sociomathematical norms, yackel, rasmussen, & king, 2000). if pedagogical content knowledge is the reshaping and melding of knowledge and beliefs about mathematics and pedagogy into instructional realizations in the classroom, then certainly the aspects of communication just listed are part of pck. but where in figure 1 are these dynamics? here we report on our efforts to develop an expanded model of pedagogical content knowledge in secondary and post-secondary contexts that considers a key aspect of shulman’s (1986) original framing that is not explicit in existing models in mathematics education. based on work discussed below, it is called knowledge of discourse. this brings to pck the discipline-steeped semiotics that is part of advanced mathematics and that was part of shulman’s original description: the syntactic structure of a discipline is the set of ways in which truth or falsehood, validity or invalidity, are established... teachers must not only be capable of defining for students the accepted truths in a domain. they must also be able to explain why a particular proposition is deemed warranted, why it is worth developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a21 knowing, and how it relates to other propositions, both within the discipline and without, both in theory and in practice… this will be important in subsequent pedagogical judgments. (shulman, 1986, p. 9) ultimately, we seek to develop theory, models, guidelines, and measurement tools that allow exploration of questions such as: what is the interplay among advanced mathematical understandings, teaching, and culturally mediated communication in defining and growing pedagogical content knowledge? a useful model can inform research, policy making, and classroom practice. the purpose of this article is to introduce a model that can be used to help educators, researchers, and teachers better identify, document, and measure pck. as ball and colleagues have noted, "to those interested in building theoretical coherence around mathematical knowledge for teaching, the variety of approaches is distressing" (hill et al., 2007, p. 131). in order to open conversation rooted in a common vocabulary, we use ball’s mkt model as our foundation. the notion of common vocabulary includes the effort to identify key aspects of pck in order to create learning goals for teacher education and mathematician preparation (e.g., during early teaching experiences in graduate school) and contribute to the theoretical perspectives informing the design and interpretation of measures of the effectiveness of teacher professional learning. in particular, developing relational understandings that link among the components on the right of figure 1 involves types of knowledge and thinking that are not explicit in the current mkt model. we expand on the existing mkt model of pck by considering discourse and the role it plays in the mathematics classroom. we also consider the connections among the different components of pck that we claim are interwoven with each other and not distinct as the existing model treats them. our proposed model relies on three existing theories related to human interaction in mathematics teaching and learning: for discourse, for intercultural awareness, and for pck. we start with brief definitions associated with "discourse," make a foray into some key ideas in intercultural orientation, and then describe the revised model. we conclude with classroom vignettes and brief analyses of them to illustrate the theorized constructs. these illustrations are not definitions. they are offered as anchors for discussion. background on discourse conceptual framework: how do language and culture shape teaching and learning? meaning is situated. consider how to interpret: "the coffee spilled, get a mop" and "the coffee spilled, get a broom" (gee, 1999, p. 48). in each case, cultural models (context-based storylines that may or may not be consciously considered) are connected to the word "coffee." the cue of "mop" is likely to trigger a situated meaning for coffee as a liquid while, depending on one’s experience and available cultural models, "broom" may be more likely to bring to mind dried beans (perhaps whole, or perhaps ground up). meaning also is situated in larger conversations of current and historical social experiences and cultural practices. situated meanings are dynamic in that they are assembled on the spot, based on past and present experience, "customized in, to, and for context, used always against a rich store of cultural knowledge (cultural models) that are themselves ‘activated’ in, for, and by contexts." (gee, 1999, p. 63). people use language to express their personal and social identities, some in ways that are rooted in everyday out-of-school interactions and relationships, the "lifeworld" (habermas, 1984). others primarily perceive and use language in ways that separate or defer the lifeworld. for instance, language used in school may privilege a future-self defined by "success" where "success" is given by values, norms, and achievements characteristic of powerful institutions in a particular culture (e.g., in the us developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a22 majority culture, by grades or monetary wealth). the differences between the personalized narrative lifeworld and the language and processes of "success" rhetoric give one example of the myriad ways students’ and teachers’ personal contexts may differ. in his review of over 100 research publications in mathematics education that reported on "discourse," ryve (2011) concluded that conceptualizations of discourse have been varied in detail and diverse in scope. what ryve found was that the myriad conceptions of "discourse" could be understood through the work of gee (1996), who distinguished between "little d" discourse and "big d" discourse. "little d" discourse is about language-in-use. in mathematics teaching and learning, this may include connected stretches of utterances and other agreed-upon ways of communicating mathematics such as symbolic statements or diagrams. discourse ("big d") is situated "little d" discourse, encompassing verbal and non-verbal aspects, from the subtleties of preferences in local vocabulary and forms of symbolic or diagrammatic representation to the nuances of gesture, tone, hesitation or wait time, facial expression, hygiene, and other aspects that make for authenticity in an interaction (gee, 1996). in what follows, our use of the term "discourse" is in the "big d" sense. like any culture, a classroom culture is a set of values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms in use by a group, in this case the people in the room, that can be reshaped and handed along to others by those people (hammer, 2009). though not everyone in the classroom may describe the culture in the same way, members would recognize the set of classroom norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors that are the intention though they may not agree on a single interpretation or perception of that culture. gee’s more encompassing version of discourse addresses shulman’s attention to semiotics: a discourse is a socially accepted association among ways of using language, other symbolic expressions, and ‘artifacts’, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or ‘social network’, or to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful ‘role’ (gee, 1996, p. 131) that is, shulman’s original statements about pedagogical content knowledge included knowledge for working effectively with the multiplicity of discourses students, teacher, curriculum, and school bring into the classroom. each discourse includes a cultural context. discourses may differ from person to person or group to group. the ways that teachers and learners are aware of and respond to multiple cultures is a consequence of their orientation towards cultural difference, their intercultural orientation. we come back to intercultural orientation after unpacking what we mean by discourse a bit more. it is worth noting here that our goal is to extend an existing model with language that can contribute to the transformation of research and practice. we do not pretend the teacher-centered tradition of the transmission model (teachers broadcast and students receive) will change to a dialogic one with a snap of the fingers. language can constrain and construct, sometimes simultaneously. this extended model of pedagogical content knowledge offers language and illustration to support conversation about classroom d/discourses that may support such change. we join an already moving river of ideas. various streams of research and development on mathematics teacher learning spring from a research-practice synergy that views all people in a classroom as participants in learning. it is the question of the nature of that learning and of the interaction of the people in its support (for teachers and for students) that is foundational (schoenfeld, 2013). starting from the current state means attending to the fact that the "big d" discourse of academic mathematics esteems particular kinds of "little d" discourse. valued inscriptions are logico-deductive (e.g., developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a23 reasoning, proof) and figural (e.g., representations such as tables, graphs, or diagrams of relationships or mappings). common in advanced mathematical discourse are explanation, justification, and validation (arcavi et al., 1998; defranco, 1996; weber, 2004). as in other fields, traditional instruction is teacher-led (if not teacher-centered) and instructors ask questions to evaluate what students know and to elicit what students think. a model of classroom interaction common in the us is the basic discourse pattern of initiation – response – follow-up or i•r•f (mehan, 1979; wells, 1993). in secondary and college classrooms, this is most often initiated by teachers, but not exclusively so, and the (implicit) rules for how initiating, responding, and following-up will happen are worked out by the people in the room (nickerson & bowers, 2008). these rules make up one aspect of what yackel and colleagues have called "sociomathematical norms" (yackel, rasmussen, & king, 2000). in his ethnographic work, mehan identified four types of teacher questions (see table 1). research suggests that us mathematics instructional practice is mostly evaluative, living largely to the left of table 1 (stigler & hiebert, 2004; wood, 1994). the unfortunate aspect here is not the fact that evaluative questions are common but that eliciting questions are not. these more complex spurs for discourse can lead to iterative patterns that cycle through and revisit the frame of reference "in ways that situate it in a larger context of mathematical concepts" and foster "mathematical meaningmaking" (truxaw & defranco, 2008, p. 514). the use of eliciting, process and metaprocess questions, for example as follow-up (f), readily expands discourse into the "reflective toss" realm of comparing and contrasting different ways of thinking (with justification but without judgment), monitoring of a discussion itself, as well as attending to the evolution of the thinking of others and self (van zee & minstrell, 1997). piaget identified assimilation and accommodation as two interactive processes to explain an individual’s adaptation for achieving cognitive equilibration and learning (driscoll, 1994). humans are pattern-seekers looking for patterns to recognize for assimilation. if assimilation fails, people may create a new interpretation of ideas, based on available perceptions, for accommodation. from this perspective, teaching is the act of providing productive cognitive conflict so learners may accommodate existing schemes, iteratively, in ways that incorporate rigorous mathematical schemes. that is, concept images are challenged repeatedly by cognitive disequilibration to foster the development of the associated mathematical concept definition (tall & vinner, 1981). this is in contrast to pseudo-assimilation (e.g., about function; zandieh, 2000), where one learns to use terms in the mathematics register in a procedural way, without associating the complexities of the associated mathematical meanings. for example, "a quadratic equation has a power of 2 on x and an equal sign in it, so to solve it, use the quadratic formula" is applied with equal vigor to equations of the table 1. initiate-respond-follow-up (i•r•f) question types and example response types. developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a24 form x2 + bx + c = 0 and x2 + bx + c = x, but generally only achieves success in the first case. conversely, nonstandard mathematical terms can support procedural success, at a cost. consider the common types of pseudo-assimilation discussed by bair and mooney (2013). they offered examples of problematic instruction on the distributive property such as "foil" and "bam-bamming" two negative signs to a positive in expanding an expression like – 6 (4 – 3x) to –24 + 18x. although aiming to reduce what learners may find cognitively overwhelming, these instructional strategies may lead students to unproductive generalizations and counter-productive decisions about mathematical meanings. similarly, temple and doerr (2012) note the importance of developing fluency in the mathematical register. thought and speech inform each other and struggling through the ambiguities introduced in learning to use technical vocabulary can support mathematical meaning-making (barwell, 2005). discourse is central in our effort to bring to pck theory an explicit attention to the use of language and the dense set of values about mathematical appropriateness, clarity, and precision that are integral to thinking, learning, and communicating, especially in advanced mathematics. intercultural orientation as mentioned above, "big d" discourse as part of mathematics pedagogical content knowledge pivots on the idea of intercultural orientation. our referent framework is the developmental model of intercultural sensitivity (bennett & bennett, 2004). the developmental continuum of awareness of and orientation towards cultural difference, of "other," runs from a monocultural or ethnocentric "denial" of difference based in the assumption "everybody is like me" to an intercultural and ethnorelative "adaptation" to difference. the first transition in the path, from denial to the "polarization" orientation, comes with the recognition of the existence of difference, of light and dark in viewing a situation (e.g., figure 2a).   figure 2. intercultural orientations and developmental continuum. the polarization orientation is driven by the assumption "everybody should be like me/my group" and means viewing difference in terms of a stark "us" and "them." evaluative prompts about student thinking (left side of table 1) may be more likely for this orientation. developing along the continuum towards ethno-relative perspectives leads to a minimizing of difference, focusing on similarities, commonality, and presumed universals (e.g., biological similarities – we all have human brains so we all learn math essentially the same way; and values – we all know the difference between right and wrong and naturally will seek right). this is the "minimization" orientation. a person with this orientation will be blind to recognition and appreciation of subtleties in difference (e.g., figure 2b, a representation of, literally, the view of a colorblind person). the minimization orientation tends to take the form of ignoring developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a25 fine detail in how people might have differing ways of thinking. for example, efforts at eliciting (right side of table 1) may take the form of questions that allow listening for particular ways of thinking. this is in contrast to a teacher attempting to set a classroom norm for dialogue in which teacher and students listen to each other. transition from a minimization orientation to an "acceptance" orientation involves attention to contextual nuance and a growing awareness of self and others in two ways: (1) as potentially having a preferred cultural alignment, and (2) as belonging to cultures (plural) that may differ in both obvious and subtle ways. while aware of difference and willing to interact (e.g., engage in dialogue and carefully listen to others), how to respond and what to respond in the moment of interaction is still elusive. from the acceptance orientation, classroom discourse may include eliciting prompts, but sustained cycles of interactions can be challenging to maintain in the immediacy of dynamic classroom conversation and shifting contexts. the transition to "adaptation" involves developing frameworks for perception, and responsive skills that value dialogic interaction and attend to a spectrum of detail in an interaction (e.g., the detailed and contextualized view in figure 2c). adaptation is an orientation where one is aware of multiple relative perspectives, and may – without violating one’s authentic self – adjust communication and behavior in contextually appropriate ways. an additional theorized developmental stage, integration, has yet to be thoroughly documented by researchers (in terms of figure 2, it might be analogous to the image in figure 2c suddenly becoming a motion picture with sound). integration is a form of adaptation, it is theorized, that may be reached by someone like an especially effective hostage negotiator or particularly adept diplomat (bennett & bennett, 2004). there is an instrument for measuring general intercultural orientation along the continuum up to adaptation (hammer, 2009; see idiinventory.com). the central idea here is that such orientations are learned, developmentally, and are part of teacher (and student) orientation towards each other and towards mathematics teaching and learning (bennett, 1993, 2004; dejaeghere & cao, 2009). bishop (1991) conceptualizes mathematical acculturation as a "re-creative act" (p. 166) – where all members recreate, redefine, and "re-live" the symbols, concepts, and values of the mathematical culture. engaging students in respectful dialogue for this purpose includes attending to the culture(s) all bring into the classroom (prediger, 2001). teacher skill in paying attention to these cultures depends on intercultural orientation. extended model of pedagogical content knowledge pragmatically, having viable models for the system that is "classroom teaching and learning" helps teachers, teacher educators, and other instructional professional developers and researchers improve the process of teacher learning in directions that support student learning. years ago, in the classroom visits and interviews we conducted with mathematics teachers, we noticed the significance of mathematical syntax and the mathematical register. we found the existing models did not provide a variable for what was important in describing and predicting for the system we were investigating. while hill, ball, and colleagues (2008) took a classical measure theory approach to identifying and measuring k-8 teacher knowledge, we continue to investigate a non-linear alternative (i.e., instead of the traditional linear methods such as hierarchical linear modeling – more on this below). in particular, our current approach adds a fourth sector to the mkt model of pck, knowledge of discourse. like speer and king (2009), our observing, interviewing, and developing of assessments about secondary and postdeveloping a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a26 secondary mathematics teaching has required re-thinking the content and relationships in the mkt model. depaepe and colleagues’ (2013) review of mathematics pedagogical content knowledge across the english-speaking world noted that some researchers take a perspective on pck as stable knowledge structures while others focus on the dynamics of understanding by teachers. we blend the two in a model that is anchored in fairly stable knowledge structures (the three in the mkt model plus knowledge of discourse) and attends to the connections among them. here we focus on relational understandings and the thinking that connects knowledge of discourse with the three original pck knowledge components. as indicated in figure 3, we call the connections from knowledge of discourse to knowledge of curriculum curricular thinking, to knowledge of content and students (kcs) anticipatory thinking, and to knowledge of content and teaching (kct) implementation thinking. these differ from stable knowledge collections in that each is a kind of thinking linked to proceptual understanding (gray & tall, 1994), thinking that integrates relational components along with instrumental ingredients (skemp, 1976). we seek to identify, prompt for, and assess the connected and overlapping relational aspects, especially in how the three types of thinking (curricular content, anticipatory, implementation) interact with knowledge of curriculum, kcs and kct to be generated by and generative of knowledge of discourse. we use the phrases, knowledge of discourse, curricular thinking, anticipatory thinking, and implementation thinking in the following ways: knowledge of discourse is knowledge about the culturally embedded nature of (big d) discourse, including inquiry and forms of communication in mathematics (both in and out of educational settings). it includes what a teacher knows of normative and non-standard mathematical vocabularies, representations, and artifacts. curricular thinking is ways of thinking about (strategies, approaches to) mathematical topics, procedures, and concepts as well as the relationships among them. this includes the vertical knowledge of pre-requisite topics and potential future topics, as well as the relationships among them, along with conventions for reading, writing, and speaking them, found in curricula. in its most robust form, this part of pck contributes to what ma (1999) called "profound understanding of mathematics" (p. 120). in combination, knowledge of curriculum, curricular thinking, and knowledge of discourse are the home of simon’s (2006) "key developmental understandings." anticipatory thinking is ways of thinking about (strategies, approaches to) how learners may engage with content, processes, and concepts. it includes awareness of and responsiveness to student thinking. part of anticipatory development involves what piaget called "decentering" – building skill in shifting from an ego-centric to an ego-relative view for seeing or communicating about an idea or way of thinking from the perspective of another (e.g., eliciting, noticing, and responding to student thinking; carlson et al., 2007). teachers with complex anticipatory thinking manage the tensions among their own instrumental and relational understandings of mathematics and its learning and those of their students. such perspective-shifting is deeply connected to discourse through the awareness of "other" as different from "self." we see this as intimately connected to intercultural orientation. implementation thinking is ways of thinking about (strategies, approaches to) how to enact teaching intentions in the classroom. moreover, for us, it includes how to adapt teaching according to mathematical content and socio-cultural context and act on decisions shaped by intercultural orientation. this draws on knowledge of discourse(s) – including that of advanced mathematics – and on knowledge of mathematics-specific instructional practices. while the status quo is often an intention to enculturate in developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a27 the sense of kirshner’s (2002) "teaching as enculturation" (i.e., to identify a reference culture and then target instruction for students to acquire particular dispositions), we have seen implementation thinking move beyond this, driven by greater knowledge of discourse. implicit in the mkt model is that one can witness and describe mathematical knowledge for teaching with an associated metric. ball and colleagues have developed some measures for the types of knowledge that make up the mkt model, and have reported their struggles to isolate the types. that is, they have taken a piece-wise linear approach to modeling mkt as a proxy for determining teacher quality of instruction, with the idea that a good predictive model for teacher quality would look like an equation with three independent variables. for example, in the three parts of pck in the mkt model, a linear approach says that if we can measure kcs, knowledge of curriculum, and kct and add them up, it will capture pck in a way that can be predictive of the quality of instruction. modeling this in an equation-like structure would look like teacher quality = as(x) + bc(x) + ct(x) where s, c, and t are measures of kcs, knowledge of curriculum, and kct for teacher x (e.g., from student scores on national tests, classroom observation protocol scores, etc.) and the coefficients a, b, and c might be numerical weights for relative contribution of each type of knowledge in characterizing "quality." according to this line of thinking, once a, b, and c are given, and once values of s, c, and t are determined for teacher x, an assertion can be made about the quality of teaching available in the classroom of teacher x. we do not challenge the basic modeling assumption. rather, we suggest that a more complex model beyond the linear assumption may be a better fit for the dynamics in secondary and college settings. hill, et al. (2008) acknowledge the importance of teacher knowledge of standard and nonstandard mathematical representations and communication, but knowledge of discourse as we construe it does not appear explicitly in their model. the relative contribution to the quality of instruction of each term in a mathematical model of teacher quality may depend on teacher intercultural developmental orientation. for instance, a classroom environment where students frequently engage in mathematically rich conversation with each other may not be particularly challenging for someone with an acceptance intercultural orientation to manage, but may be very challenging for someone in polarization. in developing the non-linear model we need to work to determine to what extent the intercultural "signal strength" is essential in each term and coefficient, starting by considering the terms that include knowledge of discourse. we come back to the idea of mathematical modeling of the relationships in the conclusion section. one way of visualizing our extension to the ideas in figure 1, that highlights and focuses on the interplay among the components of the new and existing views, is as a tetrahedron whose base is defined by the existing mkt components with a new vertex of knowledge of discourse (see figure 3). our empirical research has focused on knowledge of discourse and the three "edges" connecting it to the components in figure 3 (hauk, jackson, & noblet, 2010). developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a28 figure 3. tetrahedron vertices, edges, and surfaces as a way to visualize pck components and relationships. corners of the base are pck dimensions from figure 1. vignettes and discussion over the last 10 years, the authors have been involved in a variety of ways in research and professional development with post-secondary faculty, in-service secondary mathematics teachers, and their students. in that work, mathematically trained stakeholders regularly ask us for examples and nonexamples of pck in use. the first two vignettes included here are about teacher pat, a mathematics doctoral student at a large university whose teaching assistantship includes being the primary instructor for an algebra class. as instructor, pat is responsible for establishing the syllabus, running the class (e.g., lectures, in-class activities, quizzes, tests), and assigning grades at the end of the term. the examples are based on real classroom transcripts from various research projects by colleagues and ourselves. vignette 1 is teacher pat in the first year of teaching. vignette 2 is pat teaching the same course, in year 3 of teaching. pat’s professional learning in the intervening years included observing others’ classes and participating in teaching seminars about noticing and responding to student thinking. as in many universities in the us, pat’s college algebra class is one of several, taught by different instructors, coordinated by an experienced faculty member. the coordinating professor with whom pat worked, dr. gold, required graduate students to sit in on his own class meetings. a snapshot of professor gold’s advanced algebra (group theory) classroom on the first day of the semester constitutes vignette 3. the vignettes are teacher-centered in various ways, to various degrees. the two vignettes from pat allow noticing of the shifts in classroom practice and, arguably, increase in teacher quality from pat’s initial to fifth term of teaching. it is important to note that at the time of vignette 2, pat is still considered a novice teacher, though one who is moving away from a classroom practice aligned solely with the evaluative focus characterized on the left of table 1. vignette 3 with professor gold, who has 10 years of college teaching experience, reflects the fact that though often teacher-led, mathematics teaching also developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a29 can be dialogic (swan & swain, 2010; wake & pampaka, 2008). by the time of vignette 2, teacher pat has spent several years observing dr. gold, someone whose classroom practice includes the evaluating and eliciting practices represented in table 1. reading the additional vignette from dr. gold’s class may give helpful information on the instruction that pat observed. while much might be said about the presumptions in the set-up and problem contexts in the vignettes, the aim here is to highlight what we can understand about pat's pck in terms of knowledge of discourse, curricular thinking, anticipatory thinking, and implementation thinking.   vignette 1. teacher pat’s instruction in first year of teaching. knowledge of discourse. in vignette 1, teacher pat foregrounds the correct answer and a single path to that answer. that is, the primary discourse (little d) in the classroom is pat’s utterances to identify the correct procedure. this indicates the discourse (big d) is also centered with the teacher, as the kinds of explanations valued in the classroom are pat’s. in vignette 2, pat asks students to "explain to us why you did what you did, what were you trying to find?" to participate, students have been asked explicitly to offer their own thinking to provide a convincing argument. such eliciting questions by pat are evidence of an intention to build a particular socio-mathematical norm for what is valued – both as connected strings of language and as mathematical communication. an aspect of the discourse, then, is that engaging in explanation is an expectation of all in the classroom. pat evidences this again in the contribution of a table to organize information on the board as well as in the final question in the vignette. pat’s voice is first to propose the table. while still teacher-managed, the table could support the utterances in the room to shift towards conversation between teacher and students and among students. knowing to explicitly request and use developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a30 vignette 2. teacher pat’s classroom instruction in third year of teaching student-generated contributions to the table on the board could be a next step in pat’s development of the mathematical discourse. developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a31 that is, pat could have asked gina and nasir how to represent their contributions in the table or, opening the conversation more, asked students to take a few moments to consult with each other to explain their thinking then nominate representatives to step to the board and explain. either move on pat’s part would require a change in intercultural orientation. pat’s focus in both vignettes is that students need to be more like an "us" to which pat belongs: people who are adept at getting the right answer to a problem, articulate at justifying their reasoning, and direct in their validation of the reasoning of others. in vignette 1, in getting the right answer into the air, pat implements choice and product questions. in vignette 2, pat’s eliciting questions are focused on getting mathematically valued justification and validation into the air in the room and correct values onto the board in a way valued by mathematics (in tabular form). curricular thinking. there are subtle and distinct differences between the two vignettes with respect to pat’s content questioning. in vignette 1, pat’s responses include immediate correct or incorrect feedback. pat also mentions briefly the idea of a larger goal of understanding, while what constitutes such understanding is implicit. unlike vignette 1, in vignette 2, pat’s questioning provides cognitive conflict about central concepts (particularly about interpreting temporal ordering) and scaffolds the use of key mathematical practices (visual organization of information, parsing arithmetical relationships, and to some extent, reasoning as a problem-solving approach). to resolve the challenges, students attend to the properties of time, context (e.g., age is usually precise only to the year, it is uncommon to say "i’m 32 and 1/3 years old"), and also may notice their juxtaposition (the table). richer curricular thinking, while still at the same intercultural level, on pat’s part might have led to a format for the table that placed "future" to the far right and gave room for "now" to its left in preparation for standard mathematical formats encountered later in the text. a potential connection to the next curricular step lurks in the background as pat ends the segment by directing students to reflect on what they think. however, throughout, his curricular thinking is constrained by the values pat enacts – of success defined by the class "covering the material" in short, right-answer-rich bursts rather than being defined by verification of rich conceptual understanding for all the students in the room. anticipatory thinking. in vignette 1, pat demonstrates anticipatory thinking (and i•r•f evaluative approval) of a correct solution path expressed as procedural knowledge. pat does not appear to anticipate the variation in student thinking in the room. pat evaluates jackie’s statement rather than taking up the statement as an anticipatory opportunity about student confusion. that is, in vignette 1, teacher pat does not appear to anticipate common student struggles, while also probing about a (possible) struggle (deciding to divide by 3) in a way that is not especially productive. this leads to a question about the nature of anticipatory thinking and its relationship to what actually happens in the classroom: how might anticipatory thinking be seen as subtly and grossly different from implementation thinking? as we see in vignette 2, anticipation can be a resource for enhancing students’ opportunities to make sense of mathematics. in vignette 2, pat asks questions that elicit student thinking. also, pat anticipates that students may possess some knowledge about managing the information in the problem, particularly the temporal ordering aspects, but may not recognize their interaction in the context of the particular proposition in question. pat looks to elicit an intellectual need for accommodation by having students consider the potential mismatch of information through a representation (the table). in vignette 2, anticipating and eliciting of student thinking are central and are leveraged by pat for finding out more (and building kcs) by asking students to speak about their rationales as part of working through the problem. it takes time to build skill in planning for, and reflecting on, interactions with students. even with attendance at seminars where the focus was attention to student thinking, in vignette 2 pat is still in the early stages of building knowledge of discourse to draw meaning from conversations with and among developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a32 students. such knowledge is needed for anticipatory thinking that organizes student meaning and mathematical ideas into knowledge of content and students. implementation thinking. vignette 1 indicates pat has a solution map in mind for steps of an example and pat’s implementation thinking includes putting pat’s idea of a correct solution path into the air in the room. while teacher pat’s own subject matter knowledge may operate without loss of generality, that strategy may not be familiar to or understood by students. that is, vignette 1 is pedagogy aimed at getting an answer through proceduralizing problem-solving (e.g., "what did you get?"). there is no student-to-student interaction and when pat overhears jackie’s question, the response is to evaluate and correct. in vignette 2, pat elicits and connects student thinking to procedures and concepts. pat’s implementation opens the way for students to make sense of each other’s ideas, although students have not yet taken over the responsibility of sense-making for others’ ideas. as students present their thinking, pat emphasizes reasoning rather than the product (e.g., "what does the 12.66… stand for?" and "wait a minute, too fast! explain your reasoning"). pat also uses multiple modes of discourse, including a common mathematical visual referent on the board, student generated statements, unspoken recording in the table, and confirming questions in order to support the needs of various students. pat asks the students to clarify their terminology and language so others can make sense of it and share their understanding (e.g., "what is it that is not right, maura?"). the connection between what has been put on the board and what "solving the problem" means remains unspecified at the end of vignette 2. pat’s implementation thinking in vignette 1 focused on getting the right answer in the air whereas pat’s implementation approach in vignette 2 seems to incorporate aiming for the next curricular step, attending to student thinking, and attention to making sense of and reasoning about the mathematics at hand. a next developmental step for pat will be working to have his students generate and explain representations such as the table pat draws in vignette 2. vignette 3 is an excerpt from a longer vignette on the first day of class for dr. gold, teaching advanced algebra (group theory). a more extensive vignette is available as an online appendix (toney, hauk, & hsu, 2013). in it is an example of the teacher giving ownership of the board to the students along with talk and questions informed by an intercultural orientation that is at least at the developmental level of minimization – presuming students will share the instructor’s view that students have responsibility for sense-making about each other’s utterances and about the mathematical ideas. gold structures the lesson so students talk together about the mathematics in small groups and then in whole-class discussion. this structure centers on students talking with each other and having their voices heard. for example, in whole-class conversation students raise their hands, gold solicits ideas and then provides pauses and think time, and then asks for hands again. in small group interaction, gold effectively anticipates student communication struggles and supports student-centered development of concepts, enacting his initial message "be prepared to tell me why your picture has the look that it does" with eliciting questions to groups collectively and to students individually as responsible agents in sensemaking and explanation (e.g., his approach to group 4 in vignette 3, and other interactions in the full vignette). developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a33 vignette 3. dr. gold’s classroom instruction in tenth year of teaching.   developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a34 conclusion teaching requires complex management of instructional resources, including the teacher’s own subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge. how communication is initiated, normed, and revised in the classroom is shaped by intercultural awareness. we have attempted to include the shaping of classroom mathematics communication in an extended theory of pedagogical content knowledge as knowledge of discourse. success in teaching advanced mathematics is not just about what is said, but also how it is said, by whom, and with what warrant. effective teaching extends beyond precise and accurate transmission of facts or uptake by students of information and includes taking into account the background and experiences (mathematical and otherwise) of the people in the room. thus, teachers must make decisions informed by that knowledge to shape opportunities for learning (schoenfeld, 2013). an area of ongoing work for us are the relationships among intercultural orientation, self-aware use of the mathematical register in teacher talk, and what orientation(s) towards intercultural difference, mathematics as a discipline, and mathematics teaching as a profession may be necessary, if not sufficient, for rich discourse development for mathematics teaching. in particular, we continue to explore the extant literature on the concept of "decentering" as one potential instantiation of the developmental intercultural continuum that might be seen at work in classrooms. mentioned by piaget (1955), decentering refers to making a concerted effort to be aware from another person’s perspective, particularly when that other perspective is different from one’s own. this is, of course, related to the ancient advice to not judge fellow beings until having walked their footsteps. decentering is a particular approach to awareness of "other" entailed by the definition of radical constructivism (e.g., see von glasersfeld, 1995, chapter 6 on constructing agents; see also carlson, et al., 2007 on decentering in professional learning; and steffe and thompson, 2000, on intersubjectivity). on a separate note, the visualization of the extended theory as the vertices, edges, and faces of a tetrahedron may offer a way of articulating how intercultural orientation, as part of discourse, may be seen (tacitly or overtly) in looking at pck. suppose each of the four faces in figure 3 represents a multidimensional interaction. as an example, consider the obscured face at the back of figure 3; if we label the "edge" between kct and kcs (perhaps call it balancing intended and achieved concepts) then – if we can go this far without breaking the usefulness of the visual model – how might instructional activity near the lower edge of the face be different from instructional activity on the same face, but closer to the knowledge of discourse vertex? perhaps the difference is the nature of decentering. or, perhaps it is a more complex intercultural constellation of which decentering is part. conversely, in comparing vignettes 1 and 2, where might we point or trace paths on the tetrahedron to indicate that pat had built some skill in generating and sustaining conceptually focused discourse during instruction? the main analysis of vignettes included here was for pat, a relatively novice college instructor teaching traditional undergraduates. we have also talked amongst ourselves and colleagues about the situation where a professor is instructor to a room full of in-service secondary mathematics teachers. in our research with a set of mathematics phd faculty, the distribution of intercultural orientations across the developmental continuum has been centered in minimization with small variance. at the same time, though distributed more widely across the developmental continuum, the in-service teachers in our work (over 100) have intercultural orientations centered at polarization (hauk, yestness, & novak, 2011; faculty and teachers completed measures of intercultural orientation). we have seen many in-service teachers coming from a noticing of difference (polarization) orientation who are ready to think about and pay attention to how others’ approaches to learning might differ from their own. meanwhile, their professors (leading graduate classes and professional developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postsecondary mathematics instruction shandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a35 development workshops) have tended to minimize difference. so, when teacher-learners spoke in class about their mathematical understandings and how they differed, professors suggested it was most important to see how the approaches were essentially the same. that is, a challenge for the professors was how to notice nuances in the differences across teacher-learners’ ways of thinking and use that information in their own anticipatory and implementation thinking. faculty whose instruction of undergraduates in advanced mathematics courses looked like pat in vignette 2, were more like pat in vignette 1 when working with in-service teachers. the diversity of background and content knowledge is much greater in the teacher-learner population than is typical among undergraduate math majors. it may be that the intercultural pressures on knowledge of discourse can be so large as to impede flow along the anticipatory and implementation thinking edges of the tetrahedron. a complementary area for research that might illuminate the relationships is looking at the classroom interactions for polarization-centered in-service secondary teachers. a polarization orientation means identifying difference is a ready skill, but identifying and building on commonality is a challenge. we continue to explore what it means to have rich knowledge of discourse and how it and orientation towards cultural difference can support teaching that balances and engages with myriad cultures in-themoment to scaffold effective mathematical communication among all in the room. a related area of interest for us is experienced teachers’ epistemological perspectives on mathematics and the teaching and learning of mathematics (chamberlin et al., in press). many see mathematics as a culture (prediger, 2001). a teacher’s perspective about mathematics is vital in determining the culture of their classroom and in teaching specific math topics. a teacher with a traditional view perceives mathematics as objective and focuses on transmitting the mathematical facts to students who are receivers of knowledge. in contrast, a reform-oriented perspective aligns with a social constructivist view. mathematics is seen as dependent upon human activity and students are encouraged to actively construct an understanding by reasoning on their own and with others. in addition, the perspectives of a teacher inform decisions on the selection of teaching materials for specific topics, ways to assess students, and how to build upon ideas. thus, it guides teachers’ curricular, anticipatory, and implementation thinking (and students’ too, when they become co-teachers). in this article, we did not provide narrow definitions for the new constructs for the model. instead, we described the terms as thoroughly and variedly as we could to help, but not to confine, readers to build up potential uses for further research. a pragmatic purpose of this pck model is for identifying how knowledge of content and discourse is inextricably linked with knowledge of content and students, of content and teaching, and of curriculum. not explicit in the new model are important variables that inform and condition the development of the ways of thinking in our model. essentially, we have proposed two changes to the current model, (1) the addition of knowledge of discourse as a variable to be described/measured and (2) a non-linear relationship. that is, we include the interdependence of knowledge of discourse with kcs, kct, and knowledge of curriculum through the connectors anticipatory thinking, implementation thinking, and curricular thinking, respectively. inevitably, there are both similarities and differences between teachers’ own mathematical acculturations, their own everyday cultures, prior mathematical enculturation of students, everyday culture of students, intended mathematical enculturation of the curriculum or school, and interim classroom cultures that combine all of these. how teachers and learners approach navigating those different discourses, establishing classroom mathematical discourse(s), and the tools they have to do this is informed by their intercultural orientation. developing a model of pedagogical content knowledge for secondary and postshandy hauk, allison toney, billy jackson, reshmi nair and jenq-jong tsay dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.40 | vol. 2 (2014) a36 one way to represent that dependence on intercultural orientation in a non-linear mathematical model in an equation-like setting would be to introduce a new parameter, i, for intercultural development. we assume that coefficients in a non-linear model will not be uniform, but rather, the coefficients themselves might be better modeled as depending on intercultural orientation. to be mathematically specific, we noted earlier the linear assumption might be modeled: teacher quality = as(x) + bc(x) + ct(x), where s, c, and t are measures of kcs, knowledge of curriculum, and kct for teacher x. in a non-linear approach, one might consider an equation similar to the one below, teacher quality = as(x) + bc(x) + ct(x) + w(i)d(x)+ p(i)d(s(x)) + q(i)d(c(x)) + r(i)d(t(x)). it is in the interplay represented by the non-linear terms like d(s(x)), representing interaction between knowledge of discourse and knowledge of content and students, that we explore the aspects of thinking (in this case, anticipatory thinking). for example, if the original three-term linear equation were sufficient, then research would suggest that the non-linear equation’s coefficients p, q, r, and w would be virtually zero. hill, ball, and schilling’s (2008) report, however, suggests that at least the terms p(i)d(s(x)) and r(i)d(t(x)) will play a role. how to document and measure these terms in the real classroom drives our next steps as researchers and as assessment developers. finally, we share two suggestions for our ongoing work that have arisen out of recent lively discussion. one was the recommendation that development of the theory presented here pursue the distinction between "ways of thinking" and "ways of understanding" (see, e.g., harel, 2008). doing so might open up the model to learners-as-teachers. the current model only addresses the perspective of an individual teacher and not a dialogic cooperative of learner-teachers. also emerging from discussion was the suggestion that we consider a further extension of the visual model of pck to all of mkt with the addition of another tetrahedron for the subject matter knowledge components (left side of figure 1), linked to the pck model through the knowledge of discourse vertex. it is still an open question whether this linking could be useful in thinking about, describing, and developing the knowledge used for teaching advanced mathematics. acknowledgement this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation (nsf) under grant no. due0832026 and the institute of education sciences, u.s. department of education through grant r305a100454. any 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(2000). a theoretical framework for analyzing student understanding of the concept of derivative. in e. dubinsky, a. schoenfeld, & j. kaput (eds.), research in collegiate mathematics education iv (vol. 8, pp. 103-127). providence, ri: american mathematical society. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word marjanovic-shane, the golden cage, 2018-04-15 (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc62 the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract from the mid 1950s through roughly the 1980s, some or many children and youth of the socialist yugoslavia, especially those of us in belgrade, the capital, lived in a curious, almost surreal “window” in the space and time. this surreal window of space-time, offered to children and youth of yugoslavia, unprecedented opportunities for personal development, exposure to the classic cultures and the newest events in the cultural worlds from all over the world, freedom of speech, gathering, activism and opportunities to travel and interact with a multitude of people of the world who came to yugoslavia. such special window in time and space sounds impossible to believe, all the more, in the light of the subsequent brutal and bloody civil wars of the 90s in which yugoslavia perished. and yet, for many of us this window in time and space did exist! it was a product, i think, of several paradoxical tensions that may have created unprecedented loopholes in the fabric of an otherwise authoritarian and often brutal regime that had its ugly underside in suppression of any actions and words which would be critical of the ruling regime and its leaders. one could arguably say, that, when i talk about this curious, surreal time, i talk from a point of view that can only belong to the children of the privileged: children of the high officers of the communist party, of the belgrade political, intellectual, cultural and economic elite. of course, in many ways, i cannot escape, some of the privileged vistas of my own background – as no one can entirely escape the bent of their own lives. however, my privileged view comes from being among the intellectual elite of belgrade, rather than the political elite. but my views were also based on the experiences of “ordinary” others which i shared in the everyday ways of life in which i was not segregated from everyone else: my neighbors, school mates, people i met in various other gathering places. in this auto-ethnographic essay, i explore a uniqueness of my socialist yugoslav childhood, where a lot of children and youth lived as if in a golden cage. this golden cage had an internal reality that was in many ways protective of our wellbeing. in this reality we experienced freedoms, stood for justice, had many opportunities to participate in cultural clubs, art studios, musical bands, poetic societies, sports clubs, summer and winter camps, etc. at the same time, the world that surrounded us, and even in many ways created our childhoods, was harsh, often brutal and did not hold any of the high ethical principles and values that we believed and lived in. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar in philadelphia, usa. she studies meaning making in human development, dialogic educational relationships and events, democracy in education, dialogic teacher orientation, the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. in her studies, she is developing a dialogic sociocultural paradigm, inspired by a bakhtinian dialogic orientation. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play, education, and democracy. her most recent publication is: marjanovicshane et al, (2017). idea-dying in critical ontological democratic dialogue in classrooms. learning, culture and social interaction. acknowledgements: i am thankful to my colleagues eugene matusov, lei chen and marek tesar for their feedback and support. i am also thankful to my community of “jakljanci,” micko jojkic, ivana stambolic, issn: 2325-3290 (online) the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc63 dusan glusac, and many others, who shared their memories on our online site, in personal emails, and in endless “symposia” in belgrade caffees, in discussions about what was true or not true about our childhoods. ��� introduction i grew-up in the socialist federal republic of yugoslavia in the 50s and 60s. even today it is hard for me to say “former” yugoslavia – as my personal memories, as well as the memories of many of my close and distant friends and acquaintances from belgrade, are mostly memories of closely knit families and communities, of rich personal and cultural experiences, of many opportunities we had to be creative. we felt equal to anyone. we often interacted with people of culture, considered to be the most renowned in their professions: artists and scientists, film and theater actors and directors, world travelers, adventurers, writers and poets, and others. in the span of about 30 something years (from the late 50s and the start of the 60s, through the end of the 80s) children and youth of yugoslavia, especially those of us in big cities like zagreb, sarajevo, ljubljana, skoplje and particularly, belgrade – the capital of yugoslavia, lived in a curious, almost surreal “window” in space and time – in an unparalleled “chronotope.”1 we had (and usually took for granted), extraordinary opportunities for personal development, cultural, artistic, scientific and ideological becoming. the children and youth of yugoslavia were exposed to the classic cultures (through literature, theater, museums and movies) and the newest events in the cultural worlds from all over the world (through new popular youth music, avant-garde theater performances, international film festivals, translations of the newest literary works from all over the world, etc). they enjoyed relatively a much greater freedom of speech, gathering and activism than most of their counterparts in other socialist countries, and they had opportunities to travel abroad and interact with people from all around the world who visited yugoslavia. that is not to say that the life in yugoslavia was a paradise of overall prosperity and full democratic ideological freedoms, with no dramatic events, confrontations and clashes with the ruling communist governmental bureaucracy. yet, there was something different and unique about the possibilities and the opportunities of life that was experienced by many in our generations2 – that is worth exploring and understanding. such special window in time and space sounds impossible to believe, all the more, in the light of the subsequent brutal and bloody civil wars of the 90s in which yugoslavia perished. and yet, for many of us, this window in time and space did exist! paradoxically, it’s existence is a result of many tensions, crises and contradictions of the “yugoslav project” (spaskovska, 2017, p. 15). this curious and contradictory “time-space window” grew slowly and almost imperceptibly out of a far harsher authoritarian, if not outright totalitarian communist rule in socialist yugoslavia in the aftermath of the wwii and a period of the close ties between the yugoslav the soviet union leadership. but as yugoslavia moved away from the soviet union, turning toward the west, and as it started to change from a poverty stricken, largely agrarian society, ravaged by the wwii, toward a more progressive economic growth of industrialization gaining a momentum in the 50s, and toward becoming an international leader of the movement of the non-allied countries at the start of the 60s, the life opportunities and the overall cultural and political climate were becoming increasingly open for the children and youth. 1 a “chronotope” is a unity of time, space and axiology, i.e., a set of values, relationships, rules and expectations that exist for the participants in a time-space. bakhtin described chronotope in literature as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed… [s]patial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought out, concrete whole. time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (bakhtin, 1994, p. 184). 2 people mostly born in the 50s and 60s. for more discussion of the definition of a “generation” and its significance for historical analysis (especially of yugoslavia) see spaskovska (2017). the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc64 one could arguably say, that, when i talk about this curious, almost surreal time, i talk from a point of view that can only belong to the children of the privileged: children of the high officers of the communist party, children of the belgrade political, intellectual, cultural and economic elites. of course, in many ways, i cannot escape some of the privileged vistas of my own background – as no one can entirely escape the bent of their own lives. and yet, among my friends and acquaintances, as well as among various groups of “yugosnostalgics3” of my generation (people born in the late 40s, 50s and beginning of the 60s), there is almost a consensus regarding many aspects of the surreal, extraordinary, almost dreamlike quality of this “window” in time. furthermore, my friends and acquaintances, whose written and oral memories4 i used here, were in no way privileged. my privileged position and views result more from growing up among the intellectual elite of belgrade, rather than the political or the economic elite. although my father had been a member of the “ck” (tse-kha), the central committee of the yugoslav communist party for a short time in the late1940s before he was sent to a political school in soviet union, he was removed from all political positions, after the breakup between yugoslav and soviet communist parties. it was only by a stroke of luck that did not end up in one of the yugoslav concentration camps for political dissidents. instead, the communist party removed him from its governing central committee and placed him to work in the belgrade historical archives. by the end of the 50s, he became a professor of history at the university of belgrade – leading mostly an academic and scholarly life. similarly, my mother, who participated in the underground resistance movement in belgrade, occupied by the german army during the wwii, started working in an organization that promoted wellbeing, care and culture for the very young children5, after the war. in the mid 60s, she too, became a professor at the university of belgrade in preschool education studies. my parents socialized with people who belonged to the world of the educators, writers, poets, painters, musicians, actors and actresses, journalists, etc. there is no doubt that growing up in those intellectual and cultural elite circles, made my life very different from the majority of other children in yugoslavia, and that it makes my memories, memories of a “privileged” person. yet, these intellectual elites of yugoslavia were also very different from the political elites of the communist party officials, whose privileges also included great economic perks (e.g. greater salaries, large but cheap if not free of rent apartments, privilege of shopping in special stores always well stocked in all kinds of domestic products that may have been in shortage for the rest of the population, as well as having rare and greatly popular western goods, reserved for the communist party officials and their families, etc.), and probably some extent of being “above the law” (e.g. special tags on their cars that enabled them to park in restricted parking spaces, being able to “jump” the long lines in many bureaucratic institutions, etc.). every history, and particularly history based on personal memoires and narratives is dialogic. in the words of abrams, “oral history is a dialogic process; it is a conversation in real time between the interviewer and the narrator, and then between the narrator and what we might call external discourses or culture” (abrams, 2016, p. 19, cited in spaskovska, 2017, p. 16). one could add that it is also a dialogue between the narrator and the particular reader, situated within the past, present and future voices of all the involved people – both those who are remembered, those who are interviewed, those who do the narration and those for whom the story is told. as i narrate these stories, being both the interviewer and the narrator with a “privileged” point of view, i respond to the voices of my diverse dialogic partners. i respond to the 3 here i refer to a phenomenon called “yugo-nostalgia,” which “refers to a nostalgic emotional attachment to both subjective and objectively desirable aspects of the sfry [socialist federal republic of yugoslavia]. these are described as one or more of: economic security, sense of solidarity, socialist ideology, multiculturalism, internationalism and non-alignment, history, customs and traditions, and more rewarding way of life” – wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/yugo-nostalgia. 4 many of the written memories on which i rely are collected on a wiki we created to share these memories among a group of people who attended various cultural programs and summer and winter camps organized by “dom pionira beograda” (home of belgrade pioneers) – a cultural club for children and youth. the wiki can be found at http://jakljan.pbworks.com 5 “društvo prijatelja dece” [friends of children association] http://www.prijatelji-dece-srbije.com/?pismo=lat the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc65 friends and acquaintances whose memories i share both in participating in the same events, and as a member of “a generation” (spaskovska, 2017), who would insist that this exceptional window in time-space provided unprecedented opportunities to “all of us,” yugoslav children and youth. i also respond to some of the co-authors in this special issue, who grew up in the soviet union, china and czechoslovakia, and whose experiences in much more totalitarian societies, lead them to see me as “girl major key” (мажор),6 one whose memories represent a very distorted picture, a view from a privileged bubble, blind for the suffering of the poor and the suppression of the ideological dissidents. i also respond to myself – to what i knew or didn’t know at the times i describe, to what i believe and have believed that was not only my own personal truth, but the truth of many yugoslavian children of my generation, and to what i now look with different eyes and with many questions. in other words, i am trying to discern the visible, the invisible and at the time intangible boundaries of a golden cage of my generation. even just calling it a “golden cage”, i am risking not only disagreements, but outright resentments from many of my friends and arguably from many others that i did not know personally. not so much about the “golden” part of this image, but much more about the “cage” part of it. not that they would deny the existence of the cruelties and autocracy of the communist regime, dangers of the political dissent, and hardships of common, non-privileged, people. yet, what seems to dominate in the memories of many i talked to, are the internal freedoms and the opportunities that opened and enriched our lives. the internal reality of our cage was protective of our wellbeing. we experienced freedom in many areas of personal, academic and professional lives, we believed that we stood for justice, explored the truth, and were able to create ourselves and our own lives, despite the fact that the surrounding external world, that also shaped our childhood, was harsh, often brutal and did not really hold any of the high ethical principles and values in which we believed. it is also true that not all yugoslav children and youth had the same childhood. in yugoslavia, the childhood i lived was not typical. in fact, yugoslavia was far from being homogeneous in any way. rather, the norm was in the diversity of people in every possible way and the tensions that accompanied these diversities: the circumstances and the localities of theirs lives (e.g., rural vs, urban), their multitude of ethnicities, their mutual political and ideological oppositions and enmities, etc. the various tensions would sometimes become visible and open; at other sometimes they were believed to be overcome, and at still other times these tensions were exacerbated, abused and played upon by those who were in power or sought power for ideological and other gains. in this essay, i use a combination of a reflective auto-ethnographic method, a weak historical research and a strong intention to develop an “anti-methodological approach” (matusov & brobst, 2013) to the memory of my own life and the lives of children and youth in the former yugoslavia. in fact, in studying the times in which i grew up and my own ideological becoming, i wish to develop a research “mastery” (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 127), a “dialogic research art,” where truth is conceptualized as living “in a critical heterodiscursive dialogue of diverse participants and communities with diverse foci, where alternative ideas are examined and tested by the participants – i.e., what bakhtin called ‘internally persuasive discourse’ (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010)” (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2018 in preparation). my intention is to problematize, subjectivize, dialogize, even politicize my own and my close friends’ memories and some historical analyses of the period. let me briefly explain. in my essay, i want to go further than, as ngunjiri, hernandez and chang write, “…autoethnography is context-conscious. rooted in ethnography (the study of culture), autoethnography intends to connect self with others, self with the social, and self with the context” (ngunjiri, 6 eugene matusov’s comment on the margin, as he read a previous draft of this manuscript was: “, i think you should remember that you are a child of high level party functionary living in a bubble. in the ussr, children like you, [ana], were called “boys major key” or “girls major key” (мажоры) for their “too cheerful mood” and disregard of oppression and burden of the rest. wish you can listen to and understand soviet underground song “мальчики-мажоры”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yvz1qddloo the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc66 hernandez, & chang, 2010, p. 3). in ngunjiri, hernandez and chang’s view, this context is necessarily complex, multilayered and often brings in memories of the relationships among people with opposing views. however, i would like to go one step further in order to claim, like abrams (abrams, 2016), that memories and history are always dialogic, that they are contested and the “context” cannot be finalized by the presentation of an auto-ethnographic study. the very act of its writing and publication is an act of a transgression and a further leap into potentially risky transformations of the intersubjective dynamic. even preparing to write this essay, interviewing my childhood friends and acquaintances, i encountered “different” contexts, opposing “realities” and diverse judgments of these “realities”. i encountered changes in my own views and memories as well as in the views and memories of my friends. in that sense, i agree with matusov and brobst, that one of the defining differences between natural science and humanitarian science is the reflexivity of the latter, i.e. that the very fact of the research with people and about people usually changes the subject-matter of the research7. furthermore, talking about our memories with my friends and acquaintances, was not a mere “collection of data” in any sense of the word, but rather, it was a profound personal and often risky ideological and political dance among us, former school buddies, forgotten sweethearts, people who grew together, and in some cases, also grew apart in many ways: geographically, culturally, ideologically, politically, epistemologically, even ontologically. certain questions and certain answers raised open or silent new realizations about each other, new wonders and suspicions and lead to new judgments. this process made me aware that my essay not only could be contested, but that it potentially might cause personal hurts, new revelations and admirations developed in these “research encounters” rather than in revisiting some past “realities”. because of that, i am aware that in my presentation of the childhood i remember, i also answer to myself and to my own and my friends’ relationships. this research incorporates “addressivity and responsivity” (bakhtin, 1986). in other words, “not only humanitarian science texts report subjectivities of the studied people, but implicitly or explicitly they address these people and provoke responses from them” (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 127). that is why my essay is not merely an informative autoethnographic account, but it is also transformative project (cf. lotman, 1988). first, it has been transformative for myself: doing research to prepare my essay and writing it, transformed who i was. second, it has a potential to “become an event” (bakhtin, 1999), transforming the relationships between me, my friends and unknown others, in further unpredictable ways. the background: trying to define my ideological origins let me start with providing a short socio-historical-political overview of the socialist federal republic of yugoslavia, a country in the balkans, that is no more. the years after wwii in yugoslavia were turbulent and difficult. wwii in yugoslavia was not just a war of the yugoslav resistance movements against the german/italian occupation. it was also a bloody civil war among the three main ethnic/religious groups: the serbs (christian orthodox slavs), the croats (catholic slavs) and the large population of muslim slav bosnians (or bosniaks), as well as non-slavic populations of the albanians, hungarians, italians, greeks, jews, roma, and so on. it was also a struggle for power and domination among the political and ideological factions: the communists, democrats, fascists, royalists, liberal-democrats, etc. the wounds they inflicted upon each other during wwii were still fresh and open, and, as the time will show, these wounds never completely healed, but were crudely patched over – only to open forty years later in the new civil wars of the 1990s that lead to the final breakup of yugoslavia8. i was growing up in the post wwii years, the time of unprecedented economic and industrial changes and migration from the agricultural rural to the industrializing urban centers. most of all, the time 7 in education, this is known as “pygmalion effect” – that the very description of reality can change this reality: “when teachers‘ high or low expectations for their students can create self-fulfilling prophecies for the students‘ academic achievement and progress”, (cf. rosenthal and jacobsen, 1969 in matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 127). 8 for a brief overview of the 1990s wars in yugoslavia see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/yugoslav_wars the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc67 of my childhood was the time of huge ideological and political struggles under the yugoslav communist dictatorship that forcefully and violently suppressed not only the non-communist opposition, but that was also purging any political and/or ideological dissent within the yugoslav communist party – especially punishing those who remained pro-stalinists after the famous break between the soviet dictator stalin and the yugoslav president tito in 1948 (shachtman, 1948). thousands of political opponents were proclaimed “enemies” and imprisoned in the yugoslav version of the soviet gulag – a set of concentration camps – where they were tortured and many killed. the lives of children in yugoslavia were almost entirely planned and designed by the communist government, especially through its yugoslav pioneer organization and association of the youth of yugoslavia9. although it was officially constituted in 1942 during the wwii, “mass pioneer organizations came into being after 1945 in yugoslavia [like] in the rest of the communist world—in the balkans (romania, bulgaria, albania), in central europe (hungary, czechoslovakia, poland) and outside europe (china, north korea, cuba). pioneer organizations were created on the soviet model. their objective was to build up patriotic emotions and develop a sense of belonging to the ideological collective from the earliest age, [for the] enrolled school children aged 6 to 14” (erdei, 2006, p. 1). prior to the break of yugoslavia from the soviet bloc, children’s and youth’s lives were controlled and “produced” with a full support of and ideologically almost identical to the soviet model. as erdei writes, “soviet influences were visible in every aspect of life, and particularly in a cultural and educational policy” (erdei, 2006, p. 7). what it meant was that the members of the pioneer organization (and those were virtually all school children), were systematically indoctrinated into a particular communist ideology. children were … considered pioneering builders of the future, who would move the society forward, finding new paths to socialist goals. their whole upbringing and education, both in and after school, was created with reference to the communist party, under the supervision of ideologically and class conscious teachers and pioneer leaders, who monitored and controlled the “correct” way of growing up. at an early school age (or even before that, as in romania and hungary) children were converted from the status of “ideologically undecided” to “ideologically decided” members of the community… (erdei, 2006, p. 2) however, after the breakup between tito and stalin in 1948, yugoslav educators consciously worked on redefining the meaning of growing up in an ideologically “correct” way. together with other “cultural workers”, e.g. writers, journalists, film makers, theater directors and actors, artists, musicians, etc., people who worked with children started to invent a specifically “yugoslav” childhood – based on political idea of self-management, psychological and social theories of human development as self-actualization, creative authorship, and on the idea of creating culturally and socially rich environments for children. “the transformation of the pioneer organization into a “true children’s organization” began in the same year (1950) as ‘self-management’ was established in yugoslav companies. along with the change in the content and method of work, the transformation also brought a change in the manner of social control of children. in the years that followed, a particular combination of ‘merry,’ ‘childish’ forms with serious, ideological 9 savez pionira jugoslavije i savez omladine jugoslavije the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc68 content was made. it created a way to control youth in a more indirect, informal and seductive, yet more innocent way—and one that was equally effective” (erdei, 2006, p. 6). somewhat paradoxically, while the educators and cultural leaders were working hard to define a new “truly yugoslav” communist ideology, that would still keep children’s and youth’s lives under their ideological control, they unleashed what amounts to unprecedented freedoms of creative authorial expression and exploration. in order to get the reform going, a variety of activities for “correct creative development” and “encompassing personality” was to be set up with the necessary “material support.” newly planned children’s activities would take place in specially created centers, and necessary symbols of the organization, plus now toys, books and magazines, would be supplied as soon as possible. beyond the pioneer corners and pioneer residences, “pioneer cities” were built near belgrade and zagreb, and a pioneer valley near sarajevo. playgrounds were also supplied with equipment required for proper physical training. the world of children/pioneers was gradually institutionalized in activities and content. special pioneer summer houses were built, pioneer holidays set up, pioneer magazines and radio stations founded, a “pioneer railway” was created, and a later renowned child-orientated event called the yugoslav pioneer games was organized for the first time. artistic creation for children was stimulated (children’s literature, children’s movies), and children by themselves were encouraged to engage in different art forms. this new cultural and educational sensibility for the child was developed in times of yugoslavia’s growing economic and political opening toward both the “non-aligned” world10 and the capitalist west11. paradoxically, while striving to define a “true yugoslav” ideology, brought to life possibilities and freedoms that did not exist in other more dogmatic communist countries of the soviet bloc. thus, i can claim to be a part of a special intellectual and cultural elite that supported and was supported by the yugoslav communist project on the ideological, cultural and political scene of the country. however, my life and the lives of others similar to me were not secluded from the other children of yugoslavia. we did not have special schools, or special clubs, nor did we go to special resorts, reserved only for the elite. we lived in the mixed neighborhoods and went to the neighborhood schools to which our “address belonged.” the cultural organizations, playgrounds and events for children, we attended were all functioning based on the freedom of attendance, e.g. “walk in” basis. except when very young, below 7 years of age, children used public transportation to travel through belgrade, or walked around. many of my childhood friends were people from “ordinary” families, who did not belong to the communist, intellectual or cultural elites. their families were most diverse: people who came both from the riches and from the dire poverty; with jobs ranging from physical workers, who loaded freight trains or were “cleaning ladies”, to doctors, engineers, artists, or private tailors and seamstresses, hairdressers, or bank clerks, school teachers, professors, opera singers, medical doctors, accountants, etc. their families were of all six or more nationalities that lived in yugoslavia. i can’t think of any rule to systematically exclude some children from the life i remember as mine. i can find only probabilities that gave some of the children more chances than others to live in the golden cage. first, it was more probable to be exposed to and become a part of our rich and protected children’s culture – if one lived in an urban center rather than in a village or a smaller provincial town. this was true especially if one lived in belgrade (the capital), but also in the big centers of 10 the non-aligned countries included among others the oil-rich middle-eastern countries where yugoslav engineers started working on big energy projects, and many african states with which yugoslavia started building joint economic projects. 11 “tito used the estrangement from the ussr to obtain us aid via the marshall plan, as well as to found the non-aligned movement, in which yugoslavia was a leading force.” wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tito%e2%80%93stalin_split the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc69 other regions, sarajevo, zagreb, ljubljana, split, etc. second, it was more probable that one would be more included if their family was not hurt by the ideological and political oppression of the time. and yet, some of my acquaintances were children of the known dissidents who either fled the country or served time in prison12. against a tumultuous political and economic background, i was growing up among children who were supported and encouraged – through a host of cultural programs, cultural centers, special trips, summer and winter camps, etc. – to develop their interests, passions and creativity. these programs were organized as a part of the overall yugoslav initiative to support children and youth. youth was “seen as a critical pillar of the yugoslav socialist project, the state invested in the youth both symbolic and economic capital with the hope that the sense of ‘yugoslav socialist patriotism’ would supersede and replace narrower circles of belonging or ethnic and class divisions” (spaskovska, 2017, p. 38). this enabled us to gain progressively growing freedoms and access to the world cultures. besides several non-governmental organizations like the “association of the friends of children,” which organized cultural programs for younger children, yugoslavia developed a “relatively liberal youth culture and a semifree press, ... [and by the 1980s] the youth media [were used] as an arena for various articulations of demands for freedom of speech and critical reflection on the contemporary socio-political reality” (spaskovska, 2017, pp. 38-39). our protected and promoted lives, in many ways stood in sharp contrast to the otherwise authoritarian political, economic and educational regime of yugoslavia. this authoritarian nature of the “official regime” of yugoslavia was not unknown to us (especially when we became teens), and our lives were not entirely without the clashes with “the system” – clashes both in the contradiction of our own values and in the actual events of rebellion against the authorities. maybe the existence of such parallel yet contradictory realities was possible because yugoslavia was a country, “in between”13: between the occident and the orient; between the democratic capitalist west14 and the totalitarian socialist east; between the rich developed world and the poor “third” world. maybe it was this position of being “in between” that created openings and loopholes in every aspect of yugoslavian life. whatever the causes, i want to explore these loopholes in the socialist regime that enabled a group of enthusiastic idealists and educational activists in the generation of my parents to create a world for yugoslav children, which, in the hindsight, and from any outsider perspective, must seem outlandish, unreal, almost impossible. here, through my and some of my childhood friends’ memories i provide descriptions of a few programs and institutions that existed as ubiquitous cultural environment for and with children and youth. these programs took place in the cultural centers and youth clubs in belgrade, where we experienced the magic smell of oil paint, created self-styled music groups, acted, directed and experimented in our theater and film projects, organized and participated in reading clubs, wrote poetry together, marveled at the first cartoons we ever saw, and became insatiable watchers of films and tv. some of my most significant memories are of life we created in the summer and winter camps spent away from our parents, on an island in the adriatic ocean and in the mountain tara in serbia. 12 notably, the son and daughter of milovan djilas who was one of the most worldly known yugoslav political dissidents, serving a jail sentence in a belgrade prison. 13 this is also the title of a movie by a well-known yugoslavian film director s. karanović – see an excerpt here: “in between” (“nešto između,” 1983) 14 yugoslavia was a recipient of the “marshall plan” and other funds from the united states from 1949 to 1989 (according to lampe, prickett, & adamović, 1990) the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc70 and yet, our freedoms, our riches, our relationships and adventures, events and programs we made, had both visible and invisible “socialist” boundaries. i use the “socialist” in quotation mark, as i will try to show through the memories of our lives – that it was a mixed bag of contradictory and clashing values: simultaneously valuing freedom, creativity, agency and activism, on one hand; and, on the other, following authoritarian, hierarchical, monologic and finalizing principles of an ideology we were not supposed to question, an ideology that produced “the most developed form of society” – our “emancipated and the most advanced country” – yugoslavia. we didn’t always feel those cold, unforgiving, and sometimes dangerous boundaries, but we still knew that we lived within a golden cage. our freedoms stopped sometimes gently, without our suspicion, but sometimes openly, roughly and with a reprimand. we rarely noticed (as children) the soft captivity of our ideologically homogenized official socialist school programs and textbooks that painted our motherland non-problematic and glorified: only as loving, beautiful, sunny and gay, a place where all the problems were solved and all the people were ready to help each other in harmony, unity and brotherhood. but, we also sometimes experienced the limits that bound down our freedoms and creativity, when we were “put in our place”, our voices silenced, and we could glimpse the ugliness of the reverse side of our “freedoms”. we would, from time to time, whisper about friends whose father or mother were dissidents, some of whom have even been on “goli otok”15 or have “mysteriously disappeared” without any trace or explanation. we were aware that certain things should not be talked about without special precautions16 taken so no unwanted ears could hear them. we knew that all our public work might be subject to censorship. here i make our curious and surreal golden cage live one more time through the stories about our everyday lives, relationships, small and big joys and miseries, and through the mundane and heroic quests and brushes with the “law and order” of the yugoslav “in between” regime. the boundaries the 50s in belgrade was the first new decade after wwii and the memories of the war were fresh for my parents’ generation. they were palpable in every moment of our lives. i remember a neighbor, sava, a woman with one leg who walked on crutches. she lost a leg in the war. the time was divided between “before the war” and “after the war”. everyone had someone in their family who was lost or killed or wounded in the war. for my mother, the story was about 56 family members who perished in the holocaust, especially her beloved 7-year-old cousin. but the overpowering post war energy and jubilation were present in every life detail. “we fought for you, so that you can live a better life and be free!” – were the words we heard daily, present in every deed of our parents. somehow, for me the life began not at the time of my birth, but with the liberation and victory at the end of the war. and then one more time, with the yugoslav liberation from the clutches of the eastern empire, with the break between tito and stalin17. it was the dawn of the new world: the dark shadows of the german and russian totalitarianism were lifted!18 everything was in the hands of our parents and their friends and comrades, people who were our shield from the evil, who protected us and knew what the best was. their leader was tito – a hero who lead the resistance and battled the enemy throughout the war, who was chosen for a leader of the communist party and elected 15 goli otok was one of the harshest and most known of the concentration camps for the political prisoners in yugoslavia, until the mid 80s. see more here: https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/politi%c4%8dki_logor_goli_otok 16 for instance putting the phone under a pillow inside a closet 17 josip broz tito was the head of the yugoslav communist party and “the eternal president” of yugoslavia until his death in 1980. joseph stalin was the communist dictator of the soviet union, until his death in 1953. the famous tito–stalin split occurred in 1948 – with growing political disagreements between the two leaders and culminating in the yugoslavia's expulsion from the communist information bureau (see more: http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/easteurope/titostalin.cp.html) 18 of course, as my colleague, eugene matusov pointed out, there were also dark shadows of yugoslavian totalitarianism 1948-1965, where, according to the growing sources 20,000 people died (or were killed) in and 250,000 went through the yugoslavian concentration camps during that time. see for instance, (cvetković, 2011; kotek & rigoulot, 2000; savich, 2007). the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc71 for the first president of the new socialist yugoslavia in 1945. we believed in tito and loved tito, with a childlike trust in the omnipotent and good parent. the majority of the children were initiated into their socialist childhood through the ceremony of becoming a pioneer, also called a tito’s pioneer, when they ceremoniously received a red scarf, a pioneer emblem and a “pioneer’s cap” with a shiny red star, and where they collectively recited the pioneer’s oath. tito and the pioneers pioneer’s oath today when i’m becoming a pioneer i give my honorable pioneer word that i will diligently learn and work respect parents and teachers and be a faithful and honest friend who keeps his word of honor; that i will follow the path of the best pioneers, appreciate the glorious deeds of partisans and all progressive people of the world who stand for liberty and peace; that i will love my homeland self-managing socialist yugoslavia and its brotherly nations and nationalities, and that i will build a new life, full of happiness and joy. however, i mark the boundaries of my socialist childhood, the entry and the exit from it, with two very personal encounters with tito. with the first – i became a tito’s pioneer, and with the second, i finally broke with tito, bewildered and disgusted, but without regret, for the first time seeing the paradise of my childhood from the outside-in, as a golden cage. i met tito in person on, what was known as tito’s birthday, may 25th 1959, at the end of my first grade. i knew tito, of course, from the pictures in our textbooks, from the big canvases draping buildings at the times of holidays and parades, and from his speeches on the radio. i somehow believed that my father knew tito personally and that they held daily conversations about how to make our country better19. “building our country for a better life” was the most important thing and the highest ideal, and we lived it in everything we did. tito’s birthday, may 25th was celebrated un yugoslavia as a holiday known as “the day of youth”. on that day, a great performance-rally had been organized in the one of the biggest sports stadiums in belgrade20. the program featured speeches, songs and dances performed by children and youth dressed in different colorful costumes, making intricate symbolic figures with their bodies. even the audience on the other side of the stadium, facing tito’s special spectators box participated in making 19 my father was a member of the communist party as a youth in the pre-war yugoslavia. during the war, he joined the “partizani”, the communist resistance movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/yugoslav_partisans). after the war, he spent about a year in the soviet union in a political school, but came back in august 1948, with the break between tito and stalin. for a short time, he was a member of the central committee of the yugoslav communist party. in 1950 or 1951 he became a director of the historical archives of belgrade, and from 1963, he was a professor of history at the university of belgrade. 20 dan mladosti. see a video excerpt from the 1979 celebration rally here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig6fuodl_lw . the words of the song’s chorus represent a slogan famous in the communist yugoslavia: “narod, partija, omladina armija,” meaning “the people, the party, the youth, the army” (as four pillars of the yugoslav society). the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc72 different slogans raising different color-coded tablets. the program culmination was the arrival of a young man or a woman carrying a baton filled with birthday greetings and good wishes collected during a monthlong relay-run throughout yugoslavia. this baton was carried over the stadium and up the stairs to tito, a guest of honor. that year, 1959, when i was in the first grade, our class was chosen for a special task: we were to be the “pioneers” who would throw flowers to carpet the bridge as tito walked over to his box on the top of the stadium. “pioneers” was an organization of communist children, styled partly on the images, ideas and values of the american scouts (with its values of discipline and exploration, open air adventures, health and exercise) and partly on the images and values of healthy and strong youth developed both in germany21 and in the soviet union22. we were told to stay in our rows along the bridge rails, and only to throw the flowers under tito’s and his guests’ feet. as we stood there, i suddenly had an idea! i had a beautiful yellow rose in my hands and, in the spur of the moment, i decided to personally hand it to tito, rather than to throw it down under his feet. so, as tito approached me, i ran out of my line and stood in front of tito offering him the yellow rose. he was surprised, but he bent down, took the rose from my hand and offered me his cheek to kiss him. i still remember a large brownish spot he had on his elderly skin, and i remember being delighted and feeling very special. although i already knew that i was that child for whom tito and my parents fought the war to have a better future, i count this event as my symbolic entry into the golden and heroic life of the special young people, the “pioneers”. the entry felt sunny and shiny, and made me feel important, accepted and good. a pioneer gives tito a flower on may 25th, 1955 21 see for instance the famous 1925 movie by kaufmann and präger, “ways to strength and beauty” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls-dvyr1uxy 22 komsomol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/komsomol the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc73 for me, the exit from this golden life happened just ten years later, although at the time i felt those ten years as “the whole life” – a difference between being a child of seven years old and a young adult of seventeen. it happened during a speech tito addressed to “us,” the belgrade university students23, broadcasted on belgrade tv. tito’s speech, ended the students’ protests. to understand what happened that spring 1968, you have to know about the students’ movements in yugoslavia. 1968 was a culminating year of the students’ protests and uprisings throughout the western europe and the usa24, but not a lot of people outside of yugoslavia knew that a similar movement happened in belgrade, and that other bigger cities and towns in yugoslavia were on the verge of experiencing similar protests. without going into the historical details25, it was a time of disillusionment, of the growing feelings of betrayal of the socialist values the children and youth in yugoslavia were taught to believe in – equality, liberty, democracy, selfactualization and self-determination, honesty, responsibility, and so forth. in yugoslavia, our protests, resonated with the slogans of other youth and students’ protests around the world. we were demonstrating against the growing corruption in the socialist regime, hypocrisy, loss of principles, liberties and human rights, and the growing sense of loss of the democratic rights, freedoms and socialist ideals. tito’s speech came like a bucket of cold water over my head, after the heated and boisterous ten days in which we, the students, occupied belgrade university and proclaimed it “the red university karl marx”. within a courtyard of the “filozofski fakultet”26 surrounded by police ready to storm in, our professors joined us, together with the many belgrade’s cultural celebrities: writers, actors, film directors, musicians, philosophers, you name it. speeches were held, full of support and praise for our efforts and courage to stand up to the injustices everyone could see – poverty, job losses, corruption, even blatant undisguised, unpunished embezzlement, etc. one of the most memorable speeches was given by a very known actor inspired by robespierre’s speech to the jacobin club known as “report on the principles of political morality”27: our eyes were open, we saw how the enemy prepares and rises, but we didn’t give a signal. we let the people to guard and watch themselves. but the people did not sleep! the people started clinking their arms! … the weapon of the republic is – fear! and the power of the republic – virtue! virtue! without virtue, fear would be deadly! fear! because without fear, virtue is powerless. they 23 although i was still in high school, i joined with the belgrade university students and actively participated in creating and distributing flyers, which described our views of the political and economic troubles in yugoslavia, and called people, especially the workers, to join us in our demands for democratization, end of corruption, raising of the impossibly low minimum wages, and making the centrally planned economy more open for the initiatives that would create more jobs, etc. interestingly, although i did not go to school for the whole 10 days, my high school teachers who knew what i was doing, never asked me nor my parents to bring a note that would excuse my rather long absence. 24 see a brief overview here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/protests_of_1968 25 there are many reports of what happened in belgrade in the first 10 days of june 1968, and they are still controversial and passionately colored with the reporters’ ideologies and beliefs. some call it leftist, some liberal bourgeois, some see it as utopian and unrealistic, others compare it with the students’ protests of the later years in belgrade, etc. for those who can read in serbo-croatian, here are some interesting links (selected almost randomly): http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/reportaze/aktuelno.293.html:216610belo-usijanje-crvenog-univerziteta, http://www.vecernji.hr/hrvatska/tito-1968-hapsite-ja-ne-pregovaram-841553 http://elmundosefarad.wikidot.com/1968-godina-cetrdeset-godina-kasnije-dragan-klaic http://www.glassrpske.com/novosti/vijesti_dana/studentske-demonstracije-u-beogradu-1968-godine-udaljavanje-odideala/lat/155345.html 26 “filozofski fakultet” is comprised of the departments of philosophy, sociology, psychology, education, archeology and classic languages – and it resides in the oldest university of belgrade building – kapetan mishino zdanje – built in 1863 – see it here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/kapetan_misino_zdanje.jpg 27 see the translation of that speech here: http://www.indiana.edu/~b356/texts/polit-moral.html the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc74 say that fear is a weapon of a despotic reign and that, because of that, our reign looks like despotism. of course! a revolutionary reign is the despotism of freedom! freedom against tyranny!28 we believed that we could bring back revolutionary ideals of socialism and communism and restart our country’s development along the just and responsible human socialist values. but as i listened to tito’s speech and as i was becoming aware of the students’ cheers and the songs of the renewed loyalty to tito and socialism, i froze with a sudden chill and realization of how manipulative tito was and how demagogic, dangerous and treacherous were his words. although he said almost everything that a great defender of the human rights and liberties in socialism should say, as he tried to play every important chord in our hearts and minds, it all sounded hollow, false and hypocritical to me: the young people’s revolt came spontaneously, but it was infiltrated by diverse, to us foreign, elements, who wanted to use it for their own goals… however, i came to a belief, that a vast majority, i can say 90 percent of the students are just the honest youth, of whom we did not take good care, whom we saw as mere students whose time did not yet come to be a part of the social life. we must correct this error. the events in belgrade have now hit many of us… [the yugoslavian students’ demonstrations] were not influenced from abroad… students’ demonstrations reflect our own weaknesses that have piled up and that we must now eliminate.29 as i listened, i could feel the lies, i could see through this double-speak. and i realized that our lives, so free, liberated and creative, so authorial, confident and full of initiative, that our “better life” – was somehow a giant lie. i saw regret that “they didn’t take a good care”, i guess, in making our lives less free and more in line with “them” – the party leaders. i realized that we were told that we could be safe and maybe even continue to believe in all the ideals we grew up with, only as long as we stayed put in our own small childhood worlds where “they” “took care” of us, and only as long as we stood out of the way of “their” important “adult” matters. tito was not merely patronizing us, which was insulting in its own right, but his speech was laden with skin deep threat: “just do not actually meddle into the politics and power, just stay in your place, and you’ll be all right”. yet, i watched with a feeling of shame how my comrades, the students, cheered and danced, and i could not understand why and how they did not see through his demagoguery. subsequent months and years proved that my gut feelings were correct, that not only nothing had been done about human rights, democratization, freedom and economic development, but that the regime was becoming more overtly totalitarian, striving to punish and isolate everyone who took part in those protests – from the professors of the university to the student leaders. i count that day, the day of tito’s speech to the students in june 1968, as the day when i stepped out of my golden cage, and saw the ugly side of the regime that made my childhood so good, so right and so true30. 28 (parts of the speech by stevo žigon, reported by popov, 2008) 29 an excerpt from tito’s speech on june 10, 1968. my translation from popović (2008). this same excerpt from the actual speech is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nne2fenueu8 30 only fifty years later, in 2008, one could read about the planned manipulation, disrespect and dangerous background of tito’s speech. tito’s first impulse was to brutally arrest the leaders… only after several long meetings with the police and with the other communist party leaders, he decided to diffuse the situation with a speech on tv. according to the minutes from a meeting with the party leaders a day before his speech, tito allegedly said: “i would not address only the students, but all the youth and the workers, too. i would tell them nicely, listen, young comrades, you should have a trust that we are taking care of the whole yugoslavia, of the working class, of all the youth. we are taking care of everything. i will tell them that they have to change their views and not be fooled by these various elements. and i will demand that they start to work, after all” (despot, 2008) the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc75 a culture for and by children if you ask people of my age who were growing up in yugoslavia right after wwii, about their childhood, you may hear stories that may sound too good to be true, or too mysterious and fantastic to be true, or too bold to be true, or even too funny to be true. many of these stories for me and my friends come from our hanging out in “dom pionira beograda” (home of the pioneers of belgrade) – a cultural center for children and youth. we could just walk into the dom pionira, at any time when it was open, and it was always open from my point of view – on working days and on the weekends, sometimes to the late at night, for some special film viewings, poetry readings, guest speakers, etc. my friends and i began to write our memories31 of the various “clubs” and “groups” where we got involved in art, music, film, poetry, theater, sports… our clubs and our joint participation in many activities were pivotal for the lives and careers of many who later became renowned artists, actors, writers, designers, journalists, scientists, etc. for instance, one of my friends, today a painter, a photographer and a graphic editor of a major news magazine for children in belgrade, remembers, i started the first grade that year [1956], […] and i don’t know why or how, but […] the building of “dom pionira” […], was much more attractive to me than my school. [when i entered for the first time, i saw] several doors, and each leading to a “section” (a club). it just happened that i stepped into the art atelier. i came alone and i was shy, but shana [the art teacher] was there in some sort of a green overall (years later, when i was an adult, i saw something similar on the surgeons in the surgery halls, and i remembered…). there were two big ping-pong tables covered in drawings, sheets of white paper, tubes of “temperas”, a bunch of big (or so they looked to me) and even bigger brushes, and enormous glass jars full of water (i still have such a jar in my basement, but i keep pickles in it). in the corner of the room was a sink where i washed the brushes and the giant water jars. i used to draw “stiffly” – “hard”, as they used to say. shana would tell me: not this way! push the brush over the paper! wider, expresively! i never heard that word before. her husband, a well know graphic artist at the time, said to her: “let the child do what he does! see, he has a hard, stone hand – he will become a graphic artist!”32 another friend, now a movie director, remembered directing the first movie we, the children, filmed in our summer camp, once, when we were filming, the scenario called for eating ice cream. we kept repeating this sequence many times, pretending that we had “technical problems”, [but actually, to have a legitimate excuse to eat more ice cream]. but when our first movie became a great hit [in the festival of short films in belgrade] ... the smirk dropped off from the faces of the adults [who supervised us].”33 the highlight of our lives, beyond doubt, were our summer and winter camps spent away from our families and schools. our summer camp was on a small uninhabited island in the adriatic ocean, jakljan34 [yaklyan], near dubrovnik in croatia. the closest human dwelling, reachable only by a boat, was a village on the nearest island of shipan. the first several years (starting in 1958) there was only one building, a villa 31 we now have a wiki space http://jakljan.pbworks.com where we publish these memories and keep “our” old and new photos. 32 d. glušac, “the art atelier of dom pionira beograda” 33 srdjan karanovic, 1962, from: “secanja starih clanova doma pionira beograda”. 34 you can see a picture of our “old house” here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jakljanci/263516170/in/album-72157594317478782/ the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc76 built by the former owner of the island, someone known to us a “herman”. we slept in that villa and in the tents pitched in a nearby olive and pine grove. on jakljan, we created our own society and culture. it was a peculiar blend of very institutionally structured, regimented social order, with various hierarchies of ranks and positions, and very creative, artistic, literary, performing and sports activities. we were organized into “groups”, mostly by age and gender and assigned to the rooms (or tents) where we slept. each group elected a leader, who would represent the group in the “pionirski shtab” – the pioneer headquarters, our central governing body, something like an elected senate. the “shtab” members selected the “president,” and various “ministers” – for the cultural life, for hygiene, for the sports, etc. the “shtab” meet each evening to decide the “daily ordinance” for the next day. this included making the daily schedule of activities for the next day, hiving special honors to some groups and the choice of the “pioneer of the day” – a child honored to raise and lower the (yugoslav) flag on the mast during the morning and evening assembles. postcard home: dear mama and tata, we came to jakljan. by boat they call it a cruiser. i jumped from the cruiser in the jakljan bay and. swam to the shore together with the biggest boys’ teacher. drugarica35 gara brought my backpack to the land i am in. a room with five girls. love, anchica36 the groups were always competing in various activities by getting “points.” for instance, we cleaned and tidied our rooms. a special “hygiene” committee inspected them every morning giving points for the cleanliness, order and beauty. many other activities could “earn points” for a group. i remember getting “points” for killing wasps, during an action of wasp extermination one point for 10 dead wasps – killed by clapping two ping-pong racquets together, or by drowning them in jam. the wasps were pervasive at the start of each summer – swarming and clinging to the bowls of jam at breakfast, buzzing around our water pump (the main water source on the island), and it was not a rare occasion that someone got stung. the group points were summarized every three days and a group with the most points would be honored by letting it chose a “name,” instead of being called by a number (the “first”, the “second” etc., group). we chose the names of heroes, most often of legendary resistance fighters from the wwii, sometimes a dead poet, scientist, etc. it was an honor to bear a name of an important person. that was 35 “drugarica”, female form of “drug” – comrade. way to address people, comparable to miss or mr. 36 a postcard i sent home. my idea of a sentence was that each starts with a capital letter at the beginning of a line and ends with a period at the end of the line. my teacher, gara added on the side: “anchica is well. she is a good swimmer, staying in the water like a fish sometimes the whole morning. your gara”, july 1958 jakljan the old building the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc77 our only reward for the hard work of “getting points.” it was an acknowledgement of how worthy we were as individual children and as a group. besides these age and gender groups, we were also grouped by our swimming skills. these were tested at the start of the camp each summer, and we would wear colored wrist bands – coded by the level of our swimming skill: white – for a non-swimmer, then light green, then blue, red, and the best, red-andblack. i, of course, always had the red-and-black band. it was my pass to all the beeches and to all swimming and diving activities, something i enjoyed doing. there were always a few pe teachers in the camp, coaching us in swimming, diving, and other sports. their goals, so we thought, were to care for our health and our growing bodies that should develop into healthy and strong “socialist” people. one of such “health concerns” of our pe teachers were flat feet, that, according to them, were an epidemic among us, urban, sedentary, children from belgrade. to prevent and/or cure our flat feet, our pe teachers encouraged us to walk barefoot. not only that! under their supervision, we made a training course that we called “the path of death”. it was about 30 feet long trench filled with small sharp stones. we had to walk or run on the “death path” as part of our morning exercises (mandatory for all). from the time jakljan was founded as a summer camp in 1958, we, the children and youth, started to “build” it. in 1958, when we first came, the “old house” was the only house apart from a ruin of an old chapel from the medieval times when the island was a leper colony (as we were told). in the first few years we had no electricity, save for a few hours each evening when the electric current was produced by a diesel fueled generator. there existed a decrepit, partly ruined quay, where even a small boat could dock only by lifting its motor out of the water. and there was a sand quarry, used sporadically by the building companies from the main land, sending from time to time a large and slow, freight boat – a trabakula37 – to haul it. over the years, we started building various structures. every year we had “work actions”38building projects to improve our island fashioned after the yugoslav young adults’ work actions39. over the years, we have built a new docking quay, probably three times as big as the original half-broken one; we built a long walkway quay around the whole bay; we built two concrete paths connecting the “new building” and the bay, etc. “work” was one of the highest values of our small island society, as it was for the socialist culture of the whole yugoslavia – the so called “cult of work” (dobrivojević, duda, mihelj, & panić, 2014). although by the time i was a young child this kind of work – in work actions – was not any more mandatory (like in 37 a trabakul (trabaccolo, italian) is a type of adriatic sea coaster with two masts, each with a main sail. it is a cargo vessel. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trabaccolo) 38 see a picture of one of our work action here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jakljanci/263511252/in/album-72157594317478782/ in the long line that zig-zags across the field, we are passing stones from the quarry to the structure we are building. 39 see more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/youth_work_actions a "work action" on jakljan the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc78 the years right after wwii, and in some other socialist and communist countries), and probably just because it was not mandatory, we – the children of jakljan – were so proud to be building our island, that working as a builder was regarded as one of the highest honors. it was, in fact, such an honor that we “fought” over our tools! we did not have enough tools (shovels, hacks, picks, etc.) so those who would secure one, jealously kept them, tried not to let go of them. i remember going to swim with a shovel, even going to sleep with a shovel. at the same time, and within this socialist regimented organization, our lives were also full of imagination, laughter, games, fun, love, excitement. the second summer i went to jakljan (i was 8, almost 9 years old), i secretly fell in love with “m”. it happened that we soon held our “partisan night” a special game we played for one designated whole night! it was a game of strategy, skill, daring and deception. there were two teams: “we” – the children of the camp, and the “enemy” about 10 of the oldest youth in our camp. “we” had to guard and preserve our flag, neatly folded and placed on a bench next to the mast in the middle of a large field. the “enemy’s” job was to steal our flag. we planned our strategy for several days in advance. our enemies, secretly from us, also planned their “attack.” after dinner, all the lights on the island were turned off. the darkness was deep. throughout the night, we waited for our turn to guard our posts in the utter darkness, hardly daring to whisper to each other. some of the smallest children fell asleep. each half hour or so – it felt like ages to us – a member of the shtab (our commanding headquarters), holding only a dimmed flash light, would quietly take a child by the hand and lead her/him to a designated post. the rest of us did not know when our turn was coming, where our post will be, with whom will we be paired, nor whether we could rely on our “pair” to protect us in this darkness. we hoped to find out more from the kids who returned – but they were not supposed to “talk”! the wait was long. i lost the count of the children who were already posted and returned. i lost the count of the minutes and hours. i almost fell asleep. suddenly, they came for me. she took me to the farthest and the darkest post that existed. it was the post in front of the old “chapel”. a fleeting thought that there may be ghosts there crossed my mind. how foolish, i thought to myself – there are no ghosts! when we arrived to the plateau in front of the chapel i found out, what a surprise!, that i was paired with “m”! i was mesmerized. he was my “knight”, my “sympathy”! we were given the rules and a “password.” if anyone was to approach us – we should ask them for the password. if they did not know the password, a-huh! we were to immediately “arrest” them as the enemy – and call our patrols to take them “out of the game”. the two of us were left alone, in the middle of the woods, in front of the chapel, in almost total darkness! it must have been midnight, or close to midnight – a mysterious hour. i can still feel the shivers of the thought! what would i actually do if i saw a ghost? we, the two 8 year olds, stood there, spooked and silent in the scarce light of the stars and a sliver of a moon. “don’t worry, i will protect you, anchi!” said “m”. but, in spite of the darkness, i heard trembling in his voice. it suddenly occurred to me that he might be more afraid than me, and that it was i who should protect him. for some reason, i suddenly felt a relief and a surge of a razor-sharp determination, control and coldness. i was on a mission now, and i was going to “arrest” whoever came here and didn’t not know the “password”, after all. bring them on! suddenly, the nearby bushes started to shake. i yelled: “who is there?”, “m” grabbed hold of my hand. i thought that he did it because he was afraid and turned to me for protection. i yelled one more time “who is there? say the password or you cannot pass!” but nothing. not a sound, not a shiver. we stood there trying to discern, in this darkness, a silhouette of a person, a darker shadow among shadows. but nothing. not even a glimpse. it seemed to me that we stood there in silence, straining our eyes at the dark bushes for a long time. finally, our patrol, two older campers, appeared coming from another direction. they properly and ceremoniously identified themselves. then they asked what happened. they heard us yelling. did we see someone? we told them that we thought someone may be in a bush near us. it definitely was not an animal. much bigger than animal. it was really shaking. they went to the bush and checked it out. nothing. no sound, no shadowy silhouette, nobody! they asked us how the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc79 long were we on the post – and we said that it was a long time now. they said it was time to get back to our rooms. we did our job well, they said… i slept so soundly that night (whatever was left of it). in the morning, i found out that “we” saved the flag, indeed! but i felt a bit ashamed for “m”… on jakljan we also engaged in various arts: drama, music, dance, art, theater, film, etc. we passionately practiced various sports – first of all, swimming, diving and water polo, but also, soccer, volleyball, basketball, etc. every evening we had some kind of a “program” that we prepared for ourselves. we made bon-fires with singing, dancing and story-telling. we had “dancing parties”, dancing to popular music of the 60s – rock-and-roll, twist… we created “poselos” short programs made out of presentations that each group prepared for the others, including funny sketches, stand-up comedy, games of skills, poetry recitations, etc. we also made theater and filmed movies. one of the most memorable performances was “hamlet”40, created and directed by several of our friends – who later in life became celebrities, actors, theater and movie directors, musicians – “rockers” (composing and playing rock-and-roll music in self-styled “rock groups”). it is hard to describe the awe of that night, when hamlet was performed on jakljan. however, the preparations for this performance were also extensive. to describe this event i use my own memories, supplemented by the memories of the “director of organization.”41 one has to imagine a small mediterranean island as almost a complete wilderness: dry, sandy and rocky ground, olive and pine trees, oleander and macchia bushes with their sturdy almost leathery leaves, and a lot of thorny blackberry shrubs. in the midst of one of the olive and pine groves, near the jakljan beach, stood the ruins of a small chapel, on a slightly elevated sandy plateau. it was not difficult to see that this plateau was almost a natural stage for a show about the medieval danish prince. yet, this was also one of the wildest groves with no place for an auditorium, no electric light, no real stage. we built everything from scratch. micko wrote, i secured about 20 liters of diesel oil from the “military auxiliary water cistern,” which, once a month, used to bring water for our camp. sailors from that military ship taught us how to make torches using large cans42 filled with ashes, sand and rags and adding diesel oil to the mix. such a torch could last up to 5 hours – just enough for our show. we placed these torches strategically around the plateau, creating a proscenium, and we placed them on top of the remaining chapel walls and the roof – to light our improvised stage (jojkic, 2015) 40 a photo of the flyer announcing the jakljan performance of hamlet can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jakljanci/263516534/in/album-72157594317478782/ 41 milan jojkić, “mickova secanja”, http://jakljan.pbworks.com/w/page/8349742/mickova%20se%c4%87anja 42 these large cans were the packaging for the food that we (yugoslavia) received as part of the american aid (marshall plan): cheddar cheese and spam. we also drank powdered milk from the usa. a handmade poster for the second performance of “hamlet” the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc80 the scenario for hamlet was written by two of the campers (who later become a renowned theater and film actor and a film director43) who also directed the whole performance. each day of our rehearsals, the excitement grew, as we started to glimpse how this chaos of activities will become a performance. the costumes were made from the bed sheets and blankets. the crowns were made as wreaths of olive twigs. since almost all the campers were also the performers (about 100 children), who was going to be the audience? we needed to conjure an audience, somehow, so that our performance could resemble a real theater. we created an amphitheater by placing chairs, benches, tree stumps and some boulders in a few semi-circular rows surrounding our improvised stage. we made a poster (in three handmade copies!) which proclaimed that a performance of “hamlet” will be staged on “jakljan lovrienac.44” the director of our camp, gaja, […] sent announcements about our performance to people on the nearby island of shipan and dubrovnik [e.g. educators, theater critics, directors, and others engaged in the famous “dubrovnik summer festival”] so that a good number of guests who came to the jakljan premiere of hamlet were actually the real theater people (jojkic, 2015) the night of the premiere finally came and our audience, all long-faced, pensive, and serious adults we never saw before, finally arrived by the sea in their small motor boats and barks. the daylight slowly turned dimmer and the sky across our bay started to change colors in the sunset. our dignified audience, one pedagogue after another, one theater critique after another, used to the flamboyant stages of dubrovnik and the comfort of the plush theater chairs, finally sat down in the improvised amphitheater around the plateau. micko and his crew started to light the torches, unveiling the darkened contours of the chapel. a faint melody could be heard, seemingly from nowhere – and as the torches guided our gaze, we saw a small boat appear on the horizon against the last rays the sun. a stately figure of the danish king claudius stood solemnly on the bow of the boat as it silently docked. all that could be heard now was the splash and the drip of the wet oars. the “people”, silhouettes in long robes, appeared on the quay, to great their king. they took his hand as he stepped off the shaky boat and escorted him to the plateau in a procession, as the audience began to applaud even before the performance. when the king reached the plateau, the play started. one scene followed another. when hamlet returned from the exile, he found yorick, standing in a half dug grave – a real whole that we dug a few days earlier. yorick talked to a scull in his hand – a real scull, we found in the chapel earlier that summer, of a poor leper who lived and died there several centuries before45. the play went on in the flickering light of the torches with the backdrop of the ruins of the chapel, and the loud sound of the crickets in the night. as we watched, our hearts thumped together, we held our breaths together, we cried real tears with hamlet’s last words: “oh god, horatio, … i’m leaving … no one knows the truth. if you ever loved me, … stay in this harsh world […] and tell my story. … i am dying!” (shakespeare, as i remember the sound of these words, in translation to serbian, of course) the audience was blown away! was it possible that children could conceive, organize and produce such a theatrical performance? gaja, our director, was just reveling together with the guests, while i went to extinguish the already flickering torches, making sure that each one of them was properly doused with water. the guests were enchanted and fascinated. we [the authors of the performance] were jubilant. gaja “modestly” looked to the ground, enjoying in “his” children, in whom he kindled their best, a spark that never left them throughout their lives (jojkic, 2015). 43 branko cvejić – cveja and srdjan (djidja) karanović. 44 lovrienac is a medieval citadel in dubrovnik, just outside the walls of the old city. it was used as a natural stage for many renaissance plays including hamlet and other shakespearen performances held there over the years as part of dubrovnik summer festival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/dubrovnik_summer_festival 45 the sculls we found may have been much more recent, and much more ominous than we knew at the time. namely, a few years ago, croatian media published a story about the communist liquidation of pows http://slobodnadalmacija.hr/dubrovnik/tabid/75/articletype/articleview/articleid/203252/default.aspx the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc81 besides “dom pionira beograda” with its summer and winter camps, and its many clubs working through the year, belgrade developed a rich tapestry of cultural programs, literature, news magazines, theaters, and other projects specially created for children and youth. designing a new childhood – “honorable children!” in 1954, dušan radović, a poet, published his first collection of poems for children, under a title “honorable children!” this phrase best expresses a sensibility for children that was cultivated in yugoslavia, beginning in the 50s, a start of a culturally vibrant historical period of the yugoslav society spanning the 60s, 70s and 80s. it was marked by a rich production of literary, theatrical, journalistic, tv and film works for children and youth. many writers wrote poetry, stories and books specifically for children46. books and poetry, journals and newspapers were published and illustrated by some of the best graphic artists of the times. belgrade had two theaters specifically dedicated to producing plays for children. there were programs where children of belgrade could meet children of europe, or talk with celebrities.47 television, introduced in yugoslavia at the end of the 50s, became a new medium for experimentation and invention of new video genres for children. this cultural production for children was deeply inspired by children’s play and children’s own writing, narratives and drawings. among the people who created this culture for children, there developed an extraordinary attention and sensitivity to children’s ways of seeing and experiencing the world in which they lived. a renowned yugoslav writer, dušan radović said in an online interview, i write for children. first because i like how children see the world, and because i like that vision of the world. i think there is no richer vision of the world than the way children see it. … i think that children are the keepers of the secret of this world. and no matter how hard the scientific thinking strives to explain this world, we can expect to be saved by children and by poetry. it is the task of poetry to not to let the secret be discovered. and children, unbeknownst to them, are always at the start of that secret. and because they don't have any knowledge or experience, children are in a direct touch with the world, and always have their own most personal explanations of the things and phenomena around them. … those who had a chance to listen to children or to read what children write, especially small children, could see that they are unparalleled in the precise and creative 46 dušan radović, ljubivoje ršumović, dragan lukić, milovan danojlic, mika antić and many others. 47 programs like “the joy of europe” and “thursday encounters”. many known people (from yugoslavia, and world-renowned celebrities) participated in these programs. i remember, neil armstrong, the first astronaut to walk on the moon was a guest in “thursday encounters” program, and showed us rocks from the moon. dušan petričić, image from the man with the violin © 2013 kathy stinson (text) ©2013 published by annick press ltd. reproduced by permission, all rights reserved. the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc82 explanation of the world. nowhere is the world so rich, as in the stories children tell about it. i think that someone who likes to see the world like that, must have children as the best teaches.48 this cultural movement created a novel perspective of the child, and an attempt to create programs based on cultural partnerships with children. it also inspired a number of yugoslav scholars to search for and to develop a new understanding of the child and child development. they started to create a new approach to education as “open education” – especially in early childhood, an area that was the least colonized by the official “socialist” educational programs, as such small preschool children were not “on the ideological radar” of the official communist education. an open education, according to its proponents, would stop ever growing segregation of children from the mainstream culture and society, reintegrate their lives back onto the mainstream social and cultural life and provide them with an opportunity to participate in the culture not only as its consumers, but also as its co-authors. cultural clubs like “dom pionira” were the examples of such approach where the cultural, artistic, scientific and other activities were “offered” to children without imposition: children had freedom to choose to attend these clubs or not, according to their interests and inclinations. the teaching “curriculum” was usually offered by the “people of culture” (artists, musicians, writers, actors and theater/film directors, scientists, sports coaches, chess players, etc.), known primarily for their original works in the mainstream culture and only secondary for their work with children. and the learning curriculum was chosen by the children and youth through their free attendance or nonattendance in various clubs (“sections”). the scholars from the department of education and psychology of the university of belgrade, together with their colleagues in other universities of yugoslavia, became engaged in a whole wave of studies of creativity, play, visual, musical and movement creations by children, and some became leaders and consultants of various educational projects in pre-school institutions and after school programs (marjanovic-shane & pesic, 2011, september). new programs for pre-school and elementary school children were started in the mid and late 1970s, in which children had freedom to come and go as they wanted, and in which they had opportunities to work together with prominent artists, musicians, actors, scientists, etc.49 some of these programs were still in operation during and after the wars of the 1990’s in which yugoslavia fell apart. however, the wars changed the whole world for the children and the adults, draining the culture, creativity, imagination and “mutual partnerships” out of all – by the sheer brutality, by emigration, and by the political, economic and social desperation that crept in. a palace between the earth and the sky there is a slavic fairy-tale about a palace that is not on the ground and yet not in the sky50. like all fairy tales, this one, too, describes the struggle between the good and the evil, and like in all fairy-tales after almost unsurmountable obstacles, the good prevails and the evil dies. the palace is between the sky and the earth, and it is full of incredible treasures, beauty, healthy and sumptuous food, pleasant company, and other things that bring happiness, inspiration, and joy. but the palace is owned by a “dragon,” an evil 48 translation of a transcript from an interview dušan radović gave in the early 1980s https://youtu.be/gavrirs5lz4. below the words of dušan radović it is a drawing by dušan petričić, who had illustrated numerous books by radović. although this particular illustration is from a recent book by a canadian author kathy stinson, it perfectly illustrated the spirit of the sensitivity to the children’s ways of seeing the world, that petričić still expresses today, in his contemporary works. 49 one of the most known such programs that lasted 25 years, was “školigrica”, a belgrade cultural program for children from 4-6 years olds (beljanski-ristić, 1983). 50 “čardak ni na nebu ni na zemlji.” the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc83 creature who steals people, children, and other earthly creatures, and keeps them in the palace for his own entertainment. i have described the “golden” part of our childhoods in the 50s 70s more than the “cage” part of it, in spite the fact that the evils of the regime in which we lived were not unknown and unfelt by us. in part, i did it because this “golden” side was so different from what seem to have been the possibilities and the opportunities for the children in other socialist countries (as far as i know). but, in part, because i remember what my mother told me a long time ago: that it may be more astonishing that the “evil” can give birth to the “good”, than the other way around, that the good may contain seeds of evil51. from that point of view, it is not astonishing that we, the children of yugoslavian socialist regime had games like the “partisan night”, playing out the epic glory of the partisan resistance war against the nazis. nor was it astonishing that our camp was organized as an authoritarian, regimented society based on “achieving ranks” (as we did when we achieved to make a “name” for our groups) and on glorifying pure physical labor – as one of the highest socialist values. what is more astonishing is that this socialist society of yugoslavia, and the life that was organized for us – had so many loopholes in which we, the children and the youth were genuinely supported to develop our imagination, creativity, authorship and agency. for some, my memories may feel like “yugonostalgia” – a term first coined and used pejoratively for those former yugoslavs who try to glorify the socialist past. but this is not my sentiment, nor my intent. i do not wish to resurrect the life of the former yugoslavia. it is hard for my colleagues and co-authors of this special issue to believe that my memories and my privileged point of view have a lot to do with the ideological becoming of the majority of the yugoslav children and youth. yet, from the start of the 1960s, yugoslavia was an open country and an open society in many ways: the citizens could freely travel out of the country and back. yugoslav “gastarbeiters”52 worked in the western europe freely travelling between their home in yugoslavia and their work in germany, or france, or perhaps sweden. at the end of the 60s, in 1967, belgrade got bitef belgrade international theatre festival – a yearly occasion to see the newest experimental theatrical productions from all over the world. yugoslavia imported movies from all over the world, a good majority from the united states and western europe, but also from many other countries, including those in the eastern bloc. in the mid 70s, a film festival was founded in belgradeknown as “fest” – a festival of the movies that won prizes in other world festivals (oscars, emmy awards, cannes festival, uk film festival, etc.). the popular western youth music of the 60s, 70s, 80s and on – could be heard throughout yugoslavia, and many yugoslav youth music bands started to play “rock,” “heavy metal,” “punk” and other music genres. the summers created opportunities to meet other young people, mostly from europe, who were attracted to the yugoslav adriatic coast by the increasing number of possibilities for cheap camping in the rising yugoslav tourist industry. yugoslavia hosted international students from many non-allied countries. if one characteristic can be highlighted as the predominant for most of the yugoslav youth, it was a spirit of internationalism. paradoxically for its overall authoritarian regime, even … from the perspective of official youth politics, ‘internationalism’ was seen as ‘an integral part of the socialist upbringing of young people’. the desired level of familiarity with contemporary international relations, the social and political movements around the world, the international labour movement, and the politics of peaceful coexistence was to be achieved through programmes of youth 51 for my mother it was a reflection on when, during the wwii, she and her parents were literally rescued and sent to safety out of a concentration camp by the very commander of that camp, an unabashed murderer and a torturer, who, on daily basis, used to kill people on the spot by a shoot in the head – but that is an altogether different story. 52 “gastarbeiter” is a german word for a “guest worker” – many of whom migrated to germany and other west european countries in the 50s, 60s and 70s, as part of part of a formal guest worker program. the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc84 exchange and mobility… in the words of borka pavičević (born 1947), a playwright and cultural activist who took part in the 1968 student protest, ‘i think for my generation internationalism was something completely natural. it need not be labelled as such, but it was that ideational, public and literary convergence – marx, mao, marcuse, the frankfurt school. all of that existed as one spiritual milieu’ (spaskovska, 2017). however, i immensely wonder and still don’t fully understand the set of circumstances and the people – those among our parents, our teachers and those who created the yugoslav “cultural scene” – who had a vision and boldness to create an environment for a childhood in which the children and youth could be freed, at least in a good part, from being fully molded and manipulated into submission, obedience and docility. what, for me, became a message from childhood, is a line of poetry “oh, be yourself!53” this was what my high school professor of serbo-croatian language and literature54, asked us, the new high school students, to write down in our notebooks as a guiding motto, on the very first day of our first grade in high school. so, i wonder how such an unreal place was possible. because our childhood in the socialist yugoslavia was a little like that palace – neither in the sky, nor on the ground. it was a curious, and unusual window in time and space, in which we lived protected, inspired, creative and authorial lives. yet, in spite of that, we were also in the grips of the uncompromising, ruthless and evil dragon. for a short time in terms of history, we believed that the dragon was dead. but, after all, that is possible only in a fairy tale. references abrams, l. (2016). oral history theory: routledge. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays (m. holquist & c. emerson, trans. 1st ed.). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1991). the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1994). aesthetic visualizing of time/space: the chronotope. in p. morris (ed.), the bakhtin reader: selected writings of bakhtin, medvedev, voloshinov (pp. 180-186): arnold. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. beljanski-ristić, l. (1983). školigrica: program studija stvaralačkog vaspitanja i estetskog obrazovanja za decu predškolskog uzrasta pri centru za kulturu "stari grad" u beogradu ["play-school" -a program of creative and aesthetic education for preschool children at the cultural centre "stari grad" i beograd. predškolsko dete [pre-school child], 1-2(1983). cvetković, s. (2011). žrtve komunističkog revolucionarnog terora u srbiji posle 12. septembra 1944.(istraživanja državne komisije za tajne grobnice). hereticus-časopis za preispitivanje prošlosti(01+ 02), 9-36. despot, z. (2008, june 25, 2008). tito, 1968.: hapsite, ja ne pregovaram [tito in 1968: arrest them, i won't negotiate]. večernji list. retrieved from http://www.vecernji.hr/hrvatska/tito-1968-hapsite-ja-ne-pregovaram841553 dobrivojević, i., duda, i., mihelj, s., & panić, a. (2014). they never had it better? modernization of everyday life in socialist yugoslavia. erdei, i. (2006). “the happy child” as an icon of socialist transformation: yugoslavia’s pioneer organization. in j. r. lampe & m. mazower (eds.), ideologies and national identities: the case of twentieth-century southeastern europe (pp. 154-179 ). budapest; new york: central european university press. jojkic, m. (2015). mickova sećanja [micko's memories]. retrieved from http://jakljan.pbworks.com/w/page/8349742/mickova%20se%c4%87anja 53 “oj, budi svoj” is a poem by august šenoa, a croatian poet from the 19th century http://webograd.tportal.hr/miha29/knjizevnost/knjizevnici/augustsenoa 54 olivera zečević, professor srpsko-hrvatskog jezika, druge beogradske gimnazije the golden cage: growing up in the socialist yugoslavia ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.241 | vol. 6 (2018) sc85 kotek, j., & rigoulot, p. (2000). le siècle des camps: détention, concentration, extermination, cent ans de mal radical. paris: lattès. lampe, j. r., prickett, r. o., & adamović, l. s. (1990). yugoslav-american economic relations since world war ii: duke university press. lotman, y. (1988). text within text. soviet psychology, 24(3), 32-41. marjanovic-shane, a., & pesic, m. (2011, september). significant educational concepts and themes developed by the belgrade school of creativity, "belgrade school of studies on creativity, play and art in learning and development". paper presented at the third conference of iscar (international society for culture and activity research), september 5 -10, 2011, rome, italy. matusov, e., & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centaur failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2018 in preparation). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research: bakhtin by and for educators: palgrave macmillan. matusov, e., & von duyke, k. (2010). bakhtin’s notion of the internally persuasive discourse in education: internal to what? (a case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). in k. junefelt & p. nordin (eds.), proceedings from the second international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin stockholm university, sweden june 3-5, 2009 (pp. 174-199). stockholm: stockholm university. ngunjiri, f. w., hernandez, k.-a. c., & chang, h. (2010). living autoethnography: connecting life and research. journal of research practice, 6(1), 1. popov, n. (2008). robespjer pod lipama [robespierre under the linden trees]. večernje novosti online. retrieved from http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/090.shtml popović, v. (2008, june 3, 2008). belo usijanje crvenog univerziteta [the white heat of the red university], report. večernje novosti. retrieved from http://www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/reportaze/aktuelno.293.html:216610belo-usijanje-crvenog-univerziteta savich, c. (2007). yugoslav dissidents during the cold war. retrieved from http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/090.shtml shachtman, m. (1948). stalinism on the decline: tito versus stalin, the beginning of the end of the russian empire. new international, 14(6), 172-178. spaskovska, l. (2017). the last yugoslav generation: the rethinking of youth politics and cultures in late socialism. oxford, uk: oxford university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 7 tesar carnevalesque postmodern provocations from boris groy’s argument.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.219 | vol. 5 (2017) db:44 carnevalesque postmodern provocations from boris groys’ argument marek tesar the university of auckland, new zealand marek tesar is a senior lecturer in childhood studies and early childhood education at the university of auckland. he is editor-in-chief of policy futures in education published by sage, and is engaged in different editorial capacities with a number of other journals and book series. his focus is on childhood, philosophy of education, policy and methodology. ��� boris groys’ essay "between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival" is an important contribution to the interpretation of bakhtin’s scholarship and to the growing number of positionings of bakhtin’s work in relation to the power, ideology and constitution of the human subject. groys’ genealogical, and largely provocative thinking, processes what we could mean, and understand, as postmodern, in relation to the human subject. groys’ thinking about the discipline provides grounding for other thoughts, for other types of thinking. my contribution to ponder through these questions is by introducing havel into the mix, to both understand and elevate what may be seen as the complex characteristic of creative thinking within the whirlpool of ideology, in order to contribute to the colourful polyphony of discourses. for the czech thinker havel, substantial changes in the power relations within any ideologically driven society, but particularly society that is determined and subjugated by the communist regime, is to justify the shift from the traditional terminology associated with communism in the eastern bloc, such as totalitarianism or a dictatorship. for havel (1985), this has become a question of a concern, of a discourse. while these traditional terms – perceiving communism as a dictatorship, as a total sum of totalitarian practices, is what and why they detract from the meaning of power relations, as they focus only on a description of the traditional form of a dictatorship. these dictatorship-like models of governance are usually connected with the cult of leaders, local lives, cultures and experiences, and are not dependent on any particular ideology, and are well depicted in the stalinist era. on the other hand, havel’s term post-totalitarianism is bound by an extremely multifaceted “network of manipulatory instruments” (p. 24) that is supported by a “precise, logical, structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology” (p. 25), that responds to the scientific model of post-totalitarian society that is more cunningly structured. as havel explains, the posttotalitarian system “… offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life. in an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world issn: 2325-3290 (online) carnevalesque postmodern provocations from boris groys’ argument marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.219 | vol. 5 (2017) db:45 means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm. to wandering humankind it offers an immediately available home: all one has to do is accept it, and suddenly everything becomes clear once more, life takes on new meaning, and all mysteries, unanswered questions, anxiety, and loneliness vanish” (p. 25). according to havel (1985) the traditional features of the dictatorship-like system, such as the “revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication, and boisterous violence” (p. 26) disappeared in posttotalitarianism. the post-totalitarian system operated like a business with its investments. the system itself needed to rationalize, and evolve. post-totalitarianism was effective in controlling and disciplining citizens, as everything, including factories and shops, was state owned and centrally planned, removing any economic profit for the individual citizens. this aspect of self-reflection and self-transformation of the system is an important feature of the post-totalitarian society. the system possessed, as havel argued, an “unprecedented and uncontrollable capacity to invest in itself” (p. 26). this was particularly visible in the investment in the prison systems, police, state security agents and the bureaucracy of the state. havel noted that the post-totalitarian system had become “simply another form of the consumer and industrial society” (p. 27). this capacity to act like a business that invests in certain projects aimed at controlling citizens was a pre-requisite for the new post-totalitarian system. while it still had some of the totalitarian features, this shift in power represented how it had evolved and now behaved in a different mode. power in such an ideological setting is related to the truth. truth has a different purpose and meaning in the post-totalitarian society than in other systems and ideologies. in the post-totalitarian system, living within a lie is woven together with living within the truth; and if a citizen – human subject decides to move from the private sphere into the public to begin living within the truth, he disturbs the peace of the public lie. for havel (1985), the tension between the post-totalitarian power structures and living within the truth is not experienced through a real, institutionalized, quantifiable power struggle, but on the level of human conscience, on the spiritual, moral and existential level: in the post-totalitarian system, citizens encounter implicit power and influence each other. somehow in such a system, perhaps not so dissimilar to the postmodern era, it is necessary to carefully tease out how truth is located in the thresholds crossed between public and private spheres. the act of living within the truth is not restricted to an ostentatious resistance to the system in the form of dissident activity. living within the truth can happen in the classroom, at a concert, at an art exhibition, or in everyday interactions between citizens. explicit forms of power do not need to be demonstrated, or the exposed ideas do not need to be overtly political. for havel, the act of resistance is grounded in everyday life, and within the responsibility of citizens’ everyday existence, where the living condition of every aspect of public life becomes living within a lie. havel’s (1985) concern is that in the post-totalitarian system one would not fight against concrete, ‘real’, political power. in the post-totalitarian system power is distorted, complex, nonlinear and produces aspects of truths. living in the truth is thus essentially “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” (p. 45) and the system itself in its defensive strategy attempts to implicate those who try to live within the truth, and accuses them of greed for wealth and fame and of leeching off the working class. citizens living within the truth, in line with what havel calls the aims of life, are the main threat for the post-totalitarian system, although perhaps in other political ideologies this would not be noticed as an act of resistance: “if the suppression of the aims of life is a complex process, and if it is based on the multifaceted manipulation of all expressions of life then, by the same token, every free expression of life indirectly threatens the post-totalitarian system politically, including forms of expression to which, in other social systems, no one would attribute any potential political significance, not to mention explosive power” (p. 43). carnevalesque postmodern provocations from boris groys’ argument marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.219 | vol. 5 (2017) db:46 so havel’s notion of the truth is not of a cartesian nature as he does not seek the ultimate truth. the truth is very much concerned with power relations; and havel’s questioning is not so unfamiliar in relation to boris groys’ teasing out of the argument about his version of postmodernism. however, havel’s writing is mostly concerned with the overall understanding of openness and honesty (havel, 1985); it is an existential statement underlying his experience within the political framework. havel emphasises the significance of truth as an act of resistance, and not as a positivist truth. truth in havel’s writing is thus unidentifiable without understanding the lie that is present in the official ideological statements of the government (havel, 1985). therefore, havel is more concerned with the tension between the truth and a lie, than with what necessarily constitutes the truth itself. for havel, the truth is linked to the concept of power/knowledge and authority, such as the institution, state or government. if power is considered to be productive, it influences the way knowledge, and therefore truth, is produced by that authority. so truth is linked to each discourse, debated and constructed within power relations, and perhaps in any setting governed by any ideology, as boris groys’ essay implies. references havel, v. (1985). the power of the powerless. in j. keane (ed.), the power of the powerless: citizens against the state in central eastern europe (pp. 23-96). london, united kingdom: hutchinson. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word lei chen, memoirs of a socialist childhood in china (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc40 memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen shaanxi normal university, china abstract in this memoir, i accounted several episodes of my childhood of a middle class family in early 1990s in a chinese urban city. two major discourses permeated my account: the nationalism and socialism discourse and the upward social mobility discourse. while my family and i cherish the comfort and joy of everyday life enjoyed in the era of “socialism with chinese characteristics”, the suffering past is like a ghost, peeking out behind the curtain. lei chen: upon finishing my phd at school of education, university of delaware, usa in 2017, i proudly joined shannxi normal university, xi'an, shaanxi, p.r. china. my current work focuses on teacher training in both b.a. and m.a. programs. i teach a number of classes in second language teaching, second language acquisition, applied linguistics and social linguistics. i am interested in understanding teaching and teachers from sociocultural perspective and was drawn to the studies of dialogic pedagogy in second language classes. ��� i was born in 1987, in a middle-class family1 in wuhan, a populated city along yantze river in china, about 9 years after the “reform and open” policy2 (改革开放). my childhood memory was marked by socialist songs and stories of child heroes in battles against japanese invaders during the wwii. and i also remember vividly the desire for a pink dress branded by disney3, and endless late night study hours for school exams. therefore, i think my childhood memory can be characterized by a phrase often used in chinese media, socialism with chinese characteristics4 (中国特色的社会主义). i am quite aware that the stories i told was from the perspective of a middle class family in a populated city as poverty still exists in rural areas in china. there is also a saying that since china develops so fast, every five years, china witnessed a new generation. thus, i belong to the post-85 generation.5 my 1 in chinese political discourse, the concept of middle class is termed as xiao kang, (小康)，moderately prosperous or basically “welloff”. i classified myself as “middle class” since my father has a college degree and a professional job. please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/moderately_prosperous_society for more information. 2 the chinese economic reform (literally, “reform and opening-up”), led by deng xiaoping, refers to the program of economic reforms in china that was started in december 1978. the economic reform introduced market principles by decollectivization of agriculture, privatization and contracting out of much state-owned industry and the lifting of price controls as well as other policies. the reform successfully led to unprecedented growth and elimination of poverty in urban china as well as drastically increased living standards in rural china. 3 with the “reform and open” policy, china started to import and translate disney movies since 1981. 4 officially, china is a socialist country rather than “post-socialist”. the political and economic reform gave the socialism some “chinese characteristics”. 5 born after 1985 and before 1990. issn: 2325-3290 (online) memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc41 generation is different from post-80 generation or post-90 generation. post-80 generations might have some memories of living in courtyard homes and shared bathrooms with extended families. post-90 generations would remember themselves living in apartment buildings with elevators. post-85 remember the transition from the former to the latter. two major discourses (in my analysis) permeated in my memoir of childhood. first, the formal and official socialist and nationalist discourse – this discourse emphasizes loyalty to the nation, the party, and the revolutionary past, as well as high appreciation of the economic development that “new china”6 has achieved. second, the informal discourse by my parents, which emphasizes pursuing and cherishing the comfort and joy of everyday life. the “reform and open” policy offers unprecedented opportunity for upward social mobility in urban china. also influenced by confucianism that education will transfer to economic benefit, the lessons that i received from the informal discourse of social mobility is simple: “getting ahead” through education to ensure a comfortable life for my future. in some episodes of my memories, the two discourses merge: sometimes, you can “get ahead” in education by demonstrating your loyalty to the communist party. for instance, an exemplary student who won revolutionary songs competition would mean access to better educational opportunities. however, in other episodes, the two discourses conflict. to enter the no.1 middle school in my city, i had to focus on my academic study to pass an intense standardized test. thus, i was not allowed to participate in the school organized after-class-activities that showcase my loyalty to the party and the nation because such activities distract me from my study. i regard the second discourse of comfort and joy of everyday life vastly different from the informal discourse in other socialist childhood memoirs discussed in this special issue. for instance, matusov (in this special issue) discusses critical reflections of the socialist policy in the economically and politically stagnant ussr of the mid 1960s – the beginning of 1980s and marjanovic-shane (in this special issue) discusses enjoyable freedom for children’s creation in the socialist federal yugoslavia. in my case, the informal discourse in china is chinese teacher or parents’ responses to the vast social and economic changes in 1990s—getting ahead against all the odds. witnessing the possibility of social mobility in the 1990s and influenced by the confucius teaching which highly values education and educational degrees, teachers and parents gave me one instruction: study study and study. the search for the literature examining chinese childhood in 1980s from sociocultural perspectives did not yield many studies or memoirs of post-socialist chinese childhood. in my analysis, there might be two reasons. first, china is still, in nowadays, a socialist country and therefore, there is not enough distance to view the socialist regime analytically and critically. second, there are many “non-socialist” elements in childhood or daily life in china since 1980s. for instance, after “the reform and open” policy, there is a flux of western books, movies, children’s book. many chinese children in city grew up with barbie and disney movies like their western counterparts. although there were definitely some socialist elements in 1980s, for instance, the election of young pioneers that will be discussed in this memoir, the capitalist influence was rather salient. my memoirs of socialist childhood feature three themes. first, the official socialist and nationalist ideology that is handed down through school curriculum, classroom decorations, morning meetings, the red-collar child’s community group and other institutional environments. second, the informal discourse that 6 “new china” refers to the rule of the communist party of china since 1945. memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc42 focus on opportunities and competition. third, the relationship between the two discourses: conflicts and intersections. i tell these themes through diverse sources: 1) the official socialist and nationalist ideology in my school system, 2) how as a child, i navigated the formal and informal discourse, 3) my parents’ memories about their childhood which explains some of their parenting choices. 1. the official socialist and nationalist ideology i entered the elementary school in 1994. while i had previously considered my elementary school as “normal” and “there’s nothing to say,” when i first started writing for this project, i surprisingly found my memory similar to matusov (in this special issue) discussion of soviet schools thirty years before my childhood. i suppose such similarity is what marked its socialist and nationalist nature. the classroom settings of my school was similar to matusov’s discussions (see it in this special issue). in my elementary school, we sat in rows all facing the blackboard in the front. on the top of the blackboard, there was a picture of the national flag or a photo of chairman mao. on the left and right side of the flag, were patriotic mottos like this, for example: “work diligently, study tediously, love your country, and live honestly.” the school desks were for two pupils to share and teachers deliberately had boys sit with girls to prevent the students from talking to each other so that the students could focus on learning7. the socialist and nationalist regime was also passed down through the official school academic curricula. in language art classes, we read stories of the revolutionary time: the red army endured great difficulties to fight the enemies. the prime minister zhou worked until midnight to manage the country. the wife of prime minister zhou sewed and mended his socks to save money for the revolution. we had an ideological and ethical education class once a week since first grade. in those lessons, we read about little children were tortured in capitalist factories and the sacrifices of revolutionary heroes. those lessons taught us: capitalism is evil. poor people in the capitalist society could hardly survive, and we need to feel fortunate that we live in a socialist country. while it is easy to get hold of disney stories in bookstores, those stories were not included in the curriculum. the school was very much organized in an army regime. in our class of 50 pupils, we had one “head of class”, and four “head of small groups”. since the first day of first grade, i was appointed “headof-the-small-group”, as the teacher quickly discovered that i was clever with the academic subjects. this meant i would be in charge of a small group of six students. the “head of class” was in charge of all the “head-of-the-small-groups”. whenever there was noise in class, the teacher would ask: “all head-of-thegroups, please report who (which student) is (illegally) speaking!” the students wore insignia to show that they belonged to different “rank.” “head of the small groups” wore one bar on the badge, while “the head of the class” wore two bars on the badge. for each grade of around 200 students, there was a student of three bars on the badge. besides the badge, out of 50 students in the class, 20 students were “young pioneers” and wore red scarf to showcase their “advance” in moral and in behavior/performance. 7 in my analysis, the official discourse is genderless and ignores the students’ reality of socializing with different gender. i often hear teachers say: “how the hell do you, girls, have so much to say with boys?” memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc43 picture 1. a boy wearing red scarf and three bars. picture is from an online blog. 2. navigating the official and unofficial discourses interestingly, in our time (socialist society), the official socialist and nationalist discourse was much contested at the school and at home. while a rank could transfer to privileges and opportunities in education, sometimes, parents regard school rank as a burden from preparing for middle school entrance examination. i, on the other hand, remembered that my mom asked me to return my two-bar badge to the teacher. my mother felt the responsibilities that came with “the head of the class”, including grading other students’ homework and making sure that my classmates cleaned the classrooms on time “wasted my time”. she thought that my time should be “better” spent doing practice tests towards the middle school entrance examination. in my mind, returning the badge to the teacher felt like a defiance to the honor that the school and the party had given me. in my mom’s perspective, this honor would matter little twenty years later, but the opportunity to go to a highly qualified middle school would. twenty years later, when i did my fieldwork in an elementary school in the u.s. and realized that there was nothing like “two bars” in the u.s., i thought: so the children in the u.s. did not need to choose whether to follow the school or the parents. what a relieved childhood! another big step to show your loyalty to the party is through joining “young pioneers.” in chinese elementary schools, a few months after the students entered the institution during the first grade, there came the time to elect a small group of first graders to join the “young pioneers”. “young pioneers” wore a red scarf which is a token for the red national flag, symbolizing the blood of revolutionaries fought for the better future. joining “young pioneers” manifests that you are “an exemplary student”. unlike american concept of girls’ scouts’ selling cookies for camping, this is more like the chinese adults’ joining the chinese communist party. it is an honor that is associated with various aspects of life. the red scarfs were awarded in a ceremony, after which we were required to wear the red scarf every day to demonstrate that we remembered the national flag and all the people who sacrificed their lives in the revolution to give us the peaceful life. one day during the first grade, the rumor went out that we, as a student group, were going to elect the young pioneers. in our class of 50 students, only about 10 students would be selected the “young pioneers” for their excellency in academic performance and high moral and ideological standing. being a leader of a small group gave me a head start in the election. some group leaders would talk to their memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc44 members: “if you vote for me during the election, i would not write your name when you talk in class.” in this kind of environment, some fellow group members felt a strong sense of belonging for their groups during the election and would campaign for their group leaders. “i will let you copy my homework, and you can vote for my group leader.8” having a group leader elected as young pioneer was regarded as an honor for the whole group. then there were parents’ part of the campaign, which usually involves showing some kindness to the teacher. once, i overheard one of my friend’s mother telling my mom that she bought a bottle of a luxurious face lotion for the teacher, ms. liu. those days leading to the election for “young pioneers” were my first exposure to the practice of politics. a few days later, the election was held in classroom. first of all, the first graders raised hands to volunteer and nominate the candidate. ms. liu wrote all the names on the blackboard. then, she went over the names again, and we would raise hands to show our vote. she counted the hands and wrote the number behind the names on the blackboard. the name with the highest number won the election. somehow, i took it for granted that considering my smartness and “good behaviors” in class and the fact that i was adorned by teachers and fellow students, i deserved the red scarf. i could hardly remember or comprehend who were selected by the students and who were finally selected for the ceremony. i just remember that i proudly joined the line of students waiting to be offered the red scarf on the day of the ceremony. when the teacher counted all the students in the line, well, there were 11 of us rather than 10. “one person is not supposed to be offered the red scarf today,” the teacher asked. “who was not on the name list?” at once, another girl claimed that it was me who was not on the name list. i immediately claimed that another girl was the extra one. the argument disturbed the whole event and as a result, i was exiled from the “young pioneers” group for our disrespect of the rules of the event. (i did not know whether i was elected or not until today, but it did not matter at all when ms. liu dragged me out of the line.) i did not realize how “young pioneers” would affect my life until later that day. in math class, after my teacher ms. huang asked a question, i raised my hand immediately. but she did not call my name. instead, she said: “today, i will let a young pioneer to answer my question.” all the students who were not young pioneers dropped their heads. the other day, i was playing a game with a group of friends and i wanted to explain the rule to someone that just joined. the girl said to me coldly, “why would i listen to you? you are not even a young pioneer!” in retrospect, the selection of young pioneers was based on a mixture of factors: willingness and the abilities to obey the authority, students’ talent in academic subjects, popularity, family backgrounds, parents’ influences, and even the teachers’ impression of the students. however, in my experiences, the selection was normalized as honor and loyalty to the country and the communist party through a democratic process. i guess i did not have much to complain as i, at least, were from middle class families. i was born after the implementation of “one child only” policy in china. growing up, i keep hearing my relatives telling 8 a 2007 documentary, “please vote for me”, produced by don edkins, following a third grade class in china may provide you details of a similar election. the documentary won the sterling feature award at silverdocs in 2007. memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc45 me: “you are so lucky being a girl. grandma already had three grandsons and no granddaughter yet. she was really looking forward to have a granddaughter, which was such a perfect timing for you. otherwise…” otherwise, i have heard people aborted or killed their born female babies in order to have a son in the family. i also remember sharing snacks with a close friend of mine who did not have any pocket money because her parents only gave her younger brother pocket money, not to girls. i have personally witnessed numerous girls quit middle or high schools because their families did not want to support a girl’s education. i have also known girls sending all the money they earned to parents immediately after they started working so that their parents could buy a house for their brothers to marry and to carry the name of the family. whenever my relatives telling me this, i shivered in their voices. fortunately, i grew up in a protected environment as from early on -my mom started talking to me that a girl can be as capable as any boys in any aspect. however, i could hear as girls would gather together and discuss: “the math teacher said that even if i tried really hard to excel in math now, after middle school, math track would not suit me as a girl.” we talked about the unfair treatment we received and often, those discussions ended in resentful comments: “being a girl is a sin.” “if i had an after-life, i would make sure i was a boy.” i saw those girls internalized the denigration of girls and women so helplessly. when i think about childhood, more often, i think about the summer nights. when it was too hot in wuhan, people would carry bamboo beds and slept on the side of the streets, chatting, singing, counting stars. every night i was determined to stay up late for all the good stories my uncle had to tell, an episode of monkey king for instance. every night, i ended up being the first one falling asleep. i think about the afternoons that i was pretending to do math problems in the room while holding my breath, waiting for the cry of the vendors walking passed by: sweet tofu soup for one yuan. i took the one yuan note my mom left me, ran downstairs and two minutes later, came back to the room with a bowl of the sweetest tofu soup in the world. i think about the 10 minutes recess i had in between the classes in elementary school. within that ten minutes, i was able to ran downstairs with my friends, from the classroom on the fourth floor, play hide-and-seek, play chasing, play sands, and then ran back to the classroom when the class resumed. how i was able to do all that within 10 minutes is beyond my concept of time now as an adult. 3. memories of the past on the day that i was excluded from the “young pioneers”, my mom consoled me with her stories. she was neither a “young pioneer”, nor a “small-group-leader,” although she always had the highest grades in her class. at her time, the composition of family backgrounds was crucial and a clean background was needed to be elected for anything. unfortunately, before 1948, my grandpa used to own a small factory and was a “petty capitalist,” according to the state, for that matter. my mom could not be elected or selected for any position because of the past bad social status of her father. my auntie had even more sad stories to tell since she was an exceptionally talented volleyball player. her application to the province’s team were repeatedly rejected because of the composition of grandpa despite that the province’s team “borrowed” her to play in every important game. i was hardly consoled because i did not like my aunt in the first place. “everyone had to face hardship in life,” my mom used to say. also, see, in 1993, no one cared about the composition of the family anymore, and that was a tremendous improvement compared to twenty years before. memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc46 as a loyal young citizen, i didn’t like the fact that my grandparents were “petty capitalists” either. after reading stories of the red army’s fighting “capitalists” in textbook, i went home in tears and asked my mom, “are my grandparents capitalists? if so, they are evil, and we should not visit them anymore.” but, i wondered, “why do they cook the best roast duck in the world?!” retrospectively, i couldn’t remember how i reconcile the dissonance between the official discourse and the personal experiences. the pressure to conform was so strong that any dissent was unimaginable. the first time my dad told me he used to crave for rice when he was a kid, i told him, that kinds of reality could only exist in an evil capitalist society. my dad was so shocked by how modern chinese history was taught in schools and started to tell me his childhood. he was 5 years old when the great famine 9swept china between 1958 and 1961. many years later, i read one of mo yan’s (a chinese nobel literature prize laureate) novel, in which he vividly described how his friend and he ate coal during the famine, what the coal tasted like, smelled like, and how it gave him a sense of fullness during the desperate time. however, today, when i raised the fact that the history textbooks in china tend to be single-sided story and did not capture his experiences, my dad would say, “that’s ok. it doesn’t matter. as long as our life is much better off now. that’s ok.” in my analysis, it is hard to say if he internalized the conformity required in confucianism culture or the totalitarian regime, or, honestly, he cherished his life after the “reform and open” policy and did not want to lose such peaceful and prosperous life. my dad went to school during the era of cultural revolution10. he told me in his elementary school, there was no textbook or learning materials, the teacher would just teach whatever comes to her mind. he had one notebook. after he finished the whole book with a pencil, he would erase the whole notebook with an eraser and reuse the notebook. when he went to the middle school, he finally got textbooks. but the textbooks were so thin he would finish reading a whole semester’s book within three days. despite that, at the beginning of every chapter, there were two pages of “chairman mao says.” for instance, “chairman mao says all the capitalist enemies are paper tigers. we should not fear them at all.” and all the classes began by chanting “chairman mao says” for ten minutes, then a real lecture began. till today, whenever he wanted to encourage me to do something fearlessly, he would begin, “all the capitalist enemies are paper tigers……” when, not long time ago, i was doing my graduate school work in western universities, the chant seemed really appropriate to me. well, back to his middle school. the other reason that the textbooks were so thin back then was that they were only in school for half a day at the time. the rest of the time, the whole school would work in a factory because “workers were the best teachers, not the books or the academy.” since they were so young, they would do simple and repetitive work like folding boxes, or washing cloth. again, complaining would only make it worse because showing disrespect for factory workers, who were the best teachers for the academy, was a crime. my father said one of his classmate entered the university by turning in a blank examine paper in english tests. well, not all blank, but he wrote a chinese poem on the english language examine paper: “english sounds like dog talk and french sounds like cat talk. since our society is better than theirs, why do we have to learn their languages? long live chairman mao!” the whole school was shocked by his 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/great_chinese_famine 10 cultural revolution was a sociopolitical movement in china from 1966 to 1976. its stated goal was to preserve the “true” communist ideology in the country by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from the chinese society. however, the movement paralyzed china politically and negatively affected the country’s economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cultural_revolution memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc47 courage. a lot of foreign language teachers stopped teaching for fear that they would be caught teaching “capitalist languages”. the teaching about the evil capitalism affected my dad’s life in every aspect. he had eight sisters and brothers. the family had to save the food for those who work in the field, as a child, he had always suffered from malnutrition. corn buns were the only thing available to him. his neighbors who had only two children would have white wheat buns. when my dad told his teacher that he craved for white wheat buns, his teacher said, “white wheat buns are bad for your spirit – they spoil your stomach and make you weaker in facing the famine.” white wheat buns were “capitalist food”. i do not know what exactly shaped his personality: the famine or his teachers’ talk. nowadays, whenever i eat with my dad, i would eat all the dishes proportionally, avoiding showing him which food i like, otherwise, he would lecture: that food (the food i apparently liked, chicken wings, for instance), is bad for your spirit, it would make you weaker in facing the enemy. nevertheless, whenever my dad talked about his childhood, he always ended his stories by praising the current economic development in china. he grew up in a family that treated white wheat buns as luxury. by the time he entered college, food was no longer a problem. a few years after he got his college degree and started to work in an export company, he bought bikes, televisions, and telephones. he is very satisfied with what he got despite that he hated the current history school textbooks. in china, the economic development in recent decades had become so successful and loomed large in media, that all the other problems seem tolerable. conclusion this essay is a memoir about my childhood in post-socialist china in 1990s. on one hand, my experience was marked by the formal discourse of a socialist regime: the election to join “young pioneers”, the curriculum about revolutionary past, and the dancing competitions devoted to the party. on the other hand, after the “reform and open” policy in china, opportunities for the upward social mobility emerged. while my parents, who were traumatized by the experiences of poverty and famine enjoyed such opportunities, they pushed me to pursue such competitive opportunities against all the odds. in my experiences, sometimes, the two discourses intersect, other times, i experienced conflicts of the two discourses. while my parents were dissatisfied with the official discourse of socialist regime, the pursuit for a well-off life was normalized as the benefit of “new china”. therefore, they support the current socialist regime whole-heartedly. for my generation, growing up with endless course work, disney movies and nintendo games, the suffering past is almost forgotten. however, if you look really closely, through the red collar that children wore, the songs that were taught in schools, the elections for class monitor, you could see the past like a ghost, peeking out behind the curtain. memoirs of a socialist childhood in china: socialism, nationalism and getting ahead lei chen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.243 | vol. 6 (2018) sc48 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word walker, teen views of sex. layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a39 “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story produced by mexican immigrant youth dana walker university of northern colorado, us abstract this paper1 proposes an analysis of dialogical processes in the creation of a radio feature story titled “teen views of sex,” co-produced by mexican immigrant high school students in the context of a youth radio and radio arts program. after describing the socio-cultural and curricular context of the program, i apply zittoun and grossen’s (2013) semiotic approach to dialogicality to describe the kinds of dialogue that took place during the interviews and subsequent reflections upon the feature story and production process. the types of dialogue examined include: actual dialogue, distant dialogue, auto-dialogue, dialogue between situations, and dialogue with material objects, or non-human actants. i explore how the inter-animation of these forms of dialogue gave rise to dialogic tensions, which may have created openings for shifts in identity positioning and an enhanced sense of agency for the youth in their personal and public lives. dana walker is professor of culturally and linguistically diverse education at the university of northern colorado. her research focuses on youth media, poetry, and arts for multilingual youth, most recently in a translocal youth media research project that connects students and teachers in barcelona and greeley, co. ��� introduction advances in dialogical pedagogy in the past several decades have provided a hopeful counter narrative to the generally dehumanizing approach to education in the united states, which privileges testing over inquiry, de-professionalizes teachers through the imposition of recitation scripts, and provides inequitable learning opportunities for the children of working class immigrant families. in educational research, empirical studies have moved the field forward in helping us understand the potential benefits of dialogic practice as well as the challenges it poses (e.g., resnick, asterhan, & clarke, 2015). however, educational researchers tend to limit themselves to dialogue that is visible and measurable, which “misses the most important thing which is the invisible opening of dialogic space” (wegerif, 2017) within which participating voices enter into a relationship of “inter-illumination,” where the persuasive words of others enter into one’s own (bakhtin, 1981). these invisible openings are worthy of consideration because they may also represent potential openings for the self-authoring or the “reinvention of self” (zittoun, 2014) along 1 this research was conducted with support from a spencer foundation small grant. issn: 2325-3290 (online) “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a40 with shifts in cultural practices when individuals introduce novelty in their externalizations in ways that can potentially transform meanings and practices (freire, 2005; skinner, valsiner, & holland, 2001). in this article i propose an analysis of dialogical processes that emerged in the creation of a radio feature story titled “teen views of sex,” co-produced by tania and yoli in the context of a youth radio and radio arts program for first and second generation immigrant youth.2 i draw on zittoun and grossen’s (2013) model, which provides the analytical tools for examining the different types of dialogue involved in students’ use of cultural elements (philosophy or history texts) to construct a continuity of self across multiple spheres of experience. in the analysis presented here, i describe the kinds of dialogue that took place between tania, yoli, their interviewees and myself, in the planning, implementation, and postproduction of the radio feature story. i explore how the inter-animation of these varieties of dialogue set in motion through the creation of the feature story, gave rise to dialogic tensions that may have played a role in developing greater self-consciousness, re-positioning in their social and semiotic fields, openings to new understandings and potential action in future. situating this analysis of dialogical processes i situate my discussion in this paper within two broad areas of scholarship on dialogicality and dialogical pedagogy: 1) sociocultural psychology, specifically research that explores the dialogical processes through which the person may reinvent herself and contribute to collective change, together with the conditions that support or inhibit these processes (skinner et al., 2001; zittoun, 2014); and 2) scholars who explore dialogic pedagogy as a means for promoting student and teacher agency, democratic participation, and broad educational and social change (freire, 2005; matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovicshane, & von duyke, 2016; segal, pollak, & lefstein, 2017). i am interested in the potential of dialogicality for opening spaces for self-authorship, in which the person may reinvent herself and re-envision herself as a powerful individual who is capable of transforming her social reality in collaboration with others, what freire calls “dialogic action” (freire, 2000/1970). as noted above, whereas educational researchers of dialogical pedagogy tend to limit themselves to analyses of spoken dialogue in the classroom, recent research in cultural psychology has shown that dialogue, in fact, involves varied and heterogeneous processes, and is much more than the specific dialogue with internalized words of others, which is a common understanding of bakhtin’s (1981) notion of dialogism (grossen & orvig, 2011; marková, linell, grossen, & salazar orvig, 2007; valsiner, 2007b; zittoun & grossen, 2013). from a dialogical perspective, dialogue can involve any reference to another time, situation, meaning, discourse, person, facets of self, or cultural object which creates the possibility of two perspectives to be held simultaneously in the mind. for example, the present and the past or future, here and over there, this situation and that situation, i and others, and so on, all located within in specific social settings shaped by wider political and ideological forces (märtsin, wagoner, aveling, kadianaki, & whittaker, 2011; zittoun, 2014). dialogical approaches have revealed the dynamic dimensions of self, freed from the limitations of a static and essentialized views (grossen & orvig, 2011; hermans & gieser, 2014; ligorio & césar, 2013). yet, how does one make sense of oneself and the world when one is subject to the inchoate flow of images, voices, contradictory narratives, identities, and expectations for behavior, especially during adolescence (zittoun & grossen, 2013)? holland and co-authors (holland, lachicotte, skinner, & cain, 1998) use case studies to illustrate how self-authoring occurs when people use culturallydefined narratives and songs to “orchestrate” the voices of others. in the process, they inject their own intentions and perspective from their particular social position, as they engage and answer people who are 2 pseudonyms are used for all participants except for the professional mentors, who chose to have their real names used. tania and yoli were 15 years old at the time of this study. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a41 actually present or who may be far removed in time and space (skinner et al., 2001). zittoun and colleagues (zittoun, 2006; zittoun, duveen, gillespie, ivinson, & psaltis, 2003) have argued that a cultural element, such as a novel or a history narrative, can play an important role in the emergence of agency, when the cultural element becomes a symbolic resource that supports psycho-social processes that link various spheres of experience: past and present, distant and near, fictional and real; school, life, and work. as a symbolic resource, a novel, for example, can serve as a model for responding to the multiple and conflicting voices that speak to a young person as she attempts to define herself within her peer group, her family, society, and with regard to her own values and sense of self-worth. a cultural element might become a resource that is used to think about the past, generate alternative possibilities, or define future pathways. in this regard, when used as a symbolic resource, a cultural element might play a fundamental role in the reconfiguration of a person’s life narrative and may therefore contribute to enhancing the person’s agency on her own life trajectory. (zittoun & grossen, 2013, p. 105). in their study of students’ use of cultural elements (philosophy or history texts) to construct a sense of continuity of self across spheres of experience (school, life outside of school), zittoun and grossen (2013) examined five types of dialogue at work:3 distant dialogue, actual dialogues, auto-dialogue, dialogue between situations, and dialogue with material objects, or “non-human actants” that frame human interaction.4 this model includes dialogues one may have with internalized others (marková, 2006), such as in dialogue between situations. in connecting various spheres of experience and temporalities (the now of the current situation and the then of the situation invoked in the imagination), such dialogues link various facets of one’s own self. the interaction of these various forms of dialogue produce dialogical tensions: “under some conditions, such inner tensions might bring the person to reflect or to find new creative solutions that might yield new ideas and actions. of course, people might also want to reduce tensions by repressing some voices or complying with others” (zittoun, 2012, p. 101). whereas zittoun and grossen (2013) examine dialogical processes involving cultural elements already in circulation in the social world, the analysis presented here examines dialogical processes at work in the creation of a new cultural element, a radio feature story by two mexican immigrant high school youths, tania and yoli. i explore how the inter-animation of these varieties of dialogue set in motion through the creation of the feature story, gave rise to dialogic tensions that may have played a role in developing greater self-consciousness, agentive re-positioning in their social fields, openings to new understandings and possibilities for taking action toward change. following freire (2000/1970), i also consider the implications of externalization within dialogical processes. this is the process through which people develop conceptual tools to work on, and alter not only themselves but also their environments, “to create new settings, social destinations, personal and group trajectories, and means for producing them” (freire, cited in soutomanning & smagorinsky, 2010, p. 44). the following questions guided this inquiry: what types of dialogue can be inferred in the production of the feature story (grossen & orvig, 2011; zittoun, 2012)? what dimensions of dialogical self and self (re)positioning come into play (hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012; zittoun, 2006)? how does the interanimation of the different types of dialogue generate dialogical tension that may create openings for self 3 this typology of forms of dialogue originated in the work of grossen and orvig (2011). 4 the authors reference latour’s (1996) notion of non-human actants. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a42 authoring, shifts in perspective, and dialogical action? (freire, 2005; holland et al., 1998; zittoun & grossen, 2013). research context and methodology youth radio and radio arts was created in 2006 in the rocky mountain region of the western united states as an educational innovation with the goal of offering an alternative to remedial esl5 language and literacy practices and promoting youth agency in and out of school. the program incorporates elements of multiliteracies (thenewlondongroup, 1996), critical language teaching (norton & toohey, 2004), youth media (goodman, 2003; soep & chávez, 2010), and community based arts education (heath & smyth, 1994; heath & smyth, 1999), in order to promote personal, social, and academic development among immigrant youth, while creating greater access to digital technology and communication media. the program was designed to create a network of independent media professionals, artists, and community activists to support the literate, artistic, social, and personal development of latina/o youth. the case study i present here – tania and yoli’s feature story production – is drawn from an ethnographic study of a youth radio and radio arts program conducted in 2010-11 in a multi-grade (9– 11) high school class that combined an english as a second language (esl) class with an academic support class based on the avid model.6 the combination of the avid and esl classes in the youth radio and radio arts program brought the two teachers and myself into a co-teaching relationship. the teachers, with support from the administration, agreed to combine their two classes and devote five days a week to the youth radio program, one hour and a half each day, plus two hours after school for field trips and computer lab. the year during which this ethnographic study was conducted, i was on sabbatical leave and was sole researcher in the youth radio and radio arts program. i played multiple roles – participant observer, co-instructor, and program director – and spent four days a week in the classroom as well as after school computer lab and some evenings or weekend field trips. my six years of previous experience in the school district directing arts and media programs at the middle school level facilitated my entry to the high school.7 entering the classroom i was well aware of my position of privilege and power vis-à-vis the participants in the program—both teachers and students—as a university professor and white, middle-class woman who brought funding to the school-based program. i was also aware that perceptions of my social position might limit my access to emic, or insider perspectives, of the student participants and their psychosocial processes. to reduce the power distance, i participated in all informal after school activities including field trips, and engaged in playful, friendly conversations with students on a daily basis. i attempted to include the teachers and students as active agents in the research process: students sometimes asked to video record classroom activity or interviews, which i allowed them to do. teachers, mentors, and students provided ongoing feedback on my interpretations of the meanings that were being constructed in the context, and i shared chapters of my book based on the study as they were completed (walker, 2014). the paid mentors who participated on a weekly basis throughout the year included a bilingual radio and print journalist and a radio broadcaster, both volunteers at the local community radio station. a theater professor, actor and director originally from mexico, was the program’s artist-in-residence in the fall. a chicano poet and novelist served as writer-in-residence in the spring with support from a state humanities 5 esl is an acronym for an educational program known as “english as a second language” 6 avid: advancement via individual determination, is an educational intervention designed to raise the educational achievement of underperforming students, typically minority students. esl: english as a second language classes, at the time of this research in this school, pulled students out of content-area courses for intensive, typically remedial english instruction. 7 in addition to youth radio and radio arts, i co-directed an after-school arts and media program called poets and artists networked (pan) for four years (walker, 2003). “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a43 agency. a hip-hop dj talk-show host and community-activist mentored the students after school in the computer lab and at the radio station: he conducted two interviews with students in the studio that were broadcast on the air. the 18 students who participated in the youth radio and radio arts program were from workingclass, undocumented immigrant families in the usa. these included 15 latina/o students, two nepalese, and one russian, with equal numbers of girls and boys: 15 of the 18 students had been labeled english language learners. the students lived in trailer parks or federally subsidized housing: none of them had a computer at home. while the high school was considered the magnet school for bilingual students in the city, the students i came to know felt segregated in a separate wing of the school, excluded from the majority population in classes and social spaces, and subject to racially motivated microand macro-aggressions, including graffiti that read, “all latinos will die on october 23.” this specific social setting was shaped by wider ideological and political forces, including generalized anti-immigrant sentiment in u.s. society, racism against people of color including those who speak languages other than english, economic exploitation, and immigration enforcement policies that created an environment of uncertainty among youth who feared being separated from their families due to deportation. methodology to understand how the radio program supported dialogical processes among participants, i combined elements of interactional ethnography (castanheira, crawford, dixon, & green, 2000; green & wallat, 1981), and sociocultural psychology with a semiotic focus (zittoun & grossen, 2010, 2013). interactional ethnography joins a cultural anthropological perspective on social life (geertz, 1973/2000; spradley, 1979) with a sociolinguistic perspective on the study of language in use (gumperz & hymes, 1972; heath, 1983) to examine how people create meaning, identities, and opportunities for agency through the ways they act and react to each other through the use of language, including verbal and nonverbal semiotic systems with attention to social, cultural, and political processes (bloome, carter, christian, otto, & shuart-faris, 2005). sociocultural psychology provides the analytical tools to explore the experience of the individual as shaped by her inner life intermingled with activity and cultural tools, present and distant others, related situations, the spatial and temporal dimensions of experience and inner-dialogues, and the dynamics of personal sense-making (zittoun, 2017). for the end of the year interviews with students, i adapted a protocol created by zittoun and grossen (2010) in their longitudinal study of the use of cultural elements (philosophical and literary texts) by high school students in bridging the contexts of school and life outside of school. sociocultural psychological approaches to dialogicality can help address the gap in educational research that tends to focus only on those dimensions of dialogue that are visible/audible and measurable. recent advances have been made by researchers in this tradition to connect inner dialogicality to institutions and larger social processes, beyond interpersonal relationships to account for historico-cultural and ideological dimensions of dialogicality (gillespie & zittoun, 2013; grossen & orvig, 2011). interactional ethnography provides us with complementary set of analytical tools that allow us to develop “the big picture” and depth of field, through long term immersion in the field and analyses of data across time and contexts. in the case study discussed here, for example, knowledge gained from years in the field working with mexican immigrant community allowed me to grasp the full extent of tension among the voices captured in the feature story, due to my knowledge of cultural discord between the mexican immigrant community and the dominant social group – white middle and upper-class families – regarding teen sex. i also was aware of how the topic was treated by tania and yoli in a digital story they created previously, and i was able to identify curricular texts that were brought into dialogue with their feature story. the interactional “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a44 ethnographic approach allowed me to expand my analyses of dialogic processes in time and space, and thereby develop a perspective with enhanced depth of field and a more nuanced interpretation of the data. data collection and analysis the data sources used for this analysis included audio recorded interviews, student work, and observations and video recordings of learning activity in the classroom, the radio station, and the school computer lab during and after school. the audio and video recordings – constituting approximately 240 hours – were summarized and time-stamped by a research assistant. portions of audio and video summaries were then selected for detailed transcription based on their relevance to the research questions and emerging themes. coding followed spradley’s (1979) procedures for domain, contrastive, and taxonomic analyses of ethnographic interviews. for this analysis i focused on the feature story due to its inherent dialogicality. students were expected to represent and consider multiple perspectives on a topic they selected, which offered the potential for students to see “as if from the perspective of others” (wegerif, 2013, p. 47), to see, hold, or feel from multiple views at once (wegerif, 2017). having identified the feature story and its production process as the anchor for the analysis of dialogical processes, i used the “backward and forward mapping” strategy proposed by putney and colleagues (putney, green, dixon, durán, & yeager, 2000) to reconstruct tania and yoli’s experience of the feature story project and their reflections on the process. i constructed a timeline of events, products, and processes related to the feature story with associated data records. i transcribed the feature story, my exit interviews with tania and yoli, and video and audio recordings of what appeared to be key interactions in whole class, small group work, and interactions with the radio journalist mentor joe richey. i conducted discourse analyses of selected transcripts, and a content analysis of the feature story. my analysis is presented in three broad strokes. first, i situate the process and final product of the feature story in time and space. i then discuss the dialogical processes and openings for authorial agency that could be inferred from different types of dialogue involved in the process. finally, i show how the feature story became a symbolic resource for other youth, in what i perceive to be a form of cultural, collective transformation. overview of the curriculum and feature story genre because youth radio and radio arts was designed as a community-school linked network that connected learners and learning to practitioners and their work in independent media and arts organizations, the program introduced a set of practices and material and conceptual artifacts that were new for both students and teachers. the curricular texts consisted of online multimodal stories taken from the youth media international website (youthradio, 2016), mainstream news organizations, the center for digital stories (storycenter, 2009), oral and visual texts, guest speakers, and radio and digital stories created by peers and discussed in class. to produce the feature story, the students and teachers used audio and video editing applications, audio recording devices, flash drives, the internet, and the website application iweb to create content for the program website. they conducted background research and evaluated sources on the web; they composed interview questions, scheduled and conducted interviews, edited their own and others’ recorded voices. they received peer and adult critique, and presented their work to a larger public, both in person and on the air. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a45 curriculum and instruction were organized around activity cycles and genres, falling within three main domains: radio production and broadcast, multimedia production and digital design, and radio arts. these are presented in table 1. table 1. activity cycles and genres activity cycles genres radio production and broadcast youth commentaries (oct.–dec.) feature story: our school community (jan.–may) work in the kpfw station studios (oct.–may) vox pops (vox populi) (dec., april) “if i were mayor of this city i would . . .” (in class) “how can we make this city a better place for youth?” (in the streets) training sessions in the station studios interviews by radio personnel at the station multimedia production and digital design digital stories: our neighborhood community, personal life stories (oct.–may) website content development (nov.–may) end-of-semester presentations by students of their productions (dec., june) radio arts radio skits (oct.–nov.) poetry writing and performance (mar.–june) field trips to chicano theater in a nearby city (dec., april) for each genre taught, we provided overt instruction for developing control of the specific genre focused on (a) the social purpose of the genre, including the kinds of people associated with the genre and how it is used to get something done, such the kinds of technology that are used; (b) the particular structure or organization of the genre; and (c) the language features that are typical of that genre. however, while students received explicit instruction in each genre, the teaching did not target an object of knowledge nor a stance toward the object of knowledge that would require distancing themselves from emotional and identification processes in order to focus on the genre techniques or forms (rochex, 2004; zittoun & grossen, 2013). in contrast, the program sought to help students develop a stance toward the voices and conditions impinging on their lives, using radio genres and communication technologies to shape their own narratives and those of their communities, rather than being mis-represented or overlooked in the media. the radio genres were taught in the program, following freire (2005), to help students become aware of the connections between their own lives and society, rather than personalize their problems as their own. the texts used to model each genre were selected to encourage dialogue about generative themes drawn from the students’ everyday lives (freire, 2000/1970). for the feature story, the class listened to, read transcripts of, and discussed examples of feature stories created by urban, multilingual and transnational youth. the unit was framed within the general theme of “our school community,” with published online youth radio stories used as models addressing topics such as secret romance in school, and undocumented students – those with unresolved legal residency status – who aspired to attend college but faced the dilemma of ineligibility. the multimodal texts were heteroglossic (bakhtin, 1981), representing a diversity of social languages, ideologies, and voices speaking english, spanish, and african american vernacular english. the structural elements of the feature story that were highlighted for students included, 1) the introduction which frames the problem drawing on background research, 2) three interviews representing divergent perspectives, 3) transitions between “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a46 sections, 4) a wrap-up or “outro” with “a punch,” and 5) the “tag,” for example, “for youth radio at beckwourth high, this is tania lendoza.” language features specific to the feature story included the different types of questions tailored to different types of interlocutors (an expert is asked different questions than a participant in an event), and a narration using a formal register and authoritative voice grounded in “the facts” for the intro and outro sections. the audio features highlighted for students included ambient sound designed to “bring the listener into the setting,” along with an aural balance of voices and sound to create overall cohesion. dialogical processes in “teen views of sex,” by tania and yoli in their feature story “teen views of sex,” tania and yoli explored adult and teen views about teen sex, supported by research and their own reflections on the subject. their production made an already compelling topic even more interesting for their various audiences by including a range of voices: a mom, a male teacher, male and female teens, the producers themselves, and the “official research” on teen sex. in their exit interviews, both tania and yoli identified the feature story as her favorite project. tania stated, “i got a lot of feedback on what sex really was to teenagers nowadays, and i now know what i can say to teenagers when they think of that problem, and i can have a better explanation to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong.” when yoli was asked if there anything she read, viewed, or listened to in class that affected her in any way, she responded, “our feature story made me realize more what’s there, not actually what it seems. i thought everyone lost their virginity their freshman year.” tania and yoli’s feature story was viewed by teachers and students as a slightly shocking, and courageous, an exemplary production that was one of two feature stories that achieved “broadcast quality” and was aired on the radio. the feature story was played as a model of the genre for students in youth radio and radio arts in subsequent years. as noted above, the feature story is inherently dialogical as it brings together and juxtaposes multiple perspectives on a controversial topic, in dialogue with the narrator. the producer arranges these voices into a single, unified whole while retaining the tension among diverging perspectives. additionally, the feature story is clearly addressed to a particular other, implying an orientation toward “a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener” (holland et al., 1998, p, 178). the following is a full transcription of tania and yoli’s feature story. transcript 1: “teen views of sex,” by tania and yoli 1 tania today, sex is a subject that is openly discussed among teens. it’s a subject that seems to 2 lose its value more and more as teens evolve into a new era. 3 yoli i think nowadays teens want everything now. we don’t want to work hard for something 4 and then have it pay off in the end. 5 tania especially sex. the age of teens having sex is getting younger and younger. during this 6 process, we interviewed a mom who shared with us her opinion on how sex is viewed by 7 teenagers nowadays. 8 mom it has changed because it seems to me that most girls don’t have respect for themselves, for 9 the way they act, the way they dress. they lack lots of respect. 10 tania [to radio audience]. we walked along boulder high halls and asked a senior and a 11 freshman on what they thought about sex to get the views of both a newcomer to high 12 school and someone who has been through it all. 13 tania [to interviewees]. what is making us teens want sex so bad? is it that it gives us a feeling 14 of being older and experienced, or is it just another oh-everyone’s-doing-it type of thing? 15 boy oh my god! but, i think it’s really fun. [laughs] “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a47 16 girl i think sex is a normal thing for teenagers (.) they should know about it first. 17 tania if this is how teens are viewing sex, then is it viewed the same in their families? do parents 18 have a big impact on teens deciding whether to have sex or wait? 19 boy they told me to wait and that everything comes at its time. 20 girl my mom talked about it since i was eleven, so, um, it’s like i’m pretty aware. 21 tania [to radio audience]. what about the pressure of high school or friends? being around kids 22 that are or are almost adults is a bit intimidating, if you ask me. 23 yoli [to interviewees]. coming into high school, do you think that everybody lost their virginity 24 in high school? 25 boy no, i think some people are still virgins. 26 girl i don’t know, but probably i would say that, like, fifty percent or like … 27 tania studies show that roughly only fifty percent of high school students lose their virginity in 28 high school. so, about fifty percent of teens are virgins by the time they reach seventeen. 29 yoli which is a good, responsible age to start having sex, right? because at seventeen you are 30 able to deal with the consequences of having sex, if there is any. 31 girl yes, a lot, like pregnancy, (.) hvi 32 girls [laughter] 33 yoli hiv 34 girls [laughter] 35 tania [to radio audience]. as you can see, the adult perspective is different from the teenage 36 perspective. 37 yoli [to radio audience]. knowing teens want to have sex and considered to be something that 38 is common among high school students, then teens should be taught about contraceptives 39 and to be smart when it comes to sex. 40 tania [to radio audience]. life is too short to have it end so quickly. 41 yoli [to radio audience]. so, don’t let the pressure of sex get to you. 42 tania for youth radio at beckwourth high, this is tania lendoza. 43 yoli and yoli solórzano. situating the feature story in time and space before examining the dialogical processes that can be inferred from the feature story itself, it is necessary to first situate the story within space-time dimension of its production. the feature story was produced in school during school time, as a class assignment for which students received a grade, with learning objectives aligned with state standards as required by the school administration. the general curriculum of this high school privileged what matusov et al. (matusov et al., 2016) call a “technological approach” to education, which assumes that, “skills” or “knowledge” are garnered in pursuit of preset curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards). since the goals of the technological approach are divorced from the students’ personal goals, values, and interests, they are incompatible and irreconcilable with what we idealize as the true goal of education, education for agency. (p. 162) the students in the program, including tania and yoli, viewed school as tedious and marginalizing (walker, 2014): their classes featured remedial reading and writing, worksheets, and a focus on how to answer the teachers’ and textbook questions. the feature story assignment, part of the school curriculum, therefore, would have been associated with the authoritarian, “monologic” (bakhtin, 1991) school discourse. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a48 however, over time, the feature story assignment and radio program more generally came to be acknowledged by students as opening spaces for expression of their perspectives and voices. the following is a sample of responses from exit interviews with student participants: in youth radio you learn how to express yourself and how to let people know what you think and talk for yourself, but also for other people – to express your opinions. (sonia) in other classes we have to be most of the time quiet and just take notes. notes, notes, notes. we never get to express ourselves or make comments because in other classes we just have to take notes and just sit there. (yoli) in this class you say what you’re thinking, not just like answering teachers question. in other classes you only talk about the subject, not your opinion. (delfina) youth radio gives us a chance to express what we feel and let others know what we think about topics. (yoli) the pre-existing contradiction between school and program ideologies about personhood and learning would have created a dialogical tension in the feature story from the very start. by choosing to include the school counselor as one of their interviewees, it seems that tania and yoli elected to directly confront the authoritative school discourse by bringing this voice into relationship with voices from their mexicanamerican peer group and family at home. in their radio story, the girls represent some of the contradictory perspectives in u.s. and mexican society and different generations on teen sex: “as you can see, the adult perspective is different from the teenage perspective,” tania concludes. the interviewees in this feature story could be thought of as emblematic persons representing distinct views on the subject of teen sex: a mother, a school counselor, and sexually active teens, both male and female. beyond the spoken voices, it could also be inferred that these radio voices represent the externalization of voices from an inner dialogue about when teens should become sexually active. the voices in the feature story also signify and weave together distinct social spaces and times: the time-space of home and family; of a childhood in mexico; of past selves before the “culture of romance” (holland & eisenhart, 1990) became so prominent in their teen lives; the extracurricular time-space of social media; of face-to-face gendered peer groups where sex is discussed; the time-space of science and public health policy explored on the internet; and the time-spaces of school, in and out of the classroom: the trip to the counselor’s office would have represented an escape from the classroom space where youths’ bodies are controlled and immobilized in rows of desks, even during youth radio class (except during radio improv and sometimes during poetry workshop). from a bakhtinian perspective, the conflicting voices embodied in the radio story represent ideological standpoints that the girls orchestrate as a way of responding to the dilemma that confronts them – when teens should begin to have sex. in this polyphony of voices and ideologies, the girls seem to come down on the side of the societal, school, and parental discourse that encourages teens to wait until marriage or adulthood (itself an ambiguous notion as it differs in mexico and the united states). this can be seen as they take an authoritative and evaluative stance toward teen pregnancy, giving advice – consejos – to other teens: “don’t let the pressure of sex get to you” (lines 37-41); “we [teens] don’t want to work hard for something and then have it pay off in the end” (lines 3-4). however, they do not simply “ventriloquate” the parental and dominant societal discourse. the authors add their own words, as when they pose this “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a49 question: “what about the pressure of high school or friends? being around kids that are or are almost adults is a bit intimidating, if you ask me” (lines 21-22). the end product is a dialogic object in which the societal message about teen sex appears to become “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991) for the authors: it appears as if the school discourse has been taken into their own, has intermingled with their own words, becoming “half [their’s] and half someone else’s” (p. 376). actual dialogue actual dialogue, or dialogue in praesentia, can be face-to-face or mediated by technology. actual dialogue involves more than one speaker, and the circulation of discourse as the result of interactions (zittoun & grossen, 2013, p. 119). the production of a feature story involved several types of actual dialogue: dialogue between the co-producers, dialogue with the radio mentors, and dialogue with interviewees. in the following section, in addition to describing the types of actual dialogue found in the feature story production process, i discuss two related dimensions of dialogicality: aspects of the dialogical self that can be inferred, and the re-positioning of self in one’s social field. dialogue between the co-producers. tania and yoli spent a good deal of time in dialogue, both at school and out-of-school. production work on the feature story occurred primarily after school in the computer lab, amid intense conversations, excited laughter, and clear signals for the need for privacy and no adult intervention. tania and yoli both lived in the same federally subsidized, low-income housing projects, and shared common childhood and early teen experiences. in their earlier digital story, the girls juxtaposed images of young teen girls and older gang-identified males with the following narrative: transcript 2: excerpt of digital story titled “back then,” by tania and yoli 1 san juan is where we live. it’s a neighborhood that is mostly populated by mexicans. 2 back when we were ten, in elementary [school], everything seemed fine. 3 we had playgrounds, wide open fields, friends. 4 everything seemed perfect in our own little world… 5 but then came 13, when we started to grasp the concept of what real life is… 6 weed [marijuana] 7 cocaine 8 alcohol and sex. 9 it’s all part of the ugly world the cool kids are living. in both their digital story and their feature story, the girls explore the challenges they faced growing up exposed to young adult male drug abuse and sexual activity. as tania states in the feature story regarding the pressure on teens to have sex at an early age, “being around kids that are or are almost adults is a bit intimidating, if you ask me.” the girls examine these difficult questions through extensive dialogue over a period of approximately four weeks. together they co-construct a feature story that draws together some of the contradictory perspectives on the topic of teen sex, and begin to take a stance – however tentative, as evidenced in the hesitant tone of tania’s final statement above – toward the voices that are impinging on their lives, with real consequences in this key moment in their life trajectories. dialogue with the radio journalist mentor. grant funding obtained for this research allowed me to hire professional writers and artists as mentors for students in the program. mentors from the local community radio station worked with students twice weekly from october through may. the continuity of mentor support allowed for relationships of trust to develop, and for students to benefit from extended exposure and engagement with professionals and their practices from independent media and arts organizations. an important component of the instruction and production process of radio stories was “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a50 extended dialogue with the journalist mentors. in these small group or individual sessions the mentors helped students elaborate and refine their ideas and language on their chosen topics while providing guidance on the genre features and approaches to writing and speaking for the radio. this mentoring by journalists in speaking and writing for radio was identified by several students as critical to developing language skills and a public voice for communication in the public media sphere. joe richey was the program’s journalistic writing coach and “managing editor” for the student radio productions. he modeled the feature story using a syndicated story he had produced on the mexican-u.s. border zone. students pitched their ideas for stories to him, and he decided when written drafts were ready to be recorded. joe showed students how to connect a personal issue to the larger sociocultural context. in tania’s radio commentary, for example, she began her writing process by describing her own situation at home. her final product “all teens need a second home,” generalized her personal experience to other teens who might suffer forms of abuse at home. these dialogues with joe facilitated the negotiation of the numerous discourses that students brought with them to the classroom from home, peer, and national cultures. transcript 3: excerpt from feature story “teen views of sex,” by tania and yoli 37 yoli [to radio audience]. knowing teens want to have sex and considered to be something that 38 is common among high school students, then teens should be taught about contraceptives 39 and to be smart when it comes to sex. 40 tania [to radio audience]. life is too short to have it end so quickly. 41 yoli [to radio audience]. so, don’t let the pressure of sex get to you. 42 tania for youth radio at beckwourth high, this is tania lendoza. 43 yoli and yoli solórzano. ethnographic data from across the year helped contextualize the construction of the authoritative voice of the co-producers/narrators heard in the feature story. interactions recorded between joe richey and the girls indicated that he encouraged the girls to frame their feature story as a public service announcement (psa), though this was not intended as part of the originally modelled genre. the psa “speech genre” would have resonated with tania whose previously produced radio commentary closed with the statement, “i stand for my generation and send a message to all teenagers to stay strong, brush your shoulders off, and keep walking forward.” the authoritative tone expressed in the feature story reveal an emerging stance among tania and yoli toward the voices – especially those teen and young adult males – pressuring girl teens to have sex at an early age. this stance developed in part through extended dialogue over time with joe richey. dialogues and the dialogical self in the interview process. the actual interviews conducted for the feature story involved several dimensions of dialogue, and call attention to hermans’ and co-authors’ notion of dialogical self (hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). developing the interview questions required that the girls orient themselves toward their interlocutors in order to frame meaningful questions. at the same time, the questions needed to be framed in such a way that the interviewees would orient themselves to the girls’ interests and the central concern of the story. rommetveit (1992, cited in wegerif, 2017) might have called this circularity of reference, “attunement to the attunement of the other.” preparation for the interviews included rehearsals in posing follow-up questions, which required careful listening and on-thespot improvisation of new questions. the process of anticipating and building on the thoughts of the other would have intermingled the mind of the interviewer with that of the interviewee in the moment. later, during the editing process, these dialogical movements became objects of reflection and autodialogue, as i discuss below. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a51 autodialogue is the type of dialogue that a person has with herself, as when one speaks to oneself in the mirror, internally or audibly. while not directly observable, autodialogue can be inferred, according to zittoun and grossen (2013), by the presence of certain discursive markers in a person’s speech, such as the use of pronouns indicating different enunciative positionings, “or the use of opposition markers such as ‘but,’ ‘on the other hand,’ etc. … all these markers can be seen as indicators of dialogical tensions between various facets of the self. (p. 119). the case of gaëtane is used by the authors to illustrate aspects of autodialogue. in her reflection on her use of music to mediate psychological states, gaëtane presents herself in two different aspects: “…the ‘i’ who is in a good mood and the ‘i’ who feels unhappy” (p. 119). gaëtane’s autodialogue about her choice of music depending on her moods shows, according to the authors, that she looks after herself, as if she were another person. her discourse also reveals different “i’s” in different moments in time. zittoun and grossen’s (2013) concept of autodialogue, in this sense, is suggestive of the notion of shifting “i-positions” within dialogical self-theory, though the authors refrain from citing hermans and colleagues in relation to autodialogue. (e.g., hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). in my analysis of tania and yoli’s reflections on the feature story interview process, i make use of elements of the concept of shifting “i-positions” to elaborate the presence of autodialogue in the feature story production, including the girls’ reflections upon the process. tania and yoli’s reflections on the interview process, shown in transcript 4 below, appear to have centered on three facets of the experience: the girls reflected upon the embodied voices of the speakers, upon the thought processes revealed in the interview, and on the perspectives communicated by the interviewees. in her exit interview, tania describes the dialogue mediated by a recording device as a moment when she simultaneously sees and interacts with the interviewee, while assuming that she is being seen by the other as slightly audacious and transgressive: a girl asking boys, men, and a mother about teen sex. it could be said that tania and yoli thus position themselves as both the self (i) as the knower, and the self (me) as the known (hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). in conducting the interviews for their feature story, tania and yoli positioned themselves as both the self (i) as the knower, and the self (me) as the known (hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). in herman and colleagues’ theory of the dialogical self, the self is composed of temporary positions in relation to other real or imagined people and objects, shaped by interactions, space, time, and recurring situations (hermans, 2001; hermans & gieser, 2014; hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). in her exit interview, tania describes the dialogue mediated by a recording device as a moment when she simultaneously sees and interacts with the interviewee, while assuming that she is being seen by the other as slightly audacious and transgressive: a girl asking boys, men, and a mother about teen sex. in the following interview with me, tania describes both a self as interviewer (self as knower), and self as seen through the eyes of the male teacher (self as known): transcript 4: an interview between tania and dana (05/02/11) 1 dana: has youth radio helped you develop more self-confidence in any way? 2 tania: it has. just because you know we show our feature stories and people are seeing 3 what we did specifically, what we worked for, how we like developed out 4 narration. and we play them [to the class] in the end. at first it’s a little shy but like 5 in the end you see how they [the interviewees] really see it and they’re 6 [interviewees or audience?] not laughing and cracking jokes about it. they’re “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a52 7 [interviewee or audience?] really taking it seriously so… 8 dana: so the audience helps you develop confidence? 9 tania: definitely. 10 dana: that’s interesting. i hadn’t thought about that. what was it like to interview people 11 who weren’t necessarily your friends for your feature story? was that difficult? 12 tania: at first it was just because they take you like as being always the funny friend 13 someone you can count on but when it comes to serious work like you know 14 interviewing on their perspective on sex, they take it like, they’ll accept it, but it’s a 15 little awkward at first for them because now they see you all serious. 16 dana: now you’re talking about your friends, right? right. and what was it like it like to 17 (.) did you interview people that you didn’t really know? 18 tania: i did. with selena it was. or an adult, or (..)? oh yeah. mr. lyndberg, i think it 19 was. he’s a gym teacher here. 20 dana: he teaches sex ed? health and sex ed. so what was it like to interview him? 21 tania: at first it was like a little nerve-wracking just because he is an adult and he is a 22 male so it’s like and we’re both girls so it’s like, at first it was a little nervous but 23 after you know, he adjusted to it and it was like, he was [thinking], “this is for their 24 grade,” so he was like, “so.” he did help us out, so it definitely worked out. 25 dana: how did you feel after you interviewed him, after going through 26 your nervousness? 27 tania: afterward it was a little more comfortable and like now every time i see him in the 28 hall it’s always like, “oh hey how are you?” “good.” so i think it definitely built 29 up my confidence to talk to people when i need to. 30 dana: and maybe developed relations with other people that you didn’t know? like him? 31 like now you say hello and stuff like that. 32 tania: yeah. in this excerpt, tania first describes the internal experience of the interview with the male teacher: “at first it was a little nerve-wracking” (line 2). she then describes herself as the girl who is seen by the male teacher (the self as known): “he is an adult and he is a male…and we’re both girls” (lines 22-23). she then goes on to offer a form or reported inner speech on the part of the teacher, describing the situation from his perspective: “[h]e was thinking, “this is for their grade” (lines 24-25). tania is thus representing herself from two different perspectives simultaneously, looking at herself from the inside and the outside, occupying two different positions. as bakhtin (1981) suggests, constructing “outsideness” is a way of representing ourselves to ourselves from the vantage point of others, a way of standing apart from immediate experience while still defining it as ours through the arrangement of perspectives and voices (holland et al., 1998). repositioning through dialogue in interviews. in addition to the shifting i-positions of the interviewers noted in the discussion thus far, social positioning processes were also important dimensions of dialogicality noted in this case. social positioning involves identity processes, the repositioning of the person “in her social and symbolic fields” (zittoun, 2008, p. 166)), and new representations of past and possible future selves. in reading or listening to the feature story one is struck by the reversal of roles in “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a53 terms of who gets to ask whom about sex: in this instance, it is girls asking boys and adults — both male and female — in ways that are usually taboo in school (at least in u.s. society in the rocky mountain region). the girls challenge hegemonic gender roles in their production process. in the course of the interview tania’s positional identity shifts from that of a shy and funny girl (someone who jokes around), to a radio interviewer who is to be taken seriously. tania reveals her awareness of the shift in her positional identity when she points to the social awkwardness the shift caused among her peers: transcript 5: interview between tania and dana (05/2/11) 31 at first it was just because they take you like as being always the funny friend 32 someone you can count on but when it comes to serious work like you know 33 interviewing on their perspective on sex, they take it like, they’ll accept it, but it’s a 34 little awkward at first for them because now they see you all serious similarly, tania’s reflections on the interview with the school counselor, described in her interview with me on may 2, 2011 (transcript 2, lines 22-25), highlight the discomfort felt by the girls as well as the adult male teacher during the interaction. however, she explains that he was forced to adjust to their agenda, reversing the gender and age hierarchies. it is interesting to note that in subsequent encounters in the school hallways it was she, not the male teacher, who initiated the informal, friendly greetings. according to tania, this experience built her confidence in talking to people, including those outside her usual spheres of experience. the shifts in identity positionings that she describes, while momentary and specific to the interview process, may have created openings for the girls to imagine alternative gender roles and “possible selves” (cole, 1996). another aspect of re-positioning that emerged in tania’s reflection on the interviews she and yoli conducted, had to do with transitioning from someone who was not taken seriously, to someone who could be both lighthearted and someone of consequence. before, she was seen only as “the funny friend” (line 16) or as she says at another point in the exit interview, “someone who is outgoing and funny and different.” now, she also wants to be seen as someone to be taken seriously, whose opinion or stance – what she calls “voice” – matters. transcript 6: interview between dana and tania (05/02/11) 1 dana: can you think of some concrete examples of things that you’ve done in 2 this class that have helped you develop your voice? 3 tania: i would say the teen sex views just because, like it gets, like, you know, 4 you can tell that my voice is very serious about that and before i wouldn’t 5 be able to be so serious about such a small thing. and now i’m more 6 serious and i can project my voice to let them know that i am being really 7 serious about the situation. it could be inferred that work on the feature story led to a transformation in tania’s relationship to herself, as well as to others and to objects of knowledge – in this case teen sex. she learned that if she worked hard, developed confidence and the proper communication tools, she would be taken seriously – she could be “successful.” in her exit interview tania reflected, “i learned that i can be successful you know if i (..) because i did get a little push in youth radio like they were like, “go and interview” you know be confident in yourself and you know and just what’s in me, and go use it outside.” this quote from tania recalls freire’s (2005) notion of dialogic action and his interest in externalization as the process through “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a54 which people acquire tools to work on, and alter, not only themselves but also their worlds – “to be confident in yourself…just what’s in me, and go use it outside.” dialogue among situations the feature story shows tania and yoli moving among and linking several situations and social spaces: home (interview with mother); her peer group (interview with other youth); school (interview with the assistant principal); and the distant world of public policy and scientific research. the interview process placed her in a location of dialogical tension between these various situations, allowing her not only to explore and synthesize a range of diverse perspectives on the topic. it also enabled her to examine her own knowledge and feelings on the subject of teen sex in the context of our exit interview: “sex is a thing that some kids thought everyone did by their junior year. but we learned that’s not true.” while the process may have been emotional tumultuous – “it does like bring out a little happiness or a little sadness or a little angriness, you know, towards like what i’m living or how i’m living and so forth,” tania and yoli came through the process feeling not only more knowledgeable, but also empowered to share her knowledge with other teens “so they don’t make the same mistakes.” dialogue with distant imagined others in the local community and “on the air.” distant dialogues refer to dialogues with absent parties, living or fictional, in the present past or future (zittoun & grossen, 2013). in the program there was frequent talk of radio audiences, including kareem – the hip hop dj and radio host mentor mention – that “you never know who might be listening,” and “there may be millions of people listening all over the world” (through internet radio). the students were interviewed at the community radio station and learned how to use the audio board there. they met professionals and volunteers to talked to them about the local community audiences they would reach. the students thus worked with these potential community and global internet-based audiences in mind. when tania and yoli’s feature story was broadcast on the radio and the internet, they might have imagined what people “out there” thought about their piece, and about them. i would argue that this sense of a projected self (on the airwaves), together with an enlarging sense of community through their participation in the radio station and interactions with individuals from other community-based organizations, contributed to an expanding sense of self and realm of potential action. the following conversation reveals how the teacher ray and i together interpreted changes we were observing in students’ sense of themselves, in terms of voice, agency, and the potential for dialogic action: transcript 7: conversation between ray, the esl teacher, and dana (05/10/11) 1 ray: [an outcome of this program has been] students feel they belong to a greater community, 2 and once they do that then they feel they’re important, and they have a 3 voice. i think that the community has made them feel that—the lyles, the joe 4 richeys, that they belong to this community 5 dana: what community? 6 ray: [our city]. and our studies on community, school, their neighborhood, combined 7 with people from the community coming to them and saying, like tim lately saying, 8 “you guys have something to say.” not just teachers–teachers are supposed to say 9 that. so i think all that contributes, and now they’re starting to have their voice, 10 they’re starting to say, “yeah, i do have something to say.” 11 dana: sandra said something interesting to me. she said, “we start looking into issues and “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a55 12 problems in our communities and then we feel like we wanna do something about it.” 13 ray: yeah, i think when you ask them to, it’s saying, “you’re important, tell me.” dialogue between humans and non-human actants cultural elements are semiotic devices made out of signs in a material, perceptible form that carry meaning that is socially shared (zittoun, 2006). a feature story is composed of semiotic units of introductory music, images, narration, ambient sound, and discourse to which other people attach meanings that come to be shared through cultural processes such discussing and critiquing a feature story in the classroom. when someone creates a new feature story, they use the existing genre rules of composition (internalization), while adding new elements or new translations of existing forms through processes of externalization (valsiner, 2007b). these objects can be viewed as creating a space of dialogical tensions between different times, spaces, and multiple voices. in producing their feature story tania and yoli entered into dialogue with feature stories that were selected to model the genre. these feature stories were produced by other youth and made available to our students in the context of whole class listening and discussion sometimes accompanied by transcripts. one cultural element with which tania and yoli seem to have been in dialogue during their production, was a feature story presented in class five months earlier entitled secret dating. in this feature story a spanish-english bilingual teenage girl explores the dilemmas faced by a teen whose parents, she believes, disapprove of her having a boyfriend. the author interviews her mom and her boyfriend. it seems that the topic and the voices in this radio story found resonance with tania and yoli, and triggered emotional elaboration and reflection on the dilemma addressed. elements of the secret dating story entered into the creation of their own feature story, such as the types of people selected for interview (mother, boyfriend), the stance of the interviewer taken toward the mother (seeking an opinion rather than advice), and the general theme of teen romance and sex. this example shows the forward motion of change that can be engendered through dialogue with a cultural element, or non-human actant. in this case the girls used an existing cultural element – secret dating – for interpreting their own experience and conferring sense to it. they then combined words, themes, and images from that symbolic resource with their own words, images, and ideas in a new creation. the new feature story created space for self-authoring as well as for semiotic work among other youth going forward, as i will explain. with the growing acknowledgement they received for their compelling radio production, tania and yoli began to see themselves in a new light, as serious more mature teens who could shape the perspectives of younger siblings and other teens through their radio stories. as noted above, yoli’s favorite project in the youth radio and radio arts program was the feature story, because it made her “realize more what’s there, not actually what it seems,” and because she appreciated gaining insight into the dialogical nature of human society: “there’s always two sides to a story.” tania’s favorite project in the program was the feature story, because in the process she gained the knowledge and communication skills that would allow her to shape the perspectives and futures of younger teens and siblings: my favorite project was the feature story because i got a lot of feedback on what sex really was to teenagers nowadays, and i now know what i can say to teenagers when they think of that problem, and i can have a better explanation to tell them what’s right and what’s wrong. the feature story was one of many projects in the youth radio program that permitted tania to link program-based knowledge and activity to spheres of experience outside school, while gaining the tools with which to transform her already strong sense of social responsibility into action for social change in her “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a56 community. both tonia and yoli’s reflections upon the interview and production process revealed growing self-awareness about themselves and their positionality in relation to others. their enhanced sense of agency was expressed by tania in relation to shifting identity positions in the gender hierarchy, as well as their narrative of becoming mature teens with the knowledge and communication tools necessary to inform other teens about the realities of teen sex. concluding remarks the purpose of this paper was to provide a fine-grained analysis of the dialogical processes that could be inferred from the production of a radio feature story “teen views of sex.” drawing on the work of zittoun & grossen (2013), i examined five types of dialogue to understand how their interaction produced a dialogical tension that created space for reflection and openings for self-authoring, as well as taking action in the world. findings from this case study called for consideration of related approaches of positioning and dialogical self theory (hermans, 1999; hermans & hermans-konopka, 2012). bakhtin (1981) wrote that struggling with another's discourse is crucial for the development of an individual's consciousness. when voices become critically interanimated, the person must take a position among and toward the voices. in the case discussed here tania and yoli used the feature story genre to juxtapose competing voices and took a stance toward the voices by stating their conclusions about what they had learned, drawing in part on their own experience. further opportunities for reflection were offered in the hour-long exit interviews, which constituted a kind of “thinking space” (perret-clermnot, 2004) for students and the researcher: “the thinking space is the frontier of freedom in the psychic activity in which the individual elaborates the perceived reality in order to represent or symbolize it and to become able to reflect on it” (perret-clermnot, 2004, p. 3). making dialogical tools such as the feature story available to youth in educational settings is critically important. adolescence is a time when the person is subject to an incoherent flow of images, voices, narratives, identities and expectations for who they should be and become in the various cultural worlds they inhabit. orienting oneself within the multitude of voices requires that the individual transform the voices and messages encountered in various activities, not by simply internalizing collective representations, but by reconstructing and orchestrating them in personally meaningful forms that resonate with past life experiences and with future possibilities (skinner et al., 2001). educational researchers should seek a deeper understanding of dialogicality that goes beyond classroom dialogue, and even the presence of other persons in one’s discourse. as zittoun (2014) writes, “if dialogicality is a proper condition of the mind – of the person in her social and cultural environment – then it is important to see what supports such dialogicality” (p. 105). in the analysis presented here i explore a variety of dialogical processes in the production of a feature story, which seem to nourish youths’ capacity for reinventing themselves. further research should continue this line of inquiry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of dialogical processes, in order strengthen efforts to understand the conditions that sustain dialogicality and create openings for agency and the potential for dialogical action in one’s community and world. acknowledgment i would like to thank the reviewers, diana jaleh arya, and especially ana marjanovic-shane and antti rajala for their dialogical approach to reviewing and editing, which has been essential to bringing this manuscript to publication, while providing me with an invaluable learning experience. “teen views of sex:” inter-animation of dialogues in a radio feature story dana walker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.175 | vol. 6 (2018) a57 references bakhtin, m. m. 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(2013). cultural elements as means of constructing the continuity of self across various spheres of experience. in m. b. ligorio & m. césar (eds.), interplays between dialogical learning and dialogical self (pp. 99-126). charlotte, n.c.: information age publishing. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word i thought you’d never become one of us (layout)1.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a1 i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley kelburn normal school, new zealand abstract in this paper, i describe a collaborative process in which a class of grade 6&7 students made and performed two plays, and also transformed their learning. in this process, a reconfiguring of the spaces of learning, the students and i adapted a variety of literacy and drama practices; a key change in practice was the shift away from an instrumental mode of dialogue in which the teacher occupies the superior position of knower and evaluator, towards a bakhtinian mode in which dialogue, as heteroglossic, moves between all the participants, and becomes the main purpose of learning. in a dynamic combination of linguistic, theatrical, and relational meaning making, the students moved clear of the outcomes-based learning that had hitherto stultified their interactions and language. as a result, they developed a new creative agency, both singly and as a collective, and an authoritative discourse. they left this discourse open for me to join, and also continue afterwards, as i have done here, by presenting and interpreting their voices, and including new ones.1 charles bisley is a teacher and the curriculum leader at kelburn normal school, in wellington, new zealand. there he leads participatory action research into ways to develop the school's curriculum to empower all students. he has a background in the performing arts, and draws on all the arts to make learning, particularly in literacy, a creative collaboration. he teaches students from k to grade 7, with an emphasis on grade 4 to 7. he is the vice president of drama new zealand, the national organisation for drama teachers and researchers across all sectors. he is also on the editorial boards of two academic journals, and in his spare time writes poetry. acknowledgement i would like to express my appreciation to ana marjanovic-shane and bojana skorc, the managing editors, and also to the reviewers, for their constructive responses which helped me to improve this article considerably. also to my colleagues at kelburn normal school for the wider conversation and research this project was part of, particularly linda kingston, alistair button, justine mcdonald, michelle hunt, and danielle sanders. and finally my co-authors, the children of senior additional english room 2010, who created the momentous events i describe here. 1 editorial note: charles bisley’s article is an unusual and brave attempt to transcend the current norms of scholarly and academic genres and create a polyphonic article in which he describes a year long educational event through the voices of all of its participants – among which he counts not only his students and himself, and their audience of parents and the school authorities, but also includes educational, literary and philosophical authors who inspired him and whose thoughts guided him in his actions and reflections during and after his project in creating dramatic spaces and times with his students. his writing has elements of reflective auto-ethnography, woolfian lyrical stream of consciousness, dialogic double-voicedness and a storytelling narrative that is intended to transport the reader into an experience of the dramatic enfolding of the events and their protagonists, actors and directors: his students and himself. although, his work doesn’t follow what is currently assumed to be the scientific criteria regarding form, length or standard components, we find it interesting and valuable as a polyphonic approach and qualitative study. issn: 2325-3290 (online) i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a2 1. an unforeseen inquiry “i am always answerable for the response that is generated from the unique place i occupy in existence. my responses begin to form a pattern: the dialogue i have begins to assume the form of a text, a kind of book” (30). michael holquist it’s late in the last term and the children are busy, rehearsing their parts in our new play sooner or later. there are twenty eleven to thirteen year olds in the rainbow room, a space designed for fifteen five year olds. in a few days we’re off to the gryphon – a theatre in town – and i’ll have my hands full then. right now though, i’m sitting at my desk with the script. and there’s maisie. she’s stepped into the little gap right before my desk. she has her stern listen-to-memr-biz face. look, this is serious! she’s taken up by what she has to say to me: maisie: i thought you’d never become one of us. she says it and that’s that. maisie, she’s not only deep, as the kids say, but she’s also learnt to put it out there. i was just one of the play makers, and the kids were working closely together, in an independent phase. the atmosphere was convivial; their talk was all about the play, and between them, mostly. there were eddies of quiet too. maisie’s announcement took me by surprise. one of them was the last thing i thought i’d be. from the beginning, i’d offered these kids new practices and roles so that they could take the learning away from me, from my superior role as knower and evaluator. so as time went on, i’d taken great satisfaction in watching one asymmetry replace another. as playmakers and performers, the children had brought their higher imaginative powers to the fore. and they’d also become researchers, in their own way. when i set this research process in motion, i knew i wasn’t going to get far without their ideas and questions. i backed the kids to take an active part in the process, even if i had to wait for them to do so. i didn’t have a method for them, and one consequence was the kids had set off on inquiries of their own. i took it that maisie was answering a question she’d come up with about me. her answer came across as more about the class than me, as an afterthought to another inquiry, perhaps. it’s not that i doubted her word about meit’s just i felt i was borderline. her words came from some way off, from them. and if i were really part of this ‘us’, how come i hadn’t understood that myself? around the performances of the two playsfirst, thank you for holding and then, sooner or later, the class became coherent a new way. despite the fact that they were still pulling in so many directions, they also were pulling together. i saw their creative agency as a group, and i’d call this polyphony now, to use bakhtin’s metaphor. and later i came to ask what if, along with their play, this class had created their own way of learning, and a language to go with it, an internally persuasive discourse that took over from instructional language, from its authoritarian discourse? was their authorship of this discourse the dialogical struggle which bakhtin describes as determining “the very basis of our ideological relationship with the world”? i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a3 (discourse 342). maisie spoke with authority, and from then on, i felt i had to answer her somehow, and the class she represented. as i didn’t understand this new dialogue, i would have to take it further, write a new one of my own. gary saul morson: “we not only learn, we also learn to learn, and we learn to learn best when we engage in dialogue with others and ourselves. we appropriate the world of difference and ourselves develop new potentials. these potentials allow us to appropriate yet more voices” (331). 2. dialogue, means or end? “the relation between educator and student is a power relation by virtue of the practice itself. no amount of dialogue will change the fact that in this relation one party determines the grades and the other does not, one possesses the knowledge that the other does not (or not in the same measure), and one partakes of an institutional power that the other does not” (561) paul fairfield to finish off its practice each week, piccolo sings the miller of dee2. it’s a melancholy number, best with the lights off, the room in shadow. the kids like the ritual, the quiet afterwards; even if the next class is bumping around outside, they hold still and savour the moment. but the other day mira a grade 3 student interrupted the quiet to ask me. mira: why do you turn the lights off for the song? i was puzzled wasn’t this piccolo’s secret custom, one the newbies followed the others on? mira’s question seemed rhetorical, so i turned it back to her with a why do we? when she said nothing, i added a you know, don’t you? she smiled in seeming agreement, but then asked again. i paused, puzzled by her insistence. meanwhile some of the next class had snuck in, and were watching. one of them, claudia, ten, took her chance. claudia: mr bisley... it’s because teachers ask so many questions... and they always know the answers. claudia’s quite the observer, and not one just to step in. the audience of her peers enjoyed her move, seemed right behind her. he’s a teacher, and even if you told him how it was for us, would he get it? claudia’s answer took me back to maisie’s. as one class took themselves off, the next got ready. i didn’t have anything to say to claudia; however, this encounter seemed the reverse of the other. i felt isolated mira’s words had pushed me right away from the class. was her question a comeback, for both that stream of rhetorical questions we teachers ask, and also the questions that maintain us as the experts, and the kids as subordinate. the kids were righti was the one with my finger on the switch. and yet the class’s response, their mutual recognition of their subordinate role, their limited agency as learners at school, reminded me there were other conversations and worlds they were part where they had more agency. brought back maisie’s us. 2at kelburn normal school i teach two literacy classes, and a variety of performing arts ensembles, including piccolo, a choir for grade 3-5 students. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a4 paul fairfield reminds us that the educational relation is a power one by virtue of the practice itself. in my school, the power relation often goes unremarked, and i don’t kid myself that this practice isn’t ingrained in my work too. our children are used to, depend on it . dialoguethat won’t change things on its own; instead my approach has been to work around the problem, to open up many fronts on it. if i developed alternative language practicesplural, dialogic, and aestheticwith kids, might they also think differently about the way they learnt? in 2010, for the research project described here, i’d set up adopting such alternative linguistic and aesthetic practices as our main action. how could we adopt and adapt literacy to loosen the language that framed it, and find more space, other spaces for the class’s voices and thoughts? i planned, specifically, to experiment with a literacy/drama blend that would offer the kids to collaborate on a playmaking and performing project, and reconfigure the socially restrictive space that went with standardised literacy3. i’ve often thought about arguments that dismiss schools as places for learning. taking these into account, i’m developing an argument here about how this class’s alternative practices changed the power relation inside a school4. in the ignorant schoolmaster, for example, jacques ranciere contends that the teacher, because of his institutional role as knower, and the fixed language that goes with that role, can’t teach his students to speak their thoughts, and can’t therefore establish a relation of equality with them. charles bingham & gert biesta: “to gain voice in this way would mean that the master needs to tell the learners what they are thinking and sayingwhich at the very same time ‘overwrites’ their own thought and speech and denies them their capacity for thought and speech” (140). indeed. but children also speak and learn elsewhere, and they can bring these other languages and learnings into school5. claudia and her piccolo audience, for example, show how knowing kids can be about how they are made to learn, and implies kids know about other learning too, and share this awareness too. what if teachers put aside their magisterial status, and instead gained voice by responding to such learners? in its early days, i felt that piccolo push back from maisie’s class too, but push back wasn’t all. some of the children, knowing i did things differently, would give me this curious look, before they’d learnt to speak up and ask. claudia’s mild tone of voice, her tone of candour rather than argument, was similar. i encountered that in this class tooan expectancy. had they come up with a question about me, like maisie? did i have some potential? the piccolo encounter represents a further school-wide context that was relevant to this research. our school has building a powerful learning culture as a strategic goal; in this, developing learning conversations has been the key strategy. back in 2010, many classes had a clear procedure for this conversation or dialogue, an instructional one deriving loosely from vygotsky.6 the main purpose of this dialogue is knowledge acquisition, and the role of the teacher there, as holquist describes it, is one of tutor, the one who with more consciousness assists the ones with less. 3 for the first term of this three term project, the three other grade 6& 7 literacy classes joined with mine to make devising and performing a play the major component of their literacy programme. each teachers had their own focus; the question we did share was to do with a more open planning process. 4 since 2009, other classes i have taught, and other teachers with other classes, attempted similar changes as part of an ongoing process of teacher inquiry and curriculum development at kelburn normal school. 5 i had learnt this from what my own children said to me, from the expressiveness of their language and learning away from school. 6 our vygotsky in use is far from the actual texts, for example our use of the term zpd for a group teaching situation. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a5 michael holquist: “the child needs to cross the distance from one state to another in cognitive space, which is precisely the point where vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development becomes crucial” (82). in our learning conversations, the child or groups of children cross the distance, guided by teacher modelling and questioning. in teacher speak, their move is “scaffolded” by our questions and prompts; the move across is also up. the scaffold can be quite restrictive.7 although it has worked well well for reaching prescribed cognitive outcomes, this dialogic practice can, as bingham and biesta argue, overwrite the children’s own language and thoughts. the teacher follows, models and monitors an instructional speech genre that inhibits the expressive voice. the teacher’s main role is knower and evaluator, their position higher than the students. claudia’s recent speech and her audience’s response, shows how our kids feel about being subject to this interrogative script. some of our teachers have been all for it. doesn’t this mode support the basic ireinitiation, response, evaluationcycle where learning is sequenced back from its prescribed, cognitive outcome? this instrumental/instructional dialogue, it’s second nature to us: anticipate the responses before the lesson; jot down the ones you are looking for; let the discussion run in the groups; to conclude, choose those who can explain the best, who can model the correct concepts; you tidy up their language, put them right. get the kids to tell you what you told them they were looking for. others of us saw this dialogue as a restrictive circle. in our teaching as inquiry, we were trying to loosen the circle, make learning more of a partnership,8 and not just in project-based afternoons. it wasn’t that the instructional dialogue didn’t have its place, but we argued that the basics weren’t instructional. and for us the kids’ conversations about learning were repetitious, as were teachers’. that’s the power of the script, that’s what we wanted to put down. i can see more than i did back then, but i'm representing the perspectives i took back then as well, as they are where i spoke to the children from. so even before i bring in the children’s voices, the narration has an open, double-voiced form, the form that bakhtin describes as “orientated to the discourse of others” (problem 199). since i’m not arguing from a single or abstract framework, it remains dialogical as the original process was, and open to the voices of others, open to the voices of others, including new, outside ones, and unfinalised insofar as these voices that may alter and divert my current perspectives as i go. as for the gaps and discrepanciesboth witting and unwitting between these various perspectives, i’m hoping that readers will not misconstrue them in terms of a logic or form of discourse i’m not attempting. a controversy occurred at this year’s (2014) dialogic pedagogy institute in new zealand,9 which continued as an online discussion in this journal. for me, it pivoted on the difference between dialogue as means or end; its two leading voices further articulated the problem that the dominant dialogic practice in the school presented to me, then (and now). 7 some schools are now using the acronym dirt (direct instructional reflective time) for the teacherled summative phase of this mode of dialogue. 8 in aotearoa, new zealand the maori concept ako is used to describe reciprocity of the learning relationship. ako values what the teacher and the student bring; in practice, the power relation can still be asymmetrical. 9 this followed dialogue at the boundaries: the fourth international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limitations of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a6 back then, i was influenced by the comparison cheyne and tarulli made between vygotskian and bakhtinian modes of dialogue in terms of their spatial dynamics. if the vygotskian is centripetal, towards knowledge acquisition, the menippean mode in bakhtin is centrifugal, and driven by the formation of social relationships. they describe how the teacher’s voice in vygotskian dialogue is lent authority from the third, magisterial voice, the authority of the knowledge domain and its discourse. their interpretation of vygotskian dialogue corresponds with our dominant mode, and in both, the learner as knower and speaker is subordinate to the teacher. as i planned this research, i was after centrifugal dialogue from the children, the conversations that come from outside of the usual, centripetal discourse, that might move them away form this subordination. they sure needed to interact more with each other, and refer back less to me. since i saw the magisterial discourse as the anchor of the centripetal, i intended to downplay that too. continuing their discussion in an online editorial, rupert wegerif argued for dialogic education as dialogue for education, whereas eugene matusov argued for dialogue as education. rupert wegerif: it is true that in real dialogue we cannot determine in advance where the endpoint will be. it is also true each child and each student is unique and will have their own unique educational journey. so how can i claim as “dialogic” a curriculum that speaks in advance what is to be learnt?” (e18). in planning this drama/language blend, i’d thought of dialogue more as a means for making a play, so as dialogue for education, an open ended centrifugal process that could be dialogic in that many of its outcomes were not prescribed. i was sceptical about dialogue as education; with individual students, within a small group or two, but not between a whole class. i had never seen a class take their learning that far from school discourse. in the first term of the year of this class, i did say to these kids there was only so much i could do on my own. i suggested how the class turned out was up to them as well. i didn’t ever say to the kids what their role might be, what kind of community we might become. i didn’t lead them along by questions, socrates style, because i didn’t know. my style is to keep my ideas about learning indirect, implicit in other conversations that the kids might respond to. playmaking, classmaking. in playmaking i did anticipate how the distinctions between process and product, and means and end, would give way to a dynamic meaning making in which any finalisation would only be temporary. and how dialogue would be key. i didn’t anticipate how dialogue would become both means and end too. as the kids interacted and talked over their fiction together, wouldn’t they discover that finding out who they were was implicit in that main fiction and its dialogue, as subtext. so here i’m looking for how, out of the first theatrical linguistic dimension, a second emerged, as subtext, as a metaor translinguistic dimension even. how could dialogue as a means become dialogue as an end too, dialogue as education? maisie’s answer has stuck in my mind because it suggests the shift that took place within the aesthetic event. i’ve been tantalised by the possibility that creativity of the play had become the means for the class’s primary task to create an alternative to “the practice of education itself”. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a7 caryl emerson: “[f]or bakhtin: art is not primarily a matter of pleasure, beauty, perfect proportion, or disinterested play, but the site of another more essential taskknowledge of the self through communicative exchange” (206). 3. disparate fictions “the writing person is one who is responsible for him/herself before the world. the writing person is one who dares to be not only inside him/herself, but outside as well. the writing person is one who is ready to be heard by others” (39). alexander lobok the drama/literacy combination had a prequel. for the first term of the year, i’d introduced the kids to more expressive literacy practices, both to give them more agency as language users, and to ready them for the literacy/ drama mix of the following three terms. i knew these literary practices well, seen how they’d opened up literacy for the class of the year before, for example. at that time, the school’s literacy practice was largely functional and procedural, a tight fit with the instructional procedure and dialogue i’ve already described. in writing especially, the kids followed a standard text-type process which myhill and locke describe as having been “linearised and fossilised into routines of planning, drafting, editing, revising and presenting” (7) controlled by the teacher. one shift the class made was responding to texts for their aesthetic qualities. this led them to improvise more in their responses, and to explore unfamiliar forms of language. they also had to improvise more as writers. i knew there was going to be dissonance; i’d got that from the class the year before. mary: strange because when i do normal english, i stress the word normal, i know what to do straight away. it’s like my brain is wired a certain way and if you give me something hard and strange to do then i have to like rewire my brain. does that make sense, do you get it? both classes felt this sense of strangeness. this language experience asked so much of them that the kids needed me to understand what it was like but hardly thought i could. in their first terms, the change in the writing process involved a change in learning; the writing that showed this change was the learning letter. prior to the learning letter, the kids had formulated and explained their goals, coached by their teachers. i didn’t hear any distinctive voices or ideas in these goal monologues.10 to address this deficit, i didn’t go back to mainly oral reflections, especially since the oral routines seemed to be a comfort zone for many. you are used to not having to say much, and why would you start, especially now you are twelve? instead, i set up adjoining oral and written reflections over several weeks. in these letters, a lot of the kids spoke up for themselves for the first time. i also heard some skaz. mikhail bakhtin: “skaz is above all orientation towards the speech of another, and only then as a consequence, towards oral speech” (problem 191). 10 the year before this research, a new zealand council for educational research survey of student engagement at our school confirmed our students’ low engagement in reflection. to address it, we’d come up with school-wide action research to elicit student voice about learning. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a8 sally: i know i’m being a bit uncharacteristically naughty at the moment but i’m sick of being good all the time. i’m sick of being miss perfectthe one who’s only ever gotten one b and one b+. miss i have gotten only a-, a and a+ the rest of the time. i promise to not do that too often though. miss perfect, on track. early on, the class’s key question was the am i on track one, on track to a good grade from me that meant. most of these kids went along with the standard script; however, a small group were more assertive in their compliance, and even monitored and corrected me. i’d try to refer the question back to them, but they knew who was who. their push back contrasted with claudia’s; they wanted me to lean back in. they tried to play their new class too, but they misjudged their audience. it turned out that most thought the instructional script was, well meh. david solway: “it may be regarded an educational fiction almost entirely devoid of ontological pluralisers, those practices and motifs which introduce alternative modes of life and thought into a rigid paradigmatic structure” (17). as the reactionary phase abated, the class took some pleasure in the new ways‘going curvy’ the previous class called it. this curvy gave both classes their first point of difference, their first identity as a class. i knew that the first class attributed this ‘going curvy’ to themselves as individualsit was their capability, not mine, which was good in a way. i’d call it a self-indirectedness. marcel: as you may have already noticed, i may not be your usual twelve year old boy. but male or female you could probably apply that to the rest of the class (kettle of weirdos the lot of them). this second class were eccentrics too. in this class’s first learning letters however, there was more dialogue with me, and some confiding even. i took the letters of the eleven i’d observed as socially inhibited, and arranged their letters along a continuum. at one end, there were those who felt shut in, in a state of interrupted flow, like stella, a grade 6 girl: stella: i really like to write poetry. not just any poetry. poetry with meaning that you can feel flowing through you. like an otter gliding through the water. slipping and sliding over the rocks. those rocks are the dead ends, the blocks, the things that slow you down. man, there must be a lot of rocks in my pond… at the other end, representing those who were shut out from their ideas we have miles, a grade 7 boy: miles: it’s like my brain was a kingdom, full of ideas. but, in the deepest, darkest reaches of the kingdom there was a wall, a wall that reaches right to the sky, neverending. behind this wall, are more ideas, and in the wall was a gate, was a large one, it only opens slowly, for the hinges are rusted, and so the ideas come slowly i realised how little i’d known them. take miles, his image of a boy shut out from himself. in class, he’d seemed an agreeable and composed mastery learner. he’d selected the goal to draw on his personal experience in his writing for a couple of years now, but he hadn't, he wasn't that easily drawn. and now this striking and expressive self-image, wordsworth’s ‘shades of the prison house’ in reverse. i wondered who had built this wall and if i’d been another brick in it. i wasn’t about to plonk a scaffold up against these imaginative dramas. get to work with the loan of consciousness? come off it! i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a9 if i frame these letters now in the aesthetic and relational terms of bakhtin’s early architectonics – i for myself, i for others, others for me – i find that they mostly express the i for myself. as for the self-other relations, the other is mostly their own self that they are now wondering at, depicting as strange. at the time, i was taken aback that the kids hardly mentioned learning with others. and it wasn't that they weren't agreeable, or adept at the communicative competencies. i’d believed for a long time that the magisterial voice, the one cheyne and tarulli identify in vygotskian dialogue as the third voice (teachers and students were the other two); could inhibit social learning. in the drama process ahead, i was going to be able to share knowledge more with the kids. and i was looking for the three veterans from last year’s classclara, holly, sallyto take the lead in the class’s social interactions. they’d experienced these more than the others, and were clearly frustrated by their new class’s lack of responsiveness. clara: as you have probably noticed, i have changed slightly from last year, maybe not particularly in the way i wanted, but it’s a start. if people have noticed they keep it to themselvesnot everyone’s ears are open to hear. one other thing. i said i wasn’t going to grade these letters and the kids questioned that. i wrote back instead. i felt self-conscious my responses would have come across as an exercise. i didn’t know much bakhtin at the time; if i had, would i have been able to follow the class as far as i did, as far out? i didn’t have a relevant theoretical framework, and so i had to improvise11. i did have characters from novels representing the imaginative prowess and perspectives of children to guide me, to enhance the picture i had from my students already. as for the kids, expert knowledge might have elicited if not more of the am-i-on-track response, the feeling of being subject to the socratic question and answer procedure. i may not have been as open to their other for me. in the event, i learned from meanings ingrained in life, and that’s bakhtinian isn’t it? and here, if i do succeed in my attempt to pass up through the gates of the chronotope, i will need to hold onto those meanings. it’s not that easy to stop being superior. to maisie, a sympathetic observer, it didn’t look as though i’d do it. at the end of the prequel term, the impersonal on-track check-in with the teacher was rare. in the next, the first play term, playful flourishes on the subject of learning started to appear, flourishes that showed there was an audience in on the joke, a joke i was complicit in too. scarlet: oh no! now i’m distracted from my thought train! it veered off course and i can’t seem to get back in the right direction. 4. a reconfiguring of learning. “theater […] is material and ephemeral, and recognises that meaning is made not only in the symbols, metaphors and narratives of drama, but between spaces and places, in the gaps and the silences of reflection as well as in the movement and activity of practice” (214). 11 the voices of children like mick kelly in carson mccullers’ the heart is a lonely hunter and the orphan, alfgrimur in halldor laxness’s the fish can sing, had long spoken to me. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a10 helen nicholson i staged the opening of the second term in two ways setting process drama in motion, as a vehicle for improvised language and thinking, and at the same time, reconfiguring the learning space of the class, to provide aesthetic and interactive learning spaces. within this duality, the kids would be able to extend their repertoire of curvy literary practices into a plurality of creative language practicesliterary, digital, authentic, critical aka multiliteracies. bill cope and mary kalantzis: “in a pedagogy of multiliteracies, all forms of representation, including language, should be regarded as dynamic processes of transformation rather than processes of reproduction. that is, meaning makers are not simply replicators of representational conventions” (175). my dual design provided the frame for my main research action, combining drama and literacy with the purpose of empowering student voice, and reflectiveness. in contrast with the tight framing of functional literacy, in process drama, in the theatrical spaces, the outcomes frame could be loosened further, the literary and aesthetic approach to meaning of the prequel enhanced. jonathon neelands & tony goode: “to be too definite and clear about the learning intentions and focus of the work in advance is to deny students the power and experience of being artists” (5). if your kids are going to work as artists, i’d go further and say you have to give them time to develop their own learning intentions and focus. and, looking back, that a long running and open drama process is needed for this creative incubation and emergence. back then, i envisaged that over the next three terms, the kids would create meaning by moving between the three phases of the drama processmaking, performing, reflecting which they could be take up in any order, in contrast to the fixed, instructional sequence. furthermore, i wanted the kids themselves to be subject to an interactive process one that made them creative, that worked both for and on them by taking them out of themselves, of the selves that i saw isolated many in class. michel foucault: “ [...]we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has oneself to a creative activity…” (351). i also planned departures from the standard drama process. in that process, the making phase is where meaning is made, largely improvised meaning in the oral mode. in our combined practices, however, i saw meaning making move between all three phases, and also, that no mode of language would be privileged. i was confident that written language and scripts could enhance play and creativity, even though the orthodoxy holds they do the reverse. after more mobility for these young creators, i set up a hybrid process in which a theatrical aesthetic and the drama process could complement each other. i also knew, from many performances (including of the most recent play, never never) that young actors can experience a culmination of meaning in realising their character and play fully, on stage. in this heightened theatrical experience, what mihaly csikszentmihalyi calls flow, many young actors discover a new sense of agency. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a11 erin: when i said that last word, i felt tears welling in my eyes, because it was at that precise moment in time that i realised never never was over, done and dusted…i then began to feel my sense of achievement. how did we pull it off? how did i turn my part from a daydream into this? erin’s use of i and we shows she recognises her own and her class’s effort and agency. by contrast, this new class hadn’t experienced this joint agency. first movean improvising phase. i’d introduce process drama and its conventions, the conventions which neelands and goode describe as a repertoire of shared meaning-making forms derived from theatrical art, “mainly concerned with the process of theatre as a means of developing understanding about human experience and theatre itself ” (7). after some hesitations, the kids would adopt these strategies avidly to explore the inquiry questions, improvising setting, character, imagery and plot, and building a fictional world. these practices, when combined with drama games, would be disinhibiting, invite interaction. in process drama, you imagine a fictional world where you take up roles and share perspectives; from there, you can think critically about this world. some in this class really needed an active, shared fantasy, given their solitary absorption in escapist ones. and that’s where the next phase, performance would come inif you present scenes in the aesthetic and semiotic ‘outside’ spaces of the stage, your meanings become part of a shared, immediate world. caryl emerson: “in bakhtin’s view, art was an active co-creation of images that served to link an individual person responsively to an immediate reality. as such, it posited a sort of aesthetic activism” (209). the configuring and combining of learning spaces, of actual and imaginary, of private and social, of verbal and aesthetic, i didn’t know where that would take us. what if there were multiple spaces, each with its own immediacies, each adjoining on all the others, where the children could make and act out their fiction? in my centrifugal bias, i was also anti-centric. instead of this order, i envisaged role playing as a common practice, providing coherence across the five spaces. i like the mobility of role playing; kids can move from playing themselves through improvising a character to fully realising a character in the semiotic space of the stage12. the planned reconfiguration: first, a circle of chairs, for speaking; second, the floor, for improvising and devising; third, exercise books, for journaling; fourth, the stage, for performing; fifth, online, for a forum. i anticipated these five different actions as mixing; for example, improvising and performing, or speaking and writing. also, that they would invite different audience interactions. patrick verriour discusses the key relation of the speaker to the audience, in terms of the increasing distance to the audience as the play moves through different phases of devised presentation, to performance. he agrees with moffat that students should have “an emotional mandate to play the symbolic scale, to find subjects and shape them, to invent ways to act upon others, and to discover their own voice” (87). patrick verriour: “if, however, educators truly believe that drama offers children the opportunity to play the entire symbolic scale in a range of different language contexts, then they should also be 12 the three stages i use correspond to the five stages of role from dramatic playing (playing yourself in a fictional context) through role playing (sustaining a point of view not necessarily your own) to acting ( fully embodying a character for an audience) described by morgan and saxton (1987). i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a12 aware of the ways in which drama’s differing modes of expression and communication can be integrated with the process of teaching children language” (89). i did believe in finding the width of the scale, and intended to initiate a drama/literacy blend that worked both ways. the five spaces configuration would enable verbal language contexts, and drama’s various modes to be co-ordinated. seven months after the class had disbanded, some now ex-pupils came back to say hello. the next thing i knew, they were improvising on an old forum, creating a sequel to their last play, sooner or later. this writing had a characteristic out-loud and skaz quality. i was amazed that they picked up with their old characters and each other, just like that. kathleen gallagher: “the built-up context and the improvised development of the characters leave open spaces for unpredictable engagement, for those moments of identification, unknowable to the teacher, that a player might make with the fiction” (90). if you put together take a group of zany kids13, invite them into a fictional world and reconfigured spaces, you don’t know where they’ll go with it. or how they might revive their story this resurgence of meaning, long after the event, was a social occasion; it shows how the kids' unpredictable engagements with their fiction weren't only individual, but made in relation to their co-authors. in this sequel, maisie plays shiraz. shiraz used to be sweet in her capsule in the arcades, but in the play she rebelled. now she’s being punished by hoss, the digital authority (more on him later). despite the informality and humour of her writing, maisie is slyly artfully dramatising a serious paradox that i’d once introduced to the class, that cyberspace’s fullness was vacuous. maisie/shiraz: this isn't as snug as my capsule, is it. no. this is all empty and i can't bear it. every thing is empty and i can't see my reflection in the greasy mirror. hosssss is still gathering more and more sss's to put at the end of his name and soon the world will be too small to fit all his ss's. they will suffocate us. but don't worry, it is sooner now and that is later. make the most of the emptyness until we can't breath anymore. on the bright side pink is my favourite colour again! i was confident that the collaborative role play of the drama process would extend into a more collaborative approach to literacy, writing especially. i intended to join the role plays, to be more collaborative myself. as the spaces could be worked in outside of school, and the kids learnt differently there, i wondered how this other learning might evolve, and what its effect on school might be. outside of school, some kids show more initiative; in the digital space these kids would take over my teacher role, some with alacrity. sally: and also, mr bisley, kim, clara, andrew and stella, you all seem to have ideas about how it would work. if i were describing our meaning-making practices now, i’d rephrase them not as a dual drama and literacy ( a duality which invites factionalism) but as a three-fold combination, of linguistic, theatrical, and 13 this school offers a differentiated curriculum; these kids had been identified as divergent and creative learners (not for their grades, which varied) and had been grouped together to learn in a less instructional environment. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a13 relational meanings14. regretting the class’s lack of responsiveness towards her in its first term, clara anticipated the learning ahead as a similar combination relational, linguistic and somatic. clara: i like experiencing people you hardly know, thinking with their brain, speaking with their mouths. i like knowing what they’re thinking. how they’re thinking. knowing their mind and what makes them tick. this is all a subtle part of the unexplored world of drama. unexplored in that the children hadn’t encountered it yet, and also in that it would always be so because they’d find meanings as much in the gaps and silences of its forms, and the gaps between their makers too. 5. the subject as an event “if someone is to say something to us, it is not enough that there should be a so-called recipient who is there to receive the information. for over and above that there must be a readiness to allow something to be said to us. it is only in this way that the word becomes binding, as it were: it binds one human being with another. this occurs whenever we speak to one another and really enter into genuine dialogue with one another” (106) hans georg gadamer i like asking kids questions about the future, because i don’t need to pretend to not know the answer. i like to begin a drama by sitting there with the children, with a question they didn’t see coming. mr bisley: what if technology evolves to the point where humans are no longer needed or desirable? the drama’s first question, and the class was subdued. benedict asked if this was the matrix, and that drew some smiles. it was 2010, the third year of twilight at kelburn normal school. vampires were cool, dystopia was still a minority interest. the kids went off into small groups and came back with their own brainstorms, brain puffs more like, and i wrote their words on the board. brainstorm #1: technology, artificial intelligence, robots, science, space, the big bang, nature, environmental degradation, extinction, power, war, slavery, aliens, god. the words came, but the kids seemed indifferent to the subject. in arguing for the lesson as dialogic, analogous to the polyphonic novel, and for the teacher as the author as described by bakhtin, miyazaki presents kihaku saitou’s pedagogy as that, “between children, teacher, and teaching material should be generated contradictions, oppositions, confrontations, and conflicts. children and teacher should, going beyond the oppositions, discover and create new views, and go over to the new horizons” (203). i like to suggest new views; i like to provoke tensions between me and the kids. in this case, i felt i’d gone too far. my material seemed right out of sight for all but a few. 14 here i don’t use o'toole et al's authoritative categorization of drama into four paradigms of purpose as linguistic/communicative, expressive/developmental, social/pedagogical and aesthetic/cognitive (6), a categorisation because i don’t find these paradigms separate in practice. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a14 clara: […] there we were, sitting harmlessly around, gathered in a quiet conversation. this is the first time we hear of the singularity, hear of the play, and know of what is going to happen. let’s end here, at this unsuspected moment[…] it was quiet alright, and for a whole week! then martine had had enough. she wanted to get back on track, and get me back on. martine: haven’t we discussed this enough? could you just tell us what you want us to do? i’d expected puzzlement, but the problem was that even most of the divergent thinkers (most of the class) seemed to reject the subject and its first question. later, in their first play letters (about thank you for holding) they both discussed the subject avidly, and recalled how they’d rejected it at first. scarlet: at the beginning of the honest i thought this show was well…absolute rubbish. martine didn’t get her instructions, but the class got the opposite, a whole week of improvisation. we used drama conventions to imagine semi-automated worksites, and perform workplace rituals. for this work, the kids stuck to friendship groups. the call centre of singularity.coma retailer selling online games, my suggestiongot repeated airings. operators (named after celebrities, names changed daily) were becoming semi-automated through their scripted responses to customers; we used a carousel technique to show off each group’s work. the word play loosened things up generally. in an improvisation on taking calls, early on, i was complaining about my old mobile, half in role. the kids knew its issues, and decided i needed a new one. there are all kinds of deals mr biz! i knew i wasn’t supposed to in class, but i mischievously asked if i could actually ring 2 degreesa phone companyand the kids were all for it. they were dead quiet when i made my ‘prank call’. and i got the option to speak to a real, automated operator. this was real mischief. of course they’d heard such voices before, but my call’s mix of pretend and real sharpened their awareness of these voices. mr biz’s weird idea about automation replacing humans wasn’t his idea after all. after a fortnight, i put the question again. the task was to write a one line pitch for a singularity play, but some wrote a paragraph. this time it wasn’t just my question, and the kids overcame their opposition to me, and we moved as a class in the way saitou suggests, to share future horizons, and also evoke possible fictions. the pitches ranged from automated home comfort to robot armageddon; here were the first signs of the many voices of the authors. from then on, whatever the children said or wrote, and wherever, there was further talk about it, just because their ideas were different, incongruous. stirling: …but what happens when there is a power cut. think about 2001 employees, some on the phone, some discreetly playing computer games, some microwaving soup and some on the loo… one image held the kids attention from early on. it came from a play book, was discussed, became part of devising, then of informal performances, and later, of the online fiction. last, it became the last scene of the first play ‘thank you for holding’. in this scene the stage was empty, lit by a single light, while over it the automated voices of the once human operators played, and the voice of the operator in chief. clara (first, in playbook): the one blinking light in the room smiles lazily at the deformities mankind has created as a companionable substitute… i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a15 clara (later, in the interactive blog fiction): an endless empty room with a single blinking light, and no-one knows there is a secret passageway. this image was linguistic and aesthetic. the kids came back to it over and over, they accepted its power. i can explain its draw now, in the light of gadamer’s reformulation of aestheticaesthetic not as subjective, as a matter of personal taste, but as a meaning that has a centrifugal pull, that grips us outside of our intentions. nicholas davey: “aesthetic experience is the experience of something acting on us contrary to our willing and doing. in other words, aesthetic experience is annunciative, an event to which we are subject” (373). the annunciative meaning of such images thickened over time, as when clara later added the secret loophole. as an act of individual imagination became more and more interactive, and part of our fictional world, i didn’t know where else the kids might be taking it. they still had their private and solitary spaces. in one of the very last online posts, post fiction, post class, post primary school, clara returns to the last blog knowing that this time, no-one is there. she changed its namesooner or laterthe second play's name that is, to function as an adverbial phrase; that is the class’s story has moved from its imaginative domain to become a possibility in the real world. clara: whether or not our earth is destined to have the fate of the parallel universe in which the society has collapsed and the singularity has enforced its rules, is still to be decided. maybe we will get the chance again to play our part, this time in reality. sooner or later we will see... after the first burst of writing in the play makingthe singularity pitchesi sparked a lively discussion by asking the children about the role of technology in their lives. what would be the hardest thing for them to give up, for a week or so? after the discussion, i announced that our experiment for the week was actually to do so. at first, the kids saw me as the author of their misfortunes, but then, i did give them a choice. moana: mr biz smiled while we were tortured with the thought of not being able to use these things for a week or more, then happily announced that that’s exactly what we were going to do! oh mr bisley, how we disliked him at the time. it was an old school gamethat banding up against the teacher. but no-one turned down the task, and the dislike passed. it was winter, and i gave up heating. i set up a blog (more a forum, but blog was the name the kids liked) called the sacrifice. they found their posts drew an audience, both online and in their homes. they performed, responded and reflected, as the occasion demanded. they asked questions of each other, responded, gave advice etc. sally: stirling, just a tip, you could crush the sugar cube then it would be some random shape, not a cube. is it just me, or is everyone sleeping on the floor noticing that they get extremely strange dreams? and their blind is broken so those little flashing ufo lights flash on their face at 4am? hmm... nice picture stella, it is very informative. mr. biz, about the heating thing, can you bring peg to class so we can all check she isn't hypothermic? andrew, try not to burn the book. i am sure your parents would be very annoyed at mr. biz for that, as all of this was his idea. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a16 the kids were more solicitous for my dog peg than for me. as the discussion spread out into the online space, and back to the discussion space, i saw that most of the class had decided to share their experiences. and they were adamantthey couldn’t break their fasts, even if they were told to. they’d made a vow hadn’t they! they were almost teenagers, and this was a power they liked but weren’t used to. you could blame the teacher if there was trouble. this was the first carnival of the plays, and it stretched to school. no heater in the classroom, no watching the screen, no sitting down, no mp3 player, no cubes etceterano wonder some other teachers weren’t amused. we played courtroom dramas in which i was the judge. michael, who’d given up utensils had to go to a dinner party. his dad insisted he’d have to eat with a knife and fork, and the kids were gleeful. they made me negotiate on his behalf. our compromisea fork. getting through the ordeal, that was a matter of pride. these fasts were for real, and became theatrical, because of the audience. and out of the kids’ experiences, as diverse as their fasts and their families were, shared problems emerged that gave the original question some grip. if technology was so built in to life and so important, did you really have any choice about using it? some shared the discovery that when it was removed, your thought changed to, so that was a new horizon. maybe there was an alternative horizon to the singularity one. i was a wet blanket however. no heater and i was just cold (my dog was fine). andrew, days 5 and 6: “the sacrifice is nearly over, and so is my sickness i hope. but i woke this morning to the sound of a match. it turned out my thoughts had had an effect on my family too. it was dad he was lighting a candle in his room too. wow he has come a long way. so i got up at 8 30(i'm purposely sleeping in until the sun is well up) went downstairs to watch the game of cricket i recorded on my sky. the clouds were overhead so, just for fun and as a ceremony for the last day of the sacrifice i got all the candles in the house and lit them in my room and boy did the room glow. it was like i 17th century disco. i can make the sacrifice fun...even on day 6. these performances were reality changing. the performers had to defend their special awareness against the normality around about. ranciere’s theorises how small changes in everyday perception can transform the way we see the world, and might it be that these small theatrical events, with their perceptual shifts, were initiated a series of similar events that culminated in the class remaking itself? the kids set up theatrical events that disoriented them, what ranciere calls “events of appearance”. david panagia: “by “event of appearance” i refer to the power of monstrance or perspicuity that appearances have, and their capacity to disrupt conventional forms of looking, of hearing, of perceiving.” (103) these events drew an online audience too, and raised the profile of our subject. i kept a low profile in these events, as following on from the sacrifice, the kids worked out their rules and limits of their role play, as in their younger play. from the sacrifice on, a theatrical aesthetic took on, and the class started collecting, swapping, and mixing its languages. i'd also add that the subject took hold not as it does in a traditional discipline, not as authoritative, but as interactive, an interactive fiction that once picked up, couldn’t be put down, because it was incomplete and puzzling, and asked for a contribution. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a17 three weeks had passed. as well as a theatrical aesthetic, we had the start of an intertext. from then on, the look became part of the text, and the text became part of the look. these mixed languages stimulated interaction and imitation; if the shows you saw didn’t add up, you could always try your hand. clara’s image stirred the children’s curiosity. it disoriented them the way the question also did. it stood for the meanings they couldn't quite get. as julia told us after thank you for holding’s performances, it was only when she was acting in the play and got to the last scene that she saw what it meant ‘finally’. her finally met with agreement from others, with a sense of relief. that was the power of their long spectatorship, of meanings that are implicit and evoked, of being in the hold of an image that shifts about, an image that’s only realised for some in the heightened material space of performance. kids are curious about gaps in meaning, whether in perception or in texts. they like to step and jump over them, and don’t want to fill them in. the plays gave this proclivity a work out. this is the curiosity that tyson lewis describes as the “capacity to sense things otherwise now, in the moment of perceptual rupture” (111). according to lewis’s interpretation of ranciere’s the ignorant schoolmaster, pointing out these gaps, these empty spaces is the role of the teacher artist. these kids did needed some provocation from me to get gap jumping; my co-authorship continued the way it had started. three whole terms! a class and i had never had so much time to collaborate on plays. and if the combination of literaciesthe threefold take on meaningformed in a few weeksit took the whole first term for its relational implications, and the us i am looking for here, to emerge. jump to one morning in late july. i’d a dress rehearsal for another play15, so i left these kids in the library, with a loose outline for their first play letters. the class worked for an hour and a half, largely unsupervised; i got a good report from a colleague who looked in. and their letters were great, showing the old goal recital had been superseded, more on that later. later, i heard the inside story from the kids, orally and in their reflections. clara: sitting in the library typing this i realise just how much we have adjusted to our play, as i look around everyone is typing continuously like operators, tess is even using my phone to make a call to santa (teacher approved, don’t worry) and silence never used to be the object of our rare typing sessions. not only writing their reflective narratives, but playing a new scene; making, performing, reflecting all mixed upperfect! i never thought i’d see a group of kids make such a clean break from the confines of text type writing! i never saw this scene, but i laughed at the thought of it, the thought of the last act of the play as a parody, in the library. in the light of maisie’s address, i reinterpret the library scene not just as an epilogue to the old play, but as a showing of a new social learning. and what is doubly fascinating are the parodic aspects of this unfinalised event. take clara’s don’t worry. she knew i wouldn’t care about scarlet’s parodic phone call to santa ( a reprise of my call to 2 degrees), so her don’t worry was doubly parodic. she also was letting me in on the joke that the class was actually more engaged in their writing than when i was in control. 15 i wrote a papercreating the work, creating the selfdescribing this younger class’s contrasting play process through a dialogue with a student. in the 2014 volume of the online journal the new zealand journal for the performing arts, http://www.drama.org.nz/publications/ new-zealand-journal-of-research-in-performing-arts-and-education-2015/ i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a18 by the fifth week of the first play term, the antagonist in our fictional world was cranking up a plot; but i had no idea we were soon to go head to head with another antagonist, in an outside fiction. here there was theatre making, with its blend of imagination and curiosity, there a national standards regime, prefiguring a seamless, standardised pathway to achievement. allow me to be your m.c. charles bisley. roll up, roll up. push play. a fanfare. (the fanfare that started thank you for holding sounds like the fanfare from star wars). ladies and gentlemen! in the red corner, representing a pedagogicised society, an expert on assessment! in the blue corner, representing her creative class, and othersa twelve year old girl! ministry of education official (to a teachers meeting): […]and my daughter was excited when i was able to show her where she would be up to with her english…and mathematics… at the end of year 6…and then year 8. sally: personally, i think we need to have not too many props, leave some to the imagination…and also i think we need cellophane. i dunno why…my brain just thinks light cellophane and cover the screen with it. how to show the growing power of hoss, the digital potentate of our play? how to change it? for sally, working as a dramaturge, the play’s evolving singularity question was also an aesthetic problem. present hoss on screen on stage too, but alter his digital appearance, literally. as i read her post for the first time, an image made me shiver. it was the diorama i made when i was six, the way it looked. yes, the power of cellophane to change the world. 6. humour, creative and subversive “[t]he author is far from neutral in his relationship to the image of another’s language, argues with it, agrees with it (although with conditions), interrogates it, eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it, and so forth” (dialogic imagination 49) mikhail bakhtin along with theatrical style, the class also developed a distinctive verbal humour. their humour was disinhibiting, enabling them to take themselves and others less seriously, and therefore to interact more freely, as improvisers and authors16, to counteract the givens and constraints before them. if the neutral discourse of instruction had confined our interactions, now a shared, anomalous word play set them off. hans richter: “the safety-valve was off. however unsafe and unknown the territory into which we now sailed, leapt, drove, or tumbled, we were all sure where our path lay…and the paths led in all directions” (57) 16 this freely was not free as in free range learning, or the self=directed unlearning that’s trending in some of our schools as our reaction to instrumental regimes. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a19 i don’t think the kids realised how much they were giving me voice, and freeing me up as their teacher. until they leapt on their hobby horses, i wasn’t going far. lucky for me, they turned out to be dada natives. we revelled in wordplay, unhitching words from given meanings and objects. for example, in a class discussion about how to show hoss and his increasing power, i suggested we could add another s into his name in each scene, so that hoss became more and more of a hiss. not to be outdone, stella jested on-line, reversing my idea. stella: hey mr biz i reckon with the adding more ssss onto hoss that we should start off with heaps of ssss and then get shorter and shorter until it’s hos, ho, h. our tussle opened up the question of whether the singularity was empty or full. the word play fuelled the play making, especially online, and the online space aka the blog became a place to hang out, out of school. role play, word playanother mix-up! nonsense, glossolalia, paradoxes, puns, jokes, visual jokes, nonsequiturs, gags, slapstick, satire, irony, black humour, parody. you got to know each other by appreciating the distinctiveness of each other’s humour; moreover, joking around in role let you take more risks than as yourself. the voices in role ranged from stella’s skittish nonsense, through max’s heavy black humour, to clara’s allusive irony. the kids were really surprised by this humour in role; they read each other’s fictions and fictional selves, and in this way, started an intertext across the five spaces, and made it into a rich language resource which they imitated and parodied. in the candidates, the week 6 play blog, the question was how to get a job at its call centre, which was how to get on the right side of an invisible, all-powerful boss. the kids were familiar with the set piece get in with the teacher, so had experience to draw on. stella, for example, plays a character, usher, who wears out another contestant by a repeated play on two wordsrepetitive & pet. stella: woof woof woof i'll be your pet your very very helpful, repetitive pet. i'll sit by your side and bark not too much but listen to every word you say  and take it allllllll in.  this is a slightly hypnotized worker. such interactive play also pushed the development of characters. here’s maisie’s new character howard, as he first presents himself to the boss. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a20 maisie: …my lifes ambition is to walk through the middle of state highway one. with a huula hoop that has utopia written on it…my lifes ambition before that was to get a purple and green affro, with a w written on it. but after that was completed i realised that howard started with a h so now i have a w on my head. how we laughed over this anti-hipster! in this scene, the anomalous becomes the subversive. look at this ‘clueless’ jester, whose bodily inscriptions take the mickey out of words, the words maisie had pinned to her too (she hadn’t had an easy ride at school). the kids were discovering the creativity of the sign, of the world as full of languages; as holquist writes, for bakhtin “anything that means is a sign, and since there is nothing that may not function as a sign, everything has the potential to mean” (49). the likes of maisie didn’t take the world as read anymore, and others tagged along. you had to take it allllllll in. the laying hold of things in the improvising space was mirrored by the laying hold of words as things in the online space. this was the start of a new creative discoursewords became animated in the fiction, like props, like repetitive pets. in discussing the contrast between piaget and benjamin’s attitude to the development of logical, conceptual thinking, susan buck-morss notes that whereas piaget only registered the passing of prelogical thinking as inevitable, its disappearance gave benjamin pause because he saw it as a distinctive form of cognition, creative imagination. susan buck-morss: “children’s cognition had revolutionary power because it was tactile, and hence tied to action, because rather than accepting the given meaning of things children got to know objects by laying hold of them and using them in a way that transformed their meaning” (85). this class’s improvising on perception moved between things and words; the effect of this mobility was to unfix meanings, and nothing was spared, not who you were, or your social status. and if you were witty, you got noticed, whoever you were in the pecking order. early on, on the blog, i noticed how peer group status affected the response you got; some, maisie included, expressed frustration. later, as a series role plays, the blog gave each new poster a chance to be heard in an imaginary setting, to gain influence as an author or character. and this influence in the fiction became all about how far out of school you could lay hold of material. scarlet/aaron: hi my name is aaron and i work for tv ziva, slovakias leading television channel dedicated to documents, astrology and telephone quizes my job is to read out whats up next in the most plain voice i can. occasionally if im lucky the boss will go out to buy his coffee and while he's gone i make rude remarks instead of doing what is written for me. that is what i come to work for although it only ever happened once i still have hope that maybe one day he will do something not normal but for the moment his day is going to work, send lucas out for his coffee, drink it, take the little tab bit off the cup and put it on his hat, yell at me then go home and he does this every single day. religiously. i once heard about a man who added ss's to his name to make him more powerfull oh how i want to meet him! maybe it will work for me?or are a's less powerful…and on that note stay tune for frantisek maria and later we have stars, from the beginning the medium may be the message, but scarlet’s not sold on it. like maisie, her language has an improvised, out-loud quality. it’s authoring and acting simultaneously, a process where sentence boundaries are over-run, and inside and outside overlap. scarlet tended to be solitary in class (not in a bad way) and was quiet online, well, until tv ziva appeared for her. she didn’t see herself as a writer, not i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a21 until she saw she could draw on what bakhtin calls the novelness of life, and started to mimic its heteroglossia, in this case the media’s fake events with their babble. speak was often laugh and speak. to connect, that was the main thing. play as a means that was its own end became valuable as the means that disrupted the means to the end, especially those to do with functional literacy and magisterial dialogue. the subject asked for it. henry caldwell cook: “for the play way is not a bunch of contrivances for making scholarly pursuits more valuable, but the active philosophy of making pleasurable pursuits valuable…play is the one means that is an end in itself, for “that we would do, we should do as we would” (8). the jingle jangle of the sideshow drew the punters. or was it a sideshow? the word play assisted the characters into life, enhanced the kids’ sense of their own implausibility, their amusement at it. by the third play term, they seemed quite at ease with any incongruity, even their teacher’s. and i think this sideshow was vital for maisie’s us, for the playful and humorous way it carried the kids clear of social norms ( the power relation too), without even trying. hence the episode in the librarya parody of the old linear writing process, and a parody of the first play too, in a new aesthetic/ relational writing process. tyson lewis: “parody is, in other words, the slightest difference that makes all the difference: an opening for disagreement from within the forms and rituals that are repeated” (48). tyson lewis extends ranciere’s redistribution of the sensible to include theatrical and parodic acts. the kids showed that, in changing how how they perceived, their aesthetic register, they removed themselves from the standard practice of education, to a theatrical alternative. equally, from sally with her cellophane on the computer screen, to scarlet’s out of season cellphone call to santa in the library for example, they took up the parodic and dialogic language bakhtin says we have as authors, some to the extent that they made fun of our inquiry itself. stirling: if people think the onegularity is going to occur then what is the point in contributing anything to society (personally i think the idea of the onlygularity occurring is just a load of bollocks)? 7. zones of proximity. “the semantic structure of an innerly persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean” (dialogic imagination 346). michael bakhtin over the last play term especially, there was little unease or dissent; several kids didn’t like our parodic use of the digital. the blog had become the main space for our play writing after all, but then the play came to criticise the digital world. holly: it’s hypocritical, using the blog to disrespect technology. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a22 critical as hypocritical? interestingly, there was little dissent over our humorous critiques of school, perhaps because school didn’t have the same standing as the digital for these kids? the dissenters thought that digital technology should be the one given off-limits, and their dissent over its use did get some oxygen from the class. were these kids were the real thingdigital natives, or becoming so, and was biting the hand that fed us their issue? what john ralston saul says about corporate entities being constituted as persons could be relevant. hoss, the ceo of both plays personified technology in a corporate way. the use of a first namehoss for a non-person, a name taken from a character in the television series bonanza17, was of course parodic, and became, in our text the master anomaly in a play of anomalies, and the source of repeated puns and japes. respect is big at our school, a core value, and this disrespect for a personified power really bugged some. i was amongst the majority who were interested in the issue, but didn’t feel the disrespect. stirling’s riposte, in an end of year blog, was telling. his response also shows how the class’s core value was their new creative process, the process that made both their plays, and their us. stirling: hypocritical or not, using technology to create a play against technology really worked for us didn't it? i’d always intended to disassociate myself from the magisterial voice. i didn’t know how to. even when i got my lucky break using teacher in role, i didn’t realise what i was doing, what the innovation would be. teacher in role is a drama convention that can shift in your position in relation to the students. it does this, as bolton explains, by addressing the issue of who owns knowledge (32). i employed this practice in the devising space, joining in role plays, as dorothy heathcote demonstrated, with middle status roles that give the teacher some say, but not too much. after a devising session, the usual practice is for the teacher to move back out of role, back to the objective space, where she can reassert her control as knower/evaluator. after one term of play making, including devising, i didn’t usually reassert that objective role, because the play and its theatrical aesthetic was establishing a playful, collective discipline. as in the library event, the threefold theatrical, verbal, and relational patterns washed into the standard space, process, discourse. and those practices didn’t need me insofar as the kids were making the exchanges between them intentional and purposeful. it was in the devising space, in the middle phase of the first play, that a robotname of gary appeared, turned despotic, and morphed into a multi-site artificial intelligence called hoss who had three avatars and three voices. the kids went off into groups several times to devise him, and enjoyed each other’s three-handed voiced shows. the devising spilled over into the writing space, which extended it. days in the life of hossthey turned out great! until this new process, a process including writing, writer’s block had stayed massive for four kids in the class. for kids like max, who was however strong at role play. back home, around the same time he started role playing online, he wrote his day in the life by parodying a work world he knew from his life world, by copying its speech. 17 bonanza was a western, a popular nbc television series in the sixties and early seventies. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a23 max/hoss: […]since i never sleep i am there when everyone gets up. i start off. i ball them up – get to your workstations. time is money. come on, come on. i can hear gaga on the phone negotiating with a scotsman – they have a language impasse – the scotsman can’t understand a texan fool and gaga is asking the guy to say everything 15 times over. it is totally off. i intervene. sort it out and send gaga to a white room [….] hoss sparked discussion too. i hadn’t devised as hoss (too high status) in class, nor joined in the online role plays so far. but when i suggested an episode involving him, i got offered the part. this led to my innovating on teacher in role, and more bending of our five frames, and crossovers. the struggle between the children’s characters as protagonists and mine as the highest status character and antagonist raised the online to be the leading edge of our fiction. it turned out that hoss, a representation of the singularity, didn’t like questions, and was trying to override the play with a digital rant. our inquiry shifted to the questionability of being human. and i admit putting on this posthuman mask unleashed a voluble scathing voice i’d never heard myself speak. tyson lewis: “performance is a kind of parody of names, gestures, and sensations that are not one’s own, that were meant for others unlike one’s own” (51). some of the kids relished being addressed as alien, as slaves even. this new, authoritarian voice stimulated everyone to speak up, across the spaces. the main narrative (now online) was emerging in a series of moves that had tension but no clear narrative curve, more like devising than playwriting. h. porter abbot, in asking whether role playing is narrative, quotes aarseth in whose account of role-playing games users make similar moves to learn more about a predetermined plot. as “intrigues” (37) their moves can push a plot forward into multiple directions. norwegian novelist, karl ove knausgaard, in his autobiographical novels my struggle, makes a distinction between understanding, or knowledge, and meaning, meaning being what children make. his narrative depicts how adults’ knowledge is gained at a price, and is antagonistic to meaning, for “knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning” (11). these children as meaning makers were not going to take up the knowledge offered by hoss, the end of meaning. they were becoming more mobile with each post. the week of the candidates, we were reading jaron lanier’s manifesto you are not a gadget18. lanier criticises the internet’s operating system for devaluing the thinking subject, and for making the user computational. these kids, however, became authors in response to hoss’s devaluing/debunking of the human subject. they did this by creating their own characters for the first time in the process. another first was their use of phrases from earlier writing, theirs and the classes. it’s this double-voiced language, to use bakhtin’s term, that gives the speakers’ new connection, develops their discourse as shared, in so far as their utterances refer back to and carry forward the phrases of a number of speakers, and their varying perspectives. martine/mr bisley/gloria/voice of hoss: i’ve only just got crankin soon the world is gonna be like an airplanea plane without any passengers knifing majestically through the ether. silently. 18 the short text of the week was a regular feature of the literacy side of the programme, along with the shared class novels.. favourites at the time included black swan green, i capture the castle, a member of the wedding. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a24 the process by which hoss acquired his voice in the play was dynamic, involving transformations of voice and role. as part of our inquiry into human automation, martine discussed a bus driver she’d observed. she went on to post as him on a blog, her airplane image expressing his desire to get away from being behind the wheel. like clara’s empty room, this image became part of the shared, poetic meaning of the play. later, as hoss, i appropriated the voice and image, rephrasing them into my end times script. in the actual performances, gloria played the voice of this hossin a chimerican accent, with a hyper-real intonation that added gloss to martine’s original satire. in this way, between a variety of voice and roles, both fictional and actual, the class developed its own dialogic heteroglossia. on the stage space, a variety of hoss avatars had to put up with a raucous agitprop band singing nursery rhymes and making jokes about them. in the online space, the power struggle between hoss, his retainers, and his employees became dramatic, and required a change in theatricality, to make the text, its look, more of a spectacle. as hoss, i led the charge in the online multiliteracy, the graphic use of print, layout, colour etceterathe aesthetic in the linguistic of the subject as an event in another guise. i didn’t get the full appeal of the battle with hoss, until i heard a recording of a post-play interview. here the kids were discussing the online language. stella: guys can i just say one last thing…like how mr bisley used the different type sizes and colours and stuff…it was kind of like reading it as though we were in a play…but we wrote it..so that was a really good way of empathising with his hosss speeches so our online acting was a mode of the acousmaticsound which only has a visual source? as our literacy practices became multiple, as the oral, verbal, aesthetic, theatrical critical, digital, cultural interleaved, the roles of readers, speakers, writers, audience, actors also interchanged. the spaces, the practices, the roles were fully configured for creative learning. one day we were talking the action from the candidates when some of the kids slipped into role. clara, as the cloakroom lady, addressed me as hoss and i responded. others joined in, there was some banter; the kids all knew the good guy pose was fake, and were being provocative. hoss (grimly): why do people always have so many questions? (a very long pause) nick (calling out): ‘stop! (the class falls silent) mr bisley (pausing): what’s wrong? nick (quietly): this has got too real. the class was visibly shocked, silent. what to do? after a bit i said why don’t you guys discuss hoss. i kept back so they could decide. they decided to fix a boundary between the online fiction and the devising space. i wasn’t to play hoss in the devising space, but the blog with me as hoss, or was that hoss as me, could continue and did, almost to the end of the year. later, it was okay for the kids to play hoss in the stage space, well his voices, but from off-stage. in my playing a character who masked the teacher, and the kids playing back, our humour was becoming more subversive, our authorship highly interactive. and the crisis showed how far the class had come from the first term when they’d niggle over much smaller issues. now they were problem-solvingthey could acknowledge their different perspectives in discussion, even as in their fiction discussion was being i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a25 quelled. this crisis was in contrast to the events of the wave19; the society we were enacting in our various fictions did not transfer over into real life as it did back then. the kids’ discussion reassured me their developing coherence as a class was not group think, not uncritical conformity. their online cult playing spurred on the development of its reversea polyphonic thinking, maisie’s us. the hoss incident provoked a wider variety of responses in the writing space. some mimicked other’s oral views before moving off to their own. in taking different views, this time not in role, i saw they were articulating complex self/other relationsbakhtin’s architectonicsthat had first appeared in the blog role plays a fortnight back. i for myself. now i think i need to carry my character on. i just need to keep my ideas going and make good contributions to the blog. i also think i need to have a dark side to my character, disagree with hoss once or twice (andrew). others for me. sometimes it can be so enjoyable because i feel like i am who i am pretending to blog. a strange sensation. (stirling) i for others. i think that the blog is good because we can share our thoughts through another character, and see other people’s thoughts too. (holly) the fiction embodied the relational meanings first. hoss may be entertaining but he demands an unquestioning adherencethe question bone has no meat left on it. the cloakroom lady plays the novelist in response. she is knowing in an authorial way, influencing the characters to form their own views, often speaking in riddles or quoting shakespeare. morson discusses bakhtin’s distinction between the authoritarian and the authoritative voice as demanding adherence versus attention (321). from week 6 on, the fictions were propelled by this clash of voices. to oppose hoss’s monologue, his mission, the characters had to learn the intentions of the other characters, and of the other players, to several removes, and thus became intuitive practitioners of the theory of mind. i quote a short session from an exchange that shows this complex relational meaning, between characters, each other, and the intertext. clara’s character, for example, offers a receding series of negations to question an anonymous plotter and the plot he was brewingcoffee poisoning. her point is that hoss is no one, and as such takes the real world away from us. 9 june. kim: we need to figure hoss out! 9 june. stella: hossy hossy don’t you let your chips go blippety blop blippety blop and around and round giddy up we’re utopia bound 9 june. kim: hossy, hossy, hoss, he is not the boss, but he thinks he is. if he is not here, he is nowhere!!! 9 june. clara: nameless, whats the use in putting something in its coffee, when theres no body to drink the coffee. if theres no body to drink the coffee then theres no one to order the coffee, and if 19 in the 1969 school incident called, and fictionalised as, the wave, a teacher provokes his students to role play a fascist youth party, but losing the distinction between the fictional and the real, the students enact this party in a destructive way in their real lives, and he has to intervene. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a26 theres no one to order the coffee then theres no once to make the coffee and if theres no one to make the coffee then theres no coffee. if you all plot separately then none of this is going to work, it’ll just be a waste of time i was delighted by clara’s character picking up on kim’s character’s melodramatic nowhere!! she’s quite dismissive in her criticism of the plotters’ lone acts so far, and they respond, start plotting together. in a later exchange, these two characters resume their dialogue, an almost socratic one in which clara’s character reprises lear’s dialogue with cordelia to make her questioner think more. 14 june. kim: why must hoss destroy us? he could be peaceful, if we altered his wiring a bit. hoss is nothing but he can destroy us, how is this possible? answer me, now. how does nothing destroy usis he nothing? 14 june. clara: nothing can come of nothing 15 june. kim: what do you mean; nothing can come of nothing??? 15 june. clara: i mean exactly what i said. nothing can come of nothing. speak again. with her ironic humour, her riddles, her allusions, her questions, her reflectiveness, the kids became intrigued by clara’s persona, wanted to read her, find out what made her tick, and from her, other characters in this unexplored world. they paid attention to her first in the text; the puzzle was to work out how her character was like her, or not; part of their response was to find out, and this made the writing intersubjective and intertextual. others experienced this new attentiveness via text, including the eleven, from stella to miles, as the growth of a social agency they’d hitherto lacked. in varieties of role, they enjoyed making a spectacle of themselves; their strong voices emerged in the online fiction first, before transferring from their personae to a confidence face to face. for me, however, playing the magisterial voice in the fiction led to a loss of teacher voice in the classroom. i have never gone for the simple concept of voice; then, even in the discussion space the kids became keen not to just be but to play themselves, and also pick up on others’ tones and views for themselves. in their reading, rewriting, and enacting other's’ language, i think these authors came to take up their text as other too, as part of the complex architectonics that generated maisie’s us. in the last term, that included the ambiguous other relation you had with your character. michael [ commenting on his character prom]: we were kind of a bit of bothdissimilar and similar at the same time. just goes to show sooner or later means more than just a couple of words typed up. indeed. in their play, sooner or later the meanings kept their three-fold dynamic. performing in the theatre or on the blog, led to a reflective discourse about who its authors and actors were, a shared discourse both about each other and about the other in each. the structure of this discourse wasn’t finite, but open; even in the performance, the actors found new voices and interactions. it was hard for some afterwards, alone in the writing space and disconnected from the others as an immediate audience, the others for me. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a27 michael: all my sentences are disjointed […] why is it easier blogging than sitting in front of an emptyish word document? but i’m not allowed to have someone else to think me for me. after the first play, a majority agreed that the stage performances fell short of the blog’s. i suggested that the blog was the play outside the play, and they took that away to think about. a week later, clara responded to my play outside the play idea. she situated blogging on the border between inside and outside, self and other. clara: about the blogging being a play outside a play, the blogging is really part of the play, like the play was inside the blogging, the blogging being a bigger play…you're right about it being another way of acting, it's like socially communicating and expressing yourself with the world but still staying inside your own little box of reality, where you can choose anything and virtually experience it. i guess it's a little hard to explain. for most, the blog became the best space for this communicating, this interchange between self and world. blogging is speaking from the boundary between self and other, at a distance where you could imagine what you wanted and choose whether to communicate it or not. and this dialogic meaning was not centrifugal, but movement across and back. michael holquist discusses what form of language provides the threshold between self and others (57). bakhtin’s answer, dialogue, accords with the architectonics of our practice, and especially of blogging. hoss’s digital voice, as a dramatised parody of the remote authoritarian voice, could be approached and hidden from. unlike the authoritarian voice, there were many zones of proximity, ways to approach and appropriate his language. in the online fiction especially, the kids’ characters mimicked, mocked, misled, infiltrated, augmented each other too. i’d never seen this mobility of voice and role before. their linguistic interactions were plural, diverse, and parodic in other words, a dialogic heteroglossia. perhaps the kids saw a bit of hoss in me, a taint. maisie’s answer did only come after i’d come down from hoss’s lofty spheres, and back into the zone of contact. near the end of the first play making, justine mcdonald, the principal, came on an appraisal call. we were having a class meeting, and the dialogue moved across the circle, primed by the stage and online interactions, often missing me out. i was a bit dubious about an observation of me in which the discussion moved from response to response between the kids, with few prompts from me. justine mcdonald: hi charles, thanks for having me in your year 7 and 8 english class today. i really enjoyed watching the social dynamics and interactions which were taking place during the discussions between you and the students, and between the students themselves around the play development. it was very obvious that all of the students were actively engaged and not only making connections and reflecting on each other’s comments and contributions, but also extremely confident in the way they addressed each other, and the issues they were discussing. this is very pleasing to see. i felt that given the context you had set up with the class the students were given the platform to speak freely, and without worrying about peer pressure and expectations which seem to hinder this age group at times. you have provided the opportunity for them to be removed from i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a28 their own identity and take on the role of someone else, which has obviously provided access to a whole new level of thought and discussion for the class as individuals, and as a group. […] idyllic was my word for this speech situation. in the second play term, the class only met in an online space, and the postings were more about presenting information and collecting pictures, even when there were opportunities for role play and dialogue. a few kids, maisie included, claimed they preferred online-only playmaking. no offence mr biz but you get in the way. you can relate to hoss best in writing, in the distance, fully symbolic. perhaps they were responding to his alteritythe other for me as other from me? i responded by doing hoss even better when i returned to the class in the last term. and as my online performance lifted, so did maisie's, despite her view above. actually, when i was a way, the class lost its way, stopped collaborating. two voices were raised in protest. sally: distractions seem to have overpowered us. who are we?! this is not ee!!! where's the deep, deep thought, the posts we have been prided with, the smarts? despite these protests, the group didn’t get resume their interactive postings until i returned. for most, blog only didn’t work. they told me they needed the face to face discussions as well. i talked with a couple of colleagues, and they thought peer pressure had also eroded the group. as we moved back into all five spaces, the class got their their dialogue back. our new subject took hold too the idea of children as an endangered species. its setting was a ruined tower, some time before the singularity event that was imminent in thank you for holding. more than a year later, three kids were discussing their old class. they reflected that one reason their current class didn’t get as far as their last was because they couldn’t communicate as well with each other or with me, and that not having the playmaking blog was the major factor. that blog had been the contact zone, the boundaries where meaning is accessed, exchanged. scarlet: last year’s blog was essential to our class, it was the gateway through to our teacher and our thoughts that paper couldn’t contain. we needed to go on to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. we had a collective feeling of letting ourselves share our thoughts without being looked down on, and imagined a ‘no offence’ before reading any post others had written about us. our aim was not to be aimless and we achieved that in any way we could. this class lacked the aimlessly aiming not to be aimless quality. so i’d managed to dissociate myself from the lofty magisterial. and i did become part of this collective dialogue, in which their was equal access to each other’s thoughts i haven’t found an image to represent our mobile meaning making, our creative polyphony; however, i do have an image of what we were noterik whitaker’s virtuai choir 4 singing fly to paradise. all those disembodied heads confined to flat screens, displayed in rows and columns of windows arranged in rectilinear blocks, a city of specimens in cases. the affordance of web 2.0. homophony as total synchronisation, is that it? and as for that ingenuous-looking cyborg-anime angel, hovering above on the song, she’s not much of a zone of contact with whatever is above her. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a29 with the help of a hieratic internet, we might no longer need our bodies, our aesthetic spaces, our effort to speak and respond, our creative heteroglossia with its ever new ways to mean. fly to paradise shows we can give it all away for a song. jaron lanier: “communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. a new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.” a few of you are sounding like transhumans good on you you jokers need to get ready to dock with your shiny mother ship hosss nightnight earth and nature all things bright and beautiful you are lost. you are tiny already i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a30 8. children’s theatre as a form of activism “everything is turned upside down, and just as master served slave during the roman saturnalia, so during the performance, children stand on stage and teach and educate their attentive educators. new forces and new impulses appear” (in buck-morss 86). walter benjamin. from the sacrifice on, performances and spectatorship became part of the action, and the subject provoked talk all over the placedinner tables, three way conferences, netball courts. the responses of spectators ranged from curious to hostile, and they kept on coming. andrew: it turned out my thoughts had had an effect on my family too. it was when we came to the problem of how to show hoss on the stage, that’s when the kids saw the outside audience as a problem too. hence sally and her cellophane, back in the subject takes hold. a couple of weeks later, sally foresaw the rocks ahead from her sickbed ( she’d joined the class online). sally: sally. hey you guys, it's sally again with a confession to make... being an outsider here makes me see through the glass that is this world. this world with long pauses and extended silence…. ok, back to business... i am just going to say that some of this might overwhelm a lot of people. i mean, the singularity is a big concept... sally was bang on, unfortunately. from then on i pulled out my old sawyou should never underestimate your audience; except i didn’t take my own advice. later the class realised that the fictional world of the blog couldn’t be translated onto the stage, and that this problem went right back to the first speculation, and how difficult that was to get your head round. the first outside reservations about our subject came from a faction on staff, and they not only tackled me, but talked to parents. and after the performances, some of the audience criticised the unsuitable subject. i guess thank you for holding didn’t conform to the standard expectations of children’s theatre. why not oz, everyone loved that? i’d say that’s because they have low expectations of children’s theatre, and children as creators. on the up side, there was some agreement that the staging was effective, some that the kids had ownership. the shock that you’d shocked your parents! it took a lot of getting used to. the kids handled the controversies well; a hard one was false attribution. we know what kids can do, and they don’t come up with stuff like this, it went. some teachers agreed. there was no way mr bisley could pass this nonsense off as kids’ work. the fact that the kids couldn’t give the adults a satisfactory ( to them) explanation of the story just proved the adult’s point. i answered the children’s frustration with a speculation. what if your parents aren’t as intelligent as you are, in your way? this question led to their agreement that it would have been hard to understand if you hadn’t done the work. what i am still intrigued by is how kids can find positive responses from parents troublesome too, for their glibness. has this to do with low expectations, with parents underestimating what their children have been through as creators, in their encounter with a play. here’s an example from a recent, different contexta free adaptation of king lear. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a31 carly: to hear from parents “you all did so well!” brings up this tiny misanthrope that’s been hiding in some unknown, messed up place in my soul. i wish it wasn’t rude to say ‘you don’t understand’ it’s the truth though. how could someone understand if they only were there for an hour of the play’s life? sure, most probably can try to see from our perspectives and even imagine and stuff, but they can’t understand in the same way we can (because we were there for most of the process of making the play). back then there were positive responses the cast liked. here’s one of the curvy class, by email (there were three other class plays). esther: it was good to have one thing that night that was really and fully up to the imagination. during the performance, i caught myself having visions of sauron and the egyptian devourer of the dead who would consume you if you had not been good enough to have an afterlife. the only clue that you were given was his voice but even that was unable to stay the same. to me, it would appear the hoss was the new generation of a space time continuum that would take your soul from you and in turn give you eternal power. another way to discuss the play warts and all was to examine it forum theatre style.20 the kids played their characters, themselves, and a selection of the adults who were invited to comment on the play. i half role-played a bemused but interested parent ( the role of an intermediary). the perspectives ranged from julia’s performing as understanding the play, ‘finally’, to maisie’s the performance was our imaginative world ‘set in mud’. in this, the most serious controversy of the year so far, the kids disagreed amongst, and with themselves, especially later in the writing space. however else, the night performances were seen as an advance on the improv and showings, for the rhythm of their interactions. maisie: my moment of power was when we were typing at the start (that looked and sounded awesome!) and i said “one singularity 3d on its way” and sacha’s line went i’m sorry sir, we do not deal with private citizens, have a nice day…” it rolled together perfectly, and our lines merge together at exactly the right moment. it was like a little tune-almost! to give the chance for reflection at some distance, i set up a new blog the critic. there i wrote up my inclass role play as a letter from a puzzled but well-disposed audience member. the kids chose to respond in role. miles: you seem to have a lot of questions. i don't like questions. they mean i have to do some talking to answer them. and then my jaw gets sore. i don't like that. just remember, while you're gathering answers to those questions, don't lose your footing, otherwise you will have to start from scratch, and heed the warnings; unlike the polar bear in my picture. well, you'll have to be careful, because there are those people that won't give up the information you want without a fight, or there are just those people that won't want you to know anything. p.s. the sign says "watch for ice". who knew that polar bears can't read? miles adopts a high status rolehe changes the game to one adults are more used to, who has access to what. he wittily mimics hoss, and uses the fate of the polar bear in his blog picture as a warning to the 20 forum theatre is a practice created by augusto boal where audience members are invited to respond to and comment on events in a play, especially the problems of the oppressed, with the help of an intermediary called the joker. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a32 reader/critic of the consequences of getting it wrong. this is not the docile, conflictshy boy of the old days. in a cheeky reversal, he puts the adult reader on the wrong end of the educational practice. he tells us “the sign in the picture says ‘watch for ice!’ ” he has to tell us, because the small print on the image is too small for any criticwhether polar bear or human to read. by not conforming to children’s theatre as harmless entertainment, both plays became, as in benjamin’s formulation, a saturnalia. or as in bakhtin’s, a co-creation of images as aesthetic activism. the audience had been challenged to think about far more than a rather kooky play. and i wondered who amongst our adult antagonists would have been able to outwit miles and his band. miles who’d been only able to write to order, but could now take the class’s emerging discourse about learning to outsiders, to engage expert and populist discourses, the disparate fictions. paul fairfield: “becoming literate in this sense means developing the capacities of intellectual agency, and where agency signifies not only that one knows how the conversation has unfolded to this point, but how to carry it further” (560). these kids were indeed literate, and were able to engage this dissent because their conversations were internally persuasive. i’d add that the agency they felt as performers made them strong too. many felt the flow. you fully realise your character in a process that takes place in a charged, aesthetic space outside yourself, and yourself in relation to that character and that space21. the full performances extended the architectonics of the making phase; they were where the kids encountered multiple others: the character you fully embody; the material semiotics of the stage; the presence of the audience. erika fischer lichte discusses the tradition of theatre and acting as being “transformative” for the actor in the performance (170), and proposes a new “transformational aesthetics” in which transformation extends beyond the performance. given that the kids made transitions between all five spaces for meaning making, given their mobility and cognitive variability as inquirers, given their new way of learning with its shared internal discourse, the lines between process and product, and devising and performance, dissolved. gavin bolton: “in the former one submits oneself to the experience: in the latter one projects what one has already determined” (selected writings 14). it was like a little tunealmost as maisie said. a pattern one creates and submits to, not unlike experiencing your character (and others) on stage, as more the other for me, outside of you, than the i for the other. this process of relating to a character is heightened by the finalised performance of that character. clara: when i was performing the cloakroom lady sililoquy. it was like performing the life story of maximum power; it gives a sense that this character has had a long and complicated life and knows so much more than you so it gives a slightly intimidating vibe, like the character has your life and fate in their hands and everything depends on their decision. her on-stage vibe stayed with clara (and others), so much so clara tried to write her old character into sooner or later, and was averse to new ones. i thought her attachment seemed like loyalty for the knowing she’d got from her, that experiencing people you hardly know, thinking with their brain, speaking with their mouths. 21 i refer back to foucault’s argument that you know yourself not in relation to yourself , but “in relation to a creative activity” (351). i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a33 justine got to hearing a lot about the plays in her office, but she spared me the details. she wouldn’t tell me who the agitators were, but i could tell from the kids anyway. in the end, one kid couldn’t stand it anymore, she burst out to us what she thought of her parents’ moves. i suggested to justine that we stop sooner or later, but she said not to. it’s only a few parents, and the kids’d be so disappointed. so yes. we carried on. we had the odd quiet chat. and some went off and reflected on the conflict in one of the quiet, writing spaces. scarlet: i know my teacher will come through in the end whether the logic makes sense or not (even though sometimes i wish there was none). i doubt the “ministry of education”, or ‘the national standards” would stand for that, so that’s why i say, mr bisley my little or rather big friend, i would fight until the pta says yes to no logic learning!! the pta is the parent teacher association. no logic learning, national standards, the ministry of educationthat’s not my language with the kids. i became curious about what else the kids overheard; it was clear from reflections like scarlet’s that the debate among parents had widened to being about the curriculum in general, even teaching as inquiry. the mood in the press was that teachers needed to do as they were told. a colleague told me the kids really empathised with me; i replied i had noticed we were becoming tighter as a group. i wonder if the conflict helped maisie decide that i did belong to her us. i regret my comment about the intelligence of our antagonists now. often parents get their compass on learning from their school experiences; some were all for the new, retrograde national standards policy and were influenced by the populist ‘debate’ in the press, and the sabre rattling over teacher accountability. i would now follow paul fairfield and argue that the hostile faction was not as literate as the children. some parents just couldn’t join in the conversation. wellington’s a small world. one day in the third play term, over a cup of tea, an acquaintance associated with the community told me where i belonged. she half-voiced the community’s questions about me, and her conclusion contrasted with maisie’s, no surprise there. susie: i had a coffee at mode [the café in kelburn] the other day… you really are seen as a maverick [putting it mildly]… have you thought about what else you could do…other than teaching? i didn’t fall on my sword. i did doubt myself though. i made fun of myself by imagining myself as john keating, having ‘captain, oh my captain’ recited over me. as for my friends, they laughed when i protested i’d been trying to lie low. they reckon i provoked the conflict. and looking back on this trouble, i see the relevance of nietzsche’s ideas on truth. our truth involved a moral dimension, one we shared as part of the us, one that started way back with our puzzlement over the subject. krzysztof michalski: “the search for truth, the will to truth, contains within itself moral notions that bind us in one way or another with other people, and as a consequence every truth is also a greater or a lesser force, a threat to or a chance at another” (44). with sooner or later’s season, the audience we needed came closer; however, the old debate must have also flared up because there it was, back in the classroom. now it was harriet who addressed me directly. she’d joined the class for the performance phase of the second play, and hadn’t been involved as an author. curt one-off responses in discussion were her normal; this time was differentlike maisie, she’d been conducting her own inquiry elsewhere. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a34 harriet: mr bisley, you knew all along. you knew what was going to happen. you wrote it… the characters and the story. you were dr xana, and we were the children. the teachers were the guards. the board of trustees and the ministry were thinktec. you knew you were going to get into trouble. don’t try and deny it. so she attributed authorship of the real life conflict to me. if only, i thought. i denied i knew. the class looked restless. this wasn’t the usual pause. then, for the first and only time, two of the kids swore. out of total frustration. and then another pause. fortunately, it was lunchtime. in sooner or later, creative children were relics of a forgotten world. the play itself was an adventure story; it told of an experiment to find how these child relics thought, and ended in the trial of dr xana, the experiment’s leader, and her disgrace (she was played by clara). this fiction was in the adventure genre that bakhtin describes, with its two way test: mikhail bakhtin: “it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions for the purpose of testing the idea and the man of the idea, that is for testing the ‘man in man’” (problem 105). in this context, for testing the “human in the child.” at the time of maisie’s address, the kids were discussing their play with a visiting teacher. they were taken with his idea that these questions would come up again one day, and they would understand them so much better for having thought about them when they were children. i’ve often thought about play making as a rehearsal for maturity; the children had come across the idea in clara’s first play letter. clara: now look! oh how we’ve advanced. we have completed the ritual, passed the test. from boyhood into man-hood we strive, or in my case, girl-hood into woman-hood. we have the brains of an adult, the minds of the child, the thoughts of an invincible future! but there we were, sitting harmlessly around, gathered in a quiet conversation. there was no alibi in school, and especially not the alibi of the grades that tell you if are up to the mark. you take on a task, you make the task your own. and only you and your companions could judge whether you’ve accomplished it. 9. the transformation of language. “language in usediscourseis the ‘signifying material of both inner and outer life; consciousness is not only ‘embodied’ in the body, it is embodied in language (discourse). in the dialogic text, specifically, meaning is embodied in the discourse of the character; it is ‘embodied’, that is, at a remove and without a need for a body” (82). alistair renfrew and so it turned out the questions the children came to ask themselves, were not only about about themselves, but also about others, and the questions of others, addressed to them. their starting off selfcuriosity and doubt, their who am i question, led them out into the many locations and perspectives of i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a35 their text and its theatre, both fictional and actual, and to encounters in new social spaces, beyond the practice of education. charles taylor: “this question finds its original sense in the interchange of speakers. i define who i am by defining where i speak from, in the family tree, in social space” (35). way back in section 3 i revisited the children’s first learning letters; in that writing i saw the first decisive move of this story, the move to become what alexander lobok calls the writing person, a person who is ready to be heard by others. by the first performance of thank you for holding, all the kids had dared this move, as authors and actors, and their first play letters continued, reflected on it. the where i speak from, for this class, became an imaginary and aesthetic world, a theatre they could move about in, in and across its spaces. the others they spoke to from there included the crew, the characters, the play, other audiences, the subject, the text, other texts, but first and most of all, each other. the kids not only responded to each other in the play, they responded to each other as if they were in a play. the play also spoke to them, and that was an other relation to, a significant one. this textual responsiveness, that's in both sets of these play learning letters too. the kids write as bricoleurs, collecting words and phrases from all the previous texts. in these reflective narratives, their performances, their online writing and role playing, their play book writing, their conversations, the script, become intertextual as the blog also was, and with the mix and voices, languages and styles, heteroglossic too. that’s a quantum shift from the old reflection as goal recital. as this language was theatrical and relational/dialogic, the kids didn’t get swallowed up by intertextuality. they kept their presence; the play kept on signifying to them. my question here isis there more to this than collage and reassembly, than the exercise of a secondary associative power that can never gets outside its linguistic frame or its recombinations? scarlet offers an answershe reflected that the play and its questions continued on in the writing, and that this continuance showed the difference between writing a story and living one, the difference which makes all the difference. if the play extended further than the straight verbal, became novelistic, translinguistic, the kids' writing would tell us. another angle on this linguistic question is to ask what kind of knowing the kids’ reflective play letters display. are their thoughts here an epistemological play, the sort of knowing that charles bingham and gert biesta propose as an alternative to the fixed meanings of the explanatory order of school? do they refer to a world of epistemological relativism, where “childhood meanderings are the order of the day” (157). meanderings i take it, because language is arbitrary, in a good way, as our parodies also showed. meander was what the curvy class before this one did, self-meandering learners each one. but this class’s creative acts were not relative to each individual, not contingent in this way. the class in question had a bond, an ongoing exchange over a question, a deceptive and parodic meander aimlessly aiming not to be aimless. lewis hyde: “in all such cases, trickster’s art involves playing with what i call the second-order articulation: trickster shifts patterns in relation to one another, and by that redefines the patterns themselves” (257). trickster is also a gap maker, as we were. our role and word play was mischievous and subversive imitative and divergent. you were never quite sure what others meant, and as soon as you wrote, another actor/writer might take your words off you. one thing i do feel reassured aboutour creative process with i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a36 its pattern and gap making drew on the autonomous play of children, and didn’t curtail its metasocial meanings. and then there was the overlap of styles and genres in our texts, a parataxis creating gaps, gaps for new meanings (and that was just in the writing, before the other combinations). for example, straight after some improvised out-loud writing on the blog, the cloakroom lady writes a long allegory in a prophetic vein that’s dissonant stylistically, and brings in new ideas. clara as the cloakroom lady: fate is like a forest of trees, the start being a circle of tiny trees. each seed has a colour, and each colour represents your future. the seed of hoss is the centre of the circle, an intimidating seed representing the singularity, the future, the end. around him cluster the spies, the chosen ones, their hearts being a deep grey, they have not reached the standard of black. they represent willingness and gratitude for death. next come the blank seeds of operators, lifeless automatons that represent the nothingness that the world will become [...]. and it wasn’t just mixing up of a wide range of languages, or the spillovers. it was also the variety of settings and auras of the different performances. it was a long way from the machinic ritual of thank you for holding to the magical captivity of the ruin in sooner or later. charles baudelaire: “do not neglect the marvellous element in dramathe magical and the romanesque. the surroundings, the atmosphere in which the whole narrative must be steeped” (30). with all that contact and with all those gaps, the linear discourse and pattern of school had to crack, break up. the question is where do you go in the gaping hole left by outcomes-based pedagogy? this question takes us back to the dpj debate about dialogue for education, and dialogue as education. eugene matusov: “students socialisation in the given, ready-made culture occurs through its transcendence, and critical reflection on it. the curricular endpoints are unknown for the students and the teacher in advance but only looking back and these curricular endpoints are constantly on the move as the participants keep engaging in critical dialogue” (e18). the shift from the first learning letters, to the second and third (the play learning letters) was from monologue to dialogue; the kids’ experience of blogging as socially communicating spread into the other spaces. the first letters had been defined by the use of the first person singular pronoun. i was delighted when i discovered in these new letters that the kids ranged between first, second and third person, and singular and plural (without any instruction from me), how the writing reflected the play, how the carryover theatre in the library was not a diversion, but a turning point in the move towards dialogue as education, a critical and creative dialogue. and i saw the connection with bruner’s concept of the “selfmaking narrative” (78), in which the writer attempt to balance autonomy and commitment. i thought balance between them, like a kid stepping back and forth on the middle of a see-saw. i keep returning to the class’s attentiveness to each other in these letters (and other reflections). this is writing as addressivityit often takes a half-spoken, transitional form, bearing the marks of the speaker, a speaker identifiable to the audience of participants. the kids share the subject, give room for replies, by expressing doubts and criticisms, by being open to each other about its difficulty. it’s more than a game with two ends though, or one field. the writing is dramatised, speaks in several voices. if the class came to hear itself as a polyphony of voices, you’d expect to hear that polyphony i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a37 reflected in the letters, and internalised, and you do. from my centrifugal frame, i’m seeing the kids move from a simple to a more provisional view of themselves, that is move out from, from their static learning selves too. the kids choose a variety of starting places; they do so according to who they are. krzysztof michalski: indeed, truth is always my truth and only has meaning only in the context of the life i can call my own. but it would be futile to try and represent that life from outside, like one of the butterfly species displayed in a museum case. (12). i’m listening to each child’s story, not observing specimens in a case. miles starts with a question, from own ironical voice to his expressive other, and his letter is an internal dialogue as to what the expressive other really thinks about the subject, and in fact, why it’s even worth considering at all. miles: well, what can you say about the productions? anything? max, first author of hoss, as hoss the robot, max whose favourite space is the acting space starts by quoting his character, hoss’s head of security, and then jumps out into commentary. max: “you would have noticed a lot of vermin getting in lately lt karmov of the cccp that was the longest line i spoke in the marvellous play… tim, influenced by home disapproval of the alternative programme as it turns out, takes a parental view from the audience (he gets onto his own role and determined view later). tim: i don’t know where to start so i’ll just say what it felt like the audience were feeling: ‘shocked.’ moana starts from the start of the sacrifice, and addresses the teacher from the class, already quoted (as it turns out, the class has moved on). scarlet address is close and personal, to her critic, who is me (next, she abandons this start as unpromising). scarlet: ok here goes…now try not to be too harsh eh? sally re-quotes and parodies the cloakroom lady’s warning to amuse herself. the first syllable of recorded time is hoss’s, and the last syllable of recorded time is hoss’s is copied and corrupted into: sally: the last syllable of recorded time is hoss’. and the first of this piece of writing is hoss’. hoss’. happy now? anyway, i may as well start with an opening idea that will make me laugh. julia shows a mobile sense of self. to write, she moves out of the play; she also moves out of her character. she plays herself, but with her character’s words in her mouth. she also switches the medium from theatre to mp3 player. the stage directions change to prompts: rewind, play, pause, fast forward. julia: welcome to singularity.com you are speaking to julia how may i help i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a38 you want a letter reflecting on the production? can do! lets rewind and take it from the start.... andrew is another who writes dialogically. he collects, plays with the characters and their languages. he recasts hoss, by deforming his words into the riddle form characteristic of hoss’s enemy, the cloakroom lady, his character’s ally. but then he goes further, he turns to the subject of the class. he interprets script writing not as the death of the author but as the scripting of the class; making the play didn’t just lead to close collaboration, it becomes a metaphor for the making of the class, maisie’s ‘us’. dumb arse! it’s a metaphor. andrew got the metaphor long before i did. i love the linguistic disparity between the two halves of the address. andrew: i portrayed a hosss follower on my life in the play. the blog was the way of all our characters coming together and talking about the play. little did we know at the time mr b was cutting, pasting, copying, printing and writing. our script, we were the ideas. we were our script (i know it scared me at the time too). i don’t want to be words! i want to be human dumb arse! it’s a metaphor ha maisie was an avid online author, and she started with the blog. i’d already overheard her and clara earnestly try to explain the gap between the blog and the stage plays to friends from another class, and give up. (unlike maisie, clara liked blogging but her favourite space was the stage). madonna: ride the rainbow to the other side. i can’t stand the adult/media rendition for children of their magical innocence somewhere over the rainbow. the senior choir sings a tacky innocence song-jesse-say, and all they get is a cartoon world of elephants and pink lemonade. unlucky jesse (or is she not a real person?). this genre replaces the real thing with a simulacrum. the last thing we should do is tell them where to go. maisie: learning about the singularity was like entering a different world that i never knew even existed before. well it didn’t. we created it. using the blog, on that world we created our own world and characters, ee’s very own three dimensional planet. the ideas behind it were something else. we were an “ideas team” as mr bisley put it, and this bright and colourful world was just waiting for ee to come along and create a shape so temporary and complex that fits into the lock to enter into this world that nobody would understand….if they want to “see” your play when you don’t want them to, you can just say “sure” and show them the blog, and since they cannot twist themselves into the shape that ee has created that will enter into this 3-dimensional world. maisie describes a motion different from bingham and biesta’s childhood meanderings. the class’s mobile meanings were not associative and fanciful; the children’s imaginations transported them to a new, radical knowing. if i’ve been cautious about describing their creativity as transformative, but this i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a39 imaginative and social act is clearly an act of self transformation, and also social transcendence. to eiaborate this transformative, i’ll have have to extend my three-fold meaning making adjectives to six. this creativity was fictional, critical, kinaesthetic, somatic, aesthetic, theatrical. and if it was another world you had to journey to, it was also inside, internal to the group that assembled there. so my centrifugal, moving outwards metaphor has pulled up short, and i need to have centripetal motion back in there too. the class’s imaginary world has a paradoxical quality, in that it was both waiting there, as a rhythm or pattern for the kids to join, but also as a space for them to create their world in. this paradox a mythical feel, in the sense that the stories told about a myth always fell short, or grew stale, and there was always the chance a newcomer might come along and replenish its meaning, like these kids who’d never been there. to re-consummate it. the homeric hymn to hermes: “and luck-bringing hermes, the son of zeus, passed edgeways through the key-hole of the hall like the autumn breeze, even as mist: straight through the cave he went and came to the rich inner chamber, walking softly, and making no noise as one might upon the floor” (375). after killing the cattle of apollo, hermes returns to his mother’s house and lies in his cradle, as innocent as a baby. it’s the way he gets in, through the lock, as if he were a breeze, that’s telling. the kids improve on his technique, and become momentary keys. more, in becoming the key, they became the lock too. in their mother’s house with its rich inner chamber, was that where they met to create their bright and colourful world? it was clara who first gave us the image of a synchronised totality, but with one gap, a loophole, her secret passage way, a way out. in contrast, andrew writes about meaning as aesthetic, as coming in from outside. but not by the usual opening. the play is foreign, has a body of its own, and if you want to take it in, you must re-configure your own. the aesthetic of one body ingesting another, that’s living the story as carnival, as a parodic sociability. andrew: our play wasn’t orthodox. to really swallow it you must use your foot (not literally, i don’t want someone trying to swallow their foot). if you eat it with your hands, your teeth will break and you will stay silly for life, but if you get the guts of it, the meaning and the plot and all the little things come alive. your brain has too many tentacles. as does hosss. all the little things come alive. the play is topsy-turvy, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonsense. in andrew’s reversal, the guts of it is cerebral, and the transformation the play works on its makers is to make them into a text. i’m finding this transformative reversal hard to get my head around. was this textthe play and its voices-embodied as ‘embodied’that is at a remove-without a need for a body, to use alistair renfrew’s phrase. does this ‘embodying’ play work as a parody of our actual bodies? and what does this parodic body share with the embodying of other art forms? mark wigley: “in a strange way, the body depends upon the foreign elements that transform it. it is reconstituted and propped up on the ‘supporting limbs’ that extend it. indeed it becomes a side effect of its extensions. the prosthesis reconstructs the body, transforming its limits, at once extending and convoluting its boundaries. the body itself becomes artifice” (8-9). for the young artists in question, the bodily became more tangible because the metaphorical and linguistic gave it a new reach. making a play on the outside, forming themselves into an internally i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a40 persuasive text, that was a double act. this double act is what makes the children’s language more than a reassembling of givens, their knowing more radical than relative. to accomplish this ontological knowing, you had to go further, be drawn right out of your depth. sally: what i really want to do, is to be thrown in the deep end. again. i want to be so out of my depth that the surface is all but a mystery. something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. which brings me to the limit of this discourse, to the last move in this history of relational meanings that i too became part of, the move which corresponds to bakhtin’s concept of outsideness, and also unfinalisability. caryl emerson: “[...] dialogue, according to bakhtin, is always “outside” any potential whole, more likely to remain isolated for longer and expected to sustain itself in the absence of transcendental guarantees” (228). in her last second play letter, scarlet, for example, re-asks a question her character has, one first written by a co-author, her teacher; this is yet another personal inquiry like maisie’s, but this time from the speculative distance of outsideness, a distance that anticipates a time when the play is in the past. mikhail bakhtin: “to find one’s voice and to orient it among other voices, to combine it with some and to oppose it with others, to separate one’s voice from another voice from which it has inseparably mergedthese are the tasks that heroes solve in the course of the novel” (problem 239). scarlet: mr bisley, scarlet, kalyx: could a teaspoon’s silhouette be a silver mountain followed by a silver abyss or a silver abyss followed by a silver mountain? what our teacher really did see in those teaspoons [the teaspoons were images of lost memory, souvenir teaspoons] is a question i don’t have an answer for… the teaspoons are the key, the key to the door. what door? the door that will lead us into later. so that’s why mr bisley liked them so much. or could i be wrong? maybe there’s more to it. maybe it’s what he saw in the teaspoons. he saw no shadow. in the light he saw a reflection. a reflection. a reflection of himself. that is his +1. that is the mirror that made him two. i guess he would have felt happy. just knowing it was there. like the play, the us we made was ephemeral. i showed them the door out. the children came to themselves again. scarlet’s answer follows maisie’s. as the text embodied us, so the mirror made me two. from and in her outsideness, scarlet can imagine the outsideness of another human being, distant already and again, but also visible in this distance as a character in her fiction now, as he might have once been in his own. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a41 it is easier for me to write my ideas down instead of saying them out loud. if you got an idea at home you didn't have to remember it for school the next day you could go and put it on the blog. sitting in a class for ages is less fun than blogging with class members because it is on a computer. it might be more fun but do you learn more from the blog? it was necessary for mr bisley’s absence to keep us together as a class. another thing i found hard was not being able to discuss my ideas with other people. it was difficult to continue the thoughts of hosss in the blog without mr bisley being there to help you understand it. i find i always think clearer when i’m not under any pressure to say something meaningful and explain it in the perfect way. the blog is somewhere where i can really think deeply about a topic. you say all you mean and mean all you say without stuffing up or sounding stupid in front of a visible audience. if you try to talk to someone like your mum for example about this random idea you've had, they don't get it as an eeopian would. on the blog i feel that we think of what we will write, therefore allowing new ideas and thoughts to come into our writing. the blog has got me into a habit of saying worthwhile things because there’s no point in doing ones which don't help at all. i think a bit of both is good because we can then discuss our blogging thoughts in class which adds an extra element to everything. i think blogging gives you a sort of confidence that you get on stage when you’re acting as a person that is so far from your own self. what was good about writing on the blog is that you really get the chance to write something you wouldn't normally do, like creating a whole new character completely different to yourself. it was cool to think that all the ideas people discussed on the blog contributed to the final play. hypocritical or not, using technology to create a play against technology really worked for us didn't it. i find it easier to go on the blog when there is actually a need to. now mister bisley has escaped from the yakusa there is not really a need at all. face to face can make a statement gain more power. most people (i’m guessing) find it harder to properly communicate and interact through the internet, it's better for all of us when we have real conversations. i think the blog's changed what i say and what i think about things. now i tend to think around the box, not outside or inside the box, but around the box. the blog teaches that when you don't think about things you manage to think about them in an improved way?’ 22 22 this is a remix of blog # 13. the speakers are stella, max, sally, holly, maisie, stirling, clara, scarlet, stefan, andrew, moana, and miles. the blue changes with each speaker. i thought you’d never become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a42 works cited abbot, h. porter. cambridge introduction to narrative. 2nd ed. cambridge: cup, 2002. bakhtin, mikhail. dialogic imagination. ed. michael holquist. trans caryl emerson and michael holquist. austin: university of texas press, 1981. ---. problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. trans. caryl emerson. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1984. baudelaire, charles. intimate journals. trans. christopher isherwood. san francisco: city lights, 1983. bingham, charles and gert biesta. jacques rancière: 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become one of us charles bisley dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.113 | vol. 4 (2016) a44 taylor, charles. sources of the self. the making of modern identity. cambridge, mass.: hup, 1989. verriour, patrick. “drama, distance and the language process.” language arts 62.4 (1985): 385-390. wrigley, mark. “prosthetic theory: the disciplining of architecture.” assemblage 15 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a1 rereading comprehension pedagogies: toward a dialogic teaching ethic that honors student sensemaking maren aukerman stanford university, usa abstract this conceptual essay critiques reading comprehension pedagogies that are part of the current educational landscape. i argue that comprehension pedagogy generally reflects one of three differing orientations, each with its own assumptions about what comprehension is: comprehension-as-outcome pedagogies, which emphasize getting textual meaning “right”; comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies, which emphasize knowing the “right” ways doing reading; and comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogies, which take all textual interpretation seriously, regardless of “rightness.” comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogies, in turn, can be distinguished as either primarily responsive – aimed at surfacing student understandings – or primarily dialogic – aimed at getting student understandings to refract. arguably, comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy dominates current reading instruction. a focus on measuring and teaching toward “right” interpretations permeates almost all aspects of comprehension pedagogy even when one of the other orientations toward comprehension pedagogy is also at play. while seemingly intuitive, this overarching outcome emphasis reifies textual meaning in ways that are both theoretically and ethically problematic. i make the case that comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy should become primary instead. i propose that comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies should not be abandoned, but should be subordinated to dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy so that students’ textual sensemaking is more fully heard, respected, and examined in reading classrooms. keywords: dialogism; reading comprehension; sensemaking; theories of reading; ethics; understanding maren aukerman, a former bilingual classroom teacher, is an assistant professor of curriculum and teacher education at the stanford graduate school of education. she is the recipient of a national academy of education/spencer postdoctoral fellowship, which helped support this research, and also received the 2009 albert j. harris award for her research in the teaching of english article: “when reading it wrong is getting it right: shared evaluation pedagogy among struggling fifth grade readers.” her research focuses on how students make meaning from text in conversation with others, and how teachers can better facilitate talk that makes authentic room for student voices. she can be contacted at: stanford graduate school of education, 485 lasuen mall, stanford, ca 94305-3096. email: aukerman@stanford.edu issn: 2325-3290 (online) rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a2 rereading comprehension pedagogies: toward a dialogic teaching ethic that honors student sensemaking maren aukerman stanford university “children are taught to read so they can understand what is in text. thus, most of what matters in reading instruction matters because ultimately it affects whether the student develops into a reader who can comprehend what is in text. reading instruction is effective in stimulating student comprehension abilities to the extent that it stimulates students to process texts as good readers do.” (pressley, 2000, p. 545) “meaning making is always creative; it is a surprise. it is a possibility among many other possibilities, and therefore never pre-determined.” (matusov, 2009, p. 2) if reading is about the making of meaning with from text, what we make of that meaning-making is pivotal to our understanding of reading pedagogy. from pressley’s common-sense perspective, meaning-making is a standard way of engaging with text; consequently, teaching reading comprehension is about enhancing children’s abilities so that they can become “good readers.” matusov, by contrast, has a less fixed view: following bakhtin, he posits meaning-making as a “surprise” that cannot be predetermined. in the paper that follows, i argue that how educators treat reading comprehension pedagogy rests on varied assumptions about what comprehension means, assumptions embodied in three pedagogical orientations.1 these include comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy, which emphasizes getting the meaning “right”, comprehension-as-procedure pedagogy, which emphasizes doing the “right” kind of reading, and comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy, which values the actual (creative, surprising) meanings readers make of text, regardless of “rightness” (aukerman, 2008). this last orientation can be further divided between what i term expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy, which emphasizes surfacing student interpretations, and dialogic comprehension-assensemaking pedagogy, which seeks to juxtapose and engage with student’s varying understandings through dialogue. while each of the orientations plays some role in how reading is currently taught, i argue that comprehension-as-outcome pedagogies predominate. i further suggest that, no matter how appealing these pedagogies are, there are theoretical and ethical grounds for rejecting a primary focus on having students achieve “right” understandings of texts. i propose that reading educators and researchers should strive instead to make a dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy the fundamental engine – and ethic – for reading instruction. i make the case that, although there is a continued place for attending to comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-procedure, these should be subordinated to a focus on engaging with students’ sensemaking. 1 these traditions are ones i have identified as primary based on my decades-long engagement with schools and with educational research literature, first as a reading teacher and later also as a scholar. i do not mean to imply that they represent the full range of ways that reading comprehension has been conceptualized, nor that schools and educational regimes universally privilege those pedagogical orientations i have identified here as primary. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a3 commonly enacted comprehension pedagogies reading researchers and practitioners have historically relied upon one term, comprehension, to denote multiple aspects of a complex intellectual endeavor, often without defining the term (e.g., national reading panel, 2000). an additional complicating factor is that a number of classroom practices also focusing on textual meaning-making have not been called comprehension (e.g., wolf, carey, & mieras, 1996). i will draw here on multiple pedagogical traditions that place an emphasis on reading for meaning, whether or not these emphasize the term “reading comprehension” per se. either way, they manifest the varied assumptions about comprehension i describe below. by including such practices in my analysis, i am better able to map the range of practices undertaken in the service of supporting readers’ focus on textual meaning, without arbitrarily excluding those that use different terminology. for each pedagogical orientation, i will first provide an overview, then discuss some practices where that pedagogy is prominent. comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy aims to produce readers who generate “correct” readings of texts: they “get it.” whether novice readers have comprehension, partial comprehension, or lack comprehension depends on whether their readings are considered the right ones by their teacher. a comprehension-as-outcome orientation can be seen in currently ubiquitous directive teacher questioning sequences, generally with corrective feedback. teachers who are concerned with students arriving at a predetermined textual understanding often organize classroom instruction around questions that primarily assess whether students have reached that sought-after understanding (or they give them written assignments with the same purpose). a predominant emphasis on comprehension-as-outcome was observed to be ubiquitous as early as 1978, in durkin’s (1978-79) classic observational study of reading and social studies lessons in grades 3 through 6. durkin found that, to the extent that comprehension was addressed at all, the vast majority of classroom time devoted to it was actually focused on what she termed assessment, either in the form of teacher oral questions or in the form of worksheets that assessed but did not teach comprehension. more recent research has documented that little has changed in terms of this emphasis.2 in addition to the continuing ubiquity of verbal teacher questioning (nystrand, 1997), typically following an initiationresponse-evaluation sequence (mehan, 1982), contemporary versions of teacher questioning sequences include practices such as giving sample standardized reading tests and providing multiple choice computer drill on books through programs such as accelerated reader (cf. thompson, madhuri, & taylor, 2008). another way the comprehension-as-outcome orientation is enacted is through item teaching,3 where teachers provide students with information aimed at enabling the production of certain understandings. students are taught vocabulary and content knowledge, for example, on this premise: if students have a robust vocabulary and appropriate background knowledge, they will be able to interpret texts correctly. research in this area has postulated a general effect of vocabulary instruction on assessed comprehension. it has also focused on specific populations of students, such as english 2 i in no way mean to suggest that all teachers privilege this tradition; there are teachers who deliberately teach against the grain, and some teachers who emphasize comprehension-as-outcome do so in response to external mandates and pressure rather than internal persuasion. 3 i borrow this term from reading recovery (e.g., pinnell, 1985). its use in reading recovery primarily focuses on item teaching (versus teaching for strategies) in word identification, which is somewhat different from how i am using the term here, given my focus on comprehension. my use of this term is related to but broader than the term’s use in descriptions of teaching “to” the test, where it refers to drilling students on items that are similar to those that students will encounter in a subsequent test (e.g., popham, 2001). rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a4 language learners and socioeconomically disadvantaged students, as well as on the development of specific academic vocabulary (e.g., baumann, 2009; beck & mckeown, 2007; lesaux, kieffer, faller, & kelley, 2010). perhaps the most prominent proponent of teaching background knowledge in the service of comprehension is e.d. hirsch, who has asserted that teaching reading comprehension is primarily about preparing students to understand the vocabulary and content they will encounter in texts they read: “we need to adopt a more accurate, less formalistic view of reading, one that grasps the degree to which coherent content in the curriculum is in itself a reading comprehension program—in fact, the most effective one yet devised” (hirsch, 2005, pp. 185-186). his core knowledge curriculum pursues this end by organizing student literacy learning around carefully sequenced knowledge children are believed to need to know in order to understand what they read (datnow, borman, & stringfield, 2000). for hirsch (2005), vocabulary plays a pivotal role, though content knowledge also includes conceptual knowledge and understandings beyond the word level. comprehension-as-outcome is the object of focus in much of the recent large-scale research on reading. for example, a recent series of articles appearing in the educational researcher all addressed the question of research methodologies in large-scale research on reading in elementary settings (connor et al., 2009; croninger & valli, 2009; pianta & hamre, 2009; rowan & correnti, 2009). each of these studies was concerned with how to improve classroom reading instruction by tying it to outcome measures of comprehension achievement. it is also important to note that comprehension-as-outcome approaches are not exclusively reserved for the reading of nonfiction text in classrooms: literature instruction with fictional and other literary text frequently relies on comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy as well (nystrand, 1997). comprehension-as-procedure pedagogy if comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy is most concerned with readers (re)producing certain readings, comprehension-as-procedure pedagogy is most concerned with producing readers who undertake their reading in prespecified ways. comprehension strategy instruction is one key way in which this happens; for example, in reciprocal teaching, students are taught to predict, generate questions, summarize, and clarify as they read (palincsar, 1986). the idea behind teaching comprehension strategies is straightforward: strategy instruction provides students with their culture's best secrets about how to obtain academic success, strategies many students either would not discover at all or would discover only after a great deal of frustration and failure. (harris & pressley, 1991, p. 395) increasing attention has been paid recently to teaching students specific disciplinary ways of reading, also coming from a comprehension-as-procedure orientation. for instance, wineburg’s (2001) work in the domain of history teaching stems from such an orientation. having documented that novice readers of history pay attention to different aspects of text than historians do, he argues that history teachers should explicitly teach ways of reading, such as sourcing, that are used by skilled historians. other disciplines have developed analogous curricula premised upon helping students appropriate disciplinary ways of reading (moje, 2007; rabinowitz, 1987). some disciplinary reading practices may allow for differing interpretations; for example, different historians may have dramatically different readings of a historical text, and still rely on the same practices rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a5 in undertaking those readings (gottlieb & wineburg, 2011). but when a reader generates a meaning that does not conform to the right set of disciplinary practices, that reading is unacceptable, from a comprehension-as-procedure orientation. one example (from wineburg, 2001) would be an adult reader, ted, who read an 1863 historical document that provided a religious argument in favor of slavery. because ted applied a contemporary “presentist” lens on racism and multicultural understandings, seeing such categories as static and “unchanged across space and time” (p. 106) rather than historicizing the document as a historian might do, his reading is characterized by wineburg as problematic. expressivist and dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogies comprehension-as-sensemaking refers to the hypothesizing that a reader undertakes as s/he wrestles with textual meaning – the active exploration of possibilities for meaning. comprehension-assensemaking is something that all readers do, even in classrooms that favor particular readings (comprehension-as-outcome) or ways of reading (comprehension-as-procedure). but, when a teacher treats this kind of intellectual work as generative regardless of whether it aligns with her own thinking or ways of reading, s/he is proceeding from a comprehension-as-sensemaking orientation. that openness is what crucially distinguishes this pedagogy from comprehension-as-outcome or comprehension-asprocedure pedagogy. indeed, children (and other novice readers) may engage in textual hypothesizing that leads them to radically different understandings than those held by their teacher for a given text. for example, a latino fourth grader, manuel, while reading a passage about tarantulas, considered a line of text that read as follows: “hairy mygalomorphs are known by scientists as primitive spiders. they have existed for millions of years, yet have changed very little” (mcginty, 2002, p. 7). manuel made the following claim about textual meaning: “right here, i think with the ‘million years,’ ‘millions of years,’ i think, like, spiders can live for a million years and that’s how long scientists have been studying them. for millions of years, to get used to them and to get a lot of information and facts about them, so they can, like, tell us, so they can tell us which ones are deadly and which ones are not deadly.” although manuel’s interpretation was decidedly different from that of his teacher, he was actively engaged in constructing meaning from the text – thoughtfully interpreting the phrase “they have existed for millions of years” – and he successfully arrived at a meaning that, for him, fit the text. that is, he was engaged in sensemaking. manuel could be engaged in such sensemaking regardless of the pedagogical focus of the teacher (i.e., even when the teacher is emphasizing comprehension-as-outcome or comprehension-as-procedure). but, when a teacher honors this kind of intellectual work and treats it as generative, s/he is proceeding from a comprehension-as-sensemaking orientation. such a focus on students’ textual thinking regardless of correctness stands in contrast to the previous orientations i have described. admittedly, it can be seen as radical, particularly when adopted within the context of disciplinary text.4 accepting such textual hypothesizing without trying to twist students’ thinking toward a particular “right answer” is often particularly challenging for teachers (aukerman, 2008). even where instruction does honor student sensemaking, it does not always proceed from the same pedagogical assumptions. indeed, i identified two primary traditions within comprehension-as 4 for an elaborated discussion of how manuel’s teacher responded in a way that valued his sensemaking and sought to have it refract with those of his peers, see aukerman, 2008. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a6 sensemaking pedagogy. the first frequently traces its lineage to reader response (rosenblatt, 1982)5; i call it expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy (cf. mccormick, 1994). for example, during classroom readalouds, young readers may be invited to express their diverse reactions to texts; there is no “wrong” interpretive response (sipe, 2000). and, indeed, the forms these reactions take vary considerably, as sipe (2000) documented in his taxonomy of young children’s responses. important, though, if the focus is truly on comprehension-as-sensemaking, is that there is no “right” or “wrong” interpretive response to text. student interpretations, whatever these are, are welcomed, nurtured and celebrated. yet, because expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy does not identify a major role for the interplay of different readers’ interpretations, it treats reader interpretations as substantially self-contained reader-text relationships. the other major tradition privileging comprehension-as-sensemaking often traces its lineage to bakhtinian views on language and interaction; i call it dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy. like expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy, it privileges students’ textual ideas regardless of “rightness.” but readers are also expected to engage with each others’ often differing accounts of what texts say. in this tradition, texts come to mean through a reader’s anticipation of and response to the unfolding ideas encountered in how others have read and discussed the present (as well as previous) texts. thus, teachers believe that students’ ideas will transform classroom discourse, other students’ understandings, and even their own understandings of text; thus, they pose questions aimed at better understanding student ideas and helping these develop and collide (aukerman, belfatti, & santori, 2008; nystrand, 1997). for example, in the following conversation (cf. belfatti, 2012), manuel’s classmate jorge had begun to make sense of a nonfiction text called sand (prager, 2006) with a hypothesis that sand could be made from rocks, but not from coral. as the conversation proceeded, he reread part of the text, and the teacher asked the group to discuss the sense they were making of it: jorge: sand made from coral and shells form the whitest of white beaches. teacher: so what does that mean? ned: it has to be made out of coral ’cause it says, “made from coral and shells.” but coral is very sharp. i mean, if you pick up a sharp coral, you can cut yourself on it. it’s like glass. it’s like if you have a broken piece of glass, you can cut yourself on it. that’s how coral is. but if you dropped a glass, it breaks. teacher: i thought jorge was saying it wasn’t made of coral, so i’m getting confused. jorge: sand cannot be made from coral because, like you said, it’s so easy to break, like glass. you can just pick it up and throw it on the ground. sand cannot be made from coral because, like i said before, coral, all’s you got to do is toss it on the ground, and it will break. rock, it takes a hard time to break, so when you break it, probably, it take you like a lot of chances to break it, when you break it, it turns into sand. teacher: so what are you arguing sand is made of? sand to you is made of? jorge: rocks. teacher: and sand to you [ned] is made of? ned: coral. teacher: and sand to you [manuel] is made of? manuel: coral. teacher: say more. 5 while reader response in its initial forms primarily emphasized student expression, reader response pedagogies have also taken on the more dialogic forms i discuss in the following paragraph. thus, some teachers who see themselves as teachers who value reader response might be enacting dialogic rather than expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a7 in this conversation, the teacher’s primary concern was not whether the students were coming to an understanding of the text (or of sand formation) that matched her own. she wanted to have a conversation in which she and the students worked together with these ideas as they refracted and evolved (belfatti, 2008), and her statements (“i’m confused”; “i thought jorge was saying it wasn’t made of coral”; “say more”) were oriented toward having students expand on their thinking and engage with each other’s. as she did so, ned could work through how his understanding of the words did not quite align with his understanding of the properties of coral and of sand, exploring the fit of ideas that did not, for him, quite fit together; jorge could appropriate ned’s words about coral and use them to support his idea that countered ned’s assertion; and she herself learned to see the text in a different way.6 dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy is not a matter of simply nurturing and celebrating student understandings, but rather of engaging students in dialogue about text in which understandings are transformed through encountering the understandings of others; even when students read alone, they will be engaging with a plethora of possibilities as they make sense of text. from a dialogic perspective on comprehension-as-sensemaking, then, neither a text’s meaning, nor the way in which a student arrives at meaning for a text, are predetermined: they are surprises, to use matusov’s (2009) term, that unfold in refraction with other voices that are also working at sensemaking (bakhtin, 1981). monologism and dialogism in comprehension pedagogies some form of what is called dialogue undoubtedly takes place in classrooms oriented toward the other pedagogical orientations, too – those that privilege comprehension-as-outcome, comprehension-asprocedure, or expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy. yet, dialogic comprehension-assensemaking pedagogy is the only pedagogical orientation described here that is fully dialogic as pedagogy in the bakhtinian sense: it is the only one that sees meaning-making as fundamentally unfinished, contingent work that centrally depends on the refraction of multiple voices. comprehensionas-outcome pedagogy makes little or no room for multiple perspectives, favoring a ready-made, monologic view of meaning. comprehension-as-procedure pedagogy offers a bit more room for readers to engage with text in divergent ways. but, because it allows for only certain ways of reading to count as legitimate, the approach is still dogmatic, in bakhtinian terms (1984), aimed at reducing or eliminating the element of surprise that students’ sensemaking might offer. and what of expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking, where students’ sensemaking is seen as valuable? expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking offers space in the classroom for multiple perspectives, and in some cases acknowledges dialogic reader stances vis-à-vis the text itself, such as children “talking back” to the text (sipe, 2002). it may also acknowledge the intertextual nature of reader response by identifying how previous readings of different texts “speak” in the reading of a current text (sipe, 2001). for these reasons, i see it as epistemologically more related to dialogic comprehension-assensemaking than either comprehension-as-outcome or comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies. yet, within expressivism, the refraction and interanimation of multiple readers’ ideas (or of multiple competing voices within a single reader) is not necessarily fostered, and often remains unacknowledged: sensemaking is treated as a relationship with a text, rather than as a relationship that also centrally involves other readers and other voices. for this reason, expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy tends to overlook the socially contingent and emergent nature of meaning-making (cf. 6 while this transcript excerpt was selected to illustrate a way in which a teacher used language to engage with her students’ textual ideas, it is important to note that students in this group also directly engaged with each other. indeed, it was typical for the students challenge and address each other directly. for elaborated examples and analysis of such talk, see belfatti (2012). rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a8 mccormick, 1994); opportunities for dialogic responsiveness among readers in such classrooms tend to be incidental rather than anticipated, orchestrated, and honored. some caveats because sensemaking may initially appear amorphous, i will elaborate on what i mean, then develop my critique of what i perceive as the current outcome-driven focus in comprehension pedagogy. before i do so, though, i should note several key aspects to how i have applied this terminology. in any classroom there will be students who make textual hypotheses (comprehension-as-sensemaking), arrive at understandings their teachers prefer (comprehension-as-outcome), and apply particular strategies to their reading that can be named and taught (comprehension-as-procedure) – sometimes simultaneously. my schematic is thus not intended to distinguish between what students are doing as they make sense of text, but rather to offer a way of talking about what teachers are pedagogically emphasizing as they seek to support novice readers. in addition, it is important to note that what a particular pedagogical practice gets called in no way guarantees that the practice will necessarily fall within a particular orientation. the word dialogic appears particularly slippery in this regard. whitehurst’s (1999) dialogic reading intervention among preschool children focuses on discussion, but it does so in explicit service of getting children to arrive at certain understandings, without necessarily emphasizing children’s ideas as valuable and important regardless of “rightness.” so whitehurst’s work would be categorized in the above schematic as primarily oriented toward comprehension-as-outcome. even some of the research discussed by wilkinson and son (2011) in their recent review of discussion approaches they characterize as dialogic, such as questioning the author or instructional conversations (beck, mckeown, & blake, 2009; goldenberg, 1992/1993) do not necessarily share the premise central in dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking, that meaning is responsive, emergent and in flux. though wilkinson and son themselves acknowledge that “the product of comprehension – meaning – is not stable” (p. 359), questioning the author and instructional conversations do not create any explicit space for student understandings that differ from those of the teacher; they illustrate well how discussion might serve as a vehicle for having students achieve the right fixed meaning (comprehension-asoutcome). thus, while discussion-based approaches may be particularly conducive to dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy, they are not equivalent concepts. i should also note that the kinds of divisions i have made are tidier than such divisions in the world of practice, since teachers may well juxtapose and juggle different pedagogical orientations. for example, many language arts teachers ask students to keep double-entry journals where students record, in separate columns, events from and reactions to a text: if the first column is about getting at a single “right” meaning for the text, and the second column is about personal sensemaking, then the format would reflect a simultaneous commitment by the teacher to both comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogies. and a teacher who centrally values comprehension-asprocedure might at times engage students in discussion because she genuinely wants to hear their ideas, just as a teacher who centrally values comprehension-as-sensemaking might sometimes steer students toward particular understandings. recognizing this messiness, though, does not mean that the distinctions become irrelevant. the central question to be answered in thinking about what orientation underlies a pedagogical practice is how the reader is primarily being positioned vis-à-vis the text: is the reader positioned as one who should extract a pre-established meaning or range of meanings (comprehension-as-outcome)? as one who must rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a9 apply pre-determined techniques (comprehension-as-procedure)? as someone whose sensemaking is conducted in an individual, idiosyncratic way that primarily involves the reader and text in direct relationship with each other and thus does not need to match that of the teacher (expressivist comprehension-as-sensemaking)? or, finally, as someone whose textual hypothesizing is dialogically contingent, emergent – important and valuable for what it is and for what it is becoming as it refracts with other textual hypothesizing (dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking)? while it is possible that a classroom practice might straddle more than one of these, even such a practice might end up privileging one pedagogical orientation over another. for example, if a teacher evaluates a double-entry journal according to how well the student got “the facts” of the text down, but offers little commentary or response to the column recording student responses beyond checking off whether the column has been completed, the practice fundamentally reflects a comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy despite its small nod to expressivist sensemaking. defining sensemaking meaning, sign, text in order to develop what i mean by sensemaking, i will first describe how i am using a few other terms, including meaning and sign. voloshinov (1973) proposed that a sign is something that exists as a material reality (such as a word) that “reflects and refracts another reality” (p. 9). kress (1997) describes one such moment when he tells of a 4-year-old who looked at a piece of toast into which her father had bitten, and proclaimed that he had made it “‘like a crocodile’” (p. 87). the bitten-into toast is just food until the child draws a relationship between the toast and a crocodile; in that moment it becomes a sign. for voloshinov, “meaning is the expression of a semiotic relationship between a particular piece of reality and another kind of reality that it stands for, represents, or depicts” (1973, p. 28). meaning thus resides neither within a sign (e.g., the piece of toast), nor in any reality that might be described by that sign (e.g., an actual crocodile). rather, meaning is relational: meaning is a function of the sign and is therefore inconceivable (since meaning is pure relation, or function) outside the sign as some particular, independently existing thing. it would be just as absurd to maintain such a notion as to take the meaning of the word ‘horse’ to be this particular, live animal i am pointing to. why, if that were so, then i could claim, for instance, that having eaten an apple, i have consumed not an apple but the meaning of the word ‘apple.’ a sign is a particular material thing, but meaning is not a thing and cannot be isolated from the sign as if it were a piece of reality existing on its own apart from the sign. (p. 28) i am primarily interested in meanings that are developed in relation to texts – representations involving symbols and/or images deliberately arranged to evoke meaning for a reader who will treat them as things that mean.7 such texts, for example, might be picturebooks, algebra problems, or tweets. while texts vary widely in their genre, use and in the range of meanings that a given reader sees as acceptable, all texts exist in order to mean. what human beings do as they read, then, is always about relating text to another reality – a reality that of course may be conceptual (e.g., the notion of freedom) and/or imaginary (e.g., quidditch) as well as purely concrete and visible. in relating the text to one reality rather than to another, the reader is making an active semiotic decision. it is this act of decision-making, 7 i acknowledge that it is also possible to read things as texts that were not deliberately arranged to evoke meaning, as i might if i study the shapes of clouds and decide on meanings for them. such readings are not the focus of this paper. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a10 of establishing one relationship between text and reality rather than a different one, that constitutes sensemaking. the reader’s context readers, of course, never undertake sensemaking in a vacuum. although the signs themselves may appear internally, they are responsive not just to the text but also to the reader’s context (cf. nystrand, 1986; rommetveit, 1974). but what, exactly, do i mean by a context? according to cole (1995), there are two important ways in which context has been characterized. in the first characterization, individuals are surrounded by a static context that serves as a container – and causal force – for their actions. an alternative view of context sees it as something that is continually reconstituted: individuals and their contexts mutually shape one another. in this view, which i share, contexts are treated “not as static givens, dictated by the social and physical environment, but as ongoing accomplishments negotiated by participants” (miller & goodnow, 1995, p. 8). although this idea of context is helpful, even scholars who adopt this more dynamic view have sometimes been silent on another critical question: context according to whom? the experiencing of a context is never neutral, but rather represents one subjective (albeit negotiated) perspective – one that determines which aspects are available and described. the moment an actual described context comes into play (rather than the abstract idea of context), the context becomes characterized by someone’s perspective. even when two individuals negotiate a “shared” context, for example, during a classroom literacy event, their relative positions as participants in that event differ – making it likely that their senses of the context will differ as well (aukerman, 2007; dyson, 1999b). context is thus in some important sense heteroglossic, irreducible in any honest way to a unified phenomenon or perspective. the scholarly decision of how to represent a context when describing an event is thus always ideological. some scholars have articulated how different perspectives on context may be taken up – and why they matter. for example, an outsider may mark different aspects of what is happening than an insider in a given community. watson-gegeo (1992) describes what she calls a “vertical context,” involving larger institutional structures. such a context, she points out, “may be poorly understood or even unknown to the interactants,” unlike a “horizontal context” that involves more immediate circumstances, events, and interactions (p. 53). although researchers often lean in the direction of analyzing vertical contexts, hymes (1972) makes a case for foregrounding the experiences of those actually using the language when studying language in use: “to understand language in its social context requires understanding the meanings that social contexts and uses of language have for their participants” (p. xviii, emphasis added). in the analytic unpacking of sensemaking that i undertake here, i will, like hymes, foreground a local, participant perspective on the meaning of context. i believe, moreover, that it is noteworthy that different participants, including readers of the same text in the same classroom, will experience context differently. foregrounding the reader’s understanding of the context makes visible that the inseparable reading of text and context takes place from a uniquely situated perspective for each reader. because it is this situated perspective that i seek to understand, i emphasize what i call the reader’s context. the reader’s context (whatever its omissions and idiosyncrasies) is de facto the context that the reader reads while s/he is reading a text; this context, the reader’s “internal representation of the context that the text enters,” crucially shapes and is shaped by the reader’s reading of the text (witte, 1992, p. 288). i wish to be clear that the reader’s context is never static, nor is the reader ever free of social shaping as s/he interprets that context. rather, the reader’s context is emergent, constantly impinged upon by circumstances and negotiated with other social actors, including the text’s author. as each succeeding rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a11 clause in a paragraph is read, for example, the reader’s sense of the context is renegotiated (cf. rommetveit, 1974). interest and social purpose readers are not passive perceivers of contexts; they have particular orientations toward what they experience that figure into their sensemaking. kress (1997) has used the term interest, which i adopt here, to describe the orientation of attention that a reader brings to an experience of sign-making (or, i would add, of sensemaking); it is interest that determines what aspects of the text are foregrounded in a reader’s reading of the text. kress develops the idea of interest in ways that challenge one prevailing view of the term as something personal and asocial, instead arguing that interest “has physiological, psychological, cultural and social origins” (p. 11). the social (and, i would add, dialogic) aspect of interest is particularly pivotal: interest is a composite of my experience; but it is also a reflection of my present place …. i stand here now, in a social place, in a physical place. my experience, personally constructed out of my incessant readings through all my life, makes me assess my present position, and its potentials and responsibilities. it makes me read my immediately present social environment, now at this moment in a certain way. (p. 90) highly related to the idea of interest is the broader idea of the reader’s social purposes, what readers are “after” as they read and engage with others around texts (cf. dyson, 2002). social purpose encompasses what an individual seeks to accomplish (through reading, but also through other practices); social purposes are multiple, socially configured and continuously re-established. even though the two are not identical, one’s social purposes when reading a particular text are likely to play a major role in one’s interest, and vice versa. for example, as a high school student, my interest in the red badge of courage (crane, 1993) was heavily driven by a desire to locate every possible sexual innuendo (in a text typically not known for these). this interest was connected to social purposes that included wanting to rile the english teacher who had assigned the text, and seeking to portray myself in particular ways to my peers in the class. both interest and social purposes play integral roles in shaping how readers make sense of text. social, cultural and semiotic resources readers also engage with social, cultural and semiotic resources (cf. dyson, 2002) in the service of the sensemaking work that they do. broadly speaking, whatever a reader draws upon (consciously or unconsciously) in the process of figuring out what a text means would be such a resource: as i define it, a resource is a resource because it is treated as such by the reader. resources are social because they involve relationships with others; cultural because they are imbued with the values and practices of particular communities; and semiotic because they support and transform the meanings being made. the reader stands in dialogic relationship with these social, cultural and semiotic resources, reconfiguring and hybridizing (dyson, 1999a) them in the work of establishing new meanings that are nonetheless never “created from scratch” (matusov, 2009, p. 120). what constitutes a resource in deciding on meaning for a text depends on the reader’s context, social purposes, and interest at a particular moment in time. such resources may be interpersonal (e.g., the kid i think is a good reader who is seated next to me), environmental (e.g., letter-sound spelling cards on the wall, the dictionary), or intrapersonal (e.g., knowledge of letter sounds; prior experiences with fruit bats; strong beliefs about what reading is and is not good for; an ascribed identity as a good daughter). rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a12 since knowledge and experience are developed through relationships with others, and because what is around us is socioculturally constructed, even resources that i have described as environmental or intrapersonal have sociocultural, dialogic dimensions. sensemaking and the sensation of not understanding what happens during reading, then? a reader dialogically engages with available social, cultural and semiotic resources to create meaning for a text, meaning that is bound up in her/his interest and social purposes as that reader simultaneously makes sense of the context. seen in this light, sensemaking is the reader’s work in the service of a subjective commitment to certain semiotic possibilities over others, that is, toward the “actualization of a decision” (bakhtin, 1990, p. 28) that resolves for a text to mean one set of things and not another for that reader. when that subjective commitment to certain semiotic possibilities adequately accounts for the reader’s interest, given that reader’s present social purposes and sense of the context, the reader has understood the text. but, in order for a reader to resolve for a text to mean one thing and not another, the reader must come to see certain semiotic possibilities as internally persuasive: internally persuasive discourse – as opposed to one that is externally authoritative -is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with “one’s own word.” in the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. …. more than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. (bakhtin, 1981, pp. 345-346) in terms of sensemaking, meaning can be internally persuasive only if the reader is able to a) wrest the newness of unfamiliar text into her/his own ongoing dialogue with available, often competing and polyphonic, semantic possibilities (born of active engagement, even struggle, with her/his available social, cultural, and semiotic resources); and b) make a subjective commitment to some of these possibilities over others at a particular moment in time. conversely, the sensation of not understanding occurs when a reader encountering a text finds it so unclear that s/he is unable to commit to a set of semiotic possibilities that satisfy her/his interest in it. when i recently read an obtuse tax code document while doing my taxes, i could piece together partial understanding, but i was still left with a frustrated sensation of not understanding. i never did have a confident sense that i had understood it well enough, given my interest in disambiguating how to complete my tax return as i should. although i eventually chose a course of action based on my best guess, i was never entirely internally persuaded (bakhtin, 1981) of the meaning i had created on which that pragmatic decision hinged. my sensation of not understanding does not mean i was not sensemaking – i most certainly was, as my intellectual work was very much in the service of trying to make sense – but it does mean that my sensemaking did not produce a (to me) satisfactory resolution of the semiotic possibilities that accounted for my interest: i did not resolve meaning. it is important to realize that sensemaking does not, and probably should not, always yield clear resolution for the reader. one may simultaneously juggle multiple semiotic possibilities (and many unresolved questions) as one makes sense of a text. and all resolution is provisional in any case: even a resolved meaning may un-resolve or re-resolve differently at a later point in time. still, it is important to acknowledge the subjectively different experiences of a reader whose sensemaking becomes rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a13 overwhelmed by a sensation of not understanding – to the point of giving up on the sensemaking as i eventually did with the tax return document – versus one who encounters sufficient resolution to keep wondering and keep at it. readers who regularly do not feel in a position to resolve meanings of texts for themselves often feel unsuccessful as readers and become dependent on the meanings others assign to texts (cf. aukerman, chambers schuldt, & moore johnson, 2012). i believe it is a pedagogical responsibility of teachers to support students sufficiently in their efforts at sensemaking that students continue to see themselves as capable of resolving meaning, for example, by offering texts that challenge but do not overwhelm the reader. at the same time, traditional comprehension assessment is not the most reliable way to identify such texts. a number of comprehension assessments, such as the developmental reading assessment (beaver, 1997), designate a comprehension-related “frustration level” for texts where students provide explanations for what is going on that diverge from the institutional bounds – a comprehension-asoutcome measure. such texts are presumed to be too hard for the reader. while it may be true that both the teacher and the student would be frustrated in a classroom setting where this student was expected to produce a reading that was considered within the institutional bounds for such texts, what would be frustrating under those circumstances would be the expectations for a particular, narrow reading – not necessarily the text itself. while there may be valid diagnostic reasons for such a test (full disclosure: i administered many in the past myself), i believe that a “frustration level” designation should apply only to those texts where students see themselves as incapable of fruitful sensemaking – a designation that depends on close observation of the student with a variety of kinds of text rather than the results of a comprehension-as-outcome measure.8 alien judgments and institutional boundaries when the textual meanings readers create for themselves become visible to others through how they talk about, write about, or act on their sensemaking, those around them commonly make judgments about those meanings, often on the basis of how they themselves have made or are making sense of the same text(s). a lover struggles to explain that the true intent of a hastily scrawled text message differed from how a hurt loved one received those words; a scathing review of a scientific article is found unconvincing by an editor who has read the same article more generously; two friends who have read a book share a laugh as they recognize that both were rooting for the villainous character rather than the “heroine.” reading is a fundamentally evaluative task, and part of what we do as readers is evaluate how convincing the readings we encounter around us are, and to seek to convince others when we prefer for them to share our meanings for the texts we have read in common (aukerman, 2007). in the course of encountering alien judgments about one’s own sensemaking, readers will sometimes realize a need to closely re-examine previously resolved meanings; sometimes they will not. either way, bumping up against other readings (both in external and internal dialogue with others) is part of what makes reading inevitably social, dialogic, and never definitively finished. yet, while judgments about one another’s sensemaking can have a fruitful role in dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy, i believe these judgments often become problematic when they become fused with authoritative discourse (bakhtin, 1981), as appears to be frequently the case in classrooms. because judgments about how other readers have made sense of text are frequently bound up in historical conventions and social status, the judgments of those with the most institutional and social capital (bourdieu, 1986; luke, 1996) – usually the teacher, in a classroom – are enormously powerful. 8 indeed, in one classroom i observed regularly where dialogic sense-making pedagogy was the norm, students frequently tackled and resolved meaning from texts that would have certainly been “frustration level” text for them according to traditional comprehension leveling schemes. used to having their sensemaking matter, they were in no way put off by the text difficulty. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a14 those with such capital have the power to enforce what they see as the institutional boundaries. these boundaries, based on their own, inevitably limited, sense of what is plausible, can come to determine what counts as legitimate comprehension. while institutional boundaries are inevitably fluid and contextually contingent (with that contingency driven by the teacher’s sense of the context), certain meanings attached to texts can become reified as correct, wrongly seen as the “one true” meaning of the text. yet, it is important to keep in mind that readers who read a given text within the institutional bounds do not share an identical understanding of that text, for they do not share identical interests, social purposes, or social, cultural and semiotic resources. as when different spotlights, beamed from many angles, are directed at the “same” location on a stage, the light and resulting shadows cast by each readers’ sensemaking is a different one. for example, kramsch (2000) found that adult college students who were asked to summarize a story about an immigrant produced a wide range of summaries that revealed subtly different meanings the story held for these readers. kramsch focused on differences that could be linguistically parsed; even her analysis did not get at differences in subjective experience that went deeper than that, as when two readers who use the same term, e.g., “immigrant,” imbue that word with different subjective meanings, meanings bound to bear traces of the different subjective experiences in which that term has come to its present meaning for each reader (kress, 1997). such differences in light and shadow, reflective of inherent dialogism, undercut any posited monologic purity of what is considered institutionally in bounds. yet, these differences may not become visible in classrooms. as matusov (2013) has noted, “agreement is a special discursive activity of ignoring the differences and the local uniqueness of both context of the meaning and the meaning making process and abstracting similarities” (p. 6). often more visible are moments when a student says something that reveals an understanding of the text sufficiently distinctive that it is not recognized as plausible by those with more institutional capital: i call such sensemaking reading outside of the institutional bounds. take the sentence, john was hit by mary. for a reading to be considered within the institutional bounds, the reader would typically need to designate mary as the hitter and john as the one who got hit. but the parameters of what gets designated as an institutional understanding usually extend further. for example, a teacher in the united states might expect that students identify mary’s hitting as inappropriate. what counts as within bounds in a classroom usually depends on what the teacher finds plausible – which in turn is dependent on the teacher’s sense of both the text and the context. a teacher with a feminist take on john and mary might, or might not, expect her kindergarten students to see john and mary in the same light. and the teacher’s sense of what is within bounds is not her/his own individual construction, but has been shaped by parameters which have become salient to her/him through many conversations in which s/he has previously been engaged; ultimately, what counts as good reading for a given reader is historically and culturally (over)determined (cf. freebody, luke, & gilbert, 1991). sometimes there may indeed be good reason for wanting readers to identify and respect institutional boundaries, no matter how socially constructed and arbitrary those may be. for example, the stakes of reading within the institutional boundaries may be high indeed: mortality rates for elderly patients with high assessed literacy levels are half that of those with low assessed literacy levels, 18.9% compared to 39.4%, respectively (baker et al., 2007); there are marked differences in patient medical knowledge depending on assessed literacy level that could account for this gap (e.g., williams, baker, parker, & nurss, 1998). arguably, readers should learn to read the labels on their prescription medication rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a15 to determine dosage as their doctor intended, and to come to see other possible readings as ones they need to put aside when they act on their reading of the medication instructions. what is important to realize is that, as a sociocognitive semiotic process, sensemaking that resolves a meaning for a text inside the institutional bounds is utterly indistinguishable from sensemaking that resolves a meaning for the text outside of the institutional bounds – even if the consequences of such readings have different stakes attached to them. readers may choose different courses of action on the basis of their readings; subsequent judgments about those meanings as they become visible to others may differ; other people’s judgments may shape how a reader comes to think about the text and about her/himself as a sensemaker over time. but, when manuel understood a text to mean that a single tarantula could live for millions of years, or when jorge argued that sand could not be made from coral, they were engaged in sensemaking no more and no less than their peers across the table who believed the text meant something else. they brought to bear the social, cultural and semiotic resources currently at their disposal in order to make sense of the text exactly as a reader who generates a reading recognized as within the institutional bounds might. moreover, readings such as theirs are also not wholly out of bounds when examined more closely. when manuel read the passage about tarantulas, his reading appeared to roughly align with that of his teacher in the sense that he identified it as pertaining to spiders and ascribed temporal significance to the “million years” mentioned in the passage (and thus it could be described as within bounds in that respect). but his reading did not match his teacher’s view that the time frame referred to multiple generations of spiders rather than to a single spider’s life span (and thus it could simultaneously be described as out of bounds in that respect). when i use the term reading outside of the institutional bounds throughout the rest of this paper, i will be referring to situations in which the out-of-boundsness is in some way salient to the teacher (even if the teacher recognizes the student’s reading as a valid one – it is possible to see institutional boundaries as salient without agreeing with them or considering the students’ reading less valid). but i assume that such sensemaking might be well within bounds when the focus shifts to different aspects of the meaning being made. of course, a student may be driven to say something about a text that does not reflect meaning s/he has resolved through sensemaking but is rather an attempt (often a blind guess) to meet a teacher’s demands despite being confused. these students are likely looking for ways to satisfy the teacher and/or save face rather than reveal that they are experiencing the sensation of not understanding (cf. hall, 2009). readers who are experiencing the sensation of not understanding (whether or not they seek to hide that) are likely to experience the sensemaking process in profoundly different ways from those readers who are resolving meaning through sensemaking (even when outside of the institutional bounds). these differing sensemaking experiences call for different pedagogical responses, i believe, and yet the distinction between these experiences are not necessarily pedagogically recognized because the boundary that generally gets all the attention is the arbitrary one between readings that are in and out of bounds. because comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy makes room for readings whether they are in or out of bounds, the arbitrary institutional line between in and out of bounds does not assume the importance that it does in comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies. in a dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking classroom, the teacher will not cast off her/his own subjective sense of what is plausible (s/he too is a reader who resolves meaning, after all), and may remain quietly aware of what might get counted as institutionally in and out of bounds within certain reading circles. but s/he recognizes this subjective sense as potentially limiting, and strives to encounter students’ rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a16 perspectives in part as a way to become less beholden to the assumptions that have previously guided her/his reading of the text. such a position is not only pedagogically coherent, but is more theoretically defensible than an exclusive focus on reading within the institutional bounds, as i argue below. questioning the predominant emphasis on reading within the institutional bounds meaning: affixed in text? the emphasis on reading within the institutional bounds generally relies on one of two ways of conceptualizing meaning-making. the first takes the commonsensical view that the meaning of a text is affixed and predetermined, in the text, to be extracted by the reader. this position is common in comprehension-as-outcome pedagogy: readers are supposed to arrive at a given predetermined meaning, affixed by the author, to be extracted by the reader. but, in comprehension-as-procedure pedagogy, there is also a tendency to treat meaning as affixed in the text: if there is a single text-inherent meaning, then it follows that a predictable sequence of moves could enable a reader to arrive at that meaning (olson, 1977; pressley, 2000). yet, the insights of the schema theorists (e.g., anderson & pearson, 1984; rumelhart, 1981), starting more than 30 years ago, render this conceptualization of meaning problematic. schema theory built a strong case that meaning is always shaped by what the reader brings to a text. a range of studies have established that readers from different cultural backgrounds make different kinds of meaning from the same text, that readers’ purposes alter the meaning that is made, and that different readers attend to different dimensions of the same text to construct meaning (goetz, schallert, reynolds, & radin, 1983; prichard, 1990; steffensen, joag-dev, & anderson, 1979). although schema theory itself has been critiqued, and alternative theories proposed (e.g., kintsch, 1998; mcvee, dunsmore, & gavelek, 2005; sadoski, paivio, & goetz, 1991), all of the more well-developed theories of comprehension assert an active role for the reader that, when taken to its logical conclusion, renders the simple meaning-extraction view of reading comprehension problematic. but not all of those who assert an active role for the reader have fully moved past a view of reading as meaning extraction, and attempts to move past it can remain stuck in a compromise position that is theoretically inconsistent. for example, the rand reading study group (2002, pp., p. 91) is one of the few prominent documents aimed at influencing reading research that is bold enough to provide a definition for comprehension at all: “we define reading comprehension as the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (p. 91). while intriguing, this definition conceptually falls short. construction implies the creation of something new using available materials; extraction implies that a pre-existing object is isolated. it remains unclear what it would mean for the same thing (meaning) to be extracted and constructed simultaneously. at the very least, the relationship between construction and extraction needs systematic elaboration in order to be tenable, yet the rand report does not clarify the relationship beyond stating: “we use the words extracting and constructing to emphasize both the importance and the insufficiency of the text in comprehension” (rand reading study group, 2002, p. 11). extraction implies that at least some unadulterated aspects of meaning are taken from the text alongside moments when one is building understanding through the lens of the known. but, if this view is to be accepted, which aspects of meaning would reside in the text, and which would be constructed? if unadulterated pieces of meaning did exist, that would mean that what the reader brings to the text is irrelevant to that part of the meaning for that reader. as intuitive as it might seem to posit some aspects of meaning as text-inherent, it is not a rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a17 coherent theoretical stance – and it is entirely inconsistent with voloshinov’s (1973) argument that meaning be seen as the expression of a semiotic relationship that is not to be located within the sign itself. meaning: cultural codes to be recognized? there is an alternative, and somewhat more defensible, theoretical position from which it is possible to privilege reading within the institutional bounds. i will call this position social constructionism, following nystrand’s usage (1992). from a social constructionist point of view, one can still treat meaning as something stable even if one does not wish to argue that meaning is extracted in some unadulterated way from a text where it was previously affixed. social constructionists accept the premise that meaning is constructed by readers whose existing understandings play an integral role in that construction process. however, social constructionism represents discourse as the informed activity of members of particular interpretive communities…. in this view a text interpretation is “canonical” and discourse is “normal” to the extent that each is consistent respectively with the premises and speech patterns of its parent community. (nystrand, 1992, p. 158) according to this perspective, writers produce texts according to culturally determined reading codes, and readers in turn are expected to read according to these codes. smagorinsky has developed one of the more thorough explications consistent with this view of meaning-making; he argues that “readers who lack enculturation to reading codes will not have access to the meaning potential that they are inscribed to suggest” (smagorinsky, 2001, p. 143). reading from within a culturally determined set of codes still allows for some divergence of textual understanding. but smagorinsky proposes that readings made without access to this important set of codes lie outside the “transactional zone” (2001, p. 143) where institutionally sanctioned understandings are produced. thus, the primary goal of teaching students to read for meaning (for social constructionists) is to help them learn to access to the right codes, since these codes are what enable the production of institutional understandings: the job of the teacher is to socialize students into the kinds of knowledge and ways of reading that enable them to join a particular reading community (cf. rabinowitz & smith, 1998). although a theoretic improvement, the pedagogical implications of the social constructionist emphasis on meaning as code-dependent do not appear dramatically different from those that see meaning as text-inherent; indeed, when examining empirical research studies on comprehension, it is often difficult to tell which of these two positions is in play. for social constructionists, meaning may not be fixed in texts, but meaning is essentially fixed in codes. these codes might manifest themselves as bits of knowledge (comprehension-as-outcome), for example, knowing that certain markers indicate that a particular character is being portrayed as gay in a novel from the 1930’s, or they might manifest themselves as more sophisticated processes in which readers engage (comprehension-as-procedure), for example, deciding on what themes underlie a shakespearean tragedy (rabinowitz & smith, 1998). either way, mature readers are unlikely to accept meanings that fail to draw on the right codes, according to the social constructionists. thus, the right range of meanings and ways of reading are not open to question, just as they are not open to question when meaning is seen as residing within the text itself. because codes are seen as stable repertoires drawn upon by readers and writers, meaning is still reified as a given that must be correctly reproduced. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a18 nystrand has critiqued the social constructionist perspective; he argues that social interactionism9 more adequately captures the actual reading/writing people do than social constructionism, describing the distinction between the two as follows: for social constructionists, texts and text interpretations function semiotically by representing or instantiating the norms of the group…. by contrast, for social interactionists texts and text interpretation function by intermingling and mediating the purposes and interests of conversants [writers and readers]. (nystrand, 1992, p. 163) social interactionism, as nystrand understands it, proceeds from the bakhtinian (1981) premise that reading and writing are fundamentally heteroglossic. that is, while there are certainly centripetal forces, that “tend toward unity and system which make communication and codification possible,” there are also always centrifugal forces that “foster the diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity which characterize actual discourse” (nystrand, 1992, p. 164). these centrifugal forces are not impediments to be overcome, but rather represent the stuff of actual readers’ grappling with text – a mess of competing possibilities and purposes that do not necessarily behave nicely as meaning is being constructed. as a result, meaning is never stable, nor “irrevocably fixed” (nystrand, 1986, p. 35) – not in the text, and not in pre-established cultural codes either. instead, meaning is negotiated – first, as the writer “balances her own intentions with what she anticipates will be the expectations of her readers,” and again “as the reader interprets the text in light of his own assumptions about the author” (nystrand, 1992, pp. 164-165). meaning is configured as this reciprocal relationship between reader and writer is negotiated in particular contexts of use, given their respective interests, and is premised on “the joint expectations of the conversants that they should understand one another” (nystrand & himley, 1984, p. 200) – the fundamental contract between writers and readers. if so, then the idea of valuing a reader’s sensemaking only if it produces a reading that is within particular institutional bounds is profoundly problematic. i argue that nystrand’s social interactionism reflects a more realistic sense of what actual readers do as they wrestle meaning from text. to be sure, sensemaking will be deeply informed by the work of other readers – inevitably, and as it should be. but what makes a posited meaning for a text internally persuasive (bakhtin, 1981) to a reader is not faithful acceptance of a predetermined meaning inscribed in cultural codes, but rather having a posited meaning adequately account for the text in light of the reader’s assumptions about the author and the author’s purposes. and what shapes those assumptions is involvement in dialogue during the reading with multiple others, past and present voices that are (or have sought to become) internally persuasive to the reader through dialogue. so the semiotic choices the reader makes in determining meaning are still ultimately premised on her/his dyadic relationship with the author – what s/he understands that person to be doing as s/he makes her own sense of the text. even if a reader makes her/his choice for a social purpose explicitly bound up in wanting to function as a member of a particular interpretive community, and even if s/he seeks to produce readings within certain institutional bounds that will help establish that membership, resolved meanings will still be about that reader’s assumptions about the author’s intentions. indeed, each reader’s sense of what the institutional bounds are for a reading are driven by that dyadic reader 9 it is important to note that nystrand’s definition of social interactionism differs from the interactionism often associated with george herbert mead (1962), who emphasized the social nature of the mind but did not necessarily perceive of it as in heteroglossic dialogue with others. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a19 author relationship as it enters into contact with the polyphony (bakhtin, 1984) of the reader’s ongoing dialogues with others. the enduring appeal of seeing textual meaning as fixed (and a response) thus, when pedagogies place a premium on students being able to arrive at shared institutional understandings, ones that depend on having access to a particular interpretive community’s ways of reading, they treat meaning as fixed, not negotiated. in doing so, they somewhat misrepresent the act of reading. they foreground what readers “should” do rather than foregrounding what readers actually do. there are real reasons for privileging reading within the institutional bounds. even those like myself who lean toward social interactionism would generally acknowledge that centripetal forces (bakhtin, 1981) in constructing meaning from text do exist – forces that often move readings in the direction of institutionally sanctioned meaning. and since these centripetal forces may be treated largely as stable interpretive communities to which readers must adapt their readings (both in classrooms and in other social circles), there is an argument to be made that social constructionism is more suited as a practical model for thinking of reading comprehension in classrooms than social interactionism is. i mean that, although social interactionism is a fuller depiction of what readers actually do, social constructionism still may represent a fuller depiction of the image of reading that is pedagogically and socially most in play. and image matters. to the extent that academic environments rely on a notion of stable interpretive communities (albeit ones that are reified, idealized, and not fully representative of the ways in which readers actually read), it is possible to make a case for teaching reading as the social constructionists do, as if it were a matter of accessing the correct codes to arrive at socially predetermined meanings to texts. regardless of the extent to which it may be theoretically problematic to presume that textual meaning is fixed, reading within the institutional bounds does matter socially, after all. because such reading is by definition associated with cultural capital, there is enormous appeal to basing reading pedagogy on the social constructionist premise that it should lead students to read within the institutional bounds. and one can point to real consequences beyond the classroom of not being able to construct such a meaning. reading a bus schedule in a highly idiosyncratic way may mean that the reader misses the bus. in the case of some legal documents (e.g., restraining orders, miranda rights), maintaining institutional boundaries on what constitutes a legitimate reading – and making sure that the understandings of those critically affected by those documents fall within the institutional bounds – can protect those who are most vulnerable. reading a public safety notice, traffic sign, or instructions for a medical operation in ways that do not fall within institutional parameters which the author was assuming can result even in death. and there is also the less dramatic but still convincing perspective of writers on the matter: typically a writer wants to be understood by her/his reader; those who write articles for academic publication would certainly take issue with the notion that any reading of their own work is equally valid (cf. smagorinsky, 2001). perhaps for these reasons, reading within the institutional bounds has assumed a privileged place in comprehension pedagogy, and a comprehension-as-outcome orientation functions as the overarching evaluative and pedagogical apparatus in most conventional reading classrooms (durkin, 1978-79; nystrand, 1997). indeed, with a few exceptions, outcome-oriented measures that privilege reading within the institutional bounds are the basis for determining what constitutes successful reading teaching. for example, even nystrand’s (1997) large-scale study of dialogic discourse in english classrooms linked classroom opportunities to engage in such thinking with outcome measures premised rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a20 on institutional understandings. so, although the pedagogical premises of the study were focused on comprehension-as-sensemaking, the study’s measurement was focused on comprehension-as-outcome: the importance of comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy was empirically justified by its superior ability to enable students to read within the institutional bounds when compared with instruction that did not focus on students’ sensemaking. i have no quarrel with the proposition that some attention to reading within the institutional bounds is warranted, but i do take issue with the pedagogical primacy of that focus. an overarching emphasis on the efficacy of teaching, defined in this one way, fails on the theoretical grounds i have laid out thus far: it idealizes reified notions of textual meaning that ignore the heteroglossic nature of sensemaking, and it fails to acknowledge the dyadic relationship of reader and writer during sensemaking. but what is even more troubling is that a primary emphasis on comprehension-as-outcome also fails on ethical grounds. indeed, one important perspective that talks back to the utilitarian premises surrounding an emphasis on institutional understandings is voiced by willis (2008). she argues that, when educators privilege certain institutional understandings, they actually privilege the ideology of the culturally dominant group. such a position, she maintains, “misses or underestimates relationships and associations with, and in, the world in which ideas are formed, acted upon, and silenced,” an ideologically charged world in which texts, and ways of reading, are associated with power and often with white privilege (willis, 2008, p. xxiv). even if one were able to nail down important reading codes precisely (as the social constructionists would have us do), these will never be either neutral or equally relevant and sensible to all readers. some social constructionists concur but argue that it would be a disservice to cultural minority students not to give them access to the very codes they need for success (cf. delpit, 1988; rabinowitz & smith, 1998). willis, though, makes the case that this premise (which assumes only the reader and not the system can change) rests on “a narrow and inadequate foundation” (willis, 2008, p. 217) – a foundation that fails to acknowledge the ideological ramifications of reifying institutional understandings and of penalizing those readers who fail to produce them. toward an ethic of honoring sensemaking making comprehension-as-sensemaking the crux of reading pedagogy i propose, then, that reading comprehension pedagogy should shift from its current focus on institutional understandings to a primary emphasis on eliciting, illuminating, and juxtaposing students’ sensemaking: special attention to reading within the institutional bounds should become subordinate to that. indeed, conventional designations of what counts as in and out of bounds may need to be rethought or even abandoned. rather than thinking about all pedagogical practices in the domain of reading as being in the ultimate service of comprehension-as-outcome, educators should think about pedagogical practices (including those that might be characterized as comprehension-as-outcome or comprehensionas-procedure pedagogy) as being in the larger service of supporting students’ comprehension-assensemaking. such a shift initially may seem naïve. why should a teacher respect all sensemaking, including sensemaking that might be (to her/his mind) way off the mark, even in a science or history classroom? why should a reading that is outside of the institutional bounds be accorded the kind of hearing that has generally been reserved for a reading that matches the teacher’s read on what is plausible? one rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a21 possible answer to these questions is that reading comprehension pedagogy should attend to a far broader set of outcomes (e.g., the student’s sense of self-efficacy; the student’s awareness of multiple perspectives; the student’s sense of commitment to her/his own ideas, etc.). focusing on comprehensionas-outcome, seen from this perspective, may mislead educators by priming them to see the wrong thing as the most important. it is possible, when a broader set of outcomes is considered, that what students learn in a classroom where all of their textual ideas are treated as worthy of examination will be more valuable than what students learn in a classroom where respect is accorded to only those readings that align with those of the teacher. but i argue that something even more important is at stake here. the work humans do in the service of making sense of their worlds – and that certainly includes the sense they make of texts – is entitled to a critical level of respect that should be unassailable. by unassailable, i mean that this respect, in the context of the classroom, should come before other pedagogical goals a teacher might have in mind, including getting students to produce particular kinds of readings. respect for the reader certainly does not mean the absence of challenge, nor even the absence of consequences when the reader resolves meaning for a text that is not plausible to others. but it does require, first, that the teacher hear what each reader does with a text as fundamentally bound up with that person’s identity, agency, and humanness. thus, the teacher needs to acknowledge that all textual meanings, including the teacher’s own, are contingent, limited, and open to evolution from the perspectives that others bring. it follows that the teacher should wholeheartedly strive to make sense of the textual sensemaking of her/his students, and to engage with that sensemaking, answering it in a way that honors it. such engagement with student sensemaking, i propose, should be seen as a fundamental ethical obligation of a teacher: anyone who does the human work of trying to make sense of text should be entitled to a place at the table. that some resolved meaning will be factually wrong, or even on occasion morally questionable, does not mean the work of sensemaking can be dismissed. i make this case because i maintain that our textual sensemaking is a fundamental part of our humanity. as human beings, we are born with a prelinguistic capacity to mean, to communicate with others who are doing their meaning with and around us; even young babies engage in dyadic, nonmimetic exchanges of meaning through proto-signs and gestures well before conventional adult-like language takes root (halliday, 2005). and this non-mimetic drive to understand and be understood follows children into later experiences with text (kress, 1997). indeed, there is evidence that students in the same classroom engage in sensemaking in different ways, even when reading the same text (santori, 2008). these semiotic decisions reflect interests and social purposes connected to who the reader takes her/himself to be and what it is about the text and the context that matters to her/him. thus, a failure to respect a reader’s textual sensemaking is a failure to honor that part of the reader’s humanity – a failure to acknowledge that even a novice reader constructs textual meaning out of the ideational stuff of who s/he is. of course, if respect for textual sensemaking is something that we as human beings all owe one another, then students also have an obligation to strive to make sense of the textual sensemaking of others, including the sensemaking of their peers, of their teachers, and of other more distant readers and writers. in other words, students, no less (and no more) than their teachers, should take a dialogic stance vis-à-vis the voices they encounter around them. it is to this standard, then – one that places value on the sense each of us, as human beings, endeavors to make of text – that teachers should hold themselves and their students accountable during classroom encounters with text. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a22 if taken seriously, of course, the teacher’s ethical obligation to privilege sensemaking is also a pedagogical one. teachers should seek out pedagogical practices where student sensemaking plays a pivotal role and eschew practices that undermine respect for student sensemaking, even if such practices might have apparent benefits when viewed through a comprehension-as-outcome or comprehension-asprocedure lens. consider, again, the definition of sensemaking that i offered earlier: the reader’s work in the service of a subjective commitment to certain semiotic possibilities over others, that is, toward the “actualization of a decision” (bakhtin, 1990, p. 28) that resolves for a text to mean one set of things and not another for that reader. in a setting where comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy is primary (e.g., aukerman, 2007; mohan, 2008; santori, 2008), one would thus see the teacher: a) inviting students to read texts where divergent understandings are likely to become visible, ones that will challenge but not overwhelm the students who will be making sense of them; b) putting students in situations where they exercise their own textual authority rather than consistently positioning the teacher as the only textual authority (for example, by withholding evaluation of student responses, whether these lie within or outside perceived institutional bounds); c) expecting that all classroom participants take the sensemaking of others, within and beyond the classroom, seriously (for example, by asking students to consider closely the contributions of a low-status student; or by asking them to engage with a published critique of a text being studied); d) facilitating frequent opportunities where students’ sensemaking and resolved meanings become visible, develop, and intermingle (for example, by facilitating dialogue rich with teacher uptake and open discussion among students, particularly when divergent understandings begin to become visible); e) encouraging students’ awareness of how others respond to the meanings they resolve, and also of how these responses might matter given the purposes that are at stake for them (for example, by pointing out disagreements or places where a course of action chosen on the basis of one’s sensemaking – such as following a written series of steps to conduct an experiment – might be rewarding or disappointing to the reader); f) making additional social, cultural and semiotic resources available for the reader to do her/his work, and encouraging students to make creative use of such resources (for example, by supporting students’ decoding proficiency or vocabulary knowledge; or by pointing out how her/his own cultural blinders might have made her/him initially unaware of certain textual possibilities); and g) inviting students to consider potential new purposes and interests as they engage with text (for example, by inviting students who are particularly drawn toward pictures in the text to consider how engagement with the words might open different doors for them as readers; or by suggesting that stories can be read with a feminist or critical lens as well as for the content of the story). it is important to note that honoring student sensemaking does not mean that student understandings are treated as fully-formed creations, beyond critique. because sensemaking is a social undertaking, not an individualistic one, a dialogic pedagogy that honors student sensemaking also rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a23 highlights the ways in which sensemaking is transformed through dialogue; multiple competing understandings are par for the course. comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy and reading within the institutional bounds can teachers legitimately invite students to consider readings that are institutionally within bounds without truncating or undermining respect for students’ ongoing sensemaking? i believe that the teacher should carefully consider whether and how any special attention to the institutional bounds (as the teacher perceives these) could contribute to students’ ongoing work as sensemakers; s/he should exercise considerable restraint before issuing such an invitation. in many cases, such an emphasis is unnecessary (at best) or counterproductive (at worst), either because special attention to reading within the institutional bounds would serve no critical pedagogical purpose (e.g., there is no compelling reason that manuel needs to accurately estimate the lifespan of tarantulas right now), or because students would explore those institutional bounds with each other in the absence of targeted teacher intervention. i trust that, in many cases, students will invite one another to consider readings that are institutionally in bounds, and i do not underestimate the persuasive power of such invitations by other students. indeed, students may come to a more nuanced sense of institutional bounds (and how they see those bounds) through free-flowing dialogic discussion with their peers rather than through deliberate teacher intervention. still, there may be selected times when the teacher can productively issue invitations for students to consider readings within the institutional bounds. the challenge in those cases is for the teacher to facilitate the exploration and examination of those institutionally sanctioned readings – and the stakes involved in accepting or rejecting them – rather than dictating that students adopt the readings because they are “right.” for example, in one classroom where the teacher sought to organize instruction dialogically, i observed a teacher-facilitated discussion in which second graders passionately discussed their differing responses to a particular test item on a previously completed multiple choice reading test mandated by the district. the discussion focused initially – and primarily – on the students’ varied reasons for the choices they had made. but the teacher also presented the answer that “the test-makers” had privileged, and then asked the students to consider: why might the test-makers have privileged that answer? was that privileging legitimate and fair? did students still prefer their own responses? why or why not? in this way, the institutional bounds themselves became deliberately and overtly dialogized, and students’ sensemaking was not subjugated to the “right” answer. potential barriers to dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy does not represent some kind of educational utopia, of course: even where teachers have the desire and the freedom to take it on, such pedagogy is hard work and will face its own set of difficulties. inevitably, the teacher will have to make choices around how to orchestrate conversations, and may not always be as successful as s/he would like in having all student perspectives unpacked. the polyphony (bakhtin, 1984) of the give and take, the lack of clear right answers, and the upsetting of the intellectual apple cart may feel uncomfortable to some students. for example, with multiple, divergent student purposes at work, and varying understandings of the context, some students might feel frustrated by peers taking the conversation in a direction that feels to them too loosey-goosey and extra-textual, while their peers feel equally frustrated that those students are trying to rein in the conversation in ways that feel too textually constraining to them. furthermore, teachers committed to dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogies may need to contend with student hierarchies that position certain high-status students as the textual rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a24 authorities and devalue the voices of other students, in effect reinscribing a problematic evaluative apparatus into classroom discourse. in other classroom settings, students may be reluctant to engage critically with one another’s perspectives (enacting a detached, expressivist comprehension-assensemaking perspective on each other’s ideas). how does a teacher honor the purposes these students bring while at the same time pushing them toward dialogue in which students transform their own and each other’s thinking about text through their talk? and at what point, if at all, should a teacher introduce divergent textual perspectives when students genuinely share views on a text that might be problematically uncritical, narrow, or racist/sexist/homophobic, and no student challenges such views? i acknowledge that pedagogical complexities abound. yet, as i see it, these complexities do not absolve educators of the obligation to work at creating classroom cultures where dialogic comprehension-assensemaking pedagogy becomes central; indeed, they make it more urgent for educators to develop, share, and research varied ways in which teachers can approach and work through the difficulties, and to learn from those teachers who already embrace dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy. reconceptualizing pedagogies i also reject a simple, dichotomous view of pedagogy that assumes that a classroom that privileges comprehension-as-sensemaking should never borrow practices associated with comprehension-as-outcome or comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies. if the purposes for these pedagogies are substantively reimagined, associated classroom practices can play a supporting role in a classroom where dialogic comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy is central. for instance, teaching vocabulary, currently approached from a simple comprehension-as-outcome orientation in most cases, can instead be seen as offering additional social, cultural and semiotic resources that will be available to (and inevitably transformed by) the reader as s/he seeks to make sense of text – but only if such instruction is embedded in a curriculum in which comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy predominates. the reframing might be phrased as follows, from the teacher’s perspective: i am introducing my students to unfamiliar vocabulary relevant to a particular text they will be reading, not primarily in order that they read within the institutional bounds as i perceive those, but rather so that they might have additional resources available for evaluating that text as they work to decide on their meanings for it. i hope that this move helps the text not feel so overwhelming that the struggle to understand turns the students away from the sensemaking. i know that my students will understand even the definition i provide in varied ways, and that the variation will enrich the work we do together to make sense of the text. similarly, the teaching of disciplinary ways of reading, which is currently approached from a comprehension-as-procedure orientation in most cases, might instead be offered as a way to make additional social, cultural and semiotic resources available to the reader for her/his sensemaking. or disciplinary ways of reading might be reframed as a ways of paying attention to the sensemaking that other people do, and of potentially trying on different kinds of interests. a teacher might pose the issue to her/his students in this way: here is how a particular historian read this passage we discussed yesterday – let us take that person’s sensemaking seriously by examining what is behind it. how might your own reading of the passage be different if you were making this historian’s assumptions about texts when you read? how does that alternative way of reading feel to you? thus, i reconceptualize the practices associated with comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies as provisional semantic offerings, made to students with the expectation that students will inevitably transform those offerings as they bring them into contact with their current and future understandings. when reconceptualized as offerings, the other pedagogies become part of a teacher’s invitation to further the ongoing interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogue about textual rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a25 meaning, rather than fixing a desired endpoint (traditional comprehension-as-outcome) or becoming the sine qua non (traditional comprehension-as-procedure) of reading comprehension. of course, if comprehension-as-outcome and comprehension-as-procedure pedagogies are re-envisioned as offerings that support an ongoing, larger focus on comprehension-as-sensemaking, then they must remain subordinate to that focus. and teachers must be ready to let them go in those moments where they threaten to truncate or undermine respect for students’ ongoing sensemaking about texts. envisioning the letting go i close, then, by describing a teacher who engaged in just such a letting go. ms. christensen, a fifth grade teacher in an ethnically diverse urban classroom, made comprehension-as-sensemaking pedagogy the lynchpin of her science instruction, which involved close readings of science texts, handson inquiry activities, and hour-long discussions of student thinking (mohan, 2008). yet ms. christensen also had moments in her curriculum where she gently guided or provoked students toward experiences that might enable them to read within the institutional bounds. she explained the importance she placed on her students being able to grapple with their own and each other’s understandings of science content in this way: i think that they need to hear people making sense of what they’re seeing. they need to hear explanations, whether they’re right or wrong, initially because that sort of discussion—entertaining back and forth, entertaining ideas and suggestions, and ideas and opinions—i think that’s an important part of it—the give and take. but i also think that during the discussion if we’re aiming toward something, for instance, the transparent, translucent, opaque activity, i’m going to be sort of corralling them toward these final working definitions, so out of the discussion i’m hoping will arise an [scientific] explanation for the phenomena that they were exploring. (mohan, 2008, p. 50) although ms. christensen’s words here might sound much like a teacher who was incorporating a comprehension-as-sensemaking orientation in the ultimate service of comprehension-as-outcome, what distinguished her teaching was that, even when she seemed to be guiding students toward a particular understanding, it was not her preconceived idea of that understanding, but the students’ sensemaking within the conversation, that remained most important. for example, definitions were not ends in themselves, but rather “working” definitions that students could appropriate as the classroom dialogue around ideas continued. and, despite her language of “corralling” student understandings, ms. christensen in fact allowed students’ intellectual work to transform her own understandings – there was some mutual corralling going on, if you will. in one conversation about a text describing evaporation and condensation, she posed the question: what drives the water cycle? the students generated a number of different hypotheses (air, water, sun) and discussed these: they developed and revised these multiple views based on their linguistic and scientific understandings, drawing on textual evidence as well as personal experience and analogy. when ms. christensen returned to the question on a subsequent day, she acknowledged to the students how their ideas had reshaped her own thinking: i don’t think i realized or appreciated just exactly how deeply you would think about it and how difficult and complicated the question was. but as i’ve listened to your questions, i’ve come to feel that maybe there really isn’t an answer. the reason that i asked the question in the first place, was because in your book when it came to what we were reading, “the role of the sun”, it said on page 79. you want to open up your book. “the role of the sun”, and we read through this. i’m waiting for you to get your book opened up to page 79. rereading comprehension pedagogies maren aukerman dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a26 “evaporation and condensation in earth’s atmosphere depends on the heat energy of the sun. the sun heats up the water on the surface of lakes, rivers, oceans and even puddles. water evaporates from all these sources adding water vapor to the air. when the sun heats earth unevenly, either from place to place, or from day to night, warm air cools and the water vapor condenses back to liquid water. this movement of water from the surface of the air, surface of the earth to the air and back to the surface is called the water cycle. what do you think drives the water cycle?” and i thought that paragraph made it pretty clear to me just what drove the water cycle. now after having the discussion that we’ve had, i see that it’s much more complicated than that, and maybe the question is not nearly as important as the discussion that you’ve had about it. do we need to come up with what drives the water cycle? do you think we need to come to a consensus on that? (mohan, 2008, pp. 62-63) ms. christensen did want her students to come to understandings of the science texts they read that were institutionally within bounds, and did see herself as playing an active role in moving students in the direction of those understandings. yet, even more important to her than having her question answered in the “right” way was the discussion itself, a discussion in which students’ textual ideas were of central importance to her and to each other. ms. christensen was able to recognize that reading within the institutional bounds (in this case, answering her question about what drives the water cycle with “the sun” as the answer) mattered considerably less than the students’ reasons and reasoning as they explored the question and issues at hand. because she never made comprehension-as-outcome the primary goal, she ultimately let her preferred answer and her need for consensus, both driven by her sense of what was institutionally in bounds, go. she never lost sight of a conviction that the sense students make of texts and of their worlds is what matters most of all during reading. and neither should the rest of us. acknowledgements i extend thanks to the many people who read and commented on various drafts of this manuscript, particularly the thoughtful editors and reviewers, whose ideas i will continue to ponder as i move forward. monica belfatti provided helpful feedback and generously allowed me to use unpublished data from her research on dialogically organized conversations about nonfiction picturebooks among fourth graders. martin nystrand, jessica pandya, max vélez and paige ware were particularly supportive during the writing process, and their insights, as well as those from various graduate students in my classes, helped shape this piece into its current form. i dedicate this writing to the memory of my beloved colleague, larry sipe, whose voice animates and responds to mine even after his passing. larry, i am still talking with you, and owe you a debt of gratitude for all the conversations you started with me that remain unfinished. references anderson, r., & pearson, p. d. 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"what is this literachurch stuff anyway?": preservice teachers' growth in understanding children's literary response. reading research quarterly, 31(2), 130157, doi: 10.1598/rrq.31.2.2 dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2013.9 | vol. 1 (2013) a31 articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e1 dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov professor of education university of delaware, us rupert wegerif professor of education, university of exeter, uk abstract this email dialogue that we record and report here between eugene matusov and rupert wegerif, exemplifies internet mediated dialogic education. when eugene emailed rupert with his initial (mis)understanding of rupert's position about dialogic pedagogy rupert felt really motivated to reply. rupert was not simply motivated to refute eugene and assert his correctness, although rupert is sure such elements enter into every dialogue, but also to explore and to try to resolve the issues ignited by the talk in new zealand. through this extended dialogue rupert's and eugene's positions become more nuanced and focussed. rupert brings out his concern with the long-term and collective nature of some dialogues claiming that the – "dialogue of humanity that education serves is bigger than the interests of particular students and particular teachers.…" – and so he argues that it is often reasonable to induct students into the dialogue so far so that they can participate fully. on the other hand, eugene's view of dialogue seems more focussed on personal responsibility, particular individual desires, interests and positions, individual agency and answering the final ethical "damned questions" without an alibi-in-being. rupert claims that dialogic education is education for dialogue and eugene claims that dialogic education is education as dialogue. both believe in education through dialogue but education through dialogue is not in itself dialogic education. for rupert dialogic education can include ‘scaffolding’ for full participation in dialogue as long as dialogue is the aim. for eugene dialogic education has to be a genuine dialogue and this means that a curriculum goal cannot be specified in advance because learning in a dialogue is always emergent and unpredictable. our dialogue-disagreement is a relational and discursive experiment to develop a new genre of academic critical dialogue. the dialogue itself called to us and motivated us and flowed through us. this dialogue is much bigger than us. it participates in a dialogue that humanity has been having about education for thousands of years. we hope that it also engages you and calls you to respond. key words: dialogic education, monologism, dialogism, praxis vs poïesis, educational sovereignity, ontological vs epistemological vs instrumental dialogism issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e2 introduction rupert [january 31, 2014]: in the dialogic pedagogy institute meeting held in waikato, new zealand this january, the research talk i gave with sibel kazak provoked a strong reaction (wegerif and kazak, 2014: kazak, wegerif and fujita, 2013). eugene seemed worked up and claimed that i had 'gone over to the dark side'. i was robust in my defense and recall telling one questioner to 'shut up' when i felt she was talking over me (sorry ana1!). sibel, who is an experienced maths education researcher, looked shocked afterwards and told me 'i have never seen a response like that before!' if we had been in one of our research partner primary classrooms the teacher might have told us not to be so 'disputational' and to try to be more 'dialogic'. but of course we were still being dialogic despite the raised tone and angry body language. to prove it we engaged in an email exchange afterwards to explore the issues further. why did the temperature rise? what was really at stake? you decide after reading the debate. this email dialogue, we record and report here between eugene and myself, exemplifies internet mediated dialogic education. when eugene emailed me with his initial (mis)understanding of my position i felt really motivated to reply. i was not simply motivated to refute him and assert my correctness, although i am sure such elements enter into every dialogue, but also to explore and to try to resolve the issues ignited by the talk in new zealand. the dialogue itself called to us and motivated us and flowed through us. this dialogue is much bigger than us. it participates in a dialogue that humanity has been having about education for thousands of years. we hope that it also engages you and calls you to respond. eugene [february 2, 2014]: this dialogue-disagreement is a relational and discursive experiment to develop a new genre of academic ontological critical dialogue. we want our readers to judge how much eugene-rupert disagreements are paradigmatic or not. in paradigmatic disagreement, people disagree about definitions and values of the practices, nature of inquiries and approaches (kuhn, 1996). if the disagreements are paradigmatic, it is interesting to build an agonistic dialogue among conflicting paradigms. belgian political scientist chantal mouffe (2000, p. 103) contrasted antagonistic and agonistic relations, “… the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism [involving adversaries who try to annihilate each other] into agonism [involving friendly adversaries, whose right of the existence is recognized by each side, if not even appreciated].” in an agonistic dialogue, the goal is not to try to convince the paradigmatically opposite side of one’s own truth but rather to challenge each other (and self) to push one’s own paradigmatic ideas further in an honest open-minded reply. of course, occasionally, we may come to some (temporary) agreements or even convince each other of each other’s truths or of new emerging truths. an agonistic dialogue does not expect a collapse or merge of the involving paradigms, even if a collapse or a merge may occasionally occur. the appreciation of the agonistic relations and dialogue comes from a gift of extra-paradigmatic challenges — challenges that come outside of one’s own paradigm — that moves the paradigms further and make the participating (and attending) voices stronger. our agonistic dialogue has been definitely facilitated by personal and professional respect for each other that apparently has only deepened through and as a result of our agonistic dialogue-disagreement. 1 ana marjanovic-shane. dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e3 we present our email correspondence as it has emerged. at times, we replied by embedding our utterances in the text of our interlocutor and at times, we replied by following the text of our interlocutor. this represents a challenge for publishing our dialogue but we hope we successfully address it by marking the author and the date of an utterance. sometimes we coded our utterances in our texts to mark subheading. we preserved that. all our post-dialogue comments-clarifications are marked by brackets. email correspondence 1) from: eugene matusov subject: going to the "dark side"? date: 24 january 2014 02:02:11 gmt to: rupert wegerif r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk dear rupert it was nice seeing and talking with you at the conference. it was very stimulating for me and i learned a lot from you. i really enjoyed our conversations. i think that a conference short discussion after your last presentation provides only a very limited opportunity for all of us to dialogue. i wonder if asynchronous communication of email can be a good continuation of our dialogue for us. it may not have intonational and emotional display for us to share but, in my view, face to face talk does not provide us enough time to think and fully express our ideas and their nuances. also, one strength of face-to-face communication, which is to quickly correct each other’s unnecessary misunderstandings of each other through back-and-forward responses, cannot be usually possible in 15-minute qa sessions with multiple participants. [eugene’s longer text is below copied in rupert’s reply and with rupert’s responses to each point] 2) from: wegerif, rupert sent: saturday, january 25, 2014 4:32 pm to: eugene matusov subject: re: going to the "dark side"? hi eugene i am happy to engage in dialogue with you. but first, a short biographical preface might be in order. bakhtin pointed out that dialogues involve whole personalities carrying with them their embodiment and their unique histories (bakhtin, 1986). you have mentioned to me several times the importance of your experience under communism in the soviet union for forming your educational and political positions. i therefore feel drawn to also share a little bit of relevant biographical information before we start. under communism for you, it seems that there was too much indoctrination and too little freedom. my experience of childhood in 1960’s britain was very different. my liberal artist mother, perhaps influenced by the child-centred educational philosophies popular at the time, expected me to make my own decisions and find my own way. i found the lack of guidance and structure i experienced frustrating. your claim in the meeting in waikato (referred to above) that i had ‘gone over to the dark side’ implied that i had been corrupted by an evil monological system. this makes sense to me in the context mailto:r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e4 of a struggle with soviet communism but it also resonated with me as the sort of thing my late father, boudewijn wegerif, might have said, and in fact did say in different words. like you, my father, who died in 2004, was an avowedly moral man calling for an alternative to the ‘evil’ economic and political system around us. he could perhaps be called a christian anarchist influenced by the thought of nicholas berdyaev. ‘love not debt’ was written on the banner he carried when he did a two-year ‘walk for peace’ from sweden to cape town in the 1990s. some traces remain of his thought on the web mostly from people saying what an inspiration he was. my attitude to him was shaped by the fact that he did not look after me when i was little and that later, when i turned to him for guidance, he did not encourage me to succeed within the system. in my view my father played the role of a prophet crying in the wilderness instead of getting his hands dirty with the messy reality of the world as it is. in practice, his moral absolutism was linked, in my mind at least, to his failure to take responsibility for his children. i feel from our discussions that you might also be trying to oppose current reality and go for purity and revolution instead of engagement and evolution. i wonder if this extreme position of yours is also linked to a failure to take proper responsibility for the education of our children? apart from its apparent closure i think that the taoist yin-yang symbol expresses one essence of a dialogic world view very well. this is that the other is always to be found at the heart of the same. the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ sides of the symbol are intertwined and can be found each within the heart of the other. that you sense 'the dark side' in some of what i am saying therefore seems entirely appropriate to me. as i said in the waikato meeting, i want to be the dark side as well as the light side and above all, i want to remain with the opening of infinite creative potential to be found in the point of tension between these two false alternatives. ——————— 1) eugene’s mirroring rupert’s ontological project [january 24, 2014]: correct me, rupert, if i’m wrong, but i see your ontological, if not your political project, in trying to reform the conventional monologic education by engaging conventional educators into dialogic pedagogy within the institutional (monologic) constraints of their work. if this is your overall goal, if my portrayal of your ontological goals is correct, i do not find it “dark” by itself. however, let me continue to mirror you. you seem to accept the conventional teachers’ pedagogical problems of helping the students to achieve the curricular endpoints preset by the designers of the educational standards (e.g., defining educational success by students passing standardized tests). you seem to accept the educational preset curricular endpoints but try to socialize the conventional teachers in dialogic instruction that may more effective and lead the students deeper into acquisition of the preset curricular endpoints. so, by dialogizing the instruction, you seem to want to “corrupt” conventional monologic practices and to push subversively the conventional education into the dialogic realm. the subversion and corruption are in a better path of reaching the monologic pedagogical goals of conventional education through dialogic means, which may create a “crawling revolution” of tacit dialogization of the teaching practice and the teachers themselves. is my portrayal of your ontological-political project and desire correct? feel free to correct it, please? rupert's response [january 25, 2014]: your mirroring is mostly correct but not quite. firstly, i will outline where i think we agree. i want dialogue as an end in itself to be an explicit goal of education and i see this as both an individual goal and a collective goal. i am not happy with the current focus on reified knowledge exemplified in the emphasis on testing and i think that by bringing more dialogue and dialogic into the process of education this alternative approach will eventually take over to become the main goal. so, for example, once policy dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e5 makers realize that engaging children in outer and inner dialogue from an early age leads to improved scores on every kind of test then the tests will eventually assume less importance and the dialogue that has been a means to the end of test results will take over as the acknowledged main end of education instead of the tests. however, i do not oppose knowledge and the teaching of knowledge in a knowledge based curriculum. i see knowledge and dialogue as dynamically intertwined. my concern is not to oppose teaching knowledge but to shift the balance to locate knowledge within a larger dialogue. therefore if we teach inherited useful knowledge we should teach it in a way that enables it to be questioned and developed later on and not as something already inert and fixed. in the context of maths and science there is a great deal of useful knowledge already discovered and constructed by previous generations in the long dialogue of culture. children need to be inducted into that knowledge as part of their acquisition of their culture and in order to empower them to take it further. (oakeshott, 1962 and wegerif, 2013, chapter 2). i oppose child-centered discovery learning as the only approach to science education. inquiry based approaches are part of the whole but so is the teaching of established concepts (wegerif, 2013, chapter 6). we must distinguish between knowledge, which is the product of long-term and large scale collective scientific dialogues, and individual understanding of that knowledge. a dialogic approach is essential for understanding. but collective knowledge (science) has a social reality that transcends each of us and is not fully described by our different individual understandings. so yes i want to dialogize the curriculum but for me that is not necessarily inconsistent with having some curricular endpoints. in the words of a popular song: it is not what you do so much as the way that you do it that really counts. if teachers induct students into the prior knowledge of the human race in a way that enables the students to take up this knowledge and use it creatively in their lives then that is good. bad teaching focuses on the knowledge as in the tests and good teaching focuses on participation in the living dialogue of science. normally this switch to a dialogic approach would be manifest in different kind of tests and in a different curriculum but that external change in form is not the most important thing here. once we switch to a dialogic ontology we discover that the reality of things often depends upon our orientations towards them. everything can look the same and yet be completely different if we approach it in a different way. let me explain what i mean here with an illustration from my own education. in my traditional english state grammar school i was taught the poets blake and wordsworth by an enthusiast in a way that helped these poets become living voices for me. if they had not been on the curriculum i would not have read them. i was grateful for the wisdom of the teacher who set the curriculum. at the same time, i was taught maths by a functionary in a procedural way that enabled me to pass the exam but killed any interest in maths for me until i discovered its potential as a living voice much later on while doing a masters in computing. the maths was taught monologically and the poetry dialogically within the same school and the same education system. in my view monologic and dialogic curricula are not so obviously different as you seem to imagine, it is monologic and dialogic teaching and learning that are different. 2) eugene’s conceptual discussion of rupert’s onto-political project as eugene understands it eugene [january 24, 2014]: i think one of the big ethical issues for me in your onto-political project is whether, through this onto-political project, you will indeed corrupt the conventional monologic pedagogical practice or it will corrupt you (or both, and if so, to what degree). in a way and in my view, rupert, you call for dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e6 transformation of conventional alienated education, — in which both curriculum and instruction are poïesis (aristotelian term for a practice, in which its goals, qualities, and definitions are predefined in advance, 2000), — into progressive education (cf. dewey, vygotsky), — in which curriculum remains to be poïesis of achieving the preset curricular endpoints, while instruction become praxis (another aristotelian term for a practice, in which its goals, qualities, and definitions of what the practice is, emerges in the practice itself and is are not pre-given). ana marjanovic-shane and i (2012) called progressive education “closed authorial socialization”, in which authorship, creativity, and dialogue are allowed for and, thus, limited to only achievement of the authorities’ preset goals (ana and wrote a short paper for human development on that and if you want to i can send it to you, 2012). rupert, would you agree with this analysis? if not, how and why not? rupert response to eugene [january 25, 2014] i am not quite sure of this. i feel that you are implying a very idealist separation of pure freedom from conditioned freedom. i think we begin as conditioned animals in nature and only gradually achieve relative freedom through appropriating voices and resources. so scaffolding is required and this is the responsibility of the parent and the educator. the parent and educator show foresight in selecting the curriculum. when faced with babies it is absurd to suggest that they 'choose' a curriculum. freedom to choose is a cultural product that needs to be part of the curriculum and taught. it is not a given of nature. quite the opposite, in fact. we are not born free and only achieve freedom to the extent that we are taught freedom, or, rather, taught in a way that frees and empowers and enables subjectivity to emerge. is this manipulation? no, it is culture. in england, babies wish to learn english sounds and drop chinese sounds and in china they learn chinese sounds and drop english sounds with no overt coercion required engaging in dialogue with the voices around leads to this motivation and this selection towards a capacity to engage more deeply. moving beyond the learning of language to the learning of culture is similarly naturally motivated. this understanding of the role of culture in the production of freedom and subjectivity does not in anyway limit the outcomes of education or circumscribe freedom in advance. we must learn to speak within a dialogue in which many things have already been said but what we say can take that dialogue somewhere new and unexpected. again things are complex and nuanced and intertwined. what appears to one person at one time as a block to freedom may be a necessary structure for empowerment and gaining freedom for another. am i right in imputing to what you say a rather extreme unsituated view of freedom? 'freedom from' instead of 'freedom for' meaning freedom as a capacity to do things like e.g. play the piano? amartya sen (2009) has written an interesting book on the dangers of this sort of extreme view of freedom. eugene to rupert [january 24, 2014]: alternatively, you may sincerely believe that learning math, specifically math, is about learning the preset math truths. if you do believe in teaching preset truths in math (or beyond), let me know, please and we can discuss this fascinating topic, as i do not agree with teaching any preset truth in any subject unless it is purely instrumental to support some other more existing issue. in my view, messiness — messiness in the goal and definition of the activity and in multiple discourses, voices, and approaches that are viewed as legitimate — is a marker of the ontological dialogue. when, we educators, tries to reduce this messiness in the name of order, clear focus, logic, goal, purity, mono-discourse, and so on — i think we kill the ontological nature of dialogue. dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e7 rupert's response [january 25, 2014]: well, yes, there are useful truths in context that empower people to solve problems. ultimately mathematics is part of a larger dialogue, the larger dialogue of humanity (as i understand it this claim is one of the implications of godel’s theory which shows that mathematics can never close itself off from its context, casti and depauli, 2000) but this does not mean there is no collective knowledge that children need to acquire in order to function. i was happy to drill and test the 10 times table with my son using fun software and bribes just as i am happy to drill and test my spanish verbs or my driving skills everything in its time and in its context! 3) eugene’s consideration of ethic consequences of rupert’s onto-political project: is it going to “the dark side”? [january 24, 2014]: rupert, if my conceptual analysis of your onto-political project is correct, the following question may emerge. is progressive education better — i.e., more humane, thus, more dialogic, — than conventional alienated education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012)? my reply to that, informed by foucault (1984, fendler, 1998), is, “yes and no, but essentially no.” i agree that the progressive education has much more elements of dialogism than the alienated education. i should admit that i was attracted to the lively dialogue between the two boys with contagious, carnivalistic, big laughter of one of them. however, i was also repelled by the hidden exploitation, manipulation, and colonization of their dialogue by cruel excessive monologism. through skillfully deceptive scaffolding the teacher (and the problem institutionally preset) marched the students’ lovely dialogue to the preset math truth by making all other possible alternative truths cognitively impossible and socially/politically dangerous for the participants (the two boys). pardon my strong russian-jewish simile, but it is like enjoying a jewish prisoner orchestra playing classical music, while other jews were marched to the oven in concentration camps (http://www.holocaust-lestweforget.com/orchestra.html). did great classical music make killing jews more humane? i doubt, even though there is more humanity elements in this terrific classical music, its humanity played a terribly inhumane role in the nazi crime. i can be wrong but i suspect that adding more humanity and dialogicity for the overall monologic purposes makes pedagogy more, rather than less, excessively monologic. (of course, in any way, i do not want to compare your progressivist education with the nazi crime but i hope this simile can articulate my ambivalent attitude to any progressive education). another possibility for you being acquired, tempted, and trapped by “the dark side” is that the progressive education’s promise and even delivery of the better and more effective outcomes for monologic education can bring grant money. again, i do not see a problem of getting grant money from our monologist agency-enemy in general, but i do see its ethical problem, when it is done by selling our “dialogic ontological soul” (matusov, 2009; wegerif, 2007) to the “devil of excessive monologism.” in my observation and reverent judgment, you, rupert, have made and have been making big important contributions to the development of the concept of ontological dialogic pedagogy. i have been learning a great deal about ontological dialogic pedagogy from you and i worry that this temptation to “reach the other side” and to get its pound/dollar traps, distorts and diverts your great “dialogic ontological soul” as well as souls of the other participants. http://www.holocaust-lestweforget.com/orchestra.html dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e8 i remember many of my friends and relatives and just people i knew in the soviet union decided to join the soviet communist party because without joining communist party, they might not have jobs and resources to achieve success in their professional life, housing, and overall financial well-being. they tried to be realists and even claimed that they would corrupt the communist party from within, through being honest, good people. my observation on them was that the party corrupted them more then they corrupted it through compromises they had to do and through trying to be logical and consistent although i felt a lot of sympathy for their needs. during our debates after your presentation, i remember that you claimed that conventional schools are reality. i refuse accept conventional schools as reality because it is wrong reality. once slavery was reality but it was wrong reality based on abusive power. i doubt that one would reform slavery by offering dialogic means for making slaves more productive and obedient to their slavemasters… or even dialogic in fulfilling the slavemaster’s tasks. rather than accepting reality of wrong, i think we may better deny wrong in its reality by undermining its normality and legitimacy for its participants. i think it is better and more dialogically honest to engage our colleagues from “the other side” in a critical dialogue about their (and our) pedagogical desires than to try to help them achieve their oppressive desires by offering means and power of dialogue in hope to subvert them in dialogue and create in them an attraction to dialogic pedagogy. what do you think? rupert's response [january 24, 2014]: i think there is some methodological confusion here. i see myself as an educational researcher and in the research i reported with sibel kazak (wegerif and kazak, 2014) our focus was not on changing anything but on observing it to see if the ways in which children were learning things in the current system depended on invisible dialogic mechanisms of seeing through the implicit perspective of others. i think this is interesting. we did intervene a little with adding a 'teaching ways of talking' element to make sure there were more opportunities for dialogue but that was not really the focus. the curriculum goals we derived from the uk national curriculum in discussion with the teachers. this did not imply that i approve of these goals anymore than if i studied the tides i would need to approve of their movement. these curriculum goals were set by educational mathematics researchers and i am not sure it would be very ethical of me to challenge them since they have more expertise in this area than i do. i believe in science and science means persuading people who are not predisposed to agree with you. it is kind of like submitting oneself to democracy so as to avoid destructive conflict. you might think you know already but the best way forward is science understood as the open minded dialogue of humanity. this means that while politics and ethics shape my choice as to what to research and shape the way i use what i find out i refuse to let politics and ethics determine what i see in the classroom. i really want to find out how children learn to think. if the processes turn out to be monological then i will learn from that but i suspect that they are deeply dialogical and i am looking for evidence that will persuade me and others of this. i mean rigorous evidence of a scientific kind. if this is persuasive it might teach us how to design education and ultimately contribute to a more dialogic education in the future. it might be counterproductive to junk science and imagine we know how best to teach everything already just because we have passionate political and ethical commitments. this would be unethical. using children as experiments in a political vision. dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e9 yes, the children are being manipulated by a hidden hand to learn certain things. i see no alternative to this. i would like to change the curriculum to teach more dialogue and more freedom but this would still be a manipulation of a sort. i do not even begin to understand what perfect freedom on the other side of all constraints and manipulations would be like. i suspect it would involve the irresponsibility of parents towards their children and a failure of their duty of care. in this debate i think we return to my biographical note at the beginning. i think that there is no freedom without engagement and incarnation involving real world constraints and so freedom is a slow journey of evolution not revolution. in russia, i would probably have joined the party to evolve it from within. gorbachev seemed and still seems quite a reasonable person who worked for evolutionary change within the system. things could have been worse if reasonable people refused to join up. nuclear holocaust was avoided for example. things can always be worse. of course there is always the danger of corruption by 'alienating monologism' and so we have to keep recalling the larger context of our teaching. following derrida i would call this teaching with two hands. deconstructing at the same time as we construct. each curriculum 'fact' can be taught in a way that maintains and encourages creativity and freedom or in a way that limits creativity and freedom. it is often as simple as using language differently, from saying 'this is the case' to saying 'this might be the case according to some people, try it and see if it is useful but bear in mind that there might be another way of seeing things that is even more useful just we have not found it yet.' i.e. it is the way that you teach that matters often more than what you teach. i wonder if we share a similar ontology but that politically and ethically we have very different motivations? but perhaps our ontology is also different i do not seek authenticity on the other side of alienation but through embracing alienation and thereby moving up a level of awareness to discover that we participate in the whole messy business, dark side and all there is no separate pure self nor finalised 'whole' no point of freedom from the uncertainty and dialogic struggle no outside that we can refer to as solid ground on which to place our lever to escape the chaos. yet there is an outside of a sort, all our conceptions are preceded and exceeded by a larger unbounded 'space' of potential a kind of void that cannot be expressed but enables the possibility of our questioning what is. this is the always already broken whole. the whole is not graspable but it is in some way relatable. i mean that one can orient towards it. that relating is humility and openness to the infinite other. i am tempted to paraphrase nicholas cage on art here: “i have nothing to teach and i am teaching it and i call that dialogic education.” best wishes rupert (in a hotel room in bangkok on saturday morning 25th january before checking out, but feeling transported by the open-ended dialogic process of writing to a different chronotope altogether) eugene [january 24, 2014]: ps if you feel that my subject title about “dark side” is too distractive and/or offensive for you, please, feel free to change it — it is ok for me. as we discussed it at the conference, for me the ethical dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e10 aspect of our pedagogical work is very important. i’m constantly checking if and when i am going to the dark side. actually, i view myself constantly being on the dark side but painfully trying to leave it with rather doubtful results in my pedagogical and academic practices. using the alcoholic anonymous approach (“once alcoholic is always alcoholic”), i’m admit that by my upbringing and biographical socialization, i’m a pedagogical monologist who tries to be a pedagogical monologic dialogist (i.e., becoming a “dry alcoholic”) (matusov & smith, 2012). pps should we invite other participants of your symposium to this discussion or should we keep it private? 3) from: eugene matusov subject: re: going to the "dark side"? date: 26 january 2014 22:52:17 gmt to: "wegerif, rupert" r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk dear rupert— thanks a lot for your helpful, challenging, and profound reply. thanks for sharing about your upbringing — it is helpful for me better understand your concerns. i am not political or parental anarchist. reading little about your father, i feel more sympathetic with you rather then with him. but i may be an educational anarchist, which is different all together (but i am still not sure and your reply is helpful for me to make my mind). i agree with you that little children and adults in general are thrown in life that in many ways imposes on them without much their consent or even negotiation. a famous example is kids do not choose language they learn to speak. but, and this is where we may (or may not) different — you are to judge, — i do not equate authorial socialization to human practices as education. for me parenting is not education either. although, both authorial socialization and parenting may involve important elements and aspects of education. for me education is about critical dialogue that you so nicely described, “i believe in science and science means persuading people who are not predisposed to agree with you. it is kind of like submitting oneself to democracy so as to avoid destructive conflict. you might think you know already but the best way forward is science understood as the open minded dialogue of humanity.” however, we still may disagree about whether dialogue can and should lead to consensus at the end of the day. also, for me there is such thing as “teaching knowledge” or “scaffolding to knowledge” as the core of education (it is ok on its periphery) that is outside of critical dialogue (or “internally persuasive discourse” as bakhtin would probably call it). i wonder if our core disagreement may lay here. would you see education as first “teach” (i.e., make the students acquire important knowledge) and then “dialogue” (i.e., deepen their understanding of this knowledge)? if so, this is probably where we are different, because for me teaching=dialogue, not transmission of knowledge. like you i want to study messy business of conventional (monologic) education, and yes politics shape my research and teaching practices. but it does not mean for me that in a name of “realism” i accept institutional political goals as a starting point of practice or as the given or my excuse. i see it as a potentially dangerous path of collaboration with “the dark side” j. i do not believe in the whole, ungraspable or otherwise, because holism is for me too monologic. mailto:r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e11 i love your paraphrase of nicolas cage! thanks! take care, eugene 4) from: wegerif, rupert sent: tuesday, january 28, 2014 4:20 am to: eugene matusov subject: re: going to the "dark side"? hi eugene i suspect that some of these apparent conflicts relate to the way in which dialogic theory points us to the limits of conceptual thought. it is well known that bakhtin contrasts dialogic to monologic and yet also, in other passages, writes that all meaning is dialogic. i think that this apparent contradiction points us to the importance of the context of reading. the same text can be monologic or dialogic depending upon how it is read. the same is true of pedagogy. perhaps this contradiction that is not a dead monological contradiction but a fertile dialogical contradiction, offers a way to understand some of the differences between us. 1) socialisation and education. you, eugene, make a distinction between these two processes but ordinary language in every culture i know does not make such a clear distinction. teaching for dialogue is a kind of socialisation. experience in primary classrooms suggests to me that can only learn to think critically in the context of being socialised into warm human relationships and practices within the context of which we can feel safe and supported when we question and challenge. practical programmes for developing shared social norms for dialogue in classrooms such as the 'thinking together' approach that i helped develop can be useful here although i understand why this might seem somehow compromised as an approach to dialogic education since it assumes we know in advance what is good for the children. 2) teaching knowledge or dialogue first? you say this might be the difference between us but actually i agree with you that i think we should engage in dialogue first (in the sense of a contingently responsive relationship) and then teach knowledge within the context of that dialogue as a response to questions raised. knowledge only makes sense within dialogues. but in practice it is not so easy to distinguish the two moments. for example in teaching a good dialogic way of talking in classrooms a kind of knowledge our first two 'lessons' in the 'thinking together' programme raise awareness of implicit expectations that children have about talk and then ask them what kind of expectations they would like to have of the way that they talk together in their classroom. ground rules like 'listening with respect' tend to come up. this is both manipulative, since we have an idea of the kind of talk we want, and open ended, since we really listen to what they children say and each classroom ends up with a different set of 'ground rules' or expectations for talk. i think that this tension is just another instance of the same inevitable tension between dialogic and monologic, centripetal or centrifugal forces, that bakhtin (1991) brought out and that we keep bumping into in different forms whenever we try to teach for dialogue. 3) consensus or disensus? accounts of science often focus on the achieving of a consensus. this is perhaps because we need consensus in order to act. we can't use medical knowledge to inoculate every child against polio unless there is consensus. but any such necessary moment of consensus as a basis for action in the world is born out of dialogue and returns to dialogue. dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e12 i was amused and pleased to see lamark referred to frequently recently as advances in the understanding of transmission of acquired characteristics have led to advances in understanding evolution [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205102713.htm]. in dialogues with the followers of darwin, lamark's account of evolution was defeated in the 19th century. consensus was reached in the community. and yet lamark's voice was not really dead and has returned to us now. somehow both consensus (related to action) and disensus (related to ideas) can co-exist and has to coexist in dialogues. 4) you say that 'holism is too monologic' and i agree with you but i think a certain form of holism is implicit in dialogism. this is the idea of great time "the mystery of great time" as bakhtin (1986) writes — which is the mystery that all voices can somehow communicate with each other across all time and space. bakhtin pointed out that if the meaning of an utterance is given by its position in a dialogue then what it means needs the totality of the dialogue to interpret it i.e. as hegel said: 'the truth is the whole'. but of course bakhtin also said that 'there are no first or last words' or the dialogue is never finished so we never reach this final truth or totality. at one and the same time we are motivated by an aspiration to the whole (the truth) and there is no whole (or final truth) for us. the aspiration to the whole, or the assumption that every voice can potentially speak to every other voice, is important in dialogue (and science) and yet implies a counterfactual since there is no whole (for us). i tend to think of this absent 'whole' that is an infinite potential for new meaning, on the model of the idea of the 'void' found in buddhist, taoist and hindu thought. this is what i was connecting with when i paraphrased cage earlier to say 'i have nothing to teach and i am teaching it and that is dialogic education', i.e. not an empty nothing but a 'no-thing-ness' that is the context of the possibility of all things. [a kind of dialogic space that is not a voice itself but is the context within which voices can emerge and inter-relate]. thanks for helping me unpack a little some of these problems that do not have easy answers but give rise to new questions for me every time. 5) from: eugene matusov subject: re: going to the "dark side"? date: 29 january 2014 05:25:40 gmt to: "wegerif, rupert" r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk [rupert’s responses to eugene’s points included in this email] dear rupert— if you do not mind i’d like to summarize important differences and tensions between us as i see them — building boundaries of disagreement, misunderstanding, non-comprehension as well as reply to your points below. please, feel free to comment on my list of the differences, develop your own, alternative ones, and/or develop a list of agreements from your point of view. or something else you wish to do in our dialogue (maybe i’m an academic, and not only pedagogical, anarchist as well ). as you may see, through this list i tried to address your points that you just wrote (but i missed something, please, raise it again). eugene’s list of tensions, differences, and disagreements between eugene and rupert: 1) education practice sovereignty. although i agree with rupert that many practices, including socialization, has elements of education, in apparent disagreement with rupert i think it is time for the http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111205102713.htm mailto:r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e13 practice of education to declare its sovereignty from other practices and functions. many other practices, like art, science, medicine, law have become sovereign and recognized by the society as such. however, the practice of education has not yet achieved sovereignty yet but badly needs this recognition. art used to be seen as powerful political propaganda or worshiping god or entertainment, and although the boundaries of art will be always contested as art, like any practice, can be always instrumental (and legitimately instrumental), art is viewed as sovereign practice. it is viewed important not because art can raise test scores, or send a powerful political message, or entertain masses, or heal a psychological trauma — all these secondary functions of arts can be legitimate and good — but because people need art in itself. i think education is similar but not recognized yet. education is still viewed instrumentally: to socialize to a socially important practice, to compete in global economy, to make model citizens, to make people moral, to solve societal problems, to make everybody healthy, to promote national unity, and so on. although all or some of these goals may be important and legitimate, they do not define education and can be on the way of education as a sovereign practice. in a case of a conflict between these important societal functions and education, it is ok to push education in its sovereignty on a side at times but we need to be clear what we are doing and not to confuse non-educational societal goals with education itself. like we do with art, science, medicine, law and so on. rupert [january 30, 2014]: i find this sovereignty of education idea interesting. i agree that education needs to be treated as an end in itself and not as a means to achieve other ends such as economic ends of social ends. however, for me, the end of education should not be defined in a way that excludes the rest of life. i think of the end of education as expanding dialogic space both for apparent individuals and for society as a whole. this end of education therefore includes, for me, science as shared inquiry inextricably bound up with knowledge and it also includes elements of socialisation because social norms, procedures and institutions are needed to support shared inquiry. so it seems that i disagree with eugene about the possibility or value of drawing a clear boundary around education and what is educational while i agree with him that education is an end in itself, in my view the most important end for society, and never just a means to other socially desirable ends. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 2) sovereign education as leisure. following ancient greeks and greek etymology of the word “school”, i view sovereign educational practice as personal leisure in pursue of self-generated inquiries and interests — i.e., critical examining the life and world — embedded in a critical dialogue (=”internally persuasive discourse”, bakhtin, 1991). of course, i recognize that this is my parochial, particular, and probably culturally biased definition of sovereign education (i.e., personal visionary). other people may have different definition of sovereign education or even deny sovereignty of educational practice all together. i suspect that rupert and i disagree on that matter. rupert [january 30, 2014]: this sounds interesting but idiosyncratic, it over values a tiny part of education for me, something only open to the leisured rich in the past. i see the self as a product of relationships and therefore the questions posed by the self as questions that emerge from responsibility within relationships. if we are open to nature we find that questions arise and we are engaged in a shared enquiry that is not just the questions of the individual but in a sense the questions posed by the universe (einstein, 2011). more socially we are led by our engagement to want to understand social issues in a way that is the selfawareness of a community and of the emergent global society of all humanity. education is collective before it is individual. organising educational activities, opportunities and spaces is therefore a collective dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e14 responsibility. of course there are individual differences and the specificity of individuals should be nurtured but this can be done by negotiation within the larger context of responsibility for a collective life. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 3) teaching vs. dialogue. in contrast to rupert, i do not separate dialogue from teaching. for me, for teaching to be meaningful, it has to be dialogic. there are no phases: first teaching and then dialogue (as the paideia proposal educators, adler, 1982, argue) or first dialogue and then teaching (as rupert argues). in general, i define (dialogic) teaching as teacher’s seriously — taken at his/her mind and heart — replying to the student’s genuine question of ontological interest. of course, teaching may have many different forms: generating ontological provocation, bringing alternative ideas, exposure and so on but the core idea of (dialogic) teaching is serious replying to the student’s genuine question. students are teachable when they ask genuine information-seeking ontological questions. rupert [january 30, 2014]: this sounds irresponsible to me. i wonder where these students with ontological questions emerge from. what language is used to ask these questions? i think that question-asking subjects emerge as a result of dialogic education which begins as early as the womb when key distinctions, such as the distinction between random noise and meaningful signs, begin to be pointed out or 'taught' by parents talking to their babies (or near babies) in ways which are designed to engage them and lead them forth to acquire a voice within a dialogue. in other words dialogic teaching is not only responding to children it is also leading children to ask questions and to engage in dialogue. dialogic education is education for dialogue and this can be planned with foresight as a series of experiences and activities drawing children or students into dialogue. but the clear distinction made here by eugene between teaching and dialogue needs to be questioned. there is much mutual teaching within dialogues in the sense of pointing things out, directing attention to evidence etc. consciously planned teaching programmes delivered to students can also be seen as part of longer term dialogues, often dialogues between generations, in which student feedback and reflection is used to adapt and develop the programmes of teaching. as a child i was taught many things i found i did not really want but i was also taught, sometimes almost by mistake, many things i later found, in retrospect, that i had wanted to be taught and that i was pleased that some of my teachers had taken the responsibility to teach me. things like how to ask critical questions. as an adult i now want to learn more about things like quantum theory and advanced statistical methods and i want someone to guide me as to the key questions to ask and the key concepts required to make sense of the key questions. as well as face-to-face dialogues there are long term dialogues and sometimes we cannot participate fully in them until we have been inducted into the history and meaning of the key terms being used. this induction into long-term dialogues such as e.g. statistical theory can also be a form of dialogic education if it is education designed to enable students to participate more fully in an area of dialogue. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 4) monologic teaching. i define any teaching monologic when the teacher tries to make students arrive to some preset curricular endpoints. it can be epistemological preset endpoints (e.g., conventional school) or social justice preset endpoints (e.g., freire, 1978; paley, 1992). of course, a student can transcend monologic teaching by dialogic autodidact. i can be wrong but i feel that rupert feels that in some cases monologic teaching is legitimate in education in its core. eugene disagrees with that (beyond dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e15 non-educational peripheral use of preset endpoints like in case, for example, of not allowing people unfamiliar with mushrooms to cook poisonous mushrooms). rupert [january 30, 2014]: yes, i think that monologic and dialogic are often closely intertwined and somewhat hard to distinguish in education. if i ask about why some children in the world are poor while my family is rich, then i may need to find out some key and complex concepts in order to really understand the issues. in this case, my real question could be followed by a 'monologic' course of instruction in order to lead to provisional answers and further questions. here the 'monologic' moment of instruction is perhaps within an overall dialogic educational approach. but, what if i do not spontaneously ask about poverty? what if i do not appear to care at all about understanding the larger context of my privileged life and then someone (a teacher) uses their relationship with me to manipulate me into experiences that lead me to ask the question? i think teachers have foresight and can design environments and experiences for students that lead them to ask questions and draw them into the process of shared inquiry. that is the dangerous responsibility of teachers as agents of the larger dialogues of society. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 5) agreement vs. disagreement. i think that rupert views agreement as a desirable endpoint of dialogue and disagreements, misunderstandings, non-understandings, incomprehension as annoying but productive temporary obstacles. thus, if this is true, rupert believes in the principal transparency of human consciousnesses. in contrast, eugene believes in the principal opaqueness of human consciousness. any agreement is a temporary epiphenomenon of intentional (if not political and relational) disregard of differences and gaps of incomprehension. people cannot consume each other subjectivities and are needed and attracted to each other through this principal opaqueness of consciousnesses. rupert [january 30, 2014]: i certainly have found in classrooms that the desire to reach agreement motivates reasoning and understanding. where there is no desire to reach agreement there is little fruitful dialogue. there is some good research on this by cristine howe (howe, 2005). however this does not mean that agreement can ever fully be reached. this is a pattern in the disagreement between eugene and myself that takes many forms. i agree that there is a core of misunderstanding and incomprehension that relates to essential difference and that needs to be respected. in the theory of science area this position perhaps translates to post-positivism based on what bhaskar (1975) refers to as transcendental realism. the successes of natural science make it clear that there is an underlying (i.e. not humanly constructed) reality which we can get to know better, in any given context of practice, so einstein's understanding of space-time was better than newton's for understanding things like long distance space travel. however the fact that we are part of this universe that we are trying to understand means that there is a necessary limit to our understanding and we can never know the truth fully. nor does our knowledge progress smoothly as each new intervention could radically re-frame all the preceding dialogue to show what had been thought of as certain knowledge in a completely new light. so in every area of shared inquiry, and for me dialogue is always a shared inquiry, there is progress but there are also limits to progress that need to be respected. another interesting way of referring to this position that is offered by derrida (1994) is that of 'messianicity without messianism'. in other words there is always an attitude of hope and openness to the dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e16 possibility of each new voice and new insight bringing understanding and agreement within the overall understanding that we will never arrive at the goal of a full understanding. i find this position also in bakhtin (1986) with his references to the need to have a 'prophetic' attitude and to see things from the perspective of 'great time' not our narrow concerns while, of course, he made it clear, that full agreement was not an option since if i were to be you or you were to be me the dialogue would stop. so, yes, it is true that i live with an always frustrated aspiration for agreement. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 6) epistemologico-ontological vs. ethico-ontological approaches. rupert seems to subscribe an epistemologico-ontological approach focusing on knowledge production, while eugene subscribes an ethico-ontological approach focusing on addressing “final ethical damned” questions. rupert [january 30, 2014]: i am not sure that i accept this but i think i see the point. this is perhaps a version of an old distinction that i first came across in my life in the form of the contrast between the injunction above the door of the oracle at delphi to 'know thyself' in contrast to the more christian injunction to love others as oneself and to love god with all your heart. levinas (1989) refers to something similar as the contrast between the hellenic and the jewish traditions of thought. is it 'knowledge of being' we seek first or 'ethics' in the form of a direct relationship with the other? i find that debates about what we 'ought' to do can be informed by understanding what 'is' the case from biology to social history to our position in the universe. but final ethical questions are more than knowledge and transcend knowledge. i feel that thinking is important: i think that feeling is important. what more can i say? eugene [january 29, 2014]: 7) alibi-in-being. in contrast to bakhtin (1993) and eugene, rupert believes that under certain circumstances people have “alibi-in-being” and their deeds (postupoki, поступки, in russian) can be ethically excused by the self and the others . rupert [january 30, 2014]: again, i think this is two sides of the same coin. on one hand, we participate in bigger systems and they often speak us and act us and so, looking from the outside, our actions and utterances can often be understood as the product of these larger systems. on the other hand, from the inside of each conscious act and utterance, we have a choice and we define ourselves in the way in which we act and by what we say and there is 'no alibi in being' for who we are. in reality we live this tension everyday. who amongst us has not said or wanted to say: 'it was not me it was the a) vodka b) hormones c) jet lag d) psychological problem e) social conditioning? yet we also tend to feel responsible for whatever we say and do even though we know how fragile and limited this responsibility often is. eugene [january 29, 2014]: 8) holism vs personal responsibility. rupert seems to like systems, whole, organity, selforganization, and unity (buddhism, cybernetics, chaos theory) while eugene sees it as a lack of personal responsibility in this bird’s eye’s view where a part is often smaller than the whole and completely shaped by it. eugene refuses this part-whole vision that is impersonal, monologic, cold, and essentially inhumane. dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e17 it does not mean that systems, wholes, unities, assemblies, networks, and organisms should not be study but they should not model dialogue or dialogic human communities. when humans are a part of a system, it is always a problem to be solved. system and network have to be overcome and transcend — dialogize — to regain people’s humanity. rupert [january 30, 2014]: мy model of dialogism was very shaped by an early passionate engagement with merleauponty's phenomenology of perception (2005/1945) moving onto his later concept of the 'chiasm' or flesh of the world (1968/1964). i see the ultimate dialogic relationship as between every 'figure' and every 'ground' or between the smallest 'part' of the universe and the unfinalised whole. i suspect this is true of quarks as well of moments of perception. but this is a relationship between an inside and outside which are balanced because mutually enveloping each other. my freedom comes from the fact that i define my situation just as much as my situation defines me. so, i see my task as to apply insight derived from human dialogues to understanding science and maths just as much as it is to apply science and maths to understand human dialogues. i refuse to accept the usual subject/object or human/nature distinctions that clearly informed bakhtin and inform many current bakhtinians. perhaps my love of science and maths leads to a difference in my tone and in the focus of my approach to dialogic education. eugene [january 29, 2014]: any other tensions and differences? rupert, please feel free to disagree with my portrait of you either because of the substance or form i put our disagreements and tensions. last words in the manuscript but not in dialogue eugene [february 3, 2014] bakhtin (1999) described dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels as ones where the author does not say anything about the characters to the readers that the characters do not know about themselves. there is no talking behind the other person’s back. this is what my colleague mark smith and i (2009) called as “dialogic finalizing” — providing the other a surplus of vision of the other for the other to respond, correct, and transcend it, rather than to cage the other in a box of monologic finalizing of the last word about the other. i think this exchange of gifts — dialogic finalizing — what rupert and i did to each other in our agonistic dialogue. bakhtin (1986, 1999) argued that dialogue — not as a genre but as a quality of personal relations — defines meaning making process and humanity itself through interaddressivity (i.e., deep interest in the other, matusov, 2011a), responsivety, answerability, responsibility, deeds, heteroglossia, heterodiscoursia, and so on. from this perspective, monologue — again not as a genre but as a certain quality of relations — is a distorted dialogue and not a phenomenon in itself, i.e., epiphenomenon. i feel we, rupert and i, both agree that monologue — distortions of genuine dialogue — are unavoidable. however, we seem to disagree about the nature of education. i feel that rupert believes that education is essentially monologic because students should arrive at some important curricular endpoints preset by the society. in his vision of education, dialogue apparently serves this monologic process by making students ontologically deeply engaged to preset curricular and by making a personal trajectory toward the preset curricular endpoints through skillful scaffolding by the teacher. education is essentially viewed by rupert as reproduction of culture, socialization into the given, ready-made culture, “at the end of the lesson, term, school, the students will dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e18 learn such as such knowledge and master such and such skills.” if my characterization of rupert’s vision of education as cultural reproduction correct, his vision is somewhat similar to positions of alexander sidorkin (2009) and john dewey (1956). in contrast, my view of education as students’ production of culture, culture making by students’ socially recognized transcendence of the culturally give in a critical dialogue (2011b). students’ socialization in the given, ready-made, culture occurs through its transcendence and critical reflection on it. the curricular endpoints are unknown for the students and the teacher in advance but only looking back and these curricular endpoints are constantly on the move as the participants keep learning and engaging in a critical dialogue. rupert [february 4th, 2014]: my ‘last word’: the disputed definition of dialogic education i think i am finally beginning to see why eugene was so worked up by my apparent support for a kind of education that specified in advance what the misconceptions were and what the correct conceptions were. it is true that in a real dialogue we cannot determine in advance where the end point will be. it is also true that each child and each student is unique and will have their own unique educational journey. so how can i claim as ‘dialogic’ a curriculum that specifies in advance what is to be learnt? it is not true that i advocate education as social reproduction. i would tend to see elements of social reproduction as an inevitable and necessary part of education but that is not really the point of my position on dialogic education. i am arguing that what makes education dialogic or monologic is not whether or not there is a learning objective on the course but whether it is taught in what bakhtin called a ‘persuasive’ voice that engages the student where they are and draws them into dialogue in a way that leads to further dialogue or whether it is taught in an authoritative voice that closes down dialogue. for me what defines dialogic education is that it is education ‘for dialogue’ as well as and in addition to whatever content knowledge is at stake. this implies a minimum curriculum endpoint of the skills and dispositions required for dialogue. it is necessary to teach in a way that produces a dialogic self. it is necessary as a minimum to talk to your baby in responsive and contingent way. to access the powerful knowledge bearing dialogues around us that shape our lives other skills are required such as a language, some mathematics and knowing how to use communications media. the new model of education emerging in the internet age allows for an almost infinite number of educational routes responding to the different interests of individuals but this does not mean that, to be dialogic, any given course should not have learning objectives. if i want to study advanced statistics i would expect to learn certain things specified in advance by the teacher precisely in order to equip me to participate in dialogues about statistics at an advanced level. the dialogues i want to equip students to enter are not just face-to-face dialogues happening here and now in the classroom but are also global and historical. although every educational dialogue is unique there is also a sense in which all dialogues participate in the same larger dialogue. this is just another way of saying that all the dialogues inter-connect so that learning about any one thing can and should be a way in to learning about almost everything. whether we are teaching a course on ancient sumeria or a course on astro-physics there is an important sense in which we are always inducting students into participation in the global dialogue of humanity. i think that eugene sees me as teacher-centred in that i do not oppose the need for some cultural reproduction in the form of a disciplined and sustained induction of new participants into key elements of dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e19 the dialogue so far. i see him as too student-centred. in my view dialogic education is not studentcentred, nor is it teacher-centred, but it is dialogue-centred. the dialogue of humanity that education serves is bigger than the interests of particular students and particular teachers. it has its own logic and if we allow ourselves to be open to its voice we find that it calls us all forward in an open-ended way on an exciting adventure. references: adler, m. j. (1982). the paideia proposal: an educational manifesto. new york: macmillan. aristotle. (2000). nicomachean ethics (r. crisp, trans.). cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1991). dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act. austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bhaskar, r.a., (1997),[1975]. a realist theory of science. london: verso. casti j l and depauli, w. (2000). gödel: a life of logic. cambridge, ma: basic books. derrida, j. (1994). specters of marx. new york: routledge. dewey, j. (1956). the child and the curriculum and the school and society. chicago: university of chicago press. einstein, a. (2011). the world as i see it. new york: booktree. fendler, l. (1998). what is it impossible to think? a genealogy of the educated subject. in t. s. popkewitz & m. brennan (eds.). foucault's challenge: discourse, knowledge, and power in education (pp. 39-63). new york: teachers college press. foucault, m. (1984). the foucault reader. new york: pantheon books. freire, p. (1978). pedagogy in process: the letters to guinea-bissau. new york: seabury press. howe, c. (2010). peer groups and children’s development. oxford: blackwell. kazak, s., wegerif, r. & fujita, t. (2013). i get it now!’ stimulating insights about probability through talk and technology. mathematics teaching, 235, 30-33. [kazak wegerif fujita atm 2013 article] kuhn, t. s. (1996). the structure of scientific revolutions. chicago, il: university of chicago press. levinas, e. (1989). ethics as first philosophy (a. lingis, trans.), in s. hand (ed.), the levinas reader. oxford: blackwell: 75-88. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. matusov, e. (2011a). irreconcilable differences in vygotsky’s and bakhtin’s approaches to the social and the individual: an educational perspective. culture & psychology, 17(1), 99-119. matusov, e. (2011b). authorial teaching and learning. in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21-46). new york: peter lang publishers. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2012). diverse approaches to education: alienated learning, closed and open participatory socialization, and critical dialogue. human development, 55(3), 159-166. doi: 10.1159/000339594 http://lc.zju.edu.cn/sts/tushu/upfiles/4e28481f-46a7-420c-a6d2-c5bcd96eb33d.pdf http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/collegeofsocialsciencesandinternationalstudies/education/research/statstalkproject/kazak_wegerif_fujita,_atm_2013.pdf dialogue on ‘dialogic education’: has rupert gone over to ‘the dark side’? eugene matusov and rupert wegerif dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http//:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.78 | vol. 2 (2014) e20 matusov, e., & smith, m. p. (2012). the middle-class nature of identity and its implications for education: a genealogical analysis. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 46(3), 274–295. merleau-ponty, m. (1964). le visible et l’invisible. (claude lefort, ed.). paris: gallimard. merleau-ponty, m. (1968). the visible and the invisible (claude lefort, ed., alphonso lingis, trans.). evanston, il: northwestern university press. merleau-ponty, m.(2005). phenomenology of perception (colin smith, trans.). london: routledge. mouffe, c. (2000). the democratic paradox. london:verso. oakeshott, m. (1962). the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind, rationalism in politics and other essays. london: methuen. paley, v. g. (1992). you can't say you can't play. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. sen, a (2009) the idea of justice. london: allen lane. sidorkin, a. m. (2009). labor of learning: market and the next generation of education reform. rotterdam, the netherlands: sense publishers. wegerif, r. (2007). dialogic, educational and technology: expanding the space of learning. new york: springer-verlag. wegerif, r. (2013). dialogic: education for the internet age. london: routledge. wegerif, r. and kazak, s. (2014). some dialogic mechanisms at work when children learn to think. dialogic pedagogy institute. university of waikato, new zealand, 17 january 2014. information about the authors eugene matusov, ph.d., dpj editor-in-chief, is a professor of education at the university of delaware, usa. he was born in the soviet union. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. email: ematusov@udel.edu rupert wegerif, ph.d., is a professor of education at the university of exeter in the uk. he has researched and published widely on the theory and practice of dialogic education especially in relation to teaching thinking and to the use of new technology. web: www.dialogiceducation.net email: r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. mailto:ematusov@udel.edu http://www.dialogiceducation.net/ mailto:r.b.wegerif@exeter.ac.uk http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ microsoft word 12. marino filho^j (layout)^j overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process^j 2023-01-12.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a261 overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho federal university of mato grosso do sul, brazil abstract in this article, i present a way of understanding how to overcome violence through dialogue and the democratic organization of group relations. the goal is to discuss how this approach to overcoming violence in an ngo (nongovernmental organization) revealed the need to be flexible, to listen to each other, and to be willing to create a new unknown path together with the students by developing the activities to overcome violence (aov). the objective of the aov was to change the interpersonal relationships in the organization, to make it a place of co-existence for the children and adults, and to overcome this preponderant form of relational violence. i present actual events that took place at a brazilian ngo specifically founded to provide care for children at social risk. the project i designed at the ngo focused on the (re-)organization of teaching activities and daily life as a community practice creating a community as a space where the relationships among the participants could become more democratic. the idea was to transform the power and individualistic domination of the ngo’s teachers, coordinators, or founders into shared power relationships established through democratic and dialogical processes. the expected result was that the young attendees of the ngo would become community authors of their own life in the institution and have more personal autonomy. this process also showed us that while we could transform reality, the reality was also transforming our expectations. the very dynamics of the dialogical process require openness in the sense that one cannot predefine the goals according to one’s wishes. one has to be ready to accept the new, unexpected issues that may arise through dialogues and change initial objectives. in any case, i would reckon that one cannot strictly control the dialogical process. for this reason, the means and instruments, as well as the procedures for the aov have to be understood, created, and reinvented during the process by the participants themselves and not by a single person prior to the aov. the results showed that an action plan and instruments could only be suggested as a guide during the events, but not as an a priori condition, independent of all those involved in the actions taken.1 keywords: psychology; education; violence, dialog, group process. armando marino filho is a psychologist with a ph.d. in education from unesp-marília sp, brazil, and an associated professor at the federal university of mato grosso do sul – cptl, brazil. in addition, he is a postgraduation professor, head of the group research "historical cultural theory for teaching and learning," affiliated with the national research council, and coordinator of educational research projects 1 “this study was financed in part by the coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior brasil (capes) finance code 001. unesp/marília ppge/pós-doutorado; ufms/ três lagoas ms – brazil. professor associated dep. education, collaborating professor ppgedu link lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/5655607305392046 link orcid: http://orcid.org/0000-00025212-3972, e-mail: armando.marino@ufms.br issn: 2325-3290 (online) overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a262 at the elementary school. currently, his research interests include children's psychological suffering at fundamental school, group process learning, and dialogical and democratic organization of the class. ïïò introduction social relationships established through power and domination can produce violent actions by individuals in a general context and in particular situations. it is from this perspective that the report and analyses presented here describe the creation of ngo2 for the education of children at social risk. in the context of the power and domination relationships, individuals subjected to certain conditions against their own will make continuous efforts to resist or try to dominate their opponents. therefore, in my opinion, conflicts that emerge between different individuals could probably be seen as attempts to control or nullify each other’s power or to gain independence. these conflicts may emerge as a result of individuals’ drive to achieve some form of dominance over one another. in this article, i claim that social relationships of power and domination derive from our creative capacity to produce our own life and, therefore, from our acquired skills to perform actions using historically developed tools and meanings. in this sense, a person acquires power when he or she adopts the cultural means to participate and be the agent of his or her sociocultural existence. therefore, the power established by individuals through their sociocultural existence cannot be confused with the agency itself. the development of sociocultural existence is actually the means by which individuals can be agents as social beings because to be an agent of your own life, you need to create ways to be an individual with your own personality. domination refers, firstly, to the idea that individuals, through the acquisition of power, are able to guide, execute, and control their relationships with objects and social subjects, i.e., they can control their relationships creatively and effectively. secondly, the power of mastering meanings and social means to act can lead a person to guide and manipulate the existence of other people. this article presents an analysis of the context and circumstances that developed in the abovementioned ngo that greatly affected the relationships of power and domination among its members. this includes events of significance for the people of the ngo and describes how a new meaning arose for them out of the circumstances. the article includes an analysis of my own actions undertaken for the purpose of overcoming violence among the organization’s members. a brief history and social circumstances of the ngo the ngo in which i worked was created by a group of citizens concerned about the high number of children living in situations of social risk. these were children of different ages, ranging from five to sixteen, boys and girls, who attended the ngo activities together. they all attended regular schools because the law mandated it, but they did not like school. these children could be seen roaming the streets, asking for money, or engaging in shoplifting, mainly in the central area of the city. the residents who worked in or frequented the city center, mainly the local merchants, began to complain to politicians and the law enforcement system. as a result, a group of the city’s politically influential people created the ngo with the intention of tackling this problem. 2 the ngo (non-governmental organization) i describe is an organization in birigui, são paolo state, brazil, that cares for children and youth at social risk. it was founded in 2001 by a group of citizens interested in promoting social inclusion. i will refer to it as the “ngo,” rather than using its official name, for the sake of protecting various individuals’ identities. additional explanations of this ngo are provided further in the text. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a263 the ngo was created in 2001 as a non-profit association in the city of birigui, state of são paulo, in brazil. its aim is to promote the protection of children and adolescents considered to be living in vulnerable situations and at social risk. for this purpose, it was planned to offer participants educational, creative, and cultural experiences aimed at improving their socialization into mainstream culture. the organization also tried to encourage community participation of the children’s families in its work, which entailed social activities with the families to make them aware of the importance of the children’s and youth’s education and development as citizens. according to the ngo’s bylaws, it would promote the “common good” without prejudices of any kind, providing services free of charge. this means that the ngo would guarantee the contracting of teachers, social workers, psychologists, and any other type of professionals to attend to the participants. these internal rules were created in advance, before the participation of the members (children and youth, teachers, and other staff). the ngo members were called ‘volunteers’ because they joined voluntarily due to their belief in the importance of the work performed by the ngo. they believed that those children truly needed to be educated to uphold the morality of their society. the members, referred to as ’volunteers,’ were generally from the middle, upper middle, or upper classes. they were affiliated with various religions (catholic, evangelical christianity, spiritism, etc.) and organizations (e.g., rotary club, freemasonry). they were considered to be the paragons of the ideal morality and culture held by the politically influential people in the city. according to this ideal, the children they wanted to bring into the ngo were supposed to be educated. but, for all its intentions and purposes, this ideal represented a local form of honesty, loyalty, and respect, which meant that the children at risk should become fit for the job market, subject to the values of this society. the children needed to learn what was right and wrong without asking questions by being amenable and obedient. this ideology, based on an authoritarian outlook, is already discernible from the fact that the ngo ‘volunteers’ prepared the internal rules in advance, without any participation of the future children or teachers, dictating to the children and the teachers what was right and what was wrong for them to do. however, the creators, who called themselves ‘volunteers,’ did not work directly with the children. some of these people volunteered at another institution called the association of prisoner protection and assistance (apac). this institution aimed to provide social assistance to the families of inmates. several children who were referred to our ngo were also children of inmates. in order to create this ngo to obtain funds, materials, food, and other resources, the ‘volunteers’ used political forces, merchants, schools, public institutions, and donations from other residents. they created a social campaign to collect materials and aid in order to fulfill their objectives. with this, the people involved in the creation and maintenance of the organization developed an idealistic sense that they have the right and responsibility to organize and set goals, action plans, and content for the children’s education. thus, the ngo’s guidelines focused on preventing delinquency and drug use and on protecting children from violence in their social environments and neighborhoods where they lived. after the ngo was created, the parents were pressured by the ngo’s creators to send the children to its out-of-school programs and activities. in this way, they wanted to guarantee that the children would participate in the ngo’s activities for their education. the children were expected to go to the ngo in the morning right after leaving their homes, before the school opens, and after school was over in the afternoon. the general idea behind the ngo was that, on arrival, the children would get a meal, and then they were required to participate in the educational activities until it was time to go either to school in the morning or home in the afternoon, depending on the schedule. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a264 one of the governmental institutions that supervise how children are raised and educated in families is the child and adolescent guardianship council. this public body is designed to protect the rights of children and adolescents. they warn parents when they receive reports of violations of children’s rights or the mistreatment or socially inappropriate behavior of children. in the case i describe here, this public body forced the parents to keep the children in school and send them to the ngo’s out-of-school programs. failure to fulfill this responsibility could cause families to lose government benefits and be referred to the guardianship council for further assessment and intervention. thus, coming to the ngo’s programs became compulsory for the children and youth created through the pressure of various social agents, such as the ’volunteers,’ the guardianship council, and the children’s own families. in the form of education through inculcation, they were required and expected to participate in activities to learn socially acceptable forms of behavior approved by the society of politicians, merchants, schools, public institutions, etc. for instance, “do not say bad words,” “do not walk around without a shirt,” “do not eat with your hands,” and “do not hang out on streets offering people to watch their parked cars for some change” (the latter, a common practice in urban areas in brazil). however, the ideas and expectations that emerged through the discourse and guidance of the ‘volunteers’ and teachers, expressing their pressure on the children to become like them and acquire the same moral values, did not get realized as expected. the children, as mentioned, were placed in this new social context, where, ironically, they sadly suffered a form of violence inflicted on them by the very ‘volunteers’ themselves and their idealistic intentions to change the children’s lives. this kind of violence can be understood through the words of sánchez vázquez (1977): violence is manifested whenever a natural or a human object of human activity offers resistance; thus, it is characteristic of those activities the aim of which is to detain, change or overthrow a particular natural or social legality (sánchez vázquez 1977, p. 305). the idea in this passage is that an act of violence is committed every time when a subject, motivated by his personal intentions, changes the particular form of existence of an object or another subject, considering it as an object. it is through this lens that we will consider the violence against the children and by the children in the ngo and in the external social contexts. for example, all the adults around the children, the parents, ’volunteers,’ and politicians, among others, made decisions about the children’s lives as if they were objects of the local society’s personal, economic, or political interest. these decisions were imposed on the children regardless of their own interests or knowledge of what was happening. in reaction against this kind of domination, the children began to behave violently on the very first day when they were forced to attend the ngo. they took over the building, broke doors and objects, climbed on the roof, threw some tiles off, and started to fight each other. ironically, that kind of behavior only confirmed the ’volunteers’’ worst stereotyping image of the children as “delinquents” or as having a natural inclination toward violence. frightened, the ‘volunteers’ locked themselves in the principal’s office and waited for the children to stop what they were doing.3 this tragic day confirmed to the ‘volunteers,’ politicians, merchants, and public institutions who participated in donations and maintained the ngo that those children needed to be “corrected.” the 3 this was reported to me by the employees who had been there at the time. as we will see, i volunteered at the ngo for one semester in the first year of its existence while i was studying psychology. i started as an employee psychologist in the third year after its establishment. i got some information about the ngo’s early days from the staff reports. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a265 ’volunteers,’ assisted by a judge, also a ‘volunteer’ in this ngo, wrote rules and regulations to control the children’s behavior in the ngo. it was assumed that these rules would be enforced by teachers and that this would regulate and control the children’s behavior. the intention was to make it possible for teachers to teach classes, provide moral education, and impart “good manners,” copying the same subject and curriculum structure from the regular school. again, the endeavors of ‘volunteers’ and teachers to control or change the children’s behavior resulted in failure. the children took control of the institution through physical violence and force, which were characteristic of their own world. for example, every teacher, coordinator, director, psychologist, and the social worker was assaulted or threatened by the children. the reports i heard were: “attacked by a chair,” “punched in the belly,” “kicked in the shin,” and “spit in the face.” i experienced the latter myself as well. some children were able to threaten the teachers, saying that their father or uncle would kill them when they got out of prison. the teachers also experienced other types of threats and feared retaliation by the children’s relatives, given that the ngo was located in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. most of the time, the children managed to stay in charge of what they were and were not willing to do and of what they wanted things to happen in the ngo. the teachers, who were contracted on a salary, felt pressure from both sides: from the ‘volunteers’ because they were afraid to lose the jobs they so needed and from the threats of physical violence coming from the children and their parents. the result was that the teachers became rather disoriented and passive. they did not know what to do in this situation in order to remain in the organization for the salary they needed. the teachers were not teaching, either because the children completely ignored them or because the children fought among themselves or with the teachers using physical aggression. the children formed small groups that tried to control particular sections of the building. this became the reason the groups were in constant conflict with each other. some of the more intimidating children, ages 9 to 15, whose parents or relatives were considered most dangerous, took control by threatening violence. the social influence and power of the children’s families in the neighborhood and the ngo represented a very forceful, both real and symbolic power within the ngo. teachers continuously tried to take measures to gain control over fights, first asking the children to stop and then screaming at them. sometimes, restraining the children by physical force became inevitable for them, but the children reacted back with force and physical aggression. it was difficult to control the children under the constant threat of physical injury and death that the children made to each other. to the teachers, these were not just mere figures of speech but real possibilities. as a result, the director and officials decided to remove all knives and forks and any other objects that could be turned into weapons. after that, children could only eat using spoons or hands, making it hard to cut meat and some other foods. there was only one knife in the kitchen, locked in a drawer, for the cook to use. the following example paints a clearer picture of the intensity of this tension and violence. often, while the principal, ’volunteers,’ and teachers met to discuss important issues behind a locked door, some of the children would kick the door until they broke the lock, entering the room, grabbing papers and documents, mocking and threatening the people. some days, a lock that was changed in the morning was broken again in the afternoon. many teachers and other professionals did not stay in the ngo for long. it was common for the ‘volunteers,’ who also taught courses or did other activities with the children, not to return after a few days of working with them. for example, in the course of just one year, 22 psychologists who started working or were hired for a trial period left the institution after a few days. those who remained either lived in the neighborhood and already knew the children and their families, or they desperately needed to keep their jobs for lack of an alternative. in several cases, those who stayed did so by force of their life circumstances. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a266 the ‘volunteers’ who founded the institution visited it systematically. during these visits, they tried to organize activities, imposing on the teachers and the students their own educational concepts and personal moral standards. in this way, they tried to institute a cultural model and values of their particular social milieu. their values clearly contradicted the children’s reality, resulting in many misunderstandings and conflicts. every time the ‘volunteers’ left for the day, these conflicts had to be resolved by the teachers, but almost never ended in success. therefore, these visits were unproductive, and mostly they just disrupted relationships between the staff and children. the ‘volunteers’’ moral values were questionable because the children’s actual lives were very different from theirs. for example, the ‘volunteers’ espoused the following moral principles: do not hurt others, do not lie, be honest, do not kill, etc. however, in the reality of the children’s lives, all these principles that the ‘volunteers’ believed to be an essential part of their middle-class social life were actually dangerous in the world of these children. in their reality, following these values could be life-threatening. in a setting where people attack, hurt, threaten, kill, and lie to survive, it can be dangerous to be different. the children grew up with very different, if not opposite, values: survival by all means, which includes hurting others, lying, and even killing. for example, b., a 9-year-old girl, kidnapped a cat from a middle-class neighborhood house and asked for a ransom of brl 80.00. after negotiations with the cat’s owner, she returned the animal in exchange for brl 60.00. several children admired her for this, claiming that she was right to negotiate the ransom and do what she did because the cat was found on the street. it was impossible to demonstrate to her or to the other children that this way of getting money was dishonest. in the reality of this girl’s life, it was a good way to survive. sometimes, when the ‘volunteers’ left for the day, strong tensions would arise between the teachers and children. the power of those ‘volunteers’ and the values they promoted were an actual threat both to the children and teachers. on the one hand, the ‘volunteers’ provided the funding for the program, and the law was on their side. however, on the other hand, their cultural values, needs, and desires could only be applied by force on the children and teachers. this only added more violence to the ngo, violence that the ‘volunteers’ purported to be against. so, in this sense, the ‘volunteers’’ discourse remained a threat in the institution, even when they were not there—as a preponderant discourse of the power of the ruling class's social values. politicians, businessmen, schools, and public institutions criticized the performance of the ngo staff. there was constant talk that this ngo did not work well. the founding ‘volunteers’ were afraid of such negative judgment. as a result of this negative criticism, some of the donors began to cut their monthly contributions, and the ngo began to struggle to maintain itself. the employees and founding ‘volunteers’ held fundraising events. the ngo was already going through difficult times when another episode happened, making the negative public assessment even worse. a female coordinator, who was trying to interrupt a fight between two adolescents, was wounded in the arm by a piece of wood they used as a weapon. she developed a severe infection that spread to other parts of her body and subsequently died. approximately two years after its beginning, the ngo was facing potential closure. it was during this time that the general director invited me to work there and to attempt to salvage the situation. the general director extended the invitation to me specifically because i have previously volunteered at the ngo for one semester. at the time, i was in the last year of psychology studies, and some of my fellow students who lived in the city wanted to help out at the ngo. however, the bad things they had heard made them afraid. they invited me to help and protect them. they were, on average, twenty years old while i was forty-four. we came together to work at the ngo as a group of seven psychology overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a267 students. however, a week later, i was the only one who remained. i stayed on as an intern there for six months. after i completed my degree in psychology, the general director invited me back. she pleaded with me: “if you do not help change the situation, the organization will close.” so i was contracted to solve the problem of violence and to create conditions for the children’s sociocultural development. as the ngo’s psychologist, i positioned myself as part of the community. gradually, i began to guide the teachers and other employees until i took on the role designated to me by the general director as the general coordinator of activities. this position allowed me to analyze the internal relationships in the ngo, propose changes, analyze results, and recalibrate the activities for the changes we expected. studying the origins and genesis of violence in the ngo and the suggested ways to overcome this violence required systematic observations and analysis of the group relationships. it also required suggestions on how to reorganize the activities to gradually achieve inclusion of the students in the process and sharing of decision-making power among all participants according to their activities. this was a cyclical process that took place similar to what is described by matusov and marjanovic-shane (2015): besides teacher epistemological authority, we see some other legitimate authorities in democratic dialogic education (dde). the first one is teacher pedagogical authority. it is a legitimate role of the teacher to design a pedagogical regime—learning activities for possible important learning experiences—for the students’ dde. this imposed initial pedagogical design is usually based on the teacher’s past pedagogical experiences, past students’ inputs, the teacher’s anticipation of the new particular students in the particular time and place, the teacher’s own participation in the ongoing public historical pedagogical discourse, and the teacher’s educational philosophy and innovations. also, the school institutions, local communities, historical and cultural traditions, and the larger society (via laws and regulations) often shape this pedagogical design introduced by the teacher. again, this teacher's pedagogical authority should die and be resurrected in democratic dialogic education. it should die as the students start taking responsibility for designing their own learning journey—i.e., the active exercising of their own self-generating authorial agency—that may involve rejection or modification of the teacher’s pedagogical design.” (matusov and marjanovic-shane 2015, p. 199) in my understanding, the movement i generated had the same essence of determining some ways to carry out activities grounded in theory, which i considered important for the children’s development, and, later on, also for the teachers and other staff. nevertheless, the model imposed through my authority as a psychologist and coordinator needed to die, as explained by matusov and marjanovic-shane (2015) above. in fact, it needed to be discussed, argued, rejected, and recalibrated through a dialogical process with the community’s participation. when the power to discuss, argue and suggest new kinds of relationships was shared among all the participants, my authority died, only to be reborn in them. with that, we could observe the process of growth of personal authority and agency of different community members in a complex cycle of affirmation, rejection, and recreation of relationships, where the ways to overcome violence could become the central theme. the method was, therefore, establishing itself as a community process of everyone assuming responsibility for thinking of the changes needed to overcome violence and create a living space that would enable everyone’s development through a dialogical process. this was true not only for the children but for the teachers and staff of the ngo too. thus, we could call this process a method of community development of social relationships. what follows is an analysis of the plan i developed with the aim of overcoming this complicated situation within the ngo. as a psychologist, i organized my plan based on the cultural-historical psychology overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a268 of lev s. vygotsky and alexis r. leontiev, the theory of social psychology proposed by sílvia t. maurer lane and ignácio martin-baró, and the community psychology ideas of maritza montero. these theories composed the theoretical background on which i based my activities. initially, the main idea was to organize activities that could generate some common goals for the people involved. the contradictions4 resulting from the implementation of my ideas to control and determine goals for others, in the way i had internalized the theories, will become apparent further in this article. a brief overview of the power/domination structure with systematic violence to provide a clear understanding of the internal violence of the ngo, it is important to set the stage with an overview of the complicated and multilayered structure, shaped by public power, the interests of certain politicians and members of elite families, as well as the children’s parents, ’volunteers,’ and social systems—all intended to control the children and their out-of-school education and socialization. i argue that the way these groups acted shaped a structure that was one of the systematic causes of violence that erupted within the ngo. i call it a “structure” because i observed a systematic recurrence of the same type of social power and domination relationships that resulted in violence within the ngo. the creation of the ngo, therefore, was shaped by groups that acted out of their own interests, regardless of the children’s concrete lives, needs, and interests. in effect, the ngo founders were authoritarian groups. theirs was a movement based on actions of the public authorities, guided by a judge, aimed at responding to the complaints received from business owners about poor children loitering in the town’s commercial center. some of the politicians joined the project alongside members of the high socioeconomic class, which reflected the way economically powerful families are able to get political advantages. this movement was characterized by the use of force by public authorities and political powers to dictate socio-educative actions rooted in legal and economic power. for example, they could allocate financial resources towards forcing the parents and their children, by legal means, to apply to be part of the project. in fact, the ngo was granted the right to use a building that belonged to a company experiencing legal trouble by a court order. the politicians and elite families arranged fundraising activities for the project. that meant that the group who founded the ngo had the power and control of the sociopolitical and economic forces that served their interests, especially since these economic and political forces adhered to the idea of moral education based on their culture’s values. such actions were driven by the ‘volunteers’’ interest in imposing their own educational values and behavioral standards on the children, as the only right ones, for preserving the society in which they lived. the ‘volunteers’ used legal power to control the parents and children who participated in the ngo’s project. this use of force meant imposing restrictions on those with little or no economic and political power. in the face of such force, the parents and their children were completely powerless and had to endure and obey this situation. some children’s parents submitted themselves to this situation because they needed the food and education provided to their children. they expected this to raise their children’s social conditions. other parents made their children participate just to avoid the visits and pressure from the police. similarly, the 4 contradiction is understood here not as a formalist negation, but as a unit of movement in any relation in which its components are denied and affirmed at the same time as they are interdependently constituted. it reveals identity and otherness in unity and, therefore, the new that takes place in the movement between opposites and that changes their forms of existence. (marino filho, 2014, p. 07) overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a269 teachers submitted themselves to this public power for guaranteed employment. however, the teachers experienced additional pressures from some parents, to which they yielded power in fear of retaliation. this circular and convoluted structure and system of violence in the ngo worked as follows: the representatives of public, political, and economic power were a threat to the teachers, parents, and children. in turn, parents who were involved in criminal activities posed a physical threat to the lives of the teachers. the statute of the child and the adolescent (eca) threatened poverty-stricken parents and families. the teachers threatened children to report them to their parents, who could punish them physically, or to use the child and adolescent guardianship council, which could take legal action against their parents. the children threatened each other and the teachers with verbal and physical violence. although various conclusions may be made based on these facts, i argue that the threats were the most important tool by which the groups tried to control each other. this threat-based system prevented open dialogue and democratic processes from being set in place in order to organize a shared life within the ngo. this was at the center of the problem that i was able to analyze based on my direct observations as the party to the situations and having to deal with these situations. in the face of these circumstances, no matter how hard the teachers tried to start a dialogue with the different groups inside and outside the ngo, their efforts failed. the threats did not disappear. moreover, it was also me who was a threat to all of them, and many times i realized that they actually felt i was a threat. however, i needed to use the power i was given in order to effectively bring about a transformation of the relationships at this ngo, as well as to create and guide individual and group activities. power is a force to move, transform, execute, orientate, and control the activity. therefore, every living being needs the power to maintain their life towards a specific action from their species. for humankind, signs, tools, and instruments have a force as means to communicate skills and knowledge to produce their particular actions of cultural activity. in this sense, individual power rises from acquiring these cultural means. besides the natural forces, cultural means compound the system that we can call psychological that organizes and controls our behavior toward reality. for this reason, such a system is a power every individual needs to acquire to be a culturally accepted agent in their life. as vygotsky (1987) analyzes bleuler research’s data on imagination, speech frees the child from the immediate impression of an object. it gives the child the power to represent and think about an object that he has not seen. speech gives the child the power to free himself from the force of immediate impressions and go beyond their limits. the child can express in words something that does not coincide with the precise arrangement of objects or representations. this provides him with the power to move with extraordinary freedom in the sphere of impressions, designating them with words (vygotsky, (1987, p. 346). for this reason, the action plan that i initially devised was focused on the system of power/domination as the center of the democratic process and dialogue as the center of the transformative process. power and domination are conditions of existence. every human being must have the power to guide, execute, and control the means of his or her existence in society, i.e., their own psychological system. this system is what constitutes the human being’s power. when subjected to certain social conditions, he or she adopts the means, instruments, and ways of being of his or her culture. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a270 power is a kind of force that exists within all things. force is something that moves existence. for instance, a stick of wood resists being bent. this kind of force somehow moves its interaction with different things. when one takes a stick of wood to use it as a cultural tool to move a rock, he understands its power and force as a handle, and he acquires a psychological means to guide him through these types of actions. it means that he appropriated the power of the symbolic existence of the stick itself. in this sense, that wood stick became a cultural tool and changed one’s behavior. now, one knows the material power in the stick and turns it into a power to guide, control, and execute one’s own actions with it. no matter whether one changes his behavior through cultural tools or signs, its embodied power still exists. therefore, i argue that cultural tools and signs have a power that each one needs to appropriate as psychological power that arises from the activity with it. activity to overcome violence: the plan of action the concept of an activity to overcome violence (aov) was a general concept for all of the activities. this concept coordinated actions oriented at their target. therefore, every particular activity that was organized was oriented toward overcoming violence in the ngo. to achieve its goals, it was necessary that an aov creates relationships characterized by community structure and has an objective to develop a sense of community among the members. we strived to develop feelings of interdependence and trust to build a place to live together. the principles for creating this sense of interdependence will be discussed below through the concepts of participation, opportunity to communicate, and enlightened understanding of the objectives of coexistence. these concepts were the general principles for organizing all of the group activities as aovs. an aov could be created by any group of individuals within the ngo once they acquired a sense of interdependence and adopted the above-mentioned principles that gave rise to this sense. i started my work from those principles. while transferring my individual power to all of the participants, the aovs i created began to integrate the individuals as members who shared the power. now, they could reproduce the same attitude i had toward transformative relationships in the activities that were within their domain. therefore, the aovs were not predetermined. the new ones could be created in the process of transformation of the relationships. furthermore, it is important to point out that my ideas about these aspects of the aov were undergoing a change as the work progressed and the ngo members participated. they started to include values based on their own view of the world and of the kinds of relationships they wanted to build. in this sense, i was compelled by virtue of the real circumstances to adapt my position and vision of the world as well. otherwise, i would be excluded from the community or take up an authoritarian position of domination. the new and inclusive set of goals could be reached mainly through democratic relationships and dialogical processes. these two types of relationships were chosen because the first one contains the shared power and the second the shared voice, needs, and interests that need to coexist without being subjugated or organized in a hierarchy within the community. therefore, power and voice constitute the foundation of individuals’ participation and their self-assertion as a person in any group or community. when power is taken away through domination and voices silenced through submission tension and suffering are generated. this creates a state of violence and results in violent reactions. for this reason, aov’s very content needed to lead to a sense of interdependence. what follows is an explanation of this structure of activities. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a271 an action-based approach to changing relationships in the ngo the most obvious problem, from my point of view, was the struggle for power among different groups. these were the groups inside and outside of the ngo: the ‘volunteers,’ politicians, a variety of donors, the children’s parents, and the children themselves. each group tried to gain control of the wheel in order to steer the institution’s course in its own direction and demonstrate the effectiveness of its own power. due to these groups’ reluctance and inability to listen to each other, democratic dialogue between them was impossible. the problem was to find a way to change this power struggle. but how? through moral preaching? could the teachers potentially diversify their pedagogical approaches? would it be reasonable to apply common-sense practices, for instance, set limits for the children? no. ultimately, none of these attempts worked. we conceptualized the basis of the democratic relationships as follows: a) participation of all community members as recognized agents of the collective activities; b) opportunity for all community members to communicate interests, desires, and needs; c) enlightened understanding by each member of the goals of coexistence, knowledge, and control of the plans to take care of their life in the institution. these were the guiding principles for organizing and structuring our aovs. through these principles, the organization of activities promoted a democratization process among the ngo members. for this reason, it seems to me that the concept of the democratization process is more important than the concept of democracy. i argue that the democratization process leads subjects to build their own local ideas and meanings that organize their coexistence. therefore, they can deal with the meaning of democratic relationships that make sense in accordance with their own needs. such a process is a dynamic unit of the concepts mentioned above and is briefly explained in the following: a. participation participation means that a subject commits to cooperating in the community's collective activities. the individuals become agents of actions and operations guided toward the common ends jointly with the other subjects' actions. alexis n. leontiev (2009), in examining “the fundamental structure of the individual’s activity in the conditions of a collective labour,” explains, from my point of view, that participation is a prerequisite for the emergence of democratic relationships among people, that is, the cooperation in a collective production of life. he says as follows: this activity is also now no longer reflected in man’s head in its subjective oneness with the object but as the subject’s objective, practical relation with it. in the conditions being considered, this is always, of course, a collective subject and the relations of the individual participants in the work are consequently originally reflected by the individuals only to the extent that their relations coincide with those of the group as a whole (leontiev 2009, p. 190). overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a272 b. opportunity to communicate opportunity to communicate is a condition for the subjects’ participation in collective activity and achievement of their personal needs that depend on other members. individuals may be capable of achieving their own needs without limiting themselves. however, democratic participation in collective activities enables them not only to respect the interests of others by limiting their own actions but also to ask others to respect their own personal interests by limiting their actions. i argue that the act of respect entails searching for the history of the subject’s needs, comprehending such history through the current conditions, and paying attention to them in making one’s own decisions. this is an objective condition for something like a dialogue process to arise among the participants. in this joint participation, they need to argue, show their feelings and interests, and discuss with their body, soul, and entire life. on this very subject, bakhtin (1999) said: to live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. in this dialogue, a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. he invests his entire self in the discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (bakhtin 1999, p. 293). c. enlightened understanding of the goals of coexistence an enlightened understanding of the goals of coexistence is the basis for acquiring and improving consciousness of one’s own place in the group. becoming aware of the common objectives is a condition that can lead the members of the community to build the notion of interdependence among themselves as the foundation of their community. community arises from real relationships in which people realize their interdependence. the concept of community represents group unity in practices and intellectual activity, meanings and spaces, in which the group members see reasons for their socialization. it is a life, in which they find possibilities for personal development and can accomplish their personal objectives based on the trust and confidence in their co-existence with others (marino filho 2012, p. 10). at that time, certain questions had to be asked when considering the problem of transforming the relationships of power and domination between the people of the ngo into democratic and dialogical relationships to form a community among them. first, is it possible for democracy to emerge in a group in which the difference of power among its members has an undue influence on each individual’s personal experiences? is the creation of a new, personal sense of community life possible? could democracy be a system for changing the power dynamics, i.e., diminishing the domain of the influence some individuals have over others? in my view, answering this last question was crucial for producing democratic changes. based on my own experience in this institution, i would argue that democratic actions depend on the ability to teach others how to use and share power. it also means diminishing the power of a single individual or a majority of individuals over the others and increasing the power of all members of the community as a whole. dialogue with one another, through shared power, was the key of the aovs to fundamentally change this ngo. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a273 when i started working in the ngo, the general director gave me full authority to make decisions and change relationships. having this authority gave me power over the ‘volunteers,’ the politicians, the outsiders involved in maintaining this institution, and even the power over the founders, as well as the judge who participated in the establishment of the initial internal rules. at the same time, i had the power to control teachers’ activities, choose which supplies to buy, and organize the employees’ tasks, among other activities. i did this for some time. but i needed to make changes to this distribution of power if i were to change the manifestations of violence by some and the submission by others. firstly, i started to regulate the visits of the ‘volunteers,’ i.e., people who tried to impose their worldview on the ngo, usually disturbing the relationships between teachers and children. secondly, i began working with the children on a collective transformation of the rules that had been written by the judge, teachers, and ‘volunteers’ so that they could become co-owners of these rules. later, i began to transfer the power of decision-making about the employees’ activities to the employees themselves. the nature of my discourse, while keeping track of activities and the democratization process, turned from authoritarian to authoritative and then eventually to dialogical. i had to use an authoritarian language so that, later on, i could share my power with others, ultimately achieving a dialogical process. this was a dynamic situation where my role was slowly becoming that of a psychologist instead of an authoritarian leader (which i was at the start of my work there). breaking down the domination structure based on the authority given to me by the general director and the confidence that i could make any changes i saw fit in the ngo, i created rules by which i could regulate and limit the visits of politicians, high-society women, and the judge: they were not to work with the children without my prior permission and giving me an advance notice. their immediate reaction was to threaten us with the withdrawal of funding and their help. nevertheless, i explained to them that i needed to do this because their contradictory ideas and rules were interfering with the ngo’s system. from this moment, i started to have a different kind of conversation with them, disrupting their authority, until, after a few months, dialogue became possible between us. some of them, primarily the women who started the ngo, began to understand our—my and my team’s—motives and our requirements. they arranged fundraising events for monetary, food and teaching material donations (computers, for example). they started to visit the ngo with a different goal: in order to understand the new organization and how it was operating. they talked to me about my plans and wanted to know what the staff thought of the changes. they became able to talk to the staff respectfully. nonetheless, they never changed their ideology and position of power. they tolerated me because the general director backed me, but they were merely restraining their power. further in this article, it will become clear how this power emerged again and its consequences for the ngo and for myself. the domination structure had to be broken down, in my view, because the ideological influence of the politicians and representatives of high society inside the ngo needed to be diminished. with their discourse, they only reiterated that their power and domination triggered violent behavior in the ngo. on the other hand, the reason why my dialogue with the politicians and the elite could not change their ideology and why they restrained their power and interest in dominating the ngo is described well by lukács (2010, p. 288), when he states that “[…] every social class ideologue tends to interpret the social condition that seems to him to be the solution of all problems as the ‘end of history”. i contend that the overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a274 changes in the ngo were a threat to these people’s ideology because they saw a possibility of a new history being shaped. although they helped us, they never fully gave up the idea of controlling the ngo. second, the relationships of domination among the children also had to be broken down. an example of the internal process by which domination among the children was broken down involves b., the nine-year-old “cat kidnapper.” it had to do with changes in the internal procedure (aov). this process, detailed below, was at the center of the changes in the domination structure. at the age of four, b. had been sexually abused by her father. her mother used to hit her and her brother on their toes with a wooden stick to punish them when they did not obey. her brother told me several times that he would kill his mother once he turned eighteen. these were just some of the realities of their situation at the time. in this setting, b. became an extremely violent child. she hit other younger or older children and was not afraid that the stronger boys might hurt her. usually, she made the other children do what she wanted by using threats and authority. one day, as i watched the children play, i saw b. forcing two other girls to play a game with her. there was a third girl who asked to play with them. b. rejected her, saying that she could not play. the first two girls asked b. to accept the third one, but she refused and ordered them to start playing with her immediately. when i noticed this situation, i told the girls that there was no rule in place that would allow b. to force them to play with her. they all looked at me in surprise, including b. then, the two girls and the third girl who was rejected from participating ran away to play somewhere else. i watched b. as she paced back and forth, not knowing what to do in this situation. after about three minutes, she ran up to where the girls were playing and asked to join them. they accepted her and played all together. this was a clear indication to me that the new procedure belonged to the children, arising out of the aov to deconstruct the power and domination relationships. now, it became a power shared by all of them, and somehow it made them all equal. it is essential to notice that the new procedure, namely, the rules created for the community by themselves, became a tool—a primary means to think through a new community structure. the aov of rewriting the community rules and the final product, i.e., the document they produced, gave them an instrument of shared power and, thus, the community's capacity to control their actions. the relationships of the teachers, children, and staff began to take a new shape, gradually transforming their life and work in this space. they were being guided by the new constitution that regulated everyone’s behavior and they could also suggest changes to this document, whether they were children or adults, teachers or guards or cleaning staff, and so on and so forth. the possibility of dialogue and debate regarding the value of the relationships between them changed the quality of their relationships. if previously the disputes were dictated by individually held values, they now needed to have a reference to a values sanctioned by everyone. this had the characteristics of a democracy based on dialogue. we could observe even a physical relaxation among all the ngo participants, with less tension and nervousness. for example, d., the accountant responsible for finances, had previously been very tense and afraid of making a mistake in the accounting records, and she had constantly suffered from nervous skin irritation. after having assumed the responsibility for her accounting activities without any kind of supervision on my part and making her own decisions about how to distribute the money for the ngo’s needs, her mood started to improve, she smiled more, and her irritation symptoms began to subside. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a275 in another example, the guard, who had endlessly complained about his situation of inaction, passivity and lack of participation in making team decisions due to being a simple guard, stopped complaining and was seen whistling and in cheerful spirits after being included in the team as a teacher and contributing his opinions on education and on what to do in the ngo. these were signs of a general shift that was taking place in the organization through the aovs, as a system that began to actually exist. transformation of meanings into means for dialogue and creation of a sense of community my intention was that the ngo members understand that they live together in that organization and have the power to transform it into a home, a community. this aim was supported by my theoretical knowledge and the ethical values grounded in the social psychology of s.t.m. lane (1994) and i. martínbaró (1989) and the community psychology of m. montero (2004). this perspective led me to gradually transfer my powers to the children and employees so that they could define the rules, goals, and schedules, among other things. to realize this aov, which gradually included all the ngo members in a movement to share the decision-making power, i organized group discussions: a group for teachers and staff and two groups of children: the young ones and the adolescents. organized as an aov to promote a dialogic process, we jointly scheduled the days and times for our meetings. i talked to them beforehand, giving suggestions and listening to their ideas for the meetings, and the meetings started only once they agreed on the time and the goals. this group process allowed me to release my authoritarian role, and i started to position myself in a different capacity than before in the ngo. the circumstances forced me to recognize that their needs and expectance to be agents of their own decisions must guide my actions toward the changes i thought before. for this reason, i needed to give up my authoritarian power and give them the means, for instance, to discuss the meaning of concepts we use to think or for their authorial responsibility for the changes they needed to build a new constitution for their relationships. the meetings with the children to discuss and decide on the rules continued, based on their own decisions. afterward, we extended this practice to the teachers and staff too. we took the official rules that already existed and read and analyzed them to understand what they meant. we debated about the need for the rules and the importance of their existence in the ngo. the children and i went through the rules one by one and debated what rules they felt were unfair or partial because they regulated their behavior but not that of the teachers and staff. we found that the existing rules were aimed only at controlling the children. the children and i decided to eliminate those rules that did not make sense to them or were not based in their reality. we also decided to write new rules the children felt were needed. the result was a new set of rules that best expressed their interests, such as: “professor j. cannot step on our feet” (talking about a teacher who was 1.75 m tall and weighed 90 kg, who used to step on the feet of younger children to control their behavior); “teachers cannot yell at us”; “teachers cannot force us to study the same content we already studied at school”; or “children can choose the activities they want to do.” in this process, the children gained the confidence to utter and formulate the rules based on their own lives. most importantly, the revisions and modifications of the rules were handwritten on paper by the children themselves. we filed the document in the principal’s office as an official document. now, the employees and staff had to read the document and respond to the children with their considerations and opinions about the new rules. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a276 the teachers were surprised by this reversal of power between them and the children. they learned that they had to give in, too, and adjust to each other’s needs. they learned that fairness is about striking a balance between needs and possibilities—the needs of each one and the possibilities of satisfying them without giving anyone preferential treatment. for example, r., the janitor, argued about the logic of the order in which the rooms were being cleaned and managed to change the teachers’ schedule to improve this order—something hitherto unthinkable in the hierarchy of organizations such as this one. one positive consequence of this process of transforming the rules and making them official documents is that the children acquired a different kind of power. now, managing their behavior and actions became a matter of pride for them since they were following a document that symbolized their sphere of influence. not infrequently, i saw the children instructing newcomers to the organization about what they were or were not allowed to do according to the rules. behavior transformation through the ownership of the rules was quite crucial in switching their relationships to a dialogic process. new behavior needs new meanings and psychological orientation through some breakdown of the current system, as we can understand in the explanation of ilyenkov (1982) about a new phenomenon. he said: in reality it always happens that a phenomenon which later becomes universal originally emerges as an individual, particular, specific phenomenon, as an exception from the rule. it cannot actually emerge in any other way. otherwise history would have a rather mysterious form. thus, any new improvement of labour, every new mode of man's action in production, before becoming generally accepted and recognised, first emerge as a certain deviation from previously accepted and codified norms. having emerged as an individual exception from the rule in the labour of one or several men, the new form is then taken over by others, becoming in time a new universal norm. if the new norm did not originally appear in this exact manner, it would never become a really universal form, but would exist merely in fantasy, in wishful thinking. (ilyenkov 1982, p. 83-84) besides becoming the authors of the new rules, the children started to ask for things they were interested in, discuss issues with one another, and connect their lives inside and outside the ngo in a more rational way. they started to share emotions and affection for one another in small groups with teachers, the staff, and myself. the amount of physical violence decreased, and some of the teachers were able to organize classes effectively. one example of the profound transformations in the social relationships within the institution was c., the guard. his activity, restricted by the policies of a security company, was limited only to guarding the gate against possible intruders and monitoring for any unauthorized exit of the children. sometimes, when the children were in danger of getting hurt in fights, he helped the teachers restrain the children by physical force. he did this, but not without fear of being punished by the security company that employed him because it was outside the scope of what he was allowed to do on his job. this caused him to live under constant stress. the teacher’s requests and his employer’s policies put him in an ethically contradictory situation: he wanted to protect the children but doing this put his job in jeopardy. at one point, i found out that he was an excellent comic book designer, and i asked his commander to let him teach the children how to create comic books. i spent a month convincing the commander of the importance of these lessons. he made an exception for c., allowing him to participate in the project for the benefit of the children’s education. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a277 a generous and well-meaning person, c. carefully organized the drawing lessons. first, we organized a campaign to raise funds to buy materials and paint the walls of the room where they would be working. with the help of the children, he painted the walls and decorated them with comic book characters. he separated the children by age and taught them how to draw. during the lessons, he talked to the children in a manner of a caring parent. this made him a respected teacher, and he did not have to use physical force anymore. now, everything could be resolved through dialogue. in this setting, subjective needs arise out of the contradictions between the situational context and personal knowledge and emotional conditions. for example, c., the guard, created a context for the drawing lessons with my help. in this context, he used language, verbal expressions, tools, and actions that the children did not initially understand. this circumstance created the need for the children to understand the teacher. in turn, if the teacher teaches the children carefully, the knowledge they acquire could make them valuable participants in that activity. in my view, one becomes a valuable participant when one can realize one’s skills with the domain tools and meanings to accomplish the targets of one’s tasks and check and evaluate the correspondence of the product with the objectives of the activity in which they participate. therefore, one can feel integrated into a group of people. this kind of conscious integration is the source of motivation, meaning-making, and psychological sense. it is the root of the affective and emotional system based on which children's personalities can develop. the values, being signs of a positive or negative quality of the relationships, are constituted by the individual participants in social activities that are vital for them. it means that the individuals take relations and interact with their world to satisfy needs that include their existence as social agents and personalities. therefore, when the product or effects of relationships correspond to personal needs, it has a positive value. it is positive because its qualities confirm, i.e., uphold the existence of individuals' lives. for instance, c., the guard turned teacher, could experience value changes in his relationships throughout his classes. the children started to respect him, to listen to his advice. as a teacher, he could feel prized by the staff because of the changes in the children's behavior. therefore, the activity takes a positive value for him as a member of the ngo. it was perceptible how carefully he set classes and proudly told us about children's progress in drawing skills. by organizing activities based on the aforementioned general structure, i expected the participants to become aware of the meanings and social functions of the objects, actions, and psychological senses needed for building our shared life. moreover, by structuring aov activities in this way, i knew that i would be generating a process of meaning-making guided by affective, emotional, and cognitive senses for all the staff too. when a group accomplishes something together, based on shared knowledge, and achieves the desired goals, trust can arise among its members. trust-based relationships contribute to creating a sense of community in the group’s consciousness, thereby helping it overcome violence. the staff and i arranged a variety of aov activities where the children were involved in designing and determining the goals, timelines, and everything needed to carry out these activities. as a result, about two years later, we felt confident enough in the new trust-based relationships that we could give the children knives and forks during mealtimes. the tables were now set with plates, cutlery, and napkins. some children began to help wash the dishes and clean up the lunchroom, and help each other with the homework, for example. all of the relationships started to change once the power to create and choose the rules for the activities was distributed more equitably. the fights subsided, although they did not disappear completely because the children continued to experience violence and tension in other environments, such as their family or at school. however, they were finally able to see the ngo as a place where they could talk and freely express their needs and overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a278 desires. even with the tensions they brought to the ngo, everyone learned the power of dialogue through new experiences and a better distribution of power. finally, it was possible for the organization to go several days without physical violence. sharing power to create dialogical and democratic relationships once i transferred my power to the others so they could organize their activities themselves, a dialogical process emerged, and democratic decisions took shape. these events became more and more evident. for example, r., an illiterate black woman who was the janitor and a cook at the ngo, did not have the confidence to participate in discussions between teachers and staff during meetings. i tried to transfer the responsibility for planning her tasks to her – making the budget and buying the groceries she needed. i also explained that this meant she could be held accountable for these tasks. however, she explained that being illiterate, she did not know how to write a budget or search for grocery prices on the internet. i asked one of the adolescents to teach her. once she learned how to turn on the computer, set prices, choose materials, and the other skills needed to accomplish her tasks, she started to feel empowered— and rightly so, since she was mastering her activities without any supervision on my part. in meetings, she started to gain the confidence to participate in discussions and to provide arguments in support of her decisions. this confidence to participate in the community developed to the point that one day, she pointed her finger at me and said: “i want to set up an urgent meeting because i do not agree with some of the things you are doing.” she was referring to the method of action i used to get people to overcome problems. namely, i brought the contradictions between them to the surface and made evident the issues that needed to be solved and that people usually tried to sweep under the rug. in her eyes, i was the “troublemaker,” and she criticized me for it. her confidence to accuse me—the person who could have fired her,—was a strong indication to me that the transformations in the power relationships were taking hold. this group process can be understood in view of the fact that the group is a total of its components and “this totality of the group implies certain connections among the individuals, a relationship of interdependence that determines the character of the structure and makes people its members” (martinbaró 1989, p. 205-206). however, from these connections emerges something more on the inside of the group that represents more than the total of its members, something that sets them in a continuous movement of unity and separation, that is, the contradictions among members, their individual needs, and personal objectives. this is why we need to consider the idea that subjective experiences and ideological representations could lead to contradictions “[…] in the level of action and group interaction, in which domination performance tends to create a contradiction and deny the domination itself […]” (lane 1994, p. 86). for this reason, domination processes can be changed by uncovering the contradictions that people try to conceal. the contradictions can only exist when there are relationships between parts that some members try to disguise for convenience or private interest. the changes began to happen when these splinter groups transformed into unified groups. in splinter groups, people have personal interests that may coincide, but actions to satisfy them could occur without regard to the other participants' needs. communication and discourse have mostly a selfish perspective and value. in this case, people's actions are collective, but not as a community action shared with others. given the individual activities, people operate close to each other but rarely together, and any attempts to cooperate usually result in conflicts. the association between subjects in their shared life develops into a self-transformation movement from which new needs and particular interests emerge, motivated by the uncontrollable diversity of relationships that affects all those involved, albeit they are not aware of them. on the other hand, there is overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a279 also a dialogical process that represents the possibility of overcoming the contradictions created by that diversity, not perceived by each subject. in this sense, i would argue that there was a unity of the processes of the transformation of objectivity of their life as a group and a dialogical process by means of which a subjective interconnection could occur for them as well. therefore, we can understand this dynamic process as a communication process, that is, a movement of the interpenetration of the diversity of thoughts, feelings, and interests of the individuals that created a community existence, the unity of diversity among them that resulted in a new way of being for all. we can, therefore, affirm that the self-transformation movement, by means of contradictions between the diversity of ways to exist and the dialogical process of becoming aware, coexist in the community’s unity. in this sense, there is a social movement in the meanings and senses that is multifaceted and differs from that which can be understood by any individual subject alone. therefore, the dialogical process is a necessary condition for the awareness and the understanding that “i, together with others,” shape the community's reality. it is in this sense that we consider the contradictions in the dialectical process that also occur beyond the boundaries of the particular existence of an individual, which are inevitable, unstable, and permanent. on the other hand, the dialogical process makes the “i/other” relationship break down these boundaries in search of the unity of diversity in one’s consciousness. in the processes of humanization, the dialogical is, in the same measure, inevitable, unstable, and permanent. understanding that there is unity between dialectical and dialogical (dafermos, 2018) was crucial for my actions to transform the consciousness of the ngo’s people. this was true especially when we reorganized relationships through activities and reshaped the communication based on these relationships. for example, when c., the guard, organized his activities together with the children, there were various discussions about the rules for the drawing activities. how would the members of this group participate? what would be the hours? how would the materials and tools be stored? what would they create? various conflicts of interest and personal values emerged among them that could only be resolved through a dialogical process and group and individual self-transformation generated by this very diversity of interests and individual values. self-transformation of groups and individuals, created by the diversity of interests, never coincided, that is, never was the same for everyone, although everyone and the group itself transformed continuously. this is my understanding of the dialectical process as an unstable and permanent process of selftransformation of the group and individuals. something new for them and created by them as a way to coexist in the community can arise in this way and develop as a way of their own humanization, impossible to be predicted and determined by just one person. the actions aimed at changing the dialogue must create new needs for the children, teachers, and staff to find meaning and develop their psychological system in order to live as a community. some examples of this are: to understand the meaning of words and instruments to guide their actions; to become aware of needs, objectives, actions and operations of the group activities; to work for the group goals, and for that reason, to be motivated to work together; to learn how to use tools and instruments to carry out the actions. these examples may seem like a common approach to teaching that already exists, but the purpose of these actions is what actually makes a difference. if one wants to create a sense of community, he/she needs a dialogue free of domination, in general. he/she needs to share the power of knowledge and listen to the other members of the group. the purpose of each activity needs to be discussed among overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a280 the members before, during, and after the activity. in community teaching, the teacher is responsible for giving students the power to make their argument beyond the teacher’s individual interest. this kind of group structure enabled the organization to create motivation beyond the motives of any particular activity itself—the motivation to improve the group’s interdependence aimed at fostering a sense of community. furthermore, it produced a logical and emotional communication system for our actions in community life, led us to listen to each other in order to change the purpose of our life together, and created new values for our life. values result from affection, individual and social experiences, and life itself. affective and social values constitute meanings in the creation process of signals. personal values organize our emotional orientation through our relationships. since context and conditions can change, values of social and personal practices never stabilize in one's personality. subjects change their social and personal values depending on the circumstances, changes in the environment, and their needs and desires. these circumstances produce a social and psychological play of values, which plays a part in meaning creation in the process of meaning-making. a play of values arises in a system of relationships when its components' movement changes their values for the system and each correlated member. for this reason, improving community feelings, we need to set a play of values of the interdependence of the individuals to build a place to live together. therefore, it is essential to change personal values. here, we could consider the eleven-year-old m., who was extremely violent. every day he beat someone younger or even older than him. also, he was the one to decide whether someone could participate in an activity or not. he was strong and did not listen to anyone. his father, a prison inmate, was considered a dangerous person. m. used his father’s reputation to threaten others, saying that his father would kill people when he got out of jail. everyone was afraid, and no one doubted it. in the early days of the ngo, he and the other children used to destroy doors, walls, and furniture when fighting or revolting against their situation in the organization. they had absolutely no problem doing this. at some point, m.’s father got out of prison, and two months later, he was shot dead. the morning after his murder, when i arrived at the ngo, m. came to tell me what had happened. he saw his father dead in the street, in front of a bar. his father was shot six times in the face, and one of his eyes fell out. immediately after telling me these gruesome details about his father’s death, m. said without any emotion, just as he talked to me any other day: “hey, i am going to play soccer now. see you!” i invited m. to work with me on the rules he and the other children were responsible for. he liked doing this because the power he felt from such participation was different from that of the power of physical force. the use of this new power generated admiration and respect from others, although the constitution also regulated his own actions and behavior when he argued with other children and teachers. the teachers praised him as he made sure the others followed the rules. this was a clear example of power changing someone’s actions. instead of hitting the others, his physical violence was transformed into another type of power, for instance, punishing younger children for breaking the rules by forbidding them to use the computer for some time. in this sense, physical violence was overcome, although another form of violence continued to exist. nevertheless, it was clear to me that this path of gradual inclusion in assuming responsibility for new rules and the community recognition of the value of his actions could lead to different uses of his power, ultimately replacing violent acts with educational and potentially dialogical ones. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a281 two years later, the ngo had to move to another building because, for various reasons, it became impossible to stay where we were. i invited m. to help me transport the furniture. during the move, when he realized how much the building was vandalized and destroyed by the children’s actions, he looked at me and said with tears in his eyes: “look at what we did to the building.” he then fell silent. it was clear to me that the place he occupied in the ngo, our discussions about the rules, about what kind of place we were creating, and the fact that we shared power, all together transformed his values, affections, and emotions. that moment, for me, and i believe for him also, was a sincere dialogue through the experiences that changed our lives. we did not need words anymore, only looks and facial and motor expressions during this silent but disquieting dialogue that went on for some time. i want to point out that dialogue as a communication process exists beyond the words, in our body, lips, eyes, and movements, as mentioned in bakhtin’s quotation before. m. may not have had the words to express his emotions, but that did not prevent us from engaging in dialogue. to me, this was a strong indication of the transformational power of the aov approach implemented in the ngo. to recap, my actions in these activities to overcome violence were guided by the ideas of changing personal meaning-making and the formation of personal values and a sense of community in the real context of the ngo. i used these ideas to make sure that the actions of the teachers and staff signified the values chosen by the children as the best for their community. we learned that determining values for the other’s life could probably lead to failure in an educational activity. it is, in fact, an undemocratic process. in sum, these examples and the analysis show why and how to create circumstances that place people in a different situation, give them different forms of power, and change the quality of their actions and behaviors. perhaps most exciting is that we found a way to change the relationships such that the autonomous power of the community members could be used to organize the shared life and space. autocracy and domination were replaced by our creative ways of democratic managing relationships. this novelty was the expression of the possibility of self-creation when it comes to the standards of social behavior and values for a shared life. this was evident whenever the members of the organization told an outsider, “this is how it works here…,” meaning that they were different, and that they had their way of organizing relationships. after i shared my power, others took over control in areas i dominated before, and my role in the organization was no longer clear to them. they saw me as someone who had no tasks or responsibilities, despite the fact that i continued to interfere and raise contradictions for them to decide what to do. due to this, i turned from a “troublemaker” to a “lazy bum” in their eyes. i heard this said by the employees themselves. nevertheless, i felt good! in my view, this was actually part of my path as a psychologist: through my actions, to gradually become unnecessary for people as they learn to solve their problems on their own. a sudden end unfortunately, the year we moved into the new building in a different neighborhood, the general director was replaced, i was fired, and the municipal agencies cut the funds for the children’s transportation to the new neighborhood, far from where they lived. our children could not return to the home they began to build, and they went back to the streets. this was the start of a new chapter for the ngo, with children from “well-structured families” from the new neighborhood. this made the ngo a fairer social investment in the eyes of politicians and residents because these children did not need to be corrected or transformed, only taught, since they were already well-adjusted to the culture and values of the class that dominated them. overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a282 considerations the aovs reported in this article show our struggle to organize a shared life in an educational organization. the context of the difficulties in this undemocratic environment was characterized by the relationships of power and domination that generated miscommunication, conflicts and violent actions. this hierarchical configuration of power is not very different from other social institutions in our society, but the violence appeared there acutely in all its manifestations. the main difficulty in carrying out practical actions was the fact that at the beginning, i had only a theoretical idea, a working hypothesis about what should be done to overcome this configuration of relations and decrease violence in the ngo. i was forced to modify the ideas and work on plans for the aov by virtue of the context and concrete circumstances in which the people co-existed. however, the changes often happened without me always having a clear idea about what had to change. different internal and external factors, which escaped my awareness, always produced something new that could not be answered theoretically in the moment. for example, in the beginning, i was convinced that having conceptual mastery of the general activity structure as i understood it from studying the works of a. n. leontiev or the meaning-making process proposed by l. s. vygotsky, i could guide, suggest and produce meanings and values that i understood to be better for changing the relationships among the ngo members. however, i was wrong about this, about the conceptual mastery and the fact that these ideas would be sufficient for the necessary changes. throughout the whole process, and even after including other concepts such as the dialogical process, for example, the concrete reality of that particular community continued to pose new challenges for me and presented me with the need to re-develop and transcend my understanding of reality, mediated by theoretical concepts, but based on the reality itself. this proved to me that reality is always broader than the theories about it, and to understand and modify the theory, we need to keep coming back to reality. the methodological problem lies in the fact that it was i, as the coordinator of the aov, who made all the decisions about the objectives of the actions, thus possibly losing the essential part of the project, the people themselves. when the coordinator makes theoretical considerations and, therefore, occupies a higher place than the others, he/she disrupts the possible development of the community. in this sense, i also held a position of power, and to some extent, my actions were violent since i had a priori plans for the types of relationships that others should engage in, so that my vision of the world could materialize, regardless of their wishes. what followed were my attempts to organize the relationships based exclusively on the theoretical framework, which was partially valid but insufficient to overcome the different forms of violence. this problem with the suggestions i made based on the theories emerged during the activities when the effects i expected did not occur in the way i imagined they would. this was also true of the times when i could not explain the events by theory. a methodological problem for achieving the goals arose. it is this question that the aov challenges us to address and which i consider most important. based on my experience as the coordinator of this aov project, i find that a plan of action needs to be proposed from this perspective of working with groups to serve as a guide to be followed in changing circumstances. however, that guide is insufficient for making a priori assumptions as to constancy, accuracy, or certainty of any of the actual activities and their effects. to work with a dialectical and dialogical process is not to inhabit a world of security, certainty, and stability. in such situations, knowledge guides us only provisionally because the consciousness of the subjects of the aov, shared through experiences, produces changing values. in my experience, the transformation happens because values emanate from personally constituted and changeable conditions. thus, consciousness arises through the transformation overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process armando marino filho dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.283 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a283 of one’s own identity and otherness since people do not only get to know themselves but also get to reknow each other. the unity of diversity in the group could not be understood through identity or stable patterns because it was constantly in the process of being created. therefore, i had to learn to coordinate, abdicate a part of my power, and place myself in the movement of the multi-determination of the democratic dialogue. in this movement, the group can create new forms of existence that cannot be determined by just one person—myself or anyone else. finally, i argue that attitudes of force are inevitable in the educational process. however, in a community group, they do not take the form of violent acts. in a community, people mediate force through respect 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(2001a). a construção do pensamento e da linguagem. são paulo: martins fontes. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word 306-article text-1600-1-9-20200913 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa1 challenging the politics of education: intertwining dialogic pedagogy with a research-based practicum for first-year pre-service teachers perla barbosa new mexico state university, usa wenjie wang new mexico state university, usa abstract the public education system in the united states has long been under assault from neoliberal educational reforms. those reforms have been characterized by anti-democratic and homogenizing assessment methods and systems that reinforce the banking model of education. in this model, students learn to passively and uncritically consume the knowledge transmitted to them in school. in order to counteract the banking model, this research urged first-year, preservice teachers (psts) in an introduction with internship in bilingual/esl education college coursework to engage in a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy grounded in a freirian perspective. psts conducted a mini research-based practicum (rbp) that was six weeks long and required a total of 24-hour field observations across local public elementary schools. the rbp framework consisted of a research question, a mini literature review, practicum observations, findings, a group-written report, and a group presentation. in this study, we analyzed the rbp process and data sources that responded to our guiding question: what counts as good teaching according to psts? the major findings included: (a) good teaching means relationship building, (b) good teaching starts with understanding the multiple roles of the teacher, and (c) good teaching is inclusive. we discussed the transformative moves that psts went through while engaging in a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy. teacher-educators (tes) can benefit from this study, as the viability of the transformative effects of a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, along with its challenges and coping methods, were discussed. keywords: teacher preparation program, field experience, pre-service teachers, dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, research-based practicum, conscientização. perla barbosa holds a ph.d. in curriculum and instruction with a focus on language, literacy, and culture from new mexico state university, and a master’s degree in applied linguistics from the university of massachusetts boston. in addition to her experience as an efl teacher in brazil, dr. barbosa has served as a teacher educator and university supervisor for k-12 public schools in new mexico, usa. her research, deeply influenced by the work of paulo freire, is bonded with her teaching, which engages education students in dialogic problem-posing pedagogy to unpack the political and ideological aspects that underlie curriculum, instruction, and assessment. her research also encompasses bilingual and esl education grounded on the participatory action research paradigm. wenjie wang holds a ph.d. from the department of curriculum and instruction, school of teacher preparation, administration, and leadership at new mexico state university. she has served as a teacher educator and liaison with early childhood, and elementary teacher education programs. she has engaged in supervising pre-service and in-service teachers’ practicum and student teaching. her specialization and issn: 2325-3290 (online) challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa2 research interests mainly focus on family-school-university-community partnerships, immigrant children and their families in border school communities, early childhood/elementary teacher preparation, field supervising experience, esl/bilingual/multilingual education, and anti-bias critical multicultural education. acknowledgments we would like to express our deepest appreciation to the editors and peer reviewers who delivered insightful and detailed feedback. we couldn’t reach to this final result without their generous comments and recommendations. ïïò introduction the public education system in the united states has long been under assault from neoliberal educational reforms (giroux, 2014, 2015; ravitch, 2010). those reforms have been characterized by antidemocratic and homogenizing assessment methods and systems that reinforce the banking model (as coined in pedagogy of the oppressed by paulo freire (2010) of education. in other words, students learn to passively and uncritically consume the knowledge transmitted in school. this is problematic because students complete their schooling without gaining the skills or understanding to participate in a democratic society. matusov and marjanovic-shane (2017) explained that when public schools adopt a top-down program of studies, they rob students of authorial agency by excluding them from participation in their own learning decisions. in other words, students do not learn how to question, examine, or make decisions on what, why, and how to learn for meaningful participation in a democratic society. learning becomes less meaningful for students instead of a path for addressing existential life events. to prepare critically cognizant students with social and cultural awareness that prepares them to take part in a democratic society, teachers must have clarity with regard to their own beliefs on education and teaching (bartolomé, 2004; freire & macedo, 1987). as historical beings, pre-service teachers can gain clarity by working to expand their views during their teacher education program (tep). their experiences, knowledge, and practices will determine the future of their students’ learning environment, classroom structure, assessment type, and, eventually, the overall educational system. bartolomé (2008) pointed out that many teps focus solely on technical and didactic strategies of teaching to address cultural and linguistic diversity and fail to address the ideological aspects of it. as a result, many educational goals rooted in diversity, such as reducing achievement gaps, are handled at a superficial level as quick fixes. yet, most pre-service teachers (psts) predictably resist a progressive pedagogy that challenges the status quo and calls for what freire (2013) states as “the creation of a new attitude” (p.48) that dialogue requires. in order to start the transformation to democratic curricular and pedagogical practices, we urge first-year, psts to engage in a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy by conducting a research-based practicum (rbp) during their coursework leading up to their internship in bilingual/esl education. dialogic problem-posing pedagogy helps psts deconstruct the ingrained epistemological truths that we posit limit the transformation of unjust realities. possibly, participants should reinvent those realities and resist domestication of their pedagogical understanding in favor of liberation (freire, 2010; freire & macedo, 1987; macedo, 2006). challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa3 the rbp model we used was six weeks long, with a total of 24-hour field observations across local public elementary schools. the rbp was presented as a tool for psts to identify, examine, and interrogate teachers about curricular and pedagogical practices they observe during their field experience, coursework readings, literature reviews, and their own inquiries about teaching. introducing a democratic model of transformational pedagogies into a system that values quantitative results over democratic and participatory processes and assessments must happen gradually. even though the short 15-week timeframe for coursework allowed us to only scratch the surface of the politics of education, the rbp itself prompted students to take ownership of their own learning about how schools work from the perspectives of insiders (e.g., teachers, administrators, staff, parents, students) and raise questions about those perspectives, values, assumptions, practices, and consequences. with this in mind, our guiding research question was: how does a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy transform first-year, psts’ understanding of what counts as “good” teaching in the context of the current educational system? in the rbp, teacher-educators (tes) forged a space in which students scaffolded their dialogues as they questioned the realities of schooling they witnessed in their practicums. psts were encouraged to reinvent teaching and learning through discussions about alternatives that position students, especially minority students, as subjects, not objects. in this way, we advocated tes to use their agentive rights to cocreate knowledge with our psts. through co-authorship of curriculum, tes transform themselves and also pave the way to transform psts’ current and future realities in their schools. this article documents: (a) the implementation of an rbp philosophically grounded in the work of freire and other critical pedagogues (e.g., bartolomé, macedo, giroux, shor, and others); (b) the psts’ beliefs about education, and (c) how research and dialogues were central to the transformation of psts’ thinking about education and pedagogy. this work also calls attention to the need for teps to go beyond the ideological invisibility of assumed best practices (giruox, 2014) and urges tes to consistently examine their own levels of conscientização to meet the academic rigor required for the role of a critical pedagogue. this paper consists of five major sections. above, we first provided the background, research foundation, purpose, and research question that drove our study. part two explains our interpretation of dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, grounded in freire’s philosophy of education. part three describes our study, including an explanation of the research question, participants, setting, method of data collection and analysis, and operationalization of the rbp. the fourth part contains findings and a discussion in which data are presented and evidence is offered with an in-depth, qualitative analysis that responds to the research question. in the last part, we acknowledged the psts and our/their challenges during the implementation of the rbp. finally, we proposed suggestions for tes (including ourselves) for future implementation of rbps using a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy. theoretical framework: freirean dialogic problem-posing pedagogy we grounded this research and our teaching on brazilian educator paulo freire’s philosophy of education, which is a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy. we believe his approach supports this study for several reasons. first, freirean dialogic problem-posing pedagogy sets the stage for psts to take ownership in identifying, examining, and questioning how the political structure of schooling shapes identities and marginalizes or empowers people. identification, examination, and questioning are daunting tasks for first-year, psts and tes, yet at the beginning of a pre-service program is the best time for this to happen so that psts “make their own choices of beliefs based on diverse perspectives they confront in school and society” (kincheloe, 2008, p. 11). the time is now for future teachers to scratch the surface of the politics of education and the power structure of schooling, and to recognize that education itself is a political act. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa4 second, freire opposed what he metaphorically called the banking model of education in which teachers provide information (metaphorical deposits) to students who receive it and store in their minds (metaphorical accounts) without critical analysis. students are treated as mere receptacles and are thus diverted from exploring creative processes and diverse epistemologies (freire, 2010). in other words, the banking model prevents the masses from engaging with their own realities and the world by promoting an ideology of reality as fatalistic. in this research, we as tes did not treat psts as information receptacles (freire, 2010); rather, we encouraged their own investigations through practicum-based research and critical examination to challenge their mindsets. third, freire (1998; 2010) discussed how authentic teaching and learning emerge in dialogue, and that starts where the students are—their problems, perspectives, and dreams—in their dialectical relationship with others in the world. while unpacking their rbp through dialogue, all of us, tes, and psts became familiar with each other’s cultural and social experiences, inquiries, and contradictions. these are coded in what freire called thematic research (freire, 1998; 2010; 2013). the role of the lead teacher is to decode these experiences, inquiries, and contradictions by presenting them back to students in the form of problems to solve. these problems become what freire called generative themes. “ it is not our role to speak to the people about our view of the world, not to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours” (freire, 2010, p. 96). freire repeatedly stated that themes represent people’s thinking, “which occurs only in and among people together seeking out reality” (p. 108). freire referred to the process of transforming oneself and the world for the common good while addressing social power asymmetries as conscientização. he emphasized that reality is not static and is always transforming, as are people. indeed, this process of “becoming” is “cyclical, recursive, critical and formative” (souto-manning, 2010, p. 23). none of us, including psts, can be aware of all dimensions of life let alone all at once. as historical beings, our interactions in and with the world and with other humans constantly shape our social and cultural contexts. tes and psts need each other and need to cooperate to analyze and understand their roles in their existential situations. that is, psts and tes become coinvestigators mediated by dialogue. knowledge emerges through and from this collective inquiry (freire, 2010, 2013). the main tenet in freire’s dialogic problem-posing pedagogy is to not impose one’s thinking and views on others. rather, the dialogical aspect of freire’s pedagogy fosters engagement in a critical understanding of the multidimensional realities of the school and classroom. in the rbp, we wanted to implement a methodology by which psts became critical observers rather than mere spectators during their 24 hours of field observations. specifically, we wanted psts to utilize their observations as investigative data and progress toward conscientização. the school and the classroom were the sites at which psts theorized about emergent cultural and social practices. for instance, instructional methods, which are the most requested lessons from psts, cannot be treated as one size fits all. they will not have the same effectiveness and outcomes for every student in any given socio-cultural context (bartolomé, 1998, 2008). in implementing freire’s dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, emancipation is a pursuit of the psts, as dialogue provides a moment of de-alienation in which they “recognize themselves as producers of culture and reclaim their place in the dialogue” (puiggrós, as cited in robinson & taylor, 2007, p. 13). therefore, the dialogical process is praxis, meaning, critical reflection upon reality. the critical reflection calls for actions, but the consequences of those actions must also be the object of critical reflection (freire, 2010, p. 66; sanchez-vazquez, 1977). finally, in praxis, the dialectical tension that emerges in dialogue challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa5 leads the participants (psts and tes) to modify their social attitude (fals-borda, 1985) during the process towards emancipation. the idea of including a research-based practicum in our coursework also sprang from freire’s juxtaposition of teaching and research. research stimulates reflection on prospective teachers ’ assumptions of what counts as good teaching, curriculum, and assessment, along with the problematization of the macro context of schooling. that context includes values and policies that ignore how the social order shapes how we think and what we believe. last, by introducing a research-based practicum at the beginning of a tep program, prospective teachers receive the message that teachers who want to become transformative intellectuals (giroux, 1997) must admit their unfinished natures (freire, 2010) as they learn to conceptualize their practice. this helps them avoid the blind adoption of pedagogical methods and activities just because they are put forth as best practices. according to freire (1998): [t]here is no such thing as teaching without research and research without teaching. one inhabits the body of the other. as i teach, i continue to search and research. i teach because i search, because i question and because i submit myself to questioning. i research because i notice things, take cognizance of them. and in so doing, i intervene. and intervening, i educate and educate myself. i do research so as to know what i do not yet know and to communicate and proclaim what i discover. (p. 35) freire’s words provided us the niche we needed to implement a rigorous learning process in which psts engaged in a dialogical pedagogy to make sense of their inquiries. these inquiries were the foundation upon which they developed their rbps that addressed issues that were relevant to them. through this project, we as tes intended to regain our academic autonomy despite the limitations that teps have established. ep administrators design programs in conjunction with k-12 school curricula and assessments, and tep accreditation relies on quantitative results of psts ’ performances (giroux, 2014). in turn, k-12 curricula and assessments are the results of state legislators’ decision-making on educational policies in complicity with business companies (giroux, 2014, 2015; nader, 2012; weiner, 2012). the cycle of accountability is perpetuated at the expense of a linguistically, culturally, and civically responsive education. in conclusion, we argue that the political aspect of this research challenged psts to recognize the discriminatory, anti-democratic, and unequal ideologies throughout the current educational system. the high stakes accountability system was always at the forefront of dialogues, as this educational system is imposed upon teachers as a collection of set-in-stone instructional practices conveyed in policies and topdown curricula and assessments. the study: dialogic pedagogy through a research-based practicum (rbp) guiding research question explained how does a dialogical analysis using problem-posing pedagogy transform first-year, psts’ understanding of what counts as “good” teaching in the context of the current educational system? based on our previous experience with psts, we recognized that they come to the tep with their ideas and beliefs about education as well as good intentions. for example, their willingness and enthusiasm to improve english proficiency in english language learners were unanimous. through examples like this, challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa6 we realized that their good intentions indicated the lack of a deeper understanding of educational issues. the problem they did not realize was that (most of the time) english immersion is encouraged instead of a well-structured bilingual program (crawford, 2004). another problem they did not initially recognize was the systemic failure to seek out the root causes of achievement gaps that affect students in the linguistic and cultural minorities; namely, the inequalities of the wider society that are reflected in the classroom. according to bartolomé (2008): the combination of a meritocratic view of the social order combined with an assimilationist ideology and a deficit orientation proves to be an especially deadly one because it rationalizes disrespect for minority students ’ native languages and primary cultures, misteaching them english and about the dominant culture, and then blaming their academic difficulties on the students themselves . . . [this scenario is an example of] dysconscious racism (king, 1991) and other discriminatory tendencies—tendencies that in the end reproduce the very dominant oppressive ideologies [that] created the need for the latest teaching methodologies. (p. xix) if psts fail to reason about their good intentions and disregard the fact that not all students’ home cultures will be reflected in the school culture (villegas, 1988), instead of encouraging students to achieve academic success, the psts will become teachers who continue to fail students with minority home cultures. second, we were intrigued when we noticed the following phrases: “control the students”; “empower students”; “safe space for poor students”; “spanish speakers have more difficulties learning the content,” and; “students need strict rules to behave” or “behave properly,” referring to how to discipline students behaviorally and intellectually. similarly, also despite good intentions, those phrases and sentences may reproduce the dialectics of domination and subordination that exist in today’s social order. even assuming that students from minority groups have the same opportunities as socially privileged students, bartolomé (2004) highlighted that if these dialectics of domination and subordination are unconsciously reproduced and remain unexamined, “1) they blame the minorities themselves for any disadvantages they experience rather than blaming white racism or other oppressive aspects of the system, and 2) they oppose policies designed to increase minority opportunities such as bilingual education and affirmative action” (p. 100). in other words, if good intentions to provide equal opportunities are not examined through the lens of wider societal expectations and dominant ideologies, we do a disservice to minority students and push them to drop out of school. therefore, teaching methodologies should not be dissociated from ideological and political influences with which education is infused. ptss’ beliefs about education and teaching emerged throughout the semester and consequently during their rbp became themes or issues examined in this study. for example, the phrases listed above are also commonly heard in field experiences and are normalized with the understanding that those are the best attitudes to have toward students, regardless of the students’ social and cultural background. based on our understanding, we aimed to analyze if psts transformed how they framed and re-framed their understanding of good teaching by engaging in a dialogical problem-posing and rbp. it is through dialogue that individuals continuously transform or, in freire’s terms, participate in the process of becoming. we expected that the ptss’ words aligned with their good intentions during their rbp. at the same time, we as teacher educators (tes) strived to be vigilant, not to contradict ourselves, and not to impose our language on them. we believe psts and tes need to co-construct new ways of understanding and conceptualizing schooling through dialogue, replacing the original, unexamined beliefs with which they came into their challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa7 coursework with a “new” language that reflects the new construction(s) that emerged during the rbp. drawing on halliday’s (1999) functional semantics, we observed that “the context for language as text”, and “language as a form of action, as the enactment of social relationships and social processes” (p. 6). our understanding is that if language is action, then what we say and believe is what we will do, regardless of our awareness of the intricacies or nuances of our language or belief. there is no neutrality in any language manifestation. halliday (1999) discussed that culture becomes the context for language as a system, and “language as a form of reflection, as the construal of experience into a theory of model of reality” (p. 6). it was through these lines of inquiry and philosophy that our research question was formed and investigated. setting and participants this study took place at a university located in a southwestern city close to the border between the united states and mexico. we approached 37 students in two different course sections, and 23 consented to participate in our research. our participants were first-year undergraduate education students in a threecredit-hour class called introduction with internship in bilingual/esl education. in addition to a supervised fieldwork experience, the course description includes the foundational component of the structure, organization, governance, and policies of the american public-school system, and focusing on the state level. despite being located in an area with a high concentration of latinx, our participants self-identified as several diverse ethnic groups, including caucasian, hispanic-american, african american, and native american. they also self-identified as working-class or middle-class and ranged in age from 18 to late 20s. there were two male and 21 female participants. about half of them considered themselves as bilingual in english and spanish, while the other half was english monolingual. participants were required to complete an on-site field observation totaling 24 hours spread over six continuous weeks during the second half of the semester. we met in the classroom on a weekly basis during their field observation period. the tep administrators placed students/psts at local elementary schools, but the students/psts were responsible to initiate contact with their schools and their respective cooperating teachers to negotiate their practicum/field experience schedules. methods of collecting and analyzing data our primary sources of data for this study were: 1) tes’ field notes and weekly reflections based on dialogue outcomes and our feedback to psts, 2) psts’ fieldwork reflection essays, 3) psts’ “ why i teach” essays, 4) psts’ rbp essays and oral powerpoint presentations that included their research questions, a mini literature review, results, and findings, and 5) psts’ feedback on the rbp projects in terms of structure, activity distribution timeline, and meaningfulness. with this data, we had many opportunities to examine students’ levels of critical consciousness on what they consider to be good teaching, how that unfolds from their perspective, and their opinions about the classroom social practices they observed in the field. we employed qualitative content analysis using an inductive approach to analyze our data and seek evidence of first-year, psts’ transformation of their understanding of what counts as good teaching in the current educational context. since data was collected from five sources, data from each source was separately analyzed and compared, but findings were combined and reported as a whole. thus, we were able to view and review data from specific to general and compare each data source thoroughly. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa8 we performed an inductive content analysis in four stages: (1) coding and grouping, (2) categorization, 3) mapping, and 4) comparing and interpreting. first, we coded and grouped the data through several rounds of reading and re-reading (saldaña, 2009). we coded as we read our field note reflections and feedback, and also as we read the psts’ “why i teach” reflection essays, their rbp essays, presentation slides, and feedback. multiple coding cycles occurred as we continuously highlighted ideas, concepts, and themes. second, after we completed the coding, we then categorized it. we first placed the data into broad categories and then further classified them into subcategories, including building a curriculum collaboratively, democratic practices, problem-solving, in-depth analysis of current educational policies and schooling structures, questioning “best practices” and standardization, collective inquiry and decisionmaking, reflection-action-reflection (praxis) in conducting the rbp, and negotiation of tensions and contradictions. this process helped us to further explore the research question, discover issues, and review ideas (lincoln & guba, 1985). the third step was mapping. by mapping, we generalized categories and subcategories and found clear evidence with which to respond to the research question. mapping showed us the critical transformation concerning how first-year psts understand good teaching, the ideological and political influences hidden in one-size-fits-all teaching strategies, and reflections on more inclusive teaching alternatives that resist inequalities in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment (bartolomé, 2004). the last step was comparing and interpreting data. this process was informed by freire’s theory of education and pedagogy and allowed us to draw solid conclusions. we wrote our analysis and findings based on various themes that crossed multiple data sources. for example, a common theme across the data was understanding the multiple roles of the teacher. this theme was widely and deeply discussed by psts, addressed in their essay reflections, “why i teach” essays, rbp essays, and oral presentations. by comparing their understanding at the beginning versus the end of the semester, we could distinguish their changes in mindsets and actions; namely, the transformation process. overarching course process introducing a dialogical problem-posing pedagogy at the beginning of coursework creates resistance, and should be gradually implemented (barbosa, 2018; fals-borda, 1985; fals-borda & rahman, 1991; pacheco, 2016). by enforcing participation in a democratic sense, we would be contradicting the very nature of dialogic pedagogy and would thus revert to the authoritarian banking model. as a result of us as tes gradually releasing our power in dialogue mediation, psts and tes developed a relationship of trust in which collective self-development replaced grading as a punishment. dialogue as a way of co-constructing meaning, and hence a way of learning, started taking shape (freire, 2010). by the fourth week, this relationship of trust had developed, and we introduced the rbp in the sixth week, at which time the psts started their fieldwork. the reason for the increase in dialogic engagement lies in the nature of the project, in that the rbp led students to recursively make meaning out of their fieldwork observations as they sought answers to their research questions. therefore, instead of final results, the coursework was intended to benefit participants through the collective de-construction of their pedagogical beliefs and their day-to-day discovery of emerging subjectivities they found hidden in social practices of schooling. in this sense, dialogue became a way to co-construct new knowledge instead of dialogue as the expression of individualistic opinions to make a point. last but not least, the dialogic and research processes nurtured students’ understanding of their agency. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa9 in this vein, generative themes emerged as a methodology in our classes. the very process of thematic investigation is educational because teachers and students become co-researchers by tapping their authentic perspectives about the same issue; that is, they investigate beliefs usually left unexamined or taken for granted. “education and thematic investigation, in the problem-posing concept of education, are simply different moments of the same process” (freire, 2010, p. 109). in turn, themes emerge in concrete representations in which opposite themes are also revealed, for each theme interacts with its opposite. by concrete representation we mean scenes they observed in their field experience such as teacher-student’s relationship, or how students interact with each other during group activities. by themes, we mean concepts or attitudes that emerge from those representations such as relationship-building in negotiating classroom attitudes and learning strategies respectively. the opposite themes would be a topdown relationship for both teacher-students and students-students relationships. in this research, psts’ emergent practicum observations were translated into our course text or themes (curriculum) for us to problematize and seek answers about psts’ transformation through the rbp. a lesson moment the following is a prototypical “lesson moment”: during the rbp and throughout the semester, classroom management was a constant theme. psts were concerned about being able to handle large groups of students, specifically in elementary education. they explained that the age range of elementary students requires close attention to be paid to their ethical development. however, some psts reported that historically implemented rewards and punishment provided immediate behavior “correction,” or correction that was due to the enforcement authority’s ability to give detention or suspend a student. one group questioned the balance of authority and freedom, and self-assigned freire’s work after asking one of the tes for readings on the theme of authority. this group also pointed out that the opposite of punishment is immediate rewarding. these practices may instill anger, silence, and the perpetuation of the misbehavior elsewhere because these punishments don’t help children understand how to live in society. the participants explained the progress that restorative justice or restorative practices make in teaching kids to take responsibility for their actions through the design of an action plan that interrupts the repeated misbehavior. ongoing discussions and reflections the central aspect of the discussion concerning the theme of authority highlighted that what psts experienced through observation and what they brought from their experiences in the classroom provided the groups with several perspectives and strategies on how to manage a classroom. we strived for dialogue that did not undermine each other’s level of consciousness on critical situations and viewpoints. another important characteristic of our dialogic methodology was to bring new ideas to the forefront of discussion, such as the importance of conceptualizing discipline as everyone’s responsibility, including students, to make the classroom climate inclusive and democratic. students understood that they have freedom of expression as they explained how their cts solved behavioral problems and as they reflected on those solutions. psts went back and forth with this theme of authority as they investigated and dialogued about the school regulations about discipline, the similarities between the language used by the school administrators, and the language used by the military (e.g., detention), and psts’ own developing management strategies. psts understood that this theme (authority) needed to be explored because they wanted to find the means through which to be part of the change to a more humane type of education without being patronizing, and how to bring awareness to teachers of their individual responsibilities and what can be achieved through dialogue. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa10 research-based practicum (rbp) the rbp fieldwork involved three main parties: (1) our students/psts, (2) the public-school teachers who served as cooperating teachers (cts), and (3) us, teacher educators (tes). concerning the administrative formalities of fieldwork, our role as tes was to mentor psts on how to get necessary background clearance, how to contact the school to schedule a pre-visit, how to keep up with the fieldwork protocol (observation notes, log, and reflection) requirements, as well as orient them about professionalism and communication etiquette. the rbp created the spaces in which psts could practice the skills of democracy (giroux, 1997). the project provided psts with an agentive backbone for critical inquiry on the realities in different school sites and the risk-taking required when sharing perspectives and beliefs. decision-making was also a strong characteristic of the rbp process because psts started seeking ways to transform the realities they once problematized. therefore, participants were not merely providers of information or followers of an outside protocol, but instead became co-researchers and decision-makers in every step in the process of collective inquiry. rbp operationalization phase 1: in this phase, the psts investigated their past and present schooling experiences through individual and collective brainstorming. also, in this phase students interviewed an experienced professional, such as a teacher who has taught for 20 years, or a representative of an older generation (such as a grandmother) who attended school 40 or 50 years ago. in class, we discussed possible questions and follow-up questions depending on their interviewee’s responses. a week later, students presented their findings. phase 2: research questions were developed in this phase. the psts gathered in groups of two, three, or four to brainstorm their inquiries. they built their research questions on issues raised in phase 1. in their groups, each member proposed a question, and then negotiated one main theme that was of common interest to all members. thus, by drawing on individual inquiries, they came up with a group research question. they still made use of their individual research questions in individual field observation reports. as tes, we assisted each group in the development of their research question to ensure their questions had the potential to generate robust findings (foss & waters, 2007). we, the tes, and the psts had to revisit each research question, as our reflections and discussions brought new issues to the forefront. phase 3: this phase was a literature investigation. we (tes) provided an orientation on how to use the library database to find peer-reviewed research articles that provide insights for their research questions. the psts researched individually, and then came together in their groups to share their findings and perceptions. phase 4: phase 4 was the practicum fieldwork. in preparation for field observation, we read field observation protocol and discussed various ways to write and compile ethnographic field notes. some psts took the initiative to interview their respective cts to gather further information about the student population and student histories at their field placement. phase 5: phase 5 was the findings phase in which the psts gathered to discuss their findings with their initial research questions. they negotiated how they would structure their findings in a paper and how they would share in class in a way to generate thematic discussions. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa11 phase 6: in phase 6, the final phase, the psts shared their results with their fellow psts. they started by situating their audience with the school context (location, demographics, and type of bilingual/esl program) at their fieldwork location. they shared their research questions and presented their findings, emphasizing the similarities and differences they encountered in different grades and schools, or different grades within the same school. finally, we opened up the discussion to pose alternative views for the events they found critical in terms of teaching methodology, classroom management, and school district programs such as restorative justice, gun control, and bullying prevention. the roles of cooperating teachers, pre-service teachers, and teacher-educators the cts’ roles primarily involved hosting the psts. cts generously presented psts with instruction on what a curriculum looks like, along with how they bridged the intersection of school policies and classroom practices. cts were role models for lesson planning and implementation, and for ways to accommodate special needs children and manage a classroom. they fielded a lot of questions from the psts! the psts’ roles were to observe the dynamics of the classroom from the perspective of the teacher and visualize themselves in the situations they observed. that was how they began to consider the settings in which they will work in the future and what dispositions they will need to navigate those settings. as tes and teacher-researchers, we were aware of the influence of our subjectivities in mediating dialogue with psts and during the process of responding to our guiding research question. according to madison (2020), “positionality is vital because it forces us to acknowledge our power, privilege, and biases just as we are denouncing the power structures that surround our interlocutors” (p. 6). first, we were aware of the power dynamics in the classroom. we were the lead teachers and the ones who oriented psts for their field experience, which may have influenced how we mediated the dialogues. second, even though we strived to align our methodology with our practice, there might have been times that we resisted unexamined opinions of psts. yet, as researchers, we had the ethical commitment to acknowledge those moments and renegotiate meanings with the psts. our influence may have increased when we made our methodology explicit. we openly expressed that the teaching methodology they observed was not merely the transmission of neutral knowledge or conveyance of innocent social practices. social practices mirror an individual’s and a cultural group’s values, beliefs, and the intersections of different identities that are shaped and reshaped by and with one’s presence in a given environment. findings and analysis as stated earlier, although we analyzed each data source separately, we compared and reported them as a whole as we pursued our research question: how does a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy transform first-year, pre-service teachers’ understanding of what counts as “good” teaching in the context of the current educational system? to present evidence and answer the research question, we here provide our findings and analysis. the first section focuses on what pre-service teachers (psts) understand “good” teaching to be, and the second section focuses on the transformation of psts’ critical consciousness during their research-based practicums (rbps). challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa12 responding to what counts as “good” teaching theme 1: good teaching means relationship building this first theme fell under the classroom management coursework module. based on observations during their field experience, psts demonstrated concern regarding misbehaving children and how the types of relationships teachers build in the classroom relate to children’s behavior. for example, one pst shared her difficulty coping with children who presented a pattern of misbehavior during instruction time or individual and group activities. her explanation of the reasons some children misbehave was that, “the children in my classroom get frustrated with their peers because they are slower at grasping a few concepts than the others, so they become impatient, and therefore disruptive” (maria, field experience report). another pst shared her ideas about children misbehavior, noting, “i see that the majority of the kids misbehave or disrupt the classroom due to their age, lack of independence, as well as lack of attention they receive from home” (fernanda, field experience report). once psts started their field experience, we, the teacher-educators (tes), used issues that they raised in their field reports as topics for class discussions. in the discussion about misbehavior in class, psts first shared their observations with regard to what they thought generated the children’s misbehavior. we then discussed how cooperating teachers (cts) coped with misbehavior in their respective classrooms. in this conversation, psts emphasized the importance of nurturing children, principles of mutual respect, and basic courtesy while preserving the children’s autonomy and agency. pst magdalena explained how her ct emphasized relationship building in classroom management and pointed out the structural intersections between school and society. [in today’s observation] i was focusing more on the relationships that the teacher and students shared. observing the conversations, they shared got me very excited for my future classrooms and sharing that relationship with my students. my cooperating teacher is known to be the teacher that gets all the “troubled kids” in her class, simply because she has proven to work very well with them and encourage them to behave and learn. this inspired me because although i was unable to observe these students from the very beginning, today i was able to witness students and teachers discuss their accomplishments and things to work on. i then asked my cooperating teacher for advice [on how to relate and gain students ’ trust] and she advised me to keep going and never lose motivation even through the hard times. i remember the very first day my cooperating teacher said, “it’s never the kids. it’s the system that makes teaching become hard.” i took these as words of wisdom because when times get hard, i have to remember that it isn’t hard because of the kids. it isn’t the kids ’ fault, and i have to try my very best to stay strong for them. (magdalena, field experience report) the passage above demonstrates a critical moment of insight. the lesson pst magdalena learned from her ct, who clearly demonstrated political awareness with her “words of wisdom,” was the entry point for our discussion on deficit ideologies. valencia (2010) pointed out that deficit models are pseudoscientific explanations propounding that minority children’s academic problems are genetic and their sociocultural pathologies are associated with their racial and disadvantaged economic status. valencia (2010) stated that, as an ideological model, the deficit model explains the academic failure of minorities by blaming the victims, which has the practical effect of creating unequal schooling arrangements that prevent minority students from succeeding academically. with regard to relationship building, another pst pointed out how bringing children’s funds of knowledge into the classroom plays a significant role because recognizing their cultural background shows that it is valued and valuable. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa13 my class was almost full of strictly spanish-speaking students. that is important to include because culture plays a role in the relationship between students and teachers. mexican cultures use words like “mijo” and “mija” and the same names many are called at home by their parents. automatically, the title is comforting, which is why i infer the students are so vulnerable with their teacher that i observed. the students called their teacher “ms.”, but it was very obvious that they saw her as more than that. to them, she was a friend, a mom, and a teacher. (elena, field experience report) the next example shows a captured moment that revealed how the act of listening is an essential requirement to build relationships of mutual respect between teachers and children. my teacher also gathered in a circle with the first graders once a week and they each said one thing they liked or disliked about the week. as a teacher, that is going above and beyond. the teacher was essentially telling her students how much she cared about them without even having to say a word, she just listened and that was enough. (ana, field experience report) what the pst described about what the ct was doing was what bell hooks (2010) called “radical openness” (p.10). by listening to children, teachers start to open their minds and understand children, just as hooks (2010) explained that “teachers must be open at all times, and we must be willing to acknowledge what we do not know. a radical commitment to openness maintains the integrity of the critical thinking process and its central role in education” (p. 10). in other words, the pst illustrated with that example that good teaching means creating a supportive environment by listening to children actively. theme 2: good teaching starts with understanding the multiple roles of the teacher the data for this finding comes from the “why i teach” essays in which the psts explained their understanding of the role of a teacher. we gave this assignment both at the beginning and the end of the semester and analyzed the responses by comparing each pst first and second essay. the comparison reflected the psts’ shifts in understanding of the different facets of the teaching profession and the multiple roles teachers have. these shifts happened gradually throughout the psts’ research-based practicum (rbp). for example, one pst initially demonstrated awareness of the devaluation of the teaching profession in terms of the salary. by the end of the semester, this pst changed the tone of her response, and instead focused on the importance of relationships in a child’s education. pst 1 beginning of semester “why i teach” essay end of semester “why i teach” essay if i am being completely honest, i never described what means to be a teacher. i saw how it could potentially be fun. but when i thought about the small amount of money i would be making, i didn’t think of being a teacher once. i thought about other careers, careers that made money. i am taking this class because i have to, and i am still trying to figure out what i want to do. what has made me want to pursue the career of teaching is how much the teacher can influence each student. i think i have learned a lot about the things in this life that matter, and at the top of my list is loving people. i now understand that there are different instances of being a good teacher, the first was a parent, the second was a cheerleader, the third is a friend, and lastly, a counselor. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa14 in the first essay, the pst demonstrated a preoccupation with making money and how a teacher’s income does not support a decent lifestyle. in the second essay, after experiencing the classroom from the perspective of the ct, the pst’s focus shifted from money (or lack of it in the teaching profession) being a priority to the responsibility teachers have in shaping identities. one of the tes delivered the following feedback to this pst regarding her essays: both reflections mirror realities in the teaching profession. my suggestion is that you continue exploring those realities by getting acquainted with the teaching profession at different levels. feasible actions consist of gathering allies from different settings, such as caregivers, students, and representatives because change starts from the bottom up (e.g., civil rights, the anti-slavery movement, women’s rights and emancipation, farmers ’ and workers ’ movements). what are your thoughts on that? what could happen if we teachers raise our expectations towards our profession and education? (teacher-educator, written feedback for the “why i teach” essays) te feedback was used in class discussions as part of the dialogic problem-posing pedagogy. although the end of the semester cut short some of our discussions, students took our feedback seriously. their commitment to our back-and-forth written conversations throughout the assignments was expressed in the psts’ responses to our end-of-semester survey on the efficacy of our teaching methodology and assignments (results of which are shared later in this article). pst 2 initially expressed a romantic idea of the role of the teacher, starting the semester with the belief that all that happens in a classroom is a consequence of the teacher’s work. as the semester went by, she demonstrated a shift in her belief from individual responsibility to collective responsibility when it comes to teaching, and by the end of the semester, she was taking into consideration the sociocultural context that shapes the education system. she found that teachers also seek allyship with other stakeholders such as, family and community members, administrators, and policy makers. pst 2 beginning of semester “why i teach essay” end of semester “why i teach” essay as a teacher, i must understand each student, knowing their background well and individual needs, and trying my best to provide what i can to them. one teacher alone cannot even hope to shape the future through our kids, but together we can do anything. you can be a great teacher alone, but you can’t singlehandedly educate the whole student population. to successfully prepare out future generations it falls on us to do our best to work collectively and educate them. theme 3: good teaching is inclusive one event that stood out during this research was described in a pst’s field report, which we then discussed with the whole class. she gave an example of a situation in which the teacher deconstructed a stereotype of special needs children. i was fortunate to be in the classroom when that happened and witnessed how the teacher dealt with the situation with so much wisdom. we heard a student with special needs screaming and it sounded very scary. it came from the next door, and all the students got shocked and started whispering, trying to understand what was going on. i don’t remember why the sped student was there at that time because i had never seen him challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa15 before. i believe someone left the door open and we heard that from inside our room. the teacher heard the screaming and noise. so, rather than ignoring her kids ’ curiosity, she completely changed what she had planned to do that lesson and improvised a lesson on diversity and inclusion. it was amazing! the teacher used this moment and started a conversation on what it means to be different or what makes us different, how we deal with our differences, how comparing each other doesn’t give us the whole picture of who we are . . . she asked questions and gave and asked for examples. (sonia, field experience report) pst sonia sharply captured that moment in which her ct improvised content based on a real-life incident that triggered her children’s curiosity and fear describing how the ct used her philosophy about ethics in the classroom in a real-life situation. the ct did not hesitate to depart from the official curriculum despite the deadlines attached to it. pst sonia’s experience piqued the interest of the entire class regarding how to better include children with special needs in daily interactions, and even encouraged one of the quietest psts to start talking in class. the quiet pst was pursuing a special education (sped) degree, inspired by her mother’s job working with visually impaired students. this fostering of idea exchange—pst sonia sharing her experience being the catalyst for the quiet pst to engage—demonstrated that a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy grounded in power symmetry builds relationships of trust and respect among psts. responding to transformation pursuant to the rbp theme 1: critical consciousness is an ongoing process of reflection-action-reflection (praxis) as explained earlier in this article, dialogic problem-posing pedagogy was nurtured throughout the rbp process. specifically, psts first created individual research questions. then, through dialogue, they shared their questions and collectively (in their group) negotiated one research question to explore based on their common curiosities. in other words, this process was their first step in finding common ground as a community. next, the psts refined their group research question through mini literature reviews, individual reflections, fieldwork observations, and their findings, which they presented as a group in class. going through this process, the psts concluded that there were no single answers to their research questions, let alone one single truth that fits every social context. rather, answers vary depending on different school demographics, grade levels, and specific classroom situations. the cycle of reflectionaction-reflection happened spontaneously because of the democratic nature of the rbp framework. table 1 illustrates how the two different groups of psts engaged in praxis and how we mediated the rbp process. note that their experiences are streamlined and paraphrased, using the voices of two psts in each group. the rbp process is complex, cyclical, multidimensional, and fluid, just like human thinking. we stated their main ideas rather than display entire dialogues for brevity and ease of understanding. table 1. praxis: pre-service teachers’ rbp process scaffolding praxis group one group two step 1. reflect on past schooling experiences and student 1: building a studentteacher relationship is important. student 1: it is challenging to have students with special needs in the same classroom with the regular student population. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa16 generate initial ideas for research. student 2: teachers must build foundations and keep interacting with students. student 2: special needs students and the regular student population must interact. it can promote inclusion. i also think that it is a challenge for the sped teacher and even for the special needs kids to follow what is going on in the classroom. step 2. draft the research question. does the personal relationship between a student and the teacher affect the way a student learns? what does the interaction between special needs students and the general student population look like during recess? step 3. te comments what do you mean by personal relationships? when you say relationships affect the way a student learns, explain what do you mean by “the way”? are you also thinking of how a kid’s culture informs him about how to interact with people? how is kids' culture similar or different from the teacher’s culture which informs their interactions, and whether the similarities or differences determine studentteacher relationship outcomes? that research question will give us good insight into how important it is to experience many types of diversity within the classroom. as you want to observe interactions during recess, how much time will you actually have to observe? if you have enough time to observe recess, what will be the next step after you explore the interaction between students with special needs and the general student population? step 4. pst’s reflections from field experiences and te feedback the focus is not whether or not there is a personal relationship between the teacher and the students, but how it is built and how that relationship affects students. possible effects may emerge in discipline-specific knowledge, psychological, emotional and interpersonal skills, and how the apprentice of relationship outcomes influence children to either apprentice values, beliefs, and behavior or develop awareness of the norms of each place [social context]. due to the lack of time available to observe recess, the research question had to be revised. the ultimate goal was to know how diversity in the student population benefits learning. step 5. major actions mediated by the teachereducator, the group revised the research question. one mediation intervention consisted of avoiding yes/no questions. revised the research question based on dialogue with the whole class on the theme of inclusion and diversity. students shifted the focus away from highlighting the limitations of special needs kids and started challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa17 instead, the group understood that to foster robust findings with complex results and insights, researchers should use “what” and “how” questions. questioning the potential of all learning together in the same space. step 6. final research question how does the personal relationship between the students and the teacher influence the students’ learning? how does interaction between students with special needs and the general student population influence classroom dynamics? step 7. reflections from findings 1. personal relationships can be reflected in multiple ways, such as name-calling, gestures, and body language. for example, instead of the teacher giving a misbehaving student an angry look, we witnessed a serious look, followed up by exploring what led the student to misbehave. 2. personal relationships are connected to culture. for example, most of the cts used spanish words when relating to a student who was having trouble working through a negative interpersonal situation. 3. positive personal relationships create a positive learning environment. when teachers shush and yell at students, students don’t see the teacher’s authority, but rather see the teacher as an authoritarian who is removing their agency. most of our cts showed love and care while showing children the consequences of their actions and how those actions delay their learning and success. 1. students with special needs bring a reality that all children will find outside the classroom. students have opportunities to interact with each other, with the general population respecting the type of impairments special needs students have and developing empathy. 2. in other classroom settings, students with special needs were often pulled out, which was enough to disturb other students ’focus. we also noticed that children look at the special needs children as not belonging in the “normal” environment. doesn’t this create intolerance, isolation, and separation between people? 3. we also noticed that if a classroom has too many students with different types of special needs and only one sped teacher, it is difficult for the teacher to assist with each individual’s needs. perhaps the way classes are set up makes for inefficient inclusion. challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa18 step 8. psts plans for future action understanding students’ cultures, family values, social status, and their domestic background builds a relationship of mutual respect. the relationship between teachers and students cannot be one of punishment every time children break the rules, but it should be one of communication and understanding of consequences (good and bad) of actions. there is a need to read more research on this topic and have conversations with special education teachers. those actions would help us understand students with special needs and how to create more inclusive classroom? accommodations. the general student population is also a part of this process. one idea was to create more collaborative and cooperative activities within the classrooms so that children develop more empathy for each other. as shown in table 1, both groups demonstrated a predisposition for conscientização. despite starting the process within inaccurate understandings, their understanding of realities advanced in praxis. for instance, in the initial discussion, the second group demonstrated a concern about having sped and non-sped children in the same classroom. they explained that they didn’t see sped children make progress because the pace of the other children and the lead teachers was too fast for them. even though that was a timely insight, they were fatalistic with regard to the issue, and did not question the potential for transformation. there were other examples of naïve ways of thinking that psts approached the issue in the first group’s initial remarks. yet, by the end of the rbp, both groups had significant insights on their respective topics. the first group articulated how authority is differentiated from authoritarian. the second group articulated that the educational system, despite its history of working with special needs children, still needs to change to incorporate methods and philosophy by which all children collaborate on their collective development in solidarity. theme 2: psts take ownership of their learning example 1: psts adjust the placement protocol to the real-world administrative context of schools at the beginning of the rbp, tes provided field placement information to psts. psts’ first responsibility was to contact their cts via email to schedule a pre-visit. they had to act quickly because there were only six weeks before the end of the semester to complete their rbp. some psts complained they did not receive an email or call back from their cts by the end of the week that they attempted contact. they were concerned about failing to fulfill the rbp hours according to the tep protocol. this issue was brought up in class, and the tes suggested psts take into consideration the coordinating teachers’ obstacles to replying, such as hectic daily schedules and significant workload. one of the most important dispositions for teachers is the ability to act in solidarity. by developing solidarity with the cts, psts would avoid frustration and not take the lack of response personally. moved by solidarity, psts found alternatives. rather than passively wait for tes’ feedback and solutions, one pst decided to do a pre-visit to the school on her own, introducing herself (with proper identification) and requesting to meet with her ct. having a formal face-to-face conversation was a positive start, as the pst showed how committed she was to the school and the ct. this pst was a model for others having the same issue, showing them that they could find a way to solve this problem. as part of dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, psts should have the agency to cope with limiting situations in order to develop problem-solving skills. doing the opposite of that is a form of oppression, challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa19 which is the foundation of freire’s (2010) conceptualization of banking model. after dismantling problems and co-constructing possible ways to solve them, psts better understood their duties and rights, as well as their autonomy, in creating a bridge to the school and the ct. the psts became an essential part of negotiating the partnership between the university and the public schools. in becoming committed to their rbp, psts also held tes accountable in our role as proponents of a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy. example 2: psts problematized the placement protocol by negotiating sites during their field observation, some psts found that being in the same classroom for the 24-hour practicum did not help them to explore their research question. for example, one pst wanted to learn more about bilingual education strategies; however, the majority of the children in the kindergarten class she observed were spanish speakers. in that particular school, despite offering a two-way bilingual program, the ct struggled to teach academic content in english. although the pst believed that maintaining the home language was fair and necessary to preserve the children’s ethnic roots, she wanted to have a field experience in which she could observe how to teach content in a dual-language educational space. psts were willing to see more learning environments. although staying in the same classroom was a requirement of the rbp protocol, psts still brought up this issue in our dialogues and asked for suggestions, rather than passively following the protocol when it didn’t serve them. finding classrooms at other schools for psts before the semester ended was administratively and logistically prohibitive. thus, we discussed with the psts the feasibility of observing two classrooms across different grade levels at the same school site. we had agreed that observations could not be done in more than two classrooms, because the time available was too short. we considered who the psts needed to work with to make the placement adjustment they requested, and the psts proposed the adjustments to the cts and the school principal. as a result, psts who wanted to observe more than one classroom were accommodated. psts embraced the responsibility of having more labor added to their field experience, as scheduling with principals required patience. in doing this, psts learned how to find allies who could help them fulfill their needs and took on the responsibility of transforming their rbp into a meaningful and authentic experience. during our discussion on this issue, our dialogue focused on language learners, culturally responsive teaching, teaching of english to speakers of other languages (tesol) strategies, and different types of language and content assessment. the pst who observed a bilingual classroom shared some of her in-depth thoughts, such as: (a) teachers are not the world’s rescuers. some situations are not only hard, they also need attention and effort from the children’s families, school administrators, and the community; (b) there is no one-size-fits-all strategy, especially in bilingual education; and (c) teachers are life-long learners and should always seek new challenges. example 3: psts problematized the placement protocol by negotiating practicum hours toward the end of the rbp, some psts brought up the issue of their schedules conflicting with partnership for assessment of readiness for college and careers (parcc) testing. specifically, public elementary schools in our district didn’t allow pst visits during parcc testing, so psts had to postpone their observations, placing them at risk of not completing their rbp required hours before the end of the semester. the problem was real, and some psts became frustrated with parcc testing itself, which places pressure on the students, teachers, and public-school administrators. as this situation emerged, we included topics in our discussion such as the connections between the common core state standards initiative, high-stakes testing, accountability, and holistic assessment. we discussed alternatives in the challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa20 event that a lack of time prevented completion of rbp hours. some psts suggested the reduction of rbp hours, but that was not possible because the total hours were a requirement set by the college of education administration. therefore, they proposed the following: (a) interviewing their respective cts (if the ct’s schedule allowed) about questions they had, (b) participating in the after-school program and comparing formal and informal learning practices, 3) attending a parent-teacher conference to focus on family engagement, and (d) auditing teachers’ weekly meetings. as a result, psts were able to negotiate among the cts, the schools, the tes, and themselves regarding ways to make up their hours meaningfully and without sacrificing the goals of the rbp. discussion based on the findings, we now extend our analysis from specific results to a discussion of general implications, interpreting the importance of applying dialogic problem-posing pedagogy in helping psts reinvent curriculum and instruction through the deconstruction-construction-reconstruction process by questioning both the greater educational system and real-time classroom practices. specifically, we address three aspects of the implementation of dialogic problem-posing pedagogy through an rbp: collaborative curriculum building, analysis of the greater educational system, and psts recognition of their agency. 1. dialogic problem-posing pedagogy provided the class with both the text and context to build a curriculum collaboratively, promoting a more democratic teaching practice. dialogic pedagogy from a freirian perspective is participatory and democratic in nature—it requires power symmetry, which can be achieved through cooperation between psts, cts, and tes as a course unfolds. because we strived to present a bottom-up pedagogy, the psts’ voices were heard throughout the process as we checked in with them about what they observed in their field experience, their inquiries, and discussions of how the issues posed play out in different contexts (i.e., the school, a classroom, a grade level). we as tes emphasized the topics in which the psts appeared most interested, such as classroom management through relationship building. we started our classes by placing their observation(s) into a problem format for general discussion. dialogue, sharing field experiences, asking for clarification, and expressing disagreement and agreement until finding common ground became the process through which we built our lessons together. this democratic aspect of our pedagogy assured the validity of the research process because the research benefited those involved and emanated from social justice principles. throughout the course we encouraged deliberation about curriculum as new issues came up that psts wanted to address. the psts and tes together modified the curriculum as class discussion themes were brought forth based on rbp experiences. in other words, the psts brought themes and questions to the classroom from the field, and together we incorporated their reflections, experiences, and inquiries into our dialogic classrooms. this is how dialogic problem-posing pedagogy works—it provides ongoing opportunities for psts and tes to reexamine our texts by reading the words as well as examining our realities through reading the world (freire & macedo, 1987). 2. dialogic problem-posing pedagogy creates opportunities for problem solving and in-depth analysis of various aspects of current educational policies and schooling structure. since dialogic problem-posing pedagogy is an ongoing problem-solving process rather than a fixed destination, considering and studying various aspects of the same issue while making sure to include forgotten and/or opposing voices is significant to the development of critical consciousness. for instance, by addressing so-called “best practices” that originated under the umbrella of the standardization in challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa21 education, psts’ understanding of what it means to be a teacher expanded from day-to-day classroom strategies to the relationship of schooling to the greater social structure. specifically, the narrative of “best practices” as the essence of teaching was reflected in some of the psts’ discourses, which was not surprising considering their own schooling was in banking model classrooms. they understood “best practices” as a general method or strategy implemented to fix so-called academic gaps using a predetermined curriculum. other psts presented signs of critical consciousness early on, revealing an openness to discussing ideological aspects of the current educational system that hinder minorities’ academic success. the fluidity of our rbp, from the articulation of the psts’ own research interests to bringing their questions from the field to the class, proved to be effective. gradually, psts switched from talking about “best practices” to questioning the status quo and taking the initiative to do their research. they discussed deep aspects of education that have less chances to be discussed once psts become teachers and immerse themselves in the long hours of teaching and the parallel tasks that involve the profession. the psts raised the possibility of not being able to implement an inclusive pedagogy to the extent that they wanted because of time needed for daily bureaucratic teaching tasks and a rigid school structure that limits teachers’ abilities to educate students beyond the academic curriculum. psts started problematizing their inquiries and expanding their consciousness about what is seen as having value in the educational system beyond the banking model. moreover, by studying the psts’ reflections, it became visible in their language that our dialogic problem-posing pedagogy was transforming and expanding their ways of thinking. first, in their later essays, the psts offered more detailed and specific ideas about how to be a teacher compared with the superficial statements they made in earlier essays. second, psts’ perceptions of the role of the teacher and teaching matured, evidenced by their acknowledgment of the non-neutrality of teachers’ and administrators’ actions on decision-making and on preparing children to participate in society. compared to the beginning of the semester when the psts had only a very general understanding of the role of the teacher, classroom dynamics, and school structure, at the end of the semester the psts displayed a critical awareness of their role in the classroom, how compliance with administration policies affects the classroom, and the lack of funding for schools and education. for example, in their essays they articulated that “teachers spend money from their pockets to buy supplies for children,” “teachers don’t get enough salary,” “things are not always happy and sweet in teaching,” “teaching as well as influence cannot be done by a single teacher’s effort,” and there is teaching value in “long-term moral influence rather than academic achievement.” this critical awareness is necessary to manage realities that are out of a teacher’s control, such as standardized testing in students ’ non-dominant language(s). although there was not enough time in the semester to discuss action plans, the psts did learn the value of having allies while navigating the school system which started from observing and reflecting. 3. dialogic problem-posing pedagogy cultivated psts’ sense of agency in negotiating problems that occurred with their placements, field experience, coursework requirements, cts’ expectations, and tes’ implementation of pedagogy in philosophical opposition to the more familiar banking model. freire (2010) stated that the banking model of education places teachers on a pedestal as the ultimate classroom authority that controls how learners think and what they learn. as tes, we moved away from the banking model to engage psts in envisioning new ways to solve old real-world problems. dialogic problem-posing pedagogy facilitated this goal, as we believe psts are indeed researchers and problem solvers. in the power-sharing learning environment that we established, we led psts in a semester-long dialogue, including the rbp. there is no doubt that psts found this type of progressive pedagogy challenging, but more importantly, as they found their voices, they advocated for their needs and rights in challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa22 this process. we believe that dialogic problem-posing pedagogy supported the psts in recognizing different types of oppression, acknowledging people’s agency and value, and including learners in decisionmaking, evidenced by psts ’ gradual movement away from the banking model toward problem posing and problem solving. we believe that, regardless of the expected and unexpected problems that arose, psts sensed the pain, and awakened as they began to understand that the dynamics of school are not innocent but reflect the power and politics of dominant ideologies. starting from here, psts also began their journey of in-depth analysis of the current educational issues and started to prepare for making changes in their learning and future teaching career. conclusion this study highlighted the transformation of first-year psts’ critical consciousness through engagement in a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy through an rbp in the class called introduction with internship in bilingual education/esl. we aimed to answer the question, “how does dialogical problemposing pedagogy transform first-year psts’ understanding of what counts as good teaching in the current educational context?” we engaged the psts in the process of conscientização, which deepened their understanding of how the relationship between children’s socio-cultural and economic backgrounds and the school structure drives children’s academic performance. in this study, psts were invited to shape and reshape themselves by challenging their own status quo and exploring a progressive pedagogy. we wanted to escape the banking model of education, which promotes blind obedience to socialized ways of thinking, being, and doing that move people away from managing their realities (chomsky, 2002). in the banking model, instead of devising conditions in which learners co-construct knowledge, learners, including low-income, disadvantaged children, are submerged into a type of schooling that leads them to uncritically consume the information delivered to them. the information delivered and consumed ultimately serves the dominant class that presents this information as knowledge. as a part of the process, we reflected on our challenges and limitations. first, one of our class sections took place in a classroom in which the desks were immovable. as a result, psts sat side-by-side in rows facing the board. we had requested a classroom in which we could gather in a circle and smaller groups, but that did not happen. in fact, we initially doubted that dialogue could take place in an environment with such an arrangement. this arrangement influenced the psts in that they had to turn their bodies every time someone spoke, and some of them, especially the ones sitting on the side, often became distracted and did not interact. even though it was out of our hands, in this classroom we dealt with the contradiction of promoting a democratic type of pedagogy without having the tool of an appropriate physical arrangement. the other classroom, fortunately, had movable chairs, allowing us to arrange ourselves in a semi-circle or circle, which was more appropriate for promoting dialogue. in the first section, the banking model classroom setting thus jeopardized our dialogic process. second, multiple inquiries arose with regard to why the psts were not placed in private schools for their rbps. the simple answer was because of our university’s tep partners with the public-school district. we as tes defend public education because it is a constitutional right and available to all children regardless of their social, economic, ethnic, and citizenship status. we advocate for policies that promote ways in which public education can increase and equalize opportunities for children, ranging from informed curriculum decisions to ensuring teachers are well-paid and highly qualified. however, we could not dismiss psts’ inquiries regarding the reasons they were not placed in private schools (even though they had completed a coursework module on the purpose of public schools). thus, we assigned psts to groups to discuss their rationale(s) for having private schools included in the tep. this demonstrated that in a dialogic challenging the politics of education perla barbosa, wenjie wang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.306 | vol. 8 (2020) sa23 problem-posing pedagogy, students have the agency to question the status quo of the curriculum, our partnerships, and choices made by administrators with regard to their education program. their inquiries encourage us to include in future coursework a discussion of narratives that either encourage or denounce the privatization of public schooling. we can ask critical questions (janks, 2000; janks & ivanic, 1992) to start a dialogue that challenges the roles of public and private schools, such as: what are the major differences between public and private schools? as public school is a constitutional right, what can we do to improve it? there may be other questions that address pst’s epistemological curiosity (freire, 1998, 2010). once psts understand the different sides of the issue, they could discuss who benefits from each type of school, who is excluded, and they can debate what purposes these schools serve. at that point, they could make a collective, informed argument whether or not they would advocate for different school settings in their tep program, and if so, how they could make that happen. even with its challenges and limitations, this study adds important new insights to the literature, especially with regard to the role of dialogic problem-posing pedagogy in building curriculum collaboratively and promoting more democratic practices for use by future teachers. using collective inquiry and decisionmaking processes, the psts brought their inquiries and insights, along with their voices (which gradually grew), and these were valued and integrated into praxis. importantly, dialogic pedagogy offered opportunities for psts to engage with real-world issues and to analyze and propose alternatives to cope with those issues. moreover, the findings of this study are significant in showing that both tes and psts need to tap different perspectives about the same real-world issues. that means uncovering unexamined blind spots through the investigation of beliefs, especially when those beliefs conflict with those of others or/and crash into reality. our findings suggest that dialogic pedagogy builds a foundation that transforms psts through research-based practicums, and through that research, tes can better facilitate psts’ problem-solving 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(2012). the future of our schools: teachers unions and social justice. chicago, il: haymarket books. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 2 emerson, balhtin pro and contra.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:6 the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson princeton university, emeritus, usa caryl emerson is a. watson armour iii university professor emeritus of slavic languages and literatures at princeton university. her scholarship has focused on the russian classics (pushkin, tolstoy, dostoevsky), mikhail bakhtin, and russian theater and music. current projects include the russian modernist sigizmund krzhizhanovsky and the neothomist aesthetics of jacques maritain. ��� mikhail bakhtin would have loved this forum. it has everything that the most productive types of dialogue require: a strong fearless utterance with a “speaking face” behind it, emerging from a chronotopically precise but open-ended historical moment, followed by eight equally fearless responses, each coming from a different angle and each hearing the utterance against its own distinct ideological “horizon.” what is more, groys is attacking an image that bakhtin would have found extremely unappealing, that of a canonized cult figure, an authoritative name whose signature-terms were being dropped into every academic conversation because the figure was, alas, experiencing a world-wide “boom.” the fact that this image was of him would not have mattered much. as far as we can tell from the memoirs of contemporaries, bakhtin had a playful, flexible authorial ego and almost no possessiveness about his own ideas. naturally, he desired that his ideas circulate and stimulate others to respond, but he did not desire that his ideas become “officially” revered. bakhtin would welcome this forum, in short, because of his own relation to the utterance. the speaker stands behind an opinion or an interpretation, yet does not “possess it.” as michael holquist once put the matter, for bakhtin, meaning is not owned, only “rented”—and thus it is always in flux. wonderful memoiristic evidence attests to the truth of this. in the early 1970s, the dostoevsky scholar grigorii pomerants met several times with bakhtin, seeking the latter’s opinion on some essays he had written “of a polemical nature.” bakhtin chose not to pass judgment. where the two men disagreed, bakhtin remained serene and made “no attempt to defend the bakhtin in print.” on the contrary, pomerants recalled, “ . . . at times it seemed to me that he looked down on his published works ‘as souls look down from on high on the body they have cast off’.”1 in recollecting this conversation, pomerants reflected on bakhtin’s “inner quietude,” which was in such stark contrast to the agitated tone of his own polemical writing, and to the rhetoric of so much soviet literary scholarship, both official and samizdat. 1 see grigorii pomerants, otkrytost’ bezdna. vstrechi s dostoevskim [the openness of the abyss. meetings with dostoevsky] (moscow: sovetskii pisatel’, 1990), 225. the chapter where this quote occurs was written in 1975, the year of bakhtin’s death. issn: 2325-3290 (online) the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:7 the feedback on groys’s “between stalin and dionysus” in this forum is also agitated and polemical, but reassuringly diverse. it ranges from grateful endorsement—although perhaps not for reasons groys would endorse—to scandalized rejection. some contributors believe that groys is right about bakhtin, some believe he is wrong, and then a third overlapping group considers groys perhaps right, perhaps wrong, but most importantly he is “useful” (that is, provocative, original, conducive to the raising of important questions). in this third group we find fascinating, unsettling case studies of dialogic pedagogy, what might be called “applied groys.” this afterword will attempt to put these responses in dialogue with one another. even the warmest appreciations of groys usually introduce a caveat that refocuses or refines the argument. consider antonia larrain. she finds groys’s essay “convincing and thoughtful,” but would apply complex systems theory to bakhtinian thinking in order to finesse the brutal charges of totalitarianism and totalization. bakhtin might indeed be “political” in the ways that groys suggests—or might lend himself to such politicization by others—but, she argues, bakhtin’s basic response to the world was aesthetic, not political. those two responses cannot be confused. communities are sustained by aesthetic activity. when understood as an open, unpredictable configuration of responsive encounters, a community affirms artistic totalities and thus makes political totalitarianism impossible. groys arguably misrepresents community, which is never a homogenizing or totalizing whole. but larrain grants groys an important insight: that bakhtin can confound those of us with so-called “free world” mental habits, since he resists totalizing environments with non-liberal tools. bakhtin is an “anti-totalitarian communist.” the best resistance to stalinism, according to larrain’s bakhtin, is the constant production of art: continual small local acts of closure that are seen not as transcendental objects but as “provisional and partial visions” always open to re-negotiation. alexander zholkovsky also welcomes groys on bakhtin. over the past several decades, zholkovsky has displayed a special gift for shrewdly debunking self-fashioned cultural icons (most vigorously, anna akhmatova)—and consistent with this attitude, he disapproves of bakhtin’s “western worshippers.” bakhtin’s politics aside, zholkovsky considers the very canonization of bakhtin to be a totalitarian act, and he is eager to deflate it. he would move bakhtin from icon shelf back to bookshelf. where larrain applied a decentralizing systems theory, however, zholkovsky is more personalistic. he pulls in, as an ally in groys’s anti-bakhtin campaign, the great classicist and verse theorist mikhail gasparov (1935-2005), who for a quarter-century was bakhtin’s most high-profile, principled opponent. the juxtaposition is a good one. both groys and gasparov view bakhtin’s enthusiasm for the carnivalesque as a sinister thing, not freedom-bearing but stage-managed by those in power. zholkovsky, who cites only gasparov’s initial contra-bakhtin publication from 1979, could have made his case more forcefully. for gasparov went on complaining about bakhtin until a year before his death, and his complaints became louder and less forgiving as the bakhtin industry continued to grow and gain ever more adherents and hero-worshippers. it was not the political implications of carnival that aroused gasparov’s ire, however, as much as it was the genre of menippean satire (which, in gasparov’s opinion, bakhtin had simply fabricated, in his desire to rewrite not only the history of european literature but the literature itself). gasparov also took to task bakhtin’s myth of a “dialogue” with the fictive and the dead at the convenience of the critic—which was, he claimed, nothing more than critics talking narcissistically with their own selves.2 2 for this story, see caryl emerson, “in honor of mikhail gasparov’s quarter-century of not liking bakhtin,” in catherine o’neil, nicole boudreau and sarah krive, eds., poetics. self. place. essays in honor of anna lisa crone (bloomington, in: slavica, 2007): 26-49. for a version of this essay adjusted for a domestic russian readership, see кэрил эмерсон, «двадцать пять лет спустя: гаспаров о бахтине», вопросы литературы 2 (март-апрель 2006): 12-47. the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:8 also appreciative of groys are the essays in the forum that address the theory and practice of dialogic pedagogy (miyazaki; lensmire and snaza; matusov and marjanović-shane). but their task, palpably experiential and concrete in actual classrooms, requires them to “think with groys,” apply his insights to living situations and see how they work, rather than merely analyze his pronouncements abstractly. each of these essays “co-thinks” carnival wisdoms, as well as carnival clichés, in its own way. before addressing this middle “applied” group, however, let us first pull into dialogue the other end of the spectrum, the essays that reject groys’s reading of bakhtin pretty much out of hand. these contributions to the forum are cast in different registers and display various degrees of intolerance. sergeiy sandler raises serious philosophical objections. his major methodological reservation is that groys, by means of select quoting or misquoting, reads postmodernism back into bakhtin from a later time. carnivalesque and polyphonic cannot be equated. nowhere does bakhtin preach the death of individuality. he does not teach the death or even the absence of the author, as did roland barthes. choreographed stalinist terror, for all that the audience might laugh at the victims, is not an example of bakhtin’s carnivalesque. carnival is an attitude, a philosophy; it is not an institution. and if a nietzschean critique was appropriate to bakhtin’s generation, a deconstructive critique is not.3 sandler then offers his own contextualization. bakhtin is a personalist. the “world” of bakhtin is always an individual’s world. a collective subject is incomprehensible to him. so is the autonomous cartesian subject. bakhtin’s hero, in carnival relations as well as polyphonic ones, is intersubjectivity. because groys ignores the early philosophical writings of bakhtin, especially “toward a philosophy of the act” [«к философии поступка»], he has misconstrued this reality. carnival imagery is not political, sandler insists, because it is the “world experienced individually from within,” consciousness gropingly in quest of agency and the other. this cognizing body—sandler intimates—is always experienced as misshapen, unfinished, grotesque. sandler’s thesis of a personalized carnival grotesque is the strongest freestanding philosophical utterance among the responses to groys in this forum, deepening both larrain’s and zholkovsky’s critiques. of another sort altogether is alexander lobok’s response. lobok is angry to the point of insult and disbelief, and flies to bakhtin’s defense. it’s one thing to note parallels between the crowd laughing at executions and anaesthetized carnival violence; it is quite another thing to assume that bakhtin is therefore a source of stalinism. in treating bakhtin like an ideologue, groys reveals himself as a product of the old condescending soviet-textbook mentality toward great thinkers—aristotle did this wrong, kant did that wrong—whereas the necessary first step in interpretation should always be to re-create the “thinking space” of the subject. why should bakhtin be political at all? lobok takes a rosy view of the task of carnival (a survival mechanism proving the “indestructibility of humanness in a human being”). more idiosyncratically, he argues on behalf of bakhtin’s “anti-totalitarian stylistics.” along the lines of larrain and sandler, lobok notes bakhtin’s mode of self-expression: pulling the reader in, loosening up the authoritative claims of the text, and celebrating other authors who do the same. these traits of writing are inevitably personalizing and thus anti-totalitarian. one must attend to the effect of the voice in the texts, not only to the facile chimera of bakhtin’s outward images. 3 in “deconstructing” bakhtin from a later time, groys is in distinguished company. in the forum “the contexts of bakhtin” published in the premiere post-soviet humanities journal novoe literaturnoe obozrenie in 2006, two postmodernist émigré critics, mark lipovetsky and irina sandomirskaia, interpreted bakhtin as suspicous toward the image and cynical toward the word. see mark lipovetskii and irina sandomirskaia. “как не завершить бахтина? переписка с двух электронных углов” [how is one not to ‘finalize’ bakhtin? a correspondence from two electronic corners]. novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 79 (2006): 7-38. craig brandist and evgeny dobrenko mount the most sustained criticism of lipovetsky’s and sandomirskaia’s appropriating dialogic approach, insisting that bakhtin’s intellectual sources in german philosophy, as well as the concrete conditions of his soviet life, be considered primary in keeping bakhtin “unfinalized.” the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:9 the remaining responses to groys attempt to apply bakhtin in a productive rather than an accusatory way, from within bakhtin’s own “thinking space.” in a retrospective that is startlingly relevant today, marek tesar points out parallels between bakhtin and vaclav havel’s post-totalitarian treatise, the power of the powerless (1985). kiyotaka miyazaki takes exception to groys’s assumption that polyphony (and to a certain extent carnival) must have a “super-author,” a stalin figure, masterminding the whole. at best those outside figures “organize” their human material; they do not control its potentials. here miyazaki asks us to follow him into the dialogic classroom. this will become the site for the final two essays, the most “professionally invested” in the bakhtinian subfield of dialogic pedagogy. lensmire and snaza are harsh on groys—but unlike lobok, good-naturedly so, offering correctives rather than condemnations. groys (and zholkovsky too) want to decrown bakhtin, to prove he is not a saint. but who ever said he is a saint? it is certainly not bakhtin’s fault that a boom and a cult rose up around him. blame his disciples, blame the readership if you must, but not the man himself. (even mikhail gasparov admitted that the influence of bakhtin among apprentice scholars and the trend-setting young was the problem, more so than bakhtin’s own strange, poignant individual trajectory.) lensmire and snaza take a close and critical look at the primary reader of bakhtin in this forum, boris groys himself, a person (they suggest) who comes across as “elitist,” official, frightened by the “stinking folk.” because of his own anxieties, groys imposes binaries on bakhtin and passes judgment on his politics— whereas a more productive route would be to examine bakhtin on the concept of “the political.” here we confront a radiant, messy, porous and participatory scenario, inflected by an open-ended hegelianism but not at all totalizing: “what is, has become, and this implies, of necessity, that it can become otherwise.” matusov and marjanović-shane provide the forum’s most open-ended, ambivalent, and risk-laden testimonies. they see both inspiration and considerable danger in “applied dialogics.” bakhtin’s “mystical organic cosmic holism” does not impose a politics, it is humble about what it knows. there is much in this organic holism that is relevant to a polyphonic education, rooted as it is in “internally persuasive deconstructive discourse.” but the school is an institution (and a graduate school is a certifying institution), not a cosmos and not a carnival square. a power hierarchy is both built into it and presumed by its participants. this hierarchy can be masked or softened, but if dissolved altogether there is no reason to go to school; more interesting and fun would be to kick your teacher in the belly or shout her down with public-square billingsgate. and that would be a waste of everyone’s time. what i found most instructive in this essay were the embedded case histories. the first is the account of lensmire’s pedagogical experiments with a dialogic (that is, with a rousseauean or tolstoyan) classroom of third-graders; the second is matusov’s trial experiments in dialogizing his graduate seminars. the former revealed that bakhtin (in keeping with his utopian sociology of carnival) does not take seriously the fact of “horizontal oppression,” that is, the powerful impulse of children to beat up on their peers. this is a bullying that can be kept in check by a modest amount of vertical authority from the teacher. and matusov’s experiment with his older students was an eye-opener. pulling adults-in-training into free dialogue, asking them to identify their private concerns with their classroom selves and make both public, leaving it up to them to “complete whatever assignments they want,” can be not liberating but invasive—and enslaving. for a polyphonic teacher is not comparable to a polyphonic novelist, or only very naïvely so. can you “question someone to despair or death?” asks one of matusov’s students. matusov calls such questions an expression of “epistemological pain,” and wonders if salaried teachers, even with the best intentions, have the right to inflict it. he would like teachers to stand behind “students’ power” (meaning: students’ responsibility for their own intellectual growth) and admits, along with groys, that bakhtin offers only partial support in this task. bakhtin’s mystic holism and his distrust of liberal institutions—his disinterest in the details of governance—present a huge challenge to dialogic pedagogy, the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:10 which is obliged to work within institutions and not with people at their free and festive leisure. these are all familiar anxieties raised against bakhtinian carnival when it is presumed to be a politics, a revolution, an end rather than what it actually is, which is an attitude. the solution, perhaps, is for teachers to withdraw sooner rather than later from their students. this would “respect their final authority.” but the student still desires the grade, the accolade, the glowing letter of recommendation, the academic degree. can those goods be provided in the absence of respect for the vertical hierarchy? in closing, several thoughts. groys is not alone, of course, in distrusting bakhtin’s carnival, his celebration of cultures of laughter and his delight at the bodily grotesque. alexei losev and sergei averintsev had deep reservations of a religious nature. viktor shklovsky worried about the timeless, ecstatic nature of bakhtin’s carnivalized menippea. a decade after boris groys emigrated from the ussr to germany, mikhail ryklin, of the “laboratory of post-classic studies” within the soviet academy of sciences in moscow, authored his “bodies of terror” [tela terrora] (1990). alongside groys, ryklin was determined to decrown and demystify carnival. ryklin too identified the book on rabelais as a “hymn to the victory of the collective,” whose major trope was “individuation as a sin par excellence.” under the influence of the french postmodernist jean baudrillard’s work on the seductiveness of simulation, ryklin analyzed the stultifying “pan-speech” of collective soviet subjects, fearfully present in the iconography of the stalinist moscow metro.4 all these theorists and critics would find groys a provocative ally, even if they stopped short of assigning bakhtin to the category of “crypto-stalinist” and bakhtin’s writings on polyphony and carnival to the “mindset of the 1930s.” groys’s essay was a product of its liminal time, a historical document, and even its overstatement would have made bakhtin smile. but there is a final, more narrowly pedagogical reason why bakhtin would have welcomed this forum, and especially its appearance in the pages of dialogic pedagogy. the first full-time job that bakhtin held was at the saransk pedagogical institute; he was a professional teacher of teachers. during the final years of world war ii (1944-45), bakhtin supported himself and his wife by teaching german and russian to high school students in kimry on the volga river, east of tver. volume 5 of bakhtin’s collected works contains an essay that bakhtin prepared for publication in 1945, “questions of stylistics in russian language lessons in secondary school.”5 in this essay bakhtin describes how the russian masters—gogol and pushkin—worked creatively with syntactical constructions and the conditional mode to make causality problematic and to “open up” interpretive potentials in their texts.6 in the belly of the stalinist beast, armed with nothing more subversive than grammatical categories, bakhtin was teaching russian literature through a type of dialogic stylistics that recalls the “anti-totalitarian stylistics” alexander lobok identifies in bakhtin and praises in this forum. bakhtin practiced such a stylistics not only in his carnivalistic attitude toward his own survival, but also in the traditional and censored soviet classroom. if, as grigory pomerants claimed, bakhtin looked down with bemusement on his own published texts as if on “bodies bereft of a soul,” then that soul was relocated in readers, students, receivers, the other half of the communication arc. how could bakhtin fail to appreciate all the potentials that this forum has unleashed? 4 ryklin’s “tela terrora” first appeared in bakhtinskii sbornik i (moscow, 1990): 60-76. a translation into english as “bodies of terror: theses toward a logic of violence,” by molly wesling and donald wesling was published in new literary history, vol. 24.1 (winter 1993): 45-49. 5 «вопросы стилистки на уроках русского языка в средней школе», м. м. бахтин, собрание сочинений т. 5 (москва, русские словари, 1996): 151-56. the essay was first published in 1994. 6 to my knowledge the first integrative discussion of this pedagogical essay in english is by irina sandomirskaia, “bakhtin in bits and pieces: poetic scholarship, exilic theory, and a close reading of the disaster,” in the forum “the dark and radiant bakhtin. wartime notes,“ edited by irina denischenko and alexander spektor, slavic and east european journal, vol. 61.2 (2017): 278-98, esp. 282-87. the bakhtin of boris groys: pro and contra caryl emerson dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.214 | vol. 5 (2017) db:11 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word kevin currie-knight, yes-but...-yes-and...-a-sympathetic-challenge-to-matusov, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf65 “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education” kevin currie-knight east carolina university, usa abstract in this response to matusov's "right for freedom in education," i will offer two “yes, but…” concerns about crucial complexities of this freedom that i think matusov leaves unaddressed, and a “yes, and…” alternative pragmatic justification of this freedom that differs from, but i think is more compelling than, matusov’s. kevin currie-knight is a teaching associate professor in east carolina university's college of education (foundations area). his research focuses on the history, philosophy, and political economy of us education. he is the author of the book education in the marketplace: an intellectual history of pro-market libertarian visions for american education in twentieth century america. he is currently the president of the board of directors for the pathfinder community school, a self-directed learning center in durhham, nc usa. ïïò in “a right for freedom of education,” eugene matusov lays out a case “that students must have to freely define their own education.” he lays out four types of education (training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination), and argues why students’ rights to define how, whether, and when to engage in these forms are necessary for true education in each form. he then argues against several foreseeable objections. at the outset, i must say that i am sympathetic to matusov’s overall case; i believe that students, as much as possible, should have the freedom to define their educational trajectory. i will offer here two “yes, but…” concerns about crucial complexities of this freedom that i think matusov leaves unaddressed, and a “yes, and…” alternative pragmatic justification of this freedom that differs from, but i think is more compelling than, matusov’s. “yes, but…” 1: what is a student? as detailed as matusov’s defense is of students’ rights to educational freedom (roef), he does not seek to lay out what we do and don’t mean by “student.’ we shouldn’t expect authors to define each term used in their argument with full precision. yet, in this case, the lack of definition is crucial. saying that all adults have the right to enter into contracts means nothing without a delineation of what an adult is, and issn: 2325-3290 (online) comment on text eugene matusov: this is a profound question that i must address. thanks a lot, kevin, for raising it for me. i’ll address this question in my reply to all commentaries. “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education.” kevin currie-knight dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf66 similarity, we cannot make sense of what it means for students to have an roef without knowing who is and isn’t a student. as i write this, my family has an infant foster-daughter in the house. regularly, we violate her roef by forcing her into “tummy time;” we put her onto her stomach so that she can strengthen muscles necessary for crawling and gain necessary practice being on her stomach. her forceful cries during this process tell us that this educational experience (we’ve tried in vain to explain to her that it is an “opportunity”) is entirely against her will. the question is whether she is a student in matusov’s relevant sense. certainly, she is a learner. (arguably, infants are tremendous learners.) but is it possible that not all learners qualify as the type of students who should have an roef? moreover, if matusov persuades me that she is indeed a student with an roef, i would still likely not follow his advice, leaving her entirely free of unasked-for intervention. the law would (rightly) call that child neglect. i suspect that for matusov’s case to work and to explain why our infant is a learner but not an roef-entitled student we need to define “student” by appealing to the capabilities we (parents? society? government?) believe are prerequisite to the ability to exercise these rights. to have a sensible idea of a right to free contract, for example, we must imagine that the rights-bearers can likely do the things necessary to exercise the right: read written contracts, understand and entertain contractual terms, have the self-restraint to bind themselves to the terms of the contract in the future, etc. otherwise, allowing the right to free contract to those manifestly without the capabilities for its exercise would be, at best, meaningless and, at worst, a right to be swindled, exploited, or unaided. i think a similar thing applies here. there is disagreement over what cognitive powers infants have (and how developed they are), but we can certainly say that infants cannot do a multitude of things that are likely necessary to effectively exercise an roef communicate anything more complex than a cry, identify anything beyond the most simple interests, use their bodies to act on (let alone imagine how to act on) these interests, etc. the questions matusov needs to address are what capabilities are required for learners to benefit from an roef, and how to use that set of capabilities to delineate who are and aren’t students entitled to an roef. when matusov gives examples of students exercising the right to education, in fact, he does so exclusively by reference to undergraduate students who presumably have the capabilities that would need to preexist for exercise of educational rights. he describes how his own college students use their freedom to navigate his college level course, a course that provides them much guided choice. yet, we can assume that most of these students went through a coerced system of k-12 education matusov rejects. an interesting upshot of his case is that, if it true, as he says early in the paper, that “education requires freedom” that coercion rules out actual education matusov would have to argue the questionable position that these 18+ year-olds are little more educated than my infant foster-daughter. “yes, but…” 2: the justification is unclear early in the article, matusov writes: “my justification for the thesis is existential rather than pragmatic or liberty-based. i am not going to argue here that students’ freedom of education will pragmatically improve educational outcomes, although it might be often true.” nor is he making an argument that some conception of liberal rights demands that students have an roef. “in contrast, i argue here that students’ right to freedom of education is the essence of education itself. in other words, i argue that education requires freedom. education requires students to define their own education.” comment on text eugene matusov: my argument is applied to your infant daughter if she engages herself in education. please see my discussion of your daughter’s case in my reply-essay at the end of this special issue. what do you think? “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education.” kevin currie-knight dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf67 there are two difficulties with this justification. the first is that as an empirical matter, it is untrue. i’ve heard and read stories from many people who recall having benefited educationally from learning paths they were forced to march. matusov himself writes of an experience that disproves his justification when he recalls being coerced to learn english in the soviet union. he writes that he did not enjoy learning english in this way and that he did not learn it as effectively as his wife, who learned english without coercion. but it does seem matusov does not say otherwise that he did in fact learn the english, and this must mean that education did not in that case require freedom.1 the second problem with his existential justification is that throughout the paper, he seems exclusively to rely on the pragmatic justification he says he is not making (and without that pragmatic justification, his argument would be less convincing.) for instance, when justifying why a right to educational freedom is justified in cases of “open socialization” (learning socialization into situations where rules are illdefined or negotiable, like learning to converse) he writes that open socialization requires creativity, and creativity requires freedom: creativity is out-of-box thinking, feeling, relating, talking, imaging, and acting. it involves a student’s transcendence of the given – mostly the socially and culturally given on the macro or micro scales–recognized and appreciated by other and/or the student themselves. creativity and, thus, open socialization require the student’s freedom to define what creativity and open socialization are, – hence, their own education (p. sf7).2 similarly, in justifying why this freedom is required for “critical examination,” matusov writes that for critical examination to take place, it “cannot not be assigned by the others, but only self-assigned.” for me to critically examine something, the question being examined must be mine rather than one imposed on me.3 even if we agree with both justifications, the problem is that they are irreducibly pragmatic, outcome-focused. the arguments both say that for education in x to be possible or of good quality, the best outcomes will come through route y (freedom), and hence, the goodness of y route is largely or wholly tied to how well it can bring about x. suppose we agree with matusov that learning for “open socialization” requires creativity and that the justification for student roef here is that freedom allows for and leads to creativity. we can at least imagine a situation where we leave students free in “open socialization” learning but witness no resulting creativity. based on matusov’s justification above, it would be hard to argue that the value of freedom does not depend on it leading to the result of creativity. that matusov generally relies on pragmatic arguments for student freedom is important. why? because even though matusov seems to want to couch this right to freedom in outcome-neutral language, it is an impossible task. all attempts to say what education is and what conditions are required for it let 1 matusov could retort that he was trained, not educated, in english. to do that, though, i suspect he would have to invoke an definition of “education” that bakes freedom as a necessary condition into the definition itself, thus making his point trivially true: “if we define education so that any ‘education’ where the learner isn’t free doesn’t count, it will be, by definition, that education requires freedom!” 2 it should also be noted that the sentences in this passage problematically contradict each other. the first and second define what creativity is and the third argues that what creativity is must be defined by the student. this is problematic as it leaves open the question of how we, in fact, know whether students learning “open socialization” in freedom are in fact doing so creatively, which matusov argues is necessary for such learning. 3 this idea is arguably false because it contains a false choice between “self-assigned examination that will be felt by the inquirer as a question work critically examining” and “other-assigned examination that can’t be felt by the inquirer as a question worth critically examining.” the missing third option the reason education need not require freedom is “other-assigned examination that the assignee comes to be interested in enough to reflect on.” it may be more likely that self-assigned questions will be the most interesting to the inquirer, but it is possible that other-assigned even imposed questions can come to the inquirer to be worth examining and appropriated as if it were self-assigned. comment on text eugene matusov: actually, kevin, you are factually wrong. after my elementary, middle, and high school and college english formal instructions, i learned the phrase, “the komsomol was born…” and the words “pollution” and “pedestrian.” i really started learning english just before my immigration to the us via an innovative pedagogy developed by russian linguist educator igor shekhter, which was based on playful closed socialization with some elements of open socialization. of course, when i entered the us, i was literally thrown in the english environment. also, the english formal instruction for adult english leaners in the us was based on a mixture of closed and open socialization with some elements of training. we were engaged in debates, watched and discussed movies, prepared for toefl (an english proficiency exam for english non-native speakers), and chatted and developed friendships with other immigrants in english, our lingo franca. however, being factually inaccurate in my particular case of learning english, i think, your general point about a possibility of effective foisted education is important to address. i’m going to do that in my reply to the commentaries. comment on text eugene matusov: i agree. in reply to your footnote 3. self-assigned questions can emerge from many different sources and people, including even from imposition and violence. however, education requires freedom for a student to accept or not accept questions to be self-assigned. comment on text eugene matusov: the outcome-based criterion of the quality of education is not my argument. please see my reply-essay at the end of the special issue. comment on text eugene matusov: interesting reading of my argument, by “outcome-neutral language” is not my goal. rather, i argue that each educational paradigm needs freedom of education, although its reason and definition of freedom of education is different. “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education.” kevin currie-knight dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf68 alone differentiating, as he does, legitimate from illegitimate educational paths demand the use of outcome-focused thinking. if the goal of education is to allow for student flourishing, for instance, we have to have some guiding idea of what flourishing does and doesn’t look like (otherwise, we could not be able to tell that any method of education seems superior or inferior to another). one can be comparatively strict or loose, inelastic or elastic, monistic or plural in what one thinks the outcomes of education should be (and i recommend loose, elastic, and plural), but all arguments for how education should proceed even matusov’s will unavoidably be hitched to its ability to produce some specifiable outcomes. “yes… and” 3: a different grounding to conclude, i will offer an alternative vision of how to ground students’ roef, one i think is more plausible and realistic than matusov’s. i join matusov in embracing a (berlinian) value pluralist conception of what the legitimate outcomes of education should be: people can and should be able to live many different kinds of lives, and education should allow for a wide plurality of different paths for students. (yet, i also agree with matusov that there must be limitations on what types of educational paths should be off-limits as “illegitimate,” though i think this admission is less a problem for my justification than matusov’s.) instead of suggesting that education can only take place with the necessary condition of freedom clearly false, as i’ve argued i argue that epistemically, it is advisable to allow decisions about education to be made by (a) those who have the most stake in the result and (b) the most local or personal knowledge that should bear on the decision. that is, the child is generally (a) the one who is primarily affected by her education and (b) generally has the most knowledge about what learning and methods she will find most engaging and useful. a good summary of this type of liberal approach comes from economist and philosopher friedrich hayek: “the true basis of his [the liberal’s] argument is that nobody can know who knows best and that the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do.” (hayek, 1948, p. 15). philosopher john lachs summarizes the point similarly: “for the most part, being oneself, day and night gives one a privileged view of what satisfies; there is little basis for substituting the judgment of others for our long experience and considered opinions” (lachs, 2014, p. 9). one could, of course, argue that experienced adults are more likely to know what students will need in the future, and that this suffices to justify supplanting student judgement with force by adults. a necessary component to my modified argument, then, is the idea that it is quite feasible for students, as they grow, to identify and learn need-to-know things as they need them. in other words, leaving them free from educational coercion allows students to use their capabilities to learn what they need when they need, or discover an interest in, the learning. literature on this approach is growing, confirming its viability as a way to prepare children into adulthood (greenberg & sadofsky, 1992; llewellyn, 2005; riley & gray, 2015; thomas & pattison, 2008). articulating the details and parameters of my epistemically pragmatic justification is beyond the scope of this reply, but i think it improves on matusov’s justification. first, it unabashedly places the freedom from coercion on pragmatic grounds: freedom works because it will likely yield better results for learners than coercion because it allows the individuals who have the most “skin in the game” to operate on the knowledge they possess about themselves that others can’t or likely won’t have. this pragmatic justification need not rely on the false idea that freedom is a necessary condition for education, but only acknowledges that while others may indeed know what is best for us at times, it is more likely in any given case that they comment on text eugene matusov: or not 😊 comment on text eugene matusov: meaning more conservative? 😉 “realism” is always in the eye of the beholder: how much an author wants to challenge and transcend the given. comment on text eugene matusov: yes. i discussed that in my original article. comment on text eugene matusov: why? comment on text eugene matusov: i think you are bringing paternalism here. the problem is that some paternalism is legitimate if it is sanctioned by the student, but some is not. also, the practice stakeholders can legitimately impose their requirements on the practitioners. however, these requirements must be kept away from education, unless the student is committed to them. see my discussion of that in my reply-essay. i think you are making a mistake by justifying illegitimate paternalism here. what do you think? comment on text eugene matusov: ironically for me to say, but this is not necessary true, but still the student must rule. see my discussion of that in my reply-essay. comment on text eugene matusov: try to apply this principle to your health when you are sick. paraphrasing orwell, “nobody can know who knows best, but some does not know more than others” 😊 comment on text eugene matusov: yes, on-demand learning is the only certainty that we have about what is needed in the unknown and uncertain future. comment on text eugene matusov: this is my argument as well. comment on text eugene matusov: it is not just a pragmatic argument, but also axiological one. see my reply-essay. “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education.” kevin currie-knight dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf69 do not. that some look back on imprisonment as a positive transformative experience does not justify mandatory imprisonment for everyone. that some have retrospectively profited from a forced education does not invalidate the idea that freedom is still the best policy. with my epistemically pragmatic justification, an roef is justified because it puts the educational decisions in the hands of those we should suppose on balance are in the best position to make them. (more experienced adults or educational experts can surely consult and advise, but the decision itself should be placed with the student herself, as long as we have reason to think she has the capabilities necessary to use her roef.) lastly, because my justification is pragmatic, it can and should be sensitive to rights’ dependency on capabilities. the reason why i can coerce my infant into “tummy time” is because our best knowledge of infants tells us that she does not have the capabilities necessary to appraise what she will need to know, the bodily ability to act on her interests (or think through how to do so, or enlist others to aid her beyond the most basic cries for help), etc. the older she gets or the more she can demonstrate to concerned parties that she is increasingly capable of such things, the easier it is to justify this pragmatically-grounded approach to freedom. one can, of course, object that because this freedom is pragmatically grounded, it is less secure and potentially “up to” the judgment of others besides the student. (“you use your freedom to choose unwisely in my judgment, and therefore, i will not let you choose anymore.”) my pragmatic grounding does leave freedom vulnerable. yet, no philosophy can make freedom invulnerable, and arguably, my pragmatic justification leaves the roef vulnerable at the opportunity of making it feasible and worth having. if we imagined a world where students have an roef, where the freedom persistently left people ill-equipped for and/or unhappy with life, matusov would have to continue advocating for the roef because results don’t affect the validity of the right. i, the pragmatist, would concern myself with flourishing and happiness first, and reappraise the “shape” of the roef accordingly. it might also be true that my pragmatic justification for an roef leaves this freedom vulnerable to the judgment of whoever is in a position to grant and rescind it. yet, so does matusov’s! matusov leaves it entirely to these people not the learner to decide such things as what educational paths are legitimate or not, for instance. if there is a concern that my theory provides grounds for illiberal folks to rescind student rights to freedom on paternalistic grounds, we can easily imagine those illiberal folks could do the same if granted by matusov the power to determine what education are legitimate and not. that these rights are vulnerable to paternalistic rescindment is not a problem philosophy can solve. the only thing that can prevent the problem is that whoever is in a position to rescind or grant the roef is of a certain liberal temperament and interprets whatever justifies the right in a liberal way. references greenberg, d., & sadofsky, m. (1992). legacy of trust: life after the sudbury valley school experience. the sudbury valley school press. hayek, f. a. (1948). individualism: true and false. in individualism and economic order (pp. 1–32). univ. of chicago press. lachs, j. (2014). meddling: on the virtues of leaving others alone. indiana university press. llewellyn, g. (ed.). (2005). real lives: eleven teenagers who don’t go to school tell their own stories. lowry house publishing. comment on text eugene matusov: great point! comment on text eugene matusov: this is an illegitimate paternalism, in my judgment. i wonder who “we” is. educational experts? adults? comment on text eugene matusov: i respectfully but strongly disagree with your analysis, smuggling paternalism. see my counter-analysis of the case in my reply-essay. comment on text eugene matusov: do you mean i’m an ideologue, arguing right for a sake of having the right? 😊 if so, i’d never consider the limitations of a student’s right to freedom of education. comment on text eugene matusov: or a conservative? 😉 comment on text eugene matusov: not so. please see my reply-essay. comment on text eugene matusov: in my view, liberalism is defined by its (limited) tolerance to illiberalism. “yes, but…” yes, and…” a sympathetic challenge (and reframing) of matusov’s “the right for freedom of education.” kevin currie-knight dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.339 | vol. 8 (2020) sf70 riley, g., & gray, p. (2015). grown unschoolers’ experiences with higher education and employment: report ii on a survey of 75 unschooled a=adults | other education. other educaiton, 4(1). https://othereducation.org/index.php/oe/article/view/105 thomas, a., & pattison, h. (2008). how children learn at lome. continuum international publishing. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word elkader, epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching, book review (dpj layout)-2.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b1     epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting – critical review nermine abd elkader school of education, university of delaware abstract book review for dialogic pedagogy journal: this is a review of the book 'inspiring dialogue: talking to learn in the english classroom' by juzwik et al. (2013), new york, ny: teachers college press, 162 pages, $ 32 (paper). the review looks critically at the theoretical framework of the book and compares it to the ontological tradition of baktinian dialogue. the review aims to find the strengths of the book and meanwhile exposes its weaknesses in light of the interpretation of the bakhtin's circle and modern bakhtinian scholars of dialogic pedagogy. inspiring dialogue: talking to learn in the english classroom is a book that tries to find solutions for some of the most expressed problems that teachers face with class dialogue within a discussionbased method of instruction. chapter 1 gives the rationale for using dialogue in teaching but also maintains that dialogue could be a problem because both teachers and students have not learned to dialogue throughout their schooling experience (p.9). this is why the authors dedicate chapter 2 to describe how teachers can develop a dialogic stance to help their students learn to talk and also to stimulate them to talk to learn. developing a dialogic stance, according to the authors, entails that both teachers and students show a commitment to listening to one another and to responding to the speaker’s argument rather than talking over it. in this sense, developing a dialogic stance implicates an ontological change in the teacher-student relationship that would allow the students to see and believe that their voices are valued and heard (p.31). for an ontological change to take place, the authors emphasize heavily the importance of reflection and meta-thinking for both teachers and students. chapter 3 delineates one of these meta-thinking tools represented in a diagnostic survey that calls teachers to assess their attitude toward class discussion and reflect upon their practices that might be hindering the dialogue before they start planning for the dialogue. chapter 4 points out meta-lessons in which teachers encourage students to think about what makes a good discussion as an opportunity for teachers to lay out the ground rules for discussion and to prevent bullying and disrespect among students during dialogue. developing a dialogic stance, according to the authors, also means emphasizing the linguistic diversity in the dialogic classroom as a necessity for the students to use language to develop and share their thoughts and for teachers to develop the attitude of regarding students’ home languages as a resource for learning rather than as a deficit for their english language skills. i find it valuable that in both chapters 3 and 4, the authors give entry level teachers some clear distinctions between listening and responding authentically to students’ participation and following an i-r-e (initiation, response, and issn: 2325-3290 (online) epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b2 evaluation) pattern which is monologic1 teaching under the disguise of a pseudo discussion (chinn, anderson, & waggoner, 2001). another valuable dialogic practice that the book promotes is using dialogic provocations to encourage dialogue and enhance its persistence. the authors call the provocations “dialogic tools” (p.31) and claim that they can be provided by either the teachers or the students. for example, although the authors show that teachers might prefer teacher-led ones (at least one of them did), the authors insist that these tools –even the ones that are concerned with discussing the dialogue rules can be prepared and led by the students. the authors, thus in chapter 3, have a long list of dialogic provocations that can be prepared by the teachers and those that can be prepared by the students and suggest that students respond better to the class dialogue when they work with these tools. in chapter 4, the authors introduce a method by which teachers can ensure to plan for dialogue for the whole academic year. the authors’ initial purpose for planning for the long haul is to prevent teachers from growing weary of the dialogue on the long term (p.54) or to give up on it if they were met with one bad or flat session. planning for the long haul, according to the authors, also allows teachers to stay focused on the state recommended curriculum and to meet the learning objectives as set by the ccss (p.55). one of the most important concepts that chapter 4 emphasizes, in my opinion, is the issue of assessment. the authors recommend formative assessment and once more emphasize the importance of dialogic tools in providing a means for rigorously assessing classroom participation away from any presumptions that in dialogue anything goes. the authors offer a rubric for assessing socratic seminar participation on p.66 that takes into account students who might be shy or might not wish to talk within the classroom context by looking at how the students have prepared for the discussion at home and how deep the questions, comments, and concerns they wrote in reflection about the material are. thus, in assessing the students, the authors are careful to be sensitive to students’ different personalities and the potential that some might be uncomfortable to speak in public. chapter 5 focuses on taking a dialogic stance in argumentative writing. i commend this chapter for moving away from the highly structured lesson planning that characterized the previous chapters to a more dialogic approach in writing arguments based on polyphony and multivocality (depalma, 2010b; sullivan, 2011). the authors in this chapter denounce the formalist approach of a five paragraph argumentative essay and stress the importance of teaching argumentative writing against a background of the social role that arguments play in actual life. even though the authors provide templates of transition phrases and words that teachers should introduce to the students to help them understand how to enter an argument or transition among the different voices of an argument in their writing, the authors warn against using these words and phrases as a formulaic instead of understanding them as being generative rather than comprehensive. moreover, in this chapter, the authors skilfully demonstrate how authentic dialogic conversations as represented in students’ voices in a free classroom conversation or in talk shows can be transferred in writing an argument in such a way that allows the students to see arguments as a part of their normal everyday lived experience. in my view, this chapter is one of the strongest chapters in the book even in its empirical evidence as the students’ voices in this chapter are authentic and indicative of an ontological participation in the discussion. the last two chapters in the book emphasize using dialogic inquiry to promote better dialogic practices. in these chapters, the authors return to a metaphor that they have introduced in chapter 1 in the book of a dialogic lesson being a draft rather than a final product. thus the authors encourage and 1 in monologic teaching, the teacher is the sole holder of knowledge which she wishes to transmit to the students and thus students’ answers to teachers’ questions need to align with the curricular goals and the lesson plan objectives that are foreknown by the teacher (matusov, 2009) epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b3 demonstrate methods of discourse analysis and peer feedback to help teachers revise their practices based on the findings of their investigation. both chapters are powerful in that they promote the concepts of reflective practitioners (dewey, 1933) and community of practice (lave & wenger, 1998) for learning and education. it is also worthy to note that the authors were realistic in guiding teachers to receive feedback from colleagues by alerting them to the importance of choosing people they trust and collaborate well with for their peer feedback group and in being prepared for the meeting by collecting the tools they used and excerpts of videos they recorded for their class sessions. the last section in the book draws the attention to the many challenges that can arise during a dialogic class and the authors’ answers to these challenges. i find this last section in the book powerful as well since the authors delineate some of the challenges that emerged during their study and that are also well documented in the literature of class discussion especially in a culturally diverse classroom (chinn et al., 2001; solorzano, 1997; wortham, 1995). the strength of exposing these challenges and how teachers dealt with them relies on the fact the authors’ voice almost disappear and more space is given to teachers’ voices as they reflect on their own practices and mistakes as they see them. the authors use the appendices to talk in more detail about their research participants, the curriculum, and their research methodology. i have concerns about revealing to the reader that the study was a design or an intervention study only at the end of the book and in the appendix. this could create confusion throughout the book about whether the authors are describing successful dialogic practices or whether they are describing a dialogic philosophy as they see how it should be implemented in the classroom. also, in the summary of findings, we hear the authors saying that students’ participation flourished more when the teacher controlled the dialogue through prepared dialogic tools rather than letting the dialogue be planned and led by the students. i did not find evidence for this proclamation throughout the book except in one teacher’s proclamation that her students struggled with student-led discussion. more evidence is needed on this important and unlikely point for it to be more empirical. i commend reading inspiring dialogue to all teachers who are falling under the burden and pressure of curriculum state standards and want to create some life in their classrooms. the book explicitly maintains that the dialogic approach that the authors promote meets many of the standards for listening, speaking, and writing as outlined by the common core state standard. the book also offers a contribution to the literature of discussion-based instruction in conventional classroom by showing how teachers can be prepared, trained, and guided through the process of implementing dialogue in their teaching. this is especially important when we talk about the teaching of english owing to the inherent connection between dialogue and language with language acquisition relying mainly on interaction (depalma, 2010a). the book also finds some solutions for some of the issues that have been raised in the literature of class discussion mainly teacher’s domination of the discussion (chinn et al., 2001), lack of preparation on the students’ part (billings & fitzgerald, 2002), and digression and focus on personal issues rather than the learning material (wortham, 1995). in this sense, i consider this book a manual for teachers and pre-service teachers who wish to implement a discussion based method of teaching in their classroom and to be able to measure, assess, and document students’ success against the state standards. however, there are many other issues and problems with the dialogic approach that the authors followed that the book does not tackle and does not seem to take into consideration. it seems that the authors, in this book, have followed an epistemological rather than an ontological approach to dialogue. epistemological approaches focus on the dialogue as a medium through which legitimate knowledge that is known, defined, precontested, and finalized by the authoritative word is presented to the students (matusov, 2011). although the students’ role in reflecting on and critically considering this knowledge is epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b4 not diminished, it is still expected that students will reach an answer that has already been proven by another and that is considered to be a universal truth (fishman, 1985). it is true that the authors commended this epistemological approach in order to orient the students toward dialogue knowing that few students have encountered dialogue throughout their schooling trajectory and thus do not always know how to dialogue (p.6). however, i still find it problematic that the authors recommend teachers to be in ultimate control of the dialogue including planning for the long haul. the authors went as far as comparing planning for the dialogue to preparing a good meal that needs to be well seasoned and marinated before served to the students. this conceptualization of dialogue contradicts how several bakhtinian scholars defined dialogue, according to bakhtin, as a human activity that is hard to be predicted, controlled, or submitted to the demands of any policy (gardiner, 2002; sidorkin, 1999). such dialogue engages the students ontologically because dialogue is not a medium for education; rather dialogue is the education i.e. the ultimate end goal for the dialogue is dialogicity which bakhtinian scholars define as the realization of the value of other consciousnesses in one’s own understanding of any idea (matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999). in fact, bakhtin’s concept of carnival is where the most processes of rejuvenation, death, and re-birth including that of language development or rather mutation takes place away from the eyes of officialdom to the extent that participants sometimes have to hide behind costumes, masks, and farces (gardiner, 2002). ontological dialogue engages the students not because it is an interesting instructional method that makes learning more fun and less boring –although it certainly does but because ontological dialogue is the essence of human existence and thus an educational project that follows this approach permeates the very essence of the students’ existence. recently, the dialogic pedagogy community has witnessed a debate between matusov and wegerif (2014) about the ontological and epistemological nature of dialogic education. the debate was interesting at many levels but in my opinion, it highlights an important dilemma that dialogic educators are already starting to face as they try to find a place for ontological dialogue in the context of conventional education with its current status of seeking quantifiable and measureable one-size fits all standard for assessing students’ learning. i believe one of the most important points of difference between matusov and wegerif in such a debate is the role of monologism in dialogic education. wegerif believes that monologism is important at a large scale in dialogic teaching especially if we are seeking to present the students with well-established universal truths that are proved by hard evidence as in the fields of science and math. on the other hand, matusov maintains that an ontological view of dialogic education cannot start out with an expectation of curricular endpoints and predictable and expected learning outcomes. the debate represents a gap between how the bakhtin circle (gardiner, 2002) and many other modern scholars (for example: matusov, sidorkin, skidmore, and others) interpret dialogue as a natural human activity that is ongoing, open-ended, and intertwining with all aspects of human existence (sidorkin, 1999) and how many other western scholars (for example: alvermann & hayes, 1989; applebee, langer, nystrand, & garmoran, 2003) interpret dialogue as an activity that can be coached, scaffolded, and used as an instrument of instruction. this gap has always been attempted to be bridged by scholars who try to find a place for bakhtinian dialogue in conventional education (for example: dysthe, 2011) but are faced with the dilemma of standard-based policy and quantified measures that use the students’ head as a unit of analysis (depalma, 2010b) and thus feel the need to follow conventional methods for an approach that does not recognize these methods and does not acknowledge them as legitimately dialogic. i see the authors’ negligence or confusion of ontological dialogue in this study as problematic despite the fact that epistemological approaches to dialogue can be argued to be a pleasant alternative to the traditional lecture approach and can promote analytical and critical thinking which are according to vygotskian scholarship more conducive for learning and retention of knowledge (vygotsky, 1987). however, the epistemological approach is problematic in this study because the authors do not wish to epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b5 attain through it merely better students’ engagement, achievement, and/or performance goals or even merely to satisfy the demands of the common core state standards. the authors claim that dialogic teaching has become a mandate in our day and age in order to present to the society democratic citizens able to discuss and debate the bigger societal issues within a political climate that has become polarized and void of civility and respect for the other diverse viewpoints. however, throughout the book, we see the authors focusing on the teacher as the absolute authority figure in the classroom even to the extent that teachers are advised to prepare, select, and sequence the dialogic tools that will provoke students into dialogue. it is true that the authors showed other student-led dialogue tools but it is obvious that both authors and teachers prefer teacher-led tools and teacher-led dialogues (p. 45, 136). there were moments in the book when the authors resorted to a more ontological orientation for the dialogue (which makes me think that the authors struggled with2 rather than completely ignored this specific orientation) especially when the authors focused more on the students’ voices and how they responded to the dialogic approach in argumentative writing in chapter 5 or even when they encouraged teachers to deliberately reflect on their practices through participating in dialogic inquiry with their community of practice. however, students’ voices appeared only sporadically throughout the study and they were always overcome by the teacher’s voice even reflecting on their own mistakes as opposed to listening to the students also evaluating and even critiquing the dialogic approach and the teacher. the very fact that the authors claim that students struggled in the student-led dialogue makes me wonder if an authentic dialogue was actually taking place. depalma (2010a) claims that when dialogue is used merely as an instrument of instruction rather than an authentic project that seeks students’ voices as a legitimate source of knowledge, students’ performance plummets in comparison with more teacher-centered practices. matusov (2009) maintains that an epistemological approach to dialogue can potentially be more harmful to dialogue than a monologic one since it throws students into confusion about what is expected of them and even fear of repercussion if what they shared in one context could be taken against them in another. shor and freire (1987) maintain that in the dialogic classroom, the success of the dialogic project is only measured through the diminishing role and the diminishing voice of the teacher and the growing control and authority that the students gain of the dialogue. besides, going back to the cooking metaphor that the authors used throughout the book, i can’t help but wonder what if some students did not like the meal that was prepared for them. the issue of pedagogical violence aimed at students who do not comply with the instructional goals of the teacher has been raised in several studies that did not even use bakhtinian dialogue for a theoretical framework (see for example: candela, 1999). moreover, in dialogue, there will always be students who do not want to participate for ontological reasons such as that the material is of sensitive and personal nature to them (hill, 2009; wortham, 1995) or because they prefer to work in isolation rather than join a community of learners (brown & renshaw, 2006). how can teachers thus deal with these students in a class that is supposed to prepare citizens for democracy while meeting state mandated standards as well? shouldn’t democracy entail a freedom of even non-participation (kukathas, 2003)? should students be penalized by grades in this instance? this is the dilemma that i faced when i read juzwik et al. (2013)’s book inspiring dialogue: talking to learn in the english classroom. on the one hand, i find that the book offers sound arguments for the need for dialogue in traditional schools and for the value of providing teachers with dialogic tools that help them plan for instruction and achieve curricular goals. on the other hand, i have concerns about 2 it is expected for the ontological dialogue to create a problematic for educators especially when educators try to satisfy the demands of a policy while truly seeking to engage in a democratic dialogue. the question was raised at the beginning of the book when the authors maintain that teachers refrain from the dialogic approach either because of their fear of losing control over classroom management or because they don’t think their students are cognitively ready for it epistemological approaches to dialogic teaching in a conventional setting nermine abd elkader dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b6 the authors’ ignoring students’ agency within this project or the need to prepare teachers to acknowledge and respect this agency. although the authors try to find ways for teachers not to fear the dialogic approach but to master it in such a way to make it easy to implement, to assess, and to improve on, i think more investigation into students’ responses to the approach and the challenges that long term practices can reveal is needed to see if issues of disengagement, lack of motivation, and pedagogical violence (teachers’ penalizing the students for not complying to their preset goals) would emerge, which in my view is likely to happen in any educational project that does not center on students’ agency and their subjectivity. references adler,  m.j.  (1984).  the  paideia  program:  an  educational  syllabus.  new  york:  collier  macmillan.   alvermann,   d.   e,   &   hayes,   d.   a.   .   (1989).   classroom   discussion   of   content 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international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.83 | vol. 2 (2014) b7 sidorkin,  a.  m.  (1999).  beyond  discourse:  education,  the  self,  and  dialogue.  albany,  n.y.:  state  university  of  new   york  press.   solorzano,   d.   (1997).   images   and   words   that   wound:   critical   race   theory,   racial   stereotyping,   and   teacher   education.  teacher  education  quarterly,  24(3),  5-­‐19.     sullivan,  p.  (2011).  qualitative  data  analysis  using  a  dialogical  approach.  thousand  oaks,  ca:  sage.   vygotsky,  l.s.  (1987).  thinking  and  speech.  in  r.  rieber  &  a.  carton  (eds.),  the  collected  work  of  l.  vygotsky.  new   york,  ny:  plenum.   wortham,  s.  (1995).  the  microstructure  of  multiculturalism:  experiencing  the  great  books.  paper  presented  at  the   the  annual  meeting  of  the  american  educational  research  association,  san  francisco,  ca.     reviewer's short bio: nermine abd elkader earned a ph.d. degree from the university of delaware in the sociocultural and communal approaches in education with a special focus on dialogic pedagogy and multicultural education. nermine's research interests center on the ontological orientation of dialogic pedagogy and the role it plays in students' learning, engagement, and transformative educational experiences. articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a131 dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya jessica k. parker university of california, santa barbara sonoma state university abstract global efforts to prepare young developing minds for solving current and future challenges of climate change have advocated interdisciplinary, issues-based instructional approaches in order to transform traditional models of science education as delivering conceptual facts (unesco, 2014). this study is an exploration of the online interactions in an international social network of high school students residing in norway, china, new zealand and the united states (n=141). students participated in classroom-based and asynchronous online discussions about adapted versions of seminal scientific studies with facilitative support from seven scientists across various fields. grounded in a language-in-use frame for investigating facilitation and demonstrations of problem-based and evidence-based reasoning (kelly & chen, 1999), we traced the varied questions, assertions, and evidentiary sources within student-led online discussions. we found that questions from scientific experts in the form of unconstrained, open-ended invitations for exploration were followed by students’ acknowledgement and consideration of complex and, at times, conflicting sociopolitical and economic positions about climate change issues. these findings suggest that broadening science classroom discussions to include socially relevant, unsolved issues like climate change could open potential entry points for a dialogic approach that fosters a scientific community in the classroom. key words: science education, digital literacy, dialogic practices diana j. arya is currently an assistant professor at the university of california, santa barbara. her research interests include digital literacy practices and fostering collaborative learning and discussions among adolescent students from various cultural backgrounds. jessica k. parker is associate professor in the school of education at sonoma state university. parker studies how secondary schools integrate multimedia literacy into academic literacy learning. her areas of emphasis include new literacies, educational technology, new media studies, and gender studies.  introduction at this potentially critical moment for human civilization, it is imperative that people, organizations, and governments be given the resources they need to participate in constructive civic, commercial, and personal decision-making about climate change risks and solutions. (bowman et al., 2010) issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a132 dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution. (freire, 1970, p. 128.) the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) has claimed the past ten years as the “decade of education for sustainable development” (desd) in efforts to elevate the issues of long-term, environmental sustainability in learning communities all around the world (buckler & creech, 2014; wals, 2012). moving beyond notions of education as teaching knowledge and principles, the desd framework for classroom learning emphasizes the need for teachers to foster student engagement in “the complexities, controversies and inequities rising out of issues relevant to environment, natural heritage, culture, society and economy” (wals, p.12). this framework aligns with the “excerpted messages” above; real changes in the ways that people think about and act on the earth’s changing climate and available natural resources requires an open dialogue that is inclusive of varying sources of knowledge and experience. climate change scientists like bowman et al. (2010) demand that citizens consider the evidence for and life-threatening consequences of the earth’s changing climate in order to take an active, decision-making role in discussions about climate change mitigation policies and practices. freire’s (1970) words complement this sentiment about what should be considered with the how; any major changes in the ways that communities, organizations and institutions operate are impossible without open and honest dialogue. similarly, unesco is calling for educational practices that foster the engagement in sustainability issues that is more than understanding conceptual information and processes. as such, traditional models of science instruction in the form of delivering conceptual facts are insufficient for fostering engagement with issues about an uncertain future. in their most recent report, unesco emphasized the importance of providing opportunities for students to consider the tensions created from the intersections of lifestyle consumption and green technologies (buckler & creech, 2014). for such an open dialogue about the consequences of climate change on living beings within ecosystems around the world to occur in the science classroom, students need the time and space to initiate and engage in problem-based and evidence-based reasoning about climate change. such reasoning requires that students have the opportunity to question, challenge, and co-construct ideas and claims. this form of dialogue is what we characterize as dialogic action. our schools are called to contribute to desd efforts in raising societies equipped to address a continually changing climate with limited natural resources, yet it is unclear what specific pedagogical practices promote this form of dialogic action as a way of fostering awareness and engagement in complex issues (benavot, 2014; fien, 2012). this call for dialogic action has arrived during the everevolving digital age of multiliteracies that involve linguistically and technologically diverse forms of communication, including online discussions (e.g., hafner & miller, 2011; luke, 2008; mills, 2009). our study is an exploration of virtually posted discussions initiated by questions and issues related to global climate change (e.g., threats to biodiversity) within an international project for secondary students living in china, new zealand, norway, and the united states (n=141). based on a view of learning as sociocultural practices in argumentation (kelly & chen, 1999), we traced the communicative turns in online discussions initiated by student participants and facilitated by seven scientists across the fields of biology, physics, and environmental studies. with particular interest in the expert-facilitated conversational moves to foster the dialogic action (defined here as student-led, posted discussions that invite problem-based and evidence-based reasoning that involves questioning, challenging, and coconstructing ideas and claims), we explore the pedagogical moves and subsequent interactions within a series of discussion forums in order to answer the following research questions: 1. which assertions (questions, suggestions, etc.) from participating facilitators (the consulting scientists) were taken up by the students? dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a133 2. how did the assertions from the facilitators support (or constrain) the shared reflections, disagreements, affirmations, and creations of understanding of the student participants? we employed a two-step discourse analysis of online discussions, using other related data sources (preand postinterview responses) for clarifying and/or confirming analytic claims, to address these research questions within a discourse-based frame of dialogic action. dialogic pedagogy for a global virtual community students are increasingly provided with the necessary technologies for engaging in discourse with others beyond the classroom walls, to engage in dialogue about shared interests or learning goals in virtual space (blake, 2013; collins & halverson, 2009; wegerif et al., 2010). as such, teachers are increasingly provided with the opportunities to foster a global community of students through the use of available wikispaces, chat rooms, online forums, etc., that are designed to provide a space for members to share, reflect, disagree, affirm, learn, and create. this vision of pedagogy has been widely supported by researchers and scholars across disciplines who tout the use of virtual spaces for broadening and fostering dynamic and meaningful interactions and learning (anderson, 2008; bellanca & stirling, 2011; hoadley & enyedy, 1999; richardson & swan, 2003; rovai & jordan, 2004; wertsch, 2002). however, the availability of the virtual space does not, on its own, ensure dialogic communication among its members (kop, 2011; krejins, kirschner & vermeulen, 2013; massey, 2003; rourke & kanuka, 2007). for example, participants in a wikispace may not even be aware of the idea that they are members of a community (beth et al., 2013). further, these participants may not be compelled to engage with others in the kind of online discourse required for questioning and co-constructing ideas about a given academic topic or issue (cho, lee & jonassen, 2011; hoskins & van hooff, 2005). teachers in turn may not be prepared to foster online discussions at such a deep level (beth at al., 2013; hernandez-ramos, 2004). exchanges involving problem-based and evidence-based reasoning that includes questioning, challenging, and co-constructing knowledge reflect unesco’s vision for desd-based education and, in turn, serve as our vision of dialogic action for this study. the dialogic nature of scientific reasoning. learning practices have long been viewed as social acts; the need for students to exchange ideas and co-construct meaning in order to develop linguistic and conceptual knowledge has been welldocumented in literacy research (bazerman, 1982; bomer & bomer, 2001; gee, 1996; gutierrez, baquedano-lopez & tejaeda, 1999; hicks, 1996; lewis, 2001). the socially dependent nature of issues like global climate change further heightens the need for open, thoughtful interactions among our student population about these critical issues (luke & woods, 2009; mendelsohn, 1977). yet, too often students spend most of a science class period responding to discrete questions about conceptual facts from lectures and textbooks, leaving little or no opportunities for thoughtful and critical dialogue about the relevance and significance of targeted conceptual information (ackerson & abdi-el-kalick, 2005; latour, 1987; lederman, 1992). traditional science classroom notions of the scientific method, for example, have been criticized for demonstrating a narrow view of science; the contrived steps of inquiry oversimplify the complex and dynamic process of science and the conceptually oriented models that are employed by scientists across various fields (abd-el-khalick et al, 2004; cartwright, 1983; giere, 1988; nersessian, 1999). this bleak picture of school science learning is encased in the general criticism of classroom teaching across the curricula as little more than a transmission of knowledge from the teacher as authority figure to the students as a passive audience (anton, 1999; adair-hauck, donato & cumo, 1994; freire, 1970; scott, 1998). dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a134 the extensive literature on classroom talk across multiple disciplines has consistently revealed that teachers produce the majority of talk in classrooms, much to the detriment of student learning (e.g., sampson & clark, 2009; flanders, 1970; zander, 2003). instead of being passive receptacles of factual information, students must be able to talk in order to learn, especially within the science classroom (lemke, 1990; scott, 1998; sutton, 1996). thus, this study is a telling case about the affordances of online interactions for facilitating dialogic action as student participants engage in the sociopolitical and economic complexities of global climate change. a well-documented application of dialogic theory is mortimer and scott’s (2003) work on meaning making in science classroom discussions. these researchers highlight the importance of talk that includes varying viewpoints for challenging conceptual understanding. as students are given opportunities to express their ideas about the targeted concepts, they engage in an iterative cycle of revision and meaning co-construction. this view of dialogic action emphasizes the multi-voiced, contentious nature of discursive acts (bakhtin, 1930s; 1981) and the socially and culturally situated nature of learning (vygotsky, 1978; wertsch, 2002). mortimer and scott have demonstrated how dialogic action (defined within their work as consensus building about conceptual knowledge) is facilitated within a classroom; however, investigations of dialogic action within online spaces shared by multiple classrooms around the world have yet to be conducted. dialogic action in online discussions. collaborative online learning has been characterized as dialogic in nature; that is, such learning involves the interactions of multiple voices that are at times conflicting, and these conflicting positions are in turn necessary ingredients for critical reasoning (enyedy & hoadley, 2006; wegerif, 2006, 2011). further, the online quality of these interactions releases participants from the traditional constraints of who and when in classroom discussions in that users are able to post their ideas, disagreements, affirmations, and experiences without first being recognized by the community or competing with other potential contributors to share within a limited time frame. although some confusion may occur in such an exchange, the overflow of responses to an initiated topic, question, opinion, or reported experience can also increase the opportunity for deeper reflection and learning (bell, 1997; cohen & scardamalia, 1998; hoadley & linn, 2000; schellens & valcke, 2005; wegerif, 2004). the importance of incorporating dialogic, online learning into classroom practices rests on mounting research illustrating the positive results (e.g., increasing open dialogue and collaboration among students) when students are able to freely discuss subject matter in virtual space rather than the limited time and space of traditional classroom discussions. empirical studies on the educational benefits of increased critical reasoning and argumentation via online communication have surfaced in recent years (cress & kimmerle, 2008; larusson & alterman, 2009; mak & coniam, 2008; nussbaum et al., 2007; pifarre & staarman, 2011; wegerif, 2006; wheeler, yeomans & wheeler, 2008). pifarre and staarman, for example, examined the online collaborative practices of 25 primary students (ages 9 to 11 years of age) in spain, and found that online discussions within a wiki environment facilitated an open dialogue with greater frequency of student talk that led to co-constructed texts and shared new understandings. similarly, larusson and alterman found in their two case studies of university students that a wiki environment may be a supportive element for collaborative activities, which often require time and space beyond the typical boundaries of a classroom. in this sense, online collaboration enables participants to “change their minds, to question their own positions, and to ask for help when they did not know the answer” (wegerif, 2006, p. 150). dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a135 in this study, we seek to contribute to scholarly work on online learning by exploring how dialogic action is facilitated (or inhibited) within issues-based discussion forums initiated by a network of high school students who reside in four different countries. using a classroom discourse frame for analyzing language in use within a secondary school science context (kelly & chen, 1999), we explored the social turns within online discussions that were designed (along with classroom-based materials and activities) to address the three general themes highlighted by the working groups of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc, 2010)—a) the physical science basis of climate change, b) climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and c) mitigation of climate change. in addition to descriptions of participant and site-level contributions to these online discussion threads, we investigated the particular linguistic and social cues that indicate a sense of membership and the ways in which members engage in problem-based or evidence-based reasoning, with particular emphasis on the contributions of the consulting scientists for facilitating these engagements in reasoning. patterns identified in the facilitative moves of the consulting scientists may inform a theory for fostering the dialogic action needed for environmental awareness and sustainability around the world (buckler & creech, 2014). further, this approach may be useful for fostering dialogic action within other disciplines of study. method participants and setting a total of 141 high school students (14-17 years of age), participated in climate exchange for language and learning (cell), which was an eight-week program designed for collaborative, evidencebased discussions related to global climate change issues. the participants from china (n=30) attended a boarding school located in one of the largest cities in the southern region of the country. the participants from new zealand (n=25) attended an urban high school in the southern tip of the northern island. the participants from norway (n=32) attended a performing arts high school in a large city in southern norway. whereas the three previously mentioned groups were single class settings, participants from the united states (n=54) were made up of two separate science classes, only one of which (n=28) completed the preand postsurveys and interviews. both groups of u.s. participants attended the same suburban high school in northern california. all participating classrooms devoted an average of two hours of weekly class time for cellrelated activities over the eight-week period. the number and duration of daily cell activities depended on scheduling constraints of each participating classroom. participants were also encouraged (but not obligated) to devote time outside of school hours to engage in online activities related to cell. instructional context: cell program the central focus of the cell program was to provide the structures necessary for an open and honest cross-national exchange about the scientific evidence related to five issues considered most critical to global climate change (gleick et al., 2010): rise in temperature; rise in sea level; humaninduced greenhouse effect; loss in biodiversity; deforestation. compared to school science topics such as electromagnetism or photosynthesis, climate change has a greater socio-political relevancy and thus, in our opinion, increased the potential for productive exploratory talk among the participants. online exchanges were by design initiated by participating students who were encouraged by teachers and researchers to construct and post questions to an online platform. moodle, an open-source learning management system, provided a secure and private site for students to engage in asynchronous activities and access project-related resources. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a136 the moodle platform provided a space for student participants to build upon the classroom discussions about the targeted climate change issues. within this platform, participants entered a discussion forum about a particular climate change topic by selecting the corresponding forum prompt: post your group’s questions regarding (climate change issue) and respond to your peers’ posts. these forum prompts were open-ended in order to encourage students to ask questions that they had about the topic. in addition to the discussions, the moodle platform was a source for a collective glossary, various brief surveys and games, and member profiles. initial questions posted by students were in turn read, considered, and responded to by participating peers, researchers, teachers and consulting scientists. the overarching structure of the cell program was inspired by earlier initiatives in collaborative online science learning by slotta and colleagues, who have found that online collaboration among peers can have a positive effect on engagement and understanding (e.g., stagg peterson & slotta, 2009; slotta & aleahmad, 2009; slotta & linn, 2009). the unique components of the cell program included the use of adapted seminal scientific studies, which participants read and discussed in their respective classrooms as well as within secure, online discussion forums, chats, and blogs. another unique aspect of cell was the inclusion of seven scientists across a variety of fields (biology, physics and environmental studies) who were recruited to facilitate the online discussions. educational researchers from neighboring universities facilitated the cell-based activities in the four respective research sites. participants read, researched, and discussed a variety of texts including adapted versions of original scientific research, video clips from news programs and public service websites, and digital images. the primary language of all cell activities and materials was english. online discussions in the cell program began with a posted question by one student or a small group of students. the formation of these questions was influenced by classroom readings and discussions as well as events and experiences outside the classroom. within the classroom, students read and discussed the relative importance of scientific data that suggested a significant change in the earth’s climate. these data were presented in the form of individual study abstracts of seminal published articles about one of the five targeted climate change issues. students were encouraged to discuss the practical significance of these readings in light of their own knowledge and experiences, thus allowing for a fluid exchange of ideas that vary in formality and conceptual focus. the lead teacher also prompted students to consider what questions they would like to post to the online platform. students were then encouraged to post their questions online and engage in discussions with students from other participating classrooms. however, it was explained to all students that unlike the classroom activities and some of the online tasks (e.g., preand post-surveys) that were completed within the classroom period, there was no obligation to contribute to the discussions that generally occurred outside of school hours. our decision to confine obligatory activities to in-school contexts aligned with established school-based guidelines for three of the four research sites. seven scientists from a variety of fields agreed to act as consultants for this program. the scientists as well as the lead teachers were encouraged to provide only solicited information and to post questions that would challenge the students’ thinking (e.g., do you think that these results are compelling? what do you think we still need to know? how do the data tell us that . . .). only the first letter of the students’ last names was published in the online platform, and the distinguishing feature for scientists and researchers was that their full names were presented. participants, including students, were able to view the profile of each contributor by clicking on the featured name, which was displayed next to a self-created avatar picture. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a137 all texts and classroom activities within the cell program were designed to provide linguistic and conceptual support for the online discussions as well as to maximize the online communication between students and consulting scientists. as such, classroom-based discussions provided student participants with the opportunity to reflect on and co-construct questions, assertions, or claims that they deemed most relevant to the targeted climate change issue. reading materials excerpted seminal scientific studies were introduced and discussed within the respective classroom sites and thus served as anchors for the ensuing online discussions. cell participants read a total of 12 abstract studies, one or two pages in length, which were referenced by the ipcc (2010). the selected original studies were modified according to text length and cohesion of structural components (i.e., introduction, methods, results, and discussion) while maintaining original tables and figures. all abstracted studies and associated discussion questions were vetted by participating scientists, educators, and previewed by a classroom of norwegian students (n=24) prior to the eight-week study. figure 1 shows an excerpted text and illustration from a study by church and white (2006) regarding the rise in sea level: figure 1. example of excerpted scientific study. the original versions of these study abstracts range according to climate change issue and date of publication. this cross-generational display of scientific work provided the opportunity for students to view and discuss the historicity of scientific investigations on a single issue such as the steady rise in sea dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a138 level. student participants read, evaluated, and reflected on reported processes and empirical data through in-person classroom discussions with immediate, country-specific peers and asynchronous computer-mediated communication with peers from the other research sites. pre/post measures participants responded to a series of online questionnaire items and individual interview questions before and after the cell program in order to document individual change in conceptual knowledge and language use over time. the pre and post online questionnaire items (18 and 21 items respectively; the three additional post items targeted students’ overall reflections of the program) were designed to elicit students’ attitudes and beliefs about global climate change and their perceptions of the agreement within the scientific community regarding the changing climate (e.g., do you believe that the earth’s climate is changing? why or why not? what percentage of scientists do you think are confident that the earth’s climate is changing?). a total of ten individual interview questions (conducted by researchers across the four sites) were asked prior to and after the study concluded. these questions elicited students’ understanding of science, the work that scientists do, their definitions of global climate change as well as their understandings of scientific data presented in graphic form. all pre and post items from the interviews and online questionnaires were vetted and edited by researchers, scientists and the pilot class of students in norway prior to program implementation. for this study, these responses served as ancillary sources of evidence for further clarifying patterns in the online exchanges. specifically, responses to individual items, as previously exampled, were matched with online interactions involving the same participants; the additional data from survey and interview responses helped to clarify or confirm posted responses in the online forums. analysis of online interactions the central focus of our analysis is the dialogic action within the discussion forums that were programmatically organized by specific climate change issues. our approach for identifying and analyzing data sources involved a two-step process. first, we employed kelly and chen’s (1999) language-in-use frame to identify key interactional events according to the design of the program and the context of learning science as problem-based and evidence-based reasoning. our selection of this initiating frame of analysis is based on the similarity of kelly and chen’s study, in which they investigated classroom interactions among high school physics students in order to make visible the ways in which discourse shapes a learning community. these educational scholars began their iterative cycle of inquiry by determining a taxonomy for organizing collected artifacts (classroom discussions, writing tasks, curriculum materials, etc.), which aligned with the local classroom units of study. the next phase of their analysis involved the creation of maps that traced moment-to-moment interactions within one of the identified units of archived data in order to determine the phases of an interaction leading to consensus. this grounded, participant-observer approach for identifying analytic units served as guide for selecting data sources and analytic units according to the organization of cell events and activities. just as author and science educator kelly co-taught a conceptual physics course within a public high school in order to gain an insider’s perspective of “science in the making” (p. 884), we were co-facilitators of the norwegian and u.s. sites, which helped us to understand the ways student interactions facilitated understanding about climate change issues. kelly and chen’s process of identifying and constructing data from available artifacts began with rich descriptions of discourse-related classroom routines and activities, including lab protocols, and writing assignments. these scholars then determined analytic units based on identified sources (e.g., collected written artifacts, lesson plans, recorded interviews and dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a139 classroom activities) from a sequence of segmented activities that constituted a “cycle of activity” within a two-week period. key discourse events from this cycle were identified, transcribed, and organized into thematically defined sequence units (e.g., conducting the experiment). following kelly and chen’s logic of inquiry, we identified key data sources according to the design of the cell program and the context of learning science as problem-based and evidence-based reasoning. although the cell online discussion activities were generally not a required component of program participation, we learned from site facilitators (including the norwegian site teacher) that students were keenly interested in the online activity and would often refer to them during class discussions of seminal studies. as such, we used the students’ perspectives about the online discussions as a guide for selecting the discussion threads for analysis. threads that were discussed by the student participants were either topically framed (the one thread about the earthquake really showed that the chinese are worried) or framed according to a particular activity (what can we do about . . .). based on students’ characterization of the discussion threads, we decided on a thematic (topic/activity) focus for our analysis of individual discussion threads. as such, our approach for categorizing units of analysis was grounded in a participant frame, which was followed by a closer inspection of the intentions and assertions within the bounded units. our initial step in identifying specific thematic categories for the discussion threads was to determine how climate change issues were organized within the aforementioned ipcc’s (2010) working groups; as a guiding authority for the content of the cell program, we suspected that the use of the working group themes would align with the themes of the online discussions. these themes are: a) the physical science basis of climate change, b) climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, and c) mitigation of climate change. we identified the use and prevalence of relevant constructs (e.g., aware(ness), change, ozone) and general summary ideas (e.g., a post focused on eliciting clarification about the natural process of the greenhouse effect) that facilitated the assignation of these thematic categories. in order to ensure accuracy in this categorization process, we categorized randomly selected portions of the posts separately and compared the initiating posts for each line of discussion. intended meanings in all posted responses were clear enough to avoid any discrepancies in this categorization process. the next phase of our analysis involved a closer inspection of the individual posts within the categorized discussion threads, taking note of communicative turns that signaled agreement (e.g., yes, i agree), disagreement (but that isn’t the problem), or deictic indications of membership (we need to think about ways that we can . . .; this is our problem). analysis of specific asserted positions, contentions, and agreements within the discussion threads followed the general principles of conversational analysis (ca), which is defined as a method for observing and evaluating the intentions or shared understandings between individuals engaged in talk (atkinson & heritage, 1984). ca is noted as an effective approach for conducting “in-depth examinations of the content, structures, processes, and meaning of on-line conversation” (mazur, 2004, p.1095). following such conventional thinking, ca served as a general guide for identifying structural features like indications of disagreement and questioning stances in online discussions (but, i disagree, and no, etc.) as well as assertions of agreement (i agree, yes, that also happened to me, etc.) that were focal points of analysis (pomerantz, 1984; sacks, 1987). just as kelly and chen (1999) used sociolinguistic frames for identifying “contextualization cues” in classroom talk (p. 895), we use the ca framework for identifying communicative cues signaling dialogic action in online discussions. in this sense, we were able to identify patterns across the thematically organized discussion threads. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a140 in accordance with standard practices in scientific methodology for ensuring validity of inferences (budowle et al., 2009), we conducted separate analyses of the online discussions during both phases of the investigation. these separate analyses were then compared to one another for evidence of consistency in inferential claims about the discussion threads. as an additional check to the quality of our analysis, we recruited a scholar with an expertise in research methodology to conduct an external review of our analytic methods and data analysis. we achieved a high consistency in identified categories and communicative assertions; we had full consensus on the decision to thematically organize analytic units and 92% consistency of ca-guided analysis of disagreement, agreement, and evidence-based assertions across the three raters. the few discrepancies in discursive moves were discussed and resolved by achieving consensus across the three raters. because assertions by raters required the open and explicit consideration of evidence from data sources, consensus was reached for each disagreement. interview transcripts, online survey responses, commentary from consulting scientists and participating teachers, and field notes by researchers were sources for a) contextualizing online discussions in order to present a clearer picture of the intended actions and values of active participants and b) triangulating data sources for supporting emerging theories about the ways in which contributors (particularly the scientific experts) facilitate (or inhibit) dialogic action within the online discussions. a total of 132 discussion threads (i.e., collection of posts) encompass 453 individual posts (310 of these posts are from students). our analysis is focused on these discussion threads and excludes 46 initiated posts without responses. approximately 32% (144 posts) were written by researchers or scientists. all other posts were from students. none of the teachers posted a response, even though the researchers at each respective site explicitly invited teachers to join these exchanges. the teacher of the norwegian classroom had expressed his interest in monitoring the students’ online activities, but was reluctant to “interfere” with the exchange. the teacher of the california site expressed his overall skepticism of human-induced climate change, noting that this program was a way to address one component of his curriculum. the teacher of the chinese site found the exchanges very interesting but felt more comfortable exchanging messages with the program coordinators. the teacher from the new zealand site never responded to inquiries about her lack of involvement in the online discussions. as such, we suspect that there are various reasons for the lack of participation from the teachers. the initial posts of the majority of discussion threads (90%, 118 threads total) reflected the climate change impacts and mitigation of climate change groups. nearly all discussion threads (98%) reflected the interests of more than one of these groups, which were either conceptual (as primarily emphasized in the first ipcc working group) or socio-political (emphasized in the second and third working groups) in nature. initial posts that targeted key information from the readings or class discussions (e.g., based on the data we read today, it seems that the sea level is rising, but how fast will it rise?) were in turn followed by responses with a conceptual focus (reflecting the interests of the first ipcc working group) and with fewer emotional or personal narrative statements. similarly, politicallycharged questions (e.g., how much does the government hide the truth about climate change?) were generally followed by points of view that were more political in nature (we have to keep the pressure on so that things will change). the discussion threads were fairly split between these two general interests. occasionally, we observed the few comments that veered from topic of climate change (i have red hair); these comments were too few in number in order to observe any pattern involving their presence and thus were excluded from this study. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a141 results the facilitative moves of the participating scientists in this study (i.e., the assertions from participating scientists and the affordances of these assertions for supporting students’ understanding) were traced across the 132 discussion threads, which began with a question or comment by a participating student and included all forms of subsequent responses (e.g. answers, comments, additional questions, embedded links, digital images, etc.). the results of our two-phase analytic approach indicate the following findings about the online discussion threads:  students demonstrated a high level of participation and engagement.  students rarely included scientific evidence (i.e., references to scientific findings) in their posts.  opinion statements without explanation or scientific evidence were not challenged.  facilitators, who were scientists and researchers, varied in their indication of membership (vs. authoritative voice) within the cell community, unlike the students, who frequently acknowledged membership across the research sites. each of these findings is attested in turn by the following descriptive accounts of discussion threads. high-level participation and engagement as mentioned previously, participation in the discussion forums was not mandatory. of the 141 students, 127 (90% of the total) logged in to view discussions within at least one of the topics and 109 (77% of the total) posted at least one comment to one of the discussion threads. the fact that the majority of students were engaged to some degree with the discussion forums is consistent with responses from individual interviews in which the majority of participants (90%) explicitly expressed an eagerness to learn more about climate change and about how people from other countries think about climate change issues, all of which speaks to the high level of engagement within this program. the american students were most active, totaling in 43 contributors to the online forum (30% of the total), with 27 chinese and 23 norwegian students also contributing to a fair amount of the exchange (19% and 16% respectively). only 16 new zealand students contributed to these discussions (11% of the total), which may be attributed to the fact that they entered the program two weeks after it began. although participants from all countries contributed to the discussion threads, not all nationalities were represented in each thread. all contributors to the online discussions posed predictions, questions, and/or declarations, all seemingly in an effort to voice their thoughts and elicit the thoughts of others involved in the project. all initial posts of the discussion threads were, by design, created by the participating students. initiators’ posts generally began with some commentary in reference to the classroom readings, an event or journalistic piece related to climate change, or to the author’s worries and predictions about the plight of humanity and the animal kingdom, and finished with an elicitation for input from others. there were no restraints on the nature or structure of participation in the discussion forums. the most common posts were variations on the question, what can we do? this demonstrated concern and reflection of the mitigation of climate change discussion theme was also reflected in the individual interviews, during which the majority of students (approximately 80%, 87 of the total 109 respondents) explicitly expressed a desire to do something that could either slow down or stop global climate change. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a142 scientific evidence (not opinion) as a catalyst for dialogic action student participants rarely presented scientific evidence in support of their conjectures about climate change. of the total 310 individual student posts across the discussion threads, only 37 included the use of evidence in their explanations. most other posts included either opinions without any explanations whatsoever, assumed shared knowledge (we all know that . . .) or personal narratives (well, i can see in my own country that . . . ) rather than the scientific evidence presented in the classroom readings. of the 37 evidence-based posts, 27 focused predominantly on the working theme of the physical science basis of climate change (based on the data table below, we know that the sea level is rising . . . ) with 10 posts highlighting climate change impacts (in that report, we learned that emissions are causing the increase in co2) and 8 posts referring to mitigation of climate change (scientists reported that recycling would help a lot). our analysis of discussion threads revealed that posts in the form of more extensive reflections and explanations were most prevalent when there were disagreements to comments posted by one of the consulting scientists or researchers, or to students who cited scientific work. for example, comments that included references to scientific evidence presented in the readings (e.g., we read about how there’s much more co2 than ever before so it’s pretty clear that people are making it worse) received far greater critical commentary (yeah but the weather is always changing and there is a natural cycle). these more extensive comments also demonstrated the use of hedging (i.e., observed reluctance or hesitancy to disagree, yes, i can see that, but . . ., e.g., sacks, 1987). posts that represented opinions or personal reflections without supportive evidence or references to external corroborating sources were left unchallenged. indications of membership within a virtual community throughout the discussion threads, students used the first-person plural pronouns, us, we, our, 80% as often (a total of 540 entries) as first-person singular pronouns (i, me, my). the first-person plural pronouns were present in comments about potential courses of action (we should conserve our water use) and about problems relating to climate change (if people keep chopping down all the trees, our forests will be gone and the animals will die and we won’t have any food). first-person singular pronouns were present in comments representing personal opinions about the current and future conditions of climate change (i think . . . i believe that it is going to keep getting warmer) or personal experiences about courses of action (when i’m at home, i try to shut off the lights in other rooms . . . ). three examples of dialogic action the following three discussion threads provide explanatory evidence for each of our findings described above. each thread highlights one of each of the three themes (i.e., proposed courses of action, prospective claims about current and future conditions, and the universal relevance of climate change) that were selected during the first phase of our analysis. these threads illustrate our findings about students’ commentaries and use of deictic markers (i.e., forms of communication that depend heavily on the given context; see filmore, 1960; 1982) within the cell online discussion forums. the first thread occurred during the first week of the program whereas the second and third threads occurred during the third and fourth weeks, respectively. in order to protect the anonymity of the participants, all participants’ names and references to specific places have been replaced by a pseudonym that maintains the cultural identity of participants. for example, the american participants whose actual names primarily reflected a anglo-saxon origin were given pseudonyms of a similar cultural quality while the chinese participants were given dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a143 pseudonyms that are conventional chinese names. individuals represented in the discussion threads are mostly students with the occasional commentary from a researcher (indicated by an asterisk, *) or a consulting scientist (indicated by two asterisks, **). students are able to view the profile of each contributor by clicking on the associated name, and, as mentioned earlier, scientists and researchers could be immediately identified by the fact that their last names were fully displayed. the discussion threads are presented here as they were in the platform; original spelling and grammar are maintained, and any edits were solely for the purpose of masking identifying information beyond one’s self-identified gender, nationality, and role in the program. theme 1, courses of action. respondents shared and considered a multitude of strategies for reversing, or at least slowing down, the effects of climate change. contributions included references to national and local recycling programs, personal testimonies or declarations on reducing one’s carbon footprint through the conservation of resources, and thoughts about alternative sources of energy. these contributions also reflected uncertainty about the state of affairs that may inform potential courses of action. one participant had posted the question, we need to fight climate change, but shouldn’t we focus on our economy first? the following thread is an extended discussion about this issue of priority. [title of student-generated post]: what comes first, climate or economy? anders: in this blog i want to learn about what different pupils think about climate-change up against economy and cociety. whats the most important at the moment? shall we keep using coal and oil to save money or to focus on decreasing pollution and stop climate change? or shall we do somthing in between? :-/ (this topic is also in my blogg) :-) donna*: wow, great thoughtful questions . . . i look forward to seeing your thinking develop over the next 6 weeks! arthur*: a great question, indeed. it seems like a lot of the people who don't want to think about climate change are the people involved in industries that generate a lot of pollution. their argument is that the economy would suffer and jobs would be lost if they were forced to stop polluting so much. and to an extent, this is probably true. but maybe "greener" (more environmentally-friendly) industries can be developed, so that we don't need to choose between the economy and the environment? stian: yes that is true, that would be great if we could find up "greener", more environmentally-friendly industries. but then again the economy cause a problem, because probably the new environmentally-friendly industries/factories will cost a lot of money and then few will choose these environmentally-friendly methodes. monica**: one thing i don't understand is why climate change in the us is framed as "it's either the environment or jobs". personally, i don't believe that. rather it is a tactic to scare people. ultimately, without sustainable ecosystems we won't have sustainable economies....this is where efforts to value ecosystem services are trying to have an impact. check out the natural capital project. ying*: climate and economy never conflict, the reason that causes the conflict is the nature of human beings---greed. anders: yes greed and selfishness is one factor, but knowledge and influence by media/politicans can adjust how much a person cares about the climate and how much the person knows about what to do, whats happening ect. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a144 anders: comon i want more views here :-) nicky*: i just heard a show on the radio that talked about how language can be used to make people feel differently about the same topic. their example was that if you say "exploring for the environment" instead of "drilling for oil" you will get a much more positive response. because there is so much pressure on big industry to be environmentally friendly and to address the issue of climate change, we really need to watch businesses carefully to make sure that what they are doing in the name of the environment is really good for the environment (and not just good for the economy). karl: i wish it was as easy as you present it [ying], yet i have to disagree with you. in my opinion climate and economy does conflict with each other as of today. although they did not come into conflict before about 1750 with the newly invented steam engine and the birth of pollution. from the late 1700's to about 1850 the industrial revulotion took place, and it changed the way we supported our lifestyle completely. from then on pollution have been with us every step of the way, and there is no other option when it comes manufacturing and farming. pollution is there all along the way. this burden is weighing down on the economies shoulders whether they like it or not. yet the question should be risen, in the end is it actually the market for such things that made it happen, and henceforth societies responsibility for supplying said market.so in a way i might agree with you ying, but i would say that economy is responsible as for now. ;-) anders, a norwegian student, began this thread by presenting the current economic conditions and the necessary actions for addressing the issues of climate change as opposing forces and thus sparking an exchange that seems largely socio-political in nature. the participating norwegian teacher described anders as an inquisitive student who is actively engaged in classroom activities. donna and arthur (both facilitating researchers) expressed general affirmations and compliments to anders while the consulting scientist, monica, engages in an open exchange about the problems of positioning climate change talk within a economy/climate debate structure. the contrast in facilitative styles demonstrated within this exchange highlight the issue of accolades and praise as a form of asserting authority within a learning community. monica’s use of phrases like “i don’t understand . . .” position her as a member of the cell learning community rather than as an expert and a voice of authority. ying (a participating teacher) asserts her opinion that greed is the main reason for unresolved issues about climate change, and this comment is taken up by anders and another norwegian student, karl, who push back on this stance. both students first acknowledge the value in ying’s point and then present a more complex alternative to ying’s summation of the problem. anders presents the notion of multiple factors preventing alternative industrial practices while karl provides a brief historical narrative as evidence for the economy/climate conflict. the dialogic action emerging from the posts in this discussion thread seems to be based on comments that are not positioned as authoritative frames; posts from facilitators (researchers, teachers, and scientists) that express questions, disagreements, opinions and the like invited contributions that engaged in the economic, socio-cultural, and political complexities of global climate change. scientific evidence is not emphasized in this discussion. monica offers a source for further research on environmentally friendly industries that are cost-effective, but other references to authoritative knowledge (i.e., karl’s historical narrative and american researcher nicky’s reference to a radio show) are more speculative. theme 2, prospective claims. as mentioned earlier, the study abstracts created and used in the cell program were intended to be used by the participants in student-directed discussions about conceptual and social issues related to climate change. reported current events, like the nuclear explosion in japan that occurred during the implementation of this program, served as additional sources of knowledge for determining the ‘truth’ dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a145 about the earth’s climate and potential demise. the following thread is an example of how ru, a chinese student, integrates his understanding from the readings with the explosion in japan to hypothesize about future conditions. [title of student-generated post]: nuclear explosion’s influence to green house effect ru: personally, i think the nuclear explosion of japan may increase the temperature of the earth and it must be extremely harmful to people. what about your thoughts? nils: the nuclear explosion in japan has nothing to do with an increase in temperature, and will not have any influence on the green house effect. jill: no chernobyl is possible at a light water reactor. loss of coolant means a temperature rise, but it also will stop the reaction. even in the worst-case scenario, that would mean some radioactive leakage and equipment damage, but not an explosion. read more: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76237,newscomment,news-politics,japans-tsunami-and-nuclear-explosion-how-bad-is-it#ixzz1i4wmj8mu anton: if the atomic plant in japan has a meltdown, the possibility is close to slim that the temperature will rise. radioactivity has got nothing to do with the global warming. the only place the plant will cause the environment is basically outside the plant. this is because the explosion will release a giant wave of heat. the climate will not be affected by this explosion. this discussion took place a few days after a devastating earthquake in japan. ru, a chinese student and considered by his teacher to be the highest performing in his class, speculates the possible climate-related consequences of the nuclear explosion and elicits other opinions. the post reflected many forum comments and blog entries from other chinese students, who generally seemed more concerned about the japanese earthquake than the other participants. the chinese classroom teacher had mentioned that most of her conversations with the students during this time period centered on the japanese earthquake. nils, a norwegian student, dismisses ru’s prediction without any evidence or a rationale. jill, an american student, and anton, a norwegian student, also refute ru’s claim and include media-related and conceptual knowledge to support their positions. jill refers to the well-known disaster in chernobyl and offers a link for further reading. anton’s use of the phrase “close to slim” reflects skepticism about a global rise in temperature. unlike the previous thread, there seems to be no hedging or reluctance to disagree with ru. however, similar to the previous thread, the dialogic action emerging from this exchange opens the discussion to the complexities of disastrous events and to the possibility that resolutions are not as simple as they seem. theme 3, universal relevance of climate change. throughout the online discussions, students consistently used the pronouns, we, our and us. these deictic devices were used when speculating about current and future conditions and actions; student examples included: are we destroying our planet? and what should we do about it? deictic devices were also employed as declarations of assumed knowledge about human nature: we are naturally a compassionate species and our want to help sometimes has gotten us into trouble. the following thread highlights the recurring theme of the universal relevance of climate change. [title of student-generated post]: isn’t this just the way of nature? http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76237,news-comment,news-politics,japans-tsunami-and-nuclear-explosion-how-bad-is-it%23ixzz1i4wmj8mu http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76237,news-comment,news-politics,japans-tsunami-and-nuclear-explosion-how-bad-is-it%23ixzz1i4wmj8mu http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/76237,news-comment,news-politics,japans-tsunami-and-nuclear-explosion-how-bad-is-it%23ixzz1i4wmj8mu dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a146 sander: after taking a look at the scientist siegenthalers diagram—that shows that the co2-level has been going up and down in a 650,000 year period with pretty even spaces. do we have to worry about that the co2-level is rising? because he supports (proves) that in a 650k year period it is just natural to think that the co2-level will fall at some point, may not before 200 years from now. isn’t this just the way of nature? jason: i think co2 is definitely something to worry about whether the world does it naturally or not. grace: some of it could be caused by nature, but with the chemicals that humans use . . . i believe it will just keep rising instead of going down. millions of cars are made every year. and people keep getting another car, driving another car, and contributing to the atmosphere again. alice: true, but i think that we should still notice these problems. nate: it might be just the way of nature, but new modern technology has also caused an increase in co2 and it will continue unless we do something about it. rose: we do play a part in the amount of co2 because of the way we live in general but some of it’s probably natural. thora**:that is an important question, and as a mater of fact, not all scientists agree on this. several scientists wrote a report for the un about the effects of releasing these gases. research indicated that the effects were more sever than expected. for a short version of the report, see: http:/www.un.org/apps/news/story/asp?cr=climate&newsid=21429 molly**: i think this technology/human impact idea is an interesting one. in architecture, we are often debating if we should look towards newer, more efficient technologies to reduce how much energy buildings use, or if we should look back to natural processes and try to design in ways that can use nature to be more sustainable using wind to provide ventilation and re-using rainwater for tasks like flushing toilets. i'd be interested to hear what everyone thinks since it is a question without a clear answer is technology making the greenhouse effect worse and/or do you think that more technology can help humans to reduce it? the overall emphasis of this thread is concept-oriented; sander, a norwegian student, starts an exchange about one of the study abstracts that had been previously discussed in all of the participating classrooms. his question refers to the figure 2, which was in the study abstract assigned for the week of the scheduled discussion. the figure is a graph that shows the combined results from an analysis of two ice cores (i.e., cylindrical samples of ice that are more than 2,000 meters in length); the graph shows shifts in levels of co2 over a given time period, but no overall increase across this time period. http://http/www.un.org/apps/news/story/asp?cr=climate&newsid=21429 http://http/www.un.org/apps/news/story/asp?cr=climate&newsid=21429 http://http/www.un.org/apps/news/story/asp?cr=climate&newsid=21429 dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a147 figure 2. fluctuations in co2 levels in extracted ice core. sander refers to this table in his statement that levels of co2 may decrease. responses reflected a general acceptance of the plausibility of sander’s hypothesis, yet respondents are generally uncomfortable about the notion that we shouldn’t worry about what cannot be changed. jason and alice, both american students, declare the need to worry or notice the documented trends of the climate. we observed similar comments throughout the discussion threads (e.g., well, we should be thinking about these things; we need to careful that we don’t ignore these things), the bulk of which were posed by the american students. in the case for students who posted such comments, to pay attention to or to worry about the climate seems to be a form of taking action. molly’s commentary is the last post in this thread; although she encourages further discussion on the topic, no one picks up the topic. both thora and molly (consulting scientists) indicate some notions of praise similar to the research facilitators featured in the first exchange. these authoritative voices are the last entries; the presence of dialogic action among the prior student exchange highlights the complexities of the rising level of carbon gases and their membership/responsibility to address these complexities. american students grace and rose provide an explanation founded on assumed knowledge about human behavior: people are producing chemicals and driving cars, and this takes a toll on the atmosphere beyond the natural fluctuations, thus people must be contributing to the changes in the earth’s climate. nate’s reference to modern technology alludes to the additional, human-induced burden on the levels of co2. the use of we in the student posts refers to all readers. thus, there is an assumption that all members are affected by the consequences of increased levels of co2 in the atmosphere, regardless of where they live in the world. although both scientists attempt to engage students in this discussion, the thread discontinues. both begin with acknowledgement and praise for tackling tough issues like carbon emissions, which again could be interpreted as an assertion of an authoritative voice. thora, a norwegian astrophysicist, shares her knowledge about the ambivalence of the scientific community and offers counter-evidence in support of the hypothesis that even with the natural fluctuations, the current levels of various gasses are much greater than would be expected. similarly, molly, an american architect and scientist who studies sustainability efforts in developing countries, shares her experiences about the work she does with her dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a148 colleagues. both scientists, while attempting to open their professional experiences and knowledge to the cell student community, are demonstrating their expertise as authoritative figures. one consistent finding from our analysis is that instances of authoritative positioning are consistently absent in exchanges that feature dialogic action. the less posted comments or questions demonstrating authority (i.e., giving praise, or asserting professional status by describing one’s work), the greater the presence of student questioning and challenging claims. further, these instances of dialogic action revealed students’ ability to grapple with complexities of climate change issues; students were able to address specific problems or processes within scientific, economic, political or socio-cultural contexts. another finding that emerged from our analysis of dialogic action concerns the lack of scientific evidence in supporting or refuting claims raised in discussions. we address the pedagogical implications each of these findings in turn. discussion an unavoidable limitation of text-based analyses of any kind is that one can only learn from what was said or written; it is not possible to learn about the thoughts and opinions of many of the participants who may have contributed as silent partners. it is also important to state our trepidations about conducting a discourse analysis of international data. although we believe it is a worthwhile venture to study an online exchange between individuals from different parts of the world, we realize culture and contextualized genres are essential to communication and such intercultural communication may result in conflicts about what is expected from whom and to what particular ends (kramsch & thorne, 2002). however, during our initial phase of categorizing discussion threads, we found that the student-driven discussion forums aligned succinctly with the official working groups established by the ipcc (2010), which was not entirely unexpected since the official materials and activities for the cell program were inspired by the governing principles and published reports of ipcc. as such, we have some evidence, based on our successful taxonomy of discussion threads, that there was some communicative coherence in the online exchanges across the research sites. with general limitations noted, three major general findings surfaced from our investigation of pedagogical moves for facilitating high school students’ online interactions about climate change. first, our discourse analysis of interactions revealed that dialogic action was most prevalent in threads that invited multiple perspectives without authoritative assertions of praise or position. second, we found that comments by students in these open exchanges often reflected a position that is more complex or nuanced than a purely dichotomous, agree/disagree response. third, our concern about the lack of evidence used in assertions by students highlights a need to consider ways in which pedagogical moves can support evidence-based reasoning without inadvertently squelching the dialogic action needed for fostering deeper understanding. we unpack each of these findings according to our research questions. rq1: which assertions were taken up by students? the presence of authority in the form of evaluative comments (great response!) did not seem to inspire student engagement in dialogic action. hermans and dimaggio (2007) commented on the consequence of explicitly demonstrated differences in dominance between participants; when such differences are minimal (as in a conversation between two good friends), the dialogical process is reciprocal, that is, the parties involved are relatively free . . . [when] differences in dominance are strongly increased, questions dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a149 and answers are highly uneven, with one party posing the questions and the other party forced to answer within the frame determined by the questioner as a representative of the institution. (p. 38) thus, pedagogical practices that strive to minimize difference in dominance—including refraining from evaluative comments during discussions—may help in increasing the dialogic action within student discussions. direct opinion statements or short refutations without references to external sources or personal narratives rarely received explicit negative evaluations of other students’ viewpoints. for example, nils’s comment (the nuclear explosion in japan has nothing to do with an increase in temperature, and will not have any influence on the green house effect) within the prospective claims thread reflects an opinion that is in direct opposition to ru but without any direct comment about ru’s position (e.g., you’re wrong; you don’t have the correct information, etc.). jill provided a website link that supports her position, which is also in opposition to ru, but beyond a brief negative marker, no, the focus in jill’s commentary remains on her own position. thus, tensions in the form of negative address towards opposing opinions—tensions that are often observed in pundits’ reports, oratories and blog posts (bowman et al., 2010; oreskes & conway, 2010)—were a rare occurrence in the discussion threads. the absence of such negative commentary may be in part due to the cell discussion guideline that all members should be respectful and present their opinions without the use of negative or insulting commentary towards others. this expectation was introduced by the facilitators and teachers in the beginning of the program within the participating classrooms. thus, we believe that establishing general community norms may be helpful to teachers who strive to create a safe place for dialogic exchanges about socially relevant issues like climate change. rq2: how did the assertions support (or constrain) student contributions? lengthier posts by students, as evidenced in the threads previously presented and discussed, often included conjectures with some reference to scientific evidence (e.g., reference to the readings), popular media (website links or reported current events), experiences (personal narratives), or assumed accepted knowledge (conventional social behaviors) and received responses with a similar level of reflection and references to external sources. peer responses to student posts occasionally contained words or terms that would indicate some level of discomfort or hesitancy with a stance or opinion (e.g., yes, but; that may be true for you, but not for me), which more often is the case for disagreements during face-to-face interactions (sacks, 1987). such examples of hedging were observed in responses to comments that contained references to scientific information such as the classroom readings or a website presenting scientific data. hedging was also observed when students were disagreeing with comments by researchers or scientists. thus, an unanticipated form of tension within these discussion threads was the hedging used by contributors when addressing comments that referenced authoritative knowledge or that were written by authoritative figures (e.g., consulting scientists). the dialogic tension observed in the extended contributions not only reflected some form of disagreement with other contributors but also some amount of ambivalence with one’s own position or idea. for example, karl’s comment to ying in the courses of action thread reflected a bit of hedging (i wish it is as easy as you present it; in a way i might agree with you), possibly due to ying’s more authoritative position as a researcher, and also demonstrated a more nuanced understanding of the economic and environmental issues related to climate change. karl provided a historical context that was used to connect economic progress with pollution and to problematize ying’s simpler target of greed as reason that industrialized countries like the united states are not fully embracing mitigation strategies. dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a150 similarly, grace and nate considered multiple potential causes for climate change within the universal relevance discussion thread. both students demonstrated hedging by acknowledging that the extreme observed conditions of the climate may be a part of the natural cycle (e.g., it might be just the way of nature,) but they followed with examples and assumed knowledge that targets humans as significant contributors to these conditions (millions of cars are made every year; but new modern technology has also caused an increase in co2). such indications of uncertainty about future conditions and potential approaches for mitigating climate change effects seem to align with the work of hermans and dimaggio (2007), who traced the dialogic nature of self and identity for individuals living in increasing globalization and uncertainty. these scholars make visible the multiple voices within a person, and the need for the development of a “dialogic self” (hermans & hermans-konopka, 2010) to engage in the complexities of global and local contexts. instances of hedging may be one way that participants negotiate these multiple voices. we believe that one consideration for dealing with uncertainty is for teachers or facilitators with subject matter expertise to model this uncertainty in their own thinking; just as monica, the science consultant within the first featured exchange, indicated her lack of understanding and discomfort about the framing of climate change as a debate, science teachers could also share their confusions, or even conflicting ideas about various concepts and processes. one of the most problematic findings from our investigation is the lack of discussion about scientific evidence. according to the next generation science standards (achieve inc., 2013), which were drafted by the contributive efforts of 26 states within the u.s., students must have opportunities to engage in discussions about scientific evidence. the fact that students read and discussed study abstracts related to climate change concepts and processes was apparently insufficient for inspiring student-led, online discussion anchored to scientific evidence. related research on scientific argumentation suggests two approaches for effectively fostering evidence-based discussions; one approach involves explicit teaching of toulmin-like, argumentative structures used in explaining data or supporting conjectures with evidence (e.g., sadler & donnelly, 2006; simon, erduran & osborne, 2006; toulmin, 1969) while the other approach involves the use of open-ended questions that give students the opportunity to question and explain scientific evidence within a social context (lee & kinzie, 2012; smart & marshall, 2013). findings from this study suggest that perhaps an open design allowing more expressions of uncertainty may be helpful for providing students opportunities to consider the complexities of concepts and processes related to socio-scientific issues like climate change. we suggest that time, space and an open invitation to engage in such issues may serve an important first stage in the development of arguments, which does not fit within a clearly defined linear structure (sadler & donnelly, 2006; sadler & fowler, 2006). future iterations of cell should include explicit structures for teachers and other facilitators as co-learners and models for engaging in the uncertainty of issues that connect participants across local and global spaces (krueger, 2000). this point is supported by our finding no significant differences in growth in student participants’ understanding (using preand postinterview responses) about uncertainty when asked about the role of scientific evidence in asserting claims. extended invitations for students to evaluate the varying qualities of evidence, and what counts as “compelling” should be considered. the programmatic features of cell may have supported constructive discourse about climate change-related science and issues; however, further refinements in this initiative should include ways in which such online exchanges could lead to furthering community-based understanding about climate change. some educational scholars like wells (1999) suggest that an online discussion forum may not be the most appropriate source for investigating intellectual development through dialogic action; our findings seem to align with this position in that none of the discussion threads in this study included a declaration or demonstration of new understanding. scardamalia and bereiter (2006) found similar results dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states diana j. arya & jessica k. parker dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.53 | vol. 3 (2015) a151 with the use of discussion forums and concluded that the discussion-thread format may actually hinder a group’s ability to build a shared understanding about targeted conceptual knowledge. however, what are better sources? we argue that forums with open-ended prompts that minimize the differences in authoritative positions are precisely a medium needed to ensure student engagement and membership in scientific discussions, and with sufficient support in ways to engage in the uncertainties and complexities of climate change science, student contributors would demonstrate growth in collective understanding. findings from this study suggest that when students have the opportunity to engage in thoughtful, open discussions about matters of importance, like climate change, a variety of forces have a potential influence in what individuals bring to the discussion and that tensions between and within contributors reflect a complex level of understanding rather than a one-sided, polarized view of climate change. participants in the cell program demonstrated their ability to use the variety of funds of knowledge (moll et al., 1982) that are available to them while engaging in meaningful discussions about subjects that matter. unlike traditional classrooms, all members in an online exchange had the opportunity to share their thoughts and insights, which can result in more critically engaged discussions. these participants also demonstrated their willingness to venture into the grey areas of climate change rather than hold onto ideological positions. however, moments of authoritative assertions as demonstrated in the sampled discussion threads reveal the need for pedagogical practices that minimize the differences in authority in order to foster the dialogic action needed for civic engagement in climate change issues (buckler & creech, 2014). students are able to handle the realistic complexities of socio-political issues and teachers, educators, and members of professional communities should acknowledge and use these abilities for fostering exchanges that address the complexities of issues like climate change. further efforts to support online discussions about scientific evidence are also needed in order to align with the current demands of school science curricula (achieve, inc., 2013). the implications from this study highlight the need for dialogic pedagogical practices to include community-based approaches in which students share, debate, and reflect on their scientific knowledge and inquiries as active student-researchers in a complex world of science, politics, and socio-economic issues. such discursive practices broaden the focus of study to acknowledge the multiple contexts of science exploration and the relevant issues related to socially-relevant scientific topics like climate change. additionally, an online space complementing a face-to-face classroom environment can potentially foster international connections that reflect complex, nuanced positions rather than polarized viewpoints. pedagogical practices that support dialogic action position the teacher or facilitator as a colleague rather than an expert with authority; 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(2003). talking, thinking, responding and creating: a survey of literature on talk in art education. studies in art education, 44(2), 117-134. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ microsoft word the cartography of inner childhood (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:1 the cartography of inner childhood fragments from the book alexander m. lobok institute of system projects, moscow city pedagogical university, russia abstract presented here are fragments of my book the cartography of inner childhood in the translation from russian. the main hero of this book is our childhood experience. or, rather, the book is about our remembrances of our childhood experience. some people would exclaim, “these remembrances are extremely subjective, utterly personal and therefore untrue!” i wonder, however, if one’s ultimate subjective experience may very well be one’s innermost human core, exactly what is important about any person. for an ‘objective’ external onlooker, the childhood of different children is largely indistinguishable. all children play certain games, absorbedly listen to fairytales, react to various events, and so on. in fact, nearly all modern psychology research testifies to these ‘childhood uniformities’ and their typologies. the reason for this supposed uniformity is a flaw in the main approach of modern psychology. modern psychology often focuses on universal, generalizable, predictable, and regular principles, which is the standard of the science. anything else is viewed as non-scientific. how else it can be?! the problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. that is why the childhood of each one of us is not simply a childhood of some external events or a childhood of typical or universal, but rather a childhood of absolutely unique and un-borrowed inner life that makes every person’s internal experience absolutely precious. this very situation compels one to look most carefully into ‘the inner child’ each of us is capable of re-discovering in her-or himself. the structure of the book is the following: each chapter presents excerpts of the memoirs of one of the world-famous people, after which, there is a commentary analysis. presented here are only three of those memoirs: by orhan pamuk, george orwell and ingmar bergman. for almost thirty years, alexander lobok has been a theoretical-practitioner. he constantly theorizes his innovative pedagogical practice while trying to enact his theory of agencyand dialogue-based education in practice. his evolving theory and emerging pedagogical practice mutually inform and test each other. his overall methodology is based on kurt lewin’s “action research” and lev vygotsky’s “formative experiment.” alexander is a designer of exciting educational games and a host of children’s tv shows in russia. he is a leading researcher at the institute of system projects, moscow city pedagogical university, russia. issn: 2325-3290 (online) the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:2 foreword the main hero of this book is our childhood experience. or, rather, the book is about our remembrances of our childhood experience. some people would exclaim, “these remembrances are extremely subjective, utterly personal and therefore untrue!” i wonder, however, if one’s ultimate subjective experience may very well be one’s innermost human core, exactly what is important about any person. for an ‘objective’ external onlooker, the childhood of different children is largely indistinguishable. all children play certain games, absorbedly listen to fairytales, react to various events, and so on. in fact, nearly all modern psychology research testifies to these ‘childhood uniformities’ and their typologies. the reason for this supposed uniformity is a flaw in the main approach of modern psychology. modern psychology often focuses on universal, generalizable, predictable, and regular principles, which is the standard of the science. anything else is viewed as non-scientific. how else it can be?! the problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. if so, a question emerges: can a particular human being, his/her particular and unique subjective cognizing world be a subject of science – a subject of scientific observation and interpretation? can a particular child with his/her unique subjective world, subjective cosmos, not overlapping with subjective cognizing worlds of all other people in principle, be a subject of science? thus, for a researcher, it would appear strange to avoid addressing this individually subjective world since it is exactly the disparities of people’s inner subjective experiences that, in all likelihood, make up our essence as humans. it is not what a person has in common with other people what makes her or him become a unique personality. on the contrary, what makes one a genuine person is precisely what he or she by no means shares with the others. i strongly argue that the phenomenon of childhood is not defined by those things that make children of a certain age group category look mostly alike. childhood, rather, is made of diversity of children’s views, experiences, and fantasies that are unique for each person and different from anyone else's experiences. probably, this non-overlapping of human subjectivities is the deepest and the most important enigma of human beings. today, due to the fantastic progress of the science of psychology, we know quite a lot about the general laws of individual development. we know what is universally, culturally and historically common for the development of each and every person and how this universality manifests itself in the individual development trajectories. maybe time has come to tackle the very issue of how individuals' unique human universes differ from one another? this question calls for a dramatically different paradigm of doing research. we must focus upon phenomena of non-overlapping of subjectivities, rather than on phenomena of overlapping human subjectivities that make human subjectivities the same. we must explore what makes children (and people in general) differ, not what makes them alike. as matter of fact, this is what russian poet and philosopher daniel zhukovsky pointed out in his memoirs. the issue is how to make the subjectivity of a child’s inner world the subjectivity of the child’s the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:3 experience the subject of investigation focus. it is not what can be generalized and squeezed into some categories, but rather what cannot be generalized in principle that is extremely valuable exactly due to its principle non-generalizability, which is what constitutes the main enigma of human individuality. take two children playing one and the same game in a sandbox. for an onlooker, both of them are involved in one and the same activity of playing. but from each of these two children’s inner perspectives they are absorbed by very different processes as each of the two is filled with her or his individual imagining and lived exeriencing. each of the two sees her or his own reality where each is creating and/or destroying absolutely individual and unique imagined worlds as each is filled with uniquely individual here-and-now experiences. the problem is that often a child, especially very young child, often cannot tell her or his allimportant experiences to others. it is so at least because these experiences are infinitely rich while a young child’s language is likely far poorer than needed to even begin expressing the richness of her experience. it is only in the process of growing up and mastering diverse, complex, and intricate forms of language, that the child develops a capacity to express some of her feelings and works of imagination, even if to a very limited extent. by the time this linguistic mastery becomes possible, however, the memories of early childhood experiences become either blurred, erased, or supplanted by other, for the person more important and immediate experiences. this very fact represents the main and almost insurmountable obstacle for the researcher aspiring to gain an insight into the child’s developing consciousness. the world of a consciousness-inthe-making and consciousness-in-being is only accessible in its entire immediacy and completeness to the child’s self, but the situation is such that he or she has no instruments enabling the observation, reflection, or comprehension of what is going on with him or her. in the absence of necessary conceptual or analytical tools, the child is, so to say, "unanchored" in a way that amounts to drifting and floundering in the boundless sea of the flowing sensations and feelings, which, being nameless, are all the more engulfing and overwhelming. when a child has grown up enough to generate what is commonly known as “conceptual thinking” and to develop some capacities of observation, reflection, and comprehension, it may be futile to focus on the inner states he or she was experiencing during the period of her or his consciousness formation, since they are already gone and became irretrievably out of reach. this is why, for an adult, the world of her or his babyhood and childhood presents a terra incognita of sorts that, so far, is a nonexistent topic of investigation in modern psychology. a considerable effort would be necessary to recall even a tiny portion of what one had really experienced a very long time ago. who of us, grown-up people, is really willing to find the time and energy needed to undertake this retrospective inner journey? what one of us strives to rediscover and revive during such a ‘trip back’ our own feelings and experiences for which we had had neither language nor names? having been incredibly vivid and vastly numerous, they, at the same time, were, as a rule, not verbalized or marked in any other way by the child who was feeling and experiencing them. it calls for a special concerted effort on the part of the today’s grownups, to peer into the bygone inner world of her or his early childhood, to rediscover and describe at least some of its fragments, no matter how small. there are very few adults who have the courage to embark on this most difficult and the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:4 risky journey of a retrospective introspection. this endeavor encompasses not just the task of seeing one's own self in the past, from the adult vista, but rather looking carefully into one's own past self that remains inconceivably and unbelievably remote. in childhood – especially infancy and toddlerhood – time is structured in ways that are utterly different from the ways they are structured in the adulthood. just one week or even a single day in the life of a threeor a two-year, let alone a one-year-old, could be justly equaled to a decade in the life of an adult because of the density of the dramatic novel events, emotions, aha-moments, and puzzling experiences. what are days and hours for a grown-up, for a child are eras and epochs. each of these epochs is crowded with events that leave behind but a vague imprint in the memory of an adult person into whom the former child has grown. the earlier the age, the more each of its moments are filled with happenings and events. as for a just newborn baby, every second of its life is a real tsunami of absolutely undifferentiated and unconscious events. it is really a bombardment, by quite obscure, indiscernible and vague perceptions and feelings. it is a wholly engulfing fusion, or rather, a confusion of sounds, colors, odors and tactile inputs that must resemble the time-space and physiochemical fusion that may have resulted from the big bang in the great void, at the moment of birth of our physical universe. thus, it is highly improbable that anyone will ever come, anywhere near, a reliable and accurate description how a newborn human being is experiencing her or his first life moments. while looking at an ‘object’, a newborn baby or a toddler sees things in a very different way than an adult. an adult ‘catches’ any object into the trap of names-notions that, by the means of culture, are always at her or his disposal and service. but a newborn baby has no such trap. for the newborn baby, each and every one of the thousands upon thousands of objects entering his or her perception range is unknown and unnamed. the baby has no instrument inventory nor conceptual-verbal ‘toolkit’ to categorize the object-world. the baby sees everything for the first time and has to give “names” to each thing within his or her perception range – using his or her inner language of emotions. sunlight falls upon a baby’s face, makes the baby feel warmth and the dazzling brightness, but, for the recipient baby, it is something absolutely unknown and strange so far having no name, and existing as an immediate undifferentiated ‘sensation-emotion-feeling’. the baby has yet no inner instrument inventory that would enable it to define something as ‘light’ or a ‘sunlight’, or as something that ‘falls’ and ‘dazzles’, all these notions being words from the adult stock of concepts. a bit later, having grown-up a little bit, while moving from a darker to a lighter area, a child will base her sensations on the already formed name-concept categories and would perhaps be able to say, “it’s light here” or, “here’s light.” as for the earliest life stages, the baby only has nameless sensations-feelings at her/his disposal; while the comprehending (and, thus, naming) of the world is something bound to happen sometime later. and there is no one to help the baby accelerate the process; the baby him/herself must separate darkness from light and differentiate the initially syncretic and ‘con-fusing’ perception, to create a personal and unique palette of images that would reflect the world’s inexhaustible variety. for the time being there is just the ‘spirit upon the face of the void’1 insofar as there is just the sensation-feeling of an opening abyss. the abyss is ‘formless and void’ since everything in this deep opening for the baby’s feelings and experimenting is con-fused and tangled in one unsegmented enormous lump that challenges the baby to mold it into a shape, to place it within certain sense and meaning frames, and to make it differentiated and articulately significant. the newborn not only faces the 1 a poetic reference to bible’s book of genesis verse 1.2 "and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. and the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters". the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:5 challenge to separate light from darkness but the task to differentiate the multitude of objects, one from another, to notice and grasp the outlines and boundaries of their meanings. as seconds, minutes and hours of a newborn’s life pass by, each and every one of her/his moments becomes filled with a most intense process of the feeling differentiation. everything that happens during this period is doomed, however, to be left completely and forever unnoticed by an onlooker psychologist, who has the only option to guess and wonder at the numerousness and the diversity of the epochs experienced and lived through by the infant. however, one must admit that the content of these epochs is always sealed against any non-speculative psychological reflection. it is only much later, when the child has developed an awareness – the awareness of the individual self as opposed to the world around (usually about the age of three) – that we can more or less legitimately say that the infant begins to retain her or his inner life’s events and perhaps hold them in her or his memory, and a capacity begins to form to store some, if vague, recollections of what was going on during that period of time. thus, a child turned adult must apply a considerable effort to evoke her or his inner states from that remote and time-dimmed era, all the more so if he or she needs to give a more or less adequate description of them. it is especially so because the concepts, which a grownup employs to define those states, are those of his or her adult life while the inner experience of an infant entirely lacks any such concepts. to capture, retain, store, and descriptively retrieve one’s early childhood experiences is really to perform a miracle since those experiences per se, or even the images of these experiences, are what the infantile memory is unable to retain and store. memory needs certain marks and signifiers, certain ‘notches,’ ‘nodes,’ and ‘serifs’ – usually in the form of words. in the absence of such notches, nodes, and serifs (and they are, as a rule, totally absent in early childhood experience) the experiences and the representations of these experiences tend to escape, quite like those of a dream, even of the most vivid one, unless remembered and verbalized promptly upon awakening. if, on the other hand, the needed verbal molds are there, the night dream images will surface easily and freely, bounded by the words’ powerful magnetic field. alas, a three-year-old’s consciousness still lacks the signifying frames and shapes that allow him or her to retain and store the flow of the experienced sensations and feelings. this is why any adult person embarking upon the effortful journey of remembering and re-collecting her or his early childhood inner experiences is, in a way, undertaking to perform a heroic deed – for which professional psychologists ought to be profoundly thankful to anyone daring enough to plunge into this kind retrospective introspection. the main phenomenon that will be investigated here, is how the children are innerly different. the main characters of this book are memoirs – the memoirs about their own childhood written by worldfamous people, such as the russian poet and philosopher andrei bely2, russian philosopher and theologian pavel florensky3, missionary and theologian albert sweitzer, painters petrov-vodkin and salvador dali, stage director konstantin stanislavsky, writers hermann hesse and stanislaw lem, bernard shaw, george orwell and orhan pamuk, philologist mikhail gasparov, mathematician sophia kovalevskaya, scientists charles darwin and albert einstein, politician winston churchill, historian arnold toynbee, dancer and choreographer maurice bejart, composer alfred schnitke, film directors federico fellini and ingmar bergman... 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/andrei_bely 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pavel_florensky the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:6 what unites them all is that they have recorded some extremely important and particular memories about their “inner child’s” most intense and dramatic life. of paramount importance here is that any of the mentioned people’s memories – if we do care to read them carefully – is, it appears, about something very important in each of us. it is so because these memories are not just about the inner child of ‘the great ones’ but about that ‘inner childhood’ in which each, great person is extremely close to any quite ordinary one – since the domain of early childhood experiences is the one familiar to everybody. each and every one of us has her or his emotion marks, notches, nodes, and serifs dating back to our own past childhood. this past inevitably awakens – in its entirely indigenous and unique individuality – in response to an honest recounting of childhood events by another person. that is why the childhood of each one of us is not simply a childhood of some external events or a childhood of typical or universal, but rather a childhood of absolutely unique and un-borrowed inner life that makes every person’s internal experience absolutely precious. this very situation compels one to look most carefully into ‘the inner child’ each of us is capable of re-discovering in her-or himself. the structure of the book is the following: each chapter presents excerpts of the memoirs of one of the world-famous people, after which, there is a commentary analysis. we present here only three memoirs by orhan pamuk, george orwell and ingmar bergman. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:7 orhan pamuk, excerpts from istanbul: memories and the city4 from a very young age, i suspected there was more to my world than i could see: somewhere in the streets of istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double. i can't remember where i got this idea or how it came to me. it must have emerged from a web of rumors, misunderstandings, illusions, and fears. but in one of my earliest memories, it is already clear how i've come to feel about my ghostly other. when i was five i was sent to live for a short time in another house. after one of their many stormy separations, my parents arranged to meet in paris, and it was decided that my older brother and i should remain in istanbul, though in separate places. my brother would stay in the heart of the family with our grandmother in the pamuk apartments, in nişantaşi, but i would be sent to stay with my aunt in cihangir. hanging on the wall in this house where i was treated with the utmost kindness-was a picture of a small child, and every once in a while my aunt or uncle would point up at him and say with a smile, "look! that's you!" the sweet doe-eyed boy inside the small white frame did look a bit like me, it's true. he was even wearing the cap i sometimes wore. i knew i was not that boy in the picture (a kitsch representation of a "cute child" that someone had brought back from europe). and yet i kept asking myself, is this the orhan who lives in that other house? of course, now i too was living in another house. it was as if i'd had to move here before i could meet my twin, but as i wanted only to return to my real home, i took no pleasure in making his acquaintance. my aunt and uncle's jovial little game of saying i was the boy in the picture became an unintended taunt, and each time i'd feel my mind unraveling: my ideas about myself and the boy who looked like me, my picture and the picture i resembled, my home and the other house-all would slide about in a confusion that made me long all the more to be at home again, surrounded by my family. soon my wish came true. but the ghost of the other orhan in another house somewhere in istanbul never left me. throughout my childhood and well into adolescence, he haunted my thoughts. on winter evenings, walking through the streets of the city, i would gaze into other people's houses through the pale orange light of home and dream of happy, peaceful families living comfortable lives. then i would shudder to trunk that the other orhan might be living in one of these houses. as i grew older, the ghost became a fantasy and the fantasy a recurrent nightmare. in some dreams i would greet this orhan-always in another house-with shrieks of horror; in others the two of us would stare each other down in eerie merciless silence. afterward, wafting in and out of sleep, i would ciing ever more fiercely to my pillow, my house, my street, my place in the world. whenever i was unhappy, i imagined going to the other house, the other life, the place where the other orhan lived, and in spite of everything i'd half convince myself that i was he and took pleasure in imagining how happy he was, such pleasure that, for a time, i felt no need to go to seek out the other house in that other imagined part of the city (pp. 3-5). … i was old enough to climb off my mother's lap and can recall that on each floor there was at least one piano. when my last bachelor uncle put his newspaper down long enough to get married, and his new wife moved into the first-floor apartment, from which she was to spend the next half century gazing out the window, she brought her piano with her. no one ever played, on this one or any of the others; this may be why they made me feel so sad. but it wasn't just the unplayed pianos; in each apartment, there was also a locked glass cabinet displaying chinese porcelains, teacups, silver sets, sugar bowls, snuffboxes, crystal glasses, rosewater ewers, plates, and censers that no one ever touched, although among them i sometimes found 4 pamuk, o. (2004). istanbul: memories and the city (m. freely, trans. 1st american ed.). new york: a.a. knopf. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:8 hiding places for miniature cars. there were the unused desks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the turban shelves on which there were no turbans, and the japanese and art nouveau screens behind which nothing was hidden. there, in the library, gathering dust behind the glass, were my doctor uncle's medical books; in the twenty years since he'd emigrated to america, no human hand had touched them. to my childish mind, these rooms were furnished not for the living but for the dead. (pp. 9-10) … because the traffic between floors was incessant, as it had been in the ottoman mansion, doors in our modern apartment building were usually left open. once my brother had started school, my mother would let me go upstairs alone, or else we would walk up together to visit my paternal grandmother in her bed. the tulle curtains in her sitting room were always closed, but it made little difference; the building next door was so close as to make the room very dark anyway, especially in the morning, so i'd sit on the large heavy carpets and invent a game to play on my own. arranging the miniature cars that someone had brought me from europe into an obsessively neat line, i would admit them one by one into my garage. then, pretending the carpets were seas and the chairs and tables islands, i would catapult myself from one to the other without ever touching water (much as calvino's baron spent his life jumping from tree to tree without ever touching ground). when i was tired of this airborne adventure or of riding the arms of the sofas like horses (a game that may have been inspired by memories of the horse-drawn carriages of heybeliada), i had another game that i would continue to play as an adult whenever i got bored: i'd imagine that the place in which i was sitting (this bedroom, this sitting room, this classroom, this barracks, this hospital room, this government office) was really somewhere else; when i had exhausted the energy to daydream, i would take refuge in the photographs that sat on every table, desk, and wall. never having seen them put to any other use, i assumed pianos were stands for exhibiting photographs. there was not a single surface 1n my grandmother's sitting room that wasn't covered with frames of all sizes. the most imposing were two enormous portraits that hung over the neverused fireplace: one was a retouched photograph of my grandmother, the other of my grandfather, who died in 1934. from the way the pictures were positioned on the wall and the way my grandparents had been posed (turned slightly toward each other in the manner still favored by european kings and queens on stamps), anyone walking into this museum room to meet their haughty gaze would know at once that the story began with them. (pp. 11-12) … leaving the library to return to the main room of the museum, stopping briefly by the crystal lamps that only add to the gloom, we find a crowd of untouched black-and-white photographs that tell us life is gaining momentum. here we see all the children posing at their betrothals, their weddings, and the other great moments of their lives. next to the first color photographs that my uncle sent from america are snapshots of the extended family enjoying holiday meals in various city parks, in taksim square, and on the shores of the bosphorus; next to a picture of me and my brother with our parents at a wedding is one of my grandfather, posing with his new car in the garden of the old house, and another of my uncle, posing with his new car outside the entrance to the pamuk apartments. except for extraordinary events like the day my grandmother removed the picture of my american uncle's first wife and replaced ii with a picture of his second, the old protocols prevailed: once assigned its place in the museum, a photograph was never moved; although i had looked at each one hundreds of times, i could never go into that cluttered room without examining all of them again. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:9 my prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for posterity, and in time i also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. to watch my uncle pose my brother a math problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him at five years old – my age – with hair as long as a girl's, it seemed plain to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so we could weave them into the present. when, in the tones ordinarily reserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather, who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she – like me – was pulled in two directions, wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savoring the ordinary but still honoring the ideal. but even as i pondered these dilemmas – if you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay, and the passage of time or are you submitting to it? – i grew very bored with them. (pp. 13-14). … …i pretended to be someone else and somewhere else. it was a very easy to escape into this other world i concealed from everyone. in my grandmother's sitting room, i'd pretend to be inside a submarine. i'd just had my first trip to the movies to see an adaptation of jules verne's twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and as i sat watching it in the dusty palace cinema, what terrified me most were the film 's silences. in its frantic, claustrophobic camerawork, its shadowy black-andwhite submarine interiors, i could not help but recognize something of our house. (p. 20) … …the worlds that i created by my imagination were completely subject of my control – i could choose which world i could go, i could change this world according my wish like in night dream when you know that you are asleep. with the power of my imagination in one moment i erased almost all its baroque beatifications, carvings, and pearl inlay bits from the wide table with a big chandelier hanging over it and the table was transformed into a huge mountain, about which i “read” in comics – there was its special world that existed on that mountain. all the rest of things of furniture in the room also became mountains and i, transformed into an airplane, was flying between them picking up speed.5 …“don't swing your legs like that, you're making me dizzy,” my grandmother used to say, when i was obviously immersed in one of my carefully staged daydreams. i would stop swinging my legs, but in my daydream an airplane was still banking in and out of the smoke rising from the gelincik cigarette she was raising to her lips, and soon i would enter the forest inhabited by the many rabbits, leaves, snakes, and lions i had previously identified among the geometric shapes on the carpets. involving myself in an adventure from one of my comics, i'd mount a horse, start a fire, kill a few people. with one ear always alert for external sounds, i would hear the door of the elevator slam shut and, before returning my thoughts to half-naked redskins, note that ismail the caretaker had gone up to our floor. i enjoyed setting houses on fire, spraying burning houses with bullets, escaping from burning houses through tunnels i had dug with my own hands, and slowly killing flies i had caught between the windowpane and the tulle curtains, which stank of cigarettes; when they fell to 5 this fragment does not exist in the english edition of pamuk’s book but only in the russian one. translation from russian is by eugene matusov. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:10 the perforated board over the radiator, the flies were gangsters who were finally paying the price for their crimes (pp. 20-21). … …sometimes, too, i would sense, from the way my mother spent her mornings talking endlessly on the phone to my aunts, her friends, and her own mother, that something was wrong. my mother would be wearing her long cream-colored robe with the red carnations; as she sat with one leg crossed over the other, the robe would fall to the floor in a cascade of folds that caused me confusion; i could see her nightgown as well as her beautiful skin, and i could see her beautiful neck, and i'd want to climb onto her lap and nestle up to her, get closer to that beautiful triangle between her hair, her neck, and her breasts. ... while i waited for my mother to notice me, i would sit at her dressing table and fiddle with her perfume bottles, lipsticks, fingernail polish, colognes, rose water, and almond oils; i would rummage through the drawers and play with the assortment of tweezers, scissors, nail files, eyebrow pencils, brushes, combs, and various other sharp-pointed instruments; i'd look at the baby photographs of me and my brother that she had slid under the pane of glass atop the table. one showed me sitting in a high chair as she, dressed in the same robe, gave me a spoonful of baby food; we were both smiling the sort of smile you only saw in advertisements, and when i looked at this picture i would think what a shame it was no one could hear how happy my scream was. when boredom loomed, i would cheer myself up with a game very similar to one i would later play in my novels. i would push the bottles and brushes toward the center of the dressing table, along with the locked silver box with the floral decorations that i had never once seen my mother open, and, bringing my own head forward so that i could see it in the central panel of the mirror triptych, i would push the two wings of the mirror inward or outward until the two side mirrors were reflecting each other and i could see thousands of orhans shimmering in the deep, cold, glass-colored infinity. when i looked into the nearest reflections, the strangeness of the back of my head would shock me, as did my ears at first-they came to a rounded point at the back and one of them stuck out more than the other, just like my father's. even more interesting was the back of my neck, which made me feel as if my body were a stranger i carried with me-the thought is still chilling. caught between the three mirrors, the tens and hundreds of reflected orhans changed every time i altered the panels' positions even slightly; although each new succession was different from all the others, i was proud to see how slavishly each link in the chain aped my every gesture. i would tryout all sorts of gestures until i was sure they copied me perfectly. sometimes i would look into the mirror's green eternity for the orhan who was farthest away. sometimes it seemed that a few of my faithful imitators did not move their hands or their heads at exactly the same moment as i did but rather a moment later. the most frightening time was when i was making faces-puffing up my cheeks, raising my eyebrows, sticking out my tongue, and singling out eight of the hundreds of orhans in a corner-and then (not noticing i had moved my own hand) seeing what i thought to be another group of tiny and very distant renegades gesturing among themselves. losing myself inside my reflections came to be the disappearing game, and perhaps i played it to prepare myself for the thing i dreaded most. although i did not know what my mother was saying on the phone, or where my father was, or when he would return, i knew for sure that one day my mother would disappear too (pp. 77-78). … my father and my uncle's string of business failures, my parents' arguments, the smoldering disputes between the various branches of the extended family over which my grandmother presided – these were some of the things that had prepared me for the knowledge that, despite everything the world had to offer (painting, sex, friendship, sleep, love, food, playing games, watching things), the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:11 and although the opportunities for happiness were limitless and hardly a day passed without my discovering a new pleasure, life was also full of sudden, unexpected, fast-flaming disasters of every size and shade of importance. the randomness of these disasters reminded me of the radio maritime announcements, warning all shipping (and the rest of us too) about "free-floating mines" at the mouth of the bosphorus and giving their precise location. at any moment, my parents could begin to argue about something utterly predictable, or else a property dispute could flare up with the relatives upstairs, or my brother would lose his temper and decide to teach me a lesson i'd never forget. then again, my father might come home and mention in passing that he'd sold our house, or they'd slapped a restraining order on him, or we had to move, or he was going off on a trip (p. 199). … i had a number of strategies to keep these small disasters from unsettling me. i'd established strict regimes of superstition for myself (like not stepping on sidewalk cracks and never closing certain doors all the way); or i'd have myself a quick adventure (meet up with the other orhan, escape to my second world, paint, fall into a disaster of my own by picking a fight with my brother); or i'd count the ships passing through the bosphorus. in fact i'd been counting the ships going up and down the bosphorus for some time. i'd been counting the romanian tankers, the soviet warships, the fishing boats coming in from trabzon, the bulgarian passenger ships, the turkish maritime passenger liners heading into the black sea, the soviet meteorological vessels, the elegant italian ocean liners, the coal boats, the frigates, the rusting neglected varna-registered cargo ships, and the decaying vessels that kept their flags and countries of origin under cover of darkness. this is not to say i counted everything; like my father, i didn't bother with the motor launches that crisscrossed the bosphorus, taking businessmen to work and transporting women with fifty bags of shopping, nor did i count the city ferries that darted shore to shore from one end of istanbul to the other, carrying gloomy passengers who spent the journey lost in thought, smoking and drinking tea; like the household furniture, these were already fixtures in my everyday life. as a child i counted these ships heedless of the disquiet, agitation, and mounting panic they induced in me. by counting i felt as if i was giving order to my life; at times of extreme rage or sadness, when i fled myself, my school, and my life to wander in the city streets, i stopped counting altogether. it was then i longed most keenly for disasters, fires, the other life, the other orhan. perhaps if i explain how i got into the habit of ship-counting, it might make more sense. at the timewe are talking about the early sixties-my mother, father, brother, and i were living in a small bosphorus-facing apartment in my grandfather's building in cihangir. i was in the last year of primary school, so i was eleven years old (pp. 200-201). … as anyone who has had to memorize a prayer or a poem will know, if you're trying to engrave words into your memory, it's better not to pay much attention to what you see before your eyes. once the words imprint themselves, your mind is free to go in search of images that can serve as aide-memoires. your eyes can be entirely disengaged from your thoughts and watch the world for their own amusement. on cold winter mornings, while i shivered under the covers and memorized my poem, i'd gaze through the window at the bosphorus, shimmering in the darkness like a dream. i could see the bosphorus through the gaps between the four and five-story apartment buildings below us, above the roofs and chimneys of the rickety wooden houses that would burn down over the next ten years, and between the minarets of cihangir mosque; no ferries ran at this hour, and the sea was so dark that no searchlight or lamp could pierce it. over on the asian side, i could see the old cranes of haydarpaşa and the lights of a silently passing cargo ship; with the help of faint moonlight or the lamp of a lonely motorboat, i could sometimes see huge, rusty, mussel-encrusted the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:12 barges, a solitary fisherman in a rowboat, the ghostly white contours of kizkulesi. but mostly the sea would be engulfed in darkness. even when-long before sunrise-the apartment buildings and cypressfilled cemeteries on the asian side began to grow light, the bosphorus would remain pitch-black – it looked to me as if it would stay that way forever. as i continued memorizing my poem in the dark, as my mind occupied itself with recitation and strange memory games, my eyes would fix on something moving very slowly through the currents of the bosphorus – a strange-looking ship, a fishing boat setting out early. although i paid this object no mind, my eyes did not refrain from their usual habits; they'd spend a moment studying this thing passing before them and only when they'd established what it was would they acknowledge it. yes, that's a cargo ship, i'd say to myself; yes, this is a fishing boat that has not lit its only light; yes, this is a motor launch taking the day's first passengers from asia to europe; yes, that is an old frigate from a remote soviet port... on one such morning, when i was shivering and memorizing poetry under the blanket as usual, my eyes lit on an amazing sight, the likes of which i'd never seen. i remember well how i just sat there, frozen, my forgotten book in hand. a great hulk, growing larger and larger as it rose from the pitch-dark sea and approached the closest hill-the hill from which i was watching – this was a colossus, a leviathan, in shape and size a specter from my worst nightmares, a soviet warship! – rising out of the night and the mist as if in a fairy tale, a vast floating fortress. its engine was running low, the warship passing silently, sluggishly, but so powerfully that it shook the windowpanes, the woodwork, and our furniture; the tongs that someone had hung wrongly next to the stove, the pots and saucepans lined up in the dark kitchen, the windows in the bedrooms where my mother, my father, and my brother were sleeping were all trembling too, and so was the cobblestoned alley that went down to the sea; even the garbage cans in front of the houses were making such a clatter you might have thought this peaceful neighborhood was suffering a minor earthquake. it meant that what istanbullus had been discussing in whispers since the cold war began was actually true: the biggest russian warships passed through the bosphorus after midnight, under cover of darkness. for a moment i panicked, thinking i should do something. the rest of the city was asleep and i was the only one to have seen this soviet vessel heading who knew where to commit who knew what terrible act. i had to spring into action, to warn istanbul, to warn the whole world. this was the sort of thing i'd seen so many brave child heroes do in magazines-stir cities from their sleep to save them from floods, fires, and invading armies. but i could not find the will to leave my warm bed. as anxiety overtook me, i hit on a frantic stopgap measure that would become a habit: i applied my full mind, sharpened as it was by memorization, to the soviet ship, committed it to memory, and counted it. what do i mean to say? i did the same as those legendary american spies rumored to live on hilltops overlooking the bosphorus, who photographed every passing communist ship (and this is probably another istanbul myth that had some basis in reality, at least during the cold war): i mentally cataloged all the salient features of the vessel in question. in my imagination, i collated my new data with existing data about other ships, the bosphorus currents, and perhaps even the rate at which the world was turning; i counted it and in so doing turned the giant hulk into something ordinary. and not just the soviet ship: by counting all ships "of note" i could reassert my picture of the world and my own place within it. (pp. 202-204). the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:13 pamuk’s inner child the very first experience the child becomes aware of him or herself is in the perception of ‘i’m different’. it happens when there are still no words, when thoughts appear as images that do not yet have verbal clothing for the child. ‘i’m different’ means something exists inside of me that distinguishes me from any other human being in the world. i am or, rather, my self is what never coincides or merges with any kind of ‘we’. i do not have to compare myself with anyone else to feel this type of my own self, this unique ‘i’. it is something absolute, bestowed upon me as something self-evident – as my own feelings, my own experiences, and my own images that are evidently my own and nobody else’s. when i realize myself as being different and distinguished, however, to really become aware of my self i must draw a demarcation line between myself and others. this represents the moment when self-awareness emerges – the awareness of oneself and one’s own boundaries. still, it is in the course of one’s entire life that one keeps attempting to come close to the mystery of one’s self. what is there in me that unconditionally and certainly distinguishes me from any other person, given that in many other aspects i am quite like all the others – or similar to many others. i can easily classify myself as belonging to this or that we-group: i am a child, i am my parent’s offspring, i am a student… but then, where am i? are there no other people who can rightfully classify themselves the same way as i do? ok, i can talk about the games i like to play or about the books i like to read, but are there no other people having quite the same likings and interests? are there no other children who like reading the same books or playing the same games, who are being taught to and learn the same things as i do? nonetheless, my self-awareness tells me assertively and unconditionally that my self – as the one distinct from everyone else’s in the world – surely exists. i am unique. i feel my self. i am aware of my-self – still, i am the only person in the whole world aware of what goes on within me! all the others know me just from the outside and are only aware of some of my outward manifestations, they can only guess what is going on inside of me, which means they – nor anyone else for that matter – do not know my true self. psychologically, in my view, this represents the extreme moment where emerges the problem of ‘the other orhan’, “in some dreams i would greet this orhan – always in another house – with shrieks of horror; in others the two of us would stare each other down in eerie merciless silence” (pamuk, 2004, p. 5). the fear of the doubleness is a very common childhood fear. quite like the fears of being mistaken for some other baby in the maternity hospital or of being born to other parents. this is the fear that you’re double and you cannot somehow prove that s/he is s/he and you are you. in the final analysis, it is the fear that the grown-ups are not able to recognize your uniqueness and your indispensability while you, yourself, are keenly aware of something in you that actually makes you ‘the you’ who cannot possibly be confused with or taken for any other orhan. but the adults see just the external you – the you of your acts or words. they do not surmise the worlds and entire universes in your depths, they have no idea of your infinitely diverse experiences, feelings and realms constantly being created by your imagination. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:14 externally you are like everybody else and, frankly speaking, you can easily be confused or replaced with some other child. it is because in general what you do millions of other children all over the world do as well – what a child of your age is assumed or supposed to do. it is only within you, in your innermost depths, that something is happening – something that no one could read about in any of the textbooks on childhood psychology. what is happening is an intense, highly dramatic and incredibly rich inner life that is absolutely different from that of anyone else. you are filled with emotions, feelings, and experiences that are felt and experienced by nobody else, and your mind swarms with images and thoughts that could be found in no one else’s mind. and none, except you, is aware of that inner world of yours, of those feelings, experiences and images. no one but you knows what makes you an absolutely individual orhan, the orhan who cannot possibly coincide or merge with anyone else in the whole world. what makes you unique is your inner world –the world of your feelings, experiences and of your imagination. within you there are galaxies and universes which are belonging and known exclusively only to you alone. these are the worlds that are being permanently created by your own vision, your own imagination, by your own meaning making. you are not just looking at the surrounding world, you are constantly cultivating it with your imagination’s work, populating it with the images of your own creation, placing it within certain meaning making frames, attaching your own individual subjective meanings to it. there is not a single other person in the entire world who could think, feel, or imagine the way you do. imagination is the crux of the matter. you are what you are totally due to your capacity and proportional to your ability to imagine; in proportion to what extent you are able to add aroma and colors of your individual, unique, and subjective imagination to those of the ‘objective’ world. any object getting within your range of vision becomes imbued with an imagined life of some sort and made to exist according to the laws and logic of your imagination. a human being’s dialogue with the world never begins with a person’s cognitive activity aimed at ‘reflecting’ the world ‘as it really is’. this dialogue starts with a person imagining the world, filling it with her or his own images, thereby populating it with him or herself, making it her or his own. this is what fundamentally distinguishes humans from animals. a baby animal masters the environment in strict accordance with the genetically installed biological needs of its species. that is why the interests of representatives of a given species are practically identical. there are, of course, some minute individual differences or deviations but all of them are entirely within the specie’s normative limit, which enables us to predict with a nearly 100% certainty what may be the sphere and range of interests for any representative of this or that animal species. the human’s plight is completely different. the human is distinguished through and marked by developing and possessing groups of interests that are in no way fully determined by the human specie’s biological needs and necessities. a child can get interested in everything –literally in every thing – and the intensity and depth of this interest are determined exclusively by what he or she imagines about this object, by what individually imagined interests he or she fills out the object; by what frame of her or his individual imagination the child is able to furnish the object, and by what imaginative meanings he or she creates for it. when a child enters a room filled with sundry objects it is impossible to predict which one or ones of them will attract her or his attention; one child will be ‘drawn’ by one group of things, another one – by the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:15 quite a different one. and it is absolutely impossible to infer this difference in children’s interests from any bio-genetic predetermination. these interests are of an entirely different basis and different nature. for example, let’s consider a child’s aesthetic interest. what is an aesthetic perspective? it cannot be explained away by a biological necessity. ‘it’s so beautiful’, exclaims a child, but what seems beautiful to one person is not at all so to another one. one perceives something as being beautiful when an aesthetic image of an object emerges in one’s soul, but an image of the object, however, might not necessarily be an aesthetic one. a child says, ‘it’s interesting’, but what does this ‘interesting’ mean? it means that a child populates an interest-evoking object with her or his individual features thereby making the object subjectively and personally important. therefore, even when two children find interesting one and the same toy they have two quite different interests: the imagination of each of them populates the toy with altogether different features and creates for it his or her own space of life, his or her own mythical topology. each child creates his or her own imaginary-fairytale space of this toy. the same is true for any other object in the child’s surroundings. the child’s look hooks onto or gets hooked by an object when he or she creates an imagined meaning making frame, creates an inner image of the object by filling it with some subjectively important features, and building it in her or his own worldview and the relationship to the world. this why a child is capable of looking at things infinitely long and of really looking into things – to see things visible and known only to her or him alone. a child looks at a mere object and sees imagination-born universes. for that matter, for a child everything has a personality of its own, its peculiar individual face. everything has a long trail behind it made up of the fantasies that a child has been wrapping it in during her or his interactions with it. that is why the child’s world is marked by fantasies. the world of images created by a child’s fantasy is her or his personal gps to the external ‘grown-up’ world. this is why the child’s epistemological activity is truly insatiable. the child actually imagines rather than learns or cognizes with learning and knowledge being, so to say, imagining’s byproducts. …the worlds that i created by my imagination were completely subject of my control – i could choose which world i could go, i could change this world according my wish like in night dream when you know that you are asleep. with the power of my imagination in one moment i erased almost all its baroque beatifications, carvings, and pearl inlay bits from the wide table with a big chandelier hanging over it and the table was transformed into a huge mountain, about which i “read” in comics – there was its special world that existed on that mountain. all the rest of things of furniture in the room also became mountains and i, transformed into an airplane, was flying between them picking up speed.6 "don't swing your legs like that, you're making me dizzy," my grandmother used to say, when i was obviously immersed in one of my carefully staged daydreams. i would stop swinging my legs, but in my daydream an airplane was still banking in and out of the smoke rising from the gelincik cigarette she was raising to her lips, and soon i would enter the forest 6 this fragment does not exist in the english edition of pamuk’s book but only in the russian one. translation from russian is by eugene matusov. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:16 inhabited by the many rabbits, leaves, snakes, and lions i had previously identified among the geometric shapes on the carpets. involving myself in an adventure from one of my comics, i'd mount a horse, start a fire, kill a few people. with one ear always alert for external sounds, i would hear the door of the elevator slam shut and, before returning my thoughts to half-naked redskins, note that ismail the caretaker had gone up to our floor. i enjoyed setting houses on fire, spraying burning houses with bullets, escaping from burning houses through tunnels i had dug with my own hands, and slowly killing flies i had caught between the windowpane and the tulle curtains, which stank of cigarettes; when they fell to the perforated board over the radiator, the flies were gangsters who were finally paying the price for their crimes (pamuk, 2004). we often say in russian, ‘man’s presence spiritualizes the place.’ what it means is the human imbues the surrounding space with specific souland spirit-born dimensions, fills it with profoundly individual subjective meanings that are not there ‘objectively’, without the human’s intervention. man subjectivizes the space. this in-spiration of the world is the very essence of the relationship of a child with the world. first comes this in-spiriting impregnation of the world with the self and self-born images and meanings and only then, based on this foundation, follows the process of cognizing and comprehending of the world as of something objective and human-independent. imagination presents a buffer between the man and the external world, which is a way of mastering the world, subjecting it to one’s self. imagination is a tool for gaining psychological power over the external world and thereby overcoming one’s innate fear of this strange and alien environment, making it into a home, a part of one’s self. this is exactly what the mystery of all ancient mythologies boils down to. any myth image is in the same degree a means for becoming psychologically powerful, for becoming a ruler of the world in a situation where the world is stronger than you. thus, the human imagination is not only the instrument of the human selfhood, but it is the foundation for the entire process of human cognizing the world. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:17 bergman, excerpts from the magic lantern: an autobiography7 today, as i lean over photographs of my childhood to study my mother's face through a magnifying glass, i try to penetrate long vanished emotions. yes, i loved her and she is very attractive in the photograph, with her thick centre-parted hair above a broad forehead, her soft oval face, gentle sensual mouth, her warm unaffected gaze below dark shapely eyebrows, her small strong hands. my four-year-old heart was consumed with doglike devotion. nevertheless, our relationship was not uncomplicated. my devotion disturbed and irritated her. my "expressions of tenderness and my violent outbursts worried her. she often sent me away with cool ironic words and i wept with rage and disappointment. her relationship with my brother was simpler, for she was always defending him against father, who brought him up with rigorous sternness in which brutal flogging was a recurrent argument. i slowly realized that my adoration, alternately gentle and furious, had little effect, so i soon started to test out behaviour that would please her and arouse her interest. illness immediately attracted her sympathy. as i was a sickly child with endless ailments, this did indeed become a painful but successful route to her tenderness. on the other hand, as mother was a trained nurse, shamming was swiftly seen through and punished in public. another way to gain her attention proved more harmful. i learnt that mother could not bear indifference and preoccupation. she used them as her weapons. i also learnt to subdue my passions, and started on a peculiar game, the primary ingredients of which were arrogance and a cool friendliness. i can remember nothing about what i did, but love makes one enterprising and i quickly succeeded in creating interest in my combination of sensitivity and selfesteem. my greatest problem was simply that i was never given the opportunity to reveal my game, throw off the mask and allow myself to be enveloped in a love that was reciprocated (pp. 3-4) … most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness and grace, concrete factors in relationships between children and parents and god. there was an innate logic in all this which we accepted and thought we understood. this fact may well have contributed to our astonishing acceptance of nazism. we had never heard of freedom and knew even less what it tasted like. in a hierarchical system, all doors are closed. so punishments were something self-evident, never questioned. they could be swift and simple, a slap over the face or a smack on the bottom, but they could also be extremely sophisticated, refined through generations. if i wet myself, which often happened, and all too easily, i was made to wear a red knee-length skirt for the rest of the day. this was regarded as harmless and funny. major crimes reaped exemplary punishment, starting from when the crime was discovered. in minor instances the criminal confessed, say to maids, or to mother or one of the innumerable female relations living at our parsonage on various occasions. the immediate consequence of confessing was to be frozen out. no one spoke or replied to you. as far as i can make out, this was to make the criminal long for punishment and forgiveness. after dinner and coffee, the parties were summoned to father's room, where interrogation and 7 bergman, i. (1988). the magic lantern: an autobiography. new york: viking penguin the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:18 confessions were renewed. after that, the carpet beater was fetched and you yourself had to state how many strokes you considered you deserved. when the punishment quota had been established, a hard green cushion was fetched, trousers and underpants taken down, you prostrated yourself over the cushion, someone held firmly on to your neck and the strokes were administered. i can't maintain that it hurt all that much. the ritual and the humiliation were what was so painful. my brother got the worst of it. mother often used to sit by his bed, bathing his back where the carpet beater had loosened the skin and streaked his back with bloody weals. as i hated my brother and was frightened of his sudden flaring rages, i found great satisfaction in seeing him punished so severely. after the strokes had been administered, you had to kiss father's hand, at which forgiveness was declared and the children of sin fell away, deliverance and grace ensued. though of course you had to go to bed without supper and evening reading, the relief was nevertheless considerable. there was also a spontaneous kind of punishment which could be very unpleasant for a child tormented by fear of the dark: being shut inside a special cupboard. alma in the kitchen had told us that in that particular cupboard lived a little creature which ate the toes of naughty children. i quite clearly heard something moving in there in the dark and my terror was total. i don't remember what i did, probably climbed on to shelves or hung from hooks to avoid having my toes devoured. this form of punishment lost its terror when i found a solution. i hid a torch with a red and green light in a corner of the cupboard. when i was shut in, i hunted out my torch, directed the beam of light at the wall and pretended i was at the cinema. once when the door was opened, i lay on the floor with my eyes closed, pretending to be unconscious. everyone was horrified except mother, who suspected shamming, but no evidence could be found and further punishment was not forthcoming. other punishments were no excursions to the cinema, no food, being sent to bed or sent to your room, extra homework, caning on your hand, hair-pulling, working in the kitchen (which could be rather pleasant), no one speaking to you for a specific time and so on. nowadays, i understand my parents' desperation. a pastor's family lives as if on a tray, unprotected from other eyes. the parsonage must always be open to criticism and comments from the congregation. both father and mother were perfectionists who sagged beneath this unreasonable pressure. their working day was open-ended, their marriage difficult, their selfdiscipline iron -hard. their two sons reflected characteristics they unremittingly punished in themselves. my brother was rebellious and unable to protect himself. father used all his willpower to break him, and almost succeeded. my sister was loved very much and possessively, by both parents. she responded with self-effacement and gentle timidity. i think i came off best by turning myself into a liar. i created an external person who had very little to do with the real me. as i didn't know how to keep my creation and my person apart, the damage had consequences for my life and creativity far into adulthood. sometimes i have to console myself with the fact that he who has lived a lie loves the truth. my first conscious lie stands out clearly in my memory. father had become a hospital chaplain. we had moved to a yellow house on the edge of the great park that borders lill-jansskogen in stockholm. it was a cold winter's day and my brother and i and his friends had been throwing snowballs at the greenhouse on the edge of the park, breaking a great many panes. the gardener at once suspected us and reported the matter to father. interrogations followed. my brother confessed and so did his companions. i was in the kitchen drinking a glass of milk, alma baking at the the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:19 kitchen table, when siri, the housemaid, came into the kitchen and relayed the progress of the awful punishments. she asked me if i had had any part in this vandalism, something i had already denied at a preliminary interrogation (i had been temporarily released owing to lack of evidence). when siri jokingly asked me as if in passing whether i had succeeded in breaking any panes, i realized she was trying to trap me, so i replied in a calm voice that i had just watched for a while and thrown a few loose snowballs that had hit my brother, but then i'd left because my feet were so cold. i clearly remember thinking: this is just what you do when you lie. it was a decisive discovery. in roughly the same rational way as moliere's don juan, i decided to be a hypocrite. i cannot say i was always successful: owing to lack of experience, i was sometimes seen through, and occasionally outsiders intervened. the family had an immensely rich benefactor called aunt anna. she invited us to children's parties with conjurors and other delights. she always gave us expensive and much coveted christmas presents and took us every year to the schumann circus premiere in djurgården. this event drove me into a state of feverish excitement: the car journey with aunt anna's uniformed chauffeur, going into the huge brightly lit wooden building, the secret smells, aunt anna's voluminous hat, the blaring orchestra, the magic of the preparations and the roaring of lions and tigers behind the red draperies of the circus entrance. someone whispered that a lion had appeared in a dark opening under the cupola and that the clowns were frightening and aggressive. i fell asleep from sheer emotion and awoke to wonderful music a young woman dressed in white was riding around on a huge black stallion. i was overcome with love for this young woman. she was included in my fantasy games and i called her esmeralda (perhaps that was her name). my fiction finally took an all-too hazardous step out into reality. under an oath of secrecy, i confided in the boy called nisse who sat next to me at school. i told him that my parents had sold me to schumann's circus and i was soon to be taken away from home and school to be trained as an acrobat, together with esmeralda, who was considered the most beautiful woman in the world. the next day my fantasy was revealed and desecrated. my class teacher considered the matter so serious that she wrote an agitated letter to my mother. there was a dreadful court scene. i was put up against the wall, humiliated and disgraced, at home as well as at school. fifty years later, i asked mother if she remembered my sale to the circus; she did, very well. i asked why no one had laughed or at least been affectionately amused when faced with so much imagination and daring. did no one question the deeper reasons why a seven-year-old wished to leave home and be sold to a circus? mother replied that they had already been troubled on several occasions by my lies and fantasies. in her anguish, she had consulted the pediatrician. he had emphasized how important it was for a child to learn at an early stage to differentiate between fantasy and reality. as they were now faced with an insolent and flagrant lie, it had to be punished accordingly. i had my revenge on my former friend by taking my brother's sheath-knife and chasing him around the school playground. when a teacher threw herself between us, i tried to kill her. i was removed from school and severely beaten. then my false friend caught polio and died, which pleased me. the whole class was sent home for three weeks as was the custom, and everything was forgotten. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:20 but i still fantasized about esmeralda, our adventures becoming more and more dangerous and our love more and more passionate. meanwhile, i became engaged to a girl in my class called gladys, thus betraying tippan, my faithful playmate (pp. 7-12) … to be honest, i think back on my early years with delight and curiosity. my imagination and senses were given nourishment, and i remember nothing dull, in fact the days and hours kept exploding with wonders, unexpected sights and magicai moments. i can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and again experience lights, smells, people, rooms, moments, gestures, tones of voice and objects. these memories seldom have any particular meaning, but are like short or longer films with no point, shot at random. the prerogative of childhood is to move unhindered between magic and oatmeal porridge, between boundless terror and explosive joy. there were no boundaries except prohibitions and regulations, which were shadowy, mostly incomprehensible. for instance, i know i did not grasp the concept of time. you really must learn to be punctual. you've been given a watch and you know how to tell the time. but time ceased to exist, something told me i was probably hungry, there was a row. it was difficult to differentiate between what was fantasy and what was considered real. if i made an effort, i was perhaps able to make reality stay real. but, for instance, there were ghosts and spectres. what should i do with them? and the sagas, were they real? god and the angels? jesus christ? adam and eve? the flood? what was it truly like to be with abraham and isaac? was he really going to cut isaac's throat? i stared in dismay at doré's engraving, identifying myself with isaac. that was real. father was going to slit ingmar's throat. what would happen if the angel came too late? then they would have to weep. blood running and ingmar smiling bleakly. reality. then came the cinematograph. the weeks before christmas. the immensely rich aunt anna’s uniformed mr. jansson had already delivered a quantity of presents. as usual, they were placed in the christmas present basket in the cupboard under the stairs. one parcel in particular aroused my excited curiosity. it was brown and angular with 'forsners' on the wrapping paper. forsners was a photographic store in hamngatan which sold not only cameras but real cinematographs. more than anything else, i longed for a cinematograph. the year before, i had been to the cinema for the first time and seen a film about a horse. i think it was called black beauty and was based on a famous book. the film was on at the sture cinema and we sat in the front row of the circle. to me, it was the beginning. i was overcome with a fever that has never left me. the silent shadows turned their pale faces towards me and spoke in inaudible voices to my most secret feelings. sixty years have gone by and nothing has changed; the fever is the same (pp. 13-14). … …the distribution of christmas gifts took place at the dining-room table. the baskets were carried in, father officiated with a cigar and glass of sweet liqueur, the presents were handed out, verses were read aloud, applauded and commented on; no presents without verses. that was when the cinematograph affair occurred. my brother was the one who got it. at once i began to howl. i was ticked off and disappeared under the table, where i raged on and was told to be quiet immediately. i rushed off to the nursery, swearing and cursing, considered running away, then finally fell asleep exhausted by grief. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:21 the party went on. later in the evening i woke up. gertrud was singing a folk song downstairs and the nightlight was glowing. a transparency of the nativity scene and the shepherds at prayer was glimmering faintly on the tall chest-of-drawers. among my brother's other christmas presents on the white gateiegged table was the cinematograph, with its crooked chimney, its beautifully shaped brass lens and its rack for the film loops. i made a swift decision. i woke my brother and proposed a deal. i offered him my hundred tin soldiers in exchange for the cinematograph. as dag possessed a huge army and was always involved in war games with his friends, an agreement was made to the satisfaction of both parties. the cinematograph was mine. it was not a complicated machine. the source of light was a paraffin lamp and the crank was attached with a cogwheel and a maltese cross. at the back of the metal box was a simple reflecting mirror, behind the lens a slot for coloured lantern slides. the apparatus also included a square purple box which contained some glass slides and a sepia-coloured film strip (35 mm). this was about three meters long and glued into a loop. information on the lid stated that the film was called mrs. holle. who this mrs. holle was no one knew, but later it turned out that she was a popular equivalent of the goddess of love in mediterranean countries. the next morning i retreated into the spacious wardrobe in the nursery, placed the cinematograph on a sugar crate, lit the paraffin lamp and directed the beam of light on to the whitewashed wall. then i loaded the film. a picture of a meadow appeared on the wall. asleep in the meadow was a young woman apparently wearing national costume. then i turned the handle! it is impossible to describe this. i can't find words to express my excitement. but at any time i can recall the smell of the hot metal, the scent of mothballs and dust in the wardrobe, the feel of the crank against my hand. i can see the trembling rectangle on the wall. i turned the handle and the girl woke up, sat up, slowly got up, stretched her arms out, swung round and disappeared to the right. if i went on turning, she would again lie there, then make exactly the same movements all over again. she was moving. (pp. 15-16) … before the primaeval darkness of puberty lowered itself round me and confused both body and soul, i had a happy love affair during the summer i was living alone with grandmother at våhoms (p.75). … although we were the same age, märta was half a head taller than me. she was broad and angular, her straight hair cut short and almost white from the sun and swimming. her lips were thin, her mouth broad and when she laughed it seemed to me that her mouth went out to her ears, revealing strong white teeth. her eyes were pale blue and her gaze seemed surprised, her eyebrows as fair as her hair, her nose long and straight, with a little blob on the very end. she had powerful shoulders and no hips, her arms and legs long and sunburnt, and covered with golden down. she smelt of the cowshed, as astringent as the marsh. her dress had originally been blue but was faded and torn, with dark patches of sweat under her arms and between her shoulder blades. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:22 love was immediate as between romeo and juliet, the difference being that we never even thought of touching each other, not to mention kissing. on the pretext of time-consuming duties, i disappeared from våroms early in the mornings and returned after dusk. this went on for several days until grandmother finally asked me straight out and i confessed. in her wisdom, she granted me unlimited leave from nine o'clock in the morning until nine at night. she also told me that märta was always welcome to come to våroms, a kindness we seldom made use of, as märta's younger brothers had swiftly taken note of our passion. one afternoon, when we dared go down to the gimå to fish and were sitting close together without touching each other, a horde of little boys appeared out of a bush and sang: 'screwer and fucker wanna be fine but pricker and cunter at once start t'whine'. i leapt on the mob and hit some of them, but got quite badly beaten. märta did not come to my rescue. presumably she wanted to see how i would cope. she didn't talk. we never touched each other, but we sat, lay or stood close together, licking the scabs of our sores and scratching our mosquito bites, swimming in all weathers, but shyly, ignoring each other's nakedness. i also helped as best i could with the chores at the outfield barn, but i was rather frightened of the cows. the elkhound watched me jealously and kept nipping at my legs. sometimes märta was scolded. aunt was very thorough about the duties assigned to her and once märta had her ears boxed and she wept with rage. i was quite unable to console her. she was quiet and i did the talking. i told her that my father was not my real father, but i was the son of a famous actor called anders de wahl. pastor bergman hated and persecuted me, which was quite understandable. my mother still loved anders de wahl and went to all his premieres. i had been allowed to meet him once outside the theatre. he had looked at me with tears in his eyes and kissed me on the forehead. then he had said 'god bless you, my child' in his melodious voice. 'märta, you can hear him when he reads the new year bells on the radio! anders de wahl is my father and as soon as i leave school, i'm going to be an actor at the royal dramatic theatre.' (pp. 78-80). … we were alone in the cramped hot room. it was a mild day, the rain streaking the small windows and rustling above the loft. 'you’ll see,' said märta. 'autumn'll be here after this rain.' i suddenly realized our days were now numbered, that eternity did have an end and separation was approaching. märta was leaning over the table, her breath smelling of milk. 'a goods train from borlänge leaves at quarter past seven,' she said. 'i can hear when it leaves. i'll think about you then. you hear and see it when it passes våroms. then you must think about me.' she stretched out her broad sunburnt hand with its dirty bitten nails. i put my hand on hers and she closed hers round it. at last i stopped talking, for an overwhelming grief had silenced me. autumn came and we were forced to wear shoes and socks. we helped with the turnips, the apples ripened, the frost came and everything turned to glass in space and on the ground. the pond outside the good templars' hall had a thin layer of ice on it and märta's mother started packing. the sun was hot in the middle of the day, but it turned bitterly cold towards evening. the fields were ploughed and the threshing machines thundered away in the barns. we helped occasionally, but liked to go off on our own. one day we borrowed berglund's boat and went fishing for pike. we caught a huge one which bit my finger. when lalla cut open the pike, she found a wedding ring in its stomach. with a magnifying glass, grandmother could see the name karin engraved inside the ring. some years earlier, father had lost his ring up by the gimå. it did not necessarily follow that it was the same ring. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:23 one raw cold morning, grandmother told us to go to the village store half way between dufnäs and djurmo. we got a lift with berglund's son, who was going the same way to sell an old horse. we sat on the back flap of the wagon. the journey was slow and difficult along the road full of potholes made by the rain. we counted cars passing or coming towards us, and they added up to three in two hours. at the store, we packed our knapsacks and started off home on foot. … one night it snowed, the river turned blacker than ever and all the greenery and yellow colours vanished. the wind dropped and an overwhelming silence fell. although it was half-light, the whiteness dazzled because it came from below and struck where the eye was unprotected. we walked along the railway embankment towards the good templars' hall. the grey sawmill crouched sagging and abandoned under the weight of all that white, the water in the pool rippled discreetly, and there was a thin layer of ice on the water nearest to the closed hatchways. we could not speak, nor did we dare look at each other, the pain was too great. we shook hands, said goodbye and maybe we would see each other next summer. then she turned quickly away and ran towards the house. i walked along the embankment back to våroms thinking that if a train came along it might as well run straight over me (pp. 81-83). … freed from the iron restrictions of school, i bolted like an insane horse and did not stop until six years later, when i became director of helsingborg municipal theatre. i learnt some history of literature from martin lamm, who lectured on strindberg in a bantering tone that caught the audience and offended my uncritical admiration. i realized only later that his analysis was brilliant. i joined a youth organization in the old city called mäster-olofsgården and had the great privilege of taking charge of the lively and expanding drama activities. then there were student dramatics. i soon started i course at the university in stockholm for the sake of appearances, but student drama took up all the time not spent sleeping with maria. she played the mother in the pelican and was famous within the student unions. she had a thickset body with sloping shoulders, high breasts and big hips and thighs. her face was flat with a long well-shaped nose, broad forehead and expressive dark blue eyes. she had a thin mouth, the corners sophisticatedly drawn down. her hair was thin and dyed very red. she had a considerable gift for language and had published a collection of poems praised by artur lundkvist. in the evenings, she held court at a corner table in the student café, drank brandy and chain-smoked american virginian cigarettes called goldflake, packed in a dark yellow tin with a blood-red seal. maria gave me all kinds of experiences, and became a splendid antidote to my intellectual indolence, my spiritual sloppiness and confused sentimentality. she also satisfied my sexual hunger, opening the prison bars and letting out a raving lunatic. we inhabited a cramped one-room apartment on the south side of stockholm, containing a bookshelf, two chairs, a desk with a reading lamp and two mattresses plus bedclothes. cooking was done in a cupboard and the basin was used for both dishes and washing. we sat and worked, each of us on a mattress, maria smoking incessantly. in self-defence, i fired off a counterattack and was soon a chain smoker. my parents immediately discovered i was spending my nights away. investigations were made, the truth revealed and i was asked to explain myself, with the result that i had a violent altercation with my father. i warned him not to hit me. he hit me and i hit him back. he staggered and ended up sitting on the floor while mother alternately wept and appealed to the remnants of our the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:24 commonsense. i pushed her aside and she screamed loudly. that same evening i wrote a letter to say we would never see one another again. i left home with a sense of relief and stayed away for several years. my brother tried to commit suicide, my sister was forced into an abortion out of consideration for the family, i ran away from home. my parents lived in an exhausting, permanent state of crisis with neither beginning nor end. they fulfilled their duties, they made huge efforts, appealing to god for mercy, their beliefs, values and traditions of no help to them. nothing helped. our drama was acted out before everyone's eyes on the brightly lit stage of the parsonage. fear created what was feared (pp. 138-140). the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:25 interpreting bergman’s childhood memoir the child’s subjectivity manifests itself through pain. it is the pain of rapture from the world, which neither hears nor understands the child – in a situation where the world is of very paramount importance for the child as it is the world of her or his dearest and nearest, most important people. this makes the child’s self try and break into this world to be noticed – only to be left completely overlooked by the grown-ups unable to surmise the storms raging within the child‘s heart. “my four-year-old heart was consumed with doglike devotion.” “…i wept with rage and disappointment.” “…love makes one enterprising and i quickly succeeded in creating interest in my combination of sensitivity and self-esteem.” the quotations above represent a four-year-old boy’s love for his mother. it is by no means an exaggeration or a lie; it is a real drama of unrequited love that many four-and five-year olds do experience as keenly as is only possible at this age – because it is in that very age that the child starts wiggling out of her or his ego’s cocoon, out of his or her mythical self-sufficiency while tentatively establishing relations with the real world around; to realize that the world runs according to the laws quite often allowing no room for the child. but how, then, is a child to establish her or himself as someone important, as a person that really is, existing, desiring, and demanding here-and-now? previously, up to now, the world had been entirely within yourself constituting a condition quite sufficient for your self-existence. now, it turns out that the world is something outside you, when does not in the least belong to you and it challenges you to conquer it. it makes no difference that you are in no way less (or, maybe, even much more) sensitive, feeling, and/or rich in experiences than any of these surrounding adults since you have neither of the skills nor knacks of living a life they have mastered, you are compelled to invent your own, quite effortful, ways to establish yourself in this world out there. however, it is not only you who is endeavoring to establish yourself in this world. it turns out that the world of the dearest and nearest is trying hard to establish itself at your expense. this grown-up world’s establishing itself at your expense bears an adult name of ‘education’. of course, you have already experienced some of this ‘education’, sometime earlier. being nearly entirely within the protective cocoon of your fantasy-born mythological ego, however, you never noticed any of those ‘education efforts’ that had been considerably less refined and excruciating. indeed, what point is there in educating a child that is still unaware and too foolish to be provoked into remorse or shame? but as the child grows, he or she learns to cognize him-or herself as being apart from the world around – this awareness by the child becomes paired with an irrepressible urge, on the part of the adults, the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:26 to refine all sorts of ‘educational activities’ centered around arousing the feelings of guilt and shame within the child. furthermore, the task of arousing the guilt-shame complex soon becomes an end in itself for the adults. it is so because an adult who has succeeded in instilling these feelings in a child can experience a most sweet and enjoyable feeling of power, which becomes the main impellent in no time at all. indeed, had there never been children’s faults and misbehaviors, they would have been invented. how otherwise would one have formed a basis for guilt-and-shame forming? furthermore, where would one ground for an authoritative self-affirmation at the expense of the child? “most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness and grace…” following is the ‘classical’ christian education logical sequence that looks practically impeccable: a misdeed (a breach of some convention or rule) – experiencing it as a sin (a shameful, impermissible vice) – catharsis from a public confession (which is a ‘must’ since the violator must confess in and repent of the sin, which procedure should be made public securing the sinner’s soul’s would-be salvation ) an even more intense and purifying catharsis of the punishment as the expiration of the sin -and, finally, the apotheosis of a graceful forgiving aimed at making the culprit’s soul fill with tears of a most tender emotion and blissfulness. in reality, this ‘ideal model’ turns out to be but a sophisticated system of humiliating the child’s person-dignity, suppression of her or his will that, in the final analysis, has formed the neurotically authoritarian face of the western civilization. it is not enough to make one repent in public – it is allimportant to humiliate and crush the ‘sinner’: in order to disgrace and pillory one in public. wetting your pants? well, then you must forever wear a knee-long red skirt for everyone to see and jeer at you! smashed a windowpane while playing? a public confession shall be wrung out of you (with your mother, your governess while ‘the innumerable female relations’ present) followed by a unanimous boycott aimed at making you feel a complete outcast craving for a punishment (i.e., so-called “forgiveness”) and for flogging itself. “the ritual and the humiliation were what was so painful.” it would be wrong to say that parents do not love their children. on the contrary, they do love them and ‘wish them well’ and they most sincerely and ardently wish to ‘rectify a bad temper’, to ‘vanquish sin’, to therefin punish their children with tears of a sincerest sympathy welling up in their eyes. one might surmise the holy inquisition was as sympathetic with the heretics being tortured. the result, however, is that the children learn to hate their parents, themselves and others, including their own brothers and sisters. “my brother got the worst of it. mother often used to sit by his bed, bathing his back where the carpet beater had loosened the skin and streaked his back with bloody weals. as i hated my brother and was frightened of his sudden flaring rages, i found great satisfaction in seeing him punished so severely.” it is a pedagogy based on repression and humiliation. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:27 it is a pedagogy that provokes envy and thirst for power. it is a pedagogy that forms a certain type of oppressive social relations in the society. it is the pedagogical soil that, in the long run gives birth to totalitarianism – since totalitarianism, undoubtedly, had had its pedagogical origins too. it is a respectable pedagogical violence ‘in the name of sublime values’ that leads to a total and boundless mutual violence. moreover, it is also a pedagogy that unconditionally results in hypocrisy and cynicism, which is a pedagogy that is doomed to form hypocrites. it is because i (my self) can only survive if i learn to be hypocritical and deceitful. the only alternative is represented by the fate of bergman’s brother and sister, who are people psychologically broken and crushed. “i think i came off best by turning myself into a liar. i created an external person who had very little to do with the real me.” it is a pedagogical drill-training that drives one into a system of social conventions and norms but, at the same time, crushes and warps one’s personality, which presents a ready recipe for an easy prey by a totalitarianism ideology. the brother’s back, slashed bloody with repeated flogging, as well as his furious outbursts of violence were also a direct consequence of this same education. a person with a school of such humiliation behind her or him is likely to be as merciless in humiliating others. the system of upbringing in a respectable swedish pastor’s family presents a prototype for the would-be nazi and soviet concentration camp ‘pedagogy’ – proceeding entirely from the ideals of correct education and correction of the incorrect. however, in the final analysis, what salvages one from this sadistic and perverted pedagogy is, not the learned hypocrisy but the intensity and the depth of the inner reflexive experiences and emotions filling the child’s soul. this fact explains why, even within the most repressive pedagogical environments, there appear and arise not just villains or psychologically broken people. a child is not merely a being ‘educated by the grown-ups’. first and foremost, a child is a being that lives her or his own, secret and enormously rich inner active life – a life of inner observations, reflexive experiences, and deep passions. it is what constitutes the real soil for the child’s growth despite any of the surrounding ‘pedagogical environments’. the crux of the matter is the child’s imagination, the ‘mythological cocoon’ being woven in and by the child’s consciousness. it is this very mythological, imaginative cocoon that turns out to be the main resource the child draws on for withstanding any ugliness and perversity of the ‘education systems’, the main resource nurturing the formation and development of the humane even in the midst of most inhuman and manipulative circumstances. this is largely due to how, all through the childhood, the child lives mainly an inner and imaginary life instead of an outer life of ordinary acts and benign events. the greater the child’s power of imagination, the greater is her or his resources for survival as a human. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:28 here is a description of a visit to the circus by bergman, “feverish excitement,” “the secret smells,” “the magic of the preparations,” “the roaring of lions and tigers behind the red draperies,” “the clowns were frightening and aggressive,” “someone whispered that a lion had appeared in a dark opening under the cupola….” the child’s intensity of perceiving and experiencing is absolutely incomparable with those of the grown-ups. what for an adult is a mere sum of ordinary things is, for a child, a chain of incredible and fantastic miracles performed chiefly by one’s capacity and power to feel and fantasize. it is all the more so as the circus is a visible symbol of an ‘other world’ full of real passions and adventures that match, in their magical incredibility, those taking place within a child’s soul. no wonder so many children have become crazy about the circus to the point of creating fantastic stories about their would-be circus life. this is because the circus is a remedial metaphor of the soul refusing to be placed within the jesuitical domestic pedagogy’s procrustean bed. it is also because the only alternative to the ‘meek acquiescence to nazism’ is a soul awakened by the imagination and refusing to be structured according to the logic of meek self-humiliation or cynical hypocrisy. regardless, all in all, help is only likely to come from the circus, since even the pediatrician who was visited by the parents to consult the child exhausted by his interminable fantasies, instructs them with a thoughtful air on “how important it was for a child to learn at an early stage to differentiate between fantasy and reality.” at the same time, the fantasy power is the only thing capable of salvaging little ingmar’s soul. it is exactly what severs as a buffer between the inner and the outer worlds and allows ingmar bergman to eventually become what he has become. “it was difficult to differentiate between what was fantasy and what was considered real. if i made an effort, i was perhaps able to make reality stay real. but, for instance, there were ghosts and spectres. what should i do with them? and the sagas, were they real? god and the angels? jesus christ? adam and eve? the flood? what was it truly like to be with abraham and isaac? was he really going to cut isaac's throat? i stared in dismay at dore's engraving, identifying myself with isaac. that was real. father was going to slit ingmar's throat. what would happen if the angel came too late? then they would have to weep. blood running and ingmar smiling bleakly reality.” this fantastic biblical story is an amazingly accurate metaphor of ingmar bergman’s attitude to his father and thereby becomes another metaphor of his life’s salvation. indeed, it is quite difficult to separate fantasy from reality in a situation where fantasy is what really led little ingmar out of the impasse from the reality that was driving him into a dead-end! indeed, the pediatrician’s advice about drawing a demarcation line between fantasy and the reality turns out to be utter nonsense. “…i remember nothing dull, in fact the days and hours kept exploding with wonders, unexpected sights and magical moments. i can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and again experience lights, smells, people, rooms, moments, gestures, tones of voice and objects. these memories seldom have any particular meaning, but are like short or longer films with no point, shot at random.” it all boils down to the fact the child has the strength to live an inner, not an outer life, which rescues her or him. no matter how harsh and strict the outer bans imposed by the adults are, the child can have enough strength to live in a state of inner freedom. if this is the case, moreover, it enables the child to break through all pedagogical enclosures to get into an authentic, true life. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:29 “there were no boundaries except prohibitions and regulations, which were shadowy, mostly incomprehensible. for instance, i know i did not grasp the concept of time. you really must learn to be punctual. you've been given a watch and you know how to tell the time. but time ceased to exist, something told me i was probably hungry, there was a row.” it is so, because for a child filled with an inner, not an outer life, time also flows inside, not outside her or him. the ‘external’ physical time, measured by watches and clocks is only needed for establishing a consensus with others. inner time, on the other hand, needs no such agreements. it is self-sufficient. the validity of the inner time is in its eventfulness: eventfulness of the child’s inner experiences. likewise, the child’s space of existence is an internal and imaginary one. even the external, the ‘outer’ physical space is only open to the child in proportion to the extent her or his imagination has succeeded to mark it with the imagination’s notches and marks. thus, a child ‘aimlessly’ and ‘nonchalantly’ wandering around in a park seemingly just ‘looking around and daydreaming’, in fact is ‘marking’ as it were the place around with her or his individual tokens, creating her or his, deeply personal ‘cartography of the locality’ where everything gets marked with your own images, fantasy, and emotional experiences. and a cinematograph is a wonderful gift to the child’s power of imagination. “to me, it was the beginning. i was overcome with a fever that has never left me. the silent shadows turned their pale faces towards me and spoke in inaudible voices to my most secret feelings. sixty years have gone by and nothing has changed; the fever is the same.” as it came to be, imagination was not just what existed inside you but something that could be visualized outwardly. which meant that you were not as lonely as you had believed you were. it meant that imagination might come true. you turn a lever – and lo, the girl gets up, stretches out her arms and disappears out of the frame. it is something you can make happen as something that depends entirely and solely on you. also, it can hold feelings of your first love forever in its minutest detail… because, thanks to a cinematograph, it is for the first time in your life that you have and enjoy the right to be yourself, not just internally, but externally as well. it is an opportunity to limitlessly express your own self – the self of your redeeming fantasies – which, it proves, instead of being embarrassing or repulsive this self of yours turns out to be incredibly important for your female vis-à-vis. this is exactly what makes your memory retain the smallest details of the relationship, turning the externally fleeting summer months of being with märta into something perceived as ‘infinity’ – presenting another example of the ‘inner’, subjective time that flows according to entirely different laws and clocks, and is much more powerful than the so-called ‘objective’ time flowing with the city hall tower’s clock. it is so because here there is truth and authenticity. it is so because here the duty of the ‘inner self’ is to be rather than to hide and this means that one can talk, and talk, and talk – freely, unrestrainedly, forever… hence, the anguish of separation is an absolutely unparalleled anguish. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:30 it is so because that side of love there is again the barren of everyday life where the concentration camp-like family education complemented and amplified with the concentration camp-like education at school. “it was an institution, a storage place, based on an unholy alliance between authorities and family. the stink of boredom was sometimes penetrating, sometimes suffocating. the class was a miniature reflection of pre-war society; indolence, indifference, opportunism, sucking-up, bullying and a few confused flashes of revolt, idealism and curiosity. … punishments were exemplary and often affected the offender for life. the teaching methods largely consisted of punishments, rewards and the implanting of a guilty conscience. many of the teachers were national socialists…”. this is why, in the final analysis, “more than forty years were to go by before my emotions were released from that closed room where they had been imprisoned.” the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:31 george orwell, such, such were the joys8 i soon after i arrived at st cyprian's (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when i seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) i began wetting my bed. i was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which i must have grown out of at least four years earlier. nowadays, i believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. it is normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. in those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. for my part i did not need to be told it was a crime. night after night i prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘please god, do not let me wet my bed! oh, please god, do not let me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference. some nights the thing happened, others not. there was no volition about it, no consciousness. you did not properly speaking do the deed: you merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet. after the second of third offence i was warned that i should be beaten next time, but i received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. one afternoon, as we were filing out from tea, mrs wilkes the headmaster's wife, was sitting at the head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady of whom i knew nothing, except that she was on an afternoon's visit to the school. she was an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding-habit, or something that i took to be a riding-habit. i was just leaving the room when mrs wilkes called me back, as though to introduce me to the visitor. mrs wilkes was nicknamed flip, and i shall call her by that name, for i seldom think of her by any other. (officially, however, she was addressed as mum, probably a corruption of the ‘ma'am’ used by public schoolboys to their housemasters' wives.) she was a stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deep-set, suspicious eyes. although a great deal of the time she was full of false heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang (‘buck up, old chap!’ and so forth), and even using one's christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing look. it was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of anything in particular. ‘here is a little boy,’ said flip, indicating me to the strange lady, ‘who wets his bed every night. do you know what i am going to do if you wet your bed again?’ she added, turning to me, ‘i am going to get the sixth form to beat you’. the strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed ‘i-should-thinkso!’ and here there occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. the sixth form was a group of older boys who were selected as having ‘character’ and were empowered to beat smaller boys. i had not yet learned of their existence, and i mis-heard the phrase ‘the sixth form’ as ‘mrs form’. i took it as referring to the strange lady — i thought, that is, that her name was mrs form. it was an improbable name, but a child has no judgement in such matters. i imagined, therefore, that it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. it did not strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way connected with the school. i merely assumed the ‘mrs form’ was a stern disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed to bear this out) and i had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a 8 orwell, g. (1953). such, such were the joys, retrieved from http://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:32 hunting-whip. to this day i can feel myself almost swooning with shame as i stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. i could not speak. i felt that i should die if ‘mrs form’ were to beat me. but my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment: it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offence. a little later, i forget how, i learned that it was not after all ‘mrs form’ who would do the beating. i cannot remember whether it was that very night that i wetted my bed again, but at any rate i did wet it again quite soon. oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets! there was no chance of hiding what i had done. the grim statuesque matron, margaret by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my bed. she pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder: ‘report yourself to the headmaster after breakfast!’ i put report yourself in capitals because that was how it appeared in my mind. i do not know how many times i heard that phrase during my early years at st cyprian's. it was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. the words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the words of the death sentence. when i arrived to report myself, flip was doing something or other at he the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. her uneasy eyes searched me as i went past. sambo was a roundshouldered, curiously oafish-looking man, not large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humour. he knew, of course, why i had been sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding-crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting yourself that you had to proclaim your offence with your own lips. when i had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the riding-crop. he had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged you, and i remember the words ‘you dir-ty lit-tle boy’ keeping time with the blows. the beating did not hurt (perhaps, as it was the first time, he was not hitting me very hard), and i walked out feeling very much better. the fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. i was even incautious enough to wear a grin on my face. some small boys were hanging about in the passage outside the door of the ante-room. ‘d'you get the cane?’ ‘it didn't hurt.’ i said proudly. flip had heard everything. instantly her voice came screaming after me: ‘come here! come here this instant! what was that you said?’ ‘i said it didn't hurt,’ i faltered out. ‘how dare you say a thing like that? do you think that is a proper thing to say? go in and report yourself again!’ this time sambo laid on in real earnest. he continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me — about five minutes, it seemed — ending up by breaking the riding-crop. the bone handle went flying across the room. ‘look what you've made me do!’ he said furiously, holding the broken crop. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:33 i had fallen into a chair, weakly snivelling. i remember that this was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to tears, and curiously enough i was not even now crying because of the pain. the second beating had not hurt very much either. fright and shame seemed to have anaesthetized me. i was crying partly because i felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. i knew the bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. the second fact i was personally aware of, and the first i did not question. it was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you. i do not want to claim that this idea flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the blows of sambo's cane: i must have had glimpses of it even before i left home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. but at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that i was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. and the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which i had been flung. life was more terrible, and i was more wicked, than i had imagined. at any rate, as i sat snivelling on the edge of a chair in sambo's study, with not even the self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, i had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as i do not remember to have felt before. in general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. one is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them. at twenty i could have written the history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible now. but it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others. here are two things which in a sense i remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting until quite recently. one is that the second beating seemed to me a just and reasonable punishment. to get one beating, and then to get another and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the first had not hurt — that was quite natural. the gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune you should conceal it. the other is that i accepted the broken riding-crop as my own crime. i can still recall my feeling as i saw the handle lying on the carpet — the feeling of having done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. i had broken it: so sambo told me, and so i believed. this acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years. iii no one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy. i have good memories of st cyprian's, among a horde of bad ones. sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the downs to a village called birling gap, or to beachy head, where one bathed dangerously among the boulders and came home covered with cuts. and there were still more wonderful mid-summer evenings when, as a special treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual but allowed to wander about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge into the swimming bathe at about nine o'clock. there was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour's undisturbed reading (ian hay, thackeray, kipling and h. g. wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. there was also cricket, which i was no good at but with which i conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:34 the age of about eighteen. and there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies. this business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable. very occasionally, perhaps once during each summer, it was possible to escape altogether from the barrack-like atmosphere of school, when brown, the second master, was permitted to take one or two boys for an afternoon of butterfly hunting on a common a few miles away. brown was a man with white hair and a red face like a strawberry, who was good at natural history, making models and plaster casts, operating magic lanterns, and things of that kind. he and mr batchelor were the only adults in any way connected with the school whom i did not either dislike or fear. once he took me into his room and showed me in confidence a plated, pearl-handled revolver — his ‘six-shooter’, he called it — which he kept in a box under his bed, and oh, the joy of those occasional expeditions! the ride of two or three miles on a lonely little branch line, the afternoon of charging to and fro with large green nets, the beauty of the enormous dragonflies which hovered over the tops of the grasses, the sinister killing-bottle with its sickly smell, and then tea in the parlour of a pub with large slices of pale-coloured cake! the essence of it was in the railway journey, which seemed to put magic distances between yourself and school. flip, characteristically, disapproved of these expeditions, though not actually forbidding them. ‘and have you been catching little butterflies?’ she would say with a vicious sneer when one got back, making her voice as babyish as possible. from her point of view, natural history (‘bug-hunting’ she would probably have called it) was a babyish pursuit which a boy should be laughed out of as early as possible. moreover it was somehow faintly plebeian, it was traditionally associated with boys who wore spectacles and were no good at games, it did not help you to pass exams, and above all it smelt of science and therefore seemed to menace classical education. it needed a considerable moral effort to accept brown's invitation. how i dreaded that sneer of little butterflies! … by the social standards that prevailed about me, i was no good, and could not be any good. but all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same people. it was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called ‘guts’ or ‘character’, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others. i did not possess any of these qualities. at games, for instance, i was hopeless. i was a fairly good swimmer and not altogether contemptible at cricket, but these had no prestige value, because boys only attach importance to a game if it requires strength and courage. what counted was football, at which i was a funk. i loathed the game, and since i could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting. the lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at knocking down and trampling on slightly smaller boys. that was the pattern of school life — a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. life was the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:35 hierarchical and whatever happened was right. there were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly. i did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as i could see there were no others. how could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong? it was their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones. and yet from a very early age i was aware of the impossibility of any subjective conformity. always at the centre of my heart the inner self seemed to be awake, pointing out the difference between the moral obligation and the psychological fact. …what you ought to feel was usually clear enough but the appropriate emotion could not be commanded. obviously, it was my duty to feel grateful towards flip and sambo; but i was not grateful. it was equally clear that one ought to love one's father, but i knew very well that i merely disliked my own father, whom i had barely seen before i was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘don't’. it was not that one did not want to possess the right qualities or feel the correct emotions, but that one could not. the good and the possible never seemed to coincide. there was a line of verse that i came across not actually while i was at st cyprian's, but a year of two later, and which seemed to strike a sort of leaden echo in my heart. it was: ‘the armies of unalterable law’. i understood to perfection what it meant to be lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge. the schoolmasters with their canes, the millionaires with their scottish castles, the athletes with their curly hair — these were the armies of unalterable law. it was not easy, at that date, to realize that in fact it was alterable. and according to that law i was damned. i had no money, i was weak, i was ugly, i was unpopular, i had a chronic cough, i was cowardly, i smelt. this picture, i should add, was not altogether fanciful. i was an unattractive boy. st cyprian's soon made me so, even if i had not been so before. but a child's belief in its own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts. i believed, for example, that i ‘smelt’. but this was based simply on general probability. it was notorious that disagreeable people smelt, and therefore presumably i did so too. again, until after i had left school for good i continued to believe that i was preternaturally ugly. it was what my schoolfellows had told me, and i had no other authority to refer to. the conviction that it was not possible for me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions till far into adult life. until i was about thirty i always planned my life on the assumption not only that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that i could only expect to live a few years longer. but this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by something else: that is, the instinct to survive. even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. i could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but i could accept my failure and make the best of it. i could resign myself to being what i was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms. to survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially criminal, since it meant breaking rules which you yourself recognized. there was a boy named johnny hale who for some months oppressed me horribly. he was a big, powerful, coarsely handsome boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was forever twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging somebody with a riding-crop (he was a member of the sixth form), or performing prodigies of activity on the football field. flip loved him (hence the fact he was habitually called by his christian name) and sambo commended him as a boy who ‘had character’ and ‘could keep order’. he was followed about by a group of toadies who nicknamed him strong man. one day, when we were taking off our overcoats in the changing-room, hale picked on me for some reason. i ‘answered him back’. whereupon he gripped my wrist, twisted it round and bent my the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:36 forearm back upon itself in a hideously painful way. i remember his handsome, jeering red face bearing down upon mine. he was, i think, older than i, besides being enormously stronger. as he let go of me a terrible, wicked resolve formed itself in my heart. i would get back on him by hitting him when he did not expect it. it was a strategic moment, for the master who had been ‘taking’ the walk would be coming back almost immediately, and then there could be no fight. i let perhaps a minute go by, walked up to hale with the most harmless air i could assume, and then, getting the weight of my body behind it, smashed my fist into his face. he was flung backwards by the blow, and some blood ran out of his mouth. his always sanguine face turned almost black with rage. then he turned away to rinse his mouth at the wash-basins. ‘all right!’ he said to me between his teeth as the master led us away. for days after this he followed me about, challenging me to fight. although terrified out of my wits, i steadily refused to fight. i said that the blow in the face had served him right, and there was an end of it. curiously enough he did not simply fall upon me there and then, which public opinion would probably have supported him in doing. so gradually the matter tailed off, and there was no fight. now, i had behaved wrongly, by my own code no less than his. to hit him unawares was wrong. but to refuse afterwards to fight knowing that if we fought we would beat me — that was far worse: it was cowardly. if i had refused because i disapproved of fighting, or because i genuinely felt the matter to be closed, it would have been all right; but i had refused merely because i was afraid. even my revenge was made empty by that fact. i had struck the blow in a moment of mindless violence, deliberately not looking far ahead and merely determined to get my own back for once and damn the consequences. i had had time to realize that what i did was wrong, but it was the kind of crime from which you could get some satisfaction. now all was nullified. there had been a sort of courage in the first act, but my subsequent cowardice had wiped it out. the fact i hardly noticed was that though hale formally challenged me to fight, he did not actually attack me. indeed, after receiving that one blow he never oppressed me again. it was perhaps twenty years before i saw the significance of this. at the time i could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: break the rules, or perish. i did not see that in that case the weak have the right to make a different set of rules for themselves; because, even if such an idea had occurred to me, there was no one in my environment who could have confirmed me in it. i lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals questioning nothing, accepting the law of the stronger and avenging their own humiliations by passing them down to someone smaller. my situation was that of countless other boys, and if potentially i was more of a rebel than most, it was only because, by boyish standards, i was a poorer specimen. but i never did rebel intellectually, only emotionally. i had nothing to help me except my dumb selfishness, my inability — not, indeed, to despise myself, but to dislike myself — my instinct to survive. it was about a year after i hit johnny hale in the face that i left st cyprian's for ever. it was the end of a winter term. with a sense of coming out from darkness into sunlight i put on my old boy's tie as we dressed for the journey. i well remember the feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an amulet against flip's voice and sambo's cane. i was escaping from bondage. it was not that i expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than i had been at st cyprian's. but still, i was escaping. i knew that at a public school there would be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate. for years i had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later on — that when once my scholarship was won i would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer. this resolve, by the way, the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:37 was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three i hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work. …and yet how happy i was, that winter morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie (dark green, pale blue and black, if i remember rightly) round my neck! the world was opening before me, just a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. a public school would be better fun than st cyprian's, but at bottom equally alien. in a world where the prime necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly-brushed hair, a charming smile, i was no good. all i had gained was a breathing-space. a little quietude, a little selfindulgence, a little respite from cramming — and then, ruin. what kind of ruin i did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an early death. but first a year or two in which one could ‘slack off’ and get the benefit of one's sins, like doctor faustus. i believed firmly in my evil destiny, and yet i was acutely happy. it is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it next term i was going to wellington. i had also won a scholarship at eton, but it was uncertain whether there would be a vacancy, and i was going to wellington first. at eton you had a room to yourself — a room which might even have a fire in it. at wellington you had your own cubicle, and could make yourself cocoa in the evenings. the privacy of it, the grown-upness! and there would be libraries to hang about in, and summer afternoons when you could shirk games and mooch about the countryside alone, with no master driving you along. meanwhile there were the holidays. there was the 22 rifle that i had bought the previous holidays (the crackshot, it was called, costing twenty-two and sixpence), and christmas was coming next week. there were also the pleasures of overeating. i thought of some particularly voluptuous cream buns which could be bought for twopence each at a shop in our town. (this was 1916, and food-rationing had not yet started.) even the detail that my journey-money had been slightly miscalculated, leaving about a shilling over — enough for an unforeseen cup of coffee and a cake or two somewhere on the way — was enough to fill me with bliss. there was time for a bit of happiness before the future closed in upon me. but i did know that the future was dark. failure, failure, failure — failure behind me, failure ahead of me — that was by far the deepest conviction that i carried away. (orwell, 1947) … 1947 (*) (*) “first published with some changes of names in partisan review, sept. oct. 1952, then not in great britain until the cejl of 1968. ... commonly thought to have been written in 1947 just before he [orwell] began to write nineteen eighty-four (this is highly speculative), but all that is certain is that he sent it to his publishers then. several factors point strongly to an earlier composition.” bernard crick: george orwell: a life, 1980. (* added by o. dag) the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:38 interpreting orwell’s childhood memoirs the world of orwell’s school years memories looks more frightening than that depicted in his famous “1984” anti-utopia. the school resembles a smoothly running clockwise mechanism with every cog-wheel having its own clearly defined function, including the system of punishment and hierarchical structure of relationships within the children’s collective. there is no room for improvisation or for spontaneous expression of feelings – nothing beyond the perfect order of well-established conventions. not to fit into this deeply hierarchical clockwork mechanism – to be a misfit – is to commit a real crime. this is why little eric blaire – totally unable to fit within the social standards – is a real criminal. he looks preposterous and out of place in a world where the main virtue is “a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak,” a world where any manifestation of individuality may become an object of merciless ridicule. it is a world structured according to the hierarchy pyramid principle which reads, “being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. there were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.” and the most monstrous thing about this world, however, is that none of its little inhabitants has any dignity of his own. here, a person’s dignity is measured not according to his or her self-actualization but according to the position he has managed to attain in the school hierarchy pyramid. it is a world inhabited by people-functions, people-roles all of whom solve their own instrumental tasks. as for the teachers’ task, it mainly consists of diligently encouraging the students’ industry in fighting everything that does not fit within the well-established system of rules. school is a mechanism of production of the future members of the society who will be destined to secure its smooth and slick functioning. a st. cyprian school newly arrived 8-year old student urinates in his bed. still, his ‘misdeed’ is left unnoticed as something not even worth discussion or moral admonition. indeed, who is he to be talked to, let alone – admonished? he is a complete nobody. and nobody is his name – this is the very first lesson that the child must learn in school. he is at the very bottom of the school social pyramid and therefore does not deserve even to be talked to. “after the second of third offence i was warned that i should be beaten next time, but i received the warning in a curiously roundabout way.” the indirectness is the most oppressing and frightening thing of all – because it is based on a most profound scorn. all your feelings and ideas notwithstanding, you are but a nobody. you are but a student of the lowest class grade. you are just a cog in the school machine and you are only important to those around you insofar you make progress in learning and mastering the behavioral achievements. your inner life is of no importance whatsoever. of importance, however, is that your night enuresis hampers the logic of the educational process that provides room neither for your inner emotional experience nor for your night enuresis. you are being scornfully ignored, however, as the atmosphere becomes denser around you, you sense that something awful is going to happen and this ‘something’ fills you with an irrational animal fear. no one says anything straightforwardly, but by their intonations, looks, and indirect remarks you unmistakably read that your night problem is a loathed and abominable thing that shall be followed by a severe and unavoidable punishment. even though you do not know yet what it will come to, you feel this the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:39 atmosphere getting denser around you, and every night you pray hard to prevent this totalizing horror from coming true. there is not a horror of the punishment as yet, but there is the horror of expecting a horror to come and this imaginary horror’s abyss is engulfing everything that might happen in reality. alas, god doesn’t hear your prayers. and, except god, there is no one to turn to: in a functionally built school hierarchy, you are doomed to be alone and, indeed, quite lonely. it is so because the main idea of the school is that of school achievement allowing no room for any of your reflexive experiences. the school is a track race of a stadium of sort that makes you run towards the conventional education goals and sets your ‘price’ and value exclusively according to how fast you can run and how much you do not deviate from the limits of the lane assigned to you. this is precisely what constitutes the real horror of the situation orwell describes. this horror exists not in just the mere fact of a child being exposed to physical violence – not even in just mere real fact of this violence being deeply unjust – but rather it is in the routine, even in somewhat mechanical character of what one is being exposed to, totally devoid of any personal attitude, any emotional experience, let alone sympathy. had this punishment been a manifestation of some affective breakdown responses on the part of the teacher, it would have been much less frightening since an extreme affective response, though dangerous, is an altogether human one. as for the situation described by orwell, its horror is in its everyday inescapability, its indifferent impersonality, and its functional disdainfulness. for this impersonal clockwork social mechanism of school, there is no such thing as an eight-year-old boy filled with anxieties and fears, rather there is a mere (and minor) malfunction of the mechanism that should be corrected in strict accordance with the preexisted pedagogical rules. the early 20th century british schools’ rules required flogging (as an accepted punishment), so the headmaster took a whip and flogs an eight-year-old boy not because the headmaster is a pathological sadist or an emotionally imbalanced person but solely because he complies with the pedagogical requirements and rules of the period. the headmaster flogs a student in strict compliance with his pedagogical duties and school traditions, and in accordance with the requirements of a slickly running and finely tuned mechanism of the school hierarchy’s pyramid. the corporal execution process is in itself a smoothly running ritual employing standard psychological props. so, the headmaster performs the procedure practically with indifference; in compliance with the rules and in accordance with the norm, as the epoch’s guidelines fashionably require. as for the little round-faced boy in corduroy knickers, he is a total nobody for the headmaster, just another one in the long row of those young students who have so far failed to fit in the conventional school order and who have to be made fit in by force – for their own prospective good. since this or that particular cogwheel has got jammed, it must be rectified, and since it is conventional to rectify by flogging, so shall it be, performing some routine ritual: a purely technical procedure. punishment is a mere element of the general school rhythm, the one completely predetermined and familiar. this is exactly what makes it the most horrible thing in the whole story: a clockwork fixedness of a smoothly running school mechanism that has always been and still is the core foundation of any conventional school. according to this clockwork social mechanism of conventional school, a teacher acts in compliance with the accepted rules and traditions, not following his or her own emergent feelings, values, or judgment that might have distinguished him or her from all the other school teachers of the period. and it makes the teacher him or herself into a mere cog of the established mechanism, alienating him from himself while affiliating to a certain generalized school order, to a sum of conventional rules. this is why little erick blaire’s story sounds so familiar fоr the modern reader. the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:40 it is not because of flogging, nor because of corporal execution in general – by now they have totally disappeared from majority of schools. everyone is all too familiar, however, with the unavoidable ritualistic over determination of the conventional teacher’s modus operandi making him or her act this or that way not because he or she sees it as something meaningful or important for his or her personal and professional point of view, but solely because it is required by the regulations, traditions, and guidelines from above. everyone is but too familiar with the conventional school’s hierarchy pyramid where formal procedures (be it lessons, be it exams) enslave the teacher’s human essence and make him or her into a function of the humanless process. everyone is all too familiar with the common situation when the student gets depersonalized since the ultimate value is whether he or she is able to pass the test of compliance with certain educational tasks and goals, not her or his inner life. everyone is very well familiar with the fact that conventional school is a smoothly running institutional mechanism set to produce functionally successful members of the society. everyone is very well familiar with this idea of conventional school as a well lubricated, finely tuned, and smoothly running clockwork mechanism. neither mrs. wilkes nicknamed flip, nor the school’s headmaster wilkes nicknamed sambo, nor st. cyprian school’s students are in anyway worse than teachers and students inhabiting the today’s conventional school; both do what is accepted and conventional, both act in compliance with a certain established norm and common practice. what they proceed from is neither their personal human feelings nor their idea of good and evil, nor their conscience or their personal dignity, nor their own judgment or values, it is solely what is commonly accepted and generally required irrespective of by whom exactly and why. this presents the main and most dramatic vice of schools, even up to this day: the regulations’ requirements priority over the commandments of personal conscience, personal responsibility, and personal sense. it is the priority of a clockwork mechanism over life – life that refuses to go at the clockwork pace. it makes little difference that old ‘accepted conventionalities’ have been long substituted by modern ones and the teachers display the so-called ‘student-centered approach. it makes little or no difference if this ‘student-centered approach’ is not the teacher’s deep moral choice, but another item among those required by the regulations. a ‘guidelines-dependent’ pedagogy is doomed to be totalitarian irrespective of the ideological and pedagogical values it aspires to attain. the clockwork pedagogy, in its very essence, is the one going against the grain of a person’s dignity. if my interaction with a child is determined by external educational tasks and objectives, it is doomed to be functionally-totalitarian. in fact, there are just two pedagogy types – the humane and the functionally-totalitarian ones. the humane one is a pedagogy that proceeds from the student, from her or his states, needs, and possibilities. it feels stinted and uncomfortable within the limits of a standard preset syllabus. for such pedagogy, every educational task is just an opportunity for a dialogue with the student’s inner world of his or her feelings and ideas. the emphasis here is not on what the child acquires or masters, but on what he or she experiences and what happens with the child. the main thing is the child’s inner world, not the amount of information, knowledge, skills, competence or behavior norms he or she masters. as for the functionally-totalitarian pedagogy, it is the one whose main pedagogical objective is not the child per se but what he or she masters in the process of being educated. its main concern is not the child’s inner processes, but the cultural clothing he or she must duly and properly put on. what goes on within the child’s soul is of no or very little importance. what he is required to do is to stop wetting bedsheets, to pass the high stakes finals and to master some other institutional prerequisites of “life success” known in advance. in erick blaire epoch, scholastic prerequisites of such “life success” were different the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:41 from modern prerequisites of “life success.” the totalitarian core of these educational systems is just the same, however, and the child must become “successful in life” therefore her or his ‘incorrectness’ – alias her or his self that makes her or him unique and distinguished from others – must be corrected. so, it is of but secondary importance what is employed to crush the child’s self (physical or psychological violence): “this business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.” a student should not necessarily be flogged – a student may be lashed with sarcasm, or irony, or contempt. there is nothing more humiliating and crushing than to be made an object of ridicule. there is nothing more hurting and debasing than to be laughed at, which mercilessly exposes you as a nobody and good for nothing. “how i dreaded that sneer of little butterflies!” again, neither butterflies nor the value of the natural history is what really matters. what matters is the presumption, on the part of the grown-ups, concerning what the child needs and does not need, this is what serves the basis for the entire school hierarchy’s pyramid outlining the so-called ‘curriculum program’ aimed to predefine the limits of the child’s cognitive needs and ‘corresponding’ educational goals in advance even without seeing the child. the most important thing here is to preset the uniform limits for all children without even meeting these children. this is exactly what constitutes the very essence of a functionally-totalitarian school; its objective is to destroy the individual self for the sake of the ‘universally common’. a ‘selfness’ child is the one that could be drill-trained into becoming tame like animals in a circus. this makes the functionally-totalitarian adults regard children’s ‘selfness’ as children’s ‘incorrectness’ in whatever form from academic to behavioral, as an offence, a deficit, and/or a crime. this is why this functionally-totalitarian system requires merciless trimming and pruning the children’s selfness as early as possible. the ideal child/student is an unconditionally obedient and fully controllable one, the one who never contradicts or thwarts the grown-ups and readily and willingly complies with whatever they require of her or him. in this system, a person must be able to be and act always together with the others in bundle (cf. italian word “fascio”, fascism). a person has no right to be and act on her or his own. a person must be able to be an element of a thoroughly controllable mass, a part of a smoothly running clockwise mechanism. a person must be a useful member of the society ideally capable of being unconditionally obedient and controlled. to completely eradicate everything that is the individually-incorrect in a child in order to educate, at the cleared ground, a universally-correct person (of course, “a highly spiritual” or “a highly moral” one) is the ultimate super-objective of any totalitarian pedagogy. however, this is nothing less but a pedagogy of destroying the child’s self, her or his individuality, which cannot possibly be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. it is either there – or not there. if it really is there, there will always be those who will perceive it as ‘wrong’ and deviating from what for others is an the cartography of inner childhood alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.200 | vol. 5 (2017) sia:42 accepted norm. individuality is what is ‘wrong’ in its very essence. this is what makes it so valuable, to the point of comprising true human dignity. the pedagogical dominance of the european culture – in family, in school, in society – is, undoubtedly, one of the reasons for the rise of the totalitarian regimes that were so widespread in the 20th century. it was the functionally-totalitarian pedagogy’s soil that the european totalitarianism grew upon in all of its political manifestations. totalitarianism is rooted in certain education. basically, totalitarianism is also a pedagogical and not just a purely political phenomenon. the political regime of totalitarianism is simply what gives a ‘finishing touch’ to the functionally-totalitarian pedagogy. if a culture is founded upon a system of education aimed at modeling debased human automatons, which means it is based on humiliation of the human dignity, it will be inevitably pregnant with political totalitarianism. references bergman, i. (1988). the magic lantern: an autobiography. new york: viking penguin orwell, g. (1947). such, such were the joys retrieved from: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys pamuk, o. (2004). istanbul: memories and the city (m. freely, trans. 1st american ed.). new york: a.a. knopf. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic, (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e1 promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance eugene matusov university of delaware, us ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college abstract we define genuine education as students’ active leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, society and the world. it is driven by the person’s interests, inquiries, needs, tensions, and puzzlements. thus, it is based on the students’ ownership of their own education, rather than on the society’s needs and impositions on the students. hence, genuine education cannot be forced on the students, but rather the students need to be supported and guided to find and pursue their own education as their existential need. we view genuine education as students’ authorship based on the students’ learning activism. in our opinion, the primary condition for the students’ ownership of their education is the students’ freedom to participate in making decisions about their education. in our paper, we discuss pedagogical experimentation aimed at promoting learning activism and ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. however, to our surprise, we found out that merely engaging students in decision making about their own education does not work for many students. after several years of practicing the open syllabus pedagogical regime in our undergraduate and graduate classes, we have experienced and abstracted two major mutually related problems: a problem of “culture” and a problem of “self-failure.” the issue of “culture” involved a tension between building a new democratic educational culture while practicing it. we also found that our undergraduate and graduate education students do not follow their own freely chosen educational commitments, and thus they feel betrayed by themselves. analyzing students’ reflections on the self-failures, we found that they felt pressured by life and institutional survival and necessities. because of that, they did not have the luxury of prioritizing their own educational self-commitments. in response to this and other concerns, we developed a hybrid pedagogical regime, called opening syllabus. we focus on tensions within this new, hybrid pedagogical regime, by analyzing students’ reflections and contributions in class. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college in philadelphia. she studies meaning making in education and play, dialogic educational relationships and events, issn: 2325-3290 (online) promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e2 dialogic teacher orientation, and the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. she uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic orientation in her studies. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play and education. her most recent publication is: marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). "spoilsport" in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4. acknowledgements we want to thank tina kullenberg, robert l. hampel, marisa koffke, mark smith, and angela kost for their critical feedback and suggestions on the previous drafts of the paper ��� introduction problem: robbing students of authorial agency in education conventional institutionalized education is probably the last institution in a democratic society that remains authoritarian by design1. even such traditionally authoritarian institutions as medicine, military, and police have been democratized recently. for example, it is not appropriate for a doctor to dictate a treatment for his/her patient any more, but rather to inform the patient about possible treatments and their probable outcomes and side effects for the patient to make his or her informed decision about his or her health (and define what health means for the patient). conventional schools arguably remain the last bastion of authoritarianism in the name of education. all or almost all decisions about education are made for the student: whether to have education or not have it, what to study, how to study, with whom to study (i.e., the professor and peers), what the success of education is, what the purpose of education is, when and how to communicate, and so on. paradoxically, a democratic society suspends democratic practices and relationships for the eventual mastery of participation in a democratic society. ironically, it is true not only for children but also for adults in conventional institutionalized education. this authoritarian pedagogical regime creates the biggest educational problem, namely that the very people that are in the center of educational practice are excluded from having a legitimate right to make decisions about its meaning and purpose. this leaves the students often alienated, disinterested, learning shallowly and without deep critical reflection, treating education as an imposed chore and not something that is important and relevant for themselves. the students, in other words, do not readily develop ownership of their own education, do not take educational responsibilities, do not accept educational commitments, and avoid educational activism. the authoritarian makeup of the conventional educational institutions is, actually, robbing the students of authorial agency in education (matusov, 2011). in our paper, we discuss pedagogical experimentation aimed at promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. to our surprise, we found out that merely engaging students in decision making about their own education does not work for many students. we found that our undergraduate and graduate education students do not follow their own freely chosen educational commitments and, thus, feel betrayed by themselves. analyzing students’ reflections on the self-failures, we found that they felt pressured by life and institutional survival and necessities. because of that, they did not have the luxury of prioritizing their own educational selfcommitments. in response to this and other concerns, we developed a hybrid pedagogical regime, called 1 this oppression is common not only for conventional educational institutions but for some innovative ones, including homeschooling. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e3 opening syllabus. we focus on tensions within this new, hybrid pedagogical regime, by analyzing students’ reflections and contributions in the class. democratization of higher education open syllabus pedagogical regime we think that it is long overdue finally to democratize institutionalized education in order to promote students’ learning activism and ownership of their own education. this democratization of education will serve at least three major purposes. first, it deepens democracy. students are socialized for 13 (k-12), 17(+undergraduate), or even 22 or more (+graduate) years in authoritarian institutions where negotiation, authorial judgment, and democratic decision making about one’s own fate are not legitimate. after that, people are expected to unlearn this socialization and socialize within a full-blown democratic society. this unlearning of authoritarian socialization is not always easy – leaving many people as either passive participants, poor participants, or even non-participants in a democratic society. students’ socialization in democratic educational institutions should arguably strengthen a democratic society and people’s participation in democracy (dewey, 1966; rietmulder, 2009). second, student’s socialization in democratic practices deepens education. in our view, the inherent, non-instrumental, sphere of education involves critical examination of the self, life, society, and the world (cf. plato, 1997). education in itself is a part of the self, life, society, and the world and, thus, it has to be critically examined by the learners. also, making informed authorial judgments and decisions about the learner’s own education promotes learning activism. genuine education requires freedom for decision making about education itself. finally, third, democratic education promotes the learner’s authorial agency (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016) and ownership of his/her own life. self-determination is a universal human right, currently robbed from the students by conventional institutionalized education (macfarlane, 2013). interestingly enough, from a survey of 299 undergraduate students in a university in hong kong, macfarlane found that the large majority want free attendance and no grades (macfarlane, 2016). macfarlane argues that academic freedoms should be expanded from the academic faculty to university students as it used to be in many european universities until the end of the nineteenth century (macfarlane, 2013). these considerations have led us to the development of the concept of “open syllabus education,” where all decisions about the organization of education are made by and with the students where the teacher is a facilitator and consultant of the process (but not an enforcer of it) (shor, 1996). analyzing conventional “closed syllabus” pedagogical regime, where all decisions are made unilaterally by educational authorities (e.g., teachers, school administrators, ministries of education), we abstracted four major areas of the teacher’s and institution’s unilateral decision making about the organization of the educational process. these areas include: 1. curriculum: what students are expected to learn and in what sequence; 2. learning commitments: a set of learning activities in which the student must engage (commonly known as assignments); 3. educational policies: a set of regulations and deadlines to enforce the learning commitments, rule the participants’ engagement in class, and create sanctions for their breaking and/or rewards for their achievements; 4. summative assessment: definition and operationalization of the institutional educational success and failure. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e4 we added fifth and sixth elements of our organizational decision making that are never a part of the closed syllabus because they are not needed there: 5. organization of democratic decision making: how the participants make decisions in the face of their disagreements; 6. type of pedagogical regime: what type of pedagogical regime the students want to have in our class: open or closed syllabus (later we added “opening syllabus” see below). interestingly enough, the issue of how to organize the teacher’s guidance has so far not been defined and recognized as a separate area of the organizational decision making in either closed or open syllabus (decision#7). probably because in both cases the teacher’s guidance is left to the teacher’s professionalism and practical wisdom in the moment (i.e., phronêsis, using aristotelian terminology). another important decision that is left out of both open and closed syllabus is whether the student should have education or not at all (decision #8). this decision is taken away from the students in the conventional credentialed institutions. in our first efforts to democratize our undergraduate and graduate university classes all 6 areas of the organizational decision making, listed above, were open for our students. in a group of professors, before we began our open syllabus classroom experiments, we engaged in a deep analysis of the book “when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy” by ira shor (1996). in our analysis, shor limited democratic pedagogical regime to learning commitments (#2), educational policies (#3) and organization of democratic decision making (#5). he left his unilateral power intact to define the class curriculum (#1) and unilateral institutional power to define summative assessment (#4). although he did not have an in-depth discussion of these limitations of his democratic pedagogy in his book, it seems to us that his curricular unilateralism was justified for him by his epistemological authority (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015) – as an expert in the subject focus of the class he knew what should be learned, while his students did not. also, it seemed that he accepted his university regulations of and needs for the summative assessment. our approach to democratization of institutional education was different regarding these matters. we accept shor’s tacit argument about the teacher’s epistemological authority but we reject his decisions and conclusions (#1 and #4) presented in his book2. we agree that the teacher often has epistemological authority by having experiences, familiarity, and interest in the field. however, we also think that learning activism and education ownership begins with our students’ constant and changing consideration of what they want to study, i.e., “open curriculum.” also, deciding what to study as a class, and therefore having to argue how to prioritize one topic over others, has an important educational aspect in itself. to reconcile these two important concerns -the teacher’s epistemological authority and students’ learning activism – we developed a tourist guide metaphor for a role of the teacher. the teacher’s epistemological authority should serve an advisory rather than a dictatorial role. as a tourist guide, a teacher should provide the students with the map of the “foreign curricular territory” of possible curricular topics with brief descriptions-provocations of their attractions and possible significance for the students so they can find their own places of their interests3. 2 later ira shor started providing curriculum choices for his students (shor et al., 2017, in press). 3 for example, this is one of the listed topics of a curriculum map for an undergraduate course on cultural diversity in education: “cultural mismatch” what is a cultural mismatch between the teacher's and students' cultural expectations and behavior? have you experienced ones? what can educational problems result from a cultural mismatch? is it possible to prevent cultural mismatches or not and why? how can a teacher recognize a cultural mismatch (and not intentional violation of cultural norms and expectations)? facing a cultural mismatch, what should the teacher do: a) make the student learn and use only the cultural pattern of expectation and behavior dominant in the mainstream culture that the teacher belongs to, b) promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e5 the students are invited to choose a curricular topic from the “curricular map” – a collection of curricular topics with short teaser-explanations. curricular topics in the curricular map are compiled from the three main sources: a) the instructors’ own authorial professional expertise (before the class starts), b) colleagues’ professional authorial judgments (e.g., a list of curricular topics in their syllabi of similar courses) (before the class starts), and c) the former and current students’ interests relevant to the course (during the class term). students decide which of the topics to study for the next class and how long to study it. in case of disagreements, the student-sponsoring the topic has to try to convince his/her peers why this topic is better than all alternatives for the next class. the final decision is often defined by vote, although in some cases students came up with different means of resolution: flipping a coin, sequencing the topics for several classes in advance, studying individually or in small groups in parallel, or scheduling the competing topics for the same class meeting to be studied by the whole class. students also can and do add new curricular topics that are not originally suggested by the teacher. finally, in some cases, students suggested the teacher’s epistemological authority should define the next option – this option allowed the teacher to select whatever topic the teacher felt to be important and relevant for class at the given moment (although the students always demanded a justification from the teacher of his/her choice). sometimes, a new topic emerges during the class discussion and the students make a collective decision to put on-hold the topic planned in advance (and sometimes they change their mind later and do not want to return to it). this is how we articulated the open curriculum to the students in our course syllabus: in order to make our class as meaningful and useful for you as much as possible, i want to apply the concept of "open curriculum”: you will design what you want to learn (i.e., the class curriculum) as the class goes. you may ask me and yourselves, "how can students (i.e., we, educxxx students) participate in designing a good class curriculum, if students are not familiar with the academic matter of the class? is it not a primary, if not the solely, role of the teacher, who is supposed to be very knowledgeable expert in this academic field and knows better what the students (i.e., we, i) should learn in this class?” this is a good and tough question, which, in my view, reflects one of the main paradoxes of learning, namely: on one hand, a student does not know what to learn because the student is not familiar with the subject of his/her own learning. but on the other hand, learning is transformation of the student's subjectivity: his/her opinions, thoughts, feelings, worldviews, interests, puzzlement, and concerns. without a student actively raising a question, his/her teacher's answer usually remains meaningless for the student. thus, meaningful guidance by the teacher starts with the student's question. to address this learning paradox, i propose us to constantly negotiate what we will learn to reflect your emerging questions, puzzlements, concerns, and interests. it is like going to an unfamiliar foreign country: the guide's suggestions and the tourists' emerging interests generate meaningful, safe, and exciting tourist experiences and learning. the more tourists become familiar with the foreign country, the more informed becomes their interests. similarly, i hope that the more you become with vast terrain of the field, the more informed you will become your interests and choices of the study. based on study of the field of diversity issues in education, i have developed a "curriculum map”: a list of topics important for diversity in education. at any time, feel free to propose a new topic of your interest that may be not on the list and i will include it on our curriculum map. as your views and interests may change during the course, we can travel in different territory of the curricular terrain (i.e., curriculum map). at the end of each class meeting, we will make decision of what to study next and check if we want to continue staying on the current topic or move on. we'll try to plan one session ahead. i already asked you to reply on my learn the student's cultural pattern of expectations and behavior for providing better guidance and comfort to the student, or c) something else (what is it and why)? what would you do, as a teacher, when facing a cultural mismatch? promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e6 curriculum map survey about your familiarity and interest in curricular topics of the class. the results of the curriculum map survey4 show, you already have certain interests and attractions and also you have certain indifferences and curricular repellences. some of these indifferences and repellences may be caused by your lack of familiarity, or poor learning experiences with these subjects, but some can be a result of your informed choice. there is also a potential effect of serendipity of getting attracted (or repelled) to something that you did not care before or were not even aware of. you may ask me about a logical and necessary sequence of curricular topics. how can this issue be addressed in the open curriculum pedagogical regime when students select what they want to study? what if students select topics in a wrong sequence? in my view, topic sequence may have many diverse logical and psychological underpinnings but the bottom line is that it should make sense for a student and should emerge as an epistemological and ontological need for the particular student. if a topic sequence is violated for you, you should experience a topic sequence problem first and then we can address it together. i found out that when the students are choosing topics, this logic of the subject-matter needs to be a part of the educational inquiry itself. the issue of sequencing needs to be a part of the student’s negotiations within the very process of choosing topics itself. moreover, the participants may discover during the examination of some topics that they need to have some “prior” knowledge, and decide to switch the class topic to a “previous” topic in a sequence. what is important is that the “sequencing” of the topics itself is a part of dialogic negotiation and examination5. some people argue that open curriculum can work in social science where academic issues often have more entries through students’ personal experiences but not in exact sciences or math. interestingly enough, i experienced a pedagogical practice of open curriculum in my high school math calculus classes, where my math teachers introduced new big units through many math problems that we had to solve on our own (individually or in groups). guidance was provided on-demand when some or all of us got stuck. we could jump on any math problem on the sheet (or invent our own). this open curriculum approach was developed by russian-soviet math educator nikolay n. konstantinov6. the curricular sequence was dictated by students’ emerging educational experiences, needs, and demands. as to the summative assessment (#4), we found that our institutions do not specify how summative assessments have to be performed (except assigning letter grades), leaving it to the full professional discretion of the professors. based on these institutional regulations, we can legitimately pass the summative assessment decision to our students. in practice, in our open syllabus classes, students’ decisions about summative assessment vary. some students and/or classes choose relatively conventional summative assessments based on their “participation” and “quality” of their work (usually papers) graded by the instructor. these students often argue that summative assessments help them 4 students take the curriculum map survey before the class starts. the survey lists many of the curricular topics of the map and asks the prospective students to rate how familiar and how important each other topic is for them personally and for their professional development. 5 for instance in one of my (second author) classes on the school-family-community partnerships there are three topics about race issues: 1) issues of race in school family relationships – problems (i) – introduction to issues of race (general issues of racism, racial identity and dominant and minority tensions, etc.); 2) issues of race in education problems (ii) – specific issues of educational relationships, problem of “acting white”: achievement vs loyalty etc.); and 3) issues of race and education – solutions (iii). my students chose topic #2 that dealt with specific issues of educational relationships and justified it by saying that they are very interested in discussion of the problem of “acting white” and not as interested in general issues of racism. however, during the class itself, they started discussing general issues of racism (topic #1). the topic became a “natural” path for them to address these issues in that sequence. 6 i (the first author) am working on a preparing a special issue on an innovative math education by nikolay konstantinov for the journal of russian and eastern european psychology. konstantinov described mathematics as a “living science, still intensively being created, and not a rigid body of knowledge that one must learn and then apply” (karp & vogeli, 2010, p. 217). promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e7 stick to their learning commitments and manage their life demands. however, some other students and/or classes demand to abolish summative assessment (grading) all together by giving themselves an “unconditional a” for the class from the beginning. the latter students argue that summative assessments are about conformity of the students to the teacher’s expectations – they involve pleasing the teacher’s demands and distract students from their own education. some of these students may require formative assessment and ask for the teacher’s and/or peer’s authorial feedback and judgment of the quality of their work and progress. the other two interesting areas for the students’ decision making in the open syllabus pedagogical regime are organization of democratic decision making (#5) and type of pedagogical regime (#6). as it is now, in our open syllabus classes, students have practiced the following diverse ways of democratic decision making: a) voting by majority (i.e., majority imposes its decision on minority), b) each person deciding for him/herself, c) going by consensus via seeking a compromise (with each student having a veto power), d) flipping a coin, or e) deferring the decision to the teacher. an issue of how to decide about decision making presented an interesting meta-problem for our students who felt initially that decisions should be reached by consensus. it was a novel experience for the vast majority of both undergraduate and graduate students not only in their educational institutions and, paradoxically, in their life in a democratic society. deciding upon a type of pedagogical regime also involves many interesting discussions. some of our past students wanted closed syllabus because they were afraid of “a lack of structure” in the open syllabus and of spending too much time on organizational decision taking away from “the class itself.” meanwhile many of our other past students were either excited or intrigued about promises of the open syllabus to promote the ownership of their own education (and life). often these two groups could not convince each other. in those cases, we, their professors, proposed to have a class with mixed pedagogical regimes: closed syllabus for those who wanted it and open syllabus for those who wanted it. for the first group, we promised to develop a conventional syllabus and for the second group, the syllabus had to be developed collaboratively. however, while the second group was ok with the proposal, so far the first group unanimously rejected the proposal for the mixed class and demanded from us to impose their choice of the closed syllabus on the whole class because “otherwise it would not make sense.” after the second group of students and we, their professors, rejected this demand, the first group reluctantly accepted open syllabus (despite our encouragement to stick with their own pedagogical regime of closed syllabus). finally, we want to describe how we introduced the whole idea of the open syllabus pedagogical regime to our students on the first day of the class. often we tried to connect this idea of the open syllabus to the topic of the first class. for example, in one undergraduate class for preservice educators, the class title was “building community of learners in urban settings” taught by the first author. after we unpacked the notions of “urban” and “community”, i guided my students to contrast the notion of “good learner” versus the notion of “good student.” very quickly the students came to the important difference between “a good learner,” who tries to pursue his/her own, self-defined, inquiries and studies, and “a good student”, who tries to please the authorities to get good grades. then i asked them how they wanted me to treat them: as “learners” or as “students” and what pedagogical consequences would follow promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e8 from that decision. this discussion quickly led to the discussion of the open vs. closed syllabus. however, connecting the class topic and the consideration of pedagogical regimes was not always possible. in the latter case, we asked our students if they wanted to know about the class syllabus exploiting their conventional expectations. then the instructor asked them what type of syllabus they preferred, open or closed, and the discussion jump-started. after practicing open syllabus for several years, we became excited with many aspects of the open syllabus pedagogical regime. we were impressed with many thoughtful deliberations about different aspects of the students’ education. the education became more meaningful and exciting for the students. it really worked well for some students, propelling their learning activism and ownership of their education, and spreading their self-initiated educational activities outside of class space, participants, and time. students brought a lot of pedagogical innovations in our class, curricular, instructional, and organizational. for example, in one of our undergraduate classes, 30 out of the 66 curricular topics on the curricular map came from the students. in another graduate class, a student proposed and conducted her main learning project through the whole class’ enactment of a hypothetical town hall meeting between urban school administration and parent community to discuss whether the urban school should become a charter or remain traditionally public. some teacher education students decide to try open syllabus in their own classes. at the same time, we have been faced with two major problems of the open syllabus pedagogical regime. one major problem involved a cultural disruption and the second major problem involved an emerging sense of self-failure in some students. below we will discuss these two major problems in detail. to address these problems, we have moved to another, hybrid, pedagogical regime: opening syllabus, which we will describe and analyze. we conclude by problematizing democratic education in the society, where the totalities of its practices are based on instrumentalism of labor and work, necessities and needs (arendt, 1958). two main problems of open syllabus in high education after several years of practicing the open syllabus pedagogical regime in our undergraduate and graduate classes, we have experienced and abstracted two major mutually related problems. we have labeled the first main problem as a problem of “culture.” it involves a family of issues related to many students’ collision with the new pedagogical culture of open syllabus, based on their freedom, decision making, and democratic self-governance. these are cultural communal aspects, which are mostly unfamiliar for many of the students. we have labeled the second main problem as a problem of “selffailure.” it involves some students’ sense of personal failure to prioritize their commitment to freedom to study what they want – the freedom they openly desired -over their commitment to their life and institutional survival and pressures, coming from the students’ other classes and other spheres of their life. issues of open syllabus: “culture” "the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings." oscar wilde democratic governance of the students’ own education distracts from the curricular subject matters. although we tried to connect these two activities, since our curricular subjects also involved education, it was not always organically possible. this was especially evident at the beginning of the class when many decisions had to be made. some students became frustrated, because they desired promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e9 getting into the gist of the curricular issues, which they felt was the purpose to come to the class. however, the professors (and other, more enthusiastic peers) involved them in designing the class. later, some of the students reported that they felt we, their professors, were “lazy” because it was not their job to design the class but their professors’. thus, at times, the democratic governance felt like an annoying obstacle on the road to education. second, often the democratic governance decision making in the open syllabus pedagogical regime felt more intellectual – a game of mind – rather than ontological – an important experienced life tension/dilemma – for the participants. this means that the need for decision making did not come from the participants’ experience with some kind of problem or tension or dilemma but was simply imposed by a need to be organized. for example, deciding summative assessment at the beginning of the class often felt like a remote esoteric issue, while simultaneously it was important as defining the class atmosphere and a nature of the students’ participation: whether the students’ conformity to the instructor would be important for her learning or not. at the same time, diverse alternatives, discussed by the students, were often also driven by their old culture of survival, comfort, and minimizing efforts. for example, in a discussion determining whether a professor should only call on students who raised their hands or also call on students who did not raise their hands, often a majority of the students prioritized their own personal comfort to not be called by the professor without raising their hands. although the professor warned them that with a high probability it would lead to a split of the class with a minority of very vocal students and a silent majority, they still voted for this option. later in the semester the students might experience this phenomenon and became frustrated with this decision at the beginning of the class. however, it became too late to change because the semester was almost over. the issue was not that the students did not trust the professor initially or did not even know about the phenomenon but that apparently, they did not prioritize their education over their comfort. in itself, the problem was not inherently bad for education but it became bad in the context of the short 15-week semester. third, in the open syllabus, the students and professors intentionally design their class culture from scratch, while critically examining their intentions and underlining values at the same time. the task often became overwhelming for many students, especially in the context of the short 15-week semester. the issue became especially evident with a few students who took several open syllabus classes. they told their peers how much they relaxed, trusted and liked the open syllabus through experiencing and experimenting with it again and again. for example, in a class with both novice and seasoned7 open syllabus students, the novice students were often shocked when the issue of grading was brought to their deliberation by the professor on the first day of the class. in our view, the novice students’ shock was coming from their realization that the institutional power over them was given to them. grades are the institutional symbolic power over the students that can create pains and pleasures that can open institutional doors and close them. many novice students became anxious about trusting themselves, if the institutional oppression suddenly disappeared, calling not having grading, “going to the dark side.” a former open syllabus graduate student wrote to us, i think, for me anyway, there was also a tension to consider if the course would then be considered as “rigorous” as other courses if it had an unconditional a. both in my mind and in the mind of others with whom i shared the information the a grade came from an open syllabus class that allotted unconditional a’s – so thinking about the grade as a type of credential to pass a course and as a symbol of the work i completed in the course, is another cultural consideration for me. 7 we define “seasoned open syllabus students” as ones who took more than one open syllabus classes. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e10 in contrast, open syllabus seasoned students often got excited about another opportunity to study without the institution looking behind their back and forcing them to learn and defining their success. thus, one open syllabus seasoned student named paulina exclaimed in a discussion of grades from her previous open syllabus class that had decided to have automatic a’s (i.e., elimination of grades) that she felt liberated to pursue her project of interest she wanted to explore without any constraints, without pleasing the teacher, without knowing where it would lead her (if at all), or even without knowing if she would finish it. fourth, the open syllabus created a culture shock for some students that might lead to unnecessary resistance at least for some time. the transition from the ubiquitous conventional closed syllabus to the open syllabus was not organic or immanent but might feel impositional, artificial, and even alienating for some students. it might feel like it were imposed by a “benevolent dictator” (i.e., by us) who might revoke the majestically granted freedoms and rights at their whim at any time. as a result, an introduction of the open syllabus to novice students could become an open struggle for the students’ trust that could carry to the end of the semester or even beyond. for example, when discussing a possibility for a joint learning project, some students might refuse on the grounds, “i’m afraid of free riders,” which seems to imply that they would not get a fair reward for their work. this reveals for those students their subscription to a metaphor and a paradigm of the conventional closed syllabus pedagogical regime. fifth, when imposed educational commitments are suddenly removed from the students by the open syllabus, some, many, or maybe even all students may need an “alienation vacation” from any educational commitments (a term of one of our students) before they could generate healthy educational commitments driven by their educational self-actualization. this phenomenon of required “alienation vacation” is not new. educators involved in democratic education and in homeschooling observed this phenomenon as well, which they characterized as “intoxication” by conventional schooling that paralyzes and colonizes students’ authorial agency. the reverse of the process is “school detoxification,” when you quit school, do nothing academic for at least, at the absolute minimum, a week. if you wish, however, write stories or journal entries about your past and your future. dream, dream, dream. if you crave tv, watch it. if you crave sleep, indulge. allow yourself to go through withdrawal. pass no judgments. if you want to “work” on anything, work on forgiving and forgetting. forgive yourself for everything. forgive your teachers for everything. forgive your parents for everything. forget the lies school taught-forget that learning is separate from your life, that you can’t teach yourself, that you are defined by your grades, and all other such nonsense. detoxify. purge (llewellyn, 1998, p. 126). a founder of the uk democratic school summerhill, neill, even suggested that for each year spent by a student in a conventional school, the student should have a month of the “alienation vacation” of doing nothing educational to recover from their alienation from their own educational agency (neill, 1960, p. 2). of course, in higher education when we see the majority of our students only for a 15-week semester (during which they must take other conventional closed syllabus classes) the students do not have luxury of the time or opportunity for their “alienation vacation” to recover their educational authorial agency. sixth, the pressures coming from the students’ conventional response-resistance to impositions of the conventional institutional pressures and need for “alienation vacation” often led to the students to drop opportunities and commitments for their meaningful educational experiences. some of these promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e11 meaningful experiences might require collective efforts from at least a critical mass of the participating students. when there was a critical mass, the learning activity might collapse. for example, an online class forum might require a certain number of participants for its discursive success. when there were not enough students, the forum collapsed, i believe my answer ([i.e., preference for] limited open syllabus) was the way educxxx [another past class with the same professor that was not run as open syllabus but opening syllabus] was run (if not, that what i intended my answer to be). in educxxx i like that we had certain assignments "forced" on us, but the topic, scope, etc. was always at our discretion. i think "forcing" some assignments provides an opportunity for shared experiences and classroom culture. this semester seems a little disorganized in the sense that everyone was doing what was best for them (which i like), but what is best for you might not necessarily be what is best for the group. i guess i am struggling with how best to balance the individual as a member of a group?? i also like voting on the topics from a wide variety of possibilities so we could explore what interested us instead of what you thought would interest us. i wish more professors provided that opportunity (but i understand why they don’t b/c it's a lot of work for you!) i missed webtalk this semester as well, so i wish that was "forced" in some way (matusov, 2015, p. a200). some open syllabus students became upset with themselves and/or their peers that their educational opportunities and aspirations were not realized because of these issues. issues of open syllabus: “self-failure” although many undergraduate students may wish to have academic freedom to decide their education completely (macfarlane, 2016), our open syllabus teaching experiences suggest that not all of them are prepared for these academic freedoms. as a result, those students experience disappointment about themselves as capable learners. this can be a part of a vicious cycle: conventional school disables the students’ academic authorial agency, which makes the students unprepared for academic freedom that promotes the students’ academic authorial agency. even when our open syllabus students were extremely enthusiastic and excited about the open syllabus pedagogical regime and the course overall topic, some of them experienced an educational failure of their own prior commitment to pursue their own excitements (i.e., “autodidact helplessness”). at the end of course, they became very upset with themselves for not taking advantage of the presented educational opportunities that they had desired. their self-reflection indicated that the main reason for that was that they prioritize other, more demanding, aspects of their life that are guided by necessity and treated our open syllabus class as auxiliary, putting it on a backburner. for example, one open syllabus student wrote the following non-solicited email to the instructor, in short, i am having a terrible semester. i have bit off more than i can chew in having a part time job and taking 2 honors classes as well as extracurricular activities. when i miss class it is because i am either working extra hours at work or i am cramming for my next exam. i realize i have not been the ideal participant in our class but i can assure you i do really enjoy our educxxx class and the topics we discuss. urban education is a passion of mine and i looked forward to this class until i became so stressed this semester. it probably obvious to you, as well as to myself, that because of our open syllabus and "no grades" policy, that i have used this class as a cushion for my heavy workload. i apologize because i know i have taken advantage of what was supposed to beneficial to my learning and our class. i don't know how to make up for the class time that i have missed promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e12 except to tell you that i really have enjoyed what i have been there for and that i have tried to use webtalk to understand the days i missed. i hope you see that when i am in class i enjoy participating and have a lot to offer (email, november, 2012) (matusov, 2015, pp. a198-a199). in this email, the student started with a list of burdens that she faced in her semester in a parallel with our open syllabus class, but then she shifted her reflection on the non-coercive nature of the open syllabus that allowed her to neglect her commitments to her own educational self-actualization. this indicates a lack of a culture of taking responsibility and caring for one’s own self-actualization while prioritizing other responsibilities mostly coming from instrumental necessities and also resting from these instrumental necessities. however, without this culture of commitment to one’s own self-actualization life feels like an empty struggle for survival (arendt, 1958). this is how open syllabus students from another class reflected on the open syllabus pedagogical regime at the last day of the class: student#1: i’ll say it [the open syllabus class] 100% doesn’t work for me and i’ve learned that this semester. … i’m not a stressed out person, but i put a lot of on my plate often [including] this class clearly for me, which was a class that i was expecting to be my favorite. i mean i still love your class, but… [i was] expecting it to be … the class i put the most effort in, because it’s a topic i’m most interested in and it got completely pushed to the side for me and i [have] consciously realized that the entire semester. but also [i] just couldn’t compromise my grades and my work… i have a job … and my other stuff and i was like… well that’s – this unfortunately is the thing that gets significant […] and i needed that. that’s awful… student#2: [this was] … partially true [for me too], in the sense of the open syllabus. i absolutely loved being able to pick what we talked about next. and then… if i was present and we talked about something and it wasn’t so interesting [for me and]… we are going to talk about [that] next class, i felt i had the freedom to maybe not come, which i really enjoyed being able to. because i feel like we got to cover things that i was more interested in then – and we skipped over some of the things on the syllabus that i was less interested in [but other people in the class might be interested]… -[this is] what’s my positive side of the open syllabus. but there’s also the negative side. [by the negative side,] i mean i also i wasn’t present every class. and because there’s no attendance policy and i probably didn’t do as many webtalks [i.e., class online forum postings] as i would if they were graded and things like that. like in the grade sense, i probably didn’t put as much effort into this class as it would have if there were grades. however, i feel like i’ve gained a lot more from this class than i would have if it was graded, because when i actually was coming to class i was coming to class to be part of the discussion and to sit here and listen to what was going on. and i think that because this class we learned so much from discussion and it’s not like a powerpoint where you’re reading off the slides and lecturing, it’s like important to be here and present and i think i took a lot of this class especially, because in an urban setting it’s like a different type of teaching and i think i got a lot out of that because we had an open syllabus and it was more of a laid back discussion type feel in the class. [another student, student#3, argued that these important rich class discussions were not enough for her and she wanted a more tangible learning project to supplement classroom discussions – the commitment that she had rejected during the class nerveless.] promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e13 student#4: [yeah, it could be] a reflective journal that you just keep throughout the semester and like keep every class or every week for the two classes you would talk about what you learned and then topics you discussed and things that you can keep in a little notebook or fieldbook. like in one of my classes we kept a fieldbook. i wanted to do it [in our class] but i saved it to the end, so that’s my fault. but anyway, so it just seems little – if [just] we have the [template] worksheets where like… you can put […] them into the field book or like pictures or things like that, – because now i’d have had that for the rest of my life, so i know it was a fun thing. what was interesting in that open syllabus class is that we discussed doing collective or individual tangible learning projects – a video on urban education, a book of fieldnotes, a mythbuster book on what is urban and what is urban education, etc. – throughout the semester. at some point, the students arranged special time in the class to discuss making a video. however, when during this discussion and in the middle of excitement one student objected that it might require a lot of work in the context of many demands from other classes, the enthusiasm immediately subsided and the students never returned to this idea until the last day of class. during that discussion the professor suggested that they might not need a consensus and only those who wanted to do this project could but it did not help. another interesting theme that emerged from this discussion presented above is these open syllabus students’ ambivalence about pedagogical coercion. on the one hand, some students were against coercion because it extinguishes the students’ enthusiasm, interest, desires, meaningfulness, and learning initiatives about their education. however, on the other hand, the students felt helpless without any coercion to stay true to their commitments to their own educational self-actualization. also, coercion may lead to serendipity of a student discovering interest in an imposed curriculum theme that might not sound interesting and appealing initially. as a result of this ambivalence, they felt betrayed by themselves. in our analysis, the students’ strong experiential socialization in the culture of survival and culture of necessities overruns their will. an alternative culture – a culture of leisurely8 self-actualization, where survival, necessities, resting, and entertainment are (temporary) bracketed from personal commitments – was not available for these students. evaluation of the open syllabus elsewhere, matusov argues that the open syllabus students’ ambivalence about benefits or harms of pedagogical coercion and their sense of self-failure can be important in themselves for the students’ development of self-propelled educational agency (matusov, 2015; matusov & brobst, 2013). he argued that if these students were given more time and more experience with the open syllabus, it might promote their self-generating authorial agency in education. now, we have become doubtful about the usefulness of both this ambivalence and the students’ experience of self-failure. we also doubt matusov’s hypothesis of time and experience of the open syllabus as the crucial element of the development of the students’ self-generating authorial agency. the reasons we are dissatisfied with the experience hypothesis are both empirical and theoretical. empirical reasons are the following. despite the fact that our seasoned open syllabus students were often more trusting, positive, even enthusiastic toward the open syllabus, this does not always translate into their strong self-generating educational authorship. the evidence is mixed. the issue is that even those open syllabus seasoned students who demonstrated relative strong self 8 “leisure” means “to be allowed” (in latin), “time for learning”, “opportunity to do something”, “time at one’s disposal” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=leisure , “time for philosophical discussions of no practical purpose” (greek), in greek the word for “leisure” is “school” http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=school. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e14 generating educational authorship often welcomed it from the very get-go and had some educational or some other cultural background supporting being in control of one’s own life/education -e.g., attending diverse progressive schools, homeschooling, entrepreneurial culture in their past and/or present. a systematic empirical study of open syllabus students with strong self-generating authorship (both novice and seasoned) is needed. for theoretical reasons, we hypothesize that it is culture that creates students’ self-generating educational authorship and self-actualization. by culture we mean a dialogically and socially supported strongly valued way of life, without which a person cannot live. in the case of a culture of self-generating educational authorship, the strongly valued way of life becomes self-actualization in a cultural dialogue – a leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, society, and world. a famous american theoretical physicist savas dimopoulus nicely articulated this culture of critical self-actualization, “why do humans do science, why do they do arts? they think that arts and science -the things that are the least important for our survival -are the very things that make us human” (levinson, 2013). to generalize, fundamental science, arts, philosophy, play, and non-instrumental education, things that do not serve our survival and necessities, are things that make us human. valuing these things so strongly that it makes it impossible to live without them is the culture of self-actualization. this culture of self-actualization stays apart from a culture of survival and necessities, on the one hand; and from a culture of entertainment, hobby, and resting, on the other hand. when a famous russian artist dmitry vrubel, who testified in a case for two russian artists accused of offending russian orthodox church, was asked by the judge, "what's the purpose of your art?", he replied, "i don't know for sure, but when i don't paint for a few days, i feel terrible. my body aches, my mood is gloomy, my temper is irritable" (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 63). a culture of self-actualization transcends survival and necessities by engaging itself in imagining how things may be and humanly ought to be rather than how they naturally are. being fully human is never in the given but in imaginative and ethical becoming as the highest human purpose. however, modern societies, based on post-industrial economy of people functioning as smart machines, do not support and do not tolerate a culture of self-actualization beyond certain enclaves. institutionalized education is almost totally based on instrumentalism brought by a culture of survival and necessities. so, if our overall hypothesis is correct, we have to work hard on creating a culture of self-actualization and protect it from both institutional and cultural assault by instrumentalism, survival, and necessities. through opening syllabus toward a culture of critical self-actualization the two major problems of culture and of self-failure forced us to move us away from the open syllabus toward the opening syllabus pedagogical regime. the opening syllabus pedagogical regime starts with a hybrid of open curriculum, where students are able to choose topics they are interested in studying, and all other elements unilaterally decided by the teacher. as the class progresses, more and more decisions about other areas of the pedagogical regime are gradually transferred to the students’ collective decision making. the opening syllabus pedagogical regime stays a hybrid – somewhat in between the closed and the open syllabus: it has some common elements from either of these pedagogical regimes but also it has its own unique elements that try to capitalize on advantages of both regimes addressing their disadvantages. similarities between opening syllabus and open syllabus opening syllabus has several important elements of the open syllabus pedagogical design. these elements involve the following. first element, the pedagogical focus is on promoting students’ promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e15 voices and authorial judgments in a critical dialogue. we try to engage our students in ontological dialogic provocations (matusov, 2009) that throw and thrust them into developing their own invested opinions about the issues at hand. for example, on the issue of inequality in educational testing, we ask each small group of students sitting around a table to volunteer one participant for a musical chair activity. then we place chairs in the middle of the class – one chair less than the number of the volunteers. while music plays, the students walk around and dance. when the music stops, the students have to sit down quickly on the chairs. of course, one student will not have a seat and remains standing. the winners, the students who found a chair, get a reward – candies. we ask all students why this one student failed. usually the students provide many deficit-model replies: she was not fast enough, she did not pay attention enough, she was not skillful enough, she was motivated enough, she was clumsy, and so on. we jokingly translate their deficit ability suggestions into character deficits: lazy, stupid, ignorant, and so on. this continues until someone mentions the deficit of the number of the chairs. a professor gets “offended,” “oh, now you are blaming me for her failure?! ok, i didn’t provide enough chairs but i provided an equal opportunity for all students to succeed! why could they succeed and she couldn’t? what’s wrong with her?!” the students usually start realizing that the activity was not fair by the design because it included a deficit of the chairs: it is by default setting up somebody to lose, no matter what. by the activity design, there is no way that all can succeed, the question is who will fail in particular, not whether anyone will fail at all. then the professor introduces an unusual twist, “now you all agree that this activity is unfair. but in just a moment, all of you will create a similar unfair educational activity!” students could not believe that it would be possible because they can clearly see that the deficit in the activity, like musical chair, creates deficits in people. the professor continues, “imagine we are an educational testing company and we need to design a math test for 4th graders. you are my boss. after some time with experimenting, i created a math test that i decided to try on diverse 4th graders across different states in the us. the result of my test shows that 100% of the tested 4th graders passed my math test. is my math test good? tell me as my bosses of the educational testing company.” the students usually reject this math test because it was “too easy” for 4th graders. the professor continues, “ok, you, my bosses, rejected my math test. i go back and design another math test. this time 0% of the tested 4th graders succeeded. is it a good test?” our students often said no, because it was “too difficult of a test.” the professor asks, “so, tell me what percentage of the students should succeed to make a math test a good test?” the students’ opinions usually split between 50% and 90% percent. by voting we can establish, let us say, 80%. the professor exclaims, “now we design another musical chair activity: 80 chairs for 100 4th graders. we designed an activity where 20% of students must fail but we, the test designers, will blame students for being lazy, ignorant, incompetent, low achieving, and so on, and also blaming teachers, schools, and parents. is it fair? what kind of test can be fair?” the class usually explode in shock, discussions, inquiries and so on. after these ontological provocations, the educational process of considering educational fairness of testing begins. these ontological provocations for the students’ authorial judgments are common in both open and opening syllabus. the second similar element involve students’ limited participation in self-government of the class. this aspect is done through three major elements of the opening syllabus design: open curriculum, midterm town hall meeting, and engaging students in collaborative decision making about emerging issues. open curriculum involves students collectively deciding the next curriculum topic for the class facilitated by the curriculum map offered by the professor, like in the case of open syllabus described above. the mid-term town hall meeting is a class session, set unilaterally by the professor (in contrast to other promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e16 classes where topics are selected collaboratively), to evaluate, reflect, and improve diverse aspects of the class pedagogical design. the class starts with a survey, which explores how students feel about the class. what role or roles they have assumed in the class so far: students, pleasing the teacher; learners, pursuing their own interests and inquiries; slackers, trying to minimize efforts; and so on. how they feel about the class: as a community, as a business, as a mad house, and so on. we ask them to evaluate diverse aspects of the class pedagogical design and articulate the class strengths and weaknesses. finally, we ask the students to make specific proposals for improvement of the class and provide pros and cons of their proposals. after in-class and online discussions of the proposals the class votes on the proposals. for example, proposals may include shortening the class by setting a break or just finishing earlier, having more inquiry choices for self-studies (exploratory projects that students are assigned to do during the class), allowing as many votes as a student wants during selection of a new topic, and so on. often the number of improvement proposals vary between 10 and 20. the voted-in proposals are implemented in the second part of the class term with students monitoring their consequences. finally, the third element, whatever organizational question a student asks the professor about the class (e.g., length of a reply in a self-study, an exploratory online study that students do in class), the professor turns back to the class for discussion and at times for voting in a case of disagreement. thus, this overall gradual involvement of the students in constantly evaluating the quality and ecology of the class pedagogical processes, proposing improvements, considering alternative ideas and their pros and cons implications, making collective decisions leading to the emergence of the students’ ownership of their education and life and authorial pedagogical judgments about their education and its quality. importantly, it makes students’ authorial decision making and judgments ontological because it emerges in the students in response to their experienced issues, tensions, and problems, in contrast to often nonontological decision making in the open syllabus. similarities between opening syllabus and closed syllabus there are also three aspects of the opening syllabus that are common to the closed syllabus. the first aspect is that the initial class pedagogical regime is designed unilaterally by the professor. the students enter the class with a ready-made non-negotiable pedagogical design. even its open element like open curriculum is not negotiable. the second aspect involves non-negotiable exposure to learning activities – learning assignments, such as each class session self-studies, posting at least one message on the class online forum, main learning project, and “class attendance” (see its description below). the third aspect is summative assessment (marks/grades) and surveillance of the students’ participation in the non-negotiable course activities like attendance, assignments, online forum (labelled as a “participation report”). this aspect creates power of punishment and rewards for the students’ unconditional cooperation and conformity with the professor’s unilateral and non-negotiable demands. although many aspects of our opening syllabus are new for the students, the overall meta-design of the unilateral non-negotiable regime is not. through the class the professor’s unilateralism and nonnegotiability are gradually and contextually melting, as students become more and more engaged in collective problem-defining, problem-solving, and decision-making, while facing diverse emergent issues. thus, first a dialogic and critical culture based on unilateral, non-negotiable, and preset professor’s pedagogical design emerges in the class. then, this imposed culture of critical dialogue and authorial judgment gradually becomes deconstructed as students find its organizational and pedagogical boundaries insensitive to their own education (i.e., its critically emerging vision) and well-being. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e17 unique features of opening syllabus finally, the opening syllabus has its own unique aspects uncommon in both open and closed syllabus pedagogical regime. first, all exposures to non-negotiable learning activities are open-ended and involve diverse forms of participation. for example, “class attendance” can be done via diverse forms. one type of class attendance is traditional: the student is physically in the classroom. the second type of class attendance is listening to an audio recording of the class and posting a reflective essay on the class online forum. the third type of class attendance is studying a different topic related to the class of the student’s own interest and posting a reflective essay on the class online forum. the latter option allows the student, who did not attend the class, to study something specifically interesting for him/her without receiving agreement from the other students or the instructor (e.g., in a cultural diversity class for future teacher a student chose to study issues of cultural diversity of humor in education). the open and diverse nature of students’ non-negotiable exposure to learning activities is designed to promote students’ own educational interests, ownership of their own education, flexibility and sensitivity to the students’ life demands and conditions, their own experimentation with their education, diverse learning styles, reintegration of life and education (i.e., making education ontological), and serendipity of discovering something interesting that they may not come to without being forced. it also promotes the students’ negotiation of types of learning activities and participation because open-endedness and diversity of participation encourages students to propose new learning activities and new form of participation of their interest and meaning-making. the second unique aspect of the opening syllabus is decolonizing the students’ personal time from learning assignments (i.e., homework). homework transforms education into chores for the students rather than leisure (it is home-work, not home-leisure). one of our students made her main learning project about effects of homework on students’ learning. she found that research shows that homework, in whatever form it is designed, is not effective for learning, however it is defined, unless homework is self-generated by the student him/herself. being surprised by this student’s finding, we checked diverse research and came to the same conclusions (bennett & kalish, 2006; chen & stevenson, 1989). thus, we decided that all assignments have to be done in class unless students freely choose to do them (or something else) at home in their own time. initially we moved homework “mini-projects”, which our students later renamed into “self-studies,” into the class time without much change but then our students pushed for changes. first, the students demanded to change the nature of the class assignments from responding to professors’ questions caused by some provocation to exploration of their own inquiries. second, suddenly students’ complaints about limited time to do the self-studies transformed into exciting learning opportunities because some students wanted to finish their self-study at home, although the self-studies were fully credited by the surveillance system of the participation report even when incomplete. decolonization of the students’ personal time creates opportunities for the students’ selfinitiated education. the third unique aspect of the opening syllabus is about summative assessment (i.e., grading). both closed syllabus and open syllabus created both advantages and disadvantages with regard to summative assessment, based on the instructor’s judgment of the quality of the students’ contribution and/or performance. closed syllabus usually involves summative assessment that has many functions. one function is to create pedagogical coercion for the students to engage in learning activities such as class attendance, assignments, final projects and so on that are considered by the professor as important for the students’ education. another aspect of summative assessment is to provide students with honest feedback about quality of their contributions and/or performance from the professor’s point of view. finally, the third function is to conform the students to the professor’s vision of the truth and the quality of the students’ work as defined by the professor. in our view of building a culture of educational selfpromoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e18 actualization, the first and second functions of summative assessment may have limited but important benefits. the first function may create the students’ exposure to important learning experiences and professional issues, in which they might not get involved on their own. this is especially important for those students whose educational self-generating authorship is relatively weak. the second function may have a dialogic, critical, and supportive value. however, we consider the third function of summative assessment most harmful for the students’ educational agency and voice because it suppresses students’ own authorial judgments. in addition, summative assessment disrespects students’ non-participation and alternative participation. it also creates an unsafe learning environment where students’ mistakes cause punishment from the teacher and are not viewed as teaching-learning opportunities, and thus disrupt the teacher-student trust necessary for providing sensitive guidance. finally, conventional summative assessment focuses the students on the professor’s authorial judgment of quality and does not engage them in development of their authorial judgment and definition of quality of their work embedded in critical dialogue. in contrast to closed syllabus, students of the open syllabus educational regime often reject summative assessment because of its negative aspects listed above. it may work very well for autodidactic students with strong self-generating educational authorial agency, who initiate and follow their own learning activities. however, for the rest of the students in the open syllabus, who are the majority in our experience, a non-coercive environment without feedback does not work well (see the evidence above). so far, we have come up with an alternative, authorship-respected, summative assessment in the opening syllabus that preserves pedagogical coercion, honest feedback by others, while engaging the students in consideration of the quality of their own work from their own perspective and providing a relatively safe learning environment. in our opening syllabus courses, the final mark grade consists of the two following parts: 1. students’ conformity with the professor’s unilateral requirements, such as “class attendance”, a minimum number of online class forum postings, and an online submission of the necessary number of self-studies (70 points max total) and 2. the graded quality of the students’ main learning project (30 points max plus possible 3 extra credits). the first part is administrated electronically by the course server through course website. in our undergraduate courses, the main learning project involves students investigating an issue of their interest related to the course to address some questions that they do not know but want to know – the practice that may be important in their future teacher profession. in graduate opening syllabus classes, students design their own main learning projects based on their professional interests. main learning projects may involve diverse formats: essay, letter, website, teaching a class, development activity, simulation, song, video, class oral presentation, and so on. in our opening syllabus classes, we require our students to produce a proposal and at least two drafts – the “first” draft and the “final” draft. we provide our feedback on the students’ proposal focusing on helping to develop their interest without any summative assessment. the student authors can choose who can provide them with feedback and summative assessment: 1) the professor, 2) a peer (or peers), or 3) both the professor and peers. in addition, they have to evaluate their own project using either rubrics or narratives. for the final summative assessment of their “final” draft, in case of grade discrepancy between (or among) their own grading and other people’s grading, the student author of the main learning project can choose their own grade on a scale of the minimum and maximum grades of the discrepancy. this way of authorship-respected selfgrading informed by others protects the author student from a need to conform to the judgment of the grader (the professor), while allowing to be exposed to other people’s honest feedback. it also engages promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e19 the student-author in an authorial judgment about the quality of their work and creates a possibility for engagement of the student-author in the critical dialogue about what constitutes the quality of their work. of course, this practice of authorship-respected self-summative assessment informed by others is not without its own problems. first of all, students’ self and others’ summative evaluation can be shallow as they may not engage in dialogue about their evaluation of quality of their work. second, their primary focus of selfand other summative evaluation may focus on safety and not judgment of the quality their work. third, self and others’ evaluation is imposed on the students who may not want or need it at the given time or at all. fourth, if we consider our target group of the students for whom we have designed the opening syllabus and for whom the opening syllabus is helpful, it is an open question whether the pedagogical coercion built in the opening syllabus pedagogical regime also impedes the students’ agency and critical dialogue. this issue becomes especially acute when the opening syllabus students face summative assessment grading of their main learning project. on the one hand, this grading is negotiable and offers honest feedback by others combined with institutional learning safety to the students. however, on the other hand, the honest feedback and institutional learning safety often contradict each other. for example, if in the authorial judgment of the professor a student’s project has poor shallow quality that the professor communicates by giving a low score grade, the student’s institutional learning safety is jeopardized. this jeopardy can be addressed by the student’s high self-grading either because the student wants to protect him/herself and/or because he or she really thinks that his or her project is good (however the student judges it). in this case, we think the grading practice will work well by communicating the professors’ honest feedback to the student while providing the student with the institutional safety. however, in the other possibilities -when both self-grading and grading by others are driven by honest feedback or by safety at the expense of the others’ concerns -either honest feedback or institutional safety will be sacrificed. another related problem is that an opening syllabus student may realize during the class or when taking the next opening syllabus class that pedagogical coercion is a sham, which can be easy to manipulate and beat as a game. for example, the surveillance system of the participation report only registers the presence of a student contribution but not its content. similarly, the summative assessment of the main learning project can be unconditionally set up by the student in advance by a high score in the self-grading regardless of its content. thus, an opening syllabus student may jump to essentially an open syllabus pedagogical regime regardless of how much the student is ready or not ready for his/her own successful educational self-actualization. it may again lead to self-failure of missed educational opportunities. although we believe that genuine education cannot be guaranteed, we still want to work on a pedagogical regime that is sensitive to the diverse needs of diverse students. does the opening syllabus promote the emergence of dialogic culture of authorial agency in education? do we have any evidence that the opening syllabus pedagogical regime promotes the emergence of an authorial agency dialogic culture for the students that addresses the “culture” and “selffailure” of the open syllabus without falling back into the closed syllabus coercive pedagogy, robbing the students of learning activism? yes, we have this evidence. first of all, during the mid-term town hall meeting, all opening syllabus students expressed their great satisfaction with opening syllabus. so far, nobody has wanted to switch back to the closed syllabus. however, many of them informed us that they had had initial apprehension about the opening syllabus. thus, one undergraduate student wrote about the class at the end of the semester, when the class was over, “at first, i was a little hesitant, just because promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e20 it was so different than any other class i have ever experienced, but each week i liked the class more and more” (em, webtalk, 16 december 2015), “i also really enjoyed this class! i wasn't really sure what to expect at first but as we got into the swing of things this became one of my favorite classes this semester!” (sg, webtalk, 17 december 2015). in a graduate opening syllabus class, half of the class wanted to switch to the open syllabus (and they switched) while the other wanted to stay on the opening syllabus (nobody wanted to switch to closed syllabus). in an undergraduate class, when the class term was over several students (8 out of 19) took the initiative and introduced the discussion thread, “overall class experience” on the class web forum (known as “webtalk”). this was in itself an interesting evidence of emerging culture of self-initiating educational authorship because these postings were not required and because for technical reasons the forum notifications were not working -this means that they were checking the webtalk on their own after the class was over (there were some other substantive discussions on the class matters as well). these 8 postings, reflecting the students class experiences, have several themes. the first common theme strongly going through all postings was appreciation and enjoyment of the class, “it was by far my favorite class this semester… i really enjoyed this class and i will miss coming to class! i learned so much about our culture and the various diversity topics we could have. i hope everyone has a great semester next year. j” (kc, webtalk, 9 december 2015). the second theme expressed was sadness that many more curricular topics were not studied, “i am actually disappointed we did not get to cover more material” (ds, webtalk, 13 december 2015), “if i could study the rest of the topics with the class i would in a heartbeat!” (am, webtalk, 15 december 2015), “… i wish we could've covered even more in the class. …. the final topic of nutrition, even though we didn't get to finish, i think is an essential lesson teachers need to incorporate into their classrooms. because so many kids in the us are becoming obese, children need to be aware of the components of living healthy. i wish we could've talked about how to incorporate that into classrooms without devoting an entire lesson or class to health education strictly. how would you incorporate healthy living into a math classroom?” (gh, webtalk, 13 december 2015). this theme indicates growing and strengthening educational desires among some of the opening syllabus students. they seem to develop more educational future-oriented interests in class. the third theme was the students’ appreciation of the freedom to explore issues of their own interests and a lack of pressure from colonization of the students’ personal time by assignments (e.g., homework, tests, taking notes, memorization), “i liked how eugene gave us so many opportunities of freedom in the class such as choosing a topic or making suggestions to changes in the class during our town hall meetings” (kc, webtalk, 9 december 2015), “the fact that we did not have tests or homework allowed me to focus more on the discussion and i actually got more out of the class because i was not concerned about writing everything down or memorizing things. i also liked that we got to provide feedback on the class throughout the semester and how we made changes if we as a class wanted to” (nc, webtalk, 8 december 2015). “i really enjoyed the freedom that we had in this class but also that it was structured enough so that we wouldn't get off topic. we were all able to focus on the parts of each topic that were the most important to us with the self-studies and learn how to implement new ways of teaching into our future classrooms. thank you for a great semester!” (sg, webtalk, 17 december 2015). as the last quote shows, the freedom of exploration was not disorienting for the student, it felt secure and served her educational purposes. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e21 the fourth theme, which we are really happy about, was the students’ appreciation of the weekly self-studies that they did in class (and some continuing at home if they chose to), “i liked having the freedom to learn without worrying about memorizing little bits of information, and with the self-studies i could take my education in the direction i wanted to. all in all, i am very satisfied with this class!” the title for this in-class assignment was given by a student from previous class (our label was “mini-projects”). not only did we change the name of this assigned learning activity but we also changed its nature and pedagogical purpose. before it was a responsive assignment, asking the students to response to some videos or readings or pedagogical dilemmas. now, we provided guiding opportunities and choices for the students to develop, explore, and pursue their own inquiries by often providing them with about 20 general possible inquiries about the studied topic (e.g., what is considered bullying in different cultures) and about 20 education-related possible inquiries about this topic (e.g., what diverse teaching approaches to bullying). students asked to select two inquiries from the list (i.e., a mini-curriculum map around a particular curricular topic) or develop their own and study using internet sources of their choices (guiding sources were provided as well) to find out interesting, new, disturbing, disagreeable, or exiting information for them to share with the class. we intentionally limit time to 20-30 min to make sure that it is not enough for the students to finish to create in the students a dissatisfactory desire that they need to finish and learn more (some continued the self-study at home but we jokingly “discouraged” any homework) (cf. “the zeigarnik effect” of unfinished activity http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/zeigarnik_effect) (baumeister & bushman, 2011). the opening syllabus students, at least some, seemed to appreciate this possibility. another evidence of that was that in a graduate opening syllabus, all of those students who chose the open syllabus for the second part of the semester insisted on their engaging with a weekly self-study. in an undergraduate opening syllabus class, when a professor unilaterally cut a selfstudy because of a lack of time in the second part of semester, several students complained on the class web about a) the cutting of the self-study and b) about the professor’s unilateral decision making. the professor had to restore this self-study that some of the students choose to do it at home. the fifth theme was the students’ contrasting of some elements of the closed syllabus and opening syllabus: “… i actually got more out of the class because i was not concerned about writing everything down or memorizing things” (nc, webtalk, 8 december 2015), “…i enjoyed the aspect of no homework or tests. this helped me focus more on what i was learning through the discussions in class rather than struggling to complete an assignment or study for a test” (kc, webtalk, 9 december 2015). the students saw many aspects of the closed syllabus as distracting them from their genuine education. the sixth theme was appreciation of important learning in the class that helped the students’ personal and professional growth: “the open curriculum really brought me out of my comfort zone along with the very relaxed class atmosphere, and i think it is great for students to feel a little unsure at times in the classroom since it means they're only growing as a person” (sb, webtalk, 17 december 2015), “ i liked that we got to choose the topics we discussed in class and all of them were relevant and helpful not only as a student, but also as a future teacher…. i was really glad that i decided to do a lesson plan for my main learning project and that we were able to teach it to the class. it was great experience and practice creating a lesson plan and teaching the topic to the class!” (nc, webtalk, 8 december 2015). opening syllabus students’ appreciation of the assigned learning activities and the class overall shows that there were many learning opportunities for them, in contrast to the open syllabus courses where many students chose to opt out of these important opportunities (and did not develop alternative learning opportunities for themselves). we judge that there is another “educational culture” – opportunities for the students’ learning, nurturing interests, and growth – promoted by the opening syllabus. at the same time, so far, we did not see any evidence that the pedagogical coercion of the opening syllabus impeded promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e22 students who are strong autodidacts, probably due to the flexibility, diversity, and open nature of the assignments. ironically, conventional oppressive educational culture shapes the open syllabus pedagogical regime much more than the opening syllabus pedagogical regime. it is ironic because on the surface the open syllabus provides all the freedom to the students from the beginning while the opening syllabus gradually releases the institutional grip of the power. it is probably because when the open syllabus starts with the collapse of the institutional regime and its unilateral power, the cultural vacuum can then be filled out by students’ conventional resistive responses to the institutional regime. these responses by the “institutionally good” students involve minimizing efforts while maximizing rewards, looking for preset structure (if the teacher is not going to give this structure, the students will), if something is not required by the authority with consequences attached to the demands – no commitment will follow, life priorities are shaped by the necessities and then by having a break from these necessities (rather than by selfinitiatives and self-actualization), and so on. opening syllabus socializes the students in an alternative culture of authorial judgment and testing ideas. like in a case of extreme and prolonged food starvation where it can be dangerous to trust the person’s freedom to regulate his or her own eating – the person may die from eating too much food -excessive educational oppression may similarly require a gradual transfer of responsibility for the students’ education from the imposed regime focused on promoting the students’ dialogical authorial judgment, i.e., how the opening syllabus class starts, to the students’ own authorial agency and democratic governance. the seventh theme of the opening syllabus was that unsolicited feedback on class was one of the strongest among all the postings. this feedback involves high appreciation of critical dialogue in the class. “all the topics we covered are relevant to me as a future educator, and the class discussions really made me think about my own pedagogical views. also, it was always interesting to hear about my classmate's thoughts” (em, webtalk, 16 december 2015), “this helped me focus more on what i was learning through the discussions in class rather than struggling to complete an assignment or study for a test” (kc, webtalk, 9 december 2015), “i took away so much from our discussions and learned so much from the opinions of my peers. i think eugene is a great model of a teacher. i loved his open teaching style and his great ability to lead a discussion. i also felt comfortable & like my opinion would be respected” (am, webtalk, 15 december 2015). finally, the eighth theme was the students’ growing appreciation and commitment to the democratic self-governance that was strongly evident at the end of the class term. each time the professor made a unilateral decision, the students demanded a democratic deliberation and decision even though they might end up agreeing with the professor. they were very comfortable to raise their voice and publically (but friendly) criticize the professor, which was supported by the professor. for example, when the professor suggested to cut a second part of the class that previously decided to study bullying in school and to use the class to work on the students’ main learning project because the professor forgot a holiday break (the main learning project workshop was scheduled by the students on that class meeting), the class demanded a brief discussion and a vote. as a result, all but two students wanted to do the workshop in the second part of the class and the professor continued the bullying lesson with these two. however, later a student wrote on the class web, “this class was interesting but i wish we did the self-study on bullying, not the mlp” (rm, class web, 17 november, 2015). the professor apologized on the class web for his unilateral decision about the self-study on bullying and restored it on the class web (and a few students chose to work on this self-study at home, as noted above). promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e23 these latest themes about dialogism and authorial judgment were erupting during our mid-term town hall meeting. all of the undergraduate students said that as students they preferred opening syllabus, similar to our class, over closed syllabus, very familiar to them in their present and past school experience, and that open syllabus that threatened them. however, only half of the opening syllabus undergraduate students, future teachers, expressed that they would try to practice the opening syllabus in their future classrooms as teachers. when they asked their peers, who as teachers would practice only the closed syllabus in their future classroom but preferred the opening syllabus for themselves as students, the second half discussed how conventional education and recent reform of the no child left behind and the race to the top were not compatible with the opening syllabus. they reflected that the opening syllabus teaches students to develop their strong voice and their own judgment informed by alternative views and to use evidence to defend them. in contrast, the closed syllabus of conventional education is aimed at making sure that the students can repeat what was taught (information, skills, problems-solving) on the demand of the test designers. we were amazed by the opening syllabus students’ ability to articulate the opening syllabus philosophy and culture of promoting educational authorial dialogic agency – the theme we did not directly discuss in our classes. it showed not only the students’ powerful but tacit, and potentially uncritical, socialization in the new culture of educational authorship but also the critical awareness of it in the opening syllabus students. finally, we did not sense any sentiment of “self-failure” in our opening syllabus students. unconcluding: current problematics of the opening syllabus in this paper, we discussed and conceptualized pedagogical experimentation aimed at promoting learning activism and ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic selfgovernance. to our big surprise, we found out that merely engaging students in decision making about their own education, the open syllabus pedagogical regime, does not work for many students because of neglect of the pedagogical culture issues and self-failure. in response to these concerns, we developed a hybrid pedagogical regime, opening syllabus. below we focus on tensions within this new, hybrid pedagogical regime, by analyzing students’ reflections and contributions in the class. one of our biggest concerns with the opening syllabus (or even any pedagogical regime for that matter) is whether it “pedagogically works” for all students. for the opening syllabus, “pedagogically working” means creating a sensitive environment that provides students’ development of the educational authorial agency and personal-professional voice in and around the subject matter of the class. the concept of the opening syllabus has been developed in response to the students who are: 1) heavily socialized and traumatized by a conventional education robbing them from self-generating authorship with regard to their own education, 2) interested or can be interested in the subject matter of the class. we judge that majority of our students are like that. we have also experienced or can imagine some other types of the students. the first possible group involves students who are more or less mature autodidacts, who can organize their own education and for who the peers and/or the instructor may be unnecessary or even detrimental (e.g., bill gates in his high school and college, gladwell, 2008). they may need to be in dialogue with themselves, with literature, and people outside of the class. the opening syllabus may accommodate them by offering an alternative sabbatical-like attendance, where students are engaged in their own education and report about it to the class – but even that can be too insensitive and oppressive for some autodidacts. so far, we have not been faced with this situation, but we are considering how to accommodate these students in the opening syllabus. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e24 the second group involves students who are ready for open syllabus because they can already successfully engage in self-generating educational authorship while highly appreciating dialogue and guidance with and from their peers and/or the professor. for these students, some of the coercive nonnegotiable aspects of opening syllabus can be unnecessary, insensitive, and, thus, oppressive. the opening syllabus pedagogical regime allows for the open syllabus to be offered in the second part of the class term for those students who want to grab this opportunity. but this flexibility has a problem for those students who may want to have this legitimate opportunity from the beginning of the class. we have already experienced that the students who chose open syllabus, in an otherwise opening syllabus class, felt isolated and unsupported. one graduate student who chose the open syllabus for himself wrote in his feedback on the class, “the structure gives students an uncomfortable feeling of deviating from the prescribed path and venturing out into the open syllabus world” (december 2016). another graduate wrote in her self-evaluation at the end of the same class, although i chose to move to the open syllabus, i found i was afraid to stray too far from the rest of the class. i continued through the end of the semester as if nothing had changed. if i have the opportunity to pursue a course with an open syllabus again, i hope i will be more adventurous in pursing my own interests in the class. while freedom is nice, venturing into the unknown can be uncomfortable. i find comfort in structured assignments. i need to find comfort as a researcher as well. soon i will be on my own without a clear path through research. while i have enjoyed the opportunity to attempt venturing out on my own, i clearly have a long way to go before i am comfortable as an independent researcher (december 2016). a lack of open syllabus community and open syllabus public discourse in an otherwise opening syllabus class may create alienation in emerging autodidact students and pressure to conform to their opening syllabus peers. another possible problem related to this group of emerging autodidacts is that some of the students may jump from the opening syllabus to open syllabus prematurely and experience self-failure, which robs themselves from the available educational opportunities. again, so far we are not sure we have faced with these possibilities. the third group of students may be faced with the very different challenge of having not enough necessary coercion in the opening syllabus pedagogical regime. our opening syllabus classes start with only a very few aspects of the class being open: curriculum and dialogue and then gradually becomes open to other aspects of the class by the mid-term when the students may decide to switch back to the closed syllabus or move to an open syllabus or to have some open and some closed aspects (i.e., being open on the meta level). although in our classes so far this organization “pedagogically worked” for our past students, we do not know if it really worked well for all of our students or will it work well for all in the future. the degree and the pace of how an opening syllabus should be open-close at the beginning of the class and should progress to becoming to a more open pedagogical regime may vary from student to student. it may also involve a certain process of negotiation that we are not fully aware of or ready to explore. the fourth group constitutes students who may need “an alienation vacation” from any coercion (and even from education) to detoxify themselves from the oppression of conventional education robbing them from their authorial agency for so many years. as we discussed above, educators of democratic schools and of homeschooling have noticed this phenomenon of some students being traumatized by promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e25 conventional education so much that they may need some time off from any educational commitment to recover their authorial educational agency. the opening syllabus in the context of conventional high education does not have enough time to accommodate the needs of these students. the fifth group of students may also need a vacation from institutionalized education but for a different reason. they may be very interested in the subject matter per se and in dialogue and guidance with and from their peers and the professor but their life circumstances (e.g., poor health, poverty, family issues) may preclude them fully or partially from engagement the class. the opening syllabus does provide organizational flexibility and encourages negotiation of the pedagogical coercion (and promote trust to discuss personal issues). however, this flexibility is limited and may not always fit to the life circumstances of a particular student. the sixth group involves students for whom the subject matter of the class is peripheral to their personal and/or professional interests. we have experienced those students in our opening syllabus classes and both they and we have found that the open syllabus pedagogical regime provides enough freedom, opportunities, and legitimacy for their both engagement and disengagement. we, the open syllabus professors, legitimatize both micro and macro non-participation and disengagement from some or many topics of the class communicating to our students that we expect that some topics may or may not be interesting and important for them. not all of our students are education majors or they may change their professional interests. the students can engage in many alternative activities using their computers in the class or stay on the periphery of learning activities getting in and out. their grade can be ok when they do the otherwise required coursework or make compensations (which can be too much for these students). also, the design of the self-study explorations allows the students to find their own interests that may peripherally link to the studied topic (e.g., in a topic on the issues of drugs in education, a student may study a different relationship, for example between seriousness of drugs and incarceration rates). the seventh group, which we have actually observed, involves students who are forced to take our opening syllabus classes by the system but who may not have much interest in the overall subject of the class. for these students, our opening syllabus class may be felt as a prison or waste their time from the get go even before coming to the class because the institutional and opening syllabus pedagogical coercion might be very unwelcome by these students. of course, their attitude may change through the serendipitous learning through exposure to issues and phenomena that they might not be familiar and through our dialogic provocations (e.g., we may ask students who have particular views on some controversy and for these students create an option “i don’t care” which may present an important dialogic position for the class). however, we should not expect that serendipitous learning would happen in each and every of the cases. for the latter students our opening syllabus will remain oppressive. finally, the eighth issue with the opening syllabus pedagogical regime involves a diversity of the students’ educational philosophical values. some students may value only institutional credentials and nothing more, some students may value socialization in a targeted practice that study (e.g., becoming a competent educational researcher or a teacher), some value critical examinations of the targeted practices and beyond, some consider their educational processes as a hobby of their life, and so on. some students have a combination of these values; some students dynamically change their values during the class, and some students remain vague about their values. in our view, considering educational values is a part of education itself, which is especially important in the education of educators (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). we think that students have a legitimate right to be involved in the educational practices they believe in, and it is a good idea for their education to engage them in a critical promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e26 examination of their own educational beliefs and values in a critical dialogue with the self and others (unless they do not want to do that – we believe that genuine education cannot be forced). when students disagree with us about the inherent critical nature of their education and insist on this disagreement, it might be time for them to change their teachers (i.e., "no-fault teacher-student divorce, see mayo, alburquerque candela, matusov, & smith, 2008). from this perspective, only learners can initiate and define their education: curriculum, instruction, and assessment (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). this genuine education requires students’ freedom from necessities and assignments by others. our opening syllabus pedagogical design is an approximation and invitation to this genuine education, which can be only done fully in open syllabus. we think that our society, based on ubiquitous instrumentalism, is not ready for this type of education yet because it is still too much based on necessity. the fact that the inherent, non-instrumental, nature of the sphere of genuine education (i.e., education for the sake of education itself as the basic human need defining humanity itself) is not publically well-recognized may have deep historical and sociocultural roots, although it is powerfully felt by many people (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017, in press). the notion of education expressed by the greek word “school” means “leisure” and was understood as a leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, world, and society (arendt, 1958; plato, 1984). this type of leisurely pursuit of critical examination, freed from labor and work, was available to free male citizens of a greek democratic polis and was based on the exploitation of slaves and women (arendt, 1958). until people again become free from labor and work – free from survival and necessities and experience this freedom as a culture given -non-instrumental education for self-actualization cannot be achieved in mass education, beyond small oases and safe havens (e.g., greenberg, 1992; neill, 1960). some older people find this type of genuine leisure and leisurely education when they retire9. currently most economic and institutional practices require people to act as smart machines: to predictably arrive at preset goals and to be mutually replaceable (mitra, 2013). of course, it is true that humans can never act as perfect smart machines even when they engaged in the most routine work (wenger, 1998). it is also true that modern economic and institutional practices also require architects and designers – an intellectual elite -who do not act as smart machines but are engaged in creatively imaging new goals, values, practices, art, theories, and so on. this means the fundamental need of people for self-actualization and personal growth remains mostly unrealized for the majority of modern humanity (maslow, 1943). these are oases of non-instrumental education in the vast ocean of instrumental education. however, we may come closer and closer to the point when a need for human instrumentality will diminish through robotization, automatization, and telecommunication when economic and institutional practices may not need mass human employment in general (so called “technological unemployment”) and smart machine-like employment in specific (ford, 2015; markoff, 2015; rifkin, 2014). these growing changes in technology, economy, and institutional practices may create a new demand for mass non-instrumental education. thus, the tension in the 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(2014). the zero marginal cost society: the internet of things, the collaborative commons, and the eclipse of capitalism. new york: palgrave macmillan. shor, i. (1996). when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press. shor, i., matusov, e., green, j., ratnam, t., cresswell, j., kroflič, r., . . . marjanovic-shane, a. (2017, in press). the dpj interview with ira shor. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. promoting students’ ownership of their own education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.199 | vol. 5 (2017) e29 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word tesar, power, ideology and children (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc49 power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar the university of auckland, new zealand abstract there was not one, singular childhood in socialist czechoslovakia, but many and diverse, plural, childhoods. spanning over 40 years (1948–1989), the czechoslovak communist governance produced diverse conceptualisations of childhoods that remain often invisible, unexplored, and the current analyses are at best sketchy and refer mostly to pedagogical nuances of strong ideological pedagogical struggles. one way to explore such an abundance of historical data in a short journal article is to utilise a somewhat personal narrative of a child. this dialogic approach allows the strong presence of the voice of a child, re-told from an adult’s perspective, and it methodologically justifies an approach to thinking and theorising of socialist childhoods through vaclav havel’s (1985; 1989; 1990) theoretical thinking that has been utilised in philosophy of education previously (see tesar, 2015e). there are also other examples of complex and thorough analyses of socialist childhoods in other countries (see for example aydarova et al, 2016), and theoretical thinking about the socialist child as a foreigner to its own land, can be done through kristeva’s lens (arndt, 2015). marek tesar is a senior lecturer in childhood studies and early childhood education at the university of auckland. he is editor-in-chief of policy futures in education published by sage, and is engaged in different editorial capacities with a number of other journals and book series. his focus is on childhood, philosophy of education, policy and methodology. ��� introduction there was not one, singular childhood in socialist czechoslovakia, but many and diverse, plural, childhoods. spanning over 40 years (1948–1989)1, the czechoslovak communist governance produced diverse conceptualisations of childhoods that remain often invisible, unexplored, and the current analyses are at best sketchy and refer mostly to pedagogical nuances of strong ideological pedagogical struggles. one way to explore such an abundance of historical data in a short journal article is to utilise a somewhat personal narrative of a child. this dialogic approach allows the strong presence of the voice of a child, retold from an adult’s perspective, and it methodologically justifies an approach to thinking and theorising of socialist childhoods through vaclav havel’s (1985; 1989; 1990) theoretical thinking that has been utilised in philosophy of education previously (see tesar, 2015e). there are also other examples of complex and thorough analyses of socialist childhoods in other countries (see for example aydarova et al, 2016), and 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/czechoslovak_socialist_republic issn: 2325-3290 (online) power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc50 theoretical thinking about the socialist child as a foreigner to its own land, can be done through kristeva’s lens (arndt, 2015). childhoods in communist czechoslovakia might be positioned in a time and space of mutual surveillance of all citizens, in public and private spaces. while children and their childhoods were governed by a strong ideology that aimed to shape children subjects’ positions, this may lead to sweeping statements and assumptions when compared to childhoods in western countries. for example, that these children must have been painful, dull and boring, and perhaps sad. there are obvious differences from western childhoods, such as being indoctrinated by political figures such as stalin (in the 1950s), lenin and other political figures, and knowledge about the communist party incorporated into their daily lives (vancura, 1999). however, there is strong evidence that children in communist czechoslovakia enjoyed their childhoods, and loved the stories that shaped them2. their experiences were perhaps similar to how children experienced their mundane and everyday childhoods in western countries, albeit through and under the different ideological governance (tesar, 2014c). children in communist czechoslovakia, perhaps unlike the adults, did not have to whisper while talking about their desires. however, they did have to carefully navigate their bodies and minds as they moved to spaces outside the reach of adults, to share their thoughts and childhood secrets. such emergence of childhood places and spaces occur across cultures and ideologies, when children produce their own cultures, share their own secrets, and produce what can be referred to as their childhood undergrounds (knapp & knapp, 1976; van manen & levering, 1996; tesar, 2014b). in these times, such uncontrollable and unpredictable children’s cultures had the unintended consequence of demonstrating and performing very noticeable cracks that children could create in a system that produced, on the surface, an ideologically smooth unity of all citizens. it is here that these ‘childish’ subcultures cracked the veneer of the dominant ‘adult’ culture, offering a space of resistance that could potentially reach beyond their childhoods, as demonstrated in this article3. what was prevalent in those times was how citizens of czechoslovakia excluded themselves from public life to perform their subject positions in private. this could have been perceived as a direct ‘opting out’ of public participation, and therefore withdrawing into what could be called a private life. for children such an act would reduce the need for interventions by government agencies and educational institutions into their lives. on the surface, this idea seems to portray a less complicated time, where citizens of the state could retreat into the private sphere to ignore so-called socialist political, educational and cultural developments. however, on the other hand, this was a time in which citizens did not know who to trust and who not to talk to. citizens thus lived ‘double lives’, one public and one private (see wertsch, 2002). in the 1970s and 1980s, government agencies allowed, and in a certain sense encouraged, citizens to have public and private identities, tolerating complaints and discontent as long as these remained hidden in the privacy of weekend homes and non-political interest groups and did not become public. in this article these yet unexplored aspects of the production of childhood ideologies and thinking, are uncovered, discussed and conceptualised as childhoods at the intersections of power and ideology. the power of childhoods at the outset of the argument, it is important to highlight the theoretical framework underlying such complex thinking about childhoods as outlined in the prior section. this will then be explored through 2 for interesting example, see see the article by ana marjanovic-shane in this special issue 3 examples do not refer to the extreme organized groups, but to everyday occurances, for example hiding of a western toy or magazine out of the adults’ gaze, and sharing and experiencing this event with a peer group power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc51 presentation and analysis of the author’s personal diaries and reflections of his childhood experiences in communist czechoslovakia. while the thinker, reluctant philosopher, and playwright, vaclav havel4 (1936-2011) did not directly talk about childhoods and education per se, his conceptual thinking has a lot to offer this current positioning (tesar, 2015b). havel’s (1985) seminal text power of the powerless discusses power relations, and argues that during the stalinist period in the 1950s, citizens of czechoslovakia were governed by what could be perceived as an extreme, brutal, life-threatening, somatic power, that would position all citizens to questioning and thinking about their ability to pursue ideas in relation to their survival. according to havel, power was centralised by clear force – by the police and military departments of the government, and other power-bearing institutions, towards citizens. in an understanding of a traditional totalitarian society, this was recognisable as something akin to a dictatorship. a somewhat different structure became prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s, after the crush of the prague spring in the late 1960s. havel argues that there was a shift in the governance of citizens, from pure and sheer censorship by government institutions, towards a selfcensored, re-created and re-invented culture and society, where governing structures lost the need, and partly also the resources, to exercise total governance over all citizens in czechoslovakia. what havel (1985) argues is that society could not be divided merely into those with power and those without, but that power was distributed amongst all citizens, including students and children, as participants in the production of the ‘new’ communist system, that became reliant on the self-governance of citizens. in such a space, the lines of power became very much non-linear and not necessarily represented by the ‘level of power’ of groups of citizens, but by each and every citizen who was (knowingly or unknowingly) “both a victim and a supporter of the system” (p. 37) at the same time. it has been argued elsewhere that apart from victims and supporters, all citizens, including children, are (knowingly or unknowingly), according to tesar (2015c), also rebels of the system (tesar, 2015c). however, this era represented new relationships between citizens and the government agencies, and the social conditions that all citizens and children became subjected to. what did these childhoods look like under such a strong ideological governance? children in this era, as part of the public life, were actively involved in learning and reciting poems about political and revolutionary figures like lenin, listening to the official ideological stories from children’s magazines like little bee, as read by their teachers, and making sense of the illustrations and images that were published and distributed to them. schools and kindergartens practiced and performed mass exercises called spartakiad5 for parents and local communist leaders, and drew and created ideologically driven artwork based on the examples and ideas from the curriculum and teachers. child subject positions were not easy to govern through these statements in public stories and illustrations. for children, there were far too many colourful western toys to desire and dream that their parents might be able to acquire for them under specific conditions. western toys were only available in special stores called ‘tuzex’, the only place to buy lego, matchbox cars, and barbies; but only for the children whose parents were allowed to travel to the west. these citizens were required to return all their remaining western currency back to the state upon their return to czechoslovakia, as it was not allowed to possess foreign currency. in exchange they received a pretend currency, bony, that was valid only in these tuzex stores, which specialised in such western goods (samizdat newspaper, 1989a, 1989b). citizens and childhoods were governed by the desires for these western products. in this way, public loyalty to the system was maintained through the promise of materialist advantages and desires. however, this also created a black market within society, which 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/v%c3%a1clav_havel 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spartakiad power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc52 occurred under the veil of darkness in the passages where speculators secretly sold bony, and ‘ordinary’ citizens could buy the desired goods, for themselves, and for their children (ash, 1991). metaphor, power and childhoods havel’s (1985) work provides us with conceptual insights into communist childhoods in czechoslovakia. his metaphorical story of a fictitious greengrocer is central to his analysis of power relations in an ideological setting. the greengrocer’s tale is a narrative of the ordinary, mundane and everyday life experiences of a shopkeeper, who runs a fruit and vegetable store, which havel uses to demonstrate the complex nature of power relations in a society. the greengrocer represents the citizen in an ideological setting, who displays a sign proclaiming ‘workers of the world unite’, in the window of his shop whenever he is asked to do so. for havel, this act of placing the sign means that the greengrocer officially, publicly declares that he accepts the contemporary ideology and its governing system, and that he is ready to live in harmony with it and its structures. there is nothing simple about this act. havel (1985) argues that this is the message that the greengrocer conveys as he displays the sign: “i, the greengrocer xy, live here, and i know what i must do. i behave in the manner expected of me. i can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. i am obedient and therefore i have the right to be left in peace” (p. 28). so when the greengrocer displays the sign, he acts as if he accepts the meaning of the slogan ‘workers of the world unite’. for havel, the meaning of the greengrocer’s actions lies not in the slogan but in the performative aspect of responding to the request and placing the slogan into the window of his fruit and vegetable shop. this act carries a different message than the semantics of the slogan itself. as the greengrocer displays the sign, the message conveyed to all citizens and children walking past his store is: ‘i am just like you, i play my part in the system, i displayed the sign in my shop just as all of you have done your little parts. you cannot badmouth me, you cannot tell on me, and informers have nothing on me. i am supporting the system, and my public record is clean. my managers know that i have fulfilled my part and that i have obeyed the order.’ this is what power means for all citizens in the ideologically governed society. in this sense, the simple semantics of the slogan that the greengrocer was actually asked to display allow him to think to himself: ‘there is nothing bad, unusual or wrong with the workers from all around the world getting together and uniting’. so as havel (1985) states, the slogan supports the greengrocer in concealing from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. it hides them behind the facade of something high. and that something is ideology … it offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them (p. 28). havel’s argument could be conceptualised and interpreted as such that citizens and children living their everyday, mundane, ordinary lives are central to any power relations in the society. as such, everybody is part of the system, even if citizens are on the fringes of the society (and traditional conceptions of power), and are thus often seen and portrayed by these models of power as powerless (havel, 1985). however, for havel, all citizens are the victims and the pillars of the system, as they struggle with and at the same time support the ideological governance of the society. and that is regardless of whether they are powerful, or powerless, in the traditional sense of power. as such, this ideological governance, and system is embedded within the greengrocer’s life – and it can be any subject – whether an adult, or a child. while the greengrocer’s private life grows into what can be perceived as a multiplicity, a diversification – realised through him reaching out for his interests, power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc53 ideas and friendships, he also very much self-governs himself within acceptable levels of freedom and independence. his private life is outside of the public perception, that ultimately demands and requests from him particular subject positionings. these positionings demand particular discursive positions, that include the self-disciplining subject that can follow orders, and that is ready to conform to other citizens, and can uphold similar, if not the same, ideals as others. the greengrocer thus must publicly demonstrate that he is united with other citizens, if he really wants to quietly live his private life havel notes the difference between private and public subject positionings, as citizens separated by a deep abyss, where the purpose of life is to “create new and 'improbable' structures where … the system contrives to force life into its most probable states” (havel, 1985, p. 29). the concern is ‘what if any other performances of the subject creates a crack in the system – panorama of everyday life?’ so, the greengrocer must be punished if he challenges the everyday panorama, and it is expected that the system must react to such a ‘crack’ within it. the other citizens must punish the greengrocer, to display their own public loyalty with the system through ‘fixing’ this ‘crack’: “… the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth” (p. 39). the boundaries between who is in power and who is not are thus shattered and exposed. shore (1996) calls it “the collapsing of the traditional dichotomy between victim and oppressor” (p. 164). she uses as an example, a scene from kundera’s novel joke, where a young communist is judged for making a statement against the system that he allegedly meant as a joke. kundera analyses the transformation of the subjectivity of the young communist, from a victim of crime to being a judge. the young communist comes to understand that the way he operates in the system is that he is, as a victim of the system, in the same position as the judges. he is under the influence of the system, he is oppressed by the system, and so are the judges. he realizes that he would do the same, and pass the same sentence on himself, if he were the judge. the boundaries between who is judging and who is accused dissolve, as the selfgovernance of the person makes him realize that the system needs him to act upon his own behaviour, no matter how insignificant, to maintain the panorama of the everyday public life. it is no longer clear who is the oppressor and who is oppressed (tesar, 2014c). the greengrocer’s grandchildren these conceptions of the greengrocer as a subject of power in the centre of ideological governance is relevant to children and their childhoods in communist czechoslovakia. to illustrate the theoretical conceptions of citizens and their subject positionings, this article presents a number of the author’s diary and reflective, previously written and unpublished narratives to illustrate havel’s points6. looking back, this is a child growing up in czechoslovakia, and seeing how his experience relates to the experience of the places and spaces of childhoods, and the complex relationships with his teachers: i grew up in a city of grey, faded colours. that is how i remember my childhood in the late 1970s and 1980s in the czechoslovak socialist republic. around me were grey buildings, dark streets with fading streetlights, and children walking in bleached uniforms and red scarves. i still have a clear vision of propaganda statements printed on red banners, hanging from buildings and columns all around me in the city. a sea of soviet union flags flooded the city during celebrations. all children 6 this is becoming an established way how to look at childhood and history – see recent work by i. silova, z. millei, and n. piattoeva (silova, aydarova, millei, & piattoeva, 2016; silova, piattoeva & millei, 2018). power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc54 wore identical clothes and played with the same toys and games. we children were supposed to be all equal, treated the same, and we were all expected to think in the same way about our homeland, but the notion of all the children being equal disappeared quite early for me. our teachers wanted to know where we came from, who our parents were, and about our working-class heritage. the answers were important to the way we were perceived and treated by the teachers. “are your parents of the working class?” was a common question teachers asked us. the answer determined what was entered on each child’s file, which became an important document and character reference in a child’s journey through the socialist education system. children carried the weight of the history of their parents and families, and despite the happy, peaceful and colourful childhoods promised to us through the socialist education system, the substance of our educational futures was dark and gloomy. another reflective narrative relates to the early childhood space, and the reflection on the formation of subjectivities, in public and private discourses, and childhood underground as mentioned above: kindergarten was a special place for me at the age of three. i learnt a lot about myself, others, and about my country. what i learnt and experienced in kindergarten was not practised at home. in kindergarten, our growing bodies were subjected to exercises that resembled military marches and gatherings, specific teacher-guided games were executed, particular songs were selected for us to learn and sing, and we performed certain children’s plays and rhymes that we memorized and repeated. the curriculum was supported by a children’s magazine, which was filled with stories about children who were, as we were often reminded, just like us, and with tales about how our childhood should look, and how children should behave. we were prepared by our teachers to accept our educational and childhood destinies, and like the children portrayed in children’s magazines, to have happy, colourful childhoods and to be excited about the possibilities and potential of socialist society. it was a society where, as the communist party leaders proudly stated to citizens through its slogans, life and developments were so advanced that ‘tomorrow already exists today’. no child could escape the production of political subjectivities in our education and childhoods. apart from grey faded memories of childhood in my kindergarten, i also have fond recollections of a childhood in sunlight and nature. this involved being with my parents and their friends, far away and out of the reach of the educational structures, often outside of the city. i listened to and was read stories unlike anything i had heard in the kindergarten: dark, scary, uncertain tales shared by my grandmother and by other adults. they were unlike what teachers said in the classroom, which was often challenged, as were the stories published in the children’s magazines. in this familiar, community environment, children like me were exposed to different kinds of books, read to us by family friends, with many adults listening too. these books looked and felt different, as they did not have colourful, hard copy binding, and i never saw them on a shelf in the classroom. i understood only later on that these stories were samizdat dissident children’s literature. these texts were often very lyrical and spiritual, and at other times very brutal and punitive. they were the only children’s stories i remember adults listening to. i recall wondering why adults would want to hear them when they had their own stories that we children were not allowed to hear. i was also exposed to other narratives in my childhood – stories about other children and their childhoods. where these other children lived was not far away, just across the border, in a land that we could see from the top of a hill, but never visited. the tales about what the other children power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc55 played with, what stories and games they had outside of czechoslovakia, were shared through whisperings in the kindergarten playground. one time, mišo, our playground hero, brought an unfamiliar toy to kindergarten and those who were part of his ‘circle of friends’ were allowed to touch it and play with it. the toy, as we learnt, was based on a western tv cartoon character. mišo did not trust everyone to see it, especially not the teachers. he understood that not everyone should be allowed to know about this special toy, particularly not those children who were ready to report any kind of argument or fight between children to our teachers. we never learnt how mišo had gained the toy, but it was the most exciting toy i had ever seen, and because he had it in his possession, mišo secured his exulted position amongst the children. his best friends were even allowed to take it home, but such events needed to remain secret, and to stay between the children. no teachers or other adults were allowed to know. these were my first experiences of a childhood underground, of young citizens managing to resist a public discourse that was openly guiding us towards expected educational futures. the formation of public subject positions was part of a conceptual framework: when i was in kindergarten, i knew that i would become a little spark, and that this would prepare me to become a member of the pioneer organisation when i was older. little sparks were the youngest members of the ideological youth organisation that each child was expected to join. we had uniforms but lacked the badge and red scarves they would get as pioneers7 once they pledged their devotion to the communist party and socialist homeland. little bee, the kindergarten magazine for children, emphasized that i would become a faithful pioneer in the school system, someone who supports and trusts the communist party, a child whose childhood is devoted to the collective work for the benefit of the country, a child that helps to guard our borders against enemies coming from the west. also, while the magazine little bee was widely distributed to kindergartens, it was not the only literature available to me as a child. other magazines and literature for children also provided endless opportunities for promoting a desire for other childhoods. the everyday mundane tensions between the hegemonic discourse by official children’s literature in the communist czechoslovakia, such as little bee, and other resistant discourses, such as the dissident literature as further highlighted below, related to the subversive nature of childhoods. these alternative and ‘forbidden’ discourses offered seductive glimpses of subjective formations, where apart from the unofficial literature, the signal of foreign television channels from the west also infiltrated and challenged the official, public sphere, and the ‘right’ kinds of childhoods considered appropriate for socialist czechoslovakia (tesar, 2015d). while it may seem that this article is focused on the simple indoctrination and propaganda that produced childhoods and childhood subjectivities, it also emphasizes the power inherent in these official stories. power also is at the centre of giugni’s (2006) argument, about how “children use dominant cultural storylines such as goodies and baddies as a vehicle to produce their identities” (p. 97). children are active in this process, and as i argue in this research “children are savvy power brokers; they are political and moral agents” (giugni, 2006, p. 106). as another narrative documents: in my childhood, resistant discourses were not only presented through foreign radio stations, western tv programmes, or the french children’s magazine pif, but also through my grandmother. my grandmother was a great storyteller. she had white hair, a distinctive voice, and witty tales to tell. she read and narrated stories to me that i would never have heard at kindergarten 7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pioneer_organization_of_the_socialist_youth_union power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc56 or school. my grandmother’s stories created the multi-layered themes that crossed boundaries between countries, ideologies, race and even realities. the truth was not considered in my grandmother’s stories, as the focus was on the story itself, the context and the layers that appeared as the narrative unfolded. the importance was on the characters’ actions, and then on how they dealt with the consequences of their behaviours. my grandmother’s stories contributed to the production of the resistant discourse of my childhood, perhaps in a similar way to how other grandparents, uncles and aunties challenge dominant ideologies of education with other children through the tales they told. whilst the official stories from the magazine little bee engaged me in thinking about who i was, and how i was progressing at kindergarten and school, my grandmother’s stories in my childhood were like a safe haven from the ideologically charged texts that were being publically shared with me. as argued above, children’s observations and narratives are the embodiment of havel’s theories: i look back at my childhood as a time and space of mutual surveillance. every citizen watched over or out for another citizen. there was so much distrust in another human being, neighbour, friend. people were scared to look directly at each other. on the streets, or in homes, during the warm summer evenings when all windows were wide open, adults whispered and used quiet voices, as they were worried that they could be heard and that their private lives would be exposed to public scrutiny or judgement, and that this would lead to repercussions. no one knew how many other people listened in on their telephone conversations. citizens stopped reading czechoslovak newspapers or watching official tv news, as the same stories were presented over and over. the same tales were broadcast on tv, and school libraries held only a limited supply of books, by the same authors, from the same publishing houses. the complex relationships with discourse outside of the main framework also shaped the children’s perspective on power and painful understandings of the discrepancies between the educational discourse and lived reality: outside of educational settings i also experienced the power of the totalitarian system and how it could impact upon a child. one of the encounters with the technologies of the posttotalitarian government that is deeply embedded in me, was when my family got permission to leave the country for a two-week holiday in the early 1980s to experience the ocean in socialist yugoslavia8. my family was allowed to leave the country as a result of my brother’s and my own respiratory problems that were deliberately exaggerated by sympathetic doctors, who recommended that a stay by the ocean would be beneficial for our health. without this recommendation, getting an exit visa from czechoslovakia was nearly impossible. it was my first visit to yugoslavia and the first time i was to see the ocean, as czechoslovakia is a landlocked country. driving in the car to the borders, i was thinking of the stories we children shared in the kindergarten and school about the ocean how it looks, how it feels, how it tastes and what games can be played in it. however, as we were crossing the borders, the special unit of the czechoslovak border patrol intercepted us and searched our car, our luggage, and us. they took apart the entire car, our suitcases, everything. the moment i have never forgotten was when they took my little plastic children’s suitcase, in which i had toys and 8 in contrast to socialist cseckoslovakia, socialist yugoslavia was not a part of the soviet block and was a member of non-allied third world. in the early 1980s, socialist yugoslavia enjoyed many political and economic freedoms that were not available to the countries of the soviet block (see the article by ana marjanovic-shane in this special issue). power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc57 various little items that i treasured. the woman who took my plastic suitcase was tall, with short blond hair and a green uniform. she got hold of my suitcase despite me not wanting to let it go from my hands. she grabbed it, opened it, and turned it upside down. the toys fell on the examination table and subsequently on the ground. some of them broke, and some others were taken apart by the examiners. i have never forgotten this moment. i became scared of the person whom i was taught in stories from little bee that i should trust. citizens lived double lives, one public and one private. in that time, thousands of active participants in the prague spring signed collaborations with the secret police and became undercover informers in exchange for social security, comforts and goods. these informers were sometimes neighbors and friends. everybody could have been somebody not to be trusted. citizens became reclusive, and escaped more and more into nature and the mountains and the private domain of life (bren, 2002). the government agencies allowed citizens to have public and private identities, tolerating complaints and discontent as long as they remained hidden and did not become public. citizens were scared of hidden microphones and cameras, and every question by a stranger was taken as a test. as the iron curtain was lifted in 1989 during the velvet revolution in czechoslovakia9, archives were partly opened and names of collaborators with the system were publicised. citizens found out the names of their family relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues who had been informing on them for years. at the same time, the information obtained from these institutions may not necessarily carry the truth that people search for in their quest for understanding the past. secrets of totalitarian childhoods the stories of childhoods, perceived through different lenses, provide an interesting opening into the secrets of totalitarian childhoods. such a lens is offered, for example, through subversive children’s literature. the philosopher egon bondy wrote children’s samizdat – self-published and distributed – stories, that were popular with adults as well. bondy’s stories were originally written as private stories in response to a request from his friend lopatka and his children, who wanted him to write fairy tales. his stories often referred to the lopatka children, who became central characters. the lopatka family lived in the same block of flats in prague as bondy, above the pub where he spent a lot of time. bondy’s stories were dark and scary, with such characters as a dog-eater, the secret police officer, death and the cursed school manager. they were published in 1976 in the samizdat edition as the true horror stories for the lopatka girls on three kings, and consisted of 15 short stories. these stories were very popular amongst dissidents, as they contested the hegemonic discourse of children’s education, through the themes, topics, characters and morals they depicted. the stories from bondy’s samizdat challenge the traditional roles of the children, adults and fairytale creatures that children experienced in the stories encountered in educational institutions. in the story sleeping monster, for example, bondy (1995) describes the life of a creature that sleeps all day and wakes up just before midnight, looking for anyone who is still up. the sleeping monster hangs on to that person and does not let her or him get up from their chair to go to bed. the story states that “once such a sleeping monster caught bondy a long time ago, and flies after him wherever he moves” (p. 31). bondy claims that the only way to resist this monster is to drink either beer or sparkling water. in the story bondy explains to the children that this is why he drinks so much beer, as he cannot drink sparkling water due to his health condition. the metaphorical layer of this story is that the sleeping monster hanging over the person can be interpreted as the ideological context with its ever-present agencies such as the secret police, and that this leads to a lot of alcohol being consumed as a coping mechanism. for decades, the government agencies 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/velvet_revolution power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc58 suggested to children through the official stories that citizens with long hair who smoke and drink alcohol are potential supporters of the west and are enemies of progress and of peace (blažek & pospíšil, 2010). so, through stories such as bondy’s tales, children were able to form new experiences of themselves and of the world around them. in another story pub secret police officer bondy describes the main character, the secret police officer, as “the most common scary creature in our country” (bondy, 1995, p. 20). a ghost floats right under the ceiling in the pubs, hidden in the smoke, and his job is “catching the words” (p. 16). the secret police officer floats around the ceiling as “words are lighter than air” (p. 20), however he has regular hiccups as he busily catches the words because he “does not have time to drink a beer” (p. 20). children who were exposed to stories about such topics as a policeman listening to what people said in public, were presented with different narratives than those in the literature used in kindergartens and schools. perhaps the most intriguing and subversive story in bondy’s samizdat is the tale about lopatka’s children’s school education. whilst in the public discourse school was celebrated as a place where children learnt from teachers, in bondy’s story children at school had their tummies sliced with a knife and filled with useless information. indoctrinated children were then sent home, to become the agents of ideology, and this ritual was repeated each day while at school. bondy in this story exposes the ideological nature of education to young children in such a way that was subversive to the public communist education discourse, and these stories became the children’s secret education. the children in the 1970s and 1980s who were read these stories were children of the generation of the prague spring of 1968. their parents had often been students in 1968, who resisted the soviet invasion that crushed the prague spring, whose friends were killed, and walked the country’s streets with blood stained flags. as these children became high school and university students, they were the ones who marched the streets of prague and demanded democracy, and they sparked the so-called velvet revolution in 1989. children in the 1970s and 1980s, who were young people by the end of the 1980s, demanded changes in society and challenged the dominant ideology and oppressive regime, partly perhaps because of their secret education. perhaps it was the education that occurred in private spaces, not in public, that allowed these children to grow into young people who understood, and felt, social justice, fairness and freedom, as captured in some narratives (taylor, 2009). children were faced with childhoods through texts and poems that dealt with other children’s experiences, shaping their childhoods. one such narrative is the story when i grow up, which was published under a banner that states ‘hooray to the xv congress of the communist party of czechoslovakia!’, in the magazine little bee. in it a little girl proclaims: “i’ll be wise, i’ll be brave and there is a lot of work in our country” (little bee, 1976a, p. 7), as she promises to produce a new society through positive attitudes towards work. similarly, the article greetings to the congress of the communist party of czechoslovakia claims that all advancements were produced and built under and by the communist government, so that happy childhoods could exist and prevail. little bee portrayed how the children publicly supported the congress with songs, and with the unity of all, portraying children “running together with dad, mum and the whole homeland” (little bee, 1976b, p. 4). the illustrations show happy children running on the grass with colourful flowers, alongside the smiling sun and the factory chimney as symbols of progress, work and happiness. so whilst the congress cared about childhoods, it also expected, and needed, a certain subjectification from children in return. the political childhood subjectivities, as produced in this public discourse, are portrayed as responsible, hardworking learners, who developed and cared about their relationship with their country, and who gladly followed a predetermined path to become little sparks and pioneers (tesar, 2015a). power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc59 concluding comments this article illustrates the complexity of socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia. torn between the private and public discourse, represented by official and dissident literature, and supported by a child’s voice, there can be no one representation, or singular experience or memory of childhood in these times. the idea of desires, and subjective experiences that challenges the monolithic conception of one socialist childhood, is presented through the narratives that describe particular children’s experiences. havel’s framework exemplifies the dominant force that drives the theorization of such conditions, where multitudes of childhoods are produced. childhoods in communist czechoslovakia were governed by a strong ideology. however, as havel’s work outlines, the very strength of the ideological governance produced, enabled and also hid multiple subject positions and subjectivities of socialist childhoods. references arndt, s. 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[invited chapter]. in c. rubie-davies & j. stephens (eds.), the social psychology of the classroom international handbook (pp. 475–492). london, uk: routledge. tesar, m. (2014a). grandpa frost, pioneers and political subjectivities: a historical analysis of childhoods in totalitarian czechoslovakia through children’s literature. romanian journal of population studies, 8(2), 75–88. tesar, m. (2014b). reconceptualising the child: power and resistance within early childhood settings. contemporary issues in early childhood, 15(4), 360–367. doi:10.2304/ciec.2014.15.4.360 tesar, m. (2014c). my feelings: power, politics and childhood subjectivities. educational philosophy and theory, 46(8), 860–872. doi:10.1080/00131857.2013.781496 vancura, j. (1999). občan a totalitní stát. in j. vancura (ed.), proč jsme v listopadu vyšli do ulic (pp. 7796). brno, czech republic: doplněk. van manen, m., & levering, b. (1996). childhood's secrets: intimacy, privacy and the self reconsidered. new york, ny: columbia university. wertsch, j. v. (2002). voices of collective remembering. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. power, ideology and children: socialist childhoods in czechoslovakia marek tesar dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.244 | vol. 6 (2018) sc61 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a158 dialogical grammar: varieties of dialogue in wittgenstein’s methodology dorit lemberger bar-ilan university abstract the dialogical character of wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations has received scant attention in the literature, given the work’s status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the tractatus and the investigations. the main lines of interpretation that have been proposed see dialogue as a rhetorical technique intended to present erroneous positions and then refute them, as an exemplification of what can be expressed in language (mcginn 1997; rhees 1998), or as a reflection of wittgenstein’s informal teaching method (malcolm 2001; savickey et al. 1990). the present article adopts the perspective that wittgenstein’s use of dialogue makes it possible to track the various modes of language-acts, consonant with his directions to examine the daily use of language (wittgenstein 2009, §116 and esp. §132), “when language is, as it were, idling.” in his later inquiries, wittgenstein frequently considers the nature of mental states, accompanied by an attempt to characterize the differences between them while at the same time dealing with the cases in which it is difficult to distinguish them. in this process he made a variety of uses of dialogue, each of which embodies a different aspect of language action. subsequently i will demonstrate that these different uses are not haphazard. a scrutiny of the nature of the dialogue can help us understand the nature of the activity carried out of the state of consciousness. finally, i propose a distinction among three main types of dialogue: technical, conversational, and reflexive. key words: technical dialogue; conversational dialogue; reflexive dialogue dorit lemberger (ph.d.) has been at bar-ilan university since 2005. dr. lemberger is a lecturer in the hermeneutics and cultural studies, interdisciplinary unit, with research interests in philosophy of language and literary studies.  issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a159 introduction a close look at wittgenstein’s use of dialogue can make a major contribution to clarifying the nature of dialogism, for two reasons. the first part of wittgenstein’s magnum opus, philosophical investigations1, is written as a dialogue (wittgenstein was not responsible for the format of the second part; see n. 1). in the introduction to the fourth edition, the editors stressed the need for a new translation that would adjust the grammar and syntax to coincide with the conversational tone.2 in practice, as early as his vienna circle period wittgenstein employed a dialogical and conversational method (wittgenstein 2003), marked by questions and answers and the use of dialogical terminology such as “aspect” and “game,” as will be discussed below. his disciples edited others of his works, too, as conversations that reflect how wittgenstein taught and interacted with them.3 because dialogue is a form both of writing and of oral instruction, a separate discussion, going beyond what has been carried out thus far, about the relationship between the dialogical nature of writing and teaching, on the one hand, and the content, on the other—that is, the ways in which language works—seems to be in order.4 although much has been written about wittgenstein’s philosophical language, his choice of the dialogue method is perceived as a rhetorical technique to persuade us of the correctness of a certain position, as an exemplification of what can be said in language, or as a way to dispel perplexities and illusions.5 such uses certainly exist, and will be presented below; in the current article i wish to show that wittgenstein’s method goes beyond the forms noted above and reflects the philosophical change of direction he worked in the study of language. this revolution is based on the assertion that “essence is expressed by grammar” (wittgenstein 2009, §371). in other words, all the modes of human thought are embodied in grammar. grammar can act only as a regulator, because any one-time use cannot create meaning. in the philosophical investigations, this regulatory aspect finds expression in the dialogical nature, inasmuch as this is how our grammar is implemented in daily life: from buying red apples at the start of the book, through participation in various games, and concluding with the inquiry into internal processes and states such as intention and pain. the original contribution of the present article is its demonstration of the link between the type of dialogue and the human action taken, such that there is a substantive connection (in the sense of §371) between the dialogical grammar and the type of conscious/mental action. wittgenstein’s method, viewed as “dialogical grammar,” functions on two levels: the first includes the technical plane of punctuation signs that denote direct address, such as quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation points, all of which belong to the “surface grammar.” the second level is that of 1 i quote from the fourth, revised edition of the philosophical investigations (2009). in addition to the revision of the translation and reediting, there is another important innovation in this edition: the second part was re-edited and divided into sections. it is important to note that the title assigned to the second part, “philosophy of psychology: a fragment,” reflects a tendency that goes back to the 1980s, and which grew stronger in the last decade, to focus on wittgenstein’s deliberate attention to the psychology of the individual as way to understand how language works. for our purposes here it is important to look at the place of individual psychology in the work and the existence of fruitful dialogue. 2for example, the editors write in the introduction to the 2009 edition: “we have also favoured colloquial compression, as in ‘i’m’, ‘i’ll’, ‘he’d’, ‘we’d’, ‘isn’t’, ‘aren’t’, ‘won’t’ and ‘‘wouldn’t’, rather more than anscombe, in order to bring out the conversational tone of the writing” (ibid., p. xiii). 3one of the major relevant works is wittgenstein’s lectures on philosophical psychology 1946-1947, ed. p. geach (chicago: the university of chicago press, 1988), from which we will exemplify dialogical usage. see also his lectures & conversations (berkeley: university of california press, 1966). 4beth savickey relates to wittgenstein’s manner of teaching and cites testimonies by his students that his lectures had the nature of meetings and lengthy conversations, and not of frontal instruction (wittgenstein’s art of investigation , pp. 58-59). 5a significant example of this is the scholarly reference to wittgenstein’s recurring discussion of the relationship between “picture” and “use.” marie mcginn, for instance, presents the awareness of the difference between picture and use as being conscious of the existence of a number of uses (wittgenstein and the philosophical investigations, p. 85). in the current article, however, i will argue that this does not refer to a number of alternate uses, but to a dialogue between simultaneously functioning states of consciousness. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a160 the “depth grammar,” which includes wittgenstein’s references to his sources of influence, whether explicit (frege, augustine, james, plato) or implicit (conscious and unconscious, to which he was exposed in the context of his “form of life”). a second aspect that requires discussion of the connection between mode and content in the dialogical method is a series of auxiliary terms based on “dialogical consent” and which wittgenstein coined as a way to understand how language works, such as “rule,” “family resemblance,” and “form of life.” in an attempt to describe the nature of dialogue from a philological perspective, i will argue that wittgenstein created a “strategy of understanding” in which the use of language is not based solely on technical capability or, alternatively, on some mystical ability, but also on mutual understanding that is expressed in agreement on definitions and judgments.6 the terms mentioned above have been intensively discussed in the scholarly literature; i do not intend to elaborate on them here, but only to argue that the dialogical nature of the philosophical investigations is the foundation for all of them. in his dialogue format, wittgenstein delineated a triad (meaning-creature-understanding), each element of which participates in meaningful linguistic activity. this move is based on the need for justification, in certain conditions and circumstances, that always include a discourse (potential and not necessarily real) involving more than one person. the present essay proceeds as follows: first, in light of the fact that wittgenstein mentioned the platonic dialogue form in the investigations, we should begin by comparing the two men’s forms of dialogue, especially in light of wittgenstein’s methodological directive to examine philosophical questions by a comparison of language-games.7 here i will show that wittgenstein had his reservations about platonic dialogism, and then adumbrate three similarities between the two. in the second section, i will consider wittgenstein’s dialogical grammar in the philosophical investigations as comprising three species of grammar: rhetorical dialogue, conversational dialogue, and reflexive dialogue. the “family resemblance” between the platonic dialogue and wittgenstein’s method wittgenstein’s criticism of socrates plato’s dialogues have been the subject of extensive and variegated scholarly attention, with the emphasis on their division into three periods, each marked by dialogues of quite a different nature. an alternative interpretation of the periodization, relevant for a study of wittgenstein, was advanced by charles kahn (1996), who proposed viewing the differences in the several types of dialogues as reflecting changes in plato’s position on various topics.8 there is a clear similarity between kahn’s interpretation of the role of dialogue in plato’s work and wittgenstein’s discussion, in the second part of the investigations, of “changing aspect” (as will be exemplified below). first, however, we should examine the apparent differences between them. on the few occasions that wittgenstein used the term “dialogue,” he did so to express his vigorous opposition to the platonic form, both as a didactic and scholarly method and with reference to its content: 6as his unequivocal statement in the following paragraphs: “so you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?” what is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. this is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life. it is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgments that is required for communication by means of language” (philosophical investigations, §§241-242). 7 wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §130. 8kahn presents plato as critical of his own writings as he regards the significant change that occurred in plato’s dialogues as forgoing the pretension of imparting knowledge and teaching, in favor of the transition to the rhetoric of persuasion. see c. kahn, plato and the socratic dialogue (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1996) pp. 376-377. this transition can be seen as paralleling that between the tractatus and the investigations. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a161 i can characterize my standpoint no better than by saying that it is the antithetical standpoint to the one occupied by socrates in the platonic dialogues. for if i were asked what knowledge is, i would enumerate instances of knowledge and add the words ‘and similar things’. there is no shared constituent to be discovered in them since none exists. the traditional conception of the use of concept-words hangs together with the idea that the meaning of a word is something that must be present at the same time as meaningful use is made of the word. it is as if words were labels of bottles with particular contents, and if i take down the bottles, i thereby have my hands on the stated fluid contents as well. if it is objected that the words ‘and similar things’ do not give the concept a boundary, i can only say that the application of concept-words is in most cases actually not bounded. if one compares a concept, as frege did, with an area in the plane, one could say that the use of a concept corresponds to an area with blurred boundaries9 here wittgenstein criticizes the socratic notion of “forms” found in plato’s dialogues. he uses the metaphor of bottle and fluid to illustrate the perception of content as form and of its applications as fluid. wittgenstein asserts that knowledge cannot be bounded; it is possible only to show its expressions. hence no narrower concept can be bounded. it is possible only to show the various embodiments of any concept, but impossible to set its boundaries. the method that frege had proposed is comparative and makes no attempt to arrive at essences. in effect, this is another formulation of the term “family resemblance” in the investigations, or of wittgenstein’s critique in the blue and brown books of the “craving for generality.”10 wittgenstein was clearly opposed to the attempt, which he believed to be reflected in plato’s dialogues, to clarify the nature of things by means of the relation between a concept and its embodiment. this disagreement is implied in the very rejection of the dialogical method as a key to understanding or explanation.11 the similarities between wittgensteinian and socratic dialogue: quotation, language as the substrate for thought, and reflexive dialogue at various junctures in the investigations, wittgenstein quotes the theaetetus, demonstrating his acquaintance with complex conceptions of language in the platonic dialogues.12 in §46, for example, he asks one of the fundamental questions that illuminate the transition from the tractatus to the investigations: “what lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?” in response, wittgenstein quotes the theaetetus, where socrates asserts that primary elements cannot be defined (emphasis in the original). he goes on to quote socrates’ discussion of the boundaries of a name, which cannot determine if something exists or not, and therefore, in practice, “it is impossible to give an explanatory account of any primary element.”13 at the end of the section, wittgenstein compares socrates’ position to “russell’s ‘individuals’ and my ‘objects’ (tractatus logico-philosophicus).” then, in §48, he analyzes the action of calling by name and demonstrates its role in the language game of “representation.” these sections can be seen as an expansion and exemplification of §43: giving names is one way to impart meaning, alongside others. this 9wittgenstein, the voices of wittgenstein, pp. 33-34. 10wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §§66-67; l. wittgenstein, the blue and brown books (oxford: basil blackwell, 1969), p. 17. 11“reading the socratic dialogues, one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! what’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing” (l. wittgenstein, ms 111, 1931. the collected works of ludwig wittgenstein, internet version [oxford: basil blackwell; charlottesville, va : intelex corp., 1998] p. 55. 12wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §§46, 48, 518. maurice drury quoted wittgenstein, who claimed that “plato in this dialogue is occupied with the same problems that i am writing about.” see m. o. drury, “conversations with wittgenstein,” in ludwig wittgenstein: personal recollections , ed. r. rhees, (oxford: basil blackwell, 1981) p. 149. 13wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §46. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a162 does not mean that it is faulty, but only that it is part of a language game (just as the presentation of augustine’s stance on children’s learning of language is not falsifiable, but only incomplete).14 in addition to wittgenstein’s direct quotations from plato, which preserve the dialogue format, there are other similarities between the greek philosopher’s conception of language and wittgenstein’s study of language in the investigations. i will show below how this family resemblance is a basis for understanding the importance of dialogue in the investigations, not only as a method, but also as cognitive content, when wittgenstein examines concurrent mental states. after looking at the types of dialogue in investigations, i will propose the term “aspects-dialogue” for dialogue between two distinct mental states. the singularity of such dialogue lies in its inclusion of more than a single mental state by the same speaker; its use transforms the dialogical method into an expression of content and not only of manner. language as the substrate of thought the dialogical conception of thought can be traced back to socrates in the theaetetus, where language is deemed to be the substrate of thought.15 socrates depicts the thought process as grounded in an internal mental dialogue composed of questions and answers, affirmations and objections. this process continues until thought reaches something clear, whether as a result of the internal discourse or of a “leap.” this internal process concludes when, whether gradually or suddenly, a person makes a statement that formulates a judgment. this statement is not intended for another person, nor is it formulated out loud: socrates: a talk which the soul has with itself about the objects under its consideration. [...] the soul when it thinks is simply carrying on a discussion in which it asks itself questions and answers them itself, affirms and denies. and when it arrives at something definite, either by a gradual process or sudden leap, when it affirms one thing consistently and without divided counsel, we call this its judgment. [...] to judge is to make a statement, and a judgment is a statement which is not addressed to another person or spoken aloud, but silently addressed to oneself.16 two points are important for our discussion: first, the dialogical process set forth here is not a matter of rhetoric (intended to persuade listeners that some assertion is correct), nor is it based on agreement between individuals. second, formulation in language is a condition for the mental process. this silent verbalization is not intended for any communicative act, but only for the thinker’s reflexive and internal activity. this reflexiveness can be compared to wittgenstein’s discussion of the will in tractatus: a person can know his will. it is the will that gives meaning to the individual’s world, making him happy or wretched; but he can formulate it only within the boundaries of his language and cannot influence facts that are expressed in language.17 whereas socrates presents this dialogical method as a response to the question of what thought is, for wittgenstein in the tractatus, reflexive thought has the nature of soliloquy. in the investigations, by contrast, reflexive thought is clarified by means of dialogue. soliloquy still exists, but 14in the philosophical investigations, §518, wittgenstein quotes an interchange from the theaetetus that discusses the relation between image and picture and between “something” and “something real” as the starting point for proving the necessity of grammar for understanding through visual perception. actually, wittgenstein continues the platonic dialogue in a formulation similar to that described above, with the dialogical method illustrating the process of clarification that exists within the context of the reality of a conversation between people, and not as theoretical thought. savickey already indicated the methodological similarity between investigations and the platonic dialogues, in, for instance, examining the conduct of children to understand the use of language (wittgenstein’s art of investigation, p. 75). 15david sedley used the phrase “language as the medium of thought” as a subtitle for his discussion of “plato on language”; see “plato on language”, in a companion to plato, ed. h. benson (uk: blackwell, 2009) pp. 214-227. 16theaetetus, in plato, plato complete works, ed. john m. cooper (cambridge: hackett pc, 1997) 189e-190a, p. 210. 17 “if the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts not what can be expressed by means of language. in short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. it must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” (wittgenstein, tractatus, §6.43). dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a163 takes place in universal language, which is not limited by the boundaries of a particular person. this view is stated concisely in the latter work: “a human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. so one could imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue, who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves.”18 wittgenstein concludes this discussion by denying the existence of some individual criterion that cannot be known by another person. at the same time, soliloquy is real, and its speaker uses “ordinary language.” in other words, socrates and wittgenstein concur that even if the speaker chooses not to vocalize his thoughts, it is not because they cannot be expressed in universal language, but only because speaker opts to remain silent. reflexive dialogue: simultaneous sense-perception and image now i want to show how a more complex cognitive reality is portrayed in the philebus, which can be characterized as a dialogue between mental states. socrates describes to protarchus a situation in which different mental states appear concurrently and lead to the conclusion that there is more than one factor responsible for creating the content of thought. the dialogue between socrates and protarchus is completely rhetorical, but the content of what socrates says refers to a form of mental dialogue that could obstruct judgment: socrates: if memory and perception concur with other impressions at a particular occasion, then they seem to me to inscribe words in our soul, as it were. and if what is written is true, then we form a true judgment and a true account of the matter. but if what our scribe writes is false, then the result will be the opposite of the truth. [...] socrates: do you also accept that there is another craftsman at work in our soul at the same time? [...] a painter who follows the scribe and provides illustrations to his words in the soul. protarchus: how and when do we say he does this work? socrates: when a person takes his judgments and assertions directly from sight or any other sense-perception and then views the images he has formed inside himself, corresponding to those judgments and assertions.19 below i will show how wittgenstein related to this difficulty and resolved the tension. at this juncture, however, i want to conclude the comparison between the two dialogical methods, those of socrates and wittgenstein, by noting the similarity between their instructions for evaluating the meaning as a function of how a word is used, inasmuch as the same word can have multiple meanings.20 in both instances, dialogue functions as a method that enables both the use of the word itself and understanding it in relation to other possible uses. in the euthydemus plato shows how “learning” can be used to denote opposites, and strongly advises examining the manner in which the word is used in order to decide on its meaning (as does wittgenstein in the investigations, where the verb “use” appears in countless passages): you must learn about the correct use of words. [...] you did not realize that people use the word ‘learn’ not only in which a person who has no knowledge of a thing in the beginning acquires it later, but also when he who has this knowledge already uses it to inspect the same thing, whether this is something spoken or something done. (as a matter of fact, people call the latter ‘understand’ rather than ‘learn’, but they do sometimes call it 18 wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §243. 19plato, philebus 38c, p. 427. 20see sedley, “plato on language” for an exhaustive examination of plato’s discussions on the nature of language, and particularly on equivocation. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a164 ‘learn’ as well.) now this, as they are pointing out, had escaped your notice that the same word is applied to opposite sorts of men, to both the man who knows and the man who does not.21 the possibility of using the same word to denote two different things (for example, “learn” refers both to the acquisition of the previously unknown and to the acquisition of existing knowledge) requires that we conduct a meticulous examination of the specific use in order to determine meaning. we cannot make do with knowledge of the “inherent” meaning of a word, for even if a person knows every meaning of a word (as socrates later argues), he cannot predict the nature of a certain use. the parallel to the concept of use in investigations is clear: wittgenstein, too, says that determination of the word’s meaning must rest on the nature of its use, even if it seems to us there is some preexisting picture or experience.22 this parallel is supported by an additional argument, based on the considerable differences between human beings. in the sophist, the visitor tells theaetetus that, even if there is agreement on a particular name for something, each of them might view it differently. consequently, the agreement concerning the essence of the matter must be stated explicitly; they cannot make do merely with agreement on the name.23 this view of the use of a word parallels wittgenstein’s argument that we must agree about definitions and judgments in order to conduct hold fruitful communications.24 to sum up, there is a series of parallels between the socratic dialogues and the concept of language in the investigations, reflected in dialogical grammar. these parallels sharing an inherent linkage between grammar and everyday life: language reflects human conduct, which is dynamic, cannot be defined on the basis of “quantitative scientific knowledge,” and, in particular, is dialogical and based on agreement. dialogical grammar: rhetorical dialogue, conversational dialogue, and reflexive dialogue in the investigations dialogism in the investigations: the view from above25 almost the whole time i am writing conversations with myself. things i say to myself tête-à-tête.26 although the dialogical method of the investigations is unmistakable, wittgenstein scholarship relates to it infrequently and emphasizes the rhetorical impact of dialogue to persuade us of wittgenstein’s unequivocal stance on central issues, such as the possibility of private language or second sense.27 here 21plato, euthydemus 277e-278c, pp. 714-15. 22 see, e.g., wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §59 and many others. 23plato, sophist 218c-d, p. 238. 24“‘so you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’ what is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. it is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgments that is required for communication by means of language” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §§241-242). 25“a surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links” (wittgenstein 2009, §122). 26l. wittgenstein, culture and value (oxford: blackwell, 1980), p. 88. 27 a prevalent contemporary scholarly view relates to dialogue only incidentally, within other discussions, as, for example, in the context of private language when dialogue is harnessed in support of the position attributed to wittgenstein (m. mcginn, wittgenstein and the philosophical investigations, pp. 134-135.). even in works that give pride of place to interpersonal discussions, as wittgenstein and the possibility of discourse (rhees 1998), that describe dialogue as essential, not only as a expression of control of the technique of language, but also for understanding the nature of the discussion, the nature of dialogue is shunted aside in favor of the underlying clarification of the way in which what is understood is distinguished from what is not (mcginn, wittgenstein and the philosophical investigations, pp. 90-91). in the final analysis, we conclude that speaking in language does not always entail discussion (ibid, p. 94). dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a165 i would like to consider the dialogue for its own sake, with its various aspects, while applying wittgenstein’s methodological directive on “finding and inventing intermediate links.” actually, when wittgenstein uses the word “dialogue,” he generally is critical of plato’s use of the format (as in the passage from voices of wittgenstein quoted earlier). but when he described his conversations with his friends, or routine communicative acts between people, he uses the words gesprach, gesprachen (conversation). in practice, wittgenstein regarded conversation as a central medium of human activity and as the key to understanding our use of language.28 when he referred to the regulated conduct of a conversation, in which it seems to us that the listener perceives the meaning of what is said by the encounter with the manner in which he perceives this meaning in his own mind, wittgenstein turned a routine everyday activity (the language-game of reporting) into something unfamiliar. he did this in order to argue that the process of conveying meaning in a conversation is complex and its success not to be taken for granted. notwithstanding, this language-game reflects the fact that speech, conversation, is the “straight highway” for the transmission of meaning between two people. the german word that wittgenstein used in the above passage, selbstgespräche (“conversations with myself”) illustrates, without irony or any rhetorical interest, the nature of the wittgensteinian dialogue in the investigations. he was in the habit of writing his works as if they were private conversations with himself. wittgenstein’s reflexive awareness of the manner of his writing did not prevent him from classifying it as the key to understanding his future activity; that is, he did not assign precedence to what is said in the first person when someone is speaking to himself.29 all the same, he applied this dialogical method in the investigations in a way that sometime makes it difficult to determine whether he is documenting an internal dialogue or one with another person. in any event, my use of the term “dialogical grammar” is meant to assert that wittgenstein’s depth-grammar incorporates a set of rules that are based in dialogue: the contextgrounded conversation between (at least) two principals, mutual recognition (by one agent of the other), and agreement regarding its regulatory nature.30 on the surface-grammar level, these rules are sometimes invisible or only alluded to, but in any event they allow us to base the discussion on them, as was noted by jane heal.31 the use of dialogical grammar, even if readers face it on their own, entails giving up unequivocal conclusions, as well as a constant movement between one aspect and another, in the attempt to clarify the connections between mental processes and the language in which they are fashioned. the dissimilarity between the forms of argumentation in the tractatus and in the investigations is already evident from a comparison of their respective introductions. in the tractatus wittgenstein argues, “the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive.”32 in his 28 “what is the language-game of communicating something? i’d like to say: you regard it too much as a matter of course that one can communicate anything to anyone. that is to say, we are so much accustomed to communicating in speech, in conversation, that it looks to us as if the whole point of communicating lay in this: that someone else grasps the sense of my words which is something mental that he, as it were, takes it into his own mind. if he then does something further with it as well, that is no part of the immediate purpose of language” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §363). 29 the following passage is an important example of this: at the question “why don’t i infer my probable actions from my talk?” one might say that it is like this: as an official in a ministry i don’t infer the ministry’s probable decisions from the official utterances, since of course i am acquainted with the source, the genesis of these utterances and of the decisions. -this case would be comparable to one in which i carry on conversations with myself, perhaps even in writing, which lead me to my utterances out loud in conversation with other people; and now i say: i shall surely infer my future behavior, not from these utterances, but from the far more reliable documents of my inner life. (wittgenstein, culture and value, §711). 30 see wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §§664. gordon baker already pinpointed the connection between depth-grammar and the form of life which conditions its overall understanding. see g. baker, “wittgenstein’s ‘depth grammar’” language & communication 21 (2001) pp. 303-19. 31 “the fact that the dialogue element in the investigations is introduced so inexplicitly and is not signposted by some uniform devise enables wittgenstein to foreground it or background it to the extent that seems most appropriate to him at any given stage of the discussion” (j. heal, “wittgenstein and dialogue,” in timothy smiley, ed., philosophical dialogues (oxford: oxford university press, 1995) p. 72. 32l. wittgenstein, tractatus logico-philosophicus (london: routledge, 1961) p. 24. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a166 introduction to the investigations, by contrast, he presents the book as an album that evades the possibility of pointing in a single coherent and clear direction.33 furthermore, the presence of an interlocutor is emphasized in the latter, both formally and rhetorically. on the formal level, many sections in the book raise or answer a question. on the rhetorical level, this produces a conversation. whereas wittgenstein’s statements in the tractatus are formulated as logical propositions, in an unequivocal and declarative tone that brooks no dispute, only rarely do we find in the investigations emphatic claims that do not lead into a renewed discussion. to this we should add wittgenstein’s methodological directives to avoid definitions and to accept the impossibility of unequivocal definitions (and therefore we must make do with indicating the “family resemblance” between things). i will attempt to show how the dialogical method suits wittgenstein’s arguments, building on his assertion that there is no difference between method and content, because there is no “second-order language.”34 at the same time, however, i wish to demonstrate how we nevertheless can distinguish between the various ways of language use that represent different ways in which language functions, pursuing wittgenstein’s argument that language functions in different ways.35 from a methodological perspective, this differentiation between ways of usage is made possible by the dialogue, which facilitates the emergence of a distinct intersubjective process that is not subservient to some other or prior order. this illustrates how language enables the expression of a singular encounter between two agents, one that is not amenable to generalization, definition, or standardization. there are many types of duality: two people, two aspects in the experience of a conflict by a certain person or by the two parties. in any event, in some instances we can speak of duality that is regulative and not a one-time occurrence and that cannot be reduced to an unequivocal description. i have chosen to demonstrate this with three aspects that appear more than others and that concretely illustrate the function of the dialogical method. these aspects are part of a broader array of differences between the language of the tractatus and that of the investigations. aspects of dialogism the first prominent aspect is the technical and rhetorical, which wittgenstein often uses to present the recurrent arguments in the investigations, such as the need to examine meaning in the context of use, the inherent connection between language and everyday actions, and the avoidance of theories and second-order language. the second aspect relates to instances in which wittgenstein mentions, either directly or incidentally, his interlocutor-colleagues, such as frege and ramsey, and interlocutorpredecessors, such as plato, augustine, and william james. the third, reflexive aspect, refers to dialogue between mental states. in my survey of this aspect i will attempt to show how, even when wittgenstein finally decides in one direction or another, the dialogue method reflects the possible existence of two parallel states, even if these are two concurrent mental states. our review above of the characteristics of the socratic dialogical method enables us to see their great similarity to wittgensteinian dialogue, more than wittgenstein and his readers were aware. dialogue as technique the dialogue format of most of the investigations and of many passages in wittgenstein’s posthumous works is at the center of the affinity between platonic and wittgensteinian dialogue. furthermore, both plato and wittgenstein are most apt to employ dialogue to clarify common terms or 33 “my thoughts soon grew feeble if i tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination, and this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. for it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. [...] so this book is really just an album” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §3-4). 34 ibid., §121. 35 “the paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or whatever” (ibid., §304). dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a167 conceptions; dialogue functions as a technique to discard an illusion about the nature of language. in wittgenstein’s first use of technik, in the sense of the rules of a game, he argues that even though we establish a “technique,” we are still not able to control the course of the game.36 the result is a contradiction between what we expected would happen and what actually took place; consequently, we say: “that’s not the way i meant it.”37 on the level of surface grammar, except for the sentence enclosed in quotation marks (as in a conversation), the dialogical grammar is expressed in the recurring use of the first-person plural. this creates the sensation that all the readers are participating in a joint activity and that they all sense the contradiction between the individual intention and the action in the game. on the depth-grammar level, wittgenstein offers the ultimate example of tension in a dialogical context, when there is a difference or contradiction between the speaker’s intention and his action in the shared language. in §664, wittgenstein returns to the example of intention in order to illustrate the role of depth grammar and emphasizes the gulf between the two types of grammar that emerges in dialogue, between a person’s words when speaking to himself and the adherence to conventional rules in actual speech. the dialogue between the two uses is expressed in actual speech and preserves the possibility of distinguishing between depth and surface grammar (ibid.). wittgenstein’s depiction of the attempt to distinguish between fantasy and reality is an outstanding example of the function of dialogue as technique. this is a rare instance of wittgenstein’s use of the word “dialogue” to denote an effective method and not to criticize plato. along with the use of dialogical grammar on the surface level (questions, quotations), wittgenstein wrote dialogue as a technique for exploring the nature of his thought action. as i argued above, dialogue functions as an imaginary technique that allows us to determine whether the speaker is fantasizing or not.38 this passage also embodies two additional functions of dialogue. one is the internal dialogue between the dreamer and himself, which wittgenstein presents as “quite imaginable”; the other, the “dialogue of a play,” reveals the possibility of a gulf between language games. in dramatic dialogue, the playwright is not giving expression to his own intention, but to that of the character on stage. whereas the internal dialogue of a dream does not employ any specific technique, dramatic dialogue exemplifies dialogue as a conventional technique in a literary-artistic language game. dialogue serves a similar function for clarifying a series of “problems and disquietudes.”39 following augustine, wittgenstein argues that it is in fact the simple things that are hidden from sight.40 as in platonic dialogue, wittgensteinian dialogue works a defamiliarization that makes it possible to examine the simple things, inasmuch as dialogical grammar contains direct address and the asking of questions, techniques that require a reexamination of the instinctive manner in which we generally act in language. dialogue as a technique is not only a rhetorical means, but also a psychological one (in the wittgensteinian sense, in which psychological terms help distinguish among different uses of language). by means of dialogue, a person may extricate himself from a linguistic move that seems necessary when communicating with himself, and correctly understand it by 36“here the fundamental fact is that we lay down rules, a technique, for playing a game, and that then, when we follow the rules, things don’t turn out as we had assumed. so that we are, as it were, entangled in our own rules. this entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand: that is, to survey. it throws light on our concept of meaning something. for in those cases, things turn out otherwise than what we had meant, foreseen. [...] that is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: ‘that’s not the way i meant it.’ the civic status of a contradiction, or its status in civic life that is the philosophical problem” (ibid., §125). 37ibid. 38“suppose it were part of my day-dream to say: ‘i am merely engaged in phantasy’, would this be true? suppose i write such a phantasy or narrative, an imaginary dialogue, and in it i say ‘i am engaged in phantasy’ -but, when i write it down, -how does it come out that these words belong to the phantasy and that i have not emerged from the phantasy? might it not actually happen that a dreamer, as it were emerging from the dream, said in his sleep ‘i am dreaming’? it is quite imaginable that there should be such a language-game. this hangs together with the problem of ‘meaning’. for i can write ‘i am healthy’ in the dialogue of a play, and so not mean it, although it is true. the words belong to this and not that language-game” (l. wittgenstein, zettel, ed. g. h. von wright, and e. m. anscombe (oxford: basil blackwell, 1981, §397). 39wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §111. 40ibid, §90. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a168 means of “external criteria” that make this possible.41 at times, however, dialogue with a real interlocutor is required to elucidate a particular insight. conversational dialogue throughout his philosophical career, starting from its beginning, wittgenstein regularly engaged in conversations and correspondence, at first with his teachers, frege and russell, and later with his students and colleagues.42 he mentioned these dialogues in various contexts, and in the investigations, in the formulation of specific arguments. to this we should add evidence of the clear influence of thinkers to whom he referred (kierkegaard) or whom he quoted (james, augustine). whether or not wittgenstein agreed with them on a specific point, we can see the very allusion or quotation as evidence that he saw their argument as a challenge worthy of attention and response.43 his dialogue with frege is an outstanding example of this. on the one hand, wittgenstein disputes frege’s claim that assertability is tantamount to a move in the language-game.44 in another place, though, he agrees with frege that a name alone has no meaning outside a sentence.45 “dialogical grammar” means that dialogue is conducted as conversation with another philosopher (real or virtual), colleague, or student-colleague. in this “conversation,” wittgenstein disputes his interlocutor’s position or question, because doing so makes it possible to clarify a problem in understanding a language-act. in the investigations, when wittgenstein mentions augustine, frege, or james, he does not present him as a thinker who merely brought the issue to his own awareness, but as one who was engaged with this matter and coined an expression (such as james’s “if-feeling”) or originated a common insight (such as learning by ostensive definition, as in augustine). so the scholarly consensus that wittgenstein was not actually influenced by his interactions with other thinkers, but merely used their statements to justify his own stance, is not surprising.46 since, however, wittgenstein himself wrote the investigations in dialogue format, interspersing these philosophers’ statements into his text, this question should be reexamined. 41ibid, §580. 42 in the introduction to the tractatus, wittgenstein seemingly negated the importance of finding the sources of intellectual inspiration for what he wrote. in the introduction to the investigations, in contrast, he makes the ability to understand the problems in the former, as well as the stimulus and clarification at the basis of the book, conditional upon his conversations with his colleagues ramsey and sraffa: “for since i began to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, i could not but recognize grave mistakes in what i set out in that first book. i was helped to realize these mistakes to a degree which i myself am hardly able to estimate by the criticism which my ideas encountered from frank ramsey, with whom i discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last two years of his life. even more that to this always powerful and assured a criticism, i am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, mr p. sraffa, for many years unceasingly applied to my thoughts. it is to this stimulus that i owe the most fruitful ideas of this book” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, 4). see also ibid, §81 n. 43russell goodman already suggested this interpretation, and offered a comprehensive examination of wittgenstein’s dialogue with james. his position, however, is not representative of most scholarly opinion; see r. goodman, wittgenstein and william james (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004). 44 “frege’s opinion that every assertion contains an assumption, which is the thing that is asserted, really rests on the possibility, found in our language, of writing every assertoric sentence in the form ‘it is asserted that such-and-such is the case’. but ‘that such-andsuch is the case’ is not a sentence in our language it is not yet a move in the language-game” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §22; emphasis in the original). 45 “with the mere naming of a thing, nothing has yet been done. nor has it a name except in a game. this was what frege meant too when he said that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence” (ibid., §49). 46“wittgenstein rarely quotes other authors and when he does so, he brings attention to where he differs rather than where he agrees with them” (todor polimenov, “wittgenstein in conversation with his sources: anspielungen und zitate im werk ludwig wittgensteins by h. biesenbach,” nordic wittgenstein review 1 [2012] p. 200). see also henry jackman’s thorough discussion and conclusion: “in conclusion, in spite of the fact that james was one of the most frequently cited authors in the investigations, he was not one [sic] ‘a classical opponent of the tradition in the philosophy of mind that [wittgenstein] was opposing.’ there remain, of course, serious differences between the two philosophers, but in terms of what was central to their outlook, wittgenstein and james were far less apart than has been commonly assumed” (h. jackman, “wittgenstein and james’s ‘stream of thought,’” meeting of the society for the advancement of american philosophy (2004) p. 9; the internal quotation is from coope et al, a wittgenstein workbook (oxford: blackwell, 1970) p. 7. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a169 in contrast to this consensus, i maintain that in the investigations and other late works, as earlier in his vienna circle period, wittgenstein frequently referred to other positions, not only to dispute them or for rhetorical purposes, but also as a catalyst for a more precise formulation of his arguments, or as a source for key questions that require attention. the fact that wittgenstein rarely expressed complete agreement with his interlocutor does not detract from the importance of the conversation. in this sense, there is a marked resemblance to the platonic dialogues, each of which is named for socrates’ main interlocutor in it. this “other speaker,” whether fictitious, a stand-in for plato himself, or a real person, fulfills a similar function: revealing (generally dialectically) the various facets of the discussion, which usually does not arrive at an unequivocal definition of a concept, even if consensus is reached.47 another example of conversational dialogue can be found in dialogues that were not edited by wittgenstein, in the collected lectures on psychological concepts that record mainly exchanges between wittgenstein and his students.48 there wittgenstein begins his attempt to describe “motive,” as opposed to “reason,” with the reservation that we cannot automatically assume that all humans learn and know how to use all language-games. nevertheless, in the context of the description of a motive or reason for an action, a person elucidates, not only for himself but also for those around him, why he performed that action.49 a reason is given or a factor described in dialogical fashion, since, at least in this conversation, a person does not have to explain to himself why he performed a certain act, but only to another. a linguistic-ethical discussion derives from this question, since malcolm suggests that if a person offers an absurd reason for committing murder, it cannot be defined as a motive. intriguingly, wittgenstein himself, as a teacher, struggles with the question of when different terms should be used to describe the background for a certain action (“it’s not clear to me”)50 and, in particular, how his students’ questions lead him to the cardinal distinction between the reason for an action and the motive behind it. as regards the former, a person can explain to himself the connection between two moves (for instance, i stay in my job because i need money).51 as for the latter, wittgenstein draws a parallel between the murderer’s explanation and a bull’s response to a red flag: the connection between the facts is evident, but cannot be justified ethically or causally by the person; rather, it “just happens.” reflexive dialogue reflexive dialogue is the third type of dialogue, and is the most complex and vaguest of the three types presented here. this is because it is mixed with dialogues of other types and because it includes internal dialogue that is shaped by the criteria of public speech so that it will be comprehensible to others. the choice to keep this dialogue an internal monologue derives from a need for privacy, embarrassment, or shame, but not from a linguistic deficiency.52 language functions as a mechanism that enables reflection, self-examination, and self-knowledge. in the investigations, wittgenstein frequently employs dialogue to 47this position is represented, e.g., by sedley, who divided the platonic dialogues into periods, with the later dialogues characterized by discourse lacking unequivocal answers/definitions (sedley, “plato on language”). see also scolnicov on plato’s two different perceptions of language that create an open, skeptical, and reserved dialogical language (s. scolnicov idea and method, thirty-three studies in plato (hebrew) (jerusalem: magnes press, 2008) pp. 301-307. 48wittgenstein, lectures on philosophical psychology 1946-1947. 49ibid, pp. 82-84. 50ibid, p. 3. 51ibid. 52in his discussion of wittgenstein’s notion of private language, norman malcolm coined the term “contingent private language” (n. malcolm, “wittgenstein’s philosophical investigations,” philosophical review 62 [1954], pp. 530-559). this means that a person can conduct a conversation that, for various reasons, is wholly inner, and therefore his language seems private (but it is possible that other people will understand what is said in this conversation if the speaker chooses to include them). such use of language ensues from the need for privacy, and wittgenstein himself exemplified this when he wrote “secret diaries” while a prisoner of war during the first world war. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a170 describe self-observation (selbstbeobachtung aussprechen); for example, when the speaker portrays longing and expectation, which he experiences as an inner process: “i’ve heard he is coming; i’ve been expecting him all day.” this is a report on how i have spent the day. in conversation, i come to the conclusion that a particular event is to be expected, and i draw this conclusion in the words “so now i must expect him to come.” this may be called the first thought, the first act, of this expectation. the exclamation “i’m expecting him i’m longing to see him!” may be called an act of expecting. but i can utter the same words as the result of self-observation, and then they might amount to: “so, after all that has happened, i’m still expecting him with longing.” it all depends on what led up to these words53 this passage graphically illustrates the role of dialogue, since wittgenstein lists both the surfacegrammar depth-grammar roles, thereby shedding light on the use of selbstbeobachtung. wittgenstein points to the process that occurs on the surface level in the speaker’s mind, in the description of the transition from expression to conclusion, as these take place “in conversation” in the individual’s mind. he then distinguishes “first thought” from “exclamation” that expresses “an act of expecting.” here we have two types of “self-observation.” the first watches the actions of language—reporting, conversation, contemplation, and expectation. the second is self-observation that also directed to a certain conclusion beyond the distinction between the language-acts. the conclusion includes a sort of self-criticism (“after all that has happened, i’m still expecting him with longing”). wittgenstein next seeks to clarify the nature of “the process of introspection.” this process functions as a reconstruction of past states of consciousness, and differs from self-observation in the present. it is noteworthy that wittgenstein uses dialogical language only in relation to the present (and not to the past) to depict a situation of indecision followed by a decision.54 an additional example of introspective activity formulated in dialogical grammar is when selfobservation makes it possible to distinguish between levels of intention: “when you were swearing just now, did you really mean it?” this amounts to something like: “were you really angry?” and the answer may be given on the basis of introspection, and is often some such thing as “i didn’t mean it very seriously,” “i meant it half jokingly,” and so on. there are differences of degree here.55 self-observation makes it possible to detect differences of degree in the speaker’s intention, drawing on the inner dialogue in which the speaker clarifies the seriousness of his intent. wittgenstein’s discussions of memory constitute an additional example of an internal dialogue in which two states are compared. wittgenstein does not explicitly refer to the meno, in which socrates portrays search and learning as recollection, dependent on a person’s courage and continual quest, but we can see the similarity.56 these three actions—searching, learning, and recollection—are characteristic of wittgenstein’s inquiry about the characteristics of the inner processes in which memory takes part.57 in this context he also raises the need for an external criterion to bear witness to an action of memory; at the same time, “we bear in mind” the model we select to determine whether we remember it. that is, there is a 53wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §586. 54ibid., §588. 55ibid., §677. 56plato, meno 81c-d. 57 see, e.g., wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §§53, 56, 166. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a171 reflexive dialogue between the remembered model and a specific use in the present, such as the attribution of a certain color to an object.58 an additional point of similarity between the account of recollection in the meno and wittgenstein’s description of inner processes is found in his argument that an individual process is based on a potential mental mechanism that can be detected only when an action is conducted in general, public language. socrates’ claim that “the soul has learned everything,” and that a person can consequently recall specific things when he learns them, is analogous to wittgenstein’s argument that the action of the pedal is based on the existence of an entire mechanism, which, although concealed, is necessary for a concrete action to take place.59 moreover, this context, too, is identical to that in meno: wittgenstein uses the metaphor of pedal and mechanism in order to depict a process of learning by ostensive definition.60 a completely different type of mutual dialogical interaction that is reflected in the use of language in the speaker’s mind can be found in the notebooks 1914–1916, and in parallel assertions in the tractatus.61 these works incorporate mental dialogue of two types: the first, dialogue between what exists within the bounds of language and what definitely exists, but beyond the bounds of language (and the world);62 the second, the dialogue between what is said and what is shown and cannot be explicitly expressed.63 a sentence in language does not express the rules of syntax that make its formulation possible, but reflects them by expressing a meaning. here we can distinguish between two rule types that are constitutive for the use of language: normative-consensus rules, and logical rules that are independent of human consent.64 once again we are speaking of reflexive dialogue in which a person makes decisions in the realms of ethics, aesthetics, and belief, although, according to wittgenstein, these decisions cannot be justified on a factual basis and therefore cannot be justified in general language. but instead of remaining silent, as wittgenstein prescribes at the end of the tractatus, we could say that conscious decisions in these realms require a reflexive dialogue in which the various possibilities are examined. conclusion in this article i have looked at the explicit and implicit characteristics of wittgensteinian dialogue. i have tried to show how wittgenstein was influenced by the dialogues of plato which, despite his reservations about them, have many similarities with his own dialogues. this resemblance was one of the underpinnings of wittgenstein’s method in the philosophical investigations. he employed this foundation to dispel the perplexities produced by incorrect use of language. to achieve this, he employed a dialogical method that copes with the questions and problems associated with human beings’ use of language in their actions and does not rest content with a theoretical examination. because these problems fall into different 58ibid, §56. 59 “‘i set the brake up by connecting rod and lever’ yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing” (wittgenstein, philosophical investigations, §6). 60 ibid., §6. 61l. wittgenstein, notebooks 1914-1916, ed. g. h. von wright and e. m. anscombe, 2nd ed. (oxford: basil blackwell, 1979). 62ibid, pp. 72-73. 63“propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them. what finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. what expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language. propositions show the logical form of reality. they display it [...] what can be shown, cannot be said” (wittgenstein, tractatus, §§4.121, 4.1212). 64wittgenstein’s statement: “grammar is not accountable to any reality” demonstrates the claim for the independence of language; see: l. wittgenstein, the big typescript: ts 213. g. luckhardt and m. a. e. au (eds. and trans.) (oxford: blackwell, 2005) p. 85. dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a172 categories, they must be addressed by different forms of dialogue. i have defined three such, which respond to the various needs linked to the use of language. in conclusion, wittgenstein’s dialogical notion of language can be illustrated as an anthropomorphization of words, giving them a face that looks at us and seems to request a response, like the face in a painting. continuing in this vein, a proposition creates a “group portrait.” nevertheless, the existence of agents who can engage in dialogue does not eliminate the question of how meaning comes into existence; instead, it rather directs our attention to the boundaries within which meaning is created: while any word one would like to say may have a different character in different contexts, all the same there is one character a face that it always has. it looks at us. for one might actually think that each word was a little face; the written sign might be a face. and one might also imagine that the whole proposition was a kind of group-picture, so that the gaze of the faces all together produced a relationship among them and so the whole made a significant group. but what constitutes the experience of a group’s being significant? and would it would be necessary, if one is to use the proposition, that one feel it as significant in this way?65 works cited baker, gordon. “wittgenstein’s ‘depth grammar’.” language & communication 21 (2001): 303-319. dascal, marcelo. “introduction,” in: dialogue: an interdisciplinary approach, ed. marcelo dascal, john benjamin publishing company, 1985, pp. 1-9. drury, maurice o. ‘conversations with wittgenstein’, in ludwig wittgenstein: personal recollections. ed. rush rhees. oxford: basil blackwell, 1981. goodman, russell. wittgenstein and william james. cambridge: cambridge up, 2004. heal, jane. “wittgenstein and dialogue” ed. timothy smiley, philosophical dialogues. oxford: oxford up, 1995. 63-83. jackman, henry. ‘wittgenstein & james’s “stream of thought”‘. meeting of the society for the advancement of american philosophy (2004):1-9. kahn, charles. plato and the socratic dialogue. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. keightley, alan. wittgenstein, grammar and god. london: epworth press, 1976. malcolm, norman (1958). ludwig wittgenstein: a memoir. oxford: oxford up, 2001. mcginn, marie. wittgenstein and the philosophical investigations. london: routledge, 1997. parret, herman. “contexts as constraints on understanding in dialogue”. in: dascal, marcelo (ed.), dialogue: an interdisciplinary approach. 1985, pp. 165-179 plato. plato complete works. ed. john m. cooper. cambridge: hackett pc, 1997. polimenov, todor. “wittgenstein in conversation with his sources: anspielungen und zitate im werk ludwig wittgensteins by h. biesenbach.” nordic wittgenstein review 1 (2012): 200-208. rhees, rush. wittgenstein and the possibility of discourse. ed. dewey z. phillips. cambridge: cambridge up, 1998. 65l. wittgenstein, culture and value, §322. https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/pbcs.1 dialogical grammar dorit lemberger dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.132 | vol. 3 (2015) a173 savickey, beth. wittgenstein’s art of investigation. london: routledge, 1999. sedley, david. “plato on language.” ed. benson, hugh. h. a companion to plato. uk: blackwell, 2009. 214-227. scolnicov, samuel. idea and method, thirty-three studies in plato. (in hebrew). jerusalem: magnes, 2008. ter-hark, michel. “wittgenstein on the experience of meaning and secondary use.” eds. o. kuusela and m. mcginn, eds. 2011. the oxford handbook of wittgenstein. oxford: oxford university press, pp wittgenstein, ludwig. (1922). tractatus logico-philosophicus. new-york: routledge & kegan paul (2nd edition), 1961. wittgenstein, ludwig. ms 111, 1931. the collected works of ludwig wittgenstein, internet version, oxford: basil blackwell pub. ——— lectures & conversations. berkeley: university of california press, 1966. ——— the blue and brown books .2nd ed. oxford: basil blackwell, 1969. ——— notebooks 1914-1916. eds. von wright, george h. and elizabeth m. anscombe. 2nd ed. oxford: basil blackwell, 1979. ——— remarks on the philosophy of psychology, vol. i. eds. von wright, george h. and elizabeth m. anscombe. trans. g. e. m. anscombe. oxford: basil blackwell, 1980. ——— (1967). zettel. eds. von wright, george h. and elizabeth m. anscombe. oxford: basil blackwell, 1981. ——— lectures on philosophical psychology 1946-1947, (ed. peter geach), chicago: the university of chicago press, 1988. ——— culture and value, trans. peter winch, 2nd ed., oxford: basil blackwell, 1998. ——— the voices of wittgenstein. trans. baker, gordon, michael mackert, john connolly and vasilis politis. london: routledge, 2003. ——— the big typescript 213. eds. and trans: grant luckhardt and maximilian aue. oxford: blackwell publishing, 2005. ——— philosophical investigations, 4th ed. trans. anscombe, elizabeth m., peter hacker and joachim schulte; eds. peter hacker, joachim schulte. uk: wiley-blackwell, 2009. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ microsoft word 6 lobok boris groys between dialogue and ideology (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.218| vol. 5 (2017) db:39 boris groys between dialogue and ideology, or why it is so easy to fall into the trap of fleeting political circumstances alexander m. lobok moscow pedagogical institute, russia for almost thirty years, alexander lobok has been a theoretical-practitioner. he constantly theorizes his innovative pedagogical practice while trying to enact his theory of agencyand dialogue-based education in practice. his evolving theory and emerging pedagogical practice mutually inform and test each other. his overall methodology is based on kurt lewin’s “action research” and lev vygotsky’s “formative experiment.” alexander is a designer of exciting educational games and a host of children’s tv shows in russia. he is a leading researcher at the institute of system projects, moscow city pedagogical university, russia. ��� the first thought that comes to mind when reading the article by boris groys goes along the lines of – he could not have meant it seriously. it just has to be a sort of an intellectual paradoxical challenge meant to tease the reader. but the more you read groys’ text, the more you come to realize that the author was quite serious in claiming to have discovered the theoretical basis of totalitarianism and stalinism in bakhtin’s theory of carnival and it becomes obvious that such a conclusion was made simply due to theoretical carelessness, deficit of analysis, and adherence to certain ideological clichés. the most surprising is the fact that groys treats bakhtin not as a philosopher and thinker but as an ideologist, or a person who has a number of ideas, which he tries to somehow inculcate in the minds of his readers. as if bakhtin’s texts about dialogue are written from an absolutely monologic standpoint. as if bakhtin’s texts do not create a space in which the reader can breathe in the freedom of dialogue, but instead forcefully lead the reader along linear boundaries to some truths fed to them by bakhtin. the methodology of groys’s analysis of bakhtin is highly reminiscent of the methodology of historicalphilosophical analysis, which was part and parcel of the old soviet textbooks on marxism-leninism: “aristotle mistakenly believed…”, “kant underestimated…”, “hegel failed to realize…”, “feuerbach failed to understand…” – such kind of clichés that do not even attempt to try and reconstruct the real thinking space of this or that philosopher according to the inner laws of this space. essentially, the whole text by groys consists of such evaluative judgments meant to “label” bakhtin. at that, groys does not even quote bakhtin – there is not a single quote from bakhtin in the text that could somehow support such arrogant evaluations. groys just throws in his judgements as if they were absolute axioms not requiring any proof: issn: 2325-3290 (online) boris groys between dialogue and ideology alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.218 | vol. 5 (2017) db:40 • “bakhtin negatively reacts to the russian avant-gardist formalist theory…” • “in the avant-gardist emphasis on the author, bakhtin saw the perpetuation of the traditional monologism…” • “for bakhtin, each word is just a remark in the endless dialogue of everyone with everyone else” • “a polyphonic novel is interpreted by bakhtin as a result of carnivalization of literature…” • “bakhtin’s theory, in fact, equates literature to life – and, therefore, it calls everyone to see a life program in it…” • “bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy...” • “bakhtin welcomes the carnivalesque pathos of the “final death” of everything individual…” • “this truth is, according to bakhtin, incarnated in the polyphonic novel…” • “all the voices, in bakhtin’s opinion, have the right to be heard – but only within the context of a whole, totalitarian, all-absorbing novel…” • “such a novel, in fact, cannot even have an author, because an author should exist outside of the novel – which, according to bakhtin, is not allowed to anyone…” and, finally, the grand-finale: “…bakhtin’s aim was not to criticize the revolution and stalin’s terror (?!) from a democratic standpoint, but to theoretically justify (!!!!!!) them as an archaic ritual rooted in ancient traditions”. the last statement prompts the following question: why on earth should bakhtin have been concerned, generally speaking, with “criticism” or “justification” of stalinism in his writing? or is it simply because groys’s mind is incapable to admit the existence of texts, which are not related to politics but live according to different laws that have nothing to do with politics? it seems, actually, that groys’s main genre is the political “tongue in cheek” genre. it also seems that, for groys, any theoretical-philosophical text cannot be just that, a theoretical-philosophical text, but must necessarily be an allegory for a certain political statement. that is why groys absolutely does not care about what bakhtin wrote. he is solely interested in how it can be interpreted in political terms – is bakhtin’s theory of polyphonic novel and carnival “for” or “against” stalin? as for the actual content of groys’s discussion, it should be mentioned that the author of the article made two serious conceptual mistakes. these mistakes concern two fundamental concepts of bakhtin’s philosophic discourse. the first concept is that of dialogue. here is how groys treats it: for bakhtin, each word is just a remark in the endless dialogue of everyone with everyone else: it is always original and, to some extent, passive, separated from the speaker, “material”, it always contains in itself the reduced voices of “others” – and this is also true about the author’s voice. boris groys between dialogue and ideology alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.218 | vol. 5 (2017) db:41 it appears that groys hears in bakhtin’s dialogue some chaotic noise, some cacophony of voices randomly put together and having no individual faces. but if a voice has no face of its own – can we even call it a voice? and if voices merge into some sort of an endless background noise – can we call it a dialogue? one of the fundamental things that painfully emerges in bakhtin’s texts is that a dialogic voice is a voice which does not have an author-puppeteer, who leads this voice by the threads of his aprioristic knowledge of what remarks the voice should utter. bakhtin’s voices are voices that have their own merits and their own life, which is not a projection of the will and knowledge of a super-author (whether we call him god or a writer). whereas the whole point is that, if everything has been planned beforehand in the head of an author (= god), any real dialogue becomes unthinkable – we can only talk of the imitation of dialogue in this case. which, in fact, is the golden dream of any totalitarian regime. the second mistake, the second conceptual trap that groys falls into, is the trap connected to his treatment of the concept of carnival. groys claims that bakhtin’s descriptions of carnival and carnivalization “reproduce the atmosphere of stalin’s terror with its unbelievable eulogies and vilifications, and also with its unexpected crownings and dethronings, which obviously had a carnivalesque nature.” what are the arguments supporting such a serious claim? well, here are as many as four of them: 1. “stalin himself notoriously said that “life has become more joyous”…” (so, according to groys, any manifestation of joy is carnivalesque – groys, therefore, equates “carnivalesque” to “joyous”) 2. “[stalin’s] favorite feature film was the purely carnivalesque “volga-volga”…” (it would be nice to see some arguments in favor of the claim that the mentioned comedy film is a carnivalesque comedy – i.e., a comedy of absurdity, a comedy of inverted social roles) 3. “there are many accounts of the specific “joyousness” of the 1930s. for example, it is widely known that the show trials and, especially, the verdicts thereof were accompanied by the laughter of the audience…” (again, groys apparently does not understand the specificity of carnivalesque laughter. for him, the mere fact of laughter is a sign of carnival) 4. carnival is… a manifestation of the “national character” and “national character” is the “core of the stalinist culture”. (this is a truly carnivalesque inversion: form now on, let us treat everything that can be called “national” as pertaining to stalinism and let us, therefore, apply the term “stalinists” to all people dealing with national symbols, arts, and crafts). all of this is followed by the conclusion that bakhtin is, essentially, a stalinist, whereas his concept of carnival is a theoretical justification of totalitarianism. what can be said about that? only that groys’s reasoning is unbelievable in its childish naiveté. it is similar to the reasoning of a simple-minded schoolboy, who has problems with the laws of formal logics and who builds the following logical chain: “socrates is mortal. a worm is mortal. therefore, socrates is a worm”. it should be specifically mentioned that the four “arguments” above prove the fact that boris groys does not fully grasp the very essence of the phenomenon of carnival in culture as a space for playful, “not-for-real” inversion of the customary hierarchical relations. this inversion is to a large extent boris groys between dialogue and ideology alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.218 | vol. 5 (2017) db:42 similar to a children’s play, in which children downplay various psychological tensions they feel towards adults, and it has nothing to do with a hollywood thriller, in which children turn into real vampires or serial killers. carnival, in its essence, is anti-hierarchical. the anti-hierarchical property of carnival is its core component. carnival is the levelling of top and bottom. moreover, it is a purely voluntary levelling. carnival is a space for freedom, in which man claims his right for egregiously rowdy behavior in the world of strict hierarchies. carnival is a space for salvation of human existence in the world deprived of the right to exist. carnival is playing in death but it is not real death. and in this sense, carnival is downplaying of the fear of death. groys, however, seems to be unwilling to accept that, in its very essence, carnival is a means of the survival of culture in the world where politics destroys culture. he seems unwilling to realize that carnival is all about the indestructibility of humanness in a human being. that it is about the indestructibility of play and playful inversion. that the psychological mechanism of carnivalization of the horrors of real life is an important instrument of salvation, which allows humankind to survive even in the conditions of the most anti-human totalitarianism. in this context, the comparisons between the dark, gloomy absurdity of stalin’s court trials and “carnival” seem very strange, to say the least of it. stalin’s trials had absolutely nothing to do with play and participation in them could not possibly be voluntary. stalin’s trials did not have any space for the carnivalesque “not-for-real” property. and the fact that mocking laughter, addressed to the former “leaders of the revolution”, could be heard in the courts had nothing to do with a carnival act – which can be proved by the mere fact that those “leaders” were really crushed – not by the carnivalesque but by absolutely real physical and psychological tortures. whereas stalin’s murders were not in the least “playful” ones, or carnivalesque “not-for-real” ones, they were absolutely real murders. it is amazing that groys, having diagnosed bakhtin’s thinking style as a totalitarian one (the “dionysian mode” of totalitarian style), fails to perceive that the very stylistics of bakhtin’s texts (unlike groys’s text, by the way!) is an essentially anti-totalitarian stylistics. bakhtin’s text never dictates anything; it never persuades the reader; it never postulates anything unequivocally – rather, it creates a space for the reader’s thinking. and that is why bakhtin’s texts are live philosophical texts that have no connections to the political circumstances of the era in which they were created, which makes them essentially timeless – just like the texts by heidegger or mamardashvili. this cannot be said about the text by groys, though, which seems to belong to a certain time (with the visible signs of the political discourse of a certain time period), and this makes this text temporary, or transient, – in other words, it is a text that will hardly be of any interest to anybody, outside of this specific political context. this can actually be the reason why groys’s text betrays this sentiment of bitterness, envy, and a bit of that adolescent desire to assert oneself and win applause for one’s daring. for groys certainly understands that any texts by bakhtin will be perused even in the next century, but will anyone read the texts by groys in a hundred years?.. hence the desire to shout out something incredibly daring – just to attract some attention. alas, political boldness is not the highest merit that a thinking philosophical text can possess. and it is not political boldness that makes a certain text truly philosophical – i.e. a text that exists in the realm far beyond the fleeting political circumstances of the moment. boris groys between dialogue and ideology alexander m. lobok dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.218 | vol. 5 (2017) db:43 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a20 dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article gabriela aiolfi federal university of technology of paraná (utfpr), brazil anselmo lima federal university of technology of paraná (utfpr), brazil letícia lemos gritti federal university of technology of paraná (utfpr), brazil abstract this article presents a study that aims to identify and analyze dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article. the data were collected in the research laboratory entitled 'workshop of reading, writing and rewriting of opinion articles', an activity of the research group utfpr-cnpq lad'humano, in 2015. the opinion articles were written by first term undergraduate students of the letters teacher certification program in portuguese-english of the federal university of technology of paraná, brazil, pato branco campus. the writing of the texts was recorded by the software autoscreen recorder and inputlog. the analyses are mainly based on bakhtin, volosinov, and vygotsky and show that repair by lexical synonymy has the dialogic functions of addressing the target audience of the text, of textual adjustment, of giving the desired content to discourse and of acting in the process of construction of the writer's image. as "the meaning of the word is completely determined by its context" (bakhtin/volochínov, 2014, p.109), it is the verbal and extraverbal context of a certain word choice that will contribute or not to building the meaning intended by the writer, and that is why synonymy study in the process of writing is important. gabriela aiolfi is a master's student at universidade tecnológica federal do paraná (federal university of technology (utf) paraná state, brazil). she develops her work in the graduate program in linguistics and literature (ppgl utfpr) under the guidance of dr. anselmo lima. her work focuses on the study of the process of writing and rewriting of a text in a computational environment, mainly on the phenomena that constitute such process, deeply influenced by bakhtin, vigotsky, voloshinov and studies from genetic criticism. she holds a teaching degree in portuguese and english languages and literature from the federal university of technology paraná state, pato branco campus. she held a scientific initiation scholarship from the institutional scientific initiation scholarship program (pibic cnpq) from 2016 to 2018 and is part of the cnpq research group linguagem, atividade e desenvolvimento humano (lad'humano language, activity and human development). anselmo lima is a tenured professor of educational linguistics at universidade tecnológica federal do paraná utfpr (federal university of technology of parana state, brazil). phd in applied linguistics and issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a21 language studies from pontifícia universidade católica de são paulo – puc-sp (pontifical catholic university of sao paulo, brazil); phd internship in occupational psychology at conservatoire national des arts et métiers de paris – cnam (national conservatory of arts and trades of paris, france) and postdoc in the college of education and human development of the university of delaware, usa. he is the author of “teacher education & teacher health”: www.formacaoesaudedoprofessor.com leticia lemos gritti is a tenured professor of linguistics and portuguese language at the department of letters, of the federal university of technology (utf) paraná state, where she teaches portuguese language and formal linguistics at an undergraduate teaching degree course in portuguese and english languages and literature, in which she was in a course coordination between 2015 and 2016. she also works as professor and researcher in the graduate program in linguistics and literature of (ppgl utfpr). the author holds a phd in linguistics from the federal university of santa catarina, where she defended her doctoral thesis in the area of formal semantics. from september 2010 to july 2011, she did a sandwich internship at université paris diderot (paris vii), structures formelles du language, in paris, through the capes-cofecub project, a brazil-france cooperation. acknowledgements: special thanks to cnpq, for research funding; to utfpr, for scholarships that helped undergraduate students participate in this project; to doctor mirian ruffini, for her fine proofreading of our text; to our managing hidden editors, for their invaluable help with revisions. ��� introduction when writing an opinion article, the writer's choice of words is extremely important. among other things it is responsible for the targeted audience’s acceptance or rejection of his or her position. when making a word choice, the person who writes can displace a word or use an inaccurate term that would not be helpful in the task of convincing the reader. to solve this problem, the writer can repair his or her text by means of replacement of the "problematic" word for a synonymous term. understanding what happens in this phenomenon of the exchange of words can be very useful for teaching and learning the textual production of an opinion article. in addition, thoroughly analyzing this process can bring advances in the area of linguistics and applied studies. we seek, in this paper, to identify and analyze the dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy1 in the process of production of an opinion article. given this objective, our major research question can be specifically stated as follows: what are the dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article? others have already studied lexical synonymy with different objectives. for instance, spáčilová (2009) carried out a study about some synonymous words and their use according to their semantic category and their meanings. stanojević (2009) wrote about cognitive synonymy, concluding that cognitive synonyms have the same sense in common, even regarding the different registers, styles or dialects they belong to. silva (2015) studied lexical synonymy in concrete cases, taking social factors in consideration 1 in lexical synonymy, according to ilari and geraldi (2006), there are two words that contribute to the same meaning of the sentence. “repair” is a term that means “self-correction” and lexical synonymy is a kind of repair. this article aims to study dialogic functions of this repair. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a22 when analyzing changes of words meaning, following elements from cognitive sociolinguistics. al-hindawi and alkhazaali (2014) studied synonymy as a stylistic marker and as an element related to the themes of william wordsworth's poetry. the process of repair has been examined by other studies as well, like the one carried out by schegloff, jefferson and sacks (1977), who highlighted repair as a phenomenon in which "linguistics and sociology meet", being the "self-righting mechanism for the organization of language use in social interaction" (p.381). schegloff (1979) shows that repair has an important role in the sequential organization, the syntax, of conversations. clark and andersen (1979) studied repair in the process of children's language acquisition, concluding that spontaneous repairs close the gap between children's language knowledge from input received and from their own language production. all these works analyzed data from conversational sources. we do not know of other investigations that deal specifically with repair by lexical synonymy in written text the way we propose to do in this article. maybe they do not exist or are hard to find. this seems to indicate that this field of study has not yet been totally explored. focusing on the role of words in written discourse, this study therefore addresses some of the gaps in the existing literature of lexical synonymy and repair. and it also examines written data from the point of view of its production process. this last fact establishes the major difference between this paper and the ones mentioned above, which focused their attention exclusively on oral texts (conversations). our work is organized in three major sections. in section i, just below, we present our theoretical basis, which is developed in six subsections, as follows: 1) text and speech genres; 2) text as process; 3) synonymy; 4) argumentation and repair by lexical synonymy; 5) opinion articles, and 6) a discussion on the position of the writer as his or her own first reader. in section ii, we present our methodology, which, in its turn, is developed in two subsections: 1) authentic data production for analysis, and 2) computerized method: the use of autoscreen recorder and inputlog. in section iii, we present and discuss our findings in six subsections, each of which approaches a specific process of word substitution by synonymy: 1) pessoas ou jovens? (people or youngsters?); 2) câncer ou tumor? (cancer or tumor?); 3) cobrar, exigir ou fazer com que? (to require, to demand or to make somebody have something done?); 4) governo ou poder público? (government or public authorities?); 5) acidentes ou tragédias? (accidents or tragedies?); and 6) pois ou visto que? (because or seeing that?). our work is concluded with some final remarks and a list of references. theoretical basis to identify and analyze the process of repair by lexical synonymy in the writing and rewriting phases of an opinion article, we have used theoretical concepts from linguistics and psychology, which are presented in the following subsections. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a23 text and speech genres wachowicz (2012, p.22) states that "text is discourse" 2(author's highlight). for this reason, when we here talk about text, we do not only seek to strictly analyze its linguistic aspects, but also how these aspects act in the social environment in which they belong: "it means to think about the historical ideology that constituted it"3 (wachowicz, 2012, p.23). this author's statement is compatible with the concept of speech genres (bakhtin, 2011), adopted in our research. text, which is therefore also a form of speech, is here understood as utterance, that is, a unit of communication. each field of human activity uses certain relatively stable types of utterances, which are called speech genres. bakhtin (2011, p.263) emphasizes the heterogeneity of speech genres and classifies them into two categories: the primary genres and the secondary genres. the first classification involves more "simple" genres, the daily utilized ones. the second considers the more intricately organized ones, which involve, mostly, written texts. that which characterizes genres are their constitutive elements, which are inseparable among themselves: interlocutive relationship, compositional construction, thematic content and style. the objective of working with the notion of genre is not merely the analysis of linguistic terms that define the text, but to analyze the text in its socio-interactive flow of communication and how the linguistic elements act in this flow. text as process according to the concept presented in the previous subsection, text imbued with a particular historically expressed ideology. it can be thought of as a historical diachronic process. in our study, the idea of process refers to a perspective that faces text not simply as a product of writing activity, as an object of linguistic aspects analysis. our approach seeks to explore the very process of writing, i.e. the flow of written production, with all the writer's hesitations that are not visible in the final text delivered to the reader. therefore, we perceive text as a process, not as a mere product of communication. vigotski (2007, p.63), working within developmental psychology, says that the analysis of a process "requires a dynamic exposition of the main constitutive points of the history of the processes"4. the repairs made by the writer in the process of writing, are possibly also important constitutive points of this process. this is why we chose to analyze the functions of repairs in the development of the writer’s production as one of the several constituents of text. as it will be seen in our methodology section, repair by lexical synonymy was chosen for analysis in particular because of its high frequency of occurrence, which stood out among other textual operations. the phenomenon of (text) repair is constituted by writing a word or some words that are then erased and replaced. this phenomenon could only be perceived by following the writer's process of writing. we thus do not seek to study text only for what it is, but also for what it could have become (lima, 2014, p.39). the conception of text as a product makes sure that a writing does not leave clues of the process of planning, presenting itself as a completed and complex whole (rodrigues, 2010, p.36). it is therefore a feature of writing not to "provide clues, apparent marks concerning the process of its creation. it usually hides such processes from the reader and it shows only the finished product"5 (chafe, 1985 apud rodrigues, 2010, p.32-33). this point of view excludes, in part, the fact that there are "trepidations" in 2 original: "texto é discurso". 3 original: "significa pensar na ideologia histórica que o constituiu". 4 original: "requer uma exposição dinâmica dos principais pontos constituintes da história dos processos". 5 original: "não fornecer pistas, marcas aparentes a respeito do processo de criação. geralmente ela esconde tais processos do leitor e mostra apenas o produto acabado”. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a24 written production and that the final product does not correspond to the first attempt of writing, to the first outline, an initial creative moment. salles (2008), a researcher of the genetic criticism6 field, studies the creative process of literature, which does not pull away from the procedural perspective of our linguistic focus. when this author says that "the creative act is the result of a process"7 (salles, 2008, p.25), it is evident that the marks of the creative flow are present in the written textual production. text takes shape in its creative flow, and all the hesitations of the writer are part of it. in this way, the work delivered to the audience and all the operations involved in its construction are a single object. in other words, the final product is not detached from the process of its production. on the contrary, its production is a constituent and an important part of the text, but it cannot be considered the only single part of the whole (biasi, 2012; silva, 2010; salles, 2008; hay, 1993; grésillon and lebrave, 1983). synonymy from a historical-ideological perspective, a text is always addressed to someone. bakhtin/volochínov (2014, p.116) claims that the word is always addressed to an interlocutor. this statement emphasizes the importance of the interlocutive relationship in the discussion about the chosen word. which word (among several possible ones) will have the desired impact on the reader? when it is selected to integrate in an utterance, a word becomes an ideological sign. the ideological sign will reflect (and it will also refract) the writer's position (bakhtin/volochínov, 2014, p.99). as "the meaning of the word is completely determined by its context"8 (bakhtin/volochínov, 2014, p.109), it is the verbal and extraverbal context of a certain word choice that will contribute or not to building the meaning intended by the writer, and that is why synonymy study in the process of writing is important. it is also important to remember that a text is a part of a social context, and each context provides "certain grammatical choices to be made by the individuals"9 (wachowicz, 2012, p.23). the writer of an opinion article, with the purpose of convincing his or her readers, seeks for linguistic elements that respond to his or her objectives (wachowicz, 2012, p.23), which produce the desired meaning. with this in mind, it is important to define what synonymy is. ilari and geraldi (2006, p.43) broadly define synonymy on the lexical level as "the identity of meaning"10. however, the authors bring some observations about this definition. the first of them is that the synonymous terms not only allude to the same object, but also allude to the same meaning (ilari; geraldi, 2006, p.44). the identity of meaning discussed by the authors is that words must bring the same contribution to the meaning of the sentence, in any application, to be considered synonyms. nevertheless, it is recognized by them that the use of a synonymous term in any situation will not always result in the desired effect, because synonymy is directly connected to its context of use (ilari; geraldi, 2006, p.44-46). once the meaning of a word depends on the context in which it occurs, it is impossible to claim that it is a case of perfect synonyms, exactly because they are not "interchangeable in all the contexts"11 (pietroforte; lopes, 2008, p.126). therefore, when they can be used in the same context, they will have different discursive impacts (pietroforte; lopes, 2008, p.126). 6 genetic criticism studies the genesis of text, mainly the literary creation process and its traces of writing. 7 original: "o ato criador é resultado de um processo". 8 original: "o sentido da palavra é totalmente determinado por seu contexto". 9 original: "determinadas escolhas gramaticais pelos indivíduos". 10 original: "identidade de significação". 11 original: "intercambiáveis em todos os contextos". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a25 according to the context of a word choice, the load of meaning of one will be different from that of the other, because "some type of specialization, of meaning or use"12 always happens (ilari; geraldi, 2006, p.47). concerning this, the authors talk about the choice of a synonymous term by saying that, presumably equivalent, synonymous expressions are, even so, expressions among which the interlocutors choose: choice is, in this case, a "search for the exact word"[...], which shows that two expressions are not equally appropriate to the target purposes13 (ilari; geraldi, 2006, p.47, highlighted by the authors) we assume that the target purpose of repair by synonymy in an argumentative text is the provocation of certain reactions in the reader by the word use in the context of discussion, as the data show later. thus, the choice of synonymous expressions is almost never randomly made. argumentation and repair by lexical synonymy perelman and olbrechts-tyteca (2005, p.04) define the object of argumentation theory as "discursive techniques that allow to induce and enhance the adherence of minds to the theses presented for their assent" (highlighted by the authors)14. we think that a search for a synonym can be seen as one of these techniques. the expression provided by a word only exists in the "process of its living use in a concrete utterance"15 (bakhtin, 2011, p.292) and an "absolutely neutral utterance is impossible"16 (bakhtin, 2011, p.289). the ideological sign is not taken from a neutral language, it is taken from other utterances and it is repeated and recreated to suit the purpose of the utterance under construction. in the context of argumentation, words serve the ideology defended by the writer. a word or an ideological sign is the bearer of a point of view to be defended or attacked, and the choice of a word will be influenced by this fact. vigotski (1996, p.67) conceptualizes human behavior as being "a system of triumphant reactions"17. articulating this concept with the process of repair by lexical synonymy, a chosen synonym among several contestant terms is a triumphant one. all the available words compete among themselves and, in the case of argumentation, the argumentative potential of a word in a certain context can be decisive for its choice to be made. vigotski (1996, p.69) affirms that behavior which is realized is a tiny portionof the universe of all possible behaviors because “human beings are every minute full of unrealized possibilities"18. relating this idea to repair by lexical synonymy, we can say that a chosen synonym, the term that triumphs over the others, is just one of the several that could be used. however, some unrealized possibilities leave marks in the process of writing because they compete for space in the subject's speech, who hesitates between the choice of one possibility over that of another. 12 original: "algum tipo de especialização, de sentido ou de uso". 13 original: "[...] presumidamente equivalentes, as expressões sinônimas são, ainda assim, expressões entre as quais os locutores escolhem: a escolha é, no caso, uma "procura da palavra exata" [...], a mostrar que duas expressões não são igualmente adequadas aos fins visados [...]". 14 original: "técnicas discursivas que permitem provocar ou aumentar a adesão dos espíritos às teses que se lhes apresentam ao assentimento" (grifos dos autores). 15 original: "processo do seu emprego vivo em um enunciado concreto". 16 original: "enunciado absolutamente neutro é impossível". 17 original: "um sistema de reações triunfantes". 18 original: "o comportamento que se realizou é uma parte insignificante dos comportamentos possíveis. cada minuto do homem está cheio de possibilidades não realizadas". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a26 the writer, among several conflicting possibilities of lexical choices, seeks for the one that accomplishes his or her speech, the one that is more appropriate for the genre (lima, 2016a, p.29). however, this choice is neither immediate nor easy. the writer's choice attempts can be understood as inarticulateness in the 'opinion article' genre. lima (2016a, p.24) conceptualizes lack of mastery of a genre not just as lack of capacity to be articulate in the genre, but also as a specific activity through which the subject develops from genre inability to genre ability. in other words, he or she develops from lack of genre mastery to genre mastery. lima also emphasizes that, when performing this activity, the subject makes efforts to comply with the social specificities of the genre (lima, 2016a, p.24). by means of the process analysis, we notice that hesitations by the writer, when choosing a word, is evidence of social and dialogical influence, since, at times, the subject pauses his or her writing, standing speechless while facing a certain disturbing communicative situation (lima, 2016a p.27). opinion articles the “opinion article” genre "draws on argumentation to analyze, evaluate and respond to a controversial issue"19 (boff; köche; marinello, 2009, p.03). the subject approached, most of the time, encompasses social issues that raise hot discussions. the subject assumes a defensive position regarding his or her opinion and, through argumentation, seeks to convince his or her reader to adhere to the defended idea (boff; köche; marinello, 2009, p.03). an opinion article is an utterance because it works as a form of concrete communication and it has "absolutely precise limits"20 (bakhtin, 2011, p.275). the limits of this utterance are defined by the alternation of the subjects of discourse, which establishes an absolute beginning and an absolute end: the previous utterances which it responds to and the subsequent ones that will respond to it. bakhtin (2011, p.275) says that the utterance limit is determined by the responsive comprehension of the other. therefore, when the speaker has said all he or she had to say about a topic (relative semantic-objectual finiteness of the thematic content) he or she gives the floor so the other(s) can respond. bakhtin (2011, p.276) also emphasizes that the configuration of secondary genres is differentiated, since whoever writes also responds, makes objections and refutes his or her own questions. this may correspond to repairs of the written text because the writer is his or her first reader (as we are going to emphasize in the following subsection). besides, a text whose writer assumes is finished is not finished at all. it is not finished because it is waiting for active responsive comprehensions coming from the readers. an utterance, that is, an opinion article produced by a writer, is not the only existing text produced about a specific topic or object of debate, which, according to bakhtin (2011, p.281), is inexhaustible. in other words, it can be approached in infinite ways, from several different points of view. in an opinion article, only one aspect of a certain topic is usually approached, and it can only be relatively exhausted. that is because the impression over readers can generate several interpretations, returning to the inexhaustible character of the topic. the position of the writer as his or her own first reader grésillon and lebrave (1983, p.09) stress the importance of the role of the writer as his or her first reader. although they give emphasis to this topic in the literary sphere, the same happens in a non-literary production. a writer, as his or her first reader, has 19 original: " se vale da argumentação para analisar, avaliar e responder a uma questão controversa". 20 original: "limites absolutamente precisos". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a27 different powers from those of an ordinary reader: a writer is a reader who is, at the same time, the one who writes, the one who reads, who comments, who rewrites, etc. lebrave says that writing and reading are inseparably intricate in the production of a text. the author is more of a reader than a writer. it is always possible to correct, to modify, to cancel, to enrich the utterance that is already produced. these corrections are effects more related to reading than to writing itself (salles, 2008, p.109-110)21 when a writer reads his or her own work and becomes his or her first interlocutor, he or she is to a certain extent able to predict the reactions of other possible interlocutors. according to this idea, bakhtin/volochínov22 (2014, p.116) states that "the word is addressed to an interlocutor: it is there in function of the person who is the interlocutor [...]" (highlighted by the author)23. therefore, the writer repairs his or her own text after receiving his or her own feedback, after placing him or herself in the position of an interlocutor. methodology this section is divided into two subsections. the first one is about the strategy we used to produce data for analysis in as authentic a manner as possible, so we could be in accordance with our theoretical bases. as it will be clear in the first subsection, what makes it authentic is the fact that the writers were students who were actually there in order to really learn how to produce opinion articles. the second subsection, in its turn, is about the computerized method we have used to identify and observe the phenomenon of repair by lexical synonymy in the data we produced. authentic data production the production of the data analyzed in this study was carried out in the year of 2015, in the research laboratory entitled “workshop of reading, writing and rewriting of opinion articles” of the pato branco campus of the federal university of technology of paraná. the workshop aimed to teach undergraduate students how to write opinion articles. first time it was offered, in the first semester of 2015, the objective of the workshop was to reduce difficulties in reading and writing by a group of undergraduates of the first term of the letters teacher certification program in portuguese-english at the pato branco campus. as a research laboratory, the workshop also aimed to produce data for scientific studies like this one. furthermore, the texts that were produced were intended to be published in the blog 'pães e opiniães' (lima, 2016b), which was designed to function as a strategy of reaching out for real readership24. by means of the readers’ comments in that digital platform, there is interaction of the writers with their target audience about their published opinion article. the subjects who participated in this research produced, in total, six texts (aiolfi; götz, 2016, p.1734-1735) throughout the workshop. this study focuses on the textual analysis of lexical synonymy of only the diagnostic text of one of these participants, a female student aged about 18 years old. the diagnostic text is the first text written, with only a little orientation from the professors. the only instructions 21 original: "[...] por sua vez, poderes diferentes de um leitor comum: é um leitor que é, ao mesmo tempo, o eu que escreve, que se lê, que se autocomenta, que reescreve, etc. lebrave diz que escritura e leitura estão indissociavelmente intrincadas na produção do texto. o autor é mais leitor do que escritor. é sempre possível corrigir, modificar, anular, enriquecer o enunciado já produzido. essas correções são mais efeito da leitura do que da escritura propriamente dita". 22 the edition of marxism and the philosophy of language consulted attributes the authorship of the work to bakhtin/volochínov. that is the reason why we credited the work with both names, although it was written by one of the authors bakhtin/volochínov. 23 original: "a palavra dirige-se a um interlocutor: ela é função da pessoa desse interlocutor [...]" (grifos do autor). 24 the students knew that they were writing not only for themselves or for the teachers of the workshop, but for real readers, external to the university, who would read their opinion articles and make comments. that was possible because the blog was open to anyone who wanted to read, counting on a space for comments at the end of the text. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a28 given were the following: the participants must write an opinion article (without specifying which would be the structure of the text) and must write about a present-day polemic topic. the subsequent versions of the text were written based on more targeted orientations about the structure of the opinion article and about elements of textual construction. to our study, the diagnostic text is very important because, by using it we could analyze the students’ beginning of the genre mastery development process. it is important to point out that the workshop was grounded in the principles of dialogic pedagogy. lima and von duyke (2016) make reflections about this educational approach based on the writings by bakhtin. it is possible to establish a relationship between these authors' reflections and the work developed in the workshop: the professors' approach in the workshop leads to a process of development of the students' self-consciousness, thus guiding them throughout the process of writing and rewriting, by focusing on their inabilities, without eliminating their subjectivity. that is why the whole process matters, because the students' progress cannot be seen in a final version of a text. therefore, this perspective shows the authenticity of data production. the course of students' development is visible, happening while he or she was writing texts for other authentic purposes. all the pauses and hesitations are noticeable, and that is what makes the entire process of data production compatible with the research purpose. computerized method: the use of autoscreen recorder and inputlog textual production was entirely carried out on the computers. this was so firstly because those computers are actually used at the university by teachers and their students for various educational purposes, and secondly, from the point of view of our research, because it was the most efficient way of recording writing processes in real time. therefore, every student had his or her process of writing individually recorded. this recording took place by means of two softwares: autoscreen recorder and inputlog (leijten; van waes, 2013). autoscreen recorder is a software that captures the computer screen, in a video recording everything that is done on screen. this functionality is used in the analysis of the data in order to monitor the text in its flow of production. inputlog (leijten; van waes, 2013) is a program that executes some types of linguistic analyses over the process of textual files production. it has a connection with microsoft word, into which the text is typed. this tool records all the movements of the computer mouse and keyboard. the analyses used in this study, generated by the software, involve the recording of movements in intervals of one minute. the program generates reports in transcription symbols that represent the command executed in the computer. in this paper, we will present, analyze and discuss some excerpts of these reports. in order that the software language can be understood, we present below the meaning of each symbol of transcription that appears in the excerpts: code meaning [rshift] button 'caps lock' is pressed (indication of capital letter) . indication that the space bar was pressed { } the pause, in seconds, is represented by the numbers that are between braces. ex: {10671} 10 seconds and 671 milliseconds dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a29 there is indication of pause in cases where there are only five numbers between braces. cases in which more than five numbers appear can indicate selection of characters or indication of deleted characters {movement} any movement of the mouse [left click] click with the left button of the mouse [back] button 'backspace' is pressed (indication that characters are being erased to the left) [return] button 'enter' is pressed (indication of paragraph) [oem_7] buttons to the typing of stress characters are pressed (tilde and circumflex accent) [oem_4] buttons to the typing of the acute stress are pressed [delete] button 'delete' is pressed (indication that characters are being erased to the right) [scroll] scrolling of the page with the mouse [up] button with the arrow ↑ (page up) is pressed [insert] buttons to the typing of crase are pressed using the resources provided by the software, we started what we call the "mapping of repairs". with that mapping, we perceived various types of repairs that occurred in the text, among them the repair by synonymy. the mapping consists in the transcription of the text recorded in video concurrently with the analyses provided by inputlog. thus, we transcribe the text in its flow of production, including all the modifications made by the subject. this mapping was made following the chronological order of production, because by doing this we were able to determine the time of the beginning and end of each repair. throughout the section of analysis in this paper, we will present the time at which each change took place, so that the order of writing of each word becomes clearer.25 this method is justified by the functions of both software. without them, the phenomenon of repair by lexical synonymy would not be found and captured, because it happens only in the process of writing and rewriting, and does not appear in the final version of the text. the connection with microsoft word makes the writing process even more organic because students are familiarized with this text editing software. inputlog and autoscreen recorder were run in the background, not being visible to the users of the text editor. therefore, the possibility of control and regulation of writers' behavior because of the software simply does not exist. therefore, we do not analyze machine-mediated discourse because what is recorded is actually the students' own discourse, without our interventions and, if any, with minimum interference. this approach is relevant because the students' discourse can be seen in its “natural” flow of production and their subjectivity is not at all erased from our study. on the contrary, it is revealed and shown more deeply in its complexity. a limitation of the method is that we did not record the immediate extra-textual environment of production. for some long pauses, we hypothesized that the student writers could have been talking to each other or leaving the room. in addition, a microphone could have been used to record their conversation, and it would let us know if they were talking about their texts or about something else. another limitation is that we cannot pinpoint where their focus actually was during production because we did not use an eye tracking method. there is however no doubt that our methodology is connected and in accordance with the theoretical basis we previously outlined in section 1: by methodologically proceeding like we did, both in our workshop (for data production) and in the use of the software (for data collection), we do not lose track, 25 the inputlog generated three reports to the total time of recording (1h18min). the excerpts that will be presented belong to different reports and, because of this, there is discrepancy between the time indicated in the figures and the time when they really happened. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a30 for instance, of the idea of text as a dialogical process of communication, and not simply as a finished, motionless product. the analyses that will be presented below were also supplemented and elaborated from informal conversations with the student who wrote the specific opinion article whose process of production we focus on. in these conversations, she briefly reported her motives of choice of each repair and the meaning difference she understands there is between one word and another. from her indications, we dialogically deepened the analyses of each word/repair. we are not going to present analyses of all the changes that took place throughout 1 hour and 18 minutes of video length. we have chosen word changes we judge relevant to the argumentative process, because they were important to the comprehension of the writer's argumentation and because they allow the interpretation of the way she wanted to address her text to the target audience. the choice of terms reveals how the writer intended the readers to receive their text, how they would read it and how they would agree (or not) with the arguments. in other words, word choice reveals how the writer intended to respond to and potentially eliminate the presumed negative critiques and how she intended to get the readers to assent to her arguments. the methods used to analyze and interpret the data are going to be the description of the repair in the flow of the text, followed by the meaning and the sense of the word in the text with some discussions grounded in previously presented theoretical basis. as it will be seen, the analyses were only possible by means of theoretical foundation, by which the phenomenon of repair by lexical synonymy can be explained. findings and discussion the diagnostic text, in which the repairs by lexical synonymy were identified and analyzed, focused on the topic of violência no trânsito (traffic violence). the title chosen by the writer was situação caótica que vive o povo brasileiro (the chaotic situation in which the brazilian people live). the choice of the title shows her position: she considers traffic violence as something problematic in brazil. through the recordings, we detected that the title was written after the text was finished. this way, the textual choices of the writer preceded the title, which had the function of summarizing the written idea. to make clearer the context in which the analyzed excerpts took place, we present below the final diagnostic text written by the writer26. the repairs will be presented in the ascending order according to the lines where they happened. lines 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 chaotic situation in which brazilian people live thousands of traffic accidents happen everyday all around the world. in brazil, 60 thousand deaths were caused last year, according to data from the world health organization (who). it frightens me to know that most part of these deaths happen to youngsters, from 18 to 29 years of age, that act many times with irresponsibility. in some countries, such as germany, the number of accidents and deaths in traffic was considerably reduced. however for this to occur the government needed to be more strict, creating laws with more severe punishments, as well as the population doing its part. in brazil, i believe that this is the biggest problem. the laws somehow do not punish those responsible for causing accidents with deaths, and the population seems not to care 26 the original text written by the writer in brazilian portuguese is attached in the end of this paper. the text was transcribed exactly as it was written in its final version handed in for evaluation. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a31 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 about the absurd number of deaths that occur annually. it is inadmissible to accept that so many lives are lost. today in brazil it is perceptible that greatest number of deaths is considered by the brazilian justice as manslaughter, in which there is not the intention to kill. cases like this serve as a encouragement to many drivers who act irresponsibly, so they can get rid of the real punishment that they deserve, being up to them as sentence the donation of some baskets of basic food supplies, and to help in community service.27 this should not be allowed to happen, not even thousands of baskets of basic food supplies could pay for the value of a human life. we need to take some action. it is unacceptable that i, who am a driver, cyclist and pedestrian take a risk of not going back home safely everyday. to give an idea, i need to fear more the mister or the youngster who is driving a car than to fear the possibility of having a tumor, because it is proven that traffic accidents kill more than cancer. measures need to be taken with urgency, because the number of deaths that we see in the statistics points to a very serious problem. the average brazilian either does not know how to drive or is not being well instructed for this. i refuse to accept that there exists the possibility that someone can do wrong out of pure irresponsibility, i rather believe that there is a lack of knowledge and a lack of information. for this reason, the driving schools have a fundamental role in the process of decreasing the accidents. they must make drivers have their licenses renewed more frequently, and not each 5 years as it occurs nowadays. the public authorities also need to improve the traffic engineering, since the brazilian roads are in a chaotic situation, facilitating the occurrence of tragedies. “awareness campaigns” must occur more frequently through public bodies, seeing that in my city awareness campaigns are made only in the "traffic week". maybe, continuous information will help the driver to realize how important responsible action is. the war of canudos28 killed 30 thousand people in bahia’s hinterland. we live a war that has the same proportions twice every year, but in the traffic. it is necessary to fight against this war so the victims will not exist anymore, for this to occur everybody must be aware. when it has an end, the biggest and the better award will be received, life. pessoas ou jovens? (people or youngsters?) the first change that will be analyzed happens at the sixth minute of recording, in the excerpt corresponding to lines 3 to 4 of the diagnostic text. 27 in brazil, in some sentences, the judge of the court decides that the convicted person, instead of being arrested, should donate basic food supplies to needy people. there is another type of sentence in which the judge decides that the convict should do community work. 28 the war of canudos happened between 1896 and 1897 involving federal government troops against settlers led by a religious leader named antonio vicente mendes maciel, known as antonio conselheiro (1828-1897). he preached a mix of christian doctrine with popular religiosity and founded the village called canudos. in canudos he created a movement that criticized the republic. the war started when the villagers protested against the charge of taxes and ended with the end of the village, with over 30,000 deaths. dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a32 figure 1 transcription provided by inputlog the first choice, pessoas (people), was replaced by jovens (youngsters) almost immediately. through the transcription provided by inputlog, presented in figure 1, we notice that there was not a pause between the writing of pessoas (people) and the change to jovens (youngsters). pessoas (people) and jovens (youngsters) are not perfect synonyms, because they do not necessarily express the same idea. the first one refers to human beings, in general, that, in this context, can drive. the second one refers to the specific age group of the drivers, from 18 to 29 years old, who are considered young by the writer. in other words, pessoas (people) does not necessarily have the trait of jovens (youngsters), while jovens (youngsters) necessarily has the trait of pessoas (people). the change can be justified by the target audience of the opinion article. the writer previously knew that her text would be published in a blog and that this one would be promoted, among other audiences, to the academic community, composed, in its majority, by people of the mentioned age group. besides, the argument chosen to validate her opinion is related to specific statistics about the age of those involved in traffic accidents. in other words, the choice of argument may have influenced the choice of word. on the other hand, the intention to write a text about the young population may have influenced the option for the chosen argument. another reason that may have interfered in the selection of the word were the contents studied throughout her school life. as it has previously been pointed out, the undergraduate writer is part of a group of students of the first term of a teaching degree in letters. before entering college, she took enem (exame nacional do ensino médio national high school exam) and its essay test. one of the instructions for the essay is that students should avoid straying away from the topic, which happens when the subject of the text is not developed (inep, 2016, p.15). when the writer used the expression pessoas (people), the idea of generalization and of straying away from the argument may have occurred, compromising the development of the text. using jovens (youngsters), she limits the sample of the argument and directs the reading of the text. the substitution of people (pessoas) with youngsters (jovens) was chosen to be analyzed here as a repair because it was important to the process of argumentation. by means of her final choice, the writer shows her concern about adequate choice of a word (pessoas/jovens) in addressing an assumed interlocutor (bakhtin/volochínov, 2014, p.116). she also shows her concern in regard of the word serving the aims of her argumentation (perelman; olbrechts-tyteca, 2005, p.04), by guiding her argument and by directing the reading of her interlocutor. moreover, she shows knowledge about certain dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a33 aspects of the genre (bakhtin, 2011, p.263), by avoiding straying away from the topic, an instruction that fits the essay of enem, another kind of argumentative text that she has already written. câncer ou tumor? (cancer or tumor?) in this repair, which occurred at the fifty-second minute of the recording and which is presented in line 23-24, the writer used euphemism to employ synonyms due to their argumentative potential. figure 2 transcription provided by inputlog câncer (cancer) was the first typed word, being right after that substituted by tumor (tumor). here occurs something remarkable related to the meaning of the words. a tumor is a tissue without physiological function that proliferates itself abnormally, and a cancer is a malignant tumor (michaelis, 2008, p.156, p.886). according to the meaning of the words, both of them are related to tumors, but the word câncer (cancer), as well as its meaning, has a much bigger negative semantic load in speech. in the context in which the word was written, we understand that tumor (tumor) carries more of a positive connotation than câncer (cancer), which carries a negative connotation. in other words, the word was not employed in a neutral way. the motivation for the use of a milder word is shown in the sequence of the text. in line 25 the word câncer (cancer) is used again. if we consider the load that the word câncer (cancer) carries to speech, it is possible to think of the load that the writer took in consideration when writing. starting with the word with a soft tone, in a certain way, the effect of worsening of the situation is detected when we read the word with a more impacting tone. therefore, there is a growing significance, from the softer to the more contentious tone. there is a gradation of the argumentative force. the heritage from school knowledge is also perceptible in this change. when the writer chose not to repeat the same word twice, she is avoiding repetition, which is a recommendation given by teachers regarding all kinds of essays (situations in which repetition becomes a stylistic effect are exception), including the essay for enem (inep, 2016, p.18). the choice of analyzing this specific repair is justified because it shows a lot about the argumentative consciousness that the writer had when executing the substitution for a softer word instead of a more polemic one at a first moment. she sought a word that could be more appropriate to her argumentative objective (lima, 2016a, p.29; perelman; olbrechts-tyteca, 2005, p.04), that is, in dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a34 this case, to create a growing significance that could be more appealing to her interlocutor. this was important in order for her to position herself in relation to her topic. by claiming that the situation with traffic is as dangerous as a tumor or a cancer, she guides the reader through her text. furthermore, the meaning load of "cancer" seems to be a very important argumentative point, because even if it is not the triumphant word (vigotski, 1996, p.67), she did not leave it out of her text, because the word was repeated later. cobrar, exigir ou fazer com que? (to require, to demand or to make somebody have something done?) this change of synonyms begins at the forty-sixth minute, in line 32. figure 3 transcription provided by inputlog in the substitution of cobrar (to require) for exigir (to demand) there was only a very short pause, but in the replacement of exigir (to demand) for fazer com que (to make somebody have something done) there was approximately one minute and twenty-nine seconds of pause. this time was probably dedicated to the rereading of the text or maybe to some extra-textual activity that deviated her from her writing activity. this pause explains the writer's hesitation in view of her available choices to adjust her opinion to the text: the argumentative potentials of the words available were in conflict (vigotski, 1996, p.67). the verb cobrar (to require) has the meaning of receiving something that is due, of forcing the charge of something (michaelis, 2007, p.195) often related to monetary quantities. then its substitution for the verb exigir (to demand) was quick, in the effort of eliminating the monetary and colloquial meaning of the word. exigir (to demand), in this context, would have the formal meaning of imposing something as a duty (michaelis, 2008, p.376). exigir (to demand) would have a more practical meaning than cobrar (to require). however, right after the excerpt "exigir dos motoristas" (to demand from drivers) was written, it was soon deleted. when the pause of one minute and twenty-nine seconds happened, the writer could read her text and analyze which changes would be relevant to provoke a certain reaction in the reader. by choosing the expression fazer com que (to make somebody have something done), she puts the obligation on the driving schools, the undeniable duty of executing their role in drivers' education. fazer com que (to make somebody have something done) shows an action even more practical than exigir (to demand) because it gives the idea that some attitude will be taken and not just the solicitation that some requirements are met. in the argumentative scheme of the text, we can assume that the writer uses this term to, again, solicit an agreement from the target audience. our analysis of this repair was based on the dictionary meaning of the words because, even if they are slightly similar, their meanings are not perfectly the same (pietroforte; lopes, 2008, p.126). dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a35 context was crucial here (ilari; geraldi, 2006, p.44-46), because it determined the sense of the words in the text. the pauses show that she hesitated and oscillated between her possible choices and that she was trying to adapt the word to the sentence (lima, 2016, p.24) and to the idea defended in the sentence. again, she probably had the target audience in her mind, making efforts to comply with the specificities of the text. governo ou poder público? (government or public authorities?) this repair starts at the forty-ninth minute of recording, in line 34. the word governo (government) was replaced by poder público (public authorities) approximately thirty seconds after it was written. in this interval, the writer wrote o governo ao (the government when), deleted ao (when), wrote ta, which we believe to be the beginning of the word também (also), saved and renamed the file in the computer. figure 4 transcription provided by inputlog those terms are not perfect synonyms (pietroforte; lopes, 2008, p.126) and, despite being very close as far as their meaning in the text is concerned, we can infer some differences between them. governo (government) can have the meaning of current management, which could infer partisanship. poder público (public authorities) can have a wider meaning, covering all the governments that had already managed and all the others that will manage the country. we can also infer that governo (government) regards only the executive power of the country (silva, 2014, p.1013), while poder público (public authorities) can cover the executive, legislative and judicial powers (silva, 2014, p.1600). moreover, governo (government) can sound cliché in comparison to poder público (public authorities), which may suggest a larger vocabulary repertoire coming from the writer. according to the possible constructed meanings, we can now talk about the possible motivations of the writer to opt for poder público (public authorities). the text was written in april of 2015, a period in which the state-owned company petrobras was going through a turbulent phase (uol, 2015). the issue was in its apex of discussion and, potentially to avoid touching on political party matters, she avoided the word governo (government) because this one could refer to the party that was managing the country, even dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a36 if the subject of her text did not directly relate to that theme. by using poder público (public authorities), the writer keeps herself out of that political discussion and still distributes the responsibility, somehow, among the three governmental branches.29 this is related to the the author’s motive to get an acceptance of the text by the target audience. if she had defended any political party, the text (and the writer herself) could have been attacked by the readers, who, depending on the political point of view defended, could offer resistance to the opinion she defended. in an informal conversation with the writer, she expressed her concern about her readers moving away from her opinion because of lexical choices. thus, she thought that if the final word had been governo (government), this could have happened. that is why this specific repair was brought to this paper to be analyzed: because the context that is connected to the choice of a word is not merely the context of a sentence, but also the one in which the writer is thrown in her actual life. in this repair, she chooses a term that would not seem to be advocating a political party issue, but rather a call for the general responsibility of the state. thus, poder público (public authorities) can be more convincing and can make a larger number of readers accept the defended point of view. acidentes ou tragédias? (accidents or tragedies?) this repair starts at the fiftieth minute of recording, in line 36 figure 5 transcription provided by inputlog the writer typed the word acidentes (accidents) at the fiftieth minute of the production and right after that started writing another paragraph, before this one, without discarding the part that had been already written. seven minutes passed while she wrote the new part and an additional twenty-seven seconds after30 the end of the new paragraph she substituted acidentes (accidents) for tragédias (tragedies). according to the context, acidentes (accidents) can be understood as any unpleasant happening in traffic. tragédias (tragedies), however, refer to the idea of fatality, of something irremediable. acidente (accident) is a disgrace, an unplanned disaster (michaelis, 2008, p.13). tragédia (tragedy) is a "sad catastrophic happening"31 (michalis, 2008, p.870). a catastrophic happening is a situation that "has the proportions of catastrophe"32, which can be conceptualized as a "huge disaster; public sacrifice"33 (michaelis, 2008, p.172). thus, the idea of tragédias (tragedies) refers to happenings that cause deaths, having a character of more negative impact than the one of acidentes (accidents). 29 at the time that this opinion article was written, there was a major conflict between voters of the left and right parties. using the term governo (government) would take the reader straight to the presidency of the republic, unlike poder público (public authorities), which includes the three branches of power, whose representatives stand for different parties. 30 through the recording in video, we verified that all the movements between the typing of acidentes (accidents) and the beginning of the typing of tragédias (tragedies) took, approximately, 7min27s to be concluded. 31 original: "acontecimento triste, catastrófico". 32 original: "assume proporções de catástrofe". 33 original: "grande desgraça; hecatombe". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a37 here we can highlight the urgency of her appeal to stay with her argument, addressed to the target audience, as was proposed by perelman and olbrechts-tyteca (2005). we can realize the sensationalist and appealing character of the term tragédias (tragedies) in comparison to the term acidentes (accidents). bringing an expression that represents the chaotic dimension of brazilian traffic, she may convince a larger number of people to adhere or to agree with her opinion. in the twenty-seven seconds of pause, she was probably rereading the text that had been already written. thus, the writer became at this point, as in many others, her first reader, as it was pointed out by grésillon and lebrave (1983 apud salles, 2008). predicting some kind of resistance from other readers, in other words, anticipating a possible utterance of negative criticism, she revisits her first position and repairs her text while thinking about her interlocutor, as indicated by bakhtin/volochínov (2014). thereby, the new word, tragédias (tragedies), brings back the focus on the fatality of traffic accidents to the text. pois ou visto que? (because or seeing that?) the last change of synonyms to be analyzed in this paper occurs at the sixty-first minute of the textual production, in line 37. figure 6 transcription provided by inputlog as soon as the word pois (because) was written, it was right after substituted for visto que (seeing that). in this repair it does not seem that there were motivations related to the grammatical classification of the word, since pois (because) is almost an exact synonym of visto que (seeing that) in this case. both of them are subordinating conjunctions that present the meaning of relating two sentences with the indication of justification of the first by the second (cunha; cintra, 2013, p.595). nonetheless, pois (because) sets up just as a conjunction and it has the function of relating two sentences. visto que (seeing that), in addition to the function of conjunction, has the verb ver (to see) conjugated in the present continuous34. a person who "has seen" something tends to believe it more, because he or she is an eyewitness of the situation. thus, there is a semantic trait in visto que (seeing that) that is not present in pois (because), and this trait causes visto que (seeing that) to have a stronger argumentative force. in addition, something that relates to the "moral character"35, to the ethos of the writer (platin, 2008, p.112) takes place at this point. by using visto que (seeing that), she searches for a more sophisticated vocabulary, in order to bestow authority to her speech. in the attempt of representing herself as someone who masters a vast vocabulary, the writer substituted a less formal pois (because), with a 34 in portuguese this verb is in fact in the past participle. 35 original: "caráter moral". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a38 more formal visto que (seeing that). plantin (2008, p.112) highlights a constitutive element of ethos as something "of the order of reputation, prestige, even charisma"36 in the argumentative authority. this repair was chosen for analysis because the writer said that visto que (seeing that) was "fancier" than pois (because). the impact of a "fancier" word on the interlocutor would be more penetrating, according to the writer. this shows the level of her awareness of the social specificities of the genre (lima, 2016a, p.24), in which she was supposed to impress her reader in order to be persuasive. as the final choice is a more formal word, the reader can make inferences about the writer's character: in this case, she would be someone believable because she masters a sophisticated vocabulary. therefore, the writer's image would be manifested in her speech as well as the readers' commitment, since it imparts to both of them the condition of eyewitnesses of those who "have seen". final remarks in this article, based on theories of linguistics and psychology, we have sought to identify and analyze dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting an opinion article. our major findings answer to our initial research question: what are the dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy in the process of writing and rewriting of an opinion article? the dialogical functions found relate primarily 1) to the addressivity in a text; 2) to textual adjustments; 3) to the content of discourse; and 4) to the work of construction of the writer's image. in some way, all the repairs are motivated by the writer’s assumptions about the reception of the text by the target audience. this idea is compatible with bakhtin/volochínov’s idea (2014, p.116) about aiming the discourse at an interlocutor. the hesitations of the writer are therefore of social, dialogic and argumentative nature (lima, 2016a, p.27). this study is important, among other reasons, because of the methodology used to gather the data, since the software was used in a way that did not seem to interfere with the normal flow of the writer's production, therefore keeping it as authentic as possible. as it was mentioned before, technical limitations prevented us from collecting data related to the immediate extra-textual environment in the process of writing. however, integrating pedagogical and computerized methods (the workshop and the use of software) provides a wide range of possibilities to the field of linguistics, psychology and education. in addition, this methodology shows a way of using technology in studying dialogic aspects of writing, through having access to the process of writing that helps in reconstructing the writer's path to her final choices, thereby partly revealing her motivations. in addition, our perspective presents a different way of analyzing data, different from the analysis of erasures (salles, 2008) and the analysis of conversation (schegloff, 1979). an online research did not reveal other works about repair in written production, making our study a unique contribution to procedural studies. the implications for understanding repair by lexical synonymy are in accordance with the perspective in the work of vygotsky (vigotski, 2007, p.63). by analyzing one of the constitutive points of the process of writing, it is possible to understand the function and the development of other points of the textual production process. research that studies phenomena in their flow of happening can be great contributions to our fields. due to the procedural characteristic of our studies, this one specifically presents 36 original: "da ordem da reputação, do prestígio, até mesmo do carisma". dialogic functions of repair by lexical synonymy gabriela aiolfi, anselmo lima, letícia lemos gritti dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.235 | vol. 8 (2020) a39 future possibilities of expansion: in order to indirectly access more of the motivations of writer's choices, we intend to use it in the future work. thus, repair by lexical synonymy proves to be a very rich textual strategy that can be taught to help developing writers, as much as possible, to reach their greater objective, which is to get the readers to a stronger agreement with their position. references aiolfi, g. p. a. götz, g. aprender a argumentar para aprender a ensinar a argumentação: relato de experiência com o gênero "artigo de opinião". in: iii seminário internacional de estudos sobre discurso e argumentação, 3, são cristóvão. anais do iii seminário internacional de estudos sobre discurso e argumentação. ilhéus: editus, 2016, p.1732-1742. available at: [http://octeventos.com/site/sediar/anais.php] date accessed: 06 jul. 2017. al-hindawi, f. alkhazaali, m. a. a stylistic study of synonymy in w. wordsworth’s poetry. ةفوـكلا بادا , [s.l.], v. 1, n. 18, apr. 2014. available at: [http://www.uokufa.edu.iq/journals/index.php/kufa_arts/article/view/2536]. date accessed: 13 aug. 2018. bakhtin, m. os gêneros do discurso. in.: bakhtin, m. estética da criação verbal. 6.ed. trad. paulo bezerra. são paulo: martins fontes, 2011, p.261-306. bakhtin, m. 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psicologia do comportamento. in: ______. teoria e método em psicologia. trad. cláudia berliner. são paulo: martins fontes, 1996. p.55-85. vigotski, l. s. a formação social da mente: o desenvolvimento dos processos psicológicos superiores. 7.ed. são paulo: martins fontes, 2007. wachowicz, t. c. análise linguística nos gêneros textuais. são paulo: saraiva, 2012. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 308-article text-1599-1-9-20200913 (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa60 dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement: a narrative account of three teacher educators victorina baxan university of toronto, canada joanne pattison-meek university of toronto, canada andrew b. campbell university of toronto, canada abstract research methods courses often tend to focus on transferring technical information to students rather than offer a more dialogical approach to learning (barraket, 2005; kilburn et al., 2014). by drawing on the concept of self-study (bullough & pinnegar, 2001), through personal journals and retrospective reflections, this paper explores learning activities introduced in three teacher education graduate research methods courses to support student learning beyond the mastering of research skills or techniques. narratives of three teacher educators illustrate how teacher candidates can dialogically reflect on research-related topics with peers, bring questions forward for discussion in class and online, apply their emerging technical research skills through collective analysis of a situation, and grow collective knowledge. teacher candidates recognize the importance of research in their work, although their passion for conducting research is influenced by varied constraints, including research design, programmatic and personal limitations. key terms: graduate teacher education, dialogic teaching and learning, graduate research advising, research methods, reflection, self-study. dr. victorina baxan is a lecturer in the master of teaching program at the ontario institute for studies in education (oise), university of toronto. victorina’s teaching currently focuses on research methods in education. in addition to her teaching in the graduate teacher education program in canada, victorina taught undergraduate foreign language courses in moldova. she also had the opportunity to provide academic writing advising to undergraduate and graduate students in her role with the oise student success centre. victorina holds a phd from oise. her current research interests focus on graduate teacher education, dialogical engagement in teaching and learning, research writing, and diversity issues in education. dr. joanne pattison-meek is a faculty member in the master of teaching program at the ontario institute for studies in education (oise), university of toronto. she teaches courses including educational research literacy and fundamentals of teaching and learning. prior to joining the mt program in 2018, joanne was a former high school teacher, school board curriculum leader, and program lead for a school board research department. she received her phd in curriculum studies and teacher development from issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa61 oise in 2016. her research interests are rooted in rural education and democratic pluralist citizenship teaching and learning, and dialogic pedagogy in teacher education research courses. dr. andrew b. campbell (dr. abc) is a graduate of the university of toronto, with a phd. in educational leadership, policy, and diversity. he is presently an adjunct assistant professor at queens university in the professional master of education (pme) online and a faculty member at the university of toronto, in the master of teaching (mt) program, in the department of curriculum teaching and learning (ctl). he is an ontario certified teacher (oct) and has taught at all levels of the education system for the last 25 years, in jamaica, bahamas, and canada. his research and teaching focus on issues of equity & inclusion, educational leadership, black lgbtq+ issues, teacher education, and teacher performance evaluation. ïïò introduction future teachers need to develop an understanding of educational research and how research is an inherent part of a teacher’s work (moulding & hadley, 2010). increasingly, graduate teacher education programs include a research project as part of the requirements to complete the program (e.g., ontario institute for studies in education, mcgill university). despite the interest in graduate teacher education (assunção flores, 2017; davies et al., 2013; kitchen & petrarca, 2016; petrarca & kitchen, 2017; baxan & broad, 2017), there is little research on how research methods are taught, how students actually learn research methods (earley, 2014; kilburn et al., 2014; wagner et al., 2011), and how the research supervisory relationship is envisioned and enacted by research instructors and their students. trial-anderror and reliance on peers seems to be the norm for developing a pedagogy for teaching research methods (earley, 2014; kilburn et al., 2014), while guiding students to complete their research projects is often informed by a research advisor or supervisor’s own experience as a graduate student (henderson, 2018). in this article, three teacher educators present individual narratives as research advisorsinstructors. these narratives evolved from our collective pedagogical discussions in search of approaches to move from “transferring technical information about research methods” to teacher candidates, to a more dialogical approach to learning, where technical skills are mastered through “reflection and collective analysis” (barraket, 2005, p. 67). we present and discuss ways in which dialogic teaching principles (alexander, 2018) guided our individual approaches to support teacher candidates in graduate teacher education research methods courses. the introduction of these dialogic activities was motivated by our shared challenges of guiding teacher candidates to develop an instrumental understanding of the process of conducting research, enhancing their awareness of the complexities of conducting educational research, and learning how to analyze and write up research all of which aimed to increase teacher candidates’ agency in their own learning. the main question that guided our research was: how do we support teacher candidates to dialogically navigate the complexities of conducting educational research and own their learning as they bring their graduate research projects to fruition? since teacher candidates’ research projects were embedded in the courses that we taught, we conceptualize our research advising as teaching (boud & lee, 2005; boud & costley, 2007). our research advisory roles are unique in many ways compared to more traditional research advising practices: our graduate students have relative freedom to select a research topic; students can only select either an interview-based study or document analysis; the duration of the research project is confined within the research course timeframe; and, most of what can be termed as research advisor-student interactions, occur during class time due to the relatively large number of students in a graduate research methods course (between 25 and 34 for each course). writing from our perspectives as research advisors, we aim to provide insights into how we approach advising as teaching in qualitative research methods courses. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa62 we start the paper with an overview of the graduate teacher education program in which we are all instructors. next, we describe what brought us to teaching research courses to provide insights into what experiences inform our work as research advisors. the review of the literature that we then present does not aim to be a systematic review of past research, but rather a deeper reading (kilburn et al., 2014) of studies that connected to our research, guided by our collective reflections. next, we introduce the readers to our methodology. we then proceed with a description of how we conceived teaching research methods by presenting our individual narratives of approaches to teaching/advising, and how we enacted them, as well as our reflection on the process. we conclude with an overview of major learnings and next steps in our research that emerged from our collaborative work on advising as teaching. ideas that we discuss in this paper are interpreted through our own lenses and the inferences that we present are completely our own and may not fully represent the perspectives of the authors we cite or those of the graduate program where we teach. master of teaching (mt) program context we are research instructors in the master of teaching (mt) program at the ontario institute for studies in education (oise) of the university of toronto. the mt program is a two-year graduate level teacher education program that leads to both a master of teaching degree and teacher certification in the province of ontario (canada). our teacher candidates work on a full-time basis to complete 18 half-courses (two of which are research methods courses), and 4 practice teaching placements (each 4 weeks in length). as stated in the mt program vision statement, “teaching excellence and scholarly research are the mutually reinforcing pillars of the master of teaching program. the program prepares candidates to become outstanding teachers and leaders who consult, critique, create, and mobilize educational research” (oise, 2019). thus, an important part of our work as research instructors is to support teacher candidates’ identities as teachers who are also researchers. teacher candidates complete the educational research 1 course in their first year of study (36 hours in-class), having a focus on research literacy. this introductory research course centers on epistemology and reflexivity, teachers as theorists-intellectuals-researchers, research paradigms, qualitative methodologies and methods, and practitioner inquiry. in addition to learning about these key topics, candidates review the research literature in an area of education that interests them and write a 15-20 page literature review or position paper. this is a carefully scaffolded process whereby candidates participate in a double-blind peer review. each candidate uploads a copy of their draft research paper to peerscholar (a specialized learning management platform intended for peer assessment) and in turn, reviews two papers written by other mt year 1 teacher candidates. research instructors guide candidates through how to provide constructive feedback on the work of their peers (e.g., quality of writing, conceptual clarity) as well as how to respond to critique, implement revisions, and produce a final polished research paper. in the second year of the program, as a requirement of the educational research 2 graduate seminar (also 36 hours in-class), teacher candidates conduct a small scale qualitative research study, using either semi-structured interviews with educators or document analysis, on a topic related to teaching and learning. this course pays particular attention to research design, data collection, data analysis, and knowledge sharing, and is designed to support teacher candidates throughout the various stages of the research journey. for example, teacher candidates receive feedback on the discrete stages of the analysis process so that they can implement instructor suggestions and continue to refine their findings. by the end of the course, candidates produce a 15-20 page research paper that describes their research study and findings, which they present at the annual end-of-year master of teaching research conference. content and instruction in both year 1 and 2 research courses prepare teacher candidates to engage dialogically with and contribute to knowledge in their fields of interest. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa63 this research project emerged from a conversation we had about our pedagogical choices in planning our research courses and how they affected the way teacher candidates engaged with initial research concepts, developed an inquiry question, examined empirical research articles and wrote a final research paper. as relatively new to teaching research methods courses, we started to have regular discussions around our teaching practices after each class, and soon became increasingly drawn to the idea of a self-study and understandings of how we can better support our graduate students/teacher candidates during the research components of their graduate teacher education program. our meetings and continued reading of the literature on teaching research methodology took us in the direction of exploring how a dialogic approach to teaching and learning (alexander, 2018) may support students to construct their own meaning of the research process. we had three voices on our project that shared a deep commitment to student learning and research, although we came to this work with varied past experiences. our own personalities and teaching experiences were different in so many ways that our conversations did not have the risk of becoming redundant. we constantly reframed the questions we asked ourselves which led to new lines of inquiry. having different perspectives and voices on the team helped us to avoid having a master narrative and kept the dialogic nature of our work alive (bakhtin, 1981), although we did preserve a similar interest in dialogic teaching and learning. in what follows we provide a brief overview of the experiences that shaped our collaborative work and conversations. victorina i obtained my teacher certification outside of canada and worked as a secondary school teacher and university instructor of english as a foreign language. i became a research advisor-instructor in the graduate teacher education program after completing my doctorate in canada. it was my passion for teaching and research, coupled with my interest in teacher education, as well as a teaching opportunity that arose that brought me to teaching research methodology in a graduate teacher education program. at the time of writing this paper, i was in my fourth year teaching research courses to future teachers in a researchbased graduate teacher education program. i had been holding a number of administrative roles at the university level while teaching in the mt program. joanne similar to you victorina, i arrived at the role of research instructor in the faculty of education at oise after having worked at the secondary school level. i was a high school geography and politics teacher for ten years in ontario while simultaneously completing my doctoral work in education. i was an instructional program leader in the research department of a large school board in southern ontario (canada) just prior to teaching at oise. in that role i was responsible for building research literacy among school board staff at various levels of the organization. i was drawn to the mt program’s emphasis on preparing teachers to engage in reflective inquiry with the goal of effecting change in their classrooms, schools, and wider communities. andrew coming to the mt program here at oise felt like a natural next step for me. i did my teacher education program in jamaica and came to this research instructor work after 25 years as a classroom teacher and educator in various roles. for the last 12 years i have worked part-time in postsecondary education as a college lecturer, online facilitator and adjunct assistant professor, all in educational leadership and teacher preparation programs. as someone who completed graduate studies (masters and doctoral studies) as a part-time student while being a full-time elementary classroom teacher, i have a firsthand account of the value teacher-researchers can bring to the creation of educational inquiry and knowledge to inform practice. knowing the power and value of teacher research is a major motivation for why i was so attracted to teaching research methods in the program. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa64 victorina joanne and andrew, it seems that we all came to the work of research instructors from different locations. this said, we all obtained our teacher certification prior to pursuing doctoral studies, as well as taught in grade 1-12 (elementary and secondary) classrooms, albeit in different contexts and varied lengths. while pursuing doctoral studies, all three of us were holding teaching or administrative appointments at either grade 1-12 schools or postsecondary institutions. joanne indeed, victorina. the teaching experiences at both secondary and postsecondary levels, as well as similar journeys while conducting graduate research seem to have shaped our collaborative work. furthermore, through supporting in-school leadership teams in improvement planning with respect to analysis of student and school level data (e.g., developing school improvement plans, analysis of standardized test results, and school self-assessments), as well as facilitating professional learning for classroom teachers focusing on research-informed practice and decision-making (e.g., organizing teacherinquiry projects, assessing/monitoring student well-being needs), i became increasingly interested in opportunities to teach in teacher education programs. andrew i do believe that these similarities of interest and lived experiences also allowed us to build trust and collegiality. for me, hearing these stories, it felt like you both understood my journey a bit more than others, and also valued the work that i was doing. this allowed me to see you both beyond your teaching methods, and fostered a further spirit of inspiration for this work. i also come to the work of a research instructor from a place as a teacher-researcher myself who has engaged in action research, self-study, and other phenomenological inquiries knowing these ways of finding out can support the change that we often want to see in our schools. like you joanne, doing workshops for years in jamaica, bahamas and canada, i have interacted with teachers and educational leaders who continuously seek answers for everyday issues within and outside of formal schooling. i have seen the delight with which they would engage in academic readings and activities knowing that the information provided data and critical analysis of the very issues they face. literature review equipping learners with research skills is an increasing priority in university-level programs (hughes, 2019; kilburn at al., 2014). such skills are essential to function well in the education programs, but also to prepare for a challenging landscape of job opportunities and demands. the idea that teacher candidates' work is research-informed, but that they also become researchers and have an inquiry stance is increasingly part of teacher education programs’ goal (davies et al., 2013; kitchen & petrarca, 2016; petrarca & kitchen, 2017). rudduck’s (1985) position that “attitudes and habits supportive of research need to be encouraged in courses of initial teacher education which are all too often dominated by concerns of short-term survival rather than long-term professionalism” (p. 281) remains valid today. there are numerous benefits for research-based teacher education: it shapes teachers’ view of teacher-research and of themselves as enquiring practitioners; it prepares them to become more successful readers of professional literature and allows for more competent uses of research literature; it exposes them to the discourse of the profession, both conceptually and linguistically; it equips them with academic skills required for studies at doctorate level; future teachers explore how to use research to deal with problems of practice; learning to adopt a reflective, inquiry stance helps become part of a professional dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa65 routine; and future teachers develop an ability to identify ethical issues when conducting research (crawford-garrett et al., 2015; reis-jorge, 2007). reflexivity is an important element in research-based teacher education programs, and is integral to the learning of research methods with an inquiry stance. reflexivity, it is argued, provides students opportunities to not only reflect on the research practice, on the methods they learn, the context of their learning and teaching, but also to help them recognize their own assumptions about research (kilburn et al., 2014; cox, 2012; thien, 2009). reflexivity can also help graduate students inquire into their own anxieties and motivations for conducting research, as well as their interactions with past research (delyser et al., 2012; hsiung, 2008; kilburn et al., 2014). kilburn at al. (2014) maintain that “more broadly, fostering a critical and reflective disposition towards methods is arguably an important aim of methodological learning in itself” (p. 203). increasingly, graduate teacher education programs in canada include a research project as part of the requirements to complete the program (e.g., ontario institute for studies in education; mcgill university; baxan & broad, 2017). by engaging in research projects, it is assumed that teacher candidates improve their perception of preparedness for research later in their careers (shaw et al., 2011, cited in kilburn, 2014). a question that is under-researched and is part of an ongoing debate in teaching research methods is how research capability can be taught or developed for the envisioned learning benefits to be realized (hughes, 2019). ways research methods are taught and how students are supported in their research process there is little research on how research methods are taught and how students actually learn research methods (jacobsen et al., 2018; wagner et al., 2017; earley, 2014; kilburn et al., 2014). trialand-error and reliance on peers seems to be the norm for developing a pedagogy for teaching research methods (earley, 2014; kilburn et al., 2014). integral to the latter is the question of how we can facilitate the development of research skills and support students, including teacher candidates, through the process of designing and conducting a research study, and write their final paper (albrighta, 2012). byman et al. (2009) posits that such work could start with learning qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, and practice research with small activities and assignments from the very beginning of their studies. kilburn et al (2014) posits that: the teaching approaches discussed in the literature mirrored three complementary and inter-related pedagogical goals: the first goal sought to make the research process visible by actively engaging students in the aspects of the methods at hand; the second sought to facilitate learning through the experience of conducting research; and the third sought to encourage critical reflection on research practice (p. 197). yet another strategy that may help graduate students understand research methods concepts, acquire research skills and progress well in their research is scaffolding student research (hughes, 2019). such scaffolding can be supported by a coherent program design that allows students to develop a clear picture of their learning journey, as well as develop a learning plan that includes personal progress, and shortand long-term goals (fung, 2017; hughes, 2019). a coherent program design though, needs to be further supported by a 'feed forward” (hattie & timperley, 2007) and ipsative approach to feedback. the notion of “feed forward” refers to evaluation and feedback on student research development. students would engage with such feedback and apply it to future work or research activities in a cumulative way (hattie & timperley 2007; hughes, 2019). hughes (2017, 2019) maintains that, “an ipsative approach to dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa66 feedback, where learners receive information on their progress from a comparison of current work with previous work, enables learners to develop at their own pace” (p. 399). scaffolded assignments coupled with ipsative feedback and support helps students achieve major milestones in their research (hughes, 2011, 2014, 2019). peer feedback is another strategy that has proved useful in graduate research, given the increased workloads for supervisors (saeed & ghazali, 2019). although graduate students are hesitant initially to engage in peer feedback, when supervisors/advisors provide mentoring and instructional strategies to support such work, challenges are easier to overcome (saeed & ghazali, 2019). peer research groups, as an informal pedagogy which is based on peer learning (aitchison, 2003; aitchison & lee, 2006), allow for learners to scaffold each other and construct their knowledge in writing (saeed & ghazali, 2019; yu & hu, 2017). notwithstanding the many strategies above, as the capacity to engage with and undertake research requires a “combination of theoretical understanding, procedural knowledge and mastery of a range of practical skills” (kilburn et al., 2014, p. 191), the teaching and learning of research poses many challenges. challenges of teaching research methods courses research studies that focus on teaching and learning research methods identify a number of challenges, such as conceptualising disciplinary and generic research skills and identifying threshold concepts, as well as supporting the research development of all students, not only those who may continue as researchers (hughes, 2019). research also shows the task of writing up research tends to be a burden on students’ routine, and many struggle to produce formally designed research projects to meet the criteria imposed by academic regulations (reis-jorge, 2007; löfström, 2012). there is also a tension between highly structured forms of research that research courses may foster and the consequent demands of time and expertise that it imposes on researchers (kotsopoulos, mueller & buzza, 2012). the flexibility of choice for a final project (in terms of methodology) may be problematic in terms of supervision, validation, and assessment (reis-jorge, 2007; löfström, 2012; kotsopoulos, mueller & buzza, 2012). other research shows that challenges for teaching research methods include capturing and monitoring student learning over time, as well as identifying those instances when students are unable to progress due to difficulties associated with understanding certain research concepts (hughes, 2019). hughes maintains that, “knowledge may be troublesome because it requires a student to take on a new identity. this identity may be about becoming part of the community of scholars in a discipline and thinking like them” (p. 397). in such instances, as students engage with new concepts and ideas, they feel insecure and uncertain. such instances of ‘being stuck’ may lead to delays in progressing in one’s work, “for example, if students are unable to formulate sensible questions, then they will not be able to plan appropriate data collection. getting ‘stuck’ in this way is likely to make research unappealing to students” (hughes, 2019, p. 397). one way to address this issue is to scaffold student learning across the entire graduate program (brew, 2013; hughes, 2019) and to revisit difficult research concepts over time (hughes, 2019). kilburn et al. (2014), by drawing on past research, point to the conclusion that an approach that is more akin to academic supervision may yield a better understanding for students than knowledge transmission in the classroom. however, academic supervision may not always be feasible in a research course, given the high number of graduate students enrolled in them. role of research advisor-instructor while doctoral and research-based master’s programs embed a more clearly defined research trajectory and planning process, managing and evaluating the research development is often left to the dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa67 individual student and their advisor (hughes, 2019). supervisor roles in a research-based program need to be dynamic (saeed & ghazali, 2019). the supports offered to graduate students through research-related courses may not be sufficient, and the workload of supervisors may not allow for increasing the one-onone consultations (aitchison 2009; wilmot 2016; saeed & ghazali, 2019). while research supervision in degrees that focus on research outcomes such as a doctoral and master’s theses has been given more attention, there is little research on the role of research advisors in undergraduate and graduate research projects (boud & costley, 2007). the expectations of course instructors as research advisors is increasingly shifting to comprise the advisement of large groups of students who need to complete research projects within the timeframe of research courses. compared to research training and research outcomes associated with doctoral and master’s theses, the research projects completed as part of coursework tend to have a much wider range of learning outcomes, rather than research outcomes (boud & costley, 2007). such roles take the academic advisors/instructors beyond the more familiar teaching role. bould & costley (2007) posit that there is a need to distinguish between teaching as advising, and the more traditional supervisory role: supervision is a term typically used in postgraduate research degrees in universities following the british tradition. it suggests a particular form of relationship between staff member and student that is often intense and extended. it also has connotations of direct oversight and ‘top-down’ power relations between supervisor and supervisee (p. 120). boud and costley (2007) thus advocate for a redefinition of the roles of academic staff who support research project work. in our experience, there seems to be an increasing need for redefining such roles in courses that bring together students from varied disciplinary backgrounds and a wide range of research interests. compared with a traditional supervisory relationship where the supervisor has a greater understanding of the knowledge content of the project, the advisor’s knowledge does not normally fit the research focus or disciplinary background of all the graduate students in their class. one way to address this question in our courses, was to draw on the notion of dialogic teaching and learning that posits that meaning is co-constructed, both among graduate students, as well as between them and their instructor. in our roles as research advisors-instructors, and as we started to share tensions that we encountered in our teaching, we began to be drawn to alexander’s (2006; 2008; 2010; 2018) principles of dialogic teaching and learning. what attracted us to these principles was the notions of ‘negotiation’ and ‘facilitation’ of meaning. furthermore, since our graduate teacher education program followed a cohortbased model, alexander’s (2018) work that “draws on transnational and cross-cultural classroom research” helps us to better understand “how classroom cultures, values and interactions are variously shaped by collective, communitarian and individualist emphases in accounts of social relations and by culturally located stances on human development, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and the act of teaching” (p. 3). alexander (2018) also posits that every classroom is unique, and as such, every teacher would need to develop a broad repertoire of dialogue-based pedagogical skills and strategies and draw on it as necessary to facilitate the development of such dialogic repertoires among their students. agency is fundamental in alexander’s (2018) framework, and one of the primary goals in our research courses was to develop graduate student agency for meaning making. we recognize that alexander’s (2018) principles comprise only one of the components of the dialogic teaching framework that he proposes, which also include justifications, repertoires and indicators. as we began exploring alexander’s (2006; 2018) work, we adapted the principles that he identified as guiding elements in our teaching, as follows: • collective: instructor and teacher candidates (tcs) address learning tasks together, whether as a group or class; dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa68 • reciprocal: instructor and tcs listen to each other, share ideas and consider alternative viewpoints; • supportive: tcs articulate their ideas freely, without fear of embarrassment over ‘wrong’ answers; and they help each other to reach common understandings; • cumulative: instructor and tcs build on their own and each other’s ideas and chain them into coherent lines of enquiry; • purposeful: classroom talk, though open & dialogic, is structured with specific learning goals in view. dialogic teaching or advising for us comprises a repertoire of opportunities and classroom organization on which we draw flexibly according to purpose and situation, and which become dialogic when they are informed by principles of collectivity, reciprocity, support, cumulation, purposefulness, criticality, meaningfulness, and accountability (alexander, 2006, 2018; michaels et al., 2008). to further dialogic engagement, answers during such opportunities need to spark new questions and invite participants to go beyond reporting someone else’s thinking (nystrand et al., 1997; alexander, 2018). methodology we draw on the concept of self-study (bullough & pinnegar, 2001) as our methodology and posit that through reflection and interactions of self-as-teacher educator with others who have a commitment to the education of student teachers, there is potential for powerful change in the pedagogies we use. bullough and pinnegar (2001) state that “the aim of self-study research is to provoke, challenge, and illuminate rather than confirm and settle” (p. 20). self-study has been defined in various ways by many researchers, based on their role, practice and the purpose of the study. the type of study being undertaken and its focus, such as self as a teacher, self as a researcher of their own teaching, the self as a researcher of teacher education, and the self as a researcher of self-study often define how self-study is positioned (samaras & freese, 2009). self-study, as ikpeze (2019) notes, “is a necessary pedagogical exercise that can improve teaching and learning in teacher education learning contexts. self-study enables teacher educators to conduct intentional and systematic inquiry into their own practice that yields knowledge about practice” (p. 107). the intention of this research is guided by these very foundational ideas of self-study. as faculty, we ourselves had many questions about the research process as we engaged our students. in our teaching, we see the need to provoke and challenge our own and our graduate students’ ways of thinking about research. the desire to see our students develop as teacher researchers, fueled by their successes and varied personal constraints, as well as the deliberate dialogic conversations we held amongst ourselves as instructors, fostered the need to engage in self-study. this desire was both personal and professional for all of us. we concur with mahani (2019) who notes that we need to situate ourselves in the inquiry and draw on our experiences as educators, while also collaborating with colleagues coming from different backgrounds and who bring different lenses to self-study. therefore, the three of us started to share classroom practices. we participated in self-reflection and engaged in courageous reflective and reflexive feedback from each other. this collegial collaboration was a very strong part of the process. during the many conversations we had about the course, we continuously shared ideas and ‘good’ practices. additionally, we developed a strong bond and higher degrees of trust. the vulnerability that was needed for this kind of work followed, and with that openness, came deeper insights in what we shared. this vulnerability sparked additional layers of dialogue. we knew we would share information about our classroom practices, but also about how we approached research ourselves. we asked ourselves, what are the ideas we are passionate about? how do we engage ourselves as teacher researchers? in what aspects of our teaching do we need support? how do we share those struggles and tensions with our students? samaras and freese (2009) maintain: dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa69 self-study focuses on improvement on both the personal and professional levels.self-study builds on the personal processes of reflection and inquiry and takes these processes and makes them open to public critique. self-study is not done in isolation, but rather requires collaboration for building new understandings through dialogue and validation of findings. self-study research requires openness and vulnerability since the focus is on the self. and finally, self-study is designed to lead the reframing and reconceptualizing of the role of the teacher (p. 5). as we engaged in dialogue and continuously received feedback and encouragement from each other, we were able to share and build on each other’s practices of teaching research methods. this allowed us to make pedagogical changes to our work. more and more we confirmed the relational nature of selfstudy. markides’ (2019) words reflect well how we felt during this process, “inherently, the praxis of selfstudy is an integral part of teacher education. teaching practice grows from an ongoing cycle of experience, reflection, and further action. in this way, i become the site of my study. contrary to the notation of self as being individual-focused, self-study is of a relational nature” (p. 36). it was therefore through pedagogical dialogue that we became at ease with tensions (and successes) that arose in our teaching. the process of classroom dialogue that we in turn adapted in our teaching of research methods, both face-to-face and online, seemed to allow students to gain the confidence to ask questions, share their own knowledge and expertise without being seen as threatening to those who did not have the knowledge, engaged in peer review, and garnered the skills needed to be more critical and reflexive. the dialogic engagement, thus, became part of our self-study, as well as integral to our teaching research methods, research advising, and development as teacher educators. self-study is characterized by multiple methods of data collection, depending on the focus of the study, and meaning making is the norm (loughran, 2007). as we engaged in this research, we collected data through personal journals, retrospective reflections, email exchanges, and critical incidents. during this process, we acted as critical friends to validate our findings (loughran, 2007). as faculty who are new to self-study, we were moving to a place where we valued stories and narratives within the rigor of research, and we had to come to grips with varied levels of authenticity and vulnerability, if we were to truly share our professional self. one of the limitations of this study is that we were not able to visit each others’ classes to see the various methods at work. this was something we talked about and agreed would add additional layers of reflection as we would be observers and critical friends within the actual dialogic space that we create for our students. we would be able to see and hear the dialogue from a different vantage point and provide that additional feedback to each other. scheduling demands and ethical considerations prevented us from advancing this idea. we, however, have not abandoned it, and will focus on collaboratively deciding what this process may look like as part of our ongoing self-study project. although we did not visit each other classes yet, we started to use each other’s strategies for dialogic engagement that we describe in what follows. we also acknowledge that we have not yet formally invited and included the voices of our students to comment on how they are actually experiencing our dialogic approaches. research advisor-instructor narratives as research advisors-instructors, we sought to examine how we facilitate teaching and learning of research methods in a graduate teacher education program, and describe instructional activities that aimed at fostering dialogical engagement with research concepts and ideas and at co-construction of meaning. our narratives also aimed to provide insight into the teaching as advising role. we drew on alexander’s (2006; 2018) dialogic teaching principles to help frame our advising role as dialogical and encompassing multiple dialogical encounters: dialogue among teacher candidates through activities that we as research dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa70 advisors design, dialogue between teacher candidates and research advisors, and dialogue among research advisors. in what follows we present our narratives around these three dialogical encounters. we recognize that these narratives present findings from the initial stages of our self-study and that drawing on alexander’s principles is just the beginning of a deeper exploration of dialogic teaching as a field of inquiry. dialogue among teacher candidates victorina one of the instructional activities i have used in my research courses to foster dialogic engagement is the ‘world café’ conversation model (the world café community foundation, 2015). the activity’s goal is to help teacher candidates (tcs) engage with research methods readings and concepts. tcs sign up for roles called ‘world café conversation (wcc) hosts’ for a given class, while the rest of the class act as ‘ambassadors of meaning’. each time we meet, we have 4-6 wcc hosts who facilitate two progressive rounds of conversation lasting approximately 20 minutes in small circles. in the beginning of the course, i would facilitate a discussion of dialogic principles (alexander, 2006; 2018) that would guide the wcc activity. it is the host’s role to remind participants of the critical issue of the day that serves the overarching purpose of the conversation. the hosts decide on how they want to organize the dialogue (e.g., using various question prompts, minds-on activities, online tools such as mentimeter, etc.), taking into account the dialogic guiding principles. upon completing the initial round of conversation, the hosts remain in the circle, while the ambassadors carry key ideas, themes and questions into new conversations/circles. after two rounds of conversation, i would initiate debriefing, which involves sharing discoveries and insights in a whole group conversation. the hosts post their discussion preparation notes to our course online community (called pepper) in advance of each class. after facilitating the reading discussion, each host posts their response/reflection on the activity to the online community. it is in these conversation-style or dialogic encounters that collective knowledge seems to grow and possibilities for action emerge. joanne a key question that guides the development of my research courses in our graduate teacher education program is: how can i make educational research relevant and meaningful to support teachercandidates’ dialogic engagement with course material? as a research instructor, i tend to draw on my previous professional experiences as a classroom teacher, and a research program leader in a local school board when designing dialogic activities. i feel it is important to recreate (model) school-based scenarios for my teacher-candidates to navigate as future teacher-researchers. so, i always strive to offer candidates insights into what research might actually look like in schools for the course to be useful and inform candidates’ future professional practice. for example, how and why is research collected in schools? how is this research shared and acted upon, and by whom? these school-based insights are also used as a means to inform teacher-candidates’ planning of their graduate research projects. to realize these objectives, i created teacher-research(er) in context (tric) as a pedagogical approach. i introduce tric moments as opportunities to invite students to dialogically reflect on a researchrelated topic with peers (‘talking it out’) and apply their emerging technical research skills through collective analysis of a situation. to provide one example of a tric in action, i present teacher candidates with a type of (fictitious) data set commonly distributed and discussed among staff in schools: graph data depicting students’ declining sense of belonging in school, as they progress from grades 4 through 12. after providing a very brief description of the image, i task teacher-candidates, in small learning groups, to collectively reflect on the data piece and respond to the following questions: • what are you seeing/understanding? • what questions are you still left with? dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa71 • drawing on your knowledge and understandings of qualitative research, how might you go about responding to your lingering questions? imagining that this information originated from the school in which they work, teacher candidates then collectively develop qualitative research plans to dig deeper into the quantitative sense of belonging data as teacher-researchers. for example, conducting student focus groups to qualitatively understand the data from student perspectives, or designing a classroom-based assignment in their teachable subject area that elicits students’ reflections on their sense of belonging in the school. andrew in my teaching of research courses, i wanted to ensure that students own the discussions and that dialogue would be more fluid. the approach i am using both in class and online is called “questions i still have…” teacher candidates have the option to ask questions and reflect on these questions when their peers have responded, and this seems to be effective and useful from the feedback i received from them in one on one meetings. they would often refer to these very discussions. the intention is to “maximise the power of the classroom discussion talk to enhance students’ engagement and learning” (alexander, 2018). the process has a few levels and layers of questions and responses. before each physical class, teacher candidates are asked to complete assigned readings and post a response within the designated discussion forum in our course learning management system (lms), pepper. they are always asked to post one question for discussion and to respond to two questions. this process allows teacher candidates to ask questions, respond to questions, observe the kinds of questions being asked, and develop their skills in framing questions and respond to questions by applying their knowledge and understanding of the course material. over the academic year, i have observed growth in how teacher candidates frame questions. through my observations, i noticed growth especially in their increased use of research terminologies. as their instructor, this serves as a form of needs assessment, as i am able to review their questions before class, see the kind of thinking that is happening based on their various responses, and observe their level of engagement. this impacts my lecture planning and class activities. it fosters a level of satisfaction that their ideas and questions are being seen and valued, but more so, in being responded to. during class lecture, the teacher candidates form self-selected groups to discuss various issues and complete activities. as a part of the discussion process, each group member is expected to ask questions that they have in relation to the issue or activity. however, there is an understanding that these questions allow for students to engage each other in any part of the research process they are at. all other members of the group must respond to those questions. these responses are not necessarily direct answers to the questions. they are responses, which can range from agreeing with their peers, providing additional insights, sharing a personal story or example or even asking a question. they are not restricted to provide a researched answer – they are encouraged to sustain the dialogue. finally, after the class has ended, teacher candidates have 24 hours to reflect on what happened in class, go online in our lms system, and post another question, after which they are required to respond to any two questions of their peers. in a class of 32 candidates, they have the opportunity to read 31 other questions and an average of 62 responses. so many ideas, concepts, and concerns can be addressed in this way, and it enhances a student's ability to engage in reflective practice. it also helps candidates to appreciate collegiality, the impact of peer review in research and to confirm their role as knowledge creators. this approach supports the various levels of background knowledge they bring to the research process. my intention is thus to provide a space for reflective and reflexive review since the questions remain on the course in the lms and we can look back as a class to what we wanted to know and what we now know. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa72 victorina andrew and joanne, it seems that all the three approaches that we have used in our teaching are quite structured, and that we as instructors are quite involved as facilitators. we do highlight what is most important for us as instructors as we designed these activities. for me, one of the most important aspects in learning is engaging deeply and thoughtfully with research literature. such literature, often termed course readings, and engagement with specific texts is a requirement in each of the research courses that we are teaching, as you know well. the wcc activity that i described intends to help engage students in discussions that would lead to arriving at certain understandings about research collectively. such activities aim to help teacher candidates co-construct meaning or knowledge about research concepts and terms or engage in what wells (1999) calls ‘dialogic inquiry.’ the dialogic engagement during the wcc activity is collective, reciprocal, and supportive, but rarely cumulative (alexander, 2018). although we do come together for larger discussions and we address the major concepts and topics that we are to cover in a given session, i find that this is not enough. to me, reading is at the core of acquiring the language/terms/concepts that they need to engage in further dialogue in class. a question that i am asking myself as i am planning for classes is, “how can the dialogue delve deeply if students are not yet comfortable engaging with concepts and with each other’s comments, primarily because they do not yet have a grasp of the vocabulary specific to research methodology and have not yet established a certain level of trust to express their ideas freely?” joanne victorina, i appreciate the challenge you share above regarding some students’ hesitancy to engage in dialogue with peers because they might not be comfortable with some research concepts. i face this challenge as well. in response, i tend to create situational opportunities for students to connect to course content on a more personal level to humanize the research experience, so they may feel less intimidated by the strangers in the room. i have had some success with the teacher-researchers in context approach i describe earlier because it provides dialogic opportunities for teacher candidates to recognize their role in the data story/ies unfolding in their future classrooms, schools, and wider communities. i align my goals with alexander’s (2018) principles as follows: • engaging teacher candidates in open, yet structured critical conversations about the use of education research in school settings (collective); • inviting teacher candidates to practice critical listening, while building on each other’s ideas and various viewpoints in supportive, small groupings (reciprocal, supportive, cumulative). • drawing on and applying teacher candidates’ emerging understandings of course research concepts (purposeful); it is fascinating for me to move around the room and listen to candidates’ interactions unfold. candidates appear engaged: the volume of voices in the room dials up, bodies lean forward toward the center of their discussion groups, horizontal cross talk is visual and audible. school-level data almost always seems to invite even the quietest students to share, affirm, and/or contest ideas with their peers. in these moments, those candidates who arrive to the course with little to no research training have an opportunity to listen, ask questions, and learn from those candidates who bring research experience with them to the course. this reciprocal sharing of ideas (alexander, 2018) provides an opportunity for candidates to deepen research literacy as well as to consider alternative perspectives when analyzing data. these conversations do not always happen this freely without guided support from myself. however, using this approach is one means for me to prioritize authentic learning experiences something i see as vital to connect candidates dialogically to research learning. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa73 andrew alexander (2018) posits that “classrooms remain places where it is the teacher who asks most of the questions, so a dialogically informed questioning repertoire must allow for the possibility that students too will have questions to ask and must be encouraged and if necessary, train them to do so” (p. 9). i believe that when lecture and readings about research concepts and skills prompt dialogue, it often limits what can be asked, and students sometimes shy away from asking since they feel what they have may be unrelated. this has been my experience teaching research methods at the undergrad level for several years. this limits the interaction and classroom discussions, both face to face and online becomes laborious, in my view. there are however opportunities to measure growth and learning. as part of the activity i described, i also review the online posts that may have fewer responses or the most responses (often stemming from an interesting debate), and i use that in class as part of the lecture. this brings a high level of relevance to the activity, and the candidates do not seem to feel it is useless or busywork. i see a number of benefits for my activity: value for collaboration and corroboration in research practice; opportunity to share expertise; opportunity to break down research concepts in more manageable bits for increased understanding; increased skills in peer-review process; confirmation of their role as knowledge creators; more refined reflections on class readings; better use of reflection to inform pedagogical decision-making. but, i must add, there is work to be done to get them to that place of asking questions that goes deeper than just searching for immediate responses to a problem they are facing in order to “unstuck” themselves. victorina indeed, andrew and joanne, the activities you both described seem to allow for so many opportunities for dialogue. i was wondering how these activities worked across the cohorts that you have been teaching. in my case, year 2 teacher candidates do not usually appear too sensitive to how their peers may perceive their input and whether they have mastered well the research concepts and the research terminology. from my observations, this is because year 2 teacher candidates tend to be more comfortable with each other since they would have been in the same cohort for longer. the dialogue thus tends to be more supportive (alexander, 2018), compared to other principles (e.g., collective, reciprocal, cumulative or purposeful) (alexander, 2018). also, because in their year 2 teacher candidates have to engage in their own data analysis, that is to work on data reduction and move from codes to categories to themes (saldana, 2008), they seem to engage with course concepts and readings before class more consistently. this became evident as i was listening to their dialogical interactions in class. year 2 tcs seem thus to be more purposeful (alexander, 2018) in their in-class dialogic activities as they have specific learning goals in view (e.g., identify codes in data sets). through retrospective reflection, i came to see that the dialogical engagement in my classes is highly influenced by the level of comfort tcs have with research methodology concepts, as well as with each other, and how they perceive the usefulness of research readings for immediate application in their research process. joanne i agree, victorina. teacher candidates do seem to appear more comfortable discussing research concepts and asking questions openly in year 2 of the program compared to year 1. the year 1 strangers in the room i refer to earlier tend to disappear and morph into supportive allies as they work to complete their research projects in year 2. i also notice distinct differences as i move between different research classes in the same program year (e.g., i sometimes instruct three year 1 classes concurrently). each individual class has a distinct personality that may require me to adjust my pedagogical approach slightly to achieve the learning goals. for example, some year 1 classes seem habitually chatty they easily connect socially on the first day of the program and tend to be receptive to dialogic activities. diversely, the social chemistry in other classes is not as natural, which may constrain dialogue. these situations require me to work a bit harder to nurture stronger relationships and trust among teacher candidates so dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa74 they may feel comfortable enough to engage dialogically with their peers (e.g., facilitating weekly conversation circles to practice speaking in front of a group; organizing in-class potlucks to build a sense of community). andrew i smile when i listen to you both because this is also my experience. it is also a somewhat proud moment for me when i see the growth and level of trust they build and the willingness to share knowledge and offer each other feedback. victorina, i like your use of the term supportive as i observe the marked level of support that comes with their growth. an example of when this is obvious is during my one-on-one sessions in year 2, where some students would appear at my office in pairs or threes, declaring they are aware it is time slated for one person, but emphasized that through their discussion they realised they had the same question or were wrestling with the same concern, and then (often jokingly) asked to see me at the same time. i have found this to be very encouraging as what i see is not only trust and support, but they are developing the skills to question research intentions and ideas among themselves. as we hope the above narratives showed, while each of our dialogic interactions differs in strategy, we all share the same goal in our teaching: to use a dialogic approach to nurture students’ capacity to construct their own meaning of educational research. these approaches, however, pose common challenges to our role as research advisor-instructors. we often share among ourselves that facilitating a dialogic approach to teaching and learning requires less rigidity in how we allocate time in each class session. for example, we may arrive to a 3-hour class with a fixed agenda. however, when dialogic interactions seem to be furthering students’ interest and learning in course content, we realize that we need to be flexible and consider providing more time for these activities than initially planned. such realizations have challenged us to adapt our practices in-the-moment to meet students’ learning needs. in this way, we are extending ourselves to be less bound by the rigid knowledge transmission models that we may have experienced as graduate students ourselves. to let go of a rigidity of practice can be a discomforting process. dialogue between teacher candidates and research advisor-instructor victorina one of the strategies i use to gain a better understanding of my graduate students’ progress is to provide them with opportunities to meet with me one-on-one. most of these meetings occur outside our class time, and they can last from 10-15 minutes to half an hour or more, depending on teacher candidates’ (tcs) needs and my availability. such meetings may be initiated by me or by the tcs. such meetings allow me to better understand what concepts or ideas remain unclear, as well as provide encouragement and guidance for supports outside the course, such as academic advising or teaching assistants. meetings with year 1 graduate students tend to focus on how to select a research topic and develop a research question. to help them think about the research topic, i often ask what brought them to teaching and why they selected our graduate teacher education program. year 2 tcs tend to require more advising around data reduction and analysis, and this is in line with one of the goals of the research course. we often discuss the messiness of the research process, as well as its iterative process. i often ask graduate students to bring a chunk of their anonymized data for us to look at together. we start by revisiting concepts such as code, category and theme (saldana, 2008) that are part of our in-class dialogic activities, and then independently code a paragraph or two of data/text. as we compare our units of analysis, we discuss how our positionality, disciplinary backgrounds, mastering of research concepts, and past experiences with research affect the way we select codes, categories and arrive at themes. we often discuss the role of reflexivity in the research process, as well as the importance of having a critical friend for peer support and feedback. i tend to encourage tcs to select a critical friend in year 1 and work together for the entire dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa75 duration of the graduate program. this allows tcs to learn about each other’s research in more substantive ways, as well as allows for continuity in peer feedback. given the number of students in a given class, as well as my adjunct teaching/advising status, it is not often possible to allot time frequently for one-on-one meetings. for this reason, i provide a space in the course learning management system (lms), called pepper, for such interactions to occur. i named this space “writing to learn.” students in my class are invited to upload their work in progress in that folder/space. i advise them to upload work every time we meet for our classes, when they reach a milestone in their research (often linked to major assignments in the course), as well as when they complete work on a certain aspect or section of their final research paper (e.g., introduction, positionality statement). when tcs would like me to provide feedback on a certain piece, they would send me an lms message or email. the folder thus serves two purposes: uploading work in progress for instructor feedback, as well as tracking their own research progress. for the purpose of tracking their research process and development of the final paper, i advise students not to delete any draft submissions. this allows them to go back to that folder and see, for example, how their research questions evolved, or how the sections of the paper transformed over the course of the academic year. such submissions and comparisons of prior and current work allow me and the teacher candidates to visualize the scaffolded aspect of the process, realize the messiness involved in research, as well as help them feel proud of completed work. the frequency of teacher candidate submissions varies across and within the cohorts i teach. while many welcome such opportunities, others may look at it as increasing an already onerous workload. in addition, many students expect that as a research advisor-instructor i would provide feedback on every single submission. to address this expectation, at the start of each class i provide graduate students an opportunity to share updates and learnings about their research journey, and any questions that they may have. in turn, i share what i am observing as strengths and challenges related to teaching and learning in our course, based on tcs engagement in in-class activities, as well as through reading teacher candidates’ ‘writing to learn’ submissions. this allows me to address common concerns, and emphasize that many researchers encounter both similar and distinct rewards and challenges when conducting research. joanne similar to you victorina, i do meet with tcs one-on-one outside classes. as research instructors, we recognize that students arrive to our courses with a range of research knowledge, from novice to doctoral level understandings, as well as holding diverse and often contrasting perceptions about research in general. before i meet with graduate students one-on-one, as a first step toward engaging in meaningful dialogue with my students, as well as facilitating dialogic interactions among students, i commence the research course with a reflective-narration activity. i ask candidates to consider and respond to the following questions: (i) please share any of your previous experiences with research (if you have limited experience with research, it’s ok! this is important to share!) (ii) when you hear the term research, what does it mean to you? (iii) in your opinion, what is the role of research in teaching (if any)? (iv) when you hear the term teacher-researcher, what does it mean to you? (v) what are some of the opportunities and challenges that you foresee for yourself personally as you enter our research course? as a take-home assignment, i task candidates to create a 4-7 minute voice recording to capture their responses to the above questions (e.g., via a cell phone app). candidates link their responses, as audio files, to a qr (quick response) code, and then print out their code on a piece of paper to bring to dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa76 class and display along the walls of our classroom. i usually designate one hour of class time for candidates to listen to the various research stories around the room while wearing headphones, accessing each narration via qr reader apps on their electronic devices. i had various intentions for facilitating this type of reflective audio library approach. first, it provides me with an opportunity to hear and assess each candidate’s experiences with research more generally, their understandings of teacher-researchers, and any concerns they had entering the course. these reflective-narrations provide me with talking points (which i record in a spreadsheet) to engage in dialogue with each of my candidates while inside or outside of class. for example, during a break mid-class, or a face-to-face meeting during my office hours, i might follow up with teacher candidates who made particular comments or asked questions in their recordings. this demonstrates that i take an interest in their research journey (yes, i actually listened!), and helps to build a strong(er) instructor-student relationship from which deeper dialogue can develop. i also listen for patterns across audio narratives and incorporate these into my lesson planning (e.g., attending to expressions of discomfort with qualitative research from students with quantitative backgrounds). i take much time to do this because i genuinely want candidates to know that i care and am invested in their mt research journeys. inviting teacher candidates to reflect on and share their previous experiences with (and current perceptions regarding) research also provides us, as course instructors, with opportunities to (re)shape our pedagogical approaches as i indicated earlier on. additionally, this approach is one way to ready teacher candidates to step into dialogue with their peers. through inviting them to listen to the research stories of others, candidates have an opportunity to reflect on their own beliefs about research, and who they are as emerging researchers themselves, by trying to understand the research experiences of others. victorina joanne, as you know, i started to include the activity you describe in my classes as well this year, as a result of our collaborative work. in fact, this academic year i did this activity twice: in the beginning of the course and then in the end of the course to help graduate students reflect on their journey and on how their understanding of research changed. as we displayed the qr codes on the walls, i observed how tcs were listening to recordings put together months apart. as part of the next steps in our self-study project, we can delve deeper into graduate students’ experiences with this approach following the ethics approval. this activity also proved very useful when we reached the transcription phase in the research project in my courses. tcs transcribed their recording and then they shared and discussed in class best strategies for faster and more accurate transcription. andrew similar to both of you, i established dedicated sessions/times for each teacher candidate to meet with me to discuss their progress. this has been a most effective practice and rewarding practice with year two students. they each get 10 minutes. each session is planned with a focus, but teacher candidates are informed, and even encouraged to come to the session with as many questions and/or concerns they may have based on where they are in the research process. the nature of the dialogue honors the learning pattern of the individual student and their own journey in the research process. my intention is also to build trust and to allow them to become a bit less stressed in a process that demands very rigid deadlines, thus “the goal is to create a warm, relaxing, and comfortable environment where trusting communication is able to flourish” (prewitt, 2011, p. 192). during this period, i get more insight into who they are, their research background, their ideas surrounding qualitative research, the personal issues they are dealing with, what challenges they are facing in the research process, and how i can best direct them. from these dialogues i have also observed a lack of confidence many candidates have in their research abilities and again, a lack of "passion" for a real area of interest. those who have that genuine interest in a cause connected to dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa77 social justice, educational change and student well-being, in general, are the ones who are doing the better work and making faster strides in my view. these meetings vary on a very wide continuum. there are teacher candidates who need one question answered or one point of clarity and will be done with our dialogue in less than five minutes. there are also those candidates who seem to have a lesser grasp of the concepts to be engaged with and the dialogue takes on a somewhat ‘lecturette’ feature. there are then those who used this dialogue as a means of reassurance and confirmation that they are doing what is required, and finally there are those whose dialogue has nothing to do with the focus of the day or their actual research paper they needed that time to just talk. the conversations get into them sharing personal issues impacting their research directly and indirectly. these topics range from matters of personal or family illness, death of a family member, to joyful news of an engagement or new job. what is shared is based on the trust they develop for me as an instructor. this trust is invaluable and assists me in offering feedback that is honest. when the trust and comfort level is high, for me, there has been a marked correlation in how i have provided feedback and how they receive the feedback. when they feel less judged, they are more open to the feedback they receive. this process allowed me to be more intentional in listening. as a classroom teacher for over twentyfour years, teaching at the elementary level, and in most of my years, in a very hierarchical educational system, i have developed a listening skill in order to respond. this listening is content driven and result oriented. the purpose of students’ question is to get clarity from me, and the purpose of my response is to provide an answer. in these dialogues, i have discovered and found a new value for just listening to listen. teacher candidates in some cases, did not need answers or clarifications, they needed someone to listen to their ideas and thoughts without even contributing with an actual word. my depositions of care and empathy, my body language, the offering of a tissue or simple gesture of a thumbs-up became the dialogue – enough dialogue. as we engaged in dialogue with graduate students/teacher candidates either through in-person or online activities, pre-recorded answers to questions pertaining to their research journey or understanding of research, or one-on-on meetings, what transpired for us is the element of care and opening ourselves to a less structured approach in our teaching and interactions. the trust that graduate students had to develop with their peers extended to us as research-advisors. we all felt that the one-on-one meetings, even if brief, helped build that trust that led to more in-depth dialogical encounters with both peers and instructors/research advisors as we hope will become more evident in the next section of the paper. dialogue among research advisors-instructors the three of us, victorina, joanne, and andrew, we all bring distinct yet complementary contributions to our self-study. although we completed our doctorate degrees in canada, we all grew up and completed our undergraduate and masters degrees, started our teaching careers and worked in a number of contexts: jamaica, japan, moldova, sweden, united kingdom, the bahamas, usa, china and canada. these experiences contributed to rich conversations and ideas, as well as varied approaches to teaching and learning. our self-study journey to date has been increasingly emotional and rewarding. as we shared our teaching strategies and approaches, we came to realize that at times well-intended instructional strategies appeared to add to the students’ workloads and cause anxiety; that any dialogic engagement, either between students or ourselves, requires genuine collaboration; that students responded well to guidance, but needed more autonomy when carrying out their group activities. we feel connected through shared stories about our research courses, as well as our passion for teaching and research. as we analyzed our retrospective reflections, critical incidents that we shared in person, as well as email exchanges, we found a few threads, which we discuss below. dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa78 victorina one of the recurring themes that i noticed in our discussions is that we all commented on the fact that the teacher candidates in the program that we teach come from varied disciplinary backgrounds. i find that this impacts their understanding of research and understanding of the writing conventions associated with qualitative research. what i have noticed over the course of my teaching/advising and our research advisor discussions is that those teacher candidates who come from the sciences, as well as the field of psychology, tend to favor quantitative research methodology and the language they use tends to reflect that (e.g., ‘subjects’ instead of ‘participants’, ‘results’ versus ‘findings’). i also find that students who have a sociology background tend to engage more critically with the readings, as well as have no trouble understanding the research concepts or writing conventions that we discuss. as research advisorinstructor, i spend time engaging tcs in discussions about the differences between quantitative and qualitative research, but i find that these conversations need to be iterative. we need to go back to those differences repeatedly during the course of the year, especially in the first year of the graduate teacher education program. also, i find that because tcs have to grapple with the requirements and expectations of a graduate level program and of a teacher education program, they are often overwhelmed by the workload. i tend to spend time reminding tcs about the importance of devising a schedule for completing work for our course and that a lot of self-directed learning is involved. if i were to compare the year 1 and year 2 courses, i find that by year 2, tcs reach a degree of maturity in terms of the understandings of research concepts and research process that helps them with the more advanced research work, although this varies from year to year. year 2 tcs tend to appreciate the scaffolding that happens in year 2 and think that the assignments build on each other, and help them with completing work overall, as well as with their dialogic encounters with their peers and research instructor-advisor. joanne indeed, victorina, the educational background and research experiences that graduate students bring to their work affect their engagement in our classrooms. one of the biggest challenges i face in teaching the year 1 course, and to a lesser extent in year 2, is the pushback i experience from those teacher candidates who do not regard qualitative research as “real research.” some candidates who arrive from the sciences are quick to point out what they believe to be inaccuracies built into qualitative research because of its non-scientific, non-statistical reliance on researcher subjectivisms. these students want/need to see results that can be verified and duplicated, which is near impossible, they say, when factoring in the variability of researcher bias within the data, compounded by the response bias built into the data provided by its human source. sometimes the comments i field come across as hostile and i often feel myself on the defensive. this is another reason why i developed the teacher-researchers in context activities (described above). this approach gently challenges those students from quantitative backgrounds to try on and apply a set of qualitative lenses and experience data differently. by year 2, as you victorina also notice, the resistance quiets somewhat. however, i wonder if my role as instructor, wielding final mark authority, ultimately silences the questioners. or, do they genuinely see the value in qualitative research after all of the dialogic work we pour into the year 1 course? as indicated earlier, i spent many years as a classroom teacher, followed by a period as a research leader in a school board research department. in these roles i seemed to have endless opportunities to engage and connect with my colleagues, for example, at planning meetings, professional development sessions, departmental meetings, and of course, the much-loved friday after-work socials. being new to instructing in a faculty of education, i struggled. i felt like a new teacher again (e.g., lesson planning, familiarizing myself with department technology, logistics, who’s who?) and looked for occasions to socialize and debrief with fellow mt instructors. i was relieved when you, victorina, put out a call for those dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa79 interested in joining a research instructor self-study group. to say that my professional growth has evolved as a result of our discussions after more than one year together is a gross understatement. andrew joanne and victorina, the dialogue shared among us for me too was a major source of professional development through collaboration and collegiality. we were able to speak openly about our concerns with the course, teacher candidates and other related issues. this opportunity allowed us to build professional and personal bonds. you do not get to spend this much time with others and not get to know them on various levels. in those moments of sharing we are more than just research instructors. we see each other. we brought our identities into the conversations and these allowed us to build trust, which in turn provided the foundational trust necessary to share, be vulnerable and reflective. because we come from different spaces in research and careers, these exchange of ideas and insights were significantly beneficial. the multiplicity and differences between our teaching styles, lived experiences, and professional journeys were also beneficial factors. we were able to share our concerns without feeling judged or inadequate. for me, i shared my concerns around the lack of readiness from many of the tcs to engage in real research dialogue since they lack some fundamental knowledge about qualitative research and many at that time, did not complete the readings as they should. there was also a difference in vocabulary with those who came into the program with a quantitative background and as such, there is much work to be done in that fundamental area and scope and sequence of what is taught in year one. it is hoped that teacher candidates come to the program with a certain level of exposure and fundamentals skills in conducting research. however, many are yet to understand the independent nature of research – this is an orientation and mindset that is vastly lacking and therefore impacts the amount of feedback that is being requested by the students. some lack the disposition of a qualitative researcher – not many have a "passion or cause" they wish to investigate. this also impacts their ability to be reflective and reflexive in their writing and articulate a solid positionality in their work. based on these sharing of concerns, we were able to share our instructional strategies which allowed for further feedback. we borrowed ideas from each other and would share what it looked like in our various classes. i walk away with insights and questions that are of value, having shared my own ideas with colleagues who not only value the work that i am doing, curious themselves, but also who are often living the same experiences. in this collegial dialogue, the three of us offer our opinions, suggestions, and push back with our own questions. we engaged in an authentic dialogical process. as we reviewed our email exchanges and the critical incidents that we shared, a major thread in our dialogic instructor-instructor encounters focused on the interactions among students during the activities we presented, and what affected teacher candidates’ overall engagement and motivation. as research advisors-instructors we noticed that some teacher candidates, especially in year 1, saw little value in learning about research methods. these tcs, at that stage in their journey, may not yet see the connection between what they learn in research courses and their future career or higher studies, such as a doctorate. this challenge is in line with preissle and roulston (2009) who found that learner qualities and motivations played a significant role in how they engaged with research concepts and ideas. another factor that affected teacher candidates’ engagement in dialogic activities seemed to be their level of confidence stemming from their prior disciplinary background and conceptions of what constitutes engagement. as we worked with concepts and ideas, we emphasized the messiness and uncertainty which are a part of the research process (hammersley, 2012; hughes, 2019). dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement victorina baxan, joanne pattison-meek, andrew b. campbell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.308 | vol. 8 (2020) sa80 another thread related to challenges when engaging with course concepts. these seemed to arise in the form of anxiety due to the overall workload in the program, as well as workload specific to the research courses. such anxiety may also have led, from our observations and retrospective reflections on critical incidents in our course, to a form of aversion towards research methods. aversion toward research methods is not uncommon (baloglu & zelhart, 2003). however, through points of discussion, time to reflect, online sharing, peer responses and modelling, students were able to start developing a sense of ownership for their learning. online responses seemed to allow for more freedom to post, reflect, and share a more even distribution of student voices. other struggles that we noticed related to being unfamiliar with qualitative research and language conventions due to prior disciplinary affiliations. as research advisors-instructors we also found that tcs need more one-on-one support outside the class time, but such support is not sustainable due to the types of appointments we hold (e.g., adjunct faculty) and time constraints due to the large number of students in our classes. learnings from our collaboration and next steps the collaborative self-study project that our research team engaged in for the past two academic years yielded valuable learnings that have informed our teaching, and will guide us to improve our research advising practices. given the wide range of research experiences that teacher candidates bring to our research methods courses, as research advisors-instructors, we will continue to scaffold our teaching/advising to meet the diverse learning needs of our students. we hope that guiding teacher candidates to co-construct research knowledge through a dialogic approach, having alexander’s dialogic teaching principles (2018) as a start, will support their teacher research capacity for working in school settings and beyond. as we move forward in our work, one of our goals still remains to find ways to increase graduate students’ readiness for dialogue, as well as further encourage dialogue among tcs, tc-instructor, and whole class. we also need to build more instructional activities that foster trust in tcs’ own and peer contribution to dialogue, as well as help teacher candidates to embrace their own professional teacherresearcher voice. the quality of dialogue needs further development. the range or repertoire of dialoguebased pedagogical skills and strategies that we have is still expanding and we find that some strategies that worked really well with one cohort do not do well with others. getting to know who the graduate students in our courses are and how they respond to dialogic opportunities will help inform which instructional strategies to use. findings from this study contribute to the literature on dialogic pedagogy in graduate research methods teaching and learning. the study also shows the potential for a range of dialogic opportunities for graduate students to 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(2017). can higher-proficiency l2 learners benefit from working with lower-proficiency partners in peer feedback? teaching in higher education 22(2), 178–192. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t8 pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s – early 1960s)1 vladimir i. laptun m.i. evsevyev mordovia state pedagogical institute, russia state galin tihanov queen mary university of london, uk abstract the purpose of this essay to is to describe and discuss bakhtin’s pedagogical work based on diverse archival materials and memoirs of his students. vladimir i. laptun, phd., a senior lecturer of the department of education, m.i. evsevyev mordovia state pedagogical institute, russia. his research interests include: life and pedagogical activity of mikhail m. bakhtin, history of pedagogy and education, comparative pedagogy, historical studies of local communities. galin tihanov is the george steiner professor of comparative literature at queen mary university of london. his most recent research has been on cosmopolitanism, exile, and transnationalism. his publications include four books and nine (co)edited volumes. tihanov is winner, with evgeny dobrenko, of the efim etkind prize for best book on russian culture (2012), awarded for their co-edited a history of russian literary theory and criticism: the soviet age and beyond (university of pittsburgh press, 2011). he is member of academia europaea and honorary president of the icla committee on literary theory. he is also on the advisory board of the institute for world literature (harvard university) and is an honorary scientific advisor to the institute of foreign literatures, chinese academy of social sciences. tihanov has held visiting appointments at yale university, st. gallen university, university of sao paulo, peking university, and seoul national university.  the life and legacy of the great russian philosopher of the 20th century mikhail bakhtin (18951975) have been analyzed in numerous studies. his collected works have been published in seven volumes; the archival documents related to his work are being published regularly. researchers try to conceptualize and grasp all the aspects of this unique, multifaceted personality, including his work as a philosopher, literary critic, and culture expert. besides being an outstanding scholar, bakhtin was also a brilliant lecturer, educator, and pedagogic mentor. however, his pedagogical legacy still remains mostly unexplored. 1 translation by yury almetev. we, the dpj editors, would like to thank caryl emerson for directing us to this chapter. this article was translated from the original in russian: tihanov, g., & laputin, v. (2017). pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) (педагогическая деятельность м. м. бахтина (1920-е – начало 1960-х годов)). matica srpska journal of slavic studies, 92, 57-68., novi sad, serbia issn: 2325-3290 (online) pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t9 only a few relatively small studies touching upon certain aspects of m. m. bakhtin’s pedagogy have been published by the present moment (plehankova, 1989; laptun, 1992; vasilyev, 1996). however, bakhtin’s pedagogical work was extremely multifaceted and covered many different levels. in different periods of his life, he was a school teacher, university professor, lecturer at various non-academic venues, and an academic advisor of doctoral students. unfortunately, not much is known about bakhtin’s pedagogical work before his arrival in saransk in the autumn of 1936. we know that he began teaching in nevel, a small town in vitebsk gubernia (now pskov oblast), where he had moved from petrograd2 in early summer of 1918. in nevel, bakhtin was hired to work in the nevel unified professional school of the 2nd level as a teacher of history, sociology, and the russian language. during the same period, he taught in the local pedagogical seminary (konkin & konkina, 1993, p. 53). while in nevel, mikhail mikhailovich not only worked as a teacher but also participated in social and cultural activities. he was an active participant in various debates; he gave lectures on philosophy for the local “intelligentsia”; he made public speeches before the general public. bakhtin’s brilliance as a lecturer and his profound knowledge of humanities could not but attract the attention of the local authorities of public education. thus, in september of 1919, he received a special order to deliver a course of lectures on the history of literature for the arts workers (molot, 09.29.1919, p. 2). in december of the same year, the local newspaper molot published the following advertisement: “a free-of-charge course of lectures on literature and arts will soon be given by m. m. bakhtin in nevel. citizens of both genders, 14 years of age and older, are welcome to participate (literacy is required)” (molot, 06.09.1919, p. 2). in addition, in june of 1920, bakhtin gave a course of lectures on the russian language for the members of the union of workers of public education and socialist culture (molot, 06.09.1920, p. 2). in the autumn of 1920, m. bakhtin moved to vitebsk, where he had more opportunities for pedagogical work. in the early 1920s, the town featured a pedagogical institute, a higher institute of public education, a “proletarian university,” a conservatory, and also a number of public schools. thanks to the assistance of his friend from nevel, v. n. voloshinov, who was currently working in the local bureau of people’s education, mikhail mikhailovich was hired in october of 1920 to work in the vitebsk state pedagogical institute as a professor of general literature. later, in december of the same year, he was hired by the vitebsk public conservatory as a professor of the history and philosophy of music (konkin & konkina, 1993, p. 63). in addition to that, bakhtin mentioned in his autobiography that he used to give lectures in the higher institute of public education, in a local soviet party school of the 2nd level, and in the political department of the 5th vitebsk infantry division (amsu, f. 2, op. 1, d. 54: l. 3)3. due to certain circumstances, it was only 12 years later that m. m. bakhtin returned to active pedagogical work. in autumn of 1936, mikhail mikhailovich and his wife moved to saransk, where he was offered the job of a professor of general literature and methods of literature teaching in the literature department (bakhtin, 1944, p. 4). the brief but very eventful period of bakhtin’s employment in the mordovian pedagogical institute (from 1957 the mordovian state university) has been quite thoroughly studied by researchers (e.g., laptun, 2 now saint petersburg. 3 f. stands for 'fond' [foundation], d. for 'delo' [case], t. for 'tome' [volume], l. for 'list' [sheet]. pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t10 1996, 2010). that is why we will not analyze it here in detail. instead, we will quote an excerpt from the memoirs written by bakhtin’s students, describing him as a teacher: he was of a small stature, slightly stooped, bald and pale, but some unforgettable brilliance was shining in his dark, intelligent eyes. his suit was almost white. during his lectures he used to hold his right hand in a pocket of his jacket, and his left under the lapel, on his chest. he never had any pieces of paper or books in his hands. slowly perambulating around the classroom, mikhail mikhailovich would now retreat from the students, now approach them again. i remember that when he was speaking about homer, analyzing his epic poems, we were amazed by his knowledge of the subject – he could recite whole chapters by heart. at such moments, we had a feeling that it was not our professor, m. m. bakhtin, standing in front of us, but a person from ancient greece, who had witnessed those remote events himself and now came to share them with us. the students were listening breathlessly, as if spellbound (nazarova-svisheva, 1990, p. 4). at the same time, it must be mentioned that, as much as his students were impressed with bakhtin’s lectures, some of his colleagues were of a different opinion. for instance, n. i. abushaev, a philosophy professor, visited one of bakhtin’s lectures as part of the inspection of the literature department and made an emphatic conclusion: “the methods of delivery were sub-standard for a university lecture – the lecturer was dictating during the lecture” (csarm, fr-546, op. 1, d. 64: l. 42–42 ob.). mikhail mikhailovich did not agree with such evaluation of his lecture and tried to explain to the member of the city committee of the communist party that “one should not evaluate methodology based on a single lecture, as a lecture is part of the whole course.” however, it was next to impossible to prove your point before such “[pedagogical] methodologists” in those days. that was perhaps the reason why many years later, remembering his first arrival in saransk, bakhtin noted that it had been boring to teach there as “the students were rather ignorant, and the professors were ignorant too” (bakhtin & duvakin, 2002, p. 237). at the end of 1936 – beginning of 1937, a very unwholesome atmosphere permeated the mordovian pedagogical institute, which was common for the country at large at that point. that is why, in the beginning of july, 1937, mikhail mikhailovich and his wife had to leave saransk and stay temporarily with their friends in moscow. at the end of july – beginning of august, they were in leningrad4, and later, in august, they even managed to make a trip to kustanai. after this, up until the end of october, the bakhtins were oscillating between moscow and leningrad, hoping to settle down in one of the capitals5 and find employment there. however, bakhtin’s status of a “former exile”6 did not allow them to do so. it was only at the end of october, that bakhtin’s friends managed to find a residence for him and his wife not far from moscow, in savyolovo7. that marked the start of one of the most difficult, yet at the same time productive, periods of bakhtin’s life – the so called “savyolovo period”. it so happened that the bakhtins spent the entire year of 1938 in savyolovo. there was a serious reason for that. in january, mikhail mikhailovich suffered from an acute exacerbation of his chronic disease, which caused serious problems with his right leg. amputation was the only solution in that situation. the surgery was successfully performed on february 17. during the long convalescence period bakhtin had to stay at home, that allowed him to focus on his research. apparently, it was during that period that bakhtin 4 now saint petersburg. 5 i.e., moscow or leningrad (st. petersburg) were interchangeable capitals in russian/soviet history. 6 bakhtin was arrested in 1929 by the soviet secret police for participation in a religious philosophical organization and exiled to kazakhstan 1929-1936. 7 savyolovo is a district of the town of kimry in tver oblast. the town of kimry is located 130 km from moscow and is a district center of tver oblast. pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t11 firmly resolved to finish his work on rabelais, which he had initiated during his stay in kustanai. as we know, m. m. bakhtin completed the first version of his fundamental work rabelais in the history of realism in 1940. undoubtedly, “rabelais” was not the only work completed by bakhtin during his “savyolovo period”. as already mentioned above, that period was quite productive for mikhail mikhailovich. many of the texts created by him in savyolovo, however, were either first drafts or tentative sketches. some of them were not even entitled by the author. instead of enumerating all bakhtin’s works of that period and elaborating on them, we will mention on one of them here, entitled the questions of stylistics in the russian language classrooms of secondary schools (bakhtin, 1994). this pedagogical article was apparently written in the spring – summer of 1945, during bakhtin’s employment as a teacher at two schools – school № 39 of the railway department (savyolovo, tver oblast) and secondary school № 14 (kimry), in which he worked from 1942 to 19458. unfortunately, it does not seem feasible to establish the exact date of bakhtin’s employment in the school of village ilyinskoye. it is only known that he taught german there and was dismissed on november 15, 1941, “due to the cuts of teaching hours” (korkunov, 2013). it appears that he had worked for only two and a half months at that school. this fact is not surprising in itself, as the war was on and everything was changing at a dizzying speed. it is much more surprising that bakhtin had become employed in the school that was located 15 km away from his residence (korkunov, 2013). it should be mentioned that by that time his leg had been amputated and he had to use crutches. mikhail mikhailovich did not stay unemployed for long. very soon, in december of 1941 he was hired to teach at secondary school № 39 of yaroslavl railway department (in some sources it is referred to as “railway school № 39”). bakhtin’s personal file contains “the reference of bakhtin mikhail mikhailovich, a teacher of school № 39 of yaroslavl railway department”. from this reference we find out that bakhtin worked at that school as a teacher of russian, literature, and german from december 15, 1941, to september 20, 1945. this is how he was described in the reference: during the four years of his work at the school, m. m. bakhtin has proved to be a highly cultured teacher, experienced methodologist of education, and an active citizen. as an experienced worker of higher education, m. m. bakhtin’s education far exceeds the level of a secondary school teacher, which allowed him to teach his courses at a very high level and, at the same time, to help the school with various methodological questions, raising the level of cultural and professional education of the school teachers, and contributing to the school’s extracurricular activities. for four years m. m. bakhtin conducted a teachers’ workshop aimed at further development of teachers’ knowledge of the russian language and stylistics; he was the head of the school’s literary workshop, which work he greatly improved; he gave lectures and presentations on methodological and literary topics, and tirelessly helped the school’s young teachers as a mentor. m. m. bakhtin also conducted cultural and educational work, giving lectures and presentations outside the school. in his pedagogical work, m. m. bakhtin treated his students with great respect and sensitivity, combining a high demand for students’ knowledge of the subject with rearing them in the spirit of soviet patriotism and the ideas of marxism-leninism. 8 see also bakhtin, 1997, pp. 511-512. during the wwii the bakhtins lived in savyolovo and mikhail mikhailovich taught at local schools. later, he would write in his autobiography: “since autumn of 1941 i have worked as a teacher of the secondary school in village ilyinskoye (kimry district), then secondary school № 14 and “railway” school № 39 in kimry” (“bakhtin’s personal file”). pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t12 as a pedagogical worker, m. m. bakhtin can be described as a dedicated and highly disciplined professional, who is punctual and highly efficient in attending to his duties and pro-active in his work (the archive of the mordovian state university, f. 2. op. 1, d. 54, l. 23). about a month after being hired to the school of the railway department, bakhtin found employment at another educational establishment – secondary school № 14 (korkunov, 2013). at different times, he taught russian, literature, german, and even history at that school. apart from this reference, the information on bakhtin as a school teacher is rather scant. the reference itself, being an official document, lacks any emotional descriptions. much more informative can be the memories of former students of school № 14 about their one-legged teacher, who had been telling them about literature with such pathos. one of those students was galina ivanovna mozzhuhina, who was an eighth grader in 1944/45. many years later she tried to recreate the image of her russian and literature teacher in her memory: i do not want to claim it for sure that it was m. m. bakhtin who influenced me in my decision to also become a teacher of russian and literature, but recollecting the literature classes in high school, it is his lessons that come to mind. […] he was very cautious when talking to someone. he did not socialize with other teachers, and the latter did not make any attempts to befriend him. i know for sure that only one teacher was his friend – mikhail vladimirovich lebedev. when bakhtin was leaving, he gifted many of his books to lebedev. […] during lessons, bakhtin did not focus on the whole class. he did not insist that every student should listen to him (as other teachers did) – instead, he was speaking to those who were interested. at the same time, he was strict about the classroom discipline and very rigorous in terms of our studies. […] mikhail mikhailovich was not very popular among the students of our class. he was very demanding but many of us were simply hungry and to study was hard. it was the war time. we, students, had to bring coal to school, to get the school heated. it was a very difficult time. once, the students of my class decided to “sabotage” his lesson and were behaving badly. he could not bear it and left the classroom. the school principal called the parents and there were repercussions. but we never did that again. […] so, the class was not particularly fond of bakhtin. many students were struggling with their studies and bakhtin’s standards were very high. also, he was unpopular because of his strictness. although, more capable and successful students were on good terms with him. for example, some boys from the tenth grade became friends with him. well, the following school year he left our school and i realized what a great teacher we had lost. another teacher was appointed to teach us and he was simply boring. mikhail mikhailovich was a teacher who could inspire us (korkunov, 2013; also ponomaryova & stroganov, 1992). to make our memory picture more vivid, we have added the reminiscences of two more students of bakhtin – maria isayevna krylova, whose classroom teacher bakhtin was in 1943 – 1944, and valentina georgiyevna rak, a tenth grade student in 1944. m. i. krylova: he organized a literary extracurricular circle. we could not have enough of his lessons, so our whole class attended that circle. […] he could recite goethe and shakespeare by heart. it was exciting to listen to him, and sometimes he seemed grateful to us for listening to him (ponomaryova & stroganov, 1992, p. 147). v. g. rak: pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t13 he was just as hungry and cold in our school as we all were. but as soon as a lesson started, he would become oblivious to all the hardships. he was speaking to us elatedly, wildly gesticulating, and always ridiculing our school textbooks, “how can you read them? – he would ask us. – you need to read the artwork itself, the original artwork, from beginning to end!” and we were sitting there openmouthed, listening to him, oblivious to the fact that the bell had rung a long time ago (ibid., p. 148). the memories of bakhtin’s former students cited above suggest that he was conscientious in attending his teacher’s duties. he had rigorous standards for himself and his students; he genuinely tried to instill in them the love of literature; and along with them, he was patiently enduring all the hardships of the war years. at the same time, mikhail mikhailovich had almost no social interactions with his colleagues, except for m. v. lebedev, mentioned above. for example, one of bakhtin’s colleagues, maria vasilyevna vantsova, described him as follows, “he was very introverted and almost never communicated with us. i cannot say anything about his friends or even acquaintances. i did not know if he had any. maybe he did not have friends at all” (ibid., p. 148). so, throughout the war period, mikhail mikhailovich was working as a secondary school teacher in a small provincial town. undoubtedly, such situation could not satisfy the scholar, which is why, immediately after the end of the war, bakhtin began considering changing the place of residence. mikhail mikhailovich realized that to find any employment in moscow or leningrad for him was not possible. therefore, he could only expect to be hired by a university in some remote province. in summer of 1945, while visiting moscow, bakhtin went to the public commissariat of education of rsfsr9 in the hope of getting some employment. this is how mikhail mikhailovich himself described it later: so i went there in order to receive perhaps an employment at some provincial university and i found the head of the department of pedagogical institute, who used to be my dean in saransk, georgiy sergeyevich petrov. he saw me and said, “go back to saransk. i will write to the director and send you there immediately. everything will be ready for you there. saransk is the best option for you” (besedy, p. 216). thus, mikhail mikhailovich and his wife elena alexandrovna returned to saransk. on october 1, 1945, m. m. bakhtin was appointed the head of the department of general literature at the mordovian pedagogical institute. a few documents found in the central state archive of the republic of mordovia portray bakhtin as a brilliant head of the department, sensitive and intelligent critic, talented educator, and methodologist. the following excerpts from the minutes of the department meetings (below) reflect m. m. bakhtin’s views on certain methodological aspects of university teaching. these concise and often hasty notes, in which the department secretaries documented the gist of bakhtin’s speeches addressed to his colleagues, still contain some important insights. an excerpt from bakhtin’s speech at the literature department meeting, january 14, 1952: m. m. bakhtin underscored that we must fight against routine in university education. there should be fewer lectures and more practical classes. the number of lectures must be reduced. if some topics are explained well in the textbook, they should just be referred to, but it is the material 9 russian soviet federative socialist republic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/russian_soviet_federative_socialist_republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/russian_soviet_federative_socialist_republic pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t14 that is not explained well, that needs to be taught. students tend to rely on lectures, but we need to encourage their self-study. there should be more debates, discussions, conferences. […] it should also be noted that students have poor knowledge of aesthetics and arts. we should speak about music and painting in our lectures. colloquiums are necessary, even though they are often rejected […]10. from m. m. bakhtin’s speech at the literature department meeting, february 6, 1953: students have been observed at the exams. in general, their knowledge has become deeper and they have been working more diligently than last year. but students still do not understand literary texts; they do not seem to grasp their meanings and express no real love of reading. they do not seem to have a genuine love of literature, which is the main drawback […] the educational value of literature is often neglected in our lectures. the lectures do not pay enough attention to the questions of language […] at the exams, students’ responses are too abstract and commonplace; students are afraid to give concrete examples. they are totally ignorant in terms of history, of the described historical epoch. students’ overall cultural knowledge is inadequate – for example, they do not know who mozart is, who beethoven and borodin are; they cannot name any painting by repin […]11 from m. m. bakhtin’s speech at the joined meeting of the departments of literature, the russian language, and mordovian languages and literature, october 29, 1953: m. m. bakhtin pointed out that the institute teachers need to know the mordovian language and literature, that is why he suggested that a course of lectures on the mordovian language and literature be offered. the main shortcoming of schools and colleges is the inability of educators to instill motivation in students towards language studies. students should be taught to love the sound of language. students’ speech lacks a variety of intonations. for example, students lack the ability to express irony through intonation. the important role in instilling the love of language in students should belong to teachers. […] students do not know how to use dictionaries. literature teachers should point out for students those sections of a literary work that have certain merits. a lot of work needs to be done concerning orthoepy. students make many mistakes in terms of orthoepy. […] m. m. bakhtin points out that, even though institutes should not teach elementary literacy to students, the fact is that many school graduates come to the institute being hardly literate. we must take some measures to improve students’ literacy.12 from bakhtin’s speech at the literature department, february 3, 1954: almost all the professors’ exams have been visited and observed […] the following shortcomings have been revealed: 1) students are unable to participate in a discussion, which suggests that teachers themselves do not lead discussions but rather deliver information; 2) the 10 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-546, op. 1, doc. 257. minutes № 7 of the meeting of the literature department from january 14, 1952. agenda: the discussion of the article “on educational work at the institute.” 11 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-546, op. 1, doc. 177-178. minutes № 11 of the meeting of the literature department from february 6, 1953. agenda: reports of the department members about their work in semester 1. 12 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-546, op. 1, doc. 202, 208. minutes № 3 of the joined meeting of the literature department and the department of mordovian languages and literature from october 29, 1953. agenda: on raising the general culture and literacy of students of the department of language and literature. pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t15 lectures are not used enough for raising students’ general level of culture; 3) students’ knowledge of texts is sub-par; 4) students often talk about original literary texts, which they have not read, pretending to have read them; 5) the stylistic quality of student responses is deplorable.13 from bakhtin’s speech at the literature department of the mordovian state university, january 6, 1958: the more variety of methods we offer the better – but, most importantly, they should be practically useful. practical classes have only educational goals. special seminars have scientific research goals. we should strive to make special seminars more research oriented. practical classes can use various methods – reports, methodological discussions, and especially the analysis of texts. too little attention is paid to bibliography. it is paramount to select a topic for a special seminar and it should be as narrow as possible. we must also pose debatable questions to students. every student should have a diary or a notebook to write down his thoughts and opinions. reports must be done in writing, as they represent scientific research, but it is not necessary to read the written text out loud. students must be taught how to read monographs.14 from m. m. bakhtin’s speech at the literature department meeting, october 15, 1958: during practical classes our students should be reminded that they need to acquire all the skills of practical work. pedagogical training should be treated as internship […] aesthetic education should be given special attention. history of arts will be taught at secondary schools. at the university, we should prepare not only literature educators but also the promotors of a high aesthetic taste. we should teach students to keep up with all the new literary artwork being published. the educational role of literary artwork should be constantly stressed in our lectures.15 it should be noted that mikhail mikhailovich paid special attention to students’ work with research and reference literature. he taught students how to treat such work in a right way, “when you start studying a scholarly book, you should never expect to understand it easily and quickly. science is always complex and it can take time to understand a monograph or even a textbook: they require a significant concentration of the mind and hard mental work” (bakhtin, 1958). the pedagogical profile of mikhail mikhailovich is vividly depicted in the memoirs written by his former students and colleagues. below is an excerpt from a short article written by student yury pavlov for the university magazine, in which he shared his admiration of the associate professor m. m. bakhtin’s pedagogical gift. the article was published on january 1, 1960: with what passion, what inspiration is each and every word uttered by mikhail mikhailovich imbued! one is left wondering if it is the sound of a human voice or a thrilled murmur of a water current falling on the turbine blades and generating electric waves. this is the impression that each new original idea, enthusiastically pronounced by mikhail mikhailovich, produces on his students, enkindling in them the flame of curiosity and inspiration. after such fiery lectures one craves to understand even better and love even deeper this exciting science – philology […] m. m. bakhtin’s 13 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-546, op. 1, doc. 235. minutes № 10 of the meeting of the literature department from february 3, 1954. agenda: reports of the department head and the department members about their work in semester 1 of the 1953-1954 school year. 14 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-2542, op. 1, doc. 24. minutes № 4 of the meeting of the literature department from january 6, 1958. agenda: discussion of the methods of seminars and practical classes. 15 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, fr-2542, op. 1, doc. 24. minutes № 2 of the meeting of the literature department from october 15, 1958. agenda: discussion of n. s. khrushchev’s note “on the connection between school and life.” pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t16 exemplary erudition in the field of general literature is combined with his subtle and sensitive pedagogical tact, which can be called pedagogical art. all these features of mikhail mikhailovich’s kind nature, along with his rare modesty, attract students and make them particularly fond of him. students often turn to mikhail mikhailovich with many burning questions or ask him for advice and he always responds to them. the beginning poets and writers from our faculty, with both fear and hope, share their first literary attempts with him. mikhail mikhailovich would always respectfully discuss their works with them and provide some advice on how to improve them […] (pavlov, 1960). after his retirement in august 1961, mikhail mikhailovich did not sever his ties with the university and his department. at first, he was teaching a small special course, and later he devoted himself to the preparation of research workers for the mordovian university. bakhtin was the official research advisor for five post-graduate students: yury basikhin, vladimir gobov, alevtina dialektova; elvira konyukhova, and tamara nefyodova (see also vasilyev, 2013). alevtina dialektova was one of his first post-graduate mentees. she graduated the mordovian pedagogical institute in 1953 and later worked in saransk public schools. this is what she shared in her memoirs: i became bakhtin’s post-graduate student 10 years after my graduation from the institute. it was in 1963. we mostly met at his apartment since he had retired from the university. i had a weekly appointment with him at 8 pm, every thursday. but i could drop by mikhail mikhailovich’s place at any time for a consultation. at our meetings, he would appoint certain parts of my work for me to accomplish. the first thing he told me as his post-graduate student was the following, “dissertation means science, and science cannot be fit into three years that are allotted to candidates for their dissertation defense. a dissertation takes at least 10 years of work, at the very least”. as it later turned out, his words were prophetic, as i defended my dissertation in 1973, exactly 10 years later. i believe it would be interesting for you to know about m. m. bakhtin’s methods of work with post-graduate students. first of all, he did not explicitly name the topic of the study. instead, he would name the area, to which the topic would belong. for example, he said to me, “it will be the german enlightener wieland, quite an under-researched writer of german enlightenment.” for starters, mikhail mikhailovich allocated a period of time for me within which i was supposed to become so proficient in german in order to be able to read wieland’s books without a dictionary. he gave me a book entitled “the spirit of goethe’s time.” it was a large book16, and he told me, “well, translate this book first and then we will talk about the topic of your dissertation”. of course, i went “underground” (as bakhtin’s wife, elena alexandrovna, used to joke), translating that huge book, and did not come back to mikhail mikhailovich for over two months. finally, i brought him my translation and mikhail mikhailovich rigorously checked my translation. my translation satisfied him (laptun, 2010, p. 152). in conclusion, the sources of data cited in this article suggest that mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin was not only an outstanding scholar, but also a talented educator, a scholarly mentor, who generously shared his erudition, unorthodox ideas, and pedagogical experience with his students, doctoral candidates, and colleagues. it would be interesting to investigate the question of how bakhtin’s pedagogical activities influenced his research work and publications – but this should be discussed in another paper. 16 it was a monograph by korff (1923), a well-known work on german literature. pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t17 references amsu – archive of the mordovian state university, saransk. bakhtin, m. m. & duvakin, v. d. 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[mikhail bakhtin’s countryside holidays]. zarubezhniye zapiski, 22. laptun, v. i. (1992). m. m. bakhtin. vuzovskaya lektsiya po literature [m. m. bakhtin. a university lecture about literature]. vestnik mordovskogo, 3, 14–15. laptun, v. i. (1996). perviy priezd m. m. bakhtina v saransk (1936-1937) [the first visit of m.m. bakhtin to saransk (1936-1937)]. nevelskiy sbornik: statyi, pis’ma, vospominaniya [nevel collected works: essays, letters, and memoirs]. st. petersburg, akropol, pp. 61-75. laptun, v. i. (2010). m. m. bakhtin in the 1960s – 1970s: saransk – moscow (from the memories of his friends and colleagues). strannik, 6, 147-152. molot: gazeta nevelskogo soveta rabochih, krestyanskih i krasnoarmeyskih deputatov [the newspaper of the nevel soviet of the representatives of workers, peasant, and red army soldiers], 19191920. nazarova, p., & svishcheva, t. (1990). takim on svetlym byl: vospominaniya o m. m. bakhtine [he was such a sunny person: memoirs about m. m. bakhtin]. soviet mordovia, 4. pavlov, y. (1960). chelovek bol’shoy dushi [a person of great soul]. the mordovian university, 3. plehankova, n. n. (1989). uroki bakhtina [lesson of bakhtin]. soviet mordovia, 4. ponomaryova, e. n., & stroganov, m. v. (1992). o prebyvanii m. m. bakhtina v kalininskoy oblasti [about bakhtin’s living in kalinin region]. in s. s. konkin (ed.) m. m. bakhtin: problemy nauchnogo naslediya [m. m. bakhtin: the issues of scientific legacy]. saransk, izdatel’stvo mordovskogo universiteta [university of mordva press], pp. 146-149. universiteta, 3, 14-15. vasilyev, n. l. (1996). m. m. bakhtin as a school teacher. dialog, karnaval, khronotop, 2, 73-77. 17 bakhtin, m. m. (2004). dialogic origin and dialogic pedagogy of grammar: stylistics in teaching russian language in secondary school. journal of russian & east european psychology, 42(6), 12-49. pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s early 1960s) vladimir i. laptun, galin tihanov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | vol. 6 (2018) t18 vasilyev, n. l. (2013). m. m. bakhtin and his post-graduate students. in n. l. vasilyev (ed.) mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin i fenomen “kruga bakhtina”. moscow: urss/librokom, 29 – 4118. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. 18 vasiliev, n. l. (2018). m. m. bakhtin as a university professor. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 6, t1-t7, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/234/164. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/234/164 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s – early 1960s) references microsoft word kolikant, pollack, collaborative layout+yk.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a89 collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing: the explanatory power of a dialogical framework yifat ben-david kolikant hebrew university, jerusalem, israel sarah pollack weizmann institute of science, israel abstract there is an increased interest within the history education community in introducing students to the multi-perspective and interpretative nature of history. when these educational goals are pursued within collaborative contexts, what are the relationships of individuals from conflicting groups with historical accounts that they produced as a group? how does the joint writing influence their historical understanding? we analyzed the joint accounts produced by high-school israeli students, jews and arab/palestinians, who collaboratively investigated historical events related to the israelipalestinian conflict. employing a thematic analysis and a bakhtinian-inspired discourse analysis, we found that the joint texts were constructed of themes from both in-groups’ perspectives. the students constructed a dialogic relationship between these themes, which enabled them to legitimize the other’s voice, yet keep the voices unmerged. additionally, although they never abandoned their in-group narratives, the joint account reflected a new, multi-perspective historical meaning of the historical event. yifat ben-david kolikant is an associate professor in the seymour fox school of education at the hebrew university of jerusalem. dr. ben-david kolikant’s research focuses on examining the tripartite relationship of students, school learning, and technology in the information era. mainly, her research revolves around two inter-related questions: (1) how does students’ knowledge of subjects outside of school impact on their school learning? and, (2) what pedagogies are suited to the information age and the needs of students and what role does technology play? dr. ben-david kolikant holds a ph.d. degree in science teaching from the weizmann institute of science, received in 2002. sarah pollack received her phd from the hebrew university of jerusalem, israel. her research interests focus on understanding learning processes in an ethno-politically based environment in order to devise an instructional model suitable in an age of pluralism, multiculturalism, and digitalism. ��� introduction within the history education community, interest in introducing students to the multi-perspective and interpretative nature of history is growing. it is thought that exposing students to multiple perspectives while engaging them in historians' thinking habits will encourage and facilitate them to develop critical thinking and communication skills. consequently, this would enable them to better function in a multicultural and globalized society (mccully, 2012; stradling, 2003; also see http://www.euroclio.eu). issn: 2325-3290 (online) collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a90 one way to practice multi-perspectiveness in a history classroom is through collaborative contexts. often, these contexts can be characterized as hetero-agent and hetero-narrative (hahn). hetero-narrative, in the context of history education, refers to students encountering different, even contradicting narratives and interpretations of a historical event. hetero-agent refers to cases in which students from different cultural, national or ethnic backgrounds, i.e., holding different narratives, collaborate. in these hahn contexts, when students produce a joint account, as part of their collaborative assignment, an intriguing question is what are the relationships between group products and individuals’ historical understanding of the event? in order to address this question, we analyzed the joint texts produced by high-school israeli students, jews and arabs/palestinians (the latter are also referred to as arabs or palestinians) who were engaged in an investigation of a historical event related to the israeli-palestinian conflict, by analyzing primary and secondary sources, and producing a joint account. exploring the relationships between group products and individual knowledge is relevant to the broad community of (computer-supported) collaborative learning and is especially challenging in the humanities, which require a narrative mode of thought that seeks to explain the storied meaning people make of these relationships (bruner, 1986). in history, for example, it is possible that two experienced historians, working with the same source materials and using the same methods, might reach different yet legitimate and reasonable interpretations of the same past events (wertsch & poleman, 2001); this is even more likely to occur with students from different ethnic backgrounds, as evident in the literature review below. literature review the mastery/appropriation theoretical framework sociocultural theories underscore that thinking, like any human action, is mediated by what wertsch (1998) terms “cultural tools.” historical narratives are such cultural tools because they mediate our thinking about the past and are thus crucial in constituting individual and group ethnic and national identities. historical narratives are, in essence, far from being neutral; rather, they reflect the viewpoints of particular historical narrators and producers (burke, 1969). wertsch (1998) suggests a bi-dimensional theoretical framework to articulate the interaction of agents with historical presentations: (a) a cognitive dimension, or the mastering (knowing how) of a presentation; and (b) an affective dimension related to one’s identity and sense of belonging, which promotes either the appropriation of a presentation (making the presentation one’s own) or resistance of it. wertsch claims that one’s interaction with a historical presentation varies regarding both dimensions, depending on many variables, such as particular socio-political contexts and interlocutors. wertsch's framework is powerful in explaining situations in which a bias exists in students’ interactions with historical presentations, caused by their appropriation of the in-group narrative, or, conversely, their resistance to out-group narratives (wertsch, 2000). for example, individuals often accept whatever supports their beliefs but meticulously examine and critique anything that contradicts them (e.g., chambliss & garner, 1996; kuhn & udell, 2007; porat, 2004). similarly, in multi-cultural societies, students from minority groups may face difficulties when they are taught the majority’s hegemonic narrative, because they resist it . they might, for example, be required to accept the narrative as correct, and be evaluated as ignorant or worse, immoral, if disagree with it. (e.g., almarza, 2001; barton & levstik, 1998; epstein, 1998, 2000). in collaborative settings, wertsch’ framework is useful for articulating situations when one group collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a91 assimilates the narrative of the other group, as described, for example, by goldberg, schwarz & porat (2011). this framework is also useful in situations in which groups clash, when they fail to write collaboratively, because of the appropriation/resistance of the in-/outgroup narrative (e.g., prime project, bar-on & adwan, 2006). however, barton and mccully (2010, 2012), who studied the impact of the northern irish history curriculum on irish students, claim that students’ interactions with the inand out-group narrative were beyond the mastery/appropriation framework. this curriculum aims at presenting two narratives of events in irish history: the catholic and the protestant viewpoints. barton and mccully interviewed students from both groups who studied history according to this curriculum, albeit not in a hetero-agent collaborative context. they found that students did not abandon their in-group’s narrative; however, they displayed a more complex understanding of the nature of irish history and developed a tendency to pursue the “other” perspective of a historical event they had encountered. in a previous work, we investigated the interactions within 26 bi-ethnic groups comprising israeli jews and israeli palestinian/arabs who collaboratively investigated events related to the history of israelipalestinian conflict. as expected, the analysis of the essays, which they wrote pretheir e-discussion with their peers, revealed that the jewish and arab students have conflicting viewpoints about the event. in the analysis of the online discussions we found that most of the discussions (85%) were disputatious. the students metaphorically “hit” each other, looking for flaws in each other’s narrative. wertsch’s framework provided as useful explanation: students appropriated their in-group narratives and resisted the other narrative. in 62% of the groups (namely 16 groups), however, these hits brought about intersubjective moments. specifically, participants re-evaluated their initial position as a result of a “successful hit”. we termed this process “fission” in order to emphasize that the students did not converge into one unified voice, but rather, became enriched by means of the other’s voice (omitted, 2015). except for one, all these groups produced a group account with a historical presentation that was agreed upon by all group members. wertsch’s framework is insufficient to provide insights on the relationships between the heterogeneous agents and the joint text composed in hahn situation, which is the aim of this study. it is unlikely that these students were persuaded to assimilate (or appropriate) the narrative of the other side. nonetheless, these joint presentations reflected a change in both students’ appropriation and resistance of the two presentations, what made it difficult to articulate students’ perceptions of the historical event. the work by barton and mccully (2010, 2012) sheds light on the limitation of wertsch’s framework, but does not provide insights as to hahn situations. in their study, students did not work in a collaborative context, let alone produced a joint historical account. we believe that bakhtin dialogical stance is useful to articulate the relationships between the heterogeneous agents and the joint text composed in hahn situation, as we now turn to explain. the dialogical theory: a coherent theoretical framework to articulate collaboration? according to bakhtin (1981), our entire being exists in a continuous dialogue with the surrounding world. we each have a voice, composed of ideas, viewpoints, knowledge, beliefs, concerns, and so forth (wertsch, 1998). in each utterance produced, however, we use words that have existed previously “in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions, namely we use other people’s voices. it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own” (bakhtin, 1981, p.294). therefore, each utterance entails at least two voices, that of the speaker (to whom utterances are attributed) and that of the addressee, who understands (i.e. populates) it with his or her voice. accordingly, meanings emerge within the boundaries of (at least) two voices. this conceptualization of learning and meaning collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a92 making focuses on the learner’s agency, in a way that is missing in traditional behavioral and cognitive accounts of learning (koschmann, 1999; matusov, 2009). it captures simultaneously the evolution of knowledge of the individual and the group, as each voice is created and changed in response to other voices. furthermore, this theoretical perspective acknowledges the plurality of unmerged voices in the world; that is, even if voices agree, they might “do so from different perspectives and different senses of the world” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 237). inspired by bakhtin (1981) and hermans (2001), we suggest viewing individual knowledge as a social entity: one’s knowledge (or voice) is constituted by voices and utterances living in one’s mind that have diversified dialogic relations among them. morson and emmerson (1990), in their interpretation of bakhtin, distinguish between two types senses of truth (or relations of a person with a voice): monologic and dialogic. in a monologic sense of truth, the truthfulness of a claim is judged independently from its author(s), and is repeatable by others, i.e. assumed to be universal. for example, once a mathematical theorem is proved, one can use it as truth, to solve and prove other theorems. historians, however, like other many researchers in the humanities are often guided by a dialogic sense of truth, which considers truth as the result of what bakhtin (1984) terms “voice-ideas”, that is, “the idea that represents a person’s integral point of view on the world, which cannot be abstracted from the person voicing it” (morson and emmerson, 1990: 237). matusov and von duyke (2010) explain that understanding the truth of an idea also means “to find out the limitations of the idea and the limitations of the self as having a vested ontological interest in the truth, something which is impossible to do without help of others” (p. 177). a monologic sense of truth echoes wertsch’s framework: one masters the utterance and either perceives it as truth or not, namely appropriates it as its own, or resist it. a dialogic sense of truth describes a relationship with an utterance which is beyond mere mastery, yet is not captured by appropriation and resistance and therefore, seemed useful to examine students’ relationships with joint and individual historical presentation in hahn environments. research questions we posed the following research questions: what historical perspective(s) is(are) manifested in the joint essay? what are the relationships between the historical perspective manifested in the joint text and the participants’ perspectives on the event? how did the participants interact with the inand outgroup narratives and how this interaction enabled the production of a joint text? methods israel: the macro context of the study our study was conducted in israel, where the jews constitute the majority and the arabs, who comprise about 20% percent of the israeli population, make up the largest minority. the israeli arabs are citizens of israel. they are also descendants of the palestinians who were the majority in the territory during the british mandate (1917-1948). as such, their sense of belongingness to the israeli and the palestinian groups, which are in a conflict, is complicated (salomon & issawi, 2009). in this paper, we use the terms palestinians and arabs interchangeably. jewish and arab students usually study in different schools. in many domains (e.g., math and science), their curricula fully overlap. the history curricula, on the other hand, overlap only partially. in the jewish sector, certain topics are studied in more depth than in the arab sector (e.g., the period of the collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a93 second temple in jerusalem) and vice versa (e.g., the history of islam). podeh (2010), who reviewed the changes in israeli history curricula and history textbooks between 2000 and 2010, claims that although the curricula have improved in recent years and now present a more balanced account of events regarding the arab-israeli conflict, the history classrooms are still characterized by univocality. namely, the history textbooks do not contain negative stereotypes and images of the other, yet students are exposed to one narrative. the experiment we engaged israeli jewish students and israeli palestinian/ arab students in a collaborative activity. they were asked to investigate an event relevant to the joint troubled past of their in-groups (the israeli-palestinian conflict), using historical texts that presented at least two perspectives on the event. the event studied was britain’s issuance of the churchill white paper in 1922. the british explained in the text of churchill’s white paper that they wanted to settle “[t]he tension, which [had] prevailed from time to time in palestine”. the assignment questions were as follows: what did the british promise to the arabs and the jews in the white paper of 1922? how did both sides (arabs and jews) respond to this document, and why? why is the white paper significant for the british? this event, the issuance of the churchill white paper (like many others) is described differently in the palestinian and the zionist (israeli national) narratives. from a palestinian viewpoint, this event is part of the process that led to the nakba (meaning, the catastrophe), the expulsion of the palestinians in 1948 from the land on which they had lived for centuries. from an israeli viewpoint, this event is part of the jewish struggle for revival (tekumah), i.e., returning to their fatherland after 2000 years of exile and oppression. the activity is bi-phasic. in the first phase, students worked in ethnically homogenous pairs, jewish pairs (jps) and arab or palestinian pairs (aps). they were asked to read all the sources and upload their answers to the assignment questions to a wiki environment. in the second phase, bi-ethnic groups were formed, each comprising two ethnically homogenous pairs. they read each other’s answers, commented on them, and then conduct a synchronous online chat (we will refer to it as e-discussion). they were instructed to either write a joint consensual presentation of the event, or alternatively present all members’ perspectives and discuss and explain the essence of their differences. for a more detailed description of the instructional model and its design rationale, see pollack and ben-david kolikant (2011). participants the participants of this study comprised 15 groups (total of 60 students), each consisting of palestinian and jewish students, who underwent fission in the e-discussions, and produced a joint essay. they all studied in selective schools whose achievements in matriculation exams are above the national average. data sources data sources for this study included the pairs’ essays produced in the first homogenous phase and the joint essays produced in the second phase by the groups, as uploaded to the wiki. collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a94 methods of analysis thematic analysis the focus of our thematic analysis (braun & clarke, 2006) was on students’ historical understanding of the event. to this end, we identified the historical agents to which students attributed an active role in the event discussed, the role attributed to each agent, the constraints, circumstances and beliefs upon which the agent is perceived to have acted, and the perceived relations between this agent and other agents (seixas 1993; peck et al., 2005; peck, poyntz, & seixas, 2011). additionally, moral judgment was determined based on students ’ use of expressions indicating a positive or negative opinion regarding the historical agents’ actions. themes, thus, revolved around the students’ perceptions of the three major historical agents: british, arab (i.e., palestinian), and jewish. for example, the following excerpt is taken from an ap’s essay: this decision brought about a wave of protest of palestinian arabs against the british policy. in this paper, the british broke their promises to the arabs like they had done before in the balfour declaration and the sykes-picot agreement. in 1922 the arabs woke up and noticed that and protested against the british and the jews. in our analysis, the main actor in the ap’s essay is the arab historical agent, who protested at face of harsh circumstances, which are that the british historical agent “broke the promises” to the arab historical agent. the “promises” probably refer to the husayn–mcmahon correspondences (1915-1916), in which the british agreed to recognize arab’s independence (see omitted, 2009, for further details). the historical theme we extracted is that of injustice. the arab historical agent is portrayed as struggling. often it was also portrayed as weak (i.e. facing constraints), relatively to the jewish and the british historical agent. the theme of injustice is common in pair essays produced by arab pairs. the same historical agents are presented differently, by as jp as demonstrated in the following excerpt: the white paper settled the unrest and uncertainty. the arabs were concerned that eretz israel would become entirely jewish, which would bring the loss of the arab culture and language in eretz israel, due to a mis-interpretation of the balfour declaration. the white paper settled their concerns by ensuring that the intention in the declaration is not to turn the entire eretz israel to the jews, but rather a jewish home would be established within the areas of eretz israel. the arab historical agent is portrayed as having mis-interpretations of the situation and a sense of uncertainty, to which the main actor, the british historical agent reacted: the british historical agent is portrayed positively, as fair, their policy is implied to be balanced, though misinterpreted. discourse analysis in our discourse analysis we relied on bakhtin’s (1981) theoretical idea that we utter our voice (ideas, worldview, and so forth) using words and utterances previously uttered by other people, serving other voices, and populate them with our intentions, taking into account the audience of this utterance. hence, every utterance is multi-voiced (since it serves simultaneously at least the voices of the speaker and the listeners, sometimes with different and even contradicting intentions and goals). we were inspired collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a95 by bakhtin’s notion of double-voicedness in one’s discourse: “in one discourse, two semantic intentions appear, two voices” (bakhtin 1984, p. 189). sometimes such a discourse enables one to produce a polyphony of multiple voices, when the voices do not merge into a single perspective, but rather, each of these voices has its own perspective, its own validity, and its own narrative weight within the speakers’ discourse. in addition, other interactions between the voices are also possible. first, we divided the texts into utterances, where an utterance includes a description of a historical agent, and often, its relationship with other historical agent(s). then we identified the voices that the students integrated into their utterances. to this end, we compared phrases in their answers to the texts they were provided in the assignment (e.g., the primary and secondary sources, textbooks, and the zionist and palestinian narratives), public discourse (news), and text they had produced during the activity. finally, we examined the ways students integrated these voices into their answer (i.e. change of wording (for example, past tense changed to future tense), adding or omitting qualifiers (e.g., “perhaps”, “!!!”) and markers (e.g., “the arabs thought that”). this enabled us to identify the relationships between the voices used by the students and the meaning it conveyed. specifically, we used the bakhtin-inspired typology of kamberelis and scott (1992), comprising 6 possible interactions between voices. the two most relevant interaction types for this work are adoption and hidden polemic. adoption is when one uses the other’s words and blurs the borders between his or her voice and the other (metaphorically, these voices are melted into one). hidden polemic refers to cases when users’ use of words (previously used by another voice) influences the original goal of the original speaker, thereby expressing the user’s disagreement or it introduces tension with the original goal of the utterance. the other interaction types are quoted, stylized, parodistic, and idealized) this analysis also enabled us to detect any expression of moral judgments vis-à-vis the historical agents. the analysis of these texts was carried out separately by three researchers (two jewish and one arab). disagreements among researchers regarding segmentation or categorization were resolved through discussions until a consensus was reached. results from dichotomy to multi-faceted historical perspectives the influence of students’ ethnic identity was prominent in the ethnically homogenous pair essays that students produced in the first phase of the activity. the thematic analysis revealed that although all the students received the same sources and the same assignment, the pairs decided to integrate into their essays themes that were aligned with their in-group narrative and ignore or reject those that were aligned with the other group’s narrative. in fact, we observed a dichotomy in the historical presentations. for example, most of the aps (94%, in comparison with 14% of the jps) portrayed the palestinian historical agent as the victim, as having national aspirations and legitimate rights to the land. this viewpoint was reflected in phrased like “the arabs were deceived”, “their lands were taken from them”, “the arabs thought that the white paper discriminated between them and the jews as they are the local residents [and hence are legal owners of the land]. in contrast, most of the jps (87%, in comparison with 7% of the ap) portrayed the arab historical agent as not pragmatic and unwilling to compromise and share the land with the jews, as demonstrated in the following excerpt, which is taken from an essay of a jp “they [arabs] did not agreed to share”, “the appeasement policy of the british led the arabs to believe that by means of violence they would gain political achievements”. collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a96 additionally, about 40% of the ap (in comparison with 7% of the jp) mentioned the british prozionist, discriminative policy, stemming from their interest to rule in the area, often, employing negative moral judgment vis-à-vis the british historical agent, who “deceived”, “tried to bypass the arabs”, “laughed at the arabs”, “made promises that they could have barely fulfilled”, “broke off promises”, “discriminated against”, and was “unfair.” in contrast, most jps (67% in comparison with 20% of the aps) portrayed the british as promoting a balanced policy towards the jews and the arabs, for example “a wise and moderate policy”, and an “overt attempt to try to create equality between the various nationalities in the country”. the joint essays were composed from the same themes. moreover, all joint essays included themes taken from the essays of both pairs. this is reflected in the frequency of each theme in the groups’ essays, which were found to be in the range of its frequency among the jps and the aps. for example, the frequency of the theme of unjust towards the arab historical agent appears in 47% of the groups’ essays, in comparison to 14% and 94% of the jp's and ap's essays, respectively. this implies that the joint essays were multi-faceted, namely, that participants took into account both historical perspectives. the joint essays: hidden polemic interaction between conflicting voices the discourse analysis enabled us to further explore the relationships between the two in-group perspectives within the joint essays, as well as the discursive mechanisms used in the text when the participants interacted with multiple voices. here we introduce an example of text segments from one group essay and the matching segments from the pair’s essays. the segments are presented in table 1. table 1. the response of the arab historical agent to the issuance of the white paper in 1922 the ap’s essay the jp’s essay the group essay the response of the arab side was negative. they were angry because their lands were taken from them. the arab population did not agree with the white paper because they interpreted in an exaggerated way the promises made to the jews in the white paper. the arab population did not agree with the white paper because it was perceived as the beginning of a process whereby their lands would be taken [from them]. the segments from the two pair essays demonstrate the dichotomy we described above. each pair adopted their in-group narratives and hence their perceptions of the arab historical agents differed. the ap’s claim that ‘lands were taken’ aligns with the themes of unjustness and victimhood of the arab historical agent. the jp ascription of ‘exaggerated interpretation’ to the arab historical agent is derived from the perception that the arabs could and should have shared the land (which in the first place did not belong to them and yet the jews were pragmatic and willing to share). both ignored the themes of the other narrative, thereby expressing their resistance. in the group essay they came up with this utterance: “perceived it as the beginning of the process of taking their lands”. both jp’s and ap’s original voices are evident in this utterance, but are altered. the idea regarding taking lands resembles the ap’s essay. however, the theme is altered, from past tense (‘were taken’) to future tense (‘would be taken’). this phrase is concatenated to “the beginning of a process”. the change of the original ap’s text allows the jp to maintain a hidden polemic interaction with ap’s original idea. “the beginning of the process” means that this agent still had time to change its destiny, which is compatible with the zionist perspective that this agent was non-pragmatic, not willing to share. putting the collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a97 issue of taking land in the arab historical agent’s perception also helps the jp to express their disagreement with this idea. moreover, this text is compatible with both the zionist and the palestinian perspectives. both ap and jp could agree with this text but for different reasons that are based on different world views or different narratives that they never abandoned. specifically, the jp probably agreed because the essay reflects their worldview that the arab historical agent had time and could have behaved differently, be more pragmatic about the land. the ap probably agreed because the theme that lands were (eventually) taken was legitimized to the extent it was included in the joint text. moreover, we believe that each pair was aware that the other has a different, still non-refutable point of view, that students were not naïve and rather understand that the text can be read differently. note that the ap do not mention anything about the end the of the process as they did in the pair essay and the jp do not mention the jewish right on the land but rather give room to the arab historical agent to think it is his lands that is going to be taken. namely, both the jp and ap legitimize with this utterance the other’s viewpoint, without abandoning their narratives. finally, the joint text reflects an improvement in students’ historical understanding of the event. the combination of voices brings about a new meaning, a new reason for the arabs’ disagreement with the white paper, different from what was claimed by both ap and jp in their pair essays. this is reflected in the tangled relationship between the historical agents and their mutual impact on each other. moreover, in the joint essay participants describe a historical process and avoid emotional empathy (as in ap’s text) and moral judgment (as in jp’s text) vis-à-vis the historical agents. their ability and willing to allow the other’s voice in the joint text reflects an understanding of the interpretive nature of history and it multiplicity. discussion and conclusions wertsch’s (1998) two-dimensional framework of mastery and appropriation/resistance was useful in articulating the interaction of students with their inand outgroup narratives when producing the pairs' essays. although all the students received the same sources and the same assignment, the pairs chose to integrate into their essays those themes that aligned with their in-group narrative and ignore those that aligned with the other-group narrative. this result is consistent with the vast empirical work conducted on students' interactions with multiple historical representations (e.g., chambliss & garner, 1996; porat, 2004; wertsch, 2000). however, for articulating what happens in the joint essays, we needed to account for the transcendence of both initial in-group positions into a complex narrative with over and under-tones of voices that acknowledge each other, take each other seriously, and still do not merge, retaining their implied critique, as a potent charge in the newly produced group essay. specifically, in the joint essays – agreed upon by all group members and produced after a heated yet elaborative e-discussion (omitted, 2015) – the two contrasting perspectives neither disintegrated nor fused into one. rather, these essays can be viewed as a mosaic of perspectives. they share several characteristics: (a) they are composed of bits of pre-existing (pairs’) perspectives; (b) they are compatible with both the zionist and palestinian historical narratives; and yet (c) they create a whole new historical meaning regarding the historical agents' actions and the complex interests and constraints, in which they played a role. these characteristics are demonstrated above in one example. collaborative, multi-perspective historical writing yifat ben-david kolikant, sarah pollack dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.245 | vol. 7 (2019) a98 thus, we found, wertsch’s framework to be of limited usefulness for articulating students’ interaction with both inand outgroup narratives and historical presentations in collaborative context. the jp agreed to include a theme which originally appeared in the ap’s pair essay and aligned with the palestinian notion of victimhood. yet they altered it, thereby introducing their resistance to it. furthermore, the altered text aligns with their in-group narrative, namely their act is dominated by the appropriation of their in-group narrative. thus, the appropriation/resistance framework capture only part of the complicatedness of the relationship between students’ voices, whereas the bakhtinian-inspired analytical concept of doublevoicedness that preserves the relationships between the multiple opposing voices, enabled us to advance our understanding of the interaction of participants with different voices in this hahn context. by utilizing the notion of double voiced discourse, we were able to recognize the hidden polemic interaction between the different voices in the text. this discursive interaction enabled the students to allow room for the other narrative (which they did not do in the in-group pair essays), and this in turn enabled the other to agree to the joint text. at the same time, the jp and the ap phrased the text in a way that allowed both of them to maintain their disagreement, that is, to legitimize the voice of the other, and at the same time, to emphasize that their voices were not merged. this joint text resembles kelman’s (2010) notion of “settlement” between groups in conflict, when texts produced jointly possess a “double construct”, namely, each group can read it differently or live peacefully with it, although both are aware of the other’s possible interpretation of it. finally, wertsch’s framework emphasizes that students’ interaction with the historical presentations was still dominated by their appropriation and resistance of narratives. the bakhtinian framework is more sensitive to the learning (transcendence of the original views) that took place. it emphasizes that students’ interaction with the narratives and presentations changed, moving from monological, author-less sense of truth to a sense of dialogical, multiple voice ideas (morson and emerson, 1990). first, the work on producing the joint texts in the hahn context provided students with an opportunity to recognize that language is not neutral, but rather, is ideological and heteroglot. equally important, students’ interaction with their inand out-group voices in the joint texts is more dialogical than is their interaction with these voices in the pair essays. this is in line with the goals of humanities education. the main goals of humanities education in general, and history education, in particular, is to humanize students, to assist them in re-examining how they perceive themselves and others, and to assist them in becoming aware of the limitations of their understanding of the world (parker, 2006; wineburg, 2001). therefore, successful collaboration in the humanities might lead to achieving a deeper understanding of the text and a better understanding of other people and their world view. references almarza, d. j. 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(2000). is it possible to teach beliefs, as well as knowledge about history? in p. stearns, p. seixas, & s. wineburg (eds.), knowing, teaching, and learning history (pp. 38–50). new york: new york university press. wertsch, j.v., & polman., j.l. (2001). the intuitive mind and knowledge about history. in b. torff & r.j. sternberg, eds. understanding and teaching the intuitive mind: student and teacher learning, pp.57-72. wineburg, s. (2001). historical thinking and other unnatural acts: charting the future of teaching the past. philadelphia: temple university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e27 disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james cresswell booth university college abstract dialogic pedagogy is an approach to education influenced by bakhtin, freire, and others. it is an approach that is critical of conventional education, which tends to be didactic and alienating to students. student engagement is made central as dialogue takes priority over standardization and core cannons of content. dialogic pedagogy also emphasizes the importance of communities of learners where teachers are co-learners along with students as all parties work on problems together. i seek to raise challenges to dialogic pedagogy and these come from scholars working on the “conduct of everyday life” and from charles taylor’s notion of “strong evaluations”. the conduct of everyday life involves a focus on first-person subjectivities with an eye to their constitution in social and power relations. strong evaluations enhance this discussion by addressing how people can engage in decisions that involve weighing options about the qualitative kind of person one is. i outline how education involves a conduct of everyday life where strong evaluations are promoted. taking such an approach to education grounds two challenges to dialogic pedagogy. one challenge is that students are reticent to engage in strong evaluations and the modern identity is one disposed to disengagement. the converse challenge is that student engagement entails pedagogical eros, which is easily converted into power and abuse by a pedagogue. james (jim) cresswell is an associate professor in psychology and behavioural sciences at booth university college, canada. his work has been supported by organizations such as the social science & humanities research counsel, templeton foundation, and murdoch charitable trust. his work is largely influenced by the philosophy of mikhail bakhtin and cultural psychology. of special interest is bakhtin’s work on aesthetics in relation to language and how it can enhance current work in education, philosophy of mind, cognitive science of religion, and immigration.  introduction before coming to be involved in dpj, i studied critical/cultural psychology with a focus on the work of mikhail bakhtin (e.g. cresswell, 2011). this work addressed the dialogicality of personhood, but being an academic working at teaching-focused universities has made education an important topic of study for me. in this editorial, i draw on my background and my comparatively recent experience with dpj to speculate about two challenges facing dialogical pedagogy. the objective of this editorial is to outline how disengagement and pedagogical eros are two issues that we need to think about engaging in issn: 2325-3290 (online) disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e28 dialogic pedagogy. i seek to set the ground to raise issues that we ought to be talking about. doing so requires that i first outline the background perspective that grounds the challenges i present. this background involves a discussion of scholarship on the conduct of everyday life (see dreier, 2016) and charles taylor’s (1989, 1999) notion of strong evaluations. it will then be followed by a brief synopsis of dialogic pedagogy and to so show resonance among the forgoing. doing so sets the stage for my challenge to dialogic pedagogy. critical/cultural psychology & the classroom conduct of everyday life the “conduct of everyday life” is a phrase originating from an interdisciplinary group of researchers. although this approach emerges in psychology from the work of holzkamp (2013) and is promoted largely by a psychologist named ole dreier (2016), its interdisciplinary roots speak to a wide range of disciplines including education. dreier argues that the conduct of everyday life involves the exploration of human subjectivity. this approach is one that points out how researchers can lose sight of everyday subjectivity in the development of theory and so presupposed theory or specified research interests in the industry of academy can set researchers’ interests above that of those they study. scholars working on the conduct of everyday life avoid any distinction between talking about a theory dealing with the conduct of everyday life and the conduct of everyday life itself. while such scholars are not against theorizing per se, the do critique theorizing from a third person perspective. no person can escape the conduct of everyday life and theorize about others without personal involvement. it involves examining what it is like to live life from the perspective of one living it. examining the first person perspective is important but it does not follow that the conduct of everyday life is not just about individual subjectivities. dreier (2016) points out that the first person perspective is one of a situated subject. subjectivities are constitutionally situated in sociocultural contexts and so, at a very basic level, this situatedness pertains to interpersonal relationships. højholt & schraube (2016), for example, argue that it is important to take into account how people produce and reproduce their lives collaboratively through interpersonal activities embedded in sociocultural, economic, and political contains. it is through constrained activities like talking, playing, working, and so on that people engage with others and build their subjectivities. subjectivities are co-created together with others and so examining them includes examining the interpersonal practices by which people conduct everyday life. considering the first person perspective also includes the loci of the reification of social structuring because interpersonal interactions are where such structure is constituted. dreier (2016) reviews the conduct of everyday life to address how social and interpersonal practices are intimately entwined with what we often consider to be wider social structures. social structures are held in place through appropriated ideology and practices that reify the machinations of power. persons who participate in social practices participate in such structures that entail differences in power and control. looking at such social practices allows us to grasp how people live in first person subjectivities that are not merely individualistic or independent. it includes examining the establishment of joint arrangements that enable such social structure to be continually reified. they become routines that structure and reify more extensive social arrangements and so it is important to examine the first person perspective for this reason. considering the conduct of everyday life highlights the social structure of practice in everyday life and therein sheds light on structure of society as it manifests in the arrangements of everyday life. disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e29 one of the strengths of work in the conduct of everyday life is the acknowledgment that the notion of the situation – singular, objective, and unambivalent – is naive. dreier (2016) argues that the singular notion of situation is an abstraction that is convenient for academics but it can’t be studied in singular terms if we can look at the conduct of everyday life. a given context may involve multiple situations insofar as there can be competing realities and worlds at stake at one point in time. interests and perspectives are not just differences in something simple like shallow opinions insofar as they gesture towards societal tensions and social problems (højholt & schraube, 2016). dreier (2016) therein argues that such differences in the concrete practices of everyday life entail intra-subjective discourse enmeshed with everyday concerns. they can also be clues to how one can look to change by considering how human beings take part in reproducing and changing society. as such, the conduct of everyday life involves considering how people navigate among complex realities to exercise agency (see also højholt & schraube, 2016). a result is that the conduct of everyday life involves looking at how people manage such complexities simultaneously as well as diachronically. it is here that we see the importance of the notion of conducting insofar as moving through spheres of life includes developing practices in many forms of life (dreier, 2016). such forms are infused with their own power structures and ideological agendas, which means that life is replete with discontinuities that people have to deal with. the conduct of everyday life involves bridging across spheres of life as people attempt to coordinate life with others. sometimes such attempts are successful and sometimes they are not because attempts at such bridging can be more or less successful as some ideologies are rejected as others are recapitulated. such dynamic tensions are part of conducting life in a way that one is able to get along with others well enough, one hopes! of course, this not always possible and ruptures happen. what is interesting about the conduct of everyday life is that people often navigate complexities in ways that show creativity – satisfying contradictory ideologies in unique ways so that people are not socially programmed automatons. there is thereby a kind of agency that we see in the conduct of everyday life insofar as people are able to transcend a given situational set of demands and act in unique ways. people establish routines to accomplish living in ways that are subject to decisions and choice via such transcendence. the different inequalities and tensions are managed in the course of accomplishing a modus operandi that fits with one’s interlocutors. the advantage of the conduct of everyday life is that it links spheres of activity and allows us to talk about how people individually coordinate pursuits from one place to another among and with different people. work on the conduct of everyday life is good because it focusses our attention on how education involves the conduct of everyday life. it shows us how first person subjectivities matter and yet does not diminish an important discussion of power, authority, and agentic resitance. in so doing, the conduct of everyday life entails learning as situated in multiple zones of conflict where people are agents that uniquely shape their lives. below, i will further elaborate on this work in light of education, but i first want to turn to charles taylor (1989, 1999) because his ideas add to this work by offering further insight through his notion of strong evaluations. strong evaluations taylor’s (1989) sources of the self traces the sociohistorical development of self. he has attempted to discuss human experience in general and i have found his work to be, at times, ethnocentric. his arguments fit well with a western intellectual tradition but it remains unclear how well it works elsewhere. like most intellectuals who take on large topics like the development of the modern self, he opens himself to the critique of exception, which is when one can always think of some people disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e30 group or exemption to his claims. this challenge notwithstanding, his work has been highly influential and generative because he does articulate important themes. he opens up important themes worth discussing as he carefully brings together a wide range of social and philosophical trends. rather than dismissing taylor immediately, i argue that he provides a voice that can enhance our dialogue about dialogic pedagogy. taylor (1989) opens with a discussion about how being a self is inseparable from existing in a space of moral issues. this discussion is about how humans can be deeply moral and compelled by things that matter deeply to them. human life can be about engaging with an experience of struggling with what is right or good and this discussion is grounded in what he calls “strong evaluations”. sources does not really spell out with a lot of clarity what this phrase means, but it is carefully articulated ten years later. taylor (1999), therein, draws on a well-worn philosophical distinction between first and second order desires. a first-order desire is to want something like a desire to simply feel pleasure from an outcome, choosing between sweat treats for example. we want our selves, however, to be dispositionally inclined to things that would be deemed as good and admirable and this wanting is a second-order desire. he points out that what is distinctively human is the capacity to evaluate our desires insofar as we can see some desires as good and others as bad. we can desire that we have certain first-order desires over others and this is what amounts to a second-order desire. that is, a second-order desire is to have a desire whose object is to have a certain desire (first-order desire). people can want themselves to be inclined towards things that they evaluate as good and admirable – whatever that means within a particular framework. taylor’s (1999) discussion of first and second order desires sets a background for explaining what is meant by strong and weak evaluations. weak evaluations are concerned with basic outcomes where an option is considered good if it satisfies a first-order desire. a weak evaluation means that something is desired and an option is good to take if the desire is satisfied. choosing one option over another simply enables us to have our desires met and so options often preclude each other. taylor calls these weak evaluations because an option is good so long as a desire is met and so the depth and quality of deliberation are not terribly relevant. strong evaluations are concerned with quality of motivation in a sense that resonates more with second-order desires. instead of assessing options on the base of whether a first-order desire is satiated, it is about assessing the qualitative worth of different desires as they relate to outcomes. an outcome is considered good on a much more complicated basis because we can include our considerations of whether the desires entwined with the outcomes are desires that we want to dispositionally embody. the notion of good is therein accompanied by some other evaluative terms and considerations. the action one chooses may or may not preclude other options as it may not necessarily involve incompatible decisions. to evaluate strongly involves wanting to be a certain kind of person or living a certain kind of life. we characterize such ‘certainties’ in a complex interconnected web of meanings and desires. this is the moral space in which taylor (1989) earlier describes as essential to humans. it involves largely implicit qualitative distinctions of worth that are entwined with our decisions about what one ought to do and what one ought to be. the fact that such deliberations are more ridden with conflict and they are not contingent on merely satisfying a desire, taylor calls them strong evaluations. taylor (1989, 1999) is clear that evaluations are integrally entwined with our participation in communities. much like dreier (2016) argues that subjectivity is constituted in sociality, taylor (1999) argues for a communitarian approach. the latter turns to a discussion on language to explain how the experiences that are entwined with strong evaluation are socioculturally constituted. language is not owned by any particular person and is used in a way recognizable by a community. it is a normative disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e31 phenomenon. taylor notes that language does not just label experience because we cannot just change the label of an experience at a whim. language is constitutive of experience and we draw on language to articulate our experience, leaving us with a sense of when we have got the articulation correct and when we have not. language provides a symbolic medium by which higher and lower goals can be articulated and constituted. without a communally shaped language there would be no way to articulate the kinds of choices that are at stake in life. in fact, the language that we learn to speak along with others is a constitutive force that shapes what counts as good or right. first order desires are not, thereby, merely something like biological drives. a characterization of such basic desire betrays the complexity of human experience. they are more like seemingly on-hand inclinations and so desire, in the case of strong and weak evaluations, is not about a simple dichotomy between biology and cultural sophistication. it is on such grounds that taylor (1989) argues that doing without such linguistically constituted frameworks is impossible for us. he argues that stepping outside of frameworks is stepping outside of what is essential to us. taylor (1999) is well aware of how multicultural pluralism means that desires differ markedly from culture to culture and community to community (1999, see also 1994). he writes that “… frameworks today are problematic. this vague term points towards a relatively open disjunction of attitudes. what is common to them all is the sense that no framework is shared by everyone, can be taken for granted as the framework tout court, can sink to the phenomenological status as unquestionable fact” (1989, p. 17). different communities would have different frameworks and so multicultural pluralism means that it is unlikely that there is a framework shared by everyone. people are often presented with goods that challenge and displace others. weak evaluations are easier when there is not such pluralistic challenge to what feels ‘natural’. in contrast, strong evaluations involve evaluative contrasts ranging over desires grounded in different communities of practice. it becomes hard to sustain a consistent moral ontology because such contrasts lead to uncertainties on our own beliefs. such conditions lead to a reflexive stance which is quite radical in the sense that the kinds of tensions addressed in the conduct of everyday life have serious existential weight. as such, strong evaluations are not merely “a” being more desirable than “b” on the basis of one framework. such conduct of everyday life is about articulating and deciding among such frameworks. thus, a strong evaluation is a condition of articulacy that involves a deeper sense of the world because it characterizes motivation at a greater depth. strong evaluations are about the deeply experienced tensions that come from learning language and, as noted above, the contrast of subjectivities entwined with participation in multiple communities. just like researchers interested in the conduct of everyday life have an interest in agency, taylor (1989, 1999) shows a similar interest. pluralism and second-order desires or evaluating desires is essential to human agency. one is potentially in a place where there are multiple available options that are part and parcel with the multiple zones of conflict spelled out in the conduct of everyday life. here is where strong evaluations begin in the sense that there can be competing moral ontologies as there are different lifeworlds juxtaposed. there is not a view from nowhere that is taken when making decisions but rather something like an intrapsychic dynamic of competing subjectivities. such experience is entwined with strong evaluations and is necessary to our notion of the human subject conducting everyday life. taylor argues that an agent who cannot evaluate desires lacks the reflective capacity which we associate with the human agent. not exercising such evaluations means to have no depth essential to humanity. an agent is thereby responsible for what he does and for the evaluations that he makes in two senses. in one sense, one is responsible to others in one’s life. second-order desires are not just seemingly given like first-order desires because second order desires entail more existentially challenging acts of responsibility, relative to weak evaluations. this sense means that the choices people enact have disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e32 consequences for how we get along with others and the continued fit people have (or don’t have) with our families political, economic, and/or religious communities. taylor (1991) draws on the bakhtinian notion of answerability to show that our lives are constantly responding to others as we answer to them. this quality of the conduct of everyday life is what dreier (2016) and others are getting at with the discussion of how we negotiate the conduct of our everyday life in the midst of tensions. in another sense, one is responsible to be a strong evaluator and taylor (1999) argues that strong and weak evaluations introduce different kinds of selves. one can reduce deliberation to weak evaluation and such would involve conducting everyday life as a subject who is a simple weigher. it is possible to make decision based on caprice and shallowly inconsiderate of the bigger questions and meanings involved in options. it can involve simple decisions where one dismisses obligations to diverse communities as one goes with whatever feels simply right. in a tragically ironic kind of manner, taylor argues that this sort of decision making is a hallmark or neoliberal individualism: of course the independence can become a very shallow affair, in which masses of people each try to express their individuality in stereotyped fashion. it is a critique that has often been made of modern consumer society that it tends to breed a herd of conformist individuals. this is indeed a mockery of the pretention of the culture. but just for that reason we can’t conclude that the existence of a traditional culture of independence itself empties individuality of its meaning. (1989, p. 40). in being a simple weigher who does not engage in strong evaluations, one can become shallow and conform to whatever consumer culture prompts, which therein strips one of authentic agency. one does not find creative solutions to transcend community and be unique (see cresswell, 2011), which means people can be relegated to being part of ‘the herd’. there is still a deeper meaning entailed in weak evaluations but it is obfuscated in the denial of responsibility to conduct everyday life on the basis of strong evaluations. what is articulated in sources is that we run the danger of falling into weak evaluations as a mode of living in contrast to the possibility of engaging life at the level of strong evaluations. the conduct of life can be differentiated as strong or weak and this is how our understanding of the conduct of everyday life is enriched by taylor. implications for education the forgoing has clear relevance to the topic of education, as described by schraube & marvakis (2016). they point out how the conduct of everyday life entails understanding learning as participation in social practices. to understand this conceptualization of learning it is helpful to articulate the perspective against whom they position themselves, which is what they call the “transfer model of learning”. the transfer model represents learning as the transfer of information from the teacher to the learner. a problem that they identify with this model is that learning is treated like a direct result of teaching. readers of dpj will be familiar with how understanding and learning is more than a direct result of information transmitted from a teacher (see below). fixed procedures for teaching are insufficient because learning is not a one-way process. teachers and students form a reciprocal relationship where qualities and the conduct of everyday life in students bears on the process. in contrast to the transfer model, schraube & marvakis (2016) explain that the conduct of everyday life involves an active relational contextual approach to learning. it involves subjectivities constituted in shared practices and interpersonal interactions as described above. learning is a developing ability to practice subjectivities that one theretofore did not know. schraube & marvakis (2016) thereby argue that one cannot reduce learning to a knowledge of content required to pass a test. disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e33 demonstrating learning involves a stylistic appropriation of social practices that amounts to social labor. situated learning anchors activities of learning in the world and so demonstrations of learning are about explaining world in and through participation in social practices. it is about participating in action possibilities that are contextually entwined with social meanings of the students and instructors instead of merely passive reception of content. because the conduct of everyday life involves a reciprocal relationship among students and instructors, schraube & marvakis (2016) argue that education is not neutral or free of conflict. the collision of social practices and different subjectivities in education means that it is a place of contested meanings. the conflictual character of education opens up possibilities for learnings wherein the conduct of everyday life and be shaped and reshaped. conflict is taken seriously and acknowledged in contrast to the transfer model wherein it is denied through the masking power of a pedagogue. students and teachers can take this “defensive mode” of learning that overtly curtails development and change in the conduct of everyday life. it reifies a separation of learning from everyday activities predicated on presupposed separation in society that does not work in the conduct of everyday life where people actually integrate diachronically and synchronically. in contrast, learning can involve moving forward and reshaping how one deals with everyday problems and subject matter. this conduct of learning is what schraube & marvakis refer to as expansive learning. students and teachers can be “affinitive” where they work on problems and seem to come to solutions. this solution is temporary, however, as it is possible to be redefined and open up problems for new forms of synthesis and new possibilities. it is in this way that education is a cooperative endeavor in the conduct of everyday life. it leaves us with a model of education that is not just transference of information, but it is a conduct of everyday life. in short, it gives us a good sense of education in terms of what is happening on the ground. considering the conduct of everyday life involves learning situated in multiple zones of conflict where agents uniquely shape their lives and taylor shows us how this includes the potential for strong evaluations. the first person subjectivities of students matter and not all subjectivities are the same. some can be reminiscent of weak evaluations where subjectivities involve decisions as if they are first order desires. while not succumbing to the transfer model of education, this sort of education could be masked as “student engagement” where it tunes into student interests and first order desires. much like the learner-centered trade literature that is often about seducing students into learning by cleaver tricks to appeal to their interests, education can be about appealing to first-order desires. “getting students interest and keeping it” (bain, 2004) can look like engagement because it appeals for first-order desires. taylor inspires awareness of how weak evaluations can be promoted with the result of herds that seemingly do their own thing while in fact conforming to whatever neoliberal consumerism marketing genius designs. education can, alternatively, offer a conduct of everyday life entailing subjectivities of strong evaluations. this model of student engagement involves retaining student experience and not negating it as the transfer model entails. it does not fetishize personal experience by playing to first-order desires insofar as real competing moral ontologies are brought into a zone of conflict. engagement involves agency in the sense of strong evaluations where instructors challenge students as the former are themselves challenged. risking frameworks is part of the conduct of everyday life in education and it is for the instructor as well as the students. judgment and critique are part of education and not just validation of one’s experience for its own sake. the conduct of everyday educational life includes strong evaluations and the realities of power and authority. just like the conduct of everyday life involves power and authority and the negotiation disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e34 thereof, including strong evaluations entails such negotiations. it is important to bear in mind that strong evaluations involve constant weighing and testing of options. they are not compatible with monologic tendencies where one authoritative discourse tends towards prevailing at the expense of all others. this resonates with the well-worn challenges that we see in the likes of freire’s (2002) challenging authority in dialogical education and postman’s (1971) admonition to embody teaching as a subversive activity. strong evaluations mean knowing risk and what happens when power and authority are violated. it can involve choosing to face the wrath or not, but it is a choice made as a strong evaluation and so engages communities and deals with ideology. dialogic pedagogy dialogic pedagogy partly has its roots in the freire’s (2000) pedagogy of the oppressed and related approaches that critique conventional educational practices (e.g. shor, 1987; shor & freire, 1987). matusov’s (2009) journey into dialogic pedagogy stays faithful to this critique through a careful discussion of socratic dialogues. matusov notes how socrates often starts with “pedagogical diagnostics” where he unearths what someone thinks in order to correct them. such a pedagogical style has found its way into current educational praxis where fostering conversation tends to morph into testing curriculum and prescribed cannons of information (see hayes & matusov, 2005). it involves testing for knowledge about information divorced from everyday experience. the bakhtinian roots of dialogic pedagogy highlight how the conventional approach amounts to a chronotope where knowledge and skills are treated as immutable across people and across practices and situations (see matusov, 2015b). the results of conventional schooling can be quite negative as matusov (2009) writes: i argue that monologic pedagogy; prevalent in many conventional classrooms, is responsible for at least three major mutually related problems: alienation of students from formal education, irrelevancy of the school curricula for societal and personal development, crisis of teacher authority. (p. 145). as a teacher creates an illusion of certainty where all other answers are bad, students learn to suppress what they really think in order to cooperate with a teacher’s agenda. the alienation of students is seen in how presenting correct answers does not mean that students will accept them. shor (1987) pointed out that students learn to “sit tight” and “learn the score” in terms of how to play the education game, which also entraps teachers as well. students can be disciplined into remaining with an educational curriculum in a way that defines their experience as irrelevant (see matusov & miyazaki, 2014). a result is that a conventional school chronotope is one that values unconditional cooperation (see also matusov, 2015a). the issue of teacher authority is one of eliciting cooperation and so the ontological authority of teachers pertains only to the classroom game. dialogic pedagogy attempts to offer an alternative approach to conventional schooling. hayes and matusov (2005) note how dialogue does not diagnose students to reveal errors or lend itself to be used as a technique to make students friends in a way that seduces them to presupposed truths (see shor & freire, 1987). one of the key points that emerges is that authentic dialogical relations in the classroom is the non-transparency of student consciousnesses (see matusov & miyazaki, 2014). students cannot be known a priori by the teacher and so conditions must be set to enable the former’s experiences to manifest in a mode other than the detection of error. such conditions mean that students’ positions are accepted as legitimate and teachers may not know the meaning of students’ work without dialogue and orientation. for example, elkadar (2015) discusses the issue of multicultural education and how students’ voices can be suppressed. the politicizing of multicultural education effectively makes it disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e35 monologic and suppresses student agency. in contrast, elkadar argues that dialogic education promotes student agency by welcoming resistance. student agency emerges when teachers respect all voices (not just politically correct ones) because dialogue then becomes possible. dialogic pedagogy therein involves an attempt to promote students’ responsive action in class and this is very different from mere cooperativeness. in short, dialogic pedagogy follows inspiration from shor (1987) that teachers interrupt ordinary expectations of what class structure should be in order to create an authentic dialogue. one of the chief ways that such interruptions occur is through a suspension of defined educational ends/standardization and a turn to problem-based learning. matusov (2009) notes that prescribed end points contradict open-ended spirit of dialogue needed for authentic student engagement insofar as dialogue demands its own emergent endpoints (see also matusov & miyazaki, 2014). similarly, nissen (2015) notes how a focus on standardization degrades the relevance of everyday human complexities. he argues that authentic dialogue involves sense-making practices that occupy interlocutors. such sense-making in a milieu of an ill-defined problem lends to a communal constitution of ideas: a collectivity that establishes its own knowledge and gives students a voice. where mass higher education has become largest warehouse for the institutional educational end-game to be played (see chapter one of shor, 1987), suspending definitive standards leads to place where students can be personally engaged. matusov (2009) argues that what goes hand-in-hand with the suspension of standardized ends is a problem-based learning. for example, arya and parker (2015) address climate change discussions among youth in order to demonstrate problem-based learning. the students learned how to evaluate evidence through engaging with each other on the problem of how to address climate change. the efforts of the teacher were not directed at teaching principles about climate change because they were focused on fostering student dialogue about a problem. the turn to problem-based learning is a continuance of ideas seen in freire and shor, who argue that teachers need to choose problems that come from students’ cultures (see especially shor & freire, 1987). this turn is a response to the growing monologicity emerging from the way that mass education has brought low culture of everyday life into contact with the traditionally high culture of “genteel” academe (see shor, 1987). dialogic pedagogy entails the notion that low culture is as valuable as any other form of life when it comes to learning. what matters is raising problems drawn from everyday life because a teacher cannot assume that all participants are automatically or non-problematically interested in a problem formulated in traditional education. just as life involves solving problems, education can be about solving living problems. instead of predefined ends, problem solving in the classroom becomes like everyday life where goals and the problem itself can be redefined (see matusov, 2015a&b). suspension of defined educational ends/standardization and a turn to problem-based learning set the conditions for what is called “ontological dialogue” in dialogic pedagogy. drawing on the bakhtinian distinction between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, matusov (2009) points out that conventional authoritative pedagogy is about knowledge removed from life. such authoritative dialogue amounts to an epistemological form focused on a cannon of information. in contrast, internally persuasive discourse relates to an experience where one’s being is engaged as one is personally drawn into the dialogue. dialogue is thereby ontological and such learning cannot be separated from people because it is part of what defines them (see also matusov & miyazaki, 2014). where epistemological dialogue does not involve ontological meaning for participants, ontological dialogue involves a personal urgency because one is dealing with issues that are deeply entwined with selfhood. the problem of student disengagement becomes potentially minimized due to the fact that people’s beings are brought to bear instead of being discounted. disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e36 of course, ontological dialogue results in a very different kind of classroom space that is marked by what matusov (2009) calls a “community of learners”. a community of learners is not necessarily marked by studying a core domain of knowledge because it is marked by a community that takes dialogue seriously by virtue of seeing how it is ontological. such a community involves honest dialogue where there is an ongoing testing of ideas and values against each other: in my view, genuine education is not about placing the students into a situation in which the student would accept as true voluntarily by him/herself but it is rather about helping the student consider as many alternative options as possible from many diverse angles (i.e. internally persuasive discourse). (p. 36). where conventional knowledge is established through communal authority, understanding in dialogic pedagogy is established through testing in a milieu of ontological dialogue. consider how matusov writes: in contrast, dialogic pedagogy is about colliding and testing diverse ideas presented by different voices, by different members of a community. it involves genuine interest in each other. in dialogical pedagogy, one does not look for student errors but rather learns from the student how the student sees the world and him/herself. disagreements between the student and the teacher are valued, respected, and expected. (2004, p. 7). such practice stands in contrast to a context where the community about is not winning a debate or demonstrating one has knowledge aligning with authority. consider, for example, kamberelis et al. (2105) and their discussion of a classroom engagement with literature. instead of the teacher having a pre-designed agenda for a class discussion, the teacher made space for the class to enter a free discussion. the teacher modeled questioning and then turned the discussion over to students so that the teacher’s control was breached. it illustrates how texts are collaboratively produced over time in “mangles of practice”. as such, ontological dialogue involves a community that is continually involved in “problem space” (see matusov & miyazaki, 2014). a community of learners therein involves a community of constant dialogue where questions such as the following are continually asked: do relevant people pay attention? am i or others taken seriously? do i or others provide support to each other in the act of learning? is there respect in disagreement? is there unconditional trust? (see matusov, 2009). ontological dialogues in such communities means that subjectivities are also at stake insofar as a goal of dialogic pedagogy is the transforming of subjectivities within a community of learners. matusov (2009) looks to socratic teaching to show how education can involve internally persuasive dialogues that transform students’ subjectivities. in one way, the change to student subjectivities means realigning themselves to a community of learners this quality of dialogic pedagogy was noted by shor. consider how shor writes that “i must recognize that students cannot understand their own rights because they are so ideologized into rejecting their own freedom, their own critical development, thanks for traditional curriculum” (shor & freire, 1987, p. 21). good liberal arts education that is dialogical in nature “desocializes” people such that it is possible to break students and teachers from the conventional school model into which they have been socialized. shor is interested in showing how class can become a place where people are de-socialized and re-socialized into a different dialogical milieu: the teacher is the architect of this un-doing and re-doing. the extraordinary re-experience of the ordinary cannot begin or proceed without the teacher’s counterstructures. this is an inspiring and awesome situation for teachers, who so often feel trapped in the slough of despond. so much can be gained or lost in the project of liberatory teaching. (shor, 1987, p. 97). disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e37 in this way, the classroom can become a space where there is push back against the boundaries of class consciousness because students are “expelled” from the regular mode of conventional school to re-enter it with a critical consciousness. lemberger (2015) expands on this idea by discussing the nature of dialogue. the formulation of self is not a mental process, but rather one that happens interpersonally. interaction is central to any human activity and this centrality includes the constitution of subjectivities. as such, dialogical grammar is a deep engagement with others that results in changes to one’s subjectivity. dialogue entails changes to student subjectivities that emerge in unpredictable ways contra to standardized learning objective like ‘develop critical thinking’. students’ subjectivities are also transformed through self-reflection in dialogic pedagogy. this change is entwined with the way that ontological dialogue involves contestation and debate about the means by which people frame their world (see hayes & matusov, 2005). matusov (2009) continues and expands on shor’s (1987) claim that dialogicality can lead to an extraordinary experience of life when it is seen from a new critical stance. the former writes about socrates’ “torpedo touch” wherein the world one takes for granted can be blown open through dialogue. ontological dialogue involves a space where relationships and one’s taken-for-granted reality can be redefined (see also matusov & miyazaki, 2014). hence, a community of learners involves a community that practices critical self-examination that can lead to self-generated critical student subjectivities (see also matusov, 2015b). another key quality of dialogic pedagogy latent in the forgoing is the reconceptualizing of the role of the teacher (see matusov & miyazaki, 2014). shor (1987) identifies how the role of a teacher is not to primarily impart information because the role is more about promoting critical reflection in dialogue, as opposed to implementing standardized ends at the behest of bureaucratic managerial systems. teachers must be sensitive to learners and listen carefully in such a way that they can be dynamically responsive to what they hear. a teacher may have experience and knowledge from which an exploration can begin and so a teacher does not naively deny what one thinks she or he knows. what demarcates a radical break from conventional schooling is that a teacher holds to a conviction that she or he can learn from students. teacher subjectivities can also change as they are open to reconstruction. ensuring dialogue means that there ought to be challenges to a teacher’s knowledge and such challenges demystify the teacher’s power, which requires a teacher to demonstrate competency in the course of dialogue (see shor & freire, 1987). a similar theme shows up in contemporary scholarship in dialogic pedagogy where matusov (2009), for example, turns a critical eye to the socratic dialogues. the chief problem with socrates is that he is never perplexed. socrates asks leading questions that amount to faux questions where the answers are already known by him. his style of questioning continues into contemporary education where teachers engage in a triadic discursive sequence of question, student-response, and then teachercorrection (see also hayes & matusov, 2005). matusov asks: “is it pedagogically (and morally) inappropriate to place a student in a situation, which forced the student to accept ‘the right option’, like leading-option questions do?” (2009, p. 35). socrates and teachers of his ilk do not explain context and see their role as to provoke student learning without challenging one’s own position. such practices are ineffective because they leave students ill-equipped when faced with real world problems and are unethical on the grounds that they are predicated on rigid authoritarianism. student and teachers can both be educated on important issues when engage because uncertainties open up anything for legitimate discussion and students learn that learning is not a temporary process. dialogic pedagogy & strong evaluations in the conduct of everyday life the foregoing work on the conduct of everyday life and strong evaluations resonates well with dialogic pedagogy. the latter fits well with the conduct of everyday life because the attempt to engage students’ lives and mitigate teacher authority is about the manifestation of student experience. the ethos disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e38 of collaborative learning and challenging social structures in dialogic pedagogy is echoed in the conduct of everyday life. undoing social structures in the classroom is possible because they are constituted in interpersonal practices in the conduct of everyday life. likewise, the conduct of everyday life involves complex social relationships where students and teachers must negotiate difficult tensions. the absence of a single social situation, per se, resonates well with the dialogic interplay that is so prominent in dialogic pedagogy. the emphasis on community of learners that test ideas in dialogic pedagogy consequently aligns with the complexities of a multicultural classroom like we see in the conduct of everyday life. just like the conduct of everyday life with strong evaluations paves the way for agency, dialogic pedagogy does the same. far from abstracting learning away from the communities in which people are participants, dialogic pedagogy makes room for the kind of communal realities that predicate strong evaluations. the responsibility to others and emphasis on communities necessary for the conduct of everyday life are integral to dialogic pedagogy. recall how the conduct of everyday life involves strong evaluations that lead to changing subjectivities of students and teachers. dialogic pedagogy also looks to the same kind of change and so we see an articulation of principles in dialogic pedagogy rearticulated in the conduct of everyday life involving strong evaluations. challenges for dialogic pedagogy strong evaluations raise the issue of quality in the classroom and so raise a generative point of tension between dialogic pedagogy and the forgoing: the responsibility to be strong evaluators. this issue is a difficult one because proponents of dialogic pedagogy may raise the challenge of “whose quality”. after all, notions of quality are often associated with the metrics of standardized curricula. taylor’s work on strong evaluations, however, raises the issue of quality without collapsing into hegemonic oppression. strong evaluations are about the difference between first and second order desires. this distinction leads to a kind of critical self-reflection that is about contested values and ways of life and not about standardized content. as such, when proponents of dialogic pedagogy raise the issue of ontological dialogue, taylor offers an articulation of what such ontological engagement looks like. taylor is very clear that strong evaluations are about what matter to people and this resonates with ontological problembased learning like we see in dialogic pedagogy. the kinds of tensions that we see in the conduct of everyday life involving strong evaluations fits well with the kind of dialogue we see in dialogic pedagogy, but they open up the potential of two challenges to dialogic pedagogy. challenge 1: disengagement i want to address a challenge that we need to bear in mind as we move forward in our work in dialogic pedagogy and this challenge is the threat of disengaged individualism. this threat ties into what i mentioned above in reference to how education that seeks student engagement can do so on the grounds of weak evaluations. when taylor (1989) traces the development of the kind of self we see in modern individualism, he fleshes out in more detail how people are set up to fall into weak evaluations. my position is that education is not insulated from this propensity. individualistic self-responsibility is one feature of the contemporary conduct of everyday life that enables disengagement. taylor writes that the philosophy of disengagement and objectification has helped to create a picture of the human being, at its most extreme in certain forms of materialism, from which the last vestiges of subjectivity seem to have been expelled. it is a picture of the human being from a completely third-person perspective. (1989, pp. 175-176). disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e39 this third-person perspective refers to the rational and objective control and view of oneself and life. it is about a cartesian struggle or pull one’s rational capacities away from the distractions of the body that include emotions and other such ‘irrational’ experience. one gains self-mastery through reason abstracted from life and therein one is able to shape oneself through deliberate rational. one is responsible to disengage from the attachments in everyday life and shape a self-hood grounded in pure logic. this rational control of the self is an idea that lies in our tacit consciousness of individual selfresponsibility. descartes and kant set the stage for this perspective and, in reference to moral ontologies, as [kant] puts it later: other things have a price, only rational agents have dignity (würde). in a sense, our obedience to moral law is simply the respect that this dignity commands from us. the sources of good are within. (taylor, 1989, p. 365). sources of good are not treated as socio-linguistic or communally constituted because they are found in the responsibility of an individual to pursue logic. such individualistic self-responsibility that we see permeating late-modern societies amounts to an untenable disengagement. taylor (1999) elaborates on the problem with individualistic selfresponsibility ten years after sources of the self and explains why it amounts to disengagement. he does so by challenging another cartesian: jean-paul sartre and the latter’s discussion of radically free choice. sartre’s claim was that we need to strip ourselves of attachments to be radically free and make decisions about what is right to do. taylor’s critique is that we cannot understand our responsibility for our evaluations through the notion of radical choice. he presents sartre’s discussion of a young man during the second world war who wants to simultaneously leave home to fight for the french resistance and stay home to care for a sick mother. sartre, in saying the young man needs to become detached to make a choice, is wrong according to taylor. it is only a difficult situation precisely because the options are not created by rational choice. an agent of radical choice has to choose like the simple weigher because there is no conception of a ‘pull’ possessed by either option. the real force of the dilemma comes from the sense that there are different moral perspectives entailed in strong evaluations: when we see what makes the theory of radical choice plausible, we see how strong evaluation is something inescapable in our conception of the agent and his experience; and this because it is bound up with our notion of the self (1999, p. 33). to lose these qualities is to lose the very possibility of being an agent who evaluates. an agent of radical choice has no horizon of evaluation and it is for this reason that a perfect detachable consciousness that deals with issues that matter is an illusion a dangerous illusion, because it denies life itself, and others as people to whom one is answerable. particularity is another feature of the contemporary conduct of everyday enables disengagement. where one part of the conduct of contemporary everyday life involves self-responsibility and individuality emerging from descartes’ call for radical disengagement from ordinary experience, taylor notes how montaigne requires deeper engagement with one’s own particularity. previous eras and philosophies were concerned with finding universal human nature and looking within oneself to find such commonalities. there was a shift following the radical enlightenment from looking within oneself for universal human nature to looking within oneself to find one’s own being. self-knowledge particular to oneself becomes important after expressionism as taylor writes: disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e40 what is new in the post-expressivist era is that the domain is within, that is, it is only open to a mode of exploration that involves a first-person stance. that is what it means to define the voice or impulse as ‘inner’. … the sense of depth in inner space is bound up with the sense that we can move into it and bring things to the fore. (1989, pp. 389-390). the idea is that we “have” particular selves in the same way that we have a body part that is uniquely ours. interiority and passion of self comes from radical interiority of this sort that puts us in a state of tension. on the one hand, we conduct contemporary individualist life with an ethos of cartesian individuality and disengagement. the cartesian disengagement entailed in self-responsibility/individuality means to disconnect from the experiential qualities of everyday life that are essential for strong evaluations. on the other hand, we deeply engage ourselves to explore our own passions and desires that we hide even from ourselves. even though late modern subjectivities are paradoxical, particularity nevertheless means a more robust disengagement from others and the communities in which we live. this problematic perspective means that self dissolves in a void, without boundaries in its individualist isolation. taylor is pointing out how people can miss important parts of their relationships with others and not arguing that people are missing a connection with some sort of higher community consciousness. delving into one’s own passions can run the risk of missing how others offer important boundaries and relational touch points that help shape our selves. overall, he is warning that the wider contexts of and webs of relations that ground strong evaluations are displaced in favor of one’s particular self-exploration. personal commitment is a third feature of the contemporary conduct of everyday life that enables disengagement. this feature refers to a radical shift that took place in terms of commitment to spiritual practices and alignment with some sort of moral or cosmic order. whereas commitment to such universal orders was the vocation of elites such as priests or aesthetes, the enlightenment and renaissance lead to a call for all persons to make such commitments. in tandem with self-responsibility/individuality and particularity, this change means that personal commitment is not to a theory of cosmic logos. it is not just the elite who were committed to the faith but all people must commit deeply and the thing to which one become committed is oneself. what comes from this transition is the social leveling as ‘higher’ activities come under vigorous criticism. social leveling in the value of everyday life can be seen in the interest in everyday life in the art and literature. taylor writes that this three-sided individualism is central to our modern identity. it has helped fix that sense of self which gives off the illusion of being anchored in our very being, perennial and independent of interpretation. … the growth of forms of inwardness, correlative of the increasing centrality of reflexivity in spiritual life, and the consequent displacement of moral sources. but what may seem to common sense even more basic and unchallengeable is the location in general of the properties and nature of something ‘in’ that thing, and in particular, the location of thought ‘in’ the mind. … thought and feeling – the psychological – are now confined to minds. (1989, pp. 185186). hence, there is the emergence of the ethic of being true to oneself and personally committing to holding to such individualistic truth. the result is a disengaged individualism that focusses on oneself in denying higher callings, which reduces human motivation to pleasure and weak evaluations. hence, it compounds disengagement by precluding strong evaluations. taylor’s (1989) discussion of late-modern subjectivities illustrates how dialogic pedagogy – especially in north america – is challenged by a propensity of students to fall back into disengagement. individualistic self-responsibility, particularity, and personal commitment are likely to be present forces in disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e41 the classroom. the radical restructuring and freedom we seek to promote in dialogic pedagogy makes it easy for students who are all-too-ready to fall back into disengagement, which therein undermines dialogue. it is clear that conventional education forces students into a kind of alienation from the classroom, either through weak evaluative style or obsession with external trappings of ‘success’ like grades. my concern is that a dialogic classroom does not necessarily provide an easy antidote. students can potentially transition from a very monologic, authoritarian pedagogical regime, into an open, democratic regime, and require “detoxification” from the mangles of totalitarianism. this would be a period of time where they can do nothing by obligation. disengagement could be a particular circumstance of transitioning from an authoritarian to a democratic educational governance regime. there is a path between two extremes that, i think, we need to navigate dialogic pedagogy. practitioners of dialogic pedagogy may attempt to undo alienation from standardization, but as shor (1987) intimated, they dispositionally fall back into presupposed tacit ideologies of disengagement. the path of least resistance is a danger to dialogic pedagogy and dialogue in the classroom because such disengagement we see in some wider communities – a disengagement promoted by neoliberal machinations that need docile adherents. it is not just with school, but the conduct of everyday life is potentially marked by personal commitment to an individualist modus operandi that precludes dialogue. it could well be that many students are dispositionally oriented towards weak evaluations and dialogic pedagogy may be just another first-order option in which this happens. after all, we cannot compel engagement and have a dialogic climate in a classroom. challenge 2: pedagogical eros while, on the one hand, i described above the challenge of disengagement, on the other hand, there is a converse issue: engagement that entails eros. plato’s symposium involves a discussion of love and simultaneously reflects on education. it contains a speech by alcibiades, who fancies himself to be socrates’ pupil and his speech illuminates a challenge to dialogic pedagogy: the first time a person lets himself listen to one of socrates’ arguments, it sounds ridiculous. … but if you could see them opened up, if you can get through to what’s under the surface, what you will find is that his arguments are the only ones in the world that make sense. and that’s not all: under the surface his arguments abound with divinity and effigies of goodness. they turn out to be extremely far reaching, or rather the cover absolutely everything which needs to be taken into consideration on the path to true goodness (plato & waterfield, 2008, p. 69). the hyperbole in alcibiades’ comment illustrates how there can be students who ontologically engage in pedagogy and have this kind of awakening where ideas come alive to them. they can come alive to the ideas of a pedagogue in a dangerous way where a teacher’s voice eclipses all others like we see in this excerpt from the speech. this change can happen at all levels of pedagogy and it is a powerful experience because of the ontological quality of strong evaluations. what often comes with such change is a complex kind of eroticism – one that goes beyond mere sex – and alcibiades is deeply impacted by his love for socrates. part of this eroticism is seen in how viscerally alcibiades describes his experience: in fact, i’ve been bitten by something with far more excruciating bite than a snake, and it couldn’t have attacked a more vulnerable part of me. my heart or mind … has been struck and bitten by philosophy, and when disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e42 philosophy seizes a young man of caliber, it clings more fiercely than any snake and makes him do all sorts of things. (plato & waterfield, 2008, p. 64). themes of masochistic eroticism permeate alcibiades’ speech as he describes the influence that socrates has had on him. the masochistic eroticism is not the only way that socrates sees pedagogical eros taking shape. of course, plato’s obsession with the ideal type of love lurks in the background of this speech and reinforces that pedagogical eros is not just about sex: it is about an ideal kind of love. it is possible to move away from the hegemony of the ideal forms while taking the cue that we are not just talking about eros in a shallow sense. it is a richer concept involving broad desire and affection. steiner (2003) discusses the symposium at length and points out how people love or hate socrates as they come under the spell of the master. eroticism is interwoven with the phenomenology of mastery and discipleship and steiner argues that education involves the “totalities of the mind and body [being] enlisted” in education (p. 26). class can generate an “atmosphere saturated with tensions of the heart” (p. 27). thirst for dialogue creates the penetrative tenderness of mastery and discipleship. the symposium describes love in relation to education and socrates’ discussion of love starts from a discussion of how to love something is to desire it insofar as it is something not in one’s possession that one desires. pedagogical eros therein includes desire of something else that one sees in another. in the case of alcibiades, it is the learned quality of socrates that he wants. there is a deep identification between the instructor and the pupil as the pupil wants something the instructor has. there is something attractive in socrates’ knowledge that alcibiades desires and it is the far reaching quality of socrates’ understanding. to phrase this in terms of the conduct of everyday life and strong evaluations, it is the opening up of critical consciousness that we see becomes possible in ontological dialogues. steiner’s (2003) position is that education is, on the one hand, a journey where students and pedagogues move together through life. a teacher gives an example through living as “[e]xemplary teaching is enactment and can be mute” as “socrates and the saints teach by existing.” (ibid. p. 4). education is therein a journey where to educate means to lead forth together through strong evaluations in the conduct of everyday life. this journey amounts to a partnership between the master and the pupil is the axis of journey. just as dante is lead through hell with his teacher, virgil, steiner argues that educators walk with their students through the difficulties of hell – i.e. the existential angst of strong evaluations. students progressively move away from the master as they go from hell to heaven, which means that the teacher takes students through the struggle of initial strong evaluations and they move on to managing such radical reflexivity on their own. eros is important to engagement, but not all teachers are the same in terms of their relationships with students as we see in hooks’ (1993, 2003) discussion of eros and the potential for violence that we saw in the symposium. she, like steiner and plato, sees eros as an essential part of the classroom because [u]nderstanding that eros is a force that enhances our overall effort to be self-actualizing, that it can provide an epistemological grounding informing how we know what we know, enables both professors and students to use such energy in a classroom setting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite critical imagination. (1993, p. 60). self-actualizing pertains to the identification and development that comes with engagement in strong evaluations. the epistemological grounding that hooks writes about is that our ontological engagement entwines with how we know how to live in everyday life. we often feel our way through life and relations disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e43 with others and education is not unique insofar as it is not neutral objective ground. special bonds and affection have always existed in the pedagogical relationships. moreover, instructors are instructed to bring love and passion to the classroom and there is substantial force directing faculty to go beyond the mere transmission of information in their pedagogy. she resonates with the forgoing by arguing that people enter the classroom as embodied and feeling agents who are holistic beings. paradoxically, such discussion of the body is simultaneously a betrayal of the legacy of denial and repression of the body in favor of abstract logic. hooks sees such a betrayal as a good thing because it is absurd to deny eros in the classroom implied in holding to an artificial split between private/passionate personal lives and public/dispassionate public lives. such a dichotomy becomes irrelevant when there is an honest acknowledgement of eros in the classroom. her claim is that we must live with eros and move beyond it as just sexual if we are to deal with the potential for violence inherent in it. it is here how, on the other hand, there is a dark side to pedagogical eros and the journey taken by students and teachers. the dark side is the inevitable realities of power relations and steiner (2003) identifies how teaching is an exercise in power relations. consider how he writes that, at times, [t]o teach something is to lay hands on what is most vital in a human being … a master invades, he breaks open, he can lay waste in order to cleanse and rebuild. poor teaching, pedagogic routine, a style of instruction which is consciously or not, cynical in its merely utilitarian aims, are ruinous. they tear up hope by its roots. bad teaching is, almost literally, murderous and, metaphorically, a sin. it diminishes the student, it reduces to gray inanity the subject being presented. (p. 18). he also writes how a “charismatic master, an inspired ‘prof’ take in hand, in a radically ‘totalitarian’ psychosomatic grasp, the living spirit of their students or disciples.” (p. 27). this experience certainly does not mark all students to such a degree. it is, however, indicative of the kind of destructive power that a teacher can have in light of the erotic energy entailed in teaching. cynical dialogue that undermines metanarrative can tear students up and leave them in states of despair. crushing relativism that a critical consciousness raises can lead to perpetual strangeness from life as usual. cynical deconstruction can leverage eros to a destructive end where students give up. hence, steiner writes about how teaching involves love and the darkness of love, which is when the erotic and abstention that leads to strangeness and more alienation. there is a tremendous potentiality for violence entwined with pedagogical eros when there is student engagement. hooks (2003) is clear that the dark side of pedagogical eros can be seen in abuse of power by faculty. while there can be positive erotic bonds between an instructor and students, it can be violent and exploitive. hence there are college policies prohibiting relationships that have even an erotic veneer. she points out that there are faculty who should not be tolerated and these are the ones that need power imbalances to “get it up and keep it up” (ibid., p. 148). since student development can be the context where erotic longings occur, passionate pedagogy spawns erotic energy that can be misused. steiner (2003) notes that “schoolmasters, trainers of mind and body, aware of what is at stake, of the interplay of trust and vulnerability, of the organic fusion between responsibility and response (what i will call answerability) are alarmingly few.” (p. 18). what he and hooks are driving at is that unreflective exploitation is not the kind of pedagogical eros that realizes good pedagogy. barring such exploitive actors but allowing for eros means that desire can be acknowledged among unequal partners that is nonabusive and a community of learners can test relationships like all other aspects of education. instead undermining students as being impotent through representing them as having no choice, eros can be acknowledged and be part of exploring how people learn to be just in situations of power imbalance. that disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e44 is, it is possible to hold people accountable instead of precluding recognition of accountability and responsibility when deny erotic feelings that emerge between teacher and students. the kind of community of learners that dialogic pedagogy promotes sets up conditions for pedagogical eros to emerge. in one very basic way, dialogic pedagogy sets up the conditions for eros with the erosion of boundaries that were sustained through conventional education. when students and teachers are equalized and there is an erosion of conventional boundaries, it is easier for eros to emerge. the boundaries around relationships also likely erode and pave the way for more eroticism in education. the point is that there is no dispassionate engagement when one is ontologically engaged in dialogical pedagogy. furthermore, a community of learners sets up the condition for eros because students who engage in ontological eros are put in a place where traditional forms of telos are eroded. the ethos of ontological dialogue entails strong evaluations that are not immediately resolved, which is the case in terms of weak evaluations. strong evaluations in the conduct of everyday life create a climate where traditional sources of authority become relativized and finding personal direction becomes existentially tougher. as teachers open up space for more strong evaluations in dialogical pedagogy, they open up new understandings and a richer conduct of everyday life. such change means that the conduct of everyday life involves heightened engagement and critical self-reflection that we seek to see in a community of learners. it is a conduct of everyday educational life that opens up ontologically pervasive strong evaluations. this experience can be tough to students and it leads to erotic desire and so steiner (2003) writes about how teaching involves love and the darkness of love, which is when the erotic and abstention that can lead to alienation from the life before what dialogic pedagogy would consider ontological dialogue. eros is entwined with a desire for what someone else has and, in this case, it is the experience of being a strong evaluator. a teacher seems to live a life that an engaged student desires and the issue of eros needs to be discussed in dialogic pedagogy. the teacher-student relationship needs to be discussed because the eros it entails can lead to a subversion of dialogue. the importance of the student-teacher relationship and equality that is pursued in dialogic pedagogy means that we need to face the issue of pedagogical eros. there is the issue of the dark side of eros where abuses can happen. dialogic pedagogy needs to address how such abuse is understood and defined in ways other than shallow harassment-prevention policies that we see in bureaucratic schooling. this direction means talking about the admission and negotiation of power in ways that are non-abusive, yet do not suppress or overly sexualize pedagogical eros. how do we understand the flourishing of healthy dialogue in light of pedagogical eros? considering this question means that taking a strong stance on the incidental quality of the teacher may be more complicated than is currently presumed in dialogic pedagogy. the complexities of relationships need to be careful discussed because it is not so easy to dismiss the special role of the teacher and sustain ontological dialogue. concluding… not! in this editorial, i drew on my background and recent experience with dpj to lay out the groundwork for two issues i’d like to see discussed in the area of dialogic pedagogy. namely, disengagement and pedagogical eros are two issues that i argued for addressing. scholarship on the conduct of everyday life opens up a new area for readers interested in dialogic pedagogy. its emphasis on the first person stance and the issues of power in relation to resistance provide generative material for discussion. i added the notion of strong evaluations because i have been struggling for a while with how disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e45 to talk about quality without hegemony. strong evaluations are dynamic and they allow us to talk about quality in education without falling prey to monologism or neoliberal consumer anesthesia. these genres of scholarship both resonate and challenge dialogic pedagogy, which is what we ought to do in dpj. references arya, d, & parker, j. (2015). dialogic action in climate change discussions: an international study of high school students in china, new zealand, norway and the united states. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 131-157. bain, k. (2004). what the best college teachers do. cambridge: harvard university press. cresswell, j. (2011). being faithful to ourselves: bakhtin and a potential postmodern psychology of self. culture & psychology, 17, 462-479. dreier, o. (2016). conduct of everyday life: implications for critical psychology. in e. schraube & c. højholt (eds.) psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 15-33). new york: routledge. elkadar, n (2015). dialogic multicultural education theory and praxis:dialogue and the problems of multicultural education in a pluralistic society. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 1-18. freire, p. (2000). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. hayes, r. & matusov, e. (2005). designing for dialogue in place of teacher talk and student silence. culture & psychology, 11(3), 339-357. holzkamp , k. ( 2013 ). psychology: social self-understanding on the reasons for action in the conduct of everyday life . in e. schraube & u. osterkamp (eds.), psychology from the standpoint of the subject: selected writings of klaus holzkamp (pp. 233 – 341 ) (a. boreham & u.osterkamp , trans.). basingstoke : palgrave macmillan . hooks, b. (1993). eros, eroticism and the pedagogical process. cultural studies, 7(1), 58-63. hooks, b. (2003). good sex: passionate pedagogy. in teaching community: a pedagogy of hope (pp. 139-156). new york: taylor & francis. højholt, c. & schraube, e. (2016). introduction: toward psychology of everyday living. in e. schraube c. højholt (eds.) psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 1-14). new york: routledge. kamberelis, g. mcginley, w., & welker, a. (2105). literature discussions as mangles of practice: sociological theories of emergence and/in dialogic learning events. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 98130. lemberger, d. (2105). dialogical grammar: varieties of dialogue in wittgenstein’s methodology. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 158-173. matusov, e. (2004). guest editor’s introduction: bakhtin’s dialogic pedagogy. journal of russian and east european psychology, 42(6), 3-11. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. new york: nova. matusov, e. (2015a). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 174-211. matusov, e. (2015b). chronotopes in education: conventional and dialogic. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 65-97. disengagement, pedagogical eros and (the undoing of?) dialogic pedagogy james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.182 | vol. 4 (2016) e46 matusov, e. & miyazaki, k. (2014). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy, 2, 1-47. nissen, m. (2015). meeting youth in movement and on neutral ground. dialogic pedagogy, 3, 19-42. plato & waterfield, r. (2008). symposium (trasnlated by r.waterfield). oxford: oxford university press. postman, n. (1971). teaching as subversive activity. new york: delta. schraube, e. & marvakis, a. (2016). frozen fluidity: digital technologies and the transformation of students’ learning and the conduct of everyday life. . in e. schraube c. højholt (eds.) psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 205-225). new york: routledge. shor, i. (1987). critical teaching and everyday life. chicago: university of chicago. shor, i., & freire, p. (1987). what is the ‘dialogical method’ of teaching. journal of education, 3, 11-31. taylor, c. (1989). sources of the self: the making of the modern identity. cambridge: harvard university press. taylor, c. (1991). the malaise of modernity. toronto: house of anansi press. taylor, c. (1999). human agency and language: philosophical papers volume 1. cambridge: cambridge university press. acknowledgements i have often struggled with bakhtin’s claim in the speech genres essay that a written piece of work is a single utterance in a chain. this article is populated with so many voices that i find this claim hard to accept. i am indebted to the other editors of dialogic pedagogy journal for reviews of an earlier draft, which has led to the inclusion of their voices. thanks should be extended to them for support and assistance with developing a clearer utterance. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/dscribe/ http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ microsoft word dialogic education for and from authorial agency (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a162 dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov university of delaware, usa mark smith university of delaware, usa elizabeth soslau university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa katherine von duyke newmann university, usa abstract in this paper, we extend bakhtin's ethical philosophical ideas to education and introduce a dialogic authorial agency espoused approach. we then consider this approach in opposition to the mainstream technological espoused approach, while focusing our contrasting analysis on student’s authorial agency and critical dialogue. we argue that the technological approach assumes that the "skills" or "knowledge" are garnered in pursuit of preset curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards). since the goals of the technological approach are divorced from the students’ personal goals, values, and interests, they are incompatible and irreconcilable with what we idealize as the true goal of education, education for agency. the authorial agency approach to education (dialogic education for and from authorial agency) emphasizes the unpredictable, improvisational, eventful, dialogic, personal, relational, transcending, and ontological nature of education. the authorial agency of the student and of the teacher are valued and recognized by all participants as the primary goal of education – supported by the school system and broader society. the approach defines education as a learner’s leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, the life, and the world in critical dialogue. the purpose of authorial agency pedagogy is to facilitate this process by promoting students’ agency and unique critical voices in socially desired practices – critical voices, recognized by the students themselves and others relevant to the particular practice(s). ultimately, in the authorial education for and from authorial agency, students are led into investigating and testing their ideas and desires, assuming new responsibilities and developing new questions and concerns. finally, we describe and analyze the first author’s partially successful and partially failing attempt to enact a dialogic authorial approach. it will allow the reader to both visualize and problematize a dialogic authorial approach. we will consider a case with a rich “e-paper trail” written by 11 undergraduate, pre-service teacher education students (mostly sophomores), and the instructor (peter, the first author, pseudonym) in a course on cultural diversity. issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a163 the case focuses on the university students (future teachers) and their professor discussing several occasions that involved interactions between peter and one minority child in an afterschool center. our research questions in this empirical study were aimed at determining the successes, challenges, and failures of the dialogic authorial pedagogical approach and conditions for them. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy mark p. smith, ph.d. is a researcher interested in the role of dialogue in fostering student agency and the relevance of the educational environment for life. he has also worked full-time with international students an english as a second language teacher. dr. elizabeth soslau is an assistant professor in the school of education. her research focuses on experiential learning opportunities within student teaching. her recent work, situated in urban contexts, explores equity issues. she investigates questions such as: how do candidates’ emotional needs interrupt their ability to process learning experiences? what opportunities do candidates have to develop adaptive teaching expertise? in what ways can teacher educators promote candidates’ sense of agency? how do teacher educators manage racial stress when providing field instruction for white candidates in diverse schools? elizabeth’s work has appeared in journals such as teaching and teacher education, action in teacher education, and educational action research. her clinical work includes coordinating the student teaching practicum, providing field instruction in urban schools, and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in diversity and action research methodology. before pursuing her ph.d., elizabeth taught middle school in the philadelphia school district. ana marjanovic-shane is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college in philadelphia. she studies meaning making in education and play, dialogic educational relationships and events, dialogic teacher orientation, and the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. she uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic orientation in her studies. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play and education. her most recent publication is: marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). "spoilsport" in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4. katherine von duyke received her ph.d. in sociocultural and communal approaches to education from the university of delaware under the guidance of dr. eugene matusov in 2013. her research has focused on innovative educational practices: she has critiqued open democratic schools, analyzed the way student agency is conceptualized in education, and evaluated educational discourses for their ability to connect with student thinking. deeply influenced by the works of l.s. vygotsky, and m. bakhtin she argues that education has traditionally focused on cultural transference, or an ideal of what culture should be. instead, she suggests education can support students’ meaning making participation in and reflective and creative reinterpretation of culture. ��� dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a164 …a main trait of human reality is to transcend itself… (boesch, 1993, p. 15) dialogic education for and from authorial agency the purpose of this article is to introduce, articulate, and discuss a new pedagogical approach: dialogic education for and from authorial agency (deffaa) and exemplify it in the field of teacher education. this approach is based on mikhail m. bakhtin's (1985-1975) ontological dialogic ethics that he developed working within literary studies (bakhtin, 1986, 1993, 1999) and that has important implications for education. as far as we know, bakhtin’s ontological dialogic ethics has not yet been fully realized in education and teacher preparation. we, along with other colleagues, have aimed at translating bakhtin’s philosophical ideas in the field of education (bibler, 2009; dysthe, bernhardt, & esbjørn, 2013; fecho, 2011; lefstein & snell, 2013; lensmire, 1994, 1997; lobok, 2001; matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999; wegerif, 2007). this new approach to education is an extension of an authorial approach to teaching and learning developed by matusov (2011a) inspired by bakhtin's ontological dialogic ethics. we will define, compare, and contrast the dialogic education for and from authorial agency (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016) to the technological approach (rooted in traditional models of teaching and learning) (matusov, 2011a) by focusing on how these approaches promote or demote human agency in education. we chose a dichotomous1 presentation of these two espoused educational approaches because our new pedagogical deffaa approach has emerged in dialogic and ideological opposition to the conventional approach. we are aware that these approaches can be more complexly described in terms of theory-inaction2, which guides the pedagogical practice of the practitioner, but analysis of this complexity is beyond the purpose of this conceptual paper. technological approach to education and its failure elsewhere, matusov (2011a) argues that both the mainstream conventional and even some innovative institutionalized education are shaped by a technological approach. this technological approach to education focuses on guiding students along some wellor ill-defined learning trajectory to arrive at preset curricular endpoints (i.e., educational standards, ravitch, 1995). a technological approach requires the teachers to specify what their students “will know or able to do by the end of a lesson” (or a course, an academic term, a school career) (taubman, 2009). there are two major approaches within a technological educational framework. in an admittedly extreme instructionalist version of the technological approach common in many conventional schools, the students’ learning trajectory is seen as well-defined through lock-step, fully scripted lessons. the teacher’s instructional decisions are similarly guided by unilateral, universal, decontextualized scripts, 1 it is interesting that some reviewers and the editor of another journal asked to justify the use of dichotomous approach in our analysis. in our view, the unconditional opposition against a dichotomous analysis has become almost total in social science academia. we want to point out that the total opposition against any dichotomous analysis is self-contradictory and unsustainable because it creates a new dichotomy between “dichotomous” versus “nondichotomous” analysis. in our view, it is much more useful to consider fruitful vs. non-fruitful dichotomous and nondichotomous analysis in particular contexts. for example, it may be fruitful to develop dichotomy between slavery and free labor despite much complexity and nuances of particular cases when moral judgment is going to pass. dichotomies can be very useful for contrasts and boundaries rooted in value judgments. on the other hand, it is true that dichotomies may prevent from considering nuances when value judgments are not very important or weak. a historical analysis of use of dichotomies and current total opposition to them in social sciences is overdue but outside of the scope of our paper. however, we urge reviews and editors not to censor or reject dichotomous analysis just because it is dichotomous. we are thankful to the editor who asked us to justify our position on a dichotomous analysis rather than demand to eliminate it. 2 see the discussion of differences between “espoused theory” and “theory-in-action” in argyris and schön (1978). in short, the espoused theory involves declaration of the principles that the practitioner believes shapes his or her practice. in contrast, the theory-in-action involves patterns that actually guide the practitioner’s actions. the espoused and in-action theories may have complex and diverse relations; they may match or not match each other, be compatible or incompatible with each other, and so on. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a165 ideally tested by statistical, double-blind randomized research that is often referred to as “research-based best practices” (e.g., hargreaves, 1996; hunter & hunter, 2004; slavin & madden, 2001). by contrast, in a constructivist3 version of the technological approach used in some innovative schools and classrooms, the students’ learning trajectories are often seen as ill-defined, but they all still reliably lead to preset curricular endpoints. these learning trajectories can be negotiated between the teacher and the students, usually requiring contextual, interactional, and often uniquely artistic teaching. constructivist technological teachers thus often promote the students’ own learning activism, and collaboration between the teacher and the students, while the ultimate goal is still to arrive at the predictable conventional knowledge and skills preset by the teacher in advance. they try to “psychologize” and personalize the important curricular endpoints preset by the society (brown & campione, 1994; dewey, 1956). however, matusov (2011a) insists that in whatever version (instructionalist or constructivist) it is found, a technological approach to education assumes that all students will and should arrive at the preset curricular endpoints. it is important to reiterate that learning trajectories to such preset curricular endpoints may be ill-defined; it could be that a teacher is not so much promoting a lock-step, scripted curriculum, but rather may have in mind certain preset “curricular standards” such as knowledge, skills, dispositions, or attitudes (taubman, 2009). for example, a teacher may promote collaboration with students in the discussion of an interpersonal problem in a classroom, but may ultimately be most concerned with ensuring that a student takes away from this discussion the teachers’ preset definition of what a “bully” is and the teachers’ preset attitude that it is always wrong to “bully” someone (smith, 2010). the students’ own subjectivities — students’ own interests, concerns, needs, inquiries, funds of knowledge, worldviews — are often either bracketed from the instruction or exploited often as “prior knowledge” or “misconceptions” in order to move the student to the preset curricular endpoints. since the curricular endpoints are known in advance and determined outside the scope of the students’ affinities, desires, aspirations, goals, social emergent dynamics, contextual and ethical limitations, — this approach inhibits (and often diverts) students’ agencies in the targeted practices so the students stop seeing themselves as legitimate and eager participants (hammer & zee, 2006). further, when endpoints of education are known in advance, any genuine dialogue in education is impossible (matusov, 2007), making educational practice profoundly monologic. indeed, since the espoused goal of conventional education is to make students’ consciousnesses and subjectivities predictably arrive at preset readymade curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards) — predetermined truths known by the teachers, by the state, and/or by the conventional schooling system in advance, — genuine dialogue based on humanity and respect between the students and the teacher is impossible (matusov, 2007). however, the technological approach to education has remained ubiquitous to this day. it is not an accident that bakhtin used examples of conventional schooling to illustrate his concept of extreme monologism (matusov, 2009): in an environment of … [excessive] monologism the genuine interaction of consciousness is impossible and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. in essence … [excessive monologism – the authors] knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth 3 it is important to stress here that not all constructivist pedagogical approaches are technological in their nature — not all of them insist on arriving at the curricular endpoints preset by teachers and/or by the state (see discussion of the diversity in constructivist approaches in pegues, 2007; phillips, 1995; windschitl, 2002). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a166 instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue4 (bakhtin, 1999, p. 81, emphasis is added). in bakhtin’s analysis of dostoevsky’s literary masterpiece, the brothers karamazov, he argued that excessive monologism is employed to manipulate the consciousness of another person towards predetermined endpoints and, hence, to make the other predictable, calculable, and controllable. when this project is realized, the technological educational practice causes humiliation, disrespect, dehumanization, and denial of agency of another person: truth is unjust when it concerns the depths of someone else’s personality. the same motif sounds even more clearly, if in somewhat more complex form, in the brothers karamazov, in alyosha’s conversation with liza about captain snegirev, who had trampled underfoot the money offered him. having told the story, alyosha analyzes snegirev’s emotional state and, as it were, predetermines his further behavior by predicting that next time he would without fail take the money. to this liza replies: . . . listen, alexey fyodorovich. isn’t there in all our analysis – i mean your analysis . . . no, better call it ours – aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man – in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? in deciding so certainly that he will take the money? [ss ix, 271-72; the brothers karamazov, book five, i] (bakhtin, 1999, p. 60, the italics is original) based on this bakhtinian point of view, conventional schools based on a technological espoused approach are humiliating, disrespecting, dehumanizing, and denying of the authorial agency of children. this technological orientation proceeds not from a humble human plane but “from an above”, “the bird’s or god’s eye’s” vista as if “the one who is above” is 1) is morally better, 2) knows better what is good for a student, i.e., benevolent dictator, and 3) is all knowing, i.e., expert#1. this technological approach positions the teacher to impose ready-made curricular endpoints on his/her pedagogical object (i.e., students), while at the same time releasing the one “from above” -i.e., the designers of the curricular standards and tests -from epistemological, moral, emotional, and/or ethical responsibility. the proponents of a technological approach (e.g., hirsch, 1996; ogbu, 2003) would likely object to this bakhtin-inspired characterization of their practice, arguing that they do not intend to rob students of their authorial agency. rather, they want to empower the student’s authorial agency by providing students with cultural capital (delpit, 1995; lareau & weininger, 2003) — a powerful toolkit of essential knowledge, skills, and dispositions – thus empowering students to do whatever they wish to do in future after their education is over. it is not important for the students to be interested in the technological learning activities through which they are supposed to learn this toolkit. rather, using economic terms, educational researchers nilsson and wihlborg (2011) have articulated the technological view that conventional school learning activities have an “exchange value” — value that other people may be interested — but not a “use value” — a self-consumed value. the learning activities are important as opportunities for the students to learn essential skills and knowledge, usually for their future lives, rather than to be consumed by the students as interesting or relevant to their own purposes here and now. for example, conventional school often teaches students to read in general as a universal skill – so they can read whatever they want in their future. school reading does not necessarily need to be interesting, relevant or important for the students except as a byproduct of learning more essential and universal reading skills and strategies. 4 in this context, the term “dialogue” refers simply to social interaction (matusov, 2009). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a167 what students choose to read later in their future is up to the students themselves, as the conventional school does not interfere in students’ future choices or impose on their future. thus, the conventional school provides students with a “toolkit” of essential skills and knowledge (i.e., “cultural capital”, cf. hirsch) regardless of the specific, current and future desires and goals of the students. even when the students’ interests in reading are acknowledged and encouraged, these “emergent situational interests” and “sustained personal interests” are viewed not as good or important in themselves, but in terms of opportunities for teaching students universal reading skills. in essence, these educational researchers call for exploitation of the students’ emergent and personal interests for such universal learning (alexander, 2005). in this example, reading is viewed instrumentally, separate from its goal defined through the person’s desires. however, as matusov (2011a) shows, the very notion of a tool (in the metaphor of toolkit of essential knowledge and skills) is heavily based on the desire of the person who uses the tool. this psychological concept of tool was developed by the german gestalt psychologist wolfgang köhler (1973) at the beginning of the 20th century in his studies of the mentality of apes. köhler argued that the concept of tool is impossible without the concept of desire. without the individual’s desire, a tool, which mediates a desire, stops being a tool. thus, without students’ desires a tool cannot exist. yet, students' desires are usually excluded by the technological approach to education (taubman, 2009), except for a desire to please the teacher and/or parents, to reach or be on the top of the school-created standard of achievement (i.e. high gpa), and/or to achieve credentials for entering certain professions. in the technological approach, students’ personal and authorial desires, goals, and problems are usually not legitimate aspects of schooling practice and are often subjected to severe suppression or exploitation by the school system, in its effort for unilateral control (ben-peretz, 2001). school systems concerned with this type of technological approach demand students’ unconditional cooperation with teachers and the school authority. therefore, the normal tool mediation of students’ personal desire is transformed into tool mediation of students’ wishes or needs to conform to, and satisfy the teacher (i.e. to please the teacher as one who is ‘the deliverer of the system’) who communicates how to arrive at the preset curricular endpoint, – another and distorted tool mediation all together (depalma, matusov, & smith, 2009). this phenomenon is especially evident when students choose to act according to school procedures – what they think the teacher and/or school wants from them, – even in obvious contradiction to their own sense and experience (boyer, 1983; matusov, 2015b). students are encouraged to suspend articulating their own concerns about the value of a task (e.g., “you’ll need this information later” or “maybe we’ll have time to discuss this more at the end of the unit”). in our view, this is arguably true even for a constructivist version of technological approach, because the curricular endpoints (e.g., curricular standards) are predetermined by the educational authorities or curriculum designers, completely disregarding students' ontological desires. in schools governed by technological approach, students often learn to unconditionally obey, resist or ignore the teacher’s demands, without getting caught and they learn to “smuggle in” their own interested learning (depalma, et al., 2009). students’ authorial agency is thus usurped in such efforts, which often exist in parallel to the teachers’ resistance to their students’ desires, goals, and problems. the technologically-oriented teachers often desire not to engage students in subject matters in any depth either because of the teachers’ own disinterest in the targeted academic subject or because they are afraid to lose their control over the lesson (so-called "off-script", kennedy, 2005). in addition, conventional teachers often lack of depth about the subject matter. they are often concerned about control, time, and/or the targeted curricular standards that need to be “covered” by the lesson, which distract the teachers from authentic teaching (kennedy, 2005; matusov, 2009, 2011a; smith, 2010). mcneil (1986) argues that many teachers in a technological approach teach “defensively,” in that their primary effort is to dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a168 ensure student compliance by predictably arriving at the preset curricular endpoints and to prevent “disciplinary problems,” the potential student rebellion against teacher-unilateral or effort-consuming demands. thus, they avoid going into subjects with students in depth. ultimately, some teachers in a technological approach to education, despite their espoused teacher philosophy, are primarily concerned with “management” of students over teaching and guiding, to seek the “control of student resistances to the smooth flow of classroom work processes” (carlson, 1992, p. 190). a similar concern has been expressed by kennedy (2005), who noted that the primary fear of the teacher is for students to move “offscript,” away from the pre-planned endpoints. this may occur because conventional teachers are often not encouraged to seek or use their students’ cues as directions for curriculum development especially when working in traditional schooling systems under pressure and stress of the recent neoliberal educational reforms like the president bush’s “no child left behind” and/or the president obama’s “the race to the top” (matusov, 2011b; soslau, 2012). thus, we judge that a technological approach fails to deliver its own promise of empowerment of students with a “toolkit” of essential ready-made knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes. this is evident in a so-called “lack of transfer” (when students can't "apply" what was presumably "learned" to a new or unique situation) (lave, 1988), academic disengagement and boredom (yazzie-mintz, 2006), shallow understanding (boyer, 1983), use of pedagogical violence by teachers (sidorkin, 2002), primacy of concerns of classroom management issues and teacher authority over engaging in academic subjects (mcneil, 1986), and so on (matusov, 2009). we claim that agency-free technological education fails to empower the students’ authorial agency in the future – the goal that this type of education sets for itself in the idea of the powerful toolkit that empowers students to do what they want after education is over. we suspect that a technological pedagogical approach of the conventional schools is rooted in the need of the modern economy and institutions for workers who act like smart machines that can arrive at predictable preset outcomes or solve problems set by other people (mitra, 2013; zhao, 2009). we hypothesize that authorial successes of some students in technological education are achieved despite, rather than due to, an agency-free technological approach5. dialogical education for and from authorial agency the deffaa approach to education with its focus on promotion of student agency in a critical dialogue is radically different from technological approaches to education. we argue that our notion of dialogic education for and from authorial agency (deffaa) – i.e., education focusing on promoting the student’s authorial agency in a critical dialogue as the main purpose of the teaching and learning practice, – is incompatible with having preset curricular endpoints (taubman, 2009). the very notion of authorial agency6 cannot be preset because it is inherently based on goaland problem-defining processes7, creativity, unpredictability (lobok, 2001), education-for-an-unknown-future, production of culture8 (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009), novelty, surprise by the self and the others (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009; matusov, 2009, 2011c; miyazaki, 2007, july), freedom and legitimacy for non-participation (greenberg, 1992; neill, 1960), learning on-demand of the ongoing activities (rather than on-demand of the teacher or 5 alternatively, a technological approach may unwillingly create oases of agency-based education in conventional teaching. more research is needed. 6 matusov and his colleagues (2016) discuss and contrast non-authorial notions of agency. 7 this focus on goal and problem-defining processes can be contrasted with a more conventional focus on problem-solving (cf. bransford, brown & cocking, 1999), which imply goals and problems firmly preset by others in advance and not negotiable with the student. these goals are usually set monologically and are pre-planned by the teacher. 8 in contrast to education as reproduction of ready-made culture, education-for-well-unknown-past (or education for poorly foreseen future rooted in the past) involves students’ production of culture, culture making based on their here-and-now interests, needs, and inquiries. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a169 tests), and contribution to self and others within and outside the school practices (collins & halverson, 2009). the dialogic concept of authorial agency matusov (2011a) has proposed an alternative, authorial approach to education based on recognition of the student’s authorial agency as the central concern of education. he called it “an authorial approach” because both the teacher and the student are seen as unique authors of their guidance, learning, and education. buchanan (1979) argued that a human being is different from all other animals in being “artifactual” – i.e., creating new cultural constraints that promote new desires and new subjectivities in his or her own new and not fully predictable being, “we are, and will be, at least in part, that which we make ourselves to be. we construct our own beings, again within limits. we are artifactual, as much like the pottery shards that the archaeologists dig up as like the animals whose fossils they also find” (pp. 9495). criticizing the existing economic models of education as “human capital”, based on a technological approach focusing on well-defined preset curricular endpoints, buchanan argued, “а good part of education can be modeled appropriately neither as capital investment nor as consumption of final services. instead it must somehow be modeled as ‘spending on becoming’ – on becoming the person that we want to be rather than the one we think we might be if the spending is not made in this way” (p. 96). however, as he argued further in his paper, “we” (i.e., students, parents, society) do not know what we want of this new, becoming; “we” will become "we" as “we” reach this new becoming. thus, buchanan suggested, the goal of education should focus on opening opportunities for students for furthering their not fully known “becoming,” and the new transcending of themselves, instead of any well-defined curricular endpoints, or ready-made curricular standards which are known in advance, as in a technological agency-free education. basing his definition of human authorial agency on scholarship by spinoza, bakhtin, buchanan, bateson, argyris, schön, sidorkin, and bibler, matusov (2011a) abstracted the following crucial, but not exhaustive, aspects of authorial agency: 1. person’s transcendence of any preset, given, existing limits, expectations, and norms of a sociocultural practice (bakhtin, 1993; buchanan, 1979); 2. recognition and validation of the underlining value of this transcendence by relevant others and the self (either positive and/or negative) (buchanan, 1979); 3. recognition of the cause of the transcendence in oneself, irreducible to anything else (causa sui) (buchanan, 1979; spinoza, white, & stirling, 1910); 4. personal and social responsibility for this transcendence and its recognition (i.e., requiring justificationresponse by others and the self, bakhtin’s insistence on “non-alibi-in-being”) (bakhtin, 1993; buchanan, 1979)9; 5. creation of a new definition of quality (i.e., what is good and bad) of the practice through this transcendence and its recognition – the criteria for quality do not fully preexist the deed of the agency (i.e., aristotelian notion of praxis in contrast to poïesis, where the definition of the quality of the activity is preset) (argyris & schön, 1978; aristotle, 2000; bateson, 1987; matusov & hampel, 2008); 6. this transcendence and its recognition occur on a big, highly visible, scale that often requires special actions (i.e., the actions that are often referred as "self-actualization", see maslow, 1943) as well as on a small, rather unnoticeable scale which penetrates even people’s everyday routines and basic needs (matusov, 9 buchanan (1979) wrote, “if individual man is to be free, he is to be held accountable, he is to be deemed responsible for his actions. but at the same time he is allowed to take credit for his achievement. who can claim credit for results that could have been predicted from nature? from а knowledge of his genetic endowment or his social environment, or both? but once man is conceived in the image of an artifact, who constructs himself through his own choices, he sheds the animalistically determined path of existence laid out for him by the orthodox economists’ model. а determined and programmed existence is replaced by the uncertain and exciting quest that life must be” (p. 110). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a170 2011a); 7. the existing, ready-made, given culture provides the material for the person’s transcendence of the practice and recognition of this transcendence by self and others (buchanan, 1979); 8. authorial agency exists and reveals itself through a person’s acts of culture transformation10, culture making, and culture production (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009; lobok, 2001); 9. disagreement, misand nonunderstanding, non-participation, non-cooperation, and collision of participants’ desires are birthmarks of authorial agency (matusov, 1996, 2001, 2011c); 10. authorial agency is unpredictable, ontological, unique, personal, and eventful (bakhtin, 1993; buchanan, 1979; lobok, 2001; matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999); 11. the human nature reveals itself in the authorial agency. in contrast to the above listed aspects of authorial agency, the focus of technological, agency-free or agency-exploitative approaches to education is on the reproduction of the given culture, arrival to an official agreement and consensus, and/or establishing standards of participation and human subjectivity. such approaches, common for conventional institutionalized education, dehumanize people and suppress their agency. creativity, originality, and uniqueness are not scarce properties of a small number of cultural, political, scientific, artistic, or economic elites, a very few innately gifted geniuses, and/or authorities; rather, creativity, originality and uniqueness are the essence of humanity, precious features of any human being both in his or her past, actuality, and future potentiality (csikszentmihalyi & csikszentmihalyi, 1988; grant, 2016; matusov, 2011a; rogers & freiberg, 1994). the perplexing issue for education here is the degree to which the recognition, value, scope, and promotion of human authorial agency leads us to envision diverse socially valuable practices for particular people. it could well be that this envisioning lies outside of the arena of institutionalized education, where there is little or no concern with pre-set curricular endpoints, and where there is greater recognition and value of the person’s peripheral and full participation (lave & wenger, 1991) in valued societal practices11. in contrast to a technological approach which sees meaning as pre-existent to engagement in education, bakhtin (1986; 1999) argued that meaning making processes are essentially dialogical processes involving at least two consciousnesses: the addressing and the responding consciousness to the other. these two consciousnesses are opaque and non-transparent to each other: they are genuinely interested in what one asks and how the other replies (matusov, 2015a). to emphasize this important fact, matusov (2011c) has introduced a notion of interaddressivity, in which involving consciousnesses expect to be surprised by each other (and by themselves), and thus value and respect each other’s authorial agency. in contrast, excessive finalizing, objectivizing, calculating, and/or manipulating of another person reduce or even suppress the human authorial agency of the other person (and sometimes the person’s own agency if these actions are directed on the person’s own self) (matusov & smith, 2007). dialogic authorial approach to education in the dialogic authorial espoused approach to education, the authorial agency of the student and the teacher is valued and recognized by the participants as the primary goal of education – first and foremost by the teacher (and supported by the school system). matusov and his colleagues (matusov, 2011a, 2015b; matusov & brobst, 2013; matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012) argue that in a dialogic classroom a student’s authorship can take two qualitatively distinct forms: 10 as hegel argued, an individual “cannot define the goal of his action until he has acted…” (cited in leontiev, 1981, p. 62). 11 however, there is still arguably a great need for standards-based participation in economy and bureaucratic institutionalized practices, at which technological agency-free education is directed. increasing automatization, robotization, telecommunication, nanotechnology, and, computerization as well as outsourcing both blue and white collar standards-based jobs to china and india may soon decrease the demand for technological agency-free education in favor of agency-based education, deffaa (kaku, 2011; pink, 2005; zhao, 2009). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a171 1. the student’s responsive authorship, in which the student provides creative, interested, and substantive responses to the teacher’s assignments and questions (i.e., teacher’s dialogic ontological provocations) – these students’ responses transcend the teacher’s expectations and surprise the participants (teacher and students), and 2. the student self-generated authorship, in which students initiate (individually or collectively) new projects, new inquiries, self-assignments, self-initiated readings and discussions (i.e., self-initiated academic assignments and self-committed long-term learning journeys) that they want to do and pursue. the difference between these two forms of student authorship can be blurry due to their dialogic and agentive nature: the responsive authorship always has a self-generating aspect while the self-generating authorship is always responsive and addressive (matusov, 2011a, 2015b; matusov & brobst, 2013). nevertheless, these two forms of student authorship establish their own qualities and can even be in contradiction to each other. indeed, student self-generating authorship requires resources of time, space, materials, and even human resources out of the school (i.e., involvement of interested persons outside the classroom) to be free from teacher-initiated assignments and questions (greenberg, 1992; neill, 1960), while the student’s responsive authorship heavily depends on the teacher’s dialogic ontological provocations (matusov, 2009). matusov and brobst (2013) speculate that these two forms of student authorship may constitute two developmental phases of student agency in a given social practice of students moving from responsive to self-generated authorship. alternatively, the over-reliance on the teacher-initiated form of student agency may be based on the need for a student to be provoked to engage, a phenomenon, which arguably has been generated by the students’ socialization within a traditional schooling model. the amount of time the student has been previously socialized into a traditional schooling model is related to the amount of time the student may need for de-socialization in conventional technological education, i.e., conventional technological school detoxification, – see the literature on the free school (holt, 1972), summerhill (neill, 1960, p. 3), homeschooling (llewellyn, 1998, pp. 127-130), and sudbury valley school model (greenberg, 1992). a dialogic authorial approach to education emphasizes the unpredictable, improvisational, eventful, dialogic, and ontological nature of education (lobok, 2001; matusov, 2009). students tentatively arrive to their own undetermined, transitional curricular endpoints; these endpoints are not predicted by the teacher and by the students themselves. students’ desires, problems, interests, and goals are central in authorial education and their participation in socially desired practices is viewed by the teachers as legitimate, negotiable, creative, active, and peripheral. the legitimate peripheral participation (lave & wenger, 1991) is initially evident in the students’ self-sustained “opinionship” (matusov & von duyke, 2010), not yet being bounded and engaged with diverse important opinions, evidence, and voices of others in the field (and beyond). however, with students’ increasing participation, the peripheral nature of their participation becomes more and more questionable and contestable by the participants in the educational process and by relevant outsiders within an “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). in such discourse, the students and other participants begin perceiving themselves as ever more full participants who legitimately author the practice; they are also recognized as such by relevant others. learning occurrence, duration, and its content are not limited in time and space, or by guidance (collins & halverson, 2009). the purpose of authorial education, dialogic education for and from authorial agency (aka deffaa), is to promote the students’ agency and unique voices in socially desired practices – voices which are recognized by the students’ themselves and others relevant to the practice. however, we want to emphasize a contested nature of the “socially desired practice” notion – who, how, and what defines this social desirability of a practice remains and should always remain questionable, problematized, and negotiated in the society. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a172 what can provide a source for promotion of authorial agency within authorial education are big dramatic dialogic events in which there is a collision of the participants' incompatible desires directed at each other (e.g., between the teacher and the students and among the students). the participants often want from each other what the other party does not want to do. even in light of the fact that personal desires may have shared social, historical and cultural aspects, and the fact that these desires emerge through shared here-and-now experiences, the compatibility and synchronicity of diverse desires are not guaranteed. in a technological approach to education, this collision of incompatible desires directed at each other is resolved monologically and unilaterally in favor of the teacher’s (or the educational authority's) desire to make the student arrive at the curricular endpoints preset by the teacher. thus, the student’s incompatible learning desire is viewed as illegitimate, unless it happens to be in the exact concord with the teacher’s desire that is often shaped or exacerbated by the state standards. in contrast, the success12 of dialogic authorial education is always unfinalized, interpretative, and potentially contested. in other words, the definition of “good education” and “the quality of education” is a part of education itself, focusing on dialogic testing of students’ conflicting alternative ideas and desires (see the notion of "praxis of praxis," in matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). the definition of “good education” is rooted in the emergent resolution of this conflict of the participants’ incompatible desires directed at each other (and the desires of observers who judge the success). even more, dialogic authorial education defines itself within this collision of desires. in essence, authorial education cannot be sanitized from conflict and controversy; it may be messy, uncertain, unpredictable, and its outcomes are contestable (smith, 2010) – but these collisions and controversies are viewed as legitimate and often addressed through democratic processes of decision making (greenberg, 1992; neill, 1960). ultimately, in the dialogic education for and from authorial agency, the student is led into testing ideas, assuming new responsibilities and developing new questions and concerns from their participation in socially desired practices. in turn, the student is brought closer to new sources of support and guidance within the classroom and in the outside community. testing the dialogic authorial approach in this section, we briefly consider five common challenges to the deffaa. we see these five challenges as the most acute for deffaa. of course, these are not the only challenges to the deffaa; however, we limit our exploration for the scope of this paper. our purpose is to allow for diverse voices from the literature on democratic education to intersect with deffaa, a thought experiment, which provides important opportunities for dialogically testing the ideas in our approach. where is learning of the existing culture in deffaa? conventionally, education is viewed as reproduction of the ready-made culture and preparation for the future making of culture. some educators are concerned that the dialogic authorial approach does not promote learning of what is given — i.e., the ready-made culture for the students. thus, for example, adler (1982) argues that students should first learn (for them) new material and new information through a traditional pedagogy of lecturing, demonstrations, and assignments; only after they reach familiarity with the new material should a critical socratic dialogue be applied. these educators view dialogic and/or authorial approaches (in combination or separate) as complementary to a traditional pedagogy of 12 applying economic analysis of “use value” and “exchange value” to learning, nilsson and wihlborg (2011) argue that the notion of “success” as a finalized and well-defined category is not compatible with genuine education (of what matusov defines as “authorial education”). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a173 transmission of knowledge or socialization in the existing ready-made culture. in their view, the goal of dialogic and/or authorial approaches is to deepen understanding of the ready-made culture and to prepare the students to transcend it. our main objection against these approaches is ethical. authorial agency — transcendence of the given — is the essence of human being. any postponement of this essential feature of being constitutes violence against a basic human right. the given is also constantly learned through its transcendence. probably the best illustration of this process is how babies learn their native language. babies always use language agentively, for their unique and personal goals in their unique contexts. socialization in the conventionality of their native language occurs within this process through their communicative failures and successes and through guiding corrections by others (lock, 1980). in contrast to teaching language in conventional schools, babies do not first learn the forms, norms and conventions of a language, and only after learning these forms, go about filling such conventional words with their own agentive personal meanings. rather, the existing cultural forms, norms, facts, concepts, culture, etc. may and do become a part of student’s dialogic testing of their own and others’ positions, ideas, solutions, dilemmas, desires, etc. in other words, the so called “given” in dialogic authorial education is fully present, re-animated, problematized and deconstructed in the scope of the dialogic testing of ideas, rather than based upon a pre-set endpoint. what is wrong with non-dialogic authorial approaches? as far as we know, there are two major non-dialogic authorial approaches. one is rooted in the democratic school movement (greenberg, 1992; holt, 1972; neill, 1960). it focuses on creating a democratic school society — “a scaled down democratic society” (rietmulder, 2009) — in private schools and promoting autodidactic, voluntary education among students. this approach downplays the quality of and approaches to teaching, and instead heavily relies on the students’ own learning activism promoted by the democratic and voluntary nature of the school society. in agreement with the democratic school movement, we think that students should be involved in self-governance and making decisions about their own education. defining education as praxis of praxis, where students should explore and define values of their own education, we agree that educational practice must be democratized13. however, in our assessment of this non-dialogic authorial approach, while critical dialogue seems to occur in these schools on a systematic basis, it is limited to issues of interpersonal relations (often conflict resolution), self-governance, and to availability of alternative ideas and positions in the community14. by contrast, in our view, this approach does not significantly commit to giving students systematic guidance and opportunities for critical dialogue on the students’ academic activities. in our observations, a technological pedagogical approach often highly penetrates academic activities in these schools. we suspect that students’ and their parents’ (and teachers’?) concerns about fitting into instrumentality of the broader society may shape their academic pedagogy. another common non-dialogic authorial approach can be called the “romantic social justice” approach. it focuses on inspiring the students for some important social justice causes and channels their agentive creativity to explore and approach these causes. this approach has a very strong ontological, passionate, activist, and agentive character in contrast with alienated conventional education. however, critical dialogue within this approach may only sporadically occur, and it would be highly limited to the achievement of the cause and the “right thinking” associated with that cause. critical challenging of this 13 currently, we consider adding another capital d to our acronym: democratic dialogic education for and from authorial agency (ddeffaa). 14 there seems to be a concern with the teacher imposing guidance on the students by suggesting students to study alternative ideas outside of the community when students do not initiate this move on their own. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a174 cause may lead to violence, ostracism, expulsion, and so on. good examples of such an approach are the communard movements in the soviet union (makarenko, 1973; sidorkin, 1995) and ron jones’ pedagogical experiment in palo alto, california in the late 1960s (jones, 1972). in our view, with strict curbing of critical dialogue by violently taking certain issues out of discussion, this approach often promotes totalitarianism (c. becker, gansel, & thorwarth, 2011; caskey, 1979). can dialogic authorial approach be scaled up? is it desirable? could the dialogic authorial approach be brought to the schools on a large scale? can education actively promote students’ authorial agency in socially desired practices when students’ desires, goals, interests, creativity, diversity, and problems are welcome in the classroom by the teacher not as tools of manipulation for the preset curricular endpoints, as some innovative educators want to do, but rather as central for educational processes? this is a good and important question. in our view, the answer is no, not within the current educational institutions nor within the current societal economic, political and social outlook. in our view, in the current need-based economy with its heavy reliance on machine-like human labor, there are huge pressures to technologize education in order to produce laborers who act like smart machines. in this broader socioeconomic and cultural context, education is largely organized as survival experience for the students through series of summative assessments and credentials. currently, a dialogic authorial approach is possible on a very limited scale, as small oases supported by local liberal conditions and by enthusiastic activism of its participants. nevertheless, we think that is important to try to create these oases for a dialogic authorial approach to promote human potential and to experiment and develop it for upcoming societal changes (see below). 1. the greek word “school” originally meant “leisure.” 15 conventional schools do not provide leisure for the students even when they shelter students from labor and provide resources to satisfy their basic needs. all of the person’s basic needs and necessities (including physical and mental health) are satisfied now and in the future without the person involved in labor, chores, or assignment-based education, 2. there is no social and psychological stigma for the person of not being involved in labor, 3. there are no anxieties about the present and the future, and 4. there is enough social and material support for the person’s leisure activities. we define “leisure” as an opportunity for a person’s self-actualization when: in contrast, guided by a technological approach, conventional school occupies and colonizes the students’ time with imposed assignments. in conventional schools, students do what other people ask them to do and not what they decide to do on their own. in contrast, in a dialogic authorial approach, education is defined as a leisurely pursuit of the critical examination of the self, life, and world in a critical dialogue. the good news for a dialogic authorial approach seems to be that the modern economy has been experiencing a radical change for the first time in the history of humanity, in which an agency-based economy, society, and education could perhaps become possible. here are these trends. first, more and more emerging smart machines are replacing the jobs where humans work like smart machines (frey & osborne, 2013). second, labor activity in turn gradually becomes more like praxis, where goals and the quality of activity emerge, and less like poïesis, where goals and the definition of the activity pre-exist of the activity itself. third, the need for authorial labor based on the human agentive creativity increases (zhao, 2009). fourth, for the first time in the history of humanity, the need for human’s involvement in economy — i.e., labor — drops, 47% of total us employment “could be automated…over the next decade 15 it is not an accident that the concept and practice of school-as-leisure emerged in a slavery-based society in ancient greece, where full-time leisure was available for the few at expense of the many. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a175 or two” (frey & osborne, 2013, p. 44). all these trends may create conditions (but not the determination!) for the emergence of a leisureand agency-based society that may require a dialogic authorial approach to education. at the same time, we warn that this transition process can be very painful producing technological unemployment. also, the need for authorial labor may also be co-opted by neoliberal capitalist endeavors, producing youth as portfolios (gee, lankshear, & hull, 1996). will non-imposing education work? except the democratic school movement, all other institutional education seems to be imposing on the students to force them to study, what to study, how to study, and with whom to study. even democratic schools are often embedded in the regime of mandatory education and needs-based society that puts pressures on individual students, their parents, and the teachers to conform to technological demands (e.g., college admission, graduation credentials). finally, there is a reasonable concern of whether people in a leisure-based society will voluntary commit to their education — any education however it is defined. would education become an endeavor for very few nerds? would not a majority of people choose to entertain themselves instead as it happens in many unemployed people (appelbaum, 2014)? of course, as we defined the notion of leisure above, an unemployed worker may rarely experience leisure being raised and living in a needs-based society. nevertheless, in our view, this is a valid concern and an empirical question to investigate16. what is the relationship between a dialogic authorial espoused approach and other espoused educational approaches? again, with exception of the democratic school movement, almost all other educational approaches try to be monopolistic. they often try to convince the public and the state to impose their vision of education on all the students, teachers, and educational institutions. to some degree, it makes sense since they all are convinced in their own vision of education as being better, if not more correct, than other educational approaches. in addition to being visionary, like all other approaches that claim that their own particular vision of education is better than all others, dialogic authorial approach is also inherently pluralistic (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2011). its liberal pluralism — support of all other educational approaches for existence — is rooted in its insistence that education is praxis of praxis (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). this means that the students have legitimate right to explore and define their own education as a part of the education itself. ironically, a diversity of educational approaches, which fight with each other, could be necessary for a dialogic authorial approach to bloom. the following case study helps us articulate what we mean by the authorial approach to education and engage in an empirical discussion of the deffaa challenges described above. sequestering agency: “how can we make devon do what we want him to do?” in the previous, mostly theoretical, sections, we conceptualized the dialogic authorial approach to education, focusing on engaging students in critical examination of the self, the life, and the world. the purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the first author’s partially successful and partially failing attempt to enact a dialogic authorial approach. it will allow the reader to both visualize and problematize a dialogic authorial approach. we will consider a case with a rich “e-paper trail” written by 11 undergraduate, pre-service teacher education students (mostly sophomores), and the instructor (peter, 16 one way to address this important inquiry indirectly is to do a historical analysis of whether and how people used leisure in slavery-based or aristocratic societies. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a176 the first author, pseudonym) in a course on cultural diversity. the case focuses on the university students (future teachers) and their professor discussing several occasions that involved interactions between peter and one minority child in an afterschool center. our research questions in this empirical study were aimed at determining the successes, challenges, and failures of the dialogic authorial pedagogical approach and conditions for them. background: purpose of peter’s college course the goal of the diversity in community contexts course was for preservice teachers – mostly middle class, white and suburban females – to learn how to build good relations with mostly latino/a minority urban working class children. the class included a 9-week practicum (twice a week for 1.5 hours) at a local community center (lcc) in a mid-atlantic u.s. city (for more description of the course and its practices, see matusov, 2009). unlike what could be experienced in a traditional school practicum, the afterschool site where the program was located had an open-ended structure, in which children and preservice teachers have opportunities to engage in activities, which are of interest to the children and where children can reveal their strengths (matusov & smith, 2011).17 the course thus aimed to provide opportunities to the future teachers (12 female, 1 male) to engage with the children in playing games, conducting technology and art projects, and so on. the class also provided a safe learning environment for both university students and afterschool minority children. if our university students did something pedagogically insensitive with the children, the children had a legitimate right to move away from these students (in contrast to their schools). the teaching curriculum of the class was constituted by the instructor’s (peter’s) dialogic provocations around the preplanned list of topics and by emergent issues at the practicum that both the instructor and the students brought to the class and web discussions weekly mini-projects and the final project for the class. each semester the preservice teachers generated unique, recursive-through-the-semester “hot topics” (the students’ term) that generated heated discussion and were considered by the students as the most important, memorable, and consequential for them personally and/or professionally. in this particular class one of these hot topics was the university students’ discussion of devon, an african american 7year old boy from the center. 11 out the 13 total students chose to comment about devon on the class forum (webtalk, n=40 entries) or in their weekly mini-projects (mp, n=7 entries) and insisted on discussion of this boy during several university-class meetings. although the class requirement involved a minimum of 2 webtalk postings per week on student-selected topic relevant to the course, some students made more than 2 postings per week. the weekly mini-projects often involved guided explorations of the topics, discussed in the class and students’ reflective fieldnotes about their work at lcc. there were more oral discussions of devon in the class and outside of the class, some of which the professor likely could not access. one particular preservice teacher, john, made 10 entries about devon and centered his 18-page (not counting 32-page appendixes) final project on devon. devon had appeared at the center only recently and peter had not known him prior to that semester. the emphasis here on “hot topics” is based on a dialogic authorial approach, which prioritizes investigation of an emerging dialogic pedagogical event, issue, or dilemma which provokes replies. the thread of discussions in response to the event is then investigated through the students’ and teachers’ 17 such an organization runs counter to the trend for afterschool programs for minority, low-income youth to be increasing structured like technological schooling (e.g., homework help and structured, skills-based lessons) (halpern, 2002). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a177 related webpostings18, assignments and class discussions. in the case study below, all webpostings and class assignments throughout the semester that were related to devon were analyzed. like in a verbal dialogue, a webposting about devon might emerge in reply to threads or posts which did not immediately have to do with devon. the degree to which a thread discusses devon was based on the judgment of the instructor researcher-participant. data presentation and analysis below we provide lengthy quotes from the students and the instructor in order for a reader to not only understand the students’ intellectual understandings but also to hear their ontological voices grounded in the participants’ desires. the methodology blends the traditions of self-study (tidwell, heston, & fitzgerald, 2009) and participatory action research (anderson, herr, & nihlen, 2007; herr & anderson, 2005). data were collected from all participants in the case and the instructor carefully examined his own practice. rather than using an a priori or open coding method, the researchers examined the text holistically as a complete narrative. a single event was used to illustrate the conjectures in the findings. the flow of the events and our analysis it became apparent to us that the students had diverse ambivalent attitudes toward devon, based on the instructor-researchers’ assessment of the students’ attitude in their webpostings, and student discussion about devon in the class. on the one hand, devon strongly attracted them with his sincerity, energy, spontaneity, ingenuity, interest in them, enthusiasm, openness, and non-conformism; on the other hand, the students were also strongly repelled by his non-cooperation, aggression, violence, freedom, unilateralism, non-participation, resistance, and suspicion of manipulation. it is notable that devon attracted their attention, as based in their unprovoked decision to choose to discuss devon on the discussion forum and in class assignments from the very beginning of their participation at the center. these postings also reflected the preservice teachers’ affection for devon, and the degree to which they attempted to build relations with him. a striking ambivalence is apparent in the student postings; several voices are apparent in the postings, in that the students give their own valuation of devon, and also refer to what they have heard or expect others to think of devon:19 someone mentioned the other day that devon was hard to work with. he is. however, i hung out with him the other day for most of the time we were at the lcc and i thought he was a lot of fun to be around. the way he cares about his doll [that he carries around the center with him] is, i think, admirable in a society where that is constantly being ridiculed [because of its gender stereotypes]. instead of mocking him, i tried to take the doll seriously and i think that caught him off guard a little bit. i believe that he just needs someone to hang out with, so that's what i'm going to do. i have had experience in the past with kids that are typically labeled as "problem kids" and i have found that once they start to trust you and know that you aren't going to hate them if they mess up, they start to listen to you more. i think by gaining kids trust at the lcc, we can guide them so much more than by just coming in and playing a game with them (alexia, mp, 3/16/200620). i've been making devon my little project. he's a rambunctious kid, who means well, but he can often be rude and uncontrollable. he is often disrespectful and a supervisor there has told me the same thing. i'm going to try to shadow him as much as i can and guide him. i'll lead through example and i'll attempt to use the 18 webpostings were a particularly useful form of data since students and teachers responded to each other’s postings on a discussion forum, engaging in extensive asynchronous dialogue on “hot topics” during the course. multiple replies were generated on these topics, and topics regularly shifted in meaning and direction through participation in the forum. 19 any punctuation, grammar, and misspellings are preserved from the original texts to preserve voices of the participants and the informal and relaxed atmosphere of the class online communication. 20 first week of the practicum. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a178 collaborative approach. i'm the one initiating this guidance. [s]ince i'm still working with him, i don’t have much to report on him. he is starting to warm up to me though, because when we were playing soccer he asked me to join. despite the fact that he thinks i'm "the mean one" i think we'll have a good time together. i'm sure i'll learn from him just as he'll learn from me. [i've] found that i don't like how rude many of the kids are. they often don't respect each other and will call each other names. i'm not sure if its a little kid thing, a cultural thing, or what. i just don't like it. [but] devon... he's mine (john, mp, 3/16/2006). as noted in the postings above, devon attracted the students both in strongly positive and strongly negative ways, and discussion of him generated much interest (as seen in the number of replies about him and references to others’ voices within the individual students’ postings themselves). in the last posting above, john, the only male student in the class, made devon his “little project.” later, peter renamed it as “a project for collaboration” for the preservice teachers to learn how to collaborate with devon. in our judgment, this renaming was the beginning of peter’s dialogic ontological provocation for his students to consider an alternative to their search for effective manipulation of devon. however, the students seemed to define this project technologically with the goal to make devon comply with their unilateral demands. this was evident in how one of the students formulated it in a class discussion, in her question to the professor, “how can we make devon do what we want him to do (but without using physical violence)?” we see two important stories in this case based on two conflicts of incompatible desires directed at each other. the first story in the case is about the unfolding relations between university students and devon in their pedagogical desire, incompatible with devon’s own, to domesticate him, to make him predictable, controllable, and safe for them (as seen especially in the postings above by alexia and john). the second story is about the relationship between the professor and his students. peter’s own pedagogical desire, incompatible with his students’ ones, was to introduce a dialogic authorial approach to his undergraduate students in their relations with devon as an alternative to a technological approach. such dramatic collisions between the students’ and teachers’ desires might become a source for promotion of authorial agency. still, peter’s goal was not to convert the students into a dialogic authorial approach but rather help them experience, recognize, understand, reflect on, and evaluate it as a possibility for their own teaching. the goal would be that they be able to compare these two approaches, so they could make an informed choice between the two approaches (or even think about a third approach). peter was ready to accept a possibility that after careful consideration and understanding the students would have decided to reject an authorial approach. for him, dialogic education for and from authorial agency involves success when the students’ decisions regarding their own approach to teaching are informed by considering and testing their professional desires, values, and goals against known alternatives. thus, the pre-service teachers would author their own pedagogy in a critical and informed way. in this authorial approach to education one puts full trust in the students to be the final authority for and authorship of their own learning (klag, 1994; matusov, 1999). by the time that the events surrounding devon had emerged, the undergraduate students had solidly acknowledged that peter had earned his epistemological authority (in addition to his assigned institutional authority). they demanded conceptual and practical guidance from him to fulfill their pedagogical desire for making devon controllable. in part, their pedagogical desire was probably based on how they understood the role of the teacher as rooted in their own school experiences. they were also puzzled by relationship between peter and devon, which was paradoxically different from their own experiences. as john wrote in his miniproject reporting on his interview with devon about his future professional aspirations, “what was most disturbing was his initial response to what he wants to be when he grows up. he wants to be a cop because ‘they steal stuff’ and when he grows up, which to him is age dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a179 ten, he wants to punch people in the face. later, when peter asked him, he said he wants to be a doctor or an artist. (i wonder why he answered differently to peter)” (john, mp, 4/6/2006). it seemed that devon was in different discursive spaces with john versus with peter. with john, devon activated the discursive space of survival, power, and domination fantasizing to be on the top of the power pyramid of the universe abuse (i.e., the us police that in his keen observational eyes, has arbitrary power over his community). in contrast, with peter, devon activated the discursive space of hope fanaticizing about his creative and caring contribution to the world and people. in his own turn, peter supported and legitimated the students’ inquiries and concerns. he tried to question their pedagogical desires of control of devon, encouraged them to talk with and, thus, subjectivize devon by asking him genuine questions of their own interests (rather than constantly finalizing and objectivizing him – a common trend in the relations of preservice and inservice teachers with schoolchildren and community center children studied by matusov & smith, 2007). he also tried to provide his students with alternative approaches and non-technological, non-fool-proof solutions to their problems based on collaboration and enjoyment of being with devon. in the following webtalk posting, peter emphasized devon as an agent of his own feelings and in his relationship with the undergraduate students: re: setting limits to kids in a collaborative way 4/17/2006 10:10 am posted by peter dear jackie— i'm really glad that you seem to expand a zone of your comfort of working with some particular kids! good job! please keep experimenting and report (and reflect) on these attempts as you are doing now. you wrote, "until devon jumped on my back and started eating my hair. that was gross! i made him get down, but he was fixated on getting back at my hair again… i realized that i had to just basically ignore him for a few minutes to get him to let the hair thing alone..." this is great that devon feels comfortable with you. he played with you as he did with other … [university] students. however, you did not feel comfortable and it is a good idea to communicate it to devon. you could have told him, "devon, i really-really enjoy playing with you. i know that you jump on the back of many my colleagues, [university] students, and it is probably fine with them. but, unfortunately, my back is not very strong and it is really painful for me. so, please, do not jump on my back. instead, let's do..." and you can give an alternative game (e.g., "stone, paper, scissors"). what do you think? any other strategies? if you decide to use this strategy or other strategies, please, let us know about the results? peter in the case above, the students did not directly respond to peter’s suggestions (at least known to us), which were aimed at placing devon as an agent with equal rights. however, in some other cases the undergraduates did directly respond to this agency-based guidance, as seen in the following exchange between lora and peter on the online discussion forum about a child at lcc named maryjane (devon was not the only lcc child who was the object of pedagogical actions of peter’s students): re: physical force with kids 4/11/2006 3:14 pm posted by lora sometimes i feel especially with maryjane that the children are just looking for attention. it was not anyone’s fault that she was losing and there was still a good chance she could come back and win the game. i feel like since she was not winning and did not have a lot of attention on her, she decided to steal the cards. she knew it would cause her to be watched or chased since the game could not go on without them. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a180 re: testing alternative hypotheses 4/17/2006 10:03 am posted by peter dear lora— […] your hypothesis is very reasonable however, it is just a hypothesis. it is very dangerous for us, teachers, to act out of unchecked hypotheses because at best we can be insensitive to the kids’ educational needs and at worst we can be unfair in the eyes of the kids. it is important to generate hypotheses and then check them. let me give an alternative hypothesis about maryjane. she may have difficulty to control her emotions that the game generates in all the participants. young kids have problem of coordinating their cognition and emotions. that is why for example little kids cannot play “hide and seek” game because they cannot control their emotions while hiding. almost all little kids “cheat” because of that. it is nothing to do with real cold-blood calculated cheating or with striving for attention. for adults, it is difficult sometimes to understand kids because they are different. i do not want to say that my hypothesis is better than yours (although i have noticed that novice educators overuse the hypothesis about kids’ striving for attention). i see an issue of seeing diverse hypotheses and testing them before acting. do you know how to test these hypotheses? even when there is no time to test hypotheses because actions have to be immediate, it is still a good idea to keep in mind diverse alternative hypotheses so you can read better contextual clues of a situation. talking with the child involved always can be a plus to test your hypotheses and generate new and better ones. what do you think? peter re: testing alternative hypotheses 4/17/2006 6:38 pm posted by lora i agree that there can be many reasons why maryjane acts the way she does. i think as teachers we do need to talk with a child who acts out to get to the bottom of the problem. it could be a simple solution or very complicated. while it seems from lora’s posting above that the undergraduate students began to problematize the afterschool minority children in their web postings, we do not know for sure in the full account how much the students experimented and engaged in conversations with the children at the center. however, we know that they demanded peter to demonstrate the “effectiveness”21 of his pedagogical approach, apparently interpreted by them as a technological one. the students demanded that peter reveal for them a toolkit of essential pedagogical strategies for their work with children; they wanted to learn portable decontextualized (but, probably, conditional) strategies, which could be applied to similar situations in their work with the children. they also wanted to learn universally applicable aspects of children’s psychology, which could be used for manipulation and control of students in their future classrooms. however, peter was ambivalent about “demonstrating the power” of his pedagogical approach because according to his authorial approach: 1) success could not be guaranteed and 2) his definition of success focused on the enjoyment of being-together and promoting student authorial agency. on the other hand, he wanted to prioritize and address his students’ concerns even if he disagreed with these concerns. peter thought that a teacher has to start with subjectivity of his or her students (matusov & smith, 2007). this case below, based on peter’s account of the events, illustrates the demands of the undergraduate 21 effective in the eyes of the university students because the strategy produced the university students’ desired result (i.e., a preset behavioral endpoint). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a181 students for a technological solution to addressing children’s conflicts, even in response to being guided by peter to respond to the event with an agency-based approach: mr. dolphin, mr. shark, mr. tiger, and mr. snake: the peter-devon play community i [peter] was called for help by my students to a small resource room at lcc where at that time board games and toys were stored in a locked metal closet. when i came in to the resource room, i saw a group of 6-7 of my students (john, who made devon his “project,” wasn’t there) staying in a half circle and in the middle of the room there was devon with many toys on the floor all around the room. my students explained that devon asked them to open the closet with the toys and promised to clean after himself when asked by my students. when they asked him to clean, he refused. i asked devon if it were true and he replied it was. i asked him why he refused to clean up after himself despite his earlier promise, and he told me that he changed his mind. my students looked helpless, but i saw them expecting some miracle from me, their professor. meanwhile, devon was leaving the room holding a toy shark in his hand. i picked up a toy dolphin lying on the floor and asked in a pretend voice, “hey, mr. shark, can you help mr. dolphin to clean up this stuff, please?” devon turned back to me, smiled, and replied also in a pretend voice, “ok!” we started picking up toys scattered on the floor and putting them back to the closet. my students were standing above us staring in disbelief without helping us. i noticed a toy tiger and asked devon in a pretend voice, “hey, mr. shark, do we need a help from mr. tiger?” devon replied in a pretend voice, “no, mr. dolphin, we will clean by ourselves. we’re friends, mr. dolphin.” i said looking at my students in a pretend voice, “thanks, mr. tiger, for offering your help but mr. shark and i clean up ourselves without your help.” my students did not get the hint i was sending them to join us and have a nice playful moment of collaboration while cleaning up. since i was taller than devon, mr. dolphin was lifting toys up to the upper shelves, while mr. shark was cleaning up toys from the floor and passing me the toys. we did not rush and did a lot of playful improvisations; for example, i was suggesting taking mr. snake carefully so it would not bite mr. shark with snake poison. devon laughed and intentionally dropped mr. snake and i would say on behalf of mr. snake, “ouch! i won’t bite you, mr. shark!” and then immediately added in mr. dolphin’s character, “mr. shark, but can we trust mr. snake? he can change his mind later. be careful with him!” devon laughed a lot and handled the toy snake with care to avoid its mouth. when we were done, devon suggested doing the cleaning again. but i quickly locked the closet and told him that we could do it sometime in future but we had to leave lcc for [the university] as the bus was already waiting for us. he went with us to the lcc door to say goodbye and hugged me at the door. on the bus, my students expressed their amazement of how skillful i was in making devon comply with my wishes. i was rather uncomfortable with their praise because it was not what i was doing. my goal was to have a good time with devon while cleaning up the toys rather than to force him to do cleanup. i used a cleanup situation to create a good playful moment with devon so we could have fun and enjoy being with each other. i thus did not see it as an issue of devon complying with my demands against his own desires. i see his compliance as an accidental by-product of our enjoyment and good social relations. it was not guaranteed and it was not imposed on devon 22. i asked my students why they stood around devon and me and did not join in our fun game. my students replied that they did not get that i wanted them to help. i told that it was not about me wanting them to help, or even helping with the cleaning, but rather about joining in our fun game and having good time together. i saw that they did not get what i was saying, and i began to think about how to better explain what i meant to them later on. later at lcc, i saw them trying to use “my strategy” of forcing devon to clean up or do another one of their demands by using pretend play. this strategy sounded very fake and manipulative in my view. needless to say, 22 the issue of how much devon’s clean-up was accidental or not can be contested because peter centered devon on the game of clean-up. in peter’s view, it was accidental because if devon (or he) improvisationally deviated from clean-up, peter would have followed this new direction. clean-up was not the final goal but a provocation for joyful being together. however, there might be an alternative interpretation of peter’s provocation. see more below in the paper. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a182 devon not only refused to comply and engage in the students’ manipulative “games,” but often became rather violent toward my students. my explanation of his violent replies was that he was very sensitive to being manipulated by other people. i saw many times how his mother, who was apparently overwhelmed in her life, was yelling at him and threatening him with beatings when he refused to leave lcc with her (or in reply to complaints of devon by the lcc staff). i had no doubts that she did not use empty threats as i saw her being very physical with him at lcc and on the street outside the center (peter’s fieldnote#1 about pretend play cleanup of 4/3/2006, reconstructed in full on 3/27/2011) in response to witnessing and discussing this event involving playful, friendly and improvisational collaboration between peter and devon, the students began searching for a powerful and reliable “strategy” that would work with devon to make him predictably comply with their demands. this became apparent to peter in the students’ replies to him on the class discussion board. in response to his question about what “approaches” have been “successful”23 with devon, the students began to talk about “techniques” which would predictably work with any child (in bold below). devon was further finalized and objectivized by the students as a “stubborn” child who is “set in his opinion.” the students’ discourse moved outside of any authorial relation between themselves and devon, and instead moved purely onto a technological plane, despite peter’s efforts as provoking them in a more authorial direction (the emphasis is ours): helping devon to help himself 4/3/2006 7:05 pm posted by peter dear folks— today i notice that when you transform a request into a play with devon, he becomes very cooperative (and respectful). for example, he dropped blocks but refused to gather them. instead he grabbed a toy shark and prepared to leave a room. i turned the request into a game by asking shark to help to gather the blocks. the "shark" agreed to help and devon and i gathered blocks quickly. i used the same approach later when i asked devon's mouse to help me collect all puzzle pieces from the floor. what other successful approaches did you try with devon? what do you think? peter re: helping devon to help himself 4/3/2006 9:23 pm posted by mina i have to be honest, i did not expect devon to respond the way that he did. i know that with the way i was raised, little things like not picking up after yourself were not tolerated at all and you were in a way yelled into, or kind of scared into doing it. this way you learned not to mess around with the authoritative position and you just knew what to expect if you didn't do it. i guess you don't always have to get all bent out of shape or aggravated. instead just get creative. techniques for clean-up 4/5/2006 5:49 pm posted by dominique 23 peter seemed to use the term “success” as “a boundary object” (star & griesemer, 1989) that had diverse if not opposing meaning for him and his students. for example, students may have defined success as devon cleaning up; peter, however, defined success as being in the world-with children, building relationships, and sharing a joyful moment. this boundary nature of the interpretation of "success" stayed obscure for the students, as they did not seem to sense its interpretative ambiguity. furthermore, peter's formulation "i used the same approach" – could easily be interpreted instrumentally, i.e. as part of the technological approach! thus, it further masks peter's authorial approach, instead of revealing it! we wonder if peter should have further problematized the diverse notions of success, rather than directly engaging in this discussion of how to promote success technologically defined by the students. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a183 in my past, i have seen a few successful techniques that teachers or people who watch children use. one technique is to give the child a five minute warning that clean-up time is coming so that they aren’t surprised and so opposed to it when playtime is done. another one has to do with the technique peter used. have the kid pretend they are a vacuum cleaner and put their arms out as they make sounds. this way it seems that they are playing as they "suck up" the toys. the third way usually worked well on the boys. if you ask them if they have strong muscles, of course most of them will insist that they do. then they will pick up the toys and show you how strong their muscles are getting. i was just wondering if someone else encountered anyone that has used techniques such as these; both successful or unsuccessful. techniques for clean-up 4/5/2006 8:23 pm posted by amanda a teacher i have worked with in the past used the 5 minute warning method. usually kids will keep playing but then the teacher starts counting down, so it’s like a game to see who can clean up the fastest or before she finishes the countdown. i think this would probably work better in a classroom rather than playing a game with one or two kids, but it’s worth a try. re: techniques for clean-up 4/6/2006 3:09 pm posted by john something that i found worked well was asking them to do something, without really asking. when devon knocked game pieces on the floor and didn’t pick them up i said, "well i'm not going to pick them up." immediately he got down on the ground and picked up the pieces. interesting! as demonstrated above, the university students continued to focus on finding effective ready-made strategies with predictable results that could be applied across all children and contexts with the intent of eliciting the same compliant behaviour (marked in bold above). in contrast, peter wanted to show his university students his authorial approach, which values a child’s agency and focuses on being-togetherin-the-world with the child. similarly, nikulin (2010) defined dialogue as the main ontological condition of the human being, which is always being-together. such an approach hinges on an improvisational stance toward emergent events in the world, recognizing and valuing responsive participation and enjoyment in on-going events. by offering devon a moment to play, rather than telling him what he must do or not do, peter extended an invitation to devon to be his friend. devon accepted it and reciprocated by joining the pretend clean up. as marjanovic-shane (2011) argues, creating play is both a mutually voluntary practice (all participants invite all others and voluntarily join in play but can also legitimately reject the invitation) and an authorial practice in which the players surprise each other with the unpredictability of each other’s next move (“play offer”) (cf. the notion of "interaddressivity" in matusov, 2011c). at the same time, the players strengthen their trust in each other through collaborating on joint authoring of play events. what happened in the "mr. shark and mr. dolphin" play was emergent, unpredictable, and surprising to both participants (e.g., "can we trust mr. shark?"). at the same time, both peter and devon could emerge as authors of the play content as well as creators of their new friendly relationship. the following field note of peter’s playful response to another event illustrates this improvisational nature of authorial relations: encouraging devon’s agency: being in the world with children when i [peter] entered a computer lab at lcc, i had a sense of déjà vu. mr. scott (a lcc staff responsible for teaching children technology …) was not in the room but many of my [university] students were there with francoise (another university instructor), including john. [lcc] kids were playing on computers located on the periphery of the long and somewhat narrow room. in the middle of the room, there were long tables with legodialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a184 logo blocks on them. under the tables, devon left lego blocks that he played with and did not want to clean them up. some of the students and francoise used “my strategy” asking in their pretend voice “mr. shark” to clean up (there was no toy shark although). devon refused in his own voice without accepting the role of mr. shark. some [lcc] kids tried to support my [university] students telling devon that they would “kick his ass out of the computer lab” if he did not start cleaning at once. in his turn, devon told them that he would “kick their asses out of lcc.” the verbal abuse escalated. my students turned to me expecting me to do something miraculous. i was amused by how older kids could use the bossing tone of their voice with devon – it made me smile. it presented me with another playful opportunity. i turned to devon, pointed at him with my finger, and ordered him in a pretend, overly exaggerated voice of authority, “devon, i forbid you to clean up! you’ll lose this privilege today!” everybody, including devon, immediately stopped the verbal battle and turned to me in disbelief. devon dropped on his knees and started silently cleaning up legos under the table. i bended under the table and yelled in a fake anger, “stop cleaning! i order you stop cleaning!” devon smiled at me and yelled back, “i will! i will!” i continued in a fake authority voice, “what a disobedient boy! stop cleaning at once! i said so! i order to you!” devon laughed while he kept cleaning, “no, i will! i won’t listen to you!” i kept insisting in a fake manner, “why don’t you listen to me?! i’m your boss!” devon laughed loudly, “i ain’t have no bosses!” i was improvising, “what about me?! i’m your boss! they [showing at the people around] can’t boss you around but i can!” devon laughed out loud – he was almost hysterical, “yes, you’re my boss, but i won’t listen to you.” i continued, “hey, you, stop cleaning at once! if not, if not…. i… [i made a fake anger face ready to strike]… i’ll join you!” he laughed at this threat and i joined him cleaning the legos under the table. we cleaned and laughed a lot. some other lcc kids laughed and joined us. francoise joined us yelling at us in a pretend way that she forbade both of us cleaning and that she would call mr. scott to stop us if we would not stop at once. my students laughed as well but did not join us even though i, this time openly, encouraged them. on a bus on our way back to the university, john came to my seat and asked me why devon listened to me and not to anybody else. i told john that my goal was not to force devon to do what i wanted him to do but rather to have a good time together while cleaning up together and that i did not have any strategy. i told john that in my view, devon was sick and tired of people bossing him around and that he was very sensitive to manipulation. i told him that if i needed to ask devon, i would ask him but i would also respect him refusing my request. i tried to encourage john to start treating devon with respect and enjoying being with him without bossing him around by focusing on how to make him to do what john wanted him to do. john told me that it was difficult for him but he would think about that and probably try. and john did. in a week told me about his successful effort after a class (see his description in his final project) (peter’s fieldnote#2, “i forbid you to clean up!”, sometime later in april 2006, reconstructed in full on 3/27/2011). what is notable here is peter’s focus on having a good time, improvising and being in the world with children. invitations to play open up possibilities, explicitly signal the non-obligatory nature of participation, in which refusal is expected and respected as a legitimate response, and bring forth the authorship of the participants. this may potentially lead to responsive improvisation within the ongoing discourse of the children. in doing so, peter playfully re-voiced, double-voiced, the authoritarian discourse of the other lcc children (and indirectly other bosses on devon’s life) while populating it with his own carnivalistic intonations (bakhtin, 1999); in turn, he gave a new meaning to this discourse for devon and the other children. it is also notable that such an approach to responding to events with children appears to be something which the university students might find attractive by its apparent gaiety, humor, collaborative friendly spirit, humanity, kindness, respect, play, mutual teasing, carnival spirit, dethroning of authority, and powerfulness (sullivan, smith, & matusov, 2009). yet, it was still confusing and difficult for them to recognize authorial guidance. their puzzlement is somewhat understandable since the authorial approach, in the two examples above provided by peter, elicited the reaction that the university students sought. peter chose to create this puzzlement intentionally to produce “a boundary object” (star & dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a185 griesemer, 1989) for his students; it was thus important for peter to create such a boundary object with which he could address and prioritize the university students’ technological concerns, while at the same time introducing a new educational approach to them. on the other hand, an invitation to play may potentially represent quite a powerful influence for an invited player to agree with the content, the rules and the basis of a play! according to marjanovic-shane (2016), the focus of the participants in play is on building an imaginary situation (chronotope). without collaboration and working toward a mutual agreement, this goal is hard if not impossible to achieve (marjanovic-shane, 2011). the play may fall apart when someone refuses to “play” and becomes a “spoilsport”. it is much more likely for such “boundary negotiations” to take place among the players with “equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999) for the negotiations than among the players in hierarchical relationships. the illegitimacy of contesting the play rules is especially true in educational settings where play, improvisation and drama are used as pedagogical tools for achieving preset educational goals rather than authentically for having a good time together. the only option for a child in situations of unequal rank may be to refuse to play altogether, since s/he does not stand a chance to renegotiate the imagined chronotope content and rules. the price of refusal, however, may be high. the institutions usually do not tolerate a “spoilsport”. “[h]e must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community” (huizinga, 2009, p. 11). because of that, it is possible that devon’s compliance was not completely “an accidental by-product of our enjoyment and good social relations” as peter believed (see peter’s fieldnote #1 above), but that their enjoyment and good social relations created enough attraction for devon to agree with peter’s play rules and thus join the play. the fact that devon refused similar invitations to play by peter’s students, probably interpreting them as another tool of coercion, might be an additional indicator that it was the quality of the relationship and the teacher’s focus on being together and having a good time that created an authentic opportunity for the participant’s authorship. john’s increasing subjectivizing and problematizing interest in devon initially provoked to do so as a part of peter’s class assignments and then increasingly on his own, john chose to spend time and talk with devon. here we first identify john’s responsive authorship; second, we see his emerging self-generated authorship as he became increasingly more committed to a long-term learning journey with devon. john increasingly asked devon more genuine questions of john’s own interest. initially, getting to know devon seemed to be another technological strategy for john, but then this “strategy” apparently led john to a more authorial approach (emphasis is ours to reflect on technological and authorial approaches): i wanted devon to understand that what he was doing wasn't acceptable but at the same time i didn't want to lecture him. i've noticed that he doesn't like be lectured. the best way to get through to him is through friendly suggestions, not flat out correction (john, wp, 3/25/2006). something i found most interesting: devon said that when he has a problem or gets in trouble he would come to me. i didn't realize the impact i had made on him already. [h]e doesn't like school because he doesn't like to "get teached." and he dislikes the lcc because he doesn't like being told what to do. … [i]t was very interesting getting to know devon better. i learned things about him that i never would have expected and i look forward to continuously working with him (john, mp, 4/6/2006). i've noticed as we've been there that the children at the lcc seem to respond differently to verbal commands than other children i've worked with. specifically, devon has made me think about this. i would like to explore this topic [in my final project for the class]. how do these children like to be asked what to do? why do they prefer this way? what is the one way they hate to be told to do something? is this just at the lcc or in school as well? all of these questions are important to my projects (john, mp, 4/20/2006) dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a186 it seems to us that in john’s own (school?) experience, other children did not mind or even like being told what to do. we wonder if “the other children” that john was juxtaposing with “these children” from the center have been over-socialized in a traditional model and have been so robbed of agency they did not even know it. in turn, they would not resent and rebel against adult demands the way the lcc minority children did (especially devon). it seems to us that because of that, llc was an ideal environment to teach preservice teachers how to recognize the dangers of sequestering children’s (humans’) agency. john designed his final project based on his conversation with devon about how he wanted to be treated: this project was inspired by a specific child at the lcc. i spent a great deal of time with this child and was constantly observing his behavior and interactions. devon, age 7, was a rambunctious child with a serious disrespect for authority. he had many issues with authority because he felt that they were always telling him what to do. he did not like to be given orders. he would prefer if someone asked him nicely to do something. however, he often wouldn't respond when he was asked nicely. i found that the best way to have devon respond to you was to offer a suggestion: we were playing a board game and the pieces were knocked to the floor. he made no move to pick up the pieces so i said to him, "well i'm not going to pick that up." immediately, he bent down and proceeded to pick up all the pieces. however, i wasn't convinced that this would always work and i found that devon often contradicted himself. therefore i conducted a small study of devon. i gave him the same survey everyone else completed [about how they would like to be treated]. it showed that devon would prefer to be asked nicely, but thought that telling someone to do something would prove more effective. however, later that day i observed him interact with another child, which reaffirmed my assertions: devon and i were sitting at a table and i looked at him. he said to me, "don't look at me! turn around or i'll kick you in the face!" so i asked him, "why do you tell me what to do, when you don't like being told what to do?" the only response he could give was "sorry." while devon would prefer to be asked what to do, we see that he doesn't apply the same philosophies when addressing other people (john, final project, 5/19/2006) in our view, through his conversations and engagements with devon, john moved closer to an authorial approach to education and away from his initial technological. john became genuinely interested in devon, wanting to know what devon thought about john’s topics of interest and taking devon’s responses seriously, treating him with the respect of “a consciousness with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999). devon seemed to accept john’s bid and reciprocated with his own dialogic attitude toward john. however, in our judgment, john remained in his search for an universal ethical rule based in kantian decontextualized universal ethics (smith, 2010). john expected the logical consistency from other people, “[as i expected] most of the children were consistent when they would ask someone the way they would prefer to be asked. the one child that would constantly contradict himself was devon” (john, fp, 5/19/2006). in our view, devon had been sorry not because he realized a logical inconsistency in his attitudes to others and himself, as john argued, but because he had probably felt sympathetic to john’s distress, which devon recognized that he himself had caused (as john communicated to him). in our interpretation, in devon’s view, john called on devon to take responsibility for his own abusive actions on dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a187 a person whom devon valued and wanted to be together with, “something i found most interesting: devon said that when he has a problem or gets in trouble he would come to me. i didn't realize the impact i had made on him already” (john, mp, 4/6/2006). furthermore, in devon’s view, john called on devon to consider how “we” (i.e., devon and john) and mostly he, devon, desired to relate and live together. in our view, devon’s reply to john’s call was not to acknowledge that he, devon, was logically inconsistent, as a kantian universal and decontextualized ethics demands (i.e., “to treat others as you want to be treated”), and as john seemed to interpret it. rather, devon’s reply was an acknowledgement that devon felt sorry for offending john, a person whom devon valued, liked, and respected. we argue that through his own reflection and experimentations guided by peter, john became increasingly dialogic in his relation with devon; arguably, however, john was not yet “polyphonic” in his responses, as he did not recognize and value his own dialogism (matusov, 2009; morson & emerson, 1989). in our judgment, peter was successful in building authorial relations with his students (and devon), as it was evident in their collaborative explorations of their ways of becoming good teachers and interest in being together in their classroom. the evidence of authorial relations is discernible in the establishment of the pedagogical regime of internally persuasive discourse, in which everything could be tested and testable in his classroom with the preservice teachers (bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2009; matusov & von duyke, 2010; morson, 2004). however, in our view, peter failed to make a dialogic authorial approach visible for his students (even, arguably, including john). this can be seen in the students’ puzzlement about peter's relationship with devon and their understanding of peter's playful attitude as a "technology" or a "strategy" to get devon to their pre-set end-point (to clean up the toys). even more, when they tried to "apply" what they perceived as peter's universal and decontextualized strategy, they "faked" play in a manipulative way and only managed to make devon feel uneasy and defensive. we see that peter failed to teach an authorial approach to education not because the students did not accept it but because this approach remained invisible to them. in our view, peter successfully socialized his students in his authorial dialogic approach to education, but he did not make it an object of the students’ deep reflection, consideration, and critical deconstruction. in contrast to the socialization, we define genuine education as critical deconstruction embedded in “the internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). how could peter engage his students in considering an authorial approach to education and make it visible and explicit for them? it seems that there were four challenges facing future teachers in developing a dialogic authorial approach. first, future teachers tend to take an overwhelmingly finalizing and objectivizing stance in their work toward children, treating them as objects of their pedagogical desires and actions, guided by universal pedagogical techniques (matusov & smith, 2007). at the same time, it seems that peter’s students experienced their interest and nostalgia for a dialogic authorial approach both in their relationship with peter and their occasional relations with some children at lcc (more cooperative than devon), as they reported at the end of the class and in the anonymous class evaluation. in these relations, they seemed to recognize that another way of thinking about children was possible, thinking about them as excitedly unpredictable and responsible beings-in-the-world. however, after a 9-week practicum, the students did not yet explicitly recognize and value this way of thinking about children as possible and/or desirable. focusing and reflecting on their own enjoyment in the class and practicum guided by the instructor might have been helpful for the students to notice an alternative, dialogic authorial, educational approach to what they had been accustomed to. the hidden curriculum of the authorial approach had to become explicit curriculum. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a188 second, as smith’s (2010) analysis discusses, a “modernist” way of thinking about others and interpreting events in the world dominates the future teachers’ discourse about their work with the children. this modernist approach demands kantian universal de-contextualized ethics, separated from the ongoing events (both immediate and recursive) in the pre-service teachers’ practicum experience. it seems that, in the future, peter should make more explicit the distinct and contrasting difference between reflecting upon events as a responsible participant in the world with the others, and reflecting upon the events through de-contextualized concepts and strategies. his students should have had more opportunities to discuss these two approaches, their implications and their pros and cons, as well as to reflect on their own ways of approaching children and others in different situations. alternatively (or even in addition), some of the pre-service teachers might evoke neo-liberal ideologies focusing on a hegemonic notion of “personal responsibility,” thus blaming victims like devon, while ignoring systemic institutional and societal pressures and injustice (stringer, 2014). peter might have investigated these diverse hypotheses to problematize them with his students. third, it seems that peter needed to develop a way of sharing excitement and enjoyment in engaging with children at the center with the university students. perhaps peter could reflect upon his enjoyment and excitement with the pre-service teachers more directly, asking students to reflect upon their enjoyable and exciting moments in working with children and what specifically made such experiences enjoyable. as becker (1953) argued, guided interpretation of ambiguous experiences can become a part of learning to enjoy an activity with others. enjoyment in working with children is socially learned and socially framed24 rather than “natural,” and requires a community of participants who engage in discussing how and why they enjoy it (it is arguably not something seen as immediately pleasurable). it may be necessary to more explicitly discuss why or why not students are enjoying or not enjoying the experience of working with children. as becker writes about emergent authorial agency in a practice, if a stable form of new behaviour toward the object is to emerge, a transformation of meanings must occur, in which the person develops a new conception of the nature of the object. this happens in a series of communicative acts in which others point out new aspects of his experience to him, present him with new interpretations of events, and help him achieve a new conceptual organization of his world, without which the new behaviour is not possible. persons who do not achieve the proper kind of conceptualization are unable to engage in the given behaviour and turn off in the direction of some other relationship to the object or activity (h. becker, 1953, p. 242). fourth is about problematizing of education itself for the students. the purpose of education may not be in making people good – e.g., making devon prosocial and non-aggressive, make devon to clean toys after himself, make devon polite, make devon civilized, make devon cooperative, and so on. these desires may be important but they may not be educational in themselves. the purpose of education can be in engaging students in deciding for themselves what “good” means, to examine life, to test diverse ideas in a critical dialogue (plato, 1997). in the future, peter may want to engage his students, preservice teachers, in a critical ontological dialogue about the purpose of education and ontologies behind diverse purposes (e.g., pedagogy of survival and necessity vs. pedagogy of leisure, imagination, and desirability). peter should make the contrast between conventional standard-based technological agency-free education and deffaa more visible for his future students so they can engage in a critical dialogic investigation of them and their own educational values. however, this advice is contradictory, reflecting the major paradox of education. we see the major paradox of education as the following: the major goal of education must be a part of education itself – i.e., a part of the students’ own critical dialogue – and 24 cf. “no one would fall in love if he hadn't read about it first'' francois de la rochefoucauld (french writer, 1613-1680). dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a189 cannot pre-exist the education practice or be decided by the instructor in advance (or in our advice to peter). this paradox includes the students’ right not to adopt deffaa approach as a part of their successful education. however, this non-adoption should be a result of their critical examination of deffaa and other educational philosophies and not a gut decision, an opinionship, or a result of students’ prior socialization. of course, the latter demand involves smuggling deffaa into the criteria of “successful education” – the paradox remains…. of course, our suggestions would not guarantee a success for peter or any future educators – nothing does, according to a dialogic authorial approach. however, they represent reasonable and plausible hypotheses to test and interesting and promising provocations to try in future educational practice guided by the authorial approach. conclusions in our view, a dialogic authorial pedagogical approach starts with a certain quality of the teacher being with the student. this quality involves mutual interest in each other – what they think and how they feel about the world and the self (cf. the concept of interaddressivity, matusov, 2011c) -and mutual respect. the latter involves legitimacy of non-cooperation and non-participation. for peter and devon their quality of being together was based on their having fun through improvisational play suggested by peter. for john and devon, their quality of being together seemed to emerge more from interest in, puzzlement with, and attraction to each other. for peter and his university students, their quality of being together seemed to come from mutual interest in each being taken seriously and from peter’s pedagogical desire to be helpful to his students. by being helpful, peter accepted the validity of the way the students defined their inquiries, but he did not express agreement with the formulation of their inquiries. at the same time, peter and john’s successes in promoting critical dialogues among the undergraduate students – and their desires, worldviews, and pedagogical approaches – in their work with devon were limited. on the positive side, peter apparently managed to engage his students in puzzlement, hypothesizing their dear beliefs, considering alternatives, searching for a pedagogical approach to a problem they experienced, and considering his own pedagogical approach unfamiliar to them. he also seemed to guide john successfully into engaging in a dialogic authorial guidance with devon. finally, john was successful in engaging devon (and some other lcc children) in critical dialogue about considering a desired approach for being asked to do something. however, peter seemed to fail to make his students recognize his dialogic authorial approach with them and with devon, and consider it as an alternative to a technological approach with which they were familiar. dialogic education for and from authorial agency (deffaa), a new paradigm in education, is based in a fundamentally different orientation and set of purposes than the technological agency-free approach. dialogic education for and from authorial agency grounded in this set of premises and values is characterized by the following qualities that we described as an authorial approach and contrasted to the currently prevailing technological approach. an authorial approach to education is an extension of the dialogic understanding of human authorial agency — in which both the student and the teacher participate in authoring their own new, unpredictable beings-in-the-world, their new desires and new subjectivities which cannot be pre-planned or known in advance by anyone including themselves. this process is supported by having rich opportunities for problem defining; being encouraged in making unpredictable turns and connections; mutual appreciation and respect as well as recognition and acceptance of the collision of diverging desires. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a190 1. the dialogic authorial approach to education focuses on the relational nature of human activity and discourse, rather than the technological, which focuses on acquiring knowledge and skills as tools detached from their purposes and use. as tools, knowledge and skills must be knowingly authored and authentically desired. otherwise, tools, in themselves, cannot be used to develop and assist human beings and their lived purposes because someone is authoring someone else without their consent – i.e., without an “authorial signature” (bakhtin, 1993). the technologically minded/guided teachers can only manipulate unconscious or enforce resisted or compliant behaviors. thus, by nature these tools, and their uses, are either nonor even anti-educational.25 2. authoring is anti-manipulative. in education, pedagogical manipulation entails forcing predefined curricula on students, in a pre-defined, lock-step pace, through predefined instructional and motivational management strategies, regardless of or in exploitation of the students’ interests, understanding and values26. any expression of students’ authorial agency may (and often does) create a deviation, difference and noncompliance to this rigid and predetermined set of procedures, a problem that needs to be eliminated. in contrast, authoring includes participants in the dialogic devising, exposing, and setting of agendas, goals, problems, journeys, and provocations, exposing boundary objects and their reification for potential renegotiation, and includes all affected members. 3. authorial education sets purposes and goals, but cannot be based on predefined curricular endpoints or officially preset explicit or implicit agendas. such pre-defined and, therefore, depersonalized and decontextualized endpoints i.e. reified knowledge and skills, position teachers to look for ways to control learners in a universal, abstract, non-eventful, technological, and impersonal manner. this is dangerous because teachers’ and learners’ agencies are ignored and devalued. 4. to return back to humanitarian meaning of the notion of “education” expressed in its etymology in diverse languages, education has to focus on authorial agency (deffaa) rather than on curricular standards (technological agency-free education). authorial agency (aka deffaa) is incompatible with conventional standard-based technological agency-free 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(2009). catching up or leading the way: american education in the age of globalization. alexandria, va: ascd. acknowledgements eugene matusov: i would like to acknowledge yifat ben-david kolikant and her students from the hebrew university of jerusalem. they read a previous draft of this paper which generated a heated discussion among them around the issue of dialogue and pragmatism. their discussion greatly helped me in revisions of the paper. ana marjanovic-shane: i would like to acknowledge my late friend and colleague, mima pešić, with whom i had numerous talks about our paper. her sharp questions helped me connect some of the ideas she and her colleagues forged in the “belgrade school of preschool education” to the ideas we were developing in our paper. dialogic education for and from authorial agency eugene matusov, mark smith, elizabeth soslau, ana marjanovic-shane, katherine von duyke dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172 | vol. 4 (2016) a197 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 121-363-1-le.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-1     dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov university of delaware, usa   kiyotaka miyazaki waseda university, japan abstract in september 2011 in rome at the international society for cultural and activity research conference, eugene matusov (usa), kiyotaka miyazaki (japan), jayne white (new zealand), and olga dysthe (norway) organized a symposium on dialogic pedagogy. formally during the symposium and informally after the symposium several heated discussions started among the participants about the nature of dialogic pedagogy. the uniting theme of these discussions was a strong commitment by all four participants to apply the dialogic framework developed by soviet-russian philosopher and literary theoretician bakhtin to education. in this special issue, eugene matusov (usa) and kiyotaka miyazaki (japan) have developed only three of the heated issues discussed at the symposium in a form of dialogic exchanges (dialogue-disagreements). we invited our dialogic pedagogy colleagues jayne white (new zealand) and olga dysthe (norway) to write commentaries on the dialogues. fortunately, jayne white kindly accepted the request and wrote her commentary. unfortunately, olga dysthe could not participate due to her prior commitments to other projects. we also invited ana marjanovic-shane (usa), beth ferholt (usa), rupert wegerif (uk), and paul sullivan (uk) to comment on eugene-kiyotaka dialogue-disagreement. the first two heated issues were initiated by eugene matusov by providing a typology of different conceptual approaches to dialogic pedagogy that he had noticed in education. specifically, the debate with kiyotaka miyazaki (and the other two participants) was around three types of dialogic pedagogy defined by eugene matusov: instrumental, epistemological, and ontological types of dialogic pedagogy. specifically, eugene matusov subscribes to ontological dialogic pedagogy arguing that dialogic pedagogy should be built around students’ important existing or emergent life interests, concerns, questions, and needs. he challenged both instrumental dialogic pedagogy that is mostly interested in using dialogic interactional format of instruction to make students effectively arrive at preset curricular endpoints and epistemological dialogic pedagogy that is most interested in production of new knowledge for students. kiyotaka miyazaki (and other participants) found this typology not to be useful and challenged the values behind it. kiyotaka miyazaki introduced the third heated topic of treating students as “heroes” of the teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy similar to dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel based on bakhtin’s analysis. eugene matusov took issue with treating students as “heroes” of teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy arguing that in dialogic pedagogy students author their own education and their own becoming. originally, we wanted to present our dialogue on dialogic pedagogy in the following format. an initiator of a heated topic develops his argument, the opponent provides a counter-argument, and then the initiator has an opportunity to reply with his “final word” (of course, we know that there is no “final word” in a dialogue). however, after issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-2 eugene matusov developed two of his heated topics, kiyotaka miyazaki wanted to reply to both of them in one unified response, rather than two separate replies. jayne white, ana marjanovic-shane, beth ferholt, and paul sullivan wrote commentaries about the entire exchange and these commentaries should be treated as part of our dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. we hope that readers, interested in dialogic pedagogy, will join our heated dialoguedisagreement and will introduce more heated topics. part i instrumental vs. ontological dialogic pedagogy (by eugene matusov) several of my colleagues, interested in dialogic pedagogy, have been asking me about the differences between “instrumental dialogic pedagogy” and “ontological dialogic pedagogy” – the terms that i used in my (matusov, 2009a) book “journey into dialogic pedagogy” and elsewhere. in brief, i introduced the terms “instrumental” and “ontological” in reference to diverse versions of dialogic pedagogy because i have noticed two important tendencies 1 in educational practices and their conceptualization, when scholars and practitioners, talk about pedagogical dialogue. in an instrumental dialogic tendency, educationalists (i.e., educational practitioners and scholars of education) use pedagogical dialogue in order to increase the likelihood of achieving essentially non-dialogic educational and non-educational means like: increasing test scores and learning outcomes (brown, 1997; johnson & johnson, 1991), deepening students’ understanding of facts learned outside of pedagogical dialogue (adler, 1982; burbules, 1993; plato & bluck, 1961), promoting students’ motivation (http://www.paideia.org), or engaging students in an analysis of social injustices (freire, 1978, 1986; paley, 1992). i define “non-dialogic educational means” as preset curricular endpoints, at which students have to arrive. preset endpoints contradict open-ended spirit of dialogue, in which all participants — teachers and students — genuinely interested in topics, issues, and inquiries they discuss. my list of nondialogic ends, for which instrumental pedagogical dialogue is used, is probably incomplete – i just listed what i have noticed. in instrumental approaches, the notion of pedagogical dialogue can be rather diverse: from simple meaning any discussion with short dialogic turns (i.e., dialogue as a genre of speaking) to a rather elaborate format of leading investigation as it is in a socratic method. i have observed the following characteristics of an instrumental approach to dialogic pedagogy: 1. pedagogical dialogue serves as an effective means for non-dialogic ends, which are understood outside of the notion of dialogue, within a monological framework; 2. pedagogical dialogue is viewed as a self-contained instructional method (strategy) and activity among other (non-dialogic) instructional methods (strategies) and activities (e.g., "didactic instruction of factual information", see adler, 1982), “dialogue is an activity directed toward discovery and new understanding, which stands to improve the knowledge, insight, or sensitivity of its participants” (burbules, 1993, p. 8); 3. pedagogical dialogue can and should be switched on and off depending on the instructional needs; 4. certain curriculum is better to be taught and learned through pedagogical dialogue but certain curriculum is not (e.g., it is better to use pedagogical dialogue for learning "ideas, concepts, and values" but not for learning "factual knowledge and skills", adler, 1982); 1 i think alexander sidorkin has also noticed a similar difference (sidorkin, 1999) but he used less differentiated terms, in my judgment. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-3 5. pedagogical dialogue is aimed at efficient achievement of curricular endpoints preset by the teacher and/or state (e.g., understanding that the definition of virtues is more important than the issue of their origin – socrates; unconditional inclusion is the basis for the social justice – paley; following the party’s directives is the way to freedom and prosperity – freire). in contrast, ontological approaches to dialogic pedagogy emphasize that both meaning making process and humanity are essentially dialogic and, thus, penetrating all aspects of pedagogy/education (bakhtin, 1986, 1999; buber, 1996, 2000; sidorkin, 1999), the dialogic nature of consciousness, the dialogic nature of human life itself. the single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended [i.e., “unfinalized” – em] dialogue. life by its very nature is dialogic. to live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. in this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. he invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium (bakhtin, 1999, p. 293, italics is original). ontological dialogue generates its own unfinalized dialogic values by searching for and testing ideas and values against other ideas and values (cf. aristotelian notion of praxis, see aristotle, 2000; carr, 2006). ontological dialogue has its own dialogic value in itself as the inherently valuable way of being, non-reducible to any other ways of being. let me illustrate this point with my colleague’s and mine research on “instrumental learning” vs. “ontological learning”. my undergraduate student daniella (muller) eilif and i conducted a study of “instrumental” and “ontological” learning (matusov, eilif, fan, choi, & hampel, 2014, submitted). daniella and i interviewed people of diverse age (from 9 to 75), gender, educational levels, professions, ways of life, and socioeconomic status from three countries: us (21), russia (17), and brazil (21) posing to them the following hypothetical question, “imagine scientists invented magic learning pills so people can learn instantaneously what has been known in the past and become skillful in any area of known practice. for what kind of learning would you want to use the magic learning pills and for what kind of learning would you reject the magic learning pills? why?” very few respondents said they would take the magic pill to acquire skills and knowledge. similarly, few respondents said they would always reject the magic pill. our major finding was that a high majority of interviewees reported two types of desired learning: 1) instrumental learning, for which they would want to take the magic learning pill and 2) ontological learning, for which they would reject taking the magic learning pill2. in instrumental learning, the learning itself is not valued, but actually disvalued, focusing on the desired ends. in instrumental learning, the process of learning is often viewed negatively as time-consuming, effort-consuming, frustrating, humiliating, painful, involving rote memorization of facts, boring, uneventful, annoying, scary, confidence eroding, financially expensive, well-defined, limited in time and space, measurable, finalized, and so on. instrumental learning exists outside of people and does not transform the people – it can be separated and extracted from people and their life into a “magic learning pill” and passed to other people. after instrumental learning people essentially remain the same (i.e., “people + knowledge/skills”). instrumental learning is about acquiring preset curricular endpoints (i.e., curricular standards). instrumental learning is poiesis, i.e., a process, which quality is judged by the criteria established outside of the process, i.e., by achieving preset endpoints (aristotle, 2000; carr, 2006). 2 we also got more complicated cases of instrumental responses insisting on not taking the magic learning pill because it may devalue their learning achievements and/or values of their knowledge and/or skill mastery that give them a special social status in their social groups or in the entire society. knowledge and mastery can provide important scarcity that can be a basis for a desired social status. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-4 in contrast, in ontological learning, the learning process has an intrinsic value in itself and can be viewed positively as pleasure; interesting challenge (including even frustration and pain); “curious wonder” (taylor, 1968); deep, bottomless, unfinalized understanding; dialogic relationship with important others; growth; life itself; creativity; becoming somebody different; experiential; eventful (even at times through dramatic, painful, and tragic events); relational, valuing others; situational, ill-defined; immeasurable; not limited in time and space; unfinalized; and so on. as one interviewee justified why she would not take the magic learning pill for her particular desired learning, “i don’t want to shorten my life.” in the ontological learning, the learning process is in itself a valuable event of the person’s life. ontological learning cannot be separated from people because it defines people. ontological learning defines learner’s becoming and transcending the ontologically and epistemologically given (and readymade culture). ontological learning is praxis, i.e., a process defining its own criterion for its quality and virtues (aristotle, 2000; carr, 2006). in instrumental dialogue, life of the students and their education are often split – the students’ education is out of the students’ life as “preparation for life.” in contrast, in ontological dialogue they remain the same: education is life, life is education, (cf. dewey’s famous statement “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself…. education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living”). ontological dialogue is inherently eventful, dramatic, and full of learning surprises for both the teacher and the students. instrumental dialogue can also be eventful, dramatic, and surprising but these qualities are not essential for instrumental dialogue, they can be accidental and peripheral (if not annoying, from a point of view of instrumental learning, see a discussion of the notion of "off-script" in kennedy, 2005). alexander sidorkin (1999) and i (matusov, 2009a) argued that ontological dialogue penetrates all forms of human interaction and relations even in very distorted forms like in slavery (see hegel & baillie, 1967, for hegel's brilliant analysis of this distortion in slaveowners' dream for "an ideal slave"). similarly, a russian educationalist and scholar of ontological dialogue alexander lobok argues that one can find aspects and islands of ontological dialogue in any teaching (lobok, 2001, 2008). however, ontological pedagogical dialogue becomes full-fledged when an educator realizes its value and tries to guide his or her pedagogical actions and pedagogical designs based on ontological dialogue. the notion of ontological dialogue, beyond its inherent emphasis on dialogue as the essence of life, is unfinalized and contested as it is defined itself through practice and dialogue about this practice among all its immediate and remote participants. however, in my view, even so unfinalized, it opposes all six distinguished characteristics of instrumental dialogue listed above: 1. pedagogical (ontological) dialogue is the end in itself, which cannot be understood outside of the notion of dialogue, “dialogue is not something we do or use; it is relation that we enter into” (burbules, 1993, p. xii, italics original); 2. although pedagogical (ontological) dialogue may incline to instructional conversation, it penetrates any form of instructional method, including lecture. a lecture can be dialogic if it is a long answer to students’ question or inquiry (pre-existing the lecture or emergent in the lecture); 3. pedagogical (ontological) dialogue is not a type of activity among other non-dialogic types of activities, but rather it is the participants’ orientation in any activity, specific value on dialogue as the meaningmaking process and humanity, and guidance for the teacher’s pedagogical actions and pedagogical designs; 4. pedagogical (ontological) dialogue, like meaning making or humanity, cannot and should not be switched on and off; 5. genuine education, as exploration of societal and personal values — praxis of praxis (matusov & dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-5 marjanovic-shane, 2012) — occurs through pedagogical (ontological) dialogue; 6. pedagogical (ontological) dialogue defines its own emergent endpoints in the students as temporary outcomes embedded in dialogue. to my big surprise, i found a similar opposition between two types of pedagogical dialogues in work by a russian-american educational philosopher alexander sidorkin who was also influenced by bakhtin (and buber). in my judgment, our recognition of the two main approaches to dialogic pedagogies was identical. even our terminology was very close as we both independently came to the notion of “ontological dialogue.” however, in contrast to me, sidorkin called “non-ontological” what i call “instrumental”. later, i have realized that this opposition between instrumental pedagogical dialogue and ontological pedagogical dialogue has to be revised. initially, i thought that non-instrumental and ontological were synonymous. but currently, i have come to the conclusion that non-instrumental dialogic approaches constitute a bigger class of dialogic approaches, in which ontological dialogue is a part along with other non-instrumental but also non-ontological approaches. so far, i have recognized two more noninstrumental, non-ontological dialogic approaches: epistemological dialogic approach ii and ecological dialogic approach. i have also found diverse instrumental approaches that include: epistemological dialogic approach i and social justice dialogic approach. these approaches appear in figure 1 below and can also be viewed here http://diaped.soe.udel.edu/dp-map/?page_id=18. figure 1. dialogic and conventional pedagogies dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-6 epistemological vs. ontological pedagogical dialogue (by eugene matusov) epistemological pedagogical dialogue – a family of dialogic pedagogical approaches – prioritizes, purifies, and totalizes the intellectual endeavor of knowledge production over all other human endeavors including relational concerns and tensions; conflicts of desires; human ecology; issues of injustice; participants’ attractions, excitements, interests, and repellences (i.e., biases); aesthetics; vanity; ethics; responsibility; morality and so on – what i’d argue constitute the totality of human ontology. of course, all these ontological aspects may be a focus of an intellectual investigation and all of these ontological aspects have an intellectual component in each of them and, finally, intellectual endeavors occur in ontological spaces. however, i argue that these ontological aspects cannot be reduced to intellectual decision making, and purification of intellectual endeavors from their ontological spaces and aspects is counterproductive, when applied comprehensively. for example, reduction of study of physics reduced only to development of intellectual ideas does not help to understand and appreciate the sociocultural and ontological nature of the practices — historical actors look like naïve or even stupid by ignoring “obvious” issues and arguments developed later after them (kumar, 2008; matusov, 2014). in my view, this issue alone is at the core of what separates epistemological3 dialogues from ontological dialogue. using aristotelian poiesis-praxis terminology (aristotle, 2000; carr, 2006), epistemological dialogue transforms a practice in poiesis, in which goal, endpoint, value, and virtue (i.e., what is good) are (firmly or somewhat) known in advance; while ontological dialogue considers a practice as praxis, in which goal, endpoint, value and virtue emerge in the activity itself. because of this poiesis nature of practice in epistemological dialogue, it often pre-defines the virtue of its intellectual endeavor in the immutable hierarchy of the preset “good” over the preset “bad”: systemic thinking over syncretic thinking (vygotsky, 1987); formal-operation thinking over preoperational thinking (piaget, 1985); theoretical over concrete (davydov, 2008); symphonic thinking over absurdist thinking (see a description of an innovative school using this hierarchy in von duyke, 2013); dialectical thinking over formal logical thinking (ilyenkov, 1977); high culture over low culture; advanced culture over primitive culture (vygotsky & luria, 1993). in contrast, in the praxis, the relationships between these oppositions can be very diverse – including the listed ones -depending on local contexts and emerging values. studying literature and practice of dialogic pedagogy, so far i have extracted two types of epistemological pedagogical dialogue: instrumental epistemological dialogue (epistemological ii) and non-instrumental epistemological dialogue (epistemological ii). epistemologi ca l instrumental pedagogi ca l dialogue (epistemologi ca l i) the epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy is probably the first published account of dialogic pedagogy that still remains very influential and important for all scholars and practitioners of the dialogic pedagogy field – namely socratic dialogue in plato’s version. i am sure that it will remain an object of inspiration, analysis, and exciting discoveries (phillips, 2002). like bakhtin (1999), i am rather ambivalent about it. i appreciate its focus on asking good questions, attendance to students’ subjectivity, focus on provocations and contradictions, disrupting familiar and often unreflected relations, dialogue at 3 my use of the word “epistemological” is metaphorical, impressionistic and not conceptual one — i try to capture and describe the phenomenon in dialogic pedagogy with this descriptor. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-7 the threshold, being carnivalesque, and so on. but i am also, like bakhtin, concerned with the teacher’s manipulation of the student’s consciousness and intellectualism (matusov, 2009a). the epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy is characterized by the use of dialogue between the teacher and the students and among the students to achieve some particular intellectual curricular endpoints preset by the teacher. dialogue here is a pedagogical method (e.g., socratic method) or an instructional strategy along with other pedagogical methods and instructional strategies, which can be switched on and switched off. thus, both adler (1982; 1984) and burbules (1993) argue that presentation of a unfamiliar material or new information should be done by the teacher in a straightforward lecturing or in general direct instruction ways, while deepening understanding has to be done in a form of (socratic) dialogue. since the students do not have any prior knowledge of unfamiliar material, it does not make sense to dialogue about it, from this instrumental perspective. this approach to dialogue as a method can be traced in plato’s socrates when socrates gives an example of giving directions to a certain place to someone as a task not worthy nor appropriate of dialogic investigation (e.g., see a dialogue between meno and socrates, plato & bluck, 1961). thus, the epistemological instrumental pedagogy is primary concerned with deepening students’ intellectual understanding about something but this deepening has some curricular endpoints like, for example, in case of the meno dialogue, that the virtue is problematic and inherited, or that by increasing the sides of a square twice, the area of the square will increase by four times. the dialogic method of the epistemological instrumental pedagogy is organized in a series of questions-answers usually initiated by the teacher (but not always) and often undergoes 4 phases: 1. engaging the students in teacher-defined material – as the meno dialogue shows, it can be quite a struggle because the students might have their own agendas and/or might not be immediately interested in teacher-defined issues; 2. searching for and revealing misconceptions in the students’ subjectivity about the teacher-defined issues – this revelation is first done by the teacher him or herself as the students often are not aware that they have misconceptions and contradictions in their thinking and perception of the reality. here is where a genuine dialogue is permissible and tolerable by the teacher; 3. leading the students into numbing contradictions about their misconceptions (the so-called “torpedo touch”) – it is important to develop in the students a sense of paralysis from the revealed contradiction between two strong alternatives rooted in the students’ own subjectivity; all ways out suggested by the students should be convincingly blocked by the teacher; 4. leading the students to the preset curricular endpoint as the only possible and logical solution of the contradiction – the teacher usually blocks any alternatives in themes and in solutions. here is where genuine dialogue is usually less permitted and tolerated by the teacher. there is absence of the teacher’s epistemological learning in the dialogue – despite socrates’ insistence about the benefits to his own learning i did not find evidence in any of plato’s dialogues, that socrates changed his mind or learned anything new that he did not know prior to the dialogues (matusov, 2009a, ch. 2). in instrumental epistemological pedagogical dialogue, a teacher may learn some new pedagogical knowledge about how to teach better — e.g., how the teacher can address better students’ old, known, and new, emerging, misconceptions — but not epistemological knowledge about intellectual subject matter, new inquiries previously unknown by the teacher (matusov, 2009a, ch. 4). as in case of plato’s socrates, i suspect that the teacher’s manipulation of the students’ subjectivities often involves self-manipulation of the teacher’s own consciousness to truly believe that the preset curricular endpoint is the only possible and logical outcome. indeed, it is a mathematical fact that the area of a square is equal to the square of its sides. what can be problematic there? but, as i showed dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-8 with the example of 2+2=4 (matusov, 2009a), it is never the case – anything and everything is questionable and problematic if there is desire to look deeper: two friends plus two friends may not always be equal to four friends. as bakhtin (1986) argued, understanding is bottomless. elsewhere i argued (matusov, 2009a, ch. 2) that plato’s socratic dialogic method is a bizarre combination of radical pedagogical constructivism, based on dialogic investigation of truth though revealing contradictions in people’s thinking, and radical philosophical positivism, based on the preset curricular endpoints reflecting the eternal, universal ideas. now, i wonder if this combination of radical pedagogical constructivism and radical philosophical positivism is a birthmark of any epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy. since socrates, this position has been reinforced by the rationalism of the enlightenment (the modernism), according to which, reasonable, well-intended people with access to the same information will come to the same conclusion. the modernist rational mind has to be subordinate to the iron logic of the universal necessity and purify itself from any other irrational and corrupting influences like emotions, values, beliefs, responsibility, traditions, social justice, loyalties, vanities, reputations, and judgments (matusov, 2014). in this approach, consensus and agreement are prioritized – reaching a rational consensus among rational people through the free marketplace of ideas is a proxy for reaching the truth. when the rational consensus is reached, it sets a curricular endpoint for education. in my view, necessity is only an aspect of discourse and by itself it is shaped by other aspects (e.g., values, emotions) and as well penetrates them. people’s logic does not need to follow the necessity and does not need to slavishly submit to it because the necessity and logic are shaped people’s axiology (i.e., the value system), ontology, and ethics. the logic and necessity do not provide alibi-in-being using bakhtin’s metaphor (1993) but require active authorship of values and commitments and responsibility, which is irreducible to logic and necessity (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2014, in press-a, 2014, in press-b). finally, i want to comment on the elitist nature of the epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy. since, the truth and power associated with it is rooted in the dialogic method of investigation, people who profess in the method have to be on top of the society – this is a rather logical conclusion from the epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy. according to plato’s republic, the world has to be ruled by philosophers over all other “deficient” and “ignorant” people. epistemologi ca l noninstrumental dialogue (epistemologi cal ii) the epistemological non-instrumental dialogic pedagogy prioritizes the intellectual sublime of the high culture. it focuses on “the eternal damn final questions” (bakhtin, 1999). it is interested in the mundane only because it can give the material and opportunity to move to the sublime (see phillips, 2002, as a good example). the non-instrumental epistemological dialogue is a purified dialogue to abstract a single main theme, a development of a main concept, and unfolding the logic – interested in purification of a dialogue into dia-logics (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009). due to this purification, epistemological dialogue occurs in de-ontologized intellectual space and time. in my view, as a tool of a particular investigation of an ontological dialogue, this purification can be legitimate in certain situations. however, modeling classroom discussion after an epistemological dialogue can lead to pedagogical violence as a way of “disciplining the students’ minds” so they remain on the theme and only engage in the intellectual framework defined by the teacher, which is always the most important. it brackets the complexity, ontological massiveness, and interconnection of the diverse themes and makes certain “irrelevant” agendas, interests, strengths, desires, and ontological groundings dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-9 as inappropriate and illegitimate (which, in its own turn, requires policing the discourse and issuing punitive actions for violators of the epistemological regime). in my view, one of the good representations of the epistemological non-instrumental dialogue is lakatos (1981). lakatos starts his book on imaginary pedagogical dialogue about mathematical investigation with a very keen and thoughtful observation on his own endeavor. he ended his introduction to the book with the following words, “the dialogue form [in his book] should reflect the dialectic of the story [i.e., history of the discoveries and developments of math ideas]; it is meant to contain a sort of rationally reconstructed or ‘distilled’ history” (lakatos, 1981, p. 5, italics is original). i want to focus on this nature of “distillation” or purification that lakatos mentioned. lakatos was talking about distillation, reconstruction, and purification of the history of the math practice, while i am interested in his distillation, reconstruction, and purification of ontological dialogue. history represents an ontological dialogue. but ontological dialogues can also be ahistorical and even imaginary (dostoevsky’s novels present such examples). what are the differences between epistemological ii and ontological non-instrumental dialogues? let me start with making observational notes about their similarities. first, like epistemological noninstrumental dialogue, ontological dialogue can also involve abstractions from, and reconstructions of, live conversations (and it can be entirely fictional). so, it is not focused on “exactness” that produces the difference, although it is true that ontological dialogue has more, what can be called, “life details.” second, ontological dialogue can also focus on epistemological issues and intellectual investigations. thus, it is not the thematic focus that makes the difference. third, non-instrumental epistemological dialogues usually (or maybe even always) preserve particular voices and generate person-ideas, although in an epistemological dialogue, the person is subordinated to and deduced from the idea. hence, the strong presence and depiction of particular rich voices does not distinguish ontological and epistemological dialogues. fourth, both types of dialogues can promote (as well as deviate from) the regime of internally persuasive discourse (ipd) described by bakhtin as open-ended honest search for truth by all participants (but not as a sense of “appropriation” of the teacher’s voice by the voices of the students, see instrumental dialogue) (holquist, 1990; matusov, 2007a; matusov & von duyke, 2010; morson, 2004; morson & emerson, 1990). fifth, they both can be carnivalistic with throning and dethroning the authority (bakhtin, 1999; sullivan, smith, & matusov, 2009). sixth, both types of dialogues can involve dramas of ideas and people, although in an epistemological non-instrumental dialogue, drama of the ideas defines drama of the participants. i argue that the distillation, reconstruction, and purification nature of epistemological dialogue is about creation of the comprehensive, totalized, focus of all the participants of the dialogue on some unfolding theme (what is probably called by berlyand, 1996; bibler, 1997; kurganov, 1989, as “a dialogic notion”). in contrast to ontological dialogue, epistemological non-instrumental dialogue is essentially mono-topic and comprehensive (i.e., universal and totalizing). epistemological dialogues are selfcontained. bakhtin (1999) defined voice that “includes a person’s worldview and fate. a person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. he participates in it not only with his thoughts, but with his fate and with his entire individuality” (bakhtin, 1991, p. 293). the person’s fate cannot be reduced to one dialogue, to a person’s position in a dialogue, to the theme, to the logic, to the hierarchy, or to the sublime. although, people can never be reduced to their mundane life circumstances, in which people are thrown and find themselves, the deeds that people made in these mundane circumstances penetrate and color the dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-10 sublime dialogue, which is the primary interest of the proponents of the non-instrumental epistemological dialogic pedagogy. for example, the mundane fact that a father of the american revolution, thomas jefferson was a slaveowner until the end of his life (he owned 187 slaves), who fathered black children who became slaves (he freed all of them before or after his death) from a slave concubine sally hemings (sloan, 1998), colored his sublime position on freedom and equality to the point that has allowed some scholars to legitimately claim that jefferson was not only a father of modern democracy but also a father of modern racism since the practice of slavery, which jefferson was a part of, and his claim that “all men are created equal” (written in the declaration of independence) required a justified exclusion of slaves from the notion of “men” – i.e., the ideology of racism (d'souza, 1995). jefferson’s voice and fate in a dialogue on freedom has been an uneasy intertwinement of the sublime freedom-loving philosopher and politician, and the mundane slaveowner, enslaving his own children and lover. let me now turn to magnifying the differences between non-instrumental epistemological and ontological dialogues. first, epistemological dialogue does not involve an ontological meeting of the participants. lakatos’ dialogue starts his epistemological dialogue with the following disclaimer: the dialogue takes place in an imaginary classroom. the class gets interested in a problem: is there a relation between the number of vertices v, the number of edges e and the number of faces f of polyhedra -particularly of regular polyhedra -analogous to the trivial relation between the number of vertices and edges of polygons, namely, that there are as many edges as vertices: v = e? this latter relation enables us to classify polygons according to the number of edges (or vertices): triangles, quadrangles, pentagons, etc. an analogous relation would help to classify polyhedra (lakatos, 1981, p. 6, italics is original). what is interesting here for me is that how this imaginary “class gets interested in a problem” is taken outside of the brackets of lakatos’ dialogue. we do not know how and why this interest was developed and negotiated. we do not know how this interest is grounded in the participants’ lives. it is unclear why the participants care about the problem and what makes them care. what if some of the participants had not cared about this math problem, in particular, or math in general – how did lakatos make them interested or, at least, cooperate with his dialogue? was pedagogical violence (matusov, 2009a; sidorkin, 2002) involved in the process and if so, how? what (and how) created conditions for this classroom? could the participants have freedom to leave it at any moment (like participants of socrates’ dialogues, for example)? below, i will provide themes that are present in ontological dialogue and absent in epistemological dialogue. frist, from a pedagogical point of view, an assumption or an expectation that all participants are automatically and non-problematically interested in a problem can lead to big pedagogical disasters and eventually to oppressive pedagogical violence. yes, it is true that a common interest in a particular problem can emerge in the classroom but i argue that it usually required a lot of work from the teacher and/or it is relatively short lived and ecologically (i.e., emotionally, intellectually, physiologically, motivationally, and relationally) unsustainable. second, there is no ontological diversity nor does it not intertwine with participants’ interests and agendas in epistemological dialogue. in lakatos’s dialogue all the participants are totally committed to the problem set by the teacher. in contrast, in an ontological dialogue, the participants are involved in a problem space (usually consisting not only of one problem but of many dynamically emerging fuzzy tensions) that often has the shared and collective ownership, changing alliances, and diverse agendas. thus, this problem space is often shaped by diverse, multiple, often fuzzy, uncertain, simultaneous and dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-11 dynamic ontological concerns by the participants. for example, in the case above, the participants might have multiple ontological concerns about fairness, grades, past interpersonal alliances and conflicts, making and maintaining friendships, explanation of percentages, academic motivation, sexual flirting, romantics, vanity, hunger, stomachaches, and so on. all of these apparently mundane concerns by the participants, – “the mundane noise”, – seem to be annoying for an educator working in the noninstrumental epistemological dialogic pedagogy who wants to bracket and suppress them from the public space of the dialogue. third, there are no ontological concerns in participants about their reputation that emerge in, and transcend, the epistemological dialogue. dialogue can change people’s relationships, professional and institutional stands, careers, reputations, fates, fights for material resources; – it can open and close institutional, relational, and societal opportunities that might have little to do with the theme of the sublime dialogue at hand. all of that is often bracketed in epistemological dialogues, probably, as spoilers of the purity of the arguments. nothing outside of epistemological dialogue, outside of its world of ideas, -“pulp” of the life -is a concern. participants of an epistemological dialogue are often involved in drama, but it is a drama of pure intellectual ideas. in lakatos’ dialogue, student alpha leaves the dialogue, slamming the door in disgust, so to speak. however, his dramatic actions can be deduced from the unfolding logic of colliding ideas in the dialogue, as an emotional amplifier of an intellectual point. people, their personalities, their actions, their relations are reduced to their ideas (cf. bakhtin, 1999, on the notion of person-idea). they are puppets of the self-contained logical development. for example, some proponents of epistemological dialogue view the suicide by famous german quantum physicist paul ehrenfest in 1933, as a logical development of his position in a debate with einstein and bohr (kurganov, personal communication, july 2008) rather than as a possible tragic result of his struggle with chronic depression (klein, 1985). although, logic of intellectual development can probably define people’s fate in some (rare?) cases, it is doubtful that it can be the defining case in all, or even majority instances. however, in an epistemological non-instrumental dialogue, the participants’ ontology originates and is produced by the development of intellectual ideas. fourth, there is no ontological urgency in an epistemological dialogue. the chronotope of epistemological dialogue is the world of ideas. here-and-now ontological urgency of life is not known in epistemological dialogue. arguments can be postponed for 300 years or even more. epistemological dialogue can occur whenever and wherever. historical time is bracketed, physical and embedded semiotic space is bracketed. historical time with its ontological urgency is random, shallow, and unimportant (lakatos placed his historical comments into footnotes, probably, in order not to interrupt the flow of his epistemological dialogue). fifth, epistemological non-instrumental dialogue does not know interest in ontological ecology – only in the universal logical necessity (which can be multiple, according to bibler, another proponent of the non-instrumental epistemological dialogic pedagogy, see berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009). in contrast to the spirituality of the sublime, emphasized by the non-instrumental epistemological dialogue, the ontological ecology – the corporality of the mundane – is essentially non-dialogic but it can be pulled in a sphere of ontological dialogicity. for example, with aging, i have noticed that i become crankier, more irritable, impulsive, and even depressed in late evenings. although, during these times in the evening, i’m feeling that i have a reason to be like this – something or somebody bothers me and gets on my nerves, i have learned to know that it is probably a result of some biochemical imbalance in my body. in the morning, i often feel better: full of enthusiasm, optimism, patience, and sensitivity. i try to dialogize my dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-12 non-dialogic ecology by my attempts to use (not always successful) the famous russian saying, “the morning is wiser than the evening” and not to make important relational decisions in the evening. epistemological dialogue does not know ecological concerns, rather it mandates its regime of mono-topic total commitment and purity of the spiritual sublime. sixth, despite all assurance of the contrary (phillips, 2002), the overall contempt for the mundane that the non-instrumental epistemological dialogic pedagogy expresses generates a kind of elitism with its all moral, ethical, and political consequences. if “unexamined life is not worth living” (socrates-plato), the worth of life and, ultimately the person living this life, is defined by the degree of how much a person can be a dialogic epistemological philosopher, examining his or her own life and the lives of others. the intellectual discourse on life – it is discursive examination, – becomes more important than the life itself (examined or unexamined) (see for a more discussion of this point in kukathas, 2003). using aristotle’s (2000) terms, the episteme overrules the phronêsis (and the techné and the sophia). the epistemological dialogue is not focused on just on any dialogue but only on the sublime dialogue of high cultures. thus, bibler’s idea for school as “the school of the dialogue of cultures” can be characterized as “the school of the dialogue of high cultures” (see my debate on this issue with irina berlyand in matusov, 2009b). a mundane chat or mundane activities might have different but still important wisdom than a philosophical discussion of the sublime – not to make wisdom the absolute acme of all other possible values and virtues. i think that epistemological non-instrumental dialogue can inform, inspire, and provoke an ontological dialogue. ontological dialogue can be legitimately studied by reducing it to an epistemological non-instrumental dialogue (e.g., for tracking the logic of some particular theme unfolding in a dialogue). but epistemological non-instrumental dialogue cannot, and should not, guide ontological dialogue, especially in education, because in my view, the pedagogical regime of epistemological dialogue with its insistence on the “discipline of the mind” based on the total commitment of the mono-topic development of an idea and bracketing the ontology of the participants cannot be supported without relying on pedagogical violence. people cannot simply and totally commit all their time to the development of one theme, by themselves without an external violent push on them. ontolog i cal pedagogi cal dialogue as far as i know the term “ontological dialogue” was coined by educational philosopher alexander sidorkin (1999) as opposition to other understandings of the notion of dialogue such as “instrumental dialogue”, “epistemological dialogue”, “communicational dialogue”, “linguistic dialogue” and so on. sidorkin argues, notion of dialogue is treated [in an ontological understanding of dialogue – em] as central for defining human existence, not merely a form of communication. to experience what it means to be human, one needs to engage in dialogical relations. we are human in the fullest sense when we engage in dialogue. this ontological understanding of dialogue has its implications for education. i argue that schools should focus on helping children experience and learn what it means to be human. therefore, the entire social arrangement called "school" should be designed around this purpose of introducing children to the life of dialogue (sidorkin, 1999, p. 4). the word ontological does not refer to just any kind of being, neither does it deal with the existence of dialogue; it refers specifically to human existence. this may not be the most conventional use of the term, but from my point of view, it is the most accurate one. the ontological concept of dialogue explores the place of dialogue in the human way of being. one of dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-13 the reasons for using the adjective ontological is a need to distinguish between what i propose and a number of non-ontological concepts of dialogue. in the context of this book, the very existence of a human being in his or her human quality is a result of dialogue. in the nonontological conception of dialogue, this relation between dialogue and human existence is reversed: dialogue is treated as secondary to human existence, mainly as a form of communication (sidorkin, 1999, p. 7). let me provide my understandings and inferences from sidorkin’s deep and dense definition: 1. i understand the polysemic notion of ontology, “human being”, “human existence”, as our big and small ethical deeds (“поступки,” “postupki” in russian) and relations with others that define us in the world that we create, find ourselves, and in which we are thrown. ontology has priority over epistemology – i.e., what and how we know about the world (i.e., epistemology) is a part of our being in the world (i.e., ontology). ontology is charged with ethic, moral, judgment, politics, aesthetics, desire, will, emotions, responsibility, and so on. epistemology is embraced by ontology, “how we breathe is how we write” (soviet poet bulat okudzhava’s lyrics) but not the other way around despite the fact that ontology is often the object of investigation by epistemology, which may affect the ontology (which is why critical ontological dialogue can be so important). 2. ontological dialogue penetrates all aspects of the human existence, “buber and bakhtin, like copernicus, discovered the new center of the human universe, the dialogical. it is the center in a sense that the very fact of human existence is contingent upon engagement in dialogical relations. an individual may exist as an organism in a physical or a biological sense. but we are truly human only when we are in a dialogical relation with another. the most important things in human lives happen between human beings, rather than within or without them” (sidorkin, 1999, p. 11). ontological dialogue penetrates both minute, routine, mundane, as well as the big scale time and the sublime. it does not have a beginning or an end. it penetrates even evil deeds like slavery (see hegel's analysis of the master's dream desire about his slave full of dialogicity, in hegel & baillie, 1967). any teaching, even, super conventional and monologic, is penetrated by ontological dialogue (lobok, 2001, 2008). oppressive regimes generate distorted ontological dialogue. 3. the concept of ontological provides two major frameworks: descriptive (i.e., how things are, see #2 above) and prescriptive, normative (i.e., how things should be). the prescriptive framework of ontological dialogue is usually defined by two concerns: humanity and critical overtaking of human affairs in their social and natural life. “show me onto log i ca l dialogue”: ontolog i ca l dialogue as a descr ipt ive , methodolog i ca l f ramework where is ontological dialogue? show it to me, please! otherwise, everything sounds like philosophical mumbo-jumbo blah-blah-blah: it sounds good but what does it mean in practice? how to grab it? how to study it? give me something concrete and point at that something and say, “this is ontological dialogue because….”! operationalize “ontological dialogue” for me! i do not try to mystify ontological dialogue but it is different from traditional methodology of “operationalization”. to some degree, ontological dialogue surrounding us in our everyday life, is too common and too familiar to be noticed. ontological dialogue is not in the text but always between the beholder and other people. let me provide an example to provoke and engage you, my reader, in what i mean: more than twenty-five years ago, in the mid-1980s, i, in my twenties lived in a big moscow apartment with my wife, my very young son, my grandmother tanya in her mid-80s and her older sister, my grandaunt klara who was almost 90. klara used to be a technical editor but she worked all her life also as a tailor until dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-14 almost her death making and adjusting dresses for our big extended family. once at dinner, when we all met at a circle table, klara asked us why her niece rosa, who was in her late 60s then, stopped coming to visit. rosa often visited her aunts running errands for them and provided company. i try to reconstruct our conversation that my wife and i had with klara – i combine us together as “we” because neither my wife nor i can remember our exact utterances and who made them. i do not remember tanya verbally participating in the conversation but she smiled with irony aligning with my wife and me against her sister, klara. klara: i wonder why rosa has stopped showing up at our place. we: we are not surprised. you called her “cow” last time. she was upset. we think she probably still feels being offended by you. klara: why would she become offended with me? she brought a new dress and asked my opinion. i told her my honest opinion that is that in this dress she looked like a cow. you know that i like to tell “mama-truth” in people’s face. it’s not my fault that she looked like a cow in this dress. we: you hurt her feelings. you didn’t need to lie to rosa but you could deliver your truth to rosa in more soothing and nice way. for example, you could have said something like that, “it seems to me that this dress makes you look a bit chubby, no?” klara: that would have been a lie. it did not “seem” to me but i saw it in my own eyes that she looked like a cow in it. not “a bit” and not “chubby”, but as a cow! somebody must tell that to her. we: klara, she wanted to hear a word of encouragement from you, not your offending “mamatruth”. klara: truth can’t be offending. “don’t blame the mirror if your face is ugly!” if rosa had wanted to hear a complement, she should have gone to men-suitors – not to me. we: but admit, klara, you don’t like truth about yourself when it’s unpleasant. klara: i always love the truth whatever it is. i always like when people tell me the truth even when it is bitter. we: do you? what about when people say that you are rude and insensitive? klara: i don’t like it because that simply is not true. so, is it an example of ontological dialogue? not, by itself, until it starts to be puzzling and interesting to you, reader. it puzzles and interests me. i wonder if klara’s logic is based on some kind of logical fallacy that grants her right to tell unpleasant “mama-truth” to others while rejecting this right when “mama-truth” is presented by others to herself. or her logic is ok, – it is consistent and correct, but logic, itself, is not omnipotent in humans’ affairs. i wonder if klara would agree that truth can’t be rude and insensitive, that rudeness is based on meanness while insensitivity is based on wrong perception. with rosa, as with many other people, klara was not mean-spirited but rather sincere and useful to rosa (remember gricean maxims of good communication: be truthful, be informative, be relevant, and be clear?) (grice, 1975). arguably, klara fulfilled all of these maxims in communication with rosa, but we, — my wife, my grandma, and i, — argued that it was not enough. of course, klara’s observational judgment that rosa looked like a cow in the new dress could have been wrong, but we did not challenge klara’s professional fashion judgment – we agreed with klara that the new dress did not suit rosa well. my wife and i were concerned not with truth of whether or not the new dress really suited rosa (not with whether or not grandma’s soup is salty, using another example), but with something else altogether that may (or may not) be equally or even more important than concerns about truth in a given moment and circumstances. besides truth, one can be concerned about psychological well-being of another person, as it is in the case of klara, or about being appreciative of another labor as in a case of grandma’s overdialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-15 salted soup. of course, the concern about truth can overweight these non-truth concerns. at least, this ‘something else’ has to be taken into account when a person provides a response. however, it is interesting for me in this example that my wife and i chose klara’s own way of delivering “mama-truth” to communicate to her about the limitations of this way of relating with people. we were telling klara our bitter “mama-truth” in her face about possible reasons of why rosa stopped visiting us. not only did klara use her logical closed-circuit to response to us, we used our logical closed-circuit to address her and show the limitations of using closed-circuit. the difference was that she believed in using logical closedcircuit but we did not. was it our hypocrisy? can issues of responsibility be talked through using logic? could we defeat klara using her own weapon? using audre lorde’s (1984) famous phrase, “can master’s tool to be used to dismantle the master’s house?” lorde thought it can’t but lisa delpit (1995) thinks it can. could we present our objections to klara in a different way without using her telling-mamatruth-to-your-face logical way? if so, what might it be? should teachers tell their students mama-truth about their deficits in their face? why? why not? what are alternatives? finally (for now), does presentation of truth affect the truth itself? my reader, if my excerpt, or i, managed to engage you in wonders and considering interesting issues that you want to address to me, klara, my wife, silent tanya, grice, lorde, delpit, and other people that i did not mentioned above, my example of ontological dialogue has been successful, but if not, than, sorry, it was not successful. as a successful example, ontological dialogue does not exist without your, reader's, engagement becoming interested in this story and its discussion and wanting to respond to it. i used my case because i thought it would be easier to engage you in a puzzlement (but i could be wrong – if so, sorry). however, sociolinguists (and bakhtin) used very mundane, almost dull, trivial examples to discuss and analyze ontological dialogue (see, for example, linell, 1998). see the following examples from bakhtin, …in the ordinary speech of our everyday life such a use of another's words is extremely widespread, especially in dialogue, where one speaker very often literally repeats the statement of the other speaker, investing it with new value and accenting it in his own way—with expressions of doubt, indignation, irony, mockery, ridicule, and the like (bakhtin, 1999, p. 194). the embedding of words and especially of accents from the other's rejoinder in makar devushkin's speech is even more marked and obvious in the second of the quoted passages. the words containing the other's polemically exaggerated accent are even enclosed here in quotation marks: "he's a copying clerk . . ." in the preceding lines the word "copy" is repeated three times. in each of these three instances the other's potential accent is present in the word "copy," but it is suppressed by devushkin's own accent; however, it becomes constantly stronger, until it finally breaks through and assumes the form of the other's direct speech. we are presented here, therefore, with gradations of gradual intensification in the other's accent: "i know very well, of course, that i don't do much by copying . . . [then follows a reservation—m. b.] why, what if i am a copying clerk, after all? what harm is there in copying, after all? 'he's a copying clerk!' . . ." we have indicated by italics and underscoring the other's accent and its gradual intensification, which finally dominates utterly the line of discourse enclosed in quotation marks. but even in these final words, obviously belonging to the other, devushkin's own voice is present too, for he polemically exaggerates the other's accent. as the other person's accent intensifies, so does devushkin's counter-accent (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 208-209). the notion of ontological dialogue reminds me of a quantum particle that is both localized and distributed. ontological dialogue is localized in the events – it is always here-and-now (like a particle). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-16 but it is also distributed in time and space – it does not have a beginning or end (like a wave). it does not have cause or genesis, another important feature of the [ontological – em] dialogue is this it knows neither genesis nor causality. dostoevsky, writes bakhtin, did not use such a fundamental german classical philosophy category as becoming or evolution. for him, the central philosophical categories were such notions as coexistence and interaction (bakhtin, 1999, p. 28). drawing from dostoevsky, bakhtin questioned the relevance of dialectics when it comes to a finalizing synthesis of contradictions and differences. this was not a particularly safe thing to do in a thoroughly marxist and therefore "dialectic" country. for bakhtin, differences never fully merge, instead, they coexist in an engaged interaction. dostoevsky, an embodiment of dialogical thinking for bakhtin, saw everything as coexisting in one single moment. he could only understand the world as coexistence of different things. this does not mean that bakhtin denied the importance of change. what he rejected was the ideas of genesis, where the past determines the present. he also rejected the reduction of difference (synthesis) as the end of development. dialogue does not reduce plurality of human worlds and yet it connects various parts of this plurality (sidorkin, 1999, p. 18). studying and revealing ontological dialogue means to engage in it and change it. it cannot remain the same, it is always contaminated by new understanding that the researcher brings, by the researcher addressing and replying to its participants since, a case of ontological dialogue is in the researcher’s response provoked by the presented case and its participants. inter-observational consensus is not a proxy of the validity of interpretation anymore as in traditional research is. an interpretation is validated through its testing and depth, – i.e., through internally persuasive discourse involving agreements, disagreements and changing topics. ontological dialogue requires very different orientation from traditional social research. it is dialogic subject-oriented and voiced, rather than silent, voiceless object oriented (bakhtin, 1986). kiyo miyazaki’s response to eugene matusov’s arguments on ontological, epistemological, and instrumental dialogic pedagogy (by kiyotaka miyazaki) from here, i will describe my responses to eugene’s arguments on ontological, epistemological, and instrumental dialogic pedagogy. eugene’s arguments are divided into two issues. one is about the opposition between instrumental dialogic pedagogy and ontological dialogic pedagogy, and the other is about the opposition between ontological dialogic pedagogy and epistemological dialogic pedagogy. however, i cannot respond to these two issues separately because i cannot agree with eugene’s distinction between the three types of dialogic pedagogies as mutually exclusive categories in the first place. so, i will start my response by sharing my perspective on ontological, epistemological and instrumental dialogue. first, i will show my view on the relationship between “ontological” and “epistemological.” then, i will comment on eugene’s critique of his so-called epistemological dialogical pedagogy. finally, i will argue my view on the instrumentality of the dialogic pedagogy and comment on his critique of his instrumental pedagogy. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-17 kiyo’s v iew on “ontolog i ca l”, “epis temologi cal” and “instrumental” ternary relationship eugene treats these three as mutually exclusive categories. i see these three as three aspects of a relation among people. the relation among people can be either dialogic or monologic. more precisely, dialogic and monologic are two poles of a continuum and a persons’ relation can be one in between dialogic and monologic. furthermore, a relation between persons is not just a relation between persons at its two poles. the relation between persons should be understood as a three-term relation or ternary relation. the third term is the world that surrounds the people. a person (or a party) at each pole of a relation not only has a relation to each other, but a unique relation to the world. let me describe the ternary relation in detail. regardless of whether it is dialogic or monologic, any relation between person a and b is a relation between a’s relation to the world and b’s relation to the world. people do not exist in a vacuum. a person’s experience means that she/he works on, and is worked on, by the surrounding world. some objects are shared between two people. some objects are not. when two people share nothing in the surrounding world, there is no relation between the two people. even when two people share a part of the surrounding world, there is a possibility in which these two people have a different relationship to that part. loving. hating. fighting with. ignoring. cheating. working together. teaching. being taught. discussing. any relation is a ternary relation. even with love, that makes a person blind, there is a world surrounding the two people in love, as the third term. a person falls in love with the other, attracted by his/her attitude and actions toward the world. two people who are in love are sharing with not only each other, but also the surrounding world. developmental psychologists emphasize the importance of the ternary relationship among a child, a caretaker, and objects in the world. an example of this is the development of representation in early childhood. one area of research is about the secondary intersubjectivity. trevarthen and others are studying the developmental change of an infant’s awareness of self and others, which they call the shift to the secondary intersubjectivity (e.g.,treverthen & hubley, 1978). this developmental level is defined as an infant’s coordination and sharing with adults his/her attentions, feelings and intentions toward a third pole of an object, event, and action (fogel & dekoeyer-laros, 2007). the importance of the jointattention is also shown in other areas of child development like language acquisition (scaife & bruner, 1975). i do not know whether bakhtin or other researchers of dialogue explicitly analyze the dialogic relation as ternary one. there is a third term of the world in relation to two people or two camps regardless of whether it is a dialogic or a monologic. three relations in a ternary relationship will change together. depending on whether the relation between two persons is dialogic or monologic, the remaining two relations will take a different form. when a relation between two people is monologic and one person controls the other, the controller’s view of the surrounding world is pressed on the controlled. in other words, the epistemological relation between the controlling person and the surrounding world dominates over the relation between the controlled person and the surrounding world. bakhtin’s description about tolstoy’s novel as a monologic one, cited below (bakhtin, 1999) can be read as the description of the world surrounding the author and heroes as the third term of the ternary relationship. that external world in which the characters of the story live and die is the author’s world, an objective world vis-à-vis the consciousnesses of the characters. everything within it is seen and portrayed in the author’s all-encompassing and omniscient field of vision (bakhtin, 1999, p. 71). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-18 in a monologic novel, the author’s view of the world dominates. the author decides how the heroes see the world. on the other hand, bakhtin characterizes dostoevsky’s novel as a dialogic one: he (dostoevsky) would have introduced the life and death of the coachman and the tree into the field of vision and consciousness of the noblewoman, and the noblewoman’s life into the field of vision and consciousness of the coachman. he would have forced his characters to see and know all those essential things that he himself the author sees and knows. he would not have retained for himself any essential authorial “surplus” (essential, that is, from the point of view of the desired truth). he would have arranged a face-to-face confrontation between the truth of the nobleman and the truth of the coachman, and he would have forced them to come into dialogic contact [omitted,] and he would himself have assumed, in relation to them, a dialogic position with equal right (bakhtin, 1999, p.72). a dialogic author does not have a monopoly on the worldview. her/his worldview shares equal right with the hero’s worldview. each participant can enjoy his or her own worldview. the way in which the participants share the world, as the third pole, is the deciding factor about the extent to which the people’s relationship can be characterized as dialogic. this must be the central issue for the study of dialogic pedagogy and the dialogue in general. relation between ontology and epistemology ontology, epistemology and instrumentality are three aspects, or characteristics of the ternary relationship between two people and the world. instrumentality has a little bit different of a characteristic than the other two, since this characteristic emerges when someone intentionally uses the ternary relationship to achieve some purpose. so, i will first discuss the ontological and epistemological aspects of the ternary relationship and comment on the instrumental aspect later. my view is that the ontological and epistemological aspects always coexist and relate closely in the ternary relationship4 regardless of whether it is dialogic or monologic. i will first characterize what “ontological” and “epistemological” mean. according to oxford dictionary of english, “ontology” is “the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.” human being as an animal is not a static being but an animate being. she/he is always working on other people and the surrounding world. so, the ontological aspect of the ternary relationship refers to ways a person works on the other person(s) and the surrounding world. the epistemological aspect, on the other hand, refers to ways a person is aware of the other person(s) and the surrounding world. i use the term “being aware of”, or “awareness” in the sense of the founder of the ecological psychology james j. gibson (1979). not only human beings, but also animals, are aware of the environment. “being aware of” implies not only conscious knowing but also unconscious knowing. embodied feeling is an important part of this knowing. eugene’s view on epistemology is too narrow, from my standpoint. he argues in the section of “epistemological instrumental dialogic pedagogy” in the following way, 4 someone might argue that there is the four part relationship between a leaner, a teacher, a learner’s view on the world and a teacher’s view on the world in place of the ternary relationship. i do not take this view, because, first, there are not only epistemological relations but also ontological relations. so, relations are between people and the world, not between people and views on the world. second, two people share the world and have different views on the shared world. without sharing the world, there is no relation between people, either monologic or dialogic. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-19 the modernist rational mind has to subordinate to the iron logic of the universal necessity and purify itself from any other irrational and corrupting influences like emotions, values, beliefs, responsibility, traditions, social justice, loyalties, vanities, reputations, and judgments (matusov, 2014). here, eugene identifies epistemological work as a purified rational reasoning process that follows the logical necessity. this definition is too narrow. human being s’ epistemological work, similar to environmental awareness, includes other work such as the embodied sensing and illogical feeling. even emotion has an epistemological component. frijda (1986) who defines emotion as “a change in action readiness,” points out that emotion has an experiential aspect that is “an awareness of some mode of action readiness of a passive and action-control-demanding nature, involving readiness to change or maintain relationships with the environment (or intentional objects generally.)” not only emotion. aesthetics is a human being’s awareness of her/his environment’s beauty. all human endeavors eugene listed above as non-intellectual ones have epistemological aspects, if not a rational one. human beings’ epistemological functions can be divided into “purified rational reasoning” and other ones. however, a “purified rational reasoning” cannot work alone in human being s’ epistemological activities. to understand something deeply, one should connect a purified rational reasoning about something with other types of reasoning. for example, embodied reasoning and aesthetic reasoning. this is particularly important in children’s learning in education, a point i will argue for later. working or acting as an ontological aspect and being aware of the epistemological aspect are closely connected and influence each other in the ternary relationship between two people and their surrounding world. gibsonian perception researchers emphasize the importance of this connection. gibsoninan researchers name this connection “perception-action coupling”, “perception-action loop (clark, 1997)”, or “perception-action cycle (neisser, 1978)”. gibson’s following phrase shows the basic idea, “we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive” (gibson, 1979, p.223). some researchers name the action referred to in the last half of the above phrase as “epistemic action” compared to “pragmatic action” (kirsh & maglio, 1994). human beings, even some animals, do not always only act for the pragmatic purpose of “here and now”. they sometimes act just for the epistemic purpose. reed (1996) states as follows, “although perception may well have evolved, at least in part, directly in the service of guiding activity, as any animal’s perceptual systems get more sophisticated, the animal can come to be aware of affordances other than those it is acting upon here and now” (p.98). i cannot agree with eugene’s claim that ontology has priority over epistemology. however, his assertion is certainly correct in one sense. as reed argues (1996), animals acquire epistemological organ in evolution since they act. animals must know the world in order to act in it. still, this is one side of a coin. animals must act in order to know. sometimes, they act just to know the world. epistemology does not subordinate fully to ontology. researches of gibsonian scholars are almost limited to perception. still, the idea of “perceptionaction loop” can be expanded to the epistemological functions, other than just perception. eugene’s socalled “purified rational reasoning” has developed in evolution (and in cultural development) in order for human beings to act in the world. it also depends on action to work if not directly as the researchers of embodied cognition argue (e.g., johnson, 1987). though it is apparently “pure” and detached from everyday life, it cannot be completely off-line from the practical life of a human being. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-20 dialogic and monologic ternary relationship between two persons and the surrounding world can be dialogic or monologic. these two should be seen as two poles of one continuum and not as mutually exclusive categories. a ternary relationship is dialogic when two persons experience “unfinalizability” in the sense of bakhtin. bakhtin described the relationship between polyphonic novel’s author and its heroes as follows. the consciousness of the creator of a polyphonic novel is constantly and everywhere present in the novel, and is active in it to the highest degree. but the function of this consciousness and the forms of its activity are different than in the monologic novel: the author’s consciousness does not transform others’ consciousnesses (that is, the consciousness of the characters) into objects, and does not give them secondhand and finalizing definitions. [omitted] it reflects and re-creates not a world of objects, but precisely these other consciousnesses with their worlds, re-creates them in their authentic unfinalizability (which is, after all, their essence) (bakhtin, 1999, p.67-68). on the monologic relationship, bakhtin says as follows, “in a monologic design, the hero is closed and his semantic boundaries strictly defined: he acts, experiences, thinks, and is conscious within the limits of what he is, that is, within the limits of his image defined as reality [omitted.]” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 52). when two persons participate in dialogic relation, they continuously generate actions with new significance toward themselves, each other, and the surrounding world. this is the ontological aspect of the dialogic relation. they also continuously generate new awareness about themselves, each other and the surrounding world. this is the epistemological aspect of the dialogic relation. when two people are in a monologic relation, they do not generate actions with new significance toward themselves, each other, or the surrounding world. each, or both, participants fix the significance of their actions. their awareness toward themselves, each other, and the surrounding world are also fixed. in consequence, there remains only one view dominant in the monologic relation. i agree with eugene to think that unfinalizability distinguishes the dialogic from monologic relation. however, eugene thinks that it is the distinctive characteristic of “ontological dialogic pedagogy.” for me, who thinks that “ontological” is an aspect of the relation that can be dialogic or monologic, unfinalizability is the distinctive characteristic of “dialogic pedagogy.” since unfinalizability is the distinctive characteristic, the form of the relation is not relevant for the distinction between dialogic or monologic. classroom based relations in the form of discussion or debate, do not assure that the class is dialogic. in the debate class for example, the focus tends to be to win or lose rather than to generate new questions (tumposky, 2004). such a class is monologic in the sense that only one voice dominates. i agree with eugene that lecture class can be dialogic. he says that lecture can be dialogic when it is a long answer to students’ questions. though i do not deny this, i also think that lecture can be dialogic when it generates questions in students. eugene’s two character izat ion o f dialog i c pedagogy (onto log i cal and epis temologi ca l ) v iewed from my standpoint so far, i have shared my view about epistemology and ontology as two aspects of the dialogic and monologic relations. now i will examine eugene’s two types of dialogic pedagogy: ontological dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-21 pedagogy and epistemological pedagogy. though eugene further divides epistemological pedagogy into instrumental and non-instrumental categories, i do not distinguish these two here. what are eugene’s two types of pedagogy? he wrote as follows, “the epistemological noninstrumental dialogic pedagogy prioritizes the intellectual sublime of the high culture.” the keyword is “high culture” and he contrasts “high culture” with “mundane”. two terms are not clearly defined by eugene. but his characterization of bibler’s “school of the dialogue of cultures” as “the school of the dialogue of high cultures” suggests that he defines the term “high culture” as the contents of school subjects like sciences, arts, literatures, and so on. the term “mundane” probably refers to everyday life other than schools. these two terms can probably be characterized by the difference in the detachedness from the real world of practice. what eugene names as “epistemological dialogue,” is dialogue in the world of ideas detached from the real world of practice. what eugene names as “ontological dialogue,” is dialogue within the real world of practice. if education is the intellectual activities in schools, and pedagogy is the method to organize these activities, dialogic pedagogy becomes necessarily identical to the epistemological dialogic pedagogy in this theoretical framework. a different picture is seen from my standpoint. there is an epistemological aspect in what eugene names the ontological dialogic relation, or the dialogic relation in the real world of practice. real world practice forms, and is led by, the epistemological function of the participants. the epistemological function, within the real world of practice, may not be a purified rational reasoning but embodied ones like an emotional feeling. still, these are epistemological functions and lead the everyday practice. however, epistemological aspects of the everyday practice has a unique characteristic. most everyday practices do not aim for the achievement of the epistemological concern. these activities aim for the achievement of the practical concern of the participants like their desire, demands, and interests. epistemological function is just a means for achieving practical concerns. similarly, there is an ontological aspect in what eugene names the epistemological dialogic relation, or the dialogic relation in the world of ideas from my standpoint. as i already noted, even the purified intellectual function depends on actions that some researchers call “epistemic action.” this action connotes not only the ideal action but also embodied action. as far as the epistemological dialogic relation has a component of action, it has an ontological aspect. it also has some attributes generally attached to action like desires and emotions. intellectual curiosity is one of them. ontologically, participants in this relation can be named as “intellectual inquirer.” about eugene’s cr i t ique on the epis temologi cal dialogue i will examine eugene’s two characterizations, or critiques, about his so called “epistemological dialogic pedagogy.” first, he argues that epistemological dialogue does not involve an ontological meeting of the participants. as noted above, i think that eugene’s use of the term “ontological” refers to participants’ life activities and various relations among them in the so-called real world outside of schools. eugene’s use of the term “epistemological” refers to participants’ life activities and various relations among them in the world of ideas. so, his first characterization is the logical consequence from his views on two types of relations. however, is it possible to disconnect the activity in the real world from the activity in the world of ideas? it should be emphasized that the activity in the world of idea is a necessary one for human beings. even animals, other than human being have its precursor as gibsonian scholars argue. though such epistemic action is temporarily detached from the various kinds of mundane interests and desires, it is eventually used for expanding human being’s action in the real world. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-22 gibsonian scholars are not the only ones who argue the necessity of the epistemic activity in the world of ideas for expanding the activity in the real world. wartofsky (1979) argues that there are three types of artifacts and it is the third type, which he named the tertiary artifact that is used in the activity in the world of ideas. epistemic activities, using the tertiary artifact, are contemplation and/or aesthetic or disinterested perception. however, such epistemic activities are not fully detached from the real world practice. if, as i claim, an ‘actual’ world is social-historical praxis, (technology, social organization, etc.), then the ‘possible’ worlds provide candidates for conceivable change in this mode of praxis itself. the perceptual alternative provides the possibility of a practical alternative, as, so to speak, a perceptual hypothesis (wartofsky, 1979, p. 209). the epistemic activity can expand the possibilities of activities in the real world indirectly as it is once detached from the real world activity and specializes in exploring the ‘possible worlds.’ the epistemic activity is not an escape from the real world. it is the activity with which animals and human beings necessarily have to widen the possibilities in the real world life. so, the epistemic activity is vital for school education. as cole (1997) pointed out, school can be the tertiary artifact in which children can experience various kinds of possibilities for their future real world life. eugene’s epistemological dialogue not only has indirect relation to his ontological dialogue as i noted above but also has its own ontological aspect since his epistemological dialogue is the activity of the epistemological being from my standpoint. in other words, it has its own “ontological concern.” intellectual curiosity, as intrinsic motivation, is a typical one. eugene says that he does not know how participants’ interests to the problem developed in lakatos’ imaginary math classroom. he says he does not know how their interests are grounded in participants’ real lives. i think that problems in the classroom need not be grounded in participants’ real lives. what is important is if the problems in the classroom can stimulate the intellectual curiosity of the participants’ as epistemological beings. and the pedagogy’s important missions are to characterize such problems and to find out ways for generating such problems. eugene’s second characterization or critique of his so-called epistemological dialogic pedagogy is that it prioritizes the high culture and is interested in the mundane only because it can give the material and opportunity to move to the sublime. it is true that learning objectives of school education are mostly taken from high culture. the failure of his argument is his disregard for the importance of high culture for people to understand the significance of their mundane experience. in people’s lives, the high culture and the mundane experience are intrinsically connected. not only can people’s understandings be enriched by their deep understanding of a mundane experience. the reverse is also true. understanding high culture helps people to explore the significance of their mundane experience, which is hidden from them in everyday life. appreciating the high culture like sciences, arts, and literature is not the leisure of the elite. the high culture is the historical product to make explicit the significance of the mundane experience motivated by eugene’s so-called ontological concern. it has been produced by the abstraction of some kind of universality from the mundane, corporal experience. the lesson in the classroom can provide children a chance to learn the intrinsic relations between the high culture and the mundane experience. let me introduce one case to show the importance of connecting the mundane experience and the understanding of high culture in the classroom. it is an episode of a teacher’s understanding of a poem. the teacher studied the poem as a preparation for a lesson. this type of learning is called dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-23 kyouzai-kaishaku or “interpreting a teaching material” in japan (saitou,1964; miyazaki, 2010). the poem’s title is “haru” or “spring,” written by fuyue anzai (1898 1965). haru (spring) chouchou ga ippiki dattan kaikyou wo watatte itta. (a butterfly has gone alone over the dattan strait) dattan strait is now called mamiya strait and is between the asian continent and saklin islands, which belonged to japan before the ww2. a more important fact is that the word “dattan” sounds very heavy or solemn to the japanese, and the sound reminds us something challenging and difficult to overcome, though most japanese do not know its meaning. the poem can be, and is generally interpreted, to describe a little being like a butterfly challenging the difficulties such as flying over the strait. the poem was published in 1929 and was avant-garde in its day. it is a typical “high culture” learning material. yukio tsukamoto, a principal of a japanese elementary school and my collaborator in developing dialogic pedagogy, once had a lesson on this poem for 6th graders. he conducted kyouzaikaishaku for the preparation of the lesson. he tried to understand this poem by connecting this “high culture” product with the mundane, real life episodes of his friends. so, his is a good case to analyze the relation between high culture and the mundane experience. the poem is sometimes used as learning material in japanese elementary schools. there have been many studies accumulated by teachers about this poem like the analysis of its linguistic structure or the analysis of its variants. these are ”the high culture type” analyses of the poem as the high culture. these analyses are themselves not worthless and tsukamoto learned about some of them. however, he turned his attention to the seemingly unrelated, real life episodes of his friends. in reading the poem, he was reminded of his friends’ real life episodes, such as retirement, changing jobs, and falling in love, and connected these episodes to the world of the poem. some comments will be necessary to help western readers understand the following. spring, the title of the poem, has some connotation for us japanese. since the end of march and the beginning of april marks both the beginning and end of the school year and fiscal year for companies and the government, spring is the season for the japanese to leave old communities for their new lives. in the following, i will share an episode tsukamoto referred to in the letter he sent to his fellow teachers to tell them about his view of the poem. he introduced his friend tsukushi (pseudonym in this paper. names of another teacher and the elementary school are pseudonym too), a teacher, as follows, there have been many happenings in these march and april. most shocking among them was my friend tsukushi’s retirement after 29 years long career as a teacher. his family said to him that he had worked enough and his brother living in his hometown said that he had done his best, he told to me. he said there have been many happenings in these 29 years and he had never wavered in his decision to quit the job and had worked cheerfully with his colleagues in the last weeks. so, some colleagues had been surprised with the announcement of his retirement at the last teacher meeting. in tsukushi’s letter, tukamoto quoted, tsukushi recorded his final day in school as follows, dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-24 at the last meeting, names of retirees of the year were announced. mr. iguchi, whose desk was next to mine, said, “ why didn’t you tell me earlier? you have been always telling me everything honestly, haven’t you? why do you quit?” “i am tired. there have been many happenings. now i want to rest.” “what did your wife say?” “she did not oppose to my decision. she said, not to make her feel more painful.” “how about your living?” “income will decrease so living will be harder. in the next year, all the children will leave home and be independent of us. i had worked hard for children. now i do not hesitate to quit.” he said goodbye to the children of the class as follows, today, i leave the school. in 3 years i have been with you, i have been experiencing a lot. i want to tell you this most. in your life from now, you would feel tough, feel hard and feel sad. you can rely on other people at these moments. rely on friends, teachers and families. it does not mean you are weak. it is not a shame for you to rely on other people at these moments. everyone has lived and will live in that way. i love this town. i love all people in yamada elementary school. tsukamoto commented on tsukuba’s speech to children as follows. only a person who has felt sad, felt the tender-heartedness of others and the importance of others, and had changed himself in his life can deliver this speech. i just want you to know how mr. tsukushi behaved in his retirement. though tsukamoto noted his interpretation of the poem, i will omit it. what is important here is not the content of his interpretation of the poem but the fact that he tried to interpret the poem by connecting the poem with the seemingly irrelevant real life experiences of the people. why did he do this? for tsukamoto, his friend’s experience shown in this episode was not irrelevant to the poem. his friend decided to go forth to the unknown future after the long agony he experienced as a teacher. for tsukamoto, this situation of his friend overlapped with the situation the butterfly experienced in the poem. on the one hand, tsukamoto understood the world of the poem by connecting with it the real life experience of the people. tsukamoto made clear the significance of his friend’s experience through reading this poem. many people would read poems and novels in similar fashion by connecting them with people’s real life experiences. this reading is effective because the high culture like poems and people’s mundane experiences are closely tied. the high culture, like poems, attracts people because these shed light on the significance hidden in the mundane experience of the people. mundane experience is not just a material to understand the high culture. instrumental dialog i cal pedagogy let us turn now to the issue of instrumentality. as noted before, i do not adopt the category “instrumental pedagogy” as distinct from other types of pedagogies. instrumentality is a feature of any relationship regardless of whether it is dialogic or monologic. since the pedagogical activities are not natural phenomena, but are generated intentionally by human beings for some purposes, they are more or less instrumental. it is so even in the case that people’s purpose is to experience the dialogic relation itself. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-25 then, how about eugene’s so-called instrumental dialogical pedagogy? he characterized it as the one that “services an effective means for non-dialogic ends”(italic is mine). if his characterization is correct, this one should be named not “instrumental dialogic pedagogy” but “monologic pedagogy.” maybe, what he calls “instrumental dialogical pedagogy” uses instructional methods like discussion and debates. but, as eugene himself says, and i have already noted, whether these methods are used or not is irrelevant when defining them as dialogic. regardless of the instructional methods they use, the pedagogies should be called “monologic” when they serve teachers’ preset “one correct end.” the defining characteristic of a monologic lesson is the teacher’s act of presetting an endpoint. still, whether the endpoint is preset at the start of the lesson or not, is not the discriminating characteristic between a monologic lesson and a dialogic lesson. dialogic lesson needs some preset endpoint (most often set by teachers). what makes this lesson dialogic, but not monologic, is that, the first, preset endpoint is not an answer but a question. for a lesson to be dialogic, there should be a genuine question at the beginning. that question ignites the inquiry process in the class and makes the lesson dialogic. the question should not be the so-called known-information-question that the teacher knows the answer, but the one i call the unknown-information-seeking-question5 where the teacher does not know the answer before the class (miyazaki, 2011). the second characteristic of a dialogic lesson is that the question changes throughout the lesson. in other words, both students and teacher, through their dialogue, discover new questions or new implications of the first question throughout the lesson. dialogic questioning unfinalizes itself and the inquiry. this is the real hallmark of a dialogic lesson. let me show you one episode from tsukamoto’s class lesson about the previously referred to poem. since the poem was written in the 1920s, the notations of the characters for “chouchou” or butterfly are different from the ones used now. children, even many adults, cannot read the notations used in the poem as “chou-chou,” butterfly in japanese. they read them as “te-fu-te-fu” which has no meaning as a japanese word. so, the children did not know that this poem was about the butterfly when the class began. tsukamoto asked children what the word “te-fu-te-fu” meant. this question was a simple, knowninformation-question. the class divided into three groups regarding their answers. one answer was “a butterfly,” the correct one. the other two were fish and bird. ten children voted for butterfly, eight for fish, and seven for bird. the teacher asked why they thought it was a butterfly. some of her answers were as follows, “because the same sounds were repeated twice in ‘te-fu-te-fu’ as in the case of ‘chou-chou.’ because the title is “spring” and a butterfly starts flying in spring.” the teacher asked the same question again. this time, the answer “butterfly” became the majority (19). nine voted for fish, and three for bird. teacher asked why some children thought it was a fish. one answered as follows, “because this one had gone over the strait that bird cannot.” following this answer, the teacher gave some explanation about a strait in general and the dattan strait in particular. he said, “a strait is a sea between two places, between an island and a continent or between an island and an island. for example, the tsugaru strait is between honshu island and hokkaidou island. mamiya strait (dattan strait) is between sakhalin island and the continent.” then, 5 i named this type of question “the unknown-information-seeking question” in miyazaki (2011). recent analysis showed that the term “unknown question” is more appropriate than the former one to describe this type of question since it includes not only the question in which the teacher does not know the answer but also one in which the teacher does not know either its existence or its significance before the class. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-26 the teacher again asked the same question and the result was surprising. children whose answer was “butterfly” decreased to six and those who answered “fish” became the majority (more than 20). later, the teacher told the author who had observed this lesson that he had not expected such answers and hesitated about what to do in the next step of the lesson. having the children discuss this issue was one possibility. instead, he decided to give the children the correct answer, since it was still the beginning of the class and there remained many issues for the class to tackle. so he told the class, “this is not a fish but a butterfly.” but he didn’t stop there. he continued as follows, “your thoughts are very good. your thought is that a fish can cross the strait, a bird might not be able to, but for a butterfly, it is impossible to cross the strait. that thought is very good.” the teacher’s response should not be taken as some kind of comfort for children who gave the wrong answer. this is an acknowledgement by the teacher that their answer is, in some sense, true. the answer “fish” is certainly incorrect as the answer to the question what has gone over the dattan strait. however, when the children answered it was a fish, they must have felt that a fish can cross the strait, but a butterfly cannot. they must have felt that the strait is a difficult place for a butterfly. the difficulty of the dattan strait for the creature certainly pertains to the theme of the poem. the children must have grasped the difficulty of the strait intuitively. in the sense that the children correctly grasped this difficulty of the strait, their answer that it was a fish was correct. for many children, the teacher’s question was not about how the word “te-fe-te-fu” was read, but about what animal can go over such a challenging strait. to this new question, the answer “fish” was correct. in children’s apparently wrong answer, the teacher found out a new question that the children had generated. the teacher made it clear to the children and shared the new question with the children through his comments. a new question was generated in the inquiry of the known-information-question set at the beginning. though this is a small episode, such a development makes the lesson dialogic. the absence of a preset endpoint does not make the lesson dialogic. generation of the new question, in the pursuit of a preset endpoint, makes the lesson dialogic. eugene’s reply to kiyo’s critique (by eugene matusov) kiyo wrote, “i cannot agree with eugene’s distinction of three types of dialogic pedagogies as the mutually exclusive categories in the first place.” i wonder if there has been some misunderstanding. i have never claimed that instrumental, ontological and epistemological pedagogical dialogues are in opposition to each other or are mutually exclusive. kiyo wrote, “i see these three as three aspects of a relation among persons.” i agree. but, maybe, i agree with kiyo only to a point. in my second original essay above, i think i tried to make it clear that any ontological approach has an epistemological aspect while any epistemological dialogue has an ontological aspect, although there may not be enough to make this point clear as i argue that epistemology subordinates to ontology. the matter is rather complicated in my view. for example, kiyo wrote, “first, he argues that epistemological dialogue does not involve an ontological meeting of the participants.” i both accept and do not accept kiyo’s portrayal of my position. i disagree with kiyo’s portrayal because any dialogue and monologue (even an internal monologue in solitude) always involves an ontological meeting of the participants whether the participants acknowledge/value it or not. however, what i tried to say is that in epistemological dialogues (both i and ii), ontological meeting of the participants is disregarded from dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-27 pedagogical dialogue or bracketed as an annoyance. it is in this latter sense, i think kiyo’s portrayal of my position is accurate. unfortunately, i did not make the non-exclusive relation as clear for instrumental and ontological dialogues, as i should have. thanks, kiyo for pointing at that omission in my text above. after bakhtin, i argue that any dialogue (pedagogical or not) has all three aspects (actually many more), namely: instrumentality, ontologicity, and epistemologicity. what makes instrumental dialogue instrumental is not evidence of the presence of instrumentality but rather subordination of ontologicity to instrumentality, when dialogue serves for non-dialogic pedagogical (and organizational) purposes, losing interest in and respect for dialogic partners who often become either means or objects of pedagogical and/or organizational actions. similarly, what makes epistemological dialogue epistemological is not evidence of the presence of epistemologicity but rather subordination of ontologicity to epistemologicity. in my view, to make a pedagogical dialogue ontological is not to purify it from its instrumental and/or epistemological aspects – not at all! instead, it is about focusing on ontologicity as the priority over instrumentality and epistemologicity in dialogue while supporting both of these important aspects as needed. i do not know if this clarification would satisfy kiyo or not. i suspect that not completely but i can be wrong. my suspicion is based on his conceptualizing “ternary relationship” treating instrumentality, ontologicity, and epistemologicity as equal, if not, actually, prioritizing epistemologicity, while i do not. i strategically prioritize defining a human being as “being-in-the-world” rather than “knowing-the-world” (i.e., epistemological priority) or “serving-some-other-outcomes6” (the instrumental priority). i have found kiyo’s new triangle7– two people and an object – as the unit of analysis of dialogue as rather unhelpful. elsewhere, i (matusov, 2007b) argue against defining inquiry as “the search for the appropriate unit of analysis” since i think that a unit of analysis has to be specific to a particular inquiry and material at hand. i think the unit of analysis in a social science or humanity research should not be totalizing and comprehensive but rather contextual and authorial. saying all that, i have found bakhtin’s concept of “utterance” as his totalizing unit of analysis of dialogue more promising (for some particular dialogic investigations) than kiyo’s “ternary relationship” that he may have borrowed from non-dialogic tradition of social sciences. i think it a step backward rather than a step forward as his triangle hides more than it reveals about the dialogical qualities of human interactions, relations, discourses, and activities such as addressivity, responsivility, responsibility, finalizing-unfinalizing, and so on. reading kiyo’s critique here, and his other work, makes me suspect that he is a proponent of what i call “non-instrumental epistemological dialogue” (or the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii). thus, he wrote, -and i see this statement of a pedagogical belief as the birthmark of epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii, “understanding the high culture helps people to explore the significance of their mundane experience hidden from them in everyday life.” in my view, sometimes it is true and sometimes it is not. sometimes the exact reverse is true: it is the low culture that can help to understand and ground the high culture (see my example of thomas jefferson’s hold on mundane slavery above). even more, i insist that understanding of the high culture, which is usually rooted in the past ontology (especially in school), can only accidentally and partially help “people to explore the significance of their mundane experience hidden from them in everyday life.” yes, the high culture can be relevant and inspiring but it’s relevance and inspiration are always limited by the mundane demands of the physical, semiotic, relational, emotional, and ethic unique here-and-now. i do not want to disvalue the high culture 6 that is why i oppose to so-called “outcome-based education.” 7 the other triangles as unit of psychological analysis can be found in marx, köhler, vygotsky, leont’ev, engeström (along, probably, to many others). i suspect (i.e., hypothesize) that the triangle-like unit of analysis originates in hegel’s dialectical philosophy focusing on mediation but this needs more investigation. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-28 but i want to find its limits and elevate the importance of the mundane life that is often disvalued, bracketed, and illegitimate in both conventional and many innovative schools. as local instructional moves, i have nothing against the instrumental use of low culture as a way for teachers to make the study of high culture more relevant, comprehensible, and engaging for students. also, i am not against an instrumental use of the high culture for understanding the low culture. both instructional moves were presented in the movie “freedom writers” (devito, et al., 2007) dramatizing the real events of an innovative teacher at an urban school (freedom writers & gruwell, 1999). in this case, a novice english teacher in an urban la high school (unsuccessfully) tried to use (i’d argue, exploit) the students’ poor and violent backgrounds (i.e., the low culture) for teaching homer’s odyssey (i.e., the high culture). her instructional move was unsuccessful, as her students recognized, rejected, and resisted the exploitation of their home cultures, but it doesn’t always have to be unsuccessful. later, she rather successfully used the history of the holocaust (i.e., the high culture) for helping the students deeply and critically reflect on their own racism and glamorized violent gang culture (i.e., the low culture). in general, i see both instructional moves as legitimate under certain pedagogical circumstances. however, what i view as problematic is educators’ overwhelming focus on teaching the high culture as the goal of education and, thus, pedagogically disvaluing the low culture. i am against excluding low culture from study for its own sake in its own material and its own discourse8. this credo of the monopoly and superiority of the high culture on reflection is, in my view, what catapults the epistemological dialogue ii in education. i agree with bakhtin along with morson and emerson that not only does the low culture provide the material and fertile ground for the high culture but at times the low culture (prosaics) can lead, can renew, and be superior to the high culture (poetics) (bakhtin, 1999; morson & emerson, 1990). in my view, the aristotelian framework of ways of knowing may help to illuminate the flaws of the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii that kiyo, among other dialogic educationalists, seems to embrace. i found aristotle’s four types of knowing most useful (matusov & brobst, 2013, p. 129): using aristotle’s (2000) terminology, the ideology of the exact science focuses only on technological (i.e., skills detached from the purposes, strategies, techniques of dealing with things that can be different from what they are toward a preset outcome) and epistemological (i.e., the universal, objective, eternal truth, detached from any human subjectivity, – the truth of the necessity) ways of knowing. the ideology of the exact science project, articulated by positivism, describes the exact science as poiesis, in which what is considered to be good science must be and has been articulated in advance through the valid, self-containing scientific methodology. in contrast, the ideology of the humanitarian science also (if not mainly) focuses on phronêsis (i.e., practical, situated, participatory, perceived, embodied wisdom of local and unique possibilities – the truth of good possibilities) and sophia (i.e., philosophy; inquiries of the ultimate, “final damned questions” including existence, virtues, and goodness; examination of the world as a whole) (bakhtin, 1999; wiliam, 2008). the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii heavily prioritizes the epistemological way of knowledge (i.e., epistêmê) with its objective, universal truth and detachment at expense of, especially, phronêsis – practical wisdom in loci-so rich in the mundane life of the low culture (although i argue that all four ways of knowing are present in the low culture). 8 this discussion is relevant for developing the concept of “culturally relevant pedagogy” (ladson-billings, 1994; lee, 2006; morrell, 2002). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-29 1. i charge the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii with the following mutually related flaws: 2. prioritization  of  knowing-­‐in-­‐the-­‐world  (epistêmê)  over  being-­‐in-­‐the-­‐world  (ontology);   3. prioritization  of  epistêmê  over  phronêsis  knowing  of  the  world;   4. prioritization  of  the  high  culture  over  the  low  culture;   5. superiority   of   the   schooled   and,   especially,   schooled   people   (i.e.,   cultural   elite)   over   common  people  (snobbism).   in sum, i’m not against studying the high culture – as a part of the real life; it can be a part of the curricula. further, i also agree that sometimes studying of the high culture can help people to deal with their mundane life, although i respectfully disagree that the value of the high culture is only instrumental. being an important part of human activity (and a cultural artifact), study of the high culture can, and arguably should, be for the sake of the high culture itself as any important part of human activity. the high culture can become ontological and meaningful for students no less than the low culture. however, i respectfully disagree with kiyo and other proponents of the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii, that: a) the high culture is intellectually, morally, or humanly superior over the low culture, b) the low culture is incapable on its own reflection in its own material and discourse, c) the low culture should be avoided, ghettoized in low prestige vocational training, or bracketed from education as valuable curriculum in its own rank, d) the low culture has to be exploited for teaching the high culture through so-called “activation of prior knowledge” or used purely and exclusively instrumentally as kiyo put it, “by connecting this ‘high culture’ product with the mundane, real life episodes of his friends” or for students’ engagement in the “high culture” curricular material (matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012). by excluding and/or exploiting the low culture, the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii creates “teaching taboos”9 (ayers & ayers, 2011) against such important curricular topics, constituting the low culture, such as: sex, drugs, pop-culture, violence, vulgarity, profanity, contextualized interpersonal ethic problems and conflicts, social and historical injustices taken for granted, current societal and political tensions and controversies, current war conflicts, students’ personal interests and needs, their ongoing dramas and tragedies, common slurs and prejudices, social and political taboos, issues of human ecology, and so on. for example, in the late 1990s and the earlier 2000s, i debated the issue with my russian epistemologically-minded dialogic colleagues that studying the current mundane, controversial, “vulgar”, and messy russian-chechen wars was no less, if not, arguably, more important, especially for students in the russian federation, than the high culture, “noble”, and comprehensible trojan war in the great epics by homer (matusov, 2009b). expectably, some of my russian colleagues from the school of dialogue of cultures approach, promoting the epistemological pedagogical dialogue, disagreed with me. i suspect that establishment and maintenance of the teaching taboos regime, promoted by the epistemological pedagogical dialogue ii, requires pedagogical violence (matusov, 2009a; sidorkin, 2002). i agree with kiyo’s judgment that instrumental dialogic pedagogy is essentially monologic – it is dialogic by its form, but monologic by its essence of promoting monologic relations. thus, instrumental pedagogical dialogue can be characterized as dialogic monologue – dialogic by the form and monologic by its essence. however, i think that the term “instrumental dialogic pedagogy” or “instrumental dialogue” is useful because 1) dialogic monologue is different from monologic monologue – monologic by the form and the essence and 2) these terms help to evaluate certain tendencies of educators who are interested in dialogic pedagogy. 9 an alternative way of conventional education dealing with the low culture is to de-ontologize it by teaching universal, decontextualized concepts like “bullying” or “safe sex” (smith, 2010, february). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-30 finally, i keep insisting that curricular endpoints preset by the teacher hinder a genuine dialogue (but never make a genuine dialogue impossible as a genuine dialogue can occur in any conditions however unfavorable). kiyo wrote, “dialogic lessons needs some preset endpoint, mostly by teachers. what makes this lesson to be dialogic but not monologic is that, first, preset endpoint is not the answer but a question.” of course, a dialogic teacher may prepare some questions — although, i disagree that it is required for a dialogic lesson, — open-ended prepared questions are not endpoints10, by its very definition of being open-ended. preset curricular endpoints are where students are supposed to arrive (always temporary, in my view). when students arrive at endpoints, known to the teacher in advance, as it seems to be in the case presented by kiyo above, it still can be a genuine dialogue between the students and the teacher. what makes the difference between essentially monologic and essentially dialogic pedagogy is that in the latter case of a genuine dialogue the students’ arrival at the endpoint known by the teacher in advance is accidental or occasional and the teacher is open to the students’ (and his/her own) arrival at some other endpoint not necessarily known by the teacher in advance. thus, in a genuine dialogue, my interlocutor may occasionally say something that i expect to hear from him or her or may arrive at a point that i might expect in advance. i argue that when this happens, these points known in advance represent the least interesting moments of a genuine dialogue. i think the difference is in presetting versus occasionally knowing the curricular endpoints, at which the students arrive, (and for the teacher to be open to know something different and new and to let the students legitimately disagree with the teacher and each other). 10 unless their steering the students to some kind of the preset endpoint or block the students’ own inquiries, questions, and interests. in these cases, i wonder how much we can call these teacher’s questions genuinely “open-ended.” dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-31 part ii the teacher as the dialogic author (by kiyotaka miyazaki) now let us turn to the issue of the teacher’s location and role in a dialogic lesson. i believe that the teacher is the dialogic author and the student is the dialogic hero in a dialogic lesson. or instead, i should say that teacher is the author and the student is the hero in a lesson regardless of whether it is dialogic or monologic, and the student becomes the dialogic hero when the teacher becomes the dialogic author so that the lesson becomes dialogic. “co-authorship” is another possibility that characterizes the teacher and students in dialogic lessons. in this view, the teacher and student collaboratively generate the dialogic lesson. though i do not deny that the teacher and student work collaboratively in dialogic lessons, i do not adopt this “coauthorship” point of view. why? as i argued in the section on instrumentality of dialogue, the classroom, as a pedagogical location, is organized intentionally by the teacher for the purpose of promoting student learning. it is up to the teacher to create lessons that are either dialogic or monologic. although students’ contributions make the lesson dialogic as they work collaboratively with the teacher in the lesson, the final responsibility is the teacher’s. only when the teacher becomes a dialogic author will the lessons become dialogic and the students become dialogic heroes. how does the teacher become the dialog i c author? how can the teacher become a dialogic author? according to morson and emerson (1990), bakhtin presented two types of methods the dialogic author/teacher uses. first, “he [polyphonic author, that is, dialogic author] creates a world in which many disparate points of view enter into dialogue” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 239). according to bakhtin (1999), dostoevsky utilized the adventure plot as the arena for dialogue since such a plot stimulates the dialogue between its heroes: in dostoevsky, the adventure plot is combined with the posing of profound and acute problems [omitted]. it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea and the man of the idea, that is, for testing the “man in man” (p. 105). what is important here is not the adventure plot itself but the fact that it presents “profound and acute problems” to the heroes in which they encounter other heroes “under unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea.” second, the dialogic author is as “himself to participate in that dialogue” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 239). in particular, listening to heroes is important for one to join in dialogue with the heroes. dostoevsky’s listening as an author characterized by bakhtin is suggestive: dostoevsky possessed an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of his epoch, or, more precisely, for hearing his epoch as a great dialogue, for detecting in it not only individual voices, but precisely and predominantly the dialogic relationship among voices, their dialogic interaction. he heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-32 voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, and ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews. (italics, original) (p. 90). for dostoevsky, the concept of listening is to listen for the “embryos of future worldview.” listening for him is not just to understand others but also to understand possibilities latent in others. work of t eacher as the dialog i c author interestingly enough, there are two types of methods the dialogic teachers developed in the japanese dialogic pedagogical views such as saitou pedagogy (miyazaki, 2010, 2011), which correspond to two types of methods of bakhtin’s dialogic author. the first type is the teachers’ creation of “unknown question”1 which i cited above. this corresponds to bakhtin’s first method in which the dialogic author “creates a world in which many disparate points of view enter into dialogue.” the second type is the teachers’ listening to the students. these two types are not distinguishable exclusively in the actual lesson, even though they occasionally overlap and interact. in some instances, the second type (listening) requires the first type (asking unknown questions) to work effectively and the first type occurs when the teacher commits the second type. unknown questions used in the first type are exactly “the profound and acute problems” bakhtin described above. they place students “in extraordinary positions and provoke” and stimulate them to explore the initial questions as well as additional related questions. in addition, unknown questions stimulate the teachers to explore questions collaboratively with children. in this sense, creating unknown questions not only creates a world of dialogue for the students as heroes but also allows the teacher as the author to participate in the dialogue. teacher’s learning of the teaching material for discovering “unknown question” in it is called “kyouzai-kaishaku” or “interpreting teaching material” in saitou pedagogy as i introduced above. saitou characterized “kyouzai-kaishaku” as follows: first of all, a teacher should, as one person, encounter and wholeheartedly confront teaching material in all its respects [omitted]. a teacher should, as one person, wholeheartedly interact with the teaching material, analyze it, have questions about it, ask oneself, discover and create something new in it. through these endeavors, the teacher can accumulate new questions, new thinking and new logic about the teaching material. only after the teacher has completed such an interpretative work on the teaching material, that is, only after she/he has encountered with it, can the lesson have definite direction, intention and explicit, dramatic construction. this is because, only after such an encountering, the teacher’s knowledge about the teaching material transforms from being a collection of random pieces to a lively one acquired by their significant efforts. this is also because, after such an encountering, the teacher can make the children confront with the lively knowledge that she/he acquired by being excited by it, by doubting it, and by discovering it afresh (saitou 1964, p. 89 90. originally in japanese, translated to english by the author). it is generally assumed that teaching material used in early education is easy to understand and not worth the effort to tackle with all of one’s intellectual strength. however, saitou pedagogy does not agree with this approach since it believes that a teacher can discover new, exciting questions within the apparently easy teaching material. to do so, the teacher has to challenge it with all of the intellectual strength she/he has as an adult. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-33 now let me discuss the second type of the dialogic teacher’s work: to participate herself/himself in dialogue, particularly by listening to students. the importance of listening to students is oftentimes emphasized by many pedagogical thoughts such as, reggio emilia (vecchi, 2010). however, the nature of teacher’s listening to students has not been fully understood. in the dialogic classroom, the teacher’s listening to children cannot be achieved by understanding children “scientifically” through knowledge of developmental psychology. to understand children empathically is also not sufficient as a characterization of the essence of the dialogic listening. simply speaking, listening to students is to discover the possibilities hidden within them, just as dostoevsky listened to “ideas not yet fully emerged.” more precisely, a teacher should discover the new questions that are latent in students. the typical example of this type of teacher’s listening is the lesson about the poem “spring,” as i examined above. in this lesson, the teacher, tsukamoto, discovered through the apparently incorrect answers of the children an unexpected and new unknown question. the question the teacher asked the children was about the meaning of the word “te-fu-te-fu” which was apparently the typical knowninformation question. however, any question potentially has an infinite number of meanings or queries from it other than the meaning proposed by its addresser. the children caught in the question a different meaning other than that which the teacher proposed, though they did not know it consciously. listening to the children’s incorrect answers to his question, tsukamoto became aware of the possibility of a new question and made it explicit to the children. this is a typical case of dialogic listening. tsukamoto had learned this method of listening through his long experience as a teacher and it was not assisted by any particular theory. however, there is one theory that suggests the possibility of this type of dialogic listening: gadamer’s view of “dialectics of questions and answers” (gadamer, 1975). in short, this theory states that to understand a particular thought, it should be interpreted as an answer to a question. furthermore, another question should be discovered to which the first question is an answer. thus, we need an infinite chain of questions and answers, or dialogue to understand a particular topic at a deeper level. according to gadamer (1975): to ask a question means to bring into the open [omitted.] the openness of a question is not boundless. it is limited by the horizon of the question. a question that lacks this horizon is, so to speak, floating. it becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy in concretized in a specific “this or that” [omitted.] it implies the explicit establishing of presuppositions, in terms of which can be seen what still remains open (p. 357). the so-called horizon of the question determines the meaning of the question that i referred to above. infinite horizons can be discovered in a single question and when a different horizon is selected for the question, the presupposition and “what remains open” of the question, changes. consequently, the correct answer, as well as the wrong ones, for the same question also changes. gadamer (1975) further stated, “to understand meaning is to understand it as the answer to a question” (p.368). based on gadamer’s assertions, we can derive the following. student’s “incorrect answers” to a question are incorrect only in the sense that a teacher’s horizon of the question is different from students’ horizon of the same question. there must be some horizon for the question on which student’s apparently incorrect answer becomes correct. discovering such a horizon about the question in student’s answer is the work of the teacher conducted through dialogic listening. since the student is not necessarily aware of the horizon she/he has on a question, it is up to the teacher as the dialogic author to be aware of the possible horizon the students have and to make it explicit to the student. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-34 being the dialog i c hero in a l esson i sometimes meet resistance from other researchers when i argue that the teacher is the dialogic author and the students are dialogic heroes. this resistance might be based on their understanding that such heroes are subservient to authors meaning that these students have no agency at all. this understanding would make the “co-authorship” view more attractive than the “student as heroes” view. however, this is a misunderstanding. if the hero is understood in the bakhtinian sense then the hero, who is subservient to the author, is not the hero but one of two types: the monologic hero. there is another type of hero: the dialogic one. the dialogic hero, who is not controlled by the author, is characterized by bakhtin (1999) as follows: thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is a fully realized and thoroughly consistent dialogic position, one that affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. for the author the hero is not “he” and not “i” but a fully valid “thou”, that is, another and other autonomous “i” (“thou art”). the hero is the subject of a deeply serious, real dialogic mode of address, not the subject of a rhetorically performed or conventionally literary one. (p.63) the situation is the same in the pedagogic world in which the student becomes the dialogic hero when the teacher becomes the dialogic author. when encountered with a teacher as a dialogic author, students’ utterances are unexpected for both the teacher and themselves. in doing so, the students reveal an “independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy.” to be a dialogic author in the future, a student needs to gain experience by being a dialogic hero in a world created by the teacher. if the student can be a dialogic author, without assistance from the teacher at the outset, then they do not need to enter into the so-called pedagogic world. how does a student experience being a dialogic hero? to answer this question, i will share an example of a lesson in an elementary school in which the question was: what is a store? katsuhiko sakuma, a researcher in social studies education, developed this particular teaching material and conducted class lessons at various grades in elementary schools (sakuma, 1992; miyazaki, 2010). according to the oxford dictionary of english, a store is “a place where things are kept for future use or sales.” the definition appears to be very clear, so that this question looks to be a typical “the known-information question” when asked in the classroom. but is it really so? would this be the same for a vending machine: is it a store or not? what about a self-service laundry? is a peddler also a store? in the definition cited above, the store is defined as “a place.” based on this definition, a vending machine is not a store since it is not a place, while a peddler is not a place but a human being. however, there are certainly some commonalities between a grocery store, a vending machine and a peddler. how can we characterize the commonalities? at least in japanese commercial law, there is no clear definition of a “store.” when asked by sakuma, the ministry of economy, trade and industry, the office, which regulates the commercial activities in japan, could not answer the question if a vending machine was in fact a store. such difficulty of characterizing the concept of a “store” is not accidental since it reflects the rapid transformation commercial activities are undergoing in these days, especially when various types of new stores, which are different from traditional stores in many aspects, are being established. so, this question is the unknown question that has a certain value that needs to be explored in the lesson, contrary to its apparent ease. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-35 sakuma presented five photos at the beginning of his lesson; a grocery store, a barbershop, a self-service laundry, a vending machine, and a peddler. then he asked the students whether or not these could be called a “store.” most students believed that the answers were easy. for example, a grocery store was a store while a vending machine was not. in the lesson, which i observed, the reasons included: “because there is no employee,” “because there is no building,” and “because it is a selfservice.” however, one student stated contrary saying that it was a store because owner of the machine could receive money from the sales. one student responded by stating that it was not a store because goods were often “sold-out” in a vending machine. the other objected to it stating that items in grocery stores also become “sold-out.” the students also had discussions on the topics of self-service laundries and peddlers. though the number of students who said that these three were a store increased, the students could not reach an agreement by the end of the lesson. sakuma closed the lesson by requesting that the students go home and ask adults the same question to examine additional points of view. in this case, sakuma’s lesson was dialogic in the sense that he created a world of dialogue by presenting unknown questions to the students. then, how did students experience being the dialogic heroes? after the lesson, one student commented, “before the lesson, i thought that it was not a store if there was no employee. now, i am not sure. i had thought that a self-service laundry was not a store though it is inside a building and i pay money there. now, i am lost” (sakuma 1992, p. 38. originally in japanese, translated to english by the author). this comment in which the student felt “lost” shows the change that she experienced during the lesson. at the beginning of the lesson, she believed that she fully understood the meaning of a “store.” in bakhtin’s terms, her understanding of a store was finalized. by the end of the lesson, her opinion had changed since her understanding of stores had become unfinalized and indeterminate. this unfinalization of her knowledge had become possible in the exploration of the unknown question posed by the teacher as the dialogic author. this is a typical example of a student’s experience as a dialogic hero in which the student, as the dialogic hero, encounters different views from other students as other heroes. the encounters make it possible for students to strengthen old beliefs or develop individual views based on their former beliefs, resulting in the construction of new beliefs. or, as it happened in the episode above, the students ultimately felt doubtful and “lost” about their former beliefs. in any case, these encounters make it possible for the student to unfinalize their “finalized” understandings of the original question. at the same time, the finalized question becomes the question again. learners are not heroes and heroines of their teacher’s polyphonic teaching: a reply-disagreement to kiyo (by eugene matusov) dear kiyo— let me start my reply to your very helpful and thoughtful essay with appreciation and agreement and then move to my respectful disagreements with your fruitful dialogic position. as far as i know, independently from timothy lensmire (1997), like him, you try to translate bakhtin’s literary analysis of dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels into the educational concept of polyphonic teaching. specifically, both tim and you have claimed that the educational relationship between the teacher and the student is parallel to the literary relationship between the author of a novel and his/her novel characters (i.e., literary “heroes” and “heroines”). i have found this move to be extremely useful and productive, although, at the dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-36 end of the day, i do not fully agree with it. i highly appreciate your and tim’s conceptual claim exactly because it helps me articulate my own position in dialogic disagreement with and response to it and, thus, i see you as not necessarily willing, but still co-authors of my own position, with which you disagree. i am not sure i would be able to articulate my position without you. thanks a lot for that. i agree with the following points that you have made or are consequential of your position: 1) i strongly agree with you and tim that the teacher is an author. as i argue elsewhere (matusov, 2011a; matusov & brobst, 2013), any teaching, monologic or dialogic, is authorial both from a pedagogical point of view (i.e., how to teach better his or her students this particular curricular material) and an epistemological point of view (i.e., how to know better for the teacher as a learner him/herself and with the students) (matusov, 2009a). i do not need to articulate this position more because i believe that you articulated this argument very well in your essay and previous work (lensmire, 1997; miyazaki, 2011). 2) i agree with both of your arguments for dialogic relations between the teacher and the student. both you and tim (lensmire, 1997) have identified several qualities of these dialogic relations including: a. assuming by the teacher the non-transparency of students’ consciousness (i.e., not anything that a student does and says can be understood by the teacher for cultural and personal reasons) (cf. matusov, 2011b); b. accepting legitimacy of students’ not wanting their teachers to follow the meaning of their work or contributions (i.e., a student’s insistence on privacy of his/her thoughts and contributions at times); c. focusing on promoting students’ responsive authorship – students’ creative inquires and contributions in response to the teacher’s dialogic provocations (cf. matusov, 2011a; matusov & brobst, 2013), d. the teacher can present “puzzles” to the children, that is, the teacher discovers the kernel in the teaching material and produces a stimulating question about it, which is called yusaburi, and literally means “shaking up.” when children maintain certain views of the teaching material, especially commonsense views, the teacher intentionally presents different views, if not his/her own voice, then in contrast to the children’s view to make them rethink their fixed views. so in saitou pedagogy, the teacher sometimes intentionally opposes the children. in this regard, the saitou teacher is completely different from “the teacher as a facilitator of student-initiated inquiries”—the view common to some american educational researchers (miyazaki, 2011, p. 40, italics is original); e. careful listening to the students and engaging with the students in a genuine non-known information seeking dialogue, i compare the teacher in saitou pedagogy to the author of polyphonic novels, as bakhtin described in his essay on dostoevsky (bakhtin, 1999; miyazaki, 2009). children in the saitou classroom can be compared to the heroes of a polyphonic novel. contrary to heroes in a monologic novel, in the polyphonic novel, heroes generate voices new even for their author, and can oppose the author. however, it is the author who controls the heroes’ behavior. this is similar for the saitou teacher. children become dialogic learners only via the teacher’s interaction with them (miyazaki, 2011, p. 40). 3) i agree, but agree only to a point, not wholeheartedly, that teaching involves certain aestheticization of his or her students treating them as characters, heroes and heroines, of the teacher’s own imaginary teaching drama called “lesson.” in my past work with mark smith, that we symptomatically called “teaching imaginary children” (matusov & smith, 2007), we analyzed monologic teaching in which educators are involved in, using bakhtin’s terms about literary authorship (bakhtin, 1999), excessive finalizing and objectivizing of their students. the educators, we described, made definite, high dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-37 certainty statements about their students and treated them as objects of their pedagogical actions. in our paper, mark smith and i called out educators for subjectivizing and problematizing their students, which, in my view, seems not dissimilar to your and tim’s call for the polyphonic treating of students as active heroes of their teaching. we argue that it is ok for a teacher to finalize his or her students by making observations or predictions or inferences or having expectations based on the teacher’s prior experiences. however, it is very important to treat these finalizing views as temporary hypotheses begging for testing with the students; and others’ input rather than final true portrayal of the students’ subjectivities. similarly, it may be occasionally ok for teachers to treat their students as objects of their pedagogical actions, but it is important to bear in mind that teachers primarily work with students’ subjectivities, which is not an object but rather a partner in dialogue. finally, i agree with you that teacher’s dialogic aestheticization of students, based on problematizing and subjectivizing the students, does not suppress the students’ agency but rather promotes it (but only to a point, see below). on the contrary, by developing new, genuine, “unknown information seeking”, questions for the students and testing his or her hypotheses about the students in imaginary and real teaching drama, the teacher can actively promote students’ agency. in such a case, and as in literary dialogic aestheticization of a novel’s characters, the novel’s characters (and students) are able to surprise the author and be his or her partners in never ending dialogue. educational dialogic aestheticization of students involves students being able to surprise their teacher and be his or her partners in never ending dialogue as you and tim so nicely described in your scholarship. 4) i agree with you and tim that some monologic and dialogic teachers treat their students primarily as heroes and heroines of their teaching (but i try not to be one of them j) equating the teacher’s “novelist’s power” with guidance, one of the strengths of imagining the workshop teacher as a novelist is that it makes teacher power harder to ignore. for we think of novelists as moving with power in relation to their characters, as creating and controlling them, as writing them into roles within a larger creative design that determines who they are, how they act, what they will be. the roles that workshops offer student-characters are different from those offered in traditional classrooms. workshop student-characters enjoy an expanded control over the topics, purposes, audiences, and processes they will take up in their school writing. this expanded control, however, does not escape or transcend the teacher-as-novelist’s plan, nor does it escape the larger context of schooling. rather, the students’ expanded control is part of the plan. in other words students don’t escape teacher power in the workshop, they confront a teacher power pursued with different means and toward a different end (lensmire, 1997, p. 383). it is a good description of some espoused and in-action educational theories but, in my view, it is a misleading prescription. here is where our disagreements apparently start. i strongly, but respectfully, disagree with you, kiyo, and with tim lensmire that teacher’s aestheticization11 of his or her students, even dialogic aestheticization, should be the primary means of defining the teacher-student relations in education. in short, in my dialogic teaching, i do not want to treat my students as heroes and heroines of my polyphonic teaching, rather i want to treat my students as authors authoring their own learning and lives — as learners who have the highest authority on their own learning (and lives) (klag, 1994). my authorial goal as a teacher is to support and facilitate my students authoring their own education when it is needed and asked for. i believe that the parallel between literary artwork, studied by bakhtin, and (dialogic) pedagogy has its limits. at some point, polyphonic teaching is not like polyphonic novel. let me elaborate and justify my point of dissent. 11 i use the term “aesthetics” as a particular form of transgredient finalizing of the other after bakhtin (1990). see bakhtin’s notions of dialogic finalizing (bakhtin, 1999) and also mark smith’s and my application of this notion to education (matusov, 2009a). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-38 first, i agree with alexander sidorkin that the importance of teaching is overrated (overprioritized) in education (sidorkin, 2009). teaching is secondary in education. the primary focus in education is always on the learner’s own, autodidactic, learning and study (as specifically effortful learning). teaching is aimed only on structuring and facilitating the primary processes rooted in the learner. not didactics but autodidactics is primary in education. teaching supports students’ autodidact efforts when needed and asked for. education can exist without teaching. what is important is not the teacher’s pedagogical and epistemological authorship but rather the learner’s epistemological12 and pedagogical13 self-authorship. the learner is always the primary author of his or her own learning – whether his or her teacher recognizes it or not. authorship cannot be given to the student by the teacher but rather, it can only be recognized and promoted by the teacher. if a learner is a hero or heroine, he or she is primarily educational self-hero or self-heroine. the learner is firstly the hero/heroine for him/herself and only then for the teacher. using literary metaphor, a learner is a hero/heroine of his/her own, not the teacher’s, novel. the teacher’s aestheticization of his or her students in not even secondary but, i am afraid, it is fourth in the row of pedagogical importance, after the learner’s self-authorship, learner’s selfaestheticization, the teacher’s pedagogical authorship, and, finally, the teacher’s aestheticization of his or her students14. second, it can be true that both you, kiyo, and tim in the teachers’ treating their students as polyphonic heroes/heroines may promote students’ agency and authorship as you have convincingly described above and elsewhere (lensmire, 1994, 1997; miyazaki, 2011). however, in my view, this dialogic approach promotes mostly a particular authorship in the students – what i call “responsive authorship”, -at the expense of “self-generated authorship.” students’ responsive authorship is mostly promoted in response to the teacher’s dialogic provocations (and other students’ provocations that are often caused by the teacher’s major provocations). again, your description and analysis above are good cases of students’ responsive authorship. in contrast, in my view, your dialogic approach seems to neglect students’ self-generated authorship when they assign themselves learning activities and send themselves on extensive learning journeys (or even have the opportunity to extend responsive authorship in authorial direction). as i described elsewhere there is no a clear-cut distinction between these types of students’ dialogic authorship but nevertheless they constitute distinguishing qualities requiring different, and at times conflicting, types of teacher’s support (matusov, 2011a; matusov & brobst, 2013). specifically, as i argued elsewhere, teacher’s support of learners’ self-generated authorship requires that the teacher promotes learners’ freedom, involves legitimizing learners’ non-cooperation, non-collaboration, disengagement, and dissensus with how the learners and the teacher define learning, education, and the importance of education in the life of the learners. this respect for negative freedoms (i.e., “freedoms from” rather than “freedom for”) by the teacher, on which the learners’ self-authorship is essentially based, is essentially the teacher’s respect of the learners’ temporal, spatial, and physical freedom from the teacher. it is the teacher’s respect of the student’s agency15 shown through the legitimacy for the learners’ unilateral and legitimate dissociation and divorce from the teacher. literary characters cannot leave the novel, and the novel writer, without the writer’s final consent. in a dialogic pedagogy exclusively focused on promoting students’ responsive authorship, students-as-heroes must please the teacher by accepting the teacher’s dialogic provocations and assignments, 12 i.e., searching for truth. 13 i.e., promoting their own learning. 14 also, students’ aestheticization of the teacher and the teacher’s self aestheticization have to be considered. 15 in my view, a teacher should respect a student’s existing and emerging agency rather than grant and allow it within the teacher’s own “novel” (i.e., overall dialogic provocation-assignment), like you and tim seem to suggest, “we grant children a certain agency within the context of the workshop -by allowing children’s interests, desires, experiences, to guide their own and teacher’s work - but this agency might make it less likely that they gain access to resources they need to move with agency and power outside the workshop” (lensmire, 1997, p. 388, italics is mine). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-39 now anita had a problem, for she didn’t want to write about her father. anita hadn’t spelled it out in her notebook, and ms. meyer didn’t know: anita didn’t want to write about her father because he physically abused her and her brother. but how can she not write about this hot topic and still please her teacher, ms. meyer? and if she doesn’t want to tell ms. meyer about her relationship with her father, she can’t even reveal her real reasons for avoiding this topic (lensmire, 1997, p. 383, italics is mine). anita, a student-heroine, of a novelist teacher, ms. meyer, in a writing workshop does not have freedom to walk away from the novelist teacher’s assignment or from the workshop itself (or from the school). in my view, learners can, do, and should be able to legitimately leave the educational drama (i.e., a lesson), prepared by the teacher, and leave the teacher. i insist that for promoting learners’ selfgenerated authorship, a dialogic teacher should appreciate both his or her learners’ take over of the curricula and instruction and will to divorce the teacher. the latter can be especially painful to appreciate by any teacher, but still necessary. i argue that in contrast to the responsive authorship that you, kiyo, seem to embrace as the major dialogic virtue, learners’ self-generated authorship is essentially transcending and, hence, antiaesthetic16. saying all of that, of course, the dialogic teacher’s aestheticization of his or her students can still be important even for promoting learners’ self-generated authorship through the teacher’s recognition and validation of the learners’ creativity of transcending the given. however, the teacher is not necessarily the only, or primary audience, for the learners’ self-generated authorship. the teacher can be the primary and/or only audience (besides the learner him or herself) but it is not necessary or, arguably, even desirable. finally, besides the listed agentive objections, i have a corporeal 17 objection against the unrestricted parallel between a polyphonic novel and polyphonic teaching. in contrast to literary novel characters created by, and living in, the writer’s imagination (and later in readers’ imagination), real students are corporeal and engaged in intense ethical responsibility based relationships with their teacher. learners and their teachers share the corporeal, ontological world, full of ethical tensions and ontological atand dis-tractions. learners and teachers are both ontologically and essentially thrown in the world that provides them with limited control and demands responsibility for their own deeds regardless of the level of their control. i wonder if it is a legacy of the monologic chronotope of conventional education, uncritically accepted by you, kiyo and, to a bit lesser degree, tim, that education can be bracketed and purified from messy, disorderly (or differently orderly), and, at time, violent life, disputing the teacher’s “novel”, -what literary writers can legitimately and successfully do and enjoy in their imagination, (but teachers of student’s with lives in and out of the classroom cannot). such teachers have an illusion that they and their students essentially live only in the didactic space of the shared curriculum, instruction, and self-contained purely epistemological inquiries. novelistic teachers often have an illusion of ontological control over the life of their classroom (and students). for literary authors, life usually interferes only after their literary imaginative work is done as it was unfortunately done in the case of the author of “the satanic verses” (rushdie, 1989, 2012), who was persecuted for his writing by the iranian theocratic authorities. in contrast to literacy artwork, in any teaching, life interferes all the time 16 i have noticed that bakhtin dropped the concept of aesthetics that he defined as finalization/consummation of the other, self, and the world in his early work (1990) when he moved to his dialogic framework (1999). i could not find in his later work, criticizing the concept of finalization, any dialogic reconceptualization of the notion of aesthetics and, thus, i suspect that bakhtin consciously or unconsciously might come to a realization that the notion of aesthetics may be incompatible with the notion of dialogue. when i contacted a group of international bakhtinian philologists on the bakhtin-dialogism@lists.shef.ac.uk list serv (july-august, 2009), they supported the latter suspicion of mine. 17 again after bakhtin, i argue that the notion of responsibility rooted in ethical tensions is essentially corporeal (bakhtin, 1999, 1993, 1999). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-40 and, in my view, dialogic teaching should appreciate and actively embrace it. teachers do not have the luxury of temporally bracketing out real life, as writers do. the life in education is and should be deedful, ethically charged, and eventful with limited control by all the involved parties (i.e., students and teachers) for which they still must take responsibility. an author of a novel can kill his or her hero and it would constitute an aesthetic event, while harming a student would constitute an ethic, moral, and, potentially, criminal event for the teacher. education cannot and should not be purified and aesthetized in the name of epistemology and high culture (you, kiyo) or social justice (tim). education should be above life but also embedded in life itself. i argue that, in contrast to literary artwork, in teaching in general and in dialogic teaching specifically, the ethical teacher-student relationship focusing on responsibility for the teacher’s and students’ own deeds (“postupki” in russian) should take priority over any aesthetic concern in teacher-student relationship. what do you think? my reply to eugene’s comment about my argument on the learner as the dialogic hero (by kiyotaka miyazaki) i have already noted that i sometimes meet with strong opposition about my “the teacher as the dialogic author/ the learner as the dialogic hero” view, and the opposition is based on a simple misunderstanding on bakhtin’s idea of two types of hero. your criticism on my view is, of course, not based on this kind of misunderstanding. though you avoid the term “hero” in your argument, your characterization of the learner as one having “the responsive authorship” seems to correspond to my characterization of the learner as the dialogic hero. i think this way because, in both characterizations, learners are thought to become an active agent in a lesson through the teacher’s work as the dialogic author. maybe this claim is too rough and not acceptable to you. but let me suppose this way temporarily because there are other, more crucial disagreements between us other than this issue. on the dichotomy between the responsive authorship and the se l f generated authorship now let me discuss about these more crucial disagreements between us. the first issue is about your dichotomy between the responsive authorship and the self-generated authorship. though you argue that there is no clear-cut distinction between these types of students’ dialogic authorship, you substantially describe these two types as mutually exclusive opponents. moreover, you seem to argue that the promotion of the responsive authorship hinders the development of the self-generated authorship when you take up the example of anita from lensmire (1997). you argue that students must please the teacher in a lesson in which the teacher exclusively focuses on promoting students’ responsive authorship. you use the strong word “must.” however, you do not explain why the teacher’s effort to promote students’ responsive authorship necessarily positions a student as the one who must please the teacher. certainly, students sometimes try to please their teacher in a classroom, reading and following the teacher’s intention. in japanese educational world, such students are called “yoi – ko”, or “a good kid” with the implication that they are really not good. japanese dialogic teachers are very sensitive to such students’ behavior. for them, the appearance of this behavior means that their dialogic teaching does not work well. they want students to not fear anyone, including teachers (saitou, 1969). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-41 i cannot find out any reason to suppose that the dialogic author as i define her/him “must” produce “yoi – ko” students’ behavior. of course, students will have no chance to please the teacher if they have no relations to the teacher regardless of whether or not she/he is dialogic. however, such a teacher is already not a teacher. generally speaking, when two persons have a relationship of any kind, there is always a possibility that one tries to please, or plays up to the other. to deal with these “good kids”, the teacher should be sensitive to this type of students’ behavior, and once after she/he becomes aware of an appearance of such student’s behavior, she/he should discover in the behavior of the student the germ of autonomy and help her/him to grow as an autonomous agent. just allowing her/him to leave from the teacher does not solve the problem. i do not think that the learner, or the human being in general, has two types of authorship, or agency. human beings are an agent by nature. in the sense that no one can put agency into some other, agency of human being is self-generated. simultaneously, agency in human being develops by interacting with other people. the learner can enter into the dialogic lesson and act as the dialogic heroine/hero because she/he is originally an agent. her/his experience of being the dialogic heroine/hero in the dialogic lesson helps her/his agency grow up. can a lesson be puri f i ed and dissoc iated from real l i f e? our second disagreement is about your “corporeal objection.” you mentioned that miyazaki accepts uncritically that “education can be bracketed and purified from messy, disorderly (or differently orderly), and, at time, violent life.” you also mentioned that the teachers miyazaki introduced “have an illusion that they and their students essentially live only in the didactic space of the shared curriculum, instruction, and self-contained purely epistemological inquiries.” sorry to misguide you as i did not describe these issues much so far, but these two statements are simply not the fact. my description of the teacher as the dialogic author is based on the long time experiences of the japanese teachers in, most cases, the public schools, and not a fantasy based on some theoretical considerations. these teachers do not have an illusion that their activities in schools can be done in some kind of purified space dissociated from real life. they cannot. they know very well that their effort to produce the dialogic lesson has only a limited influence on their students and their lesson is very vulnerable to the forces from the outside, real world. kihaku saitou, one of the most influential teachers of the japanese dialogic pedagogical school and to whom i owe much to the development of my own view of dialogic pedagogy, repeatedly expressed that the teacher’s work is frail. for example, saitou (1963) said, “education is powerless. teacher’s work is frail and lonely” (p. 13). saitou’s statement has several implications. one is the vulnerability of teaching to various influences from real life. saitou (1970a) said, “education is dependent to politics by nature. it is most easily affected by powers outside of the classroom. so, it is natural that education is powerless to politics”(p.6). not just politics. it is also vulnerable to the local community, parents, media, and so on. the real life outside of the classroom has many influences, good and bad, on the classroom, and consequently, what the teacher can do is limited. this is the unquestionable premise for saitou and other japanese dialogic teachers. saitou’s understanding that education is frail is concerned with teacher’s relation to students, too. saitou (1963) said, “the teacher are oftentimes betrayed, criticized, and given a hard time by children on whom she/he worked with all her/his heart” (p.11). saitou’s expression such as “the betrayal of children” dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-42 might make readers think that saitou was a tyrannical teacher who wanted his children placed under his control. definitely not. saitou knew that people would view such expressions as haughty. still, he argued that it is also natural for teachers as person to feel like that. this statement is a cynical way for saitou to admit that children are autonomous agents whom the teacher cannot fully control. the awareness of the teacher’s powerlessness did not make saitou and other japanese teachers give up effort to be the author of the dialogic lesson and leave everything to the learner. on the contrary, it is the springboard for the japanese dialogic teacher to commit himself or herself to the teacher’s work as the dialogic author. after saying that education is powerless, he continued, “when the teacher becomes aware of her/his work’s frailness, powerlessness, and loneliness, she/he will acquire new strength”(saitou, 1963, p.13). japanese teachers know that a lesson is not only vulnerable to the influences from the real world. lessons also occupy just a small part within the learners’ activities in school, much less in their lives. still, japanese dialogic teachers believe that they should strive to make lessons dialogic, even if they are not sure if they will achieve this goal, because they believe that they can do something for the learners only in a lesson. saitou described this belief in the following way. “the teacher does not need to take the responsibility for children’s future. she/he should take the responsibility only for each lesson”(saitou, 1970b, p.234).” as for the content of the lesson, the japanese dialogic teachers, and i too, believe that it is important for learners to learn your so-called high culture, or epistemological contents. however, i do not think that the learners in the japanese dialogic lesson are fully shut off from your so-called ontological issue and the real life issue when they learn your so-called epistemological, high culture contents. as i have already noted in my response to your description of ontological dialogue and epistemological dialogue as mutually exclusive categories, i think that ontology and epistemology are two aspects of any relation between two participants. so, the relation between the learning material (like a poem) and the learner (and/or the teacher) always has the epistemological aspect and the ontological aspect. when the learner (and/or the teacher) takes some epistemological stance toward the learning material, she/he simultaneously makes some ontological commitment to the learning material. i have already introduced the case in which the teacher read the poem for preparing a lesson about it. in this case, the teacher interpreted the poem by connecting it with the lives of his friends and himself. this case shows that the apparently pure epistemological conduct of interpreting the modern poem, the typical high culture product, relates closely to the ontological conduct of examining how to live in the real life. in this sense, the japanese teachers always try to relate the lesson in the classroom to the real life affairs of the learners. final remark finally, i cannot suppress presenting my basic question about your work. i cannot understand why you commit yourself to the pedagogy. as far as i understand, the pedagogy is the human endeavor to engage with others actively to facilitate their learning and the development of their agency. according to you, such an active engagement will hinder the development of his so-called self-generated authorship, and make people responsive. the learners who can leave the lesson by themselves and ask the “teacher’s” help will no longer need someone who tries to have the pedagogical relationship with them. they will be able to make use of anyone to get some help she/he needs when necessary. so, she/he does not need “the teacher”, much less “the pedagogy”. then, why do you need pedagogy? dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-43 your strong request to the teachers that they should allow their students to leave the lesson is not fully incomprehensible to me. as foucault (1995) stated in his argument about the panopticon, formal education has a feature that it disciplines people to be dependent to the powers that be. and there are many teachers who are not aware of that feature of school. they are not aware of their works’ frailness, either. they should be aware of the fact that their efforts with good intention often times make their students the monologic hero/heroine and deprive them of their chance to grow as a dialogic agent. still, i cannot accept your request to the teacher that the teacher should do nothing to the learner in the lesson except to show respect for the learner’s “freedom from.” such a request denies the dialogic teachers’ continual efforts to make the lesson dialogic so that they can help the learners to be dialogic agents in school, which is today, becoming tougher for both teachers and students to engage in rich dialogic experiences. and denial as such will make the situation in schools worse than it is, just allowing schools to become monologic arenas dominated by monologic teachers’ voices, and through it the monologic voice of the powers outside of classrooms. references adler, m. j. 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(1998). the slave children of thomas jefferson. santa monica, ca: kiseido publications. dialogue on dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121 | vol. 2 (2014) si:ddp-47 smith, m. (2010, february). can and should teachers allow students to “be”?: the parallel universes of “being-as-event” and “half-being” discourse in an innovative middle school. paper presented at the ethnography in education research forum, philadelphia, pennsylvania. sullivan, p., smith, m. p., & matusov, e. (2009). bakhtin, socrates and the carnivalesque in education. new ideas in psychology, 27(3), 326-342. taylor, r. (1968). dare to be wise. the review of metaphysics, 21(4), 615-629. trevarthen, c., & hubley, p. 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(2008). what should education research do, and how should it do it? educational researcher, 37(7), 432–438. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 4 zholkovsky, between groys and gasparov (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:16 between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky university of southern california, los angeles, usa alexander zholkovsky (b. 1937. moscow) graduated from mgu (1959), has collaborated with igor mel’chuk on structural semantics and with yurii shcheglov on structural poetics. author of over 30 books and almost 400 articles, among them monographs on boris pasternak, isaac babel and mikhail zoshchenko, he is also known for several collections of memoiristic vignettes; his annotated anthology of russian infinitive poetry is forthcoming from nlo publishers. ��� there is no need to summarize boris groys’ article (1989, 1997): it combines laconic richness with exemplary clarity, and is as paradoxical as it is convincing. just a few words about why i value it so much and how it has influenced me. the article dates back to 1989, but it was much earlier, during one of boris’s visits to los angeles, around 1985, that he privately shared with me its main idea (we had met in moscow in the 1970s): “what if, at the time of your [bakhtinian] carnival, i want to read a book in my ivory tower?!” with a refreshing shrewdness groys revealed in his essay the hidden acceptance by bakhtin of stalin’s totalitarianism—an acceptance that went unrecognized by bakhtin’s western worshippers, who canonized him as a messiah of pluralistic polyphony. it is noteworthy that by the 1980s this very canonization of bakhtin had acquired somewhat totalitarian features. it became practically mandatory to mention bakhtin in any philological publication. to do so was reliable, practical, and fashionable. on the one hand, i followed that vogue, on the other, i could not wait for the obsession to end. it came to pass, at long last. in the fall of 2012, i was invited by colleagues at the university of wisconsin to participate in a conference on slavic studies as the keynote speaker. among the speakers were local faculty and phd students as well as scholars from other universities. the conference continued for two full days, more than 20 papers were delivered, but it was only at the end of the final panel that i heard bakhtin’s name mentioned. it was something of a shock; it reminded me of the relief i once experienced en route from zurich to geneva, when i suddenly realized that the german speech that surrounded me in the train car had been effectively replaced by french (my german is much worse than my french). issn: 2325-3290 (online) between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:17 it does not mean i am absolutely anti-bakhtin. but there is a time and place for everything. let me quote from an old memoiristic vignette. it features the editor of voprosy literatury ([“the issues of literature”], a journal of literary criticism), sergo lominadze, who was generally a nice guy but always doggedly followed the ideological demands of the times (we are talking about the 1970s). on that occasion he limited himself to simply relaying to us the censorship requirements. he demanded we remove the majority of references to pasternak. my coauthor yu. k. shcheglov and i tried to argue that pasternak was not a proscribed author—he was mentioned in print quite often. “that’s right, replied sergo, and we have quite unequivocal rules about that. you can quote pasternak when writing about pasternak but not when writing about other matters. for such cases you have marx, lenin, gorky, and belinsky at your disposal.” our secret “agenda,” of course, was to alter the official soviet pantheon, conferring on the semi-illegal pasternak the status of a widely-referenced author, but it turned out that the ideological authorities had preempted such aesopian tricks. just like pushkin on having crossed the arpachay river, we still remained within the borders of immense russia. i recalled this episode at a conference on literary theory at princeton in 2002. a lot was being said about bakhtin there. his name was bandied around time and again, and, ironically, the monologic length of those presentations exceeded by far the regular time limit. one speaker just kept speaking despite the moderator’s insistent gestures and written notes encouraging him to stop. finally, the speaker said: “just let me finish one last sentence,” but after that he went on and on for a long time, graphically demonstrating thereby the bakhtinian concept of unfinalizability of discourse and the chasm between a sentence and an utterance [so beloved of bakhtin]… in discussing my presentation, professor irina paperno noted that i was the only one at the conference who openly refused to quote bakhtin. i clarified my point: bakhtin, in my opinion, should be referenced when speaking about bakhtin, and perhaps, to a lesser extent, when speaking about carnival or dostoyevsky. but he should not be quoted as the only authority on all possible subjects—for instance, poetry. curiously enough, the leading american bakhtinist, princeton’s caryl emerson, mentioned in her presentation a recent article by sergo lominadze on the inadequacy of bakhtin’s analysis of [even!] dostoyevsky, which reminded me of the pasternak episode (zholkovsky, 2008). in the case of bakhtin, just like in many similar cases, our task is, so to speak, to move the author from the iconostasis, the “icon shelf,” back onto the bookshelf proper. this operation becomes especially dramatic—and ironic—when the dethroning concerns an author who was promoted to a position of unlimited power as an apostle of freedom, no less. it is noteworthy that in his deconstruction of bakhtin, groys had an unexpected ally (and to some extent a predecessor) in a representative of a quite different scholarly paradigm—mikhail l. gasparov, a specialist in versification as well as classical antiquity, and, what is more striking, a structuralist. back in 1979, gasparov published a short essay on bakhtin, which was as laconic and explosive as the future one by groys. five years later it was translated and published in english (gasparov, 1984). i came across the two debunking essays more or less simultaneously and have been recommending them to my graduate students ever since. between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:18 in his essay, gasparov moves away from his strict structuralist vow “to never try to read the author’s soul” and exposes the deep pragmatic foundations of bakhtin’s position. one of which is his fear of an authoritative culture, first of all, poetry: if genuine culture is in the future then there is no point clinging emotionally to the culture of the past. in fact, [bakhtin] had no kindred feeling for either pushkin, or shakespeare, or even tolstoy. he accepted only two things first, the carnival tradition and rabelais and, second, dostoevsky… (it is curious to note with what indifference to the facts he exaggerated the quantity and quality of medieval parodies from other people's accounts and how flippantly he disregarded whole lines in the history of the novel. they were "bad," their authors did not understand what a novel is.) this attitude came about because any harmoniously constructed verbal structure from the cultural past rouses the fear in a new reader: what if it is not i who will master it, but it me? and hence bakhtin's … sharp hostility to poetry, as indeed to "authoritarian language" in general, which dominates the reader too much. we know that poetry, no less skillfully than the novel (and maybe even more skillfully), plays with "someone else's words"; bakhtin was against poetry not for this reason, but because it is "the language of the gods”, exasperating to a person of the new culture, and because poetry is "authoritarian" language which paralyzes the reader's own creativity (gasparov, 1984, p. 171). the parallel between the two irreverent subversions of bakhtin seems obvious. according to gasparov, bakhtin is not at all an opponent of the soulless, technocratic formalists, even though he presents himself as such, but rather their comrade in arms, engaged in the same revolutionary-nihilistic treatment of cultural artefacts—in their selection, appropriation, and demolition. the feeling "i too can be a bearer of culture" could be experienced in two ways: either "i too can create and not just look up to other creators" (this was like bakhtin with his cult of active disputatious thinking); or "i too can have an effect on others, not just them on me!" (this was the formalists with their cult of constructive verbal technology). the hostility between bakhtin and the formalists was so obstinate precisely because the struggle was between people of the same cultural formation: the most heated arguments are always over tints, not colors… the reader who enters into a dialogue with the work can either fit into its context, or fit the work into his own context (dialogue is a struggle: who will give in?). the first alternative is one possibility: bakhtin acknowledged, though unwillingly, eikhenbaum's merits for having identified in tolstoy's works the contexts of his day which everyone else had long since forgotten. but this is tiresome work and, besides, hardly necessary. the second alternative for bakhtin and for the men of the twenties came much more naturally: not to give in to the thing, but to make it give in, to take from the old world for the construction of the new only what you yourself think is needed and to throw the rest away with contempt. all the culture of the past is merely raw material for the culture of the future (gasparov, 1984, p. 170). according to groys, bakhtin is not a sly, aesopian, crypto-opponent of stalin’s totalitarianism, the way he is portrayed by post-modernists, but a sophisticated—i would say, stockholm-syndrome-style— apostle of the repressive carnival that does not leave any space for freedom (in the sense of autonomy of an individual body and soul). between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:19 in the absolute majority of their works, bakhtin’s “polyphony” is understood as a protest against the “monologism” of stalin’s ideology, of which he was a contemporary, whereas “carnivalization” is understood as a reaction to the impeccably serious and strict tone of the official soviet institutions of that period. bakhtin, therefore, becomes a mouthpiece of the democratic, genuinely public alternative to the hierarchically organized totalitarian state – the sole thinker of the soviet period who remained loyal to the utopian idea of the united, truly “people’s” life. at the same time, bakhtin insists … on this totality of carnival… bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy … simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is horrible – god forbid being part of it. there is no place for democracy in it – nobody is given the democratic right to avoid… the carnival, to stay away from it. the victim of the apollonian stalinist terror interprets it as an act of a ritualistic dionysian self-destruction – and, by that, overcomes this terror, changing its meaning from inside… it should be noted, though, that this overcoming of a life tragedy through self-sacrifice is devoid, in bakhtin’s viewpoint, of that ecstatic dissolution in the unconscious and impersonal, which, for nietzsche, constitutes the main pathos of the dionysian. for bakhtin, individuality is radically limited and final… this “different” totalitarianism cannot be subjected to the usual ideological criticism… because it represents a combination of materialism and the will to self-sacrifice (groys, 1997). the crucial feature of the totalitarian carnival, even though it was not explicitly defined as such by bakhtin, is its centralized organization of power, which only pretends to be chaotic and natural. the context of stalin is also supported by the fact that both the polyphonic novel and carnivalesque act, though being allegedly born in the people’s mind, are still directed, according to bakhtin, by a certain super-author – dostoyevsky or rabelais, which obliquely points at the author of the corresponding “life text”, which could refer to no one else but stalin (groys, 1997). the inherent drama of the ominous, allegedly unpredictable but, in fact, thoroughly organized and controlled performance, so painfully familiar to the subjects of totalitarian regimes, turns out to be a key to many artistic constructions. thanks to groys, i was able to recognize and identify this drama in the famous scenes of the exchange of clothes and the subsequent execution of prince vladimir in the end of part ii of sergey eisenstein’s film ivan the terrible. the "feast of the oprichniks" segues to the elimination of vladimir and the entire boyar threat: detecting the assassination plot, ivan turns it against its authors. the ready-made mechanism for this pivotal reversal is provided by the carnivalesque hypogram underlying the episode… the scene proceeds to the archetypal exchange of clothes and other attributes of power between ivan, the reigning monarch, and vladimir, the king of fools; then to ivan grotesquely pretending to humble himself before the new czar; and to the ensuing assassination of the temporary mock-czar instead of the real one. if this is carnival, it is one with a difference. the real czar never relinquishes his power for a moment, remaining present, sober, and vigilant. the mock-coronation of the fool is initiated and performed by ivan and his bodyguards, who also provide the crowd of revelers. vladimir's between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:20 march to his death in the cathedral is performed in what is known in sovietize as a "voluntaryobligatory manner": the victim is squeezed from all sides by the oprichniks and pushed in the predetermined direction. this squeezing is effected in full accordance with eisenstein's recipes for "merciless" geometric compositions… both the feast and the killing take place inside a closed space, …rather than in some bakhtinian public square, amidst a laughing crowd… the cathedral setting makes vladimir's death even more of a prearranged sacrifice. the perversely merciless, yet "just", stabbing is performed against the background of last judgment frescoes, which directly link ivan to god… finally, the 'mock-king' is sacrificed without any prospect of eventual resurrection; thus, instead of leading to or at least symbolizing a renewal, operation carnival only reinforces the status quo. the net result is a carnival stage-managed by one of the parties: the authoritarian parental side. it is conceived, provoked, put on, and firmly controlled from above, so that all its contradictions, role-reversals, playfulness, intoxication, and irrational energy are pressed into the service of the tyrannical father directing it. all this makes the ties between eisenstein's esthetic theory-and-practice and ivan's directorial activities suspiciously similar: eisenstein's terrible protagonist turns out to be his double… but it is not easy to recognize eisenstein in the merciless old ivan of the second part… spectacles theater, circus, street festivals, etc. were prominent in the system of artistic genres fostered by the avant-garde after the revolution. they were inherited and transformed by stalinist culture into staged mass demonstrations, soviet-style elections, political show trials, stakhanovite feats of productivity, and carnivalesque role-reversal campaigns (e.g., harvest trips, with intellectuals performing manual work under the guidance of peasants). theater naturally became the art par excellence as stalin assumed the role of the supreme director of the totality of soviet life (zholkovsky, 1996). a similar appropriation of carnival, although in milder form, was practiced by anna akhmatova, the master of life-as-art power play. the mock recital (“à la vertinsky”) of her poems by alexey batalov, initiated and choreographed by akhmatova herself and attended by vertinsky, akhmatova, and a number of chosen guests in the ardovs’ apartment on ordynka street [in moscow], had as its aim to downplay and erase the unpleasant memories of the public parodying of her “grey-eyed king” by mayakovski. in other cases, similar performances were played out at akhmatova’s request by faina ranevskaya. let’s take a closer look at the hidden psychological dynamics of these performances… it is true that their carnivalesque humor was aimed at akhmatova herself and served to downplay the atmosphere of her greatness. however, it was not an unexpected, independent laughter from outside, which would threaten to undermine her greatness, as was the case with mayakovski’s public mockery of her poems. on the contrary, akhmatova herself was the initiator and the “director” of the “insults”. having meticulously reconstructed all the details of the past situation that was troubling for her – the shocking performance of her poems to an incongruous tune, humiliating familiarity, the inversion of gender roles, collective laughter, she added one new and very important aspect – her complete personal control over the event… it cannot but remind one… of the “regally” directed carnival in eisenstein’s ivan the terrible and of its real historical prototype: stalin’s cruel humor at the expense of the victims of his carnivalized repressions… such usurpation of carnival doubtlessly attests to the power of its organizers – yet, not in the sense of their bold openness to the free play of laughter – but in the sense of controlling and manipulating laughter within a carefully fenced off enclosure of their “own” territory… as for humor between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:21 itself, it irresistibly mutates under such pressure of power. in case of success, it adopts a conceited or ominous, “barbaric”, air and if it fails, it ends up being redirected against the “tyrant” (zholkovsky, 2005, pp. 227-229). akhmatova, eisenstein, and bakhtin all bear marks of the oppressive atmosphere of the 1930s, which is further proof that all phenomena should be analyzed within their historical context. it is precisely such contextualization that both groys and gasparov bring to their reading of bakhtin. …bakhtin’s aim was not to criticize the revolution and stalin’s terror from a democratic standpoint, but to theoretically justify them as an eternal carnivalesque act… contemporary researchers of bakhtin mostly think in the pre-revolution paradigm, whereas bakhtin himself was a post-revolution thinker… (groys, 1997). mikhail bakhtin systematized his ideas on language and literature in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1960s that they became generally known and the subject of wide discussion. every age has its "struggle of the ancients and the moderns," and in the present round of the struggle bakhtin's works and utterances have become an important weapon… bakhtin is made into the bearer of the lofty spiritual values of the past, the organic integrity of which is threatened by the soulless analytical methods of today. there are good reasons for such a view, though not much foundation for it. for this view leaves out too much in the logical coherence of bakhtin's ideas. what exactly it leaves out will become clear if we recall the period in which bakhtin's ideas were formed (gasparov, 1984, p. 169). the irony of bakhtin's fate was that he thought in dialogue with the twenties, but was published, read and respected at a time when his colleagues had already left the scene and strangers had gathered around him. the prophet of the new renaissance became canonized by the age of the new classicism. the overthrower of every kind of piety has himself become the object of piety. his followers have come too late and made a research theory out of his program for creativity. and these are things which are in principle opposed: the point of creation is to transform an object, whereas the point of research is not to deform it. ... [a]s bakhtin called on his contemporaries to take from the culture of the past only what they thought necessary for themselves, so now his new adherents take from his writings only what they think is necessary for them. but it is always best when this is done consciously… to use bakhtin's provocatively imprecise language we might say: bakhtin's work is a novel, don't make it into an epic (gasparov, 1984, p. 172). as usual, we can only hope that history will eventually set the record straight and, as the poet joseph brodsky said, life “can sway aright, once swayed aleft.” references gasparov, m.l. (1984). m.m. bakhtin in russian culture of the twentieth century. transl. and comm. by ann shukman. studies in 20th century literature, 9. 169-176. (http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol9/iss1/12) groys, b. (1997). totalitarianism of carnival (in the current issue)???. zholkovsky, a. (1996). eisenstein's poetics: dialogical or totalitarian? laboratory of dreams: the russian avant-garde and cultural experiment (ed. by john e. bowlt and olga matich). stanford university press, 1996: 245-256. (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~alik/eng/ess/eis.htm) between groys and gasparov alexander zholkovsky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.216 | vol. 5 (2017) db:22 zholkovsky, a. (2005). ахматова и маяаковский. к теории пародии [akhmatova and mayakovski. on the theory of parody]. in a. zholkovsky. the selected articles on russian poetry. invariants, structures, strategies, intertextuality. moscow, 2005, pp. 221-231 (https://dornsife.usc.edu/alexander-zholkovsky/am/) zholkovsky, a. (2008). the clashes of authorities. in a. zholkovsky. stars and slightly nervous. memoir vignettes. moscow: time, 2008, pp. 132-134. (http://wwwbcf.usc.edu/~alik/rus/book/zvez/zv64.htm). new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word manuscript matusov et al-shor interview 2017-06-18.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s1 dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor college of staten island, city university of new york, usa eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane chestnut hill college, usa james cresswell ambrose university, canada abstract in 2016, the main editors of dialogic pedagogy journal issued a call for papers and contributions to a wide range of dialogic pedagogy scholars and practitioners. one of the scholars who responded to our call is famous american educator ira shor, a professor at the college of staten island, city university of new york. shor has been influenced by paulo freire with whom he published, among other books, “a pedagogy for liberation” (1986), the very first “talking book” freire did with a collaborator. his work in education is about empowering and liberating practice, which is why it has become a central feature of critical pedagogy. shor’s work has touched on themes that resonate with dialogic pedagogy (dp). he emphasises the importance of students becoming empowered by ensuring that their experiences are brought to bear. we were excited when shor responded to our call for papers with an interesting proposal: an interview that could be published in dpj, and we enthusiastically accepted his offer. the dpj main editors contacted the dpj community members and asked them to submit questions for ira. the result is an exciting in-depth interview with him that revolved around six topics: (1) social justice; (2) dialogism; (3) democratic higher education; (4) critical literacy versus traditional literacy; (5) paulo freire and critical pedagogy; and (6) language and thought. following the interview, we reflect on complimentary themes and tensions that emerge between shor’s approach to critical pedagogy and dp. ira shor is a professor at the college of staten island, city university of new york, where he teaches composition and rhetoric. he is also doctoral faculty in the ph.d. program in english and in the ph.d. in urban education, at the graduate center, cuny. shor grew up in the working-class area in the south bronx of new york city. according to shor, coming from a working-class area had a powerful influence on his thinking, politics and feelings. in collaboration with paulo freire, he has been one of the leading exponents of critical pedagogy. together they co-wrote “a pedagogy for liberation.” eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s2 in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an associate professor of education at chestnut hill college in philadelphia. she studies meaning making in education and play, dialogic educational relationships and events, dialogic teacher orientation, and the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. she uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic orientation in her studies. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play and education. her most recent publication is: marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). "spoilsport" in drama in education vs. dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4. james cresswell is an associate professor & program chair in psychology at ambrose university (calgary canada). his work is largely influenced by the philosophy of mikhail bakhtin and cultural psychology. of special interest is bakhtin’s work on aesthetics in relation to language and how it can enhance current work in education, philosophy of mind, cognitive science of religion, and immigration. his work has been supported by organizations such as the social science & humanities research counsel, templeton foundation, and murdoch charitable trust. ��� introduction last year, the main editors of dialogic pedagogy journal issued a call for papers and contributions to a wide range of dialogic pedagogy scholars and practitioners. one of the scholars who responded to our call is famous american educator ira shor, a professor at the college of staten island, city university of new york. shor has been influenced by paulo freire with whom he published, among other books, “a pedagogy for liberation” (1986). his work in education is about empowering and liberating students, which is why it has become a central feature of critical pedagogy. shor’s work has touched on themes that resonate with dialogic pedagogy (dp). he emphasizes the importance of students becoming critically literate through a dialogic inquiry into their conditions and experiences. this theme is echoed in dp with a shared critique of education that subjugates students to regimes that alienate them from their own experience. some of shor’s work has inspired dp (see shor & freire, 1987). it was for this reason that we were excited when shor responded to our call for papers with an interesting proposal: an interview that could be published in dpj! we enthusiastically accepted his offer. we (the dpj main editors) contacted the dpj community members and asked them to submit questions for ira. the result is an exciting in-depth interview with him that revolved around six topics: (1) social justice; (2) dialogism; (3) democratic higher education; (4) critical literacy versus traditional literacy; (5) paulo freire and critical pedagogy; and (6) language and thought. following the interview, we reflect on complimentary themes and tensions that emerge between shor’s approach to critical pedagogy and dp. dialogic pedagogy journal interview with ira shor 1. social justice 1a. eugene matusov: apparently, the history of the xx century has discredited the real socialism of the soviet union, china, romania, cuba, albania, yugoslavia, hungary, ddr (i.e., communist east germany), cambodia, guinea-bissau, and so on. all of these communist/socialist regimes were involved in mass persecutions, oppression, and even in mass murder on a gigantic scale and were dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s3 totalitarian in their nature. however, all of these regimes were driven by concerns about social justice. would you agree with this depicture of these communist/socialist regimes? if so, what went wrong in these regimes’ pursuit of social justice, in your view, and why? if not, how and why not? what lessons have you learned from the historical failures (if not crimes) of the communist/socialist regimes of the xx century? ira shor: just this morning i read in the nytimes about a dissident uighur scholar imprisoned for life by the “communist” regime of china, and about the arrest of a dissident blogger in vietnam by that one-party, post-revolutionary state. after marching for 10 years to end the war in vietnam when i was a student and young professor, i’m particularly disgusted reading about the totalitarian excesses of the regime in power there. these kinds of regimes, historically self-designated as “socialist” or “communist” or “democratic” or “people’s republics,” some the product of revolution and some installed by an occupying red army after wwii, have been left-wing oligarchies, anti-pluralist, ruled top-down by privileged elites (who i observed in budapest in 1971 as those few wearing leather jackets in winter and in leningrad in 1989 as those ostentatiously smoking american cigarettes bought in restricted “dollar-stores”). none of the revolutions of the 20th century installed radical democracies. obviously, seizure of state power is not sufficient to effect a transition to democracy, though the new left-wing oligarchies in control of these states can distribute social benefits more systematically or generously than prior regimes. a socialist-democratic transformation requires dismantling what foucault called the disciplinary matrix of domination spread over the whole social body by the modernist state which emerged at the end of the 18th century. we have degenerate capitalist oligarchies in the west and have witnessed the collapse of degenerate communist oligarchies in the east. those collapsed communist regimes as well as the nominally communist parties in china and vietnam have morphed into market-based oligarchies run by “communist” cadres. (china is the world’s factory with 50,000 state “minders” censoring the internet there; vietnam offers global entrepreneurs perhaps the cheapest labor force after haiti.) a neoliberal global system rules all nations now no matter what the formal government or formal leadership call themselves or their state. democratic opposition to these neoliberal regimes and to the unrelenting austerity imposed on the 99% for 40 years now is also a global phenomenon. neoliberalism, or the harsh rule of the market which suppresses democratic citizenship in favor or runaway consumerism, is now “the power that is in power,” as paulo freire would say, while democracy, equality, ecology, and peace (how i define the agenda for “social justice”) is “the power not yet in power,” in freire’s terms. 1b. eugene matusov: what is the relationship between equality and diversity (including diversity of inequality) in general and in education? do you think the desires of promoting equality and promoting diversity contradict each other? if so, how and if ‘no’, why not? ira shor: “equality” and “diversity” remain unfulfilled obligatory themes in the continuing opposition to neoliberalism. that opposition, to be a project for “social justice” with an agenda i described above as “democracy, equality, ecology, and peace,” cannot leave diversity and inclusion out of the mix. without question, democracy and equality imply diversity, or else neither is operating. the only way social justice can succeed if it is a diverse movement, an inclusive opposition, where all constituencies are included as stakeholders. democracy demands equality because a liberatory future requires the majority to make history with their own hands, as freire put it. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s4 social justice has motivated various mass movements for decades, in and out of education. the status quo, run by and for a dominant elite, uses every difference against us. “divide and conquer” is an old, effective tactic in the domination toolbox. the more social justice movements build cross-class, crossracial, and cross-gender alliances, which are now referred to as “inter-sectional” movements, the more they will challenge and change the destructive status quo. in the case of mass education, schooling has never been egalitarian, democratic, critical or inclusive, despite “the great school legend” which mystifies public schools as “great equalizers,” as scholar colin greer named and critiqued this myth in 1972, that universal free education has been the foundation of american prosperity and freedom, that the public schools embraced all immigrant groups and turned america into “a melting pot nation” where anyone can succeed by their own grit (“the american dream”). greer and other scholars like bowles and gintis, at work during the mass movements in the u.s. in the 1960s and 1970s, were referred to as “revisionists” then for revising the official narrative of american education. this demystification continued in the work of harvey graff, brian street, shirley brice heath and others, whose literacy studies demonstrated the close fit between language learning and class hierarchy. all in all, mass education has not produced equality, inclusion, democracy, or leveling of class, race, and gender divisions. in the u.s., high school and college graduation rates now are at record highs for both genders and all racial/ethnic groups, yet economic inequality is at its highest in 90 years, women graduates have not been able to convert their educational gains into economic ones, and black unemployment rates remain twice the white rate like they have always been, while white family median income stays constant at about 170% of black family income. residential neighborhoods and schools are as segregated as ever. put simply, the vast spread of public lower and higher education has not altered the material position of disfavored groups. equality and inclusion remain the unfinished tasks of democratic movements from below. in the 1960s1970s, an age foucault celebrated for “the general criticizability of things,” such opposition put the status quo on the defensive, opening up space for unearthing and circulating what foucault named as “subjugated knowledges” and “disqualified discourses.” forty years of resurgent domination has derailed progressive changes, which i wrote about in my book culture wars (1986, 1990). i called the counter-attack of authorities “the conservative restoration,” when a destabilized elite reasserted domination. the conservative restoration continues, penetrating american society decade by decade, dismantling efforts in education to build multicultural curricula, labor studies, and women’s programs, imposing market discipline on schools, colleges, health care, housing, mass transit, recreation, food chains, energy sources, incarceration [i.e., monetization, conversion of public goods into private revenue streams, diminishing democratic rights and constitutional protections, re-defining citizens as consumers empowered by choice in markets, etc]. neoliberalism is the agenda of both major parties in the u.s. under whose rule vast wealth was transferred from the public to the private sectors, from the working-class and middle-class to the super-rich, from public schools to private units (via the aggressive “charter school” movement funded by billionaires like gates, broad, and the waltons). formal, mass education from k-12 to graduate school has always served the interests of the dominant elite but that service is now being radically enhanced by aggressive privatization (a marketization strategy consistent with neoliberalism). because equality and diversity are under attack, because democracy is being restricted by great wealth, these values should remain the agenda of activist educators for school and society, for educational policy as well as for everyday learning and teaching. i base my critical teaching on democracy, equality, ecology, and peace, when i design lessons, projects, and activities for students. readers familiar with my books can find there specific strategies based in democratization and diversity. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s5 1c. eugene matusov: what is the relationship between equality and quality in general and in education? do you think the desires of promoting equality and promoting quality contradict each other? if so, how, and if ‘no’, why not? ira shor: a dominant discourse in our society has constructed these two concepts at odds with each other. constructing equality as undermining quality protects the unequal status quo against majoritarian policies. for example, when congress passed the serviceman’s readjustment act of august 1944, some elite policy-makers opposed free college education as part of the program. you can read the opposition to “the g.i. bill” as it was known, by policy-prince james bryant conant, then president of harvard, soon-to-be the high commissioner of occupied germany, and afterwards the head of the influential carnegie foundation. conant worried that the influx of non-elite veterans onto college campuses would undermine the quality of the american university system. as it happened, a million veterans (almost all white) did attend college after wwii on the federal dime where they proved themselves to be outstanding students. still, despite this example of non-elite white male veterans succeeding in college, the policy princes persisted with their apartheid education policies, that is, segregating working-class and lower middle-class high school graduates onto a new lesser track of higher education called “the community college,” instead of enrolling all of equally-funded, equally academic campuses. this preferential option for the elite among policy-makers invented what became known as the “triple-track” university system as the national standard, with over-financed university centers enrolling the top 10% of high-school graduates, lesser--funded four-year state colleges enrolling the next 10%, and least-funded community colleges catching the post-war mass of non-elite students onto vocationalized campuses. the maintenance of “quality” in this policy-making was actually the maintenance of class, gender and race privilege. “quality” is not a neutral, apolitical category which angelically measures and smiles on the best and the brightest. “quality” is a “regime of truth”, as foucault might say, which rewards the already-privileged with more privileges. foucault articulated how the institutions of society, like mass education, served as “disciplinary instruments” to rank, sort, and extract productive, compliant labor from each generation. foucault designated institutional “ranking” as a primary tool to discipline and divide a population into unequal stations (“cellularization” to disintegrate solidarity). in the universe of education discourse, “quality,” then, is a code-word which disguises arbitrary subordination. “quality” thus is a rhetorical meme for a coded narrative justifying inequality. this code also relates to bourdieu’s theory of unequally distributed, economically-dependent distinction in society. bourdieu theorized that cultural capital of unequal value is distributed through everyday life and social institutions (the habitus) from which each person is structured into hierarchical social locations. we all emerge from our habitus as human subjects of one status or another, but the elite receive cultural capital of high distinction which develops them as subjects of power and authority because of their origins in an economically-privileged habitus. one of the specific unequal effects of elite habitus equips some human subjects with control of standard usage, the idiom of highest distinction in society. the non-elite majority of all races and genders does not learn or practice the valuable cultural capital of standard usage in its habitus. the high-rank standard is a politically and economically elevated linguistic practice based in the preferences and usages of metropolitan elites in each industrializing nation. what bourdieu called “the national unification of the linguistic market” installed the singular dialect of the dominant as the national standard against which all other usages and idioms were judged lesser (“slang, broken english, black english, spanglish,” etc.) this political installation of certain cultural capital as highly-distinctive applied also to artifacts and canons, such as “the great books” or “the great works of music, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc.,” the products and preferences of the elite dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s6 became items of high distinction. because such a partisan process is always already in place whenever we compare or evaluate any social practices (including speaking, writing, performances on standardized tests, etc.), there is no innocent position from which to judge any activity or artifact of society free from politics (“power relations”). at my low-budget working-class college, students do not score high enough on the sats to compete for admission to colleges of high distinction.) we have known for decades that scores on standardized tests like the sat correlate with family income: the higher the family income the more likely a student will produce higher scores. social class dissolves here into a metric, a ranking indicated by measurement, an outcome of social hierarchy which is hidden behind a discourse of individual inadequacy. for critical literacy in my writing classes, i routinely bring in data bases and reports to pose standardized testing a political problem – “why do students from wealthier homes score higher than those from low-income homes?” teaching against the unequal status quo and for majoritarian agency is of course another way to define critical pedagogy as paulo freire proposed it. in doing this, critical-democratic educators will have to generate quality and equality at the same time. in this regard, paulo freire proposed for public schools “popular-democratic education” as he called his program while serving as the workers’ party secretary of education of sao paulo, 1989-1991. in terms of literacy, this involved teaching standard usage parallel with the grammar and beauty of the students’ own non-standard idioms. to freire, standard usage became empowering when it was taught as a tool for non-elite students to use on their behalf. in my field of composition-rhetoric, some notable scholars have taken a similar position: donald lazere in his books on teaching for civic literacy; geneva smitherman, on teaching black english vernacular along with standard english. i addressed this conundrum of standard/non-standard usages in my book empowering education in terms of what i called “the third idiom.” one goal i set for myself in my everyday practice of critical teaching is to transform “teacher-talk” so as to promote dialogue. in speaking, i try to merge my high-status academic discourse with the colloquial working-class usages my students bring to class (and which i grew up speaking in my own working-class childhood). i seek a hybrid idiom through which to dialogue with the students, which integrates conceptual frameworks and vocabulary from high-status reasoning and bodies-of-knowledge with the non-elite colloquial knowledges, usages, lexicon and syntax familiar to everyday life. when i get this hybrid discourse right in actual classroom dialogues, i model to students a way of using language to examine issues and materials which respects their own idioms while integrating analytic discourse. when a hybrid discourse does emerge, the critical classroom invents for itself a new tool for democratization, “the third idiom,” co-constructed in dialogic practice from the contradictory linguistic habits teachers and students bring to class. 1d. judith green: how can policymakers be reached and how do they need to take actions to insure social justice, not manage one-size-fits-all for all students, all teachers and all communities? ira shor: in recent years, one of the most successful movements for social justice in the u.s. has been the campaign for same-sex marriage, which is part of a long-term advocacy against homophobia. gay advocacy began in the 1970s after the landmark stonewall riots in new york in 1969. advocates built a movement and coalitions that forced the hand of the supreme court to legalize same-sex marriage in 2015. other mass campaigns in these decades included movements against both iraq wars launched in 1991 by the elder pres. bush and in 2003 by the younger pres. bush, which was supported by hillary clinton and the democratic party at that time. continuing opposition to the second and dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s7 continuing war in iraq exposed the younger bush’s lies about wmds and saddam hussein’s complicity in terrorism and the 911 attacks. the opposition succeeded in turning public opinion against the war, limiting the options available to the white house occupied by either major party. yet another recent mass movement has been the “opt-out” campaign from 2011 forward, organized locally by mostly mothers with children in schools being taken over by costly, pointless, child-abusive testing. this grassroots opt-out movement forced authorities in some key states to abandon testing regimes on which they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars. then, there was the well-known “occupy wall street” movement erupting in september 2011, which eventually spread to 750 cities and towns in the u.s., until local police destroyed the encampments in lower manhattan and elsewhere. while the police carried the day for the financial oligarchs, this campaign managed to change national debate over income inequality. regarding militant opposition to racism, a “black lives matter” movement also emerged in 2015 to shine bright lights especially on police violence against people of color. generally, mass campaigns for social justice involve rallies, marches, demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, mass lobbying, viral videos, meme-bearing t-shirts, flyers, handbills, posters, documentary film, theatrical performances, exhibitions, conferences, forums, neighborhood fairs, concerts, promotional treks, celebrity endorsements, legal challenges, petitions, and so on. these are the tools used by movements from the bottom up to pressure policy-makers. since the 1970s, policymakers and government have moved to the right in a long period of “neoliberalism,” which has meant that power is used from the top down to impose severe market discipline on the majority, to accelerate the transfer of national wealth into private hands. all sectors of society—production, transportation, communications, finance, housing, education, employment, etc.—have imposed a severe austerity on the vast majority which has greatly enriched the 1%. policy-makers are the agents of the private sector charged with imposing austerity and justifying the growing gap between the top and the rest of society along the lines first articulated by margaret thatcher as prime minister of the uk in the 1980s, “there is no alternative.” in certain cases, the “policy-maker” who must be pressured first and foremost is a retrograde union chief who refuses to organize the membership as a fighting force. this is the case with the two teacher union presidents in the u.s., randy weingarten of the aft and lily eskelsen garcia of the nea. both have taken funds from the billionaire bill gates who pushes policies favoring privatization of public schooling and standardized testing to judge student achievement and teacher quality. both rule their large unions with iron fists, preventing rank-and-file activism to emerge. they are both agents for the corporate wing of the democratic party who forced hillary clinton down the throats of their combined 3 million members without substantive debate about her lack of a public education platform, as well as her lifelong association with two billionaires at the forefront of the privatization assault on public schools, eli broad and the walton family. in cases like these, where a union organization already exists and fails to represent the needs of its members, the first activism has to be expelling renegade union leaders from office and replacing them with rank-and-file leaders. in some union locals, there have been alternative leaders, like karen turner, bob peterson, jesse hagopian, and barbara madeloni. prolonged campaigns against policy-makers are needed to change the political direction of society to act. 1e. tara ratnam: in today's market society, those educational processes seem to be institutionalized that produce the types of individuals needed for reproduction of commodity through specialized skills adapted to the global market. here, the ideals of individual profit and narrow interests are relentlessly promoted even at the cost of common humanity (e.g., the economic exploitation by the indomitable corporates that has fomented a debt crisis, subjecting many people into endless belt tightening and dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s8 ruining the life chances of the youth in these countries.). there seems to be a crisis of values that creates not only these socioeconomic inequities, but also violence and war (seen around the world involving power and politics). what would an activist stance look like that can work to alter this reproductive trend in current society and education to a transformative one; a transformation that encompasses the dominant oppressor as much as the marginalized (for it seems to be the problem not only of the marginalized, as it is commonly made out to be, but of the whole of society consisting of few who try to exert control and the many that are marginalised by it)? ira shor: when barack obama campaigned on a platform of “hope and change” in 2008, many expected a national policy change against the horrendous wall street domination of society which produced economic collapse, massive unemployment, families evicted from homes, loss of pension plans, and the drastic defunding of the public sector which led to fiscal crises like the one in flint, michigan, where city managers changed the water supply to a a cheaper polluted source and poisoned that city of 99,000. sadly, instead of a robust bottom-up offensive, obama launced a top-down restoration. he appointed wall street financiers to lead his administration’s economic policies and to head the treasury department. these policy-makers directed hundreds of billions of relief to the banks and not to the working-class and middle-class victims of the casino capitalism played by wall street. while tens of millions lost jobs and homes, wall street banks were replenished with public funds. this crime against the public good created the deep hardships and anger which opened the door to trump’s victory in 2016. the last 40 years have been very hard on the working-class, the middle class, and the poor. where i teach, new york city, 33,000 children in our public schools are homeless. data tell us that the best years to be working-class, middle-class, or poor in america were 1947-1979. in those decades, the bottom 20% of families increased their incomes at a higher percentage than any other quintile. the top quintile gained the smallest percentage of all family cohorts. in those years following wwii, productivity and wages tracked each other closely in a constant upward trend. as the wealth produced by each hour of labor (productivity) rose, the wages and benefits paid to the worker rose at a similar rate. this means that working-class and middle-class families in those decades were able to capture higher wages in return for their rising productivity, thus enabling them to do a little better each year vis-à-vis living standards. in the decades after 1970, productivity continued to rise spectacularly but wages and benefits have not; and the minimum wage has fallen way behind in buying power. flat wages mean that the greater wealth produced in these recent years (productivity) by the 144 million americans now employed has gone almost entirely into the pockets of the top—owners, executives, shareholders, debtowners--not the bottom 90%. at the same time, the cost of living continued rising (inflation of higher education, health care, clothing, food, transportation, housing, insurance, taxes, services, etc.) so, for the last two decades, even mainstream media feature the problem of rising economic inequality and “class war” (a topical theme i center in my college writing courses). a common anxiety in the mainstream media is the failure of the new generation to equal their parents’ achievements and standards of living, deeply in debt after college with no good job prospects and no apartment of their own they can afford, more and more of the young graduates moving back home to live with mom and dad. “class war,” then, is a theme for critical educators to put into course syllabi. 2. dialogism 2a. eugene matusov: where do you see similarities and difference between bakhtinian and freirean dialogic frameworks in general and in education in specific? ira shor: i’ll pass on this question if you don’t mind. not one of my central interests. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s9 2b. eugene matusov: do you think the goal of critical dialogue in education is social justice? if so, why? if not, why not? or do you think critical dialogue is an end in itself in education? if so, why? if not, why not? what do you think is the relationship between critical dialogue and social justice in education? ira shor: i already answered this question above in previous remarks. 2c. eugene matusov: would you equate the notion of “critical pedagogy” with the notion of “critical dialogue”? why? why not? ira shor: critical dialogue is essential in critical pedagogy but there is more to critical pedagogy than dialogue. dialogue fits into a sequence of teaching-learning which in the freirean mold begins with the teacher studying the students before she presumes to teach them. in freire’s literacy programs, literacy teams settled into a village or neighborhood where they planned to offer classes. before the first class, they did extensive sociocultural and socio-linguistic research into the area, recruiting local residents as co-researchers and interlocutors. from these weeks of prior research, the joint group of teachers and locals extracted the generative words and themes most relevant to the people in that area, best suited to engaging them in critical study of reading and writing because these subject matters were legible and meaningful to the students. before any written texts or letters were introduced to the students, the teams began the first class with ten projected slides which invited discussion on the already-existing culture-making powers of the assembled students. these illiterate peasants and workers were able to read the world in speech if not in printed or composed texts, so freire began the sessions with the theme of “the anthropological nature of culture,” a theoretical notion made concrete and “readable” via the 10 pictorial slides representing human activities. the 10 initial slides are important methodological starting points which privilege student expression in response to legible subject matters, which initiated critical literacy as inquiry-based alphabetization. freire scaffolded literacy in this student-centered manner, using familiar subject matters engaged in unfamiliar ways. dialogue began with slides representing how humans make culture followed by lessons based in themes from student life. this method is a form of democratic discipline because it frontloads student cognition and activity which simultaneously enables and restrains the directive voice of the teacher. the critical pedagogy in this method of dialogue deploys and validates the thoughts, language use, and everyday lives of the illiterates. the students are cognitively animated to reflect instead of waiting for the educator to explain for them and to them what things mean and what to believe. another critical dimension of this pedagogy is presenting what freire called “hinged themes” by which he meant moving outward from the generative themes discovered in preliminary research so as to connect the words and topics most prominent in local life with the history and society they are part of. 2d. judith green: what issues do you think are currently important for those of us, who are involved in proposing and promoting dialogic pedagogy and its underlying social justice agenda? ira shor: economic inequality; the looting of the nation by corporate giants and wall street; the tax evasion of billionaires and major corporations; wages far too low for far too long; the difficulty young people have finding good jobs, affording their own apartments; runaway student debt; black lives matter—police violence against people of color, the mass incarceration of mostly young black and hispanic men, the school-to-prison pipeline, the disproportionate drug arrests directed at black people. the under-financing of public schools for poor and working-class children; gender inequality in employment and the sexual violence directed at women; the accelerating despoliation of planet earth and the stark evidence for global warming. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s10 2e. jim cresswell and eugene matusov: you wrote, “the teacher is the architect of this un-doing and redoing” (1987, p. 97). do you see the primary goal of education in de-socializing, un-doing, deconstructing any sociocultural practices and values while re-socializing, re-doing, and re-constructing are occasional byproducts of genuine education? or do you see re-socializing, re-doing, and reconstructing as the primary goal of education equal, if even not more important, to de-socializing, undoing, de-constructing? ira shor: to me, critical dialogue in a critical pedagogy is an invitation for de-socialization and resocialization of both teachers and students. freire spoke of this process as “denunciation” and “annunciation.” when we practice critical pedagogy, and negotiate a meaningful curriculum with students, the social relations of discourse change in the classroom. because human subjects and human consciousness are the products of social action including discourse, we make possible an alternative construction of ourselves. such a learning process is unavoidably deconstructive/reconstructive. it invites egalitarian relations and democratic development, or the practice of democratic habits for group process. these alternative developments emerge inside a process of questioning school and society. this is a knowledge-making process constructed on different terms than prior traditional ones. the discourse enabled by this form of dialogue becomes a material force for re=perceiving self-in-society. human subject formation—seeing, being, speaking, thinking, and doing—is “neuroplastic.” all classroom methods, dominant/accomodation or questioning/critical, work from this “neuroplasticity” of consciousness, knowledge, orientations, habits, preferences, dispositions, etc., because all pedagogies are instruments for forming human beings one way or another. critical pedagogy intends a different direction for human subject formation than the dominant one now in place in all schools. critical pedagogy deploys problem-posing dialogue so as to invite students to develop as activist citizens inspired by democracy, equality, ecology and peace (the foundations of social justice). all teachers influence how students think and develop; all teachers face resistance to and cooperation with their interventions; critical pedagogy takes its place against standard “banking” pedagogies which accommodate students to their places in the unequal status quo. 3. democratic higher education (open syllabus education, ose) 3a. eugene matusov: in your pedagogical experiment on democratization of higher education, described in your famous 1996 book “when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy,” using summative assessment (i.e., grade marks at the end of the class) were non-negotiable in your classes. from your book, it seemed that the students might be able to negotiate how the summative assessment was designed but not whether the summative assessment was applied to them or not (e.g., grade sabotage was not an option). was it because of the institutional pressure that you could not avoid (or not be able to sabotage) or because of your own pedagogical belief in summative assessment as an absolutely necessary component of good education? if the latter, can you elaborate on that, please. ira shor: like all teachers in a formal school or college, i am an institutional officer required to take attendance and give grades and submit official documents at the end confirming the outcomes for each student. if i did not submit grades on the formal grading sheets, students would not get credit for the class. so, of course, such institutional regulations are “limit situations” on critical practice inside formal schools and colleges. i have no choice but to submit final letter grades for each student because this is a state-regulated institution and students will not be awarded the degree unless they accumulate passing grades in each class. summative assessment institutionally here is a letter grade but many of us consider a narrative summation more valuable to students, regarding where they started, what they did and how they ended from the teacher’s point of view. i typically do not wait for a summative narration at the end to address the student. to me, the most important assessment is daily and weekly when dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s11 students perform in class and on work handed in. i write a lot on their weekly homework papers encouraging them to rewrite, revise, re-think. i attach to their weekly writings different reading material focused on how they wrote and thought about the current issues. this week-to-week dialogue between an individual student and the teacher is where i spend most of my time in assessment. 3b. eugene matusov: from your book, it seemed that you selected the books that the students read, without input by your students, while they had freedom to pick up any topic for discussion within the books chosen by you. was it because of the institutional pressure that you could not avoid (or not be able to sabotage) or because of your pedagogical belief in curriculum decided by the teacher as an absolutely necessary component of good education? if the latter, can you elaborate on that, please. ira shor: yes, i did select the two books for the class examined in when students have power. i changed this habit soon after. the students heavily criticized me for one of the books chosen. in a subsequent class in “coming-of-age narratives,” i brought 25 different coming-of-age books to class the first night and asked the class to read each one for about 5 minutes, then grade that book on a scale of 1-10 according to how eager they are to read the next 5 minutes of that book, with 1 being “not interested” and 10 being “very interested.” i collected that first night all their scores on all the books, tabulated them, and announced at the next class meeting which book got their highest votes and would comprise our reading list. in my first-year composition class, i routinely invite students to pick their own topics to research if they prefer not to study and write about the topic i introduce in class. i also invite them to use any background materials they like in researching their topics, not only the ones i hand out in class. in my doctoral seminar, i typically leave the last month of classes for students to nominate their own readings about the topic. 3c. eugene matusov: do you think that education and critical dialogue can and must be imposed on all students or not? why? what did you do when faced with disengaged students and why? do you think that students should have a right on non-participation? ira shor: critical dialogue cannot be imposed on anyone! i pose problems around engaging themes for the students who then choose to dialogue or not about them. many remain silent all term, some alienated from intellectual study in general, some alienated from the topic in particular, some just too tired or distracted to take part. they appropriate the right to not participate no matter what i do. i can’t force them to speak with me and with others who accept the invitation to dialogue. it’s useful to reiterate and expand what i just said about student refusal to dialogue: they haven’t done the reading or the assignment for that day; they are bored with the class, with me, with the other students, with the themes under discussion, or with formal education in general; they are tired, hungry, sick or any combination of these factors; they are preoccupied with something else, like a test in another class, like a breakup with their romantic partners, like a sick family member, like paying their utility bills or paying their tuition. the problems i pose in any class typically do not provoke uniform participation; some reject or resist dialogue more, some less, as in all classes taught by all teachers, for a wide variety of reasons. 3d. eugene matusov: in some of our democratic (ose) classes, our students argued against the majority rule and for making any decision in the class only about themselves on an individual basis, so nobody could impose on another student. would you allow this way of decision making in your class, if you were the teacher? why? why not? ira shor: the contract grading process i presented in my book when students have power starts on the first class day. i hand out a typed sheet with proposals for grading plans and read aloud my dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s12 proposals for a, b, and c grades, then invite questions and amendments, which tend to be few the first night because this process is very unfamiliar to students. so, i ask students to take home the grading plans and spend some time reading them to see if they discover changes they want to propose. i announce that the second class meeting will begin with discussion of the grading plans. on the second day, i convene discussion on the plans and ask if anyone has changes to propose. some classes have none; some, one; some several. i ask each student to state his or her change aloud and explain why it is an improvement over the item i wrote on the sheet. after the student speaks, i ask if anyone else thinks this change is good? anyone disagree with it? the class has some discussion and then i call for a vote to see how popular it is. majority votes carry the proposals but i also announce that any student can write his own or her own grading plan and negotiate it privately with me for the grade they want and the work they will do. so, individual students can chart their own grading plan if they like. 3e. eugene matusov: what if some or a majority of your students voted for traditional (non-democratic) regime in you class, would you follow their wish? why? why not? ira shor: of course, i have to follow their preference if a majority of students reject the grading plans. i cannot impose democratic relations against majority resistance. this has happened in some classes and they force me to become a traditional teacher like the ones they have had before. 3f. eugene matusov: what was the fate of your democratic pedagogical experimentations described in your 1996 book? what were success and challenges? how did your pedagogical problematics change and why? ira shor: conditions for teaching and learning, as well as for everyday life and raising families, deteriorated dramatically for me and for the working-class students at my college across the 45 years i have taught there. students were paying higher tuition for lower quality education. many were unable to afford tuition and had to drop out after the class began. it became harder and more hostile to be a teacher or a student—bridge tolls and mass transit rose in cost, as did textbooks and food in the cafeteria. fewer students would stay with me after class for the very unique and useful after-class group i began and wrote about in when students have power. i discovered that the acg worked best with a minimum of 4 students and a maximum of 8, but fewer than 4 typically volunteered in recent years. students had to leave class immediately to go to jobs, to families, or to prepare for tests in other classes. critical-democratic teaching and learning became a class luxury harder to practice here as the income inequality gap kept widening. still, i begin each course with a presentation of the grading plans mentioned above. 3g. jim cresswell: in your book (1987a), you open with a history of the development of colleges. you seem to describe them as “warehouses” that placate the masses. over the last thirty years, technology has changed classrooms so that there is more online participation and more ways to engage a wider student body (e.g. student forums). how would you reformulate (or not) your assessment from 1987 in light of classroom technologies? ira shor: billions have been spent on computer hardware, software, peripherals, and bandwidth since 1987, yet critical scholars and educators are still waiting for research confirming that computer applications enhance student learning and achievement. such confirmation is irrelevant to the tech billionaires and their agents in the media and government who advocate more and more tech in schools. scholar larry cuban from stanford doubted the educational value of tech applications twenty years ago but such misgivings could not slow down high-tech entrepreneurs when tech applications are such dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s13 a leading factor in profit-making. tech entrepreneurs became hegemonic gods in our society in the last 30 years who successfully commanded the integration of technology into education at all levels despite the vast drain on declining district and campus budgets, despite scant evidence that such expenditures produce outcomes worth the cost. tech has been a one-way monologue so loud and pervasive as to exclude critical dialogue about what tech applications to learning mean or engender, or who benefits. critical learning can integrate all kinds of tools into the needs of students and teachers involved in a process to question the status quo. digital tech is a tool; so are books, pencils, chalk, blackboards, well-lit and clean classrooms, the voice of the teacher, etc. freire’s culture circles appealed to progressive authorities in impoverished brazil of the 1950s because his method was inexpensive to deploy and fast to deliver basic adult literacy in only 30-40 hours of instruction. his tools included cheap polish slide projectors to display the 10 original drawings which initiated dialogue. the projectors and slides were destroyed during the military coup of april, 1964 because they were considered subversive tools. i another instance, after the september, 1973 military coup in chile, a folk instrument associated with the musicians supporting the allende government, the churanga, was banned by the generals because it too was deemed a subversive tool. tools, then, have to be examined critically and historically for the politics of their operation. books are traditional tools of education now being displaced by digital reading devices; the political economy of digital preferences empowers the billionaire tech entrepreneurs, certainly, but neither the book nor the nook reader are by themselves critical or uncritical as tools of pedagogy. we need to ask which tools are used in which ways for what purposes and with what results, to grasp the politics as well as the efficacy of a device or method. by themselves, then, books do not guarantee critical teaching or critical reading. a pen and paper to write an essay does not guarantee the development of a student’s critical literacy. chalk and blackboards do not guarantee critical teaching. watching films does not guarantee media literacy. digital tech does not guarantee anything critical about the process of learning. the only thing guaranteed is the gigantic cost of imposing such tech on education. in my judgment, the billions spent on successive generations of soonto-be obsolete tech would have been better spent reducing class size by hiring more teachers and building more classrooms; better spent guaranteeing a full-time librarian, a full-time nurse, a full-time social worker, and a new athletic center in all schools for kids to play and run around; better spent on outdoor education for inner-city kids especially; better spent on class trips and field projects. at the very least, research has confirmed that physical activities between classes enhances student attention and that small classes enhance the achievement of students, especially low-income ones, but the hegemonic power of tech in society ignores this research and forces tech purchases on schools regardless, at a time when the public sector budget is in decline. 3h. jim cresswell: the idea of empowering students is central to your work and dialogical pedagogy in general. since the mid-1990’s it seems (to me) like there has been an explosion of something like trade literature in higher education (e.g. the “teaching professor” group and the disciples of maryellen weimer). what strikes me as strange is how neo-liberal “client-centred” administrators have latched onto this work as an effective marketing tool and model for “service-delivery” that enhances student attraction/retention. the latter reduces students to commodities and there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about incompatibilities between student empowerment and market-driven commodification. that is, this literature seems to empower students and yet it is simultaneously appropriated as a tool of objectification. can you comment on this seeming paradox? ira shor: you are exactly right. what we call “programmed learning” or sequential modules clued to single-student sequencing, has been appropriated as individualization of teaching and learning, now being called “personalized instruction” delivered digitally and paced according to the student’s progress dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s14 through the modules. many of us in education call this virtual pedagogy “depersonalized learning” because students do not interact with actual persons called “real teachers.” the students sit alone in front of screens without a professional adult educator observing and evaluating their activities inprocess, whose job it is to pull that student’s extant learning forward into the next step of their development. many years ago, lev vygotsky named this live learning interaction of the less-advanced learner with the more advanced teacher as “the zone of proximal development.” a computer screen can only feed to the student what the machine is pre-programmed to say and do. the peculiar genius of human beings, including teachers, is our ability to make on-the-spot, in-progress determinations and interventions based on our real-time observations. this is why the de-personalized individualized learning spreading now through tech buys and virtual teaching devices cannot equal the real teacher as a tool of instruction. the ultra-individualization of virtual instruction fits the neoliberal thrust of the past four decades in school and society. neoliberalism imposes strong market discipline on all sectors of society and human experience. this means micro-managing society so as to convert all activities into enhanced revenue streams for the private sector. real teachers are human beings who are harder to manage than teaching machines; real teachers join unions and demand negotiated improvements in their work. neoliberal government and business have imposed forty-five years of austerity on school, work, and everyday life, which means compelling the vast majority to settle for less, make do with less, and do more with less, so that the 1% in charge can capture more and more of the national wealth. virtual teaching in schools and colleges fits this anti-labor neoliberalism very well, because fewer high-cost professional educators are needed as lower-skill tech coordinators replace them. the tech flloding into our classrooms may be used by ingenious critical teachers to develop students as activists who question knowledge and power in their society, but the virtual takeover of schooling is certainly not intended to propel such an outcome. the conversion of public education into a feverish marketplace for digital tools has developed side-byside with the feverish privatization of public schools via the bogus charter mechanisms. if computer instruction is like fast-food for the mass of students, pre-packaged and delivered by low-cost labor, the entire public school itself is being appropriated as a revenue stream for private enterprise. pushed by billionaires who spend vast sums recently to win local school board elections for privatization advocates, public schools are losing students, buildings, and tax funds to private entities called charter schools. the neoliberal battle cry of “individual parent choice” is the discursive weapon leading the dismantling of public education in america. 4. critical literacy vs. traditional literacy 4a. tara ratnam: literacy as a tool seems to have the potential to naturally awaken critical thinking (e.g., the print media played a pivotal role in mobilizing the people's urge into the constructive direction of working to liberate india from british rule). then, if literacy comes with a critical edge inherent in it, is it useful to make a distinction between critical literacy and traditional literacy? do you think, whether literacy is critical or not depends on the disposition of the person who approaches it one way or the other? ira shor: i have read a little about the colonial education offered to native peoples by their european colonizers, who beat children caught speaking their native languages, and which oriented the students to value european culture in literature and history. on the whole, though, i am unfamiliar with this aspect of indian history so cannot comment directly, unfortunately, though it is a very important topic. i would want to study what kinds of publications circulated when among which populations and what kinds of dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s15 political activities followed from these interactions. i witnessed unsupervised literacy erupt in russia in 1989 when i traveled there and saw the streets of st. petersburg flooded with publications and speakers of all kinds criticizing the communist regime still in power then. i am also aware of literate activities as tools of resistance in england in the 1790s among peasants, artisans, and tradesmen, as reported in e.p. thompson’s magisterial the making of the english working class. at that time, “corresponding societies” emerged as part of the popular unrest lasting through the chartist movement of the 19th century. not knowing how to read was no impediment to participating in oppositional politics because at local furtive pub meetings, a literate peer read aloud news and reports of resistance elsewhere. in this period and for a century or more afterward, the ruling elites suppressed radical publications and their authors precisely because such material could spur opposition. similarly, slave owners in the american south prior to 1865 also forbade slaves to learn reading and writing because they feared the rebellious consequences of such tools. after emancipation, former slave owners opposed teaching any critical subject matters to slaves, which the white supremacists labeled “sociology” (studying social conditions), and insisted only on the abc’s-restricted literacy devoid of problematic content. at this moment, sorry to say, few of my working-class students at staten island read newspapers in print or online, so my critical pedagogy includes scaffolding critical curiosity about events reported in the news. 5. paulo freire and critical pedagogy 5a. eugene matusov: paulo freire has been criticized by several scholars (e.g., facundo 1984, matusov 2009) for his work in the communist guinea-bissau. these critics alleged that freire actively engaged in promoting communist totalitarianism in his “critical pedagogy” of literacy there, brainwashing illiterate african peasants with the communist propaganda. would you agree with this criticism? if so, how would you reply to it on your own and freire’s behalf – how did it happen that freire’s critical pedagogy became totalitarian? if not, why not? ira shor: freire has spoken for himself on this matter. i was at one of his public forums where the issue with guinea-bissau was raised and freire also addressed in his books with macedo and with faundez. freire reported opposing the revolutionary regime’s use of a european language, portuguese, as the linguistic foundation of its literacy program and schooling. freire thought this would have antidemocratic outcomes which privileged the neo-colonial european elite which is typically at the center of anti-colonial opposition. freire strenuously opposed anti-democratic, anti-dialogic leadership on the left, in pedagogy of the oppressed. he disdained dogmatic and doctrinaire leftists, referring to their arrogant certainty of possessing the truths needed by the masses, calling their method “injections of revolutionary wisdom.” freire himself was a modest and reluctant “icon” who preferred not to lecture at the many forums and assemblies he was invited to. he wanted the people there to pose their own questions and engage each other in robust dialogue about how to consolidate themselves into stronger opposition to the status quo. he knew that he could not direct people politically into action when he had arrived as a stranger from far away. this was the modest posture freire took throughout the years i traveled and worked with him, when i heard him express dismay at the way the guinea-bissau regime handled its literacy program. 5b. robi kroflič: what is your evaluation of freire’s concept of empowerment as a “tool” for emancipation, since some new scholars (ellsworth, ranciere, biesta) are extremely critical about the presumption of a teacher “being in a position of power” and give knowledge and competences to a pupil to become powerful… ira shor: freire did not believe that he or any teacher could liberate anyone in the classroom. teaching was not that powerful a tool in any society. formal education or classroom instruction could not be by dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s16 itself a “the lever to change society,” he said in our book a pedagogy for liberation. for freire, education had to be associated or coordinated with mass movements which were the tools for political empowerment in society. to freire, education mattered most when it was inside a political movement which socialized oppositional consciousness developed inside and outside the classroom, that is, gave theorizing a practical platform in the midst of forces contending for power. freire made it clear in our dialogue book that education counted most when it was embedded in mass movements contending for social justice. institutional classrooms separated from ongoing movements and distant from community life could not match the potential empowerment of a political movement. freire’s original literacy circles emerged as part of great political upheaval in brazil in the 1950s and early 1960s. a democratic coalition of popular forces was consolidating from the bottom up to radically change brazilian law and society. freire’s literacy project 1963-1964 was undertaken for the democratic government of joao goulart. by 1965, freire’s program would have set up 20,000 literacy circles nationwide, alphabetizing perhaps a million new lower-class voters who had to read and write to be allowed to vote for the first time. the concrete empowerment of peasants and workers through literacy at that time involved overcoming the brazilian constitution’s prohibition on illterates voting. before this project could radically alter the electorate with a vast new constituency oriented to the left, freire’s program was destroyed by a military coup and freire was jailed. freire’s education work was was part of a pre-revolutionary moment in brazil empowered by its connection to mass movements which it in turn empowered. 5c. judith green: what are your current views on critical pedagogy and critical literacy? ira shor: answered above vis a vis the long neoliberal imposition of market discipline on school and society, reducing education budgets, diverting school moneys to private revenue streams. larger class sizes and fewer professional educators are undermining the capacity of the public sector in education, in affordable housing, in mass transit, and in health care. this long-term assault by the top on the living standards of the bottom partly explains the populist uprisings in recent elections here and in europe. 5d. judith green: can you frame what kinds of knowledge, understandings and perspectives you have developed that teachers need to know, understand and undertake if they wish to promote equity, equality, and high quality education for all? ira shor: understand social justice as an orientation towards democracy, equality, ecology, and peace. develop syllabi which install those values in classroom practices. support mass movements which are mobilizing under that agenda. for public school teachers especially, build rank-and-file organizations at the school and district levels which can oust the current renegade leadership of the two large teacher unions, the aft controlled by the randy weingarten clique and the nea leadership controlled by the lily eskelsen garcia clique. 5e. antti rajala: in freirean pedagogy, how much emphasis should be placed on specific injustice experienced by the students themselves vs. general injustice in the society? ira shor: the most compelling themes in a learning process are those with the closest relevance and meaning to the students. the more general and abstract subject matters become, the more distant they are from the immediacy which captures students’ recognition of what is at stake. freire used the term “hinged themes” to denote connecting local generative themes to their larger social contexts, but was clear that critical literacy should begin with the local. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s17 5f. antti rajala: how can freirean pedagogy be used in classrooms that are heterogeneous with respect to students’ socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds and where some students are more privileged than others (e.g., economically, politically, academically, majority-minority, disabled-body-abled)? ira shor: if at all possible, find something the students have in common: lunch hour? food preferences? sexual encounters? family life? search for jobs during and after schooling? also, try to discover a common project they can engage in, for example, constructing an exhibition or putting on some kind of public performance, or interviewing people in the community, or redesigning the physical premises to achieve an improvement in their facilities. 5g. antti rajala: freire speaks about reflection and action as dimensions of praxis. reflection seems to be much more emphasized in regular schooling. how would you advise teachers working in the institutional constraints of public schooling about how to broaden the scope of instruction to involve also transformative action? what concrete projects could be realized in such conditions? ira shor: freire considered classroom study as “theoretical action,” by which he meant dialogic action to develop how we perceive ourselves in the world, selves-in-society and society-in-selves. the critical classroom is first of all action on consciousness, which freire defined as “intentionality,” which is similar to bourdieu’s notion of “habitus,” or the suite of preferences, dispositions, and orientations through which we understood the meaning of experience and acted in and on our experiences. so, to begin, we can say that critical classrooms which question the status quo are by definition actions for externalizing and rethinking the consciousness we bring to class, the consciousness always already extant. by proposing to students in my classes that we negotiate the curriculum or co-develop the sylla bus or the grading process, i am offering action on the concrete terms through which we constitute the learning process itself, offering the classroom as a kind of constitutional convention on the class itself. these practices offer some kinds of action as starters. other kinds of action can be contemplated, like acting on the campus or on the community, or on the city or in the larger society. all kinds of projects can be imagined for such actions and ongoing actions already underway outside the classroom can be suggested or integrated. the compelling issue here is what freire called “limit-situations,” that is, political and institutional limits on action to change things or to effect conditions. for instance, in his time, freire faced limits on the funding available to set up literacy circles nationwide, and he faced political limits vis a vis the conservative opposition to such circles operating. eventually, the elite and its military crushed the operation entirely. in any setting where critical educators and activists work, there are political forces and limits we must take account of. how far can we go in questioning the status quo? what are local limits and who are local allies and adversaries? 5h. lynn cohen: for freire one of the problems with schooling was the non-dialogic nature of pedagogy. similar to the u.s., it appears that brazil has increasingly adopted a pedagogy of submission. studies have indicated that preschool curriculum is not being taught in dialogue with teachers and children, but rather a top-down didactic approach is transpiring in brazil. what has happened to create such a nondialogic approach? ira shor: retreat of the progressive forces in brazil and in the workers party which first installed freire as secretary of education for the city of sao paulo in 1989. without progressive political forces for change in the political party and in brazil, it is much more difficult to move schools or any other institution in society in a humane direction. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s18 6. language and thought 6a. sue brindley: can policy (of whatever persuasion) claim thought if it claims language? thinking here of durkheim’s sacred and profane discourse and the ways in which education policy makers seem to have excised critical engagement (‘sacred’) from professional discourse. 6b. sue brindley: can education now resist centralisation and managerialism or is it too late? 6c. sue brindley: do you agree with lyotard’s claims that the meta narrative of science defines knowledge in this era with the consequent dismissal of any other type of knowledge as legitimised? if so, why, and if no, why not? ira shor: not sure how to respond to the durkheim reference, sorry to say. about centralization, yes, it has grown much worse in past 45 years of neoliberalism. only a bottom-up movement of school parents and school teachers will be able to win power for schools to govern themselves and for professional educators to operate their own creative classrooms. the opt-out movement of mostly mothers since 2011 against the grotesque takeover of public schools and classrooms by standardized testing is a good example of bottom-up opposition fighting top-down authorities to a standstill. this battle is still underway. not quite sure how to respond to the lyotard question except to say that quantitative discourse certainly dominates in this neoliberal age. everything must be tested, evaluated, measured, assigned a rank, all means by which authorities exert domination over masses of people. discussion by eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane and jim cresswell the interview questions and answers from shor touch on many themes and ideas and we would like to discuss some of these ideas. our position is that there are two themes where generative points of tension emerge between what shor has said and what can be understood about dp. power of pedagogues one of the key points where dp aligns with critical pedagogy is the concern with equalizing teacherstudents power in the classroom. shor writes about giving students power and dp involves eroding the status of the privileged instructor. both cases mean to reduce the power differential among students and teachers such that students have agency and power in the classroom. it looked, to us, like this equalizing was not as close as it seemed because shor seems to see education as molding students in certain preset agenda and value system of social justice. for example, he wrote that, “[t]eaching against the unequal status quo and for majoritarian agency is of course another way to define critical pedagogy as paulo freire proposed it. in doing this, critical-democratic educators will have to generate quality and equality at the same time.” what if a student disagrees with this goal of education? consider also how he wrote: “…my critical pedagogy includes scaffolding critical curiosity about events reported in the news.” what if a student’s curiosity is directed primarily toward socialization in a targeted practice without necessarily a critical stance on it (e.g., learning to speak fluent french)? on the one hand, this is an exceptionally exciting comment and it would have been great to hear more about “scaffolding” of critical curiosity. on the other hand, scaffolding critical curiosity could point to a deficit model with the instructor knows a priori what is missing in the students. it opens the door to the implication that, if education is successful, all students seemingly must be against inequality and all students must be active agents for social justice. this looks like a view of education that diverges from dp (at least in bakhtin’s framework) where education includes a critical examination of the self, life, world and society in an internally persuasive discourse (big dialogue) dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s19 without any preset agendas. in a bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy a diversity of educational goals is welcomed because it promotes a deep and critical dialogue about the nature of education with the students. in contrast to shor’s approach, a bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy does expect that all students have to be committed to social justice or even to critical examination. this distinction lead to a surprise because shor, a social justice warrior, seemed to place himself closer to an oppressive practice than we would see in dp. consider, for instance, his discussion of grading where he engages his students in the summative assessment enforced by the institution. he does not involve his students in critical examination of grading (i.e., summative assessment) in education. he does not try to sabotage this kind of oppressive practice by, for example, giving all students unconditional a’s at the beginning of the class, which some in dp do. there seemed to be an ambiguity, if not even internal struggle, with regard to the usefulness of summative assessment that is often seen in dp. dp would involve emphasizing the issue of whether summative assessment is necessary for education or not, and if so, the times when it is bad (or good) and who it is good (or bad) for. overall, an analysis of shor’s approach suggests that more power is left in the hands of well-meaning pedagogues relative to dp (at least committed to the bakhtinian framework). an instance where this divergence could be seen vividly is in how shor engaged the discussion of the numerous tragic failures of social justice movements that give rise to power of the communist totalitarianism shor referred to such moments as “totalitarian excesses,” which seems to imply that “moderate communist totalitarianism” would be fine. it looks like he equated capitalist issues of the west with communist issues of the east with comments like: “we have capitalist oligarchies in the west and have witnessed the collapse of communist oligarchies in the east”. this sort of position runs the risk of ignoring the qualitatively different contexts such as mass gulag oppression, mass murder in the communist regimes, and lack of many freedoms. people tried to escape from the communist regimes en masse to the west liberal democracies, however flawed they were, and not the other ways around. this leaves the impression that shor may represent the old left that takes less head from the 20th century mass tragedies emerging form the socialist-communist social justice movements, viewing them as excesses or aberrations and not as major flaws of the social justice movements themselves. there seems to be a lack of critical self-reflection in the old left social justice approaches. underlying this position could be a comfort with pedagogical power that is more often carnivalized in dp. ‘leftist’ positioning an admirable feature of shor’s work is his emphasis on the legitimacy of students’ non-participation in dialogue or study on a topic. without students feeling free to participate or not to participate in a genuine dialogue or genuine education, genuine education may not be possible. it is much better to expect diverse forms of participation and non-participation, which is a hallmark of dp. this point of agreement is also a point where shor and dp seem to emerge. in short, it looks like shor takes a position as a pedagogue that is politically left, whereas dp would appreciate diversity in teachers’ and students’ political positioning, including apolitical ones. consider how, instead of appreciating, politically promoting, and critically examining diverse values (not just linguistic forms) – both hegemonic and marginal – shor seems to want to instill the hegemonic cultural capital in marginalized students. dp could see this educational ideal seems to be in equal distribution of the hegemonic cultural capital for the marginal students through wrapping hegemonic ideas into marginal people’s linguistic forms. these hegemonic ideas could involve “critical teaching” – indoctrination into his social justice activism. the result is that dp would see shor’s treatment of dialogue as running the risk of being an instrumental view: a pedagogical tool of accessing cultural capital for marginalized students. following from this sort a view is the potential to adopt an instructional strategy of molding people into preset social justice agendas that are unilaterally studied the oppressed by the educator dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s20 prior to encounter to his/her students from marginalized social groups. consider how shor argues that “dialogue fits into a sequence of teaching-learning which in the freirean mold begins with the teacher studying the students before she presumes to teach them.” dp would respond to such an espoused pedagogy with the challenge that it is essentially monologic, aiming at molding the students into preset social justice agendas by using dialogic interaction and instruction for achieving this monologic pedagogical goal. consider how it is possible to wonder about freire avoiding responsibility for his own action of oppression and active participation in a totalitarian regime, which becomes possible when one’s own position is not challenged. at times, it looks as if shor challenges dp by representing an “old left” that may be disinclined to learn much from wrongs and crimes of the social justice movements of the 20th century. shor, nevertheless, makes a very thought-provoking point that good education is some kind of “luxury” requiring freedom for the students from their survival and necessity worries: “critical-democratic teaching and learning became a class luxury harder to practice here as the income inequality gap kept widening.” the greek word “school” means leisure. genuine education may require genuine leisurely life, which is not available for a high majority of the us and world population (even for rich ones) and this points to the potential privileged pedagogue. the risk, from a dp perspective is that we could miss the tension between the notions of diversity and the notions of social justice. any possible tensions could be attributed by shor to “neoliberalism.” in our view, social justice movement mainly focuses on issue of equality (in a broader sense that may include equity, inclusion, and so on), “equality and inclusion remain the unfinished tasks of democratic movements from below.” meanwhile, the concept of “diversity” involves inequality, exclusion, pluralism, differences in values, liberties, and so on. we see important tensions between these two notions and such tensions should be explored rather than ideologically dismissed as a manifestation of “neoliberalism.” shor’s positioning highlights an important discussion about the relationship between deconstructing and re-constructing in critical and dp. this relationship is a complex one, but it looks as if shor emphasizes re-construction (i.e., a positive new construction for a just society, for example) over deconstruction. if it is true, dp is challenged with a view that may involve the opposite relationship to the ontological dp. dp supposes that de-construction is primary for genuine education, while re-construction is secondary, accidental, and by-productive in education (it is not true in other practices). dp emphasize education that sees its end in itself as a human existential need. shor advocates for the opposite perspective, making education instrumental – a tool to build an equal and just society. selected bibliography shor, i. (1987a). critical teaching and everyday life. chicago: university of chicago press. shor, i. (1987b). freire for the classroom: a sourcebook for liberatory teaching (1st. ed.). portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook. shor, i. (1992a). culture wars: school and society in the conservative restoration 1969-1984 (university of chicago press ed.). chicago: university of chicago press. shor, i. (1992b). empowering education: critical teaching for social change. chicago: university of chicago press. shor, i. (1996). when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press. dialogic & critical pedagogies: an interview with ira shor ira shor, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, james cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.208 | vol. 5 (2017) s21 shor, i., & freire, p. (1986). a pedagogy for liberation: dialogues on transforming education. south hadley, ma: bergin & garvey publishers. shor, i., & freire, p. (1987). what is the "dialogical method" of teaching? journal of education, 169(3), 11-31. shor, i., & pari, c. (1999a). critical literacy in action: writing words, changing worlds. portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook publishers. shor, i., & pari, c. (1999b). education is politics: critical teaching across differences, k-12. portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook heinemann. shor, i., & pari, c. (2000). education is politics: critical teaching across differences, postsecondary. portsmouth, nh: boynton/cook. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 1 groys, between stalin and dionysus (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.212 | vol. 5 (2017) db:1 between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival1 boris groys new york university, us abstract the essay by russian american philologist boris groys and nine commentaries followed by groys’ reply to them in this special issue: “deconstructing bakhtin, carnival with evil”, present a provocative discussion about bakhtin’s conceptual work and legacy for education and beyond. boris groys argued that bakhtin embraced a dangerous play with stalin’s totalitarianism through fusing art and life, prioritizing cosmic carnival over human rights and by being mesmerised by dionysian passions. the following nine commentaries, written by educationalists and noneducationalists, present a diverse spectrum of reactions to groys’ criticism of bakhtin: from passionate rejections to sympathetic acceptance seriously considering implications of groys’ charges. the biggest implication for education is the relationship between the teacher and the student, specifically whether the teacher authors the student and the student’s education or not. the first commentary, written by caryl emerson provides a brilliant overview of all these diverse positions, in education and beyond. – dpj editors: eugene matusov and ana marjanovic-shane boris groys, professor of russian and slavic studies, nyu and professor of philosophy and art theory, european graduate school, switzerland. ��� the postmodern, or, more exactly, poststructuralist, theorizing of 1970-1980s was mostly fed by the ideas and trends of the late 1920s – 1930s that emerged due to the crisis of the avant-garde movement. in the 1930s the faith in the truthfulness and saving grace of new avant-garde revelations had already been lost, but at the same time, the break up with the tradition that occurred during the avantgarde period was recognized as final and irreversible. as a result, the traditional emphasis on the ideals of objectivity, rationality, and scientism was questioned to the same degree as the avant-garde emphasis on authenticity, intuition, originality, and novelty. an individual of the 1920s – 1930s began to identify himself2 as an integral part of the material world, from which he could not distance himself either by contemplating and investigating it or by clamming up in his own inner world. however, the world could still reveal itself to this individual at the extremes of his own material, physical existence – through the reality of death and eros, in the totality of the worldly power or in the extreme situations demanding superhuman exertion of the person’s whole being. 1 first published in russian, “mezhdu stalinym i dionisom” (between stalin and dionysus), sintaxis, 25, paris, 1989, pp. 92-98. the current text is translated from the russian version, groys b., (1997), totalitarianism of carnival (pp. 76-80). in v. l. makhlin (ed), bakhtinian collection, issue 3, moscow: labirint by yury almetev, checked and edited by the author, boris groys. 2 in russian, the gender of pronouns often refers to the three genders of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neutral. issn: 2325-3290 (online) between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival boris groys dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.212 | vol. 5 (2017) db:2 obviously, the postmodern philosophy, traditionally associated with such french authors as jacques derrida, jacques lacan, and gilles deleuze, does not put much trust in the possibility of understanding the world in its “borderline situations,” because it believes that the very notion that the world’s borderlines can be experientially grasped is rooted in the traditional “metaphysical” idea of acquiring a “metaposition” in relation to the world in its entirety. in this respect, the accusation that postmodernism resurrected the politically compromised ideologies of the 1930s has absolutely no grounds: on the contrary, the postmodern theory is directed against all kinds of purely philosophical totalism and political totalitarianism as well. at the same time, the postmodern theory uses the argumentation from that era of “super-realism” (an apt name for the 1930s with their social realism, surrealism, magic realism, etc.) against modernist illusions, which underwent a robust restoration after the world war ii on the wave of a purely emotional compassion towards the ideals of modernism, persecuted by totalitarian regimes. at the same time, those very modernist illusions, which were partially preserved and even radicalized in the 1930s, led, in the opinion of modern french philosophers, to the ensuing disasters: the politico-moral intentions of the postmodern theory are obviously quite decent; – the confusion emerges only because of the problems that the diagnosis of the previous period of philosophical development presents. at the same time, both the total initial condemnation and, later, the postmodern well-intentioned interpretation of super-realism of the 1930s equally share in obscuring its real historical outline. the symptoms of dissatisfaction with this state of affairs can be seen in the current discussion of the political implications of heidegger’s philosophy and new publications on the political flirting and affiliations of french surrealists with and their maneuvers between fascism, stalinism, and trotskyism. in this context, the figure of the russian theorist of culture mikhail bakhtin is especially relevant. his major works also date back to the late 1920s 1930s, they fit quite well into the paradigm of super-realism mentioned above, and they have played an important role in the development of postmodern theory – especially in france and the usa. bakhtin is known, first and foremost, as the theorist of the “polyphonic novel” and as a theorist of “carnival.” both theories have been elaborated by him as his commentaries to novels, the former as a commentary to dostoyevsky’s novels, and the latter to rabelais’ “gargantua and pantagruel.” influenced by marx and freud, and even more so by nietzsche, bakhtin negatively reacts to the russian avantgardist formalist theory, proclaiming an author’s supreme control over the material of his or her artistic work, or the principle of “madeness” of an artwork. in the avant-gardist emphasis on the author, bakhtin saw the perpetuation of the traditional “monologism”, as it is represented by the privileged position of the author’s voice in the narration. for bakhtin, each word is just a remark in the endless dialogue of everyone with everyone else: it is always originally passive, separated from the speaker, contains in itself the reduced voices of “others” – and this is also true about the author’s voice. not only does the word [i.e., discourse], as a material “body of the thought,” lack independence, autonomy and authenticity, similarly, the actual human body is also a part of the whole, universal, world’s “grotesque body.” through its boundaries and apertures, the human body is united with the world’s matter, world’s metabolism, and world’s eros, which manifest themselves in the carnival that disrupts a person’s autonomy, removes its everyday untouchability, and dismantles its usual protective habeas corpus act. a “polyphonic novel” transcends individual authorship and, therefore, is rooted, according to bakhtin, in carnival, which refutes all individualization: a “polyphonic novel” is interpreted by bakhtin as a result of “carnivalization of literature.” this means the destruction of the isolation, independence, and individuality of the word and the removal of the author’s rights to private discourse diffused in the general polyphony of the language, which belongs collectively to the “people.” bakhtin’s theory, in fact, equates literature to life – and, therefore, it invites its reader to see this theory as a life program formulated in what can be called aesop’s between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival boris groys dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.212 | vol. 5 (2017) db:3 language. hence a question arises about the political implications of bakhtin’s thought, a topic, which has been recently debated by many researchers. in the absolute majority of interpretations, bakhtin’s “polyphony” is understood as a protest against the “monologism” of stalin’s ideology, of which he was a contemporary, whereas “carnivalization” is understood as a reaction to the impeccably serious and strict tone of the official soviet institutions of that period. bakhtin, therefore, becomes a mouthpiece of the democratic, genuinely people’s alternative to the hierarchically organized totalitarian state – the sole thinker of the soviet period who remained loyal to the utopian idea of the united, truly “people’s” life. the only existing criticism to bakhtin is the observation that carnival, with all its “revolutionary potential,” still fits into the traditional, hierarchical order, and even, at the end of the day, legitimizes and enforces the latter by providing a controlled vent for people’s dissatisfaction. however, taking into consideration the censorship burden of that time, this “not being revolutionary enough” is usually forgiven to bakhtin, so he keeps his halo of a consistently anti-totalitarian thinker. at the same time, if there is something bakhtin insists upon, then it is this totality of carnival, which destroys and absorbs each individual body: for bakhtin, carnival is first and foremost a manifestation of the belonging to the folk (narodnost’). the belonging to the folk was, by the way, the characteristic core of the stalinist culture, which followed the period of avant-gardist “belonging to the class” (classovost’)). bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy: for him, they are synonymous to alienation, autonomization, clamming up of individuality, the separation of the latter from the natural unity of cosmic and people’s life – and, consequently, they become the historical reasons for the emergence of the pathos of seriousness, sentimentality, moralizing, and, also, of the devolution of the people’s carnivalesque laughter into individualistic criticism and satire. it is in jubilant expressions that bakhtin refers to the rabelaisian descriptions of atrocious carnival battles, stoning people with “funny matter” (feces) and splashing them with urine, the rituals of carnival insults, “dethroning and crowning,” the images of the triumphal carnivalesque death, symbolizing people’s joy about the “demise of everything obsolete and already dead”3 bakhtin welcomes the carnivalesque pathos of the “final death” of everything individual and the victory of the purely material, bodily principle over everything transcendental, ideal, individually immortal. simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is horrible – god forbid being part of it. there is no place for democracy in it – nobody is given the democratic right to avoid the total carnival duty, to abscond the carnival, to stay away from it. on the contrary, those who try to do so are the first to be subjected to “funny insults and beatings.” all this grotesque horror, according to bakhtin, turns into a joyful carnival thanks to people’s continuous laughter, by which it is surrounded. but the carnivalesque laughter has nothing to do with the philosopher’s irony over the tragedy of life – it is the boisterous laughter of people’s, or cosmic, “bodily” idiocy over the suffering agony of a tormented individual, who looks ridiculous in his lonesome helplessness. this laughter emerges from the primitive belief that a “people” is something quantitatively and materially larger than an individual, whereas the world is something larger than a people, which is, after all, the belief in the ultimate truth of totalitarianism4. 3 dpj editors: this seems to be groys’ loose quotation of bakhtin, “the death of the old world and the merriment of the new world are combined in this system of images. the bonfire which has consumed the old is transformed into the kitchen hearth. the phoenix is reborn from its ashes" (bakhtin, 1984, p. 210). 4 in this sense it is interesting to note the relationship of bakhtin’s carnival to the concept of gesamtkunstwerk that was developed by famous german composer richard wagner in his “artwork of the future.” gesamtkunstwerk is precisely the art event that embraces the whole folk and has the polyphonic structure. wagner notes: “the last, completest renunciation (entäusserung) of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can only show us by his death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. the celebration of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on” (wagner, 1993/1849, p.199). the individual must die in order to establish a communist society. wagner’s analysis of comedy is especially interesting in this regard. the comedy is for him a gesamtkunstwerk under the conditions of communism. here the main hero will be incapable any more to commit an act of self-sacrifice on his own between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival boris groys dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.212 | vol. 5 (2017) db:4 this truth is, according to bakhtin, incarnated in the “carnivalesque”, or, in other words, “polyphonic” novel. all the voices, in bakhtin’s opinion, have the right to be heard – but only within the context of a whole, totalitarian, all-absorbing novel. such a novel, in fact, cannot even have an author, because an author should exist outside of the novel – which, according to bakhtin, is not allowed to anyone. a “polyphonic” novel tautologically reproduces its own total, always proportional to itself, polyphony – just like the carnival always reproduces its own total carnivalesque properties. consequently, bakhtin de facto denies the existence of multiple novels with different authors and he accepts only one differentiation in the space of the novel genre, –novels are either monologic and are, therefore, dismissed as too individualistic, or polyphonic, which means they reproduce each other as they reproduce polyphony itself, making, therefore, their author a hypothetical, fictitious figure. for bakhtin, “other” is always someone inside a novel, and never can it be someone outside of the novel. bakhtin’s descriptions of the carnival and carnivalization are without a doubt inspired by his experience of the revolution and civil war. however, even to a greater extent, they reproduce the atmosphere of stalin’s terror with its unbelievable eulogies and vilifications, and also with its unexpected crownings and dethronings, which obviously had a carnavalesque nature (stalin himself notoriously said that “life has become more joyous”, whereas his favorite soviet feature film “volga-volga”5 was the purely carnavalesque). there are many accounts of the specific “joyousness” of the 1930s. for example, it is widely known that the show trials and, especially, the verdicts thereof were accompanied by the laughter of the audience. the context of stalin is also supported by the fact that both the polyphonic novel and carnivalesque act, though being allegedly born in the people’s mind, are still directed, according to bakhtin, by a certain super-author – dostoyevsky or rabelais, which obliquely points at the author of the corresponding “life text”, which could refer to no one else but stalin. all these considerations point at the fact that bakhtin’s aim was not to criticize the revolution and stalin’s terror from a democratic standpoint, but to theoretically justify them as an archaic, carnevalistic ritual rooted in ancient traditions. bakhtin’s carnival is not, therefore, a representation of a frustrated revolution that could not fully unfold its potential, but a justification of the absurdity and cruelty of the revolution, which can be only grasped in the a-historic space of pure and universal laughter. bakhtin’s contemporary researchers still think in the pre-revolution paradigm, whereas bakhtin himself was a postrevolutionary thinker: revolution itself could not have much value for him. does it all mean then that bakhtin was a crypto-stalinist of sorts? and if so, what would be the point of it, considering how much easier it was at that time to just be a regular stalinist? obviously, bakhtin was not a stalinist. but he was not an anti-stalinist either. by his upbringing, friendships, social and cultural backgrounds, bakhtin belonged to the class of people who became victims of the revolution and stalinism – but it was exactly that very circumstance that made it psychologically impossible for him to moralizingly condemn those phenomena: he was too much of a follower of nietzsche and the russian silver age6 to allow himself to be in a position of protest that could been born out of his personal resentment. the tragedy of revolution – and his own personal tragedy7 – was understood by bakhtin as a manifestation of the eternal cosmic tragedy, constantly and ritualistically replaying itself, which can and must be “aesthetically justified,” in order not to be futile. bakhtin is not free will: “the egoist will be compelled to ascend into community . . . and, without further breathing-space for his self-seeking, he sees at last his only rescue in the unconditional acknowledgment of its necessity. the artistic fellowship, as the representative of generality, will therefore have in comedy an even director share in the framing of the poem itself, than in tragedy.” (wagner, p.102, footnote) 5 soviet musical comedy produced in 1938, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/volga-volga 6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/silver_age_of_russian_poetry 7 in 1929, bakhtin was arrested and send for an exile for participation in a russian orthodox philosophical circle. between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival boris groys dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.212 | vol. 5 (2017) db:5 alone in this intention as the aesthetic justification of the era was one of the central themes of the russian culture of that period. the carnevalistic interpretation of the stalinist culture is obvious in the novel “master and margarita” by mikhail bulgakov8 but also in the writing of the oberiu literary circle9. in the west the most direct analogies can be found in “man and the sacred” by roger caillois and “accursed share” by georges bataille. the stalinist russia was, in fact, interpreted by bakhtin in the nietzschean terms of apollonian and dionysian forces, customary for the russian culture beginning from the silver age. for bakhtin, carnival is synonymous to a dionysian mystery: the victim of the apollonian stalinist terror interprets it as an act of a ritualistic dionysian self-destruction – and, by that, overcomes this terror, changing its meaning from inside and inwardly stopping to be its passive victim. it should be noted, though, that this overcoming of a life tragedy through self-sacrifice is devoid, in bakhtin’s viewpoint, of that ecstatic dissolution in the unconscious and impersonal, which, for nietzsche, constitutes the main pathos of the dionysian. for bakhtin, individuality is radically limited and finite. in carnival, its finitude and mortality, at last, become self-evident. the third, laughing, party is represented by people or cosmos – an individual does not have any other choice in carnival but to accept his own destruction as a positive thing as selfrebirth and self-renewal. bakhtin’s example shows that the totalitarian mindset of the 1930s is not at all limited to the dreams of super-human power. even those who did not cherish the apollonian illusions of the absolute power over the world could think in the totalitarian paradigm, insofar as they were ready for the dionysian self-sacrifice, involving the whole totality of the world. this “different” totalitarianism cannot be subjected to the usual ideological criticism, traditionally aimed at revealing the combination of idealism and the will to power, because it represents a combination of materialism and the will to self-sacrifice. a possible criticism of such alternative strategy of totalitarianism puts forward a demand to question the unity not only of the “idealist”, or “theoretical”, but also of the material, “real” world, which, however, continues to be affirmed in many of its varieties – including, for example, ecology, even in our postmodern times. references bakhtin, m. m. (1984). rabelais and his world (h. iswolsky, trans. 1st midland book ed.). bloomington: indiana university press. wagner, richard, the art-work of the future and other works, trans. w. ashton ellis, university of nebraska press, lincoln 1993/1849. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mikhail_bulgakov 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/oberiu microsoft word 3 larrain, aesthetics and the possibility of an anti.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.215 | vol. 5 (2017) db:12 aesthetics and the possibility of an anti-totalitarian communism: reading bakhtin through the lens of groys antonia larraín universidad alberto hurtado, chile antonia larraín is associate professor at universidad alberto hurtado, chile. she is phd in psychology at the pontificia universidad católica de chile, and was a visiting scholar at faculty of education, university of cambridge, uk. her current research is on the relation between classroom argumentation and learning, and the dialogical nature of psychological processes. ��� boris groys, in his article between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival, advanced a particularly provocative reading of the political implications of bakhtin’s thought on the polyphonic novel and carnival. he claims that bakhtin’s theory is not to be read as a criticism of stalinist totalitarianism from a democratic and liberal point of view: bakhtin’s attitude to liberalism and democracy in their traditional meaning is that of deep antipathy: for him, they are synonymous to alienation, autonomization, clamming up of individuality, the separation of the latter from the natural unity of cosmic and people’s life – and, consequently, they become the historical reasons for the emergence of the pathos of seriousness, sentimentality, moralizing, and, also, of the devolution of the people’s carnivalesque laughter into individualistic criticism and satire (p. db:3). bakhtin’s theorisation around the carnival and polyphonic novel, according to groys, should be read as an aesthetic response to the tragedy of the revolution. the response is not a claim for democracy and/or individual rights, but an aesthetic transformation of horror into laughter (a religious act, according to william james, 1902/2009), based on the acceptance that community and/or people are verified as the unity of the social; as the principle (in the sense of the greek arché) of social life. the question about bakhtin’s original political intentions, or communicative will, is contradictory to his own main ideas – there is no such thing as an author coinciding with a man; or a speaking subject’s will beyond the materiality of the text (bakhtin, 1990). thus, i will argue not from the perspective of what i believe bakhtin (the man) was really trying to say, but from what i think bakhtin (the author) already said. the main point that i seek to make is that, although i find groys’ non-democratic and liberal reading of bakhtin’s critique of totalitarianism extremely convincing and thoughtful, i am not persuaded by interpreting his political choice as an aesthetic reaction to the revolution; as a religious and consoling verification of the tragedy. groys suggests that we have two options when reading bakhtin’s theory of the issn: 2325-3290 (online) aesthetics and the possibility of an anti-totalitarian communism antonia larraín dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.215 | vol. 5 (2017) db:13 carnival and polyphonic novel: either as a defense of democracy and liberal values; or an affirmation of the community as the social arché through the aesthetic reaction to one of its possibilities – totalitarianism. from my reading of bakhtin’s works, i observed a third form of critique: the affirmation of the community as the social arché through the theorisation of totalitarianism impossibility. from a reading of bakhtin, totalitarianism turns out to be an impossible and futile enterprise, for the same reasons that liberalism is (according to groys): totalities and/or individualities are not fixed entities defined by biological bodies or national boundaries. totalities and individualities are only possible as intentional fabrications or products of aesthetic/artistic activity. on the contrary, life – real, social and discursive life – is an open, inconclusive and unpredictable process. it is open and inconclusive because there is no such thing as the first or final word: each utterance responds to many others, past or anticipated. finalisation only comes when a word is responded to by a new word (bakhtin, 1986), but then, beyond a definitive ending, a new beginning starts. life is unpredictable because every response is an unrepeatable event and thus generative in its essence. the utterance is not a linguistic unit but a social one: the “utterance is a link in the chain of speech communion” (p. 93). each utterance involves a social encounter; a relationship between two or more words, points of view and perspectives that occurs simultaneously at different levels and at different rates. therefore, the community may be the minimal unit of social life, but the real arché is the encounter, the responding act – the unpredictable act that creates a new response, opening a new discursive thread. this is the key to understanding the impossibility of totalitarianism. social community, as a unit of social life, is constituted and driven by the dynamic of the encounter of two or more speakers, perspectives or ideological positions. the other is the real inconclusive boundary that ensures creativity and continuous life; and that other changes constantly, as do the boundaries. the community is not a concluded unit but an open, inconclusive and unpredictable configuration of multi-level responding acts. community, then, is a dynamic whole (a complex system?) with no clear limits and boundaries; an everchanging whole in which novelty is always emerging from the past. what ensues is that innovations and new perspectives are constantly emerging and there is almost no possibility of having total centralised control: centripetal forces are contra-rested by centrifugal forces, which resist the complete unification of language and thinking (bakhtin, 1981). real and definitive closure and conclusion, both pre-requisites for liberalism and totalitarianism, are not possible in real life, according to bakhtin’s account; social life is an open process that, at the same time, is continuously tending towards a closure that never comes, and originating novelty from what is already known and old. openness and inconclusiveness, as main features of community dynamics, are not synonymous with the fractional. bakhtin insisted, throughout many texts, upon the notion of utterance and genres (1986), even languages (1981), as wholes. utterances are wholes in the moment they can be (or are) responded to. it is the actual or anticipated response (the reaction of the alter) that renders a unit of living discourse a whole. therefore, the whole is the encounter, the rejoinder. the whole is the social bond: it is not one or the other perspective that is linked, but the point of union of different views (see haye & larraín, 2011). thus, the whole is always, and by definition, plural, incontrollable and heterogeneous. community as a whole is a complex living system, not an identical entity, and it is precisely this idea that renders totalitarianism an impossible achievement, a ridiculous spectacle. bakhtin may be aesthetically transforming his (their) suffering into laughter, but he is also arguing using logic against totalitarianism from a non-liberal perspective: from an anti-totalitarian communism. how may this anti-totalitarian communism lead to social organisation? one possibility is to read bakhtin from the theories of complex systems and to think that order, organisation and control are aesthetics and the possibility of an anti-totalitarian communism antonia larraín dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.215 | vol. 5 (2017) db:14 achieved in a distributed and local way (ladymar, lambert, & wiesner, 2013). however, to a certain degree we need closure to organise our lives; to make decisions; and to understand; and we (as selves, as communities, as nations) fabricate these closures. art and aesthetics are among the ways in which we fabricate closed entities, external objects, and experience them from the outside, taking a perspective that is necessary in order to regulate ourselves, to elaborate experiences and to continue living. for instance, regarding the self, we cannot live in the complete openness and dynamic heterogeneity of ourselves. thus, we are constantly producing aesthetic closures (i.e. biographical stories) in which we take a position outside ourselves (extra-positions) to fabricate closed versions of ourselves that allow us to emotionally elaborate our experience and understand it – versions in which we are, at the same time, author and heroes (see bakhtin, 1990). aesthetics, then, plays a critical role in the development and formation of the sense of self: through the constant aesthetic/artistic fabrication of ourselves (our families, our communities, our countries) and through/in language, we achieve a sense of me/we. bakhtin (1990) describes this aesthetic process as consisting of three steps: 1) the active imagination of the other and how the other sees us; that is, to see ourselves through the eyes of the other; 2) the emphatic vivification of the emotional and volitional world of the other that sees us; that is, ethical empathy; and 3) the clear consciousness that that other, that is, how i’m seeing my self as other, is not the whole story; the clear consciousness of the impossibility of full closure. this aesthetic activity, in a way, is an inherent part of discursive activity: every utterance necessarily involves composition and formal verbal (artistic) creation. however, this creative activity may be more or less systematic insofar as there are speech genres that may facilitate this kind of activity better than others (i.e. autobiographical novels or memoires, collective creations, among others). through this aesthetic process people appropriate a systematic way of dealing with otherness and selfness in a productive way, promoting both social and self understanding. it represents, in a way, a different form of deliberation and consideration of different perspectives that is based not on the rational consideration of others’ perspectives, but on the aesthetical extraposition and the ethical consciousness of our own interdependence. this idea has interesting implications for education and educational systems. understandings cannot be achieved in response to a centralised and totalising demand for them. conventional meanings are embedded in larger social and historical practices from which cannot be detached. however, these meanings are typically taught at school detached from their ‘background of understandings’ (bakhtin, 1981). in order to be understood those conventional meanings need to be recreated making these backgrounds explicit and opening them to consideration. the recreation of conventional meanings, the reconstruction of these backgrounds of understanding, does not occur through a clean logical activity: it involves artistic creation and fiction. for really understanding conventional meanings, meanings that arose elsewhere for purposes that are not evident for me, i need to imagine, to produce a partly fictional idea of their relations to other meanings and historical roots. therefore, understandings are somewhat active processes of artistic fabrication of provisional and partial closures that need to be locally pursued. school learning and the understanding of social and historically created ideas and tools depend on the fabrication of local aesthetic closures at multiple levels (classroom, grades, schools, communities). local agency then is the heart of education. this is not news. however, here i am not thinking of agency in a liberal way, that is, an agency as a unknown force whose source is the already constructed unit (individuals, schools, communities). here i am conceiving of agency precisely as the movement of fabricating that unity, of fabricating and becoming a totality regarding which it is possible to take a perspective for understanding, of appropriating knowledge in an aesthetic way, that is, through its artistic expropriation. aesthetics and the possibility of an anti-totalitarian communism antonia larraín dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.215 | vol. 5 (2017) db:15 in synthesis, through the artistic daily verbal creation, we unfold an aesthetic activity that is crucial to the sense of understanding us, understanding others and understanding socio-historically created ideas. the product is not a transcendental work of art, but a provisional and partial vision of our own personality, position or knowledge and their fragility: our inconclusiveness and radical dependence on others. if aesthetic activity is crucial to managing our daily social relations in their political, emotional and cognitive aspects, can we think that it is also a crucial aspect for the organisation of society? can we think of aesthetics as a political method to cope with an open, unpredictable and inconclusive community? is aesthetics, as a method of social deliberation for understanding, a key bakhtinian contribution to an anti-totalitarian communism? references bakhtin, m. (1981). discourse in the novel. the dialogical imagination (pp. 4–256). (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). texas: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. (1986). the problem of speech genres. speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60–102). (v. w. mcgee, trans.). texas: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. (1990). author and hero in aesthetic activity. art and answerability (pp. 4–256). (v. w. mcgee, trans.). texas: university of texas press. james, w. (2009). the varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature. lexington, ky: seven treasures publications. (original work published 1902.) ladyman, j., lambert, j., & wiesner, k. (2013). what is a complex system? european journal for philosophy of science, 3(1), 33–67. 10.1007/s13194-012-0056-8 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word vasiliev bakhtin as a university professor layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t1 m. m. bakhtin as a university professor1 nikolai l. vasiliev mordovia state university, russia abstract this article presents m. m. bakhtin as a university professor through his own views of on the nature of university teaching: lecturing, seminars and colloquia, engaging students in debates and reflexive analysis of literary texts, “scientific thinking”, and working with bibliography. as a chair of russian and foreign literature department of the mordovian national pedagogical institute (later the mordovia state university), for a quarter of a century, bakhtin was promoting teaching approaches that would support students’ informed, independent, analytical and reflexive learning. according to the minutes from different department meetings at his university, over the years, bakhtin struggled to define and improve his own guidance and teaching in the literature studies and the overall work of his department. his three pedagogical goals for a literary lecture were: 1) communication of certain information on a given topic establishing the level of students’ familiarity with the topic; 2) fostering students’ scientific thinking; and 3) fostering students’ aesthetic perception and taste. some of his former students emphasized his erudition, pedagogic skill, and ability to stimulate his students’ imagination and reflective thinking. nikolai l. vasiliev is a professor of philology at mordovia state university, russia. he is interested in the studies of the lives and scholarship of bakhtin, medvedev, and voloshinov; theory of language; history of russian literary languag; lingopoetry of russian writers; writers’ lexica; history of russian literature; history of soviet/russian philology of the first half of the xx century; and study of local lore. ��� in their memoirs about bakhtin as a professor of the mordovian pedagogical institute (1946-1961), his former students emphasized his erudition, pedagogic skill, and ability to stimulate his students’ imagination and reflective thinking. l. r. vdovina, a literary critic who studied in the mordovian pedagogical institute in the second half of 1940s, writes the following about bakhtin: “he was a very lively, active, and energetic man. the expression of his face was amazing… it was constantly changing. it could fluctuate from ironical to sternly judgmental, from trusting and intimate to furious, from thoughtful to grumpy… truly, an unlimited gamut of expressions. […] bakhtin spoke in a loud, clear voice, and with a lot of emotion, as if he was performing on stage… no matter what he was talking about […], he always had his own opinion about everything. […] he 1 a fragment from the 2014 monograph “mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin and the phenomenon of ‘the bakhtin circle’: in search of lost time. reconstructions and deconstructions. squaring the circle” (“михаил михайлович бахтин и феномен "круга бахтина": в поисках утраченного времени. реконструкции и деконструкции. квадратура круга”), moscow, librokom, pp. 22-29. translated and published here with the agreement of the author. translation from russian by yury almetev. issn: 2325-3290 (online) m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t2 could easily recite whole passages in german, english, or greek. he would give us examples of such subtle critique of literary texts, that they would become engraved in our memory. […] sometimes it felt as though in his lectures he was engaged in a dialogue with an invisible opponent. once he said: ‘every book argues with somebody.’ that meant that we were not to trust implicitly everything written in books… that was, probably, the reason, why he once said that literature textbooks were ‘evil… but a necessary evil.’ in his numerous students bakhtin tried to foster the ability to think, to reflectively analyze what one read, to have a diverging opinion… he advised us to read slowly, taking our time” (vdovina, 1991). y. f. basikhin, bakhtin’s post-graduate advisee, wrote this in his memoir: “…it was in 1948. […] we were first-year students at the time and we used to spend many autumn evenings in the university library… reading, arguing, and talking about professor bakhtin’s lectures. for the first-year students he was giving a course on ancient greek literature. at first, it was difficult for us, the newbies, to understand bakhtin’s lectures. we were totally unfamiliar with ancient greek literature back then – it was so alien to us. but mikhail mikhailovich made it close to us. as if by magic, the new, enchanting literary horizons now loomed before us. homer’s heroes suddenly became close and familiar to us…” “mikhail mikhailovich’s lectures were full of passion and enthusiasm… it was unforgettable when he recited ‘the iliad’ in ancient greek for us…” (basikhin, 1968, pp. 243-244). other students of m. m. bakhtin write about their mentor with similar gratitude. in this context, it would be interesting to consider the views of bakhtin himself on the nature of university lectures, on students’ independent studies, and on the principles of organization of the educational process that he used as the chair of russian and foreign literature department of the mordovian national pedagogical institute (later the mordovia state university), where the scholar worked for a quarter of a century2. bakhtin repeatedly addressed the issues of teaching methodology applied in higher education – both among his colleagues and in press. for instance, on october 30, 1954, the question of “students’ selfeducation” was being discussed at the department meeting. during the discussion, bakhtin pointed out the following: “more attention should be paid to bibliography. what students know about bibliography is insufficient – therefore, they should be provided with bibliographic guidelines for each course topic. every student, by his graduation from college, should have solid bibliographic knowledge for each studied course”. it must be mentioned that not all of his colleagues met bakhtin’s suggestion with approval – for example, professor m. a. patrakeev retorted that “students should be familiar only with the most essential bibliography”3. on july 2, 1956, in his report at the department meeting, bakhtin stated that he had delivered a few lectures of supportive nature for first-year students, namely “1. methods of independent work with books; 2. methods of note-taking at university lectures. and a lecture on teaching the theory of literature in secondary school, which was given for school teachers.”4 on january 14, 1957, bakhtin shared the following thoughts with his colleagues: “we must fight against routine in university education. there should be fewer lectures and more practical classes. the number of lectures must be reduced. if some topics are explained well in the textbook, they should just be referred to, but it is the material that is not explained well, that needs to be taught. students tend to rely on lectures, but we need to encourage their self-study. there should be more debates, discussions, 2 even after his retirement in september 1961, bakhtin continued working as an academic advisor for post-graduate students of the russian and foreign literature department of the mordovia state university, participated in its research, and advised his colleagues. 3 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-546, op-1, 343, 5. 4 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-546, 56. m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t3 conferences. […] it should also be noted that students have poor knowledge of aesthetics and arts. we should speak about music and painting in our lectures. colloquiums are necessary, even though they often get rejected”5. on january 6, 1958, the department discussed the methodological principles of seminars and practical classes. bakhtin shared the following ideas: “the more variety of methods we offer the better – but, most importantly, they should be practically useful. practical classes have only educational goals. special seminars have scientific research goals. we should strive to make special seminars more research oriented. practical classes can use various methods – reports, methodological discussions, and especially the analysis of texts. too little attention is paid to bibliography. it is paramount to select a topic for a special seminar and it should be as narrow as possible. we must also pose debatable questions to students”; “…and every student should have a diary or a notebook to write down his thoughts and opinions”; “a report must be done in writing, as it represents scientific research, but it is not necessary to simply read the text out loud”; “students must be taught how to read monographs”6. on march 3, 1958, after hearing the reports of his colleagues about their work in the previous semester, bakhtin said: “when i was observing students’ work at seminars and exams, i could see that many students simply summarized literary works, instead of analyzing them. we need to pay more attention to artistic forms. our students are totally lacking their own approach, aesthetic judgement, they know very little by heart, and cannot substantiate their point of view. we must deal with these shortcomings”7. in the same year, bakhtin shared his views on the work with scientific literature with his students and colleagues. since this source is virtually unknown outside of mordovian scholarly circles, we will quote its most relevant parts: when you start studying a scholarly book, you should never expect to understand it easily and quickly. science is always complex and it can take time to understand a treatise or even a textbook: they require a significant concentration of the mind and hard work. when you study any book, it is important not only to learn all the facts and scientific concepts it contains, but also the methods that were used to find, establish, and prove those facts. you must try to master the very logic of science. when you study something on your own, you should not forget the practical side. you should always find connections between theoretical concepts and real life – try to find possible practical applications of these concepts. surely, this must not be done superficially: some theoretical concepts cannot have direct applications. […] but the general direction towards practice should be a necessary condition for understanding any scientific book. a scientist, an engineer, or a professor needs such an amount of scientific information for their work, as cannot be contained in one person’s memory. that is why it is very important to know where and how certain information can be found. for this reason, you need to thoroughly investigate the bibliography of your field of knowledge, acquire the skills of working with various kinds of reference books, and the overall skills of working with books – so you can quickly find what you need in them. […] referential information is located outside the book’s main text: before it, after it, and at the bottom of the page, in footnotes. it usually includes the following elements: the 5 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-546, 74. 6 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-2542, 24, 9. 7 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-2542, 12. m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t4 front page, prefaces, afterword, and footnotes […]. other such elements include commentaries (usually placed in the end of the book), tables of contents, various kinds of references, maps, diagrams, and charts. the differences in the constituent parts of a book depend on its specialty. however, one should always start working with any scholarly treatise with a preliminary perusal of its references, so that later the whole text can be systematically used from its first page to its very end. the work with referential data teaches students to be accurate and rigorous in their research and it fosters their appreciation of bibliography. reading a book without a thorough use of its references is unproductive and scientifically deficient” (bakhtin, 1958, pp. 17-19). on july 15, 1959, speaking about the current goals of the department, bakhtin stated the following: “we must pay serious attention to the special courses. our students have poor knowledge of many scientific disciplines, such as textology, stylistics, and source study. there is an urgent need to address this issue. our students have poor knowledge of bibliography. we need to creatively rework our courses’ syllabi instead of simply rewriting them8. on august 31, 1960, bakhtin proposed to offer a new course for 5th-year students, called “lectures on bibliography of russian literature.” on october 20 of the same year he recommended all the department professors to conduct tutorials with first-year students on “methods of note-taking” (both proposals were met with approval). on december 27, 1960, the question of lecturing methodology was discussed at the departmental meeting. the main presenter, and probably the organizer of the discussion, was bakhtin. here is an excerpt of the meeting’s hours concerning his presentation: in his speech m. m. bakhtin said that he would just pose a few questions about the methods of lecturing at a university. a literature lecture should pursue three main goals: 1. communication of certain information on a given topic; establishing the level of students’ familiarity with the topic; 2. fostering students’ scientific thinking; 3. fostering students’ aesthetic perception and taste. goal 1. all kinds of knowledge can be divided into two main groups: a. essential knowledge, proven and established by science; and b. debatable knowledge. in their lectures, professors must deliver both essential and debatable knowledge, even though there is a notion that a lecturer should only deliver essential knowledge and avoid any debatable questions. students’ scientific thinking is fostered through their learning about diverse opinions and scientific debates. nevertheless, lecturers must underline the difference between these two types of knowledge. the lecturer should also emphasize his own point of view in his lecture. special attention should be given to those questions that belong to the specific domain of the professor’s expertise. then he can share a lot of new information with students. the curriculum does not provide much time for lectures – that is why it is impossible to deliver all the materials. therefore, professors should deliver such information in their 8 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-2542, op.1, p. 24, 34. m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t5 lectures that is not contained in the textbook. students are usually quick to notice when a lecturer is simply reduplicating the textbook’s material. they lose any interest towards such lectures and engage in all sorts of extraneous activities in the classroom. many textbooks are outdated and need to be brought up-to-date with recent scientific achievements. lecturers should avoid delivering truisms (e.g., 2x2=4) or sharing details of their autobiography. you can find these in secondary school textbooks. however, if they have learned something new about a writer from his autobiography, they should share it. students need to know that. autobiographical data is relevant when it can be used in analysis, when a certain point needs to be clarified9. about literary analysis. university lecturers often give analysis in its most simplified form – similar to how it is done at secondary school. some lecturers adhere to the widespread notion that students must only be given that information in lectures that they can use later in schools. such materials can be found in any school textbook. on the contrary, lecturers should provide a deeper treatment of a scholarly topic. they should give examples of scientific analysis (instead of banal truths). interpretation of a literary work is limited by subjectivity. each literary work has its sources. they should be discussed in lectures. lecturers should know the history of the literary text. the question of genre should be treated with the utmost attention. students often have no idea of the genre of a given literary work. the analysis of a literary text should always start with defining its genre. a lecturer must specifically emphasize the analysis of the artistic form in their lecture – they should always clarify and underline their own opinion (about any book). goal 2. how can we teach scientific thinking? lecturers must showcase it in their own work, rather than talk about it. we must be engaged in reflective thinking in the classroom, in front of our students (doubting, assessing the validity of arguments, etc.) a lecture must become the starting point for an ongoing process of thinking. goal 3. cultivating students’ aesthetic perception. literature study is a science that explores aesthetic phenomena. literature is one of the arts (another example is music). we must foster students’ aesthetic perception and taste. the majority of our graduates have a very poor understanding of literature. in our lectures we must reveal the artistic nature of literature for instance, by comparing literature and music10. the presentation triggered a discussion, during which bakhtin’s colleagues both expanded his ideas and contested them. a. m. kukanov noted that the department chair “did not touch upon the historic method, which is essential in the teaching of literature. for example, [russian famous writers and poets] pushkin, nekrasov, lomonosov, and gorky all have “narodnost” in their works. but how are they different in their “narodnost”? without answering such questions, the study of literature would be incorrect. besides “narodnost”, m. m. bakhtin did not touch upon the literary process in his discussion of lecturing methods. to what extent do we really need classicism? […] the analysis of a literary work should begin with defining its idea, its theme, and not its genre” (kukanova, 1997). v. m. zabavina said that “every lecturer should pay more attention to defining the time period, in which a certain author’s worldview was formed”. she supported a. m. kukanov’s idea to briefly summarize authors’ philosophical views. in conclusion, bakhtin said the following: “the discussion was productive. ideological upbringing of students can be partly achieved through providing them with scholarly materials. 9 in this context, “autobiography” can be understood as “biography of a writer”. 10 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-2542, p. 10, 12. some fragments of this speech by bakhtin are cited from the book by s.s.konkin, & l.s.konkina. mikhail bakhtin: stranitsy zhizny i tvorchestva. 1993, saransk. m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t6 we must give them as much academic knowledge as possible. we need the historic method and we need to study the time period, but we do not have the opportunity to provide a detailed depiction of the historic period. for this, we need to refer students to textbooks. a lecture is one of the “links” that constitute the course. each and every lecture must be connected to the previous one and usher in the following one. improvisation is a component of a lecture – it comes as a result of good knowledge of your subject matter, your field of study. many things can be touched upon in a lecture. but we must be careful in selecting the lecture material.”11 on february 9, 1961, bakhtin shared his opinion on synoptic lectures for students preparing for graduation examinations: “we must begin giving synoptic lectures on literature. we cannot reduce the number of synoptic lectures. students have to know the materials of the discussion on [alexander pushkin’s] “eugene onegin” and other discussions. we should inform students about these materials. every professor should include in his lectures bibliographic questions and questions on the theory of literature. students should be introduced to all aspects of the literary process. textology questions should also be discussed with students. students, probably, do not even know that there exist three texts of [yury lermontov’s famous poem] “the demon.” without that, a work of literature cannot be analyzed.” “the questions for state graduation examinations must be revised. every professor must carefully formulate questions for his course. the questions should include a variety of aspects – the writers’ literary careers, the nature of the literary process, problem questions, and questions concerning specific literary works. questions on the theory of literature should also be included.12” bakhtin’s reflections on the methods of university instruction, based on many years of his teaching experience (vitebsk, kostanay, saransk), seem to be still relevant today. in a sense, the lasting legacy of the famous scholar not only includes his scholarly work but also his thoughts on teaching methodology. references bakhtin, m.m. (1958). nekotoriye zamechaniya. mordov. universitet, november 18. reprinted in m.m. bakhtin: esteticheskoye naslediye i sovremennost’. mezhvuzovskiy sbornik nauchnyh trudov. saransk, 1992, chast’ 1, str. 17-19. basikhin, y.f. (1968). o mikhaile mikhailoviche bakhtine. rodnye prostory, saransk, pp. 203-204. central state archive of the republic of mordovia (tsentral’niy gosudarstvenniy arkhiv respubliki mordovia). konkin, s.s., & konkina, l.s. (1993). mikhail bakhtin: stranitsy zhizny i tvorchestva. saransk. kukanova, n.g. (1997). bakhtiny v nashey zhizni. strannik, saransk, 1, pp. 138-146. vasilyev, n.l. (2000). m.m.bakhtin kak vuzovskiy prepodavatel’. dialog. karnaval. khronotop, 1, pp. 4552. vdovina, l. (1991). “zamuchen tyazholoy nevoley”. slovo o bakhtine. sovetskaya mordovia, jan. 23. 11 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, p-2542, op. 1, p. 138, 12. 12 central state archive of the republic of mordovia, ibid., p. 14. m. m. bakhtin as a university professor nikolai l. vasiliev dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 | vol. 6 (2018) t7 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word kitchen, a students repsonse, layout w comment.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf43 a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen ambrose university, canada abstract this essay is a commentary on dr. matusov’s article “a student’s right to freedom of education”, and it will reflect on dr. cresswell’s and dr. dyck’s technology-free classroom experiment as well as some of the thoughts and opinions expressed in dr. matusov’s article. in particular, this essay will examine and raise some objections to dr. matusov’s thoughts and opinions and argue for a more nuanced and tempered view of the nature of the student’s right to freedom of education. the technology-free experiment and dr. matusov’s objection to it will be explored and met with arguments in support of the experiment and the possible benefits of a technology-free learning environment. the remainder of the essay will largely consider dr. matusov’s thoughts on the student’s right to freedom of education and will offer arguments both for and against some of dr. matusov’s thoughts expressed in his article. finally, an argument for a more holistic and structured view of authority and freedom in education will be discussed, using some studies on the finnish education system as an example of one approach to improving education. key words: education, open education, freedom, students, teachers, authority, technology. shonda kitchen is an english literature student in her third year at ambrose university. she fell in love with reading and writing at an early age and has since filled many notebooks with words of her own. she enjoys both creative and academic writing and hopes to continue to grow as a poet and a scholar throughout her degree and beyond. most importantly, she hopes that she never stops learning. ïïò earlier this year, during my winter semester at ambrose university, i took part in a classroom experiment in which no technology was allowed. this experiment was under the direction of two professors from ambrose university: dr. cresswell, professor of psychology, and dr. dyck, assistant professor of english literature. the aim of this experiment was to determine how much technology, or a lack thereof, could influence the learning environment. upon learning about this experiment, a friend of dr. cresswell’s, dr. matusov, wrote an article in which he criticized the experiment, claiming that it restricted students’ freedom and “[forced] the students and faculty not to use personal technology” (matusov, 2020). in this response, i will address dr. matusov’s critique of dr. cresswell and dr. dyck’s technology-free experiment and comment on the other thoughts he expressed about education throughout his article. because i am in the english program at ambrose university, i enrolled in dr. dyck’s class on popular fiction, one of the two classes participating in the experiment. one of the most interesting and helpful things i have learned from some of my professors in the english program is that it is more beneficial to take notes by hand rather than on a laptop. in nearly all of my introductory classes, my professors told issn: 2325-3290 (online) a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf44 us that recent studies (mueller & oppenheimer, 2014) have shown that taking notes by hand encourages students to actively listen and write down in their own words what they think is important. this is because it is quite difficult to write at a quick enough pace to get everything from the lecture. because of these studies, many of my professors strongly discouraged the use of laptops or tablets for note taking purposes in the classroom. i chose to take this advice and have since been committed to only taking notes by hand in all of my classes. thus, when i learned that dr. dyck’s class would be participating in the technologyfree experiment, i did not feel it would affect me too much, if at all. i was already accustomed to leaving my laptop at home and keeping my phone tucked away in my backpack, on silent. i knew that all i needed to learn effectively was my notebook, a pen, and whatever novel or other material we would be discussing during the lecture. in this regard i did not feel that my freedoms were being restricted at all. while i can understand dr. matusov’s reservations about this technology-free experiment and the ways it could be restrictive, i feel that his criticism is perhaps too harsh. the experiment only involved two classes and took place during most of the semester, before we were interrupted by the covid-19 pandemic. in my small english class, i do not remember anyone raising any significant objections. the only time my fellow students objected to the experiment was when we had to write an in-class essay, which prompted some students to ask if they could use their laptops to write said essay. if any student felt a strong enough objection to the experiment, they had the freedom to drop the class altogether. i would also like to emphasize that the point of this experiment was to see how a lack of technology would impact a student’s ability to learn. this is something which can only be tested by purposefully denying students access to technology. throughout the semester, both classes were given surveys which asked students how they felt the absence of technology was impacting their learning. although i am not in the psychology or behavioral science programs at ambrose university, my understanding is that this is a common trait of most studies. i would also argue that throughout the history of psychological studies, it has been a common practice to restrict or withhold something from the participants of a study, using such tactics as a control group or a placebo treatment, which allows researchers to compare data with other groups in a given study. even today, as numerous covid-19 vaccines are being tested around the world, some participants are being given placebo vaccines, without their knowledge, in order to give researchers a clearer picture as to what may help them in further developing the vaccine (“new study reveals oxford coronavirus vaccine produces strong immune response,” 2020). it appears that often new and helpful knowledge is acquired through a process of trial and error, and sometimes we cannot find good answers or solutions to our problems without some level of controlled experimentation and exploration. if the question is “what would happen if we removed this factor?” then the only way to find the answer is to remove the factor in question. having thus discussed the technology-free experiment, i will now address dr. matusov’s thesis on the student’s right to freedom of education. upon reading the introduction to his article, i found his thesis and thoughts on the matter to be both interesting and somewhat radical. on one hand, i believe i do see the value of a student’s freedom and autonomy in education. it is true that most students do not take well to the feeling that they are being forced to learn. there are plenty of children who are not always excited to go to school first thing in the morning, especially when they know that they are required to stay there for roughly eight hours with restricted freedom. indeed, i can even remember how much i disliked waking up early in the morning when i was attending elementary school and high school. on top of this initial dislike, students are forced to sit still and listen to a lesson for hours at a time, sometimes to things that they have little to no interest in. and when they are not listening, they are filling out workbooks and working on projects. though the level of course difficulty increases as the students advance through the years, this is still something that can be difficult for students of any age. this is largely why having regular recesses are important, so that students can get some of their pent-up energy out before returning to class. but even comment on text eugene matusov: eugene matusov: did professors dyck ask the students for a consent before starting his experiment? if not, i wonder if some students felt that it was useless for them to object because nobody asked for their consent in a first place. what do you think? a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf45 with recess time, it can still be frustrating for a young child to be required to do something for hours that they would rather not do. i have heard enough of my peers complain about school over the years, along with complaints of my own, to know that this current system of public education is not instilling a love of learning in many young people. if anything, it only seems to promote a habit of simply doing the bare minimum to pass, as students wait for the school year to end. we know that this should not be the norm. as someone who has now attended university and has had the pleasure of being in a program i am deeply interested in, i have come to love school and learning in a far more fulfilling way than i ever have before. it upsets me to think that our education system in north america seems to have a penchant for killing a student’s love of learning and natural curiosity. after considering these things, i still find aspects of dr. matusov’s thesis to be too extreme. when he insists that “it is students who are the principal authors of their own education” and that “education must occur on the student’s terms because education is primarily the personal business of the student”, i feel that perhaps he has gone a touch too far (matusov, 2020). while it is true that students ought to be involved in their education, and that it is largely the prerogative of the student to choose how much they will get out of their education, i think education is more nuanced than dr. matusov’s initial claims. i would agree with him that education should not be the business of “society, state, taxpayers… economy… democracy, patriotism, nationalism, [and] healthcare”, as these things are, as he puts it, “secondary or auxiliary for education” (matusov, 2020). these external powers, ideas, and people should not have direct involvement in determining what is suitable for a curriculum because they likely do not have the proper qualifications for making such decisions or judgements. they may have ulterior motives or personal agendas that they would like to impose on the impressionable young minds of children, or they may be otherwise ignorant about what is effective and helpful for education in general. the point at which i disagree with dr. matusov is when he includes educational experts and teachers in his list of people whose involvement in defining education is secondary. i would argue for a more nuanced, interconnected, and holistic approach to determining who gets to define education. the education of the student should be the primary goal of education, but education does not happen in a vacuum. creating a curriculum and designing an educational system requires the work of educational experts and teachers who have gone through higher education themselves and have dedicated their lives to delivering quality education to students. students depend on the valuable hard work of these educational experts and teachers for their education. a teacher is one who simultaneously serves and leads students in their learning as they teach, listening to the concerns of students and answering their questions. this is when education starts to become more interconnected. just as the knowledge and hard work of educational experts and teachers are vital to education, so too are the voices of the students. for a curriculum or educational system to be effective, it is important to take into account the opinions and needs of the students, as they are the ones receiving the education. an important distinction to make, however, is that the students are not the experts. students do not yet have the knowledge or experience to judge what will be most beneficial for their education. they are still children, and therefore require a trusted, educated adult to guide them as they grow. i found dr. matusov’s thoughts on what he calls the critical examination approach to education to be one of the most interesting parts of this article. critical examination can be a beautiful and extremely helpful approach to education, and in everyday life in general. in my own life and education, i find it to be quite healthy, thought provoking, and enjoyable to regularly assess different concepts and ideas critically as i grow in both my personal character and in my educational pursuits. i would argue that it is a good thing to have a desire for our students to be critical of their beliefs and learn to engage in ideas different from a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf46 their own, as it has the potential to open up their worldview and lead them to the multitude of exciting new ideas that any field of study has to offer. one could say that this is one of the foundational ideas of education to begin with. to learn new things and explore them critically is, i think, quite a valuable skill to have both in and out of the classroom. i think i would agree with dr. matusov when he warns that teachers should not “lock the student into critical examination” (matusov, 2020). to use the practice of critical examination in a manipulative or forceful way would, in my opinion, go against the very principal of critical examination. by forcing critical examination onto the student, the teacher is not helping the student to explore and engage with new ideas, but rather pushing an agenda on them in a way that is likely not beneficial to learning. critical examination works best when the student decides to engage in it, either in response to a new idea or a thought-provoking question. along with this, if a student is genuinely interested in a given topic, then the process of critical examination will be made far easier, and they will likely come to grasp the new concept in a more constructive and helpful way. perhaps a better approach would be one in which the teacher gently introduces new ideas and asks students if they have any questions or feedback on the topic. in this approach, teachers ought to be planting seeds in the minds of their students. these seeds may remain dormant for a time, but they have the potential to be nourished and eventually grow into further knowledge later, when the student is ready and has chosen to do so. a teacher can only do so much as they plant their seeds of knowledge. the rest is up to the student to decide whether they will engage in the growth process or not. in this way both the teacher and the student retain their freedom in the educating process. the teacher has the freedom to teach the lessons which they feel are important, and the student has the freedom to either engage in or ignore these lessons. i appreciated dr. matusov’s method of using the curricular map, giving his students the freedom to choose certain topics for their class. however, i find myself thinking that there is still a place for a more formally structured curriculum. for example, when i enrolled in a class on medieval literature, i expected that i would be taught by a professor with knowledge on this topic that would be superior to mine. i trusted that the texts which my professor chose for us to read and study were ones which he felt would be the most important and helpful for learning about medieval literature. however, in that class we did have some discussions about the syllabus, our schedule, and as a result several lectures and readings were changed accordingly. i would argue that there can be room for both a formalized and flexible curriculum, trusting the expertise of the professor while also considering the desires and concerns of the students. i can also see the value of this curricular map approach, as it would entice students to be more involved in their learning. if they have the freedom to choose a topic which they are interested in, then they will likely be more motivated to study and engage with the educational material. however, i do not think that traditional, formalized curriculums are entirely bad. a good curriculum gives structure to a class and gives students some idea as to what they should expect to learn. also, it is sometimes most beneficial to learn things in a certain order, such as learning the alphabet before learning how to read and write. i think that there are some things which are beneficial and necessary for every student to learn, such as reading, writing, math, science, and history. what if a student was in a class covering historical events of the 20th century, using the curricular map concept, and never got around to discussing the two world wars or the holocaust because the students never wanted to learn about these events? if you were to meet such a student who had never learned about these important historical events, we would probably call them ignorant and wonder what went wrong in their education. i find myself strongly disagreeing with dr. matusov’s notion that a student’s participation in education should not be mandatory. i would argue that students do not necessarily always know what they need or what is good for them. anyone who has been around children for any length of time will quickly discover that they frequently do not want to do things that we know are good for them, such as eating a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf47 vegetables so that they are properly nourished, or going to bed on time so that they get enough sleep. while they are young children, they are extremely inexperienced with all fields of knowledge, hardly knowing how to read and write. it is important for their young minds to learn the basics, and to challenge themselves and expand their minds as they grow older. it is also important for them to learn these basics so that they can properly function in society. when i was learning math in elementary school, i did not enjoy it in the least. if i had had the option of leaving my math class, i would have gladly taken it. but now that i am older and have worked a few retail jobs in which i have had to count money, i am extremely grateful that i was taught the basics of math. and that is only one small area in which i use my knowledge of math. i cannot imagine how much more difficult my life would be if i had not learned how to count, add, multiply, and the like. this is comparable to the example which dr. matusov used in his article, wherein a former student of the unusual summerhill school never learned how to read and write because of his immature decision to never attend classes. he lived most of his adult life barely knowing how to read and write, and only decided to finally learn these skills when he felt embarrassed that he could not spell the word ‘caravan’ for his japanese employers. i feel that this is a glaring failure of this man’s education, as it did not give him the benefit of being properly prepared for adult life. how can we say this form of education is good when it leaves its students crippled by an inability to use one of the most basic skills? how much time could this man have saved if he had simply learned how to read and write when he was young? this is exactly why young children need proper guidance and education, as it gives them a foundation of skills that will enable them to function as an adult. i also feel that this approach teaches children that if something becomes difficult, they should give up rather than persevere. perhaps it is all well and good for a child to give up on learning a new skill while they are young and being taken care of by adults. but when that child grows up to become an adult themselves, they will soon find that when life becomes difficult, they will no longer have the same option of simply walking out of the classroom. we must all learn at some point that we will have to do certain things in life that we would rather not do, and that this is a normal part of life. learning new things may naturally take some students out of their comfort zone, but the best part about this is that this can be done in a safe learning environment, with a teacher who can guide them and answer their questions. i also feel that it is important for education to challenge students in a safe and healthy way, as it not only promotes growth in their character, but it also teaches them to take risks, explore, and learn how to navigate uncomfortable situations. as children grow older, they will quickly discover that the world will not always cater to their desires, and they will have to learn how to adapt and thrive when they are faced with the challenges of adult life. reading this article made me curious about other educational systems, and how our own system in north america could be improved. i have seen several stories in the media lately about the success of the finnish education system, so i decided to do some research and find out why finland’s education system was getting so much attention. i found out that finnish students have been one of the top performers in the domains of science, reading, and math in a program called pisa (the programme for international student assessment) since its inception in 2000 (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). in one study, the researchers concluded that there was not one individual factor that accounted for this success, but rather a system of interrelated factors (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). the study focused mainly on finland’s emphasis on educational equity, long term educational policy, culture of trust, the reading habit of finnish people, and a high level of cooperation as some of the main aspects responsible for the success of the finnish education system (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). perhaps one of the most intriguing things about the finnish education system is that their students receive the shortest total learning time among all the participating countries in pisa (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). this fact indicates that although finnish students spend the least amount a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf48 of time in the classroom, they appear to be receiving quite an efficient education, given their outstanding achievement in pisa. this also likely means that students are spending more time doing other things, such as enjoying time with their family and friends, exploring their world through play, and engaging in other hobbies. the shorter class times of finnish schools allows students to enrich their lives in many ways, which probably makes them better, more focused, and more well-rounded students in the classroom. according to the finnish basic education act, the three main objectives of finnish education are “to provide them (pupils) with knowledge and skills needed in life… to promote civilization and equality in society… [and] to secure adequate equity in education throughout the country” (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). in light of these objectives, we can see that the finnish education system is concerned with equipping each student with necessary skills, improving society through the proper education of its citizens, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to be educated regardless of their socioeconomic status. i found myself to be quite astonished and impressed with these principles. this is an education system which is concerned about the wellbeing of both its students and its society as a whole and sees the inherent connection between the two. by contrast, it seems that our education system in north america does not always appear to care about the wellbeing of its students. instead, it only seems to care about how well they perform on a standardized test, merely teaching students how to memorize facts and survive education, rather than nourishing them with knowledge and enabling them to thrive in education. this brings us to yet another set of highlights of finnish education. according to this study, finnish education appears to have a focus on flexibility and diversity rather than standardization, an emphasis on broad knowledge which includes aspects of individual growth and learning, and a culture of trust through professionalism (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). this indicates that education in finland likely favours creativity and individuality in its students, along with a general interest in providing students with adequate knowledge and skills needed for both personal growth and educational success. and, unlike the unconventional practices of the summerhill school mentioned in dr. matusov’s article, finland’s education system, which spans over ten years, is compulsory (ustun & eryilmaz, 2018). considering dr. matusov’s feelings on compulsory education, i find it very interesting that finland’s students appear to be doing so well in an educational system in which it is mandatory to attend classes. i feel that perhaps the problem with a lot of western education is not that it is mandatory or uses a standard, imposed curriculum, but rather that it seems to lack the consistent care and consideration that the finnish education system appears to be using. reading dr. matusov’s article on the student’s freedom of education, and writing this response, has been an incredibly thought provoking and informative experience. at times i found myself agreeing with dr. matusov, seeing some of the value in his arguments. i think it is true that the education system in north america has largely become too rigid and standardized and leaves little room for creativity and critical thinking. but on the other hand, i also found myself vehemently disagreeing with other parts of dr. matusov’s article, especially when he argued that education should not be mandatory, and that the student should be the primary authority on their education. i felt that it was simply too extreme and unhelpful in finding a good solution to some of the issues with the current education system. i do not think we can solve the extreme standardization of this system with the extreme individual freedom that dr. matusov proposed in his article. after looking at the finnish education system, learning how different their ways were from ours, and seeing how successful they are with it, i am inclined to believe that a compromise is a more likely solution. there is room for both formal curriculums and individual creativity, for both traditional educational design and the unique voice of the students. instead of viewing the educational process as a dichotomy in which it is teachers versus students, perhaps it will be more helpful to view it as an interconnected, dialogic process in which both sides work together towards the common goal of giving students the best education possible. a student’s response to dr. matusov’s article, “a student’s right to freedom of education” shonda kitchen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.361 | vol. 8 (2020) sf49 references matusov, e. (2020). a student’s and a teacher’s right to freedom of education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8 (2020), sf1-sf28. doi:10.5195/dpj.2020.356 mueller, p. a., & oppenheimer, d. m. (2014). the pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. psychological science, 25(6), 1159–1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581 new study reveals oxford coronavirus vaccine produces strong immune response. (2020, july 20). oxford vaccine group. https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/news/new-study-reveals-oxford-coronavirusvaccine-produces-strong-immune-response ustun, u., & eryilmaz, a. (2018). analysis of finnish education system to question the reasons behind finnish success in pisa. studies in educational research and development, 2(2), 93–114. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word raz shpeizer, amnon glassner, free will and heutagogy shpeizer and glassner, 2020-06-14 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf80 free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer kaye academic college of education, israel amnon glassner kaye academic college of education, israel abstract in this paper we argue that there are at least two conditions for the adequate realization of the capacity of free will – and thus of the realization of the right to freedom of education – that are missing from matusov's account, and needed to be integrated with it in order to enable the successful implementation of the right to freedom of education principle. we will then offer a different typology of the field of education, a typology that is complementary, rather than contradictory, to matusov's typology, and use this typology – especially the concept of heutagogy – to offer a way that optimizes freedom of will in education. dr. raz shpeizer is a lecturer and pedagogical instructor at kaye academic college of education, beersheva, israel. born in tel-aviv, he graduated with bachelor’s degree in art and philosophy and m.a degree in philosophy from tel-aviv university. he then moved to beer-sheva in the south of israel, to gain his phd in philosophy from ben-gurion university. he was appointed a lecturer at kaye academic college of education in 2011, and since then teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as conducting researches. his fields of interest encompass general philosophy, philosophy of education, critical and creative thinking, project-based learning, and multiculturalism. he has published articles in various international and national journals, and a book about henri bergson and the problem of free will. amnon glassner is a senior lecturer and pedagogical guide in kaye academic college of education. his main research and teaching interests are: heutagogy approach; creative and critical thinking in education; argumentation skills; meaningful learning; intelligent use of ict for meaningful learning. his papers were published in journals such as: acta psychologica, learning and instruction, british journal of educational psychology, journal of thinking skills and creativity, and journal of action learning. his last book was written with prof. shlomo back: exploring heutagogy in higher education: academia meets the zeitgeist ïïò introduction one of the main aspects of the subject of freedom is that of free will. the free will theme is one of the core themes of western philosophy and keeps haunting it for many centuries. however, the debates concerning free will tend to be very abstract, and mostly deal with its metaphysical and logical conditions (as well as their consequences to the concepts of moral responsibility). in this paper we will focus on the more practical aspect of free will, that is, its execution in real-life situations, and we will assume that free will do exist, since it seems to us that free will is both a logical condition of the freedom of education thesis and presupposed by matusov (2020) when dealing with this thesis. issn: 2325-3290 (online) free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer, amnon glassner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf81 assuming that humans are endowed with the capacity of free will, and that this capacity is a necessary condition for the realization of the right to freedom of education, a question arises: does the priority that matusov gives to the principle of the right to freedom of education hinders in some way the full realization of this capacity? for if it does, it follows that this very right is being damaged. in what follows, we will argue that there are at least two conditions for the adequate realization of the capacity of free will – and thus of the realization of the right to freedom of education – that are missing from matusov's account, and needed to be integrated with it in order to enable the successful implementation of the right to freedom of education principle. we will then offer a different typology of the field of education, a typology that is complementary, rather than contradictory, to matusov's typology, and use this typology – especially the concept of heutagogy – to offer a way that optimizes freedom of will in education. two views of free will beside views that deny the possibility of free will, and will not be dealt with here, there are two basic philosophical positions which suppose, and argue for its existence. these positions are compatibilism and libertarianism. the main difference between compatibilism and libertarianism is that the former holds that there is no contradiction between the concepts of determinism and free will, while the latter holds that for free will to be possible, indeterminism must be true. thus, central to the libertarian views on free will is the principle of alternative possibilities (e.g., ginet, 1996; kane, 1996, 2005), which states that for every free action, there must be at least two possible actions that the agent can chose from, while compatibilists deny the necessity of this condition. of course, there is much more to be said about the compatibilism-libertarianism debate, but this cannot be done here due to space limitation. it is important to notice, however, that both views agree that some conditions, such as external coercion or manipulation, and agent's ignorance, would hamper free will (berofsky, 2009; kane, 2005; pereboom, 2014), and also, that in order for an action to be considered free, the agent must be, in some sense, the author, or the source of this action. in his paper, matusov does not explicate his position regarding free will. nevertheless, it seems to us that he emphasizes the concept of choice (matusov, 2020, pp. sf3, sf6, sf10, sf11, sf19, sf22), and hence his free will view is close to the libertarian view. therefore, in what follows, we will assume this view, but most of our arguments can be adopted (with slight modifications) as to encompass the compatibilist view as well. the argument from thinking skills suppose that john studies in a university. before the beginning of the semester, he reads a syllabus of a course entitled "critical examination," and, impressed by its rational, he decides to take the course. heading toward the class for the course's first lesson, he meets another student – emily. they discuss the course syllabus and emily claims that while the syllabus is well-constructed, john should not believe everything written in it because obviously, the professor who wrote the syllabus has an interest in promoting it and attract students, and furthermore, she never heard any student saying something positive about this course, "so it must be a poor course." convinced by her claims, john decides to give up the course and take another one instead. was john decision a free decision, and was he executing is right to freedom of education? many would notice that john's change of mind was a result of erroneous reasoning, since emily's argument is comment on text eugene matusov: this is not exactly correct. i define freedom first of all as authorship which is based on a person’s transcendence of the given recognized by others and the self. choice is rather weak form of authorship. see: matusov, e. (2011). authorial teaching and learning. in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21-46). new york: peter lang publishers. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). dialogic authorial approach to creativity in education: transforming a deadly homework into a creative activity. in v. p. glăveanu (ed.), the palgrave handbook of creativity and culture research (pp. 307-325), doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_15. hampshire, uk: palgrave macmillan publishers ltd. sticky note raz shpeizer: we accept, as noted above, the importance of the principle of authorship. we can also accept, at least for the sake of the discussion, the notion of the transcendence of the given, since our main point is that no matter how one defines freedom, there are still some necessary conditions (like critical thinking skills and some knowledge of the subject matter) for this freedom to be realized. free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer, amnon glassner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf82 based on two logical fallacies – the circumstantial ad hominem and the argument from ignorance. however, some may feel reluctant to conclude that that fact alone is sufficient to establish that john's decision and the action that followed it were not free. after all, it seems that he could have decided otherwise, he was not forced to take this course of action, so cannot his decision be considered a free decision? but what we would have thought if we knew that emily's conversation with john was a premeditated attempt to manipulate him and cause him to leave the course (maybe she had a quarrel with the course's professor and looked for revenge)? many philosophers have given examples of external manipulation, showing that people who are being manipulated to think, decide or act on the manipulator will cannot be considered free agents. these examples may be classified according to the strength of the manipulation – from neuroscientists who can manipulate human's brain states (pereboom, 2014) to social engineers who manipulate people behavior (kane, 2005), to governments indoctrination, and so forth. the point is, that both common people intuitions, as exemplified in the law system (e.g., murray & lombrozo, 2017), and philosophical considerations, lead to the conclusion that manipulated person is un-free, or at least less free – if the manipulation is understood as less forceful. the philosophical arguments for the impediment of free will in case of manipulation may vary according the philosophical orientation of the arguer. thus, for compatibilists, the manipulee is less free because her manipulated act is less authentic, not expressing her deep self (shoemaker, 2015), while for the libertarian, the loss of freedom is the outcome of the loss, or narrowing, of the range of possibilities, or, on other accounts, the loss of the ultimate authorship of the manipulee, who is no longer the source of her act (kane, 1996, 2005). in our example, john initial decision to take the course was his own, and if we think of emily's move as a premeditated manipulative move, we will probably be more inclined to accept that john's decision was not free because he could not be considered the author or source of it. however, the most important point to be noticed is that john change of mind was due to an erroneous reasoning. this has nothing to do with any objective state of affairs in the outside world – because neither john nor emily, or, for that matter, anybody else, could knew (based on emily's argument) whether taking the course was good for john or not. it was wrong judgment, which is the outcome of poor reasoning, and this poor reasoning, whether it was caused by intentional manipulation or not – brought john to take a course of action that otherwise he would have not taken, and thus damaged his ability to choose what is good for him. thus, it seems that basic thinking skill, or, more precisely, basic critical thinking skills, are needed for students, and persons generally, in order to make choices that are both more suitable for them, and, in a broader sense, freer. these skills might be less needed for villagers who live simple life in remote places, but in our modern societies, with the mass media, fake news, aggressive advertising, and strong and manipulative political and economic powers, it seems as a necessary condition for the actualization of free will. moreover, even beyond the ever-present tangible possibility of manipulation, it should be noted that cases like the above case has nothing to do with the agent's right to act foolishly, irrationally, and so forth, since the action taken by john was a result of ignorance, and not of his (free) will to act as he wishes. at the bottom line, this means that without the ability for "reflective and reasonable thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do" (ennis, 1985, p. 45), people will be less free, and students' right to freedom of education will be impaired. lastly, it is important to point out that the demand for basic critical thinking skills is far more modest and less pretentious than the kantian ambitious portrayal of an all-embracing, truth-discoverer and moraldiscoverer reason. there is no need to assume, and indeed most critical thinking scholars will not assume, that reason discloses the absolute truth or the absolute moral principle(s). rather, reason, or rationality, as free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer, amnon glassner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf83 the ability to weigh reasons (paul, 1993; siegel, 1988), helps us to avoid mistakes and wrong judgements, to better understand ourselves and the world, without necessarily supposing neither that it can reveal the ultimate truth nor that it is the only guide for action. the argument from lack of content let us imagine, for example, a student who studies to become a teacher in a teacher education institution. she studies in a program which adopts the guidelines of the principle of the right to freedom of education, and thus, among other things, gets "to decide what to learn" (matusov, 2020, p. sf10). after visiting few schools and learning their educational practices, she decides that she wishes to focus her entire learning on the prevailing practices she has seen in these schools, which – she rightly supposes – are the common practices of the entire educational system (she might reason that both her future student and herself would benefit from her becoming an expert in the established way of teaching). now, it seems to us that this student's freedom of choice, and thus her ability to act freely, is being damaged, rather than broadened, because she is not aware of other educational options, such as, if we adopt matusov (2020) terminology, the practices of close and open socialization and of education as critical examination. yes, she might acquire knowledge of these other practices from "her interaction with the teacher, peers, other people, texts, experiences, observations, activities…" (matusov, 2020, p. sf11), but she also might not, especially if she is inclined to stick with her initial decision. to put it more generally, in order to exercise free will, an agent needs possibilities, and the less possibilities there are, the less possibilities the agent is aware of, the lesser is her freedom, and vice versa – the more possibilities the agent has, the more possibilities the agent is aware of, the freer she is. in our present context, a student who is not aware of, and even more – does not have basic understanding of – the major trends in the discipline or subject she wishes to study, cannot really execute her right to freedom of education, either because she hardly has option to choose from, or because her choice is a mere guess. pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy (pah) following the above discussion about freedom of will as a precondition for freedom of education, and referring to matusov (2020) differentiation between "training, close socialization, open socialization, and critical examination, along with the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy" (p. sf3), we would like to present a complementary conceptual frame which expresses the different levels of learners' freedom of education, by identifying three major educational paradigms: pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy (pah). pedagogy assumes that the “learner is, by definition a dependent one” (knowles, 1980, p. 43). the teacher takes full responsibility of determining what, when, and how something is to be learned, and to evaluate it. in pedagogy, the freedom of education is very limited. in pedagogy, "what is to be learnt, and how, is both determined and directed by the teacher; in andragogy [i.e., adult learning], it is determined by the teacher and directed by the learner” (anderson, 2006, cited by luckin et al., 2010). pedagogy and andragogy differ from heutagogy (self-determined learning), in which “both determination and direction shift to the learner” (luckin et al., 2010). heutagogy enables the students to experience high level of freedom of education. knowles (1970) defines self-determined learning as “…the process in which individuals take the initiative…in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying resources for learning, choosing and implementing learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes” (p. 7). using our and others' experiences in teaching heutagogy courses, we believe that we do not have to wait until the "intrinsic education occurs when our civilization transitions from the exclusively necessitybased to a leisure-dominated hybrid" (matusov, p. sf23). implementation of heutagogy enhances such comment on text eugene matusov: freely? if not, it is contradiction of terms. freedom cannot be imposed. comment on text eugene matusov: are you talking about conventional (and some innovative) oppressive educational institutions here? comment on text eugene matusov: i’m not taking about freedom of choice but rather freedom of education. this is not the same. sticky note raz shpeizer: we completely agree with the importance of the ideal of freedom of education. our claim is that this ideal is damaged if some conditions are not fulfilled. if students lack critical thinking skills and at least some subject-matter knowledge, their ability to choose their own pathway (in our terminology, their ability to exercise their free will) and thus their “control and ownership of [their] education” (matusov, 2020, p. sf2) are hindered. comment on text eugene matusov: what i sense here is that the authors feel that they know the best what is needed to learn by a student. if my sense is correct, i address this parternalism in my orginal paper and in my response to all commentaries. sticky note raz shpeizer: we do not claim here that the teacher should decide for the student what to learn, but rather support and strengthten her ability to decide on her own (see below, our discussion of heutagogy). comment on text eugene matusov: i’m not sure i like this notion. i do not find it helpful. i feel this notion is forced by an opposition to determinism. determinism – mechanical or probabilistic – tries to purify human phenomena from freedom, meaning, and responsibility. freedom of wll tries to purify human phenomena from being shaped by the given – biology, culture, society, economy, politics, ideology, etc. i want to stay away from this unhelpful continuum because freedom requires the given (i.e., determined) as its creative material. sticky note raz shpeizer: we do not think there is much controversy here. the problem of free will may be understood as the question of the relation between the determined and the indeterminate, or creative, aspects of human existence. free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer, amnon glassner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf84 education in schools and in higher education (see blaschke, kenyon & hase, 2014; glassner & back, 2020). in the next section we expand on the characteristics of heutagogy, and its dialectical relations with the concept of free will and the issues of critical thinking skills and lack of content. heutagogy: to implement freedom of education heutagogy (hase & kenyon, 2000) is a student-centered learning-teaching approach in which the learners, facilitated by a mentor/teacher, determine their own learning. they individually decide what, how, with whom, when, and in which environment to learn. they also choose how to evaluate their learning and its outcomes and how to present the knowledge they had created about the topic they have learned and about themselves as learners (glassner & back, 2020). according to the connectivism theory (simense, 2008), heutagogy presupposes that knowledge (tying connections) in its nature is usually organized as a mesh network (each node is connected to the others nodes), in addition to other traditional networks such as a ring (circle), tree (roots and brunches algorithm) and bus-line (linear) (glassner & back, 2020). following this presupposition, we suggest that heutagogy learning is characterized by learners' wandering in mesh network and by handling symmetric dialogue (without authority) with their teachers. the learning is for its own sake, although it might have instrumental ends (glassner & back, 2020). in addition, the ethical aspect of learning should promote freedom, democracy, and tolerance toward others. referring to matusov (2020, p. sf10-sf11) elements of freedom of education, heutagogy enables the student's freedom to choose the curriculum, instruction, participation, valuation, ecology and leisure. one can argue, though, that in heutagogy students are limited in their freedom to choose their role and paradigm, as they are expected to be self-determined learners. we cannot and should not force students to participate in heutagogy learning, but we can invite them to experience it by facilitating their self-determined learning. the lecturer/teacher has to fully trust her students' capability to be self-determined learners (glassner &back, 2020). in addition, when students choose to learn in groups it might help some of them to feel more comfortable and secure. however, working in groups can discourage the individual from being self-determined. in order to cope with the obstacles of freedom of will mentioned above (lack of content that limits more freely choosing and lack of critical thinking skills), we take some practical steps in our version of heutagogy courses. fostering curiosity to learn and expanding choices for learning: this is a preliminary stage to the self-determined learning, in which, we, the lecturers, expose the central ideas, issues and questions of the course’s general subject. such exposure enables the students to develop their own ideas about what they wish to learn in the course. although this preliminary stage represents more pedagogy than heutagogy, it enables the students to increase their freedom of will and education by expanding their choices to identify what they wish to learn in the course (glassner & back, 2020). enhancing a dialogical critical thinking environment: in our heutagogy courses, the students are invited to initiate genuine dialogues with us and among themselves, using different communication ways and tools they choose (e.g., face to face meetings or remoted correspondence like e-mails). in these dialogues they are invited to discuss their learning aims, desires, believes, blokes, challenges and difficulties. the students are encouraged to reflect upon their decisions, attitudes and preferences, and try comment on text eugene matusov: that is what i suspected – namely paternalism. sticky note raz shpeizer: as was explained above and in this sense, all of us are limited in our freedom to choose, although not all of us are aware of this limitation at the same level, and this is why it is not paternalism. we have to experience such freedom and to discuss it by dialogue in order to improve our awareness. comment on text eugene matusov: what if students like alina and mikyala reject the self-determined learning? force them into heutagogy? exclude them? sticky note raz shpeizer: can we force them to learn by conventional learning? it can be a wonderful opportunity to faciilitate an open dialouge between the teacher and the students on the meaning of learning and freedom in learning. maybe these courses should remain elective courses. usally, students who experienced such courses recommend them to their friends as a unique and meaniungful learning experience. teachers can suggest a limitted freedom for those students who refuse to take it all. for example, one student may decide that he will be free to choose only the way he will learn. enother alternative option is to help the students to experience some level of self-determined learning by offering them some scaffolds which will help them to move on by themselves. we believe teachers should use their creative thinking to find the way to convinice their students to be open minded and to try self-determined learning (at least two courses) and then, to let them choose if they wish to experience more heutagogy courses (see glassner & back, 2020). comment on text eugene matusov: what if some students reject this invitation? sticky note raz shpeizer: it will be a new opportunity for a dialouge on why to reject the invitation free will and heutagogy raz shpeizer, amnon glassner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.347 | vol. 8 (2020) sf85 to understand their origins and how they can justify them. in this way they develop their critical thinking, unpack their deep personality, and discover their authentic identity (glassner & back, 2020). conclusion there is no absolute freedom, rather, there are different levels of freedom, and in order to get closer to the higher levels of freedom, certain conditions are needed. this means that freedom is a dialectical concept, because necessity is interwoven within it. content knowledge and basic critical thinking skills are two of the conditions needed for elevating free will, and thus the execution of the right to freedom of education, to those higher levels. surely, there are more conditions (e.g., some reflective capacity), and further mapping and understanding them can contribute to the important subject of freedom of education. here, however, we have focused on these two, trying to show both their importance, and the way heutagogy tries to integrate them with the aspiration for freedom of education, in a way that harms this freedom as less as possible. thus, heutagogy presents an educational paradigm which acknowledges the tension that is built-in within the concept of freedom, a tension we should strive to soften as much as possible, without hoping for its complete resolution, since 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(2008). learning and knowing in networks: changing roles for educators and designers. presented to itforum for discussion. retrieved from: http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a1 moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov university of delaware, usa lucinda pease-alvarez university of california santa cruz, usa abstract the purpose of this article is to examine and conceptualize our pedagogical and organizational experiences and understandings of how undergraduates and instructors participating in the uc-links project from fall 1996 to spring 1997 learned together through their engagements in undergraduate courses and afterschool activities with predominantly mexican-descent children at a local community center. we had started our project privileging collaboration and collaborative guidance as the way to approach our collective engagements; however, the events in the project pushed us to reconsider our practice. it took us 25 years to completely understand that what we have come to call “critical dialoguing in action” is how we now conceive of innovative organizational and pedagogical practice, which stands in contrast to the pedagogical and organizational notion of collaboration. we describe the efforts and struggles participants, including ourselves, encountered developing, implementing, and communicating about innovative teaching approaches and practices that we originally thought aimed to promote meaningful and collaborative learning. we call particular attention to dilemmas participants faced dialoguing about the dynamic teaching/learning processes that emerged in our project. these experiences prompted us to characterize our vision for participants’ involvement in the project as “critical dialoguing in action,” which contributed to our ongoing analysis and understanding of emerging dilemmas in our work. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. lucinda pease-alvarez is professor emerita of education at the university of california, santa cruz, where she also directed the teacher education program. her research focuses on the meaning making practices of multilingual children and the development of pedagogical perspectives that build on the resources that these children and their families bring to schools and classrooms. she is also engaged in research examining how teachers of immigrant students are responding to and negotiating educational policy. her scholarship in teacher education is focused on investigating how prospective teachers’ experiences with language minority children and their families outside of school informs their pedagogies. she is a co-author of pushing boundaries: language and culture in a mexicano community (cambridge university press) and teachers of english learners negotiating authoritarian policies (springer) and co-editor of learning, issn: 2325-3290 (online) moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a2 teaching, and community: contributions of situated and participatory approaches to educational innovation (lawrence erlbaum). acknowledgement we thank all participants for their dedication and contributions to developing and realizing the uclinks project. ��� introduction when we began the project that is the focus of this article, we conceived of learning/teaching as a collaborative endeavor involving multiple stakeholders. as educators, we believed in the notion of “collaborative guidance” developed by our colleague, barbara rogoff, together with her research group. according to rogoff’s conceptual framework, collaborative guidance involves examining and building on each other’s ideas and actions in order to work toward a common goal or to solve some shared problem (matusov, bell, & rogoff, 2002; rogoff, 2014, 2016; rogoff, matusov, & white, 1996; rogoff, mejia-arauz, & correa-chávez, 2015). however, as we describe below, we became increasingly frustrated with the concept of collaboration as it proved to be constraining and inadequate, prioritizing agreements over disagreements, which, we felt were especially important when it came to negotiating the diversity of perspectives and goals held by stakeholders in a community-university partnership known as ucsc links. consequently, as we reflected on the events that we describe here, we embraced the challenges in our collective work, moving away from collaboration, away from shared goals, away from shared problems, and away from agreement and consensus as the engines of guidance and collective action, turning toward a bakhtinian notion of dialogue (bakhtin, 1999). in describing the experiences and perspectives of those who have participated in the uc links project between fall 1996 and spring 1997, we aim to share with the reader a meaningful educational event that represents an important departure from what we have experienced as university students and faculty and from the collaborative approach that we had endorsed. while several themes emerged through our involvement in the project, we feel that critical dialoguing in action stands out as a central feature of our work. critical dialoguing in action involves participants considering alternative ideas and recursively testing them in dialogue and in practice. the qualification “in action” emphasizes that testing ideas involves their application in the participants’ practice rather than just through discourse. that is to say, our engagement in this project is a story about learning what it means to critically dialogue with others, which was sometimes both very painful and very exciting. participants often found their involvement in the project painful when, from their vantage point, their (and our) closely held and cherished beliefs were questioned, critiqued, or challenged. at the same time, many of them were excited and pleased as they discovered new commitments that they might like more than old ones and engaged in warm and caring relations with their collaborators on projects that mattered to all involved in them. profile of the ucsc-links project established in the fall of 1996, the uc-links project was a multi-campus initiative that involved undergraduates and low-income k-12 students attending after school programs. according to project founders, uc administrators supported this initiative because they saw it as part of outreach efforts aimed at mitigating the effects of proposition 209, which eliminated the use of affirmative action as a means to equalize the educational and economic opportunities available to minority populations. the overall purpose of the uc-links fifth dimension system was to develop a “community-university pipeline” for low-income moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a3 youth through the development of innovative research-driven education, based on informal learning assisted by university undergraduate students. the projects were comprised of afterschool programs for youth that were established as partnerships between community organizations and uc campuses. at ucsc, undergraduates of diverse cultural backgrounds enrolled in a variety of uc links courses in education and psychology that were linked to a practicum where they worked in an afterschool program twice a week for an hour-and-a-half with primarily mexican-descent lower-income elementary school children. the program was affiliated with a community-based organization committed to violence prevention and community empowerment. the afterschool program ran four times a week during three university quarters. it provided opportunities for undergraduates and children to engage in a variety of activities, such as arts and crafts (e.g., movie making, clay sculpturing), reading, computer games, internet exploration, homework, and outside activities (e.g., soccer and basketball games, hikes and walks, and excursions to nearby recreational spots). generally, many undergraduates opted to continue their involvement in the uclinks project more than one quarter by enrolling in other uc-links courses (e.g., continued enrollment ranged from a few students to over half of the class). many projects at other campuses adhered to and expanded upon the fifth dimension organizational structure developed by michael cole (2006). according to this structure, undergraduates worked with youngsters, many of whom come from low-income, minority communities, as they engaged in a range of computer-mediated activities, most of which were delineated via a set of task cards aligned according to the level of difficulty (e.g., beginner, expert). tasks cards were organized in what was termed a maze, which specified the order in which tasks were to be completed. after the children solved all the problems set out in the task cards in a specific room of the maze, they were allowed to move to the next room. the undergraduate students were responsible for guiding children as they moved through the maze. the wizard, an anonymous entity within the fifth dimension, resolved conflicts and bestowed permissions and awards on specific children. contact between children and the wizard occurred via email and other computer-mediated exchanges. once children completed the activities specified in all of the task cards in the maze, they were deemed to be wizard assistants1. uc links sponsors anticipated that programs across the uc system would draw heavily on the fifth dimension structure. as we mentioned above, the ucsc-links program was originally grounded in a commitment to developing a collaborative learning community. this commitment drove our decision not to adopt the features of other fifth dimension projects. we chose not to have a “wizard,” “maze,” or “task cards” as typical of other fifth dimension projects (cole, 2006; nicolopoulou & cole, 1993). based on our observations of other fifth dimension sites, we worried that these structural features, imposed by adults, fostered a learning milieu in which adults were primarily responsible for monitoring and directing children’s learning away from adult-child collaboration. relying on an anonymous wizard as an authority figure seemed to deny children, undergraduates, and others the opportunity to engage in a collaborative learning community characterized by shared governance and interpersonal problem-solving. moreover, given that two of the main emphases of our partner agency, the community center we worked with, were community building and violence prevention, we could not visualize how we could support these two emphases using an anonymous “wizard” to mediate conflict, especially when the children were expected to learn how to handle difficult conflicts that arose in the real-world settings outside of uc-links where no wizards are available. hence, children, children’s families, undergraduates, staff, and instructors (including the authors of the article) worked hard to negotiate problems and dilemmas in ways that maximized our collective resources. this entailed developing a communal approach to negotiating a problem in which all participants 1 further details about the definition, description, and justification of fifth dimension organizational structures may be found at: http://etec.ctlt.ubc.ca/510wiki/the_fifth_dimension#how_the_fifth_dimension_works. moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a4 shared and critically examined the many sides of an issue or dilemma at hand. we drew upon our own emerging perspectives on teaching and learning with an emphasis on involving all participants in defining and shaping practices that matter to them. building on our interest in developing a program that emphasized mutuality in ownership and our respect for the participants’ agency, our decision not to use a maze and task cards also emanated out of a concern that we could not predefine activities that children would find meaningful and engaging. in addition, opting not to use the “maze” related to leaders’ concerns that the “maze” preemptively decided the trajectory of children’s involvement in activities in ways that might create conflicts between the children, who might want to choose whatever activities they like, and the undergraduates, who might feel responsible for making sure that children complete activities in accordance with the way they were ordered in the maze (our thensuspicions were later supported by research of the 5th dimension projects, see nocon, 2005). we also could not envision how task cards could support and guide children as they participated in a given activity. the ordering of task cards from “simpler” to “more difficult” (predefined by the experts) did not seem like an adequate way to accommodate differences in children’s learning, interests, and skills, and to provide guidance. we thought collaborative guidance and learning opportunities would more likely optimally occur when children engaged in activities on their own terms, and in negotiation with other participants, without potential obstacles of, for example, a script, curricular endpoints, goals, and procedures defined in advance by so-called experts. our perspective on this issue was confirmed when we observed children redefining the goals of activities to make them fit their level of skills and interests. for example, from the game designers’ point of view, the educational computer game “oregon trail” involved planning, problem-solving, and decision making about how to survive as nineteenth-century american pioneers moving across the continent (bigelow, 1996). however, for some children learning how to play the game, the goal of the game became being the first player to move through the stages of the game to reach the stage where hunting animals was allowed so that they could shoot as many animals as possible. for some other children, killing all of the travelers as soon as possible was the initial goal of the game. at first, undergraduate students working with the children felt that children who took these approaches to oregon trail were “off-task” or “cheating” when playing the game. however, according to students’ later observations, children changed their goals as their playing skills and familiarity with the games progressed (see a similar observation of children's involvement with "oregan trail" in another afterschool program, matusov & smith, 2011). in our view, task cards with prescribed procedures and goals attached to games like “oregon trail” would have contributed to unnecessary conflicts between undergraduates and children (nocon, 2005). these conflicts would have possibly disrupted the students-children’s relations, inhibited the children’s playful activities, and limited the nature of the guidance undergraduates ultimately provided children (and vice versa). the organization and flow of our courses distinguished our project from other fifth dimension programs. at ucsc, uc-links courses were flexibly organized to help undergraduates become actively involved in designing a safe learning environment for the children and themselves and reflect on and analyze their experiences with the children in order to help them. undergraduates were expected and encouraged to critique the existing classroom and practicum practices, raise concerns and issues, provide suggestions on how to make changes and address concerns, test their proposals in practice, and participate in decision making about program practices. when students and instructor disagreed about ways of implementing and changing pedagogical practices and defining problems, students’ suggestions and definitions were not overruled by the instructor but rather considered and weighed against: 1. the possibility that the instructor’s views might be wrong or problematic, moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a5 2. the opportunities for critical reflective learning that might occur if students were able to implement their own plans, even if an instructor deemed them to be problematic or even wrong, 3. the wellbeing of all the participants as a result of the students’ suggested actions, 4. the development of the students’ authorial agency (i.e., we considered our students to be the authors of their own education), and 5. the support that students’ actions required. opportunities for reflection and analysis were organized through a variety of venues that included in-class and online discussions, debriefings following practicum sessions, and group projects that involved students investigating some aspect of their work with children. from sociocultural transformation of participation to critical dialogue in action as we have mentioned, our work with children and undergraduates was originally guided by sociocultural and collaborative conceptual and pedagogical approaches that conceive of learning as participants’ transformation of participation in community practices (lave & wenger, 1991; matusov, 1998; rogoff, 1990). pedagogical perspectives that draw upon sociocultural and collaborative views of learning emphasize participants’ collaborative and voluntary involvement in meaningful activities of their own choosing. through their collaborative interactions, participants consider and act on issues, inquiries, and/or tensions of concern to them as they work toward a shared goal. in this way, participants’ actions converge to attain a single goal. their engagement in activities is supported and transformed as they collaborate with other community members so that all participants play active and flexible roles in the learning process. as participants engage in shared endeavors of cultural, communal, and personal significance with others, they gradually come to take on new roles and responsibilities (engeström, 1990; rogoff, 1990). this perspective conceives of learning as meaning-making that leads to a collaborative agreement among participants who engage in shared endeavors (rogoff et al., 1996). a key feature of a collaborative approach that is also an important aspect of critical dialoguing is its horizontal organization. that is to say, participants’ roles and relationships in the dialogue are not hierarchically structured. participants, regardless of their ages and experiences, engage in predominantly horizontally-oriented interactions where they fluidly share roles and responsibilities in each other’s learning. using bakhtin’s philosophical framework of ontological dialogism, we tried to treat all the participants as having “consciousnesses with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). our current notion of “critical dialoguing in action” is influenced by the work of matusov and marjanovic-shane who have introduced the notion of “critical ontological dialogue,” which values and builds on disagreements, misunderstanding, and dissensus in the field of dialogic pedagogy (marjanovic-shane, 2016; marjanovic-shane, meacham, choi, lopez, & matusov, 2019; matusov, 2009, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, 2015, 2019). thus, in contrast to the notion of collaboration, critical dialoguing in action is not predicated on the idea that participants share or must come to share experiences, cultural practices, goals, or understandings. further, unlike conventional approaches defining dialogue only as forms of linguistic expression (bakhtin, 1986), critical dialogue in action involves testing diverse ideas in a dialogue, in which participants with differing, yet valuable experiences are engaged together verbally and nonverbally in dialogic moves of action and reflection. the goals of critical dialoguing in action go beyond the discovery of a “correct” answer or finding a collaborative resolution to a problem to encompass processes of transforming ownership-based engagements as participants jointly consider and moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a6 enact or undertake their activity or interaction. ownership-based engagement2 involves the legitimacy of all participants to define and redefine the goal of the activity and the nature of their discourse. consequently, part of critical dialoguing entails not assuming or privileging specific cultural experiences, practices, goals, or understandings. all of these aspects are open to examination and transformation at any point in the process of addressing a topic, problem, or dilemma. further, the notion of establishing a common ground or consensus is not a goal of critical dialoguing. when resolutions to a problem do emerge in critical dialoguing, they are often temporary and yield a new chain of problems and considerations that beg further critical dialogic reflection and action that test alternative ideas. thus, from this critical dialogic perspective, education is viewed as a mainly deconstructive, rather than a constructive process (marjanovic-shane, 2016; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, 2019). this perspective is contrasted with a sociocultural perspective that often views education as creative or closed socialization in an existing practice, which is a constructive process (lave & wenger, 1991). hence, the dialogic process we describe here is characterized by a spiraling, meandering, and often unique trajectory rather than a universal linear from here to there, from process to product, from means to ends pathway. it means that participants reconsider a past concern from a different vantage point, thereby rendering a multifaceted and unpredictable spin on the way they come to participate in the project. for example, instructor and undergraduates considered the progress in their practice by comparing new and old problems, by pondering the consequences of their actions, and by reevaluating their priorities, goals, and values -in other words, their new ways of being (argyris & schön, 1978; lave, 1992, april). in the following sections, we focus on the events that have led us to introduce the notion of “critical dialoguing in action.” these events led to important transformations in both the project and the participants’ learning. we call attention to the significance and facets of these events by illustrating specific challenges participants encountered that disrupted their practice and even threatened their communal ecology (matusov, 1999). these events were moments that helped us became intently aware of and critically reflective about differences in the actions, meanings, purposes, and perspectives among all participants engaged in uc-links practices and community. although we could not fully conceptualize these challenges and our new dialogic approaches to them when they occurred, we view these challenges as important crossroads or milestones for the project’s continued wellbeing as they were moments of transformation. you can’t order people to collaborate having many students in the project, who actively subscribed to an adult-run educational philosophy, based on adults’ unilateral decision-making, posed an interesting dilemma for us as we had tried to introduce a collaborative educational philosophy based on mutuality and shared responsibility for providing guidance, managing learning, and evaluating our practices (rogoff et al., 1996). basically, we wanted to mold all our students in our collaborative educational philosophy and our particular views on social justice. but we came to realize that we wanted to make them like us. by adult-run, we mean a pedagogical perspective that is grounded in the notion that adults define and direct children’s learning. in conventional school settings, this most often begins with adults identifying the gap between what students have already known and what they must know by testing children’s ability to accomplish specific skills, with a focus on determining what children don’t know (i.e., a “deficit model”). 2 not any engagement is owned by the participant. for example, students’ engagement in school activities are often driven by the external forces of a reward-punishment system, like grading, that are not owned by the student. moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a7 these tests are used as the basis for deciding on what adults will do to guide or support children in learning those skills that they appeared not to have mastered. when we began the project, we thought teaching and learning were always productive goaldirected activities of bringing our students to some desired outcome, but we struggled to define what this desired outcome should be for our students. did we want to make all the students think like us, or should we leave them alone with their own beliefs, or should we all (students and professors) decide on some collaborative agreements? what about those students who wanted to try other educational philosophies – how would we address their needs and provide them with appropriate guidance on how they should engage with children? we experienced a tension between the visionary aspect of our collaborative approach to teaching and our pluralistic pedagogical approach, emphasizing students’ freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and even assume pedagogical ideas and values that are different from our own (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). our dilemma was that, on the one hand, we could not wholeheartedly support some students pushing for creating an adult-run learning environment in the uc-links project. essentially, those students seemed to want to bring conventional schooling to the afterschool program, apparently motivated by their conviction that many of the minority children were failing in their schools and, thus, needed extra adult guidance and practice. we did not believe in such an approach, saw a lot of problems with it, and could not use it and do it well (i.e., the visionary concern). we thought that many children had been failing in schools where an adult-run environment is common, and it did not make sense to us to repeat the same educational environment at uc-links. on the other hand, we were aware that overruling and dismissing the students’ concerns and requests for guidance within their adult-run teaching approach would be in itself a reconstruction of an adult-run approach by us (i.e., the pluralistic concern). we did not want to impose our view of a collaborative (and later critical dialogic) educational model on the students who did not see a need for it. we were stuck, as the following event illustrates. during the first uc-links class that eugene (the course instructor and the first author of this article) and the two teaching assistants (tas) taught, there was an intense discussion among the instructor, tas, and undergraduate students about how to run the uc-links program better. the class was split almost equally into two groups of students expressing two different approaches. the first group of students insisted that there was a need to test children’s reading, writing, and math skills in order to diagnose and prescribe individualized guidance for these children as is often done in conventional schools (i.e., the “adult-run approach”) (rogoff et al., 1996). these students thought time playing games with children was not educational – they wanted to introduce school-like assignments to the children. the second group of students did not support the idea of testing children suggesting that doing so would be a repetition of the same type of guidance that failed the children in the first place (namely in schools). these students also disagreed with the claim that the games did not have any educational value. they backed up their opinion by citing examples of children learning reading, math, and writing while playing games (i.e., probably reflecting a combination of the “collaborative” and “child-run”3 approaches) (rogoff et al., 1996). however, examples of children’s learning as they played games provided by the second group apparently did not convince the first group of students. they thought that these examples were merely 3 in a “child-run” approach, a teacher leaves children to their own devices and provides minimum help when being asked. in a “collaborative approach” the responsibility for guidance and learning are flexibly distributed between the student and the teacher (rogoff, et al., 1996). we wonder if the derogatory term “glorified babysitters” used by some of our students referred to the “child-run,” hands-off, pedagogical approach (although it might also have referred to some other pedagogical approaches). moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a8 “incidental learning” (i.e., learning that happens by an incident – random, unpredictable, unsystematic, contextual, and fragmented4) and instead argued for the establishment of a more structured learning environment at the uc-links program, where learning is targeted, predictable, systematic, universal, and holistic. eugene really liked the class discussion among the students because it demonstrated students’ ownership of the program as well as their differing views and educational philosophies. however, he did not know what to do with this philosophical diversity – especially in terms of how to guide the students. on the one hand, he wanted to side with the second group of students because he agreed that the children and students learned a lot from playing games together. he also thought that learning through playing games was authentic because it was embedded in the activities that the children liked and selected. while children played games, they were interested, competent, active, successful, struggling, and willing learners. on the other hand, eugene did not want to silence (or be perceived as silencing) the first group of students if they openly opposed the second group of students. eugene also suspected that one of the reasons that the first group of students did not think that children learn from playing a variety of games was related to the difficulties that the students had guiding and supporting children as they played games. he had observed the first group of students interrupting the children’s play with their scaffolding, quizzing, or, what can be called, schoolish guidance (dorr-bremme & mcdougall, 1999, april). scaffolding involves simplifying tasks to be learned by children, managing children’s motivation, challenges, and frustration, and developing procedural steps of guidance that predictably lead children to the curricular outcome preset by the adult (rogoff, 1990; wood, bruner, & ross, 1976). in contrast, in order to support children as they played games, undergraduates needed to understand the children’s dynamic and situated goals and needs (including needs for getting help) and appreciate and acknowledge the children’s ideas. in addition, children and undergraduates had to enjoy being with one another (matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016). so, after some trepidation and soul searching, eugene made the decision to prioritize students’ ownership of the program and their own learning through active exploration of their philosophical disagreements. thus, when students in the first group decided it would be good to test children to diagnose the children’s educational deficits in order to decide what they should be taught, eugene decided not to prevent them from doing so. however, he asked those students to report back to the class what transpired during those occasions when students tested or attempted to test children. he also suggested to the second group of students that they provided the class with more examples of occasions when children learned to read, write, or do math while playing games. in the spirit of critical dialoguing, eugene wanted the first group of students to first experience the process of testing children and then reflect on the consequences of their testing. in particular, he wanted the first group of students to compare the nature of their relationships with the children they tested with those of the other students who spent time playing games with children. there were uncertainties and risks involved with these suggestions, such as the possibility of creating a community of school-like test makers/takers; children losing interest in the program distrusting it, and deciding not to attend; and disciplinary problems along with adversarial relations that might emerge among the students and children. 4 cf. the notion of “incidental learning”, “a subcategory of informal learning is defined by watkin as a byproduct of some other activity such as task accomplishment interpersonal interaction, sensing the organizational culture trial-and-error experimentation or even formal learning. … incidental learning … almost always take place although people are not always conscious of it” (marsick & watkins, 1990, p. 12). moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a9 a few days later, saul5, a student from the first group, came to eugene and one of the teaching assistants after class to ask for advice about how to test all children in reading, writing, and math. after trying out a test that he had developed on a few children, saul asked the class instructor how to discipline and keep children on task when testing their academic skills for educational deficits because many of the children, whom he was testing, moved away from his testing activity and, thus, from him. saul saw the solution to this problem as tighter control of the activities and eliminating “non-educational,” “purely entertaining,” games at the ucsc-links project. in fact, he wanted the instructor to enforce the use of only “educational” activities in the program so that children would learn academic skills and not be distracted from participating in his tests. one of his math tests was on the recognition of geometric figures, using the microsoft paint software for windows 95. he asked young children at the community center to draw and label geometric figures (e.g., triangles, circles, squares) thinking that this test would prepare the children for learning the software as well as diagnosing their educational “handicaps” and “deficits.” he was convinced that this was particularly important for minority children who often failed in schools. saul thought that, unlike traditional paper and pencil tests, his computer tests were authentic because they were “hands-on” and “fun.” however, he noticed that many children chose to play with the microsoft paint program instead of completing his test. in discussion with saul, eugene tried to focus on revealing saul’s tacit assumptions about teaching/learning. he asked saul why he needed to test the children if he could see how well they worked with geometric figures while drawing on the computer. saul replied that he thought kids needed to label or distinguish geometric figures in isolation in order to work with these figures across different abstract contexts (like in school). saul insisted that “objective testing” helps reveal children’s “deficits” – i.e., the gaps between the children’s performance and correct solutions, – which according to him was always the prerequisite for sensitive guidance (cf. the notion of "scaffolding" in rogoff, 1990; wood et al., 1976). saul and eugene’s conversation then shifted to a discussion of microsoft paint (i.e., what kind of activities could be done with children using this software). sitting at the computer and playing with the program, eugene and saul concluded that microsoft paint was not a very good program for free drawing, but very useful for making collage pictures using preexisting geometric forms available in the program. eugene suggested that saul develop several attractive pictures (e.g., faces, houses) using the geometric forms available in microsoft paint, show the pictures to the children, and help them create their own collages. saul was a bit skeptical about how creating collages with children would help him to diagnose “where the kids are in math.” eugene suggested that saul could try this approach, compare it with his own approach, and then report his findings in class. 5 a pseudonym. moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a10 saul resonated with this advice, probably, thinking that a more attractive activity would keep children on his task of testing them. eugene liked this activity for a different reason – he thought that the children might find this activity to be more playful, meaningful, and challenging than saul’s original test. eugene’s suggestion that saul and the children make collages with microsoft paint was an occasion of socalled “boundary object” (star & griesemer, 1989), meaning coordination of participants’ (his and saul’s) different perceptions on and uses of the same object. boundary objects make participants coordinate their diverse perceptions, functions, and roles in the activity without the participants having a shared goal or a shared vision of the activity. at the same time, eugene and saul set up a different type of examination. eugene wanted saul to compare the suggested learning activity with his experience testing children to determine which educational activities would feel better for him and for the children. at the same time, saul wanted to compare eugene’s activity, understood by him as another “test,” with saul’s original test – to see which test was better in his judgment. however, at the time, neither eugene nor saul would probably understand what “better” meant for them. what was “better” that emerged in saul’s experience and his reflection on this experience? a day after making collages with children, saul rushed to meet with eugene and the tas. he told eugene that he was very excited because the children liked the activity, learned a lot from it, and, for the picture 1. eugene’s suggestion of a learning activity based on microsoft paint for saul: make a face out of the given geometrical figures (the presented face is a possible solution). moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a11 first time, enthusiastically asked him for guidance. saul reported that kids often assigned themselves the task of drawing different pictures using the same geometrical figures that he had given them. he also reported that when he told the kids to draw the same type of picture, they would do so using different geometric figures. for the first time, he relaxed with the children at the center, had a good time with them, and felt good about himself as an educator. he also acknowledged that he was very surprised to find out that testing for students’ “deficits” was not necessarily a prerequisite for sensitive guidance. he stated, “i almost did not think about guidance” – the activity itself and the children guided him how to guide them (cf. de haan, 1999). the new relationship with the children and new guidance felt better for saul than diagnosing the children’s “educational deficits” and scaffolding to eliminate those “deficits.” later in class, saul shared this experience and told his classmates that he was confused about his role working with the children and unsure about the approach to teaching that he advocated. some students, who, like saul, advocated adult-run approaches to teaching and learning in the past, also revealed that they had problems engaging with children in the games and other activities. in contrast, students moving toward more children-run, collaborative, and dialogic approaches to teaching and learning provided alternative approaches and examples of how to engage more effectively with the children while playing games. as saul and other class members struggled with their roles in working with children in the ucsclinks project, they found themselves in a community of people seeking child-run, collaborative, and dialogic types of guidance while also struggling with their own transmission-oriented educational backgrounds and with the diversity of the alternative, often poorly defined, approaches to guidance. at the end of his second ucsc-links course, about three months after he attempted to test children, saul wrote the following reflection about his learning experiences in the program. different opinions, different thoughts, different frustrations, all make up for a different learning experience. this change in structure can be difficult to adjust to at first. i recall my frustrations in the first quarter. we are so used to having teachers impose their structure on the student that we get frustrated when the responsibility is put into our hands. eugene refuses to impose his structure on his students, and creates one which tries to be as free and open to student collaboration of course curriculum as possible (saul, final paper, march 19, 1997). instead of dismissing or suppressing saul’s concerns about testing the children (i.e., that the children were trying to avoid him and his tests), eugene took them seriously and tried to help him address them from his own perspective. he believed that the solution to saul’s problems lay in testing and examining his own pedagogical desires and commitments by trying to improve the quality of his interaction and relationship with children. his proposal was to make saul’s activity meaningful for the children because they owned the activity and participated in defining the goal of the activity (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). saul liked this proposal because it allowed him to test the children while securing their cooperation. when saul was diagnosing the children’s deficits using school-like tests, the goal of the activity was not open and negotiable for the children, which perhaps caused them to resist saul’s testing and avoid saul. in trying to help saul, eugene wanted saul (and similar students) to experience helpful and enjoyable engagements with the children in order to compare those engagements with saul’s experience testing the children. eugene simply wanted saul to enjoy working and being with the children (matusov et al., 2016) rather than struggling to keep them on task and/or diagnose their educational deficits in order to fix them so that they fit some assumed “norm” (matusov et al., 2016). however, it was up to saul to judge his new experience and compare it with the old one. if upon reflection, saul had concluded that giving children tests was better than making pictures and collages with them, eugene would have accepted saul’s conclusion (cf. bakhtin's notion of "the internally persuasive discourse," bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a12 in fact, some of saul’s classmates were convinced that testing was a more productive activity than collage making. eugene didn’t object to this conclusion as long as everybody continued to examine their pedagogical approaches and values through critical dialogue6. arguably, neither eugene nor saul clearly understood just what exactly a productive way would be to engage with and help the children. nevertheless, they were both committed to defining and enacting such an approach. eugene had struggled between drawing on a collaborative or dialogic approach to engaging with and supporting saul. saul struggled with how to engage with children productively by making them willing and successful testers. thus, during their meetings, eugene and saul had created a zone of shared problem solving focused on searching for productive ways to engage with the children and one another. although as the instructor, eugene had different visions about how to approach the problem, he recognized that saul’s concerns were serious and real. the shared problem for eugene and saul was “a boundary object” (star & griesemer, 1989). in our view, saul’s transformations occurred because a dialogic process of goal-negotiation and value-testing in the project became open for all participants. as participants engaged in this process, they revealed their differing pedagogical goals and implicit values; then tried these goals out, and evaluated the desirability of their consequences on the children and saul. this dialogic approach to providing guidance does not require a shared vision or a common shared educational philosophy or collaboration toward a common goal on the part of the instructor and the students (fullan, 1993; hargreaves, 1994). for a problem to be shared in critical dialogue, it does not need to be perceived in the same way by all the participants (matusov, 1999). rather, all participants should recognize and acknowledge a concern that generates the problem as genuine, real, important, and serious for others who have this concern, even though they may disagree with how to address it or what makes it a concern. in this case, saul had been dissatisfied with his engagement with the children while testing and diagnosing their “deficits,” while eugene, who had seen difficulties in how saul worked with the children, worried that saul and the children might develop adversarial relations. the instructor was concerned about saul’s engagement with the children. however, saul saw the problem in the ucsc-links program as related to a “distractive” environment, while eugene saw the problem as related to saul’s efforts to monopolize and control children’s activity. aspects of critical dialoguing in action the events described above compelled us to reconsider our commitment to a sociocultural collaboration framework that conceives of participants as engaging in the process of jointly moving toward a common goal. according to this framework, collaboration involves resolving, reducing, neglecting, compromising, and, even at times, suppressing and manipulating participants’ differences in the name of a particular desired collective outcome. this outcome can predate the collaboration itself – i.e., collaborationpoïesis, using an aristotelian term (e.g., fixing a bike together). alternatively, the collectively desired outcome can emerge in the collaboration – i.e., collaboration-praxis, using another aristotelian term (e.g., solving an ill-defined problem together). recently, collaboration has become one of the primary virtues in social sciences. however, collaboration can be overreaching and abused. we concluded that there are two major problems with collaboration in general and specifically in education. the first problem is that not all instances of collaboration are honest. we define honest collaboration as occasions when: 1) the participants join in freely, instead of being coerced or manipulated, 2) the participants freely choose to neglect their 6 our educational pluralism guides us to accept students who may not be willing to engage in a critical dialogue as we do not believe in a forced critical dialogue. genuine critical dialogue can be only voluntary. moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a13 disagreements and/or to limit their attempts to explore issues in-depth, and 3) all participants desire and agree to achieve a collective outcome. imposed, non-honest, collaborations include those occasions when some participants manipulate, exploit, coerce, oppress, or suppress other participants. participants cannot be ordered to engage in honest collaboration. the second problem with collaboration is that honest collaboration is not always possible and/or desirable. it is not always possible for the participants to honestly resolve, compromise, or limit their disagreements or desire the same collective outcomes. in line with this view, british philosopher isaiah berlin argued for a radical pluralism of values. according to berlin, radical axiological pluralism … rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. it recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values (kelly, 1978, p. xv). moreover, in our view, there is no collectively desired outcome in education; – unless, of course, it becomes training, enforced by high-stake exams, tests, and a rigid, poïesis-like, practice (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). if a general goal of education is to promote students’ unique voices as they are involved in a range of practices of their choice; or to engage the students in critical examinations of their life, selves, world, society, and education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019), the uniqueness of students’ subjectivities is both the foundation and outcome of such education. given this goal, there is no single subjectivity or voice that counts as an outcome but a variety of voices and subjectivities. in critical dialogue, the participants – the teachers and students – develop unique positions, unique worldviews, unique intonations, and unique desires that are brought into dialogues with each other and with other sources, outside of the immediacy of the classroom. a framework that encompasses critical dialoguing in action more fully captures the ways undergraduates and instructor transformed their participation in the ucsc-links project. these critical dialogues in action were venues of engagement during which we posited, drew upon, refined, questioned, and re-conceptualized our varying alternative perspectives, experiences, and goals, especially as they related to addressing issues or dilemmas in the afterschool program. as participants engaged in critical dialogue disagreed with one another, they questioned and deconstructed project goals and their roles, values, and interests. so far, we have abstracted several aspects of this process. to illuminate the dialogic nature of these aspects, we juxtapose them with a one-sided, adultand child-run, and collaborative alternative approaches to teaching and learning common in us educational practices. 1. critical dialoguing expects, invites, and supports shared ownership for activities and education without assuming the common understanding, common goal, or agreement – all participants engage in decision-making and defining direction, values, and goals of the project, which do not need to be in agreement with each other. the curriculum, instruction, and learning trajectory are emergent and divergent here, rather than prescribed in advance. guidance is driven by critical dialogue: by questioning, examining, testing, deand re-constructing the participants’ ideas, actions, goals, and values. in contrast, an adult-run approach expects the instructor to assume full responsibility for designing guidance and managing students’ learning. teachers who adhere to a child-run approach, moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a14 do not provide any or only minimal guidance to the students in their decision-making and process of defining goals. teachers who are attracted to a collaborative approach insist on having a common curriculum, common goal, and/or agreement-driven guidance. 2. critical dialoguing develops, encourages, and supports public space for free discussions of hot issues, dilemmas, problems, and concerns of all project participants. all concerns are welcomed, respected, and recognized as genuine and serious. there is no expectation that participants will agree with one another. sometimes, participants in ucsc links did not even agree about whether something is a problem (e.g., not testing children had been a problem for saul, but not for eugene). an adult-run approach tends to silence those students who try to express opinions that contradict with, interfere with, or are considered wrong or irrelevant from the instructor’s point of view. a child-run approach often involves leaving the students to their own devices and figuring out ways to articulate and deal with their own concerns and issues. a collaborative approach privileges agreement as it is grounded in the notion that participants must agree if they are to move forward and conceives of disagreements as temporary and as problems to be resolved and overcome (latour, 1987). 3. critical dialoguing fosters a safe learning environment so that participants’ mistakes, explorations, and reflections about the consequences of their own actions are safe and valued resources for their own and other’s learning. the differences among students and between the teacher and the students are the subject of critical dialoguing. an adult-run approach is likely to focus on ways to prevent students from making mistakes, to punish students for making mistakes, and/or to save the students from experiencing “negative consequences” for their actions. a child-run approach is less likely to provide support to the students for reflecting on their actions and/or not to interfere in order not to “spoil,” “contaminate,” or disrupt students’ exploration and creativity. a collaborative approach makes learning unsafe when a student does not enter the consensus making process of deciding upon agreed-upon curricula, goals, approaches, and solutions to problems. 4. critical dialoguing promotes a zone of shared legitimate problems, disagreements, and concerns among all participants. an adult-run approach often recognizes only those concerns that the instructor considers as legitimate by ignoring, overruling, diffusing students’ concerns, and/or by making any emerging “hot” (i.e., concrete, close, personal, and urgent) issue “cold” (i.e., abstract, remote, anonymous, and general). a child-run approach tends to treat all problems and concerns as a matterof-taste or opinion -individual preferences that cannot be judged or be the subject of dialogue with each other. a collaborative approach insists that in the long-run, everything should be common and agreeable. 5. critical dialoguing generates alternative and diverse approaches, perspectives, values, and frameworks. an adult-run approach is more likely to limit students’ focus to the instructor’s approaches, perspectives, and frameworks. a child-run approach encourages the instructor to avoid sharing their own ideas, values, and preferences in order not to impose their views upon students’ original creative thinking. a collaborative approach treats this diversity as temporary, to be resolved, and undesirable in the long-run. critical dialoguing in action promotes participants trying out their ideas in practice and then collectively evaluating them in a safe learning environment regardless of how disagreeable these ideas and evaluations are to some participants. participants’ reflections are embedded in an on-going critical dialogue (cf. bakhtin, 1986; bibler, 2009; morson, 2004). indeed, these dialogues may best be perceived of as inprocess and never-ending. an adult-run approach does not provide a safe learning environment for moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a15 students to discuss their ideas. instructors tend to shut down any disagreements that occur among students, thereby shutting down students’ efforts to make meaning. they also often punish students who do not provide “correct” answers expected by the teachers. instructors assuming a child-run approach may encourage students to examine their ideas in what appears to be a safe learning environment. but because instructors are committed to leaving students to their own devices, they are removed from students’ deliberations and discussions and offer little if any feedback. instructors committed to a collaborative approach may try to finalize dialogue by imposing an agreement either via silencing, use of the students’ ignorance, or manipulation. for example, socratic dialogues described by plato involved socrates’ leading questions, hiding alternatives from his interlocutors, and providing false choices (matusov, 2009). collaborative instructors may avoid certain controversial issues because they don’t envision students coming to a consensus over these issues. there is another important difference between our critical dialoguing in action and the adult-run, child-run, and collaborative approaches. what defines each of these latter three approaches is their focus on establishing a monopolistic hold on educational institutions. further, proponents of these approaches insist that only their approach is correct and worthy of being enacted in schools. in contrast, critical dialoguing in action is pluralistic in nature as it is grounded in principles that support and legitimize alternative perspectives. paraphrasing the famous words on pluralism and freedom of speech often attributed to voltaire, matusov and marjanovic-shane insist, “i disapprove of your educational philosophy, but i will defend … your right to use it in your… school” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. e3). critical dialoguing as a transformation of participants: our struggles finally, we want to discuss two issues related to possible limitations of critical dialoguing as a way of developing and participating in our uc-links project. the first issue involves a discussion of resources and institutional support necessary to sustain critical dialoguing. the second issue involves our concern that our participation in critical dialoguing privileges and, thus, imposes a worldview that may closely relate to our cultures and backgrounds and/or those of individuals in positions of power. projects grounded in a commitment to dialogic pedagogy need permanent and stable institutional support from states, universities, businesses, and communities in order to sustain themselves. tenuous finances and meager institutional support have caused them to become further ensnared in traditional institutional hierarchies that have privileged adult-run pedagogical approaches. for example, in order to obtain funding, some uc links projects agreed to focus their efforts on enhancing children’s academic achievement as measured by standardized assessments. consequently, these projects spent time developing those measures of achievement, assessing students using them, and involving students in adult-run activities that they thought would enhance their performance on those assessments. currently, funding many educational projects is overwhelmingly top-down and monopolistic in nature. this process focuses on discovering the “best practices” in education and then imposing them on educational institutions. funding for projects is collected via taxes, centralized, and then redistributed by government agencies based on their (monopolistic) priorities. so-called best practices in education are those that government agencies tend to deem as worthy of funding. in contrast, we advocate an approach to funding that is based on and calls for educational pluralism (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). this requires democratization and bottom-up redistribution of resources so that local projects decide on how they will use the funding. interestingly, this was what ultimately occurred when it came to funding the ucsc -links project. in light of our perspective on the 5-d model that we describe above, we did not want or plan to use this moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a16 model or any of its features. however, while uc links leaders provided us as well as other campuses with resources on how to implement the 5-d model, they did not require campuses to use it. in our subsequent discussions with uc links leaders, michael cole and charles underwood, they raised different perspectives about the value of using the 5-d model across all uc-links projects. michael cole told us that he couldn’t tell different campuses what to do in their specific programs. yet he saw the value of using the 5-d model across campuses, which was evident when he told us that by allowing projects to freely implement the 5-d organizational model, users of that model could refine it in ways that responded to differences in the contexts in which the various programs were embedded. michael cole thought that implementing the fifth dimension model across sites was akin to “throwing it up into the wind and seeing where the seeds land …” in contrast, charles underwood had espoused much broader principles, defining the uc-links project as having the following four components: 1) an afterschool program, involving informal learning activities between undergraduates and kids, 2) an undergraduate course for the undergraduates participating in the afterschool program, 3) ongoing collaboration with the community, and 4) reflective research on the emerging practices. charles underwood told us that he favored a program where each project was free to generate their own approach to their work with children, undergraduates, and communities. as he told us, “i believe in building from the ground up and building from ... local knowledge and local structures ... and look[ing] at ways people build things up in their culture and their social world.” the differences and disagreements about the project’s vision did not preclude the participants from supporting each other’s efforts, including the provision of funding. as we further reflect on our own frames of reference and how they have contributed to the way we participated in the uc-links project, it occurs to us that our notion of critical dialoguing may privilege and, thus, impose our own world view shaped by our cultures, societal positioning, and experiences (matusov, 2018; matusov & lemke, 2015). to some degree, we feel that this is true, and we are ambivalent about that. on the one hand, from our vantage point, our backgrounds and understandings are building materials for our practices. hence, they both delineate and support our practices. our backgrounds situate us in the universe of history, give us home (i.e., anchor and solace), and compel our passions. on the other hand, our biases, particularly when endorsed by institutions and status quos power hierarchies, might compel us and others to endorse specific pedagogies and cultural practices. we think there is an inherent tension between participants’ biases and the pedagogical pluralism necessary for a genuine dialogue. this is particularly apparent in our struggles to accommodate or transcend our own adult-run and collaborative teaching backgrounds and institutional arrangements so that we can fully embrace a pluralistic dialogic philosophy of teaching and learning (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). having experienced traditional adult-run and collaborative schooling approaches first as students, and then as teachers, we feel that we probably will continue to utilize these pedagogical approaches. indeed, as autobiographically adultrun and collaborative instructors, often, our immediate response to issues or challenges that emerge in our classes is to draw upon our arsenal of adult-run and collaborative practices. further, the institutions we work in are organized in such a way as to encourage and almost demand that we engage in adult-run, autocratic, educational practices. finally, there are occasions when the power dynamics that come into play during critical dialoguing can complicate our work. for example, we have experienced occasions when some undergraduates who identify as lgbtq have felt strongly that they should be able to reference their sexual orientation and/or gender identity in their work with children while others have disagreed. consequently, on occasions when lgbtq students have done so, for example, in response to children’s questions, they have been criticized moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a17 by others. for some of these students, these critiques have been painful as they have interpreted them to be expressions of disdain or hate. on these and other occasions, instructors who have struggled to support dialogue when undergraduates appear angry or upset find it “easier” to insist on a specific course of action regardless of context (e.g., a rule banning any reference to sexual orientation or gender identity) or to seek consensus. in realizing and accepting these tendencies, we are learning to confront them directly and not to be paralyzed by, deny or rationalize our adult-run and collaborative pedagogical actions (matusov, marjanovicshane, & gradovski, 2019). this realization helps us to avoid unreasonable expectations from others and ourselves. thus, discovering and using elements of traditional adult-run and collaborative philosophies in our practice is not evidence of our failure, hypocrisy, or surrender but something that we expect from ourselves and are ready to confront. in this process, we are working toward transcending known and unknown limitations of our own sociocultural, historical, and personal upbringings. references argyris, c., & schön, d. a. 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(2012). diverse approaches to education: alienated learning, closed and open participatory socialization, and critical dialogue. human development, 55(3), 159-166. doi:10.1159/000339594 matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2015). typology of critical dialogue and power relations in democratic dialogic education. in k. jezierska & l. koczanowicz (eds.), democracy in dialogue, dialogue in democracy (pp. 211229). farnham, uk: ashgate publishing, ltd. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). the state’s educational neutrality: radical proposal for educational pluralism (editorial). dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4, e1-e26. http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/170/114 doi:10.5195/dpj.2016.170 matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2019). intrinsic education and its discontents. in l. tateo (ed.), educational dilemmas: a cultural psychological perspective (pp. 21-40). new york: routledge. matusov, e., & smith, m. p. (2011). ecological model of inter-institutional sustainability of after-school program: the la red mágica community-university partnership in delaware. outlines: critical social studies, 5(1), 19-45. matusov, e., smith, m. p., soslau, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & von duyke, k. (2016). dialogic education from and for authorial agency. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4, a162-a197. http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/172/130 doi:10.5195/dpj.2016.172 matusov, e., & von duyke, k. (2010). bakhtin’s notion of the internally persuasive discourse in education: internal to what? (a case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). in k. junefelt & p. nordin (eds.), proceedings from the second international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin stockholm university, sweden june 3-5, 2009 (pp. 174-199). stockholm: stockholm university. morson, g. s. (2004). the process of ideological becoming. in a. f. ball & s. w. freedman (eds.), bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 317-331). cambridge, uk; new york: cambridge university press. nicolopoulou, a., & cole, m. (1993). generation and transmission of shared knowledge in the culture of collaborative learning: the fifth dimension, its play-world, and its institutional contexts. in e. a. forman, n. minick, & c. a. stone (eds.), contexts of learning: sociocultural dynamics in children's development (pp. 283-314). new york: oxford university press. nocon, h. d. (2005). productive resistance: lessons from after-school and engaged non-compliance. american journal of education, 111(2), 191-210. rogoff, b. (1990). apprenticeship in thinking: cognitive development in social context. new york: oxford university press. rogoff, b. (2014). learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: an orientation. human development, 57(2-3), 69-81. rogoff, b. (2016). culture and participation: a paradigm shift. current opinion in psychology, 8, 182-189. moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education eugene matusov, lucinda pease-alvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.292 | vol. 8 (2020) a19 rogoff, b., matusov, e., & white, c. (1996). models of teaching and learning: participation in a community of learners. in d. r. olson & n. torrance (eds.), the handbook of education and human development: new models of learning, teaching and schooling (pp. 388-414). malden, ma, us: blackwell publishers inc. rogoff, b., mejia-arauz, r., & correa-chávez, m. (2015). a cultural paradigm—learning by observing and pitching in. in advances in child development and behavior (vol. 49, pp. 1-22): elsevier. star, s. l., & griesemer, j. r. (1989). institutional ecology, "translations" and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in berkeley's museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. social studies of science, 19(3), 387420. wood, d., bruner, j. s., & ross, g. (1976). the role of tutoring in problem solving. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 17, 89-100. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 11. matusov^j (layout)^j promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university^j 2023-01-12.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a245 teacher as a benevolent dictator: promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract this essay1 provides a grounded critical discussion of why a professor might limit their undergraduate students’ sovereignty of educational decision-making to promote an opportunity for a democratic dialogic culture in the class situated in a conventional university. on the one hand, both democracy and dialogue require voluntary participation by the students in their education and dialogue and their sovereignty over collective decision-making and educational reasoning. on the other hand, this participation is based on the students’ socialization in a special culture which might often be at odds with their sovereignty. it is difficult for many students to freely choose democracy and dialogue in education when they are embedded in a conventional educational institution based on kantian educational paternalism and foisted education. also, the students are often culturally unfamiliar with such concepts as “democracy,” “dialogue,” and “self-education,” let alone their practical implications. to address these contradictions, i introduce the notion of the “teacher as a benevolent dictator.” i discuss, problematize, and analyze the forms of this benevolent dictatorship, its potential pitfalls, and promises. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." acknowledgment i would like to thank ana marjanovic-shane, kevin curry-knight, peter gray, rebecca english, bob hampel, and an anonymous reviewer of the dpj for discussions of, critical feedback on, and helpful suggestions for this essay. i am also thankful to jim rietmulder, who was the first person to call me “a benevolent dictator” while reflecting on my innovative democratic dialogic teaching practice. ïïò setting a problem to introduce the problem of a teacher as a benevolent dictator in democratic dialogic education, let me start with the following event that occurred in the fall of 2018 semester in one of my undergraduate 1 a shortened version of this paper was published in matusov (2021c) issn: 2325-3290 (online) promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a246 classes. i tried to run all my classes democratically by engaging my students in decision-making about their own education through dialogue as much as possible. one of these opportunities for decision-making was to let the class choose what to study: at the end of each session, the students decided what topic to study next from a list of curricular topics (“the curricular map”) that we created together (similar to what was described by duberman, 1969). a student would propose a topic from the curricular map and then try to convince their peers to choose it (among other topics proposed by other students). then the students usually voted on all proposed topics to select the topic for the next class meeting. a second opportunity for decision-making concerned the “pedagogical regime” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017) the students would prefer for themselves. the students have a choice of four pedagogical regimes that i provide to them, and they change according to their wants and needs: 1) open syllabus for “self-responsible learners and lurkers,” where students can make all decisions about their own education – what to study, how to study, with whom to study, when to study, – including their final grade. 2) opening syllabus for “other-responsible learners,” where i made the initial decisions about the organization of the class and then gradually transferred responsibility to the students. the students participating in this pedagogical regime can choose “virtual attendance” instead of attending the class meetings, which, in fact, generate possibilities for a variety of versions of the opening syllabus pedagogical regimes for the students based on their own choices, creativity, interest in the subject, and life circumstances. that was the default pedagogical regime from which the students could switch. 3) non-traditional closed syllabus for credential students who just want to be certified via passing exams, similar to receiving a driver’s license. 4) non-syllabus for “prisoners of education,” i.e., students who were forced to take this class by the university but felt that the class was unnecessary and painful. they were given any grade of their wish and said “goodbye” to avoid education being a “cruel and unusual punishment”2 for them. third, i tried to turn any emerging problem or organizational question in the class into an opportunity for collective deliberation and democratic decision-making (e.g., should we have a break in our 3-hour class meetings?). finally, the fourth area of decision-making was how to make collective decisions – by majority vote, by consensus, by flipping a coin, by making individual decisions, by delegating decision-making to me, by splitting into groups having common curricular interests, by studying solo, and so on. i used to believe that students’ decisions about their education would promote their learning activism and ownership of their education (matusov, 2015). i was not afraid of their “bad” decisions because i expected that they would experience the consequences of these “bad” decisions and would correct them through democratic decision-making. that was my philosophical belief in democracy in education (and elsewhere) (cf. hayek, 1994). however, my views have gradually changed as my students, and i experienced the educational consequences of this approach. 2 cf. the wording of the united states constitution. promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a247 just before the 2018 fall semester started, i was asked to teach a course on cultural diversity for future teachers and students who needed to meet the “multicultural” university requirement. because of this last-minute change, i could not choose a room for this class. usually, i request a so-called “pbl room” (problem-based learning) for my classes with flexible desks that allow for students’ groupwork. the rectangular room assigned had a conventional set of moveable desk-chairs in several rows facing two long blackboards. students were sitting at their individual desks with their laptops, which we used in class. i employed diverse learning activities of group study and discussions, individual studies involving some learning activities, whole-class video watching, and whole-class discussions. for the group studies, students moved their desk-chairs together to form small circles, but then they returned to the row formation. during whole-class discussions, a few students tried to attend to and engage in the discussion, some were consumed with whatever was on the screens of their laptops or smartphones, and some were in and out. the class had multiple pedagogical regimes giving students opportunities to attend or not attend classes. i had a small core of students who came all the time or almost all the time. another group of students was coming from time-to-time, about half of the time. the third group of students came rarely. finally, the fourth group of students never came to the class after an initial couple of meetings. at the end of each meeting, i asked the attending students to write “exit reflections” on their class experiences. they frequently said that the class was interesting but boring. the class was often interesting for the students because of the presented material, dialogic provocations, emergent controversies, and deep discussions. however, as some of them openly shared in the exit reflections and in class, boredom arose when very few students participated in the class discussions, and many partially or fully disengaged themselves from the class. in response, i told my students that it was very normal within any collective discussion for participants to have more interest at one time in the discussed topic and then less. i said it would be very difficult to come back for a more engaging part of the discussion if students disengaged themselves by doing something else on their laptops or smartphones when they felt bored. my students agreed as they all had an experience of this while watching interesting movies or tv shows, but this discussion of the problem did not help (matusov, 2022, submitted). at mid-semester, we had a town hall meeting to discuss how we felt about the class and how to improve it. a student suggested we change the desk-chair arrangement to make a circle. this student argued that the circle arrangement might boost students’ engagement and attention during whole-class discussions. we discussed the pros and cons of this – it seemed that the idea got support from their peers. but at the next class meeting, this proposal was voted down by one vote. the students who opposed this proposal argued that they liked the privacy and anonymity of the desk row formation – the circle formation would provide too much visibility for them (perhaps a reference to teacher’s surveillance through the foucauldian panopticon?). the problem of disengagement continued along with the students’ complaints in their exit reflections. a few weeks after the mid-term town hall meeting, a student i will call peter, who attended this class regularly, came to my office. peter demanded that i impose the circle arrangement of the desks. he argued that my insistence on democratic decision-making about emerging problems in the class ironically created vicious cycles of student disengagement. based on their prior experiences with conventional education, students decided to protect themselves from educational impositions. however, this protection created the very same disengagement and alienation the students complained about. with my philosophical beliefs in democracy, i asked peter to bring this idea to the class meeting. but he demurred. peter said that his peers would once again vote this idea down. he argued that many of his peers could not make an informed decision because they needed to test the ideas before deciding on them – to experience these two different sitting arrangements and their consequences to make a thoughtful decision. it made sense to promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a248 me. i agreed to follow his idea for me to impose the circular desk formation unilaterally, but i also decided to promote the class’s reflection on that at the end of the class. another innovation peter suggested was for me to leave the class during small group discussions, so it would make more sense for the groups to report back to me (and each other) about their discussions when i come back. before that, i had tried to move from group to group during the small group discussions. i agreed to impose that change as well. so, i did. in the exit reflection on the class meeting with these changes and on the online discussion forum, all students commented on how engaging the class became. they mostly focused on their excitement with the discussed topic of the class, which was “preschool in three cultures: japan, china, and the us” (tobin, davidson, & wu, 1989). however, one student, mike (a pseudonym), also reflected on my imposition of the new sitting arrangement and small group discussions in his exit reflection, today, i was excited to learn about the different ways that different cultures teach students in the classroom environment because i actually want to teach in japan one day, and learning about these cultures has really broadened my view of education in other cultures. i was also very surprised to learn how lenient japan was in terms of its teaching and behavior management, and i was also surprised to learn how safe the country is in terms of crime and how smart people are in that country compared to america (japan is better in both aspects). this was probably my favorite class overall. i really thought the desk arrangement this time around was really good, as it helped me connect more with my peers, and i really enjoyed the self-study session, where only us students talked amongst ourselves for twenty minutes about the topics from the video we watched, as that really made us feel really connected to one another through brainstorming (november 11, 2018). at the end of the class meeting, the students were unanimous in continuing this circular sitting arrangement and their small group discussions without me. after this class meeting, i met with peter, who made the original proposal for my imposition. he suggested that i should develop a list of necessary impositions to present to students at the start of each class at the beginning of the semester. students should experience my impositions promoting their learning engagement first and then consider changing them later if they find some problems with them. peter also volunteered to be an informal teaching assistant for the next class on cultural diversity that i would teach in another semester. peter insisted that not all educational or organizational decisions must be made democratically for authentic democratic education to be promoted. at least, not immediately. peter argued that students must experience and value authentic education, in which they can define and explore their interests, develop their authorial opinions, and critically examine them first. the students should have a taste of it to make informed democratic choices and decisions. the teacher must impose authentic education first on the students, who have been raised in and by authoritarianism, and only then engage them in democracy. this authoritarian role of a democratic teacher in building a democratic culture might be called a “benevolent dictator.” another good example of a situation that requires the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship in my classes was an issue of a class break. for many years, i intentionally did not schedule a class break in my almost 3-hour undergraduate and graduate classes. i expected that the issue of class break could become one of the first issues where the students sought our class's democratic decision-making. and often, i was right. however, if this issue emerged earlier in the semester when a classroom learning community was not yet formed, most students voted to shorten the class rather than have a refreshing break in the middle as they initially suggested. after the class had developed a taste for genuine education of critical exploration of inquiries of the student’s interests, the class voted for having a break in the middle of the class and not to shorten it. also, the time of shortening the class vs. having a break varied. when the class time was shortened, students shortened it to 20 to 30 minutes (out of 2 hours and 45 minutes). when the students promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a249 set a break in the middle of the class, it was between 5 and 10 minutes. when students experience genuine, authentic education, they often do not want to shorten the length of the class meeting because these students apparently feel that their in-class experience becomes important, constituting valuable events in their lives (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). this is education for education’s own sake – intrinsic education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). my interpretation of this phenomenon is that when the students lack ownership of education in the class, they want to protect their time from the impositions of the class. however, when they started valuing and feeling ownership of the class, they did not want to shorten it. for example, one student from the described class wrote on their anonymous online evaluation of the class at the end of the semester on the prompt of how to improve the class, “make the class meet more than just one night a week so we can cover more topics.” the students seemed to become hungry for education and wanted more of it, not less. that is how i decided to include a mid-class break as a part of my teacher’s benevolent dictatorship and not to offer it to my students for their initial democratic decisionmaking. finally, a student from one of my undergraduate 2018 fall courses, leslie (a pseudonym), who later volunteered to be an unpaid teaching assistant to continue her experience with democratic education, criticized my multi-syllabus class with the four pedagogical regimes described above. leslie appreciated the freedom of choice i was giving to the students, but she argued that i was giving it too soon on the first day of the class. many students had not experienced democratic dialogic education in their life, knowing only oppressive alienated education. that was why some of them rushed out of my class by choosing the open syllabus pedagogical regime, stopped coming to class, stopped learning anything and got an unconditional a. for example, a fall 2018 student of mine wrote on the ratemyprofessors.com website about the class, giving a 4 out of 5 rating for the class: take for a multicultural requirement or breadth! the 2nd class we went over the course and you have options as to your syllabus, choose an open syllabus. i literally wrote a paragraph or two on what i planned on doing in this class and stuck to it for the semester and was able to grade myself with an a! no hw [homework], no exams, no attendance, still an a (from https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/showratings.jsp?tid=586).3 i thought this type of student was prisoners of education masquerading as an autodidact. leslie disagreed. although she acknowledged that some of them might be true prisoners of education, the problem was that they were not informed enough and, thus, could not make an informed choice. leslie suspected that some of them might like democratic dialogic education if they had a chance to taste it. leslie insisted that i must impose the opening syllabus pedagogical regime on my future students to give them a flavor of democratic dialogic education. rereading students’ anonymous feedback at the end of the semester, i noticed that some of my past students discussed this issue. some endorsed leslie’s argument, but others insisted on preserving students’ choices from the beginning of the class. after agonizing, i decided to accept a role of a benevolent dictator and run a pedagogical experiment in the fall 2020 semester. at the beginning of the class, i gave my students a choice of only three pedagogical regimes; i withheld open syllabus. all of my students chose the opening syllabus during that semester. just a week before the grace period at week#6, i opened a possibility for open syllabus. about half of my students in the class decided to attend the class on a regular basis. out of the students who chose open syllabus, only one-third seemed to be hidden prisoners of education as judged on the quality of their self-assessment and volunteer participation in the class forum. 3 it is interesting that this student did not choose the prisoner of education pedagogical regime, available to them, even though they were obviously not interested in studying multicultural education but rather apparently prefer to “cheat” on the open syllabus. promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a250 reflection my original philosophical belief in democracy as a self-correcting political regime apparently required revisions. first of all, within a class community, this self-correction requires time to experience problems, become aware of them, develop alternatives, and test these alternatives to see if they address the problems satisfactorily or not. a 15-week university semester is too short for this pedagogical experimentation for many of my students. the students might get stuck with their bad decisions without having an opportunity to test them and propose and experience alternative solutions. most students will never take another democratic class with me (or with anybody else at my university). we meet once a week for two hours and 45 minutes. however, democracy as a culture requires time to develop. for example, one teaching problem in my past classes was how i, as a discussion facilitator, should offer the public floor. should it be only by students volunteering by raising their hands, or should i call on some students who do not volunteer, or should it be “the 5th amendment” – i would have the right occasionally to call on nonvolunteering students, while they would have the right to remain silent by saying, “pass,” without any explanation (shor, 1996). in the past, i discussed this issue with my students at the beginning of the semester, and the students predictably voted for the volunteering solution – i could only call on students who volunteered. and this solution predictably had a problem, about which i had informed my students in advance. rather quickly in the semester, two groups emerged: a talkative minority and the silent majority. in some classes, the students corrected this during a mid-term town hall meeting by proposing and voting on the 5th amendment rule. it often made a difference, but it was too late in the semester to experience deep, engaging, and inclusive discussions. many of my past students recommended making the 5th amendment rule built into the class’s initial pedagogical regime and not letting the students vote on it at the beginning. as one student pointed out, the postponement of this rule robbed them of many learning opportunities because their discussions were truncated by the limited number of students who participated. yet, at times, a late awareness of the problem of their own education can be an important benchmark for their growth and important learning. for example, one student in their anonymous online evaluation suggested the following class improvement: “maybe have some requirements for coming to class; as much as i loved doing outside research with other members of the class, i think it didn't encourage my attendance and now that the semester is ending, i wish i had spent more time learning in class rather than outside of class.” the student started appreciating the learning classroom community of their peers and the professor only at the end of the semester and wished to be forced4 to attend the class by the teacher, a benevolent dictator, from the beginning of the semester. elsewhere, i refer to this phenomenon of a student asking their teacher to force them to study what the student wants to study as autopaternalism (matusov, 2022b). i argue that autopaternalism is another form of self-education. however, it is highly possible that this student might not develop this value of their own intrinsic education and the classroom community if they were forced to come to the class through autopaternalism. in my view, it is important for students to experience certain problems in order to appreciate intrinsic, authentic education and a learning community, even at the expense of losing some important educational opportunities. i do not think that intrinsic education can be problem-free or waste-free. elimination of problems and waste can kill the organic nature of intrinsic education. on the other hand, too many problems and too much waste can be toxic. 4 in my interpretation of the student’s wording “encourage my attendance,” i think the student referred to the teacher’s coercion. at the beginning of the class, i discussed with my students the pros and the cons of studying alone, outside, of the class but i think this discussion might feel too abstract for some students who had not experience freedom of self-studies outside of their classes with all their pluses and minuses. promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a251 the second way to understand the concept of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education is within the notion of the culture of authentic (self-)education. most of the students have not experienced a democratic pedagogical regime and came from authoritarian, if not totalitarian, pedagogical regimes. as one of my students wrote on a class online forum, as a very anxious student, i very often find myself doing work just for the sake of seeing an "a" on my transcript, only to get it done and get the good grade. very rarely do i find myself driven to learn solely for fun, however you [eugene] bring up the point of students enjoying challenges. personally, i love problem-solving and trying to discuss issues to find solutions. i took a [math education] course last year called problem-solving strategies and it was my favorite class ever. there was not much structure; we would come to class and solve whatever mathematical riddle we were thrown and that was that. i think with a progression towards removing grades, we must also reevaluate how we go about teaching courses. a lot of courses currently are organized in a way that logically progresses toward certain exams or projects, often failing to slow down and discuss the content. my problem-solving class and this class (educ258) are the two classes in college that have made me feel the most fulfilled. i feel like i really use my potential because i am not worried about retaining every minute detail in fear that it will come up on an exam. instead, it is more about listening to others’ views, reconstructing my own views, and gaining insight on issues that i never previously thought about. this class and that class both are teaching me applicable strategies that will come in handy, and i think if we are to remove a grading system alltogether, we should attempt to shift towards more classes like this (fall 2020). most of my students come from a defensive student culture5 mainly concerned with protecting themselves from teachers’ coercive engagement in alienated studies (assignments). when given opportunities to make decisions about their own education, their decisions are guided by their defensive student culture. the less engagement coupled with higher grades, the better. however, as a result, this defensive culture leads the students to even more disengagement and alienation, which, in its own turn, undermines their democratic decision-making. students’ true educational decision-making starts with caring about and valuing their education. the more they are alienated from their own education, the less they are interested in their decision-making about it (or their decisions are guided by their alienating defensive culture). this is the vicious cycle that peter was talking about. in contrast to the first issue discussed above, this problem cannot be solved by time – simply by the students experiencing and reflecting on the problem. vicious cycles of defensive alienation are not self-correcting. without having a taste for educational excitement in the classroom, it is difficult for the students to develop care for their own education that leads to their informed decision-making. now, i think i was wrong to believe that democratic education starts with the students’ decision-making about their own education. i think it starts with experiencing authentic (self-)education that creates excitement in the students. this experience of authentic education gives rise to the students’ sense of nostalgia for it – e.g., see mike’s exit reflection above – (cf. my notion of "education for nostalgia," in matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016) which leads to a need for its protection, nurturing, and expansion through their collective and individual democratic decision-making6. this problem of transition from authoritarianism to sovereignty (e.g., democracy) is not new. in the old testament, moses let the israelites wander in a desert for 40 years before they could reach the 5 this notion is somewhat similar to mclaren’s notion of “defensive teaching,” when some conventional teachers use their instruction that promote the institutionally expected order and student unconditional cooperation in the classroom (mclaren, 1993). 6 there is somewhat similar reasoning and approach emerging in the environmental education. some educationalists argue that environmental education should start not with focusing students on growing ecological humans-made catastrophes and problems, at it is often done in many schools, but with focusing on students’ appreciation and enjoyment of the nature (yang, 2015). promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a252 promised land to shake off their culture of slavery. constitutional clauses of unpopular freedoms (e.g., the rights of the accused or criminals, the freedom of unpopular and disruptive speech), difficult to change, have been developed in some democracies to guard against populism guided by authoritarian cultures. similarly, i wonder if, in the context of otherwise conventional/authoritarian institutional education, a limited authoritarian protectorate to nurture authentic democratic education is also needed and warranted. an authoritarian postponement of the open syllabus pedagogical regime or imposition of the 5th amendment rule described above is a good example of such limited and, arguably, justified, benevolent authoritarianism. teacher as a benevolent dictator in democratic dialogic education i conceptualize “teacher as a benevolent dictator in democratic dialogic education” in the following way. first, a benevolent dictator invites and then, if accepted by the students, throws the students into democratic dialogic education (cf. heidegger's and sartre's notion of "throwness," heidegger & stambaugh, 1996). in my view (and in view of some of my students, see below), the nature of invitation allows some or all students to reject this invitation and remain firmly in the grip of conventional authoritarian education. this feature makes the invitation benevolent. still, in my view, the invitation is always dictatorial because, in the context of the otherwise conventional authoritarian institution, the teacher has the institutional power to return to the authoritarian pedagogical regime at any time unilaterally. it is the teacher who grants students their educational freedoms, which the teacher can also revoke at will. this hovering power of granting and withdrawing the students’ liberties constitutes the teacher’s domination (cf. pettit, 2014). students intuitively know that, and it takes time for them to trust that the teacher won’t do this7. for example, a student of mine, who had chosen open syllabus and designed her learning activities without summative assessment (she assigned an unconditional a for the class to get away from grading altogether), sent me her investigative essays (self-assignments) at the end of the semester. i asked her if she sent them to me for my feedback. she explained that she just wanted to show to me that she completed the promised work for the class to make sure that she “deserved” an a for the class. i replied that according to her own open syllabus design, it was she who made all the decisions about the class grade. she answered that she wanted to make sure that this was still the case. she wrote, “i don’t want any surprises.” some students may not fully trust the democratic teacher until the semester is over and the students see that the teacher has stood by their words8. second, a benevolent dictator is responsible for the emergence of a truly educational culture in the classroom to give students a taste of educational excitement. here are some examples of students’ articulation of their taste for genuine (self-)education in their anonymous online evaluation of the class at the end of the semester: • “this class really encouraged students to enjoy and explore the material in their own interest. we acted as a community of learners using the class website and class discussions.” • “[the class] allowed the students to choose how they wanted to learn and what they wanted to learn in their own manner without the stress involved in their learning experience. it was a very stress-free yet content-filled class.” 7 i am thankful to jim rietmulder, a founder of a democratic school called “the circle school,” for pointing out this phenomenon to me. 8 i suspect that the students who choose open syllabus pedagogical regime might have diverse motivation and it might change during the semester. some of the open syllabus students might be autodidact, some are lurkers, some might want to guarantee an a grade, some might be “prisoners of education” who believe that a grade “must be earned” even when “the work” (i.e., study) is meaningless for them. promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a253 • “this course allowed me to go into an interview and project what i have been learning on my own and landed me the job!” as i discussed above, if students do not have a taste of genuine (self-)education, they might not care about it, and, as a result, their democratic decision-making might be guided by a concern to protect themselves from teachers’ educational impositions and colonization of their time, attention, ideas, and energy and from the teachers’ and peers’ potentially negative judgments and evaluations (gates, 2020). as shown above, their defensive decision to preserve the privacy of their sitting arrangements, to cut class time, or to allow the teacher to call only on students who volunteer to talk and so on often creates vicious cycles of students’ alienation from their own education. in turn, this alienation increases the students’ defensive decision-making and helps to promote a defensive student culture that causes the alienation in the first place. thus, i argue that a teacher, as a benevolent dictator in a democratic dialogic education classroom, has to unilaterally promote a student culture of authentic education, at least during the first part of the class term. after the participating students have enough chances to get a taste of democratic dialogic education to judge its value for themselves, the teacher’s unilateral grip on the organization of the class and its design can be (gradually or abruptly) relaxed, and the responsibility for it can be shared with the students through increasing democratic decision making. then, students’ possible rejection of democratic dialogic education becomes their informed choice. the 5-week postponement of the open syllabus choice for my students described above is an example of this process. currently, my benevolent dictatorship at the beginning of my undergraduate and graduate classes is limited to the following unilateral arrangements: 1. an individual choice of four pedagogical regimes a. open syllabus for autodidacts – i postponed it for the first five weeks of the class, and i asked my students to submit their initial open syllabus design on a special online class forum for my feedback. this choice becomes available for my students only after the first five weeks of the semester; b. opening syllabus for other-responsible learners with initially non-negotiable learning activities, organization of the class, and choices backed up by grading; c. non-traditional closed syllabus for credential students – a set of graded exams and learning activities; d. non-syllabus for prisoners of education with an unconditional grade of the student’s choice and saying goodbye to the student; e. a grace period of 6 weeks of the 15-week semester to decide about a student’s pedagogical regime from the list above. 2. default classroom pedagogical regime of opening syllabus, which includes: a. curriculum map – a list of possible curricular topics to study that can be extended by the students; b. democratic deliberative decision-making about what to study for the next class; c. a choice of who prepares and (co)teaches the class; d. teaching plans, the structure of the lesson, and learning activities, when i teach the class; e. the 5th amendment rule of whom the teacher can call on; f. name tags for everyone; g. music at the beginning of the class and during group/individual work; h. sitting arrangements in the class; promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a254 i. no homework (except one online posting per week) or exams; j. self-studies during the class (often as a part of the flip instruction); k. one minimum online posting without any limit (min or max) of wording on issues broadly related to the course between class meetings; l. 10-minute break in the middle of class; m. exit reflection at the end of the class; n. mid-term “town hall meeting” culminating with proposals for improvements of the class and democratic decision-making; o. main learning project, graded by the author(s) of the project and the class peers and/or the teacher – the student’s choice. in a case of discrepancy, the author(s) chooses the final score for the project on the graded continuum. also, the first draft of the project must be submitted to the class peers and/or the teacher for feedback; p. required attendance: either face-to-face or virtual (with several diverse options by its form – synchronous via zoom or asynchronous – and it's content); q. the final grade for the class is based on points for attendance, online participation, and main learning projects (or on the exams for credential students). of course, some students might have had prior experience with authentic and democratic dialogic (self-)education, and thus, they might need less or none of this benevolent dictatorship. when i have classes with many former students, they can heighten a sense of trust in the other students, who still don’t know me, or authentic democratic education. i expect the benevolent dictatorship to become unnecessary with some critical mass of seasoned and/or returning autodidact learners. however, why would university students accept the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education? i think that there are four major sources of acceptance. 1. the first is unconditional authoritarian institutional power. undergraduate and graduate students have been socialized for at least 12 years of their formative life in accepting authoritarian institutional power unconditionally. the students must unconditionally accept things just because the institution or its teacher said so through its rules, syllabi, and regulations. 2. the second is the students’ conditional trust in the teacher’s epistemological and pedagogical expertise (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). this trust is conditional: if the teacher proves to be relevant, helpful, and exciting for the students, the trust credit will grow. however, if students (some or all) find the teacher irrelevant, unhelpful, and boring, the trust credit will drop. 3. the third source of student acceptance of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship is the teacher explicating their dictatorship and providing reasons for their unilateral decision-making. the teacher’s reasoning dialogizes the benevolent dictatorship by addressing the students, encouraging them to ask questions, encouraging their counter-reasoning, and proposing their own suggestions for class improvement, thus, creating conditions for a legitimate and public challenge of the teacher’s dictatorship by the students. 4. finally, the fourth source is the teacher’s care of the students from day one of the class by asking for their feedback at the end of each class and addressing students’ concerns and complaints. in my classes, in addition to exit reflections, i created an online forum for anonymous feedback on the advice of my past students. also, students express their concerns about the class via an online class forum open to all students in the class or raise issues directly promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a255 in class and during the mid-term town hall meeting. the students get the message that their teacher cares about their concerns, well-being, and education and is eager to improve the class. in my view, moving the source of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship away from the unconditional authoritarian institutional authority toward the students’ conditional trust, the teacher’s reasoning, and the teacher’s care is important. when the class is progressing well, there are signs of this move. for example, at times, students ask me to choose the next topic for the class. however, when i do this, they demand from me an explanation of why i chose this particular topic – why this topic will be good for them in general and for the next class topic specifically. once i joked with them by replying that since they had asked me to choose the next topic, i had a right to select whatever topic i wanted without any explanation. the class erupted in protest. they said, “in our class, everyone must explain their decisions!” and threatened to withdraw their delegation for me to select the next topic. participatory democracy requires dialogue, while dialogue requires voluntary participation and students’ ownership of their education. in my judgment, this demand by the students reflects the weakening of institutional authoritarian power, at least in this class, the fading away of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship, and the arrival of democratic decision-making and government. pitfalls of teacher’s benevolent dictatorship even if it can be necessary and justified, the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship is pregnant with the potential for power abuse. dictatorship, the teacher’s unchecked unilateral power, creates plenty of conditions for abuse, while the teacher’s belief in its benevolence encourages an ideological cover-up of this abuse. a benevolent dictatorship can promote the teacher’s corruption, philosophical distortions, pedagogical failures, and even blunt abuse of power. first, the teacher’s corruption involves using the benevolent dictatorship to justify the teacher’s own benefits at the expense of the students. for example, many conventional higher education institutions nowadays demand from the teacher a promotion of credentialism, meritocracy, summative assessment, and, recently, in the us, strict surveillance of student attendance in their classes (as a condition for getting federal educational grants or loans). rejecting or compromising these demands by the teacher may undermine the teacher’s institutional survival or promotion. the teacher might be tempted to include these authoritarian institutional demands as a part of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for promoting democratic education. in other words, the teacher’s own institutional survival masquerades as a benefit of the students’ authentic education. i am not suggesting that the teacher’s survival in a conventional authoritarian institution has to be ignored or neglected – there can be diverse approaches and strategies to address it in diverse conditions (see for more discussion and examples of that in matusov, marjanovicshane, & gradovski, 2019). however, i argue that these approaches and strategies must be separated from the notion of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education to prevent the described corruption. second, the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship is prone to promoting philosophical distortions in the teacher. since the second aspect of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship aims to encourage students’ engagement in authentic education, it can be easily transformed into progressive education social engineering. as i argued elsewhere (matusov, 2015, 2021a; matusov et al., 2019), progressive education believes that “...any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (bruner, 1986, p. 129). thus, it is the teacher’s unconditional responsibility to find a way to teach every student what the teacher and/or society think is important for the students to learn. the main pedagogical question of progressive education becomes how to develop this “honest teaching” and make the student want to study promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a256 what the teacher chooses for the student to study – or, as the foucauldian scholar fendler (1998) put it, to create “the educated subject.” the holy grail of progressive education is the creation of an educational vortex (cf. the notion of "double psychologizing," dewey, 1902) that will suck all students into the studied subject matter all the time (matusov, 2021a; matusov et al., 2019). by making the teacher responsible for the educational outcomes, progressive education undermines the core belief of democratic education that the students are the final and ultimate authority for their own education (klag, 1994). in my view, progressive education promotes a wrong pedagogical desire and pedagogical goal in the teacher to make all students engage in genuine education rather than to offer the student a taste of it so that the student can start making informed decisions (matusov, 2021a). let me explain the difference between progressive education and democratic education in my understanding with the following analogy. when i was a little boy, i disliked smoked fish because it looked and smelled repulsive to me. at the same time, i loved dark chocolate candies. once, my parents suggested i take a few bites of smoked fish in exchange for chocolate candy. after some trepidation, i agreed. when i tasted smoked fish, i loved it. i did not need any bribe to eat it – smoked fish became one of my favorite dishes. my parents’ bribe encouraged me to test whether i disliked smoked fish. their goal was not to make me eat smoked fish but only to test my visual repulsion. similarly, in my view, the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education is aimed at engaging students in tasting genuine education. if they like it, they can start taking ownership of it. if not, they have a legitimate right to disengage. in contrast, progressive education uses its impositions to make all students like the unfolding education. i use the mid-term town hall meeting to engage my students in critical reflection and decisionmaking about what they like and dislike about how the class has been run so far and why. we also develop and discuss various solutions for perceived problems to shape the remaining class meetings accordingly. i believe that in democratic education, students are the final agents of what they like or dislike. as one student from the described class wrote in their anonymous online class evaluation at the end of the semester, “if you want to engage in this class, you can. if not, you do not have to. it is completely up to the student how much they want to get out of this class. this gives students the responsibility to want to learn.” in democratic education, students’ non-participation is legitimate and respected (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019; rietmulder, 2019). third, the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship can inhibit a self-correcting process and thus makes the class arrangement insensitive to the students’ individual or collective needs. it aims to suppress students’ “wrong” desires – the desires coming from their authoritarian past, discussed above and the teacher might see as educationally wrong. but it might also suppress the students’ “right” desires for educational self-determination and signs of emerging pedagogical problems. for example, once, i had a graduate seminar on the contexts for learning, where almost 20 doctoral students enrolled (matusov, 2022a). at some point in the semester, i noticed dissatisfaction among a small group of students regarding the topics that their peers chose democratically by majority votes. it took me a while to realize that i had three more or less stable groups in the class. the scientific paradigms defined the groups (kuhn, 1996) they espoused. the biggest group espoused the so-called “cognitive, information-processing” paradigm of comparing the human mind with a computer. in contrast, another smaller group espoused the so-called “sociocultural” paradigm of insisting that the human mind is shaped by culture, society, institutions, and practices (matusov, 2007). the third group was uncommitted and in-between. the accidental composition of the class gave a systematic prioritization to the cognitive paradigm over the sociocultural paradigm in selecting the class topics. my original unilateral pedagogical design of the class, based on a selection of one topic by a majority – i.e., my benevolent dictatorship – was insensitive to the educational needs and interests of the second, smaller student group promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a257 interested in the sociocultural paradigm and its particular curricular topics. when i realized that, i brought this problem up to the class, and we decided to have two topics for each class at the same time, forming two groups who studied two different topics embedded in two distinguishable paradigms. the in-between students had a choice of joining either of these two groups. it seemed to solve the problem. later, this issue on an individual rather than on a group level forced us to develop the notion of “asynchronous virtual attendance,” where students could stay at home to study a topic of their own interest different from the interest of the class. also, a student could come to class to do that if he or she wished to do so. in my view, although the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship might be necessary in some cases, it is always pregnant with pedagogical and educational insensitivities. for example, a student can always dynamically change their attitude toward their own role in the class, while my current design insists that the students make up their minds within the 6-week grace period. the worst-case scenario is when the teacher overcommits to the benevolent dictatorship at the expense of the students’ personal or collective needs, interests, and freedoms and rationalizes their own pedagogical failures by blaming and shaming students and by making the students’ resistance to the benevolent dictatorship illegitimate (see matusov & brobst, 2013, for our description and analysis of this case). when that happens, the dictatorship stops being benevolent and becomes outright malevolent. fourth, i am a benevolent dictator granting my students freedom of self-education. genuine freedom cannot be granted but only affirmed. if i have the power to give freedom, i can withdraw it at my will, and many of my students feel that by constantly asking my permission for their decisions or confirmation of their freedoms. my democratic education is caged by the conventional institution based on kantian educational paternalism believing that experts have the right to force students to study and decide what the students must study, how, with whom, where, and so forth (kant, 1784; matusov, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b). to be not caged, i should not have this power of student empowerment created by the institution of foisted education. finally, fifth, the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education can lead to blunt abuse of teacher power. for example, in the past, when running the class as an entirely opening syllabus pedagogical regime, i was grading and provided formative feedback on my students’ main learning projects according to my judgment of the quality of their work and their educational needs. when my authorial judgments went along with the students’ educational desires and visions for their own work, this feedback and grading worked more or less well. however, my feedback, especially rubrics-based grading, became oppressive and abusive when we were in discord. using the institutional authoritarian power of grading, i tacitly demanded my students unconditionally please me. of course, they had a right to argue with me, but it was always up to me to accept or reject their arguments. essentially, it was “my way or the highway” to lower their final grade for the class. this violation of trust in democratic dialogic education and in me as their democratic dialogic teacher at the end of the semester was heartbreaking, as some of my past students shared with me (duberman, 1969; eisenstein, 2006; holt, 1982; kohn, 2011). i agree with duberman, who argued that “only when the necessity to please others is removed, can the main job of selfevaluation begin” (duberman, 1969, p. 260). i had to rethink and redesign my feedback and grading to address this problem of in-built abuse of the teacher's power by making my feedback and grading a student’s choice along with their own and peer feedback and grading. as it is now, i think that the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education must be limited to organizational-relational issues and not go into ideas, values, or attitudes. students should feel free to express any ideas, values, and attitudes for their critical examination and deconstruction as much as possible – only when these ideas, values, and attitudes lead to relational crises should the limitations on students’ free speech and expression be considered (see my discussions of these issues here, matusov, promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.331 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a258 2018; matusov & lemke, 2015). teachers must not impose their cherished ideas on the students in the name of objective truth, social justice, or some other reason. i believe that students’ free examination of ideas, values, attitudes, and desires in a critical dialogue should be promoted and prioritized. in sum, although necessary under some conditions, i argue that the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education creates opportunities, conditions, rationalizations, and temptations for hijacking the democratic spirit of educational governance and for the establishment of new educational authoritarianism. conclusions in this essay, i have argued that the main goal of the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic dialogic education situated in a conventional university is to give students a taste of genuine (self-)education as the precursor of students’ ownership of their own education and democratic governance of it. when there is a critical mass of students in a class who have experienced genuine intrinsic education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019) – who are deeply interested in the subject matter, have enough time and energy resources free from other demands, and assume the role of autodidacts – the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship for democratic education is probably unnecessary. for example, this is how one autodidact student articulated their gratitude for an opportunity to define their own learning in an anonymous online evaluation at the end of the semester, “the most exciting/unique feature of the class was the ability to create or modify your own learning journey. this helped me tailor my learning to relevant and helpful subjects, and i could not be more grateful for the opportunity.” this student did not seem to need any benevolent dictatorship from the teacher. when present in class meetings, these autodidact students can guide each other and non-autodidact students, who might need extra help in organizing their own learning. even more, the autodidacts can sometimes become benevolent dictators for other alienated students who need a taste of genuine education. in some cases, a benevolent dictatorship for democratic education can be shared between the teacher and those autodidact students. when there is no critical mass of these autodidact students, those few autodidact students can be excused from the teacher’s benevolent dictatorship through multiple pedagogical regimes in the class i briefly described above (especially through the open syllabus pedagogical regime that autodidact students can choose). however, one big challenge that still remains unaddressed in my pedagogical practice so far is that individual students, alienated from and inexperienced with authentic intrinsic or autodidact education, may need different forms, intensity, and levels of benevolent dictatorship at different times and with different curricular topics to get a taste of genuine education. references bruner, j. 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(2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators: palgrave macmillan. matusov, e., von duyke, k., & kayumova, s. (2016). mapping concepts of agency in educational contexts. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 50(3), 420–446, doi:10.1007/s12124015-9334-2. mclaren, p. (1993). schooling as a ritual performance: towards a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (2nd ed.). london ; new york: routledge. pettit, p. (2014). just freedom: a moral compass for a complex world (first edition. ed.). new york: w.w. norton & company. rietmulder, j. (2019). when kids rule the school: the power and promise of democratic education. gabriola island, canada: new society publishers. shor, i. (1996). when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press. tobin, j. j., davidson, d. h., & wu, d. y. h. (1989). preschool in three cultures: japan, china, and the united states. new haven: yale university press. yang, c.-p. (2015). education for appreciating environment: an example of curriculum design of natural aesthetic education in taiwan. international education studies, 8(5), 88-100. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word 5 sandler the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:23 the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler independent scholar, israel sergeiy sandler is a scholar and translator (into english and hebrew) of mikhail bakhtin's works. he is the author of multiple articles on bakhtin's philosophy, as well as of studies promulgating a bakhtininspired approach to linguistics and the philosophy of language. ��� in the summer of 1989, the heated debate around the theories of french poststructuralist thinkers (michel foucault, jacques derrida, and others) and their american followers was all the rage in many intellectual circles. it is as a contribution to this debate that boris groys originally published the article, which has now been brought to us in english translation on the (virtual) pages of the dialogic pedagogy journal. the contribution was quite sophisticated—a critique of some central ideas of poststructuralism (rejecting the notion of the subject, the “death of the author”) using poststructuralism’s own methods of genealogy and deconstruction. more specifically, groys offered a critique of poststructuralism carried out in the form of a deconstructive reading of one of poststructuralism’s “ancestors”, and his choice of “ancestor” was mikhail bakhtin. this, of course, required reading bakhtin’s work as poststructuralism avant la lettre—a strained interpretative exercise to say the least.1 but strained interpretations can sometimes nevertheless yield interesting results. and so it happened that groys’ article became a somewhat scandalous classic in the field of bakhtin scholarship. within the context of bakhtin scholarship, groys’ article is a mixed bag, the way strained interpretations are prone to be. as we shall see below, groys chanced upon one truly valuable insight when, in the last paragraphs of his piece, he analyzed bakhtin’s notion of carnival in nietzschean terms, and more specifically as a sort of self-sacrifice. beyond that, groys’ reading of bakhtin is a deconstruction, and at its best, it can do what a good deconstruction does: expose latent tensions and potential contradictions in the deconstructed text, pose new questions for later research into it, and point to weaknesses in more “traditional” readings. in its weaker spots, though, groys’ reading fails even as a deconstruction: it uncritically embodies some problematic practices in reading bakhtin’s works, and at times (especially where groys tries to force on bakhtin some poststructuralist ideas about authorship) he deteriorates into utter incoherence and does violence to the texts he claims to interpret. 1 though, to be fair, poststructuralist appropriations of bakhtin—now strongly discredited—were still a relatively common practice in the 1980s. issn: 2325-3290 (online) the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:24 in what follows, i will discuss each of these pros and cons of groys’ reading of bakhtin. in the process, i will also offer my own reading of bakhtin’s philosophy, and particularly of the role that the notion of carnival plays within it. the things you could get away with back in 1989 i will spend most of my time discussing the serious challenges groys’ article posed, but at its base, it offers a seriously flawed reading of bakhtin. so, before i get into deeper waters, let me briefly note some of that article’s most obvious weaknesses. the primary problem with groys’ article lies at the heart of its main argument: groys wants his criticism of bakhtin to reflect on poststructuralism, and in the process uncritically reads poststructuralism into bakhtin. now, it is true that groys only explicitly speaks about bakhtin as an important figure in the formation of poststructuralism, not, at first blush, as a direct carrier of postmodernist philosophical ideas. it is also true that bakhtin’s ideas were influential, up to a point, within french postmodernism, especially as filtered through the readings given to them by julia kristeva (1986) and tzvetan todorov (1984). back in 1989, that kristeva/todorov version of bakhtin was still relatively fresh. today, however, it is easily recognizable as one-sided. it speaks of intertextuality, but not of intersubjectivity, of a dialogic principle detached from actual persons engaged in dialogue. bakhtin’s principled personalism—the clear and consistent cornerstone of his thought—is painted over, and it is painted over, one could argue, precisely because it would not have been given a very warm welcome in the sort of milieu kristeva and todorov were writing for.2 groys’ reading of bakhtin suffers from all the flaws of the kristeva/todorov version, and then adds some. take his claim that “bakhtin welcomes the carnivalesque pathos of the ‘final death’ of everything individual”. if you are wondering where exactly does bakhtin—who famously wrote “nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its festival of resurrection” (bakhtin 1986e, 170; translation modified)—welcome such a pathos, well, you are right to wonder. the phrase “final death” (okonchatel’naia smert’), which groys places between quotation marks, suggesting it is a quote, only appears in bakhtin’s extant writings once, in notes from the early 1960s (bakhtin 2002, 349). the context is an analysis of dostoevsky’s short story “bobok”, and the reference is to the “final death” of that story’s characters (who are already dead, but not quite finally). no ruminations about “everything individual” are implied. moreover, groys could not possibly have been citing this text—it was not published until 2002. a more likely option is to read this phrase as a loose quotation of a passage from “forms of time and the chronotope in the novel” (bakhtin 1981c, 220), where bakhtin writes lucian’s satires put to “ultimate, comic death” the gods of greek and roman myth. only the gods are not mentioned in that passage as some sort of a metaphor on individuality, “comic death” is not quite the same as death, and that comic death is said to be “ultimate” in the sense of being long-overdue. in short, groys ascribes to bakhtin a position on the final death of individuality that directly contradicts anything bakhtin had ever written about finality, death, or individuality, and he has zero evidence to support his interpretation. groys’ attempt to coopt bakhtin’s notion of polyphony into his reading is no more convincing: 2 the publication history of bakhtin’s works accommodated such readings to some extent. bakhtin’s earliest and latest works, in which his personalism was on starkest display, were mostly published and translated late in the day, from 1979 on, when kristeva’s and todorov’s main contributions were long published. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:25 this truth is, according to bakhtin, incarnated in the “carnivalesque”, or, in other words, “polyphonic” novel. all the voices, in bakhtin’s opinion, have the right to be heard—but only within the context of a whole, totalitarian, all-absorbing novel. such a novel, in fact, cannot even have an author, because an author should exist outside of the novel—which, according to bakhtin, is not allowed to anyone. a “polyphonic” novel tautologically reproduces its own total, always proportional to itself, polyphony—just like the carnival always reproduces its own total carnivalesque properties. consequently, bakhtin de facto denies the existence of multiple novels with different authors and he accepts only one differentiation in the space of the novel genre,—novels are either monologic and are, therefore, dismissed as too individualistic, or polyphonic, which means they reproduce each other as they reproduce polyphony itself, making, therefore, their author a hypothetical, fictitious figure. for bakhtin, “other” is always someone inside a novel, and never can it be someone outside of the novel. the views about authorship, which groys attacks here, would be familiar to any reader of roland barthes (1977) and michel foucault (1988), but latching them onto bakhtin takes some nerve. groys is beating up a straw man, and a shabbily designed one at that. one can go over this paragraph claim by claim and show bakhtin never said anything of the sort. to begin with, no, “polyphonic” and “carnivalesque” are not quite the same thing. in problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, bakhtin credits dostoevsky with the creation of the polyphonic novel (bakhtin 1984a, 5–46), while many earlier authors are said to have worked firmly within the carnivalesque tradition. groys also gets his chronology wrong here, by the way. bakhtin first brings the notion of carnival to bear on dostoevsky’s work in notes from the mid-1940s (e.g., bakhtin 2014, 525, 526, 535), and it’s not until the early 1960s, long after the end of stalin’s purges, that bakhtin attempts to integrate his notion of carnival into his book on polyphony. groys (implicitly) misplaces carnival back into the first edition of bakhtin’s book on dostoevsky, published in 1929, where it is distinctly absent. i sincerely have no clue where groys could find any support in bakhtin’s writings to the idea that voices have the right to be heard only in the context of the polyphonic novel, or that this novel is meant to be “all-absorbing”. i also couldn’t find any place where bakhtin suggests the polyphonic novel cannot have an author, or that existing outside the novel is “not allowed to anyone”. locating passages where bakhtin claims the exact opposite, on the other hand, is not particularly difficult. bakhtin’s book on dostoevsky begins with a sustained discussion of dostoevsky’s distinctive achievement as a creator (khudozhnik), of how earlier studies of his novels failed to grasp the guiding principles of his work as an author, focusing instead on the views espoused by his characters (bakhtin 1984a, 5–46). and as for existing outside the novel, i need only recall one central bakhtinian principle, running through all aspects and periods of his work (see, e.g., bakhtin 1990, 212; bakhtin 1986b, 7)—the principle of outsidedness (vnenakhodimost’). of course people exist outside the novel; otherwise the novel would be meaningless, unreadable, impossible to evaluate. evaluation, for bakhtin, can only come from outside. what groys seems to be aiming at in these comments is the structuralist view, enthusiastically adopted by the poststructuralists, that the author of a text should only be considered as a function of the text itself, not as a real person in the outside world. in soviet literary scholarship, a parallel view was represented by viktor vinogradov’s doctrine on the “image of the author” (obraz avtora) as contained in the literary work. bakhtin, however, made a point of arguing against this doctrine, repeatedly (e.g., bakhtin 1986d, 109–10, 116; bakhtin 1986a, 148; bakhtin 1986e, 160–61; and see gogotishvili 1996, 600, 606, 629–31), on the grounds that this would involve a form of direct authorial presence within the author’s work, depriving the author of her rightful position outside the work (or “tangential” to it, as he puts the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:26 it in bakhtin 1981c, 254–55). bakhtin does praise dostoevsky’s choice to avoid using the benefits of his outsidedness against his characters (e.g., bakhtin 1984a, 69–75), but that is hardly the same as denying the author exists at all, or that the author exists outside the work.3 the claim that all polyphonic novels tautologically reproduce one another and that therefore all polyphonic novels are de facto the same is pure fantasy. groys makes no attempt to ground it in textual evidence, and it’s not that he’d find any such evidence if he tried. finally, as we already saw, the other for bakhtin is first and foremost precisely someone outside the novel, and only by extension also someone inside it.4 to reiterate, much of what groys is doing could still pass as par-for-the-course in bakhtin scholarship at the time he was writing. a reading of bakhtin limited to his two monographs (and perhaps also the four essays on the novel gathered in bakhtin 1981d), flatly ignoring bakhtin’s early and late writings and working notes, was still acceptable back then. moreover, many of these writings were either still unpublished or published only very recently, in perhaps not the most accessible editions, at the time. it was also still quite common in the 1980s to see readings of bakhtin as a structuralist, or poststructuralist, and indeed also as a marxist. when groys wrote that bakhtin was “influenced by marx and freud”, without any caveats, as if this were a simple statement of fact, it looked not as preposterous back in 1989 as it does now.5 but even making an allowance for when groys was writing, the truth has to be said: as an interpretation of bakhtin, groys’ article simply does not hold water. totalitarian carnival? another sense in which groys’ reading of bakhtin is typical of the 1980s is the ease with which bakhtin’s work is brought to bear on the political conditions under which he was writing. the gist of most such readings is briefly and poignantly summarized by groys early in his essay: bakhtin is said to be a “consistently anti-authoritarian thinker”, whose notions of polyphony and carnival directly (albeit allegorically) repudiate the stalinist regime they were conceived under. and while nobody, not even groys, thinks bakhtin was a fan of stalin, there really is very little evidence to read into bakhtin’s notions any commentary clearly touching on contemporary political realities. groys effectively offers a reductio ad absurdum of such readings by showing there are many ways to read the purported “allegories” in bakhtin’s writings. but, by the same token, groys’ own reading exemplifies what’s wrong with the methods applied in the work he criticizes, and, indeed, in many other attempts to apply bakhtin’s concepts, especially that of carnival, to any number of social and aesthetic phenomena. in a nutshell, the problem with all these readings is that they consider some aesthetic “symptoms” of carnival (or some other bakhtinian term) as sufficient for a full “diagnosis”, while the philosophical essence of the concept is left out of the discussion. and while usually this flaw in the argument is concealed by the generally-agreeable nature of the 3 moreover, bakhtin’s draft notes written when he was working on the second edition of his book on dostoevsky (bakhtin 2002, 303, 314, 316, 319–20), indicate he was explicitly concerned with the nature of the author’s outsidedness in a polyphonic novel. he reiterates the view that an author is always located outside the work, and finds concrete expressions for this outsidedness in dostoevsky’s writing (for instance, in his use of double-voiced discourse), while distinguishing these forms of outsidedness from simpler, monological forms. 4 one can be more specific, noting the prototype for all forms of the other in bakhtin’s philosophy is “absolute otherness” (bakhtin 1990, 144), i.e., god (and see erdinast-vulcan 2013, 33–36). the existence of a religious dimension in bakhtin’s work (a dimension that is explicitly stated in several of his works, e.g., bakhtin 1993, 16; bakhtin 1990, 138–50; bakhtin 2001, 207–9, 219–21; bakhtin 1996, 7–10; and see coates 1998) entirely contradicts groys’ attempt to paint bakhtin as a denier of all things spiritual and nonmaterial. but, to be fair, very few of the explicit religious references in bakhtin’s writings were allowed into print in soviet times, so groys would not have had access to them back in 1989. 5 besides, as we shall see, groys was much closer to the mark putting nietzsche on the same list. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:27 phenomena claimed to be carnivalesque, groys’ idea that carnival is really a form of totalitarianism can make the problem much easier to spot. groys has two sorts of arguments for his claim about the totalitarian nature of carnival. i will deal with the more substantial of the two—grounded in the apparently all-encompassing nature of carnival— later on. but there is also the more superficial kind of argument, where groys claims to find carnivalesque motifs in the practices of stalinist terror: laughter at show trials, “crownings and dethronings” of party officials, even stalin’s preference for the film “volga volga” (which groys finds to be “purely carnivalesque”, without explaining exactly why). the problem is that by this sort of criteria, virtually anything can be declared “carnivalesque”. groys records the presence of some features bakhtin associated with carnival (laughter, on some occasions, promotion and then persecution of officials), but makes no mention of others (overabundance of food and drink, images connecting the “topographies” of body and cosmos, especially the nether parts of the human body with the nethers of the earth, leveling social hierarchies). for the features he does mention, the resemblance could be quite superficial. notably, no crowning and dethroning touched the very top of the hierarchy (stalin himself), while a “carnival king” is meant to stand for the highest authority in the state.6 with a bit more effort, groys could have achieved better resemblance. soviet propaganda definitely claimed great material plenty existed in the country, and claimed the ussr was a place of freedom and equality. indeed, old social hierarchies were upended by the new regime (only to be replaced by new ones, of course). but this entire approach misses the point. carnival is not defined by a checklist of external features. it is rather a philosophical attitude, linked to ethical ideals and an elaborate development of aesthetic means for reproducing subjectivity and freedom in a literary image—but i’m getting ahead of myself (and of what groys could have known about bakhtin’s philosophy at the time of writing). i will come back to the roots of carnival in bakhtin’s philosophy later on. however, the main ethical commitments bakhtin invested his notion of carnival with should have been apparent to groys, even in 1989. above all, carnival laughter, for bakhtin, overcomes fear (of all powers human, natural, and supernatural). this is evident from several passages in bakhtin’s book on rabelais. here are just a few examples: [t]he images of folk culture are absolutely fearless and communicate this fearlessness to all. this is also true of renaissance literature. the high point of this spirit is reached in rabelais’ novel; here fear is destroyed at its very origin and everything is turned into gaiety. it is the most fearless book in world literature (bakhtin 1984b, 39). [m]edieval and renaissance grotesque, filled with the spirit of carnival, liberates the world from all that is dark and terrifying: it takes away all fears and is therefore completely gay and bright. all that was frightening in ordinary life is turned into amusing or ludicrous monstrosities. 6 the truth has to be said that bakhtin himself could often be overly sketchy when counting phenomena and literary pieces as belonging to the carnival tradition. but then, bakhtin’s task was different: his aim was to establish a notion (carnival, menippean satire, etc.), make it tangible to readers. this required bringing in a vast amount of material and molding a picture out of that. bakhtin was not aiming to deduce that this or that piece is carnivalesque, but rather was trying to induce a coherent vision of carnival out of a wide variety of examples. one can dispute whether some of these examples are good, but bakhtin’s central thesis does not hang on any one example. that’s not the case with groys’ claim that stalinist terror was carnivalesque, in bakhtin’s sense, which is quite central to his argument in the article. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:28 fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter […].complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world (bakhtin 1984b, 47). it was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man. it was not only a victory over mystic terror of god, but also a victory over the awe inspired by the forces of nature, and most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden (“mana” and “taboo”). it was the defeat of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and punishment after death, hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself (bakhtin 1984b, 90–91). in the whole of the world and of the people there is no room for fear. for fear can only enter a part that has been separated from the whole, the dying link torn from the link that is born. the whole of the people and of the world is triumphantly gay and fearless. this whole speaks in all carnival images; it reigns in the very atmosphere of this feast, making everyone participate in this awareness (bakhtin 1984b, 256). stalinist terror, as the name suggests, was by no means about overcoming fear. needless to say, groys also brings no evidence for what bakhtin terms “ambivalence” in stalinism: invective is not conjoined with praise, and death does not imply rebirth. the image of laughter at a trial at least allows conjuring up some semblance of a third defining feature of carnival imagery— liminality. one could describe the defendant as standing on the limit (possibly on the limit between life and death). but groys does not make this link (at least not explicitly), nor does he claim any “ultimate questions” (bakhtin 1984a, 115) of ethical and philosophical import came up at those occasions. at best, stalinism could lay claim on declaring the fearless leveling of all hierarchies, on abundance and plenty, together with philosophical depth at show trials, but that would mean taking it at its official, censorshipbound word—exactly what bakhtin claimed was antithetical to carnival joy and laughter (bakhtin 2014, 524, 528).7 fearlessness, ambivalence, and liminality are not just three more items on a laundry list of carnivalesque features (on par with laughter, food, scatology, etc.). they describe not what carnival imagery looks like, but what it means, and if the meaning ain’t there, it ain’t carnival, even if it looks a bit similar to true carnivalesque images in some respects.8 moreover, there is arguably an even higher philosophical level at which carnival is truly defined, but, again, that’s for later on. the challenge groys poses to bakhtin’s notion of carnival is not really that shallow, though. it’s not that groys ignores what carnival means. rather, groys assigns a meaning to carnival that is different from the one bakhtin claims for it (the sort of things deconstructive readings can take the license to do). for groys, carnival is totalitarian not because people laughed at trials in stalin’s ussr, but because in its 7 although, again, this is a point bakhtin makes explicitly in texts first published after 1989. 8 to be more precise, the “external” features are defined by bakhtin in such a way that they already carry the meaning of carnival within them. so, for example, laughter for bakhtin is no accidental feature of carnival. quite on the contrary, he continuously stresses it as a defining feature of carnivalesque culture as such (calling it smekhovaia kul’tura, “culture of laughter”). but then, when bakhtin speaks of laughter, he does not have the sound of giggles in mind. purely scornful laughter is a one-sided exemplar of the phenomenon, in which the positive aspect has been lost or misunderstood, while such a somber piece as boethius’ consolations of philosophy is, per bakhtin, full of “reduced laughter” (bakhtin 1984a, 114, 134). why? because it is a discussion of “ultimate questions” on the verge of death, inducing a fearless attitude toward all powers. bakhtin’s concept of laughter is defined by what that laugher means, not by what it looks or sounds like, just like his notion of carnival is. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:29 very essence, carnival is all about destroying human individuality, swallowing the individual into the crowd, into the folk: simply put, bakhtin’s carnival is horrible—god forbid being part of it. there is no place for democracy in it—nobody is given the democratic right to avoid the total carnival duty, to abscond the carnival, to stay away from it. this alternative essence of carnival is also what all of the misreadings and dubious claims in groys’ article, which we discussed above, stem from and are geared toward. groys does capture a certain uneasiness some of rabelais’ passages (and bakhtin’s descriptions of them),9 arouse in many modern readers. our individualistic psyches demure at the thought of a festivity everyone takes part in. we are quick to sense an implied threat of coercion. the many dismemberments of characters standing in the way in rabelais’ novel—think especially of the “tragic farce” story on françois villon and the sorry fate of the sacristan, who tried to stand in the way of the carnival play, recounted in chapter 13 of rabelais’ fourth book (see bakhtin 1984b, 263–64)—seem to confirm our worst suspicions. bakhtin himself was aware of such a possible reading of rabelais, and made a point of rejecting it: [t]ime has transformed old truth and authority into a mardi gras dummy, a comic monster that the laughing crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace. kind master rabelais deals with these dummies pitilessly, cruelly, but merrily. actually, it is gay time itself in whose name and with whose voice the master speaks. rabelais does not torture living persons. let them go, but first of all let them remove their royal robes and pompous academic gowns of the sorbonne in which they masquerade as heralds of divine truths. rabelais is even disposed to grant them a little hut in the backyard and a mortar to crush onions for “greensauce”, as he did king anarchus. or he may give them some cloth for a new pair of trousers, or a soup tureen, a sausage, or firewood such as he offered master janotus de bragmardo (bakhtin 1984b, 213). one may or may not agree with bakhtin’s interpretation of rabelais in this passage, but the important point for our purposes is not about rabelais, but about bakhtin and how he defined his notion of carnival. violence to persons, to individuals, is not part of how bakhtin wanted his conept to be understood, and wherever such violence appears in texts he analyzes, he gives it an allegorical reading.10 more broadly, precisely what groys deems to be the essence of carnival—the elimination of the individual in favor of the collective—is a position bakhtin has always been at pains to renounce and argue against. the notion of a collective subject is a constant target of polemic in bakhtin’s writings (e.g., bakhtin 1993, 66–68; bakhtin 1986a, 147). the uniform rational subject of kantian philosophy fares hardly better.11 it is true that bakhtin also rejects the cartesian version of individualism and argues for the 9 arguably, groys’ critique of carnival as totalitarian works much better as an interpretation of rabelais than as an interpretation of bakhtin. 10 to be more precise, violence against other persons is excluded from bakhtin’s notion of carnival. we will later see that, in one sense, carnival imagery in general can be understood as an externalized image of the self and the violent aspects of carnival practices turn out, paradoxically, to be a form of self-mortification. 11 on bakhtin’s complex attitude toward kant and kantianism, see sandler (2015); erdinast-vulcan and sandler (2015). the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:30 constitution of the subject by and through other subjects,12 but such dependence on others is, for bakhtin, the way in which individuals can truly and fully become individual. authorship and creativity is achieved in truth when the author absorbs and learns to manipulate, speak through, other voices (e.g., bakhtin 1981a, 293–94). for bakhtin, intersubjectivity does not contradict individuality. on the contrary, it enables and enhances it. the (uneasy) place of carnival in bakhtin’s philosophy and yet, in his one-sided way, groys was on to something. in writings on carnival, and in the book on rabelais in particular, bakhtin does speak of an “ancestral body” (rodovoe telo; bakhtin 1984b, 19, 29, 322–24, 367) that transcends the life and death of an individual human being. this tension between some characteristics of carnival imagery and the consistent philosophical personalism we find in bakhtin’s writings, has been frequently discussed in bakhtin scholarship (see, e.g., morson and emerson 1990; wall 1998), and groys’ article was among the first to highlight it.13 this tension is not easy to explain away. it is not merely a matter of chronology—while carnival as a major theme in bakhtin’s work is largely concentrated within a relatively short time span (roughly 1938–1950), and personalism is more prominent in other periods (the 1920s, 1960s, and 1970s), there is also a good deal of overlap between these themes in particular texts (most notably in the 2nd edition of bakhtin’s book on dostoevsky, bakhtin 1984a, 101–80, but also in other works, e.g., in “response to a question from the novy mir editorial staff”, bakhtin 1986b, 5–7). needless to say, groys’ “solution” to this problem—the claim that bakhtin embraced totalitarianism and rejected all forms of individuality—cannot be taken seriously either, as it flatly ignores central elements of bakhtin’s thought. to explain, and perhaps resolve, this tension in bakhtin’s philosophy, one should delve deeper into its development, locate the philosophical problem to which bakhtin sought a solution in his notion of carnival. i would like to use the opportunity to briefly sketch my own positon on the matter (for a more detailed discussion, see sandler 2016). to understand where bakhtin is coming from, we should first of all examine his early philosophical works (incomplete as they are), toward a philosophy of the act (bakhtin 1993) and “author and hero in aesthetic activity” (bakhtin 1990), written, most probably, in the early 1920s. toward a philosophy of the act, in particular, stands at the very heart of bakhtin’s philosophical project. it contains what we would today call an existentialist argument for the philosophical primacy of subjective action and experience—which bakhtin refers to as an act or a deed14—over objective, scientifically valid, realities.15 to illustrate what bakhtin means by that, let us consider a very simplified analysis of one of his own examples (see bakhtin 1993, 65–73; bakhtin 1990, 211–22)—from a poem by alexandr pushkin. in that poem, the narrator recounts his parting from a woman he was in love with. if we read this as a crudely autobiographical reference (which we will assume for simplicity’s sake), the man here is pushkin 12 this, in itself, is in fact a common feature of german philosophy from hegel on. bakhtin’s innovation here is that he does not view this as a step toward the eventual unification of self and other in a collective subject (see sandler 2012a; sandler 2015, 180). 13 though, to be more precise, groys does not really notice any tension. he seems quite unaware of bakhtin’s personalism. 14 “deed” is a more accurate translation of the russian postupok in this context, and i will be using it exclusively below, despite the fact that the published english translation of this work has “act”, not “deed”, in its title (which is, in any case, not bakhtin’s original, and lost, title for the treatise). 15 this argument closely resembles, and is directly influenced by, a central argument advanced by søren kierkegaard (1992). for more on bakhtin and kierkegaard, see, e.g., fryszman (1996) and schittsova (1999), and, more specifically in this context, see sandler (2011; 2012a; 2012b, 229–33). the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:31 himself, while his lover is amalia riznich, an italian, and the event described is her sailing back to italy (never to return) from the port of odessa in 1824. now, objectively speaking, riznich’s upcoming journey was one event—that of riznich traveling from russia to italy on a certain trajectory in space and time. we can draw that journey on a map. but subjectively speaking, that journey is (at least) two different deeds: from riznich’s perspective, she is going home; from pushkin’s—she is going away and abroad. moreover, if we now focus just on riznich’s perspective, her journey for her is no mere line on a map either. she does not experience it as such a line, and, more generally, she does not experience space as a neutral frame viewed from nowhere-inparticular. she is always situated within space, focusing her sight on some regions of it, not others (she does not see what’s behind her back, or what’s many miles away). moreover, space and time for her are imbued with evaluations, “tones”, or “intonations” (bakhtin 1993, 32–34). for one thing, there is one region of space that is the destination of her journey, and in the context of the journey itself as a deed, it has privileged status. space is ordered into a hierarchy of places closer to the destination and farther from it. space is also ordered, for each of us, into places near and far, in front of us and behind us, etc. time is divided into past, present and future. all these categories are meaningful subjectively, to individual human beings, but not objectively. space and time in the abstract have no future and no past, no near and no far, no home and no abroad. we can define such terms in relation to any arbitrary point in space and time, at which we would potentially place a person answering this or that description. but that hypothetical person is not actually there to see and evaluate anything, and actually standing there, doing and experiencing and evaluating, is beyond anything you can capture by describing a hypothetical person, placed hypothetically at some spatio-temporal coordinates (e.g., bakhtin 1993, 28–29; for more details, see sandler 2012b, 229–33; sandler 2013, 154–55). no amount of objectively correct information about the world entails actual human deeds and experiences. the barrier between the deed and objective reality is only insurmountable in one direction, though. maps and lines on them are part of the lived experience of many people, travelers included. the same is true for other abstract theoretical representations and for all sorts of objectively correct information about the objective reality we share (bakhtin 1993, 2–3). what bakhtin disputes in toward a philosophy of the act is not the objectivity or reality of the real and objective world (e.g., bakhtin 1993, 9– 10). he rather argues about the philosophical order of priorities. a philosophy that takes objective reality to be the only truly real world while people’s deeds are treated as merely subjective (bakhtin refers to such positions as “theoretism”), would have no possible way to account for the actuality of my own firstperson experiences and deeds. a philosophy that takes people’s deeds to be ultimately real, can account for all things objective as abstractions we make from our own experiences, and those of others (this implies people can communicate, and more broadly implies intersubjectivity in a strong sense—we’ll get to that in a moment). thus, bakhtin concludes, it is the multiplicity of human deeds that underlies the unity of the objective world, not the other way around. so far, the thrust of bakhtin’s argument is diametrically opposed to what groys finds in his texts (although, of course, groys shows no evidence of having been familiar with bakhtin’s early philosophical writings). groys “credits” bakhtin with the desire to eliminate all individuality. but it is precisely the individuality of persons that bakhtin argues from and for when he claims deeds—the worlds constituted by persons’ lived first-person experiences, actions, and evaluations—take philosophical precedence over the objective reality that can be abstracted from them. the uniqueness (edinstvennost’)16 of actual human persons and their deeds is “heavier”, bakhtin tells us, than the unity of the objective world (bakhtin 1993, 8). 16 see sandler (2015, 175–77) for more on the origins and use of the term “uniqueness” in bakhtin’s early works. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:32 but this is only one half of bakhtin’s two-step move. a person, for bakhtin, is no self-sufficient cartesian subject. in the world constituted by my deeds, i can see many other people, but there is no room in it for me, not, that is, as an entity among other entities. in my deed, i come out (iskhozhu) of myself and come upon (nakhozhu) others (bakhtin 1993, 73–74), but i cannot locate myself.17 to become a subject, to obtain a reflection of myself in the world, bakhtin tells us, it is not enough for me to simply look in the mirror. in a mirror, i see an external image of my body that necessarily fails to merge with my inner sensation of myself into a single coherent image (see especially bakhtin 1990, 27–35, but also bakhtin 1986b, 7, and bakhtin 1996, 71; for english translations of the latter reference, see emerson 2000, 25, or nikulin 2011, 61). there is only one kind of source from which i can obtain a true image of myself. this source is other people (and, eventually, god). a mirror would not do. a good portrait (and not a self-portrait) might (bakhtin 1990, 34–35). this also means, for bakhtin, that only in giving up on my own presence in my world, only by accepting others’ authority over my image, do i get to receive such an image of myself as a graceful gift from the other. we have, by now, entered deep into the sphere of bakhtin’s aesthetics. but this aesthetics, more than other aspects of bakhtin’s philosophy, went through several stages of development. the earliest stage is expounded in some detail in the unfinished treatise “author and hero in aesthetic activity” (bakhtin 1990), written around 1923/4. at the center of this early aesthetics we find an emphasis on the act of completion (or “consummation”, in the published english translation; the russian is zavershenie) of the literary character (the “hero”) by an author, which is, at the same time, also the completion of me by an other, of a person by god. this completion is carried out from an external position, outside the person being completed. this external vantage point allows the author/other to: collect the hero and his life and to complete him to the point where he forms a whole by supplying all those moments which are inaccessible to the hero himself from within himself (such as a full outward image, an exterior, a background behind his back, his relation to the event of death and the absolute future, etc.) (bakhtin 1990, 14) it is through this act of grace that i may obtain proper access to an image of myself as a whole. people familiar mostly with bakhtin’s later works will find in this description an eerie combination of familiar and strange themes. the crucial importance of outsidedness (vnenakhodimost’) for evaluation and for authorship will remain, as we have already seen, a staple of bakhtin’s thought for his entire life, as will the notion that i depend on others for any true self-assessment and self-image, and the (sometimes thinly veiled and sometimes explicit) promise of immortality in the minds of others (and of god), but not in my own spirit (on which see below). but an author looking behind her character’s back, from after the time of his death, is supposed to be anathema to the bakhtin most people know. this indeed reflects a reversal in bakhtin’s position, or better, in his focus, but one that aims to extend and further develop his core philosophical principles, not to walk them back. bakhtin’s first major publication—the 1929 edition of his book on dostoevsky—credits dostoevsky with the creation of a new literary form, the polyphonic novel. in the polyphonic novel, central characters are self-conscious, and actively resist any attempt to comprehensively describe them, bring them to completion. dostoevsky, the author, does not supply us with a view of what is behind their backs, 17 so, what i am thus missing is exactly the ability rene descartes (1996) used to define his notion of a subject—the ability (the naïve ability, bakhtin would say) to see myself. anti-cartesianism is the one thing that bakhtin and the french poststructuralists really do have in common, and it is this anti-cartesianism that groys seems to conflate with anti-individualism. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:33 nor with totalizing reflections on their lives and deaths from a vantage point forever in their future (e.g., bakhtin 1984a, 69–75). now, all the elements in this description of dostoevsky’s works already appear in the earlier “author and hero” (bakhtin 1990, 19–21, 146).18 but there is a crucial difference in bakhtin’s evaluation of these features of dostoevsky’s writing. in his earlier work, bakhtin interprets them as a sign of failure— dostoevsky fails to attain completion for his characters because he fails to distance himself from them (they are, on this early account, essentially autobiographical). the resulting literary works lack proper aesthetic form. but by 1929, those same features mark dostoevsky’s true greatness as a writer (bakhtin uses the russian word khudozhnik, literally “painter”, which specifically implies the creation of aesthetic form, to refer to dostoevsky as the creator of the polyphonic novel, when he states his main thesis on the book’s first pages—see bakhtin 1984a, 5). his characters are no longer seen as autobiographical but are explicitly others with respect to the author (bakhtin 1984a, 7). dostoevsky himself is no longer said to have failed to attain completion for his characters, but rather to have deliberately refrained, on ethical grounds, from abusing his authorial perspective by completing them (bakhtin 1984a, 69–75 et passim).19 like the hero of bakhtin’s early aesthetics, dostoevsky’s characters are granted a form (or rather, a voice) by the other/author. unlike the predetermined hero of “author and hero” (see bakhtin 1990, 34– 35, 46, 107, 117–18, 130, 174–77), dostoevsky’s characters are active and free persons,20 and the aesthetics of their literary form is dominated by their concrete first-person perspective, not by the view from outside. as bakhtin’s working notes and drafts from the second half of the 1930s (some of which have only been published quite recently) show, this idea of the image of a free person—a creator, an initiator, an activist (deiatel’), a person shown within the world that he is changing (bakhtin 2012, 226, 261–64, 278, 325, 332, 571, 578, 586, 640; bakhtin 1981b, 38)—is the true center and prime mover of bakhtin’s theory of the novel. bakhtin tries to trace the historical processes in which such an image was forged, and he is especially interested in the ways in which such an image can be expressed in space and time. this is precisely the context in which bakhtin’s notion of carnival eventually emerges. to cut a long story short, the aesthetics of carnival offers bakhtin a neat solution to the problem of creating an image of a free, creative individual: an image of a deed is an image of the world that deed constitutes; the image of a free person is an image of the world as that person experiences and changes it.21 if you consider carnival imagery from this perspective, things start falling into place. bakhtin repeatedly stresses in his descriptions of carnival elements that correspond to his accounts, in his early works, of the world of the deed, the world as it is for me. the grotesque body is always shown in its interaction with the world and with other bodies, but never as a well-defined shape within the world (bakhtin 2008, 647). the aesthetic principle behind this approach to the body is determined by how a body is experienced from within. 18 in fact, we have evidence that bakhtin was already working on a book about dostoevsky in 1921/2 (emerson 1984, xxix, xxxix). 19 contrast this, again, with groys’ claim that a polyphonic novel has no author. this reading rolls back precisely the authorial agency bakhtin now credits dostoevsky with. 20 the freedom of dostoevsky’s characters receives comparatively little emphasis in bakhtin scholarship, so it is worth noting that the very first thing bakhtin has to say about dostoevsky’s innovative form of authorship in his book is precisely that his characters are free: “dostoevsky, like goethe’s prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him” (bakhtin 1984a, 6; italics in the original). 21 this principle is already evident in bakhtin’s (mostly lost) study of goethe’s bildungsroman (bakhtin 1986c; bakhtin 2012, 180– 335), which precedes his work on carnival, but carnival offers bakhtin a more comprehensive and historically grounded way of putting it to use. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:34 the world of rabelais’ novel, and of carnivalesque literature more generally, exists within the individual’s “zone of contact” (bakhtin 2008, 626; bakhtin 2014, 524), and is thoroughly evaluated (rabelais has no “neutral words and expressions”—bakhtin 1984b, 420). this is not a world of general concepts, but of concrete actions and experiences, precisely in the sense bakhtin speaks of in toward a philosophy of the act. a passage from bakhtin’s recently published draft notebooks for his book on rabelais is very telling in this respect: an expansion of purview22 (of the spatial order), but there are no typifying generalizations. there are no chasms between the singular and the general. all abstractly-mathematical, irrational, and imaginary quantities are absent. sharp contrasts with the cartesian and newtonian world. the general (the typical, functional, mathematically regular) has not yet begun to play a leading role in the model of the world. the movement followed not from the singularly particular to the general and typical, but from the singularly particular to the cosmic (which is also individual), from the small to the larger and largest. hence the importance of lists and naming (where now we have a generalization, rabelais had a list of all possible things and actions); a collective, in which every member can be named (bakhtin 2008, 646). so what, then, of the features groys emphasizes in his reading of bakhtin as reflecting a “belief in the ultimate truth of totalitarianism”? on one level, the aesthetics of carnival does not respect the contours of the individual human body. grotesque imagery depicts bodies fused with one another and with the world, in the process of change and transformation. this may be one reason groys claims that bakhtin is against individuality (though groys does not make this particular link explicit). but when we examine this feature of bakhtin’s aesthetics in its philosophical context, it turns out to reflect an expression of individuality in aesthetic form, not its erasure. the grotesque body’s contours do not coalesce into a stable form because this body represents a body felt from within, and it represents a body felt from within to better depict the free, creative, acting, and interacting individual, not just her passive outward shape.23 groys ascribes to bakhtin the desire to denigrate the individual and dissolve her in the greater whole of the people, and the even greater whole of the world. but when we read bakhtin in context, we realize that the world here is the individual’s world. and as for the people, and the “ancestral body”, groys neglects to mention the main function this concept plays in bakhtin’s book: this bodily whole holds out the promise of immortality to the individual (bakhtin 1984b, 322, 367). with this in mind, we can place this bakhtinian notion in a sequence with other expressions of the same idea in his writings. it corresponds to his claim in “author and hero” that the soul (my mind as perceived by others), but not the spirit (my acting self from within), is immortal (bakhtin 1990, 100–101). it also corresponds to bakhtin’s famous claim, in his latest notes, that in the endless dialogue in “major time” (bol’shoe vremia), personal meanings never die (bakhtin 1986e, 170). in other words, this notion is one of several ways, in which the other, and ultimately god, makes a slightly disguised appearance in bakhtin’s book on rabelais, and other works dealing with carnival.24 if we now come back to the violent treatment rabelais subjects some of his characters to, we can notice another layer of meaning it acquires within bakhtin’s architectonics. in bakhtin’s analysis of 22 krugozor; this term was rendered as “horizon” in the published translations of bakhtin’s early works. 23 seen this way, the grotesque body has a lot in common, on bakhtin’s (and partly voloshinov’s) account, with another material expression of the person—language. like the word, the grotesque body is “half someone else’s” (poluchuzhoe; bakhtin 1981a, 293). i make it my own, express my voice through it, by modulating, intonng, evaluating the words/bodies of others. 24 i discuss some of the other forms the other assumes in these works in sandler (2016). the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:35 rabelais, this violence, and more generally, all forms of invective, is one pole of an ambivalent evaluation (combining invective and praise). bakhtin’s analysis of shakespearian tragedy (bakhtin 2014) allows for a certain degree of separation between the two poles of this ambivalent attitude, and also pinpoints a target for invective and violence (remember, we are talking about tragedy) that he does not name when discussing rabelais. analyzing macbeth, bakhtin finds behind the story of a tyrant and usurper a deeper level, at which macbeth exemplifies the tragedy of (political) power as such (not quite an endorsement of totalitarianism, i should note). and then there is a deeper level still, where macbeth exemplifies the tragedy of “every self-asserting life” (bakhtin 2014, 527), where “self-asserting” means refusing to accept its limits in time, its eventual replacement by a younger generation, seeking immortality through itself, not others. such individual self-assertion—when taken to its logical conclusion—leads to murder, to the murder of one’s parents and children. such claims to power and immortality are “punished” by shakespeare with a tragic end, by rabelais with a thorough beating, by the carnival crowd with a “dethroning”. but recall that the world of carnival imagery is a world experienced from within, so this “punishment” (or better, refutation) originates in the individual herself. it is, in fact, a later development of what early bakhtin called “absolute self-exclusion”—my exclusion from the world constituted by my deeds, which, at the same time also “the sense of all christian morality” and “the starting point for altruistic morality” (bakhtin 1993, 75). this, finally, leads us to one truly valuable insight that groys offers us at the very end of his article. all those dismembered bodies in rabelais’ novel are, in a sense, self-dismemberments. groys correctly identifies the philosophical precedents bakhtin is following here: nietzsche’s birth of tragedy, partly mediated through the writings of russian symbolists. yes, this is precisely, in groys’ words, “ritualistic dionysian self-destruction”. no, it does not reflect bakhtin’s attempt to aesthetically justify his own persecution (as we just saw, there are equivalents of this self-dismemberment in bakhtin’s work that long predate his 1929 arrest), and there is one more detail that groys leaves out of his retelling of the story: in the end, dionysus is reborn. conclusion boris groys’ contrarian reading of bakhtin as an apologist for totalitarianism is—not to put too fine a point on it—wrong. nevertheless, it has been a useful exercise. it offered an effective refutation of other simplistic political readings of 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liudmila archirovna gogotishvili, 5:535– 658. moscow: russkie slovari. kierkegaard, søren. 1992. concluding unscientific postscript to philosophical fragments. translated by howard v. hong and edna h. hong. princeton, nj: princeton university press. kristeva, julia. 1986. “word, dialogue and novel.” in the kristeva reader, edited by toril moi, translated by alice jardine, thomas gora, and leon s. roudies, 34–61. new york: columbia university press. morson, gary saul, and caryl emerson. 1990. mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. stanford, ca: stanford university press. nikulin, dmitri. 2011. “the man at the mirror (dialogue with oneself).” iris. european journal of philosophy and public debate 3 (5): 61–79. http://www.fupress.net/index.php/iris/article/view/10148. sandler, sergeiy. 2011. “kierkegaard and bakhtin’s philosophical motivation.” paper presented at the xiv international mikhail bakhtin conference, university of bologna, july 2011. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2045694. ———. 2012a. “bakhtin and the kierkegaardian revolution.” ssrn electronic journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2558247. the pros and cons of deconstructing bakhtin: a reflection on boris groys sergeiy sandler dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.217 | vol. 5 (2017) db:38 ———. 2012b. “whose words are these anyway?” in dialogues with bakhtinian theory, edited by mykola polyuha, clive thomson, and anthony wall, 227–42. london, ontario: mestengo press. ———. 2013. “language and philosophical anthropology in the work of mikhail bakhtin and the bakhtin circle.” rivista italiana di filosofia del linguaggio 7 (2): 152–65. doi:10.4396/20130711. ———. 2015. “a strange kind of kantian: bakhtin’s reinterpretation of kant and the marburg school.” studies in east european thought 67 (3–4): 165–82. doi:10.1007/s11212-015-9237-2. ———. 2016. “tema karnavala v kontekste filosofii m. m. bakhtina.” studia litterarum 1 (3–4): 10–28. doi:10.22455/2500-4247-2016-1-3-4-10-28. schittsova, tatiana valer’evna. 1999. k istokam ekzistentsial’noi ontologii: paskal’, kirkegor, bakhtin. minsk: propilei. todorov, tzvetan. 1984. mikhail bakhtin: the dialogical principle. translated by wlad godzich. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. wall, anthony. 1998. “a broken thinker.” the south atlantic quarterly 97 (3/4): 669–98. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 268-1166-1-ce.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e1 whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander university of cambridge, uk abstract if, as evidence shows, well-founded classroom dialogue improves student engagement and learning, the logical next step is to take it to scale. however, this presumes consensus on definitions and purposes, whereas accounts of dialogue and dialogic teaching/pedagogy/education range from the narrowly technical to the capaciously ontological. this paper extends the agenda by noting the widening gulf between discourse and values within the classroom and outside it, and the particular challenge to both language and democracy of a currently corrosive alliance of digital technology and “post-truth” political rhetoric. dialogic teaching is arguably an appropriate and promising response, and an essential ingredient of democratic education, but only if it is strengthened by critical engagement with four imperatives whose vulnerability in contemporary public discourse attests to their importance in the classroom, the more so given their problematic nature: language, voice, argument and truth.1 key words: dialogue; pedagogy; democracy; language; voice; argument; truth robin alexander is fellow of wolfson college, university of cambridge, professor of education emeritus at the university of warwick, fellow of the british academy, and past president of the british association for international and comparative education. he has held senior posts at four uk universities and visiting positions in other countries. he directed the cambridge primary review, the uk’s biggest enquiry into public primary/elementary education, and has worked extensively in development education, especially in india. his research and writing, whose prizes include the aera outstanding book award, explore policy, pedagogy, culture, primary schooling, comparative and development education, with classroom talk a prominent subset culminating to date in the successful large-scale trial of his framework for dialogic teaching. www.robinalexander.org.uk ��� the story so far in 2011, scholars converged on the university of pittsburgh to consider the claims of dialogic education in light of recent research. the evidence was succinctly summarised by the seminar’s convenors: students who had experienced ... structured dialogic teaching performed better on standardised tests ... some students retained their learned knowledge for two or three years ... in 1 this paper is an edited version of the author’s keynote at the earli sig 20/26 conference argumentation and inquiry as venues for civic education, held in jerusalem in october 2018. issn: 2325-3290 (online) whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e2 some cases students ... transferred their academic advantage to a different domain. (resnick, asterhan and clarke, 2015, p. 1, authors’ italics). resnick then nominated prerequisites for taking dialogic teaching to scale: two major ... tasks face us. first, we need a larger empirical base for the claim that dialogic teaching is likely to be effective with all kinds of students in various settings and subject matters. second, we need to find ways of training many more teachers who are willing and able to use academic dialogue as a major component of their teaching. (resnick, 2015, p. 448). in a subsequent evidence review, park, michaels, affolter and o’connor (2017) confirmed that dialogic approaches accelerate learning across students, grades and knowledge domains; but noting that such talk is still uncommon they warned of “a lack of shared conceptualisations of what [it] is and how best to characterise it”. yet howe and abedin (2013) had earlier found a “shared conceptual core”, albeit with “divergence around the edges.” george bernard shaw may or may not have aphorised that “the biggest single problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”, but if we wish to address the post-pittsburgh agenda we should at least agree on what we are talking about. dialogue comes to most european languages via latin from the greek dialogos, a conversation, and for some people conversation is all that dialogue ever means. but dialogue is also the exchange of ideas, while when heightened by focused effort it enables us to expose, explore and resolve competing points of view. similarly, “argument” may be a mere statement or proposition, but it can also signify the making and testing of a case, a well-tempered debate between opposing viewpoints, or indeed an ill-tempered quarrel. in many languages other than english the words for argument in these contrasting senses are different, so there is less room for ambiguity. but the community of educational dialogue and argumentation is international, and translation, especially in the realm of ideas, is not an exact science, so we should treat such keywords with caution. back, therefore, to “dialogue” as conversation. simple definition becomes complex concept at the point when the conversation acquires a purpose. thereafter, dialogue is stance as well as process. in classrooms the stance is self-evidently relational, certainly epistemological, probably ethical and conceivably ideological, and both separately and in combination these properties intimate a barely containable plurality. in the research community some seek, evidentially or conceptually, to impose order by describing dialogue; others prescribe the form it should take. as for “dialogic teaching”, it has both multiple stipulative definitions and a vaguely generic one. stipulatively, i have used the term my way since the early 2000s, others use it their way, and whether the twain or many shall meet is a matter of chance. generically, “dialogic teaching” can signify no more than talk that replaces irf/ire by discussion, without specifying that discussion’s purpose or character. indeed, used without explanation the term “dialogic teaching” may be little more than virtue signalling: irf/ire bad, dialogic teaching good. the definitional differences that are most likely to confound even the illusion of communication are those that stem from disciplinary affiliations. the fact that talk, dialogic or otherwise, interests cognitive psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psycholinguists, sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, pragmatists, comparative linguists, discourse analysts and conversation analysts might justify celebration that its importance is so widely recognised, except that this plurality reduces prospects for mutual understanding still further. for disciplinary perspective, or what park et al. (2018), following emig, call a “governing gaze”, determines what we look at, how we look at it, and what, having looked, we see. then, in application, it whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e3 shapes our view of what dialogue ought to be about. this paper started with the dialogic claim as validated by student performance in standardised tests in a small range of curriculum domains. but some hold that dialogue, argumentation and discussion serve other educational purposes that are no less important, while a case can be made for regarding these kinds of talk as of intrinsic value to the development of mind and culture regardless of what schools choose to teach and test. dialogue, in short, may be a means or an end, a way of doing or of being (matusov, 2018). it may be a pedagogy narrowly defined, a necessary educational goal which is at once pedagogical, epistemic and ethical, as commended in the cambridge primary review (alexander, 2010a, p. 199) or indeed an education in itself (alexander, 2006). attempting to make sense of all this, lefstein and snell (2014) posit six quasi-paradigmatic dialogic concepts or perhaps stances each with its own questions, values and goals, and for good measure its own guru: dialogue as the interplay of voices (bakhtin), as critique (socrates), as thinking together (vygotsky), as relationship (buber), as empowerment (freire), and as interactional form (no guru specified). lefstein and snell then juxtapose these stances with four models of dialogic practice: nystrand’s dialogically organised instruction (nystrand et al., 1997), mercer’s exploratory talk (mercer and littleton, 2007; mercer and dawes, 2008), the “accountable talk” of resnick, michaels and o’connor (2010), and alexander’s version of dialogic teaching (alexander 2017). next, seeking to expose disagreement as well as consensus, kim and wilkinson (in press) compare the versions or visions of dialogic pedagogy of freire, burbules, nystrand, wells, wegerif, matusov, mercer, boyd, reznitskaya, mortimer and scott, juzwik, lefstein and alexander before identifying three “points of contention” that underlie the differences that emerge: the balance of significance given to linguistic form and function and the way, as explored by boyd and markarian (2015), that this relationship is perceived; the degree to which talk is embedded in the wider classroom culture or detached from it; and whether dialogic pedagogy is viewed as a specific way of organising classroom talk or as a general approach that can be implemented in different ways. conceptual differences such as those exposed in these reviews are marginal, pace howe and abedin, only if one concedes that dialogic pedagogy is little more than technique; a view perhaps reinforced by the use of standardised tests as the default measure of its effectiveness (see our opening quotation). since it is evident that dialogic pedagogy can do, be and produce much more than this, the extent of a “shared conceptual core” remains open to question. a collision of discourses so what else can dialogue be and do? i now muddy the definitional waters further by registering what i see as a widening chasm between the ways of talking and reasoning that are cultivated inside the school, whether dialogic or non-dialogic, and those that students encounter outside it. indeed, i want to propose that while the gradualist agenda for talk reform at scale extrapolated from the reviews cited above clarify concepts, extend evidence, consolidate proof of concept(s), disseminate practice, improve training pursues the leisurely logic of academic enquiry, it makes educational as opposed to technical sense only if it also confronts this socio-cultural collision of discourses. let me elaborate. for some students the norms of pedagogical, curricular and wider cultural discourse may be more or less in harmony. others experience well-researched dissonances relating to class, race and gender; and they discover how academic and everyday registers diverge inevitably so, for opening up new ways of knowing, understanding and hence of naming, expressing and communicating is the essence of schooling. whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e4 but divergence has lately morphed into confrontation. on the one hand we have the sedimented habits and values embodied in school curriculum domains and the more or less rational and courteous ways of accessing, interrogating and verifying the knowledge that such domains embody. but on the other hand we witness the raucous free-for-all of social media, the ascendancy of ephemeral and anonymous online content over the verifiable and attributable knowledge of book and laboratory, the mischievous anarchy of fake news, the reduction of judgemental nuance to the binary “like”/”dislike”, the trolling and abuse that for many people have replaced discussion and debate; and the sense not so much that truth claims are open to question, as of course they always should be, as that for many in the public and political spheres truth is no longer a standard to which they feel morally obliged to aspire. as if to prove his immunity from this basic moral standard and pronounce the overton window well and truly shattered, a democratically-elected american president can utter, according to the washington post, over 8000 “misleading or demonstrably false” statements since his inauguration in 2016, or an average of 11.3 public falsehoods each day, yet still be president. (kessler et al., 2018; washington post, 2019). at the time of writing, trump’s case is egregious but far from unique, for in extreme form he displays tendencies that have afflicted the leadership of many other countries that call themselves democratic, as well as those whose regimes are openly autocratic: the braggadocio, aggression and narcissism of the would-be alpha male; the manipulation of information; the appeals to people’s worst instincts rather than their best; the stoking and exploitation of racism, misogyny and homophobia; the sustained attacks on the press, judiciary and other institutions of civil society that provide the checks and balances that good government requires. and, insidiously but dangerously, the erosion of what levitsky and ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of democracy: mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals; and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. (levitsky and ziblatt, 2018, p. 9). uk legislators have begun to acknowledge the challenge posed by these trends. in 2018, a parliamentary select committee documented extensive evidence that digital media had been exploited to play to voters’ fears and prejudices and influence their voting plans and behaviour in the 2016 us presidential election, the 2016 uk brexit referendum, and elections in france, germany, spain, africa and latin america. meanwhile, there was growing concern about the extent to which social media had come to dominate children’s lives, skew their development and exploit their vulnerability. (o’keefe and pearson, 2011; savage, 2019). the committee concluded: urgent action needs to be taken ... to build resilience against misinformation and disinformation into our democratic system ... our democracy is at risk. our education system should [equip] children with the necessary tools to live in our digital world, so that their mental health, emotional well-being and faculty for critical thinking are protected ... digital literacy should be the fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths. (house of commons, 2018, pp. 3 and 62-3). children must certainly acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for coping in a digital world, but i am less sanguine about bolting digital literacy onto a curriculum that in other respects remains untouched. conspicuously unchallenged is the belief that the so-called “3rs” are the three immovable “pillars” of school education; and that this hoary definition, which shackled britain’s schools for the urban masses in the 19th whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e5 century but goes back 1400 years to st augustine’s “legere et scribere et numerare”, can be made fit for the 21st century by adding another “literacy” but without challenging the assumption that oracy is merely incidental. some see the task in terms of what england’s national curriculum calls pshe (personal, social and health education); others reach for the nostrums of civic education. traditionally restricted to imparting received wisdom about the institutions of government and the values that are held to underpin them (in britain officially defined as “democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and ... respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, and ... those without faith”) (ofsted, 2018), this version of civic education sanitises politics and idealises citizenship. some might add that it confirms the school as instrument of cultural and economic reproduction (bowles and gintis, 1976; bourdieu and passeron, 1990), if not as full-blown “ideological state apparatus” (althusser, 1976). there is little space in the traditional and somewhat hirschian view of civic education for the awkward question, let alone for the critical pedagogy of a freire or giroux (hirsch, 1988; freire, 1970; giroux, 2011). the handling of talk in schools may be no less hegemonic. in britain, exclusive and expensive private schools used to train the nation’s future leaders in the art of public speaking and adversarial debate so as to send them into the world articulate, confident and ready to take control. this tradition goes back centuries to when classical and then renaissance rhetoric were fundamental to a gentleman’s education. (simon, 1966; kennedy, 1999). meanwhile, schools for the ungentlemanly majority (of either gender) pinned their faith on the 3rs and at all costs avoided unleashing the subversive possibilities of talk. in britain, the contrast between private education for leadership and state education for followership is still evident in the social and educational profiles of senior politicians, the private/state school opposition of liberal and instrumental curricula, and the struggle to persuade government to give spoken language the prominence in state schools that it deserves and defend it against the ministerial charge of “idle chatter”. (alexander, 2014; 2015). such conditions highlight the challenge facing those who believe, following dewey (1997), that a deliberative democracy requires a deliberative pedagogy. for, as kakutani says, “without commonly agreed-upon facts ... there can be no rational debate ... without truth, democracy is hobbled” (kakutani, 2018, pp. 172-3). equally, when immediately after the second world war george orwell warned that “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language” (orwell, 1968, p. 139) he foreshadowed our own present, for the abuse of public language is symptomatic of what in some countries is a democratic malaise and in others is a crisis. and in considering where all this might lead we recall hannah arendt: the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction ... and ... between true and false ... no longer exist. (arendt, 2004, p. 474). in light of all this, i suggest that consideration of the future of dialogic pedagogy might encompass not only the post-pittsburgh agenda conceptual clarification, evidence of impact, strategies for professional development but also four new imperatives. they are language, voice, argument and, as a subset of the latter, truth. these provide the focus for the remainder of this paper. language cued by orwell, we nominate language as the pivot. language makes us human, powers thought, evokes learning, conveys culture, coheres community, and for better or worse tempers or inflames public discourse. whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e6 we approach this first post-truth imperative by way of a pedagogy that explicitly links spoken language with democratic education and engagement. “accountable talk” was first proposed by resnick during the 1990s (resnick et al., 2010) and developed with michaels and o’connor, who preferred the term “academically productive talk” (michaels and o’connor, 2015; park, michaels, affolter and o’connor, 2017). it has three interdependent facets. accountability to community, later modified to accountability to the learning community, establishes and maintains the culture of classroom talk that is essential to collective sense-making and learning listening, respecting others’ ideas, building on each other’s contributions and so on. accountability to standards of reasoning “emphasises logical connections and the drawing of reasonable conclusions.” accountability to knowledge requires that speakers base what they say on “facts, written evidence or other publicly accessible information that all ... can access” (michaels, o’connor and resnick, 2008). this triple insistence on accountability communal, rational, epistemic speaks to the proper conduct of public and policy discourse no less than to that of teaching and learning. michaels, o’connor and resnick acknowledge, as this paper does, the mismatch between what we strive for within classrooms and what students may encounter outside them; and “though ... we have made some progress in ... classrooms ... there is much we still do not know about how best to set up the conditions for truly democratic discourse on a wide scale.” (michaels, o’connor and resnick, 2008). yet accountable talk remains a powerful ideal. it links classrooms with democratic practice not indirectly or by exhortation as in traditional civic education, but by being of itself participatory and deliberative; and it has been applied through a battery of talk moves for the third turn in ways that are both practical and successful (michaels and o’connor, 2012; 2015).2 yet its authors speak of unfinished business, and in that spirit i propose a fourth strand: accountability to language, and specifically accountability to spoken language. what do i mean by this? in the first instance, talk must be the object of learning as well as its medium. in the 2014-17 dialogic teaching project led by frank hardman and myself, “talking about talk” was the first of 11 cycles in a 20-week programme combining professional development with teaching, mentoring and video analysis, and it remained prominent throughout. (alexander, 2018). similarly, dawes, mercer and wegerif (2004) initiated their thinking together programme with a group of five lessons fronted by “talk about talk”. out of such foundational activities can come, alongside ground rules for classroom talk of the kind with which we are all familiar, a heightened awareness of talk’s possibilities; of the interplay between linguistic and paralinguistic aspects; of the dynamics of turn-taking; of code, register, accent and dialect and their social ramifications; of the relationship between discourse form, function and context; of the language of argumentation; and, salient here, of the nature, uses and impact of rhetoric. such metalinguistic understanding is sensitised and deepened through audio and video. teachers in several of our projects have shared and discussed with their students the lesson videos they initially intended for their own self-study, with striking results. these teachers literally “made talk visible” to their students (qca, 2004, p. 4). ever the pioneer, cazden was doing this, though with audio, several decades ago. (cazden, 2001, p. 7). however, video-prompted “talk about talk”, if untutored, may concentrate more on talk’s paralinguistic features than its structure and meaning, or what we see rather than what we hear (alexander, 2 sarah michaels and cathy o’connor have kindly allowed me to use their ‘talk moves’ (michaels and o’connor, 2012: 2015) to boost the latest iteration of my dialogic teaching framework (alexander, 2018), though i have renamed the moves ‘extending’ to emphasise their attention to the third turn. whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e7 2017; lefstein & snell, 2014). carter’s work on the grammar of talk rebalances the focus. using computer corpora of naturalistic spoken english, he shows how written and spoken forms are different not only in obvious respects like formality and fluency but also in their structure, yet that sufficient consistencies emerge from corpus analysis of discourse markers, word order, ellipsis, deixis and incremental rather than subordinate clauses for the word “grammar” to be appropriate. (carter, 1997; mccarthy and carter, 2001). carter’s grammar of talk is descriptive, not normative. it is an aid to understanding the relationship between conversational structure and meaning, not a manual for “correct” speaking, and in a country like the uk where debates about “correct” or “standard” english are sharply politicised this proviso requires emphasis. a grammar of talk begins to do for talk what literary analysis does for text. but it is only a beginning, and if talk is as important as we believe then we might also consider whether tools of discourse analysis used for researching the talk of teachers and students might feature in the education of students themselves, and indeed the place in the school curriculum of linguistic analysis of the kind hitherto confined to universities. these possibilities are now being actively canvassed in the uk (crystal, 2018; clie, 2019). talking about talk applies equally in the context of democratic education, for leaving aside the question of whether we live in an orwellian age of language decay, talk is the medium through which politicians engage with the electorate, even if at one stage removed via tweets and television debates. in the uk i have charted four signature discourses through which policies may be advocated and contrary views marginalised. the discourse of derision (kenway, 1990; ball, 1990), uses ridicule or abuse to discredit or at least neutralise ideas and evidence that are politically inconvenient. the discourse of dichotomy reduces complex issues to a binary choice between caricatured alternatives and the politics of them and us. the discourse of myth peddles inflated claims while belittling what others have achieved in order to lower the baseline against which delivery on policy promises will be set. and if the discourse of myth is about the destruction of the past, the discourse of meaninglessness destroys language itself, for it evades or obfuscates meaning, parades the old as new, but once unpicked collapses into a tangle of cliché and tautology. (alexander, 2008; 2010b; 2014). the discourses of derision, dichotomy, myth and meaninglessness transparently flout grice’s maxims governing the relation between logic and conversation: quantity (a contribution should give as much information as is needed and no more), quality (it should be well-founded and true), relation (it should be relevant) and manner (it should be clear and orderly in delivery) (grice, 1975). of course, such negative discourses may be offset by the judicious language, serious argument, defensible evidence and intelligibility to which politicians of integrity remain committed. yet this everyday contrast underlines the argument that examining how political language works should be part of students’ democratic education; just as, in their education as a whole, talk should be the object as well as the means of their study. equally, having recourse to generic tests of the argumentative power and validity of language as used, such as those cited above by grice and below by walton and toulmin, or with a specific focus on dialogic pedagogy (reznitskaya and wilkinson, 2017), or by the proponents of philosophy for children (lipman, 2003; fisher 2008; gregory, 2007) can make talk a powerful tool for cultural and civic engagement no less than for learning more narrowly defined. voice all i have is a voice / to undo the folded lie, / the romantic lie in the brain / of the sensual man-in-the-street / and the lie of authority / whose buildings grope the sky. whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e8 thus wrote british poet w.h. auden (1991), on september 1st 1939: fateful day. citizenship is the exercise of voice as well as vote. citizens use their voices to argue for what they believe is right and against what they believe is wrong. voice is where democracy starts, and voice is what autocracy seeks to stifle. like our other keywords, “voice” has several meanings. in life we speak, shout, scream, whisper or sing, and these contrasting physical exercises of our vocal cords express intentions, opinions, ideas, emotions, wants and needs: indeed, who we are. in classrooms segal and lefstein (2015) differentiate four senses of “voice”: having the opportunity to speak; expressing one’s own ideas; speaking on one’s own terms; and being heeded. these stages in the progress of the classroom exchange, from permission to speak to acknowledgement of what is spoken, are about ownership and rights. together, they prompt four questions. what do we do to encourage our students to speak? how do we ensure that what they say is treated equitably and respectfully? when they speak, whose voices do we hear? and how do we handle the contributions that don’t follow our agenda? such questions are partly addressed in the literature on turns and turn-taking, ground rules, communities of discourse and communicative rights and competences (edwards and westgate, 1994; mercer, 2000), so i concentrate here on the question about voice in the sense of ownership of what is said. segal and lefstein tell us that students in their study enthusiastically contribute to lively classroom discussion and often frame these discussions as dialogical responses that build on each other’s ideas, but at the level of voice the discussion is mostly univocal, since most student contributions are aligned with the official voice of the teacher and the curriculum and in the rare instances where they emerge, independent student voices fall out of the conversation. (segal and lefstein, 2015, p. 1). the authors call this “exuberant voiceless participation”, using voice in their sense of ownership of what is uttered. (see also segal, pollak & lefstein, 2016; lefstein, pollak & segal, 2018). while they acknowledge bakhtin’s much quoted maxim that “the word in language is half someone else’s” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 170), they find their observed teachers and students caught between competing epistemologies: on the one hand the principle of co-construction, on the other hand the “official knowledge” of the school curriculum. this dilemma, say segal and lefstein, is translated into teaching that may be dialogic in form but is monologic in function. discussion, however lively and promising, reductively yields what the teacher expects and is therefore, in the authors’ second and third senses, “voiceless”. the paradox of apparently open pedagogy mediating a closed curriculum was noted over 40 years ago in a piece by atkinson and delamont (1977) entertainingly entitled “mock-ups and cock-ups: the stage management of guided discovery instruction”. yet i am not convinced that matters are this clear-cut, for if bakhtin is right, then nobody, including the teacher, has an independent voice. teachers initiate their students into ways of thinking and knowing developed by others, and their task is in large measure cultural transmission, and indeed if we accept basil bernstein’s classic definition of pedagogic discourse (bernstein, 1990, p. 168) as “a relay for power relations external to [the classroom]” social control. viewed thus, even the goal of developing students’ autonomous thinking, notwithstanding the confident claims of dialogists, is normative. yet while freedom is never absolute it can be tempered. the path from the official curriculum to the curriculum as enacted and experienced in the classroom is rarely linear. governments may specify, but schools translate what is specified, teachers transpose it and together teachers and students transform or domesticate it (alexander, 2001, pp. 552-3). it is through pedagogy that a paper curriculum gains life and whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e9 meaning, and in this matter the agency of teachers and students is critical. similarly, students learn more outside school than their teachers may credit (mayall, 2010) and each student’s unique out-of-school biography predisposes classroom contributions to the curriculum as translated and transposed that may be as much their own as the teacher’s; though what each student brings to the learning encounter enters the dialogue only if the teacher allows it. but when the teacher does allow the student’s voice in segal and lefstein’s senses of speaking on one’s own terms and being heeded, i see no contradiction between the dialogic dynamic and the school’s obligation to advance the student’s understanding in ways that have been culturally developed and are collectively understood. if teaching may be dialogic in form but not necessarily in function, it may also be monologic in form but in its content more dialogic than at first sight it appears, for example when the teacher uses the expository mode conventionally associated with “traditional” teaching to introduce ideas of different kinds and from different sources in order to encourage corresponding dissonance in the mind of the student. (see the case study of one such teacher in alexander, 2008, pp. 154-172). this teaching mode reminds us to differentiate inner from outer speech as well as, again, to avoid confusing form with function. (wells, 1999; boyd & markarian, 2015). curriculum domains represent centuries of cumulative co-construction and are inherently dialogic; and while teaching that is behaviourally dialogic may explicate and celebrate the epistemic dialogue and monologic teaching may mask it, neither consequence is inevitable. (cf mortimer and scott’s discussion of the tension between authoritative and dialogic interactions in science teaching, mortimer and scott, 2003; and nystrand’s insistence that the bottom line is not the presence or absence of discussion, small group work and so on but the extent to which teaching, however configured, “requires students to think, not just report someone else’s thinking” (nystrand et al, 1997, p.72)). we should avoid treating dialogue and monologue as mutually exclusive. epistemic and pedagogical dimensions transect; boundaries may be blurred. no less important than the overall balance of teacher and student voice is the matter of vocal equity among students themselves, but re-casting equity as voice underlines its complexity. consider this: it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs (hardy, 1916, p. 414). at first sight this expresses a very modern consciousness about voice and patriarchy, and dale spender puts the matter almost identically: women have been obliged to use a language not of their own making ... women [have been allowed] to express themselves, but only in male terms (spender, 1980, p. 12). but what i quoted first was in fact written nearly 150 years ago, in 1874. and it was written by a man, british novelist thomas hardy, putting the sentiment about man-made language into the mouth of a woman, bathsheba everdene in far from the madding crowd. so which version of spender’s or hardy’s or bathsheba’s statement about language and gender is “man made”? and while spender offers explicitly feminist critique, what exactly is hardy up to? does he empathise with women’s situation, or does he reinforce male dominance by attributing to men more power than they have? and does dale spender unwittingly do the same? is it in fact male arrogance to assert that language is “man made”, and double arrogance for a male novelist to put that assertion into the mouth of a woman? i float the matter in this equivocating way because my final concern about voice is this. many countries are deeply divided by inequalities of income, opportunity, education, class, race and of course gender. among the promises of dialogic teaching is that it distributes classroom talk more equitably, first whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e10 between teacher and students collectively, then among students themselves; and that this redistribution will contribute to the larger cause of reducing social inequality. that is why the uk education endowment foundation were keen to support our trial of dialogic teaching with children meeting the criteria of social and economic disadvantage.3 yet while dialogic teaching can be shown to shift the balance of classroom talk towards students collectively, we must ask how far it equalises the voices of different groups of students. if the word is indeed “half someone else’s” does this maxim apply to every student equally, or is it the case that for some students theirs is a “silenced dialogue”? (delpit, 1988; edwards, 1989). in reconciling cultural transmission, equity and the development of the student’s autonomous (or normatively autonomous) thinking, much hangs on the third move in the spoken exchange. here the seminal work of michaels and o’connor (2012; 2015) reminds us that the third move has the power to ensure that the student’s voice, once invited, does not “fall out of the dialogue” (bakhtin, 1986, p 168). so to assess whether an exchange is genuinely dialogic, and whether it promotes student equity and autonomy, we might treat the third move as an indicator while being ever mindful of the danger of inferring cognitive function from oral form. argument in english, “argument” suggests bellicosity as well as rationality, and this is how many students view it (osborne, 2015, p. 406; kuhn et al., 2011). the norms of deliberative discourse are not instinctive but need to be made explicit and translated into ground rules (mercer and dawes, 2008). argumentation is an acquired skill, and helping students to move from mere disagreement to evidentiary discussion is a necessary educational task. (reznitskaya and wilkinson, 2017). it is hardly surprising if students view argument as conflict. they witness the media turning complex issues into battling binaries. they join a twittersphere that thrives on intolerance. they see politicians asserting cases rather than demonstrating them, using evidence selectively, and gleefully stoking disagreement into conflict. but the manipulation of evidence is among the oldest tricks in the political game, so rather than deplore this as an aberration students should learn that political and academic argument have different goals and conventions, and that when argument is about persuasion and power rather than truth, evidence gives way to rhetoric, and rhetoric has its own rules. (condor, tileaga & billig 2013). cicero, master of political rhetoric, said, “wisdom without eloquence does little benefit”; though he did have the grace to add, “but eloquence without wisdom does much harm” (kennedy, 1999, p. 94). pertinently, there has been a revival of interest in classical rhetoric and its modern variants, especially in university english departments (welch, 1990). the last great flowering was during the renaissance, when the key texts of aristotle, cicero and quintilian were rediscovered and in schools and universities the practice of rhetoric was as essential as the study of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. (simon, 1966). rhetoric, too, guided and framed renaissance poetic discourse. some of shakespeare’s greatest speeches and bouts of oral fencing, for example in hamlet, can be properly understood only if one has a grasp of the 3 classroom talk, social disadvantage and educational attainment: raising standards, closing the gap, directed by robin alexander and frank hardman and funded 2014-17 by the uk education endowment foundation. the project entailed the development and independent randomised control trial, with nearly 5000 students in three english cities, of a professional development and support programme based on robin alexander’s dialogic teaching framework. after just 20 weeks, students in the intervention group were up to two months ahead of their control group peers in standardised english, mathematics and science tests. the project is reported and discussed in detail in alexander (2018), while there are accounts of, respectively, its interim internal evaluation and external rct in alexander et al (2017) and jay et al (2017). https://cprtrust.org.uk/research/classroom-talk/ whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e11 rhetorical devices and figures of speech with many in shakespeare’s audiences were familiar (adamson et al., 2007). is this territory to which dialogic pedagogy might return us? in any event, we cannot be content to frame our discussion of dialogic pedagogy and democratic engagement by polarising academic and political argument as if each were one-dimensional. walton (2013), for instance, proposes seven types of dialogic argumentation, each with its own goals, moves, questions and responses: persuasion, inquiry, discovery, negotiation, information exchange, deliberation and eristic argument. the first six are reasoned and rule-bound, and only eristic argument (from the greek word for “strife”) aims to win by whatever means are available. political argument can and often does entail negotiation, inquiry and deliberation, but the eristic is always there as the last resort or, for some, the first. prominent in eristic argument are the well-known fallacies of syllogistic reasoning: equivocation, or exploiting ambiguity; begging the question; ad verecundiam, or citing an “authority” who may be nothing of the sort; ad hominem, attacking the person rather than the argument; ad baculum, or threatening dire consequences if one’s views aren’t accepted; and so on. some of these classic fallacies are numbered among schopenhauer’s “38 ways to win an argument” (schopenhauer, 2004), which start from the proposition that logic pursues truth but eristic aims only for victory. schopenhauer’s list, published in 1831 but still resonant, includes alongside the familiar syllogistic fallacies some decidedly contemporary echoes: “make your opponent angry”, “generalise from the specific”, “claim victory despite defeat”, “persuade the audience, not the opponent”, “interrupt or divert the dispute if you think you are losing”, “puzzle or bewilder your opponent by mere bombast”, and “be personal, insulting and rude.” just as academic and political argument are not mutually exclusive but overlap on a continuum, so academic argument is not one mode but many. scientific, mathematical and historical reasoning, to take three obvious paradigms, are manifestly different. less frequently considered in the dialogic pedagogy literature is argument in the artistic and literary spheres. how do we make or test the case for a work of art, music or literature? between the 1930s and 1970s the influential cambridge literary critic f.r. leavis taught his students to attend as closely as possible to text, investigating and assessing the technical, linguistic and stylistic ingredients of prose, poetry and drama and locating them in historical context, so that they could distinguish the technically original and inventive from the mediocre or routine, and assign dates to samples of writing without knowing the author, which, like “blind” student grading, certainly aids objectivity. but moving from assessments of artistic technique and style to judgements of artistic merit is more problematic. here leavis relied on his famous question “this is so, isn’t it?” which puts a literary work’s moral seriousness and psychological or experiential authenticity on the line alongside its technical and imaginative mastery. but “this is so, isn’t it?” was always followed by “yes, but...”, an obligatory riposte that commands both convincing justification and rigorous scepticism about every judgement ventured, the literary equivalent of popper’s theory of scientific conjectures and refutations, perhaps (popper, 1963). of course, this process interrogates evidence of a kind and in a way that would be unlikely to satisfy a physicist, but that is the point: the modes of argument and justification in the arts and sciences are different but not necessarily of unequal validity. as reznitskaya, wilkinson and their colleagues have shown (reznitskaya & wilkinson, 2017; reznitskaya, kuo, glina & anderson, 2009), toulmin offers a kind of reconciliation. noting that different kinds of question or claim call for different treatment, he proposes a generic “layout” of six elements of argumentation applicable to most circumstances: claim (what has to be established or proved); ground (facts, evidence, data or reasoning in support of the claim); warrant (justification for the grounds cited); backing (additional or alternative support); qualifier (limitations on the claim); and rebuttal (counter whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e12 arguments). this applies as well to leavis’s approach to literary judgement as to the scientific/mathematical examples that toulmin cites, such as “whether ... fröhlich’s theory of super-conductivity is really satisfactory, when the next eclipse of the moon will take place, or the exact nature of the relation between the squares on the different sides of a right-angled triangle.” (toulmin, 2003, pp.12-13). this is the briefest of canters across a vast and complex field to which others, notably schwarz and baker (2017), have devoted the depth and multi-disciplinary breadth that it deserves; while reznitskaya and wilkinson have devised an “argumentation rating tool” that identifies four key criteria of “quality argumentation” and tracks these through 11 “facilitation practices” (reznitskaya & wilkinson, 2017, pp 4046). learning in general, and learning for democratic engagement in particular, require us to be able to make, understand and test arguments of different kinds. the task is larger than even a totally reconfigured civic education programme can accomplish. it requires us to think about dialogue and democratic education across the curriculum as a whole, and hence in epistemic as well as pedagogical terms. approached through dialogue rather than recitation, curriculum domains come into their own as ways of arguing as well as knowing, and taken together they can enhance the student’s capacity to make, understand, critique and challenge argument outside as well as inside the classroom. truth and trust “comment is free, but facts are sacred” was the mantra of c.p.scott, legendary one-time editor of the then manchester guardian. nowadays the boundary between objective fact and subjective opinion is more blurred than in 1921, and not only in the media and body politic: in academic life, too, it is contested. indeed, academics may be unwittingly implicated in attacks on received truth by epistemic nihilists in the white house and westminster. “people have had enough of experts”, declared england’s former education secretary michael gove of those who cited hard evidence to challenge populist claims about migration and economic impact promulgated by brexit advocates in 2016; and “truth isn’t truth” said presidential attorney rudi giulani, to gasps of outrage even louder than those that greeted kellyanne conway when she defended as “alternative fact” president trump’s exaggeration of the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration. but kakutani (2018) shows how such tropes do not so much come out of the blue as take to extremes the post-modernist rejection of the enlightenment belief in objective reality, provable truth, stable linguistic constructs and reason itself. habermas noted that there is an inherent contradiction in using traditional methods of reasoning and arguing to attack those same methods of reasoning and arguing. (habermas, 1987). if the methods are invalid, so is the critique. the concept “fake news” is truly fake news. yet if there are different ways of knowing and making sense, which there manifestly are look no further than the school curriculum and if these embody different tests of truth, then truth itself may also be plural, epistemically if not morally. some of jerome bruner’s most interesting work towards the end of his long life provides a perspective on these matters, though he was no post-modernist. he reduces humankind’s ways of investigating, knowing and understanding to just two modes: one verifies by appeal to formal verification procedures and empirical truth. the other establishes not truth but truthlikeness or verisimilitude ... one mode is centered around the narrow epistemological question of how to know the truth; the other around the broader and more inclusive question of the meaning of experience (bruner, 2006, p. 116). bruner named the first mode logico-scientific or “paradigmatic” and the second mode “narrative”, which recalls anthropologist clifford geertz’s definition of culture as “the stories we tell ourselves about whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e13 ourselves” (geertz, 1975). (not coincidental: the admiration of these two giants was mutual (mattingly, lutkehaus & throop, 2008). but apart from the obvious cases of, say, mathematics and science, assigning school subjects to one or other of bruner’s modes isn’t straightforward. history, being both evidential and narrative, can be in either mode or both, while locating the social sciences, despite their name, is equally problematic; and in mentioning f.r. leavis earlier i noted his exemplifying the educated literary response as a combination of subjective/intersubjective judgement and evidence from textual scrutiny. leavis’s “common pursuit of true judgement” placed him closer to the toughness of philosophical analysis than to the genially idiosyncratic study of literature as pursued by others of his generation (tanner, 1975; joyce 1988). bruner’s paradigmatic/narrative distinction might appear to reinforce the old opposition of “fact” and “fiction”, or of what is supposedly true and what is manifestly made up. but would those to whom margaret attwood’s the handmaid’s tale speaks so vividly allow that because it’s a work of fiction it doesn’t deal in truth? would we be happy for this sweeping judgement to be passed on all those poets, novelists and dramatists, and indeed artists and musicians, whose illuminating insights into the human condition take us beyond the reach of the social sciences, and show inner lives rather than merely attach labels to them? (leavis again: “this is so, isn’t it ... yes, but ...”). in the words of scottish novelist ali smith: fiction and lies are the opposite of each other ... lies go out of their way to distort, or to turn you away from, the truth. fiction is one of our ways to get to truths that are really difficult to talk about, that we haven’t yet been able to articulate, or see; truths that we come to articulate via a story. (smith 2018). not fact versus fiction, then, but fact and fiction versus lies, with both fact and fiction aspiring to truth, albeit to truths of different kinds, while lies fabricate it. but once again there’s a problem of definition fiction as something made up, and fiction as literary genre. ali smith is talking about fiction as literary genre, but the colloquial opposition of fact and fiction fails to make that distinction, thereby denying the truths that serious fiction, as opposed to mere entertainment, explore and expose, and relegating bruner’s narrative mode and geertz’s “stories we tell ourselves about ourselves” to the outer circle of trust. but let us be clear. when commentators complain of “truth decay” and “the death of truth” they speak not of a universal epistemic and moral collapse but of a localised political or media malaise, or in academic circles a post-modernist turn. to most people truth really does matter, and they see it in terms of trust as much as evidence. today’s truth decay is about the behaviour of the body politic and sections of the print and digital media. it is about people who destroy trust by spreading falsehood and giving comfort to the cynical relativism of “fake news” and the “alternative fact”. for the rest of us, including teachers and students, keeping faith with the enlightenment may be the best we can do. conclusion democracy is fragile and history cautions us against complacency about its prospects. playing on voters’ worst instincts and deepest fears self-styled “strong” leaders fan the flames of division and intolerance, marginalise dissenting voices, debase language and argument, and treat truth with contempt. the collision of this discourse with what is aspired towards in schools and universities is reminiscent of the darker decades of the 20th century, eric hobsbawm’s “age of extremes” (hobsbawm, 1995), when h.g. wells warned that “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe” whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world robin alexander dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.268 | vol. 7 (2019) e14 (wells, 1920), and joseph stalin retorted: “education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed” (stalin and wells, 1937).4 the scenario, then, is hardly new, but with a screen in every hand allied to a highly addictive technology, 21st century mass communication possesses power and penetration far beyond what was conceivable in the 20th. yet, by the same token, the sheer volume of information now accessible affords countervailing opportunities to challenge and correct, and behind every purveyor of fake news or alternative facts lurks a fact checker. at the end of his vast and prescient 1990s trilogy the information age, manuel castells concluded that although the enlightenment dream seems forever frustrated by the “extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social underdevelopment”, it nevertheless remains within reach; for “there is no eternal evil in human nature” and “there is nothing that cannot be changed by conscious, purposive social action” (castells, 1998, pp. 359-60). dialogue is not a panacea, but it is indeed “purposive social action” as well as a vital ingredient of effective teaching and a worthy educational end in itself, and hence a manifesto for hope. dialogue is essential to our response to the current cultural crisis; but only if it attends rigorously to those of its ingredients that are currently under most sustained attack: language, voice, argument and truth. references adamson, s., alexander, g.r. and ettenhuber, k. 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(1920). the outline of history, vol 2. george newnes. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word beyond equality and inequality in education, draft #3, 2018-01-24 (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e1 beyond equality and inequality in education: bakhtinian dialogic ethics approach of human uniqueness to educational justice eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract in our essay, we challenge the hegemonic kantian discourse of defining justice as equality (in a broader sense) and injustice as inequality in education (and elsewhere). we argue that this discourse is based on the underlining assumption of replaceability and measurement of people and of educational practice itself. in contrast, we argue that people and their education are unique. thus, it is necessary to develop an alternative notion of justice based on uniqueness and immeasurability of people and their education. we found that bakhtin’s dialogic ethics framework is helpful for developing such an alternative approach. according to the bakhtinian dialogic ethics, people are engaged in self-contradictory deeds, charged with ethical tensions. these ethically problematic deeds must be challenged by others and the self in critical dialogue and must demand responses by the authors of the deeds striving to achieve justice. taking responsibility is not merely a discursive process of answering – it is not “answerability” – but rather another ethic deed of defining ethically good or bad, defining quality and values, accepting blame, standing grounds, committing to fixing negative consequences, emotional sympathy, and so on. the process of challenging people’s deeds in critical dialogue and their taking (or not taking) responsibility defines (in)justice of people’s deeds. we examine two cases of educational injustice based on the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework of uniquness. we try to show that education and its justice are essentially authorial and, thus, unique processes. even when justice involves measurable things like money, it is still about unique people with unique educational goals, interests, and needs in unique circumstances that these measurable resources afford. we consider a case of allocation of measurable resources as a compromise between the kantian formulistic and the bakhtinian dialogic ethics approaches. we conclude our essay with developing a vision for a just educational practice based on students’ academic freedoms for authorial education. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar in philadelphia, usa. she studies meaning making in human development, dialogic educational relationships and events, democracy in education, dialogic issn: 2325-3290 (online) beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e2 teacher orientation, the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. in her studies, she is developing a dialogic sociocultural paradigm, inspired by a bakhtinian dialogic orientation. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play, education, and democracy. her most recent publication is: marjanovic-shane et al, (2017). idea-dying in critical ontological democratic dialogue in classrooms. learning, culture and social interaction. acknowledgements we want to thank our colleagues who provided their generous and thoughtful feedback and editing of the previous draft of this editorial article: sergeiy sandler, paul spitale, antti rajala, bryan campbell, and lei chen. ��� epigraph it is often remarked that you can conceive equality in two ways: either by saying two things are (in any important respect anyway) precisely the same, or else by saying they are so different, there’s simply no way to compare them at all. it’s the latter logic that allows us to say that, since we are all unique individuals, it’s impossible to say any one of us is intrinsically better than any other, any more, for instance, than it would be possible to say there are superior and inferior snowflakes. if one is going to base an egalitarian politics on that understanding, the logic would have to be: since there’s no basis for ranking such unique individuals on their merits, everyone deserves the same amount of those things that can be measured: an equal income, an equal amount of money, or an equal share of wealth (graeber, 2013, p. 301). introduction the purpose of this editorial essay is to discuss the notion of educational justice, criticize the mainstream kantian discourse on educational justice as a discourse on equality or inequality of educational outcomes, and propose a new definition of educational justice based on the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework of human uniqueness (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009, ch. 5; morson & emerson, 1990). at the beginning of this essay, we define the notion of educational justice heuristically as a feeling of (in)justice about one’s education, experienced by the participants or observers of this education. this definition is intentionally vague to engage proponents of the mainstream definition of educational justice as (in)equality of measured educational outcomes and/or educational funding (e.g., grades, test scores, diplomas, certificates, employment, student expenditure). later in the essay, we clarify and fully develop our definition of educational justice. we criticize the mainstream definition of educational justice based on the discourse of equality and inequality and discuss why it has been so prevalent in the past and currently, but not necessarily in the future. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e3 in the paper, we discuss the conceptual problem of the equality/inequality approach to educational justice. we argue that this approach emerges from viewing students (and teachers) as people with replaceable, transparent, and measurable consciousnesses. we offer an alternative vista of students (and teachers) as unique, opaque, and unfinalizable consciousnesses (matusov, 2015a). we develop the latter concept using an educational case of teaching first graders 2+2=4. based on the new vista of human uniqueness, we introduce a new paradigm of the ethical dialogic justice rooted in bakhtin’s framework. using this new paradigm of justice, we analyze two problematic cases of educational injustice. we consider complex dilemma of just distribution of resources for education from this new paradigmatic vista. finally, in conclusion, we discuss the notion of a just educational practice from the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework of human uniqueness. problems with educational equality justice: “all children are above average” the mainstream definition of educational justice through (in)equality is based on the discourse of equal (or unequal) quality of educational outcomes and conditions (e.g., “educational justice is nothing less than passing the [same] knowledge [to each and every student] that makes for a level [even] playing field in the [future] competition for life’s resources and rewards”1). it involves two major phases of the equal distribution of goodness: 1) establishment of the rigorous criteria of educational quality in advance, i.e., defining educational goodness (e.g., particular knowledge that is necessary for the future successful “competition for life’s resources and rewards”), and 2) assuring achievement of the same educational outcomes for all students (i.e., making for a level [even] playing field in the [future] competition for life’s resources and rewards). from the proponents of this mainstream view, the rigorous quality of educational outcomes and conditions has to be defined first by the society through political, academic, bureaucratic, philanthropic, publishers of testing and curricular materials, and practitioner means. politicians make laws defining the rigorous quality of education, based on wishes and demands of political stakeholders (e.g., employers, parents, academicians, teachers, educational agencies, professional unions and organizations, bureaucrats, taxpayers, religious organizations, philanthropists, corporate lobbyists), political struggles, means to promote it, and means to enforce it. the two recent educational reforms in the united states: 1) no child left behind (nclb) under president george w. bush (2002) and 2) race to the top (rttt), involving the common core state standards (ccss), under president barak obama (2009) are the most dramatic examples of political means to define the quality of educational outcomes. academicians are involved in academic scholarship discourse defining the rigorous educational quality through research, evidence, reasoning, paradigmatic wars and so on. for example, academicians have launched a series of concepts defining the quality of educational outcomes, such as: “best practices,” “research-based practices,” “evidence-based practices” and so on often borrowing these notions from the mainstream medical research (d. h. hargreaves, 1996, 1997). educational officers, staff, and functionaries work to interpret, organize, and implement political mandates enforced on them. for example, governmental departments/ministries of education and even some local educational institutions are often involved in defining a list of core knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers and students must master to be institutionally credentialed (e.g., a grade 1 math competency is defined as: “represent and solve problems involving addition and subtraction”2). 1 http://justiceproject.org/educational-justice/ 2 the common core state standards initiative: http://www.corestandards.org/math/content/1/oa/ beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e4 philanthropists promote and impose their special visions about educational quality through providing extra funds to educational practitioners. for example, in 2009 the bill and melinda gates foundation “pledged a gift of up to $100 million to the hillsborough county, florida, schools to fund bonuses for high-performing teachers, to revamp teacher evaluations and to fire the lowest-performing 5%” based on their students’ standardized test scores3. publishers of testing and curricular materials define the quality of education through interpretation of their mandates of developing rigorous, accurate, reliable, valid, and fair tests, helpful and noncontroversial textbooks and so on. thus, these agencies create an independent additional power of defining the quality of educational outcomes. for example, the testing industry has been often criticized for making tests too easy or too difficult4. textbook publishing houses often try to censor their textbooks to avoid political and social controversies and to sell to the largest number of students, giving educational boards in the most populous us states, like california and texas, excessive power of the decision making5. finally, practitioners remain active in defining the quality of education through their pedagogical and organizational innovations, their resistance to bureaucratic, political, and academic impositions (many waves of reforms and regulations), their long-term political educational convictions (e.g., a sense of social justice), and their unique in-situ feeling of emergent educational justice in particular situations they face (a. hargreaves, 1994). remarkably, students are missing from the process of defining the quality of their own education in the mainstream vision of educational justice. the second phase of the mainstream approach to educational justice is ensuring equality of educational outcomes. some educationalists argue that it is better to express this point with the notion of “equity” rather than “equality.” “equality,” in this narrow sense, is defined as treating everybody equally. meanwhile, “equity” is referred to as “giving everyone what they need to be successful6” to achieve the same outcomes. some proponents of equity like to illustrate this notion with the following famous cartoon depicting the contrast between equality of treating the same and equity of achieving the same outcomes: 3 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-gates-education-20160601-snap-story.html 4 e.g., https://www.fairtest.org/testing-industry-critique-falls-short 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html (although with digitization of the textbooks, the influence of the most populated usa states is diminishing). 6 https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/09/equality-is-not-enough/ beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e5 figure 1 this image was adapted from the original graphic: http://indianfunnypicture.com/img/2013/01/equality-doesnt-means-justice-facebook-pics.jpg. note that the equity picture is based on the equality of the outcome – children of diverse heights have the same view. for our discussion, we do not need to distinguish between the notions of “equity” and “equality” because the mainstream equality-based approach to educational justice focuses on the equality/sameness of the treatments, opportunities, or educational outcomes as its goal defining educational justice. in practice, the equality of educational outcomes is manifested in and operationalized by a widespread discourse on “educational achievement gaps” – e.g., inequality of standardized test score results for different social groups (e.g., male vs. female students, african-americans vs. white students) (for example, see haycock, 2001). other educational achievement gaps may involve unequal statistics regarding the distributions of school dropout, diploma, subsequent employment, college enrolment, educational degrees, grade retention/repetition, and so on among these social groups. as advocates of the notion of equity argue, achieving the same educational outcomes by different students may require different treatments, different guidance, different resources, different conditions, and different schedules of arrival at these same preset educational outcomes. probably, this idea has been mostly realized in the area of special education, where american teachers are supposed to develop the individual educational plan (iep) for each student with a diagnosed disability and revise it on a regular basis (e.g., mclaughlin, 2010). elsewhere, one of us (matusov, 2011b) has criticized this mainstream educational justice approach based on the (in)equality discourse. he developed four major critiques. first, the notion of “rigorous high quality of education” contradicts the notion of “educational equality/equity” and, thus, makes it unachievable. second, just education cannot be based on equal educational achievement in principle. third, presetting curricular endpoints cannot define the quality of education. fourth, the student is the highest authority for defining the quality of his/her education. based on the quote from david graeber, with which we started our essay, we are adding the fifth critique here. we argue that education of each student is unique and cannot be measured. in his article, matusov argues that rigorous high quality of education contradicts equality/equity of educational outcomes because the notion of rigorous educational high quality is based on inequality, beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e6 the high-level educational standards are set up through normalization of the targeted population of the students: if too many of the total targeted students (e.g., all third graders in the united states) pass the standard, the standard might be considered too easy and too low [i.e., not rigorous] and [thus] has to be moved up by making it more challenging, thus failing more students.... [similarly], when too many of the total targeted students fail the standard, the standard might be considered too high and insensitive (what some might term developmentally inappropriate) and it would be adjusted to let more students to succeed in the future … (matusov, 2011b, p. 1). thus, quality is defined by the proportion of accepted inequality: how many students have to fail or succeed for it to be rigorous high-quality education. “there is a catch-22 as the concerns for equality and quality in the high-stake assessments annihilate each other (taubman, 2009)” (p. 1). this contradiction of equally distributed high educational quality, which in itself is defined by inequality, in the modern approach to educational justice was sarcastically criticized by the former npr host of the show “a prairie home companion” garrison keillor who always finished it with “the news from lake wobegon, where all… the children are above average.” matusov’s argument continues that even when all social groups equally succeed and fail on some “rigorous” tests, it cannot constitute just education (even from the mainstream point of view). let us provide an extensive quote of this argument. it starts with the following example of previously “resolved” educational inequality, …we know that there are no vestiges of educational problems with previously oppressed immigrant minorities in the united states (such as descendants of irish, polish, and italian immigrants), since their high-stakes test results are not much different from those of other white students (ogbu, 2003). so, [following this example] all social groups [must] have nearly the same rate of success (and failure) with the high-stakes achievement tests for a system to be “fair” and “working well.” such an educational system could be said to realize the spirit of equal opportunities, prevent social stagnation, and promote social mobility in each social group. i argue that this is a rather honest, although unachievable, … [mainstream] account of educational equality. i call this … account honest because it is driven by sincere concerns about social stagnation and fragmentation within the society (labaree, 1997). i call it unachievable because it has many internal and external problems and contradictions. … [the main contradiction involves the following reasoning: imagine] if the social groups with equal proportional presence are reshuffled, [then] the achievement gap emerges again. indeed, if social groups a, b, and c (e.g., middle-class whites, blacks, and latinos) have the same rates of success on a highstakes test, all at 80%, then it is possible to develop new social groups x and y by placing all students from the a, b, and c groups who passed the test into group x (i.e., the group of absolute success with 100% success) and those who failed in the group y (i.e., the group of absolute failure with 0% success). critics might protest this reshuffling, arguing that these new groups are not like known social groups (those based on ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status, gender, and so on) that have their own cultural values and practices but are instead purely mechanical aggregates that do not represent any social reality and culture. however, students who experience institutional success and students who experience institutional failure on a systematic basis tend to flock together into stable social groups and cultures (eckert, 1989; ogbu, 2003). it seems that group equality can be achieved only through [individual-defined justice] with the total absence of educational failure. thus, the “no child left behind” slogan (not g. w. bush’s policy!) requires the total absence of beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e7 educational failure rather than closes the achievement gaps among existing diverse social groups (matusov, 2011b, pp. 2-3). his second critique is that setting the same educational outcomes for all students is educationally unjust. “students have diverse educational needs, interests, learning paths, and learning paces. there is no one existing psychological or pedagogical theory that predicts that children with the same chronological age and exposed to one good instruction can all learn the same preset curriculum at the same time” (p.3). even more, in the third critical point, in just education curricular endpoints emerge in practice rather than can be preset. matusov argues that preset curricular goals distract the student from the practice and its learning itself: … when a young child speaks unclearly for parents or peers outside of conventional schools, efforts are usually made to help the child get through and to understand the message. in this case, the conventional form of the child’s message emerges as a mere by-product of the parent’s or peer’s pragmatic understanding efforts (even when they use direct correction) (rogoff, 2003). [here, the success of communication is negotiable and defined by the participants themselves.] in contrast, in conventional schools the teacher’s focus is on making the child arrive at the conventional correctness of the form of the message rather than on [the meaning of] the message itself. thus, in conventional education, conventional correctness of the form is a self-contained goal (matusov, 2011b, p. 5). when the goal of the student’s activity becomes achieving preset curricular endpoints, the practice loses its meaning for the student. to continue this example of young children learning to speak, when the focus of communication becomes making the student’s speech conventionally correct, the student loses his/her focus on the meaning of the communication and on voice. in practice, speech conventionality primarily serves communication comprehension. however, in conventional school, the relationship becomes distorted: communication comprehension is sacrificed for the sake of the accuracy of conventionality. thus, in one second grade conventional classroom, a child wrote, “im diprsd,” and the teacher started immediately correcting the child’s inventive spelling instead of addressing the disturbing meaning of the message7. in contrast, in an innovative classroom running as a community of learners, a third-grade teacher overheard her two students being puzzled over their computer’s reports about their spelling results. both of the students made only one spelling error but their computers reported 95% versus 94% of accuracy. they thought that the computer might have made a mistake. the teacher used this opportunity to engage the whole class in a discussion of proportions and percentages, which became an emergent math curriculum in a spelling and typing lesson (drier, 2000). fourth, matusov argues that the student is the highest authority for his/her education (klag, 1994) defining its quality, “in democratic education, what is educationally good for the students has to be rooted in the students — in their interests, strengths, and needs — and embedded in the socially desired practices (dewey, 1956)” (matusov, 2011b, p. 5). educational quality cannot be based on “the state bureaucrats’ defining the curriculum standards, as it is in mainstream schools, or in the teachers’ consideration of ‘big ideas,’ as it is done in many innovative schools (smith, 2010)” (matusov, 2011b, p. 5). the idea of the students’ defining the quality of their own education is rather controversial because 7 this case was reported to the first author by his undergraduate student, a preservice teacher, who observed it during her teaching practicum in one of local public elementary schools in delaware. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e8 students are often viewed as ignorant by definition – not always knowing or even being able to know the goals of their education. in his article, matusov addressed this important concern by pointing out that students’ education has always involved critical examination of this education in itself, a counterargument that students are not ready to define the goals of their own education because they are not equipped with the right skills and knowledge is similar to arguments against democracy as a whole: that common citizens cannot govern themselves because of their ignorance and incompetence, and only a well-informed and skillful elite is competent for governance (plato & waterfield, 1993). a response to this counterargument is that the democratic process of governance is also an educational process— in order for it to be viable, it demands from people decision making and guidance (dewey, 1966; greenberg, 1992) (matusov, 2011b, p. 6). this educational process of the student defining the quality and goal of his/her own education can be assisted by the teacher. finally, we have arrived to our own point, the fifth critical point, informed by the work by david graeber (2013, 2014). we argue that education is authorial and unique for each and every student and moment and, thus, it cannot be measured. we will develop this argument in the next section. why both education and students are unique together with osberg and biesta (2008) and lobok (2017), we argue that genuine education, which is based on meaning making, is unique. this uniqueness of education is based on the uniqueness of its participants – the students and the teachers acting, living, and making sense in unique circumstances and relationships. proponents of the mainstream education may also argue that they appreciate the meaning-making process (along with drills of skills and tacit socialization based on pattern recognition and production). however, their appreciation of the meaning-making process does not necessarily imply its uniqueness. a conventional understanding of meaning is based on the idea that meaning is rooted in statements. the very reason for why standardized exams and tests are possible is that they can legitimately check if diverse people have the same stable meaning by producing the same (correct) statements or not (osberg & biesta, 2008). in contrast, bakhtin disagreed that any statement or utterance has its internal self-contained meaning, “an utterance is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. it always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)” (bakhtin, 1986, pp. 119-120). he argued that meaning is a relationship between a question genuinely searching for an answer and a serious reply to it. by meanings i understand answers to questions. that which answers no question is meaningless to us8. … the responsive nature of contextual meaning. meaning always responds to particular questions. anything that does not respond to something seems meaningless to us; it is removed from dialogue. contextual meaning and formal [dictionary] definition. formal [dictionary] definition is removed from dialogue, but it is deliberately and conventionally abstracted from it. it contains potential meaning (bakhtin, 1986, p. 145, italics is original). 8 the two first sentences have been translated from russian by sergeiy sandler. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e9 according to bakhtin, the relationship between the authentic question and serious answer cannot be reduced to a mere logical relationship that can exist in one consciousness, but it is a social, dialogic, relationship between different consciousnesses, question and answer are not logical relations (categories); they cannot be placed in one consciousness (unified and closed in itself); any response gives rise to a new question. question and answer presuppose mutual outsideness. if an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue and enters systemic cognition, which is essentially impersonal (bakhtin, 1986, p. 168, italics is original). thus, meaning has always a social, emergent, contextual, and unique nature. it always is ephemeral, non-tangible, and exists here-and-there (osberg & biesta, 2008). it is always open and unfinalizable. it cannot be repeated. it is always creatively co-authored, meaning is always unique and unrepeatable… meaning always has authorship rooted in a) its unique addressivity and responsivity and b) dynamic networks of relations with other meanings. for example, such a simple mathematical fact as 2x2=4 addresses and responds to many explicit and implicit questions that the person might have in mind, like “what does it mean?”, “why bother to think about it?”, “why now?”, “why doesn’t 2x2=5 or 3 or any other number but 4?”, “under what circumstances does 2x2 equal 4?”, [“what does equal mean?”], “what does ‘multiplication’ mean?”, “why do people use multiplication?”, “can i avoid it?”, “why did the author of the article bring this particular example?”, “what is it going to do with me?”, “who cares about 2x2=4?”, “why don’t we go to see movies rather than focus on this 2x2?” and so on. the number of such questions is unlimited, situational, and dynamic. similarly, the math fact of 2x2=4 is always in relationships with many other activities and practices (math and non-math based). for instance, it connotes with a popular phrase, “it is as clear as two by two” which does not necessarily have mathematical meaning. mathematically, 2x2=4 can be reworked as power 22=4 or as addition 2+2=4, which is probably unique for the relationship between twos (is it?). geometrically, it can be represented as a search for the area of a 2 by 2 square. i have a good memory of learning multiplication in my elementary school. it reminds me [of] my classmate friend in the second grade whom i taught successfully the concept of multiplication. the math fact 2x2=4 both triggers and is supported [by] these chains of my personal memories. …although [the] meaning [of 2x2=4] seems “self-contained,” in actuality, [it] is unique, limitless, contextual, dynamic, and very personal (matusov, 2009, p. 119). dialogically meaningful education is always eventful. it involves dramatic unique events, in which a genuine encounter of different consciousnesses occurs (lobok, 2014). the following example from our (the first author’s) pedagogical practice illustrates this dialogic unique eventfulness in such an encounter. math drama: is 2+2 always 4?9 i (the first author) was always interested in learning disabilities. when two of my undergraduate university education students, future teachers, invited me to visit their teaching practicum classroom to observe a first-grade boy with “math disability,” i immediately accepted their invitation. math disability! what was it about? my students told me that the boy had “a math logic disability” as he could not 9 this description is borrowed from our paper (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018, submitted-b). beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e10 understand the simplest arithmetic calculation operations like addition and subtraction even with single digits, despite repetitious exhaustive instruction. i was intrigued. i arrived at the school around 10:30am and after some brief security procedures of signing up as a visitor from the university, i was directed to the first grade classroom. my students were already there waiting for me and the teacher nodded at me in acknowledgement. the classroom was full of sunlight. it was a rather spacious room for 19 students, who were sitting in clusters of four at individual desks facing each other. the children did not pay much attention to me, perhaps being accustomed to visits by adult strangers. they were busy working on math worksheets that the teacher gave to them. the teacher was sitting next to one of the cluster groups, discussing something with one of the children there. my undergraduate students pointed at a boy sitting at one of the desks in a cluster. i moved to stay in close proximity to his cluster to observe and hear the children’s work and conversations. the children of his cluster – two boys and two girls – worked silently and independently on their math problems on their worksheets at their own pace. the boy selected the next problem “1+4=”, turned to the girl, sitting next to him and working on her problems, and silently showed her the problem with his two fingers. the girl briefly glanced at the written problem and replied, “five.” the boy nodded in appreciation, turned back to his desk, and carefully drew the correct number on his worksheet. he picked up the next problem in a column, “3+2=” with his fingers and turned again to the girl. she glanced again and said, “the same.” the boy nodded in appreciation, turned back to this desk, and drew the number five. the next problem was “2+2=”. i waited until the girl replied “four” and asked her, “how do you know that? how do you know for sure that two plus two equals four?” the other two kids looked at me with an interest and so did the boy. the girl smiled self-assured and with anticipation of a triumph, as apparently, she heard this question before and was ready to shine with the correct answer expected by adults. she drew two lines on her own worksheet below the math problems she had to solve and then other two lines, slowly counted them, and declared almost with triumph, “four! two and two is four.” i glanced at the boy – he looked perplexed. his perplexed look guided me to push forward. i replied to the girl, “yes, two lines plus two lines is four lines. but, i didn’t ask you about the lines. i asked you about two plus two.” the boy turned to the girl as if it was him who was asking this question and not me. my question did not perplex the girl in any way. she picked two pencils from her pencil case and then two more and counted the pencils, “four.” she smiled at me. but, the boy was not moved by her pencil reply. again, i pursued my investigation, “yes, four pencils. two pencils plus two pencils is four pencils. i can see it. but i asked you about numbers, not pencils.” she stopped smiling and replied without any doubts, “it doesn’t matter. two plus two is always four. it does not matter what to count.” the other two kids in the cluster were attentively listening to our conversation. the boy turned to me. it seemed to me that he was not satisfied with the girl’s answer but did not know how to challenge her. i asked the girl, “how do you know that it doesn’t matter what to count? what about russian pencils? you know, i’m from another country that is called russia. what about two russian pencils and two russian pencils?” the girl smiled again at me and replied, “four!” she moved her fingers in the air as if counting the invisible russian pencils. i continued, “but how do you know that? you haven’t seen russian pencils!” she giggled as if we played a funny game, “it doesn’t matter! it’s four. four russian pencils.” i asked, “what about martian pencils?” the group exploded. the other girl started clapping, laughing, and exclaiming, “it doesn’t matter! it doesn’t matter! it’s four! it’s four! it’s four!” the first girl also joined her with joy. the two boys started talking about a battle between superheroes and martian aliens. i waited for a while and asked the girls, “how do you know that it’s four? i bet you both have never seen beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e11 martian pencils! what if martian pencils are round like balls?!” the girls were giggling with joy, “it doesn’t matter! it doesn’t matter!” the first girl counted imaginary round ball-like martian pencils in the air with her hands, “two and two: one, two, three, four!” the noise in our group attracted attention of the rest of the class but when i looked at the teacher, she smiled in apparent appreciation that the kids in my group enjoyed a discussion of math. two of my university students who stayed behind me and observed attentively our conversation were smiling as well. i lowered my voice and asked the girl, “but what if martian pencils are liquid?” the girls became almost hysterical with laugh, “liquid pencils! it doesn’t matter!” the first girl counted imaginary four pools of liquid martian pencils, while the boys were in the mid of their imaginary battle between the superheroes and martian aliens gesticulating with their hands. i lowered my voice even more, almost to whisper, and asked all kids, “ok, kids. what is two hundred plus two hundred?” the boys stopped immediately their imaginary battle. the first boy, who, according to my university students had math logic disability, asked me to repeat the question. i did. the first girl replied with perplexity, “we didn’t study such big numbers yet.” i asked, “but you didn’t study russian and martian pencils but you were eager to provide answers. what stops you now?” she looked at me with surprise. there was some silence as the kids were apparently thinking and then the first girl broke the silence by saying without enthusiasm, “ah, i remember now. it’s three hundred. my mom told me.” i did not reply but kept waiting for the other kids to comment. suddenly the boy, who was initially suspected to have “a math disability,” said calmly, “it’s four hundred.” i asked him, “how do you know that?” like the girl before, he drew two and two lines on his worksheet and counted them, “one hundred, two hundred, three hundred – four hundred.” when he counted the last line he circled all four lines with his pen in the air. the girl objected, “no! you can’t draw one hundred with one line! one hundred has many-many lines! it’s difficult to draw them and count them. we didn’t study such big numbers!” the boy calmly replied, “it doesn’t matter.” the girl grabbed his worksheet, on which the boy drew his lines representing hundreds and started rapidly, almost violently, drawing many-many lines without counting under each of his lines. she yelled with frustration when she finished, “these are hundreds. it’s difficult to count them! see, how many of them there are!” the boy replied calmly, “it doesn’t matter!” he circled her chaotic lines with circles and counted them, “one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred. it’s four hundred.” “no!” – yelled the girl, – “you can’t do it! you must count all these…” she was pointing at her chaotically drawn lines within the boy’s four circles. the other boy joined the discussion, “no, you mustn’t!” the other girl kept silence, but she was perplexed… at this moment, the teacher started clapping loudly gaining all kids’ attention. the lesson was over, and the kids were supposed to form a line to go for a lunch. in the line, the discussion about adding two hundreds and two hundreds spread rapidly. the kids’ opinions split. i could hear, “it doesn’t matter!” “no, it does!” “too big numbers,” “martian pencils,” “superheroes…” when my two university students and i left the classroom, one student exclaimed, “the boy is just a genius! i thought he had a math disability, but he was just a deep thinker. i thought that the girl was a very advanced learner but she was just a shallow learner! we can’t teach math through worksheet drills. we need to have deep math discussions with our students!” the other student asked me, “what the hell just happened?! can somebody explain it to me, please?” i apologized to both of them as i had to run back to my office for a meeting, but i asked them to bring this event for our class discussion the next day and they both promised to do that. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e12 i went back to my office being rather satisfied with my improvisational teaching and my students’ reflections. i liked that i grabbed the kids’ attention by creating an interesting and deep math discussion. i liked the fact that i apparently managed to recognize the boy’s struggle with the mathematical idea of the universality of numbers: it does not matter what one counts: lines, pencils, russian pencils, martian pencils, or hundreds. i liked that the kids left the classroom while discussing math. i liked the flip in of my students’ assessment of the kids’ learning: the advanced kid turned to be a shallow learner and the kid with math disabilities turned to be “a math genius.” “many great scientists were “slow learners” in school, like, for example, albert einstein10. their slowness was a sign of their deliberateness, their thoughtfulness of not to follow, not to conform to the procedural teaching imposed on them by their conventional teachers,” – i thought. i also liked that my students saw a link between teaching procedures of calculation – common in many schools – and students’ shallow learning. finally, i liked pedagogical perplexity of my second student. yet, the more time passed since the event during the day, the more a sense of some kind of dissatisfaction with my teaching was growing in me. i sensed that something was wrong but it took me a few hours before i could realize what the problem was. the girl’s voice that you cannot easily add big numbers penetrated me (cf. the notion of "penetrating discourse" in bakhtin, 1999). i was always interested in math and these types of issues have always grabbed my attention firing in action a swarm of many math thoughts in me. for example, two infinities plus two infinities is one infinity and not four infinities: 2+2=1! well, infinity is not a number. but is it? can you circle infinity like the first grade boy circled a hundred? i started thinking, but is it really true that two plus two always equals four regardless what one counts? does what one count matter for the result? rather quickly, i came to the following five paradoxical examples: 1. two drops of water plus two drops of water equal one drop of water and not four: 2+2=1 for water drops: + = 2. two animals (hungry cats) plus two animals (fat mice) equals two animals (two filled up, satisfied cats): 2+2=2 for these animals: + = 3. two molecules (of hydrogen) plus two molecules (of oxygen) equals three molecules (two molecules of water and one molecule of oxygen), 2+2=3 for this chemical reaction of molecules: 10 http://www.albert-einstein.org/acticle_handicap.html beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e13 2h2+2o2=2h2o +1o2 4. two triangles plus two triangles can be five triangles, 2+2=5 for the following triangles (the original small and one big): 5. finally, two friends plus two friends equals uncertainty as there can be four friends, three friends, two friends, or even zero friends as a result. i wish i could share these new ideas and puzzling examples with the first-grade children! with all these examples, i started thinking that maybe the girl was not such a shallow learner and the boy was not such a mathematical genius after all. this was another flip for me on the same day. it is not true that the result of addition does not depend on what objects are being added. two and two big numbers do not always add to four. what might be great was not necessarily the individual mind of a child but all their minds in the deep and critical mathematical discussions in which they were authentically involved. thus, i decided to focus my upcoming discussion of the event with my university students not so much on mathematical geniuses and shallow learners but on organizing deep pedagogical discussions of children around deep mathematical issues as the most desirable way of teaching. i decided to share my five examples above with my university education students, future teachers, so they could appreciate the depth of math and how it could have been possible to continue the deep discussion that i started with the four kids in the first-grade classroom. after the excitement of my two students, i expected that the rest of my students would become excited to hear about how little children could be involved in deep discussions about math. however, my class did not go exactly as i had expected. after my two students presented the event described above, some of the students became perplexed and some excited. although i noticed the difference, i did not explore it at the time. rather, i raised the question for the class about who of the two children were more mathematically advanced learners: a) the boy who was constantly asking the girl for the answer to his arithmetic problems or b) the girl who asked her mom about the result of adding 200+200? initially the discussion went in an interesting but predictable direction for me. most of my students agreed that the boy became more sophisticated than the girl, when he was able to understand that a hundred can be united as one and that it does not matter what you count: martian pencils or hundreds. i problematized this pedagogical issue even further by asking my students, future teachers, “is it better to reject a mathematical rule that you don’t understand but the teacher imposes on you like apparently the boy before i had engaged him in my lesson did or to conform to the adults’ math rule without deep understanding of it, as the girl seemed to do?” the class erupted in discussions: many students were speaking at once creating small discussion groups or trying to address the whole class in vein as it was too noisy and chaotic. when the initial chaos subsided, i asked my students of what kind of beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e14 students they would prefer in their future classrooms: ones who would follow math rules and procedures regardless of how well they understood them (like the girl) or ones who would refuse to follow math rules and procedures until they deeply understood them (like the boy). i suggested voting on this choice but one student raised her hand and said that it was a false choice. she insisted that good teachers should not throw kids in this situation at all by teaching them deep conceptual math and not procedures. to my surprise, some other students disagreed saying that if we did not teach our students math procedures and rules, they would fail their math standardized tests based on testing students’ procedural math knowledge. some students suggested a compromise of teaching both: procedural math knowledge and deep conceptual knowledge. a student asked why standardized tests could not focus on testing deep conceptual knowledge. and at this moment, i decided to make another flip and introduce my students to my paradoxical examples when two plus two is not necessarily four. i told my students that i suspect that a genuine standardized test on deep conceptual understanding might be impossible, ever. my students became quiet listening carefully to my words. i said that deep conceptual understanding unfolds only in a dialogue. it never stops. it is bottomless (bakhtin, 1986). it belongs to all its participants. i saw that my words made my students interested, mystified and yet not quite understanding what i meant. i said, “let’s consider the boy and the girl one more time. we all agree that at the end the boy was more mathematically sophisticated than the girl because he could see the universality of numbers. he could add hundreds while the girl couldn’t. he could probably add thousands and millions while the girl couldn’t. the boy understood that it doesn’t matter what you add: imaginary martian pencils or hundreds – the result is the same: 2+2 is always four regardless of what you add. in contrast, the girl doubted that one could add big numbers so easily, arranging them in units. she agreed that one could easily count imaginary martian pencils but not necessarily big numbers. we sided with the boy. but are we really correct in doing that?” and then i shared my addition examples of infinity, drops, hungry cats and fat mice, triangles, and friends. my students were in shock. my paradoxical examples and the additional flip were shocking for them. however, they were shocked about many different things: some of what they were shocked by was contradictory to what other students were shocked by. here is a list of their shocks and objections that i remember: 1. infinity is not a number because you cannot count it. numbers are countable but infinities are not. my counter-argument was that we can add uncountable quantities (e.g., water) that we represent with regular numbers (e.g., with pounds of mass or liters of volume). so why can’t we add infinities and represent them with numbers? 2. some of my students charged me with tricking them. they said that two plus two is always four but i tricked them. they claimed that i was tacitly adding “apples and oranges” and not the same objects. only the same objects can be countable. but i added different things: small drops of water but counted a big drop of water; cats and mice but counted “animals”; small triangles but counted both big and small triangles; and hydrogen and oxygen but counted molecules (they could not find my “trick” about friends but kept exploring it). my counterargument that we always count different things by abstracting some “same” ideal was not convincing for them, as they could not come to terms with the idea that two plus two may indeed not be four for some objects. many years after the class was over and these students became teachers themselves, one of them sent me an email with the subject, “2+2 is always 4! j”, when he wanted to remind me of our class or asked a question. there was something deeply personal in their rejection of my paradoxical examples, as if a rug was violently taken from under their feet. 3. some of my students became very excited about my examples both about the new math beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e15 horizon that they opened for them and about new dialogic pedagogy that can open this new horizon. thus, i remember that one of these students was able to make 2+2=9 by adding two and two equal small rectangles to create one big rectangle carrying 8 diverse smaller rectangles inside. another student tried to make 2+2=-1 (a negative number) or 2+2=0.5 (a fraction) but she was not able to do that (at least at that time). some of them asked what might be a next “flip” and how to achieve it. my response to that was that future mathematical “flips” (i.e., unexpected new mathematical vistas) probably required our moving deeper and deeper into math practice and critical math discourse with people who are interested in it. we discussed the difference between learning about math and doing math and tentatively came to a conclusion that there might not be a clear boundary between these two activities. 4. yet, some other of my students became pedagogically upset with my paradoxical examples with “2+2 is not always 4.” they said that before the examples they had been leaning toward dialogic pedagogy11 that i demonstrated in the first grade classroom. however, after my examples and discussion, they firmly decided to teach mostly procedures and rules. it was because teaching for deep understanding would be very confusing for little children and for the teachers themselves. also, the children’s parents might get upset that their children became too philosophical while not demonstrating mastery of simple math. also, those children might not do well on standardized tests, which might reflect poorly on the teachers and the school. finally, employers might be upset that their employees – the past students of deep math understanding – refuse to follow rules because they could not fully understand them. this criticism of my dialogic pedagogy provoked very interesting and important discussions about the purpose of math and general education. 5. lastly, one student shared her realization that she probably struggled with algebra because algebra mostly studied non-linear relations among objects. but because she learned that 2+2 is always four, it was very difficult for her to understand non-linear math relations, for which 2+2 is not 4 (see the discussion of this math and pedagogical phenomenon by russian mathematician and educator konstantinov in matusov, 2017). her comment provoked the class to discuss the features of the objects, for which 2+2 is always four. we came to a conclusion that these objects should be indifferent to and not interact with each other. some students became excited to find exceptions from this rule but some wanted to know what “indifferent” or “not interact” meant. like the first-grade class on russian and martian pencils, this undergraduate class for future teachers was very memorable and eventful. during the semester, the students and i returned to the themes of this discussion again and again. as i mentioned before this discussion colored our class as such for many of the students. human uniqueness vs. human replaceability in education so, when a student replies “4” to the school test question “2+2=?,” what does it mean? in mainstream education, it means the student is correct; especially when, in addition, she or he can justify his/her answer correctly. in mainstream education, students are replaceable, people are replaceable. there is little difference among students who correctly reply to the school test question “2+2=?” they constitute a group of those who know what two plus two is, according to the school authority. although students in this group may vary by what kind of correct explanations they can provide, these differences are educationally inconsequential. these students can all reliably arrive at the correct answer on a systematic and correct basis. in gist, these students can act as a human-machine, a smart machine (e.g., a calculator). in contrast, the other group of students, who provide either a wrong answer, or no answer at all, or cannot justify the right answer correctly, are students who cannot work as a reliable and correct 11 this agreement-based dialogic pedagogy can be qualified, probably, as habermasian. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e16 human smart machine. one can measure via a standardized test which student belongs to which group or remain somehow in a grey area in-between. in mainstream education, students and education itself are measureable. the goal of such mainstream education is to make all students into human smart machines that can reliably produce the correct answer or the correct solution to a presented question or problem on a systematic basis. this education is essentially algorithmic: if x (question/problem) then y (correct answer/solution). the justice problem for mainstream education is to make all students arrive at the preset curricular endpoints: no student left behind in making all of them reliable multi-functional smart machines. this justice problem is a problem of equality in a broader sense, including equity. alexander lobok provides similar critique of the mainstream psychology, the problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. if so, a question emerges: can a particular human being, his/her particular and unique subjective cognizing world be a subject of science – a subject of scientific observation and interpretation? can a particular child with his/her unique subjective world, subjective cosmos, not overlapping with subjective cognizing worlds of all other people in principle, be a subject of science? (lobok, 2017, p. sia:2). in contrast, from the point of view of the ontological dialogic pedagogy illustrated above, providing “the correct” answer to an authority’s question may be evidence of an authoritarian regime where a student has learned how to please the authority well, which may have little to do with genuine math and genuine education. participation in genuine math practice and genuine math education means a student’s engagement in critical unfinalizable mathematical discourse, where meaning is a relationship between genuine questions and serious answers and among other meanings, contextual meaning is potentially infinite, but it can only be actualized when accompanied by another (other's) meaning, if only by a question in the inner speech of the one who understands. each time it must be accompanied by another contextual meaning in order to reveal new aspects of its own infinite nature (just as the word reveals its meanings only in context). actual contextual meaning inheres not in one (single) meaning, but only in two meanings that meet and accompany one another. there can be no "contextual meaning in and of itself"— it exists only for another contextual meaning, that is, it exists only in conjunction with it. there cannot be a unified (single) contextual meaning. therefore, there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; it always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real. in historical life, this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn (bakhtin, 1986, pp. 145-146). in ontological dialogic pedagogy, people are interested in each other and their ideas, expecting to be surprised by their uniqueness and difference from each other. nothing is replaceable and, thus, nothing is measurable: neither meaning, nor people, nor education. neither a correct nor an incorrect answer exists outside of the social context of the question. this context continues evolving and being evaluated. correctness or incorrectness is always temporary until the next flip of meaning changes it: (in)correct for what, for whom, and under what circumstances? that makes people in dialogue poor beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e17 machines because they are unreliable and non-systematic. people in dialogue are constantly ready to transcend any given meaning. people in dialogue are not replaceable and, thus, are unmeasurable. people in dialogue are unique in their education, their emergent curriculum is unique, eventful, and unpredictable (lobok, 2014, 2017; osberg & biesta, 2008). to engage in human subjectivity, it is necessary to focus on the uniqueness and unfinalizability in human beings (nancy, 1991; nikulin, 2010). the goal of ontological dialogic pedagogy is for people to freely (leisurely) engage in an endeavor of examination of the self, life, society, world, including their own education in a (critical) dialogue (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018, submitted-a). it is about people’s self-actualization, self-transcendence, and self-realization. it is about a person’s development of creative and critical voice in dialogue. the existential justice problem for this approach is for each and every person to be able to engage in selfactualizing examination and (critical) dialogue. this existential justice problem is a problem of dialogic self-actualization based on people’s genuine interest in each other and mutual respect. like any existential justice problem, it is self-contradictory. however, the self-contradictions of existential justice are addressed very differently by the equality-inequality approaches and by the bakhtinian ethical dialogic approach to justice. beyond equality justice: relational and dialogic types of justice in education before turning to discuss the inherent self-contradictory nature of the notion of justice, let us consider a similar inherent self-contradiction in the notion of freedom through a dialogic approach to this inherent self-contradiction12. both justice and freedom are relational concepts and a discussion of freedom will guide us in our discussion of justice. anthropologist david graeber tracked the etymology of the germanic word “freedom” to the word “friendship.” in our interpretation of his views, freedom is about establishment, maintenance, and breaking of the web of personal relationships based on personal desire and choice. in slavery, a person is stripped from the possibility and legitimacy of establishing, maintaining, or breaking the person’s relational web (graeber, 2014), “slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among slaves and between slaves and freemen” (putnam, 2000, p. 318). although graeber did not discuss it, this relational notion of freedom is inherently selfcontradictory. it is because when a person has a choice and legitimacy to establish, maintain, and break his/her relationships with others, it may infringe upon the relational freedom of other people who may make a different choice and have a different desire than that person (perel, 2017). thus, this infringement may be felt as unjust. although under some circumstances these differences among involved people in defining freedoms can be negotiated and compromised to the satisfaction of all the sides, these negotiations and compromises can be limited and even unsuccessful in some cases. this is where the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework of human uniqueness can be helpful. a conventional approach to resolving the inherent self-contradiction of the relational notion of freedom, leading to injustice, is often kantian. it is based on the development of duty, obligation, rules, principles, imperatives, and laws – universal or conditional but always abstract and finalized, above the unique people with their unique needs, interests, and desires and above their unique contexts (c.f., bush’s educational policy “no child left behind” or obama’s policy of “the common core state standards”). a good example is the kantian imperative, based on the christian morality, to treat others as 12 sergeiy sandler raised an interesting issue of how these “good” self-contradictions, we are going to discuss here and further, are different from “bad” contradiction between quality and equality, inherent in kantian equality-based approach to justice, we discussed above. hegel defined “good” internal mutually-constitutive self-contradictions as productive for the development of the phenomenon, while “bad” external contradictions destructive to integrity of the phenomenon (hegel, geraets, suchting, & harris, 1991). we agree with hegel on this matter. thus, quality and equality, discussed above, do not mutually constitute each other: there can be equal misery or unequal quality – these concepts can exist independently of each other. when people define educational quality through inequality of test successes and failures as it is in the case of developing a “rigorous” standardized test in education, they cannot commit to educational equality at the same time. the integrity of the people’s commitments collapses. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e18 one wants to be treated by others. the kantian approach to solving moral contradictions and dilemmas is non-subjective, universal, and decontextualized. it is based on an impersonal agreement of objectivity among reasonable and moral people (rawls, 1971). bakhtin criticized this approach making people ethical slaves of the rules, principles, and laws and, thus, making them irresponsible hiding behind objective universal principles. the history of the 20th century totalitarianisms has challenged the conventional ethical modernist approaches13. mikhail bakhtin, a russian philosopher of dialogism, dialogic ethics, eventfulness, and human uniqueness, argued that people constantly author their deeds, charged with ethics, along with authoring ethic judgments about these deeds and new ethic values, emerging from these judgments. in turn, these ethically charged deeds, judgments, and values define the authors of these deeds – what kind of persons they are – to others and, consequently, also to themselves (arendt, 1958; bakhtin, 1993). according to bakhtin, ethics is socialized through a special critical dialogue of responsibility, involving words and deeds. the ethical meaning of the authors’ deeds can be problematic as we already discussed in the case of freedom. others have rights to challenge the ethics of these deeds and reveal inherent relational contradictions, if not injustices, deeply rooted in them. sometimes even the author him/herself can challenge the ethics of his/her own deeds based on a sense of unease with his/her authored deed – which is often referred to as a person’s “conscience.” further, the author of an ethically charged deed has an ethical obligation to respond to these charges produced by others and him/herself with his/her words and/or deeds. this ethical obligation of response is called “responsibility” to stand behind the authorship of the deed, to accept diverse positive and negative judgments and obligations, and to take care of consequences of the deed to diverse involved suffering parties (bakhtin, 1993). responsibility for a deed is not isolated but rather it is enmeshed in a web of the person’s responsibilities for other deeds and relationships. again, how a person deals with this hanging responsibility, demanded by others and the self, defines the ethics of the person (i.e., what the person considers (un)ethical and why and how well/badly he or she follows his/her own ethics). thus, bakhtin’s approach to self-contradictions of ethics is dialogic, through the notion of unfinalized personal responsibility, which is always unique, authorial, and contextual. now let us go back to the notion of justice in general and in education in particular. we want to demonstrate the notion of justice is also self-contradictory, thus, requiring to be addressed as a problem to others and the person him/herself through a dialogic act of responsibility. again, we prefer the bakhtinian dialogic framework to the mainstream kantian one. justice starts with a discursive appeal to a community about a relationship, which is deep down felt as wrong by one involved party, demanding to fix this relational wrong; while this relationship feels right by, at least, another involved party. justice is all about relational conflict of opposite claims. the self-contradiction of the notion of justice is inherent in it: what is good for one is bad for another. when a situation feels good to all, it does not generate a justice problem – paraphrasing the famous quote by eleanor roosevelt, it is possible to say, “harmony – i.e., the absence of perceived injustice – cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.” when it feels wrong to all (e.g., a natural disaster), again it is not a justice problem. as bakhtin argued, there cannot be any theory of right and wrong – it is an authorial judgment, for which people must take responsibility. bakhtin contrasted his ethical dialogism with kantian “theoriticism” (bakhtin, 1993), which he would later call “excessive monologism” (bakhtin, 1999). 13 as many critics show, the kantian universal imperative leads to obvious ethical irresponsibility. for example, kant argued that unconditional telling truth to everybody is one of the universal imperatives. thus, according the kantian approach, a person hiding jews during world war ii must tell the truth about hidden jews to a nazi officer (varden, 2010). beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e19 the kantian approach to addressing the self-contradiction of justice is to develop universal or semi-universal (conditional) rules and laws. this kantian approach may have diverse realizations in education. for example, all schools must receive the same funding expenditure per student (i.e., equality in the narrow sense), which is a response to a justice problem of unequal school funding. or, it can be amended based on the students’ particular needs through categorization of the students’ special needs with a price tag attached to each of these categories (i.e., equity), which is a response to a justice problem of school funding in special education. or, the kantian approach may lead to a demand to have the same educational outcomes (e.g., no child left behind, common core state standards) – an approach we discussed above, which addresses a justice problem of achievement gaps in reaching the same preset curricular endpoints. or, the kantian approach can demand a minimum of educational equality in achieving the basic educational standards, after which students can be let to be creative and diverse, as some progressive educators argue (e.g., ravitch, 2013). we reject all these kantian equalizing approaches because they eradicate the uniqueness in people, their education, and their circumstances, making them mutually replaceable, measurable, predictable, controllable, and machinelike (even at a minimum basis level). a bakhtinian approach to the justice self-contradiction is based on the uniqueness (i.e., ultimate diversity) of people, education, circumstances; authorial agency (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016); responsibility; and dialogicity. in education, we argue that the core problem of educational justice lays in the notion of student authorship, on which genuine education is based (matusov, 2011a). authorship involves a person’s transcendence of the given – e.g., culture, knowledge, skills, traditions, established relationships, – recognized and evaluated by relevant others and/or the self. this evaluative recognition is in itself an authorial and creative process (matusov, 2011a). both authorship and its evaluative recognition, required by authorship, are unpredictable and unique processes. recognition is not guaranteed. this raises a justice problem. a student’s bid for authorship may not be met by relevant others’ positive recognition. this is especially important when the lack of positive recognition comes from the student’s trusted teacher. there can be many reasons for why, let’s say, the teacher does not recognize positively (or at all) the student’s authorship. it can be because of the teacher’s lack of understanding or imagination, insensitivity to the student’s pedagogical needs, ideological rejection of the student’s values and beliefs, envy, ignorance, and so on. alternatively, the student’s authorship can be really bad or not even worthy of recognition: it can be wrong, of poor quality, plagiarized, clichérized, evil (e.g., aiming to be mean, to hurt other people), careless, not intellectually honest, and so on. negative (or entirely absent) recognition of the student’s authorship by the teacher may feel unjust to the student while positive recognition of the student’s authorship, expected/demanded by the student, may feel unjust to the teacher. bakhtin’s ethical dialogic denies any attempt to develop rules, patterns, or procedures – what he criticized as “theoriticisms” (bakhtin, 1993) – to resolve this justice problem in a satisfactory way or even that satisfactory ways may exist (or pre-exist) at all. bakhtin calls for the participants to take responsibility for their unique (pedagogical and educational) actions/deeds and to demand this responsibility from others, by challenging others and responding to challenges by others, by their open mindedness in accepting wrongs of their doing, by their desire to ameliorate these wrongs, by standing one’s grounds when feeling right to do so, by accepting the guilt, by mitigating negative consequences, and so on. the dialogic ethic process of responsibility (or lack thereof) defines the educator and the student. as bakhtin claimed, “there is no alibi in being” (bakhtin, 1993) – which in our view, means that there is no justification for one’s wrongs in one’s circumstances but excuses and guilt mitigating circumstances are fine. inspired by the bakhtinian dialogic ethical framework, we argue that justice is not defined by individual complains about injustice, not by resolutions that satisfy all or many, not by some universal or beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e20 conditional principles. rather, in our view, justice is defined by the totality of critical dialogue of unique words and unique deeds in unique circumstances asking for responsibility, challenging words and deeds of others, and replying to these challenges. justice does not belong individuals but by the big dialogue unfolding in the human history (bibler, 1991, 2009). below we present two educational cases involving educational injustice and provide our bakhtinian analysis of them. these particular cases were chosen because in each of them, the teachers focus on teaching their students the concept of justice while trying to eliminate injustice caused by the students themselves (from the teachers’ point of view), although in different contexts. in our analysis, the main tension, which caused educational injustice in both cases, was between the instructors’ teaching about justice and their attempts to impose what they considered was just. in the first case (the case of ana shaming a behaviorist teacher), the professor, ana (the second author), tried to make her student, sarah (a pseudonym), an in-service teacher of autistic young children, realize that sarah was harming her students by using the behaviorist approach of applied behavioral analysis to shape her students’ behavior in a desired way. in the second case (the case of vivien paley excluding exclusion: “you can’t say you can’t play”), the preschool teacher vivien paley tried to make her students stop systematically excluding some children (mostly of minority and working-class descent) from playing together by imposing a new rule of excluding the exclusion on them. according to our analysis, in the first case, the teacher took responsibility for the educational injustice she caused in her classroom, while in the second case, the teacher was apparently so invested in her truth of imposing social justice that she refused to take responsibility for the educational injustice she caused and was aware of. the case of ana shaming a behaviorist teacher in our current interpretation, the injustice that happened in a class i (the second author) taught, involved my attempt to “teach the ugly truth” about behaviorism – i.e., molding my graduate education students’ mind in a way i desired to prevent them from harming their own young pupils. all but one of my graduate students were current early childhood education teachers. later i realized i did not provide them an opportunity to test their own ideas, opinions, positions and desires but rather tried to impose my truth on them. the situation was complicated by the fact that it turned out that what i set to teach as the uncontestable end-point and final truth was rather critical of the educational practice, to which some of my students were profoundly committed. thus, at least one of my students, sarah, was personally invested in behaviorism in her everyday work with very young autistic children. sarah regarded herself a kind and skillful and caring teacher who loved her young pupils. looking back, i realize that during the event, i did not really listen to sarah’s teaching experiences about her work with young autistic children nor to her own dilemmas, problems, and doubts when making her own pedagogical decisions. i did not create a place where such real-life experiences can be safely examined and perhaps transcended, and where i could also learn something from an experienced practitioner. instead, i brought up ethical issues condemning behaviorism, in which wrongness i did not have any doubts. ironically, by desiring to prevent sarah (and some of her agreeing peers) from harming their students by behaviorism, i similarly harmed them by making them objects of my pedagogical actions. like sarah using behaviorism for molding autistic young children, i was using socratic dialogue pedagogy to mold my students’ minds about behaviorism in education. this event was an important transformational point for all participants in this class including me, the professor, a dramatic transformational event in a dialogic pedagogy run class – in two acts (marjanovic-shane, 2016). it involved sarah’s intense feeling of being stunned or numbed by a penetrating socratic "torpedo’s touch" (matusov, 2009; plato & bluck, 1961) undermining her ontological, beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e21 existential, ethic being (matusov & brobst, 2013). sarah reacted with a very powerful cry against the injustice of being implicitly accused by me and other students of unethical behaviorist treatment of children with autism she was teaching. i was faced with my pedagogical desire to disrupt and undermine effectively some of my students’ commitment to behaviorist techniques of punishments and rewards as their main approach of working with younger children with autism (for more description and analysis of the case see, marjanovic-shane, 2016). i deeply felt that the use of behaviorism in education was very harmful for children in general and for little children with autism in specific. thus, to engage my students in critique of behaviorism, i showed my students a video on "operant conditioning14" about b. f. skinner’s behaviorist approach and made a parallel between skinner training pigeons by starving them, and sarah using this kind of behaviorism with her young autistic students when using punishments and rewards. i moralized the parallel between treating pigeons and autistic children, "if you are using the same kind of techniques based on behavioristic learning theory on children, are you really keeping them [young autistic children], in some way, hungry? and what do you think about that?" some of my other students picked up on my moralizing tone and vocally joined in the critique of using behaviorism with young autistic children, while other students openly or tacitly took sarah’s side. sarah became incredibly disturbed as this situation made her confront her own professional ethics. our discussion in class resulted in sarah’s dramatic protest, … sarah burst out in protest and defended her position. in a shaky voice, holding back tears, she explained in a distressed and angry tone, addressing primarily [the] professor …, that in her practice, based on aba [behaviorist techniques of shaping children’s behavior], she was "not cruel to my students!!! on the contrary! … you don’t know what you are talking about! you don’t know much about aba! how can you judge it?! i love my students — i feel like a mother to them! you don’t know my day-to-day problems! enough of this!!!" (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a61) with these words, she left the class. later that evening she posted a message on the class’ online discussion forum her protest of the injustice of my and other students’ accusations that she may be an unethical teacher, sarah: i was rather embarrassed when i left class … and was surprised that i had engaged in such a, shall we call it, spirited discussion with the professor… i believe that i reacted in such a single-minded fashion because it went straight to my heart rather than my head. with views so opposite to mine so readily expressed i felt that the care i feel and show for my students was seen by another as a disservice to the child. as a teacher, it makes my heart ache when it is thought that i am not trying to do all i can for students… i know that these strategies, if implemented with caring and respect, can help many students discover more about their world and themselves and to embrace school life in a more positive way for themselves. […] it is my opinion that children are motivated in much the same way as i am, and that sometimes when they need that extra boost to change their way of thinking or their behaviors … i should be able to assist them in this process. […] one of the most important roles of schools is to reach out to children and help them grow with the partnership of the child and the parents to do so. i hope that i did not offend anyone with my spirited outburst, or impolite argument with the professor at the close of class. i am sorry and hope that i will be able to control my own behaviors 14 this video can be found on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_ctjqjlrha&list=plabg1zghpvypkbdhwqnqvmbd1uml5allx&index=2 beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e22 in the future so that i retain my respectful demeanor even when confronted with ideas or statements that are different than mine. hopefully this class will continue to allow me to learn to respectfully dissent, stand up for what i believe in with clear statements, and to keep an open mind about new techniques and ideas. thanks for listening (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a62). this new development made me not only puzzled, distressed, and dissatisfied, but it also threw me into self-examination and deep reckoning of what i was doing as a professor who wanted to become “a dialogic humanist teacher.” something was going wrong, i could clearly see, but i didn’t know what. this was far from what i wanted to achieve as a teacher, … to create “a safe learning environment,” in which it was safe for the students to bring any ideas and positions into the class for class discussion and testing. [i] was also concerned with [my] lack of dialogic guidance for the students: that [i] was not able to deepen the discussion on behaviorism and humanism. [i] was very concerned that sarah, […] would remain ignorant and continue harming [her] students by [her] behaviorist pedagogical techniques without understanding how bad [it] what [she was] doing [was]. [...] [i] also saw the stinging and numbing "torpedo’s touch" effect (matusov, 2009; plato & bluck, 1961) [was] on sarah and worried that sarah would close up, that i had lost sarah's trust, and with that, potentially the trust of the rest of the students. for [me], sarah's […] outburst at the end of the class meeting and her web posting became a signal. it was a powerful signal that [i] needed to make a change in [my] pedagogy, in order to restore the trust, the respect, and most of all, the ease everyone in the class had with each other – so that they could continue to freely test their ideas, opinions, positions and desires with each other (marjanovicshane, 2016, p. a62). i needed to do something to restore justice in our class – justice as a response to my student’s outcry of pain and being wronged. at that point, i consulted eugene (the first author), as my colleague and dialogic mentor, who was more experienced in dialogic teaching. eugene focused my attention on my own unexamined pedagogical desire to “educate” the “behaviorist” sarah, and two of her supporters, in order to “convert” them from “behaviorists” to “dialogic humanists” like me and two other students. eugene pointed out that i was not seriously interested in sarah’s concerns, and above all that i was not interested in testing my own dear ideas about behaviorism! instead, it looked like i was only interested in “molding the students in the preset ways dear to me.” eugene suggested searching for situations where the application of behaviorism might be legitimate from my perspective (e.g., when a person wants to quit smoking). thus, eugene helped me problematize behaviorism for myself making me interested in what other people, my students and especially sarah, might think about the limits of behaviorism’s legitimacy and the reasons behind these limits. the talk with eugene was another socratic “torpedo touch” experience for me – as it revealed what i was doing in my teaching to be so far apart from what i was aspiring to do: while i desired to create “sincere dialogues” with students, i was undeniably monologic, listening to the only truth i knew – my own one, and unjustly imposing it on them. this was a turning point for me. i had to “transcend” my own teaching persona, and find a way to let the students’ ideas guide me, as much as i wanted to guide them. eugene suggested that we reopen the discussion of the behaviorist approach in education – with a twist, using the metaphor of the “magic wand,” to create a new exploration focused on the teacher’s beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e23 and the learner’s educational desires. i introduced the “magic wand” metaphor to the students on the class online forum, and in the next class meeting – as an open inquiry about, … what do i want to achieve and in what way with my students. if there were a magic wand that i could use to make all my students behave and study exactly as i wanted them to do, would i use it? when would i use it? isn't aba (behavioral management) something like a magic wand, to help me as a teacher achieve exactly what i want, with all my students? … let's examine different real and imaginary scenarios and test the limits of our own beliefs about behavioral management techniques. [let’s examine] different difficult and problematic educational situations for all of us to think through whether to use or not to use behavioral management. what are the pros and what [are] the cons? …[the] next class meeting was completely overtaken by … critical dialogue about the "magic wand"… when would we use “the magic wand” on ourselves? when would we use it as teachers – on our students? is it educational to make our students unconditionally conform to the teacher’s desire, however good or bad this desire might be? when would it be better and more efficient to learn using a "magic wand" to make the students well behaved? should students become involved in testing ideas about what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong? is it educationally worthwhile to let our students make their own decisions about their own behavior — moral decisions about what is right and what is wrong — and then reflect on them?... what would make a difference in our own development and for our own subjectivities? what does it mean to be “educated?” do we want to raise citizens who unconditionally follow the authority, however good the authority may be? (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a63). this time, i was attentively listening to my students’ stories and critical analyses. our critical dialogue about the “magic wand” led to many interesting and fruitful revelations about each one of us as teachers and as people. some of the “behaviorist students” including sarah, “raised important issues about their institutional settings. they […] said that they were concerned with the institutional pressure to use behaviorist classroom management aiming at active[ly] suppressing the students’ ‘bad’ behavior [loudly running through school corridors, paying no attention to the class, etc.]” (a63). another student, nora, did not believe that the given school institutional environment could ever be changed, and made a cynical remark that “her professional responsibility [is] simply to follow institutional orders, although she did not mind most of these institutional orders. from nora’s professional position, the ‘magic wand’ inquiry seemed to sound interesting but a bit [of a] frivolous and [an] inconsequential exercise” (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a63). and yet, she did worry that “having too much structure in the class, could take away a child’s ability and right to be a kid.” 15 i learned that sarah did not like “negative reinforcements,” i.e., punishments, but preferred “positive reinforcements,” i.e., rewards, which my other two “humanist students,” mona and kathy, criticized as “bribery by rewards.” sarah’s credo as a “good teacher” was to do only what is good for her students. it seemed that the “magic wand” inquiry, actually made sarah test her own pedagogical desires. sarah (and other students) started developing a list of circumstances for which she would use the “magic wand,” and for which she would not, along with reasons for that. thus, she said that she would use a “magic wand” to “fix medical conditions like cancer” but not for an “autistic child to learn that she/he should not hit their sister on the head. … that kind of learning should be a process, because the children 15 previously unpublished direct citations from the transcript of the class audio recording are without page numbers. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e24 are growing.” sarah would definitely use a “magic wand” to eliminate acute and severe self-hurting behaviors by autistic children, like their banging their heads on the wall. she would also use a “magic wand” to give just a little help to a child to make eye-contact with a teacher or a member of the family. and then, this eye-contact would boost the child’s spontaneous communication, “which would be so important for the child and the whole family to grow together.” however, sarah, would not replace this “process of family growing together” with a wave of the “magic wand’s” fixing. mona, a “humanist student,” compared the process of a “family growing together” with her own family learning to live with and love her uncle who has down syndrome. mona cherished her family’s love for her uncle and she would never use a “magic wand” to change anything about her family. however, mona agreed with sarah that she would also use the “magic wand” for children’s acute and severe selfhurting behaviors. like mona, kathy, another “humanist student,” said that she would never use the “magic wand” to change the behaviors of others, including her own children and students. she would always be afraid to “break” the others’ personal integrity and autonomy, and hurt their real, deep needs. nevertheless, she would use a “magic wand” on herself, to make herself gain insight and understanding of each child’s strengths and needs, so that she as a teacher could provide the best guidance to children. the children, in her opinion, should still need to learn by themselves, through a process. kathy thought that if a “magic wand” would make you have “a photographic memory, [and] incredible knowledge base, but not [deeply] understand it… that means you didn’t really learn it.” ironically, as a teacher she did not wish to learn through a process together with her students how to be sensitive to their needs but instead wanted to become a sensitive teacher instantaneously. unfortunately, i did not notice this contradiction in kathy’s reasoning at the time and, thus, missed this teaching-learning opportunity. what was important, however, was that nearly all of my students found the “magic wand” (and, thus, behaviorism behind it) legitimately useful in some circumstances and not in others. as the class discussion exploring the boundary of legitimately using a “magic wand” progressed, sarah became baffled: in her opinion, behaviorist aba training can help children to gain self-control and focus their attention, and that is precisely what “children ‘on the autism spectrum’ [were] ‘lacking.’ … how could such a beneficial technique be un-ethical? at what point would it become un-ethical?” (marjanovicshane, 2016, p. a63). it seemed that, for sarah, the “magic wand” discussion was becoming “professionally and personally important, exciting, and revealing” (p. a63). sarah started wondering if this discussion would change her professionally, making her doubt in the ultimate power of behaviorist aba techniques, “you know… its… i’m not so sure anymore... if i’d wave the “magic wand” for all the things… all the time... the kids need a process [of learning] … i think that that’s true communication16…, and that it’s so important for them… you know – to grow…”. the situation was complicated for sarah by the fact that she was obliged to use the aba techniques in her school all the time. this could potentially “put her on a collision course with her conventional institution” (p. a63). for all of us, the participants in the class, the “magic wand” discussion became an examination of limits: the limits of behaviorism and the limits of humanism in education. when is each one of them legitimate? we, the class participants, tentatively agreed that behaviorism (the “magic wand”) would not be unethical when used to stop self-hurting and other violent behaviors (like hitting and hurting others). but there was no agreement among all of us about behaviorism when practiced because of schools’ institutional pressures to control children’s behavior. nor did the class participants agree on the legitimacy of behaviorism to make children “sit still and focus on learning what they need to learn.” the boundaries 16 italics indicate sarah’s verbal stress. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e25 were fuzzy about what does it mean to “have too much structure, that could take away from children’s ability to be a kid.” “the [class] event seemed to have a lasting effect on [all] the participants. afterwards, during the class and many months and years after the class was over, ‘behaviorist’ adele contacted [me] on several occasions. she said that she often felt as if little professor ana was sitting on her shoulder, asking whether adele liked her own pedagogical desires behind her pedagogical decisions and actions or not” (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a64). other students, often recommended my classes to new students… it seemed that justice was restored. or, possibly not. i never again, after the course was over, heard from sarah. painful torpedo touch can often create powerful memorable events in people’s lives. based on the bakhtinian notions of “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2009; matusov & von duyke, 2010) and “penetrative discourse” (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009; matusov & brobst, 2013), torpedo touch may forcefully start vicious internal dialogues in students. critically analyzing the use of the torpedo touch approach in dialogic pedagogy, matusov and brobst (2013) do not reject torpedo touch as such, which may be both unavoidable and even desirable by some students. however, they question a non-consensual torpedo touch and, of course, the pedagogical utilization of humiliation. they argue that torpedo touch has to be welcomed by the students and not imposed on them – it should be consensual, like in the case of plato’s meno dialogue (plato & bluck, 1961) or, in this case, as with eugene’s guidance of ana. although pedagogy based on socratic torpedo touch may lead to important critical reflections and deep learning, it raises serious questions about educational justice. when imposed by the teacher, a torpedo touch experience may undermine the student’s right to control, initiate and invite such experiences. looking back, i (ana) can see that as a teacher, i did not question my educational decision to “shake” sarah and two other students out of their behaviorist beliefs by accusing her of potentially being “professionally unethical” with her students. at the time, this decision was in accordance with my “dialogic humanist” beliefs about good (and just) education. from this “dialogic humanist” point of view, treating autistic children as animals to be controlled and trained by punishment and reward is deeply inhumane, disrespectful, and abusive. it denies children the possibility and the right to make their own meanings about the world, make their own judgment about what is good and what is bad, to have a right to be frustrated and not cooperate with others, or at least to express their frustrations, etc. however, now i realize that i fell into my own trap: i was educationally unjust to sarah! first, in contrast to my wish to be “dialogic,” my own desire to “tell the truth” about the problems of behaviorism, overtook my pedagogical decisions, and i stopped being interested in seriously considering sarah’s points of view and her complex and difficult work with young autistic children. second, i was not ready to be truly a dialogic partner in jointly thinking through a tough and complex issue, letting myself deconstruct my own dear beliefs. third, i did not take into account my institutional authoritarianism in the relationship between sarah (and the other students) and me, the authoritarianism that made my truth about behaviorism almost uncontestable for her, crushed her, and made her “heart ache when it is thought that i [i.e., sarah] am not trying to do all i can for students…” (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a62). she lost her power to defend her truth “that children are motivated in much the same way as i am, and that sometimes when they need that extra boost to change their way of thinking or their behaviors … i should be able to assist them in this process” (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p. a62). ironically, i was fighting sarah’s authoritarianism directed at her young autistic pupils with my authoritarianism directed at her. fourth, the torpedo touch i tried to create for sarah, was not consensual – she was not in any way doubting her beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e26 pedagogical truths, nor asking me for help, nor inviting discussion about them (matusov, 2009; matusov & brobst, 2013; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2018, in preparation). i did, however, hear her pain which was for me that “extra boost” to change something in my teaching and take responsibility for the educational injustice i caused. however, although i can say that i tried hard to restore the educational justice, it may have come too late for sarah. we argue that although plunging students into powerful emotional examinations of their own beliefs, positions, desires and acts in critical dialogue, may potentially lead to the students’ transcendence of themselves, such educational acts do not necessarily serve educational justice. without students’ explicit welcoming and/or initiating of dramatic and potentially existentially undermining confrontations of their own living being, such educational acts are not only existentially dangerous for the students’ wellbeing, but are experienced by the student as unjust violations of their educational integrity. if we compare the “torpedo touch” experienced by sarah and by me (as a student of dialogic pedagogy), we could say that sarah experienced “torpedo touch” as unjust violation of her existence as an ethical human being and a skillful professional. this educational injustice may have potentially never been overcome, not even by the innovative “magic wand” pedagogical approach. on the other hand, in my learning to become a dialogic teacher, i needed and i invited my own “torpedo touch” experience from eugene. i already felt that “something” was wrong in my teaching, and i needed to confront my own fears and desires. there was no injustice in eugene’s “torpedo touch.” the case of vivian paley excluding exclusion: “you can’t say you can’t play” vivian paley, a preschool teacher, was faced with the following pedagogical problem in her classroom. her 4-year old children systematically excluded some minority working class peers from their play and thus from their networks of friendships, making them outcasts in the classroom. she sent two major pedagogical goals for herself: 1) integrating the outcast students in the networks of friendships and 2) teaching her students about the problem of systematic exclusion and searching for a solution with them. as a conscientious teacher deeply committed to issues of social justice in education (and beyond) vivian paley eventually prioritized her first goal of social justice in her classroom community over her second goal – educating her students about social justice issues and finding a solution of the problem of exclusion together. to address the problem of systematic exclusion and her two major pedagogical goals, paley employed very creative pedagogical approaches by: 1. gradually inventing a fairytale story both reflecting on the current situation in the classroom and offering new ideas that she shared with her young students, 2. sharing and discussing the problem of systematic exclusion with her 4-year old children, and 3. consulting with her former preschool students, 4th graders. initially, paley was very successful in sharing the problem of systematic exclusion with her 4-year old children. she managed to create a public forum for her children, giving voices to both systematically rejected children (angelo, nelson, clara) and “play-bosses” (lisa): angelo: let anybody play if someone asks. lisa: but then what's the whole point of playing? nelson: you just want cynthia. lisa: i could play alone. why can't clara play alone? angelo: i think that's pretty sad. people that is alone they has water in their eyes. lisa: i'm more sad if someone comes that i don't want to play with. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e27 teacher: who is sadder, the one who isn't allowed to play or the one who has to play with someone he or she doesn't want to play with? clara: it's more sadder if you can't play. lisa: the other one is the same sadder. angelo: it has to be clara because she puts herself away in her cubby. and lisa can still play every time. lisa: i can't play every time if i'm sad. how clearly the issue is stated (paley, 1992, pp. 19-20). arguably, the 4-year old children, at least, the children involved in presented dialogues, including even play-boss lisa, understood intellectually and emotionally the pains of systematically excluded children. paley managed to organize an “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010) among her children, although in a rather limited way (matusov, 2009, ch. 7). however, after this pedagogical achievement, paley hit the wall as she did not know how to convince play-bosses and their play supporters, led by lisa, to accept systematically rejected minority children in their playing. after an agonizing impasse and further considerations, paley launched an authoritarian coup abandoning any further internally persuasive discussions among the children and announced a new rule of forced inclusion: “you can’t say you can’t play” in her classroom. paradoxically, paley decided to defeat play bosses by using their own weapon – by being an even bigger play boss, imposing her rule of excluding exclusivity on all children. she justified this decision by her humanistic and professional ethics of preventing suffering among her systematically rejected minority and/or workingclass children. although one can sympathize with vivian paley’s agonizing decision, several educationalists raise intellectual, pedagogical, and ethic objections to paley’s authoritarian coup and its justification. thus, together with other scholars, eugene matusov (the first author) and mark smith raised some intellectual limitations of paley’s reasoning which did not consider seriously lisa’s position about the importance of exclusion and exclusive social relations, king (1993, pp. 334-335) charges paley with failing to see the right to exclude as a protected public right, just like the right to participate, and paley does not consider this right to exclude seriously. for example, exclusive rights related to the legal protections are socially granted to women in intimate relations with men. using lisa’s argument, we can ask, “would it be sadder to legally allow any man to enter into a sexual relation with any woman at his unilateral whim, or to exclude all men but one who is consensually chosen through the institution of marriage as it is in the current societal practice?” even taking into consideration cultural and historical diversity among societies in marriage arrangements, we think that the right of public exclusion is “less sadder” than the right of unilateral inclusion. of course, there are important differences between marriage and sexual relations, on the one hand, and children’s play and friendships in the classroom, on the other. like king, we just want to problematize the issue to show its complexity and the potential reasonableness of lisa’s intellectual-ontological position (matusov, 2009, pp. 238-239). a pedagogical critique of paley’s decision involves her shift from an educational democratic pedagogical regime, where truth is tested and forever testable (morson, 2004), to an authoritarian pedagogical regime, where truth is imposed by the authority. matusov and smith (matusov, 2009, ch. 8) argued that an authority-based regime can be justified in some extreme cases when safety is more beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e28 important than education. for example, when a person tries to cross a street without checking for cars, it is legitimate to forcefully pull the person out of the road without engaging in any internally persuasive discourse. however, presumably, paley’s was not in an emergency situation. as she confessed, her sense of emergency was driven by a sense of her guilt for tolerating systematic exclusion of minority and/or working-class children in her preschool classes for many-many years before. furthermore, paley, with brutal honesty, reported that her shift to the authoritarian pedagogy generated a hidden power struggle among children and with her. her kantian rule-based approach “you can’t say you can’t play” pushed play-bosses and their playmates to find creative ways of how to systematically exclude unpopular children from their play, while simultaneously remaining compliant with the teacher’s rule at least on the surface. thus, matusov and smith wrote, we have many examples provided by paley [where] play bosses and their friends try to manipulate the new rule of inclusion and renegotiate it to diminish its universal and unilateral power. for example, even at the end of the book, lisa and charlie might accept children whom they do not want in their play but then they try to send them away (e.g., “in a different woods”) in a playful way (p. 121-122) or they try to create unattractive characters that the unwanted children may reject on their own (p. 126). or lisa (and cynthia, pp. 114-115) tries to offer ms. paley alternative rules that smuggle exclusion at least sometimes or under certain circumstances, lisa raises her eyebrows. "could i give an opinion?" she asks in her most polite voice. "we could change the rule, not too much change it, but kind of like change it this way. we could say yes you could play if you really really really want to play so much that you just take the part the person in charge wants you to be" (p. 94). in conclusion, … ms. paley was not successful in establishing the authority of her new rule (matusov, 2009, pp. 265-266, the italics is original). matusov and smith argue that paley did not need to move away from her initial pedagogical regime of internally persuasive discourse (ipd) because, ironically, she offered in her book two different types of possible solutions for the impasse within an internally persuasive regime. here we will provide only one type. matusov and smith called the first type of ipd solutions, provided in paley’s book, “dialogical objectivizing” – “tricking” children into a new experience and reflection on a new possible reality. for example, paley mediated a play conflict of exclusion through play itself by tricking the playboss children into experiencing and enjoying inclusion, waka [a rejected child] tugs on my shirt. "i'm not following them!" "he keeps following us," ben complains. "waka just wants to play with you." "we're playing two army bombers, me and charlie." i try a bit of humor. "br-r-r! and here comes another one. waka! the daring army bomber good guy!" the boys are laughing with me. i'm in such a good mood now they can't resist (paley, 1992, p. 57). matusov and smith pointed out that paley could have expanded this approach to address the main problem of systematic exclusion from play, beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e29 we argue that the teacher ms. paley could have used this approach of tricking the students into […] reconsidering their attitude [toward] inclusion in her own classroom systematically. she could have playfully mediated the access of the rejected children to play… on a systematic basis. by doing that, she would have tested her own hypothesis, according to which play engagement with […] necessity leads to children’s friendships. as we discussed above, we suspect that the issue of what leads to what -play engagement leads to friendship or friendship leads to play engagement, – is more complex. in some cases, play engagement may lead to friendship but in some other cases, the reverse […] is true. however, [in] ms. paley’s experimentation through dialogic objectivizing, she might explore this complexity and alleviate the severity of systematic exclusion of rejected children. also, like magpie bird in her own fairytale, she could help to mediate networks of friendship for the systematically rejected children. in this case, if paley had reached […] successes, these successes would have had “construct validity” (using term from research methodology, see hartmann, 1992) unlike the tautological “successes” of the new rule presented in the book. as we discussed above, dialogic objectivizing contrasts [with] social engineering by providing a real and safe choice for the participants after they are being tricked into […] ontologically new circumstances. the children could have faced the real comparison of two ontological conditions that they experienced. if the kids in […] play accepted a previously rejected child as a result of ms. paley’s dialogic objectivizing (like in her case with waka), it would be for real, because, now they are having collective fun in being with waka, and not because the children are forced to do it behaviorally by the rule enforced by the teacher. by doing that, the teacher would have not abandoned the ipd regime and still could address her concern about immediate actions for social justice. she could have involved the students in reflection about these two different ontological circumstances: one is the status quo of the exclusion right and the other is new experiences of play inclusions mediated by the teacher (matusov, 2009, pp. 273-274). we do not argue that matusov and smith’s alternative approaches to paley’s authoritarian coup would necessarily work, making her class a justice paradise, but we argue that she did not even try. the alternative approaches, preserving internally persuasive discourse in her class – the essence of dialogic critical education – might have made her classroom more just both from a narrowly defined pedagogical point of view and from a relational/communal point of view. in our view, paley’s authoritarian regime, involving subversive creative exclusion, was a failure of justice, arguably making things worse and not better for the systematically rejected children. informal subversive horizontal oppression by peers often beats a formal authoritarian vertical rule-based oppression because the former is contextual, dynamic, creative, flexible, and amorphous, not bound by any rules. in contrast, engaging all the community in dealing with the problem of systematic exclusion through internally persuasive discourse, successfully initiated by paley in the initial phase of her pedagogy might unleash collective creativity, critical reflection, and good will from all in dealing with serious and real contextual and relational contradictions of exclusion and inclusion. the latter approach might be messy, imperfect, and time-consuming but in the long-run, it might be better for communal atmosphere than paley’s authoritarianism. it might create a culture among the children and the teacher of examining and re-examining justice in the classroom. finally, matusov and smith provided an ethical critique of paley’s pedagogical deed. they found many places throughout her book where she apparently criticized herself in an honest and straightforward ways. for example, matusov and smith wrote (p. 261), but has paley been aware that she destroyed a dialogic ipd regime in her classroom by imposing the new rule? we are ambivalent about answering this question as, probably, paley is beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e30 herself. there is evidence that she knew perfectly well what she was doing, although this evidence is very indirect. we can hear another, almost alien, voice violently entering paley’s self-reflections in her book. it usually comes into very sensitive moments of ms. paley replying to children’s urgent questions. it sounds like a voice of paley’s double (bakhtin, 1999) who vigorously argues with her in her internal dialogues. paley’s double is not nice to her. it comments on her own statements with brutally-honest evaluations denouncing her own hidden manipulation with the children17, “angelo wants to know what else i don't tell the children." i try not to tell you what thoughts or opinions to have," is my less than honest answer, at a time when i am singlemindedly pushing new attitudes about play (paley, 1992, p. 27)18. however, she did not reply to her own self-challenges as if she was suppressing her own internal voice challenging her ideological position of pedagogical authoritarianism. paley did not want to reply to her own challenging questions nor to challenging questions about her problematic pedagogy raised by matusov and smith in their personal email communication with her. after reading a draft of their critical essay, she replied to them, “thanks also for inviting me to comment on your paper, but i prefer to let you carry on your own investigations and come to your own conclusions” (matusov, 2009, p. 272). matusov and smith shared their and her own challenges of paley’s publicized pedagogical actions but she apparently refused to take responsibility for her pedagogical deeds by not responding to these challenges in her book and in her reply. matusov and smith called this phenomenon of being aware of challenges to one’s own deeds without replying to them “awareness without responsibility” (matusov, 2009, p. 261). in sum, we argue that in the first phase of her pedagogy, vivian paley promoted justice and education about justice in her preschool classroom by successfully establishing a public forum for a critical dialogue of internally persuasive discourse. however, together with other critics, we challenge the intellectual limitations of this critical dialogue. paley did not guide and did not allow her young students to explore the complexity of exclusion, constituting the crux of any special relationship. in the second phase, when she radically changed her class’ pedagogical regime by executing her coup, the situation was more complex. in contrast to ana (see above), vivian paley had the urgency in experiencing the injustice of the systematic exclusion of minority children caused by the play bosses almost every moment of her classroom time. she felt responsible to stop it as soon as possible. we are sympathetic to paley’s concern about the continuation of horizontal peer oppression via systematic exclusion of minority and/or working-class unpopular children from play and friendship. however, we challenge her abrupt ending of the critical dialogue and the shift to her authoritarian pedagogical regime of “you can’t say you can’t play.” the shift transferred her pedagogy of children’s collective critical examination of the self, life, world, and society honestly assisted by the teacher into children’s socialization into “the goodness” defined by the authority. we argue that this shift, or better to say, coup, was guided by kantian universal rule-based justice making people mutually replaceable and circumstances universal. however, even with our critique, the question remains open of whether her classroom after the coup became more just than before for previously excluded children on a systematic basis and the other children. is vertical oppression by the authority, which involves promoting forced integration at the expense of special exclusive relationships of freedom, still better than horizontal peer oppression of systematic exclusion or not? one can argue that paley’s pedagogical move of coup was similar to the us 17 “paley’s double denouncing her manipulation with children reminds [of] the voice of angelo denouncing manipulative kids (see above). this fact provides another reason of why angelo seems to be paley’s conscience” (matusov, 2009, p. 261). 18 the italics are by paley, the bold is by matusov and smith. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e31 forceful racial desegregation of public schools, leading to imposed busing of children from one racially segregated neighborhood to a school, located in another racially segregated neighborhood, in order to mix racially diverse children. although imposed busing may not be without its flaws and critiques, one can convincingly argue that on average, a situation of forced racial desegregation is better than a situation of forced racial segregation. alternatively, one can compare paley’s coup with the bolshevik revolution in russia in 1917, where forced equality was imposed on the country. like in the case of paley’s coup, the bolshevik revolution required suppression of all public discussions and elimination of all alternative approaches (in contrast to the forced racial desegregation in the us). this raises a possibility that paley’s regime was not only authoritarian but may also have been totalitarian in nature. of course, to address the question of whether the situation became more just before or after paley’s coup, it can be helpful to access paley’s children’s subjectivities and ask them. unfortunately, paley did not do that and probably could not do that as a regime of free discussions was eliminated in her classroom. finally, we wonder if paley’s lack of responsibility in replying to her own, her children’s, and other people’s challenges of her pedagogy is part of the pedagogical and social justice authoritarianism, if not totalitarianism, that she has committed. we wish that paley wanted to reply to our criticism19… educational justice of the replaceable and measurable in the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework above, we discussed diverse approaches to the immeasurable notion of justice in education – i.e., justice, which is applied to unique people and unique educational processes. what about measurable justice? for example, money and many material things can be mutually replaceable and, thus, measurable. thus, how can they be distributed justly? in our epigraph quote, david graeber argues that when things are replaceable and measurable to be just they have to be divided equally, “…since there’s no basis for ranking such unique individuals on their merits, everyone deserves the same amount of those things that can be measured: an equal income, an equal amount of money, or an equal share of wealth” (graeber, 2013, p. 301). for example, in an educational context, this principle probably means having the same funding expenditure for each student. we want to take issue with this equality-based approach to measurable justice. although one can argue that economic exchange-value of a $20 bill is the same regardless of who has it20, its meaning for the person, for his/her particular needs, wants, and interests – its use-value – is rather unique and, thus, irreplaceable and immeasurable. a twenty-dollar bill has the power to affect lives of different people differently depending on their needs, their affluence, desires, interests, and so on. in educational context, we know that the same expenditure for “regular” students and students “with disabilities” may be highly unjust. as above shows, an evenly leveled floor does not guarantee that all people can see the game. this is the problem of the exact equal distribution of measurable things to people. of course, as we have already discussed, equity – unequal distribution of measurable resources to achieve the same outcome – is highly problematic in its own right. in general, in our view, graeber is 19 sergeiy sandler, who kindly provided us with his feedback on a pervious draft, raises an interesting question of how our harsh criticism of paley is different from our ana’s treatment of sarah. in our view, there are many differences. in contrast to ana who wanted to change her behaviorist student, we do not try to change paley in any way. rather we honestly want to know her reply to her own and our challenges to her pedagogy. also, paley is not our student – we do not serve her self-education as teachers. she is our colleague. we do not need to assume a teacher orientation toward her. our dialogue with paley is out of educational context. there are other less important differences as well (e.g., institutional authoritarianism). 20 of course, in practice this is a questionable assumption since access to the global market and availability of goods are always local and particular. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e32 too optimistic, cavaliering the problem of measurable justice. the main problem we see is that although sometimes resources can be mutually replaceable, exchangeable, and measurable, their meaning and use value for unique people with unique goals situated in unique circumstances becomes unique in itself. thus, exchangeable resources are measurable but they are also always unique. this creates a selfcontradiction in measurable things and, thus, in measurable justice. karl marx (1972) emphasized this self-contradiction of the notion of economic value as a mutually constitutive self-contradiction between exchange-value, which is always measurable and replaceable, and use-value, which is always unique and immeasurable. but, how can unique people with unique goals, interests, and needs being in unique circumstances be supported by measurable resources in a just way? when these resources are unlimited or abundant enough for all of the participants in education, this is not a problem, of course. in this case, people can take as much resources for their education as they need and want. the problem starts when these measurable resources, having unique use-value for each participant, are not enough for all participants – how can they be split in a just way? our bakhtinian dialogic ethics approach leads us to realize that there is no satisfactory formula for solving this problem. thus, we reject kantian modernistic formulaic preset approaches based on equality, or equity, or lottery (i.e., luck of equal opportunity), and so on. together with bakhtin, we argue that justice and its criteria do not pre-exist the problematic situation but rather emerge from the problematic situation and the participants’ creative deeds addressing it. thus, we argue that the so-called measurable justice is not much different from the immeasurable justice situations discussed above. participants’ authorial deeds, their justifications, and replies to challenges of these deeds and justifications (i.e., taking responsibility) will ethically define these deeds and these participants for others and themselves in their unique circumstances in critical dialogue. paraphrasing thomas jefferson’s declaration that “all men are created equal,” we argue that “all people are created unique.” having said all that, any society faces a problem of a just allocation of measurable resources in advance, without fully knowing the unique people with their unique goals, interests, and needs in their unique circumstances. thus, in education, different public and private funding agencies have to allocate their funding in advance, knowing rather stereotypically about possible unique educational goals, interests, needs, and circumstances and not at all about emerging ones. the bakhtinian dialogical ethics of responsibility reaches a limit in addressing this problem. in our view, it has to compromise with a kantian formulaic approach. recently, we have introduced such a proposal making a compromise between bakhtinian dialogical ethics and kantian formalism (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). in our approach, we want to minimize unavoidable educational injustice coming from the limitation of resources, their unique effect on and unique value for unique participants, and the preset nature of the allocation process. we propose the minimum necessary monetary funding (i.e., measurable resources in the form of educational vouchers given directly to students21) that can promote good quality education, where good quality education is defined heuristically and impressionistically by students. the formula for minimum funding is based on a statistical comparison of the surveyed quality of education between “poor” and “rich” students. “poor” students are those whose education is only funded at the public level. “rich” students are all those whose educational funds exceeds the public ones. if the comparison of the medians shows that “poor” students’ satisfaction with their education is statistically lower than the educational satisfaction of “rich” students, the public funds have to be increased until the difference is not statistically significant. thus, “rich” students define the minimum necessary resources for “good enough 21 in our paper, we define nuances of this and other points (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e33 education” for all. this idea is based on the principle of “good inequality,” promoting the future, described by sci-fi writer william ford gibson on the radio show fresh air (npr, august 31, 1993), “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” good inequality drives creativity and innovation and sets new goals for distributive justice. the kantian aspect of our proposal for funding justice in education involves: 1) a formula of funding, equalizing unique students, 2) statistical modeling, “regression to the mean,”22 and 3) surveying students’ educational satisfaction, ranking unique values and definitions of education. the bakhtinian aspect of our proposal involves unique students uniquely defining their goals, values, quality, and criteria of their education, calling for the pluralism of education philosophies, and the recursivity of the funding allocation process. of course, our proposal is possible only when there are enough resources to support good enough education for all where “good enough for all” is defined statistically, – and there is societal commitment to that. as the overall measurable resources of the society grow and “rich” students consume more and more for their education, the statistically defined good enough education will require more resources. thus, we expect that the minimum necessary public funding will grow as well (of course, if there is a political will for that). because of that, our proposal for the societal allocation of public educational resources can be called “the maximin for good enough education as a basic universal right.” the society maximizes that what it can afford and politically wills to allocate for the minimum universal basic income. conclusions: just educational practice in conclusion, we want to discuss how a just educational practice may look like from the perspective of the definition of educational justice based on bakhtinian dialogic ethics. a just pedagogical practice does not guarantee educational justice but rather it promotes it by creating favorable conditions for justice. bakhtinian dialogic ethics, described above, focuses on the uniqueness of people and their voices, on authorial transcendence of the given, on recognition of this transcendence by others and the author, on consciousnesses with equal rights, on internally persuasive discourse, on no-alibi in being, and finally on personal responsibility (bakhtin, 1986, 1991, 1993, 1999). applied to education, this framework puts the learner in the center of educational practice as the author of this practice. only when the learner is the full and final author for his/her education, supported by others as needed by the learner, is the educational practice just in the bakhtinian dialogic ethics framework. we operationalize the favorable conditions for the learner’s full and final educational authorship as the learner’s multidimensional academic freedoms. these multidimensional academic freedoms and rights involve: 1. curriculum: the learner’s freedom to decide what to learn; 2. instruction: the learner’s freedom to decide how, when, where, and with whom to learn and ask for guidance; 3. participation: the learner’s freedom to engage or disengage, freedom to learn or not to learn, freedom of a no-fault divorce from any teacher or learning community; 4. valuation: the learner’s freedom to determine what is or is not important for the learner to study or to do, the quality, and the purpose of his/her education; 5. ecology: the learner’s right to have access to and opportunity for a rich educational environment, pregnant with and supportive of diverse discourses, practices, and values; 6. role: the learner’s freedom to define what kind of student the learner wants to be in every particular situation and overall (e.g., a credential student, a self-responsible critical learner, an 22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/regression_toward_the_mean beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e34 other-responsible critical learner, a creative learner, an autodidact, an apprentice); 7. leisure: the learner’s freedom from necessities and needs such as hunger, sickness, concerns about shelter, concerns about safety, concerns about future well-being, costs of education, and so on (matusov, 2019, in preparation). for a discussion of these learner multidimensional academic freedoms, we refer our readers to our upcoming chapter (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018, submitted-a). unfortunately, most conventional and innovative schools23 deny these academic freedoms and rights to the students because they view education instrumentally and not intrinsically. mass education was designed as the right of the society to impose education on the people for economic, political, nationalistic, and other societal goals. the right of a person for such education is nothing more than a right of the society to impose its unilaterally designed curriculum on the person. at its best, the right for education in our society is the right of the person to fit into our society, in a way that the society defines it. however, there is no right for education for the person’s self-actualization, 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(2013). students' agency, autonomy, and emergent learning interests in two open democratic schools. phd, univrsity of delaware. beyond equality and inequality in education eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.236 | vol. 6 (2018) e38 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word from classroom education to remote emergency education (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt1 from classroom education to remote emergency education: transformations in a dialogical pedagogy proposal arthur santiago federal institute of education, science, and technology, brazil cristiano mattos university of são paulo, brazil abstract this paper presents how a dialogical educational proposal, inspired by freire’s perspective, was introduced and adapted to the digital educational environment in distance teaching-learning. from freire’s pedagogy perspective, dialogue is one of the main assumptions for the teaching-learning activity. therefore, we developed an online environment introducing a dialogical pedagogy, considering students’ problems during the pandemic. based on this proposition, we created a remote educational environment through the discord platform. this platform has excellent potential to base an educational environment enabling students and teachers to engage in a dialogical activity. we investigated how the discord platform contributes to enhancing dialogical pedagogy. then, we introduced a dialogic activity in an initial training course for physics teachers in a discipline called “non-formal education”. nineteen students participated in the activity developed throughout the discipline. we gathered data during the classes by recording student interactions on the platform system. the analysis was based on activity theory to identify the situations where their agency emerged and changed the activity and what role discord played in this through the students’ dialogue. the study explores discord facilities to introduce the dialogical teaching methodology previously developed in the faceto-face format. finally, we could identify that the students’ voices emerged in the interactions, given the opportunity to express their ideas on their own terms and, fundamentally, be heard and considered by others. at last, students developed agency in the remote school activity, engaging productively in the required tasks and creating a community through the platform. keywords: chat, freire, discord, pandemic, non-formal education arthur santiago has a ph.d. in science education at the interunit science teaching program from the university of são paulo. he is currently a professor at the federal institute of education, science, and technology (ifsp são paulo campus); he works on critical pedagogy and cultural-historical activity theory in science teaching and science communication and is a member of the research group in science and complexity education (ecco). cristiano mattos has a ph.d. in physics from the university of são paulo investigating artificial cognitive systems. currently, he is an associate professor at the institute of physics at the university of são paulo and the leader of the research group in science and complexity education (ecco). he works on philosophical and psychological fundaments of teaching and learning processes, emphasizing science education research to establish theoretical-methodological foundations based on the cultural-historical activity theory from a freirean perspective. through this framework, he investigated topics related to the teaching and learning processes of scientific and quotidian concepts, models of dialogic interaction, situated issn: 2325-3290 (online) from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt2 cognition, interdisciplinarity, and complexity. he also developed practical educational activities aiming at science as an instrument to develop citizenship and democratic education for social and economic equity. ïïò introduction the covid-19 pandemic has radically transformed human activities, as social distancing has established itself as one of the main epidemiological controls. thus, changing habits required the quick establishment of new actions and coordination between them. the established urgent social needs prevented many of these actions from being planned, accentuating and generating contradictions in the most diverse systems of social activities. in addition to the inherent urgent difficulties of the sanitary situation, the pandemic in brazil emphasized the enormous socioeconomic inequality, drastically increasing the number of people in poverty (neri, 2021). in recent years, the country has been experiencing a severe political and economic crisis, culminating in a government that systematically denied science as the proper way to deal with the sanitary crisis and changed not ideologically aligned ministers of health more than four times. (aquino et al., 2020). the working class was one of the populations most affected by the pandemic (ibge, 2021; u.s. department of labor, 2020), especially with the precariousness of working conditions and labor relations (matilla-santander et al., 2021). however, among workers’ activities, the school was one of the most impacted, involving a considerable number of people. the relevance of school to the working class extends beyond the teaching-learning process since many workers’ families rely on the school to care for their children throughout the working day. radical measures to preserve life and reduce contagion resulted in social distancing and the closing of schools worldwide (unesco, 2020). across the planet, different solutions were developed during pandemics, emerging in different concrete cultural and historical conditions. remote contacts, whether synchronous or asynchronous, defined a large portion of educational activities and, in any case, delimited the multimodality of face-to-face interactions (united nations, 2020). this dramatic situation required a forceful adaptation of educational activity, establishing itself in a remote emergency mode. the vast majority of face-to-face activities were quickly adapted to become distance activities. in order to overcome the challenges posed by the pandemic situation to the educational system, we developed a dialogic activity using the discord platform. beyond some specific and unique discord functionalities, such as being a full-time open environment to users, one of the most significant advantages of using this platform is that it is popular among young students who already use it to participate in online team games. we explored the discord environment tools, which allowed us to establish dialogic situations in a remote educational activity. in an initial physics teacher education degree, we developed this activity within the discipline of non-formal education, in which the objective was to learn how to use scientific dissemination resources. we developed the intervention inspired by freire’s critical pedagogy and analyzed it from the cultural historical activity theory (chat) perspective identifying the benefits discord brings to emerging dialogue and student autonomy development. the student’s voice is a crucial component of the activity in its individual and social dimensions. dialogue is central to the process, not just exchanging ideas but as an activity. this paper proposes a dialogic educational activity from a freirean perspective, emphasizing the possibility of dialogic interactions among students in a self-regulated collectivities environment. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt3 theoretical framework chat – cultural historical activity theory like any other human activity, educational activity is complex and constituted by myriad mediations. thus, an adequate theoretical-methodological perspective is needed to analyze the various dimensions of this complex phenomenon. this is why we based our research on the cultural historical activity theory – chat, – considering the perspective of leontyev (2009a,b) and engeström (1987, 2001, 2010, 2020). we investigate an educational activity system taking the emergency remote dialogical teaching activities as the unit of analysis. the origins of chat can be traced back to the core idea of mediation in its epistemological, ontological, and axiological dimensions, which were used to investigate subject-object relationships. theoretical and methodological breakthroughs in chat were achieved by broadening the scope of its object, requiring support from other research fields (e.g., psychology, sociology, education, and administration), and introducing increasingly complex study objects. thus, understanding more complex mediating systems of collective interactions around common goals was required to investigate the coordination of mediated human behaviors. according to leontyev’s (2009a,b) approach, the coordination of collective actions toward a goal allows the emergence of hierarchical levels interpreted as an activity in a complex activity system. furthermore, each coordinated action has specific goals and conditions the operations to be realized. activities can be organized into activity systems coordinated activities which are constituted with several hierarchical levels mediated among themselves. in addition to this hierarchical structure, human activity could be expressed through mediating fields that give unity to the subject-community-object triadic structure (mattos, 2019). the mediating fields, which are constituents of and are constituted by the activity, have different properties and functions. engeström (1987, 2001, 2010, 2020) proposed mediations by pairs, such as the subject-object dialectical pair, mediated by cultural tools, resuming the vygotskian principles of cultural mediation (daniels, 2015); the subject-community pair mediated by rules, which express the forms of regulation of social relations in the activity; and finally, the division of labor mediating the community-object pair, expressing the organizational forms of the activity’s productive processes. figure 1 shows the triangular scheme of engeström’s model. figure 1: activity system (engeström, 1987) going further, engeström (2001) proposed five principles that characterize human activity: it is object-directed; is multivocal; has contradiction as the motor of its dynamics; is historical, and; is expanding. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt4 in addition, sannino, engeström, and lemos (2016) introduced two more principles to characterize human activity: agency production and formative intervention. those last principles are closely related to the “transformative stance” of the socio-political processes in which research is inserted (stetsenko & arievitch, 2010), determining an axiological position concerning the situation in which the object is immersed. dialogue as activity dialogue is a central phenomenon in investigations of human interaction. this concept is polysemic and has different origins based on different assumptions about human nature and language (matusov, 2009). dialogue is a complex concept that requires clarification on the meaning that will be assumed. in this text, we take the idea that dialogue is a human activity characterized by the coordination of targeted actions. in this way, dialogue is a collective interactional process – an activity whose “object” is constituted in its development and in which both the interacting subjects and the mediating means are transformed (wells, 2002). this ontological perspective of dialogue does not exclude its instrumental dimension, especially when we consider an activity as a complex dynamic system of activities. in this sense, the dialogue activity development responds to motives that could change within the transformation of the mediations between subjects and objects but, at the same time, including the instrumental demands of communication. particularly, the emancipating dialogical activity implies that subjects recognize the identity-alterity dialectical coupling – the recognition of ourselves within the others. this perspective highlights the political dimension of the dialogic activity, which indicates the need for a position and an opposition concerning the ways subjects, collectively, are being in the world. in this perspective, we are inspired by paulo freire’s work (e.g., 2005), which supports understanding the research and educational processes as an active social and political transformation unit. for freire, the concepts such as love, humility, faith, trust, hope, and critical thinking support dialogue and whose absence implies the absence of dialogicity. for the author, dialogue is a creative and liberating act; it is an act of loving the world (freire, 2005). thus, praxis is an onto-creative act in which human beings recreate the world permanently. to freire (2016), faith is the power to make and remake, create and recreate, a faith in the human call to be more. when dialogue is based on those concepts, a relationship of trust is established between the subjects in dialogue. trust is established by dialogue, whereas faith in humankind is an a priori requirement for dialogue (freire, 2005). from this dialogical perspective, educators cannot start a dialogue without hope, which “is rooted in men’s [human] incompletion” (freire, 2005, 91)1. finally, unlike naive thinking, dialogue “implies critical thinking” as a basis for “real education.” an education that can overcome the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation where both address their act of cognition to the object mediating them (freire, 2005). the activity we present here is based on freire’s perspective. the present, existential, and tangible situation, reflecting people’s aspirations, must be the starting point for organizing the program content for education or political action. we must communicate this existential, concrete, current condition to the people as an issue that challenges them and necessitates a response—not merely on the intellectual level but also on the level of action—using some fundamental contradictions (freire, 2005). 1 criticism was made to the sexist language found in the "pedagogy of the oppressed." however, freire became aware of this kind of use and was concerned with being “careful to use the terms 'women and men' or 'human beings' in his writings and public presentations.” (weiler, 1996, 366) from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt5 as part of the transformative action, we take dialogue as a mediating instrument and a constituent of the forms of being human a dialogical activity. dialogue activities have an instrumental dimension founded on coordinated actions produced under concrete conditions. then, developing a dialogical activity to overcome contradictions expresses the transformation of dialogical instruments and all the mediations of this unit – rules and division of labor. human activities support and are supported by genres of ways-of-being-human that express historically stabilized forms of how subjects coordinate their actions. the subjects’ ways of being are related to the division of labor historically developed and stabilized by the community those subjects belong. the subjects experience and develop coordinated activities through mediation with the different hierarchical levels of the activity system to which they belong. human activity is history’s substrate that continuously transforms itself, facing contradictions the motors of the activities (engeström, 2001). thus, overcoming contradictions expresses the movement of activity and subjects’ conscious awareness but simultaneously drives them into newly emerged contradiction. the classroom has been a privileged place to investigate the dialogical forms that define and develop the teaching-learning processes in an educational activity. however, different models, approaches, and theoretical and methodological frameworks investigate dialogue in education (cui & teo, 2020; howe & abedin, 2013; matusov, 2009; wells, 2002). without losing sight of dialogue as an activity and considering its instrumental dimension, we focus on the freirean perspective, where dialogue aims to “transform social relations in the classroom, and to raise awareness about relations in society at large.” (shor & freire, 1987 p.11). in this work, dialogic educational activity development is a process of complexifying the subject’s conscious awareness. the ways-of-being-in-activity manifest a process of overcoming dichotomies between individual and collective actions through the dialectical constitution of sense and meaning. then, overcoming this contradiction implies establishing dialogue as an expression of the movement of the subjects’ consciousness (and ways-of-being), allowing the subjects’ contradictory experiences to become expressed not as a problem-in-itself, but as problems-for-themselves whose responsibility to be solved by themselves (camilo, 2015; mattos, 2019). thus, we are interested in developing educational activities that increase students’ conscious awareness of the contradictions they live (camillo & mattos, 2014), becoming “perturbative activities”2 (santiago, 2019; santiago & mattos, 2019). the dynamic of this activity demands the development of new mediations between actions. the complexification of mediations changes the activity and the subjects’ conscious awareness by connecting their private lives to the more public, social, and political community life. the following section presents the methodological design for developing perturbative educational activities in the emergency remote teaching mode. “discord” we developed the remote educational activity on the discord3 platform. this environment is a free online platform created in 2015 and designed for video gamer communities. like other communication platforms, it is organized to let users communicate through channels by text, image, video, and voice. it 2 in the mathematical sense, to perturb a physical system is to disturb it in a very controlled and usually small way to see what happens to it. however, when a complex system, such as an educational activity system, is disturbed, the implication is not always controlled, but as in the simplest case, the system no longer shows the behavior it displayed in its non-disturbed state. 3 available at: https://discord.com/ ; access on: 17/04/2022 from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt6 was developed to resolve the security problems of other platforms, such as skype and team speak, and make interactions between players more user-friendly (rioja, 2019). currently, it is one of the most used platforms worldwide and has become one of the leading platforms for online communities (webb, 2018). in addition to the collective communication facilities, the platform offers features allowing individuals or groups to manage the environment, creating room for private conversations. this possibility allows individuals to configure virtual spaces differently from the community environment managers. virtual game companies use discord by offering free games to attract potential customers and form communities around those games. discord adoption has powerfully grown in recent years, from 45 million registered users to 130 million in 2019 (kimball, 2018). furthermore, the platform does not use advertisements in its chat application and is against selling user data to third parties (greenberg, 2019). reports of investigations into the educational use of discord are rare, but some attest to success among students (e.g., mock, 2019). discord platform is advantageous as many university students already know the environment (konstantinou & epps, 2017; vladoiu & constantinescu, 2020), facilitating its use without requiring elaborate training to get started in the environment. however, the environment must be structured to enhance, in an educational situation, the dialogic interaction between teacher and students and among the students themselves. discord can record each group’s chat texts and make them available to community members afterward, allowing students to resume discussions and organize their arguments. one of discord’s main advantages is that teachers do not have to manage students’ access to groups, allowing them to join any group at any time and managing their involvement in any discussion of their or other groups in the classroom. similarly, all class members’ tasks and products can be shared, allowing them to participate in each group’s various activities and conversations and giving them more agency. theoretic-methodological design chat is based on the dialectical perspective, in which we assume an onto-epistemological position considering the ways of knowing and the nature of the object as a unity (rodrigues, camillo & mattos, 2014; stetsenko, 2018). this unity can be expanded to an axio-onto-epistemological perspective when considering axiological (ethical) dimensions (stetsenko, 2018; mattos, 2019) of human activities. thus, we approach the methodology in this section without losing sight of its constitutive relationships with the theoretical framework. the teaching methodology was developed in a face-to-face educational mode based on the freirean perspective and was modeled as an educational activity (santiago, 2019; santiago & mattos, 2021), based on which we proposed our dialogical educational activity (figure 2). the main objective of this activity was to complexify the subjects’ conscious awareness by constructing mediations for students to be aware of the contradictions in which they were inserted. in this case, this contradiction was studying on a university campus located inside an oil refinery. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt7 figure 2: dialogical activity during a face-to-face situation (santiago, 2019) as a result, the activity proposed by santiago (2018) was developed during a semester in the basic physics course in an initial chemistry teacher formation degree. the activity involved the subjects (students and teachers) mediated with an object (to be aware of the contradiction of the university’s location) through physical concepts, experiments, digital tools, and more immediate concrete instruments like the highway (that gives access to the campus) and the refinery. these mediators were used as material elements that contextualized teaching and learning. beyond the mediations of the instruments, the community (university campus users) also mediates the interaction of the subjects and object. the subject-object mediation through the community is more complex since the school rules (class duration, evaluation, class planning, etc.) mediate the coexistence of the subject and community, and the division of labor mediates the community and object since community members have different responsibilities with the object production. we modified the activity by altering it. we introduced actions that considered the concrete circumstances of the pandemic and the emergency remote teaching mode. then the teacher developed the activity’s first five steps, usually among students and the university community (table 1). beyond that, we designed an activity to be developed in the course “non-formal education” in a physics teacher education course at a brazilian federal university. to deal with the remote teaching mode, the teacher used discord to create a server with nine virtual spaces: five were text channels, with one dedicated exclusively to the discussion forum during classes (discussion-forum) since some students did not have a microphone to participate through voice; three other chat channels to group members talk to each other through text (discussion-group); and, finally, a text channel in which participants could post messages for the entire room (messages). the teacher also from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt8 created four voice channels, three of them for vocal interaction among students from each of the three smaller groups (group) and one for verbal interactions by all students (classroom). voice channels allow users to open webcams and microphones and share the screen, making the interface of these channels similar to various meeting applications such as zoom, teams, or meet. however, an essential difference between these other environments to discord is that the teacher does not need to manage the environment while the students are using it. students can log into the server at any time, so the environment is not only used for classes but as a meeting point for students to discuss and carry out other educational or entertainment activities. the server provides the basis for students’ autonomy, serving as a concrete ground for establishing a community that feeds itself independently of the teacher. activity design: from the thematic preparation to the critical teaching the course’s main objective is to understand the importance of scientific dissemination to establish a connection between the production of scientific knowledge and society. the way scientific information is disseminated, the languages used to disseminate science, the relationships between science and society, and the importance of communicating science were themes developed in previous classes before the intervention. a total of 19 students aged around 22 years attended the course. they were in the second year of a 3-year course degree in physics teacher education. they already had specific basic physics disciplines (theoretical and experimental physics) and some directed educational disciplines, achieving 80% of the degree curriculum. this allowed the use and development of various mediating instruments to understand scientific dissemination’s role in forming critical students and society. table 1 introduces a scheme of the online activity with the structure of seven stages of the activity. table 1: activity design stage responsible action description 1 teacher thematic survey (substituted by teacher hypothesis) the teacher investigated and established themes related to the contradictions experienced by students in their most immediate daily life. 2 teacher community vision the teacher investigated news media as the dominant social vision to develop a thematic universe connected to the hypothetical theme proposed in the first stage. 3 teacher categorization of speeches the teacher chooses the media they will analyze. 4 teacher content linking the teacher chooses the content that will be analyzed from the media selected. 5 teacher critical approach planning the teacher plans the meetings and contents 6 students and teacher thematic confirmation the students identify the theme and propose actions to investigate. 6.1 students meeting the teacher presented two teachers’ interviews, one against and the other in favor of reopening schools, then students searched and selected the texts and contents on this theme. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt9 7 students and teacher implementation of the critical pedagogy the students intervened with the discipline concepts of science communication to solve the misinformation about reopening schools. 7.1 students meeting to research articles and government materials about covid-19 7.2 students meeting to choose the media of communication and start to make it. 7.3 students meeting to finalize the project and disseminate the banner on social media santiago (2018) proposed that the activity starts with stage 1 (the thematic survey). in this stage, the purpose was to establish a thematic universe related to the contradictions experienced by students in their most immediate daily life since the students are the visceral subjects of the discipline. the step 1 survey was usually carried out with students of the earlier semester (santiago & mattos, 2021), but rather than conducting an extensive survey with the students, we hypothesized the central theme of the tensions the students were experiencing with the demands of returning to face-to-face classes. the hypothesis was based on the situation brazil was experiencing as one of the worst pandemic scenarios in the world and the huge pressure on elementary schools to return to normality emanating from some segments of society. this situation became much tenser for the teacher training course students, who would have to return face-to-face to university and complete their internships in public high schools. therefore, there was a tense atmosphere with great insecurity and misinformation since the worst fear of the hasty return to the classroom materialized with the fast covid-19 infection of several education workers4. beyond that, the media propaganda voiced the principal contradiction experienced by the students. on the one hand, a part of society agreed with the scientific view in favor of social isolation and a safe return to economic activity; on the other hand, government propaganda downplayed the severity of the pandemic and supported herd immunity by weakening restrictive measures, such as mask use. in brazil, at this moment, the dichotomy between “affirmationists” and “negationists” of science (mattos et al., 2021) seems to have become a topic of tension and conflict for society as a whole and particularly for students, especially concerning the resumption of face-to-face educational activities at schools, reinforcing the view of the “return to classroom” thematic. stage 2 (the community vision) usually develops with the community (university students, teachers, staff, and parents) and is carried out based on the thematic choice made in the first stage, with the survey verifying how the community sees the themes. we adapted those stages to the pandemic conditions, including a search on the news media where the theme “return to normal life” was a fierce point of contention among health and educational professionals, economists, families, and students. one clear manifestation of the social tension focus was the dispute over narratives about covid-19, characterized by the transmission of contradictory news about schools’ reopening in the most diverse digital and tv media broadcasts. on the one hand, the position of health professionals who defended the return to schools stands out, stating that the return to face-to-face classes would be safe based on some safety protocols. on the other hand, the experience of the majority of students in brazilian public schools corroborates the press portal’s information about the sanitary precariousness in most brazilian public schools. the course teacher simultaneously developed stage 3 (categorization of speeches) and stage 4 (linking content). once the theme and the community’s vision were chosen, the teacher selected the 4research on death due to covid-19 in são paulo city in 2021 revealed a considerable rise in fatalities among education workers compared to 2020. the return to face-to-face schooling at the end of 2020 was one of the factors mentioned (klintowitz et al., 2021). from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt10 discourses from social media (social networks) and the traditional press (newspapers and television) to cast the generator theme and connect it to the curricular content later. then, he chose the debate on reopening schools and linked it to their relationship with scientific communication. the contents related to the theme were: limits and potentialities of scientific dissemination; relations between science and technology and their implications for society; the role of scientific knowledge in society; sources of information and ways to obtain information relevant to the knowledge of science; codes, genres, and languages of scientific dissemination. these steps are inspired by the freirean hypothesis that problematization and contextualization help mediate students’ lives and the contradictions they are experiencing. then, the dialogical dynamics with and among students allowed them to identify the contradictory discursive examples among media advertising on covid-19 safety measures. during stage 5 (critical approach planning), the teacher planned the meetings that would be developed in stages 6 and 7. meeting 6.1 would be held in stage 6, where students should choose and discuss one of two articles presenting two teachers’ interviews about reopening schools to face-to-face interactions. the purpose of selecting those two articles was to show that there was no agreement among educators at the time over the reopening of schools. the teacher planned the meetings on stage 7 for students (7.1) to research articles and government material about covid-19; (7.2) to choose the media of the communication and start to produce a banner presenting the discussion; and (7.3) to finalize the project and disseminate the banner on social media. in stage 6 thematic confirmation, the theme presented reopening of schools, as evidenced in steps 2, 3, and 4, needed to be validated as being of interest to students. thus, meeting 6.1 started with discussing reopening schools before presenting the article with interviews of the two different teachers’ positions. the teacher mediated this debate, guiding it by questioning what problems students face with continuing their remote emergency education studies. based on this question, the teacher expected that the debate would reach the issue of reopening schools since they are living with this very problem in their own quotidian. then the course teacher presented the articles arguing against and in favor of reopening schools. one article presents one brazilian teacher’s position against reopening schools. this teacher works at a school in the outlying ghettos of são paulo city (capital of the state of são paulo), whose population is 11.9 million and has a high covid-19 contagion rate with dozens of daily deaths. another article presents the position of another teacher who favored school reopening. this teacher taught at a school in elias fausto city (in a country county of são paulo state), with a population of 18,000 inhabitants, and has accumulated only about two dozen deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. the other three scheduled meetings were held in stage 7 implementation of critical pedagogy. we (the researchers) expected that students critically develop the contents related to the problem of reopening schools through scientific dissemination. then, they could mediate their experience with the social contradictions they were immersed in. in the meeting (7.1), the students should survey scientific articles, reports, official documents, and other materials supporting each of the two points of view; in (7.2), the students should develop a scientific dissemination project based on the material collected, select the digital media to synthesize and decide the target audience, and, finally, (7.3) they should be committed to producing their project. method: collecting data from discord steps six and seven, developed with the students, took place on the discord platform. the platform allows recording text, audio, and video and students’ individual and collective tasks. in discord, students can be divided into small groups, simulating typical face-to-face classroom organizations for discussions, from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt11 and each group’s chat texts can be recorded, allowing community members later access. furthermore, this allows students to resume discussions and organize their arguments. beyond that, teachers do not need to manage access to groups, allowing students to join any group at any time. likewise, all class members’ tasks can be shared, enabling their engagement in each group’s different tasks and discussions, creating opportunities for their agency to emerge. we examined four meetings (6.1, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3) in which students participated and focused on the contributions the discord platform made to the students’ dialogue throughout the course. we registered all steps in a field notebook, and those with student participation were recorded through the discord platform, allowing us to analyze the dialogical relationships established over the meetings among students and with the teacher. the material available for analysis were transcriptions of the video-recorded dialogues by chat and voice, the movement of students among the groups, the records of their interactions and actions in the discord environment, the products students developed in their activities, and the whatsapp message between students and teacher. researchers frequently look at participants’ relationships to investigate social interaction in online communities. there are many ways to examine social support and interaction in online groups, both in quantity and variety. this variation frequently results in misunderstanding regarding the best method to employ in any specific circumstance. here, the emphasis is on examining language, communication patterns, and the content of messages in online communities messages (herring, 2004; pfeil and zaphrieis, 2010) we made the qualitative content analysis considering the contradictions and conflict of motives (sannino, 2015) between face-to-face and online classes interactions concerning: whether to open schools at that moment or not; the lack of face-to-face social interaction and communication in the online environment; and the actions and utterances that indicated the presence of students’ intent and resolve to overcome contradictions. to frame those points on discord’s contributions to students’ dialogical and agency attitudes, we use the chat model to consider how the platform instruments mediated and facilitated dialogue and students’ agency through the activity. beyond those topics, we also looked for the use of science dissemination criteria taught during the course, such as we pointed out earlier: the limits and potentialities of scientific dissemination; the relations between science and technology and their implications for society; the role of scientific knowledge in society; the sources of information and ways to obtain information relevant to the knowledge of science; codes, genres, and languages of scientific dissemination. discussion: analysis and results in this section, we discuss the analysis of the events from the perspective of the chat model. we present the activity centered on the actions, dialogues, and products realized by the students, particularly those taken during the meetings. the analysis of each meeting begins descriptively to situate the context of the dialogue’s expansion and the students’ agency. in addition, we exemplify the analyses with excerpts from the transcripts of the exchanges and verbal productions recorded throughout the activity (voice/classroom, discussion forum, whatsapp messages) to base the results pointed out throughout the analysis. in the excerpts, we identify the students by a letter to preserve their anonymity. the teacher used the classroom voice channel to begin meeting 1, drawing attention to the pandemic and how it affected the dynamics of our social interactions. based on the contextualization established throughout the introduction, the teacher starts to survey the problems students experienced, from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt12 asking them to express themselves regarding the following question: “what are the difficulties you are facing as students of this institution at this moment?” (teacher, voice/classroom). students begin to express themselves through the text channel (discussion forum) by describing their own pandemic difficulties. however, as they become aware of the similarity of their challenges, they initiate dialogues negotiating their different perspectives on common problems. this activity ended up converging towards a consensus around two problems that, according to the students, were the most acute they experienced at that time. one of the most pressing concerns mentioned was a shift in time management when confronted with changes in daily activities that needed students to adapt their actions because social distancing required reorganizing and coordinating daily and school activities. the home dynamics were one of the most affected, particularly by low-income students, since various domestic responsibilities traditionally undertaken by other family members began to be shared, causing individuals to carry out more household activities than normal, in addition to work and study. this situation emerges in hopelessness: student g: “i don’t know if this is more a problem of mine either, but i also feel a kind of despair seeing some students having problems that not even f [a student] mentioned. in my classroom, some students come to class and need to lock the microphone to do housework, food, taking care of their siblings and family and end up not being able to perform, and even so, there are teachers who are not taking this into account, and it is very sad.” (discussion forum) this “limit-situation”5 (freire, 2005, 99) students faced could be understood as a conflict of motives (sannino, 2015) since the student was in a double activity, dealing with different necessities. another important aspect the students brought up was the lack of face-to-face social interaction and communication with colleagues and friends during emergency remote teaching. student g: “i think it’s been really sad having to do everything online without looking into the eyes of other students and teachers. i met many students in the course because of some situations, and because i took this subject, and if i see people on [university] campus, i won’t even know who is who ...” (discussion forum) student g could synthesize the discussions by presenting the collective problem more fluently. the teacher mediated the debate based on the students’ comments, aiming to relate them to the theme of school re-openings. the teacher guided the dialogic flow between the students via the text channel (discussion forum). in contrast to what happens in more traditional classes, when the topic gets more significant to the students, it is possible to identify students who open their mics, usually closed, and continue the textual argument by voice. this activity’s instrument allowed students to elaborate more quickly on relevant negotiations about the gravity and commonality of the difficulties they were experiencing from their particular perspectives. the instrument within the pedagogical dynamic opened new possibilities for the emergence of students’ agency, overcoming face-to-face classroom inhibition experienced by some students keeping them from voicing their ideas, which lowers their engagement (pickhardt & wiley, 2013; croxton, 2014). the ecology of freire’s online activity appears to have widened the scope of debate, allowing a more significant number of students to participate in the discussion. despite many students’ material constraints and connection difficulties, there were no issues accessing the discord environment or using equipment such as the webcam and microphone in this exercise. 5 the "limit-situations" are not "the impassable boundaries where possibilities end, but the real boundaries where all possibilities begin; they are not "the frontier which separates being from nothingness, but the frontier which separates being from nothingness but the frontier which separates being from being more." (pinto, 1960, as cited in freire, 2005, 99). from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt13 initially centered on students’ school difficulties, the conversation moved on to the problem of returning to school, which brought up the topic of school re-openings. from then on, students began to connect their own issues and the problem of restarting schools. the discussion was established both through the voice channel (classroom channel) and the text channel (classroom forum), as we identified them in the following excerpts: teacher: are you following the progress [pandemic situation] and saying “if we could have hope for getting out of this period that is hindering all our activities,” as you have reported here? student l: so... teacher, from what i am following... the são paulo vaccination plan... i believe that they [politicians] will not wait for students to be vaccinated, which is a problem. due to the situation in the state, when all teachers are vaccinated, they will want to return to classes, which already worries me because some students are in at-risk groups. now... how will this be done... i don’t know... (teacher and student l, voice on classroom channel) student a: the university... i think it’s totally unfeasible to go back because the contamination isn’t just there. everyone takes at least one subway line... there’s a school in front of my home... i can hear the kids screaming. student g: i agree, a [student]. even if we manage to keep the distance in the room, the way to get there... crowded subway, crowded bus, some inconsequential going to party with the crowd. (discussion forum) taking advantage of the discussion on returning to school, the teacher summarized the discussion and introduced the articles he selected about the teachers’ positions on the theme. following the reading, a debate among the students focused on their concerns about returning to face-to-face sessions. however, many expressed the desire and need to return to face-to-face activities, as shown in the following excerpt: teacher: i saw parents who are dying to send their children to school. as if the school were a child’s deposit, i still heard the justification that the child could no longer be held at home. student g: i think returning now is a bad idea when we are at the stage of starting vaccinations. it is capable of increasing the spread and... doubling the work needed to immunize the population. student l: the liberal discourse normalizing the pandemic and the genocide is working just fine. student v: i think it gives a somewhat opinionated tone to a public health issue student f: in fact, we had very compelling examples of combating the pandemic... at this point, it’s hardly a matter of opinion anymore. but the economic issue speaks louder to the authorities (discussion forum) the ensuing heated debate necessitated the sharing and validating of information to support the various points of view. although students were more confident about the sources of information they were basing their claims on, the need for reliable sources became evident. at this point, the teacher suggests students research reliable sources, determining reliability criteria, a topic already addressed throughout the course. thus, students began seeking information, researching and analyzing the risks and benefits of reopening schools. they developed the investigation during the class and placed the information they found in a discord text channel (messages) that served as a collective repository so everyone could access and check the sources. following the class, the teacher created a wiki page for students to submit their results and a summary for everyone to comment on during the week. the goal of this action was to discuss their findings in discord. however, the students decided to use a forum on moodle, modifying the tools used to from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt14 carry out the activity. at last, meeting 2 became a review in the moodle forum of what they had produced until this moment. at meeting 3, the students organized the results of their research by themes and positions about school reopening, considering the benefits and risks of returning to school. the teacher suggested that each student lead a conversation about what drew their attention the most. the new mediations brought with the further information enhanced the dialogic interaction, allowing students to express their opinions better and elaborate on better ways to disseminate the selected information. in the following excerpt, we can identify some of the topics raised by students to highlight difficulties linked to school reopening, which are already based on their study. student g2: social/economic disparities between different regions of brazil… and the experiences with the reopening in places… like brasília [brazil’s capital]. student l: the lack of an awareness-raising campaign about going back to school... at all levels of government” (discussion forum) students discussed the appropriate method for disseminating the findings of their research: student l2: does any social network have easy dissemination??? student g2: instagram, facebook… student g: look, i tried the “medium,” and it was a reasonably good platform to post an article. student l: “zap, zap, chain” [a whatsapp group]! the good guys only get information there these days” (discussion forum) finally, students agreed to produce an infographic that would be distributed via the whatsapp application, outlining the pros and cons of returning to face-to-face classes. students organized themselves into three groups. one was responsible for gathering positive information for the return to presential classes, another for organizing the contrary information, and a third for designing the infographic. the students requested that the teacher set up voice (groups 1, 2, and 3) and text (discussion-groups 1, 2, and 3) channels so they could develop the activities independently. during the activity, the dialogue among students improved since they moved among groups negotiating information organization, forms of dissemination, and infographic design. in part, this movement reproduces face-to-face classroom activity, in which students working in groups could circulate, talk and sit with members of other groups without needing teacher permission or mediation. the teacher planned for students to finish the infographic in a single meeting, but they could not accomplish it due to the vast quantity of material chosen and the design challenges. as a result, the students organized another meeting independently of the teacher, using discord potentiality to form self-organized and autonomous communities, accessing the server even when the teacher was not online. this instrument creates a new circumstance that rarely arises in a face-to-face classroom, where most debates occur in the school indoors, leaving few actions to be taken outside of it. the platform allows organizing a community whose members’ access is independent of third parties; students self-organize to meet without the teacher’s consent. they can see if a colleague is online, allowing them to engage whenever they want without scheduling anything in advance. this movement must be seen in the context of dialogue as an activity. the students use the activity instruments, interacting quickly at any time of the day, negotiating meanings, and exchanging information through their virtual community, which has an availability distinct from the face-to-face situation. they from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt15 become faster-meaning negotiators, changing from group to group and expressing themselves with great versatility. finally, students shared the infographic (figure 3) via social media platforms, primarily whatsapp, to which most had access. unfortunately, due to the difficulty of mapping information exchanged via whatsapp, there are no results on the scope of diffusion. figure 3: infographic produced by students (text in portuguese)6. the teacher planned the remote activity in the last three meetings. the activity’s object was “the reopening of schools during the pandemic,” and the students and the teacher were its subjects. subject and object were mediated by: discord, the covid-19 pandemic, scientific dissemination and 6 the red and greens titles: “the pandemic and the return to school; the subtitles inside the boxes are: (red boxes) “significant increase in cases”; “lack of infrastructure”; “socioeconomic disparities”; “exclusion”; “sources”; (green boxes): “recovering the time lost”; “help to families”; “minimize damage caused to students”; “accessibility”; and “sources”. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt16 communication, and dialogue; all of them served as mediating instruments. the activity’s community was comprised of the people from the university. the rules of online meetings and intervention planning mediated the subject and the community. the division of labor mediates the community and the object of the activity. teacher and students used their technological skills to develop the interactions, research, and presentations. figure 4 shows the activity and its elements. represents how the subject, the object, and the community are mediated through their mediating instruments, rules, and division of labor. this analysis was carried out after the application of the meetings. figure 4: arrangement of dialogical activity on discord. (authors) conclusion during the covid-19 pandemic period, the development of educational activity was characterized by the need for quick adaptations to a form of emergency remote education. this type of teaching was a poor copy of distance education due to the improvisations made worldwide since schools were not prepared to quickly reorganize the teaching-learning process in this educational mode. the disaster was even worse in countries like brazil, where most schools and the low-income population have limited budgets to buy internet services. in addition to technical and financial limitations, the teaching models implemented reinforced pre-existing banking education trends, in which the students’ voices almost wholly disappeared and further extinguished dialogical activities (lago et al., 2021). although teaching conditions in public universities are better than in public primary and high schools, the shift to emergency remote teaching violently affected teaching modes. the selection of students who can access higher education in brazil magnifies economic disparities. thus, the students that from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt17 participated in our project had better access to the internet than the vast majority of brazilian public education students. our project presents a proposal for dialogic educational activity from a freirean perspective and highlights the potential to foster dialogic interactions amongst students in different self-regulated collectivities. the student’s voice is an essential constituent of the activity, not only in its individual but also in its collective dimension. dialogue is at the heart of the methodology, not as a mere exchange of ideas but as an activity. thus, we could identify that the students’ voices emerged in the interactions given the opportunity to write and speak, express their ideas on their own terms, and, mainly, be heard and considered by others (segal et al., 2017). this means that the dialogic movement of the activity stirred the students’ conscious awareness throughout the new mediations established between the specific knowledge and the hierarchy of meaningful problems. moreover, they linked their more immediate problems with the socio-political problems they were immersed in. we used the discord platform as a teaching environment, which allows for organizing the educational activity and facilitating students’ agentive and autonomous movement among groups. this facility added to the involvement with the central theme of the activity – to return or not to face-to-face classes, and led students to engage productively, enhancing dialogic processes through text and voice channels and also the joint production throughout the course. as a result, we are convinced that using discord enabled students to self-organize, increasing their agency in this activity and resulting in a new division of labor in which students distributed new tasks among themselves based on their technological abilities. students proposed meetings without the teacher’s presence to finish their projects and produced texts collaboratively, synchronously, and asynchronously. such movement was uncommon in face-to-face classes, implying that the technological tool supplied instruments for the subjects’ involvement with one another and, more importantly, with the activity. we understand that combining different factors allowed the successful and productive engagement and development of students’ conscious awareness. we summarize the most prominent factors as follows: (i) the prior familiarity that most students had with the discord platform since it was used as an environment for the gamers’ community, allowing students to use the environment independently of the teacher autonomously. this situation gives room to students’ agency, allowing them to move between groups, share their productions, and self-organize their own meetings since they have unrestricted access to discord during the course, which is not possible on other platforms. the emergence of students’ agency in this digital context could be included in the “domains to student agency in digital contexts,” where it is possible to give room to the agentic possibilities, a “digital selfrepresentation,” the autonomous data uses, an increasing “digital sociality,” and an expanded consciousness of the digital temporality (stenal, 2021, p.60); (ii) the freirean-inspired educational dialogic activity allowed the selection and thematic organization based on the problems experienced by students during the pandemic and its hybridization with the specific contents of the course. students dealt with the problem of whether or not to return to the face-to-face classes based on the theme discussed in class, such as the limits and potential of scientific dissemination depending on the discursive genre used for dissemination, the relations between science and technology, the role of scientific knowledge in society, and the problems of relevance and reliability of information sources considering the scientific knowledge. (iii) the organization of students’ actions in the collective construction of products mediated their most immediate problems with some complex and collective problems; they mediated the relationship between their particular and collective educational needs. from classroom education to remote emergency education arthur santiago, christiano mattos dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.462 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) dt18 the dialogical activity enhances students’ autonomy as they become aware that their voice has a place in the process of constructing the activity’s products and becoming authors and producers. the established agency allows students to follow paths not always expected by the teacher and exercises their autonomy to produce what is meaningful to them. finally, the proposed dialogic activity establishes dialogue in its instrumental and ontological dimensions, in the sense that students solve a more immediate problem and develop a more complex conscious awareness of the relationships between their lives and the lives of others. here, the freirean proposition of the humans’ ontological call for becoming more fully human is identified when we face the necessity to overcome the limit-situations, such as the one pandemic imposed on us. a limit-situation in which we should overcome hopelessness by taking hope and agency as a ground to create and face untested feasibility (freire, 2005) and bonding us in a collective, purposeful, and transformational activity. the activity we presented in this work was designed to be a formative intervention that expands its boundaries, perturbing subjects’ other life activities. this objective means to create a mediation that could lead subjects to become consciously aware of the relationship between systemic social contradictions and their own particular problems. reframing the tension between particular and general is dealing with the reopening of schools, not just an individual and particular problem but a socio-political problem that should be solved agentively and collectively. references aquino, e., silveira, i.h., pescarini, j., aquino, r., & souza-filho, j.a. 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(1996). myths of paulo freire. educational theory, 46(3), p.353–371. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-5446.1996.00353.x new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word dialogic discourse analysis layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a143 dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun university of stavanger, norway abstract bakhtin is a source of theoretical inspiration for educational research. this article will be an attempt to activate also bakhtin’s analytical practice and his methodology. i will explore and elaborate the typology of discursive relations which are suggested in bakhtin’s book on problems of dostoevsky’ poetics (bakhtin ,1984), and the potential application of it in the study of discourse in the classroom. in order to do so properly it will be necessary to activate bakhtin’s understanding of the utterance as a meaningful unity, and thus also the problem of authorship and the relationship between author and hero. bakhtin’s analytical practice can be considered a consistent methodology for the study of literature in schools as well as in the scholarly study of literature (cf. skaftun, 2009; 2010), and i have called it dialogic discourse analysis (dda). the first main part of the article elaborates key features of dda in dialogue with bakhtin’s work. in the other main part, dda is applied to educational settings in order to enter the educational dialogue on how to make sense of authorship and the adhering conception of the classroom as a text. my ambition here is primarily to elaborate dda as a powerful and dynamic toolkit also for educational research. in doing so i also hope to contribute to the ongoing work of transferring bakhtin’s dialogism as a whole from the study of literature to the study of education. examples will in part be drawn from literature, but for the most part from educational settings. atle skaftun is a professor in literacy studies at the university of stavanger. his disciplinary background in scandinavian studies with a dissertation on knut hamsun’s dialogic realism (2002). after this his research interests have shifted towards educational contexts. he has written articles and books about literacy and literature education, and lately he has also worked more explicitly with digital and oral conditions for dialogic participation and thinking in norwegian classrooms. ��� introduction the russian philosopher of language and literature, mikhail bakhtin, is an important source of inspiration for sociocultural educational research, and particularly for those working within programs or frameworks that are associated with dialogic pedagogy (alexander, 2008; mercer, 2000; matusov, 2009; mortimer & scott, 2003; nystrand, 1997; reznitskaya, 2012; reznitskaya & wilkinson, 2017; wells, 1999).1 a lot of bakhtinian concepts and ideas are established as useful in education without any lengthy explanation transferring the concepts from the world of literature to that of teachers and students, which in 1 cf. wegerif 2017 for a broader overview. i will not discuss differences between approaches to dialogic pedagogy, education or teaching, but rather refer to them as a field of research sharing a more or less deep association with bakhtin and his dialogism. issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a144 itself is an indication of the inspirational powers across domains in bakhtin’s philosophy. increasingly, however, educational research has displayed an interest in exploring the connection and transferability between the domain of literature and that of education (cf. matusov, 2007). a paradigmatic example of this turn might be the not yet finalized debate on the concept of authorship (cf. lensmire, 1997; matusov & myiazaki, 2011; sullivan, 2014) and the relationship between author and hero transferred from the study of novels to the study of classrooms (brandist, 2011). also, in the study of classroom discourse bakhtinian concepts has shown themselves useful, particularly his distinction between the authoritative and the internally persuasive word (bakhtin, 1981, p. 342) and the general insight that words are inhabited by voices and thus that utterances and texts2 can be conceived of as instances of the general heteroglossia surrounding us. bakhtin is a source of inspiration in the sense that he provides us with theoretical concepts, and increasingly we also see an interest in how he performs his analyses (cf. matusov et al., 2019)3. this article will be an attempt to bring us closer to bakhtin’s analytical practice and his methodology. i will explore and elaborate the typology of discursive relations which are suggested in bakhtin’s book on problems of dostoevsky’ poetics (bakhtin 1984), and the potential application of it in the study of discourse in the classroom. in order to do so properly it will be necessary to activate bakhtin’s understanding of the utterance as a meaningful unity, and thus also the problem of authorship and the relationship between author and hero. this means cross referencing texts that are written by bakhtin over a timespan of approximately 50 years. i will do so in concordance with holquist’s understanding of bakhtin’s authorship as a study of dialogism (1990) and morson & emerson’s (1990) emphasis of dialogue as a “global concept” alongside prosaics and unfinalizability. bakhtin’s analytical practice can be considered a consistent methodology for the study of literature in schools as well as in research (cf. skaftun, 2009; 2010), and i have called it dialogic discourse analysis (dda). my ambition here is primarily to elaborate dda as a powerful and dynamic toolkit also for educational research. the moment we enter a classroom we are situated in a complex field of discursive relations, whether it is a new class getting to know each other and the teacher, or a class where dialogic relations have developed over the course of many years. different authorial intentions might be at play simultaneously, and there might be friendly or hostile or any other kind of relation between these positions as they co-create the discourse of the classroom. teachers have a professional responsibility for authoring the classroom as a learning environment, whereas students more or less consciously author their own learning or even their future (cf. matusov, 2011, matusov et al.,2016). in the live events of the classroom they participate in action authored partly by themselves and partly by others. the observing researcher enters this complexity, and responds to it in the moment of ongoing lessons, and also later on, looking back and reflecting over the experience while completing field notes and writing memos, and even later, when making use of these notes in a process of analysis and writing. talking about authorship in the classroom implies analogies between the study of texts and the study of meaningful action. in what follows i will explore these analogies and make the case for bakhtinian 2 i will elaborate bakhtin’s definition of the utterance as we find it in his essay on “the problem of speech genres” (in bakhtin, 1986) later (see “the utterance and dialogizing background revisited”. for now it is sufficient to accept that an utterance might be brief or very long, and it might be spoken or written. the spoken utterance is the primary model also for dealing with written texts in bakhtin’s dialogism. as we will see, his definition of the utterance is not at odds with a common sense understanding of the term. it is rather a matter of theorizing the common sense understanding. 3 there is an apparent overlap between my approach and that of matusov et al (2019), particularly in the titles, but also a distinct difference. my article elaborates bakhtin’s methodology conceived of as dialogic discourse analysis, whereas matusov et al. (2019) discusses dialogic analysis in education against discourse analysis as an established, predominantly linguistic field of research. thus, there is a difference in interest in the overall arguments. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a145 dda in the study of classroom action.4 the argument falls in two parts: i will first establish what dda represents in bakhtin’s analytical practice, before applying dda to an example from classroom fieldwork, in order to illustrate key features of dda more than making claims for a completed analysis. in doing so i hope to contribute to the ongoing work of transferring bakhtin’s dialogism as a whole from the study of literature to the study of education, with a particular focus on authorship and bakhtin’s theory of the utterance. dialogic discourse analysis in bakhtin’s work dialogue in three distinct senses dialogue and dialogic is used with different meaning in bakhtin’s thinking. morson and emerson provide us with a meaningful sorting out of three such meanings on different levels of abstraction (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 130 f.). in the first sense, dialogue is a metaphorical model of the human life world, and as such it is used to comment on cultural relations, history and the relations and interactions between people. his famous model of the interplay between the centripetal and the centrifugal forces (bakhtin, 1981, p. 270ff.) points towards the struggle between the given openness of the world as dialogue, and cultural and ideological forces working to gain control and monologic authority in a messy world. the metaphor compares forces maintaining an orbit to cultural forces working towards centralizing order and de-centralizing disorder, and as such the model tells us that balance between these forces – the centripetal force of monologization and the centrifugal force of dialogization –is essential. in the second sense, dialogue more concretely concerns language conceived of in a way that we have learned to identify as discourse.5 any utterance is itself part of the chain of speech communication, which is at the same time reflected within the utterance as a whole (bakhtin, 1986, pp. 92-93). to bakhtin the words we use are always used by others before, and thus they carry with them meaning ascribed to them by others. language as such (i.e. as it used to form utterances) is populated by alien voices: […] any word exists for the speaker in three aspects: as a neutral word in language, belonging to nobody; as an other’s word, which belongs to another person and is filled with echoes of the other’s utterance; and finally, as my word, for, since i am dealing with it in a particular situation, with a particular speech plan, it is already imbued with my expression (bakhtin 1986, p. 88). this quote describes in a characteristic way bakhtin’s understanding of the utterance and of language in use as inherently dialogic. but this dramatic structure also prepares the third sense of dialogue and dialogic, which is tied to potential conflict and tensions, and thus to the intentionality or speech plan of the voices involved. within the discursive world, we meet again the struggle between dialogic and monologic forces, similar to the struggle between openness and authoritative finalization on the global level. an utterance might be more or less dialogic or monologic, and in bakhtin’s dialogic philosophy any 4 in his essay “the model of the text: meaningful action considered as a text” (1981)paul ricoeur reminds us of the important distinction between written texts and meaningful action, particularly that texts have authors whereas meaningful action is open-ended until it is described and textualized. bakhtin’s dialogism represents a framework where authorship is a meaningful category also in the openended lifeworld, not the least in education. nevertheless, we might gain from following the example of ricoeur and make the model explicit. 5 we should keep in mind that bakhtin’s work on dialogic aspects in literature and in everyday language predates the birth of discourse analysis, or the “discovery” of discourse as social phenomena and object of scientific interest. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a146 utterance is conceived of as a discursive micro world of its own,6 whether it is a brief rejoinder in a dialogue or a complex aesthetically elaborated representation of voices that we might find in a novel (bakhtin, 1986, p. 60f.). when we are talking about dialogue in the third sense – as opposed to monologue – we must bear in mind that we are talking about concrete utterances with their specific authors, and more specifically how authors and speakers relate to the words and meanings of others. dialogizing background and the relationship between author and hero in order to proceed in the exploration of dialogue in the third sense, we must address the relationship between author and hero, or more generally, the relationship between the author of any utterance and other speaking persons that appear in the utterance. they do so when the author talks about them. meanings and thoughts, too, will be verbalized by the author, who thus might manipulate how the thought, meanings and words of others are conceived: the following must be kept in mind: that the speech of another, once enclosed in a context, is – no matter how accurately transmitted – always subject to certain semantic changes. the context embracing another’s word is responsible for its dialogizing background, whose influence can be very great (bakhtin, 1981, p. 340, my emphasis). the single utterance thus provides a new context – or background – for the words and meanings of others.7 the author of the utterance controls this background, and he or she8 can manipulate it according to how she wants the listener or reader to perceive the other person. thus, an endless spectre of possible dialogic relations are available. the author can be friendly or hostile, explorative or exploiting, in agreement or not etc. the relationship can be simple to grasp and describe, or it can be a highly complex one involving layers of cognitive, emotional and ideological (or axiological) meanings and tensions. as authors of utterances in our everyday life we all provide dialogizing background, even if the power and influence vary a lot. we will return to how this perspective might apply to educational contexts, but before we do so, we should elaborate how bakhtin makes use of this perspective in his reflection on literature. the control over the dialogizing background concerns what bakhtin calls an “essential surplus of meaning” on the hands of the author in his book on dostoevsky (bakhtin, 1984, p. 73). bakhtin contrasts tolstoy and dostoevsky as monologic and dialogic authors respectively, based on how they use this surplus. tolstoy’s authorial position is rooted in tradition, and bakhtin sees him as the loving authoritative father, that holds the narrated world together. dostoevsky’s innovation is that he finds “a new integral9 view on the person […] possible only by approaching the person from a correspondingly new and integral authorial position” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 58; original italics). what characterizes this position is that it makes it possible for dostoevsky to “renounce” essential surplus and monologic premises in general (bakhtin, 1984, p. 52) so that the represented person and the zone of discourse surrounding him gains a relative independence from the potentially all-seeing authorial eye.10 the result is what bakhtin calls the polyphonic 6 cf. also the final words of vygotsky’s thought and language (1986, p. 256): ”a word is a microcosm of human consciousness” and wertsch’s (1991) understanding of the relationship between bakhtin and vygotsky; that bakhtin starts working where vygotsky stops. 7 cf. van leeuwen appropriation of bernstein’s concept re-contextualization (van leeuwen, 2009). 8 for the purpose of simplicity and clarity, in the following i will use she instead of he or she when referring to authors in general. 9 “integral” here might cause some confusion. it is perhaps more often used in combinations like “integral part of”, thus pointing towards essential parts, rather than the whole containing the parts or keeping them together. i think that we here must understand “integral” as a reference to the whole of the hero created by the author, and also the authorial position as a whole, which allows the author to create and also to set free his characters. the relation between the two is thus a relation between two integral subjects. 10 “the all seeing authorial eye” is a metaphor, and it is consistent with bakhtin’s own metaphorical exchange between his early approach to human action and aesthetic activity (bakhtin, 1993; 1990) which has been characterized as a “phenomenology of seeing” dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a147 novel, well aware of the limitations in the metaphor. the point he wants to emphasize, is that dostoevsky found a way to represent the open-endedness of human life, conceived of as open-ended prosaic discourse and an infinity of relations between voices. in describing this open-ended representation of prosaic discourse bakhtin find his way into a methodology. holquist (1990) calls it dialogism – or architectonics of relations. morson and emerson calls it prosaics in order to emphasize that his study belongs to the sphere of the prosaic word and that of prose fiction rather than poetics. to me it also seems fair to explore his dialogic approach to discourse analysis on its own terms. in doing so we will start with the dostoevsky book, where he identifies different types of discursive relations in a more systematic way than often is the case. bakhtin’s typology of discursive relations: a basis for dialogic discourse analysis bakhtin identifies three main types of discourse in chapter five of the dostoevsky book: 1) unmediated, direct discourse; 2) objectified discourse; and 3) double-voiced discourse. the first type is oriented towards the referential object only, and not towards the speech of others. the second and third type both have a twofold direction: “it is both directed toward the referential object […], and toward another’s discourse, toward someone else’s speech (bakhtin, 1984, p. 185). objectified discourse (type two) is most typically to be found as the direct speech of the characters. the person being quoted is oriented toward the referential object, whereas the author representing his speech uses his words as an object in order to characterize him individually or as part of a social group. there is a twofold direction in the discourse of the author, but the author does not relate to the speech of the other person as live discourse representing another subject. as such it is not a dialogic relation; “the relation to the thing (in its pure thingness) cannot be dialogic (i.e. there can be no conversation, argument, agreement, and so forth)”, bakhtin says (bakhtin 1986, p. 121).11 dialogic relations are possible only between subjects, not between subject and objects. discourse of the third type concerns such dialogic relations, and is as such the chief subject of bakhtin’s investigation into dostoevsky. he establishes three sub categories of discourse. the first two are defined by the orientation of the authorial intention relative to the intentionality of the represented words of another. bakhtin calls them unidirectional and vari-directional double-voiced discourse (cf. category ii1 and iii.2 in table 1). both of these types will in one way or the other provide concrete references to the words of the other, so that it is a matter of representation. unidirectional and vari-directional here simply refers to whether the internationalities at play – those of the author and the speaking persons being represented – are aligned or deviant. agreement and disagreement are illustrative examples, but the range of possible relations is wide and deep, particularly when in the field of vari-directional discourse. irony and parody are prominent examples of vari-directional discourse, which can be playful or harsh, friendly or hostile, recognizable in the utterance on the basis of subtle nuances. (gemzøe, 1998; 2001; skaftun, 2003, p. 32, n; white, 2016), and his discovery of discursive representation of dialogic relations in dostoevsky’s poetics. 11 in «from notes made 1970-71» bakhtin lists three types of relations: 1) between objects, 2) between subject and object, and 3) between subjects (bakhtin, 1986, p. 138), which appears all through his authorship. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a148 i. direct, unmediated discourse directed exclusively toward its referential object, as an expression of the speaker’s semantic authority ii. objectified discourse (discourse of a represented person) 1. with a predominance of sociotypical determining factors 2. with a predominance of individually characteristic determining factors various degrees of objectification iii. discourse with an orientation toward someone else’s discourse (double-voiced discourse) 1. unidirectional double-voiced discourse a. stylization; b. narrator’s narration; c. unobjectified discourse of a character who carries out (in part) the author’s intention; d. ich-erzählung when objectification is reduced, these tend toward a fusion of voices, i.e. toward discourse of the first type. 2. vari-directional double-voiced discourse a. parody with all its nuances; b. parodistic narration; c. parodistic ich-erzählung; d. discourse of a character who is parodically represented; e. any transmission of someone else’s words with a shift in accent; when objectification is reduced and the other’s idea activated, these become internally dialogized and tend to disintegrate into (two discourses) of the first type. 3. the active type (reflected discourse of another) a. hidden internal polemic; b. polemically colored autobiography and confession; c. any discourse with a sideward glance at someone else’s words; d. a rejoinder of a dialogue; e. hidden dialogue the other discourse exerts influence from without; diverse forms of interrelationship with another’s discourse are possible here, as well as various degrees of deforming influence exerted by one discourse on the other table 1: bakhtin’s typology of discourse (bakhtin, 1984, p. 199)12 in the last sub category – the active type, or the reflected discourse of another (cf. category iii.3 in table 1) – we don’t find any explicit representation of the words of the other. nevertheless, the author more or less clearly relates to another speaker, be it as a response or anticipation of future response. the discourse of another has influence on the author from without. the isolated rejoinder in a dialogue is probably the best example to illustrate this category at this point. with that as a model we might think of more subtle examples, where we speak under the influence of alien discourse, be it past or future, friendly or hostile, interested or disinterested etc. we will explore these categories more in depth as we apply them to educational contexts, but before we do so, we might benefit from an excursion into bakhtin’s more general discussion of live speech and the utterance as the unit of investigation. 12 the complete table makes visible the main categories, which is immediately helpful. the comments on degrees of objectification is perhaps not immediately meaningful. i have included them in order to display the wholeness of the only occurrence to my knowledge of the table format in bakhtin’s writing. the types of relations listed in footnote 10 might be helpful; “objectification” introduces a dynamic field between the isolated types of relation (subject-subject and subject-object). dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a149 the utterance and dialogizing background revisited in the problem of speech genres (bakhtin, 1986) bakhtin defines the utterance by identifying three features that makes it a whole, meaningful unity. first: it is framed by the change of speaking subject, and thus has a “stable mass that is sharply delimited from other related utterance”.13 second: the utterance is always finalized, thus making it possible to respond to it. “the finalization of the utterance is, if you will, the inner side of the change of speaking subjects”, bakhtin says (1986, p. 76); it concerns the thematic, intentional and compositional unity of an utterance. third: the utterance is also a relational whole, defined by its relation to the theme (referentiality), the author (the expressive aspect) and other (past, present and future) participants in the communication (addressivity) (bakhtin, 1986, p. 84ff.). the utterance as a whole, a unity,14 is part of a macro cosmos of utterances in a particular sphere linked together in a chain with no beginning and no end (bakhtin, 1986, p. 191). at the same time, it can be seen as a micro cosmos of interacting voices and perspectives. the third category in the scheme from the dostoevsky book applies primarily and most concretely to the novel (and correspondingly, the utterance) as a micro cosmos of voices, utterances and social languages.15 double-voiced discourse are utterances where the author addresses another’s discourse. in the essay on speech genres he describes it as follows: it is as though the change of speech subjects has been internalized. the boundaries created by this change are weakened here and of a special sort: the speaker’s expression penetrates through these boundaries and spreads to the other’s speech, which is transmitted in ironic indignant, sympathetic, or reverential tones […] (bakhtin, 1986, p. 92). further, the utterance as such is always created by an author, independent of the genre and independent of whether the utterance is written or spoken. there are of course differences between everyday communication and novelistic prose. the novel might have as an objective in itself to represent the world surrounding people, talk and action, whereas communication is more likely to make use of representation as a means to an end. nevertheless, this is a difference in degree rather than an essential difference. forms for representing the words of others are important in everyday life as well as in novelistic prose (bakhtin, 1981, p. 337ff.): the topic of a speaking person has enormous importance in everyday life. in real life we hear speech about speakers and their discourse at every step. we can go so far as to say that in real life people talk most of all about what others talk about – they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgement on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset about by other’s words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth (bakhtin, 1981, p.338). three important points can be made following this quotation. first, it reminds us that we respond to representations of other people as speaking persons in everyday life, similar to what is the case when 13 the utterance as a unit in speech communication is fundamentally different from the sentence as a unit of language (bakhtin, 1986, p.73ff.). 14 these three features evoke his focus on the problem of material, content and form (cf. bakhtin, 1990): the utterance is considered as a whole, a unity, from different perspectives, we might say as physical material, as immaterial content and finally as relational (architectonic) form in the essay on the speech genre. 15 if we acknowledge this, it has important implications for how we might apply in an analysis of the classroom. we will return to later under the heading “the classroom as a text”. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a150 we read a novel.16 second, the kind of talk bakhtin mentions is played out in conversational settings, but the basic unit of analysis is the utterance and the discursive life that goes on within the border of single utterances. transmission, weighing and judging the words of others are authorial actions; it concerns how the author of the utterance relate to the speaking person he is referring to. hence, the third point is a reminder that we keep in mind that every utterance necessarily has an author responsible for the dialogizing background. there is an infinity of possible relations between an author and his hero, or rather, the words of another speaking person, and dialogic discourse analysis is concerned with grasping and describing this field of relations. dda applied to educational settings transferring these three points to the study of meaningful action, we face some challenges. in general, there is the fact that we are applying a model based on the study of literature and texts to openended meaningful action, thus necessarily making use of inferences that will be based on the work of conceptual metaphors. the conception of authorship is the most prominent of these metaphorical features. the concept of dialogizing background will be particularly useful in what follows. i will introduce an example displaying an experience of classroom discourse, before moving on towards reflections over authorship and a conception of the classroom as a text. an experience of discourse in the classroom let us consider an example from an observational case study of digitalized secondary classrooms (the response-project, cf. igland, skaftun & husebø, 2019; skaftun et al., 2017). the research team followed five classes through year 8-10 (students aged 12-15), which is the lower secondary school level in norway. i observed 36 lessons across all subjects in one of these classes. the main interest in the project was whether or how digital technology might contribute to dialogic space calling for students’ responsive and responsible action. classroom discourse as such was not the primary interest in the response-project, and we made neither audio nor video recordings. nevertheless, overall relational and discursive features were prominent in my field notes and memos from the early stage of the fieldwork. first or early impressions like these clearly have their limitations, but they are both important and interesting as the researcher’s immediate response to the classroom as a textual whole, to be tested, revised and analyzed over time. after one of my first visits (november the fifth, 2014) in 8a at the south east school i summed up fieldnotes and reflections, and included a memo on classroom culture: there are 9 boys and 4 girls in the class this day. the boys dominate the classroom before the teaching starts as well as when it is ongoing, whereas the girls seem quite passive. it is possible that this is because the 3 girls missing – this must be considered later on in the fieldwork. in talks with involved teachers during the day, i searched for their judgment, but they did not seem to think in categories like these, even if the math teacher actually talked to two of the boys in the break about their “cantankerous” behavior. maybe i am wrong. nevertheless: my impression is that there is a distinct student discourse in the room, which in a subtle way opposes the discourse of school and learning. this discourse is characterized by a constant ironic displacement of focus – it is tempting to see it as parodistic discourse: the students performing the parody engage in what is going on in the classroom, but they relate to a distorted image of the disciplinary intentions underlying the ongoing work. this is not about school hostility as 16 bakhtin acknowledges the complexity and open-ended vitality of the discursive lifeworld as a source of inspiration for the development of the novel as a genre. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a151 such, i think. quite the opposite, actually: i sense an intellectual undertone in the distancing to the disciplinary discourse, as if they call for resistance. the group work on arguments for and against halloween [a foreign tradition imported to norway] is a clear example: most of the boys accept that they are going to find arguments and that they are supposed to for or against, but beyond that they establish a quasi-discussion, where the main point is to create witty and funny phrases. subtler, perhaps, are the negotiations on how to write full answers to text-based tasks in math in the first lesson of the day. there is nothing new in students wondering what’s the point with a lot of things in school. here, however, it seems that there is something else or more at stake; smart and clever students seem to call for verbal struggle and argumentation. at one point during the day, i associate this phenomenon with “posh brats [“silkeramp”]. the student discourse is a way of positioning students, and at the same time, it positions teachers, subject matter and school as teacher governed, with no interest in what students actually think and know, etc. when teachers do their best at meeting the students on their turf, the students have already defined them as not interested in dialogue with students. we might say that the student discourse is a response to such an image of the discourse of school and teachers; what happens in the classroom is a continuous not-meeting (my field diary, november the 5th, 2014). the memo lacks support by means of transcriptions, but it is nevertheless a concentrated, descriptive and interpretative representation of speaking persons in 8a based on being present in the classroom; it is a representation of the classroom against a dialogizing background rooted in my experience of the classroom. over the course of three years, the somewhat subversive energy emphasized in the memo faded out and the students were more concerned with grades and performing according to standards. it might be that i was actually wrong, and thus that the teachers, who did not quite recognize the subversive forces at play, were right. but it might also be that i, from my vantage point of view as unfamiliar with the class, perceived something that the teachers did not see or hear. it might be that i was hypersensitive, but it also might be that the teachers were deaf to the subtle parodistic play in the student responses to tasks and questions. this is a question with methodological implications, concerning both the value we ascribe to first impressions and to descriptive interpretations. the gap between my understanding and that of the teachers is in itself an observation that calls for attention. the memo concerns what happens in a classroom over the course of several lessons in an ordinary school day, not the more or less dialogic purpose of the teachers, nor the kind of questions they are asking. rather than representing ideal learning trajectories, as is often seen in research on dialogic teaching, the observed lessons are drawn from the everyday life of normal classrooms. let us take a closer look at one of the lessons referred to in the memo. the mathematics lesson consists of two 45-minute sessions separated by a 15 minutes break between 0815 and 1000 in the morning. the first session consists of four main activities in addition to practical information, followed up by seat work with tasks on the new subject of the day in the second session (see table 2). the teacher – let us call her mary17 – was in her early thirties at the time of the observation, which was the only time i met her; the next time i observed mathematics, a new teacher had taken her place. 0815 practical information 0822 1: writing complete answers to text-based tasks 17 locations and people are anonymized by means of fictional names dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a152 0832 2: math quiz; 12 tasks to be worked out in the head and written down on pieces of paper handed out) 0844 3: review of the answers 0852 4: new subject: number lines 0900 break 0915 introduction to seatwork on number lines 0920-1000 seatwork with tasks on number lines table 2: overview of activities in the mathematics lesson i had the impression that mary sincerely wanted to reach out to the students. the first activity is partly motivated with reference to test demands – the fact that incomplete answers to text-based tasks will not be considered correct – but there are also references to important conventions of mathematics as a discipline. to some extent, she argues the case of disciplinary thinking, rather than the case of authoritative disciplinarity, we might say. some of the clever boys also seem to identify with mathematics as a subject, even if they do not align with their teacher. “we could have done that in the head”, says ben, f.ex., and mary makes the point that “you have to show them how you think”. they continue through several examples, and the resistance persists. “it’s ok to do it once, but doing it 17 times…”, ben says, and mary defends the activity by emphasizing the importance of learning routines through simple tasks. this negotiation of a disciplinary literacy practice starts out as an invitation into dialogue, but it develops into more of a positioning game. in the end, mary stops the discussion by saying that she defends the value of complete answers in general, and not the least in order not to lose points in tests and assessments. as she is saying this, she is literally standing alongside the written answer on the blackboard with her arms crossed over her chest. also, in the next activities – performing and reviewing a set of tasks to be worked out in the head – there is a buzz of cantankerous discussion. increasingly, the boys seem impatient and bored, and not acknowledging towards the disciplinary capacity of the teacher, thus leaving the scene open for subversive voices. in my field notes, i noted the abundances of pedagogical moments in this lesson, but gradually, the negative forces took over. it is particularly one of the boys, andrew, who plays this part, and most prominently in the last activity before the break, in which number lines are introduced as a new topic. when the plenary talk touches upon the use of signs for less than (<) and greater-than (>), he starts talking about them as “crocodile signs”, which is a term the teacher has used once during the quiz review in order to explain the logic of them. andrew, however, activates the term as a simplified, childish term, and relates to it as if he is playing along, being the child which allegedly the teacher has positioned him as. in this case we see parodistic discourse directly attacking or even mocking the teacher. if we set aside the uncomfortable and somewhat mean aspects of what andrew is doing, we see quite complex communication. andrew answers to the teacher initiative, and seemingly he accepts the position made available for him by the teacher and the predominant ire-like speech genre of school (cf. mortimer & scott, 2003). as such his answer is framed by the institutional talk of the teacher. by means of parodistic distance, however, his utterance becomes the frame in which the talk of the teacher, the speech genres in school, as well as the discursive position available for students in school is represented and commented on. andrew activates what might be called a subversive speech genre which is established in the class, and which is associated with a parodistic register of talking, or of discourse. this genre and the corresponding discourse seem to represent a framework for vari-directional response to dominant dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a153 discourses in school. we might say that the parody shows itself as playing along with the expectations of the ire-structured discourse, while at the same time displaying consciousness of playing along with no deeper interest. if this makes any sense, then it might also explain why the teachers does not sense the double voiced activity in class; they are inhabitants of the discourse that is the object of parody and not prepared to detect signals of distance towards it. alternatively, they do sense the hostile tendency, but consider it part of business as usual. or perhaps they do sense it, but are not ready to talk about it with me as alien researcher. dialogic discourse analysis provides us with tools to describe the relational dynamics of real-life classroom interaction. the example above displays the classroom as a field of discursive struggle. dda as applied here doesn’t solve the problem, but rather helps us to recognize it as part of the classroom culture and practice. the teacher has a position in the present of the ongoing lesson, and will have to deal with challenges and subversive initiatives from moment to moment. teachers and students alike are continuously authoring the situation (cf. matusov et al., 2016), mutually responding to each other. the teacher authors a learning situation where the students are invited into substantial engagement. prominent students on the other hand, relates to a distorted version of the teacher intention, thus authoring a parodistic counter discourse which dominates the classroom. vari-directional discourse can be playful and witty and it is indeed a situated phenomenon to be interpreted as such. the danish poet piet hein might be an important reminder to us about the interdependency of seriousness and play: taking fun as simply fun and earnestness in earnest shows how thoroughly thou none of the two discernest (http://www.sophilos.net/grooksofpiethein.htm ) den som kun tar spøg for spøg og alvor kun alvorligt han og hun har faktisk fattet begge dele dårligt (hein, 1940) a dialogic approach to understanding what is actually going on in the classroom provides us – researchers and teachers – with a sensitivity for the classroom as a relational complex; we are making use of dialogism as relational architectonics, with the words of michael holquist (1990). maureen boyd and william markarian (2011) make the case for a “dialogic stance” in a teacher that doesn’t appear very dialogic based on transcripts from his lessons. they analyse a seven minutes teaching sequence, where the teacher challenges the students and says things that taken in isolation would seem quite direct and authoritative. in the situation, though, the students accept this tone and addressivity, and they respond as part of a meaningful event. boyd and markarian provide contextual support for this claim, by observing the classroom over a long period of time. the main point, however, is that dialogic stance cannot be grasped on the basis of linguistic form and structure alone. we sense the author in the whole of a novel. this is the case also of the classroom as authored by the teacher. authoring and the problem of the text the idea of authorship linked to dialogizing background enables us to see discursive relationships within single utterances and between utterances over different time spans. the two levels – that of concrete dialogic exchange and that of the inner life of the single utterance (or the text) – mutually shed light on each other. we can study single utterances (texts) as if they contained dialogic interactions, and, the other way around, we can study interaction and situations as texts. we do that when we turn meaningful action into a dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a154 textual representation (cf. ricoeur, 1981) or with the words of van leeuwen, practice into discourse (van leeuwen, 2008). shifting between these perspectives provides us with metaphors and analogies. one such metaphorical use of bakhtin’s theory of the utterance, is to consider the classroom as a text, with one or more authors and perhaps also a reader (or listener) in the form of the observing researcher present in the classroom. i realize that the analogy has its limitations, but it seems appropriate to widen the perspective in order to get a grip of the larger dialogizing background of what goes on in a classroom. it is also an understanding which is at work implicitly in the discussion of authorship in educational contexts (lensmire, 1997; matusov, 2011; matusonv & miyazaki, 2014; miyazaki, 2011). lensmire (1997) was the first to compare the role of the teacher with that of an author within the field of dialogic pedagogy. more specifically he outlines how ”the teacher as dostoevskian novelist creates a classroom novel and takes up relations with student-characters”, with reference to writing workshops in elementary and secondary classrooms. miyazaki, similarly, sees the teacher as the author of a polyphonic novel, and correspondingly, the students as heroes of the created learning space: children in the saitou classroom can be compared to the heroes of a polyphonic novel. contrary to heroes in a monologic novel, in the polyphonic novel, heroes generate voices new even for their author, and can oppose the author. however, it is the author who controls the heroes’ behavior. this is similar for the saitou teacher. children become dialogic learners only via the teacher’s interaction with them (matusov & miyazaki, 2014,p. 36) matusov (2011) “respectfully disagrees” with these claims, and more specifically with the idea that teachers author students. even if characters in a novel can surprise their authors, these characters “remain transparent to the authors who are their creators”, he says (p. 40), and he continues: students are not creations of their teachers, they do not unconditionally cooperate with the teacher’s plot (or the “logic” of the emergent plot), they have voices that the teachers do not have, and they are not transparent to the teacher’s comprehension and imagination. […] there is only one legitimate author of the student, namely the student him or herself as unique, limitless, unfolding universe (matusov, 2011, p. 40). where lensmire and miyazaki see students as authored by the teacher, matusov see students becoming authors on their own, and “authorial teaching and learning” as a matter of student agency conceived of as authorship. there are (at least) two objections in this passage, both of which directly rejects bakhtin’s positions rather than that of lensmire and miyazaki. the first objection is that students should be their own authors, conceived of as “unique, limitless, unfolding universe”. matusov (2011) finds the idea that teachers author students a scary one, and it seems that he, in order to free the students from the authorial powers of the teacher, is willing to abandon bakhtin’s general idea of authorship within a shared human life world. according to bakhtin we author each other, and we need the authorial position of others in order to become and see ourselves as subjects. as subjects, we all have a unique place in the world,18 i.e. in the same world. creating our own worlds, however, would 18 bakhtin calls it “the unique and unified event of being” (bakhtin, 1993). it is unique in the sense that only the individual subject can fill this place, and it is unified since we all have such a place in the world. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a155 lead us all into isolated filter bubbles (cf. pariser, 2011) or even solipsism. thus, if we push the logic of matusov’s statement, we end up in a conflict with basic ideas in bakhtin’s dialogism. the second objection is simply a rejection of bakhtin’s conception of the polyphonic novel without any comment. bakhtin’s point in the dostoevsky book is that it is possible to represent a speaking person while at the same time letting the person retain the final word about himself (bakhtin, 1984, p. 53). he talks about the “freedom of the character as part of the author’s design” (p. 65) and about “the relative independence of characters with the limits of dostoevsky’s creative design” (p. 64), mainly based on the fact that, “for the author the hero is not a “he” nor an “i” but a fully valid “thou”, that is, another and autonomous “i” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 63). matusov rejects this idea, and in its place, he puts the monologic conception of the novel with its omniscient author.19 dostoevsky found a creative design that enabled him to bring the novel closer to being in the prosaic world, we might say. similarly, when we are talking about dialogic teaching, we are often dealing with pedagogical designs that might enable us to bring teaching closer to a sense of conversation in everyday life (cf. nystrand & gamoran,1991). the polyphonic novel is a meaningful conception of novelistic innovation when it is contrasted to traditional forms. similarly, dialogic teaching is still teaching – it is still part of the architectonics of education – but it provides the teacher with a new integral position relative to that of his classroom and his students. it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that the very heart of dialogic teaching is – or should be – relating to the student as “a fully valued thou” (i.e. a subject – subject-relation), and thus providing them some relative independence and freedom. students and teachers may all contribute to authoring the classroom. when things are working well, students author themselves and the classroom in a way that is compatible with the overall pedagogic and didactic design authored by the teacher. nevertheless, teachers have a responsibility for the classroom as a whole, similar to the authorial responsibility for the utterance as a whole. teachers make plans for each lesson and the progression of lesson on both short term and for the whole school year, and they often reflect on what actually happened during a lesson afterwards. the teacher thus has an authorial position outside the classroom as a textual whole, from where he or she20 can manipulate the dialogizing background and create dialogic space (wegerif, 2007). the teacher is, however, also present in the open ended here and now of the classroom. the degree of openness tied to this presence is thus an important part of the pedagogic design. making open ended space for student participation in open ended events implies that the teacher must include uncertainty and risk as part of their design, and also accept being in uncertain and risky situations in the present of their lessons. the teacher is thus both an author of the classroom as a text, and a character in this text.21 the really flexible “reflective practitioner” in donald “schön’s terms (1983) is able to shift between these two positions on the spot. we need an understanding of the classroom as textual space where dialogic relations are played out. this space can be designed in different ways just like novels can be created in different ways. the pivotal point of both literary and pedagogical designs is how the dialogizing background for concrete events and utterances is formed and administered. i 8a, as i experienced it early autumn 2014, there was open struggle about the control of this dialogizing background, we might say. the subversive energy disappeared 19 marjanovic-shane (2014) makes the point that miyazaki and matusov are talking from different paradigmatic positions, and thus not really talking about the same thing. this is a good point, and combined with my argument, matusov actually falls out of the dialogic paradigm. i don’t think neither matusov nor marjanovic-shane will agree, however, and hopefully they will respond to my challenge. 20 for the purpose of simplicity and clarity, in the following i will use she in stead of he or she when referring to teachers as authors. 21 here we are entering a paradox that is a paradox also in literary theory in general as well as in bakhtin’s theories of the novel and the utterance. autobiography as a genre for our analogy is a readily available example of the relation between authorial i responsible for the text, and the “i” represented in the text. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a156 over time, but so did energy in general. the classroom came to be emotionally flat and lifeless, and it felt like teachers and students had made a bargain, where “teachers implicitly agree not to demand too much of the students, and students acquiesce to the standards of conduct required by teachers” (nystrand and gamoran, 1991, p. 3). rather than the relative freedom of a polyphonic space, it seemed like an upsidedown world of carnival and parody, and after a while, when the carnival was over with, it turned into a copy of a monologic traditional prose story, where all elements and features are known in advance by both teachers and students. pedagogic and didactic design is a matter of creating and forming the textual space of interaction. dialogic designs differ from traditional pedagogical design in that they more highly value open-endedness – or eventness22 –as a feature of the classroom. following this line of thought, designing dialogic teaching and creating classrooms that can be characterized as dialogic, is not a question about whether the teacher is an author or not, but rather what kind of author she is. understanding author-ity we have pointed out that dostoevsky’s innovation was possible due to what bakthin calls a new integral position of the author relative to the speaking person in the novel. the innovation implies a shift in the history of the novel genre, but it is also indicative of a revolting shift in bakhtin’s thinking from classical to a more modernist aesthetics, as pointed out by the danish literary scholar anker gemzøe (1998). in his 1924 essay on author and hero in aesthetic activity (bakhtin, 1990) bakhtin is concerned with authorship in general and the consummation of the subject possible only from the position of the other. aesthetic activity is generally the act of creating wholes, which is even more important in artistic activity than in everyday life. in the last section of the essay he refers to modernist tendencies in literature, and reflects over what he calls “the crisis of authorship” (bakhtin, 1990, pp.202-205). stable forms associated with authorial outsidedness begin to disintegrate, he says, with dostoevsky as a prominent example. five years later, in 1929, the first edition of problems of dostoevsky’s poetics is published, in which the distribution of value is turned upside down, making dostoevsky the hero in the story of the novel genre and the quest for representing human life. considered as a shift, this story in itself might be worthwhile making part of educational discourse. it adds historical and cultural depth to our analogy between single authors and teachers, by situating concrete classrooms in a process of struggle between ideas and values belonging to a traditional paradigm for education and the still emerging paradigm of dialogic teaching (cf. wegerif, 2013). we should, however, proceed with caution about development and shifts in bakhtin’s publications. brian poole (2001) warns us about the great uncertainty tied to dating bakhtin’s publications, and he also argues that bakhtin might have worked on different texts simultaneously. the most important point, nevertheless, is that bakhtin’s positive evaluation of consummation in author and hero can be said to complement his devaluation of finalization in the dostoevsky book, in a way resembling the double nature of the centripetal force. the first one is concerned with authorship and the creation of meaningful wholes in general, whereas in the latter he focuses on a particular authorial position that enables the author to get closer to representing human consciousness in its here and now by more specifically entering into dialogue with them. the author is still there – it is what he does and how he does it that is new. similarly, the teacher of the more dialogic classroom is still the teacher responsible for the whole, but she orchestrates it in a 22 eventness, a key term in dialogism, concerns the open-endedness of life and being in the world. being as event implies that every one of us has a unique position in the continuous flow of time, and every moment we face situations that address us and call for an answer. whether we answer or not, and how we answer does not change the fact that we are called upon to answer. this situation – the unique and unified event of being (bakhtin, 1990, p. 24) – is thus the basis for bakhtin’s conception of answerability, or responsibility. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a157 manner different from that of traditional teaching, and (at best) based on a different understanding of the teacher – student relationship. if we allow ourselves to see both arguments as meaningful – that there is a development towards the discovery of a more dialogic form of the novel, and that bakhtin explores different aspects of the genre over time – we have ourselves a cultural and historical framework for making use of the analogy between teachers and authors. thus, we might also avoid the tendency to only focus on the dostoevsky book as a source of inspiration for educational research. bakhtin describes in detail different authorial positions, which all add substantially to the novel genre as a field of possibilities for representing the prosaics (cf. morson & emerson, 1990) of human life. tolstoy is the all-embracing, patriarchal authority, who consummates his characters with love from his outside authoritative position (cf. bakhtin, 1990, p. 25). dostoevsky renounces his “essential surplus” as author and leaves the final word about the hero to the hero himself (cf. bakhtin, 1984). by situating the hero on the threshold of the present, in dialogue with surrounding voices, he managed to represent the open-endedness of life. goethe as the master of the bildungsroman is able to create “the image of man in the process of becoming” (the bildungsroman, bakhtin, 1986, p. 19); whereas rabelais celebrates and transfers the mundus inversus of carnival to literature (bakhtin 1981, 1984b). all of these positions (and there very well might be others given that dialogism is a way of thinking in open systems, not in closed taxonomies) are useful for different purposes, in literature, and probably also in education. an understanding of different authorial positions adds contextual depth to the understanding of classroom discourse and literacy events, and also signals that different teacher positions have different strengths and weaknesses. every single teacher necessarily build up a register (cf. alexander, 2008) of approaches to the class, and from that position, like an author, she will stage lessons (cf. utterances) which will be framed by recognizable genres of teaching. thus, the teacher might turn into a stable type of a traditional teacher or a teacher inspired by modern ideas, or she might appropriate both traditional and modern approaches as a basis for shifts between different positions and communicative approaches depending on purpose and content (cf. f.ex. mortimer & scott, 200323). dialogic pedagogy is a well-established idea over the course of several decades, and there is a convincing research basis documenting positive correlation between dialogic teaching and learning outcome (applebee et al., 2003; mercer, 1995; 2002; nystrand, 1997; 2006; mercer et al. 1999; murphy et al., 2009). rupert wegerif suggests dialogic to be a model of understanding for an education in the internet age, replacing the book logic as a model for teaching and learning (wegerif, 2013, 206). the shift towards dialogic features is increasingly expressed in official white papers, and supported by digital technology providing new dialogic space and enhancing conditions for collaboration and interaction in old ones (major et al., 2018; skaftun et al., 2017). yet, we also know that realizing dialogic teaching is not easy. teachers who acknowledge the positive effect of dialogic teaching, doesn’t necessarily act on this insight in their own practice (nystrand, 2006). large scale implementation might end up in a superficial emphasis on student talk (lefstein, 2008; segal & lefstein, 2016), which is not any substantial step away from neither “the persistence of recitation” (alexander, 2008, p. 47f.) nor the “lack of depth” in whole class teaching in norwegian classroom (hodgson et al., 2012, p. 16). 23 mortimer & scott (2003) operationalizes authoritative vs dialogic on the basis of whether or not the teacher relates to other perspectives on the subject matter (referential object). as such they do not address dialogic relationships in the sense suggested by bakhtin: “dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to relationships oriented semantically toward their referential object, relationships in and of themselves devoid of any dialogic element. they must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become the positions of various subjects expressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relationships might arise among them (bakhtin, 1984, p. 183). it resembles rather what has been called linguistic polyphony (nølke, 2017). dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a158 increasingly researchers point towards a connection between high quality dialogic teaching and the understanding of knowledge and learning that is the basis for the practices observed in school (kuhn, 1991; wilkinson et al, 2017). taken together this situation resembles the “crisis in authorship” bakhtin described in his essay on author and hero in aesthetic activity (bakhtin 1990). conflicting ideas and ideals of what it means to be a good teacher is at play, similar to the tension between tradition and innovation in the history of art and literature. the classical idea is deeply rooted in all aspects of the traditional practices in school, whereas the idea of the dialogic teacher is still emerging, and often reduced to the behavioral surface. research promoting and supporting the shift towards dialogic teaching might find authorship a useful conceptual tool in addressing and working with underlying theories of action (argyris & schön, 1978) tied to classroom practice together with teachers24. and dialogic discourse analysis might be a useful analytical approach when verbalizing the relational mechanisms that holds the practice together, thus making them available for reflection and negotiations. summing up: methodological implications dialogic discourse analysis (dda) allows us to describe the relational complexity of the classroom. in our 8a example we have seen that there is an ongoing conflict about authorship. with authorship comes authority, which again must be used in one way or the other. in 8a it seems that there was a local crisis in author-ity; students resisted being authored into a childish position, by responding childishly as if they actually accepted this position. the students relate to what we might call a “teacher voice” which we sometimes meet particularly in primary school; in my experience this stereotype of a teacher talks in a lighter tone (typical of parent – children talk) and slowly with an emphasis on every word, almost as if modelling reading to beginning readers; actually, we might say, metaphorically, that the teacher is behaving like a speaking book. it is a kind of talk that is very far from conversational flow, and there is no room for student voices nor thinking. the result is vari-directional double voiced discourse (parodistic discourse), in which the students control the dialogizing background, which undermines the authority of the teacher and thus also the teacher as responsible author of the lesson. focusing on the teacher in educational research is a sensitive matter, even if we know that the teacher is an extremely important factor in single events and more established practices in the classroom culture. the concept of authorship might be a useful way of drawing a line between the teacher as author and the teacher as a person. educational researchers act like readers of a novel, and we might have an image of the author based on what we see and hear. this is a construction, however, and cannot be taken for the author as a person. “authorship” is performed by the teacher, and responded to by the readerresearcher, who will try to grasp the classroom as a text and re-accentuate it as a meaningful whole. “art and life are not one, but must become united in myself – in the unity of my answerability”, bakhtin says in a brief text on “art and answerability” probably written in 1919 (bakhtin, 1990, p. 2). in his late essays and notes he returns to this issue, with the term “creative understanding” (bakhtin, 1986, p.7; 142). doing dda requires creative engagement in the act of understanding, and also finding an integral position from where to relate to the speaking persons in the classroom, similar to the task of the teacher and the author of novels. the descriptive account must be credible and transparent, and transcriptions of dialogic exchanges will always be valuable. but dialogic aspects of discourse are not always rendered most effectively by quoting concrete discourse (boyd & markarian, 2011). it is rather a matter of ground rules (nystrand, 1997, p. 90), of trust and respect, and taking students seriously (kachtur & pendergast, 1997). 24 action theory has become a key reference in school based professional development in norway (postholm & emstad, 2014). dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a159 the idea of student voice is not realized the moment students simply talk more. alongside opportunity to talk (which is not a prominent feature in the typical classroom in norway, (cf. hodgson, 2012, klette, 2003, skaftun & wagner, 2019) they must be allowed to deal with substantial ideas, use their own language, and be acknowledged for doing so by others (segal & lefstein, 2016). bakhtin’s study of the double-voiced word has taught us to consider the dialogic relations that are played out within single utterances, and sometimes, in order to verbalize or visualize such relations, we must ourselves enter into dialogue with them. the memo from 8a is an example of such a response to a classroom populated by teachers and students. dda calls for a respond towards the whole of situations and speaking persons, and also provides specific tools that might enable us to verbalize relational aspects that often determine the conditions for student engagement. references applebee, a. n., langer, j. a., nystrand, m., & gamoran, a. 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(1999). dialogic inquiry : towards a sociocultural practice and theory of education. new york: cambridge university press. wertsch, j. v. (1991). voices of the mind: a sociocultural approach to mediated action. cambridge, massachussets: harvard university press. wilkinson, i. a., reznitskaya, a., bourdage, k., oyler, j., glina, m., drewry, r., nelson, k. (2017). toward a more dialogic pedagogy: changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. language and education, 31(1), 65–82. white, e. j. (2016). a philosophy of seeing: the work of the eye/‘i’ in early years educational practice. journal of philosophy of education, 50(3), 474–489. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12158 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. dialogic discourse analysis: a methodology for dealing with the classroom as a text atle skaftun dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.277 | vol. 7 (2019) a163 this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word strickland, engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r1 engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland the university of georgia, us abstract book review: fecho, b., falter, m., & hong, x. (2016). teaching outside the box and inside the standards: making room for dialogue. new york: teachers college press. this review highlights the editors’ vision of showing the power of engaged dialogic practice in classroom contexts that are at odds with the push for the standardization of schools and learning. in particular, this review will show how the individual stories of the four teachers highlighted in the book along with the experience of the university researchers created a dialogue from which readers can take hope that their choice to engage in bakhtinian dialogism in the context of their classrooms is a worthy pursuit. according to the book, this is true even when that choice puts them at odds with other teachers, administrators, and state or national standards. this review will show that the editors and the teachers whose stories are told do not intend for their readers to come to this text ready to join the fight against standards, but for them to be able to see how dialogue is exceptionally important in working in standardized spaces. the book itself is short with only six chapters and just over one hundred pages, therefore, the review will address each chapter individually and its overall engagement with the purpose outlined above. each chapter ends with the author’s suggestions for action which can help the reader new to dialogical pedagogy grasp dialogical strategies. keywords: bakhtin, standards, dialogue, teaching, engaged dialogic practice t. hunter strickland is a doctoral candidate in language and literacy education and graduate teaching assistant in english education at the university of georgia. his research interests are in dialogic pedagogy and the use of young adult literature in both secondary schools and teacher education programs. additionally, he is interested in using bakhtin’s concepts in analyzing young adult literature in order to engage with young adult texts and the students who read them. ��� the struggle for so many educators that want to create a dialogical classroom is that none of us have a clear roadmap for making that happen. we all know the importance of paying mind to the authoritative discourses that are at play in classroom spaces, but teachers often find it difficult to allow for a truly ever-changing and evolving heteroglossia, or “other tongues” (p. 12), in spite of them. fecho, falter, & hong (2016a) share that "in bakhtin’s dialogical theory, one source of tension is the constant tug of war between authoritative discourses and internally persuasive discourses" (p. 4). this book recognizes this struggle in the age of standardization knowing full well that “as more and more testing and standardization happens in schools, teachers are metaphorically and literally swimming upstream against rough and exhausting currents that are leading the focus away from the individual and more toward the common” issn: 2325-3290 (online) engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r2 (fecho, falter, & hong, 2016b, p.xiv). this book engages with the tensions of heteroglossia and monoglossia as they come into contact with both authoritative and internally persuasive discourses in schools. the editors of this book decide to make their case for engaged dialogic practice (p. 97) through the telling of stories and how the stories that are told in classroom spaces will either further the tide of standardization or help others break away from it. in “the story of this book,” the first of chapter out of six, the editors not only provide the context for themselves, the researchers, and the teachers whose stories are told, but they also provide a framework for the reader to understand what dialogical pedagogy is as well as the nature of wobble moments, their key to the following stories, where “…the equilibrium of their [teacher’s] belief system—what counts for them as good teaching and how best to work with diverse groups of adolescents—is put into sway” (p. 5). the editors show in this introductory chapter that it is in these wobble moments when teachers have a chance to choose dialogue or not that we then learn what engaged dialogical practice really is. the intent of this concept of the wobble for teachers is good as the foundation for understanding the tensions at play within the discourses and heteroglossia within a school. however, the wobble moment and the examinations of tensions within teaching are much easier to understand for the established teacher such as the four teachers highlighted in the text or the editors themselves, but what this text is missing is how the dialogic moment can be planned and prepared for with the preservice or new teacher struggling with the new responsibilities of teaching and managing a class. for the preservice or new teacher, we that have been there know, the centripetal (bakhtin, 1981a, p. 270) and centralizing forces hoping to reify our teaching to tradition and standard are hard to deal with as they work to cover curriculum, plan and assess, and feel the burden of outside-the-class school duties for the first time. how do new teachers go into a context where the monoglossia of traditional teaching is valued, and how do they make room for dialogue anyway? how do we teach new teachers of, as bakhtin explained, "the living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue" (p. 277). how does the living utterance exist in our classrooms? the important message throughout the book is that none of us who choose to call ourselves dialogic teachers get it right all of the time. none of us have perfect dialogic classrooms, but we choose to go for it anyway. this first section of the book ends with an attempt (and one of the best ones i’ve seen) to give a crash course in what engaged dialogic practice is, however imperfect, and introduce the reader to the theoretical foundation of mikhail bakhtin and dialogic pedagogy. the great value here, and the reason i will use this book with my preservice teachers, is that an unfamiliar reader can be introduced to dialogism, bakhtin, and the inherent tensions and wobble moments that come from engaged dialogic practice in a relatively short time and have the foundation necessary to understand the teacher stories that are the bulk of this text. the perfect reader of this text, though, is the teacher educator or established teacher who has some foundation in dialogic pedagogy and at least a cursory understanding of bakhtin’s work. otherwise, the reader might be disappointed that more space was not given to unpack and dive deeper into the theoretical foundation of bakhtin’s work. in the second chapter, paige’s story highlights the tension of stakeholders outside the dialogic classroom that misunderstand a teacher’s motives because of the pressure of standardized assessment. paige, a social studies teacher, shares the story of a parent email that she received after she and michelle, one of the researchers, diverge briefly from direct instruction and engage in a class discussion of no child left behind as it related to their work on jefferson’s inaugural address and the philosophies of several of engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r3 the founding fathers. the parent sent an email asking why paige was not focused entirely on the graphic organizer that would be used for a quiz later that week instead of discussing no child left behind. paige shares in her story the hurt and defensiveness that she felt upon receiving this email, but reflects how it only highlighted a piece of the much larger picture of instruction that day. paige shares that “my student may have been longing for a list of things to memorize instead of a bunch of concepts and ideas that we were weaving together through discussions” (p. 19). in paige’s wobble moment, one where she felt the pressure of many discourses at play within her classroom, she had to choose to do what was best for all of her students in spite of the pressures of standardization. this highlights bakhtin’s notion that “every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear” (bakhtin, 1981a, p. 272). the centripetal forces of standardization pushed this parent to demand that quiz preparation be the only focus where paige and michelle knew that the centrifugal forces of a living heteroglossia called for so much more. the reader is left with an important message that “teachers can be dialogical and create classrooms that are alive without sacrificing good test scores, skirting expectations, and acting as subversives” (fecho, falter, & hong, 2016b, p. 25). instead, dialogical teachers are flexible and leave their classrooms open to whatever whim and direction that heteroglossia takes them. the english and social studies teacher as reader of this section is going to find much they can relate to. in fact, any teacher will recognize the tension between standards, parent expectations, and their teaching. the reader is left wondering how can i be okay with the messiness of dialogic pedagogy, what about the pressure of someone outside of my class judging my teaching when they do not know or understand the theoretical foundation for what i am doing in my class with my students? most importantly, the section needed some action steps to providing rationales for how dialogic pedagogy is valuable and can enhance and not sacrifice test scores. i know that in my own experience it was difficult to know that the unfinished nature of the heteroglossia in my classroom meant that i had to be willing to let go of control. there were no other teachers in my school that engaged in dialogic pedagogy, so, i at times felt alone and judged for how i ran my classroom. what would the featured teachers or editors say about this idea? how would they encourage teachers to join professional networks where they will be supported and encouraged? if it is true that "many secondary english teachers don’t open themselves to dialogical relationships. they worry that by validating students’ personal searches for meaning, their own identities as teachers and the traditional culture of the classroom will spin out of their control and chaos will reign" (fecho & amatucci, 2008, p. 6), then how do we teach new teachers that this is okay? . lisa’s story in the next chapter highlights another tension that dialogic teachers will come up against, and that is when engaged dialogic practice puts teachers in opposition with their colleagues and administrators. early, lisa shares that “…dialogic practice has an amazing capacity for diminishing the hierarchies that set me apart from my students” (p. 33). with this ability, lisa is able to form close bonds with her students through vulnerability and openness. her story of wobble explains a moment in a professional learning meeting at school where a student of hers, emilio, was to be brought before a group of teachers to explain his underperformance. lisa, with the close relationship and personal connection to emilio gained through a dialogic classroom, stood up for emilio and ushered him away from what could have been a horrifying and uncomfortable experience. lisa says, “i was also angry about the agenda of the meeting. there was no invitation to discuss how we might approach or inquire into the problem of student failure in our school” (p. 37). lisa felt the need to use her position in emilio’s life to stand up against the authoritarian voice of the administration who had decided to bring several students in to this meeting. engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r4 the nature of dialogic teaching provides a much more personal connection to the lives of students, and as such, lisa would attest, this gives teachers a duty to speak for the well-being of students when the authoritative voices of a school do not value their voices as students. this is much easier said than done, however. the reality is that it is difficult to stand up against a school culture, administration, and other teachers who do not believe the same things about teaching that we do. choosing dialogic pedagogy does not mean that we believe that our way is the only way, or the only right way, but that we must be willing to stand up against those who may have power over our jobs in choosing to protect our students. this is noble, no doubt, but this section perhaps makes it seem easier than it might have actually been for lisa. tension with colleagues and administrators is much the focus of this chapter, but the grinding difficulty that that choice can be could have been given more space. this section has much merit, however. lisa reflected bakhtin’s notion that “one’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse” (bakhtin, 1981a, p.348). she had to stand up against the authoritative voice that would have potentially humiliated her student. when she did this, lisa heard all kinds of negative reactions to her taking the student from the meeting. many thought she was too emotional or overstepping her bounds, but lisa, sharing the vulnerability and imperfection of her reaction, tells the reader that “perhaps this is the charge of the dialogical teacher—to open discussion of those big issues so as to lessen the need for so many micro-interventions” (fecho, falter, & hong, 2016b, p. 39). lisa ends her chapter by making the case for engaged dialogic practice as a rigorous space that also engages student learning with their personal connections to their lives. lisa’s chapter is evidence of a great willingness for vulnerability in front of and for her students. the emotional toll on her teaching life was taxing, but worth it. i wonder though how difficult it would seem or how not worth it dialogic teaching might seem to a new teacher who just wanted to put their heads down, go with the flow, and get their work done? is a willingness to rock the boat a requirement of the dialogic teacher? personally and reflectively, these choices were worth it for lisa as she grew as a teacher, but it is a difficult choice to teach in this way, and in some ways teachers have to be willing to subject themselves to this difficulty year after year. ian’s story in the next chapter engages the reader in many concepts of note. first, he shares how state and national standards, in particular the common core state standards for english, actually “…gives english teachers the freedom to do nearly anything we want in the classroom and call it standards based; on the other [hand], it makes knowledge claims based on the learning of language arts standards nearly vacuous” (p.47). he goes on to explain that standards can create a counterfeit schooling that dialogical pedagogy, in some ways, fights back against. standards, he explains, too often are used merely to check off a box of “good teaching” whether or not a teacher is doing anything of substance. thus, this chapter is the first to really hit the promises that the title implies. ian’s story tells of the tensions of heteroglossia in the classroom as well as the ethical and legal tensions that come into play in a dialogical classroom. he shares an experience where a state senator accosts an undocumented immigrant who was a high school student of ian’s. he explains how he, ian, had to stand up for and protect his student against the authoritative voice of the senator, and how “the tension between the legal and ethical here consists of how the roles of citizen, teacher, and employee separate and conflate” (p. 50). in his dialogical classroom, ian has to listen to the internally persuasive discourses that evolve his thoughts and actions while allowing for dialogue to happen in the heteroglossic environment he is in with his students (bakhtin, 1981a, p. 346). this can be exceptionally difficult in a classroom especially when teachers come into contact with discourses that they personally disagree with. ian shares the difficulty in a dialogical classroom of allowing students’ transactions with a text be theirs and not to force them to find meaning according to his opinions. engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r5 more analysis of the varying discourses that all teachers would be in contact with in a school could be explained especially considering the authoritative discourses of standards and state representatives who make decisions for educators and students across the state. these discourses also come into play with the local discourses of county officials and administrators within a school. it is under all of these varying authoritative discourses seeking to centralize that teachers and students operate. how can a teacher choose to work towards the social justice issues affecting their students while also under the frame of required standards? this chapter does give some practical advice on changing activities to be more dialogic, but dialogic pedagogy requires our work to be unfinished and always in the process of becoming and evolving. how or why then do teachers take the risks associated with the vulnerability and freedom that dialogic pedagogy provides? can teachers find "a shift towards a more collaborative teaching culture—a culture based on dialogue, reflection, and the sharing of ideas—[that] can supplant the unproductive hierarchy between teacher and students and maximize opportunities for teaching and learning to occur" (stewart & mcclure, 2013, p. 95)? in the final chapter showcasing the story of a teacher’s wobble moments, angela’s story addresses the discourses present in her school. in particular, she starts her chapter by explaining the myriad authoritative voices in the school, and how the social constructions within the school position teachers and administrators at the top of the hierarchy while “…it positioned students as powerless in that they had no voice” (fecho, falter, & hong, 2016b, p. 67). she explains how those engaged in dialogical practice are often small islands of dialogue within a much larger monologic space (p.68). she calls for teachers to help flatten the hierarchies present in their school and to work to become an equal with the student to create a truly dialogical classroom. angela’s moment of wobble comes from a class discussion on race within a text. her tension comes when a white student responds in a way that the rest of the class reacts with discomfort. angela knows that any number of reactions on her part can have negative influences on all the students in the class, and, ultimately, the lesson ends with an unsatisfactory response on her part. she explains that “this is the challenge of the dialogical classroom. students explore their voices, and in a diverse classroom, their voices are not always going to align with their classmates” (p.72). the struggle for the teacher becomes not to jump in to control the discussion when such disagreements happen. however, the most important lesson that angela shares for the reader is that we cannot remove bias, but “…what the dialogical classroom offers is a way in which to have those agendas and biases voiced, while also listening to and understanding others” (p. 76). this is the great hope of engaged dialogic practice. power must be shared so that the many voices of a classroom can create meaning together. the only question to contemplate, though, is: but how difficult is it for teachers and teacher educators to keep our mouths shut in a classroom? the essence of this chapter is true, we must provide more space for the voices of our students to be heard in our classrooms, but isn’t the unsaid end of that sentence “within reason?” teachers invested in dialogic pedagogy do not create or plan for chaos to rule their classrooms. the reality is that we are held to standards, we have annual evaluations tied to our names forever, and we are all working for somebody. so, how do we make room for the heteroglossia and it not become a free-for-all? we cannot completely give up our power as teachers in the classroom; parents, administrators, and school boards all give us that power and a paycheck to teach a curriculum to students, so what do we do when any stakeholder questions what we are doing in our classrooms as they see a dialogic and heteroglossic mess through the classroom door window? the final chapter of the book readdresses the major tensions discussed throughout. the editors explain each tension and, more importantly, give the reader lessons on what can be learned from them. engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r6 engaged dialogical practice is not easy, but the editors finish the book with practical advice for how a newcomer could choose moments of dialogue even when they are difficult. this information is valuable, and present throughout all other chapters, but as it is most likely what the reader is looking for when picking up this book; so, the authors could have featured the advice in more length and depth tied to each chapter’s narratives. one critique of this book is that every chapter ends with a one to two page action steps section by each chapter author. this information is both summary and a how-to guide, but for the reader looking for even more, they might be disappointed that more room was not spent going into more depth. overall, the editors push readers to become reflective educators that are constantly in dialogue with the many discourses that surround them. the dialogic teacher is constantly evolving. standards driven instruction does not hamper the dialogic teacher, but the dialogic teacher holds themselves to a much higher standard and one that cherishes the living heteroglossia of the classroom (p. 104). this text provides an introduction to engaged dialogic practice that would be a worthy start to what we mean by dialogic pedagogy, and focuses on "making authentic dialogue the centerpiece of instruction [which] creates spaces for teaching and learning to become a multi-voiced activity that offers both teachers and students the opportunity to be active participants in meaning making" (stewart, 2010, p. 6). while part of me is always looking for the perfect text on dialogic pedagogy, i know that it does not exist, and this book is the closest that i have felt to that practical need in dialogic pedagogy. as i read this text, all of my history as someone who wanted to be an engaged dialogic teacher was in conversation with the editors and the teachers who told their stories. my first experiences with dialogic pedagogy where in bob fecho’s classes during my master’s degree at the university of georgia. he taught me that the heteroglossic nature of the classroom needed to be given space for our many voices to engage in dialogue. it was a revolutionary idea for me as i had to realize that the hierarchies between student and teacher needed to be shifted so that every voice had a place in the classroom because they were competing to be heard. bakhtin (1981b) wrote about the active nature of the polyglossia in the novel which we then extrapolate to our understandings of the nature of a classroom. he said, "where languages and cultures interanimated each other, language became something entirely different, its very nature changed: in place of a single, unitary sealed-off ptolemaic world of language, there appeared the open galilean world of many languages, mutually animating each other" (p. 65). this is directly applicable to pedagogy. in teaching, historically, the teacher’s language has been the one voice of value in a classroom. student voices that were then animating and engaging with each other were seen as language to be silenced. thus, the language of the teacher was privileged, and the language of the student was quieted. many classrooms unfortunately still operate in this fashion. fecho’s work, long before this book came out, has always been to help teachers move beyond the privileged language paradigm of the classroom, and to help teachers begin to see that the many voices in their classrooms are something to embrace. fecho & ammatucci (2008) argued that "many secondary english teachers don’t open themselves to dialogical relationships. they worry that by validating students’ personal searches for meaning, their own identities as teachers and the traditional culture of the classroom will spin out of their control and chaos will reign" (p. 6). teaching outside the box but inside the standards helps make that choice possible. the book takes bakhtin’s idea about language that "we live, write and speak today in a world of free and democratized language; the complex and multi-leveled hierarchy of discourses, forms, images, styles that used to permeate the entire system of official language and linguistic consciousness was swept away by the linguistic revolutions of the renaissance" to heart, and this shows the reader that making the choice as a teacher to walk a dialogical path is worth it for their teaching and for their students. (bakhtin, 1981b, p.71). fecho, falter, & hong show in this text that the chaos that many engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r7 teachers are afraid of is naturally how their students’ communication works, and how it can best develop as an active and evolving force. fecho, falter, & hong give readers a crash course in what they mean by engaged dialogic pedagogy in this text, and, in such a short space, i am left wanting more. however, this want for more is born out of the excitement for what the editors have accomplished. each of the vignettes told in this book end with suggestions for action for teachers to put dialogic pedagogy into practice. these couple of pages at the end of each chapter give practical advice for those who are new to dialogic pedagogy, and each time i read one i applauded with how helpful they were, but i wanted those sections to be much longer and more developed. what student teachers especially want are examples of what they will see in their classrooms, and how to handle those situations when they come. these steps for action section are a start to answering this need. these sections are helpful as they give steps for teachers to follow when they are given an opportunity to choose dialogue in their classroom or school contexts. as i am now a doctoral student teaching in the english teacher preparation program at the university of georgia, i am using this text to expose my students to batkhin and dialogism in a practical way and not only with the theoretical. as i immerse myself in the original texts of bakhtin to make my own sense of them, i am glad that i can have such a great book of practice alongside my study. i wish i had had this text years ago when i was first becoming an english teacher because it explains dialogic pedagogy in an understandable way. this would have helped me start on a less rocky path to dialogic teaching as a high school teacher with a better rationale for what i believed in. i would not, then, have just had to try to figure it out alone as i went along. it allows me to have conversations with my students based on the real stories of teachers choosing engaged dialogic practice, and the book allows my students to engage in an open dialogue on what it means to give space for the heteroglossia that surrounds them in their new schools, and prepare them to face the tensions of authoritative discourses in education as they reflect on the various internally persuasive discourses that move them, and this is the book’s greatest strength. references bakhtin, m. m. (1981a). discourse in the novel. in m. holquist (ed.), the dialogic imagination: four essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.) (pp. 272-348). austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1981b). from the prehistory of novelistic discourse. in m. holquist (ed.), the dialogic imagination: four essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.) (pp. 272-348). austin, tx: university of texas press. fecho, b., & amatucci, k. b. (2008). spinning out of control: dialogical transactions in an english classroom. english teaching: practice and critique, 7(1). 5-21. fecho, b., falter, m., & hong, x. (2016a). embracing tension: using bakhtinian theory as a means for data analysis. qualitative research, 17(1), 20-36. fecho, b., falter, m., & hong, x. (2016b). teaching outside the box and inside the standards: making room for dialogue. new york: teachers college press. stewart, t.t. (2010). a dialogic pedagogy: looking to mikhail bakhtin for alternatives to standards period teaching practices. critical education, 1(6). 1-20. engaged dialogic pedagogy and the tensions teachers face t. hunter strickland dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.224 | vol. 7 (2019) r8 stewart, t.t. & mcclure, g. (2013). freire, bakhtin, and collaborative pedagogy: a dialogue with students and mentors. international journal for dialogical science, 7(1), 91-108. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word osovsky, kirzhaeva, chernetzova, educaton-for-self and education-for-other, complete, 2020-06-14, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf71 education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky mordovia state pedagogical institute, russia vera kirzhaeva national research mordovia state university, russia ekaterina chernetsova national research university higher school of economics, russia elizaveta maslova plekhanov russian university of economics, russia abstract the article contains reflections on the problem which has arised in eugene matusov's article on freedom of education, and considers the experience of mikhail bakhtin as an example of the way the right to the freedom can be fulfilled. not only bakhtin's life and ideas play a significant role in contemporary social and educational theories and practices, but they reveal how education becomes a result of selection of particular knowledge and one's conscious choice. the core of the article is a correlation of notions “education-for-myself” and “education-for-the other” which are taken by the authors as derivatives of the terms of bakhtin’s early philosophy “i-for-myself” and “i-for-the other”. thus ideas of “education-for-an individual” and “education-for-the society” result from the reflections and can be evidence of the need in mutual understanding and dialogue in order to achieve freedom of education. oleg osovsky works as a chief research fellow in pedagogical institute in saransk. he is a dr. of philology. professor osovskiy is the author of several books on m.b bakhtin’s ideas and their reception in anglo-american humanities, russian émigré school in europe. vera kirzhaeva works as a professor of russian at philology department in saransk. she is a dr. of pedagogy. her main research interests are bakhtin studies, russian émigré education in 1920-40s, russian intellectual history. ekaterina chernetsova is an associate professor in school of foreign languages at higher school of economics (moscow). she specializes in american studies and world literature, problems of teaching languages and literature. her research also focuses on contemporary american fiction, clash of paradigms in literature, and bakhtinian approaches to a literary text. her recent book is chernetsova e. (2018) after new journalism: history, myth, imagination in norman mailer’s novels of the 1980-s – 2000-s. elizaveta maslova works as a university lecturer in moscow. she holds a phd degree, celta and ftbe. her special interests include lcci exams preparation and development of online courses, bakhtin and contemporary us novel. issn: 2325-3290 (online) education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf72 ïïò professor eugene matusov wrote a serious and crucial article which in many respects reflects a whole range of the most complicated problems closely linked to a changing image of the contemporary education. it seems a student’s right to freedom of education is an inviolable right, and even if it is not warranted by national or international legislations, educational communities quite realize its value. the author brilliantly stated the way he sees freedom of education. as a whole his vision of this notion doesn’t provoke any objections. but other questions arise at this point: what does the notion of freedom of education involve? how can the right to this freedom be realized in a particular situation of a particular country? does this right depend on whether this is a democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian early industrial, postindustrial or digital state? moreover, we have faced the problem of distance learning within the frames of the covid-19 pandemic and its restrictions and difficulties – methodological, technological, and psychological. so professor matusov suppositions are crucial concerning the reality we are living in, his ideas about a student’s right to freedom of education are becoming a discussion about whether this freedom is possible in conditions of almost total inability to be free which is not dictated by someone’s malice but determined by the epidemiologic situation in the world. in other circumstances we could have begun by considering the article as a project dealing with traditions of the western pedagogic utopia tradition, which traces its origins to dialogues by plato and cyropaedia by xenophon, to social philosophic utopias of the renaissance (such as the abbey of thelema by rabelais), to numerous projects of the xvii-xviiith centuries (primarily french and english enlightenment), to reformatory constructions in the age of transition from industrial to postindustrial society. do we have to unconditionally support the thesis that the right to freedom in education support is that the right to freedom of a learner is an integral part of all human rights? solutions of the problems linked to obviously, the solutions of the problems related to the implementation of this right depend on the national education system, the economic and intellectual capabilities of a country and the readiness of the professional community and society as a whole to accept this right as legitimate. in this context, historical experience is also important, which allows one to see precedents that may be in demand today in terms of national school reforms or changes in national education systems in the era of crises and revolutions. but no less, and perhaps more important, are personal stories of those who, at different periods of the world upheavals, gained their own experience in getting education as a result of their conscious choice and selection of certain body of knowledge (from benjamin franklin and jack london to steve jobs and bill gates). in this regard, it seems quite natural that reflection on the article by professor matusov made us think of mikhail bakhtin, whose ideas play an increasingly important role in modern social and educational theory and practice (see matusov 2019; osovsky 2018; chernetsova, maslova, salski 2018; chernetsova, maslova 2019). speaking about bakhtin’s biography, it’s difficult to resist temptation to build a construction related to the terms of bakhtin’s early philosophy “i-for-myself” and “i-for-the other”, replacing “i” with the term “education”. “education-for-myself” and “education-for-the-other” – how do they correlate in bakhtin’s life? how do they interact? where do they match? comment on text eugene matusov: i think that these are super-important questions that must be addressed in a future separate work. comment on text eugene matusov: i love these very helpful terms. thanks for coining them! education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf73 "education-for-myself": mikhail bakhtin’s experience a brilliant thinker mikhail bakhtin creates himself, without going through a single formal educational institution, gaining his philosophical, wider-intellectual view of the world and culture via exploration of scientific heritage created in previous eras, and thereby he demonstrates the highest degree of freedom of education, the right which he could realize due to the circumstances of his own life, as we try to show. the facts of bakhtin's early biography are not supported by a lot of documentary evidence. biographers, including michael holquist and katerina clark (clark & holquist 1984), semyon konkin (konkin 1984; konkin & konkina 1993), vladimir laptun (laptun, 1993; laptun & tihanov 2018), svetlana dubrovskaya (dubrovskaya 2017), nikolai nikolaev (nikolaev 1998; 2017) and the best of bakhtin’s biographers, the creator of dialog. carnival. chronotope journal nikolai pankov (pan’kov 2010), do not give definitive answers to the question of what the level of bakhtin’s formal education was. the only document that has been preserved in bakhtin’s archive and that confirms his formal right to conduct teaching is a candidate of philological sciences diploma, received in 1952, that is 6 years after defending his dissertation on rabelais (see dubrovskaya 2014). no other documents on education were found by researchers. there is no doubt that if these documents existed, they would have been preserved in the family archive, as was his wife’s gymnasium certificate kept in it. in the modern bakhtin studies, there is a tendency to speculate that bakhtin had not formally received even secondary education. the only document available dates back to 1912: mikhail is 16 and a half years old, and, having received a commendation for success in studying in his fourth year of the classical gymnasium1, but being two years late compared to his peers, he is transferred to the fifth year. it is easy to calculate, taking into account requirements of the educational system in those days and at a normal pace of studying, bakhtin must have completed his full eight-year course of gymnasium in 1916 at the age of 20. finishing high school at that age was not something exceptional (for instance, a prominent russian medievalist and literary critic, the author of perhaps the best review of bakhtin’s problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, professor peter bitsilli left odessa gymnasium at the age of 20 due to his illness). but evidence of bakhtin’s further training in gymnasium cannot be found, and it seems plausible to conclude that he received all his extensive knowledge in humanities only by means of self-education. it should be pointed out that traditions of homeschooling, originating in the bakhtins family, contributed to this. according to the recollections of his elder brother nicolay, boys already in childhood were fond of the classical age poetry and culture, under the supervision of a german bonne, they performed scenes from the homeric "iliad" in the german language, were absorbed by classical russian literature, and argued about serious philosophical subjects (bakhtin 1963, 1). according to bakhtin himself, by the age of 14 he had read all of dostoevsky, read i. kant in german, a little later got acquainted with the treatises by s. kierkegaard and even wanted to learn danish in order to compare the german translations and original texts: “i already knew dostoevsky at the age of eleven-twelve. and a little later, at the age of twelve or thirteen, i already began to read serious classical books. in particular, i knew kant very early, i started reading his “the critique of pure reason” very early <...> i read him in german <...> in russian, i only read “prolegomenas”. “prolegomenas” translated by vladimir solovyov. this was what i read.” young bakhtin’s concentration on philosophy and history of culture, comprehension of world and russian classics was largely determined by a serious illness: “i had a disease in childhood <...> which, in essence, still has not somehow left me. this is called osteomyelitis” (bakhtin 2002, 41). 1 in prerevolutionary russia, as a rule, children, of the privileged classes entered “the classical gymnasium” at the age of 10 and graduated at 18, gaining the right to enter the university. due to illness, bakhtin failed a year twice, thereby seriously falling behind his peers. education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf74 the experience of bakhtin as a teenager can be a convincing illustration of what professor matusov says about homeschooling as a form of fulfilling freedom of education. the bakhtin brothers, with only a year age gap, were so close psychologically that the elder’s university life could not but change mikhail's attitude to the gymnasium. although in conversations with victor duvakin he shows affection speaking about the gymnasium years, he is much more enthusiastic about what happened to him at universities. here we are again embarking on making assumptions, but there is no doubt that bakhtin knew the university life of odessa and petrograd very well. it is difficult to say how often he appeared in university classrooms, apparently trying to attend lectures of those professors that were of particular interest to him; but the very fact of bakhtin’s communication with university teachers is undeniable. there is also important official evidence. for instance, one of the greatest russian linguists, was academician viktor vinogradov, whose ideas were criticized in many bakhtin’s works, which was well known to vinogradov. however, speaking in support of bakhtin’s dissertation at a meeting of the higher attestation committee, vinogradov noted: “bakhtin is almost my leningrad university friend” (see osovsky 2017). in bakhtin’s memoirs, remarkable details have been preserved of his conversation with a famous psychologist and teacher, the head of the department of philosophy of odessa university, professor nikolai lange. it is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that an experienced teacher and a 19-year-old boy are having a conversation as equals: “he was a great professor <...> but, for example, when, as i remember, i asked him – since i started reading philosophical books very early in the original, in german, – i asked him regarding hermann cohen – this is the head of the marburg school <...> i asked him if this was a solid book. he replied to me: “it seems pretty solid.” that means he did not read it. and moreover, it seemed to me that he knew the name of hermann cohen only by hearsay.” the department of philosophy of petrograd university becomes for bakhtin completion of his "neo-kantian universities", the school where his own philosophical thinking is finally burnished and a very independent and original prospective thinker is prepared: "in general, the department of philosophy was very interesting and very lively <...> the department head was alexander ivanovich vvedensky <...> he was a strict, consistent kantian, not even a neo-kantian, but a representative of pure kantianism. this was the head of the department. well, one of associate professors, and later professors, was nikolai onufrievich lossky. it was the most striking and vivid figure at the faculty. he held completely different views. he was the most striking and vivid figure at the faculty. he held completely different views. he was not a kantian, he could even be called anti-kantian. he was an intuitionist” (bakhtin 2002, 63). bakhtin at this time was not only interested in philosophy. he got acquainted with the greatest representatives of petrograd literary life, culture of the silver age2 as a whole, joined various literary circles and associations, attended meetings of religious and philosophical society, home seminars of the greatest philologist and specialist in antiquity tadeusz zelinsky. the lessons of his father-financier are not in vain: he masters practical accounting and, according to some evidence, he even serves in one of the bank branches in petrograd; subsequently, these skills will help him to make a living in exile in kustanai, where he managed to get an economist position in the local consumer union and even to conduct a course in accounting (clark & holquist 1984; konkin & konkina 1993). by the way, the fact he knew german was also useful to him. in the late 1920-s, he began translating the “theories of the novel” by d. lukacs into russian but refused to finish this project when it turned out that the author had radically revised his views. during the war he began to teach not only history, russian, and literature, but also german. 2 the silver age – a period in the history of russian literature and culture, the 1890s – 1910s. it is marked by significant artistic discoveries and achievements, the flourishing of russian symbolism and avant-garde movements in russian poetry, prose and drama, music, religious philosophy. education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf75 bakhtin exercised the right to freedom of education throughout his life, gradually mastering new levels of humanitarian knowledge in the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, moving to new research topics from moral philosophy and aesthetics of verbal creation to problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, theory of the novel, conceptualization of laughter in rabelais, speech genres and dialogue of cultures. "education-for-the-other": the path from nevel to saransk in 1918, fleeing starvation and devastation in the post-revolutionary petrograd, bakhtin moved to nevel, a small town on the border of russia and belarus, where a friend of his elder brother’s, a philosopher and literary critic lev pumpyansky, invited him. bakhtin taught first in the male gymnasium, then in a unified labor school3. he even made a kind of pedagogical career: he was elected as the chairman of the secondary school council. the proceedings of the council meetings discovered by nikolai pankov preserved details of the uncompromising struggle of teachers and students for the right to freedom of education. the nevel school, just like the other schools of soviet russia, survived difficult conditions, when the communist administrative apparatus, extremely unprofessional at the local level and having little to do with education, seeked to impose a new vision of goals and objectives of education. bakhtin and his like-minded friends were trying to resist this dictate. among them one should particularly mention matvei kagan, a ph.d. of marburg university, and a beloved student of hermann cohen. it seems that bakhtin and kagan would agree with the opinion of another russian neo-kantian philosopher and educator sergei hessen: “...enforcement, whose true origin should be sought not in the external world but in the internal world of a child, can again be destroyed only by the internal power of a person that can withstand all the enforcement, and not by simply abolishing this enforcement, always partially if necessary. it is precisely because enforcement can really be cancelled only by the very gradually growing personality of a person, liberty is not a fact, but a purpose, not a given, but the task of education. and if so, then the very alternative to free or forced education fails, liberty and enforcement are not opposed but mutually penetrating principles” (hessen 1923, 57). in the cited book basics of pedagogy. introduction to applied philosophy, published in 1923 in berlin, but conceived and started in tomsk in 1918–1919, the largest theoretician of pedagogy of the russian émigrés set forth his vision of the most important problems of education. it is noteworthy that the first chapters of the book are devoted to the problems of free education and the balance of discipline and freedom in the educational process. hessen's book was highly praised by the european pedagogy and ranked among the most important for the pedagogical audience of czechoslovakia, poland, yugoslavia and italy in the 1930s (see osovsky & kirzhaeva 2017). among the issues discussed at the school council meetings in nevel, were the issue of curriculum changes, the selection of new subjects, and the optimization of the educational process. it is significant that despite the ideological dictatorship, the council defended the right of students to comprehensive education: "representative of the department of public education “comrade shiryakov” proposed “a new study of socialism”. however, “comrade bakhtin” said that “while teaching sociology, it will also be necessary to look in detail at the history of socialism, and therefore there is no need to single out doctrine of socialism as a special subject”. the participants of the meeting supported bakhtin. then kagan spoke in favor of starting teaching english at school, and gorbatsky – in favor of teaching latin, fencing and boxing. the meeting approved these subjects as optional for those who wish” (pan’kov 1998, 100). other forms of work with students were also used in nevel, for example, mass theatrical performances4, which were popular in the immediate post-revolutionary years. thus, the nevel newspaper molot in the issue of may 27, 1919 3 the type of a comprehensive seven-years school in soviet russia in 1918-1920s 4 one of the most popular forms of the revolutionary and cultural propaganda. it needed a large number of non-professional actors and was organized for the working masses in the open air. education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf76 reports that “an open-air performance of the greek tragedy by sophocles oedipus in colonna5 is being prepared. students from city and county labor schools, numbering over 500, are involved. the production is directed by experts on hellas and greece comr. bakhtin and comr. pumpyansky” (maksimovskaya 1996, 150). the most important form of "education-for-the other" for bakhtin himself are the public and private lectures. while in petrograd he was mainly a listener, in nevel, vitebsk and leningrad he was a frequent and in-demand lecturer. it should be mentioned that it also helped bakhtin to make his living, since in the 1920-1930s he basically did not have a permanent job. the molot newspaper preserved evidence of a wide range of topics and plots that bakhtin spoke on to a very diverse audience. among these talks were on friedrich nietzsche’s attitude to christianity, on the meaning of life, leonardo’s world view, chekhov's personality and writing, russian national character in literature and philosophy. bakhtin is even more in demand as a lecturer in vitebsk, where he moved in the fall of 1920 to teach at the people’s conservatory and at the local institute of public education. the vitebsk journal art in 1921 announces the lecture at the newly opened club of the union of art workers: “m.m. bakhtin on the topic art and reality and k.s. malevich on the new art and production” (see osovsky 1993). the name of the outstanding innovative artist kazimir malevich next to the name of bakhtin is the best confirmation of the role that bakhtin played in culture of vitebsk at that time. according to the recollections of listeners, the topics of lectures delivered by bakhtin from september 1920 to april 1921 included aesthetics, new russian philosophy, ethics, culture, literature and the latest russian poetry. having arrived from vitebsk to leningrad in 1924, bakhtin immediately began lecturing for a limited audience, close to him in spirit, which included mostly friends and acquaintances. bakhtin’s faithful friend, world-famous pianist, heroine of the black comedy the death of stalin, maria yudina wrote in october of that year to yulalia casanovich: “i welcome you to the lecture by m. bakhtin about dostoevsky this week, i will inform you about the exact time” (yudina, p. 92). a great example of the role that bakhtin's lectures played in the learning process of his audience at different stages of their lives can be found in rakhil mirkina’s story. she got acquainted with bakhtin in high school in vitebsk, when she and her sister attended bakhtin’s home seminar on russian literature: “mikhal mikhalych gave excellent lectures. he was a born speaker with a very expressive, beautiful voice. his speech flew free and relaxed. he never used notes, plans, neither did he prepare quotes. some of the heaviness inherent in his printed works disappeared in his oral speeches. he created an impression of a brilliant improviser, enthusiastic and emotional. he recited verses in a chant, and it seemed that it was not a lecturer or reciter who read them, but a poet – the author himself. bakhtin, of course, took into account the composition of the audience, but giving popular lectures to the general public, he never simplified anything. this ability to combine simplicity of presentation with deep analysis was also characteristic of mikhal mikhalych” (mirkina 1993, 94). having already become students at the leningrad institute of art history, the mirkin sisters found bakhtin in leningrad to continue their studies in bakhtin’s seminars that he would teach specifically for them. from the late 1940 – early 1960s, bakhtin continued to lecture in the so-called cultural education system in saransk, giving lectures for members of the union of writers, mordovian branch of the vto (allrussian theatrical society), school for the music college teachers, and students of various evening 5 the text is full of reporter’s mistakes: from the russian ‘колонна’ /kəlona/ which has similar spelling with ‘колона’ /kəlona/ the russian translation of the original ‘colonus’; ‘hellas and greece’ instead of greece; pompyansky instead of pumpyansky education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf77 courses. bakhtin was quite free in the choice of material for his lectures, which can easily be demonstrated in the published lecture on the marxist-leninist aesthetics of 1958. along with quite traditional figures from the history of european aesthetics of the classical era, it included theodor lipps with his “theory of empathy” and even sigmund freud with his psychoanalysis6. this freedom, as we might assume, had a special value for bakhtin himself, who exercised in his lectures his own right to freedom of education and freedom of pedagogical expression, as he said, “on this barren ground, under this unfree sky”. it is important to emphasize bakhtin’s special attitude to this type of speech because he did not assess his lectures for the student audience as very good, acknowledging their being dependent on his general ideological attitudes in private conversations, for example, with the literary critic alexander chudakov (see chudakov 2013). to summarize, we would note that one or more personal stories, of course, are not enough to draw a final conclusion on how an individual model of freedom of education should be implemented today. we agree with professor matusov’s opinion that the right to freedom of education should be realized on the level of personal responsibility of everyone, which is, perhaps, another point of contact with the philosophy of mikhail bakhtin. the right to freedom of education should be fulfilled through the consensus of an individual and the society, an individual’s understanding of what “education-for-the individual” is, the society’s understanding of what “education-for-the society” is. it is here that mutual understanding and the dialogue developing on its basis should arise. references bachtin, n. (1963). lectures and essays. birmingham. bakhtin, m. m. (1997). sobraniye sochineniy [collected works]. moscow: russkiye slovari. bakhtin, m. m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act (v. liapunov, trans. 1st ed.). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. & duvakin, v. d. (2002). m. m. bakhtin: besedy s v. d. duvakinym [m. m. bakhtin: conversations with duvakin]. moscow: soglasiye. chernetsova e. v. & maslova e.g., the alien city chronotope within the scope of toni morrison’s jazz // 3l: language, linguistics, literature. 2019, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 43-54. chernetsova e. v, maslova e. g, salski l. implementation of integrative approach in teaching american studies in institutions of higher education // integration of education, 2018, vol. 22, № 1, pp. 120-133. chudakov, a. p. (2013). sbornik pamyati [memory collection]. moskva: yazyki slavyanskoy kul'tury, pp. 109-158. clark, k. & holquist, m. (1984). mikhail bakhtin. cambridge: harvard university press. dubrovskaya, s. (2014). “gogol' i rable” kak syuzhet otechestvennogo literaturovedeniya 1940–1980-kh gg. [“gogol and rabelais” as the plot of russian literary criticism of the 1940–1980s] // izvestiya rossiyskoy akademii nauk. seriya literatury i yazyka, 73 (6), pp. 62-71. 6 https://bakhtin.mrsu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2020-%e2%84%963-%d0%9a%d0%bb%d1%8e%d0%b5%d0%b2%d0%b0%d0%98.%d0%92.pdf education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf78 dubrovskaya, s. (2017). s.d. er'zya i n.i. shibakov: novyye materialy po istorii kul'tury i iskusstva mordovii 1950-70-kh godov [s.d. erzya and n.i. shibakov: new materials on the history of culture and art of mordovia in the 1950s and 70s] // vestnik ugrovedeniya, 7, 3 (30), pp. 169-171. hessen, s. (1923). osnovy pedagogiki. vvedeniye v prikladnuyu filosofiyu [fundamentals of pedagogy. introduction to applied philosophy]. berlin: slovo. konkin, s. s. (1984) put' uchenogo: stranitsy zhizni i tvorchestva m. m. bakhtina [the path of the scientist: pages of life and work of m. m. bakhtin] // grani: literaturno-khudozhestvennyy sbornik. saransk: mordovskoye knizhnoye izdatelstvo, 213-230. konkin, s. s, & konkina, l. s. (1993). mikhail bakhtin: stranitsy zhizni i tvorchestva. [mikhail bakhtin: life and creative work]. saransk. mordovskoye knizhnoye izdatelstvo. laptun, v. i. (1996). perviy priezd m. m. bakhtina v saransk (1936-1937) [the first visit of m.m. bakhtin to saransk (1936-1937)]. nevelskiy sbornik: statyi, pis'ma, vospominaniya [nevel collected works: essays, letters, and memoirs]. st. petersburg, akropol, pp. 61-75. laptun, v. i. (2010). m. m. bakhtin in the 1960s – 1970s: saransk – moscow (from the memories of his friends and colleagues). strannik, 6, pp. 147-152. laptun, v. & tihanov, g. (2018). pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s – early 1960s) // dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | 6, pp. 18-18. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-58057-3. new york: palgrave macmillan. mirkina, r. (1993). bakhtin, as i knew him (young bakhtin) [bakhtin, kakim ya yego znala (molodoy bakhtin)] // dialogue. carnival. chronotope. 1, pp. 92-96. nikolaev, n. (1998). the publication of bakhtin’s heritage as a philological problem [izdaniye naslediya bakhtina kak filologicheskaya problema] // dialog, karnaval, khronotop, 3, pp. 114-157. nikolaev, n. (2017) teptelkin i drugiye v romane konst. vaginova “kozlinaya pesn” [teptyolkin and others in the novel by const. vaginova “goat song”] // literaturnyy fakt, 4, pp. 233-267. osovsky, o. (1993). chelovek. slovo. roman. (nauchnoye naslediye m. m. bakhtina i sovremennost') [person. word. novel. (the scientific heritage of m. m. bakhtin and modernity)]. saransk: rik trio. osovsky, o. (2017). bol'shoye vremya idey: myshleniye m. m. bakhtina skvoz' prizmu sovremennosti [the great time of ideas: the thinking of m. m. bakhtin through the prism of modernity] // russkaya literatura. 1, pp. 252-253. osovsky, o. (2018). the destinies of meta-criticism in the era of mega-crisis // social sciences. 49 (2), pp. 132-143. osovsky, o. & kirzhaeva, v. (2017). с.и. гессен и журнал «русская школа за рубежом»: из истории педагогической журналистики русского зарубежья 1920-х – начала 1930-х [s.i. gessen and the russkaya shkola za rubezhom journal: from the history of the russian émigré pedagogical journalism of the 1920s the beginning of the 1930s] // vestnik tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, filologiya, 48, pp. 202-228. education-for-myself and education-for-the other: the right to freedom of education and mikhail bakhtin’s experience oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.346 | vol. 8 (2020) sf79 pan’kov, n. (1998) архивные материалы о невельском периоде биографии м.м. бахтина // nevelskiy sbornik: statyi, pis’ma, vospominaniya [nevel collected works: essays, letters, and memoirs]. st. petersburg, akropol, pan’kov, n. (2010). voprosy biografii i nauchnogo tvorchestva m. m. bakhtina [questions of biography and scientific creativity of m. m. bakhtin]. moscow: izdatel'stvo moskovskogo universiteta. yudina, m. v. (2006). vysokiy stoykiy dukh. perepiska 1918–1945 gg. [high persistent spirit. correspondence 1918]. moscow: rosspen. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word dialogic analysis vs discourse analysis layout draft-10, 2019-03-06.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e20 dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa tina kullenberg kristianstad university, sweden kelly curtis university of delaware, usa abstract the goal of this article is to compare and contrast dialogic analysis versus discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy to address bakhtin’s quest for “human sciences” and avoid modern traps by positivism and by post-truth. we argue that dialogic analysis belongs to dialogic science, which focuses on studying “the surplus of humanness” (bakhtin, 1991, p. 37). “the surplus of humanness” is “a leftover” from the biologically, socially, culturally, and psychologically given – the typical and general – in the human nature. it is about the human authorship of the ever-unique meaning-making. dialogic analysis involves the heart and mind of the researchers who try to reveal and deepen the meanings of the studied phenomena by addressing and replying to diverse research participants, other scholars, and anticipated readers (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019, in press). we argue that dialogic science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “what does something in question mean to diverse people, including the researchers, and why? how do diverse people address and reply to diverse meanings?” in contrast, traditional, positivistic, science is concerned with meta-inquiries such as, “how things really are? what is evidence for that? how to eliminate any researchers’ subjectivity from the research?” (matusov, 2019, submitted). positivist (and monologic) science focuses on revealing patterns of actions, behaviors, and relationships. we argue that in the study of dialogic pedagogy, it is structural and/or functional discourse analysis that focuses on studying the given and objective aspects of dialogic pedagogy. in the paper, we consider, describe, interpret, and dialogically re-analyze a case of dialogic analysis involving science education coming from david hammer’s and emily van zee’s (2006) book. we also discuss structural and functional discourse analysis of two pedagogical cases, a monologic and a dialogic one, provided by david skidmore (2000). we dialogically re-analyze these two cases and skidmore’s research. we conclude that in research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond, on social sciences in general) both dialogic science (involving dialogic analysis) and positivist science (involving discourse analysis) are unavoidable and needed, while providing the overall different foci of the research. we discuss the appropriateness and the limitations of discourse analysis as predominantly searching for structural-functional patterns in the classroom discourses. we discuss dialogic tensions in the reported dialogues that cannot be captured by discourse analysis search for patterns. finally, we discuss two emerging issues among ourselves: 1) whether discourse analysis is always positivist and 2) how these two analytic approaches complement each other while doing research on dialogic pedagogy (and beyond). issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e21 eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar in philadelphia, usa. she studies meaning making in human development, dialogic educational relationships and events, democracy in education, dialogic teacher orientation, the role of imagination, drama, play and critical dialogue in education. in her studies, she is developing a dialogic sociocultural paradigm, inspired by a bakhtinian dialogic orientation. her articles were published by "mind, culture, activity journal", "learning, culture and social interaction", and as book chapters in books on play, education, and democracy. her most recent publication is: marjanovicshane et al, (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological democratic dialogue in classrooms. learning, culture and social interaction. tina kullenberg holds a doctor of philosophy in education, currently working at kristianstad university (sweden) as a lecturer with teacher students from various programs, and the master's program in educational science. her research focuses on pedagogical communication, applying dialogic and sociocultural perspectives on teaching and learning. lately she has been especially engaged in bakhtininspired approaches to education. she also has a special interest in addressing democratic issues with a relational lens, for example, exploring the intricate dynamics of power-relations in educational dialogues between teachers and students or peers, premises for student agency, and other institutionally embedded dilemmas or opportunities in schooling of different types. moreover, she has a background from the area of music education, in theory and practice. kelly curtis is currently a phd student in mathematics education at the university of delaware with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in mathematics education from brigham young university. she has taught mathematics and mathematics content courses for pre-service teachers at the secondary and college level for six years (in utah, colorado, and now delaware). she is currently working on her dissertation which has to do with how cognitive demand of mathematical tasks affects the way that teachers and students interact around mathematics. she wants to help teachers learn how to improve their teaching skills. she is especially interested in mathematical discourse and how teachers can implicitly send messages to students about what it means to do mathematics and be good at mathematics. acknowledgements we are thankful to mikhail gradovski, tara ratnam, david hammer, and emily van zee for providing their critical feedback on previous drafts of this manuscript. ��� introduction in our observation, broadly defined “dialogic pedagogy,” which emphasizes the importance of dialogue for education, has mainly, but not exclusively, been studied discursively. since the mid1970s, discourse analysis – i.e., finding structural and/or functional patterns of classroom interactions – has been extremely helpful for problematizing conventional monologic pedagogy. specifically, the discovery and critique of “the triadic exchange” (sinclair & coulthard, 1975) – when the teacher initiates a discourse by dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e22 asking students a disinterested, quizzing question, a student replies, and then the teacher evaluates and/or provides a follow up guidance – set innovative educators and educational researchers on a task of finding alternative pedagogies, evaluated through discourse analysis. in our paper, we challenge this predominant tacit conviction that dialogic pedagogy can be studied exclusively or even principally through discourse analysis. in gist, we claim that dialogue, and especially authorial ontological dialogue, involves and is defined by the participants’ authorship of meaning. thus, we argue that the key for studying dialogic pedagogy should be dialogic analysis of authorial meaning making (i.e., the authorship of meaning making based on people’s unique and diverse voices in dialogue), based on particular concerns and attractions by the participants. we argue that authorial meaning can be studied only in a dialogue through and with other authorial meaning about their concerns, observations, interests, excitements, inquiries, values, and so on. students’ and teachers’ educational authorship of meaning making can be mainly studied by and through the researchers’ evaluative authorship of the original meaning-making by the researched embedded in a timeless big critical dialogue, thus involving the researcher in further dialogues with both academic and educational community (and even beyond). dialogic analysis is different from other kinds of qualitative analytic methods in that the researcher assumes an equal rights perspective to the studied meaning-making event, effectively positioning oneself as a participant in the primary dialogue, rather than as a final authority with a bird’s-eye view or as opinions, juxtaposed among other opinions. although discourse analysis can assist this process, it cannot lead the research. we define discourse as a semiotic flow of signs signifying to the participants and observers what is salient for them in the situation while not being tangibly and physically present in it. the discourse signifiers may involve such material objects as dress, landscape, body shape, accent, words, intonations, the structure of interactive turns, gestures, behaviors (and its scripts), age, skin color, odor (or its absence), and so on (e.g., see a discourse analysis of the dress and manerisms of bikers at a bar to be accepted as a member of the bikers community, gee, 2011). discourse signified may involve such ephemeral and intangible aspects1 as history, class, gender, power, recognized types of relationship, sexual orientation, used speech genres, ideology, profession, family or community status, activity role, and so on. in contrast, dialogue, involves a special quality of human relations, based on the principle of “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). at the core of this (ontological) dialogue, argued bakhtin, is authorship of meaning. meaning is defined as a dialogic relationship between an interested question asked by one person and a serious reply by another person in a broader sense (bakhtin, 1986). in genuine education, the questioning person is primarily the student, while the responding person may or may not be the teacher. in educational research guided by dialogic analysis, the questioning person is the researcher while the responding person is the researched, although in a critical dialogue of dialogic analysis they can easily switch their roles because in dialogic analysis, any authored meaning can become a subject of further questioning. in our view, this is what might be behind of “a plurality of consciousness, with equal rights” – a right to be questioned by the research participants and beyond. we argue that all types of discourse analysis2 are mainly about recognizing structural and/or functional patterns of discourse – patterns that have some relevancy for the researchers (and, at times, beyond the research community). by “structural patterns,” we mean a pattern of organization of some elements of the discourse like conversational turns, roles, power relations, mediational tools, rules, norms, semiotics, narrative structures, voices, linguistics elements (e.g., grammar, genres, registers), and so on. 1 this is what probably soviet philosopher evald ilyenkov unconventionally refers as “the ideal” (ilyenkov, 2009). 2 it can be interesting if a reader can find any exception from our claim. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e23 by “functional patterns” we mean a pattern of the relationship between outcomes/effects of the discourse and means responsible for these outcomes. functional patterns of discourse may involve relational breakdown, agreement, disagreement, power domination, silencing, arriving at truth, recognition as a full member of a community or a group, decision making, arriving at preset curricular endpoint, doing “dialogic pedagogy,” and so on. the studied structural-functional patterns can be preset or emergent in a discourse analysis. trappes-lomax (2004) discussed a diversity of linguistic and interdisciplinary discourse analysis, discourse analysis may, broadly speaking, be defined as the study of language viewed communicatively and/or of communication viewed linguistically. any more detailed spelling out of such a definition typically involves reference to concepts of language in use, language above or beyond the sentence, language as meaning in interaction, and language in situational and cultural context. depending on their particular convictions and affiliations – functionalism, structuralism, social interactionism, etc. – linguists will tend to emphasize one, or some, rather than others in this list (p. 135, the italics are original). in our judgment, discourse analysis in all its all variations focuses on abstracting structural-functional patterns, while considering the very notions of “structural and functional patterns” broadly defined, beyond narrow definitions of structuralism and functionalism. we claim that the birthmark of discourse analysis, as such, is to treat dialogue as it, as a thing among other things, as an object of analysis existing independently and outside of the researchers studying it, which can be viewed by well-informed and well-trained scholars in the same way (cf., “intercoder reliability”). discourse analysis objectifies the subjectivities of the participants by trying to eliminate the subjectivities of the researchers, and especially their authorial subjective judgments (of course, never successfully). thus, trappes-lomax sees differences in researchers’ subjectivities as a problem of validity to be solved using diverse methods, one way of dealing with subjectivity is through multiplicity of approach. this is usually referred to as triangulation and is especially characteristic of ethnographic approaches. triangulation is generally understood to refer to the use of different types or sources of data (for example a participant’s account in addition to the analyst’s account) as a means of cross-checking the validity of findings, but may also refer to multiple investigators, multiple theories, or multiple methods (denzin, 1978), (trappes-lomax, 2004, p. 141). in positivist-minded research, disagreements among researchers about perceived patterns of discourse have to be reconciled into agreements. these attempts to take out the researchers’ subjectivity are, in our view, attempts to take a bird’seye perspective on the given reality and to make it as pure as possible – even and especially when discourse analysis focuses on various issues of human relationships, perspectives and identities. thus, for example, in his classical book on discourse analysis, james gee defines it in the following way, “discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities” (gee, 2011, p. i). he claims that discourse analysis focuses on meaning, “the approach [to discourse analysis] in this book looks at meaning as an integration of ways of saying (informing), doing (action), and being (identity), and grammar as a set of tools to bring about this integration” (gee, 2011, p. 8). in our judgment, gee defines “meaning” monologically as a particular pattern that has the function of an integration of informing, doing, being, and “grammar of tools.” monologic “meaning” is always a pattern, a thing, which is often located in mediation, gestures, intonations, behaviors, actions, dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e24 signs, words, sentences, utterances, networks, and systems. this pattern seeking is often related to a structuralist and/or functionalist approach to language use in a situated interaction, focusing on studying either structures of a discourse or functions it services for some activities or both. linell (1998) describes it in the following way, although within the framework of “dialogism,” which, in our view can be more accurately called “discursivism”3, discourse and discursive practices are themselves highly structured. it is possible to generalize across singular situations to define patterns, sequential structures, routines, recurrent strategies and situation definitions (framings), activity types and communicative genres, as well as more traditional linguistic unit and rules. but this is largely structure within discursive practices, rather than structure apart from, above and before discourse. moreover, it is first and foremost an organization of social actions, and not a structure pertaining exclusively to language and linguistic forms. this is of course not to deny that there is a formal structure of e.g. the syntax of spoken language as it appears in actual discourse. within a comprehensive dialogism, structuralist and functionalist perspectives could penetrate and complement each other (linell, 1998, p. 5, italics are in original). in discourse analysis, monologic “meaning” is a semiotic thing, a semiotic pattern. thus, gee (2011, pp. 8-10) exemplifies the discursive “meaning” by two sentences about hornworms showing that one sentence belongs to an everyday discourse, shaped by certain cultural practices, while the other belongs to a scientific biological discourse, shaped by (positivist) science practice. gee convincingly argues that these two discourses generate different functional patterns of integration of informing, doing, and being – i.e., different discursive “meanings” (or better to say functions). essentially, espoused discourse analysis equates “meaning” with a particular pattern recognition. of course, in practice discourse analysis also usually involves dialogic meaning-making of the recognized structural-functional patterns as well. it often has genuinely interested inquiries and question addressing, at least, the academic community, in which this discourse analysis is situated. it is often guided by the researchers’ own genuine emerging interest, redefining their initial inquiries and questions. discourse analysis researchers often try to make sense of the new patterns they find and consider their implications. however, discourse analysis researchers often feel uneasy with their own dialogic meaning making because it undermines the objectivity, generalizability, and validity of their research by positioning the researchers as subjective unique authors of their dialogic meaning making rather than as objective scholars of a given reality (denzin & lincoln, 2005). when discourse analysis is used to study dialogic pedagogy, it focuses on looking for, identifying, and coding certain structural and/or functional patterns that are attributed to dialogic pedagogy by the researchers. these (mostly) functional patterns might involve “dialogic instruction,” “dialogic enquiry,” “dialogic teaching,” “heteroglossia,” “intertextuality” (or “heterodiscursia”), “high students-teacher talk ratio,” “asking open-ended questions,” “the teacher’s uptake of student ideas,” “cycles of critique,” and so on, drawing mainly on the theoretical ideas of bakhtin on the dialogic nature of language, a number of authors have stressed the educative potential of teacher-student interaction which enables students to play an active part in shaping the agenda of classroom discourse. examples include: dialogic instruction, characterised by the teacher's uptake of student ideas, authentic questions and the opportunity for students to modify the topic (nystrand, 1997); dialogic enquiry, which stresses the potential of collaborative group work and peer assistance to promote mutually responsive learning in the zone of proximal development (wells, 1999); dialogical pedagogy, in which students are invited to retell stories in their own words, using paraphrase, speculation and counter-fictional utterances 3 however, per linell (personal communication, december 2018) does not agree with our characterization of his approach. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e25 (skidmore, 2000); and dialogic teaching, which is collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful (alexander, 2004) (skidmore, 2016, p. 98, the italics are original). these structural-functional patterns of the studied students-teacher classroom discourse are both conceptualized and operationalized to be coded for presence or absence the listed structural-functional patterns of dialogic pedagogy. what is important for our discussion here is that researchers of discourse analysis do not need to participate with their mind and heart in the ideas discussed by the research participants beyond the coding, interpretation of findings, and making implications, which often involves a minimum of their ontological engagement with the ideas raised in the studied discourse and a minimum of their dialogic contact with their research participants. researchers’ participation with their heart and mind in the studied phenomenon (i.e., ontological engagement) means reporting the researchers’ personal feelings, authorial thoughts, personal experiences, personal connections, authorial descriptions, and authorial judgments in a response to the observed phenomenon and the research participants’ contributions (matusov et al., 2019, in press). discourse analysis researchers do not usually engage in addressing or replying to the research participants, at least not in an explicit and legitimate way. they are often not in a dialogic ontological contact with them, neither intellectually nor emotionally. in contrast, in dialogic analysis, researchers are active co-participants in the dialogue with the researched participants and their ideas. the data collection process adopts dialogical approach (sullivan, 2011) which attempts to form dialogues among the participants as well as between the participants and researchers to explore the research question. sullivan wrote that dialogical approach is concerned with the subjectivity of data analysis. this approach takes bakhtin’s (1986, 1999) perspective that “ideas are exchanged but ideas are actually lived rather than abstract and are full of personal values and judgements” (sullivan, 2011, p. 2), which attempts to form dialogues among the participants as well as between the participants and researchers to explore the research question. in this article we present, analyze, and compare dialogic analysis and discourse analysis. we first focus on an existing dialogic analysis study of a dialogic lesson in science with first-grade children discussing gravity by hammer and van zee (2006), that we define as a case of “tired gravity”, case #1. in the process of our dialogic re-analysis of this pedagogical event, we enter into agreements and disagreements with the original researchers, david hammer and emily van zee. we express puzzlements and have many questions for them and for the first-grade teacher whose science education class was recorded and described by them. next we present and dialogically re-analyze two cases presented by david skidmore (2000) as cases of discourse analyses (cases #2 and #3). one of the cases (case#2) represents skidmore’s discourse analysis of monologic pedagogy in a language art lesson in a multicultural primary school where the teacher quizzed the students to determine how well they comprehended a story “rocky’s fox.” the other case (case #3) represents skidmore’s discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy with the 5-6th grade students discussing their views about characters in a story “blue riding hood,” a parody of the “red riding hood” that makes all the characters behave in rather questionable ways. in our subsequent dialogic reanalysis of these cases, we discuss the appropriateness and the limits of discourse analysis as predominantly searching for structural-functional patterns in the classroom discourses. we discuss dialogic tensions in the reported dialogues that cannot be captured by discourse analysis search for patterns. we question david skidmore’s conclusions about dialogicity of the case#3, based solely on the discursive patterns that are coded as dialogic, without entering into the critical dialogue about authorial meaningmaking between the teacher and the students and about the discussed story. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e26 throughout our dialogic analyses of all three cases, we address the teachers, the researchers (the authors of the cases), the involved children (students), and the discussed texts/ideas (and their authors). we also entered into dialogic disagreements amongst ourselves, when we, the four authors, have differences in interpreting transcripts, or question each other’s views of what was happening in that class and what we think it all meant to the teaches and different children. and we invite the readers to join us in this dialogue – we are looking forward for our future readers’ replies to this paper. we conclude the article with presenting our new questions, quandaries, agreements and differences among ourselves (the authors) about dialogic and discourse analysis. this unfinalized, still open, nature of the research conclusions marks this research as uniquely dialogical and distinguishes it from other qualitative research which also recognize personal meanings4. dialogic analysis: case#1 of “tired gravity” as an example of dialogic analysis, we chose a case of “tired gravity” from a terrific book “seeing science” by david hammer and emily van zee (2006) describing, analyzing, and promoting dialogic pedagogy in science education. the book includes many lessons5 of teachers of diverse grades involving their students in deep, more or less free, conversations about diverse physical phenomena. the lessons were then presented to teachers during professional development workshops to “see science” in the students’ free conversations. the researchers also interviewed the author teachers about their lessons and their decision making. the main goal of both the research and pedagogical practices described in the book was to promote professional dialogues among teachers and to recognize and imagine new teachinglearning opportunities, rather than to criticize author teachers. hammer and van zee argued in the book that the major problem of traditional science education (and probably beyond) is failing to recognize science in students’ everyday thinking and conversations about natural phenomena. with a reference to albert einstein, they define science as refined discursive thinking on possible mechanisms – “tangible causes and effects” (p. 6) – behind natural phenomena. the entire case of “tired gravity” in the first-grade classroom took exactly the first 9 minutes of the day#2 lesson (21 minutes total on the video accompanied with the book). paradoxically, it was the most prominent “case” in ana’s and eugene’s reading of the book. we wrote, “paradoxically” because, arguably, this “case” was the least developed by hammer and van zee, who skipped it in most of their workshop seminars, “in almost all seminars we skip this segment, in order to get to what comes later. it is mostly made up of the teacher trying the experiment herself in front of the children. at the end there's some joking about how ‘maybe the gravity's tired’ (lines 212-25), which could be interesting to think about. what's the joke? what understanding goes into making it or finding it amusing?” (p. 90). however, david hammer and emily van zee seem to be clearly intrigued with this case, since they actually keep referring to it in their introductory chapters. the “tired gravity” and what the teacher, was doing to guide the children, attracted a lot of attention, but at the same time it seems that it was rather confusing and made david and emily not sure what to do with it. david and emily, we wonder what the teachers said about it when hammer and van zee presented it in a few workshop-seminars. this episode has initially become a case of interest for me (matusov, 2018b) and then for the other authors of this article. we respectfully disagree with david hammer and emily van zee’s interpretation that the episode can be reduced to the teacher’s demonstration followed by the children’s joke. we were also attracted and even fascinated by the author teacher’s immediate reflection on her decision making during the episode (p. 78) 4 we are thankful tara ratnam for making this point clear for us. 5 the book came with videos of the lessons and their transcripts. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e27 and then her postponed, arguably contradictory, profound reflection promoted by her later conversations with other teachers (p. 78) (see below). question for david, emily, and the teacher, what were these conversations about? do you remember? as a former schoolteacher of physics, a dialogic pedagogy educator, and a scholar of dialogic pedagogy, i (eugene matusov) immediately recognized an importance and richness of this dramatic dialogic event that i conceptualized as first the teacher inviting her students for a genuine dialogue, then silencing them, and then critically rethinking her guidance. the other three authors of this paper agreed. elsewhere, my second author here (ana marjanovic-shane), some other colleagues, practitioners and scholars of dialogic pedagogy, and i developed a research on “idea-dying out” in dialogic pedagogy, in which we studied cases when students’ ideas were extinguished in a classroom discussion (marjanovic-shane, meacham, choi, lopez, & matusov, 2019). we (the first and second authors) think that the case of “tired gravity” belongs to this phenomenon of the teacher’s silencing the children’s ongoing dialogue. so, why did we choose this particular case to illustrate and engage our readers in dialogic analysis of dialogic pedagogy? we have the following three main reasons. first, the case generates a strong excitement in all of us. usually, it is so difficult to find a teaching case where a teacher allows students to speak freely and listens to them very carefully and mindfully. we also had a strong desire to discuss it among ourselves and with david hammer, emily van zee, dialogic researchers of dialogic pedagogy, with whom we both agree and disagree and with the author-teacher, whose contradictory and creative reflections we found very thought provoking. in other words, this case powerfully “sucks” us into a dialogic analysis of dialogic pedagogy and hopefully we will be able to promote engagement of our readers in it. second, in contrast to more developed cases of dialogic analysis such as, for example, by joe tobin and his colleagues in their project “preschool in three cultures: japan, china, and the us” (tobin, davidson, & wu, 1989; tobin, hsueh, & karasawa, 2009), hammer and van zee focused on a) dialogic pedagogy (in their version) and b) academic curriculum and instruction. arguably, the most attractive cases (for us) of dialogic analysis by tobin focused on a) conventional pedagogy and b) classroom management. third, the case of “tired gravity” is at par with david skidmore’s cases #2 and #3 (see below) of discourse analysis involving elementary school students. now we turn to providing a description and our interpretation and critical meaning making of the case. on the day #2 of the “falling objects” lesson in the first grade, the teacher started her lesson asking her students to report about their experiments with a falling sheet of paper versus a falling book from the same height letting them fall at the same time. the students were very enthusiastic to reply providing all possible answers the outcome of the experiment6: 1 teacher: what, what happened when you dropped the book and the piece of paper at the same time, at the same height? huh, what happened? [students raising hands] ok, ebony, why don’t you go ahead and begin… […] 4 ebony: to me7, first, the paper fell first. 6 the following fragments are from hammer and van zee (2006) book’s accompanying appendix of transcripts of the lessons. for the most part we summarize the teacher’s and the children’s dialogue, but we tried to preserve the actual voices directly quoting them, when absolutely important for our dialogic analysis. for the full transcript see hammer and van zee (2006). since the book is accompanied with dvd with the videotaped lessons, we enriched some of the transcribed verbal contributions by adding descriptions of non-verbal communication in the presented transcript. they are marked with the italics. 7 bold is ours. we made some text bold to highlight issues we later discuss, so that the reader can easily be guided to the actual parts of the dialogue that we refer to in our analyses. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e28 several children, jorge, brianna, and henok, disputed ebony’s claim, insisting that to them the book fell first. to each one of them, ebony replied that (11)8 “… the paper fell first to me!” the children continued asking ebony what happened to him and telling each other what happened to them. jorge asked if that the book fell first, or the book and the paper fell at the same time. ebony insisted that for him the paper fell first. henok and ebony had a small dispute about what fell first, ebony claiming that it was paper. at one moment, allison addressed the teacher telling her that, (18) “to ebony the paper fell first.” but the teacher let the children’s dialogue continue without replying to allison. most of the students disagreed with ebony, claiming that the book fell first. at one point, jorge said, (22) “our paper—our paper goes slowly. it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit [out of practice?].” rachell added that for her and julio the book and the paper were tied twice. ebony, allison and rachel had a small side discussion about what it means to be “tied.” ebony and some other students clarified that it meant the paper and the book fell at the same time. allison emphatically agreed that it was the same case with her, exclaiming “same with me!” four times. at that point the joint group discussion disintegrated into smaller groups and pairs who created parallel dialogues creating inaudible noise and laughter. the teacher called their attention saying, 36 teacher: so, what i’m hearing is that we have one person that said when he did it, that— […] —that when he dropped at the same time, from the same height— 40 brianna: the paper fell first 41 teacher: [turning to ebony]—that the paper fell first. now do you mean it hit the ground first, or it just started to fall first? 43 ebony: it hit the ground first. 44 teacher: so, you’re saying the paper hit the ground first, and then the book hit the ground. [ebony nods his head in affirmation.] then we have two other friends who are saying that the book and the paper hit the ground at the same time. 48 rachel: twice! 49 students: yeah! twice! 50 teacher: twice. you did it twice and that’s what you noticed. 51 allison: yeah, me too! 52 teacher: ok. the teacher established firmly for herself and the students that the students claimed to have observed three different outcomes of the experiment with the falling paper and book: 1) for ebony, the paper fell before the book, 2) for brianna, the book fell first, and 3) for rachel, the paper and the book reached the floor at the same time. the teacher then moved to the problematization of why different “friends” (i.e., students) obtained different results of the same experiment. 73 teacher: how could this be that we all did the same thing—we dropped the paper and the book— 75 brianna: and it was all different! […] 77 teacher: —at the same place, at the same time. how could it be that we got all these different results? one person found out the paper hit the ground first, and then the book. we have two other friends that found out the book and paper fell down at the same time. 8 we use the numbers in parentheses in the in-line quotes, to indicate the line numbers in the original transcript. when directly quoting the transcript, we preserved the formatting without the parentheses. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e29 for a while, the students and the teacher continued to discuss the different results children got, until the teacher asked, (73-77) “how could it be that we all— we got different results— […] —when we did the same thing?” analyzing this event, we (the authors of this article) had different interpretations of what was going on at this point. we decided to preserve our authorial discussion in which we questioned and challenged each other’s interpretations. below we present it and extend an open invitation to the reader as well. tina kullenberg: it is interesting that these key words “how could this be” by the teacher are to be repeatedly found in lines 77 & 86. i am not sure of how dialogic this particular question really is. whether it is a teacher-like rhetorical question or not. if the teacher is searching for a correct, pregiven answer (according to the scientific laws in this case) or it could be conceived of as a genuine, explorative question. eugene matusov: dear tina, my reading of this that the teacher sincerely believed in the moment that getting different results of “the same experiment” is impossible. i think her question and her search for possible plausible explanations of the phenomenon experienced by the children are genuine. i do not think that she tried to make the students to arrive at a preset curricular endpoint. ana marjanovic-shane: i am unsure whether to agree with you, tina, or with you, eugene, that in the case of “how could this be” question, the teacher is trying to swing the children toward a preset scientific understanding of gravity, thus not being genuinely interested in their answers, or if she is genuinely puzzled with different results in “the same experiment.” i kind of think that the teacher was fluctuating in her being genuinely dialogic (like in 41-44 -where she is asking ebony to explain what he meant by “fell first”; and when she is carefully mirroring the students’ reports and summarizing differences in among them); and being herself sure in her own understanding of gravity, rather than actually trying to conceptualize what the students’ concepts of gravity might be. this is why it sometimes looks to me as if she is genuinely interested in the children’s dialogic opinions, and sometimes she seems to be just sure that her understanding of the science of gravity is the only possible, correct way of conceptualizing these forces. i think that we see these two different aspects of this teacher in her genuine struggle to be dialogic, and in her approach to science. tina: i see what you mean, eugene. i am not quite sure about my own opinion yet but will take a closer look on it. however, ana, i really liked your added reflections here. the teacher perhaps was wondering this genuinely, so to speak, but what is even more important is her approach to the voices of the others, namely the children's own understandings of the phenomenon. to mirror their ideas and clarify different viewpoints among them without sincerely letting these viewpoints affect your own interpretations is not completely dialogic? (also in monologic scaffolding you are mirroring and answering prompting questions like that, no?) kelly curtis: i think these are all interesting points. i like tina's point about getting at students' understanding of the phenomenon, in their own words. when i read "how could this be" i was wondering if she was pressing students to reflect the conditions of the experiment. for example, perhaps the students did not all drop it in the same way. she summarizes what the students said, "fell first," meant by reiterating, "at the same place, at the same time." perhaps she was trying to prompt students to talk about someone not letting go of the objects at exactly the same time. in this way, i agree with eugene that the teacher believed that students should have had similar results. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e30 <<tara ratnam, feedback 2019-02-06: this classroom episode poses a tricky situation for readers’ interpretation: on the one hand there is a preset/given understanding of gravity. in that sense ultimately the teacher’s intention might be to lead them towards that (here, i tend to agree with tina’s point about monologic scaffolding). on the other hand, if you look at the classroom interaction per se, it can be seen as an opportune opening to furthering an understanding of a phenomenon in the dialogue of differences in probing the students’ subjective experiences further.>> it seemed that the teacher decided to focus the children on searching for a physical mechanism that could explain their striking different outcomes of their experiment, conducted in the same way (as the teacher claimed). the students seem to struggle for an explanation, by first trying to retell their experiences: for some of them, in some turns, the book fell first, but in other turns the paper fell first. the teacher continued to solicit their opinions on what happened and why, until one child, rachel, suggested that the reason is in the “forces of gravity.” another child, diamond, asked for an explanation of what “forces of gravity” are. various children gave different answers: that gravity is what “keeps us down on the ground” when we jump, like “ground magnets,” that there is no gravity in space where one can “never fall down,” but just “float in the air,” and so on. some children started demonstrating it by jumping and showing how gravity pulls them down. when more children got up to jump and laugh, the teacher said, (turn 121) “oh, we’re not all going to [jump?].” and directed the children to sit down. the teacher then restarted the dialogue about the force of gravity: 129 teacher: so, you’re sayin’ the force of gravity is pulling the book down at a different time than the paper. 131 student: yeah. 132 rachel: yeah, probably. and, sometimes it’s pulling it down at the same time, or pulling the paper down— 134 alison or brianna[?]: before the book. 135 brianna[?]: and then the book, and then the paper [?]— 136 rachel: —before the book and then the book’s pulling it down before the paper. gravity’s pulling the book down before the paper. the teacher then carefully guided the children’s attention to a puzzle of getting different results in their experiments, asking, (139) “why would gravity—why would gravity? [three-second pause] how do i phrase this. why, why would gravity sometimes make the book come down first, and then the paper. but the, the same gravity at other times make things come down at the same time. or you’re saying that gravity sometimes makes the paper come down before the book. … why does—why does gravity do all the— i’m trying to think. [two-second pause] how could gravity make—how could the same force of gravity… give us three different results?” the children again seemed puzzled and started to describe what happened in their experiments. the teacher guided them with a lot of supporting questions to remember whether they dropped the paper or the book first, or together. a child, henry was deeply involved in testing his ideas about what happens if you drop the book and the paper together. at one point his idea was that, (167) “… if you, if you drop ’em at the same time, maybe they might fall on the same time—on the floor.” the teacher announced that she was going to demonstrate what happens by dropping the paper and the book together three times and asked the children to watch and see what happens. when diamond offered a hypothesis, the teacher dismissed it and said, (174) “well, we’ll see. some people said that that’s dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e31 what they found out, other people that they saw that they hit at the same time, and then we had two people that said that ‘well, the paper hit first.’ let’s see what happens, ok? you guys watchin’?” the teacher started dropping the paper and the book together. every time, when the book dropped first, some children exclaimed in confirmation that they “knew it.” after the third time, there was some laughter and a boy, henok turned to ebony saying, “see, ebony?” then the teacher looked at ebony and said, 197 teacher: but, you found out something different. 198 ebony [nods]: the book—the paper fell first. 199 teacher: how could that be? 200 ebony: i don’t know. [ebony shrugs his shoulders.] the children were still puzzled. autumn alleged that ebony possibly dropped the paper first, but ebony denied it. then allison offered another hypothesis (207) “—the gravity probably had, uh, [turns to ebony] the gravity probably just pulled the paper a little more than it pulled the, the, um, book.” ebony responded to that with a laugh, (209) “maybe it’s tired.” this made almost all students laugh and repeat “maybe the book is tired.” the teacher joined the children’s laughter for a while, but then she stopped and said, (216) “let’s come back to allison’s idea. allison said, ‘well, maybe the gravity—the time when ebony did the gravity pulled the paper down more than the book that time.’” however, instead of following the teacher, ebony laughingly repeated his joke that the gravity is maybe tired. many children exuberantly joined him. autumn leaned towards the teacher, very close to her, eagerly waving and smiling to her, and repeated ebony’s joke about “tired gravity.” but the teacher announced a change of the activity, (223) “we’re going to do something different now with the piece of paper; watch this.” the students continued for a while to make comments about gravity being tired. allison continued a discussion with ebony, about gravity pulling something faster than something else, using hand gestures to represent each object. the teacher continued with the change of the activity, (228) “when you go back to your seat, this is what you’re, you are going to do with your piece of paper.” she crumples up a piece of paper… the teacher now chose to not be responsive to autumn, who was explicitly echoing the joke that the gravity was tired. instead, the teacher demonstratively turned her face and body away from autumn and introduced the next activity on the agenda, shifting the conversation to another phenomenon: the crumpled piece of paper falling down at the same time as the book. no more discussion of why the children reached different outcomes by letting a straight piece of paper and a book to fall down. no more discussion of variable and unstable gravity. no more discussion of tired gravity. no more joking. back to serious exploration of the physical mechanisms and the instructional agenda. tina: to me it is feels that the teacher somehow speaks in terms of “discovery” and “exploration.” but i think she does it for the sake of persuasion; the aim of giving evidence for the universal physical law? eugene: again, i respectfully disagree with you, tina. i think that the teacher was sincere here – in my view, she sincerely exhausted her attempts to engage the students in exploration of “mechanisms” and dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e32 she did not know what to do with the diverse outcomes of the experiments and with the “tired gravity” joke. she got stuck and wanted to move on. what do you think? tina: eugene, then i would say sincere persuasion. after viewing the video and reading the transcriptions, i do not have the impression that the teacher is teaching and talking in an openended, non-finalizing way to the children. in my eyes, she orients to a consensual “agreementdiscourse”, seeking to unifying the voices in the end, according to her scientific and pedagogic believes. in doing so, she mirrors and clarifies different student viewpoints and experimental outcomes, no? ana: i am listening to the teacher in turn 216: teacher: [laughs with the students] let’s come back to allison’s idea. allison said, “well, maybe the gravity—the time when ebony did the gravity pulled the paper down more than the book that time.” to me (sic!), it sounds like the teacher is sincerely trying to “hunt” for children’s ideas and mirror them back to children, in order to provoke more discussion. and yet, she still cannot figure out what to do with some of their dialogic turns: i think she struggles to interpret what the expression “tired gravity” was meant to do and what it really did. i think that she herself is wondering was it a joke, or somehow a genuine idea about how gravity might work. i think that she was not insincere, or manipulating, but because she herself was somewhat confused about the intent of the “tired gravity” that children themselves laughed about, she decided to retreat to a safer ground of “scientific experiments” (see her subsequent explanation in the quote below.) what do you think? especially, you, teacher, and you, david and emily, what do you think? tina: ana, i also think she is somehow seeking for the children’s ideas and making them explicit in order to provoke further discussion. however, what i was referring to more specifically is the ultimate purpose of this kind of classroom discussion (as i interpret her, of course i would like to hear her own opinion here). in this particular case, the teacher seems to refer to allison’s suggestion of a scientific principle that she (allison) herself was after. therefore, the teacher had a plausible reason to re-contextualize allison’s claim again. in doing so she argues for her own opinion via support from allison’s “correct” reasoning. utilizing allison’s comment as a resource for herself is at least partially finalizing teaching? what do you think about such an interpretation? kelly: tina, this makes me wonder what the teacher's opinion of gravity is then. when galileo dropped two spheres of different masses off the leaning tower of pisa, he demonstrated that the objects would fall for the same amount of time. therefore, from my perspective, gravity "pulls" on objects the same amount. the issue with the paper versus the textbook has more to do with air resistance than with gravity then. but perhaps the teacher was allowing students to explore the idea of gravity pulling on the book “more” in preparation for the next experiment when they crumple the paper into a ball and perform the experiment again. this experiment would contradict their conclusion that gravity pulls more on heavier objects. i wonder if the teacher made the connection between the two activities, where in the first activity the book would drop first but in the second activity they would drop at the same time. this connection would influence how the teacher talked about the activity with the children. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e33 we judge9 this event as “idea-dying out” (actually “ideas-dying out”) (marjanovic-shane et al., 2019) through the teacher’s silencing the students. the teacher “killed” the dialogue about inconsistency of the experiment’s results and the children’s explanation through “tired gravity” by moving the discussion on to another topic, another physical phenomenon, and another inquiry. <<tara ratnam, feedback 2019-02-06: i tend to agree here [with your judgment characterizing the event as “idea-dying out”]. i don’t see the point of opening to a dialogue the teacher initiated by the experiment she set for students who came up with diverse results. she didn’t follow it through by allowing students to experiment and explore further to reach new levels of understanding. she also let go of her own contribution that could provide another perspective for students to juggle with in advancing their thinking. the potential to learn from differences was given an abrupt stop! however, this might not stop students from continuing to think /argue about it further beyond the class. in this sense there is still some value in the exercise the teacher set for students and the puzzling differences that it brought out.>> the teacher seemed to disagree with us, at least, immediately after her lesson (she might agree with us later when she started seeing a possible physical mechanism behind the children’s “tired gravity” joke). this is how the author teacher explained her pedagogical and organizational decision to switch the topic of the classroom discussion, at this point, the students were out of ideas – perhaps out of steam. or maybe they were confused by my asking them about an inconsistency that they did not see. in any case, i did not feel many of the students were comfortable with this explanation. the mechanisms they had talked about during their predictions, that the book would be pulled harder to the ground and that the air would push up on the paper, still seemed the most tangible explanations they had, and i wanted to get back to them. since it looked like the class was tiring out, i decided to drop the book and flat piece of paper in front of the whole group, hoping to generate more discussion. it did not work. instead, the students became a little silly, talking and giggling about how the book and the gravity were getting "tired." … it was time to move on. (hammer & van zee, 2006, p. 78). tina: i think this utterance, “at this point, the students were out of ideas – perhaps out of steam”, is perhaps one of the most remarkable (and central) reasoning, worth to problematize because i cannot find evidence for it at all in the transcription. on the contrary, to me it seems like the children have a flow of ideas, although not the expected ideas, and they are using joking/humor as a childish, playful way of engaging in learning (i see it in a study of my own right now!). at least in my eyes. do you think it looks like they are running out of ideas, tired and out of steam? 9 tina: or interpret? it could sound too harsh to the reader with the word “judge”?? eugene: sorry, tina. this is pure judgment and not just interpretation. i know that middle-class folks do not like strong words and prefer euphemisms "#$%. but feel free to explain of why you think that “judgment” is inaccurate descriptor of our (or mine only?) action here? ana: i agree with eugene that what we are doing is not just interpretation, but our judgment is based on our interpretation. this may be a dialogic finalizing – a provocation to the addressed teacher to respond to our judgment. tina: ok, it could be my lack of language skill as well. in swedish it is a strong value-based term. i was thinking about general readers. what do the term "judge" mean to you then? eugene: i think your swedish understanding is probably correct. for me, “judgment,” or better to say, authorial judgment, is making a subjective value-laden evaluative opinion about a phenomenon or a deed, for which the author of the judgment takes responsibility. i am against the christian call not to judge other people. i think authorial judgments are unavoidable and important to make especially when they are highly dialogic. in itself, an authorial judgment is a deed, putting its author on record and on line of judgments by others. what do you think? dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e34 eugene: i think this was the teacher’s interpretation at the moment of the lesson. later, she seemed to disagree with her initial judgment, but it was not stated explicitly in the book. ana: tina, i agree that the children were having a lively flow of ideas – but the teacher interpreted it different!! see the quote of hers. on another note – about our own disagreements and misunderstandings: it seems to me that it is sometimes hard to follow whose voice is saying what – since we all refer constantly to someone else’s voice! i am not sure if this is possible to untangle – or is it just the really complex nature of our analysis. tina: ana, your first point: yes, exactly! this is intriguing and worth to notice: that the children in fact have a vital web of ideas but the teacher did not seem to value it during the lesson. kelly: i agree and find it interesting that humor and laughter is a sign for some teachers that the lesson is getting off track when, in this case as tina noted, the children are having a flow of ideas. i think this reflects the issue of the teacher dealing with classroom management that was mentioned previously in this paper. generally, students are seen as “on task” when they are serious in how they are discussing ideas and seen as “off task” when they are acting “silly” and using humor. as tina points out, when the children continue laughing about “tired gravity” (lines 209-222), the teacher tries to redirect the children to engage more seriously by making the transition in line 223, “we’re going to do something different now with the piece of paper...” this effectively ends the laughter. <<tara ratnam, feedback, 2019-02-06: here, i don’t agree with the teacher that students got silly or stuck. i think it is the teacher who missed seeing its potential for further exploration. i am in the field observing/participating in preservice teachers’ ‘simulation lessons’. time after time i’ve seen student teachers simply letting go of students’ diverse ideas. for most part, they just allow students to say what they think and where it supports their (student teachers’) point, they pick it up. the rest fall by the wayside. in a physics class (in the introductory part for a lesson on newton’s first law), to a question what happens if the bus you are traveling in suddenly breaks, there were three different answers, “i fall forward”, i fall backwards” and i fall forward first and then backwards”. the teacher went on to the next question she had planned to ask without stopping to problematise why 3 students spoke differently of experiences of the same phenomenon.>> for the teacher, the students were simply tired or got stuck with the inquiry, “it was time to move on.” on the one hand, we agree with the author teacher that it may be ok “to move on” when students’ ability to dialogue on an inquiry or a phenomenon is exhausted because of their intellectual, emotional, or attention ability. we also agree that the discussion might have been stuck here. however, on the other hand, we suspect that it was the teacher who got stuck and not the students. for the teacher, variable and unstable gravity did not make sense during the lesson, as she admitted later. also, it seemed to us, at that moment she did not know how to guide the children in their phenomenon of having three different outcomes for the same experiment. after having conversations with other teachers during seminars organized by david hammer and emily van zee10, the teacher seemed to have a second thought, it sounded as though rachel [lines 128-137] thought the force of gravity was a variable that acted according to its own whims, and my sense at the time was that this did not seem like a reasonable explanation. 10 david, emily, and teacher, is it true or teacher’s conversations with other teachers were outside of the seminars? if the latter, teacher, can you elaborate, please? dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e35 but conversations later with other teachers gave me more to think about. maybe rachel was being more reasonable than i thought. she might have been thinking about how other things in nature have a varying effect, such as the wind: if you threw a ball from the same spot, in the same direction, at the same speed over and over again, the ball would not land in the same exact place every time. the wind might change speed or direction, causing the ball to take a slightly different course each time. of course, the ball would probably land in the same place a few times, just like the book and the paper hit the ground at the same time more than once. thinking about her idea in relation to this example made sense to me, so maybe it could be a reasonable explanation for these first graders. gravity changes just like wind changes. earlier, when i had asked them directly to resolve gravity's inconsistent effect, it is a possibility that they did not answer because they did not see the inconsistency (hammer & van zee, 2006, p. 78, bold is added by us). in our view, the teacher’s proposed “mechanism” explaining the observed three different outcomes of the same experiment with falling paper and book is brilliantly creative. we applaud to the teacher’s intellectual move of finding a natural phenomenon that behaves similarly to rachel’s (and allison’s, and some other children’s) suggestion that gravity may be whimsically unstable. we also love the teacher’s new pedagogical and, even more important, dialogical approach of taking children’s suggestions seriously rather than dismissing them as children being stuck, silly, and/or tired, exhausting their intellectual and attention abilities. russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin argued that genuine dialogue starts when the participants assume that all of them have consciousnesses with equal rights and begin to take each other seriously (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). here we want to add a note on the role of humor and laughter in classrooms. for instance, turn 226 from the transcript lead us to think that at least some, if not all, of the students were neither running out of steam nor of ideas at all. on the contrary, they (allison and ebony) continued to engage in a genuine dialogue, trying to explore the gravity mystery at depth. in doing so they communicated vividly both with words and bodily gestures when seeking to illustrate and creatively explain the issue of that day’s lesson. when considering the video-documented sequence it is quite obvious that they did not look bored or stuck as they talked it through. it is also notable that this turn was preceded by a peer discussion and not a teacher-led question or comment about the joke: the tired gravity. that means that the humorous, perhaps “childish,” talk did not distract them from involving in the intended school-science at the moment. humor could be seen as the learners’ way to deal with knowledge playfully and dialogically, rather than a break from productive learning. thus, it does not exclude relevant learning, but rather disguises it in another language. consequently, it could be argued that it may be problematic to dismiss young students’ way of exploring by means of dialogic jokes as non-serious or inappropriate knowledge building. however, we argue that even if the students had purposefully desired to totally drop the topic about the gravity experiment, thereby switching to another topic, they should have the academic right to do so, at least for a while (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). it is interesting for us that in hammer and van zee’s book, the two quotes of the teacher we brought above followed one after another in the reverse order to the order we gave them, and that they were left without any explicit dialogic responses to each other. we wonder if the teacher still thinks that her students became exhausted and confused, even after she found a possible new intellectual and pedagogical approach of how she could have moved the inquiry forward? knowing what the teacher learned afterwards about wind as a model for unstable gravity, would she have switched the class discussion to another phenomenon or not? if so, why? if not, how might she proceed? how would she address the joke in the context of the wind mechanism? would the joke about tired gravity emerge at all, in her view? we do not know. teacher, david, and emily, what do you think? dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e36 four puzzling concerns after reading the case of tired gravity in hammer and van zee’s book, we have developed four major related puzzles for them: 1. why had the teacher interrupted the class discussion on the inconsistency of their experiments’ outcomes, unstable gravity as a possible explanation of this inconsistency, and children’s joke of “tired gravity” metaphorically capturing the essence of their “mechanism” for whimsical gravity (and even modeling a whimsical behavior)? prompted by the teacher’s own later reflection (see her second big quote above), we rejected her initial explanation of children being tired and confused (see her first big quote above). rather we suspected that the teacher became epistemologically, pedagogically, and dialogically paralyzed and frustrated. but, if so, why? teacher, what do you think? 2. why didn’t the teacher come up with the idea of wind modeling whimsical gravity proposed by rachel? why didn’t the teacher recognize science behind it? of course, there could be zillion reasons for a missed teaching-learning opportunity as david hammer and emily van zee discussed in the book: the teacher’s lack of creativity in the moment, getting tired, being distracted by diverse multiple demands at the moment, and so. however, we suspected that a systemic problem was looming even if other explanations were also applicable. we sensed that something in the teacher’s pedagogical orientation trapped her and prevented her from seeing other possibilities at the moment. if so, what was it and why did it prevail? teacher, david, and emily, what do you think? 3. why didn’t the teacher’s then-reflections (immediately after teaching) and her now-reflections (when writing the case and reflecting on it) explicitly address each other, when strong implicit contradictions existed between them, and especially because they closely followed each other on the same page of the book (p. 78)? we see contradictions in the then-teacher claiming that she abruptly switched the classroom topic discussion because the children were tired and confused and the now-teacher taking on rachel’s idea of unstable gravity seriously. this question is for both the authors of the book – david hammer and emily van zee – and for the author teacher. it is possible that they either did not notice these disagreements, or they would disagree with us that the teacher’s reflections contradicted each other. however, again, we suspect a deeper problem behind possible neglect or disagreement. 4. finally, we wonder what we might do in this teacher’s shoes as dialogic pedagogy educators (and researchers) being outside of the urgency of the moment in contrast to the teacher’s situation. here we want to propose ideas addressing all four of our puzzles for the readers’ judgments and further discussions. we suspect that a major meta-problem of the case of “tired gravity” is rooted in the authors’ understanding of science as “refined thinking about mechanisms” behind natural phenomena (or human phenomena in social sciences). by “authors,” we mean david hammer, emily van zee, and the teacheras-author of this case. this view of science can be better understood in the light of the concepts of readymade science and science-in-action, developed by the french sociologist of science bruno latour (latour, 1987, 1993, 1996, 1999; latour & woolgar, 1979). latour described ready-made science is a science without any or with only minimum human subjectivity. it is about the world how it is, independently of its observers and researchers. in contrast, science-in-action is a practice of cleaning out researchers’ statements about studied phenomenon from researchers’ subjectivity through a special discursive practice in a scientific community. some readers may comment that latour described a positivist science (positivist dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e37 ready-made science and positivist science-in-action), which is a good point, in our view. however, school science is often, if not always, about teaching positivist science as well, positivist ready-made science, to be exact. positivist ready-made science is about learning “facts” – statements of consensual truth, cleaned from any subjectivity, that latour called “high modality statements” (e.g., “the earth rotates around the sun”) (latour, 1987). traditional school with its monologic pedagogy focuses on imposing facts on students through monologic instruction and exams. the authors of the book, however, tried to get away from this approach by shifting from teaching ready-made science to engaging students in science-in-action guided by the teacher. we see the problem in how, hammer and van zee, the authors of the book, defined the science practice as refined thinking about mechanisms. namely, we see the problem as rooted in the authors’ peculiar mixing of science-in-action with ready-made science practices. from the science-in-action approach, the authors have taken the discursive nature about science as a discourse of making mechanistic explanations through refining thinking about mechanisms in a dialogue. for instance, the teacher guides brianna and others to refine and deepen their observations and reporting, in line 41 when the teacher replies to ebony’s statement, “the paper fell first” with, “now do you mean it hit the ground first, or it just started to fall first?” the teacher creates two alternatives for ebony’s (and some other) children’s discourse, introducing a possibility that they might perform their experiments differently, which results in different outcomes. also, along the same lines of evidence of dialogic pedagogy, the authors recognize, value, and promote authorial nature of students’ creating mechanistic explanations. in contrast to conventional monologic pedagogy, the teacher and the researchers are not focused on making the students produce the correct explanations, but rather on the children’s authorship of diverse explanations and testing them against each other. the teacher makes it important to acknowledge each child’s observation, and contribution. for instance, the teacher replies to ebony, “so, you’re saying the paper hit the ground first, and then the book hit the ground. [ebony nods his head in affirmation.] then we have two other friends who are saying that the book and the paper hit the ground at the same time.” and then acknowledges rachel’s and other children’s remark “twice!” by replying, “twice. you did it twice and that’s what you noticed.” this promotes allison to voice her authorship, “yeah, me too!” the teacher did not hunt for the correct answer, as many conventional teachers often do, but rather she hunted for students’ creative authorial conceptualizations of mechanisms of the discussed physical phenomena. in our judgment, these two powerful aspects of science-in-action, discursivity and authorship, are embedded in the authors’ defining science as refinement of thinking about mechanisms. importantly, they constitute both dialogic pedagogy and the authors’ dialogic analysis of this dialogic pedagogy. however, we also argue that the authors’ definition of science involves two aspects from readymade science and that exactly these two aspects created the problems in the case of tired gravity. the first aspect of ready-made science is about the insistence on the exclusion of human subjectivity from the science practice. the authors defined science as refining it from the students’ thinking about mechanisms. they “forgot” latour’s discovery that the science-in-action practice primarily focuses on elimination of scientists’ subjectivity from their explanations and facts. in the case of tired gravity, the children-scientists focused on emphasizing their scientist subjectivity rather than eliminating it. thus, ebony proclaimed, “to me, first, the paper fell first” (line 4). ebony emphasized his scientist subjectivity via his intonation and then via his repetition (lines 8, 11, 13, 17), echoed by other scientists-children (lines 18-20, 22, 25, 34, 51). to us (sic!), ebony and other scientists-children seemed to imply that a phenomenon can reveal itself differently for different people. of course, this goes against positivist science-in-action studied by latour. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e38 scientists have to be disciplined to eliminate any subjectivity from their observations of a phenomenon. correctly trained scientists must be mutually replaceable to experience and see the same thing from the same experiment. thus, a part of (positivist) science-in-action is not only about creative generating, arguing, and testing mechanisms but also about eliminating their own subjectivity from their own observations and experiments. interestingly, that at one point the teacher got apparently involved in discussing her scientistschildren’s subjectivity to eliminate it through a consensus. thus, on lines 36-37, 39, 41-42, the teacher seemed to be checking if a problem of different outcomes of the experiment was rooted in a miscommunication, “so, what i’m hearing is that we have one person that said when he did it, that—…— that when he dropped at the same time, from the same height—…—that the paper fell first. now do you mean it hit the ground first, or it just started to fall first?” “it hit the ground first,” replied ebony. there is no miscommunication and the teacher moved to focus her scientists-students on finding a mechanism behind the discrepancy of the experiment outcomes. in our meaning-making interpretation and analysis, the teacher’s focus on generating and considering mechanisms as definition of science, insisted by the researchers david hammer and emily van zee, partially blinded her from guiding her scientists-students sensitively and dialogically to explore their differences further and deeper. the question of how her scientists-students conducted their experiments seemed to be technical for the teacher, staying in the way of more important science actions of generating, arguing, and testing mechanisms. in contrast, in our view, exploring differences is central for the science making. it is interesting for us that the teacher did not ask the students to show how exactly they conducted their experiments but throughout the lesson mostly did the experiments herself, with children occasional repeating what she did. on lines 86, 88, the teacher firmly closed the topic of the scientists-subjectivity by insisting that in their experiments, they all did the same thing, “how could it be that we all— we got different results— … —when we did the same thing?” the question for the class became what natural mechanism could be responsible for diverse outcomes of their experiments rather than considering how and what they might have done differently while doing their experiments with falling paper and book. with their major focus on discourse about mechanisms, experimental science-in-action, full of human subjectivity that will be eventually eliminated to become ready-made science, was apparently not important, neither to the teacher, nor to the researchers. in fact, we argue, their focus on discourse about mechanisms contributed to an emergence of an epistemological and pedagogical trap for the teacher – to guide her scientists-students to imagine a natural mechanism behind the inconsistent outcomes of their experiments and away from the issue of how differently the scientists-students might have conducted their experiments. the second ready-made science aspect, hidden in the authors’ definition of science, is even more consequential and problematic in our view, than the first one, discussed above. the authors’ definition of science as a refinement of everyday thinking about mechanisms of natural phenomena11 implies that the definition of science practice pre-exists the science practice itself. this is exactly the position of the readymade science described by latour (1987). aristotle labeled activities, which definition and goal pre-exist the activities themselves as “poïesis ” (aristotle, 2000). in contrast, in the science-in-action practice, its goal and definition emerge in the discourse of the community of relevant scientists, according to latour’s study. aristotle called this type of activities “praxis.” the teacher promotes and hunts for ready-made definition of science – namely, mechanisms, – while missing the whole discussion of the scientist subjectivity “to me” initiated by ebony, as a scientific practice. einstein’s definition of science as a refinement of everyday 11 hammer and zee (2006, p. 6) quoted albert einstein who said that, “the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking" einstein (1936, p. 349). they added focus of everyday thinking on mechanisms. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e39 thinking, hammer’s and van zee’s definition of science as thinking about mechanisms, latour’s definition of science(-in-action) as elimination of subjectivity12 are very interesting but still problematic and contested insights, in our view. for example, latour’s definition of science(-in-action) that reflects praxis of the elimination of researchers’ subjectivity13 has been contested by quantum mechanics in general and by the famous copenhagen interpretation approach formulated by danish physicist nils bohr and by german physicist werner heisenberg in specific, arguing that elimination of the observer’s subjectivity is impossible from a quantum phenomenon in principle (see, heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty), “there is no quantum world. there is only an abstract quantum mechanical description. it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. physics concerns what we can say about nature” (nils bohr, quoted in kumar, 2008, electronic version). thus, deciding what is science and what is “scientific” belongs to the scientific practice itself and to debates in a community of scientists while scientists engage in science, and does not pre-exist, or at least, does not fully pre-exist, the science practice. science, science-in-action, is not poïesis but praxis. or, in other words, using bakhtin’s neo-kantian terminology, it is possible to say that in sciencein-action, the definition of science in unfinalizable (see, nikulin, 2010). we argue that the author-teacher’s acceptance of the final definition of science, promoted by the educational researchers, severely limited her epistemological horizon, thus, preventing her to recognize emerging teaching-learning opportunities in the scientists-children’s discourse. even more, it robs the students from their own teaching-learning opportunities, not even mentioning their teacher’s guidance. thus, the “to me” discussion was abruptly put to the end when the teacher introduced her new inquiry, “how could this be that we all did the same thing— we dropped the paper and the book— … —at the same place, at the same time. how could it be that we got all these different results? one person found out the paper hit the ground first, and then the book. we have two other friends that found out the book and paper fell down at the same time” (lines 73, 77-80). by implicitly making the diverse and personalized outcomes of the experiments strange and intellectually unacceptable, the teacher effectively closed a possibility for an inquiry, “should we get the same results of the experiment or is it ok to have different results?” in everyday life, people are often faced with legitimately different perceptions, experiences, interpretations, meanings, and judgments while observing or being involved in a shared event. probably, the best example of that is the japanese 1950 movie by the director akira kurosawa “rashomon” based on ryåunosuke akutagawa’s short stories (akutagawa & lippit, 1999). in the movie, the audience sees four different versions of a murderous crime that was perceived, experienced, and told by three participants of the crime and one hidden observer. the audience is left to think for themselves what “really” happened and whom to blame for the crime. of course, in art, a diversity of subjective perceptions, outcomes, meanings, and judgments is very often legitimate and expected. in natural sciences, it is problematic, although not completely impossible in the theory of relativity or in quantum mechanics, while in social science it is open for a heated debate (creswell, 2007; denzin & lincoln, 2005). the author teacher could have engaged herself and promoted further the children’s “to me” discourse and the inquiry behind it. in few lines down the lesson, the teacher closed up another possible inquiry for the same reason of her epistemological horizon being severely limited by the preset definition of what science is about. as we already discussed above, on lines 86 88 the teacher shut down a possible inquiry of whether the scientists-children really do the same thing in their experiment or not. the author teacher apparently wanted to focus the children’s attention on finding natural mechanisms that might be responsible for the differences 12 to be exact, latour (1987) defines science-in-action as a communal discourse of changing modalities of scientists’ statements about the studied world by elevating their own modalities into objective facts, independent of human subjectivity, and by downgrading modalities of their opponents’ statements to subjective questionable falsehood (“artifacts” in his terminology). 13 in our view, latour has developed a model of poïesis of positivism (ready-made science) and a model of praxis of positivism (science-in-action). dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e40 of the outcomes of their experiments with falling paper and book, while all of them “did the same thing” (line 88). effectively, an inquiry of whether they actually did the same thing or not became blocked. we wonder, when rachel finally proposed a mechanism for the different outcomes of the experiment on lines 128-137 by suggesting that gravity may act differently on paper and book at different times, if the author teacher took this suggestion seriously and pushed it forward by asking her scientistsstudents, “why, why would gravity sometimes make the book come down first, and then the paper” (lines 139-143). however, in our judgment the teacher struggled to accept rachel’s mechanism as legitimate. the teacher apparently undermined rachel’s explanation by emphasizing “the same gravity” (lines 139143) and “the same force of gravity” (lines 145-147), tacitly rejecting rachel’s proposal. we suspect that the teacher struggled because she might have sensed the anthropomorphic nature of rachel’s mechanism. in our interpretation, the teacher struggled to formulate her question in a response to rachel’s proposal, “why would gravity—why would gravity? [three-second pause] how do i phrase this…” because she might have been trying to avoid anthropomorphism in her question and still “why would gravity sometimes make the book…” might have sounded as if gravity were a person. her final formulation on line 147 was cleaned from any apparent anthropomorphism but at expense of firmly rejecting rachel’s mechanism, “how could the same force of gravity… give us three different results?” only after conversations with other teachers, the teacher could see a possibility for a non-anthropomorphic mechanism behind rachel’s proposal – unstable and apparently “whimsical” behavior of wind (see hammer & van zee, 2006, p. 78, the quote is above). again, according to our interpretation and analysis, the teacher’s preconceived notions of what science is and what kind of mechanisms are legitimate severely limited her epistemological horizon and, thus, obstructed her recognition of emerging teaching-learning opportunities, injured her guidance, and, finally, inhibited students’ critical dialogue. of course, we do not mean that if the teacher had not preconceived notions of science and mechanisms, she would have been able to recognize all teaching-learning opportunities emerging in the students’ classroom discourse. we agree with david hammer and emily van zee (2006) that it is impossible in principle. teaching and learning are authorial and creative processes (matusov, 2011). our authorial approach to education is based on bakhtin's authorial ontological and polyphonic approach to dialogic meaning making: an existential point of view that stands in sharp contrast to instrumental education (and instrumental educational research). on the instructional level, instrumental teaching designs imply standardized teaching “technology” where the participants’ unique and creative voices tend to be neglected. moreover, authorial teaching and learning might be considered as a “performance art” in which both the teachers and students develop critical voices which transcend the culturally given, such as pre-given norms, rules, conventions and fixed educational goals (cf. matusov, ibid.). we don’t think that this teacher’s approach to teaching was instrumental. on the contrary, we think that she had a creative ontological, polyphonic and authorial approach to teaching. however, we argue that her apparent treatment of science as poïesis severely and systematically limited her ability to recognize certain teaching-learning opportunities. this time the teacher was not effective in blocking students’ discourse undesirable for the teacher (if our interpretation is correct, of course). instead of refining rachel’s mechanism from its anthropomorphism sensed by the teacher, ebony developed a joke of “tired gravity” (line 209), essentially and effectively torpedoing the teacher’s desire, as other peers enthusiastically joined the joke. we wonder if the teacher perceived this joke – their goofing off -as carnivalesque resistance (cf. bakhtin, 1984) to her pedagogical regime of scientific mechanisms. it would have been interesting to talk with ebony and the other children participating in the joke to check if they sensed that the teacher made anthropomorphic mechanisms a taboo in the classroom discussions and they rebelled against this taboo through this joke. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e41 of course, ebony’s joke might have been just a joke and not a sign of resistance in their own eyes (or children might have diverse sense of the joke among each other), but we argue what makes ebony’s utterance, “maybe it’s tired. [laughs],” a joke is its explicit anthropomorphism for gravity contrasted with the official classroom discourse focusing on naturalism for any phenomena they discussed and actively promoted by the teacher. in another classroom context, like for example, writing stories or poetry, tired gravity might not generate any laugh (or it still might but maybe less likely – more research is needed). so, our reply to david hammer’s and emily van zee’s important questions, “what's the joke? what understanding goes into making it or finding it amusing?” (hammer & van zee, 2006, p. 90) is that we suspect children’s carnivalesque resistance to the anthropomorphism taboo as a meaning of their “gravity getting tired” joke. in our judgment, the teacher’s response to the students’ joke of “tired gravity” was very deliberate silencing the children by the teacher’s switching the legitimate topic of the classroom discussion, “we’re going to do something different now with the piece of paper; watch this” (line 223 and then see line 228). arguably, in four previous times, the teacher’s silencing the students’ discourses and potential inquiries was not deliberate, but this time it was. in our view, it was not only suppression of the children’s carnivalesque resistance to her pedagogical regime but also her admission of helplessness. she did not know what to do. she exhausted herself epistemologically and pedagogically. her epistemological, pedagogical, and dialogic horizons collapsed. she wanted to move on. we argue that the teacher’s epistemological poïesis, limited as it might be, monologized her pedagogy and the entire classroom discourse. granted, the teacher’s epistemological poïesis of predefined science and mechanisms was much-much more open than the epistemological poïesis of conventional teachers hunting for one or few correct answers by their students. this teacher viewed science and its learning as a process of discourse and authorship. that fact made her pedagogy essentially dialogic. still, her “seeing science” was predefined on a meta-level of what science is and what kind of mechanisms are legitimate in science. we argue that she still had preset curricular endpoints, although very different from conventional pedagogy. her preset curricular endpoints were at a meta-level. arguably, the teacher wanted that at the end of her lessons her students would learn that science is a refinement of their thinking about natural mechanisms about natural phenomena. elsewhere i (the first author) argued that preset curricular endpoints are birthmarks of the pedagogical excessive monologism (matusov, 2009, 2018a). for a teacher, seeing science-as-praxis in a classroom discourse is a peculiar thing. why is it peculiar? how can a teacher recognize science in a classroom discourse among students, if science is an elusive thing in itself, emerging in and from the practice of the scientists-students?! it reminds us of the paradoxes of the russian fairytale “go i know not whither and fetch i know not what”14 or by socrates in the “meno” dialogue (plato & bluck, 1961). paraphrasing socrates’ paradox about research making, one can ask a researcher preparing for a research project, “if you know what you are searching for, why do you search for it?! [implying that the researcher has already found what she wants to find] but if you don’t know for what you are searching, what are you searching for?! [implying that the researcher is clueless and disoriented]” both the russian fairytale and socrates’ research paradox describe praxis. teacher’s seeing science-as-praxis in a classroom discourse with her students is based on all previous definitions of science – by albert einstein about a refinement of everyday thinking, by david hammer and emily van zee about mechanisms, by bruno latour about elevating modalities of scientists’ statements, by nils bohn about scientists saying about our experiences and relationships with the world and so on – taking as helpful but always problematic and always limited insights rather than the final definitions. a teacher should expect that her students and she will develop their own helpful, problematic, limited, and elusive – unfinalized – 14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/go_i_know_not_whither_and_fetch_i_know_not_what dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e42 definitions of science through their own science practice in the classroom. this teacher orientation can prepare a science teacher to see science in the “to me” discourse, in an anthropomorphic mechanism, in a joke of “tired gravity”15, in a metaphor, in a poetry “the tired wind” by alvin willis16, and so on. yet, we characterize the teacher’s pedagogy as deeply dialogic. she accepted and seriously considered any mechanism of the discussed natural phenomena proposed by her students. her teaching was authorial because she engaged her own mind and heart in trying to understand and engage her students in developing, clarifying, and testing their own mechanism proposals. in this, the teacher treated her students as “a plurality of [opaque, non-transparent] consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6, the italics is original). even when she rejected the students’ “tired gravity” as tiresome goofing around, she was willing to revisit the students’ contribution and to imagine a serious proposal for a natural mechanism of capricious wind. arguably, this revisiting is another evidence of the teacher’s dialogic pedagogy teacher-orientation. for us, dialogic pedagogy is not “ideal” or “model” teaching but rather a dramatic pedagogy that is full of problematic moments to be considered, analyzed, praised, and, yes, criticized. this makes dialogic pedagogy risky and always contested. in our view, dialogic pedagogy always involves missed teachinglearning opportunities and excessive monologism – both required for dialogic critical reflection among professionals (and even students). our judgment of this teacher’s dialogic pedagogy is based on her genuine interest in and commitment to her students’ subjectivities and authorship. her lapses of this commitment and interest and her struggles that we noticed are manifestations of challenges of dialogic pedagogy and not betrayals of it. in our view, it is much healthier to see (and expect) that dialogically minded educators are monologically corrupt than to expect incorruptible “model dialogic teachers” and “model dialogic teaching”. finally, however limited it might be, in our interpretation and judgment, we argue that the teacherauthor, david hammer, and emily van zee were involved in a dialogic analysis of the case and this and other teachers’ dialogic pedagogy in their book. the main goal of dialogic analysis is to deepen meaning of the studied phenomenon, imagine new possibilities, abstract and problematize values, and so on (matusov et al., 2019, in press). such a dialogic approach also means to provoke responsive questions by addressing and testing alternative interpretations. this is exactly what the authors and the teachers did in their book. they engaged their mind and heart in recognizing events, interpreting them, meaning making, imagining new possibilities and alternatives and testing them, and making their authorial judgments rather than just focusing on recognizing patterns and their relationships. in our view, these processes constitute dialogic analysis and distinguish it from other traditional types of analysis like, for example, discourse analysis. we will turn to describing and discussing discourse analysis in the following sections. postscriptum we emailed an earlier draft of our manuscript to david hammer, emily van zee, and the teacher17 for their feedback, hoping to spark their public discussion around our dialogic analysis. to our big surprise, david and emily became very upset with our critique of the teacher’s teaching practice. the teacher herself did not respond, although she was probably attending to our intense email communication. at the end of the day, david did not give his permission to publish his objections to our paper. as to emily, she 15 see a serious online scientific discussion about “tired light=tired gravity” here: https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?19195-tired-light-tired-gravity 16 https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-tired-wind/ 17 we capitalize the teacher in the postscriptum to preserve our addressing her directly as an author, in order to give her back her authorial agency as a co-author of the dialogic analysis of her case in collaboration with hammer and van zee. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e43 requested us 1) to avoid using the teacher’s name in our paper and 2) to add her (emily’s) statement below. <<emily van zee, 2019-01-14: warning! this paper unethically uses a published video, transcript, and case written by the teacher. her case provides an outstanding example of a young teacher responding in a respectful way to a student’s unexpected comment, opening a conversation in which multiple students participated for an extended time in consideration of the student’s claim. this paper’s mis-characterization of the dialogue as a case of “silencing” students is misleading and unfair. emily van zee, department of physics, oregon state university. emily.vanzee@science.oregonstate.edu>> tina: i want to be considerate and respect the participants’ integrity and wishes and therefore protect the teacher’s identity, although it was published in the book. eugene: i reject emily’s first request because david and emily published this teacher’s teaching practice and reflections using her name. the teacher’s name was revealed and heavily used throughout in the hammer's and van zee's book. she clearly became a co-author of the book. i find it very important for our dialogic analysis, to address teachers-practitioners and researchers as authors with equal rights of voice to our own, rather than as mere objects of our analysis. this is especially true when they publicize their practice and research. in our view, any ethical issues of protecting researcher participants’ privacy is full responsibility of the original researchers – in this case, david hammer (the first author of the book), emily van zee (the second author of the book), and the teacher (a signed co-author of the analyzed teaching practice). however, i respect tina’s ethical and personal concerns while disagreeing with them. ana: i also respectfully reject emily’s first request for the same reasons as eugene, but also for one more. in my analysis, watching, and reading the case of “tired gravity” this, now unnamed, teacher became to me a big and very real person who i like to address and greatly respect. not being able to address her by name is like “killing” her as a person for me. but i go along with tina’s wishes and concerns out of respect for tina, my dear colleague and friend. kelly: although i understand where emily is coming from, i disagree with her assessment that we are being unethical. i personally feel like we were engaging in dialogic analysis of teaching itself, considering our own assumptions and taken-for-granted practices, which is an important activity in the field of educational research. i do not mean disrespect for this capable teacher and i am sad this is how it was interpreted. however, i do not feel anything is lost by referring to this individual as “teacher.” in our judgment, the tension between david and emily, on the one side, and us, on another side, goes beyond being personal and represents a paradigmatic difference (including among us). david and emily think that based on professional ethics, researchers must not make negative judgments about teaching practitioners because it might undermine the practitioners’ confidence in themselves and even hurt their public careers. however, in our paradigm, research of teaching practice has to be free from the concerns for the professional development of emerging practitioners as much as possible. indeed, we think that in the latter, a mentor has to be careful in providing feedback and pay attention to the practitioners’ confidence. while saying that, we still disagree that a mentor has to provide only positive feedback and refrain from exploring pedagogical limitations, possible improvements, and even mistakes of the practice with the emerging practitioners (matusov, 2017). furthermore, research, especially second-order research as is ours in this paper, has ethical obligations to reveal these pedagogical limitations, improvements, and mistakes in its analysis (dialogic or not). it is up to our readership to judge our paradigmatic and ethical dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e44 dispute. these types of disputes and even emotionally-charged conflicts among researchers seem to be common to dialogic analysis based on dialogic disagreements of authorial judgments. discourse analysis of monologic pedagogy: case#2 of “true or false” comprehension quizzing famous british scholar of dialogic pedagogy, david skidmore, developed a discourse analysis of a monologic pedagogy using a case of a language art lesson in a multicultural primary school in south-east england to contrast it with dialogic pedagogy, see case#3 (skidmore, 2000). after reading the story “rocky’s fox,” the teacher quizzed the students about how well they comprehended it by asking them “to consider a series of statements about the story and determine whether they are (1) true (2) false, or (3) there is not enough evidence to decide” (p. 286). although the text was new, the comprehension quizzing was familiar to the students. as we join the discussion, they are considering the statement ‘he [i.e., rocky, the main character] heard a dog barking’ [which is not true based on the story]; in understanding the sequence it will help the reader to know that, in the story, rocky hears a barking noise which he knows is not made by a dog; later, a neighbor tells him that it was a fox. one pupil (kevin) has already argued that the statement is false, but fiona disagrees, saying: ‘it’s true ‘cause he did hear a dog barking.’ the teacher re-reads the relevant section of the story with fiona, then continues: 1. teacher: right. so is it true or false? ([rocky18]) knew the sound (.) erm(.) ‘he heard a dog barking.’ did he hear in the first picture on the first page did he hear that barking (.) to be a dog? 2. fiona: yes. 3. teacher: it wasn’t a dog (.) fiona. 4. pupils: [fox. [false = 5. teacher: = it was false because it was a fox barking. how does he know it was a fox barking? ‘cause he described it to mr keeping later on and mr keeping said ha that’s a fox bark. fox (.) foxes bark like that. do you understand? not really do you? 6. fiona: erm. (fiona shakes her head). 7. teacher: why do you think that it’s a dog barking? you tell me one piece of information from that story to tell you that it’s a dog. 8. fiona: because erm foxes don’t bark and dogs does (.) do. 9. alex: foxes [do. 10. teacher: [ok look at page six fiona. 11. alex: foxes bark like that. 12. teacher: page six? ok. read it with me. 13. teacher and fiona: ‘the next day rocky saw mr. keeping. he told him about the noise.’ 14. teacher: what noise fiona? what noise? 15. fiona: the noise what the fox was making. 16. teacher: the noise that the fox was making. which noise was the fox making? 17. fiona: a dog (.) noise. (fiona laughs). 18. teacher: he was barking. the fox was barking yeah? so the noise that he heard in the night. so he told him about the noise. carry on (.) reading (.) page six. ‘that’ = 18 in the original text of david skidmore’s article, it is written “docky”, which, we think, was a typo as there is not such character in the book “rocky’s fox.” dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e45 19. teacher and fiona: = ‘will be a fox said mr keeping. foxes bark like that.’ 20. teacher: so. 21. alex: it’s true = 22. teacher: = so the noise he heard on that first page was a bark. he thought it might have been a dog. 23. fiona: it wasn’t. 24. teacher: but it wasn’t a dog. what was it? 25. fiona: he knew it wasn’t a dog. 26. teacher: what was it? 27. fiona: it was a fox. 28. teacher: it was a fox. and the statement says on your sheet ‘he heard a dog barking.’ did he hear a dog barking? 29. kevin: no. 30. teacher: so is it true or false? 31. fiona: [false. 32. richard: [it was false. 33. teacher: do you understand? 34. fiona: ° yes. ° 35. teacher: ok next sentence (pp. 286-288). in his discourse analysis of the case, skidmore abstracted and focused on structural and functional patterns of the discourse. as we argued above, this focus constitutes a discourse analysis. thus, for example, skidmore noticed a structural pattern of the teacher-student talk ratio being near 50%, noticing that “nearly half of her turns are convergent or ‘test’ questions, i.e. questions which have a pre-specified answer already known to the teacher (1, 14, 16, 24, 26, 28, 30), and which typically elicit from the pupil a yes/no answer, or the recitation of a word or phrase from the text” (p. 288), which is in itself a functional discursive pattern. skidmore commented that this structural-functional pattern “of the dialogue thus approximates to a sequence of ire exchanges” – teacher’s initiation, student’s response, and teacher’s evaluation, noticed by many previous researchers and critics of monologic conventional pedagogy (e.g., lemke, 1990; mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975). skidmore also connected this ire triadic discourse of monologic pedagogy with scaffolding “the student’s learning by reducing the degrees of freedom for the learner and accentuating critical features of the task (mercer, 1992, 1994; wood, bruner, & ross, 1976; wood & wood, 1996)” (p. 288) – another structural-functional discursive pattern. in contrast to case#1, in case#2, neither the teacher nor the researcher was much engaged with their mind and heart into deepening meaning making of the students’ and the teacher’s contributions. for the teacher, the lesson was mainly making all students arrive at preset curricular endpoints (e.g., although fox barks like a dog, it is not a dog). for the researcher, his discourse analysis of the lesson was mainly to reveal the structural-functional patterns of a generic monologic pedagogical discourse. thus, one can legitimately argue that discourse analysis of monologic pedagogy is congruent with monologic pedagogy itself and, hence, is appropriate and justified. we agree with that, but to a point. as interchangeable teachers can similarly quiz comprehension of different texts (or other curriculum) by these or different students in the same way; interchangeable scholars can similarly apply a similar discourse analysis to any monologic pedagogy, revealing its diverse structural-functional patterns. yet, both the data and david skidmore’s discourse analysis are pregnant with a dialogic analysis in our view. the story in the focus of this class’ discussion, “rocky’s fox” by tessa krailing (1989) is filled with complex dilemmas for, emotions of, relationships among its characters, and plot twists, using dramatic, dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e46 sympathetic and even somewhat humorous narrative and illustrations in our reading. it is about a young boy, rocky, who hears strange noises at night, somewhat similar to dog barking, but he knows it is not a dog. helped by a good neighbor, mr. keeping, rocky discovers that a fox moved into a hole under a shed in his garden. he learns that the fox had stolen some food from the dustbins of a nearby fish and chips store. the store owner prepares a trap to catch the perpetrator. but as the story progresses, we learn that rocky is concerned for the fox and the next night he saves it from getting trapped. his neighbor, mr. keeping shares this concern and helps rocky feed the fox in his garden to avoid being trapped by the fish and chips store owner. rocky, then, also discovers that the fox is a mother with several babies. instead of the fox, rocky’s dog, max, gets trapped, but the store owner gives him back to rocky, advising him to take better care of him. the danger is now over, the store owner satisfied with “catching the perpetrator,” while the fox family lives safely in rocky’s garden. it could have been interesting to ask the teacher what might attract her attention in the fragment if anything, whether she was satisfied with her guidance or not and why. specifically, we would like to ask the teacher if she thought that: 1) fiona knew that foxes don’t actually bark like dogs and in her answer (turn 8) challenged the author and the characters in the story who imply that foxes may “bark” exactly like dogs; 2) fiona could not understand why people (the author of the story, the teacher, and some of her peers) called the sounds that foxes make “barking;” 3) after the classroom exchange, fiona sincerely realized that the poetic simile between the foxes’ noises and dog barking was legitimate; 4) after the classroom exchange, fiona strategically pretended to agree that foxes “bark” to stop forceful imposition of disagreeable ideas on her by the teacher and by some of her classmates, while secretly believing on the contrary; 5) something else might have happened (what?). do these options matter for the teacher and why or why not? what was the basis for fiona to reject characterization of foxes’ sounds as barking? was the teacher under strong pressure of all her students passing high stake tests by any means possible or not? what does it mean for the teacher that her students deeply understood the studied material in general and in this particular moment with fiona about barking foxes? was it important for her? if so, why? if not, why not? furthermore, how do the teacher and other kids know that foxes bark? do all foxes bark or only some? under what circumstances barking foxes bark? what would convince fiona that foxes can bark like dogs? what would convince the teacher and the other kids that they are wrong? are barking foxes indistinguishable from barking dogs? is “fox barking” a figurative saying in comparison with dog barking – i.e., foxes produce a noise very remotely sounding like dog barking, – as fiona seemed to suggest? or is “fox barking” a literal expression – i.e., foxes bark exactly or nearly exactly like dogs and can be confused with dogs in this regard, – as the teacher and some other students argued? our own mini-investigation on the internet, which was, probably, unavailable back then in the 1990s when the lesson was held, supports fiona’s and not the teacher’s stand, all species of fox have a pretty wide variety of vocalizations, just as dogs and cats do. it's simple to reduce, say, a dog's vocalizations to "bark," but as any owner knows, dogs can yelp, whine, howl, dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e47 growl, and make all kinds of other sounds. foxes aren't quite as varied in their vocalizations as dogs, but they're still capable of making lots of different sounds. the most commonly heard red fox vocalizations are a quick series of barks, and a screamy variation on a howl. all fox vocalizations are higher-pitched than dog vocalizations, partly because foxes are much smaller. the barks are a sort of ow-wow-wow-wow, but very high-pitched, almost yippy. it's commonly mistaken for an owl hooting. that bark sequence is thought to be an identification system; studies indicate that foxes can tell each other apart by this call19 (nosowitz, 2013, september 5, italics are ours). finally, for us and for now, why are foxes and dogs so similar in their vocal behavior? are they biologically related or there is some other reason for this similarity? of course, we would like to know what else attracted the kids in this interesting book and why, if anything? at the end of this discourse analysis of conventional monologic pedagogy, david skidmore apparently tried to dialogize his primarily discourse analysis by imagining alternative moves by the teacher, allowing for the constraints imposed by the support materials in this case, we might nevertheless ask whether alternative responses by the teacher at specific points could have lent a more productive turn to the dialogue. would fiona’s learning have been better assisted, for example, if at turn 3 the teacher had requested her to elaborate on the reasoning behind her (mistaken) thinking, instead of making a straightforward contradiction? what if fiona’s statement ‘foxes don’t bark’ (turn 8) had been treated as an opportunity to open the floor to other pupils, rather than directing the group’s attention immediately back to the text? these instances can be seen as critical turning-points in the discourse, where the teacher’s utterances influence the shape and tone of the subsequent interaction, in this case pushing it in the familiar direction of teacher-dominated recitation, but where alternative choices were available which might have challenged the pupils to engage in a higher level of literate thinking (p. 289). however, in our judgment, skidmore's alternative suggestions remain structural-functional in their nature. he did not focus on what might have been the connections – for the students and the teacher, – between this particular episode in the story when rocky hears barking noises that he knows are not made by a dog, and the rest of the dramatic events in the story. we do not see how he engages his mind and heart in the issues at hand that the participants faced. his imagination remains organizational in its nature -"what if fiona’s statement ‘foxes don’t bark’ (turn 8) had been treated as an opportunity to open the floor to other pupils, rather than directing the group’s attention immediately back to the text?" his justification, and thus pedagogical values, remain structural-functional, in our view, "a higher level of literate thinking," rather than unique, personal, contextual, and authorial. similarly, when david skidmore directly addresses the teacher through his research assistant, in our judgment, he does not try to engage himself into genuine dialogic contact with the teacher. he wrote, responding to my analysis of this extract, the student who recorded the episode argued that my criticism of the teacher’s decision to require fiona to reread portions of the story (turns 13 and 19) was misconceived, since it failed to take sufficient account of the teacher’s instructional goals. a primary purpose of this activity, she argued, was to encourage the pupils to develop the skill of retrieving specific information from the text. from this point of view, the strategy of returning to the text and testing the student’s literal understanding of the narrative material was precisely what was 19 you can hear a fox’s “barking” in the cited article and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uir8rti9kaw dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e48 needed. against this, i would want to ask how confident we can be that fiona’s independent competence in close reading has indeed been strengthened as a result of this interchange; and whether the model of comprehension enacted here is appropriate to the genre of text under consideration (pp.289-290). we agree with david raising an important issue about the nature of fiona's acceptance of the teacher's "fact" that foxes can bark like dogs. however, without talking or addressing the teacher, it is unclear (at least for us) what her pedagogical goal was. we can think of several possibilities. first, the teacher might have wanted to engage fiona in the production of facts – unfolding internally persuasive discourse leading to a consensus that foxes can bark, – something that david skidmore apparently is interested in. alternatively, the teacher might not be interested in teaching her students about production of facts, but rather consumption of facts -what constitutes the quality of epistemological authority to believe. yet, another possibility is that the teacher might have planned to teach something completely different – even a deep dialogic exploration of the story, but the barking foxes were in her way of doing that, so she decided to deal quickly with barking issue in an authoritarian way, like, "trust me, foxes bark," and move on something more important (e.g., discussing perspective taking by the book characters). all three (or more?) alternatives for the teacher's possible goals – 1) the production of facts, 2) the consumption of facts, and 3) the prioritization of the dialogic pedagogy – could have been explored by the researcher. finally, for us and for now, david skidmore’s position is a bit unclear for us: why the teacher’s focus on teaching fiona to closely analyze the text was less promoting her independence than david’s suggestion to discuss the text with her peers. and why is students’ “independent competence” an important a pedagogical value for him in the first place? discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: case#3 of who is most guilty in “blue riding hood” in the same article (2000), skidmore describes and analyzes another pedagogical event which he characterizes as an instance of dialogic pedagogy. in this case, a group of 5-6th grade students in a multicultural urban primary school in south-east england are discussing “their views on the characters in a story called blue riding hood (hunt, 1995)” (p. 290). as skidmore explains in his article, the “blue riding hood” is a parody of the familiar fairy tale “red riding hood”, where all the characters are subverted and recreated as not always behaving well. the teacher asked the pupils “to discuss the story and try to put the characters in order, from least to most blameworthy” (p. 290). as we join the discussion, the group has just been judging which character was most guilty of “bad behavior,” talking about the character of the wolf in the story; the teacher now moves them on to consider others. 1. teacher: okay we have other characters. who should we discuss next? 2. ian: erm (.) the woodcutter. 3. teacher: where does he come on the scale [of the guilt]? 4. ian: near the end. 5. suma: because when she [i.e., blue riding hood] was wandering around in the forest and he [i.e., the woodcutter] met her and the he told her that he’s going to show her grandmother how to behave (.) and he had an axe and (.) the the (.) he took the skin off the wolf and he killed grandma. 6. ian: no they [i.e., the woodcutter and the blue riding hood] didn’t know there was bears in the forest and erm there they thought she would just get lost in the woods. 7. kulvinder: but the woodcutter bashed granny’s door down. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e49 8. penda: i don’t think he was well behaved (.) because he should have come and talked to her not smash her house down. 9. suma: yeah but granny still behaved in the same way even when the woodcutter was in her house. 10. kulvinder: granny (.)was mean and she was just horrible she just tells her [blue riding hood] to get out of the house. […] (there is a hiatus in the transcript at this point because the audiotape had to be changed while the group continued to talk.) 11. teacher: okay should we now try to put the characters in some sort of order? the teacher seems to stop the discussion with this question dictated by the instructional manual for how to teach this story! (see the preparation pages in the “blue riding hood” story instructional material, hunt, 1995, pp. 30-31). 12. kulvinder: woodcutter (.) granny blue red riding hood and the wolf. 13. colin: i had the wolf then the woodcutter then blue riding hood then granny. 14. ian: i had blue riding hood the wolf the woodcutter then granny. 15. suma: the woodcutter the red riding hood the wolf then granny granny. 16. penda: the wolf the woodcutter blue riding hood then granny. 17. teacher: it is very difficult isn’t it? i would say the wolf although we agreed his behaviour was far from perfect. then i would say (.) you need to think about what happened. granny threw blue riding hood out of the house yeah? erm now that was quite deliberate = 18. ian: = a witch. 19. penda: yeah she started everything it was all her fault (.) if she hadn’t thrown red i mean blue riding hood none of this would have happened. 20. kulvinder: but blue red riding hood killed the wolf. 21. penda: ° oh yeah. ° 22. colin: none of them were really nice. 23. ian: no. 24. penda: but whose fault was it? 25. suma: i think granny’s. 26. colin: but she didn’t kill any one. 27. penda: no but it was her fault really wasn’t it? 28. kulvinder: she wasn’t very nice (.) well i didn’t like (.) she deserved to be eaten. 29. colin: she wasn’t killed on purpose was she? 30. ian: the woodcutter killed her. 31. colin: no she was eaten by bears. 32. ian: i mean it was his fault he erm chucked her out. 33. teacher: well we have run out of time. i think you have done very well. i thought it was hard to sort them out but you together all of you have done that really well. i don’t think there is a right or wrong answer if there was we wouldn’t have had much to talk about.” (skidmore, 2000, pp. 290-291). david skidmore starts his analysis as a dialogic analysis engaging into the very dialogues in the excerpt, seemingly with the purpose to evaluate “how dialogic” was the pedagogy in this episode. he problematizes some of the teacher’s pedagogical organizational/structural decisions to not elaborate on some points that the students’ offered, and wonders if some deepening of the dialogues would be more beneficial to the students. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e50 it could be argued that the pupils in this sequence would have benefited from being asked to elaborate or unpack some of their more elliptical comments (e.g. turn 5). it also seems a pity that the teacher feels obliged to terminate the discussion before the pupils have had chance to compare their views on all the characters systematically; as it stands, the discussion has only touched on their views about one of the central characters in the story (blue riding hood) (p. 291). he is mostly interested in finding structural and functional characteristics of the episode. he shows marked contrast to the episode #1 (our case#2, see above) that can be used to characterize this discourse as “dialogic” through structural and functional aspects of the classroom discourse. for example, he attracts the reader’s attention to distributions of turns among all speakers, where the teacher’s participation is proportionally far less prominent than in the episode#1 (i.e., structural aspect of discourse). the dynamics of turns between the speakers is far from the monologic teacher – less the ire pattern (structural). the teacher asks authentic information seeking questions, genuinely inviting students to explain their views, rather than information-known questions as in the episode#1 (case#2) (functional). the teacher acts as a facilitator of the students’ engaged discourse, rather than a conduit of preset knowledge (functional). students address each other more than they address the teacher, “it is normal for pupils to address questions to each other” (p. 292) (structural). furthermore, skidmore picks up some other structural and functional characteristics of this discourse: the use of the “modal propositions”, “hypothetical statements (“he should have come…”), alternative counter-fictional propositions, pupils explain the reasons for their views about the story, collectively exploring its polysemic potential; in so doing they are necessarily involved in glossing the text, re-interpreting the significance of events in the narrative in an act of retelling which goes beyond the words on the page; cf. the use of amodal proposition by one pupil in turn 8 (‘he should have come and talked to her’), or the hypothetical statement in turn 19 (‘if she hadn’t thrown . . . blue riding hood none of this would have happened’) (p. 292). david skidmore also describes the dynamic of students addressing and challenging each other, considering each other’s points of view, etc. and finally judges that the classroom discourse represents “internally persuasive discourse” – the term coined by bakhtin (1991). this is also a functional coding of the discourse by david skidmore, in our judgment. the following-up contrasting comparison of the cases #2 and #3 by david skidmore is almost completely based on his structural-functional discourse analysis. ironically, in contrast to the case#2, described above, we could not find any meaning making dialogue by david20 about the ideas expressed in the lesson or the unfolding events, neither with the students nor with the teacher. it is ironic because case#2 was a case of monologic pedagogy, according to david skidmore (and we agree), while case#3 was a case of limited dialogic pedagogy, according to him and we again concur with his authorial judgment. in our view, david’s analysis was more dialogic of monologic pedagogy and purely discursive, i.e., positivist, analysis of dialogic pedagogy. we see several tensions among children in assigning a degree of guilt based on negative consequences of the story characters’ actions (e.g., suma, turn 5; kulvinder, 7; suma, 9; kulvinder, 10) versus on the characters’ intentions and knowledge (e.g., ian, 6; penda, 8), 20 we asked david skidmore to comment on our analysis but unfortunately, he could not do that due to personal reasons not related to our paper. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e51 5. suma: because when she [i.e., blue riding hood] was wandering around in the forest and he [i.e., the woodcutter] met her and the he told her that he’s going to show her grandmother how to behave (.) and he had an axe and (.) the the (.) he took the skin off the wolf and he killed grandma. 6. ian: no they didn’t know there was bears in the forest and erm there they thought she would just get lost in the woods. in turn 19, penda seemed to introduce yet another basis of assignment of guilt by considering who started the mess, “yeah she [granny] started everything it was all her fault (.) if she hadn’t thrown red i mean blue riding hood none of this would have happened.” it seems to us that although the involved children sensed the disagreement among each other, neither they nor the teacher apparently recognized and defined the tension, if our interpretation is correct21. we definitely would ask the children and the teacher a question about this tension and how they defined the guilt and assigned it to the characters. in the turn 11, the teacher asked the students (again?) to rank the characters by their guilt of bad behavior. in turns 12-16, some children provided diverse answers. we wonder why the teacher did not ask the children to provide the reasons behind of their ranking. ana: however, to give both the teacher and the students credit, after reading the two-page story “blue riding hood” (hunt, 1995, pp. 133-134), i conclude that the story itself is a rather bad, even senseless quasi parody of the classic fairytale “little red riding hood” – where the task of the story is to make everyone “bad” – but without any motivation why would such change be meaningful. i feel very sad and disappointed with the story in the first place: there is no moral dilemma – the message is just that everyone is bad. the question about “degrees” of moral corruption seems a false question for me. i don’t see it as actually educational – since it does not lead to any insights that can be revealing about ethics, in my view. it is probably not easy for the teacher and for the students to engage in genuine dialogue about it, i mean the degree of guilt, except probably developing a genuine critique of it, which would go against the didactic material, the teacher used. but even with this story a dialogue could be developed about the children’s questions about what is good/bad. and they have just started – when the 30min was over and the teacher cut them off. *sigh!* eugene: dear ana, i respectfully disagree with you. i found the “blue riding hood” story interesting, full with working-class (and peasant) humor and sensibilities similar to the classical medieval french fairytales (darnton, 1984). let me retell the gist of the story (i.e., its plot). the blue riding hood heads to her old grandmother, who lives in woods, to give the grandmother cakes in exchange of getting a dinner. however, the girl gets lost in the woods. the wolf volunteers to help the girl and brings her to the grandmother’s house. for his work, the wolf demands the girls’ cakes. when the girl hesitates, the wolf threatens the girl with a bite. the clever girls offer a cake covered with a poison. the wolf eats the poisoned cake and dies. the girl comes to the grandmother who gets 21 tina: see a similar phrase below: i don’t think we, ourselves, should join the traditional monologic paradigm by suggesting “accurate” or “correct” interpretations. but i understand the intention behind this phrase, i think. however, i suggest that we delete it and instead proudly show that we don’t care about the correctness of our interpretations at all? we rather represent creative, situated and embodied voices in its relativity? eugene: an interesting issue. in my view, we should be concerned about correctness of our interpretation because otherwise we would talk on behalf of people, which is rather monologic to me. the teacher and even kids might recognize the disagreements but might strategically ignore them for a while for whatever reason. i think we should be humble in our interpretations when we do not have access to the participants to ask them directly (we could still disagree with them but at least we would have asked them). what do you think? dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e52 upset that the girl did not bring all cakes for her and also that the girl is late. the grandmother expels the girl to the woods late at night. the girl is frightened but meets the woodcutter. the woodcutter and the girl violently force themselves to the grandmother’s house and send her to the woods where she gets eaten by a bear. the woodcutter marries the blue riding hood and they live happily ever after. in my view, the story is full of motivations – sometimes rather selfish and violent but also mundane and at times even noble and generous – of common people of low means, struggling in making their ends meet. it could have been fun to consider and judge these motivations: possible rights and wrongs of them. for example, the wolf was apparently nice, volunteering to help the blue riding hood girl, although he did not tell her in advance that he wanted to be paid by her with her cakes. the wolf has a family that he supports, making him apparently a good parent, -a half of the cakes would go to his family. knowing that in advance, the girl might reject his help. but the wolf threatened the girl with biting, – thus, setting her mind on a counter-offense of poisoning and killing him. each of the characters’ motivation and action were understandable and even somewhat justified, but also highly questionable. the carnivalesque humor of plain folks involves constant flipflop of power, described by bakhtin in his analysis of novels by french medieval writer rabelais (bakhtin, 1984). the powerful and scary wolf was trumped by the blue riding hood, who tricked and poisoned him to death; the blue riding hood was bullied by her grandmother, who sent her granddaughter to the forest at dark night; finally, the grandmother was violently de-crowned (bakhtin’s term) by the woodcutter and the blue riding hood, who made the grandmother taste her own medicine by sending her to dark night forest. at the same time, i agree with ana that the characters felt empty, lacking, in my view, a sense of humanity in their relationship with each other. in my judgment, the story is pregnant with dialogic inquiries both for the students and for the teacher that unfortunately did not realize in the lesson. in our brief dialogic analysis, we also took into account the didactic materials the teacher apparently used to organize this teaching unit (hunt, 1995, pp. 30-31). in those materials we read: “discuss, with the whole class, the orders of blame arrived at by different groups. encourage the children to justify their choices by referring to specific parts of the text” (p.30). thus, we see the teacher’s question to the children in turn 11, “okay should we now try to put the characters in some sort of order?” not as a dialogic question – a serious question based on the teacher’s real interest in what the students think – but as the teacher following a preset didactic strategy aimed to arrive at certain preset curricular endpoints (“to prompt the children to discuss the behaviour of the characters in a story; justifying their judgements of who is most and least blameworthy by referring back to the text” (p. 30)). eugene: dear ana, as you wrote the text of the paragraph above, i wonder what exactly made the teacher monologic, in your view. was it her use of the pre-existing didactic materials? my answer is “yes” and “no.” i can envision a teacher using pre-existing didactic materials to promote a genuine dialogue with her/his students. in this case, the pre-existing didactics serves as a dialogic provocation for the students and the teacher who become genuinely interested with their minds and hearts in addressing each other and the provocation – wherever it may lead them. unfortunately, this did not happen in the case#3. rather, and i agree with your judgment, it seems that the teacher mechanically followed the didactics, without dialogically engaging in it and with her students. the students tried to address the teacher’s disinterested question without much addressing and questioning the story or even each other. ana: i agree that a preset monologic teaching instruction can be used as a provocation. but in this case, the teacher does not use the material as a provocation, not does she enter into a dialogue together dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e53 with the students. in my view, she seems to use these instructions to get back “on track” with the class as prescribed, without guiding students into a deeper analysis of their positions and ideas. accordingly, in her turn 17, the teacher asked the children to focus closely on what happened in the story. this pedagogical move reminds us of the teacher from case#2. it is interesting that david skidmore does not seem to notice this parallel that the teachers in both cases tried to focus the students on the text and not on considering the differences among each other. we also wonder, based on our reading of the didactic materials used by the teacher in case#3, if she might have tried to guide her students to the preset curricular endpoints, albeit in much looser, “constructivist,” consensus-seeking way than the more traditional teacher of case#2. maybe, pedagogy in case#3 is much less dialogic than david skidmore and we (initially) thought. the teacher’s relativistic statement ending the discussion (turn 33), which we found rather decontextualized and not very thoughtful, but david apparently likes “no uniquely ‘correct’” answers, supports our suspicion that this class was not much dialogic. in our view, when faced with the diversity of ideas and opinions, a dialogic approach would focus on putting these diverse ideas in critical contact with each other, comparing them and contrasting, them, creating assumptions implied by each diverse idea and checking them, etc. instead, the teacher conclusion about the relativity of “the right and the wrong answers,” remains monologic. if we are accurate in our interpretation, we would like to ask both the teacher and david skidmore why they are ideologically attracted to this universal relativism. speaking in general, we wonder if a researcher’s focus on discourse analysis, on identifying structural and functional patterns, makes it difficult for the researcher to recognize a dialogic pedagogy because the latter requires the researcher to focus on deepening the participants’ authorial meanings and to engage in dialogue with them. this may suggest that a discourse analysis, focusing on revealing functional-structural patterns, is not sufficient to recognize, analyze, and critically meaningfy dialogic pedagogy. research on dialogic pedagogy may require a dialogic analysis. finally, at the end of our essay, we want to make a “big picture” comment. in our view, at the beginning of the 21st century, people around the world have experienced two types of oppressions: 1) oppression by positivism/modernism that tries to manage people like objects signified by “big data”, “best practices”, “research-driven, evidence-based policies,” “universal truth,” “consensus among rational and informed people,” and so on; and 2) oppression by “post-truth,” “alternative facts,” “identity politics,” “relativism,” and “post-fact” of social engineering. we see a trap in fully rejecting or fully accepting either positivism or social engineering as such. in our view, dialogic research preserves positivism of factdiscovery while curbing it through authorial meaning-making of these facts. at the same time, dialogic analysis recognizes the legitimacy of authorial actions transcending reality, which social engineering can be a part of, and demands responsibility for it from its actors in a critical dialogue. now, we are turning to comparing and contrasting dialogic analysis and discourse analysis through a dialogue among us. conclusion question#1: is discourse analysis always positivist and monologic? tina: i think we should be careful with equating all types of discourse analysis with positivism. is it more convincingly with the distinction monologic vs. dialogic science? for example, i am thinking of linell (2009) who distinguishes between monologistic vs. dialogistic science. accordingly, he views monologism as a counter-theory to dialogism. as far as language and language use are concerned there are essentially two authorities to lean on in this contrasting paradigm of science: “the individual speakers and the language system, the latter of course being ultimately (at least partly) dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e54 based on implicit social contracts among users. these are the sovereign ‘monological’ meaningdeterminers.” (p. 35). with such a distinction, the monologic paradigm is understood as containing positivism or, as bakhtin terms it, “exact science” (bakhtin, 1986) among other more or less monologistic approaches to science, language and dialogue. what do you think? ana: i think that discourse analysis in its ideological approach is always positivist – because it tries to capture the “objective,” the “given,” “how things really are,” the phenomenon as it is in its essence, independent of anyone’s subjectivity. for david skidmore – it is not important what the students or teachers think as people, why they think so, what might it mean to them, etc., e.g., all what is a dialogic revelation of their voice in an encounter with the text and with each other. what is important for him are forms and processes of any dialogue as a process in which human subjectivities figure as ephemeral, local input into much more universal systematic process, conceptualized as something that (positively) exists, i.e. as a positive given that any independent, disinterested researcher (i.e. without subjectivity) could discover, observe, describe, analyze and interpret – coming to the consensus with others that they are observing the same given phenomenon. in that sense, discourse analysis strives for a consensus about the assumed given reality – i.e., it is positivist. in fact, the case#3 actually beautifully shows that looking for the formal characteristics of the dialogic pattern can lead one to conclude that there is dialogue where it actually does not exist for the actual pedagogy. in the case#3, we can actually see how a discourse analysis can completely miss finding a dialogue, when it only looks at the superficial structural and functional patterns. thus, in this case we can discern what seems to be just the beginning of a serious dialogue, but only for the children, and not for the teacher, who seems to have followed the preset instructions of the didactic material, rather than to have engaged and tried to lead an authentic dialogue! the teacher’s remarks in lines #11 and #33 interrupt and stop the actual dialogues that the children are trying to have amongst themselves. what do you think? tina: i fully agree to your interpretation of the episodes; how the teacher deliberately chose to kill the dialogicity in her preplanned effort to pursue her teaching that relied on instructional material about how to teach this story. she therefore seemed to forget to be attuned to the emerging ontological dialogue that took place between the children (as in our case#1 where some peers continued to engage vividly in a conversation of the mystery of gravity when the teacher decided to suddenly move on). line #11 in case#3 is a bit complex to analyze though, due to the fact that we do not know how the peer discussion (and the discussion between the students and the teacher) really unfolded. there is a long transcriptional break because the researcher had to fix a new audiotape to the following recording. so, i am not sure whether the teacher interrupted the discussion abruptly or not. [ana: good point!!] we know nothing about the adjacent preceding conversational episode, unfortunately. however, as far as i can see, i do think that also skidmore noticed this and was quite concerned about it throughout his analysis of precisely this case. what do you think was missing? what do you mean should be added in order to be an even more dialogical analysis? ana, let me now turn to your proposed take on positivism, as you identify some fundamental features here above. they are thought-provoking, but i think we must discuss how positivism could be, or should be, defined in relation to existing interpretations of the term. in my eyes there are a number of definitions throughout history when coming to the scientific paradigm of positivism. on the one hand, some scholars should agree that just seeking after visible empirical realities in terms of what is “positively given” is a kind of general positivism (cf. hall, 1987; ritzer & stepnisky, 2018, p. 108). but on the other hand, it is commonly argued that positivism in the strictest sense methodologically, has more to do with the dominant norm of studying social phenomena with the dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e55 same methods as the natural sciences. one crucial implication following from such a paradigmatic guideline is the focus of discovering stable, invariable and universal laws and outcomes which are both possible to generalize and predict in subsequent studies. however, poststructuralist (and postmodern) discourse analyses, for example critical discourse analysis and discourse psychology analysis (e.g., potter's version, see potter, 1996). are you sure that also these analytic approaches assume a (pre)given essence, seeking mere objectivity? i thought they were highly relativistic perspectives and, thus, anti-essential in their postmodern outlook, although i can understand what you are problematizing when stating that they have an ambition to be “objective”, i.e. independent of human subjectivity, and so forth. the latter is interestingly also discussed in sullivan’s (2011) book on dialogic analyses, in the light of a variety of discourse analyses. he seems to support the idea that dialogical research does not neglect human subjectivities, neither the participants’ nor the researcher’s (although he seems not to contrast it with positivism what i can see so far). for instance, he says, in other varieties of discourse analysis, the temptation is to uncover the power dynamics, including unconscious, social and historical power dynamics, which are responsible for the organization of truth-claims in discourses (e.g., fairclough, 1992; parker, 1992; walkerdine, 1987). much of this suspicion of the truth-claims of the talk derives from french philosophy, including jacque lacan, ferdinand de saussure, roland barthes and michel foucault (see kress, 2001). they argue that the author is one who reproduces and adds to social meanings but whose intentions are largely irrelevant to the organization and study of the talk. in both these varieties of discourse analysis, the text is an object of suspicion and the author is ambivalently spoken of as either a strategic agent or ultimately irrelevant to the production of the text (sullivan, 2011, p. 10). furthermore, i agree that it is important to notice how discourse analysis may be based on arriving at consensual facts or truths. i prefer to conceptualize this monological dimension as a finalizing research approach that stands in sharp contrast to a non-finalizing methodology where the authors, as we try to do here, never claim we had arrived at final truths. i therefore see our suggested conclusions as tentative, highly temporary instances of finalizations, left open for validation by the research communities and all the readers and participants involved, including us. we are not stable and may find it reasonable to deconstruct our insights later on, in response to critique or questions addressed to us. eugene: i think all pure discourse analysis, as such, is monologic and positivist, unless it is deeply embedded in a dialogic analysis. i think discourse analysis as such is positivist because it mainly focuses on how things really are – i.e., on the given, rather what the things subjectively and authorially mean for different people, including the researchers, in an unfolding dialogic contact. of course, discourse analysis cannot escape meaning/sense making but often it is often very uncomfortable with deepening meaning/sense as it is afraid to lose its objectivity, generalizability, and validity. i think that there is a confusion of sociocultural and cultural-historical contextual positivism that fights universal and decontextualized positivism with dialogism. sociocultural and cultural-historical contextual positivism (e.g., vygotsky and neo-vygotskians) studies how culture, history, institutions, economy, and so on (i.e., diverse forms of the contextually given) shape, mediate, and, thus, pattern human behavior, activity, and discourse. in contrast, dialogism studies how people transcend, author, address, and reply to their diverse given contexts – i.e., the culturally, socially, dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e56 biologically, historically, politically, and economically given. i want to contrast contextual positivism and dialogism with the following quotes about child development: contextual sociocultural positivism the following quote from per linell’s book nicely illustrates the contextual sociocultural positivism that i am talking about, according to a vygotskyan sociocultural theory, the individual also partially repeats the sociohistorical evolution. what the child today learns in culture and in school in, say, mathematics, took humanity centuries and millennia to develop. nowadays, individuals and groups are crucially dependent on the support of cultural (cognitive) artifacts, such as pen-and-paper, the abacus, the slide rule, the mini-calculator or personal computer, but with the help of these, they learn to master complex mathematical operations and can move into domains of much more advanced knowledge than was ever possible for earlier generations who belonged to other sociocultures (linell, 2009, p. 253). dialogism in contrast, dialogism can be illustrated by alexander lobok’s critique of traditional psychology, for an ‘objective’ external onlooker, the childhood of different children is largely indistinguishable. all children play certain games, absorbedly listen to fairytales, react to various events, and so on. in fact, nearly all modern psychology research testifies to these ‘childhood uniformities’ and their typologies. the reason for this supposed uniformity is a flaw in the main approach of modern psychology. modern psychology often focuses on universal, generalizable, predictable, and regular principles, which is the standard of the science. anything else is viewed as nonscientific. how else it can be?! the problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. if so, a question emerges: can a particular human being, his/her particular and unique subjective cognizing world be a subject of science – a subject of scientific observation and interpretation? can a particular child with his/her unique subjective world, subjective cosmos, not overlapping with subjective cognizing worlds of all other people in principle, be a subject of science? thus, for a researcher, it would appear strange to avoid addressing this individually subjective world since it is exactly the disparities of people’s inner subjective experiences that, in all likelihood, make up our essence as humans. it is not what a person has in common with other people what makes her or him become a unique personality. on the contrary, what makes one a genuine person is precisely what he or she by no means shares with the others. i strongly argue that the phenomenon of childhood is not defined by those things that make children of a certain age group category look mostly alike. childhood, rather, is made of dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e57 diversity of children’s views, experiences, and fantasies that are unique for each person and different from anyone else's experiences. probably, this nonoverlapping of human subjectivities is the deepest and the most important enigma of human beings (lobok, 2017, p. sia2). while sociocultural positivism looks for predictable contextual patterns organized in systems, dialogism looks for unique meaning to author it and, then, to address it. tina: i agree that your vygotsky-illustration above seems to be driven by a seemingly confusing principle of law: the idea that an individual also partially repeats the sociohistorical evolution. without denying it, i would like to say some words about how a contemporary sociocultural approach generally approaches learning issues, with our positivism-discussion in mind. a basic idea following from a sociocultural perspective on learning is the assumption that the world is construed differently in different discourses and social practices. learning is then ultimately about discovering how different discourses and premises for participation are made relevant, or productive, in certain activities (säljö, 2011). säljö problematizes the traditional (positivistic) dualism that divides mental and abstract (e.g. psychological) knowledge on the one hand, and practical, concrete (e.g. physical) knowledge on the other. one implication for the positivistic notion is related to language and its social functions. here language is said to strictly represent the social realities, if applied properly. if we happen to “misrepresent” the reality in our inappropriate choice of words, it is consequently judged as an individual mistake. however, it does not really matter because the world is ultimately not contingent on how we chose to conceptualize aspects of it. from a sociocultural stance, knowledge formation rather starts with dialogues: “the origin of knowledge is simply in social interaction and not in internal psychological processes” (säljö, 2011, p. 68, tina’s translation from swedish). in his critique to classical individualistic takes on learning and language, säljö accordingly turns to the epistemological relativity in the human processes of learning and linguistic meaning making through various situations and contexts in life. there are no predictable, universal laws for analysts to rely on, and no uniform methods for uncovering regularities of such phenomena. he clearly illustrates how sociocultural interpretations differ from positivistic approaches, in this sense. in the end it is all about subjective (and intersubjective) interpretations, situated in a complex layer of norms for what counts as scientifically valid knowledge. as discussed throughout our text, however, positivism is not an unambiguous term. i doubt that what you call “sociocultural positivism” is looking for predictable patterns in the classical positivist way, but i agree about your concern that identifying contextual (and interactional) patterns tends to be a central concern in many sociocultural studies, perhaps at the price of participants’, or researchers’ own, subjectivities. in contrast, ‘dialogic dialogism’ addresses and discusses unique meanings between authors/speakers, without reducing individual meaning making. kelly: tina, ana and eugene this is a very compelling discussion and there are good points on both sides. when i first read the question, my reaction was, discourse is not purely positivist. my rationale was similar to tina's point that "one crucial implication following from such a paradigmatic guideline is the focus of discovering stable, invariable and universal laws and outcomes which are both possible to generalize and predict in subsequent studies." coming from a constructivist perspective, the function and structure of language is one that is co-constructed by the users of the language over time. in gee's book on discourse analysis (2011), he says that language follows "two closely related functions: to support the performance of social activities and social identities and to support human affiliation within cultures, social groups, and institutions" (p. 1). in this way, i dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e58 think discourse analysis has a hard time reaching positivism because the laws of language are not universal and always predictable. however, i can see eugene's point about how discourse analysis "mainly focuses on how things really are – i.e., on the given, rather what the things subjectively and authorially mean for different people, including the researchers, in an unfolding dialogic contact." i think if we were to restrict discourse analysis to the most momentary structure and rules of language that are mutually agreed upon, then i would say that it is positivist. i would agree that dialogic analysis is further away from positivism than discourse analysis, so maybe it's an issue of shades of gray rather than black or white, being that it is or is not entirely positivist. question#2: how do discourse analysis and dialogic analysis complement each other? eugene: without a little dialogism, positivism is meaningless, treating people as predictable and calculatable zombies run by their universal biology or by their contextual socioculturalism. without little positivism, dialogism is groundless, mystifying the human authorship (matusov & marjanovicshane, 2017; matusov et al., 2019, in press). discourse analysis and dialogic analysis need each other: dialogic analysis makes discourse analysis meaningful, while discourse analysis makes dialogic analysis grounded. positivism and dialogism need each other. for example, in case#1, the students, the teachers, the researchers, and we, the authors of this paper, tried to make sense of the patterns of the students’ experiences, patterns of their and our ideas, patterns of their and our discourses by addressing and replying to each other. all of us were engaged in positivism: objectivizing and finalizing our authorship and contributions. at the same time, all of us engaged in dialogism: making sense of each other’s ideas and contributions, challenging each other, taking seriously each other, addressing each other, replying to each other, testing each other’s diverse and often conflicting ideas, and inviting our readers to join our dialogue. neither pure discourse analysis nor pure dialogic analysis is, strictly speaking, possible. discourse analysis has to be liberated from its ideological fear of contamination with dialogic authorial meaning making. on the other hand, positivism and dialogism are incompatible, for many reasons. probably, one of most important reasons is that positivism is aiming at reaching for a consensus among relevant people as a proxy for the truth (latour, 1987), while dialogism is unfinalizable, in principle (nikulin, 2010). positivism values the relationships of agreement and consensus, while dialogism prioritizes disagreement, dissensus, and misand non-understanding (matusov, 2015). another important reason is that positivism tries to eliminate researchers’ subjectivity and authorship, while dialogism strives for subjectivity and authorship. when positivism studies subjectivity, it reduces it to “objective subjectivity” – making it stable, predictable, calculable, and measurable. dialogism studies authorial subjectivity, which is unique, unpredictable, relational, and immeasurable (matusov, 2019, submitted; matusov et al., 2019, in press). ana: i agree with eugene and want to add a few more thoughts about the differences between dialogism and positivism. i see positivism as in principle aiming at construction of commonly (if not universally) accepted truths as a platform for collaborative action. with its “high modality” of expression that erases subjectivities in the construction of the academic “facts” (latour, 1987) positivism is calling for the suspension of disbelief (marjanovic-shane, 2016), asking the students to trust and to follow the authority. positivism is meant to dissuade and even block doubt, and by that, to block further critical inquiry, especially in education. in other words, it strives to promote the belief in the established truths and, thus, to influence researchers (and students) to act in a certain way, or risk losing “social goodies.” gee’s perceptive quotation about a “good student” can be adapted for a “good scientist.” dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e59 in this sense, even though practices like being a “good [scientist]” are not really games—their “rules” or conventions are usually much less formal—there are, in these practices, in a sense, “winners” and “losers.” the winners are people who want to be accepted as a “good [scientists]” and gain such acceptance. the “losers” are people who want such acceptance, but do not get it (gee, 2011, p. 6). in that sense, positivism leads to socialization as the principle of research, i.e., to moving individuals from a non-member or a peripheral member of a particular group to a full-fledged member of that group that can be recognized as following the social “rules” of that community. on the other hand, dialogism, with its disagreements, dissensus, and misand non-understanding, is about “lowering modality,” (latour, 1987), doubting the “facts”, inquiring about their origins, construction, and truth. dialogism is about suspending belief (marjanovic-shane, 2016), doubt and deconstruction. it aims at re-establishing subjectivities, desires, contexts and relationships and critically evaluating all the “earlier stages in the construction of facts” (latour, 1987, p. 25). in that sense, dialogism is not promoting collaborative action, nor socialization into the community of (academic) practice. rather, it is promoting critical testing ideas and developing richness of diverse points of view, as well as continuing search for evidence, all of them necessary for creating internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). i also agree that positivism and dialogism need each other. dialogue in principle does not have a beginning nor an end, and researchers may want to come to some point when they stop any further deconstruction – either because they exhausted arguments or evidence or because a further deconstruction may seem to be irrelevant) and agree that they reached a truth they claim to be “the truth.” in a sense, a 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(1996). vygotsky, tutoring and learning. oxford review of education, 22(1), 5-16. dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, kelly curtis dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.272 | vol. 7 (2019) e62 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word dialogic authorial academic language learning layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a65 dialogic authorial academic language learning: an alternative to genre pedagogy mark philip smith kean university, usa abstract this paper reenvisions academic language learning in the university from a dialogic authorial perspective inspired by the work of bakhtin. i argue that language pedagogues have misappropriated the radical alternative bakhtin poses for language learning in his critique of genre through adopting a vygotskyian internalization approach to discourse and a post-structuralist interpretation of bakhtinian dialogic discourse as intertextuality. i explore how genre pedagogy has adopted these misunderstandings of bakhtin to prioritize students’ and scholars’ socialization within pre-existing, commonly accepted, shared, authoritative patterns of discourse. i claim that genre pedagogy tends to legitimize the practice of university writing curricula to postpone students’ engagement in meaning making, focusing on training over education. i explore the consequence of this prioritization on socialization and training in form for suppressing students’ dialogic addressivity to and problematization of the ideas of others, which is an essential for meaningful academic discourse. by contrast, a dialogic authorial approach to language learning prioritizes education through students’ and scholars’ ontological engagement in posing problems and authoring meaning in communion with others. the expectation is for language forms to become a necessary byproduct of the production of utterances that are meaningful to oneself and responsive to others. when focused on meaning, academic language forms become invisible except when there are challenges with intelligibility or modality. i argue for a radical rethinking of university language learning curricula in terms of a focus on voice and the “stylistics” of form to serve meaning making. mark philip smith, ph.d. is an assistant professor of english as a second language in the school of english studies at kean university. his interests include critical, dialogic authorial approaches to language learning, sexuality and gender education, drama in education, and cultural diversity education. he is interested in addressing issues of social exclusion and bullying in k12 contexts from a bakhtinian dialogic event perspective. he has also explored issues of academic integrity in university settings from a similar perspective. mark is also interested in teachers’ valuation of dialogue in their classrooms, both as an espoused value and a value “in-action” (cf. argyris & schön, 1974). he has explored what arrests and what affords pedagogical authorial dialogue in classroom settings. he is notably interested in the possibilities for authorial learning agency within informal “free-choice learning environments” (falk & dierking, 2000; 2002) and in drama, and has had experience working within afterschool-based practicum settings for undergraduate teacher education in cultural diversity. he lives in new york city and is active in the transportation alternatives movement. ïïò participation in dialogue is essential for academic language learning. even if one does not have a firm grasp on how to define dialogue, this statement seems very apparent. yet, i argue that genre pedagogy, a dominant curricular approach to academic language learning, too readily suppresses students’ and issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a66 scholars’ unalienated authorship – their interested and provocative dialogic addressing, responding, questioning, deconstructing, and problematizing of ideas with each other and the world – in favor of prioritizing their disciplinary or academic socialization within pre-existing (and supposedly commonly accepted and shared) authoritative patterns of discourse. genre pedagogy further legitimizes the practice of educators to postpone students’ engagement in meaning making. in this paper, i argue for a radical alternative to genre pedagogy developed from the ideas of mikhail bakhtin (1981), which i term dialogic authorial language learning. i will end the paper with a discussion of the possibilities for this approach, which requires a fundamental rethinking of the university academic language learning curriculum. genre pedagogy and the socialization of form genre pedagogy is a common curricular framework within university composition courses designed to prepare students and novice scholars for academic work and careers. through genre pedagogy, educators focus on the “linguistic resources” – essentially discursive forms – considered to be essential precursors for intelligible and meaningful communication within the “social arrangements and activities” familiar to those within a discipline or professional interest area (bazerman, 1997, p. 19). the genres are seen as serving an essential mediating function that socialize students or scholars’ discourse within the supposedly shared rhetorical practices of the discipline they are entering (devitt, 2009). imitative socialization approach to genre pedagogy a common understanding of genres in writing pedagogy is that they are model disciplinary discourse forms to be imitated so that students and novice scholars can develop and communicate their own ideas academically. in an imitative socialization approach to genre, students and novice scholars learn to “express themselves” through imitating the forms of those who are proficient in academic discourse, and by doing so, develop linguistic and rhetorical skills that allow them to master academic communication for their own future purposes within specific “academic communities” (swales, 1990). by focusing on imitation of forms, educators prioritize organized, logical deduction of elements deemed to be familiar, expected, or conventionally accepted within academic discourse. trying as much as possible to have students imitate the linguistic forms and rhetorical appeals extracted from authoritative models within academic disciplines, these educators attend to patterns of linguistic forms such as “old-to-new information flow” or “problemsolution-evaluation” organization, commonly encountered toolkit expressions of modality and certainty in different fields of study, or effective rhetorical appeals to ethos and credibility, among other concerns (swales & feak, 2012). for example, the following activity is suggested as an introductory activity in a widely used academic english textbook for graduate students, referring to one or more ‘model’ papers in your discipline, notice in particular such matters as how the papers are organized, how phrases are used, and where and why examples or illustrations are provided (swales & feak, 2012, p. 2). swales could rely upon vygotsky to further posit that imitative practices allow for a bounded type of creativity, vygotsky (1984, p. 263) stressed that by imitation he did not mean ‘mechanically copying an intellectual operation. ’ rather, it refers to reconstructing an activity with the help of others. it is called ‘imitation’ because it concerns the re-enactment of a pre-established cultural activity, but it is still an act of creation allowing the child [or student or scholar – mps] to make his [sic – mps] own version of the imitated activity within the boundaries allowed by the social environment that is in charge of controlling the acceptable variations within the socially shared definition of that practice (van oers, 2012, p. 143). dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a67 it is notable that van oers emphasizes the importance of developing one’s “own version of the imitated activity.” rather than learning the supposedly right way to write or speak in the disciplines, genre educators can stress recognition and production of the forms and patterns that are “adequate” for participation within an academic disciplinary culture (bazerman, 1985). bazerman, for instance, has called for a focus on kairotic1 textual elements, which calls attention to the rhetorical adequacy of communication, style, content, and form within certain “social arrangements” (motta-roth, 2009, p. 324). however, it is notable here that curricular priority is still being placed upon the reconstruction of form over the meaning of the writing itself for the students and the development of student voice. i will soon call into question the prudence of socializing students into forms prior to engaging in making meaning. critical socialization approach to genre pedagogy many genre pedagogues are rightfully concerned, however, with the authoritative power of the genres in imitative socialization to limit or silence student authorship. in response to this concern, another approach to genre pedagogy emphasizes students’ and novice scholars’ critical awareness of genre through “a conscious attention to [the diversity of] genres and their potential influences on people and the ability to consider acting differently within [similar or quite different] genres” in the future (devitt, 2009, p. 347). these educators notably still prioritize the value of learning to write in the genres as essential for socialization within academic disciplines but encourage writers to take a critical stance toward the forms they employ. bazerman (1992) argues that it is through becoming critically aware of and responsible for the use of structural forms in academic writing that students and scholars become liberated to participate within their disciplines, the more precisely we learn how the symbols by which we live have come into place, how they function, whose interests they serve, and how we may even leverage on them to reform the world, the more we may act on our social desires. exposing the choice making that lies behind the apparently old and taken-for-granted world forces us to address the ethical question of our responsibility for our world. criticism, however, is only the beginning of action. action is a participation, not a disengagement. participation is the other side of rhetoric: the art of influencing others through language in the great social undertakings that shape the way we live (bazerman, 1992, p. 62). to bazerman, “participation” in the genres allows for meaningful and responsible contention within the disciplines. the critical genre pedagogues thus see the genres as stable sites of critical analysis and resistance, and students and scholars are even suggested to ideally become “quietly subversive” in their relationship to their disciplines or fields of study (russell, lea, parker, street, & donahue, 2009). bazerman has further argued that there is power in “learning to wield tools of symbolic power for immediate rhetorical purposes” (bazerman, 2001, p. 25), if students want the power of their discipline, they have to develop the appropriate ways of expressing and using the knowledge. students need to learn to speak with voices recognisable as legitimate, warrantable and powerful within the disciplines and professions (bazerman, 2001, p. 25). through using the rhetorical tools of the disciplines, then, bazerman argues that students’ or scholars’ discourse undergoes “refinement,” and their ideas undergo a “discursive transformation” wherein they can learn to integrate “knowledges and selves” and engage in “complex discursive resources and presentations” (bazerman, 2001, p. 28). learning to participate in refining one’s voice within the genres is 1 kairos is defined as “a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action: the opportune and decisive moment” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kairos) dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a68 thus considered to be learning to participate “in new ways of thinking and acting” which “can enrich and expand one’s identity” (bazerman, 1992, 2002 in russell et al., 2009, p. 411). thus, bazerman argues that while many educators may wish to prioritize nurturing and sustaining students’ voice, socialization within the academic genre may supercede such a focus in that the genres may be what “students will find most valuable for their ethical and personal development” (bazerman, 1992, 2002 in russell et al., 2009, p. 411). however, it is my contention that this refinement of discourse through the genres – one’s socialization within the ready-made genres of academic practice – becomes an educational end in itself over production of meaning. in this sense, genre pedagogy, particularly critical genre pedagogy, promotes a “closed participatory socialization” model of education in which the “goal is students’ mastery of sociocultural practices in contrast to a dispassionate and decontextualized toolkit of essential knowledge and skills [as seen in the imitative model]… it treats cultural practices as ready-made for students to learn and, thus, defines education as reproduction of the ready-made culture (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, pp. 160-161). genre pedagogy and the postponement of meaning in essence, then, the genres do not necessarily need to be relevant, interesting, or important to the students or scholars except to develop the needed skills or rhetorical moves needed to participate in the genres themselves (matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016). meaningful participation is expected to be postponed, as generic systems are thought of as internalized “frames” for action which can be “transferred” to meaningful participation later on. bazerman compares the pedagogical value of genres in writing to that of learning the classification systems of trees in botany. when the botany student internalizes the scheme of the names of trees, the student is argued to become capable of greater observation and thinking about trees, learning the names of trees and their distinctive features only becomes part of creative thinking about botany and evolution after the scheme has become internalized, to reshape perception, which allows for fresh observation and fresh thought (bazerman, 2009, p. 288). the assumption here is that like the classification system of trees the genres are symbolic cultural systems which underpin meaningful communication in a particular discipline, reshaping perception and understanding as they are employed in writing or speaking. the reshaping of perception and thinking is posited as a consequence of successfully reproducing the patterns (regardless of whether the patterns are imitated or critically engaged with). the assumption is that these shared discursive forms or practices are needed prior to meaningful participation in academic practices. in genre pedagogy, then, students and scholars are expected to develop language skills considered existent (and sometimes hidden) within disciplinary practices and recognize and learn to produce key, preset patterns in language forms prior to engaging in meaning making. from a vygotksyian/brunerian perspective, these internalized cultural forms and patterns “scaffold” meaningful communication, …[it is an] evolutionary fact that mind could not exist save for culture. for the evolution of the hominid mind is linked to the development of a way of life where “reality” is represented by a symbolism shared by members of a cultural community in which a technical-social way of life is both organized and construed in terms of that symbolism. this symbolic [or generic – mps] mode is not only shared by a community, but conserved, elaborated, and passed on to succeeding generations who, by virtue of this transmission, continue to maintain the culture’s identity and way of life [including within an academic practice]… meaning making involves situating encounters dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a69 with the world [or academic discipline] in their appropriate cultural [disciplinary] contexts in order to know “what they are about.” although meanings are “in the mind,” they have their origins and their significance in the culture [discipline] in which they are created. it is this cultural [generic/disciplinary] situatedness of meanings that assures their negotiability and, ultimately, their communicability (bruner, 1996, p. 3). however, a major challenge here with genre pedagogy for imitative socialization or critical socialization is that the “appropriation” or “internalization” of the genre can become an end in itself, where the value of the utterance for the purposes of expressing meaningful ideas in a course or a discipline is not considered. this is a common issue in the curriculum of preparatory institutes and departments working to prepare multilingual students for university work in english-speaking universities. for instance, i recall the head instructor of graduate preparation i worked with at an intensive english program informing me that the “content” of what the provisionally admitted international graduate students write was not of significant concern. he argued that since the graduate departments would be teaching the students to focus on meaningful content in their disciplines, what mattered more for assessment purposes and to prepare them for graduate work was the form in which the students were writing. however, i noticed over time that the writing of papers to fit into the instructors’ vision of the genre became an end in itself. students also continually complained that the language study was simply postponing their degree program and that the writing genres, such as data commentary and case analysis for business students, designed to be helpful to their graduate work, seemed frequently irrelevant to them. it also was not lost on the students that their language instructors had little expertise in the discipline in which they were entering. in turn, plagiarism was quite rampant (see smith, 2022, in preparation, for further discussion of academic dishonesty). many students also struggled severely with motivating themselves to write in such an environment. indeed, educational tasks focused on pattern recognition and (re)production can easily become alienating and tedious in their inauthenticity. the prioritization on pattern recognition and pattern production can thus not only postpone but also circumvent the possibility for meaning making, authorial agency, and “ontological engagement” within dialogue (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019, pp. 143-173; matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016). the overemphasis on written text over discourse has indeed been found to be a common feature of academic language pedagogy for international english language learning students. as leki writes, the texts are, institutionally, the sine qua non of the evidence of learning whereas the preparations and processes accompanying text production may be only minimally present or may even be undetectable (leki, 2017, p. 234). furthermore, leki argues that language instructors overly “call attention” to the writing production of second language learners, leading students to too easily focus on generic and grammatical forms rather than to the discourses to which the students are responding and addressing. notably, leki claims this issue is not as widely problematic for content-area educators, who may more readily tolerate second language writing if it is understandable. is learning the genres really necessary for participation in academic and scientific discourse? language educators should also be aware of how little undergraduate and graduate level genre writing has in common with workplace and professional writing. students in college composition courses are engaged in a practice of relying upon forms developed by writers who are part of a community they are not members of, rendering the notion of genre difficult to integrate with school writing (leki, 2017). professional writing tends to have a social/communal function to respond to a particular situation or concern, while school writing exists for the purpose of evaluating the writer or helping students to think and dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a70 reflect about ideas (leki, 2017), rendering questionable much of the idea that somehow the practice in the writing genres themselves will transition effectively within professional settings.2 i thus argue that the value and necessity for participation in academic discourse of practicing many of the patterns and forms taught in composition courses may be overstated and even ill-advised. it is questionable if anyone other than an undergraduate or graduate student ever writes essays such as rhetorical analyses or argument essays, as “in many cases students are asked to produce school genres they have never seen and their teachers have never written” (leki, 2017, p. 243). in my current practice as a composition instructor for multilingual immigrant learners, i have experienced a great deal of confusion among students and faculty surrounding the genre of the rhetorical analysis, in particular. i realized when i entered the university that i had never written nor was explicitly taught about rhetorical devices in college, and many faculty at my institution have stated the same. just recently, based on concerns from faculty that students struggle greatly with understanding how to organize the rhetorical essay and develop an analysis of ethos, pathos and logos of a text or speech, the english department is considering replacing the rhetorical analysis with a “position paper” instead. the idea behind the position paper would be that it would be a more encountered genre for the students and more likely to be helpful for future college work and professional work, but there is no reason to believe that writing the position paper will not just become another end in itself to pass the composition course. for undergraduates, as is noted in lemke’s (1990) sociocultural studies of school science discourse, it becomes apparent that overly focusing on genre can also limit students’ mastery of scientific concepts and the relationships to each other if colloquial discourse is also not reflected upon. lemke found that meaningful dialogic inquiry on unknown ideas and perplexing dilemmas in the sciences is regularly colloquial (lemke, 1990). in his view, authoritative discourse patterns and forms may give students the illusion of an explanation and effectively block further inquiry on scientific questions. for example, alan alda, the actor who developed an interest in science from his work on documentaries interviewing scientists for public television in the united states, wrote in the journal science, i was 11 and i was curious. i had been thinking for days about the flame at the end of a candle. finally, i took the problem to my teacher. “what’s a flame?” i asked her. “what's going on in there?” there was a slight pause and she said, “it’s oxidation.” she didn't seem to think there was much else to say. deflated, i knew there had to be more to the mystery of a flame than just giving the mystery another name. that was a discouraging moment for me personally, but decades later i see the failure to communicate science with clarity as far more serious for society (alda, 2012). it may that, in writing pedagogy, the genres, because of their authoritative place in the curriculum, provide a similar illusion to students that their writing is well structured, understandable, and meaningful when it may just have an academic appearance. by emphasizing the commonality and sharedness of academic genres, and reifying these shared patterns of discourse as part of an academic or disciplinary culture, then, the writing or language instructor may thus not always be helping students to gain access to desired academic practices but may instead grant greater legitimacy for sometimes alienating instructional practices which postpone meaning. it seems that genre pedagogy more readily justifies the curriculum of the university composition departments over promoting students’ and scholars’ voice in writing. indeed, leki (2017), an intensive english program instructor of international students herself, noted in her ethnographic research that assigned writing in 2 my use of the term “transition” over transfer is intentional. see beach (1999) for a discussion of “consequential transitions” as an alternative to the cognitive notion of transfer. dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a71 general education and later academic coursework was only slightly similar, at best, to the writing of college composition courses. she argued that, unlike the writing in composition courses, general education writing, for example, was either much more formulaic and homogenous (as in a biology lab report), was shortanswer exam based (as in history), or meant to determine if students completed other activities. there may also be much less need for individual writing than what composition departments (and the university instructors convinced by them) care to admit. for example, two international esol students in engineering and marketing that were part of leki’s (2017) ethnography had frequent opportunities to participate in group-work writing assignments, so they rarely if ever had to write anything by themselves. in fact, leki argues that genre pedagogy, and analyses like contrastive rhetoric, might better suit the need of experienced writers – for example, those wishing to improve their flow of ideas or argumentation structure – rather than novice undergraduate or graduate students. for novice scholars and more advanced students, instruction in the genres may also be questionably relevant to university courses, as discussed above, and to the development of meaningful scientific, professional, and disciplinary work more generally. as li (2012) suggests, to engage in their research assistantships or fellowships, graduate students and novice researchers arguably do not need to write yet according to appropriate or even academically honest standards, at least in some departments. for example, li (2012) reports on the common practice of novice researchers in biochemistry regularly copying and “borrowing” whole sections of text from manuscripts published in a similar field to insert into their articles. the pressure on the novice researchers to publish findings – and the pressure on the research professor to have them publish – dictated the lead researcher leki studied to continually edit plagiarized and poorly written text in order to ensure grant funding and career prospects were not harmed. the assumption of the novice researchers was that it was the duty of the lead researcher to approve the final writing product, not their responsibility. knowledge of genre may thus be important for scientific discourse for those responsible for final production of texts. network-actor theory also makes an important related point that it matters less how one writes a manuscript than who is writing it, reading it, and citing it. in analyzing valid markers of recognized scientific practice, latour (1987) emphasizes the role of recruiting support of ideas from colleagues in scientific inquiry over mastery of the structural-functional and conceptual patterns of discourse. in academic practice, it may thus matter more “who is doing the talking” and who is recruited to support the text more than what forms are employed to write or speak (latour, 1987; wertsch, 1991, p. 63). when it comes to learning genre, it seems that less is more, if the goal is to turn students and scholars into proficient scientists rather than writers. bakhtin’s alternative to the notion of genre in this section of the paper, i present a bakhtinian authorial dialogic approach to university writing pedagogy which is distinctively different from the genre approach. however, before presenting bakhtin’s proposal for language pedagogy, it is notable to point out the ways in which bakhtin’s notion of dialogue has been misunderstood in the field of composition studies. this translated quote from bakhtin is frequently cited by english-speaking scholars in writing pedagogy for justifying the generic shaping of voice, the word in language is half someone else’s. it becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his [sic] own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker get his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own (bakhtin, 1981, pp. 293-294). dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a72 this oft-cited passage is used to support the idea that in genre-based language learning students are “appropriating” cultural-historically authoritative models within the genres in order to make the words within the models “one’s own” over time. through imitating genre in the language classroom, students are said to arrive at “appropriating” the same or similar intentions as the more culturally advanced authors of model texts, enculturating themselves into academic practice or at least within supposedly shared ways of producing text within a particular field of study (cf. van oers, 2012). it is important to note, however, that this passage has been problematically interpreted from a structuralist english translation of bakhtin’s work. appropriation refers to “the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them” (wikipedia, “appropriation”). the root of the word “appropriation” is “proper” or “property”, which conjures up a sense of individual ownership over an utterance – “belonging exclusively to one person, private, personal (c1130)” – something which is “rendering a concept exactly (c1265), that is the same identical (c1280),” or something which is “suitable for a specified or implicit purpose or requirement; appropriate to the circumstances or conditions; of the requisite standard or type; apt, fitting; correct, right” (oxford english dictionary, 2007). if присвоение is translated as appropriation, it is quite reasonable to claim that bakhtin saw genres as ready-made, shared properties of discourse, ready for students and teachers to take in and use for “their own” desires. however, in the passage above, the translation of the russian term присвоение/prisvoenie as “appropriation” can also be translated as “stealing” (matusov, personal communication, 2019). appropriation focuses on preset and “specified” objectives and uses for a particular text, while stealing/embezzlement focuses on unrestrained or unauthorized activity with the words of another, a casting off of what is expected and appropriate, and a venturing toward what cannot be predicted or controlled (cf. the notion of "off-script" learning in kennedy, 2005). as the ukrainian bakhtinian educator iryna starygina has noted (see matusov et al., 2019, p. 89), a tension exists in bakhtin’s work between the notion of genre (“i have to say it this way”) and volition (“i want to say it this way”). if we interpret what bakhtin states about genre in the light of “embezzlement,” the language learning environment is no longer focused on reproduction of ready-made cultural frames. rather, students and scholars focus on production and creation of the new and the unexpected. embezzlement is an act of misappropriation of the ideas of another rather than reproduction! students and scholars, in turn, can be said to be joining disciplinary cultures through becoming responsible but unrestrained participants in what russian bakhtinian educator and philosopher alexander lobok (2011) has articulated as a “constant creative transcending” of pre-existing cultural practices (matusov, 2011a, p. 27). a further dialogic (rather than structuralist) interpretation of what bakhtin refers to by genre is that any re-production of generic forms, grammar, syntax, and so on is a by-product of students’ and scholars’ authorship and the critical pruning of discourse which takes place within a community concerned with the quality and nature of the production emerging out of that authorship. the form of the utterance is readily ignored for the purpose of meaning. if bakhtin did not mean to focus on “the word” or the form of discourse as a property which is acquired and used for articulating ideas, what did bakhtin mean to focus on by the use of “one’s own word”? it is important to note that the focus on the word becoming “one’s own” is much less discursive in its orientation than bakhtin’s later notion of “double-voicedness,” as is evident in comparing the passage from bakhtin above with the one below, someone else’s words introduced into our own speech inevitably assume a new (our own) interpretation and become subject to our evaluation of them; that is, they become double-voiced. all that can vary is the interrelationship between these two voices. the transmission of someone else’s statement in the form of a question already leads to a clash of two intentions within a single discourse: for in so doing we not only ask a dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a73 question, but make someone else’s statement problematical. our practical everyday speech is full of other people’s words: with some of them we completely merge our own voice, forgetting whose they are; others, which we take as authoritative, we use to reinforce our own words; still others, finally, we populate with our own aspirations, alien or hostile to them (bakhtin, 1999, p. 195, emphasis mine). in this later passage by bakhtin, a notable emphasis is placed on a “new interpretation,” which i argue is what bakhtin appears to mean by “our own” voice (rather than a vygotskian internalization of culturalhistorical patterns of speech). this second passage from bakhtin also emphasizes one’s critical evaluation of the ideas of the other. through bakhtin’s insight that the word of another is “double-voiced” in our response to it, the attention of the educator becomes focused on questioning and engaging in the problematics, questions, and uncertainties of utterances and not on what is shared in discourse. the word of another is never imitated, nor is it simply “internalized” and “transferred” into imagined or real future practices. rather, the patterns and forms from the voices of others – the genres – are responded to with our own words, sometimes borrowed directly, sometimes seen as “authoritative,” and sometimes seen as “alien or hostile” to us. as i will point out soon, the later bakhtin helps us realize that his project is more about authorship within dialogue – the creative addressing of the new, the surprising, the provocative – rather than internalization, with generic forms in service to that authorship. authorship is the primary goal of education then rather than the ability to engage in generic discourse, which i will argue is a training and socialization objective (and is thus non-educational). what is the site of meaning? dialogue or the text? most of the “standard glossaries of literacy and cultural theory” define genre as an element of intertextuality, and intertextuality as an important element of genre. a central focus on the notion of “intertextuality,” which is also misattributed to bakhtin, is seen in bazerman’s work, intertextuality forms one of the crucial grounds for writing studies and writing practice. texts do not appear in isolation, but in relation to other texts.… when we read, we use knowledge and experience from texts we have read before to make sense of the new text, and as readers we notice the texts the writer invokes directly and indirectly… the genre of any text or text to be written… grows out of a history of prior texts that set exemplars and expectations. showing students models of prior texts that accomplish the tasks they are facing and helping them see how they can build on and modify that history of genre models can help provide guidelines as well as space for originality relevant to the specifics of the current task (bazerman, 2004, p. 63). the term “intertextuality” first appeared in the work of the french scholar julia kristeva in the late 1960s. as a structuralist, kristeva prioritized the text as the site of meaning, although she interestingly questioned whether the text could be the source of meaning (todorov, 1984). it was kristeva who first brought bakhtin to the attention of western academics within her seminars with roland barthes in paris (lesic-thomas, 2005). after becoming familiar with bakhtin’s work in bulgaria, kristeva translated bakhtin’s writing from russian and bakhtin’s work, and in turn, the translations took on structuralist overtones characteristic of her own work (todorov, 1984). bazerman (2004), in his article published in an edited book on bakhtinian approaches to education (ball & freedman, 2004), acknowledges that the term “intertextuality” emerged from the work of kristeva (1980). interestingly, bazerman even is aware that dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a74 the term intertextuality, or any russian equivalent, appears nowhere in the works of either bakhtin or volosinov (bazerman, 2004, p. 54).3 yet, despite this awareness of this issue, bazerman and other genre scholars interpret bakhtinian ideas of dialogue through a structuralist lens. furthermore, it is quite curious, despite bazerman’s reference to structuralism in shaping genre theory, how highly critical kristeva was of the notion of genre (allen, 2000; duff, 2002). as allen (2000, p. 34) notes, kristeva, along with other structuralist thinkers in the social upheaval of late 1960’s paris, challenged the possibility for stable sources of signification (including the existence of genres themselves), arguing that the text is a site of infinite “ongoing transformations and/or productions” (kristeva, 1986, p. 87). there is thus a significant ambivalence with the authority of the genres in the work of kristeva (duff, 2002). kristeva and especially barthes articulated how the concepts of intertextuality and genre exist in a “basic tension” with each other (duff, 2002, pp. 54-55). intertextuality is a radically relativistic notion that does not easily lend itself to being adopted for the authoritative analysis of model texts. the consequence of kristeva’s interpretation of the centrality of text over bakhtin’s focus on discourse, and the focus on shared meaning over bakhtin’s focus on dialogic and critical responses to utterances as a source of meaning, is that “discourses” become “textual practices”, genres become “textual arrangements”, “utterances” become “textual functions”, and the category of “voice” disappears altogether (duff, 2002, p. 61). in essence, then, it can be argued that texts do not interact with one another; people interact with each other referencing texts, sometimes relying upon texts to build support for ideas and to ward off detractors of them (latour, 1987). nearly two decades after kristeva began to share bakhtin’s ideas with western scholars, bakhtin’s seminal texts were more carefully translated. the russian word разноголосие/raznogolos’e was translated as “heteroglossia” instead of “intertextuality.” bakhtin’s focus on разноречие/raznorech’e can be even more clearly, although perhaps less elegantly (because of the mixture of greek and latin roots), translated as “heterodiscoursia” (matusov, 2011b). the focus on the diversity (разнообразие/raznoobrazie) of discourses (речи/rechi) rather than texts in a pedagogical setting calls educators’ attention to “interaddressivity and interproblematicity in the classroom” (matusov, 2011b, p. 115). educators, students, and scholars can instead focus on what is “new, interesting, and important” that can be contributed by each participant in the classroom/disciplinary setting, as well as a prioritization on “ontological engagement” in that setting (matusov, 2011b, p. 115). from a bakhtinian heterodiscursive perspective, the academic language classroom can be envisioned as inviting students to participate within 3 many genre scholars have conflated the work of mikhail bakhtin with valentin voloshinov, assuming these authors are the same person publishing under two different names, despite the fact that the assumption that bakhtin wrote under the name voloshinov to hide from the soviet authorities had been highly criticized by bakhtinian philologists years earlier (see morson & emerson, 1990, chapter 4). philologists have argued that bakhtin cannot be the same person as a marxist theoretician (volosinov) who held ideas quite antithetical to bakhtin’s central vision of dialogicity and double-voicing, among other concepts. volosinov, indeed, cited these central concepts of bakhtin’s oeuvre “as symptoms of decadent ‘relativistic individualism’” (morson & emerson, 1990, pp. 124-125). dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a75 historically valuable discourses, to become familiar with historically, culturally, and socially important voices, to learn how to address these voices, and to develop responsible replies to them without an expectation of an agreement or an emerging consensus (matusov, 2011b, p. 115). a focus on heterodiscursive voice and responsible utterances over shared cultural forms has important consequences for academic language pedagogy, as it focuses students on critical dialogic addressing of voices within the genres, addressing the voices of relevant others (one’s peers, the instructor), and developing one’s responsibility to the diverse concerns of others. heterodiscursivity does not demand agreement with set cultural expectations, but rather emphasizes one’s creative authorship. the genres, in turn, are put into service to support students’ authorship. authorship and the focus on the new, unexpected, and unfamiliar is thus prioritized in bakhtinian critical dialogue over the focus on shared cultural meanings and forms. when one reviews the notion of genre from the whole oeuvre of bakhtin’s work on dialogic authorship, it becomes difficult to see genres as isolated from the dialogic events from which they emerge. while most genre pedagogy insists on socializing students into the cultural annals of the familiar, the bakhtinian concept of authorship prioritizes creating the new and unfamiliar. the familiar patterns of the genres are at the service of developing one’s authorial voice, genres provide a specific field for a specific activity, and such activity is never just an ‘application,’ ‘instantiation,’ or repetition of a pattern. genres carry the generalizable resources of particular events; but specific actions or utterances must use those resources to accomplish new purposes in each unrepeatable milieu. each utterance, each use of a genre, demands real work; beginning with the given, something different must be created [i.e., mastery of a genre requires its transcendence from the author] (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 291). note how bakhtin dismisses the simple reproduction or re-enactment of structures or forms as authorship. rather, within dialogic authorship, a participant makes a “bid for a unique creative contribution fully or partially recognized by a relevant community and by the participant him/herself” (matusov, 2011a, p. 24). thus, there is a definite incompatibility in bakhtin between genre and authorship. crucially, in authorial discourse, as wittgenstein would note, the form of the utterance becomes invisible, as otherwise the speaker or writer would be prevented from meaningfully expressing the message (guetti, 2004). even in wittgenstein’s language game of the simplistic language of two construction workers passing objects to each other and saying phrases like “lower brick three” (lower the brick on the count of three), a syntactical form which would presumably be quite easy to learn, there is a peculiar social practice in place which values, needs, or desires this simplistic form of communication (guetti, 2004). for wittgenstein, then, the embeddedness in social practices of the utterance is primary over the training and study of form. a similar argument can be made surrounding the genre of nursing care plans; in practice in the hospital, such plans are formulated in generic ways to facilitate actions on the part of the staff. however, because in school the form is prioritized over the action, the development of care plans can feel tedious and inauthentic (leki, 2017). in genuine nursing practice, in creating texts such as nursing care plans, while the effectiveness of the form of communication may be questioned, the language and form ultimately becomes invisible in communicating the intent of the writer. if this were not the case, nurses might become slaves to forms, distracting themselves from important communication with members of the medical team. of course, this does not deny the possibility of interest in analyzing the linguistic features of academic and professional utterances as an end in itself, but this is arguably an exception to the general invisibility of the genre in meaningful discourse. dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a76 another important consideration in both bakhtin and wittgenstein’s view of discourse is that authorial discourse (language games) cannot be played with just one player (guetti, 2004). the discourse exists always in response to another voice. the meaning of an utterance for bakhtin does not lie in its capacity to reproduce or mirror what has been said before but rather lies within its responsibility to other utterances (note the emphasis on response in the word responsibility). this focus on one’s responsibility to the utterances of others within dialogue is the central notion which distinguishes bakhtin’s notion of genre from notions which are more commonly found in the literature. for instance, in his interpretation of dostoevsky’s novels, bakhtin insisted on the inseparability of voice from dialogue in sharp contradistinction with the ideas of the russian formalist shklovksy, who emphasized, like bazerman, the discursive origin or source of voice (bakhtin, 1999, p. 38ff.). if the source of voice is overemphasized in pedagogy, the concern is that students’ and scholars’ creative authorship may be disrupted or blocked by the attention to the form of the utterance. what may matter more than linguistic tools like genres for academic language development is how students and scholars begin to dialogue with these ideas, to develop new ideas. indeed, multilingual undergraduate writers may well succeed and be confident in their l2 writing tasks without actively writing themselves, as they can be actively engaged with their l1 and l2 peers in formulating ideas without doing the writing themselves (leki, 2017). in this sense, the form and even the authorship of the writing is ultimately invisible. language learning thus needs to consider “socioacademic relationships” – “friendly relationships that students develop with peers and teachers through their academic interactions in shared classes” (leki, 2017, pp. 261-262). furthermore, the “funds of knowledge” existing within the students’ out-of-school and home experiences could be more prioritized (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzalez, 1992), and more attention could be paid to the activity systems in which the students’ and scholars’ language use is situated (hutchins, 2006). a critical authorial dialogic curricular alternative to genre pedagogy rather than focusing on internalization of forms and postponement of meaning, a dialogic authorial curriculum for developing academic writing focuses on instructors, students, and scholars engaging in critically important and relevant dialogue on questions of concern to them. a dialogic authorial writing curriculum prioritizes the value of engaging in academic discourses for the students’ and others’ interested purposes. only after a meaningful discourse is articulated (which seeks a response from others) is it necessary or desirable for students to analyze the form and organization of ideas and the ideas of others (bakhtin, 1981; matusov & von duyke, 2010). as an example of the danger of focusing on form prior to engaging in meaningful discourse, matusov (2015) presents the responses of teachers and pre-service teachers to a young african-american elementary student’s discourse in response to the story anansi the spider: teacher: which spider was your favorite character? jamal: well, i had about three or four of them that i liked, because some of them reminded me of different people. cause at home i have two sisters and one brother, and my cousin ree-ree lives with us sometimes when her mom is not sick. i don’t know why her brother durrell doesn’t come to our house but the spider named “see trouble” reminded me of durrell. it seems like durrell always knows when something is about to happen, but he never gets in trouble, but the rest of us do. my sister dana is just like that spider named “thirsty” she always likes to get everybody on her side of a story, but some time she can be mean, like the time she threw this bottle at my brother jj because he would not leave her alone (howard, 2002, cited in matusov, 2015, p. 405). what is notable here is how what matusov called the african-american boy jamal’s more “topicmosaic”-like discourse did not match the expected topic-centered genre expected of the school. when jamal replied to the question with this discursive form, howard (2002) noted that the teacher moved away dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a77 from discussing the students’ contribution. the topic-centered discourse of an african-american student named mike, by contrast, was validated and considered as desirable and as having more advanced use of narrative genre skills: teacher: which spider was your favorite character? mike: softy. teacher: why? mike: because he was soft and they needed him. teacher: why was his role important? mike: because he helped a lot (howard, 2002, cited in matusov, 2015, p. 404). pre-service teachers reading these utterances notably focused on the generic form of the boys’ utterances rather than on the meaning of the utterances. in their analysis, the pre-service teachers felt that jamal himself – not just his narrative – was “unfocused,” “difficult to follow,” and “illogical” (whereas mike was “more logical” and “up to the point.”) in response to these criticisms of jamal, matusov prepared a dialogic provocation in which he encouraged his students to think of jamal’s utterance not as a contribution in a class discussion but rather as an utterance one might hear at a family dinner table, imagine that you are at your family dinner party. you are sitting next to 6-year old african-american boy, jamal. his mother is a friend of your parents. imagine that you overheard a conversation between jamal and his mom about the book ‘anansi the spider’ and you hear jamal’s reply to his mom’s question [in the same way] he said [it] to the teacher. do you think you would find his reply unusual and interesting? if so, what kind of interest might you have in his statement? what kind of questions would you ask him about what he said? please try to avoid asking schoolish questions that you are not personally interested in (matusov, 2015, p. 406). the pre-service teachers were then encouraged to think of questions that were “genuine and personally invested” in response to jamal’s story rather than questions which expressed a “fake” interest. many questions they asked jamal were “fake” in that jamal answered them already in his story or they were uninteresting to address, questions that we considered fake usually were the following, “how old is ree-ree?” (who cares?!), “why does durrell remind you of ‘see trouble’ spider?” (jamal had already explained it), “why did dana throw a bottle at j.j.?” (jamal had explained it), ‘‘ what did you find attractive in ‘see trouble’ spider and ‘thirsty’ spider?” (jamal already said that they reminded him his siblings and cousins, people he knew), and so on (matusov, 2015, p. 407). it took time, but the pre-service teachers did end up asking “genuine and personally interested” questions that were potentially interesting to jamal (and themselves). in turn, the pre-service teachers (unlike jamal and mike’s teacher) engaged in authorial dialogic meaning making, defined “as a dialogic relationship between the genuine, personal, authentic question of one person seeking information and serious reply by another person in a never-ending dialogue” (matusov, 2015, p. 409). it is jamal’s authorial and unique view of the world that is being engaged with by the teachers, and in turn, the teachers (and jamal) transcend what is given in generic forms and discourses. there is a genuine interest, a creative transcending of cultural norms, and a dialogic addressing of the student as a genuine addressee whose reply to the question matters. dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a78 from a bakhtinian perspective, achieving a particular form is thus not the focus of the language study or writing pedagogy, but is instead a by-product of students’ effort for authorial meaning making within a community of participants interested in each other’s ideas. this perspective advises against postponement of students’ authorial meaning making within the language classroom for the development of language forms. indeed, problem-posing within the academic language curriculum seems essential for 21st century work and university environments, which will increasingly require creative and improvisational problem-posing and open-ended thinking (zhao, 2009). what matters in dialogic authorship is that any language form makes a difference to communicating meaningfully in dialogue with others. the focus is thus on the “differences which make a difference” in academic utterances and texts for communicating meaningfully with an audience (bateson, 1987, p. 276). this means supporting student voice and initiatives, even when they move away from pre-set curricular endpoints. participation in a messy, unfinalizable dialogue becomes an end in itself. the focus of instruction would not be based upon reproduction of form, searching for the “right” way of writing and speaking that is supposed to socialize students within a discipline, nor on socializing students or scholars within a genre, but instead upon continually ensuring novice academic writers have effectively developed, communicated, and supported their voices in response to interested others. such instruction values polyphony in education, the “engaged coexistence of multiple yet unmerged voices” within dialogue (sidorkin, 2002, p. 145). re-envisioning academic language pedagogy through a focus on voice from the perspective advocated here, dialogic authorship is necessary for developing students’ and scholars’ academic voice, but it is clear that mainstream curricular practices in language pedagogy provide little support for voice and frequently impede it. curriculum is structured mostly – if not exclusively — on the attainment of forms and assessment of those forms to the detriment of students’ and scholars’ agency in making meaning and finding their academic voices. writing courses focus on the attainment of pre-set forms for the purpose of socialization and training, but such a curriculum is arguably not educational. when meaningful discourse is labeled as a secondary “content” issue in language curricula, students’ and scholars’ productions do not enter into dialogue with the concerns, judgements and values of others and become part of what sidorkin (2002) would argue is the “wastebasket economy of schooling,” where the product is just meant to illustrate the form and to serve little purpose other than to be disposed of after it is created. making matters worse for developing voice and agency, assessment procedures focus on individual attainment of form, making unsafe the production of meaningful discourse and the experimentation with forms that one would undertake in producing it. a dialogic authorial language curriculum helps to give guidance to an important dilemma in language teaching, the debate over attention to grammatical forms versus meaning in language pedagogy. in an effort to address this dichotomy, long (1991, 2014) has argued for what he calls a “focus on form” approach over a more structural “focus on forms” based pedagogy (i.e., think of the traditional language syllabus which focuses students on “adverb clauses” one week and “relative clauses” the next) or “a focus on communication” pedagogy that eschews discussion on grammatical forms altogether. as long (2014) writes, …focus on form involves reactive use of a wide variety of pedagogic procedures (pps) to draw learners’ attention to linguistic problems in context, as they arise during communication (… typically as students work on problemsolving tasks), thereby increasing the likelihood that attention to code features will be synchronized with the learner’s internal syllabus, developmental stage, and processing ability. focus on form capitalizes on a symbiotic relationship between explicit and implicit learning, instruction, and knowledge (p. 27, emphasis in original). dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a79 an exemplar provided by long (2014) of the pedagogy needed for this focus on form is a “pedagogic task” designed to prepare a “sales report” on car production in the us and japan. notice the emphasis on the generic form of the sales report here, which is presumed to create a meaningful context for discussion of forms, [in this] target task, a learner might say something like “production of suv in the united states fell by 30% from 2000 to 2004.” if the very next utterance from a teacher or another student is a partial recast, in the form of a confirmation check, e.g., “production of suvs fell by 30%?,” as proposed in long (1996b), the likelihood of the learner noticing the plural -s is increased by the fact that he or she is vested in the exchange, so is motivated to learn what is needed and attending to the response, already knows the meaning he or she was trying to express, so has freed up attentional resources to devote to the form of the response, and hears the correct form in close juxtaposition to his or her own, facilitating cognitive comparison (p. 27). i argue that long offers here an impoverished understanding of meaningful communication, as is revealed by his choice to focus on a pre-set, teacher-led generic “task” of a “sales report.” while long is definitely right that discussion of form can and should emerge in the context of meaningful communication, the example provides little to indicate that a student would be “vested” in this generic task (cf. long, 2015, p. 27). in my view, a focus on form should be subservient in language pedagogy to a focus on voice, which we could also term here a focus on authorship, with some less clarity for those unfamiliar with the specific use of the term authorship here. i call for language learners to be given more opportunities to work with instructors and academic mentors and advisors who support students’ interests or stakes in academic discourse. the priority here is on dialogue that is generated when there is surprise, interest, or stakes in the discourse, where what someone says matters and is important to them, and when the student feels their values, ideas, and perspectives are addressed by the curriculum. the role of a language pedagogue is then to support the intelligibility and fluency of students’ voices, with attention to forms like modality becoming strategically needed to communicate one’s vested ideas. the implicit learning of the english modality system could then become a byproduct of students’ and scholars’ efforts at expressing their academic voice. thus, in disagreement with the view of my former graduate colleague at an intensive english program, “content” does crucially matter in language pedagogy. following lobok (2011), i see the language teacher as ideally a “person of culture” who is genuinely interested in ideas in multiple fields of study and can work to direct students and scholars toward inquiries and dilemmas of significance to society. as lobok indicates, a “person of culture” need not know everything there is to know about a subject but is skilled in directing students and scholars toward sources of support in the university and in one’s community to delve further into valued issues and concerns. if students, for example, really were interested in the production of suvs in the us and japan, what would be the voices that would be participating in dialogue on this issue, and what would they be concerned about? one voice could, of course, include the car manufacturers who make more money selling bigger suvs over smaller traditional sedans. but other voices could include traffic safety advocates concerned with the rise of pedestrian fatalities caused by the greater presence of heavier, high-profile vehicles in cities, or even advocates for decreasing the imprint that vehicles have in cities, who are concerned about the flow of transportation and the space given to vehicles in the cityscape. for the latter interest group, the fact that there are fewer suvs in japan may well be because of sensible street planning that gives less space over to providing parking spaces for large vehicles. the point is that a dialogue can emerge from many interest groups in this issue, which is ignored by a focus on seeing the dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a80 investigation of this issue as a component of a generic “sales report” task, where any meaning seems to be subsumed under the need for a carrier for a “target” language form or a “target” genre task (long, 2015). the focus on dialogic authorial language teaching is on the sociodiscursive function of language rather than individual student production in pre-set generic tasks like “argument papers” or “sales reports.” the diverse dilemmas and multiple dialogic responses that one encounters regarding suv sales figures in the us and japan are prioritized; the form in which one responds to this dialogue depends on whom (and to what) one is addressing. a discussion on a cultural dilemma in a language classroom should engage students in the diverse perspectives of others on the issue. the form of the argument is then a byproduct of addressivity to the concerns of others. while task-based language teaching focuses attention on the language forms and genres themselves, the content being a carrier for the forms, meaningful dialogic discourse is characterized by the invisibility of form. when the form becomes visible because of intelligibility or comprehension issues, or a pragmatic concern such as modality, the instructor can assist in providing support as needed to assist the development of ideas, problems, concerns, and questions that are emerging in the discourse. instructors can recast how they understand the problems or concerns and offer guidance (including helpful language forms) to sufficiently address the multiplicity of voices which are lying underneath these concerns. when the voices of oneself and others are prioritized, genre is a secondary concern and focusing too much on it can distract one from participation in dialogue. re-envisioning academic language pedagogy through a focus on stylistics there is also a role for dialogue on language forms in the language classroom to learn to appreciate others’ voices and to refine one’s own voice. rather than focus students on “intertextual” comparisons with authoritative models, instructors can begin to develop students’ dialogic awareness of language forms through communal comparison and reflection on language forms in the writing of others. to this end, bakhtin (2004) calls on grammatical forms to be seen not as lifeless entities taught for their own sake but as “stylistic” choices which help to express voice. bakhtin himself was a literature teacher in a secondary school in saransk for over 15 years (matusov, 2004), and he wrote about his own pedagogical initiatives in an essay translated in english as “dialogic origins of grammar” (bakhtin, 2004). in his courses, bakhtin compared the prose of master russian writers with alternative (and more typical) syntactical forms, and students engaged in comparing the forms, dialoguing upon which of the forms best expressed the writer’s voice. he gives a simple example of a dialogic provocation in which he gives the students the following short sentences, 1. sad am i: no friend beside me (pushkin). 2. he’d start to laugh—they’d all guffaw (pushkin). 3. he awoke: five stations had already fled past in the opposite direction (gogol) (bakhtin, 2004, p. 16). in the dialogue on the first sentence, for example, bakhtin reports that his students recognized how creative pushkin was in breaking the typical form of including a coordinating conjunction to express dramatic emotion. students also focused on the expressiveness of the sentence, dramatizing it by reading it and acting out scenes with it (focusing on syntax, word order, intonational structure of a clause, syllable length, etc.). discussion also emerged on how the author constructed the sentence and how adding a conjunction limits the expressiveness in the sentence, a phenomenon of which good novelists are commonly aware (bakhtin, 2004). a discussion on the stylistics of grammar is more than a psychologically “reactive” pedagogical approach to form produced in the carrying out of pedagogical tasks (cf. long, 2015, p. 27-28). instead, grammar is given ontological significance for voice development and grammatical forms can become interesting in themselves for that purpose. forms become alive, something which tends to be elusive when students switch from the widely used syntax of conversation to that of formal writing (bakhtin, dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a81 2004). one could imagine a similar stylistic comparison of other generic forms – such as the types outlined earlier in the work of swales & feak (2012) – to appreciate the expressive power behind their use for developing voice. students could learn about these genres through an effort at creatively deconstructing and reconstructing the forms in a similar way as bakhtin did with russian prose. attention to stylistics can help to articulate the importance of form in developing voice and call attention to it without overtaking a focus on authorship in the language. however, if the forms being provoked to discuss in the stylistics lesson are prescribed, as they could easily become even in bakhtin’s lesson, the lesson may be quite instrumental, manipulating students’ ontology to a prescribed endpoint to discuss forms, a caution raised by bakhtinian educator tara ratnam in her published remarks on a reprint of bakhtin’s (2004) manuscript on his grammar teaching (see matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). a role for improvisational, “strategic” dramatic events in language teaching authorial academic language learning also calls for a role for dramatic improvisational scenarios in the language curriculum that prioritize dialogue within surprising and ambiguous eventful situations. one interesting curricular approach in this regard is di pietro’s little-known work on “strategic interaction” in language teaching (di pietro, 1987).4 di pietro (1987) created a language curriculum focused on students’ rehearsal of, enactment of, and debriefing on open-ended role-based scenarios. students engage in carrying out roles in which partners do not have sufficient information or clear understanding of the intention or perspective of the other partners (p. 39). di pietro (1987) intended these open-ended scenarios and the development of students’ authorship and voice therein to become the curriculum of the language course, eschewing pre-set syllabi focused on functions, notions, or language forms. in groups, students rehearse their specific roles in the scenarios together, carefully avoiding becoming prematurely aware of the instructions given to the other group or groups. after the scenarios are carried out by at least one selected member of the group, the class then debriefs on the scenario together with the instructor, the students’ questions and reflections becoming the focus of discussion. in one example of a scenario that could be rehearsed, one group could play the role of a husband or wife who cannot wait to tell his/her partner the exciting news that he/she has been offered a new job which will finally provide enough income to pay the family bills. the job is overseas and will require living in another country for two years. unfortunately, for the first six months of the job, he/she will not be able to bring any partner with him/her. the group playing the role of the other partner could be told to tell the husband/wife the exciting news that, after years of trying to conceive, she is now two-months pregnant (scott stevens, personal communication, 2016). di pietro (1987) emphasizes how these scenarios require the need to negotiate ambiguity and competing intentions. we could add here, from bakhtin (1999), that these scenarios can lead to dramatic “dialogic events” that require partners to become responsible to the sensibilities, concerns, circumstances, and replies of others, sometimes multiple dialogic partners who may or may not be represented directly in the scenario.5 there is a need for reply, as the dialogic partners continually surprise one another and may express competing desires. strategic interaction scenarios like these give students an opportunity to engage in eventful dialogue with partners with divergent interested stakes in the outcome of the dialogue (di pietro, 1987). the students can experience the breakdown in communication that comes from uncertainty of how to proceed and a need to repair miscommunication with diverse types of discourse strategies, all the while 4 while di pietro’s (1987) work has the same title as the well-known work by sociologist erving goffman (1969), the author does not reference goffman’s work in his 1987 book. 5 because of the strength of the narrative in the scenarios, however, instructors may take a cue from bakhtinian educator charles bisley, who recommends – before students review a plot or script (or in this case, a scenario) –instructors to ask students questions loosely related to the theme (matusov et al., 2019). in this way, the instructor prioritizes students’ development of their own ideas on the themes of the drama emerging from their own situated contexts, which furthers respect and nurturing of student voice (matusov et al., 2019). dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a82 being focused on the meaning of the surprising utterances of the other. there would be no curricular endpoint to the dialogue, and intelligibility, fluency, and accuracy of form become byproducts of one’s participation in the dialogue. we can imagine a more academic focused curriculum also designed through scenarios that focus on dialoguing with the voices of multiple stakeholders to a concern of cultural importance, such as the concerns expressed earlier about large vehicle use in crowded cities. in such dialogue, it would be important to collect relevant evidence and to speak with appropriate ethos, among other concerns. it is important to ensure that the students’ own voice and authorship in interpreting and carrying out the diverse roles lead the curriculum rather than the teachers’ instrumental efforts at promoting a particular language form, lexicon, notion, or function (di pietro, 1987). the teacher's authority in the curriculum is based on the power he or she has to generate interest and awareness of the stakes of the participants in the scenarios and to assist students to effectively carry out the scenario in the language of instruction (di pietro, 1987). when dramatic scenes like strategic interaction scenarios are played out in dialogical authorial language classes, “polyphony” is prioritized, characterized by a strong sense of dialogism and appreciation for dialogue among the students (matusov, 2009; matusov et al., 2019). a “classroom culture” develops which focuses on developing and supporting students’ “personal judgments on a wide range of human concerns” (di pietro, 1987, p. 99). dramatic scenarios like these can also serve as dialogic provocations for collective analysis and evaluation of the stylistics of form and genre in the discourse of the scenarios and the degree to which the student-produced discourse is intelligible and effective for communicating intention. bakhtinian language educator iryna starygina notes the importance of language instructors paying attention to bakhtin’s (1986) insight that good dramatic acting practice requires the actor not only to express his or her internal feelings but also to view one’s production from the perspective of the other (matusov et al., 2019). to this end, the rehearsal and debriefing sessions offer multiple opportunities for students to receive feedback on their performance and to address questions they have on the degree to which they were able to succeed in communicating their intentions. throughout the scenario activity and in debriefing afterwards, the teacher continually ensures that language learning is led by students’ own questions and perplexities, simulating socrates’ dialogues with free people rather than slaves (matusov, 2009). as di pietro (1987) writes, “the writing of scenarios requires the utilization of one’s imagination about life in general” (p. 67). thus, effective curriculum and guidance in scenario-based language teaching requires the teacher to be a “person of culture” who can connect students to dilemmas of tension in the culture that lead to never-ending dialogue (lobok, 2011). participation in dialogue becomes an end in itself in the language classroom. conclusion dialogic authorial language learning can indeed become a method for language study in universities, and it is intriguing to think of it being offered as an alternative to traditional study for those who wish to participate in it. rather than focusing on the teaching of abstract forms and pattern recognition for the purpose of socialization and training in academic discourse, as is common in genre pedagogy, bakhtinian dialogic authorial language learning emphasizes students’ unfinalizable questioning and problematizing of questions of academic import within the language of instruction. any focus on language forms, text organization, and stylistics, among other elements of discourse, are in the service of developing students’ authorship in the dialogue which emerges on these questions and dilemmas. from the perspective of dialogic authorship, a focus on pattern recognition and pattern production is considered to be a training objective rather than an educational one. genuine education emerges when students have questions, and these questions are generated when students’ voices are being developed. education for dialogic authorship insists that training objectives not overtake meaningful authorship, as the need for dialogic authorial academic language learning mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.495 | vol. 10 (2022) a83 training and socialization of academic discourse emerges from the desire of students and scholars to communicate their interested ideas effectively, clearly, and persuasively with others. the notion of dialogic authorship raises a set of novel concerns for academic language preparation within academic writing and language preparation settings. it challenges language pedagogues to rethink the degree to which they (and their students) genuinely value student inquiry, uncertainty, and puzzlement within dialogue in composition and other language courses. another concern is under what conditions the authority of the writing or communication instructor develops. educators who value dialogic authorship may best develop their authority as a “person of culture,” a person who can provoke and further students’ ongoing dialogue on concerns within multiple disciplines (bibler, 2009). from a dialogic authorial approach, the success of academic education is the degree to which it supports and develops dialogue in particular fields of study (or on important societal issues) rather than the degree to which it socializes students in generic forms. from this perspective, education should focus on voice/authorship before any “focus on form” (cf. long, 1991, 2015). this paper raises the question of whether most language classrooms are effectively sites of socialization and training rather than education. if we wish education to play a central role in the language classroom, an intriguing path that deserves much more study is how much of what is explicitly taught on pattern recognition of language forms can be learned through self-study and in collaborative peer laboratory work. for instance, there is evidence that much pattern recognition in language can be learned without much teacher intervention in freely organized heterogenous groups. sugata mitra’s studies show how children from indian “slums” and “shantytowns,” whose literacy skills in english are highly basic or nonexistent, can learn the forms and patterns of how to use a windows computer set up in english with no intervention from adults (mitra, 2006). importantly, the children interfaced with the computer in heterogeneous groups in open spaces in the community (the computer was set up in an atm-like box on the streets and anyone could approach it at any time). in the assessment of his work with these and other similar “minimally invasive” self-organized systems in india and the uk (mitra, 2010), mitra encourages educators to imagine freeing up instructional time from learning form and patterns in order for groups of language learners to explore more critical issues of interest to society with their instructors, developing their voice on these issues in the process. in turn, learning additional forms and patterns in the language – beyond what is done in self-study and peer groups – could become a byproduct of participation in meaningful discourse. attention in the language course could focus on developing voice and stylistics of form over the direct instruction of language forms in the classroom setting. the role of self-organized learning systems to develop proficiency with pattern recognition in language and to support dialogic pedagogy in the classroom is worth further study, with the caveat that particular academic language forms and patterns may be difficult for students to learn without direct instructional support (long, 2015). it should also be noted that dialogic authorial instruction may require summative assessment of language proficiency to be separated from language instruction (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017). this would allow for the “existential need” for students’ authorship and freedom of “activism” in their education to come to the fore in the language curriculum over pre-set demands of university proficiency requirements (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017, p. e1). further discussion of the perils of summative assessment in language pedagogy for authorial language learning is warranted. references abdelal, r. 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(2009). catching up or leading the way: american education in the age of globalization. alexandria, va: ascd. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word vatne, sondena, subjectivity and change in process of supervision, layout 2020-10-14.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa45 subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne volda university college, norway kari søndenå university of stavanger, norway abstract supervising texts with a bachelor thesis as its outcome, has been prioritized in the norwegian early childhood teacher education. the focus has been on recruiting enough supervisors, and on qualifying supervisors. there has not been a similar focus on the bachelor texts as such, and on questions concerning what kind of function these texts should have in professional education. from a bakhtinian dialogic perspective we value variation and change in student subjectivity as a fruitful, rather than a problematic means of enhancing quality. the current study has two main research questions: (1) what typologies of subjectivity can be identified in student’s bachelor texts, and (2) what typologies of subjectivity are given priority and how these priorities respond to the possibility of change. concerning the first question, students’ legitimations have been identified as typologies of uncomplicated and complex subjectivity. as for the second question we observed that individual voices in bachelor students’ texts were not given equal status compared with more powerful generic voices that represent sameness. the latter voices are interpreted as articulated intentions in the national curriculum for the early childhood education and care, and in local curricula. an important insight from this study is that changes in subjectivity is tightly connected to sameness for all bachelor students and educational cannons. student subjectivity seems to be fixed and finished and in status of adjustment to universal claims. such insight generates new questions concerning the space for students’ lived experience, emotions and creativity in higher education. keywords: supervision, changing subjectivity, legitimation of choices, reflexive awareness bente vatne is a professor at volda university college, norway. her main research interests are supervision in higher education and early literacy in early childhood teacher education. she uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. kari søndenå is a norwegian professor working at university in stavanger, faculty of social science, department of social studies and psychology. her research interests include philosophical and qualitative research, theory of supervision and subjective and life world dimensions, and conceptions of quality related to bachelor-, masterand doctorate-ness. ïïò issn: 2325-3290 (online) subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa46 “a human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some second hand, finalizing cognitive process. in a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal, in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 58). introduction bakhtin’s (1984) underpinning of the impossibility for a human being to be turned into “a voiceless object of some second hand finalizing cognitive process” has actualized philosophical-educational challenges in supervision work. the overall aim of this article is to contribute to a growing body of research on subjectivity in processes of supervision. challenges concerning subjectivity are regarded as the essence in supervision at all three levels in norwegian academia, at bachelor, master and phd levels (bue (1973); dysthe (1999); handal & lauvås (2014); søndenå (2002); skagen (2007); fossøy (2006); bjerkholt (2013); birkeland & carson (2017), and worum (2014). supervision is a form of teaching and learning aimed at providing space for meta thinking and questions related to the supervisee’s possibility to reflect on her/his own learning as a unique and professional human being. questions like who this student is at the present time and who this student will become in future as a professional worker, and how a supervisor can contribute to the making of these future professional workers are underlying meta questions in supervision meetings. we find questions concerning comprehension and mapping students’ subjectivity during supervision processes as very important. we argue that subjectivity needs to be discussed more deeply, and in the following we present a study of subjectivity as this is revealed in the process of writing texts, ending up as a bachelor thesis (undergraduate level). supervising texts in early childhood teacher education with a bachelor thesis as its outcome, has been prioritized in norway. every student is followed up by a supervisor during a long writing process. the focus has been on recruiting enough supervisors, and on qualifying supervisors. there has not been a similar intensive focus on the texts as such and on questions concerning what kind of function bachelor texts should be related to in professional education. in this study we focus on the aspects of text and supervision. drawing on a bakhtinian orientation, we understand a human being as a subject layered with cultural and historical voices, and we view bachelor students’ texts as complex multifunctional hybrid texts (holquist, 2002). according to bakhtin (1986), it is possible to localize social variation in texts by pointing at the various forces expressed through different voices that are involved. there is an everlasting battle between centrifugal forces that pull in direction of community, common culture, and sameness, on the one side, and centripetal forces that pull in direction of uniqueness and individuality, on the other side. the centrifugal forces are the most powerful ones, and they are ubiquitous they are always “in presentia” (bakhtin, 1986). individual utterances, representing centripetal forces are less powerful and thus they represent a more complex ontological status. in bachelor texts in early childhood teacher education, the centrifugal forces are related to expectations of common responsibility in the norwegian welfare society and to authorial expectations expressed in a national curriculum in early childhood education. the research questions are: 1. what typologies of subjectivity can be identified in students’ legitimations of themes in their bachelor theses? 2. what typologies of subjectivity are given priority in supervision and how do these priorities respond to the possibility of change? subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa47 representing a bakhtinian dialogical perspective in supervision, we regard analysing variation and change in the comprehension of student subjectivity as a fruitful, rather than a problematic means of enhancing quality. our interest is to challenge supervisors’ interpretative repertoires, typologies of subjectivity as they appear in bachelor students’ texts and how the supervision process can contribute to change such typologies. focussing on student subjectivity typologies in written texts might reduce uncertainty in supervision practices and appeal to deeper theoretical thinking, perspectives and discussions anchored in institutional cultures. this can result in pluralism and tolerance of diverse pedagogies, including both those recognized as authorial, as well as others (matusov, marjanovic-shane & gradovski, 2019). theoretical perspectives according to miguens & preyer (2013), subjectivity can be understood as an issue that lies at the heart of philosophy, as the view of the subject lies at the centre of philosophical pursuits. husserl’s phenomenological tradition, for example, considers that subjectivity’s main aim was to clarify the subjective origins of sense in the condition of givenness of things (miguens et al. 2013). in recent decades, givenness and traditional views on supervision in the field of higher education have been challenged by various late and postmodern theoretical perspectives (dysthe, 1999, 2006; skagen, 2007; kvale, 2007; søndenå & gradovski, 2017). this can be regarded as a tension between conceptions representing various perspectives on subjectivity, with subjectivity based in nature, givenness of things, sameness and «beingone» on the one side, and understandings based on «being-multiple» and openness on the other (deleuze, 1991). in its extreme form, one might say that traditional perspectives in supervision have been based on an idea of “bracketing subjectivity” (husserl, 2004). this searching for a universal truth for all students has been challenged by perspectives anchored in “cracketing subjectivity” (deleuze, 1991) and deep searching for lived truths based on individual experience. historically, building new knowledge on students’ lived experience is a well-known approach in supervision (lauvås & handal, 2014). legitimisation has been linked to the raise of self-awareness and the development of students’ individual praxis theory with a view to self-realisation as future teachers (skagen, 2007). praxis theory is understood as the subjective values, experiences and theoretical knowledge that influence students’ approach to their pedagogical work (lauvås & handal, 2014). skagen (2007) claims that self-realisation has achieved a sacral status in the individual’s perception and image of reality, and that this has also influenced the work of the supervisor in higher education since the 1970s and 80s. this implies an optimistic and underlying belief that the supervisor can help to encourage a hidden, but equally fully existent fixed universal subject as «being one», in the meaning of realization of self (søndenå & gradovski, 2017). more recent supervision traditions based on dialogical understandings of subjectivity (ies) challenge the idea of a finalized subject in the sense of «being-one». in the context of supervision, subjectivity is understood rather as something un-finalized that is in continual development, and in the light of a polyphony of both sociocultural and personal experiences (dysthe, 2012). however, knowledge concerning what typologies of subjectivity that come into play in supervision and how subjectivity might change during the supervision process, seems to be unclear. an extended focus will contribute to an understanding of how student subjectivity can change and make supervision in higher education susceptible to diversity and to self-authorship. the latter in the sense of enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his environment, according to bakhtin (quoted in rule 2015, pp. 37–38). following parker’s (1997) outlining of three typologies of subjectivity and sullivan’s (2012) alternative, a dialogical interpretation, we argue that the possibility of change is enhanced when the supervisor’s interpretative repertoire includes sensitivity towards a range of subjectivity typologies. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa48 typologies of subjectivity in the following parker’s outlining of typologies of subjectivity (1997) is presented. these typologies helped us understanding features of subjectivity as these appeared in the bachelor students’ texts. sullivan (2012) outlines strengths and weaknesses in parker’s outlining. including sullivan’s critical comments, we pave the way for an alternative dialogical understanding of subjectivity in supervision contexts. parker (1997, p. 481) claims that blank subjectivity involves giving cultural forms priority and under communicating the importance of representations of self and identity. the term blank subjectivity “deliberately ignores what is going on inside the person or what the history of their particular relationship to the language might be”. this dismiss individual experiences as an effect of language or rhetoric. sullivan (2012) draws on parker when he refers to a narrow focus which separates the individual from their wider social world. this might result in reducing the complexity of people`s actions and their ability to negotiate social meanings to a few basic casual mechanics, like the writer`s personality. definitions of blank subjectivity are here interpreted as “the sensing self is missing” (sullivan, 2012, p.12). contextualized to our study, the author who is seeking to understand herself is missing, and no personal experience is apparent in these texts. as such, we refer to this typology as an “outside-in” perspective (bakhtin,1984). following parker (1997), a second rhetorical figure is named uncomplicated subjectivity. integrated in the typology of uncomplicated subjectivity, both the author’s awareness of theoretical perspectives and of earlier experiences are excluded and understood as being quite uncomplicated to combine. there is an assumption that the author already acknowledges both his own experiences and the self as fully recognised. we understand uncomplicated subjectivity as a relevant category when students legitimate their choices of theme, both from personal experience and with reference to national political documents or contemporary social challenges. the student legitimates her choice of theme from both an «inside-out-, and an «outside-in» perspective (bakhtin, 1984). parker’s (1997) third typology is referred to as complex subjectivity. this typology takes seriously both the intentions and the desires of the individual, and the operation of social structures and discourse. sullivan (2012) underlines the fact that complex subjectivity contains a recognition of the thinking, feeling and desiring subject. as such, complex subjectivity allows for the appearance of personal experience and the person’s language is fluid rather than fixed. in line with uncomplicated subjectivity this kind of legitimation might be interpreted as both an “inside-out”perspective and “out-side in”perspective (bakhtin, 1984). following sullivan’s critical reasoning (2012), parker’s three typologies do not include awareness of the possibility of change. parker’s placing of the conscious and feeling subject at the centre will ignore the key role of social language or language in use. we might add to this critique, that ignoring change will substantiate the idea of “bracketing subjectivity” rather than the idea of “cracketing subjectivity” and openness towards an unfinalized subject. sullivan shows how language can be analysed to reveal a sensing self and suggests an aesthetical discourse, representing the potential to “shape selves and look at how selves can respond, in different ways, to this shaping “(sullivan, 2012, p. 43). based on a recognition of parker’s (1997) three typologies and bakhtin’s esthetical discourse as being fruitful for a dialogical researcher, he suggests a dialogical subjectivity. this interpretation of subjectivity involves an understanding of discourse with an embodied subjectivity (sullivan, 2012, p. 43). sullivan’s perspective, which represents giving priority to awareness of the possibility of change, helps us to an understanding of practiced professional agency in a subject-oriented sociocultural framework. agency refers to a situation where professional subjects and/or communities exert influence, make choices, and take stances in ways subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa49 that affect their own work and/or their professional identities (eteläpelto, vähäsatanen, hökkä & paloniemi, 2013). dialogical subjectivity matusov, marjanovic-shane and gradovski (2019, p. 266) consider research participants’ subjectivities as authorial, encountered, and revealed in dialogic relationships of adhesivity and responsivity with the consciousness of the researcher, or within the researcher’s interests, puzzlements, reflections, research questions, subjectivity, voice, biases, and agendas. based on the definition of a dialogue by the american philosopher dmitri nikulin (matusov et al. 2019, p. 41), dialogic subjectivity is understood as an expression of the personal other within ourselves in an unfinalized way. the process of expression of any dialogic subjectivity takes place in a relationship and can be messy and is always unfinalized. burkitt & sullivan (2009, p. 565) describe the bakhtinian dialogical ‘i-for-myself’ relationship as involving a reflexive awareness of our own boundless potential – our primary experience of being without boundaries. this relationship also refers to our belief that others never have the final say on who we are (the ‘i-for-others’), nor can they ever completely define us with their words or ethical judgements. a human being can never be turned into some voiceless object of some second hand, finalizing cognitive process, as expressed by help of bakhtin (1984). this reflexive awareness challenges the former presented tradition of developing the students’ praxis theory and self-understanding that has dominated the work of supervisors in several decades. furthermore, burkitt & sullivan’s (2009, p. 566) postulate that even the objective definition of us by authoritative groups – such as religious evaluation or scientific classification – is not felt as final and does not wholly define us. there is always a word that others can say about us or that we can say about ourselves that can surpass these other definitions. it is possible to conclude that our dialogical subjectivities shape and develop themselves thanks to a continual exchange between the words of others, both loving and authoritative, and our own words, values, and understandings. method and design this study has been conducted using a dialogical qualitative approach. the approach requires an explanation of the authors’ positioning and relationship towards all sampled texts and between the coauthors. following sullivan (2012), we as co-authors see and understand ourselves as being in dialogical relations to both the sampled texts, the findings, and to each other. the choice of the approach is explained by the focus of the study and the nature of the research questions that this study wants to find answers to. the chosen approach reflects our ontological, epistemological, and axiological believes as we consider any human’s professional development to be a result of a greater dialogue between aspects that are situated in social and professional contexts that this human encounters along the lifepath. this greater dialogue consists of outer persuasive discourse with its voices that influence this human’s inner persuasive discourse aimed at shaping of this human’s ontological, epistemological, and axiological views. further, we believe that each human’s professional development is unique and that it is shaped by both knowledge and experiences acquired in professional praxis and closely related to the human’s private life experiences. thus, we view any human’s subjectivity related to and inseparable from both the professional and private social areas. in order to analyse subjectivity related to the professional development and learning we have chosen a qualitative dialogue analysis described by sullivan (2012) as it allows us to both identify, describe and analyse our data and thus obtain needed answers to our research questions. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa50 the sampling processes the sample that has been analysed consists of three texts from 37 bachelor students (undergraduates) in norway, all in all 111 texts. the students were in their last year of early childhood teacher education. these texts were collected during two years using the convenience sampling technique, in which respondents were chosen based on their availability (creswell & creswell, 2018). the texts were uploaded online and were collected at various timepoints during the supervision process. the first two texts were the students’ first sketches and their research plans and were written at the very beginning of the bachelor process. they are both pre-texts, written before the supervision process started. the third texts, the students’ graded research theses, were written at the end of the supervision process and are posttexts (see table no. 1). the students did not have individual supervision in relation to the two pre-texts, except for the general lectures preparing them for the bachelor study. thus, the aspect of change is focussed on a comparison of utterances in pre-texts produced before the supervision process and in the post-text, written after the supervision process. the students were supervised on how to improve the text several times before the final bachelor thesis was submitted. we have focused on the introduction in the student’s texts, emphasising the student’s legitimation for their choice of theme, before and after supervision. table no. 1. the analysed texts the analysed texts an overview 37 students 111 texts – 3 texts from each student – the introduction in sketches, research plans and their graded theses the first sketch (450 words) research plan (3000 words) the graded thesis (10 000 words) theme theme theme research questions research questions research questions legitimations legitimations legitimations before supervision pretexts after supervision-post texts the data analyses as a first step, we started with a review of the sketches, the research plans and the bachelor theses to gain an overview of the data. the introductions awareness to the sketches, the research plans and the theses were read and reread and discussed by the researchers. these readings and discussions gave us a general overview and a common understanding of the data (creswell & creswell, 2018). according to sullivan (2012), reduction of data is necessary for an interpretation and analysis to take place, and thus the data was prepared for a dialogical analysis. the next step was inspired by madill & sullivan (2010, p. 72) who focus on ‘key moments. a ‘key moment’ is an ‘utterance’ of significance. an utterance is a significant unit of meaning which is different from the sentence (or the line). it is defined by its readiness for reaction (madill & sullivan, 2010). sullivan (2012, p. 173) writes that “an utterance is that which the addressee feels capable of responding to”. we started out with key moment (1), trying to identify interesting situations in the students’ texts. in this reading we marked legitimations found relevant to our research questions. the second key moment (2) includes managing interpersonal relations in order to secure knowledge. following this key moment, we were looking for the students’ histories and individual intentions and desires, ‘a sensing self’ in their legitimations (sullivan, 2012, p. 30). analysing the third key moment (3), we were inspired by parker’s (1997) typologies of blank, uncomplicated, and complex subjectivity and sullivan’s (2012) dialogical subjectivity. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa51 as a fourth key moment (4), the texts were read and reread, and the chosen examples were reflected upon and discussed in depth. the next step was to compare the legitimations analysed in pretexts with the students’ legitimations in their final bachelor theses, in the post-texts (see table no. 2). changes in subjectivity analysed in a comparison between the preand post-texts are the core of our interest (madill & sullivan, 2010). table no. 2. the dialogical analytic process inspired by madill & sullivan (2010) readings purpose/key moment analytic strategies analytic questions (1) reading the introduction to the sketches, the research plan key moment 1 identify interesting moments marking relevant and interesting text what interesting legitimations are identified in the students’ texts? (2) reading and rereading the introduction to the sketches and the research plans key moment 2 to gain knowledge of the student’s individual intentions and desires in-depth analysis, trying to identify the student’s voice. what are the students trying to convey/tell the readers in their texts? (3) reading the introduction to the sketches and the research plans key moment 3 to identify the student’s subjectivity and choose the examples we would present in the article discuss and determine whether the student’s subjectivity is blank, complex, uncomplicated or dialogical what typologies of subjectivity can be identified in students’ legitimations? what are the most representative examples? (4) studying the chosen examples and introduction to the graded thesis key moment 4 discuss the construction of subjectivity related to blank, uncomplicated, complex, and dialogical (parker, 1997; sullivan, 2012) in the examples compare the examples of the student’s subjectivity in their post-texts to the examples of subjectivity identified in their pre texts how do bachelor students’ legitimations change in the process of supervision? what are the most relevant changes in relation to openness and unfinalized? subject? localising key moments helped us reduce the data systematically, alongside re-reading and discussions. in this study we present selected examples to identify change in the process of supervision. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa52 ethical considerations and validity threats the students received written and oral information about the project. they were informed that participation was voluntary and that they could withdraw from the study at any time. the students gave us written consent to use their three texts in the research project, and the students are given fictitious names. we have tried to present the analysis of the students’ legitimations (voices, perspectives and thoughts) in a respectful manner and the study was conducted in accordance with the standards of the norwegian data inspectorate (norwegian centre for research data, 2018). the design of the study was sent for consideration of its ethical side to the norwegian centre of research data in 2018. the study was approved. one of the researchers has been one of the student’s lecturer during the bachelor process. this might have influenced the student’s texts and this researcher’s reading and interpretation of the data and could be a validity threat. however, one of the strengths in this study is the fact that we are two researchers who have analysed the data together and discussed the examples thoroughly with each other throughout the project. findings our two research questions are as follows: what typologies of subjectivity can be identified in students’ legitimations of themes in their bachelor theses? what typologies of subjectivity are given priority and how do these priorities respond/relate to the possibility of change? we found that before supervision most of the participants’ texts could be identified as examples of uncomplicated subjectivity and complex subjectivity. this means that their early sketches and research plans were embodied with utterances concerning both lived experiences, student’s own experience from practical training in kindergarten, and theoretical approaches based on curriculums and literature. after supervision process we revealed several changes from uncomplicated to complex subjectivity. in the following we will present examples of identified typologies and how these changed from pre-texts (before supervision) to post-texts (after supervision) to give an answer our first question. to illustrate our findings, we use examples from the students lisa, anne, sally and mary. the result of our analysis allowed us to identify three typologies of subjectivity. we present the student’s research question, then an example of subjectivity as it appears in the pre-text and finally an example of subjectivity as this appeared in post-text. in one of the post-texts, in sally’s text, the research question is reformulated (after supervision), in the others the research question remains the same. lisa: from blank subjectivity to uncomplicated subjectivity blank subjectivity (pretext) lisa’s research question is: how can the kindergarten be able to promote an inclusive environment, where children enjoy themselves and participate in play? legitimation in pre-text: according to the framework plan (2017), the kindergarten shall contribute to (…). norwegian kindergartens have a tradition of being outdoors every day. on average, norwegian kindergartens are outdoors between 30 and 70 % every day (moser & martinsen, 2010). white paper no. 19 claims that not all children have a friend and some children experience bullying, teasing and exclusion from play. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa53 the student’s legitimation is based on political documents such as the framework plan (2017) and the white paper no. 19. documenting the time children in kindergarten, are spending outdoors, she refers to the researchers moser & martinson (2010) and as such, and she justifies her choice of topic based on research. there is no trace of the student’s voice and as such, the subjectivity is interpreted as blank. uncomplicated subjectivity (post text) after meetings with the supervisor, the typology of subjectivity has changed from blank to uncomplicated subjectivity. her personal experience and the theoretical perspectives are linked together in an uncomplicated manner. adopting bakhtinian terminology, we could say that the student now has developed both an «inside-out”-, and an «outside-in» legitimation for her choice of theme. lisa’s research question is still the same, but her legitimation has been extended and changed: according to the framework plan (2017), the kindergarten shall contribute to (…). norwegian kindergartens have a tradition of being outdoors every day. on average, norwegian kindergartens are outdoors between 30 and 70 % every day (moser & martinsen, 2010). white paper no. 19 claims that not all children have a friend and some children experience bullying, teasing and exclusion from play... it is very important to me, both as a private person and in my profession as a kindergarten teacher, that children are safe and have fun in kindergarten. i myself have experienced that my own children did not enjoy school. it's hard knowing that your child is not doing ok. lisa’s own voice and an “in-side-out" perspective are now presented as a supplement to the purely “outside-in” legitimation in the pre-text. anne: uncomplicated subjectivity maintained and strengthened uncomplicated subjectivity (pretext) anne’s research question is: how can the kindergarten safeguard the identity of multilingual children through work with the children's mother tongue? legitimation in pre-text: i wish to study cultural and linguistic diversity in the light of identity. norway is a multicultural and multilingual society in change. an increasing number of inhabitants have linguistic and cultural backgrounds from another country than norway. the kindergarten is an important arena for meetings between the children. i myself am one of the new inhabitants. because of my background, i have always been interested in all things that have to do with diversity (…) this example above shows an imprint of the student’s voice, and legitimations are influenced by the student’s own background and content from textbooks. uncomplicated subjectivity (post-text) anne’s research question is not changed, and the legitimation is extended by a theoretical (empirical) perspective. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa54 there are an increasing number of inhabitants coming from foreign countries to norway. the country is steadily becoming a multicultural and multilingual society. statistics submitted in 2016 that there had been a 7 per cent increase from the previous year in minority-language children in kindergarten. this is an important factor that has affected my choice of theme. my professional background has raised the interest i have for mother tongues and the identity of multilingual children in the kindergarten. i myself do not have a norwegian background; therefore, i think that this will be an interesting topic to study. the student legitimates her interest by underlining the fact that she does not have a norwegian background, as she did in her pre-text and after supervision. we observe a strengthening of a theoretical empirical emphasis here and a development of the former typology of uncomplicated subjectivity. sally: complex subjectivity – maintained and strengthened sally’s research question is: how do parents of foreign adoptive children experience adaption and development of their child's identity in kindergarten? legitimation in pre-text: who am i? where do i belong? am i a norwegian or am i a foreigner? these are typical questions that i and many other adopted children are asking. as an adopted child i experience myself as both – as a norwegian and a foreigner. i have had the opportunity to get to know both my foreign cultural background and my norwegian background. there has always been openness at home in norway, and we have pictures, flags and instruments from my home country everywhere. my parents took me and my sibling to my home country, and we lived there for one year. my research concerns how adopted children connect to their adoptive parent, and how these children relate to staff in kindergarten. these children have already experienced several separations and starting at kindergarten is another one. they might again go through a painful process. i have worked on my research question, i have rewritten and reformulated it. now at least, i am pleased with the result. sally’s legitimation for studying adopted children is based on her own experience as an adopted child, with reference to her question of whom she is. her feelings and intention appear quite strong also in respect of her parents and their efforts to strengthen her and her siblings’ identity from two countries. complex subjectivity (post-text) sally’s research question is now reformulated into the following: in a retro perspective, how did foreign adopted children experience adaptions to the staff in kindergarten? legitimation in the post-text: who am i? where do i belong? am i a norwegian or am i a foreigner? this is typical questions that i and many other adopted children are asking. as an adopted child i experience myself as both – as a norwegian and a foreigner. i have had the opportunity to get to know both my foreign cultural background and my norwegian background. there has subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa55 always been openness at home in norway, and we have pictures, flags and instruments from my home country everywhere. my parents took me and my siblings to my home country, and we lived there for one year. my parents did this to underline that we are a norwegian family closely related to the country where i was born. they believed that this would help us to understand why we were adopted and make us proud of our background. adoption from abroad is important to write about for many reasons. these children have often had a tough start in life, coming from areas marked by social need and poverty. it might also be mother's malnutrition during pregnancy, intoxication, inefficient health care and many other things. children adopted from abroad might also have several different care persons for a shorter or longer period. i have chosen to use bowlby’s theories of adaptions (broberg, 2014). furthermore, jørgensen’s (2017) theory concerning vulnerable stages in connection with adoption, and adaption to new close persons, is relevant. based on these outlines my research question is: in a retro perspective, how did foreign adopted children experience adaption relating to the staff in kindergarten? in her post-text we interpret sally's subjectivity as maintained and strengthened. the first part of the text corresponds with the pre-text. in the last part she elaborates on her parents’ efforts by underlining what she thinks are her parents’ arguments for taking her and her sibling to their home country. sally also introduces the topic of general adoption from abroad to the text, by highlighting these children’s tough start in life. at the end she refers to literature. mary: from complex subjectivity to blank subjectivity mary’s research question is: how might staff in kindergarten contribute to the development of children’s social competence? legitimation of complex subjectivity in pre-text: i am the mother of a child with the diagnosis of pervasive development disorder. it was my boy who ran along the fence in the kindergarten, every single day – up and down – with the same red bucket and blue spade in his hand. an educator with special needs education succeeded in breaking this pattern. she worked very focussed on play as a means of mastering social skills and social interaction with the other children. today my child master’s role plays and plays by the rules. he has even got a best friend and has good relations with other children. for me personally, the experience of the significance of play for my child’s development has given me a cause. the goal of my bachelor thesis is for me to achieve a deeper expertise in this area. i would like to develop competence in working with children who need to master social interaction. in this text the legitimation has a strong trace of the student’s voice. she writes from a standpoint as a mother of a child with the diagnosis of pervasive development disorder. this gives her a special interest and she wants to elaborate on this theme to gain expertise to be able to help other children in her work. there is an “inside out” perspective in her legitimations. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa56 blank subjectivity (post-text) mary's research question is still the same, her legitimation in her post-text is changed however: social competence is a concept that just a few decades ago was seen in connection with children’s problem behaviour, mental health, intoxication, well-being and bullying. this has led to an increasing interest in this research field. social competence turns out to be a "vaccination" against psychosocial stress and can contribute to social inclusion by focusing on positive actions (ogden, 2011, pp. 64–68). through this thesis we will look more closely at how staff in the kindergarten can contribute to children's social competence. mary now refers exclusively to ogden (2011), and she changes from “i” to “we”. there are no traces whatsoever of mary’s own voice or her own experiences as a mother, her ‘sensing self’ seems to be missing. the subjectivity is now blank. the legitimation has changed from a complex to blank subjectivity, and the text has now an “outsidein” perspective in the post-text. summing up our findings so far, we have identified three typologies of subjectivity in our data: blank, uncomplicated, and complex subjectivity. most of the participants’ texts are examples of uncomplicated and complex subjectivity before supervision. changes from one typology to another take place during the supervision process, and this reveal supervisors’ sensitivity towards students’ legitimations in written texts. supervision sessions might contribute to a changing typology of subjectivity, from blank to complicated, or even strengthen a complicated or complex subjectivity. the latter is shown in lisa’s, anne’s, and sally’s cases. in these examples’ students’ legitimations of their own choices have become even more fruitful after the supervision process. leaning on bakhtin (1986) we may also say that the bachelor texts show a strong emphasis on centrifugal forces and sameness. the same might be argued regarding to mary’s text. in mary’s case however, a complex subjectivity has been reduced to a blank subjectivity after the supervision meetings, and we will return to this in the discussion. following sullivan’s (2012) critique of parker’s categorization (1997), all three reported typologies of subjectivity are interpreted as excluding “consciousness of the possibility of changing subjectivity, in the meaning of excluding the potential of shaping ‘selves’ and look at how selves can respond, in different ways, to this shaping” (sullivan, 2012, p. 43). discussion most of the 37 respondents, representing 111 texts, show that subjectivity changes from uncomplicated to complex typology of subjectivity (parker,1997) during the supervision process. starting out in sullivan’s critique concerning the ignorance of social language and of possibility of change, subjectivity seems to be more or less fixed in the bachelor texts. this testifies the fact that the bracketing aspect (husserl, 2004) of bachelor students’ subjectivity appears as most important in this part of their learning process. bracketing is here interpreted as aspiration to separate a universal truth and individual experience. following husserl’s (2004) phenomenological tradition, the bracketing aspect implies high awareness of who we are and clarifying the subjective origins of sense in the condition of the givenness of things (miquens et al. 2003). the cracketing aspect (deleuze,1991) on the other hand, implies the perspective of becoming something new. in our study bachelor students seem to be forced to tune down individual values and instead adjust themselves to claims from the outside, and what bakhtin addressed as authoritative forces. this adjustment is particularly identified in marys text, where the typology is changed from complex to blank. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa57 an explanation to this observed adjustment could be that our respondents have just started on their journey as teachers-to-be and thus their professional subjectivities are just being formed. their supervisors and the content of education manifested in their textbooks, national documents, curriculums and examples of best practice they are exposed to, are considered as authorial and authoritarian examples to be followed (matusov, marjanovic-shane & gradovski, 2019). as for now their subjectivities are mostly shaped by the authorial and authoritarian voices of their teachers and texts, since their professional subjectivity is at its budding stage. similar powerful forces in supervision context are also observed in a former study of newly educated in professional work (søndenå & gradovski, 2017). this former study shows that supervision context is dominated by a generic monologue, based on centrifugal forces (bakhtin, 1986), while more vulnerable individual voices come into oblivion. thus, the level of response to the possibility of change, even an understanding of the need for changes, is still quite low. in a dialogical perspective on supervision this does not mean that status quo will remain. future qualification of the supervisors must include dialogical perspectives (sullivan, 2012) and enhance the ability to develop supervisors’ didactical sensibility and interpreting repertoires. the understanding of texts in this study implies an understanding of texts as complex multifunctional hybrid texts (holquist, 2002), and as such, they represent both common powerful voices and more vulnerable individual voices. we observed, in line with bakhtin (1986), that the powerful individual voices in bachelor students’ texts were not given the same priority as the more powerful voices representing sameness. with the norwegian national welfare system at the centre of the centrifugal forces, these are hierarchical oriented, and represent powerful sameness as a demanded priority. thus, subjectivity in this study is viewed as related to a hierarchical system where a dialogic subjectivity is not given priority compared to the other forms of subjectivity. the dialogical perspective of subjectivity (sullivan, 2012) acknowledges the battle between forces and makes the fulfilment of multi voice-ness possible. the example, based on the change before and after supervision in mary’s bachelor thesis, represents a disquieting result. this case shows the losing part in this battle when subjectivity is reduced from complex to blank. it seems like mary’s life experience is ignored and put into oblivion, and the overall power of centrifugal forces remain dominant. functions of students’ bachelor texts and qualification of supervisors should be even more problematized in the future, and questions related to students’ opportunities for change during the process of supervision need to be a prioritized focus. focusing on dialogical subjectivity will enrichen the quality 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(2002). tradisjon og transcendens. ein fenomenologisk studie av refleksjon i norsk førskulelærarutdanning [doctoral dissertation]. university of gothenburg. subjectivity and change in process of supervision bente vatne, kari søndenå dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.304 | vol. 8 (2020) sa59 søndenå, k. & gradovski, m. (2017). pre-teksten sin rolle i rettleiing av nyutdanna profesjonsutøvarar – ei kronotopisk analyse. uniped, 40(4), 374–385. worum, k. s. (2014). veiledning, kunnskapssyn og danning. norsk pedagogisk tidsskrift, 98(1), 26–35. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word king, who sets the limits of educational freedom, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf59 who sets the limits of educational freedom? exploring bakhtin’s architectonic self as a response to matusov’s “a student’s right to freedom of education” jeffry king texas state university, usa abstract this article is a response to matusov's argument for a student's right to define the limits of their own education. while i agree with matusov's premise, i argue that his solution is framed as a dualism, which may undermine the dialogic principles of his call to students' educational freedoms. i propose that viewing students' educational freedoms through bakhtin's arhcitectonic self removes the dualism of matusov's argument, and close by providing an example of the architectonic self in practice within the teacher-student relationship. jeffry king is a lecturer in texas state university’s department of curriculum and instruction. his primary teaching foci include instructional strategies, classroom management, and educational philosophy at the secondary level. his research interests include dialogic pedagogies, including dialogic perspectives and expressions of classroom management, and spirituality in education. ïïò if the thesis of matusov’s commentary “a student’s right to freedom of education” were restated in question form, it might read: who sets the limits of education? matusov’s position is that “education requires a student to define their own education—i.e., freedom of education” (matusov, 2020, p. sf3). his insistence that students must be the principal authors, owners, and definers of their education rejects the techniques of “foisted education, imposed curriculum, and thrust instruction” that serve to further the goals and aims of external entities (p. sf2). these goals and aims are, in most cases, predetermined and serve instrumental purposes, which focus on the product as a means to an end (matusov, 2009). consequently, they set the limits of education and deny students the right to define their own education. matusov calls for education to become disentangled from these external “non-educational” practices and goals so that educators may “recognize that education is the primary business of the student and . . . promote the student’s right to freedom of education” (p. sf23). matusov frames his call around bakhtin’s (1984) notion of a “plurality of consciousnesses with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 6, italics in original) as the starting point for dialogic education, which is essential in order to for students to define their own educational limits. participants must have equal rights to choose how they engage in, respond to, and value educational dialogue. they try to avoid instrumental approaches to education that favor treating others as objects of their actions. this position means they reject pedagogical techniques that attempt to force or thrust curricula and predetermined goals onto another, choosing instead to engage in practices that support ontological dialogue. these bakhtinian approaches to issn: 2325-3290 (online) who sets the limits of educational freedom? jeffry king dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf60 education are, according to matusov, “unthinkable without a student’s right to define their own education” (p. sf10). while i agree with many elements of matusov’s proposal, i am not convinced that it adequately addresses the central issue of concern. it appears to me that he addresses a symptom of a larger problem, the pervasive construction of false dichotomies at the root of nearly every educational system and relationship. false dichotomies are detrimental to educational freedoms because they prevent participants from engaging in ontological dialogue (king, 2017). rather than contradict it, matusov actually frames his argument as a false dichotomy, which confuses his dialogical intentions and lessens the potential impact of his suggested solutions. for example, he presents his definition of freedom of education in dichotomous terms, as a shifting of “the locus of control and ownership of education to a student from the society, state, local ethnic community, or parents” (p. sf2, emphasis added). not only is educational freedom dichotomously defined, the dyad is also couched in dualistic terms which creates a false sense conflict within the relationship (plumwood, 2002). freedom is the object over which two subjects struggle. one subject has it, but the argument suggests that it rightfully belongs to the other. in this synthetic layer of conflict, it appears the reader/observer must make a choice between the two subjects. but the function of the dualism makes this a false choice, since only one of the choices is perceived to be the correct one. structuring relationships as dualisms are “fundamentally shaped by a desire for certainty,” often resulting in “the notion of an ultimate, eternal, fixed reality” (bleazby, 2013, p. 9). given that matusov grounds students’ right to freedom in a bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy, i do not think certainties and fixed realities are what he intends for his argument. i think matusov intends for the ontological elements of surprise, creative authorship, and internally persuasive discourse (p. sf10) to provide a space for bakhtin’s plurality of consciousnesses, as exemplified by his call for the appreciation of both the instrumental and intrinsic values of education in a “leisure-dominated hybrid” approach to education (p. sf23). by presenting a dialogic solution for a dualistic problem, however, matusov has introduced a logical inconsistency into his argument that threatens to undermine his call for a dialogic approach to education. his proposed solution of students as the sole definers of educational freedom strengthens the presence of dualisms in education rather than dismantle them. since bakhtinian pedagogies favor both/and choices rather than either/ choices, matusov’s suggested solution does not enhance the dialogic nature of educational relationships. the architectonic self and educational freedom one alternative suggestion that avoids the inconsistencies within matusov’s argument is to frame the solution around bakhtin’s (1990, 1993) concept of the architectonic self. this approach removes the possibility of the false dichotomy by structuring the educational relationship as a triad rather than as a dyad. additionally, it considers the relational interdependency between participants vital to the construction of reality and meaning. in the context of freedom in education, the architectonic self suggests that students’ rights are dependent on the participation of others. although this statement appears to run counter to matusov’s argument, understanding how the architectonic self structures the relationship in dialogical terms will show that this is not in fact the case. architectonics, in general terms, is the study of relationships, of how individual parts relate to one another (holquist, 2002). for bakhtin (1993), the architectonic self is a description of how the “actual world of the performed act . . . the world of a unitary and once-occurrent act or deed” is constructed from its “basic concrete moments:” the “i-for-myself, the other-for-me, and i-for-the-other” (p. 54). three key elements in this description are immediately relevant to the issue at hand. first, the definition of the self and the other in relational terms creates no fewer than three basic moments: the self, the other, and the relationship between them. it is impossible to structure a dualism, much less a dichotomy, around three elements comment on text eugene matusov: what is the falsehood of my dichotomies? later in the commentary, you, jeff, seems to disallow any dichotomy by saying, “self rather than from a dichotomous perspective (false or otherwise).” so, am i that you want to reject any dichotomy? i’m an unapologetic dichotomist, dualist, and pluralist. this means that i view dichotomies as such unavoidable and useful at times. for example, you, jeff, is also a dichotomist dividing scholars on non-dichotomists and dichotomists. bakhtin was a dichotomist as well – his dialogue-monologue dichotomy is probably the most famous one. however, i agree with you that some dichotomies can be non-useful, incorrect, and false, but a specific analysis is needed to reveal it. also, totalizing dichotomy – presenting everything as dichotomy or not seeking limitations of a dichotomy – can be a problem as well. i think the fashionable fight against any dichotomy is rooted in a desire of many scholars for the monism – finding a unity in any phenomenon. i reject the monism in afavor of the radical pluralism, articulated by british philosopher isaiah berlin (see the reference in my original article). i believe that values and ideas are often so incompatible or contradictory that usually, it is impossible to find a satisfactory unity or harmony among values or among ideas in principle. for me, unity is a local and limited phenomenon. sticky note jeffry king: thanks, eugene, for your comments and questions. i agree with you that dichotomies are unavoidable and, more importantly, necessary to learning. the point i was trying to make was that there is a significant ontological difference between a dichotomy and a duality. while i think dichotomies are healthy and essential, dualisms are contrived and detrimental because they force people into a false choice. i am referring to the logical fallacy of false choice, where two options are presented in a way that automatically negates the validity of one. the result is really no choice at all. politicians employ this tactic extensively during election cycles. i read your shifting of power argument as a false choice, where the state has the power but it really belongs to the student. i do not disagree with this statement on an emotional or pedagogical level. but i was trying to reason a way to avoid structuring the dilemma of educational freedom as a false choice. that is why i settled on the architectonic self as a way of describing a dichotomous relationship in terms that resisted dualisms. rereading sections of my paper, i see where my language may be a little confusing, especially where i use dichotomies and dualism synonymously. perhaps i can clean up my argument to reduce this confusion. in the end, i think the key is to find ways to make the pedagogical relationship the essential focus of learning. one way i think this could happen is to find ways to encourage and validate students as the sole evaluators of their own learning, which is why i described the relationship between feedback and evaluation. thank you for including a link to your previous co-authored article. i found it informative, supportive, and challenging. i would appreciate an opportunity to continue discussing ways to assess students’ learning in dialogic and non-alienating ways. who sets the limits of educational freedom? jeffry king dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf61 without ignoring or rejecting one of the elements. second, bakhtin insists that, of the three, the relationship is the most important element (holquist, 2002). the position of the self is necessarily one of relation, because reality is both given to it and created by it. bakhtin (1993) states that “i come upon this world, inasmuch as i come forth or issue from within myself in my performed act or deed” (p. 57, italics in original). these two acts are not linear; one does not come before or assume precedence over the other. they occur simultaneously. thus, what is of utmost importance is how these two expressions of reality relate to one another to form a complete whole. third, the architectonic self is intended to describe an activity or deed rather than a specific object. this focus highlights the dynamic tension within each relationship. things are never in static relationships with each other; they are constantly moving (emerson, 1995). this movement comes, in large part, from the impermanent “once-occurrent” quality of the activity. each relationship exists within and is defined within a specific activity. but this activity only occurs once. the next activity involving the relationship is another unique event, and thus the definition of the relationship must define itself again. being, for bakhtin, is eternally and essentially active, and the architectonic self is a way for him to describe the “body of techniques by which its sheer flux may be erected into a meaningful event” (holquist, 1990, p. xxiv, italics in original). just as the architectonic self is bakhtin’s explanation of how reality is relationally constructed, the process of outsideness is his description of how the self and the other actively come to understanding through relationship. outsideness, is primarily concerned with position, where the self stands in relation to the other (and vice versa), and why this position is essential for understanding (emerson, 1995). “in order to understand,” bakhtin writes, “it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her understanding” (1986, p. 7, italics in original). what this position means for the self is, in order to understand myself, i must take up a position outside myself. how do i accomplish this seeming physical impossibility? bakhtin’s answer is through relationship with the other. other people see me more fully than i see myself because they are located outside me. they have what bakhtin (1990) describes as an “excess of . . . seeing in relation to another” (p. 24). this outside perspective is bestowed upon me, and gives me a more whole picture of myself than i could ever achieve without it (emerson, 1997). it is the active representation of the “other for me.” i can now stand outside myself and see myself as another sees me. the other’s excess of seeing helps me overcome my lack of sight, and i do the same for them. because both i and another have an excess of seeing in relation to each other, the function of outsideness becomes a cooperative effort to overcome a lack of seeing by sharing with each other the things we can see that the other cannot see (holquist, 1990). once another has presented me with a more whole picture of myself, i am obligated to “issue from within myself” a response to it. “after looking at ourselves through the eyes of another,” bakhtin insists that “we always return—in life—into ourselves again, and the final, or, as it were, recapitulative event takes place within ourselves” (1990, p. 17). he refers to this inward turn as the non-alibi, “the utterly irreplaceable uniqueness of being, in relation to every constituent moment of being” (1993, p. 57). irreplaceability is an immense burden and responsibility; there are no alibis for it. no one, no other, can make my response for me. what has been seen by another and presented to me may change me, may be changed by me, or may be rejected by me (emerson, 1995). but, essential to bakhtin’s architectonic self, is that it is my response to make. i am the only person who can provide a response to the whole picture of myself presented in another’s excess of seeing. i alone am responsible to the transformation of “every manifestation of myself . . . into my own actively answerable deed” (bakhtin, 1993, p. 57). who sets the limits of educational freedom? jeffry king dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf62 students’ freedom in the pedagogical relationship if a student’s right to freedom is necessary for dialogic education, then it must be viewed in terms of the architectonic self rather than from a dichotomous perspective (false or otherwise). false dichotomies are constructed by separating the product from its initial relationship, an act that bakhtin explicitly warns against (1993, p. 54). this separation bestows a specific value to the product that can then be imposed upon any other relationship by positioning the participants according to its purposes (plumwood, 2002), thereby denying the value or necessity of the relationship. in the context of educational freedoms, matusov appears to view them as detached products that allow whomever owns them to control the pedagogical relationship. since his argument presents education as a dichotomy between students and non-educational external entities, the one who owns the freedom has control over the other. shifting the locus of control would only serve to alter the balance of power and do nothing to dismantle the false dichotomy, allowing the product to remain separated from the relationship. bakhtin (1993) asserts that this separation is an ontological impossibility, that the product cannot survive outside its relationship. when the product is “severed from its ontological roots” and removed from the actual performed world of the dialogic act, “it is deprived of its weight with respect to value, it loses its emotional-volitional completeness, and becomes an empty, abstractly universal possibility” (pp. 54, 59). the product on its own is meaningless, and the only way to restore meaning to it is to restore it to the dialogic act (p. 54). the only way for students’ rights to freedom to mean anything, then, is for them to be restored to the architectonic self as it exists within the pedagogical relationship. to again paraphrase matusov’s thesis, perhaps the question is not “how can we promote students’ rights to freedom,” but rather “how do we promote the architectonic self in education?” since bakhtin refers to the architectonic self as the basic concrete moments that comprise the actual world, perhaps the best place to examine its place in education is within the most basic pedagogical moment, the teacher-student relationship. to maintain the focus on matusov’s original query, we might ask where students’ right to freedom exists in this basic concrete moment. examining how students and teachers participate in the process of outsideness might provide some insight into how students’ education freedoms can be perceived and practiced dialogically. i suggest that educational freedom is realized through the responsibility and actions of both the student and the teacher to position the other so that they may participate in outsideness. when a teacher shares her/his excess of seeing with students, she/he allows them to stand outside themselves and see themselves more fully. they are then free to respond from this unique position and create a new, more complete meaning for themselves. conversely, students freely share their excess of seeing with teachers. the teachers are then free to stand outside themselves and uniquely construct their own new meanings. thus, freedom to act becomes an essential part of the dialogical relationship. students are free to construct their own meanings, insofar as teachers help them achieve a position of outsideness, and vice versa. from this perspective, students’ rights to freedoms are limited when they are denied the opportunity to participate in outsideness. one such limiting factor (although certainly not the only one) concerns the denial of students’ rights to issue a response in a way that communicates their non-alibi, or irreplaceable uniqueness when confronted with a teacher’s excess of seeing. one of the most common practices teachers use to share their excess of seeing is feedback. pedagogical feedback is defined as “information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding” (hattie & timperley, 2007, p. 81). this information is generally intended to describe the level of success of a pedagogical action relative to a predetermined reference point like a standard or goal (sadler, 1989). the purpose of feedback is to communicate how the successfully the comment on text eugene matusov: they are not, when this “outsideness” is not forced on them but asked, consented, and/or trusted by the student. thanks, jeff for raising this important issue. see my colleagues and my discussion of this important of assessment here: matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & meacham, s. (2016). pedagogical voyeurism: dialogic critique of documentation and assessment of learning. international journal of educational psychology, 5(1), 1-26, doi: 10.17583/ijep.2016.1886. retrieved from http://hipatiapress.com/hpjournals/index.php/ijep/article/view/1886/pdf. who sets the limits of educational freedom? jeffry king dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf63 action “fills a gap between what is understood and what is aimed to be understood” (hattie & clarke, 2018, p. 3). this definition of feedback is non-dialogic because it conflates evaluation with feedback. along with providing information about a particular action, the presenter also evaluates the worth of the action relative to a predetermined goal or standard. there is a level of success that is desired, and the expectation is that the actions taken will eventually meet this level. in the pedagogical relationship, teachers provide conflated feedback through various forms to their students (e.g., tests, discussions, essay revisions, homework corrections). these feedback opportunities contain an evaluative quality to them, because they inform students how close or far away they are to meeting a goal. they determine for the students the worth of their specific pedagogical actions. in many cases, the conflation between feedback and evaluation is so subtle, the two are viewed synonymously (e.g., waring, 2009). dialogically, teachers cannot provide both feedback and evaluation. to do so denies the students’ freedoms because it denies the dialogic necessity of the relationship. teachers cannot provide information intended to allow students to see themselves more fully while simultaneously defining their value. by defining the roles of feedback and evaluation from the perspective of the architectonic self, these pedagogical practices can exist in a dialogical relationship that promotes rather than denies students’ freedoms to determine their own value. architectonically, feedback serves as the excess of seeing. its sole purpose is to position others outside themselves, so that they may freely respond. evaluation functions as the non-alibi, the unique response from others that conveys new meanings and value about themselves. conversely, students must also be free to provide feedback devoid of evaluation to their teachers, so that the teachers may construct new meanings for themselves. both sides of the dialogic relationship are necessary so that both participants may learn about each other (bakhtin, 1986). in this way, students’ rights to freedoms are limited only by the presence of the architectonic self and the relationship outsideness that emanates from it. focusing on dichotomous views of students’ freedoms in relation to the other limits the opportunities for teachers and students to engage in dialogic relationships. as a result, students’ educational freedoms suffer. by structuring educational practices that exemplify dialogical understandings of relationships (as exemplified through the relationship of feedback to evaluation), both students and teachers can work toward maximizing all participants’ rights to educational freedom. references bakhtin, m. m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (c. emerson, ed.; c. emerson, trans.). university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). response to a question from the novy mir editorial staff (v. mcgee, trans.). in c. emerson & m. holquist (eds.), speech genres & other late essays (pp. 1-9). university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act (v. liapunov, trans.; v. liapunov & m. holquist, eds.). university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1990). author and hero in aesthetic activity (v. liapunov, trans.). in m. holquist & v. liapunov (eds.), art and answerability: early philosophical essays by m. m. bakhtin (pp. 4-256). university of texas press. bleazby, j. (2013). social reconstruction learning: dualism, dewey and philosophy inn schools. taylor and francis. who sets the limits of educational freedom? jeffry king dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.349 | vol. 8 (2020) sf64 emerson, c. (1995). bakhtin at 100: art, ethics, and the architectonic self. the centennial review, 39(3), 397-418. emerson, c. (1997). the first hundred years of mikhail bakhtin. princeton university press. hattie, j., & timperley, h. (2007). the power of feedback. review of educational research, 77(1), 81112. http://www.jstor.com/stable/5624888 hattie, j., & clarke, s. (2018). visible learning feedback. routledge. holquist, m. (1990). introduction: the architectonics of answerability. in m. holquist & v. liapunov (eds.), art and answerability: early philosophical essays by m. m. bakhtin. university of texas press. holquist, m. (1993). forward. in v. liapunov & m. holquist (eds.), toward a philosophy of the act (pp. viixv). university of texas press. holquist, m. (2002). dialogism: bakhtin and his world (2nd ed.). routledge. king, j. (2017). pedagogy as tension: exploring the relationality of teaching and learning for a poststandardized education. international journal of pedagogies and learning, 12(1), 25-40. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. nova science publishers. matusov, e. (2020). a student’s and a teacher’s right to freedom of education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8 (2020), sf1-sf28. doi:10.5195/dpj.2020.356. plumwood, v. (2002). the politics of reason: toward a feminist logic. in r. falmagne & m.hass (eds.), representing reason: feminist theory and formal logic (pp. 11-44). rowman & littlefield. sadler, r. (1989). formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. instructional science, 18(2), 119-144. http://www.jstor.com/stable/23369143 waring, h. z. (2009). moving out of irf (initiation-response-feedback): a single case feedback analysis. language learning: a journal of research in language studies, 59(4), 796-824. https://doiorg.libproxy.txstate.edu/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2009.00526.x new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning (layout) 2019-12-28.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s1 controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa s. c. asterhan the hebrew university of jerusalem christine howe cambridge university adam lefstein ben gurion university of the negev eugene matusov university of delaware alina reznitskaya montclair university abstract scholarly interest in dialogic pedagogy and classroom dialogue is multi-disciplinary and draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks. on the positive side, this has produced a rich and varied body of research and evidence. however, in spite of a common interest in educational dialogue and learning through dialogue, cross-disciplinary engagement with each other’s work is rare. scholarly discussions and publications tend to be clustered in separate communities, each characterized by a particular type of research questions, aspects of dialogue they focus on, type of evidence they bring to bear, and ways in which standards for rigor are constructed. in the present contribution, we asked four leading scholars from different research traditions to react to four provocative statements that were deliberately designed to reveal areas of consensus and disagreement1. topic-wise, the provocations related to theoretical foundations, methodological assumptions, the role of teachers, and issues of inclusion and social class, respectively. we hope that these contributions will stimulate crossand trans-disciplinary discussions about dialogic pedagogy research and theory. christa asterhan is an assistant professor at the seymour (shlomo) fox school of education of the hebrew university in jerusalem, where she also received her doctoral degree in educational psychology and heads the learning & interaction lab. in her research, she explores the cognitive and social aspects of human interaction and human communication and how these affect learning. she strongly believes in and promotes a multidisciplinary and multi-method approach to the study of learning through social 1 the authors of this article are five scholars, the dialogic provocateur and the four respondents. the order of appearance of the authors was determined alphabetically. issn: 2325-3290 (online) controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s2 interaction. topic-wise, she has conducted research on collaborative learning, classroom dialogue and argumentation, teacher facilitation of learning dialogues, computer-mediated learning interactions, social media and education, conceptual change, and teacher pedagogical reasoning. together with lauren resnick and sherice clarke, she edited the 2015 aera volume socializing intelligence through academic talk and dialogue. christine howe is professor of education (emerita) at cambridge university. her research lies at the intersection of psychology, education, and linguistics, with major interests including children’s communicative, linguistic and peer relational skills, children’s reasoning in science and mathematics, and dialogue and learning during peer collaboration and teacher-led instruction. christine has received moreor-less continuous funding from the esrc (the uk’s premier sponsor of social science research) for over 30 years, as well as securing awards from british academy, leverhulme, nuffield, and various governmental and local authority sources. her most recent esrc-funded project addressed ‘classroom dialogue: does it really make a difference for student learning?’ christine has published seven books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and she has acted as editor for three academic journals while also serving on many editorial boards. she has held strategic appointments at the local, national and international levels relating to research and research training. adam lefstein is associate professor and chair of the department of education at the ben-gurion university of the negev in israel, where he conducts research and teaches about pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning and educational change. he is particularly interested in the intersection between research and professional practice, and how to conduct research that is meaningful, rigorous and helpful for educators. he co-directs (with dana vedder-weiss) the laboratory for the study of pedagogy, an interdisciplinary research group that investigates israeli pedagogy, schooling, educational policy and change, and processes of knowledge sharing with practitioners, policy-makers and the public. his current and recent research includes a study of israeli culture and primary pedagogy, an investigation of videobased dialogic debrief conversations, a design-based implementation study of teacher leadership and professional discourse, an experimental study of academically productive talk in primary language classrooms and an ethnographic investigation of language, class and classroom participation. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. alina reznitskaya is a professor at montclair state university, usa. she received her doctoral degree in educational psychology from the university of illinois and did her post-doctoral research at yale university. alina has acquired expertise in educational psychology, quantitative research methodology, and educational measurement, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics. alina’s research interests include investigating the role social interaction plays in the development of argument literacy, designing measures of argumentation, and examining professional development efforts that help teachers learn to facilitate argumentation during class discussions. alina has been awarded research grants by the spencer foundation and the u.s. department of education, institute of education sciences. dr. reznitskaya’s work has appeared in a variety of journals and edited books, including educational psychologist, the reading teacher, contemporary educational psychology, cambridge journal of controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s3 education, elementary school journal, discourse processes, comprehension instruction: researchbased best practices, and positive psychology in practice. introduction scholarly interest in dialogic pedagogy and classroom dialogue cuts across disciplinary boundaries, such as psychology, pedagogy, ethnography, linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy. this multi-disciplinary focus on a common object of interest has produced a rich and varied body of theory and research. yet, perhaps not surprisingly, it has also created confusion, frictions and even collisions, especially as scholars from different research traditions have begun to meet and discuss each other’s work more frequently at international meetings and/or have tried their hand at integration for written reviews and collections. whereas some apparent differences appear to be surface level only, others may be more profound and paradigmatic. for example, the meaning of commonly used labels, such as dialogue, talk, learning and pedagogy, vary across different fields. even the reasons for studying classroom dialogue differ greatly – e.g., dialogue as a goal in and of itself, as an instrument to achieve something else, as a competency, as a methodology for studying other phenomena, or as a byproduct. as scholars of dialogue, we believe it is imperative to practice what we preach and stimulate productive discussions across and within different research communities of dialogue pedagogy, to map both minor as well as major points of contention, and to identify areas of consensus. to this end, a multidisciplinary discussion panel was organized and hosted at the 2018 biennial earli conference on argumentation, dialogue and reasoning (jerusalem, israel). christa asterhan formulated four provocations, each chosen to address a key issue (past, present or future) in research on dialogic education. four leading scholars from different research disciplines, theoretical backgrounds and/or research communities were invited to react to these provocations: alina reznitskaya, adam lefstein, christine howe and eugene matusov. each of these well-known scholars has studied and written extensively about the role of dialogue in learning and teaching, whilst focusing on distinctively different types of questions and goals, employing different methods of investigation and working within different disciplinary and/or theoretical frameworks. the format was slightly different from the usual conference discussion panel: each panelist received the provocations a week in advance in order to prepare2. the session itself included four cycles of the following: • christa presented a provocation; • the audience received 2 min of partner talk to discuss the provocation with the person sitting next to them, before giving the floor to the panel members; • each panel member received 2.5 min (150 sec) to react and present his/her viewpoint on the issue, in round robin style. we have transcribed the panel member contributions, with slight adaptations to increase readability in the written format3. we share them here, in the hope of stimulating further crossand trans-disciplinary discussions about dialogic pedagogy research and theory. 2 the four panelists each referred orally to ideas and research that have been published by themselves and others. we have added the references to these publications in the written version, and in a compiled reference list. 3 unfortunately, the partner talk and general audience discussions during the session could not be transcribed and published. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s4 provocation nr 1. the terms dialogic pedagogy and/or dialogic learning are used quite often and sometimes quite loosely in our field. it seems that different scholars do not necessarily mean the same thing. what is your (working) definition of dialogic pedagogy and/or dialogic learning and what are the pivotal features that set it apart from other common or well-known approaches? alina reznitskaya: i agree that dialogic pedagogy today represents a set of rather general principles, which can be activated in many different ways and result in quite distinct classroom practices. moreover, at least in some versions, dialogic pedagogy implies the use of multiple discourse types, depending on specific instructional goals for students. our work has a narrower focus, with the main instructional goal of supporting the development of argumentation, and as a result, deeper understanding of the subject matter. to identify the normative type of discourse for this goal, we drew on the work of douglas walton who described different conversational contexts for argumentation, including inquiry, persuasion, and negotiation, among others (walton, 1998). we also followed maughn gregory who applied walton’s work to education and suggested that inquiry dialogue is a normative type of talk for promoting reasoned argumentation (gregory, 2007). the goal of inquiry dialogue is to collaboratively search for the most reasonable answer to a contestable question. during inquiry dialogue, participants not only are expected to defend their own positions and critically examine those of others (as in persuasion), but they may also need to give up or qualify their viewpoints in the face of previously overlooked evidence or faulty reasoning. inquiry dialogue is not about determining who is right, but about collaboratively deciding on what is right, or the most reasonable. so, inquiry dialogue entails a systematic movement towards the truth (even if truth remains an unreachable ideal), and it relies on epistemic commitments and evaluation standards that support such movement. adam lefstein: first, let me just share my immediate, visceral response to this question, which was, "oh no, why did i agree to be on this panel?" i feel rather boxed in by definitions. especially definitions with a two-and-a-half-minute time limit. if forced, my definition, which i'm not going to give you, would include something about interactional structures (the give and take of exchange, reciprocity in the distribution of turns at talk), something about argument and critique (ideas are expressed, criticized and justified), something about voices (participants express their own ideas, in their own language, and address one another's ideas), something about stance (critical yet open), and something about relationships (of care and trust and inclusion), shared power and ownership. i'd also point out that some of these different aspects of the definition are in practice often in tension with one another – for example, critique and care, or orderly exchange and shared power – and all are in tension with various aspects of contemporary schooling, so this definition offers a general lay of the land rather than a particular path that one can unproblematically follow. what sets this approach apart? perhaps that it's rather convoluted and not terribly memorable? i would say that what we've tried to do in our work – i'm speaking here in julia snell and aliza segal's name as well (lefstein, 2010; lefstein & snell, 2014) – what we've tried to do is to offer an approach that is grounded in existing classroom conditions. rather than starting with an ideal image of what we believe dialogue should look like and then criticizing teachers and pupils for not living up to that lofty standard, we've tried to start with the actual practices that we've encountered in classrooms. that is, to first seek to controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s5 understand the rules of the classroom game and the conditions constraining teaching practice, and then work out from them to the development of dialogic possibilities. second, our approach is multidimensional, that is we include numerous aspects of classroom communication and interaction, including communicative forms, interpersonal relations, the exchange and development of ideas and voices, power, and aesthetics. finally, we view dialogue as a problem rather than a solution. we argue that dialogic pedagogy is most helpful as a set of dilemmas to consider, concepts to think with, commitments to pursue and balance, and practices to add to our repertoires. it is less helpful as a narrow best practice solution to each and every classroom situation. and that final point partially explains why i'm reluctant to define it. christine howe: i don’t have a working definition of dialogic teaching and learning, because i don’t actually need one for the research i’ve been doing recently. i fully agree that there is a lot of variation in the field, but i also think there is a lot of overlap once you rise above the terminological quagmire that besets this whole area. and what i’ve been doing in my most recent study (howe, hennessy, mercer, vrikki & wheatley, 2019) is trying to represent relevant aspects of all divergent approaches and find out which aspects are most meaningful. so, i don’t actually have to pin myself down to one definition. i should add, though, that in the work i’ve been doing i’ve been focusing on dialogue per se, and i fully appreciate that many definitions of dialogic pedagogy also address the broader classroom ethos, that is characteristics like open-mindedness, mutual respect, freedom from censure, reduced role division, space to explore and so on; robin alexander talked about this sort of thing in his keynote at this meeting. to make the research manageable, these characteristics have been considered just to the extent of being controlled for within our analyses rather than treated as central components. nevertheless, i do think that by looking at a selected group of dialogue variables that has in some form or another been pinpointed from a wide range of different theoretical perspectives, we will eventually – maybe in another hundred years’ time achieve some collective understanding of what dialogic pedagogy is about. so that is where i am right now as regards definition. eugene matusov: well, i don’t want to be called “reactionary” [laughs], so i try to respond, not to react [to what was told before me]. probably i want just to say what i like and dislike about different approaches to dialogic pedagogy. and let me start with what i dislike about other approaches to dialogue in education. i don’t like instrumental dialogue in education. instrumental dialogue is dialogue aimed to increase test scores, dialogue to increase argumentation, dialogue to increase critical thinking, you can put anything else in this list of educational outcomes. i think, essentially, dialogue, in my reading of bakhtin, is non-productive, it can be by-productive, but it is non-productive. [in a genuine dialogue] we don’t exactly know what we’re doing, we don’t know what we’ll come up to, we don’t know what task exactly we’re trying to do… even when we are doing any task, preset in advance we may and will deviate from it in a genuine dialogue. instrumental dialogue is a highly distorted and violent dialogue. this is what i don’t like. let me switch to what i like. i like bakhtin’s idea that meaning-making is dialogic and that meaningmaking is a relationship between a question, asked by a person with an interest, urgency, curiosity and/or puzzlement, and an answer, which is provided in a serious way to that question by somebody else. which means that education starts with the students’ questions, not with the teacher’s questions and that the asked questions are genuinely interesting for the students. and again, the questions might be not always well-defined or well-articulated. dialogue might start with a student’s tension or a vaguely articulated puzzlement or something like that. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s6 i like bakhtin’s notion of “consciousnesses with equal rights,” when, again, basically, it’s about the collapse of authority. first of all, it’s about the collapse of institutional authority and teacher authority. i like the idea that dialogue cannot be forced. it’s always voluntary. so school, conventional school, is antidialogical in this sense because it’s often mandatory – society wants education for all students and defines what this education is about. and i like dialogue, in which the primary focus is not on the agreement and the consensus but on the misunderstanding, non-understanding, disagreements, puzzlement, and so forth. and i think i should finish maybe before my 2.5 minutes are over to give the floor to somebody else, thank you. provocation nr 2. dialogue is too complex to be genuinely understood and captured by quantitative statistical methods. quantitative studies of dialogue and argumentation impress at first sight because of their numbers, tables and figures and the enormous amount of work that has been put into developing coding schemes, training coders, achieving reliability and analyzing hundreds of turns and features. but i have yet to meet a quantitative study that gave me real insight into the workings of learning through dialogue and/or argumentation. adam lefstein: generally, i'm sympathetic to the idea that systematic coding and statistical analysis do not often generate much insight into the dynamics of dialogue. for real insight, i much prefer the sort of careful, detailed, ethnographically informed case studies that stretch our educational imagination. for example, ray mcdermott's work on how a young girl hides her inability to read by bidding for a turn at the very moment when she won't be granted one, and how an entire class collude to help her achieve this goal (mcdermott & tylbor, 1983). or the analysis that led ben rampton to characterize whole class instruction as, and i quote, "a jostling but expressively depleted style of communication which marginalizes students’ judgement but threatens to drag them onto the platform with curriculum-scripted performances that in the end don’t actually count for very much" (rampton, 2006). i find that account to be far more helpful than the way many of us – myself included – describe traditional instruction with measures of closed questions, brief student responses and unelaborated teacher evaluation. or, to provide an example that is closer to home, cathy o'connor and sarah michaels's careful analyses of the way teacher revoicing can reposition the student as having epistemic authority and thereby shape the ensuing interaction (o’connor & michaels, 1993). likewise, i always found the case studies in marty nystrand and colleagues' opening dialogue, the ones that come after the statistical analyses and indeed problematize them, far more insightful than the statistical chapters (nystrand, gamoran, kachur, & prendergast, 1997). but, that said, i probably wouldn't have read those case studies without the quantitative analyses, and likewise think that quantitative work in our field is absolutely crucial, because ethnographic insight is not the only game in town, or indeed not the most important one. so i'm wholeheartedly in favor of developing coding schemes, training coders, coding, analyzing etc. (especially if someone else is responsible), because without this we wouldn't be able to say much about populations, general trends, or cause and effect. so, for example, if we want to say something about the effects of dialogic teaching on students' learning, development or well-being, we're going to need to quantify variables. i doubt i need to say more about this here. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s7 so, let me just conclude with a thought about the danger of posing the discussion in terms of a paradigm war between qual and quant camps. when ethnographers dismiss quantitative studies as lacking in insight, and experimental psychologists respond by arguing that qualitative studies are not real science, the whole field suffers. so i hope we don't get too caught up on this question, at least in the way i've ended up framing my response to it here. christine howe: dialogue is just one of numerous human social practices – and like all others, it is complex. moreover, whenever quantitative methods are used to address such practices, they demand massive simplification. nevertheless, it’s my belief that fear of simplification has actually impeded progress in our field, because it has contributed to the under-researching of questions that can only be addressed through a quantitative approach. some of these questions are pretty fundamental and ought to be addressed, including for instance whether any of this stuff actually makes a difference to how students perform. i do not think you can get a proper answer to that question using in-depth, qualitative methods. i don’t want to belittle qualitative analyses. i agree with everything that adam said about them. they play an indispensable role, but i do think that, if anything, the balance in this field has been towards the qualitative and not towards the quantitative and i think that has inhibited progress. but coming back to what i said a moment ago, quantification absolutely demands simplification and some researchers are wary. the main thing i’d say to those researchers is that simplification is only a problem (and something to be fearful of) if it also results in meaninglessness – and you can do various things to check this out. for instance, in the study i have been presenting at this meeting (howe et al., 2019) we sent transcripts of the classroom interactions we recorded to outside experts. these transcripts were chosen because they fell on a continuum of ‘dialogicality’ in terms of our quantitative analyses (and the crude and simple indices these required). our experts included people for whom quantification is almost taboo. all experts were asked to rank-order the transcripts from most to least educationally productive, using their own perspective on (and criteria for) educational productiveness. our quantitative indices strongly predicted the rankings, implying that they were meaningful proxies for something that was in fact much more subtle. in short then, there are ways in which you can cut across the barriers that exist in this field. this said, our study focused on teacher-student dialogue and i don’t see the study (or any other piece of work at present) as unambiguously addressing the processes by which teacher-student dialogue has its effects. however, this is a comment on the current state of the art, not a claim about a limitation-inprinciple on quantification, for studies of group work amongst students show that it is perfectly possible to address the ‘workings of learning’ through quantitative analysis. i could give many examples (including from my own work; howe & zachariou, 2019) where, through quantitative comparison of experimental manipulations, the processes of growth (and specifically the role of dialogue in those processes) have been clarified. in the future, the same should be true of teacher-student dialogue. eugene matusov: i’ll probably continue this discussion with “no, but”. do we have norwegians here? no? because i wanted to refer to a very interesting fairytale. it’s about a little goat, a kid, who learned how to count to ten (prøysen, 1961). in the norwegian fairytale, various animals got upset and angry with the little goat who was counting them until the little goat saved the animals from drowning by counting them on an overloaded boat. i think this story reflects that in some cultures, people find that counting people is disrespectful. because it erases differences among people. it’s like a headcount. headcount is good for counting cows, controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s8 but not always people. [for example, it is disrespectful to say that my mother has two children because she has my older brother alex and me. we are not interchangeable “children” – we are unique alex and eugene for my mother and both of us.] so, in this sense, any quantitative research is anti-dialogic in its nature. and in this case, i will say: “no, quantitative research cannot be used for studying dialogue and dialogic pedagogy.” now, i need to turn around and say “but”. but – not everything is dialogue. we, humans, are not always engaged in dialogue and not all part of education, even a dialogic part, is completely dialogic. for example, sorry to say that but i have caught a cold here, in israel, and i have to do like this (wiping his nose) and that’s part of not being dialogic and not really even nice, but that’s part of my body. and that part of this can be countable and you can count that. this counting is good, useful, and respectful. so, if you want to count not-dialogic aspects, – be my guest. but anything that is dialogic is not worth, legitimate, or respectful of counting because the dialogic focuses on uniqueness, on meaning-making, which is not countable. because, again, counting is about erasing differences [but] meaning is about uniqueness (matusov, marjanovic-shane, gradovski, 2019; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018). that’s my reply to that. and actually, i agree with antonia [prof. antonia larrain, in the audience] for something that bakhtin argued at the end of his life, which is developing “dialogic science.” it is nothing like quantitative or qualitative. it is actually neither of them. dialogic science has something to do with meaning-making. i’m sitting here replying and addressing people about their dialogic research. this is nothing to do with coding, like often in qualitative research, – it is something else. and we can talk more about that. alina reznitskaya: i agree that the quality of evidence we currently have to support our understanding of whether and how dialogue works is not very high. however, i think the problem is not with the use of quantitative methods, as the choice of methodology depends on the research question we want to address, and some research questions align better with quantitative approaches. at the same time, i understand this critique of quantitative studies, and to me the most pressing problem is not having good models that clearly and convincingly specify what it means to ‘make progress’ in the context of dialogue and argumentation. for example, most existing quantitative measures of argumentation quality rely on structural analysis. that is, researchers (including myself) simply count the number of desirable argument elements (such as positions, supporting reasons, and opposing reasons) or language structures (such as phrases “i think… because”). this approach focuses on the form, and largely ignores the content of the arguments. and, although structural analysis can capture some aspects of quality argumentation, it often omits more important features of good arguments, such as accuracy, coherence, and persuasiveness. on a positive note, there are many interesting proposals about improving measures of argumentation making them more nuanced and comprehensive. there is also interesting work being done in automated scoring that can make the analysis of arguments more efficient. in fact, i believe our current understanding about the educational potential of dialogue and argumentation will be considerably revised, once we make advances in the quality of our measurement tools. so, i would not give up on quantitative methodology, but instead suggest that we work to address existing challenges. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s9 provocation nr. 3. issues of social class, (in)equity, and accessibility to linguistic resources have been neglected in this research field. enculturation into a particular, monolithic type of “ideal” academic discourse that is mainly based on rational reasoning and argumentation (typical of high ses families of particular cultures) disregards and disrespects the different registers of discourse minoritized students come to class with and alienates them from participation in classroom dialogue. to what extent does our work challenge or reify the implicit and explicit ways that schools fit minoritized students into singular or monolithic forms of thinking and discourse? christine howe: well, i’m of a sufficiently advanced age to disagree with the first sentence in this provocation. this is because i remember that in the 1950’s and 1960’s there was in fact a lot of work into social class differences in classroom dialogue, associated in the uk primarily with the work of basil bernstein (see williams, 1970). bernstein drew attention to the ‘restricted code’ of dialogue that he regarded as characteristic of working-class interactions and the ‘elaborated code’ of dialogue that he saw as more typical of the middle class. he believed that working-class kids were disadvantaged in school (and middle-class kids advantaged) because the language of classrooms also relies on the elaborated code. the idea of elaborated dialogue is of course not a million miles away from some variables that are featuring (and being promoted) in contemporary work. now i also remember that the work of bernstein and others at that time was strongly criticized for being demeaning of working-class culture, which the critics argued was just as rich linguistically as middleclass culture. at the time, i found their arguments compelling, so with that as a background, i actually feel quite nervous about engaging with this provocation. however, one possibly relevant thing i can say with reference to the study i’ve been talking about already (howe et al., 2019), is that it was a naturalistic piece of work conducted in 72 classrooms that couldn’t be more diverse in terms of socio-economic indicators within the english context (0-100% of students in each classroom eligible for free school meals; 0-96% from minority ethnic backgrounds). yet we found absolutely no relationship between any demographic indicator and the use of the dialogue forms that we, and i think most people at this meeting, would regard as productive. so, while the 72 classrooms actually varied greatly over their use of these dialogic forms, i.e. over how they managed to fit students into those forms, the variation is unlikely to be anything to do with students’ social background – and what may or may not be true of their interactions at home. in other words, based on this recent study i would say that there is absolutely no evidence that certain forms of classroom dialogue are more accessible to middle-class children than to children from a highly deprived culture. and if these forms are as productive as we think they are, i’d be a little bit unhappy about holding them back from some groups rather than making them available universally. alina reznitskaya: i have no reservations about promoting the discourse of reasoned argumentation through my work in public classrooms. moreover, i would argue that exposure to such discourse is especially valuable for minority groups who, on the one hand, may lack access to these ways of talking in their home environments, and, on the other hand, can and should benefit from acquiring this extremely useful cultural resource. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s10 of course, this does not mean that other forms of expression should be excluded or disrespected. it also does not mean that teachers should ignore the differences between school and home cultures of minority students. in fact, teachers need to find ways to capitalize on those differences in order to broaden the repertoire of discourses available to all students. adam lefstein: i think our field needs to attend much more to the interaction of social class, culture, language and classroom dialogue. we know that student socioeconomic status shapes how dialogic pedagogy is enacted in the classroom. for example, julia snell and i worked with a group of teachers in london who believed that their low ses pupils suffered from linguistic deprivation that prevented them from participating effectively in dialogic teaching and learning. we know this because when we encouraged them to engage their classes in more challenging dialogue, they explained that their pupils come from working class families and suffer from linguistic and cultural deficits that make our suggestion impractical. these beliefs also influenced the way some of them managed dialogic teaching in their classrooms. they tossed softball questions to perceived "low ability" students, who in turn dodged those questions, thereby positioning themselves as incompetent, which reinforced their classroom identities as low ability and incapable of participating in dialogue (snell & lefstein, 2018). one aspect of this is the extent to which classroom dialogue privileges certain linguistic and cultural repertoires. i'm reminded, for example, of an episode in which one east london pupil read out the opening of his story to the class, while the teacher scribed his work on the overhead projector. "when we was in year 4", the pupil read, and was immediately corrected by the teacher, "when we were …". the pupil in turn corrected his teacher – he had written "we was", in accordance with the local, non-standard dialect. teacher policing of pupil language threatens to shut down the discussion, alienate pupils and prevent them from expressing themselves in their own voices (snell, 2013). similarly, cultural and gender norms for negotiating disagreement vary, and we need to be respectful and accommodating of our students' different ways of engaging in discussion and argument, in order that all feel comfortable to express themselves. that said, there was an implication in the provocation that rational reasoning itself has a class and cultural bias. this is a troubling assertion. some forms of debate – for example, the highly explicit and formal argumentation you might find in a court room or an academic conference – are more customary in some homes – for example in homes of lawyers and academics. but that does not mean that reasoning is the exclusive domain of the upper classes. it means that we need to use multiple genres of discussion to give students access to multiple forms of discourse and interaction. nevertheless, every educational action is going to benefit some students more than others, and we need to study who are the winners and losers of different forms of dialogic pedagogy. eugene matusov: from my work on dialogic pedagogy, on the one hand, diversity is welcomed because, in a way, we’re hunting for the difference, for the otherness. and this otherness … could be in different socioeconomic classes, different religions, different political beliefs: different, different, different! especially, minority! that’s even better! minority opinion, minority students, minority experiences, they are terrific for dialogue because they are close to the uniqueness (uniqueness is minority in its extreme) (matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019). so, i would say, on the one hand, we don’t have much problem with this issue in dialogic pedagogy. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s11 on the other hand, we do have a problem with diversity in dialogic pedagogy. because of many different things, like my ontological idea, my ontological dialogic pedagogy, is different from others, right? which immediately means that there are particular values in our diverse versions of dialogic pedagogy. these different cultural values in our different versions of dialogic pedagogy promote particular cultures, particular interactional styles, and so forth. so, the question is… on the one hand, i see the purpose of ontological dialogical pedagogy to be deconstructive: it is deconstructive of values, of everything. on the other hand, this deconstruction itself is a cultural value and some people might not accept this cultural value of pedagogy as deconstruction. i think there is an inherent tension there. dialogue is very verbal, right? but not every culture is verbal. i’m sorry, i’d disagree with what some people might say, but some cultures promote non-critical attitudes, and so forth. so, the question is that dialogic pedagogy contradicts many cultures and many ways of being, and many ways of acting in the world. and this is an interesting issue of how to deal with that. and from that point of view, i don’t want my dialogic pedagogy to monopolize education. it’s one of many [pedagogies], i believe this is the best, but i also believe in educational pluralism. it’s like paraphrasing the famous statement on freedom of speech, “i’d disagree with your pedagogy, but you should have the right to practice whatever pedagogy you think is good”. so this is dialogical pluralism in education. education should include all pedagogies: different educators who want to do education differently and for different purposes (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). [break for dyadic discussion, during which eugene talked with dr. sherice clarke in the audience] let me start with… actually, this is my reply to sherice. she told me that she disagrees with my position about what dialogic pedagogy is because she thinks that basically [i meant that], and i simplify, it’s for the rich kids or for “the talented tenth”, or something like that. and my reply to that is that i both agree and disagree with that. so, let me start politely with why i agree. if you now look up the word “school”, it is a greek word that actually means leisure. and, of course, ancient greece, where the term emerged, was a slavery-based democratic state. you need to have slavery to have a school as a leisure, that’s absolutely true. and in this sense, the dialogic pedagogy that i am talking about is for “the rich”. but for any kind of institution, a society has to develop itself at a certain level to afford this institution, and for this kind of [institutional] affordances you have to be rich [enough]. and another reply to sherice’s critique is this: an american science fiction writer, william gibson, said: “the future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed”. we live in a society in which education is mostly instrumental because the whole business of education is to prepare humans to become like smart machines who can work predictably and reliably for the necessities-based society. my ontological dialogic pedagogy is a small, poorly protected, oasis of the future for lucky ones. hopefully, maybe in the future, this need for instrumentality will disappear. maybe faster than we think. maybe a jobless society is coming to us now and it will create new possibilities for education. that’s why i agree with you, sherice, that my vision of dialogic pedagogy is for “the rich”. why i disagree with you is because i think that ontological dialogic education is a part of the human rights, it’s an existential human need of each person. i work actually with minority students, working-class students in the us, and in my view, (those) children and adults are extremely hungry for that type of controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s12 education. yes, it is not necessities-based education and, yes, often one has to fight for the necessities, that’s true as well, that’s a fact of our life. provocation nr. 4: in spite of extensive evidence about the benefits of dialogic pedagogy in classrooms, the impact of teacher professional development efforts to change classroom practices in this direction has overall been negligent. why is it so hard? what, according to you, are the main obstacles or reasons for this failure? eugene matusov: i think it is very important how we, educational researchers, treat and address our colleagues, educational practitioners, how we say “they” – means “teachers.” for me, this is not very dialogic – this is instrumental. basically, we often try to impose our educational ideas, gained in our research, on teachers – to teach them how to do that. teachers become instruments for us to implement our educational research findings and research-based visions. in my view, dialogue starts with “you” and not “they.” at the same time, teachers often treat their students as “they” and this, probably, is why their pedagogy is not dialogic. there is a vicious, monologic, cycle of treating people as instruments or objects. this is, of course, from my view of dialogic pedagogy. a part of what we are discussing here is what “good education” is – this is a good question. but i think this question is a part of education itself. i think it is a part of education itself to investigate with students (and their teachers) what good education is for them: to reveal alternative ideas about education and the values behind them and test these ideas about education against each other through and in education. in this endeavor, in this inquiry, we all are “you”: students, teachers, and educational researchers. it is a dialogue. we are genuinely interested in each other and we are addressing and replying to each other. however, this question about good education is a question primarily by and for the students because it is their education at the end of the day, not teachers or educational researchers. second, it is the question of the teachers because the teachers facilitate students’ search for and investigation of good education. finally, it is the question of educational researchers because they help students and teachers. unfortunately, now it is the primarily question of researchers, or, maybe, of the state. and, it should definitely not the primary question of the state. i think the state should be kept out of this question entirely, limiting its role to securing resources for education. education is primarily the personal business of the students. yes, students may need help with that: instructional, organizational, or financial, but this all is secondary. i see the role of educational researchers in listening to and recording diverse voices about this question of good education, bringing these diverse voices in dialogue, exploring them, provoking more dialogues and bringing them back to the students and the teachers for their deconstructive dialogues. students author their own education, and their teachers help the students in authoring their own education. that is why the teacher’s pedagogy is also authorial. research is also authorial, rather than purely objective. and this is how dialogue happens, in my view: treating other people as authors in a dialogue. it is quite different from the current situation, when we, educational researchers, have already decided what is good through our research in advance, and the teachers must implement this goodness. this seems to me to contradict our value that good education must be dialogic. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s13 alina reznitskaya: i would like to start by reacting to the first part of this statement, and to suggest that the quality (vs. quantity) of evidence we currently have to support the benefits of dialogic pedagogy in classrooms is not very high. the story of unmitigated success that we often hear and read about can be challenged by considering serious methodological problems present in many studies, measurement issues that i just talked about, as well inconsistent results, small effects sizes, and even publication bias; all problems that should be given much more attention. now, switching to the second part of the statement about the difficulties to change interactional patterns in the classroom. while we do have studies and programs that produced meaningful changes in classroom discourse (including our own work), the costs of achieving such results are high, as more effective programs require intensive and prolonged work with teachers. in fact, harvard researchers o’connor and snow, have compared some pd programs to demanding fitness routines “that only those with the most leisure time or other sources of support can keep up with” (o’connor & snow, 1998). other scholars also argued that our current pd programs are unnecessarily complex, and we may be better off by focusing instead on identifying and sharing with teachers a few ‘high leverage’ practices that can be readily learned by teachers and reproduced at scale. that’s an interesting point that can be investigated in future studies. i, however, have a different perspective. i think that both pre-service and in-service education has to be intellectually demanding, because what we asking teachers to do in the classroom is in fact complex and challenging, and it does require a lot of training (and re-training) to transition to the type of classroom discourse that truly supports more ambitious goals of education. if my position is correct (and, again, we would need to test all these assumptions), it would signal the need for a major revision of teacher preparation, with argumentation and discourse studies taking a more central role in pre-service and in-service education. adam lefstein: why is changing practice so difficult? i want to touch here on four reasons. first, teaching practice is in and of itself difficult and complex work (see for example, labaree, 2000). teachers need to negotiate conflicting goals and agendas, both their own and those of their students. they need to manage multiple voices and bodies. this creates enormous complexity and uncertainty, which they must cope with at a brisk pace. keeping all this together – for some 20 hrs a week – is extremely difficult, even in so-called traditional instruction. dialogic teaching amplifies the uncertainty and complexity, in part because it gives greater weight to student agency and ideas, and requires greater teacher flexibility and knowledge. at the same time dialogic teaching robs teachers of many of their existing tools to cope with teaching's difficulties. so, dialogic teaching is difficult, and educational systems are not well-designed to help teachers cope with these difficulties. second, classroom teaching and learning is a complex, interdependent system that comprises talk, topic, activity, assessment, physical organization, pupils, time, goals, curriculum, instructional tools, teacher beliefs and more. each component influences the others. talk is shaped by activity, by epistemological stances, by content, by assessment, and more. so, if we want to change talk, we have to attend to all the other aspects of the system, many of which are institutionally entrenched. for an example of institutionally entrenched forces, consider how pressures to succeed on standardized examinations incentivize students and teachers to not to "waste" time on dialogue. now, given this claim that teaching and learning is a complex, interdependent system, i would question the premise of the question that teacher professional controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s14 development – at least in the ways it's normally understood – could be sufficient to promote dialogue at scale. teacher professional development is only one change lever, and not a particularly effective one at that. we need a more systemic approach. third, system capacity the move from changing practice in a handful of schools to changing practice across dozens or even hundreds of schools cannot be taken for granted. it requires infrastructure and expertise that are typically lacking in educational systems, and i should add in academic research groups. we in the dialogic education community have barely begun to think about how our systems work, let alone how to change them to support dialogic practice on a wide scale. finally, our own models of dialogic pedagogy. if our models are not gaining traction, perhaps we need to do some soul-searching about the models themselves. if they're not well-suited for existing conditions or create intolerable levels of uncertainty and complexity for teachers, then we also need to think about how to adapt our thinking about dialogic pedagogy to the reality to which we would like them applied. christine howe: well, it’s great to come fourth because many of the points i was going to raise have been raised already. i agree with alina that the evidence isn’t anything like as extensive as maybe our provocation suggests, and i agree with all the factors that adam has identified. the difficulties teachers experience in mastering the practices and the lack of support from the wider contacts and so on are all extremely important. but that gives me enough space to be a little bit more provocative and to suggest that one other factor may be that the message we as researchers give to teachers isn’t always as clear as it might be. it may even be muddled in certain respects. to begin with, if we go back to the first of our provocations, which drew attention to a whole range of different ideas about dialogic pedagogy and learning, maybe teachers are hearing a mixture of ideas coming from different theoretical traditions and this is confusing (relevant studies are summarized in howe & abedin, 2013). i certainly know of work that reports teachers talking about their difficulties with piecing together the messages they get from researchers who adopt a scaffolding perspective and the messages they get from researchers who come from a more interactive, egalitarian tradition. even worse, to the extent that the different ideas about dialogic pedagogy and learning are contradictory (and some may be), they can’t all be correct, so perhaps some teachers have negative experiences when they try to implement, in other words experience no positive impact on students. in addition, i think that quite often we try to do too much, too quickly. dialogic pedagogy, no matter what form it takes, comprises a very wide range of different components, and it’s tempting to address them all simultaneously. maybe this is asking teachers to do too much. we might be more successful if we took a few steps at a time, bringing a small number of ‘certs’ into classroom practice and gradually building on them. the outcome might not initially be optimal but at least there should be some durable, positive consequences. references gregory, m. (2007). normative dialogue types in philosophy for children. gifted education international, 22, 160-171. howe, c., & abedin, m. (2013). classroom dialogue: a systematic review across four decades of research. cambridge journal of education, 43, 325-356. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s15 howe, c., hennessy, s., mercer, n., vrikki, m., & wheatley, l. (2019). teacher-student dialogue during classroom teaching: does it really impact upon student outcomes? journal of the learning sciences, 1-51. howe, c., & zachariou, a. (2019). small-group collaboration and individual knowledge acquisition: the processes of growth during adolescence and early adulthood. learning and instruction, 60, 263274. labaree, d. f. (2000). on the nature of teaching and teacher education difficult practices that look easy. journal of teacher education, 51(3), 228-233. lefstein, a. (2010). more helpful as problem than solution: some implications of situating dialogue in classrooms. in k. littleton & c. howe (eds.), educational dialogues: understanding and promoting productive interaction (pp. 170-191). abingdon, oxon: routledge. lefstein, a., & snell, j. (2014). better than best practice: developing teaching and learning through dialogue. abingdon, oxon: routledge. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). radical proposal for educational pluralism and the state’s educational neutrality policy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2016.170 matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2018). teaching as dialogic conceptual art. knowledge cultures, 6(2), 9-27. doi:10.22381/kc6220182 matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & curtis, k. (2019). dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 7, e20-e62. doi:10.5195/dpj.2019.272 matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators. palgrave macmillan. mcdermott, r. p., & tylbor, h. (1983). on the necessity of collusion in conversation. text, 3(3), 277-297. nystrand, m., gamoran, a., kachur, r., & prendergast, c. (1997). opening dialogue: understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the english classroom. new york: teachers college press. o’connor, c., & snow, c. e. (2018). classroom discourse: what do we need to know for research and for practice? in m. schober, a. britt, & d. rapp (eds.), the routledge handbook of discourse processes (2nd ed., pp. 315-342). new york: routledge. o'connor, m. c., & michaels, s. (1993). aligning academic task and participation status through revoicing: analysis of a classroom discourse strategy. anthropology & education quarterly, 24(4), 318-335. prøysen, a. (1961). the goat that learned to count. st. louis, mo: webster rampton, b. (2006). language in late modernity: interaction in an urban school. cambridge: cambridge university press. snell, j. (2013). dialect, interaction and class positioning at school: from deficit to difference to repertoire. language and education, 27(2), 110-128. snell, j., & lefstein, a. (2018). “low ability,” participation, and identity in dialogic pedagogy. american educational research journal, 55(1), 40-78. controversies and consensus in research on dialogic teaching and learning christa asterhan, christine howe, adam lefstein, eugene matusov, alina reznitskaya dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.312 | vol. 8 (2020) s16 walton, d. (1998). the new dialectic: conversational contexts of argument. toronto, ca: university of toronto press. williams (ed.). (1970). language and poverty: perspectives on a theme. chicago: markham publishing company. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word smith, addressing bullying and interpersonal conflict, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a101 bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith kean university, usa abstract through discussions in class meetings of “concrete situations” experienced by students in their lived experience in and out of the classroom, educators have been encouraged to guide students to understand how bullying applies to their lives, and to learn the degree to which bullying is present or absent in their relationships with their peers (olweus, 1993). in observations of and interviews about the class meetings at a private, progressive u.s. middle school, student and teacher discourses in response to students’ interpersonal dynamics are found to exist within separate, parallel universes. the teachers’ discourse universe presumes that the lived experience of students can be understood through and guided by abstract, kantian-like moral universal imperatives – specifically, the imperative to “feel good” and the imperative not to bully. these imperatives supplant dialogue on the events of students’ experiences toward a focus on who the students are becoming rather than who they are now. this discourse of “half-being” maps the students’ experiences upon what is known, predictable, universal, unsurprising and imagined, and assumes that students are not fully responsible for their own or each other’s well-being. by contrast, the students’ discourse on their interpersonal dynamics is characterized by bakhtin’s (1993) notion of “being-as-event” discourse, which is highly contextualized, unpredictable, and focuses upon everyone’s responsibility to ongoing dramatic and ontologically charged events (either immediate or recursive in nature). the students’ discursive universe is conducive to dialogue, whereas the teachers’ discursive universe supplants the students’ messy, unpredictable and dialogically responsible discourse, thus arresting the possibility for teachers and peers to provide meaningful and authoritative guidance to dialogic events. the reasons for teachers’ attraction to kantian-like abstract moral universals as well as the consequences of the supplanting of students’ event-filled discourse with the discourse of bullying are discussed. mark philip smith, ph.d. is a full-time lecturer in the school of english studies at kean university, currently working in the field of english as a second language. his interests include critical, dialogic authorial approaches to learning, including academic language learning and social studies education. he is particularly interested in addressing issues of interpersonal dynamics and bullying in k12 contexts from a bakhtinian dialogic event perspective. he has also explored issues of academic integrity in university settings from a similar perspective. mark is also interested in teachers’ valuation of dialogue in their classrooms, both as an espoused value and a value “in-action” (cf. argyris & schön, 1974). he has explored what arrests and what affords pedagogical authorial dialogue in classroom settings. he is notably interested in the possibilities for authorial learning agency within informal “free-choice learning environments” (falk & dierking, 2000; 2002), and has had experience working within afterschool-based practicum settings for undergraduate teacher education in cultural diversity. ��� issn: 2325-3290 (online) bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a102 introduction “we will not bully other students; we will try to help students who are bullied; we will make a point to include students who are easily left out.” such are the classroom rules discussed in the context of class meetings in the olweus anti-bullying program, a program which has been undertaken in schools all over the world (limber, nation, tracy, melton, & flerx, 2004, p. 62; olweus, 1993, p. 82). in this program, knowing about bullying and its consequences, defining what “bullying” is, and learning how to reduce the prevalence of bullying in the school are considered to be endpoints of these class meetings, with “concrete situations” experienced by students helping to uncover the presence or absence of bullying in the students’ lives (olweus, 1993). the goal of this paper is to problematize the discourse of anti-bullying and its related techniques to explore what is left unaddressed by it. “anti-bullying” is seen here as a modernist, moral universal educational “project” (cf. sartre, 1963) for intervening in children’s interpersonal conflicts. in kantianinspired moral education, ideas such as “one should not bully” are unquestionable principles achieved through following decontextualized universal moral principles which are not presumed to be readily found within children’s lives without “determined and consistent” adult intervention (see olweus, 1993, p. 71). the goal of anti-bullying campaigns, akin to that of a kantian vision of education, is to supplant uninformed and “imperfect” desires with informed, commonly-held, rational moral reasoning: “rather than simply choosing to satisfy our own desires, we should cultivate our capacity to set ends and choose between them, and respect our capacity as rational value-conferring beings” (klas & suprenant, 2012, p. xxii). in turn, students are expected to become better people in the future than they are now or would otherwise become. in kantian-inspired educational discourse, the engagement and reflection in class discussions on policies and rules with standards such as “one should not bully” is itself a virtuous and praiseworthy duty (surprenant, 2012). as løvlie has stated, initially quoting kant’s toward perpetual peace on the value of rational ideas: [kant states:] ‘human virtue is always imperfect. for this reason, we must have a standard, in order to see how far this imperfection falls short of the highest degree of virtue’ (ak: 28:994) … ideas are not figments of the brain, then, but inherent parts of a common moral and political household. in addition to ideas as standards of judgment they can be treated as ideals to be sought for in the future. at the very end of toward perpetual peace we find the idea of peace [or anti-bullying – mps] as “regulative” in the sense of a projected future to be approached in time. kant thinks that the hope for universal peace [or anti-bullying – mps] can actually serve as a motivation to bring it about (ak: 8:386). in that sense ideas have force and are brought into play by our ability to imagine and project our dreams onto an impossible future situation (løvlie, 2012, pp. 118-119) the endpoint of the anti-bullying educational project is to impose a system of decontextualized, self-contained, universal rationality upon students, to presume that they will thus become more rational beings. the rational, modernist view of education underlying bullying “derives from the conviction that if man [sic] is not a wholly rational animal, he ought to be; and since he ought to be motivated solely by rational considerations, we might as well proceed as if he were” (bettelheim, 1960, p. 69). the emphasis in anti-bullying on a rational, kantian ideal is noted in the following conclusion from a study of adolescent girl friendship networks: bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a103 conflicts among girls need to be considered as possible acts of bullying rather than petty squabbles. girls need to be aware that this may be the case and to have a repertoire of strategies they can use to address these issues… we need to understand why girls place such importance on their friendship bonds and why this can lead to the jealousy and suspicion leading to conflict (besag, 2006, p. 549). it is notable here how girls’ “friendship bonds,” “conflicts” or “petty squabbles,” “jealousy,” and “suspicion” – the substance of many girls’ experiences with their peers – become the means to operationalize “bullying.” what is notable in this discourse is an emphasis on the ought-to or the ideal rather than the realities of lived experience, the imperative to “imagine and project our dreams onto an impossible future situation” (løvlie, 2012, p. 119). this oughtness discourse is well articulated by an unidentified antibullying researcher who stated in an interview: “‘we have to think, “what is a good man or a good person? that’s where we start. “what should a person be?” … i think you have to make some kind of dogmatic statement about what a person ought to be”’ (dixon, 2011, p. 186). similarly, olweus raises the work of addressing bullying to the level of a “fundamental democratic principle” expected to be agreed upon by teachers and students as important to uphold (olweus, 1993, p. 48). however, some of these idealistic oughts seem impossible to achieve and may also be undesirable for many children. for example, in the case of the push to promote the rule “you can’t say you can’t play” among the kindergarten “play bosses” in the us preschool educator vivian paley’s (1992) classroom, the “play bosses” argued that the effort to include everyone (especially the excluded children) in their friendship networks did not “feel good” and made them “sad” (matusov & smith, 2009a, pp. 264-265). despite this, paley imposed an inclusion rule on the children, noting that once she discussed it with her kindergarten students and some older elementary students in the school, she was satisfied in the unilateral certainty of her resolve: sarah [paley’s teacher aide – mps] and i can’t believe that the transition to the new rule is so straightforward and easy. ‘you can't say you can’t play’ has been in place for a week and there are only minor mishaps, quickly resolved. it is indeed a ladder out of the trap we’ve been in. exclusion is still practiced, of course, but when it is someone will say ‘you forgot the rule,’ or a teacher will be brought over to say it. what joy to be rid of the burden of indecision” (paley, 1992, p. 93). paley’s idealistic hope that social inclusion will be practiced among her students appears to guide her decisions, as well as a deep-seated belief of what ought to be rather than what is. this may well be the only explanation for how she could claim success while at the same time reporting that her children continue to socially exclude each other. note below a similar degree of idealistic oughtness, as noted in the bolded text below, in a bullying researcher’s arguments for ensuring the success of anti-bullying efforts: …reducing the frequency of all aggressive interactions would likely reduce the frequency of bullying interactions at the extreme of the continuum. alternatively, pulling more children into the friendship networks of the classroom would increase the likelihood that aggressive peer interactions, when they occur, will be among friends and so easier to resolve. it might be possible to diminish the frequency with which aggressive interactions escalate into bullying by increasing the successful resolution of peer conflicts before these escalate. finally, it might be possible to discourage intimidation by equalizing the distribution of power in a classroom or providing the classroom’s students with a protective sense of confidence. thus, the continuum bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a104 suggests that there might be multiple alternative pathways towards controlling bullying within a classroom (doll, song, & siemers, 2004, p. 164). what is notable here are idealistic visions of who a child should be rather than who they are now. it is questionable to what degree any of these goals are achievable outside of a totalitarian vision of education. by totalitarian, i mean the excessive presence of discourse characterized by tertium non datur (bakhtin, 1999), by which i mean the idea that all particularities of existence can be understood as the negation or affirmation of a particular truth: the student is either “bullying” or “not bullying.” modernist, moral universal discourse assumes it has a perfect answer to resolve social conflict, and it employs the technical concept of bullying to attempt to realize a fantastic vision of social relations among the students. but how realistic (or even desirable) is it for students to be free from discomfort, aggression and even exclusivity in friendships? anti-bullying education is also concerned with lofty goals and ambitions for the betterment of children’s peer relations. such goals can include “for children to feel safe and valued at school, and to have friends,” a goal which “does not simply equate to the absence of bullying behaviours,” but rather implies “a qualitatively different pattern of relating to that witnessed during bullying” (dixon, 2011, p. 187). yet another ideal expressed in anti-bullying initiatives is to take advantage of the “ideal time” in elementary school “to instill anti-violence values and peaceful conflict strategies within all students” (horne, orpinas, newman-carlson, & bartolomucci, 2004, p. 300). such goals hold questionable applicability to children’s social interactions, which are frequently characterized by exclusivity. the achievement of such ideals may require unilateral enforcement to be achieved over objections and concerns from the children who are targeted by them. decontextualized moral universals may thus regularly lead to projects to influence and control the lives of students which fail to fully consider the power and control which underlie their techniques (bettelheim, 1960). much anti-bullying research appears to unproblematically assume that “the teacher is the natural leader of the group” (olweus, 1993, p. 88), who can and should continually surveil “risk areas,” such as certain areas of the playground (olweus, 1993, p. 73). some anti-bullying researchers (cf. dixon, 2011; rodkin, 2004; schott and søndergaard, 2014b) have indeed noted that the field has been dominated by a behavioral orientation which has given too much emphasis to bullying as a conscious, intentional abuse of power rather than a sometimes unconscious by-product of group dynamics (cf. lewin, 1943). they have noted that olweus clearly calls for the need for two “units of analysis” in the study of bullying: the unit of analysis of the group and of the individual (olweus, 1993). however, either an individual or group-focused unit of analysis can still be an effort at social engineering which can ignore the influence of unilaterally imposed classroom management techniques themselves in the development of aggressive peer climates (cf. lewin, lippit & white, 1939). the prevalence of monologically imposed instructional demands may also play a role in peer aggression. for example, “erratic and inconsistent marking of students’ work” has been argued to “contribute to a climate that makes [bullying] more likely to occur” (galloway & roland, 2004, p. 38). heightened degrees of horizontal peer aggression could also be a response to a “crisis” or weakness in vertical teacher authority to uphold arbitrary demands (graebner, 1990; sidorkin, 2002). there is indeed a provocative literature on peer aggression from the 1930s, which noted a decrease in horizontal peer aggression and scapegoating among boys as a result of a change in the dynamics of authoritarian-run informal afterschool programs toward greater democratic decision-making (lewin et al., 1939). to address concerns with the imposition of unilateral power onto the students in anti-bullying programs, researchers and educators have attempted to turn more power over to the peer group to address social conflict in the classroom setting. as a result, some anti-bullying educators advocate for student-led bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a105 class meetings during which discussions of bullying are expected to become a “natural and important topic” (olweus, 1993, p. 89) which will emerge in the meeting and become authoritative for the students. researchers have also recommended utilizing peer support programs and peer mediator programs to reduce instances of bullying (rigby, smith, & pepler, 2004) since students are argued to be more direct participants in the peer culture and are more intimately familiar with the peer environment than the teachers (pepler, craig, o'connell, atlas, & charach, 2004, p. 137). however, concern has been raised among some educators that insufficient vertical adult authority is present in peer mediation programs (rigby et al., 2004). furthermore, utilizing peers has been found to result in increased victimization and some students who experience bullying have not preferred such approaches (mishna, 2012). what is notable here is that the alternatives to addressing bullying are portrayed as a “pendulum swing” between vertical adult-led control (surveillance, imposition of rules) or horizontal child-led control (peer mediation) (rogoff, matusov, & white, 1996). collaborative and community of learners approaches, which would be more conducive to generating teacher-student and student-student dialogue, are not readily considered, most likely because they are not as familiar to students or teachers (rogoff, turkanis, & bartlett, 2001). another critique that can been levied against anti-bullying efforts, as in other modernist projects of moral education, is that they tend to prioritize rationality over emotionality for well-being (cf. bettelheim, 1960). as will be discussed further in this paper, this prioritization appears to be due to a desire to sanitize the lived reality of students in order to promote safety and management of risk. bullying discourse may sanitize students’ lived reality by reframing the problems of children’s peer relations away from more taboo topics that may generate controversy, concern, or emotional discomfort among students, teachers, parents, and/or the public to discussions focused on the rational definition of bullying itself. some bullying researchers have indeed raised concerns that sensitively addressing issues of peer relations in school may sometimes require exploring more thorny and taboo issues with students, such as stigmatization (dixon, 2011), “forms of abuse such as sexual harassment, dating aggression, workplace harassment, and marital, child, and elder abuse” (mishna, 2012, p. 24), class inequalities (due et al., 2009), teacher bullying or victimization of low-achieving, or low-motivated students (delfabbro et al., 2006), the anxiety associated with social exclusion (schott & søndergaard, 2014b), or politically-charged bullying against nonmainstream groups (barchay, 2018). it has also been noted that bullying programs fail to directly address feelings of shame, given the fact that expressing this emotion in public (even with therapists) is taboo, as it is associated with weakness, childishness, and social exclusion (best, 2016). in turn, children and adults tend to act out inappropriately rather than face their shameful feelings. this has led to some scholars arguing that what is called bullying could be best thought of as a form of “weaponized shame” (best, 2016, p. 7). i argue here that anti-bullying initiatives reframe the complexity of student discourse around a single universal topic, bullying, instead of addressing such ontologically charged “hot topics” of concern within the interpersonal relations of children, teenagers, and young adults. since the concept supposedly has universal application and relevance, anti-bullying discourse can engender discussions on interpersonal issues that do not address the specifics of lived events in children’s lives, thus prioritizing lessons that stay “on script” and do not delve into unexpected issues for which teachers may be unprepared (kennedy, 2005). through anti-bullying discourse, as will be noted from the results of this study, teachers can also prioritize safety and comfort over unpredictable (and sometimes uncomfortable) investigations of the lived experience of students. after presenting my analysis of the anti-bullying efforts at an innovative middle school, i will argue against the necessity for general, abstract moral universals – and universal epistemic notions of the truth in general (cf. flyvbjerg, 2001) – in order for students to “learn” how to act morally in society and with each bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a106 other. from the bakhtinian perspective developed in my analysis here, the notion that a child’s lived experience can be mapped upon a set of predictable, known universal trajectories is highly problematic in that it does not fully recognize the unfinalizability of the concrete other and the dialogic nature of our lived relations with each other. application of epistemic thinking to social relations – which “concerns universals and the production of knowledge which [are] invariable in time and space, and which [are] achieved with the aid of analytical rationality” (flyvbjerg, 2001, pp. 55-56) – could in fact lead to an over-procedural and totalitarian utopianism, concerns raised by those who have tried to apply habermas’ ideas to social problems (flyvbjerg, 2001). authoritative moral universal discourse like anti-bullying also appears to block the testing of important ethical issues within internally persuasive discourse and students’ (and teachers’) emergent and ever-changing responsibility to others within dialogue (morson, 2004). my analysis of student discourse within the class meetings of a progressive, private middle school in the united states below presents an alternative approach developed from bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic event which does not presume the need for universal moral discourse to address interpersonal conflict. in the conclusion of this study, i will return to my concern with the validity of moral universal discourse for sensitively and meaningfully addressing human relations. purpose of this study this research focuses upon the parallel discourse universes of teachers and students in response to interpersonal events in a school setting. the patterns in discourse were serendipitously discovered from qualitative analysis of observations of class meetings at a small, progressive, private elementary and middle school i call here the creative learning center (clc). clc is located in a suburban college town in a midatlantic u.s. state. the class meetings were initially analyzed for the purpose of a broader study on pedagogical dialogue; since the focus was on pedagogical rather than informal dialogue, i observed the formal curricular spheres of the school day, rather than informal events such as recess and lunch (smith, 2011). the data collected for this study included both interviews and observations during the 2006-2007 school year within two multiage classrooms at the school, grade 5/6 (called “group 3” at the school) and grade 7/8 (“group 4”). i was encouraged by the teachers in an initial interview in september 2006 to observe the school’s “choices” life-skills classes, among other classes, since i would be able to observe the role of dialogue in the school as they saw it. the choices class was held weekly and was designed for students to give advice to each other about interpersonal issues as well as general life concerns, including issues in their lived experience relating to friendship issues, family issues, sexuality or puberty. similar to what is recommended by olweus (1993), the teachers utilized the student-led class meetings as a forum upon which to “intervene… in a determined and consistent way” to hold “discussions upon bullying” with the students (olweus, 1993, pp. 71, 88). in the analysis of the class meetings, the teachers’ discourse is characterized by kantian-like abstract moral universals, while the students’ parallel discourse is characterized by what i term “ontological dialogic event discourse.” unlike bullying discourse, this latter discourse takes seriously the lived experience of students and trusts that through dialogue participants can take responsibility for their own and each other’s actions, making it possible for everyone to transcend troublesome (and sometimes highly recursive) ontological circumstances they have experienced with one another. the notion of ontology i refer to here emerged within existentialism in the 19th century (heidegger & stambaugh, 1996) and differs from a metaphysical approach to ontology primarily concerned with the origins of being and of the universe (“ontology,” 1989). by ontological dialogue, i mean that our responsible deeds and the relations in the world emerging from our participation in never-ending dialogue define our existence and the world we create with bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a107 others (matusov, 2009); through such dialogue, participants can transform what is given in the world through their efforts or deeds in concrete, situated action (sartre, 1963). through my analysis of the choices class meetings, i note how the teachers’ modernist, kantian-like discourse existed within a “parallel discursive universe” from the students’ dialogic event-focused discourse on their interpersonal conflicts, and supplanted and sanitized the students’ messy, unpredictable and dialogically responsible discourse focused upon “events of being” (bakhtin, 1999). a major purpose of this comparison is to explore the value and the authoritativeness of concepts emerging within the students’ ontological event discourse and the teachers’ abstract moral universal discourse for both the students and the teachers. setting for the data the clc is a small, private elementary and middle school with 90 students located in a predominantly middle class, suburban area located in a mid-atlantic u.s. state. the name of the school, its location, and the names of all participants in the study are pseudonyms. there are approximately 20-25 students in each class in the school, which the school calls “groups.” each group is multi-aged, comprised of two grades; there are 2 teachers in each group, one of whom usually teaches math and science, the other writing and reading. within each group, some lessons are broken into individual grade groups – notably in math, science, writing and reading. however, class meetings and social science are regularly whole group lessons (involving two grades and two teachers). in this study, i focus on the “group 3” (grade 5/6) and “group 4” (grade 7/8) classes. in the 2006-2007 school year, there were 23 students in group 3 (15 boys and 8 girls) and 21 students in group 4 (11 girls and 10 boys). one female student in group 3 had to be omitted from the data because her parents refused permission for the study. demographics of the school the ethnic composition of the school reflects the predominantly caucasian population in the immediate area; the suburban city in which the school is located is 87.3% caucasian, according to 2000 u.s. census data (http://quickfacts.census.gov, accessed 23 october 2010). the tuition of the school in the 2006-2007 school year was about $7,500 per year. this places the school’s tuition at about the nationwide average at the time for elementary-level private school tuition (national center for education statistics, 2010). compared to its nonsectarian school peers (with an average tuition of $15,945 in 20072008), clc’s tuition is considerably lower than average. the school keeps down tuition by having students do “jobs” for the last 15 minutes of the day such as putting away books or sweeping the entryway. parents also perform jobs for the school or can opt out of these jobs by paying an additional fee. the history of the school the school was founded in 1971 as a parent co-operative, and like many schools at the time, the curriculum was heavily influenced by ideas to have students to explore their own interests rather than be controlled solely by the teacher (dennison, 1970; holt, 1964, 1970, 1972). while it quickly established itself as a more conventional school, it holds many practices in common with progressive schools. indeed, the desire of the school to be categorized as “a progressive school” was confirmed by a more recent visit to the school by eugene matusov with russian educator alexander lobok (matusov, personal communication, october, 2018). at clc, there is no grading of students’ work, but rather quarterly narrative-based written evaluations made of the students’ performance from the teachers’ point of view. any homework that is assigned is designed to be, in the words of one teacher who was interviewed for prior research, “specifically targeted and meaningful,” or as a former student of the school described it, “minimal” but “constructive and helpful.” the school environment is also more informal than most conventional schools. for example, students refer to their teachers by their first names. graduates of the school, when going to more conventional high schools in the area, find themselves to be different from peers in that they have developed bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a108 a love for learning (matusov, depalma, & smith, 2010). the school has also specialized in educating students with mild autistic spectrum disorders, notably asperger’s syndrome (see smith, 2011 for more information). the teachers the four teachers observed and interviewed for the bigger study on pedagogical dialogue upon which this study is based were the group 3 teachers melinda and steve, and the group 4 teachers karen and ralph. melinda regularly teaches math, science, reading and spelling. during the summers, she works as an instructor for a teacher development organization which provides mathematics education training workshops for in-service teachers. ralph, melinda’s husband, never had formal training in teacher education, and graduated from a local university with degrees in aerospace engineering and anthropology. he joined clc’s teaching ranks in its first year, and is particularly passionate about science. he also regularly leads group 3 and group 4 students in combined history lessons. steve and karen are siblings, and both specialize in teaching writing. karen was trained as a social worker, and went back to college to obtain a degree in elementary education. she taught at clc from 1991-1997 and returned in 2006. besides teaching writing, karen also regularly teaches reading classes. steve started teaching at the school in 1998. he learned of the school from his sister, and started working at the school in its child care program. steve is a camp counselor during the summers, an avid off-road bicyclist, and a writer. in his writing classes, he shares many stories with his students about the outdoor adventures of himself and his campers. steve also teaches social science and politics lessons. data collection throughout the 2006-2007 school year, approximately 20-30 interviews were conducted with teachers, 15 interviews with students, 30 observations of group 3 lessons, and 20 observations of group 4 lessons. most interviews were conducted with teachers during the school day, and were not formally arranged. in seven instances with students, i pulled groups of students out of the classroom to conduct interviews about my observations. most other interviews with the students were very short, and were conducted in between lessons, just before lunch, or at the end of the school day. lessons were videotaped with one video camera. i also carried a pocket-sized digital audio recorder to record teachers’ and students’ comments during the lessons and to conduct pre-arranged and impromptu interviews with students and teachers. when observations attracted my attention, i conducted post-observational interviews with students and teachers. i showed the transcripts of the lessons to the students and teachers and asked for their comments. i was particularly interested in events of “internally persuasive discourse” within the lessons at the school (bakhtin, 1999). i operationalized ipd as a search for and testing of “the boundaries of personally-vested truths” within pedagogical dialogue, in which everything becomes “dialogically tested and forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319), including everyone’s responsibility to their own and one another’s ideas and values (bakhtin, 1999). students and teachers were interviewed separately because i came to suspect that the students would not frankly discuss the events in the transcripts with the teachers present, and vice-versa. students more frankly and openly discussed the events of their lives when they were aware that no teachers could hear them, and when they were discussing issues of ontological significance with their peers. teachers frequently discussed concerns with specific students in a low voice, as they were apparently concerned about the students hearing their evaluations. in interviews with the teachers, i asked them to describe what they liked and did not like in the particular lesson, the typical nature of what was observed, what they would like to improve in the lesson, and why they made certain decisions in the lessons. students were asked to bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a109 describe what they learned in the particular lesson, what they thought of the lesson in general (whether they liked or disliked it), what they thought of the school in general, and what suggestions they would make for the teachers. because the bigger study focused on pedagogical dialogue and authority, i also asked specific questions to the teachers and the students about the presence or absence of dialogue in lessons. i was also interested particularly in comments that the students made about the teachers’ demands, what they thought of these demands, and why they followed them. when formally interviewing participants, i presented transcripts of class observations related to a topic of interest that emerged within the data. when conducting more formalized student interviews, in three instances, i invited specific students for an interview during the school day because there was an event of interest that i wished to discuss with them. the students were selected because, from the transcript, i sensed that these particular students were the most involved in the issue or the lesson. however, friends of these students would also regularly request to come along, which i encouraged. except in one instance, this practice led to an unexpected intimacy in the interviews, which also revealed differences in perspective across different peer groups in the school. these relational dynamics between the students became especially important for analysis of the choices life skills class. the students ended up talking about the lessons, the teachers, and their peers in more or less the same way that they would discuss the issues among themselves, with one notable exception: the students were, at times, cautious to reveal the names and identities of students with whom they were having difficulties. this appeared to be a consequence of the practice during school lessons to be anonymous when referring to interpersonal issues. context: the choices life skills class (class meetings) at clc in the choices class at clc, students are encouraged to give advice to each other about interpersonal issues raised mostly by their peers (the problems occur both in and out of school), as well as general life concerns, including issues relating to sexuality or puberty. as with many lessons in the school, particularly social studies and reading lessons, the students sit on the carpet, or on chairs or couches in the classroom. unlike most lessons in the school, however, the choices class is officially student-led. in the choices class, students and teachers usually sit in a semicircle; the student moderator of the class sits at the apex of the semicircle. this student moderator leads the choices lesson; his or her tasks include taking out and reading pre-written questions or comments out of the “choices box,” and then calling on students who raise their hands to respond to the question or comment. figure 1: group 3 choices class (november 10, 2006): overview of setting and participants bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a110 figure 1 shows a picture of a group 3 (grade 5/6) choices lesson. the student moderator is sitting in a chair in front of the whiteboard (see the central arrow). some students can be seen raising their hands to be called on by the moderator. one of the teachers, melinda, is visible in front of the window on the left side (arrow on the left of the page). the other teacher, steve, is sitting on the couch, out of the circle and out of the frame of the picture (see the arrow on the right side by the window). during the november 10, 2006 choices class, the majority of the questions in the choices box were from the students themselves. students could have placed these questions in the box at any time, although the group 3 students had been asked by the teachers to write two questions at the beginning of the year so that there would always be questions for students to discuss in the choices class. as the teachers noted in interviews, pre-written questions allow for the identities of the people who wrote the questions as well as the identity of anyone who is being referred to by the question to be hidden from public scrutiny. the teachers guide the students to write questions related to their peers in an ambiguous way; many questions asked in the box were written to anonymize the participants of the referred events with “someone,” “everyone,” and “people” as the subjects of the utterances. the group 3 teachers also reported that they began in the 2006-2007 school year to regularly pre-screen the questions in the choices box prior to the class in order to ensure, as melinda stated, that “inappropriate stuff” which included situations “where the thing [incident] was described… [in which] the person's having problems with someone else in the class” were not revealed. melinda was particularly concerned about a message related to a girl in group 3 class which “was described so that it would be obvious who that person was” [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02]. these issues were sensitive enough that the student’s participation in this study was not granted by her parents. the discussion of the questions is mostly student-to-student, with minimal teacher involvement. the teachers participate mostly by raising their hands and being called on by the moderator, just like a student would be called upon to speak. the teachers also physically position themselves in the classroom to minimize their influence over the dialogue. as noted above, reading/writing teacher steve is participating in the discussion from a corner of the room (which actually made it difficult for the student moderator to even see when his hand was raised). in interviews about the choices class, the teachers discussed the value of giving students the floor to speak to each other: teacher steve: we want them to be hearing from each other, it’s more important that they hear from each other, than it is from us, but it’s also important that they’re hearing from another adult besides their parents, [which is] giving some perspective on some very complex social issues. [interview, steve, 2006-11-27]. the teachers also stated that they sometimes write questions of their own for discussion and sometimes pose questions during the choices discussion for student reflection. the teacher’s questions seem to function to help guide students to discuss certain moral universals such as bullying and gossip. for example, on november 10, 2006, the question “what’s gossip?” had been written by the teachers and the question “what’s bullying?” was asked by the teachers in response to the ongoing student discussion. findings: the students’ dialogic/ontological event universe: the dialogic event between andrew and ben during the november 10, 2006 choices class, after a discussion of two questions that were pulled from the choices box, andrew spontaneously raised his hand and stated that he had to tell the class something that was bothering him. the discussion which followed was unusual in that everyone listening knew undoubtedly that andrew was having a problem: bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a111 andrew: i have something to say. [danny, the student moderator of the choices class, points to andrew] andrew: well, sometimes in [american] football, when i make a mistake, people start yelling at me, and it kind of makes me feel bad… [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] as is evident in the voicing of his concerns, andrew followed the anonymizing norm of the choices class not to reveal the identity of the person or people with whom he was concerned (stating that “people” are “yelling” at him). later on in this class, he noted that these “people” had been telling him, “what were you thinking!? don’t catch a pass if you don’t think you’re able to catch it!” in my judgement, andrew’s utterance to the choices class is an ontologically relevant problem – i.e., a problem which deeply affects/bothers andrew and his local relations – for which andrew demands other students to take responsibility. the tone of his utterance “i have something to say” sounds as if andrew needs urgently to say something to significant others here-and-now. andrew’s relations with others in the class appear, based on my unsystematic observations, to be strained, and the teacher melinda stated that one student even complained to his mother about andrew annoying him at school. furthermore, the teacher steve stressed the amount of effort that the teachers had been making to address andrew’s emotional and relational needs. just under five minutes after andrew’s initial utterance, ben, who is a new student in the school and who appears to be still unfamiliar with the anonymizing norms of the choices class, responds to andrew in a conversational, honest and forthcoming way. his approach violates the anonymizing norm of choices class set by the teachers not to directly address anyone to whom he refers. ben directly and sympathetically demands andrew to take responsibility for his own problem, situating the problem within a familiar chain of ontologically charged and meaningful events in ben, andrew and other students’ daily lives within the school to which he, andrew and others are responsible and interested participants. furthermore, ben addresses andrew’s problem in such a way that he admits that he himself personally has experienced it: ben: andrew, i mean this like in like no offense, but sometimes you yell at other people, and then they start yelling at you, and i know how it feels. like, when you get upset, and it wasn’t and [unclear mps] … and then if you yell at somebody ’cause they did something wrong, and they start yelling back, and it gets kind of like, it doesn’t feel good. ’cause like even though you’re the one that started yelling, sometimes, like they want to yell back. and then, when it happens, when i do it, it makes me upset, and i end up always losing. like, it… [ben starts speaking softly as andrew starts audibly crying] [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] notice in the text above ben’s multiple uses of “you” rather than “people” or “someone,” as expected by the anonymizing norm of the class. in the first two instances of the use of “you,” ben directly addresses andrew. his later use of the term “you” – after uttering “like, when you get upset” – could be taken as either as directly addressed to andrew, or to a more general “we.” it could be interpreted that ben’s direct addressing of “you” blames andrew for the problem. in such a situation, there would be no dialogue possible, since the responsibility for the problem would rest solely on the individual’s transgressions. however, what is notable here is that ben makes an effort to address andrew as one who has equal rights in being with others (bakhtin, 1999).1 there is a sense here that ben desires and wants andrew to respond to the utterance. he addresses andrew from the beginning of the utterance in a friendly, respectful and 1 this does not imply, however, that the relations are symmetrical (bakhtin, 1999). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a112 conversational way, “andrew, i mean this in like no offense…” when ben notices that andrew begins to cry during his utterance (this starts happening about midway through the utterance), he begins to shift his utterance from addressing andrew to addressing himself, ostensibly to empathize with what andrew is experiencing (“and then, when it happens, when i do it, it makes me upset, and i end up always losing”). thus, rather than blaming andrew in an “objectivizing” and “finalizing” way as a yeller or as a wimp (matusov & smith, 2007), it seems best to say that ben respects andrew while exploring andrew’s, and eventually others (including his own) responsibility for the problem. the teacher steve expressed in an interview a few days after this event that he valued ben’s empathetic response: teacher steve: part of what i think ben was doing here was really focusing on his feelings, and you know, kind of, helping to reinforce this idea of empathy among the kids. it’s important to be thinking about how andrew was feeling right now [interview, group 3 teacher steve, 2006-11-27]. ben also analyzes andrew’s responsibility for the problem, analyzing who caused the pain that andrew experienced (this is indicated by my underlining of the presence of ’cause – i.e., because –in the transcript above). first, andrew yells at people. however, this is because someone did something “wrong” to andrew, to which andrew yells at them again. the problem, however, is furthered by the yelling that others make in response to andrew. yelling follows yelling, and andrew, and potentially others, are hurt and frustrated. by the end of the utterance, andrew has his head down, looking down at the floor, sobbing. andrew’s crying appears to be essentially a cathartic emotional response to ben’s sympathetic accusation that it was andrew himself who must take at least partial responsibility for instigating the problems he received; this cathartic response appears to be a consequence of ben having led andrew out of an ontological trap (see the next section). figure 2: group 3 choices class, november, 10 2006: andrew’s cathartic crying in response to ben’s utterance. andrew (underneath the arrow) has his head down, and is sobbing. everyone appears to be directing their gaze at him, apparently expressing concern. while this scene is occurring, another student, george, has the floor, and is providing advice to andrew. the incident between andrew and ben is nicely illustrated by bakhtin’s (1993) notion of the “beingas-event” reality of human dialogic life. events such as those discussed here between andrew and ben are highly contextualized and unpredictable and demand that everyone – the students themselves, their peers and friends, their teachers, their parents and siblings, school administrators, the media, bullying experts, and so on – focus upon their responsibility to them. dialogue leads to engagement with others in a discourse “of ultimate questions and ultimate life decisions” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 74), through which all participants can bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a113 assume responsibility for their own and one another’s ideas and deeds, transforming their messy, situated and particular “unique places” in the world in response to others (bakhtin, 1993, p. 53). ben draws attention to the fact that there is a conflict over responsibility to lived events. while andrew claims that he is being teased on the field, ben reevaluates and revoices this problem as andrew being frustrated and angry when playing football. ben is insisting that andrew cannot have an “alibi in being” (bakhtin, 1993, p. 42), demanding that andrew himself take responsibility for the problem; it is as if ben is saying, “andrew, i mean this like in like no offense, but sometimes you yell at other people, and you can’t hide behind this idea that you are simply being teased. you must accept some responsibility for the problem.” since ben has “surplus of vision” over andrew (bakhtin, holquist, & liapunov, 1990, p. 12), ben’s utterance could be seen as a “dialogic gift” to andrew (see prior work analyzing vivian paley’s classroom in matusov & smith, 2009a, 2009b). in the spirit of problematizing, ben appears to have never intended his utterances to be the last word, but instead hopes that the choices class will help andrew to take responsibility for his deeds. later on, during the discussion of andrew’s problem in the choices class, the teacher steve asks questions which further expand the relational network of responsibility for andrew’s problem: teacher steve: i just have a couple of clarifying questions for andrew. one, is it a particular individual, or it is several people? andrew: it’s like two or three. teacher steve: two or three. is it the same people every time? andrew: not always. but… well, usually it’s like one or two… and then [?] teacher steve: and is this something that happens on a regular basis, or when i’m not out there? andrew: it’s usually when you’re not out there, yeah. [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] while the specific persons responsible are not revealed, what is most interesting here is that the teacher steve’s responsibility for the problem is revealed, in that the problem is worse when he, a teacher, is not outside playing football with the students. this discussion shortly thereafter provokes ben to yet again respond to the problem, further expanding the zone of responsibility for the problem: ben: i have two things, one, andrew, what i said before, i didn’t mean to hurt your feelings or anything. so, i’m sorry… sometimes, sometimes, and i noticed, it’s not just happening when steve’s [the teacher] not out there. ’cause like, yeah, when steve’s not out there. ’cause yesterday when steve was out with us, when i fumbled that kick, d[begins to state a students’ name, but stops himself from doing so], or somebody, came up to me and said, hey ben, that’s ok, just next time don’t go after the ball, don’t go after the ball if you’re not going to be able to catch it! [group 3, choices class, 200611-10] ben refers specifically to steve’s presence or absence on the field, the unnamed student’s remarks to him yesterday, and so on. this utterance addresses specific, ongoing dramatic events in the lives of ben himself and the others in the class, gaining its internal persuasiveness through referring to these events. the addressivity in ben’s utterances can be characterized as being-with others, addressing one’s own and one another’s responsibility for ongoing events. it is notable that ben’s discourse appears to be difficult to articulate without mentioning specific names (notice ben needed to stop himself from revealing the name bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a114 of the student beginning with the letter “d,” apparently to comply with the anonymizing classroom rule). responsibility within ontological dialogic event discourse seems difficult to assert anonymously and may be truncated by the norms of anonymity within the choices class. transcendence of ontological circumstances one of the characteristic aspects of ontological event discourse is that it creates the opportunity for transcendence of one’s ontological circumstances (bakhtin, 1993, 1999). ben has laid bare to andrew and to others that andrew’s anger seems to cause his peers to be frustrated and strike back at him. the recursive nature of such a pattern – “yelling” when making a “mistake” on the field – can confine andrew (and others) in an ontological trap, and ben reveals to andrew a way to get out of this trap. this is the “gift” of an outside perspective which “reveals… ontological conditions of one’s being that provides an opportunity for the addressed person… to deal with his or her ontological confinement… and eventually transcend it” (matusov, 2009, p. 238). this possibility of transcendence of circumstances is evident five months after this choices class in interview with andrew, ben, and other students, where the transcript of the choices class discussion from earlier in the year was presented. andrew responded solely to a general question to talk about “the choices class when you brought up what happened on the football field”: andrew: …it prevented me from yelling at people, and made me understand why people yell at me.... it was what ben said made me realize actually. now everyone thinks i’m a wuss! [interview, group 3 students, 2007-04-06] ben’s “dialogic finalization” thus seems to have touched andrew in much the same way that socrates is noted to have affected the recipient of his ideas like a torpedo fish paralyzes its prey (matusov, 2009; plato & bluck, 1961).2 andrew’s crying during the choices class can be seen as a cathartic response to this provocative “torpedo touch” introduced by ben (matusov, 2009, p. 25). because of ben’s utterance, andrew can no longer innocently express that he is being teased on the football field, without recognizing his own responsibility for the problem. ben’s utterances seem to open up and problematize enquiry for andrew, rather than to close it, as is evidenced by andrew’s reply that ben’s utterance appears to have helped him to “understand why people yell at me.” while andrew seems to continue to struggle relationally with his peers at the end of the school year – notice particularly his concerns of being called a “wuss” – he appears to have been led by ben out of an ontological trap with others. these “imprisoning ontological circumstances” (matusov, 2009, p. 261) were characterized by andrew starting to yell, making others yell back at him and become upset with him, thus furthering the relational tension between andrew and the other students (which, in turn, gave andrew a reason to become angry at and yell at his peers). if ben had been accusatory of andrew, without respecting him as having equal rights, ben’s utterance could have continued to mire andrew (and others) into this ontological trap. through the dialogic event with ben, however, andrew recognizes that these conditions are modifiable through his deeds. a transformation of andrew’s deeds would have repercussions not only for andrew but also for others. such a change, over time, appears to have occurred between andrew and another group 3 student, 2 in the meno dialogue, plato writes, “if the torpedo fish is itself numb and so makes others numb, then i resemble it, but not otherwise, for i myself do not have the answer when i perplex others, but i am more perplexed than anyone when i cause perplexity in others. so now i do not know what virtue is; perhaps you knew before you contacted me, but now you are certainly like one who does not know. nevertheless, i want to examine and seek together with you what it may be” (plato & bluck, 1961, p. 279). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a115 donald. while there is no direct evidence linking the transformation of donald and andrew’s relationship to ben’s utterance, the connection is not out of the question. at the beginning of the school year, melinda mentioned that donald was significantly frustrated and angry with andrew: teacher melinda: …andrew, who’s kind of on the outskirts, it’s easy for the kids, donald's made him a scapegoat a lot this year, and we’ve had to watch that. donald’s just very irritated with andrew all the time; he goes home and complains to his mother... [interview, group 3 teacher melinda, 2007-05-02] melinda commented later that donald had become less and less annoyed with andrew over the course of the year, and that these complaints stopped. it could be because of ben’s dialogic “gift.” what has transpired between andrew and ben has emerged from their messy, situated and particular “unique place” in the world, built and transformed through their deeds with each other (bakhtin, 1993, p. 53). in this sense, the dramatic events described between ben and andrew are unique and unrepeatable. furthermore, any proposed solution offered by ben to the problem takes into account the imperfect world of discursive responsibility; in essence, there is no response in the ontological discursive universe which can sanitize or put an end to the problem. most of the teachers’ discourse on andrew’s problem, however, exists in a parallel discursive universe from that of the students, as will be revealed in the next section. the teachers’ parallel discursive universe in this section, i present through observation and interviews the practice of the teachers’ translation of students’ lived realities into abstract moral universals and the rationale for their practice. at this end of this section, i present the authoritativeness and persuasiveness of moral universal discourse and the consequences that this discourse has in resolving the interpersonal issues at the school. there are two categorical imperatives in the teachers’ discourse: the “feel good community” imperative – which promotes comfort, safety, and civility above all other discourse – and the imperative of bullying. the teachers’ focus on the “feel good community” imperative appears to prepare the grounds for the imperative of bullying, which was a pre-set curricular endpoint for the teachers. underlying both of these discourses is an assumption that the children are “half-beings,” not yet fully responsible for their own or one another’s wellbeing (sidorkin, 2002). the moral imperative to “feel good” seconds after andrew raises his hand to describe the issues he is having on the football field, and before ben first responds to the discourse (resulting in andrew crying in response), the teachers focus students upon imperatives of “feel good” comfort and safety, a discussion which appears to prepare the groundwork for having the students later reflect upon the definition of bullying later in the class: teacher steve: i just have a couple of clarifying questions for andrew. one, is it a particular individual, or it is several people? andrew: it’s like two or three. teacher steve: two or three. is it the same people every time? andrew: not always. but… well, usually it’s like one or two… and then [?] teacher steve: and is this something that happens on a regular basis, or when i’m not out there? andrew: it’s usually when you’re not out there, yeah. bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a116 teacher steve: ok. so that’s, that’s an issue then... um… ’cause we’ve talked about it, i have a real concern that, i mean, the play out there needs to be healthy. it needs to be comfortable for people. just as we wouldn’t want somebody in our classroom… like, imagine, imagine if we were teaching if somebody in class would say to another student after they asked a question, “that’s was a really stupid thing to say!” imagine how that would feel for the student. and, how would that feel? … [kids raising hands] teacher steve: it’s pretty obvious, right? danny [raises hand]: well, they’d feel mad or something [?] teacher steve: they would feel completely shut down, you know, like a turd. [laughter from students] teacher steve: so, i mean, you know, when we say when things really need to be comfortable here in school, we’re not just talking about in the classroom, things need to be comfortable in other situations and in other places, and the football field during the football game is one of those times and places. and i’m sort of concerned… you know because i, uh, melinda and i can, um, be, be sure that that kind of thing wouldn’t happen um, when we’re there. but also, i don’t think people are talking to each other necessarily that way when we’re not there… i’m not hearing people talk in a way that’s a put down to make them feel bad. so, i’m kind of curious to know why that seems to be happening on the football field, and why people feel like that’s ok. ben: andrew, i mean this in like no offense… [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] what is notable here is the teacher steve’s prioritization on comfort and safety which deflects students’ attention from the (sometimes uncomfortable and divisive) realities of their lived experience to a hypothetical, posited reality and a fantasy future (note the use of “imagine” and “would” in the above utterances from steve). the focus on how “it needs to be comfortable” in school intends to posit an alternative reality sanitized from conflict. it seems that steve’s discussion of comfort and safety was intended to be the “last word” in response to andrew’s problem (that is, until the new student ben decided to reply). to indicate the fantastic and unreal nature of this universe of “comfortable” football playing, when i presented a transcript of this discussion at a conference (smith, 2008), two colleagues from the u.s. laughed at this part of the transcript, arguing that the students were being overly protected from the realities of playing football and from life itself. we can see how the teacher steve attempts to search for a consensus for his ideas among the students by focusing on how “obvious” it is that someone would feel bad as a result of what transpired on the football field. steve is thus recruiting students to act with rational intentions focused upon “feel good” comfort. the teacher steve confirmed in an interview that making andrew feel better about himself and ensuring others felt better about andrew was a priority for the choices discussion. according to steve, this prioritization was also ultimately behind the discussion of bullying as well: teacher steve: so, it sounded like we had been on the football topic, and it was really the issue that was being brought up was getting on somebody's case when they made a mistake on the field, and how that feels. so [teacher] melinda tied bullying into that. in other words, if you’re [a student is] getting on somebody’s case and making them feel bad because of their performance, then you know that kind of fits into that idea of bullying, and yes, i think [melinda, the other teacher] did want to bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a117 bring it up because it's something we've been concerned about [interview, steve, 200611-27]. “bullying” is equated here with making someone “feel bad.” the discussion of bullying which will later take place in the choices class is, in essence, triggered by andrew’s crying, and is set in motion by it. while the new student ben saw an opportunity to investigate the responsibility of everyone for the “events” associated with andrew’s problem, other students in the class were arguably more familiar with the norms of the choices class, and responded directly to the teacher steve’s appeal to the “feel good” imperative rather than to ben’s utterance, as is seen in george’s response (figure 2 above visually shows what is happening in the classroom exactly when george is speaking): george: if you have tried telling the person to stop doing that because it’s just a game or something, whatever you want to say, then they don’t listen to you and they keep doing it, then you can just tell them to stop, and if they don’t, then you have every right to go tell a teacher, and that would certainly make you feel better [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] george interestingly connects the need to “feel better” with the “right to go tell a teacher,” implying the teachers’ tendency to enforce the “feel good” imperative discourse. the other students in the class (except apparently ben) seem to be well aware of the imperative discourse and are well socialized in the way the teachers prefer them to respond to students’ relational issues. a deeper concern of the teachers steve and melinda behind the “feel good community” imperative may be for the students to come to a mutual agreement on a more civil way in which to interact toward their peers. in relations characterized by civility, students engage in actions which can be interpreted as “reasonably… respectful, tolerant, or considerate” toward others (cormier & brighouse, 2019, p. 70). civility is thus concerned with the promotion of positive “we” feelings, care for and empathy toward others, placidity in social relations, and mutual understanding and with the diminution of hostility, defensiveness, lack of trust, or psychological distress (cormier & brighouse, 2019; mayo, 2002). however, unlike “being-as-event” discourse, as mayo (2002) argues, the discourse of civility may effectively stifle the voice of students – “mov[ing] to the private sphere anything that impedes smooth social action” (p. 174) – in order to promote a “fragile ‘we’” feeling which is built upon the substance of ontologically meaningful dialogic events. while the power of civility lies in enabling possibilities for relations between students who may ignore/exclude, not trust, or be hostile to each other, it is important to note that it ultimately maintains the distance it initially appears to bridge. civility, in other words, is not the way people build close relations. instead it is a way people can maintain civil and personal distance in order to appear to abrogate the very social and political distance that poses the problem for their relations (mayo, 2002, p. 171). in essence, then, the “feel good” community imperative may serve to promote civility but at the risk of sanitizing the events of being in the students’ lives and distancing students from the events within their peer relations, a topic which i address further in another paper in regard to addressing social exclusion among teenagers (smith, 2019, in preparation). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a118 the discourse of “half-being” to reinforce the “feel good” imperative of comfort, the teachers inserted their voices again in the student-led class just after andrew started crying after ben’s first utterance. in doing this, another important feature of the teachers’ moral universal discourse is revealed, the discourse of “half-being” (sidorkin, 2002): ben: …’cause like even though you’re the one that started yelling, sometimes, like they want to yell back. and then, when it happens, when i do it, it makes me upset, and i end up always losing. like, it… [andrew is crying at this point] [two students make comments at this point; the teacher melinda interrupts a student who states she wishes to make an “off-topic” remark]. teacher melinda: ok, hold on to it a minute. try to get it some place in your mind so you can remember it. i have a question. andrew, how are you feeling right now? andrew: lousy. teacher steve: what are you feeling lousy about? andrew: [inaudible on recording] teacher melinda: i think [the teacher] steve wants to elaborate on that is, why are we, why is this happening, is that what you asked? is it the football field where it’s happening and why would that be? andrew: and also, why it’s always happening when [the teacher] steve’s not around? boy: i have a question, is it people in here? andrew: no. jamal: the reason why it’s happening is because people know they can get away with it. teacher steve: and see, here’s the thing. i mean, what i would want to say to that person, is not whether you can get away with it. but what are you getting away with? you’re making somebody else feel rotten, and what is that doing to you, and your life and the kind of choices you’re making, where you decide that it’s an ok thing to make somebody feel rotten and i can get away with that. it’s not going to matter in the end, it’s going to affect the person saying those things as much as it is the person who is getting them said to. because it’s going to end up hurting their relationships with people if that’s the way they talk to people and deal with people. [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] with this dialogic turn, the teacher steve attempts to deflect the discourse of the class away from ben’s utterance focused on here-and-now responsibility to ongoing events of being and toward the imagined future “choices” the students could make. for the teachers, who the students are becoming (what they may or will experience) matters more than who they are (and what they experience) now. in this sense, the students are “half-beings,” not yet considered to be fully responsible to themselves, one another or others in the world/society by virtue of the fact that they have not yet fully developed as adults (sidorkin, 2002, p. 43). the students thus cannot truly be expected to “take care of each other’s feelings,” as is noted in melinda’s interview response to the event with andrew below: teacher melinda: part of our job is not just to let kids go off, a lot of our job is to help kids take care of each other’s feelings, and they don’t often know how to do that with their peers, especially for someone like andrew, who’s kind of on the outskirts… when you have a peer that’s crying, sometimes people don’t know what to do. they want to avoid it and move on, but our job is to say, “no, you can’t! we’ve got to stay with this person now, we’ve got to stay and see if we can help him sort this out!” what bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a119 are we going to do if it’s [inaudible – one word] that the community make sure one of members is feeling lousy, what can we possibly do?!... [interview, melinda, 2007-0502] in reviewing the transcripts of the choices class, the teacher melinda values how the teachers seized the opportunity to provide a model for students to become more sensitive to each other’s feelings than what they are able to do now. sanitization of risk in students’ peer relations it appears that a major reason for the concerns with “feel good” imperatives in response to problems like andrew’s is that the teachers are avoiding the risks associated with directly discussing the students’ ontologically-loaded events. there is a risk that andrew may be being publicly scrutinized: teacher steve: … this thing with ben and andrew, i don’t remember where things shifted, but if it was getting sort of like, they were talking to each other about the problem in front of the whole group, like ben might have felt comfortable saying something, andrew may or may not feel comfortable, you know, getting um... he might’ve felt frustrated with ben because of his portrayal of the situation. and then that’s uncomfortable with everybody watching you, having this disagreement with somebody in class, so, it’s not bad to have things out in the open sometimes, but both people should be comfortable with it, um... but usually the practice is to deal with that separately. researcher mark: why is it important for them to be comfortable with that? teacher steve: well, imagine if you’re in a group, and you’re having an issue with somebody, and you didn't want to deal with that in out in front of your peers, because you had some things that were maybe embarrassing for you, or just uncomfortable because you’re upset about it, but you don't want everybody watching you. so, for me, it's just an issue of fairness, it’s just an issue of keeping this a safe place emotionally for kids. and if a kid feels like their dirty laundry is going to get dragged out in front of the whole class… [interview, steve, 2006-11-27] thus, concerns with comfort and safety appear to outweigh the benefits of students directly hearing from their peers; the students’ open-ended responses are considered to be “appropriate” as long as the discourse stays at a level of “generality” and “comfort.” the risk and concern, as the teacher melinda stated in an interview, is that no student would “single somebody out” in the public space of “the class” [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02]. similar concerns with public scrutinization of students also led the teachers melinda and steve to go through the choices box “almost… every time” to check for messages which may reveal the identity of the person who is being referred to in the posting. the teacher steve raises a similar concern with the risks of student-to-student discourse which could become too “personal” and “particular,” leading to fears of out-of-control shaming and blaming discourse. the teacher steve argued that andrew “was talking in generalities,” but ben started “making it particular” and a “more personal thing” [interview, steve, 2006-11-27]. the teacher steve appears to prioritize the safety of the moral imperative of “feel good” comfort even if he believes that the discussion between ben and andrew could ultimately have been safe. the assumption steve makes is that ben’s discourse could only lead to shaming and blaming rather than a constructive discussion of interpersonal issues: bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a120 teacher steve: i don’t know, i’m not saying that that conversation couldn't be had in a safe way; maybe ben would just need sort of some gentle reminders to be tactful when he’s talking to andrew. but choices is supposed to be a place where kids could bring things up, and even when you bring up things openly as andrew did, he wasn’t calling anyone out by name, he was talking about like “there’s some people [who have called me names on the football field],” and there’s some safety in doing that for everyone. you know, i imagine if he said, “well danny does this,” and “alex does that,” then we get into “well, no i didn't!” and then you have these kinds of conversations that are, when there's a lot of heat, but there’s not a lot of light, you know [interview, steve, 2006-11-27]. the teacher steve further assumes that choices class will not “work” if students do not feel “comfortable and safe” because children “will never want to bring things up, they won’t want to talk about, or it will all be things that are all distant from them.” he then claims: teacher steve: i don’t think they’re comfortable with their having classmates dissect their behavior that’s already occurred, but they are comfortable with getting suggestions about what they could do in the future [interview, steve, 2006-11-27]. steve assumes that “forward-looking” nature of the teachers’ discourse, with all its emphasis on an imagined future, comfort, and safety is more desirable to students. regardless of the veracity of this claim (which will be tested shortly with the students in an interview), there is little doubt that the “comfortable and safe” discourse is more desirable for the teachers. it sanitizes risk and reduces the uncertainty of delving into students’ lived realities. it may also allow for a civil “niceness” to be promoted, which may be attractive to parents. the teachers’ concerns with risk and discomfort are arguably ontological for them, in that the teachers are held accountable for the safety and welfare of the students in the eyes of the parents. the parents are paying money for their students to attend a private school, and i hypothesize that the parents, or the parents as imagined by the teachers, wish the teachers to provide individualized instruction, create an environment in which their children are excited and motivated about going to school, feel safe, and so on. ultimately, the teachers would want the parents (prospective, current, former, or imaginary) to be attracted to and pleased with the private school, not concerned about the risks with attending it. as i did not interview the parents to confirm this, i am unable to determine if they (or some of them) are in agreement with the teachers regarding these concerns and risks. it is possible that the “parents” to whom the teachers address these concerns might well be a fruit of the teachers’ imagination. the focus on the parents might also be a phenomenon of the way in which we talk about what concerns us through looking “into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 287). the moral imperative of anti-bullying the discourse of “feel good” comfort ultimately became the basis for teachers to focus students upon the abstract moral universal of anti-bullying. just a couple of turns in the discourse from ben’s second contribution to the choices class, in which ben further problematizes andrew’s situation by recognizing the responsibility of an unnamed student to the problem, the teacher melinda abruptly shifts from ben’s contextualized, ontologically eventful discourse toward an abstract, de-ontologized discussion on “bullying.” notice below how the teacher melinda introduces “bullying” with the students by stating, “this is actually a good place to pose a question.” the tone of her utterance sounds as if she means, “this is actually a good bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a121 place to switch the topic of the conversation and to pose a question which i have been wanting to discuss with you for some time now,” especially given the context of her statements later on in the utterance: teacher melinda [group 3 teacher]: this is actually a good place to pose a question, because it has to do with this, i’m going to ask it, and i want you to go into groups to talk about it, just like a minute and a half. what is bullying? how would you define bullying, what does bullying look like? what is it? just form, you know, talk with some people around you. [students form small groups of 2-3 people with each other, and discuss the question with each other] boy [in a perplexed tone]: what’s bully-ing?! teacher melinda: when i ask you to talk with someone, i really do mean that you need to talk about it. ok, i would like you to do that. [students discussing the question in groups for about 30 seconds; i overhear ben’s discussion with his group] ben [talking to his fellow group members]: bullying, is that what we’re talking about?! bullying is like mostly having fun at somebody else’s expense. like having fun with [?] during a [?] and getting someone upset. teacher melinda: ok, if we could just break out of our groups for a second, because i heard a couple of interesting things that went on with that. so go ahead danny [student moderator who then calls on the students to answer the question posed by melinda]. [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] the abrupt and awkward nature of the transition to the discussion of bullying is evident by the fact that the teacher melinda must repeat twice that she really intended for the students to “go into groups” and talk about the question. furthermore, when entering their small groups to respond to the teachers’ question, the students (notably including ben) appear to be confused or to forget what it is that they were expected by the teachers to discuss, apparently because the discussion of bullying is alienated from the life issues and relational problems of the students. nevertheless, it is indeed quite remarkable how students so readily and unconditionally follow teachers’ directions (sidorkin, 2002). from interviews with the teachers, the teachers noted that they chose to discuss bullying with the students in response to andrew’s problem primarily because they had been planning for some time to discuss it with the students, and saw that andrew’s problem appeared to be something that they could “tie bullying into.” as the teacher steve stated in an interview about this class about two weeks after the choices class: teacher steve: so, it sounded like we had been on the football topic, and it was really the issue that was being brought up was getting on somebody's case when they made a mistake on the field, and how that feels. so [the teacher] melinda tied bullying into that. in other words, if you're getting on somebody's case and making them feel bad because of their performance, then you know that kind of fits into that idea of bullying, and yes, i think she did want to bring it up because it's something we've been concerned about [interview, steve, 2006-11-27]. the teacher steve does not question the relevance of the idea of bullying to andrew’s problem. he sees melinda’s instrumental use of ongoing lived events to discuss a pre-set concept of bullying as unproblematic; andrew’s problem was one of many possible “opportunities” to introduce “bullying” to bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a122 address since, as he says just afterward, “kids tend to have a very monolithic view of what bullying is” (cf. olweus, 1993). the problem of bullying is seen as something which exists universally and can be understood regardless of context. steve’s comment here thus makes clear that there is a value for the teachers on moving students away from their discussion of specific, lived events (which can make people “feel bad”), toward an understanding of the abstract, universal, pre-set, emotionally detached concept of bullying. the characteristics of this discourse are evident in this discussion of the difference between emotional and physical bullying: teacher melinda: would you consider it bullying when a person says one nasty thing about someone? at least 2 students: no. susie: it’s when it’s on-going. marla: consecutive. teacher melinda: yeah, so, so, it has to be over a period of time. like it’s constant? so, if i said to steve, “geez steve, you know, you, i can’t stand it when you do such and such!” if i said that to steve once and then it was over, would that be bullying? students: no. teacher melinda: ok, that has to be, it has to happen over and over again. ok? and, you know, it can be verbal or physical, that’s what i’m hearing you say, social. it can be a social-emotional bullying or physical bullying. …right? whack-o. and again, like it wouldn’t be like i punched martin once, but every time i saw martin, i sucker-punched him, especially if nobody was looking, that would be bullying. which is worse physical bullying or emotional, mental, or let’s call it emotional bullying? how’s that? students: they’re like the same. the same. they’re equal. george: unless the physical bullying is really, really bad, emotional bullying is worse. andrew: ’cause it can scar you, can’t it? 2 students: so can physical! [one student laughs] joseph: what i have to say for the difference is that emotional bullying can sometimes be worse, because sometimes if it’s not that much, you can kind of ignore it, physical bullying, it’s pretty much, you can ignore it, but it’s not going to help. student: yeah! susie: i think emotional bullying is worse because … [inaudible] freckles or something, and you do, oh yeah, oh yeah, you know, it’s ok, don’t worry about it … physical bullying can sound really, really bad. and physical, yeah, it can really hurt sometimes, but [inaudible], … andrea: [mostly inaudible] … mostly … want to do something.., a person or something… teacher melinda: is [it] the person who is being picked on [who] doesn’t have friends, or the groups that are doing the bullying? girl student: the person that’s [?] teacher melinda: the bully?! girl student: that’s physical … unknown student: i think that they’re kind of equal, because i think that physically bullying someone can hurt just as much as that other one, yeah, emotional, cause they both hurt really bad, they can really hurt even though it’s not like emotional bullying, isn’t like actually hurting you, it feels pretty much like punching somebody’s stomach … bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a123 jamal: i think emotional bullying is worse ’cause it lasts a lot longer than a punch or two. boy student: i think emotional bullying, depending on what they say, it makes you feel bad about yourself, and like, maybe a bruise or something, unknown student: i think emotional bullying is worse, verbal bullying, if you get hit in the arm or something, it doesn’t hurt as long as if your friends are sort of joking around, and they keep saying that if you do something, you do it really stupidly, um, it sort of hurts because it just, they’re still your friends, but you feel sort of hurt all over, and you feel sort of sad because you know they’re joking, your friends are your biggest bullies. dan: like ben was saying, saying something that [?] really bad. teacher melinda [sense of recognition about the issue]: um! danny: melinda melinda: two things that i wanted to follow-up on what people said, i wondered is it always, is the bully always a person who doesn’t have a lot of friends. can it be someone who has a lot of friends? [some discussion] martin: …gossipping… melinda: or gossipping, martin just said, i don’t know if you heard him say, can you say it louder? martin: gossipping is bullying. melinda: gossipping can be a form of bullying. um… also, i wanted, i wonder, i don’t know what your experience has been, so i’m kind of interested in knowing. physical bullying, punching, hitting, that kind of stuff, do you think that that’s stopped, noticed more than emotional bullying? [some students are heard saying yes, and some no] unknown student: well, not in this school. melinda [laughs slightly]: not in this school! unknown student: not in this school. melinda: well, i don’t know, even in this school. do you think that, that it’s easier to notice and identify physical bullying or emotional bullying? student: emotional. boy: notice for? student: physical. depends if they cry. student: it depends if you hurt them emotionally so much that they start to cry. student: it depends how hard… student: there can be a whole bunch of… melinda: it seems to be that you’re saying that sometimes physical bullying is sometimes more noticeable. [begins to tell the students that educators have recently become “awakened” to the problems of emotional bullying]… but why do people bully was the question? why would somebody bully? i think this is a pretty important question to ask ourselves, because we want to be able to identify bullying, and we also want to have some idea of what bullying looks like in a community. and also what might be going on with the bully-er, the bully-ee. whatever… i’d like us to think about taking on the role of a bully. where we would actually be, each of us would be a bully, what does it feel like to be a bully, and also, what does it feel like to be a victim of that bullying? so maybe we could, next week, we could have a little bit of that. [group 3, choices class, 2006-11-10] bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a124 the problem of bullying appears to be taken seriously by the teacher melinda and has significant educational import to her, as is evident by melinda’s prolonged and patient effort to have the students say what it is she would like them to say (the desired answers being repeated by the teacher melinda or verbally approved with an audible “um!”). however, the context under which these classifications are expected to apply is not delineated, and any discussion of the specific context appears to have been supplanted by the discussion of the classificatory scheme itself. this classificatory scheme exists in spite of the students’ and teachers’ interested and emotive participation in the events around them. the discussion of bullying shuts down further discussion on specific aspects of the students’ ontological events (and everyone’s responsibility to these events), since it moves discussion onto a purely de-ontologized, abstract, decontextualized conceptual plane. any specific lived situations implied by the discussion are purely hypothetical, abstracted and alienated from the lived reality of the students to which they are meant to reply. the bullying discourse of the teachers focuses upon agreed upon, typified and normalized societal phenomenon, whereas ben’s situated concept of “anger” is potentially contestable and open for reinterpretation. bullying also appears to be a pre-set curricular endpoint for the teachers, a ready-made idea toward which the teachers were leading the students. indeed, as one of the clc teachers commented to me informally at some point during the school year, some of the teachers at the school had recently attended a professional lecture about the problem of bullying among u.s. youth. thus, andrew’s problem could just be the “opportunity” or vehicle through which the problem of bullying was expected to be eventually discussed. such a situation appears to be a quite common phenomenon; a very similar case of a nine-year old student who annoyed others when playing sports is rather unproblematically labelled as an example of “bullying” by mishna (2012, pp. 67-68). the clc students sense the fact that there is an expected endpoint to the discussion, and follow along in moving toward it. in the discussion of bullying, rather than engaging in discourse which judges their experience in an open and contestable manner, the students engage in “guessing” what the teacher wants from them (cf. jackson, 1968). in an interview about why she decided to discuss bullying at this point in the class, the teacher melinda stated – with notably circular logic – that it was important to address “[be]cause one’s person’s idea of bullying is not another person’s idea of bullying, and so we need as a group to decide, what is bullying?!” she also argues that bullying discourse gives the students an “opportunity” to discuss “general things” and invariant, universal “bigger idea[s].” the events of the students’ lives thus become incidences of an abstract universal concept: teacher melinda: to try to get them to look at the specific, we want to make generalizations from specifics. there are sometimes specific issues that have to be dealt with head-on, and also, there are often those specific things come up over and over again, because they're part of the more general thing that has to come up. so i think that’s, if we see an opportunity to, to give kids a more general, a bigger idea than they're thinking about. researcher mark: so here the opportunity for bullying was the issue that andrew was raising on the field? teacher melinda: he was being verbally bullied out there on the field. [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02] effectively, then, the students’ lived experience is conveniently considered to be insignificant when compared to the unquestioned generalizations which the teachers wish to promote among the students. any uncertainty over the meaning of what is happening is also reduced (“he was being verbally bullied out there on the field”). while the students may debate (perhaps endlessly) about andrew’s problem, the bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a125 discussion of bullying places a full stop on the discussion, silencing alternative perspectives and voices (morson, 2004). the kantian bullying discourse also justifies its relevance based on untested beliefs of social influences impacting students out of the classroom: teacher melinda: he was being verbally bullied out there on the field. and again, it’s sort of close to the beginning of the year, it’s [american] football season, kids are watching a lot of football, they're seeing that that's what they're being, football players are modelling, they’re doing it. and steve noticed, too, when he was out there with them, there wasn’t that, but the minute he couldn’t go out, the days he couldn’t go out with them, then there were more complaints about that verbal abuse happening [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02]. no evidence is provided for the “modelling” hypothesis except that children are watching american football games. there is no example provided for this influence within actual events of the students’ lives. the teacher melinda also does not provide any specific example of “verbal abuse” in the events of the students’ lives; nor does the teacher steve backup the claim of “verbal abuse on the field” that he makes to the students during the choices class in response to andrew’s problem. any responsibility for the problem of “bullying” is externalized and placed upon the broader society or abstract others rather than specific deeds within the students’ and teachers’ daily reality within the school. it could be argued that the teacher melinda’s focus on bullying may just indicate her lack of familiarity with the relational dynamics surrounding andrew’s problem. the teacher melinda did not play football with the students during recess time, so her relationship with the events on the football field is quite peripheral. in addition, as noted earlier, the teacher steve, unlike melinda, questioned whether or not his presence or absence on the field has an effect on andrew’s problem. however, lack of familiarity with the events around andrew’s problem appears not to explain why bullying is discussed with the children. in an interview response regarding andrew’s problem, melinda recognizes that andrew’s crying would be responded to differently than another student’s crying in the choices class: teacher melinda: what are we going to do if it’s [inaudible – one word] that the community makes sure one of members is feeling lousy, what can we possibly do?!. especially if there’s a kid who has been annoying, there’s that tendency to getif susie had started crying, everybody would have been focused on susie, “oh, susie, what’s the matter, what’s the matter?” but andrew crying and feeling lousy, they’re more likely to say, “oh well, we’ll just ignore it.” so i think that was probably the dynamic that was going on there. now, at this point in the year, he’s [andrew’s] much stronger, he’s really come into in his own a lot in many ways, he’s got friends, he’s, um, although he can still be annoying, most of the time he's not, he’s not as impulsive as he was, so kids are more concerned about him, except for donald [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02]. in this interview with me, the teacher melinda clearly contextualizes and ontologizes the students’ problems in their relations with one another. however, i could not find evidence that she ever did this with the students directly within the space of the choices class, a pattern which can similarly be noted within vivian paley’s (1992) classroom (matusov & smith, 2009a, 2009b). melinda also recognizes here that andrew is “annoying” to other students, but this did not call her attention away from the presupposition that andrew was being “bullied.” bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a126 presuming then that bullying is not discussed in the classroom because of its helpfulness (for the teachers and students) as a lens for revealing and understanding students’ relational dynamics, there may be other plausible reasons for the emergence of this discourse at this particular place and time. bullying has a status of being a phenomenon discussed by social scientists, which can increase the status and authoritativeness of the teachers’ ideas over the students’ ideas, making it possible for teachers to transition easily from “messy” uncontrollable discourse to discourse with a clear endpoint that is safer and less risky. alternatively, the teachers may also just wish to “move on” to what they had pre-planned for the day; discussions of the problems andrew and ben raised would take significant time to discuss, and there would not be a clear endpoint to these discussions. finally, bullying may have been discussed simply because it was a desired curricular objective (for at least melinda) to classify the students’ relational problems as bullying problems. the persuasiveness of bullying for the students outside of the classroom context from my interviews with the students, it is notable that the discussion of bullying is not persuasive for the students themselves as a way of framing or understanding their interpersonal realities outside of the classroom context. this is seen in the following interview, in which andrew and five other group 3 students, including ben, were present: researcher mark: i’m trying to understand how we got from what andrew's talking about to bullying. ben: because [?] was bullying andrew. researcher mark: is that true? marla: wait, someone was bullying andrew? andrew: somebody was bullying me? matthew: oh yeah, when you walked into that tree, you were like yelling at everybody when you were like walking off the football field, you turned around and hit the tree! ben: oh, yeah, when we were playing football! oh yeah, you turned around, you catched the ball, and you ran into the tree. andrew: oh yeah, i turned around to the catch the ball, and i hit the tree, and larry started, yelling, and laughing, not yellin’ at me. laughing at me! researcher mark: was there bullying involved in what you… ? susie: oh yeah, bullying. andrew: what i was doing, no. what larry was doing, yes. ben: really? marla: especially here. susie: i think sometimes you just laugh. sometimes that happens, i don’t know if that’s my family and i’m just kind of used to it, but when i [?] my dad laughs. and i don’t really think about it too much, maybe because i know that he’s joking, but i think sometimes you just gotta not be, not like talking to like andrew, like some people they just got to be not so sensitive to things, and that’s i think one of the problems with our thing in school. like our class this year, i think. everyone’s really sensitive to things, that’s just our class. that happened two years ago when our classes were together, everyone was always, there were always problems and stuff, it was just a mix of kids, or... [boys, except andrew, are fussing around in the back] [interview, group 3 students, 2007-04-06] the students here express ambivalence with regard to the labeling of the dialogic event between andrew and ben as “bullying.” this is notably different from the teacher melinda’s unquestioned view on bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a127 the relevance of bullying. it is also notable how students utilize different ideas such as “laughing” within their dialogue to pass judgements on the meaning of the events which bother andrew (and possibly others as well). in turn, the students’ discourse reveals and promotes further analysis of andrew and the others’ responsibility to the problem, whereas the discourse of bullying appears to deflate further discussion of these issues. other group 3 students, in interviews, also questioned the relevance of discussing bullying in the class. they reported that they do this questioning indirectly during the choices class by making comments about its irrelevance or meaninglessness under-the-breath and/or quietly to their peers. this is noted from this interview of six group 3 students: marla: maybe the teachers brought it up ’cause they thought it was a problem for us in 5th grade and 6th grade. next year, we might be going to middle-slash-high school, there might be bullies there, so we want to be able, and even here, so we know what’s bullying so we can stop it before it gets too big. […] matthew: ’cause it was the same thing almost over the whole time period. marla: i think they just read out of a thesaurus, they kept saying the same exact thing! susie [slightly admonishing, surprised tone]: marla! marla: over and over. using different words. susie: i think it went on a little too long. like it was good at first, and a lot of people were saying stuff, but it sort of kind of started repeating after a while. [interview, group 3 students, 2007-04-06] in another example of the perceived irrelevance of bullying, a group of group 4 (grade 7/8) teenage girls commented in an interview how they prefer to apply concepts other than “bullying” to their lived experience, such as “drama,” “teasing,” or “name calling.” for them, bullying appears to be something that happens “not very often,” but the other concepts regularly emerge with ongoing discourse to judge their experience: researcher mark: i see, for example, the bullying thing kept coming up. katie [with a frustrated, painful expression]: uh!!! researcher mark: is that a problem that keeps coming up in choices about bullying? jacob: that’s like a girl problem. katie and kim: not very often. kim: it’s a lot of girl drama. katie: yeah, girl drama. jacob: and no one really bullies, except when i— katie: yeah, no one really bullies at our school, they [she seems to mean the teachers] just try to come up with their own versions of bullying. which is like. alena: yeah, teachers say that they see bullying, when it’s really not, it’s just teasing, name calling. and it’s a joke! kim: it's a joke… and they [teachers or students?] know it’s a joke, and they’re laughing! katie: and some people [students] are overdramatic about it. that’s how a lot of us think, it’s just overdramatic. [interview, informal interview of group 4 students, 2007-06-05] bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a128 the concept of “bullying,” in alena and katie’s responses, is judged – along with other concepts – in terms of its internal persuasiveness to the events of being in the students. the girls wish to demand that the teachers take the context of the students’ problems into account. engaging in “drama” and being “overdramatic” have currency in their discourse, but “bullying” does not (smith, 2019, in preparation). the concept of bullying and inarticulateness in response to “events of being” regardless of its relevance to the here-and-now, we might still imagine that the idea of bullying may be employed by some students in discourse in the context of their lived interactions with each other to help them address problems emerging in their social relations. yet, in another interview with group 4 boys, the student jared becomes inarticulate when attempting to apply the concept of bullying to his lived experience: jared [after having read a transcript i prepared of a social studies lesson in which the problem of bullying was discussed]: when i heard that [ralph, the group 4 teacher, leading the social studies lesson, wanted to give us the tools to help us with bullying], it was like, great! [slightly sarcastic] that's good! that’s really good, i want to be able to stop bullying, that’s always helpful. but, yeah, i lost my train of thought. researcher mark: i just wondered, when you hear that, what are you thinking? jared: first, i was like good, yeah, that’s good. but then i thought, how in the world is he going to give us the tools to deal with bullying! because, i know, i was like, yeah! i can stop it. but now i’m like, it doesn’t really work so well […] they definitely pay attention to it, but i don’t know if they do the best job of preventing it. paul: it’s definitely that kind of environment – dennis [in a puzzled and surprised tone]: i don’t understand what you’re saying about that! there’s not really bullying! [interview, group 4, grade 7 students, 2007-04-30] jared claims that the teachers should be “preventing” bullying more, but the tools do not “really work so well.” he then states that “i can stop it,” but then places the responsibility for “stop[ping]” bullying on the teachers. it may be that in this interview i conducted with jared, paul and dennis, i did not open up the social conditions for which jared could become more articulate about the issues he was experiencing (cf. mcdermott, 1988). unfortunately, i did not pursue this discussion further, by asking jared to provide a specific example of what “bullying” means in his daily life. however, it is also telling that he did not provide this example, as jared’s discourse appears to lie squarely within the discourse in which bullying exists, a discourse which universalizes lived experience, places students’ lived reality on a plane of “half-being” and becoming, and diminishes the value of the specific, ontological event discourse in his life or in the lives of his peers in favor of risk prevention and sanitization of students’ lived realities. it is intriguing here how dennis directly rejects the assertion of the relevance of bullying to jared’s life in favor of demanding contextualization of this problem through specific events. the recursivity of bullying discourse versus the recursivity of being-as-event discourse as noted in the section above, in both the group 3 and group 4 student interviews on bullying, students report being frustrated and irritated with the frequency in which the topic of bullying emerges in the choices class. for the teachers, however, such recursivity is essential to ensure that students are thinking of the more advanced abstract moral universal thinking rather than their own ways of conceptualizing their experience: bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a129 teacher melinda: there are often those specific things come up over and over again, because they’re part of the more general thing that has to come up. so i think that’s, if we see an opportunity to, to give a kids a more general, a bigger idea than they’re thinking about” [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02]. interestingly, however, some researchers share with the children a frustration with the recursivity of the discussion of bullying and its questionable relevance to students’ lives, as noted in this anonymous interview of a bullying researcher: some people [have] found the ongoing debates sterile and of limited use in improving the lives of children in schools. ‘you know, they keep saying, “how do we define bullying?” i think, “well, we could go on like that forever and ever but meanwhile there’s a big problem out there”’ (dixon, 2011, p. 184) recursivity of discourse was also noted within the students’ event-focused discourse. however, when present in this context, recursivity of discourse is a sign that students may be stuck in an ontological trap, such as andrew being caught up within a recursive yelling-anger-blaming cycle with his peers. andrew’s frustration with this recursivity appears to be behind andrew deciding to discuss the problem with the class. the recursive “yelling” may be considered to constrain relations between the students, and be a cause for further investigation through dialogue.3 bullying as an ideal discourse imposed upon students’ real lived experiences it is important to emphasize that the clc teachers are making instructional decisions – to discuss “bullying” and “gossip” with the students – on the basis of imagined student problems and dilemmas that are based in the teachers’ consciousness of the world, which may or may not be shared by the students (matusov & smith, 2007). thus, teachers do not “problematize” or “subjectivize” the problem of bullying within the daily, being-as-event reality of andrew or any of the students (matusov & smith, 2007). in fact, in interviews, the teachers discuss a need to supplant the students’ lived being-as-event reality with a more detached and de-subjectivized lens which places the students above their responses to one another, which are “immediate” and “reactive,” and their “developmental” way of responding to problems would contaminate objective logic with the emotional intensity of conflictual relations: teacher steve: it [bullying] is a group 3 [grade 5-6] issue in the sense that i think kids are really examining their behaviors, stepping out, they can start stepping outside themselves, and have some perspective, when they get to this age, that is much, much harder for them to do when they’re [younger]… to take a look at their behavior in a more objective way. to be able to kind of look at how they’re behaving and see it as if somebody were treating them in that way. to kind of, be able to kind of examine themselves and … look at their role in a more global way. as it relates to the way that they’re dealing with people and their relationships. i mean, when kids are in groups 1 and 2 [grades 1-2 and 3-4], everything’s so immediate, everything’s reactive. and that’s developmental. that’s to be expected. when kids get to group 3 and 4 [grades 5-6 and 7-8], they’re able to pull back and distance themselves, and reflect on their behavior a bit, which is one of the things that melinda [the other grade 5-6 teacher] and 3 for further discussion of this issue, see the summerhill school “makeup case” presented in allen, getzels, and getzels (1991), which is analysed in detail in smith (2019, in preparation). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a130 i write in our [quarterly written] reports [to parents] under [the] socio-emotional [category], “ability to reflect on behavior and accept responsibility.” so when kids get, you know, some kids, some adults, never quite get there. but you would hope, and kids can start to do that [reflection], when they get to be about 5th, 6th grade. so, anyway, just the idea of the kids to be thinking about these issues about bullying in a more global way, that they can be subtle, kind of looking at their own behavior, we’re asking them to start examining those things now in a way that they hadn’t been really [interview, steve, 2006-11-27, bold and italics are mine]. from the teacher steve’s perspective, a student like ben cannot really make valid judgements and reflections upon recursive events. the teacher steve here seems to presume that it is impossible for the students to become responsible for one another within being-as-event discourse (being-with addressivity to others), since they do not “examine” their lives from the more “global” and “distance[d]” perspective that “reflect[ion]” on abstract moral universals like bullying would provide. bullying is seen in the teacher melinda’s utterance below as an abstract, universal truth (istina) which is likely to emerge within the students’ lived experience with one another (although apparently not the teachers’ lives). istina-truth (russian word, “истина”) can be compared with pravda-truth (russian word, “правда”), and is a distinction in the russian language made use of by bakhtin. istina-truth refers to the universal, abstract, de-personalized, objective truth of how things really are, while pravda-truth is “more than rational, it is answerable [or responsible]. rationality is but a moment of answerability [or responsibility]” (bakhtin, 1993, p. 29).4 this istina-truth is rooted in melinda’s justification for discussing bullying with the students below: teacher melinda: …[we teachers] try to get them [the students] to be beyond themselves in the moment. and we know it’s impossible to some degree, you know. it’s impossible to, the kids are going to be kids, and this is going to happen behind parents’ and behind adults’ backs. but i think it irks all of us here when you hear this “boys will be boys,” or bullying happens, and bullying does happen, but especially middle school is a real area where bullying can get tough. so, what as a community can we do to help bring the awareness – ’cause you can’t just say, “stop it!” although we do. we say “no, you can’t do that!” i mean there is a bottom line, we won’t let you punch somebody in the face, and we’re not going to let you verbally abuse somebody. but, you know that “just say no” isn’t the answer… [interview, melinda, 2007-05-02] the teacher melinda appears to argue above with the voice of students, parents, people in the community, or other educators that might reject the truth claim that “bullying” has much at all to do with the ontological problems faced by the students (this voice could be an imaginary interlocutor, and/or could also have been intended to address concerns that i had raised with melinda in the interviews). the teacher melinda responds to this voice by stating that the issue is not whether bullying is relevant or not to the students now or in the past, but whether bullying is likely and possible for the students to face in their lives. the teacher melinda appears to argue that the severity of the possible “bullying” problems with which students could be faced with is one of the rationales for addressing the problem and not ignoring it. in an e-mail communication (2010-12-06), the teacher melinda states that bullying discourse provides a “vocabulary” and “explicit strategies” which help students to identify and deal with bullying, which is presumably more effective than the students’ own way of responding to these problems. if students are 4 see sidorkin (2009, p. 150) and smith & matusov (2009) for further discussion. bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a131 left to their own to resolve their problems, their methods are “most often not productive.” procedures which the students are expected to “practice” appear to lie “above” the students’ lived experience, and, again, do not address the specific, underlying relational issues and dynamics which result in interpersonal conflict. the specific recursive and immediate circumstances which lead to the situation appear not to matter, as much as the identification of bullying and the resolving of it. one anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this text submitted to this journal critiqued the argument presented here that the teachers’ moral universal discourse cannot be sensitive and responsive to the needs of the students, writing that: teachers have the right to recontextualize a lived story in more general terms, for the sake of [children] learning from the details. this is what mainstream families usually do in their literacy practices (cf. heath, 1983)… the reviewer subsequently argued that the problem presented with the relevance of bullying to the students’ lives presented here is not with the relevance of abstract moral universals in themselves as applicable to education, but rather may be more an issue with the “weakness” or “underdeveloped analysis of bullying” present in melinda’s instruction. as the reviewer argues: bullying is more than agreeing on a definition, it is also [concerned with] the roles involved, the strategies each role should follow, i.e. avoiding self-victimization, promoting whistleblowing of bystanders, treating bullies as persons with “concrete needs” as well (cf. benhabib, 1987)... this [would be] a more sophisticated general conversation of a theory of human violence which could be useful for the students as well useful to discuss in first-person [in response to] a concrete event (dpj reviewer comments, june 2019).5 in response to the reviewer, i assert that the broader concerns with bullying discussed by the reviewer – bystander whistleblowing, for example – appear also to be concerns of the teacher/adult which come from outside the children’s eventful discourse on their lived experience. it is reasonable to presume that these discourses would also lie in a “parallel discursive universe” to that of the children’s eventful discourse. i suspect to find in the efforts to address bullying presented by the reviewer a similar moral imperative to “feel good,” the discourse of “half-being,” sanitization of risk, and a discourse of ideality imposed over the events of children’s lived experience. for example, recent research has questioned the authoritativeness and analytic power of the bystander perspective of bullying in wrestling with the concrete realities of children’s social lives; researchers have noted that there are “several participant positions” within peer relations and thus a great difficulty in defining and abstracting “bystanders,” “bullies,” and “victims” within the relational field of the children (schott & søndergaard, 2014a, p. 8). this recent anti-bullying research has also questioned whether children’s peer relations can and should be decontextualized from the specifics of the situation in which they are grounded and whether bullying or other aspects of it should be discussed at all without specific reference to the “patterns of interaction” – and i would add the “being as event” discourse – in the lives of the children (schott & søndergaard, 2014a, p. 8). in the discussion which follows, i will summarize main arguments in this paper on moral universal discourse and its relevance to addressing the lived experience of children in schools. i will return to the 5 the references presented in this set of the reviewer’s comments (heath and benhabib) were recommended by the reviewer, and i have taken the liberty of including the references in-line in the text for the sake of brevity. bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a132 ontological dialogic event perspective presented earlier in the text, and i will leave it to the reader to decide what position(s) they see as more ethically responsible in addressing children’s interpersonal conflicts. discussion this research has explored the tensions between the abstract moral universal discourse of bullying and the ontological “being as event” discourse of students in an innovative school, which i have argued exist within parallel and disparate discursive universes. as discussed earlier, the unit of analysis of ontological event discourse is the specific case or event. time in ontological event discourse is event-anddeed based; andrew is not the same person before ben’s utterance as he is after it, andrew’s responsibility for the events having been revealed as a dialogic “gift” from ben (matusov & smith, 2009a). i have argued that ontological event discourse is not bereft of concepts. rather, concepts can emerge as nodes which can reveal new connections between events and people’s responsibility to these events, offering new possibilities for the taking of responsibility and transforming existing relations (e.g., through nodes such as “girl drama” or “managing anger”). what is important to understand here, in comparison to anti-bullying discourse, is that there is not a pre-set application of a concept nor an endpoint toward which the dialogue is going. the nodes instead emerge within dialogue, transform existing networks of relations, and can become “penetrating words” which become difficult for involved participants to ignore (bakhtin, 1999). for andrew, the node of “anger” allowed him to take responsibility for the problem he posed in the choices class even months later (the “torpedo touch” discussed earlier). in essence, concepts in ontological event discourse are objectivizations and finalizations of lived experience, but are partial and negotiable within dialogue. these discourses do not just exist purely in theoretical or philosophical realms, but also exist ontologically as “projects,” efforts or deeds to transform what is given in the world (sartre, 1963). unlike decision-making valued in total institutions like schools, where decisions are based on discrete, bounded, rational goals, participants engaged in ontological event discourse make many contextually based decisions and prioritizations (cf. people’s decisions about what to purchase in a supermarket, see lave, 1988, 1992). in this regard, the project of ontological event discourse is to trust in and have hope for transformation of ontological circumstances in a messy, imperfect world of responsibility with others. by contrast, the project of modernism – under which kantian-like moral universal ideas like anti-bullying fall – focuses on the normative expectancies of who the person is becoming, promoting a “right path” upon which students are to follow, a fantastic future of a world sanitized from risk, “negative actions” and negative feelings (olweus, 1993). this modernist discourse is characterized by its universality, predictability, rationality, and even irrelevance to lived events and contextual decisions. i have noted that the pedagogical discourse of abstract moral universals like bullying operates through translating students’ lived experience from beings fully responsible for themselves in the here-andnow toward beings who are becoming fully responsible to themselves into “half-beings” (sidorkin, 2002). as sidorkin writes: childhood is… an experience of becoming rather than that of being. we really come to existence through the experience of childhood, which is an experience of not quite being, of halfexisting, and of movement toward full-existence. acquiring an identity of a child means understanding that you do not quite exist yet. it is an identity oriented toward the future, and therefore an identity that undervalues the present (sidorkin, 2002, p. 42). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a133 in turn, the messiness of students’ presently lived experience is ignored in favor of a “bird’s eye view” of where the students are imagined to be going. abstract moral universal discourse like bullying treats students’ relational problems as predictable consequences of the students’ membership in a particular “imagined community” (anderson, 1991). this community is an assumed normed group within the society, such as “teenagers” or “pre-teenagers,” who are expected to face certain problems in the immediate or distant future. these imagined groups exist outside of any intentions of their members, and outside of any lived events or experiences. what matters for the teachers about the students is what is typical and representative; the experience of “bullying” is thought to be part of the “representative body, not the personal life” (anderson, 1991, p. 32). it is not seen to be part of the “specific” (and i would add eventful) relationships between individuals; such relationships become “not in the smallest degree problematic” (anderson, 1991, p. 28). any focus on relevance of the abstract moral universals of “bullying” and “feel good community” to the lives of students may not even matter so much for the teachers, since the teachers end up addressing the students’ imagined, normative, and expected problems through discussions of abstract universals, not through the discourse of lived reality. since anti-bullying discourse translates students’ reality in terms of an imagined future and envisions that they are coming-to-be people different from who they are now, students are arguably less likely to question the relevance of bullying to their lives. yet, at the same time, the authoritativeness of antibullying discourse appears to be constrained to the classroom context, as students appear not to grant legitimacy to this discourse within the hallways of the school or on the picnic table next to the playground. the bakhtinian “being as event” perspective i have focused upon here is indeed not alone in critiquing abstract moral universal discourse in educational contexts. feminist scholars have critiqued such discourse for denying the existence of the “concrete other” and minimizing the role of non-rational decisionmaking. for instance, benhabib (1987) has argued that the dominant universal approaches to moral education – what she calls “substitutionalist” forms of moral universalism – presume only the existence of a rational, “generalized other” and concomitantly deny the existence of a concrete other whose specific “needs, talents, and capacities” are deserving of recognition and confirmation (benhabib, 1987, p. 87). one’s responsibility to the other is said to emerge instead from accepting an “interactive” form of universalism which focuses on “right” moral action through the values of sympathetic acceptance, caring, and love of the other as a concrete person, developing social bonds with the other, sympathizing with the other’s needs and desires, and acting in solidarity with the other. this interactive universalism is argued to be a corrective to traditional moral universals. benhabib thus claims, in contrast with what i argue here, that generalized moral universals are essential but not sufficient for right moral action. benhabib argues that moral education should connect students with “the unthought, the unseen, and the unheard” (benhabib, 1987, p. 92), essentially the “oppressed” or the “forgotten” others. thus, she argues for an “interactive” form of moral universal discourse that sees “care” and “sympathy” for others’ needs as an unquestionable value that has value in all contexts and situations. yet, as with any other type of moral universal discourse, the rightness and value of caring pre-exists any testing within internally persuasive discourse. the truth of caring is thus not dialogic; it attempts to influence students through suppression of dissenting voices, violence, and manipulation. through the lens of any moral universal, students are seen as immature “half-beings” whose ways of thinking about the world and others presumably do not fully account for the lived experience of the other. the moral universal discourse grants justification for teachers to unilaterally “correct” the students’ way of thinking and their presumably uncaring or inharmonious peer relations. unilateralism can thus be justified on a social justice basis in order to elevate the voices of those on the margins (cf. matusov & smith, 2009a, 2009b). bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a134 it is interesting to point out that “interactive universalism” and a regime of caring, like substitutionalist universalism, supplants students’ responsive and responsible discourse on specific events in the lived experience of themselves and their peers toward what is considered to be “right.” it can also lead to an even more unilaterally imposed world of “feel-good community” comfort and sanitization of children’s lives than what was noted at clc; a student negating the idea that she or he is a “bystander” of “bullying,” for instance, may need to confront the idea that she or he is not “caring” enough about the other and denying the other’s existence as a “concrete” person. if a student attempted to acknowledge everyone’s responsibility to each other in dialogue and to ongoing “events of being,” this protest could be summatively ignored on account of the universal need to understand and account for the lived experience of the “unheard” or oppressed other. in reflecting on benhabib’s position it seems important to ask: who accounts for what is “unheard” and who is “unseen” or “unthought” about? is resistance against “caring” possible or desirable? are social bonds and solidarity negotiable or not, and why? does caring as a moral universal patronize those who need “care” compared with those who do not? what alternative discourses may exist to “caring” and how is suppression of these discourses justified? thus, although benhabib offers moral education a warning to be concerned with the needs and experiences of the concrete other, i differ with her in my call for critical ontological engagement of students in dialogue with the views and perspective of their peers in regard to ongoing “events of being,” where a value is placed on critically testing one’s own and others’ dearly held ideas and values in response to the sometimes inconvenient or challenging ideas and views of the other. bakhtin calls for responsibility to the other within dialogue rather than solidarity/singularity of purpose through shared universal values of social justice. i argue that the ontological dialogic ethics of bakhtin radically denies the validity of the application of moral universals to human relations, including those of “caring.” within dialogue on the “events of being” of students’ lives, it is not possible to finalize the other or oneself; all actions and ideas are responsible to ongoing discourse. through dialogue, participants engage in a testing of their responsibility to each other without an endpoint. through such dialogue, there is a possibility for interlocutors to transcend their ontological circumstances with one another. the bakhtinian “being-as-event” ethical position also considers that moral universals applied to human interaction violate the principle of “reflexivity” in human interaction (soros, 1995). reality, soros argues, is transformed by people’s decisions, by their participation in the world. a discursive statement about an object does not change an object, but a discursive statement about a person can change the person. as soros writes, “a reflexive interaction can change both the participants’ thinking and the actual state of affairs, [and thus modernist] timeless generalizations cannot be tested,” at least with people (soros et al., 1995, p. 216). this may be a good explanation for why, as has been noted in this paper, the discourse of moral universals and bullying feel forced and alien when applied to the events of being of the students’ lives. this may also explain the findings here that students can easily become inarticulate, at least outside of the purview of the teacher or the official discourse of the school setting, when they attempt to persuade their peers that they themselves (or someone else) is being “bullied.” anti-bullying discourse thus appears better suited to focus upon typologizing and defining student interaction (or typologizing and defining political oppressions) than it does in making judgements and reflecting upon everyone’s responsibility within ongoing events. this discourse of anti-bullying and systematized “interactive” universals of caring are wider projects of social engineering designed to reduce or eliminate the unauthorized assertion of asymmetrical power among students. through being objectivized and finalized as “bullies” or “bystanders,” children become subjects of the teacher efforts at engineering their social relations to help them “become” more inclusive, caring, and empathetic that what they “naturally” are. this is arguably the “espoused” theory of anti-bullying and caring (schön, 1983). however, there bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a135 appears to also be a “theory-in-use” of anti-bullying (schön, 1983). in practice, anti-bullying discourse is employed to ensure that the teachers and the school are not liable for any emotional harm or trauma brought upon students by their peers in the school. teachers can point to discussions of abstract moral universals as evidence that efforts were made in the curriculum to address students’ interpersonal problems, all the while sanitizing the students’ being-as-event discourse, removing the impurities of social exclusion and negative emotions like anger, hatred, and so on. the discourses of the “feel good community” and antibullying are thus ontologically important for the teachers in that it can, for instance, make the school feel more inviting to parents (who in the case of clc are paying tuition). however, i am concerned that the ontological event discourse of the students is suppressed and left unguided by anti-bullying (and perhaps by interactive forms of universalism as well), rather than transformed and supplanted (as is the espoused hope of such discourse). in turn, possible discord and interpersonal problems may be left unresolved and unguided under the surface. a similar dynamic is found in the modernist efforts at classification in the medical field, in which “one may get ever more precise knowledge, without having to resolve deeper questions, and indeed, by burying those questions” (bowker & star, 1999, p. 24). as bowker & star make apparent in the medical field, the discourse of classification is also intertwined with efforts to reduce alternatives in order to limit perceived harm to others (bowker & star, 1999, p. 25). as discussed earlier, anti-bullying derives its truth from its status as an aristotelian episteme, which “concerns universals and the production of knowledge which [are] invariable in time and space, and which [are] achieved with the aid of analytical rationality” (flyvbjerg, 2001, pp. 55-56). it is reasonable to expect that one could employ epistemic thinking – promoting invariant, universal knowledge – without being excessively certain about the truth of that episteme, but this pattern was not observed in the data here. instead, at least at clc and in the review of the anti-bullying literature presented at the beginning of this study, modernist, moral universal discourse too readily assumes it has a perfect answer to resolve social conflict, the last word on interpretation, an unquestioned right to the truth. it is then employed to establish a fantastic vision of social relations onto the students’ lives. by contrast, ontological event discourse expects imperfect and always testable responses to conflict, prioritizing continued dialogue over “solutions” to those conflicts. the truth of ontological event discourse is best characterized by phronesis, loosely translatable as prudence, or the pragmatic wisdom which emerges within participation in events (flyvbjerg, 2001). in ontological event discourse, participants hope and trust that through dialogue they will be able to transcend any “ontological traps” in which they are caught (as was seen in the example of andrew’s anger and the other students’ response to it, and andrew’s and others’ response to the responses). teachers who engage in ontological event discourse with their students relax or give up pre-set curricular endpoints, and attempt to become, along with the students, learners of the lived experience of their students and the way students frame their understandings of the issues and concerns in their own lived experience. from the ontological event perspective, teachers cannot teach if they are not open to learning about what they are teaching with the students. the ontological event perspective also further opens up the truth of the concept of moral universals like bullying, for bullying cannot be “true” outside of the response of participants (teachers and students) to it within ongoing dialogue. the internal persuasiveness of anti-bullying should thus not be taken for granted, and the notion of bullying may or may not have currency within the discourse of the students’ interpersonal experience. in an ontological event-driven perspective on interpersonal conflict, educators trust that dialogue would uncover what is “true” and persuasive for the students’ lived reality. bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a136 it could be argued, however, that bullying discourse and other moral universal discourses are necessary to “mediate” the “contact” between students giving them “sufficient psychological distance and feelings of control to promote true empathy and perspective-taking” (mar & oatley, 2008, p. 181). from this perspective, ontological event discourse is a form of “direct contact” which “may be experienced as too threatening or otherwise emotionally arousing for a great deal of empathy or even sympathy to take place” (mar & oatley, 2008, p. 181). indeed, the process of engaging in ontological dialogue regarding interpersonal issues can lead to personal discomfort, and to potential social conflict. it may sometimes lead to students feeling that they may be coerced to speak and to “confess” to others (lefstein, pollak, & segal, 2018). such concerns with direct ontological event discourse being too threatening or arousing, however, appear not to be borne by the data presented here, as ben clearly was empathetic and concerned for andrew’s emotional needs, while at the same time sensitively working – through the node of “anger” – to find a way out of the ontological trap in which all were caught. additional research is needed on the perceived threat (for students and teachers) of “dialogic finalizations” and the “torpedo touch” phenomenon which was noted in ben’s dialogue with andrew. there appears to be a need for policies for ontological event dialogue which give students the right to pass or remain silent when discussing certain interpersonal issues (lefstein et al., 2018). it could be that one of the challenges to the realization of ontological event discourse in education is simply that it is less familiar, as most of us in our schooling have experienced only more traditional forms of instruction that do not invite student agency in developing the curriculum. in turn, the notion that curriculum could emerge through messy dialogue without an endpoint may not be valued or promoted as readily (rogoff et al., 2001). table 1 summarizes the key comparisons between moral universal and ontological event discourses discussed in this analysis: table 1: characteristics of the anti-bullying discourse and ontological event discourse universes characteristics of discourse anti-bullying; kantian moral discourse universe ontological event discourse universe participants’ unit of analysis purified, universal concept specific or recursive case or event notion of truth episteme: truth as universal, analytical, invariant across all contexts; truth is pre-defined phronesis: wisdom in practice of events, pragmatic, context-dependent; participants search for truth in discourse mediation purified concept: case/event becomes a trigger (“opportunity”) for discussion of purified concept concept as nodes: concepts as nodes of similar events and counter-events used to analyze responsibility, make judgements of events addressivity being above others: employing the universally right procedure; taking a bird’s eye view over events; use of authoritative discourse which objectifies, pre-exists and transcends ontological events being-with others: analysis of my-youour-their responsibility (dialogic addressivity); internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1991); participants with equal rights emotion detached, no risk taking, suppress drama, concern with “feel good” comfort, civility “torpedo touch” and catharsis (e.g., pain of andrew, sympathy of ben) bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a137 time imagined, universal future, focus on normative expectancies of the future; predictable; students as “half-beings,” rather than fully responsible for themselves, others (sidorkin, 2002) event-and-deed based (e.g., andrew before ben and after ben) concept of the person excessively finalized and objectivized (matusov & smith, 2007) inconsistent, unpredictable, participant in ongoing events; “spirit” (bakhtin et al., 1990) vision totalitarian, sanitized perfect future world (e.g., free from social exclusion) how to become better in an imperfect, messy world of responsibility final questions for consideration i leave the reader with suggestions for research and questions for consideration. it seems that one of the biggest appeals of bullying for teachers lies in a fear of intimacy (of “getting too close”) in dealing with children’s conflicts. how justifiable are teachers’ concerns and prioritizations with students’ comfort in addressing interpersonal problems? what degree of embarrassment and discomfort for students may be acceptable to educators, and what are the limits of discomfort for most teachers, for most students, and for most parents? is some degree of “indecision” necessary for sensitively guiding students’ interpersonal relations? what might the prioritization on students’ comfort say about particular cultural and educational priorities? is prevention of social exclusion a desirable end for students, or is a certain degree of exclusivity in relations (i.e., friendships, etc.) not only expected, but also desired by some students (matusov & smith, 2009a, 2009b)? finally, are there situations where the modernist, abstract moral universal discourse of bullying, “feel good” comfort, and “interactive” caring are more or less advisable or authoritative to students? what are those situations? it is possible that bullying discourse is more authoritative under more traumatic or extreme examples of “weaponized shame” that i did not investigate here, such as extreme taunting, intensive cyber harassment, homophobic intolerance, intolerance toward transgender people, domestic violence, sexual abuse, or racial harassment (fast, 2016, p. 7). this would need to be further investigated. it is hoped that this study will spark further study of educational practices which value and promote dialogue as an end in itself to investigate and understand everyone’s responsibility for interpersonal problems of concern to students. references anderson, b. 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(2012). kant's contribution to moral education. in k. roth & c. w. surprenant (eds.), kant and education: interpretations and commentary (pp. 1-11). new york: routledge. bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective mark philip smith dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 | vol. 7 (2019) a142 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word pattern-recognition intersubjectivity and dialogic meaning-making in education, (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e1 pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract from a conventional monological view, meaning-making is located in a particular statement. in conventional schools, students are positioned to be enactors of ready-made knowledge and skills on teacher’s demand based on their patternrecognition and production, rather than to be authors of their own education, learning, knowledge, and meaning. pattern recognition involves the emergence of active production of diverse potential patterns that may or may not approximate well the targeted pattern (“sprouting”). the sprouting can be guided (“supervised”) by an expert or unguided, mediated or unmediated. these diverse potential patterns are sequentially evaluated about how likely each of them can be close to the targeted pattern. in each evaluation, the probabilistic confidence of some patterns grows while some other patterns decrease. in contrast, according to bakhtin, meaning-making is defined as the relationship between a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question and serious response to it. from the bakhtinian dialogic perspective, a statement does not have any meaning until it is viewed as a reply to some question in an internally persuasive discourse. a student’s meaning-making process starts with a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question raised by the student. at least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. another aspect of dialogic meaning-making is interaddressivity. a student is interested in other people: 1) in what other people may think and how they feel about it; however these people define this it, and 2) in other people as such – in what they are doing, feeling, relating, and thinking about; in the relationship with these people; in the potential that these people may realize and offer; and so on. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ��� my central thesis in this essay is that learning in conventional and many progressive schools mainly involves individual or social pattern-recognition and pattern-production, patched and facilitated with issn: 2325-3290 (online) pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e2 occasional dialogic meaning-making1 process (as it often happens in constructivist progressive teaching). let me provide an example. i frequently asked my undergraduate college students, future teachers, what they learned deeply in school and are proud of learning. often, many of my students pick up adding fractions with different denominators, like 1/2 + 1/32. they usually feel very proud to demonstrate the math procedure of multiplying both the nominator and denominator of 1/2 by 3 and both the nominator and denominator of 1/3 by 2 to make the common denominator 6 and then add the new, transformed, fractions 3/6 and 2/6 together to get 5/6. so far, so good. but then, i ask them why we cannot do simpler addition by adding the two nominators 1 and 1 together and by adding the two denominators 2 and 3 together to get 2/5. my students usually say that it would be the wrong addition of the fraction. i ask them what makes the first addition of fractions that they did right and while the second addition that i did wrong. this is where the most interesting thing starts because my students rarely can answer this question. many of them get angry at me for “tricking them.” they say, “it’s forbidden.” i ask, “by whom?” they say, “you will fail a test.” i suggest, “why don’t we change the tests.” and so on. finally, i ask my students how and why humans, humankind, came to this strange rule of adding fractions. they do not know. in my view, the main problem is not that my students do not know many things about the addition of fractions, but the problem is that many of them have never been set on a journey of understanding about fractions. rather, it seems that many of them were conditioned to produce a certain pattern of actions, approved by the school authority (and beyond). a similar question in science often brings an answer that the earth is round – a scientific fact that many of my students, future teachers, claimed that they knew well. when i ask them how they know that it is true, my students often say that they learned it from their science textbooks. when i ask how the textbook, the scientists, the humankind know for sure that it is true. at best, my students could tell me that humans can see the earth from space. i often counter-argued that humans knew that the earth was round long before they could go to space – but how did they know? for the vast majority of my students, these questions were new. in my view, the issue here is not necessarily that most of my college students have experienced a particularly poor instruction and particularly bad teachers. the problem seems to be that apparently, something is very rotten with conventional schools themselves. although a conventional teacher can teach my students to answer my questions correctly, still the problem will reemerge when new, “tricky,” questions, unexpected by the students, arrive. in conventional3 schools, students are positioned to be enactors of ready-made knowledge and skills on their teachers’ demand, rather than to be authors of their own education, learning, and knowledge. let me illustrate this point by considering experiments by the famous soviet cultural-historical psychologists luria and vygotsky (luria, 1976; vygotsky & luria, 1993) that were then critically re-thought by the american psychologist scribner (1977). the issue of whether the meaning-making process is rooted in pattern-recognition or in dialogue is very important because it defines the nature of education: either mostly monological or mostly dialogical. 1 in this essay, i use the terms “meaning-making” and “sensemaking” interchangeably and synonymously. i should probably have used the term “sensemaking” to be exact, but i follow the conventional term “meaning-making,” which is often used in place of “sensemaking.” for the purpose of this essay, i am not going to distinguish the terms “meaning” and “sense.” 2 the other common learnings are: 1) the fact that the earth is around, 2) the explanation of the seasons, and 3) the explanation of the moon’s phases. like in the case of the adding fractions with different denominators, not only these learnings are usually conventional but also are full of misconceptions (especially for #2 and #3). 3 i use the term “conventional” here in two different ways. the first is as a synonym of “mainstream”. the second is schools, which pedagogy is based on socializing students in conventionality (see my notion of "conventional knowledge" in contrast to "conceptual knowledge," matusov, 2009). pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e3 unpacking schoolish pattern-recognition in the early 1930s, aleksandr luria went to soviet asia to conduct psychological experiments with the illiterate and unschooled local population, comparing them to their literate and schooled neighbors. vygotsky and luria (1993) expected to find evidence of qualitative differences in the participants’ psychological functions such as cognition because they believed that literacy and school provide people with new psychological mediational tools, which transform their cognition and other psychological functions. the results of the experiments seemed to confirm the vygotsky-luria hypothesis about cognitive mediation by cultural tools. they found that, in contrast to literate schooled local activists, illiterate, unschooled adults could not solve logical syllogisms – the concept invented by aristotle: [syllogism] in the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white. novaya zemlya is in the far north and there is always snow there. what color are the bears there? 1. illiterate unschooled peasant: ...we always speak only of what we see; we don't talk about what we haven't seen. 2. experimenter: ...but what do my words imply? [the syllogism is repeated.] 3. p: well, it's like this: our tsar isn't like yours, and yours isn't like ours. your words can be answered only by someone who was there, and if a person wasn't there, he can't say anything on the basis of your words. 4. e: ...but on the basis of my words – in the north, where there is always snow: the bears are white, can you gather what kind of bears there are in novaya zemlya? 5. p: if a man was sixty or eighty and had seen a white bear and had told about it, he could be believed, but i've never seen one and hence i can't say. that's my last word. those who saw can tell, and those who didn't see can't say anything! (at this point a young [schooled] uzbek [communist activist] volunteered, "from your words it means that bears there are white.") 6. e: well, which of you is right? 7. p: what the cock knows how to do, he does. what i know, i say, and nothing beyond that! (luria, 1976, pp. 108-109). vygotsky and luria argued that the illiterate, unschooled peasant could not abstract from his everyday experiences and did not possess the cognitive abilities of hypothetical thinking. however, later, american psychologist sylvia scribner (1977) re-analyzed the case and pointed out that the illiterate, unschooled uzbek peasant demonstrated his hypothetical thinking perfectly well when he argued, “if a man was sixty or eighty and had seen a white bear and had told about it, he could be believed, but i've never seen one, and hence i can't say” (see turn 5 above). the peasant used abstract thinking to refuse to cooperate – to play the formal logic game – with the unknown adult researchers who come as some kind of authority to impose their test on him. scribner also showed that the illiterate uzbek peasant demonstrated abstract and generalizable thinking as well, although different than what vygotsky and luria expected. thus, the reason, for which the illiterate, unschooled peasant rejected the syllogism premise, “in the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white,” was not rooted in “imprisonment by everyday experiences” and a lack of abstract and hypothetical thinking, as vygotsky and luria thought, but in something else. scribner attracted our attention to the fact that the syllogism premise, as probably all syllogism premises, does not make much sense outside of this syllogism game. indeed, what does it mean, “in the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white”? who said that? are those people trustworthy? what does it mean “all”? is it about (somebody else’s) past or about everybody’s future? what if somebody brings a black bear to the far north, would the far north stop being the far north or would snow disappear? what pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e4 if non-white bears exist or existed in the far north, but we do not know that yet? and so on. the premise is arbitrary (although often not random). scribner turned the table around: instead of considering the strange peculiarity of illiterate, unschooled society, we should focus on the strange peculiarity of schooled societies. in a clever research, scribner and her colleague cole (1981) disentangled literacy and schooling and came to a conclusion that it is schooling and not literacy per se that is responsible for the phenomenon observed by luria. interestingly enough, aristotle abstracted the formal logic and the notion of syllogism from the teaching practice of sophists – ancient greek teachers of wealthy athenian youth. sophists tutored young aristocrats for pay how to win arguments in democratic debates by focusing on the rhetoric and form of the arguments rather than on their content. the content-free logic (and logical traps) allowed sophists to teach young aristocrats from different political parties, regardless of their political ideology, in contrast to teachers who focused on the content of the political arguments and, thus, who had a more limited pool of their students. teaching the formal logic was economically more profitable and politically safer than teaching the content logic developed by socrates in democratic athens. the issue is why this strange practice spread beyond democratic ancient athens. it seems that what people learn in school is not so much new cognitive mediational tools, as vygotsky and luria argued, but rather a peculiar ability to seamlessly abstract or decontextualize from their own meaningfulness, rooted in meaning-making critical questions, and uncritically accept any arbitrary premise imposed by the authority. in my upcoming book, i try to address the important issue of why conventional school does that and what role it serves in our society (and what “our society” means) (matusov, 2020, in press). in this essay, i will continue exploring the peculiarity of learning in conventional schools. i argue that this type of learning, alienated from the student’s own meaning-making process, is mainly rooted in the pattern-recognition and pattern-production processes, guided by the authority’s approval or disapproval. such patterns may involve cognitive, such as in syllogistic problem solving, discursive, as in talking about invisible electrons, action patterns, as when adding fractions with different denominators, perceptional patterns, as when seeing 4 in the 2+2 statement, communicational patterns, e.g., not talking until allowed by the teacher, power patterns, such as unconditionally accepting any question or any assignment demanded by the teacher, and so on. students have to recognize patterns desirable by the authority and successfully produce them as judged by the authority. of course, pattern-recognition and pattern-production occur outside of conventional school. furthermore, one can legitimately argue that pattern-recognition and pattern-production are ubiquitous and omnipresent. yes, but pattern-recognition and pattern-production in conventional school is different from the one occurring elsewhere by at least two mutually related accounts. first, in conventional schools, patterns to be recognized and produced are arbitrary4, most often lie outside of the immediate experiences of the learners and are not rooted in the everyday practices of the society outside of the schooling-testing industry. in extreme cases, the teacher can teach whatever nonsense the teacher wants to teach regardless of its truthfulness or usefulness – conventional schooling does not have a feedback loop with targeted practices that schooling is supposed to serve. in other words, conventional school is viewed as a near-perfect self-contained tool to shape students’ subjectivity in whatever way a teacher or the entire society wants or needs. that is why conventional schools in politically, socially, and economically different societies – whether totalitarian, authoritarian, or democratic – look pretty 4 of course, this arbitrariness is relative to a student. conventional schools’ curriculum is shaped by the powerful ideological hegemonies of the society. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e5 much the same. the content of teaching (i.e., the curriculum) can be different at times – e.g., in the totalitarian communist ussr, it was taught that mostly the red army won wwii, while in the democratic capitalist us it was taught that mostly the us army won wwii. however, the organization of educational practices is often very similar: quizzes, exams, lecturing, sitting silent, unconditional assignments, the unquestionable teacher authority, expulsions, and so on. in contrast, in many other practices and contexts, patterns to be recognized and produced are often pragmatic – not arbitrary – but embedded and subordinated to the practices and contexts themselves. there, what guides pattern-recognition and patternproduction is success or failure in the pragmatics of the practice or context, mediated by the person’s own sense-making, rather than the arbitrary authority of the teacher or the society at large. second, in conventional schools, the (dialogic) meaning-making process is subordinated to the pattern-recognition and production rather than the other way around. in conventional schools, a student’s own sense-making is often overruled by the teacher’s pattern of thinking, action, perception, and so on. it usually does not matter what makes sense for the student; what matters is what makes a good answer (for the teacher), good performance, good grade, and good mark produced by the teacher, testing agency, or society at large. the role of the student’s meaning-making is diligently to serve the latter. for example, a first-grader may sense that for some objects 2+2 is not always 4 (e.g., two friends and two friends does not always make four friends) (matusov, 2009, chapter 4; 2020, in press, chapter 9) but this sensemaking is in contradiction with the school unconditional pattern that 2+2 is always 4 when one counts the same things and one should not challenge it. at best, to be successful in a conventional school, a student may develop double-consciousness (du bois, 1961) to learn that in school 2+2 is always four, but outside of school, it may not be so. at worst, the student may be brainwashed into accepting the school pattern as always true. in-between, the student may give up on school success by rejecting the school pattern while remaining faithful to his/her own private sensemaking. in any case, the student’s private authorial sensemaking remains undeveloped by the critical public dialogue that is genuine education. one the other hand, the student’s authorial sensemaking can become a legitimate and public aide (facilitator) when it is subordinated to school pattern-recognition and pattern-production. if according to school pattern, 2+2 is always 4, then two hundred(s) plus two hundred(s) is four hundred(s) regardless of how perceptually confusing it may look to a child (matusov, 2009, chapter 4; 2020, in press, chapter 9). a student is allowed to reason and make sense if and only if it leads to the authoritative school pattern, and the student’s reasoning is approved by the school authority. a student’s personal sense-making can also patch school patterns when they become obviously out of touch with reality by rationalizing the questionable school arbitrary patterns. for example, when i challenged my student who, based on a school science textbook, insisted that the moon passes monthly the space between the earth and the sun, he agreed with me that according to this model, a solar eclipse would occur every month. he added that a solar eclipse happens every lunar month, but it just happens in different parts of the earth and thus remains unregistered by most people. conventional schools are often criticized that learning is decontextualized for their students (forman, minick, & stone, 1993; lave, 1988, 1992), which is, of course, true. but even more so, conventional school learning is de-ontologized5, de-personalized, voiceless, and stripped of any student activism and authorial agency by often colonizing the student, making them agentive (milgram, 1974). example of schoolish pattern-recognition and production in a science lesson in his book “talking science” on science education in conventional school, researcher of science education jay lemke (1990) argues that this process of pattern-recognition and pattern-production occurs 5 of course, one can say that any learning is ontological in a sense that it is a part of the life of a student. but in conventional schools, it is not ontological with the regard of its content. students often learn to please the teachers (and parents) rather than because they are genuinely interested in the academic content. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e6 through and in a special pedagogical discourse. in conventional schools, students are guided by the teacher to learn to recognize and produce certain ready-made themes about science (or another academic subject) approved by the authority of the teacher (and tests, exams, and the broader society). lemke argues that this learning goes much beyond rote memorization of vocabulary, procedures, or definitions but it is rather the recognition and production of holistic thematic patterns that involve certain beliefs, perceptions, actions, semantics, social relations, contexts, and power. students not only learn to hear and talk about the pattern but also to see the world through and act by this discursive pattern. in his book “talking science” on science education in conventional school, researcher of science education jay lemke (1990) argues that this process of pattern-recognition and patternproduction occurs through and in a special pedagogical discourse. in conventional schools, students are guided by the teacher to learn to recognize and produce certain ready-made themes about science (or another academic subject) approved by the authority of the teacher (and tests, exams, and the broader society). lemke argues that this learning goes much beyond rote memorization of vocabulary, procedures, or definitions but it is rather the recognition and production of holistic thematic patterns that involve certain beliefs, perceptions, actions, semantics, social relations, contexts, and power. students not only learn to hear and talk about the pattern but also to see the world through and act by this discursive pattern. the science in the dialogue is not just a matter of vocabulary. classroom language is not just a list of technical terms, or even just a recital of definitions. it is the use of those terms in relation to one another, across a wide variety of contexts. students have to learn how to combine the meanings of different terms according to the accepted ways of talking science. they have to talk and write and reason in phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs of scientific language. … the pattern of connections among the meanings of words in a particular field of science i will call their thematic pattern. it is a pattern of semantic relationships that describes the thematic content, the science content, of a particular topic area. it is like a network of relationships among the scientific concepts in a field, but described semantically, in terms of how language is used in that field. there is science in the dialogue exactly to the extent that the semantic relationships and the thematic pattern built up by the dialogue reproduce the thematic pattern of language use in some field of science (lemke, 1990, pp. 12-13). lemke illustrates this pedagogical discursive process of the male teacher’s guiding his high school students into this pattern-recognition and pattern-production process by the following excerpt from a science lesson discourse about the quantum model of the atom: before his first question, the teacher describes the diagram he has on the board (see figure 1.1). he points to the central area of the diagram and identifies it as "the 1 s orbital." he points out that the diagram does not show that it really looks like a sphere, that is, threerather than two dimensional as it appears on the board. only then does he ask a question which refers directly to the diagram, and not to the whole of it, but specifically to the part of it he has just described. he has prepared a context for his question first. without the preparatory statements, the question would have been ambiguous or confusing for the class. (p. 6) pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e7 figure 1: atomic orbital diagram (lemke, 1990, p. 6) teacher: this is a representation of the one s . . . orbital. s'pozed to be, of course, three dimensional… what two elements could be represented by such a diagram? . . . jennifer? jennifer: hydrogen and helium? teacher: hydrogen and helium. hydrogen would have one electron... somewhere in there, and helium would have . . .? student: two electrons. teacher: two… this is… one s, and… the white would be…? mark? mark: two s. teacher: two s. and the green would be…? uhh… janice: two p. two p. teacher: janice. janice: two p. teacher: two p. yeah, the green would be 2p x and 2p y. (p. 5) in this excerpt, the students learn a discursive pattern regarding the quantum model of the atom by learning the correct way of talking about it through making the correct clarifications, correct inferences, and correctly answering the teacher’s questions. the teacher’s quizzing questions are aimed at testing the students’ existing understanding of the model but also at expanding this knowledge, which is nothing more but an intricate thematic pattern, as lemke argues. students may doubt or guess in their reply to the teacher’s quizzing questions as jennifer did (“hydrogen and helium?). their answer can be not elaborated or incomplete, as in the case of janice (it was not just 2p but 2px and 2py). it can be entirely correct, like in the case of mark. of course, it can be partially or even totally wrong, which was not presented in the excerpt. lemke argues that the students learn not “doing science,” but “talking science” – production of correct discursive patterns. this recognition and production of correct discursive patterns arguably is similar to how siri or alexa produce and recognize “speech” on smart devices. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e8 the mechanism of schoolish pattern-recognition student semantic sprouting pattern-recognition – the term emerged in german gestalt psychology (koffka, 1935; köhler, 1929) and was then actively used in computer science (bishop, 2006) – involves the emergence or active production of diverse potential patterns that may or may not approximate the targeted phenomenon well (what i call “sprouting”). this sprouting can be guided (“supervised”) by an expert or unguided – near randomly produced (sutton & barto, 1998), mediated or unmediated. these diverse potential patterns are sequentially evaluated on how likely each of them can be close to the targeted pattern. in each evaluation, the probabilistic confidence of some patterns grows while that of some other patterns decreases. strictly speaking, the winner pattern always remains probabilistic and never 100% certain as a new evaluation may change its probability to be the correct pattern. evaluation of potential patterns involves an action, in which the potential patterns are tested against the targeted phenomenon. often, the pattern-recognition includes many targeted patterns at once and is organized in a complex. for example, ocr (optical character recognition) that involves a program recognizing a scanned photo image of a text may include letter-patternrecognition, word-pattern-recognition, sentence-pattern, context-pattern-recognition, and so on (bishop, 2006; sutton & barto, 1998). one can argue that the modern computer-based pattern-recognition can be called “probabilistic cognitive behaviorism” as it is indifferent to goals, subjectivities, desires, rules, strategies, and so on and essentially based on “rewards” and “punishments” that change probabilistic weights for possible outcomes of a complex system. in conventional schools, students are active in sprouting out new semantic connections-inferences in the classroom subject-thematic discourse, as the students did in the excerpt in their response to the teacher’s lecture and questioning. some of this semantic sprouting is done by the students privately while some publicly. some students probably sprout the semantic connections when they were listening to the teacher’s lecture and watching the visual model of the atom (see error! reference source not found. above). the teacher’s mini-lecture promotes and provokes the students’ semantic sprouting. i agree with lemke, “without the preparatory statements, the [teacher’s initial] question would have been ambiguous or confusing for the class” (p. 6). we do not know how present, active, and deliberate this private process of semantic sprouting was for each and every student in the class. that is why, probably, a conventional teacher often seeks students’ public sprouting in public discourse. by asking challenging quizzing questions, the teacher promotes possible public sprouting through the students’ answers and silently in their heads. it is reasonable to assume that when jennifer, mark, janice, and other students provide their replies to the teacher’s quizzing questions, they do not only publicly reveal their semantic sprouts-connections, privately produced in response to teacher’s mini-lecture (and prior discourse), but also they publicly make new semantic sprouts-connections. also, their peers may continue producing their own semantic sprouts silently and privately in response to the teacher’s questions, their peers’ replies, the teacher’s evaluations and elaborations on the peer’s replies, and even their own discursive thinking. as to the nature of students’ semantic sprouting – how much it is emergent in reaction to other people’s (teachers’ and peer students’) discourse and demonstrations and how much it is based on deliberate actions on the part of the students – remains unclear and may differ from student to student. immediate semantic sprouting involves perceptual and semantic pattern-recognition, described by cognitive psychologist daniel kahneman as system#1(2011). however, in contrast to kahneman (and vygotsky (1978)), i do not equate meaning-making with mediation. kahneman seems to include nondeliberate and unmediated pattern-recognition in his system#1 while including deliberate mediation in his pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e9 system#2. since he equates meaning-making with mediation, meaning-making is also a part of his system#2. although i agree that the meaning-making process involves mediation, it cannot be reduced to mediation (see my discussion of meaning-making below in this essay). i will discuss mediation later in the paper. deliberate semantic sprouting involves internal dialogue, reasoning, and meaning-making, kahneman’s system#2 (but not only, see, matusov, 2017). deliberate semantic sprouting also includes immediate semantic sprouting – in a way, deliberate semantic sprouting is always a hybrid – but the reverse is not always true: immediate semantic sprouting can be pure, without any deliberate sprouting. probably (my hypothesis), more autodidactic, active learners generate more deliberate semantic sprouting, while more peripheral and passive students experience more immediate semantic sprouting. since conventional schooling heavily promotes the former (immediate semantic sprouting) and discourages the latter (deliberate semantic sprouting), i expect the overall prevalence of immediate over deliberate semantic sprouting in conventional school6. both pedagogical and psychological (indirect) evidence suggests that students’ semantic sprouting does exist but is never guaranteed. the students’ semantic sprouting exists even without the teacher’s direct instruction (lecturing, demonstration, and so on), without the teacher’s quizzing questions, without the teacher’s providing evaluative feedback and elaborations. it may be true that the students’ semantic sprouting is less likely to happen without the teacher’s guidance, although, for many students (but not in all!) it is not impossible (e.g., nicol & macfarlane-dick, 2006). at the same time, the teacher’s guidance does not guarantee students’ sprouting, not in all students, not all the time, not a predictable type of sprouting. it is safe to assume that students’ semantic sprouting is unpredictable in each and every case. however, the teacher’s quizzing feedback provides cropping of wrong semantic sprouts to push the correct pattern-recognition and pattern-production. that is probably why classroom discourse involving the teacher’s quizzing and feedback is so ubiquitous in modern conventional school. teacher’s approving and cropping of the students’ semantic sprouts – scaffolding one of the pedagogical roles of a conventional teacher is to crop out the students’ wrong semantic connections, approve and affirm the students’ correct semantic connections, clarify some of their fuzzy right connections, and encourage building still missing right connections through the triadic classroom discourse: 1) teacher’s quizzing question, 2) student’s reply, 3) teacher’s evaluation (lemke, 1990; mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975). to explicate the triadic discourse, the above exchange from lemke’s study will look like: teacher’s quizzing question: this is a representation of the one s . . . orbital. s'pozed to be, of course, three dimensional… what two elements could be represented by such a diagram? . . . jennifer? student’s response: jennifer: hydrogen and helium? teacher’s evaluation and elaboration: hydrogen and helium. hydrogen would have one electron... somewhere in there… (p. 5) the student (jennifer) was sprouting a semantic question-answer connection, although she was not sure whether her semantic connection to the teacher’s question was correct, from the teacher’s point of view. the teacher approved the student’s sprouting and elaborated on its justification (i.e., why the 6 see my discussion below in this chapter. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e10 pattern is correct) – mediated patterning, which may or may not mixed with genuine meaning-making for some particular students. in another example, the teacher cropped a student’s wrong sprout, teacher’s quizzing question: if i have one electron in the 2px, one electron in the 2py, . . . two electrons in the 2s, two electrons in the 1s, what element is being represented by this configuration?... ron? student’s response: ron: boron? teacher’s evaluation and mediation: that would be—that'd have uh . . . seven electrons. so, you'd have to have one here, one here, one here, one here, one here . . . one here—who said it? you? the teacher tacitly rejected ron’s answer and mediated his rejection by explanation of why the chemical element boron did not fit the pattern presented on the diagram. other students provided the correct spouting accepted by the teacher, student’s response: carbon. teacher’s quizzing question [beginning]: what's— students’ response: carbon! carbon! teacher’s evaluation and elaboration: carbon. carbon. here. six electrons. and they can be anywhere within those—confining—orbitals. (pp. 15, 17) the last exchange slightly deviated from the strict triadic discourse because the first student was making a response, unsanctioned by the teacher. other students joined that student interrupting the teacher, who seemed to want to reiterate his previous question since ron was wrong. the teacher sanctioned the student’s response by evaluating their answers as correct ones. the teacher accepted unsanctioned (unnamed) student’s response before. in conventional schools, at times, the teacher’s guidance of the students’ discursive patternrecognition and pattern-production goes far beyond direct instruction (e.g., lecture, demonstration) and the triadic discourse, described above. psychologist jerome bruner and his colleagues (bruner, wood, & ross, 1976) describe the guidance employed in conventional schools as “scaffolding.” the goal of the scaffolding is for the teacher to actively lead the student to a curricular endpoint preset by the teacher in advance. in lemke’s case, the preset curricular endpoint apparently was the quantum model of the atom (and, specifically, the atomic orbits of electrons in the atom). rogoff argues that scaffolding involves much more than the organization of discourse but also the teacher’s management of the students’ motivation, frustration, and challenges7, the teacher’s presentation of the idealized pattern, and so on: 1. recruiting the child's interest in the task as it is defined by the tutor. 2. reducing the number of steps required to solve a problem by simplifying the task, so that the learner can manage components of the process and recognize when a fit with task requirements is achieved. 3. maintaining the pursuit of the goal, through the motivation of the child and direction of the activity. 4. marking critical features of discrepancies between what a child has produced and the ideal solution. 7 jim cresswell, who read a previous version of this manuscript, made a comment, that i agree with, “i would say it is the teacher’s co-construction of these psychological predicates.” pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e11 5. controlling frustration and risk in problem-solving. 6. demonstrating an idealized version of the act to be performed (rogoff, 1990, p. 94). in lemke’s excerpt above, #2, #4, and #6 of rogoff’s principles of scaffolding are evident as the teacher breaks the quantum model of the atom into chunks by his quizzing questions (and probably in his lecturing) and by revealing possible discrepancies between the ideal model and the students’ replies via providing his evaluation of the students’ responses. also, the quantum model of the atom remains idealized as it is simplified in certain aspects (e.g., from quantum mechanics’ point of view, strictly speaking, electrons do not have trajectories, and their “orbitals” represent probability distributions). the #1, #3, and #5 principles are not present, but they may occur outside of the excerpt. at the same time, lemke’s extract has two additional aspects that are not present in rogoff’s list: 7) triadic discourse involving teacher’s quizzing question, student’s response, and teacher’s evaluation and elaboration; and 8) managing the discourse to make sure that the students’ replies are always sanctioned by the teacher. the list of essential features of scaffolding is probably incomplete, and the issue of how essential each of the aspects is remains open for future investigation. now i want to turn to the issue of the contrast between conventional school pattern-recognition and pattern-production with: 1) pattern-recognition and production in everyday life, outside of conventional school, 2) learning guided by meaning-making rather than by pattern-recognition and production, and 3) the concept of genuine intrinsic education. pattern-recognition/production in conventional school vs. everyday life i consider three dimensions that reveal the prevalent contrast between pattern-recognition and production in conventional school vs. in everyday life. these three dimensions involve: i) the relevance of the pattern-recognition/production for the students, ii) the ownership of the underlining values of the pattern, and iii) the realness of the pattern. i argue that in contrast to conventional school, the pattern-recognition and production process in everyday life is more often than not ontological rather than alienated (relevance), more authorial rather than technological (ownership), and more experiential rather than discursive (realness). i also consider progressive pedagogy as a pattern-recognition/production hybrid between conventional school and everyday life. relevance: ontological vs. alienated ontological8 pattern-recognition and production involve a person’s genuine interest in and/or genuine pragmatic need for this pattern. for example, a person who got a new remote control may search for new patterns of his or her actions with the new remote control leading to desired outcomes on the device associated with the remote control. in contrast to lemke’s case above, in this case of the new remote control, the person’s motivation is rooted in the actor him/herself – his/her own ontology – and not in the teacher – in the teacher’s pedagogical actions, motivating the student. in everyday pattern-recognition and production, the pattern is often desired and owned by the actor, while in school, the pattern is demanded and, thus, imposed by the authority. alienated pattern-recognition and production involve unconditional pleasing of the authority (matusov, 2011a). this pleasing – the student’s desire to get the teacher to approve the pattern that emerges in or is actively designed by the student – guides the student’s pattern-recognition and production. the pleasing is unconditional because the student is not legitimately involved in the 8 theological-philosophical term “ontology” is very polysemic. i used it within an existential philosophical tradition as “being-in-theworld.” pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e12 negotiation of what patterns he or she needs to recognize or produce. in conventional schools, a student does not have a legitimate voice in shaping the curriculum. ownership: authorial vs. technological authorial pattern-recognition and pattern-production involve the actor’s attention, consideration, and approval of the values, defining the recognized and/or produced patterns’ success or failure. bakhtin was similarly talking about putting one’s own signature under one’s deed (bakhtin, 1993), taking responsibility for the value. in conventional school values, defining the patterns’ success and failure are firmly controlled and possessed by the authority (i.e., the teachers, the test designers, graders, governmental agencies imposing the prescribed curriculum). in the case of learning an unfamiliar remote control, the actor him/herself decides what outcome is desirable (e.g., switching on the tv) and whether it is successful or not. in conventional school, pattern-recognition and production is technological because the teacher, often being disinterested him/herself, treats the student as a tool to produce the pattern that the teacher pedagogically desires to produce. authorial pattern-recognition and production promotes authorial learning (matusov, 2011a), which organizational psychologists argyris and shon (1978) called learning 2. since authorial pattern-recognition and production is guided by the actor’s desires, owned by the actor, the actor has an opportunity to reflect on, revise, or even abandon the desire altogether. this is authorial learning or learning 2. in contrast, in technological learning, the desire guiding the pattern-recognition and production process is owned by the authority and is essentially non-negotiable for the student. this type of situation promotes learning 1, or thermostat-like learning, or deficit model learning, focusing on the gap between the ideal desired pattern, controlled by the teacher, and the student’s actual discursive or action-based performance as judged by the teacher (#4 on rogoff’s list defining scaffolding). in authorial learning, learning 2 and learning 1 co-occur, with learning 2 guiding the process. analyzing everyday problem solving, lave (1988) concluded that everyday problem solving (learning 1) is often based on problem redefining (learning 2). for example, while shopping for the cheapest cereal, a shopper may redefine the criterion for successful shopping by also considering space for storing the large box of the cheapest cereal and not only its price. the shopping process often involves redefining what exactly the shopper wants through considering the choices of the products available in the store and negotiation of what patterns he or she needs to recognize or produce. in conventional schools, a student does not have a legitimate voice in shaping the curriculum. realness: experiential vs. discursive finally, experiential pattern-recognition and production involves a person’s holistic experience, rather than a discourse organized by the teacher that becomes the guiding force to form a desired perceptual or action-based pattern. experiential pattern-recognition and production has “the reality check,” while discursive pattern-recognition and pattern-production does not. in the latter case, “the resistance of material” – i.e., what makes student’s perception and action right or wrong – is fully controlled by the school authority, which makes it arbitrary. in the extreme, the school can (and occasionally does) teach whatever nonsense – whatever untrue, irrelevant, and/or useless patterns to the students – it may wish (see matusov, 2020, in press, chapter 2, for an example of such teaching). in contrast, in the former case, however arbitrary the actor’s desires may be (e.g., making the tv fly by pressing certain buttons on the tv), the realizations of these desires – i.e., patterns for desired actions – are never arbitrary because they are firmly grounded in the reality of the world. i call conventional pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e13 schoolish knowledge “conventional” (matusov, 2009) because its truth is based on the conventional authority for the students: something is true because the teacher or textbook or school exam or scientists or powerful societal traditional norm say so. below, i will elaborate on this point when i consider intersubjectivity. saying all that, i want to nuance that, of course, in everyday life, there are many occasions for discursive pattern-recognition and pattern-production learning as well (e.g., learning a language). also, experiential pattern-recognition and pattern-production can happen in conventional schools as well (e.g., lab science classes). besides, discursive pattern-recognition and production may involve experiential aspects (e.g., semantic sprouting based on the student’s past experiences), while experiential patternrecognition and production may involve discursive aspects (e.g., symbols on a remote control or the remote control manual or verbal guidance by other people). finally, there can be school-like situations in everyday life and everyday-life-like situations in conventional schools (matusov, 2009). nevertheless, the overall contrast of the dominance of ontological, authorial, and experiential aspects of pattern-recognition and production in everyday life and the supremacy of alienated, technological, and discursive patternrecognition and production in conventional school remains more or less intact, in my view. progressive pedagogical education hybrid progressive pedagogical9 education, represented by famous american educational philosopher john dewey, tries to address the problem of irrelevance, alienation, and non-authenticity of the students’ school experiences by blending together conventional school and everyday pattern-recognition and production. progressive pedagogy organizes instruction in the form of pragmatic experiential learning activities that funnel the students into the curricular endpoints preset by the society (i.e., “curricular standards”) – i.e., a body of democratically elected local and national political representatives of the general public, educational scholars and philosophers, and disciplinary scholars (i.e., scientists) (dewey, 1956). it promotes the ontological and experiential nature of pattern-recognition and production in the learning activities from everyday practices. however, it preserves the control of the curriculum inherited in conventional schooling making the ownership of the patterns pseudo-authorial. it may feel like authorial at a local level of activities as students may have some freedom of defining their own values and set their own problems and goals in the learning activities, but eventually, the students’ values, problems, and goals have to be funneled into the curricular endpoints preset by the society. however, besides this preset curricular core, the students can arrive at their own emergent curricular endpoints, which can be considered as personalized, authorial, extracurricular enrichment and may involve meaning-making outside of the pattern-recognition and production requirement. intersubjectivity intersubjectivity is a social pattern of behavior involving subjectivity. the intersubjective pattern can be based on different types of behavioral coordination among individuals (matusov, 1996). this coordination may include sameness. for example, an infant follows the mother’s outlook and, thus, sees what the mother sees (murray & trevarthen, 1985). alternatively, intersubjective coordination may involve a transactional relationship. for example, when a male wolf, losing a fighting, switches to a submissive role, becoming intentionally defenseless, while the other, winning, wolf assumes a dominant role (instead 9 the progressive pedagogical educational movement has to be distinguished from the progressive administrative educational movement. the latter focused on the organization of the institutional practices to make them more scientifically efficient and rational. the former focused on pedagogy to increase the relevance of pedagogical experiences for the students (labaree, 2010). pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e14 of killing the defenseless rival) (fogel, 1993). or, it may involve a division of labor like in a modern enterprise. intersubjectivity can be immediate or mediated. the latter can involve shared beliefs or individual coordinated calculations. thus, for example, dual bicycle sprint race often starts with the rivals staying or slowly moving, refusing to take the lead10. the intersubjective pattern involves a complex calculation. an immediate lead often results in losing because the leading bicyclist would use more energy overcoming the resistance of the air while the closely following bicyclist would save energy. however, this also depends on the distance between the bicyclists, their positions on the tracks, how far they are from the finish line, and so forth. in this case, the intersubjectivity is not only highly mediated by the bicyclists’ calculations but also dynamic leading to diverse patterns. intersubjectivity does not only coordinate people but also creates a new socially constructed reality. for example, money is based on intersubjectivity. intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individual humans. many of the most important agents in history are intersubjective. money, for example, has no objective value. you cannot eat, drink or wear a dollar bill. yet as long as billions of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages and clothing. if the baker suddenly loses his faith in the dollar bill and refuses to give me a loaf of bread for this green piece of paper, it doesn’t matter much. i can just go down a few blocks to the nearby supermarket. however, if the supermarket cashiers also refuse to accept this piece of paper, along with the hawkers in the market and the salespeople in the mall, then the dollar will lose its value. the green pieces of paper will go on existing, of course, but they will be worthless (harari, 2017). as harari points out, intersubjectivity won’t evaporate if a person stops believing in this socially constructed reality. the life of such an individual will become very difficult. by disbelieving in the intersubjective reality, the individual would disrupt it for other people, and the other people will push back the spoilsport11. the social fabric of conventional education is entirely intersubjective. for example, in my graduate classes, sometimes i ask my students out of the blue, “what is two plus two?” without exception, my students reply, “four.” this is even though my question was out of any immediate context of our class discussion. also, my students know perfectly well that i know what two plus two is – they know that this is not an information-seeking question but rather a form of a teacher’s quizzing. interesting enough, when i asked some of them the same question outside of the class when we bumped into each other on a campus street or at a campus café, they never reply to me “four.” often, my students become confused, asking me to repeat the question, “what?” or “why?!”12 they seem to want to know why i asked this strange, out context, question. my little experiment reveals conventional school’s intersubjectivity of socially constructed reality where a teacher can ask quizzing questions at will, abruptly, and out of context. the power of this 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fahlewcoxai 11 ana marjanovic-shane (2016) argues that genuine (dialogic meaning-making) education is based on spoilsports’ deconstruction of the culturally given intersubjectivity. students have to be placed in a position of such spoilsports. 12 you can watch a video fragment that shows reactions of adults after being asked schoolish, quizzing, questions outside of school context. people are confused, puzzled, disoriented, or laughing when are faced with schoolish questions in everyday life: https://youtu.be/uv1o62t8lmg pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e15 intersubjectivity is very strong. even if i told my students about my experiment in the classroom and then asked them what two plus two is, they revealed that it was very difficult for them to resist not to say “four.” obviously, they do not have this problem outside of the classroom. intersubjectivity creates powerful “psychological affordances” (gibson, 1979) – i.e. when a particular pattern of the environment or a particular situation forces an individual’s actions even despite their will. as i showed in the section above, teaching science (and other academic subjects) in conventional schools is mostly about the teacher’s socialization of students in intersubjective socially constructed reality through a pattern-recognition and pattern-construction. harari (2017) comments, “people constantly reinforce each other’s [intersubjective] beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.” as i will show below, individual or intersubjective, immediate or mediated, charged with psychological affordances or not, self-sufficient or embedded in webs of activities and relationships, behavioral and subjective patterns are not really meanings. they can become meanings only when they enter a sphere of dialogue. dialogic meaning-making vs. pattern-recognition/production in education according to the russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin, meaning-making is dialogic. dialogic meaning-making is defined as the relationship between a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question, and serious response to it (bakhtin, 1986, 1999). this dialogic definition of meaning-making is dramatically different from a common monologic understanding of meaning-making. from a conventional monological point of view, meaning is located in a particular statement or rooted in a word, or in a gesture, or in a tool, or in a mediation (mead, 1956; vygotsky, 1978). from the bakhtinian dialogic perspective, a statement/word/gesture/tool/mediation does not have any meaning until it is viewed as a reply to some question (in a broader sense as puzzlement, perplexity, tension, interrogation, inquiry, wonderment, and so on)13. for example, often a mathematical statement like 2+2=4 is viewed as meaningful because it tacitly replies to a question, “how much is 2 plus 2?” but in this case, the 2+2=4 is really meaningful only if the question, “how much is 2 plus 2?” is a genuine, interested, information-seeking question, which is probably not the case for most or all of my readers. the meaning of my 2+2=4 statement for me is answering my own genuine question of what an example of dialogic meaning-making can be. however, my readers may imagine a different genuine, interested, information-seeking question behind my use of 2+2=4 example, and, in this case, they may have their own meaning, different from mine. also, my (and other people’s) meaning-making may not need to be stable as we can come up with different questions while re-reading 2+2=4 in “the same text” (thus, the text never remains the same). although not necessarily language-based, meaning-making is always discursive and rooted in language. in a speechand language-rich environment, human actions and silences find their discursive properties of raising and addressing questions to others. although not necessarily always literally (physically) collective – as meaning-making can occur in one person during an internal dialogue or when reading others’ written texts – meaning-making is an inherently social phenomenon. any internal or imaginary dialogue within or by one person is always a purified and reduced genuine dialogue among real, living, people, who can genuinely (not imaginarily!) reply on their own behalf (lobok, 2012, 2014; matusov, 2009; nikulin, 1998, 2006, 2010; sidorkin, 1999). opaqueness of the replying and addressing consciousness of the other, 13 actually, vygotsky also has an example of how a statement “the watch fell” may mean two entirely different things based on what questions it is answering (vygotsky & kozulin, 1986). this is one of the times where he comes close to discussing dialogic meaningmaking, in my view. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e16 taking responsibility, interaddressivity, – are a few issues among many others that distinguish internal or imaginary dialogue from genuine dialogue with other people. from an educational practice perspective, a student’s meaning-making process starts with a genuine, interested, information-seeking question raised by the student, not by the teacher. at least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. without a genuine question or at least puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, or tension, a student cannot be involved in a meaning-making process (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009) – and therefore cannot be involved in education. provoking such types of questions in students is proto-teaching, preparation for teaching. socrates’ dialogues, with the exception of his dialogue with a slave in meno, started with students asking genuine questions (matusov, 2009). that is why i argue that there is little visible evidence of the meaning-making process in lemke’s excerpt from a conventional science lesson above. even when meaning-making may occur there, like in the student’s (jennifer) question, “hydrogen and helium?”, it is not clear how genuine, interested, and information-seeking, this question was for jennifer. and even if so, her meaning-making was probably subordinated to her pattern-recognition to please the teacher. a fullblown meaning-making process, transcending the given, does not know preset curricular endpoints, educational standards, as its goal. the meaning-making process disrupts the given curricular standards and endpoints. it is wild and unpredictable (lobok, 2001, 2012). it does not bow to any authority (cf. bakhtin, 1991). it is bottomless (bakhtin, 1986). it is unfinalizable in time and in principle as more and more questions can be raised, and different replies can be given (nikulin, 2010). students’ meaning-making is a social process that may require a teacher’s, peers’ and other people’s help. let’s consider the following case of an emergent dialogic meaning-making process among elementary school fourth-grade students in a typing class: a primary consideration in developing a community of inquiry is to give students ownership of the tasks and problems posed. throughout the year, many mathematical investigations grew out of students' questions and observations from mathematics class, other subject areas, personal experiences, and children's literature. the following conversation prompted us to engage the students in a rich exploration in finding patterns in rational numbers. the students were working on a computer-assisted spelling program that reported individual results as a statement, such as "19 correct out of 20 or 95%." thom: i only missed one this time! [his report showed that he got 15 correct out of 16, or 94%.] will: me, too! i got a 95. [he points to the screen and shows the other student. his report says that he got 19 correct out of 20, or 95%.] thom: hey, why did you get a 95 when i got a 94? we both only missed one. that's not fair! will: i think your computer is broken. … to begin our investigation, thom and will shared their conversation about their spelling scores. some students agreed that the computer must have made an error; others thought that the computer could be right, but they were not sure why the percents were different. although some students thought that the magnitude of the numbers might contribute to different percents, most of the students' conversation focused on the difference between the number of words spelled correctly and the total number of words. to prompt the students to explore the problem further, i posed the following question: “suppose that you took a spelling test with only two words on it and you misspelled one of them. the computer reports that you got one word correct out of two. what percent of the pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e17 words did you get correct?" the students discussed this question for several minutes with their "math buddies." when asked to share, one pair of students responded that 1 out of 2 was 50 percent because only half the words were correct, and 50 percent means half. other students chimed in and nodded agreement. we pointed out that 1 out of 2 means that you missed only one word, just as thom got 15 out of 16 and will got 19 out of 20. we then asked why the percent scores were different. sheila: ninety-five percent means that you almost got all the words correct. so, 15 but of 16 and 19 out of 20 should both be 95 percent, since you almost have all the words correct. teacher. do you think that 1 out of 2 should also be 95 percent? sheila: one out of 2 is usually 50 percent, but it also could be 95 percent, since you almost have all the words correct. john: no, 1 out of 2 is always 50 percent because 1 is half of 2 and half of something is 50 percent, just like 50 cents is always half of a dollar. john, and most others, had a clear understanding that 1 out of 2 was always 50 percent; however, they were not able to reason why the three ratios resulted in different percents (drier, 2000, p. 359). please note that here it was students thom and will and not their teacher who initiated the genuine question, inquiry, and puzzlement for themselves and the class (but not necessary for the teacher who might feel that she knew the answer). however, in a dialogic meaning-making pedagogy, a teacher can provoke students’ questions, inquiries, and puzzlements. it was ok for the teacher to recognize this math inquiry raised by the students as a legitimate learning problem during a language-arts lesson. meaningmaking does not know academic subject boundaries or, actually, any boundaries – bakhtin (1986) called this feature of the dialogic meaning-making process “heterodiscoursia,”14 literally “a diversity of ways of speaking, ” “a diversity of discourses.” another important aspect of the full-blown dialogic meaning-making process is that it is not and cannot be validated by an authority (e.g., the teacher) but only by the discourse itself. bakhtin (1991) called it “internally persuasive discourse,” contrast to “authoritative discourse” (e.g., of a conventional school) where validations of contributions come exclusively from the authority. however, my colleague and i argue that in this discourse, the internal of its persuasion and validation come from the discourse itself – it is internal to the discourse itself – and not to the individual (i.e., internal to the individual mind) (matusov & von duyke, 2010). in an internally persuasive discourse, each and every participant remains the only legitimate judge for themselves of how much each meaning-making contribution is valid or contested. of course, this authorial judgment is never final and remains challenged by authorial judgments by other people now or in the future. the third important feature of the internally persuasive meaning-making discourse is that the outcomes of the discourse, viewed by the participants as always provisional, are unpredictable and can lead in many directions. in the given case, the computer (and, apparently, the teacher) accessed spelling accuracy by the proportion of correct words to total words. this mathematical model was based on many questionable assumptions apparently rejected by thom, will, and sheila. thus, this mathematical model implied that all mistakes were the same. however, imagine that a student made a spelling mistake and learned from it, avoiding a similar mistake in the future. in this case, arguably, a student’s spelling accuracy becomes 100%, since a student becomes perfect at spelling. in another case, that of a spelling bee competition, making one mistake means that the contestant has lost the competition – it does not matter when it occurred and with how many words. it is either 100% or 0%. 14 unfortunately, in the english translation, a wrong term, “intertextuality”, was used for the russian term “raznorech’e” (“разноречье”) (todorov, 1984). i introduced a better translation “heterodiscoursia” in a parallel to another bakhtinian term “heteroglossia” (“разноголосье”) that was well-translated in english (matusov, 2011b). pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e18 the computer’s (and the teacher’s) math model implies, among other things, the spelling accuracy continuity – i.e., if a student makes one mistake out of 2 words, for example, he or she will continue making mistakes with the same frequency of 50%. of course, this is very questionable. a student who made one mistake out of 20 (like will) might continue not making spelling mistakes for the next 1,000 words (or not) or may start learning from his mistakes. from this perspective, students who made just one mistake were equally accurate regardless of how many words they wrote. this is what thom, will, and sheila seemed to imply to me. unfortunately, the teacher did not investigate their assumptions that require different math models from the one that both the computer and the teacher used. john’s position was unclear to me and also seemed not to have been explored by the teacher. this leads me to conclude that this dialogic meaning-making process was rather limited and a bit unguided. as the case suggests, dialogic meaning-making may not guarantee any productive outcome, however provisional it may be. it may flexibly dissolve any particular thematic focus (nikulin, 2006, 2010). in this particular case, we do not know how much the teacher respected this principle of the full-blown dialogic meaning-making process – she might or might not funnel the discursive process to her preset curricular point. if she did, she would be a progressive educator, subordinating and exploiting the students’ dialogic meaning-making for the pattern-recognition process (see above). although patterns of perception, patterns of action, patterns of communication, patterns of relation, patterns of power, patterns of thinking, and so on can become a subject of dialogic meaning-making, there is an essential difference between patterns and dialogic meaning as such in, at least, two important aspects. first, in the dialogic meaning-making process, people are not only genuinely, ontologically, interested in it – resolving some question, tension, puzzlement, inquiry, and so on – but also in other people: 1) in what other people may think and how they feel about it; however these people define this it, and 2) in other people as such – in what they are doing, feeling, relating, and thinking about; in the relationship with these people; in the potential that these people may realize and offer; and so on (nikulin, 2006, 2010). i called this aspect of dialogic meaning-making “interaddressivity” – i.e., genuine and deep interest in the people’s dialogic interlocutors (matusov, 2011b). the interaddressive interest in it vs. in people, i.e., in one’s dialogic partners, may vary and can create an important tension in a dialogic meaning-making process. in contrast, pattern-recognition is always concerned with it – would it be things, processes, behaviors, or even people. pattern-recognition does not address or reply – meaning-making does. second, in pattern-recognition, one tries to grasp the complete form of things, processes, behaviors, actions, perceptions, and events – i.e., finalize them. as with creating any form, one finalizes and conceives of the pattern as finalizable, even when this form of the pattern is probabilistic (e.g., a probabilistic pattern of winning in a lottery) – a pattern of probability. pattern-recognition is exhaustible and has its bottom. in contrast, meaning-making is relational (i.e., the relation between the genuine question and serious answer), bottomless, inexhaustible, unfinalized, and unfinalizable in principle (bakhtin, 1986; nikulin, 2006, 2010). pattern can become meaningful only when it is dialogized. in sum, pattern-recognition per se is essentially monologic, while meaning-making is essentially dialogic. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e19 conclusion: pattern-recognition/production and dialogic meaning-making vs. education finally, i want to address the question of how the monologic pattern-recognition/production pedagogies and the dialogic meaning-making pedagogies are situated within the practice of education. both pattern-recognition/production and meaning-making processes are often present in both monologic and dialogic pedagogies. however, these processes play different roles in each pedagogy. in the monologic, conventional and innovative, dialogic meaning-making, if it occurs at all, is subordinated to the emergence of the “correct” pattern – correct from either the authority’s point of view or/and from the pragmatic point of view. in the dialogic pedagogies, pattern-recognition/production is subordinated to this meaning-making. i think that all pedagogies are a pattern-meaning hybrid, which may have both forces at play. prioritization of one of these two aspects defines the nature of the pedagogy. i argue that the monologic pattern-recognition/production pedagogies are mainly concerned with and primarily focused on the reproduction of and socialization in existing, ready-made, culture, and specific cultural practices. the alienated pattern-recognition of conventional school approaches this task by chunking the ready-made culture into self-contained basic skills (e.g., reading, writing, calculating), basic prescribed knowledge, and basic dispositions. the students’ authorial agency is postponed until their education is “completed” (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016). some educators call this type of education – “training” (e.g., dearden, 1984). in contrast, the innovative pattern-recognition of progressive school approaches this task by engaging the students in ontologically attractive learning activities that are a funnel to carefully preselected holistic ready-made cultural practices. my colleague ana marjanovicshane and i called this type of education – “closed participatory socialization in a targeted cultural practice” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). we call it “socialization” because, in contrast to training, it views the ready-made practice holistically, involving the participants’ social relations and identities. we call this socialization “closed” because it does not see students’ potential or actual contributions to transform, modify, or transcend this ready-made cultural practice as legitimate. the dialogic meaning-making pedagogies are interested in transcending existing ready-made practices, relations, and communities of practices and in creating new ones through creative dialogic meaning-making by raising questions, concerns, issues, inquiries, curiosities, problems, challenges, controversies, and so on (kovbasyuk & blessinger, 2013). the dialogic meaning-making pedagogies are authorial as they expect and legitimize students’ authorship in making culture. ana marjanovic-shane and i (2012) distinguish at least two major dialogic meaning-making pedagogies. we called one “open participatory socialization” because it mainly focuses on the successful and creative socialization of the students in existing and innovative practices, while this socialization remains open for the student’s authorial inputs and contributions. in open participatory socialization, students can legitimately transcend the practice, in which they socialize. this education involves culturemaking – construction of a new practice – rather than culture reproduction. it prioritizes creative authorship in the students. we call the other dialogic meaning-making pedagogy “critical dialogue” because it mainly focuses on critical examination of the existing and new self, culture, world, practices, and society, while it views open participatory socialization as its by-product. it promotes critical authorship in the students. we presented all four pedagogies in the following table (i slightly updated this table by adding the new, third, column on types of pedagogy and by adding references in the second column): pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e20 table 1: diverse approaches to education (based on matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012, p. 165) approaches to education example types of pedagogy curriculum instruction/guidance alienated learning often conventional schooling patternrecognition/ production (alienated, technological, discursive) poiesis: reproduction of readymade culture poiesis closed participatory socialization “imitative participation”, progressive education, appropriation of the ready-made culture (van oers, 2012; vygotsky, 1978) patternrecognition/ production (ontological, pseudo authorial, experiential) poiesis: reproduction of readymade culture praxis open participatory socialization “community of practice”, “legitimate peripheral participation” (lave & wenger, 1991; wenger, 1998) dialogic meaningmaking (creative) praxis: production of culture praxis critical dialogue “dialogic education for authorial agency” (matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016) dialogic meaningmaking (critical) praxis of praxis: critical stance on culture praxis as i stated above, we used aristotelian notions of “poiesis” and “praxis” to characterize curriculum and instruction in these four types of pedagogy (aristotle, 2000; carr, 2006). poiesis refers to an activity, in which its goal and the definition of quality preset (standards) and preexist the activity itself. in contrast, praxis refers to an activity, in which its goal and the definition of quality emerges in the activity itself. thus, alienated pattern-recognition/production of conventional school involves poiesis of both standardized curriculum and standardized instruction as both of them are preset in advance. “standardized social and cultural behavior patterns limit creative and authentic communication between individuals and groups” (dumazedier, 1974, p. 72). when instrumentalism, servility, efficiency, survival, and necessities take over and are prioritized, they become enemies of true democracy, true dialogue, true education, and true self-realization. in a pattern-recognition/production pedagogy of closed participatory socialization in progressive schooling, the curriculum remains poiesis while instruction becomes authorial praxis. in a dialogic meaning-making pedagogy of open participatory socialization, both curriculum and instruction become praxis. finally, in a dialogic meaning-making pedagogy of critical dialogue, instruction remains praxis while curriculum pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e21 becomes “praxis of praxis” – i.e., critical examination of life (cf. socrates' motto, "the unexamined life is not worth living," plato & riddell, 1973). in my upcoming book (matusov, 2020, in press), i argue that only the latter should be the legitimate overall goal of genuine education. one may argue that by this statement, defining the goal of genuine education, i made education practice close and finalized – i.e., poiesis-like, in contradiction to my previous claims that genuine education should be praxis-like, in which its goal has to emerge in the activity itself. however, in my view, my definition of genuine education is self-deconstructive because it involves a critical examination of education itself as an aspect of one’s life (and critical exanimation of the criticality itself – its limitations). but the question still remains: why is the alienated pattern-recognition/production pedagogy of conventional schooling so prevalent in the past and present of our society15? standards-based schooling teaches students conventional knowledge that arguably constitutes “cultural capital” (hirsch, 1996), creates hegemonic consensuses in the society (gee, 1996), and prepares workers for their future workplaces that require these standards and mental templates (labaree, 1997). arguably, conventional knowledge can help people achieve success 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(1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.314 | vol. 8 (2020) e24 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 6. jorgensen^j (layout)^j from a school rebellion to a rebel school^j 2023-01-08.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a133 from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen forsøksgymnaset in oslo (the first principal), norway abstract the following text is a translation of two chapters from a norwegian book, “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” by mosse jørgensen (jørgensen, 1971). she was the first “principal,” i.e., the “school leader” and a teacher in a democratic high school, the experimental gymnasium of oslo [fosøksgymnaset i oslo] in norway. although this book was translated into eight languages in the 1970s, it never was translated into english. the editors of this special issue decided to translate and publish1 two chapters of the book: chapter iii – the people and chapter vi – difficulties with democracy2. these chapters represent a valuable addition to the special issue on dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. they illustrate, complement, and complete four other studies in this special issue issue, which also focus on the experimental gymnasium of oslo and its swedish sister school in gothenburg (marjanovic-shane, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c; marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023). we are publishing translations of these two chapters in honor of their author mosse jørgensen, who is no more. mosse jørgensen (1921-2009) was one of the founders and the first principal of the experimental gymnasium in oslo (ego) [forsøksgymnaset i oslo]. as one of the founding members of the ego planning group, together with about 15-20 founding students, mosse initially performed the role of the school administrative leader for two years (1967-1969). when she stepped down from the school administrative leader's position, she became a regular teacher in the school, teaching in the broadly defined area of the “orientation in the present times” (something like combined social sciences). a number of her articles and books about the school inspired and influenced many norwegian educators and educational researchers. she was active as a writer, speaker, and peace activist. some of her books include the art of surviving with a teenager in the house, 1969; from school rebellion to rebel school, 1971; and each other. how can the school educate about community and social responsibility? 1981. ïïò 1 dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal was given gracious permission to publish parts of the book “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” by the current owner of the estates of mosse jørgensen and the pax publishing house. the original book “fra skoleopprør til opprørsskole,” published in 1971 in norwegian, is available free of charge as an open access option through the norwegian national library system. although the book was translated to 8 languages, it was never published in english. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal is the first to publish excerpts from this book. 2 chapter iii – the people (menneskenne) and chapter vi – difficulties with democracy (vanskeligheter i demokratiet) were translated to english by ms. gro asland, a norwegian translator. the forward to the book written by mosse jørgensen was translated by ana marjanovic-shane with the help of google translate. issn: 2325-3290 (online) from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a134 foreword to the book “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” by mosse jørgensen this is not a book about “the art of creating school democracy.” nobody can write that book yet. for no one has managed to create a fully-fledged school democracy. it is a book about difficulties and failures, driving oneself to despair, defeat, broken hopes, and new impulses and inspirations. it does not provide many solutions to problems encountered on the road to direct democracy. but it reveals and clarifies some of them. uncovering the problems and bringing them to light is the first thing that must be done if you really want to find solutions. i do not think many people are aware of the problems that direct democracy in school raises. what experimental gymnasium in oslo has done is that we stepped into the midst of the unknown and faced whatever confronted us with open eyes. this is why our experiences should be of interest to most educators if one really wants to expand democracy and implement it in schools, that is, if everything declared about democracy is not just empty talk. whatever may be, whether democracy means something or not: it cannot be avoided anymore, there is no way around it. our schools must become more democratic than they are now. therefore, it is necessary to bring to light all the difficulties we encountered – and it is necessary to tell about all our joys. for this is not a book about unhappy students and teachers. it is a book about a group of people who experienced insecurities and fears, sorrows and joys in a stronger combination than most school people do. in short, a book about people whose lives were more intense than the lives of others. democracy also means people’s right to be themselves and live as themselves as much as possible. therefore, we became closer to each other, and we came closer to what is the lived reality of human beings. we brought school closer to life. it’s not easy to live but it’s exciting. that’s why school democracy is not easy but it’s exciting. for far too long, people and especially school people have believed that problems can be put under the rug. this is one of the reasons why our societies have become greenhouses for stressed neurotics. that is also why school democracy is necessary. chapter iii – the people the student when students enter high school, they have completed 9-10 years in a school system that is becoming more and more merciless and competitive year by year. in that school, all behavior is centrally administered and regulated from minute to minute, so to speak. you always sit at the same desk, always in the same position in the rows of desks. you leave the from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a135 classroom and enter it when the bell rings. you work on the assignments handed out from the teacher’s desk, and you read what others have decided. this is what a wise 14-year-old writes about his obligatory school attendance: doesn’t all interest in learning and acquiring knowledge get killed by the burden of duties, warnings, and endless demands to comply both with discipline and “cleverness”? yes, this ambition to be the best is destructive for many students. and then there is the fear of not living up to the standard the teacher wants you to have. the fear of not getting a good grade for behavior is an underlying constant worry. in all of this, what should have been the primary concern – gets drowned. namely, it is to stimulate the 14-year-olds to develop as independent, decent, mature, and well-prepared in various subjects, as well as for life. the feeling expressed by this 14-year-old is reinforced during the following school years. the years between 16 and 20 are probably the most challenging period in a human being’s life in our society. hardly a generation ago, most 15 to 16-year-olds were part of the workforce and could look upon themselves as useful members of society. now, most young people are left outside of society and forced to be passive in a strict school system until way past the age in which their consciousness of the surrounding society awakens. at this age, they ought to have the chance to contribute to the public debate and development of society with new and fresh blood and new perspectives. instead, they are dependent on their parents economically and are expected to submit to the school’s demands concerning discipline, obedience, and passivity in relation to their surroundings. during these years, the majority experience their first sexual encounters, accompanied by feelings of insecurity and unrest. they are expected to choose a profession and their place in society. the freedom to choose a profession – a great advantage for people in our time – is also freedom connected with doubt and stress. during these years, many of them are sitting in their high school classrooms, nicely behind each other at their desks. on the surface, their lives look respectable, well-groomed, and orderly. but, just underneath this surface, there is a chaos of inner unrest and disorder. sometimes grown-ups may get a glimpse of what is covered by the slick school facade. most high school students are aware of a lot of changes that have been going on out in the world that the school has completely missed out on. some have parents whose views of upbringing are in tune with what has happened during the past 50 years. their children can’t help discovering the enormous gap between attitudes that have become commonplace in society and the practices of the [antiquated] school system. all of the mentioned tensions are the background of young people’s rebellions. these rebellions take so many shapes, like the hippieand drug culture and uncompromising political extremism. it’s against this backdrop that the experimental high school (forsøksgymnaset) was established. torild skard3 has examined the 230 applications to the experimental high school and analyzed the applicants’ motivation. the majority express strong accusations against the school and the school 3 it is not clear from the original text whether torild was a student or, a teacher or another adult in the school. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a136 system. everything they don’t want is clearly expressed – but underneath, there are vague dreams and varied needs that they want the new school to fulfill. to sum it up, the essential aspect seems to be a need for a place of healing after living in the old school system. and what did we get: a school without rules or compulsion and with a minimum of artificial authority. in this way, we had taken away some aspects of the old regime. something traditional and important. however, we had hardly anything to offer in replacement. we had enormous expectations and demands toward each other. we demanded that everybody suddenly should take full responsibility for his or her own self. at the same time, we wanted to develop a school democracy, the contours of which we could hardly see. we expected everybody to take part in building a school from scratch, while at the same time, we were attacked and, at times, exposed to the full political storm. this we expected of students who, during 9-1011 years, had been subjected to a disciplinarian regime that had prevented them from developing any kind of self-discipline. not surprisingly, this led to various reactions – from withdrawal into nirvana and doomsday prophecies – to fear and unrest. the students had been torn out of their closed, cocooned environment and thrown out into a vast emptiness. the remains of the old system that we still carried with us only made the situation more confusing. we had to slowly build our own system from scratch. it could only happen through labor, slow and hard labor. but could we expect this from our students? how could they, through labor and hard work, build something, the results of which they themselves wouldn’t see? at most, they might get a glance of the promised land in their time at school. but they needed to taste freedom immediately. any restriction put on freedom felt like compromising the holy mission. but we learned something: freedom is a lonely state of mind. absolute individual freedom is only possible on a deserted island. many students in the experimental high school lived on their own deserted island of private freedom. they had been longing for freedom for several years. now they had obtained it – but for many, the price was anxiety and loneliness. the price for contact with fellow human beings, warmth, and a feeling of belonging is the sacrifice of many small individual freedoms. it deals with having enough self-discipline to be considerate of others. it is to demand of yourself those limitations that cooperation requires. the students at the experimental high school had to find their own way from an imposed discipline where others decided everything to self-discipline that is born in interpersonal relations and communication. the road became a difficult one. nothing was done to facilitate it. words couldn’t help anybody. they had already been given too many words. most of them were immune to words. they couldn’t see through their own situation – they simply had to live it through. but one group of students distinguished themselves in this picture. they were the 7 or 8 students who came from the rudolf steiner4 school in oslo. from the first moment, it was evident they managed to take responsibility in a mature way. for them, freedom was something self-evident – and not something new that had to be tested from scratch. 4 rudolf steiner’s schools are better known today as the “waldorf” schools. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a137 other students also showed this maturity, but the steiner school students marked themselves as a group. i asked karl brodersen, who was a teacher in the steiner school for several years if he could offer an explanation. he did, and it was short: “it’s because they were allowed to be children when they were children.” if one can judge the tree by its fruits, the steiner school must be the tree that the state education ought to get to know from its roots to its top. karl brodersen’s answer was in agreement with an observation i had made myself. because it was evident that playing was a strong need in these 16-17-18 year-olds, they played with equipment and materials. the teaching of arts and crafts started with gigantic cut-and-paste activities that you would suppose had been outgrown after the 3rd grade of elementary school. in the beginning, the school could only fulfill a few of the expectations that the students had. on the other hand, the environment made almost superhuman demands on them. this led to anxiety and disappointment with the school and with their own shortcomings. one would have expected that students would leave the school in great numbers. i myself expected so at times. but a miracle happened: the students thrived in spite of everything. social scientists led by associate professor harriet holter5 examined this during the second semester. a large majority responded positively about the school. this probably reflects something about the school from which they had come. after all, difficult and cold freedom was better than total compulsion. and in fact, we had achieved something. most important was perhaps the contact between teachers and students that had been established from the very first moment. young people at this age have a strong need for close and deep contact with adults. this is well expressed in the first paper from ingrid, knut, and jon6. and contact is what they got to a large extent. in our environment, we shared a lot more than what is usual in the school. satisfaction was also due to the fact that school democracy started to function and that the students were aware they took part in developing it. their participation and engagement at “allmannamøtene,” the general assemblies, tell that story. i myself believe that part of what carried the students through the difficulties was the feeling of omnipotence youth can have, paradoxically alongside the feeling of deep powerlessness. they feel that they are capable of everything even changing the world in a short time. they haven’t yet met with the 5 dr. harriet holter was a social psychologist, professor of oslo university and a mother of one of the founding students of the experimental gymnasium, øystein gullvåg holter, who ana marjanovic-shane interviewed in 2019. see more about harriet holter here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/harriet_holter 6 the three students whose leaflet calling for a student-run school in the spring of 1966, was the spark that kindled the whole project of the experimental high school in oslo. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a138 nooks and crannies of the society’s bureaucracy and the demands it places on human adaptation – which creates powerlessness in almost everybody when exposed to it. those who established the experimental high school had this feeling of omnipotence to a large degree. they believed our difficulties were due to coincidences and special circumstances at our school. the feeling of omnipotence is an enormous strength in young people. our students were not scared. and they were right. they would overcome the difficulties – even if it took longer than the pioneers anticipated. the teacher the encounters between teachers and students at the experimental high school were tough and hard – that is, when and if we met at all. there was no obligatory attendance, so the students tended to stay away from classes. here was exactly the area where freedom had to be tested. thoroughly! teachers would come into the office, sobbing and in need of consolation when they had been to classes where no one, or just a small group of students, was present. this was hard to experience, especially for young teachers. their self-confidence could easily be broken. but it was also hard for those of us who were experienced. had our work in previous years only been possible because the students had been forced to listen to us? in order to endure this, we needed to feel secure and confident and believe in the cause we were working for. i myself felt time and again like the lady in the english song who sings, “i took my harp to a party, but nobody asked me to play.” you would come well prepared, equipped with newly upgraded knowledge and exciting methods, plus a good portion of enthusiasm. and the students simply were not there. they didn’t get to partake in the gifts we wanted to bring to them. we didn’t even get to show them these gifts. and a serious danger inherent in the system became apparent: a kind of a hit list developed concerning the teachers and subjects they taught. the most entertaining teachers and the most exciting subjects, or those that were the most important for the exams7, were chosen at the cost of less amusing teachers and subjects. and at the cost of such subjects that aren’t tested very strenuously at the exams. another side of the matter was that some teachers became enormously popular as the time of the exams approached. they were haunted almost day and night by students who needed to catch up on their curriculum. some teachers were almost trampled down and torn to pieces during those periods. but why did we embark on all of this? why did we, as teachers, leave the safety of the old, smoothly polished system? 7 the experimental high school of oslo did not administer any exams. however, to enter a university in norway, a high-school student must pass a national high school graduation exam (artium in norwegian). the students at the experimental high school of oslo were allowed to take this test in other schools, after going through an intensive prescribed preparation. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a139 because we didn’t want to continue sacrificing young people, the genuine acquisition of knowledge, and our own humanity on the gray altar of security. because we in school never reached each other as human beings. because we noticed that the young people who wrote: the school denies us friendship – denies us love8 – they were right. we stood helpless in front of each other, each with our own joys and sorrows, our insecurities, and our concerns. we cooperated for years but only met with a tiny part of each other. we lived on the opposite sides of the bars. close, but at the same time, far away. and the bars are the system. the system with its grades, its reports, and regulations, threats of punishment, dread of exams, and teacher prestige that we are forced to keep up. this was also true for the students. we could come a bit closer to each other at common breakfasts during the final school year celebrations with beer and booze. because then we were to part soon, anyway. oh, – all these 17th of may [norwegian national day] speeches: we were really so fond of you – we did punish you – you always hurt the ones you love. and the students: a bit surprised perhaps, but altogether too intoxicated by the booze and the exams being over and done with. too exhausted to reflect on this eternally tragic love at any depth. and they heard these kinds of speeches this time only. but we [the teachers] listened to them, equally powerless, every year. there is hardly any other place where you have so many people around you all day as a school. but few professionals are as lonely as teachers. others have colleagues with whom they can discuss work tasks, compare themselves and evaluate the workplace. the teacher – especially a high school teacher – is in class day after day, year after year, without any other measurement of what he does than the results of a distant exam. prestige among colleagues makes it difficult to admit your weaknesses. most teachers are loyal toward colleagues outside of the class. but mutual help and support are impossible when you’re not supposed to reveal your weaknesses. satisfaction and well-being could have been a measurement, but they aren’t because boredom, discontent, and feelings of shortcomings are not allowed to be expressed. the system has no safety valve for student discontent. the duty that society places on the shoulders of the high school teacher is to lead every student to the best possible exam results based on his abilities. to this end, every teacher conveys knowledge. he is to interpret, explain, go through what is in the textbooks, and control what is acquired. he does so via daily, random tests. the tests are evaluated in relation to a grading system. a lot of teachers do a thorough and honorable job. they convey accurate knowledge; they take no part of the curriculum lightly; they strive to evaluate conscientiously in accordance with a given grading 8 these were the words used by ingrid, knut and jan, in their leaflet. see parts of the leaflet’s text in the prologue in marjanovicshane et al. (2023, this special issue) from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a140 system. some put a lot of effort and great interest into teaching knowledge in a way that makes classes livable for the students. the best give something else in addition. the best are filled with a genuine enthusiasm for their subject and want to share this enthusiasm with young people so that the knowledge can enrich the lives of the young, just like it enriches their own. having classes with these teachers can even be a great experience. but some teachers do not have enthusiasm. not everybody has a lot of knowledge or the ability to convey and communicate. like in all other professions, there are people with varying degrees of skills. and this can’t be avoided. but in other professions, cooperation may offer possibilities for development. however, in contrast to many other professions, inferior work in school is almost patent protected by the system. grades, punishment threats, and ridicule are weapons used against students who express too clearly that classes with certain teachers are boring or a waste of time. and this is the situation in spite of the fact that there are few professions where inferior work affects so many values. there are teachers who do not submit to the system. who do not report misdemeanors to the school authorities, who do not push every student to achieve the ultimate at whatever cost, and who are willing to let go of prestige and let students feel they are equals. this, however, is not built into the system. on the contrary. such a teacher is often looked upon with mistrust by his or her colleagues. and he will easily feel like a traitor toward the system he is responsible for serving – and somewhat disloyal in relation to colleagues who are totally loyal to the system. devotion to the subject matter characterizes the best teachers. by the way, it’s strange that devotion to a subject matter that is highly appreciated does not more often come in conflict with the system. because if you see it as your life mission to impart your beloved subject to new generations – then it must feel kind of like pimping to have to force-feed this beloved subject to a group of students. no matter how much passion the teacher tries to convey, there will always be some who will, first and foremost, use the knowledge of that particular subject to earn credit in the form of points in the final exam. the conflict between loyalty toward the students and devotion to the system is felt by some. but if there is an open conflict between the student and the system, the system will always be victorious. few teachers will support students openly against the system even if the system is in direct violation. to be a teacher at the experimental high school meant that suddenly you lived without bars between yourself and the students. we had no obligatory attendance, no grades, no rules and regulations of conduct, and no punishment to threaten with. we were as unprotected in relation to the students as they were toward us. we met with the much larger part of ourselves. loneliness decreased – but so did peace. prestige was futile to hold on to. we didn’t have to teach our subjects to those not interested – but we did not get the chance to arouse interest in them either. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a141 a revolution first affects the previous power elite. and we were, after all, the representatives of the old power structure. we had to bear that brunt while freedom was being tested. some of the problems were temporary phenomena that would be solved as time passed. but time neither could nor should solve them all. we had to critically examine ourselves and our profession as we were in the melting pot. we could not permit ourselves to escape behind some new bars in order to go back to safety. we had to stand where we were fully unveiling ourselves including our weaknesses. but it was difficult! because when we presented ourselves like this, it might have become apparent that we didn’t live up to the demands of being a teacher. it could be a shock. but perhaps best for everybody involved, in the longer term. and it was difficult because the students were not prepared for the situation. the system at the experimental high school means the rights and the duty for both students and teachers to discuss conflicts in the open – to expose feelings – for example, the feeling of disappointment when students didn’t show up in class. but if we did so, it happened that the students would be scared. they perceived us as traditional authorities and reacted with strong aggression. no wonder. but it made us keep silent about emotions that should have been aired and it made us insecure. when we showed our despair concerning problems, it happened that we were met with a cold shoulder or humiliating arrogance from the students. i believe that high school students – perhaps especially in the big cities – due to age and environment, are a group characterized by a high degree of self-assertiveness. this is perhaps the most difficult group of young people to expose oneself to. but then again, it happened we were met with understanding and warmth that surpassed everything we had dreamed of. the reactions of the students and our own insecurity made it easy to fall into old patterns. the “cool” teacher – or “the kind aunt” who pets the child’s head “you’re really so sweet.” both are quite condescending attitudes. but attitudes that lots of students more or less consciously expected to meet. after all, they were just attitudes the students knew to be positive, many of them. but we had to be “real grown-ups.” harald herberg, who is currently an inspector at the experimental high school, adopted the concept of “the real grown-up” for our context. it is, however, johan borgen who created it. in the book barndommens rike [the kingdom of childhood], borgen talks about what he, in his childhood mind, called real grown-ups. they are people who treat children and young people seriously. but also, in such a way that they dare to be really angry, those who dare to meet young people without pretending. johan borgen felt the great contrast between these people and those who pat children mindlessly on their heads or condescendingly say: “how are you, young man.” those who don’t feel deep inside that children and young people really are people. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a142 because it’s only when you take youth seriously that you listen to what they have to tell us. and vice versa: then you can tell them the truth even if it’s uncomfortable. only then we can expect they will listen to us. then we have created a real trust, and only then can fruitful dialogue occur, a dialogue that is a precondition for mutual growth and development, occur. because the best thing about working as a teacher in such a school is the fact that we are in motion and growing. for that reason, there’s hope that we can overcome the problems that we meet in the experimental high school and find methods for our profession that let us use more of our potential. so that other teachers also may profit from it. how can we transform our profession? the first step is to gain the confidence of our students. but still, we carry the burden of a thousand hours of boredom. we can’t leave that burden behind as long as we hold up a curriculum in front of the students. how are the students going to believe me when i say: “i have something to give – something i’m happy to give, but it happens to be the curriculum for the final exam.” we have to be organizers and supervisors for young people who learn to find knowledge for themselves. then we can tell them: “i have something to give you that may be of use to you.” then we can expect them to come to us with real confidence. then the dialogue may start. and we have to develop a deep and genuine relationship of trust among ourselves as teachers. we have to know one another so well that we can show our weaknesses without shame. then we can help one another. we have to get rid of all kinds of professional vanity, competition, and triumphs. we should not for a moment glance at the popularity lists. then we’ll never get rid of them. such cooperation will make the teachers less lonely more confident. perhaps we have to get away from the sharp division between student and teacher. both parties may learn something every day – from each other. we have to organize teaching in many different ways and use a variety of methods. then it will be possible for teachers to function in more than one single social situation and with many more work tasks than now. the potential for success will be extended. it will be a happier solution than the poor feeling of safety behind bars. but if we’re to transform our profession, we’ll have to redefine our responsibility as teachers from scratch. marie killengreen, a teacher at the experimental high school, has come up with the following formulation: “we have to find out how we as teachers and adults may contribute in the best possible way so that students can master the problems of their own existence.” even the best possible exam results in our respective subjects can contribute to this goal to a very small extent. that may happen in some cases, for example, when a student needs final exam points in order to get admission to a [university] department to study a subject he really wants to study. or when his self-esteem needs to be boosted in this way. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a143 for most students, it would be better to be allowed to work in their own way and rhythm, take some subjects more easily and concentrate on others. and for many students, it would be better to be allowed not to take the final exam but instead to be allowed to work on something entirely different. in order to find out what would help each student master his or her existential problems, we have to get to know each student well. you may ask: are we a high school when our goal is not, first and foremost, to motivate students to pass a final exam? then we ask in return: is the high school we have today geared toward helping young people master the problems they have with their lives? as we are working to find solutions to our tasks at the experimental high school, we have to consciously try to create a school that is better suited to be a place of learning for human beings. we shouldn’t, as teachers, be content with standing between the student and what he or she needs to master for their existential problems. it has been argued that teaching should not be a filling up of empty vessels with knowledge. it should be lighting torches. as teachers, we should be the sparks that light those torches. in order to make that happen, we need a new school – and we’re starting to see the contours of it. cooperation among the teachers the aim of the initial leaflet written by ingrid, knut, and jon [the initiators of the idea of a new high school] was to offer students and high school teachers “the opportunity to take part in building a democratic high school.” not a single lecturer with an m.a. or an m.s. degree seized the opportunity to transfer to this school. but in the group that gradually became permanently employed by the experimental high school in oslo, there were people with a genuine interest in the human aspects of education and the social responsibilities of schools. for example, the young inspector bjørn, who had the very best recommendations from a teaching job i’ve ever seen – at oslo cathedral school. his talent as an educator is quite unique – and so is his ability to relate and connect to other people. some had a particularly strong background in their subject, like herman [ruge], who had been doing research for years, and nils braanaas, who was one of the pioneers of teaching drama in higher education. i myself have always had a special interest in the relationship between children and adults and have educational methods among my subjects and 9 years of teaching experience in high school and junior high. others had experience working with young people in school and out of school. in addition, many of us had seriously tried other occupations than teaching – not only as holiday jobs. and i think that’s essential. it offers close-to-life contact with the world of the student, different from the circular route school – university – school. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a144 but because few people dared to take the full step into, and thus a full job at the experimental high school from the beginning, we became a far too big group. that was also part of our difficulties. so, there we were; out of 32 teachers, 6 were permanently employed, and we had an urgent need to cooperate. just to gather this over-sized group once in a while was impossible. but from the second year onward, we were 22, 12 of whom were permanently employed. of those who started in 1967, quite a few had disappeared already in the following year. the reasons why they disappeared might be interesting to look at. some of our part-time teachers disappeared because they couldn’t manage to adapt to our type of school when they simultaneously worked in another totally different environment. others stayed in their old positions when they had to choose between the old and our school. some disappeared because the atmosphere with us was very demanding and, in many ways, unsatisfactory. some of the teachers who quit were a type of teacher that appeared and disappeared from all three experimental schools in oslo, bærum, and gothenburg. they were efficient educators, often employing unique methods and ambitious pedagogical aims that they felt they didn’t get to try out in the ordinary school system. they came to the experimental high schools with high expectations about the effectiveness of the schools in which they would be able to try out their methods on independent and mature students. they were bitterly disappointed. the students were not at all determined to go along with the hard work required, which really didn’t mean independence for them but rather freedom for the teacher to try out his methods. it may happen someday in more well-established experimental high schools that there will be students who would appreciate this type of teaching. but up till now, the students who apply for admission to these schools have had quite different expectations. this type of teaching is totally incompatible with the freedom to attend that is practiced in our school. in oslo, we’ve also had some teachers who’ve expected the students to take the initiative. clearly a reasonable expectation, given the students’ demand for independence. but our students were not capable of taking the leadership role in teaching or taking the initiative. this is something they’ve had to learn gradually. the teachers had had to lead to a large extent, actively and consciously admittedly with a view to stepping back when students were ready to take over. those teachers who waited for what the students would tell them to do were also bitterly disappointed. disappointment among these teachers has cost both them and the school a lot of worries. even if many disappeared, there were more teachers than we needed who wanted to get a permanent position when we started in the second year. all the permanently employed from the first year continued. we’ve worked hard to find our own ways of supporting each other, those of us who continued. to have school councils regularly, like at other high schools, was impossible for us. we were never there at the same time. the first attempts at organizing cooperation were what we called teacherand classrepresentative meetings. we felt it was wrong that teachers should meet without students, so the chosen representatives from each class took part in meetings. they had to be held in the evenings and privately. most often, we were at the house of herman’s father, herman ruge, the elder, who also took part in the meetings. he was for many years principal at “pedagogisk seminar” [department of education at the from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a145 university of oslo] and represented perhaps more than anybody the best traditions in norwegian educational science. it felt like we bonded together, past and future, there at his big dinner table. at every meeting, we had innumerable questions on the agenda. problems queued up, and in the first year, there was more or less chaos. but being together gave us a lot. particularly the fact that we ate and drank together afterward. we discovered that the problems we had were quite different from those dealt with in teachers’ councils at other high schools. such problems were settled at “rådsog allmannamøter,” council-assemblies, and general-assemblies [in which everybody working at our school participated]. the teacherand class representative meetings had no decision-making authority. our discussions often dealt with purely pedagogical problems. and it struck me as strange that pedagogical discussions simply have no place in an ordinary high school. all of us felt a strong pressure to talk about the problems involved in teaching. during the first year, we only got to touch lightly on all the issues we would have liked to discuss. during the first summer holidays, we moved to the old hammersborg school. we called for a twoday teacherand class-representative meeting before school started. it didn’t turn out to be very successful. as often before, things didn’t go well when we tried to copy others. and it was the swedish idea of “planeringsdager,” planning days, that occupied our minds. the new and unfamiliar rooms didn’t make it easier either. it mostly resulted in a discussion of the use of the rooms. we continued our teacher and class-representative meetings. the pedagogical discussion was better now since we had fewer participants. we could discuss school, and it could be done in more informal settings. we approached “fagseksjoner,” subject-based sections. teachers who worked with the same subjects discussed their problems in more or less organized forms. in the spring semester of the second year, we found a way of working together that suited us. the teachers met for a two-day seminar while the students were sitting for their exams. they discussed subject after subject in plenary sessions so that everybody got to know about the problems of others – and finally, common issues were discussed. erik led part of the seminar and divided us into groups. it was a strange experience. everybody who uses group work in their teaching ought to try out being in a group themselves. the problems involved in organizing the work, listening to each other, and putting the results together, which only a few of us had experienced first-hand before. and then nils led drama activities. they resembled play but aimed at sharpening our senses and ability to listen to one another. we came to see one another in new ways. and the most important was perhaps that we laughed so much together. we became better acquainted with each other during those two days than we did during the rest of the year. and in addition, we learned something about what our students experienced in nils’s classes. these seminars turned out to be just what we needed, and they have been followed up and developed further. now the school had reached a stage in its development that permitted us to take a step in the direction of satisfactory teacher cooperation. we’ve taken two weekly hours from teaching and scheduled two consecutive hours for teacher cooperation. the students worked alone during those two hours. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a146 we’ve reached the conclusion that teacher cooperation is so important for pedagogical development, and therefore also for the students, that these two hours will benefit the school more than if they were spent directly in teaching. a valuable aspect inherent in this type of cooperation is that the teachers would gather as a class and would themselves experience the situation the students are in. however, this work has only just started, and no report has yet been written. in developing teacher cooperation, we had a conflict that we had to deal with, and that seems to appear also in other schools. one of our, perhaps a bit naive views of the concept of democracy was that students and teachers should share absolutely everything. teachers should never isolate themselves from the students. there was almost a unanimous agreement on this point. and perhaps it was necessary during the period of establishment. however, those who did not agree were fervently engaged in this issue. after a while, it happened that groups of teachers, bigger or smaller, who felt the need to discuss common problems, came into the office – or went together to a cafe. the office developed into a regular teachers’ cafe. the students grumbled. was there a teachers’ staff room? was there a class difference in our school? there was really no class difference or staff room – just a demonstration of a need to be able to talk in peace with colleagues in a quiet place. the recreation room – the only common room – was always noisy and smoky. but the students were never denied admittance to the office cafe. the need for a quiet place was solved in such a way that the school got an extra recreational room for those who wanted a quiet hour – students included. the need for staff meetings was solved in such a way that the teachers’ need for cooperation as a group was recognized. the teacherand class-representative meetings continued as before. the suspicious attitude on the part of the students concerning teacher cooperation seemed to be a stage left behind. now nobody grumbles about it. that’s one out of many examples that problems that once seemed insurmountable were really only teething troubles that would be overcome. there are other forms of teacher – student cooperation. for example, when bjørn appeared and asked for a teacher of chinese, it meant he also wanted to be a student. unfortunately, we didn’t manage to provide a teacher of chinese, but anyway he participated as a student in natalia’s russian classes. many teachers have participated as students. i myself joined a group of arts and crafts students and quite a few of us have participated in pe. more teachers ought to be students, particularly in the subjects in which they are weak. it makes you understand the problems that weak students meet in a new way. in addition, we have to a large extent, used students as teachers. students who are members of “klassens fagråd,” the class council, often step in when teachers are absent. in this way, we have saved a lot of money. and doing group work also implies that students must take on the teacher role. students have also taken over teaching and received a salary. our student, trond halle, who is an expert in music history, has given a series of lectures illustrated with samples from records that attracted a lot of listeners. and micheline – who was a midwife by profession and a mother of three – took over sex education in all classes. this mixing of roles ought to be developed further. the far too strong boundaries between teachers and students can be torn down in this way. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a147 the many ways of organizing teaching and the diverse methods we tried to develop, together with close cooperation between the teachers, will hopefully result in the possibility of much more individual freedom to expand teaching than the traditional teacher role permits. there will be a use for a broader range of skills. this may, to a certain extent, compensate for the difficulties we meet in our system. but our most important task in this connection is to create a really warm climate for cooperation among the teachers. we have found some ways of paving the way for such cooperation. but this doesn’t work unless it leads to deep and genuine relationships. only then we can really help one another – not only by sharing our strengths but also by showing our weaknesses without a feeling of defeat. and we have to be friends in the sense that we can tackle conflicts in a civilized way and tolerate the aggression of others. we have to find common ground for what we want to achieve with our work. from the outset, each one of us may have thought that we had a common ground. but it has become apparent through daily practice that our starting points have been different – so different that they may divide more than what is good for the school. if we don’t manage to find a least common multiple as our starting point – a common platform, well, then we have to prepare ourselves for the conclusion that we may have to part as friends. “discipline” cohabitation at the experimental high school is not without conflicts and shouldn’t be so either. but it isn’t conflicts between one system and a teacher group on one side and students on the other. perhaps human conflicts between teacher and student occur more often in our environment than in other schools. the atmosphere invites us to take the conflict into the open. but conflicts between a teacher and a student are not different from, for instance, a conflict between two students or two teachers. such conflicts are part of our daily life and can’t be regarded as so-called disciplinary problems. they are problems of cohabitation. and we will always have them because we are human beings. of course, we have problems – and they are big problems on another level. we don’t have rules for and punishment for small transgressions. smoking in places where the agreement is that it shouldn’t be done is not punished but understood as lacking the ability to take mutual responsibility. with no obligatory attendance, truancy, of course, does not exist. however, extensive absence may signify difficulties with the subject or with work in general. lacking the ability to adhere to resolutions may reveal immaturity in relation to authorities. at the experimental high school, we’re not preoccupied with small misdemeanors and small problems but concerned with what may be real existential problems for members of the school community. we have tried to avoid punishment and, as far as possible, be solution-oriented in our work. we have tried to find the emotional, social, or intellectual issues that may cause these larger problems. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a148 but since, to a large extent, this is only a noble theory, it’s because an overwhelming number of problems washed over us from the start. the pure existence of the experimental high school attracted a lot of students who had difficulties in their ordinary school. the freedom at our school was alluring, and some difficulties disappeared, but far from all. and for some, it has taken time. the experimental high school was established when the first big wave of drug use surged over high schools. many of those who had dropped out or were on the point of dropping out of their schools as the consequences of drugs applied to our school. but the first effect of drug abuse is that a student does not manage to fulfill daily duties. in a school where attendance is obligatory, that means truancy. and truancy is a reason for being expelled. so many had been expelled or had dropped out of high school, and the real reason was not always clear. we were aware of the problem and prepared to deal with it – not the east because we believed a warmer school atmosphere would help. for that reason, it felt especially unfair that a hard attack on the school was launched exactly in this field. but we were hardly aware of the extent of the problem. what schools were, by the way? we faced a difficult balance between protecting our environment and helping the individual student. it turned out we decided, to a rather extreme point, to help the individuals and let the environment take the strain. educators often say that students are tough when dealing with disciplinary matters. surely, they see it from experience, but our experience was the opposite. in our “allmannamøter,” there was never a wish to follow a hard line. the big majority of students were always in favor of a mild attitude. this is compatible with the theory that the harder a group is pressed from above – the bigger the aggressiveness among the group members. the mild attitude was a consequence of the freedom we had. still, during the second year, we approved a rule saying that a member of the school who did not function, either work-wise or socially, could not claim to be admitted in the following semester. it was first and foremost based on the belief that an individual could be at risk of hurting himself in our environment. but this rule had been used only once up till now. it was difficult to deal with these problems, just as a thousand smaller and bigger wheels were to be set in motion – and especially when the big attacks from outside made it almost impossible to work in peace in a reasonable way with the problems. we didn’t manage to act reasonably in those times when each day we picked up the newspaper we shivered from fear of new attacks. we were too few to deal with them. most of the teachers worked part time and couldn’t have the contact with the students that was necessary. nor did we agree within the school about how these matters were to be dealt with – yes, not even whether we should deal with them at all. uncertainty in relation to school democracy played a part. the freedom to attend complicated the matter. because when a student didn’t show up at school – or just sat in the hall, it felt like a violation of freedom to nag him. and you could never know if drugs were part of it. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a149 the difference in opinion didn’t run between the teachers as a group and the students. many teachers felt insecure in this area. we had many discussions among the teachers about whether it was right to interfere in any way and whether it was the right of the individual to drop out if he wanted to. when dealing with the cases, we followed a certain procedure. the homeroom teacher was the first to try to find a solution. we discussed for a long time whether the class representative should join in – but decided that he shouldn’t. it would put too much pressure on an individual student. but it happened to a large extent that students felt responsible for their fellow students and tried to help before the homeroom teacher stepped in. if the homeroom teacher didn’t manage to settle the matter, the parents, the psychologist, and the school leader could be contacted. the student should take part in all meetings that concern him. it became a difficult problem to involve parents. it did give students a feeling of security that no contact with his home should take place without him. but when we felt the need to involve the parents, it often led to conflicts. this, i thought, was the area where the highest price for freedom was paid mostly by the administration. because responsibility toward parents was abandoned, it was left behind together with the traditional administration. regardless of whether the school wanted it or not – no matter whether we ourselves wanted it or not. a school leader or a teacher cannot contribute to keeping parents in the dark when their own children are concerned. it is a consideration, and a very difficult one, whether to involve parents or let the school try to settle the problem and at what time. but when students evidently led their parents to believe they attended a school where they never went or that they functioned at school when they never showed up in class, we couldn’t go on keeping up the lie. in many cases, parents would come to school with their worries, and the cards would be put on the table with the young one present if they wanted to be there. often the school, as a neutral third party, could help solve conflicts in a family. gradually the school’s psychologist started to function. but it took a long time before students were able to make use of this option. in this area, options that nobody had seen in theory appeared. the best possibilities for problemsolving came in unexpected areas. the most important was perhaps the poetry group. it was established spontaneously by students and came to include students with a special need for help and contact. it was because the leader of the group, a student named jan myhrvold-hansen, had a good way of working with the other students. moreover, poetry was also inherently useful in letting communication take a turn toward mental health topics. both jan and his group were thoroughly criticized by the rest of us. we thought it was both noisy and demanding. it was only a long time afterward that it dawned on me that jan had taken on the part of the urgently needed therapeutic work in our school. arts and crafts also became such a retreat. it became apparent that creative subjects had a special function as safety valves and therapy. but the subjects in themselves couldn’t function like this if the from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a150 teachers in the subjects were not ready to take on this side of the task. both nils in drama and finn in arts and crafts did so. if only all those who deal with disciplinary problems on all school levels and with so-called problematic students could see the potential of these subjects: to be allowed to create something – and to meet a person who is listening, means such a lot. and it is even more valuable when these two needs can be combined. in these areas, i think that small, permanent groups of students are the best. the students will more easily get in contact with each other and be able to support each other. how the experimental high school, up till now, has functioned as a problem-solving school is difficult to say. such an account will never be settled. but if there is some truth in what many professional educators say, that the merciless, competitive school system contributes to breeding problem youth, then an environment like ours surely offers a way out. up till now, our tasks have been too big, but when more experimental schools are established, the mental health effects of the environment will be more clearly seen. and as we gain experience, we will hopefully be better at tackling the problems we meet. we see examples of students who have been almost inactive for three years and then suddenly throw themselves into work with genuine job satisfaction. whether they have just lost valuable time and would have managed much better in a more demanding school, we cannot tell. but we have the experiences from neill’s summerhill to build on. he has seen students who, after years of inactivity, have become active and creative human beings. perhaps in some cases, there is a need for such possibilities for young persons to be able to overcome the injuries they may have suffered during their upbringing. but i also believe that it is through work and cooperation with others that a human being reaches his or her fullest potential. and i mean work in the widest sense. erich fromm says in the art of loving that a healthy human being is always active when he or she is awake. but it doesn’t have to be external activity. we may seem most passive when we work most intensely, thinking. in our young, formative years, a relationship with work is established that can be decisive for our development as human beings. this we ought to put across openly and explicitly. it’s up to the young ones if they want to listen. but we fail them if we don’t tell them. even if we, as teachers at the experimental high school, shouldn’t take academic responsibility for the students, we can’t disclaim the responsibility that we have for them as human beings. we’ve seen examples of students who’ve come to us with a doctor’s certificate that they need to change schools. and it has happened that they have developed into calmer, happier, and more harmonious human beings. one of them told me he was terrified during the first weeks and just wanted to escape. “but thank god, i didn’t do it,” he said with a big smile that stayed in my life for a long time afterward. we’ve had students – severely hurt by drug abuse – who have, in one way or another, managed to get through the years at our school and to get an exam that may well prove to be of use later on. not from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a151 everybody has managed to keep going on after leaving the experimental high school. this points to the need for a freer and warmer environment. the difficult question is whether one should intervene in young people’s problems, and if so, in what way. this dilemma makes rules so impossible. they may, in most cases, only hurt. it’s necessary to have contact with each individual and understand his situation. and each individual case must be treated in its own way. the question if there should be intervention is really the question if a human being has a right to perish in peace. it’s only from an extremely liberal perspective that one can answer it in the affirmative. from my point of view, people are dependent on each other and are concerned with one another. we will all be in situations when we’re totally dependent on the human community. when a person is on the point of perishing, it’s often because this community has failed him. for that reason, we should always try to hold out a hand. how deeply we should get involved is always a question we have to consider. but reaching out a hand applies even more toward the young ones who are in the most difficult period in a human being’s life. for that reason, we mustn’t just reach out a hand but perhaps also support, even if we’re not asked to offer that support. chapter vi – difficulties with democracy organization and administration the experimental high school needn’t be ashamed that it hasn’t found administrative ways that are perfectly compatible with direct democracy. as far as i know, nobody has managed to do so, neither in school nor in industry. but it is an important challenge for us to develop such ways of working. the way we are organized and working at present carries a lot of inherited traditions. first of all, there is the formal triumvirate of the leader, the inspector, and the secretary from the old school system that doesn’t resemble our «allmannamøte» [general assembly] and «rådssystemet», [the daily leadership group, consisting of 4 students, 3 teachers, the school leader, and 1 parent. cf. p.61] but our school democracy forms also have patterns that are inherited from our two step-parents: the parliamentary system in our society with “storting,” parliament, and government; and the good old organizational practice developed together with the labor movement and formulated by einar gerhardsen [prime minister of norway after ww2] in his handbook “tillitsmannen” [the representative]. this is a way of working that gives a voice to various groups and decides matters by voting – the opinion of the majority shall be the basis for the organization’s work. it is a working method that presupposes strong disagreements. this means it’s up to the individual or the group to express their opinions and hopefully get them implemented. the rules of the game are that one should fight for one’s own views against those of others. poll democracy presupposes a big or small minority that is set aside. these ways of working stem from parliamentarianism – the democracy of representation. direct democracy has to find other ways of working. some examples may be mentioned: from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a152 the steiner school is led by a whole team of teachers. the teachers’ meeting is the highest authority of the school. one of the members does the executive office work for one year at a time. nobody is a permanent leader. at the steiner school in oslo, this system is working well in a group of about 30 teachers. but the characteristics of such a group are quite different from those of a group of 150-200 or more. according to their teachers, the pupils at the steiner school are of an age when participating in the school administration wouldn’t be relevant for them. the quakers – the society of friends – have a way of working that may be interesting in this context. they are organized in basic groups as small as 7 8 and preferably not above 40 members. if more than 40, they are split up. the small groups are then brought together in larger groups, and those again in even larger groups, up to huge meetings with as many as several hundred participants. the small groups meet for worship. but the quakers also have varied practical activities that need to be organized. this takes place at business meetings where several smaller basic groups are assembled. these business meetings have an agenda, and the individual items on the agenda are often discussed thoroughly. decisions are not made by vote but by consensus. contrary to the form of our organization, the main thing here is to find solutions that everybody can accept. the basic attitude among the quakers is that they want to find a solution, a consensus that comprises everybody. self-discipline and strong motivation are necessary for this way of working. an important aspect of this way of working is the practice that each participant in the meeting may propose a couple of minutes of silence in order to reflect and calm down. a wish that is respected by the other members. one member of the group is elected to write down to formulate the essence of the meeting. in norwegian, he is called a “skriver,” in english, a clerk. the clerk’s job is also to put decisions into practice and do secretarial work. the clerk’s job may also be done by a group. everybody may suggest ideas and make proposals at the meetings. but it’s up to the proposer to convince the whole group before the proposal can be put into practice. proposals may fall if they do not get support. or it may take a long time to convince the whole group. time is an important factor in this democracy. the clerk is elected after discussions in the small groups about whom they want to suggest. the discussion of persons may be tough and open – but the election of the clerk is not done by vote but rather by reaching a consensus. the leadership of various areas can be delegated to small groups. here too, after mutual and open criticism. one ought to be able to tell one another: this is not suitable for you. the quakers have practiced their big and worldwide peacemaking organizational model for hundreds of years. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a153 the working methods of both the quakers and the anthroposophists9 are based on an attitude of tolerance but nevertheless have a firm philosophical basis. the quakers’ way of working seems to be a goal worth striving for at the experimental school. but it may prove to be a distant goal. because perhaps the experimental high school already has solid fundamental ideas – but these ideas are not consciously present in the minds of many of our members for the time being. and then this way of working may well result in pandemonium. the other big obstacle for us would be the factor of time in this democracy. taking time as a helper is not compatible with our wish to clear new paths. furthermore, we have a long way to go before we realize that the more we use democratic working methods, the more each individual has to administer self-discipline. but it is also interesting to notice that parts of this system have developed in our school. we leave some areas for small groups to decide, and we have a mutual and often quite open criticism. even if we can’t transfer organizational practices from the anthroposophists or the quakers, we can, in the meantime, learn something from them. the quakers’ way of making proposals – to permit things to develop, is important. the way it often happens at the experimental high school is that the bright ideas that may shake the very basis of the school are thrown at an unprepared “allmannamøte” or a defenseless leader. this is, in reality, deeply undemocratic. and it serves as a hindrance to the work's peace and progress. it is not democratic to let one out of 180 people demand that their ad hoc ideas be given immediate treatment. the school has to find a procedure that guarantees that fundamental ideas are given proper consideration. it is a question of practical nature. democracy has to be given some time to develop. dictatorship is the fastest of all ways of administration. the second thing we can learn from the quakers is their concept of the role of the leader – the clerk. his challenge ought to be, in our school as in their organization, to come to an agreement about the “meaning” of the meeting. to try to unite fractions to find comprehensive solutions and take responsibility for putting them into practice. * * * in the experimental high school, the dream of organizing school in new ways is alive. it is a good thing the search for such ways is ongoing. based on my experience and knowledge, there are certain options to choose between: either a direct democracy led centrally – or an indirect, that is to say, a representative democracy in which leadership may be decentralized. 9 r. steiner’s waldorf schools are following the principles of his philosophy that he called “anthroposophy.” from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a154 either a loosely organized group under constant change with a central leadership – or a firm and permanently organized institution with decentralized leadership. either an organization where common responsibility is less developed but with a firm leadership that can take over responsibility for the welfare of the group – or an organization where responsibility for the common concerns is strong among each individual member and without leadership that has to take responsibility. either an organization where the philosophical basis for the work is weak in the individual members but with a central group that carries and supports the ideas – or an organization where the basic ideas are strong among a large majority of the members and no group specifically carries them. the degree and form of leadership will shift as these various points move between the extremes that are mentioned. or expressed in another way: as long as the experimental high school is an established direct democracy where all members have an equal right to participate as long as the form of organization and ways of working are not firmly established as long as collective responsibility is less developed as long as only a few members are conscious of a basis of ideas for the school it is that long the experimental high school would need to have a central focal point in one form or another to hold on to. there needs to be something at the center that works against the centrifugal forces. if this is to be a leader, he has to be approved by the “allmannamøte” and be accountable to it. he needs to be easy to replace. if he doesn’t act in accordance with the “sense of the assembly” he has to resign. the democratic principle is based here. it is feasible that this role could be shared by various persons. however, this could easily lead to a bureaucracy that would be hard to control for the members and “allmannamøtet.” and it could be more difficult to influence than one single person. one cannot choose to be without a central focal point, a firm structure, without established ways of working, without the individual’s ability to take responsibility, and without a common basis of ideas. maybe some can manage this, but a majority would be thrown into a situation they wouldn’t be able to handle. if so, we would have the dictatorship of the self-imposed intellectual elite. the situation of the minority a recurring allegation from the “doomsday prophets” is that “there are so many unhappy people here.” this could be the situation of the minority. from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a155 in a direct democracy where big groups discuss and vote over important questions, the danger is always that the minority is trampled down. or at least pushed into a corner. there is always the danger that especially precocious and outspoken students set the tone and the direction for the majority. it may even happen that a majority is suppressed because it lacks a spokesperson. this is especially harmful when applied to questions of what and how to teach. it’s natural that students who have a theoretical orientation and often an intellectual background become whistleblowers. and thus, it becomes difficult for a minority to voice their opinions. here lies the biggest danger that we may develop into an elite school. in my opinion, an important job for the leader is to be a spokesperson for these groups – or to get them to speak up for themselves. his position at the center gives him an overview that others don’t have. from that position, he has to find his way to such groups and defend their case in relation to the stronger ones. perhaps even protect them from injustice. however, school democracy would fail if the students did not gradually learn to take the minority’s view into consideration. but the question is if we can come that far without changing our very organizational model that presupposes debates, fractions, and voting. this problem falls in under what is our fundamental problem—the lack of a sense of community and responsibility for the common good, the whole school community. democracy needs to permeate the whole school system from the bottom up one of the clearest lessons to be learned from the experimental high school is that if school democracy is to become a reality, it has to permeate the school system from the bottom up. the high school students themselves have to start the process. the ideas of the new school have to come from students. only students know where school oppresses because they attend it. and only high school students can be strong enough and conscious enough to take on the job of creating their own school. the students, however, come from a school system totally different from ours, and the cost of transition will, for that reason, be high. not only the 9 – 10 years in another system make the transition difficult. an additional factor is an age between 16 and 19, which is probably the age when young people do not tend to take on extensive organizational challenges. it’s the period of transition from the world of childhood to that of the adult world when they face the demands of our harsh society. it is also the period when many young people need to look inward into themselves and be allowed to be left undisturbed. it’s the age of falling in love and the age of poetry. the age of pondering, uncertainty and discussions. the period in which theories dominate disproportionately. when principles are more important than realities and practice. in the years before and after that period, human beings are more down-to-earth and practically oriented, more tuned in to their surroundings. for that reason, it would probably be easier to develop new ways of cooperation with younger age groups. a woman from india who came to talk to the students about yoga and meditation was involved in an intricate discussion about indian foreign and domestic politics. finally, she said, somewhat overwhelmed, ‘life is not a speculative game.” but that’s precisely what life is like for many young people. once, we had a statute debate at our “allmannamøte.” we discussed changing our mission statement. we wanted to drop the word contribute, and make the paragraph stronger by saying we wanted from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a156 to change the present high school system. a radical group pressed hard for change. the debate was timeconsuming and intense. the radicals won. it was decided that the mission statement was to be changed. when the new mission statement was copied, the clerk forgot to include this change. it was never discovered. our mission statement still says to contribute to changing high school. the discussion was the most important. we play “the speculative game.” for high school students, words play a major part. action is often of less importance. for younger people, action is important. when it comes to those age groups before high school, we can learn from examples in other countries. especially in denmark, numerous groups have worked to develop new cooperative working methods on all school levels. and now, these experiences have started to influence public schools. a lot can be learned from henrik sidenius at værebro school outside copenhagen. our own steiner school, which obviously prepares students for responsibility, should be our closest influencer. contrary to high school, which has traditions going back a thousand years, our “ungdomsskole,” junior high school, is an incomplete newcomer in our country. it needs to search in a variety of ways to establish its form. a natural testing ground for school democracy should be here. surely many parents and students would be willing to try new ways in junior high school. for me, this is a natural consequence of our experiences at the experimental high school. the most helpful thing i can do is to use my experience and capacity for work trying out this system in junior high school. at the elementary level, there is already the norwegian summerhill organization willing to try new ways of working. but the authorities are not interested. they claim there are no facilities. if only local authorities could spend a little less on equipment in the schoolyards they are building and let the parents, children, and teachers who want to try out new ways have a barrack in which to exist, they would be happy. and the local authorities would get eager colleagues to help them with their research and experimentation. running around in circles a danger concerning school democracy is that the experimental high school may end up resembling an overgrown kitten. it is cute to see a small cat run around chasing its tail. but it would be disgusting and unnatural if the cat continued running around endlessly instead of developing into a reasonable, grown-up cat with a taste for hunting and sex life. in an organization where members change every third year, and everybody has a voice, there is always the danger of running around in circles. everybody is going to develop the school. ideally, every year from scratch. the same mistakes – the same blunders are going to be repeated again and again. because all the students still come from the same background. the oldest students who have the final exam in front of them contribute to this development because they tend to withdraw from big organizational debates. after all, they are going to leave soon anyway. they leave it to the teachers, along with the new students, to start anew. even if they were the closest to contributing by sharing their experiences. intelligence has been defined as the ability to learn from experience. the experimental high school as an institution is in danger of becoming an idiot if we cannot learn from our own experiences pretty soon. the new students must be informed about what has happened before their time. it ought to be an essential task for the school to gather experiences in an easy-to-read leaflet. the new students ought to trust what others have done and experienced before them. they should be able to build on that foundation. something from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education mosse jørgensen dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.414 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a157 has to be routine, something has to be a tradition, even if those are words the students hate. if every tiny thing is to be done in a new way each time, it will exhaust a growing number of the school members and take the focus away from what is the most important in our mission. and something has got to be a tradition. the school has to find some forms, forms that the school genuinely owns that can be inherited. until now, we have been rather unsuccessful in creating the necessary trust among the new students who enter our school. it has to do with the feeling of togetherness and belonging that we have never quite managed to create. untill now, it has been natural to have a period of trial and error for many issues. we have had to develop our own standards. but now, in the fourth year of the school’s existence, it may look unprofessional if we continue going around in circles. it seems like it is more important to throw away what others have done before than build something new on the foundation of what has been created. it doesn’t mean we should stop being critical. that is not the same as throwing away everything in principle. those who have worked in the school, so far, have found some valuable solutions to challenges. we may easily end up as a stagnant pool of backwater, where a small group that is left behind fumble with their things and make something “new and exciting” every year that has no importance for anybody because there is never any substance attached to it. it's a lovely game – but it will never be anything but a game. references jørgensen, m. (1971). fra skoleopprør til opprørsskole. oslo: pax forlag a/s. marjanovic-shane, a. (2023a). four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a198-a216, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.478. marjanovic-shane, a. (2023b). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a217 a244, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.445. marjanovic-shane, a. (2023c). a soul-searching assembly — a vignette. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a165-a197, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.360. marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & gradovski, m. (2023). scandinavian experiments in democratic education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a158-a164, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.477. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word google speak layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt82 ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in homeeducation renee morrison school of education (queensland), australian catholic university, australia abstract learning with technology is increasingly understood to be a social process involving unique and telling discourses. an emerging research agenda has resulted, investigating the links between ‘talk’ and student technological practices but is yet to include home-education. preliminary evidence exists of a relationship between particular types of ‘talk’ and success with particular online activities, namely online search. this may prove especially pertinent to home-educators who report that their most prolific online activities are those reliant upon search engines like google. this paper presents select findings from a study into online search and the associated discursive practices among early primary students and their parent-educators in australia. data from observations, tests and interviews with five home-educating families were analysed recursively using a system guided by fairclough’s critical discourse analysis. specifically, this paper seeks to investigate: which discursive practices are privileged in these sites during online search; the extent to which these practices contribute to relations of power and the extent to which these practices are found alongside effective online search. findings revealed a prevalence of inequitable discursive practices, those that either inhibited the equal conversational power of speakers or which naturalised inequitable power relations more generally. these discursive practices were found alongside ineffective online searches. notwithstanding, participants continued to speak positively about search engines and their educational power. this rhetoric-reality gap is theorized in the paper as the work of dominant ideologies surrounding technology in education. findings can assist the growing number of home-educators and their students to use online search more effectively. insights regarding links between discursive practice and search practice may also help ensure that discourse helps to maximise the educational benefits associated with online search. keywords: information-seeking; google; home-education; home-school; home learning; critical discourse analysis; fairclough; digital-native renee morrison’s research focuses on technology and the capacity to assist educators and students reach their full potential in the 21st century. her research profile also investigates the changing role of teachers today, including those in alternative systems (home-education), and highlights the relationship between ict use and effective pedagogies. specifically (but not exclusively) renee’s work considers how search engines like google are being used in educational environments and how they may be better used to enhance educational outcomes. a focus on ‘generational digital divide’ rhetoric and upon ensuring discourse is used as a resource, rather than an obstacle for pedagogies is also present in her research. renee is interested in challenging asymmetries in power and knowledge as manifested in discourse and in contributing knowledge which may serve to question pervading ideologies surrounding today’s students and educators. she has experience in both quantitative and qualitative methodologies; issn: 2325-3290 (online) ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt83 particularly critical discourse analysis and semiotics. previously renee’s research has employed gramsci’s concept of hegemony and cohen’s moral panic. ïïò introduction home-education was once understood as an eccentric form of schooling chosen by two small, but distinct groups of parents. van galen’s (1988) seminal work used the terms ‘pedagogues’ and ‘ideologues’ to represent these groups based upon motivation to home-educate. pedagogues, van galen (1988) explained, are parents at odds with traditional teaching methods or the nature of public schooling. ideologues instead have a desire to teach conservative religious values (van galen, 1988). more recent studies report a wide array of motivations to educate at home (gann & carpenter, 2017; hanna, 2012; harding, 2011). some suggest ubiquitous access to educational materials made possible by the internet (bullock, 2011; mcavoy, 2015; new south wales parliament, 2014) help account for the recent growth in home-education; growth witnessed in australia (chapman, 2017) and elsewhere (issimdar, 2018; neuman & guterman, 2013). certainly, there exists evidence of increasing reliance upon the internet in this context (bullock, 2011; hanna, 2012). the most common online activities reported by home-educators and their students, moreover, are those dependent upon successful online search (bullock, 2011; neil et al., 2014). online search is associated with several educational benefits, yet little is known about this practice in homeeducation beyond such reliance. irrespective of location, internet technologies like search engines have long been credited with giving students more power. indeed, because information online is available to anyone, anywhere at any time, today’s students are thought to have the same, if not better (prensky, 2001), access to the information their educators do (jalongo et al., 2015). in theory, this equitable access can reduce power imbalances between teachers and students, making students more active participants (kroksmark, 2016; tapscott, 2009) than that inherent in traditional didactic pedagogies. such a levelling of status may not necessarily present in more equitable ‘talk’ though, some suggesting that technology-based lessons decrease opportunities for effective teacher-student dialogue (asterhanet al., 2012; gillen et al., 2007). this paper presents select findings from a study into online search and the associated discursive practices in australian home-education. it responds to increased understanding of a relationship between particular discursive practices and student online search (castek et al., 2012; knight & mercer, 2015). the paper is guided by the following questions: rq1 what discursive practices are privileged during online search and during discussions of online search in australian home-education? rq2 to what extent do these discursive practices contribute to relations of power? rq3 to what extent are these discursive practices found alongside effective online search? the remainder of the paper is organised as follows: first, i outline the paper’s theoretical framework introducing critical theory and critical discourse analysis and identifying their suitability for the research. next, i consider the context of home-education focusing on its growing popularity and success as an alternative to school-based classrooms. i then consider research on technology in home-education before highlighting the more relevant findings from studies examining the interplay between technology and discourse in education. in lieu of any research into home-education discursive practices or home-education search practices, a review of studies investigating discursive practices in search more broadly follows before the methods are outlined. findings and a discussion of these are then presented, serving to locate ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt84 the present study within the existing literature and to theorise the participants’ search and discursive practices as reflecting wider social ideologies. some brief concluding remarks with a view to the future then follow. theoretical framework critical theory in the late 1960s, a new critical paradigm gained momentum in educational research, one influenced by habermas (1963) and the work of the frankfurt school (turner, 1996). beyond just understanding social realities, this critical paradigm aims to expose and challenge realities which house inequitable power relations by drawing attention to the ideologies that legitimise them. education can both reflect and change society, making it particularly attractive to critical research and these emancipatory aims (rogers, 2004). educational contexts have also traditionally been built upon ‘taken for granted’ inequitable distribution of status. this study is framed in critical theory. because it focuses upon relations of power; both the power afforded through discourse and through online search; this framing is particularly fitting. critical theory assists by positioning the power given to certain practices and participants as resulting from wider ideologies. like all critical work, the study seeks to interrogate whose interests these ideologies serve. more specifically, the study uses critical discourse analysis to expose “the apparently natural flow of talk” pertaining to online search and to denaturalise common-sense assumptions about the practice (luke, 1995, p. 12). critical discourse analysis critical discourse analysis (cda) is an interdisciplinary theory that combines linguistic examination with social theory to denaturalise language practices (rogers, 2002). cda sees “linguistic practices as not simply reflecting underlying […] social realities but as constructing and legitimising” them (coyle, 2000, p. 57). the ‘critical’ in critical discourse analysis reflects its particular interest in social realities where inequitable distributions of power are naturalised by language. the value of cda for educational research is well established (gee, 2004; luke, 1995; rogers et al., 2005). rogers (2004) explains “in educational settings, language is the primary mediational tool through which learning occurs” (p. 12). language helps us share ideas, and reveals what students know or understand (koole, 2015). but language does more than this. language is a social practice through which individuals establish identities and navigate relationships (wodak, 1999). it is these language practices, those determined by, and determining social structures, that cda scholars are interested in, that they consider ‘discourse’ (fairclough, 2015). discourse, and by extension cda, is thought to be more pertinent than ever in education due to perceived changes in student and educator roles (fairclough, 2015). drawing upon giddens (1991), fairclough (2013) explains “relationships once automatically affording authority […] are in decline” (pp. 97-98), suggesting that now, student and educator power is instead negotiated largely through discourse. the persistent, but ultimately problematic, rhetoric surrounding today’s ‘digital native’ (prensky, 2001) and their ‘superior’ cyber-expertise has similarly altered the status enjoyed by students and student speakers when learning with digital technologies. though to date, no studies are found that use cda to investigate home-education, nor online search, a small number investigate discourse and online search more broadly. some preliminary findings include: that technology can alter the social and learning relationships available in education (theobald et al., 2016); that parents take for granted their child/ren’s technological proficiency (danby et al., 2013); and that the “potential of collaboration and discourse should be exploited in search-based tasks” (knight & ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt85 mercer, 2015, p. 303). the present study attempts to further our understanding of such tasks and the accompanying discursive practices when conducted as part of home-education. it considers the role these discursive practices might play in contributing to power relations and seeks to explain why certain discourses are privileged and whom they serve. like bakhtin, the dialogic philosopher readers may be more familiar with, fairclough (2015) describes discourse as inextricably linked to social relations as well as social constructions of power. he suggests texts are more than a collection of linguistic features and reveal much about what individuals take for granted, including their knowledge, beliefs, and values. these internalised assumptions, what fairclough (1993) calls ‘members’ resources’, are socially constrained and constitutive and influence how individuals interpret discursive and social practices, including their own, even unconsciously. fairclough and bakhtin’s theories work in concert with one another here in that this process of interpretation is of paramount importance. both theorists understand discourse to be a social phenomenon, one where no utterance is “a completely free combination of forms of language” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 81) and where “meaning cannot be reduced to the utterance of the speaker [n]or to the interpretation of the listener, but emerges from the context between them” (omland, 2020, p. 2). fairclough’s three-tiered model for cda assists in investigating this context. it considers how texts are produced, how they are interpreted and the ‘members’ resources’ upon which this interpretation relies, as well as the social conditions making these ‘members’ resources’ privileged (fairclough, 1993). in line with his model, this study conceptualises any spoken discourse as “simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice and an instance of social practice” (fairclough, 1993, p. 4), requiring three corresponding levels of analysis. the study conceptualises the participants’ discourse as not just linguistic choices (micro), but as choices reflecting wider discursive (meso), and ultimately, social (macro) goals. the participants’ discourse is explored for its ability to expose how certain search and discursive practices are interpreted, as well as the social conditions in which those interpretive procedures are privileged. cda provides the study with a lens and an apparatus to investigate online search and the associated discursive practices in these home-education sites. the study’s critical framing considers search figure 1. theoretical framework. adapted from fairclough (1993, p. 73). ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt86 and discursive practices as influential to status and as practices creating, responding to, and resulting from wider social ideologies. literature review home-education – a success story this study defines home-education as “the [voluntary, permanent] education of students, parentdirected, at home” (neil et al., 2014, p. 107). it does not include families who, due to covid-19, had to continue tuition at home, but anecdotal evidence exists that some of these families will continue educating at home after the pandemic. academic interest in the motivations to home-educate, an interest already spanning 30 years (jackson, 2009; ray, 2015), is thus likely to continue. as established, studies have tended to move beyond van galen’s (1988) dichotomy in accounting for home-education, instead focusing upon wider environmental and historical influences, including the emergence of ubiquitous technology. a desire to raise independent and active learners, a desire proponents of dialogic pedagogy will appreciate, has also been reported (bell et al., 2016; harding, 2011). bell et al.’s (2016) study of over 450 american families reported 10 underlying motivations to home-educate, the most predominant being the desire to offer student-centred learning (see also harding, 2011, re australian parent-educators). growing studies reporting elevated academic success, studies to which we now turn, might also attract parents to educate outside of schools. students educated at home reportedly perform as well as, if not better than, their school-attending counterparts (board of studies, teaching & educational standards nsw [bostes], 2016; jackson, 2014; ray, 2015). in one australian state, home-educated students, and students previously home-educated scored significantly higher than their school-attending peers in almost every test of the national assessment program: literacy and numeracy (bostes, 2014). admittedly, these results are based on a small but growing percentage (approx. 10%) of home-educated students volunteering to be tested. regarding this state’s (nsw) school certificate, one received after four years of secondary schooling, higher than average marks for those previously educated at home were again reported, the difference growing positively with duration of home-education (bostes, 2014). at university, home-educated students in australia, as in america (cogan, 2010), also perform above average (hear our voices australia [hova], 2014), with more attaining degrees (both bachelor's & above) than in the general australian population (wight, 2019). benefits beyond academic achievement are also reported of home-education (allan & jackson, 2010; saunders, 2010). home-educated students are found to be as mature, if not more mature socially, than school-attending youth (saunders, 2010) and have a strong sense of self-worth (allan & jackson, 2010). this disposition could result from parent-educators adopting fewer didactic pedagogies (bell et al., 2016), a response, some suggest, to the parents’ own negative experiences with a traditional autocratic school environment (english, 2015). importantly, much research claiming to compare home-educated and school-attending students considers only narrow aspects of educational progress, or those reducible to numerical scores (murphy, 2014). studies also frequently fail to adequately consider the diversity in home-education, including pedagogical style (neuman & guterman, 2016), previous achievement levels (ice & hoover-dempsey, 2011), and levels of parent commitment (murphy, 2014). methodological shortcomings including biased samples, affiliations with home-education advocacy organisations (ray, 2015; wight, 2019), and narrow scope (bostes, 2014) similarly render some studies ungeneralisable. ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt87 internet use in home-education despite three decades worth of home-education research and internet technologies being accessible for about as long, scarce research investigates internet use in this setting (jackson, 2017). such a gap is somewhat surprising as home-educators have long been found to adopt new technologies (coleman, 2014). skelton (2016) found that students educated at home receive more technological exposure than those at school. home-educators report that using technology (dumas et al., 2010) and the internet specifically (sabol, 2018) improves their students’ educational experience and helps provide a rich, individualised and engaging curriculum. hanna’s (2012) research, a unique study spanning ten years, found a dramatic increase in internet reliance over that period among most of her sampled (n=250) american home-educators (see also gann, 2016; sabol, 2018). research on technology use in home-education typically focuses on which devices are used, how frequently and why. little research considers how effective such use is in attending to students’ educational needs. in the united states, several home-based educational systems (charter schools, virtual schools and cyber schools) rely upon internet technologies specifically, but investigations of these similarly fail to study the quality of internet use (barbour & reeves, 2009). this gap, coupled with the increased understanding that online search is complex and difficult (chevalier et al., 2015; eynon & geniets, 2016), and the most prolific online activity conducted in home-education makes the current study timely. the growing number of families choosing (or being required) to home-educate and knowledge that online search correlates with educational benefits (van deursen & van dijk, 2010) similarly demands a greater understanding of search engine use in this setting. online search and discourse by grade four (typically nine years of age), the australian curriculum and reporting authority [acara] (2019) states that students should be able to “use ict to plan an information search” (p. 2). this directive reflects an understanding that the ability to find, comprehend, and evaluate information online is crucial for participation in society today (oecd, 2010, 2015). online search is associated with several benefits (casey et al., 2012; halavais, 2009; johnson, 2010; van deursen & van dijk, 2010), yet much research reports a skill deficit among students (fraillon et al., 2015; gui & argentin, 2011; morrison & barton, 2018; quintana et al., 2012) meaning they may not reap these rewards. findings from the recent national assessment program (nap) ict literacy tests paint a bleak picture indicating that even in year 10, only half of the tested australian students can script “well targeted searches for electronic information” when searching online (fraillon et al., 2015, p.112-113). though few studies investigate online search in homeeducation (morrison, 2021), broader literature on online search, and effective online search specifically, are informative. several factors are found to positively influence student online search. higher reading proficiency, for example, reportedly assists students in scripting well-targeted search queries and selecting relevant websites (duarte et al., 2011). strong prior content knowledge of topics searched is also related to student search success (keil & kominsky, 2013), as is the amount of adult guidance (gossen et al., 2014) and explicit instruction received (huertas-bustos et al., 2018; walton et al., 2018). of particular bearing to this study are findings that student search success is related to certain discursive practices (knight & mercer, 2015). this finding reflects a wider academic interest in the interaction between discourse and digital technology use (hao, 2020; major et al., 2018) including the extension of traditional concepts of conversation (littleton & mercer, 2013; mercer et al., 2010; wegerif, 2013). several researchers have identified the possibility for digital technologies to not only influence discourse (danby et al., 2013; omland, 2020; theolbald, 2015; wegerif & major, 2018), but to become participants in learning conversations (craig et al., 2018; davidson, 2020; wegerif & major, 2019). others contend that when the allowances of both ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt88 digital technologies and discourse are utilised, “new forms of discussion” and the co-construction of knowledge result (major, 2018; stahl et al., 2014, p. 188; wegerif, 2013). this co-construction, importantly, does not necessarily depend on all participants consistently agreeing. in 2012, castek et al. found that grade seven students who expressed their own ideas but also built on one another’s collaborated more effectively when searching the web. knight and mercer’s (2015) study into collaborative online search similarly reported that the most successful searchers were speakers who “engage[d] critically but constructively with each other’s ideas” and where “joint consideration” is given to opinions before decisions are made (knight & mercer, 2015, p. 310). this will sound particularly promising to readers of this special issue given dialogic pedagogy’s central intention to foster learner agency and given its understanding that often, “the one who does not agree […] but perpetuates and deepens critical examinations […] is, in fact, the most valuable, legitimate, and necessary participant” (marjanovic-shane, 2016, p a53). importantly, contributions made by the teacher have been found to be the critical factor in ensuring student contributions are a central focus and that students and teachers become legitimate and equal dialogic partners in meaning making (mercer et al., 2019; omland, 2020; theolbald, 2015). indeed, imperative to success in many digital tasks is educators “focus[ing] on the effective use of talk scaffolds” (major et al., 2018, p. 13) and modelling “equitable kind[s] of debate” (mercer et al., 2010, p. 370). returning to online search specifically, coiro et al.’s (2011) investigation of seventh graders found that collaborative dialogue and conducting online inquiry in pairs resulted in “new opportunities to coconstruct meaning [which in turn] fostered more efficient and productive comprehension of online informational texts” (castek et al. 2012, p.482). the aforementioned study by knight and mercer (2015) similarly found that the most success was experienced by those (11and 12-year-olds) participating in the most exploratory talk. other discursive practices found to assist student search include extending another speaker’s ideas and equal contributions to dialogue (castek et al., 2012). the experiences of less successful student searchers have likewise been found to correlate with distinctive discursive practices (castek et al., 2011; chang, 2017). studies of online search at home, but not in home-education, tend to report discursive practices which differ from those found to correlate with search success (danby et al., 2013; davidson, 2011). specifically, parents and children have both been found to underestimate the importance of the parent’s discursive contributions in supporting the child’s online search, as with other digital technologies (plowman et al., 2008; theobald et al., 2016). danby et al.’s (2013) examination of a family’s talk during online search found that children often disengaged from dialogue with their parents. to show that they were unavailable […] they kept their gaze directed at the particular technology, talking aloud as they used it, or they continued using the technology accompanied by silence rather than answering (p. 94). this seeming reluctance to “relinquish the floor to the other or to make room for the other’s active responsive understanding”, in bakhtin’s terms (1986, p. 71), may inhibit true dialogic teaching and the equitable kinds of dialogue previously found associated with student search success. the parent’s discourse in danby’s study similarly accepted an established digital identity in their young children (< 3 years old), forewent instruction (as in plowman et al., 2008) and failed to draw attention to the literacies required for online search. in a similar study, davidson (2011) found that children collaborating with parents during online search also talked in ways preserving their identity as competent, independent online searchers (davidson, 2011). should this confidence, held by both parents (danby et al., 2013) and children (davidson, 2011), be inflated, however, as much research reports of young people’s online search (aesaert et al., 2017; erdemir, 2011), it may limit collaborative discourse, previously found to positively influence search practices (knight & mercer, 2015). if students and parent-educators can engage in discursive ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt89 practices correlated with success when searching, we can better establish contexts where new educational benefits are assured. method quantitative and qualitative data were collected from observations, search proficiency tests and interviews to develop an in-depth understanding of online search in home-education. while qualitative data (particularly spoken discourse) are informative, students (tiidenberg et al., 2017) and educators (mansour, 2013) have been found to report different, even contradictory, practices compared with practices actually observed, meaning such information is more reliable when complemented with quantitative data (e.g. that collected during observation and tests). the research design chosen also begins to address certain gaps in the literature. the age of students, for example, was guided by a lack of research into online search of australian students in early primary years (gui & argentin, 2011; quintana et al., 2012). obtaining data from observation and tests also helps the study offer some unique evidence of search in a field often limited by self-reporting (di salvo et al., 2014). participants five families (referred to as family a, b, c, d, and e) who were home-educating children aged nine and 10 years-old in south-east queensland participated in this part of the study. invitations to participate were distributed via social media home-education support networks and through a professional email group. convenience sampling (creswell, 2014) was then utilised. both students (n = 7) and their parent-educators (n = 5) were participants. the parent-educators (all female) reported having used search engines themselves as a home-education resource for between one and 20 years and reported their child/ren had been searching online for between one and five years. families came from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds and all reported home-educating for at least two years. in addition to addressing a gap in the existing literature, the child/ren’ age aligns with when australian students are expected to be able “to use ict to plan an information search” (acara, 2019, p.2). data collection observation the five families were each observed conducting online searches ‘as they normally would’ for 20 minutes during the first of three visits to their homes. screen capture software (camstudio) recorded mouse movements and typing, while a video recorder captured the participants’ discursive practice. utilising video recordings meant the observations could occur without the presence of a researcher, helping to minimise the “partialness of the observer’s view” while still collecting data that offered a sense of being in the social action (cohen et al., 2000, p. 313). this instrument offered the opportunity to record naturally occurring discourse, as prioritised in cda, and to observe online search in situ. both discursive practice during the search, and footage of the search, were collected as data to help understand the dynamic nature of search engine use in these homes. search proficiency test during the second visit, all participants (five parent-educators and seven students) independently sat a custom-designed search proficiency test including an ‘on-paper’ and online component. participants were given 30 minutes to complete as much of the online component as possible. the on-paper component was not timed. the test assessed the participants’: knowledge of search terminology; ability to manipulate search results; ability to predict search results; ability to conduct online searches to meet specific informational needs; and their ability to utilise specific search tools. designing the online items involved ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt90 extensive testing of various search topics and of queries likely scripted for each. camstudio was again used to record the participants’ search practices during the test’s online component. the test was piloted for its reliability and age-appropriateness with educators and students prior to administering in april 2017. interview during the final visit, parent-educators and their students were individually interviewed by the author using a semi-structured design. interview as a method “is particularly useful […] for accessing individuals’ attitude and values – things that cannot necessarily be observed” in other ways (silverman, 2006, p. 114). questions sought information regarding the participants’ use of online search, confidence in online search, and confidence in their students’/parent-educators’ online search. parent-educator interviews lasted between 20 and 40 minutes and those with students lasted between 13 and 24 minutes. these were video and audio recorded for subsequent transcription. participants were also shown footage from their search proficiency test during the interview, allowing them opportunities to explain certain practices or add contextual information. data analysis data analysis procedures were primarily guided by cda, an approach typically associated with qualitative research. an increasing number of cda studies, however, employ quantitative methods to support their primary qualitative information, as this research does. quantitative data quantitative data from the observation and proficiency test were used to begin addressing rq3 regarding the efficacy of the online search in these australian homes. a complete description of the coding procedures for searches conducted is beyond the scope of this paper. for illustrative purposes, some coding was employed according to: number of searches conducted; types of query scripted; number of websites entered per topic; time spent per topic; time on useful versus irrelevant websites; and search success. qualitative data discourse from the observations and interviews made up the qualitative data for the study and assisted in addressing all three research questions. audio recordings of observations and interviews were transcribed verbatim. transcripts were analysed using a system guided by fairclough’s (2015) three-tiered model for cda (figure 1), involving the recursive analysis of language to understand its social functions and determinants. fairclough (1993) identifies any instance of discourse as “simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice and an instance of social practice” (p.4). in line with this three-dimensional model for cda (figure1), data were recursively analysed at a micro-level (through linguistic examination), a meso-level (through consideration of texts as signifiers of discourses), and at a macro level (through consideration of discourses as signifiers of wider social ideologies). at the micro level, texts were analysed as individual utterances with special consideration given to vocabulary, grammar and textual structures (see fairclough, 2015, pp.129-130). at this stage analysis was “highly sensitive to language nuances” and each utterance was treated as a single text (cohen et al., 2000, p. 299). data were also analysed (at the meso level) for the presence of any patterns in discursive practice. this involved a consideration of not only the utterances themselves, but patterns in the manner in which ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt91 they were produced by speakers and consumed and interpreted by listeners. during the observations, records were made of: • the types of speech acts engaged in (the force of utterances); • the duration of certain speech acts, in seconds. any patterns identified were analysed for evidence of common-sense assumptions about searching and searchers with the aim of exposing the participants’ ‘member’s resources’; the tools they use when interpreting what it means to search and talk about search. while the meso level of analysis aimed to uncover certain discursive practices and these ‘members’ resources’, the macro-level analysis aimed to understand how and why these resources were privileged, accepted as ‘natural’ or ‘taken for granted’ by participants (henderson, 2005). according to luke (2002) macro-analysis considers the “social formations, institutions, and power relations that […] texts index and construct” (p.100). rather than focusing on individual utterances (micro) or individual discursive practices (meso), that is, the macro-level analysis treated data collectively as evidence of wider social phenomena, including pervasive ideologies. findings & discussion this research was guided by three research questions: • rq1 what discursive practices are privileged during online search and during discussions of online search in australian home-education? • rq2 to what extent do these discursive practices contribute to relations of power? • rq3 to what extent are these discursive practices found alongside effective online search? given cda considers discursive practice inextricably linked to social practice, including the legitimisation, naturalisation or even demise of power structures, findings regarding rq1 and rq2 will be presented together below. findings regarding the efficacy of the online search (rq3) then follow. during the observation, the only instrument to include discourse between students and parenteducators, coding was used to identify the types of speech acts engaged in. fairclough (2015) explains that identifying an utterance as a speech act (what bakhtin, 1986, refers to as a speaker’s ‘speech plan’ or ‘speech will’) involves attempting to identify the speaker’s purpose in producing it. thirty-three different speech acts were identified during the observations. table 1 presents a tally of several of the most common speech acts made during observations. table 1. tally of speech acts during ‘collaborative’ search row speech act parent-educators # students # 1 question/answer sequences 79 68 2 reading aloud 68 68 3 suggestions (and responses) to take certain routes 68 40 4 instructions/redirecting type statements 87 11 5 evaluating sites (reference to date/authors) 55 31 6 describing sites/what has been found 56 28 ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt92 7 commenting on site –not related to query 27 25 8 rhetorical question 39 4 9 encouragement/criticism 41 1 10 discussing information quality 30 10 11 repeating previous utterance 25 15 12 argumentative discussions re steps to take 11 27 13 ‘lesson type’ instruction re generic search skills a 31 1 14 seeking clarification/seeking help or information 13 16 15 off-task talking/behaviours 7 16 16 discussing information source 16 5 17 encouraging query ‘be more specific’ 19 1 18 self-talk/thinking out loud statements 7 13 19 behavioural correction 17 1 20 verbalising the typing process 3 12 21 questioning the relevance of the task 2 13 22 rephrasing question 11 3 23 referring to past lessons/skills covered 11 2 na various other speech acts <combined for brevity> 45 15 total utterances 769 426 note. a additional recording of the length of these utterances occurred. as presented, the most commonly recorded speech acts were ‘question/answer sequences’, ‘reading aloud’ and ‘suggestions to take certain routes’. interestingly, nearly a quarter (23%) of the utterances made (rows 2,5-8, 18, 20, 25-28, 30, 32 and 33) did not appear intended to elicit a response, such as when thinking aloud, while typing, or asking a rhetorical question. also noticeable was that parent-educators made nearly twice as many utterances (769) as the students (426) during these ‘collaborative’ searches. far from an “open-ended spirit of dialogue”, this may present what matusov and miyazaki (2014) describe as a more “monologic relation [where speakers] do not generate actions with new significance” (p. 2-20). on the surface, this count might appear to reflect a superior speaker authority on behalf of the parent-educators. fairclough (2015) suggests such a powerful position is typical in classrooms where “pupils take turns only when a question is addressed” (p. 149). while this (micro level) count does fail to present an ‘equal contribution to the dialogue’, a feature previously associated with positive online search experiences (castek et al., 2012), what is potentially more telling is the students’ (meso level) interpretation of, and response to, their educator’s utterances. indeed, despite speaking less frequently, several findings suggest that the students were the more powerful parties to the dialogue accompanying ‘collaborative’ search, not the parent-educators. excerpt 1 presents the talk occurring during one observation where a parent-educator and her two home-educated students (aged 910 years) search together. ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt93 excerpt 1: observation of online search: family a 44. parent a that one? it’s a youtube video. i think we’ll pass on that. so when you’re looking up stuff like this, 45. student a1 no, the other one, big head 46. parent a -you’ve got to be really careful that you don’t click through to anything. do you know what i mean? so don’t -you can click on a picture 47. student a2 that’s - 48. parent a -but then don’t click through to the actual website because you’re not sure where you’re going. all right? 49. student a1 whoa! is that a [sic] actual snake?. 50. parent a that looks like an actual snake [?too?]. 51. student a2 no, [?if?] that is not an actual snake. 52. parent a you don’t think? 53. student a2 no. 54. parent a no, that could be a snakeskin. found in malaysia. biggest snake. so that’s going -see how it’s got the address underneath here? it’s going to youtube. […] 55. student a1 can we get out of this? 56. parent a yep, we can. all right. what was the next thing? 57. student a1 next one is - 58. student a2 biggest egg ever! 59. parent a what kind of egg though? 60. student a2 chicken egg. 61. student a1 no, the biggest egg ever recorded. it doesn’t matter – 62. student a2 biggest chicken egg. 63. parent a in the world? ever laid? 64. student a1 [crosstalk] ever laid. 65. student a2 ever laid. 66. parent a right. that’s pretty big. 67. student a2 that’s fake. 68. parent a you think? 69. student a2 yes. 70. student a1 [?yep?yeah?]. 71. parent a well, how do we know that it’s fake or real? 72. student a1 we [?always got a?] – 73. parent a we kind of don’t, do we? 74. student a2 [?whoa?wow?]. [?wow?whoa?], that’s a big egg. 75. parent a that’s a big egg. in lines 44-48 and again in 71-73 the parent-educator attempts to instruct the students about some potential pitfalls of online search; inappropriate content and inaccurate content. a noteworthy, potentially adverse, feature in these exchanges, one typical of several observations, is the students’ interruption of the parent-educator’s instruction (lines 45 and 74). indeed, although very few parent-educator utterances across the observations were coded ‘lesson type’ instruction like this (table 1, row 13) nearly half (42%) of these instructive utterances were interrupted by students, identified as students beginning to speak mid parent-educator utterance. fairclough (2015) suggests interruption is one of four devices whereby a more powerful discursive participant (in this instance, the student) constrains the contributions of those less powerful (the parent-educator). while readers may be quick to suggest that dialogic pedagogy “gives legitimacy to dissensus, discord [and] argument” in the classroom where differences in opinion “are welcome and taken as serious opportunities to learn something more”, such learning first requires the interrupter remain ‘on topic’, a feature infrequently observed here (marjanovicshane, 2016, 66-70). controlling the topic of talk in this way is another device recognised by fairclough (2015) as affording a speaker more authority. in lines 67-73, though the parenteducator appears to answer her own question regarding what is “fake or real” (line 73), her rising intonation acts to elicit further discussion. again, the students ignore her, failing to build on one another’s ideas, a discursive practice associated with more productive collaborative online search ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt94 (castek et al., 2012). all students, in fact, were witnessed ignoring suggestions made by parenteducators; identified as students failing to respond to a parent-educator’s question or changing the subject. while proponents of dialogic pedagogy welcome more equality in turn-taking than that seen in traditional classrooms, such discursive practice, in fact, again reflects an inequality albeit one where the teachers’ voices appear suppressed. even more telling perhaps is that the parent-educator in excerpt 1, like others, accepts every diversion, evidenced by her continuing the new topic brought up by students. this again appears to represent a privileging of inequitable discursive practices, practices inhibiting the conversational power of the parent-educators. far from supporting dialogic education, some suggest that technology-based lessons can actually decrease opportunities for effective teacher-student dialogue (asterhanet al., 2012; gillen et al., 2007). in this study, these opportunities appeared affected by the inequitable discursive power afforded students. elsewhere (morrison, 2019) i have suggested that this power likely reflects and reinforces dominant ideologies surrounding technology and children today. more specifically, i theorise the disproportionate discursive power students enjoy during search as stemming from the persistent, though questionable, rhetoric of prensky’s (2001) ‘digital native’. the assumption that today’s students are always more technologically-advanced than their educators continues to be challenged empirically (gui & argentin, 2011; quintana et al., 2012), yet persists in academic literature (judd, 2018; wang et al., 2013) and educational policy (combes, 2013; jones & czerniewicz, 2010). during interviews, several parent-educators from the current study spoke in ways that reflected belief in an inherent, age-based difference of digital status. parent d states “i probably need to make more of a conscious effort to learn to do something or to find something with technology. whereas they probably – it would probably be a bit more natural for them.” this belief, also reported by school-based educators (macpherson, 2013) and other australian parents (green et al., 2011), likely affects how parent-educators interpret their students’ search and discursive practices. their habit of letting students direct both, that is, despite infrequent search success (as discussed later) may reflect internalised assumptions that their students are stronger searchers than themselves. it may also reflect a belief that students need “opportunities to develop understandings that they find internally persuasive, rather than simply being presented with the authoritative word of the teacher” (aukerman et al., 2017, p. 4). such a redefinition of relationships is, marjanovic-shane (2016) contends, frequently beneficial and always present in meaning-making in dialogic pedagogy. a desire to teach “in ways that allow student perspectives to meaningfully shape the course of [class activities and] classroom dialogue” should, notwithstanding, be considered alongside findings that adult guidance (gossen et al., 2014) and explicit instruction (huertas-bustos et al., 2018; walton et al., 2018) positively influence student search success. also found in the participants’ discursive practice was acceptance of another inequitable power relation: that between searchers and search engine. as highlighted, during observation a prevalence of speech acts not intended to elicit response was found (table 1). reading aloud from the screen, commenting on websites (unrelated to query) and monologuing while typing were privileged discursive practices, none of which promote conversation. by foregrounding the web content, interface, and search process, these practices could be said to raise the status of the search engine, diminishing that of other speakers and searchers. indeed, such a passive stance among student searchers has previously been self-reported (morrison, 2016). in a study investigating grade 8 school-attending students’ online search, morrison (2014), employed semiotics, which deems all social phenomena, including interactions with ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt95 search engines, as processes of communication. participants were asked to choose one of two stylised images to describe their communication with a computer during various scenarios: one image representing a ‘passive’ user and the other, an ‘active’ user. for scenarios relating to manipulating hardware (e.g. installing a printer or adjusting volume), most students (80%) chose the ‘active user’ image. similarly, students chose this image more often than not when describing searching via facebook or youtube. when the scenario involved searching for information via google, however, most students (60%) selected the picture representing a passive user. another way the participants’ discursive practice was found to assign power to search engines in the present study, included discursive representation of the technology as ‘animate beings.’ both parenteducators and students described search engines as “saying,” “giving,” and “sharing” information with them. though likely an unconscious linguistic choice, representing the search engine as capable of ‘human’ action in this way, raises its status above that of inanimate technology. hillis et al. (2013) state although “it is humans who design these entities [they] seem to take on lives of their own” (p. 5). this discursive practice of giving technology personal attributes, though not search engines specifically, was previously found by wegerif and major (2019). excerpt 2 shows an example of this, as well as several discursive practices which raise the status of search engines over searchers. it begins four minutes into one observation where family d is conducting a search on ‘where did the foxtrot come from?’ excerpt 2: observation of online search: family d 148. student d1 wasn’t it 1930s? 149. parent d yeah, it became popular in the 1930s is what it said, didn’t it? 150. student d1 yeah. 151. student d2 but – 152. parent d [?but in?] 1915 was when – 153. student d2 -who wa-so there was vernon and irene castle, - 154. student d1 [crosstalk] 155. student d2 -harry fox and – 156. parent d betty lee. 157. student d2 -betty lee. [crosstalk] 158. parent d that was a dance teacher 159. student d2 and she danced with vernon castle? 160. parent d oh, it didn’t say that. 161. student d1 it doesn’t say that -vernon castle [inaudible]. yeah 162. student d2 [?and?] what -when was it? 19- 163. parent d --14, is when it first kind of [?came about,?] and it was popular in the 1930s. is that what it said? in lines 149, 160 and 163 the parent-educator refers to the website “saying” things despite no ‘verbal’ function being in operation. in line 161, one of the students replicates this discursive practice. this was typical of the manner in which search engines were discussed by all participants reflecting a shared assumption about the technology and its power. use of the term ‘says’ when searching online or when making reference to on-screen texts has previously been reported among parents (davidson et al., 2020; given et al., 2016) and positions the technology as an active participant in the learning conversation. (craig et al., 2018; davidson, 2020; wegerif & major, 2019). research regarding the capacity for computers to participate in learning conversations has existed since long before the internet (weizenbaum, 1966). some suggest, however, that if students have similar interactions with technology as those in traditional classrooms, including the initiation, response, evaluation [ire] exchange where just one does the ‘evaluating’, it is unlikely to provide new educational benefits (wegerif & major, 2019). speaking of evaluation, note that parent d (excerpt 2) immediately appears to trust what the site “says” above her student’s recollection (line 160). she appears to disagree with the student’s suggestion, stating only that the search engine “didn’t say that” and by implication, anything different must be incorrect. far from welcoming ‘multiple voices’, such practice encourages the student to align their thinking uncritically with that shared by the technology. stewart (2010) suggests that if students are discouraged from being “active ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt96 in the construction of knowledge,” if they see understanding as passive instead of transactional, it “offers nothing new to the topic being explored” (p. 15). parent d’s choice to respond in this way, as opposed to perhaps “you didn’t read that” also reveals much about the parent-educator’s interpretation of online search. she interprets the practice, it appears, as one again where the searcher is a passive receiver with the search engine assigned a more powerful position regarding ‘truth’. aukerman et al. (2017) explain this is common in classrooms where meaning is frequently treated “as singular and pre-determined” (p. 5). such trust in the search engine’s reach and ‘correctness’ was also found in the students’ discursive practice, many suggesting that anything not found on google, must be something “no one knows”. huvila (2016) suggests such beliefs are widespread in western society where the limitations of technology are accepted as limitations of what knowledge is and what knowledge is worth seeking. in interview, most students reported choosing the first result from the search engine results page (serp) somewhat immediately. this practice again affords search engines immense power. advances in their algorithms, admittedly, mean search engines are better at guessing what we want, but researchers warn this further diminishes searcher control (caviglia & delfino, 2016; kammerer & bohnacker, 2012). when tested, it was actually the parent-educators more than the students who chose the first serp result. this is interesting given that three of the four parents discouraged students from doing so during observation (“don’t just choose the first one. read the information. scroll down”; just try down a little bit”; and “maybe just scan down the first page of your responses”). this reflects a rhetoric-reality gap, one where educators discursively promote different, even contradictory, practices compared with true ‘classroom’ practice (as in mansour, 2013). the instinct to choose the first serp result, even when consciously aware of its limitations, may reflect the strength of wider technological ideologies which appear ‘natural’ (wodak & meyer, 2009). technologically-deterministic beliefs, for example, as to the educational promise of all things digital (selwyn, 2010) might help explain continued reliance upon google’s placement of results. so widespread has this reliance become, in fact, (karaseva, 2016) that the multi-billion-dollar search engine optimisation industry, once satisfied with a spot on the first serp, now need sites to appear at the very top of the first serp to be profitable (hochstotter & lewandowsky, 2009). such a culture, and its resulting behaviours, inhibit the kinds of learning environments desirable; environments where students and teachers (not tech-giants like google) have authorship over meaning making (matusov et al., 2019) and where “students are active participants in the classroom instead of passive receivers of knowledge” (stewart, 2010, p. 3). in the present study, the participants’ search and discursive practices reflected such passivity and, importantly, were not found alongside effective online search. in this study, online search was considered ‘effective’ if it was related to new educational opportunities. elsewhere i have suggested (morrison, 2021) that what makes search engine technology valuable is not its ability to quickly deliver digitally resources previously available in print form. rather, search engines make available countless new educational benefits (casey et al., 2012; halavais, 2009; johnson, 2010; schroeder, 2014; van deursen & van dijk, 2010). the incomprehensible depth of information online, as well as unprecedented access to government resources, to institutions and repositories like world-class libraries, and the capacity to evaluate dozens of resources simultaneously (on the serp) offer opportunities previously unheard of. the participants in this study, however, were not capitalising upon these. table 2 presents data regarding the search practices of four families who searched together during observation including: the time spent per topic; the number of sites entered per topic; and search success. because each family conducted ‘open ended’ tasks (those where they could choose what was searched for), search success was identified when participants read an ‘answer’ from the screen or took notes having expressed satisfaction in what was found. utterances reflecting a desire to move on due to boredom or frustration, followed by a new search topic helped identify ‘unsuccessful’ searches. ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt97 table 2. collaborative online search during observation case search topic time # sites visited success family a biggest chicken 95 y biggest snake 175 n biggest egg 85 n smallest dog 275 y tasmania 35 n biggest elephant 100 n plovers 137 y magpie 1 55 n magpie 2 150 n glow worms 110 y family c endangered animals: huskies 132 1 y endangered animals: tigers 180 1 y plants in sand 279 1 n plants in gravel 485 5 n spiritual energy 320 1 y family d foxtrot 695 3 y lino printing 412 3 y family e soccer basics 455 4 y raised vegetable garden 793 4 y 19 searches 58% note. times measured in seconds. portions of family a screen capture unavailable. family b did not search together. during the 20-minute observation, families conducted between two and 10 searches, totalling 19 overall. as shown, nearly half (42%) of these searches were not successfully completed. most queries (10 of 19) were scripted as natural language questions seeking definitive answers including ‘can plants grow in sand?’ and ‘where did the foxtrot come from?’ in this way, the participants searched primarily for facts already elsewhere available. rieh et al. (2016) suggest that the way online search has been conceptualised in society results in such information seeking, where the goal is “receptive learning” only or “receiving knowledge without any critical and creative evaluation” (p. 23). this aligns with matusov and miyazaki’s (2014) concept of ‘instrumental learning’; that which involves “acquiring pre-set curricular endpoints” and where “the learning itself is not valued” (p. 3). being able to very quickly locate facts (a new affordance of search technology) can, admittedly, allow more time for engaging in higher-order thinking or for doing something with the information found. such follow-up activities might allow for more future-oriented, open and unpredictable learning outcomes, those better aligned with true dialogic learning (matusov, 2009). no ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt98 such ‘follow-up’ was observed in these homes, however. indeed, parent-educators, like students, were frequently observed encouraging others to move on to new topics, irrespective of current search ‘success.’ subsequent topics also rarely related to those preceding them. in their study into the relationship between teacher and student discourse practices, aukerman et al. (2017) found interactions like this “which focused on displaying and procuring information [were] more limited and limiting” (p. 27). also revealed during the observation (table 2), was a preference for visiting only a few websites per topic. when searching alone too (in the test), most participants entered fewer than two websites per topic. this practice again equates to use that could have been replaced by a print resource, use unlikely to provide new educational benefits. results from the individual test also revealed somewhat ineffective online search. the test included an ‘on-paper’ section and an online section. the highest score possible for the ‘on-paper’ section was 33. the highest score possible for the online section was 55, equating to a possible total of 88 points. students in the study scored between 17 and 40.5 points (out of 88). parent-educators scored between 32 and 54 points (out of 88). if 50% is taken to be a ‘pass’, furthermore, just one student passed the paper section of the test, with no parents passing. regarding the online section, no students passed but most (3 of 5) parenteducators passed this section. finally, both parents and students spent more time on irrelevant websites (34% parent-educator time and 23% student time) than relevant websites (19% parent-educator time and 9% student time). irrelevant websites were those deemed to contain incorrect, misleading or unrelated information and/or those unable to answer the item’s question. while these findings appear to represent ineffective and seemingly ‘unsatisfying’ search, participants typically continued speaking positively about online search and its educational benefits. like any study, this research has some limitations that are important to address. first, much of the data were obtained some years ago. studies into search engine use and discourse remain largely absent (morrison, 2021), however, making this a unique contribution despite its age. indeed, to date, no other studies have been found which use cda to study the discursive practices surrounding online search or that study online search in home-education. second, the study includes a tally of utterances made during collaborative search. these utterances are ‘named up’ in table 1 as speech acts. as established, identifying an utterance as a speech act involves attempting to identify the speaker’s purpose in producing it (fairclough, 2015). somewhat unavoidably, this involves a level of subjective interpretation on the researcher’s behalf, as well as the responders. despite previous critique that discourse analysts focus on “coding certain structural and/or functional patterns that are attributed […] by the researcher” (matusov et al., 2019, p.24), fairclough (2003) agrees with bakhtin that “[t]exts are inevitably and unavoidably dialogical in the sense that ‘any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances’ with meaning dependent upon an utterance’s relationship with others (bakhtin 1986, p. 69). tallying speech acts in this isolated way is thus reductionist and should only be used, as here, to complement other analysis: which involves consideration of the diverse meanings being made between speakers; which recognises and celebrates the subjectivity of both participants and researcher; and which attempts to highlight the nuances of the social nature of language. finally, it has been suggested, that certain codes cannot adequately reflect the myriad of possible purposes the same ‘utterance type’ may have. reading aloud, for example, is not universally engaged in for the same purpose. while outside the scope of the present work, additional coding may provide further insights regarding the discursive practices privileged during online search and the extent to which these contribute to relations of power. concluding remarks internet technologies have had a “significant and irreversible” impact on home-education (mcavoy, 2015, p.82). the parent-educators in this study certainly reported growing reliance upon the internet (as in hanna, 2012), and upon online search specifically (bullock, 2011; neil et al., 2014). online search is ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt99 associated with several educational benefits, but these are not guaranteed, nor dispersed equally. much research reports that young people lack adequate skills to capitalise on the new educational opportunities search engines make available (gui & argentin, 2011; macpherson, 2013; morrison & barton, 2018; quintana et al., 2012). interest, therefore, continues to grow in identifying environments associated with improved student online search. some promising preliminary findings stem from a growing field investigating the interaction between discourse and technology use (hao, 2020; major, 2018). studies have found, for example, that certain discursive practices assist with search collaboration (castek et al., 2012) and search success (knight & mercer, 2015). this study contributes an initial understanding of the types of search and discursive practices privileged by australia’s fastest-growing educational demographic, home-educated students. because discursive practice is both influenced by, and influential to, status, the study also investigated the power relations present. contrary to previous research (major, 2018), the technology use in these sites did not help establish a democratic environment, did not increase student discussion (zengin et al., 2011), nor “enhance dialogic activity by promoting exposure to alternative perspectives” (major, 2018, p. 2005). instead, a prevalence of inequitable discursive practices was found. some inhibited the conversational power of the parenteducators, while others naturalised the ultimate and discrepant power awarded to search engines like google. these practices are problematic, not only because found alongside ineffective online search, but because they reflect the discursive practices culturally available (and privileged) in education today. as danby et al. (2013) explain, accounting for how searchers talk during online search “necessitates a consideration of what it means to participate in, and understand, the social structures in which they are operating” (p. 84). in this way, and in line with fairclough’s cda, such inequitable discursive practices can be considered the work of dominant ideologies shaping these social structures. more succinctly, both the search and discursive practices reported here can be understood as reflecting beliefs about the unquestionable power of digital technologies (like google) and of those assumed better able to use them (like today’s ‘digital native’). proponents of dialogic pedagogy have long suggested that to maximise learning, “classroom talk cannot be dominated by a single, authoritative voice” (stewart, 2010, p. 12). student search success has likewise been associated with collaborations where equal contributions to dialogue exist. while the parenteducators’ discourse in this study certainly appeared to promote “students author[ing] their own education” and could not be said to dominate, certain other ‘voices’ did appear disproportionately privileged (matusov & mikayi, 2014, p. 1). students and educators in all settings will likely benefit further from online search if they continue to encourage “many disparate points of view enter into dialogue”, but ensure that they ultimately author meaning making, not the digital technologies they purport to control (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 239). references allan, s., & jackson, g. 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(2011). elementary students use of smart board the effect of achievement and attitude in science and technology course [symposium]. 5th international computer & instructional technologies symposium (pp. 22–24). fırat university. ‘google speak': the discursive practices of search in home-education renee morrison dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.387 | vol. 10 (2022) dt106 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 311-article text-1597-1-9-20200913 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa26 “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero university of seville, spain miguel jesús bascón university of seville, spain rosario cubero-pérez university of seville, spain abstract in the construction of teachers’ professional knowledge, reflective practices are a fundamental tool that responds to the need to connect theoretical principles with practical resources and to the improvement of teaching by means of critical analysis. the practicum, as a dialogic structure for the explanation and interpretation of teaching practices, provides teachers in training an opportunity to build their own understanding based on dialogue and reflection. invocation is one of the resources used to legitimize scientific or disciplinary knowledge in joint reflection. qualified voices are called and made present in classroom discourse to validate descriptions or explanations. we are interested in defining the profile of the invocations introduced in dialogic reflection, as sources of legitimation of knowledge, and identify the patterns in the sequence of the invocations' appearance. this work consists of an exploratory study of multiple cases, in which each case is a classroom unit composed of a tutor and her student teachers. two cases from the practicum in a primary education teacher degree were selected. a category system was developed for the analysis of invocations and organized into four dimensions: academic or professional knowledge, experiential knowledge, invocation of truth, and invocation of ideology or values. results allow us to highlight some relevant conclusions. invocations are a widespread resource in a process of dialogic reflection to legitimize the interpretation of educational practices. the participation of student teachers in dialogic reflection is possible and abundant thanks to the experience of the practicum, which provides a validity criterion for their arguments, supported by the invocation to the authority of teaching experiences. in this study, tutors’ efforts to connect pedagogical principles with personal experiences in the practicum have not clearly translated into student reflections in the same direction. the paper finishes paying attention to the competencies and training that practicum tutors need. keywords: invocations, dialogic reflection, reflective practices, practicum, teacher training, discourse analysis, qualitative research, case study mercedes cubero is associate professor of cultural psychology (permanent position) in the department of experimental psychology at the university of seville (spain) and a member of the research group laboratory of human activity (lah). her research has focused on the relationship between sociocultural practices, discourse genres and modes of verbal thinking. she has conducted research on narrative and propositional thinking, concept formation, memory strategies, egocentric speech, argumentation and discourse in classroom interactions. her recent research concerns the cultural construction of identity issn: 2325-3290 (online) “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa27 through the analysis of narratives. she also participates in research on autobiographical memory, gender construction and cultural competencies in diverse communities. she was a member of the organizing committee of the i iscar congress (sevilla, september 2005). miguel jesús bascón is a lecturer in language and thought (permanent position) in the department of experimental psychology at the university of seville (spain) and a member of the research group laboratory of human activity (lah). he has studied psychological processes involved in adolescent conflicts, from a discursive and gender perspective. more specifically, the relationship between argumentation and modes of thought. he has conducted research on educational discourse in classrooms, good coeducational practices, the reconstruction of identity in battered women, community cultural competence and psychological health in caregivers of dependent patients. he is currently studying the relationship between identity and resilience in situations of vulnerability in different contexts, especially in school environment and gender violence. he was a member of the organizing committee of the i iscar congress (sevilla, september 2005). rosario cubero-pérez is associate professor of educational psychology (permanent position) in the department of developmental and educational psychology at the university of seville (spain) and a member of the research group laboratory of human activity (lah). her research has focused on educational knowledge construction and the analysis of social interaction in teaching-learning processes, understood as sociocultural activities of joint construction of meanings. amongst other things, she is interested in how collective knowledge is constructed in educational discourse and how participants in this process manage to share a legitimized version of knowledge. in recent years, she has developed research on construction of science in higher education, dialogic reflection in teacher training, collaborative learning in school classrooms, and the study of learner identity through narratives. she was a member of the organizing committee of the i iscar congress (sevilla, september 2005). ïïò introduction in the construction of teachers’ professional knowledge, reflective and dialogic practices are a fundamental tool that responds to the need to connect theoretical principles with practical resources and to the improvement of teaching by means of critical analysis (clarà & mauri, 2010; cubero-pérez, cubero & bascón, 2019; feiman-nemser, 2001; mauri, cubero, bascón, colomina, cubero, jiménez & usabiaga, 2015). the development of professional practical knowledge (fenstermacher, 1994; schon, 1983) supported by the teaching experiences of teachers in training has been examined from a variety of strategies (darling-hammond, 2017; korthagen, 2010), with intervention in practicum being one of the pillars on which recent research is based. the practicum provides teachers in training an opportunity to build their own understanding of teaching based on dialogue and reflection on the practical dilemmas found in their practice (cuenca, 2010). we think, then, of teacher training as an activity situated in specific cultural practices, where student teachers develop an identity, appropriate a discourse and methods to define problems, which will allow them to be active members of their community of practice (matusov & hayes, 2002). a crucial fundamental element in the practicum is the figure of the academic tutor, a socializing agent, a figure that supports and legitimizes the construction of knowledge about teaching (cubero-pérez, cubero & bascón, 2019; cuenca, 2011). “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa28 tutors develop a fundamental role in legitimizing professional knowledge and, at the same time, conferring legitimacy on students in the teaching community, accepting their contributions in an expert discourse, and helping them feel like teachers (feiman-nemser, 2008). but teacher education based on practical knowledge requires more than just telling teachers in training how or what to teach (cuenca, 2010). taking into consideration the importance of the tutor in the legitimization of practices and the socialization of teachers in educational intervention, the selection and training of the tutors becomes a fundamental aspect of the curricula (cuenca, 2011; dinkelman, margolis & sikkegna, 2006). invocation is one of the resources used in classroom dialogue to legitimize scientific or disciplinary knowledge (cubero & ignacio, 2011). we call invocation the resource consisting of expressing statements that rely on and take as reference different elements of academic knowledge and / or personal experience of speakers. the elements of that academic knowledge or that personal experience that are introduced in classroom discourse are used as justification for the versions that are exposed in the classroom. thus, a qualified voice is called and made present in the dialogic teaching process, relating it to a specific description or explanation. the analysis of invocation as an argumentative process allows us to investigate how the relevant sources of knowledge are established in dialogic interactions in the classroom, and how empirical facts and theories that count as valid are constructed. relating the use of this resource with our theoretical approaches, since learning implies appropriating a specific discourse, a form of activity in which the meaning of the experience is constructed with words (lemke, 1990), the investigation of invocations shows the way in which academic knowledge is constructed versus everyday knowledge or other types of knowledge (candela, 1999; edwards, 1993; hatano & inagaki, 1991). this analysis, in addition, deepens in the uses of discourse according to some own rules of the formal educative contexts (edwards, 1993; edwards & mercer, 1987; candela, 1999), as well as in the use of the criteria that science uses to legitimize a certain explanation instead of other possible ones. therefore, the legitimate versions of the events offered or built in the classroom are those that are expected to become the knowledge shared by the classroom community. in this sense, the analysis of the resource called invocation collaborates in the explanation of how a shared knowledge is constructed in dialogic classrooms. also, taking up the argument of the importance of the selection and training of the tutors of the practicum, the analysis of the invocations allows to define an intervention profile in which the tutor contributes to the socialization of the students in the teaching practices through the participation in the legitimization of their own practices. regarding the functions of the invocation, we can affirm that they are: 1) establish knowledge as a valid version, as a scientific, academic or culturally acceptable description-explanation; 2) offer elements that support and justify a certain version of knowledge; 3) define or describe a situation (concept, explanation, activity, experience) in the classroom; 4) control and / or direct an activity or experience that takes place in the classroom; 5) and display the criteria that science, discipline or experience use to legitimize a given explanation instead of other possible ones (cubero & ignacio, 2011). invocations are closely related to the concept of bakhtin's voice (1981, 1986) and to the dialogic structure of discourse the analysis of educational discourse reveals that it is polyphonic and that it contains numerous voices which refer to different perspectives and movements in the process of knowledge construction, as well as different roles played by the teachers and students (cubero & ignacio, 2011). cazden (1993) and wertsch (1900, 1991) have paid special attention to the concept of bakhtin's voice in relation to the school context, since the school presents some voices as better or as privileged forms compared to other discursive forms. being respected, being heard in a classroom implies speaking with the “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa29 voice of truth (that of official science, for example). a voice that is used by the teacher to establish the truth and hold a position of authority. on the other hand, the invocation as a resource to build a valid and culturally accepted explanation is related to other resources that appear in the dialogue and reflection of the classroom. candela has described the classroom as a place where legitimized versions of the facts are constructed, which through the intervention of the teaching staff aspire to be shared knowledge. some of these discursive procedures through which the legitimacy of knowledge is established are argumentation, the search for consensus, analogies, the recourse to perceptual evidence and the authority of specialists (candela, 1999). through the analysis of discourse in these studies it is shown how scientific facts are constructed in the classroom. the author is also interested in analyzing the active role of students in these processes, who use their experience to participate in the dynamics of the classroom, whether or not they are invited to do so. the demand for answers by teachers can cause a type of student participation focused on the elements of teacher's discourse on the clues she gives, the examples she uses, the way she talks about the facts but on other occasions it is essential that students contribute with their experience and meanings, and thus be part of the classroom discourse (candela, 1999; cubero-pérez, cubero & bascón, 2019). faced with the argumentative activity of the students, teachers can perform different movements. they can block students' access to shared classroom dialogue, for example, when they do not incorporate their ideas into joint construction. teachers can also incorporate the students' arguments into the discussion, identifying them as a valid source of authority and leaving different possibilities of understanding open, without there being a single legitimate version of knowledge, but rather a plurality of authorized voices (candela, 1999). in this study we are interested in the joint reflection which is developed in the subject of practicum, as a dialogic structure for the explanation and interpretation of teaching practices. also, in the framework of this reflection, we are interested in the study of invocation as a means of legitimizing what and how to teach. this will allow us not only to describe the sources of validation, but to contrast epistemologically different types of knowledge, and to explore the agency of teachers in training in the definition and resolution of the dilemmas posed by educational intervention. the specific objectives of this study are to define the profile of the invocations introduced in dialogic reflection and identify the patterns in the sequence of the invocations' appearance. method participants this study is part of a largest research project entitled “aid for the construction of knowledge in the practicum of teachers: joint reflection to improve the theory-practice relationship” (http://www.mineco.gob.es/). it consists of an exploratory study of multiple cases (yin, 2009), in which each case is a classroom unit composed of a tutor and her student teachers. concretely, two cases were selected (named case f and case h). these are two classroom units that were integrated into the activities developed in the subject of the practicum in a primary education teacher degree. these were composed of a tutor and 15 students, and a tutor and 9 students, respectively. materials the proposed activity was that student teachers individually wrote a description of a situation experienced in their teaching pre-service practices. the situation should be described avoiding interpretations and would be lately discussed in the practicum classroom. table 1 shows the content/topic “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa30 of each situation described by student teachers. it should be noted how in case f the number of situations treated is doubled (2 in each session), compared to case h. table 1. contents/topics of the situations described by student teachers in a written narrative. case f ca case h s1. controversy over the decision of the management team regarding children repeating grades. s1. controversy over the decision of the management team regarding children repeating grades. s2. refusal of the parents of a child with down syndrome to receive support from the school. s2. differences between the teacher and the student teacher about working with an adhd child. s3. measures a teacher takes with a child who lies by saying that she receives threats from two classmates. s3. discrepancy between the teacher and a mother about the inappropriate behavior of a child in classes. s4. xenophobic behavior of a child and decisions taken by the school. s4. conflict resolution by a teacher in a fight between three children, one of them with adhd. s5. learning problems of a girl with an unstructured family due to parental divorce. s5. a teacher withdraws the abn method of teaching mathematics by cognitive dissonance. s6. a child who needs reinforcement classes outside the classroom. s7. discrepancy between a teacher and the parents of a child with behavioral and school problems. s8. collaborative work agreement between the teacher and the parents of a violent and aggressive child. s9. a child with special educational needs that is inadequately treated due to lack of resources. s10. a child with low performance and following a program to reinforce learning and integration in the classroom. procedure the study consisted of several phases: phase i. tutor’s and cases selection. in this study, we selected those cases that we believed would provide the most abundant information on educational aids. the sample selection process corresponds to what goetz and lecompte (1984) call criterion-based selection and patton (1980) calls purposeful sampling. for the selection of the tutors, and therefore of the case studies, an initial in-depth interview was carried out, in order to explore their didactic and teaching strategies as well as the importance given to reflection within them. their interest and predisposition to participate in a project of this nature were also “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa31 taken into account. likewise, according to the methodological approach of the study, the choice of tutors was based on the fact that they are promoters of good educational practices and with extensive teaching experience in the practicum, according to the assessment from the university's on teaching staff. phase ii. the activity in the classroom was intended to help students connect their experience in school practice with academic knowledge, through joint reflection between the students themselves and the tutor. thus, previously to the seminar, the students had to write individually a situation that they had experienced in their practices and that would have particularly caught their attention. the situation should be described as literally as possible, trying to avoid interpretations. more specifically, seminars were held with the students and the tutor starting with the reading of the situations by the student who had written it; in each session a student or several were responsible for presenting theirs.then the conversation was opened to the group for dialogic reflection. the 5 sessions in which the activity of dialogic reflection between the tutors and the student teachers, of approximately one and a half hours duration, were recorded in video and audio for each case study. phase iii. once the tutorials were concluded, a final interview was held with each tutor to collect their impressions of how the groups functioned, problems they had encountered, suggestions and their degree of satisfaction, etc. the data corresponding to phase ii, that is the tutor-students’ interactions during the seminars sessions, is analyzed and shown in this study. we would like to make an observation about the nature of the method and the results. in case studies, the generalization of the data to broader contexts is not based on a statistically representative random sample, but rather on the deepening of a case or a small number of cases (descombe, 2010; gerring, 2007; giménez, 2012 ; ragin and becker, 1992; yin, 2009). since our interest is to be able to explain not only what happens in a specific case, but what this implies for the explanation of teacher training processes, the cases have been selected based on their analytical generalization (yin, 2009) according to the criteria for strategic selection of critical and typical cases (descombe, 2010; fkyvbjerg, 2001). thus, the generalization of the results does not refer to the concrete frequencies, but the conceptual model that emerges from the analysis. our study, therefore, aims to successfully analyze a small number of cases and develop a model that can be extended and serves to analyze the construction of professional knowledge during the practicum. category system the data processing and its organization were carried out through the use of a category system based on previous studies (cubero & ignacio, 2011) and reworked specifically for the research project to which this work belongs. the unit of analysis that was used for the coding and delimitation of discursive extracts was the turn of intervention of each participant in classroom dialogue. the category system was developed for the analysis of invocations or knowledge validation sources. these categories are organized into 4 dimensions: academic or professional knowledge, experiential knowledge, invocation of truth, and invocation of ideology or values (table 2). the first refers to interventions that introduce the voice of academic or professional knowledge in dialogic reflection as a way to establish the correct knowledge or what counts as the correct one. the second includes the interventions through which the individual, collective or cultural experience of the participants are introduced. the third includes assertions that appeal to absolute truths, which are considered expressions of truth, and sometimes do not incorporate an empirical argument or justification. finally, the fourth dimension contains ideological issues related to a specific value system. “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa32 table 2. invocations or knowledge validation sources categories system (summary description). invocations to authority of definitions examples academic or professional knowledge iad academic discipline utterances that take as reference theories, areas of knowledge, or scientific disciplines. this idea has been proposed by cognitive psychology. iaa autor or professional group utterances that take as a reference particular individuals or professional groups perspectives with mastery of academic knowledge. but vygotsky defended the social origin of thinking… iam teacher in the school for professional or teaching practices utterances that take as a reference the perspective of the teachers in the schools, who are recognized as experts with professional or pragmatic knowledge. in the school i go for teaching practices, my tutor has told me that with parents you have to be careful to introduce any teaching innovation. iac formalized knowledge utterances that take as a reference technical terms that are recognized as formal or academic vocabulary. this is what we call in psychology the zone of proximal development. iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session utterances that takes as a reference technical terms which are generated from the experience of the groupsession (11.89%). here, in all these examples that you have been explaining, we can see something that is some kind of conceptual framework of the teacher. experiential knowledge iei participant's individual experience utterances that take as a reference the everyday practice events/experience of the participant. my friends who study sciences, laugh when i told them that pedagogy is also a science. ieg group-session experience utterances that take as a reference a collective idea which is shared by the participants because it has been generated in classroom microcosm and dialogue. as hugo is saying, and we defended before, i believe that we have to create the conflict. “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa33 iep experience on the didacticeducational practice in classroom contexts utterances that take as a reference events related to the educational experience of participants, which could be experienced with other groups of students or in previous degrees. i knew a teacher who always sat the worst children near her table. iec cultural experience of the participant or the classroom group utterances that take as a reference everyday knowledge shared by and established in a cultural group. it is known by the community that if a student disconnect from the subject, when she wants to return, it is too late. truth ive related to present experiences utterances that take as a reference an assertion on the nature or description of an object or process. the assertion is based on a direct real-time experience and it is considered and expression of truth. if i shout loudly right now (and she shouts) you get scared, you see? ivn not related to present experiences utterances that take as a reference an assertion on the nature or description of an object or process. the utterance is not related to current direct experiences and it is considered and expression of truth. it is included in discourse without the need for any proof or argument in favor. you can't educate a child without punishing him when he needs it. ideology and values iiv ideology or value system utterances that take as a reference the perspective of specific value systems or ideologies that are explicitly mentioned. the right to education is a right for all children, as stated in the human rights letter. in the process of developing the category system, the categories were verified by each team member (three members), in several re-readings of the transcripts. the different categories identified by each member were shared and described to establish an emerging list of them, combining or dividing them “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa34 according to their best ability to explain the discursive process. this mechanism involves an iterative process between created categories and re-analysis until obtaining a network of them by saturation (clarke, 2005). finally, a procedure was carried out to establish the reliability of the category system between observers (cohen's kappa coefficient over 0.87; cohen, 1960). analysis and results the treatment of the data carried out corresponds to the identification of the innvocations in two complete work sessions of the two practicum tutors and their respective student teachers. the sessions analyzed are the first and fifth sessions, with the aim of contrasting the intervention resources used. the calculations were made based on the frequency and percentage of each category. the results are described according to the specific objectives set out in the introduction. first, the case f data are shown, and after the case h ones. results of case f in the overall profile of invocations (table 3) the most used have been those referred to the authority of academic or professional knowledge (40.56%), followed by invocations to experiential knowledge (32.87%) and invocations to the truth (22.38 %). table 3. overall profile of invocations in case f. invocations f % iad authority of academic discipline 2 1.40 iaa authority of the author or professional group 13 9.09 iam authority of the school teacher 11 7.69 iac formalized knowledge 15 10.49 iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session 17 11.89 ia academic or professional knowledge 58 40.56 iei. participant's individual experience 3 2.10 ieg group-session experience 1 0.70 iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in classroom 37 25.87 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 6 4.20 ie. experiential knowledge 47 32.87 ive related to present experiences 6 4.20 ivn not related to present experiences 26 18.18 iv. truth 32 22.38 iiv ideology or value system 6 4.20 iiv ideology and values 6 4.20 total 143 100 in relation to the most used concrete categories, we highlight the invocations to the experience on the didactic-educational practice (25.87%), followed by the invocations to the truth not related to present “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa35 experience (18.18%) and the invocations to the formalized knowledge generated from the experience of the group-session (11.89%). this profile of invocations is different when analyzing separately the interventions of the practicum tutor and the student teachers (table 4). table 4. profile of invocations used by the practicum tutor and the student teachers in case f, separately. invocations tutor student teachers f % f % iad authority of academic discipline 1 2.56 1 0.96 iaa authority of the author or professional group 11 28.21 2 1.92 iam authority of the school teacher ----11 10.58 iac formalized knowledge 6 15.38 9 8.65 iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session 15 38.46 2 1.92 ia academic or professional knowledge 33 84.62 25 24.04 iei participant's individual experience ----3 2.88 ieg group-session experience 1 2.56 ---- iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in classroom ----37 35.58 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 1 2.56 5 4.81 ie. experiential knowledge 2 5.13 45 43.27 ive related to present experiences 1 2.56 5 4.81 ivn not related to present experiences 1 2.56 25 17.48 iv. truth 2 5.13 30 28.85 iiv ideology or value system 2 5.13 4 3.85 iiv ideology and values 2 5.13 4 3.85 total 39 100 104 100 the practicum tutor uses, almost exclusively, invocations in the authority of academic or professional knowledge dimension (84.62%). the most frequent categories in this dimension have been the invocations to the knowledge generated from the experience of the group-session (38.46%) and the invocation to the authority of the expert –an author or professional group(28.21%). both categories of invocations are almost exclusively present in the tutor's invocations. the teacher also appeals to formalized knowledge (15.38%). students invoked more frequently their experience (43.27%), followed by invocations to the authority of the truth (28.85%) and, finally, the authority of academic-professional knowledge (24.04%). invocations to the truth were almost exclusively used by the students. in relation to the most frequently used categories, we highlight the invocation to the experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom (35.58%), the statements about the truth that are not related to present experiences (24.04%) “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa36 and the invocation of the authority of the school teacher with whom the students develop their teaching practices (10.58%) the last two categories are almost exclusively used by students. there are also changes from the first to the fifth session in the distribution of the different dimensions and categories with respect to the overall profile (table 5). table 5. profile of invocations according to the session and the agent for case f. invocations session 1 session 5 f % f % iad authority of academic discipline 1 1.16 1 1.75 tutor ----1 1.75 student teachers 1 1.16 ---- iaa authority of the author or professional group 5 5.81 8 14.04 tutor 3 3.49 8 14.04 student teachers 2 2.33 ---- iam authority of the school teacher 8 9.30 3 5.26 tutor ----------- student teachers 8 9.30 3 5.26 iac formalized knowledge 12 13.95 3 5.26 tutor 3 3.49 3 5.26 student teachers 9 10.47 ---- iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session 9 10.47 8 14.04 tutor 7 8.14 8 14.04 student teachers 2 2.33 ---- ia academic or professional knowledge 35 40.70 23 40.35 iei participant's individual experience 1 1.16 2 3.51 tutor ----------- student teachers 1 1.16 2 3.51 ieg group-session experience ----1 1.75 tutor ----1 1.75 student teachers ----------- iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom 11 12.79 26 45.61 tutor ----------- student teachers 11 12.79 26 45.61 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 4 4.65 2 3.51 tutor 1 1.16 ---- student teachers 3 3.49 2 3.51 ie. experiential knowledge 16 18.60 31 54.39 ive related to present experiences 6 6.98 ---- tutor 1 1.16 ---- “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa37 student teachers 5 5.81 ---- ivn not related to present experiences 23 26.74 3 5.26 tutor ----1 1.75 student teachers 23 26.74 2 3.51 iv truth 29 33.72 3 5.26 iiv ideology or value system 6 6.98 ---- tutor 2 2.33 ---- student teachers 4 4.65 ---- iiv ideology and values 6 6.98 ---- total 86 100 57 100 invocations of academic knowledge are introduced in both sessions with a similar frequency and weight (from 40.70% to 40.35%). the same does not happen in the rest of the dimensions. invocations of experiential knowledge increase from the first to the fifth session (from 18.60% to 54.39%) and invocations to the authority of truth (from 33.72% to 5.26%) and value systems (from 6.98% to 0%) are reduced. in the distribution of the specific categories used in the first and the fifth session, there is an increase in the calls to the experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom (from 12.79% to 45.61%), to the author's authority (from 5.81% to 14.04%) and in the invitations to the authority of formalized knowledge generated in the session group (from 10.47 to 14.04%). invocations to a general truth unrelated to present experiences (from 26.74% to 5.26%), invocations to truths related to present experiences and invocations to values or ideologies are reduced (the latter two until their practical disappearance). if we compare both sessions for the specific case of the practicum tutor (table 5), the calls to the authority of an author or professional group almost tripled (from 3.49% to 14.4%). the declines focus on the categories referred to the dimensions of invocations of truths and knowledge related to ideologies. in the student teachers we observe the changes are concentrated in a reduction until the practical disappearance of the categories included in the dimensions of invocations to the truth, and to the ideologies and systems of values. in a complementary way, we observe an increase in invocations based on experiential knowledge until practically quadrupling them. the increase in this dimension is concentrated in the category of experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom (from 12.79% to 45.61%). the dimension referred to academic knowledge remains stable, although in the fifth session the category of use of the authority of the author or professional group increases (3.49% to 14.04%) and the use of invocations to the school teacher (9.30% to 5.26%) and the formalized knowledge (10.47% to 0.00%) decrease. results of case h in the overall profile of invocations (table 6), the most used have been those referred to the authority of academic or professional knowledge (52.90%), followed by invocations of experiential knowledge (30.90%). table 6. overall profile of invocations in case h. invocations f % iad authority of academic discipline 28 14.70 iam authority of the school teacher 16 8.38 “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa38 iac formalized knowledge 35 18.30 iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session 22 11.50 ia academic or professional knowledge 101 52.90 iei. participant's individual experience 3 1.57 ieg group-session experience 7 3.66 iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom 44 23.00 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 5 2.62 ie experiential knowledge 59 30.90 ive related to present experiences 6 3.14 ivn not related to present experiences 22 11.50 iv truth 28 14.70 iiv ideology or value system 3 1.57 iiv ideology and values 3 1.57 total 191 100 in relation to the most used categories, we highlight the invocations to the experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom (23.00%), followed by the invocations of formalized knowledge (18.30%) and to the authority of the academic discipline (14.70%). this profile of invocations is different for the practicum tutor and the student teachers (table 7). table 7. profile of invocations used by the practicum tutor and the student teachers in case h, separately. invocations tutor student teachers f % f % iad authority of academic discipline 25 30.86 3 2.73 iam authority of the school teacher 5 6.17 11 10.00 iac formalized knowledge 11 13.58 24 21.82 iagp formalized knowledge of the group-session 22 27.16 ---- ia academic or professional knowledge 63 77.78 38 34.55 iei participant's individual experience 3 3.70 ---- ieg group-session experience 4 4.94 3 2.73 iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom 1 1.23 43 39.10 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 2 2.47 3 2.73 ie experiential knowledge 10 12.35 49 44.56 ive related to present experiences 2 2.47 4 3.64 ivn not related to present experiences 4 4.94 18 16.36 iv truth 6 7.41 22 20.00 “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa39 iiv ideology or value system 2 2.47 1 0.91 iiv ideology and values 2 2.47 1 0.91 total 81 100 11 0 100 the tutor of case h, basically, appeals to the authority of academic or professional knowledge (77.78%). the most frequent categories in this dimension have been invocations to the authority of academic discipline (30.86%) and the formalized knowledge generated on the group-session (27.16%), both almost exclusively used by the tutor. for their part, the students invoked more frequently their experience (44.56%), followed by the authority of academic-professional knowledge (34.55%), and of the so-called truth (20.00%). if we analyze the production by categories, the invocation to the experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom stands out (39.10%). this category, moreover, is almost exclusively used by the students. this category is followed in percentages by the invitations to the voice of formalized knowledge (21.82%) and assertions of truth not related to present experiences (16.39%). in the invocation profile, depending on the session, we observe changes in the distribution of the different dimensions and categories (table 8). table 8. profile of invocations according to the session and the agent for case h. invocaciones session 1 session 5 f % f % iad authority of academic discipline 11 8.87 17 25.37 tutor 11 8.87 14 20.90 student teachers ----3 4.47 iam authority of the school teacher 14 11.29 2 2.99 tutor 4 3.23 1 1.49 student teachers 10 8.06 1 1.49 iac formalized knowledge 23 18.55 12 17.91 tutor 6 4.84 5 7.46 student teachers 17 13.71 7 10.45 iagp formalized knowledge of the groupsession 11 8.87 11 16.42 tutor 11 8.87 11 16.42 student teachers -------- ia academic or professional knowledge 59 47.58 42 62.68 iei participant's individual experience 1 0.81 2 2.99 tutor 1 0.81 2 2.99 student teachers -------- ieg group-session experience 6 4.84 1 1.49 tutor 3 2.42 1 1.49 student teachers 3 2.42 ---- iep experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom 32 25.81 12 17.91 “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa40 tutor 1 0.81 ---- student teachers 31 25.00 12 17.91 iec cultural experience of the participant or classroom group 4 3.23 1 1.49 tutor 1 0.81 1 1.49 student teachers 3 2.42 ---- ie experiential knowledge 43 34.68 16 23.88 ive related to present experiences 3 2.42 3 4.48 tutor 1 0.81 1 1.49 student teachers 2 1.61 2 2.99 ivn not related to present experiences 17 13.71 5 7.46 tutor 3 2.42 1 1.49 student teachers 14 11.29 4 5.97 iv truth 20 16.13 8 11.94 iiv ideology or value system 2 1.61 1 1.49 tutor 1 0.81 1 1.49 student teachers 1 0.81 ---- iiv ideology and values 2 1.61 1 1.49 total 124 100 67 100 from the first to the fifth session we observed an increase in the invitations to the authority of academic or professional knowledge (from 47.58% to 62.69%), and a decrease in the invocations to experiential knowledge (from 34.68% to 23.88%) and to the truth (from 16.13% to 11.94%). in the distribution of the specific categories from the first to the fifth session, the results points out an increase of the categories of invocation to the authority of the academic discipline (from 8.87% to 25.37%) and to the formalized knowledge generated from group-session (from 8.87% to 16.42%). in relation to the categories that decrease, we can refer to the invocation to the authority of the school teacher (from 11.29% to 2.99%), the invocation to the experience on the didactic-educational practice in the classroom (from 25.81% to 17.91%) and the invocation to the truth not related to present experiences (from 13.71% to 7.46%). if we observe both sessions for the specific case of the practicum tutor, three of the four categories included in the first dimension increase (iad from 8.87% to 20.90%; iac from 4.84% to 7.46% and iagp from 8.87% to 16.42%). in the students, we observe that the narrated personal experiences tend to diminish (ieg, iep and iec) from session first to fifth. invocations to the authority of the school teacher and the formalized knowledge also decrease (from 8.06% to 1.49% and from 13.71% to 10.45%), as well as the invocations to the truth not related to present experiences (11.29% to 5.97%). discussion and conclusions regarding the profile of the invocations incorporated into dialogic reflection, the dimensions that have been most identified, taking into account the practicum tutor and the student teachers together, have “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa41 been in order of frequency, the reference to academic or professional knowledge, the reference to experiential knowledge and the statements based on the truth. references to value systems have been very scarce. however, this profile of the characteristic invocations in a dialogic practicum is very different when focusing on the tutor or the student teachers separately. thus, we observe that the first fundamentally constructs her discourse through invoking the authority of experts and academic or professional knowledge, increasing this type of invocations in the last sessions analyzed. that is, the tutors take the voice of specialists or a discipline as a voice that legitimizes their perspective on what they are arguing (cubero & ignacio, 2011; wertsch, 1990, 1993). this does not mean that students do not have a relevant role in the joint reflection process. the sessions take place with a strong presence of interventions by the student teachers, permanently invited to participate by the tutors. their invocation profile is very active and shows a contribution to the dialogue based, fundamentally, on the teaching experience they acquire during the practicum, combined with arguments based on academic concepts, and statements that are considered true and that are held without reference to a source of authority beyond the fact that they are introduced in discourse as an unquestionable truth. indeed, we insist that the voice of the student teachers is possible and abundant in dialogic reflection thanks to the experience of the practicum, which provides a validity criterion to the arguments supported by the practical evidence. then, the fact of the teaching experience itself allows the students to have a voice and participate in dialogue. on the interactive level, this voice is possible because the tutor incorporates and legitimizes the students' voice accepting the validity of their experience (candela, 1999; cubero & ignacio, 2011; feiman-nemser, 2008). in fact, the contrast between the first and the second analyzed session shows that the intervention profile changes in the sense we are describing, so that access to debate with authority arguments is quadrupled for cases of experiential arguments specifically linked to experiences in the course of the teaching practices during the practicum. consequently, the use of assertions that are introduced with the status of an unquestionable truth (a category that except in one case is only used by students), decreases radically. this means that interventions based on the voices of others (truth or academic knowledge) (bakhtin, 1981) progress towards the student agency based on practical experience. we can affirm that the experience provides teachers-in-training with arguments that they use to legitimize a concrete perspective of educational situations. these data have led us to three conclusions and a fundamental question. firstly, the data from case analysis allow us to conclude that the invocation is a widespread resource in a process of dialogic reflection, and that the arguments and descriptions presented to the group, either by the tutor or by the students, have associated their own sources of validation. secondly, the emergence of arguments based on personal experience by students reminds us of studies on the relevant sources used by teachers-in-training, who frequently dismiss academic knowledge as hardly applicable. they leave aside the knowledge learnt in the university and begin to use other conceptions that are distributed in the culture and practice of their workplace, and that they consider more useful (clará & mauri, 2010). knowledge largely based on previous personal educational experiences and beliefs about educational intervention, whose arguments are not supported by research or disciplinary knowledge, are, in fact, present and developed in teachers-in-training. those arguments appear with a high frequency in a conversation that involves participating, describing, arguing, understanding. in fact, as we said before, it is the access to this experience that generates the voice of the students, legitimized both by the status they give to the evidence in their experience, and by the acceptance made by the tutor of this voice for actively contributing in dialogic reflection (candela, 1999; cubero & ignacio, 2011). thirdly, tutors’ attitude of “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices mercedes cubero, miguel jesús bascón, rosario cubero-pérez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.311 | vol. 8 (2020) sa42 integration and reformulation of experience in the light of academic knowledge has not clearly managed to promote the incorporation of concepts from formalized knowledge by the students themselves, in a generalized way. that is, the tutors’ efforts to connect pedagogical principles with personal experiences in the practicum have not translated into student reflections in the same direction. this last data becomes a question that deserves a deeper study and an analysis of the extent to which the different sources of knowledge are treated as sources of understanding of a situation, or if, instead, in the discourse of the students some sources prevail over others. we believe that for the socialization of student in the teaching functions, which was discussed in the introduction of this study, it is necessary to work with future teachers to reflect on the legitimacy of their claims and arguments. the practicum, by its very nature, plays a crucial role in such a training. the tutors who are responsible for generating these reflection processes must be aware of the sources of validation that they put into play in the classroom, and of those used by teachers in training to sustain their knowledge and beliefs. if these elements are decisive in the reflection processes for teacher training, it seems obliged to pay attention to the competencies and training that the practicum tutors need. supports this work is supported by the research project subsidized in 2013 by the knowledge generation subprogram of the ministry of economy and competitiveness of spain. http://www.mineco.gob.es/ r&d project “excellence” entitled: “aid for the construction of knowledge in the practicum of teachers: joint reflection to improve the theory-practice relationship” (edu2013-44632-p). acknowledgment we are especially grateful for the invaluable help of dr. isabel 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(2009). case study research, design and methods. newbury park, ca: sage. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word schaffalitzky, what makes questions authentic, 4282022-02-03 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a30 what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky university of southern denmark, denmark abstract in some approaches to dialogic pedagogy research, authentic questions have long attracted attention, since the prevalence of authentic questions has been used as an indicator of the dialogic quality of classroom activities. however, this article offers an analysis of the concept of authentic questions in the research literature and shows that this concept is less clear than is commonly assumed. for instance, descriptions and definitions offered are very heterogeneous even within particular studies, and classifications of authentic questions vary across research literature. the analysis identifies four different, implicit conceptual elements in “authentic question” — some of which cannot be reconciled. the analysis also identifies an important underlying theme, namely mutual recognition and respect, in descriptions of authentic questions. accordingly, the article concludes with the recommendation that future research on authentic questions includes this theme explicitly in reflections on the identification of authentic questions. keywords: authentic questions; conceptual analysis; methodology; teacher-student interaction caroline schaffalitzky is a ph.d. in philosophy and associate professor at the department for the study of culture at the university of southern denmark where she is also head of the research and development project philosophy in schools. her research interests include methodological and theoretical discussions in education, research ethics, dialogic pedagogy, and philosophy with children and she has published both research articles and textbook materials within these areas in danish and english. recent publications include “learning to facilitate dialogue: on challenges and teachers’ assessments of their own performance” (educational studies, 2021) and “children’s experiences of online philosophical dialogues” (childhood & philosophy 2021, with s.s. jensen and f. schou-juul). ïòò “authentic questions” in educational research and practice there is no clear consensus on how to characterize a dialogue in a classroom discourse and how to study it (e.g., howe & abedin, 2013, pp. 326-327; matusov, 2018). however, since the 1990s, there is a growing body of literature in dialogic pedagogic research that uses “authentic question” as key term. within this research, the concept of “authentic questions” – together with uptake and level of evaluation – has been taken as an important indicator of the degree of discourse dialogicity (for overviews, see e.g., nystrand, wu, gamoran, zeiser, & long, 2003, pp. 138-139; reznitskaya & glina, 2013, pp. 49-50; skidmore, 2016). a high prevalence of authentic questions in classroom interactions indicates a dialogical discourse. in contrast, traditional instruction has been described as recitation characterized by “closed teacher questions, brief recall answers and minimal feedback that requires children to report someone else’s thinking rather than to think for themselves” (alexander, 2008, p. 93). the dialogic classroom is described as one that is collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, and purposeful (alexander, 2008, p. 185). issn: 2325-3290 (online) what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a31 in this body of research, “authentic question” is offered as a clear category, but in this article, i argue that a closer look at the description of authentic questions within this research shows that the term is used in a variety of ways. first, the conceptual definitions of “authentic questions” are entangled with descriptions of their functions and effects. second, classifications, descriptions and definitions offered are rather heterogeneous and, in some cases, possibly even conflicting. third, whether a question is authentic appears to be more context-dependent than the definitions let on. and, finally, there are notable differences in descriptions of authentic questions when raised by teachers and authentic questions when raised by students. the lack of a clear concept of “authentic question” is a problem for this body of theoretical research because concepts are representations of phenomena in the world, and if the definition of a concept is imprecise, it will be unclear what the research examines and concludes. imprecise concepts are also a problem for the dissemination of research findings to inform teacher education and guide teachers more generally. to help begin addressing the issue, i offer a conceptual analysis of “authentic questions” in educational research. however, i do not pretend to cover all uses of the term “authentic question” across all research literature, so there may be further conceptualizations adding to those i identify here. but i have included various examples of frequently cited works from research with a largely instrumental approach to dialogue (see matusov, 2018) to illustrate that clarity is absent even within this limited body of empirical research. my aim is to unpack influential views on what makes an authentic question authentic: what is the conceptual content of the term “authentic question” and can a core definition be discerned? i begin by identifying four kinds of different and partially incompatible conceptual content which influential research has explicitly and implicitly attached to the term “authentic question.” then i turn to differences in descriptions of teacher and student questions, and to divergent ways of classifying authentic questions across research. the article does not, perhaps disappointingly, presume to deliver an improved definition of the term “authentic question,” but offers a tentative suggestion of an alternative way of understanding the concept(s) of authentic questions. i conclude with recommendations for future research in the field of dialogic pedagogy. conceptual analysis of ‘authentic questions’ how does this research literature define authentic questions? an often cited article states: “we define an authentic question as one for which the asker has not prespecified an answer” (nystrand et al., 2003, p. 145). the same definition is offered in many other places (alexander, 2008, p. 104; applebee, langer, nystrand, & gamoran, 2003, p. 700; boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 524; nystrand, 1997b, p. 38; 2006, p. 400; nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, pp. 261, 272). this description may appear to be a straightforward criterion for whether a question is authentic or not. however, a closer examination of the literature shows that a variety of clarifications, examples and descriptions are routinely added to this definition, making the picture less clear. in one article, a description of authentic questions adds that they “open the floor to what students have to say,” are “open ended,” that “[the teacher] doesn’t know the answer,” that these questions “take students seriously,” “encourage and build on what is noteworthy,” “clarify ideas,” and “prize student opinion and thinking” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991b). in another article, additions include that they are “used to explore different understandings rather than to ‘test’...,” are “trying to make sense,” concern something “on which there may be disagreement,” and are “tapping into students’ reactions” (applebee et al., 2003). a third includes that “the teacher is genuinely unsure,” that the questions “often overtly seek a student’s what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a32 opinion,” are offered “with interest and enthusiasm,” and someone asks them “because they want to know the answer” (boyd & markarian, 2011). considering how central the term “authentic question” is to this body of research, the variety in these descriptions is striking. “not having a prespecified answer” may in many cases be close to “not knowing the answer,” but the two characterizations are not interchangeable. for instance, i may know what my son will say when i ask him if he prefers cheese or jam, but that does not mean that i have prespecified the answer. and the distance in meaning between “not having a prespecified answer” and “encourage” is even farther. although these conceptual meanings do not conflict, there is a prima facie case for thinking that the term “authentic question” is less clear than readers are normally led to understand. therefore, it is necessary to determine whether there really is only one (perhaps fuzzy) concept or whether there are, in fact, several related variants of the concept “authentic questions” implicit in this research. four concepts of authenticity conceptual analysis can help distinguish between the various layers of meaning attached to the concept of “authentic questions” by comparing explicit and implicit definitions, descriptions and examples in order to identify contradictions, examine possible counterexamples, or possible reconciling interpretations. a philosophical analysis can also help distinguish the conceptual content of “authentic questions” from ideas about a possible instrumental value of authentic questions. for instance, some descriptions of authentic questions could appear to be part of a definition, while, in fact, they are better understood as part of a theory about these questions (see petersen, schaffalitzky de muckadell, & hvidtfeldt, 2016, pp. 23-24 for this distinction). for instance, stating that authentic questions allow students to have “real voices” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 529) or “enhance student learning” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 529) is to say something about the expected effect of authentic teacher questions. it is not the same as describing defining features, because, first, there are other kinds of teacher strategies that can enhance student learning as well. and second, it is not a necessary condition of something being an authentic question that it must, for instance, enhance student learning: whether it does this is something that can only be determined empirically, not by definition. for these reasons, researchers who point to characteristics such as these are providing a theoretical account of the functional role of authentic questions in education, but are not providing a definition, and we should disregard these characteristics in the conceptual analysis. based on the variations in descriptions and definitions of authentic questions i have found in the body of research literature, i suggest that the notion of “authentic questions” is implicitly a category which, problematically, comprises four kinds of related, but distinguishable, conceptual content: 1) a pedagogical aspect: that authentic questions are something other than test questions 2) an epistemic aspect: that authentic questions are motived by the wish to acquire information 3) a social aspect: that authentic questions are motivated by the wish to know what someone else thinks 4) a content aspect: that authentic questions are about deep puzzles the pedagogical aspect: not used for testing purposes the pedagogical aspect of authentic questions concerns their use, namely that they are not test questions related to curriculum. when asking a pedagogically authentic question, the teacher is not looking for a specific, prespecified answer with specific content. in this sense, the authentic question is contrasted with a “test question” in that it allows an indeterminate number of right answers. this understanding of authenticity is found across literature (alexander, 2008, p. 104; applebee et al., 2003, p. 700; boyd & what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a33 markarian, 2011, pp. 524, 525; davies, kiemer, & meissel, 2017, p. 976; nystrand, 2006, p. 400; nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, pp. 261, 272; 1997, p. 38; nystrand et al., 2003, p. 145). examples of questions which match this description could be: “what did you think of the story?,” “is it always wrong to lie?,” “was it a difficult assignment?,” or “have you ever heard of socrates?.” the questions may be open-ended (“what did you think of the story?”) or linguistically closed (“have you ever heard of socrates?”), and some do have specific answers (such as “what did you think of the story?”). but what makes them authentic according to the pedagogical aspect is dependent on teacher intention: the teacher is not looking for a specific answer with the intention of assessing the students. however, as they stand here, all the questions could, potentially, be used as test questions (given specific contexts and teacher motivations), so a necessary criterion for being an authentic question according to this aspect, must be that teacher does not intend it as a question to test knowledge of the curriculum, moral habitus or skills. this means that it can be very difficult to determine from a transcript whether a question is authentic. but if the question works as an authentic question, it will, presumably, stimulate dialogue, and students’ answers will show that they know, or presume that it is not a test question. the epistemic aspect: acquiring knowledge in contrast to the pedagogical aspect, the epistemic aspect of authentic questions is found in situations where the teacher is looking for specific information. the epistemic aspect can be seen in examples of descriptions of authentic questions as those where “[the teacher] really doesn’t know the answer (e.g. “what’s his name?”)” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991b, p. 265), where “rather than quizzing each other, the conversants only exchange that information they actually need to know” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991b, p. 268), where teachers ask “to find out about these things” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991b, p. 270). students can also ask these kinds of questions because they are “trying to make sense” of something the teacher said (applebee et al., 2003, p. 710), and “because they want to know the answer” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 528). so, while the pedagogical aspect is concerned with supporting dialogue by not asking for specific already known answers, there is also an epistemic aspect of authentic questions relating to an interest in knowing the answer. examples of questions which fit the description of the epistemic aspect could include “have you ever heard of socrates?,” “where do you see that in the text?,” “where did your parents grow up?,” or “what made you answer ‘4’ in assignment b?.” they can be open-ended, asking about complex facts (“what made you answer that?”) or closed-ended, asking about a specific fact (such as a name). the questions illustrate the epistemic aspect because the person asking them expects that there are specific answers and wants to know what they are. like with the pedagogical aspect of authentic questions, however, the epistemic aspect makes authentic questions dependent on teacher intentions. the syntactically same question can cease to be authentic if it is intended as a question which is actually used to, for instance, test a student: “where do you see that in the text?” could become a rhetorical test question for a student who is not putting the expected amount of effort in the work. moreover, if authentic questions are dependent on the knowledge of the one asking, the same question (such as “how much gold has been mined in the world so far?”) could be authentic for a teacher in the morning, but not authentic later in the day after a spell of googling. this contextual effect would also make it impossible to determine from a transcript of classroom discourse whether the question was authentic or not. what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a34 the social aspect: interest in what another person thinks the difference between the epistemic and social aspects of authentic questions is that the first is concerned with the need to know the answer to the question, while the second is about social relatedness in the form of an interest in the person who is giving the answer. this social aspect can be seen in descriptions of authentic questions as those where “teachers take students seriously” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991b, p. 266), which “signal to the students the teacher’s interest in what students think and know” and “open the floor to what students have to say” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, pp. 265, 266, 283; nystrand et al., 2003, p. 145). the authentic questions “overtly seek a student’s opinion” and “allow students to have real voices” (boyd & markarian, 2011, pp. 525, 529) and the person asking is “genuinely interested in in knowing how others will answer” (davies et al., 2017, p. 976). examples of authentic questions that correspond to this description could be: “do you consider the protagonist is a hero?,” “what did you think of the election results yesterday?,” or “have you ever been deprived of freedom?” (see dysthe, 1996, p. 403 for the last example). questions like these signal an interest in the student – not only because the student knows specific facts, but also as a person with ideas and opinions. unlike the pedagogical and epistemic aspects of authentic questions, the social aspect would make it impossible to use wordings of a question like “what did you make of the election results?” as a test question (unless assuming an unethically insincere attitude in the teacher asking). the social aspect requires that the question comes across as motivated by a sincere interest in the person’s opinions, not as motivated primarily by getting new information about a fact. however, these examples i have used to illustrate the idea of a social aspect of authentic questions can be read in two ways: as questions motivated by an interest in student opinion as such, or as questions motivated by interest in student opinion as a contribution to a dialogue about something. the difference can be seen in questions such as “what makes you think paris is located in texas?” or “why do you think the rabbit lied in the story?,” which can be used either to understand how the student thinks, or to inform a dialogue about paris or a story. if taken in the first way, there is a matter of the fact and a correct answer to the question, because the student thinks in a specific way. if taken in the second way, there is also a correct answer to the question about where paris is. but if the question about the rabbit is taken in the second sense, there is not a fact of the matter in the same way – rather, this literary question could be a deeper question allowing for multiple relevant answers. and this leads us to the final aspect of authentic questions. the content aspect: motivated by deep puzzles the content aspect of authentic questions is distinct from the epistemic aspect in that it is not relative to what speakers know, and it is distinct from the social aspect in that it is not motivated by wish to be informed on someone’s opinion. instead, the content aspect is related to the matter of the dialogue and especially to whether it is a difficult question that does not have a definite answer which someone (or google) can supply. like the social aspect of authentic questions, the content aspect of authentic questions also means that questions with this aspect cannot be turned into test questions in any meaningful way. in contrast to questions such as “what is his name?,” “how much gold is in the world?” or “what is your view on the election?,” all of which have specific answers that the teacher perhaps just happens to not know, authentic questions in this description are concerned with deeper, philosophical puzzles such as “what is freedom?” or “is freedom more important than having a job and economic stability?” (examples from dysthe, 1996, p. 403). in the case of such questions, the answers are unknown to all, and it is even unclear if there exists or could exist a definite fact of the matter. i have not found this aspect of authenticity explicitly articulated what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a35 in the literature cited so far, but only in examples. but it may be what lies behind the definition that “authentic questions are moments when the teacher is genuinely unsure of the answer to [their] question” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 525), although this is also compatible with the epistemic aspect (and questions concerned with factual content). it could also be what is hinted at in a seminal article which distinguishes between “the teacher as evaluator” and “the importance of ‘coverage’ of content rather than mutual exploration of interpretations” (langer & applebee, 1986, p. 185), because the latter category leaves it open whether there is a fact of the matter. clear examples of authentic questions when it comes to content are classical philosophical questions such as “what is it to be a hero?,” “is it always wrong to lie?,” “does morality depend on religion?,” or “are you the same person throughout life?.” although these questions could be accompanied by a test attitude, this is (hopefully) unlikely as these are fundamentally open in nature. i would argue that the content aspect would normally make it possible to identify authentic questions in a transcript without knowing the context or the motivation of the teacher. this content aspect differs from the other aspects of authentic questions described here. first, it is not merely a question of suspending correctness evaluation as in the pedagogical aspect, but the question also implies that there are more ways to answer (and perhaps that you should be prepared to provide reasons for your views). the content aspect also differs from the epistemic aspect of authentic questions in that the person asked is never expected to fully know and to be able to provide a definite answer. and finally, the content aspect is dissimilar to the social aspect of authentic questions, because the content aspect is related to interest is in the matter the question concerns, not in the person attempting to answer the question. so the content aspect of authentic questions differs from the other aspects of authentic questions, but it links to the wish to know in epistemic aspect: they are used to “explore different understandings rather than to test” (applebee et al., 2003, p. 690). it also links to the wish to include different voices in the social aspect, because it explains why one would usually only ask authentic questions of people one recognizes as “knowledgeable,” “with ‘lived through’ experience,” and “expertise worth sharing” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, p. 283). table 1 below provides an overview of the main similarities and differences between the four aspects identified in descriptions and examples of authentic questions. table 1: the four aspects of authentic questions characteristic aspect of authentic question not intended as test question there is a fact of the matter one can ask for interested in knowing what a person thinks a question where the fact of the matter is unknown to everyone pedagogical aspect x epistemic aspect x x social aspect x x x content aspect x x the above discussion and table show that it is possible to distinguish between four different implicit, conceptual aspects of authentic questions in the body of research literature examined here. it also shows what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a36 that seemingly identical questions should be categorized differently depending on teacher intention and similar contextual factors. the following sections show additional reasons that the concept of authentic questions is less clear than is commonly assumed within this research. inconsistency regarding authentic questions from teachers and students the incoherence between the various descriptions and examples of authentic questions is a sign that conceptual analysis is necessary. another sign is the inconsistency which can be seen in descriptions of authentic questions posed by teachers compared with descriptions of authentic questions posed by students. in contrast to teacher questions, research literature generally describes student questions as always authentic. for instance, a question is classified as authentic in a case of a “student trying to make sense of [something] the teacher describes” (applebee et al., 2003, p. 710), and it has been argued that students “always ask authentic questions – unless they are role playing a teacher” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, p. 272), and that student-generated questions are all authentic “because they want to know the answer” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 528). this is puzzling, as it seems to imply that the definition of authentic questions varies relative to speakers. first, it appears that authentic student questions are compatible with pre-specified teacher answers. in fact, the reason students ask the teacher to clarify is probably that they know that there is a fact of the matter one can ask for, so this is at odds with the pedagogical aspect of authentic questions. second, there is no sign that student questions are concerned with interest in teachers’ trail of thoughts or similar, so it is also at odds with the social aspect of authentic questions. and third, it is at odds with the content aspect of authentic question, either because there is a definite answer or at least that the question is not always about a deep puzzle. the epistemic aspect of authentic questions that appears to be what is supposed to make the student question authentic. but it would be a stretch to assume that students are always truly invested in the answer, when they ask a teacher to clarify – they may just be looking for “the right answer” (see, e.g., hargreaves, 2015 on effects of traditional school culture on children). some believe they have observed a difference between the questions students ask of teachers compared to student questions for peers: “in collaborative work among peers in small groups, all the questions are asked by students, are authentic, and typically exhibit uptake” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, p. 265). but even if this is the case, it does not mean that the definition of authentic questions should change. so when different definitions of authentic questions in teachers and students, respectively, are explicitly provided (e.g. boyd & markarian, 2011, pp. 525, 528), this at least deserves an explanation. compared to the focus on authentic teacher questions in the body of research, there is only little discussion of authentic student questions, so this discussion appears worth pursuing more. and more generally, given all the inconsistencies shown here, it is no surprise that it is difficult to classify authentic questions. the following section provides examples of the difficulties involved. classification although all four aspects of authentic questions are related to the necessary characteristic in that they are not intended as test questions, the four aspects are arguably also very different in kind and they can be distinguished analytically if not always in practice or in a transcript. for instance, a specific question such as “do you think the protagonist is a good example of a hero?” can be understood in several ways depending on whether the emphasis is put on the pedagogical aspect (not a test question), the epistemic aspect (asking to find out information about the matter of fact), the social aspect (asking because of interest in the person’s thinking), and or the content aspect (about the deep question of what it is to be a hero). but the aspects in fact determine the intended meaning of the question. what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a37 so all the aspects could be read into a single, specific question, and this means that linguistic form alone cannot not help us classify, because much depends on intention and context behind the question (cf. alexander, 2018, pp. 25-26, on educational setting and purpose; boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 516, on how questions are received; nystrand, 1997b, p. 7, on hidden agendas etc.; nystrand et al., 2003, p. 145, on classroom context). for these reasons, it is possible that the question about the protagonist could, in fact, be an instantiation of any combination of the four (or none of them). in addition to these classification challenges, the field is also inconsistent in describing how authentic questions relate to other kinds of questions. for instance, some appear to see “open” and “openended” questions as a category distinct from authentic questions (e.g., alexander, 2018; boyd & markarian, 2011; reznitskaya, 2012) while others use the “open ended” questions as a form of authentic questions (e.g., nystrand & gamoran, 1991a; nystrand & gamoran, 1991b). sometimes the two appear to be equivalent (e.g., nystrand, 2006), and sometimes open questions are seen as “questions where they [teachers] do not already know the answer” (esiyok, 2016, p. 113). it would seem desirable to distinguish between the authentic and open questions. a way of doing this could be by categorizing them not only by syntax, but also by content. for instance, the question “what can you tell me about mammals?” is grammatically open, but conceptually closed (worley, 2015), because there are clear right and wrong boundaries to acceptable answers. in contrast, “is lying always wrong?” is a philosophical question that is a grammatically closed yes/no question, but a conceptually open question. this fits with the idea that “[o]pen questions are those that have multiple acceptable answers and often overtly seek a student’s opinion” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 525) but are not the same as authentic questions. it may also be in line with the idea of some questions being “quasi-authentic” in that they “allow students some latitude” (nystrand & gamoran, 1991a, p. 272), or questions that are “open,” but not “truly open” (reznitskaya, 2012, p. 450). another helpful base for further reflection is the tentative conclusion from the conceptual analysis that intentions are a critical defining feature of authentic questions. this is seen from the discussion of the various descriptions of authentic questions, but also from the remarks that classification of authentic questions is context-dependent (and so can not necessarily be determined from a transcript). it can be difficult to determine whether a specific question is authentic or not, and in such cases, some researchers have suggested that a last resort can be to consult the teacher when the authenticity of a question is unclear (nystrand & gamoran, 1997, p. 37; nystrand et al., 2003, p. 145). however, this practical classification strategy may give rise to new difficulties. these difficulties arise because, first, it is not clear that teachers always are able to provide precise reports on their intentions, and second, because this seems to imply that the effect of an authentic teacher question is independent of student perception of the intention and the context of the social relation. these concerns should lead us to consider the possibility of a revision of the concept based on the conceptual analysis. a revised concept of authentic questions? the conceptual analysis of the implicit notion of “authentic question” in this body of research shows that even if all authentic questions are related by not being test questions used for evaluation, distinctive important aspects can be identified as well. and these aspects are not always easily reconciled because they involve contrasting descriptions of authentic questions (such as whether there is a fact of the matter or not). so, is there “a magical ingredient” in authentic questions? is there something which can unite all the aspects as the defining feature, or are there several different ways of qualifying as an authentic question? to begin to answer these questions, we need a clearer definition of what makes authentic what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a38 questions authentic. this is important for empirical research in order to know what variables we are studying, and it is important for providing the appropriate guidelines and tools for teachers. however, it would be impossible within the space of this article to discuss whether a clear and coherent comment of authentic questions could be introduced and made operationalizable for empirical research. instead, i will point to some additional observations about authentic questions and dialogic pedagogy, and offer some tentative suggestions of directions that further research could take. arguably, the four possible aspects of authentic questions i have identified could pick out phenomena that are very different epistemically and inter-personally, and this is relevant for researchers interested in the effects of dialogic pedagogy. it may be that the kinds of questions mentioned as examples have the same effect on classroom dialogue simply because they are all intended as something other than test-questions (i.e., the pedagogical aspect), but it may also be that they have very different effects relative to traits picked out by other aspects. and compare the analogy of research on the effect of parents not shouting at their children as a default way of communication: it will not do simply to note whether they shout or not, because it makes a big difference what alternative forms of communication are going on, how and what is being said, what the child thinks, and what the circumstances of the situation are. this analogy illustrates that a negative definition (i.e., stating what authentic questions are not) will not suffice. we need to identify “the magical ingredient” as well to clearly define what makes authentic questions authentic. whether this is at all possible would require further studies, but a closer look at the research literature suggests that particular variants of authentic questions are implicitly treated as more significant, namely variants related to recognizing the student as a person. first, when an article states that “only authentic discourse can engage students” (nystrand & gamoran, 1997, p. 72) this helps us identify the defining feature, as not all questions that live up to the epistemic aspect (such has ”what’s your name?”) will guarantee engagement. second, the research literature often mentions the importance of the inter-personal effect of the questions: “in this kind of classroom talk, teachers take their students seriously” (nystrand, 1997a, p. 7). a similar student-teacher relation is pointed to in this description of a specific teacher: “allowing his students to have real voices as they consider real purposes in real contexts, [the teacher] listens to what his students already know and anchors his questions and comments in their contributions, aligning illocutionary force and educational purpose” (boyd & markarian, 2011, p. 529). third, the same article also states that this teacher offers authentic questions “with interest and enthusiasm” and “must listen” (boyd & markarian, 2011, pp. 526527). these are all descriptions of a relationship between teacher and student based on mutual recognition, respect and display of interest. these descriptions of effects and uses of authentic questions are related to the social aspect i have identified, and this may indicate that it would be worthwhile to explore the social aspect more. some researchers have focused on how different modes of teacher questions and responses can affect the level of social distance between teacher and student (wells, 1999, pp. 242-243) and how a dialogic approach positions students as thinkers and learners in their own right (alexander, 2008, p. 15). what brings these approaches together is the underlying ideal of a classroom environment where students are recognized as individual, autonomous persons. experiencing mutual recognition is of fundamental importance for human thriving and student learning (altmeyer, 2018; huttunen & murphy, 2012; masschelein, 1991; wulf, bittner, clemens, & kellermann, 2012), but it has also been noted that there has been a “relative lack of attention to the affective conditions for learning” (skidmore, 2016, p. 107). i would suggest that perhaps affective conditions, such as feeling well-being and experiencing mutual recognition, have, in fact, been at the core of the search for authentic questions and truly dialogic pedagogy the whole time. what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a39 if the magical ingredient in authentic questions is best characterized as a question where the teacher asking the question respects and appreciates the students as thinkers and learners in their own right (and the students sense that this is the case), then it could help explain why researchers have appealed to contexts (such as functions and teacher intentions) in determining unclear cases in coding, why grammatical phrasing or syntax is less important, and how otherwise incompatible descriptions of authentic questions (with/without definite answers) can all be valid variants of the same kind of teacher student relation captured by the term “authentic question.” it should also be noted that several studies have in fact suggested that student participation could be more dependent on the teacher’s involvement and mutual respect in the classroom than on the kinds of questions the teacher asks (boyd & rubin, 2006, pp. 165-166; christoph & nystrand, 2001, pp. 258-260; kachur & prendergast, 1997). but this has not led to a closer examination of the relationship between authentic questions and classroom respect or to integration of insights from educational research on dialogic pedagogy with research on recognition and respect. i suggest that this could be relevant. a question remains whether test questions actually could be compatible with this understanding of authentic questions, but this will be for empirical research to decide as it hinges on whether it is possible for students to experience (certain kinds of) test questions as appreciative rather than a tool for evaluation. this would, of course, go against the common definition of authentic questions as contrasting test questions, and so this would be an important point to determine. a clearer concept of authentic question will be helpful to teachers who look to guidelines for dialogic classroom pedagogy. researchers in the field have pointed out that there is currently no direct line from research to advise for teachers: “in our own previous research, for example, we have concluded that teachers will do well to ask their students authentic questions. yet this kind of advice, sound as it may be, has limitations for teachers who must figure out how and when best to do it” (nystrand, wu et al., 2003: 190-191). the same researcher further suggests that “what has been missing is a general understanding of how effective classroom discourse unfolds, how it is initiated, and just what the teacher’s role is in shaping it” (nystrand et al., 2003, p. 191). i suggest that it might also be helpful for teachers to see the underlying theme of recognition, appreciation and a possible link to authentic questions. concluding remarks for the superficial observer, dialogue is just a series of verbal exchanges, and a classroom discourse with many such interactions will appear dialogical. but as research in dialogic pedagogy has shown us, it is necessary to be more precise in what constitutes actual dialogue and what merely looks like it. it may be easy for the participant to feel the difference, but how do we pinpoint the necessary elements, identify them in transcripts, and explain them to educators? authentic questions have played an important role in attempts to answer this question, especially in research advocating dialogic pedagogy to promote learning (see matusov, 2018) for a comparison of this approach and non-instrumental approaches). but in this article, i have argued that we need to revisit the term and the way it is used in this body of research. the concept of authentic questions is only important both for conducting research and for providing pedagogical advice for classroom teachers if we know what makes authentic questions authentic. i have argued that the term “authentic question” as it is currently used in educational research literature in fact covers a very complex and unclear concept with at least four different aspects. i have compared and classified definitions and descriptions of authentic questions and their effects, compared authentic questions from teachers with authentic questions from students, and shown how categorizations of authentic questions differ when compared to related terms such as “open questions.” what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a40 the four different, implicit meanings uncovered are not easily reconciled and, in some cases, they are even incompatible. i suggest, however, that it could be that they are all attempts to identify teacher questions that are accompanied by recognition of and respect for the student as a person, rather than questions being used to test the student. this view may explain several apparent contradictions in the literature, but it also leads to new questions of how best to identify the variables that characterize dialogic pedagogy. for this reason, i suggest that future research on authentic questions include the theme of recognition explicitly in reflections on identification of authentic questions. perhaps something can be gained from looking to, for instance, philosophical and psychological studies in respect and recognition (see, e.g., huttunen & heikkinen, 2004; iser, 2019; renger & simon, 2011, pp. 501-502) or to practices like philosophy with children, which have worked to engage children and students in philosophical dialogues (see, e.g., kennedy & kennedy, 2011; vansieleghem & kennedy, 2011). or perhaps my analysis points to more radical choices regarding the way we conceive of authentic questions – for instance that they cannot be defined and operationalized outside the totality of the learning context. it would be impossible to settle the problem about what – if anything – makes authentic questions authentic within the space of this article. but realizing that the current level of clarity is insufficient is an important first step. a more precise concept of authentic questions will benefit not only research, but also teachers who look to guidelines for dialogic classroom pedagogy. references alexander, r. (2008). essays on pedagogy. london: routledge. alexander, r. (2018). towards dialogic teaching (5th ed.). cambridge: dialogos. altmeyer, s. (2018). a theory of recognition as framework for religious education. reading axel honneth from a pedagogical and theological perspective. journal of beliefs & values, 39(4), 416-428. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2018.1442979 applebee, a. n., langer, j. a., nystrand, m., & gamoran, a. (2003). discussion-based approach to developing understanding: classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school english. american educational research journal, 40(3), 685-730. doi:https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312040003685 boyd, m. p., & markarian, w. c. (2011). dialogic teaching: talk in service of a dialogic stance. language and education, 25(6), 515–534. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2011.597861 boyd, m. p., & rubin, d. 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(2015). open thinking, closed questioning: two kinds of open and closed question. journal of philosophy in schools, 2(2), 17-29. doi:https://doi.org/10.21913/jps.v2i2.1269 wulf, c., bittner, m., clemens, i., & kellermann, i. (2012). unpacking recognition and esteem in school pedagogies. ethnography and education, 7(1), 59-75. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2012.661588 what makes authentic questions authentic? caroline schaffalitzky dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.428 | vol. 10 (2022) a42 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word shelley price-jones, students' critical commentaries, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf87 students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones kyung hee university, south korea abstract changes to educational practices have been proposed, with some being adopted globally, on a continuous basis. however, student opinions have seldom been invited into discussions. this article was written following an invitation from the dialogic pedagogy journal “to write a critical response to” eugene matusov’s editorial “a student’s right to freedom of education”. the inclusion of student voices in educational forums is integral for a more complete understanding of the position of all participants and, whether one considers students to be representative of one of gramsci’s subaltern classes, students as an active group have historically been denied “the basic rights of participation” (el, h., 2012), with their absence from educational discussions having become the status quo. the following article introduces the critical commentaries from seven students who were members of a university level discussion and debate class in seoul, south korea. their views were shaped from their previous schooling experiences and their hopes for positive changes. the students’ commentaries are responded to by eugene matusov. it is the hope of this author that this classroom process may act as one potential model for further educators to invite student voices into academic discourse. in the spirit of gayatri spivak’s 1998 essay (spivak and riach, 2012), it is time to let the subaltern speak. keywords: university students, critical commentaries, facebook, education kathryn shelley price-jones has been teaching at the tertiary level in korea for over twenty years and is currently an assistant professor. her research interests include dialogic critical pedagogy, elt materials and curriculum development, including transitioning offline classroom processes, making online classroom adaptations, and course development. contact address: shelley.pricejones@gmail.com ïïò the spring semester of 2020 brought about many changes to how classes were conducted at universities globally, because of the covid-19 pandemic. my university in south korea was no exception and my five classes, previously designed to be taught offline, had to be quickly adapted for an online forum. i used both facebook as the place where students would meet, and google classroom as a virtual chalkboard where i could post information and videos related to what we would be doing. while i was in the process of doing this, i received an intriguing email. on may 1st, 2020 i received an email invitation from the dialogic pedagogy journal “to write a critical response to the upcoming editorial “a student’s right to freedom of education” by eugene matusov. among the guidelines, the third, “the response should be unique, drastically different from other responses”, and the june 15th deadline played out in my thoughts. on may 3rd i requested a copy of the article and began to work out how i would best be able to carry out my developing plan; to have the 21 students in one class, discussion and debate, respond with their own critical commentaries, that would not be graded specifically, issn: 2325-3290 (online) students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf88 but as the last video they produced in the semester be used a means to ascertain speaking and presentation improvements from the beginning of the semester. the students’ first video had been a self-introduction, and from there the difficulty level and audience, for whom the videos were aimed at, increased in complexity. the critical commentary served to show my students that were fully capable of entering into academic dialogues. on june 14th i emailed 21 student videos, representing all members in the class who had been asked to respond. to eugene matusov and began a dialogue with him about how best to present their viewpoints. this introduction is for those students who were invited to submit written scripts of their video commentaries. i will briefly introduce my teaching philosophy, describe the class that the students were taking and the platform that was used, and relate the process by which students created and submitted their critical commentaries. my teaching theories and classroom practices were firmly established long before i came in contact with the writing of critical pedagogues, and my search was more for academic kinship connections in theory and practice than it was for teaching influence. over time i found connections with such pedagogues as vygotsky with his theories about the social dimension of learning, and the role of interlocutors; bakhtin, with his ideas about the importance of acknowledging individual voices, including those from the students’ cultural world, while drawing upon the carnivalesque; and freire. when i first encountered freire i immediately felt a connection with his teaching practice regarding literacy, wherein he noted that he believed it was his responsibility to provide his students with help to gain the tools they needed in order to fully participate in society. i related his thoughts to my korean students who had studied english for upwards of 12 or more years, yet lacked the ability to express their thoughts, the confidence to try, or both. to fulfill my responsibilities required the students having the freedom to establish what they needed, and the place to make the knowledge their own, and it is here that i have found another connection with my teaching practice this connection is with eugene matusov’s teaching practice and is with respect to how our classes are first established. in his article he notes: at the beginning of a semester, a curricular map involves a big list of topics that i have developed based on my own authorial judgments, on authorial judgments by colleagues teaching similar courses around the world (via their syllabi posted on the internet), and my past students’ interests. during the semester, my current students can and do amend the course’s curricular map at any time. at the end of each class meeting, my students are engaged in selecting a topic for the next class. student engagement is also a major part of my classes. at the beginning of the semester i give students in all classes an intake survey to complete. along with the usual general information: name, nationality, major, years studying english, and past satisfaction/dissatisfaction with previous english mode of instruction classes, and why, each class has specific sections that relate solely to them. of my five classes this semester, the class who created their critical commentaries is discussion and debate. it is an elective class, unlike my other four that are mandatory. in this class the intake survey asked them about such areas as their past speaking experiences, problems they felt they had, strengths they believed they possessed, areas they wanted to work on, or learn, and subjects that they were interested in discussing, or debating. from their submission of the intake survey the dialogue began. i knew about their needs and desires, and i needed a place that would allow, as much as possible, a social platform where students would feel comfortable and able to bring change about. students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf89 my classes meet on facebook, in a private room, where only people who are members of the room can see what has been posted. i have been using this setup for almost a decade now, and at the time of writing have over 2,000 students on my facebook page. this semester i added an agreement form, to further stipulate the private nature of the room, and to note that any infringements by the students would result in that student being deleted from my personal facebook account, and the group, and face negative grade outcomes. i did not actually believe students would behave badly, but i wanted everyone to know that i was serious about the room being only for them. students feel comfortable knowing that what they say, or post, stays within the room. and over the semester each room has its own flavour, as everything that has been posted in the group all semester can be examined whenever the students wish to do so. the private room is where people post their videos and comments and meet to carry out all classroom processes, including the debates, the committees, and talking in groups. it also means that i do not invite anyone into the room, and they are free to express their thoughts without worrying that they will be viewed, or judged by "outsiders", as they can be with other online chat forums, they can talk to each other in small groups, and i can join in. they can come to the room any time they please and post comments, ask questions, or talk to other students in the class via a message, or face-to-face call. once the room is established all they need to do is be on facebook to access it. it is their room. they own it. i do not use zoom. i do not like it. zoom is a digital panopticon, and i do not require, nor wish to have, and have the students know that i have, this type of observance, or taping, power. zoom is also not private, and is subject to hacking, and data mining with no clear statement regarding what this data will be used for. (mcmullan, 2015; hodge, 2020; nield, 2020; stables, 2020). zoom may very well be useful for meetings, both infrequent and scheduled, but it does not fit my requirements for a safe, social, online classroom. facebook did for all my classes, including discussion and debate. discussion and debate includes significant public speaking. from their first self-introduction video to the end of the class, they have taped their presentations, and sections of debates. yes, some of the students have hated videotaping. they did not enroll in a class where this would become the main way they presented their ideas. however, most came to accept, because of necessity with the pandemic, and even like what we do. a few have just accepted that i could not figure out any other way, and this too is okay. it was the only way that i could work out that the conditions all of us needed were met. this is primarily a speaking, not writing class. i tested their understanding of debate formats, in an essay, and the script for their news broadcast, to give them help with language usage and structure. that is the only direct corrective feedback they received with respect to their writing. as to their speaking, or comments on issues that were not submissions, and were posted to the group wall, they have received continuous direct feedback throughout the semester. i constructed the class, and new classroom processes most often on a weekly basis, so that it reflected students’ wishes, and also provided them with numerous opportunities to develop the skills that they noted they wanted, or needed, to improve upon. the students are from different countries: korea, uzbekistan, guatemala, russia, hong kong, italy, china, germany and ecuador. they range in ages from late teens to mid-twenties and in university year from freshman to senior. with respect to university majors they were: business, hospitality, biology, international trade, geography, sociology, tourism, english language and translation, korean language and literature, international communication and media, and international relations. this class was all about them. i provided the platform. they provided their voices. from the first issue where they were invited to share their written opinions on the facebook group page, to the creation of the critical commentaries, it has always been about students having the freedom to express their thoughts, or opinions, and as time passed to do so with confidence. this semester each student has discussed three issues in writing, discussed all issues in groups that they have made, had students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf90 several committee processes, created four videos that represented different styles of speaking from semiformal to formal, debated twice and acted as “questioners” and judges to all the debates four times, and other processes. ironically, i was actually able to give each student more individual attention with this online format, including the number of times they would be speaking, and the feedback they received. for example, in one class i had five debates occurring simultaneously, and everything went incredibly smoothly. i would only have been able to hold one debate per class in an offline classroom. students have received feedback for each and every area. they have also had the freedom to ask, and for me to accept and set up classes, for different subjects, or issues to be discussed as they were revealed in such areas as the news. the first issue that was discussed this semester was with respect to online education, and i believed it was thus fitting that their last area to discuss would be an educational practice that the students were unfamiliar with; “a student’s right to freedom of education”. education has been an especially hot topic in the class this semester with all students voicing their opinions about what they believed was wrong, and what they wanted changed, numerous times. students were provided with a brief relation of what a critical commentary entails, the article with a few areas highlighted so as to assuage any initial panic some students might and did feel, and directions to make their video and to try to keep the length down to around three minutes. students were not required to read the entire paper; some do not possess the ability to do this. the students could also refuse to read it, but no students did. the time restriction was necessary as if left open there were some students in the class who would have produced a full length movie and while interesting, it would have also caused them to experience significant distress as they have shown me this semester that their desire to be “perfect” tortures them. three minutes was in line with the other videos they have been asked to produce this semester. it is a known; a safe norm. aside from one student asking me to look at a script, i had no precise idea about what the students would post. almost everything this semester has been carried out with videos. many students wanted to do more. no students noted that they did not want to do it. some students did not reply in significant depth. that was their choice. all students received feedback on whether their video was a critical commentary, and related areas on the day they were received, but no grades were assigned. rather, the video was used to assess overall increases in confidence from their earlier videos, and attention paid to details. there were no two videos that were alike. now, without further ado, these are my students’ unfettered critical commentaries. sources hodge, r. (2020, april 02). using zoom while working from home? here are the privacy risks to watch out for. retrieved from https://www.cnet.com/news/using-zoom-while-working-from-home-here-arethe-privacy-risks-to-watch-out-for/ mcmullan, t. (2015, july 23). what does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance? retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digitalsurveillance-jeremy-bentham nield, d. (2020, april 05). how to keep your zoom chats private and secure. retrieved from https://www.wired.com/story/keep-zoom-chats-private-secure/ stables, a. (2020). your post has been removed: tech giants and freedom of speech: by fredrik stjernfelt and anne mette lauritzen, cham, switzerland, springeropen, 2019, 308 pp.,£ 44.99 (hardback), isbn 978-3-030-25967-9. students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf91 hi, professor matusov. my name's alina, and i'm russian, and i'm student at university, and my major is business administration. the first thing i want to say is that i really enjoyed reading this article. however, i don't think that freedom in education is a good idea for russian students. when i was in school, all my classmates didn't know what they wanted to do, and they didn't know what major they wanted to choose. therefore, i agree with a statement that was mentioned in the article that it would be like “a blind leads the blind.” i graduated from a school in russia. when i entered kyung university, i was in shock there because i have to choose what kind of class i want to explore. and this scared me because i don't want to make a big mistake and choose a wrong class or poor class. in conclusion, i want to say that maybe not all students want freedom in education, what if some student wants a system like in a russian university or in a russian school. this is my opinion. thank you for watching. bye. alina nedykhalova dear eugene, as a student at kyung hee university in seoul, i am very impressed with your work and the way you view the omnipresent education system. in the article you argue the main thesis why students must have the exclusive right to freely define their own education. in the following i will discuss participatory academic freedom and your attitude towards the question whether people will engage in education on their own desire, without being foisted. the first point i want to talk about is participatory academic freedom, which you describe as the right of students to move freely within and outside, to and from learning activities and educational communities. i agree with you that this right gives students more room for a process of self-correction in which they can vote with their feet when, for example, educational practice becomes meaningless to them. however, i think it is important to bear in mind that each student has individual reasons for his or her absence and that the reason is not necessarily related to the teaching method or the teaching material. according to brigitte ziehlke, students who show a higher level of exam anxiety and more general anxiety symptoms show more absences from class than other students (ziehlke, 1993). in such cases, close supervision and mental support of the students is required and not just the mere acceptance of their absences. furthermore, i believe that not every student is helped or is able to cope with this degree of autonomy and freedom, which in the long run can lead to academic failure. the second point i would like to address is related to the point i have just mentioned. on page 20, you say that the evidence and experience gathered from democratic schools has shown that, in fact, when given the choice, a large majority of young children of primary school age prefer to play rather than attend classes voluntarily. the problem i see with this fact in relation to participatory academic freedom, as you also mention in your article, is that it can lead to late education. the question i then have is whether it is responsible to grant them autonomy to decide for themselves whether they want to attend classes, and thus risk that they will receive proper education too late or perhaps not at all, because we assume that this might not have any consequences for society. comment on text eugene matusov: dear alina, your short commentary is super important and very helpful. i address it in my reply. thanks a lot! comment on text eugene matusov: dear helin, i think this is a valid concern which, in my view, must be addressed by psychologists and psychiatrists. it reminded me of an american undergraduate freshman student of mine, who came to me to apologize for not coming to my class (and all other classes of hers). she said that she spent all her time in bed in her dormitory waiting for her peers to come from their classes to go to socialize with them. she told me that she does not have any interest in her life. i suspected that she was clinically depressed and directed her to a counselor on our campus. unfortunately, i do not know if she followed my advice – i doubt. i would like to learn more from my colleagues working with mental problems how i can help students like that. in general, mental health problems complicate education like any other practices. that is why educators need to cooperate with mental health workers. students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf92 all in all, i find your article very interesting and agree with you that students need more autonomy to reach their full potential. thank you very much for your thought-provoking work. (source: brigitte z. (1993). deviante jugendliche – individualisierung, geschlecht und soziale kontrolle. opladen: leske+budrich.) kind regards, helin ag hello, professor matusov, my name is kim hyun jung and i am majoring in geography at kyung hee university. in this video, i would like to share my thoughts after reading your paper called 'a student's right to freedom of education'. as i am in the teacher training course in korea, it was really memorable thesis. it made me think about my educational experiences. many korean students suffer from their student life. here, most of the high school students go to school to 7 am and come home at 10 pm. at the weekend they go to private school to study. korean students are definitely the victims of foisted education. our goal here for education is to go to a good university. and that's it. our question is always 'is this related to our exam?'. and we never want to learn anything that is not for the test. it makes us really painful, but there is no other way here. it's sad. so, it was really new and great experience reading your article. i want my freedom of education too. "fire watch" is a science fiction novelette by writer connie willis. the story involves a time-traveling historian who goes back to london, to participate in the fire lookout at st. paul's cathedral. he has a deep emotional attachment to the cathedral and is highly devoted to his role in defending it. after finishing his experience there, he was called straight to the professor's office to take a test. the question was, ‘how many of the bombs fell on st. paul's?’, ‘how do we get rid of the mines?’, ‘how many people were injured or killed in 1940?’ he felt the anger inside and asked the professor. 'isn't there any question about what happened to people?' answers professor dunwoody. "mr. bartholomew, you're the one who answers the question, not the one asking questions." “in foisted education, the student is positioned as an object, other than a subject, of education." ”the problem is that educators are trying to make students want what they want them to want.” these sentences evoked in me a lot of educational experiences. from now on, i want to share some of my experiences and feelings. we all know that professor dunwoody's problem is not appropriate. he asked the questions in a multiple-choice format, asking for simple figures, statistics and use of memorization skills, and he also asked questions with fixed answers. unfortunately, dunwoody's exam questions are directly linked to the problem of korean education, in which students have to learn only what teachers want them to learn. thus, professor dunwoody's problem was actually very familiar to me. i'm the one who only answered questions, but whom never asked any. i'm still much more comfortable in being taught, being tested, and being the object of my education. i've never been the subject of education. students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf93 to me, school and education are places showing the exact structure of the panopticon1. the concept of panopticon’s design is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard, without the inmates being able to tell whether they are being watched. what's important in the panopticon is that this structure leads to a process of 'internalization of gaze' for the inmates. prisoners do not know whether they are being watched, but the eyes of surveillance are internalized in the inmates' consciousness. i thought panopticon's power structure is very closely related to the structure of knowledge and power that appears in schools. schools and education today play a role in spreading and settling normal and abnormal norms. many ordinary students are forced to be exemplary and social-set normal students regardless of their intentions, and this is the power. in other words, the most liberal educational space has become a venue for the power. i watched an impressive lecture about 'what is justice?' in a large auditorium at harvard university. there was only one role for the lecturer. to ask a question. the speaker sets up just one or two situations and hands the microphone to the students. students share their own perspective and give their opinions. no one gave the wrong answer in this lecture. they all came up with different answers. no one in the world has the same personality. we're all different. however, the school does not allow us any other answers. we only have to say the 'right' answers. korean students are completely ignored for their own uniqueness and individuality. there is no student opinion reflected in the curriculum. however, education is for students. students should be the subjects of their learning. in order for a student to be the subject, he or she could start with "questioning." let's all ask questions. there is no trivial question. in the small question, and from that very question, our active education begins. thank you for listening. hello everyone. my name is juan francisco poveda, i am 22 years old and i come from ecuador. i am studying my fourth semester in my major on international relations at the karlshochschule international university in karlsruhe, germany. i have an interest in foreign policy, development and diplomacy. i am currently an exchange student for this semester at the kyung hee university in seoul, south korea. i have gone through prof. matusov paper, called: “a student’s right to freedom of education.” i have observed that the thesis was oriented towards the benefits of giving the students the freedom to define their education. under this premise, i have seen that you mentioned practices like closed and open socialization or methods like the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy, which i found very interesting when i read your paper. under my perspective, i found valuable point in your paper, however, i consider that education perse could not be very individually defined. i believe that part of the goals of education is to serve as a guide to live within a community. on this regard, i have seen that you strongly agree with the self-determination of education, mainly when you mention that education is primarily the business of the student, not from the state, the public, the taxpayers or even not the business of teachers and schools. wouldn’t you consider that this extent of selfconstruction of the concept of education could affect the goal of constructing individuals able to live in a community? 1 this is an apparent reference to french sociologist and philosopher michel foucault who introduced this term for social sciences. comment on text eugene matusov: dear kim hyun, thanks a lot for your super-thoughtful, eloquent, but very sad, essay that deepens my arguments. i feel like you are my co-author. i wish you became an educator… comment on text eugene matusov: dear juan, this is a terrific question! i’ll address it in my reply. students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf94 your article has very good argument that prove that the current perspective of ideal education has failures. nevertheless, the individual approach of defining can order my perspective affect some goals of education that are also important such as building social norms to live in community. thank you very much for your time and the opportunity. juan francisco poveda good morning, professor matusov, my name is ki jung hwang, studying biology at kyung hee university in south korea. i read your student’s right to freedom of education, which interested me very much. as a student who experienced foisted education for 12 years, focused on commonality, depersonalization, i think the freedom of education with 8 principles is highly admirable form expected to autonomy-oriented society. if i’m not mistaken, the main thesis is: education requires freedom and students who define their own education, because, compared to the foisted education which imposes obligations to the students, education ensuring freedom can encourage spontaneous participation of learner. i’d like to share my thoughts related to your arguments with two questions. first, i’d like to ask the age-specific approach of freedom of education. for young children, for instance, under the elementary level, i think different methods should be needed because of the tendency to play over education, as mentioned, but also the cognitive limitation. a student should recognize their interest, attractions, and indifference before deciding the meta-direction of learning. what if a student doesn’t know what they don’t know? thus, establishing a standard to reflect the world would be the priority for young children. second, in the paragraph about instructional academic freedom, you wrote “classes, guidance, and learning activities cannot be imposed on the student but only offered and suggested by teachers”. in another paragraph, you wrote, “meaningful guidance by the teacher starts with the student’s question.”. then, should every guidance or suggestion coming from a teacher that student didn’t demand be called intervention? if a student with an evil personality grows up without proper guidance just because they didn’t ask for, who is responsible for the potential immoral, antisocial activities they might commit? i think it is a teacher’s responsibility to guide non-educational characteristics from external factors such as domestic violence. if used properly, i believe a teacher can act as a positive provider, not a suppressor of freedom or injector of social justice. to summarize, i have two questions. do you feel the need for a different approach in developing values and determining a direction for young children? and, if it is deemed to be necessary, can guidance coming from a teacher affect positively even if it’s not demanded? i would be grateful if you give your feedback. thank you. comment on text eugene matusov: sure, ki jung. i often involve my students in what i call “dialogic provocations” that can generate genuine questions, puzzlements, and interests in my students. for example, your teacher, professor shelley price-jones, used my paper to provoke terrific, genuine questions in you. right? comment on text eugene matusov: great question, ki jung! my answer is that it is not the goal of education to address societal problems. in this particular case, police, social workers, and psychotherapists are appropriate professions and not educators. however, at times, educators, as particular members of an educational community, might assume those non-educational roles temporarily. still, it is important to recognize that these roles and functions are not educational in their nature. comment on text eugene matusov: in my view, making students good people is not an educational task. i’d say even stronger, it is an anti-educational task. i think the goal of education is to inform so a student can make informed decisions, some of which can be bad or wrong. molding students into “good” values is propaganda and not education. comment on text eugene matusov: who defines is “positive” or “negative”? is not a student’s responsibility to make this decisions? students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf95 not everyone has equal abilities, but everyone should have equal opportunity for education. – john f. kennedy greetings professor matusov, my name is seung-woo han and i am a student at kyung hee university in south korea. i major in hotel management and currently i am a student of professor smith price-jones in the class of discussion and debate. first off, it was a pleasure reading your academic article on “a student’s right to freedom of education.” i could understand the philosophy and arguments you stated about why education needs freedom. on this video i will be doing a critical commentary about some of the points mentioned that i truly thought they were remarkable. first, you mentioned about the concept of closed socialization. i also agree to the argument that student’s freedom to define their own goals being impede by teachers, make those students spiritless and more likely a zombie. for example, in case of my early years of education, during my elementary, middle, high school, teachers would give out full credit in exam questions even though the answers were not exactly textbook definitions. i believe that this was possible due to the fact that teachers understood that everyone has different ways on remembering and describing the concepts. second, albert einstein once said “a student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.” i definitely agree with what you wrote about curricular academic freedom. students have the right to pursue his/her own academic interests. nonetheless, educators should help student’s passion or academic desires, they should not intervene or imposed them. however, here in korea, there are case in which some teachers in high school, tend to do the opposite and neglect student’s dream and desire. in conclusion, reading this academic article i couldn’t agree more that students have the right to freedom of education. i thought you gave strong points on your arguments and it made me feel that south korea needs a change in the education system given the fact that the majority of high school students go to specific universities and majors depending on their sunung (college scholastic ability test) a.k.a the korean version of sat. i am soo-hyeon park, a student from the department of applied english linguistics and translation studies, south korea. though i agree with the importance of freedom of education, i believe that this is not always the absolute right way. what will happen if we allow all the types of freedom of education that exists? will the society operate well even in such radical changes? at school, students learn the way to become a member of the society. social norms. rules. disciplines. if we give all the freedom from a young age, will they be able to learn “the importance of following rules”? for example, if a child continues to come to class only when he/she “feels” like it, will the child be able to adapt in the working environment where in many cases there are certain office hours that you must follow? we should think about this. one of the life lessons that we learn throughout our life is the fact that we can’t do everything as we prefer. there are certain times when we must do things that we dislike. how are we going to teach this if we let all the freedom to the students? in the statement, “a societal calculation of education is much more wasteful than a personal desire of learning.” i doubt whether there is no value in forced learning. if we call this as a “forced learning”, this could draw objections, but we can name this differently as “compulsory learning”. at school we learn diverse subjects; even subjects that we dislike. however, by experiencing diverse subjects, a disliked subject can comment on text eugene matusov: i feel very sorry for that and as a teacher, i want to apologize to you and your peers this zombification. i feel ashamed for my profession doing that. comment on text eugene matusov: wow, seung-woo, this is a very important and deep point, in my view. a lot of (progressive) teachers try to impose the passion for the curriculum they teach on their students. those teachers want their students to want what the teachers what them to want. as a novice physics teacher in the soviet union, it was my goal as well. i remember that i wanted all my students to love physics. later, i realized that it was a wrong pedagogical desire of mine. i think a better pedagogical desire to help the student explore their own passions, not to hook on the teacher’s one. what do you think? students’ critical commentaries: unfettered voices kathryn shelley price-jones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.353 | vol. 8 (2020) sf96 actually become one your favorites. compulsory learning can be a way for students to experience diverse fields and expand their thoughts and views. we can’t deny the fact that there are advantages of compulsory/forced learning. then, what is the standard of comparing the values between compulsory learning and learning of personal desire? we should consider the fact that children have different kinds of personalities and characteristics. some might say that because everybody has different personalities, we should let them choose their own education curriculums. however, what about students who don’t really want that freedom? there are indeed students who are independent, know what they like and enjoy the freedom. on the other hand, there are also students who don’t actually know what they want to learn and want a curriculum that is already given out. letting students have freedom of choosing their own subjects can rather cause confusion, especially in a young age. furthermore, there are certain information, knowledge that everybody should learn throughout their childhood. if we give freedom to choose their own curriculums, how will we going to teach students these essential information? yes, we can teach students both compulsory classes and several classes that they want to learn. however, is this really giving freedom to students? new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. comment on text eugene matusov: dear soo-hyeon, you are raising an important issue and objection that alina raised (please see above). i addressed it in my response. very helpful! thanks! comment on text eugene matusov: good rhetorical question, soo-hyeon, – i addressed it in my response. microsoft word dialogic possibilities of online supervision (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt59 dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen university of southern denmark, denmark ane qvortrup university of southern denmark, denmark abstract when schools locked down owing to the spread of covid-19, danish upper secondary school students worked on the major written assignment that completes their studies. this assignment is interdisciplinary, and students receive up to twenty hours of supervision from two teachers. this year, supervision was reorganised into a virtual format. this article explores how and in what ways students benefited from this reorganisation. this article is based on a mixed-methods design that includes quantitative and qualitative data and investigates how various online supervision formats support dialogic interaction. this article focuses on the student’s experience of supervision. it finds that all the formats we investigated offer the opportunity for dialogue during supervision, but their potential varies significantly. some formats seem to have great potential for supporting students’ academic development, whereas others support their psychosocial development. we conclude by addressing the importance of choosing the online format suited to a given purpose and recommend that supervisors be aware of the didactic purposes of the various formats. keywords: supervision, online, dialogue, corona, upper secondary school anne bang-larsen, ph.d. center for upper secondary education research. department for the study of culture, university of southern denmark, sdu, denmark. email: anneb@sdu.dk ane qvortrup, professor, ph.d. center for upper secondary education research. department for the study of culture, university of southern denmark, sdu, denmark. email: anq@sdu.dk ïïò introduction in recent years, research into higher education has increasingly focused on using digital media for supervising and providing feedback on student assignments. when the spread of covid-19 forced schools to close in the spring of 2020, students in danish upper secondary schools were about to begin writing the major written assignments that complete their studies. these assignments are interdisciplinary, and students receive supervision from two teachers. this situation may be understood as a natural experiment (mutch, 2020) related to digital supervision at educational levels other than higher education, with the opportunity to learn how and in what ways students may benefit from digital technologies in their supervision. in another study, bang-larsen and qvortrup (2021) show that the development of the supervision of these assignments displayed great variety regarding both the formats of online supervision (e.g., synchronous/asynchronous, audio-or video-based/written) and the use of technologies (e.g., email, some, conferencing systems). previous studies suggest that online supervision formats may help cement a dialogue-oriented, process-oriented, and trusting relationship. this is especially true for text-based feedback, where the virtual tools offer insight into the students’ writing process (suler, 2004; kumar & issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt60 johnson, 2019; bengtsen, 2015). based on bang-larsen and qvortrup’s work (2021), it seems that the perspectives on online supervision are complex, owing to students’ and teachers’ different ideas about the character of the aims of supervision and their different qualifications for facilitating and participating in online supervision processes. this article takes a bakhtinian perspective on communication to grasp the dialogical potential of online supervision. we were curious about whether and how various digital formats and technologies support dialogical interaction during academic supervision and how such dialogical interaction orients the development of knowledge. in april 2020, that is, in the middle of the school closures, we collected quantitative and qualitative data to investigate students’ supervision and knowledge development during school closures. our research question is, how does dialogical interaction in various formats of online supervision support upper secondary students’ development of knowledge and writing processes? this article presents new understandings of online supervision at upper secondary schools focusing on the supervision dialogue. online supervision during lockdown 2020 is a case useful for expanding and nuancing our understanding of how digital formats and technologies support supervision in general. this case is of interest since online supervision was not undertaken solely by students and teachers who have special reasons or good qualifications for completing their supervision online. the danish upper secondary school there are seven upper secondary educational programmes in denmark, all subsidised by the state. all the programmes require students to have completed nine years of compulsory schooling. three of them lead to an upper secondary school leaving certificate,[1] which qualifies students to apply to universities and university colleges. these have various academic focuses. the stx programme1 is the oldest, largest, and most common. it comprises a broad range of disciplines in the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. the hhx programme2 focuses on business and economics, and the htx programme3 focuses on technology. students have to complete three major written assignments throughout danish upper secondary education. when schools were closed because of covid-19, most of the oldest students were beginning or supposed to begin writing their last major assignment, called the specialised study project (srp)4 at stx and multisubject coursework (sop5) at hhx and htx. these assignments are independent, interdisciplinary assignments, and the students receive supervision from the involved teachers.6 the supervisors guide the students in finding material, choosing analysis methods, defining their topic, and making a thesis statement. the supervisors set the final exam paper based on the thesis statement, and the student then has 50 hours to write their assignment, consisting of 15 to 20 standard pages. the assignment is defended orally, and the student receives a mark for their work. the mark has a weight of 2 on the students’ final upper secondary school diploma. both students and teachers describe the srp/sop assignments as very important or even the crowning work of the 3-year upper secondary school programme. 1 stx is the abbreviation for the danish wording for ‘higher general examination’ 2 hhx is the abbreviation for the danish wording for ‘higher commercial examination’. 3 htx is the abbreviation for the danish wording for ‘higher technical examination’ 4 srp is the abbreviation for the danish wording for ‘specialised study project’. 5 sop is the abbreviation for the danish wording for ‘multi-subject coursework’. 6 see the curriculum for the specialised study project (https://www.uvm.dk/-/media/filer/uvm/gym-laereplaner2017/stx/studieretningsprojektet-stx-august-2017-ua.pdf) and for the multi-subject coursework, hhx (https://www.uvm.dk//media/filer/uvm/gym-laereplaner-2017/hhx/studieomraadet-hhx-august-2017-ua.pdf) and htx (https://www.uvm.dk//media/filer/uvm/gym-laereplaner-2017/htx/studieomraadet-htx-august-2017-ua.pdf). dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt61 online supervision a lot of research on supervision and online supervision has been carried out over the past 20 years (pearson, 2005; wichmann-hansen et al., 2007; bjørndal, 2008; maxwell & smyth, 2011; bastalich, 2017). many different understandings seem to be attached to the term ‘supervision’ (skagen, 2013), sharing the core premise that ‘supervision is the key to both quality and efficiency’ (bastalich, 2017, p. 1145). handal and lauvås underline that most of what we understand as doctoral supervision takes place in the form of a conversation between supervisors and students, which can vary from formal and planned meetings with a set agenda to more informal and spontaneous talks in the hallway or classroom (handal & lauvås,2011, p.101). research identifies various understandings of how the interaction between supervisor and student may support student development and facilitate learning (brown & atkins, 1988; delamont et al., 1998; lee, 2008). discrepancies in the understanding concern the role of the supervisor and the relationship between supervisor and student. the tension between students ‘dependence on’ and ‘independence from’ their supervisors (lee, 2008, p. 277) is particularly addressed. this tension calls for reflection on ‘the degree of direction and intervention necessary to facilitate independent learning (benmore, 2014, p. 13). bjørndal addresses the powerful role of the supervisor and investigates supervision as participating in a community of practice (bjørndal, 2008). this study presents research on the dialogue in online supervision of students’ written assignments. the dialogue is the part of the supervision meeting that enables the student and the supervisors to engage in and shape the meeting and the subject matter at hand (bengtsen, 2016, p.18). wisker states that the supervisory dialogues can be described as a “learning conversation” and a form of “collaborative problemsolving” (bengtsen, 2016; wisker, 2012, p. 190). our investigation is positioned in a didactic tradition that describes academic supervision as an activity in which students, as learners, develop their abilities by receiving feedback on their work (boud & lee, 2005; emilsson & johnsson, 2007; walker & thomson, 2010). within the literature on supervision, it is a dominant understanding that learning is a linear process where the student strives for greater independence (bastalich, 2017; gurr, 2010). research stresses the importance of feedback, understood as ‘information provided by an agent (…) regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding’ (hattie & timperley, 2007, p. 81) and thereby improving this performance (ives & rowley, 2005; johnson et al., 2000; lee et al., 2008). based on a synthesis of the evidence of feedback, hattie and timperley (2007) argue that feedback may be given at four levels: task (information concerning how well a task is carried out); process (feedback concerning the processes underlying tasks, or relating and extending tasks, including students’ strategies for error detection); self-regulation (feedback addressing the way students monitor, direct and regulate actions towards a learning goal) and the self (feedback concerning personal aspects). the close bond between feedback and student writing is well documented in the new literacy studies which focus on the development of writing in a social context (barton, 2007; gee, 2012; ivanic, 1998) and direct attention to writing as enculturation (sommers & saltz, 2004). in denmark, this field is informed by research on students’ writing skills development in upper secondary school (krogh & jakobsen, 2016). in the field of supervision, there has been increased interest in the role of academic socialisation and enculturation (johnson et al., 2000; pearson & brew, 2002). in scandinavia, recent studies proposed a dialogical framework for researching and supervising, focusing on how voices and dialogue influence the supervision process (dysthe et al., 2006; dysthe, 2002). ‘dialogism is important because i see the coconstruction of knowledge as essential to communication processes generally and the supervision process in particular’ (dysthe, 2002, p. 519). in the research into supervision in higher education, we find an increasing focus on online mentoring, defined as ‘a developmental relationship between a more experienced individual and a less experienced protégé that is embedded within the career context and that primarily uses online media’ dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt62 (kumar & johnson, 2019, p. 61). the field is nurtured by the research on face-to-face supervision and feedback. online supervision is typically recognised as benefiting students from a great distance. furthermore, studies claim there is significant potential for students in using screen sharing when giving feedback on written texts (kumar et al., 2017; erichsen, 2014). when it comes to dialogue in online supervision, there is a gap in knowledge. the field has been marked by an understanding of ‘online dialogue as being a poorer and less authentic substitute for the face-to-face encounter’ (bengtsen & jensen, 2015, p. 2). nevertheless, recent studies emphasise that online supervision may contribute to the development of students’ writing when dialogue is executed with close attention to the qualities of the various online formats (kumar et al., 2017; doyle et al., 2016). key to this is an awareness of how online supervision demands another understanding of presence (bengtsen & jensen, 2015). for instance, an awareness of tone and voice quality is of great significance if the online format does not give access to eye contact or gestures. furthermore, the difference between synchronicity and asynchronicity is discussed. online supervision demands an awareness of when you meet, write and respond, and the culture varies in different formats. also, research indicate, that students benefit from new possibilities for communication and feedback in different online formats, for instance flexibility in time and place (suler, 2004). the affordances of online supervision demand that attention is paid to the role of the supervisors, which is as complex as the dialogue during face-to-face supervision: ‘the supervisor is providing learning, advising, encouraging, promoting, and modeling, that is often boundaryless’ (bierema & merriam, 2002, p. 214). new online relations and a different understanding of presence in online environments mean that students’ requests for feedback may differ from face-to-face supervision. studies of students’ perceptions of online supervision stress the importance of the relationship between students and supervisors and highlight the importance of the students sensing the supervisor’s interest and personal response (rademaker, 2016). the previous foci on online supervision raise the question of whether feedback in an online setting demands a different understanding of feedback, depending on the format used for supervision. hattie and timperley (2007) suggest that feedback directed to the student’s subjectivity (e.g., ‘you are a great student.’ and ‘that’s an intelligent response, well done.’) is often too unrelated to performance to have a positive effect on students’ work. however, a number of studies show that students’ self-efficacy or belief in their own abilities may be challenged when it comes to online distance learning. tladi (2017) notes the need to distinguish between various types of self-efficacy: self-efficacy related to remote learning, self-efficacy related to self-regulated learning, and self-efficacy related to computer and online technologies. al fadda (2019) presents a similar focus, based on a demonstration of a statistically significant relation between belief in one’s abilities and inner goal orientation, and speaks of self-efficacy as a motivating target when teaching takes place from a distance. chung (2015) finds a connection between a belief in one’s abilities and the use of self-regulated learning strategies in distance education. also, wang, peng, huang, hou, and wang (2008) found a correlation between belief in one’s abilities, learning strategies, and learning outcomes among students participating in distance education. peck, stefaniak, and shah (2018) find that belief in one’s abilities, effort regulation, and peer learning correlate to distance education retention. these results may indicate that complimentary feedback at the level of the student’s subjectivity may be particularly important in the context of online writing assignments, where building self-confidence and selfefficacy is crucial for self-regulation and retention. the research on the online supervision of written assignments has had a limited focus on the way different digital technologies used in supervision influence the dialogue and the feedback, although bengtsen and jensen stress that ‘different formats influence the conditions for supervision’ (bengtsen & dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt63 jensen, 2015, p. 17). furthermore, online supervision seems to be investigated primarily in higher education. thus, we know little about how online assignments are supervised and developed in upper secondary schools, on which this study aims to shed light. theoretical framework this section presents our understanding of supervision within a didactic framework. we first present our understanding of teaching and didactics, and next, we present our understanding of dialogue and our framework for investigating dialogue during online supervision. combining these allowed us to shed light on the changes in online supervision, both in terms of micro-processes in dialogues between teachers and students, as they are facilitated and negotiated by digital media, and macro-processes linked to new conditions in teaching and supervision. this project is based on a communicative approach to teaching and didactics, which considers that the educational system is constantly changing (at different paces) (christensen et al., 2018). these changes may be due to globalisation and new agendas in transnational education policies, new forms of knowledge, and/or changes in our understanding of what education is and what it should aim to be (qvortrup, 2018). however, the changes may also happen due to the transition to online settings. previous research into online, distance education, and teaching indicates that changing physical and social setting supports certain forms of production and organisation (e.g., bundsgaard 2005), just as new positions and identities are established among students and teachers (e.g., hasse & andersen, 2012). this embraces both mental and social phenomena (asplund et al., 2018; ito et al., 2014). one may say that these changes challenge the still unchallenged legitimacy of curricula and disciplines (krogh, 2003, 2006), as they ‘force subjects to develop a pronounced and continuous readiness for change’ (ongstad, 2006, p. 28). thus, the changes force the repeated rethinking of didactics in a broader sense. we suggest that this rethinking occurs at a programmatic level through repeated curricular developments at the planning level. the teacher develops new teaching content and forms based on the didactic purpose (qvortrup, 2018). furthermore, this rethinking takes place in didactic practice, where the new content, the new forms of teaching, and the changed didactic purposes are negotiated between the school, teachers, and students. this is captured by the following model of an analysis of didactic events (figure 1), suggested by christensen et al. (2014), and has been further developed by qvortrup et al. (2017) and qvortrup (2020a). figure 1: model of analysis of the didactic event in teaching (after christensen, 2021) the didactic negotiations are understood as social events where teachers and students interact under the conditions of a given situation (e.g., in our case, the conditions associated with the covid-19 dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt64 pandemic). events refer to observable teaching situations (christensen et al., 2014), and the model shows how such events reflect practices and cultures related to students, teachers, and schools. practices are understood as ways of doing or participating in teaching. practices refer to cultural norms, values, attitudes, and social relations and cannot be directly observed in a specific situation. instead practices may be understood through an analysis of recurring approaches, techniques, and patterns that make sense of events and that also establish the limits of what is legitimate and recognisable (ibid.). in addition to referencing norms, values, attitudes, and social relations, cultures capture the fundamental assumptions that exist among and are created by the actors but are also framed by technologies, materials, and physical frameworks (ibid.). according to ongstad, the didactic negotiation is ‘triadic in its distinction between, and linking, the form, content, and use of the text or utterance’ (ongstad, 2013, p. 34). in didactic terms, these are the three essential questions: ‘what should be taught (content)?’, ‘how should this content be presented (form)?’ and ‘why/for what purpose (function/use)?’ to capture the changes, ongstad (2013) also adds the two categories of time and place: ‘kronotop, understood as physical time-and-place, […] becomes an inevitable and always present and silent context’ (ongstad, 2013, p. 35). subjects, education, and teaching, that is didactics, must ‘always relate to five basic aspects that are all woven into each other, namely form, content, use, time and place’ (ongstad, 2013, p. 35). the theoretical framework that informs our narrative analysis is based on bakhtin’s theories of dialogue and communication (bakhtin, 1986). within this framework, we investigate the dialogical potential of online supervision. understanding supervision as a communicative activity means that the supervisees learn through their interaction with their supervisors. given this, we argue that bakhtin’s ideas of dialogism seem highly significant. the term ‘dialogism’ refers to bakhtin’s theories of dialogue, where dialogism is understood as “a name for a bundle, or combination, of theoretical and epistemological assumptions about human action, communication and cognition” (linell, 2003, p. 220). bakhtin distinguishes between monologism and dialogism as two distinctive communicational modes that may affect knowledge construction and comprehension. when we speak of monologism, knowledge is understood as a given. this knowledge may be directly transmitted to the student through the teacher’s authoritative word in a learning setting. when we speak of dialogism, knowledge is understood as ‘emerging from the interaction of voices (…) and concerned with the construction and transformation of understanding through the tension between multiple perspectives and opinions’ (linell, 2003; dysthe et al., 2006, p. 302). the understanding of dialogue in supervision is framed by the idea of knowledge as co-developed through multivoiced interaction. dysthe suggests the term ‘dialogical uptake’ for investigating the micro-processes of dialogue (dysthe, 1997). these perspectives on monologism and dialogism allow us to investigate how the concept of knowledge influences the dialogue in supervision. bakhtin distinguishes between ‘the authoritative word’ and internally persuasive discourse (bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). when giving and receiving feedback, prior suggests tracing the interplay of the authoritative word and internally persuasive discourses where teacher and student negotiate words and meanings, since the negotiations bear witness to the student’s development (prior, 1995, p. 292). dysthe argues that bakhtin’s concept ‘offers a relevant distinction for discussing supervision practices because it combines an understanding of a person’s dialogic appropriation of social language and the ways outside forces assert their influences’ (dysthe et al., 2006, p. 203). both concepts suggest that supervision through dialogue demands the student’s active participation to negotiate and transform the content into knowledge that is meaningful to the students. in their research on various supervision formats, dysthe stresses that an important aspect of supervision concerns which communicative models are most suitable for transforming the authoritative word into an internally persuasive voice (dysthe, 2003, p. 3). to investigate the negotiation among multiple voices during supervision, we draw on bakhtin’s term, ‘appropriation’: dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt65 the word in language is half someone else’s. it becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a natural and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (bakhtin, 1981, p. 293–4) this statement emphasises that supervision is a continuous negotiation between a person’s dialogic appropriation of social language and the surrounding context that influences the dialogue. since supervision is understood as participation in a community of practice, the dialogue is influenced at an interpersonal level in a specific supervision dialogue between the supervisor and the student and at the level of sociocultural activity that transcends the specific situation. from a bakhtinian perspective, the supervisors have a powerful voice influenced by the voices of the organisation (school) and institution (policies). this understanding of supervision is an argument for drawing on the context when analysing the specific act of supervision. in figure two, we have captured our vision of how the student’s perspective of online supervision is embedded in a larger context. figure 2: illustration of the focus of this investigation for our investigation of how dialogue in various online supervision formats supports the development of knowledge and writing, we argue that the concepts of voice, monologism, dialogism, and appropriation constitute an adequate framework. data and methods this article is based on a mixed methods approach. it includes four types of data: 1) surveys of students’ experiences of online supervision (n=667) conducted in april 2020, 2) student notes, instructions, and assignments, 3) observations, and 4) interviews.7 all data has been translated from danish to english by the authors. in the translation, the authors emphasise the content of the students' answers over language. our mixed methods approach is characterised by a ‘diversity of views,’ ‘perspective change,’ and ‘complementation,’ as in green’s and bryman’s taxonomies for mixed methods designs (greene et al., 1989; greene, 2007; bryman, 2006). 7 the university of southern denmark is responsible for these data and ensures that the processing of personal data takes place in accordance with the rules on data protection. the legal framework for processing these data is found in the danish data protection act §10. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt66 regarding the change of perspective, we tried to increase the breadth and depth of our analyses of students’ online supervision experiences by moving among various perspectives or paradigms. regarding complementation, we sought to expand and strengthen our interpretation by combining multiple data sources. this is evident in our selection of qualitative cases. we selected cases based on findings from the quantitative part of this study that showed some discrepancies with previous studies described in the section on online supervision. the survey data were collected as part of a research project on school closures (qvortrup, 2020b). of the total 3342 respondents, 677 3rd year students responded to the last section concerning the srp (specialised study project) and sop (multi-subject coursework). as shown in table 1, on the status of the students’ work on their srp/sop at the time of the data collection, 488 students (72.1% of the 3rd year students) were completing or had completed the srp/sop during school closures. the responses from these 488 students form the quantitative database of the study we are presenting in this article. respondents percent i have not yet started to work on it 2 0.3% i am working on it now 50 7.4% i finished it before school closures 187 27.6% i finished it during school closures 438 64.7% total 677 100.0% table 1: third-year students’ responses to the question: ‘how far have you got with your srp/sop?’ another central element of our data collection was based on qualitative data. in the spring of 2020, we collected data on three students selected to answer this article’s research questions as part of a qualitative ethnographic doctoral project (bang-larsen, 2022). data involved student notes, instructions, assignments, observation of online supervision, and interviews, as illustrated in table 2. this part of the data was chosen to explore the discrepancies between the results of the quantitative part of the study and previous studies. as we discuss below, these discrepancies are related to accessibility and proximity. student pseudonym school theme for assignment topics data: student notes, instructions and assignment data: observation data: intervi ews 1 mira school 1 the rebuilding of rwanda history and social sciences instructions for assignment. student notes after 7 days of work student notes from supervision final assignment observation of 2* online supervision sessions (zoom) 5* email threads dates for 9 phone calls 2 intervi ews 1 siv school 2 swinging bridges math and physics instructions for assignment student notes after 7 days of work. student notes from supervision final assignment observation of 2* supervision sessions (google meet, messenger) 6* email threads 2 intervi ews dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt67 3 sofia school 2 terrorism – focus on dirty bombs physics and social sciences instructions for assignment. student notes after 3 days of work student notes from supervision final assignment observation of 2* online supervision (1 messenger and 1 google meet) 7* email threads 1 intervi ew table 2: data presenting the qualitative research data from the online supervision consisted of written exchanges (e.g. data from messenger), supervision meetings using video, and notes students made during audio-based supervision such as phone calls (hastrup, 2012). data and methods for selecting data were based on the online supervision in the three formats that were used during the srp/sop supervision, following the students' perspectives (banglarsen & qvortrup, 2021). the analysis of supervision data focused on describing how the dialogue evolved in a given online format. semi-structured interviews with the students were conducted within two weeks after the supervision incidents. the students were asked to describe their experience of supervision. the interviews were transcribed, coded, and analysed as documents that formed a part of the student’s accounts, along with our observations, student notes, and assignments (bang-larsen & qvortrup, 2021). finally, we collected documents produced by the students, including notes from supervision, the assignment in progress and the final assignment. for this part of the study, 3 students were chosen from the 9 students engaged in a larger research study (bang-larsen, 2021). the cases were selected because they represented three very different cases of online supervision (cresswell, 2017), using three different online formats. furthermore, data from these studies yielded the thickest data (geertz, 1973). in the analysis, students, supervisors, and schools are anonymised. data were collected with the participants’ consent. methodological approach – researching dialogue in online supervision we present our strategies for analysing our data, which combine the perspectives from the theoretical framework with our methods for data analysis. our analytical approach may be described as what bryman (2016) and schwartz-shea and dvora (2012) call an abductive approach (bryman, 2016; schwartz-shea & dvora, 2012). this strategy focus on how disturbances or conflicts in various sources (e.g. qualitative and quantitative data) are used to suggest further exploration. using this strategy we analysed the survey data in exploratory and descriptive ways, to develop preliminary hypotheses, and to complete the qualitative analysis, respectively. the qualitative data were investigated through narrative analysis, as understood in the tradition of riessman (2008). when analysing the narratives we focused on two aspects: 1. we present our investigation into how supervision, in various online formats, is influenced by time and place. 2. to expand this investigation, to explore the different forms of online engagement, we analyse the dialogues during online supervision from a bakhtinian perspective. the first part of our narrative analysis was shaped by the results of a study of online supervision formats presented by bang-larsen and qvortrup (2021). the accounts were coded and analysed according to ongstad’s categories of time, space, form, content and function (ongstad, 2013). research category questions for observation data dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt68 time when is the supervision taking place? synchronous/asynchronous communication videoaudioand online text-based observation of supervision space in which virtual space is the supervision taking place? which physical spaces are represented during the supervision? video-based observation of supervision form what characterises the format of the online communication? videoaudioand online text-based observation of supervision content what is the content of the dialogue? videoaudioand online text-based observation of supervision notes from the student assignments interviews function how does the student understand the purpose of the supervision session? videoaudioand online text-based observation of supervision interviews table 3: illustration of the research categories and data used for the study to investigate the development of dialogue during supervision, bakhtin’s dialogical framework categories were added to the analysis of the micro-processes of the dialogue. the analysis of the feedback is partly informed by hattie and timperley’s levels of feedback (2007). categories for observation in the supervision dialogues sequences content – level of feedback identified voices dialogue/monologue signs of appropriation sequence 1 – opening sequence sequence 2 – sequence 3 sequence 4 – closing sequence table 4: illustration of research categories findings in this section we first present our findings from the entire quantitative data set, with a focus on the use of online formats and the student experience of supervision. then we present the coding and findings of the narrative analysis, to explore the dialogical characteristics of the various online supervision formats. as shown in table 5, a great variety of online supervision formats were used. percent on skype 2.8% on teams 36.3% dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt69 on zoom 1.4% by telephone 23.7% by email 27.9% on my school’s learning platform 44.7% other 32.6% table 5: 3rd-year students’ answers to the question, ‘what media/platforms were used for the supervision?’ (you may select more than one) a majority of students stated that they were supervised via the school’s usual teaching platform, and the second-most used was the microsoft teams platform, which is a communication and collaboration platform that has an application for video meetings with a chat feature and file storage. also, many students were supervised via email and telephone. thus at least three online supervision formats were used: asynchronous written supervision (teaching platform and email), synchronous audio supervision (telephone) and synchronous video supervision (teams, skype and zoom). table 6 shows the students’ general experiences of the supervision as it took form after the transition to online settings (see theoretical framework). percent not at all 8.9% to a reduced extent 27.4% neither/nor 17.1% to a moderate extent 25.8% to a large extent 18.6% don’t know 2.3% total 100.0% table 6: 3rd year students’ answers to the question: ‘i have a good access to receive supervision while working on my srp/sop’ table 6 shows that the online supervision did not meet all students’ expectations. just under half of the students (44.4%) found that they had good, or somewhat good access to supervision, whereas a little over a quarter (27.4%) found that this was the case to a reduced extent, and 8.9% indicated that this was not at all the case. in the open ended comments following this survey question, it is stressed by a majority of the students that they felt particularly challenged by three factors: 1) personal contact with the teacher, 2) the possibility of on-demand supervision when needed and 3) the experience of being part of a working community with the possibility of peer-to-peer guidance. as we dove into the responses to the open-ended questions that extend the questions presented in table 6, we reached a better understanding of the factors that helped to determine students’ assessment of their opportunity for supervision. however, these answers not only presented a picture of the students’ assessment of their opportunity for supervision but also explicitly and implicitly gave us an idea of students’ expectations of supervision. three themes of interest for this research emerged in the responses. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt70 the first theme relates to the presence and dynamic dialogue. this theme includes a number of statements that address the unsatisfactory temporal dynamics. one of the students stated ‘it is really hard when you write an email to your supervisor and you have to wait several days for an answer.’ however, the question of time is related not only to response time but also to a lack of immediacy in relation to contact, ‘e.g. if you hit a wall and are not able to get started again,’ as one of the students put it. another student explained that ‘i had to write to them first and then i had to wait some time for an answer.’ in addition to time, presence is linked to physical presence. one student noted that ‘it’s all very difficult when you cannot see each other’s body language,’ whereas another explained that ‘it is not as easy to understand your supervisor when he is not in the same room and you can actually face each other,’ and a third student suggested that ‘the lack of presence may mean that you are not asked as many questions, which also means that the depth of the interaction is reduced’. this student significantly correlates visual closeness to the possibility of depth: ‘all in all, one just needs to see the teacher and get answers, instead of writing on the internet.’ the second recurring theme in the open answers addresses depth, as opposed to surface. one student explained that ‘it is difficult to find the head and tail of where to start. then it is confusing to receive various messages and documents that you cannot find later if you need them.’ another student with a similar focus explained that ’a lot can be misunderstood when writing it,’ and similarly, other students wrote that ‘it is difficult to communicate properly so that one is sure that one’s teacher understands what one is saying’ and ‘it is not so easy to explain to the teachers what exactly you think in relation to what you need help with’. according to one student, this may be due to the fact that ‘the answers were often short and did not help much.’ finally, a number of students indicated that the supervision normally referred or related to wider learning circles, or that in some way, they remind them of, or confirm the students’ relationship to the institution as a learning community. one of the students explained that ‘you do not have the same opportunity to ask classmates, etc. for advice’. another student describes the feeling that ‘you are completely alone with it’. three students’ accounts of their experiences of various online formats the survey data made it evident that the students are receiving supervision and feedback in a wide range of online formats. the survey findings also indicated that students have very different experiences of supervision and feedback depending on the use of different formats. our research informs us that online supervision demands an awareness of how various communication multimodalities may support online communication in a given format, and research emphasises the importance of the relationship between student and supervisor and suggests a focus on the informal aspects of supervision. the quantitative data address the questions of depth in supervision, which is of interest since research claims that textual feedback in online supervision has ‘great potential’ (kumar & johnson, 2017, p. 205). there also seems to be a gap between our data’s addressing of time as a challenge, and research claiming that textual feedback in online supervision has great potential transcending time and space (bengtsen & jensen, 2015). in order to understand how students experience online supervision, it is interesting to explore the ambiguity of these themes (e.g. depth, time and space), which are addressed in the analyses of the qualitative data. in the following cases, we first present the results of our analyses of how the transformations of time and space affect the online format (form). furthermore, we explore how the students experienced the content of their supervision. in doing this, we gained insight into the students’ understandings of how dialogues in online supervision contributed to their writing. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt71 mira – an experience of video-mediated online supervision mira was completing her final year of upper secondary school with a large project on the genocide in rwanda (history and social sciences). mira had been at home for two weeks when she began her writing and entered the program of supervision. as shown in table 7, mira’s supervision took various forms, but video-based online supervision was the dominant format. two twenty-minute online meetings were scheduled for mira and her two supervisors. research category/ format of supervision time space form content function written online communication asynchronous used for immediate requests for supervision use of messenger – invitation into private space questions task requests for answers, instructions and approval audio-based online communication synchronous immediate private space response – confirmation /affirmation task and process requests for answers and acknowledgement video-based online communication synchronous immediate response, but needs planning to schedule a meeting private space text oriented smalltalk task, process, selfregulating, self-level requests for tasklevel and process discussions. requests for acknowledgement. table 7: findings concerning mira’s experience of various online formats the analysis of mira’s experience of the changed conditions with respect to time and space in supervision shows that mira felt she had fairly good access to her supervisors, with which she was very pleased. it seems very important to mira that she may have supervision at almost any time. she also emphasises that the use of online formats in some way intertwines the supervisors’ space and her personal space. i think online supervision has been awesome. i could call x at any time, and we spent hours on the phone (…) for some reason it also seemed quite relaxed, i sat at home in my room and there were not a whole lot of other students, waiting for me to finish or looking at me. we used screen sharing a lot, and then they [supervisors] read through passages and asked why i did this, and why i did that.... in this sense. (mira, interview) as mira emphasised in her statement, the video-based online format leaves the student in a comfortable private room with an experience of time as ‘one’s own.’ in the second video-based online supervision session, mira requested help at the task level. the session was scheduled halfway through her writing, owing to mira’s ‘struggling with how to inform her investigation analytically by using economic theory, not just paraphrasing the theories’ (as written in an email from mira to her supervisors). by her request, mira shows signs of appropriation, since the request echoes the voice of the supervisors in previous meeting, where they expressed concern about the taxonomic levels of her investigation. the online session opened with small talk about the process level and the student’s well-being. then the social science teacher addressed mira’s struggle (sign of a ‘dialogical uptake’ from the dialogue initiated by mira). the supervisor invites mira to share the screen, and the dialogue evolves around paragraphs written by the student: dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt72 …in your analysis you use descriptions of strategies used by rwanda’s government to evolve economic growth, particularly nation branding. analysing this, you need economic theories, and i see that you use the book, international economics. which theoretical conclusions from this chapter are you planning to draw on? (mira, video-based observation) instead of imposing a teacher-driven monologue concerning relevant theories and concepts, the teacher uses mira’s text to invite her to explore the analytical possibilities of the framework mira presented. as the dialogue evolves, mira finds a way to elaborate on the analysis, by using the theoretical framework to analyse rwandan government strategies for economic growth through nation branding. the supervisor mentions another theory from the book, rostow’s strategies for economic growth, and mira decides to look into that as well. mira’s description of this supervision dialogue as contributing to her writing process may partly be explained by the use of screen sharing as a tool qualifying a dialogue closely related to mira's text. the active use of the text mira produced prompts a scaffolding dialogue. and in the final assignment, we see that mira integrated the teacher’s suggestion, which may be understood as another sign of appropriation. at the conclusion of the online supervision, the supervisor asks mira to recapitulate what she needs to do next. mira informs her supervisor of her plans, and according to the observation, she emphasises the key parts of the dialogue. this part of the session addresses feedback at a self-regulating level. the supervisor’s question is encouraging mira’s planning of the process and her ability to address the work in front of her. mira ends with a sigh, emphasising that she still has work to do. since the format allows the supervisors to see the expression on mira’s face and hear her tone of voice, the two supervisors respond to this by stating, ‘you look as though this is a bit overwhelming?’. mira responds to this, confirming that it is a bit overwhelming, but she indicates an awareness that this is expected in this part of the process. the supervisors confirm this, and add, ‘but you are a fighter, a hard-working bright student, we know you can do this,’ after which the meeting ends. this is clearly feedback at the self-level. concerning the student’s understanding of the function of supervision, feedback at the self-level turns out to be central and is a recurring feedback strategy throughout feedback provided to mira. this sort of feedback may be understood as an attempt to meet and acknowledge the student as a person, in the sense that the feedback is dialogically oriented, but not towards the actual task. nevertheless, mira emphasises the value of this response: i could call them [supervisors] at any time, and just have a short chat… ask how things were going.... or if i had a quick question. in that sense it has been very good.... very informal...the idea that someone cares about you and is interested... they believed in me, and i had the feeling of being seen. (mira, interview) in this passage, mira addresses her use of the satisfying audio-based online formats and also her need to be acknowledged as a student making her way through the difficult process of writing this assignment. she emphasises the importance of informal communication and the personal interest evidenced by the use of a communication platform involving a private space and private time. the private room and the voices of supervisors as private persons, seem important to the dialogue. and mira emphasises how the feedback at the self-level encourages her to work. the data underlines that in this case, audioand video-based online communication privileges this kind of feedback. siv – an experience of written online communication siv’s srp covers mathematics and physics, and she was investigating swinging bridges. all her supervision was carried out online. siv’s supervisors used written online communication only. they used dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt73 text messaging on messenger, based on the argument, that the potential of this platform is related to the possibilities of tracking text and order of communication. research category/ format of supervision time space form content function written online communication asynchronous lack of response loss of time appointed no access to the space in which the conversation partners are communicating. anonymous. consequence: experience of noncommitment. communication initiated only by student. questions and answers at task level. according to student, supervision should support writing process and bring new perspectives to the research. table 8: findings concerning siv’s experience of various online formats the online format chosen by siv’s supervisors, introduces another sort of ‘presence’ than the case of mira, since it offers no visual access to the rooms from which the participants communicate, and thus no intertwining of the supervisors’ and the student’s personal spaces. siv explained that because she had no access to the supervisors’ physical space, they did not appear to be engaged in the supervision. also, this format is partly asynchronous. according to siv’s account, these conditions of time and space are challenging. in her narrative, time is an ongoing issue: lack of time; presence and time; answering on time and time stolen from her, because she did not receive the supervision time that was assigned, according to the study plan. the changed conditions of time and space seem to be crucial for siv’s account of her supervision. one might characterise her narrative as a narrative of loss. the supervision has been quite particular because it was only online, and my supervisors insisted on using the chat function of messenger. sometimes i felt that it was only me posing questions, and then they answered.... in that sense, it was not really a conversation, i really missed that they did not address the specific parts of my paper, but then again, they never looked at what i was writing.... it was just questions and answers. (siv, interview) our analysis is focused on siv’s communication with her supervisors through the chat function of messenger. twice during the writing period, the two supervisors separately invited siv to participate in online supervision using the chat function of messenger. siv could also contact her supervisors by email. the supervision chat opened with siv posing a question about her given research question: ‘hi, why does it [research question] address newton’s laws in the plural form, isn’t it just the second law that is relevant?’ the question evidently addresses feedback at the task level. the supervisor is not answering immediately and siv requests an answer twice, with ‘?’ and ‘what is the answer?’. after 15 minutes, the supervisor replies ‘i assume that the 3rd law is also relevant for defining the constant of the spring’. siv replies with an ‘ok’. after another 10 minutes, the supervisor asks, ‘is that all for now?’. siv confirms this and leaves the chat. during the second supervision session, this conversation pattern is repeated, this time with a focus on formal aspects of the assignment, which addresses the assignments abstract. the mathematics supervision primarily addressed the formal aspect of the assignment. siv asked ‘how long is a conclusion?’, the supervisor answered, and siv posed a new question concerning the text representations versus models. this was also a request for feedback at the task level. the conversation was clearly driven by questions from the student and responses that answer the questions, but do not promote conversation. in this sense, the conversation drew on a very restricted form of dialogue, but nevertheless, the conversation showed signs of limited uptake and appropriation, since the answers were important for the student’s completion of the assignment. on the other hand, this may be interpreted as a result of following a teacher’s monologue. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt74 siv’s case is significant since it demonstrated that text-based supervision is effective for replying to specific questions and confirming students on the task level. on the other hand, the data indicate a weakness of this online format, since it does not encourage conversation. also, the format seems to focus on task-level feedback. in this sense, siv’s narrative reproduces some of the themes of the survey. she keeps returning to how the supervision disappointed her, and her expectations of supervision. her narrative is echoing the voices of the school as an organization that has introduced the frames for supervision. furthermore, her narrative is referring to the voices of students from other classes, and their stories of supervision, which from siv’s perspective, seem more useful. the interview addressed three aspects of supervision: 1. the desire to develop the dialogue, 2. to address the student’s work at the text level, 3. to request supervision on the process – self-regulation – and perhaps even at the self-level: the thing is, you may need supervision even though you are not aware of it. i only got supervision if i requested it, and i really wish that my supervisors reached out to me more, asked how things were working out for me, what i wrote about, whether things were okay (…) if we have had a video conference, it probably would have been much more committed... they could not just leave the room or remain silent. i really wish there was more conversation... if we had looked at what i had written, it may also have led to some sort of progress. (siv, interview) with words and expressions such as, ‘reach out to,’ ‘wish’ and ‘miss’, siv’s statement emphasises her disappointment with the supervision. she emphasises the experience of supervision as superficial and disconnected from her need to engage in a developing dialogue that addressed aspects other than task level. sofia – an experience of text-oriented feedback sofia’s writing assignment addresses the topic of dirty bombs (physics and social studies). the choice of online format was left to her supervisors. sofia’s teachers offered two formats of online supervision: written online communication and audio-based online communication with screen sharing. research category/ format of supervision time space form content function written online communication asynchronous emphasises that asynchronous interaction leaves time for reflection and formulating descriptions of needs no access to the space in which the conversation partners are communicating. communication initiated by student. question/response feedback at task level, process level and selfregulation level format is seen as offering the option to communicate challenges prior to online meeting. plus, option for fast reply. audio-based online communication with screensharing synchronous immediate answers. opportunities to evolve a developing dialogue in an undisturbed time frame time participation from private space– safe zone access to voice dialogue initiated by, and developed by all parties involved. screen-sharing as basis feedback at task level, process level and selfregulation level format seen as option for developing the project. format seen as option for explanations of difficult elements. table 9: findings concerning sofia’s experience of various online formats the findings in the first part of our analysis confirmed that sofia experienced a scaffolded supervision process, where the online format supported her writing process. sofia particularly emphasised that she found the possibility of online screen sharing supportive. the format is enabling the simultaneous presence of both students and supervisors synchronously in time. also, the format is enabling the sharing of the text establishing a sort of common ground or shared space. contrasting the survey data, sofia’s narrative is remarkable in stressing time as a resource. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt75 i had great difficulty with this project... how to present the possible use of a dirty bomb. for this, my physics supervisor was a great help. he set up a meeting in google meet with screen sharing, and we went over our case, discussed the calculations and how to present it. (sofia, interview) the analysis focused on two different supervision events and two different formats, since the supervisors switched between them, depending on the content addressed. the paragraph above is from observed online supervision between sofia and her physics teacher. the session took place on day 3 and was scheduled for half an hour. the teacher started by addressing her writing ‘how are you... what have you focused on in the beginning?’ sofia replied that she had made a good start and that she was currently engaged in presenting the case, about which she was a bit confused. the supervisor asked whether he could see her work, and sofia launched screen sharing. sofia focused the screen on her presentation of the case and her preliminary calculations, and the teacher asked how she collected her data. sofia replied, and the supervisor explained that she needed to add this explanation to that which was already presented, as a sort of metatext. this case also illustrates how screen sharing may be used as a focal point to explore a students’ written text and thereby access the student’s voice and dialogue initiated by the student. the supervisor added to the writing of the student and gave instructions that improved statements the student already made. in the final assignment, we see signs of appropriation, since the case was scaffolded by a metatext that commented on access to data and data development. the session closed with the supervisor’s response combining the processand self-regulation levels, and a concern whether the problem was clear to sofia, and whether she knew how to move forward with her assignment. sofia was concerned about the part of the assignment that involved the social sciences. sofia asked how much she needed to account for the theories before including them in a discussion. sofia started by addressing this concern in a session on google meet, on day seven of her writing. at this point in the process, sofia had been down with the flu for two days, and she felt a time pressure, which troubled her. the supervisor began by asking about her health, and sofia responded. in the interview, sofia explained that she found such parts of the supervision ‘a sort of personal investment,’ apparently the sort of informal dialogue that the quantitative data set indicated that students want. next, the supervisor asked whether she had made a schedule for her writing days, and whether they should start by looking at it. together, they discussed the process, and the challenges sofia had in front of her. the supervisor approved her plan and suggested that she should spend the rest of the day finishing the section that introduced the theories and then email it to him, for comments. the supervision showed a sensitivity to the student’s voice and an awareness of the importance of dialogical uptake, based on both text and spoken expression. when we look at the data from the interview, it is evident that the student has found that the supervision meeting met her expectations: my social sciences teacher really helped me out. he helped me by expressing some of the parts i struggled with... i emailed it to him, and he read it, and helped me out find ways to shorten it, what i could leave out, and so on. (sofia, interview) in sofia’s case, it is remarkable that the supervision combined various formats, depending on the content and the feedback requested. feedback addressed task, process, and self-regulating levels, but throughout the supervision, we found no sign of feedback at the self-level. the use of an online format that combined audio and screen sharing clearly supported the opportunity to engage in dialogue related to the text. furthermore, the format left the possibility of an engaging dialogue meeting the student's request for an immediate response. however, the impact of the format on the dialogue is of interest, since in this case, the dialogue was far more concerned with the written text shared on the platform than in mira’s case. one dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt76 might assume that the absence of the video-mediated picture of the student-directed the feedback more towards the process and the task, and less towards feedback at the self-level. discussion in this article, we examined how the supervision of major written assignments at danish upper secondary schools took place during the mandatory school closures to prevent the spread of covid-19. this article was built on a communicative approach to teaching and didactics, based on the premise that education and teaching are constantly renegotiated and re-established in response to context. we focused on how dialogical interaction in various online supervision formats supports the development of knowledge and writing among upper secondary students. research in this field is ambiguous in terms of our understanding of how online supervision may contribute to knowledge-development and the writing process, but part of the existing research emphasised the importance of attending to the affordances of the various online formats. this awareness was incorporated into our research design, which focused on how the students experienced the various online supervision formats. the two data sets showed a great variety in the use of different formats and very significant differences in the student’s experiences of online supervision. the quantitative data suggest that at least three online supervision formats were used: written asynchronous supervision (a teaching platform and email), synchronous audio supervision (telephone), and synchronous video supervision (teams, skype and zoom), and they also determined three themes that we investigated further in the qualitative data. the first is presence and dynamics in dialogues, the second is the depth of the dialogue and the third is learning circles. the qualitative data informed us of the student’s perspectives on online supervision and highlighted that students emphasise the relationship established through dialogue when using online formats. from the student’s perspective, a lot more than feedback on their actual writing is at stake, and they emphasise attention to the psychodynamic dimensions. through the students’ accounts, we learned of the importance of the relation-building dialogue, understood as symmetrical dialogue that expresses an interest in the student and the student’s perspective. the data also informed us that students value time as a condition for engaging dialogue, access, and timeliness. finally, the students’ accounts addressed text-oriented dialogue and feedback that leads to in-depth dialogue. these results suggest that complimentary feedback at the self-level may be particularly important in the context of online writing assignments, where building self-confidence and self-efficacy is crucial for self-regulation and knowledge retention. the dialogical perspective on online supervision proved to be important for gaining an understanding of why students find online supervision so radically different from face-to-face supervision. an important insight that emerged from our study is that the various online supervision formats offer very different features for developing student writing. sometimes, supervision may be directed at a specific task, and the students request clear instructions or on-demand supervision. at other times, the students request text-oriented feedback, which demands active involvement with student-produced texts. and at other times, the students ask that the supervision address psychosocial dynamics, and it turns out that the supervision format must enable the sense of a personal relationship with the teacher. in scandinavia, most studies of students’ work on large written assignments in upper secondary school have focused on literacy. recent studies have favoured face-to-face supervision of written assignments. in this article, we have tried to shed light on online supervision. our research suggests that an awareness of the different dialogical potentials of the various online formats may qualify the use of these tools. data showed, that in some aspects online supervision enhances the students’ sense of managing their work on the assignment. but data also showed, that improving the dialogic dimensions of online supervision of upper secondary school students is challenging for the supervisors. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt77 references al fadda, h. 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(2010). the routledge doctoral supervisor’s companion: supporting effective research in education and the social sciences, london: routledge. dialogic possibilities of online supervision anne bang-larsen, ane qvortrup dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.443 | vol. 10 (2022) dt81 wang, y., peng, h., huang, r., hou, y. & wang, j. (2008). characteristics of distance learners: research on relationships of learning motivation, learning strategy, self-efficacy, attribution and learning result. open learning, 23(1), 17-28 wichmann-hansen, g., eika, b.& mørcke, a. m. (2007). hvad findes der af litteratur om vejledning? – litteratursøgning med fokus på publicerede, evidensbaserede studier. dansk universitetspædagogisk tidsskrift, 2(3), 11-19: https://tidsskrift.dk/dut/article/view/5636 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word benner, response to students right to freedom of education, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.362 | vol. 8 (2020) sf39 response to “a student’s right to freedom of education” mikayla benner ambrose university, canada abstract dr. eugene matusov’s article “a student’s right to freedom of education,” promotes a system of education which is vastly different from how education has been generally approached for the past century. matusov writes that freedom in education is an integral part to what education means (matusov, sf3). this is my response to his article. mikayla benner is a student at ambrose university, canada ïïò dr. eugene matusov’s article “a student’s right to freedom of education,” promotes a system of education which is vastly different from how education has been generally approached for the past century. matusov writes that freedom in education is an integral part to what education means (matusov, sf3). from my understanding, this means that freedom must be a part of education or it ceases to be education entirely. i disagree with this definition. i do not believe education must be defined by the student, but neither do i believe that it must be defined by the state or by the teacher. i think that education is a system which is used for learning. there can be many forms of education. not all students learn the same way and we should try to help students learn in a way that suits them best. education is about learning and learning well. matusov seems to care more about the process than the product. he does not argue his case for educational freedom because it will “pragmatically improve educational outcomes,” but rather because he believes that freedom is intrinsic to education (sf3). this view focuses on education as a right. because it is our right, we should be allowed to do what we want within it. but with every right comes a responsibility. we cannot ignore our responsibilities simply because we have the right to do something. we have the right to free speech, but we also have the responsibility to use our words carefully and not speak hatefully towards people. in the same way, i do believe that education is a right that all people deserve, but i also believe that education is a responsibility. for the citizens of canada (my own country), they have the responsibility to be educated to a particular level in order that they can be good capable citizens able to give back to the country they belong to. this does not mean i believe that everyone needs to go to university or even graduate from high school. but it does mean, that for those who are able, they need to learn to read and do basic math, if only for the purpose that they can function in our society. there are some things that we must learn even if we do not want to. on the positive side, i see the value of freedom and being able to pursue the topics and subjects that each student chooses. being invested in a topic and taking responsibility of their learning improves the student’s experience. they will learn better, retain more, and enjoy the process. an example of this is matusov’s “curricular map,” which i think is a brilliant idea. it allows the students agency in their learning but still relies on the intellect and mastery of the teacher. by providing a wide variety of topics that fit within the scope of a larger topic, students are able to focus on what they would enjoy learning while still issn: 2325-3290 (online) response to “a student’s right to freedom of education” mikayla benner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.362 | vol. 8 (2020) sf40 completing the requirements of a course. unfortunately, this would not work for some courses, especially those which are cumulative learning, where each new topic is built off of the knowledge of the previous one. it also becomes more difficult the larger the class size, since it is less likely that students will come to a consensus about what they want to learn. but the courses that can accommodate this structure should. however, even in these freer circumstances, i believe that there should be teacher involvement. not just to guide the learning along productive paths, but also to motivate and correct the student when they make mistakes. freedom of education is a wonderful thing, but i do not believe it can be done in excess. some freedom is good, but freedom in education without guidance, without correction, and without an external challenging influence will not lead to a positive outcome. it is essential to have a teacher. whether that teacher is a person, a book, or in some cases experience, it does not matter; there is always a teacher. experiential learning is limited to tangible education. if a student ever desires to learn other subjects they will need to rely on people or books, which not coincidentally are written by people. matusov’s attempt to remove the teacher from the equation, unless the student chooses, is a faulty one. it cannot be done in any meaningful way. rather, he should argue that students should be able to choose their teacher because learning is rarely done in complete isolation. to deny the need for a teacher entirely is a mistake. for example, it has taken centuries for the world to make the discoveries that are a part of our everyday life. each of those inventors built on the knowledge of their predecessors. they did not start from scratch. they learned from someone. in the same we have all learned from teachers, parents, books, and peers. matusov writes an inflammatory sentence claiming that conventional classrooms often punish students for mistakes (sf12). it is not clear exactly what he means by punished. if he means degraded and made fun of, i will admit, that does happen on occasion, but that is not a fault of the system, but of the teacher. if, on the other hand, he means corrected and shown how to fix their mistake, then by all means keep on “punishing” the students. correction is an essential tool for learning. it is true that in some subjects there is no “right” answer. there are often many opinions pertaining to a single subject and the teacher should not present their own view as the only view. similarly, the teacher should not find fault in a different opinion simply because it is different. however, there are subjects whose answers are non-negotiable. two plus two will always equal four, and any other answer is incorrect. without correction in a student’s life, they could falsely believe in success when in actuality they are failing to learn. while matusov does briefly address this possibility of poor learning, he does not acknowledge that there is an issue (sf12). how can failure to learn constitute education, let alone good education? learning through mistakes is extremely valuable, but how will we know that they are mistakes unless someone tells us? i do not want to live in a world where no one is ever wrong or where we are not allowed to tell someone they are wrong. being wrong allows us to grow in a way that being right never will. matusov’s freedom in education requires and exorbitant amount of internal motivation. while some might possess such a trait, very few do. children, especially, if there is not someone telling them to study or practice, will not do it. instead, they will play. play is extremely valuable and can be educational. but that is not the point here, the point is that children will veer towards what is easy and what is fun. while learning can be fun, it is not often easy. it requires hard work and practice. this does not apply just to children; it applies to adults as well. how much better do we work when there is someone beside us and encouraging us? but, in the system that matusov proposes, the teacher is supposed to stand back and wait for the student to come to them, and if they never come, that is alright. under this system, how is the teacher able to provide the fundamental support of encouragement and pushing the student to do more than they think comment on text eugene matusov: mikayla, interestingly enough i had experienced a prototype of the curriculum map in my soviet high school math classes: calculus, geometry, the theory of numbers, and computer programming. it was an innovative authorial pedagogy developed by nikolai n. konstantinov. i wrote a book about this math pedagogy where i described and analyzed it: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings: special issue. journal of russian & east european psychology, 54(1), 1-117, doi: 10.1080/10610405.2017.1352391. comment on text eugene matusov: please read some of the commentaries by korean students in this special issue for vivid examples. it seems to either blessed not being punished in your education (lucky you!) or do not realize these punishments by accepting and normalizing them as just and necessary. comment on text eugene matusov: not necessarily. i think you might miss my points in the paper about the rooted extrinsic motivation. response to “a student’s right to freedom of education” mikayla benner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.362 | vol. 8 (2020) sf41 they are capable of? matusov writes against this objection concluding that children may choose to play when they are young but will later choose learning and that adults see the value in learning. while this may be true, the desire to learn is only the first step to actually learning. even once desire is present, people still need encouragement and external motivation to accomplish their goal. my argument surrounding the lack of motivation to learn is not without proof. in fact, the best proof comes from the continuing covid-19 crisis. in canada, students find themselves learning from home online. the grades they had before the crisis are not allowed to decrease, just in case a student has particular difficulty learning at home for any reason, be it situational or technological. the teachers, however, provide their classes with optional work which can be accessed and completed online. the hours the students would need to work in order to complete all their tasks would take significantly less time than they would attend school. for example, in alberta, an elementary school teacher is only allowed to give their students five hours of schoolwork a week. although the work is lessened, the teachers are completely available to provide support or more work should a student desire it. covid-19 has provided us an opportunity to view a part of freedom in education. the students are able to choose whether or not they want to do school. it is completely up to them. teachers have found that many students do not do their work at all. the students have chosen to do anything but school. because there are no consequences with a failure to complete work, such as a lowering of grades, students do not bother to do work at all. this is not limited to young children. many universities gave students the option to take their grade or receive credit for a course, meaning all they needed to do was pass the course. in no way would it affect their gpa. presented with these options, many students failed to finish work, or simply did substandard work because they knew there would be no repercussions. foisted education, as matusov calls it, is forcing a student to learn a particular subject or even forcing a student to learn in a particular way. opposing matusov’s view, i believe that there is a strong place for foisted education. i have had plenty of foisted education in my life, and although i did not enjoy it at the time, i can see the value of what i learned now. as a young person i strongly disliked formal writing. it did not help that i was not very good at it. but i was forced to write essays throughout high school and university. over the years i have improved significantly, and i no longer dread writing papers. but, without being forced to write and without the feedback from my teachers, which i did not always like to read, i would not be as capable as i am now. many students might avoid particular subjects that are actually very important. simply because one does not enjoy something does not mean that it ceases to be valuable or important for, they themselves to learn. similarly, my university professor dr. dyck asked our class to be technology free. we were not to use our laptops for taking notes, and if we had questions, he asked us to meet him in person rather than emailing him. i wanted to write on a different topic than the ones he had suggested for the novel we were reading. in any other class i would have emailed my professor because i found that easier than talking in person. however, i was forced to speak with dr. dyck face to face. despite my apprehension, i found that my meeting was far more fruitful than any email could have been. i was able to have a meaningful discussion about the book we were reading in class, which i would not have gotten through an email. we talked through the strengths and weaknesses of my argument and he was able to give me a new perspective on the book. i was forced to step outside of my comfort zone because of the classroom rules, and i found it extremely beneficial. i do not believe that freedom is integral to education, but it can be positive. freedom can encourage creativity and investment. but there is more to education than the process. the product is extremely important otherwise we would not have driving tests, instead we would allow everyone to drive at a certain comment on text eugene matusov: very good discussion, mikayla. thanks. i addressed your important objection in my article replying to all commentaries. comment on text eugene matusov: i’m glad that you find it beneficial and, thus, consented to this imposition. in this case, you exercised your right to freedom of your education. my concern about students who might be different from you. response to “a student’s right to freedom of education” mikayla benner dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.362 | vol. 8 (2020) sf42 age regardless of competency. i believe firmly in the value of teachers and in the encouragement and correction they give us. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 9. marjanovic-shane^j (layout)^j four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse^j^j 2023-01-11.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a198 four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract the monologues presented in this article represent a particular bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual general assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in norway, the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego), only two months after the school was opened, on november 2nd, 1967. in the meeting, they confronted each other with deep disagreements in their vision of the school and ways to govern it. the bakhtinian assumption is that a dialogic analysis of any dialogue takes entering into dialogic relationships with the original participants in the analyzed dialogue (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovicshane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019). by taking the floor in the soul-searching assembly, the students confronted each other fully from the bottom of their hearts and minds. their ideas were embodied intentions, motives, reasons, and desires – what bakhtin called the person-ideas (bakhtin, 1999). i constructed four person-ideas based on the transcript of the soul-searching assembly. in that process of dialogic abstraction, i attempted to distill specific points of view without depersonalizing them into abstract ideas thorn out of the living moment of their lives. the analysis through the construction of the four person-ideas complements a vignette i wrote based on the same transcript (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). it is both a distinctive kind of dialogic analysis, and it also helps me prepare the data regarding the students’ ideas for a further conceptual analysis, where i explore the students' ideological positions, beliefs, and worldviews. that conceptual analysis is published in a separate article of this special issue (marjanovicshane, 2023a). ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. acknowledgments i want to thank my colleague, eugene matusov, for the critical readings of the previous drafts of this manuscript. he helped me deepen my “entering into” or “descending to” the four imaginary characters – four person-ideas – i constructed for this experiment in dialogic analysis. the views and comments i issn: 2325-3290 (online) four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a199 received from my colleagues at the educationalist club at the university of students were indispensable in guiding my writing. i am deeply thankful to my colleague ljubica beljanski-ristić for her drama-in-education wisdom and for enabling the four person-ideas to take their first breath at her festival of drama in education in belgrade, serbia. i want to give special thanks to my colleague jelena stojiljković and her high school students for directing and acting these monologues in their first publicly performed dramatization. ïïò introduction this article is a part of a quartet of articles exploring democratic education and dialogic pedagogy in the first democratic school founded in oslo, norway – the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego). in the first article, my colleagues, tina kullenberg from sweden and mikhail gradovski from norway, and i explore the interplay between democratic governance and the educational ecology designed by the students (in collaboration with their teachers and educational researchers) of the first two democratic schools in scandinavia, the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego), norway and the experimental gymnasium of gothenburg (egg), sweden. we looked for the aspects of the students’ educational approaches in governing their own schools that could support and promote or hinder and suppress the learners’ authorial agency in education. while conducting our research, we found out that there exists a full transcript of the ego students’ assembly held on november 2nd, 1967, only two months after the school was opened. in this explosive meeting, the students confronted each other with deep disagreements regarding the visions of the school and visions and approaches to education. as luck would have it, the meeting was audio-recorded. the almost verbatim transcript of this fateful meeting that the students referred to as the “soul-searching assembly” or the “helluva assembly”1 was published (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 22). the existence of the recording and its verbatim transcript created a unique opportunity to look closer and deeper into the students’ actual, unique, and ontologically significant personal positions, opinions, beliefs, and desires regarding the very concepts of education, its purposes, democracy, freedom, responsibility, etc., as this dramatic meeting revealed them.2 i created three different analyses of the explosive conflicts and passionate dialogues of the soulsearching assembly. first, i approached the soul-searching assembly through a dialogic analysis (cf. matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, et al., 2019). as a result, i created a vignette, using the transcript as raw data. i constructed a story where these raw data take shape through my dialogic lens (marjanovicshane, 2023b). namely, i looked at the soul-searching assembly as a relational drama of disagreements among “the friendly enemies” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015) in the course of the four and half hour meeting. what did they want for themselves, for each other, from each other? what were their urgencies as they clashed with each other, striving to make their points meaningful and persuasive to the others and to clarify, formulate, test, and potentially transcend their own deeply held cherished ideas? the dialogic analysis in the vignette helped me understand the dynamics of the relationships among the students by letting me better hear their authorial voices emerge and take shape. this process and the resulting vignette were both an analysis in itself and a particular preparation of the evidence for my dialogic engagement with the students’ distinctly voiced worldviews out of the raw ethnographic data of the transcript. my goal has been to develop a conceptual analysis of the students’ ideological positions, the premises of their theories of education, and their worldviews. i started deconstructing the students’ 1 in norwegian “sjeleallmannamøtet” and “kjempeallmannamøtet.” i use here an english slang word “helluva” that stands for an ellipsis of a phrase “hell of a.” see more in marjanovic-shane (2023b). 2 dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal was given gracious permission to publish extensive parts of this transcript, which is a part of the book by hem & remlov, “forsøksgymnas i praksis” [experimental gymnasium in praxis], by the current owner of the estate of pax publishing house. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a200 conceptualizations of democracy in their school governance, especially their views on what and how they should change the meaning of their education. i wanted to better understand how the students espoused the purposes of education and their guiding values as they struggled to persuade each other. the resulting final conceptual analysis is published in the last article in this series of studies, “a paradigmatic dialoguedisagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting” (marjanovic-shane, 2023a). however, before creating an extensive conceptual analysis, i decided to create another analytic pass, aiming to make the emerging ideological positions even clearer and more nuanced. this second pass of the dialogic analysis resides in this article. i constructed four “person-ideas,” partially based on the transcript but also on the cultural-historical events taking place at the time that might have been important for the young students in 1967. the historical context helped me imagine the era in which they lived and the reality of their lives (see more details about this process below). what is a person-idea? according to bakhtin, events like the soul-searching assembly are the true birthplace of ideas. but ideas are not abstract constellations of individual thoughts. for bakhtin, the idea lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. […] the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 87-88). the soul-searching assembly meeting was such an event in which the ideas emerged and started to live. the students confronted each other from the bottom of their hearts and minds, testing each other not only as people but also as each other’s ideas. the ideas they tested were their embodied intentions, motives, reasons, and desires – exactly what bakhtin called the person-ideas (bakhtin, 1999). bakhtin constructed the notion of a person-idea in his analysis of dostoevsky’s novels. he described the ideas expressed by the characters of the novels as inseparable from the characters themselves, [the characters’] discourse about the world merges with confessional discourse about oneself. the truth about the world, according to dostoevsky, is inseparable from the truth of the personality. the categories of selfconsciousness […] now become the basic categories for thinking about the world. thus the loftiest principles of a worldview are the same principles that govern the most concrete personal experiences. and the result is an artistic fusion, […] of personal life with worldview, of the most intimate experiences with the idea. personal life becomes uniquely unselfish and principled, and lofty ideological thinking becomes passionate and intimately linked with personality. (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 78-79). inspired by this idea and knowing only the transcription of a discourse i did not hear or witness, i tried to envision the people and place the ideas emerging in the transcript into possible imagined lives of characters i constructed. i tried to summon the living urgency, the very pulse of these ideas, to make them vividly true by (re-) creating them as four bakhtinian person-ideas. i added the imagined internal monologues to the actual (transcribed) passionate speeches and comments, hints, and innuendos that were loudly expressed in the passionate, internally persuasive discourse of the soul-searching assembly. that partially fictional analysis-synthesis helped me, and hopefully, it could help you, dear reader, step into each person-idea and look at the world and at the others from the inside, as if through their souls. i believe four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a201 that these “living” person-ideas can deepen our understanding of the internal logic of abstracted ideological positions that i analyzed in the article on their paradigmatic differences (marjanovic-shane, 2023a). a brief historical note on the soul-searching assembly at the ego the problems and tensions among the ego students started from the very beginning of the school year. they steadily grew during the first two months of the experimental gymnasium of oslo’s (ego) existence. in the day-to-day clashes about almost everything, from the practical chores to the school’s rules and norms, the students started using derogatory labels for two of the several fast-forming groups. the first group of about 15-20 founding students had worked hard the whole year before the opening of the school. they were the ones who conceptualized and planned the school, its rules and norms, and the ways it would operate. they were the ones who obtained permission from the authorities to open the ego. they passionately wanted to make the school run in the way they had envisioned it. in an interview with me in the early winter of 2019, one of these founding students, øystein gullvåg holter, described this group of students, to which he belonged, as follows, [we were from] more progressive and leftish kind of parents, intellectuals, for example. and people with often intellectual backgrounds, arts maybe? yeah! different kinds of people, but mainly, … roughly [saying], a kind of cultural capital, [the cultural] upper class…3 the students from this group were insistently urging, even nagging everyone else to abide by their vision and already planned school organization.4 they were soon labeled by the dissatisfied others, “tantene” “the [nagging] nannies,” which they resented. on the other hand, they called another group of students who strongly resisted their impositions – “avvikere” “the deviants.”5 the deviants defied the nannies’ original educational vision in many ways – through non-attendance, class disturbance, and avoidance of myriad chores, tasks, and duties, including the democratic governance necessary for running the school (jørgensen, 1977, p. 47; see more in marjanovic-shane, 2023b). a third, probably the largest group, were “the silent ones” – students who were too disoriented, too “numb,” or too shy, or too frightened to have much to say, and who generally followed the school plans in the old, unenthusiastic, disinterested and tired ways they had become accustomed to, over the years of their alienated traditional education (jørgensen, 1971) the internal conflicts among these groups were amplified by additional external pressures of the educationally conservative department of church and education of norway6. although the school was granted many liberties when it got its permit, the state still attached some strings, making it not entirely sovereign. for instance, the school could not ignore the norwegian department of education’s curricular guidelines, although they could modify them to a certain extent. without this compliance, the ego students 3 i interviewed øystein gullvåg holter in december 2019. he was one of the founding students and also a son of one of the university of oslo's principal researchers of the school, prof. harriet holter. 4 this included a preplanned curriculum, partially based on the norwegian department of education requirements for the national high school graduation exam (artium in norwegian) and delivered through teacher organized classes (jørgensen, 1977). see more about this vision in (marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023). 5 “avvikere,” is a harsh word, meaning literally the “rule/law breakers” or “deviant people.” øystein gullvåg holter was actually slightly taken a-back when i reminded him of this name-calling. when i quoted it from the published transcript of the general assembly meeting on november 2, 1967, he said, “was it that hard word [we] used?” 6 the norwegian department of education was administratively combined with the department of church and literally called “kirke og undervisningsdepartementet (kud)” in the 1960. today “the name of the department of education in norwegian is "kunnskapsdepartementet". in english, it is norwegian ministry of education and research. the ministry reports to the parliament (stortinget). the ministry was responsible for church affairs till 2002. since 2002 the ministry of education and research is responsible for education and research.” – from the personal correspondence with dr. sultana ali norozi of the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a202 could not officially graduate, i.e., they could not apply to take the national graduation exam (artium in norwegian). in addition, the department of education closely monitored the ego’s work in these early days, scrutinizing every aspect of the school practice. it used traditional criteria of educational assessment and threatened with a looming possibility of immediate school closure. jørgensen reports that after an unannounced visit, two representatives of the department of education’s advisory board for high school education wrote: … ‘no daily record is kept regarding students’ truancy; the words on one blackboard were misspelled; there was a student who functioned as an assistant teacher, but the [visiting] representatives had to help him; the school leader was not present; a roll call of the students yielded disastrous results’ (cited in jørgensen, 1977, p. 49). the conflicts among the students mushroomed in a dramatic and explosive debate at the general assembly meeting of november 2nd, 1967, dubbed by the students the “soul-searching assembly” or a “helluva assembly.”7 a few nannies, the founding students, decided to spark this debate in their weekly general meeting to discuss the growing conflicts, struggles, agonies, and emergent bitter antagonisms. the soul-searching assembly steadily became more and more dramatic. the clashes and meltdowns seemed to ebb and flow. but at one point, it appeared that a transformation occurred. the students somehow transcended their most bitter conflicts. their fights, accusations, resentments, and insults seemed to give way. the fierce antagonisms seemed to transform into an agonistic dialogue of disagreement (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015; mouffe, 2000). in the “agonistic dialogue” of disagreement, “the politically (and/or paradigmatically) disagreeable other is appreciated as a potential source for one’s own unknown selflimitation of truths and values” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 211). they started to test their and their opponents’ positions and beliefs openly. they could problematize and re-examine their dear ideas, searching their consciences through stormy confrontations, verbal fights, and breakdowns. and although they did not end up resolving their conflicting views right there and then (and possibly never)8, their ideas could emerge and get their shapes in the juxtapositions with the opposing alternatives. we know from other sources that the students succeeded in keeping these dialogues open long after this fateful assembly meeting, returning to the debated issues with more trust, potentially with the newly gained interest in each other’s points of view (jørgensen, 1971). constructing person-ideas to deeply understand the students' positions emerging in the soul-searching assembly, i created four person-ideas, as four distinct ideological orientations to education and life, embodied in the voices of “living” people in their hot dialogue of disagreement. three specific ideological orientations were held by more than one student in the meeting, while one person mainly authored the fourth orientation. however, for this analysis, i embodied each ideological orientation into a single person-idea composed of all likeminded voices. i used the words from the actual transcript, but not only. i also sometimes used metaphors from contemporary popular music, the lyrics of the songs that i imagine the young people in this meeting had sung and played on their guitars in the hallways (hem & remlov, 1969; jørgensen, 1971; melheim, 2019). 7 in norwegian “sjeleallmannamøtet” and “kjempeallmannamøtet.” i use here an english slang word “helluva” that stands for an ellipsis of a phrase “hell of an.” 8 according to mouffe “the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism [i.e., involving hostile adversaries who try to annihilate each other] into agonism [i.e., involving friendly adversaries, whose right of the existence is recognized by each side, if not even appreciated] … modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order” (mouffe, 2000, p. 103). four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a203 in some cases, i relied on the stories and metaphors of the very new, influential ideological liberation movements, like feminism, pacifism, and anti-war protests of the time. i sometimes used ideas and wordings based on similar ideological positions held by educational scholars and philosophers.9 in addition, i also tried to give particular, personal sounds, rhythms, and speech idiosyncrasies to their imagined voices and, from time to time, to imagine what they had thought but not vocalized while they were speaking, i.e., their inner dialogues. the person-ideas i created are artistically composed characters designed to personalize and deeply understand the living spirits of the people of that time. in other words, i approach the historical moment of these people by “entering into” or “descending to” their minds – what giambattista vico, according to berlin (1990), called having a kind of fantasia, … an imaginative insight that he [vico] demands [that was] … indispensable to his conception of historical knowledge; it is unlike the knowledge that julius caesar is dead, or that rome was not built in a day, or that thirteen is a prime number, or that a week has seven days; nor yet is it like knowledge of how to ride a bicycle or engage in statistical research or win a battle. it is more like knowing what it is to be poor, to belong to a nation, to be a revolutionary, to be converted to a religion, to fall in love, to be seized by nameless terror, to be delighted by a work of art. […] it is this kind of […] self-awareness what men thought, imagined, felt, wanted, strove for in the face of physical nature at a particular stage of social development, expressed by institutions, monuments, symbols, ways of writing and speech, generated by their efforts to represent and explain their condition to themselves… (berlin, 1990, p. 62). i was also inspired by two more authors, a yugoslav writer, ana šomlo, and an american scholar, douglas hofstadter. ana šomlo wrote a book, “milena’s letters to kafka” (šomlo, 1988), in which she imagined what milena, franz kafka’s greatest love, could have written in her letters to kafka. šomlo based her imagined letters drawing from f. kafka’s published letters to milena. also, šomlo researched not only the historical records of milena’s life. she also studied the cultural “zeitgeist,” the spirit of the times of their lives, looking into the various cultural events (e.g., theater performances, public lectures, political events, etc.) happening in the times between the matching dates of kafka’s letters that may have been known to milena. in constructing these person-ideas, i tried a similar approach, looking into the artifacts of the youth culture at the time. the second inspiration to construct the person-ideas comes from douglas hofstadter’s book, gödel, escher, bach: an eternal golden braid (hofstadter, 1980). in the book, hofstadter interlaced his abstract analytic chapters with the imaginary dialogues between achilles, the tortoise, and some other characters of the famous ancient greek philosopher zeno’s paradox. describing the structure of his book hofstadter writes why he weaved the text in this way, the book is structured in an unusual way: as a counterpoint between dialogues and chapters. the purpose of this structure is to allow me to present new concepts twice: almost every new concept is first presented metaphorically in a dialogue, yielding a set of concrete, visual images; then these serve, during the reading of the following chapter, as an intuitive background for a more serious and abstract presentation of the same concept (hofstadter, 1980, pp. 27-28) i created person-ideas in this chapter for a similar reason – to allow me (and hopefully you, dear reader) to first present certain abstract concepts “metaphorically in a dialogue.” in contrast to hofstadter’s 9 for instance, k. lewin, j. dewey, p. gray, e. matusov, a.s. neill, i. berlin, etc. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a204 entirely imaginary characters, like achilles and the tortoise, my person-ideas are grounded in the actual people and their real recorded words. but i did not know the people. i was not in the meeting. i could not witness their voices. however, almost as much as hofstadter needed to create his characters, i needed to make a living “intuitive background,” a beating heart of each of these person-ideas. i named each person-idea i created by the name (or rather a pseudonym) of its most prominent champion in the meeting transcript.10 what follows are the four person-ideas clashing against each other in the soul-searching assembly. a) åge – “our school is a serious educational endeavor, not a playroom!” b) thorleif – “love is all you need.” c) inge – “our school should respect and support every student in searching for their personal goals and purposes, even the conflicting ones.” d) tom – “becoming a responsible human being and a community citizen.” four emerging person-ideas in the internally persuasive discourse of the soulsearching assembly åge – “our school is a serious educational endeavor, not a playroom!” if you ask me… no! let me tell you! i mean it: education is a serious business. this is it. we are not kids playing school! [many students chuckle.] no! for real! yes, everyone laughs, but not everyone here agrees with me… look, what is not understood here, what you don’t understand, is the essential point… – listen, this is a student democracy! not a student anarchy! there is a long applause, and åge feels emboldened. yes! we are here… creating a school – for serious, responsible people! people who are interested in their own personal academic development. hey, we are here to become learned, learned people in our culture! to learn important things in our society. to learn and to build upon the knowledge, the lore, the values of our elders! we are here to learn about the important achievements of our times. åge thinks to himself: “this is it! this is so important! tell them why! they must understand that!” last year, i worked hard! we were planning every detail of this school. and, let me tell you, i learned a lot! i learned what i know from the university professors! they are educators who study education… they are people who know. and i learned a lot from them! [åge points to a number of other students, ego founders.] so, indeed, i learned a lot about what makes a school – a good school. and let me tell you: a school, a good school, definitely, definitely, definitely is not a playroom! a school is… – a school. a place to learn. important things! here… [he makes a large circle with his hand and then stabs with his index finger in an imaginary center of this circle]. here is where we will learn the most important stuff in our life! this is what we are making here! a place where everyone can find the keys to their own mind and heart! not any keys! but exactly the keys, the most important tools to unlock everything that matters in our society, the keys to our culture! the keys that open the door to becoming an adult! this is what our school is about! 10 the published transcript contained pseudonyms given to the participants in the soul-searching assembly by the authors of the book “the experimental gymnasium in practice” (hem & remlov, 1969). i kept these pseudonyms in my analyses of this meeting. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a205 but a school – our school included – is not a place where everyone can do whatever they want! oh, no, no, no!! there are some things that must guide us all together. i mean it! especially because we are free! especially because we have been allowed, most graciously, to run a school the way we want. yes, i think we must be grateful to the department of education! everyone here should be grateful! … for the freedoms we got. and the trust! to himself: “this is what they don’t understand. i must make them see that! and appreciate the freedom we are given already! look! we have many extra-curricular activities! many more than ever before! you can be free with so many choices! no other school has so many choices! for god’s sake, we have music! we have jazz ballet! we have drama classes! we have swimming! bodybuilding! we have so many other activities!! and... we can even decide to organize more! people nod! one can hear voices of approval echoing åge. “yes! yes…,” “jazz, ballet!!” “bodybuilding!” etc. and…! [he pauses and raises his hands.] you are free to choose what classes you want to attend! hey, you can organize the class schedules! you can even tell the professors what topics you want to study!! they will listen to you! right? åge waits until some people start enthusiastically nodding again. some tentatively listen. some others remain visibly tense. he concentrates on the last group, addressing the skeptics and disbelievers. nothing like that exists in other schools. nothing! we have freedom! we do! no question... some people start to applaud. åge stands up and waves his hands to silence the applause and get their full attention. he keeps eye contact with disbelievers. but what is happening here? i see total chaos! people think that freedom means they can do… whatever... right now, the situation here is, indeed, becoming more and more chaotic… and tense by the hour. voices directed to åge from the audience: “not to mention that it is a pig stay!” “we’re proud pigs! oink! oink!” [laughter] people sit in the hallways when they should be in classes… – as if they should not have classes! to himself: “mmm, no… i should not make the deviants angry right now. i need to make them agree first. stop this open critique, åge. don’t antagonize the deviants. point out what is important. they must first understand what a good school is.” he changes his tone back to being upbeat and continues. what i want to say is: yes, we have freedom! but freedom is not just to sit on our asses! pardon my french. freedom is… not just hanging out in the hallways and doing nothing at all. seriously, guys! he raises his right index finger and slows down his speech. freedom does not mean having no responsibility! freedom does not mean having no obligations! on the contrary, freedom comes with responsibility! it is freedom under responsibility! some people nod and start to applaud, but many others still seem to feel uneasy or openly resistant. hands shoot up! in protest, åge suspects. in a flash, åge decides to appeal to their sense of pride. he must give them a reason to agree with him. as in a lucid dream, it suddenly occurs to him that you pull people four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a206 over to your side by showing them trust or even just a willingness to trust in them. you make them your comrades. you let them know that you trust them. and you show that you understand that living up to your best is not something trivial but a noble thing, indeed. this is what it means to be in control of yourself! – all of these thoughts appeared in åge’s mind with startling clarity as he continued to speak. hey! we have to behave like responsible people. like adults. after all, we were adult enough to create this school in the first place. we’ve been adult enough to form our own rules! we’ve been adult enough to hire teachers, to plan our own schedules, to plan our own curriculum. we should now also show ourselves that we are adults who can bring this school forward to success! someone yells: “down with nannies! stop moralists!” åge gets angry. he thinks to himself: “but look at these deviants! they are ruining everything! they don’t care about anything! should we even have them in school? i can’t really say that. maybe just a hint.” but the deviants don’t understand! this school leads up to the artium!11 – i will strongly oppose that we should just tolerate deviants. [cynically] of course, we should tolerate the… deviants! [laughter and applause] of course, we should do it. but, my god, you have to start wondering… one should tolerate that some people… – yes, call them “deviants” or call them whatever you want! – … that they only go here because… i don’t know! certainly not to pass the artium. many students seem to feel very upset now. they look at each other and yell at each other in angry tones with disapproval at åge. åge thinks to himself: “no, this was wrong. calm down. i shouldn’t have dissed them so strongly.” he takes a deep breath and squats back down, almost to the level of all the others sitting on the floor. he lowers his voice. look! the goal of freedom is to master yourself and become a responsible person. we must learn how to control our own impulses. the impulse you have… ok, no. the impulse i have! … to go to the hall and play the guitar! don’t you think i don’t want to? but, by jove! we have to renounce such an impulse! i mean it! we have to have a strong will… and we have to sacrifice… to get this idea, this school, worked out… big applause from his supporters. a deviant yells in sarcasm: “look at this joan of arc!” we can’t have people that just don’t care! if everyone does whatever they want, that will destroy the school. it will kill the spirit of this school! and yes! – it will spiritually kill those people here who are less self-conscious and noisy. people who really have good motivation to go here to learn. they are here to get an education. they want to pass the artium. and we are responsible for helping them. we must support them, not sabotage them! a person yells, “education is not about passing damned exams! i agree that we need to clarify what we think this school should be! then, we should all agree what to do. we have so much freedom. you can choose what to do and how to do it! but we can’t have everyone doing something entirely different. it can’t be 150 different opinions. this is ridiculous! it would not be a school! i repeat, if you think that you came here to heal your soul, i must tell you: this is not a psychiatric clinic! and if you think you can study only what you want to study, i repeat, this is not a youth club! and again, this is not a playroom! a supporter: “it’s not a coocoo house.” laughter. 11 norwegian national graduation exam. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a207 we already have… we already made good plans for the school. some of us happen to like them! and they were accepted by the department of education! but now, it turned out that there is quite extensive dissatisfaction with us! [someone yells: “the nannies!’”] you call us the “nannies” because we became a little too fond of our school! but i think that those who are dissatisfied with us, they can stand up and tell us why they are disappointed! so, tell us, what is it that does not work? seriously! stand up and say what bothers you! otherwise, we can never get clarification… at all. uncomfortable silence. åge doesn’t wait, however. he quickly continues, trying to keep the momentum. now, i mean it! seriously! don’t tell me those lame stories about love and understanding! this is just whinnying! first of all, no one is against love. but this is not a hippie school! that’s not what we’re arguing about. this is a serious school! we must take it seriously! we must be responsible for education in this school. it is us now! we owe it to our city and its taxpayers. they are paying us to run the school. after all, they work hard and expect us to work hard, too. also, don’t forget that we are here to improve norwegian education! this is a great experiment! others will learn from us. we are here to figure out how to run a school better! we must learn what works and what does not. we must carefully plan. we must closely monitor everything and understand what works. ok, we don’t have mandatory attendance! but then, we should be accountable for some kind of a “duty to learn.” something! indeed!12 there is some laughter in the audience. we are a serious enterprise! we must agree that learning important academic stuff is our priority. that is what school is about! what else are you here for, indeed? why would you go to school if not to acquire knowledge and culture, to become a dependable and respected adult? you can’t come here only for bodybuilding! c’mon! you can’t be coming here just for guitar lessons! this is not why we go here. we go here first and foremost to go to school, indeed. we must agree on what is important and what is not. what classes are important? what counts here? math, science, literature, sociology, current affairs? i think so. those are the things that count. you need those to pass the artium! we must work hard to learn these things! a responsible person understands that, for god’s sake! and you are still free! we are free! there are so many choices! someone with sarcasm: “yeah, yeah.” don’t get me wrong!! i am not against love and humanness! but it must not come at the expense of artium… obviously, i know that this school must, of course, be a humanistic school. a school that conveys love, to put it that way. but we can’t just live on love. it is regrettable but you can’t do this in this world… åge stands up again with new inspiration. we are responsible people! we were given this responsibility! and we must show it! to the whole world! to the department of education! to the taxpayers! to our parents! to our friends in regular schools! it now depends on us! it is we who are responsible for making all decisions! see? …. but that is not enough! we also must agree to obey these decisions! no one should be indifferent to them! we 12 for instance, they were recording attendance, calculating its percentages. and according to teacher arne, if class attendance is voluntary, then what needs to be accounted for and placed under “production control.” there should be some kind of “a duty to learn” (arne, p. 33). four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a208 can’t have people who are indifferent and only care about themselves. democracy means – organizing oneself under the rules! democracy is about the rules! of course, we should promote understanding and tolerance and be a school full of love! but first and foremost, we are responsible for making a school where everyone is fully and sincerely engaged in serious study. no one can be indifferent! this is what we are responsible for. this is who we are! and this is what we must agree about! thorleif – “love is all you need” i started here at school because i thought this was going to be a school where people love each other. where people are a bit neighborly with each other… and can feel glad to be together in school! i thought this was a school where you don’t trash people. even if they are different from you. i thought this would be a school where people are more important than “serious academic work.” where love is more important than anything. but you snap at those who don’t agree with you [looks at åge and the nannies]! you can’t expect people to be able to say something if you just bite them. it has so disappointed me… if this school is only about “academic work,”… you constantly bite anyone who is not in this rat race, who doesn’t do that … you just snap! everyone here bites. it’s so creepy. we snap, bite, and crush everyone. we constantly fight. but we must imagine that there is something else. there are people here who were trampled on… who were thrown away… then they come here… looking for something…, looking for love! but then they are trampled on here, too… but we shouldn’t! we need to accept them with love. you ask them to say what they want and what they don’t want and to feel free to come up with criticism! you say, “it’s antisocial not to be honest, not to say what you think.” but then! oh, then! when they do say something! what hypocrisy! i can’t avoid hearing you snapping back at them: “you are a fucking stupid idiot!” we, kind of, stand up here and talk now. maybe it applies to me, too! i might be… – we who are strong here at school – we hardly think of those not so strong, those who dare not rise up and say anything. those who dare to say what they really believe only in the hallways! but not here. how many are these? 100? 150? thorleif looks around from one face to another. most of the people stare back in some confusion. their faces are apprehensive… what is he aiming at? how many people here dare to get up and say something really serious? [he points his index finger to the floor] here, ah? he turns back to åge and some other nannies. see? they are afraid of being thrashed. [åge yells back at torleif, “no, they’re not!”] if they say something that they really need to say then they will be swept away… you tell them… i tell them, “what you say has nothing to do with anything!” or “nonsense! this it is absolutely immaterial” – it… it…, – nothing draws us together! there is no love left here. i really hoped for this, for love at this school. that we should be able to love each other. [a nanny smirks, “we aren’t a kindergarten.” others shush her.] but we are not able to love. it’s so awful… we… it’s just fighting all the time. but it should be easy! don’t you know? can’t you hear? [he slightly chants, more talking than singing a beatles’ song13] “there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done! nothing you can make that can’t be made… no one you can save that can’t be saved… nothing you can do… you can learn how to be you, in time… it’s easy…” 13 “all you need is love,” a song by the beatles, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b0_hzeqeoc&list=rdgmemjqxqamqrnmk1sejy_rkbga&index=1 more about the song and its significance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwfzqgyaavc four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a209 there is nothing we can’t do that we want to do. it’s only without love that we can’t. to åge, i say “hippie school?” – if hippies are the ones who love, if hippies are the ones who love each other, then we should have a hippie school. […] it is really one of the things fundamental for this school – [that] you only act with love… [åge smiles.] i don’t want to be… in fact, i can’t be a puppet on a string that someone else is pulling14. this is not about being allowed to sit in the hallway… i am not talking about that! it’s about simply being able to be yourself without constantly having to be in a rat race, on a treadmill. you talk about compromise… there is no compromise on love. either it is love, or it is not love. if you can… if you can simply live or be yourself without always playing someone else… without having to knock yourself down to be great... there is no compromise! if you have to say, hippie, say hippie… or whatever, or… [a nanny: “so pathetic!”] what the fuck are you if you do not have love? then you are damned. if this is just about “serious academic work…” i am out of here! thorleif can hear protests from some other students. inge tells him that she thought she understood him, but “then you outdid yourself by saying you could quit school itself. you fail to show a slight tolerance. do i understand you right that, deep down, you want to tear down the school today?” others just stare silently in disbelief and shock. maybe you guys are not saying anything … i don’t know… do you know how much i admire these people who started…? i don’t want to be scolded that i don’t like you… his voice cracks as the taste of tears chokes his throat. … that’s about the cruelest thing you can do… i… [long pause] … i don’t want to be perceived anymore just as “someone who is sitting in the hallway.” love – is not about being allowed to sit in the hallway… it’s about simply being able to be yourself… i don’t know… [turning to inge] i just want to tell them one thing now: end of school! because those who are sitting in the hallway are going to destroy our school. end of school! he jumps up and stands there, both hands on his head, in desperation. his chin shaking. then he stops still addressing inge. i’ll try to control my emotions… i’ll try to speak their [nannies’] language… thorleif takes a deep breath and says: if we agree that this school here should be a school that will make human beings … if so, this … does not fit with what the press and the department of education are expecting from us. what do we do then? if we all agree with the department of education, then we get to pull, jerk, and tug ourselves. tug tug and tug! and eventually, we’ll become a regular high school! the more we try to pull, the more we get entangled in their strings. because… you, see? if we want to dance their dance, then “we probably have to shake and bounce to the same rhythm as every other puppet in line…”15 [someone, probably a nanny, exclaims, “be a realist. they helped us.”] or!... we oppose the department of education! if we oppose the department, then the school can be closed! well, it will be closed. [sarcastically] “we did a good job!” and if we then repent, it will not be closed. but then it will not be the school of love! the school of humanity we had been praying for. 14 potentially a reference to the eurovision hit song by snady shaw, “puppet on a string” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xnzpnyywby&ab_channel=theeurosongcontest 15 thorleif recites the lyrics of a popular song “dukkeman” (puppet man) by kirsti sparboe, about a puppet that thought to be better than everyone, only to find out that he is just another puppet on a string as every other puppet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njl6xaicb4 four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a210 that is the dilemma! should we hold on to love as long as we can until the school is closed? or should we collude with the department and keep it open? i think that is the most important dilemma for us to resolve! as for me: i don’t want to compromise with myself i’d rather have the school shut down than have it be a regular high school! surrender to… the same machine that drains life from the whole world. inge – “our school should respect and support every student in searching for their own personal goals and purposes, even the conflicting ones” you know, i think there are many people here who do entirely different things… and conflicting things, too. and… an idea occurs to me now that this is really what the school is about: everyone should be free to follow their own path. free even when they don’t know… free because we don’t know. and most of us… most of us don’t know! honestly! and this is good – this is called “education” … we should be able to throw away all the pretenses. like, drop all the usual camouflage of feigning some high interests, some visions, when we don’t have them… we should no longer have to fight that war. we should be able to say openly that we, at least some… many of us, don’t have some big goal ahead of us. we’re not visionary … we’re kids, not pretend-to-be-adults. we should be able to stand naked without shame about it. inge sees that she sounds strange to åge and many others. and she freezes for a moment. “not again! again, he’ll try to freeze me out,” she thinks. but among many disapproving faces, resenting faces, she also sees a few flickers of recognition, approving eyes, maybe half smiles… almost joyous disbelief that something like that can be said aloud so casually. and that gives her a little ping and an extra beat of the heart. it occurs to me that people should be welcome to try to understand what they really want… and… they might not even know that yet! perhaps not immediately… perhaps not for a while. and that should be fine… you know… some people already know what they want, and some don’t, and some may be wrong in their current choice. there’re many false choices that we need to figure out. you can’t compare them to each other. here… in our school [she spreads her hands and fingers with a motion forward, rounding the motion at the ends as if outlining a big field], we should be able to hold…, to help each person not to feel embarrassed. each one of us should have a basic, human, comforting experience. we should support each other to feel relaxed just searching… just trying out different things. not hurrying. just being patient with someone who is trying to find… i don’t think we should be forcing ourselves and forcing others… to accept any first thing that happens to come our way…, right… at… this moment. nor should we grab and hold on to something just because we are told to do that, because we should be…, you know… [she makes the quotation marks in air with her fingers] “seriously studying.” indeed, isn’t every journey serious… when people embrace it for real? i think that we should allow ourselves to be unselfconscious… what we need… is to constantly try to see different…, many different realities… ways each one of us is unique… unrepeatable… just here… inge looks at åge, tom and thorleif. she sees their faces and their suspicious, cold eyes. what will they think if she is completely sincere? specially åge and tom. they are so serious, so dedicated, so proud of what they have already created. maybe this will completely shock them… and she continues, four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a211 i have an excruciating fear of standing in large congregations and talking so i don’t know if i can express myself clearly and say what i mean, but i hope you can try to hear what i mean. when i started here, i hoped to find a very creative environment… where i would not be ridiculed, where no one would laugh at the opinions i had. where i should be tolerated as another human being… i have been frozen out in several schools before because of my opinions. and i have a feeling that i’m being frozen out here, too. people say to me, “you can’t really believe that!” only because they think what i say is weird… they think it’s weird. and again, i have the feeling that i’m not being tolerated. and i wonder: are we not fond of each other as human beings anymore? we need to let ourselves give up, even renounce… this… made-up, pretend plastic–stereotypical– perfect image that we’ve each been taught to strive for. we need to step out of those identical girdles, chokers, body-shapers…, molds into which maybe no one can really fit. maybe we should openly renounce that everyone should agree to be “just what we are told that we ought to be.” you know! that cinderella’s glass-shoe-mold has already worn a deep groove in our brains.16 but we should stop trying to put it on. we should step out of it and let ourselves be shamelessly barefoot… or put on someone else’s shoes on… indeed. and, sometimes, that takes time. and it takes trust… i think there should exist a right to have time to think, as long as it takes… even if it looks like doing nothing! let each person experience that joy when they suddenly find out exactly what they want to do, all by themselves. and even if they don’t… this is it! … i think a school, this school, should give each of us opportunities to ask ourselves: what do i want to learn? is it time for me? see? “what do you want to study?” this could be asked not only one time… and nobody should have to stick to the first thing they try. we could ask, “what do you want to learn?” and “what do you think?” all the time! we should respect the “dunno” answer. we here… [she points to all in the room, with a quick encompassing gesture] – i think we don’t always know what… what may become important... i think no one really knows. i think that… maybe we should help each other find out what we want to do, even if it maybe takes more time… and some people may need to recover… to start to live again. someone just needs a healing place at this moment. that is what they need. why not be a psychiatric clinic for those who need that? why should we call them “deviants” and not tolerate them? why say, “this should not be a youth psychiatrist clinic”? but i have a feeling that here, humanness is being put out!! humanness is to try to understand each other… tolerate each other. hear each other… without laughing, without ridicule. this is humanness. no one should be frozen out if they sound strange. it should be up to them. as long as they are not anti-social… didn’t we all come here to make a school where people can be respected for who they are? we cannot lose our humanness! and what for? what is the use of passing the artium, when everyone becomes a machine, as you do in many other schools? …what can we do for this country if we are all computers? operating without emotions, not owning emotions… or if we have emotions, we can’t show them to each other. inge looks around. she now sees puzzled faces… she sees åge nervously fidgeting and squirming and continues hurriedly to make her point, i am not against people who want to pass the artium. not at all! i think there are 150 different sides to this case! and we need to at least tolerate them. i think we have to be clear that not only those sitting in the hallways feel depressed. also, those who advocate for rigor and such – they also feel equally depressed… no? 16 these words echo gloria steinem, a world renowned american feminist, who made a sensation with her undercover reporting from the new york playboy club in a two piece article in the show magazine, “a bunny’s tale,” in may and june 1963 https://undercover.hosting.nyu.edu/s/undercover-reporting/item-set/61, and later described in a book “outrageous acts and everyday rebellions” (steinem, 1983). four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a212 i think that everyone should have the right to do what is important to them! but what is most upsetting and wrong… is that some people try to coerce and control others! this is not right! in our school, there should be a right… everyone should be welcome to find their own vision. that’s just it! in our school here, we should be able to tolerate all people, from the most hopeless neurotics and introverts to the most hopeless fighters for freedom and love, maoists, and such. … in our school… that we run, we cannot exert control over each other in the old way, by force. coercing each other. we must find new ways… we need to agree to disagree, too! this debate is about… not about whether we should have a school of love instead of a school of work, but a place where we can expand the concept of the school… where we can have love included. and hard work included. and bodybuilding included… and playing-guitars included… and just staringat-the-ceiling, not knowing immediately what to do… included… and… for those who want it. but those who don’t – leave them alone. because, in my view, good schoolwork cannot exist, at least not for me, except when i get satisfying human fulfillment. in our school, people should have an opportunity to experience their own satisfying human fulfillment! whatever that means to them. tom – “becoming a responsible human being and a community citizen” this school is almost for real – the reality. i can feel it – palpably. i can feel it like a beacon of light. but! basically, we have a problem. a storm that may throw us off our course, maybe smash us on the rocks! let me put it this way. when you [looks at åge] call some people “deviants,” i am upset! i am upset if you imply that this school is… not for students to become responsible community citizens who are aiming for… not to study for the artium (graduation exam). no. no, no, no. but to do something in the community they live in. to try to change their society, to become socially conscious! to have freedom and free will! and to be radical! love without compassion is empty love [looks at thorleif]. compassion leads to action, to radical social activism, to the betterment of society. this is what taxpayers are paying school tax for, åge. not just for endless searching for yourself [looks at inge]. it certainly is not some comfy sleeping pillow to be radical! no indeed! it is one of the hardest things to do! of course, working with society and oneself, it’s as tough as nails. nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority. bull’s-eye! tom knew he poked the same sore that had irked the ego founders from the beginning and throughout the yearlong planning of the school. he saw åge stiffen with alert as he, too, suspected where tom was going. but it was not just a discord between the two of them – which it was, no doubt. but he also saw the dismay on the faces of those students whom åge called “deviants.” for tom, it was not just a clash between the “nannies” and the “deviants.” it was deeper. it was his own nagging doubt – it was that place he knew he would have to ultimately face, yet he still desperately avoided… a place where he had no solution… where the gordian knot of an unsolvable controversy was lurking, waiting for him. the abyss of the unknown… the sinking hole in his gut. the clash between two visions! not just two visions! the clash between all the visions: åge’s vision, inge’s vision, thorleif’s vision, his own, tom’s vision, if he even knew what it was at that moment! maybe some other, still unknown visions! and the clash was true! it so convincingly existed! that, he could not deny! a clash that he could not resolve. and again, that clash was dangerously gaining momentum right before his eyes. he had to patch it quickly. tom was a person who could not stand uncertainty, having no answer, no clue… he wanted to wish away this feeling that made his head run in circles ad nauseum. and yet, he had to be honest! yes, honest, but probably on borrowed time until he could find a resolution, find his own opinion... all of these thoughts appeared to him instantaneously, in a flash. without skipping a beat, he continued, four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a213 having one’s own opinion! … that!... is exactly what one should try to find! one’s own opinion, basically! in all matters! each one of us, as responsible students and responsible citizens, must be free to develop, to create our own education! our own entering into the world, if you will… tom slows down again. he pauses. he starts talking slower, as if thinking aloud, fishing for his own thoughts. i realize that this may be unpredictable. it may be opaque and unfathomable… you know… tom pauses. he looks around, staring deliberately into each person’s eyes, looking both stricken and curious, with slight disbelief. i suddenly realize! we cannot know how someone really thinks… tom raises both eyebrows and lifts his hands like holding something in front of him, staring into the space between his palms. he seems to be astonished about what he just said and even more astonished with a new thought he is about to utter, people cannot be judged by the same measures based on what makes sense only to me. people cannot be judged like that, … and then if they don’t fit these measures, simply be discarded! we’ve got to know one another… at least… try to find out about one another… it may never be fully possible… we should be committed to trying… tom suddenly snaps back from his dreamlike state. his voice is now fully flowing as he addresses åge and a small group of nannies in a practical and matter-of-fact tone. we should not talk about expelling the deviants. ’cause, of course, then the conservatives got it right: ‘some people are not mature enough for freedom.’ you see? as soon as we make the students fail here at school, as soon as we think people should not be allowed to learn something else than what is required for the artium… we will, basically… fail! the radicals should embrace that as a challenge. should we consider irrelevant anything that does not lead to the artium? just a waste of time? definitively not! on the contrary! it is learning to become a responsible person! that should be the most important. that motivation for learning! not for passing the artium! you see? if you can’t make a change to that motivation then the school has failed. if one is to be educated for responsibility then one must be given this responsibility! – this must not be violated. one has to have responsibility for oneself. one has to act – in their mind – in the manner of an auteur! tom sees many question-marks in people’s eyes! eyes that he sensed were now already fixed on him, but eyes that were not all approving. some people again became suspicious. he realizes that his words may be a trap. for they might even scare some people away. especially those whom åge calls deviants. asking them to take responsibility might sound like a teacher talk…? a disingenuous way to put them into the yolk of obligations they did not ask for. but tom did not mean that. so, he quickly ads, one has to have the freedom to find responsibility for oneself! only this would help us become engaged to do something in the community. to try to change society, to become socially conscious... it takes work, it takes toil. you don’t solve the world’s problems by saying: ‘let the shit hit the fan’… some students loudly laugh and applaud. others are still holding off. tom continues. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a214 i strongly believe that the school needs to develop that other sense of responsibility, the sense that you are a world citizen. the sense of having the will to try to fix the world! we will fail as a school if we do not manage to convey this sense of higher morality! if we don’t develop this inner sense of justice! more students loudly applaud. tom waves his hand as if to say, “wait, i am not finished yet!” he continues, again looking back and forth from åge and other nannies to thorleif, inge, and the deviants. i basically don’t see a contradiction between wanting to pass the artium and wanting to develop as a free person who strives to make society better. they go together, of course! in this school, we can and we should support both. you could say that both goals are equally important in life. [he counts on his fingers.] a) a personal development into a responsible human being, and b) learning skills to succeed in life and work to support oneself. so, i do not think we need to make any prioritization between these two goals of education. there is plenty of room for everyone to define what they want to do within these two goals. we should not deny anyone! not for what they think. not merely because they may be different from us. no! in fact, we can start embracing them, indeed! look, we can bring them in instead of casting them off. what is most important, basically, is that everyone… everyone should figure out what they want and then do it! each one of us, no matter how different! no matter how strange! everyone must be given an opportunity to do that! this school can be both a psychiatric clinic and a school. i have… at least, it changed me tremendously... he points around to some other founders, the nannies, addressing them. inge whispers something to thorleif. we should restrain ourselves from trying to have dictatorial power! [many in the audience: “yeah!”] we should acknowledge that others have a right to be different and to have their own goals! we should recognize them and help them become socially accepted, better people if you will! but… he gets applause, and for a while, he struggles to get his voice above the noise. when the applause subsides, he continues. i want to say one more thing. what i mean: the school has a huge responsibility to the world and society and knowledge. it is not that one should have freedom at all costs to do whatever... freedom to relax and hang out in the hallway. i mean, my god! – then you have no sense of responsibility at all! because our society nowadays… it would then hang on the brink of chaos and horrible conditions… but we can help turn it away from the brink… we can… help change the world! to become a place where people can live life in peace, and everyone can be humanly fulfilled. imagine!17 this is what we are doing here! anti-conclusion how would you, dear reader, reply to åge, thorleif, inge and tom? 17 this reference to john lennon’s “imagine” is my own impression of tom’s person-idea. the hopefulness of the turbulent 60s was strong. the youth movements of the time, with all of their violent protests were deeply grounded in the faith that a world peace and liberation of human dignity from the perils of wars, destruction and dehumanization can be achieved. lennon’s “imagine” came in 1971, four years after the soul-searching assembly at ego, but it sublimated this hope of the 1960s, and it is a song that still resonates today. in my view, while thorleif exuded anger, helplessness, and despair, tom projected calm self-confidence that it would be possible to achieve this humanization of the world. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a215 references bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berlin, i. (1990). the crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas. london, uk: john murray (publisherds) ltd. hem, l., & remlov, t. (eds.). (1969). forsøksgymnas i praksis. oslo, norway: pax forlag a/s. hofstadter, d. r. (1980). gödel, escher, bach : an eternal golden braid (1st vintage books ed.). new york: vintage books. jørgensen, m. (1971). fra skoleopprør til opprørsskole. oslo: pax forlag a/s. jørgensen, m. (1977). škola koju su osnovali učenici [a school founded by the students, serbo-croatian translation of norwegian book fra skoleoppror til opprorskole, by the same author] (l. rajić, trans.). beograd, jugoslavija: beogradski izdavačko-grafički zavod (bigs). marjanovic-shane, a. (2023a). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a217 a244, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.445. marjanovic-shane, a. (2023b). a soul-searching assembly — a vignette. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a165-a197, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.360. marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & gradovski, m. (2023). scandinavian experiments in democratic education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a158-a164, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.477. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2015). typology of critical dialogue and power relations in democratic dialogic education. in k. jezierska & l. koczanowicz (eds.), democracy in dialogue, dialogue in democracy (pp. 211-229). farnham, uk: ashgate publishing, ltd. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators: palgrave macmillan. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & curtis, k. (2019). dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 7, e20-e62, doi:10.5195/dpj.2019.272. melheim, r. (2019). frihet, likhet og demokrati: historien om forsøksgymnaset [freedom, equality and democracy: the history of the experimental gymnasium]: nygaard fors. mouffe, c. (2000). the democratic paradox. london, uk: verso. šomlo, a. (1988). milenina pisma kafki [milena’s letters to kafka]. novi sad, yugoslavia: književna zajednica novog sada. steinem, g. (1983). outrageous acts and everyday rebellions (1st ed.). new york: holt, rinehart, and winston. four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.478 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a216 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word eugene matusov, ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood (layout#2), 2018-04-11.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc4 ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching: multi-consciousness1 eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract through my autobiographical reflective ethnography of my soviet childhood, schooling and teaching, i try to investigate the phenomenon of political multiple consciousness that i observed in the ussr and its development in children. in my analysis, i abstracted eight diverse types of consciousness, five of which are political in their nature. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ��� introduction famous soviet comedian mikhail zhvanetsky commented in one of his 1970s monologue that it was very difficult to learn what exactly a soviet person thought on any issue. he suspected that the answer could be given only through a physiological examination of the person’s body, “a person who says ‘yes’ undergoes a careful examination to check if behind this ‘yes’ is lurking hidden ‘no’. the exact answer can be achieved only by a urine test, which is very difficult to obtain from the person” (zhvanetsky, 2001, p. 175, translation from russian is mine). for the purpose of this investigation, i define a type of political consciousness heuristically as somewhat consistent subjectivity. the goal of this essay is to investigate this phenomenon of political multiple consciousness in the totalitarian country of the soviet union through my autobiographical memoir of my soviet childhood, schooling and teaching. in my autobiographical memoir focused on my soviet childhood and schooling of the 1960s-1970s and, to a lesser degree, of my role as a soviet physics teacher in moscow in the 1980s, which is commonly considered as a “post-totalitarian” or “cold” communist regime (cf. vaclav havel), i want to consider several important mutually related puzzles. the first puzzle is about the relationship of soviet people with the soviet 1 i am thankful to alexander and olga bromberg, marek tesar, ana marjanovic-shane, lei chen, iveta silova, and helen aydarova for their encouragement, feedback, support, and discussions of previous drafts of the paper. issn: 2325-3290 (online) ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc5 official totalitarian ideology of communism: did the people under totalitarianism really believe in the totalitarian ideology? several past cultural critics and political science scholars commented on the phenomenon of double-consciousness among people oppressed by totalitarianism (e.g., orwell, dubois, wertsch, havel, and so on). but in my personal historical experience, the phenomenon was more complex that would allow me to talk about political multiple consciousness, rather than just double. my second major inquiry is developmental: how did these diverse political consciousnesses emerge in soviet children through their socialization and reply to the soviet (post)totalitarianism? my third major inquiry involves the relationship between “ideological” and “real” socialism, which were not mutually exclusive. i want to treat these two terms with ambiguity as it allows me to reveal the historical soviet totalitarian socialism, with its egalitarian and collectivity promises, through the eyes of a child (i.e., mostly me but also my peers). the issue for me here is not only or even mainly of whether the ideological socialism delivered its promises, but also of whether these promises and aspirations were good in the first place. i want to present diverse stories, voices, and events with diverse foci on ideology, class, gender, nationality, history, soviet imperialism, soviet nationalism, soviet communism, soviet totalitarianism, and soviet colonialism. at the same time, in this autobiographical memoir critical ethnography, i want to provide glimpses of how my friends, my peers, my parents, my teachers, my colleagues, and i made sense out our lives, our childhood, our education, and our being together that were full of joy, adventures, meaningful events, love, creative agency, drama, boredom, mistakes, mischiefs, crimes, and pains. my goal was not so much to typify my particular experiences and reflective observations but rather to make sense of my particular experiences and observations and to build plausible hypotheses, which may or may not be generalizable to a bigger population or to different totalitarian regimes or in their different phases. i tried to bring literature whenever i could to compare and contrast it with my own findings. my reflective patterns emerge from my “thick memory descriptions” (cf. geertz, 1973), united, but not entirely limited, by my grounded inquiries. i tried to create a multi-dimensional and multi-discourse storybased picture of a particular soviet childhood and schooling, coming from particular vistas and experiences of mine. socialization of a child in the soviet post-totalitarian socialism: multiple political consciousness major multiple political consciousness in the ussr i was born and raised in soviet post-totalitarian2 socialism that, in my observation, was characterized by the triple major political consciousness phenomenon among many (but not all) soviet 2 czech dissident, playwright, and, after the 1989 velvet revolution, president of czechoslovakia, vaclav havel coined the term "posttotalitarian" in this essay, "i do not wish to imply by the prefix ‘post-‘ that the system is no longer totalitarian; on the contrary, i mean that it is totalitarian in a way fundamentally different from classical dictatorships..." (havel & keane, 1985, p. 27). havel biographer, john keane, describes havel's definition of a post-totalitarian world: "within the system, every individual is trapped within a dense network of the state's governing instruments... themselves legitimated by a flexible but comprehensive ideology, a 'secularized religion'... it is therefore necessary to see, argued havel, that power relations... are best described as a labyrinth of influence, repression, fear and self-censorship which swallows up everyone within it, at the very least by rendering them silent, stultified and marked by some undesirable prejudices of the powerful..." (havel & keane, 1985, pp. 273-274). for me, post-totalitarianism, “cold” totalitarianism, is characterized by the administrative command management but already without mass terror, mass repressions, and organized mass hysteria and fanaticism – common for the acute “hot” totalitarianism of the stalinist era, – while the official totalitarian ideology remaining omnipresent, total, and ubiquitous. a scholar of vaclav havel, marek tesar argued in his response to this paper, “i also believe that havel’s work is not a good fit for your paper. we could have a long discussion around this but basically havel’s post-totalitarian thinking is very much linked with czechoslovakia – and based upon particular turns of events. the way i see this concept based upon studying havel’s philosophical legacy, is as non-transferable but relatable, if that makes sense. but i am not sure that you can use this concept in relation to the soviet union.” however, with this caveat, it is appropriate to induce havel’s term to the post-stalinist ussr, if not conceptually then metaphorically. a further political analysis is probably needed. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc6 citizens. the three types of soviet post-totalitarian consciousness were the following. the first type of major political consciousness involved expected performance of the official ideology of the day in official public settings with the participants enacting official roles. however, people did not necessarily believe in the ideology that they performed. they performed the official for different reasons – under pressure of the soviet authorities, to show loyalty, to be safe, to have a career, and so on. the second type of major political consciousness involved a person’s private beliefs, critical of the soviet regime. this type of consciousness was often grounded in spicy political jokes, keen critical observations on the soviet reality and sharp metaphorical judgments, shared with friends, relatives and confidants in informal intimate social settings, a “private-public sphere” (voronkov & chickadze, 1997). the third major political consciousness involved deeply imprinted and accepted official ideology that was shared and enacted with genuine enthusiasm, creativity, and self-generated initiatives regardless of an audience or a situation. my school principal, in a moscow school where i worked as a physics teacher from 1982 to 1985, is a good example of the soviet triple consciousness. one time she entered my classroom, looked around at the classroom walls covered with scientific posters, and reprimanded me for a lack of any political display. i tried to defend myself, that i taught physics and not an ideological academic subject like history, literature or geography, but the principal interrupted me and said, “in the soviet union, any teacher is 95% an ideological worker and only 5% a predmetnik [i.e., an academic subject teacher, in russian].” i had plenty of evidence that she did not believe in this claim herself. she had a great interest in pedagogy, being a very creative and innovative teacher of geography herself. she was among a few of my colleagues in the school, with whom i could seriously and deeply discuss diverse educational and pedagogical issues. for example, she was very interested in learning children’s indigenous views about geographical issues – i.e., exploring children’s own intuitive geographical understandings. as a teacher with an arguably progressive educational philosophy, she was constantly thinking about how to bridge students’ indigenous subjectivities and the state-imposed curriculum. thus, in my judgment, she was a true “predmetnik.” she also helped and valued me, a novice physics teacher, exactly for my deep knowledge of physics, my passionate commitment to science, and my desire to improve my pedagogy – the same 5% that she was talking about in her official speech – as she told me and my school colleagues on many occasions. she valued pedagogical professionalism in teachers and was often dismayed at ideological requirements imposed on us. i remember that during a physics exit school exam3, a student cleverly decided to use official communist ideology to mask his lack of physics knowledge. she cut him off by saying that this was a physics exam and not a “social studies” exam, where the official communist ideology was dominating. however, on that particular occasion that i described above, she performed an expected official role of the ideological supervisor, assuming a role of a party functionary. i did not know what triggered this role in her at that moment just between the two of us but i suspect that it was some kind of an external event rather her own initiative. it seemed to me that it was her own creative enactment of an external pressure. probably it was some kind of warning to me. at that time, every classroom in every soviet school should have at least a portrait of lenin, the cherished communist leader of the past, but my physics classroom did not. when i assumed the ownership of the physics classroom, i took all the ideological posters and portraits and replaced them with science displays. in the early 1980s, it seemed unclear for the school officialdom – the administration, party, and trade union leaders – how much these rituals were habitual or formal official requirements. this made them uneasy: following the official outdated line too zealously might cause them to be viewed as stupid in the eyes of their colleagues (and their own eyes), but a too lenient attitude toward a novice young teacher could be seen as a political myopia worth of a severe reprimand, in case the political requirement would be (suddenly) not considered outdated 3 at the end of soviet high school all students must take and pass exit exams in many academic subjects to get a high school diploma administrated by local schools (i.e., teachers and the school administrators). the exams were designed by the state ministry of education. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc7 by the communist officialdom. when i taught physics, i was supposed to pepper some current ideological stuff, like decisions of the recent party congress regarding technology and science or soviet science achievements or quotes from the general secretary of the communist party4, in my physics lessons but i never did it. i skipped school local communist party meetings on a regular basis – although i was not a party member or a member of the communist youth organization (komsomol). however, everybody, including non-party members, had to attend to local “open party meetings.” my ideological truancy and neglect to the performance of loyalty to the official ideology raised an eyebrow of many of my school officials – local party and trade union bosses, – which probably led my principal to the enactment of her first, performative, consciousness of the ideological officialdom. later i was called for an official meeting and was threatened with a severe punishment of reduction of my workload (and, thus, salary) but the threat was never realized probably due to shortages of teachers and my enthusiastic acceptance of the punishment because i had a second, much more profitable, job in the soviet shadow economy of tutoring. my principal’s second, critical, consciousness of the private criticism of the soviet reality popped up here and there in informal settings, in which i was present. i do not remember my principal sharing with me political jokes, although i did not have doubts that she did it with her friends. she used sharp critical language to describe the soviet reality when she felt irritated by it. for example, when in november 1982 the general secretary of the communist party leonid ilich brezhnev died, the soviet schools were ordered to have students of all grades in classrooms but not to conduct any academic lessons. students were locked in their home classrooms to watch the tv playing mourning music and official speeches, praising brezhnev’s political, economic, and military achievements. young students were also asked to draw patriotic and ideological pictures. it was a big toll of boredom on the students and teachers who had to control them. as a first-year novice teacher, i was not a homeroom teacher and did not have these obligations to babysit my homeroom students. since i could not teach on these days, i decided to leave school early and go home. at the exit door, i was caught by my school principal. she realized that i was leaving the school, which was problematic from the point of view of the official ideology requiring all workers to stay at their workplaces and collectively mourn the deceased officially loved communist leader. surprisingly to me, she asked me, “can you walk around the school until this petrushka is over?” it was clear for me that she sanctioned my leaving the school. of course, i promised her to do that but instead immediately went home. we understood each other well. she somewhat sanctioned my leaving without an overt permission. her word choice to characterize the annoying event as a “petrushka” was very symptomatic of her first private critical consciousness. the russian colloquial word “petrushka” is defined by a russian dictionary as “1) doll, the main comic character in the popular russian puppetry [similar to the british puppet character punch]. 2) something absurd, strange, funny (colloquial: humorous)” (http://www.vedu.ru/expdic/22833/). the principal clearly used the second meaning to describe the comically absurd mourning ceremony of the brezhnev funeral. in another example of her private critical consciousness, a day after she officially denounced my private tutoring5, she called me for a private chat and asked if i could tutor her nephew. yet, when i left the school in 1985, i found myself in a strange situation, reflecting my principal’s third major political consciousness, truly believed in the soviet ideology of the officialdom. i applied for physics teacher jobs at schools near my place of living, which was in the same school district where i was 4 interesting enough, soviet school physics textbooks of the early 1980s when i was teaching did not have much ideological communist stuff. for example, in the 9-grade physics textbook that i used in my teaching, i found only one reference to socialism, “the solutions of the listed above [ecological] problems is a life important task of the humanity. and these problems can be solved with the maximum success in a socialist society with its planned economy. however, the organization of ecological protection requires efforts on the scale of the entire globe” (buhovtsi, klimontovich, & myakishev, 1982, pp. 72-73). other ideological material in this physics textbook involved its focus on the russian and soviet national achievements in the science (sometimes exaggerated) – see below my discussion of the soviet nationalist socialism. 5 any earning money outside of a state job was illegal in the soviet union and viewed as a state crime. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc8 previously employed. i succeeded in being hired several times. however, before i could start my new job, mysteriously i was told that the position was closed. on the third of such occurrence, a colleague of mine, whom i knew from my professional activity in the district privately, contacted and told me that for some reasons, unknown to her, i was on the district’s “black list” as “politically disloyal.” a few days later, a teacher colleague from my old school told me that she overheard the school principal telling her confidant viceprincipal (“zavuch”) that she added my name to the district’s “black list” because i was ideologically corrupting children in the principal’s view. as far as i know from talking with soviet principals, it was my school principal’s creative initiative, as assessing political loyalty of teachers was not required by the district at that time. she seemed to genuinely believe that, although i never discussed political issues with my students, my too free and frank non-ideological discussions with the students of other issues like rock music, modern art, pedagogy, and so on were authentically viewed by her as ideologically corruptive for schoolchildren. she was probably right about that because my free-spirited discussions indeed probably nurtured free non-totalitarian thinking and liberal attitudes in some of my students6. her conviction that free liberal thinking was corrupting for school children was probably genuine and, thus, i presented a genuine threat to her political and moral beliefs that she tried to creatively address by putting my name into a school district black list of “politically unreliable.” fortunately for me, moscow had several school districts that did not share their political black lists at that time, prior to computerization7. by my 20s in the 1980s, i had probably developed a quadruple political consciousness. my fourth consciousness was active participation in both politically and non-politically diverse underground movements – i became a (political) spoilsport of the soviet post-totalitarian regime8. with my friends, i published underground literary, art, and music journals, photo copied illegal samizdat, had quit komsomol, did not participate in soviet one party one candidate elections, attended underground political meetings, organized illegal private tutoring, read illegal anti-soviet literature, created a conceptualism art group, and participated in a 2-person political demonstration against the soviet invasion of afghanistan (kushnir, gurev, & volkov, 1994; tamruchi, 1995). as a part of this fourth consciousness, i tried to maximize the sphere of private critical consciousness, to minimize the first sphere of official performance, and to eliminate the third sphere of uncritical beliefs in the soviet propaganda and ideology. however, i can recognize only now that the latter was only partially successful. in my youth, i still uncritically subscribed to the soviet ideological ideas that a person should sacrifice his/her interests, if not his/her life, for the embetterment of the entire society, a person should not try to pursue his/her material interests too much and do not become a material consumer, no economic relationship should penetrate friendship, communism is desirable, and so on (and i may still subscribe to them now in ways that remain invisible to me). i think now that these were not a result of an overlap of my own private beliefs with the soviet official ideology but rather my uncritical socialization to these ideas, which probably resulted from my lack of exposure to alternative ideas and critical discussions of them with other people. alternative ideas were scarce in the soviet union with its repressive censorship and totalitarian propaganda. samizdat and dissidents were in a scarce supply even for people like me, who were actively searching for these sources. 6 about ten years ago, i was contacted by some of my past students and they confirmed that suspicion. 7 i wonder whether or not that moscow school district alerted kgb – the state secret police – about my political disloyalty or not. 8 “the player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a ‘spoil-sport.’ the spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. it is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. this is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. by withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. he robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally "in-play" (from inlusio, illudere or inludere). therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community. … the spoil-sport breaks the magic world, therefore he is a coward and must be ejected. in the world of high seriousness, too, the cheat and the hypocrite have always had an easier time of it than the spoil-sports, here called apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.” (huizinga, 2009, pp. 11-12, i am thankful to ana marjanovic-shane for finding this quote). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc9 if a majority of “common” soviet russian people who surrounded me in moscow had all three spheres of their triple consciousness equally developed, “common” soviet people, national minorities, living in some soviet republics like estonia, latvia, lithuania had a very big private critical sphere and a very small (if at all) sphere of genuine belief in the soviet official ideology. empirical research by american sociocultural psychologist james wertsch supports my observation. wertsch (2002) described estonian double consciousness – the private-public critical and the official totalitarian – in how estonian high school students could successfully pass soviet history exams that claimed that estonia voluntarily joined the ussr in the summer 1940 because of the demands of estonian workers, while these same students retained their private beliefs in the soviet military occupation of their then independent democratic country. similarly, many people in eastern european soviet satellites, so-called “countries of people’s democracy,” perceived their socialism as the soviet occupation, the triple consciousness of post-totalitarianism collapsed into the double consciousness of the private critical sphere and the sphere of official performance (havel & keane, 1985). as to the historical time of the acute “hot” soviet totalitarianism of the stalinist ussr (1929-1953), based on stories by my parents and their friends, i suspect that the third sphere of genuine and passionate beliefs in the soviet ideology was very thick while the first sphere was very thin. the relationship among diverse types of the (post-)totalitarian multiple political consciousnesses were various. in my observation, for the most soviet citizens, they tried to keep these three types separate depending on clearly separated domains, situations, participants, and settings – most people did not try to register or resolve their contradictions among the 3 types of consciousness, governed by particular contexts. for example, in one context of her biographical account, my grandma might tell me – her teenage grandson – that about 10 neighbors “disappeared” in one night from their moscow communal apartment during the stalinist purges of 1937-1938 (i.e., they all were arrested by nkvd9, then secret police), and never came back. while in another context of a political discussion, she would claim to me that she knew nothing about the stalinist purges, probably worrying about my possible involvement with a dissent movement. when i reminded her about her own recollection of the purge, she told me that she was afraid of thinking about that then and even now. some people experienced the stalinist terror and totalitarianism, learned to deny their own memory and eradicated it from any contradictions entirely, as sometimes my father and people of his generation did, who grew up during the stalinist acute “hot” totalitarianism. it was probably a defensive psychological mechanism against accidental slipping into revealing unpleasant unofficial truth (roviello & temerson, 2007). as hannah arendt (1966) argued, totalitarianism makes people lose their ground, which may involve defensive losing their memory. i argue that this loss of ground leads to the phenomenon of multiple political consciousness. yet, many people in the baltic soviet republics often perceived the ussr as an occupation – viewing their life under soviet occupation, while publically repeating the soviet official propaganda, was their way to integrate their multiple (double) consciousness. some soviet dissidents took a heroic stand by integrating their consciousnesses into one consciousness – the fifth consciousness – of “living in truth and not by lie” through active political struggle with the regime10 (havel & vladislav, 1989; solzhenitsyn, 1974b; yurchak, 2006). yet, many other nonconformists, like me, preferred “internal immigration” (wertsch, 2002) of non-participation in the regime, internal and private dialogue of critique (bukovsky, 1979), and our moral support to active dissidents (the fourth consciousness). 9 later to become known as kgb. 10 my own involvement in the dissident consciousness reached the peak in my late 20s by my participation in two-people demonstration against the soviet invasion of afghanistan in 1987 during gorbachev’s perestroika. my friend and i were arrested by kgb officers after just about 15 min of our demonstration in the center of moscow, in an underground pass during a rush hour, and transferred to the city police for joint kgb-police multi-hour interrogation. at the end we got subpoena to come to a court for sentencing and were released from the kgb-police custody. my friend and i ignored the subpoena and did not come to the court. however, a group of people who demonstrated a few days after us in the same place for the same cause were very severely beaten by kgb officers – many of them ended up in hospitals. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc10 emergence of multiple political consciousnesses in soviet childhood in the post-totalitarian soviet society, many children were not born or actively taught the ubiquitous triple consciousness, but rather this triple consciousness emerged gradually through the following consecutive processes that i observed on myself and other soviet children. the first process was usually the total brainwash and uncritical socialization of very young children in the soviet official ideology in nursery school, kindergarten, and grade school, through children and adult media, parents, official political events, and even peers. for example, when i was 7-year old, i wrote the following poem: look, see the revolution has come, that moment of victory is on us! and with the red flag as usual we are going to the lenin mausoleum!11 when i was 8, we moved to another, bigger apartment in moscow, and i had my own room for the first time. one of my first responses to having a separate room of mine own was to create a lenin museum by cutting pages with his picture from a children’s book about young lenin and gluing these pages on the newly fixed wallpaper of my room. despite their apparent disappointment of my ruining freshly fixed wallpaper with glue, my parents did not scold or punish me but patiently and tactfully explained that although 11 вот революция пришла, пришёл тот миг победы! и с красным флагом, как всегда, идём мы к мавзолею. picture 1. i lived in this building from 1968 until 1974/1977 on the fifth floor on the left (photo is mine, 2002) ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc11 my worshiping of grandpa lenin was admirable, only the communist party could sanction lenin museums. they took all the pages down carefully from the wallpaper and rearranged the furniture in my room to cover the damage left by the glue until they replaced the wallpaper. i also remember teaching my 6-year old cousin that without lenin both of us would not born -i was eight then. in the recent 2014 documentary “stateless” by michael drob (http://www.stateless.us) about russian jewish immigrants from the soviet union to the united states in the late 1980s (exactly when i also immigrated from the ussr), a parent of a 5-year old daughter overheard her arguing with another little boy, while they were waiting for an entrance interview in the american consulate in rome to receive a us refugee status. the boy claimed that god was the most important and powerful because god controlled everything. but the girl argued that it was lenin (the mother tried fiercely to silence her daughter being afraid to fail the interview in the american consulate and to be unable to enter the usa as a refugee for political and religious persecutions). similar stories about their communist childhood have been reported in memoirs of people who were born in the post-totalitarian ussr (e.g., shteyngart, 2014). of course, i suspect that in some households, young children were protected from their contact with the official propaganda (like we did with our son by preventing him from attending any official soviet child institution before we immigrated to the us in 1988) or even exposed their children to critique of the soviet totalitarian regime. however, in my personal observations such cases were rare exceptions. in summary, many young soviet children in the posttotalitarian era were actively socialized into the third and only sphere of the genuine beliefs in the soviet official ideology. however, this solo domination of the genuine beliefs in the soviet ideology by young soviet children could not be sustained in the post-totalitarian soviet union for several reasons. first, as my parents tried to teach me, personal initiatives, unauthorized and unsanctioned by the communist state officialdom, could be very dangerous, regardless of how pure and true were the beliefs in these initiatives. one could passionately worship lenin but one could not create lenin’s shrine on his or her own initiative, without an explicit permission of the soviet party officialdom. in totalitarianism, everything that was not explicitly and officially permitted, was forbidden. creativity and initiative of people had to be well organized and directed from above in the post-totalitarian ussr. a consciousness of authorial agency based on creativity, personal initiative, and personal responsibility was viewed by the soviet officialdom, at least, with suspicion and often was suppressed and severely punished. actions of soviet people had to be officially sanctioned and socially ordered by the party-state authority. unsanctioned or unordered actions were viewed anti-soviet by default. for example, my late teenage friends, romantic che guevaran communards (sidorkin, 1995), were first “guided” and then warned by a local youth party boss for their unsanctioned protests against american capitalists’ exploitation of workers around the american embassy in moscow in the late 1970s and then, when they fiercely persisted, they were threatened by a kgb officer who visited them. the second reason for which the official passionate beliefs could not be sustained was that often (if not always!) the soviet ideology said one thing but meant another, often the opposite, thing. young people had to learn double-speech (orwell, 1992): to understand what was said for raising passions and loyalty and to understand what the real limitations of their actions must be. for example, the soviet propaganda and the soviet constitution said that the soviet union had freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of press but soviet reality was drastically different: using censorship, repressions, and prisons to eliminate these freedoms (bernholz, 1991). soviet children had to learn to claim these freedoms without any attempt to enact them. they also should never claim the obvious reality of absence and active suppression of these freedoms. the following soviet political joke of that time reflected this tension, “a [soviet] kindergarten teacher conducts a guided discussion. she puts the world map on the wall and explains, ‘kids, this is the united states of america. people live badly there. they don’t have money and that is why they don’t buy candies and ice cream for their children and do not bring them to ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc12 watch movies at theaters. but this is the soviet union. all people are happy here. they live well. they buy candies and ice cream for their children every day and bring them at theaters to watch movies.’ suddenly a little girl was crying. ‘why do you cry, tanya?’ asked the teacher. ‘i want to live in the soviet union!’ sobbed the little girl” (bukovsky, 1979). young soviet children had to learn the indirect meaning and limits of the soviet ideology, which created a need for the first sphere of performance of the official ideology without genuinely believing in or trying to enact it. third, the soviet communist ideology declared the absolute truth for all time and all people but it was also a subject of constant change by the current communist leadership. totalitarian dogmatic monologism does not tolerate any ambiguity and a possibility for change (bakhtin & emerson, 1999). totalitarianism – the total ideology – does not only create the total monopoly on the ideological space (i.e., topic diversity) but also on the ideological time (i.e., possible unpredictable changes). public noticing of these ideological changes was dangerous. however, ignoring the changes was also dangerous. children had to learn both to notice and to ignore the ideological changes at the same time. they had to accept unconditionally the new absolute truth without any focus on contradictions between its novelty and absolutism. as an old soviet joke goes, “one is applying for a job and he has to answer to the following question on the job application form, ‘have you ever deviated from the party line?’ one replies wisely, ‘yes, i have deviated but only together with the party.’” in a few months after the general secretory of the communist party leonid ilich brezhnev died, high school students in the school i taught were asked to cross out certain sentences in their history and literacy textbooks (king, 1997). as far as i remember, the teachers did not provide any explanations to their request, as if it were a conspiracy, in which the students also actively participated. “in the soviet union there is nothing more unpredictable than its past” (a popular soviet joke, ivanova, 2000, july). the changes in the soviet totalitarian ideology pressed soviet children to develop the first and second spheres of their consciousness: performative (the first consciousness) and critical (the second consciousness). fourth, soviet children noticed and discussed discrepancies between soviet officials’ ideological claims and these officials’ own actions (and soviet reality), which prompted the development of the second sphere of critical private political consciousness. i remember when i was 10, my peers and i noticed that our local communist activist in our home building forced everybody to attend a subbotnik (a communist “labor holiday” on certain saturdays with mandated “volunteering” of labor for “a community”), while she never worked herself on a subbotnik. when i shared this observation with my parents, they replied that communist leaders had more important organizational duties than the physical labor of commoners (like me). i counter-argued that grandpa lenin participated in the first subbontik in 1920 as a common physical laborer despite the fact that he was the head of the soviet state and the communist party – the picture of him carrying out a huge log was hanging in my school (see picture 2). my parents told me to stop talking dangerous rubbish because the current time was different from lenin’s time. from their reply and nonverbal tone of a mixture of anger at and fear for me, i realized that i was right but the truth of revealing the party’s hypocrisy was dangerous. this and other instances taught me the self-discipline of silence and recognition of contexts and participants with whom i could safely share my critical observations, which promoted the development of the second sphere of private critical consciousness. fifth, finally, it was a carnivalistic culture of ubiquitous political (and non-political) jokes that promoted the second, critical, sphere. soviet carnivalistic culture introduced role flip-flops and ambivalence unknown to the serious monologic official certainty (cf. bakhtin, 1984). this carnivalistic culture created intimacy, camaraderie, good laughs, and networks of support, in the context of a poor quality of public institutionalized services, deficits, or absence of some necessary institutions all together (e.g., banks). political jokes rapidly spread over 12-hour time zones of the soviet union in a few weeks through face-toideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc13 face communication as telling them on wiretapped phones was dangerous. political jokes were told in all strata of the soviet union, including party and kgb bosses and children. soviet-born journalist and historian arkady ostrovsky argued, “while the soviet system still barred private ownership of land and property, it allowed [in the soviet post-totalitarianism] space for privacy, for intimate feelings and thoughts” (ostrovsky, 2015). in my view, “allowed” is a too strong word. the soviet post-totalitarian officialdom tolerated, rather than permitted, the space for privacy, for intimate feelings and thoughts, under certain tacit norms and rules. these tacit rules involved the participants’ visible attempts to keep their feelings and thoughts private, limited only to a small intimate group of confidants, and try not to enact these feelings and thoughts in public. picture 2. vladimir lenin (the man on the right), the communist leader, helps to carry a log during the first subbotnik, moscow, 1920 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/subbotnik#/media/file:19200501-lenin_subbotnik_kremlin.jpg) children heard political jokes from their parents, neighbors, siblings, and peers and passed them privately to their friends. the culture of political jokes was the collective, public, unofficial, critical political consciousness in the soviet union12. being an audience of a political joke meant a sign of trust and inclusion. here is my favorite political joke when i was 10 or 11, “in the morning, brezhnev comes on his balcony, looks at the east, and greets the sun, ‘good morning little sun!’ ‘good morning, dear comrade leonid ilich!’ – replies the sun. in the noon, brezhnev comes on this balcony, looks up, and greets the sun, ‘good afternoon, little sun!’ ‘good afternoon, dear comrade leonid ilich!’ – replies the sun. in the evening, brezhnev comes on his balcony, looks forward, and greets the sun, ‘good evening, little sun!’ the sun keeps silence. brezhnev repeats, ‘good evening, little sun!’ the sun finally replies, ‘fuck off, brezhnev, 12 that is why my personal memoirs are full of many soviet political jokes. they are a part of my private critical consciousness. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc14 i’m already on the west!’”13 the participation in these political jokes required critical thinking and restraint – the necessary ingredients for the private critical political consciousness. it seems to me that all of these five processes of soviet children’s ideological becoming, embedded in the official soviet ideology propaganda, unavoidably pushed for the emergence of the triple consciousness in many soviet children. the degree to which each of these spheres affected soviet children varied, depending on the children’s personalities, circumstances, culture, history, local politics, ethnicity, class, parents’ political attitudes, and social surroundings. one of the consequences of this emergence of the triple consciousness in the soviet children was that they often became very savvy in recognizing what an authority wanted from them and were able to feed the authority with what they wanted to hear from them. this skill was well articulated with the following soviet joke, “if you’re my boss, i’m your fool. if i’m your boss, you’re my fool.” i remember in the early 1990s, a west german scholar visited the university of california at santa cruz where i was doing my phd in developmental psychology. at an informal lunch, he shared with me that it was almost impossible to study east german kids (it was immediately after reunification of east and west germany). in contrast to west german children who tried their best to share with the researchers what they thought when asked on a survey, east german children, raised under a socialist regime, tried to guess what the researchers wanted them to say and to please them. the west german psychologist complained that in the case of east german children, he studied not what the eastern german teens thought, but their perception of his desires. teaching in the us, i have been surprised again and again how american students are not aware of potential social danger of information they may freely reveal about themselves to me, their teacher. however, children from socialist countries often developed a deep distrust to authority that i will discuss in my section on schooling. growing in the soviet post-totalitarian nationalist socialism as a national minority: the marginal consciousness at the beginning of the nazi german invasion of the ussr in the summer of 1941 (during the wwii), stalin abruptly shifted the official soviet ideology from international communist to nationalist communist. the soviet anthem was changed from the international (“’tis the final conflict/ let each stand in his place/ the international union/ shall be the human race”) to the anthem worshiping great russia, “unbreakable union of freeborn republics,/ great russia has welded forever to stand./ created in struggle by will of the people, / united and mighty, our soviet land!” if before the 1940s, peoples (e.g., kazakhs, ukrainians, estonians) were purged and oppressed according to “the class principle”, now they became purged and oppressed according to a purely national principle. thus, some peoples, like chechens and crimea tatars, were announced “peoples-traitors” and exiled to kazakhstan (and killed and sent to gulag) (snyder, 2010). jews were denounced as “cosmopolitans” and were prepared for sanctioned pogroms and exile to siberia, where “the autonomous jewish region of birobidzhan” was created (solzhenitsyn, 1974a). russian chauvinism grew. for example, all major great scientific and technological discoveries were attributed to russian inventors and scientists (which was reflected in school science textbooks)14. arguably, russian nationalism and chauvinism was a crack on the soviet international communist totalitarianism of the stalinist and post-stalinist era rather being well incorporated into the communist totalitarianism itself. the nationalism was not openly and clearly incorporated into the soviet official ideology, remaining an officially-unofficial shadow ideology and practice. nationalism promoted the marginal consciousness manifested in many soviet minority citizens. 13 interestingly, a similar joke about then general secretary of the east german communist party erich honecker was told in the 2006 german movie “the lives of others” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/). 14 popular jokes of those years was that “the horse neigh was invented in russia” or “russia was the motherland of all elephants.” ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc15 table 1. types of observed political consciousness in the soviet union types of consciousness description relationship to the officialdom relationship to the self examples 1. performative political consciousness performance of loyalty to the official ideology officially sanctioned insincere official ceremonies 2. critical political consciousness private critical beliefs about the totalitarian regime passive opposition without action, tolerated by the officialdom to a point sincere but compromised political jokes 3. fanatical political consciousness private sincere beliefs in the regime officially promoted but not sanctioned, tolerated by the officialdom to a point sincere and uncompromis ed private political initiatives in accord with the official ideology 4. underground political consciousness private and communal active opposition to the regime active but compromised opposition with action, civil disobedience, nonparticipation, tolerated by the officialdom to a point sincere but compromised internal emigration, participation in political and nonpolitical underground movements and black market 5. dissident political consciousness open political opposition to the regime by “living in truth,” united consciousness active uncompromised resistance, not tolerated by the officialdom sincere and uncompromis ed open dissident movement 6. marginal consciousness underground official ideology unofficially sanctioned split nationalism 7. agentic consciousness unconditional following the authority, regardless personal conviction promoted, justified, imposed, and sanctioned by the officialdom unconditional submission to the will of authority functionary in the bureaucracy 8. camaraderie consciousness real horizontal socialism suspicion and distrust of and by the officialdom sincere and uncompromis ed adult and children peer culture in the ussr, nationality meant one's ethnic origin and not citizenship or religion. nationality was the fifth item in the soviet internal passport. nationality was reported in the classroom grade record book for teachers (“klassnyj zhurnal”) but students were often able to get their hands on it and find out about their classmates’ nationality (along with other things). also, children and adults learned and were socialized through nationalist discourse to recognize patterns15 of non-slavic nationalities by people’s faces and skin 15 i suspect (i.e., hypothesize) that this process of learning ethnic faces through discursive pattern recognition in the soviet union (and modern russia) might be similar to learning “talking science” in school described by jay lemke (1990). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc16 color. non-russian people were often referred by their nationality (e.g., tadjik kostya, gypsy masha). of course, people made mistakes from time-to-time but it did not preclude them from trying again. as a teen and an adult, i was frequently recognized by strangers as being a jew by my “typical jewish face.” this recognition was often gestalt-like (i.e., holistic and impressionistic), without any conscious trait-like analysis of a facial stereotype (but not always). i learned about anti-semitism and other nationalistic slurs before i learned that i was a jew by nationality. my peers and adults around me often used these nationalistic slurs. as a little child i knew that they meant bad things but not necessarily as relevant to nationalities. for example, as 5-year old, i was using the phrase “ne zhidish16!” which i meant “share, don’t be a scrooge!” but literally it meant “don’t be such a kike!” – an anti-semitic slur implying that all jews are cheap, selfish, and not generous. as a child, i commonly used the nationalistic slur “tsyganit’” meaning “to aggressively beg for money” – the word originated from “tsygan” (gypsy, roma people, in russian). as young children, we commonly used nationalistic slurs against russians (“katsap”) and against ukrainians (“khokhol”) and against many indigenous people (“churka”) without necessarily knowing the nationalistic and chauvinistic nature of these words. there were many nationalistic and chauvinistic jokes circulating in the soviet union (e.g., see chukchi [an indigenous siberian people, kin to american alaska inuit] soviet distasteful nationalistic jokes here: http://www.vavpages.narod.ru/eng/chuckcha.htm portraying chukchi people as stereotypically stupid, primitive, and without a refined culture). in my observation, soviet nationalism and chauvinism was an organic and monolithic part of the soviet consciousness. even many (but not all!) of the famous soviet dissidents were national chauvinist (e.g., igor shaferevich http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/igor_shafarevich, renown dissident writer and the nobel prize winner alexander solzhenitsyn). it is true that the official soviet communist propaganda emphasized “internationalism”, “class international solidarity,” and “friendship of peoples” but at the same time it officially promoted great russia chauvinism and especially after wwii, the soviet socialism became nationalist rather than internationalist in its nature. the internationalismnationalism was a serious internal contradiction of the soviet official ideology that threatened to split ideologically the totality of the communist totalitarianism17. a complication of this development was a proliferation of non-russian and anti-russian nationalisms (and/or chauvinisms) in the soviet union that became oppositional to the soviet totalitarianism and was under assault by the regime18, and thus penetrated multiple consciousness in the soviet union. i learned that i was a jew from my parents when i was nine. i was telling my parents about my daily school events when accidentally i called one of my (russian) classmates a “zhid” for not willing to share his toy with me and other classmates. my parents were openly upset and asked me not to use this word. i asked them why. they explained to me that this word means “a jew.” i replied, “so what?! everyone knows that jews are greedy!” and i was told that i and all my family were jews and we, like many other jews, were not greedy. soon i started experienced anti-semitism against myself. a grandma of one of my classmates, who was a pole by nationality, did not allow him to play with me because i was a jew. i remember her saying to her grandson while pointing at me, “don’t play with jews. they’re very treacherous!” i did not want to be a jew because i had known that jews were "dirty," "greedy," and 16 the russian racial slur “zhid” comes from a colloquial and conventional polish word meaning “jew” (the polish word has the same origin as the english word – “judea”). but in russian this word became a slur. in russian, a neutral conventional word for “jew” is “evrey” coming from the word “hebrew” (like in italian “ebreo”). this seems to be a similar transformation for the english-american word “negro” (meaning “black” in spanish) that historically became racial slur and has been replaced with the neutral english word “black.” 17 in the 1970s, the informal russian national chauvinistic movement “pamyat’” (memory) emerged in the ussr and the soviet authorities did not know how to respond to this non-official, non-sanctioned but officially tolerated movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pamyat. 18 studying national languages (e.g., yiddish, hebrew) and cultures was an official crime punished by imprisonment in gulag in the ussr. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc17 "treacherous" as my russian and non-russian friends, peers, and adults told me on many occasions. but, i did not have a choice. once in 6th grade, a russian boy who did not like me (we openly called each other “enemies”) came to my russian friend and told him that i was a jew. my russian friend did not believe him, turned to me, and asked, "he said that you're a jew! are you?!" i replied with sarcasm, "oh, yeah! i am a jew." both of them were satisfied with my "treacherous" answer: my russian friend could hear my sarcasm, challenging the accusation, but my russian enemy could only hear my confirmation of his accusation. my russian friend conspiratorially smiled at me and replied in sarcasm to my russian enemy, “yeah, i knew it all the time!” my russian enemy was surprised and disappointed that he could not break our friendship – he exclaimed, “you’re both zhids [kikes]!” and moved away from us. thus, i kept my friendship. however, i wasn't happy about it -i knew that i was betraying myself and my family. i was able to solve the problem of keeping my russian friend at the expense of splitting my own consciousness. looking back, i have noticed that almost all my school friends, with some minor exceptions, were non-russians: tatars, ukrainians, poles, and jews. i guess there was both centrifugal and centripetal nationalist forces that shaped our child friendships. soviet nationalism generated an additional double-consciousness that is similar to one described by w.e.b. du bois (1961), and by russian nineteenth century fictional writers gogol and dostoevsky in their stories and novels, analyzed by bakhtin (bakhtin & emerson), and by kurt lewin (1948). lewin referred to it as the marginal consciousness. the marginal consciousness is different from other multiple consciousnesses that i observed in the soviet union because it is not just double-consciousness but rather a split consciousness. in other words, all other multiple consciousnesses that i noticed in the ussr and described here manifested themselves in certain situational domains. thus, my school principle, described above, might show her critical consciousness in one situation, while her performative consciousness in another. her consciousness was situation-specific – within one situation, my principal’s consciousness was single and not multiple. in contrast, the marginal consciousness, described by du bois, gogol, dostoevsky, bakhtin, and lewin, had internal multiplicity that penetrated the consciousness itself, regardless of the situation. marginal people became walking problems for others and themselves, without having a reliable community behind (matusov, 2009). soviet nationalism made minority people a problem to be solved, in a similar way american racism made blacks a problem to solve: between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. all, nevertheless, flutter round it. they approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, how does it feel to be a problem? they say, i know an excellent colored man in my town; or, i fought at mechanicsville; or, do not these southern outrages make your blood boil? at these i smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. to the real question, how does it feel to be a problem?19 i answer seldom a word. … after the egyptian and indian, the greek and roman, the teuton and mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this american world,— a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. one ever feels his two-ness,—an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder (du bois, 1961, p. 16). 19 unfortunately, more than 100 years later, minority students are still seen as “a problem to deal with” by some teachers in the us as the incident described above reveals. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc18 minority people became marginal people whose voice and loyalty was constantly challenged by both the officialdom and common majority people (and even other minorities). lewin analyzed uncertainty of belonging that was especially troublesome for privileged minority people: not the belonging to many groups is the cause of the difficulty, but an uncertainty of belongingness. in practically every underprivileged group a number of people will be found who, although regarded by the privileged majority as not belonging to them, feel themselves not really belonging to the underprivileged minority. frequently it is the more privileged people within the underprivileged group, or those people whose open or secret intent it is to pass the line, who are in the position of what the sociologists call "marginal men." they are people who belong neither here nor there, standing "between" the groups. the psychological difficulties which the marginal man has to face-his uncertainty, his instability, and often self-hate, due to the more or less permanent state of conflict in which he finds himself-are well known to the student of sociology. the frequency of "marginal" persons in an underprivileged group is likely to increase the more the differences between the privileged and underprivileged groups decrease, with the resulting paradox that the betterment of the group might increase the uncertainty and tension of the individual (lewin, 1948, pp. 179-180). the acme of my personal experience with soviet state-sponsored anti-semitism occurred when, after graduation from my high school that specialized in math, i applied to mekh-mat20 at mgu (or msu in english, moscow state university). i applied for mekh-mat in 1977 and failed on the written math exam, which was the entrance exam in mekh-mat. as a jew, by 17, i had known quite a lot about the soviet state anti-semitism but i wanted to make sure that i really had no chance of joining mgu and all doors were closed for me as a jew. my parents and relatives tried to dissuade me from applying to mgu expecting a big personal trauma for me but i insisted. i expected to fail a russian essay exam because literature and composition were subjective and ideological and thus easy to manipulate. the oral math exam was also a possibility because it did not leave paper traces (shifman, 2005). however, i was surprised to fail a written math exam, for math being an “exact” science and a written exam was leaving paper traces. i was well prepared in math by my moscow math specialized school 91 (matusov, 2017). all my non-jewish classmates entered mgu and other exact science-oriented colleges without a problem. but not all jews. i had numerous awards from math contests (“math olympics”) organized by the city and various colleges, including mgu. i was shocked to learn that i failed the written math exam. i believed that i fully solved four math problems out of the five presented and i was half way through the fifth. i compared my solutions with my non-jewish classmates, who were later accepted to the mekh-mat and my solutions were on par with theirs (some did better and some worse than me on the exam in our analysis). i decided to appeal to see my scored work with my own eyes and to question the scores. i naively thought that math was math even in such a racist nationalistic country as the ussr. i was wrong. at the same time, a voice of doubt ate away my soul: what if i was not as good at math as i thought?! as du bois and lewin argued this anxious voice of doubt, constantly undermining one’s marginal existence, is the birthmark of painful split-consciousness caused by racism and nationalism (and classism in the case of the 19th century tsarist russian empire described by gogol and dostoevsky). 20 the mechanico-mathematical major. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc19 as soon as i arrived at the appeal process, jews were separated from non-jews using our soviet internal passports with the fifth question about “nationality.” given that my passport nationality was “evrey” (jew in russian), i joined all other jews in one room while all non-jews were directed to different rooms for their appeal. when my turn came, i was invited in and placed at a desk between two big guys in their late 30s. when one asked a question and i started thinking about an answer, the other guy asked another question, which distracted me from the first question (and i was understandably nervous in the first place). as soon as i started replying to the second guy, the first guy interrupted me and told me, “you see, you cannot answer on any of our questions.” in general, they tried to convince me that: a) i did not know math, b) i had low intelligence in general, and c) i had low moral integrity since only by cheating i could have gotten all these excellent academic records. for the latter, they used a tacit argument that being a jew, i probably bought my awards for math contests and my good school grades, since i was obviously was poor in math (see, frenkel, 2013; shifman, 2005, for description and analysis of these systematic anti-semitic practices at msu sanctioned by the soviet state). their strategy of psychological disbalancing and pressure was well-developed and well-applied. i felt like at a kgb interrogation (frenkel, 2013). i had nervous breakdown after this experience (as my parents predicted). but back to my scored exam work: i had “impure pluses” on all 5 math problems: plus-minus, plusdot, minus-plus (for the last problem that i knew i had not solved). “impure pluses” meant that a problem was unsolved and was not counted (shifman, 2005). let me provide one example of a math problem that was scored as “plus-minus”. it was a geometric problem involving a right-angled triangle. i wrote in my solution that, “according to the pythagorean theorem, the square of cathesis (a triangle leg) is equal to the square of hypotenuse minus the square of the other cathesis (leg).” the examiner crossed out my wording “according to” and replaced it with “from.” my two interrogators at the appeal told me that: 1) i did not know the correct formulation of the pythagorean theorem and 2) i was not skillful in russian enough to understand a sematic difference between “according to” and “from”. i remember a jewish girl at a neighboring desk suddenly jumped from her place (sitting like me between two of her big guys) and yelled at them, “you will live in this shitty country, while i’ll study at sorbonne!” she then stormed out of the room. i think she was right about the racist soviet union being a “shitty country” and i hope that she managed to emigrate from the ussr21 to france and her dream of studying in sorbonne became true. my jewish classmate from the moscow math school 91, who got a c for her written math mekhmat exam only to be failed in an oral math exam, emigrated from the ussr with her wise and brave parents in 1979 and she became a math professor in the us. unfortunately, i had to wait for the next emigration wave in 1988 when the soviet door again opened up to leave the racist country. in the us, i got my phd in psychology and became a professor of education. i did not become a mathematician22. you can read a similar personal account from a now famous american mathematician edward frenkel, a soviet jew 21 the emigration pathway for jews was very difficult but open in the 1970s until the beginning of the soviet invasion of afghanistan started in the late december of 1979. it was reopened only in 1988 under gorbachev, when i left the country. 22 however, being in an engineering college that accepted jews, i attended an underground university, jewish people's university (jpu), taught by famous soviet professors from msu and other prestigious colleges (including some russian and non-jewish professors) who heroically resisted the soviet state-sponsored anti-semitism. however, in july 1982, kgb cracked down on this underground university for jewish students and one organizer, bella subbotskaya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bella_subbotovskaya), was apparently assassinated in fall 1982. the other two organizers of jpu valery senderov and boris kanevsky were arrested, imprisoned and then exiled (shifman, 2005). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc20 refugee like me23 (see also, shifman, 2005, for detailed accounts of the entrance examination soviet state anti-semitism). soviet school: the agentic consciousness american psychologist stanley milgram defined “the agentic state” in the following way: … the person entering an authority system no longer views himself as acting out of his own purposes but rather comes to see himself as an agent for executing the wishes of another person. once an individual conceives his action in this light, profound alterations occur in his behavior and his internal functioning. these are so pronounced that one may say that this altered attitude places the individual in a different state from the one he was in prior to integration into the hierarchy. i shall term this the agentic state, by which i mean the condition a person is in when he sees himself as an agent for carrying out another person's wishes. this term will be used in opposition to that of autonomy – that is, when a person sees himself as acting on his own (milgram, 1974, p. 147). the agentic state studied by milgram in democratic capitalist societies was like a fish out of water. ideologically, a democratic society does not support agentic conformism. on the contrary, it promotes nonconformist individualism. and, still, to surprise of many people milgram found that many people in democratic societies demonstrate an agentic state. in contrast, in the (post-) totalitarian soviet union, the fish was in the water. the totalitarian ideology and soviet institutions actively supported the agentic state. the agentic consciousness is somewhat similar to the performative political consciousness because in both cases a person enacts ideology, in which he or she may not believe or be committed to on his/her own. however, they are different at least in two accounts. first, the performative political consciousness is a deliberate political strategy that the person chose for his/her survival via performance of his/her political loyalty. thus, vaclav havel described and analyzed why a czech greengrocer would place a communist slogan, in which he did not believe (havel & vladislav, 1989). in contrast, in the agentic consciousness, any autonomous decision making is suppressed. second, in contrast to the performative political consciousness, the agentive consciousness is not necessarily political or totalitarian in its nature. in my reflective observation, soviet school promoted both the performative political consciousness and the agentic consciousness. the former was achieved through many highly visible political rituals and participation in the young communist organizations and activities. the latter was much more tacit and involved a special non-political ideology, involving non-individualistic homogenizing norms. “do like everybody else!” any deviation from the established norm was seen as a sick egoistic perversion by the person, who wants to be “above” the soviet collective. this ideology was nicely captured by the russian 2008 musical “stilyagi,” portraying soviet underground hipster (“stilyagi24”) movement in the second part of 1950s, in the following dialogue between female youth communist leader, katya, and her male friend, mel, who became a stilyaga, i.e., a hipster, (both were college students), katya: i just want to know, what do you feel when people look at you that way [i.e., having a fashionable colorful dress and a hairstyle very uncommon in the soviet union in the mid 1950s]? mel: it's fun!... it's great, katya, when all people are different. i'm like this. she's like that. and you are completely different. katya: i don't want to be different. 23 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/the-fifth-problem--math---anti-semitism-in-the-soviet-union-7446 24 the russian word “stilyagi” is derogatory, comes from the word “style” to reflect soviet hipsters interest in dress fashion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/stilyagi ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc21 mel: why? katya: because i don't think i'm better than other people. mel: it's not about being better or worse, but just different! do you understand? this non-political conformist ideology of being the same as everybody else under constant judging looks by normative others prepared soviet students for the agentic state and the agentic consciousness. agentic consciousness was a hidden curriculum of the soviet school. in my view, any conventional school based on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints, mostly promotes an agentic consciousness. conventional school often forces students to do assignments that are meaningless for the students, which they would not do on their own. even more, conventional school disciplines many students to learn how to force themselves to accomplish unconditionally and unquestionably the activities assigned by other people. in my first grade, for some reasons i escaped the school agentic consciousness by populating my assigned homework and class work with my playful fantasies that were very meaningful for me personally. many exercises in russian (writing) involved completing sentences by filling in the omitted words marked with three dots. in my fantasy when i was in the first grade, i envisioned a little walking man, going over words in a sentence, only to face a river or a ditch marked by the three dots. like the little man, i was thinking, what to do – how to cross the dots. i draw beautiful bridges over the three dots in my textbook or imagined swimming across. i loved my school. i loved doing homework – i joyfully spent many hours doing my exercises. i loved getting bad grades because i loved how my teacher drew her 2s (a failing mark grade corresponding “d”) with all her love that looked to me like a beautiful red swan, swimming on a lake. for me, the well-rounded mark grade 3 (“c”) looked much more appealing than the angular 4 (“b”) or the arrogantly bragging 5 (“a”). i liked to collect as many red swans as possible. at times in my pleasant anticipation of the teacher’s red swan, i carefully drew my own big blue swan after my home or class assignment. the teacher crossed out my blue swan with her angry strokes and drew her red swan next to mine (i admit hers was always more beautiful than mine). my mother was hysterical at my optimism bordered with idiotism when i joyfully announced getting another swan. she was crying and saying why i would not be ashamed of bad grades as all other kids. she always referred to my older brother who once buried his grade record book (“dnevnik”) in the yard to hide getting bad grades (a neighbor found it and gave to my parents). she said that it was bad what my older brother did but she said it was more understandable than me being happy of getting bad grades. when we moved to another apartment, in another district of moscow, and i joined my second grade in another school, i got school broken. i started doing all school assignments without playing my fantasies. i started hating my school. i did my homework docilely, trying to spend as little time as possible on it. i became ashamed of bad grades. i obediently followed my teacher’s order to search my peer to find out if he smuggled in school forbidden objects (e.g., toys, colorful wires, matches). i lost an ability to be an author of my life and became like other kids, at least, in school. in my experiences and observations, soviet school was highly regimented, highly normative, and highly conformist. soviet teachers of the same grade and subject matter were supposed to be on the same page of the unified state-sponsored textbook across 12-time zones. learning writing involved memorization of the grammar rules, a lot of dictation, some text summarizing, and some essay writing with the predictable endpoints – never self-expression. when i was a schoolteacher in the mid-1980s, there was a “big scandal” when one of high school students wrote in his exit exam essay that his favorite hero was napoleon rather than an officially canonized communist revolutionary martyr, as it was expected from him. soviet students were expected to look the same, to act the same, and to think the same. the school required the agentic consciousness. of course, in reality it did not always happen. at times, the normative homogenizing pressures were counteracted and actively resisted by the students’ performative consciousness, by ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc22 students’ (and at times by teachers’) underground consciousness of resistance, and by students’ camaraderie consciousness that i am going to describe and discuss in this section. let me contextualize and exemplify the points above through analysis of my second-grade classroom (see the photo below): in the photo, you see my 2nd grade classroom of moscow school in 1969. students are 8-9 years old. there were 48 students in the classroom. you can see only 45 students on the photo, three students were absent on the day of taking the picture. because of the lack of desks, it was not uncommon for three students sitting at two-student desks. you can see three students sitting at one desk on the right row at the third desk. not all moscow schools were crowded as this one but it was not untypical school at this time as far as i know. in the soviet union, elementary, middle and high schools were located in one building and were placed under unified school administration. because of shortage of space some schools, like mine, were operating in two shifts. for example, in the school depicted on the photo, students from 1st and 5-10th grades attended school in the first shift starting at 8:30 am and ending about 2:30pm (depending on grade and number of lessons). students from 2nd to 4th grades attended school in the second shift starting at 3:30 pm and ending about 7:30pm or later. students' desk placement in the classroom was the teacher's careful consideration. the teacher tried to tightly control the classroom to minimize unsanctioned communication among the students. friends were not allowed to sit closer than at least one desk in between them. in the classroom above, friends were sitting at least two desks apart. you may notice that boys and girls were placed in the "checker" order again picture 3. my second-grade classroom, moscow, 1969 (photo from my personal archive) ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc23 to minimize same-gender contacts among the students. on average, there were rather hostile relations among boys and girls, supported by the teachers’ constant reminders of the contrasts and promotion of competitions between boys and girls (e.g., reprimanding a girl, “dorokhova, why are you so clumsy, like a boy, in your cursive writing?!” – soviet teachers addressed students by their last names; verbal, physical, and sexual harassment among students was common until high school, especially for girls who did not have a strong protective peer and sibling networks). the most problematic students (from the teacher point of view) were placed at the first desks (e.g., ones that smiled on the photo). hands were supposed to be on the desk for the entire school day as you see (unless raised by the straight angle elbow to volunteer an answer). on the desks, students had to have a textbook, the report book ("dnevnik") where the teacher put current grades and notes for parents, a notebook, and a pen. there were many other types of competitions that were promoted in soviet schools that were often called “socialist competition”, which was often but not always gendered, the [soviet pedagogical] manual begins with instructions for the teacher standing before the class on the first day of school: it is not difficult to see that a direct approach to the class with the command, “all sit straight,” often doesn’t bring the desired effect since a demand in this form does not reach the sensibilities of the pupils and does not activate them. in order to “reach the sensibilities of the pupils” and “activate them” according to principles of socialist competition, the teacher should say, “let’s see which row can sit the straightest” (silberman, 1971, p. 129) the class was divided onto several "little stars" with some formal structure set by the teacher. almost all the 2nd graders (but not all) belonged to the children of october communist organization (you can see little pins on the students in the form of star with a picture of young lenin in the center). forced collectivism, forced voluntarism, forced enthusiasm, and self-sacrifice in the name of a common good were a birthmark of the totalitarian socialist soviet society, leading among other things to the agentic consciousness. these totalitarian ideologies highly promoted in soviet school socialized the children in fulfilling the will of other people automatically without questioning it, often overruling the children’s own reluctance or concerns. personal inclinations were intentionally suppressed. for example, all students (and adults) were supposed to engage in the “communal volunteer work/burden” (общественная работа, общественная нагрузка), which was mandatory despite its proclaimed voluntary nature. initially, young elementary children were very enthusiastic about engagement in the communal “voluntary-mandatory” (добровольно-принудительная, a mock contradictory term informally and carnivalistically used in the ussr) work. thus, i remember that in the first grade, my classmate and desk mate friend who was a girl and i decided to surprise our beloved teacher and our classmate by cleaning our classroom, in such a way that “cleanness would shine.” our parents found us at 9pm in the very messy classroom because our first stage of cleaning that somehow we did not pass for all the time was to expose the existing dirt and rubbish before cleaning it. my friend and i spent more time in dreaming about how our teacher and peers would appreciate our job than in actual cleaning. our anxious, upset, and tired parents quickly cleaned the mess we created and escorted us home. nobody praised for our “community work” or even noticed it. with time we became less and less enthusiastic and then even cynical about the community voluntary-mandatory work. the ethic of the community work reflected deep soviet conviction that an individual had to sacrifice his/her pleasure, well-being, or even life for the good of the society. pursuit of self-inflicted sacrificial suffering rather than happiness (cf. the us constitution) was the right and obligation of all soviet citizen. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc24 my wife still remembers being told by her first grade teacher, “ryzhykh25, who said that you would be happy?!” thus, the assigned communal work must be unpleasant for a student by the ideological agentic design. for example, if a student liked to draw or to write, he or she would not probably be assigned by the teacher to do a classroom wall newspaper26. this theme was very strong in soviet movies and stories for children and adults. tragic end rather than happy end was the norm, “the hero has died but his cause will prevail.” somehow, the contradiction between self-inflicted sacrificial suffering of each and happiness of all – an officially proclaimed goal of a communist society – was not registered in the official soviet ideology and apparently among many soviet people. the classroom on the photo above was ethnically diverse consisting mainly of russians but also ukrainians, tatars, poles, and jews. minority children were often verbally and physically harassed and abused by other kids (including other minority students). some parents told children to distrust and to stay away from minority kids (e.g., "don't play with them!" "tatars are thieves and dirty," "jews are cunning and treacherous") as i described in the section above. parents of the students were either workers or college graduates (e.g., engineers). there was no much visible division among the children based on parents' education or type of their work, however, looking back i have reflected that fuzzy social class divisions might be evident in some older students’ friendships (a systematic study is needed). all soviet students of my childhood wore uniforms (different for boys and girls). the school uniforms seem to reflect the societal aspiration of the children’s future. the first soviet uniforms appeared only in 1948 mostly copying tsarist school uniforms: soldier-like uniform for boys and maid-servant-like uniform for girls. during khrushchev’s era of the late 1950s – the early 1960s, the school uniform changed especially for boys, probably reflecting a change of official societal expectation for men – the school uniform for boys became more worker/laborer-like. yet, in the mid-1970s, during brezhnev’s era, the school uniform changed again, especially for boys to become more bureaucrat-like. arguably, soviet school uniform represented the agentic standardization of the future soviet citizens as the communist party wanted to see them (see the picture on the next page). the agentic state was promoted both by the vertical hierarchies coming from our teachers and school administration and by the horizontal peer culture. these two sources of the agentic state were often (but not always) at odds with each other. the relationship between the teachers and students varied in soviet schools but with older grades, it grew more and more distrustful. the teacher on the first photo was considered by the students (us) as “stern but fair27.” despite official prohibition of corporeal punishment by the soviet law, he beat us with a steel metal or wooden ruler. he demanded our unconditional obedience (i.e., the agentic state) in exchange for his genuine care of us. when we transgressed his rules, we were supposed to stretch our hand palm up and he would hit us a few times by the ruler: it was painful but he did it without anger or sadism (as some other teachers did, who verbally or psychologically tried to abuse us). he served as a soviet soldier during the wwii and had a severe concussion. he came from a peasant family and was proud to get higher education (you can see a college lapel pin, which was unusual among our urban college-graduate teachers). when he intercepted a note between two boys involving lyrics from 25 my wife maiden last name. soviet teachers referred students by their last names. probably, because of that students often did not know their peers’ first names and also referred their peers by their last names until they became very close friends. 26 cf., “’public benefit’ was exclusively defined as ideology-motivated activities. for a long time, i was handling the day-to-day running of the leningrad (now st. petersburg) mathematical society, a public organization dedicated to the advancement of science and independent of leningrad university. according to rational thinking, this should be called public service; however, a university official told me: ‘how can it be public service if, in fact, you enjoy it?’” (vershik, 2005, p. 166). 27 ironically, this was people’s qualifiers for stalin. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc25 picture 4. school uniform in tsarist schools before 1917 (http://dubikvit.livejournal.com/57103.html) picture 5. stalinist school uniform for pioneers in the late 1940s – the early 1950s, a communist organization for children (http://dubikvit.livejournal.com/57103.html) picture 6. khrushchev’s era school uniform of the early 1960s (http://dubikvit.livejournal.com/57103.html) picture 7. brezhnev’s era school uniform of the late 1970s, the beginning of the 1980s (http://dubikvit.livejournal.com/57103.html) ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc26 a song by then famous semi-underground soviet bard and actor vladimir vysotsky28, he thoroughly searched our pockets, desks, and bags and visited homes of students’ who had “anti-soviet lyrics” (including me) to talk to, reprimand, and threaten their parents (including my family). at the same time, he pedagogically advocated for me, strongly arguing against my retention in the 3rd grade – i could not read and barely could write because of my then-unidentified dyslexia. the teacher correctly argued that i would eventually overgrow this problem and my math learning was outstanding. unlike some other teachers, he never involved the school administration in our problems and tried to be our advocate when we were in trouble with it. also, i do not remember him exhibiting nationalism, nationalist favoritism or prejudices, in contrast to some other teachers. it seems to me a part of the soviet school unintended hidden curriculum was to teach students’ animosity to at least some of their teachers as resistance to agentic imposition of the vertical authority of hierarchy. i have noticed that when soviet school alumni meet, one of the popular topics is often a collective resistance, badgering, or even active humiliation of hated and unloved teachers. usually, reasons for students’ collective attacks on their teachers could be the teachers’ dullness, feeblemindedness, injustice, bad temper, insensitivity, poor pedagogical quality, being boring, ill-intended, prejudiced, and so on perceived and/or experienced by the students. in my personal recollection, two of my high school teachers were special targets of our collective attacks. first was the teacher of civil defense. despite his seriously looking uniform of a military officer (a major), he was pretty harmless, but perceived by us as rather stupid, dull, boring, and pedagogically inept. he delivered rather plain lectures about “american imperialists and militarists” and constantly threatened us with the nuclear holocaust. being math and science savvy in our math specialized high school, we entertained ourselves by asking him technical and scientific questions, on which he did not know answers but did not want to admit it and provided us with ideological clichés that made us laugh. but we also made more serious pranks on him. once, my male classmate brought a clock alarm and hid it under the teacher’s desk. at the beginning of a regular boring lesson, we informed the teacher that american imperialists placed a bomb in our class. of course, he did not believe us. at some point of the lesson, we started counting backward from ten to zero, publicly announcing the explosion. but nothing happened (except our collective laughter). in ten minutes, we repeated the performance but this time the clock alarm went on. the teacher was rather scared as we theatrically and cruelly build the cathartic moment. on another occasion, some of my classmates launched a self-made black-powder jet rocket in his class. the rocket did not get up but fiercely danced on the floor exhorting huge stream of black smoke. the civil defense teacher tried to put it down by stepping on the rocket, which was not easy because the rocket constantly and unpredictably moved. when he managed to step down on the rocket, it moved up with new fury after he raised his foot off of it because in contrast to a typical fire, black power produced oxygen while burning and could not be extinguished when its access to external air was eliminated. we all knew that fact and the teacher’s helplessness – interpreted as stupidity – entertained us a lot that day. we laughed to our tears, although some girls in our class thought that it was too much humiliation and they had pity at the teacher, until he went to complain to the school administration and their compassion evaporated. in contrast to the civil defense teacher, the biology teacher was mean and ill-intended in addition to being pedagogically inept, boring, and not very knowledgeable about biology. she retaliated against students who knew biology better than her and promised to block their entrance to colleges by giving poor grade marks on the biology exit exam. our counter-attacks were swift, creative, and cruel. i remember my classmate hiding behind the window curtain and booing time-to-time after we announced to the teacher that there was a ghost in our class. the poor teacher tried to find out who made the boo noise but she could not figure it out constantly blaming innocent students. she called our homeroom teacher (whom we respected) but the boos seized when our homeroom teacher was there and we pretended that we never heard the 28 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/vladimir_vysotsky ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc27 noise implying to our home teacher that the biology teacher lost her mind. on another occasion, we forced the biology teacher to dance after placing potassium iodine on the floor – when potassium iodine got dry it made popup explosion noises. the biology teacher liked to move during her lecture and popping sounds followed her. of course, we were often punished for our teacher-humiliation pranks by the school administration. but we had the unwritten 3n rule: never report on classmates who made a prank; never reveal his/her name under school administration interrogations; and never blame the prank ring-leader for a collective punishment however harsh it was. reporting to the authority was a strong social taboo that was probably deeply rooted in the soviet historical memory of the stalinist purges. when i became a soviet schoolteacher myself, i realized that many soviet teachers knew about this social taboo among students and supported it. i remember talking with my young female colleague – an elementary school teacher – during a recess, when her 3rd grade student came to her to complain at a classmate who violated the teacher’s rules. my colleague apologized to me and left for a while to punish the rule offender. when she came back, she told me that she would “strike back” at this “little stoolpigeon” («стукачок»29), the child who made the reporting, as well later on. when i asked her why she would do that, she replied, “today this little jerk reported on his classmate – tomorrow he will report on me. he needs to be taught a lesson.” the historic memory of the stalinist purges, where a neighbor reported on a neighbor, a friend on a friend, children on parents, and so on seemed to become imprinted in soviet educators and students. when my son, who grew up in the us, visited my college in russia with me in 2002, he was shocked how russian college students openly prepared for a collective cheating on their exam, ignoring us, strangers, passing by. my son was surprised that the students were not afraid of us who might report on them to the authority. this idea never crossed my former soviet mind, as it was culturally and historically unthinkable. the student solidarity against teachers as the authority figures even in the context of good relationship with teachers was quite strong during my school years. when i was in 7th grade i had a very good math teacher. she organized an afterschool math circle for students (matusov, 2017; shifman, 2005), like me, who were interested in math. she nurtured our math interests and encouraged us to participate in local math olympics, which eventually led me to apply to a math specialized high school. once she caught my classmate who was copying my homework just before our math class. after the class, she asked me to stay to talk with her. she told that it was good that i was trying to help my classmate in math because, according to her, it was a duty of all of us, more knowledgeable people, to help less knowledgeable. however, what i did was not help but counter-help. it was counter-help because copied homework would have misled her, my classmate’s teacher, thinking that the classmate was capable and knowledgeable of the material while he was not. she told me that to be loyal to my classmate was to be genuinely helpful to him, which in this particular case was to teach him math. she asked me, “did you offer tutoring him?” i did not. she said that i should genuinely help him and her, as his teacher. i promised to do that. i came to my classmate to offer my math tutoring help. he looked at me with surprise and distrust and replied, “fuck off!” i was thinking of whether i should continue letting him copy my math homework or not and after some hesitation, i decided i would. my then decision was based on four considerations. first, student solidarity was more important than student-teacher relations were. second, genuine help should be defined by the person who may receive the help (i.e., my classmates) and not providers of help (me) or outsiders (my math teacher). third, i was concerned that my teacher might abuse our good relations and her welcomed help to me to do her “teacher job.” fourth, i wanted to preserve good relations with my classmates by being helpful to them on their own terms. 29 this russian word literally means “little knocker”. “to knock” is a russian slang word meaning, “to report on others to the authorities.” ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc28 like fights against teachers, academic cheating was another popular theme story among soviet school alumni. academic cheating was viewed by the students as honorable. it was collective, and widespread in soviet schools and often involved a cat-and-mouse game between teachers and students. soviet students expected teachers to try to catch cheating and punish cheaters if the teachers cared about their job. soviet teachers knew that cheating was omnipresent. some soviet teachers had an illusion that they made cheating impossible but, in my view, it was just that – an illusion. as a physics teacher myself later on, i left the class for my lab during tests i was giving to my students. i could observe the class through the reflection of protective glass on the class clock hanging on the classroom wall. as far as i knew, none of my students realized that. i punished only “obvious and arrogant” cheaters, who cheated openly without trying to hide or copied the text word-by-word from the textbook. i considered cheating a somewhat useful learning activity when students might read the academic text for the first (and often the last) time. however, if i stopped punishing obvious cases, my students might start thinking that i did not care about teaching my dear subject – physics. once, i had a 10th-grade student who “obviously” cheated by copying text from physics textbook word-by-word, but observing his behavior through the classroom clock, i could not figure out how he did it. i tracked his eyes’ look while he was copying from his textbook but there was no textbook there. finally, i surrendered – i called him to my physics lab and told him, “look, i know that you copy the textbook but i don’t know how you do that. i’ll give you b for the test if you tell me your trick.” he agreed and showed a clever periscope that he built out of two hidden mirrors. since it was an optics test, i gave him a for his ingenuity and his practical application of optics. both he and i proudly but secretly shared this incident among our peers: he with his trusted classmates and i with my trusted colleagues. while in the us schools, academic cheating is often viewed as dishonor, in soviet schools it, especially creative and ingenious “impossible” cheating, was viewed by students (and even by many teachers informally) as a badge of honor. segregated by the student oppositional solidarity to (adult) authority, students’ relationships varied from neutral civility, to deep friendships, to open hostilities, to sexual harassment30, to bullying, to the agentic state of peer pressure, and so on. as far as i remember, cliques, as self-sustained isolated subgroups based on exclusivity that are widespread in the us, were unknown in soviet schools. it is probably because of cohort, school-level integrated, smaller soviet schools. soviet students spent with each other their formative years attending all classes together, having the same teachers, and participating in the same school events. even enemies knew and connected to each through a network of the other classmates: they knew more or less what was going on in each other lives. the total exclusivity was difficult, unless for some reason a student was ostracized by the near entire class and became a scapegoat (which happened with some marginalized students). in case of student-student conflicts and abuse, many soviet parents advised their children to learn how to stand their ground and fight back (“дать сдачи”31) – engaging the school authority in a conflict was a social taboo for many soviet parents as well (unless it was a very extreme case). being physically not very strong, i learned to stand my ground by never giving in to the demands of bullies even when threatened to be beaten by them. in middle and high school, bullying of male students often involved money racketeering. my rule was never to give money to a racketeering bully because if you did it once there would be no end to the racket (graeber, 2014). when i joined a new high school, i was kicked in my guts by a bully (who was not form my class and was older than me) for refusing to give him 10 kopecks (probably about $1 of buying power back then). after that he left me alone. at some point, my and his social networks crossed. once he needed a few kopeks and i freely offered my money to him, as 30 as far as i can remember, the issues of diverse sexual orientation only registered my consciousness in my late teens mostly as slurs. homosexuality was considered a crime in the ussr and was punished by hard prison labor. 31 literally, “to give change back” in russian. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc29 my “friend”. next day his racket re-emerged, i refused, and he had32 to beat me again. since then i never offered money to him and never considered him as a part of my social network. however, this was never accurate as our overlapping social networks still interacted – i knew that some of our peers in our shared social networks communicated to the bully to leave me alone, which he did. soviet student peer culture contributed both to promoting and to resisting to the agentic consciousness. it promoted the agentic consciousness by providing the normative others who constantly externally and internally monitor and sanction the “deviants” as it was portrayed in the russian musical “stilyagi.” thus, i remember that as college male students we had to go to military camp after our 4th year of college in summer, before the last year. we lived in tents on a military base near a big wild flower field. a friend of mine got grass allergy: he could not sleep, coughed and had high fever. it took me a few days to force the military administration to let him leave the camp earlier. meanwhile, our platoon was late for a breakfast because of him. an officer punished all our platoon because of that (despite the fact that i explained the reason to the officer) – a collective punishment, fostering agentic consciousness, was common in soviet institutions. to my big surprised our peers were angry at my sick friend and not at the officer, who punished them. a few days before, our platoon lost “dinner privilege” for singing out aloud an obscene song while marching and it was ok for them to be punished but not to be punished for their sick peer. in soviet colleges based on a cohort system, students spent all their classes, all their parties, all their tests together. my friend was highly liked and respected by his peers. they had disliked the officer whom they called “an asshole.” and nevertheless, they were mad at their sick comrade for losing their breakfast and became the extension of the institution in their agentic state. however, at the same time, the soviet peer culture created resistance to the authorities through “good laugh” (willis, 1981) and cheating. in the next section, i will turn to consider this peer culture in details and i will argue that it promoted another type of non-political consciousness in the ussr. free-range soviet childhood and horizontal socialism: the camaraderie consciousness let me start this section with describing free-range33 soviet childhood and then move to description and analysis of peer culture, its socialist relations, and another type of consciousness that i call “the camaraderie consciousness.” in my elementary school age, my favorite imaginary play was exploration of an unfamiliar land of my neighborhood. the challenge was to go to an unfamiliar territory, explore it for “interesting things” and predictably come back, which was rather a challenge for me at times (3-11-year old). i especially liked to do it during frequent winter snowstorms in moscow winters, carrying a stick and imagining myself an explorer of a new, undiscovered, land, overcoming the burden of the nasty weather. of course, my parents did not allow that. they set up a range of my allowed-to-go territory around our house. but as far as i remember my outside life was never supervised by adults and i could go and do wherever and whatever i wished. i knew that i needed to be back home on our courtyard at certain time and i tried to be there then. but it did not always work. thus, even when i was three i went to a local furniture store to look for a new bed from myself. i overheard my parents discussing a need to buy a new bed for me and i decided to check for it by myself. my parents caught me on my way back to home. i miscalculated the time when they came back from work. my older brother, who was 10 at that time, was supposed to look after me but he was busy playing with his 32 a soviet school bully involved in maintaining his reputation among other kids and could not leave resistance to their money racket without any punishment. punishing and terrorizing the resistant weak they saved on violence from challenging their informal semicriminal authority. 33 i barrowed the term “free-range childhood” from appleton and skenazy (see appleton, 2002; skenazy, 2009). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc30 peers as usual. when my parents found me, they looked scared. we lived in a long 5-story building along with two other similar buildings, creating a letter c and, thus, an internal courtyard where i was allowed to stay. the three buildings belonged my father’s factory job. many people living in these buildings worked together and knew each other. when my parents were looking for me, someone from my dad’s work told them that they saw me in the furniture store. my parents rushed there only to find the 3-year old me walking back, having hands in my coat pocket, and looking very important. i knew that i transgressed my parents’ rules, i was faulty, and i expected a punishment. on the way back, while being scolded by my parents, i seriously asked my dad, “are you going to beat me with your belt?” he looked at me with surprised and said, “yes.” i was scared and proud. my dad had never beat me before in any way. but he beat my 10-year old brother with his pant belt to discipline him. when we came home, i pulled down my pants and underwear and laid down on a sofa preparing for the execution. my dad took his belt and very gently, almost symbolically hit me several times. i pretended to be hurt but “stoically” did not cry. after this mature discipline procedure that i took as my rite of passage, i ran to my older brother bragging to him about my bravery and accusing him of being a sissy because he often cried after being beaten up by my dad for his transgressions. this was usually at times when he, my older brother, really beat and hurt me, and i was only saved by my parents…. after this incident, my dad stopped using any corporeal discipline on my brother (and, of course, on me). my sense is that around the early 1960s, something happened in the soviet parenting culture in the intelligentsia34 class and, especially, in jewish moscow intelligentsia, and the parents stopped using corporeal discipline for their misbehaving children35. later, some of my less lucky peers envied me for that. so far, i do not know what happened around that time and why and how widespread was that phenomenon of stopping using corporeal punishment by soviet (jewish?) intelligentsia parents, but it was true for some of my peers from intelligentsia families. back to my elementary school days of an imaginary explorer. my exploration and colonization of more and more remote areas was gradual and methodical. i was searching for unknown “interesting things” varying from radio parts to live bugs or unusual plants. state garages, enterprises, factories, railroad depots, railroad tracks, construction sites, parks, water pounds and, yes, even garbage cans were sources of my potential treasure. i brought some “treasure” to home (including, for example, a sick pigeon suffering from diarrhea – it died on our balcony) but i meticulously hid some other “treasure” outside knowing well that it would never be allowed in by my parents. still, i smuggled some other “treasure” in and hide it at home without my parents’ permission. with multi-age kid gangs from my building and the surrounding buildings, my exploration of adjunct territories and even remote districts of moscow was rapid, purposeful, and more “secure” – i.e., i did not need to worry about how to come back reliably on time as older peers guided younger peers. we traveled on buses, often without pay (“зайцем” – i.e., like a hiding bunny) to watch amazingly colorful and mind-blowing japanese animations to cinema theaters located in other districts of moscow. we went to a big water pond for fishing or mock fights on self-made rafts (a rather dangerous game as i look at it now36). 34 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/intelligentsia 35 american serial “mad men” nicely portrayed a similar parental dilemma of stopping corporeal punishment of their children in american middle-class families around the same time. 36 other dangerous playful activities involved putting nails – as big as possible -on the railroad trails so a passing train would make “swords” out of them. getting sulphur from a railroad – dropped from passing trainloads – and burning it. playing with liquid metal balls of mercury from a broken thermometer. making gun powder. making various guns with real striking power. blowing up carbide. playing with knives. smoking paper, tea leaves, and tobacco, and so on http://supercoolpics.com/samye-nebezopasnye-veshhikotorymi-razvlekalis-deti-v-sssr/?fb_ref=3d8f978964de48449a7778d88583674a-facebook ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc31 picture 8. we often played a game called "knives.” we drew a circle divided equally among the number of participants. each stood on his land. then the participant stuck a knife in the standing portion of the enemy and cut off a piece of his land as much as he could get while staying on his own territory. if one’s knife was "wounded" (was not stuck or missed the other’s territory) – the move was transferred to the next participant. and by the same rules we had all the time to stand on their own land as long as you can. according to other rules, one could be outside, but in the event of a catastrophic reduction in your area, the enemy offered you three seconds to stand on it. if you cannot resist – you are eliminated from the game. the stand can be even one foot on tiptoe the main hold for three seconds. http://supercoolpics.com/samyenebezopasnye-veshhi-kotorymi-razvlekalis-deti-v-sssr/?fb_ref=3d8f978964de48449a7778d88583674a-facebook we went to numerous construction sites for play and search for valuable materials like lead, which could be easily melted and given a desired artistic or pragmatic form (e.g., a skull, a puck, a ball), or colorful plastic twisted wires used for electrical isolation (it could be pricked in a cloth and then melted with a match flame to create very beautiful forms), and so on. once a construction worker caught me (9-year old), grabbed my arm and dragged me out the site to bring me to a local police station. on the way to the police, i tried to free myself and escape but it was in vain. my peers followed us in distance, verbally assaulting the construction worker and demanding my freedom. suddenly, i changed my strategy. i stopped trying to free myself, looked straight at the worker eyes and said, “dear uncle, forgive the asshole” (“дяденька, прости засранца37”). the worker stopped with surprise, looked at me, and started laughing. he asked for my word not to get to a construction site again, explained to me how dangerous it was for all and especially for little kids like me, and let me go. my peers were shocked (they could not hear my conversation with the worker) and i gained a lot of respect from them for making the adult do what i wanted him to do. with some initial hesitation, i returned back to constructions sides in a few weeks through peer pressure. 37 literally, “forgive this little pooper” in russian ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc32 older kids (i.e., older preteens and especially teens) in our loose and variable “gangs” had responsibility to physically protect “their own” younger kids from physical and verbal abuse of remote kid “gangs,” protect younger and weaker kids inside their own gang, and install justice and order in their “gang.” as far as i remember, i was never abused by older kids in my local “gang.” i only remember their very gentle and brotherly relationship to me and other kids. i do not remember any ethnic slurs directed at me or my local peers. one of the older boys and his mother gave me the old skates he grew out of, and the whole gang in our yard took responsibility to teach me skating at the self-made courtyard skating ring. they were very patient, supportive and gentle with my mistakes, inabilities, and provided me with their guidance for several days until i mastered the skating skill. any attempt to calculate favors, which i can hear in middle class cultures in the us (e.g., “now i owe you big”), were actively discouraged in the peer camaraderie culture of my soviet youth. peers helped peers because they were friends and not because they expected a return of the favor in the future (graeber, 2014). the absence of important institutions (e.g., banks), lack of services, poor services, deficits of goods in the soviet union promoted these networks of camaraderie. people could “travel” in these networks by getting help (e.g., borrowing money, getting medicine, getting deficit goods) even from strangers, who were friends of friends38. breaking promises were rare because the natural punishment was ostracism from the camaraderie networks, which could be a severe punishment leading to injuries and even death (e.g., being left good adequate medical assistance). in the us, some working class community may have these camaraderie networks (lareau, 2003) and camaraderie relationships (graeber, 2014)39 but their extent and power seem to me much more limited than it was in the soviet union. i had a special position in the local gang. being a dyslexic, i was a “talented” improvisational story and joketeller (including sexual and vulgar ones), creatively modifying movies, jokes, and stories i heard and watched. i could make good laugh out of my lads (cf. willis, 1981) and was valued and respected for that. i added my own situational “wisdom” and morals of the current events important for my audience and creatively played with intonations. i was also a very good “german nazi soldier” when we played in the wwii – a very popular boy game of my days – because i could speak “german” fluently – i.e., i could produce unintelligent “german”-sounded gibberish in an aggressive way40. my same-age peers were another story. i was physically weaker than many of my same-age peers were and my “talents” were my protections from my peers’ abuse. i had a various alliances and friendships usually, but not always, with ethnically non-russian peers and i had enemies – kids who tried systematically verbally and physically to abuse my friends and me, often on ethnic grounds but not only (they were mostly, but not always, ethnically russian). of course, we paid them back with the same counter-abuse and aggression and we also used ethnic slurs against them. often, we were stronger verbally but weaker physically (and numerically). when an enemy boy did not have his friends around, to hang out and play with, he begged us to join our group. after some humiliation and his promises not to abuse us anymore, he 38 when i arrived in the us, i asked to borrow a few hundred of dollars from an american university colleague to buy an old used car, which was so necessary there. i was shocked that my colleague advised me to go a bank and that she was upset with me that i “forced her to refuse.” i was upset too, because i considered her a friend and her reply was culturally inappropriate for my soviet camaraderie culture. 39 in his 2014 book, david graeber called it a “communist relationship” based on the communist principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” promoted (but not invented) by karl marx https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/from_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_need. i respectfully disagree with david graeber (and karl marx) because the camaraderie relationship is not based on “from each according to his ability” in this relationship and network – nobody demands abilities from others in camaraderie – rather people contribute to their friends, neighbors, family members by whatever they can offer or have taking care of each other’s needs. 40 however, i was not happy about this role because at the end of any wwii game, i was half-playfully half-seriously beaten as a german nazi soldier. when i protested to play a german nazi soldier – i wanted to be a russian soviet soldier to play, the most desirable-respectful play role, – my peers refused arguing that i had “perfect german” to speak. they also mentioned that i could abuse them, playing russian soviet soldiers, always at the beginning of the play (which was a dangerous and stupid move because i would be triple beaten by them as a revenge at the end of the play). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc33 would be allowed to join us only to break his word when his friends appeared. we could not do the same (despite a temptation) because we knew that we would never be let in. later, in our late 40s, via email, a former russian enemy of mine apologized for his anti-semitic abuse of me that, as he said, he learned from his mother. the irony was that not only he married a jewish woman but also worked in one of hassidic jewish private schools in moscow, while remaining a big enthusiast of russian and slavic traditions, songs, and folklore. the soviet mythological ideology penetrated our free-range soviet childhood and playworld as well: we lived in constant anticipation of coming war. thus, when i was 10 in 1970, all my peers – older and younger -and i were sure that in there would a war with china in 1975. we tried to prepare ourselves by learning how to jump over fences and by playing various games of withstanding suffering. for example, we competed on how long each of us could hold a hand in extremely hot or cold water. we wanted to become a pioneer-hero41 – young children, members of communist youth organization, of the past who fought nazi german soldiers, white guard troops42, foreign spies, and kulaks43. i do not remember how we decided that the war with china would start in 1975 – but we all were sure that it was well known fact44. 41 in school and at home, we read books about pioneer-heroes. 42 anti-communist military force during russian civil war, 1918-1921, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/white_movement. 43 well-to-do peasant. “according to the political theory of marxism–leninism of the early 20th century, the kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants. vladimir ilyich lenin [the first communist leader of the ussr] described them as ‘bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine.’ marxism–leninism had intended a revolution to liberate poor peasants and farm laborers alongside the proletariat (urban and industrial workers). in addition, the planned economy of soviet bolshevism required the collectivisation of farms and land to allow industrialisation or conversion to large-scale agricultural production. in practice, government officials violently seized kulak farms and murdered resisters; others were deported to labor camps” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kulak. 44 in march of 1969, there was a sino-soviet border conflict that probably shaped our child mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sinosoviet_border_conflict. picture 9. book cover about a pioneer-hero valya kotik written by nadzhafov for elementary school children ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc34 at the same time – all western things – ball pens, toys, foreign coins, chewing gum, pins, dress – were objects of admiration and envy – the possessions by a very few lucky ones. i remember a boy from our 5-store house building where i lived brought a piece of american chewing gum (i did not know where he got it). we all begged him to give us a small piece of it. he generously shared it from his mouth and we all in line chewing the recycled gum with pleasure trying to imagine the taste of the original chewing gum. we knew that begging chewing gum and other western treasure from foreigner visitors was a political criminal act but we also knew that some kids did it. we heard stories of children being recruited by foreigners to become spies after they begged the foreigners for chewing gum and jeans and hung around hotels, wher soviet citizens were forbidden to visit. we had ambivalent feeling of moral disgust and envy/admiration of those kids. my boy playworld was centered on the issue of gaining personal power and escaping from power of others. for many years, my friends and i played in an imaginary feudal state where i was the emperor. we had our own money (“mazi” – abbreviation for the first letters of our last names – the kids who initially formed our imaginary state) that was backed with pieces of amber that i collected on the baltic sea, where i visited with my parents for a summer vacation. we had the map of our imaginary state based on the geographic counter maps that we got in school and a map of moscow that i “borrowed” from my parents without permission. later our state was involved in scientific enterprises such as building the time machine to move to pre-revolutionary russian tsarist empire in order to buy a ship ticket for the chatham islands near australia with its very mild weather around the year and no dangerous predators. for this project, we self-studied physics (the theory of relativity), geography, and history and collected old tsarist money. i wonder if many child fantasies of free travel were our tacit responses to the fact that we lived behind the iron curtain and could not freely travel beyond the soviet borders. we also “built” a “powerful” laser out of my film projector to control the world.45 this resulted in a huge explosion in my room when i tested the “laser” trying to cut my school building in half at night when nobody was in school (we lived on the fifth floor and windows of my room were opposed my “beloved” school). this fantasy was my rather clear response to an oppressive nature of soviet schooling. 45 this fantasy was based on a popular soviet science-fiction novel and then film “the hyperboloid of engineer garin” by alexey tolstoy, 1927. picture 10. my "beloved" school 145, on which i tried my "laser" to cut in half (photo is mine). i attended it from 1968 until 1974 ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc35 fortunately, miraculously i was not hurt – the lenses of the film projector were melted, the metal was twisted, the plasticine that used to cover all gaps in the “laser” was boiled and spread all over the ceiling and walls of my room. i did not tell to my parents what happened despite of multiple interrogations – i heroically kept silence “like a soviet captured partisan at a nazi-german interrogation,” as we often used to say. another “remont” (remodeling) of my room was due… my friends and i also built a machine to use the electrical field to subdue our bullies by sucking physical energy from them. my then tests on insects gathered inconclusive evidence about how effective was the machine. in pre-tween age, boys could play with girls and flexible alliances could be built. however, it quickly became a social peer taboo for tweens – preteens and early teens. our gangs run by older teen boys protected and respected girls in general: their girl-friends and their female friends of their girl-friends were even allowed in the gang. vulgar sexually loaded language, jokes and stories were not allowed in the presence of these older teen girls and younger boys were severely punished for violation of this unwritten rule. however, without the presence of these older teen girls, the culture of machismo, sexual slurs, bravado, sexual objectification of women and girls, glorification of sexual violence, pornography46, male sexual fantasies, and working-class language loaded with sexual innuendos were flourishing. at my home, my intelligentsia parents did not use non-normative language (beyond jokes that demanded that) but in my working-class peers’ homes, i visited, that language was often an everyday norm. in my preteen and early teen ages, the relationship to girls was openly hostile among my same age peers. mutual sexual verbal abuse between the genders was very common as well as physical abuse (as a part of her gender aggression a girl broke my arm although non-intentionally by suddenly pushing me from behind so i felt down with a bad luck). sex abuse and sexual harassment of girls by boys by violent touching and groping the girls’ private parts was common. however, it usually targeted some girls that had a “slutty” reputation justifying that “they wanted that or asked for that”, which was a pure lie as far as i could remember (livschiz, 2008). usually, the “slutty” girls were marginalized from girls’ networks and did not had powerful older boy protections (e.g., older boy gang leaders, powerful older brothers and so on). i did not hear about rape but i would not be surprised if it were some tragic unreported cases of it (livschiz, 2008). like probably many other boys, i personally was torn apart between my sympathy for the abused girls, my desire to fit to the boy macho culture, and excitement of abuse and sexual excitements and experimentation. although, on average, being a marginalized boy myself because of my non-russian, jewish, ethnicity, my physical weakness, and my intelligentsia class background, it was easier for me to side with the oppressed than with the oppressors – i, as a boy, tried more to protect girls and stopped the abuse than to join it. my parents noticed and commented to me (often with their disapproval) that i often hanged out and befriended with “unfit” kids: marginalized, loners, mentally challenged, dand f-students, and so on. at the same time, the gender segregated world of girls was mysterious for us, boys. thus, in fourth grade, i felt in love with a girl, who to my surprise replied with her friendship to me. but soon, i became perplexed as i liked to be near her but i did not know what we could do together. her girly fantasies and plays were boring for me and my boyish fantasies and plays did not appeal to her. our gendered and segregated worlds were very apart. our friendship and my romantic relationship to her (i did not know if she had any romantic relationship to me) were sexualized and vulgarized by my peers (my friends tried to respect me and did not participate) that embarrassed me. my parents commented that “look, he already had a girlfriend”, which both made my proud of my coming maturity and more unease at the same time. so, 46 for the first time, i faced pornography when i was 9-year old when older peers from my house building shared adult self-made pornographic black-and-white photos of adult people, males and females, in their late twenties and early thirties engaging in sex and mutual masturbation. i had no clue how my older peers got hands on these porno photos. of course, i was surrounded by pornograffiti from my early years (on walls of buildings and in public toilets, including in school), which contributed to my sex education, although, probably, highly inaccurate. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc36 in a few months i broke our friendship and stopped coming to her, calling her, and replying to her phone calls and invitations to play and hang out. the children multi-age world was completely impenetrable by the adults. adults tried to read clues and evidence of kids’ lives neglectfully left by the kids. however, through same and older peers/siblings’ guidance and apprenticeship the kids often quickly improved their hiding, masking, and lying skills. thus, my mom told me at my early elementary school age that she could see long distance through walls when i “unlawfully” ate chocolate candies or poured unwanted soup into a toilet bowl. i initially believed her. but my older brother taught me to cover poured soup in the toilet with detergent to avoid greasy spots on the water and not to throw candy wrappers into the kitchen garbage can so our mother would not notice my food abuse. we learned not to engage parents, neighbors, parents of our friends, teachers, and adult authorities in our interpersonal conflicts and pains and not to report on each other to them (despite obvious benefits of that at times). we learned to suffer silently and secretly from bullying, peer abuse, violence, peer ostracism, and even sexual abuse. the only legitimate adult protection was running into a visible proximity of familiar adults for silent observable protection – our perpetrators would not dare to abuse us in the presence of these adults. our community behind47 was our siblings, friends, gangs, peers, classmates, and neighborhood kids. i think this is how children’s powerful socialization into horizontal networks of informal support in opposition to the authorial hierarchies emerged in the soviet union. friendships and gangs were extremely egalitarian societies. these societies were open and not closed as youth cliques in the us because all children, even our personal enemies, scapegoats, and loners were engaged and connected into meta horizontal networks of support, loyalties, and alliances of friendships, gangs, former and current classmates, neighborhoods, siblings, families, children of family friends, and so on. sharing was unconditional and non-reciprocal, in a sense that it was not a calculated exchange, “i do a favor to you and you will obligated to do me a favor in the future.” any attempt to remind someone about past favors was a subject of disapproval and, if continued and insisted, a subject of peer sanction or even expulsion and ostracism. buddy generosity, relational unconditionality, incalculability and self-sacrificing for your buddy/friend as the most important social values ruled. it was “real socialism” that we knew… conclusion looking back on my own and my peers’ soviet upbringing and teaching, i have abstracted eight diverse types of consciousness – somewhat internally consistent types of subjectivity. this does not mean that all soviet people experienced all of these types of consciousness or that there were not circulated some other types of consciousness, unfamiliar to me or not discussed here48. furthermore, the described eight types of consciousness or even the phenomenon of the multiplicity of consciousnesses is not, in my view, necessarily the birthmark of the soviet socialist totalitarianism. i suspect – this is my plausible hypothesis – that a multiplicity of consciousness is probably common to all types of societies and political regimes. however, the described particular types of consciousness and their relationships with each other may characterize the soviet socialist (post)totalitarian society. the ubiquity of the five types of the political49 consciousness – critical, performative, fanatical, underground, and dissident – was expression 47 a community taking seriously and supportive a person’s voice (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009). 48 for example, a market consciousness of measured exchanges – measured exchanges of favors and goods – became increasing stronger with the soviet union coming to its collapse. another consciousness that the party-state constantly fought was a consciousness of authorial agency based on creativity and personal initiative and responsibility. 49 political in a narrow sense of actively addressing and replying to the official soviet political ideology. of course, the totalitarianism makes all consciousnesses and spheres of human activity politically-ideological regardless the inherent orientations of these spheres itself. in the stalinist ussr, such innocent, inherently apolitical, activities as a collection of post stamps or coins could suddenly become as a political crime (solzhenitsyn, 1974a). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc37 and reflection of totalitarianism, where the only legitimate power was the power of the party-state, where ideology is total, and where private sphere is subordinated to the public sphere. the following soviet joke nicely captured this political-ideological totality, “animals are in a prison cell discussing the reasons for their incarceration. fox stole a chicken. wolf killed a dog. bear reaped a calf. but rooster sits away from the rest and keeps silence. fox asks, ‘rooster, why have you been incarcerated? what for?’ rooster replies, ‘i’m not like you! you are common criminals but i’m a political prisoner. i peck a pioneer50 in his butt.’” in a country, where almost every deed was viewed as political, non-political types of consciousness – marginal, agentic, and camaraderie – were often also sucked into political orbits. thus, people who may too passionately complain to the authorities about a leak in their home roof might end up getting the same psychiatric treatment as political dissidents did51. i also want to touch briefly on the relationship between socialism and totalitarianism. can socialism at large exist without slipping down into totalitarianism (hayek, 1994)? in my investigation of multiple consciousness in my memoir, i found an oasis of “real” socialism outside of soviet totalitarianism in the soviet peer culture. it is probably not by chance that the soviet official greeting “tovarisch,” which lost its all original meaning in my time52, had come from a peer culture of camaraderie. the soviet party-state officialdom had rather ambivalent attitude toward this culture of real socialism. it accepted and encouraged the camaraderie peer socialist relations as an ideological ideal of its doublespeak, while fighting these relations as a “corruptive” and “anti-soviet” source of power outside of itself. similarly, the camaraderie consciousness seemed both to benefit and to suffer from the soviet socialist totalitarianism. thus, my question about a possibility of a full-scale socialism without totalitarianism remains open, based on my observation of the complicated relationship between them in the soviet union. besides the issue of possibility, the issue of desirability of the camaraderie consciousness at large is also open, if not problematic, because of its inherent resistance to diversity and its hidden pressure for conformity – i.e., peer pressure, camaraderie agentic state53. finally, i want to add a critical note about my investigation of children’s socialization into soviet multiple consciousness. it should be cautioned that i presented only one historical slice of it. there is a plausible hypothesis that the soviet union’s collapse of its totalitarian political regime was in high degree due to the fact that it could not ontogenetically reproduce itself through its incorporation of new generation: the totalitarian consciousness of performative and especially fanatical types of consciousness gave place to other types of consciousness – critical, underground, dissident – which overtook the new generations of soviet people. this interesting development hypothesis needs its further investigation. references appleton, m. (2002). a free range childhood: self-regulation at summerhill school. essex: gale centre publications,. arendt, h. (1966). the origins of totalitarianism (new ed.). new york,: harcourt. bakhtin, m. m. (1984). rabelais and his world (h. iswolsky, trans. 1st midland book ed.). bloomington: indiana university press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. m., & emerson, c. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 50 a member of communist youth soviet organization usually between ages of 9 and 14. 51 my aunt, a famous pediatric doctor, was a member of the moscow council (soviet) in the 1980s. she told me about this practice. 52 the russian word “tovarisch” used to mean “companion”, “friend” but in my time its meaning firmly belonged to the soviet officialdom as a reference to a member of the socialist society. interestingly, the root of this slavic word “tovar” means “commodity” and originally “tovarisch” meant a business partner. 53 thus, i ague, there were vertical agentic consciousness of unconditional surrender to the authority and horizontal agentic consciousness of unconditional surrender to peer and camaraderie. in my observations in the ussr, these two types of agentic consciousness could contradict and complement each other at times. ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.240 | vol. 6 (2018) sc38 bernholz, p. 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(2001). collected work (vol. 2). moscow, russia: vremya. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 8 miyazaki comment on groys’ essay (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:47 comment on groys’ essay “between stalin and dionysus: bakhtin's theory of the carnival” kiyotaka miyazaki waseda university, saitama, japan kiyotaka miyazaki is a professor at the faculty of human sciences, waseda university, japan. his research interest is to distill the views of dialogic learning from the knowledge of practice of japanese teachers and to make them encounter with theories of dialogism such as bakhtin, gadamer and other dialogic pedagogies. ��� groys’ arguments on the author this comment focuses on groys’ understanding, or misunderstanding of bakhtin’s polyphonic novel and, in particular, the polyphonic author. groys argued, on the one hand, that there is no author for bakhtin’s polyphonic novel as there can be no author inside of the polyphonic novel and there is, according to bakhtin, no one outside of the novel. he argued, on the other hand, that there is a superauthor outside of the polyphonic novel who controls all what happen in the novel. then, he compared the super-author to stalin, arguing that bakhtin’s view on polyphonic novel justifies the totalitarianism of stalin’s regime. groys’ view of the polyphonic author comes from his failure to grasp the unique characteristics of bakhtin’s polyphonic author who exists simultaneously in and out of the novel and has two roles. let me see more about groys’ argument in detail. groys wrote on bakhtin’s polyphonic novel and its author as follows: for bakhtin, each word is just a remark in the endless dialogue of everyone with everyone else: it is always originally passive, separated from the speaker, contains in itself the reduced voices of “others” – and this is also true about the author’s voice. not only does the word [i.e., discourse], as a material “body of the thought,” lack independence, autonomy and authenticity… (groys, db:2) groys says that each word is “passive” and “separated from the speaker” in the polyphonic novel. this argument might come from the fact that every word exists in relation to other words in the polyphonic novel. however, this fact does not mean that every word is reduced to the sum of all the other words, or the context. though every word exists in relation to other words and not independent in that sense, it does still have its autonomy and authenticity. so each word clashes with other words, but is not reduced to them. bakhtin wrote as follows: issn: 2325-3290 (online) comment on groys’ essay kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:48 [a] word directed toward its referential object [i.e., the topic] clashes with another's word within the very object itself. (bakhtin 1984 p.195) this is a simple case in which clashed words are just two that relate in the sense that both refer to the same object. in the polyphonic novel, the structure must be more complex, in which one word would clash with many other words which relate to the first word in various ways. it should be noted that words can clash with each other because they are not independent, and also because each word has its uniqueness, autonomy and authenticity. so, we cannot use the collective noun “people” to describe individuals in the polyphonic novel who speak these clashing words as groys did. a “polyphonic novel” transcends individual authorship and, therefore, is rooted, according to bakhtin, in carnival, which refutes all individualization…this means the destruction of the isolation, independence, and individuality of the word and the removal of the author’s rights to private discourse diffused in the general polyphony of the language, which belongs collectively to the “people” (groys, db:2). as for the author of the polyphonic novel, groys asserts two apparently contradictory arguments. on the one hand, he argues that there is no author for bakhtin’s polyphonic novel. such a novel, in fact, cannot even have an author, because an author should exist outside of the novel – which, according to bakhtin, is not allowed to anyone (groys, db:3). though groys says that bakhtin does not allow anyone to be outside of the polyphonic novel in this quote, he provides nothing to support his argument. i will show the readers that bakhtin argued, contrary to groys’ statement, that the author is both outside and inside of the polyphonic novel. either way, it should be noted that groys’ argument that the author must be outside of the novel would be based on the implicit assumption that there is no author inside of the polyphonic novel. for groys, there can be no one with the unique role such as an author inside of the novel as there is only “people”, a homogenous collective, in the novel. his line of arguments is: there cannot be an author inside of the novel, so, the author must be outside of the novel, and bakhtin said that there is no one outside of the novel, so consequently, there is no author at all for the polyphonic novel. contrary to this argument, groys says that there is the author outside of the novel, and this author is a super-author who directs the novel, as follows: the context of stalin is also supported by the fact that both the polyphonic novel and carnivalesque act, though being allegedly born in the people’s mind, are still directed, according to bakhtin, by a certain super-author – dostoyevsky or rabelais,…(groys, db:4) though groys’ two arguments seem to be contradictory, there is still a sort of consistency in his line of reasoning. groys cannot think that there is an author inside of the polyphonic novel, and bakhtin says, according to groys, there can be no one outside of the novel. consequently, there is no author at all for the polyphonic novel. however, provided that the novel is the product of someone, there must be someone who produced the novel: the author. groys believes that the author cannot exist either inside or outside of the novel. then, the author should be posited as the transcendental one who has no dialogical comment on groys’ essay kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:49 relations with the “people” in the novel. so, this author is characterized by groys not as just an “author,” but as the “super-author”. as the transcendental one, the super-author directs the “people” in the novel. bakhtin’s view on the author of polyphonic novel i think that groys’ arguments are based on his misunderstanding of bakhtin’s view on the author of the polyphonic novel. contrary to groys’ arguments, the author of the polyphonic novel is inside of the novel, and simultaneously is outside of the novel, not transcendentally but dialogically relating with the individuals in the novel. this feature, that is, the author plays two roles simultaneously, is the important characterization of the author by bakhtin. morson & emerson (1990) pointed out this feature clearly. the polyphonic author, in short, necessarily plays two roles in the work: he creates a world in which many disparate points of view enter into dialogue, and, in a quite distinct role, he himself participates in that dialogue. (morson, & emerson 1990, p.239) bakhtin himself describes these two roles as an organizer and a participant as the following quote shows. the entire work would have been constructed by him as a great dialogue, but one where the author acts as organizer and participant in the dialogue without retaining for himself the final word… (bakhtin 1984, p.72) the term “organizer” would be better than the term “creator” to describe the role played by the author outside of the novel, as the author outside of the novel does not create the world of novel transcendentally as groys’ super-author does, but organizes the novel by presenting some stimulating problems to the individuals in the novel and provoking them to generate their voices. bakhtin analyzed dostoevsky’s case, saying that dostoevsky presented the adventure plot to the individuals in the novel. in dostoevsky, the adventure plot is combined with the posing of profound and acute problems; and it is, in addition, placed wholly at the service of ideas. it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea and the man of the idea, that is, for testing the “man in man”. (bakhtin 1984, p. 108) the adventure plot provided by the author dostoevsky provokes the characters to generate new voices from them. the new voices are unique responses of the characters to the unexpected situations of the adventure plot. they must be new and unexpected to the author. this author, although he/she exists outside of the novel, has dialogic relations with characters. there is one more important way in which the polyphonic author relates with characters dialogically: listening to various possible voices of the characters. according to bakhtin, listening is another important way for dostoevsky to relate dialogically with his characters. dostoevsky possessed an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of his epoch, or, more precisely, for hearing his epoch as a great dialogue, for detecting in it not only individual voices, their dialogic interaction. he heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, comment on groys’ essay kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:50 the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, and ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future world views. (bakhtin 1984, p. 90) it should be noted that bakhtin emphasized that dostoevsky listened not only to the loud and already recognized voices, but also to latent, possible voices. he could listen even to voices whose speakers themselves had not yet noticed. dostoevsky as the author could bring out the voices which were not only new for dostoevsky but also for the speakers themselves. though bakhtin does not explain explicitly, listening would be used both for the author who is outside of the novel to organize it and the author who is inside of the novel and participates the dialogue with characters. so, bakhtin’s author of the polyphonic novel exists simultaneously both inside and outside of the novel. the author sometimes provokes the characters to generate new voices, and sometimes to listen to characters to bring out the new voices from them. the author is not the transcendental super-author who just direct the “people” in the novel, but a dialogic author who relates dialogically with the individual characters in the novel. lesson for the dialogic pedagogy groys’ failure to understand the unique feature of bakhtin’s polyphonic author is not irrelevant to the research of the dialogic pedagogy. in the dialogic pedagogy, the teacher should be given his/her rightful place in the dialogic classroom. i believe that bakhtin’s view on the author of the polyphonic novel is useful to characterize the place and work of the teacher in the dialogic classroom. the teacher who organizes the dialogic classroom can be compared to bakhtin’s author of the polyphonic novel (lensmire, 1997; miyazaki, 2013). i have been showing the effectiveness of the comparison between bakhtin’s polyphonic author and the dialogic teacher by examining the thoughts and the classroom lessons of the japanese dialogic pedagogy (miyazaki, 2010; miyazaki, 2013; matusov & miyazaki, 2014). in such classrooms, the teacher plays two roles. the teacher organizes the class as the arena on which students experience the dialogue with other students. simultaneously, the teacher participates in the dialogue with the students. within the teacher’s work to organize the class to be dialogic, it is most important to discover and present the questions on the learning contents that can challenge students to generate their new, unexpected voices. japanese practices show that such a question should be an authentic one in the sense that not only students but also the teacher doesn’t know their answers. this is a sort of the question miyazaki (2013) named an “unknown question”. teacher’s presentation of this type of question to students is comparable to the polyphonic author’s presentation of adventure plot to the characters of the novel. another work of the dialogic teacher is listening to students’ possible voices, which is also comparable to another work of bakhtin’s polyphonic author, that is, listening to the latent, not yet fully emerged voices of the characters. in the case of the teacher, most important listening is to discover questions in students’ utterances that are new and unexpected to the teacher and are latent for the students themselves. the teacher does listen to students’ questions in the dialogue in which the teacher herself participates. the teacher brings out the latent questions from students and makes them explicit to the students, and new dialogue develops from the new questions. as the discovered question is new to the teacher, it is another sort of an “unknown question”. comment on groys’ essay kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:51 thus, the dialogic teacher works as the author of the dialogic classroom, first, by discovering the new, authentic questions in the learning contents and presenting them to the students to organize the dialogic classrooms, and second, by listening the new questions in students, and giving them back to the students in the dialogue. the teacher exists, as bakhtin’s polyphonic author does, simultaneously both outside the dialogue as the organizer and inside the dialogue as the participant. dialogic teacher’s unique way of being is not well understood in studying the dialogic pedagogy. sometimes, the equality of the teacher and students in the classroom is emphasized too much so that dialogic teacher’s role as the author of the dialogic lesson is denied. it seems to me that the denial of the role of the author for the dialogic teacher derives from the failure to understand bakhtin’s characterization of the polyphonic author as in groys. matusov (2011), for example, denies the view on the dialogic teacher as bakhtin’s polyphonic author as follows: i respectfully disagree with my colleagues in dialogic pedagogy lensmire's (1997) and miyazaki's (in press) very interesting claims that in the authorial poly-phonic teaching the teachers author their students like dostoevsky authored his characters in his polyphonic novels (bakhtin, 1999). (matusov 2011, p. 40) he further argues that the teacher as the polyphonic author will impair the student’s agency. the parallel of authorial teaching with dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels in bakhtin’s interpretation can be dangerous as, in my view, it leads to unavoidable stifling, arresting, endpointing, and manipulating of the student’s agency. (matusov 2011, p. 40) however, there is a misunderstanding on bakhtin’s view of the polyphonic author behind his criticism. his statement cited below on the relations between the author and characters in the novel shows most typically his understanding, or misunderstanding of bakhtin’s view. [t]he characters in the literary artwork remain transparent to the authors who are their creators. (matusov 2011, p. 40) the view that the author creates the novel is rather common-sensual. it is needless to say that it is completely different to bakhtin’s understanding of the author of the polyphonic novel in which the author stimulates and listens to the characters. this “common-sensual” author is just a transcendental super-author groys assumes as she creates and controls all aspects of the novel. if this view on author is applied to the classroom, the teacher would be the super-teacher who control all the aspects of the students so that their agency will be lost as matusov describes. matusov’s criticism on the dialogic teacher as bakhtin’s polyphonic author can be made only because of his neglect of bakhtin’s unique characterization of the polyphonic author, as groys’ criticism of bakhtin is also based his misunderstanding of bakhtin’s view. matusov’s view on the dialogic teacher as the polyphonic author is not exceptional. though bakhtin’s dialogical theory is widely adapted in studying the classroom, his view on the dialogic author is rarely used to analyze the teacher in the classroom. this would be because bakhtin’s view on the polyphonic author is opposed to the common-sensual view on the author and difficult to understand. groys’ criticism of bakhtin is another instance of this difficulty. comment on groys’ essay kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2017.220 | vol. 5 (2017) db:52 references bakhtin, m. m. (1984) problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. matusov, e. (2011) authorial learning and teaching. in e. j. white & m. a. peters (eds.) bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. ny: peter lang. matusov, e., & miyazaki, k. (2014) dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 2, pp. 1-44. miyazaki, k. (2010) teacher as the imaginative learner: egan, saitou, and bakhtin. in k. egan & k. madej (eds.) engaging imagination and developing creativity in education. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing. miyazaki, k. (2013) from “unknown questions” begins a wonderful education: kyozai-kaishaku and the dialogic classroom. in k. egan, a. cant, & g. judson (eds.) wonder-full education: the centrality of wonder in teaching and learning across the curriculum. new york: routledge. morson, c. s., & emerson, c. (1990) mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaic. stanford, ca: stanford university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 322-article text-1594-1-9-20200913 (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa85 ethical dilemmas in field placements: the experiences of social work students in norway and possible implications for social work education heidi lie eriksen university of stavanger, norway mikhail gradovski university of stavanger, norway abstract the study reported in this paper focuses on social work students’ experiences of ethical challenges, including dilemmas, during their field placements. moreover, drawing on dialogical approach and the results of the thematic analysis, the authors discuss what ethical dilemmas the students experience during their in-field practice, and what implications the handling of these ethical dilemmas can have for the organization of social work education. the findings that are reported in this article are the results of the analysis of six sets of data collected with the help of interviews. the interpretive framework used in this study is a dialogical approach. the research strategy has been a qualitative approach, and the data collection has taken place in semi-natural settings. the thematic analysis of the data lead to four major themes of ethical challenges that the students experienced in their field placements. the first theme concerns structural conditions on a macro level that the students were confronted with when in practice. the second theme is about ethical challenges due to the students´ lack of knowledge and experience in the field. the third theme presents challenges in direct work with service users related to the students´ awareness of values and perspectives. the fourth theme concerns ethical challenges that occurred when students interacted with others in the organizations where the field placements took place. we argue that due to the fact that the authorial agency of any learner consists of personal attitudes, goals, values, knowledge, competences, and skills, it is important to organize supervision activities in a way that allows discussions in free and fearless environments so that the student could learn and unlearn knowledge and skills. this means that in-field placements should be viewed as learning arenas for various types of knowledge and skills, including knowledge on themselves, and not just places where the students can gain only strictly professional practical knowledge and try out their theoretical knowledge. key words: social work education, supervision, field placement, dialogical approach, thematic analysis, ethical dilemmas heidi lie eriksen is born in lørenskog, norway, but grew up in bergen. she graduated as a social worker from bergen university college in 2002 and finished a masters´ degree in social work at the university of stavanger in 2017. as a social worker eriksen was employed by the county governor of rogaland in connection to legal guardianship and implementation of the un convention of the rights of the child. in addition, she has working experience as a social worker at the municipality level of the norwegian labour and welfare administration and social services. this experience includes supervising social work students during their in-filed practice periods. as a researcher eriksen is interested in the supervisory relationship that develops between social work students and field instructors. in april 2018 eriksen started her phd project that focuses on various aspects of supervisory relationship between supervisors and supervisees. issn: 2325-3290 (online) ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa86 dr. mikhail gradovski is born in minsk, belarus. after graduation from the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim as doctor rerum politicarum in 2008 with the thesis devoted to the norwegian dialogue pedagogy, gradovski has participated in both national and international research projects on doctoral supervision, professional supervision, use of dialogue in education, and mental skill development. currently he is a main coordinator of an international eu horizon2020 project that focuses on the development of phd candidates’ skills. he has supervised both postgraduate, graduate and undergraduate students. as a teaching practitioner he is using a dialogical approach based on an understanding both teacher and learner as partners with equal rights to make judgements on what is relevant, important and true. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3098-1447 ïïò introduction we define field placements as the “signature pedagogy” of social work and a part of field education in social work, where the intent of field education is to integrate the theoretical and conceptual contribution of the classroom with the practical world of the practice setting (cswe, 2015, p. 12). the traditional way of following up the students during field placements has been through a one-to-one relationship between a social work student and a social worker at the organization where the field placement takes place. the oneto-one relationship has been claimed to have a great impact on how satisfied the students seem to be with their learning process during the placement (bogo, 2008). still, there seems to lack research concerning the dynamic within the relationship in general (o’donoghue & tsui, 2015). through field placements students are supposed to become more aware of their personal values through exercising social work directly with service users. it is therefore important that the students get supervision in this process to reflect upon professional and ethical issues (university of stavanger, 2013, p. 6). the personal values that the students have can conflict with both the professional and\or personal values of others, their supervisors, other colleagues and the service users. when different values conflict with each other this can result in ethical dilemmas for the students. drawing on heather douglas’ study (2014, p. 163), we define values as normative or emotive commitments people hold. these commitments may be tacit or explicit, and can concern a wide variety of things, from commitments to ethical principles, communal patterns of being, or even quality one wants to have in one’s knowledge about the world. different ethical principles in the code of ethics can, due to this understanding, also conflict with each other and result in ethical dilemmas for the students because they will have to prioritize between different ethical principles and give more importance to one over another of the principles (ifsw, 2018; fellesorganisasjonen, 2019). in other words, even though the students themselves do not commit themselves to values that conflict with those of the social work profession, they can still end up experiencing ethical dilemmas because of the situations they experience, where different ethical principles can become relevant and it can be necessary to prioritize. norwegian social workers and their colleagues with other educational backgrounds who are working in the public welfare sector are committed to follow both the norwegian and the international code of ethics because the norwegian association is a member organization of ifsw (fellesorganisasjonen, 2019). the first author of this article has both practical experiences as a social work student and had two field placements and as a field instructor providing supervision for social work students. these experiences have informed the importance of a fruitful relationship for the learning process of students, and on possible and worrying consequences in cases where ethical dilemmas are not discussed with the field instructors. this article reports some of the findings from a broader phd project about the relationships between social work students and their field instructors during field placements. as the previous research does not seem ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa87 to have been noticeably concerned with how ethical dilemmas are being handled within such supervisory relationships, we therefore ask: what ethical dilemmas the students experienced in their in-field placements, and what implications can the handling of these ethical dilemmas have for the organization of social work education? theoretical part ethical dilemmas proctor, morrow-howell & lott (1993) define an ethical dilemma in social work practice as an experience a social worker has when he or she cannot adhere to professional values or when adhering to one ethic requires behaving counter to another. tallant and ryberg (2000) distinguish between three types of situations when a social worker can experience an ethical dilemma: a situation where the social worker must choose the best moral course of action in a predicament from which there are two competing and equal moral choices, a situation when the decision-maker must choose the best moral course of action without knowing in advance the outcome of the decision, and a situation when the best moral choice may not be best for all the individuals involved in the predicament and, in fact, knowingly cause harm to one of the individuals. ethical dilemmas in social work can also be defined as one of the key elements of the ethics knowledge of the social work together with the value base of the social work professions, its relationship to practitioners' values; moral distress, injury, and courage; ethical decision-making; and ethics risk management (reamer, 2019). ethical dilemmas arise in situations when a professional social worker experiences conflicts between professional duties and obligations. to resolve an ethical dilemma means to decide what professional duty should take precedence in a conflict. ethical dilemmas in social work are also connected to the ethical concepts and ethical decision-making models and strategies that can be used to resolve ethical dilemmas. according to reamer (2019), common ethical dilemmas in social work concern clinical practice, program design, agency administration, social policy, and relationships among practitioners. to help social workers to recognize and navigate through ethical dilemmas one has established ethical standards (hardy, 2019). in norway the first code of ethics for social workers was published in 1967, and norwegian social workers were actively involved in the process of developing the international statements that were published in 1976 (grønningsæter, 2013). before 1967 the norwegian social workers observed the american code of ethics (lingås, 1993). the international federation of social workers’ (ifsw) statement of ethical principles is one of the most recognized frameworks for social workers. the ifsw statement of 2006 distinguishes between six different categories of standards: social worker’s responsibility to the client, social worker’s responsibility to the colleagues, social worker’s responsibility in the practice setting, social worker’s responsibility as a professional, social worker’s responsibility to uphold the fidelity of the social work profession by involving themselves in research and service to the community, and social worker’s obligation to promote social justice. in 2018 the standards on the social worker’s use of technology in servicing the clients were added (hardy, 2019). ethical dilemmas are directly connected to the value base of the social work profession. although the core social work values vary internationally, and, at times, within nations and cultures, it is possible to distinguish between core social work values from the point of view of the concept of virtue (reamer, 2019). the focal virtues in the virtue ethics include the following values and character traits: integrity, truthfulness, generosity, loyalty, sincerity, kindness, compassion, and trustworthiness. these focal virtues are linked to ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa88 the core moral principles that constitute the moral foundation of professional practice: autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice (reamer, 2019). supervision and the professional code of ethics are viewed as important tools for integrating the core values of social work into one’s own practice. moorhead & johnson (2010) show that inexperienced social workers learn quickly how to integrate theory into practice, especially, when it comes to ethical decision making. sasson (2000) argues that the code of ethics gives room for interpretation when solving complicated dilemmas. however, it can also evoke conflict in the social worker as some principles in the code of ethics conflict with each other, and therefore, must be explored and justified when compared, and such a process will be influenced by the personal values and beliefs of the social worker. banks (2005) investigated what situations students found ethically challenging and why. her findings indicate that bad practice or oppressive practice of others in field placements was the most common ethical challenge for students. the two other ethically challenging aspects for the students were handling the power and responsibility of the worker and negotiating the power of the professional relationship. weinberg & banks (2019) write that social workers who in their educational programme have been trained to see moral injuries and to have integrity while working for the best of others, can experience frustration at the micro-level of the work with individuals due to political systems that challenge the situations of the service users. contemporary political and structural systems seem to conflict with the values of the social work profession. this implicates that it is necessary to understand the connection between politics and ethics and to actively speak out against systems that make it difficult to practice the profession according to ethical principles (weinberg & banks, 2019). the code of ethics for social workers in norway reflects external values, interests of the profession and political assumptions. from 2002 there has been introduced a perspective that is characterized by the feature that hallmarks related to the professional practice itself have been given attention as independent points. this can indicate that the professional practice can form a basis for and influence the code of ethics. this can be seen as a shift in understanding and an introduction of the principle that contextual aspects are given higher ethical status (eide, 2008). working efficiently is a value that fits with the political ideology of neoliberalism which influences the welfare organizations, but efficiency is not included in the value base of the social work profession (swift, gingrich & brown, 2016). supervision: definition and its practice through the lenses of the dialogic authorial learning and authorial agency there are variations when it comes to the quality of the supervision students receive during field placements in norway (the norwegian ministry of education and research, 2012, p. 73). social work students have claimed that a good relationship with their supervisor is the key to successful learning in practice placements (bogo, 2008). the study by nordstrand (2017) of the norwegian field instructors who supervised the students in the norwegian labour and welfare administration showed that the field instructors regarded quality control of students as their principal task (nordstrand, 2017). the relationship between the social work students and their field instructors can influence how ethical dilemmas are handled. any supervision can be described as consisting of a product that a supervisee is supervised on, a supervisor and one or more supervisees. as for the period of the last ten years, we have found only three studies on supervision at the in-field placements of the social work students in norway. the first study showed that field instructors who supervised social work students in nav regarded quality controlling of students as their principal task (nordstrand, 2017). the second study found that the power structure between the students and field instructors was levelled when social work students received parallel group ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa89 supervision from social workers at the educational institution (in addition to the supervision provided by the field instructors), and this parallel supervision took place in a learning environment where it was allowed to make mistakes and explore different approaches (nordstrand & skjefstad, 2019). the third study investigated how recently graduated social workers could contribute with quality and professional affiliation in the supervisory cooperation, and the authors highlights the importance of that supervisees from the beginning perceives themselves as independent and acting subjects and that the two that the dyad consists of together are going to create new insights (søndenå & gradovski, 2017). a study from new zealand showed that the relationship between the field supervisors and social work students became unsatisfactory when the supervisors performed control function over their supervisees (beddoe, 2011). this study’s findings show that the relationship between the social work students and their field instructors can influence how ethical dilemmas are handled. beddoe’s findings are in accord with the study by gradovski and løkken (2015) where the field supervision of norwegian preschool assistants was in focus. their findings show that the main agent of influence on the subjective experiences of the assistants’ reflection and learning experienced in supervision was the human factor, the cooperation and communication between the assistants and their supervisors. findings from the studies by nordstrand (2017) and beddoe (2011) show that treating students at in-field practice placements by using mostly the means of instrumental control and poor quality of relationship between the supervisors and supervisees highlight the necessity to practice supervision using educational concepts where relationships between a supervisor and supervisees as a learning generating construct are acknowledged. a dialogic authorial learning is one of the educational concepts where the relationships between the supervisors and supervisees are considered to be a cornerstone behind any learning. supervision, according to kadushin and harkins (2003, p.123), can be understood as the critical examination of ideas and practice, even of one’s own personality. gradovski and løkken (2015) define supervision as a setting for authorial learning consisting of five coordinates: time, space, interpersonal axiology, motivated guidance by supervisors and motivated participation by both supervisors and supervisees. the time can be viewed as a critical discussion or dialogue that involves testing of ideas and desires and discussing points of view and values; the space is the very culture with its epistemologies on its many levels that the participants exist in and represent. in order to experience the interpersonal axiology, there should be a mutual understanding between the supervisors and the supervisees that their values are formative in character and can and should be discussed and agreed upon. both guidance and participation are issues that should be negotiated between the interlocutors. in our view, a dialogic authorial learning is based on the assumptions that both supervisors and supervisees are learners with equal consciousness, i.e., their experience and points of view, no matter how little their experience is or naïve their points of view are, should be heard and reacted to. to use the dialogic learning concept when practicing supervision in the in-field placements means that values to both supervisors and supervisees are identified and negotiated. learning that happens due to supervision is understood as an authorship. an authorship is defined by eugene matusov (2011) as a participant’s bid for a unique creative contribution fully or partially recognized by a relevant community and by the participant him/herself (this recognition can be problematic, contested, and controversial at times). learning is thus aimed at transformation of supervisees and supervisor’s authorial agencies. matusov, von duyke, and kayumova (2016) define authorial agency as the transcendence of the given and write that our personal transcendence has to be recognised by relevant others and/or by the self, and this recognition calls for dialogicity and responsibility. further, matusov et al. (2016) write that a bid for social recognition of a person’s transcendence of that which is culturally given transforms an individual’s ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa90 action into a personal deed, and the act of individual transcendence into a social event. this means that our authorial agencies lead to changes not only in knowledge and skills that we learn but also to changes in social relationships in our communities and society. the authorial agency of any learner consists of personal attitudes, goals, values, knowledge, competences, and skills. any authorial agency is a dynamic entity that goes through changes, as the learner, the holder of the agency—thanks to the process of transcendence, and opportunities for responsivity and dialogicality—learns and unlearns new knowledge and skills. method interpretive framework the interpretive framework of this study is a dialogical approach. matusov, marjanovic-shane, and gradovski (2019) define dialogic research epistemology as qualitative epistemology where the truth and understanding that comes as the result of the process of meaning making is highly subjective, and that each and every one has a right to his or her own subjective truths. further, the subjectivity is defined as unique, unpredictable, creative, responsible, addressable, and responsive. the truth is authorial, personal, contextual, and unfinalizable. the truth has various depths of meaning, and is always calling for responsibility, interested, and disagreement-based. the very process of investigation is particular, contextual, and authorial. the findings include dialogic finalizing that can become a provocation for further critical dialogue, and they facilitate unlimited critical dialogue. dialogue can be defined as the result of the communication between field instructors and students with different horizons of understanding when they are trying to comprehend each other’s reality (gradovski, 2012). sampling as for the field placement that we focus on in this study, it takes place in the fourth semester of the bachelor program in social work and lasts five months. the selection of participants took place between december 2018 and january 2019, and it can be characterized as strategic. the reason for this is that the co-authors wanted to get insight into social work students’ experiences with possible ethical dilemmas that were situated within the supervisory relationship in the students’ unique field placements that formed part of their bachelor education in social work in a norwegian university. our selected sample is, therefore, information oriented. the respondents had to meet the following requirements: all the respondents were social work students (supervisees) who were supervised by qualified social workers (supervisors). participation of both the supervisors and supervisees had to express their consent to participate in the study in writing. all the six supervisees that the sample of this data set consists of are norwegian females aged between twenty and thirty years old. data collection and analysis the data set analysed in this study consist of interviews with six students where they answered questions concerning the supervisory relationships and potential ethical challenges, including ethical dilemmas, that the students had experienced while staying in the field placements. each student was interviewed twice. this means that altogether the data set consists of twelve interviews with six respondents. the first interview with each respondent took place at the beginning of the period of the field placement, and the second interview with each respondent took place at the end of the field placement. the collection of data took place in natural, social settings from january till may 2019. all the interviews were qualitative, semi-structured and individual, and they were conducted at the location of the field placement of each respondent. the interviews were all recorded by an audio recorder and thereafter transcribed. during the transcribing process the identities of the respondents, their supervisors, the ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa91 locations where the field placements took place and other information that could cause people to be recognized were anonymized so that it would not be possible to identify the respondents, their supervisors, the locations where the field placements took place, the colleagues of the supervisors or the service users. after all the interviews were transcribed, identities anonymized, and the transcripts themselves were checked for mistakes, the thematic analysis as described by braun & clarke (2006) was used to analyse our data. both co-authors have read the transcriptions several times and reflected upon potential codes and themes individually, and thereafter our subjective understandings were discussed. although this process has been challenging and time consuming, we argue that it has improved the analysis and resulted in new insights. we used the thematic analysis to identify themes within our data and to interpret various aspects of these themes. social work students’ ethical challenges, including ethical dilemmas, is the focus of our thematic analysis. the data collected was coded in order to answer our two research questions, and thus, a specific, analytic interest guided us in this analysis of the data set. in our analysis we followed the six phases of thematic analysis as these are described by braun and clarke (2006, p. 87). these six phases consisted of first becoming familiarized with the data by reading the transcriptions thoroughly several times and by highlighting immediate ideas. thereafter, we generated initial codes by finding interesting features of the data and then coded these in a systematic way within each data item and thereafter across the whole data set. data that was relevant to each code was collated. then we searched for themes, collated codes into potential themes and gathered all the data that was relevant to each potential theme. after this we reviewed the themes thoroughly and changes were made as we went deeper and deeper into the analysis. finally, there were two main themes that were identified related to the ethical dilemma that the participants experienced during their field placements. we checked whether the themes worked in relation to the coded extracts and the entire data set, and then generated a thematic “map” of the analysis. we thereafter defined and named the themes and did an ongoing analysis in order to refine the specifics of each theme, and the overall story that the analysis told. we generated clear definitions and names for each theme. thereafter we produced the report for the analysis and chose a selection of compelling extract examples. we related back from the results of our analysis to the two research questions and to the literature and finally produced a scholarly report of the analysis. validity and reliability the awareness of the participants regarding the appearance and significance of ethical dilemmas in their practice varied. when collecting the data, it was not expected that the participants should have a vocabulary to speak about ethical dilemmas in their practice. what we talked about in the interviews was therefore rather difficulties when executing their role at the field placement. as researchers we are aware that we are in the powerful position of defining the ethical dilemmas that the students experienced, and the presented results are thus our interpretations of what the students shared. we attempted to clearly state the theoretical assumptions that formed the scope of this research and to describe in detail the methods used to come to the presented conclusions. this has been important in order to strive for trustworthiness and to conduct research that would be possible to compare and evaluate for others, as well as to promote further research concerning the issues treated in this article (braun & clarke, 2006, p. 80). the outer validity of our results extends only over the interviewed participants. therefore, our findings are not automatically transferable to the experiences of other social work students. it can also be seen as a weakness that all the participants were young, white women with a norwegian background, even though variation among the ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa92 participants was something that we as researchers had hoped for. however, most social work students in norway have the same characteristics as our participants and striving for more variation among the participants would have complicated the recruitment process. hopefully, it will however be possible to generalize findings in an analytical meaning of the concept as it is described by yin (2012, p. 177). ethical considerations ethical considerations have been made at all stages of this study. the students and their supervisors were clearly informed that their participation in the study did not have any relevance for the evaluation of the field placement or their relationships with the educational institution in any way. likewise, they were informed that to withdraw from the study along the way would be unproblematic. both co-authors had roles both as teachers for students in field placement and researchers at the university. to prevent potential ethical dilemmas because of the double role as both researchers and teachers for the same students and supervisors, our colleagues at the university made sure we were not given responsibility for students who met the criteria to participate in the study. a notification form of the data collection was submitted to the data protection official in norway (nsd) and it was subsequently by nsd. results as the result of our thematic analysis, we found that the students experienced four major themes of ethical challenges in their field placements. the first theme concerns structural conditions on a macro level that the students were confronted with when in practice. the second theme is about ethical challenges due to the students´ lack of knowledge and experience in the field. the third theme presents challenges in direct work with service users related to the students´ awareness of values and perspectives. finally, the fourth theme concerns ethical challenges that occurred when students interacted with others in the organizations where the field placements took place. as a result of our understanding of what an ethical dilemma is, we argue that out of these four ethical challenges only some of them ended up in becoming ethical dilemmas for the students. thus, we will hereafter describe the four themes of ethical challenges that we found through our thematic analysis. after this presentation, we will introduce the ethical dilemmas that we discovered within the ethical challenges in the chapter of discussion. ethical challenges related to structural conditions structural conditions seemed to influence whether or not the students experienced ethical challenges when in practice. through our analysis, we found that elisabeth, christina, beate and anne experienced ethical challenges related to such structural conditions on a macro level. when new learning situations came as a surprise for the students, the field instructors, probably due to several reasons, did not manage to structure the learning situations, and the students got less attention and support than what they needed. on some occasions, such lack of support indirectly created ethically challenging experiences for the students in this study. still, the aim of this study has not been to investigate the structural conditions on a political or organizational macro level. our focus has been the individual experiences. thus, what we can say from our analysis is that students on some occasions did not get sufficient support according to their needs when being exposed to new learning situations. at times, and seen from the students´ point of view, the field instructors had not been clear enough about what they expected from the students. we found that both lack of support and clarification led to the same consequence: the students did not know how to prepare themselves for tasks they had been assigned. this made the students feel insecure and confused about whether they had misunderstood something important, and they blamed themselves for not successfully coping with the tasks. it was from the service users´ and the field instructors´ reactions that the students perceived that they had failed tacit expectations. the students understood that they did not ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa93 act as they were supposed to, yet, they did not know what the appropriate behaviour in the situations would have been. the quote from elisabeth below illustrates how she experienced being put in a situation that she did not know how to manage due to lacking support and explanation ahead. elisabeth: i had a case. i was not supposed to have that conversation because i had other plans. then they got cancelled, then the field instructor said that i could take that conversation after all. and then i got so little time to prepare myself. and it was a comprehensive case that i kind of didn’t understand what she needed help for, because she said that she just had a question about a decision or something. and i didn’t have a clue what it was. and there i could almost not answer anything. i didn’t have any overview. no, for instance, she said among other things that there was an electricity bill that hadn’t been paid, but then she’s got a decision for that, so then i didn’t understand why it shouldn't have been paid. ohm... and then she and her daughter had applied for a residence permit and i hadn’t even got it that she’d applied for it, because i only looked at her decision and what she’d applied for, so then i couldn’t answer that. and it wasn’t very nice when i like sat there just opposite the service user and i’m supposed to be professional and feel that i’m supposed to give her answers, but when i don’t have the overview over her whole situation it gets very difficult. christina often worked at the field-placement while one or both of her field instructors were not there. she described that the coordination between the two field instructors and the learning activities she was confronted with were not always well planned. below she talks about how she all of a sudden experienced conducting a conversation with a service user and an interpreter without being able to prepare herself for the task that was completely new for her. christina: and then i was told i had to call my field instructor. i just; okey. then he says: we´re going to realize an interpreted conversation with the teenager. so you have to order an interpreter, you also have to talk to the teenager about that we´re going to do this, we´re going to.. and you have to inform the teenager why we´re having this interpreted conversation. and i just; okay, fine. and then i went and talked to the teenager and then it didn´t suit the teenager when we thought we´d have this interpreted conversation, so then i called my field instructor again and said kind of like: i think we should have it another day because this and that. uh, and he just: yeah, okay, but then we´ll do that, i´ll come up that day, so just order it! and then when the day came i thought that... i didn´t really think that i was going to lead the conversation. i thought i was just going to participate in it. and then we call the interpreter, and then he (the field instructor) says: yeah, just speak, you´re the one doing it! beate expressed that she wanted to experience as much as possible during her field placement. she was therefore grateful that her field instructor had arranged for her to visit other institutions as well, and she went to these institutions by herself without knowing much about what was expecting her. beate was left alone with service users whom she did not know from before. since she had not been well prepared for these visits, she did not know how to handle the situations she was confronted with. the extract below illustrates the unexpected reaction she got from the service user when she suggested to organize an activity that the service user said that she liked. beate: and then i started kind of yes, what do you like to… do you like playing games? then she said yes, i do. then i said: do you like playing cards? then she said: yes, i think that’s fun. then i said: would you like to play some now? no, i don’t feel like it. then i said: okay… and then she said: ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa94 it’s because i don’t know any. but then i said: but i can teach you if you want to. no, you don’t have to. (…) it was kind of the first time anyone has said no to something that i have suggested. at the end of the field placements it was expected that the students worked efficiently. still, focusing on how to manage large amounts of cases was not something that the students felt that they had been trained to do at the educational institution. we found that the students expressed conflicts between the field instructors expectations of efficiency and the values of the social work profession about how to treat the service users with time and patience. the quote below illustrates how anne experienced that she was not well prepared for the expectations towards her about working more efficiently. still, the fact that anne was not well prepared for the expectations concerning work efficiency is something that can be explained as a lack of preparation for such activities from the educational institution, and this is not something that can be explained as the result of the lack of preparation from the field instructors’ side. anne: we´ve talked a lot about that in supervision too, related to this with efficiency then. and i mentioned that a little before, that the doctors and the psychologists they must know absolutely everything about the patient, whilst i really don´t then, or the other social workers, because we´ve a little more to do with the social work issues. but i do know that if i´ve had a conversation, and i sense that the patient has liked very much to talk and has brought up things that i really hadn´t thought we were going to talk about, then i´ve thought that it´s good that he opens up or she opens up and that it´s kind of nice if it can help then somehow. but.. so.. i should probably have had more time for that, maybe. but then that´s not actually the task... in a way.. yes.. i don´t really feel that we´ve talked that much about that to be honest, but maybe i slept in those classes... yeah.. because then we´ve rather had that.. yeah, you never know what´s coming through the door, you never really know what direction the conversation takes, but it´s important that you take the time or.. no, maybe i´m inventing a little, but that´s at least how i´ve got the impression kind of related to social work and stuff. ethical challenges due to the students´ lack of knowledge and experience through our thematic analysis, we found that limited work and life experiences created ethical challenges for the students. for us it became clear that frida, beate, christina and dina struggled because they lacked experienced and knowledge. the students were insecure when it came to how they were supposed to act out the social worker role and they struggled sorting out how they were going to create fruitful relationships with the service users. how to respect the boundaries of themselves and the service users, where to draw the lines between personal and professional identity, and ending the relationships with the service users were complicated issues for the students. frida was struggling with both boundary issues, learning how to assess the service users´ behaviour, and learning to understand when it was necessary to end activities. she had experienced that the service user when in psychosis had scared her before and frida therefore later was sensitive to when the service user could seem to be having a psychotic outbreak again. frida could feel quite uncomfortable when being alone with the service user and she was uncertain about when she should step out of different situations. frida: i find it difficult to set up boundaries there because there you must consider a lot. and then she is listening to music and then she maybe starts dancing and sometimes the movements she makes... it can just become too much for me. then she can get a little high and there is a risk of a psychosis. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa95 beate sent text messages to the service users she worked with during the week to encourage them or show that she cared for them, even though the content of the messages did not have anything to do with the services beate provided to the service users. nor had she spoken to the other social workers at the placement about what they thought of contacting the service users outside of the agreements that they had. beate had just developed her own practice without consulting her field instructors or other colleagues about it. a fear of invading the private life of the service users was perceived, and it was difficult for the students to know what they could talk to the service users about and not. it was necessary with guidance in this matter. christina mentioned a young unaccompanied minor who according to his residence permit was gay, and he was living with other teenagers who spoke condescendingly about people with a sexual orientation that was not heterosexual. the student assumed that the young man had a difficult time, but she was not sure whether she should talk to the young man about the issue or not. christina: i haven’t talked to him about it and i’m not sure if it’s something that anyone else has discussed with him either. because for a long time we were insecure about whether he knew that we knew about it. we’ve come to the decision that he must know about it since he got his residence because of it. however, he has also been very uncertain about it, and this is something that is very unsafe for him. so, because of that i haven’t felt that i’ve been the one to talk to him about it. dina was aware of that she could risk meeting people she was familiar with in her practice because of her experience as a volunteer. she struggled reflecting upon what expectations these people might have towards her behaviour and how she would live up to these expectations. still, she concluded with that she had different roles in different settings and that this was acceptable. dina: i have in a way understood that when i´m here, i´m at work, but when i´m not here, then i´m me in a way. so, if i run into them.. because i´m often at birthday parties or that kinds of things with these kurds and they often bring along people who either are at the program or have been to the program or that sort of things. and then there´s often talking about; yeah, i had this and that one as a counsellor and.. that kind of things.. but, i´m only myself in a way, but i don´t go on about my coworkers or the organization in that way, since they´re here. when it comes to that, yeah.. but.. so, i am myself. yeah.. i don´t know how others do it or whether it´s the correct way, but i believe it should be all right, because i´m not at work or in practice when i´m out there. the challenges might be that if i meet those service users at the office and they maybe meet another person than the one they met outside, how they will react upon that. but i think that if it occurs then one just have to explain then that now i´m working, kind of, and that was private. well, one´s the same, one is, but i´m really a little different when i´m at a kurdish party then what i´m like when i´m sitting here in the office filling out an application form for social benefits. i actually am. for instance when i´m dancing there, then it strikes me: oh, lord! but, we´re all humans so… the students invested in developing good and fruitful relationships with the service users they got involved in too, and it was difficult for them imagining that these relationships would end in a relatively short period of time. the thought of ending the relationships with the service users was difficult for the students and there seemed to be a dependency to the relationships. frida struggled with the reaction she got from the service user she worked with when the ending of the placement was coming up. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa96 ethical challenges arising from the awareness of values all the six students in this study experienced ethical challenges as they became better aware of their own values and perspectives. the students struggled to maintain their professional integrity and respect diversity among the service users at the same time. even though the students tried to adjust themselves to the needs of the service users when they practiced social work, their efforts were not always appreciated. despite of the students´ good intentions, they sometimes faced the service users’ rejections, unwillingness, lack of engagement or got frightening reactions. it was difficult for the students to accept that things could go wrong when they did everything they could to help. when experiencing these disappointments or facing frightening reactions, the students became aware of the values that they needed to work on too. our findings show that the students became more aware of their own values and perspectives from practicing social work directly with service users and later reflecting about prejudices and worries in supervision with their field instructors. sometimes the students realized that they had had unrealistic hopes for the lives of others. with the following examples we will hereafter illustrate this. dina worked with a single mother who came to norway a few years ago as a refugee with her five children. the child welfare officers were worried about the children and the lack of attention from their mother. dina and her field instructor at first disagreed upon whether their guidance and support would be enough to help the mother with improving the level of care of the children. dina was at first optimistic, but then she became frustrated and realized that it would not be possible for the mother, the service user, to cope with her responsibilities on the level required by the child welfare officers. through the work with this service user, dina experienced a confrontation between her own values and the values of the mother. dina: no, i get a little like; oh, make it! yeah... i want her to do well. then it’s a little hopeless in a way, that you see that it... yeah, i don’t know if it’s going to happen. the economy and the children and the school and the child welfare and just like... when she can’t read and write herself, how difficult will it be when the children are going to start at school and will help them to do their homework and yeah... and the economy as well... then she’s said that she’d like even more children. yeah... and cannot really take care of the ones she has. no, because that... we asked her about that, but i think it was just because five were not enough. she wanted even more, but then we said: don’t think that’s so smart because it’s difficult to have many children in norway because it’s expensive and challenging. all the children are going to recreational activities and they’re going to do this and that, so we tried to explain her that, then. but she doesn’t always want to listen when we tell her stuff. the students were afraid of that potentially aggressive service users in different situations could harm them, but they seemed to feel ashamed of these feelings. frida worked with a service user who sometimes entered into a psychosis, and frida had been hit by surprise by such an incident on her first day of the placement. this incident got a hold on her and made her feel insecure afterwards when she was alone with the service user. in the extract below frida explains how she escaped from a situation that scared her and left the service user alone instead of handling the situation that arose. frida: that was the second time i was at work. i guess it was the tuesday, so then i still was a little afraid of her, right. while i knew that i really didn’t have any reason to be that. but then... she got some of the movements when she danced and sang as she got in the car and then i became like; okay, is this bad or just ordinary? so, then i was a little like... right... and then we sit behind the treadmill, right, because it can become too much stimuli with us and the music and the video and that. yeah, and then she’s walking on the treadmill and then she is singing and dancing a little bit in between and then she looked at me with that intense gaze and then i became afraid, so then... i told ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa97 her ohm... i just need to go to the bathroom now and then at that exact time the other staff came, so then; okay… when starting in practice, anne was uncomfortable because she thought that she had negative stereotypes towards elderly in general. this was a problem since anne had been assigned to work with elderly people during her field placement. after talking thoroughly about her stereotypes in supervision, anne became aware of that her prejudices was rather about helping people in general with a specific task than towards the elderly in general. anne: i was a little like excited about what it was going to be like working with the elderly because i’ve worked as a summer substitute at a nursing home where i’m from when i... some years ago. and then i remember that... that i didn’t like it that much. i thought that was a little difficult. but when i thought more about it then...and told my field instructors, then i realized that what i really didn’t like was caring and that... i thought it was kind of uncomfortable. and then... i really think it is very interesting to talk and have conversations with the service users. so... i probably think that this image has changed a little really, that it... and that´s been nice. ethical challenges due to the interaction with others anne, beate, dina, elisabeth and frida experienced ethical challenges due to working with others and staff members observing the practice of other staff members at the field placements. the staff had different educational backgrounds, and not everyone was necessarily social workers. the students reacted negatively to the way others spoke about the service users on specific occasions and that the service users in some situations were being treated differently than the students would have liked to be treated themselves. whilst the students focused on their own behaviour and communication skills in contact with the service users, they also became aware that other employees at the field placements did not always act in accordance with what the students considered to be good social work practice. it was thus a contradiction between what the students considered as practicing good social work and what they observed of social work practice at the placements. still, through our thematic analysis we found that the students often experienced it as difficult being critical towards the practice of others. the students had difficulties with criticizing the way others did their job. it was easier for them to copy what others did than saying what they meant should have been done in another way. elisabeth was taken by surprise because other employees at her placement in internal meetings spoke about the service users in what she saw as negative ways. elisabeth stated that she would not have preferred that her colleagues had spoken about someone she cared for in the way that they talked about the service users. elisabeth: of course, everyone is working together and is supposed to find the best solution. however, when they discuss a case it’s like: oh no, is it this one again, he has this and that kind of illness, and it’s kind of patronizing and then i think: what if they had discussed someone we know? anne experienced that there was a contradiction between how she would have liked to be treated herself and how service users sometimes were being treated at her field placement. this happened to be the case when she realized that information was being withheld from a service user regarding changes in her medical doses, in order to prevent negative reactions that the staff would have trouble handling. anne: i remember once there was a discussion about a service user. she was taking a certain number of medications, and she didn’t really know how much she was taking because the therapists ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa98 hadn’t told her, and they were kind of afraid to tell her because then it could get a little miserable, so then they just chose to say that in a way. and i am not sure that it was necessary either, but at the time i remember that i thought that it was the kind of thing one should inform any service user about. i thought about myself then, that i think i’d like to know it if it had been me. dina experienced that the social workers at her field placement helped the service users by doing different things for them instead of teaching them how they could fix things themselves. this was something that dina reacted to because she had learned that it was important for people to play an active role in their own lives for many reasons. dina: i have observed a little and i do see that at the university we learn a lot about service users’ participation, and it has not been service user participation to the same degree as i think that it could have been. no, because i think that if for instance a person turns up who is going to apply for social assistance… that he can fill out the application form himself, go into the internet himself and find it. that you guide the person instead of going into the internet yourself and filling out everything for him. frida experienced that her field instructor together with another social worker were following the guidelines too strictly in regard to one situation with a service user. this service user was denied a possibility to spend her own money on snacks that she wanted, because, according to the staff members, there was no need to buy more when she already had something similar at home. the situation was uncomfortable to witness for frida because she observed that this tiny issue seemed to mean very much for the service user and thus frida could not understand why these two staff members did not show more flexibility in the situation. frida: then it was apparently only the staff member who was going to buy something, and the service user knew that when they went into the store. this happened on friday, and when they were shopping for the saturday evening because they too ate snacks with her, since it would have seemed strange if they hadn’t done so. while in the store, the service user also wanted cheese doodles. however, the staff member replied that she still had some other crisps left at home from last time, and that there was another type of snack that was as home as well, so there was no need to buy new cheese doodles as she already had enough snacks at home. but the service user really wanted cheese doodles and became very sad because when the staff member said no. and there i don’t really understand why they just couldn’t allow her to buy these doodles. being critical was difficult for elisabeth when she did not manage to understand the complexity of the situations she observed. in elisabeth’s citation below she shared her reflections about what it felt like when she was striving to become more critical. elisabeth: i thought it was hard in the beginning. and, we discussed that during the supervision session too, because my field instructor also said that i wasn’t critical enough. i just understood everything as a truth and i was very aware of that myself, so i’ve tried to challenge myself a little bit on that. and especially when i’ve been with other employees in different departments, then i’ve kind of tried to be very outgoing. so, i feel that i’ve become more critical now at least compared to when i started, but i could have been even more so. i don’t really know, but i don’t manage to see the whole picture. i see what’s at that point and then i think; yeah, but that sounds fine. and then i don’t come up with that there are other and better possibilities. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa99 when beate was given the responsibility for the service users who her field instructors normally were working with she found it hard to know whether she could exercise her role as a social worker in the same way as her field instructor used to do. beate: but i’ve been insecure, right, because she’s originally maria’s (field instructor) service user, so whether i can push as much as maria can push. ohm... so, then i’ve been very insecure, but it turned out that i could then. because i notice it in the service user when i talk to her if she’s kind of receptive for me to push a little. yeah, if she shows a little like ambivalence then, maybe it would have felt good, yeah, and then you push more. but if i notice in her voice when i talk to her on the phone one day that absolutely, absolutely not, then i don’t push anymore then. but if i feel that she is showing a little like interest and if she additionally; oh, it feels so good that you’re calling, that you care, all this right, then i am feeling like, okay, then i’ve got a small loophole, that maybe i can give in a little extra then. and it has turned out, several times, it has proven to work. so, then i’ve pushed, and i’ve come to her house and then she participates in all sorts of things, and then she becomes so grateful and happy. summing up the ethical challenges experienced by students the students experienced ethical challenges due to structural conditions influencing the provided support in learning situations, the students´ lack of knowledge and experience, the own awareness of values and how these conflicted with others, and finally, through interacting with others. only some of these ethical challenges ended up in becoming ethical dilemmas for the students. hereafter, the ethical dilemmas that we discovered within the ethical challenges will be presented and discussed against relevant theory about ethical dilemmas and previous research. finally, we will reflect upon the implications our research might have for the education of future social workers. discussion we have conducted a thematic analysis of ethical challenges that six social work students experienced during their in-field practice. we have found that the students experienced ethical challenges related to structural conditions at the field placements, lack of knowledge and experience, awareness of values and interaction with others. only some of these ethical challenges can be categorized as ethical dilemmas. proctor et al. (1993) define an ethical dilemma in social work practice as an experience a social worker has when he or she cannot adhere to professional values or when adhering to one ethical principle requires behaving counter to another. tallant and ryberg (2000) distinguish between three types of situations when social workers can experience ethical dilemmas: situations where the social workers must choose the best moral course of action in a predicament in which there are two competing and equal moral choices, situations when the decision-makers must choose the best moral course of action without knowing in advance the outcomes of the decisions, and situations when the best moral choice may not be best for all the individuals involved in the predicaments and, in fact, knowingly cause harm to one of the individuals. when interviewing the students, the concept “ethical dilemma” was not defined in order to avoid shaping the students´ understandings of ethical dilemmas into our prejudices as researchers. it became clear that the students did not talk directly about ethical dilemmas. they rather talked about challenging or difficult situations they had experienced. there might be different reasons for why the students did not talk expressively about ethical dilemmas. they might not have been trained to identify ethical components of different cases they were working with, they might have little power at their field placements, or they might not have been delegated much responsibility during their practice and therefore might not have needed to make difficult decisions (banks, 2005). to find out whether or not the different ethical challenges can be understood to be ethical dilemmas or not we will discuss whether or not professional values are impossible ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa100 to adhere to, or whether there seem to be conflicting ethical guidelines in the different ethically challenging situations experienced by the students in our study. what ethical dilemmas did the students experience in their in-field placements? structural conditions the first category of ethical challenges that the students in our study experienced was related to structural conditions. it is well known that structural and political problems is an aspect that earlier has been found to negatively affect the practice of social workers (banks, 2005). in this study we have identified students’ challenges that occurred in situations where they noticed that the way they performed in practice did not match the others’ expectations. still, the students did not have the knowledge they needed so that their performance could match these expectations. political decisions on a macro level related to the resources being distributed to the organizations where the field placements took place might be a plausible explanation for why the field instructors might have placed the students in such work situations and did not provide the students with the support they needed by explaining clearly the tasks and expectations in advance. the lack of resources could have caused situations where the field instructors had too many responsibilities and that they had to choose between prioritizing service users or prioritizing the students. if this was the case, then the main reason behind the appearance of this type of challenges was the demanding work conditions for the field instructors caused by structural conditions. the political decisions might have affected the students negatively in an indirect way. another reason behind the existence of this type of challenges might be a very complex organizational structure in the field placements that include the staff’s personal values, stereotypes, and expectations towards the students. the experience of not living up to the expectations of the field instructors and the service users lead the students to feel disappointed. further this experience caused the students to feel that they were not being loyal towards their field instructors, and that they were not helping the service users to improve their lives but making their life conditions even worse. reamer (2019) writes that ethical dilemmas arise in situations when a professional social worker experiences conflicts between professional duties and obligations. to understand whether or not the social work students in our study experienced ethical dilemmas due to the structural conditions, it is important to find out if the students experienced conflicts between professional duties and obligations. a possible consequence of not getting sufficient support from the field instructors or their peers could be that the students were not able to predict the outcomes of their choices. if the students did not understand what the possible outcomes might be, it could be difficult for the students to define whether or not they were practicing in accordance with the ethical guidelines. not knowing or being able to predict the outcomes could naturally be mentally exhausting, as the students were trying to solve situations without knowing how. the results of our analysis lead us to believe that it was the lack of support and tacit expectations that were not appropriately explained that caused the students to feel insecure and frustrated. thus, we will argue that the structural conditions at the field placements lead to ethical challenges but these conditions were hardly causing any ethical dilemmas for the students, since they did not seem to have sufficient knowledge about the organizations they were placed in to fully understand the obligations of social workers, and the students did not seem to have in-depth knowledge about the ethical guidelines for social workers either. weinberg & banks (2019) write that social workers who in their educational programme have been trained to see moral injuries and to have integrity while working for the best of others can experience frustration at the micro-level of the work with individuals due to political systems that challenge the situations of the service users. therefore, we agree with weinberg & banks (2019) that it is necessary to understand ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa101 the connection between politics and ethics and to actively speak out against systems that make it difficult to practice the profession in accordance with the agreed ethical principles. lack of knowledge and experience the second category of the ethical challenges that our students experienced is grounded in their lack of knowledge and experience. tallant and ryberg (2000) state that social workers can experience ethical dilemmas when they have to choose the best moral course of action without knowing in advance the outcome of the decision. our results show that the students experienced feelings of confusion and frustration as they realized that they did not have enough knowledge and experience to make a wellinformed choice between available alternatives. the students did not have a good overview over possible consequences of their actions and decisions when practicing in the field. the mere intention of field placement is that social work students should get practical experience, and it seems that they are expected to choose the best moral course of action. however, the level of knowledge and experience that are required from the students to make informed choices on the best moral course of action is neither questioned nor problematized. the social work students in our study experienced ethical challenges as a consequence of their lack of experience and knowledge. the students struggled, for instance, with boundary issues in the relationships with the service users. beate sent text messages to the service users she worked with to show that she cared for them, christina feared that she would invade privacy of an young unaccompanied minor who was gay if she talked to him about his sexual orientation, and therefore avoided it. frida struggled with the reaction she got from the service user she worked with at the end of the placement’s period. both beate and frida accepted to work at the field placements in their holidays after their periods ended partially based on their fear to end the relationships with the service users. the students were worried that setting clear boundaries would negatively affect the relationships that they had worked hard to establish. it was difficult for the students to find the correct balance between what they should share with the service users about themselves as private persons. according to the definition of ethical dilemmas developed by tallant and ryberg (2000) students have high risks of experiencing ethical dilemmas just because they are novices in the field. the position of being unexperienced and not having knowledge from similar situations increases the risk of experiencing ethical dilemmas dramatically for students in field placements. we have found that lack of knowledge and experience was not problematic in cases where students in our study got sufficient support from their field instructors (for instance, when preparing for new learning situations). however, our students ended up with ethical dilemmas when field instructors did not provide the students with the support and supervision they needed. this applies especially to the cases when the students had to face very complicated situations. we argue that lack of knowledge and experience can result in ethical dilemmas for the students when the students do not get sufficient support and supervision from their field instructors. awareness of values the third category of the ethical challenges that our students experienced is related to their level of awareness of values. it was difficult for our students to find an ideal balance between respecting diversity among the service users as well as maintaining their own professional integrity. the students perceived that they sometimes had set unrealistic goals for the service users, and that the expressed goals were not necessarily what the service users wanted or could achieve in their lives. although our students put a lot of effort into creating conditions that would contribute with life improving results for the service users they worked with, the service users did not always appreciate the students´ efforts or react in ways that the ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa102 students had hoped for. on some occasions it seemed difficult for the students to accept that the decisions and perspectives of the service users that were different from what the students would have chosen themselves in such situations. this could create conflicts between the idea of achieving the goals that originally had been set and respecting that the service users have the right to change their opinions. respecting diversity and understanding the nature of ever-changing opinions of the service users, and thus acknowledging the service users’ right to self-determination, can be challenging for the students. to comply with the service users’ right to self-determination it can sometimes be necessary to accept that the initially set goals will not be reached and that there might not always be visible results when the professional relationships with the service users end. this might be a threat for the dignity of social workers in a neoliberal context where what counts as good social work practice is what is possible to measure. one of the results of our analysis is that working efficiently was one of the expectations that the students were confronted with, especially at the end of their field placements. the students experienced ethical challenges when the field instructors expected that the students managed to solve tasks faster than what the students felt comfortable with. we argue that ethical challenges that the students experience because of better awareness of values and perspectives might result in ethical dilemmas for the students. the students in our study experienced ethical dilemmas in organizational working environments where values of efficiency and measurable results were held in high regard. a possible explanation for this might be that this value is considered to be conflicting with the values of the social work profession. the value of efficiently has been introduced by the political ideology of neoliberalism, but it is not among the values that constitute the present-day value base of the social work profession (swift et. al, 2019). the students might want the service users to improve in different ways for their own good, but the goals might sometimes be impossible to meet for different reasons. accepting that the service users´ goals must be reduced or changed in order to be possible to achieve can bring along feelings of failure for the students. a possible explanation to this can be that the social work students confuse their own life goals with the ones of the service users. if students are not aware of what goals or values they possess and why, service users might end up having to bear the consequences. this can happen if service users end up getting solutions or treatments not based on their own real needs but on the needs of the students (urdang, 2010). the students in our study experienced ethical dilemmas due to unexpected reactions that occurred when the students were in direct contact with the service users. the students felt disappointed because they performed neither in accordance with their own expectations nor with the expectations from their field instructors. dina was optimistic even when a service user did not reach the goals that they had agreed upon at first, but later she became frustrated because she understood that the goals would never be reached. anne became aware that she had negative stereotypes that turned out to be about something else than she originally thought they were. professional interaction with staff members the results of our analysis also indicate that the social work students experienced ethical challenges through interacting with staff members at their placements, our fourth category of ethical challenges. these challenges are related to the students’ capacity of being critical to the practice of other staff members and being able of speaking out against unethical practice. the students found it hard to be critical towards the practice of other members of the staff when they were set to observe how these staff members behaved in direct contact with the service users. the students often found it easier to copy what others did than pointing out the staff members that certain issues should have been handled differently. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa103 still, the critical awareness of the students made itself known when they witnessed what they interpreted as unethical practice. elisabeth witnessed that her senior colleagues talked about the service users when they were not present in a negative way. anne realized that information was being withheld from a service user in order to prevent negative reactions that the staff could have difficulty handling. dina observed that the social workers helped the service users by doing different things for them instead of teaching the users how they could fix things themselves. frida experienced that her field instructor and another social worker in a specific situation harmed a service user because they followed the guidelines too strictly. the field instructors in our study openly proclaimed that the students should be open and honest about practices that they reacted to in negative ways at the field placements, but it varied how the field instructors handled the criticism that the students expressed. sasson (2000) argues that the code of ethics gives room for interpretation when solving complicated dilemmas, but the principles must be explored and justified when compared, and such a process will be influenced by the personal values and beliefs of the social worker. in the example of elisabeth there seems to be a contradiction with the actual practice of her colleagues, the ethical principle of recognizing the inherent dignity of every person, and elizabeth’s personal value of treating others the way she herself would like to be treated. the example of elisabeth could have turned into an ethical dilemma if she had not talked about her experiences with her field instructor or if this one had not shared elisabeth´s view that this was the case of unethical practice. since elisabeth experienced that her field instructor understood the contradictions between the actual practice at the field placement and the values of the profession, she did not experience an ethical dilemma. she instead got support for her views and her field instructor included her in a discussion about how it could be possible to change such unethical practice. experienced ethical dilemmas the results of our analysis show that the students have experienced ethical dilemmas due to the lack of knowledge and experience, as the result of becoming better aware of own values and due to the professional interaction with staff members. the first type of ethical dilemmas concerns growing pains of our students as professionals and is about making choices between following the will of others and marking own boundaries. the second type of the experienced ethical dilemmas is between present-day awareness of own values and perspectives and the ideal type of these values and perspectives. the third type of the experienced dilemmas are the dilemmas between being silent or speak out against the other staff members’ unethical practice. basing on the results of our thematic analysis we cannot say that unsatisfactory structural and political issues forming the working environment where the field placements took place created ethical dilemmas, but such conditions could make the field placements of social work students more complicated and difficult for the students’ practice in general. such difficulties might also reduce the students’ learning outcomes. reamer (2019) writes that it is common for ethical dilemmas to appear in the following areas of social work: clinical practice, program design, agency administration, social policy, and relationships among practitioners. the students in our study experienced ethical dilemmas in three out of these five areas: clinical practice, agency administration and relationships among practitioners. the students reacted negatively in specific situations to other employees’ social work practice. such situations involve frustrations regarding the practice of others as well as the agency administration, since the managers can have a lot to do with how unethical practice is being handled. in some of these situations the students became frustrated about how their opinions regarding the unethical practice of others were dealt with when they raised their concerns. it is unrealistic to assume that students would be able to predict in advance the outcomes of decisions made to resolve ethical dilemmas, especially, in the beginning of their placement period. our ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa104 results show that the students’ ethical challenges become their ethical dilemmas if the field instructors do not provide the students with sufficient support and supervision, and if the students´ interpretations of the other practitioners’ unethical practice remains unacknowledged and thus not discussed. the results of our analysis show that to avoid dealing with ethical dilemmas in new learning situations the students need support of their field instructors and others at the field placements to understand what ethical principles and under what circumstances might lead to a conflict. having mentioned this, we need to press the point that we do not believe that students must never experience ethical dilemmas in field placements. ethical dilemmas can contribute with important learning about ethics and must hence not be considered to be completely undesirable. still, we argue that students will learn more and get less frustrated if they get support, acknowledgement and knowledge of various risk aspects from the more experienced workers. such support can help the students to be able to predict possible outcomes of different scenarios and thus enable the students to make choices easier and reduce possible negative consequences that the ethical dilemmas bring forth. what implications can the handling of the ethical dilemmas have for the organization of social work education? according to proctor, morrow-howell & lott (1993) an ethical dilemma in social work practice is an experience a social worker has when it is not possible to practice the profession in accordance with the professional values. thus, it is important to gain insight into values and cultures that exist in the organizations where field placements take place to predict what kind of values of the organizations that might conflict with the values of the social work profession. the insight in this area will allow an educational establishment to prepare their students for possible ethical challenges and dilemmas that these students are likely to meet in their field placements. further, it is important to make the field instructors more knowledgeable of possible ethical challenges and dilemmas that can arise in the contexts of the organizations where these instructors work. a point of departure of what and how this insight can be created and should consist of can be discussions between educational establishments, organizations where in-field practice takes place and students. drawing on our findings, we argue that it is necessary to establish and maintain a good and trustful relationship between the students and their field instructors in order to avoid ethical challenges turning into ethical dilemmas. all the ethical dilemmas that our students experienced due to observing unethical practice of other staff members could have remained ethical challenges if the nature of the relationships between the instructors and the students could encourage the students without fear and hesitation to take up the challenges they had experienced. it requires much courage to speak out against unethical practices for any students as they are de facto in temporary and dependent positions in the organizations where their in-field practice takes place. if students avoid speaking out against what they interpret as unethical practice, the organizations where the field placements take place will lose valuable opportunities for improving of their services. in any neoliberal context, where there is both a high demand for control and documentation of the services’ efficiency for the users, the students’ speaking out against the observed unethical practice might not be something that all in the organizations might welcome. the students in our study reported that they felt that their field instructors supported them when they told them about practices that could be understood as unethical. however, it varied what the field instructors did with the information on the unethical practices. some instructors tried to change the unethical practices they were informed about, and some did not seem do anything to change such practices. this might be explained by the fact that the instructors did not agree ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa105 with the students´ views even though they seemed to do so, or because the instructors did not feel comfortable with bringing up the issues with their colleagues or the management. according to the norwegian law, social workers do not have the obligation to criticize practices that are incompatible with the code of ethics, but they have a right to notify about critical matters if practices they have witnessed are against ethical standards in a manner that can cause health injuries or death (arbeidsmiljøløven, 2005, § 2 a-1). to notify, in this context, is understood as identifying unjustifiable, incompetent, unethical or illegal situations at the work placement and reporting such issues to someone who has the power to stop such practices (fellesorganisasjonen, 2014). the critical situations that the students described in our study cannot be interpreted as causing health injuries or death. this means that notifying about any of such situations was not an obligatory action that the students or their field instructors had to do if from the point of view of the law. the consequences of notifying might be serious for some of those who notifies about critical situations, and those who choose not to notify about critical matters avoid this out of fear for negative consequences (ødegård, trygstad & steen, 2016). when notifying is not legally mandatory, the students who have unsatisfactory relationships with their field instructors might choose not to notify about unethical matters, if they believe that they will not be supported. still, the code of ethics states that social workers are accountable for their actions to the people they work with and they must work to create conditions where they minimize harm to all people. this includes notifying in the situations where practices are oppressive and unfair (fellesorganisasjonen, 2019; ifsw, 2018). according to the norwegian association of social workers (fellesorganisasjonen, 2019) the loyalty of the students should be with the most vulnerable part of any ethical conflicts, in this case, the service users, as the users are more vulnerable than the systems that are supposed to help them. this means that students have a moral obligation to notify about unethical practice according to the code of ethics, and one way to accomplish this individual responsibility is to notify the field instructors. if the students notify their field instructors, they again will be morally responsible for doing something with the matters that the students have reported. speaking out against other professionals and one’s own field instructor is difficult and therefore should not become a trivialized issue in any educational program. how and when it is right for students to speak out against unethical practice needs to be furtherly discussed. field instructors should be prepared to meet criticism from their unexperienced and often idealistic students in a constructive and supporting way, and they need to gain understanding that this might involve speaking out against the unethical practice. there is also a risk that the students give up and learn to practice social work in a way that is not in accordance with the codes of ethics. to prevent this, we need brave field instructors who are trained in how to support the students in becoming critical agents. the educational institutions should play an important role when it comes to preparing the field instructors and the students for handling unethical practice situations. the students often do not have enough insights on relevant macro aspects to fully understand the causes of ethical dilemmas. both identifying the reasons for why unethical practice take place, in the first place, and, secondly, pointing out where the responsibilities for unethical practices lie are the issues that the students partly can be prepared for at the educational institutions by learning about how ethical principles may conflict with each other and why. basing on our findings, we believe that the social work students need to be educated better about situations where ethical dilemmas in field placements could occur prior to their placements. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa106 the students will also have to make different moral choices in such situations. the results of our study show that the students might not be able to do this successfully on their own. thus, it is necessary that the students receive support from their field instructors or other professionals to see what the possible consequences of different choices might be at the places of the field placements. the value of discussing ethical problems in specific cases between students in small groups is high, and such participation might give the students the security they need to speak out against bad practice (banks, 2005, p. 751). however, the best place to learn about these issues might probably be out in the field with competent field instructors since complex and realistic ethical dilemmas occur there. this means that one might consider changing the organizational structure of the professional training by allocating teaching about ethical dilemmas to the very places where these occur. this does not mean, however, that this issue should be taught only by the professionals at the field placements, but it can successfully be taught in collaboration with such professionals. following nordstrand & skjefstad (2019), we argue that it might be fruitful to develop a group supervision construct where the students can discuss such issues with experienced social workers at their educational establishments. such construct could be designed as an addition to the supervision construct that involves the students and their field instructors and organizations. the aim of this new group supervision construct is to be an additional learning environment where it is allowed to make mistakes and explore different approaches. our findings also call us to argue that the students in the in-field practice need help to identify their boundaries, understand where they should draw the line in regard to personal issues. to understand that the service users are the ones who decide on their own final goals in their lives and that they can stop a process of change whenever they want to can be connected to the process of meaning-making on differences between the self of the service users and social worker’s own self. learning about one’s own self and the others are impossible without engaging oneself in both inner and outer persuasive discourses. this, in turn, requires the use of the dialogical approach when one plans the teaching activities. findings from the studies by nordstrand (2017) and beddoe (2011) highlight the necessity to practice supervision using educational concepts where relationships between a supervisor and supervisees are acknowledged. a dialogic authorial learning is one of the educational concepts where the relationships between the supervisors and supervisees are considered to be a cornerstone behind any learning. indeed, to learn how to handle ethical challenges and dilemmas requires the use of the authorial learning practices based on the dialogical approach as this approach asks for the full acceptance of the students’ ontological and axiological beliefs as the prerequisites for the learning and teaching. another reason why the dialogical approach will be the perfect choice for organizing the teaching and learning practices on the issue of ethical dilemmas is that any professional ethical dilemma is always value-laden and to find solutions to the experienced challenges and dilemmas require the choice between values. thus, the use of authorial learning practices dialogical approach to organize teaching and learning activities both before, during and after the in-field practice is the best choice as in its heart lies a demand to the learners (both teachers and students are considered to be learners in this approach) to both identify, recognize and challenge own values and value-laden practices. the use of the authorial learning in the area of in-field practice should be based on the assumptions that both in-field supervisors and the students are learners with equal consciousness, i.e., their experience and points of view, no matter how little their experience is or naïve their points of view are, should be heard and reacted to. following matusov (2011), we argue that students’ learning that happens due to supervision during the in-field placements should be understood as the student’s authorship. the authorship is defined ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa107 by matusov (2011) as a bid for a unique creative contribution fully or partially recognized by a relevant community and by the participant him/herself (this recognition can be problematic, contested, and controversial at times). learning is thus should be aimed at transformation of supervisees and supervisor’s authorial agencies. due to the fact that the authorial agency of any learner consists of personal attitudes, goals, values, knowledge, competences, and skills, and is a dynamic entity that goes through changes, thanks to the process of transcendence and opportunities for responsivity and dialogicality, it is important to organize supervision activities in a way that allows discussions in free and fearless environments so that the students could learn and unlearn knowledge and skills. this means that in-field placements should be viewed as learning arenas for various types of knowledge and skills, including knowledge on own selves, and not just places where the students can gain only strictly professional practical knowledge and try out their theoretical knowledge. in-field placements as learning arenas means that in-filed instructors should be allowed more engagement and contact with the students so that both the students and the instructors could experience and develop interpersonal axiology. gradovski and løkken (2015) write that the development of the mutual axiology is based on a mutual understanding between the supervisors and the supervisees that their values are formative in character and can and should be discussed and agreed upon, and requires that both issues of guidance and participation should be negotiated between the students and the instructors. this means that the process of the in-field practice should be re-organized and changed so that students’ desires and previous knowledge are better acknowledged and appreciated. conclusion social work students can experience various ethical challenges in their field placements. if these challenges are poorly handled, they may end up becoming ethical dilemmas. our study shows that ethical challenges become ethical dilemmas for the students if the field instructors do not provide the students with sufficient support and supervision and if the students´ interpretations of other staff’s unethical practice remains unacknowledged as an important issue that deserves thorough discussions. the students who participated in this study experienced ethical dilemmas due to lack of knowledge and experience, as the result of becoming better aware of own values and perspectives and due to interacting with other staff members. the areas where the students in our study experienced ethical dilemmas are well known and common for social work practice in general, and already existing theory about handling ethical dilemmas may therefore be useful for educating students. we believe that the best place to learn about these issues might probably be out in the field with competent field instructors, since complex and realistic ethical dilemmas occur there. this means that one has to change the organizational structure of the professional training by allocating teaching about ethical dilemmas to the very places where these occur. this does not mean, however, that this issue should only be taught by the professionals in the field placements, but it can successfully be taught in collaboration with such professionals where teaching cases can be real ethical dilemmas. the educational institutions obviously play an important role when it comes to preparing the field instructors and the students for what to do when they witness cases of unethical practice and experience ethical challenges and dilemmas due to it. the students in this study needed help to identify their own boundaries and understand where they should draw the line in professional relationships with the service users. to learn such things requires the use of authorial teaching and learning practices based on the dialogical approach as this approach asks for the full acceptance of the students’ ontological and axiological beliefs as the prerequisites for the learning and teaching. another reason why the dialogical approach will be the perfect choice for organizing teaching and learning practices on the issue of ethical dilemmas is that these are always value-laden and their solutions often require the choice between values. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa108 we believe that field instructors need to be trained in how to help their students to sort out boundary issues in the supervisory encounters. learning about one’s own self and others is impossible without engaging oneself in both inner and outer persuasive discourses. this, in turn, requires the use of the dialogical approach when one plans the teaching activities. the dialogical approach asks the learners to identify, recognize and challenge own values and value-laden practices. therefore, the students need to be educated about situations where ethical dilemmas in field placements could occur prior to their placements. when dealing with ethical challenges and dilemmas the students will have to make different moral choices, and they might not be able to do this successfully on their own. thus, it is necessary that the students receive support and supervision from their field instructors and/or other professionals to see what the possible consequences of different choices might be at the places of the field placements. in the future it seems relevant to do research on how demanding working environments 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(2016). varsling og ytring blant medlemmer i sju fagforbund: rapportserie om varsling og ytring. oslo: fafo. ethical dilemmas in field placements heidi lie eriksen, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.322 | vol. 8 (2020) sa111 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word beraldo et al., dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning making.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt107 dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo independent researcher, brazil silviane barbato university of brasília, brazil m. beatrice ligorio university of bari, italy abstract this paper analyses meaning-making processes in a blended setting—face-to-face interaction and web forum— purposely created for collaborative learning activity. the analysis focuses on one pair out of 14 dyads. the dyad comprises two female students aged 17 and 18 who attended a brazilian third-year state secondary school. we envisioned intertextuality in a seamless thematic flux using a single theme—about everyday problems in the culture— by two different problem-solving tasks. task#1 required discussing two polemic reports published in an online newspaper: one in favour of using digital technologies in class, the other against it. task#2 involved perspective-taking, where students should imagine the school in 20 years. afterwards, the pair participated in an episodic interview focusing on their participation in both tasks. the interactions were video recorded. to map the meaning-making processes, we applied the dialogic thematic analysis looking for centripetal and centrifugal forces. a semantic map was drawn and discussed. altogether, the paired and grouped collaborative activities in blended learning promoted authorial production. our dyad achieved reflective meta-analysis when they compared their viewpoints with the perspective of their colleagues by using justifications and explanations grounded in their production, generating reflexivity and agency in dialogue. keywords: web forums; dialogic blended setting; meaning-making; secondary education; dialogic thematic analysis. rossana beraldo is currently an independent researcher with a double-doctorate in development psychology at the university of brasilia, brazil, and psychology at the university of parma, italy. over two decades, she has been focused on the studies of the semiotic process and meaning-making from a bakhtinian perspective. her main interest is related to the issues of discursive practices, critical thinking, intersubjectivity, and authorship in a diversity of blended learning environments. she conducts a longitudinal study from 2020 to 2023 about professors' liminal experience and transition using ict during and postcovid-19. silviane barbato is an associate professor at the department of school and developmental psychology, university of brasília, brazil, and visiting professor at the nacional university of entre ríos (uner), argentina. she currently leads the ágora-psyché laboratory (capesprint/unb). she studies issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt108 conventionalisation in transition processes in undergraduates´ educational trajectories in the amazon region (procad/fapeam/capes) and meaning-making dynamics and technologies in education in impact events (coep/dpi/unb). m. beatrice ligorio is a full professor in educational psychology at the university of bari, italy. her research interests concern educational technologies, digital communities, identity, and new theoretical approaches to learning, such as dialogic and trialogical approaches. she is the department delegate for elearning. she is vice-president of the inter-university collaborative knowledge building group (ckbg; www.ckbg.org/). she is on the scientific committee of many journals in the field. she has more than 200 publications in national and international journals, chapters, and edited texts. ïïò introduction new education challenges can potentially expand dialogic teaching-learning processes. the postpandemic scenario in education calls for new practices and methodologies in blended learning settings where online and face-to-face strategies are mixed and combined (singh, 2021). blended learning improves its effectiveness when educational methods are based on dialogic principles (ligorio, 2021). it enhances collective-authorial production through multimodal teaching-learning (barbato & beraldo, 2020). the challenge now is double-fold. from one side, scholars are required to produce new educational methodologies able to inspire blended settings to create interactive and ubiquitous learning oriented to the demands of students. on the other hand, it is crucial to bridge the digital divide often exposed by the pandemic. the substantial socioeconomic gap in the brazilian school system became more visible during the covid-19 crisis and was manifested in different conditions and access to continued educational endeavours. although the earliest programs for innovative educational technologies in public schools began over two decades ago, with the urgency of remote learning, it became evident that the in-service teachers had a problem with educational technology. this revealed that, despite successful dialogical learning practices in progressive and democratic brazilian schools, there still exists among the teachers a significant orientation to traditional teacher-centred content learning. teachers without or with little experience in digital environments tended to transpose traditional face-to-face methods to digital environments, favouring the replication of interactions shaped by traditional monologic strategies, such as initiation-response-followup (irf) (sinclair & coulthard, 1975) and initiation-response-evaluation (ire) (mehan, 1979). new ways to interact with students and to sustain students’ interaction in digital environments seek new epistemic instruments to establish novel semiotic grounding systems (ritella & hakkarainen, 2012), multimodal modes of communication, and transference of responsibility in collaboration (barbato & beraldo, 2020). nowadays, technology allows diverse kinds of participation, and new psycho-pedagogical models are emerging based on freedom-to-learn where students raise their real needs and interests (marjanovicshane, 2011; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017; matusov, 2020; ritella et al., 2021). moreover, the knowledge in our time is interconnected. it is a live organism coordinated in real time both through human intelligence and artificial machine intelligence (lévi, 1999). even if you do not participate directly in the digital world, you will be impacted by it in some way. in times of digital disruption and urgency, innovation increased the use of digital technologies, mainly video conferences, webinars, software applications (apps), platforms, and many types of mobile devices. all of these technologies support and trigger expectations and behaviour changes in institutions and society. "technology catalyses changes not only in what we do dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt109 but in how we think. it changes people's awareness of themselves, of one another, of their relationship with the world" (turkle, 1984, p. 18-19). technology changes fast over time and is best suited to social life. blended learning methodologies could be thought of from outside school—in social use, as social media tools develop and innovate quicker than in educational settings. blended dialogic settings further increase dialogical potentialities in education (beraldo et al., 2021; barbato & beraldo, 2020; ligorio et al., 2020; stahl, 2006; trausan-matu et al., 2008). dialogic education implies being and acting in a collaborative dynamic with the other, mutually and discretely transforming the teaching-learning (inter)history as interlocutors. praxis emerges from the common ground of the activity itself, negotiated by the dyad or group to reach collective goals, virtues, and values (sidorkin, 1996). engaging students ontologically in natural situations may generate legitimate and spontaneous questions that can reach a high critical level to encompass each other's productions, contributions, and actions (matusov, 2009). changes between old values and beliefs and the new knowledge allow the interplay between the known and its critique that may impact personal and collective senses. such transaction processes work as open dynamics on the actualisation of meanings, enabling students to expand their understanding and repertoire of the problem in focus from different standpoints and positions (barbato & beraldo, 2020). collaborative learning processes enhance students' authorial role in creating new interpretations, positions, and solutions to problems, sometimes without the direct intervention of the teacher. the group itself can move from an initial exchange of accumulating information to an ontologic agentic collaboration. collaboration spurs engagement with responsibility and care principles, forming ethical positions on dilemmas. sensitive matters close to students' interests can promote or impede cooperation, prompting discursive rifts and triggering various constraints and opportunities in negotiating meanings (barbato & beraldo, 2020). sharing responsibility in joint activities builds trust in which everyone has the right to express themselves and promotes ontological dialogues (matusov, 1996; 2009; sidorkin, 1996). chronotopes (bakhtin, 1986) refer to how interlocutors' actions and communication create axioms and the sense of temporal contiguity in social dimensions. online, space-time perception is modified by the immediacy of communication and by facilitated ubiquity (being present everywhere at the same time). blended chronotopes add many layers and dimensions to face-to-face and remote communications, actualising meaning-making in synchronous and asynchronous flows (barbato & beraldo, 2020; perrino, 2020). the possibilities of experiencing new chronotopes affect other people's perceptions of places, temporal contiguity, and openness in dialogue (beraldo et al., 2017). the configuration of an online chronotope sets up different possibilities for socialisation. for example, students may interact with peers outside their school or in neighbouring schools to resolve an issue raised by the teacher (ligorio et al., 2005; ligorio et al., 2008). individual and collective commitments prompt different viewpoints and open gaps that may promote ontological changes. for instance, by extending an online collaborative forum for two weeks (or more), students will use the lag between reading and writing to reflect and compare their opinions. the feedback on the play between individual and collective positioning and reflexivity promotes psychosocial development aspects, such as managing conflicts and their possible solutions. this type of collaborative learning triggers negotiation and changes in i-positions. it improves students' level of agency, defined as reflexive acts in a developing situation, allowing the emergence of dissonant and fine-tuning intersubjective processes (beraldo et al., 2017; ligorio et al., 2005; ligorio et al., 2008; matusov, 1996). collective meaning-making (as a process of assigning meaning to knowledge and actions connected to its production) orients the exploration of possible, alternative solutions that impact the interpretations of oneself, the other, and the problem at hand. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt110 dialogism in collaborative activities in blended learning collaborative activities in blended learning allow for adding more layers as multimodal communication texts, including spoken language, videos, podcasts, emoticons, images, animations, writing texts, gifs, links, memes, pictures, etc. features of face-to-face and online communication are selected and combined. in a blended setting, temporality is modified. interlocutors have more time to exchange dialogue turns and can express themselves using a new multimodal language, i.e., the language of new generations. it engenders diverse possibilities for horizontal authorial exchange of viewpoints and may break hierarchies in learning (evans et al., 2011; gilje, 2019; pifarré & staarman, 2011). in blended settings, multimodal communication, or other modes than oral and written to express oneself, is perceived in chronological and anachronic ways. in multimodal environments, for example, students can simultaneously accompany their community and many other online communities (live, podcast, webinar, interview etc.) discussing the same topic. web forums, for example, became quite complex when students added these different web sources. the production is actualised on multiple layers by polyphonic dynamics (other voices may appear) (barbato & beraldo, 2020), and it opens to innovations and heteroglossia. blended chronotopes create interplays between synchronicities and asynchronicities in knowledge production. time multiplies, becoming manifold, planned to offer seamless learning experiences, i.e., intertextual (barbato & beraldo, 2020), ongoing bridged multi-faced learning possibilities that flow across location, time, technologies and social environments (kayalar, 2022). one of the main features of any digital platform is that it keeps layers of information that become a source of new reflexivity, propositions, metaanalyses etc., for a long period of time. then the production of knowledge, as well as expectations along the interaction, stands between the present abstract knowledge and meta-representation for future applications. pedagogy that supports authorial learning thrives on dialogical principles, furthering shared, negotiated meaning-making in the discussion. in polemic web forums, meaning-making depends on the impact of ethical educational problems and their consequences in social life. in general, a psycho-pedagogy model supporting authorial learning thrives on dialogical principles. within this framework, knowledge can further be shared, and meanings are continuously negotiated based on participants' positioning and shifting positions. this text presents a polemic web forum as a collaborative learning activity based on the dialogism principle, in which students debate a theme previously not applied at their school. this strategy widened paths towards a transactional space of aesthetic and ethical experience with others and the students' engagement through the interlocutor's appraisal. the web-forum considering the dialogic assumptions just described, we designed two tasks encompassing blended discussion on problem-solving that promotes meaning-making processes. the research question guiding our project is: which meaning-making processes unfold in a blended context? the activity was implemented into moodle (modular object-oriented dynamic learning environment), one of the most used free, open-source software. the participating school has been using moodle since 2006. the teachers adjusted the environment continuously to apply standardised tests and share didactic materials such as videos, links, books, and podcasts. the web forum was not used at the time. both tasks were designed based on short texts published in national online newspapers that were close to some dilemmas these students lived at school. twenty-eight students between 17 and 18 years dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt111 old agreed to participate and worked in pairs. for this paper, we analysed one dyad involving two female students: agnes and deca, both attending this third-year brazilian state secondary school. their profiles are reported in table 1. pseudonym age profile agnes 18 she started using the internet at the age of 9. she competently uses software designed to draw. she thinks teachers should publish their video classes instead of showing powerpoint to the class. she believes the government should use resources on the internet to save money on education. deca 17 she has used the internet since she was 10. she said it is unthinkable to live without a mobile phone and the internet. she affirmed that students could not learn using the internet because too many things online would distract young people. nevertheless, she believes that students will have only virtual lessons in a few years. table 1: profiles of the two students composing the selected dyad. with the support of the philosophy teacher, we devised two tasks. these activities, task#1 and task#2, were based on the same theme—"the use of ict in class"—but with different delineations. task#1 focused on the present, and task#2 set perspective-taking to envision possibilities to use ict in schools. both tasks took place in the computer lab in two alternate-day sessions, lasting approximately 45 minutes each. all dyads were free to pick up images, videos, texts, emoticons, links, etc., on the web. some other dyads used this resource, but our pair did not. they remained focused only on the tasks. the philosophy teacher and the researcher did not stay in the lab while the dyad performed the tasks. a lab technician was nearby in case they needed technical support. this qualitative study draws on the multimethod approach by using (a) a profile interview, (b) 02 problem-solving tasks, and (c) an episodic interview in which the researcher dialogues with each dyad about the tasks to clarify decision-making points of view and meaning-making. task#1 required students to discuss two short articles: one in favour of using technologies in class; the other against it. one piece brings an interview with a us expert who was in favour. he proposed that teachers should allow the use of smartphones and tablets in class because students are skilled in such devices. the second text presented various opinions from different voices and positions, such as principals, coordinators and teachers (against), and a group of students (in favour). three short questions were added: (a) the first one focused on students in general – what do you think about the students' views on using their digital devices in the classroom?; (b) the second one focused on position-shifting – how would you answer the question regarding educational use of the digital technologies if you were in the place of the teachers or the head of school?; and (c) the third one required the third change of perspective – the ict expert defends the use of mobiles and tablets in class. what's your view of that? the students were free to answer if they wanted and/or comment on each other’s posts. task#2 involved perspective-taking, where students should imagine school 20 years in the future. this task gathers on a future projection that requires imaginative play with the present and future. they have to answer a single question – who do you think should be responsible for the school in the future? they had to position themselves in the school in 20 years and decide who would be the possible dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt112 person responsible for the school’s change. they could choose among the president, the minister of education, the governor, the headteacher, a teacher, a student, or another person of their choice. the collaborating dyads focused on possible solutions to the tasks we gave them. their learning depended on how they comprehended the two activities, their relations, and their relevance for them. agnes and deca spent 68 minutes on task#1 and 26 minutes on task#2, and their whole discussion comprised 579 turns. at the end of the online activities, the dyad took part in an episodic interview meant to bring clarification to the analysis. the interview was guided by questions based on the dyad’s discussion. for example, “you said in the us students are more prepared to use technology in class. why do you think the brazilian students are not?” the students' utterances and written messages posted in the web forum have been analysed following a thematic-dialogic procedure (barbato & beraldo, 2020). this analysis requires attention to the information produced by each participant's utterances and posted messages oriented by the meaningmaking processes, textual coherence and cohesion. when activities develop over time, the chronotope becomes open as students reflect on the proposed problem in collaboration. during the period the participants are apart, between meetings, they may mention and discuss conversations, texts, and forums with other people. in dialogic-thematic analysis, meaning-making is produced through different polyphonic dynamics, depending on the activity's impact on participants. concepts of centripetal-centrifugal forces, the surplus of vision, polyphony, and heteroglossia are fundamental. the analyst considers centripetal forces as convergent and related to the permanence of values, ideologies, standardisation and cultural beliefs at this school and lead the students to instrumental learning. centrifugal forces are divergent producing decentralisation, polyphonies, openness, novelty, high variability in meaning-making, and agency. dialogic-thematic analysis focuses on how meanings emerge among the participants in an interaction sequence. the use of multimethod in studying the dyad's dialogue and written productions allowed us to make an in-depth analysis. since shifting positions illuminate sets of meanings, responsivity in adjacent pairs is not the only strategy in meaning-making as it may extend over different moments and meetings. as the many layers of analysis are related, we were able to generate assumptions about the dyad's dialogic meanings and advance the theoretical aspects of the study. the micro-level analysis focused on the two participants’ positions and meanings, especially on what changes in their positions and what remains. micro-analysis also allowed us to look at how discourse worked in the textual form. polyphonies were also identified by considering the other information: which utterances appear first in texts or at what moments participants changed the theme; what was marked with emphasis. we considered the discursive sequence and the frequency or redundancy of signs. their expression or signifier, and meaning or signified, and their orientations. ambivalences appear when the same utterance expresses different orientations. they may lead to possible changes of meaning in the dialogue. these changes in meanings were then submitted to a microgenetic analysis of the discourse to establish discursive patterns that trigger change. in each moment of analysis, transcriptions were read and re-read without removing the utterances from their context; audio recordings were checked whenever necessary. first, the transcripts of each task were organised in a vertical sequence based on the traditional analysis of turn-taking: agreement, disagreement, negotiation, appreciation, reciprocity, communicative breaks, tensions, convergences, and position (i/you/we), which made possible to understand the personal and shared meanings. after, we applied the dialogical-thematic analysis to identify how some themes dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt113 developed, meaning-production, stabilities and changes. next step, the transcripts of each task were organised side by side in a horizontal unit of analysis to identify recurrences and similar orientations to the utterances and terms. some meanings had more relevancy when the dyad qualified them at different levels of hierarchy. finally, results were brought into a single text for the analysis considering intertextuality between utterances along the tasks and interview. the process through which we shaped deca and agnes' exchanges into a single text opened up more possibilities in the analysis. a horizontal and vertical reading allowed us to find similar signifiers and meanings at different moments in their collaboration, thus enabling analysis at varying layers of interactions. also, the episodic interview gave us ways to identify similar meanings in that chronotope. we identified activity-regulating meanings in the production of knowledge in peer collaboration. to do so, we looked at the interplay between what we identified as centripetal and centrifugal discursive forces. centripetal discursive forces are oriented to the permanence of meaning and actions. they are related to instrumental learning in which the interlocutors did not produce novelty. they agreed, entirely or partially, with the perspectives of the adult authorities, e.g., the teacher, head director, coordinator, parents, etc. however, attunement to other's authorial voices (outside the forum) sometimes is oriented by the centrifugal force of innovation. for example, they reference someone's voice (inside the group) to bring more validation to their arguments. also, when they cited a prominent author or person to validate their opinion. meaningmaking has low variability when centripetal forces are present. sometimes the only resource the student search for is in the didactic material, even in blended learning. signification has high variability in centrifugal forces as the students become the centre of reflexivity. thus, a novelty in reflexivity and agency is expected (barbato & beraldo, 2020). the collaboration dynamics task# 1: discussion of the educational use of ict as a dialogical stance of re-positioning in the first moment, agnes and deca agreed on common ground, mainly negotiating tools and mediation for self-regulation. thus, physical and digital materiality indicated an increased frequency of deictic such as: here, there, underneath, look at that etc. they strived to contextualise the activity and follow up on their colleagues' posts in the collective forum. in the beginning, the girls sat slightly apart, but in time, they got closer to each other and established rules to work in collaboration. agnes constantly addressed deca while synchronising their work, to the extent that she was reading and coordinating their joint task. they also tried to identify rules of participation in synchrony with what the other dyads were posting online. personal position and reciprocal appropriation of the position worked as a tool to establish the intersubjective space. in task#1, agnes and deca's initial position was the students must use digital technologies only for learning purposes; therefore, it was up to the teacher to propose an educational use of technology in class. the girls agreed with the coordinator's position—cited in one of the initial texts—who stated, "rules are rules. the devices are only returned to students when relatives come to retrieve them personally. in our school, devices are forbidden in class". accordingly, agnes suggested, "the use of technology should be controlled, and an educational app must be created. for example, if you need a laptop in class, you should use it just for visiting sites, and you can write your observations, notes such things." agnes criticised the position of a student who admitted to using the ipad earpiece even though she knew that the coordinator could check. her initial positioning involved some attunement with a student quoted in the newspaper text. this process disclosed intersubjective interchanges and reciprocity that opened up possibilities for a collective position (we). this centripetal force introduces high variability to the semiotic field. it increases the use of evaluative words, argument consistency, and capacity for more than one interpretation of the tasks. for instance, agnes said, "the students were a bit immature! taking pictures of the teacher, using dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt114 their mobiles to mess around. this sort of stuff, you know?" and deca agreed: "yeah, they don't know how to use it to study, do they?". agnes replied, "they don't know how to use it at the right time, moment, and for what, you know? such as mobile apps. i felt they are a bit immature". deca complemented, "apps are not necessary. it is not necessary to use a mobile in class. only in case of change. change a copybook for a laptop. however, it is not necessary". the need for the teacher in the control position is underlined, caused by what the girls perceive as the lack of students' responsibility. for the girls, using technology at school brings an educational benefit and "if it is allowed, it should be done in a controlled manner". there is initial support for the interpretation that teachers should be authorised to control the use of educational technologies in school. they explain that inappropriate use refers only to social media access and improper and frequent communication with parents and friends during class. after, agnes and deca tried to find a solution for students to use ict in class. agnes pointed "the students need the discipline to use it at the right moment, for the right thing. do you agree? because they need to learn, but they don't... they don't know how to use it". the girls did not identify themselves with the students cited in the text; therefore, there was no identification between the pair "we" and the others (the brazilians' students mentioned). here, a tension between personal and social perspectives can be observed, producing a centripetal force that can be defined as the permanence of the current rules established by their school or the teacher. agnes argued that technologies are necessary only for the teacher and insisted, "if students need information, they should ask the teacher". ambivalence is noted regarding two opposing statements: "technology, yes" versus "no mobile phones [for any type of school activity]". mobiles are related to leisure, fun, distraction, games, music, friends, and social media; therefore, they are inadequate to support learning processes. but the girls supported the view that technologies could be used for educational purposes only when the teacher controls the lesson. furthermore, the girls insisted that parents must control the use of digital technologies at home. for deca, mobiles allow free access to the internet and networks, and students are immature because "they cannot resist the temptation of social media". she included herself in this situation. the second paper in task#1 contained the following statements by a north american expert who argued, "these new technologies are ending the educational paradigms since they are part of everyday life and can be integrated into the school. using technology in education is an attractive option for more exciting classes". reflexivity oriented agnes and deca to assume a new position. they began using the pronouns "we" (brazilian students) vs the "others" (north american students) as they formulated a new critique. for the girls, "the north american specialist knows how to make pedagogical use of ict in class. it is why the north american students can use such devices". agnes justified her position: "in brazil, students use it only for a social network, for chatting". in this interplay, the dyad engaged with their awareness and the voices of the social other. in the dialogue, discursive changes occur through expansions of previous argumentative utterances. agnes and deca articulated a critique about brazilian educators who are expected to create a pedagogical way to control the use of technology in class. deca and agnes brought examples to the dialogue where their comparisons aligned with the need "to control, limit, and block social access to the internet". such engagement opened up the possibility of shifting from a student's position to a teacher's position producing polyphony composed of a fused meaning of the imagined teacher's voice and their own. indeed, deca said, "okay, teachers can accept the technology in class. however, in a limited way. write this, we can accept it", and agnes responded: "okay, we accept it". the students expressed an ambivalent position as they identified themselves with the teacher rather than with their peers. the ambivalent positions ("we" in the place of the teachers) may indicate the strength of values and beliefs identified with the traditional rules established in this school and may produce criticisms and solutions. these dynamics seem to generate differentiation from the other, promoting agency. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt115 the dyad passed through different layers of activity when preparing comments and suggestions, reformulating the initial problem to balance various tensions in positions and concepts involved. changes in the shared object (the use of ict in class) are adopted through the production of commonality. they saw teachers as the controlling authority and downplayed students' awareness of the use of technology and pedagogy, including the application of rules against inappropriate ict use. it is the school that can decide what could enhance a responsible alternative educational use of technology. agnes shifted her viewpoint to visualise the problem and its connections to a third position that we call an exotopic position, i.e., (beraldo et al., 2021), when she recognised herself in the situation in focus. in this movement, she may have generated reflexivity and self-awareness, looking from the outside. this new direction and its development contributed to expanding collaboration. thus, centrifugal forces are at play and require abstraction, imagination, and cognitive efforts that involve shifting from one perspective to another in a new comprehension of the problem. this reflexive effort required a certain amount of time. agnes and deca considered the teacher's supervision of students' engagement with ict at length. they discussed restrictions ("the teacher must limit activities to tests, exercises, readings in e-books in educational applications") and prohibition ("the teacher must prohibit the use of cell phones and search engines during classes and must block access to websites, facebook, and networks"). the commitment to consider their colleagues' posts sets a new type of textuality by nesting comments and chronological asynchronous additions to the discussion. intersubjectivity here involved their reflexivity about their colleagues' opinions. thus, joint attention in collaborative writing allowed them to expand meaning-making, adding different viewpoints that promoted metacognition. the girls began reflecting on their writing process during different moments of the collaborative activity on both tasks. their colleagues' posts had an impact on their position (others-we). they approached their production with attention to 1. the posts as resulting from collaborative reflexive efforts on the same theme. 2. the reflexivity of the opposite or similar ideas in the large group with different perspectives on the tasks. and 3. the actualisation of meanings along the two activities and in the episodic interview. excerpt 1: deca: whom will you choose? agnes: ahm, i will choose… a person to create... okay, we should create the future school and say who will do it. deca: umm, the president (of the brazilian republic), maybe the minister? agnes: i think the students can do it. students and teachers can do it. deca: but students will be ministers in the future. the president will create it, but … you know, a student [a brazilian activist] already does this. agnes: oh, i don't know ... maybe the minister of education can do it, he has a great background. let me see. deca: yeah, he can do what he wants (she whispers). (…) agnes: whom will we choose? deca: who? the president! agnes: i do not choose the president because he will just… deca: no! okay. students and teachers can suggest some proposals and send them to the minister of education, and he should take it to the president. if the president accepts the proposal, he will give directions to the minister. he will apply them. don't you think? agnes: um, um. deca: let me type; i want to write. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt116 for agnes and deca, the president of brazil should be responsible for implementing teachers' and students' proposals. working with hypothetical situations in future scenarios requires a higher level of abstraction, visualisation, planning, the flexibility of positions, and creativity to explore an issue not connected to current daily practices. this type of task is generally recommended when perspective-taking is encouraged as an alternative to tasks based on memorisation or just responding to pre-defined questions. the possibilities are many in which the students could engage with awareness. besides, students may overcome the challenges to envision a future that requires dealing with and making sense of concrete situations on their own terms. the episodic interview gave us additional information to appreciate the dyad's productions. a first indication emerging from the tasks and interview activities in dialogue with the researcher was that metalanguage worked as a tool to re-contextualise and re-signify the meanings at a later moment, as deductible from the following excerpt: excerpt 2: researcher: could we try to recall what you said? you said that the students were too immature to use their mobiles in class and that, at the moment, the school shouldn't allow it. could you explain why? deca: yeah, the use of ict is not required at the moment, nor are mobiles and such personal gadgets. i think the teacher should have technology that helps him check if the grammar is correct. it could be necessary for the teacher but not for the student. i think many of them (students) are too immature to use their technologies such as mobiles, tablets etc. agnes: like in that text about ogge marques, the american specialist. he studied in the united states, and they have already used it in some places in florida. well, maybe they had discipline there, right? for example, if you allow mobile phones in class (in brazil), no one will use them for study. deca: yeah, they (brazilian students) still haven't got this… this skill, have they? agnes: yeah, they still don't have this awareness, this kind of discipline to use it for research. thus, if the teacher is in class, we don't need to use the internet to search for something. we ask him, right? it's what we thought about. in excerpt 2, we identified many meanings already expressed during the tasks and a synthesis of ideas. the outcomes indicated that meta-language worked as a tool to re-contextualise and actualise more organised and interwoven meanings. a semantic map was charted to visualise the most recurrent themes and sub-themes and to index them. we observed how these themes developed or stagnated to build a fine-tuned map (figure 1). it was also observed how meaning-making unfolded into actualised meanings. new discursive formations and significations emerged in juxtaposition with each other. the meaning-making was analysed as a seamless text summarised on the following semantic map. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt117 figure 1. semantic map – agnes and deca the use of ict in the classroom the use of technology in the classroom would only be appropriate if the students were to use it for academic purposes. teacher can allow it if used in a productive way, only technology. mobile phones would not be allowed. recontextualization students are too immature to use mobile phones no mobile phones technology, yes block the internet limited controlled immature they use apps and games in class use mobiles for memes and pranks facebook websites networksthey listen to music on the web no one will use it to study no one likes to study they get carried away with social media to read e-books educational apps students can use computer to make notes for tests and exercises they search things on google during class they cannot resist the temptation of social media the will to check out social media is greater than to study they don’t know when it’s appropriate to use it take pictures on the blackboard and don’t copy the lesson to learn and get knowledge it’s impossible to learn using mobile phones they don’t know how to use it with purpose lack of discipline lack of awareness mobiles are different from other technologies if the teacher is in the classroom, the students don’t need internet technology is only for the teacher research only with the teacher’s supervision the exception is if the teacher allows it the teacher should instruct the best way to use it dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt118 the school should provide more activities and plan classes that will promote technology usage in a positive way. it might be for research in scientific areas, or for knowledge depth, influencing students to possibly even choose a career in these areas. which would help the development of the country. the school should be full-time, so students would have more immersed in the school activities. the families should have more participation in school. students should have more things like science and technology fair. recontextualization they respect the teachers schools are better they study full time they are patriots students listen to authority and have higher expectations to meet students listen to authority and have higher expectations to meet the use of ict should be controlled to bring the teacher closer the teacher should keep in touch with the students the teacher should not teach using only a computer the teacher should keep in touch with the parents the teacher should teach, explain, and answer the questions the parents should control the time: study, network, free time to use technologies more participation from the family in school the presence of the family is important. school is the second home of the student parents are responsible to guide their kids to search the web explain right from wrong and set up time limit the parents should control internet use it helps the environment lack of discipline american students are disciplined brazilian students need to be disciplined technology, yes no need to waste paper controlled no need to bring books and laptops dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt119 in figure 1, the rectangles indicate the twin themes, and the vertical dotted line separates contrasting ideas the dyad elaborated in collaboration. the arrows positioned in the middle of the map indicate the back-and-forth flux and variability in meaning-making. the rectangles placed under the central theme are sub-themes put into dashed rectangles. these sub-themes are surrounded by utterances strongly anchored in the significant themes. the statements were sometimes reported with semantic approximation using similar words or were reiterated many times. some meanings remained undeveloped and were stored as sub-themes. for example, lack of discipline relates to social media, chats, and networks. on the contrary, lack of awareness is related to learning by using mobile phones, which is, in their perception, a peculiar type of technology. at the bottom of the map, we placed a "re-contextualisation box" to synthesise the meaning-making process's result. in sum, we can answer our research question by indicating the following elements, featuring the meaning-making dynamics as several discursive positions followed by reciprocal appropriation, accompanied by new meanings and novel connections. furthermore, the alternation between reading (the educational material assigned and the notes produced by the mates online) and writing required students' high coordination of the activity, exchanges of information, clarification of their thoughts as accurately as possible, synthesis and, at the same time, in-depth reflection. the meaning-making process was characterised by shared management, joint attention, mutual influence, elaboration of ideas, explanations with appreciations and suggestions, and discursive and reciprocal positioning. finally, students synthesised and reintegrated the meanings they produced, comparing them to those of the larger group. conclusions the polemic web forums—based on problems of real-world contexts—aim to engage students ontologically. they may create spaces of negotiation that involve ethical positions, values, and moral judgments on open-ended problems with multiple potential creative solutions. adding obstacles, i.e. difficulties to the activity—such as the different voices and other positions in the statements or putting the students in the centre of a decision—prompts freedom to learn in collaboration. the specific method we developed and the construction of the semantic map allowed us to analyse the discursive movements that characterise meaning-making. the extensive use of multimodal tools has promoted changes in everyday pedagogical practice. such multimodality in technological educational activities combines new modes of communication and forms of interaction, contributing to change and transforming socialisation and human development conditions. in addition, thematic problem-solving collaborative tasks combine different timelines and social profiles. similarly, this multimodality promoted the expanded alternation of positions and complex activities in executing actions such as reading, writing together, dictating, revising, reflecting, augmenting and deciding in collaboration. perspective-taking and freedom of expression linked the actual situation in the school setting (task# 1) to the perspectives of the school in the future (task# 2). both tasks were purposely designed to include issues that created spaces for negotiation involving ethical positions, values, moral judgements, and creative solutions. the discussion about these issues developed reflexivity about responsibility and care ethics in cultural practices. divergences, collisions or opposing positions in collaboration were triggered initially by the material provided to students. highlighting different voices and their/other positions and putting students in the centre of decision-making processes prompted the free emergence of polyphonies and heteroglossia that led the students to experience new positions in knowledge production. the outcomes show that collaboration dynamics may produce various actions, such as the ability to observe, elaborate, guide the activity, and get more involved in maintaining the intersubjective meaningdialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt120 making process. linking the argument genre with the narrative in the construction of personal and collective positions produced innovation and reciprocal alignments in making the students’ meanings. the small set of data having only one dyad as the participant is, at the same time, a guarantee of deep analysis for the further understanding of the processes and a limitation. we developed a methodology to track down meaning-making dynamics occurring within dyads collaborating in a blended setting. considering that blended activities will be more frequent in educational contexts as a post-covid legacy, it is clear that this method will continue to be developed. finally, this research adds insight into the meaningmaking dynamics when students are required to combine written knowledge in interaction with a peer while considering their peers' online responsiveness. acknowledgements this study was financed by the coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior – brasil (capes) – finance code 001; capes print, through the agreement between the universities of brasília and bari; the institute of psychology, and copei, unb we are thankful to ana marjanovic-shane for her comments on the early versions of the manuscript. references bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. austin: university of texas. barbato, s. & beraldo, r. (2020). polemic forum in blended learning as new strategies for a borderless higher education. in gesú, m. g. di, and gonzález, m. f. cultural views on online learning in higher education: a seemingly borderless class, springer series, 1, 87-101. beraldo, r., ligorio, m. b., & barbato, s. (2017). intersubjectivity in primary and second education: a review study. research papers in education, 33, 278-299. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02671522.2017.1302497. beraldo, r., annese, s., schwartz, n., & ligorio, m. b. (2021). building intersubjectivity in blended problem-solving tasks. learning, culture, and social interaction 32(6), 100546. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2021.100545 evans, m. a., e. feenstra, r. ryon, & mcneill, d. (2011). a multimodal approach to coding discourse: collaboration, distributed cognition, and geometric reasoning. international journal computersupported collaborative learning 6(2), 253-278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-0113-0 gilje, ø. (2019). expanding educational chronotopes with personal digital devices. learning, culture and social interaction, 21, 151-160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.03.002 kayalar, f. (2022). characteristics of ubiquitous model and investigation of its applicability in language education. proceedings of iac 2022 in vienna, prague. august 6-6. lévi, p. (1999). cibercultura. (translated for carlos irineu da costa). são paulo: editora 34. 272 p. ligorio, m. b., talamo, a., & pontecorvo, c. (2005). building intersubjectivity at a distance during the collaborative writing of fairy tales. computers & education, 45(3), 357-374. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2005.04.013 ligorio, m. b., cesareni, d., & schwartz, n. (2008). collaborative virtual environments as means to increase the level of intersubjectivity in a distributed cognition system. journal of research on technology in education, 40(3), 339-357. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt121 ligorio, m. b., amenduni, f., sansone, n., & mclay, k. (2020). designing blended university courses for transaction from academic learning to professional competences. in gesú, m. g. di, and gonzález, m. f. cultural views on online learning in higher education: a seemingly borderless class, springer series, 67-86. ligorio m. b. (2021). time to blend: why and how education should adopt the blended approach. in telexbe, the first workshop on technology enhanced learning environments for blended education, foggia, italy. matusov, e. (1996). intersubjectivity without agreement. mind, culture, and activity 3, 25-45. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327884mca0301_4 matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a. (2017). promoting student’s ownership of their own education trough critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 5, e1-e29. https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2017.199 matusov, e. (2020). pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8, e1-e24. https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.314 marjanovic-shane, a. (2011). you are nobody! the three chronotopes of play. bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. (p. 201-2022). new york: peter lang publishers. mehan, h. (1979). learning lessons: social organisation in the classroom. cambridge, ma: harvard press. perrino, s. (2020). chronotope. the international encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology, 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786093 lévi, p. (1999). cibercultura. (translated by carlos irineu da costa). são paulo: editora 34. pifarré, m., & staarman, j. k. (2011). wiki-supported collaborative learning in primary education: how a dialogic space is created for thinking together. international journal of computer-supported collaborative learning, 6(2), 187-205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-011-9116-x ritella, g. & hakkarainen, k. (2012). instrumental genesis in technology-mediated learning: from double stimulation to expansive knowledge practices. computer supported learning 7, 239-258. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-012-9144-1 ritella, g., rajala, a., & renshaw, p. (2021). using chronotope to research the space-time relations of learning and education: dimensions of the unit of analysis. learning, culture and social interaction, 31, part b, 100381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2020.100381. singh, h. (2021). building effective blended learning programs. in challenges and opportunities for the global implementation of e-learning frameworks (pp. 15-23). igi global. sidorkin, a. m. (1996). an ontological understanding of dialogue in education. (doctor of philosophy) 122f. university of washington, seattle, washington. sinclair, j., & coulthard, r. m. (1975). toward an analysis of discourse: the english used by teachers and pupils. oxford: oxford university press. stahl, g. (2006). sustaining group cognition in math chat environment. research and practice in technology enhanced learning, 2, 1-16. dialogic approach to the analysis of the meaning-making process in a blended setting rossana beraldo, silviane barbato, m. beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.499 | vol. 10 (2022) dt122 trausan-matu, s., stahl, g., & sarmiento, j. w. (2008). supporting polyphonic collaborative learning. eservice journal, 58-74. https://doi.org/10.2979/esj.2007.6.1.59 turkle, s. (1984). the second self: computer and the human spirit. cambridge: mit press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word andal, whose discourse, copyedit and layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.276 | vol. 7 (2019) c1 whose discourse, whose ears? harmony in dialogic pedagogy amidst the post-truth noise aireen grace andal ural federal university, russian federation abstract commentary on dpj editorial by robin alexander (2019), whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world. this commentary adds emphasis on the importance of the four areas of dialogic pedagogy--language, voice, argument and truth-that alexander proposes to be invested in and prioritized more. it is argued that dialogic pedagogy will benefit from the development of the current approach to respond to the post-truth era, rather than from looking for new ways to do dialogue. finally, it is suggested that practitioners of dialogic pedagogy take the post-truth era as a situation that fosters critical thinking and reevaluation of how dialogue is conducted. aireen grace andal is a graduate student of political philosophy and a junior researcher at the center for comparative studies on toleration and recognition at the ural federal university. she is a citizen of the philippines, where she obtained her bachelor’s degree in sociology. her recent fields of research interests are ethics, international relations and urban spaces. acknowledgement the author thanks prof. andrey menshikov whose mentorship in class inspired this commentary and the teachers in global ambassador, under the leadrship of evgeniya efremova, for their thoughtful discussions about pedagogy. ��� introduction the article by dr. alexander (2019) serves as an invitation to educators and students to engage in a dialogue about the assumptions held regarding virtues of dialogue within the classroom and the broader world. this is especially pertinent to the contemporary era where dialogue enters the post-truth world. there is indeed danger for this changing status of truth to drown out, restrict, or confuse our understanding of what a classroom dialogue is, and why and how to do it. the opportunity cost of the tendency to be unreflective about dialogue is the dearth of understanding and exchanges of thoughts particularly because of a limited take on the normative pursuit of dialogue. how should we make sense of these realities? given the promises of dialogic pedagogy, why has this not been enough to combat the post-truth threats? dr. alexander offered ways of looking at the current state of dialogic pedagogy. he showed the possibilities of having discord and incoherence in the virtues and practices of dialogic pedagogy in the classroom. more importantly, he demonstrated not only how dialogue should be done but how it is done poorly in the postissn: 2325-3290 (online) whose discourse, whose ears? harmony in dialogic pedagogy amidst the post-truth noise aireen grace andal dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.276 | vol. 7 (2019) c2 truth era. this commentary takes stock of what dr. alexander has started and interprets his suggestions as a call not to do something new but to scale up what is already being done in dialogic pedagogy. on language: we don’t pause enough dr. alexander's proposal to ensure an “accountability to talk” means to see the spill-over of these talks outside the classroom. dialogues inside the classroom are pointless if there is a “mismatch between what we strive for within classrooms and what students may encounter outside them” (p. e6). this renders futile the speech norms developed in the classroom dialogues because they do not trickle down into the students’ ability to reflect how their dialogue is connected to the larger society they live in. of no less importance are the unuttered interactions such as signs of doubts, nods of insights, pauses of reconsideration etc. these provide assistance to an accountable talk, making it impossible to think of dialogues as beyond an expression of logic, but as a reflection about the participants as well as the positions they take. without leaving rigid polarisations, dialogue very quickly lapses into a rather dogmatic practice. the challenge for educators then is to offer more opportunities for students to pause and engage into analyzing why they speak, not only what they have to speak about and how to do it. it is important because what use is it if students are able to speak yet the dialogues are mostly still characterised by the discourses of dichotomies, myths and meaninglessness? if dialogue is “the object of learning as well as its medium” (p. e6), students would be able to generate a shared lexicon to coexist in a world wherein metadebates are the norm for legitimate dialogue. this reminds us of the role of language as means not only to offer facts, but also to unveil the backdrop that prevents students from seeing otherwise. on voice: we don’t hush enough voice, by itself, may not be sufficient to cure dialogue’s deficit. dialogic pedagogy is an approach that weighs positions, not just surfaces them. even where engaging and highly critical classroom dialogues emerge, these have little bearing if the noise of technocratic “expert” voices drown out the very voices of the people they wish to educate. this reflects a hierarchy of voices and an ableist classroom to which alexander commented that “while freedom is never absolute it can be tempered” (p. e8). the previous statement resembles what shanahan (2007) meant in saying that “children may have voices, but adults control the conversation” (p. 415). to be dialogic is not simply to allow students to talk in more volume but to actually listen to these voices. for the muted voices to be heard, the noise of the dominant voices must be controlled. not only teachers must scale down their controlling of the conversations, but also teachers should scale up controlling their own voices as well as other dominant voices. silence, while seemingly ironic, is an enabling tool to create “intermissions” for other voices to begin rising up. if this becomes a routine, while dominant voices become minor voices and observers, these dominant voices can listen to themselves from way above and then hopefully come to realize how caught up they have been as dominant ones, driving other voices out of stage. as alexander reminds us, “we must ask how far it equalises the voices of different groups of students” (p. e10). sometimes, it is even helpful to mute one’s own voice and engage in dialogues assuming others’ voices. for instance, plato had dialogues through a character. he was able to engage with the ideas and enter into a pedagogical relationship with his audience. a dialogue is therefore not weighed in terms of flaunting a range of assertions at one’s disposal, though that might be useful; but rather, in terms of demonstrating kind of reasoning that is sensitive not only to valid premises and conclusions but also to listening to various sources of voices in an argument. whose discourse, whose ears? harmony in dialogic pedagogy amidst the post-truth noise aireen grace andal dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.276 | vol. 7 (2019) c3 on argument: we don’t freestyle enough the merit of an argument is not in its flawlessness but in its power to integrate and establish connection among various fields of life. however, we are obsessed with rigid and clean-cut categories such as types, kinds or groups. but as alexander mentions, we do a great disservice to arguments if we are not able to transcend the boundaries of the academic and political realms. arguments are products of thought processes that organize the premises to makes sense of any interpretation of reality. while dialogue enables many of us to carefully reflect on our own predispositions, it can backfire if we continue “polarising academic and political argument as if each were one-dimensional” (p. e11). if educators are to fulfil their purpose, they cannot afford to ignore that arguments in the academe are not only integrated with the political world but that these two are inevitably permeable membranes. arguments build communities of dialogue, spaces where students can explore further what they were taught and think for themselves about it. taken in these terms, arguments are more than discrete skills learned in schools but an approach to learning that sees the blurred lines between academe and politics. as implied in dr. alexander’s text, it would be a sad fact if arguments are determined by labels – academic, political, moral etc. if arguments are polarized, the dialogues in the classroom would be framed, down to the last detail, by the requirement to prepare for academic requirements rather than the broader world. when students lay down their arguments, the focus will not be on category-free discussions or enquiry, but on choosing arguments based on what we need to know for the school requirements. this situation is not far from the traditional classroom experience and military training ground, where students are trained to produce arguments that are favorable towards fulfilling requirements. to add to alexander’s point, part of this concern is when educators and learners remain passive and “mechanical dialogue” is left unchallenged. worst is when there is denial that being consumed by categories is an impediment to learning. as what wittgenstein said, “[t]elling someone something he will not understand is pointless” (wittgenstein, 1998, p. 10). what are some signs of this “mechanical dialogue”? on the part of educators, grades are introduced as goals, and obedience as the means. ranking is emphasized, which is why students focus on winning debates rather than appreciating their opponents’ views. the teacher might also essentialize his or her role as an authority, instigating automatic obedience from students. there is less emphasis on the long-term influences that the school experience can have on students’ beliefs. on the part of students, they may fail to see the link between their present learning and its critical consequences for society in the future. there is also no more sense of wonder, and even confusion, and the desire to get beyond mere papers and records. in this situation, there rarely emerges learning from the collision of viewpoints. on truth: we don’t sustain enough dialogic pedagogy can be easily dismissed in its futile pursuit of truth if by ‘truth’ we mean a kind of compatibility of knowledge claims with a universal reality. unsurprisingly, those who support the “cynical relativism of ‘fake news’ and the ‘alternative fact’” (alexander, 2019, p. e13) may not find dialogue to be the most supportive space. in other words, post-truth advocates have inherent cognitive limitations in processing a dialogic rhetoric. this is because they, by design, are not ready to celebrate dialogue. yet this phenomenon of truth denial cannot be easily relinquished especially in discursive venues such as those found online, or in assemblies of post-truth supporters who provide hospitable platforms for truth-assaultive discourses. no less bothersome than believing in post-truth is when the lack of trust to the pursuit of truth compounds to apathy. even in the presence of the well-facilitated dialogues, we have to recognise that people may plainly not care about the process of obtaining information. apathy in regard to pursuing the truth cannot be isolated from the fact that people typically rely on knowledge presented by the key informants and that many have simply had enough of “truth.” whose discourse, whose ears? harmony in dialogic pedagogy amidst the post-truth noise aireen grace andal dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.276 | vol. 7 (2019) c4 the challenge therefore is not so much about producing counterclaims to post-truth than it is about proactively sustaining the spaces that celebrate truth. if anything, what dialogic pedagogy is after in its pursuit of truth is to foster and maintain negotiations of knowledge claims and being able to express truth in various ways. it may be easy to spark activities that foster dialogic pedagogy. but the challenge is to keep the dialogues going, to keep the contesting positions, to keep asking questions. to dismiss sustaining what has begun in dialogic pedagogy is to judge it by a limited standard for which it was established in the first place. it would be inapt to ignore the difference between truth as claim and truth as a heuristic device, a way to facilitate dialogue and negotiation. the aim is to avoid monopoly of knowledge production. this does not imply that every viewpoint is equally valuable, or that we should accept that each person finds their own truth. rather, the logic of negotiation primes participants to be broad-minded and other-regarding. harmony amidst the post-truth noise it is in this context of much discord that dialogic pedagogy finds itself today. while there are definitely efforts to keep dialogic pedagogy active especially in the digital age, there are reasons to doubt what these ventures can achieve. has dialogic pedagogy ended up with a promising ideal overwhelmed by the whims of politics of knowledge production? yet while the post-truth craze mocks and invalidates the normative aspirations of dialogic pedagogy, it is this situation that urges us to explore further what could be done better in dialogic pedagogy. it is the disruptive noise of the post truth era that makes us hungry to revisit why and how we practice dialogue, that challenges our current dialogic practices, that nudges us away from dogmatic beliefs that impedes critical thought. the post-truth apologists are of great value to dialogue even when their beliefs are barren at best, and harmful at worst. this prevents the situation that worried mill (1859), that is, “both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field” (p. 44). the takeaway in dr. alexander’s account is the challenge to scale up dialogue and produce melody amidst the post-truth noise. perhaps there is no need to do dialogue differently, only to play it better. the question is not so much about looking for new answers than it is about listening to the often ignored and skipped aspects of dialogue in the classroom. the challenge is to cultivate the art of listening or a sensitivity to the signals when to slow down, stop, silence and adjust classroom dialogues as integrated to the rest of the world. this is akin to recognizing the notes played before a concert begins, joining all instruments of the orchestra to play in consummate connectedness around a common frequency. certainly, it is inevitable to experience an inadequacy to perform this. however, dr. alexander offered four ways to practice mindfulness or consciousness on a seamless integration of doing and being in the practice of dialogic pedagogy. like an embedded antenna that allows an examination of our inner and outer environment, sensitivity to the connection of classroom dialogues to its outside environment makes a difference. dialogic pedagogy could be easily dismissed as an illusion with no bearing on the world of practical education especially when dealing with lack of classrooms or underpaid teachers. the post-truth supporters can easily lurk over the impracticality and non-immediacy of dialogic pedagogy. what then is the point of all the attempts to revisit the ways we conduct dialogue? the value of it lies in creating enough confidence in the existence of a logical way of arriving at any epistemic gain. the pursuit of a well-designed dialogue means a careful weighing of various levels of talk among educators and students. here, the goal is not necessarily consensus but a legitimate way to process knowledge claims so that “information of the highest possible quality can be obtained” (funtowicz & strand, 2007). in order for a legitimate dialogic process to take place, parties must be able to identify the bases on which their agreements rest and consider it to be a product of a fair discussion where everyone had an equal chance of affecting the outcomes. it is through the distinct process of exchanging and carefully considering reasons that mutually-acceptable and legitimate classroom dialogues could be generated. this is an opening to amplify the application of whose discourse, whose ears? harmony in dialogic pedagogy amidst the post-truth noise aireen grace andal dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.276 | vol. 7 (2019) c5 dialogues as a response to the current context. the endeavors of dialogic pedagogy may have been the laughing stock for those who remain unconvinced by the legitimacy of exchanges as facilitated by reason. but it has also been a source of hope for those who keep on seeking to make pedagogy better by the pursuit of truth. dialogic pedagogy has a lot more to offer, especially when we lend ears for possibilities to improve beyond the mere talk. references alexander, r. (2019). whose discourse? dialogic pedagogy for a post-truth world. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 7, e1-e19. doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2019.268 funtowicz, s. o., & strand, r. (2007). models of science and policy. in t. traavik & l. l. ching (eds.), biosafety first (pp. 263-278). trondheim: tapir academic press. mill, j. s. (1859). on liberty and other writings. in s. collini (ed.), cambridge texts in the history of political thoughts. new york: cambridge university press. shanahan, s. (2007). lost and found. the sociological ambivalence toward childhood. the annual review of sociology, 33, 407-428. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.33.040406.131808 wittgenstein, l. (1998). culture and value: a selection from the posthumous remains (p. winch, trans.). oxford: blackwell publishers. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word kirzhaeva, maslova, fruitful inspiration, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r1 fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva national research mordovia state university, russia elizaveta maslova plekhanov russian university of economics, russia abstract a review of matthias freise (ed.), 2018., inspired by bakhtin: dialogic methods in the humanities, boston: academic studies press, 2018. this review provides an analysis of a collection of articles that demonstrate the possibilities of applying dialogic methods in various fields of the humanities. the authors of these articles show how bakhtinian dialogism functions in the history and theory of literature, sociology and design, in the study of platonic dialogues, the image of the other in contemporary cinema and in the practice of psychoanalysis. the reviewers emphasize that the book fits well with the bakhtin studies trend. the dialogical approach to the phenomena of human consciousness allows a new research paradigm that differs from the natural sciences. the emphasis should be placed on the internal relations among the objects of the humanities research. the latter should be considered as a form of dialogue and described within the framework of dialogic methods. each of the authors gives their own answer to the questions formulated by m. freise: “how can we define a dialogic method of research in the humanities in general, what would be the specific qualities of such a method?” as a result, reviewers believe, a convincing picture of the internal dialogism of the humanities is constructed in the book. despite the fact that special articles on the dialogic method in pedagogy are not included in the book, reviewers believe that the book will be useful for theorists and practitioners of education. keywords: bakhtin; bakhtin studies; dialogism; dialogic relations; dialogic methods in the humanities. vera kirzhaeva works as a professor of russian at the philology department at the mordovia state university in saransk. she holds a degree of a doctor of pedagogy. her main research interests are bakhtin studies, russian émigré education in 1920-40s, and russian intellectual history. elizaveta maslova works as a university lecturer in moscow. she holds a phd degree. her special interests include lcci exams preparation and development of online courses, bakhtin and contemporary us novel. ïïò mikhail bakhtin’s ideas of dialogue and dialogic imagination have been crucially important for the world of the humanities for many years (holquist, 2002; morson, emerson, 1990; osovskiy, 1997; polyuha, thomson, wall, 2012; makhlin, 2015; osovsky, 2018). the application of bakhtinian dialogics in the education sphere has also been noteworthy. an application of bakhtinian dialogics to education can be found in the works of russian philosopher and educator vladimir bibler and his school of the dialogue of issn: 2325-3290 (online) fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r2 cultures in 1990s (bibler, 1991) and later in the dialogical pedagogy, theory and practice (matusov, 2009; matusov, marjanovic-shane, gradovski, 2019; brandist, gardiner, white, mika, 2020). contemporary interpretations of the ideas and legacy of mikhail bakhtin strongly call for new approaches. this is exactly the path followed by the authors of the collection “inspired by bakhtin. dialogic methods in the humanities.” the editor of the book – the famous slavic scholar and the researcher of bakhtin’s literary and philosophical works, professor at the university of heidelberg, matthias freise – determines the position of the authors from the very beginning of the book: “many scholars around the world are inspired by mikhail bakhtin’s ideas. for them, his using of the term “dialogue” is one of the key concepts in the humanities” (p. vi). simultaneously the book’s aim is to answer the following principal questions: “despite the abundance of interpretations of bakhtin’s teachings, two fundamental questions regarding his ‘dialogism’ still seem to be unanswered: first – do the objects of other humanities have dialogical qualities similar to those literature has; second – how can we define a dialogic method of research in the humanities in general, what would be the specific qualities of such a method?” (p. vi). the editor also points out to the specific tasks that the researchers set for themselves. using bakhtin’s terminology, we can say that the voices of each discipline of the humanities merge into a common chorus: in this volume, seven scholars – from different countries, rooted in different cultures, working in different fields of the humanities – propose answers to the following questions: what in my field of study can be considered a dialogic approach and why is a dialogic approach essential in my field in order to disclose the specific qualities of the material to be analyzed? from these two fundamental questions, the specific questions in the respective fields of study arise: how dialogic is the intercultural encounter in contemporary cinema? what is dialogic design? what are the presuppositions of a successful therapeutic dialogue? on what terms a literary history can be called dialogic? how dialogic is postmodern authorship? how dialogic are plato’s philosophical dialogues? what distinguishes dialogical sociology? (p. vi). however, it is not clear what bakhtin’s ideas they discuss. we sometimes had an impression the researchers entered into dialogue with fairly general and rather vague categories of bakhtin’s ideas in order to discuss some specific problems. the choice of dialogism as a framework for bakhtin's theory seems logical for the editor and the authors. the dialogical relations of a person with the world and with one’s own self were already indicated in bakhtin’s first publication – the 1919 essay “art and answerability.” developing the thesis about the immanent dialogism of the phenomenon of “answerability,” the young philosopher writes: “it is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame. the poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life” (bakhtin, 1990, p. 1-2). here one can see the first outline of internal dialogism that will reappear in dostoevsky’s poetics as an imperative: “to be means to communicate dialogically. when dialogue ends, everything ends. thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 252). for m. freise, bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism becomes the basis of that spectrum of dialogic methods, which should become a kind of new methodology for the humanities. from the position of m. freise, bakhtin’s dialogism arises as a logical outcome of the scholar's work with the main neo-kantian texts. fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r3 dialogicity, thus, is the one common quality of phenomena expressing relationships. therefore, a dialogical approach should be the universal tool of understanding them. to examine phenomena of relationship is the long sought common quality of the various disciplines within humanities. however, this quality, and with it the very nature of such phenomena, dissolves when we, conditioned by natural sciences, redefine relationships as objects. for this reason, all disciplines in the humanities are called to develop dialogical approaches, which are the most adequate to the phenomena they examine – be it psychic, social, cultural, epistemological or historical (p. xxvii). the relations between the researcher and the object of the study, which are so different in the field of natural sciences and in the field of the humanities, determine the possibility/impossibility of internal dialogism in both scientific disciplines. at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s, returning to reflections on the essence of the knowledge of humanness in his work “to the philosophical foundations of the humanities,” bakhtin emphasized the very difference in the approaches to the object of the study in the natural sciences and in the humanities and the relations that arise from this. knowledge of things and knowledge of personality. these must be characterized as limits: the pure dead thing, having only externality, existing only for the other and capable of being completely and finally revealed by the one-sided act of this (knowing) other. such a thing, lacking its own inalienable and unconsumable core, can only be an object of practical interestedness. the second limit is thought about god in the presence of god, dialogue, questioning, prayer <…> a question is in this case posed by the one knowing not to himself nor to a third in the presence of a dead thing, but to the one known (hirschkop, 1999, p. 200). in his article “the dialogic method in literary history” m. freise clearly shows how bakhtin’s methodology works within the framework of a specific discipline of the humanities. the approach proposed by the author has the necessary versatility and allows one to extend his conclusions to any space of intellectual history – the history of education, philosophy, culture, linguistics, etc. scholarship in general – and therefore also literary scholarship – aims at the generalizing and classifying of phenomena. literary history, like historiography in general, seems to be an exception to this aim. in the field of literary history, any attempt to go beyond description seems to be unscholarly. contemporary theory of history, ever since hayden white published his groundbreaking works on the narrativity of historiography, seems to advise scholarship to refrain from any attempt to understand the flow of history. otherwise, we seem to inevitably end up exploiting history for our own ideological purposes. however, the subjective narrativity of historiography is only one side of a complex correlation between the cultural present and the cultural past, which i would like to call, with reference to mikhail bakhtin’s teachings, a dialogue (p. 25). such an attitude should ensure the use of a dialogical approach as a tool for an adequate understanding and interpretation of historical phenomena, in this case, in the literary space. one of the most important questions posed by m. freise is what ensures the correct reading of a literary work, its meanings and symbols of the past; where does the point of dialogue between cultures at a great historical distance arise and what ensures their continuity? revisiting the concept of the epoch as the fundamental element of german literature since the mid-1980s, m. freise sees in it a fruitful combination of time and style that characterizes cultural and artistic production not only in a certain historical interval, but also in the previous and subsequent periods. this creates a complex theoretical construction, whereby the researcher tries to explain the change of the renaissance to the baroque, and the baroque to the era of classicism, introduces the concept of “transitional” epochs (mannerism, rococo), etc. the theoretical fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r4 base is extremely wide and incudes names from g. welflin and yu. tynyanov to h.g. gadamer and h.r. jauss et al. hidden dialogue with bakhtin is, in some form or the other, discernible in most of the articles in the collection. for example, michal kaczmarczyk following d. bohm in the article “towards a dialogical sociology” reflects on the reasons for the complexity of the thought process, during which there is a clash between the momentary understanding of what is happening, and the experience rooted in the consciousness. he defines the process of thought formation as a kind of a blind spot, since having formulated a thought, a person, as a rule, is not able to verbalize how he or she arrived at it. finding the truth in the course of a sociological study is achieved, from the point of view of the author, precisely through the dialogical approach, partially implemented in the sociological classics of m. weber and e. durkheim. one cannot disagree that adding bakhtin dialogism to the theory and practice of sociology should create new tools for analyzing the phenomena of social life. it will not be amiss to recall here the experience of practical sociology of bakhtin himself – the article “experience in studying the demand of collective farmers,” which appeared during the kustanai exile in soviet trade journal and was awarded the communist academy medal. from dialogic sociology to dialogic design – this is how one can define the direction of klaus krippendorff’s article “discourses in the design of cultural artifacts,” whose author, a theorist and practitioner of architectural design, first of all explores the communication strategies used in planning and implementation of design projects, looks at is the proportion of thought, language and speech in the practice of negotiations and meetings, not only face-to-face, but also through technologies (webinars, forums, chats, etc.). the social constraints imposed on the creative process, and the communicative norms of various communities, including professional ones, create their discourses, and only their proper organization can lead to success in projects. the researcher believes this goal can be achieved with the help of bakhtin’s ideas – from dialogue to polyphony and speech genres: bakhtin proposed a way of reading texts not as a sequence of well-formed sentences conceptualized by structural linguists, or as a network of propositions about the world on which logical positivists insist, but as the voices behind written texts. for bakhtin, these voices belong not only to their authors, which is the primary focus of many contemporary literary interpretations, but also to those written of, explicitly quoted, and implicitly invoked, including the imagined readers. what attracted me to his conceptions is that he always grounded his reading of texts in human speech. words, he insisted, do not exist until they are spoken, and, when printed, bear the signature of their speakers and listeners without whom we rarely speak (p. 78). relying not only on m. bakhtin, but also on l. wittgenstein, r. barthes, m. foucault, the author analyzes the place of various discourses (from political and sociological to linguistic and even medical) in modern society, determines the laws of their development, emphasizes the role of internal dialogical nature of professional discourse in the development of a language that is understandable not only to members of a particular community, but also to outsiders. according to the researcher, taking into account these factors, improves the design discourse and ensures success of design proposals. xiaojing wang examines internal dialogism as a characteristic feature of the image of the other in an increasingly open europe. her article “voices in image: a methodological and theoretical approach to the dialogic image of the other with the european image of china as an example” is a typical example of combining the post-structuralist interpretations of the other, primarily in the philosophy and psychoanalysis of j. lacan, with the bakhtinian dialogue. the researcher considers the image of china, formed in the european consciousness from the 13th century, as predominantly monologic and rather arbitrary, as clearly fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r5 illustrated in her examples of the alleged "chinese" in the discourse of the french enlightenment. the gradual development of the chinese culture in the twentieth century, the change in attitudes towards the chinese immigrants to europe, the transformation of behavioral stereotypes among representatives of chinese communities naturally led to the formation of a new perception of the chinese, whereas economic growth and political changes in china since the late 1980s have changed the very principles of cultural and artistic reproduction of the chinese world. the author supports her thought by a detailed analysis of films created in denmark, iceland, italy, france, etc., where the plot is based on the nuances of communication between the chinese characters and the representatives of european culture. according to the author, a new interpretation of china in modern european cinema is rooted in the desire to understand the other, to enter into dialogue with him, thereby destroying previous stereotypical perceptions, eliminating hostility and creating a field of a friendly dialogue that “heralds a deep and profound cultural transformation, which, as it were, has turned a new page in the cultural histories of europe and china subject” (p. 170). kryštof boháček's article “between socrates and the stranger: how dialogic are plato’s dialogues?” is partly in tune with bakhtin’s understanding of dialogue in the book on dostoevsky. however, the czech scholar is much more preoccupied with the current state of research on platonic dialogues, their typology, and their structural features. the platonic dialogues enter into dialogue with the present, and the conversation lasting several millennia is actualized in each epoch, including the time of the author himself. “apology” is a vivid example of plato’s conversation with each new generation. there is no doubt that socrates speaks to the reader, whenever someone starts to read the apology. as soon as someone opens the text of apology, the trial of socrates – the legal dispute between european society and philosophy – is launched anew. the whole text of apology is actually plato’s effort to revoke the unfortunate judicial process which had ended with the unjust judgment, from plato’s view, to send socrates to death (p. 22). it should be noted again that the authors’ degree of involvement in bakhtinian ideas and concepts varies significantly. in this sense, maria andrianova's article “internal dialogism of russian postmodern literature: polyphony or schizophrenia?” is typical of modern literary criticism. polyphony or schizophrenia are metaphors of two paths along which the prose of russian postmodernism develops from a. bitov to v. pelevin. the brevity of the text does not allow us to fully determine how the presence of traditional and nontraditional dialogues in the novels “pushkin house,” “the sacred book of the werewolf” and others demonstrates their internal dialogism in its bakhtinian understanding, especially given that the reality constructed by a postmodern writer extremely rarely turns a multitude of voices into true polyphony. sometimes bakhtin’s rejection of certain trends in the ideology and culture of the 20th century – from marxism to freudianism does not become an obstacle for the authors. thus, bakhtin’s well-known criticism of psychoanalysis does not bother reinhard plassmann. in his article “attachment patterns in the bi-personal field,” he analyses various aspects of the dialogue between a psychoanalyst and a patient. the main disadvantage of the reviewed collection is the lack of works devoted to the dialogic method in the learning process. perhaps this is due to the fact that the book is based on reports at the xv international bakhtin conference (stockholm, 2014) only. however, the approaches described in this collection seem quite productive and useful for educators who might benefit from new opportunities of using bakhtin’s dialogic method not only in theory but also in class. this book, whose authors found inspiration in bakhtin, can itself serve as a source of bakhtinian inspiration for teachers. thus, the authors of the review would like to identify those problem areas where, in their opinion, certain elements of bakhtin's pedagogy should be clarified. especially promising here are the application of various forms of dialogic education for the junior and middle school; the identification of the national characteristics of educational dialogue, its fruitful inspiration: fresh view on bakhtinian dialogism in some fields of the humanities vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.436 | vol. 9 (2021) r6 relationship with the social and cultural characteristics of a particular region or country. the dialogical potential of early bakhtin's texts also needs special consideration in the context of the european philosophical and pedagogical theory of the 1900–1930s. the discussion of the possibilities of bakhtinian dialogics in the context of new media technologies and their educational potential is to be analyzed in the interdisciplinary way. references bakhtin, m. m. (1990). art and answerability: early philosophical essays (m. holquist & v. liapunov, trans.). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky's poetics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bibler, v. s. (1991). михаил михайлович бахтин, или поэтика культуры (mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin, or the poetics of culture). moscow: progress, gnosis. brandist, c., gardiner, m. e., white, e. jayne, & mika, c. (eds.). (2020). bakhtin in the fullness of time: bakhtinian theory and the process of social education. london: routledge. holquist, m. (2002). dialogism: bakhtin and his world. 2nd edition. l., n.y.: routledge. freise, m. (ed.). (2018). inspired by bakhtin. dialogic methods in the humanities. boston: academic studies press. makhlin, v. l. (2015). большое время: подступы к мышлению м. м. бахтина (big time: approaches to m.m. bakhtin's thinking). siedlce: uniwersytet przyrodniczo-humanistyczny w siedlicach. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-58057-3. new york: palgrave macmillan. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. morson, g. s., & emerson, c. (1990). mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. stanford, ca: stanford university press. osovskiy, o. e. (1997). диалог в большом времени: литературоведческая концепция м. м. бахтина (dialogue in the big time: the literary concept of m. m. bakhtin). saransk: mgpi. osovsky, o. (2018). the destinies of meta-criticism in the era of mega-crisis, social sciences. 49 (2), pp. 132-143. polyuha, m., thomson, c., & wall, a. (eds.). (2012). dialogues with bakhtinian theory: proceedings of the thirteenth mikhail bakhtin international conference. london, ontario: mestengo press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word sherry, tracking the emergence and development over time of a dialogic whole (layed out).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a27 emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry university of south florida abstract prior research across disciplines has established the value of dialogic, whole-class discussions. previous studies have often defined discussions in opposition to the notorious triadic pattern called recitation, or ire/f, focusing on variations to the teacher’s initiating question or evaluative follow-up on students’ responses. recent scholarship has also identified variations on recitations and dialogic discussions that suggest these categories might be flexible, containing types of interaction associated with particular contexts. however, research remains to be done on how such types, or genres, of dialogic, whole-class discussion emerge and develop over time. in this article, i take up this line of inquiry, analyzing the classroom discourse of five lesson excerpts generated by a prospective teacher and his students in a us secondary history classroom between october and march. i illustrate how, over time, teacher and students repeatedly renegotiated the nature of a recitation-style textbook review activity using similar patterns of language that suggested an emergent discourse genre. these five interactions did not all lead to dialogic, whole-class discussions; i explain their relative success or failure in terms of how they constructed participants’ relationships to historical and classroom events. i argue that even failed attempts at generating dialogic discourse may be part of a developing genre. michael b. sherry is assistant professor of english education at the university of south florida. his research addresses teacher response to students in whole-class discussions and in writing, particularly those types of response that promote participation from marginalized students. his writing has appeared in journals like research in the teaching of english, american educational research journal, english education, and linguistics and education. ��� introduction education researchers agree on the value of whole-class discussions in which students develop and refine their ideas in relation to what others have already written or said. such “dialogic” (bakhtin, 1981), whole-class discussions can help students learn to consider multiple interpretations, and even to disagree, and can shape students’ notions of themselves and their learning in ways that prepare them for participation in a literate, democratic society (e.g., alexander, 2006; matusov, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016). moreover, dialogic, whole-class discussions, according to several national studies, have been associated with student literacy achievement (e.g., applebee, langer, nystrand, & gamoran, 2003; cambridge primary review trust, 2017). issn: 2325-3290 (online) emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a28 researchers across disciplines who study dialogic, whole-class discussions have often contrasted them with the classroom discourse pattern commonly called recitation, in which the teacher initiates a question, a student responds, and the teacher evaluates or “follows-up” on the student’s response; this recurring triad is often abbreviated as ire/f (e.g., cazden, 1986; mehan, 1979; g. wells, 1999). the ire/f pattern, perhaps because of its persistence over time (e.g., hoetker & albrand, 1969) and its prevalence across disciplines (e.g., lawrence & crespo, 2016), has been called “a sort of genre” (lemke, 1990) and “the dominant discourse genre” found in teaching (g. wells, 1993). however, researchers have identified variations on the ire/f pattern (e.g., mortimer & scott, 2003; rees & roth, 2017) that suggest it is not a reified, stable category. likewise, though much prior research on “dialogic,” whole-class discussions has defined them in opposition to the typical ire/f pattern, attending primarily to types of teacher questions (e.g., nystrand, wu, gamoran, zeiser, & long, 2003) and evaluative follow-ups on student responses (e.g., aukerman, 2007; o’connor & michaels, 1993; sherry, 2014), recent studies have suggested that dialogic discussions may also be a flexible category that includes variations or types depending on purpose (e.g., parker, 2010) or academic discipline (e.g., sherry, 2016). research remains to be done on how such genres of dialogic, whole-class discussion emerge and develop in classrooms over time. in this article, i examine five examples from lessons in a us secondary history classroom that took place between october and march during one school year. in each example, i analyze how teacher and students negotiated the nature of the activity, collaboratively creating relatively stable patterns of discourse. across these examples, i track the emergence and development of a dialogic discussion genre, and the potential reasons for, and relative effectiveness of, its variations. based on these findings, i discuss connections to prior classroom discourse studies and propose implications for future research and teaching. literature review ire/f vs. dialogic discussion research on the pattern of classroom discourse called recitations extends back to the early 20th century (applebee et al., 2003; gallimore, dalton, & tharp, 1986; hoetker & albrand, 1969; nystrand, gamoran, kachur, & prendergast, 1997; thayer, 1928). although recitation, in the late 19th century referred to another kind of oral examination (e.g., rice, 1893), research on recitations since then has associated this term with the recurring triadic pattern in which a teacher initiates a question, a single student responds, and the teacher immediately evaluates/follows-up on that response: researchers have thus named this pattern ire/f (cazden, 1986; mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975; g. wells, 1993). much prior research has addressed this pattern as a relatively stable category, focusing on individual turns in the ire/f triad. for example, nystrand and his colleagues have found that questions initiated by the teacher during the first turn of ire/f tend to be “inauthentic,” asking for information previously furnished to students; such questions typically involve “lower-order thinking” (nystrand et al., 2003), requiring only “the routine application of previously learned knowledge” (newmann, 1990, p. 44). such inauthentic, lower-order thinking questions, often delivered at a rapid-fire pace (e.g., blosser, 2000) leave little time for students, particularly english language learners, to consider possible answers, not to mention their own ideas and interests (cazden & leggett, 1981). similarly, nassaji and wells (2000) have studied teachers’ evaluative follow-ups (the third turn of ire/f), suggesting that when teachers’ follow-ups evaluate students’ responses as right or wrong they tend to “suppress extended student participation” (p. 400), implicitly sending the discouraging message that there is a single right answer students must produce. in contrast, researchers who study “dialogic” whole-class discussions—conversations that encourage multiple perspectives, in which speakers build on what others have already written or said— emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a29 have identified techniques intended to transform the ire/f routine. for instance, instead of inauthentic “test” questions, teachers can pose open-ended, “higher-order thinking” questions (ernst-slavit & pratt, 2017; nystrand et al., 2003) that encourage multiple, complex interpretations. likewise, teacher follow-ups that involve “uptake” (collins, 1982) of students’ responses or that share responsibility with students for evaluating interpretations (aukerman, 2007) can shift interpretive authority to students (chisholm & loretto, 2016) and even invite productive disagreement (sherry, 2014). the focus in prior research on transforming the teachers’ firstand third-turn participation in ire/f is warranted: two large-scale national studies of hundreds of us classrooms (applebee et al., 2003; nystrand et al., 1997) have suggested that dialogic, whole-class discussions often arise from conversations that began with recitation. however, beyond first and third-turn transformations of the ire/f pattern, research remains to be done on the emergence and development of types of dialogic, whole-class discussions. beyond variations on ire/f because ire/f is a pattern both long-standing and wide-ranging (appearing in classrooms across grade-levels and academic disciplines), some researchers have proposed that recitations are a characteristic educational routine that should be intentionally implemented by teachers (bellack, kliebard, hyman, & smith, 1966; hoetker & albrand, 1969). indeed the ire/f pattern parallels the structure of most lesson plans and assignments, in which a teacher initiates activity, students’ respond, and the teacher evaluates their performance; this may be one reason some researchers have called ire/f a “teaching genre” (rockwell, 2000) and “the dominant discourse genre” found in teaching (g. wells, 1993). gordon wells and his colleagues (2000; 1993, 1999, 2007) were among the first to suggest that the pattern initially identified as ire might include variations on the third-turn “follow-up,” categorizing functional moves that associate the teacher with the role of facilitator, rather than primary knower. mortimer and scott (2003) have similarly identified a variation pattern, irfrf, in which elaborative feedback from the teacher invites further responses from students. other science education researchers (e.g., hsu, roth, & mazumder, 2009; rees & roth, 2017) have identified additional variations, such as initiate-clarify-respond (icr) and initiate-respond-clarify-respond (ircr), arguing that ire/f and other variations are cultural patterns that arise in relation to contextualized types of conversations, independent of the participants. likewise, boyd and her colleagues (2015; 2006) have suggested that teacher questions during what appears to be ire/f can nevertheless foster dialogic discussion when they are contingent on prior student responses in a particular context. sherry (2018) has shown that variations in students’ responses (the second turn of ire/f) can also dialogize recitations. together, these researchers have illustrated that variations in interactional form may be less important than how participants in a particular context understand the nature of an interaction like recitation, and its available roles, relationships, and responses. variations on dialogic discussion similarly, researchers have begun to identify various types, or genres, of dialogic, whole-class discussions associated with particular contexts. in english language arts, research has indicated that dialogic discussions may arise from a sequence of oral narratives, as students respond to stories with other stories (juzwik, nystrand, kelly, & sherry, 2008; juzwik & sherry, 2005). science education researchers have noted that dialogic discussions in that subject area may include “teacher revoicing” (o’connor & michaels, 1993) or “reflective discourse” (van zee & minstrell, 1997) that reformulates student interpretations to encourage collaborative theorization. parker (2010) has suggested that dialogic discussions in history may differ according to the content and purposes of the conversation, distinguishing among two types—seminars and deliberations. other history/social studies research has identified a third type in which students enter imaginatively into a historical situation (sherry, 2016) or “problem space” (reisman, 2015) in order to explore multiple interpretations. these researchers have indicated that dialogic emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a30 discussions may differ according to academic discipline. research remains to be done on how such dialogic, whole-class discussion genres emerge and develop over time in classrooms. theoretical framework broadly, the assumptions i make in this study belong to the field of interactional sociolinguistics, and to what might be considered a precursor of that field: bakhtin’s theory of dialogism (bakhtin, 1981, 1984, 1986a). whereas some linguists might study language in terms of stable systems that apply across contexts and across particular instances of communication in order to characterize cultural populations, as a bakhtinian, i am concerned with discourse, or language in use (jaworski & coupland, 1999). i assume that classroom discourse, or language in use among teachers and their students, is never quite the same from interaction to interaction (gumperz, 1982; gumperz & hymes, 1972). that is, the meanings of an utterance depend on contexts. for bakhtin, those contexts include not only the accumulation of cultural habits and procedures, but also the utterances that immediately precede and follow a turn in conversation (1981, 1986a). “dialogic” discourse is both “filled with others’ words…which we assimilate, rework and re-accentuate” (1986a, p. 89) and also “constructed…in anticipation of encountering [a] response” (p. 94). dialogic discourse thus depends on contextual collaborations. and these collaborations do not necessarily result in consensus. as nystrand et al. (1997) point out, “discourse is not dialogic because the speakers take turns, but because it is continually structured by tension, even conflict, between conversants, between self and other, as one voice ‘refracts’ another” (p. 8). that is, each time speakers use language, they both resist and affirm other influences on those words, adopting and adapting what others have already written or said. this dialogic struggle occurs during classroom discourse interactions, as teachers and students negotiate the nature of an interaction, like whole-class discussion, and their participation in it over time. theoretical concepts: interactional frame, animation/double-voicing, emergence, genre interactional frame. one way to describe teachers’ and students’ dialogic struggle to negotiate the nature of an interaction is through the sociolinguistic concept of the “ínteractional frame” (bateson, 1972; goffman, 1981, 1986). drawing on bateson’s (1972) concept, goffman (1986) defines the interactional frame as the definition of a situation, which organizes participants’ experience of and involvement in that situation (p. 10-11). that is, the meanings of words and actions, as well as the roles, relationships, and responses that are possible in an interaction, depend on how it is framed. for example, teacher moves like questions or follow-ups may indicate frames for interactions—like recitations or discussions—that students recognize, based on their previous experiences. though prior work has associated frames derived from previous interactions with cognitive schema (e.g., schutz, 1971; tannen, 1979), i do not use “frame” here in terms of a psychologistic script, mental representation, or underlying principle1. in keeping with my dialogic assumptions, i do not conceive of the frame as merely an instantiation; nor does honoring the “eventness” of the event (bakhtin, 1986b) mean that all frames are relative. past experiences with similar situations condition but do not determine the interactional frame and its accompanying roles, relationships, and possible responses. for example, when a speaker asks a question, s/he “makes producing an answer to that question an appropriate thing to do next” (goodwin, 1990, p. 5). asking a question thus proposes a (re)framing for the interaction. however, the (re)framing is a “proposal” because the respondent can choose to participate in ways other than those 1 in contrast with schank and abelson’s (1977) well-known definition of schema as “scripts,” both early and recent work on schema has described them as active developing patterns (spiro, coulson, feltovich, & anderson, 1988), which do not determine, but merely “foreground or make relevant certain aspects of background knowledge” (gumperz, 1982, p. 132) emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a31 anticipated by the question—for example by answering with an unexpected response or even by resisting, reinterpreting, or dodging the question. animation/double-voicing. (re)framing proposals are sometimes explicit. particularly in classrooms, teachers often use language like “so you’re saying…” or “now, we are going to…” or “for homework, you will…”; in goffman’s (1986) terms, such language “animates” other participants in an interaction, explicitly proposing roles, relationships, and possible responses. when speakers animate another person by attributing words or actions to him, they always also imbue that other person’s discourse with their own purposes, voicing their own intentions as well (bakhtin, 1984; tannen, 2007; voloshinov, 1971). through this “double voicing” (bakhtin & holquist, 1981; morson & emerson, 1990), a speaker intends for multiple voices (her own, as well as another’s) to be heard within an utterance. thus, (re)framing proposals can also be implicit, relying on contextualization cues, such as syntax, accent, dialect, intonation, speech rhythm, gestures, laughter, and other methods of signaling situation and relationship (gumperz, 1982). in these ways, speakers can subtly negotiate the nature of an interaction, like whole-class discussion, through their participation in it. emergence. if participants need not agree upon the nature of the frame for their interaction, negotiating it as it unfolds (matusov, 1996) then the frame can be emergent: it cannot be understood solely in terms of an individual mental conception. neither is the frame a static definition of the situation. this does not mean that “anything goes” (consider what is involved in changing the subject of a conversation once that topic has been established over several turns). reframing proposals must be accepted by other participants in an interaction. but once they are, established features of the frame can take on a life of their own and exert an influence on subsequent participation (sawyer, 2003). thus, some possibilities and constraints of the frame are emergent: irreducible to prior qualities, intentions, or contributions of individuals. put differently, dialogic, whole-class discussions are not the product of any one participant’s intentions, but rather a result of emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (sawyer, 2003, 2005). genre. so far i have drawn on bakhtin’s dialogism to describe the way discourse shapes and is shaped by interaction (bakhtin, 1984, p. 166, 1986a, pp. 121–127): an utterance has connotations from prior use and is geared toward anticipated audiences; because utterances can be reinterpreted by subsequent discourse that proposes to redefine the interaction, the interactional frame is emergent. this logic can be scaled up: what an utterance is to an interactional frame, the frame for a particular situation is to a genre, or recurring pattern of social interaction (bakhtin, 1984; devitt, 1993; miller, 1984; swales, 1990). by genre, i do not refer to a category characterized by a set of rules, nor solely to the historical variations in the discursive features of literary texts (freedman & medway, 1994, p. 1). rather, like other north american genre theorists, i am interested in connecting regularities of discursive form and content to social relationships and to participation in communities with shared practices (as in a classroom). for example, classroom practices like taking attendance, engaging in peer review, completing a lab experiment, or participating in whole-class discussion might be considered genres that involve recognizable roles, relationships, and responses established over time in that community. bakhtinian genre theory suggests that an activity like whole-class discussion is subject to the influence of “relatively stable” social conventions which have accumulated over time, but such a “genre” is nevertheless “flexible…and free” (bakhtin et al., 1986, p. 121-127): conventions developed over time in particular contexts remain open to variations. classroom routines do not always unfold the same way. much research has already applied this approach to genre to written classroom discourse (bazerman, 1997; bazerman, bonini, & figueiredo, 2009; hicks, 1995; prior, 1998), however less attention has been paid to emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a32 oral classroom discourse genres (cf., juzwik et al., 2008b; lawrence & crespo, 2016). bakhtinian dialogism, and its focus on flexible “speech genres” (1986a), helps to describe emergent, recurring patterns of discourse associated with the repeated (re)framing over time of similar interactions like dialogic, wholeclass discussions. methodology site/participant selection in 2007-8, while observing a us prospective secondary teacher (pst) from mid-western university2 who had graduated to mwu’s fifth-year internship, i generated discourse data in a suburban ninth-grade history classroom. for the pst i observed there, i was not only a researcher but also his “field instructor.” mwu is somewhat unique in offering a fifth-year internship during which psts who have graduated from the teacher preparation program are placed in local secondary schools where they gradually take over full responsibility for a host teacher’s classes. during this year, they are visited on a bi-weekly basis by “field instructors” who have been hired by mwu to observe and discuss their lessons with them ten times over the course of the year. talbott high school: dave weber. talbott high school, which might be described as a us suburban, upper middle-class school with a homogeneous student body, was chosen for the constraints and affordances it might provide for dave weber, a european-american male and prospective secondary history teacher in his early twenties, who grew up and attended high school in a nearby suburban town. in talbott, the median income is $63,000 (compared to $50,000 for the county and $51,000, nationally) ("muninet guide," 2008). a combination of small businesses, playing fields, and a high percentage of middle-class, european-american families (90%, according to muninet guide [2008]) surround talbott high school, where weber interned with forty-five-year-old european-american host teacher, rick. rick’s room was located just down the hall from the school’s tv studio, where students used stateof-the-art cameras, blue-screen technology, and video editing equipment to run a local news station. the clean, bright hallways sported the occasional message about extracurricular activities, particularly the various teams that played on the expansive fields and courts of talbott’s campus. an athlete himself, dave weber helped rick coach the women’s basketball team that included many students from his ninth-grade history class. the school’s emphasis on news/sports, and weber’s relationships with his student-athletes, may have shaped the findings described below. researcher positioning. i recognize that my position as both instructor and researcher may also have affected the data generated. because i was an instructor/evaluator, weber’s instructional practices and his responses during interviews may have been influenced by a desire to meet my expectations. i tried to reduce this influence in several ways. first, as a videotaping observer, i tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, dressing in casual clothes and minimizing my interactions with students. second, i made it clear to weber that i saw my role as that of facilitator of his reflections: since i observed a lesson only every other week, i caught a mere glimpse of his day-to-day interactions, and so as a field instructor would primarily ask questions about why he had made certain moves, how those moves related to his goals for the lesson, and what other ways he might have accomplished those goals. third, i worked in several ways to separate my pedagogical role from my researcher role; i always gave weber the option to decide not to allow a 2 all names of people and places are pseudonyms; informed consent was obtained from participants after they were no longer students in mwu’s internship program. mwu and its partner schools’ procedures made video recording of interns’ lessons standard practice; videos were stripped of identifying information during transcription. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a33 particular lesson or interview to be included in my research; and i employed procedures in my field notes and interviewing to explicitly separate these two agendas, when possible. for example, i adopted a fieldnote system (e.g., r. m. emerson, fretz, & shaw, 1995) that distinguished between questions/comments in which my goal was to evaluate certain behavior, thinking, or attitudes, and those for which my goal was to clarify the relationship between lesson plan, lesson discourse, and the (re)framing of lesson interactions. data sources/procedures data i generated during weber’s internship year included lesson plans, fieldnotes taken as i sat in the classroom and observed, written reflections composed by weber about his teaching of the lesson, classroom discourse transcribed from videotape of each lesson, and transcripts of open-ended, retrospective, stimulated-recall interviews (nguyen, mcfadden, tangen, & beutel, 2013) held with weber immediately after each lesson. (for a thorough explanation of transcription conventions, please see appendix a). these data allowed me to see from weber’s plans how he had intended to frame interactions during lesson activities, to observe during his lessons how those activities unfolded between weber and his students, and to hear in interviews and reflections how weber described the opportunities and constraints he experienced during those moments, including his perceptions of how whole-class discussion practices emerged and developed over time. data analysis to address my research focus, i drew on approaches to discourse analysis (e.g., goffman, 1986; sawyer, 2002) compatible with my bakhtinian perspective to identify turns of conversation that proposed elaborations or revisions to a possible frame for an activity, and to track discursive patterns associated with dialogic, whole-class discussions that emerged within and across activities. my analysis here focuses specifically on discourse data from lessons that included recitations and/or dialogic, whole-class discussions: four of the ten lessons in the dataset. in analyzing the discourse of these four lessons, i attended in particular to how participants proposed and accepted revisions to the interactional frame, negotiating the roles, relationships, and possible responses available in an activity. i have chosen these four lessons not only because they include several extended dialogic, whole-class discussions (rare, according to nystrand et al., [2003]), but also because the discourse of the activities i relate across these four lessons followed similar patterns, despite variations in form, content, and their relative success at generating dialogic, whole-class discussion. in so doing, i follow mercer (2008) in attempting to move beyond atemporal categories like “types of questions”—or even the distinction between recitations and discussions—toward a “dialogic trajectory” (p. 39) that tracks the emergence and development of a dialogic, whole-class discussion genre. because these conversations, recorded in a history classroom over time, often involved stories about past or future events, i attended to narrative discourse. narratives often included explicit animation (“now i’d like you to…”), reported speech (“so you’re saying that…”) and so used nouns and pronouns to refer to historical figures and to class members. during these moments, i also paid close attention to how featupres of spoken discourse like tone, facial expression, gesture, and the reactions of other listeners (like laughter) contributed to double-voicing and to (re)framing the interaction. in noting, transcribing, and coding these moments, i began to look for recurring patterns, especially repetition of certain verb tenses and nouns/pronouns, as well as the presence of conflicting details and perspectives. i also attended to when and why these patterns seem to recur with regard to the prior and subsequent discourse within and across similar interactions. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a34 tracking the emergence and development of a dialogic discussion genre below, i analyze transcripts of five examples from four lessons in dave weber’s ninth-grade history classroom that took place between october and march of one school year. in the first lesson, recitation gave rise to two back-to-back, dialogic, whole-class discussions in which students voiced and debated the different perspectives of participants in events associated with wwi. the second lesson, which addressed the stock market crash of 1929, did not produce dialogic, whole-class discussion of different perspectives on the historical event; however, this example exhibited some of the same discursive features as the first two. a third lesson, in which weber’s students imagined themselves into a scenario about collective bargaining, also failed, but for different reasons; here, too, similar discourse patterns appeared. in a fourth lesson, weber and his students addressed the berlin airlift in a dialogic, whole-class discussion whose features closely resembled those of the first two. across these examples, i examine not only the emergence of more-or-less stable patterns that might characterize a dialogic genre in this classroom, but also how variations in discursive features like verb tense and noun/pronoun use positioned speakers in relation to the historical topics. i argue that this positioning, explored by the teacher and students over time, may have contributed to the relative success/failure of the activity in generating dialogic, whole-class discussion. invasion of talbott/belgium and football/trench warfare in this first section, i describe an activity that began as a review of textbook questions assigned for homework; the interactional frame for this review activity appeared to be recitation, focused on a single account of an historical event (the textbook’s), which allowed little room for voicing and debating other perspectives on that event. thus, although students mostly had the correct answers to the textbook questions, it became clear that they did not understand how those answers might have been composed from the experiences of participants in the historical event. weber proposed a reframing of the activity that helped students to identify with the different perspectives of participants in the historical events and to debate those perspectives in a dialogic, whole-class discussion. in figure 1, below, i present the transcript in its entirety; the analysis that follows refers to specific moments of this transcript. for ease of reference, i have numbered lines in the transcript and cited them in my analysis. initial frame lesson plan: standards: all students will describe and explain the causes, consequences, and geographic contexts of major global issues and events…will reconstruct the past by comparing interpretations…and creating narratives from evidence…. activities: “work as a class to get the answers from their homework to match the chart on the board. 1. mr. weber: …what was the schlieffen plan? 2. becca: um… 3. mr. weber: yeah, becca? 4. becca (reading from book): “it called for holding action against russia.” challenges to initial frame 5. penny: i didn’t really understand that. 6. amy: yeah, i didn’t remember that at all. 7. mr. weber: ok, that’s what it says in the book, right? and then, while they’re 8. holding action, just holding the line against russia. on the east. they’ve got 9. this (drawing on board). there’s russia…. we’ve got germany here, and 10. we’ve got belgium here. alright, and they decide they want to hold this line 11. against russia, but while they’re doing it, they want to start marching into 12. paris, france. after that, they go over and attack russia. does that help? emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a35 13. becca: no. 14. penny: well, yes. 15. amy: but what are the three…? 16. olivia: yeah, what are the three little bubbles? 17. penny: yeah, what are the rocks? 18. students: (laughter) 19. mr. weber: rocks? (going back to map drawn on board) germany, belgium, france. proposed reframing 20. shirin: question: when they go through all those places, do they like try to 21. get them to go with them? or are they, like--? 22. mr. weber: are they trying to ask people to go with them? is that what you’re--? 23. shirin: kind of, yeah. response to reframing proposal 24. mr.weber: well, i don’t know they were necessarily trying to gain military 25. strength through grabbing people as they went. but say there was another 26. country’s army marching through talbott. what impact would that have on 27. talbott if tens of thousands of soldiers…it’d be kind of weird? discussion 28. penny: um people would maybe follow them? 29. mr.weber: ok. 30. penny: to see where they're going? 31. mr.weber: some might follow them? 32. amy: maybe freak out? 33. mr.weber: what kind of impact would it have on the roads? 34. penny: a lot! 35. mr.weber: on traffic? 36. student: well, they'd break them. 37. student: they'd screw everything up. 38. mr.weber: i couldn't even imagine how bad glen road would be. 39. students: (laughter) 40. student: oh my god! 41. amy: we'd have to, like, walk everywhere. 42. mr.weber: they'd have to eat something, right? 43. laura: yeah, they'd take all our food! 44. mr.weber: they'd take all our food. they'd take a lot of our stuff…. 45. mr.weber: and here they are just marching through, and say they were trying to 46. get to [the neighboring town of] burch: would it be our fault that we were in 47. between? 48. gary: yeah, i would— emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a36 49. becca: no, because we just happen to be there. 50. mr.weber: and what impact would it have on all of us if these people were 51. violent? would you want to stay here? 52. students: no! 53. tom: i'd fight them. 54. mr.weber: so it did have--it did have very profound impact on the people of 55. belgium, a very important impact. that will later factor into the war. 56. becca: wait, so what was the impact? negative? 57. mr.weber: i would say there was a lot of negative impact of that. 58. amy: but some positive: they were safe. 59. shirin: no, not really. 60. mr.weber: you don't necessarily know these people are trying to protect you, 61. right? 62. becca: they could be, like, protecting you…. figure 1. reframing of the wwi homework review activity; progression from darker to lighter shading corresponds with shifts from recitation to dialogic, whole-class discussion. the frame for this activity, as weber described it in his lesson plan and announced it to his students, was that of a brief homework review in which he would elicit known answers from students to fill into a chart with facts from their textbook reading. weber’s initial question (line 1) asked students to recall a textbook answer about the schlieffen plan. such questions are typical of ire/f and are cues that the interactional frame is recitation. however, penny’s and amy’s responses (lines 5 and 6) to weber’s question showed that they (and perhaps others, like becca) had not fully understood the textbook’s explanation of the schlieffen plan. although students had correctly answered the question, weber departed from his lesson plan and attempted to clarify. drawing a map on the board, he tried to show how the german invaders were “hold[ing] the line against russia” (line 8) and “marching into paris, france” (lines 11-12) via belgium. shortly afterward, a student asked an unexpected question about part of the schlieffen plan: germany’s invasion of belgium. like weber’s first attempt at explanation, shirin’s question (line 20) animated the german invaders, attributing intentions to them. but unlike weber’s map explanation, which animated events associated with the schlieffen plan at the level of countries on a map, shirin’s question addressed the actions of the german soldiers and the people of belgium. moreover, instead of animating events associated with the schlieffen plan in terms of its intended outcome (as weber had), shirin’s question “when they go…do they…or are they…?” (lines 20-21) raised the possibility of alternative courses of action that the invaders might have taken. weber could have ignored shirin’s question, which was not ostensibly related to clarifying the schlieffen plan within the interactional frame of the homework review. instead, his response to shirin took up this idea of possible alternatives, proposing a different kind of interactional frame, in which other roles and responses were possible. his hypothetical “what impact would that have…?” (line 26) proposed a change in the frame from a recitation review of historical past events to an activity in which students were encouraged to envision a fantastical present event, which had not actually occurred (and was not likely to emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a37 occur), in their hometown. this emergent transformation of the frame thus invited students to draw on their own perspectives, even as they identified with participants in the historical event. weber’s comments during a subsequent interview revealed his thoughts at this moment of the lesson: “we had some people, you know, she’s thinking about the army, thinking about the march, and i could hear them all talking about it, and i’m thinking right now, i need to relate them to something. and this is right before i do the talbott thing, and that was a conscious effort on my part to say, ‘let’s talk about something we all know.’” according to his comments, weber sought on the spur of the moment to clarify confusion and respond to shirin’s unexpected question by making a hypothetical comparison that would help students relate to the historical event. to help students to empathize with the people of belgium, and to enter into this historical event, weber juxtaposed the invasion of belgium with a hypothetical scenario occurring in their hometown of talbott. it is worth noting that weber’s strategy differs from other activities that cast students as figures in a past event (e.g., “imagine that you were living in belgium when the germans invaded”). instead of imagining themselves into the historical event, weber asked students to imagine a similar event occurring in their hometown. i address the benefits of this localizing, hypothetical scenario for restoring the contingency of a past event (and thus helping students to see that history is not inevitable) in the discussion/implications section of this article, as well as its benefits and limitations (including presentism) compared to other activities like the ones that follow. weber’s question proposed a reframing of the classroom interaction as one in which students could “talk about something we all know.” but it also cued to students that their talk would be double-voiced, referring simultaneously to an actual past event that had happened to other people and to a hypothetical present scenario in which students, themselves, would be animated as figures. in contrast with weber’s map explanation, students accepted this proposed reframing of the review activity: like weber, penny and then amy contributed from their own perspectives to the hypothetical scenario based on the historical event. as the discussion took off, other students, like weber, animated both the invading army and the inhabitants of talbott. from these perspectives, they built on each other’s contributions, elaborating the imagined scene with multiple, concrete, and even conflicting details of the army’s impact on the town’s infrastructure. in terms of the lesson activity, students had ratified a shift from an interactional frame in which they responded to weber’s recitation review questions with textbook answers to one in which they all contributed from their own perspectives to dialogic, whole-class discussion of an imagined scenario. the resulting activity was emergent: together, teacher and students had reframed the possibilities for participation by animating class members as participants in the hypothetical/historical event and thus inviting discussion of multiple perspectives on it. having charted one lesson activity in weber’s classroom, i now turn to analysis of a second example that occurred later in the same october 15 lesson. as before, i present the transcript in its entirety first (alongside the preceding one) and then refer back to specific line numbers in my subsequent analysis in order to compare features of these two examples. in this two-column transcript, i focus on patterns of verb tense and noun/pronoun use that emerged across these two interactions. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a38 pr e s en t t en se a nd “ th ey ” 45. shirin: question: when they go through all those places, do they like try to 46. get them to go with them? or are they, like--? 47. mr. weber: are they trying to ask people to go with them? is that what you’re--? 48. shirin: kind of, yeah. 64.mr. weber: so when they are--they have the schlieffen plan, they start 65.setting up these wars, battles. and they decide on…on a different type 66. of battle. what's that type? 67. tom: trench warfare. 68. mr. weber: trench warfare. so this is- c on di tio na l m oo d an d “ w e” 49. mr.weber: well, i don’t know they were necessarily trying to gain military 50. strength through grabbing people as they went. but say there was another 51. country’s army marching through talbott. what impact would that have on 52. talbott if tens of thousands of soldiers…it’d be kind of weird? 53. penny: um people would maybe follow them? 54. mr.weber: ok. 55. penny: to see where they're going? 56. mr.weber: some might follow them? 57. amy: maybe freak out? 58. mr.weber: what kind of impact would it have on the roads? 59. penny: a lot! 60. mr.weber: on traffic? 61. student: well, they'd break them. 62. student: they'd screw everything up. 63. mr.weber: i couldn't even imagine how bad glen road would be. 64. students: (laughter) 65. student: oh my god! 66. amy: we'd have to, like, walk everywhere. 67. mr.weber: they'd have to eat something, right? 68. laura: yeah, they'd take all our food! 69. mr.weber: they'd take all our food. they'd take a lot of our stuff…. 63. mr.weber: and here they are just marching through, and say they were 68. what if all of a sudden we decided we were going to 69. take it out to the football field and we were going to get into a 70. battle with mr. abbott's fourth hour? …. 79. erica: wouldn't they like see, if they're running, wouldn't they like see 80. that there's a hole? 81. mr. weber: ok, they would see the hole, but how would they get to us? 82. erica: um run. 83. chelsea: run and climb. 84. laura: jump. 85. tom: dig. 86. mr. weber: would there be any- 87. amy: couldn't we just shoot them before they got over anyways? 88. students: (laughter) 89. amy: i'm dead serious. 90. mr. weber: no, amy, you are dead serious, go ahead and say it again. 91. students: (laughter) 92. amy: they probably wouldn't be able to get over anyways because if 93. we're just like sitting there we could probably just like shoot them before 94. they could get over a fence. 95. tom: what if they had guns, too? … emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a39 64. trying to get to [the neighboring town of] burch: would it be our fault that 65. we were in between? c on di tio na l/ pr es en t t en se a nd “ yo u” /“ i” 66. gary: yeah, i would— 67. becca: no, because we just happen to be there. 68. mr.weber: and what impact would it have on all of us if these people were 69. violent? would you want to stay here? 70. students: no! 71. tom: i'd fight them. 106. mr. weber: it would be tough to hide. so let's think about it: what would it 107. be like if we're in the trenches? how would it feel? 108. tom: boring. 109. mr. weber: boring. 110. becca: i would feel claustrophobic….they're like right on top of you. 111. mr. weber: alright. 112. penny: yeah but they're- 113. amy: but you'd kind of feel powerful. 114. penny: --because they couldn't get to you. 115. amy: yeah, i'd feel safe. 116. mr. weber: ok, you would kind of feel safe, sometimes. 117. becca: hiding in a hole? …. pa st te ns e an d “ th ey ” 72. mr.weber: so it did have--it did have very profound impact on the people of 73. belgium, a very important impact. that will later factor into the war. 74. becca: wait, so what was the impact? negative? 75. mr.weber: i would say there was a lot of negative impact of that. 76. amy: but some positive: they were safe. 77. shirin: no, not really. 78. mr.weber: you don't necessarily know these people are trying to protect 79. you, right? 80. becca: they could be, like, protecting you…. 202. matt: you’re probably going to run out of ammo. 203. mr. weber: no they did have supplies and they did have ammo. but. i 204. mean, food and bullets, it takes a whole lot more than that to live 205. comfortably. at least for me. so this was probably not the best place… figure 2. shifts in verb tense and pronoun use during dialogic, whole-class discussions of the invasion of talbott/belgium and of football/trench warfare. (verbs are underlined and pronouns bolded; shading indicates progression toward more present, personal uses of language). the frame for this activity, as outlined in weber’s lesson plan, also suggested a recitation: weber had planned to “pass out the document packets” of photocopies from the textbook with a description of trench warfare and “begin talking about it, that it was a new style.” weber’s initial question, “what’s that type?” (line 66), asked students to recall information about trench warfare they had already read. this emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a40 seemingly inauthentic, lower-order question produced a two-word response from tom that weber followedup by repeating it—a typical ire/f triad. however, though weber’s initial comment and question referred to an actual historical event, he used the present tense, as shirin had done earlier to pose her question about the people of belgium. here, weber also animated the armies engaged in the historical event with the pronoun “they” and described their actions “setting up these wars” (lines 64-65). in his next turn, weber proposed a “what if...?” scenario, much like the first example, that asked students to imagine themselves into a double-voiced, hypothetical situation based on historical events. with this question, weber’s animations shifted verb tense from present to the conditional mood (“what if we were going…?), and his pronouns changed from “they” to “we” and “mr. abbott’s fourth hour,” (lines 68-70). weber also proposed a concrete, contemporary setting for the fantastical comparison scenario, as he had in attempting to make the german invasion of belgium more relevant to students’ hometown experiences in talbott. because weber’s “what if…?” invoked the conditional mood, calling for a complementary “then…” and inviting reactions about “what it would be like,” his question also elicited subsequent temporal clauses and evaluations—narrative discourse—about the hypothetical situation, just as in the first example. in the ensuing narrative, he and students imagined what it would be like hypothetically if they dug a hole in the field and fenced it for protection in order to continue the battle against the rival class. as they had in the first example, weber and students continued to use the “would” and “could” of the conditional mood (lines 79-81, 86-87, 92-94). this fictional condition described trench warfare with a rival class on the football field—events that were unrealized and unlikely to happen, as in the previous discussion of the imagined army’s hypothetical invasion of talbott. as before, weber and his students referred to themselves as “we” in the double-voiced, hypothetical football-field battle they described, thereby simultaneously identifying with the wwi american soldiers whose experiences in the trenches their narrative invoked. as before, the details they contributed also suggested different perspectives on the interaction described in the narrative: erica wondered why their opponents wouldn’t simply attack them in the trench, amy doubted such an attack would survive their defenses, and tom pointed out that attackers would have their own advantages. as the narrative went on, however, weber and his students made another shift in verb tense and pronoun use similar to that made during the discussion of the hypothetical invasion of talbott. as in that previous discussion of hypothetical events based on historical ones, weber and students began to move from the “would” and “could” of the conditional mood (lines 106-107) to present tense “are” (lines 110-113), and shifted from “we” (line 107) to using “you” and “i” (lines 111-116) to identify themselves as subjects in the narrative. and as in that previous example, speakers contributed conflicting details that suggested different perspectives toward the event: here students disagreed about whether life in the trench would be “boring” (line 108), “claustrophic” (line 110, 118), “powerful” (line 114), or “safe” (line 116). finally, weber made a move to close the narrative (line 203) and transition to another activity. this transition, like the initial move from the actual, historical event to the imaginary, hypothetical one, was also marked by a shift in verb tense and pronoun use, as in the previous example. here, weber used the past tense to refer to the situation of the soldiers entrenched in no man’s land. and he once again referred to them as “they.” and though his response to matt’s comment about supplies of ammunition seemed to discourage further discussion, he also affirmed, with his “at least for me,” (line 205) the interpretive quality of the contributions he and students had made to the narrative during discussion. in summary, attention to changes in verb tense and pronoun use suggested the following patterns in these two interactions from the same lesson in mr. weber’s ninth-grade talbott history class: a prologue using present tense and “they” (referring to the characters in the historical event) prompted the teacher to emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a41 propose a fantastical “what if…?” scenario using the conditional mood. that scenario sequenced unrealized, unlikely events in a double-voiced narrative that simultaneously invoked a historical, past event and a hypothetical, present event. in that hypothetical narrative, speakers initially used conditional “would” and pronouns like “we” or “our” to position themselves in relation to the action. as the narrative progressed, the present tense also appeared, and speakers used “you” and “i.” the narrative ended with a return to past tense and “they.” the patterns presented in figure 2, above, were emergent: none were explicitly proposed or directed by a single participant. nevertheless, speakers in both discussions made coordinated shifts in verb tense and pronoun use that followed a similar progression from past to present tense and from “they” to “you”/“i” during both hypothetical narratives. similarly, both examples contained conflicting but related details that suggested different perspectives on the historical/hypothetical events: in the first example, students imagined that the army’s presence would inspire people to “follow them” and “freak out,” to flee and to “fight them,” and to feel threatened and “safe”; over the course of the second example, life in the trenches was described as "claustrophobic," "powerful," "safe," "cold," "hot," "with all your friends," "hungry," "tired," "trying to fight," "going to get sick," and "waiting." these shifts in verb tense and pronoun use suggested that, through the juxtaposition of historical and hypothetical events, the past may have become more present and personal for the participants. moreover, their first-person participation in the hypothetical narratives may have been encouraged by their disagreement about the nature of the narrated event, as they imagined it from multiple, “insider” perspectives rather than elaborating an authoritative account from a single, “objective” point of view. further, this disagreement seemed to exert an influence on subsequent turns in the discussion as speakers responded to different perspectives on the imagined events with contradicting phrases like “wouldn’t they…” and “yeah but…” (lines 79-81, 87-95, 113-115). in both examples, the juxtaposition of events and of conflicting perspectives thus seemed to promote further discussion. additionally, the regularities of verb tense and noun/pronoun use suggested a coordination of the telling of the narrative among speakers. this coordination, as well as the influence exerted on the discussion by disagreement among different perspectives, suggested a relationship between the narrative frame and the classroom interactional frame. figure 3 represents the relationship among these interactional frames (see next page). while the juxtaposition of past and present, and of narrative frame and classroom interactional frame, produced positive results, the examples that follow are not as successful. next, i describe conversations in two subsequent lessons that, while they contained features recognizable as belonging to the same genre, did not result in dialogic, whole-class discussions. their similarities and differences compared to these first two examples are important to understanding the development of this emergent genre, as well as its relative success or failure at producing dialogic discourse. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a42 figure 3. relationship between narrative frame and classroom interactional frame in invasion of talbott/belgium and football/trench warfare conversations. the stock market crash: collapsing into the past a second example from mr. weber’s class occurred during a november lesson on the 1920's “black tuesday” us stock market crash. during the lesson, weber intended to “begin the class by reminding the students of the [stock market simulation] game that we played over the past two days…” and then “begin discussing the nature of the great depression, and some causes/effects in brief.” however, weber and his students soon departed from this “reminder” to attempt a clarifying explanation. below, i present a complete transcript. afterwards, i describe the framing of this interaction, its discursive features, and the relationship between the narrated event and the classroom activity. authentic student question 1. victoria: how are [stockbrokers] getting any money off of it? they're 2. just giving people help. hypothetical scenario about a past event that has already happened 3. mr. weber: ok. very good point. so it works like this. uh, we're going to go 4. with tom right here.… you owned a lot of rylant stock [during the stock 5. market simulation game], right? 6. tom: yeah, me and jon had like eight of them. 7. mr. weber: eight of them? so, in the very beginning though, we're just going 8. to start in the beginning. say you guys together, you had most of the rylant 9. stock. now in a real company, a big company like rylant, if you own the 10. majority of the stocks, in a situation like that, all of a sudden they start 11. they're very interested in what you think, because when you own stock, 12. like,that certificate proves that you own part of that company. i-i think 13. you guys understood that as we went through it, right? you are buying 14. into that company. so if all of a sudden if you guys combined had like 15. fifty-one percent of it they're really interested in what you have in what 16. you have to say about rylant motors. 17. ok. so the problem we have here is that tom starts taking partial 18. money from matt because…whitney is lending money to matt…. now, 19. matt, you still have like zero dollars to your name, right? you don't have any 20. money, you just own that stock and the stock keeps going up, and you're 21. pretty happy about it. now all of a sudden, whitney, you need your money, 22. right? because he owes you money. so what do you do? recitation 23. whitney: ask him to turn it in? present interaction talbott football narrative interaction“ what if…?” trenches belgium past interaction classroom interaction discussion emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a43 24. mr. weber: you ask him for it. and matt, whitney comes up to you and says, 25. "can i have my money please?" and what do you pay her with? 26. matt: the stock? 27. mr. weber: you could. maybe. whitney, do you want stock? you're a bank. 28. whitney: no? 29. mr. weber: you want money right? 30. whitney: yeah. 31. mr. weber: matt, she's not taking your stock. what are you going to do? 32. matt: turn it in. 33. mr. weber: now all of a sudden people…start losing money. because now the 34. bank is dependent on the company and the company is dependent on the 35. bank. and you get caught in the middle. closing 36. amy: is that why it all crashed? 37. mr weber: that is a good part of why it crashed. 38. amy: because it was like all built on itself but nothing was really there? figure 4. hypothetical scenario in which factual conditional narrative (an event that has already happened) resulted in recitation. lighter to darker shading indicates progression from open question to more constrained recitation-style question-and-answer. this example began with a seemingly authentic student question—an open-ended inquiry, rather than a query with a single right answer—about the stock market crash (1). research has shown that such authentic student questions often lead to dialogic discussions (nystrand et al., 2003). in response to victoria, weber once again proposed a hypothetical scenario as a means of clarifying the historical event: “say you guys together, you had most of the rylant stock. now in a real company....” (8-9). however, this hypothetical scenario differed from the previous ones in animating students as figures in a generic reenactment of the historical event. students were simply cast as buyers and investors in a typical stock market exchange. that is, there was no simultaneous, double-voiced comparison between a past event and a present context that might have been more familiar to students, and thus little opportunity for them to contribute from their own perspectives. the lack of relationships between students’ contemporary experiences and the historical event being elaborated seemed to influence the subsequent discourse of the interaction. this influence can be seen in matt and whitney’s responses (lines 23-32), which were short and often ended with the rising intonation more typically associated with questions. the brevity and tentativeness of these responses suggested that they were attempting to guess the answer weber was looking for. despite their participation in the stock market simulation the day before, they had limited means of relating to the interaction between lender and investor being described. in short, though this interaction began with an authentic question (often a means of disrupting ire/f and promoting dialogic discussion), and included a hypothetical scenario that cast students as imagined participants, the frame was not emergent, and bore more resemblance to recitation than to discussion. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a44 closer attention to the discursive features of this interaction allowed further comparisons. like the previous two examples, this narrative used a conditional “if…then…” (lines 9-11, 14-16) inviting students to imagine themselves into a hypothetical situation about a stock market exchange. and like the previous examples, it began with a similar prologue and launching of the narrative using present tense and “they” before shifting into a conditional mood. but unlike the invasion of talbott/belgium and football/trench warfare examples, which featured events known to be fictional, the situation weber proposed was a factual conditional narrative, retelling events that had, in fact, taken place leading up to the stock market crash. in this narrative, although students were cast as first-person participants, they could not draw from their own experiences as investors or lenders and thus could not take up multiple, conflicting perspectives on the event. and although this narrative moved from conditional to present tense and used “you/i,” those verbs and pronouns were used by weber to narrate on behalf of students, rather than by students to provide progressively more individualized impressions of the event. thus, although it resembled the previous two examples, this conversation’s framing and the discursive features, overall, seemed to emphasize a single, authoritative interpretation of the historical event through participation in a hypothetical re-enactment of that past interaction. i do not mean to devalue this interaction as an attempt to clarify the dynamics of the historical event. indeed, amy’s response at the end of the hypothetical scenario suggested that she had achieved a better understanding of “why it all crashed” (lines 36-38). however, this hypothetical scenario did not answer victoria’s initial question about how stockbrokers benefited. moreover, although it began with an authentic student question, this interaction did not result in dialogic, whole-class discussion. perhaps discussion did not occur because there was little relationship between speakers and the event under study: the way students were framed in the narrated event (as investors and lenders in the stock market exchange) did not promote their participation in the classroom interaction. that is, their participation as figures in the narrative did not encourage them to participate in whole-class discussion. collective bargaining: merging with the future during a december lesson on the roosevelt era, weber’s goal was “for the students to gain a contextual understanding…of fdr’s new deal,” including “how everyday people would feel effects.” students had answered a series of warm-up questions about the previous night’s textbook chapter, and as weber reviewed the answers with them, he stopped to explain the 1935 wagner act, and the concept of collective bargaining, by calling on mary (a student whose last name also happened to be wagner).2 recitation 1. mr. weber: …that's something that the mary wagner act helped do. thank you, 2. mary, for your time helping all workers like that. now explain why the mary 3. wagner act was important. besides the fact that it had your last name. 4. mary: because it protected the right of workers to form unions and engage 5. in collective bargaining with their employers. and also it prohibited unfair 6. labor practices. 7. mr. weber: this was a big effort of the second hundred days…and workers, 8. looking more at workers, trying to protect workers a little more, and um, 9. collective bargaining, do you guys know what it is? 10. tom: something that a union does? hypothetical scenario about an event likely to happen 11. mr. weber: there you go. uh, it's something that a union does, quite often it's 12. why a union is so strong: they can bargain as a group. it's the reason why, like, 13. if i tell you we have a test next thursday— emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a45 breakdown of the classroom interactional frame 14. amy: for real? 15. mr. weber: you see how i combined— 16. penny: are you serious? … [student worker delivers attendance slips] … 18. penny: but we can use our notes. 19. amy: for real? 20. mr. weber: see— 21. amy: are we able to? 22. tom: no. 23. mr. weber: no. 24. amy: oh. 25. mr. weber: we're going to talk more about it when we get there, but this would 26. be a perfect example of collective bargaining: penny, you said we should be 27. able to use our notes, right? ok, i value your opinion a lot, but if you get all 28. thirty people in the room all of a sudden that voice is— 29. tom: let's take a vote. 30. amy: yeah, can we take a vote on—? 31. mr. weber: (speaking in higher voice) it's not even voteable. 32. (shrugging) i'm sorry, i'm very cruel. 33. tom: i'm going on strike. 34. students: (laughter) … closing [weber regains control of the class] … 45. mr. weber: many times a company would not hear people’s single voices or 46. people coming up and saying "hey you guys should pay us more" they're like 47. "yeah yeah" but… um, you, as more people get involved with something, all 48. of a sudden the voice gets stronger, and that's something that the mary 49. wagner act helped do. thank you, mary, for your time helping all workers like that. figure 5. activity in which a factual conditional narrative (an event that is likely to happen) resulted in breakdown of the classroom interactional frame. as in the previous examples, this interaction occurred during review of textbook questions students had answered as part of their homework the night before. thus weber’s exchanges with mary and tom about collective bargaining (lines 2-11) followed the ire/f pattern, implementing a recitation-style recall of what students already knew. and as before, preliminary exchanges about an actual historical situation during this review were followed by the proposal of a hypothetical “what if…?” scenario meant to clarify the event. as in previous lessons, this “what if…?” scenario proposed a reframing of the activity from one in which the teacher posed review questions for students to answer from their reading of the textbook to one in which a double-voiced hypothetical scenario—in this case, weber bargaining with his students about a test—would be dialogically juxtaposed with an historical event in order to explain the wagner act. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a46 students took up this reframing proposal, animating themselves as figures in the hypothetical/historical scenario. in this case, penny asserted that students should be able to use their notes during the test (a practice teachers at talbott sometimes allowed), and thus took on the role of negotiator (line 18). details that participants contributed to this hypothetical scenario conditioned and constrained subsequent contributions. penny’s negotiation led to weber’s response about strength in numbers (line 2628) and tom’s call for a vote (line 29). in this way, some details of the emergent narrative frame exerted influence on its subsequent elaboration, illustrating the historical concept of collective bargaining. in contrast with the previous example, the interactional frame in the narrative empowered students in the classroom interaction: in their roles as union workers, students continued to attempt to bargain even after weber tried to postpone (line 25) and discourage (lines 31-32) negotiation. at the end of the narrative, weber’s comments made explicit this double-voiced connection between the present negotiation over the guidelines for the test and a generic past event made possible by the establishment of the wagner act. thus this interaction, in which weber’s “what if…?” proposal was taken up by students and elaborated with details that illustrated collective bargaining, referred simultaneously to both a hypothetical event and a generic historical one. the resulting interaction could not be attributed solely to weber’s proposal, penny’s negotiation, or tom’s resistance, and was thus emergent. as in the previous examples, the discourse of this collective bargaining conversation included shifts in verb tense and pronoun use that implied changes in the participants’ relationships to the historical event. from the past tense (lines 1-8) and “workers” (lines 7-8) to the conditional “if…” (lines 13, 27) and the pronoun “we” (line 13)the scenario quickly shifted to one in which weber and students were positioned as “you” and “i” (lines 26-27, 33) in a present-tense negotiation about whether students would be able to use their notes during the test. and at the end of the narrative, weber transitioned back to the use of past tense and “they” (line 48). these shifts in verb tense and pronoun use resembled the genre patterns in the preceding examples. however, the collective bargaining conversation ended quickly and, like the stock market conversation, did not result in dialogic, whole-class discussion. and though conflicting perspectives appeared on the issue of whether students could use their notes, the conflict seemed less like productive disagreement over interpretations of the past event (as in the invasion of talbott/belgium and football/trench warfare examples), and more like a breakdown of the classroom interactional frame. though the narrative frame and the classroom interactional frame were related, as in previous examples, that relationship did not promote dialogic, whole-class discussion. the failure of this activity about collective bargaining to produce dialogic, whole-class discussion may have been affected by the fact that, unlike the previous example, the proposed hypothetical scenario concerned an actual, future event: the class did, in fact, have a test scheduled for next thursday. amy’s repeated “for real?” (lines 14, 19) and penny’s “are you serious?” (line 16) suggested that they were not sure initially about the relationship between hypothetical and actual events. indeed, weber’s response (line 15) may have been an attempt to explain how he was combining past and present. this uncertainty regarding the relationship between the hypothetical event and actual classroom events is unlike the previous example, in which students seemed to understand and accept the stock market exchange as a hypothetical re-enactment of a past event. this uncertainty may be explained by the fact that this discourse sequenced events that, though hypothetical because they had not yet taken place, were also likely to happen in the context of weber’s classroom. in this way, the collective bargaining narrative was another factual conditional narrative like the one generated about the stock market crash, in which the events under discussion had already happened. further parallels between the narrative figures and students’ actual roles may also have contributed to overlap between narrative frame and classroom interactional frame. for example, though student mary emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a47 wagner has no actual relation to the senator, robert f. wagner, who originated the national labor relations act (or "wagner" act), her name was used in association with the legislation. penny novak, who took on the role of negotiator was not only an obvious choice because she is an outspoken student and because she had already made an assertion (not a question!) on behalf of the students ("but you can use your notes"), but also because she is the daughter of the superintendent of schools for weber's district (a fact which weber mentioned in a post-lesson interview). in short, both students had roles in the narrative that also reflected, to a greater or lesser degree, aspects of their actual identities in weber’s class. in this respect, the factual conditional narrative in this collective bargaining example differed from the one about the stock market. in the stock market narrative, the hypothetical scenario seemed to collapse into a past event that had actually happened; that is, the explanation of the crash became little more than a re-enactment of the past. in contrast, the collective bargaining narrative’s hypothetical scenario merged with a future event that would actually happen: that is, the illustration of collective bargaining became an actual negotiation about the future. both activities differed from the examples about the invasion of talbott/belgium and about football/trench warfare, which seemed to balance past with present (and narrative frame with classroom interaction) in a way that allowed for dialogic, whole-class discussion. regardless of their result, these two conversations seemed to depend on the nature of the narrated events being addressed—and how those narratives discursively constructed students’ relationships to past events. moreover, these two “failed” attempts to generate dialogic, whole-class discussion also suggested explorations of the boundaries of a developing genre. the berlin/capital city airlift: hypothetical narrative and the balance of past and present a final example of the development of this dialogic, whole-class discussion genre took place during a lesson in march. the lesson addressed the post-wwii division of germany and berlin that led to stalin’s blockade of the western part of the city and forced the allies to fly in supplies. weber’s lesson plan called for students to “open up their books to ‘the berlin airlift,’…read the page out of the book, and summarize it in three to four sentences. ask students to volunteer to read their sentences. discuss. move onto the smart board note packet that was worked on the day before. pick back up on the berlin airlift.” thus, weber’s lesson plan, as in the preceding examples, proposed to frame the activity as a recitation-style review of textbook information. a complete transcript appears in figure 6, below, followed by analysis referring to specific line numbers. present tense and “they”/ “we” 1. shirin: so. um does are--why are we there? 2. since it's like communist and everything? 3. mr. weber: why were we in germany to start with? 4. shirin: in berlin. 5. mr. weber: ok. after world war ii, it was decided that the fairest way to make 6. sure that germany wouldn't reconsolidate power and start world war iii 7. would be if each ally took a zone of germany. and then when they were 8. trying to figure out who should get berlin, it was decided it's not fair, berlin 9. is—if conditional mood and “we” 9. , if we're talking about [our state] it would be like [a major industrial 10. city]. or actually i guess we'll say [the capital city]. it's closer. and the 11. capital. we'll say it's like [the capital city]…. it's not fair, right? if one section 12. of the state…if someone got [the capital city]…. say you, laura, takara, and 13. amy were dividing up the state, right? it's not fair if just you get [the capital 14. city] right? emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a48 … 26. mr. weber: so we would need to supply from here to our [part of the city]. 27. …what if they shut off the roads? closed the railroads? 28. laura: oooh! 29. takara: how would we get supplies? present tense and “you” 30. mr. weber: shirin, if you have that part of--if you have, you know, this general 31. area of [the state]. what's the advantage of closing it off so that the other 32. three girls can't get 33. into the city? 34. shirin: that you have it. they can't get in. …. 47. amy: why can't you fly? 48. mr. weber: so. what's our one solution, amy? 49. amy: fly. 50. mr. weber: you have to fly supplies in. berlin airlift? alright. past tense and “they” 51. penny: that's what they did, didn't they? 52. mr. weber: that's exactly what they did. figure 6. shifts in verb tense and pronoun use during dialogic, whole-class discussion of the berlin/capital city airlift. (verbs are underlined and pronouns bolded; shading indicates progression toward more present, personal uses of language). during the explanation of the division of berlin, a student, shirin, asked for clarification about why a city that was clearly located in the eastern (soviet) half of the country would also need to be divided between east and west (lines 1, 4). in response to shirin’s question, weber proposed a “what if…?” scenario which compared the past event to a hypothetical situation set in a fantastical, contemporary context (lines 9-14). this proposal reframed the sharing of textbook summaries as an activity that animated students as figures in a hypothetical scenario. that double-voiced hypothetical scenario paralleled postwwii events in germany. as in previous examples, students took up the proposed hypothetical scenario, elaborating it with details that enabled and constrained subsequent responses. some of the proposed details became established features of the scenario: for instance, takara’s question about the desperate conditions (line 29) seemed to prompt amy’s solution (line 47). from shirin’s point of view, however, the blockade was an advantage (line 34); the narrative thus contained multiple, even conflicting perspectives on the event. and as before, comments by weber and students at the end of the narrative suggested that these double-voiced details applied simultaneously both to the present, hypothetical event and to the past, historical one. neither shirin’s initial query, nor weber’s proposed scenario, nor takara’s question alone were solely responsible for the emergent scenario. thus what began with a review of textbook summaries about the berlin airlift emerged as a dialogic, whole-class discussion. emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a49 as in the first two examples, this conversation sequenced unrealized events that were unlikely to happen—a fictional conditional. the narrative that unfolded contained a pattern of shifts in verb tense and pronoun use. as in the october narrative about an army marching through talbott, shirin’s question, in present tense (line 1), acted as prologue. weber’s response shifted from past tense (lines 5-8) and “they” (line 7) to the conditional mood and “we” (line 9-11). from takara’s “how would we get supplies?” (line 29), to shirin’s “…you have it. they can’t get in” (line 34), and to amy’s “why can’t you fly?” (line 47), verb tense shifted from conditional to present tense, and the use of pronouns shifted from “we” to “you.” at the end of the narrative, weber’s and penny’s comments returned to using the past tense and “they” (lines 51-52). this progression from past to present to past, and from “they” to “you” to “they” resembled that of the first two dialogic, whole-class discussions. as in those prior examples, this progression suggested that the past became more present and personal for the participants during the course of the activity. additionally, students’ participation in the narrative interaction affected their participation in the interaction of the discussion, much as in the earlier examples. as figures in the narrative, students were able to contribute from their own first-person perspectives, like takara, who wondered how they would get supplies, or amy, who proposed flying as a solution. participation in the interactional frame of the narrative thus shaped students’ participation in the classroom interaction of the discussion. while this was also true of the stock market and collective bargaining examples, the way students were framed in those narratives produced resistance, perhaps because the narratives were either too far or too close with regard to the classroom interaction. in this respect, the dialogic, whole-class discussion about the berlin/capital city airlift most resembled those about the invasion of talbott/belgium and about football/trench warfare: in all three, the framing of the narrated event affected the framing of the discussion, promoting participation through a balance between elaboration of a fantastical, hypothetical event and an actual, historical one. in a post-lesson interview, weber revealed that he had thought carefully about selecting a city with which to make this juxtaposition between actual past and hypothetical present. [i thought about using] the vatican…just that idea of it's not fair if one person gets the vatican. not in a religious way, i just mean the vatican city state…. but…i knew vatican wasn't going to work. then i moved to [the state capital] because…we had already done washington d.c. um, so i just had to pick something that was-that was relevant.... and i skipped the potential dividing of talbott because that undermines the fact that it's a big city…. weber first considered comparing the post wwii division of berlin to what it would be like to divide up vatican city, hoping that comparison to this more familiar, contemporary example would help students to better understand the historical event. however, he discarded this idea, as well as that of using washington, d.c., another important, contemporary city perhaps more familiar to the experiences of american students. weber also decided not to make a comparison to the division of talbott. from his point of view, it was important that the comparison not “undermine the fact that it’s a big city.” thus, the choice of a contemporary setting was important to the narrative framing of the hypothetical/historical event. weber’s reflections suggested that he, too, was aware of the delicate balance between narrative frame and classroom interaction, and the potential impacts of selecting a comparison that was either too far or too close to students’ experiences. above, i have described the emergence of a dialogic, whole-class discussion about the berlin/capital city airlift, the discursive features of that interaction, and the relationship between the narrated event and the classroom interaction of the discussion. unlike the november stock market conversation and the december collective bargaining conversation, whose hypothetical situations seemed to collapse into a re-enactment of the past and merge with an anticipated future, respectively, the emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a50 berlin/capital city airlift discussion appeared most like the initial october examples in overlaying a fantastical, contemporary context on a historical event. however, all five examples exhibited discursive features whose similarities suggested variations on a developing dialogic discussion genre. in the next section, i discuss connections to prior scholarship and implications for dialogic research and pedagogy. discussion/implications in the examples above, i described the framing and the discursive features of five variations on a developing type, or “genre” of classroom interaction. in foregrounding the idea of a developing dialogic discussion genre, my findings respond to mercer’s (2008) call for research that moves beyond attention to dialogic discussions as discrete classroom events defined by stable features like types of questions or teacher follow-ups. prior research on classroom discourse has applied the notion of genre, or recurring conventions of social interaction (e.g., bakhtin, 1984; devitt, 1993; miller, 1984; swales, 1990), not only to written discourse (bazerman, 1988, e.g., 1997; bazerman et al., 2009; freedman & medway, 1994; hicks, 1995) but also to talk and behavior in classrooms. for example, previous classroom discourse research has identified as speech genres (bakhtin, 1986a)“the lesson” (wertsch, 1991, p. 110), ire/f sequences (lemke, 1990; mortimer & scott, 2003; rees & roth, 2017; wells, 1993), and hypothetical narratives (juzwik, 2006). while some scholars have wondered whether discussion could be discerned well enough to identify discussion genres (mercer, 1995; wells, 1999), subsequent research has identified “conversational narrative discussion” in secondary english classes (juzwik, nystrand, kelly, & sherry, 2008) and “seminars” and “deliberations” in history classes (parker, 2001, 2006; parker & hess, 2001). extending this prior research, my findings illustrate the emergence and development over time of a dialogic, whole-class discussion genre i call “hypothetical narrative discussions,” through repeated (re)framing of recitations in a secondary history classroom. researchers interested in dialogic pedagogies might examine how and why teachers and students succeed or fail at reframing recitations, and whether their attempts over time reveal emerging patterns that also blur the boundaries between recitations and dialogic discussions. previous history education research has defined discussions in terms of “purpose” (hess, 2004). according to these studies, purpose shapes not only the topic and talk of the discussion but also the relationships of the participants (dillon, 1994; parker, 2006)—in my terms, purposes contribute to framing the interaction of discussions. purposes also serve to distinguish different types of discussion: discussion can be aimed at interpreting a central text or deliberating on courses of action (parker, 2001). in terms of this previous work, dialogic discussions in weber’s class resembled “seminars,” which focus on interpreting a central text, not for the purpose of finding a “right” answer, but rather to articulate, challenge, clarify, and thereby improve one’s understanding—“not to repair the world, but to reveal it” (parker, 2001). my findings build on this prior research on distinguishing types of dialogic discussions; however, i also extend and challenge these previous studies in offering the possibility of other genres that emerge over time in particular contexts. future research on dialogic teaching might identify other genres associated with disciplinary/cultural contexts. this prior history education research is in keeping with my study in implying that purpose shapes the frame for a discussion, and that purposes that frame discussions differently can lead to different types of discussion. however, a focus on unitary purpose seems to imply that an individual’s intention—the teacher’s purpose—determines or “specifies” the frame for discussion, and that both that purpose and that frame result in stable features or “models for leading discussions” (parker, 2001). in contrast, the examples above seemed to emerge collaboratively, and though they often seemed to have the same purpose (to clarify students’ understanding of a historical event through comparison to a hypothetical one), the coordinated patterns of discourse that emerged were irreducible to individual participants’ (often quite emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a51 different) intentions. i thus join roth and his colleagues (e.g., hsu et al., 2009; rees & roth, 2017; roth & gardner, 2012) in suggesting that these patterns are phenomena that arise in relation to contextualized types of interactions, rather than to particular participants and their purposes. my findings also extend these prior studies in examining how and why such types might arise in particular contexts over time. subsequent studies of dialogic discussions might investigate other cultural factors, perhaps not apparent in social interactions, that contribute to the emergence, resistance, and persistence of whole-class discussion genres. the conversations addressed above varied over time in their discursive features and in their relative success at producing dialogic discourse. these variations in form and result might be attributed to the fact that weber was a prospective teacher, and thus perhaps less practiced at establishing a purposeful activity routine with students. alternatively, weber’s status as a student-teacher may simply have made more visible the negotiation among teacher and students over time that can lead to the establishment of a dialogic discussion genre. indeed, the fact that this developing genre of dialogic, whole-class discussion included variations is in keeping with notions of speech genres as “relatively stable” social conventions which have accumulated over time, but which are nevertheless “flexible…and free” (bakhtin et al., 1986, p. 121-127). i argue that dialogic discourse genres are “unfinalizable” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 37) and may be discursively negotiated among teachers and students through repeated reframing of interactions like recitation or discussion. i call for further research on dialogic pedagogical genres that foregrounds their open, collaborative, unfinalizable qualities. the variations in the developing, dialogic, discussion genre in weber’s class (and their relative success at generating discussion) might also be attributed to student interest: for example, students might simply have found war more interesting than the stock market. however, this explanation alone does not account for the relative regularity of the discursive features across these variations. i propose that these features in each conversation constructed participants’ relationship to the hypothetical/historical and actual/classroom events, thus contributing to (and/or revealing) students’ engagement with the topic. in each conversation, as speakers collectively elaborated a “what if…?” story, they seemed to enter more or less successfully into a narrative based on historical events. prior research in history education has already established the value of “what if…?” stories (e.g., husbands & pendry, 2000), or “imaginative entry” activities (e.g., barton & levstik, 2004). typically, these activities cast present-day students as characters in a generic past event (e.g., “what if you were soldiers in a wwi trench…?”). such imaginative entry activities can be valuable when they allow students an “insider view” of history, making the unfolding of past events seem more contingent, and less inevitable (bernstein, 1994; morson, 1994; schweber, 2004), though “presentism,” in which students impose their own values on historical situations, is a potential pitfall. in weber’s class, the coordinated progression of verb tenses and pronoun use in the initial and final examples suggested that, as students entered into the hypothetical scenarios based on the invasion of belgium/talbott, football/trench warfare, and the berlin/capital city airlift, the past became more present and personal for them. additionally, i have shown that these three conversations resulted in dialogic, whole-class discussions because of the relationship between the narrative interactional frame and the classroom interactional frame: students’ participation as characters/co-tellers of the story simultaneously affected their participation as speakers in the discussion. conversely, in the other conversations in weber’s class about the stock market crash and about collective bargaining, the hypothetical situation either collapsed into the past or merged with the future, resulting in a breakdown of the dialogic balance between narrative frame and classroom interactional frame and a failure to generate whole-class discussion. prior research on dialogic pedagogies has suggested that events (e.g., present/past, narrative/classroom) may be brought into dialogic relationship in ways that enable and constrain students’ subsequent agency and participation emergence and development of a dialogic whole-class discussion genre michael b. sherry dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.256 | vol. 7 (2019) a52 (e.g., walker, 2018; wortham, 1994; zittoun, 2008, 2012). i add that even failed attempts to bring events into dialogic relationship may, over time, contribute to the development of dialogic discourse genres. appendix a. transcription conventions definition code examples (lesson and interview transcripts) cut-off — mr. weber: see— laughter (collective) (laughter) students: (laughter) mr. weber: rocks? 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(2012). on the emergence of the subject. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 46(3), 259–273. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 319-article figueredo, sink or swim layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a42 sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo federal university of goiás, brazil abstract this article discusses the results of a four-year investigation on the neoliberal challenges faced by socioeconomically underprivileged students in brazil who were majoring in english teaching. it is a qualitative study that employs the concept of language as a sociocultural and dialogical practice as well as the concepts of responsibility and agency; it also examines the relationship between these students’ experiences and neoliberalism as seen in language education. the data generated by questionnaires, students’ narratives, and semi-structured interviews reveal that the participants’ initiatives to engage themselves both in and outside academic interactional contexts acted as counter-centralizing forces. by exercising their responsible situated agency towards their english language appropriation process and teaching practice, they acted dialogically against neoliberal challenges understood here as hierarchical centripetal forces that constrain their access to different kinds of capital. the study outcomes suggest that decolonial and selfdecolonial practices should be heightened in the second language education program in question so that both undergraduates and faculty can confront traits of marginalization and self-marginalization resulted from the hegemony of neoimperial english. in doing so, more students can become part of “discursive actions” that foster their responsible situated agency towards a more egalitarian society. keywords second language education; neoliberalism; socioeconomically underprivileged students; agency; dialogical practices. carla janaina figueredo is a tenured professor of the second language education program (english area) and of the graduate program in linguistics at federal university of goiás (universidade federal de goiás – ufg), goiânia, brazil. she has a phd in applied linguistics from federal university of goiás and a post-doctoral degree in second language education from university of british columbia (ubc), vancouver, canada. she is one of the organizers of “language teaching in contemporaneity: practices of identity construction” (ensino de línguas na contemporaneidade: práticas de construção de identidades – editora pontes). ïïò issn: 2325-3290 (online) sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a43 1. introduction the first time i heard the expression ‘sink or swim?’ was during a workshop on english phonology, held by the one-day braztesol seminar, in 1994. my participation in that event was part of my academic activities as an undergraduate doing the first of a five-year program, which would enable me to major both in the english language and its teaching. although the workshop teacher was emphasizing how easily second language learners of english could mispronounce the sound /θ/ by replacing it either for /s/ or /t/, my attention had been drawn to the meaning of that question and how well it translated my anxiety over the uncertainties that haunted my choice of getting a degree in a language i could barely speak. throughout that first year, i struggled with that question in mind by always trying to find an answer for the following dilemma: should i surrender to the social and academic challenges imposed by this context and definitely ‘sink’ in my attempts to overcome my persistent linguistic and communicative constraints, or should i strive to learn how to swim against these currents? even though my grades in the english language-related subjects were not far above the required average by the end of my first year in college, i decided to face the second year. this brief account is actually part of the background that underlies the case study i present in this article. my interest to carry out this research was firstly born out of my own experience as a socioeconomically underprivileged undergraduate who decided to ‘swim’ against the neoliberal currents which flooded both my english learning process and my early teaching practice in the nineties. twenty years later, now working as a professor of applied linguistics at the same brazilian university from which i got my degrees in language education, this research also arises from the necessity of looking into the very same academic context and problematizing how brazilian undergraduates majoring in english tend to respond to second language learning/teaching challenges deeply guided by neoliberal forces. this study also points to the urgency for more proactive research in the field of applied linguistics, that is, work which “involves paying attention to the local exigencies of learning and teaching, identifying researchable questions, producing original knowledge, and subjecting it to further verification” (kumaravadivelu, 2016, p.17). given that, socioeconomically underprivileged undergraduates majoring in english are the focal point of my discussions since they should represent the ultimate goal when it comes to lessening social inequalities in the promotion of a more egalitarian society. by problematizing their responses to this neoliberal-driven academic context, i also expect to better understand their 'agency' in relation to their english appropriation process and first teaching experiences. these research findings can potentially guide the participants to widen their dialogical practices by means of english as their second language. moreover, it is also expected that the study outcomes enlighten the current faculty's agency to different language education perspectives by which the whole student body, regardless of their socioeconomic positions, can be better prepared to exercise their foreign or second language teaching identities in this globalizing world. grounded on these premises, the guiding research questions of this study are: 1. which neoliberal challenges do socioeconomically underprivileged students majoring in english at a public university in brazil report that they have faced in learning english and learning to become english teachers? 2. how do these students negotiate or overcome these challenges? below, i firstly present the research context, the methodological approach and the study participants. secondly, i review what scholarly research states about neoliberalism and second language education as well as how a sociointeractionist perspective fundamentally based on dialogical practices can lead us to relate their constructs with the study scope. thirdly, i discuss the data by bringing up the sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a44 implications not only for the educational context where this study was carried out but also to other second language education programs where similar challenges are faced. 2. research context this study belongs to a larger project entitled language-system versus language-discourse: a case study on the second language education of letters-english undergraduates.1 concerning the macro context of the investigated university, it is a public higher education institution, ranked among the fifteen best federal universities, and located in the central region of brazil, which similarly to other public institutions, does not charge its undergraduates and graduates for any registration or tuition fees.2 by taking into account the micro context of the english second language program in question, it has two central goals. firstly, it is responsible for prompting the undergraduates to use the english language as a social practice as historically and culturally situated subjects. secondly, it also has the commitment to ground these teachers-to-be with learning/teaching theories necessary to involve them in practicum activities oriented to a context-based praxis.3 3. methodological approach and research participants for this case study, with all its features and implications, a qualitative approach was the one which best addressed its scope. according to denzin & lincoln (2000, p. 3), “qualitative research is a situated activity that locates the observers in the world. it consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that make the world visible”, for it prioritizes the comprehension of the settings where the research is carried out, “attempting to make sense of the meanings people bring to them”. many scholars agree on the fact that qualitative case studies can be identified by their focus on the exploration and interpretation of individuals and their sociocultural contexts’ characteristics, which could not be easily described by numbers. for them, these exploratory and interpretive features are also a way to guide researchers to the principle of generalizability, which enables them to learn from the specific context investigated and to relate their insights to a holistic perspective of the phenomenon studied. this principle does not imply that generalizations are built on accurate similarities among research contexts and their findings, but to how these places cope with the constituents of similar phenomena (denzin & lincoln, 2000; duff, 2014; duff & anderson, 2015; moreira & caleffe, 2006; noor, 2008; van lier, 1988; zainal, 2007). in addition to these important tenets, another principle that makes qualitative case studies even more valuable for second language education inquiries is the subjects’ perspectives on the research scope, for their insights lead researchers to understand “reality and meaning as coconstructed through the dynamic processes of interacting with others and with the wider social, material and symbolic world” (duff, 2014, p. 236). in view of that claim, another point to be considered is that, from interactional processes promoted by participants and researchers, the roles played by the latter are undeniably influential into case studies’ development and outcomes. duff (2014) states that qualitative researchers are oftentimes seen as a research instrument, a mediating coparticipant, or an actor in the research process. in other words, their interpretive work of the data goes beyond the theoretical framework adopted, for it comes along with their subjectivities on the issues under discussion as well as with their historical backgrounds that encouraged them to choose their research topic. 1 this project was submitted to the committee of ethics and research, from the feral university of goiás, brazil, and approved according to the document number 2.167.649 attested by the institution. 2 applicants interested in getting into the public federal universities have to do the yearly national entrance exam (exame nacional do ensino médio enem). 3 source: https://le.letras.ufg.br/up/894/o/ppc_ing_jan2018.pdf / course pedagogical program: letters-english. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a45 regarding the focal group of investigation, these were the criteria used to define it: 1. this qualitative case study entailed the participation of students whose english background had been built solely in elementary and secondary public schools, excluding any sort of studies in private language institutions; 2. it also included those students who had never had overseas experiences with english nor had taken part in second language immersion programs; 3. it considered only the undergraduates who completed the program in four years (official length determined by the university), and it did not include the ones who, for any reason, either requested a leave of absence or dropped out of college. 4. it concentrated on the undergraduates who depended on the university to do their four-year second language program to both appropriate english and learn how to teach it. as such, students who fulfilled these criteria were considered socioeconomically underprivileged for not having been able to afford additional english-medium education (e.g. within brazilian contexts or abroad) before and during their time in college. by taking into account the criteria adopted, four undergraduates, out of twenty-five who started letters-english in 2014, completed the program in 2017. from these four participants, one of them decided not to take part in the study by claiming that her several academic duties would not allow her special time for the research. thus, this qualitative case study had its data generated from the participation of three undergraduates, identified after pseudonyms of their own choice, namely: rafaela, raul, and felipe. in table 1, i present some information taken from the participants’ profile questionnaires. in addition to the general data, i summarize where they studied english as a foreign language (efl), what their classes were like, and what profession they initially wanted for their lives. research participants rafaela raul felipe § age: 23 / gender: female § hometown: goiânia/goiás § race: white § she studied efl in public schools with emphasis on grammar and translation. § she really wanted to learn english when a teenager, but had no access to good materials; english classes were very short; studying english was meaningless due to focus on grammar, vocabulary lists and lack of social interactions. § she was always sure about her choice to become a teacher of english. § age: 20 / gender: male § hometown: são miguel do araguaia/goiás § race: black § he studied efl in public schools with emphasis on grammar and translation. § he really wanted to learn english when a teenager, but his classes were too basic; activities were inapplicable and there was no social interaction in english. § he wanted to be an interpreter or a tourist guide, not a teacher due to the low social status of the profession in brazil. § age: 21 / gender: male § hometown: aparecida de goiânia/goiás § race: black § he studied efl in public schools with emphasis on vocabulary and gap filling exercises. § he really wanted to learn english when a teenager, but always took part in large groups where indiscipline was a key element to prevent language learning and practice. § he wanted to be a journalist or an interpreter, never pictured himself as a teacher. table 1: data source – participants’ profile questionnaire with regard to the undergraduates’ participation in the process of generating data, multiple instruments were applied in different stages, following what denzin & lincoln state about the essence of sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a46 qualitative research, that is, its triangulation, which offers researchers the possibility of blending “their own observations with the self-reports provided by subjects through interviews and life story, personal experience, and case study documents” (2000, p. 21). besides a profile questionnaire (appendix a), with both closed and open-ended questions from which i could gather the students’ personal information and perspectives on prior english learning experiences, the data also came from the participants’ oral and written productions where i could outline the first steps of their english appropriation process as well as their language skills development. these data came from their in-class interactions and assignments; most of them were generated during the disciplines’ english language levels 3, 4, 5, and 6 (throughout 2015 and 2016), when i was their teacher and had the opportunity to audio-record their oral-graded evaluations. in addition to crediting advantages to classroom observations of participants’ language performance, i also agree with scholars concerning their efficiency aligned with data recording and note-taking, especially due to the possibilities of reexamining data originated in actual social interactions (denzin & lincoln, 2000; moreira & caleffe, 2006; richards & lockhart, 2001). therefore, a considerable number of participants’ discursive practices was firstly registered in the questionnaire, observed in classroom participation, audiorecorded in oral exams, and written down in my field notes. in order to promote more insights on their second language education, by the end of 2017 the participants were also asked to write about their learning/teaching experiences with english involving their communicative, sociocultural, and affective dimensions throughout the four-year program (see appendix b). these narratives, one related to each year studied, were supposed to lead the undergraduates to critical reflections on their own trajectories so that they could both evaluate what they considered as positive or negative about them and possibly be able to project what they expected the future would hold for them. the inclusion of their narratives intended to accomplish what pitman (2013, p. 31) claims about the relevance brought by this important research instrument, which is to appreciate “the power of the personal voice in educational research and its ability to provide information that other approaches cannot”, or in denzin & lincoln’s words, turn the researcher into a “conduit for making such voices heard” (2000, p. 26). to conclude the process of data generation, i also conducted a semi-structured interview with rafaela, raul, and felipe. unlike the traditional way of interviewing participants individually, i decided to coordinate it with all of them in just one meeting so as to create an atmosphere in which we could all have a conversation about the topics planned previously. the points highlighted throughout this interview were directly related to the participants’ insights revealed on their narratives. regarding the implications of this research tool, i agree with fontana & frey (2000) on their argument that interviews are nothing less than a social event, collaboratively constructed by researcher and participants, whose negotiations are shaped by their subjectivities. it is relevant to mention here that one particular element influenced this data generation substantially, namely, the removal of the textbook from the letters-english curriculum by the end of 2015. in view of that the study’s participants had two different perspectives coloring their english appropriation process: the first two years of their majoring were guided by an imported textbook (2014 and 2015), and the last two years were marked by diverse source of materials chosen and organized by their professors (2016 and 2017). given that the english language classes were textbook-free from 2016 on, intercultural matters and second language critical studies gained more emphasis in classroom discussions, and that provided students with more opportunities to diversify their appropriation of english. besides data generated in these classes (e.g. observations, oral practice recording, and note-taking), other ones came with the participants’ first experiences in their two-year practicum (2016-2017), which i collected through nonparticipant observations, thorough notes on their teaching practice, and supervision of their lesson plans. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a47 according to van lier (1988), these research instruments should count on researchers’ familiarity with the language classroom context as well as with their intensive immersion in the registered data. in summary, generating data with purposes of promoting a scientific research, regardless of being qualitative or quantitative-oriented, can never be built on neutral stances. based on this premise, qualitative case studies on second language education is not an exception. on the contrary, they are filled with beliefs and diverse identities from those who are in search of understanding not only what the social phenomenon reveals but also how it can be transformed. 4. socioeconomic context due to the complexities embedded in the term neoliberalism and how it connects to the context of my research scope, i divide this section into three parts: firstly, i present the concept of neoliberalism i have drawn on discussions promoted by bockman (2013), bourdieu (1998), fairclough (2008), holborow (2012), and saad-filho and morais (2018); secondly, i narrow it down to the features of neoliberalism in brazil; and thirdly, i conclude by making reference to some scholars who problematize the relationship between neoliberal forces and second language education. 4.1. neoliberalism seen from a four-fold perspective although bockman (2013), bourdieu (1998), fairclough (2008), holborow (2012), and saad-filho and morais (2018) come from varied fields of interest and adopt different ways to conceptualize neoliberalism, they agree on at least four basic definitions which lead us up to a better understanding of what a neoliberal force is, namely: an economy-oriented force; a capitalist force; an ideological force; and a discursive force. to start with, neoliberalism is rooted in an economic theory, which strenuously defends the lessening of the roles of a nation-state in order to strengthen “private property rights, free markets and free trade” (holborow, 2012, p. 15). based on this first premise, neoliberalism is conceived as a form of capitalism in which the state and its responsibilities towards society are rolled back in a way that multinational corporations and their socioeconomic interests exploit the so-called free market linked to globallyintegrated production. in other words, it should be understood as a system of accumulation, which is nothing less than a “stage, or mode of existence, of capitalism” (saad-filho & morais, 2018, p.56), and its continuous expansion restructures the interactions between local and global economies, reshaping, therefore, their economic, political, cultural, and social domains. according to holborow (2012), the economic crisis faced by many countries in the late 1970s triggered a very strong belief that positioned the states as cumbersome economic players. the common sense was to put them aside so that the controllers of capital could shape not only the world economy but also its social dimension. for this reason, neoliberalism is also conceived as an ideology whose supporters put forward a one-sided representation of reality highly entrenched in contradictions between what it says and what it actually does. for instance, even though the cornerstone of neoliberal theory highlights the success of free market and capital production over states’ interventions in economy, it is still the nation state which plays the role of a thermometer for international investments. by determining whether their markets are secure or not, how and where their labour forces should be used, state-run economies reveal how deep they are engaged in this economic tug of war. furthermore, despite being believed as a right-wing ideology, bockman (2013) claims that neoliberalism’s most contradictory tenet lies on the adoption of its policies by left-political parties, generally associated with socialism ideals. such inconsistencies turn neoliberal principles into a mythical mindset grounded on real world events, articulated by a dominant socioeconomic class but spread out as a world-view (bockman, 2013; holborow, 2012; saad-filho & morais, 2018). sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a48 nevertheless, all this manipulation of economy by means of privatization and liberalization of trade could never take place without a powerful instrument able to transform mere potentialities into concreteness, namely, discursive practices. in other words, discourse as the fourth element that causes to combine the foundations of neoliberalism not only serves it as a representational apparatus, but it is its main socially-embedded system that gives a tangible form to changes within social activities (fairclough, 2008). this way, discourse should be viewed as a social practice or as a way discursive subjects act towards the world and their interlocutors, shaping them and at the same time being shaped. according to fairclough (2008), there is a dialectical relationship between discursive practices and social structures, for discourse can be expanded or constrained by all kinds of social interactions, no matter where they take place, in the institutional levels or in the interpersonal levels, or how they occur, verbally-oriented or not. in summary, since discourse contributes to filling the world with ideological meanings that both reflect and refract it (vološinov, 1973), neoliberalism is, therefore, ‘discourse-led’ (holborow, 2012, p. 22). 4.2. neoliberalism in brazil when compared to countries in latin america, africa, and eastern europe, neoliberal policies in brazil were consolidated after the end of dictatorship in 1985. although the brazilian way of trading with foreign partners was still marked by an excess of protectionism, there was an urgency for a more open economy able to address both the shifts in the international power relationships and the challenges of stabilizing inflation rates. another fact that triggered neoliberal implementations was the ever-present combination of political corruption and very high state expenses, pointed out as being responsible for reducing funds for investments in industries, markets, and cutting-edge technologies, which consequently reinforced the disbelief on old paradigms (amann & baer, 2002; saad-filho & morais, 2018). although many brazilian economic shortcomings have been addressed by neoliberal measures (e.g. the permission of substantial inflows of foreign goods, services, and finance), saad-filho and morais (2018, p. 68) highlight that “these inflows increased brazil’s vulnerability to balance-of-payments, exchange-rate, and financial crises”. in the authors’ opinion, the only consequences brought by neoliberal forces into the contemporary brazilian society are that the governments “sought to limit the expansion of citizenship and shackle the emerging welfare state” (p. 68). in other words, despite the neoliberal reforms, the ultimate economic growth has been feeble, the distribution of income has worsened, and poverty has increased. it could be argued, therefore, that these neoliberal reforms should be blamed for the socioeconomic inequalities still common all over brazil. nonetheless, that would be a very simplistic thought. brazil’s painful history of colonization and slavery, two intertwined events that ravaged the country throughout three centuries, should also be considered. their legacies can still be seen on the concentration of wealth in the hands of a rich small upper-middle class as well as on pervasive corruption policies, many of them adopted by both right-wing and left-wing governors that have successively ruled the country after it overcame dictatorship. 4.3. neoliberal forces and second language education over the last years, many scholarly studies have discussed not only the impacts of a neoliberal agenda on language education but also to what extent neoliberal principles have reinforced implicitly or explicitly sociolinguistic inequalities in a range of different contexts (flores, 2013; kelly, 2013; kubota, 2015, 2016; kubota & miller, 2017; park, 2012; phillipson, 2003, 2008; rivers & ross, 2013; sayer, 2015). flores (2013), for instance, makes a case for understanding neoliberalism both from its institutional side and the individual subject’s perspective, which is inevitably moulded by neoliberal-grounded discursive practices. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a49 in other words, he argues that the autonomy and flexibility supposedly given to neoliberal subjects cause them to be also corporatized at the same time they are induced to meet the market’s needs. in terms of language education, phillipson (2003, 2008) states, regarding the roles played by english in a globalizing world: there is one major neoliberal global project for language education, which is providing english with a status of default language for intercultural/international communication in order to keep the power of anglo-american nations over other countries. furthermore, he also puts forward the argument that global or neoimperial english can be understood from three different but interdependent angles. the first one represents a lifetime project for those who dream to become part of an ‘english world community’, which is, in the author’s opinion, an ‘imagined community’ hardly reached by most of its aspirants. the second one reveals english as a process being activated and expanded by its worldwide users responsible for putting its linguistic structures and embedded ideologies into practice. the third angle shows it as a product owned by specific communities of users geographically located. given these three ways of understanding neoimperial english, phillipson (2003, 2008) advocates that the language per se does not carry an imperialistic gene, but it becomes imperialistic once its speakers use it as a vehicle to convey and impose their domination ideologies. phillipson’s contention is aligned with scholarly studies that emphasize how effective hegemonic values within the english language have been used to perpetuate colonial behaviors in former colonized countries (kumaravadivelu, 2012; makoni & pennycook, 2007; mignolo, 2007, 2009, 2013; penycook, 2001, 2007; sayer, 2015). besides still having to deal with their own colonization legacy, these nations are subdued to not only a linguistic invasion of english that undervalues their national languages but to a cultural imposition that leads many to willingly celebrate all kinds of anglo-american representations. this way, phillipson (2008) implies that the english expansion is directly or indirectly related to what bourdieu (1986) names as cultural and social capitals, which can be derived from economic capital by means of appropriation and transformation. contrary to common sense, bourdieu (1986) takes up the position that either success or failure in financial, educational, and professional life is not a natural consequence of an individual’s aptitudes. for the french sociologist, cultural competence, for instance, can be transmitted or given by one’s family according to the availability of resources at their disposal. in other words, the more the family has to offer, the more their offspring will have to appropriate. if cultural capital (education and assets) is scarcely accessible in the family context, the socioeconomically underprivileged might end up either making strong efforts to acquire it or getting satisfied with what society can provide to them. other strong mindsets reveal how neoliberal ideologies control the trade of english as a linguistic, cultural, and social capital. one of them is the belief in the promise that acquiring english successfully will guarantee higher social status and the best job positions. the implications resulted from ‘this promise’ are discussed by park (2011) when he draws parallels between what makes up the 21st century neoliberal workers and those who pursue english as the language of ‘opportunities’ under neoliberal ideologies. the neoliberal worker as well as the learner of english are, according to the author, responsible for their own development and improvement, in addition to taking all the necessary initiatives capable to respond to demands imposed by a capitalist market. another pervasive mindset is the dichotomy native speaker/non-native speaker [ns/nns] of english, which, notwithstanding many studies that problematize the myth of nativity, still contributes to blur learners of english’ vision on their legitimacy as bilinguals (figueredo, 2011; faez, 2011; park, 2012; rajagopalan, 1997; rivers & ross, 2013; selvi, 2014). overpowered by the idea that every single native speaker of english naturally holds a superior title of language authority, many second language learners sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a50 worldwide are challenged by a colonial legacy currently conveyed by neoliberal ideologies. in other words, not only has the english language reached the five continents, but it has also spread out its western-based values, beliefs, and attitudes, which are controlled by the so-called ‘owners of english’ and seen by many as a ‘gift’ everyone should have (vandrick, 2009). the effects resulted by this colonial legacy are oftentimes revealed in the social devaluation of learners’ first languages and cultures (kelly, 2013; park, 2012), in the glorification of native speakers’ fluency and proficiency regardless of who they are (figueredo, 2011), in the learners’ own conviction that their english language and teaching performances fall short of quality when compared to native speakers’ (kubota, 2015; rivers & ross, 2013; selvi, 2014), and in the discouragement many non-native speakers feel when it comes to fighting against social and linguistic discrimination (kumaravadivelu, 2012, 2016; munro, 2003). by reflecting on the english language education scenario as a whole, kumaravadivelu (2012, p. 22) points out what i also consider as a colonial legacy linked to neoliberal ideologies, namely, the process of marginalization and the practice of self-marginalization. in the author’s view, “the former pertains to the ways in which the coloniality of the english language is exploited to maintain the authority of the center over the periphery. the latter refers to the ways in which the periphery surrenders its voice and vision to the center”. in his article the decolonial option in english teaching: can the subaltern act?, kumaravadivelu (2016) puts forward some elements that directly or indirectly support neoliberal principles in the english language education worldwide, namely: the way english-speaking countries impose the consumption of their theories and pedagogical methods to learners and teachers of english from peripherical countries; the way these ‘consumers’ end up reinforcing their marginalizing conditions when they are not able to recognize the value of their own production; the way this marginalization leads to a process of self-marginalization, especially when non-native speakers are confronted by the discourse-driven figure of the infallible native speaker; and finally, the way scholarly research produced in peripherical countries is marginalized for not having been written in neoimperial english. all these stances seem to present a scenario entangled in many opposing forces, and it is hard to believe there is a way out of it. nonetheless, i argue that mignolo’s decolonial thinking and its constructs such as ‘delinking’, ‘relinking’, ‘re-existing’, and ‘border thinking’, are interesting pathways that can lead us to understand and confront second language education driven by neoliberal forces. delinking, as stated by mignolo (2009, 2013), means breaking connections with a colonial matrix of power (cmp), which has been, for five centuries, responsible for structuring discourses and socioeconomic behaviors to ultimately turn them into dichotomies or ways to homogenize the world’s perceptions of life (e.g. capitalism versus socialism, colonizers versus colonized peoples, imperial languages versus subaltern languages, etc.). according to mignolo, delinking as a decolonial attitude does not act as a new paradigm that excels other ones (e.g. the modern and the post-modern epistemologies), but it works as an option which reveals other ways of thinking, doing, and dwelling “in the borders of local histories confronting global designs” (2013, p. 9). by delinking from this cmp, discredited linguistic and cultural communities have the chance to re-link to their own legacies and values, whose transformative power enables them to re-exist into a world also shaped by their presence and contributions. taking into account these processes, mignolo (2013, p. 9) asserts that decolonial thinking is nothing less than border thinking, which means “thinking of us”. in other words, instead of just assimilating social creations that form a chasm between ‘them and us’ (e.g. the dichotomy native speaker versus non-native speaker of english), we should redirect our thoughts to our own potentialities and rediscover who we really are and what we really want to do with our modes of existence. in the following section, i focus on the sociointeractionist constructs of language and subject, as theorized by the circle of bakhtin (1973, 1999) and on the conceptual discussions of agency according to sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a51 ahearn (2001) and miller (2012). the aim is to explore their perspectives and how they can converse to one another so as to broaden our comprehension on what has entailed the case study in question. 5. theoretical framework in choosing the main premises of bakhtin and his circle4 to discuss concepts such as language and subject, i have considered two major elements: their pioneering focus on how language is both socially constituted and interactionally produced; and their insights derived from a philosophy of language that enlightens my understanding on what makes a dialogical subject and on how one’s agency works. when it comes to language as a social practice, bakhtin (1999) and vološinov (1973) put forward the argument that the word is an ideological sign par excellence, and its capacity of both reflecting (conveying) and refracting (interpreting) meanings is the language basis for what they call dialogism. in other words, the dialogical nature of a language lies within the meaningful connections diverse utterances establish between them. these semantically-aligned utterances and the language users who produce them are both time and space-driven, that is, they are shaped by atemporal discourses (past, present, and futurebased ones) as well as by the spaces or social contexts they occupy. however, it is important to emphasize that the constitution of the bakhtinian subject is not only grounded on their dependency in relation to their interlocutors and localities but also on their own abilities to create, change, and transform discursive practices arisen from their sociocultural experiences. that is why the dialogical subject designed by the circle of bakhtin is recognized by their unfinished and incomplete essence; since they are immersed in multiple discourses, they are always in constant rearrangement of their subjectivities. in addition to this incompleteness, the bakhtinian subject is both responsible and responsive, which means they cannot escape their condition of ‘non-alibi of being’ (bakhtin, 1999, p. 40); put in a different way, their human nature takes them to respond to their interlocutors (physically present or not, with words or with silence), for their mere comprehension of an utterance is itself an act of responsiveness, which implies their inherit responsibility to those who approach them meaningfully. in view of that, the climax of dialogism is, therefore, the inevitable interactions between the self and the other, their complementariness gained by convergent or divergent dialogical practices, and their capacities to promote volitional and evaluative stances, by which they express their will towards the surrounding discourses at the same time they judge them. in summary, the bakhtinian dialogical subject is essentially agentive, and their acting simply means language by itself cannot do anything, but language users and the ways they deal with it can. in discussing the complexities of the concept agency, ahearn (2001) points out that no matter what one’s research purpose is, or for what purpose one wants to understand agency, one should not reduce it to a simple free will that neglects its social nature, nor should one equate it with resistance as if it were its only aim, and, finally, nor should one even ignore it by suggesting that individuals per se are powerless before sociopolitical structures. in this sense, the author converses with the circle of bakhtin since they agree that agency is brought about by individuals’ engagement in their social interactions, or in ahearn’s words (p. 112), ‘agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.’ in spite of her awareness that her definition of agency cannot entail its several nuances, ahearn (2001) also shares the bakhtinian viewpoint that language underpins agency since she advocates that individuals actively construct and constrain context-based interpretations ‘within a bounded universe of discourse’ (p. 112). bakhtin (1981) enhances this conception when he rejects neutrality in individuals’ discursive practices and reaffirms that 4 although most of the publications are attributed to bakhtin, the current scholarly literature has decided to credit most of their contents to him and his intellectual friends (e.g.vološinov) who, throughout 1920’s, promoted insightful discussions on the social nature of language. their academic fellowship is widely known as bakhtin and his circle, a reference to knowledge they dialogically coconstructed. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a52 their discourses testify not only their existence but also their actions, for ‘the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [...] but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions’ (p. 294). along with these principles, other bakhtin’s constructs help us understand two types of agency exercised by individuals and their contexts, namely, the centripetal and centrifugal forces (bakhtin, 1981). the former is characterized by centralizing, hierarchizing, and monological actions; and the latter is recognized by its decentralizing, dispersing, and dialogical nature. each one of these powers is also discursively formed and can influence the way individuals and their social contexts respond to what affects them. hence, i take up the bakhtinian viewpoint that it is from language, from its sociocultural and dialogical nature, that we can better understand how society and its actors relate to one another. therefore, when viewed as a discursive social practice, soaked up with subjects’ identities, language does not only carry agency, but it is agency in itself. for instance, in drawing on ahearn’s discussions, miller (2016) expresses caution when she reasons about the fine line between the discourses linked to the agentive second language learner and those connected to the neoliberal subject. when it comes to the agentive learner, the author stresses some of their attributes such as reflexivity, intentionality, and capacity to take actions. although these are expected characteristics for a student to advance in their language skills, miller (2016) draws an analogy between this excessive emphasis on the learner’s autonomy and the neoliberal self, described as being ‘activated, responsibilized, individualized, moralized, and/or freed’ (p. 350). in other words, too much strength given to the learner’s agency might gloss over neoliberal ideologies that shift the educational responsibilities of social institutions to individuals’ actions alone. following these philosophical and critical reflections, i introduce the results of this case study in the next section. it aims to specifically provide an overview on how the participants exercised their agency towards their studies of the english language within sociohistorical contexts driven by neoliberal forces. i intend to discuss how the other (the participants’ interlocutors), how the spaces (the contexts they have taken part in), and how their own selves have affected their responses and the (re)construction of their agency. 6. results: the participants’ agentive profile in order to build the participants’ agentive profile, i took into consideration the data generated by the questionnaire, the students’ narratives, and the interviews, from which i could gather information on their english learning/teaching experiences (see section 3). in regard to these data, it is important to mention that, for rafaela, felipe, and raul, the other has played a central role in their sociocultural experiences, for their responsibility to respond to this other has required from them agentive stands, marked by words, silence, agreements, disagreements, denials, awareness, unawareness, etc, to mention just a few. that means their responses have always taken place, one way or another. their learning and teaching identities concerning the english language, for example, have certainly been moulded by the influence of the other’s discursive practices. moreover, since the subject occupies specific discursive places, their subjectivities are not simply brought into these territories as additional components but are also influenced, modified, expanded, or constrained by the agency of these places, which is socially and linguistically mediated by other subjects’ discourses (miller, 2012). thus, when it comes to how sociocultural and institutional spaces have affected the participants’ learning and teaching processes of english, three specific periods should be highlighted. the first one i am considering lies between the learners’ initial studies of english, which started in elementary school, and their three years spent in secondary school before going to college. during this first sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a53 period, english was a sort of imposed foreign language, for the brazilian public education did not provide them with other options. this ‘imposition’ acted as a regulating neoliberal force that conducted rafaela, felipe, and raul to experience the linguistic and cultural perspectives of a dominant language, and that force did not only prevent them from getting to know other foreign languages but also subdued them to english influences outside the school. besides that, rafaela, felipe, and raul were also affected by the agentive principles of a teaching practice grounded in the grammar translation method. since their english classes were more actively inclined to restricting students to a structural rather than to a communicative view of english, the participants’ learning identities had their agency channeled to ways their responses were found limited to negotiate changes with the spaces in question. put in different terms, very little room was left for them to advance in their appropriation process of english. the second period of agentive practices involves the first two years of students’ majoring in english teaching. it is important to point out that their choice for the english program might have been influenced by their long trajectory of studies and experiences with this language, despite the availability of other options at the university such as french and spanish programs. other elements that should be considered are the places each one of these languages occupies in the brazilian job market and what promises of a successful career each one of them has to offer. i have no intention to condemn the participants’ choice for english, nor do i intend to deny their will to study it; nevertheless, if we take into account the neoliberal influence on second language education, english is undoubtedly the one that prevails. those two years were also significant for these undergraduates because they did not only define their professional lives but were also immersed in a closer relationship with english, by which they could experience it in different ways. their agency in relation to english was certainly reoriented since their appropriation process shifted to stages beyond the linguistic structures. even though these first two years meant the beginning of a struggle to put english into different kinds of practice, and though rafaela, felipe, and raul were subjected to the use of a textbook, they could act diversely to engage themselves in social interactions that reflected more their real life. given that, i have defined the third and the fourth years of students’ majoring as the third period that reshaped once again their agency in relation to english, their interlocutors, the spaces they occupied, and their own selves. over this period, rafaela, felipe, and raul did core subjects (e.g. english and literatures of the english language), which laid emphasis on critical studies and on decolonial practices, and started teaching at the university language center. i argue that this period was of great relevance because the undergraduates’ views on english included some critical thinking that problematized many dichotomies related to the so-called neoimperial english as well as provided value to their legitimacy as bilinguals and authors of their second language. in addition, the first steps of their teaching practice certainly guided them to critical reflections when confronted by classroom challenges and probably led them to a more decolonial praxis. as it can be noticed, agency is continuously reshaped by discursive practices. in view of this discussion that reveals how the other, the self, and the context are intertwined, i propose to define the study participants’ agency as responsible situated agency, which is an attempt to emphasize their discourse-driven actions, organized and reorganized by their countless interactions that occur in result of their responsibility towards the other, their local spaces, and their own selves. my emphasis also lies on the potential autonomy this sociohistorically situated self can exercise, for i concur with the circle of bakhtin that the dialogical subject is not a transcendent creature subdued by ‘fate’ but is able to challenge and overcome opponent forces (bakhtin, 1999; vološinov, 1973). sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a54 in the next sections, i discuss some of the data generated by the questionnaire, students’ narratives, and interviews. in doing so, i expect to answer the research questions presented in the introduction of this article. 7. data discussion the data presented for this discussion are divided into five categories that address, firstly, the neoliberal challenges faced by rafaela, felipe, and raul (research question number 1); and, secondly, how these undergraduates responded to them (research question number 2). the categories related to the neoliberal challenges were designed as a way to reveal their significant occurrence in the participants’ discursive practices conveyed by the research tools described in section 3. i also considered the connections these discourses had with recent scholarly discussion on neoliberalism and second language education, based on what is presented in sections 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3. the categories which represent the students’ responses to these challenges follow the concepts of the circle of bakhtin approached in section 5 and the construct responsible situated agency resulted from my discussion on the participants’ agentive profile (section 6). data generated by the study participants were produced in english, respecting their choice to use their second language to co-construct the present research; this way, data were transcribed according to students’ original production, without any modification on their english. 7.1. neoliberal challenge 1: inequalities in getting the most out of english language education when it comes to neoliberalism, its effects are commonly represented by two sides: the ones who win, and the ones who lose, for not everyone is supposed to reach the same assets provided by society. for instance, if there is a massive concentration of economic, cultural, and linguistic capital at the hands of higher social class agents, consequently, there is also an exclusion of lower social class members from the contexts where they could access diverse material, cultural and linguistic commodities (bourdieu, 1998; saad-filho & morais, 2018). this was the case of rafaela, felipe, and raul, who, in this tug-of-war, experienced poor socioeconomic conditions that constrained their english appropriation before they started their university studies (see the questionnaire data on table 1). the lack of important amounts of these capitals resulted in limited language skills, summarized in basic normative grammar knowledge associated with basic decontextualized vocabulary. when the participants were asked what their english was like when they entered college, they said: extract 1: “it was terrible. i did not know the structure of some very basic statements. i knew basic vocabulary such as numbers, colors etc.” (rafaela/source: questionnaire) extract 2: “i could not communicate with accuracy. i only had some vocabulary and i could barely make sentences, not even to introduce myself.” (felipe/source: questionnaire) extract 3: “i was not able to express myself easily because i did not have enough vocabulary or formal knowledge of pronunciation.” (raul/source: questionnaire) these data from the questionnaire reveal what can be considered a chasm between the socioeconomically underprivileged students who have to face the challenges of english-medium classes for the first time in their adulthood, and the privileged ones who reach the university context with communicative skills. furthermore, the students’ reports also make us look to the unequal paths formed by the brazilian educational system when it comes to learning english in primary and secondary schools as sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a55 opposed to private english language institutions. when rafaela, felipe, and raul emphasize their inability to express themselves in english, they were offered very little to develop english as a social and dialogical practice (vološinov, 1973); and it also indicates that, for them to become professional teachers of english, their efforts in a four-year program will have to make up for ten years of english studies which did not prepare them for college. in this neoliberal scenario, the neoimperial english conceived as a product (phillipson, 2003, 2008) is nothing less than a linguistic capital which is not shared in its entirety as it should be. here is the way the participants found to deal with the privations of their first year in college. 7.1.1. responsible situated agency: ordinary sources of capitals can make a difference in view of their communicative limitations and urgent need to engage themselves in the appropriation process of english, rafaela, felipe, and raul acted responsibly and responsively by taking advantage of what they had at their disposal, as can be read in the following extracts: extract 4: “at the university, i interacted with my classmates in english. i am an extrovert person, and i like to talk a lot. it was good to improve my language skills.” (rafaela/source: narrative 1) extract 5: “i used to read the dictionary, literally. i used to read words and their translation to portuguese in the order they appeared. […] i basically listened to songs in english and sometimes i tried to think and talk to myself in english.” (felipe/source: questionnaire) extract 6: “i feel like when i started studying english at college, i spent most part of my days studying it. i used to watch as many youtube videos as i could, i memorized many songs lyrics and i was really focused on my pronunciation. i also became friends with foreigners from the usa, what made my english improve very fast.” (raul/source: narrative 1) according to bakhtin (1999), responding to the other, to surrounding places, and also to the own self is what characterizes the dialogical subjects, their non-alibi of being, for once they are engaged in meaningful social interactions, there is no way for them to escape but to be responsible and responsive to their demands. what i learn from the responses provided by rafaela, felipe, and raul is that they developed strategies aligned with their agentive profile and used what they had at their disposal to experience english as a relational language. in other words, their social interactions with classmates (rafaela), with himself (felipe), and with online friends (raul), along with the reading of dictionaries, the listening of songs, and the watching of videos reveal that the students’ agency was in fact triggered by both neoliberal challenges and the exigencies of their local context. that means the undergraduates’ responsible situated agency was exercised in response to how they could overcome the demands for interactions with the other and the requirements of the academic context. in doing so, these students could discursively affect their interlocutors in the spaces they occupied at the same time that they engaged themselves in their attempts to put english into practice. the use of simple materials shows us how the participants’ initiatives try to work in their favor, and that discloses not only the desire to strengthen their second language self but also the intention to move it forward despite the obstacles. 7.2 neoliberal challenge 2: poor linguistic capital narrows the path to diverse social capital as bourdieu (1986) states, social capital is not naturally given but socially negotiated, and that social participation is often determined by other types of capital, especially the economic and the linguistic ones. in the researched context, rafaela, felipe, and raul reveal that ‘owning’ the english language or being able to engage communicatively in diverse social interactions is usually the symbolic way to define sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a56 who has the ‘credentials’ to take part in varied in-class activities. by following this idea of ‘ownership’, students often socialize with the ones who share similar degrees of proficiency in english, and their attitude ends up contributing to another symbolic distinction between groups of ‘more proficient’ students and ‘less proficient’ students. this classification of who ‘owns’ english and who does not usually causes the socioeconomically underprivileged to face displacement before more experienced speakers as well as disappointment for not being able to produce their second language in a wide variety of ways, as we can read in the next extracts: extract 7: “i was worried because the teacher just talked in english and i barely understood. when you do the “vestibular” [see note 3] no one says that you are supposed to know the language in order to start the course, so it was a little bit difficult for me at first. i also noticed that some students used to show off because they actually knew how to speak english.” (rafaela/source: questionnaire) extract 8: “before starting the course, i thought i knew something, but at the very first class when i saw many people who have been abroad speaking with fluency, i had an awful reality shock and i almost quit the course.” (felipe/source: questionnaire) extract 9: “i did not like talking with the ones who were already fluent because i feared they would judge me.” (raul/source: narrative 1) when rafaela, felipe, and raul are prevented from widening their interpersonal relationships due to their poor linguistic capital in english, they reveal the powerful connection between ‘having a cultural capital’ and ‘knowing english’. rafaela supports this connection when she expresses her concern in not being able to follow what the teacher says and adds that ‘[…] some students used to show off because they actually knew how to speak english’. felipe also expresses frustration when he compares his linguistic and cultural capitals with other classmates’ who ‘have been abroad’. the participants’ dialogical practices also unveil how the english language has been legitimated as a worldwide linguistic capital. this legitimacy is unfortunately attached to the ones who think they ‘own’ english, and this mindset ends up shaping the agency of the space in question, for it determines who is eligible to speak and who is not, as we can read in raul’s report: ‘ i did not like talking to the ones who were already fluent because i feared they would judge me’. in summary, the unequal levels of investments in linguistic and cultural capitals do not only work out in favor of increasing social inequalities among the students, but they also heighten neoliberal forces attached to the learning/teaching processes of english in this particular academic space. following are the participants’ responses to the linguistic and social exclusion they were confronted by. 7.2.1 responsible situated agency: going beyond the classroom walls it is important to highlight that the academic spaces in question are monolingual-oriented contexts, that is, apart from some international students, the overwhelming majority shares their first language, which is brazilian portuguese. in view of that, the main spaces for second language practices are the classrooms, where students are supposed to get as much involved as possible with english and its cultures. even though rafaela, felipe, and raul struggled to overcome their limitations in the social interactions throughout in-class english activities, they agentively found out other ways to resist the centripetal forces that centralized them within the boundaries of their first-year classes. the following excerpts reflect their efforts to both disperse the opposing currents and to open the way for their responsible situated agency: extract 10: “although i had much difficulty with the language itself, i usually tried to express my opinions and i always participated on the activities suggested by the sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a57 teacher. at the end of the first year, some colleagues and i decided to “try” to talk only in english outside the classroom.” (rafaela/source: narrative 1) extract 11: “most of my classmates practiced the english language outside the classroom. as a result, i started talking in english with them in the courtyard, in the corridors, even when some students from different courses thought we did that to show off. […] i believe that if we only had practiced english inside the classroom, we would be in a lower stage regarding our second language acquisition process.” (felipe/source: narrative 1) extract 12: “the fact that my friends and i tried our best to express ourselves in english influenced a lot on our acquisition process. […] i found out that i had a lot to improve, but that did not break my confidence. instead, i was really motivated.” (raul/source: narrative 1) by reflecting on rafaela’s responsible situated agency, especially when she stresses her attempts to express her opinions as well as her participation ‘[…] on the activities suggested by the teacher’, we see that her efforts are both to legitimize her agentive role in this language classroom and to have her participation recognized as a voice that also has the right to be projected. likewise, feeling that the in-class interactions were not enough for their english appropriation, the persistence of rafaela, felipe, and raul takes them to beyond the classroom walls so as to guarantee their dialogical practices and other discursive spaces to be occupied (e.g. talk only in english outside the classroom, talking in english in the courtyard, in the corridors). in doing so, their responsible situated agency turns into a centrifugal force that aims to tackle the hierarchizing power that often affects classroom interactions, such as the one we read in extract 8, when felipe says: ‘i thought i knew something, but at the very first class when i saw many people who have been abroad speaking with fluency, i had an awful reality shock and i almost quit the course.’ interestingly, it is the monological nature of a neoliberal academic context where english is not always shared equally that encourages rafaela, felipe, and raul to respond in a dialogical manner responsible for including other interactants and redesigning their spaces. although they are mistakenly considered as show-off by other undergraduates, their willingness to create new interactional spaces for their second language practices acted in favour of a reconfiguration of their prior agency. this scenario reminds me of bourdieu’s emphasis on the interdependence between social structures and social subjects as well as on how the former tends to dominate the latter (2008); however, it also reminds me that the circle of bakhtin goes beyond bourdieu’s perspective when it focuses on the agentive constitution of language and how powerful it can be when used by dialogical subjects seeking for egalitarian rights in their own local contexts (vološinov, 1973). in other words, social transformation is mediated by language as discourse, but social transformation that includes equal distributions of capitals is triggered by dialogical subjects who stand up to centripetal forces such as neoliberalism. as raul highlighted in his narrative, ‘[…] i found out that i had a lot to improve, but that did not break my confidence. instead, i was really motivated”. in conclusion, the perspective of a dialogical use of language (in this case, socioeconomically underprivileged speakers of english in a peripherical marginalized country) points to language as the means to make connections between social structures and social subjects work effectively to reach common goals. 7.3 neoliberal challenge 3: the promise of english in the heart of brazil the neoimperial english as a linguistic capital has been imposed by centripetal neoliberal forces as a way of supressing the importance of other languages so that english-speaking countries and their neocolonial capitalist interests can be benefited (phillipson, 2008; park, 2011). given that, among many consequences of this neoliberal imposition is the promise that english is a gateway to a ‘better life’. for a long time, this belief also marked considerably the study participants’ perspectives on english as the following extracts can illustrate: sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a58 extract 13: “at the first year of my graduation, i had the impression that most of the students have when they are about to learn english: english is a global language, i can travel to any place and i will be able to communicate, i will get a better job etc. i did not care about english as power, for example, because i had never thought about it in this way. english represented a better way of life, an opportunity, and since i really liked the language (even before getting to know it), i felt like i was making a dream come true.” (rafaela/source: narrative 1) extract 14: “at the beginning of my studies, i used to see english as my passport to the usa. i also used to think that english was the only language i ever had to learn.” (raul/source: narrative 1) extract 15: “at the beginning of my graduation i felt annoyed, for there were not many subjects related to the english language.” (felipe/source: narrative 1) the belief that english was a passport to all kinds of capitals (e.g. social and cultural capitals: ‘english is a global language, i can travel to any place’; linguistic capital: ‘i will be able to communicate’; economic capital, ‘i will get a better job’) came along with rafaela, felipe, and raul when they started their university studies and, according to their reports, still persisted in the first terms. based on the learners’ narratives, it is possible to imply how this promise blurred their viewpoints by not allowing them to see english from different angles, such as a symbol of power and domination. for instance, rafaela ‘had never thought about it [english] in this way [as power]. similarly, raul considered english as the only foreign language worthy of learning; and the eagerness to be immersed in english was much more than a dream coming true, it was even the reason why felipe felt so annoyed for not having all the classes taught in his second language. by considering that the participants’ english learning experiences in elementary and secondary schools were grounded on grammar and vocabulary-centred classes (see table 1), it is likely that this promise of english represented one out of many centripetal neoliberal forces that prevented rafaela, felipe, and raul from engaging in dialogical discussions that problematized the roles of english in the contemporary brazilian society. needless to say, that these neoliberal forces are also entrenched by monological ideologies or one-sided representations (holborow, 2012) which, in this case, are responsible for spreading ideas that english alone will live up to all students’ expectations. consequently, the general effects resulted by this promise are the prestigious and privileged positions occupied by the english language in the linguistic world market when opposed to the social status of other languages (e.g. french, spanish, italian, etc). at the same time, the so-called ‘promise’ of english also feeds contradictions between what it conveys through discursive practices, e.g. “english represented a better way of life, an opportunity’ (rafaela), “i used to see english as my passport to the usa” (raul) and what it imposes to socioeconomically underprivileged students who have to appropriate a second language under colonial perspectives. 7.3.1 responsible situated agency: all languages are promising according to the participants’ narratives written in the last year of their program, their responsible situated agency in relation to the promise of english flourished more intensively when they got more involved in the decolonial studies read and discussed in the english-based subjects. in addition to fostering their critical thinking concerning the roles played by english in a globalizing world, rafaela, felipe, and raul also strengthened their relationship with their second language, which helped them realize that their appropriation process could be used as a 'place' where they could make themselves subjects (hooks, 1994). the following reports point out the dialogical discursive practices that now display the participants’ different conceptions of english as well as their awareness of the effects decolonial discussions have brought into their academic lives: sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a59 extract 16: “language involves people’s feelings, beliefs, and it can change lives. in fact, it changed my life in personal and professional aspects. after intensifying my connection with the english language, now i am a person who values my own language and culture.” (rafaela/source: narrative 4) extract 17: “since i took part in many discussions about issues related to identity and culture throughout the course, i have become an open-minded person. i used to think of english as a language spoken in the united states and in england and i used to be ignorant of other cultures.” (felipe/source: narrative 4) extract 18: “after all the critical discussions i had in english/about english i have become a critical person. i tend to reflect more about my practices related to english and also what regards me as a citizen. i know that the english language has many aspects and cannot be resumed in only one concept. it is a dominant language and it also oppresses other languages.” (raul/source: narrative 4) the words ‘i used to’ and ‘after’ work as time markers in students’ discourses. the first one regards their old beliefs which placed english in the center of their worlds, for example, when felipe states that he ‘[…] used to be ignorant of other cultures’. the second one emphasizes the shift from a centripetal monological perspective that subdued them to the promise of english to a centrifugal dialogical understanding that opened their eyes to other frames of reference attached to the neoimperial english, such as raul’s claims that ‘after all the critical discussions […]’, he now tends to ‘reflect more about [his] practices related to english’. by acting responsively and responsibly throughout their participation in critical studies offered by the faculty, rafaela, felipe, and raul got themselves immersed in a dialectics with the other (e.g. articles on critical thinking, decolonial activities with professors and classmates, etc). in other words, their responsible situated agency towards the other not only reshaped their viewpoints regarding themselves and their second language education program, but it was also co-constructed along with the agency promoted by the space in question, showing the complementariness between the self and the other (bakhtin, 1999). the results of these dialogical practices, also viewed here as a diverse meaning-making process, caused the participants to conceive language as a life-changing means, (e.g. rafaela: ‘language involves people’s feelings, beliefs, and it can change lives’). with this meaning into students’ perspective, english was placed in a discussion that enabled them to value their own language and culture (rafaela), to become an open-minded person in relation to other cultures (felipe), and to exercise their criticality (raul), thus, making them aware of their citizenship in face of the english oppression over other languages. the students’ agentive profile also demonstrates how they responded to textbook-free classes that focused more on the englishes and their roles around the world rather than on anglo-american values and cultural patterns. it should be considered, therefore, that the participants’ willingness to draw themselves to decolonial discussions can lead them to respond more critically to their teaching practice. in doing so, chances are that they will act to demystify the promise of english and consequently enlighten their students to the promising character of other languages and cultures. 7.4 neoliberal challenge 4: the haunting of the neoliberal self the neoliberal self has been characterized as self-directing, self-regulating, self-determined, autonomous, accountable, and free to make choices (park, 2010; flores, 2013, miller, 2016). in the viewpoints of the mentioned scholars, this apparent ‘given freedom’ is actually a façade that hides the manipulative actions of a socioeconomic system that does not want to take any responsibility for societal failures. this concept can be better understood in the extract 19, when rafaela is asked to evaluate the four-year second language education program she did. rafaela’s discourse signals to how the neoliberal self affects the understanding of her communicative limitations in english. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a60 extract 19: rafaela: for me it was, it was enough, but i think it was enough because of pibid [institutional funding program for teaching careers] and centro de línguas [university language center] because, from this year on, the beginning of the year, i think i improved a lot, so i think it helped, but concerning the graduation, the course itself, i think it was good, but …, i don’t know, i feel like, it could be better, you know, i think it’s because of me, i worked a lot at the first and the second year of college, so, i think i…, could have, eh, how can i say this?, … i don’t know, enjoyed the things, you know, that we saw at the beginning. […] so, the problem i think it’s me. […] and that’s why i make so ridiculous mistakes, because it has to do with the…, beginning. and thanks god that i’m teaching english 1 and 2, so i’m, now i’m learning the basic rules again! (source: interview) although rafaela has a positive opinion on her majoring in english (e.g.‘concerning the graduation, the course itself, i think it was good’), she takes full responsibility for not having been able to devote herself to the first years in college. in her perspective, having to work was harmful to her learning and that resulted in linguistic gaps she is still trying to fill in: ‘[…] i feel like, it could be better, i think it’s because of me, i worked a lot at the first and the second year of college, so, i think i could have enjoyed the things that we saw at the beginning.’ in blaming herself, rafaela reveals the traits of what miller (2016) describes as the neoliberal self, which discursively channels a responsibilized and individualized agency into their own self. for instance, when rafaela states that she thinks it was ‘she’ who prioritized work over her early english studies, rafaela emphasizes that her agency did not depend on the other and their social contexts to be activated: ‘i worked a lot’ […] ‘so the problem i think it’s me’ […] ‘and that’s why i make so ridiculous mistakes’. that said, rafaela’s self-evaluations do not only recall the neoliberal self, but they also reveal how oppressive it is, representing here a centripetal force to those who have to juggle their second language education and their needs to work. grounded on bourdieu (1986), miller (2016), and park (2011), this apparently ‘freed self’, totally responsible for their actions, is utopic and only works to please the interests of a neoliberal society. as it could be learned from the bakhtinian subject, their unfinished and incomplete nature requires constant interactions with interlocutors and spaces that both affect their identities and leave room for their agency. hence, rafaela could not study harder because her financial needs demanded more time from her, which means she was not ‘the problem’. this way, it is crucial that classroom discussions focus more on how to undermine the figure of this neoliberal self, but, at the same time, emphases should also be given to the fact it does not eliminate students’ responsibility and responsiveness to their other, their social contexts, and their selves. 7.4.1 responsible situated agency: conquering spaces at the university context despite the haunting of the neoliberal self that responsibilized rafaela for her low achievements at the beginning of the second language education program, her responsible situated agency can be seen in her attitude to apply for important positions in teaching enhancement programs provided by the university: extract 20: during the first year, it was not good, for i had to work in a shopping mall and i did not have time to study. however, from the second year on i enjoyed many things that the university provides. i was a monitor, at núcleo takinahaky, i entered to pibid and then i entered to centro de línguas. […] i have some colleagues who do not know how to make a lesson plan and it is not their fault, they did not have the same opportunity as i have to be part of these two programs (pibid and cl). (rafaela/source: narrative 4) sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a61 when acting as a monitor of english in an indigenous program and taking part in two institutional funding programs for teaching careers, one in a public school and the other one in the university language center, rafaela indicates that her responsible situated agency aimed to increase her sociocultural and teaching experiences with the english language; her initiatives resulted in her ‘enjoyment’ of the local programs. it is important to mention that, although the university programs aim to enhance the interns’ teaching performance long before they get their degrees as professional teachers, they are not able to include all the undergraduates, and that is why rafaela feels privileged for having succeeded in becoming part of them. by conquering her own space into what the institution offers, rafaela’s efforts to advance in the academic studies and professional practices can be understood as centrifugal forces that worked not only to reshape her identity as a learner/teacher: ‘thanks god that i’m teaching english 1 and 2, so i’m, now i’m learning the basic rules again!’ (extract 19) but also to restructure the configuration of these programs by including more socioeconomically underprivileged students. according to miller (2012, p. 447), “the agency of spaces becomes efficacious as individuals participate in practices which (re)constitute the reality of and the social meanings attached to such spaces.’ as for raul, his agentive participation as a teacher student in the language center also resulted in contributions to his own initial teaching practice and to the places he occupied in this context: extract 21: the experiences i had at centro de línguas were really important in my practice as a teacher. i believe that i will be able to use many of the material i developed and adapted while working there in other institutions. (raul/source: narrative 4) in emphasizing his pedagogical work and its influence in different contexts, raul reflects what bakhtin (1999) states about the dialogical subject and their complementing nature in relation to the other they interact with and the spaces they encounter. however, not only is the participants’ responsible situated agency able to affect the other and the social spaces but, by acting towards them, it is also able to transform the students’ selves. that can be noticed in felipe’s experience with another university program, by which he could change his perspectives on the way he saw his second language abilities. extract 22: i had the opportunity of visiting the english club, which was a conversation group guided by some native speakers of english. as i could talk to them and understand what they said, i felt extremely fulfilled. regarding my colleagues at college, i felt like we were at the same level. i stopped feeling inferior to them as i used to feel during my first year in college. (felipe/narrative 3) as stated in section 4.3, there is a fine line between neoliberal forces and the english learning/teaching spheres in marginalized countries, which becomes especially noticeable in the dichotomy [ns/nns] of english and in the unequal access students have to cultural and linguistic capitals. felipe’s narrative 3, written in regard to what he did throughout the third year, highlights the outcomes of his responsible situated agency towards the english club. by facing the challenges of this academic context, felipe’s interactions led him to confront a ‘self-marginalization’ trait that positioned his self as being illegitimate before the so-called language authority (native speakers) and inferior before the ones who had oversea experiences with english (his colleagues at college, see also extract 8). in my viewpoint, felipe’s feelings of fulfillment and self-confidence gained through his experiences in the english club were not only built up by the realization of his effective bilingualism but also by his confrontation with oppressive neoliberal ideologies conveyed by marginalizing discourses. besides that, felipe’s responses also signal to the need of more reflections on the roles played by the local academic programs: to what extent are they working as centrifugal/decentralizing/dialogical forces responsible for encouraging the agency of socioeconomically sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a62 underprivileged students affected by neoliberal interests? felipe’s reconstructed self should not be an isolated case. 7.5 neoliberal challenge 5: legitimacy is never the same among speakers of english the legitimate speaker/user/teacher of english is often built by discursive practices that strengthen the powerful figure of native speakers. the power of these discourses gradually turns into financial benefits for the english learning/teaching industry guided by central countries, such as england, usa, canada, australia, etc. (kumaravadivelu, 2012). this neoliberal challenge can be noticed in the data concerning the participants’ english teaching experiences throughout their last year in college. as it follows in students’ narratives, extracts 23, 24, and 25 reveal the undergraduates’ uncertainty of their legitimacy as speakers/teachers of english: extract 23: “at some point, i can say that i walk hand in hand with english because i work with it and i use it every day. on the other hand, i am not one hundred percent confident because i know i have a lot to improve concerning the language itself.” (rafaela/source: narrative 4) extract 24: “i think i need more practice in order to be a legitimate teacher, i don’t know about my future career, what’s going to happen.” (felipe/source: interview) extract 25: “many times i felt like what i was studying at college was very far apart from my reality as both student and teacher […] we students were asked to teach in a way that is unmanageable depending on the context we are teaching (like public schools, for example), what brought anxiety to me and my colleagues.” (raul/source: narrative 4 as it can be seen, there seems to be a lack of confidence reflected on the participants’ desire for ‘more practice’ (felipe), on their need to ‘improve’ their english (rafaela), and on the ‘anxiety’ felt in face of teaching challenges (raul). their insecurities related to their little teaching experience is understandable, and their willingness to make progress and become better learners and teachers is certainly noteworthy and should be kept throughout their professional careers. however, these uncertainties can also mirror what kumaravadivelu (2012) states about the effects of marginalization in the so-called peripherical countries, where neoimperial english is used to subdue them to the english-speaking world that agentively discredits the legitimacy of those who speak english as a second language. following this marginalized condition, rafaela, felipe, and raul reveal traits of self-marginalization, by which they demonstrate a certain skepticism on the value of their teaching practice: ‘i am not one hundred percent confident’ (rafaela); ‘i need more practice to be a legitimate teacher’ (felipe); ‘many times i felt like what i was studying at college was very far apart from my reality as both student and teacher’ (raul). in these extracts, the participants tend to surrender to a centripetal discourse that questions the ‘quality’ of their english and the ‘effectiveness’ of their teaching. taking into account the neoliberal principles that interfere in second language education where english is the leading character, these data and other scholarly research underscore a supposed everlasting gap that can never be bridged, no matter how long a non-native speaker studies the language or teach it. in other words, for the neoliberal forces that support these ‘gaps’, the never-ending practice is not enough to please the markets (figueredo, 2011; jorge, 2009; kelly, 2013; kumaravadivelu, 2012; mateus, 2018; park, 2012; park, 2011; rajagopalan, 1997; selvi, 2014). 7.5.1 responsible situated agency: legitimacy comes with teaching practice unlike other careers in education, such as brazilian portuguese, mathematics, literature, biology, etc., teaching english in brazilian regular schools usually demands extra efforts, and struggling for linguistic sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a63 legitimacy and credibility is one of them (jorge, 2009). after the participants completed their four-year program to get a degree in english teaching, i asked them throughout the interview if they viewed themselves as legitimate teachers of english. the following extract gives evidence of their responsible situated agency regarding this issue: extract 23: researcher: do you consider yourselves legitimate teachers of english? rafaela: now i do. last year i didn’t. now i do. now i can say, ‘oh, i teach english, and i’m a teacher now’, because i had the opportunity to be a teacher, to have my class. you know, although we had the supervisor, the mentor, we manage our students in our class, we control, we guide them, so, this year was very important to my formation. raul: […] i feel like, when you teach, because you get much more, you dedicate much more than when, when you are a student, and, yeah, but i still, i see myself, like, as a teacher, not only as an english teacher or a french teacher. so, yes, i get, i consider myself a legitimate, yes, a legitimate teacher. felipe: […] the lack of experiences, right, i think like, two years and a half is not enough, and especially because i have only taught here, and i, i didn’t get in touch with other contexts, and here is like, as people say [rafaela: a bubble!], it’s a bubble, because everything is available for you to use, and in many places out, out there, there are not that, that many materials available for us to use. it’s like, you only have the board and the coursebook, and do with that! so, i think, i need this reality before assuming myself as a legitimate teacher. (source: interview) rafaela and raul share the opinion that their teaching practice in the university language center legitimizes their teaching identities. both their teaching experiences and the space where they occurred represented a centrifugal force since they worked dialogically as a decentralizing power by which these undergraduates exercised their responsible situated agency towards the benefit of the other (e.g their own students, workmates, etc) and their selves (e.g. the ongoing construction of their teaching identities). by taking into account what rafaela says in relation to herself: ‘i teach english, and i’m a teacher now’, followed by what raul states: ‘i see myself, like, as a teacher, not only as an english teacher or a french teacher’, teaching itself does not only mean conveying knowledge on how the english language works, but it also means dialogical practices that can embrace different social voices and boost the self-confidence of socioeconomically underprivileged students. having their own groups conducted by their own lesson plans assures rafaela and raul of the legitimacy they need to put into practice what they experienced in their second language education program, such as building criticality on the positive and negative aspects of learning english from a textbook and from decolonial perspectives. on the other hand, felipe demonstrates his responsible situated agency when emphasizing his desire to know other teaching contexts and face different challenges as opposed to the ones he already experienced at the language center: ‘[…] here is like, it’s a bubble, because everything is available for you to use, and in many places out there, there are not many materials […] you only have the board and the coursebook, and do with that! so, i think, i need this reality before assuming myself as a legitimate teacher’. in this way, felipe agentively stands for broadening his experiences in regular schools and, in doing so, he projects his legitimacy as a language teacher once he is able to share his english education with those outside the language institution spaces. his response also displays a dialogical perspective that can potentially confront neoliberal ideologies set in other second language learning contexts. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a64 after discussing some data collected for this case study, i present in section 8 my final reflections on its contributions. 8. conclusion grounded on what the data reveal, on what scholarly research discusses in terms of neoliberalism and second language education, and on the bakhtinian perspectives for the dialogical agentive subject, i have divided the contributions of this case study into two interdependent facets: the theoretical and the empirical. the theoretical contributions have come especially with the alignment between the bakhtinian tenets on the responsive, responsible, and dialogical subject and the participants’ agentive profile that demonstrates historically and socioculturally situated responses in face of constant centripetal neoliberal forces. that is, despite having their access to different types of capitals restricted by social and economic structures, the study participants counteracted, firstly, by following a non-alibi of being principle, and secondly, by resisting a centralizing power that aims to keep them in socioeconomically underprivileged conditions. as such, bakhtin and his circle bring a crucial contribution when they put forward that language is the central social dimension where sociohistorically situated subjects are shaped. in other words, throughout the subjects’ dialogical interactions, their identities, contexts, and languages are also mutually shaped. therefore, in bakhtinian perspectives, it is worthy of notice that social transformation does not only occur when an entire social class fights against unfair sorts of capital accumulation (bakhtin, 1973), for acting dialogically within micro localities also has potentialities to contribute to sociocultural changes. these discussions along with the participants’ responsible situated agency are, in my viewpoint, an important theoretical contribution of this case study for second language education research. the social and educational implications pointed out by the data represent the empirical contributions of this case study. for instance, kumaravadivelu (2016) states that the subalterns can speak and write, but he calls into question the existence of possibilities for them to act. i argue that they can, and that one of the triggering ways to empower students to counteract neoliberal challenges, marginalization, and self-marginalization is their engagement in decolonial thinking or border thinking, the ‘thinking of us’, as proposed by mignolo (2009, 2013) and timidly accepted by kumaravadivelu in his text. the study participants’ responsible situated agency always occurred throughout their four-year program, but it teaches us that once they got actively involved in decolonial discussions in the last two years, their viewpoints and attitudes towards the english language learning/teaching processes revealed a much more dialogical agency concerned with the sociocultural and linguistic transformation of their selves, the other, and the local contexts. by taking the participants’ responsible situated agency into account, i highlight the following empirical lessons we can learn from this proactive research. firstly, undergraduates who need to appropriate english in the course of their four-year program should be encouraged by dialogical discursive practices which legitimize their language abilities and ongoing appropriation process as being valid. that requires an intensive agency from the faculty as well, for besides being a symbolical force able to promote changes in their social context, they can influence the classroom dimension and its power dynamics. when responsible situated agency is dialectically exercised by both parts, the undergraduates are guided to find their own ways to produce discourses that confront prejudice, exclusion, and self-marginalization. secondly, decoloniality should be exercised along with self-decoloniality in order to redefine subjects marked by a history of colonization and coloniality and, consequently, redesign the discursive sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a65 spaces they occupy. decoloniality is concerned with economic justice and global equality and lays great emphasis on the macro level. it should occur between society and us by decolonial practices that aim to delink our social blemishes from colonial legacies. nevertheless, i suggest that, besides caring for the collective, we should also care for the micro level and be more responsive and responsible to the selfmarginalized individual. in other words, when my-self realizes that their sociocultural constitution is so valuable as any other one, and when my-self learns that by being bilingual we are in fact able to explore different linguistic and cultural worlds, out of our own aquarium, that means we are embedded in a selfdecoloniality process. once affected by the agency of discourses that demystify marginalization and selfmarginalization, self-decoloniality as a centrifugal force crosses the subject’s borders, enabling them to adopt dialogical agentive positions that create new symbolic spaces where their language and teaching practices are valued. thirdly, diverse forms of responsible situated agency should be stimulated by second language education programs so that undergraduates (privileged or underprivileged) see themselves from sociocultural perspectives that respect who they are and what they produce in relation to the other (e.g. the recognition of their english as a legitimate language). in brazilian contexts, for instance, that would help students to dissipate a sort of street dog complex5, which oftentimes pass through their discursive practices colored by marginalized and self-marginalized traits. decoloniality and self-decoloniality are, therefore, a powerful option to build on common places for equal rights. in drawing on mignolo’s constructs of delinking, by which we disconnect ourselves from the coloniality of english-speaking countries; relinking, by which we reconnect ourselves to the valuable representations of our language and cultures; and re-existing (2009, 2013), by which we act to reconstruct our discourses and spaces, i advocate for the following points that would benefit the investigated context and probably other similar sociocultural spaces: delinking from… re-existing to… the oppressive dichotomy native speaker versus nonnative speaker. the recognition of how important being a bilingual is. a second language education grounded on the standards and ideologies from hegemonic english-speaking countries. a second language education that also projects the voices from the south as well as the legacy inherited from brazilian sociocultural elements. the agentive neoliberal self. a responsible situated agency that builds up second language education as a way to overcome neoliberal forces and fight against social inequalities. discursive practices that reinforce marginalization and self-marginalization of second language learners and teachers. a responsible situated agency dialectically exercised by the faculty and all the undergraduates, which focuses on decolonial and self-decolonial practices to oppose the reproduction of the status quo. discursive practices that ignore the legitimate identities of speakers/users/teachers of english as a foreign or second language. the option of ‘swimming’, not ‘sinking’ or surrendering to the opposing currents, which means promoting decoloniality and self-decoloniality to deconstruct the street dog complex. table 2: study implications for the investigated context 5 the expression street dog complex was coined by the brazilian writer nelson rodrigues. on a chronicle published by manchete esportiva magazine on may 31st, 1958, he defined the term as a voluntary feeling of inferiority that brazilians have when they compare themselves to the rest of the world. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a66 in conclusion, we should never underestimate our students’ capacity to negotiate or even overcome challenges that seem to be unsurmountable. the number of overcomers, however, should be increased, and it is crucial that their teachers lead them to grapple with socioeconomic injustice through dialogical educational practices filled by multiple social voices and evaluative stances. in doing so, students are taught how to 'swim'. it is not a matter of letting them be led by the currents, but how they should exercise their agency to tackle them. the subalterns can act, so we, as educators, ought to engage them in ways that turn their actions into effective results for their localities, for their own sake, and for the sake of the other. once they learn how to swim in the neoliberal ocean, being able to avoid sinking, they will just keep swimming and teaching others how to swim too. references ahearn, l. m. 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(2007). case study as a research method. jurnal kemanusiann, 9, 1-6. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a69 appendix a ministério da educação universidade federal de goiás faculdade de letras pesquisa: língua-sistema versus língua-discurso: diálogos entre pilares da arquitetônica de bakhtin e a formação linguística-docente de graduandos em letras-inglês da ufg pesquisadora: profa. carla janaina figueredo questionnaire (to answer the questions below, you don’t have to follow normative grammar rules, it is free writing) undergraduate’s name: age race hometown nationality ⇨ pseudonym chosen: 1. how did you first get in contact with english? 2. how long have you been studying english formally? 3. in what kind of school (public or private) did you study english to complete your primary and secondary studies? what was the reason for this choice? 4. which methodology (ies) did your teacher (s) use to apply in their english classes? 5. did you find these methodologies effective to foster your english language learning process? why or why not? 6. did you use to interact with your teacher and classmates by means of english? why or why not? 7. did you make use of any pedagogical material to learn english? if so, what kind of material (texbooks, cds, grammar books, etc)? in your opinion, how effective were they to your learning needs? 8. how many hours do you think you used to spend studying english throughout the week? (include here time spent at school and at home) 9. which learning strategies did you use to improve your english skills in your school days? sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a70 10. have you ever attended english classes at a language center? if so, write down where, when and why. 11. have you ever been abroad to specifically learn english? if so, where and when did you go? how long did you stay there? 12. what led you to make a decision for letras-inglês at ufg? 13. has the will to become a teacher of english always been your first choice before entering the university? why or why not? 14. did you have any teaching experience before coming to the university? did it include teaching english? 15. in your opinion, how good was your english when you started doing letras? provide some facts to support your evaluation. 16. what were your first impressions of letras-inglês as soon as you started doing it? 17. from the very beginning, were you sure your choice for letras-inglês would lead you to achieve your learning and teaching goals? justify your answer. 18. would you like to add any other piece of information? thank you for taking part in this research. professor carla janaina figueredo sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a71 appendix b ministério da educação universidade federal de goiás faculdade de letras pesquisa: língua-sistema versus língua-discurso: diálogos entre pilares da arquitetônica de bakhtin e a formação linguística-docente de graduandos em letras-inglês da ufg pesquisadora: profa. carla janaina figueredo instrumento: diário do participante this diary has been designed to serve you as an open space for personal reflections concerning your linguistic and teaching experiences undergone throughout your university days at letras-inglês. the questions provided here play the role of a guidance, and to answer them, you don’t have to follow normative grammar rules, your writing should be as free as possible. pseudonym: ________________________________________________________________ the first year in college: 1. which changes did you find when you started attending your english classes at the university? write about how you felt in relation to them. 1.1 at the beginning of your studies, what did the english language represent to you? 1.2 how often did you interact with people (professors, classmates, friends) in english inside and outside the classroom context? were these interactions relevant to your second language acquisition process? why or why not? 1.3 were you encouraged or not by the academic context (english lessons, professors, classmates, academic events, etc) to go on learning english? provide examples/stories if you wish. 1.4 how did you react and respond to this academic context and to the people you interacted with? 1.5 how was your time with the english language explored? the second year in college: 2. what sort of linguistic challenges regarding english did you have to face in your second year of letras-inglês? and how did you deal with them? 2.1 what has changed in your perception of the english language? 2.2 how did your social interactions evolve in english? provide examples/stories if you wish. sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a72 2.3 how did you react and respond to the academic context and to the people you interacted with? 2.4 how was your time with the english language explored? 2.5 could you get any contributions from the academic context that enhanced your english appropriation process and teaching perspectives? the third year in college: 3. which new things did you employ to your relationship with the english language? what was english like at this point? 3.1 how did you connect with speakers of english (native or non-native) during this time? how did it feel? 3.2 how were social interactions in the classroom context understood by you? how did you feel in relation to them? 3.3 what were your teaching experiences like throughout the third year? 3.4 what has changed in your life right after you started teaching english? 3.5 which advantages did you take of your time spent in this academic context surrounded by the english language and its teaching? the fourth year in college: 4. how do you conceive the english language now? what are you able to do with it? 4.1 what sort of person have you become after intensifying your connection with the english language? is it possible or not to say that at this point you walk hand in hand with it? why or why not? 4.2 how important were those countless people you interacted with (in college or out of it) for the construction of your identities as a learner and as a teacher of english? how important were you for their lives? 4.3 how do you describe yourself as a teacher of english? what matters the most for you when teaching? 4.4 how could the space or the social universe provided by letras-inglês contribute to your second language appropriation and education? 4.5 do you think your time in college was spent wisely? was it the right time to learn english and become a teacher? what would you change in your academic trajectory if you could go back in time? 5. how important is your academic-professional formation to the numberless sociocultural/communicative contexts you already take part in or intend to participate in the future? => final question: which future plans would you like to accomplish from now on? sink or swim? responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of english in neoliberal brazil carla janaina figueredo dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.319 | vol. 8 (2020) a73 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word osovsky, ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r1 ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky mordovia state pedagogical university, russia svetlana dubrovskaya national research mordovia state university, russia vera kirzhaeva national research mordovia state university, russia elizaveta maslova plekhanov russian university of economics, russia abstract a review of hirschkop k. the cambridge introduction to mikhail bakhtin. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021. xvi, 250 p. (cambridge introductions to literature). speaking today about the importance of mikhail bakhtin's ideas for the humanities is restating the obvious. the book by the renowned canadian literary and cultural studies scholar professor k. hirschkop, the cambridge introduction to mikhail bakhtin (2021), aims at a systematic description of m.m. bakhtin's scholarly legacy for the english-speaking reader, primarily for students. in our view, in this edition, the author solves both the traditional tasks of a textbookreference book, written in the genre of "introduction," and the research tasks. the russian thinker's theory and practice analysis is presented based on the texts of his collected works, which, according to hirschkop, form an image of a "new" bakhtin. the tried and tested scheme of the cambridge introduction enables the author to draw a concise sketch of the scholar's life, outline the main sources and contexts of his scholarly quest, analyze key ideas and works, and describe the process of bakhtin’s reception in the english-speaking world. keywords: k. hirschkop, m.m. bakhtin, j. kristeva, bakhtin studies, biographical reconstruction, reception of scholarly legacy. oleg osovsky works as a chief research fellow at the mordovia state pedagogical university in saransk. he is a dr. of philology. professor osovsky is the author of several books on m. bakhtin’s ideas and their reception in anglo-american humanities and russian émigré schools in europe. svetlana dubrovskaya is a professor at national research ogarev mordovia state university. she specializes in russian literature of the 19th-20th century, the scholarly legacy of m. m. bakhtin, particularly a study of the functioning of ‘laughter’ in russian literary consciousness, and methods of teaching russian as a foreign language. professor dubrovskaya has more than 100 academic and methodological publications. vera kirzhaeva works as a professor of russian at national research ogarev mordovia state university. she is a doctor of pedagogy. her main research interests are bakhtin studies, russian émigré education in 1920-40s, and russian intellectual history. issn: 2325-3290 (online) ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r2 elizaveta maslova works as an associate professor at plekhanov russian university of economics. she holds a ph.d. degree in philology. her special interests include teaching english as a foreign language, bakhtin studies, and contemporary us novels. ïïò review speaking today about the importance of mikhail bakhtin's ideas for world humanities is restating the obvious. the recently published monographs and collections of articles by american, european, and russian authors and the responses they received clearly reflect the global presence of the thinker and his legacy in the field of social, philosophical, and educational theories and practices (mahlin, 2015; tihanov, 2019; brandist, gardiner, white, mika, 2020; matusov, marjanovic-shane, gradovski, 2019; freise, 2018; emerson, 2020; osovsky, dubrovskaya, chernetsova, 2021; kirzhaeva, maslova, 2021). however, bakhtin is important not only for researchers but also for those who are just embarking on an academic or pedagogical path. this raises a number of important questions: how do today’s students come to bakhtin, what can they gain directly from bakhtin, and is there a place for an intermediary in this dialogue? it seems that the answers to these questions can be found in the book by professor ken hirschkop (university of waterloo, ontario, canada). in evaluating this book, let us first draw the reader's attention to its genre. "introduction" is a common type of educational and scientific reference publication, serving didactic rather than research purposes. this is its main value for students. in our case, the author consciously goes beyond the traditional format. his main goal of presenting a systematic description of bakhtin's major works and ideas does not interfere with delving into the depths of bakhtinian thought, searching for new interpretations of his theoretical legacy, and revealing specific details of the history of the origin and publication of bakhtin's texts. thus, it is immediately evident that k. hirschkop's book is an event not only for the educational but also for the scholarly field of bakhtin studies. since the russian thinker's legacy has reached the reader not only in the form of censored books and articles but also in the form of unpublished fragments of manuscripts, sketches, notes, etc., the key image for hirschkop is that of ruins. borrowing it from j. kristeva (kristeva, 1970), hirschkop provides the reader with an experience similar to that of intellectual archaeology. from these metaphorical "ruins" of bakhtin's heritage, he restores the unity of his theory. hirschkop's consciously polemical dialogue with kristeva becomes the book's backbone, signifying a fundamental rejection by contemporary bakhtin studies of the myths and clichés of the 1960s and 1970s. creating the complete picture of bakhtin's legacy restored from the “ruins” is the book's primary aim. before us is not the “order of things” in the foucauldian way but the "archaeology of knowledge." the way the researcher solves the problem of the meta-description of bakhtin's theory becomes an example of a particular "reconstructive" method, which can be used to systematically describe the legacy of other participants of the bakhtin circle, primarily v.n. voloshinov and p.n. medvedev. this is how k. hirschkop explains his position: “we’ve come, you could say, to a turning point in the reception of bakhtin, the moment at which we can finally put together something like a reasonable biography, a thorough account of his context, and a reliable description and analysis of the works themselves. that is exciting, but it makes the writing of this cambridge introduction a little more complicated than it should be. on the one hand, this book should be like a toolbox with an instruction manual: within its pages, the reader should find concepts and arguments – theoretical tools – which will be useful for their work in literary and cultural analysis, together with sensible advice on how these can be used. while many who read this book will have picked up a few of those tools already (dialogism, or the ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r3 chronotope, say) and tried to use them, this introduction ought to show them how to apply them in ways they might not have thought of or to tasks they didn’t realise were appropriate. (hirschkop, 2021, p. 3).” to be fair, we should note that hirschkop was not the first to write about the need for a problemchronological presentation of bakhtin's texts and ideas. thirty years ago, professor g. s. morson, in correspondence with the russian bakhtinist and historian of philosophy vitaly makhlin, noted the paradoxical nature of the american (more broadly, western) reader’s acquaintance with bakhtin's texts: "the book on rabelais was the first to be translated into english in the united states and became widely known outside of slavic studies, which, we believe, led to a misunderstanding of bakhtin's work in general. everything that was read afterward was already perceived through the carnivalesque lens, in the light of extreme ideas rather than the prose of life. but let us imagine what would have happened if bakhtin had first been discovered as the author of the article “art and responsibility” and the manuscript “toward a philosophy of the act”; then as the author of "discourse in the novel"; and if only after that the book on rabelais had been read. wouldn't bakhtin's image be different?" (v. l. mahlin g. s. morson, 1992. p. 41). as if guided by this thought, hirschkop lists bakhtin's works in a chronologically justified order, which eventually allows him to provide the reader with a plausible account of the thinker’s evolution. one of the most challenging tasks that hirschkop undertakes in his analysis is to create a compact biographical essay. he set a rather ambitious goal for himself: to dispel several biographical myths and present a reconstructed account of bakhtin's life on a more or less documented basis. having engaged in a dialogue with j. kristeva in chapter 1 ("introduction"), hirschkop enters into a polemic with other scholars in chapter 2 ("life"), his main opponents being c. clark and m. holquist, the first and still the only englishspeaking authors of bakhtin's biography (clark & holquist, 1984), as well as with most of the russian bakhtin’s biographers ranging from s. g. bocharov, v. v. kozhinov, v. v. ivanov to contemporary scholars. for example, he reassesses some well-established myths about bakhtin's complete lack of integration into contemporary literary criticism, his authorship of "disputed texts," and even the anecdote that bakhtin used pages of his manuscript of “the bildungsroman and its significance in the history of realism” for cigarette paper. in general, he presented a compelling and consistent picture of the thinker's life in the context of the era's political, ideological, social, and cultural realities. birth in the family of a bank manager in provincial orel, relocations to vilnius, odessa, and then to petrograd, the years of the revolution and the civil war spent in nevel and vitebsk, return to leningrad, exile to kustanai, saransk, savelovo, saransk again and finally moscow – these are the milestones of the thinker's life journey, rigorously described in this chapter. the author does not separate bakhtin as a man from bakhtin as a scholar, mentioning straight away his most important discoveries made in a particular period. by doing so, he prepares his audience for the transition to a new level – a gradual immersion in bakhtin's thought and its contexts in the following chapters. this essay can be called one of the best biographies of bakhtin in the format of a "concise biography." it should be noted that the biographical material is not only present in this chapter; it determines to a large extent the reader's exposure to the "contexts of bakhtin's thought," which at the same time turn out to be the contexts of bakhtin's life in chapter 3 ("contexts"). as hirschkop states, "context is the most ambiguous of ideas. it can vary dramatically in scale and structure, ranging from the quirks and random happenings of biography to the large-scale structural forces at work in a particular historical period. a contextual reading can ground itself in the everyday circumstances of the author, in a contemporaneous clash of opinions or worldviews, or in the gender or class relations of a historical time and place. when the contextualised object is intellectual and cultural, context can mean other intellectual and cultural objects – ‘influences,’ as they used to be called – as well as social and historical circumstances" (p. 30). however, ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r4 here as well, the context of life appears to be of secondary importance. rather, the author shows how bakhtin's ideas of a certain period relate to contemporary philosophical and aesthetic thought in germany and russia, to the philosophical interests of his friends and companions, to the pressing problems of soviet humanities, etc. predictably, much of the focus is on german neo-kantianism and first of all h. cohen, later e. cassirer, e. husserl's phenomenology, k. vossler and l. spitzer's philosophy of language, m. kagan's “cohenianism” with notable notes of messianism and marxist ideology, the original views of l. pumpianskii, discussions with formalists, debates about the sociology of language and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, the search for new ways of constructing the theory of the novel in the pre-war decade, and the problematization of speech genres against the background of stalin's “concerning marxism and linguistics.” bakhtin's consistent work with the most important discoveries of contemporaneous intellectual thought and his constructive dialogue with leading representatives of soviet and foreign humanities emphasize the originality of his figure and ideas in hirschkop's interpretation. to use the author's architectural metaphors, we note that it is the reconstruction of contexts carried out in this chapter that allows us to see the silhouette of the grandiose intellectual edifice created by bakhtin from the late 1910s to the early 1970s. chapter 4 ("works") is the most important chapter for the novice reader. we should admire the tremendous research work undertaken by the author to carefully compare the available english translations of bakhtin with the corpus of his texts presented in the collected works. in fact, it is the collected works that hirschkop relies on in his endeavor to reconstruct bakhtin's legacy. “bakhtin left behind one book published ‘on time’ (just after it had been written), one book published in a revised form about twenty years after it had been written, and then a seemingly endless trail of not-quite-finished essays, half-finished essays, outlines for books and essays, and notebooks filled with material that might have become books or essays, had circumstances been different” (p. 59), – hirschkop writes, and it is difficult to argue with him. as a result, the history of the publication of bakhtin's works in the ussr becomes a series of publishers’ attempts to thread their way through the obstacles of ideological censorship, accompanied by inevitable compromises with the authorities and by the removal of certain fragments and even lines of the published text. k. hirschkop succinctly and eloquently describes this process at the beginning of the chapter: "another consequence of the complicated times was that when the notes, drafts, and outlines were finally published, they were, with one or two exceptions, chosen, shaped, edited, corrected, and given titles by someone else, besides bakhtin, often with an eye on the still-existing regime of soviet censorship. as a result, in the thirty years between bakhtin’s rediscovery (in 1961) and the disintegration of the soviet union (1991), bakhtin’s archive of unfinished, unpublished texts was gradually turned into a body of published work, but almost all the published work was in some way deformed or distorted, often very substantially. many texts appeared in censored form, with lines, paragraphs, and pages excised from them, either because soviet censorship required these excisions or because bakhtin’s editors decided that certain lines or paragraphs didn’t represent the true bakhtin, that they were mere ‘camouflage’ added by bakhtin" (p.5960). to present bakhtin's scholarly legacy as a coherent and consistent system, hirschkop identifies several problem areas: philosophy and aesthetics, subjects of dostoevsky and rabelais, the theory of the novel, and the problem of speech genres. the choice of a problematics rather than a chronological approach has its advantages. the points of intersection and juxtaposition of bakhtin's interests in different periods give us a sense of how the early philosophical aesthetics "shines through" in the works on the novel ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r5 of the 1930s and how the idea of dialogue, first formulated in the book on dostoevsky, becomes a leading one throughout his post-war work. for hirschkop, it is important to reveal to the reader the meaning of bakhtin's quest and to outline his key concepts, so he provides an analysis of the texts within the following didactic framework: an exposition, which presents a brief listing of the most important characteristics of specific works, their critique followed by a summarizing conclusion on the concept. such a presentation of bakhtin's texts is fundamentally important for what might be viewed as a new turn in bakhtin studies that has been taking place in russia and beyond since the publication of the collected works (see osovsky & dubrovskaya, 2021). it is perhaps in hirschkop’s book that the argument for the significance of the collected works for new interpretations of bakhtin's legacy appears to be the most plausible, and it is here that the canadian scholar sees the "new bakhtin," extensively discussed in this book. in the course of his writing, the "archaeologist" turns into a textual critic. it is hard to expect that students will be very interested to read about the importance of missing fragments and inaccuracies in translation. but for a specialist immersed in the nuances of bakhtinian theory, this is certainly a reason for taking hirschkop's book as seriously as possible. at times, the author seems to be carried away by his fascination with the idea of restoring the original bakhtin. this is where we strongly disagree with his assertion that only the collected works represent the truly authentic and undistorted bakhtin. the evil role of editors and publishers that hirschkop writes extensively and with pleasure about is certainly exaggerated. it is safe to say that neither s.g. bocharov nor v.v. kozhinov have ever used bakhtin's material to suit their own academic interests or ideological predilections. this is yet another myth that grows on the ruins of those that hirshkop consistently debunks. it is to be regretted that the texts of bakhtin's university lectures were not the subject of consideration in the chapter. while hirschkop mentions notes of lectures on the history of russian literature taken by r. mirkina in the 1920s, bakhtin's lectures to students at the pedagogical institute, as partly published (see: klyueva, 2019; voronina, 2020; bakhtin, 1999), these notes remain almost beyond the writer’s attention. it should be emphasized that this material, in fact, provides much insight into the way bakhtin taught and lectured, both in 1936-1937 and in the 1950s, combining the standard material from the history of literature and literary theory courses with the problems of his own research, which is not difficult to discern even in student notes (see osovsky, kirzhaeva, chernetsova & maslova, 2020; dubrovskaya, 2020). chapter 5 ("reception"), devoted to the reception of the scholar's writings and ideas, seems less informative. hirschkop is very selective in his account of the difficult way bakhtin's books and ideas reached the western humanities. on the whole, the picture is quite accurate and adequate: from almost incidental references to "problems of dostoevsky's creative art" in english-language slavic studies in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s to the keen interest in the author of books on dostoevsky and rabelais in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by the "bakhtin boom" and then by the long and quite multivocal process of exploration and interpretation of bakhtin’s ideas in various fields of the western humanities, from deconstructivism and feminism to postcolonial studies. it is not usual for the review genre to include any extensive additions. however, it is still necessary to say a few words about the process of bakhtin's reception in his homeland. the russian reception of bakhtin is more than a hundred years old. it dates back to the early 1920s, when bakhtin's name first appeared in the pages of petrograd intellectual journals1, and his lectures and seminar presentations were 1 the young scholar m.m. bakhtin has written a book on dostoevsky and a treatise the aesthetics of verbal creation. zhizn’ iskusstva. petrograd, 1922. ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r6 discussed not only in nevel or vitebsk, but also in leningrad. this interest, which continued at the turn of the 1920s and 30s with the discussion of his book on dostoevsky, was interrupted by a period of long silence due to his arrest and exile, illness, and a long stay in a remote province, and was only resumed with his return to academic life in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, when books on dostoevsky and rabelais started to play a crucial role in the post-stalinist renewal of soviet humanities. a critical stage in this process is the late soviet and new russia bakhtin boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which coincided with mikhail gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost, the collapse of the ussr, and became one of the intellectual features of boris yeltsin's democratic russia. it was in the late 1980s and 1990s that the foundations were laid for professional russian bakhtin studies and that vitaly makhlin, nikolai nikolaev, natalia bonetskaya and lyudmila gogotishvili embarked on their study of bakhtin's legacy. over the next three decades, these researchers, with their numerous books and articles, contributed a lot to the understanding of bakhtin's philosophical and philological discoveries (makhlin, 2009; makhlin, 2015; nikolaev, 1998; nikolaev, 2010; bonetskaya, 2016; gogotishvili, 2006). this list should be complemented with the names of other scholars: vladimir bibler, igor solomadin, and sergei kurganov, who first showed how bakhtin's thought forms the contours of dialogic pedagogy (bibler, 2009; solomadin & kurganov, 2009); natalia avtonomova, vladimir alpatov and nikolai vasilyev, who devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to the study of the bakhtin circle and its contribution to modern linguistics (alpatov, 2005; autonomova, 2009; vasiliev, 2013); semen konkin and nikolai pankov, who reconstructed bakhtin’s biography (konkin & konkina 1993; pankov, 2009); natan tamarchenko and valery tyupa, who identified the key features of bakhtin's poetics (tamarchenko, 2011; tyupa, 2021). a significant role in the study of bakhtin's legacy has been played by a series of bakhtinskii sbornik (kuyundzhich, makhlin, 1990; kuyundzhich, makhlin, 1992; makhlin, 1997; makhlin, 2000; makhlin, 2004) and collections of articles and monographs published in saransk (osovsky, 2002; osovsky, 2006; dubrovskaya, 2019; dubrovskaya, 2020a). it is impossible, of course, to name all the names and achievements. a recent review of russian bakhtin studies in the second half of the 1990s and 2010s cites over 150 entries in the bibliography. thus, russian bakhtin studies has become an integral part of international studies (dubrovskaya, 2019; dubrovskaya, 2020a; osovsky & dubrovskaya, 2021). it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the tremendous work done by the authors who contributed to the collected works has noticeably influenced the nature of russian bakhtin studies. they highlighted a number of problems that had not previously been addressed. thanks to the researchers who took part in this work, not only sergei averintsev, sergei bocharov, vadim kozhinov, and leontina melikhova, who were part of mikhail bakhtin inner circle, but also to the new generation of bakhtinists (v. makhlin, n. nikolaev, and l. gogotishvili), the readers were able to discover the depth of the early philosophical texts and the philological and philosophical nature of bakhtin's book on dostoevsky. one of the most important discoveries of the collected works is the publication of bakhtin's 1940 manuscript on rabelais and its extensive materials, prepared by irina popova. bakhtin, the theorist of the novel, and bakhtin, the philosopher of language and culture, were presented in a completely new way in his notes, fragments, and unpublished texts from the 1940s and early 1970s. in fact, this is the same new bakhtin that ken hirschkop writes about in his book. perhaps, hirschkop considered it sufficient to refer to c. emerson's monograph dedicated to bakhtin's reception in russia (emerson, 1997). however, it remains unclear why mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaic (morson & emerson, 1990) and holquist's dialogism (holquist, 2002) are not on the recommended reading list, nor is hirschkop's own fascinating monograph (hirschkop, 2002). we will not argue that it is impossible to comprehend bakhtin without reading this book. still, it is clear that reading it should be a necessary step for anyone who wants to seriously understand bakhtin and ken hirschkop’s “new bakhtin” for the english-speaking students oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, vera kirzhaeva, elizaveta maslova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.521 | vol. 10 (2022) r7 appreciate the full scope of his ideas and their significance for the contemporary humanities. this applies equally to a student who is just beginning to engage with bakhtin and to an experienced researcher who has decided to take a fresh look at the thinker's legacy. references alpatov, v. m. (2005). волошинов, бахтин и лингвистика (voloshinov, bakhtin and linguistics). moscow: languages of slavic cultures. autonomova, n. s. (2009). открытая структура : якобсон—бахтин—лотман—гаспаров (open structure: yakobson-bakhtin-lotman-gasparov). moscow: russian political encyclopedia. bakhtin m.m. (1999) лекции по истории зарубежной литературы. античность. средние века: (в записи в. а. мирской). (lectures on the history of foreign literature: antiquity, the middle ages. (from the notes of v. a. mirskаya). saransk: izdatelstvo mordovskogo universiteta, 1999. bibler, v. (2009). the foundations of the school of the dialogue cultures program. journal of russian and east european psychology, 41(1), 34 – 60. bonetskaya, n. k. (2016). бахтин глазами метафизика (bakhtin through the eyes of metaphysics). moscow, st. petersburg: center for humanitarian initiatives. brandist, c., gardiner, m. e., white, e. jayne, & mika, c. (eds.). 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(m.m. bakhtin's lecture on aesthetics recorded by g.m. zakharova (berezina). the end of the 1950s.) // bakhtinsky vestnik. №3. url: https://bakhtin.mrsu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2020-%e2%84%963%d0%92%d0%be%d1%80%d0%be%d0%bd%d0%b8%d0%bd%d0%b0%d0%9d.%d0%98..pdf. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word allen, leadership learning design principles (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a85 leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen university of colorado denver, usa lori g. ryan university of colorado denver, usa rebecca vlasin university of colorado denver, usa abstract the purpose of this paper is to share our pedagogical evolution as graduate faculty in relationship with increasingly diverse cohort communities of early childhood professionals learning across the landscape of leadership roles engaged with young children, families, and other adults. the early childhood leadership program described in this paper offers a graduate certificate where annually, a cohort of 18-22 early childhood professionals from across colorado in the united states learn together for 13 months. as faculty, we share a strong commitment to both learning about our teaching and to inviting student voices, the early childhood professionals, through dialogic processes in participatory study as we co-learn and grow our practices of learning and teaching. this paper introduces and explores four leadership learning design principles: (1) identity and agency, (2) socially constructed pedagogy, (3) contextually relevant learning experience, and (4) appreciative stance. as we go, the story will unfold around how we engaged cohort members of the 2019-2020 program year through initial survey reflections and then deepening our shared understanding of these leadership learning design principles through iterations of dialogue after the program was concluded. we end the paper with reflections on how this process of study has ultimately brought us to an awareness and eagerness to engage in relational forms of inquiry, placing student voices at the center with even more intention and depth. keywords: critical pedagogy, dialogue, early childhood, leadership, cohort learning, appreciative leadership, socially constructed learning wendy b. allen, ph.d., was the co-director of the early childhood leadership program at clayton early learning in partnership with the university of colorado denver’s school of education and human development until 2022. wendy continues to explore the tensions and possibilities of centering families through her current work with rocky mountain pbs kids. through her public media content curation, teaching, and parenting experiences, she has deepened her commitment to embracing asset-based community-engaged practices. she continuously seeks opportunities to cultivate inquiry, collaborative partnerships, and shared study of the ecologies where children and families live, learn, and generate knowledge together. e-mail: wendyallen@rmpbs.org. issn: 2325-3290 (online) leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a86 lori g. ryan, ph.d., is a clinical associate professor at the university of colorado’s school of education and human development. she formerly served as co-director of the early childhood leadership program until 2022. lori centers her work within early childhood contexts and educational leadership environments, with a commitment to equitable and inclusive practices that promote, in partnership with early childhood communities, a strong image of children, families, and professionals as co-constructors of their own learning stories. within each unique context, lori’s teaching, research, and coaching are focused on building the capacity of her students, early childhood professionals, and the children with whom they work. e-mail: lori.ryan@ucdenver.edu rebecca vlasin, ed.d., is the director of the division of early childhood workforce for the colorado department of early childhood. she has over 25 years of experience across complex educational systems, including serving on the design and faculty teams for the early childhood leadership program. through her work with leaders across the state in various organizations and schools, she has content expertise in issues of preschool funding and governance, pedagogical leadership, inclusive learning contexts, community engagement, and other core areas of systems change. e-mail: rebecca.vlasin@state.co.us acknowledgment we would all like to thank the buell foundation for their support of the early childhood leadership program and program study. ïïò at the heart of this story is an evolution of an early childhood faculty we belong to into a communityengaged collective. this paper is about the nexus of learning dialogues occurring in three communities of practice: early childhood professionals centering the experiences of children prenatally to age eight, leadership learning and development experiences aiming to enhance the capacity of adults to create lasting social change, and an emerging sense of what dialogic pedagogy means to us through the co-discovery of a set of leadership learning design principles. we (the authors) have experienced the development of our purpose and a deepening of our understanding of leadership alongside those who work in communities nurturing the growth and development of young children. as we continue to inquire and learn with each group of early childhood professionals with whom we work, we find ourselves more authentically concerned with the unsettling inequities within our communities at this critical moment in history. yet, we also see the potential and future possibilities for development. in the opening to their book presence, where they introduce theory u as a theory of change, senge, scharmer, jaworski, and flowers (2005) reflect, if awareness never reaches beyond superficial events and current circumstances, actions will be reactions. if, on the other hand, we penetrate more deeply to see the larger wholes that generate ‘what is’ and our own connection to this wholeness, the source and effectiveness of our actions can change dramatically (senge et al., p.12). this paper marks an important step toward sharing with whom and how we are learning and what new understandings and questions we intend to continue to explore together. while this paper is far from sharing the full story of our experiences with early childhood leadership learning and development, our hope is that it provides a place for deeper dialogue and discoveries and contributes to a dynamic process rooted in the central aspects of bringing our work with early childhood professionals to life. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a87 co-learning with early childhood professionals the early childhood leadership program (eclp) at the university of colorado denver described in this paper offers a graduate certificate where annually, a cohort of 18-22 early childhood professionals from across colorado in the united states learn together for 13 months. the program is a partnership of a philanthropic foundation, a university school of education and human development, and a communitybased early education, professional development, and advocacy non-profit. in this program, early childhood professionals are defined as people working in communities with young children and their families from the period before birth through a child’s eight years of age. this includes professionals in three sectors: early childhood education/early learning, health/mental health, and family engagement. positions in communities across these domains of practice range from direct service to children and families to organizational or administrative positions to community-wide or policy-related roles. hybrid courses are, by design, accessible to early childhood professionals throughout the state with monthly learning both in-person and online. although the purpose of the eclp, to cultivate leadership capacity to effect change within early childhood programs, policies, and practices and advance equity, excellence, and opportunity with all young children and their families, has remained strong and constant, we have continued to deepen our belief that all early childhood professionals with a stance of commitment and curiosity about children and families have the capacity to lead and innovate to co-create “open, engaging, and democratic cultures” (lambert, zimmerman & gardner, 2016) in our communities. the program content and understanding of leadership in theory and practice have evolved to reflect the complex environments where leadership occurs across the field of early childhood and the growing scholarship of teaching and learning in leadership development in the 21st century. significantly, our sense of leadership is amplified each year by the lived experiences and wisdom of increasingly diverse contributors who represent and identify with the racial, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of the communities with whom they work. as lead learners, we are in a generative relationship with the participating early childhood professionals, those enrolled in the program, and alumni of the program, to collectively explore questions that are relevant not only to our pedagogical practices but, more importantly, to the leadership practices lived and sustained by the learners themselves in everyday work of communities. we share a strong belief that engaging student voices is crucial to honoring our reciprocal relationships with them as co-learners and collaborators in the ongoing discovery and understanding of leadership development and growth in context (felten et al., 2013). each cohort of early childhood professionals since 2007 has shaped our eclp content, course design, learning experiences, and ongoing inquiry into leadership development. in the last two years, we have come to embrace this fact as the generative core of our own study of early childhood leadership learning and teaching and as the heart of this program immersed in and responsive to the context of the field. in may 2018, as we enrolled a 12th cohort of early childhood professionals, the authors of this article became the core faculty to consistently engage throughout the entire program to align with an emerging contemporary conception of leadership development. our process of study shared in this paper was guided by the overarching questions: how does the pedagogy of this eclp bring to life leadership learning for individuals and for the collective? in what ways are the leadership learning design principles evident in the early childhood professionals learning processes and in their practice? in response to these questions and in the context of the 2019-2020 program year, we will describe our paradigm of learning and teaching and the pedagogical practices that inform the eclp. then we will describe our program study approach and findings around the program’s emerging leadership learning design principles and enriching processes and conclude with a discussion of evolving understandings and hopes for the future. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a88 critical and dialogic pedagogical and curricular foundations with our own lived experiences, we entered this dialogic process with both a critical and action orientation as “true praxis can never be merely cerebral. it must involve action. nor can it be limited to mere activism. it must include serious reflection” (crotty, 1998, p. 151). as three white women, we were committed to creating an inclusive space and to sharing power with the early childhood professionals with an openness to what we could co-create together. postmodernist and critical perspectives are tied together for us in a fundamental idea best articulated by paulo freire when he described how knowledge is generated when we engage reciprocally in “an act of creation” through dialogue (freire, 2015, p. 89). freire inspired generations of scholars, teachers, and learners to explore the liberatory potential of dialogue continually evolving through a robust global conversation of critical pedagogy research and practice (duncan-andrade & morrell, 2008). as educators ourselves, we are continually drawn back to how to “teach new worlds through new words” and embrace a “critical pedagogy that seeks to transform consciousness, to provide students with ways of knowing that enable them to know themselves better and live in the world more fully” (hooks, 1994, p.167) as we engage in forms of dialogue and a pedagogy of listening (rinaldi, 2006) that disrupt, expand, deepen, and transform our relationships with ourselves and the world. morris & stommel (2018) provocatively state that “critical pedagogy is concerned less with knowing and more with a voracious not-knowing. it is an ongoing and recursive process of discovery” (morris & stommel, 2018). our sense of a critically informed pedagogical process within our context invites active engagement to both learn and unlearn with cohort members through intentional dialogue and the introduction of multiple modalities for the representation of learning. invitations for small group learning are frequently embedded inside most learning experiences, either in person or asynchronously, through online discussions. these inclusive pedagogies surface the incredible capacity the cohort has for teaching each other and offer intimate spaces that promote deep listening. this type of listening promotes self-awareness through recognition of each group member’s own body signals, choice of words, and subconscious paradigms about the world with the hope of suspending these. through this act of letting go, group members generate a collective space for co-sensing and co-creating with one another, growing relationships as the cohort threads through experiences. the variety of perspectives included is what makes the cohort a generative source for learning. rooted in our shared paradigm of critical pedagogy, the eclp curriculum aligns best with the sentiments of dugan’s (2017) description of strategic social change leadership (ospina et al., 2012) where we go beyond individual achievements and productivity by reframing discourse, promoting a “greater sense of interdependence” (ospina, et al., 2012, p. 303), building bridges and unleashing human energies through transformational learning and community-based action. across the many experiences during the program year, we embed opportunities for early childhood professionals to learn through their own experiences as individuals, in group dialogue, and within their own communities to transform and apply theory in ways that build leadership capacity to make a meaningful difference with young children and families. we design inclusive learning environments where the materials and teaching strategies deliberately reflect the diversity of contributions of the field and the range of identities of early childhood professionals. as learners co-construct shared meaning by bringing their background, knowledge, feelings, hopes, and perspectives to one another, we embrace the power of collaboration and dialogic practices to create engaging and meaningful learning experiences with the hope that early childhood professionals can bring the same to their own diverse communities of practice. the current sequence of six courses (see figure 1) evolves with a unique focus within each and across all three semesters through an iterative process for the individuals and the collective. the program journey begins by looking inward as a leader (leading within), then toward understanding leading leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a89 inclusively within organizations and communities dynamically in relationship with children and families (leading with others), and culminating by coming into leadership action across communities and systems through co-researching, co-creating, and expanding relationships in new ways including across broader political and advocacy spaces (leading across). figure 1 the eclp curriculum framework and course flow this journey emerges gradually as early childhood professionals engage in multiple learning experiences where they examine their own and others’ lived experiences and they realize their potential to co-create positive change. in the “leading within” semester, they examine their personal identities, values, leadership theories, and practices toward equitable and inclusive early childhood environments. in the “leading with others” semester, they apply appreciative and inclusive leadership practices with children, families, and colleagues to deepen awareness and understanding of the dynamic ecologies where children and adults live and learn. and finally, when “leading across,” they engage across multiple pathways for deepening understandings around the contextually relevant and complex early childhood issues and opportunities to foster participatory collective action. leadership learning design principles: a literature review as part of our ongoing and recent evolution as program faculty, four leadership learning design principles (lldp) emerged, illuminating our own shared philosophical roots, theories of interest, and priorities in our practice with others. these design principles are not meant to be a framework but rather a way of making visible what we were learning to be most reflective on and to be touchpoints for our sense of dialogic pedagogy across the year. we are acutely aware of the multiple layers of dialogue that continue to shape and inform our practice, including the dialogue shared in this paper, as we learned alongside this group of early childhood professionals. the purpose of this focused literature review is to surface another layer of dialogue prompted by paradigms, concepts, and voices that have shaped our decisions over time as faculty regarding how we go about the work of designing learning experiences. we represent these emerging lldps in a table and narrative form. table 1 describes the lldps and lists the primary citations to literature and source material informing our understanding of them and their influence on our pedagogy. we recognize the potentially disparate quality of the table and encourage leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a90 the reader to see beyond the boundaries portrayed by the table lines to see how the lldps integrate and dynamically interact across and beyond the program year in a holistic way. the review below table 1 connects the lldp descriptions to the philosophical and practitioner voices themselves included in our citations. table 1 leadership learning design principles and citations leadership learning design principles citations (see references for full citation) identity and agency are grounded in a liberatory approach to leadership learning that operates from the premise that change begins with an exploration of the core of what people believe about themselves, their personal identities, and their experience of authenticity and agency within their lives. harro, b. (2018) johnson, a. (2018) naeyc advancing equity in early childhood education (2019) ospina, s. m. & foldy, e. (2009) wilson, p. (2019) socially constructed pedagogy centers its practice on community and collaboration; remains open to diverse voices, and thus requires reimagining the ways that communication and collaboration happen across boundaries and spaces; and generates platforms for reciprocally engaging people as full agents of their own learning. dugan, j. (2017) digital pedagogy lab at cu denver martins, p.p.s., & arantes, m. (2019) relational research network, the taos institute rogoff, b. (2003) shah & rashid (2017) vygotsky, l. (1978) wood, l. (2020) contextually relevant learning experience is based on a constructivist theory of teaching and learning. learning takes place when faculty design learning in such a way that learners can construct meaning based on their own experiences and apply their learning in context. bloch, m.n., swadener, b.b., & cannella, g.s. (2018) bronfenbrenner, u. (1979) dewey, j. (1938) harvard university’s project zero lambert, l. et al. (2002) long, s., souto-manning m., & vasquez, v.m. (2016) national academy of sciences, engineering and medicine (2018) how people learn ii: learners, contexts and cultures moss, p. (2019) vecchi, v. (2010) appreciative stance is grounded in practices that engage individuals, teams and organizations through positive inquiry and dialogue that promotes leadership as a life-long commitment to values, vision and connection to others locally and globally. the potential in oneself and one’s work in community is illuminated as problems are flipped to opportunities and human energy is unleashed. gonzález, n., moll, l. & amanti, c. (2009) nxumalo, f. & brown, c.p. (2020) whitney, d. & trosten-bloom, a. (2010) whitney, d., trosten-bloom, a, & rader, k. (2010) wheatley m. & frieze, d. (2011) leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a91 identity and agency. the early childhood professionals who participate in the eclp are seeking ways to catalyze change in their communities, specifically around how to promote equitable learning opportunities enabling all young children to thrive as valued members of society. the national association for the education of young children released a position statement on advancing equity in early childhood education (2019), offering a comprehensive set of recommendations for practices and policies that begins first by acknowledging “that [while] both institutional and interpersonal systems must change, our recommendations begin with a focus on individual reflection” (naeyc, 2019, p. 5). we come into our leadership potential through the intersections of our identities, including gender, race, sexual orientation, disability status, and social class, and through these identities, others are invited into the ways where our position and power can have significance (johnson, 2018). as harro describes in the cycle of liberation, learning that invites waking up through introspection to how we experience the world allows one to consciously dismantle forms of oppression from within to see liberatory perspectives and possibilities (harro, 2018, p. 629). likewise, ospina and foldy (2009), in their review of leadership studies, reveal a “gradual convergence of theories of leadership and theories of race–ethnicity as their relational dimensions are increasingly emphasized” (ospina & foldy, 2009, p. 877). regardless of the layer of work on social change one is seeking to transform, from classroom communities to policy systems, staying attuned with an inner awareness of one’s own identity and agency in relationship with others is fundamental to all processes of learning and leading (wilson, 2019). socially constructed pedagogy. as early childhood professionals ourselves, our sense of human development is grounded in the seminal work of lev vygotsky, a soviet psychologist best known for his sociocultural theory. vygotsky’s theory (1978) asserts that social interaction plays a critical role in child development and that children experience a continuous process of learning where language is the root of culture and where individuals learn and develop within their community. the vygotskian theory extends for us embracing adult learning and development. it forms the theoretical base of what, for us, has become a strongly rooted socially constructed pedagogy of teaching and learning. we view learning as informed by participating in community and individual and collective meaning as made from the various cultural perspectives of the learners (rogoff, 2003). vygotsky’s influence on adult learning and higher education provides a way to explain how adult learners construct experience within a social-cultural framework as they make meaning through interactions and communications with others, including those who hold varying levels of lived experience and expertise. shah and rashid (2017) review vygotsky’s core concepts and how they inform our understanding of adult learning and describe how the concepts of the “zone of proximal development” and “scaffolding” apply to adult learning contexts and processes. participatory forms of social change research reinforce our commitment to practices of socially constructed pedagogy by demonstrating how democratic processes are generated when we engage with collaborative processes of discovery (wood, 2020). we find ourselves as teachers and researchers continually integrating the intentions, influences, and possibilities of socially constructed forms of pedagogy, for example, by listening to the stories of others through the relational research network of the taos institute and at the digital pedagogy lab, inviting us to be in full collaboration with the early childhood professionals along the way. and in extension, our understanding and sense of teaching, learning (martins & arantes, 2019), and leadership are also continually being shaped as we critically think about and reflect on the diverse perspectives and stories of leading for social change in context (dugan, 2017). contextually relevant learning experience. our experience of learning and teaching has been equally shaped by the foundational concept of experience and education famously explored by john dewey (1938) and iterated upon in theory and practice by many others (national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, 2018). given our shared commitment to young children, we find all learning to be nested leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a92 within complex webs of relationships and dynamically interacting systems seminally characterized by bronfenbrenner’s ecology of human development (1979). together it is both our experiences and our relationships inside complex cultural environments that actively shape and construct our sense of knowing, thus situating our sense of leadership within meaningful contexts (lambert et al., 2002). furthermore, context and culture have changed tremendously since the early twentieth century when the elements of the u.s. education and social systems were first rooted. as educators, we find ourselves called to responsively and courageously create new educational and social structures that align with the experiences of young children and families today. there are many voices currently involved in reconceptualizing early childhood nurturing the exciting work of constructing contemporary and life-giving stories of who we are as early childhood teachers, learners, and leaders (bloch, swadener, & cannella, 2018; long, souto-manning, & vasquez, 2016; moss, 2019). with similar responsiveness and enthusiasm, we seek to design contextually relevant experiences that invite learners to construct meaning through a variety of modalities or forms of expression, such as those experienced through the visual and graphic languages known as the “100 languages” in the schools for young children in reggio emilia, italy (vecchi, 2010) and harvard’s project zero. appreciative stance. as faculty, we are bonded by a deep respect for the capacity of all people to create and positively contribute to a changing world. significantly influenced early on by the funds of knowledge held by young children and families (gonzález, moll, & amanti, 2009), we believe “people are competent” (gonzález et al., 2009, p. ix) and are the assets from which community change blossoms. by extension, together with early childhood professionals, we find the pervasive language in the early childhood field around the gaps, deficits, and risks pertaining to children to be misaligned with the abundantly rewarding and highly relational experience of working with young children and families (nxumalo & brown, 2020). as such, we are drawn to forms of learning with communities that intentionally choose to see the positive potential of all people exemplified in the last few decades through appreciative inquiry and leadership practices (whitney & trosten-bloom, 2010; whitney, trosten-bloom, & rader, 2010). inclusive and equitable leadership “relies on the fact that people want to be engaged, that they want to learn and contribute to their community” (wheatley & frieze, 2011, p. 225). in summary, we strive to recognize whole people connecting across boundaries within themselves and in communities. we invite agency through the intersectional and diverse identities of the early childhood professionals in our field. we design and facilitate inclusive spaces through dialogue and socially constructed, multi-modal pedagogy. we open and invite learning experiences to adapt and evolve in response to contexts, culture, and diverse forms of expression, and we remain committed to processes that surface potential and reinforce the life-giving nature of people and places and disrupt deficit views of young children and families. methods participants in the 2019-2020 academic year, 18 early childhood professionals enrolled in the eclp. all identified as women and collectively represented a culturally and linguistically diverse cohort, with 33% identifying ethnically as latina, native, or of indian origins. in total, this cohort was composed of committed early childhood professionals who engaged in an individual and collective leadership journey while being employed in a variety of professional roles in relationship with their communities of practice. this cohort began their year in may 2019 and finished in june 2020. as with learners worldwide, this group was deeply impacted by the covid-19 pandemic. thus, we adapted the curriculum and shared learning to respond to leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a93 local, national, and global dynamics as the pandemic required shutdowns of their school districts and organizations. the early childhood professionals began to work with children, families, and colleagues exclusively through remote platforms. it was a time for faculty and students to significantly reimagine our collaborative practices. honoring the early childhood professionals and their communities and recognizing that lives were being disrupted and lost, we were deeply grateful to the early childhood professionals for their unwavering commitment to their learning journeys as all 18 remained fully engaged. study design and data generation as faculty, we worked with our partners to intentionally shift away from the decade-long approach of external evaluation focused on program impact to a more participatory action research approach grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning. through more frequent moments of reflection, we sought to understand what is at the heart of learning during the program year, how learning was applied in context, and, most importantly, being in dialogue with the early childhood professionals to hear their powerful stories of change. as we listened in our faculty roles, we engaged in ongoing reflection on our teaching practices, adjusting and adapting along the way to co-construct responsive learning environments and experiences for individual students while promoting optimum growth for the group as a collective. we examined the early childhood professional’s reflective writing and had many conversations with individual students about their learning experiences. these conversations inspired us to dig deeper into the lldps that were coming to life for us as provocations for co-inquiry. inspired by the ethical approach of participatory action learning and action research (wood, 2020), we sought open communication, critical reflection on self and process throughout the study, and a balance of both engaged relationships and research activities centered around shared research commitments and goals. additionally, we actively documented our steps, engaged in frequent dialogue with each other throughout the process, and transparently communicated with the early childhood professionals our intent of learning from our teaching through a series of surveys and participatory approaches of making meaning of the expressions together. lldp surveys. at the end of each semester, the 18 early childhood professionals were sent a set of open-ended survey questions designed to gather insights and perspectives from each person regarding their learning experiences and the variety of ways the lldps were present for them on their learning journeys. for example, individuals were asked to reflect on the following at the conclusion of each semester, “an example of how the program supported me in exploring and trying new leadership practices is…” although names were not requested in the survey, responses were not always anonymous since the nature of the questions invited identifiable roles and context-specific details. like the data analysis spiral depicted by creswell (2007), the how of the data examination process was iterative through cycles of data generation, interpretation through theming or clustering, and shared meaning-making through faculty dialogue, reflection, representation, and visualization. we engaged individually with separate sets of survey question responses to identify initial themes for each lldp across the three sets of surveys and then collaboratively explored the themes that emerged across and within each semester. initial lldp enriching process. finally, we facilitated a relational and participatory meaningmaking process among small groups of early childhood professionals. across two phases of dialogue, the groups generated additional interpretation and insight and enriched our impressions of their leadership learning experiences expressed through the lldps. it is in this evolving dialogic approach of first organizing leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a94 the survey data into the lldp tables followed by two meaning-making sessions with the program participants that our understanding deepened. the first meaning-making session involved a semi-structured approach to the dialogue in which a small group of program participants reviewed each lldp separately. we invited the group to comment on how we interpreted their own survey response data into summarizing definitions of each lldp across each phase of the learning journey. after sending the emerging lldp definitions and organized quotes from the surveys ahead of time, we gathered virtually. we asked the group to examine each lldp through a series of questions “how do these short descriptions sound to you? how do the words resonate? what other words might you use? and what meaning is emerging for you from the data that is not already visible in these summaries?” to surface their observations and experiences around these questions, we structured the dialogue with 5 minutes to read and individually comment on a single lldp, 15 minutes of dialogue, followed by 10 minutes to critically enhance the definitions we were using for that lldp by making edits and comments on a shared document. as we will describe in a different section, we engaged in a second phase of dialogue with a different small group of program participants. to create an authentic feeling for the reader of how this process unfolded for us in surprising ways, our process for the second phase of dialogue and the quotes and themes that emerged will be described later in the paper. in the final section of this paper, we will share how this collaborative-dialogic process is nurturing in us a deeper sense of learning and leading within and across the early childhood landscape. professionals’ expressions and enriched impressions of the leadership learning design principles the 18 early childhood professionals’ expressions around the lldps, described in the section above, are organized in a series of tables. each table, corresponding to one lldp, represents written responses from each semester/phase of the program in the left-hand column. on the right are our enriched impressions through dialogue with the first group of five early childhood professionals a few months after the program's conclusion. the words and phrases found on the right of the table are representative of a collective synthesis combining both the words and comments program participants verbalized or directly wrote on a shared document during our dialogue with our own summarized understandings. our intent in sharing the tables in this way is to preserve the integrity of the words shared across the year by the early childhood professionals and also to capture the evolving quality of our understanding of the lldps as enriched by the members of the cohort. initial thoughts expressed: first set of dialogic impressions identity & agency. early childhood professionals were asked to reflect on how their learning during the program helped them understand themselves as people and professionals. they were asked to share an example(s) of how their identity was reflected (or not reflected) in their learning experiences and how they had agency (or not) as a learner throughout the program. in this sense, we defined agency as feeling effective and having ownership of one’s learning experience. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a95 table 2 identity and agency through leading within, leading with others, and leading across ec professionals’ thoughts expressed on surveys enriched impressions through dialogue leading within summer courses i started to understand the weighty responsibility of leadership to pursue equity, accessibility, and opportunity for all, and reflected on my role in those situations. i am more aware how my privileges and bias affect me and how it has shaped me. i will continue to grow, evolve, change, be challenged and therefore always keep my mind active as a constructivist learner who can engage authentically in these conversations for the rest [of the program] and afterwards in my work. it’s ok to be unsure and shaky in concepts new to me and if i am open to the learning process, i will gain confidence and strength as a leader. it’s ok to be unsure and shaky in concepts new to me and if i am open to the learning process, i will gain confidence and strength as a leader. ec professionals expressed an early self-awareness around their privilege, strengths, and areas for growth, what there is to potentially let go of and possible shifts to make as they were moving toward leading as equityminded professionals. a deeper understanding of leadership as an ongoing learning process emerged, as well as an awareness that uncertainty fuels learning, and that inquiry and reflection are helpful processes for their leading and learning journeys. leading with others fall courses conversations that i may not have previously engaged in, i now have the confidence to facilitate meaningful conversations to move forward...and create new ideas and learn new perspectives. one of the biggest learnings for me is that we must not shut down if others have differing perspectives or opinions. this semester taught me ‘third spaces’ are truly possible. collaboration can be fostered even when there are differences. it’s holding all people in positive regard. this is much more challenging. curiosity-listening, asking questions, inquiring, and really focusing on the things that i don't already know the answers to instead of depending on that which i already know has allowed me to get to know myself, my colleagues, and children and families in ways i didn’t before. ec professionals enhanced their work as inclusive and appreciative leaders who invite dialogue and shared learning. they articulated new-found confidence and experienced changes in themselves, with many examples of appreciative leadership practices. most notable is how they invited and led inclusive conversation through inquiry (asking questions instead of giving answers) and engaged others in the learning process. there was a knowing and welcoming that, “i can’t do this alone”. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a96 leading across spring courses this program has confirmed for me the importance of self-reflection. we need to know how we operate as a human, and identify our biases and privileges if we truly want to advocate for social justice within early education and all systems. that my impact can be a positive experience or negative depending on how i choose to show up, how i choose to ask questions, how i choose to engage in appreciative leadership, [and] how i choose to pause... i now see myself and how i lead with others in a new light. one who inspires others to hear the voices of our children, one that offers support to families in an equitable way, one that encourages other early childhood professionals to look within to see their own leadership potential. i am a leader who is willing to lead intentionally to ensure that i am including all. a deepening of understanding of oneself (who i want to be as i lead) emerged as well as a sense of one’s capacity to lead--that is from the position one holds and to influence change from that unique place in the field. ensuring diversity of voices and engaging in equitable practices were seen as essential elements of identity and agency. socially constructed pedagogy. early childhood professionals were asked to reflect on the various ways they learned with others and the learning processes and pedagogies that were most meaningful to them. reflections on the different tools/technologies, types of assignments, small group dialogue, and other course experiences were invited, and how these experiences of learning prepared them to contribute to a larger conversation in socially constructed ways. table 3 socially constructed pedagogy through leading within, leading with others, and leading across ec professionals’ thoughts expressed on surveys enriched impressions through dialogue leading within summer courses the active presence of the other cohort members during the learning experiences was an incredible opportunity to grow from one another and learn from others’ experiences and perspectives. ...it was incredibly meaningful, yet challenging, to break out by people of color and white. it was an interesting opportunity and one i won’t forget. i enjoyed the [world cafe] technique to further breakdown and discuss the chapters we read in leadership theories. i feel like we sometimes have to talk further about ideas and theories in order to process and internalize what we are learning. active engagement to learn about and with other cohort members and participating in the experience of intentionally facilitated meaning-making dialogue was highlighted. although not represented in the survey comments, when enriching, the group emphasized the power of multiple modalities (i.e., writing a 6word memoir, manipulating loose parts, selecting representative music) and approaches to expressing and representing learning as central to dialogic pedagogy and to the surfacing of meaning. while enriching, the early childhood professionals described their desire to engage in a deeper process of sensing and listening to self and others that this moment offered them. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a97 the women in my cohort have shown me the strengths we each bring to the table from different perspectives and different roles in ece, but also the commonality we all share: the desire to make this field stronger and to be agents of change. i've heard different perspectives, had my opinions supported and challenged, and learned from stories different from my own. leading with others fall courses i love when we are able to engage in small groups and i can listen to my cohort share all their beautiful work. i also enjoy the pattern of small group to large group...helps me to build more connections and understanding. the small group work has been particularly supportive this semester...there is much capacity. i am an introvert at heart and being around people drains me; however, i notice that as i meet with my peers more, i actually enjoy our time together. the small group discussions that we post [online] are also so rich. i notice that we engage more when we are in small group activities. small group learning continued to be key and meaningful to the learning experience during the fall courses. ec professionals named the importance of dialogue that occurred during intimate conversations and how it facilitated their understanding and growth. incredible capacity was emerging for the cohort for teaching each other and learning from one another in small group processes and was seen as incredibly supportive. there was a sense at this point that the richness of the dialogue grew from the prior semester; “it was so rich because we had the opportunity to build this in the summer...in a bare your heart kind of way”. leading across spring courses in-person meetings are absolutely irreplaceable. any time we were able to come together to synthesize our learnings, we all left feeling smarter, richer in ideas, and more focused on our goals. ...those moments are the glue [that] formed a different cohort with more stable and long-lasting connections. seeing the field from the perspective of an slp who works with low-income families, home visiting providers who provide services in both english and spanish, a child welfare advocate for the indian family resource center, and all the other unique roles filled by my peers helped me totally shift my paradigm of what early childhood is as a field, and emboldened my commitments to equity, inclusion, and justice within the system. connecting with the women in my cohort was endlessly educational and valuable. a critical aspect of what made the cohort a generative source for learning was the extended and evolving time together and the variety of perspectives included across identities, roles, and regions in the state. being in and deepening relationships with each other as a cohort was a key aspect threading through many of the learning experiences cited as most meaningful including in-person learning, something that this group experienced and abruptly lost in march 2020 when the program moved to remote learning. contextually relevant experiences early childhood professionals were asked to reflect on their application of new leadership practices across the year and to describe how the program experiences leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a98 supported exploration of leadership in context. they were also asked to share examples of how others in their context have recognized or noticed their leadership learning and growth. table 4 contextually relevant experiences through leading within, leading with others and leading across ec professionals’ thoughts expressed through surveys enriched impressions through dialogue leading within summer courses i have practiced with my family. this has allowed conversations to deepen and more understanding to come from inquiry. not only the actual course content itself, but also the modalities in which we practiced the content helped me to explore leadership practices. opportunities to practice intentionally and specifically with one another in many ways (i.e., role playing) produced new ways of thinking. learning and leading were explored within close relationships including family members and cohort members within safe spaces. the fear of thinking that “i am the only one not grasping it” was dismantled when realizing that all members of the cohort are trying to understand what this means. leading with others fall courses i have appreciated the assignments in these courses to not only read about the tools and skills for leading with others, but that the assignments pushed us into action. because of what i've learned this fall, i first had the confidence to request a spot on the search committee, and i've been able to be vocal in changing the interview questions to be more inquisitive and appreciative, challenging the status quo of how we've facilitated interviews, and being sure to weave in other voices into the process thanks to the skills i gained this semester. having ‘hard’ conversations doesn't seem as daunting. my team is utilizing strategies and tools learned this semester to help us be stronger. the fall experiences and literature have been very actionable. these classes have invited me to read and learn about tools to then explore in practice. fall courses offered multiple pathways of practice within individual and organizational contexts. the early childhood professionals described the experience of being “catapulted” into action and noticed a vulnerability in themselves as they brought the learning into their workplaces. leading across spring courses i was able to eschew the ‘path of least resistance’ (and the things we were doing because ‘that's how it's always been done’) to create something that was responsive, unique, and brand new. i was noticing some inequities in my school. i went through the regular hierarchical ladder and got nowhere. i reached out to someone high in the district, which is completely unheard of in my school, and using appreciative many examples of leadership application were noted: descriptions of nuanced leadership learning practices in context, examples of changing and impacting larger systems and examples of specific recognition and positive feedback from colleagues, supervisors and organizations related to the leadership practices and growth of the early childhood professionals. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a99 leadership, was able to illuminate the program without placing blame or even demanding a result. and i got a result within hours. it was remarkable. from my supervisor’s performance evaluation: ‘she has increased input in staff and project meetings throughout the year and has voiced new perspectives, critiqued approach or viewpoints, and suggested solutions. she delivers information calmly, but increasingly shows the strength of her convictions and continues to approach challenges with a positive lens, even while vocalizing real concerns. this balance of exhibiting these values is such an asset to her as a professional, but also to the organization and the work.’ appreciative stance early childhood professionals were asked what potential they saw in themselves as they transitioned from the summer to the fall semester and again from the fall to the spring. at the conclusion of the program, they were asked about the potential they saw in their community and/or the work they have done with them or will do that they did not see before the program. table 5 appreciative stance through leading within, leading with others and leading across ec professionals’ thoughts expressed through surveys enriched impressions through dialogue leading within summer courses i have been challenged, pushed to think deeper and further outside all of the boxes i previously operated from within and am ready to continue facing challenges head on. i have the potential to slow down and be a more intentional listener. my ability to listen, observe, self-reflect and then share. i see myself as more confident in talking to others about my values and beliefs. i've heard different perspectives, had my opinions supported and challenged, and learned from stories different from my own. also of note was a developing awareness that equity systems begin with self-reflection and reflection and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. appreciating one’s potential surfaced as early childhood professionals described their emerging clarity around what leadership is and what type of leader they would like to continue to learn to be, as well as a growing understanding and confidence in themselves. the semester surfaced an understanding of their identities and developed an equity-mindedness. knowing oneself better invited shifts in how they might show up for themselves and for others. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a100 leading with others fall courses being able to have conversations with others with different perspectives without coming from a place of judgement and truly exploring alternative narratives. now that i have no reason to feed my ego, i have realized there is much to be learned from others. co-creating is an outstanding process that leads to great outcomes. that i don't need to have an idea of the process [in advance] because it works best when we create the process as we go. appreciate all those who are a part of my work, apply meaning to my work, share responsibilities, let go, presence, apply my personal pedagogy to my current work and invite others to be a part of the journey, build relationships, involve families, listen, learn, reflect and co-create. early childhood professionals articulated their appreciation for their learning and a strong desire to continue to build their capacity that was becoming even more evident to them; a confidence was emerging. their capacity for generative dialogue and shared learning with others around issues and opportunities for the field expanded. this appreciation for the learning of the fall offered a sense of anticipation to move into more expansive dialogue within and across systems in the spring. leading across spring courses i know that my community is uniquely positioned to be active forces of change. i see the potential to change, to challenge, and grow in a way i never did before. i now see my program and community i work within as innovative and forward-thinking. before the program, i did not see the potential for growth in impacting my diverse community. now after collaborating with community partners, i have found numerous resources to support all families with young children. looking past my small circle and working together supported me in my vision of making my community a more equitable place to live. we have a great opportunity to elevate all voices: children, families, educators and other members of the community. when this is accomplished and all perspectives are valued and accounted for, we can make positive change happen for the good of the whole community. the final semester revealed to the early childhood professionals the enormous potential of their communities as coleaders and learners with them as they now realized and embraced previously unknown appreciation for and confidence in members of the community. as community potential was revealed to them, they also recognized they have the opportunity to actively value, invite and elevate the voices of children, families and colleagues in shared efforts to grow their communities. they noticed a tone and feeling in these comments that was calming after the vulnerability of the summer and the confidence/push in the fall. threads across the program year: a second set of enriched impressions as we engaged in dialogue as faculty following the first enriching session, we sensed that although enhancing our understanding, perhaps by our focusing on the lldps in a delineated fashion, we were missing an opportunity to see layers of the unfolding story across the year. and importantly, we realized that although all members of the cohort were invited, the first dialogues happened to occur only with a small group of white women. we wanted to ensure our impressions were enriched by the perspectives of those who experienced the program from racial and ethnic identities other than white. thus, we invited a second group of early childhood professionals of color from the cohort to share their stories from the year as inspired by the lldps. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a101 as a result of inviting holistic responses and storytelling around each phase of the program, this second dialogue resulted in fewer edits and comments directly on a shared document and instead was an opportunity for us to listen deeply to statements like “i feel like the leading across semester really opened my eyes to the possibilities of how one single voice can make such a ripple effect outward.” another participant built on that idea by saying, “i'm echoing a little bit of what she said is something for me is to be open to possibilities, like you said, when talking to the community…it's so exciting to talk to them about how your voice is important.” through an emergent approach to dialogue and then by studying a transcript of the dialogue recording, this group of seven further gifted us with powerful insights, collectively enhancing our understanding of additional layers of meaning that surfaced through the intentional practice of the lldps. specifically, the group surfaced four ways our pedagogy and leadership learning design principles were experienced across this unique program year, namely by (1) creating learning spaces that allowed for vulnerability and openness, (2) beginning by breaking down barriers within themselves to be able to challenge the status quo, (3) exploring together how to co-create processes with others and share power, and (4) simply how to listen. first, it was expressed right away that they were welcomed into a space of shared vulnerability and openness to take risks with each other in a non-judgmental and supportive environment. as one early childhood professional articulated, during the circle experience in the summer with the artifact, i was really impressed by the vulnerability. i was the last one to go, and i had so many experiences of feeling connected...we started clean and raw with one another so that we were able to try new things as leaders and trust the process. this feeling of safety and trust within the group allowed each person to engage through their authentic self, through their intersecting identities, and to keep trying new things throughout the program year. if they failed, it was okay, they had the “[cohort] cushion that i knew i could fall back on.” and ultimately, the unique and consistently safe space of the cohort “helped bring everyone's strengths in...which i thought was also really beautiful.” during a moment in the dialogue, one early childhood professional expressed how the experiences they had together encouraged them to first break down barriers within themselves so that they could then see ways to challenge systems and change the status quo together. “...it was almost like we gave each other permission to not have to do things in the way that we were taught to be...instead, we could really forge our own paths and include everybody.” as the conversation deepened, there was a sense of synergy in how the experiences emerging from lldps were shaping the conditions for the cohort’s learning and invited the application of practices into their own context. in other words, as they engaged with each other in unhurried dialogue and asked more appreciative questions of each other within the cohort, they began seeing opportunities in the community to include voices in similar ways. the group began to share their insights about how to co-create processes with others and share power. “...you're not coming in as the expert, that you're really honoring that community and collective wisdom that exists and being able to uplift that. i think that was a really, really big learning and just moving away from the transactional way of doing things…” ultimately, for one person, this meant understanding that fundamentally leading is all about relational processes of sharing power. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a102 this changed my perspective because i always think of leading across, leading with those who were above me, but really leading across as leading with everyone. so, it's leading with bringing in children and families and the community to really illuminate everyone's voice, is leading across for me. this inclusive stance opened pathways for the early childhood professionals to be responsive to each other and their communities when the covid-19 pandemic began, and both their personal and professional lives shifted significantly as a result. while this group shared a sense of grief of not being able to experience a more typical end to their year of learning together, they also expressed a sense of privilege of having this community with which they could experience the changes and continue the leadership learning they started together in even more important ways. as one person commented, “i don't need to have an idea of the process because it works best when we can create the process as we go.” a key practice that, surprisingly to the group, was not as visible in the original survey reflections was listening. across the program and through the many ways the cohort was invited to engage with each other and their community, the importance of listening was continuously reinforced and experienced. one early childhood professional described how her stance has shifted from walking in with “an agenda” to walking in open to listening to what is possible at the moment. and i walk in now thinking...i'm going to be, i'm not going to have an idea of what's going to happen. i did my practice during the whole year in [the program]. and it was very helpful because it taught me the importance of listening, something that i felt i was doing, and then i realized i really needed a lot of work on that. so, i really do think that throughout the whole process, i did practice my ability to stop, to slow down, and to listen to others. this experience of listening to the stories of learning through this small group dialogue with women of color opened our hearts and minds and offered us something we would have missed if we had not taken this approach. the value we place on the enriching experience is mirrored in the words of one of the early childhood professionals who shared, thank you for thinking of us and including us, because i think you're basically living out your actions through the values you're stating and modeling that for us too. you could have just said, yeah, we have that process, and we did get feedback, and that could have been the end of that. and you could have just pushed forward, but you didn't, and you opted for spending more time and ensuring those voices that weren't there missing were included and showing that and modeling it for us. so, a big thank you for that. while generating this second set of enriched impressions concluded our data-gathering and meaning-making process, it certainly started more dialogue among the three of us as a faculty team. we have been inspired by this study to continue to deepen our understanding of our own pedagogy and the potential the lldps has for our future practice as lead learners and early childhood professionals. evolving understandings of our pedagogy in a holistic review of the shared expressions and impressions across all four lldps, one sees a process of learning as it unfolds for the early childhood professionals. it begins with a foundational awareness of their unique identities and agency as learners. then they experience practices of deeper listening culminating in a new understanding of how their leadership contributes to and operates from the dynamic system of the early childhood landscape. the early childhood professionals were engaged in a process that started with seeing potential in themselves as leaders. they gradually began inviting others. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a103 ultimately, a desire was sparked to continue engaging with their communities to do the hard and important work of inclusive and equitable early childhood leadership. as we, the faculty, continued through the cycles of dialogue together with the members of the cohort, we were reminded of how transformational learning experiences are not easily sliced into phases of learning or into discrete design principles. rather, through our conversations together, we were reminded of the unique storylines that emerged from this group of women, the twists, and turns of being in a relationship with each other as we together navigated and influenced a changing world. concurrently, we also found great value in being able to articulate our pedagogy and deepen our understanding of the lldps. looking at our practices of teaching and learning through this dialogic lens allowed us to explain our “why” in addition to our “how.” to us, this study has uncovered the iterative flow of the courses, as well as an alignment across courses within each phase of the program, offering many opportunities for learning and practice that deepens across the year within the cohort and within each member’s context. the cohort structure continues to be essential for socially constructed learning. the increasing diversity of cohort members provides a space to learn across cultural, linguistic, and racial identities and across roles in the early childhood landscape. the values early childhood professionals hold and what they learn through the experiences, challenges, opportunities, and voices that each member of the cohort brings teach one another about leading within and across our state’s diverse contexts where children and families live and learn. self-awareness and awareness of the positive potential of co-creating with others is a consistent theme through all three phases of the program. additionally, the application becomes more apparent and contextually relevant as early childhood professionals move through the program. there appears to be reciprocity between the ongoing deep work of self-awareness and the application of learning as the early childhood professionals try things out, reflect, share with others, and build confidence in their capacity to lead and return to the field to practice again. these cycles of learning, integrated practice, reflection, and dialogue hold great potential for early childhood professionals as they enter the deeper work of inclusive social change leadership and stay grounded in their own authentic selves. reflections on our relational inquiry process and hopes for the future contemporary research and inquiry within leadership calls for new understandings of how liberating and equity-seeking processes operate within individuals and groups to promote generative learning and transformation across systems. the process of this study, extending well beyond the conclusion of the program year for this group, in some ways, has been our attempt to keep the community that was built alive in our minds and hearts. as one early childhood professional shared at the end of our last dialogue, “the community is important and it's not that [the program] started and ended. i think when it ended something different started, it was just the beginning of something new and i think that's a reminder for us, too, in our jobs or whatever we do that is not just one thing. you continue building that community and that's what you're doing right now. you continue building that.” learning becomes a relational inquiry process with an openness to multiple possible realities and futures. with an appreciation of diverse perspectives and knowledge generation around leadership and the early childhood issues uniquely experienced during this time, we’ve deepened our commitment to how interrelated our own leadership story is with the stories of our students (mcnamee & hosking, 2012). participatory action learning action research offered us, as co-learners on a shared learning journey, many moments of joy and, as articulated by lenette et al. (2019), many complexities. this way of engaging in scholarly work, particularly the study of our own teaching, became a process of self-reflection, open dialogue, and gradual release of our role in shaping the path of the story. the early childhood professionals leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a104 with whom we have the honor of engaging are the story holders and storytellers. our role, still evolving, has shifted and will continue to shift as we are learning the flow and the rhythm of walking alongside, how and when to slow down and drop back and when to re-join and re-engage. deeply inspired by dialogic social inquiry (defehr, infante & valladares, 2021), we now see our research process as participant-driven. we whole-heartedly embrace this discussion of research outcomes, taking a social constructivist stance, we could also suggest that research outcomes can include more than the production of propositional knowledge. an outcome could be a change in attitude, a relational shift, a new possibility, a course of action, a distinct way of understanding something, an emerging set of new questions, and even the clouding of something that was unjustifiably clear and certain (defehr et al., 2021, p. 69). the language expressed by the early childhood professionals and the meaning they made of their learning experiences shaped our understanding of their unique journey. perhaps an even greater gift to us is the light illuminating our path of co-learning with new individuals and groups each year. our teaching, our research, our leading, and our learning are forever changed by this dialogic and socially constructed moment in our shared journey. the ensuing contribution of this research effort calls forward new questions about the nature and potential of co-inquiry within communities. in 2013, felten et al. articulated a call for expanding inclusive student engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl), a vision not yet fully realized in higher education’s pedagogy or curriculum design. “intentionally broadening the range of student voices in sotl will enable us to ask additional and different questions and to pursue new lines of inquiry and dissemination” (felten et al., 2013, p. 69). and now we ask, what is next for us in our inclusive practices? how will we be in dialogue with each new group of early childhood professionals? what will we learn from them? final words it is important for us to say that the value of dialogic social processes is demonstrated through the actions that are taken to benefit the community of people directly engaged in the focus of the inquiry, in this case, early childhood professionals leading in context. therefore, our hope is that the knowledge generated in this co-inquiry process will ripple out to shape new stories of leadership learning in our own pedagogical practices and in the practices of the early childhood professionals within their communities. as arthur frank noted, “stories have the capacity to arouse people’s imaginations; they make the unseen not only visible but compelling” (frank, 2010, p. 41). we believe there are many compelling stories of what leadership looks like in development and in practice that may be currently unseen. by making those stories visible from our own practice, we hope to contribute to the evolving narrative of a complex and nuanced set of processes that is leadership within the contexts of working with young children and their families today and in the future. references bloch, m.n., swadener, b.b., & cannella, g.s. 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(2010). the power of appreciative inquiry: a practical guide to positive change. oakland, ca: berrett-koehler publishers, inc. leadership learning design principles: co-creating dialogic and critical pedagogy within cohort and community contexts wendy b. allen, lori g. ryan, rebecca vlasin dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a107 whitney, d., trosten-bloom, a, & rader, k. (2010). appreciative leadership: focus on what works to drive winning performance and build a thriving organization mcgraw hill. wilson, p. (2019). the heart of community engagement. new york: routledge. wood, l. (2020). participatory action learning and action research. london: routledge. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 431-article text-1859-1-18-20210310.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.431 | vol. 9 (2021) sa112 supervision, advisement and dialogic pedagogy: present day issues and provocations for the future mikhail gradovski university of stavanger, norway abstract this article is a reflection on the dialogic pedagogy journal (dpj) special issue on supervision and advisement. altogether five articles made it through a rigorous double-blind peer review process and crossed the finishing line to become a part of this special issue. supervision and advisement are areas of education where dialogic pedagogy approach is a welcome guest as learning and teaching constructs that are used in these areas require various forms of dialogue. this special issue is a humble but a promising beginning for the special issues on supervision and advisement in this journal. all the studies included in this special issue are good examples of well-done scientific endeavors that can be used as illustrations of how a good piece of research should be executed and reported. however, the question remains if the means of analyses used in these studies are satisfactory enough so that we could understand to the fullest the complexities of the co-lived lives of the participants in supervisory and advisement relationships and co-learned knowledge that all the participants have gained. dr. mikhail gradovski is a professor of social pedagogy at the university of stavanger, norway. he was born in minsk, belarus. after graduation from the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim as doctor rerum politicarum in 2008 with the thesis devoted to the norwegian dialogue pedagogy, gradovski has participated in both national and international research projects on doctoral supervision, professional supervision, use of dialogue in education, and mental skill development. currently he is a main coordinator of the ispas project, an international eu horizon 2020 project that focuses on the development of phd candidates’ skills. he has supervised both postgraduate, graduate and undergraduate students. as a teaching practitioner he is using a dialogical approach based on an understanding that both teacher and learner are partners with equal rights to make judgements on what is relevant, important and true. ïïò introduction australian bakhtinians jillian hamilton and sue carson in their seminal article “speaking of supervision: a dialogic approach to building higher degree research supervision capacity in the creative arts” (hamilton & carson, 2015), successfully argued that through dialogue we can gain insights into other ways of ‘doing supervision’, and of ‘being a supervisor’, develop a common language and shared understanding of what the field is, its practices, its language and definitions, and its impact. inspired by the issn: 2325-3290 (online) supervision, advisement and dialogic pedagogy: present day issues and provocations for the future mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.431 | vol. 9 (2021) sa113 hamilton and carson (2015), the goal of the dpj special issue on supervision and advisement is to present studies based on the dialogic pedagogy approach that provide new insights, contribute to the shared, deepened understanding of the practices and tacit knowledge in the field of supervision and advisement. altogether five articles made it through a rigorous double-blind peer review process and crossed the finishing line to become part of this special issue. supervision and advisement are areas of education where dialogic pedagogy approach is a welcome guest as learning and teaching constructs that are used in these areas require various forms of dialogue. this special issue is a humble but a promising beginning for the special issues on supervision and advisement in this journal. bearing in mind an obvious demand for the dialogic pedagogical knowledge to develop these educational areas, there are good reasons to believe that there will be future special issues showcasing how new knowledge from the arsenal of dialogic pedagogy can help advances in both supervision and advisement. in this article i will first present the five studies included in this special issue and then i will describe the provocations for the future that the new knowledge from these studies espouses. dpj special issue on supervision and advisement: present-day issues of supervision and advisement in barbosa and wang’s study (2020) the authors use a freirean perspective to find out what counts as good teaching according to the pre-service teachers who got engaged in a mini research-based practicum. the findings of the study show that the pre-service teachers believe that good teaching exists when there is an inclusive relationship building process in a classroom. further, the good teaching should start with understanding the multiple roles a teacher could have. the authors discuss transformative effects of a dialogic problem-posing pedagogy, along with its challenges and coping methods. the focus of the cubero, bascón, & cubero-pérez’s study (2020) is on invocations (forms of the reflective practices) of the spanish primary school teachers-to-be during their practicums. the authors view the practicum period as a dialogic construct for the explanation and interpretation of teaching practices and believe that it provides teachers-to-be with an opportunity for making their own meanings through dialogue and reflection. the authors define the profile of the invocations introduced in dialogic reflection as sources of legitimation of knowledge and identify the patterns in the sequence of the invocations' appearance. analyzing the tutors’ efforts to connect pedagogical principles with personal experiences during the practicum period, the authors discuss at the end the competencies and training that the students’ tutors should need. vatne and søndenå’s study (2020) focuses on the supervision of the norwegian pre-school teachers-to-be in connection to their bachelor theses. drawing on the bakhtinian dialogic perspective, the authors focus on how the supervision process contributes to changes in students’ subjectivities. these changes are viewed as desirable and fruitful outcomes of the supervision process that pertain to the enhancing quality process. the findings of this study show that the students have either uncomplicated or complex subjectivity types. further, the authors show that the priority is given to the voices that represent outer persuasive discourse and not students’ inner persuasive discourses. these findings call for the changes in the process of supervision of such theses to encourage students to include their own lived experience in the theses and to allow room for emotions and creativity. the study by baxan, pattison-meek, & campbell (2020) explores learning activities of three teacher education graduate research methods courses aimed to support student learning beyond the mastering of research skills or techniques. through the subtle but brilliant construction of the dialogue between their own narratives, these three canadian teacher educators weave a tapestry of meaning making to illustrate how teachers-to-be can dialogically reflect on research-related topics with peers, bring questions forward for discussion in class and online, apply their emerging technical research skills through collective analysis of supervision, advisement and dialogic pedagogy: present day issues and provocations for the future mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.431 | vol. 9 (2021) sa114 a given situation case, and grow collective knowledge together. in the unfolding of the narratives the authors show the constrains and limitations that appear on the road to teachers’-to-be recognition of the importance of research in their work. eriksen and gradovski’s study (2020) focuses on social work students’ experiences of ethical challenges, including dilemmas, during their field placements. drawing on dialogical approach and the results of the thematic analysis, the authors discuss what ethical dilemmas the students experience during their field practice, and what implications the handling of these ethical dilemmas can have for the organization of social work education. the authors argue that due to the fact that the authorial agency of any learner consists of personal attitudes, goals, values, knowledge, competences, and skills, it is important to organize field practice activities in a way that allows discussions in free and fearless environments and call for activities that create opportunities for the students to learn and unlearn knowledge and skills that are connected to their inner persuasive discourses. so what other ways of ‘doing supervision’, and of ‘being a supervisor’ the studies in this special issue have suggested, and what new insights on the common language and shared understanding have these studies brought forth regarding what the field is, its practices, its language and definitions, and its impact? the authors of all the studies from this special issue argue for better recognition of the students or pupils’ authorial agency in the processes of supervision and advisement. barbosa and wang (2020) argue for organizing both advisement and supervision basing them on the principles of freirean dialogic problemposing pedagogy. their main claim is that the use of this pedagogy will allow the students to have the agency to question the status quo of the curriculum, partnerships, and choices made by administrators. cubero, bascón, & cubero-pérez’s study (2020) rightly consider students’ practicums to be part of the professional socialization and argue for the use of dialogue to allow the students to reflect on the legitimacy of their claims and arguments. for this to happen it is necessary to make sure that the students’ tutors are well prepared to assist students’ reflections, i.e., the tutors need to learn. the necessity for more reflection and understanding of one’s own agency is something baxan, pattison-meek, & cambell (baxan et al., 2020) also argue for. using the dialogue as a means of communication in all its might and shining armour the authors show how one can “co-construct research knowledge through a dialogic approach, having alexander’s dialogic teaching principles (2018) as a start”. this study shows the importance of becoming aware of one’s own agentic position and how important it is for professionals to have opportunities to experience an interplay between one’s own and others’ outer and inner persuasive discourses for own professional and personal development. the importance of these two discourses for the learning and teaching of the professional knowledge has also been highlighted in the study by eriksen and gradovski (2020). this study shows the importance of treating professionals-to-be as responsible adults and respect their points of view on what is right and just in regard to professional activities. advocating for the right of professionals-to-be to have an opportunity to be have a room to voice personal views the study by vatne and søndenå (2020) shows that the issue of dialogical subjectivities of the professionals-to-be is not a purely educational issue but a political issue as well. to be dialogic in educational encounters in supervision and advisement means to be political! what provocations for the future the new knowledge from these studies espouses? as mentioned above dialogic pedagogy in all its brilliant forms and facets is a pedagogy of choice, in my view, when it comes to learning and teaching activities of supervision and advisement. the studies in this special issue provide us with new knowledge on how to organize learning activities so that all the supervision, advisement and dialogic pedagogy: present day issues and provocations for the future mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.431 | vol. 9 (2021) sa115 participants experience developments of the meaning-making processes of various kinds and types. however, we still need to know more on what models and constructs allow the learners to use their own subjectivities to develop a sense of trust and respect for their own voice and opinions and encourage development of their own reflective practices and authorial agency. in this time of political unrest and social uncertainties we need more knowledge on what the use of dialogue contributes when it comes to practices of both students and teachers’ resilience and resistance in educational situations. all the studies included in this special issue are good examples of well-done scientific endeavors that can be used as illustrations of how a good piece of research should be executed and reported. however, the question remains if the means of analyses used in these studies are satisfactory enough so that we could understand to the fullest the complexities of the co-lived lives of participants of supervisory and advisement relationships and co-learned knowledge that all the participants have gained. the answer, in my view, is “no” as we direly need new developed methodologies and tools for analyses so that we could understand better the complexity of the processes in both supervision and advisement. it is important to acknowledge the present-day pioneers in the field of developing new methodologies and tools for analyses who are paving the way for the future dialogic pedagogy patriots. to such belong eugene matusov (matusov , et al., 2019) and his methodological argumentation for the place and the application area of dialogic approach among the frameworks that belong to the qualitative approach, rupert wegerif and his chiasm methodology (kershner, et al., 2020), and jayne white’s works on the use of video methods and the analyses of data collected with such methods (white, 2016, 2020). however, these are not enough. the most important provocation that this issue as a whole espouses is the need for more theoretical and methodological studies so that we can get new insights, contribute to the shared, deepened understanding of the practices and tacit knowledge in the field of supervision and advisement in the future. references alexander, r. (2018). developing dialogic teaching: genesis, process, trial. research papers in education, 33(5), 561-598. doi:10.1080/02671522.2018.1481140 barbosa, p., & wang, w. (2020). challenging the politics of education: intertwining dialogic pedagogy with a research-based practicum for first-year pre-service teachers. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8(2020), sa1 sa25. doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.306 baxan, v., pattison-meek, j., & campbell, a. b. (2020). dialogic pedagogy in graduate teacher education research advisement: a narrative account of three teacher educators. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8(2020), sa60 sa84. doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.308 cubero, m., bascon, m. j., & cubero-perez, r. (2020). “my tutor doesn’t say that”: the legitimized voices in dialogic reflection on teaching practices. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8(2020), sa26 sa44. doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.311 eriksen, h. l., & gradovski, m. (2020). ethical dilemmas in field placements: the experiences of social work students in norway and possible implications for social work education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8(2020), sa85-sa111. doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.322 hamilton, j., & carson, s. (2015). speaking of supervision: a dialogic approach to building higher degree research supervision capacity in the creative arts. educational philosophy and theory, 47(12), 1348-1366. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. 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(vol. 1): brill sense. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word dysthe, challenges and opportunities of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education, 04-20-2021, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a1 opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe university of bergen, norway abstract the aim of this interpretative, qualitative research study is to investigate affordances and constraints of dialogic pedagogy in the museums, as well as its broader contribution to society today. the background is my involvement in a danish development project called ‘museums and cultural institutions as spaces for citizenship,’ initiated by seven art museum educators in copenhagen and supported by the ministry of culture. denmark has a strong dialogic tradition dating back to grundtvig’s belief in the power of ´the oral word’ to foster democratic ‘bildung.’ museum education, on the other hand, has a long tradition of monologic transmission. still, a more participatory pedagogy has been gaining ground over many years. this study is based on the observations of three-hour-long teaching sessions in seven museums and has a bakhtinian framework. while the overall analysis builds on the whole project, two cases are discussed in more detail. the overarching research question is how central aspects of dialogic pedagogy played out in an art museum context and its opportunities and challenges. the subquestions focus on three central bakhtinian concepts: how did the educators facilitate multivoicedness during the short museum visits? what role did difference and disagreement play? what opportunities emerged for students to develop internally persuasive discourse? i have chosen these concepts because they are central in dialogism and combined them because they are closely connected in bakhtin’s work. the final reflections open a wider perspective of how dialogic museum education may contribute to overarching functions of education: qualification, socialization, and subjectification. key findings were that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. they succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than the exploration of diversity and difference. the practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. challenges experienced by the educators were, e.g., the dilemmas between preplanning and student choice and between disseminating their professional art knowledge and facilitating students’ meaning making and creativity. in contrast, students found the lack of workshop follow-up problematic. the article provides deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena. museum educators and non-museum classroom teachers may find it useful for cultivating greater dialogic interactions in respective learning contexts. olga dysthe is professor emerita in education at the university of bergen, norway. she has been involved in research and pedagogical development in higher education, schools, and museums. her research interest has been teaching and learning with a special focus on a dialogic perspective on writing, supervision, assessment and technology. she has published and edited 8 books in norwegian and danish, one of which is translated into english and spanish: dialogue-based learning. the museum as a learning issn: 2325-3290 (online) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a2 space. most of her articles in english, published for instance in written communication and studies in higher education, are based on empirical observation studies. ïïò introduction the junior high school students who are slowly coming into the entrance hall at the national gallery of denmark in copenhagen (smk) are already 20 minutes late. “eight grade students have their own pace,” says the teacher. nana, the museum educator, welcomes the 23 students whom she meets for the first time. she gives them a very short introduction to the impressive building and the plans for their 3-hour visit. the topic for the class visit is “the danish golden age and national identity,” a common topic for school visits in art museums. after 5 minutes, i can hear a girl commenting: ”oh my god, how boring.” the next hour she demonstrates her lack of interest by closing her eyes while standing or lying flat on the floor. four of the boys seem to have their own agenda and are edging away from the class. others are engaged in small-talk with each other. the students´ expectations seem low, except for three girls who show their enthusiasm about being in the museum and continuously ask questions. two hours later, after a visit to the exhibitions, discussion, and varied activities, all the students are engaged around computers in the workshop room of the museum in discussions about which of the eight photos their group has taken best symbolizes or illustrates national or personal identity. the girl, who initially demonstrated her boredom, tries to convince her group to choose a picture showing the faces of the group members: “can´t you see that we represent denmark as it is today: we all look danish, but three of us have either parents or grandparents who are born in other countries. they came as refugees or job seekers.” one of the four boys comments at the end: “this digital photo workshop saved the day for me.” (observation notes) the vignette above illustrates some of the challenges and opportunities for museum educators. first of all, museum educators meet classes of students they had not seen before and then only spend 1 – 3 hours together. many students have hardly been to a museum before, and some hide their insecurity by behaving like strangers in a strange land. others react negatively to the ‘force feeding’ of art. at first, my curiosity focused on whether disinterest and opposition could be turned around and how the museum educators would deal with this in order to initiate dialogue. schoolteachers, who interact with students in a class for months and sometimes several years, have very different relationship building and dialogue conditions than museum educators. it is easy to assume that museum educators are disadvantaged compared to schoolteachers when practicing dialogic pedagogy. however, my analysis shows that the issue is more complex and that museums have other dialogic potentials than schools. the purpose of this article is to provide deeper insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena and to show educators in other contexts the potential of bakhtin’s dialogism. the point of departure for the article is my involvement in a comprehensive danish development project called museums and cultural institutions as spaces for citizenship (later referred to as the “citizenship project”). it lasted from 2009-2014 and comprised seven institutions (later ten) in the copenhagen area.1 phase 1 of the project focused on teaching in the museums, phase 2 on pedagogical training of the many part-time museum 1 the initial participants in the citizenship project were the national gallery of denmark (smk), nikolaj art center, thorvaldsen’s museum, køge museum for art in public spaces, design museum denmark, j.f. willumsens museum and music in skoletjenesten. later three more cultural institutions joined the project: copenhagen city museum, the danish national theatre and the copenhagen opera. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a3 educators, and on how to curate exhibitions in new ways that would improve communication and dialogue with visitors, regardless of age.2 i was asked to join the project because of my long-standing interest in bakhtin, rommetveit, and other dialogic thinkers and my research on dialogic teaching practices in schools and universities (dysthe 1995, 1996, 2002, 2006). i was particularly involved in the first phase of the project and contributed to the seminars throughout the whole project period. the participating museum educators had all consciously tried to break with the one-sided, monologic tradition of transmission in museums. instead, they tried to engage students as participants in conversation and various forms of activities. the project group asked me to observe and then discuss a three-hour teaching sequence at each of the seven museums. this project resulted in the book: dialogue-based teaching — the art museum as a learning space. (dysthe, bernhardt & esbjørn, 2013). the project's purpose was to understand more about how educators could facilitate dialogic pedagogy in diverse ways in art museums, particularly its contribution to citizenship education. the book aimed to share our findings and reflections primarily with museum educators to support the ongoing pedagogical change. this article has a wider audience and aims to provide insight into museums as an alternative pedagogical arena, thus contributing to an understanding of how dialogic pedagogy inspired by bakhtin may work in practice. research questions my overarching research question in this article is: how did central aspects of dialogic pedagogy play out in an art museum context, and what were the opportunities and challenges? i focus on three of bakhtin’s concepts: ‘multivoicedness,’ ‘difference,’ and ‘authoritative vs. internally persuasive discourse.’ to investigate more specifically how these became manifest in the museum teaching sequences i observed, i formulated the following sub-questions: • how did the museum educators engage students in multivoiced dialogue, and how did students respond? • what were the implications of bakhtin’s emphasis on the difference in these museum cases, and to what extent did the educators encourage the development of students’ diverging views? • traditionally, the authoritative discourse has dominated teaching in schools as well as in museums. what opportunities for developing students’ internally persuasive discourse could be traced, and what conditions seemed necessary? i have chosen these concepts because they express crucial aspects of dialogism and are particularly important in education today because we live in what has been called a ‘post truth world’ (alexander, 2018), where dialogue is rare and divergent voices a threat. in bakhtin’s work, the concepts are closely interrelated, particularly in “the dialogic imagination” (1981) and “problems of dostoevsky’s poetics” (1984). in my view, they are so closely interwoven that they should not be separated. first of all, they go to the core of learning and ‘bildung’3 in a cultural context, i.e., participation, community, use of 2 the citizenship project received a lot of attention in denmark, and several articles and books have been written. my report to the ministry of culture formed the basis for a book published in norwegian and danish: dysthe, o., bernhardt, n. & esbjørn, l. (2012). dialogbasert undervisning. kunstmuseet som læringsrom. the book was translated and published in english and spanish in 2013: dialogue-based teaching. the art museum as a learning space; enseãnza basada en el diágolo. el museo de arte como espacio de aprendizaje. 3 the german word ‘bildung’ has no direct equivalent in the english language but refers to educational formation and development. education is seen as a lifelong process of human development, rather than mere training in gaining certain external knowledge or skills (erziehung and ausbildung). bildung in contrast is seen as a process wherein an individual's spiritual and cultural sensibilities as well as life, personal and social skills are in process of continual expansion and growth. bildung is seen as a way to become freer due to higher self-reflection. (wikipedia) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a4 language, developing knowledge through multivoiced dialogic interaction. secondly, coping with difference and divergence cannot be separated from dialogue. it involves, for instance, listening to and developing respect for ‘the other’ and his or her divergent views, question one’s certainties, and develop a point of view and stand up for it. all of this is part of moving from an authoritative towards an internally persuasive discourse and inherent in the maintenance of democracy in a society. thirdly, art museums are interesting sites to explore this, as a work of art is always polyphonic and cannot be reduced to one correct interpretation. nevertheless, people disagree violently over art, whether they visit museums or not. although there is a danger of jeopardizing the complexity of each of the three concepts by including all of them, i hope to indicate some opportunity spaces of dialogic pedagogy. in the concluding reflections, i open up perspectives on the wider importance of dialogic museum education by relating my findings to the functions of education in society: qualification, socialisation, and subjectification, as expressed by the educational philosopher gert biesta (biesta, 2009, 2020). he is relevant to my topic because he is concerned with the purpose of education and what it means to exist as a subject in the world through resistance and dialogue (biesta, 2018). my own bakhtinian background my interest in bakhtin dates back to my university study of world literature. we read bakhtin’s book, problems of dostoevsky’s poetics, as a fundamental contribution to understanding the authoring of novels in general and ‘polyphonic’ literary artworks in particular. i gradually discovered that in this book, “bakhtin developed his dialogical thinking, his ‘dialogism’ most comprehensively” (børtnes, 1999, p. 21). as a high school teacher for 15 years, verbal interaction in classrooms had always been high on my agenda. still, bakhtin’s importance for educators became particularly evident to me when i observed a number of high school classes in the san francisco bay area during a year of my ph.d. spent at berkeley in 1992 (dysthe, 1995, 1996). simultaneously i read martin nystand’s research studies based on systematic observation of approximately 100 high school classes in the midwest (nystrand & gamoran, 1991). the contrast between transmission and dialogically based teaching in the classes i observed was striking and resonated with nystand’s findings. as an observer, i realised that the crucial aspect was whether students were given opportunities to talk, agree and disagree and formulate their own understanding in interaction with others, instead of being fed the correct answers and expected to reproduce them. based on these observations, my first published article got the title: “the multivoiced classroom” (dysthe, 1996). bakhtin’s theoretical approach resonated with my classroom experiences and has been at the core of my pedagogical thinking ever since. given the opportunity to observe the pedagogy of museum educators a decade later, i was curious how bakhtin’s ideas played out in such a setting. what are museums for? changing conceptions the starting point of public art museums in the western world was part of a major humanistic ‘bildung’ project in the spirit of the enlightenment (bernhardt & esbjørn, 2013, pp. 18-24). anderson (1991) argues that the historical emergence of museums has been associated with the rise of nationalism and aimed at fostering national identity. the long tradition in art museums of making cultural heritage and new art forms accessible to visitors is still very much alive today. however, the classical ‘bildung’ tradition with authoritative narratives disseminated to visitors, has changed. current museological research describes a paradigm shift in the concept of the museums: they are becoming learning arenas, where the users are seen as co-producers of knowledge and experiences generated in the museum space. eilean hooper-greenhill, an important voice in new museology, called it a shift from the modern and modernist to the postmodernist museum opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a5 (hooper-greenhill, 2000). another influential professor of museology, george hein, calls the change paradigmatic: …some writers describe this increased emphasis on education and public service as a “paradigm shift” for museums, arguing that past museums were musty, inward-looking collections of objects, while today they are recognized as educational institutions committed to serving a divergent public (hein, 2012, p. 178). this change also means a different role for museum educators, who have a long tradition of delivering talks and lectures to visitors of all ages. they saw themselves and were seen by the visitors as providers, facilitators, and mediators of authoritative knowledge about art. the museum visitors were recipients and consumers of their expertise in the field. some educators and many adult visitors still prefer this transmission model. however, participation and dialogue have become the ideal promoted in the strategy documents of many art museums and practiced by experienced educators. this has its background in changing conceptions in art theory as well as in pedagogy. “in a traditional modernist view of art, the work of art is autonomous and self-referential. …. the artwork has an inherent meaning, an essence, that can be decoded if you have the right tools and the right knowledge” (bernhard & esbjørn, 2013, p. 35). in reaction to the idea of autonomous artwork, conceptual artists in the 1960s pointed to art as an idea, thinking device, and process. the viewer is no longer seen as a passive receiver but is supposed to use his or her background and experiences from everyday life to find meaning, often in dialogue with others. the expansion of the concept of an ‘artwork’ occurs simultaneously with an overall postmodernist discourse. …when meaning is not conceived as a core of the artwork but as something that arises in a complex network of contexts and relations …the viewer is not just a passive receiver … in a teaching situation, for example, meaning arises in the encounter between students, the works of art, the museum, the curator, and the larger social context (ibid, p. 36). the expert knowledge of the museum educator is another aspect to be added to this relational web of meaning making. dialogic pedagogical teaching practice in art museums can thus be seen as compatible with or even as an expression and expansion of the same tendency. it is important for students and other visitors to understand that a work of art can be approached in many ways and have different meanings to different people. the next step is to engage visitors to use their own creativity in ‘practical aesthetic learning processes,’ as exemplified in all my seven case studies.4 in the citizenship project, curators have collaborated with educators to find new ways of engaging visitors in active participation in the exhibitions, for instance, by extending the interactive format of information or by encouraging visitors to be creative themselves. in the national gallery of denmark, an exhibition of flower art through the centuries invited visitors to make drawings of live flowers provided along with materials in the exhibition center. art museums are not classrooms, and most museum educators are not teachers by profession, but museums are recognized today as important alternative arenas for teaching and learning (falk & dierking, 2012). museum educators, which is the term they prefer to use instead of teachers, have traditionally had much less status than museum curators who compose the exhibitions. the recognition of educators in the museum has recently risen, and all modern museums now seek highly qualified educators. the term 4 the citizenship project consists of seven case studies (see table 1). only two of these are dealt with in this article. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a6 ‘museum educator’ is used to acknowledge their need to distinguish their role as teachers in museums from teachers in schools. the museum educators you will meet in this article struggle to combine their role as knowledge providers for a new generation with minimal experience of art and museums, with their own pedagogical ideal of co-construction of meaning through dialogic interaction. some of the educators in this project were educated as teachers and inspired by constructivism and dialogism during their education. others came to embrace new education ideals because they corresponded with their learning of new theories of art, as mentioned above. all the educators said they joined the citizenship project to learn more about how dialogic pedagogy could help them develop as educators. in the application to the ministry of culture, the seven museum educators expressed that transmission pedagogy was not compatible with the modern art theory. instead, they had tried to engage the museum visitors in talk and collaboration, which led to a need for a better understanding of dialogic pedagogy. the museum educators i met in this project had very high thoughts about the importance of museums in society and the value of school visits. this made me interested in how museum education relates to the functions of education in general. the european philosopher of education, gert biesta, has used the three concepts, ‘qualification,’ ‘socialisation’ and ‘subjectification,’ to describe the main functions of education in society (biesta, 2010, biesta 2020, biesta & lawy, 2006). ‘education’ is much wider than what happens in schools. in the concluding discussion of this article, i will define and explain the functions and reflect on how teaching and learning in museums may contribute to these domains of purposes. overview of content section ii in this article, “methods and materials,” provides information about the following issues: a) the citizenship project, b) the danish museum project, which is the context for the empirical cases i present in this article, as well as c) the interpretative, ethnographical research methods i used. section iii, “two empirical cases: how museum educators practiced dialogic pedagogy,” is the central part of the article. it starts with a short introduction to key concepts before describing the two cases, each with long transcripts of conversations between students and museum educators and a running discussion of what is going on. the purpose of the transcripts is to give readers a chance to get on the inside and see for themselves what dialogic interaction among students and museum educators may look like. particular attention is paid to students’ own sense-making as they encounter classical sculptures in the thorvaldsen museum and how they develop and express their emerging internally persuasive word. section iv, “presentation and discussion of findings” here, i return to my research questions and present and discuss the major findings. instead of a separate theory section, i have chosen to integrate theory with the empirical examples from section iii to discuss the concepts more relevant for educators. particular attention is paid to five bakhtinian concepts: multivoicedness, heteroglossia, polyphony, difference, and authoritative vs. internally persuasive discourse. finally, i reflect on the wider importance of museum education in “concluding reflections” with a point of departure in the three functions of education as explained by gert biesta. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a7 methods and material the empirical basis is an interpretive, qualitative study based on observations in seven art museums in the copenhagen area, all participants in a pedagogical development project. i observed one teaching session in each art museum where children and youth came on field trips accompanied by one or two schoolteachers. table 1 shows an overview of the seven cases, with students from 9 to 19 years old. the museum educators chose the theme of each teaching session. they planned the content and pedagogical approach, according to the following structure agreed on by all the seven educators who participated in the project: 1) introductory conversation with the class about the museum and the day's topic. 2) visit to the art collections or exhibition, including varied activities. 3) a practical aesthetic workshop where students collaborated in small groups to solve a project assignment. even though only two of these cases are central in the article, i chose to present table 1 with an overview of all the cases in my project. this gives the reader an idea of the scope of topics and the variety of assignments and age groups. this article focuses on two cases, nikolaj art) and thorvaldsen’s museum, both marked in italics: table 1: sites, data source, participants, project assignment name of institution & museum educator theme of teaching sequence object of study in the museum’s exhibitions students group project practical-aesthetic assignment arken museum of modern art andreas “how does architecture affect us?” the building (arken) 9-11 yrs. old 21 students students’ experience take photos and make a comic strip j. f. willumsen museum lisbeth “self-representation – me, you and the others” j.f. willumsen’s self portraits 10-11 yrs. old 18 students group workshop on willumsen selfportraits køge museum of art in public spaces (køs) kirsten “unfinished history” bjørn nørgaard’s studies for queen margrethe ii’s historical tapestries 13-14 yrs. old 23 students make a sketch for a tapestry for their own time. persons, events, objects. nikolaj art center hilde “the staging of power”/ “deficit of democracy” ismar cirkinagic’s installation bricks of enlightenment – ml 2090 (orwell’s 1984) 14–16 yrs. old 23 students a. the architecture of power in denmark and abroad b. problems of democracy national gallery of denmark (smk) nana “national identity” paintings in the golden age rooms of danish paintings 14–15 yrs. old 17 students a photo that symbolizes national or personal identity design museum denmark rikke “sustainability” the bauhaus section of the permanent modernist exhibition 18 -19 yrs. old 20 students plan the city hall square in copenhagen as a sustainable zone for all age groups thorvaldsen’s museum line & jane “new words to thorvaldsen” sculptures of thorvaldsen chosen by students 18-19 yrs. old 20 students make a new label for a self-chosen sculpture and defend your sign the citizenship project was initiated by the seven museum educators themselves, who had successfully applied for funding from the danish ministry of culture. they subsequently invited experts from opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a8 different fields to a series of seminars and workshops, with the purpose of improving their own understanding of museum teaching and learning in general and dialogic pedagogy in particular. george hein, a worldwide respected museum educator and theoretician from the usa, was also among them. i spent considerable time visiting each of the seven sites before the observations took place to familiarize myself with the museums and their different traditions. my research over the years has been predominantly qualitative, and i had long experience in classroom observation. qualitative research methods can help discover some universals inductively through concrete cases. “each instance of a classroom is seen as its own unique system, which nonetheless displays universal properties of teaching. these properties are manifested in the concrete, not in the abstract…” (erickson, 1986, p. 130). i chose an interpretive, qualitative method for this study because my aim was to come close to what was actually going on when museum educators and students met in the different physical spaces of the museums. the data collected consisted of either video or audio recordings of all the three-hour teaching sessions in the seven sites. in addition, i took systematic field notes and some pictures. i collected all the data myself, except for one video recordings made by another museum educator who was an observer in that session, and one made by a then present doctoral student. the tape recordings were transcribed by me after each observation and supplemented with my field notes and written reflections. immediately after the students had left, i met with the museum educator to discuss what had happened and what to think of it. i took short notes of our conversation and supplemented these soon afterward. a questionnaire to the students after their return to their school classes was planned, but only a few students responded. therefore, the questionnaire could not be used as systematic data. i talked to many students informally during the sessions, which provided spontaneous and useful information, but i could not conduct formal student interviews. it is a limitation of my study that systematic data about the students’ reactions is missing. data collection and analysis were influenced by professor steinar kvale’s ethical standards for qualitative research (1996). recurrent viewing and listening to the video recordings and audiotapes were a very important part of my analysis. only selected parts of the comprehensive recorded material were transcribed. the analytic categories i used were primarily theoretical, for instance, ‘multivoicedness’ inspired by bakhtin, his distinction between ‘authoritative’ and ‘internally persuasive discourses, and nystrand et al.’s ‘authentic vs. inauthentic questions,’ ‘uptake’ and ‘high evaluation’ (1997). more important than the categories themselves was an awareness of the different perspectives behind analysis and evaluation, - as well as the possible overlaps because concepts used in the analysis are rarely, if ever, value-free. as burbules (2000) and linell (2009) have pointed out, ‘dialogue’ has, for most people, but not all, positive connotations, while the opposite is the case with ‘monologue.’ even if the concepts were neutral, i as a researcher have my own preconception, for instance about what i think are good pedagogical approaches. the researcher´s own values and biases are obviously important in a qualitative study. dialogic pedagogy was the expressed goal of the museum educators i observed. it was a challenge to distinguish between different notions of dialogue, on the one hand, and on the other, to be aware of how what i saw and my interpretations, were coloured by my own values. one way i tried to clarify these for myself was to reflect on which dialogic thinkers had influenced my own understanding of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy, whom i agreed with and whom i disagreed with. my background as a high school teacher in norway for 15 years has also colored my views of what is good teaching and my fundamental pedagogical beliefs. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a9 for this article, i have made a new dialogic analysis of extended transcripts from the observations in nikolaj art center and thorvaldsen’s museum. the decision about what cases and parts of interactions to include was made in light of my research questions. i also wanted to show the challenges of planning and conducting the first version of a workshop (nikolaj) compared to a workshop that had been repeatedly revised, based on how it worked out for a great number of classes (thorvaldsen). some of the cases in the project served as data for a doctoral dissertation and were analysed from a different theoretical perspective (sattrup, 2015).5 an anthology in danish about the whole project has been published (villumsen, rugaard & sattrup, (eds.) 2014).6 the ethical issues of the research study were taken care of by the project group. all the involved participants were informed about the project: its purpose and the methods of collecting and handling the data. all gave their consent to participate. no real names of students are used in the publications of the book and articles from the project. the museum educators decided to use their own names. a special procedure was used to ensure informed consent to take and publish pictures for the book, but this is not relevant for this article as no pictures of participants are included. empirical cases: dialogic pedagogy in two art museums this study is based on sociocultural and dialogical perspectives on knowledge and learning. it is particularly based on the bakhtin’s socio-cultural perspective (bakhtin, 1986, 1981, 1994). all meaningmaking happens through some form of dialogic interaction, arising out the creative differences of contrasting and supplementing voices. bakhtin claims on the one hand that all communication is basically dialogic, while on the other hand, there are degrees of dialogicality in different contexts. even within authoritarian regimes, dialogue still takes place, although sometimes underground (wertsch, 2002). so, also in educational contexts. dialogue is, according to bakhtin, both a fact of life and a goal to be pursued. a short introduction to key concepts before entering the museums, a short introduction to some key bakhtinian concepts is needed to make sense of the presentation and discussion of the empirical cases. they will be elaborated on in the discussion. bakhtin often used the concept of voice. it is important to note that voice to him comprised the central aspects of the whole person: “a person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. he participates in it not only with his thoughts but with his fate and with his entire individuality” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 293). many students never raise their voices in the educational setting; they may be too shy, feel they have nothing to say, or nobody shows any interest in hearing what they have to say. in some cases, the classroom has not been a safe place for the students to voice their opinion. they talked through the authoritative voices of textbooks and teachers instead of their own. students bring such experiences with them when they visit museums. an important step for the two educators we are about to meet is, therefore, to create conditions that make it safe for all students to speak and be heard and offer them nonverbal ways of expression. my key bakhtinian concept is ‘multivoicedness.’ it is closely linked to ‘heteroglossia’ (hetrodiscoursia) and ‘polyphony’. the prefixes ‘multi’ and ‘poly’ indicate that there are many voices and ‘hetero’ refers to their differences. i have chosen to use multivoicedness for both these aspects. according to bakhtin, words or discourses are ‘authoritative’ when fused with the authority and 5 a phd-thesis that used empirical material from the project was published by lise sattrup (2015) jamen, hvad skal vi kigge efter? om at gentænke kunstmuseers demokratiske rolle. (rethinking the democratic role of museums. an investigation of how teaching in art museums enables children’s citizenship.) she used a performativity concept of both art and democracy (j. rancier & c. mouffe). 6 the anthology edited by villumsen, rugaard & sattrup (2014) rum for medborgerskap (space for citizenship), has a wider perspective on the project, for instance organizational change (g. hein), cultural citizenship (c. haas), and competence development of museum educators (j. bendix & l. esbjørn). opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a10 tradition of institutions or people in powerful positions. in educational settings, this may be the words of the teacher and the textbook if there is little room for doubt or disagreement. in discourse in the novel, bakhtin defined ‘internally persuasive discourse’ as a critical stance to a text, and he talks about experimenting, imagining alternatives, evaluating, and challenging the text (bakhtin, 1981). this is equally relevant when a work of art is in the center and not a text. museum educators talking to visitors are often expected to expound authoritative interpretations of a work of art, although they also present alternatives. a person is engaged in internally persuasive discourse when different ideas expressed by diverse voices collide with each other in a dialogue in which these ideas are tested. the museum sites and the structure of the sessions i have chosen to present and discuss two of the seven cases included in my research study, so i can go deeper in the analysis, particularly related to the concepts above. the first one is from nikolaj contemporary art center, where the installation “bricks of enlightenment. ml 2090” -despite its cryptic title, centered around george orwell’s dystopic novel 1984. the book has raised concerns about democracy and suppression since its publication in 1949. i chose this case for three reasons. firstly, it demonstrates the potential of visits to art centers for reflection on important contemporary issues. secondly, it exemplifies a fairly typical introductory dialogue. and thirdly, it shows how even the best-intentioned and dialogically minded educator fails and has to rethink and revise her teaching design. the second and most extensively documented case is from the venerable, classical thorvaldsen’s museum, symbolically located close to the parliament (christianborg) in the center of copenhagen. i have chosen “new words for thorvaldsen” because this case is a unique example of how a dialogic pedagogy approach, regardless of topic, may provide an opening to the “internally persuasive word” and give students a chance to trust their own interpretation of works of art, instead of just accepting ‘the authoritative word’7 of tradition or the educators as experts. the seven museum educators in the project had, as mentioned before, agreed on following the same structure in their sessions: 1) introduction and an educator-led full-class conversation about the topic of the day. 2) a visit to the exhibitions, including varied activities. 3) a practical aesthetic workshop where the students worked in groups with an assignment related to the topic, ending with a presentation of the students’ work, questions, and comments. in conclusion, a short ´consolidation talk´ where students were asked to share what they remembered best from the visit, and the teacher and students together formulated some major points of learning from the day. in this article, i pay most attention to 1) and 2) in the nikolaj case, while the practical aesthetic workshop is highlighted in the thorvaldsen case. all parts of the 3-hour session were planned as unity and closely interconnected. however, the art museum setting affords special opportunities for students to collaborate on projects related to the exhibitions, and a majority of the students in the few evaluation surveys conducted by the schoolteachers afterward mentioned the workshop experience as the most rewarding part of the museum visit. “it made my day,” as the boy in the vignette expressed it. a comprehensive presentation of all the seven cases can be found in dysthe, bernhard & esbjørn (2013). case #1: “the staging of power” (nikolaj art center) nikolaj contemporary art center is a converted church building in the center of copenhagen, with changing exhibitions but no collections. the installation “bricks of enlightenment ml 2090” by the danishbosnian artist ismar cirkinagic was based on george orwell´s dystopic novel 1984. 7 the russian word «word» (slovo, слово) means «word» or «discourse» depending on its context. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a11 this novel has had a renewed actuality over the last few years.8 i have chosen to cite jean seaton’s introduction to her article “why 1984 could be about now” (bbc culture stories) in order to show the great potential of artwork to raise awareness of aspects that are highly relevant to citizenship education. reading 1984, george orwell’s claustrophobic fable of totalitarianism is still a shock. first comes the start of recognition: we recognise what he describes. doublethink (holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time), newspeak, the thought police, the ministry of love that deals in pain, despair and annihilates any dissident, the ministry of peace that wages war, the novel-writing machines that pump out pornography to buy off the masses. with its disorientating first sentence, the book, “it was a bright cold day in april, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” defines the peculiar characteristics of modern tyranny. winston smith, the protagonist, works as a censor in the ministry of truth in a constant updating of history to suit present circumstances and shifting alliances. he and his fellow workers are controlled as a mass collective by the all-seeing and all-knowing big brother presence. in 1984 television screens watch you, and everyone spies on everyone else. today, social media collects every gesture, purchase, and comments we make online and feeds an omniscient presence in our lives that can predict our every preference. modeled on consumer choices, where the user is the commodity that is being marketed, the harvesting of those preferences for political campaigns is now distorting democracy. but the greatest horror in orwell’s dystopia is the systematic stripping of meaning out of language. the regime aims to eradicate words and the ideas and feelings they embody. its real enemy is reality. tyrannies attempt to make understanding the real world impossible: seeking to replace it with phantoms and lies (http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180507-why-orwells-1984-could-be-about-now). the artist´s expressed political intention with the installation was to awaken people to the danger signs for the future of democracy today. although the topic itself made students reflect on freedom and suppression, the installation itself was not easy to make sense of. the central object in the installation is a model of the infamous combination of the ministry of war and the ministry of love. there are other artifacts but no text from the novel. hilde, the museum educator, thought that the installation might be rather inaccessible for young people without guidance because it takes for granted that visitors know the gist of the novel and can make sense of the objects in light of their previous knowledge. in advance, she had therefore carefully prepared and sent some written information material to the school. still, she was informed by the schoolteacher as the class entered the exhibition, that this had not been read or talked about. it is, however, also possible that the installation might provoke visitors to read the novel afterward. the introduction and the educator-led conversation about the topic the visiting student group, consisting of 20 girls and three boys from 14-16 in a visual art-class, had thus no clue about the content in orwell’s dystopic novel and knew little or nothing about the political development since the fall of the iron wall. hilde’s task, as she saw it, was to facilitate an eye-opening 8 orwell’s novel 1984 became a bestseller in the us after trump’s election as president. photo #1: the installation poster (dysthe) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a12 experience that would enable them to discuss the relevance of the installation to their own life world and democratic practice today. what hilde chose to do, after a few minutes’ introductions about nikolaj art center itself, was to send the students on a 10 minutes’ walk on their own around the installation and ask them to write for 7 minutes about their impressions. observing and listening to the students share what they had written, it was obvious to me that their curiosity had been awakened in a majority of the students. they asked the teacher a lot of questions in order to make sense of what they had seen. they had been immediately struck by the suggestive atmosphere in the installation. this made them propose different interpretations. here is an excerpt from the conversation between the hilde and the students: hilde (museum educator): what made an impression on you while you walked around in the installation? student 1: i said in the exhibition that ‘freedom is slavery.’ and i mean i don’t agree with that. hilde: no. so, it made an impression on you the reality is turned around in a way? (hilde revoices student 1) student 1: yes, turned upside down. (student 1 reaffirms by revoicing the teacher’s words) student 2: i wrote “indifference.” hilde: indifference – is that your own feeling you’re describing? (uptake and asking for clarification) student 2: yes, i think when you come in here, you feel sort of indifferent, because it is so big, and yes, … it was actually… hilde: so, the first feeling that really hit you, it was sort of … student 2: emptiness hilde: a feeling of emptiness (uptake) student 2: and also, the grey and the cold hilde: yes, ok. what about all you who sit over there. what have you written down? let us hear from more of you. what about you in the back? (hilde is trying to involve more students in conversation) student 3: me? i have also written ‘indifference.’ it is very big and very, very grey and very empty, which is also part of being both ministry of war and ministry of love. then you feel indifferent. hilde: ok. and you who nod, does it mean that you agree? student 4: yes, i have also written ‘indifferent and closed.’ we talked about these feelings. (student explains why so many have the same wording) hilde: try to describe this indifference – is it the same we heard about down here, that you felt empty and rejected, or? student 5: yes, it is just cold in here, cold and indifferent … hilde: it seems the three of you have experienced a rather strong atmosphere, which you seem to share with your classmate here. what do you say? student 6: it´s a little sort of like … i´ve written “habermas´ alienization,” that is, all that about the system world taking over the lifeworld and stuff like that.9 9 habermas is a german philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. his work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere. he also wrote about power and clientifisation. photo #2: “the ministry of war and love” (dysthe) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a13 hilde: that is an interesting thought – is that a conception that you link to this whole installation or to your experience of the installation? student 6: yes, to the installation …that there has to be so much control – and everything has to be so efficient, the whole world, and stuff. for example, in netto (a grocery store), they’ve started with no cashiers, so you have to check out things yourself, and yeah, we’re gradually all of us treated like clients by the system. it is powerful and has taken over our lifeworld. hilde: is this something you have discussed a lot in class? student 6: a little. hilde: have you all read habermas – i think that is kind of cool? student 7: have we read what? student 8: habermas? hilde: habermas – the philosopher habermas, because there was a reference to a theory of his. it is kind of hard going to read, i would say. i’m not sure we can elaborate very much on habermas right now, but i really understand your point because he… student 6: i also think that v for vendetta was very meaningful. hilde: what do you mean? student 6: v for vendetta, a movie i started thinking about because there is a v in there. hilde: yes, of course, i also thought of that,… that would have influenced your associations. someone else who wants to contribute? student 9: i have also written that it feels grey and cold and boring, but also that there were no windows in the ministry. this makes you feel that something takes place inside, which is not good. hilde: ok student 9: and which should be hidden away hilde: a secret world or something hidden? student: yes, there may be terrible things going on, like torture … hilde: so you get such vague impressions? student 9: yes. student 6: and also that it was grey. i thought that there is no contrast, that everything is sort of uniform, there is no room for difference and stuff …layer upon layer, there is always something that controls what´s beneath … hilde: there is always something being repeated one story above? student 6: yes, there is always something above. hilde: yes. so the impression of the ministry of war and love in the model up there, becomes physical and sensory for you when you walk around. i hear from many of you that here, at least in this part of the exhibition, that you experience something cold and hostile and secret. you say you have the impression of something going on that shouldn’t be going on behind the scenes. this conversation or dialogue is characterized by the educator hilde’s genuine interest in hearing the students' voices and the way they expressed their first, rather vague impressions of an installation. the students could not quite make sense of it, but the atmosphere made them uncomfortable. the conversation relies on students’ “writing before talking,” a strategy used by all the educators in this project. a few minutes of individual writing seemed to make students reflect and eager to share their thoughts. often this resulted in more depth of reflection. all the seven museum educators i observed saw writing-before-talking as an important element in eliciting the students' voices, especially those who were reluctant to speak in class. having something written down on paper makes it easier for them to share. i recognized this situation from my own time in school. i was shy, insecure, and afraid of being seen as stupid in class, and i did not like to speak up unless i had to. and often, i did not know what i thought before i had written. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a14 this conversation is multivoiced in the sense that more than half of the students in the class participate. it is dialogic in the sense that the students supplement one another and extend the shared feeling of greyness and discomfort; it is cumulative. but it is not dialogic in the bakhtinian sense that the student voices are very different, express disagreement, or contradict one another. an important function of this conversation is to establish a culture of oral participation and shared experience: here is a museum educator who wants to hear their voices and who takes an interest in what they have to say. i saw variations of this in all seven cases. my interpretation is that this has an important function since the students and the educator have not met one another before. the introductory conversation sets the scene of mutual expectations, and the students experience that their voices are taken seriously. does the conversation contribute to the students’ understanding of the installation? the educator has given them no clue at all about the installation before asking them to take a walk around, except telling them the theme for their visit, “the staging of power,” and showing them the poster in the foyer. nevertheless, the see-write-talk exercise made it possible for them to establish a common framework of understanding based on their sensory experiences. from the transcript, we understand that the installation had given the students who speak a feeling of the grey atmosphere and made them come close to grasping some of the interpretive keys of a place where something nasty is going on inside the building with such a paradoxical name: ministry of war and love. hilde asked open questions and used uptake quite consistently (nystrand et al., 1997). she helped the students articulate their vague intuition, primarily by giving them space to elaborate their thoughts without guiding their interpretation. it is quite common that teachers subtly revoice what students are saying to strengthen the students’ own (authoritative) interpretations. but this did not happen here. neither did hilde comment nor tell them how she herself had experienced the atmosphere. instead, she prioritized letting the students’ voices be heard. it is in my view it was rather surprising that hilde did not follow up on the girl (student 6) who referred to habermas, as it was spot on to point to his theory of what happens when the system world takes over the lifeworld of the citizens. the 1984 scenario was an extreme case of this, and it was impressive of the 14 years old girl to grasp this and make this reference to the philosopher. from the transcript, student 6 seems to understand what she is talking about and does not mention habermas to show off to the class and the teacher. she even gives a contemporary example from copenhagen: the grocery store netto had just started the increasingly common praxis of forcing people to do their own checkout in order to save money on employees to do that job. when i had been shopping in netto, my reaction had been the same as hers: i felt that the capitalistic profit system was encroaching on my life world, and much more so on the employees’ who lost their jobs. we cannot be sure what kind of connection the student sees between netto and 1984 since the book is not about a capitalistic profit system but a totalitarian utopia prescribed by the state. hilde, however, chose to ignore this contribution from student 6 after she posed a question to the class about who had heard of the german philosopher habermas led to just blank faces. in my view, this was a missed opportunity. she could have asked student 6 to give her classmates a minilecture on habermas’ theory and explain in her own words how she saw a similarity and difference between the system taking over in the novel 1984 and in our contemporary lifeworld. an important aspect of dialogic pedagogy is to draw on students’ own knowledge and opinions, and i experienced several instances during my observation period where the class was much more willing to listen attentively to a fellow student than to the museum educator. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a15 we will never know whether this was a missed opportunity to create a link between the message in the installation and students’ own lives. in any case, it is an instance of the constraints of the teaching situation in a museum compared to a schoolteacher’s situation. a class teacher would most likely know her students well enough to judge whether this would have led to a distraction or an enrichment for the rest of the students and a feeling of embarrassment or a feeling of contribution for student 6. a class teacher would also have had a chance to return to habermas later in the week, while hilde had just these 3 hours. extended visit in the installation and a short workshop hilde’s next move was to accompany the students into the exhibition and ask them to make a sketch of the war & love ministry building. since this was a visual art class, it was a welcome assignment, while i noticed in other classes that strong protests met any assignment that involved drawing: “i cannot draw.” hilde then suggested that she could read aloud from orwell’s novel while they were drawing, and the students thought this was a good idea. since the model of the ministry of war and love was the centerpiece in the installation, she chose first to read a passage where winston, the protagonist, tells about his impression of the ministry building. he had only seen it from the outside before he was arrested. the difference is dramatic after he is arrested and sits in a white cell inside the building. every time he moves, a voice roars at him from a surveyance camera eye on the wall. by reading aloud, hilde tried to compensate for the students’ lack of background knowledge and prepare for another conversation about the relevance of the author’s message. the read-aloud made a strong impression on the students, and it confirmed their vague feeling of something secret and evil going on inside the building. interestingly, the artist had first planned to make a continuous reading of the novel over the loudspeaker system, part of the installation. still, instead, he settled on a voice reading monotonously the bare facts about the building itself. as the students finished their drawing, hilde shared with them what the artist had written in the program about his expressed intention behind the installation: to raise awareness of dangers to democracy in our western world and reflections about the mechanisms of surveyance and suppression today. she did not ask the students what they thought those dangers could be. up to this point, the students had got a lot of input about ways of oppression and the consequences of the loss of democratic rights and the invasion of “big brother,” even in their homes, might have for the inhabitants. unfortunately, the rest of the workshop lost the connection between 1984 and the theme of the installation. how could this happen to a very experienced museum educator? it turned out that hilde’s creative idea about how to involve the students backfired. through the class teacher, she had asked them to bring an artifact from home symbolizing ‘love and power’ (associated with the name of the replica of the “ministry of love and war). eight of the students had done so, and they brought a coin, a key chain, a mobile phone, an old bible, etc. hilde sat down on the floor with the eight students around her. the rest of the class, however, felt excluded and visibly disengaged after a while, as the eight students shared their personal stories connected to the artifacts that hilde arranged on a big sheet of paper where she wrote keywords (for instance, ‘suppressed,’ ‘excluded, ‘access’). photo #3: (dysthe) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a16 student 1 (had brought the coin): it symbolizes something that has power over us; often, money takes over our lives. hilde: who else of you brought a coin? come here and tell us why. student 2: i thought about love, that it can symbolize people who love money. …and then also, money is power.… hilde: yes, power and economy are often tied together. is there also a connection between money and ideology? …we have mentioned totalitarian societies, but also democracy. is it possible to say something about money and the different forms of government we just touched on? initially, the students gave examples that could apply to many, and hilde, as the comment quoted above, shows, tried to make students think of connections to the installation topic, but this was never picked up. the polyphonic interaction, which characterized the first part of the session, became more and more limited. gradually, the students’ private stories totally overshadowed the installation, which was hardly mentioned again. the thematic focus from the first part of the session was lost. the rest of the students showed their lack of interest by focusing on their phones or chatting among themselves. bad acoustics enhanced the disengagement of the majority of the students in the room, but hilde blamed herself when we talked about it afterward, especially by letting the eight students wish to explain their artifacts dominate. a series of monologues thus substituted the initial dialogic conversation. a short time was left for the workshop. nevertheless, instead of consulting with the class, hilde went ahead with the workshop as planned: groups of 5-6 got a camera each and was asked to make a 3-minutes film on the theme of love and power, which they did. the groups seemed to enjoy the practical assignment, but none of the videos produced in the groups had anything to do with the installation. when we talked after the session, hilde felt that she had failed, despite the promising start. the students had neither discovered the “red thread of meaning” which she had planned, nor had she succeeded in helping them find their own meaning. she listed several things she could have handled differently: firstly, she could have planned alternative activities for the students who did not bring artifacts. secondly, she could have limited the space of irrelevant personal stories. thirdly, she could have discussed the workshop with the whole class. hilde immediately started thinking about how to re-design the plan for the next school visit. revision of teaching design or activities is not unusual since one difference between the pedagogical context of museum educators and schoolteachers is that in museums, the same sequence is taught over and over again, depending on the number of scheduled school visits. in the big museums, many educators, some employed on short-term contracts, some permanent, use the same teaching design, and improvement or re-design are therefore ongoing. hilde's new plan was more traditional than the original one but included student choice of workshop. it retained the initial write-to-talk session. afterward, the students could choose between the following three topics: 1) “the architecture of power in denmark and abroad,” 2) “problems of democracy” (based on a recent much-debated scandal about surveillance and control in denmark). 3) “aesthetic analysis of the installation.” thus, the interests of different students could be accommodated. i could not observe how the revised plan worked in practice, as i had returned to norway by then. according to hilde, it had worked well. she was particularly pleased that the groups had engaged in heated discussions due to disagreements in the groups. the presentation by each group in plenary confirmed that the students had gained a lot of insight into their respective topics. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a17 discussion of case 1 “art is a contested terrain that offers different ways of considering, imagining, and representing our lived situation” (desai & chalmers, 2007, p. 7). the installation by the artist ismar cirkinagic in the nikolaj case brings up the question of what the relationship should be between art education and society at large. to what extent should art educators “explore contemporary art practices that may assist and inspire us to engage critically with a variety of pressing issues”? (ibid, p. 6).10 hilde´s intention with the sequence was as expressed in her subject goals: “to give the students an opportunity to understand the background of the installation, to relate it to their own lives, and to prepare a comment that includes their own reality” (dysthe, bernhardt & esbjørn, p.140). her goal formulation indicates that hilde´s focus is not so much on the critical exploration as on the personal. the description and analysis above have shown that she did not succeed. since there is often more to learn from a failure than from success, i will discuss some reasons that possibly caused the failure of the second part of the session, despite such a promising opening. hilde was one of the main drivers behind the citizenship project, and she was deeply committed to exploring dialogic pedagogy. as a museum educator, she searched for creative and untraditional ways of engaging students by helping them see the connection to their own lives. matusov (2009) has called this ‘ontological engagement.’ preplanning student visits always involves making assumptions about what will work. this time, however, her creative ideas had not worked. hilde had assumed that “power and love” would engage the students more than “the demise of democracy,” which was the artist´s stated intention with the installation. instead of continuing in the dialogic atmosphere established in the first conversation, she went ahead with the plan she had made. in the first session, hilde encouraged multivoicedness in the conversation with the students. she genuinely wanted to hear as many voices as possible, but the fact that she did not take up the challenge from the girl who brought in habermas may indicate that she was less open to diversity. in the session inside circinagic’s installation, the dialogue was by and large reduced to only the eight students who had brought artifacts. although their contributions certainly were diverse, they did not develop what rommetveit called a temporarily shared social reality (rommetveit, 1974). maybe this was a major reason why the dialogue failed. in the first session, all the students, with different backgrounds and different experiences, temporarily shared the social reality of walking around the installation, and this mediated the dialogic interaction. all the contributions made sense in light of what they had just experienced. in the second session, the eight personal stories about the coin chain, the old bible, or the key did not strike a core of shared reality, and thus they remained private and elicited no response. this is a different explanation than lack of engagement, as it touches on what rommetveit thought might be a prerequisite for dialogic interaction – at least in some situations. was it a mistake from a dialogic point of view that hilde did not involve the students in choosing what to talk about or the workshop's topic? did this make the sequence monologic? the question of student choice vs. planning ahead, however, is complex, also in dialogic pedagogy. all the seven cases in this project were carefully planned by the educators, including structure, content, and assignments. the plan (often made by a small group of museum educators in collaboration) was followed to some degree by all the museum educators who taught the same topic for the many school visits. it was viewed as a flexible guide that could be varied according to different student groups and the educator's interest and talents. particularly for short-time staff, with little pedagogical experience, such a plan was seen as very useful. the 10 desai and chalmers, the authors of the article «notes for a dialogue on art education in critical times», claim that even though art education has changed from the19th century, formalist notions of art, that emphasize conformity and obedience, still govern many art projects assigned in schools today. they also claim that art education is based on modernist notions of art, where description and analysis of art objects are foregrounded. this is not my impression of the museum educators i observed, who consistently focused on students´ own meaning making. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a18 nikolaj case illustrates that students’ choice is limited when content and pedagogical design are preplanned. leaving the choice entirely to the students, on the other hand, was not an option, even for the most experienced educators, given the short time. therefore, it may be that a choice between defined alternatives, as in the second version of hilde’s plan, was a good option. this raises an important question about the understanding of ‘polyphonic (heteroglossic) opportunities’ in education. does it mean that totally free choice is a prerequisite for students’ discourses to have the same right to arise and emerge as the teacher’s preplanned one? or could it be that polyphony within a group, even with the limited choice of topic, in practice gives more opportunities for student voices and discourses to emerge and be heard? hilde reported that the revised plan led to a dialogue between many divergent voices in each group, particularly when democracy issues in denmark were the topic. the next case indicates that group workshops afford not only multivoicedness but internally persuasive discourse. case # 2: “new words to thorvaldsen” the three hours’ school visit i observed at the museum of denmark’s most celebrated artist of classical sculptures had the title “new words for thorvaldsen.” the focus was on the wording of the short inscriptions on the plinths of the sculptures and the implications of these signs. one of the museum educators, jane, led the group around in the exhibition, where the students were asked to reflect on the rather neutral inscriptions and what difference would it make if the color or the layout were changed. this high school class consisted of 20 students, 7 boys and 13 girls, from 18-19 years old, accompanied by 2 class teachers. the initial plans for this teaching session were made during a workshop with artists and tried out on a number of visiting school classes and changed several times before the version i observed. therefore, this was a thoroughly preplanned session, where the assignments and instructions had been revised repeatedly, in contrast to the nicolaj case above, where i observed the very first time hilde tried out her plan. i was rather sceptical before i started the observation: was it possible that high school students would be interested in talking about questions like these: who had written the short inscriptions? what did the signs tell us? what did they not tell us? how did they influence the way we experience a particular work of art? but i underestimated the digital generation’s interest in how personal and cultural messages are presented. the first part of the session consisted of lively discussions in front of various sculptures. the discussions focussed on the actual inscriptions and the consequences of changing the words or the layout. the following example is just a short exchange between a few students and the museum educators as the class first looks at the inscription at the plinth of the sculpture of jason: “a822 jason.” jane (museum educator): “a822 jason.” i’d like to hear what you get to know here and how it affects you when you are visitors and take a look at this sculpture? (a closed + an authentic question) (many hands up, students seem eager to answer) student 1: it gives thorvaldsen the opportunity to express through his art who jason is, and only through his art. because the sign does not say anything one way or the other (points to the inscription on photo #4: thorvaldsen’s museum (ole haupt) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a19 the plinth), but he shows through this (points to the whole sculpture) who jason is and what he stands for. jane: yes, so you actually say that we do not get much information here it is only given visually, is that what you mean? (uptake, reformulation, asking the student to confirm her interpretation) student 1: yes. line (museum educator): what you say is a very precise observation. (praise) jane: yes. but what do we get to know? if you are a visitor who seeks information in the text, what do you get? student 2: only the name of the person and some numbers. i don´t know what they refer to. we see here is that jane practices uptake. she revoices the answer from student 1 and asks her to confirm her own interpretation. in this way, the museum educator seems to signal that she is genuinely interested in listening to the students’ voices and understanding their points of view. what does not show in the transcript is the educators´ enthusiasm and how their voices signal positive acceptance of the students. museum educator line follows up by praising the student’s precise observation. surprisingly, neither of them uses what nystrand calls “high evaluation,” which means to repeat the utterance and send it back to the rest of the class for discussion: “what do you think about this?”. this would have highlighted the content of what the student said: “it gives thorvaldsen the chance to express through his art who jason is and only through his art” (my emphasis). this is actually a very important aspect of how a neutral sign functions: it points back to the artwork itself, the focus of the interpretation in of what the artist has done, and it is left totally to the viewer, while a meaning-bearing sign may narrow the interpretation because it points in a specific direction. student 1’s comment thus went to the very core of how signs function, and it is not just precise, but it points to an important contradiction inherent in formulating signs or labels to works of art. the omission of the museum educators to recognize and follow up is common in teacher-led conversations when they are too focused on their own plan. during the tour around the museum, the class stopped at several sculptures to discuss the signs, for instance, thorvaldsen’s statue of christ. the museum educators directed attention to the connection between the sign and the significance of the work of art if the sign's color and layout were changed. this triggered heated discussions, for instance, about whether or not a pink sign written in childish handwriting degraded the sculpture and collided with its religious content and about the sign “kris” combined with a telephone icon. most of the students liked the latter, as they thought it signalled a modern christ open for contact. the students were very engaged in the discussions about different signs and the effect of the differences. i commented to the two school class teachers on the students´ engagement, and they were surprised too because this was not usually an active and communicative class in school. one of them added: “i think it is because the students feel they are being taken seriously.” this corresponded with my own observations. even in conversations when the educators had a clear agenda of their own, students felt that their input was treated as important. when the whole class walked from one sculpture to the other and discussed the signs, this first session prepared the way for the workshop. the museum educator jane introduced the workshop saying: “now it is your turn.” the gist of the workshop assignment to the groups was simply: “choose one of the sculptures and make a new sign or label for it and then defend it in plenary. “the choice of sculpture was totally open but limited by agreement among the group members. the oral instruction to the groups was to brainstorm and write down all the ideas they had about the sculpture and the assignment before deciding on their text: what associations do you want your sign to give the viewer? is it possible to make the visitor think in new directions about these familiar sculptures? the groups got 40 minutes to discuss, decide, opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a20 agree, and produce the label on a computer. all the groups had a very intense dialogue about their sculpture, focusing on the artist’s intention as well as what it meant to them. one group (here called group 1) had chosen thorvaldsen’s famous baptismal angel, which he made for the copenhagen cathedral. the water vessel was formed as a gigantic mussel shell held by the angel. after a long discussion, the group agreed on a quite unexpected and controversial sign: “the greedy angel.” the other students voiced their reactions and discussed with the educators before the group explained what thoughts and deliberations were behind their choice of label. what follows is a short excerpt of a long conversation after the group of students had revealed their sign. student 1: nowwith the new sign, it reminds me of a beggar’s bowl, where money can be put, instead of a baptismal font. student 2: i think of greediness and about the seven deadly sins. jane: when you say that it reminds you about the seven deadly sins, one of which was greediness, what does the label mean for the way we see the artwork? (open question) student 2: i don’t know how to explain this, but it seems very strange to talk about greediness as a deadly sin when this is an angel. jane: if we continue this line of thinking, …where does it bring us? student 2: i don´t know how to explain it, but when they use greediness, which is one of the deadly sins, and about an angel, then it is rather strange. student 3: i think it can still be a baptismal angel, but somehow it has become some form of duty or work for the angel to baptize the children. as it has to bring as many as possible to the christian faith. it has become ´greedy ´and wants to baptise as many as possible. museum educator (turned to student 2): this is a suggestion continuing your thoughts… the class teacher (from school): i think about the children who are forced by their parents to beg for money, and who also look like small angel children whom we should help. then the sculpture becomes a symbol of cheating and fraud. line (museum educator): i have always seen this sculpture as beautiful and thought that the baptismal font is a mussel shell (for the water), but suddenly you make me see the artwork in a different manner. now it seems that the shell is so big that it looks grotesque. it looks abnormally big because you have formulated this new label. jane: suddenly, you start questioning religion itself. the sculpture may get the opposite meanings: instead of religion as offering something, now it is demanding something. there is now an ambivalence between the beautiful angel who gives or asks for something. the group members who made the label now get their chance to explain to the class how they had first thought about using the word ‘zealous’ but decided on ‘greedy’ because this added something fundamentally new and different compared to the old label. they wanted to provoke a new way of seeing the sculpture. then they had discussed among themselves whether to write “the greedy beggar” or “the greedy angel.” they decided on the latter because the word ‘greedy’ was strong enough to direct the photo #5: “the greedy angel” (line esbjørn) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a21 visitor´s thinking towards the angel as a beggar. the classmates praised the group for making such a surprising label, which made the sculpture ambiguous. they agreed that ambiguity in itself makes the artwork more interesting than one where the meaning is obvious. one of the museum educators summed up: “an angel is usually seen as good and fine, but your words on the label bring in a dimension of doubt.” what we witness here is a group of students who rejects the authoritative interpretation of one of the most well-known and beloved of all thorvaldsen’s sculptures, an ikon in church art in denmark and beyond. they think outside the box and manage to surprise and almost shock the rest of the class and the museum educators, who change the way they understand the sculpture. the group stands up for their own redefinition, which some would find disrespectful and shocking. interestingly, however, both the fellow students and the museum educators gradually accept their proposal as a creative and thought-provoking solution to the assignment given. group 1 is not seriously challenged, as is the case with the next group we shall meet. group 2, who had chosen to look at another famous thorvaldsen’s sculpture known as “thorvaldsen’s self-portrait with the goddess of hope” (photo # 6), consists of four seemingly timid girls who look a bit nervous as they present the result of their deliberations around the new sign. they gain confidence, however, as they meet opposition and need to defend their choice: “the male chauvinist bertel thorvaldsen oppresses the goddess of hope.” the reason for the girls’ nervousness was probably their choice of the term “male chauvinist,” as this negatively labelled the famous artist and made the sign much stronger than just using the word “oppress.” their new sign not only challenged the authoritative and conventional interpretations but provoked the museum educators and some of their fellow students at the beginning of a lengthy discussion. several of the more active students in the class supported the group and helped them underpin their argument. in the excerpt from the discussion that follows, it is interesting to see how thoroughly the group of students had studied the sculpture and how they substantiated their proposal for a new sign based on an analysis of the sculpture itself. it is also telling how they defended their interpretation against the museum educators, who are curious but try to argue for the more conventional and authoritative interpretation that thorvaldsen was actually supported by the goddess of hope. they gradually accepted the girls’ arguments. jane (museum educator): i’m thinking a little about your words: ‘male chauvinist’– the sign could have just said, “bertel thorvaldsen oppresses the goddess of hope. but ‘male chauvinist’? (challenging the group with a less provocative proposal) student 2 (group member): it gives him a characterization– that he is a male chauvinist. it is the way he’s standing which shows that he oppresses a female figure. it is very strange… (defending the choice of words and grounding them in the sculpture itself) jane: yes, but it is sort of funny that a sculpture can be ‘male chauvinist.’ student (not group member): that’s also what i was thinking, because, you know, if it was a woman, then i could see it, but this is just a figure… so what about being a male chauvinist? … it is not a real person (expresses disagreement with the group). photo #6: (iben mondrup) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a22 jane: maybe we should let the group explain a little because i overheard some of what you were talking about when you discussed the new label. student 2 (group member): yes, the first thing we thought was that it should be like a newspaper headline, and then that about male chauvinism. it’s because we found out that he was never married, he had all sorts of girlfriends, but he would never… he never treated them well or showed respect or wanted to help out at home, -he hasn’t been a good father and like that. and children, he has two children and stuff, so it’s more there where this is coming from. and then she is a goddess, so she’s also a woman, in some way, so it isn’t just a figure. (vindicating the group’s choice of words in the sign) student 3 (group member): well, yeah, and there is another sculpture of her too, where she’s holding a sort of pomegranate... which stands for – was it fertility? student 2: and eternal life student 3: and eternal life student 2: and he lost a son student 3: he lost his son at a very young age the son died very young, so we also thought that was something about why he chose her because she had something to do with eternal life (the group members continue to defend and explain their choice) line (museum educator): yes, so you actually considered many of those family-like relations. male chauvinism – it could also easily be a term used in discussions of family and the rationality of the distribution of male and female roles and things like that, so a lot of it comes from there. and then you talked about this (pointing to the label) as a headline in ekstrabladet or bt (newspapers). breaking news about thorvaldsen actually being an oppressor. (the museum educator refers to the process in the group and how they came to their decision by picking up on negative aspects of thorvaldsen recently written about in the press) student 2 (group member): and then there is also the oppression thing – we have gone in and looked at the other sculpture he has made of her, where she is, in fact, just as big as him. then he decided, in this one here, that he will be bigger and taller than she is. (justifies their choice based on studying the sculptures) line: what would have happened if the work had been different, if she had been bigger than thorvaldsen, and he might have stood a bit more to the side? student 2 (group member): a little more humble … yes … line: so, if he had been more humble in the situation, he would not then have been an oppressor, then he would perhaps have been an ally or a supporter instead? student 4 (non-member of the group): it perhaps also says something about his view of hope, in other words, that hope is, like – i don’t know, like goodness, perhaps, so there is nothing hope-like, since he creates her like that, so fragile (suggests another reason). student 2 (group member): it also comes back to this about how he has lost a son, so he doesn’t believe very much in hope and such things, since he has lost his son (counters student 4’s interpretation). line: … you can also say that he is leaning on hope. you can certainly say that thorvaldsen is being supported by hope. if they had said that, then you would perhaps have read the work completely differently, so you would have thought: here is a man, where what he’s leaning on and what’s holding him up is hope. but if he is an oppressor, then it is different if he is pushing her down instead of supporting her. (testing out different interpretations) […] student 4: i had a thought about that, what you said about him supporting himself on her instead, but i just want to say that i don’t think it looks like he’s leaning on her. (disagrees with the museum educator) student 1: that’s because there is a pole... (referring to a marble block behind thorvaldsen.) opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a23 student 4: no, no, so, i mean, support – it is perhaps more like where – he’s both standing in front of her and pushing her down with his arm and stuff, right? i don’t think it looks like he is supporting himself on her. line: yes, that is absolutely right, as you say about the leg – it is in fact very pronounced, he is not even going like this (demonstrates the position of the leg), he’s doing like this (demonstrates with her arms)... student 3: yes, you can see that it looks more like something about oppressing or putting yourself forward, at least. line: so, if they had written something else, supporter, then it would simply have been … student (not a group member): yeah, then i would have thought it wasn’t credible, so they had misunderstood it (the student affirms that the group’s interpretation is actually getting support and that the educators’ earlier suggestion has no foundation when studying the sculpture carefully) in the first part of this excerpt, jane, one of the two museum educators taking part in this session, challenges the group’s use of ‘male chauvinist’ about thorvaldsen, which she obviously thinks is a bit too provocative. student 2, who is the main spokesperson for the group, initially gives two reasons for their choice. first, they wanted a label, which would create attention, like a striking newspaper heading. secondly, the first impression of the sculpture is that the male oppresses the female simply by his position in relation to her. the group, however, has also consulted the information available on the internet about thorvaldsen’s life and vindicates their choice by the way he has treated women in real life. in addition, they had compared another sculpture of the goddess of hope, where there is a connection to fertility and eternal life. so this group is not just following an immediate idea when they decided on their sign they made an impressive research effort in a short time in order to ground their interpretation. in the second part of the conversation, line, the other museum educator, acknowledges their research into thorvaldsen’s family relations to legitimate their choice. she nevertheless voices the authoritative interpretation: he is leaning on the goddess of hope for support what is holding him up in this time of mourning is hope. it is interesting to see how the spokesperson for the group (student 2) is able to justify their disagreement with this authoritative interpretation. student 4 says that hope is rather fragile for the artist in such a situation. student 2 picks up on this interpretation but rejects it as incomplete: this could have explained the reduction in the size of the goddess, but not the active oppression of her. the group insists on their new wording of the sign: “the male chauvinist bertel thorvaldsen oppresses the goddess of hope.” it is a very strong statement, augmented by the use of “male chauvinist.” line, the museum educator, realises the depth of disagreement in the newly formulated sign: there is something disagreeable about the famous artist pushing down the goddess, which does not go well with the established view of the national hero thorvaldsen. in the excerpt, student 4 goes far in supporting the argument made by the group for their reformulation of the sign: “he’s both standing in front of her and pushing her down with his arm and stuff, right?” then even line is convinced and mirrors the position of thorvaldsen’s leg. she acknowledges this as additional evidence that the group’s reinterpretation of the statue is well-founded. this is a rather exceptional example of how a group of students not only made a new, plausible interpretation of an established artwork based on research into the biography of the artist, combined with their own careful study of the sculpture itself but also managed to defend their position and convince the museum educators as well as their classmates. the students showed courage by presenting such a provocative, new inscription, and they relied on each other to keep their ground in the face of opposition. the sign initially met with scepticism on the part of the museum educators and curiosity and genuine interest opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a24 in learning together with the students. the group asserted their disagreement and argued well for their reading of the sculpture and the formulation of the new sign. the attitude of the museum educators can be characterised as open and curious. although they initially were sceptical and repeated the authoritative view of the sculpture, they were also curious. they showed an interest in finding out what they could about the students’ point of view. they were open to learning from the students. as i see it, this was crucial for the students in the group, as it made it safe for them to disagree and argue their points. in a school class used to dialogic education, presenting a novel and provocative interpretation would have been quite commonplace. visiting one of the most prestigious museums in denmark, however, with museum educators they had never met before, the students dared to show personal courage because line and jane had succeeded in creating a truly dialogic atmosphere. discussion of the thorvaldsen case the presentation and discussion of groups 1 and 2 have shown that they are both multivoiced in the bakhtinian sense that many and different voices are not just tolerated but encouraged, both by the rest of the class and by the museum educators. this is a precondition for the development of the internally persuasive word. it is when students, as well as the educators, listen to distinctly different interpretations of the artwork that their own opinions are challenged. then they may accept the traditional view or be persuaded by the arguments to reconsider their previous view and reach a more well-founded opinion, which bakhtin would call ‘internally persuasive.’ the “thorvaldsen case” is, in my view, also an interesting example of how the power of dialogic pedagogy is strong enough to defy the limits of conventional elements of schooling, for instance, the ‘assignment regime’ and a ‘pre-planned curriculum and lessons” (matusov, 2009; matusov, marjanovicshane & gradovski, 2019). the whole sequence “new words for thorvaldsen” was, as mentioned before, carefully pre-planned, and the assignments were a result of a long process. the idea behind focusing on the signs of the sculptures came from the artist line harlen a year earlier. the student workshop had been tried out and revised many times, with a particular view at the formulation of assignments, questions, and the time plan. after trying it out with a lot of different classes, questions that had restricted the students´ interest and imagination were exchanged for more open-ended questions. the ‘assignment regime’ may function negatively in museums and schools if the educators feel compelled to deliver teaching to fill in specific points in the school´s curriculum plan. this is not farfetched, as the educators reported that there had been increasing pressure from schools to do just that. however, the thorvaldsen case illustrates that creative and open-ended assignments may foster dialogue instead of stifling it. i was particularly surprised that instead of feeling constrained by the strictly structured time plan, students´ creativity seemed to be triggered. this tells me that there is a big difference between the ‘pre-planning’ and the ‘pre-set curricular endpoints.’ pre-planning of such short school visits to museums was considered by the museum educators as absolutely necessary. formulating goals for each sequence was one of the tasks the museum educators set themselves. in dialogic pedagogy, however, the ultimate goals are open instead of closed. the goals line and jane had formulated for communication, content, and didactics in this sequence were all essentially open: “give students an opportunity to …”, “reflect on how their statements (the labels they made, my comment) affect specific works of art,” “give students experiences in …”: communication goals: “to give students an opportunity to discover the significance of how a message is presented.” content goals in art: “to provide students insight into how art is influenced by the way it is communicated and the context in which it is embedded by making their own labels for thorvaldsen´s sculptures opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a25 and reflecting on how their statements affect specific works of art. didactic goals: “to give students experience in setting their own agenda for using and conceptualizing the cultural material in museums” (dysthe, bernhardt & esbjørn, 2013, p. 155) the goals were useful for the museum educators, not because they defined clear endpoints but because they reminded themselves about their overarching goals as they met with students. the short time they had with each class gives a different time frame and chronotope than for schoolteachers, who can return to the discussion later with the same students. of all the seven cases i observed, the plan for this sequence was the most thoroughly ´rehearsed´ and simultaneously it was the case where the students used the space to develop their ‘internally persuasive word.’11 teachers in other contexts may learn from this. presentation and discussion of findings: opportunities and challenges for students and educators the overarching research question of my study is: how did central aspects of dialogic pedagogy play out in the art museum context, and what were opportunities and challenges? some answers have been presented in the previous section, but a more systematic treatment follows. after summarizing the main research findings, i will first discuss some findings from my empirical research, particularly relating to opportunities and challenges for educators and students. then follows a discussion of the sub-questions from a theoretical perspective, focusing on the concepts of multivoicedness, difference, and internally persuasive discourse. the purpose is to dig deeper into their contribution to practitioners of dialogical pedagogy. summary of findings my study has shown that the museum educators’ transition from traditional to dialogic pedagogy was enhanced by their genuine interest in hearing students’ voices. they succeeded in engaging students in multivoiced dialogues but with a tendency towards harmonization rather than an exploration of diversity and difference. the practical aesthetic workshops offered unique opportunities for students to develop their internally persuasive word, i.e., by replacing authoritative interpretations of artworks with their own. both students and educators experienced the short time frame as limiting the students because of lack of followup the educators because it enhanced their dilemmas between preplanning and student choice, and between disseminating knowledge about art and facilitating students’ own meaning making and creativity. the practice of dialogic pedagogy in museums; opportunities and challenges all the museum educators made strong efforts to replace traditional vertical museum pedagogy, aimed at disseminating knowledge, with a horizontal pedagogy, where participation and interaction afforded space for students to create their own understanding and interpretations. the educators created in various ways an open and inviting dialogic atmosphere from the very beginning of the museum visits. even though they had never met the educators before, students felt that it was safe to speak, that they were listened to and taken seriously. the amount of verbal interaction surprised me because i had expected that dialogue would be easier when the participants had built knowledge and trust over a long time. the fact that the museum educators and students had no preconceived ideas about each other seemed to be an affordance instead of a constraint. 11 this seems to contradict the sceptical view of teacher-made goals and plans in the recent book dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art (matusov et al, 2019). opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a26 as could be expected, the museum educators’ understanding of what it meant to practice dialogic pedagogy changed as their experience widened. initially, some thought that dialogic pedagogy simply meant more and better use of questions in order to stimulate student talk. gradually they discovered that they could facilitate students’ own meaning-making through very different forms of teaching. thus, the project confirmed that dialogic pedagogy is not a method to be learned but a fundamental basis for educational practice and orientation to hear the students rather than tell them what to know and think. as a consequence, all instructional genres can, in principle, function dialogically if they open for, instead of shutting down, students’ wondering, questioning, exploring, doubting, and objecting. the case studies exemplified, for instance, mini-lectures, teacher-led, and student-led conversations, discussions, writing, practical aesthetic group projects, presentations with follow-up. some of these have been documented in the excerpts from nikolai and thorvaldsen. many more are presented in the book (dysthe, bernhardt, esbjørn, 2012). however, some instructional genres led to more multivoiced dialogue and internally persuasive discourse than others, and one of my clear findings was that the practical aesthetic workshops offered a great variety of expression for students, not just verbality as is often the only choice. they also afforded more collaboration, more disagreement, and more chances of internally persuasive discourse. the opening vignette of this article indicated that even disengaged students became actively involved in the workshops and contributed both practically and verbally. some even said, “the workshop saved my day.” one interpretation is that the engagement with the artifacts themselves, pictures, sculpture, photos, and installation objects, provided what rommetveit (1974) called ‘a temporarily shared social reality for the students. the sharing of an artwork and a task triggered both rational and emotional dialogic interaction, as demonstrated in front of the baptismal angel and thorvaldsen’s goddess of hope. another interpretation is that the discursive and the practical aesthetic forms ‘interanimate’ each other. bakhtin also mentions that dialogic relationships are possible, for example, among images belonging to different art forms (bakhtin, 1984, p. 185). “new words to thorvaldsen” should inspire dialogically minded teachers who work in other areas and subjects to use practical aesthetic workshops, where students need to think together to solve problems, and where divergent views and alternative solutions are welcome. it was the creativity of the museum educators in making practical aesthetic assignments, combined with their trust in their students to follow their own ideas, that facilitated these opportunities for the students. the workshop also led to considerable challenges for the students. the transcripts show that groups in their dialogic interaction went through different phases: a phase for collecting and exchanging ideas, a face of disagreement and conflict about which ideas to build on, and a phase of seeking agreement and collaboration in order to reach a shared solution. this corresponds to findings by the norwegian creativity researcher ingunn ness, who has studied innovative groups and “the polyphonic room of opportunity” (ness, 2017, ness, 2020, ness & dysthe, 2020). although i only collected data from a few groups, the students seemed to experience the same opportunities and challenges described by ness in the different phases. on a more general level, i found that the students experienced the alternative learning arena of the art museums as positive. it was not only a welcome change from the daily routines of school but an opportunity to show other sides of themselves than in their normal classroom role. the museum opened spaces for other interests and strengths that students might not have been aware of. some students also seemed to be more willing to accept unusual assignments and challenges from the museum educator than from a schoolteacher. this was noticed by several of the schoolteachers who accompanied their class to the museums and specifically expressed by the two who attended “new worlds to thorvaldsen,” who were surprised by students they thought they knew. in the art museum, they were expected to use all their senses, listen to different views and use their own judgment and their own creativity. the students were opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a27 exposed to a variety of works of art and steeped in an atmosphere of creativity, seeing the results of artists struggling with how to express themselves and their ideas. in the sequences i observed, this seemed to afford students access to their own subjectivity and creativity, which i see as closely linked. this materialized, particularly in the practical aesthetic workshops. the major challenge both for the students and the educators, was the limited time frame resulting in a lack of possibilities for follow-up, which sometimes led to superficiality instead of depth, both verbally and aesthetically. interestingly, due to the introduction of the open school program in 2014, an extended collaboration between museums and schools was facilitated and encouraged.12 one of the general dilemmas all the educators expressed was how to balance their wish to share their professional knowledge of art with giving students opportunities of “setting their own agenda for using and conceptualizing the cultural material in the museum,” as formulated by line and jane in their didactic goals. as discussed in the introduction, art museums have a long history as public institutions for preserving culture, and “dissemination” is still a key term in museology. the museum educators in my project constantly asked themselves: “what do the students i meet today, need of background knowledge?” for instance, when a class encounters circinagic’s installation inspired by orwell’s 1984, or the sketches for queen margrethe’s tapestries, depicting 1000 years of danish history in køge museum. they chose a middle way between traditional dissemination of knowledge, which seriously limited multivoicedness, and leaving it all to the students. hilde’s solution at nikolaj was to produce written preparation material, kirsten at køge chose minilectures, while line and jane’s choice prioritised students’ “setting their own agenda.” at thorvaldsen, each group discussed and agreed on which sculpture to focus on and took responsibility for finding the background knowledge they needed on the internet. this, however, raises the question of whether internet information now assumes an ‘authoritative’ status for students in a bakhtinian sense. discussion of key findings in light of the bakhtinian concepts as mentioned in section iii, the concept ‘multivoicedness,’ as i understand it, also includes the concepts ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘polyphony.’ bakhtin writes about this concept cluster both in discourse of the novel (198l) and in problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (1984). the term ‘heteroglossia’ is used there about how the languages shape individual voices in different social groups. it signals that when a person talks, their words are expressions of the person’s background, context, personality, view of the world, meanings, and values.13 bakhtin used ‘heteroglossia’ more frequently than ‘multivoicedness.’ still, i chose early in my research on dialogism to use the latter as my key term because it is more immediately meaningful for teachers and students (dysthe, 1996). but since ‘multi’ means many, they don’t necessarily recognize that the voices also are different (‘hetero’). this is also the case with ‘polyphonic,’ often used interchangeably with multivoiced. according to morson and emerson, “polyphony is one of bakhtin’s most intriguing and original concepts” (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 231), but he never explicitly defined it, even though what constitutes the polyphonic novel is a central theme in problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. polyphony in the 12 denmark adopted a unique “open schools” policy in 2014. schools are now expected to visit and collaborate with institutions and organizations in the community, and thus extended museum school partnerships are possible. preparation as well as follow-up of field trips are easier. individual students and groups can also spend a whole week at the museum working with an artist, or come once a week during several months, just to mention two examples. ‘open schools’ includes a variety of institutions, workplaces and organizations in the neighborhood as alternative learning arenas. 13 in discourse in the novel (1981) bakhtin is primarily preoccupied with heteroglossia in dostoevsky’s work, but it has implications for verbal interactions in general. in bakhtin’s own words: the language spoken by an individual is not an abstract system,” but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and the hour. each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions (bakhtin, 1981, p. 293). “… all languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. as such they all may be juxtaposed to one another, mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and be interrelated dialogically” (ibid, p. 291-292). opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a28 context of the novel is primarily about the author’s position in the text (ibid, p 232).14 for most people, polyphony is a term associated with the world of music, used about a piece where there are many voices, but none is dominant. thus, polyphony designates, as multivoicedness, both the many and different voices that exist in a group and the idea of no one being silenced and no one allowed to dominate. both multivoicedness and polyphony presuppose a dialogic sense of truth (‘pravda’ in russian), in opposition to a monologic conception of truth (‘istina’ in russian), representing an idea of truth as the only one possible. in the context of artwork, whether verbal (books) or visual (as in the art museums), this makes sense, as there is obviously no true meaning or interpretation of a work of art. however, this is not the same as relativism, which gives equal value to all interpretations and excludes all argumentation (morson and emerson, 1990, p. 233), whether or not they are anchored in the artwork itself. in the thorvaldsen case, this was one of the lessons the students learned, as the goddess of hope group grounded their interpretation in a thorough analysis of the sculpture. when voices are juxtaposed, each with its own world view, meanings, and values, they may either supplement or contradict one another and thus make dialogue between them possible. support is important for the speaker, but resistance is even more valuable, according to bakhtin, because it triggers new thoughts. we saw in the thorvaldsen case that the support and agreement the girls had experienced in the small group gave them the strength to meet the resistance after presenting their controversial sign. the same case also illustrates how resistance has the effect of opening up new perspectives and ideas, both for educators and students. together heteroglossia and polyphony embrace both diversity (hetero) and quantity (poly). in pedagogical practice, students are encouraged to voice their own opinions and viewpoints, listen to others, agree or disagree, show respect for other voices, deal with disagreements, and utilize difference as a resource. an important finding in my study was, however, as noted in the abstract, that the museum educators were very good at the quantitative aspect. they succeeded in getting many students involved in dialogue both in plenary and among themselves in groups, but they rarely dealt with disagreement, difference, and divergence. i will therefore discuss why this is a crucial aspect of dialogic pedagogy. difference and controversy in the case studies the importance bakhtin placed on difference and disagreement was one of the insights which differentiated him from the row of dialogue philosophers before him. according to holquist, it is the “mutuality of differences” that makes dialogue bakhtin’s master concept (holquist, 1990, p. 4). thus, the simultaneity of diverse voices and the struggle between them is crucial in bakhtin’s dialogism.15 a central aspect of dialogic teaching is that the educators provide opportunities and encouragement for students to engage with the ‘voices’ of others, with their diverse perceptions, experiences, and knowledge. difference and disagreement may trigger dialogue and reflection, but also conflict and frustration, as seen in my cases. the educator plays an important role in training students on how to handle this. multivoicedness, polyphony, difference, and dialogic interaction of voices based on mutual interest in each other and each other’s ideas, resonated well with the art museum educators, maybe because art today is a field that thrives on disagreement, challenges, and constant seeking of alternative interpretations. artworks are, in their essence, multivoiced and defy set answers to what they mean. even so, the museum educators were more successful in making sure that multiple voices were expressed than in helping 14 “bakhtin lays out his theory of polyphony in the seminal essay problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (1929/1973). in his reading, polyphony evokes the particular capacity of the novel to accommodate contradictory positions and multiple discourses without imposing any central authoritative view. whereas a “monophonic” text affirms the point of view of its author, polyphonic writing embraces dissonance and moral ambiguity” (lachman, 1988), p. 29) (my italics). 15 this has been strongly emphasised in the “school of the dialogue of cultures”. see bibler (2009): the foundations of the school of the dialogue of cultures program. journal of russian & east european psychology, 47(1), pp. 34–60, doi: 10.2753/rpo10610405470102. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a29 students see how the diversity of voices could extend and enrich their understanding. disagreement was rarely encouraged, even though this obviously is an important way of challenging students’ assumptions and encourage independent, critical, and creative thinking. i interpreted the educators' failure to deal with diverse views as a tendency towards harmonization, which i have often observed in my classroom research in schools. but when differences were not raised, clarified, tested, or made a topic of discussion, the result was missed learning opportunities. when i discussed this with the museum educators, they agreed but saw it as conflict avoidance and a consequence of the limited time frame of museum visits. they underlined that dealing with differences and disagreement takes time. but they also explained their reluctance to flag their own opinions with a fear of silencing their students with their own ‘authoritative discourse.’ i will argue that they thus deprived the students of valuable input. besides, authoritative voices also need to be listened to as one of many voices. students need to learn how to deal with them: agree, doubt, question, and oppose them if necessary. in the thorvaldsen case, however, when students defended their alternative signs in opposition to the authoritative interpretation of the sculpture, this was crucial in developing their inner persuasive discourse. as mentioned before, bakhtin underlined the importance of juxtaposing the voices to one another in order to see how they “mutually supplement one another, contradict one another and may be interrelated dialogically” (bakhtin, 1994, p 292). in the initial conversation in the nikolai case, most of the students’ observations in the installation supplemented and supported each other. the thorvaldsen case provides examples of the creative power of difference, contradiction and even provocation. by challenging the authoritative interpretations of thorvaldsen’s art works and trusting their own, they strengthened their inner persuasive word. it is worthwhile noticing, however, that when the student groups discussed new signs for the baptismal angel and the goddess of hope, they did not just throw out an idea or an opinion, but they underpinned their opinion by looking at the sculpture in a new way, which turned the conventional way of seeing and interpreting the sculpture upside down. and once they discovered this new way of seeing, - this innovative look, they went to great lengths to ground their discovery in a close analysis of the sculpture itself. in the process of countering opposition from museum educators and some of their fellow students, their interpretation became more and more their own. the students´ words carried no external authority, but still fellow students as well as the educators were convinced, and learnt something new. opportunities and conditions for developing internally persuasive discourse the opposition between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse was very real in bakhtin’s own life under stalin, where the cost of disregarding the authoritative word was massive. “the authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it.” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). it is difficult to escape from the power of the authority that was already acknowledged in the past: “it is indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person – and it stands and falls together with that authority” (ibid., p. 343). internally persuasive discourse, on the other hand, is tightly interwoven with our own word. “the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s. its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words from within, ...” (ibid, p. 345). there is a long distance both in time and degree between what bakhtin experienced and the students in a museum or in school today. but whatever the political situation in the society where young people grow up, they need to learn from an early age to seek out different views, develop their own points of view and stand up for them. what is new and worrying today, is that the internet seems to function as the authoritative word, in echo chambers with no opposing voices. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a30 the experiences students had in the thorvaldsen case may have had at least two important implications for the individual, the small groups and the class as a whole, even though i don’t have evidence to underpin this claim. firstly, it seemed to build the students’ self-confidence, and thus strengthen their ability in the future to assert their own ideas and judgements, even in the face of opposition. secondly, it provided them with an example of the viability of challenging authoritative truths. this ‘revolt’ against the authoritative word may seem inconspicuous and inconsequential, but in my view, it shows the potential museums have to foster the internally persuasive word, critical thinking and creativity, and thus also contribute to the development of democratic citizens. people who think independently and dare to challenge authorities, whether orally or in art, are important for a democratic society. if we look around the world today, this seems to be more important than ever. gary morson (2004) has addressed the problem of bakhtin´s use of the term ‘authoritative’, which is basically a positive word, and suggested the distinction between three types of discourses: ´authoritarian´ based on power, tradition and/or ignorance, ´authoritative´ based on trust and respect and ‘internally persuasive discourse’ without authority, but based on dialogic questioning, testing, and evaluation of statements (matusov, 2004, p. 15). the ideal of the museum educators, according to my findings, was to be authoritative based on trust and respect, but leave plenty of space for the internally persuasive word. as mentioned before, they succeeded in building trust and respect even in such short time, but their authoritative position as representatives of a public institution, may in some cases have limited the space for developing students’ internally persuasive discourse. educators in all arenas need to be aware of the authority they carry as experts and/or as representatives of an institution and the danger of silencing student voices. but the way to foster students’ internally persuasive discourse is not to tone down their role as professionals but to actively encourage and contribute to the dialogic testing of ideas. in denmark there is strong dialogic tradition, dating back to n.f. s. grundtvig (1783-1872). the danish professor of education, per fibæk laursen, underlined in his recent book dialog (2017) the importance of two traditions of dialogue in danish pedagogy, one from grundtvig and more recently from mikhail bakhtin. grundtvig emphasized the power of the oral word through his immensely influential work as a preacher, writer, and founder of the “folk high schools,” where democratic “bildung” through dialogue was at the core, and exams were banned because they encouraged the reproduction of the authoritative word instead of focusing on students’ developing their ability to think for themselves. an exploration of the dialogic potential in field trips to art museums is therefore very much in line with this tradition, even though my educators´ conception of dialogue was primarily inspired by bakhtin. my concluding reflection on the role of museum education is a follow-up of this historic link and an attempt to widen the perspective. concluding reflections: dialogic museum education contributes to qualification, socialization, and subjectification the educational philosopher gert biesta has, over the years, been concerned with questions relating to the purpose and functions of education, and i have chosen to use his definition of the three functions (domains) of education as my point of departure (biesta, 2009, 2020). the qualification function is, according to biesta, about education’s contribution to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will either qualify the students to do something, specifically in the manner of a profession or be applied in a more general sense throughout the course of a lifetime. the qualification function has always provided an important justification for schooling. over the last decades, denmark, like the rest of the western world, has been heavily influenced by neo-liberal ideas and the marketization of education. this has limited the broad understanding of what is needed to qualify the next generation for life and work. when the acquisition of testable knowledge becomes the main focus, other domains of human experience, for instance, the opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a31 creative arts, become marginalized. in his essay “what if? art education beyond expression and creativity” (2018), biesta expresses worry about the increasing instrumental motivation for art in education and what our children and young people lose if art is left out. socialization is about becoming part of existing socio-cultural, political, and moral orders and is always going on in education. knowledge is never value-free, and cultures, traditions, and practices influence how young people learn, think, feel, and act. schools partly engage in socialization deliberately, for example, in the form of values education, character education, citizenship education, or in relation to professional socialization. socialization also happens in less visible ways, as has been made clear in the literature on both the hidden curriculum and the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality (biesta, 2009, p. 355). socialization takes place directly through the contents of a teaching program and indirectly through the pedagogical values and methods of teaching and learning that are validated by the learning community. as i see it, dialogic education is a vitally important aspect of socializing children and young people to critical and respectful dialogue. the third function, ‘subjectification,’ is about how the individual develops his or her own unique character. this has been called ‘individualisation,’ but biesta prefers to call it ‘subjectification’ because it refers to the need all human beings have to be a subject in their own lives. the term constitutes a counterweight to socialisation because it is about how the individual student is given the opportunity to develop as a unique, distinctive, independent, and responsible human being, e.g., moving from authoritative to internally persuasive discourse. educators, policymakers, and scholars have found biesta’s distinction between the three domains of purposes of education useful, but there has been an ongoing discussion about the nature of each of them, in particular, ‘subjectification.’ since this third domain has been difficult to grasp, biesta returned to the topic in 2020, from a philosophical, not a didactic point of view. here he states that freedom is at the very heart of education as subjectification, but it is about “qualified” freedom, which means that “it is integrally connected to our existence as a subject. this is never an existence just with and for ourselves, but always an existence in and with the world” (biesta, 2020, p. 4, my italics). biesta has earlier pointed to a connection with the philosopher levinas’ ‘ethics of subjectivity’ and his emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for ‘the other’ in order to describe what is fundamental about human subjectivity (biesta, 2009). gert biesta’s distinction among the three ‘domains of purpose’ resonated with the museum educators’ understanding. they had a strong awareness of how dialogic pedagogy contributed to socialization and subjectification, maybe due to the long ‘bildung’ tradition in museums, a view of education as a lifelong process of human development (see endnote 4). my findings indicate that the three domains of purpose were closely interconnected. according to falk & dierking (2012) in their book “the museum experience revisited,” museums have increasingly become learning arenas for both adults and children: all museums now place an emphasis on education that they never did in the past. they see themselves as “centers of public learning” (p.11). “museums differ in one important way from all other learnings settings. museums are collections of things, some intrinsically valuable, others not. objects, stuff, are the essence of a opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a32 museum.” (…) uniquely suited to capitialize on the capacity of humans to learn initially by assimilating concrete information” (p. 111). this quotation highlights one aspect of the qualification function: ‘concrete information’ and “conceptual understanding” as well as “provide the scaffolding visitors need to grasp the more challenging ideas” (ibid. p. 113). in the nikolaj case, hilde tried to provide such scaffolding when she wrote a pamphlet of informative background material for the classes who visited circinagic’s installation and when she read aloud for the students from orwell’s novel. some exhibitions needed more scaffolding than others, for instance, the preliminary sketches for queen margrethe ii’s tapestries, which depict 1000 years of danish history (see table 1). kirsten, the museum educator at køs (køge museum for art in public places), formulated a complex learning goal for her visiting students: “enhance awareness of history, knowledge of the past, understanding of the present and expectations for the future.” (dysthe, bernhardt & esbjørn, 2013, p.114). this goal includes both qualification and socialization. short field trips to museums obviously do not amount to the qualification of students in any formal sense. however, museums contribute by expanding the fields of knowledge typically taught in school. the workshop at køs, where students were asked to design a tapestry that told the story of their own age, is one example of this. the empirical cases thus illustrate that qualification, socialization, and subjectification depend on what is being taught (content) and how (pedagogy) it is being taught. the socialization function, and particularly democratic citizenship education, was foregrounded in the project, not surprising as the title was museums and institutions as spaces for citizenship. some of the exhibitions explicitly invited a discussion of democracy and issues of freedom versus oppression, e.g., the nikolaj case. however, as i see it, students learned even more implicitly about democratic citizenship, regardless of topic, by experiencing dialogic co-creation of meaning and dealing with diversity and difference. when students could say after a museum visit: “my voice was heard, and i felt it was taken seriously,” they hopefully also learned that ‘the voices of others are just as important and i need to respect them, even if i disagree.” this is one small instance of socialization to democratic citizenship. it can only be learned over time through practice in various settings. today, the frightening breakdown of communication between opposing voices in our ‘post truth’ world reminds us how vital this is (alexander, 2019). the rise of authoritarianism, populist demagoguery, and conspiracy theories underlines the importance of being willing and able to test voices. even though museum visits are short, research indicates that because they take place in alternative learning spaces, they stand out in student memories (falk & dierking, 2012). bakhtin’s dialogism contains a duality that shows both the dependence of others and the importance of finding one’s own voice. the core of subjectification for a young person, according to biesta, is to become subject in her or his own life. it has to do with the question of freedom, but not the freedom in the simplistic sense of doing just what one wants to do, “but the freedom to act in and with the world” (biesta, 2020, p. 1). it is existential, as it is about how i exist as the subject, not as the object of what other people want from me or expect me to think. simultaneously, i am part of a context and a network that puts limits on me. “one important aspect of trying to exist as a subject is to figure out what these limits are, which limits should be taken into consideration, which limits are real, and which limits are the effect of arbitrary (ab)use of power. the question of democracy has everything to do with the limits that our living together poses on our own freedom” (ibid, p. 4). it is important, however, that these ‘limits’ do not silence the young generation. dialogic pedagogy is a safeguard against making disagreement illegitimate by insisting that opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a33 … an open-minded, honest commitment to ideas, knowledge, and skills requires the meeting of alternative ideas, the genuine listening to others, testing ideas, talking one’s own and other people’s positions seriously, and a commitment to searching for truth rather than to spread one’s own dear ideas, manipulate others, and so on (matusov & von duyke, 2010, p.177). this article about dialogic pedagogy in museum education has provided examples of how students engaged in dialogue developed their inner persuasive discourse by testing the authoritative word and standing up for their diverging views, also when they encountered resistance. a re-examination of accepted ‘truths’ was triggered by a few students who trusted their own judgment not based on opinions, but on the investigation. it is a tiny incident with immense implications for education in our critical times, whatever context. references anderson, b. 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(2002). voices of collective remembering. new york, ny: cambridge university press. opportunities and challenges of dialogic pedagogy in art museum education olga dysthe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.317 | vol. 9 (2021) a36 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word olga shagurova, exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education, 2020-05-01, layout with comments.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf50 exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education: “terrified to love this way of learning, its idea of being free” olga shugurova university of manitoba, canada abstract in this reflective paper, i respond to dr. matusov’s (2020) eloquent philosophical exploration of “students’ right to freedom of education. in doing so, i pursue a narrative inquiry (bruner, 1987; clandinin, murphy, huber, & orr, 2010; clandinin, 2013; hong, falter, & fecho, 2017) to explore my students’ self-generated meanings of their educational freedom in our teacher education classroom. i wonder whether freedom of education can be presented as a transcendental concept of self-examination and taught as the student’s right for it without a critical deconstruction of the tentious and fictitious materiality of freedom. also, i wonder what my students think when they are provoked to claim their right to freedom of education. this reflection reveals that students’ right of freedom is not necessarily about their own self-examination, freedom is a creative force of self-expression. more specifically, freedom is the selfconscious act of discovery of itself (i.e., freedom) in everything my students do as a part of their classroom learning and education. all in all, freedom does not have any meaning at all since meaning emerges in the act of freedom itself, or rather in the creative act of being free. keywords: right to freedom of education; tentious materiality of freedom; free learning; freedom; reflective teaching; reflective; dialogic pedagogy olga shugurova graduated with a ph.d. from the schulich school of education at nipissing university in 2017. her arts-based research focus was on a cultural and historical context of learning without schooling. since 2015, olga has been teaching as a sessional and distance course instructor in the faculty of arts and education at the university of manitoba. during this time, she has developed a keen interest in dialogic pedagogy in teacher education and interdisciplinary learning environments. her current research focus is on innovative, creative dialogic pedagogy of freedom and education as art. ïïò in this reflective paper, i respond to dr. matusov’s (2020) eloquent philosophical exploration of “students’ right to freedom of education.” my original response was my full and unconditional agreement with his idea of freedom as “a critical self-examination approach [in which] the student is the ultimate author of the critical examination of their life, self, world, culture, and society, including their own education” (p. sf5), and i enthusiastically sought to respond with an energetic and optimistic paper on the importance of freedom of learning as the precondition for innovation and creative development (in process). however, my writing process became too abstracted and disengaged from my own teaching experience; i felt i was betraying myself in constructing an idealized and utopian image of freedom. i issn: 2325-3290 (online) exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf51 wondered whether freedom of education can be presented as a transcendental concept of self-examination and taught as the student’s right for it without a critical deconstruction of the tentious1 and fictitious materiality of freedom. hence, i decided to pursue a narrative inquiry (bruner, 1987; clandinin, murphy, huber, and orr, 2010; clandinin, 2013; hong, falter, & fecho, 2017) to explore my students’ self-generated meanings of their educational freedom in our teacher education classroom. in doing so, i wonder what my students think when they are provoked to claim their right to freedom of education. this reflection reveals that students' right of freedom is not necessarily about their own self-examination; freedom is a creative force of selfexpression. more specifically, freedom is the self-conscious act of discovery of itself (i.e., freedom) in everything my students do as a part of their classroom learning and education. thus, freedom cannot be taught in teacher education, because it becomes an externally enforced and imposed oxymoron that may cause students to suffer and struggle in search of personal meanings. all in all, freedom does not have any meaning at all since meaning emerges in the act of freedom itself, or rather in the creative act of being free. my stance i agree with matusov (in press) that “students must have the exclusive right to freely define their own education” (p. sf2). however, i suggest that all students should be able to claim/define this right at the beginning of each course and to dialogically exercise it throughout their learning. more specifically, i explore a tension-based narrative of students’ thoughts about their freedom that was inspired by the concept of the open and opening syllabus (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017). i do not explore the specifics of my syllabus design and its provocations for freedom due to the length limitations of this particular paper. i purposefully focus and search for diverse tensions that emerge from students’ claims of freedom in our course. without these tensions, without these claims, the concept of freedom has no ontological meaning in their learning. yes, students’ right for freedom in education should be recognized and sustained by their teachers, professors, and institutions at all times. yet, freedom is always a creative act of being, not necessarily an act of self-examination, that produces a multiplicity of tensions and struggles for meaning. furthermore, i argue that freedom should be an educational culture of all schooling institutions. by the term “educational culture,” i mean a social, lived culture of students’ ordinary experience and everyday learning in the classroom (williams, 1989). it is also important to note freedom is an inseparable part of democracy. for example, the canadian charter of rights and freedoms states that the second fundamental freedom is the “freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication” (constitution act, 1982, 2b). this means that all canadian students do have the constitutional right to pursue their education as the venue for these fundamental freedoms. however, all of my students, teacher candidates and 1st-2nd year undergraduates, tell me that they never had any academic freedom in their schooling nor in their post-secondary learning; their teachers decided for them what they should study, when, how, and in what context. my students share with me that the legal, constitutional fundamental freedom has never been a part of their social culture of education. even though many students think that some professors discuss the concept of academic freedom, students are never able to claim (i.e., activate) this right for themselves, to define it, and to experience what 1 while i was writing this narrative, i invented the word “tentious,” but i didn’t notice my invention. dr. ana marjanovic-shane eloquently asked me about this word and its nonexistence in different dictionaries; she wondered if i wanted to coin it here. it is my privilege and honor to coin the word “tentious” that emerged as my response to dr. matusov’s philosophical paper and my reflection on my pedagogic experience and dr. marjanovic-shane’s attentive awareness of its novelty and innovation. comment on text eugene matusov: in my view, contention, imagination, and fiction are the key components of freedom. i also agree that, like anything else, freedom must be deconstructed. also, deconstruction must be deconstructed. comment on text eugene matusov: in my view, contention, imagination, and fiction are the key components of freedom. i also agree that, like anything else, freedom must be deconstructed. also, deconstruction must be deconstructed. comment on text eugene matusov: yes. freedom does not need to be critical. actually, criticality can become an enemy of creativity. creativity is constructive, while criticality is deconstructive. comment on text eugene matusov: i wonder if what you call “freedom,” i call “authorship.” please see my new essay addressing all the commentaries. comment on text eugene matusov: yes, it can be only affirmed, assumed, legitimized, and supported. comment on text eugene matusov: very good point! comment on text eugene matusov: yes. comment on text eugene matusov: i wonder if the notions of freedom and institution are compatible… comment on text eugene matusov: i think a (weak) exception from that is when the students agree with educational impositions on them. please see alina and mikayla’s commentaries on my paper and my response to them. exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf52 it really means in their own lives. often, the concept of academic freedom emerges when students want to discuss controversial, divergent, or contested topics that go against the cultural status quo. mccoubrey and sitch (2002) also found that for canadian students “freedom of expression issues arises in the school whenever a student expresses a view that is contrary to the educational goals of the school” (para. 3). therefore, many students believe that to have academic freedom necessarily entails to have opposing views that “make you look like a trouble-maker” or someone who is not “one of our own” (personal communication with my students, 2018). consequently, freedom of education has many negative meanings that imply conflict (parker & bickmore, 2012). barrett et al. (2009) confirmed that the canadian structure of teacher education discourages future teachers from “taking a critical democratic stance in their teaching” (p. 677). this means that preservice teachers are systematically taught not to question their status as obedient students and not to claim their fundamental freedoms of education (ricci, 2005). also, my students teach me that freedom of learning is tentious, and tensions are to be avoided, if they want to graduate without any problems. thus, the concepts of freedom and tension go hand in hand which means that both are problematic and should be brushed off. likewise, clandinin, murphy, huber, and orr (2010) found that tensions “have a negative valence, that is, tensions are something to be avoided or smoothed over” (p. 82). as a result of this folk belief and common resistance to tensions in education, students are reluctant to claim their fundamental rights to freedom of education because “having voice” or “having many voices” may result in having no place in a small town society and no job in the public school system (personal communication, 2018). therefore, the concept of freedom in education is usually utilized only as a discursive tool to render tensions invisible and to silence original ideas, thoughts, and creative expressions. in this light, my argument becomes a call for all teachers and educational institutions not to enframe freedom of education in a predetermined theoretical framework of controversy and compulsory tension-free monological teaching environment, but to develop their courses within the dialogic tension-based pedagogical context for freedom as the fundamental right of education, so that all students can define their own freedom, claim it, and practice it in the classroom, as well as reflect on this self-created concept of freedom as their education, as their learning experience. without this critical ontology of tentious education, the concept and discourse of freedom is an oxymoron in teacher education. narrative inquiry in my reflective inquiry, i compose a narrative of tensions that reveal students’ thoughts and learning experiences. in doing so, i have purposefully sought to contextualize different pedagogical tensions through which students could negotiate, claim, and exercise their right for freedom of education. what i mean by pedagogical tensions are the key teachable moments in which the whole class transforms itself from a passive, silent audience into a “multiplicity and dissonance of ideas, opinions, and voices [that become] indicative of bakhtinian dialogic research” (hong, falter, & fecho, 2017, p. 26). these tensions are relational (clandinin, murphy, huber, & orr, 2010; estefan, caine, & clandinin, 2016), they also provoke students to experience the freedom of expression and to construct their self-consciousness of freedom in education. as bakhtin (1984) eloquently wrote, the most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined toward another consciousness (toward a thou)… not that which takes place within, but that which takes place on the boundary between one’s own and someone else’s consciousness, on the threshold. and everything, internal gravitates not toward itself but is turned to the outside and dialogized, every internal experience, encounters another, and in this tensionfilled encounter lies its entire essence (p. 287). comment on text eugene matusov: and by and through freedom, right? exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf53 hence, tensions provoke students to form a self-aware and self-conscious approach to their learning. bakhtin values tensions and “encourages us to see tension in all we do, and to embrace it” (hong, falter, & fecho, 2017, p. 22). it is through these tensions that students begin to relate to one another, to their teacher, and to the course itself. in fact, clandinin, murphy, huber, and orr (2010) state that tensions “can only emerge from relationships” (p. 83). if there are tensions, then there are dynamic, active, and meaningful relationships that are evolving in the classroom. without tensions, there are no relationships; there are no dialogues; there is no meaningful and conscious learning. according to estefan, caine, and clandinin (2016), “tension can be a generative space” (p. 25). moreover, tensions make stories more visible and more intense, so that they can be entered, experienced, lived, and retold/transformed (clandinin, 2013). this means that students can become more attentive to and aware of their individual and collective learning experiences, so that they can generate their self-conscious sense of freedom in my particular class as well as to articulate their self-authored right to freedom of education in general academia. yet, tensions are not ready-made findings; they are constructed through narratives that shape the classroom experiences (bruner, 1987). for me, writing is a way of knowing and learning, constructing and deconstructing experience (richardson, 2000). in my construction, i am aware of voices that i render, represent, and reflect on. learning from bakhtin (1984) i pay attention to “who is speaking, when, how, to whom, through how many intermediaries-and how these levels of authority are represented” (p. xxxvi). more specifically, my narrative inquiry of tensions has a holistic focus on key moments that emerged from our classroom discourse around the course syllabus co-authorship and its power dynamic. thus, i do not aim to reduce any themes or codes for interpretation because “in a tensional approach, reduction is not necessary” (hong, falter, & fecho, 2017, p. 28). instead, i search for these moments of students’ claims for their right to freedom and i recall our collective storied dialogues that unfolded during and through these moments. i do not use any instrumental procedures, rather i let these stories come alive on paper and take me along their meanings, discoveries, and imagination (clandinin, 2013). in doing so, i engage my teaching journal, course syllabus, anonymized students’ feedback, and official anonymous students’ surveys that are administered by the faculty leadership team and mailed to me at the end of each course. i represent the collective students’ narrative below; each paragraph includes my students’ voices in their own words. some paragraphs embody one voice, while others combine 2-5 collective voices. i group them together because these students repeated what others have already said. specifically, i gathered these voices from the anonymous, solicited students’ surveys that are conducted at the end of my courses; i also included some of the written students’ anonymized self-authored, selfassessments in their own words that they submitted as a part of our course evaluation. the collective multiple-voiced narrative is based on my interdisciplinary courses in undergraduate education. the limitation of this data collection method is that i do not know exactly the demographic since many of these responses are anonymous. my teaching journal is a sketchbook of my reflections that i write before lessons and after lessons; also, i take my journal with me into the classroom and record spontaneous aha moments, utterances, conversations, and observations. these data sources are all stories that were told, retold, spoken, written, expressed, and imagined through oral dialogues, utterances, typed, and handwritten manuscripts. in fact, there is no single author of these storied data, as these were co-authored, co-constructed during the teaching and learning process. as wells (2011) wrote, “undoubtedly, a story, its construction and performance, and the circumstances under which it is told are reflexively inter-related” (p. 23). reflexivity in this context is focused on my self-examination of how i let my students claim their rights for freedom and how i listen to their stories of learning. hence, i agree with mcgraw, zvonkovic, and walker (2000) who define reflexivity as “a process whereby researchers place themselves and their practices under scrutiny” exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf54 (p. 68). thus, i focus on the key moments of my students’ co-authorship of the course and its dialogic moments of tension with a focus on their own words and expressions. claiming freedom dostoevsky, like goethe's prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him (bakhtin, 1984, p. 6) in my courses, i provoke students to claim their right for freedom of education, to define it, and to actively practice it from the very first day of class. in doing so, i define education with the help of matusov and marjanovic-shane (2017) as “a part of the self, life, society, and the world” and freedom as “decision making about education itself” (p. e3). this means that i invite all students to become creative decision makers and develop the course syllabus together, including their assignments, topics of interest, readings, and self-assessment at the end. my inspirational provocation for them to imagine themselves as explorers and visitors of a new country, and on this journey they should “find their own places of their interests” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017, p. e4). then, i project an expressionist painting by different, creatively provocative artists such as experimental paul klee or feminist artist miriam schapiro, and ask students to think about this course meanings through a lens of this painting or through any of their chosen artistic or creative lenses. it is important to note that i purposefully choose expressionist artists because their philosophy of art is ultimately about the freedom of self-expression and creative dialogue with the self, the unknown audience, and the world. for example, klee’s sense of freedom is in his act of creative improvisation that allows him to turn experiences that burden his soul into a composition. in his diaries, klee wrote that “working in this way, my real personality will express itself, will be able to emancipate itself into the greatest freedom” (1964, p. 232). likewise, i ask my students to improvise and to think about something they really want to learn, something that burdens their soul, something that lets their real personalities, real life become a part of education. thus, i encourage students to attend to their personal tensions and to reflect on their educational meanings. improvisation becomes an act of meaning creations and storytelling that students want to share and to learn more about. improvisation is not about any standards or presupposed templates, it invites students “to develop highly idiomatic personal and group styles” (kannellopoulos, 2011, p. 178). hence, improvisation is the claim for freedom; it empowers students to become free from scripted lessons and dogmatic thinking (bakhtin, 1965; stensaeth, 2015). similarly, schapiro creates not only her paintings through improvisational self-expression, but also her community education as a collective self-expression through dialogue and art. for example, schapiro (1972) describes her pedagogy (i.e., teaching method and art creation) with judith chicago as a circular dialogue that provides a nourishing environment for growth… classes begin by sitting in a circle; a topic for discussion is selected. we move around the room, each person assuming responsibility for addressing herself to the topic on her highest level of self-perception. . . the personal becomes the political. privately held feelings imagined to be personal held ‘hang-ups’ turn out to be everyone’s feelings, and it becomes possible to act together in their solution. (p. 268) schapiro’s pedagogical and artistic vision creates a stage for students’ questions about the course, its meanings, and possibilities of their personal freedom within it. furthermore, students become excited comment on text eugene matusov: i wonder what are limitations of this claim imposed by your institution for your students’ and your own institutional survival and well-being. comment on text eugene matusov: very interesting, olga. i think you need to document and analyze your own innovative dialogic authorial pedagogy and publish it. comment on text eugene matusov: i’d like to see concrete examples. exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf55 with the notion of soul searching and personal “hang-ups.” for many of them, it is their first encounter with their own freedom in education. yet, i advise them not to take freedom for granted, but to claim their right for freedom of education throughout the course; it does not naturally occur, we need to become free people through education (schapiro, 1972), we should not perish as voiceless slaves. collective students’ narrative of tensions with freedom thousands of voices are slipping through the veil, these voices sound like the crackling of a fire • “my learning journey in this course started a little rocky but progressed to a very enlightened form. i was allowed to do whatever i wanted so that i could experience freedom in its most creative way. i felt welcomed to the course content and influential in the choices made towards my learning throughout our time together. i was terrified at first; i was scared, i was shy; i was terrified to love this course and its idea of being free.” • “in my past, i have not been used to having an actual voice when it comes to discussing how things are taught or what you want to learn. the course was so different from all my other classes as i was given the power to make my learning meaningful and rewarding. in fact, i was always taught never to use “i” in my learning; i never imagined to have a say in any of the course outlines. yes, i like the whole idea that our class is in control of our syllabus. however, i was confused at first and did not know what to do with this freedom, power and responsibility. no one was really certain what was expected. actually, i will admit that i was apprehensive and in a sense rejected this course due to how open it was. i felt a little thrown off at the structure of the class, which was a lot more open and allowed the students to participate and discuss every part of the class as an equal. i just could not handle it; i wanted to give up.” • “honestly, i was not prepared for a course that did not provide concrete answers that i needed to memorise and regurgitate. i was in a sense nervous and frustrated due to how unfamiliar the structure of this course was. for the most part this frustration steamed from the fact that i wasn’t sure what exactly i needed to do to receive a good grade then continue on with my degree.” • “once i realized that i was free to approach the course in the manner that we wished, i felt much more at peace. after several classes i began to understand the meaning of democracy in a classroom. we, the students, could change the way this course worked to benefit our learning. in my mind, being a student in a class meant being told what to do and how to do it, and then doing it exactly how the teacher wanted you to. but what i have now found is that olga's goal was to help us think for ourselves, determine what was important to us, and to give us a say in this community.” • “the main thing that stands out to me from this course this semester is the fact that it has been so different from every other course i have ever been a part of. this was the first time that a professor asked and gave the students power to decide and take ownership of the course and its outline. this was very liberating for a student that spent a majority of their life in school without any input to what and how they were being taught. no one was really certain what was expected of them. at first it seemed daunting but upon doing the assignments and discovering the freedom in which we could complete these tasks, i am sure i am not alone in saying that i realized how wonderful it is to comment on text eugene matusov: the initial process of transition from the students’ past experiences with the conventional oppressive monologic education to an innovative democratic dialogic education is very interesting, problematic, and worth studying. comment on text eugene matusov: one past student of mine (a freshman and a single mom) exclaimed in the class, “eugene, a few months ago, i had to ask my teachers’ permission to go to pee. now, i’ve engaged in decision making about my own education! i have a culture shock, a vertigo.” comment on text eugene matusov: this is an important concern! that is why i have a lot of options to make decisions for my students, if they trust me in so-called “opening syllabus.” they can also change their pedagogical regime to open syllabus and negotiate my initial pedagogical decisions in opening syllabus. comment on text eugene matusov: yes, i think the student should have the right to negotiate how open the student wants the course to be for them. comment on text eugene matusov: i think this educational wish of the student must be respected as well. in my classes, i have an option of credential student who only wants to study how to pass the exams. comment on text eugene matusov: i think the teacher’s goal is to assist the students’ educational goals. exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf56 be able to have liberties in the topics you learn on and the way in which you present them. so, i was able to resurrect and bring out my creative side when trying to complete assignments again. this was something that i have always loved doing, especially in my younger years. but as i grew older and because of the reactions i would get from teachers in my past, i slowly let it fade away. it feels really good to slowly bring that side out of me and reconnect with it. i know that as i continue to discover it again more and more, it will allow me to be more myself, which will greatly impact my teaching and my students. now i know that freedom is creativity; it is in our own hands that transform our classroom space into an unexpected, unknown masterpiece that was hidden in the shadow of our being all along.” • “i really enjoyed the course because it opened my mind to new ideas about freedom. even though now i am a little more confused and unsure as to who i am as a teacher, it is not for bad reasons. it is actually a good thing because it will help me truly discover and meet the real teacher inside of me.” reflections as conclusion this collective narrative reveals that freedom is always an act of being that does not require any specific definition. students learn what freedom means to them and how to claim it through their learning. these experiential tensions for meaning tell a deeper story about a creative awakening of their intrinsic interests, passions, fears, meanings, and their new sense of teacher-self. without these tensions of being thrown off the dominant structure, being confused, being different, being democratic, and being creative, students cannot define, claim, and practice their right for freedom. however, i have to admit that these tensions are important, albeit difficult to cope with, when i try to co-author the course with all my students in a moment. the difficulty lies in some instances of students’ perception of me as an outsider who wants to overthrow their way of life with my own, immigrant culture of teaching. on the first day of class, for example, one student specifically told me that “we don’t do it this way here. it is all willy-nilly.” immediately, i felt humiliated by the students’ definition of my pedagogy for freedom as willy-nilly and of me as an immigrant minority. hence, the tensions of freedom require teachers’ patience to dialogize these spontaneous, impulsive reactions from some students who tend to resist the teacher as a person. also, these tensions grow over time, and they have to be dialogically explored through open and transparent class discussions, collective online blogs, and students’ reflective journals. not all students are willing to express their genuine feelings and thoughts on the first day of class; they want to build trust in our learning community before they can share these tensions. yet, these tensions are inevitable and may become frustrations without dialogues about them. for example, one student specifically shared with me at the end of the course that she wanted to drop out because she was too shy to have an open discussion about her tensions of “being off” the cultural status quo, in an unfamiliar, alien space. at that time, she did not want to be free and controversial; her previously learned idea of freedom meant anarchy, sin, and disobedience. however, she shared with me, “it was upon having the chance to speak to you one on one that i was better able to understand the goal of this course. based on these interactions, my understanding of this course changed. this course also created a place of open dialog between my peers and i, where we could share our ideas and better develop our thoughts and beliefs.” freedom is not self-evident, and many students do not want to examine themselves, and when they do examine themselves, they feel inner tensions. these tensions are the inevitable pillars of students’ right to freedom of education. hence, students should not only be able to claim their right to freedom but also claim their right to experience and openly discuss their emergent tensions of freedom without any penalties in a negative form of grade/assessment, job placements, or in a form of religious judgements about their newly discovered sinful nature of freedom. comment on text eugene matusov: which involves freedom for the student to become somebody else 😊. comment on text eugene matusov: i think the student’s exploration of this question should one of the primary questions in teacher education. probably, along with the question, “do i really want to be a teacher?” what do you think? comment on text eugene matusov: i agree and somewhat disagree. i think it is ok to have a definition of freedom that works currently for me. the problem starts when this definition is imposed on others… comment on text eugene matusov: or even freedom not to claim this freedom (fully or partially). see my reply to alina and mikayla. comment on text eugene matusov: interesting! what is the evidence of that? my dear colleague and friends, jim rietmulder, once called me “a benevolent dictator” who gracefully grants freedom to the students (but can institutionally revoke this freedom at any time). it took time of my painful soul-searching to realize how right he was. now, i do not try to deny my dictatorship but carefully analyze, limit, and reveal it to my students for their critique. comment on text eugene matusov: good idea! comment on text eugene matusov: i think this raised an issue of imposition of our pedagogical values on our students, tempting to become pedagogical missionaries for our dear educational philosophy. olga, i wonder if you are interested in pedagogical experimentation of giving your students a choice for several diverse pedagogical regimes to choose (e.g., opening syllabus, open syllabus, closed syllabus). what do you think? comment on text eugene matusov: what if it had not? comment on text eugene matusov: yes. exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf57 freedom always entails tensions and change; students experience this change in a way they think about learning, teaching, and course design. their thoughts change from the need for certainty and rigid structure of graduation to a constant discovery of freedom and their right for freedom in everything they do, everything they encounter in their education. in fact, this discovery of freedom becomes their education without any restriction from the authority figures and from the externally imposed curriculum. freedom becomes a way of knowing the truth, freedom is the truth of self-realization. references bakhtin, m. (1965). rabelais and his world. indiana university press. bakhtin, m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (c. emerson, trans.). university of minnesota press. barrett, s.e., solomon, r.p., singer, j.m., portelli, j.p., & mujuwamariya, d. (2009). the hidden curriculum of a teacher induction program: ontario teacher educators' perspectives. canadian journal of education, 32(4), 677-702. bruner, j. (1987). life as narrative. social research, 54(1), 11-32. clandinin, d.j., murphy, s., huber, j., & orr, a. (2010). negotiating narrative inquiries: living in a tensionfilled mist. journal of educational research, 103(2), 81-90. clandinin, d. j. (2013). engaging in narrative inquiry. routledge. canadian charter of rights and freedoms, part i of the constitution act. (1982). https://lawslois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-15.html estefan, a., caine, v., & clandinin, d. j. (2016). at the intersection of narrative inquiry and professional education. narrative works, 6(1), 15-37. hong, x., falter, m., & fecho, b. (2016). embracing tension: using bakhtinian theory as a means for data analysis. qualitative research, 17(1), 20-36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794116653800 kanellopoulos, p. (2011). freedom and responsibility: the aesthetics of free musical improvisation and its educational implications—a view from bakhtin. philosophy of music education review, 19(2), 113-135. doi:10.2979/philmusieducrevi.19.2.113 klee, p. (1964). the diaries of paul klee: 1898-1918. university of california press. matusov, e. (in press). a student’s right to freedom of education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. 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(2012). conflict management and dialogue with diverse immigrant students: novice teachers’ approaches and concerns. journal of teaching and learning, 8(2), 47–64. 8 (2020), sf1-sf28. doi:10.5195/dpj.2020.356 exploration of students’ thoughts about their right to freedom of education olga shugurova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.345 | vol. 8 (2020) sf58 richardson, l. (2000). writing: a method of inquiry. in n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (pp. 923-949). sage. ricci, c. (2005). rewarding the obedient: what is really being taught at the faculties of education? an experiential account. journal of pre-service education, 1-11. https://faculty.nipissingu.ca/carlor/files/2013/02/rewardingtheobedient.pdf schapiro, m. (1972). the education of women as artists: project womanhouse. art journal, 31(3), 268270 stensaeth, k. (2015). “musical dialoguing:” a perspective of bakhtin’s dialogue on musical improvisation in asymmetric relations. nordic research in music education, 16, 209-225. wells, k. (2011). narrative inquiry. oxford university press. williams, r. (1989). resources of hope: culture, democracy, socialism. verso. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. untitled microsoft word 8. marjanovic-shane^j (layout)^j soul-searching assembly a vignette^j 2022-01-11.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a165 a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract in this article, i develop a dialogic analysis of a democratic school’s general assembly meeting in the form of a vignette. as a qualitative method, a vignette is a suitable way of preparing evidence and constructing data for further analyses. it is also an ideal medium for a full-fledged dialogic analysis of the described events and dialogues that took place among the participants. i grounded this vignette on a transcript of an audio recording of a general assembly meeting held in the first norwegian democratic high school – the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego) on november 2nd, 1967, shortly after it started to work in 1967. using the students’ voices raised in this meeting, i aimed to recreate the meeting’s dramatic atmosphere. my approach follows the art of dialogic analysis (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019), as i attempt to dialogically join the students, adding my reactions and interpretations of the meeting’s unfolding debates and dialogues. i also add my dialogic replies to the students and insert other comments judging their positions dialogically in an attempt to also create rich data for further conceptual analysis, which is published in another article in this special issue, “paradigmatic dialoguedisagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis” (see marjanovic-shane, 2023b). ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. acknowledgments i want to thank my colleagues ljubica beljanski-ristic, mikhail gradovski, tina kullenberg, and other participants of the educationalist club at the university of students, for their creative and helpful comments that guided my writing. i especially want to thank my colleague, eugene matusov, for endless talks and critical readings of my previous drafts that helped me focus my attention on and sharpen my conceptualizations of crucial moments of this dramatic event. ïïò issn: 2325-3290 (online) a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a166 introductory note in this article, i develop a dialogic analysis of a general assembly meeting in a democratic school in the first norwegian democratic high school – the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego), norway. my dialogic analysis in the form of a vignette is based on transcript1 of an audio recording of a general assembly meeting held on wednesday, november 2nd, 1967, shortly after the experimental school was opened in 1967 (jørgensen, 1971, p. 41). this particular analysis in the form of a vignette is a part of a quartet of articles about the scandinavian experiments in democratic education starting in the second part of the 1960s (marjanovic-shane, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c; marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023). these four articles explore the first experiments in democratically run high schools founded by the students in oslo (ego) and its sister democratic high school in gothenburg, sweden (the experimental gymnasium in gothenburg – egg). and the whole quartet is a part of a larger project published in this special issue on dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. in addition to these three research articles, we published two parts of the book, “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” by mosse jørgensen (jørgensen, 1971), the ego’s first school leader2. why a vignette? – a methodological approach as a qualitative method, an actual or imaginary story – a vignette (barter & renold, 1999) is very suitable for preparing evidence and constructing data for further analyses. a vignette is also an ideal genre for a full-fledged dialogic polyphonic research art (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, et al., 2019). in writing this vignette, i was trying to join the students' voices in a dialogic way, adding my reactions to their ideas and opinions. i wondered what they might have meant, whom they addressed, in what ways they have treated each other, and how they saw themselves in this meeting as they discussed pressing issues of their school’s educational experiment and its very existence. i phrase my interpretations of their voices using “low modality” expressions (latour, 1987), e.g., “it seems [to me],” “it appears [that],” “i suspect that,” etc. through the “low modality” phrasing, i deliberately indicate my dialogic subjectivity in interpreting the speech of others, avoiding to “read their minds.” my purpose is to stir up further dialogues about this meeting by problematizing issues, leaving space for potentially different interpretations. as much as possible, i try to base my opinions and interpretations on the ethnographic evidence provided in the assembly meeting transcript3, rather than attempting to impose my pre-existing theories, models or views rooted in other sociological, philosophical and educational literature and research. in this way, i am trying to construct a foundation for developing what may be a type of research akin to grounded theory approaches (glaser & holton, 2004; glaser & strauss, 1967; whiteley, 2004). namely, i follow the art of dialogic polyphonic research (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovicshane, kullenberg, et al., 2019), which “is aimed at generating dialogic provocations, grounded in a studied phenomenon, for critical dialogue” (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019, p. 254). thus, i 1 dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal was given gracious permission to publish extensive parts of this transcript, which is a part of the book by hem & remlov, “forsøksgymnas i praksis” [experimental gymnasium in praxis], by the current owner of the estate of pax publishing house. 2 i am using terminology used in many democratic schools to call mosse jørgensen the “school leader,” among the others with equal rights, instead of “the principal” a term that implies hierarchy. the term is descriptive, often used to indicate the person with administrative responsibilities toward the state, rather than their day-to-day functions inside the school. 3 the meeting and its transcript were held in norwegian. i don’t speak norwegian, but i was able to translate it to english using google translate, my knowledge of two other languages related to norwegian (german and english), and the help of some friends from norway. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a167 attempt to dialogically join the students who originally participated in the general assembly dialogues, revealing my reactions, positions and interpretations of what i thought they might have meant. the vignette is simultaneously a dialogic research in itself and it serves as a preparation for further conceptual analysis of the students’ ideas i presented in another two articles, “paradigmatic dialoguedisagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis” (marjanovic-shane, 2023b) and “four personideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse” (2023a). context at the very start of the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego) in 1967, the students and teachers found themselves in a situation of growing tensions regarding the vision of their newly established school and the ways to democratically govern it. the tensions intensified in the day-to-day clashes and namecalling between two groups of students. one group of about 15-20 students were the school founders who worked hard to keep the school running in the way they had envisioned it and for which they obtained a permit from the norwegian department of education. the other group involved a large number of about 130 students who were admitted to the school in the short period between july 1967, when the school finally obtained a legal permit to open, and september, when it opened. in this group, “… there was a lot, [of students] […] who were thrown out from other schools based on their academic failures… […] [y]outh with other problems… even some who had drug-related convictions” (jørgensen, 1977, p. 30). these students, who comprised the overall majority, were attracted to the school for diverse reasons. the most prominent reason involved the students’ desire to liberate themselves from the oppression of the conventional schools to which they had been exposed in the previous nine to ten years of schooling. in the words of mosse jørgensen, “if we would want to summarize, [their most essential reason] would have to be [their] need for a place where they could recuperate and heal from the old [school system]” (jørgensen, 1971, p. 96). the tensions between the two groups of students grew around many issues. however, the strongest conflict concerned the principle of voluntary attendance of the classes, adopted as one of the fundamental principles of their school. without mandatory attendance the attendance numbers dropped to less than 50%, which, it turned out, was not exactly what the founding students had in mind! the founding students apparently began to urge, even nag everyone to abide by their preplanned and legitimized vision of the school.4 the dissatisfied others soon labeled the founding students and their followers “tantene” “[nagging] nannies,” which they resented. in an interview with me in the fall of 2019, one of the founding students, øystein gullvåg holter, described this group to which he belonged: “[we were from] more progressive and leftish kind of parents, intellectuals, for example. and people with often intellectual backgrounds, arts maybe? yeah! different kinds of people, but mainly, … roughly [saying], a kind of cultural capital, [cultural] upper class…” (interview with øystein gullvåg holter, 2019). the nannies, on the other hand, called the students who resisted their daily pressures – the “avvikere” “deviants.”5 deviants, in many ways, defied the nannies’ original educational vision through class non-attendance, class disturbance, and avoidance of other essential chores in running the school (jørgensen, 1977, p. 47). 4 this vision included a preplanned curriculum, partially based on the norwegian department of education requirements for the national high school graduation exam (artium in norwegian) and delivered through teacher organized classes (jørgensen, 1977). see more about this vision in marjanovic-shane et al. (2023). 5 “avvikere,” is a harsh word in norwegian, meaning literally “rule or law breakers.” i translated it as “deviants,” implying deviating from or breaking a norm in english. øystein gullvåg holter, however, was actually slightly taken a-back when i reminded him of this name-calling. when i quoted it from the published transcript of the general assembly meeting on november 2, 1967, he said, “was it that hard word [we] used?” (interview with øystein gullvåg holter, 2019). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a168 these tensions indicated to jørgensen that their innovative approach to the new school still contained some traditional educational orientations, values, and beliefs that clashed with the ideas of a democratic school. but she was not able to actually put her finger on what exactly these traditional conceptualizations were. my goal is precisely to try to do that: to explore the students’ (and their teachers’) ontological6, conceptual, ideological, and political differences about education and schooling that lead to high tensions among the school participants (the students, the teachers, the staff and potentially the researchers from the university of oslo who were frequently in school). let us return to the situation in these early days of school. the students and teachers felt that they needed to do something about the mounting internal and external tensions which were threatening to explode and potentially mean the end of their educational experiment. a general assembly meeting was planned for november 2nd, 1967, only two months after the school was opened. several students who were the school founders, the nannies, decided to use this regular weekly general assembly7 meeting to introduce difficult topics of their existence together (see more below). in one of those whims of fate, the norwegian department of education had sent their representatives to inspect the school on this very day without any advance notice. jørgensen wrote, then, just then, in the very moment when the school was exploding, as the sun, the moon and the stars were shooting and banging, and our tinderbox of a school was bursting at the seams, it was then that the department of education’s representatives came for an inspection, to see whether the creature was born, whether we had managed to make our school into a democracy in the [measly] eight weeks that had just passed. they came down to us and found everything to be very bad. it was november 2, wednesday and the [most important] general assembly meeting was just about to start (jørgensen, 1971, p. 41). and in the same whim of fate, this inspection was the real reason that the assembly meeting was audio-taped in the first place. namely, mosse, the school leader, and one of the teachers successfully diverted the inspectors from attending the assembly, knowing well that sensitive topics were going to be discussed. under no circumstances would they want the inspectors from the department of education witness this “family broil.” the inspectors agreed not to go to the assembly but insisted on getting a taperecording of it! later on, the transcript of this general assembly recording was published in a book by lars hem and tom remlov8, “experimental gymnasium in practice” (1969). the authors state that they “hope that the transition from the oral to the written word preserves the democratic atmosphere as much as possible so that it can also provide the reader with an educated insight into the realities of the expressions ‘school democracy’ and ‘the experimental gymnasium.’ the minutes are a verbatim transcript of the tape recordings from the meeting, and the little editing we have done is minimal and guided by the consideration that this should be read and not heard. all names are changed…” (p. 22). the meeting was remarkable and had a great significance for saving the school from breaking right then at the start (jørgensen, 1971). among the students, the meeting became colloquially known as the 6 “ontological” here is used to refer to a personal sense of being and life important issues that matter to the person. 7 the general assembly was the highest organ of the school governance. see more about the governance structure in (marjanovicshane et al., 2023). 8 tom remlov was one of the founders and a student of ego. he later became a renowned norwegian “actor, dramaturg, film producer, theatre director, and opera manager” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tom_remlov). lars hem was a graduate student at the university of oslo who participated in the research projects focused on this experimental school. he later wrote a dissertation about ego. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a169 “hell of an assembly” or the “soul-searching assembly” (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 22).9 it was a great clash among the student as they reached into their souls in search of their deepest, most earnest, most heartfelt convictions, and beliefs. i hope that reading this story will give you, dear reader, an experience of the wrenching soul-searching the students lived through on that day. for four and a half hours, they debated, fought, and struggled with and against each other, putting on trial their beliefs, purposes, and desires, searching their souls, and testing their consciences in stormy confrontations. the cast of characters10 based on the order of appearance. the students are between 16 and 18 years old. there were a few teachers present. to make the story more vivid, i indicate each person’s gender and their status as a nanny or a deviant, where it was possible to infer from their discussions. rolf – a male student, the chairman of the meeting per – a male student inge – a female student, potentially a deviant åge – a male student, a nanny dag – a male student, a deviant arne – a male teacher roar – a male student, a nanny tom – a male student, a nanny ernst – a male student, potentially a deviant øivind – a male teacher reidar – a male student, a nanny lars – a male teacher erling – a male student, a deviant egil – a male student, a nanny anders – a male student, a nanny tone – a female student, a nanny sverre – a male student, a nanny viggo – a male student, a deviant inger – a female student thorleif – a male student, a deviant anne – a female student, a nanny olaf – a male teacher vivi – a female student finn – a male student, a nanny kåre – a male student, a deviant elisabeth – a female student, a nanny liv – a female student six students whose minor remarks appear in the transcript but are not in the vignette; silent participants (about 40-45) ïïò 9 note about translation: hem and remlov used norwegian expressions “kjempeallmanamøtte” and “sjeleallmanamøtte.” i first translated them as “the confrontation assembly” and “the conscience assembly” respectively. however, my colleague, tina kullenberg from sweden, was surprised by my translations. she wrote: “i am not sure these are the best translations. … in my (bad) norwegian understanding, “kjempe” does not have to do with confrontation and fights but could mean something big: a huge meeting, or? that also fits to how they refer to this event in the context: a super-length meeting of 4,5 hours… next, the norwegian term “sjele” means soul. perhaps you translate it with “conscience” but for me it is a bit confusing and misleading. conscience to me refers more to mental and cognitive states of mind” (tina kullenberg, personal correspondence, december 3, 2020). tina’s surprise sent me to further investigate how to translate these expressions. i learned that both expressions come from the norwegian youth slang. my colleague mikhail gradovski from norway wrote: “the words are from a dialect and are neither bokmal nor nynorsk [the official norwegian languages] [the official norwegian languages]” (mikhail gradovski, personal correspondence, december 3, 2020). my other norwegian colleague, olga dysthe wrote, “kjempe means giant… [it is] easily understood. children use ´kjempe´ all the time instead of really big” (olga dysthe, personal correspondence, december 4th, 2020). furthermore, “kjempe” as a verb can also mean to fight, to struggle, to wrestle. so, because i wanted to keep the colloquial tone of the slang used by the students, i finally settled on translating “kjempeallmanamøtte” as a “hell of an assembly.” i also learned that the second expression “sjeleallmanamøtte,” is not much in use today. it was very strange to my norwegian colleagues. “sjele means soul: the connotation is probably that every soul (person) is there, or that it is particularly important, since soul is the core of the person, and they need to be there. but not obvious why they have chosen soul” wrote olga. taking that into account and knowing what transpired in the meeting, i decided to metaphorically translate “sjeleallmanamøtte” as the “soul-searching assembly”. 10 the names in the transcript are pseudonyms. the students’ actual names were changed by lars hem and tom remlov, who published the transcript (hem & remlov, 1969). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a170 in the short introduction to the transcript11, tom remlov and lars hem write: this […] meeting is the so-called “hell of an assembly” or the “soul-searching assembly,” where within four and a half hours, they [the students] got through the crisis in which the school had found itself for some time after its start [in september 1967]. this [crisis] is the reason that the debate was planned in the first place. it may seem a bit strange that the debate came under “other matters” on the [assembly’s] agenda, but that is because the situation [in school] became so very tense in the days just before the meeting that we had to have a debate. some people agreed to spark it up. at that time, we did not know each other well enough to be able to put on the agenda something like, for example, “everyone's nerves and our school’s existence.” the public meetings were held in a room where there was space for all the school members if they sat tight, which intensified feelings, either of belonging or of antagonism. the first three items on the agenda have been omitted [from the transcript]… rolf is the chair (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 22). the transcript starts with per talking about possibilities for improving the class schedule “because i think it is the schedule that has a lot to be blamed for [the fact that] the attendance [of the scheduled classes] is being so very bad” (p. 23). but åge abruptly changes the topic, åge: … this with the schedule is… a very important thing to discuss. but i am absolutely sure that no matter what you do with the schedule the attendance will not improve. it is not the fault of the schedule that 50% of the students are absent during the lessons. there is a completely different reason for that… when one is at a school where the highest [governing] body is the general assembly – [but] where there are only 70 [out of 150 students] present, – one may well ask: what is it that does not work? why doesn't it work? […] i can't make a suggestion about what doesn't work and why not – i can't make a suggestion about what to do to improve it. but i can at least point out a few things that i think are – not as they should be. and… something that is very difficult to define: it is the school spirit or milieu call it what you want. school milieu. it sounds a lot nicer. […] what is not understood is the essential point here – that this is a student democracy and not student anarchy... (long applause.) yes, everyone claps, but it is not true that everyone agrees with me… but listen here: one must begin to realize that in a democracy, one must also have some rules that must be followed. it must be possible, for example, to meet up for a class… […] it is the students [and not the teachers] who [are responsible for nonattendance]. yes, they [i.e., those students who do not attend classes] are completely indifferent to how the school works. (in a sarcastic, parodying tone), [they boast,] “if i only get to play the guitar in the hallways, everything is fine.” […] – should those students be allowed to go here? ... does our school have an interest in having students who are entirely unmotivated to our school? i don't know […] – i don't want to come up with any such suggestions to expel them and stuff… but at least i'm hoping that people will realize that – this is not a school where you can be completely indifferent. it is a school… that is serious! a serious educational endeavor and not a place for… – i would not say what… – there is no place for people who can do what they want. this is a school and not a playroom, indeed. thanks. (pp. 24-25). åge’s speech at first seems to be ignored as per and some other students try to return the discussion to the issue of class schedules. it might be that they are too perplexed with åge’s provocation, 11 a note about the transcript conventions in this article: the square brackets with an ellipsis (three dots) indicate that i have cut some parts of the speech, as opposed to a simple ellipsis inside or after some sentences but without brackets, which indicate that the speaker is making a pause. i have cut some parts of the speeches that seemed to be a digression from the main point the speaker is making, or repetitions that do not add to the overall point of the speaker, nor our understanding of the atmosphere. when the square brackets contain words, this indicates my addition to the speech to make it more understandable. the regular round parentheses are part of the original text and usually contain comments about nonverbal reactions, like “applause.” a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a171 we don’t know. however, roar quickly takes the floor and returns to åge’s argument that “[the school spirit] is beginning to slip out of our hands.” he says, roar: you can sit quietly and say: “it is a transitional period – when the first glowing enthusiasm is still high.” [but] we have to be careful not to let this [spirit] completely slip away – while we just sit there. i noticed it in myself… – very well, i noticed it on others, too. people sit in the hallways when they should be in classes… – as if they should not have classes. we must point out to the others – we must point out to ourselves and ask what do i really want at this school. we should not be allowed to just sit on our asses – not give a fuck, – excuse the expression. << mikhail gradovski, 2020-07-16: it is important to understand that norwegian culture is in no way an elitist culture so the number of vulgarities in the language use is higher compared with other germanic language cultures.>> roar (continues): we call ourselves “adults,” – we've been adults enough to form a school – we've been adults enough to form our own rules – we've been adults enough to hire teachers – to plan our own teaching. we should also show ourselves as adults who can bring this [school] forward to success. [but] it's starting to dangerously slip out of our hands and we have to do something now we can't wait. thanks. (applause) dag: the point is that we are allowed to sit on our asses that is what voluntary attendance is. so, that’s what they [the students] do. roar: of course, one is allowed. this is a free school. you can work at home. you can do anything. if a student prefers to sit in the library to work, instead in a class, of course that's fine. but there is not just one thing called freedom – there also exists another term, it is called freedom with responsibility. i repeat, with responsibility. we are responsible for our fellow students. we are responsible for our own schooling. […] we can manage to get [the school] to become a good school we are all aware that what is going on now should not go any further. thanks (pp. 26-27). roar introduces the distinction between “one thing called freedom” and “another term – freedom with responsibility.” this distinction quickly became pivotal, indicating the existence of two conflicting, paradigmatically different approaches to their school, as i discuss in another article in this trilogy “a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of the soul-searching assembly” (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). the concept of “freedom with responsibility” will echo in many other students’ speeches in this meeting, and in the subsequent books12 and other writings about the school. åge tosses a snide comment out of turn, “what dag says there that's the typical attitude here at school.” but rolf, who is the chair of the meeting, lets åge know that only one direct reply to a speaker is allowed, and if he wants to talk again, he has to request to be put on the speaker list13. the next speaker, tom, starts with describing the tension he feels about whether the students should have unlimited voluntary attendance, or should their freedoms be limited by particular obligations. he points out two obligations he thinks they have: a) to the society – i.e., the taxpayers – who financed the school for the students “to work” on their education; and b) to the school’s proclaimed mission to further advance norwegian public education. 12 for instance, in her book about the school, mosse jørgensen (1977) the first school leader, wrote in discussing this same situation complaining that the department of education was using old criteria to judge the work of the school: “… if the school does not work ‘normally,’ it will be proven that freedom imbued with responsibility is not possible” (jørgensen, 1977, p. 48). 13 for the most part i have deleted various procedural discussions about who is on the list, or how much time should the speakers be allowed, and rolf’s moderating remarks. it should be mentioned that rolf kept the procedural aspect of the meeting with a tight control, managing the list of speakers and moderating their order. in most cases, no one spoke unless rolf gave them the floor. because of that some speakers replied to an issue after several others have spoken in between. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a172 tom: … [with some unease] – i personally would allow all people to do what they want, […]. if they just want to sit and play guitar – that’s fine with me. it's just that, the goal of this school... we are in a completely different situation, different from when we can say that we can sit and do what we want because we are paid for by the public, and it is a very expensive school. […] there is a consideration of the taxpayers, … there are, after all, very many people who sacrifice part of their income, who work all day, and have to sacrifice part of their income for us to be here today. and i mean that there is nowhere else in society where anyone can sit down to do as little as we can, indeed. in all other kinds of work, you have to do something. and being in school is being in the same situation. and secondly, we are also undertaking an educational endeavor to try to change the current school system, the current high school. that's what the goal was, namely. and if it is to have any relevance at all, then one must think about: what is a school what is the norwegian school? here, tom highlights two facts about their school: that it was approved by the department of education based on a particular vision and particular plans to realize it. thus, that is what society expects from them, and they have an obligation to fulfill this expectation. secondly, the legitimization of their school also included a provision that the school be an educational experiment that is, in part, conducted by the researchers from the university of oslo (jørgensen, 1977). being an experiment in “improving the current norwegian high school,” tom seems to think the school needs to proceed based on the approved plans. another idea might be on tom’s mind, as suspected by my colleague eugene matusov, “behind the notion of an ‘experiment’ is the idea of finding the ‘best practice’ that can be scaled up to mass education.”14 in other words, this predefined practice in itself obliges its participants to conduct themselves in particular ways. tom strengthens his argument by adding that what they agreed to do is already somewhat different from the common understanding of education and that, tom: if we step out [of the common conventional understanding of education] completely and we somehow create a whole new spiritual direction… although, i am very much in favor of it… so… (laughter)… but that's just what i mean, that one cannot transition to this [kind of] school so abruptly. one cannot convince “aftenposten” and “morgenbladet15” directly quite so directly by saying that we live to have fun. that [the fun] is incidentally what we also have (pp. 27-28). almost as an afterthought, tom seems to hint that there might exist another vision of education (“if we somehow create a whole new spiritual direction”), education “where we live to have fun.” and this vision is very different from the common sense one and even the one their school was committed to developing. it seems that many others understand what he is talking about, and some perhaps approve of it, judging by their laughter. ernst undermines tom’s argument about wasting taxpayers’ money with a sarcastic comment that, in that case, “all norwegian school work is a waste of money […] when [the students] sleep through 5 years or 7 years of school” (applause) (p. 28). it appears that the students liked ernst’s sarcasm, based on the applause, but there was no verbal reply to it, and rolf gave the floor to øivind (a teacher). øivind (a teacher apparently supporting the “nannies” group) rejects tom’s hint that the school could have a different educational approach, “where we live to have fun,” or possibly something else. øivind says, “… to avoid misunderstandings – […] we're not a youth psychiatric clinic we're a school.” øivind suggests that everyone writes a new, mock application to ego, focusing on why they want to go to this school. “and those who then find out that they are here because they think this must be a youth psychiatric clinic they should think of something else” (p. 28). but reidar disagrees with øivind that the students who 14 i am thankful to eugene matusov who pointed out this implication of tom’s discussion (matusov, 2022, in press) 15 local oslo newspapers. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a173 don’t hold a “common goal” to pass the atrium (national graduation exam),16 should not be tolerated in school (p. 28). although reidar does not explicitly say so, it seems that he feels uneasy at the thought of expelling anyone. with some puzzlement, he realizes there is a diversity of educational goals among them. he is, however, not sure what to do if this diversity might not be legitimate. åge is also firmly against the diversity of students’ personal goals and desires, although not without ambivalence (see the beginning of his utterance). nevertheless, he passionately speaks against legitimizing student diversity of school goals. åge: … [sarcastically] of course, you should be able to do what you want! – but when 150 people do what they want, or 100 people do what they want, they each go in their own direction in 100 directions. then, this will be no school there will be a place where 100 people meet and do what they want. so… you can't do that at this school. that is just whining. this school leads up to the artium [graduation exam] and i will strongly oppose what you say that we should tolerate deviants. [cynically] of course, we should tolerate “deviants” (laughter and applause)! of course, we should do it. but, my god, you have to start wondering… one should tolerate that some people – yes, call them “deviants” or call them whatever you want – that they only go here because… they do not go here with the aim of taking the artium. it may be that nonconformity is not accepted in our society. and we just can't accept [this nonconformity] either. because when you go here, then the school may expect to have a failure rate of 50 – yes! one cannot tolerate that. you can't have students who go here and just don't care about how the school is doing, only that they personally have fun. this is just regrettable. one cannot tolerate this (p. 29). i suspect that for åge, following one’s own desires and interests may be a dangerous nonconformity defined as a lack of accountability to the rules and norms of a pre-defined educational practice with its preset quality, shape, tasks, roles, and goals. åge denigrates the very claims to have the right to be free and choose what to do – as “just whining.” in concordance with åge’s point regarding the lack of accountability, the next speaker lars (a teacher who also apparently supports the “nannies”) raises what he calls a “sensitive issue” of the “appalling” lack of trustworthiness in “quite ordinary human agreements.” according to lars, “there are certain things that are quite elementary like trustworthiness, for example, and attendance at the classes…” (p. 29). in lars’ opinion, although voluntary attendance is fine, “if you choose … [a class] in the first place then you have to meet up from such and such an hour and to such and such an hour, […] and not flounder… ” (pp. 29-30). egil returns to the central issue of their tensions – that some students don’t conform to the school. “so, i'm very interested in what… is the criterion for a deviant? […] we are 150 deviants at this school” (p. 31). his remark apparently produces a strong positive reaction among the students as one hears sounds of laughter, approval, turmoil (recorded on tape, and in the transcription). it seems that his remark somehow deflated a little the growing tensions of blaming and shaming anyone who thinks differently from some named or unnamed, but omnipresent norm. åge begins to reply, trying to speak through the continuing laughter and turmoil, attempting to delineate some major ideas of their educational vision åge: so there are many… there is a lot to wonder… in a deviant, so … (laughter). no, for real! don't laugh! it’s no-nonsense! 16 artium, is norwegian national high school graduation exam. the high schoolers take that exam in order to officially graduate. artium is also a necessary requirement for applying to college, functioning somewhat as the sat in the usa. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a174 what i would call “a deviant” at this school here, in contrast to what, i hope, is the majority [of students] in this particular school are people who walk around with an indifferent, indifferent attitude towards the school and only recognize themselves. they just holler… [paraphrasing] “if only i get to do what i want to do.” – “if only i get to go to the pastry shop.” – “it only matters that i don’t have to attend [classes] – that i have my personal freedom.” this is all they say, yes, there you have it! but the school must also work, and it can't work with a whole lot of such deviants that are only detrimental to our school (p. 31). at that point, rolf indicates that he wants to limit the length of time each speaker may take and the number of direct responses to the speaker. still, erling stops him, saying that they are discussing “the matters of fundamental importance to the whole school” (p. 31) and that he would oppose such limits. rolf agrees not to limit the time and gives the word to roar, who now seems to be developing an uneasiness, potentially even a repulsion against casting off the “deviants.” hesitantly, he starts considering the legitimacy of the plurality of attitudes toward the school, at least initially. he says, roar: … i think it's a bit drastic that øivind [teacher] suggests that we make a new application. [hedging] it was a damn’ good suggestion, absolutely. but i think many people will have a feeling of being cast off. some others may argue, “let’s cast off the deviants,” … but i think we are a school of 150 individualists17. we cannot expect everyone to have the same attitude [towards the school]. but then we, who hopefully have in part, that attitude, without emphasizing myself in any way… so, i would like us to, together… we start with ourselves… we start embracing people who have a slightly different attitude to this school we bring them in instead of casting them off. this [casting them off] would cause great dissatisfaction, i think (p. 32). when he says “we,” roar seems to identify himself with the “nannies,” appealing to the “nannies” to be tolerant of other people’s diversity and to make an effort to “bring the others in.” what this “bringing in” means is not clear. potentially it may refer to bringing everyone on board to work on the project of this school in the same way that “we who have the same attitude” do. roar continues, repeating his earlier argument about freedom under responsibility, roar: … regarding personal freedom: of course personal freedom! it is to do what one wants. but personal freedom, it is freedom under [with] responsibility. we are responsible for the education of others in a way. we are all under obligation to the social milieu here because we're all human, and that milieu consists of people. thanks (sounds of laughter and turmoil) (p. 32). it is more apparent now that for roar, “responsibility” means fulfilling an obligation, having accountability to predefined expectations of the practice. at that point, åge and egil, two of the nannies, try to open the floor for the others to express their opinions. in his more hawkish way, åge says, “why don't the remaining 145 speak? are you afraid to say your opinion about the school?... i just ask.” but egil speaks in what appears to be a friendlier and a more inviting tone, egil: i should say exactly the same, but i will go further. i want to confess that we are a group of 15-20 “nannies” at this school, and åge and i are some of them. and it has turned out that there is quite extensive dissatisfaction with the “nannies,” because we became a little too fond of our school. but then, i think that those who are dissatisfied with us, they can stand up and tell why they are disappointed; otherwise, we can never get clarification… at all (p. 33). 17 roar uses the norwegian word “individualister” – “individualists” in english. this term has often been used in the sense of a unique person – someone who is distinct and different from the others. in the vernacular speech it usually did not have a connection to the concept of “individualism” – which in some politically left ideologies has a negative value – as a person who is selfish and not community oriented. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a175 since no one has a direct reply, rolf gives voice to the next speaker on the list, arne (a teacher). like some others, arne begins by stressing the importance of having voluntary attendance in school. but in his view, if class attendance is voluntary, then what needs to be accounted for and placed under some kind of “production control” should be some kind of “duty to learn” (p. 33). the next speaker, anders, says that “nobody is interested in having too much accountability, to the taxpayers and things like that” (p. 33). for anders, the responsibility apparently lies in fulfilling the school's mission to improve norwegian schooling. he thinks that people “simply have to come together and then agree on some of the ideas we have” (p. 33). this vital school mission is worth controlling one’s impulse “to go down the hall to play guitar.” it is worth renouncing something, it’s worth a sacrifice in order “to go in to get this idea worked out…” he gets applause (pp. 33-34). at that moment, tone switches the focus back to attacking the deviants as she pours out her bitter feelings of resentment. she feels hurt by the deviants, who, in her view, lack respect and appreciation for the nannies’ hard work in planning and creating the school in the first place. tone: yeah, excuse me for picking up this about deviants again…. arne said … [something about] not having fun. but i would say that the deviants here at school let's call them that. anyway, they are having fun. so… but should they have fun at our expense? who created this school? who is it who was sitting and working all summer vacation and really put a lot of work into this school? and who has not done that? who is sitting in the hallway and playing music? and who is not sitting and playing? who is going to school here to have an education? and who is going here [just] to swim? who is going here to take the graduation exam? are they the ones who have helped build the school? are they looking at this as a serious enterprise? they are the ones who who who want something from this school. i do not think you who do not know what work is behind this school would be sitting in the hallway and not meeting up in classes. as soon as anyone talks to you – you scream about how you are now being deprived of personal freedom. – because… – well, well personal freedom and personal freedom. you can't just go for your own personal freedom. we have to have something called the personal freedom of the school. and then we all together have to agree on something so that not everyone keeps following their own head and constantly shoving personal freedom – and continuously repeating “if you tell us [to come to classes], aren’t you being tyrants in this school?” (pp. 34-35). tone’s speech creates an uproar. hands shoot up, and soon 10 people are signed up on the speaker’s list. rolf suggests again limiting each speaker to 3 minutes. he points out that even with this limit, it will take them until 2:30 p.m. but tor counters: “yes, but this is so important that we should spend the rest of the day if necessary” (p. 35). amidst loud agreement and big applause, rolf gives the floor to roar. it was maybe tone’s bitter tone that made roar even more uneasy. we don’t know why, but now, roar seems to try to push back against the nannies’ accusations. his words give us a glimpse of what was going on in the hallways in the last two months, between the “nannies” and the students they call “deviants.” roar: i think the reason we're sitting in the hallway… so often, it's not the reason that the nannies [invoke when] messing up with us. it simply is not hopelessness, [nor a] lack of initiative, the third thing for which the nannies’ blame us. i think that that [charge] is somewhat hasty, right there. anyway, i don’t feel like that [being hopeless and lacking initiative]. and i know others just don't feel that way. of course, some students come telling us: ‘you, now you should go to a class, and don’t object.’ [but] i do not think so. at least i don't feel bitter when i sit in the hallway. on the contrary, i have a pretty bad conscience when i see the others disappear [presumably to go to a class]. thanks (p. 35). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a176 it is remarkable that this time, roar’s “we” includes the deviants rather than the nannies like in his earlier turns! this seems to puzzle reidar, who says: “… we must, damn it, know who it is we should tolerate, and what it is we should tolerate.” reidar again invites others to “come to the floor!” sverre replies, trying to strengthen the argument against tolerating diversity of the students’ interests. for him, it is not ok to tolerate everything people want to do by “just flying around saying: ‘this is good, and that is good, and it is allowed to do that.’ and so… back and forth. it helps nothing! one has to show solidarity and responsibility” (p. 35). it seems that for sverre, the students should unite and align their interests to responsibly sustain the school. however, the next speaker, inge, has a profound disagreement with sverre and other nannies regarding the legitimacy of the diversity of students’ interests and goals. inge speaks hesitantly, she18 almost seems to be thinking aloud, trying to express her thoughts clearly, and testing her ideas in the very moment of speaking. inge: we have been talking for a long time about whether one should be allowed to do what they want or not. but then, something i wonder is this: how is it that, really, so many people want different things here at school? i think there are many people who do entirely different things and conflicting things too. and this may partly come from the fact that there are many who… most… most of us don't have a big goal ahead of us. we are not visionary enough, i think. and here i believe that øivind's proposal about… [writing a] new [mock] application [for this school] or something like that, could be… [an opportunity] that we can ask ourselves: what is it we want? [but] this, what øivind came up with, was later misunderstood. for many, this became the case for not tolerating the deviants. [in a paraphrasing tone] “this should not be a youth psychiatrist clinic.” [but] i think you… that's just it! at this school here, we should be able to tolerate all people, from the most hopeless neurotics to the most hopeless fighters for freedom and love, maoists, and such. (some talk and turmoil). i think that inge is saying not only that it is all right to tolerate the radical plurality of students’ ontological interests and goals but that this should be legitimate and even welcomed. i also wonder if inge might suspect that not having “a big goal” could potentially be a good thing. inge continues, inge: then the question is: what we should not tolerate? it is antisocial behavior. we shall not accept it if… well, yes… (pause) anyway we should not tolerate any anti-social behavior, including… so we have come to this: that it should not be just freedom but freedom under [with] responsibility and it is this freedom under the responsibility that is the basis for us to be able to develop and establish a fruitful contact and engage in useful cooperation with other people. that is why i think that antisocial behavior is the greatest and so is the anarchy – one of the biggest threats to personality here in school, i think (p.36). i wonder if inge defines “freedom under the responsibility” in terms of how one treats the others: in a respectful (not antisocial) way. she claims that responsibility “is the basis for us to be able to develop and establish a fruitful contact and engage in useful cooperation with other people.” in this case, her idea of responsibility is different from responsibility as accountability, an obligation to subordinate oneself to a particular pre-established vision and practice of education. it might be that in her view, “responsibility” is a way one relates to the others and the self respectfully and kindly. however, we don’t know if, for inge, the respectful and kind relationships with others are an ethical principle in itself, or merely an instrument of cooperation to fulfill other purposes like a “fruitful contact” and “useful cooperation.” if she defines responsibility in terms of an ethical principle of personal development, her overall perspective might be that 18 i assumed that inge was a female. but this name can be used both as a masculine and a feminine name in norwegian. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a177 the learner should be a legitimate author of her/his education. it would mean that a learner needs full freedom to define and develop such critical responsibility. it may be that inge’s position is similar to what berlin (2006) called negative freedom, which “is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others” (berlin, 2006, p. 34). on the other hand, if inge’s view is more instrumental, and she sees personal responsibility as something that is “useful [for] cooperation with other people,” then her idea is more akin to berlin’s notion of positive freedom with a well-defined purpose to serve some (higher) goal. berlin wrote that “it is possible, and at times justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do not because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt” (berlin, 1969, p. 45). i am not sure if inge’s views lean more toward negative or positive freedom. the reply to inge comes from teacher øivind, who seems to try to defuse the growing tensions among the students. he focuses on the positive value of the process of critiquing, as “each one of us – now should really try to be able to make a critique and […] in the longer term we might learn to take a critique” (p. 36). he adds that he has a little teaching unit in his social studies about the process of criticism. but his remarks stay without response. the next speaker is tom. he tries to conceptualize two different, even opposite ways to understand responsibility: as accountability in terms of obligations to fulfill the school’s preset academic requirements, vs. freely becoming a self-responsible person on one’s own terms, someone who understands on their own what is good and just and what to do for the betterment of the society. tom: i just want to talk a little bit about this thing with the deviants. – that is that you talk about cutting out [expelling] the deviants, etc. but in that very moment, [you imply] that this school is not for the students to become responsible community citizens who are aiming for… not to study for the graduation exam, but [for] the knowledge to do something in the community they live in. to try to change their society, to become socially conscious, to have the freedom and free will, and to be radical. it certainly is not some [comfy] sleeping pillow, indeed, but one of the hardest [things to do]. that is exactly what one should try to find, one’s own opinions in all matters. to work with the society and oneself, it’s as tough as nails. nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority. great. at the time i signed up [to this school], my motivation … i had a completely different motivation [than now], indeed. after i started at this school, i have regretted so many times that i took on the responsibility of being a student at this school here. because i think it was awful to have it hanging over me that … not being able to do what i want. but the moment the school does not manage to convey that [other] sense of responsibility, the sense of that you are a world citizen, and a sense of having a will to try to fix [the world], then [the school] is unsuccessful. we should not talk about expelling the deviants, because then the conservatives got it right: ‘some people are not mature enough for freedom.’ as soon as the students begin to fail here at school, and are unable to learn something else than what is required for the graduation exam… [and everything else is considered] completely irrelevant… but it’s not! in fact, it is learning to become a responsible person what should be the most important. that motivation for learning, it should not be for passing the graduation exam. if you can’t change that motivation then the school has failed. […] i would [also] say that the school here should be both a psychiatric clinic and a school because i have… at least it changed me tremendously since i started this school (applause). what i mean: it [the school] has a huge responsibility to the world and society and knowledge. it is not that one should have freedom at all costs to do whatever... freedom to relax and hang out in the hallway. i mean, my god! – a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a178 then you have no sense of responsibility at all! because our society nowadays… it would then hang on the brink of chaos and horrible conditions… it takes work, it takes toil. you don’t solve the world’s problems by saying: ‘let the shit hit the fan’… (laughter and applause) (pp. 37-38). tom seems to have developed rather strong arguments against the conservatives’ views of responsibility as a duty to subordinate oneself to the authority of a more knowledgeable, more rational other (“nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority”). however, he seems to be developing an idea of another kind of authority that one should (passionately) serve – the idea of social justice. (“… not to study for the graduation exam, but [for] the knowledge to do something in the community they live in. to try to change their society, to become socially conscious…”). <<comment by eugene matusov, june 9, 2020: “notice that tom is against privacy and freedom of a person to mind their own business. he is for [berlin’s (2006)] positive freedom, not negative freedom, which includes [lying on] a “sleeping pillow,” [or even] being conservative.”>> although he seems to conceptualize responsibility as developing one’s own views and one’s own agency (“to have a will”), this agency must be used for an important cause, like being an engaged person trying to make the world better. tom’s last remarks about not having the freedom “to relax and hang out in the hallway” when “solving the world’s problems” seem not to be strong enough for erling, who replies, erling: i believe that if one is to be educated for responsibility then one must be given this responsibility! – this must not be violated. one has to have this responsibility for oneself. so, [personal responsibility] must not be shattered by [going around and] telling [people], “you must come [to the class] now.” instead, the classes should be advertised, the attempt should be to try to sell them to us. – [after all,] sales techniques are something important in this world, too (laughter) (p. 38). erling’s reply seems not to be an outright plea for the legitimacy of each person’s freedom to decide whether to participate in classes or not. his remark might be interpreted as a progressivist view of education in which the teacher (or other educational authority) persuades or even manipulates students to believe that they want to learn exactly what the teacher (authority) wants them to learn (matusov, 2020 submitted; rousseau, 1979).19 rolf: [to tom] should you reply something? tom: i just wanted to point out that i have absolutely no intention of depriving people of the responsibility by setting up such an attendance thing… or anything. that would be absolutely ridiculous. but the thing is that i don't want to hear criticism when i try to make people aware of their responsibilities. in other words, they must be allowed to [take their own responsibility]. but i just mean: i will continue as long as i can breathe (laughter) – to try to make myself and others aware of the responsibility we have because it is so, so easy to forget it (pp. 38-39). it seems to me here that tom agrees with erling that brutal coercion is destructive for the sense of personal responsibility. however, tom simultaneously claims that his own responsibility is to remind himself and others that they potentially have the responsibility to the school mission, to make the world better, and to promote social justice. as tom struggles to distance himself from the conservative notion of responsibility as accountability sustained through work ethic, tom nevertheless develops a view of responsibility as pursuit of a higher cause – social justice. in other words, it is he who now defines what responsibility is for the others, instead of promoting the right of each person to examine and test their own ideas, desires, and their implications, and to make decisions for oneself in a critical dialogue with others and their alternative views. in my opinion, this is why tom feels that “as long as he can breathe,” he must 19 see more below in discussion of thorleif’s beliefs. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a179 keep reminding the others (and himself) that they have this “responsibility,” despite his agreement that each person needs to own their sense of responsibility. the next speaker is reidar, who claims that “the goal of the experimental gymnasium […] must be [to take the graduation exam] […] otherwise [the students] would not go here at all” (p. 39). another student, viggo, on the other hand, supports having multiple goals. in contrast to reidar and “tone, who said that she was … angry at those who want to just do things such as bodybuilding or swimming,” viggo, a swimmer himself, thinks that “it's somewhat dangerous when the gymnastics [athletics] is almost ignored. thus… a combination of the physical and psychological [curriculum] is absolutely necessary, indeed” (p. 39). however, tone replies that she disagrees and that just coming “for the bodybuilding or just coming to guitar lessons” is “not why we go here […] we go here because we have to first and foremost go to school, indeed. we should have the other [extracurricular] activities as secondary [priority]” (p. 39). rolf then gives the floor to inger, who says that “it's good that people are starting to do something. body-building all day or whatever. just that they do something not just plop down and sit there.” inger gets applause for her next remark, “there are a lot of people, i think, who came to this school because they wanted to get away from the old school and nothing more” (p. 39-40). here, i suspect, inger may have noticed the phenomenon of “school toxification” (llewellyn, 1998), also described by a.s. neill, that students who come to “summerhill” (a democratic school) from the traditional schools need time to recover from the alienation they experienced in conventional schools. neill wrote that “the recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them” (neill, 1960, p. 2). matusov and brobst (2013) called this phenomenon “alienation vacation,” a period of suspended student’s agency to restore it from the prolonged regime of traditional school oppression, which usually denies students of their authorial agency. after a short break, åge retakes the floor, picking up on inger’s remark. for him, “these [are the] people who attend this school not because they want to create something new but because they want to tear down the old and without creating something new again…” (p. 41). even more, åge criticizes them for “not only [wanting to] destroy the school itself, but they yes! kill spiritually a number of less selfconscious and noisy people who go here and who really have good motivation to go here.” åge seems to begin to realize that it is hard for many people in the meeting to express their opinions. he potentially refers to those “less self-conscious and noisy people” rather than any of the nannies or deviants. he thinks that these people “feel intimidated.” he says, “you have to be tough to a degree or you should not open your mouth at all. when such [negative] arguments can be thrown at you in a congregation, then it is clear – you do not open your mouth anymore for the rest of your life. you stop talking – as we find now this to be the case. the environment is like that” (p. 41). however, åge blames the deviants for this situation, “i want to place this responsibility [for putting down the less self-conscious people] on these people who walk around and just brawl and use big words” (p. 41). sverre then tries to develop a slightly different point, that for many people, it would be easier to talk in smaller groups rather than in a large public gathering. he thinks that in smaller groups, class councils, “you get closer contact with the people who have other opinions. and then i also think these people in a slightly smaller congregation have it easier to express their opinion because i think many people are a little scared to jump and say, […] exactly what they mean at a public meeting” (p. 42). after sverre’s remarks, there is a short discussion between two teachers, olaf and øivind, about what is legitimate and what not in terms of the legal status of the school. olaf wonders, “to what extent ego is a legislative institution.” he says that it is “good to know where we stand right there […] it's absolutely crucial for my attitude to just about everything we talk about.” he wonders if, in ego, they can take a whole year to develop a new path, as “we are one of the utmost educational outposts in all of the world history.” a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a180 he asks, “do we have the authority to do that? or is … [what we can do] limited to […] loosening up some of the well-worn tracks in the old school or have it been extended to a larger area. it is absolutely crucial for what i want to stand and vote for in all these things here” (p. 43). it is worth noticing that olaf as a teacher seems to be completely ready to submit to the authority (department of education), accepting the authority’s bonds hindering the sovereignty of this particular school that had been founded on the premise of being free from the external authority. øivind’s answer is not reassuring. he just came from a meeting with the department of education inspectors. they have pressed the school staff about the educational issues using rather conventional education criteria to judge their work (cf. in jørgensen, 1977). so øivind says that “we know nothing. we have no idea about where the department [of education] stands we have no idea regarding the status of any rules other than [the fact that] we have received positive support from the research council … […] obviously, we are afraid that they will suddenly withdraw all permissions and such. we may be afraid, for […] we have no idea where the terrain lies” (pp. 43-44). it is not clear whether these teaches’ anxiety regarding the school’s legal status had an immediate effect on the students because when thorleif takes the floor, he directly addresses åge’s points about intimidation of the people who disagree with the nannies. thorleif: yeah, i don't know. i'll say something that's not so very easy to say. reidar said it twice, and there are others also who said, "you who disagree with us, get up and say something." but you snap at those who don't agree with you! you can't count on anyone to be able to come here and say something if you just bite them. it has so disappointed me. i started here at school because i thought this was going to be a school where people love each other, where people are a bit neighborly with each other… and can feel glad to be [together] in school! but then, you just snap! everyone bites here. it's so creepy. […] that's what we do. we snap, bite, and crush everyone. we fight. that's the status here at this school, too. we must not imagine that there is something else. i think it's so… it is so disappointing somehow… you say it is antisocial to not come with criticism! but [then] one can’t avoid hearing how “you are a fucking stupid idiot” and lots of [other] weird… we kind of stand up here and talk now. maybe it applies to me, too. we might be… – we who are strong here at school – we hardly think of those not so strong, those who dare not rise up and say anything. those who may have to say [what they believe] in the hallways instead of here. how many are these? 100? 150? how many people dare to get up and say something really serious here, ah? they are afraid of being thrashed. if they say something that they really need to say then they will be swept away… [they will be told], ‘this has nothing to do with the matter,’ [or] ‘after all, this says nothing, it is absolutely immaterial’ – (stammering) it… it… – nothing draws us together! there is no love left here. it was really what i hoped for at this school. that we should be able to love each other. but we are not. it's so awful… we… it's just fighting all the time. (applause) (p. 45). rolf: reply! åge: yes, thorleif is disappointed that we do not have enough love at this school here, and probably many of us are disappointed, too. but i just want to say… that they are not the ones sitting in the hallways. they [people sitting in the hallways] are not the same as people who feel weak here. this is what i think. those who feel weak are those who are afraid to say anything because they fear those sitting in the hallways… i think it's just baloney that you go here and that you are disappointed… and that people snap at each other…, and that people do not get enough love. – my god! this is not some kind of “love school.” just look yourself in the eyes! (laughter) this is a school where you should go and feel like a human [being] and it's obvious that love belongs in there… but that does not mean that we can start making a hippie school or whatever you want… excuse me now if i’m being damn stupid, a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a181 but it annoys me that you talk about love when it comes to school. the school is first and foremost a school where one has to develop oneself as a person, and love comes under that. but we should not have that kind of talk and nonsense like that. nonsense. (laughter) (p. 45). rolf tries to limit replies to 30 seconds, but the rest shout, “no, no, no!” he gives the word to reidar, who seems to be angered by thorleif and, in what appears to be a sarcastic tone, accuses him of being closeminded. reidar: i have to thank thorleif… i think it was very nice to hear a speech from the other party like we have been asking for so long. it turns out now… now we begin to get to the problem. it now turns out that what thorleif counts as “biting” [snapping], we would call this – “love.” what thorleif counts as “biting” we call an attempt to help other people. but those people are so close-minded. they don’t want to have their self-perception disturbed. they gaze at their own navels, and they will not be perturbed. therefore, they call what we do – biting, while we just simply try to help them … and give them moral support… and provide support for their work leading up to the graduation exam (p. 46). in what maybe sounds very patronizing20, reidar here describes the nannies’ constant nagging as an “attempt to help” and to “give moral support” to those they call deviants. he does not acknowledge others’ right to differ in what they want to do in school. instead, he reiterates a deeply scornful judgment that anyone who does not subordinate themselves to the preestablished vision of the school may have some kind of deficit. in this case, potentially a deficit of the will, or self-confidence, or potentially the “moral compass” that would help them recognize what it means to do the right thing – since he describes what the nannies do as giving “moral support.” egil: i have to ask thorleif. you say you came here and thought this would be a school built on love. but was it not one of your presumptions to attend a school made just like this one? (p. 46). rolf: yes, thorleif will answer. thorleif: first to egil: i read the guiding materials i received and thought it was [about] love. to åge: “hippie school” – if hippies are the ones who love – if hippies are the ones who love each other, then we should have a hippie school. […] it is really one of the things fundamental for this school – [that] you only act with love… to reidar: it's possible that you, you… you mean it well and… and you think what you give is love. it is quite possible. but you must make people experience it as love, too… and not as biting. besides, i don't want to be called either one or the other party… i… i don't understand any of it. it is so far from me… i don't understand anything anymore… but […] if you want to give love, then you have to make people know it is love you want to give. if people experience your love as biting, then you are wrong. then you have to try to do it differently. thanks. (p. 46). thorleif appears to solidify his position about love, and his passionate tone seems to raise the emotional charge of the meeting. so, when tone starts to speak, she soon breaks down crying. “i don't want to be lambasted as i walk down the hallways here […] that i'm mosse’s fan or anne’s fan or anders’ fan… because i really admire mosse21… and you anne, the same” (p. 47). tone then praises anne and anders for the hard work they put in creating the school. she again strongly protests that she is being scorned for admiring them, especially when it “comes from the party who would like to have love… who makes arguments based on love” (p. 47). with that, she chides thorleif, potentially implying that he is a hypocrite, talking about “love,” but berating her for admiring the nannies. 20 i want to thank eugene matusov for pointing out the patronizing aspect of reidar’s speech. 21 mosse jørgensen, their “principal”. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a182 egil also seems exasperated and perplexed now, as he pushes thorleif’s arguments potentially to absurdity, egil: yes, it is a little difficult to know what to say after such a vivid demonstration of what love is… but… (pause) i just want to ask thorleif, what… what should we do? what to do… we who are nevertheless very fond of thorleif? what should we do to show thorleif how we love him? (p. 47). egil’s moving reply drives thorleif almost to a meltdown as he cries through his speech. thorleif: i'm not saying that egil is not fond of anyone… and i am not saying that tone is not fond of anyone. maybe you guys are sitting and not saying anything about what i'm talking about. i don't know if you know how much i admire these people who started… i also don't want to be scolded that i don't like you (his voice cracks with crying) … that's about the cruelest thing you can do… i… (pause)… i don’t want to be perceived anymore just as “someone who is sitting in the hallway.” i don't know… i just want to tell them one thing now […]: end of school! because those who are sitting in the hallway are going to destroy our school. end of school! (pp. 47-48). as thorleif starts to fall apart, tom addresses the manner of their debate, pleading for a change in tone so that their heated verbal confrontations and meltdowns could potentially turn into a dialogue. so that their voices may lose their contemptuous and derisive edge. above all, he pleads for a change where the participants could begin to take one another with more consideration and seriousness. tom: i have spoken today, and many others have spoken today – at least initially, it was not very… [it was] very… authoritarian and aggressive. one sits and thinks to oneself…like, ‘i am sooo wonderful, and i work! you, others, do not work!’ i mean, this [whole idea] here … [of having] tolerance and being human... it is to be able to start talking to each other like we have done the last part of the general assembly now. […] we have to be… we have to be able to talk to each other without constantly being aggressive… and, […] to be able to give and take criticism and not… […] but we have to be able to solve the problems that are here at school by talking to each other and not by arguing… and if we can learn that… then we have come a very long way (p. 48). it seems that tom calls for having a genuine dialogue rather than sustaining an open conflict. when he continues, he says something that, in my view, is very important. tom (continues): … [there is] one thing i have experienced just lately, and that is that i cannot judge other people based on myself. i don't really know what other people think. so… how do you really think? if i consider the way you act based on myself, it will be disturbing, indeed. that is, we cannot know what someone really thinks. we have to put ourselves in the situation that here is an entirely different human being… a very special human being… and not the one like myself, indeed – who cannot be judged based on the same moments [of my life]… and then just discarded and shitted on, and such… that's basically it (p. 48). to me, what tom said seems like an important insight. it was important for the immediate situation, as he tries to turn their conflicts into a dialogue. however, this was potentially crucial in the long run, as he seems to attempt to reframe the ways they understand what their education is about. he makes a point about being able to take seriously those who differ from himself, as legitimately having equally important ideas and positions that should not be just discarded and devalued. tom’s insight that people’s minds are opaque and not fully transparent (matusov, 2015) and that one has to try to understand them and not to (pre)judge them, is a call for turning their conflictual debate into a dialogue. if they could change their relationships to respecting each other and not discarding each other’s opinions as worthless, they might be able to deal with their conflicts. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a183 tom (continues): i think, what's been the most important thing in this school… it's that one does not have to be scared into dumbing oneself down, as it has been the case in other schools. i have felt that as a great liberation, to be able to go to jazz ballet, have fun and be clumsy, without a single person turning and laughing or doing anything. in any case, there is much less of it than in other schools. we can say that we bite all the time, and we do, but maybe less than in other schools. but if we can learn to bite [each other] even less, then we are well on our way, indeed. thanks. (applause) (pp. 48-49). after tom’s speech, there is a short exchange between egil and vivi, who try to figure out the main differences in the existing points of view. then, finn tries to summarize the debate, abstracting two opposing positions: one position that prioritizes the importance of academic work as the guiding value and the other that stresses personal development based on the diversity of interests and critical personal responsibility as the highest value. finn: you can say what you want about us not being split and in our case, there is a split in 150 directions but at least it seems that some people want personal development to be the most important thing about ego. and that the non-compulsory subjects should play a more significant role than the [prescribed] syllabus subjects, etc. it seemed to point that way. that is the impression one is left with. and others who believe that the graduation exam and the academic part of the work should be the most important. i do not think it is right to make such a priority such a prioritization. because i think – this trivial school as we have begun to call it has obviously totally failed in the area of personal development and has only focused on an academic, knowledge-based approach to the case. but just like work is utterly central to one's life later the life for which one is being prepared for in the school the academic work must be just as central in the ego. and equally important is the responsibility. responsibility the ability to take a stand, the ability to get involved, ability to take a stand on the things that are going on in the society… this is [also] very important in the life that comes later and therefore, the preparation for it must be just as crucial in ego. so, i don't think you can do that [prioritize one over the other, the academic knowledge-based approach over the development of responsibility approach]. the academic side of the matter: if society were a fully automated society according to the best cybernetic models we have then we could cut out the academic side and just sit, read philosophy and talk, and do just that. but since there are certain realities in the life that follows, i think they must be taken into the equation too. thanks (pp. 49-50). finn defines the guiding principles of each of the two positions that have started to clearly emerge: on the one hand, “academic work ethic” and on the other “critical responsibility for personally defined development.” interestingly, finn thinks that both are important, but for different reasons. because of that, neither one should be prioritized. it seems that finn is more attracted to personal development, but at the same time, he might also see it as potentially a frivolous luxury22. the academic work, according to finn, is important because it is a necessity since life is based on people’s need to work, having no luxury of spending time just “reading philosophy” and engaging in personal self-improvement. at the same time, finn seems to see as ideal a world where the life necessities would be all taken care of in a “fully automated” way. at this point, teacher øivind and a few other students have a short interchange about øivind’s previous idea to have the students write a mock application to the school, about the suggestion to have a discussion in smaller groups that could be more relaxed about criticism. many others want to speak too, but rolf is concerned about the time nearing dinner. however, anne wants to say something important before dinner and gets the floor. she talks directly to thorleif, as she emphatically claims that, 22 i want to thank eugene matusov for this fine-grained point. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a184 anne: i just hope that everyone will understand that we [the nannies] do not mean… we don't mean… that everyone should do as we say. but we will be very happy to be allowed to exist, too… we who want to work. but we can't work if the classes are empty. we need to get people to show up. we must get people to show up: for bodybuilding at the gym, for psychology, philosophy, and in all classes. everywhere! to make it a richer school environment than what you had where you went before. […] i thank you for everything you said, indeed. (applause) (pp. 51-52). thorleif agrees with anne, feeling resignation and defeat, thorleif: i just want to say that anne is absolutely right. this school here cannot exist without people who can work. i can't work – so i quit. those who do not work can stop [going to this school] because we have no right to ruin the school for others. you ask who's in the hallways hanging around. they may not be sitting in the hallways, but they don't work. they are not interested in school. we who are not… we have no right to destroy the school for others. that is why we must quit. otherwise, this school will not be what we hoped it would be (p. 52). it is important to notice that both anne and thorleif define education in their school as “work.” it could be argued that the definition of “work” here is an activity in which one has to fulfill someone else’s preplanned and predefined tasks. thorleif concedes that this might be important and that it is he who cannot do that kind of work for his own education. he acknowledges that if this is the way education is defined in this school, he should not be in the school – in order not to “destroy the school for the others.” in a way, thorleif stays on his radical position that, for him, the school must be defined by “love” (humanness, kindness). otherwise, it would not be a place for him. and if he cannot change the school, he will withdraw from it. we should notice that thorleif’s view is as extremely monistic as åge’s but around a different guiding principle. the time has come for a dinner break. although åge asks people to stay for another quarter-hour before dinner, rolf closes the meeting and encourages everyone to come back after they finish eating. <<eugene matusov, 2020-06-09: i wonder if thorleif was also a monist, like the nannies – a different, nonconventional monist rather than a radical pluralist. like tom, probably. the nannies defined education as rigorous work toward some particular well-defined goals: passing the state exam, getting employable skills, or even self-actualization in socially desirable, reputable practices. for thorleif, the goal was to promote love among the school participants. for tom, it was a combination of instrumental and intrinsic goals. however, what unites the nannies, thorleif and tom, is that their vision of the goals of education and the school must be accepted by the rest of the school. in my view, they did not accept other visions, with which they might disagree, as legitimate. monism is defined by the notion of “positive freedom” (berlin, 2002) as the legitimacy of the participants’ actions only conforming to the well-defined and preset unity of goals. of course, since monism does not know true diversity (i.e., outside of the preset unity), it cannot tolerate it – that is why, in my view, the personal-ideological fights (cf. bakhtin’s notion of “person-idea,” 1999) were unavoidable there. tom apparently came closer to the pluralism by stating that it is impossible to fully know what other people think and thus, fully judge them, “i cannot judge other people based on myself. i don't really know how other people think… we cannot know how someone really thinks.” still, i do not think he fully realized the pluralistic consequences of his ideas but rather broadened his positive definition of freedom to include learning “jazz” and other “fun” activities. he seemed to propose to tolerate unavoidable wasteful activities (wasteful from his point of view) for a purely pragmatic reason – because they still were less common in their innovative school than in conventional school, “in any case, there is much less of it than in other schools.” alternatively, he a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a185 might be struggling with and alternating between his engraved monism and emerging pluralism.>> <<ana’s reply to eugene’s remarks, 2020-06-11: in my view, tom realizes that participation in the fun activities at school make their school much less oppressive than the conventional schools because “one does not have to be scared into dumbing oneself down, as it has been the case in other schools. i have felt that as a great liberation to be able to go to jazz ballet, have fun and be clumsy, without a single person turning and laughing or doing anything. in any case, there is much less of it [ridiculing the others] than in other schools. we can say that we bite all the time, and we do, but maybe less than in other schools …” (pp. 48-49). this is why here i agree with eugene that tom is “struggling with and alternating between his engraved monism and emerging pluralism.” in my view, tom may be just starting to discover that a pluralistic approach may be liberating and necessary for them as a democratic school. in addition, i think that tom might have wanted to develop his point about respecting people’s unknown ideas and desires in order to be able to enter into a real dialogue among each other rather than snap or ridicule other’s ideas.>> – dinner break – after the break, the first to speak is kåre, who talks about not being able to do much academic work, as he is constantly feeling restless and attracted to sit in the hallways. but even the hallways are not really inspiring for him. “we need more inspiration but by sitting in the hallway, no one gives anything – and no one gets anything. i've found that for me the source of inspiration is it's when i do things outside of the [regular] curriculum things like drama – bodybuilding jazz ballet, etc.” (p. 53). kåre also adds that “many at the school here are hampered by the fact that they have no rest in themselves to sit and work. something is stopping them i don't know what it is. i think it is important to figure out what it is. i do not know” (pp. 53-54). he then makes a suggestion to move the library to the floor above, and a short conversation ensues between a few students and a teacher about the pros and cons of moving the library and rearranging some reading rooms. however, åge wants to turn the discussion back to the critical issues they left off before the break. rolf insists that they keep the protocol of calling speakers in the order in which they are signed up to speak and calls elisabeth as the next speaker. but she is not in the room, and rolf gives the floor to two teachers, olaf and øivind, as the next speakers. they again discuss the issues regarding what the department of education would allow the school to do and what not. however, this topic seems of no interest to the students as there is no reaction. in the meantime, elisabeth has arrived, and rolf gives her the floor. elizabeth returns to several hot topics that were raised before: personal freedoms, coercion, responsibility, and diversity of students’ goals and opinions. elisabeth: i belong to those who have an excruciating fear of standing in large congregations and talking so i don't know if i can express myself clearly and say what i mean, but i hope you can try to hear what i mean. i don't know in which category to put myself. here we talk about those who waste time and people who show up for classes. when i show up for a class, i can no longer concentrate on the work because all the time… i keep thinking about the ones i have tried to bring with me [to the class]. when i sit in the hallway and get up to go to a class, i ask people if they were not going to get up and come to the class. and then i hear, “it’s none of your business.” then i feel… well, like – i don't know what to call it – i feel like i'm criticizing them… and i get a very bad conscience. i can't work because i think about these people. they look down on me… because i try to take away their personal freedom. but that's not what i mean when i ask them to come to classes (p. 56). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a186 elisabeth seems aware of the way her peers might perceive her as coercive, even if she does not mean to coerce them. nevertheless, she apparently feels that there is something very wrong in the way she treats others, something that gives her a bad conscience. she seems to be afraid that perhaps her peers feel that she does not respect them. however, she does not develop her thoughts further. instead, she switches the topic and continues, elisabeth (continues): and another thing… i think that the school here takes too much into account its external responsibilities. [like], what the press will say? and whether we will get grants… or will not get grants? what will happen to the school, will it be shut down, or will it not be shut down? how will this go? i think there's been a lot of pressure on many of us, almost all of us, that we have this hanging over us all the time: what if we don't get grants, what will happen to the school? (p. 56). again, elisabeth raises a critical issue of responsibility, pointing out the fact that there is too much external pressure, the pressure to be accountable to someone or something else: the press, the public, the funding, etc. it seems that she does not approve of it, but she does not develop this thread fully. if she thinks that “external responsibility” is somehow the wrong direction to go, what other kinds of responsibility should there be instead, if any? does she imply that having too much of this particular external responsibility is potentially detrimental to them? elisabeth (continues): and i've also got a sense that the humanness is being put out!! we don't have the ability – we have the ability, but we don't use it, to understand each other… tolerate each other. understand each other's opinions… without laughing at each other. […] when i started here, i hoped to find a very creative environment… where i would not be ridiculed, where no one would laugh at the opinions i had. where i should be tolerated as another human being… i have been frozen out before in several schools because of my opinions, and i have the feeling that i'm being frozen out here, too. [i am being told] that i can't believe what i mean because some people think it's weird… think it's weird. and i have the feeling that i'm not being tolerated. and i wonder: are we not fond of each other as human beings anymore? we don't have any feelings for each other… when we have to sit there laughing and saying that “you do not understand anything” and “no, that fool is stupid.” i have the feeling that humanness slides more and more away. we are no longer human. we work like machines. and then it is also said that artium is the most important thing for this school that everyone goes to artium. but what do we do with artium when everyone becomes a machine, as you do in many other schools? i believe that …well, many of us will study and we will become some of the country's most prominent people… but what can we do for this country if we are all computers? operating without thinking about emotions, not owning emotions… or if we have emotions: we can't show them to each other. i think that no matter how things go with the artium, still, the most important thing is to be human. and then let the artium and exams come under the second line but first and foremost, be people and show each other that we love each other that we tolerate each other. thanks that's all i should say. (applause). (pp. 56-57). elisabeth’s concept of humanness seems to be somewhat similar to thorleif’s “love.” for her, humanness means being kind to each other, tolerating and accepting each other by showing love to each other, although not necessarily being cooperative with each other. for elisabeth, listening to and understanding each other is what counts for humanness – which is similar to inge’s views. here she highlights one of the important principles of dialogicity, listening and providing an affirming response to the other’s offer. this does not necessarily include agreement but acknowledgment and interest in the other. elisabeth’s ideas are in some ways similar to thorleif’s view on humanness as the guiding principle. however, unlike thorleif, elisabeth does not reject the possibility of “working” for the graduation exam. in her opinion, humanness, as an appreciation of others, and academic study for passing the graduation exam can coexist. however, humanness should be the highest value, and the guiding principle, while working to a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a187 pass the final exam (artium), should be the second concern. she sees the danger if working to pass the graduation exam becomes the only legitimate cause, it can then eradicate humanness. although we don’t know for sure, elisabeth’s ideas appear to be leaning toward a pluralist worldview. these arguments potentially give urgency to åge, who immediately wants to reply to elisabeth. he takes the floor. åge: so, i'm sorry to go against elisabeth, it was very good what she said… i just want to address what she said about the press and all that. obviously, this school must, of course, first and foremost be a human school. a school that conveys love to put it that way. but we can't just live on love. it is regrettable but you can't do this in the world, and that's why we are a little dependent on what the press writes about us and so many newspapers write just shit. so, it doesn't… excuse the phrase... – we can’t… we have to take into consideration… and even if we are to promote understanding and tolerance and be a school full of love, it must not come at the expense of artium. you can get to the artium and still be a good person… and still be able to keep your human and sensitive feelings. it is not necessary to let it come at the expense of each other (pp. 57-58). it seems to me that this is the first time that åge apparently tries to take the idea of humanness seriously and without ridiculing it as he did when thorleif spoke earlier. åge now starts to agree that humanness, kindness, and love are important guiding principles. still, he argues that this should not come at the expense of pursuing the national exam (artium). however, åge’s tone seems to have changed now, from direct confrontation to potentially dialogic testing of ideas, as he seems to sincerely try to give merit to the importance of humanness and love in the school. åge’s change of tone may be influencing others too. both reidar and thorleif want to reply. rolf gives the floor to reidar, who somehow tries to reformulate åge’s apparent attempt to take humanness seriously as a somewhat awkward compromise between the unlimited personal freedom and the [nannies] dictatorial rights. he says, reidar: … if a compromise is to be made, it means, if we deny the others their total freedom, then it also means that we [the nannies] should deny ourselves a dictatorial power, the one we would like to have. o.k., if anyone can submit such a proposal then i am willing to agree (p. 58). thorleif, in his turn, replies directly to åge, returning to his [thorleif’s] own definition of humanness as love, where love is an unconditional acceptance of and by the other. thorleif: there’s a word much better than tolerance, and it's love. what i want… what i think elisabeth23 wants… is love. it's not about being allowed to sit in the hallway… it's about simply being able to be yourself without constantly having to be [in a rat race] on a treadmill. there are people here who are trampled on… some people have been trampled on in all schools. then they come here… and they look for something that is love, but then they are trampled on here, too. you talk about compromise… there is no compromise on love. either it is love, or it is not love. if you can… if you can simply live or be yourself without always playing someone [else]… without having to knock yourself down to be great. there is no compromise. if you have to say hippie, say hippie… or whatever, or… – what the fuck are you, if you do not have love then you are damned. (tempestuous applause and shouting) (pp. 58-59). thorleif’s passionate and uncompromising vision of the school as a communion where everyone can be what they want to be and be loved for it, might be too radical for several other students, who reply with admonition. viggo retorts somewhat sarcastically that he wonders if people who couldn’t find love in other schools expect to “somehow step into a paradise and so we are all happy. but one has to earn love 23 in the published transcript, the name thorleif mentions is “anne” – however, it seems to me that the refers to “elisabeth” who just spoke, and whose views seem to be similar to thorleif’s. so i took a liberty to change his reference as a mistake of the transcript. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a188 for oneself. there is nothing here that can be given out like a ticket. like, when you come in through the school doors here, you get a ticket on which it says: “heaven.” (laughter). so, you have to go in and create love yourself… [you have] to generate love that you receive from others. yes, please.” (p. 59). liv also replies, reminding thorleif that he should not demonize those who work hard to sustain the school they created, liv: … after all, there are different ways of showing love and i think that those who are “[in a rat race] on a treadmill” have as much love for the school and as much need for love…, but it is perhaps a little more mixed with fear of losing the school (applause) (p. 59). in my view, liv potentially exposes thorleif’s monistic, almost rigid proclamation of love as an exclusive principle while seemingly being blind to the feelings of others. the next speaker is reidar. he returns to the tension between having personal freedom and obeying the rules and norms. he argues that “personal freedom implies tolerance and devotion to norms. […] personal freedom is to pay attention to other people as well.” (p. 59). reidar’s claim that personal freedom implies “devotion to norms” may strike us as a contradiction in terms. still, it is not an altogether unusual way of understanding freedom as it may appear at first sight. according to berlin (2002), hegel, for example, argued that “liberty is recognition of necessity” (p. 172) and “subordination to a pattern” (p. 194). even more, it is not only a recognition of the rules and norms but even an active desire that these rules and norms be there.24 reidar continues adding, “all right we may be acting in a somewhat brutal way when we try to correct what we think is wrong with ego, but it is clear we can also empathize. but then we will also demand that other people chime in” (59-60). by “brutal way,” he seems to allude to the nannies’ coercing the people in the hallways to get in the classes or snapping at people with different opinions. this really disturbs inge. as she starts her reply, inge focuses on the nannies’ repeated acts of coercion, inge: reidar said something that upsets me […] i find in it a germ of a conflict that can get bigger here at school. if he says he's going around trying to get people to come to a class, then there's something very dangerous about this. [although] this may be reminiscent of an ordinary pep talk in general debates but what reidar says and what is dangerous is that he tries to control people. and those present when j. israel25 was here know that in a school that is run by the students, we cannot exert control over each other in this old way. we have to try to find new ways to agree (p. 60). here, inge seems to argue that the problem lies in the attempt of one group (the nannies?) to dominate the others. instead, they should be developing democratic relationships among people with equal rights, where all students can be respected, and their opinions, ideas, and desires should be listened to and taken into account. these attempts of one small group of students to dominate could be felt throughout this whole meeting. however, it seems to me that the tone of their debate, and especially the tone of several very vocal nannies (åge, egil, reidar, roar), started to change in this last part of the meeting. it may be this change that made it possible for inge to address this issue of their relationships more directly. 24 i discuss the issue of berlin’s concept of “positive freedom” (berlin, 2006) in more detail in another place, in the analysis of the issues discussed in this meeting, (marjanovic-shane, 2023b) 25 it seems that inge refers to joachim israel, a swedish social scientist who worked on a theory of participation together with his norwegian colleagues. he was inspired by the work of k. lewin, especially lewin’s study of the styles of leadership and social climate (lewin, lippitt, & white, 1953/1939). according to lewin et al., democratic governance, where all members have equal rights of participation in the decisions, leads to a qualitatively superior and more engaged educational practice and its outcomes, compared to either autocratic or laissez-faire governance. in inge’s reference to j. israel, we can glimpse the ways that the social scientists from the university of oslo, who were involved in research of this new experimental school, influenced the students and probably the teachers in the school. a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a189 inge continues with her second point about the guiding principles that the school should adopt inge: and another thing, it seems that people pit against each other hard work and love–tolerance. but that's not what the debate is about. the debate is about… not about whether we should have a school of love instead of a school of work, but a place where we can expand the concept of the school… where we can have love included. and good schoolwork cannot exist, at least not for me, except when i get satisfying human fulfillment. and at the same time, it is very difficult to show love without somewhat thoughtful mind work. we simply can't sit day-in and day-out, and just be loving and kind. and it is in the synthesis of these two concepts that one finds true humanity that elisabeth spoke of (p. 60). inge, like a few others, attempts to put the two guiding values together, rather than against each other. the important question for many of them is whether that is possible or not. no one before her was able to do that. as åge said just a moment ago: “and even if we are to promote understanding and tolerance and be a school full of love it must not come at the expense of artium” (pp. 57-58). it may be that inge has something else in mind, rather than what guiding principle should predominate in school. this is true, especially in cases when decisions would differ depending on what principle predominated. inge then proceeds with her third important point, that concerns the ways how the deviants, like thorleif, perceive the nannies. inge: something else i wanted to talk about was thorleif's first speech, which was important to you. not because he represented a special wing, i don't think. i think there are 150 different sides to this case and i think that what he had to be clear above was that not only those sitting in the hallways feel depressed. also, those who advocate for rigor and such. they also feel equally depressed (p. 60). it is interesting that inge now returns back to the issue of their intersubjective relationships, but this time, addressing thorleif (as one of the deviants). she (again) points out to thorleif that the deviants are not the only ones who have feelings and that frustrations and depression are equally shared among the nannies. however, thorleif replies to inge, disagreeing with her attempt to erase the tension between the two guiding principles work ethic vs. love and kindness. this time, he seems to make a great effort to develop his argument and make his thoughts more conceptualized. thorleif: i'll try to control my emotions. – [apparently addressing inge] i'll try to speak their [nannies’] language. if we agree that this school here should be a school that will make human beings … if so, this … does not fit with what the press and the department of education are expecting from us. what do we do then? if we all agree [with the department of education’s expectations] … […] we get to pull, jerk, and tug ourselves, tug tug and tug, and eventually, we’ll become a regular high school. or we oppose the department of education. if we oppose the department, then the school can be closed. well, it will be closed. [sarcastically] we did a good job! if we then repent, it will not be closed. – [but] then it will not be the school of love the school of humanity we had been praying for. that is the dilemma! should we hold on to love as long as we can until the school is closed, or should we collude with the department and keep it open? i think that is very important. i don't want to compromise with myself i'd rather have the school shut down than have it be a regular high school. it is very important (p. 60). it seems to me that thorleif is grappling with his own critical responsibility for what he thinks and how he feels. at the same time, he laid down the situation as he sees it in a rather black-and-white dichotomy: either making the school a special place based on love and “humanity” vs. following the department of education values and becoming just another regular high school. and, if the situation is painted like that, thorleif cannot compromise. in this way, thorleif seems to be as exclusive and rigid in his own monistic views about love as the exclusive guiding principle, as åge is about the work ethic and responsibility to the existing preestablished vision of the school. thorleif continues, a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a190 thorleif: while i may not get you to understand now, i think it's right, we can't constantly agree with each other, we can't always be happy with ourselves. so, [paraphrasing the nannies] “it is these people who are sitting around in hallways. are we entitled to demand that they come in [the class] at all? of course, we are! why do we do that? that's because we want them to have a good artium – it is because they should be connected to the class. they need the graduation exam, right? (that's why they go to school after all)” (loud drumming sounds). [continuing to quote] “that's why they go to school!” [thorleif now changes his tone to directly address the nannies] but you, [nannies,] must not talk to those people [who sit in the hallways] so that they perceive it as something other than what you want it to be. you have to try to speak the language of the people. there is nothing as important as speaking the same language. […] [frustrated] oh, it is no use! you can't speak you have to learn to speak their language (p. 61). i think that by saying that it is “important to speak the same language,” thorleif tries to tell the nannies that they should have in mind the others’ possible points of view and try to anticipate how the others might potentially react to what is said. he clarifies, thorleif (continues): you must not order them to come [to classes] they must understand why they should come [to classes]. it is very important. you must motivate them to attend classes. i think we forgot that. so those people must then understand why they should take the graduation exam – why they should go to a class – why should they sit there and learn. and before they get it, they should never [be made] to go there [to the classes]. and if they are [forced], they will go with great reluctance and will not learn a single thing. they will be detrimental to the class and to the school, and to themselves. (applause) (60-62). it seems that thorleif is trying to develop a point similar to erling’s: that people should under no circumstances be forced to come to classes but that they should develop their own will and decide whether to go to classes or not. thus, according to erling, “the classes should be advertised” (erling on p.38). thorleif also claims that “if [the students] are forced” to go to classes, the students will lose their personal authorship of education, “they will not learn a single thing” – which will only “be detrimental for the school and for themselves.” what is not entirely clear is what thorleif actually had in mind when he made a progressive education point to the nannies that they “must motivate the students to attend the classes.” perhaps, this can be seen as an argument for the value of developing what bakhtin called the internally persuasive discourse (ipd) (mikhail m. bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). did he (and erling) mean that instead of brute force, the nannies should use softer and maybe more manipulative methods to get the students to actually attend classes, as progressive education usually argue (cf. rousseau, 1979)? or did he mean that going to classes may not be the ultimate goal for every student? and that this needs to be recognized as legitimate as well. therefore, the school should support the development of each individual student’s authorial agency in making personal decisions. if what thorleif thought implied that getting students to think they want to go to classes is what the nannies should do, then this could be interpreted as a progressive idea of education, initially developed by jean jacques rousseau (1979). one of the foundational tenets of progressive education is rousseau’s claim that “a progressive teacher wants the student to want what the teacher wants the student to want without the student noticing that” (matusov, 2020 submitted). the progressive education approach carries a monistic worldview based on understanding education as a predefined practice, i.e., a poïesis (aristotle, 2000), where all the participants must subject themselves to its rules, norms, and values preset by the society (via the expert or democratic politicians). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a191 thorleif advocates against åge’s and other nannies’ particular monistic vision (spirit) of the school, which was also approved by the department of education. in claims that if they continue to give in to the department’s educational demands, they will become just a regular high school and not a school of humanness and love. however, thorleif’s insistence on “love” as the only guiding principle for the school is apparently no less exclusive than the nannies’ principle of responsibility as work ethic. <<eugene matusov, 2020-06-09: it seems to me that some deviants were non-conventional monists. for example, thorleif was a hippy monist, as i discussed above. his monist intolerance, demanding “love” from everybody, is not a surprise to me. i think that elizabeth and, maybe, inge came closer to the paradigm of the radical pluralism promoted by berlin (kelly, 1978, p. xv). radical pluralism is based on a belief in the impossibility and undesirability of uniting competing goals, values, and virtues and on the notion of “negative freedom,” setting limits to people’s actions without setting any positive goals for them. >> thorleif’s adamant insistence on “love” seems to have exasperated several other students who tried to push it back as being equally uncompromising, hardcore, and potentially as aggressive as åge’s insistence on upholding rules and norms of the agreed-upon school vision. (see students’ earlier replies to thorleif, but also a bit further toward the end of the meeting). åge can now reply calmly and apparently without anger while still with strong disagreement. he makes his point very firmly, åge: yes, this was brief… after all, it is not a matter of doing a favor to any of the parties here, and it is not a matter of doing a favor to the department [of education]. we have been allowed most graciously to run a school outlined in the framework plan outlined in the statutes and adopted at a number of public meetings before the summer holidays. and that is what we must follow. and this with love – no one is against love. that's not what we're arguing about. there are questions about following the school's rules and democracy means organizing oneself under the rules as well. [sarcastically] unfortunately, there is no anarchy very sorry (applause) (p. 62). it seems that for åge, personal ownership and authorship of education, having the liberty to decide for oneself about academic matters, falls out of the already agreed upon school’s framework. what is interesting is that he does not question the fact that thorleif (and most of the other students) were not participating in authoring “this framework,” like probably åge and some of the other nannies did. åge does not find this as a problem of their democratic governance. moreover, åge sees personal freedoms to own and author one’s own education as anarchy – where there is nothing to govern the many personally authored education paths. viggo is still in shock at what thorleif implied and checks with him if he really thinks that they would have to close the school. when thorleif confirms that he does think so, viggo replies that he believes that they “still have a chance. we can do it anyway. and i mean, there's no need to shut down the school. of course, we have to give ourselves up if we prefer to let it go, but that is the only way to get started” (p. 62). the next speaker is arne (teacher). he says he is worried about “setting this as a contradiction, that is between love and working.” however, he, too, weighs in on the side of the academic work, saying that “after all, we haven't established ourselves as a youth club but as a school” (pp. 62-63). thorleif tries one more time to push back, saying, “but the thing is that […] we are constantly willing to commit ourselves. more and more and more and finally, there is no experimental gymnasium” (p. 63). tone answers back, reiterating that pursuing the artium is the main reason they go to school in the first place. and “if one can't put this together with having a love for one another; if the two things do not go a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a192 together – well, well, then i think one has to miserably fail in absolutely everything. because then, there is no experimental gym anymore.” (p. 63). she also points out to thorleif that, tone: … you can't just demand love you also have to give love. well there are maybe many ways to perceive love – indeed. but i think that if you demand a little less and give a little more – […] – then i think there should be no danger of this becoming an ordinary high school. thanks (p. 63-64). fredrick now restates the same point that although talking about love “sounds very nice, […] [we should keep] in mind that we depend on money. money and department of education. … [after all,] rome was not built in a day. thanks” (p. 64). it seems now that the dialogue has stalled and that everyone just keeps repeating the same arguments. thorleif continues with his monistic view, “if we can't love each other, we have nothing to spend money on (64).” olaf disagrees and repeats that “i know perfectly well that it is possible to do good to artium and to love each other” (p. 64). inge notices that “we're not making such a huge effort to speak each other's languages, as you say.” she asks, “but what would we do if we spoke – if i spoke your language, or you spoke mine and still didn't agree?” and she adds, seemingly exasperated, inge: now, i think i heard something that i understood from you today – […], but then you outdid yourself by saying you could quit school itself. [this is] a failure to show a slight tolerance. it is possible that i do not understand you, but do you want to tear down the school today, deep down? (voices of people talking at the same time) (p. 64). thorleif: i want to clear an obvious misconception: i never said i would close the school. i say that if the department closes our school because there is too much humanity here, so i see it as a blow (p. 64). reidar: yes, now i think there will be a personal debate between thorleif and the rest of the assembly here. (many voices over each other banging on the desks.) (p. 64) thorleif tries to call others who did not speak to say something, but there is only noisy and powerful banging. when rolf gives the floor to per, the next speaker, per proposes that they end the debate “not because this is not an important issue, but because it is such an important matter that we need a little more clarity to talk about it. [but by] now, we have talked about [all of] this here for three hours, at least.” however, roar wants to continue because “this is such an important matter that we must be allowed to speak out. it is one of the few ways adult people have to connect with each other it is talking to each other. by talking to each other, we can come to an understanding. we must continue. we are not allowed to just push it away and just say that now we have had enough, i.e., we must be able to talk about it openly” (p. 65). many people want to speak, but it seems that everyone is exhausted. rolf suggests that only a few more can be on the speaker’s list and names them. however, anders, the next speaker, proposes that they close the meeting. anders: there has been a lot of damn talk about love here now and i want to put it on a slightly different level. what we do now reminds me of a love affair that we keep talking about to death. i believe that we should shut down as soon as possible and get out of this room, and not take this discussion into plenary until quite a long time. now we still try to use the impulses that linger either to quit school or to go in and work with renewed vigor. but shut up now i can't do it anymore! (big applause) rolf: does anyone insist that we keep going? (pause) so we do not. (pp. 65-66) end of the recording/transcript. * * * a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a193 and so, the meeting adjourned without reaching any decisions about how to proceed. in my view, and probably in the opinion of many participants, the assembly meeting was unforgettable as an event of soul-searching and profound, passionate dialogue. the event itself seemed to change them and was potentially more important as a dramatic milestone than any potential resolutions or resulting decisions. jørgensen wrote that “the conflict was not resolved then, nor it is completely resolved now [a few years later when she was writing the book]. however, the problems were clarified, and the feelings could be expressed and aired out” (jørgensen, 1971, p. 40). if it “produced” anything, this soul-searching assembly succeeded in opening a dialogic space for the ego participants, transforming their antagonistic conflicts and clashes into “agonistic” dialogues among friendly enemies. (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). it created that dialogic space in which people can search for the truth together while knowing well that when the truth “become(s) dialogically tested [… it is] forever testable” (morson, 2004, p. 319), inviting for more dialogue, rather than closing it. paraphrasing the famous statement (about art) attributed to leonardo da vinci, it is possible to say that dialogue is never finished, only temporarily abandoned26. we had just joined the ego students’ passionate dialogue of disagreement now, giving it a new life after so many years. and inviting you to join in, too. in the next article (marjanovic-shane, 2023b), i explore and reconstruct conceptual approaches to life and education that were expressed and/or implied by the ego students in this meeting. there i try to abstract their person-ideas (m. m. bakhtin, 1999) from this event and create a conceptual map showing their philosophical, educational, ethical, and educational positions. appendix flyer-invitation to create a democratic school in oslo, by jon lund hansen, knut boe kielland and ingrid kviberg, april/may 196627 many students feel that the authorities are pressuring them into despair. they feel that the old, worn-out (waisted?) people deny them opportunities to develop, deny them friendship, deny them freedom, deny them sex, deny them the very youth. the previous generation has, in its time, been in the same position as the youth of our time, and this youth will, in a few years, become “the previous generation.” the gymnasium has a crucial position in this vicious circle. the high school is a school where youth are forced to adapt to an outdated system of authority, with its dictatorial structure, its grading system where the teachers are the sole judges, its mandatory attendance, and its deadening teaching methods. there the students’ personalities, development, and independence come only in second place. (cf. “the high school in the spotlight i,” the afterword). the consequences of the authoritarian system in the school are that the relationship between students and teachers is impersonal and often filled with hate. there exist almost no examples of friendships between them. the students are in solidarity against the teachers and vice versa. the dissatisfaction and unfreedom in this relationship have a detrimental effect on the work on both sides. 26 cole schafer https://medium.com/@austincoleschafer/art-is-never-finished-only-abandoned-86657a05c16b 27 translation of the original flyer published in mosse jørgensen’s book “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” (jørgensen, 1971, pp. 16-18). a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a194 the teachers are constrained by having to be in a dominant position in the classroom. achieving prestige makes it difficult to tolerate students’ opinions and suggestions. as soon as they accept the students as persons, the teachers’ authoritarian position comes under threat. these issues are the focus of several groups. the research council for the school administration works through experiments in schools. the norwegian senior lecturer association has set up a high school committee, and the norwegian high school students’ association has held a national meeting, about which the reports were published in many newspapers and magazines. this is a positive trend, and it is in the spirit of democracy. but the high schoolers and their professors have not been given nor given themselves – any real chance to participate in building a democratic high school. the purpose of this flyer is to provide them with that opportunity. concretely that means that we want to work on establishing a new gymnasium in oslo as soon as possible. in that school, the teachers and the students would have equal rights; together, they would determine the necessary rules and act as judges when these rules are broken. in that school, there will be no grades and no traditional homework; attendance will be as much as possible voluntary, and the students will not have to bring excuse notes for missed classes. the teachers and the students will together establish the curriculum. freedom will be limited only by the students’ desire to obtain a high school diploma through artium (a formal graduation exam) and by the teachers’ knowledge of and competencies in teaching nontraditional subjects desired by some students. the students and the teachers will together create and plan the syllabi. we hope that in such a school, there will be more room for individuality, development, tolerance and more place for working constructively. after gathering the interest among the students and teachers, our first concrete tasks must be to create study groups to investigate the following: the aims of the syllabus for the new high school, the school hours and the organization of the school day, teaching methods and materials in each subject, the issue of the homework, activities outside the curriculum, the practical organizational work. the purpose of this flyer is to instigate radical changes in the traditional school system. its authors are unknown people. we know that in the eyes of many, these are two negative factors. furthermore, the scope of the flyer has prevented a more thorough examination of each issue. but we know that there are teachers in our schools who work to improve their relationship with students, precisely through striving to achieve mutual equality. we also positively know that many young people have the same thoughts as the undersigned. our main goal, besides the traditional one, to start a debate, is to bring these people together to create a decisive action. this flyer will be distributed to as many high schools as possible in the oslo area. it will be sent to the school newsletters and the leading newspapers in oslo, to the department for churches and education, to the committees that work with the school administration, as well as to some individuals and groups. if you are interested in this, please submit the coupon below to a soul-searching assembly: vignette ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.360 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a195 jon lund hansen skjalgssonsgt 26 oslo 2 ______________________________________________________ i am interested in actively helping to start a new high school oslo: name: address: school: expected school grade: tel .: teacher / student –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– march / april 1966 jon lund hansen, ingrid kviberg, knut boe kielland references aristotle. 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(2004). grounded research: a modified grounded theory for the business setting. qualitative research journal, 4(2), 27. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word taboada, alvarez, dialogical experiences, 2022-12-08 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt123 dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts in teacher education maría beatriz taboada national council for scientific and technical research. autonomous university of entre ríos (uader), argentina guadalupe álvarez national council for scientific and technical research. national university of general sarmiento (ungs), argentina abstract this work proposes an analysis of pedagogical experiences developed in the context of university teacher education in dialogue with two different chronotopes: habitual face-to-face teaching modality and exceptional non-face-to-face teaching modality due to the covid lockdown. we consider here two cases of language and literature teacher education courses in two universities in argentina. both experiences share the search for an equitable, dialogical interaction, in which there is a recovery of the students’ opinions and criteria for the progressive and collaborative elaboration of knowledge. from a qualitative perspective, we resorted to autoethnographic narratives elaborated by the responsible teaching teams of the courses. in the approach we propose, there is a dialogue among different elements of our inquiry: a dialogue between the conceptions that we assume as teachers and researchers about teaching in face-to-face and virtual environments; a dialogue between the conceptualizations and concrete teachingdecisions; between the contexts of performance and the possibilities offered by virtuality; between the pedagogical experiences and the narratives; between the records and other materials that allow us to reconstitute these experiences; and between our voices and the voices of students and graduates who give us back evaluations and sustain the continuity of the dialogue. the analysis accounts for the definition of different chronotopes in the experiences and moments addressed. in both cases, the differences observed respond to contextual factors, particularities of the courses and the previous experiences that the teaching teams have had with ict. beyond the above-mentioned differences, for the exceptional non-face-to-face proposals, a greater stability in the proposed sequences and in the dynamics involved is observed in the two experiences, which seeks to generate greater predictability. keywords: dialogical education, teacher education, digital technologies, dialogue, virtualization maría beatriz taboada is a doctor in humanities and art, with a major in linguistics. researcher at the national council for scientific and technical research (conicet) at the national university of entre ríos (uner), argentina. professor of linguistics seminar at the faculty of humanities, arts and social sciences of the autonomous university of entre ríos (uader), argentina. at this same university, she directs the kaleidoscope study group, aimed at addressing didactic materials and teaching mediations in the teaching of language and literature, at the regional center for research in humanities and social sciences (crihcs). guadalupe álvarez is a doctor of language and literature, national university of cuyo (mendoza, argentina). researcher at the national council for scientific and technical research (conicet) at the national university of general sarmiento (ungs), argentina. professor of educational technology and literature and language teaching at the institute of human development of the national university of issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt124 general sarmiento. she is interested in teaching reading and writing practices, particularly in cases in which these practices are mediated by digital technologies. ïïò experience as dialogue or dialogue as experience this work brings together challenges, experiences, and shared concerns about the ways in which participants take the floor in teacher education. the flow of ideas in dialogue involves not only the opportunity to say, but also to speak and build knowledge based on a real and sustained dialogue. good education, as wegerif (2013) claims, “is not just about making things, even if we label these things ‘meanings’ or ‘cultural artifacts’, but it is also, more importantly, about expanding the capacity to participate in dialogue” (p. 4). in this sense, it is necessary to strengthen the spaces and dialogical experiences in education since educating implies expanding contexts, widening and deepening the dialogue (wegerif, 2007, 2013, 2019). in formative proposals mediated by technologies, this certainty questions, challenges and goes through the decisions made by the professor, materializing as creative processes that recover the authorial nature of teaching and learning (matusov, 2011). this means that the potential of the internet depends much more upon what teachers do with the technology than upon the technology in itself. in this regard, the ways in which information and communication technologies (ict) or digital technologies1 are integrated into the classroom for educational purposes seems to be associated with three factors: the training that teachers have received, the possibilities of experiencing and re-signifying these technologies in different teaching and learning situations (garrido et al., 2008) and the potential to reflect upon the new repertoires for the teaching practices (terigi et al., 2011). we assume that a pedagogy based on horizontal dialogues involving interaction with different actors, resources and digital materials that would allow us to create learning opportunities for teachers being trained provides new meanings to the integration with the ict in their future practices. with these reflections in mind, we approach pedagogical experiences developed in the context of university teacher education in dialogue with two different chronotopes (bakhtin, 1981): habitual face-toface teaching modality and exceptional non-face-to-face teaching modality. the notion of chronotope allows us to recover the intrinsic relationships between space and time, as interdependent social constructions, in the configuration of singular teaching and learning experiences. we are particularly interested in recovering the planning decisions that support the transformations between both scenarios. these decisions were aimed at strengthening their dialogical dimension. the notion of chronotope places the subjects, their words, values, and their inexhaustible capacity to produce meanings at the center. likewise, it encourages a reading of time in space, since time cannot be separated from the specific place where a certain event took place (bajtin, 1982). that is to say: the phenomena —in our case, the pedagogical experiences— must be read in a spatialized and temporalized way. however, the educational chronotope cannot be reduced only to the space-time issue but also involves aspects such as axiology, participation, social relations, and agency (matusov, 2015). in this context, we understand time as the fourth dimension of space (arfuch, 2005; bajtin, 1975). therefore, we assume that a chronotope does not appear as a pre-existing or pre-defined dimension, but 1 ict includes a set of technological devices (e.g., mobile) and resources (e.g., mobile apps) used to transmit, store, create, share or exchange information (taboada & álvarez, 2021). dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt125 is constructed at the time of teaching, and a result of teaching-decisions and communicational dynamics promoted in the context of concrete pedagogical experiences. as blommaert and de fina (2017) argue: “a shorthand term such as chronotope enables us to avoid an analytical separation of behavior and context, which is not matched by the experiences of people engaged in such activities” (p. 4). here, we consider two cases of language and literature teacher education courses in two universities in argentina. when choosing the cases, we have specially considered that both experiences share the search for an equitable, dialogical interaction where there is a recovery of the students’ opinions and criteria for the progressive and collaborative elaboration of knowledge (velasco & alonso, 2008). in the review we propose, there is a dialogue among different elements of our inquiry: our conceptions about teaching in face-to-face and virtual environments, how these conceptions dialogue with concrete teaching decisions, the contexts of performance with the possibilities for doing in virtuality, pedagogical experiences with the narratives, records and other materials that allow us to reconstitute them (perrenoud, 2007), our voices with the voices of students and graduates who give us back evaluations and who sustain the continuity of the dialogue. in this sense, we assume that dialogic education does not end with the work with students but also involves a work among colleagues that allows us to add new voices to this collective construction in teacher education, from a review of our practices that aims at strengthening the process. the experiences and their voices the analysis focuses on two cases linked to the teacher education for teachers of language and literature in argentina: ● language and literature teaching, the first subject devoted to didactics within the study program of the degree profesorado universitario de educación superior en lengua y literatura at universidad nacional de general sarmiento (ungs), an institution located in the northwest of the metropolitan area of buenos aires, in the province of buenos aires. ● linguistics seminar, a subject that closes the part of the curriculum devoted to languages and linguistics within the study program of the degree profesorado en lengua y literatura at universidad autónoma de entre ríos (uader), an institution located in the province of entre ríos. within the framework of these two teacher education programs, we have analyzed two experiences: in the first case, one of the three sections that make up the subject; in the second case, one of the projects around which the seminar is structured. furthermore, we analyzed two instances in each of these courses: the first instance, corresponding to the year before the covid pandemic (2019), when both experiences were developed as face-to-face courses with some virtual activities, and the second instance, when the virtual mode was the only situation available since the face-to-face meetings had been cancelled in the country due to covid lockdown (2020). this context of compulsory virtualization offered the opportunity to analyze the decisions concerning planning made to strengthen the dialogical dimension of the planned courses in both instances: conventional face-to-face and exceptional non-face-to-face teaching modality. in both cases, we focus on the reconstruction of experiences based on narratives that allow us to objectify and rethink them. thus, we set out a qualitative approach that resorts to records kept by the team of professors involved in gathering information and we propose to recover three concepts by wegerif (2013) — opening, widening and deepening dialogical spaces — as movements and categories for the analysis of the decisions made, refined through additional emergent categorization. we are particularly interested in dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt126 exploring the interaction between dialogue and digital technologies, analyzing transformations that are not necessarily unidirectional (rasmussen & ludvigsen, 2010). thus, we resorted to autoethnographic narratives (ellis & bochner, 2000) elaborated by the responsible teaching teams of the courses at both analyzed moments. these narratives were based on various records, constituted in documents from conservation and safeguarding practices (narvaja de arnoux, 2009): teaching planning, narrative class records, student feedbacks obtained in different instances, final evaluations of students, and the teaching team. narratives allow addressing the relationship between documented and undocumented aspects of pedagogical experiences from the point of view of their participants. while documented experiences refer to registered facts, undocumented experiences are associated with day-to-day life (rockwell, 2009). we also recognize that everyday life involves both historical and unique practices. narrated knowledge is situated knowledge (vázquez recio, 2017) from which it is not intended to access “the real” but rather to address experiences in which space, time, and emotions converge in an inseparable way. in this way, we recover what arfuch (2005) names as a “detail plane,” not to stay there but to promote, from its approach, a reading that can be put into dialogue, rethought, challenged by other readings from other spaces-times-emotions. from this framework, we understand narratives as a way of generating knowledge (goodall, 2008) that articulates the personal with the cultural contexts. this articulation involves our way of situating ourselves as subjects in the face of what has been done, as well as the evaluations that recover theoretical and methodological positions in the field. in this regard, the versions of these texts that we share here have transformed narrative into explanation, in order to condense the fundamental information of these materials. finally, for the communication of each experience, we opted for an expository sequence that starts from the contextualization of degrees and subjects; focuses on concrete experiences, giving an account of their particularities, with special attention to the link between experiences and ict in the habitual face-toface teaching modality; it presents a sequencing that articulates didactic strategies, activities, and resources in each of the two moments addressed. we proposed, in each case, an evaluation of the teaching decisions, and we identified a series of dialogues that allowed us to address continuities of experiences and singularities. experience 1 language and literature teaching is a four-month course taught throughout a semester. within the curriculum, it corresponds to the fourth year of the course of studies, more precisely to the eighth semester. the subject, which is usually taught as face-to-face education, is divided into three sections: i. language teaching, ii. literature teaching, and iii. language and literature teaching mediated by digital and interactive technologies. in this paper we focus on section iii2 (from now on siii), which comprises 32 hours generally distributed in 8 weekly sections of 4 periods of 60 minutes each). in siii two units are proposed for the analysis: one that puts digital and interactive technologies in dialogue with the educational field, in general, and the other with the teaching of language and literature, in particular. the pedagogical proposal is articulated around two methodological strategies. on the one 2 dr. guadalupe álvarez is in charge of section iii. in some editions there are also assistant students. at the second moment, the assistant student was carolina bellegia. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt127 hand, it distances itself from the exclusively expository class, centered on the professor, to combine the systematization of concepts in which strategies are deployed to promote student participation with individual and group activities (small and large groups). on the other hand, and closely related to the above, a workshop-like dynamic is encouraged, aimed at the progressive articulation between the theoretical and practical instances. this implies, among other pedagogical actions, that students experiment with tools that favor the production and inclusion of technologies in teaching. in this sense, the development of pedagogical plans is articulated with a virtual space of the subject, designed by teacher in the moodle platform of the ungs, as well as with other programs and digital applications. the virtual space of the subject initially provides the bibliography and other general resources of the section, and is then organized by classes, enabling the student to find in each one all the necessary components in relation to the proposed activities (document with instructions, applications, and various resources, among others). moodle is an educational platform at hand, which is actually a locus for action, a context, and a medium for the establishment of dialogue and interactions. moreover, siii is usually taught in a university computer lab, where there is at least one computer with an internet connection for every two students and a projector. accordingly, even in the face-to-face course, most of the proposed educational activities involve technological mediation. below we describe the dynamics of the proposed activities, initially, during the first instance and, subsequently, in the second instance. in the first instance, 9 students (all women, 20-30 years old, with basic knowledge about ict uses) took the course and, due to several holidays, there were 7 weeks of work: six of them with a face-to-face class and activities during and after that class; and another one in which an academic meeting was held. it is important to remember that during face-to-face (on-site) classes and homework assignments, we use the virtual space of the subject in the moodle platform organized as previously indicated. in fact, face-to-face classes were held in a computer lab where students used the platform and different apps. throughout the course and in relation to each proposed activity, the asynchronous exchange channel was enabled by e-mail between the professor and the rest of the students. the professor shared the queries and concerns with the whole group when she considered it relevant. as shown in the table below, classes 1, 2, 4, and 5 were organized in a very similar sequence: 1) systematization elaborated by professors and students on the contents previously studied (except in class 1 when the beginning was dedicated to introductions); 2) systematization of concepts read involving student participation through specific activities (e.g., comparison of reading and writing practices with printed and digital materials); and 3) planning and development of at least one weekly activity in which students were encouraged to establish different connections between theoretical concepts and diverse situations in which technologies were involved (the participants' own lives, curricular designs, applications, digital didactic materials, educational experiences, and didactic sequences). these activities, which were proposed in the classroom, were in some cases developed completely or partially at home and included individual work dynamics, work in small groups, and with all participants. the activities were presented on the basis of a brief written document that allowed the students to understand what they had to do and for what purpose, with whom, with what digital and non-digital resources, and how, as well as possible criteria for evaluating what they had done and the process of doing it. all activities involved the use of digital technologies (power point, video editors, forum, moodle glossary or wiki, shared documents in google drive, among others). dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt128 to show the pedagogical sequence, the activities and resources used during the different weeks are shown in the table: week activities resources 1 before the face-to-face class e-mail from the professor to the group indicating some readings and inviting the students to explore the virtual space of the subject and the syllabus that appears there. face-to-face class professor's presentation. presentation of students (how advanced they are in their course of studies, interests, whether or not they are teaching, expectations for the section). presentation of section iii. systematization of fundamental concepts from the proposed bibliography on technologies and digital culture, promoting the participation of the students in this activity using different strategies (questions and specific activities). during this systematization, for example, images are presented that illustrate reading and writing practices of printed and digital materials on screen in a comparative way, and students are invited to characterize similarities and differences between these practices. in this way, concepts about technologies and digital culture are approached in relation to the students' own experience and their reflections on what they have read. after having shared a conceptualization of digital technologies and their characteristics, students were invited to write a short paper about their own experience with digital technologies in a wiki. in the approach of this activity, as in the following ones, the possible evaluation criteria were discussed with the students, making adjustments where necessary. in the development of the activity and following the instructions, students included images and hypertexts. the teacher, in some cases, explained, when students requested it, the ways to include them in the wiki. homework assignments development of activity 1. professor's feedback related to the activity in the same wiki. the development of this activity allows to syllabus of the subject. printed and digitalized bibliographic materials. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. documents with the instructions for activity 1. moodle wiki to share activity 1 and its feedback. e-mail for interaction between professor and the group of students. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt129 recognize the uses of digital technologies that students make in educational contexts and outside them, as well as their knowledge about the wiki functionalities such as including hypertexts and images. some specificities can also be recognized with respect to writing practices. reading of materials indicated by the professor for class 2 interaction between the professor and the students by e-mail based on feedback and other queries about the contents and the development of the activities. 2 face-to-face class systematization built among professors and students based on activity 1 and what was studied in the previous class. -systematization of fundamental concepts of the proposed bibliography on ict in the educational field, promoting student participation with different strategies. thus, during the systematization, students are asked to recall their own experience with the use of ict in the classroom and also to mention digital resources they have used in educational contexts. in this way, concepts about ict in education and the changes they bring about are recovered in relation to the students' own experience and their reflections on what they have read. approach and development of activity 2 in dyads: in relation to the conceptualization and classification of digital resources, an exploration of this type of resources was proposed as well as the creation of an entry in a moodle glossary on digital resources for the teaching of language and literature. sharing of activity 2. discussion over group activity 3 (3-4 students) carried out over two weeks: according to concepts from the bibliography, analysis of an educational experience with the use of ict, "cortos en la net" (short films on the net). this experience is recorded in a video which was shared in moodle. homework assignments -resolution of activity 3. printed and digitalized bibliographic materials. videos in which various specialists refer to concepts from the bibliography and related notions. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. documents with the instructions for activities 2 and 3. video with the educational experience to be analyzed in activity 4. moodle glossary for activity 2 and feedback on it. wikis for the elaboration of activity 3 and feedback on it. e-mail for interaction between professor and students. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt130 -professor's comments related to activity 3; in some cases, it was suggested to the rest of the students to include observations. interaction between the professor and the students by e-mail, based on questions about the contents and the development of the activities. 3 on-site academic event: i meeting of educational technology. teaching reading and writing with digital technologies. students taking the subject participated together with a group of students taking the subject educational technology for the bachelor's degree in education. the same professor is responsible for both subjects. in this event, which took place one afternoon in a face-toface context, two language and literature teachers from the university were invited to share their experiences with the integration of ict to their subjects at schools. the aim was to promote dialogue between digital culture and the teaching of reading and writing through the exchange between these teachers and the participants of the event. homework assignments -resolution of activity 3. -professor’s feedback on activity 3. reading of bibliography indicated for class 4. interaction between the professor and the students by e-mail based on feedback and questions about the contents and the development of the activities. digital document on the academic event. 4 face-to-face class systematization elaborated between the professor and the students regarding activities 2 and 3 and what was studied in the previous classes, as well as the main aspects of the event from the previous week. -systematization of fundamental concepts of the bibliography on ict and language and literature teaching, promoting student participation with different strategies. thus, during the systematization, among other activities, curricular designs related to the area of language and literature were analyzed, focusing, particularly, how some of them dialogue with technologies and digital culture. approach and development of activity 4 individually and in class: according to concepts from the printed and digitalized bibliographic materials. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. documents with the instructions for activity 4. e-mail for interaction between professor and students. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt131 bibliography, analysis of a pedagogical proposal that encourages the inclusion of digital and interactive technologies in the teaching of language and literature. students were asked to take notes of what was analyzed to share it later in class. sharing and systematization related to activity 4. homework assignments reading of bibliography indicated for class 5. 5 face-to-face class -systematization elaborated between the professor and the students based on what has been studied in the subject so far. systematization of fundamental concepts from the bibliography on the design of sequences for the teaching of language and literature with ict, promoting the participation of students with different strategies. thus, during the systematization, we recovered the analysis made in the previous class, in order to establish dialogues with some conceptualizations, among other activities. exposition and initial steps for the development of the final individual assignment: elaboration of a didactic sequence for the teaching of language integrating digital and interactive technologies. presentation of what was done in the previous class. the instructions were shared, indicating how to develop the sequence and how to present it. the evaluation criteria were also discussed, in some cases making certain adjustments based on the students' comments. the students began to plan this sequence in a shared google drive document and, in relation to this, they consulted the professor and their peers. homework assignments development of the final assignment and interaction between the professor and each student based on the comments in the shared document. interaction between the professor and the students via e-mail based on the queries that arose. printed and digitized bibliographic materials. different digitalized materials based on the topic chosen for the final assignment of each student. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. documents with the instructions for the final assignment. documents shared through google drive. e-mail for interaction between professor and the group of students. 6 face-to-face class -individual tutoring with the professor to focus on the final assignment. during these sessions, each student talked with the professor about the development of the didactic sequence, making adjustments where dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt132 necessary. there was also a dialogue about the ways of presenting what had been done to the whole group. homework assignments development of the final assignment by consulting the professor via e-mail. interaction was also established between the professor and each student based on the comments in the shared document. 7 homework assignments individual presentation of the final assignment and dialogue with the whole group about what has been done. shared discussion about the challenges and opportunities of the subject. audiovisual or printed documents prepared by some students for their presentations. although the sequence of the aforementioned classes is very similar, the dynamics between professors and students gradually changed. this was associated, on the one hand, with the fact that the activities designed to achieve systematization were not the same in all classes, which implied a certain variation in the activity. on the other hand, student participation, which was initially achieved through very specific activities designed especially for this purpose, was also generated more spontaneously as the classes went by. this participation was encouraged and valued by the teacher and also by the whole group. thus, students who had remained silent in the first classes began to participate3. in classes 6 and 7, the sequence of activities was very different: in class 6, individual tutoring sessions were held, aimed at establishing dialogues that would contribute to the development of the final assignment, as well as its presentation to the whole group in the final class. class 7 revolved around the presentations of the assignments and the group interaction based on them. the course is thus based on a series of articulated dialogues: • between the professor and the students in the conceptual systematizations; • between the professor and the students in relation to the different weekly activities, either in person or virtually via e-mail or through the applications used (e.g., comments on shared documents); • between the professor and each student through individual tutoring sessions; • between the professor and each student or some members of small groups in relation to the different weekly activities; • between professors, students and other actors from the educational field through academic meetings; 3 beyond these observations, we believe that it would be worthwhile to evaluate the possibility of slightly modifying the sequence of some of the first classes in future editions of the course in order to offer students a different repertoire of classroom organization. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt133 • between previous knowledge and new knowledge related to technologies and digital culture; • between theoretical and practical knowledge, taking into account the experience of the students themselves with digital technologies, as well as the challenges of their integration in educational experiences; • between modes of representation of the contents of the course based on bibliographic materials, but also on shared visual and audiovisual materials; • between the knowledge involved in the different classes, for which the systematization of what has been studied and previously worked on in each class has been relevant, as well as the exchange between professor and students and among students; • between the contents and materials selected in the initial design of the subject and new contents and materials that were shared based on the students' concerns and the needs of the assignments they carried out. in short, in the different activities developed at the first moment, spaces for dialogue were opened and the points of view questioned were diversified and deepened. therefore, as we have anticipated, in the systematizations of the concepts, the participants interacted, and dialogues were also established between the theoretical knowledge derived from the bibliography and the experience and knowledge of the students. likewise, the articulations established by professors and students between the contents and activities of one class and the previous one enabled the deepening of the points of view involved and of the concepts developed throughout the course. also, the weekly activities generated the opening of spaces for dialogue between the students and the professor and between the students and each other. these activities, in turn, implied a dialogic circuit between previous knowledge and the conceptualizations presented in the bibliography. sometimes, the need to resort to materials and contents not initially planned was acknowledged, depending on the students' concerns and their activities. the personalized tutoring sessions also made it possible to deepen the points of view and work on the needs of each student according to the cut-outs made for the designed sequence. in this sense, it should be noted that the students used materials that they requested from the professor or that they found themselves, which had not been initially selected for the subject, but which were relevant for the final assignment. the diversification of points of view and voices was represented by the diversity of sources consulted and also by the different participants. in this sense, it is worth mentioning the development of the meeting in which teachers from secondary schools in the area and students from other subjects, even from other fields, came together and interacted. this favored the dialogue of disciplinary and professional views. during the second instance version, the course was developed virtually, enrollment in the course increased considerably, and 52 students took the course (41 women and 11 men, 20-30 years old, with basic knowledge about the uses of ict). moreover, that year the course had an assistant student who joined the whatsapp group of students that the professor proposed to create. the assistant also participated in the interactions generated in the synchronous meetings and in the design of some activities dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt134 and their implementation. the number of hours and their distribution were also modified: siii was taught for three weeks, eight hours every week. this implied an adjustment in the contents and also in the activities to be developed. thus, it was decided to work with the fundamental contents of the subject but reducing its scope and depth. hence, in the first week, the current technological context was addressed, introducing reflection on ict in the educational field; in the second week, digital resources and their scope in education were considered; and in the third week, reflection on teaching, especially the teaching of language and literature, in dialogue with digital technologies was proposed. therefore, we did not work on the design of didactic sequences. the activities and the final work were also modified, taking into account, mainly, that the number of students had increased and that it would be necessary to give adequate feedback in a limited time period. in this regard, it should be noted that the professor had less than a week to close the final grades of the section because she had to share these grades with the other professors of the subject. consequently, among other changes, the length of some activities was reduced and the instructions for the final assignment were modified, which implied a group development instead of an individual one. as for the applications, as in previous editions, we worked with moodle, and other applications and programs were added, including google meet, for synchronous meetings; active box to upload materials and use them from a link without spending mobile data; youtube to share videos by professors and specialists invited to the academic event, as well as for participants to interact. taking into account previous comments, various activities and resources were shared during the three weeks of the course: week activities resources 1 before the class e-mail from the professor to the group indicating some readings and inviting students to explore the virtual space of the subject and the syllabus and multimedia presentation of the subject contained therein. indications about the first synchronous class were also provided. virtual synchronous class -presentation of the subject and the professor. -systematization of fundamental concepts from the bibliography on technologies and digital culture promoting, through different strategies (questions and specific activities), the participation of students in this activity. concepts about technologies and digital culture are recovered in relation to the students' own experience and their reflections on what they have read. reflection on the role of technologies in the educational field was also introduced. the class was digitalized bibliographic materials. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. recording of the synchronous meeting. documents with instructions for the activity. google meet for synchronous meeting. forum to share activity 1 and interact in relation to it. padlet to share activity 2 and feedback. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt135 recorded and the recording was uploaded to active box and then shared on moodle. -posting of weekly activity 1, which proposed a student presentation with microblogging strategies (there was a word limit) and taking into account both the academic and professional profile, as well as the ict user profile. explanation of activity 2 (individual): reading a text from the bibliography and selecting a meaningful sentence about reading and writing in the digital context, and searching and selecting a related image. the sentence and the image had to be shared in a padlet where they received comments from the professor and other students. asynchronous activities development of activity 1. as suggested in the instructions, several students included hyperlinks. the presentations were shared in a forum and commented by the professor and, to a lesser extent, by the students. the development of the activity allowed us to learn about the students' characteristics, which were fundamental to understand their interests and needs. -development of activity 2. the development was shared in a forum and commented by the professor. reading of materials indicated for the following week (bibliography and videos). interaction about the contents and the development of the activities between the professor and the students via e-mail. e-mail for the exchange between professor and students. whatsapp group in which the group of students and the assistant participated. 2 asynchronous activities students watched an explanatory video about digital resources and their types, and their scope in the educational field. weekly activity 3 was proposed: the instruction was to write two entries about digital resources in a glossary in moodle, in groups of 3 or 4 students. these entries involved text, images and hypertexts. in the comments of each entry, the professor gave oral feedback through recorded audio and the students answered or made queries in relation to it. weekly activity 4 was proposed: the instruction was to complete a questionnaire on the use of digital resources for reading and writing in educational contexts and outside them (programs, applications, websites, etc.). the professor shared with the whole group the general results, socializing the resources used by the whole group, which allowed some digitalized bibliographic materials. video, which included a power point document. documents with the instructions for activities 3 and 4. moodle glossary for the development of activity 3 and its feedback. google form questionnaire for activities 4. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt136 of them to learn about resources that may have been unknown until then. the students, together with the educational technology students, participated in the ii educational technology meeting, teaching disciplines in times of pandemic, which took place during a week virtually. the theme of the event arose as a concern of the students themselves. this event had, on the one hand, synchronous lectures by specialists and, on the other hand, an asynchronous section with videos documenting the educational experiences of different teachers during the pandemic, some of them students or former students of the subjects. the recordings of the lectures and videos were shared on a youtube channel where they were commented by the students and the rest of the participants, including the invited specialists and the professor. reading and viewing of indicated materials (bibliography and videos). interaction via e-mail between the professor and the students based on the contents and the development of the activities. virtual synchronous meeting the ii meeting included videoconferences via google meet with specialists in education and digital technologies. these specialists dialogued with the participants and the interactions were recorded and also uploaded to the youtube channel, where they were commented upon. e-mail for exchange between professor and students. youtube channel of the event: https://www.youtube.com/cha nnel/ucxji6jkk8dg1962far eh-ew google meet for synchronous meeting. whatsapp group in which the group of students and the assistant participated. 3 virtual synchronous class -systematization about what has been studied so far in the subject, between professors and students. conceptual systematization on ict and teaching, particularly language and literature teaching, promoting student participation with different strategies. thus, during the systematization, we analyzed curricular designs related to the area of language and literature, especially how some of them dialogued with technologies and digital culture. the students' own experiences as teachers were also taken into account. in this way, we recovered the concepts about ict for the teaching of language and literature and the changes they bring about in relation to the students' own experience and their reflections on what they have read. -presentation of the instructions for the final assignment in which students were encouraged to elaborate a digital didactic material (in particular, a video with audiovisual support) that could eventually be included as a resource for digitalized bibliographic materials. videos related to the concepts in the bibliography. power point document, as a basis for the systematization. recording of the synchronous meeting. documents with instruction to make the activity. applications for video recording, such as power point, prezi or any other application for the audiovisual support. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt137 teaching and learning in section iii of language and literature teaching. they had to do it in groups of 3 or 4 members. in this sense, each group was assigned a bibliographic material. the groups were the same that had worked together in the realization of the previous group activity. asynchronous activities interaction via e-mail between the professor and the students based on the contents and the development of the activities. development of the final assignment. the professor gave feedback via e-mail the following week. applications for synchronous and asynchronous exchange among students (forums, whatsapp group, zoom). forum for sharing final assignment. e-mail for exchange between professor and students. throughout the course, asynchronous e-mail communication acquired multiple functions. on the one hand, the professor sent notices and reminders about the activities. on the other hand, professors and students shared concerns, doubts, queries and ideas related to the contents and the development of the activities. based on the previous description, we recognize that there were similar ways of opening spaces for dialogue. on the one hand, in the systematizations of the concepts, a dialogue was established among participants and between previous knowledge and the bibliography. the weekly activities also enabled these spaces for dialogue. however, since the number of face-to-face meetings was reduced (only in the second instance), we consider that there were fewer opportunities to open spaces for dialogue and to deepen the topics. in this sense, some contents of the subject (for example, ict in the educational field) were worked on without having enough time to deepen points of view on the subject. on the other hand, by reducing the number of course weeks and the possibilities of synchronous meetings, opportunities were lost to retake previous contents and activities according to the development of the subject, which reduced the deepening of the spaces for dialogue between the concepts developed throughout the course. this is possibly due to the content and activity reduction. due to the number of students, we consider that there were fewer meetings between the professor and each student, which also reduced the deepening of the dialogue between concrete situations and materials and the theoretical concepts that arose in the more personalized spaces of dialogue. likewise, the assessment was modified: although there were individual evaluative instances, these were reduced, giving way to evaluations that, although in some cases looked at the performance of each student, culminated in feedback that systematized the general performance of the group. the new edition, however, also presented potentialities. on the one hand, we understand that the dialogue with the logic of digital culture was deepened in the students' own productions due to the fact that they worked on microblogging, multiple modes of representation (productions less governed by the logic of writing), a greater number of channels for the circulation of contents and productions (we added, for example, youtube) and more group work. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt138 in addition, the virtual course represented an opportunity to diversify the voices involved in the ii meeting on educational technology since specialists in education and the students themselves were invited to participate in the event. these voices enabled diverse views on education in the digital context. experience 2 the organization of the curriculum of the language and literature teacher education program at universidad autónoma de entre ríos provides four pathways: a basic one common to all teacher education programs, a specific one for teacher education, a disciplinary one for teacher education, and an institutional option. the linguistics seminar is located in the disciplinary path of teacher education and closes the path linked to languages and linguistics. in the design of the course of studies, the seminars are defined as productive practices of research work that seek to intensify the development of other curricular areas. from this epistemological-normative framework, the linguistics seminar is presented as an annual subject based on project work that emphasizes learning by doing around two sequential and complementary proposals: a mapping of linguistic landscapes (group work), in the first semester, and the analysis of a discursive corpus (individual work), between the first and second semester, based on an axisproblem defined by the chair. for the second moment addressed, we proposed ‘violence’ as a work axis. although this initial definition is a planning decision made by the chair4, as we shall see, both the violence addressed and the discursive materials subjected to analysis and the theoretical and methodological perspectives brought into play are constructed as a result of sustained dialogic work with those participating in the seminar. thus, from a common starting point, we expected singular journeys, challenged at the same time by shared activities of reflection, analysis, and evaluation. for this paper, we will focus on the first of the projects that structure the course of the seminar and, as was done in the first experience, we will initially address the planning decisions related to the first moment, corresponding to an instance of habitual face-to-face teaching modality in regular classroom courses, and then we will focus on the changes implemented in the second moment, in order to strengthen the dialogical dimension of the proposal in an exceptional non-face-to-face teaching modality. the seminar is usually a lecture with a weekly load of two hours of face-to-face classes and complementary tutorials, as well as asynchronous tutorials through a closed facebook group that also serves as a space for dialogue and collaboration. this group was created in 2015 with the participation of students taking the course, students who took it since then, and even graduates, who not only have access to the materials and activities that we propose to the students but also raise doubts, queries, share or request resources, give their opinions, etc. this creates a sustained dialogue between current and former students, graduates from the last years, and the teaching team of the chair, who have formed a community of practice: a group of people who decide to deepen their knowledge and experiences by interacting with a certain regularity (wenger, 2001; wenger et al., 2002). this group constituted, in the first instance and also in previous years the privileged space for the non-face-to-face exchanges of the chair. at the first instance the seminar was attended by 8 students (seven women and one man, 24-29 years old, with basic knowledge about ict uses). the initial class of this cycle was oriented to the presentation of the course; its work modality which involves the realization of narratives of each meeting by some of the attending students5 and 4 the teaching team in charge of the course is made up of dr. maría beatriz taboada (tenured professor), prof. carolina sánchez (assistant professor) and eugenia charreun (assistant student). 5 we mention this strategy in particular because we recovered these narratives in the analysis of the experience. in their presentation, we emphasize two complementary dimensions to guide the elaboration of these texts: it is a narrative and therefore requires dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt139 assessment; the schedule of activities planned, and the realization of a diagnostic activity in pairs that asked to link theoretical perspectives in the field of linguistics and key concepts from the courses of language and linguistics learned through the course of studies, to discuss their definitions and to select a concept to develop a dictionary entry. as complementary extra-academic activities, we suggested reviewing notes and materials from the previous spaces of the linguistics course related to those concepts and theories that had presented greater challenges. this enabled a special orientation, taking the student from the challenge or cognitive conflict to the bibliography, and it is the one we will sustain throughout the academic year where the readings proposed from the seminar come to answer the questions that the students themselves raised in class, to dialogue with the errors as learning opportunities and to interact with the challenges that linguistic analysis poses to them. between weeks 2 and 6, we can place the experience of mapping the linguistic landscape proposed to the students. the notion of linguistic landscape refers to the way in which language is materialized in the public and/or institutional space, in posters, graffiti, signs and also in mobile objects such as t-shirts and other discursive materials that are recovered through registration strategies and analyzed paying attention to what they represent in society (castillo lluch & sáez rivera, 2013). the mapping experience that we proposed to our students future teachers focuses on violent and resistance discourses and constitutes both an end and a means. as an end, it seeks to denaturalize the landscape in order to build a more critical view of its discourses. as a means, it allows us to address the relationships we establish with objects of knowledge in research. within this framework, the proposed mapping experience was developed according to the following schematic didactic sequence, in the classroom: week activities resources 2 we proposed a continuity in the work with definitions, relating the activity of class 1 (collaborative writing of a dictionary entry based on a key concept) with the reading of the document that we sent by email6 and that deals with the notions of discourse, utterance and text. the assignment only asked to read the texts, compare the 3 definitions and synthesize their differences. we jointly evaluated the readings done and the difficulties they encountered. given that they did not detect the errors in the definitions of concepts that they have worked on repeatedly in the linguistics course, we reflected together on the need for epistemic after class 1 we uploaded to the facebook group different links8 to access the following resources: narrative from the previous class. 2 photographs of the international women´s strike (iws) that we would work with in class 2 (to download to their cell phones, computers or bring printed to class). we emailed a text with three definitions from a linguistics sequentiality -although this does not necessarily refer to a linear progressionand implies reflecting on the learning process, feelings, etc. furthermore, one of the members of the teaching team also makes a narrative of the meetings, but only the texts elaborated by the students are shared with the rest of the group as a shared drive document and they are asked to include contributions or comments after reading them. 6 in this case we did not use the facebook group because the text to be worked on contained errors and we wanted to avoid making this characteristic explicit before it was worked on in class. if we had shared it on facebook, we ran the risk of someone downloading and using it in another context without realizing that it was a manipulated material with a specific didactic intention. 8 the shared resources are organized in folders available in google drive one for narratives, one for bibliography and one for materials and the link to each new resource is shared in the course's facebook group. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt140 reading practices which question the content of the discourses, which do not accept them unreflectively. in articulation with the above, we proposed the mapping of the linguistic landscape as a practice of critical reading of the environment, problematizing the notions of landscape, discourse, violence and resistance. we shared initial instructions, in oral form, to carry out the experience of mapping the linguistic landscape: group work, need to define in advance the criteria for mapping7, shared register. homework assignments reading for the next class a chapter on discourse analysis (da) that dialogued with the concepts addressed in class. start the mapping experience, obtaining some first records based on the criteria defined by the group. dictionary that contained errors, to work on in class 2. 3 we started from the contributions, doubts and queries arising from the text read in order to recognize the fundamental dimensions of the da. work on the text previously read and guidelines for the elaboration of a reading9 report in class 4. we explored the urban voices platform10 in dialogue with a teaching sheet that explained the necessary dimensions to reconstruct the context of the mapped materials. as a group, we completed the recording of one of the iws images that we had shared to evaluate difficulties, doubts, etc. as a group we analyzed the iws images, paying attention to contextual and enunciative elements (elements that allowed us to think about the construction of an image of a sender and a receiver in the discourse). from the previous exercise we proposed to work in groups in the analysis of some of the signs that had after class 2 we uploaded links to the facebook group to access the following resources: narrative from the previous class chapter suggested in the previous class and two articles on linguistic landscape and violence, respectively guide for the elaboration of a reading report images of previous mappings made in the seminar 7 for mapping, they could select outdoor or indoor signs on the street or in the faculty, for example -, static or moving a graffiti versus a sticker on a car -, according to their subject matter political discourse, sexist... -, by location in a neighborhood, club, square... -, by type of support walls, t-shirts, tattoos -, or combine some of these criteria. 9 the course approaches the proposed bibliography in dialogue with specific academic genres. in the case of this initial project, the suggested chapter on da gives rise to the review of semantic, structural and enunciative aspects of a reading report. subsequently, the writing of a text of this genre is requested. these activities are articulated with the rest of the proposals, although here we chose not to deal with them in detail, paying more attention to those specifically oriented to mapping. 10 available at http://www.urbanvoices.net/ dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt141 been mapped, based on the categories that emerged in class. homework assignments writing reading report. continue mapping, uploading the mapped signs to the urban voices platform. 4 we reviewed together the notions of field, tenor and mode (previously addressed in the linguistics course) and proposed to rethink the contextual dimension of the discourses analyzed from these categories. each group presented orally the progress made in the analysis of the sign they selected in the previous class and received suggestions, feedback and questions from the rest of the groups. we proposed instructions for the final presentation of the mapping experience to be carried out during class 6: a brief presentation explaining what they mapped (criteria), why they assumed those criteria, presenting the images recorded, making a general commentary on what they observed and stopping in the analysis of one or two images. homework assignments advance the analysis of the images selected for inclusion in the exhibition. elaborate a support for the oral presentation after class 3 we uploaded links to the facebook group to access the following resources: narrative from the previous class apa-formatted citation and referencing worksheet 5 presentation of the progress of the analysis and dialogue on doubts and questions raised, receiving feedback, suggestions, comments and contributions from the rest of the groups. we analyzed together the evaluation criteria for the oral presentation of the mapping. we collaboratively reviewed the supports already elaborated. homework assignments prepare the oral presentations of the mapping experience. after class 4 we uploaded a link to the facebook group to access the narrative of the previous class. 6 oral presentations of the mappings made. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt142 observations, questions and contributions from the rest of the groups and the teaching team. oral feedback based on the evaluation criteria addressed in the previous class. homework assignments for those who passed the exposition11, answering a virtual survey was suggested. the project is thus based on a series of articulated dialogues: • with the class group, in the articulation of views that allow the construction of collaborative analyses on signs of the linguistic landscape and also to discuss meanings around their own and shared reading itineraries; • among the members of the group defined for the experience, from the construction of agreements, the definition of criteria for the mapping and the shared work that sustains the activity; • with other students and recent graduates who have already attended the seminar, from the interactions held in the facebook group12; • with the teaching team that takes the role of orienting and guiding the process and that encourages the sustained exchange in face-to-face and virtual instances as a condition of possibility of the course proposal; • with the nearby context, from the mapping experience; with previous knowledge and representations, around key concepts of the da and the notion of violence; • between previous readings and proposals, from a critical position that invites to read discussing meanings, recovering reading experiences, allowing doubt and challenging what appears as certainty; • with different theoretical perspectives, from the way in which they are called upon and questioned in the experiences of collective analysis, evaluating their contributions and limits; • between more theoretical and practical knowledge, from the challenges posed by the approach to discourses; • with the discursive genres, from the reading and writing proposals presented in the course; • between different versions of their own productions, based on feedback from the teaching team that seeks to encourage them to rethink and deepen what they have worked on; 11 based on the evaluation, some of the groups were asked to rethink aspects of their presentations and to present their work again to the rest of the participants in subsequent classes. 12 the group also shares pedagogical experiences related to the analysis of violent discourses carried out by recent graduates, who also participate in the facebook group, thus showing the didactic possibilities of the experience they are going through. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt143 • with their own learning experience and that of other students, from the paths recorded in the narratives and the contributions made to those texts. in the second instance, the habitual face-to-face teaching modality became an exceptional nonface-to-face teaching modality. in this context, the professors needed to rethink the course and, in this regard, we will focus here on the planning decisions we made to strengthen the dialogue in this technologymediated context. on this occasion, the seminar was attended by 10 students (seven women and three men, 24-46 years old, with basic knowledge of the uses of ict). the first decision about the course was linked to keeping the mapping of the linguistic landscape as the initial project of the seminar, looking for ways to overcome the limitations imposed by the impossibility to circulate, to go around the city. in this sense, we proposed to share a citizen science experience with friends and family, that is, collective research open to the collaboration of different people that would allow us to understand different aspects of social life, in this case, linked to the linguistic landscape. from this proposal of collaborative construction of knowledge, we could resort to different options of mapping: from one's own, friends', relatives', etc. windows or doors; along authorized routes going to the supermarket, to the pantry, etc. one's own, friends', relatives', etc.; or registering one's own, friends', relatives', etc. clothes or objects, who were isolated due to the governmental restrictions but used to be part of the external linguistic landscape. in all cases, feedback linked to the experience was essential, i.e., that those who participated also had access to the way in which the contributed discourses had been recorded and analyzed. the next decision was linked to the platform on which we would create the virtual classroom for the seminar and, in this sense, the adoption of google classroom in its free version was crossed by urgencies and linked to institutional constraints that prevented us from accessing a classroom on the moodle platform of the faculty. the adoption of this version of classroom imposed different challenges to the practice, among which we need to highlight those derived from the impossibility of creating forums for exchange. in view of this, we resorted to spaces on the platform that were not created for this purpose and which involved various limitations, such as the fact that the interventions and responses are presented chronologically, without the possibility of linking them directly to previous interventions. along with the adoption of this platform, we sustained interactions on facebook to share materials and complementary activities. as for the organization of the course, we decided to structure it around modules, setting deadlines for the development of activities as a guide but adjusting them according to the needs and complexities arising from forced virtualization that was crossed by possibilities of access to equipment and adequate connectivity. unlike what usually happens in the classroom, these modules were not defined at the beginning of the course, but we organized them as the course progressed, to some extent due to the lack of precisions about a possible return to the classroom. thus, the seminar was structured in seven modules: module 1 / introduction to the linguistics seminar module 2 / research in linguistics module 3 / approaching the linguistic landscape module 4 / towards the analysis of discursive materials dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt144 module 5 / theoretical and methodological decisions for the analysis of the linguistic corpus module 6 / advances in corpus analysis module 7 / communication of our results we proposed two initial contextualization modules, one for the linguistic landscape mapping project (module 3) and another four for the second project of the chair. the development of the first modules revealed connectivity difficulties on the part of our students, which prevented us from sustaining a fluid dialogue in the synchronous work instances. therefore, we had to choose to space these instances, record them when they were carried out and make them available on the platform for those students who could not connect or had unstable internet connections. this technical difficulty was perhaps the greatest obstacle we had to face, and this forced us to multiply the instances of asynchronous interaction, such as spaces set up as exchange forums or "tasks" functionality of the platform that allows uploading activities to share progress and receive feedback from the teaching team in the modules. in the case of the linguistic landscape mapping experience, which is the one that allows us to propose the first relations between theory and methodology for discourse analysis, these contextual difficulties forced us to sustain a more individualized work, which affected the group collaborative work dynamics that we had been working with. the module was organized around the following sections, loaded chronologically in the virtual classroom: sections description module presentation intended for the presentation of the module and the activities to be carried out. let's talk about linguistic landscapes this section was structured around two questions: what are we talking about when we talk about linguistic landscapes? to what extent are we aware of the languages and discourses present in the public space? to address these questions, we used the following resources: an explanatory video elaborated by the team of professors. a section on the website of the observatorio del discurso de la asociación internacional de estudios sobre discurso y sociedad (ediso)13 to which we had already referred in the introductory module of the seminar. the introduction to the thematic section of a journal on the subject14. an article in a scientific journal. 13 available at https://edisoportal.org/investigacion/observatorio-del-discurso 14 also in the virtual version, we used the creation of folders to organize bibliography and materials provided by the professors. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt145 mapping as experience and opportunity presentation of the basics of the mapping experience based on two questions: why? what for? to address these questions, we proposed a video presented by the team of professors at an ediso congress. towards our mapping experience we propose the instruction for the mapping experience, we approach the notion of registration. resources: section of the ediso observatory website where the notion of citizen science is addressed. "guidelines for mapping the linguistic landscape"(worksheet), which explains the decisions to be made and the dimensions to be considered in the register. photos with images of previous mapping experiences. activities: map at least one element of the linguistic landscape for the first planned synchronous encounter. carry out the mapping according to the proposed instructions. participate in the first forum to define violent and resistant discourse and raise doubts arising from the mapping activity. virtual meetings for module 3 scheduling of 2 synchronous meetings, in consecutive weeks, by zoom platform15 task16 / report of the mapping experience task created to share the report of the experience, explaining the organization foreseen for it. task / checking citations and bibliographic references activity for the revision of citations and bibliographic references. we used the following resources: apa citation styles and format of citations and references. working document with citations and references containing errors, on which we asked students to intervene by correcting them. task / analyzing... space created to share progress in the analysis based on an image of the mapping assigned by the teaching team. as an accompaniment for this activity we proposed: ask questions in the space of the task itself 15 here we also have to talk about the limitations imposed by the platform since it only allows 40-minute meetings in its free version, which is why we needed to schedule two consecutive meetings with their corresponding links and access times for each meeting planned. 16 we thus mark the use of the functionality known as task within the platform that allows the uploading of activities by the students, on an individual basis. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt146 send the progress made to receive feedback from the teaching team. connect to an optional synchronous tutorial via zoom. task / oral presentation of the mapping space created to share the oral presentation of the mapping through a video or audio presentation, in which students needed to take into account the same criteria explained for the presentations the previous year, but adding a final evaluation of the experience as a closure. to continue reading we shared complementary bibliography related to aspects addressed in the synchronous meetings, challenges that arose during the analysis or specific requests from the students. we also invited them to elaborate and share bibliographic references of these resources. in all cases, the synchronous meetings were recorded and the recordings of the meetings became resources available to the students in the classroom. the proposal carried out in the second instance was the first teaching experience in the virtuality of a space designed for face-to-face teaching, in some cases mediated by digital technologies. in this sense, the option to sustain the experience of mapping linguistic landscapes was a bet on the possibility of encouraging collaborative work from a dialogue that involved family and friends in the academic activities. we evaluate it as a positive planning decision that recovered, in fact, practices that appeared in an isolated way in previous courses students who added to their mappings images taken from people close to them but this time encouraged by the teaching team. however, although we consider that this expansion allowed us to open new spaces for dialogue, we also felt that we were unable to deepen those related to group work or with the class group, which only appeared superficially in the forums largely due to technical difficulties related to the use of spaces not designed for that purpose in the platform. likewise, although synchronous dialogue spaces were multiplied and deepened, sustained feedback among peers as an instance of deepening dialogue from the proposed activities was weakened by connectivity difficulties that prevented a fluid collective dialogue. we also omitted, in the virtual proposal, the elaboration of narratives17 by the students that implied a dialogue with their own learning process, feelings and sensations, a return on the pedagogical experience enriched from the viewpoints of their peers and their contributions. the same difficulties previously mentioned influenced the proposed dynamics: if in the classroom we always started with collective activities that multiplied the spaces for dialogue, the forced virtuality made us opt for a more direct approach where the instructions and some readings, for example, appeared as texts prior to the agreements that we could later negotiate with our students. the self-evaluation carried out by the team shows an imbalance between teaching work in this forced virtuality and real opportunities for dialogic learning on the part of the students, largely due to a precariousness of access to applications, adequate equipment, good connectivity that interfered constantly, forced us to multiply strategies and to rethink all the time new strategies to achieve a more fluid dialogue among students and professors. in spite of this, we did feel that the other articulated dialogues that we explained for the first moment were maintained in the second moment. 17 this teaching decision was linked to the overload of activities in different subjects reported by the students themselves, in an atypical and demanding course context. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt147 experiences in dialogue reviewing the planning decisions proposed in the two experiences, in their habitual face-to-face and exceptional non-face-to-face teaching modality, we observed the definition of different chronotopes, in one case with greater continuity (experience 1), in the other, to a certain extent opposed (experience 2). in both cases, as we anticipated, the differences observed in the designs respond to the particularities of the courses and to the possibilities of experiencing and redefining the scope of ict in teaching and learning proposals, from the previous experiences of the teaching teams in the courses proposed to the students in different years. thus, we can see that experience 1 recovers the work done with ict in previous academic years as well as the reflection on the use of these tools in and from education, which becomes both a means and an end. we observe here a certain continuity between chronotopes, in its two editions, which evidences a sustained mode of teacher-student interaction in face-to-face and virtuality. in any case, it is important to point out that the work during the second moment had both potentialities and limitations with respect to previous editions. we believe that the changes in course time together with the increase in enrollment had a direct impact on the number and type of activities, as well as on assessment. at the same time, the virtualization process enabled a more intense work with different ways of representing the content and with the diversification of points of view. experience 2, which presented in its 2019 version a course strongly anchored in face-to-face classes, with some interactions mediated by ict, shows different chronotopes: for face-to-face sessions, a more open one, with a marked predominance of dialogue and professor-student interaction for the definition of the course, more recursive and horizontal; for forced virtuality, a more stable, linear and to some extent vertical chronotope, crossed by material working conditions that hinder fluid synchronous interactions. beyond the above-mentioned differences, for the exceptional non-face-to-face proposals, greater stability in the proposed sequences and in the dynamics involved is observed in the two experiences, which seeks to generate greater predictability. moreover, in view of the commitment to strengthen the dialogic intentionality of the proposals, expanding contexts, broadening and deepening the dialogue (wegerif, 2013), the analyzed experiences show the way in which various contextual factors among them, less time and a greater number of students in experience 1, material and connectivity limitations in experience 2 go through the professors' planning decisions, materializing in proposals that respond to the profile of the spaces, of the professors, of the objects of knowledge addressed, of the diagnoses carried out. from the objectification of the practices allowed by the documents reviewed and the narratives elaborated and without losing sight of the material conditions that frame the teaching work in the courses we can observe creative processes with the author's stamp in the redefinition of the pedagogical experiences. this marks a more or less stable (or unstable) relationship between initial planning decisions, time, and space, in the search for a sustained dialogue, increasingly diverse in its spaces, broad and deep. this author's stamp is also evident in the effort to sustain the assumptions of the pedagogical proposal of each subject even in unforeseen conditions, which sometimes presented themselves as complicated scenarios to respond to the logic with which the professors had managed so far. perhaps it is in experience 2 where the greatest tensions are observed between teaching decisions that frame the seminar proposal and the possibilities and limitations of ict in a specific institutional context to respond to its objectives. in experience 1, the increase in enrollment and the transformations in terms of time also represented challenges for the development of contents and activities. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt148 the teaching decisions made and the importance given to dialogue in both proposals are also materialized in interactions that prolong communication among participants beyond the course periods. in this sense, we describe here two examples. in the context of experience 1, a former student who had studied at the first instance, writes to the professor the following year to tell her experience as a teacher in a pandemic context. in her message, she comments, "i found the teaching glossary helpful for this situation. if you have other resources, i would be grateful if you could share them with me. (...) i am sharing with you the link to a google quiz i prepared for the kids because the idea is for them to do one with other readings. if you have the time and desire to see it, i ask you to make suggestions to improve it." in this way, the professor-student dialogue is transformed into teacher-teacher dialogue, but recovering interaction dynamics of the initial relationship given that suggestions, approval, and revision are sought on practices that are carried out outside the shared education instances. in the context of experience 2, the professor recovers and shares in the seminar facebook group a pedagogical experience related to discourse analysis carried out by a former student, currently a teacher. likewise, she turns this experience into a singular answer to a question that the course itself poses to those who take it, thus recovering the importance of the articulation between teacher education experiences and professional practices. image 1. posting in the facebook group of the linguistics seminar course (2019)18 18 opening sentences: what is the point in critically analyzing discourses at school? here's an answer by gimena garcía. description of the picture included in the post: there are different questions related to love, which are located in three color circles (red, yellow and green) on a blackboard. these questions are: what kinds of relationships do we have? is that what we want? final hashtags and phrases: #denaturing phrases/ideas about love. #contributing to the construction of healthy relationships. excellent student work dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt149 while the experiences recovered here allowed students to become aware of their learning processes (loroño et al., 2010), technology also allows for sustaining the relationship between formative spaces and the evaluation of their own practices. returning to the notion of chronotope, we could think that planning decisions are made in the present, recovering the past and projecting into the future. thus, chronotopes linked to the formation of a teaching self in face-to-face and virtuality are articulated, with more or less evident changes in the positions assumed and in the modes of professional performance (barbato & caixeta, 2014; ligorio et al., 2013). these are not static chronotopes but chronotopes-in-action (ligorio & ritella, 2010) that make certain spaces and times significant according to the teaching decisions we assume. we even suggest thinking about chronotopes of continuity among students professors recent graduates that allow us to recover the protagonism of certain didactic interventions based on the views that former students, now colleagues, propose. from the shared examples we reinforce the ideas that we anticipated in the introduction: dialogic education does not end in classroom work, but also involves work among colleagues. the articulation of voices and, therefore, of positions, is what allows us to reconstruct the experiences considering their limitations and strengths. references arfuch, l. (2005). cronotopías de la intimidad. l. arfuch (comp.), pensar este tiempo. espacios, afectos, pertenencias (pp. 237-290). paidós. bajtin, m. (1975). théorie et esthétique du roman. gallimard. bakhtin, m. (1981). forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel. notes towards a historical poetics. the dialogical imagination. four essays by m. m. bakhtin (pp. 84-258). university of texas press. bajtin, m. (1982). estética de la creación verbal. siglo xxi. barbato, s., & caixeta, j. e. (2014). novas tecnologias e mediação do conhecimento em atividades colaborativas no ensino superior. linhas críticas, 20(42), 363-382. doi: https://doi.org/10.26512/lc.v20i42.4314 blommaert, j., & de fina, a. (2017). chronotopic identities: on the timespace organization of who we are. a. de fina, j. wegner, & d. ikizoglu (eds.), diversity and super-diversity. sociocultural linguistic perspectives (pp. 1-15). georgetown university press. castillo lluch, m., & sáez rivera, d. m. (2013). introducción. sección temática: paisajes lingüísticos en el mundo hispánico. revista internacional de lingüística iberoamericana (rili), 1(21), 9-22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24364764?refreqid=excelsior%3aa3077b57566f4b950ecd65fa191e7 108&seq=1 ellis, c., & bochner, a. p. (2000). autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. researcher as subject. n. k. denzin & y. s. lincoln (eds.), collecting and interpreting qualitative materials (pp. 733-768). sage. garrido, j., gros, b., rodríguez, j., silva, j., & nervi, h. (2008). más allá de laptops y pizarras digitales: la experiencia chilena de incorporación de tic en la formación inicial de docentes. calidad en la educación, (29), 196-209. doi: https://doi.org/10.31619/caledu.n29.193 goodall, h. l. b. (2008). writing qualitative inquiry. self, stories, and academic life. left coast press. dialogical experiences in, for, and from technologically mediated contexts maría beatriz taboada, guadalupe álvarez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.450 | vol. 10 (2022) dt150 ligorio, m. b., & ritella, g. (2010). the collaborative construction of chronotopes during computersupported collaborative professional tasks. international journal of computer supported collaborative learning, 5(4), 433-452. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11412-010-90944 ligorio, m. b., loperfido, f. f., & sansone, n. (2013). dialogical positions as a method of understanding identity trajectories in a collaborative blended university course. international journal of computer-supported collaborative learning, 8, 351-367. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-0139174-3 loroño, m. a., olea, m. j. a., & domínguez, i. m. 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(2001). comunidades de práctica. aprendizajes, significado e identidad. paidós. wenger, e., mcdermott, r., & snyder, w. m. (2002). cultivating communities of practice. harvard business school press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 13. matusov^j (layout)^j relationships between democratic education and dialogic education^j 2023-01-12.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a285 relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract in my conclusion, i want to return back to the issue raised by the co-editors of this special issue: what are the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education, between dialogue and democracy? for that, i consider the following three topics: 1) their polysemy, multiple meanings, of these two concepts, 2) their complementarity; and 3) their tensions and incompatibilities. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." ïïò polysemy democratic education as reported by a co-editor, ana marjanovic-shane, in her introduction to this special issue (marjanovic-shane, 2023a), they had a problem with the polysemy of the notion of “democratic education.” being familiar with the literature and discourse on democratic education, i have abstracted at least five distinct understandings of this term among educationalists, including in this special issue. although these five understandings can overlap or can be combined together, they have their own educational realms. democratic education as a civic curriculum: education about democracy this way of understanding the term democratic education is often also referred to as civic education. it involves teaching students about diverse forms of state or organizational governance, including democracy. democracy is often defined as people’s direct or representative participation in governance and involves issues of elections, representation, division of powers, and so on. there are two important aspects of this type of democratic education. the first is that it does not usually affect the educational and organizational processes of the students’ education per se. it does not try to democratize the educational or organizational processes of the students’ life by engaging them in decision-making about what to study, why to study, how to study, whether to study, and so on. probably, issn: 2325-3290 (online) the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a286 following the kantian principle of educational paternalism (kant, 1784), many educationalists do not see democracy as a form of governance suitable for ignorant, irrational, and immature students who cannot make informed and responsible decisions about their education and lives. the second is that democratic education as a curriculum does not necessarily affirm democracy as a desirable form of governance. for example, my study of civic education1 in soviet schools in the 1970s was about the critique of “bourgeois democracy” in favor of the “proletariat dictatorship” led by one party. as a co-editor ana marjanovic-shane reported in the introduction, they received many submissions for this special issue which interpreted “democratic education” solely as a civic education curriculum. these submissions were rejected by the co-editors. however, i think all submitted articles described elements of democratic education as a curriculum because practicing democracy often involves reflection on it. democratic education as a civic instruction: education for democracy the goal of such education is to instill the value of democracy into students as the most desirable form of state governance and develop basic skills in the students necessary for participation in democratic structures and processes. such a form of democratic education involves limited democratization of educational structures and processes: the school curriculum – by giving students some choices, the school instruction – by organizing debates and involving argumentation, the school organization – by having townhall decision-making meetings and writing students-based class constitutions, and so on. students are socialized into the process of how to participate in deliberate democracy skillfully. at the same time, democratic education, as education for democracy, tries not to lose control of the overall education of the students to make sure that the overall values and curricular endpoints are instilled in the students, including the value of democracy, which is unquestionable. kantian educational paternalism also remains but gets subtle and less visible to the students. the hard imposition and hard paternalism based on rewards and punishments are replaced here by the soft imposition and soft paternalism of manipulations by finding the key to the heart and mind of each student. although educational processes get democratized in this approach, this is “managed democracy,” using putin’s comment on russian democracy in the 2000s. often, progressive education (matusov, 2021a) utilizes this type of democratic education (dewey, 1997). in this special issue, the echo of this approach can be found in the discussions during the general assembly of the norwegian democratic school in oslo (jørgensen, 2023; marjanovic-shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023). also, jim rietmulder mentions education for democracy in his democratic school (the circle school) (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023). the difference between the democratic schools and this full-blown progressive type of education for democracy, however, is that in the democratic schools, education for democracy was/is a by-product of the students’ practicing unlimited democracy rather than as a targeted imposed curriculum. democratic education as a problem-solving tool for social problems armando marino filho (2023) demonstrates an instrumental version of democratic education where democracy is used for solving problems of children’s violence. his hypothesis that children’s violence is heavily rooted in adults’ paternalism and authoritarianism seems to be very plausible, especially after he provided evidence that under his democratic pedagogical regime, the children’s violence subsided. 1 literally, this academic subject was called “societology” (обществоведение). the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a287 yet, this instrumental approach to democratic education is not without a problem. since, in it, democracy is seen as an educational tool for solving problems with students’ violence, disengagement, disobedience, and so on and not as the value in itself, democracy is prone to manipulation and a temporary application. when the goals are more or less achieved, educational democracy can be withdrawn or weakened, as, indeed, happened in the brazilian ngo case described by armando. democratic education as the governance in a democratic school: a self-value in many democratic schools, democratic governance is viewed as the best form of collective, communal, or societal life and decision-making. here democracy is a practice that has a super important self-value: it is not a curriculum as it is in democratic education as civic education, not an instruction as it is democratic education for democracy, not an educational tool as it is in democratic education as a problem-solving method for social problems. usually, such democratic governance involves deliberate democracy where each member of the democratic school – students and staff – has the right to participate in: a) identifying a problem in the collective life requiring a collective decision, b) proposing solutions, c) debating the pros and cons of particular proposals, d) deciding which proposal to adopt, e) enforcing the collective rules and laws, f) the judicial process of investigation of the violations and passing the judgment, g) sanctioning the violators, and so on. the specific forms of rulemaking, rule enforcement, decisionmaking, and judicial processes may vary in democratic schools. some democratic schools use majority voting, some consensus, some judicial committees, some by delegation and representation, and so on, as discussed in many articles in this special issue. as several contributors argue in this special issue (e.g., matusov, 2023a, 2023b; rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023), the final test for democracy as a self-value is for one to accept and obey a democratically chosen decision with which the one disagrees: the democratic education paradigm requires an educator’s full faith that their students are the final authority for and authorial agency of their own education and life (klag, 1994; neill, 1960). the students have an unalienable right to define the purposes of their own education, their own curriculum, instruction, and organization of their education (with or without the help of a teacher or peers), including their decision to engage or not to engage in their education. essentially, democratic education is the affirmation of education as a self-education (matusov, 2021b). when faced with conflicting choices for their collective education, the students have the right to make decisions democratically, which may include public deliberation, voting, delegation of a decision to others, flipping a coin, deliberative consensus, compromising, splitting the class into smaller groups, studying solo, and so on. democratic education rejects the imposition of curriculum on the students, the teachers’ unilateralism, legitimacy of the institutional authority unsanctioned by the students, mandatory attendance, non-consensual assignments, unconditional obedience, pleasing the teachers and institutions, grading (unless asked by the students), and so on (gray, riley, & curry-knight, 2021; greenberg, 1991; holt, 1976; llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2019) in (matusov, 2023a, p. a57). both democratic education as governance and democratic education as a self-value reject kantian educational paternalism. proponents of these approaches hope that any mistakes in the democratic decision-making processes are self-correcting: when the participants experience the negative consequences of their decisions, they change their minds and make necessary collective corrections again through the democratic process. the processes of democratic deliberation and self-correction themselves have educational power for their participants. the participants' diversity of knowledge, information, expertise, experience, reasoning, sensibility, value, creativity, and maturity in democratic school may constitute its strength in these democratic processes, thus, rejecting kant’s arguments about ignorance, irrationality, and immaturity of students as the reasons for educational paternalism. the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a288 yet, my own contribution to this special issue (matusov, 2023b) problematizes this approach. democratic governance is not the only intrinsic value that democratic education may want to embrace. the other self-values and instrumental values may be, at times, in a non-harmonic relationship with democracy as governance. for example, democratic governance can become at odds with self-education or with protecting the long-term interests of democratic schools over its immediate interests, and so on. contextual, dynamic, authorial, and, thus, problematic prioritization by the participants of important self-values is required. democratic education as self-education according to this type of democratic education, there is the recognition by all participants that each student is the final authority for their own education, if not life. as the final authority, the student is the one who defines whether to study, what to study, why to study, with whom to study, when to study, where to study, how to study, and so on. this educational decision-making can be done with or without the help of other people. elsewhere, i conceptually justified this type of democratic education by distinguishing education from learning: education is the educatee’s decision about the value of experienced or planned learning (and not only learning) (matusov, 2021b). thus, making educational decisions for the educatee robs the educatee of their education (matusov, 2021b). often, many democratic educators – e.g., jim rietmulder (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023) and martin duberman (in matusov, 2023a) in this special issue – equate self-directed education with self-education. however, as i argued in my contribution (matusov, 2023b) and elsewhere (matusov, 2022b), self-directed education is only one among many forms of self-education, which may not necessarily be self-directed. from my point of view, there are at least two major limitations of this approach to democratic education, mostly discussed between ana marjanovic-shane and jim rietmulder (2023) and in my contributions (matusov, 2023a, 2023b). however, one also may find these issues in the articles on the oslo democratic school (marjanovic-shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; marjanovic-shane et al., 2023). the first limitation is external. the broader society imposes non-democratic values, such as upward social mobility, credentialism, social efficiency, etc., on the participants of democratic education. for example, some students at democratic schools have to prepare for sat tests in the usa to enter many (but not all) american universities. the other limitation is intrinsic. jim rietmulder stated, “as i wrote in my book (rietmulder, 2019), the circle school represents a ‘theory of schooling’ rather than a ‘theory of education’ ….” (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023, p. a45). i think jim is on something very important here. as soon as we start focusing on education, like on happiness, it escapes from us. it is because education exists in close contact with non-education and is supported by the latter. the greek word “school” means “leisure.” intrinsic, noninstrumental education is a form of leisure along with other forms of leisure like playing, hanging out with friends, and hobby (matusov, 2020). all these forms of leisure are surrounded and supported by mundane non-leisure activities and concerns like safety and survival, keeping order, keeping resources, providing lodging and food, and so on. without promoting all these non-educational forms of leisure and mundane non-leisure activities, education becomes impossible or, at least, very difficult. also, which is probably, an even more important point, self-education resists a “theory of education” because it is the educatee who defines what education means for themselves at the given moment: whether it is a critical examination of life (cf. socrates), creative socialization, closed socialization, training, their combination, or something else (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). that is why, in my view, the focus on schooling as the ecology, culture, and institution of joint self-education might be more warranted for educators and educatees than their sharp focus on education. the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a289 dialogic education when we (the dpj main editors) created our journal dialogic pedagogy 10 years ago, we had to make many important decisions. two of these important decisions are relevant to this section on the polysemy of the concept of dialogic education. the first important question was to define the term “dialogic pedagogy.” our first temptation was to define it by our consensus – fortunately, we rejected this temptation. instead, i offered to define dialogic pedagogy heuristically: “we loosely define ‘dialogic pedagogy’ as any scholarship and pedagogical practice, from educational researchers, philosophers, and practitioners, which values and gives priority to ‘dialogue’ in learning/teaching/educating across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional learning settings” (https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/about). i think it was a very fortunate move for many reasons, but primarily because it was a very inclusive definition, preventing the journal from becoming a paradigmatically exclusive club. this open-ended heuristic definition invites an investigation of how diverse educationalists, including the authors of this special issue, understand “dialogic pedagogy.” as i discussed elsewhere (matusov, 2018), i abstracted two major types of dialogic pedagogy: instrumental and ontological. the second important question, which the members of the proto–editorial-board decided that is relevant to this section, was about the title of our journal. the two most popular options were: “dialogic pedagogy” and “dialogic education.” i was the proponent of the former, which, unfortunately, as i judge it now, won. not only is dialogic education a broader and more inclusive concept than dialogic pedagogy, but it focuses on the primary actors: educatees rather than educators. please notice that educatees, students, and learners are missing from our definition of dialogic pedagogy above. this omission is both legitimate because of the journal’s primary focus on pedagogy and illegitimate because pedagogy serves education and not the other way around: educatees can exist without educators, but educators cannot exist without educatees. i suspect that growing up and working in conventional institutions of foisted education, i have realized this obvious distortion only recently. instrumental dialogic education instrumental dialogic education views dialogue as a tool for achieving other ends. these ends can be learning achievements, or learning outcomes, – for example, raising test-scores (clarke, resnick, & rosé, 2015); deepening students’ understanding of some curricula viewed by educators as important (lefstein & snell, 2013); making students deeply engaged in the preset curriculum (böheim et al., 2021); improving society through social justice (freire, 1986); and so on. in instrumental dialogic education, dialogue is not self-valued, but it is viewed as an effective means for achieving non-dialogic ends. in such an approach, usually, the genre of classroom discourse and the teacher’s instruction are dialogized and codified by the educators – e.g., “productive dialogue” (webb et al., 2019) or “productive talk” (alexander, 2015), – toward educational goals defined by the educators. thus, dialogue is very limited and, actually, monologized by the goals unilaterally selected and preset by the educators. in the special issue, a good example of instrumental dialogic education involves some, but not all, participants of the oslo democratic school (jørgensen, 2023; marjanovic-shane, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; marjanovic-shane et al., 2023) who saw dialogue as an effective way to establish a consensus for school goals or solve emerging problems through a consensus or a majority agreement. another example of instrumental dialogic education may be the article by armando marino filho (2023), who used open-ended dialogue (and democracy) as a tool or a method to overcome violence among children in his brazilian ngo – dialogue as a tool for social justice. however, i am not sure. i wonder if a used sociocultural framework, which i consider to be rather positivistic (matusov, 2022a), might blind armando from his recognition of the ontological nature of democracy and dialogue in his educational the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a290 practice, where dialogue and democracy are self-valuable ways of living joint lives together rather than tools for decreasing violence, which was a by-product of such living. ontological dialogic education ontological dialogic education views dialogue morally as the primary venue for the humanization of life, epistemologically as the basis of meaning making, and ontologically as a way of living (matusov, 2009). jim rietmulder articulated this point in his interview: dialogue, you can't keep human beings from dialoguing. meaning making is really an essential part of human being. and democratic schooling throws people together in a community which necessarily leads to negotiation of one sort or another. … conflict, tension between differing meanings, and it's a stage on which existential needs are experienced and met or not met, but a venue in which people can pursue satisfaction of those existential needs. community generates, as i point out in the book (rietmulder, 2019), an endless stream of situational challenges that all require meaning-making, much of that meaning-making in dialogue with other people (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023, p. a33). the dialogue here has a self-value being the end and the mean of education (and not only). however, learning and insights are not necessarily dialogic. a student’s learning and insights become educational only when the student passes a value judgment on their own learning and insights. this value judgment is embedded in a dialogue with other people and/or the student themselves (matusov, 2021b). in conventional and progressive schools, a full-blown dialogue about the value of learning for the student is not legitimate because education and its curriculum are imposed on the students and not negotiable. as a result, not only is education monologized there, but essentially, students are robbed of an education. education is effectively replaced with learning there: learnification of the education (matusov, 2021b). in the special issue, ontological dialogic education was presented by the articles on the oslo democratic school’s general assembly (jørgensen, 2023; marjanovic-shane, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; marjanovic-shane et al., 2023). the students at the oslo democratic school discussed the educational values of the school, including who must set them and why – which was one of the central foci of the heated meeting, in my judgment. the interview of jim rietmulder by ana marjanovic-shane (2023) also focused on similar issues. my essay on martin duberman’s educational experiment (matusov, 2023a) discussed the educational philosophies behind his experiment, which again considered the values that made students’ learning education. the struggles for educational values can be found in the essay by armando marino filho (2023), which defined both the success and the abrupt end of this innovative educational practice. one of the primary issues in my article about benevolent dictator (matusov, 2023b) was a collision of values, constituting my students’ education. considering the polysemy of the concept of ontological dialogic education, some educationalists, including me in the past, defined ontological dialogic education as a critical dialogue (matusov & peasealvarez, 2020). now i view critical dialogue as a particular type of ontological dialogic education. this vision of ontological dialogic education was eloquently articulated by socrates at his terminal court: “the unexamined life is not worth living” (plato & riddell, 1973). ontological dialogic education is understood as a critical examination of life, self, world, society, and education itself against alternative ideas and values in a dialogue with other people and themselves (matusov & pease-alvarez, 2020). not all educatees want to engage in critical dialogue all the time, nor should they do that. not all educatees value critical dialogue as a type of ontological dialogic education. the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a291 it is clear to me that martin duberman (in matusov, 2023a) and me (in matusov, 2023b) are committed to the value of critical dialogue – some of his and my students have become interested in it. it is an interesting question of whether any of the students at the oslo democratic school were interested in critical dialogue. from his interview and personal communication, it seems that jim rietmulder has become interested in it. recently, i started distinguishing two types of ontological dialogic education: conservative and democratic (matusov, 2022, december). a conservative approach tries to organize ontological dialogic education within a conventional educational institution, however, without rejecting its foisted nature. in contrast, a democratic approach to ontological dialogic education rejects foisted education altogether. my understanding of the debates at the general assembly at the oslo democratic school was, in part, a struggle between these two approaches. in martin duberman’s educational experiment, the tension between these two approaches was also very strong. at the same time, after all the temptations and doubts, he was firmly committed to the democratic approach, although within certain limits that i discussed in my essay (2023a). i sensed that armando marino filho (2023) was also committed to a democratic approach rather than to a conservative but also with some trepidations and reservations. of course, jim rietmulder’s circle school espouses and practices a democratic approach after its transition from a conservative approach (2023). as to me (matusov, 2023b), i started making my transition from a conservative to democratic ontological dialogic education in 2011 when i realized that dialogism requires deeply down an unfettered democracy: democracy as governance, self-value, and self-education. complementarity in my essay here, i argued that “participatory democracy requires dialogue, while dialogue requires voluntary participation and students’ ownership of their education” (matusov, 2023b, p. a255). for dialogue, democracy is a political regime of dialogue. democracy assures that dialogue is voluntary, non-participation is legitimate, the participants define the topics of dialogue, the ownership of dialogue (and life) belongs to its participants, freedoms, rights, and so on. for democracy, dialogue is critical deliberation. dialogue is the heart of democracy. it promotes opportunities to raise issues and find satisfactory solutions, the quality, and depth of decision making, assurance of the unique personal voice to be revealed, affirmed, heard, and responded to, revelation and articulation of alternative ideas, approaches, values, and paradigms. dialogue can reveal and legitimize the existing and emerging tensions and prevent violence. dialogue humanizes democracy. biographically, i came to democracy in my university classes from dialogue, from my dialogic pedagogy, when i recognized that my non-negotiable impositions, my unilateralism, and institutional foisting education at large are enemies of ontological dialogue and dialogic education. in contrast, jim rietmulder seems to have come to dialogue from democracy, from his democratic education, in his democratic school. dialogue deepens democracy, “…judicial committee, it seems to me, is just loaded with dialogue that involves everybody in the school, some people more than others, but it's tremendously about meaning making from the rules. "why do we have this rule? if i do this, why does it violate the rule? or why doesn't it? or why doesn't this rule... why doesn't this rule say what we mean?" and that's a huge one. [chuckle]” (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023, p. a35). tensions while dialogue and democracy need each other, it does not mean that they can have harmonious relations or are even compatible with each other. elsewhere, ana marjanovic-shane and i discussed this issue (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). let me reiterate some points from our past essay and provide the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a292 new areas of the dialogue-democracy tensions that, in my observation, were present in all essays in this special issue. the first area of the dialogue-democracy tensions is their attitude toward power, politics, and collectivity. dialogue rejects any power, while democracy accepts it. of course, democracy is a particular political way of establishing power. power is the imposition of a particular perspective, value, solution, or worldview on a person who disagrees with it. bakhtin’s notion of “internally persuasive discourse” rejects any politics and power (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). dialogue does not know voting, compromises, manipulations, bargaining, peer pressures, threats, procedures, closures, decision-making, solutions, and so on. any political regime, including sociocracy2 (shread & osόrio, 2018), is anti-dialogic. any obligation, obedience, or commitment is anti-dialogic as a compromise with one’s views. dialogue is lichnost’-based3, it does approve and affirm civil disobedience as the assertion of personal responsibility above any law of the socium. dialogue’s credo was articulated by bakhtin (1993): “i don’t have alibi-inbeing.” in contrast, democracy is socium-based, it rejects civil disobedience: “we wouldn't tolerate, or we don't wanna tolerate civil disobedience in that sense, but those policies don't dictate interactions” (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023, p. a45). a german philosopher max stirner insisted that freedom of thinking is rooted in personal safety from communal persecution, when the pursuit of an inquiry can be prioritized over the harmonious communal relations4, “the thought is only my own when i have no hesitation about putting it in mortal danger at every moment, when i don't have to fear its loss as a loss for me, as a loss of me” (stirner, 2017, p. 354, italics original). yet, this dialogic ideal cannot realize itself is a social vacuum and, thus, requires its limitation – a compromise with democracy as the best political regime/oppression for dialogue out of all possible5. it is worth noticing that out of the five ways of defining democratic education listed above, it is the last one, democratic education as self-education is the most compatible with dialogue. the second area of the dialogue-democracy tensions is the speech-action divide. while pure dialogue is pure speech, pure democracy is pure action. the speech and the action have different rights and different obligations. the speech has the right to be free, while the freedom of action is not legitimate. dialogue accepts any utterance, however unpleasant, problematic, and disturbing, which is not an action. democracy cannot accept any action but only lawful action. the realm of dialogue is ideas, worldviews, perceptions, convictions, judgments, paradigms, values, and so on. the realm of democracy is decisionmaking, solutions, pragmatics, morality, responsibility, deeds, and so on. of course, there is a grey area between speech and action – any speech has its action component, while any action has its speech component – which requires a judgment about their contextual boundaries and compromises. setting boundaries and compromises is in itself another act of democracy. the third area is the crucial difference of what dialogue and democracy are about. dialogue, especially critical dialogue, is about bottomless depth of understanding. democracy is about maintaining 2 like in “democracy,” “sociocracy” is a compound word with the second root “cracy” meaning “power”: the power of socium. 3 unfortunately, english does not have an analog to the slavic word “lichnost’.” it can be inadequately translated as “personality.” however, i can often hear my colleagues’ charge me with “individualism.” the slavic term “lichnost’” allows transcending the individualsocial dichotomy so powerfully inescapable in english. see also marjanovic-shane et al. (2023) in this special issue, its discussion of “tensions between individual and collective rights” (pp. a107-a109) 4 cf. aristotle wrote in his book “nicomachean ethics”: “amicus plato, sed magis amica veritas” translating from latin as "plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend (literally: plato is friend, but truth is more friend (to me than he is))." this is a societal maxim involving the legitimacy of the transcendence of friendship. in contrast, in a community, the maxim is the opposite: keeping harmonious relations is often more important than truth. 5 cf. winston churchill’s famous statement about democracy: “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” the relationships between democratic education and dialogic education: conclusion eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.560 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a293 peace in the face of disagreements by searching for livable solutions. as jim rietmulder told in his interview: “i think part of democracy is peaceful co-existence of difference. i think that democratic schools generally, and i know that the circle school in particular, as a community, is able to work through differences in a civil way, and there's very little vilification of people who hold different opinions.” (rietmulder & marjanovicshane, 2023, p. a30). dialogue is essentially deconstructive (marjanovic-shane, 2016), while democracy is essentially constructive. dialogue lives in the unfinalizable, reversible, and imaginary time where every word can be taken back. this dialogue time is constituted by the events of deconstruction of the given, deepening our understanding and liberating it from being colonized by the given culture, socium, and nature. any particular dialogue is embedded in the big dialogue of humanity that does not know its beginning or the end (bakhtin, 1999; bibler, 2009). in contrast, democracy lives in finalizable, irreversible, and real-time, when its deeds cannot always be easily taken back. this democracy time is constituted by the events of the construction of a new peace negating the present disagreements. in this sense, i respectfully disagree with my dear friend and colleague jim rietmulder, who said in his interview: jim: we're trying to get at differences or conflicts between dialogue and democracy, but even where our democratic judicial system, where the rubber meets the road, where pushing comes to shove, or where it really... there's a lot at stake, when the judicial committee finalizes its findings by voting on it, when the judicial committee charges somebody by vote, when the judicial committee imposes a sentence, all of those are finalized in one sense, that is, at least on a temporary basis, it's declared an end of the dialogue. ana: exactly. jim: but that's not non-dialogic and it's not a conflict. decision-making is not in conflict with dialogue... what do i wanna say here? all of those decisions are still open. school meeting reviews all of those decisions, every week. and even a year later, if somebody said, "you know, i think i was falsely convicted in this case," they could bring it back to school meeting. i think one of the reasons i oppose capital punishment is because there is a finality to that dialogue. i think it's a denial of due process. so i don't object to... frankly, i don't object to a society killing somebody because they think an offense has been so great, but i do object to a society determining with that degree of finality that they should die. and so i oppose capital punishment for that reason. but i don't see any incompatibility or conflict between "finalizing" decisions, between finalizing anything and dialogue. dialogue doesn't imply open-endedness, and democracy doesn't imply rejection of expertise. 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(2023). freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a21-a48, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.488. shread, c., & osόrio, m. (2018). school circles: wondering school in the netherlands [documentary film]. netherlands: wonder school. stirner, m. (2017). the unique and its property (w. landstreicher, trans.). baltimore: underworld amusements. webb, n. m., franke, m. l., ing, m., turrou, a. c., johnson, n. c., & zimmerman, j. (2019). teacher practices that promote productive dialogue and learning in mathematics classrooms. international journal of educational research, 97, 176-186. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word rapanta, macagno, introduction to the special issue (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.576 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a1 introduction to the special issue “boundaries between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory” chrysi rapanta universidade nova de lisboa, portugal fabrizio macagno universidade nova de lisboa, portugal abstract dialogue and argumentation are two processes that complement and mutually influence each other. however, this essential relationship is not sufficiently acknowledged by current educational research. this neglected relation is also mirrored by the lack of sufficient dialogue between two fields that are defined by the dialogical approach to education and argumentation, namely dialogic pedagogy and educational argumentation. in this special issue, we argue that dialogue pedagogies and argumentation theory and practice should communicate more, bridging their somehow different perspectives for the common goal of engaging learners in productive and constructive discussions. keywords: dialogue, argumentation, dialogic pedagogy, education chrysi rapanta (ph.d. in communication, 2011) works as a researcher in the field of argumentation and education at the institute of philosophy at the universidade nova de lisboa. she has coordinated national and international projects on argumentation and dialogical practices in education, closely collaborating with teachers from various contexts and educational levels. she has authored several papers on argumentbased teaching published on major international peer-reviewed journals such as review of educational research, educational research review, educational psychology review, teaching & teacher education, and learning, culture & social interaction. she is also the author of “argumentation strategies in the classroom” (2019, vernon press). fabrizio macagno (ph.d. in linguistics, 2008) works as an assistant professor in the departments of philosophy and communication at the universidade nova de lisboa. he has coordinated national and international projects on dialogical practices in different contexts, including education and medical communication. he authored several papers on definition, informal fallacies, argumentation schemes, and dialogue theory published in major international peer-reviewed journals such as journal of pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, argumentation, philosophy and rhetoric, informal logic, and pragmatics and cognition. his most important publications include the books argumentation schemes (cambridge university press 2008), emotive language in argumentation (cup 2014), interpreting straw man argumentation (springer 2017), and statutory interpretation: pragmatics and argumentation (cup 2021). ïïò dialogue and argumentation are two processes that complement and mutually influence each other. on one hand, engaging students in dialogic interactions helps them produce more dialogic moves (i.e., moves manifesting dialogicity), as the emergent multiple understandings that take place within a issn: 2325-3290 (online) introduction to the special issue “boundaries between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory” chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.576 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a2 dialogic space foster learners to think ‘intersubjectively,’ i.e., taking into consideration the others’ viewpoints. argument moves are considered high-dialogical moves because, for an argument to make sense, it always needs to include a different or contrary perspective, which is the core of argumentative reasoning (kuhn, 1991; kuhn et al., 2016a; macagno, 2016). the idea that dialogue improves thinking is well-established in the educational literature through the socio-constructivist learning theories of vygotsky (1962) and wertsch (1991). according to these authors, any learning taking place within the inter-mental zone, i.e., through dialogic interactions with significant others, can then be transferred to the intra-mental zone as a result of a process of skills’ interiorization. significant research shows that engaging in dialogue helps learners be more argumentative when they argue individually, namely in their writing (e.g., kuhn et al. 2016b; reznitskaya et al. 2012). research has also shown that the types of oral arguments produced during systematic dialogic interactions improve (becoming more sophisticated) over time as a result of learners’ engagement in the dialogue (iordanou & rapanta, 2021). therefore, dialogue can lead to improving argumentation skills. on the other hand, argumentative reasoning is dialogic by nature because it necessarily includes the skill of “antilogos” or counter-argumentation (billig, 1987; kuhn, 2018; larraín & haye, 2012). this means that dialogue, under a dialectical perspective, is an inherent aspect of arguing, as the duality of perspectives is an essential condition for effective argumentation. in argumentation and education, two similar concepts refer to this dialogical dimension of argumentation. the notion of “dual” or “two-sided arguments” captures the speaker’s consideration of the opposing-side claims and arguments in one’s own reasoning. thus, a dual argument mentions the perspective(s) incompatible with the speaker’s, provides rebuttals thereto, and qualifications to the speaker’s claim (felton & herko, 2004). the notion of “integrated arguments” refers to different strategies through which a speaker (or writer) takes into account both sides of an issue – by refuting the opposing perspective, developing both positions into a compromise, or weighting the evidence on both sides and assessing the strength of the arguments in favor of both positions (nussbaum & schraw, 2007). significant research shows that the more learners understand the dialogic nature of arguing, the more they are able to produce integrated arguments in the form of “however” statements (kuhn et al., 2014; kuhn & crowell, 2011). the highest evidence of skilled argumentative reasoning has been identified with the ability to recognize the restrictions of one’s own reasoning through counterarguing against oneself but then integrating these counterarguments in one’s own reasoning (nussbaum, 2021; rapanta, 2019). this ability is also manifested in the academic writing (macagno & rapanta, 2019). therefore, (skilled) argumentation presupposes dialogue. however, this essential relationship between dialogue and argumentation is not sufficiently acknowledged by current educational research, as shown by the lack of a sufficient dialogue between two fields that are defined by the dialogical approach to education and argumentation, namely dialogic pedagogy and educational argumentation. both research areas are developed by considering only their own perspective without integrating the complementary view, as explained below. dialogic pedagogy (dp) is a broadly defined field, with several traditions and practices being involved (asterhan et al., 2020) that highlight the need to speak of pedagogies rather than pedagogy (teo, 2019). the term “dialogue” has often been used interchangeably with the terms “classroom talk,” “discussion,” “communication,” and “dialogical inquiry;” the authors commonly follow a strict dialogical paradigm mostly grounded on bakhtin’s works and a communication paradigm based on habermas or the philosophy for children program (lin, 2013). different theories and paradigms of dialogue emphasize its different aspects and functions; however, put together, dp studies tend to focus on the features of classroom discourse and the climate that favor equal access and participation, legitimization of voices, accountability, community building, and critical thinking (lin, 2013; marttunen & laurinen, 2009; resnick et introduction to the special issue “boundaries between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory” chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.576 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a3 al., 2010). in particular, dp scholars tend to consider critical-argumentative reasoning as a by-product of dialogic behavior, meaning that when partners in dialogue engage in mutually exploring each other’s ideas and negotiating meanings, a great part of such negotiation is potentially critical and constructive, resulting in deeper argumentation. however, dp studies explicitly focused on argumentation as a learning goal are scarce. dialogic argumentation has been largely defined as a “social and collaborative process necessary to solve problems and advance knowledge” (duschl & osborne, 2002, p. 41). although eristic (disputative) argumentation exists – and it is highly common both in everyday and classroom peer-to-peer contexts – usually scholars identify argumentation as a pedagogical method with the types of argumentation dialogue called “inquiry” or “deliberation” (see, for example, felton & crowell 2022; reznitskaya & wilkinson 2017). within the growing field of argumentation and education, two main currents are recognized (muller-mirza & perret-clermont, 2009): the first one, known as “arguing to learn,” is characterized by the use of argumentation as an “instrument” for learning; the other, known as “learning to argue,” aims at using dialogue to incentivize argumentative reasoning. for both, dialogue is “just” a vehicle for learning; as a consequence, the principles leading to a good dialogue are often neglected by argument-oriented literature. in this special issue, we argue that dialogue pedagogies and argumentation theory and practice must communicate more, bridging their somehow different perspectives for the common goal of engaging learners in productive and constructive discussions. we base this argument on a recent literature review by rapanta and felton (2022), which showed that pedagogical framings vary from less to more taskfocusing when considering arguing as a learning task. most of the studies, largely defined by their “learning to argue” goal, emphasize the sensemaking and articulation aspects of argumentative dialogue much more than its deliberative and persuasion dimensions. this suggests that an increasing number of argumentation researchers tend to avoid a purely instrumentalist view of argumentation (winning a discussion) to include ontological aspects of engaging in authentic interactions with others (for the distinction between “instrumental” and “ontological” learning see matusov, 2021). the benefits of this "marriage" between dialogic pedagogies and educational argumentation are also emphasized by schwarz and baker (2016), who stress the need to combine a dialectical approach (in which a normative approach to arguments and argumentative discussions is developed) with a dialogical one, through instilling dialogical norms or a dialogic ethos (howe et al., 2019) when engaging students in argumentative practices. inspired by these ideas, this special issue breaks new ground through theoretical and empirical studies that make the connections between dialogue and argumentation explicit and equally meaningful for classroom practice. the first article by michael nussbaum, ian dove, and leann putney, entitled “bridging dialogic pedagogy and logic through critical questions,” explores the relationship between argumentation theory and dialogic pedagogy through a focus on critical questions. in particular, the authors present the critical questions model of argument assessment (cqmaa) as a framework for evaluating arguments emerging in classroom discussions. the second article is a theoretical reflection by christine howe, inspired by the latest research conducted by the author and colleagues in the field of dialogic teaching. in her contribution entitled “classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition,” howe offers a thoughtful analysis of recent empirical research findings on students’ reasoned dialogue, putting forward the idea that it is reasoned opposition more than dialogue that has significant learning effects. in the third paper, kiyotaka miyazaki offers a theoretical contribution towards a connection between “questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory.” the author establishes theoretical connections in the view of questioning from an argumentation theory and a bakhtinian introduction to the special issue “boundaries between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory” chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.576 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a4 perspective and showcases his integrative approach through japanese pedagogical scenarios. his innovative proposal aims at showing how dialogue – and, in particular, questions – are characterized by a continuous negotiation of meaning, where the process of interpretation becomes crucial. the fourth contribution by chrysi rapanta and fabrizio macagno bears the title “authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences: a pragmatic approach.” in this empirical article, the authors offer an innovative view of the so-called authentic questions as pragmatic constructs emerging from types of argumentation dialogue. they conclude their analysis of a large multi-country classroom interaction corpus with a focus on discovery questions and their function for promoting more productive and constructive student participation. the fifth article by jonathan kilpeläa, kaisa jokiranta, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, and jouni viiri is an empirical and methodological contribution to “analyzing science teacher support of dialogic argumentation using teacher roles of questioning and communicative approaches.” through an innovative analysis of classroom argumentative episodes, the authors identify different teacher roles accompanied by types of talk moves that function positively or negatively towards students’ quality of contributions. the last article of this special issue is “advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas,” by ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli and omer keynan. the authors present an intervention designed to resolve interdisciplinary societal dilemmas through dialogic argumentation with the goal of advancing classroom epistemic practices. their use of actor-network theory for analysing the discussions is an innovative and promising tool for bridging dialogic pedagogies with argumentation. all in all, this special issue attempted to address the missing dialogue between dialogic pedagogy and educational argumentation. in particular, we tried to bring to light some aspects of a common agenda and overall mission between these two fields. for this purpose, we brought together scholars from these two research trends, engaging them to work on a common topic. in this special issue, three contributions (articles 2, 3, and 4) are by scholars who identify themselves more with the community of dialogic pedagogy and teaching, while the other three (articles 1, 5, and 6) are authored by scholars more familiar with argumentation theory and research. a common aspect between all contributions is that they represent the research conducted at the “boundaries” between dialogue and argumentation, pursuing research objectives that need a combination of methods and concepts from both fields. we encourage more scholars to promote this “frontier” research work and engage in a dialogue between the two disciplines for the sake of more meaningful classroom discussions and learning. references asterhan, c., howe, c., lefstein, a., matusov, e., & reznitskaya, a. 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(2016). dialogue, argumentation and education: history, theory and practice. cambridge university press. teo, p. (2019). teaching for the 21st century: a case for dialogic pedagogy. learning, culture and social interaction, 21, 170–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.03.009 vygotsky, l. s. (1962). thought and language. mit press. wertsch, j. (1991). voices of the mind: sociocultural approach to mediated action. harvard university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word is dialogic teaching sustainable (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a37 is dialogic teaching sustainable? portrait of a teacher three years after completing a teacher development programme klara sedova masaryk university, czech republic abstract this study deals with the question of whether a change in classroom discourse implemented through teacher professional development (tpd) is sustainable over time. i studied one teacher’s practices and thinking three years after completing a tpd programme focused on dialogic teaching. the data were collected through interviews with the teacher and video recordings of her lessons. the data showed that the teacher continued with dialogic teaching, but she appropriated and modified the concept of dialogic teaching to serve her own needs and preferences. the way the teacher overcame obstacles to sustaining the implemented change is discussed in the study.1 klara sedova is a professor in education at masaryk university in the czech republic. she is leading a research team that has been working for more than ten years in the field of classroom dialogue and interaction studies. the team has conducted ethnographic observations in czech schools as well as interventional studies and large-scale surveys. currently, she is interested in the link between individual student talk during lessons and the learning achievements of those students. email: ksedova@phil.muni.cz ïïò introduction it has been repeatedly claimed that a student-centered approach based on positioning students as social agents and active learners remains rare in contemporary classrooms, which are dominated by rote memorization and textbook work (crick et al., 2007; mameli et al., 2020). one instructional approach being regarded as promising in enhancing student learning through their agentic participation in classroom talk is dialogic teaching (alexander, 2020). on that account, many professional development programs have been initiated in this field in the past three decades. some of these programs were remarkably successful, and the participating teachers managed to establish productive dialogue in their classrooms (see, e.g., alexander, 2018; hennessy et al., 2018; o’connor et al., 2015; osborne et al., 2019; schwarz et al., 2017; sedova et al., 2016). however, the issue of the sustainability of the change in teaching was rarely discussed in these studies. the aim of this paper is to contribute to filling this significant knowledge gap. i present a case study of one teacher who participated in a teacher development programme focused on implementing dialogic teaching in the 2014/2015 academic year and who changed her teaching practices as a result of the programme. the same teacher was observed three years later to explore the extent to which this 1 this article is an output of the project collectivity in dialogic teaching: an intervention study (ga21-16021s) funded by the czech science foundation. issn: 2325-3290 (online) is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a38 change was preserved. this paper addresses the question of whether dialogic teaching is sustainable in ordinary lessons after the teacher has lost the support provided during a teacher development programme. theoretical background dialogic teaching as a difficult-to-attain ideal dialogic teaching is a pedagogical approach utilizing the power of talk to engage students, stimulate and extend their thinking, and advance their learning and understanding (alexander, 2020). in dialogic teaching, the teacher does not deliver pieces of information to students; rather, the teacher and students co-construct new knowledge together (mercer, 2008). the concept of dialogic teaching stems from the sociocultural theory related to the work of vygotsky (1978), who postulated that there is a clear connection between speech and thought. in this view, our inner mental abilities come from the outside (vygotsky, 1978); all human knowledge is of a social nature and is created by previous social participation (wertsch, 1985). the theory of dialogic teaching was also inspired by bakhtin’s (1981) theory of speech genres. bakhtin differentiated between two speech genres: authoritative and dialogic discourse. the aim of the former is to persuade, mediate knowledge that is considered true, and ensure the reproduction of such knowledge. in essence, the aim of authoritative discourse is to convince its audience to accept the perspective of the speaker. in contrast, dialogic discourse opens space for various perspectives, ideas and aims to provide stimuli for thinking. different voices, or perspectives, take turns in speaking in dialogic discourse. dialogic teaching as an instructional approach thus emphasizes verbal interaction between teachers and students in a class in which different voices animate each other (bakhtin, 1981). students use specific talk moves – they speak in long and elaborate utterances that include arguments and reasoning words; they express their authentic ideas, explain their thinking, actively listen to the ideas of others, and engage in thinking about these ideas. teachers support student participation in classroom dialogue through their talk moves: they ask open-ended and cognitively demanding questions that fuel open discussion (with peer interaction established) and invite students to analyze, generalize, and speculate rather than simply look for facts or review already learned knowledge; they build on what was said by students, paraphrase, summarise, and elaborate student utterances, give them uptake, and ask contingent questions (see, e.g., alexander, 2020; lyle, 2008; kim & wilkinson, 2019; sedova et al., 2016; vrikki et al., 2019; wilkinson et al., 2015). also, specific general principles of dialogic teaching needed to be heeded by the teacher. according to alexander (2020), classroom dialogue must be (1) collective (all students should participate); (2) reciprocal (teachers and students should listen to each other and share thoughts); (3) supportive (no fear about expressing one’s own ideas); (4) deliberative (aiming to resolve different points of view); (5) cumulative (knowledge should be accumulated through dialogue); and (6) purposeful (dialogue should serve given educational goals). a substantial body of empirical evidence shows that dialogic teaching positively impacts learning (see, e.g., alexander, 2018; andreassen & bråten, 2011; applebee et al., 2003; mcelhone, 2012; muhonen et al., 2018; o’connor et al., 2015). in spite of this, the research on actual school practices overwhelmingly shows that the prevalent forms of teaching are far from dialogic ideals (see, e.g., alexander, 2008; hardman et al., 2003; berry & kim, 2008; nystrand et al., 1997; sedova et al., 2014). the dominant form of instruction is still transmissive and monological, where the teachers present certain facts to students and then, through closed-ended questions, briefly check whether students have learned these facts (riesman et al., 2018; wells & arauz, 2006). is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a39 teacher development programs as a tool for delivering dialogic teaching to classrooms teacher professional development (tpd) is a tool for improving the quality of teaching (gore et al., 2017). not surprisingly, many tpd projects have been created to introduce dialogic teaching into schools over the past three decades (e.g., alexander, 2018; hennessy et al., 2018; lefstein & snell, 2014; osborne et al., 2019; schwarz et al., 2017; sedova et al., 2016). some of these projects reported only limited or no outcomes; others were successful. according to wilkinson et al. (2015), the successful programs shared an element of reflection on teaching practices through video recording and transcripts, co-inquiry and coplanning of lessons, and a dialogic approach to professional development. however, even studies based on successful projects have claimed that shifting teaching practices towards dialogic teaching was not an easy task for teachers, as it demanded a lot of effort and support (gomez zaccarelli et al., 2018; sedova, 2017; snell & lefstein, 2018). also, in some studies, the authors concluded that although they assessed the teachers as thriving in the practice of dialogic teaching, it does not mean they mastered all the elements of the dialogic teaching addressed by the particular intervention program (sedova, 2017; chinn et al., 2001; nassaji & wells, 2000; gomez zaccarelli et al., 2018). these observations may arouse some concerns about the sustainability of change accomplished during tpd. what happens to the teachers after the support of the researchers and educators is gone? will teachers gravitate back to their former ways of teaching? doubts about the long-term impacts of tpd were explicitly expressed by hennessy and davies (2020). these authors also hypothesized three general reasons that limit the impact of tpd: (1) the complex change in teaching is too demanding for the teachers, and they do not develop all the needed abilities during the training time; (2) the shift from traditional practice is not trivial, requiring a change of teacher mindset, which does not always happen during the tpd; and (3) teachers do not really believe in what they were taught during tpd; they do not find it sufficiently informative, persuasive, nor valuable. for the dialogic teaching movement, it is absolutely essential to examine these concerns. if the quality of teaching changes only temporarily, and the changes are not sustainable, then investing effort and money in tpd focused on dialogic teaching is in vain. unfortunately, there is nearly no data about the longterm impact of dialogic teaching tpd initiatives. to my knowledge, few studies have investigated the sustainability of dialogic teaching. chen (2020) conducted tpd focused on changes in teachers’ beliefs in the usefulness of classroom talk as well as in their self-efficacy in guiding the classroom talk and on enhancing teachers’ ability to encourage student elaboration, reasoning, and thinking with others in the classroom. the teachers in the intervention changed both their beliefs and their teaching practices. in a delayed post-test after three terms, the sustainability of the teachers’ beliefs and self-efficacy was verified. however, the sustainability of teacher teaching practices was not examined. the sustainability of dialogic teaching practices was examined by hennessy et al. (2018), who reported observing two teachers who continued using a dialogic approach ten weeks after they completed a tpd program (see also hennessy & davies, 2020). more elaborated findings were published by osborne et al. (2019), who conducted a tpd program to enhance elementary teachers’ ability to engage their students with argumentation in science. the data were gathered longitudinally (over four years in total), with the last collection one year after the end of the tpd program. the authors found a rapid increase in dialogic teaching practices in the first year of teachers’ participation in tpd, then the pace of change decelerated. when measured one year after completing the programme, the values of indicators were lower than during the programme, although still higher than before the programme started. osborne et al. (2019) concluded that changes in teaching practices might be difficult to sustain. newly mastered teaching skills may fade without additional tpd opportunities and support. is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a40 the present study the aim of this study is to explore the issue of the sustainability of a shift towards dialogic teaching through a case study of one teacher. the teacher participated in a tpd program in the 2014/2015 academic year (study 1). i was a researcher closely cooperating with this teacher during tpd, and i analyzed the data about her learning development in depth to find what was the result of her participation in the program (see sedova, 2017). in 2018, i had the opportunity to cooperate with the same teacher again, video record her lessons, and interview her (study 2). this resulted in rich data, allowing me to compare how this teacher approached teaching before, during, and at the end of the tpd programme, as well as several years after its completion. with regard to the scarcity of studies investigating the long-term impact of tpd on dialogic teaching, this dataset is worth a thorough examination. the following questions guide the analysis: rq 1. how does the teacher’s classroom discourse compare with her discourse three years earlier when she finished the tpd program? rq 2. what did the teacher think about dialogic teaching three years after completing the tpd programme? methods the focal teacher and her classes the teacher daniela2 worked at a lower secondary school (isced 2a)3 in a big city in the czech republic. the school was attended predominantly by children from working-class and middle-class families. daniela had 12 years of teaching experience at the time of study 1; she had 15 years of experience at the time of study 2. she taught the czech language, language arts, and history, but for the research project, she was observed only in the language arts lessons. during study 1, daniela was observed with the seventh grade: the class was attended by 20 students, average age 13 years, 11 girls and 9 boys. study 2 took place in the ninth grade, with 13 students attending the class, average age 15 years, 4 girls and 9 boys. design of study 1 and study 2 study 1 study 1 was designed as an intervention through a tpd program. eight teachers from five lower secondary schools participated in the program. when designing the tpd program, we, the researchers, were aware that successful intervention requires dialogic reflection on teaching practices through video recording and co-planning of lessons by both the teacher and the researcher (wilkinson et al., 2015). therefore, the development program included several components: 1) four workshops for the teachers (each lasting three hours); 2) documentation of their lessons using video recording (10 lessons lasting 45 minutes of each teacher); and 3) reflective interviews led by a researcher with a teacher (8 interviews with each teacher, each lasting 60 to 90 minutes). the duration of the program was eight months (beginning in november and ending in june). 2 this is a pseudonym – see the section on research ethics below 3 compulsory education in the czech republic lasts nine years and includes elementary schooling (grades 1 to 5) and lower secondary schooling (grades 6 to 9). is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a41 during the workshops, participating teachers were familiarised with the theoretical background of dialogic teaching and its features and principles. during the reflective interviews, a stable teacherresearcher pair watched and commented on the video recording of a previous lesson and planned how to approach the next lesson. generally, teachers were encouraged to incorporate the following indicators of dialogic teaching into their lessons: (1) student thoughts with reasoning (pimentel & mcneill, 2013) – a student’s utterance with characteristics of a sentence, including an argument or reasoning; (2) teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand – authentic questions requiring cognitive operations of a higher level than memorization, aimed at revealing a student’s ideas and opinions, and for which there is no set answer (gayle et al., 2006); (3) uptake – a situation in which the speaker builds on what has been said by the previous speaker; typically, a teacher creates a follow-up question based on a student’s answer (nystrand, 1997); (4) student questions (nystrand et al., 2001); and (5) open discussion – a sequence that includes at least three participants who respond to each other for more than 30 seconds (nystrand, 1997). the principles of dialogic teaching, as established by alexander (2006), were also introduced to the teachers. the researchers stressed dialogue to be collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, and purposeful; this was extensively discussed during workshops and reflective interviews. as for analysis, the research team monitored the presence of the indicators of dialogic teaching in the series of lessons and compared video recordings of participating teachers before they entered the program, during the program, and after they completed it. the tpd was considered to have been successful, as the teachers strengthened indicators in their lessons (for details, see sedova et al., 2016). study 2 the aim of study 2 was to investigate the relationship between student participation in classroom talk and their achievement in the ninth grade (see sedova et al., 2019). the research was conducted under natural conditions on a sample of 32 classes (639 students). in each class, the research team conducted a systematic observation of classroom dialogue, at the same time collecting data about student achievement. the sample was constructed by the czech school inspectorate (csi), which is a key central institution in the evaluation of the education system in the czech republic. it was a lucky coincidence that a class taught by daniela was included in the sample. subsequently, the research team selected four classes for in-depth research focused on individual student participation in classroom talk. the data collection consisted of video recordings of lessons (six in each classroom), interviews with teachers (two with each teacher), and group interviews with students (four in each classroom). when being video recorded, teachers were instructed to teach as they usually do. the aim was to capture standard lessons with customary student talk behavior. daniela agreed to participate in this part of study 2, and i was again nominated to be a researcher in close contact with this teacher (making video recordings and interviewing the teacher and the students). this made it possible to analyze data to consider how dialogic daniela’s teaching was three years after the tpd programme concluded. data and the analysis this paper analyses data gathered during study 2 – video recordings of lessons and interviews with the teacher. six video recordings of daniela’s teaching were made during the study. four of them were made in language arts lessons, and two of them were made in czech language lessons. in this study, i use only data from the language arts lessons (4 x 45 minutes) to make the material comparable to the data from study 1. further, two interviews with the teacher were conducted during study 2, the first before the video recording started (50 minutes) and the second after the video recording finished (65 minutes). is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a42 i compare data gathered during study 2 with data from study 1. study 1 collected ten video recordings of language arts lessons (10 x 45 minutes) and six interviews with the teacher (lasting 45 to 60 minutes). the overview of data sources is in appendix 1. to address rq 1, i coded the video recording of the lessons included in study 2 the same way that the data in study 1 were formerly coded (see sedova et al., 2016). during study 1, a deductive set of codes was used, representing the individual indicators of dialogic teaching: student thoughts with reasoning, teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand, uptake, student questions, and open discussion. an overview of the coding system with examples and illustrations is presented in appendix 2. the unit of analysis was one lesson. the absolute incidence of each indicator was counted for each individual lesson. the duration of open discussion was measured in minutes. when coding, only those parts of the lessons that involved interaction between the teacher and students were included. students’ reading, individual work, and group work were excluded. the coding in study 1 was done by four pairs of coders who were thoroughly trained in recognizing individual indicators. prior to the start of the analysis, each coder practiced identifying each indicator using older video recordings that were available to the research team, individually and in a supervised group. the training was finished when agreement among all coders reached 90%; this took about 60 hours per coder. during the analytic stage, each lesson was coded by one pair of coders who worked independently and subsequently compared their codes; inconsistencies were solved through discussion. during study 2, i used the same set of codes. i coded the lessons the same way as in study 1. my coding was checked by a member of the research team who had worked on study 1, roman švaříček. the inconsistencies were rare (less than 8%) and were solved through discussion. to address rq 2, i analyzed data from interviews using the atlas.ti software for qualitative data analysis. i coded the material using a three-step procedure. in the first – deductive – phase of coding, i proceeded from the hennessy and davies (2020) clusters of dialogic teaching obstacles (see section on teacher development programs). therefore, i searched in the data for passages reporting on (1) the complexity of the change, (2) teacher mindset, and (3) (dis)trust in dialogic teaching. in the second – inductive – phase, i applied open coding based on the grounded theory approach (strauss & corbin, 1990) to create fine-grained inductive codes inside these three broad clusters. i created 69 inductive codes in total. in the third phase, i used selective coding (strauss & corbin, 1990) to re-categorize the inductive codes according to their affinity to three categories: (1) educational goals; (2) students; and (3) teacher selfperception. these categories represent a subject domain of change as seen by the teachers. these finally established categories correspond with our findings. the coding procedure is depicted in appendix 3. research ethics in both studies, i first obtained the consent of the teacher daniela and her school principal. subsequently, i asked for and was granted written consent from all parents to the participation of their children in the research. all data were carefully anonymized. all participants were assigned pseudonyms under which they appear in the published studies. all participants were assured of data confidentiality and the ability to withdraw from the research at any time. no one withdrew during the research. limitations of the study this study has some obvious limits. some are due to the research design – a case study with repeated data gathering. first, only one teacher was observed, which makes the results provisional, calling for an examination of the findings on a larger teacher sample. also, we should be clear concerning some particular characteristics of the participating teacher before we interpret the findings from this case. daniela is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a43 is an example of a teacher who was in favor of a dialogic approach before entering tpd. moreover, she entered the tpd program voluntarily and was successful in implementing the changes required by the program. this is why the same findings cannot be expected with teachers who are in opposition to dialogic teaching, enter tpd by command, or do not successfully implement it. therefore, not only do we need a bigger sample in the future, but also a sample consisting of teachers with variable professional experience and attitudes to dialogic practice and self-efficacy. second, the analysis in this study is based on a comparison of data from 2014/2015 and 2018. the results are weakened by the fact that daniela did not teach in the same class in both series. some of the differences can proceed from different characteristics of the two classes, including the different ages of the students. however, this is a methodological puzzle – when coming back to the tpd-leavers after some time; we have no option but to observe them in different classes and/or altered conditions. the other limitation of this study is due to the analytic approach. in order to compare data representing classroom dialogue in different time sections, i used a set of measurable indicators of dialogic teaching. this approach is legitimate but necessarily reductionist as the list of indicators can never fully embody the nature of classroom dialogue. in addition to this, the numeric values of individual indicators cannot be understood as determinative for encompassing the quality of dialogic teaching. therefore, a more detailed qualitative analysis of observational data needs to be conducted in the future as a complement to the analysis presented in this study. findings daniela’s 2018 teaching at a glance for an illustration of the classroom talk at the time of study 2, i am providing an excerpt from the first lesson in this series. the class had read aloud a passage from the book sophie’s world by jostein gaarder dealing with ancient greek philosophy. reading was followed by a discussion about the text. excerpt 1: lesson 1, study 24 1. teacher: the philosopher socrates thought that a slave is just as educable as a literate citizen. (3) do you think this could be true? 2. katka: yup. 3. veronika: well, it is. if he wasn’t a slave, he would be the same human like all others, having the same education and so on. 4. michal: but the slave could be absolutely stupid. then he would be hard to educate. 5. teacher: why do you think he is stupid? 6. michal: can be. 7. teacher: can be, but why do you say he could be stupid? 4 for transcipt conventions, see lefstein & snell (2014). is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a44 8. michal: don’t know. the same with the citizen. both can be stupid. it’s about in what class they were born. 9. radek: well, the slave can just appear stupid. it could be because he hadn’t learned anything since he was born. 10. tomas: being from a poor family. 11. teacher: so, isn’t it more probable that an educated citizen will understand the philosopher more accurately? (3) 12. veronika: the uneducated can understand, too. ((student radek nodding his head)) 13. teacher: ((smiling)) well, socrates evidently thought so. from time to time, he was talking to slaves, and he expected them to understand. the excerpt has many attributes of dialogic teaching (see section on dialogic teaching as a difficultto-attain ideal). the students are heading towards authentic thinking and participation. together with the teacher, they co-construct new knowledge (mercer, 2008). in terms of talk moves, there are student thoughts with reasoning (lines 3, 9), teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand (line 1), uptake (lines 5, 7), and open discussion (the whole excerpt). also, principles of dialogic teaching (alexander, 2020) are clearly kept – the conversation is linked to a deep interpretation of a literary text (purposefulness), many students are involved (collectivity), there is no fear of expressing one’s thoughts, and students even contradict the teacher (supportivity), the speakers obviously react to each other (reciprocity), and build on each other’s utterances (cumulativity). changes in the characteristics of the classroom dialogue in this section, i address rq 1, looking for what changed from study 1 to study 2 primarily in terms of indicators of dialogic teaching. i utilize the data from the videorecordings collected in 2014/2015 and 2018. comparison of pre, post, and follow-up lessons in figure 1, i compare some features of daniela’s teaching before she entered the teacher development programme (pre lessons, n = 2), at the end of the programme (post lessons, n = 2), and three years later (follow-up lessons, n = 4). the vertical axis shows the average values of individual indicators of dialogic teaching per one lesson in the pre, post, and follow-up phases. the open discussion indicator is measured in minutes. values of all the remaining indicators state the absolute number of occurrences of the given indicator per one lesson. is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a45 the trend is not the same for all indicators. the open discussion and student thoughts with reasoning show the same pattern: a rapid increase between pre and post lessons and a moderate decrease between post and follow-up lessons. teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand increased heavily due to the program, but three years later, they were used with very similar frequency as before the program had started. uptake increased only mildly between pre and post lessons, but the increase continued over time, reaching its maximum in the follow-up lessons. by contrast, student questions decreased continually from pre to follow-up lessons. in a nutshell, figure 1 gives no simple answer to the question about the sustainability of the change. some things from what the teacher had learned in the program strengthened over time (uptake); some things remained, but not in the top form (open discussion and student thoughts with reasoning); and some things seemed to be lost (teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand, student questions). before i start with a more subtle analysis, i want to stress that during the program, we placed the strongest emphasis on the indicator of student thoughts with reasoning, which we considered to be the most prominent and reliable feature of dialogic teaching (see sedova et al., 2016). with this in mind, we can say that the most important gain from the development program was sustained, even though not in its top form. a closer exploration of the individual lessons in both series in figures 2 and 3 we can see the incidence of indicators of dialogic teaching in daniela’s lessons during the teacher development programme (figure 2) and three years after its completion (figure 3). 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 pre post follow-up va lu e of th e in di ca to r lessons open discussion (min) teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand (n) uptake (n) students’ thoughts with reasoning (n) student questions (n) figure 1: comparison of pre, post, and follow-up lessons in indicators of dialogic teaching is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a46 figure 2 reveals an observation that remains hidden when simply comparing average values in pre lessons (1, 2) and post lessons (9,10). the change in the parameters of the classroom dialogue during the teacher development programme was not of a linear nature. it is clear that a smooth, gradual growth of individual indicators did not take place over time; the change happened in jumps, some of which have the characteristics of a regression. there are two points in the diagram where the values of most indicators visibly drop. one is in lesson 4; the other is in lessons 7 and 8. in contrast, there are some apparent peaks – in lessons 3 and 6 and most obviously in lesson 10, the final lesson. lesson 10 can be labeled as extreme – there are more than twice as many occurrences of student thoughts with reasoning as in other lessons; other indicators are also very high. it is evident from figure 2 that during tpd, it was not easy for daniela to maintain the levels of all the measured indicators. sometimes she was successful; sometimes not. during the whole series of lessons, the teacher used a variety of instructional methods (e.g., student role-playing, incomplete lecture with space for student questions, creating and re-creating stories in peer groups, and student presentations of books); she knew some methods from past experience, some were presented during the workshops for teachers, and some she creatively fashioned herself. the chosen methods did not always work as daniela intended, which repeatedly led her to abandon or modify them (for details, see sedova, 2017). the final two lessons at the end of the program were – in terms of indicators – very good or even excellent. when analyzing the case of the teacher daniela after the tpd program had ended, i evaluated her as very successful in mastering dialogic teaching (see sedova, 2017). but the question of the sustainability of the change remained open. there was no guarantee that the peak in lesson 10 would not be followed by another massive drop. utilizing the new portion of data collected in 2018, i can now address this question. 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 va lu e of th e in di ca to r lessons during study 1 open discussion (min) teacher’s open question of high cognitive demand (n) uptake (n) students’ thoughts with reasoning (n) student questions (n) figure 2: development of dialogic indicators during study 1 (november 2014 – may 2015) is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a47 when analyzing the sequence of lessons recorded in 2018, we have to keep in mind that the data was being collected under different conditions than the previous series. in 2014/2015, daniela was undergoing a teacher development programme; within this frame, achieving the maximal feasible values of indicators was prescribed as a desirable goal. daniela knew her teaching was assessed by the researchers according to the indicators, and this made her try hard to maximize these indicators in each lesson. in 2018, there was no assignment of this kind. in this project, the researchers asked the teachers to conduct ordinary lessons the way they usually teach. this implies that lower values of indicators in 2018 were expectable. when we compare figure 3 with figure 2, we can see that all of the indicators except student questions are above the lowest values in the 2014/2015 series. the sequence is more balanced – the drops and peaks in most of the indicators are not as steep as in 2014/2015. the fact that the 2018 lessons are equable is of high significance. it can be interpreted as a signal of the routinization of the dialogic approach in daniela’s lessons. her instructional methods were also simplified. during the tpd program, daniela was experimenting with diverse methods, looking frantically for what might work; during the follow-up data collection, the structure of the lessons remained nearly the same. the core of the lesson was always a literary text that was read aloud in the class. students then worked in pairs with sheets prepared by the teacher, answering questions related to the text. finally, there was a whole-class conversation focused on the interpretation of the text. these three elements (reading, working with sheets, discussing) rotated freely during the observed lessons. thus, not only the values of indicators but also instructional methods had become stable. to sum up, the follow-up lessons were characterized by a more favorable structure of dialogic indicators than the pre lessons. however, it cannot be overlooked that the teacher did not surpass all the indicators of the pre-lessons. i will discuss this finding below. the follow-up lessons are more equable than the post lessons, which indicates the sustainability of the accomplished change. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 1 2 3 4 va lu e of th e in di ca to r lesson during study 2 open discussion (min) teacher’s open question of high cognitive demand (n) uptake (n) students’ thoughts with reasoning (n) student questions (n) figure 3: development of dialogic indicators during study 2 (february 2018 – may 2018) is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a48 changes in teacher’s thinking and beliefs in this section, i will address rq 2, looking for what changed from study 1 to study 2 in how the teacher thinks about her teaching and students. i will utilize the data from the interviews collected in 2014/2015 and in 2018. dialogic teaching as a vehicle for teaching goals in 2014/2015, daniela reported that it was challenging for her to boost student participation and at the same time keep the classroom dialogue purposeful, especially when students were involved in the open discussion (see sedova, 2017). during study 1, when the open discussion was established in the class and students reacted to each other, this interaction often distracted from the curricular content or teaching goals of the teacher. only at the end of the series had daniela mastered the skill of keeping open discussion purposeful. at the time of study 2, there were no visible problems with purposefulness in a discussion. students discussed a lot; interactions among peers were lively but always linked to the literary texts the class read and interpreted. the teacher explained it as follows: i am very happy when the lesson is running as i have planned. when i fulfill the curriculum and my intended goals, and at the same time, students are eagerly engaged. this is what i find to be a success. and in this class, this happens very often. the issues of ‘curriculum’ and ‘intended goals’ are very much connected to time and time management. the concern about being under time pressure in order to keep to a plan was repeatedly discussed between daniela and the researcher during study 1. however, at the time of study 2, the teacher considered the problem with time and pacing to have been solved: formerly, i wanted to do too much in the lesson. i didn’t realize that when students start to talk, it would take a lot of time. and sometimes, i drove them forwards and stopped them from talking because i wanted to squeeze another activity in the lesson because that was my plan. and this is what i have learned – it’s not always necessary to keep the plan. sometimes it’s more valuable to let kids talk. during study 2, daniela did not mention problems with time, curriculum, plans, and pacing at all. on the contrary, she was satisfied with fulfilling her intended goals, as shown in the statement above. therefore, the concept of intended goals is worth closer examination. when the teacher was talking about her goals in 2018, she was setting them in accordance with dialogic teaching theory, and with the tpd program she had undergone: i want students to be able to reason when talking about the text. not only to answer questions like ‘is this an essay or a report?’ i try to give them a word to let them express how they understand what they have read and to discuss it. this is what i learned during the professional development programme. to teach students how to reason or discuss are objectives representative of dialogic teaching. on the other hand, during the interviews in study 2, daniela often associated dialogic teaching with very traditional teaching goals that had not been emphasized in the tpd program. for example, she spoke about checking student understanding, teaching students to look up information in a text, and supporting remembering through dialogic teaching: is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a49 when they enter a discussion and explain what they think and why they think so, it causes them to remember much more from the lesson. this implies that the teacher was utilizing a new approach to fulfilling the traditional goals that she already had before she entered the tpd program. during study 1, daniela was repeatedly discontent when using dialogic teaching as this distracted her from what she felt committed to doing (e.g., delivering factual information to students). what happened after she had completed tpd was not a radical shift in what this teacher saw as her objectives by replacing ‘old’ ones (e.g., remembering) with ‘new’ ones (e.g., authentic expression). rather, the newly mastered approach was appropriated to match the formerly established set of goals and achievements. dialogic teaching started to work as a reliable vehicle for the wide spectrum of daniela’s teaching goals. trust in students worries about student capability were apparent in daniela’s thinking at the time of study 1, even though the class she taught in 2014/2015 had a good reputation among the teachers and consisted predominantly of high achieving students. she worried about the willingness of students to participate in challenging conversations. this led her to an ongoing deliberation of what degree of cognitive demand is appropriate for not discouraging students from taking part in classroom dialogue. several times during study 1, daniela assessed her questions as too demanding for the students, which – according to her – undermined their zest for participation. on the other hand, sometimes her questions and tasks were too low in their demands. the students were enthused by talking, but they hardly learned anything new. when planning her lessons, daniela repeatedly expressed concern about how students would cope with the learning tasks. in contrast, the class taught by daniela in 2018 had a bad reputation among the teachers and consisted predominantly of low-achieving students. daniela repeatedly mentioned the bad grades of these students, but she did not doubt their capacity for intellectually challenging dialogue at all. this class is not much liked by the teachers. the kids don’t have good grades and also had some troubles with relationships in class. but i like them since they are not scared of talking. i like that they are able to express their thoughts, and they are authentic. when talking, they don’t make random guesses but apply reasoning, and sometimes really very interesting things emerge in this class. daniela changed her thinking about the students. in 2014/2015, she saw students as potentially resistant; in 2018, she appreciated student zeal for classroom talk. moreover, through engaging in talk with these students, she was able to reveal their bright sides. this indicates that the teacher’s mindset concerning students and their ability to participate in dialogic conversation changed due to the teacher’s experience with dialogic teaching. the new perception of students seems to be mirrored in daniela’s dealing with the issue of cognitive demand. her concerns about this had fully disappeared at the time of study 2. in the 2018 interviews, daniela repeatedly presented herself as not being afraid of challenging students. for example, there was an energetic student discussion about various theories of world creation in one lesson during study 2, based on a reading from sophie’s world by jostein gaarder. in the interview with the researcher, daniela commented on this lesson: is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a50 daniela: they surprised me in how deeply they discussed such complicated topics as the big bang theory, et cetera. it surpassed my expectations. researcher: why did you pick such a hard reading for them? daniela: to make them think. ((laughing)) it is obvious from the fragment that daniela intended to challenge students, even when she did not expect them to master the task perfectly. the demand stopped being a problem for her. she sets high standards for her students, but she is not disappointed if the standards are not met. self-confidence, enjoying dialogic teaching in study 1, teachers participating in the tpd program experienced a variety of emotions, including strong negative ones (for a detailed analysis, see sedova et al., 2017). daniela was no exception. during tpd, she expressed a lot of insecurity, anxiety, and disappointment related to her teaching performance. she repeatedly doubted her ability to conduct a proper dialogic lesson; this made her anxious about what would happen in the class. at the time of study 2, daniela presented completely different proclamations: it is not happening to me anymore that when i ask a question, the kids don’t react. when they know that the environment is safe and the others listen to them, they always start talking. instead of being nervous about how to make students talk, daniela expected to be successful in making students talk, and at the same time, she was able to identify key elements that she could safely rely on: a safe environment and respectful listening. when talking about dialogic teaching during study 2, she mentioned her positive emotions solely; she said it was ‘riveting’ or ‘entertaining’ for her, she repeatedly said that she was ‘happy’ when talking with students. the 2018 interviews showed that daniela felt dialogic teaching to be integrated into her teaching repertoire. moreover, she perceived it to be part of her professional identity. it is very important for me to let students talk in lessons. i always favored it, but after i had completed the program, it started to be my priority. really. i am very interested in seeing how kids are opening themselves and how they are gradually gaining the ability to express their thoughts. my advantage was that i found myself in the dialogic method. it matched with what i was doing with kids before. and then i saw the incredible outcomes. so, i continue. it is apparent from her statement that daniela felt dialogic teaching to be compatible with her former mindset. at the same time, she perceived dialogic teaching to be an upgrade of her previous style of teaching, and she was able to identify the benefits of it. this all led her to continue. discussion in this paper, i studied one teacher’s practices and thinking several years after completing a tpd programme on dialogic teaching with the aim of assessing the sustainability of the change accomplished through tpd. i demonstrated that the majority of indicators that the teacher had incorporated into her teaching due to tpd persevered, albeit not at the high level accomplished during tpd. this observation is in accordance with osborne et al. (2019). my interpretation of the moderate decrease at the follow-up lessons is based on the changed conditions of data gathering. lessons recorded during study 1 were taught in the context of an ongoing tpd program – teachers were strongly encouraged to teach in is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a51 compliance with the tpd conception of good teaching as defined by the presence of monitored dialogic teaching indicators. in contrast, the lessons recorded during study 2 were not a part of any tpd program; the teacher was instructed to teach as she normally does. therefore, these lessons reflected more the teacher’s own conception of what is good. from this perspective, it is clear that daniela appreciated some of the indicators enough to keep them, but she avoided the extreme values that she was able to reach when being monitored and mentored by the researchers (see sedova, 2017). instead of labeling this as unsustainable, i suggest modifying the notion of what the sustainability of tpd effects means. not all indicators were improved during tpd and then maintained afterward. the teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand returned to the same frequency as before tpd, and student questions even went down. on the other hand, uptake continued to increase after the completion of tpd. these findings indicate that after some time, the teacher performed dialogic teaching, but not exactly as she had been taught to do: she autonomously re-interpreted and re-created the concept. some things were accentuated by her, and some things were de-emphasized. similar findings were presented in a study by gomez zaccarelli et al. (2018), who observed one teacher undergoing a long-term tpd program in which participants were taught new teaching practices – asking challenging questions and pressing students to elaborate their reasoning. after the tpd program, the authors found that the focal teacher increased the press moves but reduced the ask moves. simply said, the teacher prioritized pressing students to elaborate over asking challenging questions. my findings, as well as those of gomez zaccarelli et al. (2018), can be interpreted using the theory by grossman et al. (1999) of the appropriation of new teaching tools in the process of tpd. according to grossman et al. (1999), teachers who enter tpd are familiarised with new teaching tools. however, teachers do not adopt teaching tools unmodified. instead, they tailor the tools to their own needs and preferences, and they creatively complement them to their pre-existing repertoire of skills and knowledge. in the most advanced stage of appropriation, the teacher is able to use the tools effectively and deliberately (grossman et al., 1999). in this light, we can understand the data from daniela’s follow-up lessons – e.g., strengthening uptake and suppressing student questions. according to butler et al. (2004), an effective tpd program should allow teachers to try new ideas in an authentic context and find their own way of implementing them in their own practices. similarly, silver et al. (2019) claim that teacher understanding of a new instructional strategy needs time to develop and be refined through teacher participation in various types of activities, e.g., through applications of the strategy in the classroom, thinking about possible adaptations, and reflecting on their own implementation. this is what was happening during the tpd program and – as the data indicates – even after its termination when the teacher independently continued in appropriating dialogic teaching; this resulted in the differences between the post and follow-up lessons. further, i found that the follow-up lessons were quite consistent, both in terms of the measured indicators and the observed teaching methods. this stability can also be perceived as evidence of the sustainability of the attained dialogic approach to teaching. daniela mastered the appropriation of the dialogic teaching tools to serve her needs and preferences; the hectic search for innovations and modification was no longer necessary. all these observations indicate that daniela practiced her professional agency as she made choices and took stances to affect her classroom work and its effects (eteläpelto et al., 2013). according to imants & van der wal (2020), teacher agency is a necessary prerequisite for a sustained change in teacher and school development. the teacher participating in this study did not follow all the instructions and suggestions given to her during tpd, but she did establish ways to interact with students that led towards their authentic thinking and participation and maintained the spirit of dialogic teaching. the teacher capacity for agency thus might be significant for sustaining dialogic practices after completing tpd. is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a52 when thinking about the scarcity of dialogic teaching, hennessy and davies (2020) identified three general reasons for why the implementation of dialogic teaching practices through tpd might not be sustainable: the unmanageable complexity of the change, the lack of deep shift in teacher mindset, and distrust in dialogic teaching. from the perspective of the data, it is possible to observe how the focal teacher in this study overcame these obstacles. the problem of complexity was intensely experienced by daniela during study 1. she struggled with disharmony between individual indicators (see sedova, 2017), had difficulty coordinating the content of classroom discussions with curriculum and her teaching goals, and she felt herself under pressure in terms of time. these observations are in accordance with what has been reported by other authors. lefstein (2010) argued that the necessity to connect classroom talk to the curriculum prevents teachers from elaborating ideas introduced by students. similarly, michaels and o’connor (2015) reported that teachers experience fear about the content of their discussions and worry that they will not be able to keep the discussions within the boundaries staked by the curriculum. further, michaels and o’connor (2015), as well as pimentel and mcneil (2013), found that lack of time during lessons inhibits teachers from using the dialogic approach. i have outlined above how daniela coped with the complexity of dialogic teaching: she prioritized some of its elements over others. it is interesting that open discussion was difficult for daniela during tpd; despite this, she persevered with this indicator. this means that she did not abandon what was challenging for her; she acted with an agency to employ the most fruitful tools. when dealing with complexity, daniela rethought the relationship between the dialogic approach and her teaching goals. she learned how to use dialogic teaching to fulfill the goals she already had before the tpd (to deliver factual information, to make students remember, etc.). on the other hand, she also started to appraise new goals in compliance with the dialogic approach (to let students express their authentic ideas, to teach students to argue, etc.). this made her more relaxed in relation to time planning, as she revealed that letting students express their thoughts is valuable in itself. in terms of teacher mindset, butler et al. (2004) reported that the mere development of teachers’ practical skills does not necessarily change their teaching if it is not accompanied by a movement in teachers’ conceptual knowledge and beliefs. fecho (2011) claims that there must be a ‘wobble’ – a shift in the balance in teacher belief systems – to make a deep change in their instructional approach occur. in daniela’s case, the most noticeable transformation was grounded in how she perceived the students. many authors claim that this is the critical point since many teachers believe that not all students are capable of engaging in challenging dialogue (e.g., pimentel & mcneill 2013; snell & lefstein 2018), or they even worry that some students may resist when being invited to a discussion (michaels & o’connor; 2015); this worry stops the teachers from applying dialogic teaching. daniela changed her mindset concerning students. i think this change was due to her experience during tpd when she was supported by the researchers to invite students in dialogue and to challenge them despite her worries about their talkativeness and their courage to discuss difficult questions. the analysis of the data from study 1 showed that once participating teachers changed their communication behavior, students answered with corresponding changes. when invited to give elaborated and thoughtful responses with reasoning, students did so (sedova et al., 2016). i believe that daniela considered this (during the study 2 interviews, she spoke about ‘incredible outcomes’ of dialogic teaching), and this made her believe that she could effectively influence the way students participate in classroom dialogue. at the time of study 2, her confidence in the students and in their capacity and willingness to engage in the sophisticated talk was strong, and this led her to continue with dialogic teaching. is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a53 the last obstacle against the sustainability of dialogic teaching identified by hennessy & davies (2020) is the distrust in this approach. even when teachers complete tpd on dialogic teaching, they do not necessarily lose the need to be persuaded about the benefits of this approach. daniela repeatedly expressed her strong belief in dialogic teaching, stressing she found herself in this way of teaching. the question is what convinced her so strongly. there is evidence that in the eyes of teachers, a strong theoretical foundation legitimizes tpd (adey, 2006; butler et al., 2004). we relied on this in the tpd program when we tried to present dialogic teaching as well-founded and provably effective. however, during the interviews, daniela did not refer to this knowledge base. another device for making tpd convincing is experimenting with new approaches and teaching tools in authentic classroom situations together with reflection on the teaching experience (see korthagen et al., 2001). this seemed to work in this case, as daniela often mentioned her first-hand experience in the classroom as persuading her of the benefits of dialogic teaching. last but not least, daniela did not enter the tpd in opposition to ideas related to dialogic teaching. rather, she had a spontaneous and implicit inclination to this teaching approach, and the tpd program helped her to make it more developed and applicable in the class. implications of the study this study provides some promising evidence that tpd can be regarded as a tool for delivering dialogic teaching in classes, even from a long-term perspective. this is an important message, as tpd programs, especially those based on intensive collaboration between teachers and their educators (e.g., through making video recordings and reflecting on them), are costly and demand a lot of time and effort both from teachers and their educators. the analysis in this study provides evidence that the obstacles against dialogic teaching tpd programs identified by hennessy and davies (2020) are fitting. the focal teacher was contending with all of these obstacles; this study concerns how she overcame them. this implies that when designing tpd programs on dialogic teaching, the issues of complexity, teacher mindset, and trust should be taken into careful consideration. finally, this study shows that making dialogic teaching sustainable requires allowing teachers to re-create and re-interpret the concept and teaching tools in the process of their appropriation (grossman et al., 1999). this means not only giving teachers enough space to acquire and consider the first-hand experience with how the tools work in their classes but also applying a sensitive stance in judging whether the teachers properly utilized the support given to them in tpd. i opened this study by claiming that the issue of the sustainability of the change towards dialogic teaching has been rarely investigated and that this paper was to contribute to this underexplored field. however, this study is only a very small contribution to the question of the sustainability of dialogic teaching. with regard to the importance of this topic for the legitimization of dialogic teaching tpd efforts, it is necessary to build a coherent research line in this field. references adey, p. 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(1985). vygotsky and the social formation of mind. harvard university press, cambridge. appendix 1: overview of data sources used in this paper study videorecordings of lessons interviews with teacher study 1 10 6 study 2 4 2 appendix 2: deductive system for coding classroom dialogue (data from videorecordings) indicator description illustration from the data set incidence in study 1 (10 lessons) incidence in study 2 (4 lessons) student thoughts with reasoning student utterance that resembles a sentence and includes explanation teacher: so, can you tell me why you think that aragorn is a hero? student: it seems to me that he was afraid at first, but he overcame this and led the army into a battle, a victorious battle, and he just decided to take on this burden and by that he helped everyone to succeed. 173 95 teacher’s open questions of high cognitive demand authentic question with many possible answers requiring logical thought teacher: so, can you tell me why you think that aragorn is a hero? 225 47 is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a58 uptake the teacher poses a new question to the student, based on his/her previous answer teacher: so, would you like to see the corrida? student: yeah. teacher: why yes? student: um, because it’s nice. teacher: and what is nice? try, try to tell me what is nice about it? 128 68 student questions question posed by a student student: why does the author use so many weird words? 86 11 open discussion sequence that includes at least three participants who react to each other for more than 30 seconds teacher: why do you think that this behaviour of don quixote is nonsensical? student 1: that somebody has been building a mill for half a year to be able to mill flour and this knight comes there and starts, starts to destroy this mill. does that make sense? student 2: no. student 3: he is paranoid. student 2: yeah, exactly. student 4: i think that every activity or every human behaviour has some meaning. student 1: just because somebody thinks that what they do is meaningful does not mean that it is really meaningful. student 4: but it is meaningful for this person. 32,85 minutes 53,22 minutes appendix 3: interview coding procedure phase 1 and 2 deductive category description of the category example of inductive code within the category illustration from the data set number of inductive codes within the category complexity of the change teacher is talking about how demanding the change is, what the obstacles are, what the cost of the changes is. time consideration formerly, i wanted to do too much in the lesson. i didn’t realise that when students start to talk it would take a lot of time. 18 teacher mindset teacher reveals her beliefs about students and curriculum. student talkativeness when they (students) know that the environment is safe and the others listen to them, they always start talking. 29 is dialogic teaching sustainable? klara sedova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.423 | vol. 9 (2021) a59 (dis)trust in dialogic teaching teacher expresses beliefs about potential benefits of dialogic teaching. teacher is considering the effects of dialogic teaching in her classroom. talk focus it is very important for me to let students talk in lessons. i always favoured it, but after i had completed the programme, it started to be my priority. 22 phase 3 inductive category description of the category example of inductive code within the category illustration from the data set number of inductive codes within the category educational goals changes in how educational goals are perceived, set, and evaluated by the teacher. time consideration formerly, i wanted to do too much in the lesson. i didn’t realise that when students start to talk it would take a lot of time. 21 students changes in beliefs about students, experiences with student behaviour in dialogic lessons, consideration of student achievement student talkativeness when they (students) know that the environment is safe and the others listen to them, they always start talking. 22 teacher selfperception changes in how teacher perceives herself, her professional competencies, self-efficacy, and the potential for further development talk focus it is very important for me to let students talk in lessons. i always favoured it, but after i had completed the program it started to be my priority. 26 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt22 dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano university of salerno, italy monica mollo university of salerno, italy maria polo university of cagliari, italy giuseppina marsico university of salerno, italy abstract this paper discusses the results of a research1 that integrates digital interactive storytelling (dist), competenceoriented mathematical activities, and argumentation called dist-m. the general aim is to support a reflective knowledge of mathematical concepts by implementing a digital educational device based on collaborative and dialogical activities proposed by researchers. within a dialogical dimension of interactions (bakhtin, 1981), argumentative practice is considered a social activity, where the acquisition and elaboration of new knowledge take place within a social space with multiple interlocutors in a dynamic process. the participants are engaged in constructing and negotiating mathematical meanings within a specific context. this dialogical approach to argumentation tends to create an authentic argumentative culture that is a system of implicit and explicit rules where the exchanges and interactions among participants require a joint elaboration of new meanings, within a given mathematical context, through a dialogical exchange. learning and development result from a dialogical negotiation process during which new knowledge is developed and those already possessed are re-organized and systematized (bakhtin, 1981; vygotskij, 1978). in the current pandemic circumstances, technologies are the main tools to uphold the educational processes. despite the fact that the dist-m was implemented and tested before the covid-19 era, its epistemic bases of dialogism mediated by technology could significantly keep alive the dialogic interaction in educational settings that have been heavily affected by the social distancing and promote mathematical thinking. the articles focus on the united nations sustainable development goal n. 4,” ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” keywords. argumentative culture, dialogical interaction, digital interactive storytelling, mathematics, technologies 1 the research is funded by the italian ministry of education, university and research under the national project “digital interactive storytelling in mathematics: a competence-based social approach”, prin 2015, prot. 20155npra5. issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt23 giovannina albano, ph.d. in pure and applied mathematics, is an associate professor at the university of salerno (italy), and she got the national scientific qualification for full professor. she is a member of the scientific committee of the italian mathematical union and president of the italian association of research in mathematics education. her research interests mainly concern integrating research in mathematics education and technology. in this regard, she is the principal investigator of an italian research project of national interest (prin), “digital interactive storytelling in mathematics: a competencybased social approach,” and of the research group “digimath” within the italian mathematical union (umi).2 monica mollo is a development and educational psychology researcher at the university of salerno, italy. she is a ph.d. in research and methodology of educational research at the university of salerno (italia), and she graduated in education sciences. her main research interests are devoted to the study of argumentation in the educational context and the construction of logic/mathematical thinking in children. maria polo obtained her doctorate in didactics of mathematics at the university of rennes i. since 2001 maria polo has been an associate professor at the department of mathematics and informatics of the university of cagliari. she has been involved with activities principally focused on mathematics education; in particular, she has investigated how the teacher’s epistemology influences the didactical practice. moreover, she has worked in the teacher’s continuing and initial training. giuseppina (pina) marsico ph.d. is an associate professor of development and educational psychology at the university of salerno (italy), visiting professor at ph.d. programme in psychology, federal university of bahia, (brazil) and honorary associate professor at university of sydney (australia). she is president elect of the european society of psychology learning and teaching (esplat). she is editor-in-chief of the book series cultural psychology of education (springer), latin american voices (springer), co-editor of springerbriefs psychology and cultural developmental sciences (with jaan valsiner), and annals of cultural psychology: exploring the frontiers of mind and society (infoage publishing, usa, with carlos conejo and jaan valsiner). she is also co-editor of human arenas (springer) and of trends in psychology (springer). her academic tracks and list of publications include two lines of investigation: 1) an educationalfocused research activity where prof. marsico is the leading figure in the new field of cultural psychology of education; 2) a culturally oriented perspective focused on the borders as a new ontogenetic perspective in psychology. ïïò introduction previous psychological research (arcidiacono, 2015; rigotti & greco, 2010; schwarz & baker, 2017) has explored the role of argumentation in knowledge construction processes in educational settings. this work has highlighted that, under certain conditions, argumentation contains a learning mechanism that allows people to change their position on a topic and expand and acquire new knowledge in interaction contexts (doise, mugny & perret-clermont, 1975; doise & mugny, 1981). thus, argumentation enables people to change their point of view (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984; leitao, 2000; piro, 2015; mollo, 2018). in this paper, we analyse the link between argumentation and the development of new knowledge in teaching-learning contexts. we specifically focus on a dialogical dimension of interactions (bakhtin, 1981). our theoretical frame of reference is based on classical works of social genetic constructionism 2 the author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research authorship and/or publication of this article. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt24 (doise, mugny & perret-clermont, 1975; perret-clermont, 1979; iannaccone, 1984; iannaccone & ligorio, 2001) on the contributions of vygotsky’s (1978) cultural-historical school, and on previous research on argumentation (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984, 1992; grossen & perret-clermont 1994; perretclermont, trognon & marro, 2008; piro, 2015), particularly in the area of mathematics education (boero, 1999; mariotti, 2006; antonini & mariotti, 2008; boero, douek, morselli & pedemonte, 2011; mariotti, durand-guerrier & stylianides, 2018). the socio-constructivist perspective has developed a concept of learning that holds that the cognitive dimension (of learning) is connected to the social dimension. there is a strong link between the social condition of thought – understood as an activity located in sociocultural interaction – and cognitive activity (iannaccone, 2010; marsico, 2017, 2018, marsico et al., 2015; szulevicz et al., 2016). the processes through which participants give meaning to what is happening around them (and their interpretation of the context in which these interactions occur) are indissolubly intertwined with how they perceive their involvement in a shared activity (coppola et al., 2015). these studies reveal that cognitive activity – particularly the acquisition of new information – cannot be decontextualised or traced exclusively to activity in isolation. instead, it depends on one’s understanding of the world and the progressive (social) construction of the meaning of the events in which one is continuously involved (iannaccone & arcidiacono, 2017; iannaccone, 2010; perret-clermont, 2004). based on this landscape, argumentation takes on a central role; it is understood as a discursive and exchange process defined by the presence of others with different skills, specific cultural artifacts, and action practices. it requires quasi-formal reasoning and unfolds within certain interaction contexts (baker, 2006; iannaccone, 2010; iannaccone & arcidiacono, 2017; manzi et al., 2020; mollo, 2021; plantin, 2015; van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984). emerging from these premises are dialogical and pragmatic dimensions of argumentation, where argumentation can be understood as action-oriented to an addressee and immersed in a specific context (rigotti & greco, 2010). furthermore, the dialogical and pragmatic dimensions of argumentation point to previous studies, including the work of austin (1961, 1962), searle (1973, 1975, 1978), and grice (1957, 1975). all of them contributed to developing the modern argumentation theory as a particular type of dialogical interaction between speakers. they also represent the foundation of pragma-dialectics (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984, 1992; van eemeren, grootendorst, snoeck & henkemans, 1996; schwarz & baker, 2017). pragma-dialectics adopts the critical perspective that finds its highest expression in the concept of critical discussion and implies the argumentative use of language to resolve a difference of opinion3. within this model, a difference of opinion can only be resolved if the counterparts reach a common decision on the acceptability or unacceptability of an argument4. this will only be possible if the interlocutors are willing to critically examine all the elements of a particular thesis to determine whether there is an area of agreement – a sort of ‘common ground’ between the speakers – where they share values and knowledge. this condition is essential for the success of discussion5. in this sense, according to pragma-dialectics, argumentation activates a process of discursive negotiation using language (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984, 1992). 3 a difference of opinion on a thesis is the starting point for initiating discussion. 4 its primary objective is to bring out the weaknesses of a specific thesis or argument through a rational and intersubjective verification of its validity that highlights those elements that would lead to its refutation. in this perspective, attention to the discussion aims to highlight the defense strategies or persuasion stratagems used by the various interlocutors in order to bring out the dialectical procedure used to conduct the critical discussion: the linguistic act contained in the discourse. 5 argumentation is conceived as a tool of reasonable persuasion in which critical discussion is aimed at reaching a common and reasonable conclusion that arises from certain premises and the willingness of the interlocutors to continuously subject their thesis to critical testing (justification of opinions and consideration of oppositions). dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt25 in this paper, we focus on analysing the process of solving a mathematical problem that arises within a story proposed to student participants. our qualitative analysis concerns the critical discussion activated in the forum by questions asked by the researcher, who is a character in the story. the research has two purposes: 1) to help the student build mathematical arguments and 2) to support, through the creation of a dialogic argumentative space mediated by technologies, reflective knowledge of mathematical concepts. the scripts and related mathematical tasks were designed to induce the production of argumentative chains. this work focuses on analyzing the solving process of a mathematical problem arose within a story proposed to the students. the students are engaged in the construction and negotiation of mathematical meanings. the qualitative analysis concerns the critical discussion activated in the forum by the questions asked by the researcher (who is a character of the story). in education, considering argumentation only in terms of logical proof would be reductive to its potential for learning and development. in effect, logical proof6 represents one aspect of argumentation, the product of a much more complex argumentative process. this process takes the form of a kind of critical engagement that involves reasoning, experience (or rather, our knowledge), context, and each other. from our perspective, critical engagement is defined as the ability to think critically – in other words, to reflect, process, and evaluate facts: to cognitively engage in meaning-making (langer, 2005; bonney & stemberg, 2010; gruenfeld, 2010). the participants must propound and justify their viewpoints for a dialogical exchange to turn into argumentation. the group member presents her viewpoint and defends it against counterarguments and the critical questioning raised by the researcher (who takes the role of an opponent). we have two dimensions: the dialogical and dialectical dimensions of argumentation. the dialogical dimension of argumentation points to the role of "the other" (the researcher). here the argumentation and the dialectical dimension emphasize the role of systematic opposition and critical questioning in argumentation that comes from the researcher (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1984; leitao, 2000). argumentation as dialogue it is clear from the above discussion that to consider argumentation in terms of language and, consequently, dialogue, it is fundamental to understand the potential of argumentation in educational contexts fully and within teaching-learning processes. according to vygotsky (1978), language and dialogue represent fundamental tools in learning and development from early childhood. within collaborative social interactions, dialogue helps children organise and systematise knowledge. in fact, according to vygotsky (1978), children already possess a number of spontaneous concepts (pseudo concepts) that are as yet disorganised and unsystematic. vygotsky’s pseudo concepts constitute the most widespread form of children’s real thought, and in school-aged children, this form of thought prevails over all other forms. through guided verbal exchanges, a child who already possesses such concepts can compare these concepts with an adult’s logical and rational concepts. with this comparison, the child’s knowledge will become, in turn, more logical and rational. through dialogue with a child, an adult can determine the course (and effect) of the development of generalisations. vygotsky emphasises that the adult does not impose ‘on the child his way of thinking,’ but that this confrontation is instead part of a co-construction of knowledge that implies a negotiation of intersubjective meanings. learning and development result from a dialogic negotiation process through which new knowledge is developed, and knowledge that is already possessed is organised and systematised. from this perspective, argumentation cannot be considered exclusively in its role of logical proof or only as a form of communicative confrontation between parties. instead, argumentation should be considered in its dialogical 6 argumentation as proof is understood as a discursive mode that has the purpose of demonstrating (evidence of fact) and justifying a certain type of reasoning and that is articulated in series of discursive moves such as: hypothesis, thesis or proof (piro, 2015; rigotti & greco, 2010). dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt26 dimension as a form of organisation and development of knowledge evolving within a process of intersubjective discursive negotiation that uses language for intrapersonal construction of new levels of knowledge. concept and meaning development represent a complex act of thinking that require multiple functions (such as voluntary attention, logical memory, abstraction, comparison, etc.) and high levels of awareness. on the other hand, thinking can be conceptualised as communication with oneself. it ‘arises as a modified private version of interpersonal communication’ (sfard, 2001). the argumentative practice, considered within a dialogical dimension of interactions (bakthin, 1981), is configured as a social activity through which one may acquire and process new knowledge within a social space and with multiple interlocutors in a dynamic process that sees participants engaged in the construction and negotiation of meanings within a given context. this dialogical approach to argumentation tends to create an ‘argumentative culture’ – a system of implicit and explicit rules that contains built-in exchanges and interactions involving the active participation of the participants in jointly elaborating potential meanings within a given context through a dialogical exchange. beyond that argumentative space, any meaning loses its meaning (iannaccone, 2010; perret-clermont, 2014; bakhtin, 1981). an important element that comes into play in learning processes is context (walton & krabbe, 1995; muller mirza, 2012; muller mirza & perret-clermont, 2009). studies of educational contexts (iannaccone, 2010) have highlighted how institutional frames give shape to social interactions and intertwine with cognitive activity by influencing how individuals within those frames perform the different participatory activities (iannaccone & perret-clermont, 1993; perret-clermont, 2001; iannaccone, 2010). modern theories of argumentation also include the interpersonal reasoning model7 (walton & krabbe, 1995), in which reasoning plays a central role in argumentation. reasoning is immersed in communication, and resides within a strong dialogical and pragmatic dimension. the argumentative moves implemented by the interlocutors are guided by reasoning that follows the discursive relationship. in fact, its development depends on the course of the conversation and considers the social dimension, the purpose of the dialogue, and contextual differences. interpersonal reasoning evolves within interpersonal discursive space; every cognitive decision is tied to the relational and contextual situation. walton and krabbe (1995) found out that dialogue rules, which are defined by different communicative contexts, emerge from argumentative practice. the rules within the dialogue define the argumentative moves or the actions that conform to the rules of the particular communicative context. the violation of a rule (shift) corresponds to a fallacy, or non-cooperative contribution (grice, 1957, 1975), within the discursive space that relates to the purpose of the dialogue. it is clear then that reasoning, which is inherent in argumentation is dominated not so much by rationality but by how reasonable the arguments are in a particular context. within a very strong pragmatic dimension, every argumentative move makes sense and can be used within a given context, while outside of that context, every discursive move loses its function. it is essential to take into account different communicative contexts, despite the fact that they cannot be considered variables external to the cognitive activity – but still they play an important role. such argumentative dynamics, in different interaction contexts, may activate a process of knowledge transformation through a game of social roles and negotiated positions. through these sorts of interactions, an argumentative space that continuously evolves in a temporal dimension (in the dimension of the micro-history of the dialogue) is delineated; this argumentative space becomes, in turn, a space of thought (bakhtin, 1981; perret-clermont, 2014). the creation of an argumentative space within which students may confront what is unknown (to them) or elements that may 7for an in-depth discussion of the model, see walton d., krabbe e., 1995, commitment in dialogue. basic concepts of interpersonal reasoning, state university of new york press, new york. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt27 destabilise their opinions represents for the participants a source of reflection and awareness of themselves and their own knowledge (savarese et al., 2019). this perspective demonstrates the importance of creating educational devices that involve cooperative activities that centre on argumentation as a tool for conceptual evolution. we assume that through learning activities that involve argumentation, we can not only facilitate access to new knowledge but also improve students’ argumentative skills. research purpose the overall goal of this research is to support the reflective knowledge of mathematical concepts. we aim to develop the participants’ reasoning and argumentative skills in mathematics through a training and research device that integrates digital interactive storytelling (dist), called dist-m. reasoning and argumentative skills are defined as those skills that involve ‘logic-based mental processes that allow one to analyze and connect the elements of a problem in such a way that one can draw conclusions, verify a given justification, or provide justification for statements or solutions to the problem’ (niss, 2015). we presume that argumentation is an important scaffolding tool – a dialogic space of collaborative interaction modulated on the students’ abilities within which they co-construct knowledge. to this end, we present our analysis of an activity carried out with participants from the first class of the secondary school. participants8 thirty students from the first class of a human sciences high school took part in the activity. the students were divided into seven groups of four or five members (in the case of five members, two students took the ‘pest’ role). we left the composition of the groups to the discretion of the class teacher, asking that they ensure that the groups were of a homogeneous level among themselves. dist-m educational device the methodological architecture for this study develops around a digital story in the form of comics (marsico, mollo, albano & pierri, 2019; albano, pierri & polo, 2019), which evolves through multiple episodes and revolves around five animated characters (four teenagers and an adult, the uncle of one of the teenagers) who face mathematical problems that are born spontaneously from the story itself. each student participant is a character in the story and, within and through the narrative, is given a role and actions to perform – sometimes alone, sometimes in collaboration with others. unlike previous research and practices, this study does not place the participants as either the one who listens and reproduces a story or as the one who invents a new one. instead, we integrated the students into the scenario that was presented through the comics, assigning them the position of the protagonist by giving them the role of one of the characters. through this approach, the students direct the development of the story through their interactions with each other. we used the same approach for the mediating role of the expert, who was also a character in the story and who acts on the basis of the stimuli/responses/silences of the other actors. the teacher and student actions evolve on the following two interrelated levels. mathematical storytelling this refers to the context within which the mathematical problem arises, develops, and evolves through various phases of action that correspond to many episodes in the story. the storytelling is related to specific objectives that are fundamental for constructing argumentative and communicative competencies and for initiating mathematical proof. these objectives are as follows: 8 informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt28 1. exploring (episode 1): observe and produce a summary description of what was found; 2. conjecture (episode 2): refine the wording of the previous description; 3. formalise (episode 3): manipulate the conjecture to pave the way for proof; 4. prove (episode 4): identify and organise arguments in an appropriate deductive chain, justifying each step of the deduction. each episode is structured into two working phases: a) peer work, where the students interact among themselves, trying to reach a shared answer to a subproblem posed within the episode; here, the role of the expert is played by the vignettes; b) asymmetric work, where the students interact with the character representing the expert, with the aim of discussing, refining, and institutionalizing what they found by themselves; the starting point of this phase is the answer shared by the students in phase a). roleplaying within each episode of the story, the characters’ work is governed by the specific roles, which can be associated with the main cognitive functions that come into play in the mind of a mathematician in a problem solving situation (albano, coppola & dello iacono, 2021; coppola et al., 2015; 2011; 2019). some of these roles have been played by the students: the boss (the group’s organiser and articulator of the work: social interaction and relationship in work); the blogger (the verbaliser and speaker: memory and communication); the pest (the devil's advocate: critical/constructive thinking); and the promoter (the initiator and animator of the task performance: insight and knowledge). alongside these roles is a character who plays an asymmetrical role with respect to the peer group: the expert (the adult in the story). the expert exercises his function as a mediator (bartolini-bussi & mariotti, 2008) and intervenes as needed, both in autonomous moments of peer work and in moments dedicated explicitly to the confrontation between the peers and the expert. this role is important because the expert ensures the group’s productivity and acts as a guide and facilitator. the technological architecture of the story was based on an online digital platform (moodle). this model involves the integration of various online technologies, some of which are general purpose (forum or chat) while others are specific to mathematics (spreadsheets, cas, dgs). we also used technology developed specifically to support the development of some specific skills, such as language toolkits (albano & dello iacono, 2019). methodology we analysed, at different levels, an activity concerning the resolution of a mathematical problem presented in one of the stories proposed to the pupils (fig. 1) (doise, 1982b). the analysis examined 1) the communicative interactions within the forum, identifying the resolution strategies that the pupils coconstructed in their interactions (dialogic dimension); and 2) the participants’ individual reasoned responses before and after the discussion (monological dimension). we will present the analysis of the dialogic dimension in this paper. dialogical dimension analysis according to pragma-dialectics, in order for a confrontation of opinions to turn into true argumentation and, therefore, a space for dialogic interaction, students must propose and justify their points of view (confrontation stage) and let their responses be examined by others (opposing points of view and possible critical questions posed by other students) (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1992; mollo, 2018; dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt29 2021). our qualitative analysis9 examined the students’ argumentative skills in collaborative learning situations. in particular, we focused on the students’ ability to produce arguments for and against their own and others’ positions10. this analysis also focused on how the critical questions posed by the researcher in one of the discussions in the general forum activated further elaborations, reflections, and possible conceptual changes in the students. our intent is to highlight the transformations and micro-transformations that took place among the participants. activity the activity presented to the participants concerned a fantasy story titled ‘aliens are coming,’ which follows a group of four friends engaged in the enterprise of communicating with aliens from whom they have received mysterious messages composed of numbers and operations. the four friends in the story correspond to the four expected participant roles: group, speaker, devil's advocate, and technology; these were appropriately contextualised within the story as character profiles (fig. n. 3). the activity, which was the subject of our analysis, began with a screen of numbers and operations sent by the aliens (see fig. 1, below) that contained the following hidden mathematical question (mellone & tortora, 2015): ‘pick four consecutive natural numbers, multiply the middle two between them, multiply the extreme two, subtract the results. what do you get?’ figure 1 starting from what is shown in figure 1, the students are guided to explore and conjecture that the result of the mathematical question posed is 2, then they are required to prove it, and to this aim, they need to mathematically formalize their conjecture. in each phase, the students are expected to support with suitable arguments their findings. the activities were designed and supervised by teachers and researchers. the students were asked to discuss the problem and possible solutions in chats until they arrived at a single shared solution. one member of the group, the blogger, was given the task of communicating (through the forum) the answer that was discussed and chosen by the whole group. the forum used by the participants was managed by the researcher or the teacher who filled the expert role (the uncle in the story). the expert’s task was to collect the solutions presented, in argumentative form, by the different groups and stimulate the students through questions and suggestions to activate a reflection on the answers given and the concepts learned. this was performed in accordance with the vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development, which holds that reasoning abilities increase in 9 here, there are no conditions for analysing the entire critical discussion using the rules of pragma-dialectics; the analysis was inspired by some concepts of the pragma-dialectical approach. 10 the data in their entirety are available to researchers who may be interested. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt30 interaction among peers and with more experienced people (vygotsky, 1978). each group member within the game took on a role, and our analysis examined the communicative interactions within the forum. data analysis in this section, we will present an analysis of the arguments produced within the study’s general discussion forum. the analysis of critical discussion was guided by some of the principles from the theory of language acts (searl, 1979) used in the pragma-dialectical model (van eemeren & grootendorst, 1992); some of the linguistic moves used by the students and the researcher in the different stages of critical discussion could be characterised as language acts (searl, 1979). we considered the following acts, in particular11: assertive, commissive, and directive12. the focus of the analysis was on the relationship between the critical questions posed by the researcher and the emergence of any conceptual changes, elaborations, or reflections by the students – i.e., conceptual transformations and micro-transformations. dialogic dimension analysis the starting point of an argumentative discussion is the shared answer to the sub-problem at stake reached by the students in the peer work phase. it is the expression of a point of view and the resulting non-acceptance13. the first excerpt presented below represents the start of a peer discussion, started by the expert inside the story by means of vignettes, as shown in the following excerpt from the story: ‘but where do you think these aliens want to go? why are they sending us these quaternary14?’ (fig. 2). after the peer work and submission of the shared answers, the focus of the discussion is the argued response provided by groups 6 and 1. the language act in this first phase of the discussion is assertive; the students expressed their theses with respect to solutions for the task. answer no. 1: group no. 6 1. any quaternary consisting of 4 consecutive natural numbers can be chosen because the difference between the product between the 1st and 4th numbers and the product between the 2nd and 3rd numbers results in 2. 2. a = natural number 3. b= a+1c= b+1d= c+1 4. b*c-a*d. the result found is 2, because the messages are probably coming from a planet 2 light years away. 11 for an in-depth study of the theory of language acts, see searl, j. r. (1969). speech acts. an essay in the philosophy of language. cambridge: cambridge university press. tr.it (1992) linguistic acts. essay on the philosophy of language. turin: bollati borghieri. 12 assertive when the subject commits to the acceptability of a thesis; directive when the subject tries to push the listener to perform a verbal act (request, forbid, reply, recommend, etc.); commissive when the speaking (or writing) subject commits to the interlocutor to do or not do something (promise, accept or not accept, decide to start the discussion, etc.). 13 non-acceptance can take many forms; it can be expressed indirectly or directly (i.e. strong or weak) (baker, 2015). 14 group of four. figure 2 dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt31 answer no. 2: group no. 1 5. this is the answer of group 1 6. taking 4 successive numbers (n+1), for example, 9,10,11,12, if we subtract the product of the averages by the product of the extremes, we always get 2: 9,10,11,12 7. (10×11) (9×12) = 110 108 = 2 8. (n+1 * n+2) ( n * n + 3). n =9 in accordance with pragma-dialectics, the expert's questioning of the groups’ proposed responses opens the discussion phase (excerpt no. 1): excerpt no. 1: researcher (gianmaria, as a character in the story) 9. hi guys, i have read all your answers. but i am still in doubt. i think i have understood the way you have selected the quaternary. however, you have not convinced me that by choosing consecutive numbers, the result of the operations the aliens do will always be two. 10. i have seen that many of you call the four numbers a, b, c, d and then say that a*d-b*c=2. 11. but i am not sure that whatever the numbers a, b, c, and d are, in math, the result is 2. i seemed to remember that each letter can take on any value, so how do i know that the result is really 2? the expert expressed his non-acceptance of the answers given by the students in two ways. first, he expressed it directly, but in a weak way (directive act) (‘i still have a doubt,’ ‘you haven’t convinced me’). then he expressed it in the form of a question (‘so how do i know that the result is really 2?’). in turn 11, he expressed his alternative point of view (‘but i am not sure that whatever the numbers a, b, c, d are, in math the result is 2. i seemed to remember that any letter can take on any value.’)15. in round 2, the researcher engaged the students in a comparison process (‘i have seen that many of you call the four numbers a, b, c, d and then say that a*d-b*c=2’). at this point, the argumentation phase begins; as excerpts 2 and 3 show, the students presented arguments in support of the answers presented in the forum. the communicative act here is commissive; the students accepted the challenge and began to defend their argument. it is interesting to note the diversity of the arguments used by the different groups to defend the same thesis (that their answer is correct – i.e., that the result is always 2). excerpt no. 2: student no. 1, group no. 3 12. group three thought to consider a as any number, and a+1, a+2, and a+3 its consecutives. in all quaternary, the numbers are arranged so that we get the subtraction between the product of the second and third numbers and the product of the first and fourth numbers, then: 13. (a+1)(a+2) a(a+3) 14. if we solve this expression, we get: 15. (a+1)(a+2) a(a+3)=. 16. =a^2 + 3a + 2 (a^2 + 3a)= 17. = a^2 + 3a + 2 a^2 3a= 2 and it is for this reason that whatever value we give to a (even a large number) the result will always be 2. excerpt no. 3: student no. 2, group no. 5 18. because, in my opinion, by writing the quaternary in a literary form, then replacing the smallest number of the quaternary with b and getting the others consecutive to him by adding the appropriate number, we get a small literary expression that gives us a result the number 2. 19. b;(b+1);(b+2);(b+3) b belongs to the set of natural numbers 20. [(b+1)*(b+2]-[b*(b+3)] = 15the expression ‘i seemed to remember that any letter can take on any value’ represents, moreover, the opening phase, within which we focus on the shared premises (plane of knowledge) that constitute the ‘zone of agreement’ between the participants in the discussion. the sharing of a common ground represents the essential element for the start of any critical discussion. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt32 21. =b^2+2b+1b+2-b^2+3b= 22. =2 we can consider this expression as the formula to calculate the various expressions derived from the quaternary given to us by the aliens. and to explain that it works with any natural number, both big and small. in excerpt 2, the student presents the answer as a product of collaborative group work (turn no. 12, ‘group three thought’), while in excerpt 3, the student expresses himself individually, initially (turn no. 18, ‘in my opinion), but later in the course of the argumentation, he switched to the first person plural (turn no. 22, ‘we can’). this change is indicative of how the critical discussion took place in cooperative terms (grice, 1957), which was certainly thanks to the establishment, in the opening phase, of a ‘zone of agreement’ among the participants16. in addition, the responses provided (compared to those provided initially by groups 1 and 6) are well-argued and consistent, and the propositions provided by the students to reach the conclusion (i.e., the result is 2) adequately supported the conclusion. excerpt no. 4: researcher 23. does the same apply if we substitute a letter for the largest number in the quaternary? 24. why are you so convinced that the value you assign to a is not important? in excerpts 4 and 9, in order to make students’ arguments more effective, the expert resorted to the use of a series of non-inductive technical relaunches and reformulations of the answers with the aim of facilitating the process of reflection on the knowledge. the linguistic act here is directive; the effect is further clarification of the position taken by the students (excerpt no. 5). excerpt no. 5: student no. 3, group no. 2 25. first, i thought of taking a letter, for example, c, as any number c+1, c+2, c+3. 26. in quaternary s, to get a result 2, we have to do the subtraction between the product of the second and the third number and also the product between the first and the fourth number, so taking c in consideration, we can do 27. (c+1) (c+2) c(c+3). and if we want to solve this little expression, we will see that it will come out as a result 2 because: 28. (c+1) (c+2) c(c+3) = c^2+ 2c +1c + 2 b^2+3c=2 29. this expression, as we have seen, could be the right formula to calculate the various quaternary s given by the aliens. also, we have seen that whatever value we give or attribute to c, with a small number or with a large number, the result, as we have seen, will always be 2 in excerpts 6, 8, 10, 11, and 12, we see that the students defended their classmates’ positions (‘i agree with...’). it is interesting to note that the students did not limit themselves exclusively to agree, that they also ‘enriched’ the answers given by their colleagues with further arguments supporting the position. this phenomenon is inherent in collaborative learning situations in which knowledge is supposed to be coconstructed; during such a process, students do not remain ‘stationary’ in a position17 (nonnon, 1996) as the construction of knowledge evolves within the argumentative space. excerpt no. 6: student no. 4, group no. 1 30. i agree with my classmates because i also think that [(n+1)*(n+2)]-[n *(n+3]= 2 is the operation needed to answer this question. excerpt no. 8: student no. 5, unidentified group 31. 31. in my opinion, the expression:(a+1)(a+2)-a(a+3) is an expression that can be applied with any number, even with relatively large numbers because the result of the expression will always be 2 with any number. 16 this phenomenon, the shift from ‘i’ to ‘we’ (to the group), is present in most of the discussion. 17 such as, for example, simply stating that you agree with your partner or faithfully reproducing the thesis. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt33 excerpt no. 9: researcher 32. so you mean that the value of the letter a is not important? and what did you get that from? the question posed by the expert excerpt 9 (turn 32, ‘so you mean it's not important...’) was interpreted as a challenge by the other students. being challenged during a discussion is a relevant developmental experience that offers an opportunity to revise one's positions in order to deepen, understand and reflect (backer, 2015). this challenge triggered a series of chain responses (examples excerpted from no. 10 and no. 11). excerpt no. 10: student no. 6 33. the value we assign to a is not important because in the expression 34. (a+1)(a+2) a(a+3) = 35. all the values of a are cancelled 36. = a^2 + 3a +2 a^2 3a= 2 37. because +a^2 a^2 and +3a 3a are equal to 0, and the only result of the products between the four consecutive numbers that cannot be ‘undone’ is 2. excerpt no. 11: student no. 7 38. i agree with zuleika's exposition because it doesn't matter what value we give to a because at the end of the expression the terms in a are cancelled out and at the end (as the final number always comes out 2). 39. in fact: a^2+3a+2-a^2-3a=2, 40. because 3a and -3a cancel out and a^2 -a^2 cancel out, and so the result that remains will be 2. this process of interpersonal knowledge triggered by the discussion led student no. 9 to selfreformulate (excerpt no. 12) the reasoned response provided by the group (answer no.1, group no.6). this was followed by a chain of other reformulations elaborated by other students18. excerpt no. 12: student no. 9 41. 41. if we consider the letter b as any number b+1, b+2, b+3 42. 42. as we know, in the quaternas if we do the subtraction between the product of the second and the third number, minus the product of the first and fourth number, we will see that it will come out for sure as a result always 2. 43. 43. if we make and unfold a small expression such as: 44. 44. (b+1) (b+2) – b(+3)= b^2 +2b+1b +2 – b^2-3b =2 45. 45. so as we have seen, the result is always 2, even if we give, in this case to b, a value with a larger or smaller number. excerpt no. 13 represents the beginning of the conclusion stage of the critical discussion, with the difference of opinion being resolved in a reasonable manner and with the researcher's acceptance of the proposed theses (turn 46, ‘okay, guys, you've convinced me’). the pragma-dialectical model emphasises that in the conclusion phase of the critical discussion, the resolution of the divergence of opinions is realised, though it may also represent the beginning of a new discussion. at this point, the participants might begin a new discussion on a modified version of the old divergence that begins from different premises. examples of this are shown in excerpts 14 and 15, in which the challenge is accepted by student 2. excerpt no. 13: researcher 46. okay, guys, you've almost convinced me. 47. i am left with only one doubt. but then can we use the calculator or not? 48. i seem to remember that some of you used it to try with very large quaternas, and it didn't work. what was the 18 this paper does not report all of the discussion – only some excerpts. dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt34 problem? i can't really remember...didn't 2 come out? 49. and if the calculator can't do operations with numbers that are too high (by the way, how high?), how do i check that 1,256,257890*1256257891-125625789*1256257892=2? 50. or maybe you guys are saying i don't need to do any calculations? 51. please don't keep me on my toes too much :-) excerpt no. 14: student no. 2 52. you only need to change the signs 53. or example, a is the largest number in the quatern, 54. a; a-1; a-2; a-3 55. and do the same calculation. excerpt no. 15: student no. 2 56. the problem that was found during the calculations is that the last numbers of these numbers, relatively very large, were not identified because there was the exponential notation, 57. but applying the expression, we used, the problem is solved. 58. or if you want to be 100% sure, you have to do the calculations by hand with the help of the calculator. in conclusion, we observed that the argumentative moves enacted by the students were guided by a form of interpersonal reasoning (walton & krabbe, 1995) whose development depended on the course of the conversation. this course is steered by the different kinds of the teacher-researcher’s interventions in managing the mathematical discussion (albano, coppola & fiorentino, 2021; bartolini bussi m. g., boni m., & ferri f., 1995). for each episode of the story, the mathematical discussion guided by the researcherteacher aims to support the key elements of the argumentative and proving competencies, which are the phases of exploration, conjecture, formalization, and proof (for instance, see excerpts 1, 4, 9). in addition, during the discussion, the students demonstrated argumentative skills, and the answers they argued for were the result of reasoning that was based on the problem and stimulated by the discussion itself. discussion of results and conclusion our analysis of the critical discussion reveals that it activated an interpersonal elaboration of knowledge in the students involved, which is in accordance with vygotsky’s (1978) and sfard's (2001, 2008) theories that state that dialogue represents the basis of the construction of knowledge. we observed a critical engagement on the part of the students in defending their point of view in the face of the critical examination operated by the expert, who assumed the role of the opponent. the students acted as one group within a shared argumentative space of meanings (perret-clermont, 2004) that fostered a process of co-processing the solution (bruner, 1996; vygotsky, 1978). moreover, the discussion stimulated the students to freely express their ideas, which activated, on the one hand, a reflection on their own reasoning, and on the other hand, a process of error control that was regulated by the group (vygotsky, 1978; bartolinibussi & mariotti, 2008). we were also able to identify differences in the students' argumentative skills earlier in the process when a greater commitment emerged, from a cognitive point of view to providing argumentative responses. it is likely that during the discussion, the students perceived freedom of thought and a certain degree of awareness regarding the possibility of being able to act freely within a conversational space (iannaccone, convertini & perret-clermont, 2016; iannaccone & perret-clermont, 2014; iannaccone & zittoun, 2014; inhelder, sinclair & bovet, 1974; boero, 1999; sfard, 2008). in convincing the others of their position, they were required to present arguments (which the other will also present). this would not only lead one (or more than one) of the participants to adhere to a position (as a process of knowledge negotiation would be triggered), but it can also make known and understandable any knowledge that is still opaque (grize, 1982, 1983) and of course, by the interlocutors (vergnaud, 2015; wegerif, 2013; traverso, 1990). dialogical interactions mediated by technology in mathematics education giovannina albano, monica mollo, maria polo, giuseppina marsico dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.517 | vol. 10 (2022) dt35 in the reasoning enacted during the argumentative practice, each cognitive decision evolved within the interpersonal discursive space (walton & krabbe, 1995; sfard, 2001; mollo, 2018; 2021) in a social dimension that considered the aim of the dialogue as well as any contextual differences. reasoning (inherent in argumentation) emerged that was fully immersed in a social dimension, in a dialogical space of confrontation between the participants and the other, in which every cognitive decision was influenced by the relational situation (rigotti & greco, 2010). valsiner and wertsch have demonstrated the cultural roots of cognitive processes and have shown that action does not necessarily consist of the simple execution of previous cognitive decisions but that it constitutes the way in which social actors explore the specificity of the situation (wertsch, 1998). rationality is not sufficient to account for all reasoning (rigotti & greco, 2010). in this study, the role of the researcher was to mediate between students and knowledge, orchestrate discussions in the forum, and lead the students to reflect upon their learning process. the students acted within a co-constructed dialogic space that was mediated by the technologies used in the study, which facilitated a process of co-elaboration of the solution. in addition, the discussion encouraged students to freely express their ideas and promoted the students’ reflection on their own reasoning and the process of error control regulated by the group. this has been realized thanks to the fundamental role of the researcher-teacher and of the learning environment equipped with the potential of technology. indeed the researcher-teacher plays the role of designer of the activity as well as of the expert-teacher in the distm. based on the a priori expected answers of the students, she is able to real-time moderate within the storytelling the advancement of the construction of the competencies, not only regarding the solution of mathematical questions but above all of the development of competencies of argumentation, proving and communication (albano, 2017; polo 2017). in the current pandemic circumstances, technologies have become essential tools for upholding educational processes. despite the fact that the dist-m was implemented and tested before the covid19 era, its epistemic basis of dialogism mediated by technology could have a great effect on preserving dialogic interaction in educational settings, which have been heavily affected by social distancing, and in promoting mathematical thinking in general. the articles focus on the united nations sustainable development goal n. 4, which aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’ references albano, g. 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(2012). la dimensione narrativa di un problema: il modello c&d per l'analisi e la (ri)formulazione del testo. parte i. l’insegnamento della matematica e delle scienze integrate. vol.35 a n.2 marzo 2012. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 2. marjanovic-shane^j (layout) dialogic pedagogy in democratically run schools introduction^j 2023-01-14.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a12 dialogic pedagogy in democratically run schools: introduction ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract the introduction to this special issue has the particular purpose of presenting the philosophical and educational approach of democratic schooling and its practices to readers interested and knowledgeable in dialogic pedagogy but without enough information about democratic education. namely, many scholars of dialogic pedagogy are not very familiar with democratic schooling, if at all. the term “democratic education” is polysemic (matusov, 2023), and many educationalists use it to refer to civic education in conventional schools. however, in this special issue, we explore the relationships between dialogic pedagogy and democratically run schools. in the article, i describe democratic education and its current spread and scarcity worldwide. next, i examine the meaning and the uses of dialogue in conventional and progressive education. finally, i introduce the questions about the meaning and values of dialogic pedagogy in democratic education that guided us in putting together this special issue. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. acknowledgments: i want to thank my colleagues and co-authors of this special issue on dialogic pedagogy and democratic education for their hard work and enduring patience during its preparation. my dear colleague eugene matusov gave me myriad inspiring insights and had the patience to read through and provide feedback on many early drafts of several articles that are now gathered in this special issue. i want to thank my co-authors, tina kullenberg and mikhail gradovski, for working with me through over twenty drafts of our article on the scandinavian democratic schools and for waiting so long for this article to be published. i am indebted to jim rietmulder for the wisdom and knowledge he shared about democratic education that he lives every day as a founder of a democratic school, the circle school in pennsylvania. my colleague, armando marino filho, from três lagoas, brazil, helped me better understand a different academic culture of writing and find ways to make both writing traditions, english and portuguese academic styles, show their strengths in the final text of his article in this issue. issn: 2325-3290 (online) democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a13 there are people i never met, but i feel like i know them well, without whom i would never have understood the depths and intricacies of starting a democratic school in a very traditional, conventional state educational system. i am incredibly thankful to the late mosse jørgensen, the first school leader and the first students of the experimental gymnasium of oslo in 1967. jørgensen’s book (the parts of which are translated and republished in this special issue) sparked my curiosity about the first scandinavian democratic school. i wish i could say “thank you” to the students of that first class whose voices helped me glimpse important ideas about democratic education and what it can mean to different people. ïïò introduction there is a specific purpose for an additional introduction to this special issue of the dialogic pedagogy journal. it is to present the philosophical and educational approach to democratic schooling and its practice, especially to readers who, although knowledgeable in dialogic pedagogy, often lack enough information about democratic education. you see, when we at dialogic pedagogy journal sent a call for proposals for this special issue concerning dialogic pedagogy and democratic education, we experienced a problem we did not expect. we were surprised and astonished when the majority of the proposals that arrived did not focus on democratic education at all! instead, they focused on what could be better described as civic education for democracy in the otherwise conventional and even innovative progressive schools. in the subsequent correspondence with the authors of these proposals, we (the editors of the special issue) realized that many of these authors, who were dialogic pedagogy scholars, indeed, were not well acquainted with democratic schools, if at all. some of them had barely heard about democratic schools. they did not know how these schools work in practice, nor were they knowledgeable of the democratic schools’ educational philosophies, regardless of having heard of the widely known and acclaimed school summerhill in england (neill, 1960). so, when these dialogic pedagogy scholars received the call for papers on dialogic pedagogy and democratic education, many interpreted “democratic education” as civic education for democracy within conventional and progressive schools. however, civic education for democracy within conventional and progressive education only teaches about democracy, its principles, values, rules, and conventions. at the same time, the students at these schools remain firmly subordinated to a hierarchical, patronizing educational regime. this is true both for the conventional, authoritarian schools and for the progressive, but no less hierarchical, authoritative schools. despite their differences, conventional and progressive schools are founded on the same principle of “educational paternalism.” the paternalism of conventional schooling is direct and autocratic: students have to obey the teacher’s orders, comply with the rules that were instituted for them by the educational authorities, and work on the assignments they are charged with regardless of their own interests, needs, or opinions. progressive schooling paternalism, on the other hand, is paternalism with a “soft glove” but not less hierarchical. first “formulated by rousseau in his pedagogical novel ‘emile’ and then justified by kant: a progressive teacher wants the student to want what the teacher wants the student to want without the student noticing that” (matusov, 2021a, p. 8). although progressive education may democratize some areas (e.g., curriculum and instruction) to get the students personally involved and excited, its ultimate goal is to get each student to reach predefined endpoints. its openness to the students’ subjectivity, interests, and needs serves not the students’ goals but to achieve its own goals in better and more humane ways – to make the students arrive at predefined curricular endpoints. in both conventional and progressive education, the students live in a hierarchical, non-democratic regime in which their voice (if they have it at all) never has an equal status with the voice of the educational authority. in other words, the hierarchical regime of conventional and progressive schools and their main principles and goals are incompatible with the philosophy of democratic schools, their governance, principles, and practice (see more below). democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a14 why is the term “democratic education” so often used to describe educational practices in otherwise non-democratic progressive schools? as matusov points out in his conclusion to this special issue (matusov, 2023), the term “democratic education” is polysemic. it is used to name various forms of democratization of educational practice, including those in otherwise conventional or progressive, hierarchical schools with their authoritarian paternalistic regimes. furthermore, the same term, democratic education, is also used to describe education in democratic schools. but then, what are democratic schools? what are democratic schools, and why are they not better known? democratic education fundamentally differs from conventional and progressive education in its philosophical approach to the student’s rights and the relationships between the students, teachers, and other participants in the educational practices. in contrast to the conventional and progressive educational approaches, in democratic schools, the students, teachers, administrators, and other participants have equal rights and power of decision-making about almost all issues of school governance and personal educational matters. there are, of course, differences between the students and the staff in regard to the obligations of the staff to “steward the program’s facilities, finances, and business” (the circle school). however, the students at democratic schools have legitimate rights to make decisions about their personal lives and learning journeys within the school’s rules and regulations which are authored in a democratic way where each participant – the students and the staff alike – has “equal rights of voice and vote in matters of governance and the common good” (the circle school). in a democratic school, “children and teenagers are accorded all the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship; […] students truly practice, rather than just read about, the principles of free speech, free association, and freedom to choose their own activities; […] students vote on the rules that affect them and serve on juries to try those accused of violating those rules. … a democratic school […] is a school where students are trusted to take responsibility for their own lives and learning and for the school community. at such a school, students choose their own activities and associate with whomever they please. if courses are offered, students are always free to take them or not. most such schools accept students across a wide range of ages (commonly age four through the late teens) and do not segregate students by age so that students can learn from interacting with others who are older and younger than themselves.” ("democratic education," 2022). but democratic schools are rather rare in overall global schooling today. depending on what is counted, democratic and the so-called “free schools,” in the widest sense of the term, exist in 44 countries on all continents ("democratic schools," 2022) or, according to more strict accounts, in 10 countries ("list of democratic schools," 2021). they represent just a tiny fraction of the educational institutions of each country, ranging from just one school per country to a maximum of 103 schools and learning centers in the usa ("lists of democratic schools, co-ops and resource centers," 2022). however, 103 schools in the united states still represent less than 0.08% of about 130,930 public and private k-12 schools (vlasova, 2021), or eight (8) democratic schools per 10,000 mainstream schools. it could be argued that the disparity would be even greater if one could calculate the percentage of students attending democratic schools since these schools tend to have less than 100 students (in the very generous calculation). in contrast, an estimate of the average school size in the usa is about 526 (vlasova, 2021). in most countries, democratic schools are not a part of the state-financed public school education, although there have been some exceptions, notably in canada, israel ("democratic education," 2021), and scandinavia (see more about the scandinavian democratic school experiment in this special issue). the lack of public institutional support is not a coincidence. in the current global education, the so-called public schools are “public” by two different accounts. first, they are “public” because they are financed by the democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a15 taxpayers’ funds, i.e., by the state. second, they are “public” because they are obliged to adhere to a centrally designed educational philosophy and its programs, norms, and principles. and in most countries worldwide, the public educational philosophy is the philosophy of conventional, authoritative, hierarchical education, and potentially progressive education. however, democratic schools’ philosophy defies the mainstream conventional and progressive educational values, norms, and principles. from the point of view of conventional and progressive education, the democratic approach to education is highly controversial, irrational, and potentially dangerous, even harmful for students. the crux of the controversy is the status of the students and their educational rights. in the mainstream conventional and progressive approaches to education, the student is regarded as a ward of the educational institution without legitimate freedoms in the matters of learning and education (and sometimes wider). furthermore, “the mainstream and innovative schools heavily rely on foisted education. in those schools, students cannot choose whether to study or not to study – education is foisted on them. in addition to that, what students should study and even what they should learn is designed for the students and imposed on them” (matusov, 2021b, p. e12). the students have no legitimate rights and even less opportunity to evaluate the educational process to which they are subjected. in many countries, the students have no right to move away from this process if and when they find it irrelevant, alienating, humiliating, and painful. in contrast, democratic governance in education, like democratic governance in society, is based on power-sharing and equal rights of input of ideas and points of view – which is contradictory to the hierarchical, authoritarian regimes. in these schools, the students both learn about democracy and actively practice democracy. this opens up a whole new aspect or a sphere of education to the students that no other educational approach provides nor promotes, but that represents one of the crucial educational spheres: a metalevel of evaluation and assessment of education itself. here students can legitimately engage in assessing what is for them good, useful, beautiful, practical, or none of that in their education. they can discuss these issues with their peers and adults and make decisions based on such deliberation. how does that look in practice, what are the pros and cons of engaging in this aspect of education, and what are its opportunities and obstacles? all of these are the issues we discuss in almost every article in this special issue. here we describe such democratic schools and practices rather than “democratic education” as civic education for democracy in the otherwise autocratic educational practices. what is the place of dialogic pedagogy in diverse educational approaches? dialogic pedagogy has a different status in different educational approaches. ostensibly, the conventional authoritarian school, in its traditional regime of the monologic transmission of knowledge and skills, does not recognize dialogue as such, nor does it acknowledge dialogue as an educational method. the predominant discourse pattern in these schools follows the monologic sequence of the initiationresponse-evaluation (ire) (sinclair & coulthard, 1975), where the teacher has “the last word” when interrogating a student and evaluating their answer. according to bakhtin, who often used pedagogical examples to illustrate the monologism as an antithesis to dialogue, in an environment of philosophical monologism, the genuine interaction of consciousnesses is impossible, and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. in essence, idealism knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue (bakhtin, 1999). in contrast, progressive education, inspired originally by the philosophers of enlightenment (kant, rousseau, fichte), rebelled against the monologism of the traditional schools, arguing that the development of autonomous and rational people with dignity, the people must have opportunities to practice their democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a16 reasoning in a free exploration of their ideas. in an earlier publication, my coauthors and i claimed that according to kant, … the teacher must not force the truth on the students (except in religious education) but carefully guide them toward the universal truth through a public dialogic exploration of the students’ errors and shortcomings. the teacher’s power of persuasion must be based not on their epistemological or institutional authority, nor a system of rewards and punishment, nor on brutal force but rather on the power of reason, rationality, and the universality of the truth. only through this self-persuasive process of the students’ free exploration of their own imperfect reasoning, rationality, and knowledge, argued kant, can the students’ own rational device be formed. … the students must have the freedom to reason, however imperfectly it might be, but not the freedom from reason (shugurova, matusov, & marjanovic-shane, 2022, p. e6). thus, dialogue is welcome in progressive education as a practice in which the students can test their ideas. however, at the same time, in progressive education, which is foisted upon the student in the name of developing their knowledge and reasoning, the goal is not to freely discuss the matters at hand completely. the goal of progressive education is the same as the goal of conventional education: the students should arrive at the known truths and values agreed upon by the already rational people, who are the experts and, thus, authorities in their respective domains of knowledge. the students may test their ideas, but not with full freedom: the caveat is that they must arrive at an agreement with the known truths prescribed by the curriculum, educational authorities, and experts – and, ultimately, they can then join the big dialogue of cultures (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 2009), i.e., become “educated.” thus, in progressive schools, the dominant type of discourse still remains an authoritarian, magisterial discourse (bakhtin, 1991). dialogue in these schools is controlled and limited. it is used strictly as a pedagogical instrument for injecting the students’ reasoning into their path to the pre-set curricular end-points (alexander, 2018; fecho, falter, & hong, 2016; lefstein & snell, 2013; skidmore, 2000; skidmore & murakami, 2016). regardless of how tolerant of diverse opinions and ideas these schools might seem to be, the tolerance is always temporary and in the service of the achievement of the indisputable educational pre-determined truths and values, the knowledge of which the students will need to show to get a grade and graduate. as the prussian prince frederick allegedly said and kant agreed, "argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey!" (kant, 1784). ultimately, both the conventional and progressive educational philosophies are based on ideological monism1 that is antithetical to the pluralism necessary for the genuine dialogue, in which it is legitimate and expected that “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event [co-being, transformative being together]” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). proponents of dialogism in education have tried to overcome or circumvent the ideological, organizational, and axiological obstacles posed by monism in many interesting and important ways – both in practice and in theory (cf., alexander, 2018; alexander, 2019; lefstein & snell, 2013; matusov, 2020a, 2020b, 2021c; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017; segal, pollak, & lefstein, 2017, and others). however, what is considered to be educational dialogue that can be practiced in progressive education, must remain controlled and limited, specifically designed as an instrument of improvement of the predesigned student’s educational journey, leading the student to predetermined, given truths and values. but what are the place and the value of dialogue in democratic education? in contrast to both conventional and progressive education, in democratic education, the student could be considered a legitimate owner and author of their learning and life journey. furthermore, as i mentioned above, a whole 1 according to isaiah berlin, monism is a belief in the “the unity or harmony of human ends” (berlin, 2002, p. 4) democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a17 new sphere of life (and learning) becomes open and reachable: the student in democratic schools has an opportunity to directly enter a sphere of civic governance of their school and their own life and affairs, a sphere that is to a large extent, if not almost completely, out of reach for the student of mainstream conventional and innovative, progressive schools (greenberg, 1991, 1992; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2009, 2019)2. this change in the student’s status has a potential of a ripple effect on almost all aspects of the student’s learning, their appreciation of that learning, their examination of its meaning in their lives and relationships to others, and their actual lives. in our article in this special issue, rietmulder and i discuss this point in great detail (see rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023). the question is whether the student’s legitimate status as a free person with equal rights of opinion and decision-making (in most matters of school life and education) also creates opportunities and conditions for dialogic pedagogy, a genuine possibility for the students to develop critical dialogic examinations of the world, of their life and learning, and of their desires, motivations, and values. democratic schools, with their democratic principles of pluralism of opinions, equal rights of participation of all (students and staff) in the school organization, decision-making, and promotion of students’ self-determination and self-education (greenberg, 1991, 1992; matusov, 2020a; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017; rietmulder, 2019; shugurova et al., 2022) seem to have designed an educational ecology in which the participants with equal rights of input and decision-making can freely initiate and join the genuine critical, creative, ethical-ontological dialogue. however, this assumption has not been thoroughly examined. there are many questions about the relationship between the ecology of democratic education and dialogic pedagogy. in many democratic schools, with their philosophy of students’ self-education, there is not much focus on the teaching3 (rietmulder, 2019), and thus, not much focus on teaching something through dialogue. if and when dialogue happens, is it “educational?” what would it mean that dialogue is educational? in progressive education, dialogic pedagogy is understood as a pedagogical instrument to teach some predefined curricular area, but if in democratic education, students do not have to focus on the same given topic jointly, why should they have a dialogue about it? as i stated earlier, the main purpose of this special issue has been to examine the ways dialogic education (in its widest sense) exists and can exist in democratic schools: what is the educational status of dialogue in democratic schools? what promotes and hinders dialogism, i.e., the synergies and the discords between democracy and dialogue? in what situations and what kinds of events do critical and creative dialogues thrive, and when are they unsupported, neglected, and maybe even suppressed? the authors of this issue focused on examining diverse aspects of dialogicity and democracy: from descriptions of various dialogic and democratic practices, noticing many obstacles that dialogue and democracy in education encounter in our era, telling about the effects dialogicity and democracy in education can have on the students, on their schools, and on the larger society, through examining their multiple values and meanings and trying to abstract important, diverse and sometimes even contradictory worldviews lying behind them. 2 in a recent national public radio podcast “a1” on january 6th, 2022, dr. kei kawashima-ginsberg of the tufts university “center for information and research on civic learning and engagement,” discussed what their center termed “civic desert.” it is a concept that describes “lack of access to all or most physical sites of democratic learning and practice in the community” claiming that such civic desert was experienced by more than 50% of youth and young people in the usa. https://the1a.org/segments/after-the-riot-youngvoters-on-the-state-of-our-democracy/ 3 this is not true for all democratic schools. for instance, oldest democratic school in israel, in hadera, organizes classes in many subjects, that are taught in a regular way – there are time-tables, etc. although the students are free to choose what classes they want to go, or not to go, the classes are there, awaiting anyone interested. democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a18 as my dear co-editor, eliane fernandes azzari, said in her introduction (azzari, 2023), we might have had particular reasons for focusing on one or another way of examining dialogic pedagogy in democratic education and for creating a certain order among the articles in this issue. but you, dear reader, may find other purposes and reasons to read them, searching for concepts and ideas of your own and finding your own way through the issue. and, of course, we would greatly appreciate your responses, ideas, critical analyses, and comments. references alexander, r. 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(2016). dialogic pedagogy: the importance of dialogue in teaching and learning. bristol, uk: multilingual matters. the circle school. bylaws, article three — ends we seek. in the circle school bylaws. democratic schools and the meaning of dialogue in them ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.559 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a20 vlasova, h. (2021, december 24, 2021). how many schools are in the u.s (statistics & facts) – 2021. retrieved from https://admissionsly.com/how-many-schools-are-there/ new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word tsemach, advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a119 advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach stanford university, usa baruch schwarz hebrew university, israel mirit israeli kaye college, israel omer keynan the academic college of tel aviv– yaffo, israel abstract the present paper inquires whether a meticulous program designed to resolve interdisciplinary societal dilemmas through dialogic argumentation advances epistemic practices. to delineate how epistemic practices are manifested in classroom discussions, we adopted the actor-network theory (ant), which explores the interactions and agencies of human and non-human actors. ant analyses uncover the power these actors exert on each other and help recognize the networks that these actors create or dissolve. they also delineate how epistemic practices emerge and are shaped in these networks. we identified four epistemic practices in the discussions: (1) taking a reasoned position, (2) integrating knowledge from different disciplines, (3) weighing pros and cons before taking a complex position, and (4) role-playing in a democratic game. we show that the type of discourse developed in the program was mostly dialogic argumentation. in addition, we demonstrate how teachers often inhibit these advancements. indeed, in the case of integrating knowledge from different disciplines, teachers’ role is central, but the emerged actors’ network is often nondialogic. moreover, we show how non-human actors shape the interactions in networks as well as the formation of knowledge and agency. we conclude that: (a) the design of activities for resolving interdisciplinary societal dilemmas provides many opportunities for advancing epistemic practices, (b) these practices are mostly advanced through dialogic argumentation, but (c) more efforts should be invested in affording interdisciplinary argumentation. keywords: dialogic pedagogy, epistemology, actor-network theory, interdisciplinarity ehud tsemach is a postdoctoral fellow at the graduate school of education at stanford university. his research explores pedagogies that facilitate textual thinking skills and how cognition processes are interwoven with identity, values, and cultural background in the classroom. tsemach's ph.d. research has focused on ultra-orthodox jewish students and explored how cognition, sociocultural background, and gender intersect. his peer-reviewed studies delineate how ultra-orthodox jewish men and women build arguments in an academic context compared to other populations. baruch schwarz is a full professor at the school of education, the hebrew university. his expertise ranges from educational psychology to the development of mathematical/scientific reasoning. he is a specialist in the role of argumentation in learning and development. he has led several r&d european projects on the use of technologies to boost deliberative argumentation, productive discourse, collaborative issn: 2325-3290 (online) advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a120 learning, mathematical problem-solving, and "learning to learn" skills. he is also involved in research on the moderation of collaborative learning. he is active in the study of ultra-orthodox learning in yeshivas. he led the special interest group on dialogue, reasoning and argumentation (sig 26) at the european association of research in learning and instruction. mirit israeli is a postdoctoral fellow at the school of education at the hebrew university of jerusalem and serves as head of the program of teachers' training for academics at kaye college of be'er sheva. her doctoral research focuses on distributed leadership and the role of coordinators in teacher collaboration. her current research investigates classroom dialogic interaction and teacher learning in-service and preservice. omer keynan's research focuses on integrating digital technologies and social media in civic discussions and learning processes in civil society and social movements. in the field, and as part of my research, i lead training and learning processes in third-sector bodies in israel. ïïò introduction nowadays, interdisciplinarity has good publicity in the educational system. in higher education, interdisciplinarity is a natural way to handle new theoretical and practical fields such as ecology, nanotechnology, or biochemistry. these fields have become disciplines of their own with their distinct instruments and methods. however, for the most part, interdisciplinarity has gained popularity not because it opens new fields but because it has a motivational role, especially in secondary education. indeed, the rise of knowledge domains as disciplines was traditionally aimed at training learners to master methods and strategies used in schoolish activities, not "real problems."(sadler, 2009). socio scientific issues (ssis) – represent topics the scope of which is societal. thus, students' engagement and the application of scientific ideas are frequently discussed in schools. as sadler (2009) argues, ssis motivate students to learn science: they feel the relevance of science to their lives as citizens, and this relevance boosts their engagement in the resolution of ssis. schwarz and colleagues (schwarz et al., submitted) have attributed the flourishing of interdisciplinary programs (and not only programs in science education based on the extensive capitalization on ssis) to a more comprehensive reason related to the traditional compartmentalization in the teaching of disciplines. they suggest that the flourishing of interdisciplinary activities conveys a post-modernist stance, in which reason cannot conquer the world and cannot solve all problems. however, despite this immense popularity, research focusing on deploying interdisciplinary processes induced by these programs in classrooms is scarce. schwarz and colleagues (schwarz et al. submitted) have argued that dialogic argumentation may enable the deployment of interdisciplinary processes but that this deployment depends on a meticulous design. although there is substantial literature on principles of design tasks for disciplinary engagement (engle & conant, 2002) or dialogic argumentation (e.g., andriessen & schwarz, 2009), interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation is a relatively new field of research. koichu and his colleagues (2022) proposed design principles for interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation. these are content-related, pedagogy-related, and organization related. the design principles koichu and his colleagues identified are essential, but they do not tell about the nature of the discourse induced by this design among students. tsemach & schwarz (2022) used ant to assess whether the discourse deployed in a program in which tasks were designed to afford interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation was indeed dialogic. the ant concepts and methodology is described in detail further on. it explores when and how human and nonhuman actors assemble and interconnect into dialogic networks and when these networks evolve and dissolve. in this study, we used ant to examine epistemic practices and their advancements in the context advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a121 of interdisciplinary programs in schools. the program we focus on here is a case-study for this matter. the program was designed to resolve interdisciplinary societal dilemmas through interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation in four junior-high schools in a mid-size town in the central part of israel. we check the effectiveness of the design by addressing and analyzing the actors who shape the dialogic and non-dialogic networks. in addition, we trace how epistemic practices emerge and evolve in classroom activities and discussions. it is accepted that epistemology concerns not only the nature of knowledge but also its limits and how it is constructed, processed, and evaluated (greene et al., 2016). we follow epistemology as a social practice approach to the study of epistemology in educational contexts that explores how knowledge is produced, evaluated, and justified through interactions among individuals (kelly, 2016). the next sections provide a general background on our research by (a) providing a brief review of how research about epistemology is approached in the learning sciences and (b) sketching the fundamentals of the actor-network theory. research on epistemology through the observation of social epistemic practices three general research directions have been adopted to study epistemology in education, personal epistemology, disciplinary epistemology, and social epistemic practices. personal epistemology is a prominent research perspective that often follows fixed models and tools to assess students' epistemological stances and beliefs (greene et al., 2016a; kelly, 2016). this perspective has revealed valuable insights regarding the connection between epistemic stances and the learning outcomes of individuals. research on personal epistemology traces the modification of general models to contextual models that perceive epistemic cognition as sensitive to the context and subject domains (barzilai & weinstock, 2015; bråten & strømsø, 2009). other studies examine epistemology as stances that guide learning in situ. such studies inspect how epistemology is situated in cases where students as individuals have to assess, evaluate and create knowledge (barzilai & zohar, 2012; mason et al., 2011). a second perspective on the study of epistemology is disciplinary. kelly defines this perspective as "specific ways members of the community propose, justify, evaluate and legitimize knowledge claims within a disciplinary framework" (kelly, 2008, p. 99). this perspective focuses on epistemic disciplinary practices. for example, cunningham and kelly (2017) examined how elementary school teachers framed engineering practices in elementary school classrooms. the teacher invited her students to participate in aerospace engineering activities and instructed them to design a parachute for space landing, considering how its characteristics affect its drop speed. in reflection on this data, kelly (2016) delineated how epistemic practices, such as observation, data analysis, and redesigning, are embodied in teacher and student interactions. knowledge is produced and considered intersubjectively between the participants and relevant texts. for example, educational settings and activities facilitate students' conception of justifying scientific conclusions on observations and data analysis. in another study, kelly et al. (2000) examined how teachers in oceanography universities frame the epistemological positions of the disciplines to the students. they delineated how the course mentors and the students jointly defined, communicated, and set epistemic positions of oceanography. hamza and wickman (2008) and wickman (2002) explored how students’ engagement with knowledge in science learning is shaped through social interaction, the context, and students' previous knowledge and experience. while the personal perspective focuses on the epistemic beliefs of individuals, mostly expressed in interviews or questionnaires, the disciplinary perspective focuses on utterances during scientific practice. although this perspective considers the context, the utterances are generally extracted as isolated elements. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a122 finally, a third perspective is the study of epistemology as a social practice (greene et al., 2016b; kelly, 2016). this perspective explores how epistemologies are enacted in social settings (kelly, 2016). following socio-cultural approaches to learning (lave & wenger, 1991; vygotsky, 1978), this perspective conceptualizes epistemology as a social practice, as students and teachers define what counts as knowledge and create, assess, and evaluate knowledge claims. we extend the scope of the study of epistemology as a social practice to its study as a socio-cultural practice. we perceive knowledge as a process and an outcome that emerges through the interaction among individuals as well as with different artifacts in specific contexts rather than the individual achievement of mental possession. knowledge is created, distributed, and considered through discourse processes among people and with various texts. in this paper, we study epistemology as a socio-cultural practice and observe the emergence and development of epistemic practices in classrooms. for this study, we use the actor-network theory. actor-network theory ant explores how actors shape and are shaped by the interactions and how they exert power and agency on each other (latour, 1984). the theory was developed as a critique of traditional sociological research on the grounds that it examined the "social reality" by focusing on the actions and intentions of human actors (latour, 2005). according to the methodological concept of symmetry, objects, materials, and technology are not just objects subjugated by humans. non-human actors shape interactions, exert force, and clout humans' epistemology, learning, and knowledge manifestation (fenwick & edwards, 2010; latour et al., 1979). ant explores the associations and interactions of the socio-material. it describes how these actors (known as actants) interact, shape, and are shaped by each other and thereby assemble into networks (fenwick & edwards, 2010). in their ethnography of science-in-themaking in a laboratory, latour and wooglar (1979) revealed how scientists' epistemology is constructed through relations with non-human actors such as machines, routines, and scientific assertions. ant has been used in educational studies. it allows scholars to explain learning processes based on interactions between teachers, students, and non-human actors, such as teaching aids and educational technologies. law (1992) demonstrates how overhead projectors are used by teachers and students to present and discuss ideas. as non-human actors, these pedagogical aids have an agency that affects the learning process and how students develop ideas. thus, this technology has an agency in shaping interaction, learning, and epistemology (see mcgregor, 2004, for similar use of ant in technology-rich contexts). in educational studies in ant, the general idea of translation of the ant theory is central to understanding how learning processes, knowledge building, and epistemic assumptions are created. the concept points to the possibility of transformation and change of form that produce equivalence, from actant to actant, so that actants stand in place of something else. in this sense, technologies and pedagogical aids are used to translate ideas, thoughts, and knowledge. knowledge, roles, and agency are not pre-given attributions; they are effects of interactions between different actors in specific contexts. similarly, knowledge and epistemology are not conceived as mental resources held by individuals but rather as the effects of a specific network that emerged through interaction between different actors (fenwick & edwards, 2010). mcgregor (2004) showed the process of a science teacher becoming a knowing location through the interaction of materials (bunsen burners, flasks, etc.), routines and timetables, texts (science books), people, and her former experience and education. similarly to latour and wooglar’s (1979) interpretation of laboratory life, she describes how laboratory artifacts, instructional practices, and the teacher's behaviors are assembled into a network and create knowledge and agency. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a123 sometimes configurations shaped in a particular network can solidify and be fixed (immutable) while being mobile and traveling to multiple other networks that continue to shape their interaction (fenwick & edwards, 2010). latour (1987) calls these configurations immutable mobile. after their creation, they move between time and space, extending their power. sometimes, when moving to different networks, the circumstances of their creation remain unknown or are ignored (fenwick & edwards, 2010). indeed, latour and woolgar (1979) described how laboratory inscription devices transform pieces of matter into graphs. the scientist's epistemic assumption regards these devices and graphs as having direct relationships with the substance examined. once produced, the graphs can be borrowed, cited, and compared. thus, they start to shape the interaction in multiple other networks. likewise, the national curriculum acts as immutable mobile, as it is produced in specific circumstances, is consolidated, and then travels and shapes learning and epistemology in different classrooms, transferring knowledge and shaping interactions and procedures (mcgregor, 2004). a new research direction: using ant to observe epistemic practices in classroom discourse in the present research, we adopt a socio-cultural approach to the study of epistemology. our research question concerns the deployment of epistemic practices in classroom talk induced by a program aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation in schools. we ask which epistemic practices are advanced in such a program and aim to recognize how these practices are deployed in time. although raising hypotheses for such a research question is difficult, we were aware that theorists link dialogic discourse to epistemology. for example, wegerif and colleagues (wegerif et al. 2019) provide three definitions of dialogues: everyday, ontological, and epistemological. the third definition is based on two assumptions about meaning and knowledge creation. one is dynamism knowledge is an effect of continuous and everlasting interaction between people and the world. knowing the external world manifests only within a dialogue of continuous and lasting process of questioning and answering. thus, the perception of what counts as knowledge is dynamic. the second is contextuality the meaning of every utterance is understood in a context by understanding its relations to previous (and future) utterances. we were aware, though, that such considerations were theoretical. other researchers have linked dialogic discourse and scientific argumentation to epistemology from a pedagogical point of view and have pointed out that epistemology differentiates dialogic pedagogies from traditional ones (alexander, 2020; driver et al., 2000; nystrand et al., 2003; sandoval and millwood, 2007). for them, dialogic and argumentative discourse aim at facilitating active engagement of students with the construction of knowledge and involve genuine inquiry, compared to traditional approaches focusing on the teachers and textbooks as the source of knowledge. some studies explore classroom discourse and concentrate on epistemological aspects of learning (pollak, 2017). two linguistic-ethnographic studies about epistemic climate present a complex picture that emphasizes epistemology's sensitivity to educational contexts and practices. lefstein and snell (2011) analyze and expose how epistemic dimensions are reflected in 10-11-year-old students' english classroom discourse. from the discourse emerged an epistemology that conceived of knowledge as tentative rather than fixed, seeing the students' active roles in constructing knowledge with peers instead of the teachers being the primary source of knowledge and knowledge as built through the interaction of different perspectives. pollak's (2017) findings ratify and contradict some of these findings. he analyzed the enacted epistemology in 4th-6th grade language art lessons and included a quantitative description of epistemic practices. among the findings, pollak depicted how students are the source of knowledge when their beliefs are shared in classroom discussions. however, these beliefs are transformed into knowledge through the advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a124 teachers' validation; only then is the knowledge treated like a fact. epistemic practices are implicit and ambiguous, and lack shared language between students and teachers to reflect and evaluate knowledge. pollak also relates to the processes of knowledge structure. he concludes that knowledge remains isolated and disconnected from larger knowledge structures and is affected by the specific activity's traits and time constraints. another study, presented by tan and tang (2019), explored the role of dialogue in epistemic practices in science classrooms, which resembles kelly's studies (cunningham & kelly, 2017; kelly, 2016). they present four epistemic practices: questioning, inquiry, argumentation, and legitimizing conceptual knowledge, in which students can be engaged and, in this manner, be encultured to science. from the research review on the links between classroom discourse and epistemology, we saw that theorists of dialogic education and classroom discourse have articulated differences between dialogic and non-dialogic pedagogies. our research question explores a temporal dimension of epistemic practices induced by a program aimed at facilitating interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation in schools. we ask about the epistemic practices that emerged in the program. since, as will be described in the next section, the program was designed to afford interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation, it was reasonable to conjecture that various epistemic practices would emerge in the program: an invitation to interdisciplinarity brings to the surface disciplinary knowledge, its limits, and issues on sources of knowledge. the educational context a program aimed at promoting interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation in school was initiated in four junior-high schools in a mid-size town in the central part of israel under the auspices of the interuniversity dialogos center. we organized a series of special one-day-long events, "focus days," in which students from the four schools convene in a municipal education center. there, they would participate in activities prepared in collaboration with the dialogos team, but conducted by the regular teachers at the participating schools. overall, during two academic years (2019-2021), about 150 students from the four junior-high schools participated in eight "focus days". each focus day focused on a different interdisciplinary societal dilemma (isd) (see table 1). each focus day began with an introductory talk given by an expert knowledgeable about the chosen isd. then two 90-minute disciplinary sessions took place, in mathematics, science, or philosophy. each student participated in two sessions in different disciplines. following the two disciplinary sessions, a 90-minute interdisciplinary session took place, in which the students discussed the isd of the day while capitalizing on what they had learned in the disciplinary sessions. at the end of each focus day, a joint product (e.g., a presentation, a short movie, a written story) was produced; deliberations were conducted in all disciplines around texts that invited inquiry and dialogic argumentation. during most focus days, the students and teachers of the four schools convened face-toface in the municipal education center. due to the covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, two focus days (day 5 and day 6) took place in an online synchronous learning environment. table 1. the isds for the eight focus day interdisciplinary societal dilemma (isd) day 1 biometric passports: the supreme court will soon have to decide whether the citizens' dna sequence information be added to their biometric passports. help them reach a decision. day 2 sustainable development: your municipality will decide how to divide the city’s open areas among three developmental projects: buildings, nature reserves, and communal advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a125 areas. help the municipality choose the most appropriate and democratic way to consider the inhabitants' preferences. day 3 the vaccines dilemma: should the state mandate parents to vaccinate their children? day 4 genetic engineering in humans: should the state allow interested parents to genetically engineer their future babies? day 5 fake news: as an editorial board member of your school bulletin, you should decide which four out six submitted papers will be published in the bulletin using the following criteria: precision and reliability, preservation of freedom of speech, respect for the authors, and the readership. day 6 the educational system dilemma during the covid-19 crisis: should schools in your municipality be closed or open during lockdowns? if open, in what format? day 7 ethics in competitive sport: should competitions participants be permitted to enhance their performance using self-blood transfusion or other artificial means? day 8 fair distribution of resources: in the north-east part of our country, a kibbutz took over natural spring water near its fenced territory and built an open tunnel that runs beside its inhabitants' houses. people from the nearby town, and many other activists throughout israel, require free access to the tunnel for leisure and sports purposes. this implies free access to the kibbutz territory, which the inhabitants object. suggest an arrangement that may resolve the dispute. methodology our data included more than twenty recordings of interdisciplinary lessons, both video, and audio. these lessons focused on group work, and we recorded 3-4 groups each time. after sorting the recordings, we decided to leave some of them out of the sample due to bad-quality audio. we analyzed more than 50 recordings of group work. the length of recordings was between 12-30 minutes long. all recordings were transcribed. we analyzed the transcripts alongside watching the videos, if available. based on ant methodology, our analysis focused on: (a) identifying which human and non-human actors are involved in the interaction; (b) describing the associations created between the actors and how these assemble together; (c) delineating the power and agency exerted during the interactions. following our first efforts (tsemach & schwarz, 2022), we observed how dialogues were created and dissolved in networks. the first and third authors analyzed all the data separately. then, they met and discussed their analysis and insights. the data analysis included three rounds. in the first two rounds, we tried to identify patterns of interactions and epistemic practices that repeated in different lessons and groups. then we named and explained these patterns and practices. in the third session, we analyzed all the data again to refine our analyses and recheck which patterns were prominent and recurred in different lessons and group work. we chose four vignettes from our data that exemplify common epistemic practices and enable us to demonstrate the potential of ant analysis to reveal epistemic practices in classroom dialogs. all students, students' parents, and teachers give their consent to participate in the study. all names that will be presented in the finding section are pseudonyms. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a126 findings the following protocols are taken from two discussions on two different focus days. the discussions took place during the last part of the focus days – in which we designed an activity to afford interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation. as will be shown, four epistemic practices were enacted: 1. taking a reasoned position 2. integrating knowledge from different disciplines 3. weighing pros and cons before expressing a complex argument 4. playing a role in a democratic game we will consider the role of the design and ensuing instructions or artifacts as non-human actors and of the teachers as catalyzers or inhibitors in advancing these epistemic practices among students. the ant methodology interweaves macroand micro-processes: interactions cannot be understood without being contextualized within a particular network in which they take place. this specificity of ant entailed the impossibility to describe the emergence and evolution of each epistemic practice separately. subsequently, in the following sub-sections, we will describe the conjunction of epistemic practices in relatively long excerpts. the first story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk – taking a reasoned position and integrating knowledge from different disciplines we present excerpts from a discussion during the second focus day on the exploitation of open spaces in a city. the overall topic of the second focus day was the utilization of open areas in the town where the activity took place. the town's deputy mayor talked about the municipal council’s policy in this town. students were then arranged in mixed groups of around 20 students from the four schools. each group focused on a disciplinary activity – in mathematics, science, or humanities that lasted 90 minutes and that was related to the general issue at stake. in mathematics, students presented the preferences of citizens in their town about the utilization of open areas (living area, public park, reserve) and learned about different methods of voting (majority, absolute majority, borda count method, pairwise comparisons method). they also learned about their respective advantages and drawbacks and were asked about the best voting method for using open areas in cities. in philosophy, the teacher triggered a discussion about the difference between culture and nature and then arranged dyads to report on things from nature vs. artifacts that they like the most. then, the teacher invited students to learn two stories about the creation of the world – one man-centered mythological tale from ancient egypt and one nature-centered central african tale and asked students how nature and cultural artifacts are valorized in the two tales. in the science session, students were first invited to observe numbers and varieties of birds and plants side the building where the focus day took place. the teacher then provided data about the fauna and flora in various places in different cities worldwide. he then created small groups and invited them to discuss the relations between the variety of birds in different places (living areas, public parks, and reserves), the average income of the inhabitants, and the population density. in a second session, new groups of around 20 students were set, so all students attended a session in a new discipline. figure 1 displays the stages of the focus day. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a127 figure 1: climax day’s structure the students were finally re-arranged in groups of 20 from the same school to discuss the utilization of open spaces in their town as citizens. the teacher split the group into three small interest groups: real estate entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and representatives of citizens of the town (the residents). in each interest group, the students were requested to bring multiple reasons to justify their position for splitting the land. the protocol below describes the activities of a “residents” group. several humans and nonhumans were actors. a group of five female students worked alone. several instructions served as actants the topic of the second climax day: sustainable development overall dilemma: how to utilize of open areas in the town where the activity took place? session 1 plenary talk 45 minutes plenary talk session 2 disciplinary activities in six mixed groups 180 minutes the students attended two disciplinary sessions. each session lasted 90 minutes. math (2 groups) students learned about different methods of voting to determine elections and about their respective advantages and drawbacks. philosophy (2 groups) students learned about the difference between nature-centered or man-centered views of the world, through two stories about the creation of the world. science (2 groups) students learned about the fauna and flora in various places in different cities worldwide, and specific in their city. session 3 interdisciplinary activity in four school-based groups 90 minutes students from the same school arranged in three small interest groups: real estate entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and representatives of citizens of the town (the residents), to discuss the utilization of open spaces in their town as citizens. in each interest group, the students were requested to bring multiple reasons to justify their position for allocating areas in the city. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a128 – non-human actors: (a) to propose a suggestion for dividing the land (the percentage allocated to each goal) using a diagram pie, (b) to present supporting reasons for their position, and (c) to build their arguments based on information from previous units (philosophy, math, and science). we will show how these actors interacted – created a network of interactions. the network whose deployment will be described follows the deployment of other networks: the instructions were created in a different network by researchers in math, science, and philosophy education (koichu et al., 2022). as will be shown, the instructions created in that network shape interactions in the network we will describe. finally, each interest group was told that a discussion with representatives of different interest groups to reach an agreement about allocating the lands. in table 2, we show the beginning of the discussion among the group members. table 2. excerpt 1 showcases the first story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line what do you say if i take a picture of the board and we can look at it right in front of our eyes? shaked 1 yes noa 2 no shani 3 no, but let's copy it from the board shahar 4 but the residents don't care about that shani 5 i'm thinking gardens and parks, because we need occupations and such, open spaces. the uniqueness, at least in my opinion, of nes ziona is that it is quiet here. if say you live in tel aviv, you will have noise shahar 6 right shani 7 that's exactly why open areas ori 8 come on, we are the residents shani 9 first open areas, then parks shahar 10 but we are the residents, so shouldn't it be the gardens and parks? shani 11 yes, because you think that... shahar 12 because we are the green city shani 13 think about it now. let's say your parents, not let's say noa's parents. what would they prefer to have open areas or activities for children? shahar 14 for children noa 15 well, exactly, so gardens and parks shahar 16 shaked begins the discussion by suggesting copying from the board what they learned from the session in mathematics – ways to choose the best solution when there is no unanimity (4). she suggests incorporating a non-human actor, a data set, to guide their interaction. however, they agree that this artifact is irrelevant to the residents and, therefore, is not incorporated into the network (5). then, they show hesitation about what is the interest of residents (6-16). they agree that they must keep their city green but hesitate between favoring open spaces and parks or playgrounds. they construct their arguments about their common interests collaboratively. the interacting actors constitute a dialogic network in which no actor advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a129 is subjugated by others. they participate in dialogic argumentation and participate in the epistemic practice of expressing a reasoned position (14-16), that can be paraphrased as "as residents, we prefer gardens and parks since we care for our children and want them to have space for activities that fit their age." in table 3, we see that this dialogic network quickly dissolves as the teacher joins it and gives a definite direction to the discussion. table 3. excerpt 2 showcasing the first story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line hi girls teacher 17 hey in chorus 18 so actually you... your support of the city residents is public gardens and parks, when we actually say is it nature, or man, culture? is it something natural or something man-made? however, if it is man-made a factory, a building? or are we talking here about a structure of... teacher 19 about employment shahar 20 no, but as far as we know, nes ziona... shani 21 would you talk about a park? is a park something that is not natural? teacher 22 no shahar 23 fundamentally? teacher 24 no shani 25 where does the park originate ? a park with flowers and trees? teacher 26 oh. yes shahar 27 is it unnatural? it is natural but… teacher 28 it depends on which one, there are parks... shani 29 that is its result. its role in nature is that of an ornament, and oxygen and other things that... fine. but who put it there? teacher 30 we shani 31 it is domesticated nature noa 32 it is domesticated nature, or cultured, civilized nature teacher 33 great idea shaked 34 some plant, the plants in the shape of, there are those who do it in the shape of, flower, or they do it in the shape of a certain person shani 35 they are doing it in such a beautiful way shaked 36 yes shani 37 when the teacher joins the discussion, she asks, “your support of the city residents is public gardens and parks when we actually say is it nature or man, culture? is it something natural or something man-made?” (19). this question reminds the students that they participated in a philosophy session in which they learned about the natural and man-made categories. the aim of the teacher is clear. she wants advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a130 the students to participate in another epistemic practice – to incorporate knowledge from various disciplines in their argument. the teacher is the focal point of this network: she decides the topic of discussion and who will focus. some of the students’ answers show that they do not understand what the teacher wants from them (like shahar's "about unemployment" in (20). interactions are mostly with the teacher, and turns are short. the students try to comply with the direction the teacher intends to give to the discussion, and noa uses the term "domesticated nature", which had been used in the philosophy session. however, they do not adopt the teacher's direction (35-37). the teacher then tries again to capitalize on the ideas developed in the philosophy session (table 4). table 4. excerpt 3 showcasing the first story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line who here was in philosophy? teacher 38 oh before? no, i was last time shaked 39 no, today, today ori 40 we, the four of us shahar 41 the four of you. so, you have read the texts about the creation of the world? teacher 42 yes in chorus 43 and in fact, the creation of the world in both texts are extremes: one extreme focuses on the nature and how man destroys it, and the other extreme focusses on man as the creator of social order only teacher 44 he destroys and creates. no, but he destroys to produce something new shani 45 he creates things by destroying other things ori 46 did he create human culture? teacher 47 yes ori 48 but he didn't preserve nature teacher 49 right ori 50 he destroys animals to eat them, let's say shani 51 is it necessary to destroy animals? teacher 52 no shani 53 so ok, this is actually the in-between border i'm talking about. there is a fine line that connects the two texts. also, understand that man needs, for human culture, to build things, and to be industrialized and produce infrastructure for humans, and on the other hand, we need to preserve this natural resource called nature. you have to find the middle path. ok? and the reasons for this... what is written for you on your information page? supposedly yours is the most complex because it sits on both worlds teacher 54 because of this... noa 55 ok, so read me what is written before you teacher 56 advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a131 this excerpt shows an initiate-response-evaluate (ire) pattern of interactions between the teacher and the students: she asks the questions (38, 42, 52), gets shorts answers that show mere approval (43, 48, 50) or disapproval (53), and gives long explanations without being asked for (44, 54). those explanations were produced in the philosophy session, and the teacher wants her students to use them. most of the talk is produced by the teacher. her reference in (42), (44), and (54) to two philosophical texts about the creation of the world is aimed at influencing the position of the residents. her long and detailed argument in (54) does not leave room for the students. the protocol exhibits a network in which the teacher is at the center. the students are actors with little agency, as the teacher exerts her power on them. the students do not participate in the epistemic practice of expressing a reasoned argument. their dialogic argumentation is replaced by a teacher-centered discussion, in which the teacher invites the students to participate in an epistemic practice – integrating knowledge from different disciplines. however, they do not participate in this practice. the instructions given to the teacher to relate to the previous lessons are an invisible actor which exerts their power on the teacher. the instructions are immutable mobiles, e.g., a configuration that was shaped in one network and then moved to another network exerts power and shapes the interaction. the circumstances of their creation have been forgotten, and the injunction "read me what is written before you" in (56) shows that the designers' aims in instructions have been forgotten. the next excerpt (table 5) begins with the reading of instructions by shaked. table 5. excerpt 4 showcasing the first story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line (reads) the municipality of ness-ziona is very concerned about the issue of the remaining open spaces in the city. on the one hand, some residents cry out that the quality of the environment is deterioradng. the iris reserves around the city are in danger! on the other hand, the city is young, its inhabitants muldply rapidly, and many new residendal buildings are needed. shaked 57 this is the issue i presented to you. ok, and your reasons, as residents of the city? teacher 58 i don't think so shaked 59 what does it say to you? do you have reasons that you can find? teacher 60 we are interested in maximizing the quality of life of the city's residents. we are less interested in the new residents entering the city. in light of our interests, we must propose a pie diagram that will divide the remaining open areas in ness-ziona according to the percentages that you think should be allocated to each category (private homes and public buildings, nature reserves, and public areas such as gardens or parks). shaked 61 in my opinion, i actually think that open spaces should be in the first place because the first thing is what makes ness-ziona unique shani 62 now, there is your personal opinion, and the opinion you represent in the interest group. what should be the priority in the interest group you represent? teacher 63 gardens and parks noa 64 also try to think about using an open area that has not been touched and is completely natural and wild and see why it serves the city. perhaps it is be\er to create a domesdcated nature, an urban nature, yes that can be teacher 65 advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a132 enjoyed and that sdll serves the environment. this (reason) supports your (posidon) in my opinion, domesdcated nature is not that much be\er than wild nature, but at different dmes, for example, when you want to walk around and that, domesdcated nature is a be\er thing shaked 66 why? teacher 67 because there are animals that can be dangerous in normal and wild nature, but in domesdcated nature there are not... shaked 68 reason number one, you found excellent. this is reasoning. what more? what else is good about domesdcated nature? what else is good in a cultured, civilized nature? teacher 69 me, i have an idea but i'm trying to formulate it ori 70 as parents, you know you are sending the children to the park noa 71 and it is much safer shaked 72 but in the parks, it's not... shani 73 no one can come and eat them shaked 74 do parks mean kindergartens? (in hebrew the word gan can be understood as park or kindergarten) shani 75 also, ornamental public gardens where you can also spend dme there. we don't... you don't have public gardens here in ness ziona, i am not a ness ziona resident, where you can walk around, play and protect the environment? teacher 76 there is… shahar 77 this is the park ori 78 i don't *** (inaudible) as a safer place shaked 79 at first, i thought of kindergartens as kindergartens, not parks shani 80 no, not a kindergarten, i mean a garden of plants, *** (inaudible) beaudful, neat, organized, and the environment is also pleasant teacher 81 yes. exactly shani 82 people choose, say, this flower in this color, so they remember where to put *** (inaudible) shahar 83 so write it down so you don't forget teacher 84 what is your reasoning maya? shahar 85 after shaked follows the teacher's order to read the text (57), the teacher bluntly claims, "this is the issue i presented to you" (58). shaked's position in (61) reflects what the text (and the teacher) indicated should be the solution. however, when shani says, "in my opinion" (62), the teacher immediately rejects her initiative by saying, "now, there is your personal opinion, and there is the opinion that you represent in the interest group" (63). again, the instructions shape the interactions as an actant. the teacher serves as the instructions’ gatekeeper and delegitimizes shani’s opinion. the teacher keeps requesting additional reasons that strengthen the interests of the residents "also try to think about the use of an open area that has not been touched and that is completely natural and wild " (65). despite her request, shaked tries again to express her complex position (66). the teacher relates only to the part of the position which fits what she understands as the interest of the residents (67). the ire pattern rules the rest of the discussion until the advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a133 teacher feels the students fulfilled what was expected and ends her intervention (84) by "so write it down, so you don't forget." in this example, we saw that the students began to collaborate by identifying their common interest as residents and then participating in an epistemic practice – they expressed a reasoned position. at that stage, a dialogic network was maintained in the context of dialogic argumentation. this network was immediately dissolved when the teacher intervened in order to strictly follow the different instructions – to integrate knowledge learned in a different discipline in the students’ discussion. therefore, the teacher aimed at triggering an epistemic practice – the integration of knowledge from another discipline, but the network deployed in the interactions between the teacher and the students was not dialogic: the teacher exerted her power on the students, and the instructions functioned as actants that imposed the centrality of the teacher. the second story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk: weighing pros and cons before taking complex positions, and role-playing in a democratic game we present here what happened in the group of entrepreneurs on the same second focus day as in the second example (about the exploitation of open spaces in a city). the students in this group start their discussion by looking at the survey results. the actors in this network are similar to those presented in the previous example: five male students, a teacher, and the instructions. however, this network also involves a chart of survey results about the preference of the residents for the partition of the land. we will see in table 6 that this actant shapes the interaction of the students in what will appear as the deployment of dialogic argumentation. table 6. excerpt 5 showcases the second story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line listen, the majority prefer parks and playgrounds, then open spaces, and rank us, housing, in last place avi 1 right noam 2 are we ranked in last place? gal 3 so we need to consider this? for whom? teacher 4 no, so we have to consider this, but we manage everything, so what do we care about them? avi 5 avi interprets the survey results and infers that they, as the representatives of entrepreneurs, are in a difficult position (3). in the beginning, avi suggests ignoring the other stakeholders' positions (5). however, this suggestion is not adopted by the other group members. instead, as will be shown in table 7, they came up with two other proposals to accommodate the contradicting needs of entrepreneurs and other stakeholders. table 7. excerpt 6 showcasing the second story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line parks in first place and parks we also build. we are contractors we also build parks gal 6 but listen, listen, houses noam 7 advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a134 parks are in first place avi 8 yes gal 9 look at my diagram, the chart noam 10 66% houses because we are, after all, houses are our main source of income avi 11 but a source of livelihood focuses on the side of the contractors, he is right teacher 12 we need to make money, and (building) houses allow us to make the most money avi 13 [turns 14-54 omitted – students repeat their arguments] … … now listen to avi teacher 55 the one who says that 66% is not possible does not have to spread this 66% horizontally, it can be spread vertically, and then this 9% expands. it takes up less space avi 56 but then it's not 9%. noam 57 what i'm saying is we'll take 6% off the houses gal 58 this is 40 avi 59 then it came out 60.5 student 60 yes, but you do say 60%, so you don't have to do them all single-family houses. you make everything buildings, you only want buildings avi 61 gal suggests allocating most of the land to building parks (6). noam reminds the group that entrepreneurs want to build houses (7), but avi concurs with gal's suggestion (8). noam brings an actant – diagram representing the open spaces’ exploitation according to the interests of entrepreneurs (10). gal further explains that entrepreneurs build parks and can benefit financially from this decision. avi challenges this suggestion by saying that the financial revenue from building housing is more significant than building parks (13). so far, the entrepreneurs have formed a network in which they explain to each other what their interest is. we do not show a long discussion among students during which they weigh the pros and cons of possible solutions. the entrepreneurs co-constructed complex arguments: they would build hospitals, retirement homes, and universities for the sake of all, as well as buildings; by doing such, they show that they take into consideration the interests of other groups. turn 56 is a turning point. avi says, "the one who says that 66% is not possible," and refers to other groups of interests. he calls for reinventing the concept of land allocation. instead of allocating the land horizontally, he offers to build multiple-story buildings (56). this solution provides mass housing that requires a small percentage of land allocation, and it answers the goals of all stakeholders. the epistemic practice he initiates consists in playing a democratic game. the enactment of this practice originates from a complex pedagogic design that provides actants, for example, the chart representing other stakeholders’ positions. it also provides a sequence of activities: the students were told that in the next activity, they would need to convince other stakeholders and reach an agreement on land allocation. they feel they cannot take most of the land, yet they must achieve other stakeholders' acceptance to build many apartments. the process of weighing arguments and counterarguments leads avi to suggest the creative solution of building vertically. this instructional design facilitates two-sided argumentation that considers multiple positions (nussbaum, 2008; tsemach & zohar, 2021). one-sided disputative argumentation will hinder the students' chances of "winning" the game. instead, they are expected to formulate arguments and suggestions to address the needs of other stakeholders, such as building tall residential buildings. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a135 nevertheless, there is more in the participation of the epistemic practice of role-playing in a democratic game: the students shape their roles in the game. avi and gal suggest redesigning the activity when proposing suggestions not aligned with the official instructions. gal’s and avi’s roles are translated through the interaction between different actors; their roles are not pre-given. the students not only play the role assigned to them, the strict role of entrepreneurs pursuing their interests but their roles are also translated into activity designers. their role is not prescribed; they are negotiated and manifested through the network's interaction. during their conversation, the students do not rely on previous units (mathematics, philosophy, and science) to build their arguments. consequently, teacher 2 stopped the students' conversation about land allocation and asked them a series of questions to lead them to incorporate arguments from other disciplines into their discussion (table 8). table 8. excerpt 7 showcasing the second story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. talk speaker line to which text of the world's creation does this idea of massive construction correspond to you? the egyptian or the african text? teacher 2 86 the second noam 87 the african gal 88 the african? teacher 2 89 man builds things by himself noam 90 turns 91-103 omitted … … what is more controlled there? they tell you that man is responsible for the entire social order, the structures, and the infrastructure, and he is actually equal to god because he was created from god's tears, right? so, man equals god equals order. so, is this order a social order? natural order? of flora and fauna? this is the text you need to base yourself on teacher 2 104 i think that would be the best way (how to allocate the percentage) avi 105 ok. we are in first place gal 106 like in the previous example, the instructions serve as actants that shape the interaction: teacher 2 functions as their gate keeper. teacher 2 is determined to fulfill all pedagogical goals and uses an ire turn-taking sequence of interactions to introduce arguments that incorporate knowledge from the disciplinary lessons in students' mouths. however, the students do not participate in this epistemic practice (of integrating knowledge from different disciplines). immediately after the teacher finishes recalling what was said in the philosophy session (103), the students discuss land allocation without further referring to what was learned in mathematics and science. such a reference seems artificial to them and is not incorporated into the discussion because it does not serve the students' main goal formulating a proposal that will convince other stakeholders to give high-rise building rights. this example demonstrates, again, how an educational design and its interpretation by the teacher can dissolve a dialogic network. the teacher is determined to incorporate arguments learned in other disciplines even if it stops the dialogue among students. after this activity, each group received five minutes to present its suggestion to the class. the entrepreneurs presented the idea of building multiple-story buildings to save the land and other arguments advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a136 in favor of filling other civic needs by building centers such as hospitals, retirement homes, and universities. due to the lack of time, the presenters did not develop their arguments. following the presentation, the students were divided into groups of different stakeholders and asked to agree on land allocation. we show here a short excerpt from one of the heterogenous groups of stakeholders. the idea of tall buildings, once ignored by the second teacher, is now adopted by her. the protocol in table 9 shows that the teacher now offers this creative idea to bend the game rules to reach an agreement. table 9. excerpt 8 showcasing the second story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. line speaker talk 2257 teacher 2 fellows. please, let's go on 2258 noam let's just split it 40% and 40%. 2259 avi ok. good 2260 teacher 2 can the proposal to build multiple-story buildings that accommodate more people and not hurt nature work for you? this excerpt demonstrates how the epistemic practices of playing a role in a democratic game and creating complex positions are facilitated and hindered through the interaction of multiple actors. the teacher did not embrace avi's idea of multiple-story buildings in the previous activity because she was more concerned about fulfilling other educational goals: integrating isd arguments and ensuring all groups have time to present their cases. in this network, the groups consist of different stakeholders that are expected to reach a compromise. now the teacher finds avi's creative solution suitable to help the students agree and compromise. the knowledge created in one network roams to other networks. it can be ignored or embraced according to the interactions of different actors. the third story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk taking a reasoned position and integrating knowledge from different disciplines the protocol is taken from the first focus day that presents the question of whether to insert dna information into biometric data for passport control uses. the protocol shows excerpts of the interdisciplinary session that followed the disciplinary sessions on how to encode texts in an encrypted way (in mathematics), dna (in science), and human rights (in philosophy). these sessions were designed to provide resources for the interdisciplinary session. like in the previous example, we will describe the deployment of a network. in this network, multiple actors interact. the human actors are teacher 1, teacher 2, and 20 students. the non-human actors are instructions: (a) take a position about inserting dna information into the biometric passport, and (b) use what was learned in the disciplinary lessons to justify the position chosen. the teacher begins the interdisciplinary session by asking the students to take a yes/no position (table 10). table 10. excerpt 9 showcases the third story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. line speaker talk 1 teacher 1 now there is a question that comes up in court discussions. do you know that biometric passports are issued? 2 students in chorus yes 3 teacher 1 should we put in the question being asked, insert information from the dna, the question that now comes up for discussion, are you listening […] the question is whether to insert information from the citizens' dna into the biometric passport? advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a137 this question is now being debated in the courts in israel. i want to hear your opinion about the question. today, biometric passports are commonplace. it is the passport without the pages 4 benjamin i did it 5 teacher 1 ok, we want to insert information from the dna. but each person's dna is unique, except for identical twins 6 benjamin there is another table (explaining dna and rna) 7 teacher 1 the question is, i want you to tell me whether you are for or against it, but to give me a reason, a scientific reason, or a reason from what you have learned. the biometric passports? 8 benjamin yes 9 teacher 1 should you put your facial features in there, your dna information? should you enter this information? it is not information written inside some chip. [are you] for or against, bar? 10 bar i am against it because you can lose your passport, and then let us say someone finds it, i do not know, a criminal, let us say, and then he can use your details from the dna for things 11 ely but also, with a non-biometric passport, there is a risk of identity theft 12 bar yeah, or break into your privacy or stuff like that 13 rotem he cannot, it's your dna 14 teacher 1 so wait, bar, you are against it? 15 bar he can hack his dna 16 benjamin because it's possible to enter 17 rotem that's not true because if he tries to enter with his dna, it won't be the same. the dna won't be 18 teacher 1 bar is against 19 bar he cannot 20 teacher 1 because she says if i 21 bar like no, he won't steal my identity, he'll be able to use this information 22 sarah he will not have access to the information because if he enters dna in order to enter the information, he will have to enter his dna 23 rotem and if it turns out someone, i don't know, who knows how to break into all the repositories 24 ely dna? 25 bar but even a normal person can break through 26 rotem no, but it's specific to dna, not to... 27 bar dna no, it's harder to break 28 teacher 1 daniel, what are you saying? advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a138 29 daniel i actually wanted to say what she said. it's just so easy to lose something like a passport, especially, and anyone can 30 teacher 1 so, you say what bar said. thanks. liat, what are you saying? this example demonstrates the deployment of the epistemic practice of taking a reasoned position in a dialogic argumentation. the conversation which develops in this protocol is now more equally distributed as many students participate in it and interact among themselves. a dialogic network is constructed, as nobody is subjugated to other actors, the teacher, or the instructions. after introducing the topic for discussion (3,7), teacher 1 asks the students to take a yes/no position (9). bar expresses a reasoned position (10), which is elaborated by ely (11) and challenged by rotem (13). dialogic argumentation is initiated in which the epistemic status of bar's argument is at stake. the teacher, who dislikes this incertitude, requests bar to stick to a clear position (14). however, the students ignore her and continue their dialogic argumentation (15-17, 19, 21-27) despite the teachers' interventions to state their positions (18, 20, 28, 30). there is no consensus among the students, and they try to challenge each other's positions. the students focus on the questions of identity theft and stealing private information. the network shifts in a different direction when doron, one of the students, asks teacher 1 for an example of a supporting reason for biometric passports (table 11). table 11. excerpt 10 showcases the third story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. line speaker talk 31 hila someone said identity and anyone could hack into your personal information. let's say 32 teacher 1 wait, doron can't hear you at all, and it's a shame 33 doron teacher 1, you didn't explain [inaudible] 34 teacher 1 what? are you in favor? 35 doron yes 36 teacher 1 for example, someone who is a terrorist... a terrorist, today you can tell by his facial identification (identify a certain person by facial recognition), catch him already at the airport on the way to an attack. for example, this protects me; it is an argument in favor. yes 37 hila so, let's say someone is a terrorist, let's say someone is a terrorist. he can't get a passport because no one will issue one for him, he can't, he's not allowed to pass because... let's say, someone, i don't know, someone who was released 38 teacher 1 i need to check this, what teacher 2, someone who is a criminal, is not issued a passport? 39 teacher 2 listen. first of all, you are right. everyone has a passport. it doesn't matter if they're a terrorist or not, ok? but if now that person is considered a terrorist, ok? he arrives in the country; they can tell him, 'listen, we won't let you in.’ 40 teacher 1 using the facial features that are in the database 41 teacher 2 not just the facial features, but in general, his fingerprint, according to the retina of the eye, or even according to his dna test. ok? they can tell him, 'you are not coming in.' advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a139 42 teacher 1 but it protects us doron asks teacher 1 to give a reason supporting the insertion of dna (32), and teacher 1 presents a reason to support a biometric passport – biometric data can help border control identify and prevent terrorists from infiltrating the country (36). hila challenges and modifies the reason given by teacher 1, suggesting that no one will issue a passport to a terrorist (37). teacher 1 approaches teacher 2 for help. it appears then that doron and hila's comments lead teacher 1 to introduce a new actor in the network. teacher 2 provides information (39, 41) to teacher 1 and the students. we will see in the following that teacher 2 will end the epistemic practice of taking a reasoned position in dialogic argumentation and, at the same time, will initiate another kind of network. to understand his moves, we should say that handling interdisciplinary societal dilemmas involves different disciplines. as shown by koichu and his colleagues (2022), the program was designed to afford interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation. to this end, we preceded discussions on isds with disciplinary sessions that prepared the students for the interdisciplinary session. in a session in mathematics, students learned methods to encrypt information and how these encryptions can be broken. in a session in science, students learned about dna and that everybody has a distinctive dna signature. in a session on philosophy, students learned about relations between the individual and society through texts by rousseau (who stressed the common good) and locke (who stressed individual rights). the issues raised in these disciplinary sessions were considered relevant to the isd. the question was whether students would use what was learned in these sessions in the interdisciplinary session. the pedagogic goals and instruction aimed to achieve this goal. however, students' actions are manifested through interaction with other actors in the network. so far, students have participated in dialogic argumentation in a dialogic network but did not capitalize on the disciplinary sessions. they did not spontaneously incorporate disciplinary knowledge. at least not explicitly. in this situation, teacher 2 decided to remind the students what was learned in the philosophy session (table 12). table 12. excerpt 11 showcases the third story of two epistemic practices in classroom talk. line speaker talk 43 teacher 2 by the way, i want to… just for a second. those who were in the philosophy group, think about the two philosophers in this context that kalanit is talking about. one philosopher rousseau said we need the common good, ok? the common good comes before the individual. ok? the group, the majority, decides. john locke said that the individual comes first. i am what matters. so, think when you argue for and against, what, why, what, a second, who is more important in this matter? try to do who says what, as if you were talking from his throat 44 teacher 1 ah yes 45 liat but i'm not done 46 teacher 1 oh sorry, wait … … turns 47-61 omitted 62 rotem these things are inside the passport to protect it. that also means his privacy but also a protection system. in the same protection system, it is impossible to fake 63 teacher 1 so, you are saying that it can help us because it is another means of protection 64 rotem protective measures 65 teacher 2 but protection from whom? advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a140 66 benjamin about your details, about everything 67 teacher 2 yes, but for whom? 68 rotem me 69 hila but rotem, i wasn't talking about identity theft. i was talking about, let's say, he lost his passport. it can reveal the details of where he lives, his name, and then he 70 rotem he can't because his details are saved inside the card. to get inside the card, you need dna and facial recognition or things, so it's impossible 71 hila but he can know his name and where he lives 72 rotem you need facial features 73 hila even according to the passport without dna 74 teacher 2 rotem, yes 75 rotem i said 76 teacher 2 you said very [inaudible] things. i want to ask a question and refine it a bit so everyone will understand. when you talk about protection, it's actually your details that are now in a repository, ok? an international, national database. who are they meant to protect? 77 rotem they come... 78 teacher 2 second, i will give you the option to make it easier for you to tune in. your details are here to protect you as an individual, ok? as a citizen of the state of israel, ok? it's to protect the country, ok? and it doesn't matter what country you live in, ok? whom does it come to protect, and for whose benefit does it come to protect? 79 rotem it came to protect me and for my benefit, but because it's my details, my things, but in the same situation, if, say, a terrorist steals it, it will still protect him, and he still won't be able to steal it, i mean it still protects the majority 80 teacher 2 i will present a case here 81 rotem he still can't get in with it 82 teacher 2 i'll give a case here, ok? i'm sick now, ok? in an international database, it is written that i am sick with some kind of disease. i now want to go visit switzerland. i came to the border crossing. they told me, 'sir, you are sick. you can't visit us. go home’. so now my question is, whose data is stored in an international database, and whom does it protect? does it protect me or the state? i really, really want to visit switzerland now. 83 rotem (it protects) the state and you 84 teacher 1 ok, what do you say tomer? 85 tomer about the *** (inaudible) 86 teacher 1 no, about what came up (in the conversation)? 87 tomer first of all, one is that, it's for good, it's not for good, the good of everyone, including my own personal good, the prevention (of sick people from entering the country) because if it's a disease that can really infect people, it's for the good of the whole, but if it comes *** (inaudible) on the passport, it's for the good of everyone advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a141 88 teacher 2 let's say, my disease is not contagious 89 tomer so there is no reason 90 student like, what kind of disease? 91 teacher 2 diabetes. it is not contagious 92 student so why not let him in? 93 teacher 2 they don't want to let him in. the swiss government is determined that anyone sick with such diseases with this body temperature cannot enter switzerland 94 student but why? 95 teacher 2 i will also say why. they decided they didn't feel like taking care of people. they didn't feel like taking care of people. i did declare that i was coming to travel for a week, but in the end, i'm coming, i'll tell you a secret, i'm coming there for ten years. now, if i'm sick, who should take care of me? the swiss health system. and they say, listen, we don't want to treat a second-class citizen this protocol shows how the epistemic practice of taking a reasoned position in dialogic argumentation fades out to the benefit of integrating knowledge from different disciplines in guided classroom discussion. teacher 2 brings forward what was learned in the philosophy session, rousseau's social contract, and locke's treatises of government to show the tension between the common good and the individual's rights (43). teacher 1's "ah, yes" indicates that she forgot this instruction. however, this invitation to integrate knowledge from the philosophy session is rejected by liat “but i'm not done” (45). teacher 2 respects her will to continue expressing her thoughts without being disturbed (sorry), in (46). we do not show the continuation of the dialogic argumentation among students. turn 60 is a pivot in the discussion as rotem refers to "protective measures". teacher 2 interrupts him to bring to the attention of the other students the issue of protection – "listen to what he has to say. he may say things of interest". in (62), rotem expresses the idea of protection again and adds the idea of privacy, and in (63), teacher 1 interprets the student's turn as "it can help us because it is another means of protection.” in turn (63), teacher 2, who understands that the discussion blurs the boundary between the protection of the individual and society, asks, "protection from whom?". in (67), he modifies his question as "protection for whom,” to which rotem answers in (68), "me.” here, we see a succession of turns in which teacher 2, who failed at explicitly integrating what was learned in the philosophy class in (42), does so implicitly (67). indeed, the students implicitly express philosophical ideas they learned in the philosophy session without the help of the teachers. as for the ideas of theft of identity, protection, and privacy, they are alluded to by the students. the teachers only help articulate them as a tension between the individual and society, an idea introduced in the philosophy session but could be integrated into the network only when it became relevant in the flow of the discussion. the instruction to integrate knowledge learned in the philosophy session is an omnipresent non-human actor as it directs teacher 2's actions: in (78), he states, "to protect you as an individual, or to protect the country?". however, teacher 2 gradually focuses more often and in longer turns and becomes the dominant actor as he changes the topic of discussion according to his interpretation of the instructions. when doing so, he puts aside the dominant epistemic practice of taking a reasoned position in dialogic argumentation by enacting a guided discussion in which he is the center. in 82, he alludes to an international database and asks, "whom does it protect? does it protect me or the state?". when asked why the good of the state advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a142 is not necessarily the good for all (in 87 and 94), teacher 2 declares, "they [the state] decided they didn't feel like taking care of people […] and they say, listen, we don't want to treat a second-class citizen". we see that the integration of disciplinary knowledge in the isd is led by teacher 2 in a network that stopped being dialogic, as he dominates the other actors. the arrangement and dynamics within a network affect the flow of information, ideas, and students' agency. at the beginning of the discussion, the students created arguments when they were involved in dialogic argumentation. yet, they did not explicitly incorporate disciplinary knowledge from previous networks spontaneously. teacher 2 seems obligated to achieve this goal. he presents a case and series of questions that aim at leading students to incorporate disciplinary knowledge (88,91,93,98). however, when doing so, he becomes the main focus, the source of knowledge dissolves the dialogic network, and a teacher-centered discussion emerges. the change in epistemic practice from taking a reasoned (disciplinary) position to integrating knowledge from different disciplines is accompanied by a change of network – from dialogic to monologic, in which actors (humans and non-humans) are different, as well as the source of knowledge. this example demonstrates similar interactions and epistemic practices as in the third excerpt (table 4). in both examples, in small-group activity and classroom discussion, the contradicting instructions function as immutable mobiles: the instructions were created in a previous network, the circumstances of their creation were forgotten, and now they exert power and shape the interaction in other networks. the instructions function as actants that dissolve a dialogic network. the dynamics hinder the original educational goal of promoting students' argumentation toward expressing reasoned positions. this example demonstrates that teachers' roles are not given in advance; they are translated in certain interactions with human and non-human actors. at the begging of the discussion, teacher 1 facilitates the discussion among students and enables them to create and challenge arguments. at the end of the discussion, teacher 2 is a source of knowledge who tries to lead the students to a pre-given conclusion. their roles emerge in the complex interactions between humans (students, other teachers) and non-human actors (multiple instructions). their roles also change the dynamic and epistemic practices in the network. discussion this research aimed at identifying advancements in epistemic practices in the classroom and small group discussions around interdisciplinary societal dilemmas. we asked which epistemic practices are advanced in such a program and aimed to recognize how these practices are deployed in time. we identified four main practices: (1) taking a reasoned position, (2) integrating knowledge from different disciplines, (3) weighing the pros and cons before taking a complex position, and (4) role playing in a democratic game. we claim that the emergence of these practices was afforded by a program designed for promoting interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation around isds. indeed, students expressed reasoned positions and preceded their expression by weighing the issues at stake in the resolution of isds (see second story, table 7). the explicit integration of knowledge from different disciplines demanded concerted efforts from the teacher, but implicit integration could be detected. the social construction of knowledge happened in small groups of students whose agency was high, although the presence of the teacher sometimes inhibited the co-construction of knowledge (first story, table 5; second story, table 8). role-playing was not achieved to pursue interests and aims that corresponded to the roles assigned. instead, students played roles by considering the interests and aims of other players with other roles – by participating in a democratic game (see second story, table 7). as for the second part of the research question, how these practices were deployed in time, we would suggest advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a143 first factors contributing to the enactment of these epistemic practices and their advancement, then specific interactions that were somehow unpredictable. we claim that the factors responsible for this success are twofold: the contents of the program – the interdisciplinary societal dilemmas (isds), and the program's design. isds are similar to socio scientific dilemmas (ssis). the issues they raise are relevant to society and involve the consideration of many perspectives. however, in contrast with ssis, which are tools for advancing engagement and knowledge in science (sadler, 2009), isds are not aimed at advancing any knowledge domain but at engaging young citizens in real problems whose scope is societal (schwarz et al., submitted). the interdisciplinarity of isds stems from the complexity of real-world problems. we suggest that this authenticity confers to isds the potentiality to raise the desire to know because knowing in the case of isds is useful and has an ethical dimension. the program we developed focused on the isds. it relied on a principled design aimed at affording interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation. these principles, which are partly theory-laden and partly rely on empirical studies, are documented elsewhere (koichu et al., 2022; schwarz et al., submitted). they demanded enormous efforts at multiple levels (curricular, organizational, and institutional). without such a design, the program could not have been implemented. that being said, the gap between the design for argumentation and the talk induced by this design is generally wider than for the design of other educational practices because dialogic argumentation leaves much freedom to participants (schwarz & baker, 2016). to a large extent, this gap was analyzed based on concepts of ant. ant helped describe unpredictable interactions that deployed in classrooms. educational practitioners and researchers aspire to develop learning activities that foster specific goals. ant-based analyses exhibit the complex and unexpected links between different actors within a specific network and the relations between different networks. mapping the different actors, human and non-human, and how they interact with each other through time reveals how some of the educational goals are not accomplished and sometimes contradict other goals. a process that otherwise could have remained a 'black box' (latour, 1999) was disassembled into its various components and thus uncovered the ways teachers and students interpret and navigate around the various goals that create tensions in enacting epistemic practices. for example, we found that the designers' goal to enable discussions among students about inserting dna information into biometric passports led the teacher to interpret her role as a facilitator of yes/no one-sided reasoned positions (third story, table 10). this interpretation hindered the goal of the students – to weigh the issues at stake for this isd seriously before expressing their reasoned position. it seems that the teacher preferred certain positions, which can hinder conceptual development and sophisticated argumentation. this phenomenon resonates with research done by chen and colleagues (chen et al., 2019; chen, 2020; chen & qiao, 2020). also, the way the teacher interpreted the goal of the residents in the exploitation of open spaces in the development of a city for creating parks (in the third example) hindered the students' pursuit of the interest to balance between lodging needs and leaving room for domesticated nature (first story, table 3). this phenomenon could be described through the kinds of networks that developed – some being dialogic and some not. the dialogic networks – those in which human actors were not subjugated to other actors (human and non-human) were frequent. in those networks, students expressed reasoned arguments and interacted with each other in what seemed to be dialogical argumentation. we saw that such dialogic networks often disappeared when the teachers intervened and imposed instructions on them (according to their interpretations) or their position on the isd. nevertheless, we saw that the teachers often translated their role from instructors as knowledge transmitters to facilitators and vice-versa. advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a144 ant could then discern between dialogic and non-dialogic networks and roles played by actors: students' and teachers' roles were re-translated in the shift between dialogic to monologic networks. in the dialogic networks, the teachers functioned as facilitators and students as knowledge constructors. in the monologic networks, the teachers' role was translated into the primary source of knowledge. sometimes the shift from a dialogic to a non-dialogic network was so abrupt that immediately after the teachers left, the dialogic network continued from where it last stopped without affecting the dialogue. more generally, the ant methodology helped map actors' agency in all networks created. students or teachers had no predefined roles. actors manifested themselves through interaction with other actors. students could act as knowledge constructors or educational designers in enacting the epistemic practice. or they sometimes were absorbers of knowledge when the teacher acted as the primary source of knowledge. by using ant methodology, we showed the significant role of actants, non-human actors, in deploying networks: tables, instructions, texts, etc. these actants often exerted their power on the teacher, who took care of the fulfillment of the requested task at the expense of the needs of the students. that is, the agency of these actants was revealed as affecting both the teaching and learning processes and teacher-student relationships. we saw the role of immutable mobiles that emigrated from one activity to the other, from one network to the other, and from one session to the other. the protocols we presented exhibited several instances of dialogic and non-dialogic argumentation. concerning interdisciplinarity – the third vertex of the design to afford interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation, we saw that it hardly happened. when it happened, it was not dialogic: the network deployed when the teacher on the first focus day instigated the use of insights from the philosophy session showed how the teachers imposed on the students the integration of knowledge from another discipline. we saw traces of this type of intervention in a network that was at the boundary between the dialogic and the non-dialogic. however, in general, interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation did not happen. in this paper, we could not show this general claim, but in another publication (schwarz et al., submitted), we provide a systematic description of the interdisciplinary sessions in all focus days and show that the autonomous integration of knowledge from different disciplines was not reached. in spite of the difficulty to integrate knowledge from different disciplines, we could say that, all in all, the discourse deployed in the focus days showed the remarkable agency of the students most of the time. although we did not expound on the design principles here, we could say that we cultivated two-sided argumentation in our design tasks. it was not difficult in the case of isds, which presented many opportunities for the emergence of conflicting arguments. two-sided argumentation is essential to develop students' reasoning and promote civic and democratic discussions. nussbaum (2008) showed how learning tools facilitate students' ability to incorporate arguments and counterarguments in opinion essays. although such diagrams are not presented in the examples we showed, we often used diagrams like his. our insights offer an educational design that facilitates students' two-sided argumentation in classroom dialogue. as public discussion has become more polarized in recent years, some educational institutions still cultivate one-sided eristic argumentation that hinders students' participation in democratic civic discussions (tsemach & zohar, 2020). our carefully crafted program proved that students could engage in civic discussions where different voices are taken into account and reach a compromise, a goal articulated by theorists (cohen, 2020; walton et al., 2008), but whose instantiation has not been evidenced so far. while the educational design was not fully successful in affording the integration of students’ knowledge, it was very successful for the three other epistemic practices we listed above: taking reasoned position, weighing pros and cons before expressing a complex position argument and playing a role in a democratic game. for example, including role-playing in a democratic game where students were required to consider other stakeholders, persuade them and reach an agreement. this design yielded two-sided argumentation as students offered creative out-of-the-box solutions that answered the interests of different advancing group epistemic practices in the resolution of interdisciplinary societal dilemmas ehud tsemach, baruch schwarz, mirit israeli, omer keynan dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.551 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a145 parties. sometimes, the students who represented entrepreneurs acted as activity designers when they challenged the game rules, as in the example when one of the students rejected dividing the land into 100% rights for building and other causes. instead, he offered to build multiple-story buildings, which freed more land for parks and open spaces. the ant analysis also traced how the teacher ignored this solution in a small group activity when it did not align with the teacher's educational goals. then in the last activity, it was embraced and used by the teacher because it served her needs. in a brief review of research on epistemology in the learning sciences, we have stressed that research on epistemology as a social practice is a burgeoning direction besides the personal and disciplinary perspectives. in light of our use of ant to analyze talk around the resolution of isds, we claim that ant is a forceful methodology for studying the advancement of epistemic practices in classroom talk. since it holistically reveals a variety of elements involved in creating dialogic and non-dialogical networks. therefore, it seems that the advantages of this method are in highlighting the conditions through which it is possible to enable and create dialogic learning environments and avoid dialogue barriers. our success in advancing epistemic practices in solving isds through dialogic argumentation has educational implications. beyond applying the design principles for elaborating programs around isds, we believe that the ant methodology, which was adopted for research goals, may have educational repercussions. introducing teachers to the basic concepts of ant, together with authentic examples, can help them better interpret learning situations and make better choices in practice to achieve their pedagogical goals. exposing teachers to the idea that different actors interact in isds activities – human and non-human, is not far-fetched. this is especially important in an era of technological developments in education. more so, bringing teachers’ attention to the agency of these actors is an accessible idea. in general, the more teachers and students are aware of the actors involved in creating (the networks of) the learning processes, the more they can choose how to participate and learn together. moreover, conveying the idea that when interacting with their students while engaging in isds, they form networks, some being dialogic and some not, is an idea that can easily be grasped. more research is needed to explore how isds provide opportunities for educational design, interdisciplinary dialogic argumentation, and 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(2019). introduction: research on dialogic education. in n. mercer, r. wegerif and l. major (eds.), the routledge international handbook on dialogic education (pp. 1-10). london. routledge. wegerif, r., mercer, n., & major, l. (2019). introduction to the routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education. in the routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education (pp. 1–8). routledge. wickman, p.-o. (2002). induction as an empirical problem: how students generalize during practical work. international journal of science education, 24(5), 465–486. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 1. azzari^j (layout)^j a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a very special issue^j 2023-01-15.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a1 a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari pontifical catholic university of campinas, brazil abstract this introductory article to the special issue “dialogic pedagogy and democratic education” aims to reflect upon the process of putting this special issue together and to pinpoint some of the most relevant aspects of the articles collected within the issue. therefore, reverberating one of the editors’ perspectives, not only is this paper meant to introduce the dpj readers to the texts compiled in the volume, as well as it is dedicated to giving you, dear reader, a glimpse of the journey taken by the editors and authors. it also tries and situates the issue in its social and historic chronotope to justify the ever-so-present appeal to reinforce, advocate and share theoretical discussions as well as practical accounts which focus on dialogic and democratic educational efforts – both distant and more recent events – that took place in different contexts, and different parts in the world. it's claimed that the several accounts and discussions highlighted in the papers in this special issue provide dpj readers with both hints and strong, factual proposals which might foster new ideas and further actions by those who want to consider dialogic/democratic education either as an end or/and as an act of/for social transformation. keywords: dialogic pedagogy, democracy, dialogism, heteroglossia, social transformation. eliane fernandes azzari has a ph.d. in applied linguistics (language and education). she is a full professor and researcher at the postgraduate program in languages, media, and art at the pontifical catholic university of campinas, brazil. ïïò opening words as i embrace the task of writing an introductory paper to our special issue, i feel compelled to warn the dpj readers that i do not mean to render a stereotypical editorial text per se. instead, my editorial is meant to be a particular version that aims to portray a dialogued “reading” of the whole process of coediting this issue with my dear colleague, ana marjanovic-shane, both a co-editor and an author of several articles in this issue1. the first steps towards preparing a special issue on dialogic pedagogy and democratic education were taken late in 2018, and the first proposals for developing papers started coming in february 2019. it has been a four-year-long journey throughout a bumpy path. some proposals had to be turned down along the way, and accepted manuscripts were often (re)written and revised several times. nonetheless, the journey was filled with many honest discussions and rewarding exchanges, which resulted in meaningful 1 i want to express my gratitude to ana who has been a great colleague, a mentor of sorts, and a good sport who put up with the difficult times i faced in the past three years. without her partnership, experience, and patience, this paper wouldn’t have come to terms. issn: 2325-3290 (online) a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a2 learning for all of us who took part in it. a chronotopic experience of sorts in which dialogic relations unbridled genuine meaning-making processes. since the very beginning of 2019, ana and i have tried to pragmatically work through the ins and outs of organizing this issue. indeed, it has been a conjoint effort to keep the whole process as democratic as the education we advocate. from the initial readings of the proposed papers to the blind peer-review stage – and the consequent feedback it was designated to provide the contributing authors with – ana and i have made extra efforts to give writers plenty of opportunities to revise and rewrite their manuscripts by keeping up a truthful and constant interlocution with authors and reviewers. as editors who were directly responsible for leading those stages, ana and i have made a conscious decision to favor quality in lieu of quantity, which has (fortunately) resulted in the compilation we are finally ready to present you with. accordingly, i’d like to register ana marjanovic-shane’s words: <<ana, 2022-12-03: for me, this was both an authorial decision and an editorial decision. in other words, i was looking to make my own manuscripts more critical and more grounded, standing up to my peers' real and potential critical comments and taking the reviews as serious challenges to be clearer, more precise, and base my views on carefully considered evidence.>> during such processes, we opted to put a premium on the relevance and possible contributions of each paper submitted to this call. for starters, we took into consideration each submission which provided us with a proposal that was conducive to good discussions, as we offered the authors an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue with the editors and the reviewers. therefore, it took us a bit longer to reach the point where each manuscript was finally prepared to be edited, as the contributing authors were given plenty of time (within a reasonable frame) to rework their papers according to each insightful feedback they received from our dedicated reviewers. in some cases, it took more than two review rounds for papers to be fully revised and finally considered ready. on a personal level, i must confess that getting involved with the whole editing process of this issue was a rewarding experience and that i am truly grateful i could be a part of it. i honestly believe that one must “do as they preach,” so it does make much sense to me that we carried on a democratic reviewing and editing process to publish an issue that has democracy at the core of the discussions we want to incite. on that note, i’m confident that, over the several years i’ve been a part of the dpj reviewing and editing team, i’ve felt really blessed to share professional experiences with reputable scholars from different parts of the world who truly engage in a decent, dialogically driven way of working in the academy. for those who have been in the academic career route for a while, it is no secret that it might be a cruel world and that getting your paper published by a serious non-profitable journal can be a rough task. my experience as a volunteer member of the dpj’s team has proved to me that, in fact, it is possible for us scholars to build up a new kind of academy where excellent work, high-level scientific research, collegiality, and empathy can coexist. all it takes is for us to try and keep genuine dialogue amongst the participants involved in it, while we also bear in mind that reviewers and editors are not gods who are sat on a throne at the olympus from which they produce their reviews. having said that, i wish to express how grateful ana and i are for those who bore with us during such a long journey; the esteemed authors who contributed with their articles to this volume, as well as the kind colleagues, members of the dpj, who dedicated their time to present us all with thoughtful, wellinformed, and insightful reviews. my sincere gratitude to all of them who kept their faith in our editing ways. indeed, after the whole prospecting, selecting, assembling, and deeply reviewing processes we’ve driven, a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a3 i can affirm that we were able to build a trust circle permeated by polite and genuinely respectful collaborative work with results we are finally glad to share with all the dpj community. in the following paragraphs, i present my attempt at situating this special volume in (some of) its sociocultural and historical contexts. situating the special issue in contemporary sociocultural and historical contexts as a brazilian educator and scholar editing this issue, i could not exempt myself from mentioning paulo freire’s contributions to the makings of democratic education, one he proposed as central to building up social transformation, critically oriented citizenship, agency, and autonomy. in fact, as he so well put it many decades ago, our struggles for the democratization (of both society and education) might rest on a sort of shared “democratic inexperience” (freire, 1998b, pp. 29-30). i think such inexperience has been sustained as a dark product of the (neo)capitalist world, in which schools (as many other social institutions and practices) have somehow hindered students’ creativity and agency. from my point of view, democratic and dialogic approaches to education hold a key role in moving society from such a lack of experience, that is, in providing kids with opportunities to “become” in the world. correspondingly, in an interview with ana marjanovic-shane, presented in “freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school” (this issue), jim rietmulder comments on his experience with democratic education and affirms that “it's (…) also healthy for kids to have plenty of experience out in the world. and the school's job, as we saw it then and still do now, is to help with that latter piece, giving kids experience being apart from home and family” (rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023, p. a24) bearing those ideas in mind, i deem it crucial to establish the sociocultural standpoint i speak from. on the verge of coming to the last legs of the year 2022, i must acknowledge that attempts at instilling democratic education are still few and sparse in my country, which then again might reinforce freire’s claims of our democratic inexperience. the thing is, although i’ve been teaching since 1986, working with the ins and outs of democratic education is a first for me. as a matter of fact, back in the late 80s, when i started working in a school, brazil was riding the last years of a military dictatorship. i remember holding the first conversation about democratic education with my colleague ana marjanovic-shane in 2019. she was drawing a scholarship proposal and searching for democratic schools around the world to visit. i told her, “ana, i’d love to have you over here, but unfortunately, democratic education is not really ‘on point’ nowadays in my country.” later in 2022, ana kindly reminded me that <<ana, 2022-12-03: (…) democratic schooling is also rare in the rest of the world. although there are democratic schools in many countries, their numbers are so small that they are practically unknown not only to the public in general but to most educators, too.>> after my experience editing this issue, i feel i must agree with ana’s words. however, no matter how global the problem is, i am still more comfortable tackling it by taking into consideration my own local context. what i mean is that although a lack of democratic educational programs is a global fact, i can better speak about it from my local point of view. having said that, let me state my point: how can one advocate (truly) democratic education in a country where the very concept of “democracy” still seems to be a blur? to build my case, i’m going to refer to recent developments following the presidential elections in brazil. as i see it, they are proof that, as a society, we might really be toddlers who still have a long way to learn what living in a democracy entail. the “developments” i’m referring to concern a group of brazilians, who are usually self-addressed as “patriots and good citizens,” that have played the lead in feeble acts a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a4 against the election results. such acts are stunted attempts to put our democracy at risk. they are a group of supporters of the far-right candidate who recently lost the election for a second run at the presidential office. those self-proclaimed “patriots” started riots in which they stood in front of military bases in the main capital cities all over the country, holding posters in which they called for “military intervention” in the name of defending “democracy and freedom.” without any legal or fair complaints concerning the election results whatsoever, they built up a ploy that has also been fed by them on social media. they use their personal profiles to post their unacceptance of a legitimate and notarized election result marking their position by simultaneously using the hashtags: “intervenção” ([military] intervention), “democracia” (democracy), “pela liberdade” (in the name of freedom) and “todo o poder emana do povo” (all power comes from the people). i believe that one does not need to be a scholar who has been dealing with language matters for decades to conclude that, besides the ultraconservative and far-right discourses underlining the aforementioned utterances, the words categorized by such hashtags blur the difference between “military intervention” and “freedom and people’s power,” in the name of “democracy.” from my point of view, it materializes a clear paradoxical understanding of what democracy (and thus, a democratic society) might mean2 –especially if we take into consideration that getting direct elections for presidency was a huge democratic step taken by our society after years of military governance. it’s also possible to denote such acts in brazil as (political) copycats of the aftermaths of the last presidential elections in the united states of america, in 2020. all in all, in the last decade or so, a worldwide spread of far-right ideas has weakened democracy in educational contexts in several countries, thus hindering attempts at democratic education. unfortunately, it has had some of its nefarious effects bestowed upon brazil as well, where the conservative turn was (sadly) noted for detrimental choices in governmental decisions that have severely affected education in general – and opportunities for democratic and dialogic education by default. let me try and explain. firstly, it’s important to notice that the liberal ideology underpinning far-right economic decisions that led to reduced investments (or a lack thereof) in brazilian education in the past four years has been sustained by the idea that public schools should become private matters. one of the nefarious results of some of the many destructive federal governments’ (in)decisions taken in terms of budgeting education, for instance, left kids with little or no food supply for the preparation of meals (which were meant to be distributed during school hours), in several public schools around the country. sadly enough, many of those students live in extremely poor social contexts. thus, they’re used to counting on school meals as their daily nutritional source. dialogically and democratically speaking, those kids who were affected by such actions have been pried from what jim rietmulder (in this issue), established as a role of schools: to have a “healthy experience out in the world.” conversely, a hungry kid at school would hardly ever be assigned the right to have access to “the democratic education paradigm,” as eugene matusov defines it in the manuscript “democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy” (this issue). according to matusov, democratic education “requires an educator’s full faith that their students are the final authority for and authorial agency of their own education and life” (matusov, 2023a, p. a57) quite a hard task to achieve with empty bellies, right? to add injury to insult, amidst the consequences of the far-right political turn, brazilian educators have been subjected to a bizarre undertaking: the wide (and wild) spread of retrograde ideas advocated by ultraconservative groups that tag schools/universities as places where students are submitted to 2 to learn more about the political ploys that underlie current manifestations against the legitimate presidential election results in brazil, you might want to check out the following news articles: https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/protesters-shut-brazil-highways-police1.6638703, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-63739057. a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a5 “ideological brainwashing,” and that deem teachers as “lazy” and “improper leftists.” sadly, in the early days of 2019, the powers-to-be did use (digital) media broadcasts to instigate learners to “videorecord” any teacher’s attempts at “indoctrination”3 if they’d felt submitted to it. from my point of view, it certainly poses a hard challenge for democratic education practitioners to work with: the paradox of dealing with such ultraconservative notions that stimulate contemporary versions of witch hunts in schools, while also advocating an education that “requires an educator’s full faith that their students are the final authority for and the authorial agency of their own education and life,” as matusov states. the bottom question might be how to deal/break with whatever local political discourses are underpinning narratives in social ecologies when voicing for or against certain pedagogies. driving from allan luke’s proposals about narratives and the educational policy (luke, 2019, p. 96), i find it important to discuss the matter because “as narratives, all policies state or imply specific problems, anomalies or challenges.” in the face of the aforementioned events, as a higher education professor (acting in both undergraduate and graduate programs during such a daring period) myself, i must say that i felt highly insecure in dealing with the challenge of keeping up a critical and dialogic pedagogy approach, whilst being scared of the potential threat posed by each students’ mobile phones and their cameras, and the flimsy possibility of being “exposed” by something i might have said in my lessons – which could have been taken as “indoctrination” (whatever ultraconservative citizens might mean by it). in such a turmoil, while paulo freire’s critical pedagogy proposals are still highly appraised and referred to by several reputable academic researchers all over the world, in brazil, his work and ideas have been counterposed, “canceled,” negated, and disregarded in the last four years by supporters of a movement entitled “escola sem partido” – usually translated as “nonpartisan schools” (see knijnik, 2021). roughly speaking, it’s a conservative movement supported by people who are driven by the concept of a “neutral” type of education – as if language, discourse (and, therefore, any sociocultural artifacts and events) could ever be non-ideological. as i see it, such a highly unrealistic and idealized way of portraying educational practices deeply contradicts the inherited plural and diverse nature of languages and cultures. grounded on bakhtinian discussions, i assume that we are all social subjects who – whether we are aware of it or not – share a consciousness of our own class and of our social location that permeate our self-consciousness. therefore, instead of undertaking normalizing, homogenized, and parameterized epistemologies like the one advertised by the followers of nonpartisan schools, i believe that democratic education allows students to operate under premises that provide them with plenty of opportunities to become aware of what bakhtin called “heteroglossia” – i.e., the existence of the plurality of views, the plurality of topics, the plurality of values and aims – given that, (…) oppositions between individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social heteroglossia [pluralism], surface manifestations of those elements that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradictory, saturate their consciousness and discourses with a more fundamental speech diversity (bakhtin, 1991, p. 326). from my point of view, the origins of a successful democracy lie in how ready (a certain) society is to face and deal with diversity and plurality, as well as to allow citizens to exercise their agency. as i mentioned before, far from being a “walk in the park,” adopting such a perspective on education demands a lot from all the actors involved in it. for instance, a student who’s being brought up under the wings of an ultraconservative family might find it hard to engage in “discursive interactions” (bakhtin, 1986) with 3 to know more about, you might want to check the articles available from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/brazilschools-teachers-indoctrination-jair-bolsonaro. a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a6 someone who comes from a progressive upbringing and vice-versa. in the end, it all comes down to how willing the teachers are to deal with such challenges in dialogue within school boundaries. all in all, i believe that the key to the implementation of heteroglossia-friendly schooling might rest in the idea that we should not merely try to standardize and homogenize educational practices. much on the contrary, it is important to prioritize local classroom ecologies as well as to vouch for educational processes in which “(…) comparison, repetition, observation, indomitable doubt, and curiosity [are] not easily satisfied,” i.e., ones that promote “autonomy” – in the critical sense it was proposed by (freire, 1998a, p. 32). when confronted by the self-other interactions, and when one truly engages in dialogue (i.e., openness to difference), alterity is experienced. here, i address alterity from a bakhtinian perspective, considering bakhtin and his circle’s ideas about “exotopy” as a much-needed exercise from crossing cultural boundaries that has the potential to expand teachers’, learners,’ and parents’ views by leading them to assume an “extra-position” (bakhtin, 1986). alterity stems from the encounter of/with a myriad of different opinions and ideas – which does not mean those involved in it have necessarily to change their minds and agree with the other as a result of dialogue (in or outside school limits). otherwise, instead of letting us go into the deep of plurality, the whole purpose of dialogue would be reduced to some sort of argumentation practice destined to “convince” people, turn heads, and homogenize social contexts from a certain dominant point of view. therefore, dialogue is essentially an exercise in which we deal with different, plural, ambiguous perspectives, and – provided that no illegal, personal or collective ill-meaning/harmful acts result from it – we do not need to “agree to disagree,” but we can just disagree and live (healthily) with it. i trust that it is by assuming positions in discursive interactions that students, teachers, and any other actors involved in education might engage in real dialogue – given that each part engrossed in it respects the right of other people to do so – so that we are moved to exercise exotopy, i.e., looking at ourselves from the eyes of the others, from a place that, while only settled in our own shoes, we will otherwise never be able to occupy. then, it is all intrinsically related to (living in) heteroglossia. consequently, alterity surfaces when one acknowledges that there are several (diverse and not always congruent) ways of making meaning(s) out of what it is “to be” and “to be located” in the world. bakhtin (bakhtin, 1991, p. 414) pinpoints the “languages of heteroglossia” to compare them to “mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its way a piece, a tiny corner of the world.” resembling a mosaic rather than a full reflected picture, each part is necessary as they force us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-leveled, containing more and varied horizons than would be available to a single language mirror (bakhtin, 1991, pp. 414-415). therefore, not only do we need to acknowledge heteroglossia in educational environments but also, we must fight for our rights to live (in) it. but why is it a core notion? drawing from bakhtin’s assumptions towards dialogic relations (1999), azzari, amarante, and andrade (2020) affirm that subjects “become” when they engage in sociocultural practices, thus generating “acts” in which they answer to the word of others. in those instances, dialogic relations “[...] must clothe themselves in discourse, become utterances, become the positions of various subjects expressed in discourse [...]” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 183). this is a fundamental idea deeply acknowledged in dialogic and democratic approaches to education that is more extensively discussed in the other manuscripts in this special issue (e.g., see kullenberg & marjanovic-shane, 2023; rietmulder & marjanovic-shane, 2023). a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a7 a dialogued and dialogic pedagogy might also shed light on educational contexts permeated by violence/violent acts, as armando marino discusses in “overcoming violence through a democratic and dialogical process” (2023, this issue). marino reports his experience with dialogic and democratic education as a powerful means to deal with group relations in a project conducted with a non-governmental organization that meant to “(…) transform the power and individualistic domination of the ngo’s teachers, coordinators or founders into shared power relationships established through democratic and dialogical processes” (marino filho, 2023, p. a261). however, in his paper, marino offers an important critical analysis of his experience. he affirms that “to work with a dialectical and dialogical process is not to inhabit a world of security, certainty, and stability” (marino filho, 2023, p. a282). adding to the idea of the importance of experiencing otherness, marino acknowledges that transformations rarely occur as planned and that rather than being connected to the type of knowledge the teachers intend to guide students through, it “(…) happens because values emanate from personally constituted and changeable conditions. thus, consciousness arises through the transformation of one’s own identity and otherness since people do not only get to know themselves but also get to re-know each other” (marino filho, 2023, p. a282). however, and undoubtfully, it’s also a huge challenge for the teachers inclined to deal with it. in “promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university: teacher as a benevolent dictator,” (matusov, 2023b, this issue) poses the “problem of a teacher as a benevolent dictator in democratic dialogic education.” the scholar draws his idea from his own shot at running democratic classes in which he fostered students’ engagement in decision-making processes about their own education. one important conclusion matusov draws from his experience is that students who often come from authoritarian, conventional education struggle with concepts such as “democracy,” “dialogue,” and “self-education.” as the scholar affirms, it’s also a matter of being “culturally unfamiliar” with a less centralized and “defensive culture.” therefore, dialogue is essential for education. as freire states, it is a “human phenomenon” of which “the word” is the essence (freire, 2005, pp. 87-88). it is also the way in which we transform the world because “to exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it.” to perform such change, educators, students, families, and the government need to take sides (to acknowledge their “party”), i.e., to become aware of their own responsibility and answerability that are inherent in each utterance in every single “act” in which we “become” in the world (bakhtin, 1993). praxis oriented by a dialogic pedagogy and dedicated to democratic education can promote safe and healthy environments for those “acts” to happen within educational contexts. accordingly, dialogue is also portrayed as a central construct in the discussion presented by marjanovicshane, kullenberg & gradovski in their paper “scandinavian experiments in democratic education” (marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023, this issue). the manuscript is the first in a series of four4 destined to explore the “first democratic schools founded by teenage students in norway and sweden” and is dedicated to expanding the discussion about the “complex between democracy in education and educational dialogism.” the authors focus on “ethical-ontological dialogues” to explore how the students evaluated “their relationships with the world, with others, and their selves.” after facing such a challenge, the authors conclude that there was a clash between collective and individual rights concerning a democratic (equal rights) decision-making process and the assurance of students’ personal academic rights. according to the researchers, teachers’ and students’ academic ownerships were at stake, and several issues concerning it were raised by assuring “ethical-ontological dialogues,” i.e., “dialogue that 4 see also the other three papers by ana marjanovic-shane in the series: “a soul-searching assembling – a vignette,” “four personideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse” and “a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting,” this issue. a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a8 critically and creatively deliberates and deconstructs topics of its focus” (marjanovic-shane et al., 2023, p. a99, this issue). finally, i’d like to emphasize that, as i already mentioned before, dealing with a dialogic and democratic education is neither easy nor simple. as matusov (previously mentioned in this paper) addresses it, there are cultural aspects at stake, such as academic and educational inherited cultures that might foster a sense of unfamiliarity with the concepts of dialogue and democracy to students participating in educational processes dedicated to promoting their ownership of their own education. accordingly, in “from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education,” mosse jørgensen (jørgensen, 2023, translated, this issue) asserts that “freedom is a lonely state of mind” and that when first involved in democratic education students had “to find their own way from an imposed discipline where others decided everything to self-discipline that is born in interpersonal relations and communication” (jørgensen, 2023, p. a136) consequently, it’s clear that dialogue, living in heteroglossia, and otherness are key elements for a dialogic and democratic education. conclusions in the current paper, i’ve tried to weave some of the main concepts, ideas, and constructs that permeate the discussions presented in the other eleven manuscripts collected in this volume. the papers gathered in this special issue offer theoretic insights and highlights of events from both a distant and a more recent past in which subjects engage in “acts” concerning dialogic pedagogy and/or democratic education, as i’ve briefly mentioned here. first and foremost, i made a point to say that i was not writing this introduction to merely inform you about the main topics focused on each paper of this issue, as it would usually be done, although i’ve (hopefully) managed to include some teasers. anyway, i’d like to advise you to keep an eye (and your mind) open for the several opportunities in which you, as a reader, might be incited by the different authors to reflect upon your own experiences – especially when you read about the educational practices that they describe as their own and by the ways in which they reported that they engaged (or not) in dialogue with their own students. as editors, ana and i have organized this issue by establishing what we thought would be a solid reading sequence for our readers to follow, so i’d like to invite you to give it a try. the rationale for organizing the sequence in our special issue was based on starting with in-depth descriptions and interpretations of democratic education, then moving toward examining various issues and tensions in establishing a public democratic school in an educational system that otherwise promotes conventional authoritarian education, and finally dealing with particular issues of ethical, ontological relationships in democracy and dialogue. therefore, we’ve devised the following reading flow. after going through this foreword, the insightful interview jim rietmulder gave to ana about his experiences with opportunities for dialogic pedagogy in a democratic school. then, you might want to read matusov’s discussion about duberman’s innovative pedagogy. after that, we believe it could be a good idea to get through the discussion about “scandinavian experiments in democratic education.” moving on, you might want to dedicate some time to reading the translation of jørgensen’s “from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education.” then, you might read tina kullenberg’s take on democratic education and dialogic pedagogy. after that, we recommend you get comfortable and embark on a trip down memory lane in a sequence of three papers written by ana marjanovic-shane concerning a soul-searching assembly that ends up with a conceptual analysis of the assembly meeting. in his paper on the teacher as a benevolent dictator in democratic education, matusov returns to the tensions between the cultures of autocratic and democratic education in the relationships between the teacher and the students in higher education. next, a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a9 you should guarantee some time to check armando marino’s reflective account of his experience dealing with dialogic pedagogy in a violent context. last but certainly not least, make sure you read eugene matusov’s concluding chapter, which deals with deeper analytic insights about the relationships between dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. please note that although i’ve just mapped a (possible) reading route for you, based on ana’s and my editorial point of view, you could obviously simply embark on a journey of your own. having said that, i’ve opted to keep this introductory paper as spoiler-free as possible, so whatever way you choose to read the manuscripts gathered in this issue, i sincerely hope you enjoy it! all in all, you are about to be touched by the experiences driven by selected accounts from educational experiences pinpointed and analyzed by those scholars. they recall, describe, and examine events and discourses in which they participated. they write from different educational contexts in south america, north america, and western europe as well. their reports span periods from the late 1960s to the 2020s, which provides a valuable historical dimension to their topics. the way i see it, the ideas assembled in this special issue are potentially strong enough to move us ahead in the direction of the makings of democratic education. amidst other aspects peculiar to such an educational perspective, i would like to think that it might help us promote social justice and beyond. as i see it for many of us, a commitment to social justice has meant that education is not just about the equalization of opportunity in classical liberal social theory, about a hypothetical freedom to compete for unequal outcomes and differential successes, but potentially about the opening up of access to valued forms of cultural practice and knowledge to students from communities that historically had been excluded from capital, status and power (luke, 2019, p. 103). i also tend to agree with luke (2019, p. 50) luke that “(…) the politics of representation and interpretation are complex and local, and classrooms and living rooms are the very sites where contestation and the kind of play that bakhtinians make great stock of are most visibly at work. however, having engaged in a dialogue with ana about it, she posed a different perspective i believe you might want to consider. <<ana, 2022-12-23: i tend to think that all alternative views and perspectives should have a right to be represented and examined in true dialogues, even those with which we deeply disagree. that would include the views and perspectives on what “social justice” can mean. in that sense, i think that true dialogue can't “promote” or “stand for,” nor “stand against” any predetermined value, including “social justice.” this is a specifically touchy topic for many people. still, according to isaiah berlin (berlin, 2006), true freedom also means appreciation of the pluralism of the values and its inevitable implication that there will always exist controversial and conflicting values. for instance, defining “social justice” in terms of “equalizing” and “equality” may be in contradiction to the acknowledgment of the “uniqueness” of every person and their individual rights to differ. this is especially important in education. however, although we can disagree politically and ideologically to the point of wanting to “shut” disagreeable others, for a true dialogue, we have to accept the right of the disagreeable points of view to exist and be taken into consideration. in other words, there should be no taboo for dialogue. what do you think?>> i think that the experiences recalled in/by each manuscript in this issue remain singular and unique acts (bakhtin, 1999). however, i’m also certain that, by reading those narratives, we are led to an exotopic drill of sorts as they urge us, the interlocutors, to reexamine our own contextual realities while we take part in the construction of a chain of past and future utterances (bakhtin, 1991). a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a10 finally, with the best wishes for a joyful ride, i’m delighted to leave you with this rich selection of papers, with hopes that they might be as rewarding for you to read as it was for ana and me to put them together. references azzari, e. f., amarante, m. d. f. s., & andrade, e. r. d. (2020). “it’s true this notte”. dialogic relations and/in discourse in the cyberspace. bakhtiniana, sao paulo, 15(1, jan-mar 2020 ), 7-34. retrieved from https://www.scielo.br/j/bak/a/9vfkx7bt5p8wycstxjrv4sf/?lang=pt bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. university of texas press slavic series; no. 8, xxiii, 177 p. bakhtin, m. m. (1991). the dialogic imagination: four essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act (v. liapunov & m. holquist, trans. 1st ed.). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press berlin, i. (2006). two concepts of liberty. in d. miller (ed.), the liberty reader. (pp. 33-57). boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. freire, p. (1998a). pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage new york: rowman & littlefield. freire, p. (1998b). pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed (a. m. a. freire ed.). new york: continuum. freire, p. (2005). education for critical consciousness. new york: continuum international publishing group. jørgensen, m. (2023). from a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a133-a157. knijnik, j. (2021). to freire or not to freire: educational freedom and the populist right-wing ‘escola sem partido’movement in brazil. british educational research journal, 47(2), 355-371. doi:10.1002/berj.3667 kullenberg, t., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2023). democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a158-a164. luke, a. (2019). educational policy, narrative and discourse: routledge. marino filho, a. (2023). a way to overcome violence through a democratic and dialogical process. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a261-a284. marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & gradovski, m. (2023). scandinavian experiments in democratic education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a158-a164. matusov, e. (2023a). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a49-a92. matusov, e. (2023b). promoting an educational culture of democratic dialogic education: teacher as a benevolent dictator. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a245 a260. a dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue eliane fernandes azzari dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.554 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a11 rietmulder, j., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2023). freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 11(2), a21-a48. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word dialogic teacher inquiry layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a1 dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a preservice teacher learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez university of california, davis, usa steven z. athanases university of california, davis, usa abstract developing knowledge and practice for high-quality k-12 class discussion remains challenging, especially for new teachers juggling other classroom responsibilities. our study reports the case of a preservice teacher learning to lead discussions while enrolled in a teacher education inquiry course, simultaneous with semester-long supervised practice teaching in a seventh-grade class (12-13-year-olds) in a high-poverty urban community. the work is guided by a complex teacher learning process for developing complex practice of facilitating discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school english classes. countering popular approaches to “talk moves” as useful but often generic facilitation practices, the teacher education pedagogical innovation we describe positions teachers as knowledge-generating, agentive professionals. our conceptual framework for teacher learning features dialogic teacher inquiry, with three domains. the first domain involves moving beyond methods texts to dialoguing analytically with and among multiple print, online, and mentor resources for supporting development of a dialogic teaching stance. the second domain intentionally guides new teachers to explore classroom data and consider students as knowledge resources in shaping instruction. the third domain sustains dialogue about discussion processes and evolving conceptions of dialogism in small groups of preservice teacher collectives, enabling sharing of inquiry data, emerging findings, and dilemmas of practice. drawing upon a larger database, we present a case study demonstrating one preservice teacher’s inquiry work with deep analysis of student talk, detailed memoing processes featuring challenges and benefits of developing dialogic teaching practices, thoughtful criticism of long-established discussion practices, and discoveries about nuances of dialogic teaching. our case contributes to the literature by presenting an example of dialogic pedagogy for teacher education, in service of preservice teachers learning to lead classroom discussions. additional innovative pedagogical designs are needed to assist teachers in gaining complex knowledge and practice for teaching and promoting meaningful and learning-rich talk in k-12 classrooms. keywords: dialogic pedagogy; preservice teachers; teacher education; teacher inquiry; classroom talk sergio l. sanchez (ph.d., university of california, davis) is a postdoctoral scholar at uc davis school of education, working in the teachers-as-learners project, funded by the james s. mcdonnell foundation (steven z. athanases, pi). previously, dr. sanchez taught english as a second language (esl) and classroom drama in his native argentina and has recently taught undergraduate and teacher education courses for uc davis school of education. dr. sanchez draws upon his teaching experience for his research on early-career teacher learning to lead class discussions and integrate drama-based pedagogy in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. his research appears in teaching and teacher education, english journal, contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, international journal of education & the arts, research in drama education, journal of literacy research, and arts education policy review journals. issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a2 steven z. athanases (ph.d., stanford university) is a professor in the school of education, university of california, davis. dr. athanases is pi for a teachers-as-learners project, funded by the james s. mcdonnell foundation, focused on preservice teachers learning to facilitate text-based discussions in culturally and linguistically diverse high school english classes. his work has documented multiple pedagogical innovations in teacher education, including partnering with diverse scholars and program graduates teaching in the region. his recent scholarship appeared in teachers college record, teaching and teacher education, journal of teacher education, contemporary issues in technology and teacher education, and equity & excellence in education. dr. athanases also directed the center for shakespeare in diverse classrooms (2018-2021), partnering with globe education, shakespeare’s globe london, reporting new teachers’ classroom drama and inquiry work in research in drama education, international journal of education and the arts, and arts education policy review. acknowledgments research reported in this article was supported by a teachers-as-learners project (steven z. athanases, pi), school of education, university of california, davis, funded by the james s. mcdonnell foundation (grant #220020519). the authors claim no conflict of interest and full responsibility for claims and arguments herein. the article has not been published or submitted elsewhere. ïïò introduction studies document multiple merits of class discussion for student learning. research has associated substantive student engagement in discussion (using authentic questions, uptake for cohesive discourse, high-quality evaluation of responses) with academic achievement, particularly in english language arts (ela) (applebee et al., 2003; juzwik et al., 2013; nystrand & gamoran, 1991), the subject area focus of our study. despite documented values and features, class discussion remains a complex, challenging practice to sustain substantively (sedova, 2021), particularly for early-career teachers. among the challenges of developing effective discussions is the transient nature of talk. discussion typically occurs in a fleeting manner, where a teacher performs some facilitation and may not recall what unfolds for future adjustments without records of what and how talk occurred, who participated, how ideas navigated through discussion. students shape discourse and classroom cultures (ghousseini, 2015), requiring that teachers attend to all voices, especially of students who are increasingly diverse, and often historically marginalized. adding to these concerns is the still-dominant inherited discourse of schooling, with the teacher as an authoritative voice, guiding initiation-response-evaluation (ire) structures (mehan, 1982) often learned by teachers through an apprenticeship of observation (lortie, 1975), with far fewer models of classroom discourse that promote multiple interpretations and student voice (applebee et al., 2003). structural factors also impact teachers’ discussion practice. these include physical constraints of classrooms often shaped by rows of desks facing a teacher, necessitating restructuring of space for faceto-face talk. time constraints also challenge teachers, often compelled by national, school, and departmental standards with expectations for content coverage and for compliance with other accountability measures (stillman, 2011). these constraints may work at cross-purposes with discussion goals that include exploratory talk (barnes, 1992) to try out ideas, especially in ela curricula where multiple interpretations and ambiguities are central to the discipline. teachers wrestle with how much time they can invest in exploratory discussions within contexts that dictate content coverage. finally, teacher education (te) as a context for preparing teachers for complex teaching such as ela discussion seldom includes dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a3 time and human resources to manage such activity. a recent national survey of te programs in the u.s., the site for our study, found that most ela methods classes, sites for development of pedagogical content knowledge (shulman, 1987), at least claim to move past generic “best practices,” to those that support student learning (caughlan et al., 2017). however, given the breadth of standards and curriculum dimensions te programs seek to cover, few programs have opportunities dedicated to preparing teachers to develop effective practices for class discussion. the study we report draws upon a larger project that investigates how new teachers learn about and implement dialogic instruction. that project includes the design of a 10-week teacher inquiry course in a post-baccalaureate te program focused on knowledge and practice for facilitating discussion in culturally and linguistically diverse secondary ela classes. the course enabled the sustained study of class discussion over time, supported by teacher inquiry as systematic, intentional work focused on problems of practice (cochran-smith & lytle, 2009). the focal course also instantiates cohesion between a pedagogical process to be learned for use in k-12 classrooms and the te pedagogical process that guides relevant pst learning. while such integration of k-12 and te is needed for many instructional goals, our project assumes that developing class discussion particularly benefits from such linkages. too often, k-12 teaching and te get dominated by methods and strategies in a lockstep manner (athanases, 2021). in te courses, for example, sometimes little attention is paid to deeper structures and nuances of practices that can help a teacher judiciously choose and adapt activity, with strategies limited to those that preservice teachers (psts) can easily replicate in their classrooms. although rehearsing discussion practice with fellow psts in methods classes has proved valuable for pst learning, we feature psts’ more sustained activity informed by concepts of dialogism. effective teaching is associated with the capacity for instructional adaptations (parsons et al., 2018), which can include micro-adaptations during instruction (corno, 2008) or improvisational responses (sawyer, 2011). our project rests on the assumption that sustained engagement with a breadth of relevant resources, guided by teacher inquiry, may prepare psts to move past static practices to inquiry-informed repertoires of responsive discussion practices. in what follows, we identify several concepts from the literature on dialogism and dialogic teaching that inform the pedagogical design of the focal course within which our study is situated. we then present a case study that unveils the developing knowledge and practices of an english language arts preservice teacher as she strives to facilitate class discussion. background conceptions of dialogism and dialogic instruction while we do not intend an exhaustive treatment of dialogism and dialogic teaching, we highlight definitions and tensions in the literature that inform our work. these elements are important for k-12 dialogic work in ela and inform our te pedagogical design. dialogic instruction often has competing definitions, muddying researchers’ and teachers’ understanding of this pedagogical approach (asterhan et al., 2020; kim & wilkinson, 2019). for some, dialogue and dialogic instruction signal a competency that students must develop to realize themselves as responsible citizens capable of engaging in critical, democratic conversations. this ontological stance highlights dialogue as a process through which students make meaning of their world and their relationships with others in that world (matusov & wegerif, 2014). many other authors, particularly in educational and social sciences research, take a more epistemological approach to define dialogism (e.g., alexander, 2019; juzwik et al., 2013). in this dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a4 interpretation, dialogue and dialogic teaching are central to enriching students’ thinking and learning (kim & wilkinson, 2019; sedova et al., 2014), including, for example, the development of argumentation and a deeper understanding of subject matter (athanases et al., 2020; reznitskaya, 2012), while honoring students’ meaning-making processes (aukerman, 2013). within this epistemological understanding, students defend positions and critically examine those of others. during dialogic participation, students are able to express ideas, often in their own language, supported by prior knowledge, sometimes grounded in home cultures and backgrounds (lefstein, 2010). classroom culture also plays an important role in dialogic classrooms, requiring teachers to create classroom spaces that center open-mindedness, mutual respect, a reduced teacher role, and a place for exploration. in such contexts, the teacher takes a “dialogic stance” to create a classroom space where students and teachers are responsible for continuous, respectful, and shared dialogue (boyd & janickigechoff, 2020; juzwik et al., 2013), focusing more on functions of discourse for learning than on surfacelevel attention to forms (boyd & markarian, 2015). our framing of dialogic pedagogy is largely informed by an epistemological focus on fostering learners’ co-construction of meaning and knowledge. however, such learning opportunities also relate to an ontological perspective. through dialogical engagement with often complex texts, ideas, meaningmaking, and interpretive processes--particularly possible in ela study--learners may reflect on their sense of being in the world and on their own and others’ stories, diverse experiences, understandings, and identities. these potentially expansive discussions of being and identities, in turn, may deepen and add complexity to close text-based sense-making and interpretations. in this way, we view these dialogic perspectives as mutually informing, helping to foster expansive and equitable learning. from recitation to dialogic instruction class discussion remains a valued yet challenging teaching practice that warrants great care. studies across national contexts surface limitations of ire structures, movement beyond monologic engagement, and affordances of dialogic pedagogy for students. a mexico-based study, for example, found students resisted teacher authority reflected in ire, refusing to speak up, indicating disagreement with the teacher’s perspective and control, not resistance to learning (candela, 1998). when teachers have sought to move past monologic structures, changes are evident. in a u.s. classroom, sherry (2019) found that mr. weber – the pst featured in the study – would include ire/non-dialogic practices at times, yet managed to break through the pattern, enabling increased high student engagement and successful classroom talk. similarly, a study in the eastern us reported how a third-grade teacher used forms associated with recitation but still found ways to promote a dialogic stance that functioned to support learning (boyd & markarian, 2015). studies of dialogic engagement have surfaced many benefits for students. a study in chile, for example, found that as dialogic instruction progressed, students shared background knowledge more comfortably, aiding their interpretation of text and ability to build arguments to support opinions; preservice teachers developing such practice needed opportunities to identify relevant features and “approximate practice at a representational level (for example, analyzing cases, videos, transcriptions)” (meneses et al., 2018, p. 121). in a study documenting the consistent use of classroom talk across four canadian classrooms during narrative writing activities, students were willing to take risks more comfortably after engaging in discussions and often negotiated social ideologies based on gender, age, or socioeconomic status (ses) (peterson & calovini, 2004). a study in the czech republic found that when lessons included dialogic instruction, students engaged in asking questions more often and took up others’ replies more regularly; however, the study reported how teachers considered dialogism time-consuming when juggling dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a5 teaching responsibilities (sedova, 2017). nonetheless, sedova added that when teacher development programs combine preparation to lead discussions, enactments of such practices, and teacher reflections aided by videos of their own teaching, dialogic teaching might become part of the teacher’s repertoire. challenges also include managing social dynamics and creating classroom cultures for collaboration. such cultures include norms for safe, equitable participation in small-and large-group structures (cohen et al., 1999) and a climate for exploratory rather than final-draft talk (barnes, 1992). creating these safe spaces--though necessary--can be a daunting endeavor, especially for early-career teachers. this is particularly true in trust-building and treatment of complex topics (reznitskaya et al., 2001), including social issues, identities, and personal values (medina, 2010). this need is heightened when classes are large, heterogeneously grouped, and racially and linguistically diverse. in norway, for example, students in a linguistically diverse class challenged the class status quo by engaging in heated negotiations over social ideologies that often go unchallenged; the study’s author (pastoor, 2004) argued that discussion challenges may arise from teachers’ lack of preparation to work with linguistically diverse students. other sociopolitical issues may arise that teachers feel unprepared to facilitate, including how to navigate conversations about race (rogers et al., 2006) and systemic inequities. as classrooms grow increasingly diverse in terms of race, language, and gender identities, teachers may need to attend more thoughtfully than ever to ways in which texts (often literary works within ela classes) and remarks made by students may need redress related to racialized identities, immigration experiences, and gender and sexuality. if teachers envision equitable participation opportunities, they also need to attend to the supports that emergent bilingual learners (ebs) may require for engaging in public talk in the classroom (de oliveira & athanases, 2017; de oliveira & jones, 2021). supports for ebs may mitigate, for example, self-evaluation of target language proficiency and an anxiety component (edwards & roger, 2015), both of which can impede discussion engagement. in general, psts may find it challenging to move from teacher-centered questions of what and how am i doing, to a focus on students and what and how they are doing in classroom talk. preservice teachers often replicate pursuit-and-recitation of canonical knowledge, a practice that may be acute in a generation of teachers in the united states raised on scripted curricula, accountability regimes, and testing mania dominating instruction (murphy, 2003; wills & sandholtz, 2009). also, resident teachers who host and mentor psts may not possess the knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions to model and support classroom talk that breaks tradition (bieler, 2010) and, at times, may redirect student-centered teaching to mandated curricula and scripts (anderson & stillman, 2010). this may occur especially when communication appears less controlled and seemingly more chaotic (aukerman et al., 2008). attempts to develop teachers’ dialogic instruction in the last two decades, te and professional development projects and programs of research have explored the pursuit of effective discussion practice. examples include sites where psts engaged in approximations of practice (adler et al., 2003/4; kavanagh et al., 2020), pulling apart components of discussion as a “high-leverage practice,” then recomposing it through insights derived from observations, rehearsals, and reflections (e.g., grossman et al., 2009). other studies document teachers learning to notice patterns of engagement through video-clubs featuring teachers leading discussions (sherin et al., 2011), and learning to understand classroom social dynamics by observing videos of themselves leading classroom talk (ghousseini, 2015). other relevant studies feature learning to listen to meanings of students’ silence, including resistance (candela, 1998; schultz, 2009) and learning to leverage students’ cultural and linguistic resources for classroom activity that may include discussion (lee, 2001; martinez et al., 2017). these dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a6 approaches present promising practices for work with psts, a special population learning to facilitate discussion while immersed in countless demanding new tasks. although varied in context, needs, and processes, programs can develop te learning designs that approach “alignment amid variation” (alston et al., 2018), serving teacher learning and te as a field. for programs and the psts they serve, diverse innovations illuminate opportunities where knowledge (in this case, of facilitating discussion) is not transferred but developed (korthagen et al., 2001). space for multiple voices in tension historical patterns of ela classroom discourse, of whose voices have been centered, for what purposes, and through what means, inform present and ongoing patterns, challenges, and opportunities for disruption. this is particularly relevant in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, where students often are on the receiving end of historically unjust classroom practices. some reframing of class discussion is informed by bakhtin’s (1981) work rooted in literature study, in which he argued that any “text” draws from language, concepts, and knowledge from others, in an echoing of past texts and language. this dimension of bakhtin’s work is often neglected, with dialogism “reduced to immediate interactions between or among people” (smagorinsky, 2017, p. 35). a more expansive adaptation of bakhtin’s work highlights dialogue among utterances across time and space, with single speech utterances invoking and situated within past discourses and anticipating follow-on utterances. extending this notion of utterances containing echoes of past texts and ideas, pedagogical practices also contain echoes of past voices, beliefs, and positions. knowing the antecedents of a practice is important to grasp its history, ways it has been entrenched, and who has benefited and in what ways from inherited notions of how to do school and subject matter activity. practices a pst reads about, observes, and studies contain voices and assumptions deep within social and educational histories. these are at play, for example, as one facilitates ela discussion in diverse 21st-century classrooms. a monologic approach in te might highlight that a methods text says x, a te supervisor says y, a resident teacher expects z, all of which can result in pressures for a preservice teacher to align practice accordingly, based on which “voice” gets most amplified. in this way, psts experience “competing centers of gravity” as they engage potentially conflicting orientations and messages (smagorinsky et al., 2013). we view articulation of such tensions as indication of increasingly textured understanding of complex practice in a subject or cross-subject instructional domain. although tensions may impede psts’ movement toward pedagogical action, they often lead to deep and transformative learning (gutiérrez et al., 1999; sedova, 2017), enabling psts to reconcile past beliefs, ideas, or experiences. in dialogic teacher inquiry, tensions are intentional, highlight competing priorities, and are sites for learning. any site and resource offers perspective and knowledge that is partial. in their review of functions of discourse, o’connor and michaels (2007) draw upon various authors, including bakhtin (1981), to contrast functional monological with dialogical discourses. they explain that monologic forms often present talk with meaning as authoritative or fixed, with such forms used to replicate social ideas and practices. in contrast, they characterize dialogic discourse where meaning is negotiable, meaning-making is generative, and discourse supports creative inventions. as wells (2007) argues: ...one (monologic) mode makes the assumption that there is only one valid perspective, which is put forward with no expectation that there is more to be said, while the other (dialogic) mode embodies the assumption that there is frequently more than one perspective on a topic and that it is worthwhile to present and discuss them (p. 261). this framing of dialogic discourse captures discussion goals for k-12 classrooms, particularly apt for ela where multivocal interpretive processes are central. however, we also draw upon this monologic/dialogic dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a7 distinction in our design of teacher inquiry practice. in our work, a dialogic lens on teacher inquiry sharpens focus on more than one perspective on a topic. we propose intentional treatment of knowledge and practice development as a conversation of ideas of complementary and conflicting interactions, creating productive tension (nystrand, 1997), all of which support teacher learning. conceptual framework: aligning te learning design with dialogic goals for k-12 the framework informing our te innovation features dialogic teacher inquiry. by this we mean that our design engages psts in concepts from dialogism and dialogic instruction, including a multitude of voices, voices in tension, exploratory talk, and collective meaning-making. a multitude of voices: engaging with a democracy of resources to aid psts in learning about a complex ela practice, our framework design intentionally guides psts to engage with a democracy of resources (figure 1), which psts access in interactive, nonhierarchical ways. this plethora of diverse resources helps new teachers develop a repertoire of knowledge and practice for facilitating discussions. figure 1: a democracy of resources that may inform and guide development of knowledge and practice of preservice teachers note. in the focal te inquiry course, a democracy of resources for psts to learn about classroom discussion includes a plethora of voices and perspectives, often in conflict, about what it means to enact this complex ela practice. from athanases et al. (2020). cc by 4.0. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a8 however, multiple resources may overwhelm especially prospective teachers. additionally, knowledge to be gleaned from such a complex set of informing resources may be loaded with tensions between, for example, ideas gleaned from research and advice from local cooperating/resident teachers or between one’s convictions grounded in one’s cultural and linguistic identities and the expectations of a school leader. in prior work featuring small groups of psts collectively exploring problems of practice in culturally and linguistically diverse classes, we found that repeated use of figure-making tools helped surface developing conceptions of an instructional domain and helped track resources informing evolving conceptions (athanases, 2014; athanases et al., 2020). we also found figures, as reified texts, “talked back” to their creators, aided management of complexity, charted gaps and more nuanced understanding and sharpened learning targets. aligned with the notion of tensions as learning supports in dialogic classroom practice (lefstein, 2010), our dialogic teacher inquiry framework embraces tensions among resources as potential prompts for teacher learning. engaging with this democracy of resources at times achieves synthesis, where discoveries support conceptual or practical understanding, both needed to learn a complex instructional practice (grossman et al., 2009), to mitigate a retreat to practices unresponsive to particular students in all of their diversity (athanases & de oliveira, 2014; enright et al., 2012). for dialogic instruction, conceptual tools include principles and concepts that organize understanding of classroom discourse, while practical tools include strategies, methods, and practices that guide and support dialogic talk (williamson, 2013). deeper structures of understanding how to successfully engage learners in classroom talk are necessary for teachers to navigate, respond, and improvise. as hsieh (2015) suggests, te programs with these types of engagements may support new teachers in “developing adaptive and collaborative practice grounded in theory, examination of practice, and reflection” (p. 188), which may enable development of a dialogic teaching stance. in a panel dialogue about dialogic teaching and learning, and in response to the question of why classroom practices are hard to change despite documented benefits (asterhan et al., 2020), adam lefstein addressed this theme of tensions: teachers need to negotiate conflicting goals and agendas, both their own and those of their students. they need to manage multiple voices and bodies. this creates enormous complexity and uncertainty, which they must cope with at a brisk pace…dialogic teaching amplifies the uncertainty and complexity, in part because it gives greater weight to student agency and ideas, and requires greater teacher flexibility and knowledge. at the same time dialogic teaching robs teachers of many of their existing tools to cope with teaching’s difficulties. so, dialogic teaching is difficult, and educational systems are not well-designed to help teachers cope with these difficulties (asterhan et al., 2020, p. s13). tensions outlined in lefstein’s reflection also apply to a te course. in addition to instructor goals and agendas, learners in the focal program of this study are preservice teachers, juggling multiple other responsibilities at the onset of their careers. besides practice-teaching in diverse, often high-need communities, these psts are required to interact with parents and school officials while also completing assignments for the te course (which includes an intense 10-week inquiry project). most also are applying and interviewing for permanent teaching jobs starting the following fall. these are some of the competing priorities psts encounter during the te course we describe in this work, which purposefully provides psts with structure to engage with a democracy of resources for learning a complex practice: learning to lead dialogic class discussion. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a9 toward needed structure for engaging with multiple resources often in tension in our work, we have organized the plethora of resources explored in the te inquiry course into three domains in order to guide and track contributions to pst learning (figure 2). figure 2: three resource domains for pst engagement and learning related to class discussion dialoguing with and among print, online, and mentor resources to develop a dialogic teaching stance our first domain of resources aligns with wells’ (2007) notion of dialogic modes engaging several perspectives. this domain is anchored in the treatment of psts as agentive, knowledgeable professionals who learn from diverse resources (figure 2, top left). to foster such engagements, we saturate the learning space with a wide range of resources and mediational tools (gutiérrez & vossoughi, 2010). by resources, we mean human and material aids used to “support claims, an available supply that can be drawn upon when needed” (zuidema & fredericksen, 2016, p. 15). while a teacher educator guides psts’ uses of tools and processes to understand a focal domain, all is embedded in the democracy of resources. by this we mean useful knowledge generated in diverse contexts and explored and analyzed through diverse means (athanases et al., 2020), including research, teacher practice reports, standards documents, and interviews dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a10 and conversations with students, teachers, and cohort peers. this process can help psts move past hierarchical notions of knowledge production, rethinking where education knowledge originates and who constructs it, supporting teacher flexibility and adaptive practice (athanases, 2014). resources and tools also can help psts reframe problems of practice as sites for expansive learning (engeström, 2001). beyond simply exploring diverse resources, however, our design features analysis and reflection. resources are accompanied by protocols that help psts collect information and by tools and processes that mediate the process of transforming information into data (erickson, 2011). without such structure, the breadth of resources may go unnoticed or may be treated superficially by psts. classroom-based original inquiry works intentionally in dialogue with other “knowledges,” and preservice teachers’ developing knowledge for teaching content may be traceable to specific sources and the interface of these. while such learning processes may occur across many models of teacher inquiry, they are central to our design for teacher learning. the inquiry course described in methods provides psts with purposeful activities that engage a diversity of resources and invite them to dialogue with and among such resources, challenging propositions and addressing new concerns arising from teachers’ own practice in local contexts. students as knowledge resources for teachers’ shaping of dialogic instruction our second domain of resources focuses on students’ behavior and classroom talk, which inform teacher practice (figure 2, top right). foundational to developing as an effective discussion facilitator is learning how students shape discourse and how one perceives social dynamics of classrooms during the talk. perceiving classroom dynamics is complex, however, teachers need to learn to listen to and notice students’ verbal and nonverbal engagements (schultz, 2009), and how to elicit, prompt, and prod. additionally, the process requires that teachers notice the myriad ways students co-construct classroom talk and other patterns of engagement (sherin et al., 2011), whether visibly engaged or silently resisting (candela, 1998). by utilizing teacher inquiry techniques and tools, such as transcribing classroom conversations (meneses et al., 2018) and writing reflections (rogers et al., 2006) on discussions, teachers identify students’ resources and assets that can be leveraged in classroom learning. for instance, inquiring into students’ performance during class discussions can provide information about specific content topics that pose difficulty for students and about ways teachers can scaffold learning and leverage students’ cultural and linguistic resources for use in discussion (lee, 2001; martinez et al., 2017). much of what occurs during ela discussions requires keen perceptual skills. teachers need to observe student interactions and meaning-making. this includes attending to ways students try out interpretations of texts and make sense of others’ attempts. teachers also may notice interactions requiring direct intervention on issues arising such as bias, racism, or other forms of discrimination (patterson williams et al., 2020). a 21st-century pst needs to know that developing dialogue in a culturally and linguistically diverse class in a high-poverty context (sites within which our project works) carries echoes of the rarity of teachers facilitating challenging, meaningful discussion in low-ses schools serving predominantly youth of color (oakes et al., 2006). this is much to observe and comprehend during the unfolding discussion. the interpretation process taps a teacher’s capacity to draw upon a repertoire of knowledge and practice (figure 1) to understand what is happening and what might come next if new actions occur (banes et al., 2022). voices in a pst collective shaping evolving conceptions of dialogic instruction the third domain of resources in our framework highlights how dialogues are situated within collective teacher inquiry (figure 2, bottom). by this, we mean inquiry that generates cumulative knowledge using a multicase study anchored by a quintain or central unifying topic (stake, 2006) – here, class discussions. intentional dialogue among pst peers in topic-alike groups and in cross-group reflections dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a11 supports preservice teacher learning. as ohlsson (2013) argued, the “collective learning process through which team members [in our case, small groups of psts] create knowledge and understanding [help them] develop collective competence to solve their task and handle problems in everyday work” (p. 298). in our design, psts in small topical groups share classroom examples, video-view their own and peer teaching examples, and engage in peer feedback guided by protocols for sharing inquiry findings and for reflecting on comparisons and contrasts across individual classroom inquiries. even as psts attend to particular learners in their own k-12 placement classes, they also contribute findings, patterns, and anecdotes from their own class discussion inquiry to move collective knowledge and practice forward. data collection tools and pattern-finding and analysis from data, constructed collectively, serve preservice teachers’ metacognitive goal of thinking conceptually about what they are learning about teaching, mediating interpersonal knowledge that may be internalized later (vygotsky, 1962; wertsch, 1985). developing insights from inquiry discoveries may be shared within and across inquiry groups. through such practices, new teachers can gain other benefits, including peer-learning (wilkinson et al., 2017), teacher agency (adler et al., 2003/2004; soini et al., 2015), and trust-building between educators (loughran, 2003). novice teachers’ individual and collective reflective practices often support shifts in understanding of teaching and learning needed for the development of adaptive expertise patterns (anthony et al., 2015). adaptive teachers are frequently metacognitive about their practice, willing problem-solvers as challenges arise, and prepared to adapt as needed (parsons et al., 2018). however, this is a tall order for a pst who can benefit significantly from sorting through discoveries and tensions in the company of peers. framework applied to a case of one pst learning to facilitate ela discussions learning to facilitate discussion in diverse english language arts classes provides an ideal site for exploring our design. discussion is particularly challenging for psts, as talk is ephemeral, difficult to unpack, and challenging for metacognitive awareness. this relates to a key challenge of teacher education: guiding psts to develop metacognition as they embrace the complexities of teaching (hammerness et al., 2005). psts are often preoccupied with promoting multiparty talk that they hope will approach the conversation that occurs in non-classroom settings (banes et al., 2022). however, psts also need to consider how students engage with discussion collectively for learning. embracing complexity in this way disrupts fixed notions of effective practice (cochran-smith et al., 2014), memories from the apprenticeship of observation (lortie, 1975), and prevalent school constraints and requirements. for our focus on learning to facilitate ela class discussions, this process includes learning about and dialoguing with inherited discourses of school talk and its purposes and structures, dialoguing with others about these ideas and practices, and talking back at inherited ideas that warrant redress. we offer the case of a preservice teacher developing a dialogic stance. we explore her evolving conceptions and practice in a diverse classroom, examining the resource-rich learning processes of one pst going dialogic for the first time. the case enables us to track the pst’s work as she dialogues among resources, surfaces tensions and competing priorities, and textures her understanding of how to lead ela discussions. the study asked: ● as she engaged with multiple resources, what themes did this pst surface in her learning about the complex nature of developing classroom discussion practices with diverse middle school youth? ● in what ways, if at all, did her engagement with the dialogic teacher inquiry design support this pst’s learning and discoveries? dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a12 ○ in what ways, if at all, did dialoguing analytically with and among print, online, and mentor resources support her learning about dialogic practice? ○ in what ways did this pst’s discoveries arising from students as knowledge sources contribute to her learning about dialogic practice? ○ in what ways did her cohort of peers, and the dialoguing in the collective, contribute to our focal pst’s nuanced understanding of discussion practice? methods we used the three framework domains of resources to examine a pst’s learning (during a 10week teacher inquiry course) about dialogic teaching in ela. context this study is set within a 10-month, post-baccalaureate te program that yearly credentials 150+ california teachers and fosters advocacy for equity for diverse students, with focused attention to emergent bilinguals (ebs) (athanases & martin, 2006). the te program links coursework with yearlong supervised k-12 practice. beyond foundations and methods, psts complete courses guiding inquiry design and use of fieldnotes, survey, focal student interviews, and data coding and analysis. inquiry as responsive to content, context, and professional community guides the english courses (athanases et al., 2012). in the 10-week inquiry course, psts formed topic-aligned groups that explored problems of ela instruction. topics included leading discussion and promoting critical thinking, character in literature study, and discussion-writing links. psts were encouraged to collaborate, seek support from peers, and offer each other critical feedback on data-based claims. focal teacher, her school, and class we analyzed the work of one four-member group who explored ela discussion. the group was comprised of four asian american women of varied ethnicity. all four completed the full set of inquiry tasks and worked collectively to deepen their discussion knowledge and practice. to unpack complexity of this learning process, we selected one pst from the group as a “critical case” with strategic importance to a focal concern (flyvbjerg, 2001)--a preservice teacher learning to foster discourse with young students age 12-13 in a highly diverse school. nina, who is vietnamese american, was doing semester-long practice teaching in a seventh-grade class in a low-ses california urban middle school diverse in race, ethnicity, and languages. nina and her students offered the opportunity to highlight diverse participants seldom featured in teacher learning research. nina’s school had 875 students in grades 7-8 (ages 12-14), 91% from low-ses families, 100% eligible for free lunch, well above the national average. in the united states, “high-poverty schools are those where more than 75.0 percent of the students are eligible for frpl (free or reduced-price lunch)” (u.s. department of education, 2021). students were 40% latinx (mostly mexican descent); 30% asian/asian american (many south east asian, especially hmong); 17% black/african american; 5% white; 4.3% mixed race; 2% pacific islander. overall, 30% were ebs, with spanish (50.8%), hmong (21%), vietnamese (9.1%), cantonese (4.4%), mien/yao (3.6%), and other (11.5%) (e.g., farsi, russian, punjabi) as home languages. one-third of students were proficient in english (state ave. 49%). in this context, nina’s class (reflective of the school’s demographics) offered a rich site to explore how one pst worked to develop discussion practices and to learn from early-adolescent students’ dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a13 perceptions and discussion engagements. nina’s focal inquiry class had 32 heterogeneously-grouped students. seven (22%) were identified as ebs, with 2 others redesignated english proficient (formerly receiving english language support classes, now mainstreamed into content curricula, with assumptions they will need support for their writing). this means that 28% of nina’s students were currently or recently developing english language proficiency. such linguistic diversity invites preservice teachers to find ways to leverage students’ diverse communicative repertoires for academic learning (athanases et al., 2018; martinez et al., 2017). project activities: practical manifestations of framework domains the project used analytic and reflective prompts to intentionally engage psts in dialogue with multiple human and material resources, moving beyond compliance with seemingly authoritative perspectives on practice. each pst project yielded an average of 30+ pages of documentation and reflection. we organized inquiry content by our framework domains (table 1). published research and mentor resources print sources were co-curated by the inquiry course instructor in conversation with each inquiry group. for nina and her group, this included guidance to examine research on class discussion in an array of major journals, with special attention to literacy and english-oriented publications. the instructor encouraged mining citations and reference lists for pieces particularly pertinent to middle and high school contexts. bolded language (table 1, column 1) shows psts are guided to move from summarizing published research to being interpretive and agentive (e.g., paraphrase through your perspective), signaling value placed on psts’ perspectives drawn from experience and socio-cultural identities--a sense of agency needed for in-practice decision-making central to dialogic instruction and learning (boyd, 2016). for research articles, psts reflect on what is lacking and needed: what further study, what warrants critique. these prompts highlight an interpretive, critical stance in which psts engage their whole selves in dialogue with, as opposed to being recipients of, understandings as static and finished. table 1: engaging in a democracy of resources: guided dialogic teacher inquiry in coursework activity a dialoguing with print, online, and mentor resources focus on students as resources collective inquiry: in dialogue with pst peers published research: ● complete a structured abstract of article ● paraphrase to filter research through your perspective ● what further study might build on this research? ● what in this research warrants critique? interviews with 2 teachers: ● transcripts or interview narrative accounts ● in 3+ page memo, report what you learned from ts: difficulties and support for ss, successes and tips for working with ebs, etc. focal student performance data and interviews: ● find ways to make “things” into visible data for evidence (erickson, 2011) ● mine data. examine ss’ work, their remarks, for what the data tell you ● annotate ss’ work in the margins to clarify how you interpret and analyze ss’ work ● focus on depth, not breadth (due to small n of focal ss, short timeframe) student surveys: ● display results of selected response items; analyze trends ● bins and coding: notes showing your process of pattern-finding in responses to any 2 open-ended items ● use selected language from ss’ responses or full “juicy quotes” to illustrate themes ● how do research findings relate to something you know from prior collective conversations? ● focal ss’ race/ethnicity/first language (if relevant), interests, performance in other classes? interactions with peers? ● show some ss’ responses in bins/coding during peer feedback ● in a group presentation, dialogue about two emergent bilingual learners in your inquiry and their learning/performances a language is excerpted from coursework assignments, available upon request. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a14 note. bolded text indicates ways psts were guided to bring personal reflection, interpretation, and critical questions to data and information from resources they reviewed. mentor resources included interviews with regional educators (table 1, column 1, bottom). each pst interviewed two ela teachers in the region about their focal topic--in nina’s case, facilitating class discussion. psts transcribed interviews (each running 30-45 minutes) and reported on emerging themes, comparison/contrast between their two interviews, and their own remaining questions. psts then shared findings with te class peers and instructor. students as resources students in psts’ classes were key informants through co-designed surveys and focal student interviews (table 1, column 2). beyond full-class surveys, the project guided psts to engage deeply with an “n of 4” diverse learners, including two emergent bilingual learners of varied english language proficiency, a particularly important data source (appendix). this enabled psts to learn about these focal students’ learning processes, likes, and dislikes through observations, surveys and interviews, and to examine engagement in literacy activities. to foster synthesis of findings and discoveries during practice, psts wrote three data analysis memos on student performance; memos included data trends, discoveries about ela issues, instructional adaptations to meet focal student needs, and notes on dilemmas. psts were guided to annotate student work (clarify how you interpret student data) and to be transparent (show your process while reviewing/analyzing survey data). this work expanded nina’s and her peers’ understanding of what worked and what needed further tryouts for dialogic instruction. each pst prepared a 20-minute slideshow featuring contexts, research questions, methods, full-class data, focal student profiles and findings, synthesis of learning through inquiry, and next steps for follow-on work. teacher inquiry in a collective of peers in small, topic-aligned groups, psts were guided to dialogue with their peers about patterns, findings, and questions from their inquiries, sharing insights on ways to further support learners for active participation in ela classes. for nina and her peers, this involved sharing copies of transcribed classroom discourse with preliminary coding schemes and providing each other with feedback on codes (what was captured, what missed) and on what the transcripts revealed about discussion processes and students’ challenges and successes. each small group collaborated on identifying collective discoveries and tensions that they integrated within their individual slide presentations that featured their site-specific findings (table 1, column 3). psts dialoguing across/among resources beyond naturally occurring connections across data sources, activities guided psts to forge links between classroom findings and published research. such guided dialogue among resources helped psts identify tensions and hypothesize ways to manage them. for example, questions guided nina and her peers to discuss how published research on dialogic instruction related to other research they read and how such research also related to what they know from classroom experience as learners and instructors (table 1). similarly, psts’ interviews with teachers included questions about students and their interactions during dialogic talk. takeaways from these interviews worked at an interface with psts’ own studentfocused data related to class discussion (table 1, column 2) specifically focused on students and their role in discussions, where psts synthesized and integrated classroom data with findings from previous sources. at all times, psts were guided to make sense of student data they were analyzing and to document tensions arising from data. finally, during collective inquiry with peers, psts discussed challenges and tensions as they weighed discoveries and often conflicting insights from diverse resources in a kind of dialogue among sources in support of their developing knowledge and practice. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a15 data collection and analysis moving from full-class, to the group of four, to nina as a focal case, we compiled nina’s inquiry data into an expanded 32-page dataset. this included nina’s data reports and reflections plus her final slides reporting research questions, knowledge sources considered and what they revealed, visual displays and patterns from student data, inquiry syntheses, and steps for future inquiry. our first broad research question asked, “as she engaged with multiple resources, what themes did our focal pst surface in her learning about the complex nature of developing classroom discussion practices with diverse middle school youth?” we reviewed all data for ways nina worked analytically with diverse resources (table 1). we entered reflective comments in the document margins and reviewed for patterns in themes and language. using strauss’s (1987) axial coding process, we tracked ideas nina identified as important. we read data independently and together, seeking inter-coder agreement, and distilled themes. our second research question asked, “in what ways, if at all, did her engagement with the dialogic teacher inquiry design support this pst’s learning and discoveries?” our analysis treated the three subquestions to this overarching question. to answer our first sub-question on processes and impact of nina’s dialoguing analytically with print, online, and mentor resources, we refined codes and themes from our first research question analyses and collected illustrative examples from data sources. for example, nina noted something she gleaned from a teacher interview: “crucial for conversations with the class, stating that it is okay to make mistakes…it’s good to give students oral rehearsal and allow them to talk to a partner.” we coded this as “safe environment.” we also found a pattern in nina’s language that marked linkages among sources--at times highlighted with linguistic markers of complementarity: also, and, in a related way. in other cases, nina’s language marked tensions: however, but, and although. for instance, as she reflected on findings from jadallah et al. (2010), nina placed this study in dialogue with her observation data: “although i have seen models where teachers at the secondary level accept multiple interpretations and ideas, i have not seen how teachers ask students to truly expand and substantiate opinions.” here nina reflects on the value of accepting diverse interpretations, as reported in the study, but also engages observation data, raising the critical question about elaboration and support. similarly, nina unpacked the treatment of scaffolding during discussions when comparing jadallah et al. (2010) with christoph and nystrand’s (2001) study. we coded her commentary on how scaffolds may be detrimental to classroom talk as “scaffolding tensions.” to understand the links nina forged between sources and how understandings evolved during the inquiry, we examined across datasets for ways ideas, discoveries, and themes were echoed in her own words. to answer our second sub-question about ways students served as knowledge sources about dialogic practice, we coded for discourse details and the kinds of noticing nina reported in her transcript analyses (rosaen et al., 2008). we tracked patterns and what she deduced from students’ engagements and examined her coding processes, what she deemed quality discussion engagement, and her treatment of focal students (e.g., preparing a table summarizing focal student information). analyses considered nina’s final slideshow and corresponding notes featuring focal students and coded transcriptions that included focal student attempts at dialogic talk. finally, for our third sub-question about contributions of dialoguing in a collective of pst peers, we focused on nina’s written reflections on emerging knowledge and practice (table 1, column 3). we coded instances where nina reported learning from her peers’ videos, suggestions she and her peers made during feedback sessions, and insights from general peer discussions. such insights were supported by audiotaped excerpts of nina’s peer group talk. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a16 across datasets and considering the three overarching framework domains (table 1), we used coding and the constant comparative method (merriam, 1998) to understand nina’s learning about leading dialogic instruction. we tracked patterns and themes to illuminate ways resources advanced and troubled nina’s conceptions of discussion practice, and how she drew links among resources across time. we also situated nina’s case within her four-member group to reflect on any ways in which nina’s processes were anomalous and/or echoed in her peers’ inquiries. positionality as authors, we are a latin american native spanish-speaking male and a white male (inquiry course instructor), both committed to research and innovative practice for teacher learning in diverse classrooms. the instructor had easy access to project data and insights--beneficial but also challenging (lampert, 2000). to critically review datasets and avoid biased findings (clift & brady, 2005), some analyses were conducted independently of the instructor. results: nina’s dialogic learning to teach dialogically nina’s knowledge and practice in leading english language arts discussions evolved from formats (large group, small group, socratic seminar) to underlying discourse features. we report on several emerging themes, tracing ways nina deepened her discussion knowledge and practice through our dialogic teacher inquiry framework, which included nina’s dialogue with and among resources, prompting her to wrestle with conflicting and, at times, problematic ideas analyzed individually and explored collectively with her inquiry group peers. central to her evolving conceptions was a focus on students as informants for her learning about classroom talk complexities. besides gaining ideas from resources, nina raised questions, taking a critical stance on long-established practices that might hinder equitable teaching during classroom talk. multiple interpretations and voices a movement toward multiple interpretations and voices is evident in both nina’s emerging discussion focus and her inquiry process as she entertained multiple interpretations of discussion practice. at times, nina reported the synthesis of knowledge sources. however, aligned with our framework, nina also embraced tensions as learning opportunities--for her students as they interpreted text and for herself as she developed vision and practices for class discussion. across written and spoken inquiry work, nina consistently indicated both interest and challenges in creating a student-centered discussion that could support interpretation of the text. in written reflections, nina deepened her commitment to moving beyond legislating right and wrong answers, an approach she reported was common in her own schooling. she drew upon her own memories of discussion as a resource to recall contrasting patterns. her earliest recall of discussion was 8th grade (a year beyond where nina’s students currently were): “these discussions were always teacher-led and question-and-answer based.” this contrasted with discussions she recalled from a later honors english class, which she found more student-led, occasionally debateand persuasion-oriented. recalling the honors teacher’s role, nina noted, “she would interject to stimulate discussion, clarify a point, or challenge an idea, but her role was not to lead the discussion in any way.” this example resonated with nina. these memories aligned with how nina’s resident teacher emphasized a need to “move away from simple recall questions” to deeper student engagement with text and meaning-making. nina was synthesizing information from varied human and print resources: written reflections she completed on memories of her schooling discussions practice, recommendations from her resident teacher, and a dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a17 research article (jadallah et al., 2010) that described how pursuit of right/wrong answers from students persists as an ela practice. this interplay of resources also surfaced a tension for nina about the lack of models as resources: i have not seen how teachers ask students to truly expand and substantiate their opinions. it is one thing to hold this belief that discussion has to be open and free flowing, but it is another thing entirely to execute and sustain one successfully. though she struggled to discern appropriate classroom discourse practices at this point, nina gained clarity about a need to teach students to think, explain, and defend opinions during discussions, and to accept varied students’ understanding of texts and meanings. nina used these reflections to name a teaching goal of “breaking the mold,” saying “i need to not only accept and ask for multiple interpretations, but i must also not show preference or signal clues for one desired answer.” she further reflected on her goal of moving from “monologic to dialogic” discussion: teachers should not be (or act like) the sole gatekeepers of information and correct answers. true discussion, a free exchange of multiple and possibly contradictory ideas, cannot take place if there is an underlying belief that there is a “correct” and “incorrect” answer. it also cannot take place if the teacher’s presence is too influential during the actual discussion. nina viewed her students as capable of providing multiple ideas and reported a need to monitor ways she and other teachers expect compliance with canonical interpretations, and instead planned to maintain a democratic, equitable distribution of ideas and voices. doing so would help create space for tensions in interpretations, an idea nina reported in a “going deep” memo on a research article as resource. there, nina referenced bakhtin’s (1981) framing of discourse as inherently dialogic and continually structured by tension among conversants. space for such tension was part of nina’s vision for discussion. support for meaning-making: challenges and tensions probing for evidence and elaboration in discussion nina sought to develop through discussion what aukerman (2013) refers to as a pedagogy that privileges students’ sense-making. nina used a data analysis memo as resource to unpack students’ emergent meaning-making in discussion. students had been reading the giver (lowry, 1993) and an essay on china’s historic one-child policy. nina posed a question to students: “does the government always know what is best for its people?” she described how she primed students: before the discussion, students had to actually write down 3 pieces of evidence (1 from the article and 2 from the giver) and explain how these supported their opinion. therefore, students had thought about the two pieces of text extensively, making it easier for them to share their thoughts completely and fully (data analysis memo, 4.22). despite this preparation, we see in the following discourse episode, transcribed for her data analysis memo as resource, how nina uses time, patience, and persistence to foster multiparty talk and to orient students to sharing opinions and evidence. 1. me: the question for today is—“does the government always know what is best for its people?” [various shouts: “yeah,” “no,” “not always”] dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a18 2. me: who would like to start? [beto raises his hand] go ahead, beto. 3. beto: yeah. 4. me: go ahead. 5. beto: yeah…[pauses] wait. 6. ethan: go. explain why. 7. beto: oh. okay…[pauses] i’m getting there. [students whispering] 8. me: be respectful. [. . .] go ahead. 9. beto: they know what’s best for the people because of population control. so there’s less poverty and more jobs. 10. me: any responses to beto’s claim that yes, the government does know what’s best because it prevents poverty? [bree raises her hand] 11. me: bree respond. 12. bree: i do not agree with that. 13. me: ok— [beto interrupts] 14. beto: why? 15. bree: because, um, because i don’t think that there…they don’t know what they are doing with the community because like…because like…wait [students laugh] 16. me: are you talking about the giver or the article? 17. bree: the article. 18. me: the article. 19. bree: okay. i don’t think that the um government in china knows what’s best for the community because they are making women in china have an unwanted abortion.so that’s why i think that…i don’t…[stops talking] 20. me: alright. we have another opinion. bree just said that the government does not know what’s best because they are making women get abortions…by force. anyone want to elaborate or contradict this idea? 21. amie: i agree with bree. 22. me: alright, amie agrees… 23. amie: with bree. 24. me: with bree. so go ahead and elaborate. 25. amie: so i’m supposed to explain why? 26. me: uh-huh. lines 2-8 show the fits and starts of prompting 12/13-year-old volunteers to speak in a room full of peers. beto probes (line 14) to learn why bree disagrees with him, eliciting elaboration from bree (line 15). nina probes for clarification (line 16), and bree further elaborates (line 19). in line 24, nina prompts amie to explain why she agrees with bree. amie’s line 25 response (“so i’m supposed to explain why?”) highlights the fledgling nature of discussion engagement for meaning-making. nina uses revoicing (lines 10 and 20), each time “broadcasting” what a student offered as opinion, helping to keep ideas centered to advance meaning-making. this extended exchange between students and nina illustrates the difficulty for teachers in presenting dialogic structure and for students to engage in dialogic interaction. the process is complex, and it requires teachers to attentively listen and probe to move the conversation forward. much like lefstein noted in asterhan et al. (2020), teachers in a dialogic class have to “manage multiple voices and bodies, creat[ing] enormous complexity and uncertainty, which they must cope with at a brisk pace” (p. s13). this complexity is also heightened when students are still learning about dialogic talk, often competing with students’ prior conceptions of classroom instruction. nina’s navigation of the dialogue guides learners in dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a19 dialogic structure while making sure her interjections do not lead students to the expected, interpretative answers. tensions in scaffolding discussion after reviewing her inquiry reflections, nina reported that a key theme was the need to scaffold participation through various means. she reflected on the inherited discourses of schooling: “[students] are accustomed to asking the teacher questions and getting a ‘correct’ response--especially during teacher-led discussions.” nina recognized the need for supports. she initially responded well to sentence starters, and touted in resources of professional materials and local teachers, noting these are “great to help students who struggle with speaking and writing in english” (interview report, 3.25). she found reinforcement for scaffolding students’ talk in jadallah et al. (2010) and initially lauded its use in student-led small-group discussions. nina reflected on the need to present students with tools for talk. these frames are part of teachers’ attempts to foster language production using sentences with fill-in-the-blank structures. further engagement with resources, teaching, and discourse data led nina to a revised position. she noted the treatment of scaffolding in christoph and nystrand’s (2001) article differed from jadallah et al.’s (2010); the latter authors found scaffolds do not always foster meaningful discussions. moreover, nina revisited the topic in early data collection, arguing that “too much scaffolding” in discussions can over-direct thinking and responses. scaffolding, she reflected, is usually planned but less about interaction. through dialogue with and reflection on professional print resources, nina now critiqued sentence starters as helpful but insufficient: …usage of these key phrases informs me that students are aware that these serve as sentence starters for participating in discussion. what they do not understand is how to truly “build on” or directly contradict each other’s comments. this might be due in part to the fact that they are more concerned with reciting their own opinions-ones that were already thought out and “pre-recorded” on their binder papers (data memo, 5.9). nina agreed with the research resource by christoph and nystrand (2001) that planned scaffolds do not ensure quality discussion. instead, she found these can constrain creative responses to peers’ comments despite “safety” in highly structured answers. she valued teacher probes that “aimed to help students elaborate or clarify their points” and deepen thinking but inquired: i often wonder if it is considered “cheating” or undermining the learning process, if i supply the answer when they are “stuck.”...[our] role can be further complicated if the discussion loses momentum, gets off topic, or is not engaging enough. how much is too much input and guidance? nina also addressed a need for interactional scaffolds, contributions that move beyond planned, often generic and routine supports, to moves that are contingent upon in-the-moment talk (athanases & de oliveira, 2014; hammond & gibbons, 2005; van de pol et al., 2009). interactional scaffolds are particularly useful for eb learners, especially when teachers make explicit connections to students’ prior knowledge and experiences during class talk (de oliveira & athanases, 2017; de oliveira & jones, 2021). when reporting discoveries from interviews-as-resource with her mentor teacher, nina learned that this teacher found “discussion as a way to engage students in different modes and types of discussion. her answer demonstrates the importance of collaboration with peers.” this excerpt from nina’s memos may have helped her understand how a more experienced teacher envisioned collaborative learning as a goal of discussion, which nina was just starting to explore. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a20 nina questioned instruction where teachers and students may perpetuate static practices. she engaged a tension aligned with what sawyer (2004) identifies as a needed balance between structure and creativity in effective teaching. through her exploration of and dialogue with a democracy of resources, nina was able to see this challenge of balance and managing competing priorities as she envisioned her role as a discussion leader. thus, nina positioned herself as a reflective, agentive new teacher mining multiple resources carefully, thinking critically about resources, challenging concepts not aligned with her developing conceptions of practice, and exploring an interface between these external resources and her students’ engagements. questions raised by nina, based on tensions she uncovered during her early leading of classroom talk, may have helped her develop a deeper understanding of what it means to truly create a dialogic classroom. her dialoguing with and among resources may also have helped her clarify some of these concerns and raise new questions for an evolving dialogic teaching stance. how individual voices shape discussion as part of her inquiry, nina audio-recorded student discussions, transcribed them, and coded transcriptions using a priori codes from research and emerging codes from her classroom observations and analyses. from this work, nina created three detailed data analysis memos over several weeks, each documenting patterns in students’ discussion engagements with discourse moves counted and tabulated, and micro-level analyses of discourse moments. analyses resulted in nina’s unveiling of students’ detailed turns at talk formatted as dialogue, supported by accounts of actions: pauses, interruptions, hand-raising, various shouts: “yeah,” “no,” “not always” from a selected discussion. she color-coded discussion questions, tabulated kinds of questions and responses she and her students used, then constructed a twopart table tallying students’ responses to probes. the tabular representation showed how nina was learning to display findings. describing her pattern-finding at a countable level, nina noted: although many students shared various ideas, i was looking specifically at how well students were able to state their opinions and do so using textual evidence to support their opinion. 4 students were able to state their opinions and supporting textual evidence without any probing from their peers or me. evident in nina’s analysis are her discussion concerns and values: focus (responding appropriately and directly), elaboration (questions aimed to help students elaborate), and depth (responds superficially to probe/prompt). nina’s analyses are evidence of her using transcription to locate, count, and display interaction patterns, capture the ephemeral nature of discussion, and analyze how students participate in the co-constructing discourse. analysis of focal students’ engagements as a key resource through analytic engagement with multiple resources, and by using discourse analysis as an inquiry tool, nina discovered nuances in her focal students’ discussion participation patterns. using student data from surveys as resource (table 1, column 2), nina identified and logged focal students’ “baseline strengths” and “areas of struggle” (table 2) – potential assets and growth areas in discussion. she characterized her students as 7th-graders who “possess and exhibit varying skill levels in terms of reading, writing, speaking, and listening,” central to ela classrooms. from surveys, nina learned that her focal students found discussions “extremely beneficial to their understanding of the text[s].” for example, beto attributed understanding “differences of the different arguments” presented by peers to discussion. alexa rated discussion impact highest, adding: “if i did the dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a21 reading on my own, i probably would not have understood.” for nina, alexa’s answer “exemplifies how beneficial discussion can be to low-performing students” and the importance of structuring discussions around strengths and areas for growth. table 2: nina’s discussion engagement profiles for her four focal students betoa alexa karen (rfep)b bella race/ ethnicity latino african-american korean-american multiracial interests video games kendama (japanese skill toy) track basketball anime drawings cheerleading baseline strengths reading comprehension asks critical questions that challenge others vocalizes opinions with ease summarization citing textual evidence attentive, keen listener vocal sociable summarizing asking for feedback citing textual evidence vocalizing opinions baseline areas of struggle speaking with “flow” organization and specificity citing and analyzing textual evidence building on peers’ ideas active participation grammar and spelling reading aloud citing and analyzing textual evidence building on peers’ ideas analyzing evidence building on peers’ comments & idea explaining and analyzing textual evidence building on peers’ ideas apseudonyms. breclassified fluent english proficient indicates holistic assessment (with parent consultation) of meeting language performance basic skills (california department of education, 2021). across focal students, nina noted a challenge of “building on peers’ ideas,” a discourse feature nina explored later. for example, nina described beto, a latino, as “the most outspoken”: he likes to make jokes, so sometimes, the thing that he contributes to the discussion is not relevant.... he also likes to take the less conventional, and less popular, opinion.... he is not motivated to complete his work, and he is very disorganized. he is incredibly intelligent and consistently performs well on exams that test reading comprehension. nina noted that beto enjoyed playing devil’s advocate and “likes to challenge his classmates’ thinking.” she suggested his unconventional or unpopular positions might enrich discussion and valued beto’s boldness to ask questions many of his peers did not think of until he posed them. however, nina also noted “his preoccupation with upholding this role further undermines his ability to finish the task at hand,” making beto a struggling student in terms of academic achievement. in dialogue with her peers, nina reflected how discussion is often heavily shaped by classroom culture, individual students’ personalities, and the interactions and social dynamics among learners. she noted that karen’s and alexa’s preference for small-group discussions echoed those of quiet and shy students: “they appreciated the ability to talk and participate but…in a safe number of peers” (slideshow notes, 6.5). in contrast, beto chose whole-class discussions leading nina to associate students’ preferences with personalities and interaction patterns. during small-group data debriefings as resource, some of nina’s pst peers described their focal students as “headstrong” or “opinionated,” suggesting such qualities negatively impacted discourse. nina disagreed and reflected on how her class discussion benefited from contributions of beto, who would be labeled disruptive in other classrooms and who liked to dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a22 play “class clown.” to illustrate her point, nina highlighted ways beto challenged peers’ thinking to help drive discourse forward. it was in the collective discourse with pst peers that nina sharpened such understanding. dialogic discourse, grounded in particularity of learners, helped nina’s students “think critically about the text(s)...no matter what discussion format the conversation took place in” (final reflection, 6.10). sharing such findings and reflections in the collective served nina in clarifying her emerging discoveries and convictions, and potentially contributed to the learning of her peers. elaboration and misfires in students’ co-constructing knowledge nina’s conception of discussion gained additional texture when she examined focal students’ discourse in detail after students had read three texts exploring aggression and violence. texts included song of the trees (taylor, 1996), a novella set in mississippi during the 1930s depression in the united states. the story concerns the logans, an african-american family struggling for food and work, who have valuable trees on their land. two white businessmen, including mr. anderson, aggressively offer the logans a sum for the trees less than they are worth. negotiations grow tense and the children, including david and little man, resist. supporting study of the novella were “amigo brothers” (thomas, 1978), about two teenage friends whose boxing activity extends to other fighting, and an article (“benefits of boxing”) exploring boxing violence. nina analyzed discourse about themes from the texts, with detailed notes (figure 3). the notes (figure 3) relate to a socratic seminar, a fairly common discourse structure in u.s. english language arts classes in which the teacher prepares students to lead and sustain discussion (often among half the class, with the other half observing), without teacher intervention. nina had learned about socratic seminars from her peers, who had implemented this practice to great success. she appreciated hearing that such seminars “supported students’ listening and speaking skills--and this encouraged students to engage in uptake.” she audiotaped and transcribed socratic discussion, excerpting a section in which three of her focal students engaged in crosstalk. in the excerpted transcript, karen, beto, and bella discussed forms of violence in song of the trees and how violence escalated quickly when little man (a child) was “pushed down” by mr. anderson after the children physically attacked the man, due to tensions in the perceived unethical financial offer and feelings of being bullied. while beto explained that the children’s actions led to the violence that ensued, bella argued that “the fight wasn’t fair” as it was a grown man against children. using her transcript as a student-based resource, nina analyzed and underlined discursive moves. she composed interpretive and analytic comments alongside each student’s entry, enabling her to learn more about students’ contributions and interactions. nina discovered how students impacted each other’s contributions. her inserted text boxes (hereafter “notes 1-8”) clarify how she featured issues of focus (note 3: attempts to be specific/speaks in very broad terms) and elaboration (notes 4 & 6: she elaborates on what beto states/bella does not elaborate). however, nina offered additional foci. she clarified her value on textual references in discussion (notes 1 & 4: damian directly references the text/karen cites from the news article). nina valued such references not only from an academic or assessment standpoint, but also because referencing serves group discourse, prompting a text-reference snowballing effect. she noted that after damian’s reference, “the following students were able to really focus on a text and express an opinion on it” (note 1), emphasizing student roles in others’ discursive contributions. nina noticed adherence to her conception of higher-order thinking as a key discussion goal. however, her conception of discussion also began to include how students co-construct discourse through individual moves. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a23 figure 3: focal students’ socratic seminar excerpt with nina’s analytic notes note. students discuss “fighting back” in context of song of the trees (taylor, 1996) and essay on violence. three focal students (karen, beto, bella) speak in this stretch of discourse, enabling nina to analyze their remarks. figure reconstructs word-for-word (with near-identical layout) original figure where nina used one color text per student to code quotes and analytic remarks. nina’s annotations are in darker numbered text boxes for display and to readily align with analysis in our commentary. one kind of move nina noticed was how students attempted to extend peer remarks (note 3: beto builds on karen’s statement). nina did not yet use the term uptake (neither student nor teacher uptake) from research readings but noticed students’ successful attempts and misfires at building cohesive discourse. she noted, for example, “it is unclear what [bella] is ‘agreeing’ to” (note 6) and “what karen says dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a24 was not at all what beto suggested in his first comment [and]…was not at all what beto ‘was trying to say’” (note 6). in this way, nina scrutinized students’ early attempts at extending or refuting peers’ ideas. among talk moves not identified was nina’s teacher uptake, which took the form of a probe for bella to elaborate on a response (note 6). nina’s discourse analysis nonetheless reflects how she noticed and valued student argumentation (notes 2 & 8: karen complicates damian’s assertion/[bella] disagrees with beto’s suggestion). this reveals nina’s developing conception of individuals deepening arguments and building collective ideas and text interpretations. through inquiry, then, and situated activity of doing and learning, nina was expanding her understanding of discussion process and learning to uncover various ways students co-constructed ela discussion focused on literary and informational text. pseudo-uptake: on a path toward discussion cohesion nina wanted to deepen her work on an area of struggle for her students: “building on peers’ ideas.” drawing on her analytic memo regarding the resource of published research by nystrand (1997) and christoph and nystrand (2001), nina now had a conceptual tool of uptake, which she defined as: “when students actually built on comments previously made, creating continuity in discussions” (data analysis memo, 5.9). this definition is not far from that of nystrand et al. (2003), who frame uptake as “facilitating the negotiation of understandings, as conversants listen and respond to each other…promo[ting] coherence within the discourse” (p. 146). as she grew increasingly interested in this concept, nina presented to her students an online professional resource--a video of a discussion in which a student used the word “piggyback” to indicate extending an idea. several of nina’s students playfully took up the term during extended discussion of song of the trees: seba: oh. well. um. i guess because in song of the trees david threatened them to blow up the forest instead of using violence against them, he used words. damian: i’d like to piggyback on that. [laughter and “he said piggyback!”] in song of the trees, david threatens mr. andersen without hurting him. so, there are non-violent ways to fight back. seba: i’d like to piggyback on that too. [laughter] although the term elicited laughs, nina noted value in “the introduction of a new phrase ‘piggyback’ to show agreement.” nina used transcription and analysis of student talk as a resource to reflect on how “i agree” showed an inching toward cohesive talk: these phrases were something that students could rely on when they couldn’t think of how to fully express their opinions or textual support. the fact that phrases like “i agree” were used (but never utilized to expand on their opinions) is consistent with the findings in my teacher-led discussion. the students’ dependence on discussion “lingo” or “terminology” weakened their arguments rather than supported them. nina reported that she wondered “why they continue to use these. here is an example of how ineffective these phrases are”: beto: but, i agree with you. seba: well, i agree with you too…sir. nina added: “i believe that these students think that it is enough to just use these phrases and never elaborate further as to why they agree. these phrases appear to stifle rather than support students’ abilities to expand on their claims.” dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a25 in a transcript, nina continued analytic work with student talk as resource, italicizing relevant linguistic markers (i agree, i disagree) and bolded ways discourse began to cohere: me: in that case, the 10th grader used violence against his bully. um, thoughts on that? otto: i agree with how he fought back. if he didn’t fight back, the other kids watching would keep making fun of him and tormenting him.... kai: i’d like to respond to that. it says that the older child broke the younger child’s ankle. and while the tormenting had been going on for a long period of time, i think what bella said earlier is better. if the older child just spoke to someone sooner then maybe the other problem could have been fixed…without breaking anyone’s ankle. so, i agree with what bella said. he could have just stood up for himself. scott: i agree, but maybe it’s the bully’s own fault. if he would have never bullied that kid, he would have never got his ankle broken in the first place. nina was pleased to see uptake occur, marked explicitly with language of agree and disagree, and implicitly as students extended thinking and co-constructed meaning. supported by discourse analysis and her memo process, nina made a discovery (“the most interesting phenomenon that i noticed”) about students’ attempts at cohesive discourse. she identified how students learned to use sentence starters (i agree, i disagree, in my opinion) but added, “upon closer examination…more than half of the time they used these phrases, they were not actually agreeing or disagreeing with what was previously stated. instead, they would present a completely new idea.” she reported what is “abundantly clear” in her transcribed discourse, coding, and tabular displays: students grappled with the underlying nature of uptake, how to truly build on or contradict another’s comment. she labeled and defined this as pseudo-uptake: “use of phrases to show agreement/disagreement: there is superficial elaboration on previous response; or presents new idea” (data memo, 5.9). for one of her discussion transcripts, nina used this coding scheme to unpack this pattern: [u.a.] – uptake/agrees: student uses phrases to show agreement/disagreement and actually builds on a previous point [u.i.] – uptake/introduces: student uses phrases to show agreement/disagreement and does not build on previous point. introduces new point. [p.u.] – pseudo uptake: using phrases to show agreement/disagreement and does not build on previous point nor introduce new point. in the discussion on violence, based on analysis of several texts and after small-group work, this scene unfolded, begun by seba (italics indicate nina’s highlights): seba: the article says, “researchers find that those who fight back their aggressors are more mature than those who don’t.” beto: i agree with that. if you…if you don’t fight back. like for example, if a homeless guy tries to take your shoes, and you don’t know how to fight back…[laughter] me: beto, avoid hypothetical examples. use what you know from the text. beto: yes. ok. it says, wait, hold up. it says on the 6th paragraph in the article. [various students shout, “that’s the same one!”] beto: i’m still going to bring it back to it. “…children who stand up for what they believe in are more mature.” dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a26 nina wrote that while beto’s comment garnered laughs, highlighting his “jokester” personality, it was not “particularly insightful”: he tried to recover after i told him to “use what you know from the text.” beto chose to simply reiterate what seba said before, and the class recognized this…even though beto did cite textual evidence, he failed to explain it. further, his reiteration of seba’s point is another case where uptake was not fully realized. although she critiqued his playfulness and frequent need to say things for laughs, nina also noticed his positive contributions. viewing beto and his interaction patterns through an asset-based lens, nina documented, for example, beto and karen using “true uptake” focused on david in song of the trees and on the article on boxing (figure 3). karen expressed relief that mr. anderson (one of the lumbermen) backed down after being confronted by david, the logan patriarch, or otherwise, she added, “there would have been violence.” beto agreed but added that “not all the characters used just their words,” in fact the kids “hit [mr. anderson]. physically,” suggesting there was violence nonetheless. beto’s challenge to karen’s initial statement led her to push her position forward, saying that “little man [one of the longan children] was trying to stand up for himself” after mr. anderson, an adult, had pushed him to the ground. nina documented multiple other examples of true uptake. she differentiated uptake forms, adding to her conception of “true uptake” as synonymous with “critical thinking…speaking, listening, and analytical skills…to extend, contradict, and/or complicate a comment that was previously made.” as she reflected on successful uses of “true uptake,” nina wrote: i am more inclined to believe that this was because students had to talk to each other. in order to have a conversation, they had to actually listen first. the amount of uptake visibly increased near the end. although the usage of phrases like “i agree” appeared in these cases as well, students i believe got into a natural, conversational rhythm in the end, allowing them to elaborate and build on the previous comment(s). some students successfully connected back to the text, but they were all able to expand and build on each other’s comments (slideshow notes, 6.5). nina’s reflection on the importance of listening and actually having a conversation emerged only after she worked with audiotaping and transcription to unpack what students were doing in the talk. she reported a deepened conception of uptake as a discourse strategy that fosters coherence, meaningfully advances and enhances discussion, and prompts complex interpretations. in a final reflection, nina further pondered her moves in shaping discussion, including those that did not work as anticipated (i had assumed that… and this is not what i expected since i thought...). nina had “assumed that the actual format was a large factor in dictating the level of student engagement” but learned countless ways students--as co-actors-shape and reshape discourse. aided by the interplay of situated inquiry and varied human and material resources, nina used discourse analysis and frequency counts to surface new conceptions of how students explore new discourse strategies and used this knowledge to refine her practice. discussion: how a dialogic framing reveals nina’s learning about leading discussions our case study makes several contributions. first, we document how one preservice teacher engaged with what we refer to as dialogic inquiry informed by our framework. reports abound of teachers perceiving research literature as disconnected from k-12 classroom realities, vilifying and using language inaccessible to teachers (freedman et al., 1999; zeichner, 2009). our case instead illustrates how a focal pst explored an interface of multiple resource types, highlighting a reconfiguring of knowledge hierarchies dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a27 for learning to teach. in her inquiry, nina is in dialogue with histories of ire (mehan, 1982), traditions of talk, and past teachers, including her own whose practice she recalls. nina is in dialogue with readings and understandings of diverse learners and linguistic demands and needs for scaffolds. she is also in dialogue with voices published on new ideas, forward-thinking visions of talk that break traditions. in conducting inquiry, nina is in dialogue with notions that an inquiry stance raises questions of all things related to teaching, learning, and schools (cochran-smith & lytle, 2009). second, our case study illustrates possibilities of a preservice teacher synthesizing discoveries to challenge long-established practices, critiquing teachers who refuse to share interpretive authority with students and who overuse sentence starters and scaffolds. nina, as our case teacher, neither blindly accepted nor fully rejected ideas learned in her inquiry but used them as touchstones for learning. this was illustrated by her uncovering nuances of uptake, adding insight from multiple analytic memos about unsuccessful student attempts she defined as pseudo-uptake. nina also used her developing knowledge to guide moves she tested, illustrating inquiry as praxis (athanases, 2011), echoing freire’s (1998) view of practice and theory in a dynamic tension between doing and critically reflecting on doing. engaging in this inquiry process, as opposed to simply learning methods, prompted psts in the project to question things. nina, for instance, wondered if teachers truly practice accepting varied responses from students, and questioned and analyzed students’ emergent uses of uptake. she discovered the importance of noticing the navigation of ideas and arguments, as she wondered if beto was only playing jokester or if he advanced conversation by posing non-standard questions, pushing others in their talk. nina’s discoveries and nuanced understanding of class discussion were relevant to her teaching practice as well as those of her peers who accessed nina’s findings through collective reflections. these collective reflection spaces became rich opportunities for teacher learning (ohlsson, 2013). third, our case highlights how one pst used deepening knowledge about student strengths and interests, developed through inquiry tools, to create opportunities for engagement. evident in her dialoguing with peers, nina’s balanced views of students’ assets, needs, and contributions to talk demonstrate a pst’s pedagogical commitment to diverse learners’ success. this is important work, as deficit perspectives are deeply entrenched in educators’ conceptions of learners and learning, historically highly resistant to reform (artiles, 1998; oakes et al., 1997). deficit lenses diminish challenging goal-setting especially in educating minoritized youth (resnick, 2010), reinforce a culture of low expectations (lee, 2007), and enact an ideology of remediation with minoritized students assumed to be deficient, needing repair (gutiérrez et al., 2009). clearly, the field needs more inquiry into processes and tools that guide psts in acquiring an assetbased lens. in contrast to deficit-oriented activity, psts in our project used inquiry tools to examine what focal students were doing within discussion activity. for example, in transcript analysis, nina noted “class clown” behavior of beto, a latino student, but also his unconventional contributions that pushed others’ thinking. inquiry processes in our dialogic inquiry framework, particularly psts’ nuanced analyses of discourse data, helped psts engage with what literatures on noticing describe as key processes of attending to students’ thinking and interactions; reflecting on and analyzing what was observed; and responding to or acting on students’ inputs (e.g., sherin et al., 2011). to develop asset orientations, such care in noticing is needed. although nina, our focal pst, chose four culturally diverse focal students and appeared equityminded, she reported little about emergent bilingualism in her data. despite mentioning the importance of interactional scaffolds, often useful for eb learners (athanases & de oliveira, 2014; de oliveira & athanases, 2017; de oliveira et al., 2021; hammond & gibbons, 2005), nina did not include details of how she may have implemented these types of scaffolds during discussion in a class in which 28% of students were eb learners. for her report on teacher interviews, nina noted neither teacher interviewee went deep dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a28 in unpacking their discussion practices related to linguistically diverse students. one suggested that emergent bilingual learners do not get special treatment although the teacher acknowledged scaffolding their learning initially. nina did not probe on what type of scaffolding, and she was unable to glean concepts or practices for use. this may have been due to the hierarchical position of teacher-mentor and mentee, or to nina missing an opportunity to challenge her teacher resource on treating every student the same, even when emergent bilingual students may need additional learning support. this is an important consideration. psts may need more opportunities to explore ways to challenge instructional practices they find inadequate or detrimental to students’ learning, even if such practices are observed or absent in the work of more experienced teachers. te programs may need to further prepare psts to counter problematic practices as they learn to advocate for all learners. nina’s scant attention to eb students in her inquiry highlights the need, especially in teacher preparation, for additional knowledge of discussion supports for these students, a concern we identified in our background to the study. to support ebs, teachers benefit from pedagogical language knowledge to support design and teaching that maximize learning for linguistically diverse learners (bunch, 2013). recent work highlights how alternative modes of participation support ebs, including “silent graffiti” where learners post responses to images or quotes on shared poster paper and engage in written uptake, building chains of response at their own pace (glick & walqui, 2021). the covid-19 pandemic further pressed teachers to diversify ways of inviting ebs and other learners into discourse, through digital tools that included “safe” modes of engagement (e.g., private chat in zoom) and other digital spaces for sense-making and responding to peer remarks (ferdinandsen et al., 2022). such activities are needed especially in culturally and linguistically diverse settings: if a minoritized student senses that their efforts to enter conversation on their terms is assessed as disengagement by teachers or peers, they may choose disengagement, knowing they will not be called upon to contribute (glick & walqui, 2021). nonetheless, our case study enabled us to see how nina’s explorations of students’ identities in the context of discussions showed an evolution in how she viewed students, perceiving them as participants with much to offer. through the interaction of all dialogic framework domains, nina explored elements to advance discussion enacted by both teacher and students as shapers of classroom talk. this is a valuable takeaway for new teachers. student voices, their perceptions of discussions, and classroom social dynamics gained focus for nina, supported by a student-centered teacher learning design. nina widened the scope of her inquiry from fostering “higher-order thinking” through discussion, to the myriad ways learners interacted with texts, language, ideas, and each other. such noticing and learning illustrate processes that may benefit other teachers. instruction in te methods courses, such as the practices described in our innovation, can support first-time discussion leaders. collecting and analyzing student data also may foster deep and memorable learning, textured with particularity of individual students as informants about their own learning. finally, we advance a dialogic design for teacher learning and inquiry about a classroom practice that expands preservice teacher learning beyond a process of replicating methods for generic use in practice. instead, our innovation presents psts with opportunities to challenge classroom discourse that relies solely on ire structures and that holds the teacher as authority assessing student talk through quizlike questions. by fostering multiparty talk as a foundation and guiding development of cohesive discourse, preservice and more veteran teachers can create spaces for learning through dialogue and interaction with students, intentionally considering learners’ voices and avoiding overly-scripted conversations in ela and other subject areas. drawing upon multiple inquiry sources, nina, for example, attended closely to beto’s voice, his learning assets, noticing ways he helped fuel talk, far beyond rigid assumptions of what counts as serious discourse. yet she also recognized his potential for growth as a discussant, challenging him to engage in the academic literacy task of seeking textual evidence to support claims. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a29 our study had two limitations. first, shorter-term te programs may not have opportunities for pst inquiry to unfold as our framework describes. at the time of the study, nina had completed an introductory inquiry course and two months of extended student teaching. without such opportunities, teacher educators wishing to promote similar teacher learning may need alternate means to foster similar complex teacher learning and practice. programs might adapt our design, with psts examining more or fewer print sources, teacher interviews, or classroom data as they discuss findings with peers. we believe, however, that a solid foundation of teacher inquiry is crucial for the success of our project design. second, our study is limited by the treatment of a single case. however, our unit of analysis is not nina as a heroic teacher but nina’s practices and learning processes as a “critical case” (flyvbjerg, 2001). examining one preservice teacher’s practices with rich detail enabled us to move past the probable of psts inundated with ideas, practices, and expectations driven by whichever text or voice gets most amplified–to instead instantiate the possible in an elaborated case of teacher learning (shulman, 1983). complexity in teacher preparation for complex teaching practice documented across many research studies and across national contexts, facilitating class discussions that center dialogue and collective meaning-making is a complex practice that complicates simple teacher preparation in “talk moves” and methods (caughlan et al., 2017; sedova, 2021). in english language arts, a subject that embraces ambiguity, multiple interpretations of texts, and sociocultural/sociohistorical perspectives on content and themes, teachers need a rich repertoire of knowledge, practices, and preparation in thinking deeply about how every learner may contribute to discussion and co-construction of understanding. teacher education methods and related courses are generally designed to hit many topics, often preventing in-depth consideration of the plethora of issues in any curricular domain. many te programs may not have time and opportunities for extended treatment of a domain within crowded schedules. our case study rests on the assumption that extended treatment of a single curricular domain can enlighten psts about teaching and learning in that domain, about complexities of teaching and learning, and about processes and tools for future inquiry. the case study presents ways te programs can support development of knowledge and skills to better understand and promote equitable, meaningful classroom talk. in our study, nina invoked elements of resources she had engaged with during her inquiry course, each mediated by an analytic or reflective process. from a dialogic perspective, each discovery nina made echoed voices, language, ideas (akin to bakhtin’s focus on dialogue and utterances), and resources she had tapped and explored in explicit ways. discoveries also echo discourse within schooling, ela practice, and te methods, with nina--at times--challenging such discourses and methods. to truly meet the demands of complex teaching in culturally and linguistically complex settings, the field of teacher education needs infusion of and documentation of innovative pedagogies that equip teachers effectively. we present our case study of such an innovation as the context within which we offer one pst’s learning journey. our study positions nina, at the dawn of her career, not yet a teacher-of-record in her own classroom, implementing dialogic talk and learning from student interactions through inquiry, as a professional committed to comprehending the nuanced nature of class discussion in diverse k-12 classrooms. despite our own extensive work on facilitating discussions, our analysis of nina’s practices and emerging insights shed light on the centrality of students in sustaining authentic talk in schools seldom designed for safe, social construction of knowledge (resnick et al., 2015; wells, 2007). little work has treated knowledge constructed in teacher inquiry as warranting analysis or useful to inform models of teaching (zeichner, 2009). despite that pattern, we learned from nina’s inquiry and reflections about complexities of learning to lead discussion and about what is possible in teacher education. a case such as this can serve as a te resource, highlighting for teacher educators and psts the complicated, nuanced dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | 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(2016). resources preservice teachers use to think about student writing. research in the teaching of english, 51(1), 12-36. appendix: inquiry and focal students working with an n of four: overview your n, or number of participants, may be a full class, but your special focus is four students, an n of 4. so what is the value of studying an n of 4? you can’t really generalize from such a small number to whole classes or whole grade levels or to students across school sites. so what does an inquiry with such a small n yield? the answer is: careful mining of data, in a case study manner, to learn about learning challenges, to uncover issues, problem areas, ways young people grow in their learning, close looking at individuals and phenomena, factors involved in their learning in your focal ela area, and the revealing of relevant themes. some researchers write journal articles using an n of 1—often one learner, one child, one student. but what they try to achieve in that study is a deep looking at learning and development issues, using a range of data sources. the reporting needs to use rich sampling from the data in order for the “case” to come alive and shed light on teaching and learning issues. mine the data deeply. look closely at your students’ work, their remarks, to understand what the data can tell you. you cannot do a lot with breadth (with such a small number of focal participants, and in just a short timeframe). but do as much as you can with depth. synthesize and integrate your data and what you are finding. think about how what a student does relates to what s/he tells you, and how this relates to or differs from input from another student. think of how these things relate to what you have learned from professional resources you reviewed. this synthesizing and integrating is what makes inquiry into an n of 4 compelling. a student can be an example of something. or one piece of work or one remark from the student can illustrate a phenomenon you have been seeing. dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a37 provide a trail from claims to evidence. avoid making sweeping claims without evidence. how can you do this with student work, with student interview data, with venn diagrams, outlines, revisions to essays, or transcripts of classroom discourse? be thoughtful and creative about this. find ways to make “things” into visible data that serve as evidence. this is how you make your inquiry credible and trustworthy. some of you have been doing some of this in excellent ways in your memos. here are examples: ● annotate students’ work with your own language in the margins of student work, in order to make clear how you are interpreting and analyzing bits and pieces. ● scan student work excerpts and reflections right beneath claims you make about them, to build evidence for things you want to say about students’ understandings and reflections. ● transcribe a stretch of discourse in scripted fashion, and interpret and analyze what occurs with students’ contributions to talk. locate what is occurring, with specific references to what student 1 or 2 or 8 says and what a specific student remark does to shape discourse. make explicit the trail from student work/talk/reflections to your claims or comments about them! introducing linguistically diverse focal students: reflection too often we imagine emergent bilinguals/english learners as a unified group with the same strengths and needs. in fact, we know that levels of english language proficiency vary widely for emergent bilingual learners, as do motivation, interest in a particular topic or subject area, and general literacy skills and abilities. for this reflection, choose two very different emergent bilingual learners in your focal class for your inquiry and reflect on their learning and performances. if you do not have two relevant students in your focal class in which you will conduct inquiry, then choose students who demonstrate some challenges in their literacy performances. collect work samples from these two students for close study. remove names and add pseudonyms. (1) introduce the students. who are they? race/ethnicity/first language (if relevant)? what do you know of their broader interests? performances in other classes? ways of interacting with peers in class? level of english language proficiency according to “official” school indicators and according to your assessment at this point. (2) specific strengths in work, especially in writing. characterize what each student does that demonstrates achievement that is there. if you have a sample writing, examine exactly what is going on in the work that demonstrates achievement and what it shows. quote from the work if you can. (3) room to grow. what literacy goals might you still hold for these students? where do you hope they might get to in future literacy tasks? by the end of the year? in future years? how might you help these students reach even higher? (4) comparing these two students’ work. how would you compare the work of these two students? thoughts on the kind of scaffolding you might still use with them? (5) closing thoughts? thoughts on these students as learners related to focus of your inquiry? focal students’ work: memo 1 questions to consider: 1. what do my focal students know and understand about this area of english language arts work? 2. what do they need to understand more fully? dialogic teacher inquiry: the case of a pst learning to facilitate class discussion sergio l. sanchez, steven z. athanases dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.482 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a38 3. who among my students appears to need more scaffolding to move ahead in their understanding/performance? 4. what do i need to understand more fully about the focal area of content, in order to help my students understand it more fully? 5. among four focal students, which students appear to understand what about the focal content/process work? 6. rather than only noting the deficiencies in my focal students’ work—or areas where they fall short of my learning goals for them—how can i document the achievement that is there in order to build on this achievement? 7. what is the achievement that is there? what are the very specific pieces of performance that i can tease apart, in order to understand what is working and what is not? 8. what are my students’ learning preferences related to the focal content/process? 9. are their particular ways my focal students prefer engaging with the content? 10. are their particular kinds of scaffolding that my various focal students benefit from most? 11. in what ways do especially my focal students seem to resist the focal content/process? new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word rinholm et al, dialogues in education, 2023-06-26, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a60 dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm oslo metropolitan university, norway ida heiberg solem oslo metropolitan university, norway inger ulleberg oslo metropolitan university, norway abstract the aim of this study is to explore how aspects of dialogic teaching are concretized in classrooms to fill the gap between educational rhetoric and classroom practices. a central competency needed in our time is the ability to participate in democratic dialogue. education for democratic citizenship can be connected to the notion of “becoming human,” which is a central idea in the bildung dimension of education. the national educational regulations in norway state that the teacher’s mandate is not limited to conveying knowledge and skills but also includes fostering the students’ critical reflection, inquisitiveness, and participation. the research questions that guided the study are: what theoretical concepts can be helpful in understanding and analyzing dialogic classroom practices? how can participation be promoted through dialogic classroom practice? how do the dimensions of ontological and epistemological dialogue appear in educational settings, and how do they interact with each other? methodologically, the article presents, analyzes, and discusses two cases from different educational settings: pre-service teacher education music courses and upper-primary-level mathematics education. the findings show that the chosen theoretical concepts of mathematizing, musicking, and bildung, as well as ontological and epistemological dialogue, are helpful in making sense of dialogic classroom practices. keywords: epistemological and ontological dialogue, education, bildung, musicking, mathematizing hanne rinholm (previously fossum) is a professor of music at the faculty of education and international studies, oslo metropolitan university. since 2018, she has been leading the multidisciplinary research group teacher education as a process of bildung at oslo metropolitan university and has been program co-chair for the international society of philosophy of music education symposium 2017–2023. she has published on topics such as musical-aesthetic experience, dialogue in education, democratic citizenship, critical reflection, and teachers’ professional diversity competences. ida heiberg solem is associate professor emerita in the faculty of education and international studies, oslo metropolitan university. she is engaged in the topic of communication in the mathematical classroom, and her research interests comprise the exploration of the students’ questioning, reasoning, arguing and justifying mathematical ideas and concepts. solem has written several textbooks for teacher students and issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a61 teachers in norwegian, as well as research articles such as “which questions should be asked in classroom talks in mathematics” (with inger ulleberg) and “aspects of a teacher’s mathematical knowledge in his orchestration of a discussion about rational numbers” (with bodil kleve). inger ulleberg is professor emerita at the faculty of education and international studies at oslo metropolitan university. her research interests are connected to communication between teacher and students in the classroom as well as between counselor and teacher in counseling processes. ulleberg has published research articles, book chapters, and textbooks on these questions, such as “which questions should be asked in classroom talks in mathematics” (with ida heiberg solem), “asking questions in supervision” (with per jensen), “what do i share – personal and private experiences in educational psychological counselling” (with heidi mjelve and kristin vonheim). ïïò introduction a central competency needed in the 21st century is the ability to participate in democratic dialogue on different levels: globally, nationally, and locally. considering the political situation in the world at present, where democratic dialogue is threatened by currents such as neoliberalism, populist nationalism, and polarization between social and ethnic groups, such competencies seem to be needed more than ever. the foreword to the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) report rethinking education: towards a global common good (2015) calls for a changed education to meet these challenges: the world is changing – education must also change. societies everywhere are undergoing deep transformation, and this calls for new forms of education to foster the competencies that societies and economies need, today and tomorrow. this means moving beyond literacy and numeracy, to focus on learning environments and on new approaches to learning for greater justice, social equity, and global solidarity. (unesco, 2015, p. 3) new forms of education must prepare citizens for the changing world. moreover, with the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) pandemic, as well as the russian invasion of ukraine, the world is facing the biggest global existential threats since world war ii, and the term “global solidarity” used in the unesco report has thus gained new relevance. the climate crisis is another global threat. education plays a key role in developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that are vital to upholding the democratic dialogue needed to address such problems. on a national level, the norwegian education act states that “pupils and apprentices must learn to think critically and act ethically and with environmental awareness. they must have joint responsibility and the right to participate” (education act, 1998, 1-1). the act further states that pupils must have the “opportunity to be creative, committed and inquisitive” (education act, 1998, 1-1). these statements draw a picture of an active, participative student who is taught to be a full and responsible member of society. the global engagement with environmental issues in recent years, such as the school strikes for climate change initiated by the swedish teenager greta thunberg, has shown that young students’ voices can be heard and can make a difference both locally and globally. the values from the education act are defined more explicitly in the core curriculum of norway’s new national curriculum (core curriculum, 2020), which has been implemented in norwegian schools since august 2020. the core curriculum states that “[t]he teaching and training must give the pupils rich opportunities to become engaged and develop the urge to explore. the ability to ask questions, explore, dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a62 and experiment is important for in-depth learning” (core curriculum, 2020, 1.4). another basic value in the new curriculum is defined under the headline “democracy and participation,” which is one of the three new key interdisciplinary issues reflected in the curriculum. here, the stipulation is that “[t]he school must be a venue where children and young people experience democracy in practice. the pupils must experience that they are heard in the day-to-day affairs in school, that they have genuine influence and that they can have impact on matters that concern them […] the dialogue between teacher and pupils, and between the school and the home, must be based on mutual respect” (core curriculum, 2020, 1.6). the values highlighted in these educational regulations point to the fact that the teacher’s mandate is not limited to conveying subject knowledge and skills but also includes helping the students become critical and inquisitive societal participants and citizens. such education for democratic citizenship can be connected to the notion of “becoming human,” which is a central idea in the bildung dimension of education (fossland, 2004; humboldt, 2000; rinholm & varkøy, 2020). democratic citizenship education can also be understood in the context of what gert biesta (2014) referred to as “the subjectification dimension” of education. an education that includes both epistemological and ontological dialogue will be supportive of democratic citizenship (matusov, 2009). due to the focus of this study, we do not deeply discuss the possible cause-and-effect relationship between dialogic pedagogy and the development of democratic capacities, which we realize is not necessarily given in a direct sense. however, we still believe, in line with the core curriculum (2020), that dialogic pedagogy can contribute to bildung and the development of democratic capacities. these educational challenges form the background context of this study, in which we explore how general aspirations and values could be concretized in classrooms. our aim is to fill the gap between educational rhetoric and classroom practices. first, we introduce the theoretical perspectives and concepts that we developed as a framework for the study and the analytical tools that we employed. next, we present, analyze, and discuss two cases from different educational settings: pre-service teacher education music courses and mathematics education at the upper primary level. finally, we compare and discuss the cases according to some common features of dialogic elements. the following are our research questions: what theoretical concepts can be helpful in understanding and analyzing dialogic classroom practices? how can participation be promoted through dialogic classroom practice? how do the dimensions of ontological and epistemological dialogue appear in educational settings, and how do they interact with each other? the first question is answered through the presentation of the theoretical framework and the discussion of the cases. the second and third questions are answered through the analysis and discussion of the cases, as well as in the final discussion. methodology this study is an interdisciplinary qualitative project based on empirical material originating from two teaching situations at different educational levels and subjects. the collaboration among the researchers stems from a joint interest in understanding the dialogic dimensions in education, both theoretically and practically. the research team consists of teacher educators in pedagogy, music, and mathematics. the study applies a deductive approach, in which theoretical concepts function as lenses for studying practice. dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a63 background this project was developed across many years through different opportunities for collaboration. we, who are colleagues from different departments of teacher education at oslo metropolitan university, norway, first got to know each other through a joint interdisciplinary book project on dialogues in education (christensen & ulleberg, 2013), which was followed up by a symposium about dialogues in education at a conference in 2014. at this conference, we presented and discussed the material and findings developed in each discipline. we then decided to continue this collaboration by exploring our joint interest in how dialogues with students could emerge in different educational settings. we found that bringing together cases from educational situations in different disciplines would enrich sense-making processes and discussions. while we were studying and discussing the relevant literature and each other’s cases, we came to develop a common understanding of both the theoretical concepts and the material. materials the cases were chosen from a portfolio of materials developed through different projects in each discipline. we had a multitude of cases, transcripts, and observations from which to choose and were searching for cases that could show a variety of educational settings and simultaneously capture aspects of dialogue. our reasons for choosing the two cases at hand were that they offered possibilities for comparison as well as a variety in both form and setting. the cases were chosen through preliminary examination and discussions in the project group, and the teaching situations were transformed into two cases that had a plot-like form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. the first case draws on experiences from a choir project as part of a pre-service teacher education music course in 2013. the part of the project portrayed in the case was chosen because of its complexity and many-layered character in terms of its different levels of communication and of being imbued with many not-outspoken qualities, which lent itself to an interpretation based on the theoretical framework used in this study. the choir project went on for 4 weeks, with six 2-hour rehearsals, one general rehearsal, and one final public concert. forty students participated in the project. one of the researchers, who was also the teacher educator in the choir project, documented the project through diary notes and constructed the case shortly after the project ended. the researcher especially focused on existentially meaningful and significant events in the writing of the case (polkinghorne, 1995, p. 19), which corresponds with the notion of ontological dialogue in the theoretical framework we are applying (åsvoll, 2006; matusov, 2009). the second case stems from a project in which the researchers observed, audiotaped, and transcribed a 45-minute classroom talk that transpired in an upper-primary-level mathematics class (ulleberg & solem, 2015). this session was chosen because the lesson involved some of the theoretical aspects addressed in this study. the case was constructed through a selection of sequences from the transcript of the classroom talk. the selection was theory-driven, and sequences were chosen by the researchers as relevant for exploring traces of epistemological and ontological dialogue, as well as bildung in the classroom talk. the sequences should also be rich enough to present a picture of the communication between the teacher and the students. the music case is an account of the experiences from an event in which the researchers’ interpretation played a role in constructing the story. thus, the case is also based on and expresses the researchers’ emotions and thoughts regarding what happened in the situation (chase, 2005). for example, the researchers sensed that the event described in the case could be interpreted as an educative encounter with learning material involving the students’ whole being (bollnow, 1959, 1972). the same applies to the case of the mathematics classroom talk, in which the researchers’ interpretation helped in choosing the relevant parts of the talk to be highlighted in the study. the cases belong to different genres, as one is a dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a64 constructed story, while the other presents transcripts of conversations from the classroom. mathematics and music are also school subjects belonging to different knowledge traditions. these differences comprise some difficulties, as well as some opportunities for comparisons that could yield a richer and more complex understanding of dialogue in education. analysis the analysis was inspired by the narrative study method, which can underline the interrelatedness of theory with practice (mcewan, 1995). narrative analysis is case-centered and grounded in the particular but general aspects that can be derived across narratives. thus, “[the] particularities and complexity of the narratives come to the fore” (riessman, 2008, p. 13). this can prompt the reader to go beyond the surface of the text and move toward a broader understanding of the text (riessman, 2008). the narrative study method is closely connected to a hermeneutic line of thought, with a focus on the researchers’ interpretation and meaning-making processes (gadamer, 2004). each case was developed and analyzed by the researchers in each discipline independently and in the project group. the researchers participated in a hermeneutical process (gadamer, 2004) in which the empirical cases served as the lenses for reading theory and where the theoretical concepts simultaneously guided the meaning making of the cases. the researchers moved toward a broader commentary and reached a consensus on using some common theoretical lenses in analyzing the two cases and drawing on concepts specific to each narrative. this process resulted in a focus on the common concepts of “epistemological dialogue,” “ontological dialogue,” musicking/mathematizing, and bildung, which are elaborated on in the succeeding sections. the researchers’ voices merge in the methodological and theoretical parts of the article and in the discussion section, allowing for a multi-faceted view of the topic at hand. the aim of this study was not to provide fixed answers to specific questions but, in line with the ideals of dialogic pedagogy and hermeneutics, to arrive at new questions that may prompt an extended understanding of dialogic education (gadamer, 2004). theoretical framework the theoretical framework of this study draws on multiple sources and traditions, such as the philosophy of education, hermeneutics, and different concepts concerning dialogic education. in this section, we present the joint framework for the study, in which the concepts of dialogue are central. in subsequent sections, we also present subject-specific concepts connected to the analysis of each narrative: musicking (small, 1998) and mathematizing (freudenthal, 1991). in education, teachers and students meet, talk, argue, joke, and make faces and gestures; in short, they are in dialogue with each other. arguably, life itself is fundamentally dialogic (bakhtin, 1984, p. 293; trevarthen, 1992, 2008). in the following sections, we first present different aspects of the theoretical concept of dialogue, including the notions of epistemological and ontological dialogue. next, we introduce the notion of bildung, which has vital intentions and aims in common with the concept of dialogue and may prove fruitful for an extended understanding of dialogue. at the end of this section, we present characteristic features of a dialogic classroom as identified in the literature in the field of dialogic pedagogy. dialogism, dialogue, and dialogicality dialogism is a comprehensive, meta-theoretical framework for understanding human sense and meaning making (linell, 2009, 2017). it is a way of understanding how we see the world and ourselves in it. dialogism understands the human being as a dialogical and social being, and meaning and knowledge dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a65 as being created in the dialogical interactions between individuals. mikhail m. bakhtin, who developed the classical dialogism theory based on his reading of dostoevsky’s novels, claimed that the human mind is dialogic by nature. he found this displayed in dostoevsky’s work and stated that dostoevsky, in his novels, “could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and human life; where consciousness began, there dialogue began for him as well” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 40). bakhtin regarded dostoevsky as the first author to create characters whose consciousnesses were different from his own, which to bakhtin meant that his works were permeated with a profoundly democratic spirit (bakhtin, 1984). in a review article summarizing the current state of understanding of dialogue, linell (2017) identified and categorized about 20 approaches to the study of dialogue or interaction. he distinguished between dialogue in the sense of overt exchanges of utterances, dialogicality (or dialogism), which denotes a general capacity for sense making through interaction with others, and interactivity, which implies that action, communication, and cognition are interactional in nature and must always be understood in the relevant context. most theorists in this field agree that dialogism has moral and ethical dimensions (linell, 2017, p. 307). thus, dialogism allows for both an analytical, descriptive perspective and a normative perspective with epistemological and ontological dimensions. an approach inspired by normative dialogism is dialogic pedagogy, which advocates for democratic practices in the classroom (alexander, 2008, 2018, 2020; barnes, 2008; dysthe, 2012, 2020; matusov, 2005, 2009; mercer & hodgkinson, 2008; wegerif & phillipson, 2016). in this article, we particularly refer to this approach, whose representatives intend to develop the theoretical and practical concept of dialogue in education in a certain normative direction. arguably, it is a form of applied dialogism that elaborates on certain moral and normative aspects (linell, 2017, p. 310). however, we also refer to dialogism as a non-normative theoretical framework and analytical tool, as dialogism, in this sense, may be used to understand and describe human learning, development, and change in general (rommetveit, 2008; trevarthen, 1992, 2008). this implies that we operate on several levels in our analysis because we describe both external dialogue and interactivity on the one hand and internal dialogue and more hidden aspects of dialogical education on the other hand, including the epistemological and ontological dimensions, and even silence (hägg & kristiansen, 2012; linell, 2017; matusov, 2009). therefore, we relate to aspects from all the basic categories of dialogue, dialogicality, and interactivity, and our approach is both descriptive and normative (linell, 2017). even though dialogism is not a normative theory per se, its statements function as a critique of monologic, traditional educational accounts and dichotomic understandings of education (alexander, 2008). dialogism recognizes duality, complexity, and heterogeneity and facilitates culture-sensitive, genuine, and humanizing teaching practices (linell, 2009). as monologic and dialogic classroom practices are not good or bad per se (matusov, 1996), we acknowledge that monologic teaching can have a place as a part of the repertoire of classroom practices, but we will not discuss this issue in detail in this article. epistemological and ontological dialogue in this study, we are especially interested in the relationship between the epistemological and ontological dimensions of dialogue in education. in line with åsvoll (2006, p. 451), we understand the epistemological dimension as being mainly about the development of subject knowledge. arguably, education is always concerned with the development of subject knowledge, which means that all dialogues in classrooms are basically epistemological. epistemological dialogue can be connected to biesta’s (2014) qualification dimension of education, which we will elaborate on in the next section. the ontological dimension of dialogue in education, by contrast, concerns questions that are central to students’ lives and self-understanding. it implies that what takes place in school engages the students on a deeper level (dysthe, 2006, pp. 465–466; matusov, 2005). ontological dialogue is characterized by being uncompleted, dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a66 unpredictable, and experimental, besides having a transformed quality of time and space (åsvoll, 2006, p. 449). there is also an existential dimension to ontological dialogue. åsvoll (2006) claimed that there is a gap between the epistemological and ontological dimensions of the dialogic perspective and that they are not commensurable because they belong to different levels of interpretation. such a view resembles the german educational philosopher otto friedrich bollnow’s existential-hermeneutic notion of the “continuous” and “discontinuous” forms of education, in which the former is systematically planned, while the latter is offered only as educative encounters with learning materials involving the students’ whole being (bollnow, 1959, 1972; koskela & siljander, 2014, p. 73). a focus on the ontological aspects of teaching leads to the whole-person engagement of both the teacher and the students in the studied curriculum (matusov, 2009, p. 125). this means that the teacher, as a person, must come forward and participate with genuine engagement in the classroom. students also need to be recognized and engaged as persons, not merely as knowers (barnett, 2005, p. 795; fossum, 2015a; hansen, 2011, p. 251). an ontological-dialogic, being-oriented approach to education acknowledges openness, wonder, commitment, and passion as integral to learning (dall’alba & barnacle, 2007) and as instrumental in the creation of meaningful educational events (matusov, 2009, p. 376). when subjectspecific discussions are allowed to merge with or even emerge from the students’ own experiences and lifeworlds, they have the potential to attain ontological-dialogic qualities. these facilitate dialogues that further ontological engagement (matusov, 2009, p. 125). dialogue and bildung in line with our view of the tension between the epistemological and ontological aspects of dialogue, biesta (2014) emphasized that the goal of education is multilayered and complex. he identified three central dimensions that are at stake at the same time. first, education should deal with qualification, which involves providing students with knowledge, skills, and understanding. second, education should promote socialization, introducing students to traditions and culture. both qualification and socialization can be connected to the notion of epistemological dialogue. third, biesta (2014) described subjectification as a dimension of education that has to do with the students’ process of personal development and becoming independent and responsible citizens. these ideas can be related to the ontological aspects of dialogue and the theory of bildung. subjectification, as biesta used the term, is connected to the process of becoming a human subject. education should contribute to students becoming more independent in their acting and thinking. the concept of bildung, which was developed in the german-speaking area between 1770 and 1830 by the thinkers lessing, herder, kant, pestalozzi, schleiermacher, and von humboldt, among others, considers education important for the cultivation and development of humans as persons, not only for conveying scientific knowledge to them (klafki, 2001a). the cultivating aspect of bildung is about being educated in true humanity and about fostering wise and virtuous human beings. a person who is gebildet is well educated and able to think critically, behave politely, wisely, and responsively, and treat others with respect (rinholm & varkøy, 2020, p. 42). a central idea of the concept of bildung is the notion of mündigkeit—the empowered, critical, and independent citizen (see, for example, klafki, 2000, 2001b, 2001c). kant stated in 1784 that “[e]nlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity (unmündigkeit).” thus, kant advised human beings to “have courage to use your own understanding!” (kant, 1983, p. 41). in line with this, von humboldt, ten years later, described this aspect of bildung as educating the individual by helping him obtain a “fresh view of the world” and his “own perspective.” the educated person “no longer wants only to prepare knowledge or tools for men’s [sic] use, no longer wants merely to help further just a part of dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a67 his bildung” (von humboldt, 2000, p. 60). rather, according to von humboldt, the educated person will achieve a more holistic measure of bildung that emphasizes her self-determination. the two aspects of bildung described in this section, the humanizing aspect and the notion of autonomy (mündigkeit), are especially relevant to dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy is particularly concerned with helping students develop their own voices and their whole person (dysthe, 2001; matusov, 2009). moreover, the dialogical dimensions of teaching value equal participation as an important condition for learning and bildung (dysthe, 2001; wells, 1996). the dialogic classroom not every dialogue has genuine dialogic qualities, and simply proclaiming that there should be dialogue in one’s teaching is not sufficient. in matusov’s (2009) view, focusing too much on achieving dialogue in the classroom may even have a counterproductive effect: “the more one focuses on learning and dialogue, the farther they become. dialogue like nirvana, like happiness, like love, like learning cannot be achieved by the direct desire to have a dialogue” (matusov, 2009, p. 385). accordingly, it is not merely the use of dialogue as an overt exchange of utterances that characterizes teaching as dialogic. rather, dialogic teaching can be defined as whether the teacher facilitates genuine dialogic communication (dysthe, 2012, p. 46; matusov, 2009). dialogic qualities are manifested both in explicit utterances and in implicit acts (ulleberg & solem, 2015). it is even possible for these qualities to be manifested through silence or through tacit agreement (hägg & kristiansen, 2012). arranging a classroom where genuine dialogic communication is allowed can be understood as establishing a didactic contract (brousseau, 1997) between the teacher and the students, in which they agree on certain dialogic values. a didactic contract consists of the implicit or explicit rules for interaction in a classroom, often as a tacit agreement between the teacher and the students that determines what is at stake in the classroom. the teacher’s genuine engagement in the activities held in the classroom, as shown by the fact that she listens to her students, will be part of a didactic contract that affords genuine dialogic communication between the teacher and the students. of course, such a didactic contract also needs to consider institutional and formal structures, such as scheduling or the demands for assessment. however, the teacher is the most important factor in shaping an atmosphere that gives room for genuine dialogue, even within a strict schedule (nordenbo et al., 2008). thus, genuine dialogic dialogue is imbued with many nonverbal qualities. further, being silent may pave the way for students and teachers to participate in dialogue if the other participants are listening carefully with all their senses. arguably, the most basic value of dialogic pedagogy is the safeguarding of human dignity (fossum, 2015b; michelet, 2020). according to matusov (2009), dialogic pedagogy is an educational practice guided by a pro-dialogic project of education, which has three characteristics. first, it is expressed through the teacher’s attitude toward the students; that is, she does not simply manage their learning but is also a learner and learns together with them (freire, 1972; matusov, 2009, p. 5). second, dialogic pedagogy is expressed through the belief that stable knowledge does not exist; rather, knowledge is always social and dialogic and must be problematized and negotiated. in this negotiation process, the students’ and the teacher’s consciousness are valued as equally important (matusov, 2009, p. 5). the third quality is shown through genuine information-seeking questions that both the students and the teacher ask each other (matusov, 2009, p. 5). as already indicated, a dialogic educational perspective is not necessarily merely about conducting dialogues in the classroom in a concrete and everyday sense. dialogue does not even have to include the use of words. through the teacher’s many words and activities and through their wish to become effective and successful, they may miss important dimensions of education that are connected to the more hidden dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a68 and contemplative aspects of existence. teachers may too hastily deem quiet students as “passive” or “doing nothing” (von wright, 2007). such notions often bring up negative associations in today’s teachers, who are professionally rooted in dominant activity-based educational theories (i.e., dewey, 1926, 1938). even in dialogic pedagogy, it often seems that active participation in dialogue is regarded as a key premise. moira von wright (2007) suggested seeing “passive” students’ behavior from an alternative viewpoint: that these students may merely be “at ease” with themselves. in the next section, we present and discuss two cases from different educational settings: a preservice teacher education music course and an upper-primary-level mathematics education course. as already indicated, the aim of this study was to fill the gap between educational rhetoric and classroom practices. this means that we looked for elements of dialogic pedagogy in the two educational situations. the cases exemplify how dialogic pedagogy may be found and carried out in different educational settings. classroom practices the case of a choir project music teacher educator ann organized a choir project with her pre-service music teacher students. she invited them to suggest songs to be included in the program, together with some classical choir works of her choice. one student, a musical enthusiast, suggested the song “seasons of love” from the musical rent. ann initially doubted that this song would be suitable because of its style and content. rent was staged in the arts venues in new york around 1980, at the time of the first global hiv/aids epidemic. the song itself is about enjoying life with your loved ones while you are still alive. ann found this theme somewhat odd for a concert program, but she finally decided to go for the song. during the first rehearsal, she discussed the lyrics of the song with her students. a little hesitantly, she decided to tell them about her own experiences with aids. her brother had been infected with hiv while studying in the u.s. around 1980. he died of aids later, just before life-saving treatment was found for the disease. there was a deafening silence in the room while she was telling this story, which later drove ann to ask herself if she had made the right decision to share this personal story with her students. after the rehearsal, however, some students thanked her for her openness. during the concert, the song was performed in an atmosphere of cheerfulness and joy. along with this cheerfulness, the song became a deep, existential undertone for ann and maybe also for her students. in the following sections, we will analyze and discuss the situation described in the case through the theoretical lenses of the concepts of musicking, epistemological and ontological dialogue, didactic contract, musical-existential experience, and existential bildung. analysis and discussion of the choir project case musicking arguably, in the encounter between music and human beings, there are manifold relations at play. christopher small (1998) introduced the term musicking to thematize music’s character as an event, something people do and participate in, rather than being just a thing or an object. when people participate in musicking, meaning when they participate in a musical event in one way or another as musicians, listeners, or audiences, or even as ticket sellers, there is a set of relations at stake. that is, “[m]usicking is a ritual that explores, affirms and celebrates relationships – the pattern which [sic] connects, batesonian mind in nature – at a biosocial and gestural level that is deeper and more complex than mere verbal languages [do]” (keil, 2000, p. 161). for small (1998, p. 8), the meaning of music is not individual but social. the relations created between the people participating in a musical event are the meaning and the end of dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a69 music. these relations act as metaphors for the ideal relations between persons, between the individual and society, and between the human being and the world, both the natural and the supernatural (small, 1998, p. 13). musicking is thus a way of knowing the world, a world of experienced relations in all their complexities (small, 1998, p. 50). seeing the music classroom from such a perspective creates a wider, higher, and deeper classroom than the one that is visible, with a “heaven” above and a wide space of invisible relations encompassing it, allowing ideas, emotions, and existential overtones to resonate behind and beyond what, in a concrete sense, happens in the music classroom. due to what happened during the rehearsal, the performance of the rent song in the concert increased in complexity. existential themes such as different forms of sexuality, sickness, and death, even the tabooed theme of hiv/aids, but also the joy of life, love, and friendship and the excitement of performing music together with fellow students in front of an audience consisting of friends, educators, and family, were all at stake during the concert performance. however, to ann, the hesitation, doubt, and shame she had felt during the rehearsal because of her openness regarding her brother’s death was also at stake. this narrative illustrates how music can be experienced as a multi-spectral universe of meaning that allows the complexity of the emotions and experiences belonging to the human condition to exist and be felt simultaneously (nielsen, 1998, 2006, p. 166). the relations that were awoken and celebrated with such a performance were those between the musicking participants (the students, ann, and the audience), but also the relations with the dead brother and with all those who have suffered from and died of aids were brought into remembrance and celebrated. in this way, the relations between the living and departed human beings and between the natural and supernatural worlds were brought into being (small, 1998, p. 13). the musicking perspective thus encompasses both the epistemological and ontological dimensions of dialogue in the pre-service music teacher classroom. epistemological and ontological dialogue as a didactic contract ontological and epistemological dimensions are simultaneously at play in all classrooms, in visible and invisible forms, and in heard and unheard ways (pio, 2007; von wright, 2007). during the choir project, as described in the narrative, the teacher conveyed concrete subject-specific knowledge content through dialogue and through music practice. the students were taught and had to learn by heart the songs and classical works included in the concert program. they learned to sing and convey songs and classical works musically in a certain way, and they also acquired practical knowledge and pedagogical skills related to how to manage and direct a concert performance in school. such aspects of teaching and learning arguably belong to the epistemological dimensions of classroom dialogues. however, the ontological dimensions of dialogue in the music classroom are more hidden. by giving room for the students’ own song suggestions, ann set a standard for which and whose music choices were legitimate to express. the students’ musical preferences were valued as equal to her own. the values and patterns of communication she conveyed to the students became part of the didactic contract in this preservice teacher classroom (brousseau, 1997). ann modeled to her students how to give room for the students’ voices without abandoning her own voice and her subject-specific authority. she did not abdicate from the professional leadership of the project. this feature is a dialogic quality in line with bakhtin’s idea of letting “consciousnesses of equal rights” have their say in the classroom. neither dogmatism nor relativism regarding musical taste was allowed to hinder authentic dialogue (dysthe, 1999, p. 15). according to bakhtin, there is no contradiction between dialogic teaching and conveying subject-matter knowledge. on the contrary, the teacher’s authority, both as an expert and as a person, is essential for developing “the internally persuasive word” in the students, which arguably is the paramount goal of dialogic education (bakhtin, 1981, p. 345; dysthe, 2006, p. 466). here, we follow dysthe’s understanding of the notion of the dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a70 internally persuasive word as supporting students in finding their own voice. this idea coincides with von humboldt’s notion of bildung, in which the empowerment of the person toward developing her own autonomy (mündigkeit) is central, which includes developing a “fresh view of the world” and one’s “own perspective” (von humboldt, 2000, p. 60). ann also set a standard for what topics were legitimate to discuss in connection with the songs and music used in the classroom. ann’s decision to speak openly about her personal experience with aids can, of course, be called into question. the border between being personal and private in educational relations is subtle, and there is no clear answer to the question of which teacher attitudes are appropriate in such situations. therefore, it is necessary to find a balanced way of handling emotionally charged issues in the classroom so as not to make students feel unsafe. the teacher should not allow herself or any student to step over this border by becoming too personal or even private, and she should be aware of the danger of letting the lesson content become “too close to home” or “too ontological” (matusov, 2009, p. 376). musical-existential experience the question of whether existential themes, such as sickness and death, are relevant to classroom discussions can be further raised. sometimes, things happen that necessarily put forward such themes, such as the mass shooting on the island of utøya in norway on july 22, 2011, where 69 mainly young people died. in the months after the mass shooting, the teachers were compelled to address these themes with their students, regardless of their grade level. in nearly all classes, some students were either personally affected because someone in their family was on the island when it happened, or they knew someone who was affected by the incident. in some classrooms, there were even students who went missing forever. in this situation, certain songs and music could better capture the sense of life and the atmosphere that reigned in norway at that time than words could (knudsen et al., 2014). this example shows the vital role that music can play in significant moments in students’ lives. in the literature, such experiences with music are referred to as musical-existential experiences (pio & varkøy, 2012). such incidents and situations have the potential to create ontological relevance (matusov, 2009) for the themes discussed in the classroom, themes that concern the students at a deeper level. the 9-11 terror, the ongoing climate crisis, the recent pandemic, and the russia–ukraine war are other examples of such themes. existential experiences with music, however, do not necessarily have to concern only negative or dramatic events; everyday issues and joyful life events may also be of existential importance to students. as the case shows, happiness may be conveyed simultaneously with more sorrowful or contemplative emotions through music. of course, joyful singing does not necessarily reflect the singer’s inner emotional state during a performance. it is a conventional musical practice to facially express the emotions of a text when performing songs. still, it is not unreasonable to assume that at least some of the students remembered the rehearsal talk about the song “seasons of love” during the performance while simultaneously enjoying the joyfulness and success of the performance. existential bildung in line with this, the danish education philosopher finn thorbjørn hansen uses themes from the students’ lifeworld as a basis for reflection in his being-oriented, bottom-up approach to existential bildung, starting from the phenomenological description of cases in which the students were emotionally affected (hansen, 2011). this concept is built on the pedagogical concept of wonder inspired by hannah arendt, which also includes a reflection on the “unsolvable mystery” that life experiences often represent (hansen, 2009, 2010, 2011). a specific type of “cautious listening” is applied to produce “real education” (bildung) in a heideggerian sense, which hansen calls “ontological education” (hansen, 2011, p. 252). dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a71 it is evident that the concepts of existential experience, existential bildung, and ontological education resonate with the notion of ontological dialogue described and discussed in connection with the choir project case. hansen’s notions of cautious listening and existential bildung have commonalities with von wright’s reminder of listening carefully (with all one’s senses) to silent students so as not to miss the important aspects of education connected to the more hidden and contemplative aspects of existence (von wright, 2007). the case of a mathematics education class the classroom dialogue described in this case from a mathematics education class took place in a large city school where the students had mixed backgrounds. the setting was a classroom where 25 seventh-grade kids sat on benches in a circle in a corner. the two researchers sat in the background, audiotaping the lesson, and taking notes. the teacher had prepared a classroom talk that included comparing rational numbers and placing them on a number line. the numbers were written on a flip-over, as shown in figure 1: figure 1. from the flip-over the teacher started by saying: teacher: i will give you some time to think on your own before you answer. you are allowed to discuss this with the student next to you. i am not very concerned about whether this is eventually completely correct. however, the important issue is for you to explain how you are thinking. […] [w]e are going to place numbers on a number line, and i do not want you to place them right away. i want us to talk about the numbers first. ok? therefore, the goal of this lesson is to be able to place fractions, percentages, and decimal numbers on a number line. the students discussed different aspects of the numbers by comparing and exploring them. after about 25 minutes, the teacher posed a challenge to the class: teacher: can you find a fraction between 3/5 and 4/5? the students worked with the challenge by expanding the fractions: 3/5 to 6/10 and 4/5 to 8/10 and finding 7/10 between them. suddenly, some of the kids made a discovery. neda: now the same happens again; 4 plus 3 is 7! elias: it was like that the last time we did it! kim: it happened then too, but you said it was a coincidence. dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a72 teacher: but maybe there is a pattern here? students: yes, yes… teacher: wait a minute … lisa: last time it wasn’t ten, but now it is ten, isn’t it? neda: we can add them both, the denominators, and get ten. the students discovered that they could find a fraction between 3/5 and 4/5 by adding the numerators (3 + 4 = 7) and the denominators (5 + 5 = 10). they also remembered that this happened the last time they had worked on similar tasks, so they claimed that they had found a mathematical pattern. the teacher, however, could not see the pattern clearly. teacher: some of you are starting to see some patterns that i’m not sure i can see. hanna: yesterday, we had the same, or we multiplied both by two. then we saw that – that those numbers, i mean, the numerators, if we added them, it became the same as, yes, as the answer. and now it happened again. teacher: ok. but if it has happened twice, are we sure it will happen next time? lisa: no, but there is such a rule that if it happens once, it is completely random – twice it is special and three times it’s okay. teacher: three times, then it must be that way? is there such a rule? the teacher did not know if this was a pattern that held mathematically, but he knew that in mathematics, three examples are not enough to call it a rule. however, if there is one counterexample that does not follow the rule, it is sufficient to dispel the “rule.” he knew that the students should explore this further, searching for counterexamples, and he gave the class new fractions to explore: teacher: we must explore this further. can you find a fraction between 1/4 and 2/4? januscha? januscha: i just moved – one plus two – i added the numerator and the numerator, and that was three, and then the denominators, and that was eight, and to be sure i doubled it. teacher: and then you reached three. januscha: out of eight. teacher: ok. have you all reached the same? students: yes, yes. teacher: ok. so, we can see a very similar pattern now. if we add the numerators and add the denominators, we will find the fraction in between. but are we confident? does this apply to all kinds of fractions? students (different voices): no – we don’t know… yes… after studying even more fractions together, the students came up with different hypotheses, with the examples as a point of departure: • i think … it always goes when there is one even and one odd numerator. • when there are two even numbers or two odd numbers, there is always a number between. • when there is one number of each, then it goes. • i think—i do not know if it applies to fractions with different denominators. the teacher summed up the discussion by commenting, “do you know that we are looking at an area that i have not quite checked yet? i do not know how this will end, either. i cannot see all the patterns that are there, so i think this is very exciting. we need to work much more with this in the future.” dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a73 in the following sections, we analyze and discuss the case from the mathematics classroom concerning the dialogic aspects of the conversation. we point out and discuss the features of epistemological and ontological dialogue and the mathematizing and bildung aspects in the talk. analysis and discussion of the mathematics classroom case didactic contract the teacher in this second case had been a teacher in this class for several years and had established a didactic contract with the class as a community of learners characterized by participation and sharing (brousseau, 1997; ulleberg & solem, 2015). this comes to expression in the teacher’s introduction to the task: teacher: i will give you some time to think on your own before you answer. you are allowed to discuss this with the student next to you. i am not very concerned about whether everything is eventually completely correct. however, the important issue is for you to explain how you are thinking. through this introduction, the teacher communicated several intentions and goals: to think, talk, share, explain, doubt, and discuss. he expressed an understanding of the subject of “mathematics” as a venue for searching for patterns and relationships, formulating hypotheses and assumptions, and investigating whether these can be confirmed or disproven (lampert, 1990). however, it is not sufficient to express a view explicitly if it is not followed up with implicit messages or actions through the way the teacher asks questions, listens, follows up on students’ inputs, and orchestrates a classroom talk in line with an epistemological dialogue (ulleberg & solem, 2015). we will now have a look at how the teacher in this case followed up on his explicit introduction by acting in accordance with what he said. epistemological dialogue in this case, the students’ contributions were seen by the teacher as crucial and of interest, and the students listened to the teacher and his questions and to each other. they trusted their own thinking and wanted to share their thoughts with others. the students were used to being challenged and explaining, justifying, and arguing. such an epistemological dialogue can be seen as a reflective communication with the intention of sharing ideas to deepen the students’ mathematical understanding (brendefur & frykholm, 2000). kazemi and hintz (2014) claimed that classroom discussions in mathematics should be guided by four principles. in our view, these principles can be connected to biesta’s (2014) three dimensions of education. the first principle is that discussions should achieve a mathematical goal, which is related to biesta’s idea of qualification. we found an example of this in the segment in which the students were looking for and learning about “in-between fractions.” the second principle is that students need to know how to share mathematical content. this can be connected to biesta’s socialization aspect of education. in this case, the students were active in the classroom talk and willingly shared their thoughts and explanations with each other. the third principle is that teachers need to orient their students to each other and to mathematical ideas at the same time. this principle can be connected to both the socialization and qualification aspects of education (biesta, 2014). the teacher, in this case, explored the issue at hand and challenged the students to explain their thoughts and to develop hypotheses. the fourth principle for classroom discussions in mathematics is that teachers must communicate to all students that their ideas are valued and make sense. this is in line with biesta’s concept of subjectification (2014). in this case, the teacher took the students’ inputs seriously and let them influence the teaching. dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a74 the last principle aligns with the aspects of dialogue presented above, as stated by matusov (2009), concerning the teacher’s attitude toward the students. matusov claimed that a teacher who carries out dialogic pedagogy is also a learner and learns together with the students and values the consciousnesses of the students by letting them ask and answer genuine information-seeking questions. the teacher’s questioning is a fruitful springboard for talks with dialogical elements (boaler & broadie, 2004; mason, 2000; ulleberg & solem, 2018). in the classroom talk, the teacher prepared a challenge for the class formulated as a question: “can you find a fraction between 3/5 and 4/5?” he trusted the students to be able to consider his question and come up with some answers to it. he listened to the students and was interested in what they were saying. he challenged them to explain their views by explaining why they believed these views were true. the students were expected to justify their thinking through deductive reasoning (kazemi & hintz, 2014). in this way, they learned to be critical and to argue, and they learned that their participation was crucial for developing the classroom talk. these are elements of an epistemological dialogue aimed at developing knowledge. the subjectification side of education offers a perspective for exploring the notion of ontological dialogue in this case. ontological dialogue arguably, when students explore a matter together with the teacher in classroom talk (in this case, the patterns between fractions), and when the teacher clearly states that he is uncertain about the matter, the students will participate in a dialogue in which some ontological features can develop. classroom talk can engage students on a deeper level and can help them deal with issues relevant to their selfunderstanding and their understanding of being human (dysthe, 2006, p. 466; matusov, 2005). when the teacher in the narrative said, “some of you are starting to see some patterns that i’m not sure i can see,” he shared his fallibility with them and introduced the idea that children can sometimes understand more than grown-ups can and that teachers are also learners. as he also said, “i do not know how this will end,” he shared with the students his experimental attitude toward exploring the subject at hand and his openness to the unpredictable elements of teaching. allowing oneself to stand on thin ice and showing such a fundamentally curious attitude are significant features of ontological dialogue (åsvoll, 2006). the dialogue can then develop to a deeper level, where issues of self-understanding can be touched upon. through the classroom talk, the teacher actualized elements of ontological dialogue by conducting the conversation in a certain direction. he picked up initiatives from the students and let them influence the classroom talk. he put a student at the center of the talk when he let neda express her finding: “now the same happens again, 4 plus 3 is 7!” further, he followed up on a student’s initiative when he reacted to hanna’s elaboration on what happened again when the numerators were added. the teacher also showed genuine curiosity when he asked januschka to explain her thinking while she was exploring another example (1/4 and 2/4): “i just moved – one plus two – i added the numerator and the numerator, and that was three, and then the denominators and that was eight, and to be sure i doubled it.” finally, the teacher asked the students to come up with hypotheses such as, “i think … it always goes when there is one even and one odd numerator. when there are two even numbers or two odd numbers, there is always a number between. when there is one number of each, then it goes. i think—i do not know if it applies to fractions with different denominators.” in this way, the teacher implicitly conveyed to the students that the world is complex and that we need to collaborate with each other and think together to address this complexity by developing different hypotheses and that we learn from each other. such an approach can also be related to a foundational understanding of learning mathematics as mathematizing (freudenthal, 1991). dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a75 mathematizing dialogical classroom talks in mathematics class imply a collective reflection led by a competent teacher (bergem & klette, 2012). through such talks, students develop mathematical competence by learning to mathematize (freudenthal, 1991). mathematizing involves being able to express, test, and revise one’s ways of thinking. it includes trying out, discussing, and analyzing ideas in a learning community. mathematizing is encouraged through conversations that give room for different voices to be heard and that alternate between questions and answers and between arguments and doubt, as we found in the described classroom talk. mathematizing is about creating connections between written and oral mathematical expressions and directing one’s attention toward process aspects that centralize oral activities and mathematical language (riesbeck, 2008). learning mathematics does not only consist of the mere transference of knowledge but rather of meaning-generating communicative processes between persons that include dialogue and transformation of the participants’ understanding of the topic (biesta, 2014; solem & reikerås, 2017). we claim that our case has the features of mathematizing, as both the students and the teacher participated in meaning-generating conversations connected to the understanding of fractions. mathematizing has similarities with the term musicking, as we explored in the choir project case, in that the processes are regarded at least as important as the “products,” a view that becomes evident through the use of the verb form in both concepts. bildung in mathematics we can also connect the mathematics classroom talk to the question of mathematics as a formative subject in which the students participate in dialogues that foster bildung processes. as the students learned subject-specific content, the teaching simultaneously focused on how working with mathematics could help them develop critical and active abilities. how the teacher conducts classroom talk can promote participation in a dialogue in which all the participants can introduce questions to explore (roth, 2004). this can be connected to ontological dialogue and subjectification, where the independence of student thinking and action is promoted (biesta, 2014). mathematics education in this form can promote democratic citizenship by empowering students (rangnes & herheim, 2019). in the classroom talk portrayed in the case, we found examples of students who posed questions to their teacher and who participated in further investigations of these questions. they had a voice, and they knew how to use it. by working with mathematical questions, the students on a meta level learned some crucial aspects of democratic citizenship, such as participation, independence, listening to others, and posing critical questions (bateson, 1972). this type of mathematics education can also be compared to biesta’s (2014) concepts of socialization and subjectification as part of the ontological dialogue in education. discussion in this section, we discuss the common features of the two cases and the questions concerning aspects of dialogue in educational settings in light of the theoretical perspectives. we also discuss the relationship between the epistemological and ontological dialogues taking place in bildung processes. next, we discuss the teacher’s role in dialogic teaching. finally, we attempt to connect experiences from the classroom to educational rhetoric concerning the values schools are obliged to impart to students, as elaborated on in this article’s introduction. dialogic features in the cases the two cases in this study have some common features concerning dialogic teaching. in both cases, the teachers listened carefully to the students’ input. both teachers engaged in the dialogic practice dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a76 of “uptake” in that they invited the students to contribute to the dialogue, listened to the students’ ideas and arguments, and let the students’ contributions affect the further development of the activity (dysthe, 1993; nystrand & gamoran, 1991). the music teacher listened to the students’ suggestions regarding which songs to render in the concert, and the mathematics teacher followed up on the students’ discovery about fractions. both teachers had important subject knowledge and were worth listening to (alexander, 2008). they were themselves active participants in sense-making conversations in their classes. both narratives showcased teachers who were willing to take risks, not knowing for certain where the students’ input would lead them. this is a hallmark of genuine dialogue, in which one must give up monologic control over the outcome of the communication. matusov (2009, p. 3) argued that “learning is the transformation of a student’s meaning, it is unpredictable, undetermined, and cannot be designed or controlled by the teacher.” similarly, biesta (2014, p. 25) emphasized that “[d]ialogic teaching with real participation rests on the basic understanding that educational processes cannot be fully controlled by the teacher.” the participants’ knowledge and meanings can also be expanded, changed, and developed by classroom dialogue, resulting in each participant learning something new. this applies to both the teacher and the students (freire, 1972). in a genuine dialogue, the participants are present as subjects, and they develop a subject–subject relationship in which they listen to and trust each other. in our narratives, the teachers modeled such subjectification by openly showing themselves and their values. we argue that they appeared as whole persons to the students, as they demonstrated both their relations to the subject matter at hand and their relations to their students (matusov, 2009). these features can also be understood as part of the didactic contract that both teachers established with their respective classes (brousseau, 1997). arguably, dialogic pedagogy focuses more on the relations between the entities in the didactical triangular meeting (the learner, the teacher, and the content to be learned) than on these entities themselves (ulleberg & christensen, 2020). regarding the relations between the students and music (small, 1998), the teacher showed interest in the kind of music that the students liked and identified with and how they thought and felt about their music. this requires the music teacher to let her classroom become an arena of dialogue and negotiation, not least regarding which and whose music should be represented (fossum, 2015b). in the mathematics classroom talk, the teacher attempted to explore how the students thought and made sense of his mathematical question. dialogic education is, therefore, essentially closely connected to what biesta (2014, 2015) called a “world-centered pedagogy,” different from childand content-oriented pedagogy. a world-centered pedagogy focuses on the teacher’s active relationship with the world and engaging the students in being connected to the world, which here applies to music and mathematics. bildung: ontological and epistemological from the perspective of the bildung dimension of education, which is part of the school’s mandate, focusing on the relation between the student and music or mathematics also means being interested in how this relation may be developed and extended. becoming musically and mathematically gebildet (educated) involves going through formation processes and being transformed through encounters with something new and unknown that is of significance to the experiencing individual, which can be a subject matter, a piece of music, a historical period, or a person (bollnow, 1959, 1972). musical and mathematical bildung is the “transformation of basic representations of the self and the world” (koller, 2011, p. 17, our translation). however, as this transformation cannot be planned or enforced, the teacher’s task is to prepare for and facilitate encounters with music rather than to try to force these to happen. this is also the case in mathematics education. the teacher’s power to plan, manage, or direct bildung processes is therefore limited (bateson, 1972; fossum, 2015a, p. 83). in line with this, biesta (2014, p. 25) stated that teachers do not produce or create their students, but students are “human subjects of their own.” rather, the dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a77 teacher’s task may be to leave room for a variety of musical genres and mathematical ideas and for a variety of ways for the students to experience and talk about music and mathematics. the bildung processes comprise both the ontological aspects of being and the epistemological aspects of learning. as we have seen in the two cases, teachers must pay attention to the multilayered dimensions of teaching, in which the students learn about the world and about themselves simultaneously, as they are both learners and persons. according to bateson’s (1972) learning theory, students always learn at several levels at the same time. they learn about the concrete subject content of a specific lesson as they simultaneously acquire a fundamental understanding of the subject. further, they learn something about themselves in connection to the subject (in our case, music and mathematics) and about themselves in relation to other people, such as the teacher and their fellow students (bateson, 1972). this line of thinking coincides with biesta’s ideas about the complexity of teaching and learning through the subjectification, qualification, and socialization aspects of education (biesta, 2014). we claim that the way students are dealt with and listened to on a micro level in classroom talks in different subjects can support their development into democratic citizens. using the concepts of musicking and mathematizing, we underpin an understanding of the multilayered and complex aspects of teaching. the teacher can develop alertness to the bildung aspects of communication in educational settings. the teacher’s understanding of the subject matter at hand and the didactical questions she poses are crucial for her sensitivity to both epistemological and ontological challenges and possibilities in actual teaching situations. in agreement with the ideals of dialogic teaching, the teacher needs to be genuinely interested in how students gradually grasp new dimensions of the subject matter at hand. simultaneously, she needs to be genuinely interested in the students’ ways of interacting with each other. further, the teacher should ask focused but open-ended questions and should give herself and the students time to reflect without losing the pace of the lesson (alexander, 2008). the aims are to support the students in their investigation of the subject matter at hand and to consolidate new insights or practices more than to compel the students to give a correct account of what appears in the textbook. dialogic pedagogy neither promotes a romantic view of education based solely on the students’ own interests nor promotes teachers who abdicate from being responsible persons for the activity. the teachers in the two cases were supposed to be leaders of the students’ task of learning both regarding open investigation and acquiring established valuable knowledge for gradually becoming active fellow citizens. as the two cases show, both the teachers and the students dared to put themselves at risk by improvising and standing on thin ice. both teachers showed their vulnerability to their students, one by sharing her personal story and the other by showing his fallibility and lack of knowledge. in so doing, they showed that they were whole persons and acted as models for the students. for students to develop as whole persons, it is necessary that their teachers show their different sides in the classroom. this can be seen as crucial in promoting bildung processes. such educational experiences, with openings for showing vulnerability and genuineness, can turn everyday situations into “golden moments” where teachers and students meet in ontological encounters. the development of the class as a community of learners may offer new opportunities for both subject learning and social learning as part of the students’ development toward citizenship in a pluralistic democracy (matusov, 2009). to achieve this ideal, the teacher must encourage the students to commit themselves to understanding the subject matter at hand instead of simply endeavoring to become the first to find the correct answers to questions or problems. dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a78 paradoxes finally, we touch on some problematic issues that may emerge in dialogues in education. there are some paradoxes regarding the power that teachers use to influence young people to become independent and critical. ellsworth (1989, p. 308) criticized strategies such as “student empowerment,” “dialogue,” and “student voice” for giving the illusion of equality while leaving the authoritarian nature of the student–teacher relationship intact. she asked, “how does a teacher “make” students autonomous without directing them?” in trying to meet some goals, such as “developing democratic citizens” or “encouraging participation in discourse and critical thinking,” we may happen to develop monologizing practices (linell, 2003), in which the direction and the goals for the teaching are set and where genuine dialogue may be impossible. student voices that speak up against the majority or against the teachers may thereby be silenced and replaced by compliance and adjustment. it is important for teachers to be aware of these pitfalls and reflect on their own influence. bateson (1979, p. 8) claimed that teachers “are wisely unwilling to touch or teach anything of reallife importance” because, as he put it, they “carry the kiss of death” to what they teach. we are not as pessimistic as bateson, even though we acknowledge the challenge he raised. in our cases, we claim to see elements of genuine participation and true dialogue. nevertheless, we must ask ourselves: how can students be deeply moved and touched on a personal level by knowledge content? how can teachers bring this to pass without being “too ontological” (matusov, 2009) by invading the students’ private spaces as subjects? can the ontological dimension of teaching tend to “standardize” bildung processes and channel the students toward one specific direction, idealizing the students who are active, extroverted, and critical? bringing up new generations is a matter of influencing children in certain directions determined by the larger community (the united nations or the state), such as promoting independence and critical thinking. we are obliged to pay attention to new approaches to learning to promote greater justice, social equity, and global solidarity (unesco, 2015, p. 3). some understandings of individual and universal human rights are taken for granted in the western world and are difficult to explore and discuss. in schools, this can lead to a wish to develop preferable emotional and social skills, as described in the organisation for economic co-operation and development’s (2020) “study on social and emotional skills.” this understanding of aspects of students’ personal sides can be criticized for being too narrow and culturally biased concerning what emotional and social skills are preferred. keeping the balance between organizing ontological dialogues that promote certain values while inviting inclusive talks with room for diversity in values, attitudes, and skills will continue to be a challenge for teachers. further, teachers cannot predict in detail the outcome of their teaching in developing certain values and attitudes among their students. this is also the case regarding whether dialogic teaching necessarily leads to the development of democratic capacities. the connections between attitudes and actions are complex and cannot be reduced to cause-and-effect relationships in education. the same applies to the connections between values and emotions. conclusion to summarize, we found that the theoretical concepts we chose to explicate dialogues in education were helpful in making sense of dialogic classroom practices. the concepts of mathematizing, musicking, and bildung, as well as the different aspects of dialogue in education, contributed to a rich understanding of the empirical material of the study. the teachers in our narratives promoted student participation by facilitating both the ontological and epistemological dialogical aspects of the classroom talk. in our analysis and discussion, we have shown how these aspects interact in concrete educational settings. these issues dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a79 need to be explored in more depth so that teachers can be aware of how to carry out the important values of dialogic education. references alexander, r. 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(2008). the musical art of infant conversation: narrating in the time of sympathetic experience, without rational interpretation, before words. musicae scientiae, 12(1suppl), 15–46. ulleberg, i., & christensen, h. (2020). en triadisk modell for klasseledelse. [a triadic model of classroom management]. in h. christensen & i. ulleberg (eds.), klasseledelse, fag og danning, (2nd ed.). gyldendal akademisk. ulleberg, i., & solem, i. h. (2015). hvordan kan lærere bidra til deltakelse og matematisering i klassesamtalen i matematikk? [how can teachers contribute to participation and mathematising in the classroom talk in mathematics?]. in h. christensen & r. s. stokke (eds.), samtalens didaktiske muligheter [didactic possibilities in conversations] (pp. 104–120). gyldendal akademisk. ulleberg, i., & solem, i. h. (2018). which questions should be asked in classroom talk in mathematics? presentation and discussion of a questioning model. acta didactica norge, 12(1), art. 3, 21, sider. https://doi.org/10.5617/adno.5607 dialogues in education: exploring cases from music and mathematics education hanne rinholm, ida heiberg solem, inger ulleberg dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.458 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a84 united nations educational, social and cultural organization. (2015). rethinking education. towards a global common good? https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000232555 von humboldt, w. (2000). theory of bildung. in i. westbury, s. hopmann, & k. riquarts (eds.), teaching as a reflective practice: the german didaktik tradition (g. horton-krüger, trans.) (pp. 57–61). lawrence erlbaum associates. von wright, m. (2007). where am i when i am at ease? relocating the notion of activity in education. nordisk pedagogik, 27(3), 222–235. wegerif, r., & phillipson, n. (2016). dialogic education: mastering core concepts through thinking together. routledge. wells, g. (1996). using the tool-kit of discourse in the activity of learning and teaching. mind, culture, and activity, 3(2), 74–101. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word matusov layout in word 356-article text-1550-1-4-20200817 (proofread).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf1 a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract this conceptual essay, which opens the special issue, examines why a student’s right to freedom of education – the right for a student to define their own education – is so crucial for the education itself. four diverse educational approaches are considered: training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination, along with the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy to reveal the need for freedom of education within each of the approaches and the pedagogy. the eight aspects of the right to freedom are explicated. three major objections against the right are considered and rebuked: 1) the kantian paradox of autonomy and paternalism in education, 2) the paradox of learning and ignorance, and 3) fear of non-participation in education without coercion. the legitimate limitations of the right are discussed. finally, the two major pathways to the right – radical and gradual – are analyzed. i sent the earlier draft of the paper to the dialogic pedagogy journal community, asking for critical commentaries. many people submitted their critical commentaries involving their agreements, disagreements, associative readings, extensions, evaluations, and so on. my paper, their commentaries and my reply constitute this special issue. three people – david kirshner, belkacem taieb, and jim rietmulder – chose to provide commentaries on the margins. i included most of their comments on the margins as a new genre to promote a critical dialogue in our readers. also, belkacem taieb and matthew shumski submitted short commentaries that i included, below, at the end of this article as appendix i and ii. jim cresswell shared the manuscript with his undergraduate psychology students, and one student volunteered to add her commentary. shelly price-jones shared it with her international undergraduate students studying english at a south korean university. twenty-one of them chose to provide a video reply. i selected a few of them that attracted my attention. finally, i chose to address some of the issues brought in the presented critical commentaries either as my reply on the margins or at the end of this special issue. this should not be taken as “the final word” in the debate, but rather a dialogic response inviting other responses in the authors and in the audience. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020). envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective, matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. acknowledgment this article was inspired by an online discussion initiated by jim cresswell on the dialogic pedagogy facebook group about his university forcing the students and faculty not to use personal technology (laptops, tablets, computers, phones) for some period of time – except when the personal issn: 2325-3290 (online) comment on text eugene matusov: please be aware that some comments have replies. in order to see the replies, please click on the highlighted text and when the comment opens, scroll down to see the reply. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf2 technology addresses students’ disabilities or deficits 1. i want to thank ana marjanovic-shane, armando marino filho, danyang li, bryan campbell, and bob hampel for extensive discussions about this issue and subtopics with me. i am very thankful for all commentators for engaging in the critical dialogue with my article and ideas (and editing of my text). ��� introduction: thesis for freedom of education my main thesis here is rather straightforward: students must have the exclusive right to freely define their own education. this thesis goes beyond the right of all students having access to good education, although it includes that. in negative terms, my thesis bans foisted education, imposed curriculum, and thrust instruction. in positive terms, i insist that it is students who are the principal authors of their own education. education must occur on the students’ terms because education is primarily the personal business of the student. all other parties and spheres – society, state, taxpayers, educational experts and practitioners, parents, economy, social justice, democracy, patriotism, nationalism, healthcare, etc. – their important interests, urgent concerns, and exciting visions (including my own as a particular dialogic pedagogy educator), are secondary or auxiliary for education. of course, like in any case of the rights, at times, other priorities – like, for example, safety, fairness, social justice, demands from other spheres of human life – must take over education and students’ right for freedom of education. but in each of these cases, it has to be understood that this legitimate priority of another sphere compromises education as such rather than proclaimed that it is done in the name of it. my use of the term “freedom of education” is different from its use in the literature. often “freedom of education” is referred to a concern about “how to accommodate the different demands of a growing number of non-western immigrants” (karsten, 2006, p. 23) and minorities – i.e., some limited curricular freedom, – the professional independence of educational institutions from the state censorship (pető, 2018), or providing parents with a school choice (varjo, kalalahti, & silvennoinen, 2014). my term is different, shifting the locus of control and ownership of education to a student from the society, state, local ethnic community, or parents (cf. douglas, 1991). similarly, the term “foisted education” requires clarification. education can be forced on a student by circumstances, and the student might not have much choice but to engage in it. for example, very young children often do not have a choice to learn their native language because young children are “thrown” into a particular linguistic environment. in another example, during the covid-19 pandemic, many people are faced with the medical necessity to learn a new practice of social distancing, at least those who agree on it as a medical necessity rather than an arbitrary governmental imposition. all these cases of a lack of educational choice for the student do not constitute the phenomenon of “foisted education” i am talking about here because the student’s education is still driven by the student’s agency of their realization of the environment and/or necessities. the phenomenon of “foisted education” is defined by the designers of education for the student, who is not the student: the society, state, local community, educational experts, teachers, parents, and so on. these designers decide for the student: whether the student must engage in education, when, under what conditions, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, and so on. in foisted education, the student is position as an object rather than a subject of education. my justification for the thesis is existential rather than pragmatic or liberty-based. i am not going to argue here that students’ freedom of education will pragmatically improve educational outcomes, although 1 https://www.facebook.com/groups/dpj.two/permalink/2761274623915932/ highlight david kirshner: the individual is the unit of analysis. belkacem taieb: students aren’t isolated individuals. strongly disagree. we don’t know what we do not know. education should be a genuine relationship between student and teacher in order to find develop and sustain personal growth. student might be influenced by external factors that do not allow for his-her freedom-availability of thinking. sticky note eugene matusov: i understand but do not the critical charge by my two sociocultural colleagues. i think the issue is rooted in the cultural-linguistic and paradigmatic difficulties. unfortunately, in english, a person is described and analyzed only either as an individual (i.e., an universal bio-machine of producing thoughts, feelings, and actions) or as a member of particular collectivity (e.g., culture, institution, race, ethnicity, practice, gender). paradigmatically, these two linguistic definitions of a person reflected in the cognitivist and sociocultural approaches to social science. i’m very sympathetic with david’s and belkasem’s critique of individual as self-contained, universal, atomistic, and egoistic entity. however, i also critique attempts to define a person mostly as a member of collectivity as being oppressive, total, and essentially disrespectful. in slavic languages, an alternative definition of person is available, namely “lichnost’” (личность in russian). lichnost’ reveals itself by being seen, heard, and understood by others and, through others, and by oneself. lichnost’ does not belong the individual-collective continuum. in contrast to individualistic and collectivistic approaches, the notion of lichnost’ is unique, unfinalizable, dialogic, and authorial. since english does not have this term, i use the terms “person” and ”personal” to refer to the russian notion of lichnost’ in this paper. for more discussion see: matusov, e. (2007). in search of the appropriate unit of analysis. culture & psychology, 13(3), 307-333, doi: 10.1177/1354067x07079887. matusov, e., & smith, m. p. (2012). the middle-class nature of identity and its implications for education: a genealogical analysis. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 46(3), 274–295, doi: 10.1007/s12124-012-9192-0. highlight belkacem taieb: rather than denying diversity in order to create a reductionist positivist environment, student shall be taught to live with complex systems. metacognition rather than lab experimentation. comment on text belkacem taieb: “non western immigrant” this terminology is already criticized as it is presenting the west as a good and welcoming and the “rest of the world” as others… in need for support. rather, it is the west draining the world from its natural and human resources and creating different level of society for the benefits of very little number of “free student”. immigrant therefore are not migrants but rather an exploited mass lock in a demagogical statement of identity. can we advocate on freedom with the use of discriminative terminology? comment on text david kirshner: the basic point seems wrong. someone, in mandating social distancing, is making decisions on behalf of the student. there is no “student’s agency guidance” in this case. the distinction seems to be that foisted education is when these decisions are made on behalf of the student as educational decisions, rather than as healthcare decisions, etc. comment on text belkacem taieb: this article should address the relationship between the learner and the teacher in order to understand the complexities of the learning experience. instead, isolating the student with its “freedom problem” is creating a dehumanizing experience in line with the covid experience. therefore, education and covid are both “foisted education”. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf3 it might be often true, at least in some cases. similarly, i won’t argue that the realization of human liberties requires students’ freedom of education. however, it might be true that freedom of education – together with freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, etc. – constitutes the basic human rights. in contrast, i argue here that students’ right to freedom of education is the essence of education itself. in other words, i argue that education requires freedom. education requires students to define their own education. education primarily is the business of a student, and not the state, the public, the taxpayers, teachers, school, economy, educational scholars, or parents. the role of the state is to ensure that every student has access to the quality of education as defined and judged by the student themselves (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016b). not having this freedom injures education. being and the process of education demand freedom. the structure of the article is the following. first, i consider why education needs freedom. second, i unpack the notion of the students’ academic freedom. third, i provide known objections against the students’ right to define their own education and try to rebuke them. forth, i discuss possible limitations of the students’ right to freedom of education. finally, in conclusion, i ponder about a path of achieving the students’ right to freedom of education. why is a student’s freedom needed for education? i argue here that education requires a student to define their own education – i.e., freedom of education. but what is education? education is a contested concept. people define it differently, depending on their approach to education, often disagree with each about the core educational values. i argue that, however education is defined, it inherently requires freedom of the student to make decisions about their own education. my colleague and i have abstracted the following four distinguished definitions and their corresponding practices of education: training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination – some of which we criticized and some of which we endorsed (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). i argue that, regardless of how desirable or undesirable these diverse approaches, all these abstracted four educational approaches need a student’s freedom for education, but, as i show below, they may need it differently. in addition, being a bakhtinian dialogic educator, below, i consider the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy as a special realization of open socialization and critical examination (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). training involves the acquisition of discrete, self-contained, decontextualized skills, and knowledge. for example, learning how to use a tv remote control or rules of the addition of fractions with different denominators can be done and often are done through training. similarly, the fact that the earth rotates around the sun is usually done via training as a way of recognition of a discursive pattern – without necessarily ever considering conflicting ideas about the relativity of the movement (lemke, 1990; matusov, 2020c). when successful, training produces more or less identical performers, which can be verified by tests and exams. arguably, conventional schooling/pedagogy is heavily based on training, although it may not be true for some innovative schooling/pedagogy: progressive and democratic. closed socialization2 entails students’ socialization into a well-defined normative practice. learning driving a car is probably a good example of closed socialization. driving a car is a well-defined normative practice structured by traffic signs and traffic rules. however, the driving actions are not discrete and self 2 colloquially, closed socialization is often confused with training. for example, it is commonly pronounced “teacher training,” “nurse training,” “pilot training,” and so on, which i view as “closed socialization” and not as “training.” comment on text david kirshner: defending freedom of education as embedded in the meaning of education, without reference to ethics or morals, is ambitious, perhaps hard to sustain. belkacem taieb: the sense of the word freedom seems to be truncated. human liberties are not only liberties. we cannot remove the “human” characteristics to reduce it to a list “liberties” free of influence. humans live in interrelated ecosystems. denying it means destroying all form of freedom and removing freedom from the deep meaning that it holds. jim rietmulder: i think "the students' right to freedom of education is the essence of education itself" is a new argument to me, in this formulation. thank you. comment on text belkacem taieb: capitalist terminology. education is no business. strongly disagree. sticky note eugene matusov: raz shpeizer & amnon glassner made a similar comment: “capitalist terminology. education is no business. strongly disagree.”

substantively, i agree that education as such is not a business as a commercial enterprise in economy (although it can be like, for example, a private school). my use of this term is metaphorical like in following sentences “none of your business,” “i make you my business” and so on. it is a colloquial metaphor here and not a concept. comment on text belkacem taieb: quality is a very broad concept has so many cultural, economic, politic (etc.) aspects. comment on text belkacem taieb: i have trouble agreeing with your definition of freedom therefore i cannot really engage in further discussing this in terms you set. comment on text belkacem taieb: education versus training? who can pretend that training qualifies as a form of education? training is the most edulcorated form of education. training is to education what aspartame is to sugar… taste pretty much the same except one leads you to cancer while the other one to diabetes. 
you cannot draw conclusion on education from the description of training examples. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf4 contained, but rather holistic, embodied, contextual, and relational, at times requiring driver’s situational judgments and negotiating the road with other drivers. it is also embedded in other related practices like getting and negotiating car insurance, a driver’s legal responsibilities, filling the car with gas, using credit cards, paying special taxes, bringing the car for inspection and maintenance/repairs, and so on. education as closed socialization has been studied by sociocultural scholars producing a conceptual framework of “apprenticeship,” “observations,” “peripheral participation,” “transfer of responsibility,” “community of practice,” and so on (lave & wenger, 1991; rogoff, 1990). closed socialization might produce different stylistic “identities” for the participants – e.g., “aggressive driver,” “careful driver,” “defensive driver,” “impulsive driver.” still, closed socialization remains highly normative, where creativity is rarely appreciated, legitimized, or encouraged3. open socialization is based on students’ socialization into ill-defined practices, essentially requiring the participants’ creativity, authorial judgment, voice, and dialogue. for example, learning creative arts is often open socialization. creative, originality, voice, authorship, and judgment are both encouraged and appreciated. these practices, however, diverse they might be, often require authorial judgments from the participants fit the unique circumstances transcending the given guidelines, rules, and norms. the participants are viewed as unique and irreplaceable. the existing, given structures, norms, conventions, strategies, knowledge, skills, models, and masterpieces have to be learned, only to be transcended by the learners and through the learners’ own creative transcendence. the primary focus of education as open socialization is on promoting a student’s creative authorship in a targeted practice. critical examination originates in the famous motto by socrates, “the unexamined life is not worth living” (plato & riddell, 1973). in contrast to the all three approaches above, education is viewed deconstructively, as a critical examination of the life, self, society, culture, and the world (and, of course, education itself). to be critical, this examination has to be embedded in a critical dialogue where ideas, worldviews, knowledge, values, and skills are tested against alternative ideas, worldviews, knowledge, values, and skills. any construction of knowledge and skills by the learners is by-productive and accidental to the critical deconstructive process. like in open socialization, each learner is viewed as a unique author (of critical deconstruction). the primary focus of education as a critical examination is on promoting a student’s critical authorship. a particular educational practice can be a hybrid of several educational paradigmatic approaches described above. also, boundaries among the listed educational approaches can be blurry at times. my colleague ana marjanovic-shane and i do not claim that our educational typology of the four approaches to education – training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination – is exhaustive (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012). additional approaches may exist or emerge in the future. guided by my thesis, i argue that it is primarily up to a student, and not to the teacher, institution, state, or society, to subscribe to a particular paradigmatic educational approach listed above or to a mixture of them as well as to modify their subscription at any time. the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy involves the participants addressing each other while having a genuine interest in each other as unique human beings and in each other’s ideas. it views dialogue ontologically as a way of being in the world (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999). the participants in an ontological dialogue are expected to be surprised by each other and by themselves. bakhtin saw the sense-making process as essentially dialogic: as an ephemeral relationship between an interested, information-seeking, question of one person and a serious and honest reply of another person (bakhtin, 3 socialization in car racing represents a case of open socialization, see below, exactly because creativity and uniqueness is welcomed in the practice. highlight belkacem taieb: does the tree fall if i am not there to see it? socrates’ perspective, as you present here, kills the expression of freedom as it shows the necessity to control rather than accept what we do not know. control is a limitation to what we know and therefore a subjection to the limits of the knower. knowledge could be critical or not. education should be seen as a dynamic endeavor not a static “rationality”. comment on text david kirshner: this would seem to place critical examination as a subset of open socialization. comment on text belkacem taieb: when they arrive in schools, students are already the result of an experience. they do not subscribe to anything freely (as you define freedom). the existence of student is not limited to their existence as learners. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf5 1986). ontological dialogue is eventful, involving “the consciousnesses with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy is a particular realization of open socialization and critical examination, aiming at promoting student’s creative and/or critical authorship. each of the listed paradigmatic approaches to education demands a student’s freedom of education. however, the nature of the required freedom is different in each paradigmatic approach, although often overlapping. thus, the critical examination requires a student’s freedom of deconstruction of ideas, values, and worldviews. meanwhile, training requires a student’s freedom to commit to training. below i consider these relationships starting with the strongest in education as critical examination and proceed to the weakest relationship as training. freedom in education as a critical examination probably, the strongest demand for a student’s freedom to define their own education is in education as a critical examination approach. in this approach, the student is the ultimate author of the critical examination of their life, self, world, culture, and society, including their own education. the critical examination cannot be assigned by the others, but only self-assigned. nevertheless, a critical examination can be provoked by a teacher, and this is the biggest temptation for some progressive educators, who might want to engage their students’ critical examination through dialogic provocations, whether the students want it or not. one of the first such progressive educators was arguably socrates, who was the first known philosopher who defined critical examination and who wanted to engage all his fellow citizens of athens in this critical examination (matusov, 2009, see chapters 1 and 2). another temptation is coming from the social justice minded educators who want their students to become good citizens through critical pedagogy – to become free from bigotry, racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so on through the students’ critical examination of their own dear ideas and values, which are often full of invisible and unexamined oppressive prejudices. these educators want to use critical examination to cure their students of “oppressive consciousness” or “false consciousness,” which promotes injustice. a good example of that, of course, is the brazilian educator paulo freire (1986). what is wrong with these two pedagogical temptations? ironically, both progressive and social justice educators severely curtail education for critical examination by trying to make students to want what the educators want them to want. in the case of progressive educator socrates, he wanted his students (e.g., meno, anytus) to get involved in a critical examination of their lives, whether they wanted (e.g., meno) or not (e.g., anytus). according to plato’s account (plato & bluck, 1961), socrates was successful with meno but not with anytus. in his critique of socrates’ progressivism, analyzing the village life of simple muslim fishermen, modern political philosopher kukathas argues that socrates’ motto, “the unexamined life is not worth living” disregards the possibilities that sometimes the unexamined life might be worth living, while the examined life might not be worth living (kukathas, 2001, 2003). without students’ freedom to engage in an exploration of and experiential experimentation with alternatives to the examined life and education as critical examination, the very education as the critical examination itself will suffer. the teacher’s locking the student into critical examination robs the student from in-depth critical examination because in-depth critical examination requires the transcendence of the critical examination itself – i.e., students’ consideration and experience of its alternatives to the critical examination. in the case of social justice educator freire, he wanted the oppressed (and even the oppressors) to become involved in education as critical examination aiming at liberation of the oppressed from their false consciousness directly or indirectly imposed on them by their oppressor. this social justice version of comment on text belkacem taieb: by critical examination you mean rationalization and factualization. this is the definition of scientific reductionism. it has been criticized many times. comment on text belkacem taieb: is this really true? i think the aim is rather to make inform choices and definitely not to forget or leave one’s positions. comment on text jim rietmulder: this is ascendant now! all over the place! a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf6 the preset educational endpoint as making all people good, free from oppressing prejudice, is problematic from the critical examination vista for several reasons. first, making people predictably good through education or some other means strips people off their agency to make their own moral choices when these moral choices are disagreeable with the teachers’ ones. in one of my past classes, my students debated an issue raised by one of the peers: whether hitler’s teachers were responsible for his crimes against humanity. some students, probably, guided by ideas of the enlightenment and the social justice, argued that since the purpose of education is to make students good, hitler’s teachers clearly failed this goal, and, thus, they were (fully or partially) responsible for his crimes. other students disagreed, arguing that education must inform students so they can make informed choices, including informed moral choices. for this perspective, hitler’s teachers might or might not be responsible, depending on how successful they were informing him. still, being informed does not preclude an educational alumnus from making bad or even evil choices. one of the students from the second group made a powerful and passionate speech arguing from a religious position that “making people good” is super disrespectful for human agency, making people predictable “robots,” and, she argued, even god does not want to do that leaving people with free will (matusov & lemke, 2015). another problem with social justice critical education is that alternatives to the oppressor-oppressed binary are not considered. not everything in life is rooted in the oppressor-oppressed totality. life is not limited to liberation from oppression. also, this social justice approach excludes the possibilities of situations when being the oppressed might lack of virtue, while being the oppressor might have virtue. oppression might not be limited to the oppressor-oppressed binary. in other words, the totality of the oppressoroppressed binary itself is reductive and thus severely limits critical examination of the life, self, world, and society, including education itself. what if it is a student and not a teacher (or school, or state) who chooses to be progressive or social justice based in education as critical examination? would not all the critique, provided above, be applied to the student as the author of their own education? if so, would the student’s freedom of education be failing the student’s critical examination no less than other educators would? why would the selfimposed limitations of critical examinations be better (better for what?) than the limitations imposed by others? in my response to these important and valid questions, i argue that a student’s self-imposition of the limitations on their own critical examination of the life, self, society, culture, world, and their own education is still better than the imposition by other because the student better preserves their own educational agency, which is so important, so necessary for education as critical examination. first, it is the student, and not others, who makes a meta-decision to limit their own critical examination. second, it is the student and not others who applies the imposition of these limitations on themselves. third, it is up to the student and not somebody else who decides what to prioritize to focus on their critical examination. fourth, it is the student who can draw the line where to stop their critical examination (cf. “the centipede's dilemma4”). fifth, at any moment, the student has the right to change their mind without any pressure, pedagogical violence, or threat of pedagogical violence by others. sixth, it is much easier for the selfimposing student to engage in a dialogue about the nature and goodness of the self-imposed limitations with other than a student on whom the limitations are imposed by others. thus, the self-imposed limitations may constitute important experiences of alternative ideas for the student’s consecutive testing diverse ideas about their education. 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_centipede%27s_dilemma comment on text belkacem taieb: it is quite the contrary. freedom of one shall not impact the freedom of the group or other individual. plus. individualism is not freedom but rather it is a counter nature isolation, toxic to human environment. therefore, freire’s enterprise is allowing individual to make informed choices and access to education while before, “free” of education systems subjugated them to unconscious influences. freire does not give answers he opens up journeys. developing critical thinking shall not be confused for acquiring knowledge. one is dynamic and evolutive when the other one becomes inert and dead matter. comment on text belkacem taieb: are you seeing religion as stereotypical rituals only or a multilayered experience? comment on text david kirshner: this reification of individual choice, as if choice is an entirely instrumental phenomenon, seems so naïve as to be inscrutable. i am trying to make sense of it. progressive ideals are not innate, they are culturally located. if a student chooses to move toward such ideals, she/he is making a choice about cultural location. but that “choice” in the wild is far from a “free” choice. it reflects a history of cultural engagements, status differentials, coercions, seductions, etc. but amidst all of this tumult, school, representing the society at large, is to be restricted from providing cultural influence. and why? i assume because matusov believes only school robs choice of its free quality, everything’s just fine if it’s madison avenue or hollywood that exerts influence. the basic problem, here, is the apparent belief that free choice is there for the student except if schools intercede. comment on text david kirshner: the only sense i can make of this is that critical examination is seen as a spontaneous possibility of the human psyche, rather than as a cultural practice that has historical and geographical location. this naturalization of critical examination countermands the obligation to teach it as a cultural practice, with all the attendant social and political strife regarding control of the cultural agendas of the school. comment on text jim rietmulder: not sure how this is different from the first one. first, the meta-decision. second, actually implementing the decision? i guess that’s different. on another point… it seems to me the meta-decision could be “meta” in two ways. it’s meta because it’s a decision about the education process, rather than within the education process. (although part of your point is that “about” is also “within”.) but it could be called meta in another way: in actual life, i believe there would usually be no conscious decision of that sort, about the education process. instead, i think most people apply limitations like this without forethought and never notice that they have done so. the decision could be called meta (or implicit) because it’s never consciously made (which is ironic if it’s about critical examination). it’s a “decision” that an observer could impute from the student’s behavior; a decision that is realized but not “made”. oh, but if the student is in eugene’s class, then nothing they do could be meta in the sense of being unexamined! eugene wouldn’t let that happen! comment on text jim rietmulder: isn’t this part of the first? maybe; maybe not. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf7 in sum, education as a critical examination resists any impositions, positive goals, and limitations for its power of critical examination, including a critical examination of critical examination. it requires considering, testing, and, thus, partial or even full experiencing uncomfortable, unpleasant, and even potentially damaging alternatives – nothing is out of reach for a learner’s critical outlook in a dialogue with others and themselves to leave no stone unturned, at least, in principle and in the potentiality. freedom to choose an alternative paradigmatic approach to education or no education at all is a part of testing ideas in the critical examination. freedom in education as open socialization why is a student’s freedom to define their own education needed for open socialization? education as open socialization focuses on promoting students’ creative voices in the targeted, ill-defined practice. in open socialization, creativity is viewed as a legitimate process for a newcomer. creativity is out-of-box thinking, feeling, relating, talking, imaging, and acting. it involves a student’s transcendence of the given – mostly the socially and culturally given on the macro or micro scales – recognized and appreciated by other and/or the student themselves (matusov, 2011a; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016a). creativity and, thus, open socialization require the student’s freedom to define what creativity and open socialization are, – hence, their own education. however, in order for a student to engage in creativity – i.e., in transcending the given recognized by others – this given has to be known to the student. some educators guiding open socialization want to define and impose the curriculum of the culturally important given on the students. they often sequence open socialization into a two-phase process: 1) the student must learn the important ready-made culture (e.g., learning musical notes, mechanics of playing piano), and 2) only when this mastery has been achieved, the educators allow the student to engage in creativity. although this pedagogical approach does not deny students’ creativity, agency, authorship, and freedom, it postpones them (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016). the major problem with this pedagogical approach is that the educators’ arrest of the student’s creative authorial agency until learning mastery of the culturally given is achieved, which may severally damage or compromise the student’s agency. even more, during the first phase, the student may lose their interest in the targeted practice and in their own creativity altogether. “at the same time, the educators may not recognize the student’s own transcendence of the student’s given – because it may look to the educator as a ‘mistake of ignorance’ or some lower type of cognition (piaget, vygotsky) – because the student does not know the important cultural and social givens. this is the case when children’s metaphors are taken as mistakes. thus, the educators are not in a position to promote the students’ creative transcendence by recognizing it as such” (marjanovic-shane, personal communication, march 30, 2020). alternatively, some other educators engage a student in both processes at the same time: learning the relevant cultural given while promoting the student’s creativity (reardon & mollin, 2009; schaefersimmern, 1948). for example, while learning to play the piano, a student is encouraged by the teacher to improvise. also, student’s mistakes are treated by the educator with the ambivalence of hunting for creative gems. in this approach, the student’s agency is stimulated and encouraged while the student masters the given, predefined by the educators. the student’s creative authorial agency is stimulated and promoted all the time, while the educator imposes the curriculum, education, and, to a lesser degree, instruction, and assessment on the student. the main problem with this pedagogical approach is that creativity is bounded by its material. each material – culturally given – affords its own creativity. selecting the specific material is a part of the creative process (bakhtin, 1990). when the teacher selects and imposes the material that the student must learn to master and transcend, the teacher severely curtails the student’s creativity. this is very clear for sophisticated and recognized creative people. switching a type of the material of their creativity: painting for creative musicians, music for creative writers with high probability will either destroy comment on text jim rietmulder: i think all of k-12 school, or maybe k thru college, can be viewed as this 2-step process. the system denies children basic human rights and freedoms until they have somehow become “ready”. but in the meantime their agency is obliterated by years of repression. no wonder, then, that so many adults (who have gone through this system) aren’t “ready”. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf8 or severely damage their creative self-expression. the issue here is not just the familiarity with the material, but the selectivity of the material by the author as a part of the creativity itself, who must be the student and not the teacher. the effect of the choice of the material on creativity may be even stronger for the novices. i argue that the problem of the student’s self-imposition of either the two-phase process, described above or the rigidity of the material choice in open socialization is much less severe, although still might be present, than when these impositions are external to the student. the student’s self-impositions, especially if they are temporary, can be a part of an experiential, experimental creative process of trying different ideas of their own education as open socialization. the student’s self-impositions involve a meta-decision and are usually free from pedagogical violence, as the student is in full control of their own agency, even when this agency is colonized by various pedagogical ideas. yes, without engaging in critical examination, it might be more difficult for the student to notice and address this colonization, but without external impositions, the student has the freedom to switch to different educational approaches on a whim. freedom in education as closed socialization as we are sliding down to more rigid educational approaches, the role of a student’s freedom becomes less salient, yet not negligible. i argue that the student’s most prominent freedom in closed socialization is the freedom to realize their own goals through the tight norms and structures of a targeted, highly normative practice. the first example that comes to my mind is for a student to socialize in their native or foreign language, with regard to its rather rigid conventional structures, norms, and rules in a situation when the participants focus on the normative correctness of language rather than on the pragmatic comprehension. successful socialization in language means that a novice can say what they want to say within the strict linguistic, agreement-based, norms. also, a successful understanding of the learned language means the novice’s active interpretation of the heard message into diverse contexts, again within strict normative frames. closed socialization cannot be fully successful when a student does not own it. essentially, successful closed socialization involves the holistic merger of the student’s goaland contextdefining process and the tight norms and structures of the targeted practice in particular, often unique, situations. pedagogical impeding the student’s learning activism and improvisation in this merger, and, thus, the student’s freedoms associated with it, impedes closed socialization itself. closed socialization with a student’s activism and freedom to define their own goals, impeded by teachers, makes the student act like a zombie in the targeted practice, without much spirit. this reminds me of my learning english as a foreign language in the soviet union. we studied to memorize phrases like, “pete and mary are friends. does pete have a friend? yes, he does. mary is pete’s friend. does mary have a friend? yes, she does. pete is mary’s friend. pete and mary are friends.” in a high school, we memorized the history of the young communist league (komsomol) written in english. in both cases, started with a pure training, the memorized phrases were extended by the english teachers’ novice questions about “pete and mary” or about the komsomol which allowed the soviet students to abstract and practice linguistic patterns and rules of english in new contexts, guided by disinterested normative situations and the official communist ideology. needless to say, not only my english was super limited, many of my classmates and i hated it in school. in contrast, my wife studied english in a specialized school in the ussr, where the main focus was on students’ and teachers’ self-expression in english to the point that some regular academic subjects were taught in english as well, and the students spoke english with each other and their teachers during their recesses. still, her school exams and many assignments were focused on the formal norms and rules of english. she loved learning english exactly because her closed socialization, embedded in open socialization, in english legitimately involved and welcomed her agency of self-expression. when russian comment on text david kirshner: there is conflation here of the closed socialization of linguistic forms, “rather rigid conventional structures, norms, and rules,” and the open socialization of linguistic self-expression, “a novice can say what they want to say.” so the very notion of freedom of education for closed socialization is undermined. what’s left, is only freedom of education for open socialization. comment on text david kirshner: the claim, here, i believe, is that the variable elements of closed socialization—those elements that distinguish closed socialization from training—require exploratory freedom to master. but does this hold up? consider the case of learning to drive discussed earlier. driving is closed socialization. the rules of the road are not reducible to rigid formulas that can be mastered by training. there are variable elements essentially embedded in this practice. yet do we need improvisational agency to master driving? it would seem not, given how driving is typically taught and learned. improvisational agency feels dangerous for early drivers. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf9 philosopher and literary theoretician mikhail bakhtin had to teach the formal rules and norms of russian in a soviet middle and high school, in his innovative dialogic pedagogy, he also successfully wrapped closed socialization into open one (bakhtin, 2004). in addition, although closed socialization requires a student learning the mastery of a highly normative and highly structured practice, this mastery is impossible without the student assuming a unique social position in practice recognized by other people – oldtimers, novices, and even external observers. a sociocultural linguist, jim gee, introduced the notion of discourse with a capital d: the notion of “big ‘d’ discourse” (“discourse” spelled with a capital “d”) is meant to capture the ways in which people enact and recognize socially and historically significant identities or “kinds of people” through well-integrated combinations of language, actions, interactions, objects, tools, technologies, beliefs, and values. the notion stresses how “discourse” (language in use among people) is always also a “conversation” among different historically formed discourses (that is, a “conversation” among different socially and historically significant kinds of people or social groups). the notion of “big ‘d’ discourse” sets a larger context for the analysis of “discourse” (with a little “d”), that is, the analysis of language in use (gee, 2015, p. 418). in closed socialization, a student creates their unique participatory “accent” or “personal style” in the discourse (with a capital “d”) regarding the targeted highly normative practice. this unique participatory accent or style in the discourse is never given to the student. rather, it is the student’s task to develop it. without educators’ legitimization of the student’s freedom to develop this unique participatory personal discourse accent, it becomes difficult for their learning the normative practice and, thus, their closed socialization. when closed socialization, with or without the help of educators, is initiated and owned by the student, the merger of the goal-defining process and the practice’s norms is facilitated by the student’s own activism and freedoms. the same is true about the process of the student’s development of their unique participatory personal accent or style. owning closed socialization allows the student to make decisions of how much and when the student wants to transcend the boundaries of closed socialization to move it to creative open socialization and/or to the critical examination of the targeted practice making their education deeper. when closed socialization is controlled and owned by an educator, both processes are often inhibited. in addition, in the latter case, the student may develop resistance to the educator’s guiding efforts. freedom in education as training why is a student’s self-initiated and self-owned training better than training imposed by the teacher, for the sake of training itself? i claim the following three major mutually related reasons: relevancy, sensitive guidance, and motivation. when a student chooses the training curriculum – e.g., passing an sat test for a college desired by the student, learning how a remote control works to manage roku, using zoom for online teaching in the coronavirus pandemic, – this self-initiated learning and its content is relevant for the student. this relevance guides the student’s learning by setting goals important for the student and provides the student with authentic formative assessment to see whether the student’s probing actions lead to accomplishing these goals or not and, if not, what has to be changed. this relevance mobilizes the student’s learning activism by asking themselves and their educators challenging and meaningful questions such as “how can i return back to the main menu on roku,” which makes the educators’ guidance sensitive. the educators address the questions asked by the student – the questions that the student is really interested in and cares about – rather than the educators addressing imagined questions that the student might not be interested in nor ready to ask at this moment, as it often occurs in imposed training. answering the comment on text david kirshner: undoubtedly, every driver has a unique driving accent, as indelibly linked to them as a fingerprint. but development of this accent does not require agency or intentionality. it’s a natural artifact of the intersection of ontogeny with culture. comment on text david kirshner: a problem, here, is that the goals of training are not clearly delineated. closed socialization is learning a cultural practice of a certain type. these training examples seem to be all over the map in terms of learning goals, including procedural learning, conceptual learning, cultural learning. this departs from the earlier characterization of training as involving “the acquisition of discrete, self-contained, decontextualized skills, and knowledge. for example, learning how to use a tv remote control or rules of the addition of fractions with different denominators can be done and usually are done through training” (p. 3), including also an example of memorization of facts. passing an sat test clearly is not this kind of learning, and learning to use zoom is closed socialization. comment on text jim rietmulder: yes, this rings true for me as i think about the circle school kids “training” with me to take the sat.
note: jim is a co-founder of the circle school, a democratic k-12 private school nearby harrisburg, pa, https://www.circleschool.org/ highlight a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf10 student’s real questions makes the educators’ guidance sensitive to the student’s on-demand educational needs. when faced with frustration or when efforts are needed, the student may invest more in the training of their choice than in foisted training. in self-initiated training, the student’s motivation is rooted in their authorial agency (matusov, von duyke, et al., 2016) – their desires and is self-managed, – even if this motivation is extrinsic and instrumental (like, for example, passing an sat test). in imposed training, the motivation is usually unrooted from their authorial agency to be managed by somebody else. in contrast to self-imposed training, foisted training is often irrelevant, insensitive, and not very motivating, making training difficult for the student. also, foisted training usually does not allow the student to move freely among all four paradigms of education – i.e., critical examination, open and closed socialization, and training itself – which often makes training shallow and difficult for the student. freedom in the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy a student’s right to freedom of education – to define their own education – is the core of the bakhtinian dialogic education, based on “the consciousnesses with the equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). the equality of the rights for the participants’ consciousnesses means that the participants in educational dialogue have equal rights to join or leave the dialogue, define and change its topic, reply or remain silent, introduce ideas and values of their choices, and so on. it also means that they take seriously each other, expecting to be surprised by each other. they try to avoid treating each other as objects or means for their actions (cf. kant), including a teacher’s treating a student as an object of their pedagogical actions. curricular endpoints preset by the teacher in advance (e.g., “by the end of the lesson, the students will acquire the following knowledge and skills…” – a typical lesson plan statement in conventional teaching) are illegitimate in an ontological dialogue and, thus, in the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and neither foisted education and imposed curriculum. rather, the teacher can invite their students to the teacher’s dialogic open-ended provocations, pregnant with students’ replies unexpected by the teacher, offer alternative ideas and values, promote testing and examination the students’ dear ideas and values, encourage the students’ creative and/or critical authorship, support the emergence of the students’ unique voices, response to the students’ request for help, and so on. all this support and guidance has to be consented by the students in an ontological dialogue (matusov et al., 2019). in sum, the bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy is unthinkable without a student’s right to define their own education. students’ academic freedoms: unpacking elsewhere, my colleague ana marjanovic-shane and i (matusov, 2020b, chapter 10; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019) developed the organizational principles for organized education aimed at promoting the right to freedom of education5. these principles are based on the following multidimensional academic freedoms and rights of students: 1. curriculum: freedom for a student to decide what to learn. 2. instruction: freedom for a student to decide how, when, where, and with whom to learn and ask for guidance. 3. participation: freedom for a student to engage or disengage, freedom to learn or not to learn, freedom of a no-fault divorce from any teacher or learning community. 4. valuation: freedom for a student to determine what is or is not important for the student to study or to do, the quality, and the purpose of their education. 5. ecology: a right for a student to have access to and opportunity for a rich and safe educational environment and guidance, pregnant with and supportive of diverse discourses, practices, and 5 the text below is heavily based on these published chapters and is a revised version of it. highlight comment on text jim rietmulder: is the degree of freedom set by the approach of the educator? or by the student? this paper concentrates on the educator’s perspective (i.e., the educator’s “approach” to the student), but the educator has limited control over how the student experiences the process. the student can create a different “educational approach” -either by receiving and responding to the educator’s approach in a way not intended by the educator, or through an internal self-dialogue that isn’t shared with the educator. for example, even when the teacher adopts a training approach, the student can self-educate with an internal “approach” of critical examination. maybe the student will not speak to the teacher about their internal experience of critical examination, because it wouldn’t be well received, but the kind of educational experience is nonetheless meaningfully determined by the student. in that sense, the teacher can’t really deprive the student of educational freedom. the teacher can fully determine their own “approach,” and that approach can suggest or facilitate a corresponding degree of student freedom, but the teacher cannot deprive a student of educational freedom. of course a student’s internal critical dialogue (with a teacher’s training approach) is unlikely to be as rich and surprising. (maybe young people are generally more suggestible and less likely or less able to transcend the educator’s approach and choose their own? maybe more mature students – perhaps returning to the training classroom for an additional certification after years of practice in a field – are more likely or more able to self-create a critical examination “approach” even when the educator is taking an entirely training approach.) i’ve seen the opposite, too: the educator’s approach is critical examination or open socialization, but the student cares only about how to use the remote. the student’s internal dialogue says “blah, blah, blah. shut up already and just tell me how to do it.” comment on text david kirshner: does this characterization of what the right to freedom of education means in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy apply to what matusov is arguing for more broadly? comment on text david kirshner: how do multiple students exercise this right simultaneously, or is this a collective right of the students comprising a class? the organizational principles listed in the next section all speak of “a student,” singular. comment on text david kirshner: freedom of education imposes serious obligations on the student. if a student is unable or unwilling to accept these obligations does she/he forfeit the right to freedom of education comment on text jim rietmulder: i don’t remember seeing these principles so clearly spelled out before. very helpful and useful. comment on text jim rietmulder: but not all? at the circle school students can disengage from “any”thing and everything within the school, but in western nations generally, they can’t legally disengage from “all” schooling. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf11 values. 6. role: freedom for a student to define what kind of student they want to be in every particular situation and overall (e.g., a credential student, a self-responsible critical learner, an other-responsible critical learner, a creative learner, an autodidact, an apprentice). 7. paradigm: freedom for a student to choose an educational paradigm, to mix them in any way, and flexibly move among them. 8. leisure: freedom for a student from necessities and needs such as hunger, sickness, concerns about shelter, concerns about safety, concerns about future well-being, and so on. of course, all these academic freedoms and rights have limitations, rooted in the given history, culture, human biology, economy, and so on where the student is located. the student can choose only what is available for them as the basis of their choice as well as the material for their creative transcendence of the available choices. the student might limit their own freedoms by delegating some of the decision making to their teachers – which is still an exercise in their right to freedom of education. also, necessities cannot be eliminated, and, at times, necessities can be prioritized over leisure and interfere with the listed freedoms and rights. still, these academic freedoms and rights must provide aspirational guidelines for education. let me zoom in on these freedoms and rights. curricular academic freedom involves a student’s right to pursue his/her own academic interests, questions, inquiries, needs, and passions. these interests, questions, inquiries, needs, and passions may pre-exist in the learner or emerge in an interaction with the teacher, peers, other people, texts, experiences, observations, activities, and so on. for example, in my undergraduate and graduate classes, i provide my students with curricular maps (cf. duberman, 1969). at the beginning of a semester, a curricular map involves a big list of topics that i have developed based on my own authorial judgments, on authorial judgments by colleagues teaching similar courses around the world (via their syllabi posted on the internet), and my past students’ interests. during the semester, my current students can and do amend the course’s curricular map at any time. at the end of each class meeting, my students are engaged in selecting a topic for the next class. often my students vote on the topics, but at times they want to decide by consensus, or by accepting several topics and splitting the class into smaller groups, or by asking me, their instructor, to make a choice for them, or by flipping a coin on several most popular topics of their choice. also, students often try to convince their peers to join them in voting for the topic of their choice. recently, i started experimenting by offering my students a list of themes (i.e., subtopics) within the chosen class topic to begin our discussion, which the students can always amend with their own themes during the class. the curricular map creates an image of the vast, rich, and growing field of study – representation of the rich and inexhaustible learning environment – for the students. this democratic process of selecting topics to study or themes to discuss promotes both students’ activism and ownership of their own learning and education. it discursively and powerfully forms their educational desire, “i want to study/learn…” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017b). this is especially important for education as critical examination and open socialization where the curriculum is always emerging, surprising, and, thus, cannot be preset. in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, it is up to educational authorities to define and mandate curricular topics, themes, and their sequence, disabling students’ educational activism, desire, and ownership. the curriculum is imposed on the students. students do not have a legitimate right to define their curriculum. this is often justified by their ignorance. their educational desires are tabled until after school is over. efforts are made to motivate students to engage in the school-imposed curriculum and/or to make the school-imposed curriculum attractive to the students, like, for example, in innovative, progressive education (e.g., dewey, 1902). comment on text david kirshner: this characterization of the student’s right to freedom of education is coming awfully close to imposing no obligations on educators or on society. comment on text david kirshner: now, here’s a loophole to drive a truck through! comment on text david kirshner: yes, in addition to whatever function it plays in creating choice, it also serves as an advance organizer (see david ausubel’s article). ausubel, d. p. (1960). the use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. journal of educational psychology, 51, 267–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046669. comment on text david kirshner: your saying dewey’s progressive education didn’t offer students authentic freedom of education? a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf12 the instructional academic freedom involves a student’s right to organize their own study in whatever way may fit the student. the teacher truly becomes a teacher when a student asks them for help. classes, guidance, and learning activities cannot be imposed on the student but only offered and suggested by teachers or initiated by the student. the teacher’s pedagogical and academic freedom for and authority of the teacher’s authorial pedagogy must be subordinated to the student’s freedom and authority and should be based on the student’s consent. the student has a right to be the final authority to accept, reject, or modify these guiding offers, suggestions, or invitations by the teacher (schaefer-simmern, 1948), which is somewhat similar to the modern patient-doctor and client-lawyer fiduciary relationships. the student must have a right to choose or create their own classes, to choose or invite teachers or peers with whom to study. like in the case of the curricular map, a teacher can develop a list of possible diverse, rich learning activities and projects that the student can choose from, modify, or amend with their own. guidance cannot be imposed on the student by the teachers (or peers, or institutions) but can only be offered. of course, the student can ask for guidance. in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, classes, guidance, and learning activities are determined by school authorities and imposed on the students. students’ instructional choices are illegitimate there. this often leads to insensitive guidance that generates resistance in the students to which many teachers reply with oppression or bribing. it also often undermines the students’ educational interests, desires, and confidence in their own educational aspirations and abilities. the participatory academic freedom involves a student’s right to move freely, in and out, to and from learning activities and educational communities. the student’s right of non-participation and disengagement must be respected and valued. the student’s non-participation, disengagement, and divorce from activities and communities must be viewed as legitimate and not be punished, as it is often the case in many conventional and even in many innovative schools, except in democratic schools (rietmulder, 2019). this right creates an opportunity for a self-correcting process in educational practice, where the student can vote with their feet when educational practice or guidance becomes insensitive for their educational (or other) needs or meaningless for them (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016b; tolstoy, 1967; tolstoy & blaisdell, 2000). in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, participation is mandatory and unconditional. students’ non-participation is viewed as illegitimate and punishable. it makes the educational practice insensitive and leaves it without feedback from the primary benefactor of the educational practice – the student him/herself. conventional education ensures its quality by using the accountability of the preset curricular endpoints. summative assessments are used to measure how each student far, close, or at the preset curricular endpoints. sociocultural scholars jean lave and etienne wenger (1991) argue that summative assessments in education create parasitic practices that undermine the trust between the teacher and the student and the educational process itself (matusov, 2009; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & meacham, 2016). as bryan caplan puts it, i don’t hate education. rather i love education too much to accept our orwellian substitute. what’s orwellian about the status quo? most fundamentally, the idea of compulsory enlightenment. educators routinely defend compulsion on the ground that few students want to explore ideas and culture. they’re right about the students’ tastes but forget a deeper truth: intrinsically valuable education requires eager students. mandatory study of ideas and culture spoils the journey (caplan, 2018, p. 352). comment on text david kirshner: why is the tyranny of the majority not being recognized as an attack on the individual student’s right to freedom of education? the realities of (gendered) adolescent competition make this whole approach nightmarish. comment on text david kirshner: students may opt out because of a sense of alienation that originates outside of the school. this is not a self-correcting process. i see lonely, alienated youths walking the streets and struggling with mental issues that have become exacerbated by their having been allowed to opt out of school-based sociality that might have provided them emotional resources no longer available to them—emotional resources they didn’t have the maturity to know they needed. comment on text david kirshner: true. but then freedom of education is valuable only insofar as it produces eager students. if it doesn’t, it is no better than conventional education. what are the warrants for the (implicit) assumption of this paper that it does? does the fact that on occasion it has been shown to work (e.g., the lego-logo club described in the next section) constitute an argument that it can work in general? even if it can, in principle, do we have any idea of what circumstances would be needed to maximize the chance that it does? surely many cases can be found in which it hasn’t worked. when it doesn’t work, do we know the personal costs involved for students, and how they compare to the costs of foisted education? a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf13 the valuative academic freedom involves a student’s right to define the values, quality, and purpose of their own learning and education. in intrinsic education, the purpose, value, and quality of the educational activity emerge in the activity itself (i.e., “praxis” in the aristotelian terms) and do not pre-exist the educational practice (i.e., “poiesis” in the aristotelian terms) (carr, 2006). in praxis, the initial purpose, value, and quality of this activity are temporary and expected to be changed. an inherent part of intrinsic education itself is the self-defining of the student’s educational values, goals, and qualities. the student’s realization of the transformation of their educational goals, values, desires, and qualities in education can be called meta-learning. of course, this practice does not guarantee a good education (good for what and for whom?), but it is open for it. it is the student, not the teacher, who is the primary and final authority for educational evaluation of the quality of the student’s work, setting educational purposes, and defining its educational values. the teacher does not have a right to see the student’s work without the student’s permission (matusov, marjanovic-shane, et al., 2016). in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, valuation is exclusively done by the school authority, which increasingly includes private testing companies. often the quality of education is predefined as all students successfully arriving at curricular endpoints, preset by the society, school authorities, teachers, and testing agencies. the hidden curriculum of such schooling involves students learning how to please this school authority rather than to engage in genuine education. the ecological right for a learner’s education involves both the access to diverse, rich, and safe resources, access to sensitive guidance, and the legitimacy to pursue diverse practices, discourses, and values. thus, for example, at the latin-american community center at wilmington, delaware, usa, a computer instructor, mr. steve villanueva, has organized a lego-logo club for latinx children of very diverse ages from 5-year old to 18-year old as a part of their afterschool program (matusov, 2009, ch. 10). the club settings involved a computer room with some children playing computer games or engaging in other activities unrelated to the lego-logo club. let me provide “a snapshot” of the activities there. in the center of the room, there were big desks with the lego-logo blocks and settings for robots designed by the children. mr. steve (as he is known in the community) was preparing the children for a national competition. this was an extremely rich and diverse learning environment. some children were involved exclusively in engineering tasks of the robotics competition, some exclusively in programming the robots, some in in-between tasks, some were interested in the aesthetics of the robots, some were videotaping the work. however, some children were involved in robotics projects outside of the competition promoted by mr. steve (e.g., making robot-cars that could “dance” to music, like their favorite latino wrestler eddie guerrero). a few very little children were sitting under the long desks with lego-logo settings and playing with small cars that they made out of lego-logo blocks. a few teenage girls were discussing romance and pregnancy symptoms. a few young boys were engaged in horse-playing and teasing. one boy who was engaged in an engineering task suddenly said that he was bored and wanted to go to play basketball. mr. steve commented that the boy should have left for basketball a half-hour before when his team had left. the boy left and came back half an hour later. there were many separate, overlapping, and dynamically emerging and shifting discourses. children moved freely between the various activities and discourses. the learning environment was heterodiscursive, affording very diverse activities and discourses (matusov, 2011b). everything was legitimate. at times, steve or some of the children asked for help from those children who were not engaged in preparation for the competition, but they were free to move back comment on text jim rietmulder: jim rietmulder: lovely program! give mr. steve a school to run. 😊 a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf14 to their activities after they helped (some did, but some did not). all-in-all, the children loved to come to the club and could come and work on their activities even when steve was not with them for whatever reason (matusov, 2009, ch. 10). in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, the learning environment is either sterile or highly limited, mono-discursive, unsafe, and controlled by the teacher. the students are expected to be on-task or on a few tasks, well defined by the teacher (and if not, the teacher may be punished by the school administration). the tasks and subjects are purified from “contamination” by other discourses, practices, and values (often couched in terms of the moniker “best practice”). in a conventional classroom, a tomato is always a fruit, as defined by in the scientific practice of biology, and never a vegetable as defined by the culinary practice. students are often punished for making mistakes. finally, the educational ecology promoting the right to a student’s freedom of education requires resources. my colleague ana marjanovic-shane and i have developed a proposal for providing the universal educational voucher provided directly for all students to ensure the quality of education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016b). the role of academic freedom involves a student’s right to define their own mode of participation in each particular area, educational activity, or topic. it is up to the student to determine their own approaches to their own interests. the student may determine their overall educational goals as, for example, to become recognized by society or by a practice’s experts as a competent and capable practitioner through receiving a license or certificate – i.e., to assume a role of a practice-based credential student6. in this case, the goal of education for a credential student is to pass some qualifying tests set by the practice’s experts. it does not matter how the credential student will prepare for these qualifying tests: alone or with the help of somebody or by going to school. passing the qualifying tests is the most important thing. alternatively, a student may want to be a good authorial professional who learns in a community of other professionals as an apprentice. alternatively, a student may want to engage in a critical dialogue about life, oneself, the world, and society. all these and other possibilities for students’ roles in education must be available and legitimate. also, there should be a possibility for a student to combine or shift between and among these roles. in contrast, in many conventional and some innovative schools, the legitimate role of the student is single and predefined by the school authorities mostly (but not always!) involving the role of a school-based credential student, who successfully jumps through all the hoops that the school sets for the students. the paradigm freedom involves a student’s legitimate choice of educational paradigm, their mixture, or dynamic moving among them. a student can freely decide to engage in critical examination, open socialization, closed socialization, or training (with or without an educator). in conventional schools, the educational paradigm of training is hegemonic. leisure academic freedom is based on the idea that education is a form of genuine leisure. the word “school” (σχολείο) in greek means leisure (σχολή), a particular type of leisure – time that one can dedicate to examination oneself, of others, and of the world. the greek notion of school does not seem institutional, as it is now, but rather it is a form of the human condition – namely a special type of leisure (arendt, 1958) among other types of leisure like: intrinsic play, passionate endeavors, and hanging out 6 this is competence credentialism and not educational credentialism. comment on text jim rietmulder: jim rietmulder: tomatoes, by the way, at least in pennsylvania, are legally defined as vegetables and regulated as such. 😊 (i had a tomato processing company as a client in my consulting practice decades ago.) a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf15 conversations among friends (matusov, 2020b, chapter 5). institutions can assess this condition when needed but should not shape it. in contrast, conventional and many innovative schools colonize the students with assignments – the traditional necessity of work for children is replaced with the necessity to fulfill schools’ assignments in and out of the classrooms. this makes education another chore rather than a type of leisure, which is especially can be important for education as critical examination and open creative socialization. an educator has the fiduciary duty of their primary loyalty to their students (rumel, 2013). the educator’s fiduciary duty is to assist the students to author their own education. this involves providing a safe learning environment for students when the students are not punished for their mistakes. it involves the freedom from impositions – still, a teacher can legitimately make suggestions, expose the students to alternative ideas and activities, challenge the students’ dear ideas and beliefs (at the students’ consent), provide guidance welcomed by the students, and so on. an educator essentially becomes a genuine teacher, rather than a nominal “teacher” appointed by some authority, only when a student asks them for help. rebukes to objections to the students’ right to freedom of education here i try to consider and rebuke three major known objections to the students’ right to freedom of education. the first objection comes from the german philosopher immanuel kant, who insisted that education is required for the realization of human dignity and, thus, it must be forced on “immature” people – i.e., children and ignorant adults – who are not ready to make this choice on their own. the second objection involves the argument that a student’s freedom of education unavoidably involves the “blind leads blind” situation (jones, 1971, p. 293). the third objection is that without education being forced, most people and especially young children won’t engage in education at all, which will lead to the collapse of modern society. of course, these are not the only possible objections to freedom of education (e.g., possible selfsegregation of education). consideration of the other objections is outside of the scope of this paper. kant’s paradox of autonomy and paternalism in education objection in his defense and promotion of the enlightenment’s focus on the rational autonomy as the final human dignity, kant articulated a paradox of autonomy and paternalism in education (lavaque-manty, 2006; von duyke, 2013). kant empirically noticed that people’s rational autonomy is often suppressed by external and internal forces. the external forces of political oppression must be remedied by political means. the internal forces of people’s “self-incurred tutelage” (kant, 1784) – their ignorance and lack of rationality, defined as universal objective reasoning7, (“immaturity” in kant’s term) – must be cured by education. kant saw the purpose of education in fostering the autonomous agency of a student by making the student informed and rational8. since people, especially children, are often “immature,” ignorant and non-rational people cannot be left to their own devices to decide their education. education must be compulsory – i.e., forced, foisted – along with its curriculum and instruction guided by pedagogically wise teachers. paraphrasing the famous rhetorical question by auguste comte, the founder of positivism, “if we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in education?” (cf. “research-based education”). teachers and society in their wisdom and scientific advances define and impose the curricular 7 universal objective reasoning leads to the objective truth, existing out-there, independent of the human particular subjectivity. 8 kant’s education is instrumental to serve autonomy rather than intrinsic having its worth in itself (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf16 content on the students and make sure that the students would arrive at the correct endpoint tested by the universal objective reasoning mediated by exam agencies. however, according to kant, education must be based on students’ freedom of reason. teachers must encourage and legitimize the students’ use of their own reason, however imperfect it might be, and engage the students in collective and dialogic testing of their imperfect reasoning, which under the guidance of the skillful and intellectually honest teachers will predictably lead the students to the correct rational conclusion9. the authoritarian imposition of knowledge, common to kant’s paradigm and many modern schools, is not legitimate. having the freedom of reason, students do not have freedom from reason (except in religious education), according to kant. one of the major by-products of this guidance is the growing rationality of the students, which is the basis of their future autonomy. kant’s paradox is that students’ autonomy is fostered through educational paternalism by denying the students’ autonomy in education (except the students’ freedom to use of their imperfect reason, consequently guided and corrected by the teacher). educational paternalism is the pathway to rational autonomy. kant’s philosophical follower fichte articulated it in the following way, education, says fichte quite consistently, works in such a way that “you will later recognise the reasons for what i am doing now.” children cannot be expected to understand why they are compelled to go to school, nor the uneducated – i.e., the majority of mankind – why they are made to obey laws which will presently make them rational and so retrospectively justify such coercion as they may have suffered. this is the task for the state. “compulsion is also a kind of education.” … if you … do not understand your own interests as a rational being, i cannot be expected to consult you or abide by your wishes in the course of making you a rational being. … i force you to be protected against smallpox though you may not wish it (berlin & hardy, 2002, electronic edition). my reply british philosopher isaiah berlin criticized philosophical monism as the possibility to harmoniously unite all human virtues and values. in kant’s case, this harmonious unity of monism involves rational autonomy (biesta, 2007). berlin argued for the radical pluralism of values and virtues that cannot be fully known and united harmoniously in principle, berlin believes that precisely because monistic visions of reality answer fundamental human needs, a truly consistent pluralism has been a comparatively rare historical phenomenon. pluralism, in the sense in which he uses the word, is not to be confused with that which is commonly defined as a liberal outlook-according to which all extreme positions are distortions of true values and the key to social harmony and a moral life lies in moderation and the golden mean. true pluralism, as berlin understands it, is much more tough-minded and intellectually bold: it rejects the view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. it recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values (kelly, 1978, p. xv). 9 in this sense, kant’s position fits progressive education (lavaque-manty, 2006; matusov, 2020, submitted). a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf17 according to berlin, human dignity is an unfinalizable, conflicting, and open-ended project, with the rational autonomy being one of its possible virtues. the pathways to these other virtues may or may not lay in the universal objective rationalism and kantian’ reason-based education. the kantian universal objective rationalism robs humans from their autonomy and dignity by making them robots of the natural laws. a kantian rational person must discipline themselves to slavishly obey the natural laws of the necessity, existing out-there, independently of human consciousness. kantian autonomy – freedom to reason by themselves and in dialogue with other people – is an essentially transient and limited process to discover or learn an unknown natural law or fact of the necessity. when the law is discovered and learned, discipline must prevail (matusov, 2015a). kant quotes a claim attributed to enlightened prussian monarch frederick the great, “argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” (kant, 1784). this enlightened authoritarianism can be applied to kant’s universal objective rationality. the despotism of aristocracy, tradition, religious dogma and personal prejudice is replaced with the despotism of the natural laws, including the historical laws of the societal development (cf. hegel, saintsimon, marx). the more natural laws and facts we discover, the more slavish out behavior must be. there is no doubt that the kantian virtue of knowing (always imperfectly) the natural laws and facts of the necessity and subordinating to these laws is important. however, as berlin argued, there many other virtues that can be more important at times, which might be in conflict with kantian virtue. for example, it may be mathematically true that sacrificing the life of one person is better to save the lives of three people. this mathematical formula is in accordance with the kantian ethics of his categorical imperative, a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, time, and place, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end. however, it may not be true from a moral point of view (greene, sommerville, nystrom, darley, & cohen, 2001). according to bakhtin, who criticized kant, any moral formula is an oxymoron. moral can be only a human unique personal deed, embedded in a dialogue that challenges this deed and demands responses from the person (i.e., responsibility) (bakhtin, 1993). combining bakhtin’s and berlin’s philosophical frameworks, this responsible human deed addresses the “agonizing choices” of the unfinalizable pluralism of human values in the contested open-ended project of defining human dignity. also, there is a contested plurality of rationality itself in addition to the contested plurality of values, argued by berlin. in addition to the kantian universal, objective, positivist, self-contained rationality, there are contextand practice-bound diverse rationalities (e.g., "agonistic rationality," "critical ontological rationality," see matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). for example, according to universal objective rationality, the concept of “brother” is always relational – there cannot be just one brother (piaget, 1985). however, from the relational human rationality, a brother can denounce his brother because of his unbrotherly deed of betrayal, as it portrayed in the movie “the godfather ii” (matusov & hayes, 2000). in contrast to the universal objective rationality, the context-bounded rationalities are often contested and cannot necessarily be established through a consensus. finally, some scholars view rationality essentially as a social, discursive property rather than individual – e.g., as a person’s participation in an “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1991), where the “internal” is referred to the discourse and not necessarily to the individual (matusov & von duyke, 2010). similarly, the notion of autonomy becomes contested from within and from outside. from outside, autonomy has been challenged as being the only or even primary value defining human dignity, as i discussed above. from within, the concept of autonomy is diversified and contested by diverse versions of rationality, also discussed above. kant himself seemed to discuss different versions of autonomy: capricious immature autonomy, autonomy colonized by cultural and communal prejudices, uninformed comment on text jim rietmulder: hahaha! the classroom cry of the progressive educator! a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf18 autonomy, and rational informed autonomy, which he valued the most. in addition, in contrast to kant’s version of rational autonomy, autonomy can be based on responsibility as a person’s commitment to addressing the challenges of their deeds and ideas by others and the self (cf. bakhtin, 1993). in addition, a person seeking help can be viewed as a manifestation of dependency, in some versions of autonomy, or as autonomy, in others. there are also known cultural versions of autonomy (rogoff, 2003). for example, there are cultural differences in how the members of marquesan indigenous communities and the westerners view autonomy, “western concepts of autonomy stress the freedom of the person to pursue individual goals unencumbered by social obligations… marquesans view mature adults not as those who give up personal goals… to conform to the group, but rather those who coordinate their own goals with those of the group” (martini, 1994, pp. 73, 101). unfinalizable contested pluralism of values, rationalities, autonomy, and definitions of human dignity undermine kant’s call for the educational paternalism. human dignity is not a well-defined known destination, but rather an open-ended contested project, tasked to humanity and to each individual person. education may or may not be a pathway to the realization of this human dignity project. besides, education is not reduced to the students acquiring the universal objective rationality. instead, education is itself bounded by the unfinalizable contested pluralism of values, rationalities, and definitions of human dignity. in fact, this radical pluralism, affirmed by berlin, is the philosophical basis for a student’s right to freedom of education. this principle of freedom of education was articulated by the founder of the first democratic school, called summerhill, a. s. neill, “freedom, like peace, is indivisible. it means that you should never influence the choices children make. it’s all or nothing. if trust in a child is not absolute, the principle of summerhill, the principle of free choice, loses all value10.” this principle of freedom of education is not limited by a student’s age or disability. radical pluralism severely undermines the kant-fichte paternalistic arguments that “compulsion is also a kind of education” and that forced education is akin to forced vaccination against a deadly communicable disease. "compulsory education is a contradiction in terms, a central miscalculation about the nature of learning… in education as in love, compulsion destroys the pleasure and the inherent rewards” (jerome, 1970, pp. 107, 108). practices require competence and mastery, not (compulsory) education (caplan, 2018). it is true that education can be a powerful pathway11 to a practice’ competence. however, it is up to a person to choose this pathway, if the person desires the entry to the practice. kant’s thesis for freedom of reason in education must be extended to freedom of a diversity of reasons – not only reasons bounded by the universal, objective, positivist rationality, – to freedom of non-reason (e.g., intuition, creativity), to freedom of curriculum choice (what for the student to study), and so on. neither the teacher nor society can predict what is needed for the student’s future in our civilization with rapidly accelerating technological and social changes. education on-demand becomes a more and more attractive alternative to education as the preparation for the imaginary future (collins & halverson, 2009). the paradox of ignorance and learning objection but, is it the “blind leads blind” situation? when a student has the freedom to define their education, curriculum, instruction, assessment, etc., is it not a “blind” student-as-educator leads a “blind” student-aslearner? how can an ignorant student participate in designing a good curriculum for themselves, if the student is not familiar with the academic matter, they want to study? is it not a primary, if not solely, the role 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58xthgyziy 11 an alternative pathway to a practice’s competence is being thrown in the practice by themselves and/or others – swim or sink. the latter pathway was undertaken by such famous people like physicist michael faraday, inventor thomas edison, computer gurus and college dropouts steve jobs, bill gates, sergey brin and larry page, among many others. comment on text jim rietmulder: i agree with the main point you’re making, but i’m distracted by this and i wonder if this is neill’s (habitual) iconoclastic hyperbole. i wonder if what he really means is “never impose the choices.” to “never influence the choices,” you’d practically have to avoid dialogue. it would be the non-interference principle as espoused by some sudbury practitioners (which, i think, originated in neill’s hyperbole – a strong influence on danny greenberg and his own hyperbole). and yet education can’t be a solitary activity. community is essential and with it comes many influences. freedom of education doesn’t require freedom from influences, including educator’s influences. (you taught me that, eugene. we make impositions on one another all the time, and those impositions can be important influences.) quite the contrary, freedom of education requires choice. freedom is pointless without influences to freely choose from, if only as starting points. anyway, i don’t disagree, but found it distracting (maybe as moderate voters are distracted and put off by protesters’ demands to “defund the police”). sticky note eugene matusov: excellent point, jim! i agree. i wanted to cut out this sentence, but your super important comment forces me to keep it. i wonder if a.s. neill was concerned with purity of individual (a child), which is somewhat common among democratic educators (not all, of course). this brings back david’s and belkacem’s important critique of individual. students, understood dialogically and authorially, are full of influences, which are a welcomed fact. yes, it is an imposition of curriculum, when not consented by the student, is a problem, not an influence. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf19 of the teacher, who is considered to be very knowledgeable in this academic field and in pedagogy, and who, thus, knows better what and how the students must learn? my reply this is how i address this paradox in my past open curriculum syllabus, where my students have a right to choose a curricular topic for their next class. i develop a list of possible curricular topics, which i call the “curricular map” (matusov, 2015b; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017a). this list involves topics that i personally and professionally and my colleagues around the world teaching similar classes feel important in the studied field to learn, choices added by the past students, and new choices that my current students add. i wrote in one of my syllabi, this is a tough question, which, in my view, reflects one of the main paradoxes of learning, namely: on the one hand, a student does not know what to learn because the student is not familiar with the subject of their own learning. but on the other hand, learning is a transformation of the student’s subjectivity: their opinions, thoughts, feelings, worldviews, interests, puzzlement, and concerns. without a student actively raising a question important for the student, their teacher’s answer usually remains meaningless for the student. thus, meaningful guidance by the teacher starts with the student’s question. to address this learning paradox, i propose we constantly negotiate what we will learn to reflect your emerging questions, puzzlements, concerns, and interests. it is like going to an unfamiliar foreign country: the guide’s suggestions and the tourists’ emerging interests generate meaningful, safe, and exciting tourist experiences and learning. the more tourists become familiar with the foreign country, the more informed becomes their interests. similarly, i hope that the more you become familiar with the vast terrain of the field, the more informed you will become your interests and choices of the study. i already asked you to reply to my curricular survey, based on the curriculum map, about your familiarity and interest in curricular topics of the class. the results of the curricular survey show, you already have certain interests and attractions, and also you have certain indifferences and even curricular repellences. some of these indifferences and repellences may be caused by your lack of familiarity or poor learning experiences with these subjects, but some can be a result of your informed choice or inclination. there is also a potential effect of the serendipity of getting attracted (or repelled) to something that you did not care before or were not even aware of. as your views and interests may change during the course, we can travel in different territories of the curricular terrain. at the end of each class meeting, we will make a decision about what to study next. i’ll try to plan one week ahead. of course, this is just one approach to address the paradox of ignorance and learning. an alternative approach for a student is to start studying something of their interest and see where it leads the student. both autodidact and assisted education have their own ways to address this paradox. will people engage in education on their own desire without being foisted? objection most children and people, in general, won’t engage in their own education unless being forced on them. although education might be the primary preoccupation of students, society and the state also have a strong interest in education. the economy needs an educated workforce. skillful participation in modern institutions needs educated clientele. democracy and politics need educated citizens. military needs educated soldiers. as one of my undergraduate teacher education students said, without being foisted, she would spend all her day in her bed. young children will spend all day playing games. most adults who may comment on text jim rietmulder: this reply seems indirect and incomplete. maybe a bit defensive, too. it doesn’t seem to be a “rebuke,” because you accept the validity of the objection. it comes off more as a workaround. also, this reply seems to apply to the university level, but not k-12 and therefore not to education generally. i hope you’ll think more about this one. as i understand it, you are saying… “yes, it’s the blind leading the blind and that’s a problem with educational freedom that calls for some kind of compromise of freedom. to minimize the compromise and maximize students’ freedom while also inviting access to my own deep knowledge of the subject, i create a “curricular map” of the subject domain and encourage my students to treat me as their tour guide as they explore this new territory. and they can redraw the map as they wish.” here (the circle school), parents of young and middle children sometimes express the related concern: how will my child know what s/he needs to know, if you don’t tell them? my answer for those parents (but maybe not for university students) is twofold, as you probably already know: imposed curriculum harms children (elaborated in my book; some would apply to education generally, i think); and the “basics” are basic because you can’t get by without them. in school-as-a-scaled-down-world, kids readily perceive these needs and are highly motivated to learn the “basics”. if we were to create a curricular map for young and middle children, it would include everything. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf20 need education will spend all their days engaging in idleness or entertainment. without foisted education, modern society will collapse. my reply i see the following three issues in this objection: 1) instrumental education, 2) intrinsic education, and 3) young children. instrumental education, aiming at primarily some educational outcomes, is often forced on people by the necessities. people, including very young people, either want or need to engage in certain immediate or future practices, which requires competence from them. sometimes they are faced with obstacles that they need to overcome. sometimes they need to solve interpersonal problems, and so on. education is a powerful means to address these needs; that is why i call this education “instrumental.” the focus of instrumental education is on outcomes: competence, overcoming obstacles, solving problems, and so on. this type of instrumental education is often forced on people by the described necessities. however, this “personal” self-coercion by the necessities is different from the “social” coercion by teachers, state, and society, common to many schools. it is because the “personal” coercion by the necessities perceived by a student involves the rooted motivation, described above. in the “personal” self-coercion, education is a response to the person’s own desires to overcome the experienced current or imagined future necessities. in the “social” coercion, education is a societal calculation of what might be needed from the student in the future. a societal calculation of education is arguably much more imprecise and wasteful than a personal desire of learning. also, a student’s self-disciplined study on a personal demand is more efficient than a student’s study foisted by the teacher (collins & halverson, 2009; sidorkin, 2002, 2009). for example, in the uk democratic school summerhill, a student had chosen not to attend classes on reading and writing – he graduated from the school being able barely to read but not to write. he was forced to learn reading and writing as a young adult, spending a few months on that. eventually, he achieved an advanced degree in environmental studies. later, in his reflection as a mature person, this man claimed that he learned in summerhill the most important lesson of self-directed learning on his own demand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58xthgyziy). in sum, voluntary instrumental education is enforced by the student-perceived necessities and, thus, guaranteed. what about intrinsic education, which involves education for education's sake – will people voluntary involve in such education? is it true that only a small elite of people, with some kind of “advanced” brains, would desire and capable of intrinsic education? do most people really desire only instrumental education to get good jobs, improve their socioeconomic status, make society better, promote patriotism, and so on? to test this inquiry, my colleagues and i conducted a study in three countries – the us, russia, and brazil – with 58 participants of different ages, with a diverse educational and vocational background. we called this study “the magic learning pill.” in this study, we ask our research participants if they would take an imaginary magic learning pill (mlp), would-be designed by scientists, instead of going through with their education, if the result of taking the pill would be “the same,” if not better, than the result of the best education. we asked them to envision areas of their past education for which they might take the magic learning pill, if at all, and for which they might not, if not at all, and why. our results show that almost all participants experienced and valued both instrumental education of taking mlp for some of their important learning and intrinsic education of rejecting mlp for some other important learning of theirs (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). intrinsic education is less valued by modern society because it is a form of leisure, which often is viewed as frivolous in our necessities-based civilization (matusov, 2020b). in addition, intrinsic education for creativity and critical examination often undermines the societal stability and challenges the existing power hierarchies. in sum, at least one empirical study shows that intrinsic education is valued and demanded by people when there is a lesser societal pressure to force it comment on text jim rietmulder: i don’t have a clear understanding of the “issue” and what objection you are addressing. i understand the answer, but i would find it helpful to better understand what it’s an answer to. actually, i think the answer that’s implied here is something like “no, the objection is not valid because children and people, in general, will and do engage in instrumental education, without being forced.” then you go on to explain why they do. but you never directly contradict the premise. if that’s what you’re saying, then it would be helpful to say so directly up front: the objection is not valid because its basic premise/assertion is wrong. but maybe you are saying the premise is correct, that people will not engage in instrumental education voluntarily, but social pressures are adequate to force them, so there’s no need to impose it in other ways. comment on text jim rietmulder: yes. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf21 on everybody. still, it remains an empirical question of whether most people would engage in intrinsic education, given a choice of leisure. the accumulated evidence and experiences of the existing democratic schools for about last 100 years have shown that, indeed, when they have a choice, a high majority of young, elementary school age, children prefer playing over voluntary attendance of classes (greenberg, 1991; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2019). however, democratic educators also report young children learning to read and write through play and through learning with peers. also, the overwhelming majority of the democratic school graduates attend universities and colleges, disproportionally high to their national demographics (rietmulder & the circle school, 2015). again, this suggests that although children may choose education as a recognizable activity in itself, later than it is now forced on them by others, self-chosen, self-directed education is much more efficient than foisted education with the imposed curriculum. of course, one might object that the evidence above is coming from a self-selected population of the students of families interested in self-directed education. more research is probably needed. in sum, although it may be true that given a choice, many young children might choose to play over education, it might not be consequential for society in the long run because self-chosen and self-directed education is more efficient than compulsory and foisted education. limitations of a student’s right to freedom education like anything in life, a student’s right to freedom of education has its own legitimate limitations. these limitations are often contested and often have blurry boundaries. in other words, people may disagree on whether a particular limitation of the right is legitimate or how far this limitation must go. for example, consider safety as a limitation of freedom of education. some parents let young children to explore their neighborhood or climb high on a tall tree, while some do not (skenazy, 2009). it is a matter of judgment. however, most people would probably agree to object to a student’s experiential, trial-and-error, education of tasting unfamiliar mushrooms or touching unfamiliar snakes to distinguish the poisonous ones from nonpoisonous. education for crime is probably another type of legitimate limitation. i reported a case when i was a physics schoolteacher in the ussr. a middle-school student of mine suggested me to teach him “mechanics” of robbing newspaper kiosks and making flying knives. i refused to provide him with this education (matusov, 2020, submitted). like in any fiduciary professions – e.g., legal, medical, educational, – there are legal limits of the practitioners’ help and servitude to their clients, patients, and students. the concerns about safety, legality, and morality of the students’ actions and demands on the educators my legitimately limit the fiduciary duty of the educators. limited resources for education represent another interesting case of possible legitimate limitations of the right to freedom of education. thus, a person, inspired to learn to pilot an intergalactic spacecraft, might be out of luck because our civilization has not developed this technology yet. in a less dramatic example, access to learning a particular available practice or educational resources (e.g., computers or access to the internet) might be limited or even absent for a particular student. this limitation can be historical, local, social, economic, and political. poverty can severely limit the right to freedom of education. but, is poverty a legitimate limit, historically or universally? what makes a limitation of the right legitimate or illegitimate? one possible outlook on the legitimacy of a limitation of the right to freedom of education is moral. from a moral perspective, poverty, as a form of injustice, is an illegitimate limitation. from a legal perspective, however undesirable, poverty is legal and, thus, legitimate in most modern societies. from an economic perspective, depending on a comment on text jim rietmulder: yes, but this is exactly children’s choice to engage in intrinsic education (which is what you are addressing here), rather than the less effective and less valued foisted classes, which, by the way, are usually instrumental education. chapter 7 of my book could be viewed as my assertion that “deep play” is intrinsic education. also, in the last decade i believe there is a renewed recognition of the educational value of children’s play, among childhood scholars and education practitioners. comment on text jim rietmulder: again, i don’t think they’re “choos[ing] education later”; i think they’re choosing education (play) now, reflecting its intrinsic value. this is the inborn impulse to strive, thrive, and grow – universal and universally recognized. comment on text jim rietmulder: on the contrary, it would be hugely consequential for society, in a hugely positive way, if children could choose play. imagine colleges filled with students who are motivated and self-directed. comment on text jim rietmulder: i wonder if this section is necessary as part of the topic: “why a student’s right to freedom of education […] is so crucial for education itself.” seems peripheral and doesn’t deepen previous ideas. there are some politically provocative statements here (unrelated to your topic) about poverty, social justice, and menial jobs that could be misinterpreted and evoke anger. be careful! a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf22 particular economic doctrine, poverty might be seen as unavoidable (and again legitimate), at least, in the current historical time. the economic perspective becomes even more salient when the division of labor is considered for its legitimacy of a limitation of the right. as it is now, for our society, someone still needs to deliver pizza, work on assembly lines, and take garbage from the streets – jobs that might be replaced by smart machines in the future12. students’ educational aspirations can be crushed by a lack of available jobs that might fit these aspirations. the historical situation with poverty, division of labor, types of available jobs (e.g., mechanical, non-creative, repetitive), or even having jobs as such may change with the advance of the global technological unemployment that might become a blessing rather than a curse for the right to freedom of education (markoff, 2015). when the economy starts requiring fewer and fewer people for production and services, the conditions might be created for a leisure-based society, in which education can become a form of leisure (matusov, 2020b). a path to a student’s right to freedom of education there are radical and gradual approaches to promoting the right to freedom of education. there are small oases where the right to freedom of education has been radically realized. i am talking about democratic schools like summerhill in the uk (neill, 1960), sudbury valley school in the usa (greenberg, 1991), the circle school in the usa (rietmulder, 2019), and so on. due to the national laws governing educational institutions, most of the democratic schools are located in the usa. democratic schools are characterized by the absence of foisted education and imposed curriculum. students have the right to not engage in education and, when they engage, to choose their own curriculum13 (rietmulder, 2019). another form of organized education is homeschooling, although it is much more diverse than the democratic school movement. some few homeschooling respect the students’ right to freedom of education (llewellyn, 1998), but many more do not. at the higher education level, there have been some pedagogical experiments in democratic education that promote the full or limited right to freedom of education (duberman, 1969, 2009; gates, 2020, in press; matusov, 2015b, 2020a; phillips, 2002; shor, 1996; tompkins, 1996). there have been historical precedents of respecting the students’ right to freedom of education: socrates’ circles, plato’s academy, aristotle’s peripatetics, and southern european medieval universities (cobban, 1980). gradual approaches to the right to freedom of education involve opening up some limited areas of institutionalized education for the students’ choices and freedoms. many educational institutions may have a limited right for the students to practice their freedom of education. the most limited right is probably freedom of participation in education, especially for young children. most k-12 schools are based on compulsory education. another highly limited right is freedom for the students to decide their curriculum even in higher education. attendance is another highly limited freedom. freedom from imposed assignments and assessments is rarely guaranteed, especially in conventional school institutions. some progressive schools (and individual classrooms), like montessori, walldorf, reggio emilia, and so on, provide students with freedom from grading, imposed homework, controlled classroom movements, and so on. they allow more curricular, instructional, and organizational choices for their students. some conventional schools and classrooms include open-ended imposed assignments, which grants some freedom of expression to the students. some innovative teachers try to provide a safe learning environment that encourages the students to express their opinions and views in the classroom without repercussion when their views turn to be erroneous or unpopular. 12 elsewhere, i argue that humans were first “smart machines” (matusov, 2020b). 13 in personal communication, jim rietmulder argued that democratic schools are not completely “free-range” education, because although they have more freedom for education, they are still “caged” by the national laws of compulsory education and some oppressive restrictions. in addition, i argue that democratic schools often do not have students’ freedom from leisure. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf23 on the bigger picture, in my judgment, the main obstacle for the right to freedom of education is the enmeshment of education with other non-educational practices and goals like educational credentialism aiming primarily at social mobility, keeping young children from streets and jobs, fighting against poverty (school lunches), promoting social justice, instilling nationalism and patriotism, social cohesion, cultural homogenization, assimilation of immigrants, economic social engineering, childcare, social or political conformism, democratic participation, instilling moral values, need-based educational assistance, and so on. disentanglement education from these important needs might help to recognize that education is the business of the student and, thus, to promote the student’s right to freedom of education. i believe that this disentanglement will become possible when education as intrinsic value, rather than only instrumental, will become appreciated in our society (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). in its own turn, the appreciation of intrinsic education occurs when our civilization transitions from the exclusively necessity-based to a leisure-dominated hybrid (matusov, 2020b). references arendt, h. 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(2013). students' agency, autonomy, and emergent learning interests in two open democratic schools. (phd). univrsity of delaware, appendix i dear eugene, i take the freedom of writing this as a quick letter. i want to honor my engagement while realizing that this type of conversations is far away from my nature. my sincere apologies for not being able to go deeper. i am precising that my comments are not to be published and are only a contribution from me to you. analysis: freedom for students. yes or not seems to be the duality in which you inscribe your argument. but is their such thing as duality in freedom? explained in different context, presented from different perspectives, freedom for student is the leitmotiv that is argued all over this article. however, sometimes i feel that what is happening here is not a conversation on freedom but rather a conversation that uses freedom as a subject. freedom is perverted to the exercise of mental activity. in that sense, i feel that i, as an engaged reader, am taken into a spinning circle that does not lead me anywhere especially not to the freedom for student. sometimes, it feels that i am reading a paper advocating for humanist freedom, and then i realize that i am reading a libertarian paper calling individualism and isolation “freedom”. these oppositions in perspectives presented in the same place and given the same importance make the article confusing. where do you locate yourself and why for? i wonder all the way where you wish to go. i understand the statement “student must be free to choose their education”. seems pretty altruist. why are they student at the very beginning? also, i have been a teacher for around 20 years. i taught students comment on text eugene matusov, belkacem, as i wrote in response to jeff king’s similar charge, i’m an unapologetic dualist. please see my arguments for the legitimation of dualism there and feel free to reply. comment on text eugene matusov: i’m not sure i understand. examples grounded in your analysis can be helpful. comment on text eugene matusov: what is wrong with “humanist freedom”? how do you understand it? comment on text eugene matusov: i replied to this charge above to your comment on the margin. comment on text eugene matusov: i “locate” myself – if i understand this term correctly – in an educational practice, as an educator who wants to support my students’ educational authorship. comment on text eugene matusov: why?! a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf27 of all ages. they are all different, all have different ambitions; however, we also find commonalities. there is no such thing as a “student” entity. all ages are different, all people are different, all stories are different, while at the same time being all the same. how can we then say: “student must be free to choose their education” what student, when? where? with whom and how? we think generally and we advocate for individuality? shall teachers forget all forms of personal agency in order to leave room for students’ experiences? if students are the “masters in their domains” why aren’t they teachers then? are parents needed in the development of a child? maybe we could replace parents by machines that sustain the life of children until they are capable of being self-sustainable? altogether, i think that these arguments are trying to define in a very static and reductionist way a concept that is evolving and transforming. education is an experience. using static rationality to talk about education experience is a mistake commonly made. it reduces education to the accumulation of knowledge and a list of achievable outcomes. freedom itself is not static and cannot be define using a list of arguments as discursive as they can be. freedom as much as education are relational experiences. i leave it to each and every one to find ways to share his-her experience in education to create his-her understanding of freedom and-or education. with my respect, si belkacem taieb appendix ii hi eugene, thank you for taking the time to read this email. this is matthew shumski (a member of the self-directed education, sde, research group). i hope you are well. "a students right to freedom of education" is a fantastic paper. it prompted deep thought and i really enjoyed reading it. a couple of thoughts came to mind that i wanted to ask: 1. something i have been thinking about a lot is the degree of appropriate freedom and direction in education for a student with dyslexia. in my experience, most unschooled and sde children learn to read, but i have known a couple who have dyslexia and did not receive support at a young age. what are your thoughts on this? how should freedom in edu be negotiated with potential disabilities and/or trauma? i know you mentioned this briefly in the meeting, and i would love to know your thoughts. 2. how should freedom of edu in closed socialization be squared with an individual who opts out of the well defined normative practice when the practice relates to safety concerns (i.e. refusing to social distance during covid, etc.)? maybe this falls under the limitation of illegal activity that you mention at the end. is there a suitable approach to mitigate a refusal through directed education? comment on text eugene matusov: great questions! i think i address them in my reply-essay “a student’s and a teacher’s rights to freedom of education: reply to the commentaries.” i wonder what you think about my reply. comment on text eugene matusov: i discussed a teacher’s right in both of my essays, but especially in the reply-essay. comment on text eugene matusov: i wish your provided a grounded analysis of these charges. comment on text eugene matusov: yes. it seems to me we disagree about the nature of this relationship, belkacem. comment on text eugene matusov: this is my son and my own school experience. comment on text eugene matusov: this is a terrific question! i’m not a scholar of dyslexia, but i can offer some (limited) personal insight. both my son and i are dyslexic. we both started reading around our 10-year birthday: i was in the ussr in russian, he was in the us in english. i suffered a lot being hit both by my teachers and by my parents (to less and more gentler degree). in contrast to my parents, my teachers were often mean to me, probably due to their pedagogical helplessness. of course, i hated both reading and writing while loving stories. i was a very good oral storyteller – which was my “relational currency” among my peers back then. i “learned” to read overnight. i remember going to sleep one night not being able to read. if you want to have this experience, just look at any foreign text – it’s just signs. deeply down, back then, i, as a child, believed that there is no such thing as “reading.” people simply pretend “reading” while memorizing the texts. i thought i simply had a bad memory. however, that when on that memorable morning, i looked at a text, suddenly i could hear a voice talking to me. i stopped seeing signs (i.e., letters and words). it was a magical experience. i still have dyslexia – especially when i’m tired, -i still can misread words and miswrite letters and words. my folk hypothesis is that my dyslexia is based on holism – i see holistic symbols. if it is true, probably, i would not have dyslexia in chinese, where words are holistic symbols. learning to read in chinese fluently involves memorization several thousand hieroglyphs – probably, it took several years for my son and me to memorize several thousand words. this is my hypothesis. in contrast to me, my son attended progressive elementary schools in utah and then in california, where he had terrifically good teachers. their approach was that my son would learn reading at his own pace. they were patient. however, it did not work that way entirely because, in the second grade, my son started developing a phobia of “reading-writing” activities in the classroom. his teacher did not require him to read and write but to listen to audiotaped stories and to dictate his own texts either to his peers or adults. but, my son started comparing himself to other kids. to counteract that, his teacher suggested studies with a special ed teacher to give my son an impression of “progress.” again, his special ed teacher was very good – she told my wife and me that her goal was to make sure that my son had an illusion of progress while the natural course would take place. since in the third and fourth grades, the instruction became mostly text-based, the principal of the california progressive school came with an idea to use an esl teacher to sit with my son and read the text in the classroom. in contrast to me, my son loved reading and writing. in short, if my son and i had attended a democratic school, we would have been more than fine. i bet that we would not have even noticed that we were dyslexic, especially nowadays, when reading and writing can be done digitally with the help of spellers, vox, and ai. at the same time, i do not want to cavalier to pretend that i know how to answer to your important question. i think it is a good inquiry to investigate by studying diverse cases. my hunch is that people with disabilities might do better in sde than in foisted education because they can demand meaningful and sensitive guidance when they need it. it is important to emphasize that sde is not equal to autodidact. a big part of self-defined education is about knowing when and how to ask for help. comment on text eugene matusov: i’m not sure i fully understand your question, sorry. i think a specific example can be helpful. refusing to social distancing is not education-specific issue and should be dealt with that as such. if a student wants to opt-out of a normative practice in closed socialization, there is nothing wrong about that. i don’t see a problem. for example, i’m learning computer programming related to moodle via what i call “voodoo programming” rather than through a systematic study of the moodle syntax. by “voodoo programming,” i mean modifying the existing moodle syntax i found in moodle php pages until it does what i want it to do. as to safety concerns, it is a good point. safety demands can be legitimately imposed on the students. this is a part of so-called “negative freedom” – i.e., setting well-defined limitations within which a person can exercise full freedom (see writings by isaiah berlin). negative freedom is when a person can legitimately do whatever is not explicitly forbidden by the authority. positive freedom is when a person can legitimately do only what is explicitly allowed by the authority. berlin argued against positive freedom for negative freedom. comment on text eugene matusov: it is the same issue, in my view. imposing legal limitations on the self-defined education is fine. a student’s right to freedom of education eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.356 | vol. 8 (2020) sf28 3. to what extent is it possible to disentangle education with welfare and safety programs when these things permit leisure, which in turn permits education? what is the most effective way to parse them out when they seem inherently intertwined? the covid shut down has me thinking and writing about this. 4. is there a paper and/or article to learn more about the bakhtinian dialogic appriach and practical application? i am really interested in this topic and using it. admittedly, i have not read much about it; a general overview read would be really helpful. thank you again. i really appreciate your work and the opportunities you create through the sde research group. although i have not joined as much as i'd like to (i plan to join more now that my work has been rescheduled), it teaches me a lot and inspires great ideas for my graduate work. in kindness and gratitude, matthew shumski new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. comment on text eugene matusov: as the welfare, i think the universal basic income and targeted vouchers can address these problems. recently i published a book about that: matusov, e. (2020). envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective. new york: palgrave. also, you can read my article: matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2016). the state’s educational neutrality: radical proposal for educational pluralism (editorial). dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4, e1-e26, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.170. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/170/114. comment on text eugene matusov: here are my texts that i recommend: matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy (13-chapter monograph). hauppauge, ny: nova publishers. matusov, e. (2011). authorial teaching and learning. in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21-46). new york: peter lang publishers. matusov, e. (2015). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 3, a174-a211, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2015.110. matusov, e., smith, m. p., soslau, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & von duyke, k. (2016) dialogic education from and for authorial agency. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4, a162-a197, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2016.172. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-58057-3. new york: palgrave macmillan. microsoft word adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces in lower secondary education (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt41 adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces in lower secondary education giuseppe ritella university of helsinki, finland fedela feldia loperfido university of bari, italy gianfranco de giglio lower secondary school "michelangelo" – bari, italy antonietta scurani lower secondary school "michelangelo" – bari, italy maria beatrice ligorio university of bari, italy abstract this article explores how the adoption of educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software can provide valuable opportunities for dialogic interaction and learning. the potentialities of this type of activity are often overlooked in dialogic investigations. based on empirical illustration, we discuss how openended educational tasks involving the creation of material-digital artifacts can promote the expression of the students’ voices and the emergence of a dialogic space in which both human and non-human others, as well as chronotropic dynamics and materiality, play a crucial role. to provide a polyphonic account of the dialogical processes detected, we analyzed excerpts from two group interviews with seven lower secondary school students (aged 11-12) and excerpts taken from meetings with their teacher. our qualitative analysis shows that the technology-mediated activity provided valuable opportunities for opening a dialogic space in which the students could express their own voice in interaction with both human and non-human others. the material world (including the virtual materiality of computer-generated objects) seems to play a twofold role. first, the resistance of the virtual and material objects can contribute to the opening of a dialogical space between the child and the world; second, the chronotopic relations seem to have an impact on the dialogic learning process. these are valid opportunities for educationally relevant dialogic interaction. they should be cultivated and supported to further advance the pedagogical value of educational robotics and coding. giuseppe ritella1 is a post-doctoral researcher at the faculty of educational sciences of the university of helsinki. his research interests concern the socio-material processes of technology-mediated learning; the transformation of educational practices during the covid-19 pandemic, as well as the examination of space 1 ritella’s contribution to this work was partially supported by the strategic research council of the academy of finland for growing mind project (312527 and 336064). issn: 2325-3290 (online) adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt42 time relations and social interaction in technology-mediated learning adopting, an approach based on dialogic and socio-cultural theories. fedela feldia loperfido is adjunct professor in educational psychology at the university of bari and a postdoctoral researcher at the university of cassino. her current research interest concerns emotional processes mediated by the use of technology in formal and informal learning contexts. she also work as a psychotherapist and teacher trainer. gianfranco de giglio has been teaching technology for about 10 years in a lower secondary school. for ten years, he has been developing his expertise on teaching practices involving coding and educational robotics and since 2016 he became teacher trainer on innovative teaching methodologies and the use of educational robotics at all school levels. he adopts a constructionist approach in his daily teaching. antonietta scurani was born in bari on october 28, 1963. school principal of the lower secondary school michelangelo of bari, she has been a teacher of mathematics, physics and computer science in many state secondary schools. the professional activity, both as a teacher and in the current capacity of school principal, has been constantly characterized by an important attention to the didactic innovation and the concrete participation in scientific research in close collaboration with the university of studies of bari. she provided various personal contributions to the pedagogical research with a view to educational dialogue and relational well-being in different students’ learning contexts. m. beatrice ligorio is full professor in educational psychology at the university of bari. her research interests concern educational technologies, digital communities, identity and new theoretical approaches to learning such as dialogic and trialogical approach. she is the department delegate for e-learning. she is vice-president of the inter-university collaborative knowledge building group (ckbg; www.ckbg.org). she is in the scientific committee of many journals of the field. she has more than 200 publications among national and international journals, chapters and edited texts. ïïò introduction during the pandemic situation caused by covid-19, schools were forced to embrace distance education or develop hybrid teaching practices, thus resorting to digital spaces where students and teachers could meet. since online education disrupts the social conventions and norms of social interaction already established in a classroom (anagnostopoulus et al., 2019), most of the attention around technology in education focused on its role as a mediator for social interaction. the most used types of technology are meant either to allow social interaction at a distance or to enrich the landscape of educationally relevant social interaction in face-to-face learning situations. for instance, they might empower classroom dialogue through purposely designed software (mercer, hennessy & warwick, 2019), enrich dialogical interaction using interactive whiteboards (ritella & sansone, 2020), or enhance the process of knowledge building using asynchronous tools such as the web forums (tan et al. 2021). other types of technology, such as fabrication technology, programming software, and educational robotics kits, have recorded less attention. nevertheless, these technological tools can become potential objects of dialogue and/or instruments for individual or collaborative educational activities. the spreading and use of this type of technology in education are not grounded in its communication function but in its potential for creating and sharing material-digital artifacts that might have educational significance. this type of technology attracts young students because of the connection to daily life experiences and the adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt43 practical hands-on activities involving objects such as sensors, motion detectors, and lights (papadakis, 2020). this article explores how adopting the latter class of technological tools can provide valuable opportunities for dialogic interaction and learning. in particular, we use empirical illustrations to discuss how open-ended educational tasks involving the creation and sharing of material-digital artifacts can promote the expression of the students’ voices. in addition, we illustrate the emergence of a dialogic space that involves the participation of both human and non-human others, and discuss the role played in this process by space-time relations and materiality. to provide a polyphonic account of the dialogical processes detected, we will discuss excerpts from two group interviews with lower secondary school students and excerpts taken from some meetings with their teacher. this teacher adopted open-ended knowledgecreation tasks using educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software in his teaching practice. during the meetings, the teacher portrayed his pedagogical approach and perspective on the learning processes emerging when the students use these technological tools during his classes. in the following section, we provide the rationale and theoretical background of our investigation. subsequently, we provide details concerning the research aims, the participants, and the research method. then, we describe the main dialogic features characterizing the approach adopted by the teacher. finally, we will use the empirical materials to illustrate how the dialogical nature of the students’ engagement with the technology involved both human and non-human voices and explore how space-time relations played a role in the learning process. theoretical framework the learning activities involving the design and fabrication of virtual or material artifacts by the students are central in “object-centered” approaches to learning such as “knowledge-creation” (paavola et al., 2004). in this approach, a key role is played by epistemic mediation, that is, a deliberate process of deepening inquiry by creating external knowledge artifacts that crystallize meanings and provide steppingstones for directing and guiding further personal or collective inquiry efforts. the use of digital fabrication technology and programming software in knowledge-creation activities has been associated with the label “maker-centered learning” (riikonen et al., 2020), suggesting a connection with the social movement of makers. the maker movement refers to “the growing number of people who are engaged in the creative production of artifacts in their daily lives and who find physical and digital forums to share their processes and products with others” (halverson & sheridan, 2014, p. 496). as discussed by hatch (2014), a crucial feature of the maker movement is its democratizing effect. the evolution of technology (which allows individuals to design, fabricate, and share a wide range of material and virtual objects) combined with a spreading culture of making implies that individuals and local maker communities can easily consider themselves innovators. thus, makers creatively engage in the invention, design, and production of digitalmaterial objects that, in their perception, potentially could change the world, at least in terms of improving their own and their community’s lives. accordingly, the maker culture “has become a way to express creative and communal drive” (halverson & sheridan, 2014, p. 495). while the label of making is principally associated with the fabrication of material objects, for example, using 3d printers, laser cutters, and other digital fabrication technology, makerspaces are equipped with a range of digital fabrication technological sets. in particular, they might also include educational robotics kits or software enabling the creation of virtual objects such as video animations or videogames (lock et al., 2020). it is argued that the educational usage of such technological tools involving the creation and sharing of material or virtual objects could support the development of several key skills adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt44 and competencies. these may include creativity, critical thinking, social and collaborative skills, etc. potentially, this may also contribute to connecting pedagogical activities with the students’ passions and their lives out of school (peppler, halverson & kafai, 2016). we argue that the latter aspect is crucial for the emergence of genuine dialogical interactions as the students collaborate at activities including one or more of the digital technologies mentioned above. in this sense, the approach to learning and education discussed in this article is not connected only to academic achievements but “takes into account the person as a whole” (kangas, 2010) with their own unique and creative voice. a few authors have emphasized the importance of the connections between educational activities and the students’ interests and passions (akkerman & bakker, 2019), which might promote the expression of the students’ voices. several authors maintain that the efficacy of makerspaces does not depend only on the material features of the space but also on cultural and social aspects: “the role of culture is profound and crucial in shaping who participates (and benefits from) makerspaces and how they benefit from participation, the learning mindsets they develop, and how they connect with others, both within and out of the space” (kim et al., 2018, as cited in culpepper & gauntlett, 2020). this argument shows a potential convergence between dialogic approaches to education and making-based pedagogies. nevertheless, research in this field has overlooked specifically examining the potential of these technologies for dialogic learning. indeed, the discourse around making-based pedagogies is often grounded in constructionism, and there is a limited number of studies explicitly addressing the pedagogical use of this type of technology from a dialogic standpoint (e.g., kumpulainen & kajama, 2020; mercer, wegerif & major, 2019; jung & lee, 2021). this gap might be related to the fact that the first generation of making-based pedagogy focused on technical aspects, while the cultural and social dimensions have been overlooked. as culpepper and gauntlett (2020) noted, makerspaces often hold rhetoric of social inclusion but soon turn into “exclusive places,” where people unfamiliar with the technology might not feel at ease (see also vossoughi et al., 2016). the dialogical processes associated with these types of educational activities have not yet been comprehensively examined. in particular, in this article, we emphasize the importance of an analytic focus on the dialogic interaction with the material world, which is often overlooked in dialogic investigations. in this sense, we agree with hetherington and wegerif (2018), who claimed that previously dialogic theory in education had focused mainly on the interaction between human voices. this can include real people participating in a conversation as well as absent individuals or abstract social entities voiced by the real participants (grossen & orvig, 2011). such abstract entities have been theorized in terms of ‘generalized voices’ (linell, 2009) or ‘cultural voices’ (wegerif, 2012). these are not necessarily human beings but can be institutions, professions, social categories, etc., voiced by participants who hold socially recognized views on the topic under discussion (ritella & ligorio, 2016). however, the role of non-human voices and the material world has been overlooked. when examining specifically research on the dialogical use of technology, scholars have mainly focused on how a range of communication technology tools might support online and/or offline dialogue and how such tools might contribute to the opening of a “dialogic space” (e.g., cook et al., 2019; pifarré, 2019). instead, the role of technology in the creation and sharing of material or virtual artifacts has not yet been central in the dialogic research agenda. only recently, a growing number of investigations have supported the claim that materiality plays a substantial role in dialogical processes (see, for example, ritella & loperfido, 2021; hetherington & wegerif, 2018; kumpulainen & kajama, 2020) and a few investigations on knowledge creation and making-based pedagogical activities have discussed the socio-material dimension of the learning processes taking place when learners use these technologies (mehto et al., 2020). the material world has been partially examined in the dialogical literature by adopting the bakhtinian concept of chronotope (ritella, ligorio & hakkarainen, 2016a). chronotope has been defined in terms of adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt45 socially emergent configurations of space-time, where space and time are considered interdependent social constructions (see bakhtin, 1981). this concept has been used to investigate the role of spatial and temporal relations in different types of educational activities, considering both discursive and material aspects of space-time relations (e.g., ritella, ligorio & hakkarainen, 2016b; brown & renhsaw, 2006). in sum, we will address a current gap in the existing literature by discussing how a specific focus on both non-human voices and chronotopic relations can improve our understanding of the role that the material world can play during the unfolding of the open-ended making-like tasks. research aim and questions our aim with the present investigation is to explore pedagogical activities involving educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software. in particular, the analytic focus is on exploring the interaction between human and non-human voices and the role of chronotopes in dialogic pedagogy involving this type of technology. in addition, we examine the relationship between the pedagogical activities and the students’ interests and passions and how such a relationship might contribute to the expression of the students’ own voices. the research questions guiding the analysis are: 1. which human and non-human voices are discursively represented by the students when they narrate their experience with open-ended knowledge-creation tasks involving educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software? 2. what was the significance of the material world during the activities, as perceived by the students? 3. how do the students represent the chronotopes associated with such educational activities? 4. how do the carried-out activities align with the interests and passions of the students methods and participants the present investigation involved a technology teacher from a lower secondary school in southern italy and seven of his sixth-grade students (aged 11-12) who volunteered to participate in the research. the main source of data consists of two online semi-structured group interviews conducted in may 2020, during the first national lockdown. the first group involved three male students who carried out several projects using educational robotics kits. the second group involved three male students and one female student, mainly using cloud-based animation software and simplified visual programming software. each interview lasted about 45 minutes. the interviewer asked the students open questions concerning: i) the activities they had engaged in during the last few months; ii) what they liked or disliked; iii) the task-related social interaction; iv) the digital and material resources they used; v) the difficulties they encountered; vi) the creative process activated to design their own original artifacts. the interviews were analyzed through qualitative content analysis (hsiah & shannon, 2005) involving the following steps: 1. transcription of the interviews, which were anonymized using pseudonyms. 2. iterative coding of the utterances relevant to the research questions by two independent coders, focusing on: a) the human and non-human voices that were represented as significant resources for the ongoing activity, b) chronotopic relations implicitly represented in the students’ speech, and b) the interests and passions of the students that were connected with the activity. 3. discussion within the research group concerning the utterances coded differently by the two coders until adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt46 complete agreement was reached (see table 1 for an overview of the final categories emerged). 4. construction of summary tables and visual representations of the categories emerging from the coding. 5. interpretation of the data and in-depth qualitative analysis of a selection of relevant excerpts. table 1: the categories emerged from the analysis categories sub-categories human / non-human voices videos: references to videos that were considered by the students significant for the activity software programs: references to software programs that the students considered to be significant for the activity books: references to books that were considered by the students significant for the activity school context: references to the school context, represented as a resource by the students family context: reference to the family context, represented as a resource by the students peers: reference to social interaction with peers, represented as a resource by the students interests and passions interests and passions: references to the students’ interests or passions the technology teacher collaborated with the researchers in all phases of the research. in particular, he assisted with the data collection, including the recruitment of the students and the collection of the informed consent of the students’ parents. he also participated in several research meetings with the researchers providing further information about the educational activities described by the students during the interview. he contributed to the interpretation of the findings. we considered the teacher’s point of view to be important because it allowed us to uncover some dialogic features of the design and implementation of the educational activities, which are important for the interpretation of the interviews. therefore, in the following section, we will report on the teacher’s description of the pedagogical design of the activities mentioned by the students during the group interviews. in addition, since the teacher’s voice contributed to reaching a polyphonic understanding of the dialogic processes examined in this article, when relevant for the interpretation, the teacher’s perspective has been integrated into the discussion of the findings. the teacher’s perspective the first important aspect concerning the design of the activities that the teacher emphasized is the open-ended nature of the tasks assigned to the students. although he sometimes defined a theme or a general description of the virtual or material object that the students should create using the technology, the students were usually free to self-organize their own activity and autonomously decide what kind of object to create. the teacher did not impose a right path, but he put “the technology in the students’ hands,” and he let them explore and discover what they could do with it. most of the time, he asked the students to adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt47 engage with the technology in small groups, gradually guiding each group in developing their projects using the available technological tools. while the students engaged in the activity, he provided help and support when needed. some students became very enthusiastic, and every day they greeted the teacher by showing a “shoe box with inside a new robot, their last creation.” although the teacher was proud of the commitment shown by some students, he also admitted that, at times, it was challenging to interact equally with all the students since a few were pressing for continuous feedback. sometimes, he had to ask some students (described as “rivers in flood”) to hold on because he needed to involve the other students. to emphasize the freedom left to the students during the activities, the teacher narrated how some of the students engaged with educational robotics according to their own interests rather than according to a specific task: excerpt 1 teacher: they started bringing me things that were not connected at all with the tasks i might assign, i mean they came and brought something, saying, “this is my last creation,” when they brought something, i said, “but why don’t you? you could also do this to improve it” and since then i started assigning some tasks, but at the beginning, it was just their own creations. in excerpt 1, it is possible to notice that the teacher let the students’ voices emerge, welcoming their creations and building on the students’ own creative engagement. he saw his role as being that of an advisor, suggesting ways in which they could improve the objects they created. in this way, the teacher seemed to attempt to build a connection between the student’s voice and the voice of the school curriculum. while before the pandemic, the teacher proposed this type of task as a collaborative activity to be carried out in groups; during the pandemic, the activities were re-designed to comply with the imposed restrictions. the teacher assigned a series of open-ended tasks inviting the students to create digital or material objects at home using a range of technological tools. for example, the students were invited to design a robot that would help in dealing with the pandemic. the students were guided by the teacher throughout the process of creation. students sent to the teacher videos, emails, and messages to show him what they created and received feedback from him. a further aspect emphasized by the teacher was the importance of social interaction among students and the characterization of the learning process as a creative endeavor. the teacher considers social interaction as necessary to develop student's skills and competencies: excerpt 2 teacher: i see educational robotics in this sense, as a tool for collaborating with each other. you see, these students have created their own whatsapp group, and they exchange suggestions, advice… i mean, it is a constant flow. […] with the digital classrooms with the ipads they reach levels of knowledge of the tablet in a short time. they do a great part of the job by themselves, i mean the one who discovered something explains to the other and then, afterwards… the spiral of creative learning… one says something, and they grow up together, also with robotics they do the same thing in practice. and then for me, this is… these are cornerstones, i mean the most important thing for me is just this, it is not the final product, the product is ok. you created it, and it works, but that is more a satisfaction for the students themselves… what i like the most is the process; i mean, it’s what they tell me. finally, of great importance for the teacher was the reflective activity he prompted by asking the students to narrate their learning experience, to explain what they built with the technology and how they adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt48 built it. he attempts to offer a learning environment in which students do not feel the pressure of the assessment. the teacher claimed that when the students are not worried about their grades, they seem more relaxed and engaged in the activity. consequently, the teacher did not consider what the students showed as strictly connected to the grade, and students did not ask what grade would be assigned to them. this attitude allowed for enjoyment of the activity, with students acting in a relaxed way even when showing some objects that did not work properly. in the teacher’s account, this was related to the fact that he tended to provide only formative feedback aimed at helping them to find solutions to the problems they encountered during the activity or suggest revisions to the artifacts that, in his opinion, could potentially have a pedagogical value. findings voices emerging during the interviews table 2 provides an overview of the frequencies of each category and subcategory. the analysis allows us to identify seven main voices represented by the students as they narrated the activity. according to the researchers’ interpretation, the students considered each of these voices to be a significant resource for the ongoing educational activity. the most frequent human voice represented during the interviews, especially during the second one, was the voice of peers (which occurred 19 times in total). the analysis of the excerpts reveals that the social interaction among peers was very intensive in some cases. this is the case of the three students from interview #1 that created a whatsapp group where they exchanged ideas and helped each other when they were not physically together. table 2: frequencies of categories and subcategories. categories subcategories interview #1 interview #2 tot non-human others videos 5 17,86% 2 4,55% 7 9,72% books 0 0,00% 3 6,82% 3 4,17% software programs 1 3,57% 6 13,64% 7 9,72% school context 4 14,29% 7 15,91% 11 15,28% human others teacher 2 7,14% 4 9,09% 6 8,33% family 1 3,57% 2 4,55% 3 4,17% peers 5 17,86% 14 31,82% 19 26,39% interest and passions interest and passions 10 35,71% 6 13,64% 16 22,22% tot 28 100,00% 44 100,00% 72 100,00% for some students, peer interaction was an occasion to learn how to use the technologies even before the teacher introduced them at school (excerpt 3). the teacher emphasized that he observed instances of peer tutoring during which the students taught each other what they knew. some students, who initially were not at all familiar with the technology, became passionate about it because of the interaction with friends enthusiastic about it. adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt49 excerpt 3 larry: roland and i had a friend who was very good with computers and with programming, so he taught us how to use the robots. second, the teacher was mentioned four times by three students, who emphasized the help provided by the teacher for the development of their project, also noting that he provided additional technological tools that allowed them to improve their creation according to their own desires. for example, roland mentioned that the teacher loaned him some building blocks that were essential for creating the robotic arm that he was keen to construct. three students also mentioned the family as a significant resource for their projects, especially in terms of support received by some family members. third, concerning the non-human voices, several students mentioned that they used youtube videos as inspiration for their creations or as a resource for solving problems encountered during the process. only two students mentioned the use of books as a resource for their activity. instead, the school context seemed to be an important non-human voice in the account of five students, which seemed to be strictly related to the chronotopic constraints of the activity. in the following sections, we will report specifically on the analysis of non-human voices and discuss how in our interpretation, the chronotope of physical co-presence at school provided an invisible ground for social interaction with peers. the voice of the material world in this section, we will discuss two excerpts as empirical illustrations of how the dialogically minded use of technology in educational activities can contribute to the opening of a dialogic space including nonhuman voices, thus emphasizing the role played by materiality during the learning process. in excerpt 4, roland describes the process through which he ideated and constructed one of his creations, which is a robotic arm including a robotic hand. roland’s idea was that by means of sensors, the robotic arm would detect the movement of a human hand and activate some electric motors, which would then continue the movement initiated by the person “wearing” the robotic arm until the sensors detected a different movement. excerpt 4 roland: ok, i first watched this glove in a video. then i started from the fingers. i built a kind of very thin panel, this much, more or less [gesture showing how thin the panel was]. and i thought this could be a finger, but i thought it will never work. then one day, i tried and i engaged in building the hand. i said, “but it is a beautiful idea, i guess that a nice thing could come out from this.” then i improved the fingers, i improved stability. and then there was a problem. i was not able to sustain it, i needed to keep the mechanical arm attached to my own arm, right? and so, i was not able to keep it stable, i needed to put some joints that would be able to keep it stable. and after a few tries, i succeeded. then i moved to the programming, but it was also not easy, but i made it. […] and at the end, i decided to decorate it a little bit to make it more beautiful. and then, since i did not have three touch sensors, i had asked the teacher to lend me two of them, so i had to disassemble the arm [in order to return the borrowed parts]. the idea of the robotic arm was first taken from a video he had previously watched online. roland was at the same time enthusiastic about the project (“it is a beautiful idea”) but also skeptical about its realization (“it will never work”).in addition to the dialogical interaction between two inner voices, roland’s account includes non-human voices that allow for discussion of the role of the material world connoted by constraints and practical problems. as roland had “a few tries,” the material world provided a feedback adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt50 loop and iteratively pushed him to figure out complex solutions to emerging problems (e.g., “i was not able to sustain it”) until he eventually succeeded. a similar process to the one described by roland during the interview was insightfully discussed by pickering (1993) as he presented his concept of the “mangle of practice.” for pickering, the material world tends to resist human action so that an iterative process is activated. first, the person (or group of people) acts on materials. second, the materials might resist the action by raising “obstacles” to the realization of the intended actions. third, the (individual or collective) actant acknowledges the resistance of the material world that reacts to their intention and responds through what pickering (1993) labels as accommodations, that is, actions meant to circumvent the emerging obstacles. within the educational context, biesta (2012) framed such interaction between learners and the materials in terms of a dialogue between the child and the world. biesta’s contribution conceptualizes the existence of several ways in which a person can respond to the resistance of the material world, distinguishing between the monological and dialogical responses. on the one hand, there are two (monological) ways of addressing such resistance. the first is when a person attempts to simply impose their will upon the world, which, at its extreme, may lead to the destruction of the object of resistance. according to biesta, the second monologic possibility is to withdraw oneself from the resisting world, not engaging with it, and not connecting with it. both these options are characterized as monologic since they imply either the destruction of the voice of the resisting external world or the self-silencing of the students’ voice, thus closing the potential dialogical space residing in the interaction between these voices. on the other hand, the third option that biesta suggests is to inhabit the educational – dialogical – space that emerges in the “frustrating middle ground between the two extremes of world-destruction and selfdestruction” (biesta, 2012, p.95). excerpt 4 illustrates how the creative processes that emerged during roland’s engagement with the educational robotics kit were dialogic in nature and included non-human voices. the teacher’s design of the activity might have contributed to enhancing the dialogicality of the process. indeed, he did not attempt to dictate procedures for using the technological tools (which would tend to silence the student’s voice). instead, he allowed students’ own voices to emerge in a dialogue with the material world that resisted and was iteratively addressed through dialogical “accommodations,” which at times might have been developed in interaction with peers or with the teacher, or both. in roland’s account of his own activity, the middle ground theorized by biesta was found as the student did not give up his desire to build a robotic arm when encountering difficulties or when he expected that it might not work properly. roland accepted and addressed the emerging “voice” of the resisting materials, iteratively revising the initial design to make it work. the open-ended nature of the task might have supported the emergence of such a dialogical space, as roland was allowed to engage with the world with his own creative voice (autonomously conceiving the object to be created based on his own interest). he was also encouraged and supported by the teacher (and by his peers, as reported several times during the interview) in the dialogical interaction with the resisting materials. finally, at the end of the excerpt, roland also expressed his creativity and aesthetic sensitivity by decorating his robotic hand to “make it more beautiful.” the resistance of the external world concerns not only the material objects used during the activity but also the features of programming software and virtual objects. in this sense, recent research introduced the concept of “virtual materiality” (paavola & miettinen, 2019), emphasizing how some virtual objects provide tangible means for interaction and collaboration. accordingly, the resistance posed by virtual objects can also trigger dialogic processes, as we will discuss using excerpt 5 as an empirical illustration. adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt51 in this excerpt, jack and matthew describe how they worked with a programming software – scratch – to generate geometrical figures. the teacher did not provide a correct procedure, letting the students figure out what kind of instructions were needed to draw the figure chosen by each student. excerpt 5 jack: i used the formula. i mean basically you take 360 degrees and divide them by the number of sides, and you get the degrees that you needed to generate the figure. matthew: well, not only this. it was not only like this because also sometimes, when i did as… using jack’s method, i obtained [a figure] with couple of degrees more than the others. jack: but not for the odd ones ((meaning figure with odd numbers of sides)), for the odd ones, you understand? you cannot make 360 degrees divided by 7. teacher: no, what jack says is right but actually there are some approximations and then it might not work out jack: if you want to make a heptagon, 360 divided by 7 you cannot make it… the strategy that jack describes in order to draw the figure using the programming software was to use mathematical formulas to calculate the size of the angles between the sides of the figure. in excerpt 5, we notice that the resistance the students encountered in the virtual environment also provided opportunities for reflection on relevant disciplinary problems. jack explains that he used a formula, “simply,” dividing 360 degrees by the number of sides of the figure. however, matthew claimed that the formula does not always work properly, as sometimes he had not been able to generate exactly the figure he intended to draw. for some of the geometrical figures, the formula worked well, while for others, it did not. the problem encountered was familiar to jack, who responded that the formula does not work with figures having an odd number of sides, giving the example of the heptagon. from a dialogic perspective, these occasions of sensemaking have high learning potential. they might provide grounds for opening a dialogical space for collective knowledge building in a struggle with the virtual objects’ resistance. the open-ended nature of problems encountered by the students encourages them to engage in further collective dialogue. it leads them to seek explanations and solutions as they creatively engage with the technology. these opportunities for educationally relevant dialogic interaction might deliberately be cultivated and supported to advance the pedagogical value of the implemented pedagogical activities. in this section, we used two empirical illustrations to show how the interaction with both the material and the virtual objects provided occasions for opening a dialogical space. therefore, we claim that this type of learning activity can: i) provide a high potential for learning; ii) support the process that biesta (2012) labeled as the dialogue between the child and the world, and iii) offer an optimal site for investigating the role played by non-human voices in learning processes. social interaction and chronotopes of distance education in this section, we will discuss how the chronotopes implicitly represented in the students’ narration functioned as gateways for dialogical interaction. in our interpretation, the students described a chronotope associated with the technology-supported activity in the classroom before the pandemic, which was radically transformed when they were forced to embrace distance education. we will analyze a few excerpts from the group interview to discuss the chronotopic relations we identified in the data and their significance for the ongoing dialogical processes. on several occasions, the students mentioned interactions at school they had with peers around the technology before the pandemic. they reported that when they were at school, they were keen to complete their making projects, and sometimes they even used their free time during the breaks to work on them. several students in their narration mentioned the physical environment of the school, especially adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt52 referring to the proximity with their classmates. in some excerpts, students contrasted the activities at school before the pandemic with the ones that they carried out from home during the lockdown. the following excerpt (excerpt 6) provides a good illustration of this theme. in excerpt 6, anne joins a discussion about the help-seeking and collaborative interaction they experienced while engaging with the technology. excerpt 6 anne: i did not ask my parents for help because they are not good with these things. when i was in school, i asked the teacher for help, especially for programming and these things, instead concerning the drawings [she refers to the drawing of geometrical figures by providing instructions to the software program] … i think that at that time max was my desk mate… and so if we did not understand something, he used to help me, and by the end we always succeeded. instead, in this period [during the lockdown due to the pandemic], i asked for help only from my friends. anne’s contribution clearly shows that sitting next to a peer at school provided grounds for a flow of social interaction with her classmate, which was interrupted during the lockdown. the spatial proximity with max encouraged her to ask for and receive help from him before. instead, since the distance learning started, she no longer asked for help from max, addressing only some other peers that she considers to be her “friends” when needing help on this kind of activity. through the analysis of anne’s words, we infer that the space-time of the classroom (characterized by physical proximity) facilitated interaction with peers that she would not address at a distance. this excerpt shows how the material conditions of interaction (being desk mates in the classroom vs. being at home) in anne’s perception had an impact on her social interaction with peers. during the interview, several times, the students mentioned constraints or technical problems that hampered their social interaction with peers during distance education activities, which contributed to reduced collaboration and reciprocal help-seeking. for the students, the chronotope of distance education seems to be characterized as a space where collaboration and social interactions encounter more obstacles than in the classroom. nevertheless, since the students seem to have established a habit of collaboration across several school projects, at times, they include the voice of their peers in their individual activities even when collaboration seemed impossible to them. a good illustration of this process is described by matthew (see excerpt 7). before the excerpt, max described a project developed in collaboration with matthew using a cloud-based animation software named powtoon (the label being a portmanteau of “powerpoint” and “cartoon”). at this point, the researcher asked if this was the only idea they developed collaboratively. excerpt 7 matthew: there were other two ideas we realized [together], also in powtoon when we were doing a task on the characteristics of glass. i phoned him [referring to max] and asked if he wanted to do it [the digital creation] with me. since we were not able to make an arrangement… it was a bit difficult… since it seemed that he was not able to access [the online software] from the ipad… in the meantime i was asking him if he wanted to do it or not. we got to the point that each of us made it by himself but both of us made it including the character of the other. in excerpt 5, matthew describes some of the challenges he encountered when trying to engage in a collaborative activity with his peer at a distance. despite the apparently insuperable difficulties, the two students did not give up. as they were forced to work individually due to technical problems, they decided to reciprocally embed the voice of the other in their creations by using each other’s characters when creating their individual online animated presentation. in this way, the students could develop a highly dialogic artifact even when working individually. this was not required by the teacher; it was an autonomous adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt53 decision taken by the students. this may be an effect of the culture of dialogue and collaboration already promoted by the teacher. in conclusion, the analysis of the excerpts discussed in this section shows how the different spacetime configurations emerging in students’ perceptions during classroom teaching and distance education impacted their social interaction with classmates and peers. nevertheless, they sometimes found creative solutions to include each other’s voices in their activity despite the challenges encountered. meeting students’ interests and passions in this section, we provide some empirical illustrations of how the dialogically minded design of educational activities involving educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software aligned with the interests and passions of several of the interviewed students. during the interviews, several students reported that they particularly liked robotics kits based on building blocks as they liked to see their ideas “come alive” (e.g., nando: “i like to unleash my fantasy with the lego model, and afterward i program it,” roland: “for me, it is easier to build [the robot], it’s more beautiful because i am able to represent my ideas”). the open-ended task provided by the teacher (discussed above), together with the features of the technological tool, seems to provide a learning environment where the students feel free to creatively engage with the technology by expressing their own voice. the teacher confirmed that students’ enthusiasm tends to “go sky-high” when he provides this type of robotics kits rather than with pre-assembled robots to be programmed. the students seem to appreciate the possibility of building robots according to their own inspiration rather than programming pre-assembled robots. cloud-based animation software also seems to align well with the interests and passions of some students. when nando discovered this type of software program (introduced by the teacher), he decided to use it to create a comic strip on charlemagne and the history of the holy roman empire. in nando’s view, this particular use of the technology at school was connected to his own passions and interests: “when i was younger, i already had this passion for ancient comic books, and then i saw the virtual ones, and i developed a passion for them.” in this sense, these tools have supported playful learning processes, able to stimulate creativity and knowledge co-creation (kangas, 2010). one of the students, max, clarified that expressing his own creativity through these technological tools was not immediate. indeed, in excerpt 8, while providing an example of peer support when he was helping a friend with educational robotics, he reflected on his own learning trajectory of using the technology. excerpt 8 max: for example, matthew wanted to start building and since i had two different platforms for building, i loaned him one and he did some practice with it. for example, for building the first programmable small cars, an easy thing, it can be done with some instructions, at least when i learned it, i always followed the instructions. then when you became more expert, then you can start building what you want, following your own fantasy… in excerpt 8, max reflected on how he himself learned how to use the technology, which initially required some practice based on the instructions provided by the companies selling the robotics kits. subsequently, he was able to follow his own fantasy creating the objects that he liked, but only after acquiring a good knowledge of the technology. in this sense, max portrays his current creative engagement with educational robotics as an outcome of such a learning process. adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt54 the meetings with the teacher allowed us to uncover additional aspects related to the students’ interests and passions. in particular, he claimed that while providing assistance and feedback to the students, he was also able to recognize their interests and passions and engage in a dialogic relationship with each student, even with some who are usually silent in class: excerpt 9 teacher: the first days when i observe them, a student like max, he would be one who … well a professor at the beginning would not even give him a six ((out of 10)) because he is a reserved person, silent, he stays hidden in the back of the classroom, he does not say anything, he speaks only if he is summoned… and then there are instead those students that… you see them… that they are all show, while he is substance, he does not make a show, but you have to observe, otherwise… i don’t really know how to explain […] max… since the first day of school, he brought me one small thing after the other… well, let’s call them small things. he made himself known… […] when they [referring to max and roland] realized that they could bring me… that we could talk… that maybe we could make some things together, then they started arriving with these shoeboxes full of robots … excerpt 9 shows that the teacher perceives this approach to teaching as promoting the free expression of the students’ interests and passions, even those normally silent. this allows the generation of a dialogical space where the students “bring” their creations to the teacher as tools that mediate a truly engaging dialogic relationship with him. this dialogic interaction allows the teacher to recognize the specific passions of each student, as shown in excerpt 10: excerpt 10 teacher: every one of them has his own [passion]… there is the one who… the one of the mechanical art, he is obsessed with the transmission of motion, he likes to put cogwheels everywhere, … the other one is obsessed with arts, with legs, he wants to create a man and in the end he will do it… while max likes different types of things, he goes from tracked vehicles to the car that can climb, he builds a bit of everything… the photovoltaic system… the teacher often had the impression that when the students engaged with the open-ended collaborative activities, he was able to observe “their own selves” (excerpt 11): excerpt 11 teacher: i like very much to observe them. i stay there with them. i observe them while… also while they are fighting inside the group … because then some leaderships emerge that you would not normally expect in a classroom. the student always shy, who is always silent, now is coordinating the whole group. here [at school], they do not usually do a task like this; so, when i talk about this to their parents, they say ‘yes, at home they are like that,’ so maybe at school, they wear a mask, in the classroom, they tend to hide.… instead, when we do an activity with robotics, their own self comes out, they are themselves. this is the thing that i like the most, in this way i get to know them better… excerpt 11 shows that the teacher considers tensions and conflicts emerging during the group work as a venue for the authentic self of each student to emerge. such conflicts can be considered valuable from a dialogic pedagogy perspective. indeed, it is exactly the tension and even conflict emerging in dialogical interaction that “fuels students’ understanding and learning” (kim & wilkinson, 2019, p. 74). interestingly, in this excerpt, the teacher becoming capable of seeing the authentic self of the students can also be considered an outcome of this dialogic tension. through these excerpts, we understand how the activities based on educational robotics, cloudbased animation software, and simplified visual programming software seem to build on the students’ adopting educational robotics and coding to open dialogic spaces giuseppe ritella, fedela feldia loperfido, gianfranco de giglio, antonietta scurani, maria beatrice ligorio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.466 | vol. 10 (2022) dt55 genuine interest and are able to promote both the students’ authentic expression as well as the dialogic interaction with the teacher and with peers. conclusions in this article, we have discussed how a dialogic approach to the adoption of educational robotics, cloud-based animation software, and simplified visual programming software can provide valuable opportunities for opening a dialogic space where the students can express their own voices in interaction with both human and non-human others. it appears that the open-ended nature of the task facilitated the connection of the educational activity with the students’ interests and passions, thus promoting the expression of their own voices. we also illuminated how chronotopes were particularly relevant since the educational activities were initially carried out in the classroom and suddenly were moved online during the lockdown caused by the pandemic. therefore, the material world (including the virtual materiality of computer-generated objects) seems to play a twofold role in the educational activities we have examined. first, the resistance of the materials can contribute to the opening of a dialogical space “between the child and the world” (biesta, 2012); second, a crucial aspect of the role of the material world resides in the chronotopic relations that function as a ground for learning and that through an “invisible mediation” (authors, 2016) can have an impact on several aspects of the learning process. we believe that this article addresses a research gap in the literature. indeed, as discussed above, the early scholarship on making mainly focused on technical aspects and overlooked the social and cultural dimensions of mediated learning making activities, while the dialogical scholarship on the pedagogical use of technology did not pay enough attention to the material aspects of learning. the analysis shows that fertile learning processes can emerge when the adoption of digital fabrication and programming technology is framed in the context of open-ended making-like activities where the students are free to express their own creative voices in dialogical interaction with both the material and the social world. it appears that the open-ended nature of the task facilitated the 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(2012). learning to think as becoming dialogue: an ontologic-dialogic account of learning and teaching thinking. in m. b. ligorio, & m. ce’sar (eds.), interplays between dialogical learning and dialogical self (pp. 27–51). charlotte, nc: information age publishing. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 7. kullenberg^j marjanovic-shane^j (layout) democratic education and dialogic pedagogy^j 2023-01-10.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a158 democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg kristianstad university, sweden ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract this paper is a re-publication1 of an interview between tina kullenberg and ana marjanovic-shane, published in the earli sig 25 interview series: ”the role of theory and philosophy in educational science” (kullenberg & marjanovicshane, 2020)2. in the interview, the authors discuss the reasons democratic schools sometimes support but other times do not support or even limit dialogic pedagogy. in the interview conducted by tina kullenberg, marjanovic-shane makes a distinction between schooling and education. finally, in the face of global development, while sharing her comprehensive experiences over time and cultures, marjanovic-shane critically reflects on predominant approaches to education and the organization of schooling. tina kullenberg holds a doctor of philosophy in education, currently working at kristianstad university (sweden) as a lecturer in teacher education programs and postgraduate courses in educational science. her research focuses on pedagogical communication, applying dialogic and sociocultural perspectives on teaching and learning. lately, she has been especially engaged in bakhtin-inspired approaches to education. she also has a special interest in addressing democratic issues with a relational lens, for example, exploring the intricate dynamics of power-relations in educational dialogues between teachers and students or peers, premises for student agency, and other institutionally embedded dilemmas or opportunities in schooling. moreover, she has a background in the area of music education, in theory, and practice. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. 1 we (tina kullenberg and ana marjanovic-shane) want to thank the publishers of the earli sig interview series for granting us a permission to republish this interview. 2 https://earli.org/node/139 issn: 2325-3290 (online) democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a159 gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. ïïò introduction in this conversation, ana marjanovic-shane and i (tina kullenberg) discuss whether democratic education always goes together with dialogic pedagogy or not. ana raises the question by pointing out why, how, and when dialogic pedagogy and democratic education seem to be in synergy and when they take separate ways. in this context, she also problematizes the common idea that all democratic schools follow liberal values and principles, promoting students’ unconditional academic freedoms. by definition, democratic schools can decide to adopt illiberal educational philosophy and practice based on monologic pedagogy as well, she claims. she moreover distinguishes between schooling and education and explains why that makes sense to her. finally, ana reflects on the development of educational systems over time and over cultures as well. education has become more and more standardized, and governments tend to manage more and more aspects of education. the degrees of freedom for the students and the teachers have thus been diminished in an alarming way. so, in current times there is less freedom of thinking, acting, and personal meaning-making in the education of today. the interview ana: so, what do you want to ask me today? tina: well, based on what we already have set out to discuss, i have this issue in mind: do you think dialogic pedagogy may imply a democratic education or not? if so, why, when, and how? perhaps you remember, at first, i was eager to ask you why dialogic pedagogy and democratic education go together, but then you advanced my question and told me that you are interested in talking about when and how as well. a good point, i think. ana: yes, i found that dialogic pedagogy and democratic education do not always support each other. i found this very deeply now, working on my project on the norwegian democratic school experiment history. especially while working on the analysis of a particular general assembly meeting held in the experimental gymnasium of oslo in the first months of the school existence in 1967. so, i think it is important to note that democratic education is a way of governing a school. it is about the participants’ rights in making decisions about the organization of the practice of schooling. so, democratic education is not really about education itself, but about the shapes and conditions of life and practices in which education can take place! i want to note that here i refer to “education” as a particular kind of practice in the sphere of human practices, like: art, or music, sports, cooking, trade, etc. in contrast, “school” is an organizational, i.e., institutional or just a communal way to organize people around the practice of education. education can actually take place outside of an organized school. and vice versa, a school can be organized in a way that may harm or even suppress genuine education, while promoting socialization, training, and obedience! democracy in organizing education as a human practice, is about questions like who is in charge of organizing this practice? who can make legitimate decisions? democracy as a way of governance means that everyone in the community of people in the school has equal rights to make their voices heard, their ideas discussed and participating in making decisions about educational practice issues. tina: mhm, and this is what democracy is all about? ana: yes, this is basically what democracy in education is. ultimately, democracy is not about the content of the decisions the participants will actually be making. the notion of “democracy” is only about how the governance (of the school) is organized: what are the powers, the rights, and the relationships of democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a160 the participants in creating their practice. it is about who has the right to make decisions, but not about what kind of educational approaches will be adopted. for instance, in summerhill and the sudbury valley school, education itself was often organized in very conventional ways (greenberg, 1991; neill, 1960). the difference was that the students had a right to decide what classes they wanted to have and whether to participate in these classes or not. dialogic pedagogy may happen to be one of the approaches among several that the democratic school participants decide to practice. but whether dialogic pedagogy will be practiced will not be directly determined by the fact that the school is democratic. so, for democracy in school governance, two things are critical. the first one is for the school to be sovereign, having full control of their decisions. when we think about democratic countries, that means the country first needs to be self-standing. no other countries are dictating them what to do and how to behave… a democratic country cannot be a colony of another country. in a democratic country, people make decisions for themselves, right? and when it comes to schools, it would be the same principle. you have that in the summerhill school, and you have that in other private democratic schools in the usa. potentially, this is so in some other countries. i don’t know how it works in other countries so well. however, to go back to summerhill, for instance, they are educationally sovereign. they don’t have to follow any national, educational rules, except hygiene… tina: hygiene? ana: yes, hygiene. tina: that’s an interesting fact! ana: well, they must have their health guarantee (windley, belrhiti, chippington, & white, 2019) after all, and other safety guarantees about the physical and some social aspects of their schooling. but as far as the educational [pedagogic] issues in question: how and what will the students learn, what will be the internal policies of the school, their ways of evaluating what would count as being good students or bad students, all of that, – nobody from the outside can make decisions about that and impose them on the students and teachers. that means that there are no external impositions nor any external pressures. in other words, there are no external authorities for democratic governance to be possible. this is the first condition for truly democratic schools. these schools have to be entirely run by their own communities, and no-one else from the outside can make the decisions for them. the second condition has to do with the internal practice. it is that all participating voices are equal, which means they all have the equal right to participation and the right to be heard. in that sense, there is no hierarchy in the school. this is all about having the right to decide. at the same time, it is not at all about what to decide and what the decision will mean or imply. democracy has to take into account people’s different opinions. thus, there will always be somebody who will not be satisfied with a collective’s decision. in democratic governance, these differences must be resolved when making decisions. the differences in the opinions and points of view are also important for dialogue in education. in fact, the differences, contrasts, and even contradictions among the points of view in dialogic pedagogy are the very core of dialogic pedagogy. as you can sense, there is a crucial difference between the role of dialogue in education and its role in democratic governance. democratic governance needs dialogue for deliberation. it needs dialogue for giving all participants equal rights to express their opinions. but in the end, when it comes to the issues of running the school, decisions have to be made, too. these decisions must be finalized, taken out of the dialogue of diverse opinions, and they cannot always be expected to please every involved participant. tina: please, go on with the issue of pedagogical dialogues! democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a161 ana: ok, the big difference between democratic education and dialogic pedagogy is that the latter, the dialogic pedagogy, actually depends on and thrives on disagreements! the more differences of opinions, the more potential to deepen the educational dialogue! and what is essential, one should not be compelled to finalize the dialogue in dialogic pedagogy. in fact, pedagogical dialogue needs to be open to different interpretations and new arguments and opinions in the present and the future. the agreement, i.e., closure in pedagogical dialogue, is assumed to be only temporary. so, here you are, in fact, happy to have both differences and oppositions between teachers and students, and between diverse students. each of them has an equal right to exist, so their voices can exist parallel to each other. no voices should be suppressed. each person should, through dialogue, test their own ideas and positions and have a right to form their own, according to bakhtin, internally persuasive discourse (ipd) (bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010, p. 346) tina: in other words, plurality? ana: yes, but when it comes to the governance, to how to run the school, to questions like what are the rules of conduct in the school, what freedom can students have in making personal educational decisions, what is the scope of educational impositions, what decisions should be made, how to plan the budget and other very concrete decisions regarding the life in school, then you have to finalize, you have to make decisions and close further dialogue. for that reason, you cannot have plurality when it comes to communal decision making about the actual relationships, obligations, chores (who is doing what), etc. you cannot have plurality when it comes to concrete decisions about what is legitimate or not. you can only decide to grant liberties to the students, leaving decisions open to each person. tina: in democratic education as well? ana: in any education. democratic education can be more or less liberal. in fact, it does not have to grant a lot of personal freedom, essentially. it could be very illiberal. it depends on what decisions have been made for the school. these democratically made decisions can either widen or narrow that personal sphere of liberty that isaiah berlin called “negative freedom” (berlin, 2006) – a sphere of personal liberty where no one has a right to interfere with one’s personal views, desires, and decisions. tina: that’s a good point. do you then view dialogic pedagogy as a contrast to democratic education? ana: yes, democratic education is about creating an educational environment. it does not have to go along with dialogic pedagogy because the people running the school may ultimately make decisions contrary to dialogic pedagogy. the difference between dialogic pedagogy, which is about instruction, and democratic education, which is about governance, is that democratic education is about organizing the whole school environment with its practices, relationships, powers, individual rights, responsibilities, and philosophical approaches, etc. so, democracy is about organizing people. it is about what controls this organization. what leading values, principles, world views, philosophical approaches to truth, and life guide that organization. thus, a democratically run group of people could decide on very conservative principles as well. it would be their decision. a democratic school could become a very illiberal democracy. democracy is not dialogue. democracy, on the one hand, needs dialogue, because making decisions is best when there is a critical dialogue about the differences of opinions, when everyone’s voice is heard and deliberated, and when decisions are made based on the equal rights of all the opinions. everyone will have an opportunity to provide their point of view, and everyone will be more informed about the pros and cons of potential decisions when the decisions are made. nevertheless, the dialogue needs to be eventually closed when decisions are made. and so, democracy, as a form of governance, ultimately means imposing these decisions on all the participants, whether they agree or disagree with them! like any other governance, democracy, too, is about limiting individual freedoms through creating common rules and laws, to which everyone has to adhere! democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a162 on the other hand, dialogic pedagogy is not about making decisions. on the contrary, it is about problematizing diverse ideas. deeply inside, dialogic pedagogy is about what happens in the meaning-making process. what happens with the meaning in the process of its creation for each person and between different people who are examining an educational issue of their interests. we want to, let’s say, study shakespeare’s dramas, and so everything you want to know about it, reading them, playing them, discussing them, thinking about how the characters are developed, what the characters go through, what is the meaning of their acts, etc. whatever becomes a particular educational topic becomes the focus of meaning-making in dialogic education. the student has the right to set the questions, create the issues to study, bring new ideas, and discuss alternative ideas. dialogic pedagogy is about how we communicate in the process of making meaning, and how we make sense about some topics of education at that time. dialogic pedagogy is about enabling this never-ending sense-making through critical dialogue. in other words, let me tell you this. i think we should make the distinction between education and schooling. tina: why? tell me why. ana: ok. schooling is about how to organize education institutionally. as an institution, a school must decide on some common set of values, principles, and rules. in other words, as an institution, a school is about creating and setting an environment where education can take place. as an institution, school sets limits on what the shape of education could be for each student. the premises of the actual schooling environment delineate the educational practice, i.e., the roles and responsibilities of each student, their rights and freedoms to be (or not) the authors of their own education, the nature of their responsibilities to self and the others, and the opportunities and rights to transcend the given. in other words, a democratic school environment can be more liberal or more illiberal. it depends on the scope of personal (negative) freedom that the democratically organized school has decided as legitimate. can the students personally decide both how to participate in the educational activities and whether to participate in these activities or not? is there a non-negotiable part of educational activities? can a student decide to only engage in cooking (either in classes or outside of classes) and nothing else? a democratically run school may make a decision that everyone has to learn basic mathematics and basic reading, whether that makes sense to them or not. even though it is democracy regarding how decisions about schooling are made, these decisions in a democratic school may impose something on the students. right? as you see, this is very concrete and practical. it’s about schooling, but not about education. however, it shapes the education by leaving more or fewer possibilities for the students to be the authors of their educational meaning and sense. for me, education is about the personal endeavor of examining the world, the others, the self, and there are no limits. tina: where does the teacher-student dialogue come in? ana: if in communication, especially educational communication, the teachers think they already know everything, and don’t listen to the student, and are not trying to understand where this student’s perspective comes from, then there is no dialogue, as i define a genuine educational dialogue. in a genuine educational dialogue (in my understanding that is inspired by bakhtin), students and teachers are trying to understand the other one. they engage in testing their own and each other’s ideas – in the process of meaning-making. what is important in dialogic pedagogy is that the teachers and students don’t need to agree with each other. for me, the dialogue is really a very creative discourse among people in this sense. it means listening to various perspectives about an idea, or some issue, and bringing alternative ideas, providing evidence, examining pros and cons, exploring implications both in general and in particular: what is good or bad for whom and for what, etc. does it matter, for whom and for what, under what circumstances, etc.? democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a163 tina: yes, the creativity for me in such “dialogic dialogues,” besides the clearly ethical aspect of it, implies the transcendence of the given into something new: novel insights, expressions, knowledge, thoughts, perspectives, and so on. tina: i happen to know that you have extensive experience of education throughout time and cultures and have been engaged in this topic for a very long time in exploring what both democratic and dialogic education could mean in terms of organization and consequences. if you look at the education of today, comparing it with education in earlier times, what do you think has changed? what are you afraid of, or what are your hopes? ana: well, a lot has changed for me, from the time i was a child in yugoslavia to our present time living and working as a professor in the usa. i think that the changes took place all over the whole world. education has become more and more standardized, and governments manage education more and more. the degrees of freedom for the students and the teachers have been diminished. so, there is less freedom of thinking, acting, being an author of one’s own meaning-making, and one’s own education. although we, too, had non-negotiable aspects of the curriculum, instruction, policies, and evaluation in education, there was a lot more time and space for free choices and personal educational activism. instead, today, there are more and more prescribed and predetermined things in schooling, where there is less and less room for education as a personally pursued examination of life, others, and the self (matusov, 2020b). you have standardized testing; you have constant measuring and ranking people; you have a mindset where education is conceptualized as the production of people, almost like objects that have certain characteristics. such ideas perhaps existed before, but these views and practical school organization seem to be much stronger today than they were in my childhood and youth! however, in the modern era, a germ of ideas about public education, or public schooling, is based around a central premise that the role of public education (for the masses) should be training people to read and write to become workers in an industrial area. consequently, the expected educational outcome had to be identical for each person to function effectively in that kind of society. tina: i see, thanks for sharing this, ana. finally, your last words to the readers? ana: i am always an optimist. i think that the idea of education as a central sphere of the personal pursuit of meaning and sense has a lot more chance to become legitimate for more people in the future than it had a chance before. although it always existed for some people some of the time, i think it will become a reality for more people more of the time in the future. i base my optimism on the development of science and technology that makes it possible for humankind to increasingly relegate tedious and senseless work to smart machines so that people can dedicate more and more time and resources to essential human creativity in making life more meaningful (matusov, 2020a; matusov & marjanovicshane, 2017, 2019). although i know that this will not take place over-night, i hope that each person’s rights of freedom in their own education (matusov, 2020b) will become the most important guiding principle for creating educationally rich human existences for all. democratic education is probably the first step in giving powers of self-determination and self-direction to all people through their lives. references bakhtin, m. m. (1991). the dialogic imagination: four essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. berlin, i. (2006). two concepts of liberty. in d. miller (ed.), the liberty reader. (pp. 33-57). boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. greenberg, d. (1991). free at last: the sudbury valley school. framingham, ma: sudbury valley school press. democratic education and dialogic pedagogy: synergies and dissonances tina kullenberg, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.480 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a164 kullenberg, t., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2020). democratic education, dialogic pedagogy – synergies and dissonances [interview]. earli sig 25 newsletter, 2020(november). retrieved from https://earli.org/node/139 matusov, e. (2020a). envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogical approach. cham, switzerland: palgrave, macmillan. matusov, e. (2020b). a student’s right to freedom of education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8 (2020), sf1-sf28, doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.357. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2017). promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 5, e1-e29, doi:10.5195/dpj.2017.199. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2019). intrinsic education and its discontents. in l. tateo (ed.), educational dilemmas: a cultural psychological perspective (pp. 21-40). new york: routledge. matusov, e., & von duyke, k. (2010). bakhtin’s notion of the internally persuasive discourse in education: internal to what? (a case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). in k. junefelt & p. nordin (eds.), proceedings from the second international interdisciplinary conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in mikhail bakhtin stockholm university, sweden june 3-5, 2009 (pp. 174-199). stockholm: stockholm university. neill, a. s. (1960). summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing. new york: hart publishing company. windley, b., belrhiti, l., chippington, n., & white, s. (2019). regulatory compliance inspection report for schools with residential provision: summerhill school. retrieved from united kingdom: http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/downloads/regulatory%20compliance%20inspection%20rep ort%20june%202019.pdf new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices -layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt1 the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote universidad del valle-universidad del magdalena, colombia diana de castro daza universidad del valle, colombia nancy ramírez roncancio universidad pedagógica y tecnológica de colombia, colombia abstract this article discusses the dialogic nature of regulating perspectives on a controversial topic during students’ argumentative writing in remote teaching. the emerging collaborative writing processes mediated by digital technology are importantly changed as responses to physical distancing in education, as demanded by the measures of biosecurity established by the national government to prevent the transmission of covid-19. our analysis is framed in a sociocultural perspective, which contributes to our understanding of the concepts related to dialogism, regulation, positionings on a topic, collaborative writing, and digital technology as a tool for dialogic interaction. our qualitative, idiographic study analyzes the argumentative utterances produced by a dyad of students enrolled in a textual production course at a colombian public university who write a critical commentary over four (4) weeks using google docs application. the findings indicate that the participants discuss and negotiate decisions in the group writing situation and that during this dialogic interaction, the ideas are influenced by the thoughts of the other. when they communicate with each other, their discourses regulate their positionings on the social situation that is the subject of the dialogue. it is also possible to identify both the possibilities of the pedagogical mode and its potential limitations for dialogic interaction, which synchronously and asynchronously facilitate or restrict the performance of the joint writing activity. it can be concluded that within the framework of remote teaching, digital technology has become a flexible mode of pedagogical practice that supports dialogic interaction, enables regulation among peers for discussion, negotiation, and positioning on a topic, and facilitates the construction of collective knowledge that emerges in argumentative collaborative writing. keywords: social regulation, positionings, dialogic interaction, collaborative writing, digital technology. zuany luz paba argote is a phd candidate in psychology at the universidad del valle, colombia and an adjunct full time professor at the universidad del magdalena unimagdalena; with a master of education from the unimagdalena caribbean state university system (sistema de universidades estatales del caribe sue caribe); and a specialization in edumatics from fundación universidad autónoma de colombia. she is interested in studies on dialogism and technologies in teaching and learning processes. she has research experience in reading and writing processes in university students, pedagogy and didactics in language teaching, academic performance, and pro-social skills in children and young people. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8559-3500 issn: 2325-3290 (online) the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt2 diana de castro daza is an assistant professor at the department of developmental sciences, cognition and neuroscience, faculty of psychology, universidad del valle, colombia. she obtained a ph.d. in human development processes and health at the universidade de brasília, brazil, and a master of psychology with an emphasis in cognitive development from the universidad del valle. her research focuses on education and development, particularly the study of children’s textual production, emphasizing peer interaction, narration, and mediation of digital technologies. currently, diana is the team leader of the language, cognition and education lab at the center for research in psychology, cognition, and culture, universidad del valle. one of the most relevant products of diana’s lab is a videogame called “ medith: relatos de la magia perdida,” which promotes children’s collaborative learning and multimodal production. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2213-5817 nancy ramírez roncancio, professor at the universidad pedagógica y tecnológica de colombia uptc, with professional experience in both classroom and distance programs. she received a degree in psychology from the uptc and a ph.d. and master’s degree in cognitive psychology from the universidade federal de pernambuco upfe, brazil. she obtained a specialization in learning needs in reading, writing, and mathematics from the uptc. she is an active member of the human development, cognition, and education research group at the uptc and an associate researcher at the center for research in argumentation at the upfe. research areas: educational psychology with an emphasis on the reading and comprehension of texts, cognitive development with a focus on argumentation, and the development of critical-reflective thinking (metacognition). orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9937-4640. ïòò introduction the covid-19 pandemic has led to the declaration of biosecurity measures by health entities and governments around the world, which have impacted many areas of our lives. in the case of the educational system, this phenomenon has produced a massive transition of learning practices to environments mediated by digital technologies. thus, it became important to understand educational challenges imposed by physical distancing, resulting in the impossibility of face-to-face interaction. this posed new challenges for education, particularly when digital technology became an alternative for creating spaces for dialogic interaction to encourage reflective thinking and the construction of joint knowledge. this article is framed in the situated learning approach, emphasizing argumentative collaborative writing as a social practice influenced by the sociocultural context (o’brien & battista, 2020). we are especially focused on the students’ joint regulation of positionings on a topic when this regulation is mediated by digital technology as a tool for dialogic interaction in the textual production process. within the framework of these concepts, there is an interest in understanding how the students position themselves on a topic, how the regulation can produce transformations in the students’ positionings on the topic, and how positionings on a topic are negotiated during collaborative writing mediated by digital environments. dialogism in the regulation of collaborative writing the concept of dialogism implies that all utterances are addressed to others, seeking their understanding, response, consensus, or dissent (bakhtin, 1993). moreover, it brings together a plurality of voices, consciences, ideologies, and worldviews immersed in the same discourse. in this approach, it is understood that self-regulation, co-regulation and shared social regulation are distributed among multiple agents and emerge during the process, taking different forms throughout a collaborative activity. this understanding assumption that learning is a social process regardless of whether regulation is seen as the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt3 influenced by environmental context, appropriated through participation, or situated in social activity systems (järvelä & hadwin, 2013). consequently, collaborative writing is understood as a collective process from the beginning to the end. all the participants adopt an active position to perform a task, with a horizontal differentiation of roles, in which exchange, commitment, and participation are encouraged (roselli, 2016). these concepts are found in the argumentation theory. they are part of this discursive dialogic phenomenon, in which writing subjects interact and self-regulate to defend or negotiate their points of view with their interlocutors (leitão, 2001). we see argumentative writing as the continuous and dynamic dialogic process where every discursive perspective is constantly being constructed and becomes more complex as it evolves (caron, 1983; chabrol, 1994; de chiaro, 2006). it is important to emphasize how the writing process develops through constant negotiations between voices about what will be written and how it will be written (brandão, 1997), particularly when done collaboratively. the literature proposes that in collaborative writing, writers can participate equitably in the production of the text. they should share the responsibility to perform the task considering the plans, suggestions, and ideas that they each conceive, negotiate and discuss with the others. they are expected to arrive at a unified perspective that will allow the writing to proceed (nykopp et al., 2019). nevertheless, a dialogic perspective recognizes that participation is informed by the background and experience of each subject, which results in different forms of participation. this understanding involves a dynamic analysis of the regulation of writing. a socially shared approach to writing is understood as how the members of a group collectively regulate their collaborative process, which establishes an interdependence during the production of the text, a joint monitoring process is used to complete the writing activity (volet et al., 2009). the joint writing activity is understood as a situated practice, as it is a form of discourse that has specific demands framed within a concrete situation (linnell, 1998). according to o'brien & battista (2020). a situated practice involves understanding the learning and writing process that includes the proposed activity, context, and culture in a social framework concerning student participation. from this perspective, regulation is influenced by the environmental context, which is appropriated through participation, or situated in social activity systems (järvelä & hadwin, 2013). this becomes highly relevant when the context makes it necessary to rethink modes of collaboration and interaction, which occurred due to the recent pandemic. insofar as concrete situations impose specific demands, it is important to analyze how the context of physical isolation caused by the pandemic influenced the argumentative collaborative writing process. this is particularly significant since the digital environment—as an interface—has important properties that make it possible to observe the internal dialogic process emerging in such digitally mediated writing practices. argumentative writing: regulation of positionings argumentation is a discursive organization intended for negotiating ways the audience would end up representing a topic. argumentation is an action that can increase the acceptability of a proposed statement (leitão, 2001). this conception describes argumentation from a historical-cultural perspective as a form of dialogue between two or more points of view on a topic (ruiz & leitão, 2010). it is also understood that argumentation plays a prominent role in enabling reflective thinking insofar as the discursive actions the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt4 that constitute it1 lead to an examination of one’s own thinking and the consideration of alternative perspectives, which confirm or modify the positioning or the reasons that substantiate it (ramírez et al., 2013; ruiz & leitão, 2010). as such, argumentation involves a number of highly complex cognitive skills, such as analysis, inferences, planning, self-regulation, and the examination and evaluation of information, among other reasoning skills (leitão, 2007b). in this article, positioning is understood as taking a position on a topic under discussion when the arguer is called upon to defend either side in a controversy. this positioning depends on how the arguer uses their beliefs and prior information to reinforce, maintain, reject, accept, counter-argue, or integrate elements of the opposing point of view into their understandings (ramírez, 2018). from this perspective, argumentative dialogue is an encounter between alternative positions rather than a monological approach without opposition. arguing implies intentionally addressing others as an audience in a chain of utterances that preserve a dialogic principle, demonstrating that subjects interact and self-regulate as writers to defend or negotiate their points of view with those of their interlocutors (goulart, 2007; ruiz & leitão, 2010). consequently, the composition of knowledge, ideas, beliefs, concerns, and points of view are part of a dialogic interaction produced through the participation of other voices, even if the subjects are not present in the immediate or remote context (kolikant & pollack, 2019). this idea is based on the dialogic nature of arguments resulting from the interrelation between utterances (bakhtin, 1989). bakhtin emphasized the internal dialogization of every utterance, i.e., every utterance responds to other past and anticipated utterances. in addition, every utterance is addressed to another person, who is not always the same as the initial interlocutor. thus, the dialogic dimension is inherent to the process of argumentative exchange insofar as it presents the justification of views and the consideration of those in opposition; this directs the focus toward the process of discursive negotiation between the one who argues and the one to whom it is addressed: the audience. dialogic interaction does not occur without one of the two parties; the presence of the other is essential (leitão, 2001). this understanding of argumentation underscores the significance of the concept of “heteroglossia,” i.e., double-voicedness, even multi-vocedness of each utterance, as two or more interlocutors imbue it with the meaning (borges da silva, 2019; huang & archer, 2017; kolikant & pollack, 2019). in short, argumentation is conceived as a social practice within a dialogic process, which imbues writing and text with a meaning that transcends communicative significance. it is interpreted according to its cultural context and within the limits of the dialogic interaction. the text is understood as a part of extratextual dynamic. it engages in a continuous dialogue in the sociocultural environment in which it is immersed, bringing together countless voices. the flow of written production and the processes involved in writing can become an object of linguistic analysis due to the richness and plurality that emerge from social practice (aiolfi et al., 2020; severina & milkevich, 2019). digital technology as an alternative for dialogic interaction the covid-19 pandemic posed an adaptive challenge that has transformed the educational system (cabero & valencia, 2021). the need to maintain physical distancing and prevent the spread of the virus led educational institutions to make a swift and dizzying transition to the alternative education using 1 for instance, justifying one’s own point of view, considering opposing elements—objection or critique aimed at a divergence of opinion—and responding to those objections—reaction of the initial proponent to an objection, etc. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt5 the online media (burns, 2020). it was necessary to ensure educational continuity and, consequently, connection and contact between students and teachers, which could be partly realized through technology. this is why the researchers needed to focus on identifying certain tools, such as chatrooms, forums, online word processors, and a number of other potential modes of sharing discussion and construction, to analyze their capacity to enrich the cognitive experience of students (cueva gaibor, 2020). at the same time, studies have shown that the use of technological media leads to a change in the way people interact and perceive the voices in the exchange of knowledge, representations, and concepts. as a “meta-medium,” technology involves not just a change in the way experience is transmitted but, as it is a context with different characteristics, it also generates other ways of giving meaning to communication; it represents a drastic change in the intertextuality itself (severina & milkevich, 2019). as a result, the incorporation of digital technology in teaching-learning processes creates new opportunities that require transcendental changes (cueva gaibor, 2020), including the field of writing. the complexity of the writing field —whether related to an epistemic, communicative, interpersonal, or transactional function—is particularly evident in its role in thinking (saneleuterio & gómez-devís, 2020). it also has a major impact on collaborative argumentative writing practices. while the field of collaborative writing in digital spaces has been explored and investigated before (with studies such as zapata et al., 2017, ludvigsen et al., 2019, among others), the context of the pandemic and the massive transition to the digital environment became new points to consider when thinking about studying collaborative spaces for argumentative writing. the role of the technological interface in dialogical interactions can be analyzed within the concept of the public square postulated by bakhtin. the writer in a public square is an interpreter of culture who maintains a condition of social critique by offering utterances that they publish in the technological environment in which they interact with many other interlocutors. the technological interface understood as a world where everyday discourses and intersubjectivities abound reiterates the possibilities offered by digital technology as a tool that supports and encourages dialogic interaction (hynes, 2014). understanding the digital environment through the concept of the technological interface contributes to our understanding of the negotiation, meaning, changes, and identity of writing in public spaces for debate, for example, online writing communities. it is important to examine the architecture of the online writing communities considering not only technological but also sociohistorical and cultural aspects, through which it is possible to understand internal dialogism. dialogism also recognises that utterances are enriched by the words of others and that utterances become active participants in social dialogue (monea, 2020). in this way, the writing activity is not only a simple mode of interaction, but rather, it actively shapes dialogues in writing. the digital text becomes, in this perspective, an ongoing dialogue, now mediated by a logic of the interface that also acts as a new cultural metalanguage. this also involves a double logic, both that of the technological context itself and the culture in which it is immersed, opening up a new field of study: the sociocultural contexts mediated by the information and communication technologies (icts) (severina & milkevich, 2019). to summarize, digital technologies in learning have diversified over the last several decades. all the more so when humanity experienced a rapid need to adapt and change educational methods using virtual mediation to respond to the demands of the health emergency. digital technologies and their different applications in education play a key role in new ways of teaching, learning, writing, communicating, and the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt6 living together. pedagogical strategies designed for digital environments take on a new meaning and confront new challenges that involve understanding these practices in higher education. hence, it is important to explore and discuss the dialogic interactions established in these educational environments for situated learning activities designed with the intervention of technological mediations. in this contemporary world, young people are increasingly engaged in collaborative academic activities, requiring them to develop regulation strategies to interact effectively with their peers, i.e., recognize them as co-responsible and co-authors. they need to manage, plan, evaluate, negotiate and make decisions leading to learning achievements and producing knowledge. it, therefore, becomes necessary to identify methodologies that make it possible to capture and understand the strategies students use to perform their tasks when they are unable to have face-to-face interactions. this can help ensure the creation of pedagogical practices that promote meaningful use of digital technology that can promote dialogicity and the applications of such technology related to educational objectives and teaching-learning processes. the methodological approach of the study this qualitative, idiographic case study seeks to understand the regulation of positionings on a topic. to this end, it analyzes the case of a pair of university students who collaboratively write a critical commentary. for this purpose, a digital writing activity is designed using the google docs application, which the participants utilized over four weeks within the context of an elective course. the case we analyze involves two students at a colombian public university in the 8th semester of the bachelor’s degree in computer science, enrolled in the professional elective: textual production. the presented case offers different dynamics in the processes of the regulation of positioning during the collaborative practice of argumentative writing. regularity in the dialogic interaction, variety of published argumentative utterances, and permanence of the two participants during the entire development of the activity. the students of the course get to know each other in the classroom. to establish the pairs in this mediated activity the teacher invites them to create pseudonyms. the students decide on their pseudonyms and when to stop using them. the dyad we analyzed created a pseudonym to keep their identity anonymous during the development of the digital activity designed in google docs. the decision to create pseudonyms is justified because it allows for interaction between the members of the dyad. it also minimises possible bias or coercive actions due to the proximity or affiliation between the writers. pseudonyms also bring a particular motivation to the practice of writing given the mystery that is generated over the interlocutor. the construction of the corpus was carried out during the joint writing process using the google docs tool. over four (4) weeks was registered the dialogic interaction. examining the corpus, it was possible to capture the actions of each participant, the duration of each participating move, the editing of the writing, and the publishing of comments. it is important to note that digital writing became the only alternative for continuing educational processes, which included academic activities involving collaborative work, given the restrictions imposed by physical distancing. the impossibility of interacting face-to-face in the classroom, meeting in a physical space, and dialoguing about what they would do left only one option for collaborative textual production. it meant transforming their learning space by incorporating devices known by the students and their different self-regulation, co-regulation strategies, and shared social regulation, demanding them to construct a joint positioning in the production of the final text. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt7 the course professional elective: textual production in which the writing activity is proposed follows a model based on dialogic pedagogy, which recognizes discourse as polyphonic, a space in which different actors coexist with their own positions that may be convergent or divergent, which implies permanent negotiation processes. this dynamic encourages critical reflection through educational praxis, where divergence promotes the construction of knowledge and reciprocal interactions and promotes a participatory, democratic, and pluralistic education (ferrada, 2020; teo, 2019). dialogue has an intrinsic value, where the relationship with the other creates a possibility of growing, transforming oneself, of becoming someone different through the joint experience (matusov, 2009). using the google docs application, collaborative writing activity is designed for the students: to write a critical commentary about a controversial social topic. the participants enter the dialogue and interact synchronously and asynchronously during the writing of the text. three texts addressing the same social problem: the poverty present in the department of chocó, colombia, were proposed to encourage discussion among the participants. the chosen genres included a cartoon (vladdo, 2016) and two opinion pieces (mosquera, 2015; moreno, 2014) published in the digital spaces of the national newspapers “las2orillas” and “el tiempo.” these two genres were chosen because they promote critical assessment of a news event, guiding and inviting the participants to express their opinions. by presenting different perspectives on a well-known and controversial social problem, these texts require the participants to be engaged and discuss their opinions to produce arguments for their joint textual production and become the starting point for constructing their positions on the topic. additionally, the students were asked to publish their final text on the blogger application, part of the google platform. this created a situation of sharing their writing with potential readers. these readers do not belong to the learning situation created. still, they are part of an external community with which they could share their writing, in a publicly accessible space that invites them to reflect as citizens on the country's reality and the problems it faces. the decision to publish the text on an open-access platform was intended to ensure that it could be read beyond the classroom space by the professor or classmates. this also contributed to motivating and further legitimizing the writer's role and encouraging the writing process with greater significance, commitment, and willingness for the university students.2 analysis the analytical procedure begins with the pre-analysis, making it possible to become familiar with the data, identify the argumentative utterances under analysis and capture the proposed analytical categories. subsequently, we carried out microanalysis of the discourse using analytical categories that let us capture the students’ strategies regulating their positionings on the topic during the collaborative argumentative writing process. table 1 describes the categories, indicators, and discursive marks used in the microanalysis. to analyze the regulation of positioning on the subject matter during the writing activity, we first identify the unit of analysis proposed by leitão (2007a). this unit of analysis consists of arguments, counterarguments, and responses. different marks (modalizers and tonalities) are identified that enrich the analytical and interpretative process focussed on understanding how regulation is defined in these discursive actions. 2 the corpus constructed is protected under resolution 008430, of 1993, of the colombian ministry of health on research on human beings and the principles enshrined in law 1090, which governs the practice of psychology in the colombian territory. the present study is considered to be an investigation with minimal risk, as it does not involve physical or psychological risks for the participants. the data collected was treated according to the rules of habeas data and was only used for research purposes. it was approved by the research ethics committee (comité de ética para la investigación) at the university of magdalena (universidad del magdalena). the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt8 these analytic categories allow us to recognize the subject in the framework of an enunciative dynamic, constructed as a discursive subject who, through diverse forms of enunciation, configures an intonational social metaphor of ontological-cognitive, emotional, and axiological values (martínez, 2013). diverse tonalities are revealed through images that the author of the text constructs about him/herself, those who interact with him/her, and what is said. the intentional, appreciative, and predictive tonalities present in the argumentative utterances are captured. on the other hand, the discursive modalizers epistemic, deontic, and affective/evaluative serve as clues in the discourse to capture specific actions of regulation of the positionings on the topic (castilho & castilho, 2002). these modalizers make it possible to identify the degree of certainty and the strength with which the views are supported. table 1 categories of analysis for the regulation of positionings on the topic categories of analysis actions that indicate regulation in positionings on the topic (leitão,2007a) discourse modalizers (castilho & castilho, 2002) tonalities (martínez, 2013) regulation through argument -produces utterances that offer a point of view and its justification based on a regulation of the individual or other’s positioning. -uses authoritative citations. -presents causes, consequences, examples, figures and data, personal judgments, and opinions. -creates hypotheses through references. -traces similarities between terms or situations, giving value to specific aspects. modalizers indicate regulation in points of view and the degree of certainty and strength the ideas are substantiated. deontic deontics is about expressing the necessity or convenience of acting, obligation, prohibition, permission, and volition. for example, expressions such as: we should, we would have to, it would be appropriate to, we can, we know, it is necessary. epistemic it is used to express the evaluation of the other’s discourse, the degree of certainty about what was said. for example, assertive expressions such as: really, in fact, undoubtedly. quasi-assertive expressions: i suppose, it is possible, probably; and qualifying expressions such as: theoretically, from the point of view of, according to the author, in agreement with, i concur with the idea. affective/evaluative it is used to communicate positive or negative emotions or evaluations. for example, expressions such as: fortunately, appreciative uses expressions that establish an appreciative relationship with another person’s discourse. for example: colleague, i like your opinion, your idea is excellent. predictive uses expressions that anticipate the potential utterances of their interlocutor, seeking agreement. for example: you agree, i would like to hear your opinion, you can change it. intentional uses expressions that demonstrate the construction of an image of themselves related to their intention or aim. for example: it is better, some other time, today, i will think about it, i will do it. regulation through counterargu ments produces utterances that critique or present objections to an argument, based on the regulation of the individual or other’s positionings. -uses divergent or contrary arguments. -partially or totally rejects the argument. -attacks the reasons or point of view of the other. -weakens some justification of the argument. -questions the relationship between reasons and point of view. regulation through response -executes actions or produces utterances that offer a response to the objections raised by the other, based on the regulation of the other’s positioning or coregulation. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt9 -uses arguments that demonstrate a direct reaction to the counterargument. -performs actions in response to partial or total opposition that invites negotiation and joint decision making. good, consistently, bad, exactly, sincerely, without a doubt, regrettably, honestly, approximately. additionally, a macro-analysis was carried out that made it possible to establish how moments of variability and stability occur in the forms of regulation of positionings on the topic that emerge during the writing process and the implications this had for the writing of the final text that they published in the blogger digital environment. moments of stability correspond to utterances produced by the subject, which are partial or final products of reflections and consensus. moments of variability occur when the point of view and the reasons that substantiate it are transformed, complemented, or clarified (santa-clara, 2005; santaclara & leitão, 2011). we studied the utterances in the discursive chain to identify the moments when the regulation strategies change. we looked at the negotiation spaces and decision making with respect to the argumentation on the topic, as they were established by the voices of the participants and the other dialogic actors involved in the activity, e.g., the authors of the referenced sources and the instructions that the professor includes in the proposed writing activity. all of these are closely linked to the negotiations of positionings on the topic, their validation, and whether these positions were retained in the final text published on the blog. for the analysis, the utterances were temporally grouped into episodes. each interlocutor’s types of regulation were identified. as the writing activity progressed, we analyzed the movements, strategies, and transformations in the social orientation of the argumentation, identifying the meaning given to the moments of textual production in the co-authorship. in addition, the analysis shows the forms of synchronous or asynchronous communication that define each moment of interaction. this enabled us to have a macro vision of the regulation process. we present various alternative forms of collective decisionmaking that lead to stability in using a particular type of regulation. it is recognized that the variability of positionings is articulated with changes in the situation of enunciation and the valuation of the other’s discourse. these changes also demarcate a hierarchy between discursive subjects and establish individual strategies for regulating the other, especially shared regulation processes established during the writing. results to explain the processes of regulating positionings on the topic, which emerge during the collaborative argumentative writing practice among university students, we provide examples of relevant moments in the beginning, the middle, and the end of the dialogic interaction. it is, thus, possible to see how the students position themselves in relation to the topic under discussion and how they negotiate and co-construct their positioning to produce the text (arguments, counterarguments, responses, and other discursive resources). below, the results of the macroanalysis are presented, as well as several examples of the moments from the microanalysis that capture the processes of regulating positionings on the topic during the collaborative writing. the utterances shown are taken verbatim, as published by the participants, and the lines are numbered to facilitate the analytic process. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt10 at a general level, the positionings on the topic presented during the dialogic interaction are regulated by the proposed writing activity, which means that the instructions and generative texts become the point of reference for establishing the positionings of the dyad. likewise, there is evidence of negotiation mechanisms that allow the review of different alternatives to collective decision-making. an atmosphere of collaborative writing is generated. this leads to the construction of discursive subjects with the capacity for discernment that seeks to regulate the other, mobilize reasoning and influence the understanding of the other to convince him/her to accept a point of view, but considering that he/she has freedom of choice. transformations in positioning are related to changes in the enunciation and social evaluation of the interlocutor, their reasoning and evaluations. the capacity and strategies for accepting arguments create different relationships between discursive subjects. joint understanding between the interlocutors is related to the forms of regulation used by the individual, the other, or shared regulation established during the writing process. the proposed writing activity regulates the students’ positionings on the topic presented during the dialogic interaction. in this sense, the slogans and the generative texts become the point of reference for establishing the positionings of the dyad. the following is the microanalysis of the processes of regulation of the positionings on the topic during the collaborative writing process. at the microanalytical level, the understanding of texts, as regulators of writing activity is demonstrated when subject 1 (s1) opens the interaction, offering their positioning: “chocó has been abandoned.” figure 1 shows how s1 uses the cartoon as explicit support for his positioning and he says: “each panel of the cartoon shows the reality of the department of chocó, neglect, abandonment, backwardness, false promises from politicians...” likewise, s1 ratifies its position when it takes up information provided by opinion texts: “...there are ther conditions such as its geographical location so far away from the rest of the country that there is little access to transportation, which prevents it from developing economically with the rest of the country…”). figure 1. guidelines and reference texts for the activity the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt11 a few days after the comment from s1, s2 intervenes, restating and reiterating s1’s positioning: “the image in the cartoon is a portrait of the history of neglect…” this positioning is co-regulated through both what was previously written by s1 and the professor's generative sources. the reiteration of the positioning by s2 expands the justifications for the abandonment of chocó, such as: “has been plagued by corruption, abandonment…government failures and political figures” (l2-l3) and “has a biological, natural and cultural wealth that makes it extraordinary” (l5). the justification offered in l5 makes it possible to infer that s2 demonstrates the tradeoff between the negative of what is occurring in the department and the positive aspects, which are not being used to escape from the situation. assertive epistemic modalizers, “it is no secret” (l2), give certainty and strength to the positioning, which the two writers now share. this position is further reinforced by the use of authoritative resources, such as the figures for the number of departments that have been abandoned by the state government (l2) (see table 2). table 2 argumentative utterance by s2 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 the image in the cartoon is a portrait of the history of neglect in the department of choco, as it is no secret that it is one of the 32 departments that has been plagued by corruption, abandonment, insecurity, government failures and political figures that have adversely affected the progress of this beautiful department which has a biological, natural and cultural wealth that makes it extraordinary, but which undoubtedly continues to be mired in neglect and the hope for a better future note: research corpus. this utterance illustrates how the s2’s argument is based on the cartoon referenced by the professor in the writing activity. the co-regulation is also marked by the use of the appreciative tonality by s2, recognizing the value of s1’s discourse when they introduce the epistemic modalizer “undoubtedly” (l6) and reaffirming that chocó “continues to be mired in neglect.” similarly, this justification offered in l5-l6 strengthens their position and introduces anticipation of a potential counterargument when they use the discursive modifier “but,” pointing out that although it has riches, it has not been able to escape from this situation of neglect, which also indicates self-regulation of their own positioning. at the end of the utterance, s2 add the statement “and the hope for a better future” (l6), which is taken as a mark of deontic modalization, as it connotates subjunctive. this inference is, in turn, substantiated by the assessment presented in the proposed cartoon: “in chocó, the best is yet to come, for two centuries.” in addition to the professor's generative sources and instructions, it is clear that reiterations, expansions of justifications, and deontic epistemic modalizers of certainty become important discursive resources for regulating the other’s positions and, consequently, constructing a joint position. at the beginning of the interaction, the dyad retells historical elements to understand the discussed social phenomenon presented in the reference texts, with a new reading of the situation of chocó under the current conditions of the pandemic. this shows new shades of positioning that account for the authorial thought and novelty. at table 3 is illustrated in the utterance by s2 when he offer reasons that justify their position on “the abandonment of chocó.” through their justifications, they reiterate and expand the explanatory line of this position, saying: “it can be inferred that in these instances, the department is experiencing one of the most unfortunate tragedies, coupled with the covid-19 problem and crisis” (l3l4), demonstrating how the poverty in the department has been present for a long period and has been the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt12 exacerbated by the global pandemic. this position, in turn, becomes a point of view to be justified by ‘‘the lack of biosafety supplies,’’ ‘‘deficiencies in hospital infrastructure’’ and ‘‘a lack of tests’’ (l6-l7). similarly, there is a use of affective/evaluative modalizers, such as “most unfortunate tragedies” (l4); “this situation is very difficult” (l5); “precarious and unfortunate situations” (l6); “is sad and regrettable” (l9); “so much scarcity and negligence” (l10), which s2 uses in their discourse to mark the evaluation they want to make of the content of their argument, giving emotional force to their positioning. table 3. argumentative utterance expressing s2’s positioning l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 l7 l8 l9 l10 l11 l12 hello good evening, how are you doing? what is going on... i will continue the argument... alluding to the expression that appears in the image “the best is yet to come...for two centuries! it can be inferred that in these instances the department is experiencing one of the most unfortunate tragedies, coupled with the covid-19 problem and crisis, which has affected an entire country, this situation is very difficult because its people are in precarious and unfortunate situations due to the lack of biosafety supplies, deficiencies in hospital infrastructure and a lack of tests to help expedite things and slow down the spread of infection in this department which is having difficulties in aspects related to health care it is sad and regrettable that there is still so much scarcity and negligence in terms of the care this problem requires. because of this it is said that the best is still expected and longed for in the hope of surviving in the midst of so much poverty. note. this table shows an example of an argumentative utterance by s2, in which they present their positioning on the topic. in addition to the affective/evaluative modalizers, during subsequent dialogic interactions, s2 is observed to reiterate their point of view using an intentional tonality, which allows them to construct an image of themselves concerning their position. this understanding is confirmed by the epistemic/asseverative modalisers, “surely” and “certainly,” which express the degree of certainty of their positioning. this is also true for the reiterations in the justifications, e.g., “many resources that should ensure equity and equality for all do not reach the communities”; “many children and communities are dying of hunger and a lack of opportunities that would provide care and protection in all integral aspects such as health, optimal conditions in services such as drinking water, education.” the use of epistemic/asseverative and affective/evaluative modalisers becomes an important discursive resource in the process of coregulation by this dyad. after these successive interventions by s2, made asynchronously, it is understood that the arguer consolidates their position in a poetic way, reexamining an external reference that they themselves had explored. s2 says: “first and foremost, there is the saying that the state has typified for this population throughout history: ‘the village of my birth remained far from colombia, from the entire homeland, mute and forgotten’ -rogelio velásquez murillo.” the voice that conveys this text regulates its positioning, and there is also simultaneously a process of identification with it. the affective evaluation through the condensation of this utterance reverberates with such force that it is adopted as the conclusion of the critical commentary. from the beginning of the dialogic interaction up to this point of the analysis, it is possible to identify moments of stability in the positioning taken by the two writers (the abandonment of chocó). variability is the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt13 observed in the justifications, with different explanatory lines and an expansion of justifications that had already been presented to further strengthen and reiterate that initial positioning. although the writers have maintained a consensus on their positioning and the reasons that justify it, at the end of the writing process, a distancing is observed, in which s1 explicitly requests a more solid justification for one of the points of view already offered. it is a response of partial agreement, in which s1 explains that they share the point of view put forward by s2 “the faith that conditions in chocó will improve and that the leaders will contribute to their people” (l1-l3 – table 4). however, in l4, he anticipates potential counterarguments to the strength and solidity of this point of view: “partner on this point, if we were to choose it, we would have to find more arguments” (l4). the use of the deontic modalizer “we would have to” (l4) conditions and expresses the need to perform a certain action to make the decision. one of the sources proposed for the activity would express a possible counterargument (cartoon): ‘‘in chocó, the best is yet to come…for two centuries.’’ the use of this intentional tonality and the deontic modalizer “there would be” (l6) accentuates the understanding of the regulation of s2’s positioning, as it urges them to reinforce the argument with more reasons. the anticipation of potential counterarguments and the need to write a critical commentary with solid reasons is evidence of reflective thinking. the writer examines the limits and possibilities of the reasons offered in their points of view and recognizes the argumentative force of the text under construction. in this regulation of positionings, there is a reexamination of perspectives spurred by the influence of different voices, i.e., that of their fellow writer and the analytical voices that have previously addressed the topic. table 4 argumentative utterance by s1 l1 l2 l3 l4 l5 l6 i am sharing this opinion with you in this document because i believe that as humans, we always have faith that everything will improve, thinking that those in power will generally help the people. partner on this point, if we were to choose it, we would have to find more arguments, i suggest that if we choose this point of view of yours in particular, we should do more research, here there would be more material to work with, honey note. this table shows an example of the partial acceptance of s2’s point of view by s1. this argumentative cycle constituted by the partial response demanding a greater solidity in the argumentation, leads s2 to searching for new bibliographic references that, by citing authoritative sources (author, figures, and data), reiterate the justification of corruption as a central cause of the abandonment of chocó, making the position advocated more reliable and acceptable. s2 says: “according to gamarra (2006)... one of the highest rates of poverty in the country...approximately 35% of the department’s product in recent years presents a high degree of corruption.” similarly, s2 shares hyperlink to the source to engage their partner in reexamining positions and the reliability of the offered material and in the decision-making about the argumentative approach of the text. in this way, s2 enables a shared practice of hypertextuality. the use of hyperlinks to other texts reveals a new meaning, which situates the collaboration as part of a process that aims to put into practice the principles of dialogism reflected in the sense of co-responsibility in the management, planning, and evaluation of the writing process. up to this point of the analysis, at a macroanalytical level, there is a significant shift from individual positions—at the beginning of the interaction—to collective positions, which are reinforced as the dialogic interaction unfolds during the writing process. an example of this would be the identification of the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt14 commonalities and differences leading to important moments of negotiation and decision-making about the most solid arguments that should be included in the final text. for instance: “...we have some common criteria, which means that we can begin to define the text…”; “ i am sharing this opinion with you” (l1). the use of the plural—we have, we can—reiterates the emergence of a shared, legitimate voice in digital writing, demonstrating the convergence of the writers’ voices. this evolution of the writers’ collective voice leads to the socially shared regulation of the positioning. they jointly make decisions about the choice of the arguments that will be presented in the final version of the critical commentary. we observed that toward the middle and end of the participants’ dialogic interaction, the regulation of positioning consist of more synchronous (8) than asynchronous moments (4). this is analyzed in terms of the timestamp (date and time) when each subject publishes their argumentative utterance and the thematic thread followed by the utterances. finally, the version published on the blog indicates that there is stability in the positionings on the topic under discussion, negotiated, and adopted throughout the writing process by the dyad of students. the initial positioning—the abandonment of chocó—adopted in the dialogic interaction is reworked and restated in the title as “chocó, far from colombia: a mute and forgotten homeland” (see figure 2). from this title, it is possible to infer that the meaning is maintained, and the written reworking is more in line with the characteristics of the discursive genre, the critical commentary. this positioning is substantiated through the reiterative use of justifications based on facts, data, and citations of reliable sources, which, similar to the positioning, are negotiated and expanded during the writing process. it is also important to emphasize that the activity designed, through digital technology, provides a writing environment that strengthens the dialogic interaction with other voices, which can contribute to the text and structure the positionings of the university students. online word processors, such as google docs, make it possible to engage in synchronous and asynchronous relationships (leaving comments in the margins, embedding objects, links, online messages). they encourage the use of different resources that stimulate the development of reflective thinking and resourcefulness, such as browsing online to search and analyze other information sources, evaluate them and select the ideas that best substantiate their positions. as the interaction progresses, it becomes necessary to reach a consensus and make decisions that enable the construction of the joint positioning, which will be part of the final text; the participants thus find synchronous interaction to be an easier and faster form of negotiation. this need is reaffirmed when one of the participants proposes using a different technological mediation (whatsapp), which would allow them to respond to each other immediately and directly, as they observe that the negotiation is being delayed. they have limited time to define their position as writers. s2 says: “...my name is /.../, my number is /.../ we can contact each other on whatsapp to get a better agreement…” it is inferred that, for one of the participants in the dyad, the online word processor google docs constrained the performance of the activity, and they thus sought out a different resource to overcome that difficulty. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt15 figure 2 final publication of the critical commentary on the blogger note. this figure contains the critical commentary published by the dyad of students on the blogger. original data corpus (in spanish). discussion the analysis of the processes for regulating positionings on a topic in the collaborative argumentative writing activity between dyads of university students allowed us to explore how students position themselves on a controversial issue when they are asked to engage in a joint writing activity. the writer-subjects use different discursive-reflective forms of regulation to validate their positions; for example, anticipating potential counterarguments, requesting and expanding justifications, mentioning authoritative citations, reiterating and emphasizing points of view or reasons, and using hyperlinks, figures and data. these actions seek to regulate the other’s positioning more forcefully, using information that gives greater credibility to the positions presented and, therefore, may be more convincing and accepted by their writing partner. in response to the request to strengthen positions, the regulation process privileges authoritative sources. it excludes new ideas produced by the writers, who establish a relationship between the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt16 the problems in chocó and the recent covid-19 pandemic, which was beginning to be experienced at the moment of the textual production. in the enunciative dynamic that the students construct during the dialogic interaction in the writing activity, the subjects use epistemic, deontic, and affective/evaluative modalizers (castilho & castilho, 2002). they strategically utilize these modalizers in the argumentative utterances they produce to express their points of view. in the case under analysis, the modalizers are used to communicate the degree of certainty and the strength with which the ideas are substantiated and to express emotions about or assessments of the content of the discourse or about the speaker. the use of affective/evaluative and epistemic modalizers is privileged to contribute to constructing an utterance that achieves the objective of regulating the positioning on the topic during the writing practice. at the same time, the participants produce and use other mechanisms to express their points of view and construct an image of themselves as co-authors. for example, they evaluate and respond to previous statements that they support or contradict; anticipate potential utterances by their writing partner to identify agreement or disagreement; construct an image of their writing partner insofar as it involves the co-responsibility of producing a text collaboratively. each participant adopts an active response position: if they agree, they accept the arguments and reasons and sometimes supplement them; if they partially accept them, they request justifications to strengthen the text. in this case, it is possible to observe the different evaluative positions constructed in the text, which constitute what is defined as tonality (martínez, 2013). in the analyzed case, it is possible to identify three tonalities that comprise the evaluative act of enunciation and reflect the social relationships established among the students. the predictive tonality is rarely used, while the appreciative and intentional tonality appear regularly. thus, we can conclude that these tonalities are selected to regulate positionings because they are expressly linked to presenting points of view, recognizing oneself and the other as joint authors, and working toward negotiating those positionings, enabling the construction of a collective position to write the critical commentary. the analysis also allows us to confirm that argumentation is constructed in the mutual relationship of discursive subjects in specific social practices and that, to the extent that the topics under discussion are related to real situations from the historical and sociocultural context surrounding the writers. it enables them to position themselves as responsible citizens committed to the problems of their community and, as a result, contributes to enhancing their capacity for critical thinking and action. furthermore, it is especially relevant to reflect on the collaborative practice of writing mediated by a digital environment, its possibilities, and limitations to generate a dialogic interaction that facilitates the realization of collaborative argumentative writing activity. within the context of remote teaching, digital technology becomes a mode of a flexible pedagogical practice that, to a great extent, enables regulation among peers for discussion, negotiation, and positioning on a topic and, consequently, facilitates the construction of collective knowledge. during the writing process, it was found that self-regulation and co-regulation of the positioning were supported, for the most part, by asynchronous communication. toward the end of the writing process, when the demands for negotiations, consensus, and decision-making increase, socially shared regulation processes become more frequent, requiring more synchronous encounters in order to complete the textual production. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 10 (2022) dt17 the university students adapt to the digital writing pedagogical mode created for the activity (google docs), use the options offered by this technology, and interact to finish the task. they also identify the restrictions that affect the completion of the textual production, i.e., they mention the possibility of using other applications to make decisions smoothly and more quickly about the positionings on the issue under discussion. the sociocultural aspects involved in socially shared regulation processes in argumentative collaborative writing practices require the design of pedagogical mode that incorporate digital technologies, encouraging dialogic interactions through situated practice, and recognizing each subject's background and sociocultural experiences and the needs of the discursive communities. this leads to diverse forms of participation and construction of regulation dynamics, which bring together a multiplicity of voices, reasons, knowledge, values, ideologies, and positions toward the world that give an identity to the discourse and, therefore, to the writer-subject. the social activity of writing, understood as a situated social practice, has specific demands that indicate the integration of context and culture in a social framework specific to the learning pedagogical mode, which takes on new importance at a time when the current situation has limited physical encounters, as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. consequently, it is essential to rethink alternative for collaboration and dialogical interaction to create educational environments that respond to students' realities, needs, and contemporary uses of digital technologies and lead to flexibility in pedagogical processes and the collective construction of knowledge. thus, it is essential to recognize that writing is a social practice, which allows us to understand that the utterances produced by the writing subjects transform the discourses, modifying both what is said about something or someone and the writing participants' thoughts and points of view. the thoughts and ideas of some are intertwined with others. in this communicative process, the positioning on the topics discussed and dialogued is regulated during collaboration in the writing of the argumentative text. the writers who participate in the collaborative writing activity use the statements to dialogue and situate a critical position on the topic. their discursive acts shape the type of their social enunciation and its tonalities. in this way, the enunciative social intonation establishes among the participants the recognition of the other and their co-authorship through the utterances they produce and exchange. in addition, the use of digital resources and discursive moves in this situated activity promote the development of regulation strategies and dialogic interaction. our research results explain how students implement discursive moves to manage their argumentative writing tasks and what they do to self-regulate and regulate the positioning of other participants collaborating in a textual production. our findings could provide guidelines for teachers to propose the joint construction of digital pedagogical mode that promote meaningful spaces for writing, the dialogic construction of knowledge, and the development of critical thinking that contribute to the sense of citizenship in young people. in this line, from a shared sociocultural and social understanding, the regulation of positioning in digital collaborative writing needs to be understood from the context of those who participate and relate in digital collaborative writing. this opens a path of study in new emerging contexts, in which the bakhtinian perspective contributes to the conception of language. it highlights the role of sociocultural interaction not as a context that acts as a simple vessel for the statements but as a fundamental part of the dialogic process with the other and the social character of language, which acquires relevance in the study of writing processes. the dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices zuany luz paba argote, diana de castro daza, nancy ramírez roncancio dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.468 | vol. 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(2017). exploración de un ejercicio de escritura colaborativa en línea de un grupo de estudiantes de básica primaria [exploring an online collaborative writing exercise for a group of elementary school students]. revista lasallista de investigación, 14(1), 29-41. https://doi.org/10.22507/rli.v14n1a2 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 352 middleton, response matusov and pease-alvarez, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c1 response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education” by matusov & peasealverez, 2020 ray paul middleton ladder4life, a non-profit organization, uk abstract here i reflect and respond to the article on critical dialogue in action: “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education” by matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 dr ray middleton is an independent trainer at www.ladder4life.com and the workforce development lead for the fulfilling lives programme in newcastle and gateshead (england). with a special interest in traumainformed care, ray is piloting a programme of trauma-informed training taking a dialogical approach towards staff development using the ‘ladder4life’ social-psychological framework he developed. ray has a phd on dialogical/narrative approaches to complex trauma and has written a chapter for a book opening a dialogue between america and britain about innovative approaches to people without a home (cross cultural dialogues on homelessness). previously, ray has set up and managed personality disorder services, been a senior care co-coordinator in an early intervention in psychosis service and is a systemic practitioner within systemic family therapy. ray has personal lived experience of complex needs and has used mental health services in the 1990’s, an experience which motivates him to improve staff skills and services for others in the future. ïïò i started reading it with an emotional attitude of hope as i’ve been working towards something for over 20 years which i cannot quite articulate, and do not fully understand. i was sat in my garden trying to make sense of what i’m doing in my day to day working practices. i thought it is something about teaching and training (i write and deliver training to staff who work in homelessness, mental health, criminal justice and substance misuse services). i try to do this though a dialogical reflective practice style drawing on bakhtin’s dialogical epistemology (bakhtin, 1981). i’m also trying to do this collaboratively, sharing power, seeing people always already within a dialogical subjectivity. basically i’m wanting to help people (staff) “get better” at helping people with complex combinations of needs around mental health and substance misuse interlinked with past trauma and a poor future prognosis. my work and values are motivated by my own journey through these issues in the 1980’s and 1990’s and i want to do all this in ‘plain english’! i thought what i am trying to do is probably called ‘dialogical pedagogy’ within an academic genre so i ‘googled’ the phrase and found there was an online journal about this pretty niche subject! i signed up, got sent a link to this essay the abstract provoked an interest, so i’m starting to read on, in hope of issn: 2325-3290 (online) response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education,” matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 ray paul middleton dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c2 something… that it might help my journey of making sense of my practice. so i am responding dialogically as there was an invitation for critical commentary on the essay. i’ve done a phd – in part using dialogical narrative analysis methodology (sullivan, 2012) but i have not worked in academia so am not so familiar with the genre expectations and what might be expected from a ‘critical commentary’but i can probably draw on my memory of things i have read and have a good guess, and i would like to respond. the style the text was written in is anticipating responses. so here is my response. i felt an emotional connection with the idea of ‘critical dialogue in action’. initially i could see some of what i do in the words as they appeared – like seeing part of me reflected in a mirror, something i act out but struggle to see or name for some time. there were differences of course (i teach adults traumainformed ways to better help other adults). the idea that we can create ‘zones’ of shared problem-solving appealed to me as a useful concept. particularly ‘zones’ of shared problems that do not need to be seen in the same way by all participants in the dialogue. during the coronavirus pandemic i am facilitating dialogical reflective practice space for staff teams around domestic violence and homelessness in the northeast of england. one of the new tenants had said they had sold all ‘white goods’ (cooker, fridge, washing machine) for drugs. the charity and the tenant may not agree on what the problem and solution was but they needed to engage in a dialogue about it, which created a zone of problem-solving. this had happened with three different tenants in one week as the virus increasingly impacts those most socially excluded – so learning through ‘zones’ of shared problem-solving appeals as a way to make multiple senses of problem creation/solution as a dialogical process. connected to the zone i found the triangular concept of “teacher (eugene) teacher (saul) pupils” helpful. i identified with eugene as one of the ‘heroes’ of the text – because i am trying to teach staff to teach something (hope and skills?) to adults without a home (or in supported accommodation) who are often in various states of intoxication interlinked with mental and emotional distress. i am ‘teaching the teachers’ or ‘training the trainers.’ bakhtin’s concept of zones (bakhtin, 1981) came to mind – or at least my reading of it as a specific space in time created by voices – by people with desire and will – who are creating zones with multiple spheres of influence, a place where our will or intentions must pass through other character’s will and so are refracted through a prism. i thought this idea could have been expanded upon more as it is interesting. my desire and will is to ‘teach’ some skills to staff (motivation building, collaborative problem-solving, being reflective, handling strong emotions, tolerating uncertainty, assertiveness, etc.) in the hope they can ‘teach’ these reflective / developmental techniques to their clients – but the staff i teach may desire other things (to feel more confident in their job, to feel more certain, to have more support from management) so my strong pedagogical desire is refracted by their desire/will and then again as they interact with their clients – more or less applying some of the skills i ‘taught’ them (my teaching is weak/weakened in the wake of the world). so, thank you i can see some value in reflecting on this pedagogic ‘zone’ of relating wills. part of the pedagogic challenge is that i am trying to teach techniques to change subjectivity, what foucault describes in his writings on ethics as ‘techniques of the self’ (foucault, 1988). this is not so much cognitive ‘head’-knowledge, but an ethical, felt, relational, embodied knowledge. so i’m thinking these zones of shared learning are not just an exchange of ideas or views – they have an emotional atmosphere and an embodied, ethical, relational, spatial quality. a second response i had was seeing several ‘characters’ in the text strong characters, whom we are introduced to, characters called; critical-dialogue-in-action, adult-led pedagogy, child-led pedagogy and collaborative pedagogy. the landscape the authors are speaking within became clearer to me, but it is new territory for me so i may easily misread things in this land. in discursive battles there is no ‘no-man’s land’ free from other’s voice on the subject, so eugene and lucinda cannot speak on this subject as adam and response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education,” matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 ray paul middleton dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c3 eve in eden naming things for the first time. clearly, neither are they trying to have the last word the omega. instead they are speaking in the way we all speak within a landscape created by others whilst anticipating other’s voices – past, present and future voices. i hear these other voices calling out in this text. what i mean is different pedagogical discourses have historical contacts which rhythmically settle in to traditional relationship which shapes how we think. centripetal forces doing what they do. this centrifugal text attempts to disrupt this and open up a new space different from the usual dialogue around adult/child/collaborative, and for me it succeeds. i think i understand it because i respond emotionally to it it opens up a subjectivity for me to fit into – an image to try on – of ‘critical dialogue in action’. this is a new concept for me. maybe it appeals to me like seeing something in a mirror. i am trying to see something ‘inside’ my subjectivity and this text appears to me as an ‘outside’ text contacting me and it becomes to me internally persuasive. so why is this? the authors appear to be sharing their journey of learning / discovery which allows others to try this subjectivity on for size. the authors create a ‘hero’ of the text – the critical dialogical practitioner of pedagogy – and they shape up some limits for them – reflecting their own struggles to emerge and make sense of their actions retrospectively. the past changes as we look at it through subsequent experiences – the ground of our past is ever changing as it shifts beneath our feet. the authors give the protagonist – the critical dialogical practitioner – some degree of agency but warn their hero and the reader that they are historically hemmed in by other characters in the playground (the adult-led/childled/collaborative characters, institutional power, etc.) anticipating a critical reader-response the authors give permission for the hero of this text to be hybrid in pedagogy. the text is attempting to change the landscape of discourse around pedagogy to allow a different kind of subjectivity to emerge in the space of teacher/teacher/pupil. yet there are hidden powerful voices which shape and structure the voice of what is said. for example, it is possible to hear the hidden voice of others: “you have given up. you are a hypocrite. you have failed!” when the authors say, “…using elements of traditional adult-run and collaborative philosophies in our work is not evidence of our failure, hypocrisy or surrender…” (p. a17). they are answering the other voices in their head. the hero of this text is “ready to confront this challenge” which to me sounds double voiced. by this i mean it addresses the ‘outside-in’ powerful voices of competing pedagogies attempting to penetrate the subjectivity of the authors. there appears to be an ‘outside-in’ / ‘inside-out’ struggle with the discourses on pedagogy and the author and their hero (see sullivan, 2012, ch. 6 & 7). i imagine those other voices have hit a ‘sore-spot’ and so are being pushed back out of the subjectivity of the authors and hero. these powerful voices are oscillating on the boundary of the author’s subjectivity – ‘outside-in’ and the authors pushing back ‘inside-out’. the text raises interesting questions for me about the teacher/student relationship, enabling me to think in new ways. i think the metaphor of the teacher as ‘author’ creating the student as ‘hero’ in the way bakhtin (1984) thinks about the author/hero relationship in a polyphonic novel is useful here. eugene and lucinda are writing a story with three characters – the teacher of teachers, the teacher and the student. perhaps all three are heroes, or perhaps they take turns author/hero? the relationship is dialogical, mutuality in the relationship is a hope. the ideas exchanged are not abstract (istina) but lived knowledge response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education,” matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 ray paul middleton dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c4 (pravda) embodied ideas saturated with personal values and judgements. here the ‘hero’ is the other, given a gift by the author (teacher). using this metaphor to help us think the learner/hero anticipates and reacts to attempts by others to author them (as we do unendingly in lived-life). the learner’s reaction may provoke dialogues around identity/subjectivity for both teacher and learner. such dialogue takes place in an ethical zone of unequal power where self and other are mutually shaping. the dialogical teacher appears to me to be a reluctant author who is always trying to shift the balance of power (the authority to author) to the hero/pupil. maybe the dialogical teacher feels conflicted, or maybe they think in different ways about the same thing at the same time? to encourage the pupil to become the author of their learning – but this is difficult, impossible (?) (even to articulate) as no one can author themselves in a vacuum – we always need the other to dialogue with. the pupil to some extent needs an authoritative author/teacher to enable them to take something into their subjectivity as internally persuasive (or reject from the inside-out). the teacher also needs a learner. when the pupil is the hero they are (intertextually) exposed to different kinds of characters (the different types of pedagogy) – characters in this story who could influence their subjectivity, including ‘critical dialogue in action’. i see the eugene (as teacher) as a searching-author in a relationship to the other/hero (pupil). power relationship exist between texts (e.g. other pedagogies) but what is interesting is the responsiveness of the other/hero/learner to the shaping activity of the teacher. both teacher (author) and hero (pupil) anticipate the judgement of others. this is what i mean when i say the author/hero relationship helps us think about this text. in an earlier publication miyazaki (matusov & miyazaki, 2014) proposed this idea that the teacher is the dialogic author and the learner is the dialogic “hero” in a polyphonic novel. eugene responded a caution that they may be the hero of a monological discourse, so the dialogic teacher/author has a responsibility to make an effort to keep the lesson dialogic. for me this connects with lensmire’s (1997) exploration of this idea of teacher/student as author/hero, where he concluded the responsibility of the dialogic teacher is to impose reflection and sharing of themselves through dialogue and not to abandon the student to a ‘freedom’ stuck in their childhood without a teacher/authority figure. there is something about taking responsibility for encouraging reflection as a teacher and not anxiously avoiding the responsibility of our positive productive power. power can be productive and not just negatively valued, avoided or always to be freed from – as it is always relational. to some extent, less in a dialogical approach, the teacher holds some authority/power to shape the subjectivity of the pupil/hero and the pupil has varying degrees of power to resist, or listen and learn, to become something new. eugene wants the learner to be active as a responsive ‘author’ of their learning. here we encounter one tense knot of the ontological/epistemological puzzle for me – the author (teacher) wants the hero (learner) to become, to some degree, free from them… to become their own author. basically, eugene does not want to treat his students as heroes and heroines in his polyphonic teaching but ideally prefers to treat students as authors authoring their own learning/lives because they have the highest authority on their own learning/lives (matusov & miyazaki, 2014). however, i think this is an ideal extreme end of a spectrum that does not exist in everyday lived life. instead we are ontologically always embedded in dialogues with more powerful discourses and others with more or less power, so no one can author themselves. to have a consciousness and subjectivity is to be subject to something. we can teach learners to become aware of this but not to be free from it. we can free ourselves from limiting subjectivities by believing a new story about ourselves, re-orientating the co-ordinates of our life-trajectory within a new narrative with a go-ahead plot, but we cannot author ourselves i believe, we can only co-author ourselves amongst others through dialogue. we can free ourselves from destructive dialogues by subjecting ourselves to believable alternatives about the ‘good life’, but for me identity is too response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education,” matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 ray paul middleton dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c5 dialogical and social for us ever to author ourselves. we have to co-author our lives and this is where we can oscillate between learner/heroes and sometimes teacher/authors. we can do both. to illustrate we can think of the article as a “lesson” and the reader as the learner. to some extent they may use some of this to ‘author’ their future self – but always in dialogue. degree of belief in the new (lesson) is an important factor. for example, the text provokes me to wonder if the authors use a word with a loophole when they say they ‘…probably will continue to utilize these pedagogical approaches [adult-led and collaborative pedagogy]’ (p. a16). “probably” provokes the reader (maybe they will / maybe they won’t?). the anticipated super-addressee (reader) is positioned to wonder – their subjectivity is given some wriggle room and in a way an escape pod. perhaps this is expressing the hope of more space for the subjectivity of the teacher or teacher/teacher to grow into/not feel hemmed in? perhaps this ‘probably’ is just a ‘sideways glance’ at the critical powerful other/alien voices in the room – the other (usual) characters – or other subjectivities available for the teacher to adopt as a position. to be honest i’m not sure. i find myself thinking in different ways about the same thing at the same time (i.e. the hero’s possibility of using the other pedagogies). it does not have to be that i am conflicted or confused. perhaps i do not need to ‘confront’ myself, just take a sideways glance at another self in another universe (‘in this world i believe this, and in that world, i believe that – how strange!’). it may be enough that the range of subjectivities available for me to think about my teaching is a bit broader, the landscape mapped a little more into previously uncharted territories. the hero they have authored is becoming detached from the authors as they support their ‘hero’ to take on a life of its own – they let go as it is published. as the authors anticipate response and invite critical commentary i tune into an emotional atmosphere of some anxiety about the reader response mixed with hope (that it is understood, that it is internally persuasive, that it is responded to in some wayeven in the anticipated ‘confrontational’ way that they promise to confront ‘in themselves’). in this utterance of promising to confront themselves is a micro-dialogue with an absent other. the absent other structuring the discourse is the power of educational institutions (as funders). the double voiced-ness here is how the educational world is and how it ought to be – two ‘truths’ addressed simultaneously in speech. as i read lucinda and eugene’s text, i thought about how i was responding to it. this responding has led me down a path to seeing – to see that they have created a hero of this text – a hero/teacher (different from the hero as learner) that can use adult-led/child-led/collaborative and critical dialogue in action pedagogies in hybrid ways, depending on the local context, needs and will/desire of the participants. creating such a hero in this text i think offers the reader a new subjectivity to move into. personally, it appeals to me. i am fitting some unarticulated subjective half-thoughts and feelings into it and i like it. i’m going to try it out to test how internally persuasive it is – to see what response i get from others. thank you for taking the time to write it up and share your new pedagogic dialogic teacher/hero! my takeaways are to think about the different characters involved in co-producing a local zone of shared legitimate problems where teaching/learning can take place – a place where the differences between teacher and learners are up for reflective dialogue and where diverse perspectives and approaches are encouraged by opening up dialogue on each valued topic being taught about. everyone is bringing something into the zone, some of what i bring into the zone i cannot see until the others see it, and visa-versa so it will be a zone full of surprises! perhaps we are characters appearing in each other’s narratives, sometimes as author/teachers and sometimes as learner/heroes within the heteroglossia of centripetal and centrifugal forces at play. i will take up my responsibilities to facilitate dialogic reflective response to “moving from collaboration to critical dialogue in action in education,” matusov and pease-alvarez, 2020 ray paul middleton dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.352 | vol. 8 (2020) c6 learning on topics i think have value (or topics that emerge / are requested by learners) and ready to respond to their response. references bakhtin, m.m., (1981). the dialogic imagination: four essays. translation by emerson c. and holquist, m. (editor). austin, tx: the university of texas press bakhtin m.m. (1984 [1929]). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. translation by emerson c. (ed.). university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m.m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays. translation by mcgee, v.w. (ed.). c. emerson c. and holquist m., austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m.m. (1990). art and answerability: early philosophical essays by m.m. bakhtin. translation by v. liapunov (ed.), m. holquist and v. liapunov. austin, tx: university of texas press. bakhtin, m.m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act. translation by v. liapunov (ed.), m. holquist and v. liapunov. austin, tx: university of texas press. foucault, m. (1988). the history of sexuality volume 3: the care of the self. knopf doubleday publishing group. lensmire, t. j. (1997). the teacher as dostoevskian novelist. research in the teaching of english, 31(3), 367-392. matusov, e., & miyazaki, k. (2014). dialogue on dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 2014, si:ddp-1 si:ddp-47, doi: 10.5195/dpj.2014.121. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/121/60. sullivan, p. (2012), qualitative data analysis using a dialogical approach. sage publications ltd. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e36 a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract often, “system crashers” are portrayed as disturbed children (students) who actively break the institutional system work and disturb relationships with other people. however, some system crashers are perfectly happy children who, precisely due to their happiness, liveliness, and rich imagination, do not fit into a conventional school. in this paper, i provide a detailed case of such a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools. i found out that at home, the parents of the system crasher often reflected and rethought their parenting practices, priorities, and values to shelter their child’s happy life, often at a great expense for themselves. in contrast, the conventional school either ignored or punished the happy system crasher to preserve its institutional practices and keep them smooth. i hypothesize that conventional school is aimed at promoting a disciplinary society by making students convenient, obedient, and useful citizens at the expense of the student’s authorial agency. in contrast, parents and democratic schools address a happy system crasher’s disruption of their lives by rethinking and renegotiating their practices. finally, i argue that happy system crashers are essential for democratic and dialogic education. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books include: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." acknowledgements: acknowledgment: i am thankful to bob hampel, jim rietmulder, and ana marjanovic-shane for their most helpful feedback and suggestions on the early drafts. i also want to thank jim rietmulder for the interview about system crashers in his democratic school. ïïò a happy system crasher at home and in a conventional school it is enough to look at one and the same child at home, in the street, or at school: now you see a vivacious, curious child, with a smile in his eyes and on his lips, seeking instruction in everything, as he would seek pleasure, clearly and frequently strongly expressing his thoughts in his own words; now again you see dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e37 a worn-out, retiring being with an expression of fatigue, terror, and ennui, repeating with the lips only strange words in a strange language, – a being whose soul has, like a snail, retreated into its house. it is enough to look at these two conditions in order to decide which of the two is more advantageous for the child's development. that strange psychological condition which i will call the scholastic condition of the soul, and which all of us, unfortunately, know too well, consists in that all the higher faculties, imagination, creativeness, and inventiveness, give way to other, semi-animal faculties, which consist in pronouncing sounds independently from any concept, in counting numbers in succession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, in perceiving words, without allowing imagination to substitute images for these sounds, in short, in developing a faculty for crushing all higher faculties, so that only those might be evolved which coincide with the scholastic condition of fear, and of straining memory and attention. every pupil is so long an anomaly at school as he has not fallen into the rut of this semi-animal condition. the moment the child has reached that state and has lost all his independence and originality, the moment there appear in him various symptoms of disease, – hypocrisy, aimless lying, dullness, and so forth, – he no longer is an anomaly: he has fallen into the rut, and the teacher begins to be satisfied with him. then there happen those by no means accidental and frequently repeated phenomena, that the dullest boy becomes the best pupil, and the most intelligent the worst (tolstoy, 1967, pp. 16-17). often “system crashers” are portrayed as disturbed children who not only do not fit the system but who actively break the institutional system work and system relationship (e.g., see the german 2019 movie “system crasher”1 or the new zealand 2016 movie “hunt for the wilderpeople”2). however, some system crashers are perfectly happy children who, precisely due to their happiness, liveliness, and rich imagination, do not fit into a conventional school. i was such a child in my first grade in the soviet union in the late 1960s. this paper describes my autobiographical experiences. i also consider happy system crashers in democratic educational settings. since a happy system crasher is apparently not a well-documented phenomenon, i spend space on autoethnography describing it in detail. i specifically focus on my childish experiences at home and school. i conclude with my reflection on the difference in my parents’ and my teachers’ responses to me being a happy system crasher. i also want to raise questions of whether system crashers in general and happy system crashers in specific are unavoidable in educational institutions or collective educational enterprises. or even if a system crasher is a necessarily negative phenomenon in the first place. i will consider (happy) system crashers in a democratic school and my own democratic dialogic higher ed classrooms. * * * i loved my first-grade teacher. she was strict, yelling at us a lot, especially at children like me, who often acted in ways that she did not expect. but at the same time, my first-grade teacher introduced many fun and mysterious activities that i really liked. for example, in the middle of writing, she suddenly clapped. 1 “on her wild quest for love, 9-year-old benni's untamed energy drives everyone around her to despair” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8535968/. “ 2 “reclusive country folk bella and hector become foster parents to ricky, a problem child from the city. … a national manhunt is ordered for a rebellious kid and his foster uncle who go missing in the wild new zealand bush” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4698684/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8535968/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4698684/ a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e38 we were supposed to stand up quickly but without noise to sing: “we were writing and writing – our fingers got tired.” while we were singing this little song, we had to close and open our fists. the teacher was totally unpredictable to me. i did not know what she would ask us to do next. i liked her unpredictability. her unpredictability created a possibility for meaningful events for me and, i suspect, other children in the classroom. apparently, she did not like our unpredictability. when faced with our unpredictability, she became angry and mean. once, when my beloved first-grade teacher got sick, i organized my peers to visit her after school. on my suggestion, we went to our homes to collect candies and fruits as gifts for our sick teacher – the cultural script that i was aware of when one visited a sick, dear person. i got my favorite chocolate candies from our home. we got on a bus (another cultural script of visiting an ill teacher): it did not cross our mind that we did not know the teacher’s address – it did not bother us. we felt very proud of doing a good deed, an adult thing, of caring for our teacher by visiting her with our sweet gifts for her. we changed buses several times and walked around unfamiliar areas in the big city of moscow, imagining how much our teacher would be happy to see us when we finally arrived at her place. we were found by the police later in the evening. by then, we were completely lost and had eaten all the goodies we had collected for the teacher. i was punished as the ringleader at school the next day. however, my parents were sympathetic. they told me that knowing the address was crucial for arriving at the targeted place. i was very impressed with this beautiful wisdom. i had never thought about that before because before, i had always arrived at a desired place without much thinking ahead of how to do that – my feet had delivered me there. on the one hand, this wisdom was apparent. on the other hand, it was still mysteriously lost on my peers and me. here is another example of my happy system crashes. on the first day of the physical education (pe) class, the pe teacher gathered us at the center of the school gym on the basement floor and instructed us on how we should behave at the gym, what kind of sports dress uniform we needed to bring to the next class, and so on. we learned that we were not allowed to run or yell in the gym without the teacher’s explicit permission. we were told that we boys and girls must change our clothes in different dressing rooms. this was new to me because, in my kindergarten, boys and girls had always changed clothes together, visited the same bathroom at the same time, and washed naked together in the summer. when our pe teacher finished his long gym orientation, he asked us: “do you have questions? feel free to ask me any question.” nobody asked. i looked around at my peers, then at the teacher, and asked him: “how does water in a river know where to start growing its first ice crystal in the late fall?” the teacher looked perplexed at me and then at my peers. i followed his gaze and also looked at my peers. my peers were apparently ok with my question, but the pe teacher was visibly puzzled. he seemed to try to figure out what exactly he said that prompted my question. my big, much older brother studied physics in his 8th grade, and i knew that my question about the first ice crystal fitted pe perfectly well: "physical education.” to my pe teacher’s credit, he did not yell at me but rather patiently replied after a lo-o-ong pause, “well, you’ll learn it later.” later, i learned in school that when the teacher said “later,” it meant “never.” the school required from us “an agentic state” (milgram, 1974) – unconditional and unquestionable obedience to its arbitrary demands: its numerous assignments (homework, behavior, classroom activities, etc.). in my first grade, i escaped the school agentic consciousness by populating my assigned homework and class work with my playful fantasies that were very meaningful to me personally. for example, many exercises in russian (writing) involved filling in omitted words in sentences marked with three dots. in my fantasy, i envisioned a little walking man, going over words in a sentence, only to face a river or a ditch marked by the three dots. like the little man, i was thinking about what to do – how to cross the dots. i drew a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e39 beautiful bridges over the three dots in my textbook or imagined swimming across them. i loved my school. i loved doing homework – i joyfully spent many hours doing my writing exercises. it was so imaginative, so creative, so playful! although my peers were rarely involved in similar playful activities themselves, they could easily understand and participate in my plays with the school assignments. my teacher yelled at me each time she noticed what i was doing. but her unpredictable yelling and anger only added mystery to my imagination. somehow, i knew that my teacher was nice inside. i loved getting bad grades because i loved how my teacher drew her 2s (a failing grade corresponding to an “f”) with all her love that looked to me like a beautiful red swan, swimming on a lake of my notebook page. for me, the well-rounded mark grade 3 (a “c”) looked much more appealing than the angular 4 (a “b”) or the arrogantly bragging 5 (an “a”). i was happy to collect as many red swans as possible. at times, in my pleasant anticipation of the teacher’s red swan, i carefully drew my own giant blue swan after my home or class assignment. the teacher crossed out my blue swan with her angry strokes and drew her red swan next to mine, but i was happy and thankful: her angry red swans were always much more beautiful than my clumsy blue swans! there was one academic subject where i got a 5 (an “a”) all the time. it was singing. i loved to sing. the singing teacher arranged us for choral singing. i was standing on a bench with some of my classmates. the other students were standing in front of us. the teacher asked us to put all our efforts and soul into the singing. i did. i was very loud and enthusiastic. after the first trial, the teacher called a few other kids and me away. she told us that we must sing silently to keep good collective work. still, she emphasized, we must put all our efforts and soul into pretending that we were singing, but we must sing silently3. we should pretend so well that even our classmates would not suspect silent singing, she said. this was an interesting new game for me. i put all my efforts and soul into my silent singing. and the singing teacher rewarded me with a 5 (an “a”) after each class. i liked getting my only 5s, but i missed my loud singing. in my beforeschool past, adults had appreciated my singing a lot. i usually stood on a chair and sang as loud as possible 3 see the hungarian short 2017 movie sing (mindenki) where a similar pedagogical practice is portrayed and problematized: http://www.singshortfilm.com/. figure 1. this is typical russian homework with the teacher's grade mark. my classwork was much less neat, and i made many more mistakes. (source: https://www.defectologiya.pro/zhurnal/opyat_dvojka!_rugat_li_rebenka_za_ploxie_oczenki/) http://www.singshortfilm.com/ https://www.defectologiya.pro/zhurnal/opyat_dvojka!_rugat_li_rebenka_za_ploxie_oczenki/ a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e40 with all my lungs and soul. later, when i grew up, i learned from my parents that a big part of the audience’s enjoyment was my distortion of the song words that i could not comprehend and pronounce correctly. when my mom came home from her work, she asked me about my grades. i joyfully reported three 2s (“f”) – for reading, writing, and arithmetic (because i could not read the math problem) – and one 5 (“a”) for singing. pretty good! three beautiful red swans in one day! my mom was hysterical at my “optimism bordering on idiotism.” my mom was crying, exclaiming why i was not ashamed of bad grades like all other kids. she always referred to my older brother, who once buried his grade record book (“dnevnik”) in the yard to hide getting bad grades (a neighbor found it and gave it to my parents). mom said that it was bad what my older brother did, but she said it was more understandable than me being happy about getting bad grades. i could not understand how my mom could not see the natural beauty of my teacher’s red swans. why was she so upset? however, i was happy – i loved my whimsical magic school very much, despite its great efforts to cause a lot of pain in me to domesticate me to its institutional demands. on sundays, when the school was closed, i often asked my parents: “what do you think ‘ours’ [students] are doing now?” my parents replied that it was sunday – the school was closed. “i know that,” replied i, “but what would they have been doing at this time if it hadn’t been sunday?” i was looking forward to going to school (e. matusov, 2018). the phrase “optimism bordering on idiotism” was coined by my aunt yera (my dad’s brother’s wife), who was a school principal. she also called me “a cheerful freak” and professionally recommended my parents place me in a special school for children with mental problems. my beloved first-grade teacher suggested that as well, independently of my aunt’s professional advice. the school principal put me on probation, but my parents hid this truth from me back then. my parents protected me. my dad appreciated my wits, multiple interests, imagination, playfulness, fantasy, optimism, and enthusiasm for life. i think it resonated with my dad’s own romantic life attitudes (e. matusov, 2020b; l. matusov, 2006), although he was never a system crasher himself as far as i know. my mom was much more ambivalent than my dad, but she was protective as well. being a system crasher (even beyond school), i often got them in trouble. still, as far as i can remember, they were patient with me and primarily focused on protecting me and repairing the damage caused by my cheerful life rather than on punishing me. in the early summer of 1967, just before i entered my first grade, the six-day arab-israeli war started in the middle east. being soviet jews (i did not know that we were jews back then), my parents quietly discussed the worrisome political and military development because the ussr sided with the arab states against israel. although my parents tried to be discrete in their political discussions in my presence, i could hear about “arabs” and “the suez canal.” based on my parents’ disapproving tone, i sensed that “arabs” were against the “ours.” in my seven-year-old mind, embedded in numerous soviet movies about wwii that i was constantly watching on the tv, i had heard the troublesome news that “the arabs took over the soviet canal [i.e., the suez canal].” i did not know who the arabs were, but i had no doubts that they were some version of the nazi germans who invaded the ussr in the past. we lived at the end of moscow, a few blocks from the khimki canal. ah, that was obviously the canal that my parents worried about! i did not hear “suez canal” – i heard “soviet canal4.” the khimki canal was the only soviet canal i had known back then. i rushed to our courtyard to announce the exciting news that the arabs had taken over the soviet khimki canal. some kids were skeptical, but i told them that i had heard the news myself from my parents. 4 in russian, suez canal and soviet canal sound very similar: “suyetskiy kanal” vs. “sovetskiy kanal.” a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e41 many of my buddies wanted to go to see the war by themselves, and, despite our parents’ strict rule against doing that, we all went to see the battle for the soviet canal located about ten blocks from the courtyard. to our big surprise, the beaches of the khimki canal were very peaceful. there were no warships on the canal. we were disappointed. the three large five-story buildings constituting our courtyard belonged to a military jetfighter building plant where my dad and mom worked. thus, all the kids’ parents were my parents’ co-workers. the kids’ news about “the arabs attacking the soviet canal” spread quickly at their work – people mostly laughed. however, it was potentially dangerous for my parents. the soviet union politically sided with the arab states against israel. my dad was a true-believer communist and a leader of the local communist organization at his work. in a lesser “politically vegetarian” time, like the stalinist ussr, when my parents grew up, it might have cost him a job or even freedom. my parents were embarrassed by the whole debacle i created, but they did not tell me anything and instead tried to be more discrete during their political discussions at home in my presence. a year later, in my second grade, when we moved to another district of moscow, and i got my own room, not shared with my older brother, one of my first responses to having a separate room of my own was to create a lenin museum by cutting pages with his picture from a children’s book about young lenin and gluing these pages on the newly fixed wallpaper of my room. i fantasized about having a schedule when my classmates would visit my little museum of young lenin – of course, the entrance to the lenin museum would be free. despite their apparent disappointment of my ruining freshly fixed wallpaper with glue, my parents did not scold or punish me but patiently and tactfully explained that although my worshiping of grandpa lenin, the founder of the soviet union, was admirable, only the communist party could sanction lenin museums. they took all the pages down carefully from the wallpaper and rearranged the furniture in my room to cover the damage left by the glue until they replaced the wallpaper a few years later. my dad told me that nobody could establish such a thing as a lenin museum without the communist party’s authorization. it surprised me – why not?! (e. matusov, 2018). looking back, i have noticed that many of my friends were marginal kids: ethnically marginal, behaviorally marginal, and mentally marginal. other kids and adults established their marginality – i did not notice it myself. my mom was concerned about the fact that i had “freak friends,” but my dad was not concerned about that at all, as far as i remember. my friendship with those kids was not exclusive as some of my friends were very popular kids as well – i was some kind of a mediator for the marginal kids and regular kids. in our courtyard, one of my friends was “a gentle giant,” vitya lalykin, and this was how i referred to him. he was two years older than me and much bigger. adults and some kids called him “oligophren,” a word i did not understand but knew that it meant something bad. they were mean to him. gentle giant vitya did not fight back and only cried when other kids’ abuse became unbearable. i was his only friend and engaged him in playing with my other friends and their friends. his mom appreciated our friendship and invited me to their apartment. she gave me very tasty food and small gifts. vitya’s older brother often offered physical protection to me in the courtyard. he attended the same class as my older brother, but they weren’t friends. being backed up by two much older boys for protection gave me solid weight in our courtyard. i protected gentle giant vitya from children’s (and, at times, adults’) abuses as much as i could, occasionally using the protection of my older brother and vitya’s brother. “i don’t understand how you can play with this feeble-minded boy. what can you have in common?” – my mom often complained. vitya’s responses to my play moves or stories were unpredictable and unusual, which sparked my imagination. for example, when i was leading the kids to the khimki canal to see the battle between the “ours” and the “arabs,” gentle giant vitya asked all of us which side we would join in the battle. we laughed at his naïve question – the a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e42 answer was obvious for us: of course, the side of the “ours,” the soviet side. but we appreciated his question because he made us feel mature and wise. it was always exciting and fun for me to be around him. also, he was spectacularly generous. if he sensed that i liked any of his possessions, he immediately gave them to me as a gift “forever.” he also sensed when i was upset and hugged me gently. he cried when i cried; he laughed when i laughed – in empathy. at times, probably being overwhelmed by the meanness of other kids directed at gentle giant vitya, i also became mean to him. he looked at me with such a surprise and tried to hug me. when i rejected and laughed at his hugs in disdain, he started bitterly crying. i felt ashamed. i hugged him and apologized. he smiled through his tears as if the sun appeared through rainy clouds. when he was not disturbed or abused by others, he was always cheerful – “a cheerful freak” like me. i had a special position in the local gang of multi-age kids of both genders from our courtyard. being an undiagnosed dyslexic (nobody heard about dyslexia back then), i was a “talented” improvisational story and joke-teller (including sexual and vulgar ones), modifying tv movies, jokes, and stories i heard and watched. i could make a good laugh out of my lads (cf. willis, 1981) and be valued and respected for that. i added my own situational “wisdom” and morals regarding the current events that were important for my audience and creatively played with intonations. i was also a very good player as a “german nazi soldier” when we played in wwii – a very popular boy game of my days – because i could speak “german” fluently – i.e., i could produce unintelligent “german”-sounding gibberish in an aggressive tone. however, i was not happy about this role because, at the end of any wwii game, i would be half-playfully, half-seriously beaten as a german nazi soldier. when i protested to play a german soldier – i wanted to play a russian soviet soldier, the most desirable play role – my peers refused, arguing that i spoke “perfect german.” they also mentioned that i could abuse them, as russian soviet soldiers at the beginning of each play when the germans were winning over the russians in wwii (which was a dangerous and stupid move because i would be three times more beaten by them in revenge, at the end of the play). i was physically weaker than my peers of my age, and my “talents” were my protection from my peers’ abuse (e. matusov, 2018). in my first grade, i immediately became friends with an unpopular boy, sasha bublikov, who was chubby. being raised at home and not attending kindergarten, he did not know how to act and talk well around other kids. he was unfamiliar with children’s working-class culture. he was a foreigner in his own land. for example, he did not understand vulgar, sexualized, taboo language or even the fact that, for kids, it was taboo to use it publicly. one of the favorite abuses by other kids (mostly boys) was to ask him to repeat bad words like “pussy,” “dick,” or “fuck” in the presence of a teacher or his grandma who picked him up from school. he would repeat it, and the kids would drop dead laughing. sasha was slow in his movements, and, as a result, our class was often punished because we could not accomplish a task assigned by the teacher as quickly as the teacher expected it from us. one time, to “give us a lesson,” the teacher punished the whole class by taking away our recess. my classmates, boys and girls, decided to beat sasha up after school “to teach him a lesson” – the lesson that the teacher passed on to us. i managed to diffuse the situation by suggesting going to watch a cartoon in a local cinema theater, which got me into trouble with some parents, including sasha’s grandma, who could not find their kid after school. my school fantasies were mixed with the reality. thus, i remember that in the first grade, my classmate friend, olya ugol’kova, and i were on rotating duty to clean our classroom – a typical practice of the soviet schools back then. we decided to surprise our beloved teacher and our classmates by cleaning our classroom in such a way that “cleanness would shine.” we took all the rubbish from the desks: dirty pieces of paper, cores of an apple, old cookies, socks, etc., on the classroom floor. then we brought buckets of water and spread the water on the floor. it was in our imagination how deep cleaning must look like. we kept fantasizing about how much our classmates, teacher, school principal, and parents would appreciate our work. our parents found us at 9 pm in a very messy classroom. we were still in the first stage of our cleaning! somehow, we still did not pass this stage, despite the time it took us to extract the a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e43 existing dirt and rubbish from all the desks before cleaning it off the floor. olya and i spent more time dreaming about how our teacher and peers would appreciate our job than in actual cleaning. our anxious, upset, and tired parents quickly cleaned the mess we created and escorted us home. nobody praised our “community work” or even noticed it. my parents were visibly upset but happy that they finally found me. my best friend in the first grade, andryusha kamensky, a friend from kindergarten, went to the school library, and i followed him. andryusha was a fluent and passionate reader – another important source for my stories. while he was searching for interesting books to borrow, i was browsing over books with fascinating pictures. i could not read because of dyslexia, but back then, nobody had heard of dyslexia in the ussr. when andryusha was checking out his book, the librarian asked me if i had my library card. i did not – she made a card for me. i was very proud. the librarian asked me: “where are your books to check out?” wow, i did not realize that with the library card, i had to borrow books. it made it even more fun. i selected 12 softcover picture books. the books had extensive texts as well, but i chose them because of their interesting pictures that inspired my imagination and fantasy. i brought the books home. my parents were pleasantly shocked: “wow, you have started reading books by yourself! we must celebrate!” before that moment, “reading” was a kind of torture for me. it looked like the following scene. my mom, dad, and seven-year-old me were sitting around a family-room table and taking turns to “read” aloud the fairytale “puss in boots.” my mom and dad would read a page while i had to read one paragraph – the shortest one on the page. i loved stories and storytelling, but i hated this torture of “guided reading” (i was reading in russian, my native language, this is a compatible translation): my mom: dear, with what letter does this word start? me (nailing the letter “h” with my index finger): “aich.” my mom: good. here, it reads as “kh”. and the following letter? what’s its sound? me (i’m thinking, how does mom know that this time it reads like “kh”?! strange. moving my finger to the letter “a”): “ai.” my dad: hmmm, “æ.” me (focusing on the letter “a,” thinking: “why ‘æ’? – how does dad know that? but whatever.”): “æ.” my dad: so, what will that be like together? me: “aichai?” my dad: no, remember it is “kh” and “æ”. what will it be together? me: “khæ”. my mom: good, sweaty. and the last letter? how does it sound? me (shifting my finger to “t”): “ti.” my dad corrected me: “t.” and what you will get when you put them together? add together “kh”, “æ”, and “t”. what will you get? me (with a great effort): “kh,” “æ,” and “t”… – together is… “coat.” my dad exploded: where do you see “coat”?!!! “kh”, “æ”, and “t” together, is “hat”! not “coat”! my mom (hysterically): he’s mocking us! i look at them with puzzlement. what makes them so angry? back then, i suspected that people lied to me that they could read “texts.” they just memorized stories so well that they could point at the correct “word” – a combination of meaningless, alien symbols. it was all pretense. i just had a bad memory, so i could not do what they could do (e. matusov, 2021b). like my parents, i was sitting in the living room with one of the books that i brought from the school library: “reading” it. i knew the behavior of “silent reading” rather well. a “reader” must concentrate on a page for some time, moving a finger or gaze over the text and then move to the next page and so on. it a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e44 was a rather boring activity, in my view. however, with my picture books, it was fun because i tried to create a story based on the pictures in the book. often, the following picture completely disrupted my emergent, improvisational story, making it silly or very challenging. such a picture reading was eventful and exciting! i really appreciated a stroke of inspiration when the new picture created an interesting twist in my story. i could return to the book i had already “read” – it was fun to create a new story with the same pictures. also, i could decode the titles of the books with the help of the librarian who read the titles, and i remembered them. of course, i shared my “readings” with kids in my yard and at school. the kids appreciated my stories. once in a while, when i had just finished one picture book and was ready to pick up another book, my mom asked me what the book was about. i was happy to tell my improvisational story based on the book pictures and the title of the book to my mom. she was pleased because i was a good storyteller, and the book was unfamiliar to her. that went all well for a while. until… she recognized the story of the book: “the soldier’s porridge.” although my improvisational pictures-based story of the soldier outsmarting a bad witch (baba yaga) followed the archetype of this classical fairytale5, the details were drastically different from the story she knew. she came to me and picked up the book. gotcha! my mom got me. she smiled at my ingenuity. my older brother approved of my cheating reading wits with his laugh. my school was unusual, specializing in teaching french from the first grade on. i liked the french lessons. we were asked to bring small mirrors for the lessons. we watched the mirror when we pronounced new french words to see if our tongue and lips were positioned correctly. of course, the small mirror could be used for many other things like watching kids behind me, making dancing sunspots on the classroom’s walls or peers’ faces, looking at a book picture or text in the mirror, and so on. french was a strange subject. it was unclear to me why people needed it. it is much easier to speak russian. but it was fun. it used some russian words, but the meaning was strangely different, often with exaggeration. for example, the russian word “cup” (“chashka”) was “tasse” in french. the word “taz” in russian means “basin” (in english). i was so amazed that i rushed home to share this bizarre information: that cup (chashka) is tasse (taz, basin) in french with my parents and my older brother. however, on my way home, the russian word “taz” (basin) somehow was transformed into “miska” (“bowl” in english) in my consciousness. i guessed that a “basin” felt to me too big for a “cup” even for french. “dad, do you know how the word ‘cup’ sounds in french?” – asked i with excitement. “how?” asked my dad. “miska [bowl]!” – i exclaimed. my parents and older brother had their doubts. but i insisted: “you don’t know french! from the fact that you are older or bigger, it does not mean that you know more than i do. our french teacher said that cup is miska in french!” teaching french in the specialized school was mostly text-based. probably because of my dyslexia, this instruction did not work well for me, and i was sliding more and more behind most (but not all) of my classmates. the french teacher gave us a dictation of russian words that we had to translate into french and write them down using the french (latin) alphabet. this was beyond my skills and knowledge. to create an impression of my work during the dictation, i was trying to write the russian words the teacher read aloud for us, using french letters. this was a fun and challenging activity for two major reasons: 1) i was not sure how to spell a russian word in russian, and 2) transforming russian spelling into the latin alphabet was not easy because many russian letters were not represented in the latin alphabet. for example, one word that the teacher said was “myaso” (meat, мясо in russian cyrillic). in french, meat is “viande,” but i did not know that. so, i spelled the russian word as “miassoue,” which looked more like a french word to me – i had noticed that many french words had much more vowels together than russian words. usually, after the dictation, the teacher asked us to exchange our work with a peer for correction. i hoped that my friend andryusha kamensky, an a-student in french, would correct my words. however, this time, the french teacher collected our notebooks to correct by herself at home. in a few days, i got a 5 the russian fairytale was based on the grimm brothers’ story “stone soup”: https://collaborationsoup.com/stone-soup-story/ https://collaborationsoup.com/stone-soup-story/ a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e45 zero for my work (the angry grade mark far below an “f”), and she called my parents to come to school. when they came back home from the meeting with the french teacher, they asked me how i produced the french words during the dictation. my french teacher was puzzled how i made up the words that had nothing to do with the correct french words she expected, but the total number of the words i wrote corresponded well with the number of the words she dictated. “there should be some pattern in his writing!” – she declared to my parents. when i explained to my parents how and why i did what i did, they laughed and replied that it made sense to them. they were also puzzled about why my french teacher had not asked me about that. at the same time, my parents started thinking of taking me out of the specialized french school to put me into a regular school. every year the school prepared a play in french for a french delegation. this year, it was “the prince frog.” my best school friend andryusha kamensky, an a-student in french, was assigned to play the prince frog. he was very proud and anxious. i did my best to help him to prepare. he practiced with me while i provided him with my feedback. i liked his performance, his exaggerated gestures, his funny faces, and especially his majestic frog leaps. i could not understand one word he was saying in french. at some point in his rehearsal, the prince frog had to make the frog sounds, “kva-kva” in russian. i did not like it because this was a french play, and i argued that the frog sounds must also be in french like the rest of the play. andryusha did not know how to make the frog sounds in french. that was a puzzle. i was thinking for a while and produced: “bre-ke-ke-keks6.” i felt it was a very frenchy sound, suitable for a french frog. andryusha agreed. the school hall was full of french dignitaries, district school administrators, teachers, and students of different ages. although student admission was very limited due to a lack of space in the school hall, as andryusha’s closest friend, i was allowed to attend the play. i could not follow the french speech in the play, but i enjoyed the performance, especially of my friend, the prince frog. the costumes were magnificent. the acting was superb. i laughed together with the audience, although i did not know what exactly was funny. when the prince frog made the french frog sound, “bre-ke-ke-keks,” i invented, the silence broke. people looked at each other. andryusha repeated louder, “bre-ke-ke-keks, bre-ke-ke-keks!” i could hear a kid next to me asking quietly, “what does it mean?!” i replied proudly: “it means ‘kva-kva’ in french.” my reply spread among the kids and then the adults. people, including french adults7, started laughing and applauding. i felt like i was in seventh heaven. but after the play, our french teacher called me and andryusha and reprimanded us: “you shouldn’t listen to this 2-student [i.e., f-student]! you mustn’t deviate from the script and bring your own incomprehensible words. you spoiled the play.” andryusha was crying. he looked angrily at me and stopped talking with me. however, later, the school principal called for andryusha and praised him for his performance during the play. the french delegation liked the play a lot, especially the french frog sound “bre-ke-ke-kes,” which we invented. the sun came back from the clouds for both of us again. when we moved to another apartment in another district of moscow, and i joined my second grade in another school, my school fun was gradually gone – i got broken. i started doing all my school assignments without playing with my fantasies. i started hating my school. i did my homework obediently, trying to spend as little time on it as possible. i became ashamed of my bad grades. i obediently followed my teacher’s order to search my peer to find out if he smuggled forbidden objects (e.g., toys, colorful wires, 6 this neologism exists in russian, but its meaning and origin are unclear. some say that it refers to a magic spell, but some others mention it as a frog sound in the antique comedy by aristophanes "the frogs,” in a russian translation. apparently, i heard this word somewhere (https://otvet.mail.ru/question/10676047) 7 the frog sound in french is koah-koah (or “croa croa” written in french) https://www.ouiinfrance.com/french-animal-sounds-withaudio/ https://otvet.mail.ru/question/10676047 https://www.ouiinfrance.com/french-animal-sounds-with-audio/ https://www.ouiinfrance.com/french-animal-sounds-with-audio/ a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e46 matches) to school. i lost the ability to be a public author of my life and became like other kids, at least in school. but i learned how to keep a kindle of the joy of life inside of me. i learned to hide my happiness; i realized that at times and with some people, i must shield my feelings and thoughts and keep them to myself. i studied carefully the norms and expectations in order to pretend that i followed them. i discovered the underground double life of what later soviet dissidents referred to as "internal emigration” (wertsch, 2002). why did this change happen to me? did the system-induced pains finally start hurting and disciplining me? or was it a result of my social isolation caused by the move to a new district and school? or was it a result of my maturation? i do not know. coda comparing the ways my parents and my school responded to me as a happy system crasher, the pattern emerges. my parents often addressed my disruptions of their lives by rethinking and renegotiating their practices. a good example of such rethinking was my dad’s reconsidering the physical punishment of my older brother. my dad disciplined my older brother for his “serious” misdemeanors using corporeal punishment by beating my brother with his belt, which was a common disciplining practice in the soviet union of those days. my brother had to pull his pants down, lay on our sofa, and my dad would beat my brother’s naked butt with the belt. my brother cried and promised not to do “it” – whatever “it” might be – again. however, inadvertently, i contributed to stopping such beatings. this is how it happened. when i was three, i went to a local furniture store located three blocks away from our house to look for a new bed for myself. i overheard my parents discussing the need to buy a new bed for me because i had outgrown the old one. i was proud of the fact that i was not a baby anymore. so, i decided to check for the bed by myself. my parents caught me on my way back. i miscalculated the time when they came back from work. my older brother, who was ten at that time, was supposed to look after me, but he was busy playing with his peers as usual. my parents looked scared. we lived in a long 5-store building along with two other similar buildings, creating the shape of the letter c around an internal courtyard where i was allowed to stay. the three buildings belonged to the plant where my father worked. so, many people living in these buildings knew each other. when my parents were looking for me, someone from my dad’s work told them they saw me in the furniture store. my parents rushed there only to find the 3-year-old me walking back, with my hands in my coat pockets and looking very serious and important. i found a bed that i wanted in the furniture store. when i saw them, i knew that i had transgressed my parents’ rules. i was at fault, and i expected a serious, mature punishment. on the way back, while being scolded by my parents for leaving the courtyard without permission, i seriously asked my dad, “are you going to beat me with your belt?” he looked at me with surprise but then answered, “yes.” i was scared and proud. my dad had never beaten me before in any way. but he beat my 10-year-old brother with his pant belt to discipline him. i felt that i was becoming a grown-up with this corporal punishment that was meant for older kids. when we came home, i pulled down my pants and underwear and laid down on a sofa, preparing for the execution. my dad took his belt and symbolically hit me several times. i pretended to be hurt but “stoically” did not cry. after this mature discipline procedure that i took as my rite of passage, i ran to my older brother, bragging to him about my bravery and accusing him of being a sissy because he often cried after being beaten up by my dad for his transgressions. this was when i was really beaten and hurt by my older brother, only to be saved by my parents…. after this incident, my dad stopped using any corporeal discipline on my brother (and, of course, on me). a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e47 my sense is that around the early 1960s, something happened in the soviet parenting culture in the intelligencia class and, especially, in the jewish moscow intelligencia, and the parents stopped using corporeal discipline for their misbehaving children. some of my less-lucky peers envied me because their dads still beat them. so far, i do not know what happened around that time and why and how widespread the phenomenon of stopping corporeal punishment by soviet intelligencia parents was. still, this was true for some of my peers from the intelligencia families (e. matusov, 2018). later, my dad told me that my halfplayful, half-serious request for corporeal punishment helped him reflect on “how cruel and irrational his corporeal discipline was” (his words). in general, my system crashing due to my happy life at home often caused my parents to reflect and rethink their parental practices, values, priorities, and attitudes, regardless of how inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even dangerous it might be to harbor and protect my happy life that they appreciated. i was a happy system crasher at home, before school, in my kindergarten, and in my school. however, only the school blamed me for being happy (cf. mcdermott & varenne, 1998). in contrast, the school responded to my happy lifeful system crashing completely differently. at best, the school responded by ignoring me or, at worst, by punishing me, intentionally causing pain, and suppressing me. the conventional school system prioritized its smooth, uneventful functioning over addressing my interests, needs, and life, which did not fit in. the school tried to normalize me, to make me non-problematic. when my happy life disrupted their machine-like functioning, the system tried to discipline me. there was no reflection of itself, its own practices, priorities, and values. why is that? i hypothesize that one of the major problems of conventional school is that it does not serve the interests of its students, mostly serving the disciplinary society (i.e., the government and the institutions) to mold children into convenient citizens at the expense of the student’s authorial agency (e. matusov, 2024, submitted; stirner, 1963). the conventional school tries to domesticate children in order to make them convenient and useful for society, whose agent is the school institution, transforming “wild” students into “educated subjects” (fendler, 1998; foucault, 1995). conventional schools do not accept teachers’ fiduciary duty toward the students, where teachers serve their students’ educational goals (e. matusov, 2022). let me quote aleksey arestovich, a ukrainian psychologist, philosopher, soldier, and (former) advisor of the office of the ukrainian president zelensky: our culture is a culture of colossal neurosis, sometimes passing over into psychosis. why? did you observe children at six years old and then at seven? they are entirely different because they come out of the first class being already very well-trained and well-disciplined. instead of being joyful six-year-olds who run around and have fun, after the first grade, they become such obedient bunnies, able to sit quietly on their little butts for 45 minutes, which for them is an absolutely unnatural story. because hundreds of iron sticks have already been broken on them in order to make them, as professor preobrazhensky8 said, "socially acceptable members of society." this is done by roughly clipping their wings with coarse garden clippers, by breaking off those individual features that stick out of them so inconveniently for society that could have made us unique creative authors of our lives (arestovich, august 9, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rupif7_rscm, translation from russian is mine). finally, i want to consider the issue of how a school should look, in which happy system crashers would blossom and where students’ wings would be nurtured and valued rather than clipped (cf. e. matusov, 2017). arestovich’s quote gives some guidance. such a school must treat all its students as system crashers! not as cogs of any system but as unique people who author their unique lives. the primary 8 it is the reference to famous soviet writer mikhail bulgakov’s character in his fictional short story “the dog’s heart.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rupif7_rscm a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e48 goal of such a school is not to load the student with preset knowledge, values, skills, and attitudes and to make convenient, useful, obedient citizens but to help the student find themselves, their own unique voices, and develop their wings. dialogic education can help in this process by providing educatees with dialogues where their unique voices and authorship might develop further (e. matusov, 2009). the system, if it is needed at all, must support these processes rather than suppress or hijack them. do i know such schools? yes! there are democratic schools like summerhill (neill, 1960), sudbury valley school (greenberg, 1991), the circle school (rietmulder, 2019), etc. in such democratic schools, children choose whether to study or not, what to study, for what purpose, when and with whom, and so on. they have an extensive zone of personal freedoms limited by their democratic self-governance. democratic schools do not force children to become “obedient bunnies.” still, as reported by democratic educators, even these schools could not tolerate all system crashers, whom they are forced to expel at their democratic gatherings. usually, this happens very rarely, and based on the published descriptions, those system crashers are not happy system crashers like me. i wonder if universal and unconditional acceptance of system crashers is ever possible. interview with jim rietmulder, a founder of the circle school, about system crashers in his democratic school eugene: how do system crashers feel at tcs [the circle school]? jim: so, at the circle school... well, i’m sure there are many system crashings that i don’t notice -happy, disturbed, mischievous, angry, independent. importantly, i suppose i don’t need to notice them. i think most system crashing here is accommodated by informal and formal processes that are “built in.” to the degree that a system accommodates system crashing, is it really system crashing at all? some actions that would crash other systems are routine here and don’t crash the system. eugene: it makes sense to me because tcs not only has many feedback loops for all, not only the students but also prides itself on serving the students. jim: limiting my thoughts to academic classes (which, as you know, happens when students ask)... suppose a student is taking a class and, say, fails to do the homework assigned by the teacher or does it “creatively” in the way of some of your stories. if it’s a one-on-one class, maybe the student and teacher acknowledge the creativity together and then move on or do the homework together, or maybe the teacher will suggest taking class time to do the work while the teacher moves on to some other activity. if it’s a group of students, then maybe the class will proceed, and the “crasher” just won’t get whatever benefit they might have derived from the homework. if the class group was counting on the crasher to deliver a report or otherwise facilitate the class progress, then the outcome might be that the crasher feels regret or embarrassment by the disappointment thus caused, or they might feel nothing in particular. in any case, though, the teacher is not held responsible for the student’s learning, so the teacher has no need to chastise, disapprove, or compel the student. a wise educator !"#$%&' recently wrote “the teacher’s pedagogical fiduciary duty to their student is to recognize and respect that the student is the final authority for their own education and life” (e. matusov, 2022). if teachers did their [professional fiduciary] duty, much system crashing would pass without recognition as such. eugene: what kinds of system crashers exist at tcs? happy? disturbed? some other types? how would you define them? jim: as you may know, the jc [judicial committee, consisting of tcs students of various ages and staff that deals with tcs participants’ violation of the school rules] each day has two appointed “runners” to go get witnesses. sometimes a young student serving as a runner is seen actually running through the building – because they think that runners are supposed to run. :-) that’s a happy crasher. when it a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e49 comes to light, the jc chair or someone else explains that we call it “runner” but don’t really mean what that word implies. [as to “disturbed’ or other system crashers,] in the 1980s or early 90s we expelled a student for shoplifting during a school field trip. twice or more, we have expelled students who simply weren’t attending school regularly. expelling such students was deemed to protect the school from adverse action by authorities – prioritizing institutional survival. these were not “happy” crashers and not “disturbed” in the sense of your stories. i don’t know what to call them. eugene: i wonder if you might call them “irresponsible” system crashers. i wonder how they saw themselves. do you remember how they justified their actions? jim: i think they felt oppressed in the [conventional] schools they came from, and then held onto their alienation when they came to the circle school. subversion and alienation had become part of their identity and change is hard. it's why we don't automatically admit kids who are over 16 years old – there's not enough time left in their school career to detoxify and reboot, to develop a new identity. and they didn't try to justify their actions. i think they just accepted that they were caught doing something the system didn't allow – a system that they didn't care about. eugene: in my view, they are system crashers because they disrupted the school practices and relationships, and the school could not accommodate them. whether they were “happy system crashers” depends on how they perceived the situation of their “disruption” – it is an interesting question of who disrupted whom. by the way, as a happy system crasher, i did not feel that school disrupted me. i was just surprised at why so many people, mostly adults, were suddenly mad at me. jim: i think we have also expelled a few students after accumulating a long history of rule infractions when it seems there’s open defiance and refusal to change, or there’s no progress towards acceptable patterns. eugene: “acceptable patterns” – accepted by whom? maybe not by them. i wonder if you consider changing or at least problematizing these “acceptable patterns”? do you remember specific examples? jim: specifics: physically striking; physically striking other kids; yelling obscenities; refusing to appear before the judicial committee; sometimes property damage. you ask "by whom"... by some combination of adult judgment, weighing values and harms (to the subject individual and to others and also to the school as an institution), and usually the vote of school meeting, usually substantially influenced by adult judgments. occasionally we have “soft-expelled” a student diagnosed with asd [i.e., “autism spectrum disorder”] whose eruptions and disruptions imposed greatly on others and also made it unlikely they would thrive here. were they “happy” crashers? i don’t know. i don’t think we’ve ever expelled a “happy” system crasher, even for a long history of rule infractions, unless it appears that there’s harm to the crasher or some unacceptable imposition on others. eugene: i suspect that little eugene would have been mostly happy at tcs. one possibility for tension could have been clean-up time – i might play with cleaning instead of effective cleaning out of super good intentions (read the cleaning example in above). i remember living a playful, fairytale-like life (sorry for the tautology) full of magic adventures, which had nothing to do with efficiency or expediency. if little eugene had been at tcs, i might have enthusiastically volunteered to do many assignments, but i might have upset others because my ways of doing things would not have been very good despite my good intentions and even efforts. i loved to help others. do you remember having kids like that? if so, what was the school’s response to them? jim: a young child with a mind full of "magic adventures" is not really a problem. that child might be part of the playroom cleanup team. their teammates might mostly ignore or tolerate it, or be part of it, or cajole a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e50 and demand. more of a problem is chore refusal or shirking -which is more common than anyone wants to admit out loud. :-) the chore committee finds accommodations – a special chore or a designated time, or just a bit of slack for someone whose personality, capacity, or quirks make it easier to accommodate than to fight. eugene: do you think there can be a democratic school that can nicely incorporate all kids without any expulsion? if not, why not? if so, what does this democratic school look like? jim: i think several factors would make it difficult for the circle school (here in pennsylvania in 2023) to accept all kids and never expel any: government regulation (can’t violate laws, such as student attendance), market reception (gotta have paying customers), scale (gotta be a large enough population to integrate extremes while accommodating normals), and resources (for accommodating extremes). jim’s last response made me think that the ideal of a democratic school or any collective enterprise, educational or otherwise, for that matter, without “hard” and “soft, self-“ exclusions might be harmful. i think that a no-fault and fault divorce should be expected to avoid violence and abuse. at any time, the participants can feel imprisoned by school settings that do not work for them anymore (or at all). after crashing too much or too badly, not being able to cope with these system crashes, – when mutual accommodations do not work – expulsion or voluntary leaving the democratic school can be a good option. people are unique and not totally malleable. each institutional setting and each collective are specific. it might work beautifully for some participants but ugly for others. search for the holy grail of an institution or a collective setting that works well for all without crashing can be a disastrous utopia. normalization of a no-fault or fault divorce might be a better alternative. (happy) system crashers in eugene’s democratic dialogic higher ed classrooms the discussion of a happy system crasher at home, in conventional and democratic schools, led me to think about my own university teaching, where i try to practice democratic dialogic education (e. matusov, 2015, 2020a, 2022, 2023). i teach diverse educational classes to undergraduate students, most of whom are preservice elementary school teachers, and to doctoral graduate students, most of whom will be educational researchers. i came to democratic education from dialogic education that i have tried to practice at the higher education level in the usa since 1994. i believed that genuine dialogue was not possible without my students’ freedom to define and change the topic of the classroom dialogue. gradually, i realized that “genuine dialogue” demands other freedoms for my students as well: freedom to be silent, freedom to choose what to study, freedom of voice, freedom of the classroom collective organization, freedom of attendance, freedom of defining their own pedagogical regime, freedom not to study, freedom from my impositions, freedom not to study from me, and so on. in other words, i have realized that “genuine dialogue” is mostly possible among free people: dialogue requires democracy. have i experienced happy system crashers in my democratic dialogic high ed classrooms? yes, i think so. one of the most vivid examples occurred in the mid-2000s in one of my undergraduate multicultural courses for future teachers9. this was before i was providing my students with a choice of pedagogical regimes (see below). in one of my past undergraduate classes, i had a student, a future teacher, who was disengaged in my class on cultural diversity in education despite all my diverse pedagogical approaches to engage her and despite her own public pronouncements in the class that she wanted to learn to be a good teacher. back then, i was a progressive education teacher who tried to find “a key to the heart and mind” for each and every student of mine in order to engage them in each and every curricular topic i taught (e. 9 this case was first published elsewhere (e. matusov, 2021b). a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e51 matusov, 2021a). for example, during our practicum at a local community center, i used to send little children to her to ask for help with their playful activities. still, this student rejected those children – she continued texting on her smartphone or distracting her peers working with children. despite all my efforts, she remained disengaged and got a c+, which was a rather unusually low-grade mark for my classes back then. to my big surprise, a year later, while bumping into each other on the campus, this student was happy to see me. she admitted that our class was the best thing that happened to her at the university. “how come?!” i asked, perplexed: why would she like my class when she was disengaged and got a low final grade?! was she an educational masochist (e. matusov & sullivan, 2020)? no. she explained that in my class and through my efforts to engage her in studies and in working with kids, and through her negative, disengaged response to that, she painfully realized that she did not want to be a teacher. instead, she changed her major to acting, and she felt happy there. she concluded that it was important for her to listen to herself rather than always force herself to engage in educational studies. she was surprised by her disengaged response to the class that she freely chose and was looking forward to. giving up teacher education was the best learning she experienced. she reported that she was happy in our class because i did not “push” her, letting her freely and safely experience and live through her disengagement and reflect on her feelings about that. in the previous classes, she reported to me that she was forced to study by her teachers, and she studied well despite her perceived revulsion. she attributed this revulsion to her normal response to being forced to study. however, in our class, the teacher pressure was greatly reduced (but not entirely, in my judgment), but her revulsion was not. she told me that she noticed the enthusiasm of her peers. it puzzled her why she was missing this enthusiasm. before meeting her on the campus a year after our class, i thought that i had failed this student because, as a progressive teacher, i could not find a key to her heart and mind, and she did not learn much from my class. however, i was wrong. in her case, the lack of the student’s study activism, engagement, and motivation aimed at becoming a good teacher, despite her own learning desire, – was, in fact, educational in itself because she, the learner, came to appreciate it. she learned from her study disengagement that she did not want to be a teacher. as her teacher, after this meeting and my reflection on it, i learned that my pedagogical role was not always to engage my students in the studies in my classes – even if they had chosen these studies – but, importantly, also to help my students test their motivation and commitment to their future profession. the lack of motivation and commitment might be an important sign that their initial educational desire and professional aspiration might be wrong. the presence of education is defined by the value the learner attributes to their learning. if this value is negative or neutral, the underlying learning is not educational for the learner (a neutral value), or it can even be anti-educational (a negative value). only when the learner attributes a positive value to their learning does the learning become educational for the learner (e. matusov, 2021b). for the student i described above, the value of her learning disengagement apparently changed from seeing herself as “a poor, unmotivated, preservice teacher” (as she told me) to find her own calling as a future actress. her subjective attitude to her learning disengagement has changed. in our class, initially, she saw her disengagement with the class studies and children – her learning how not to engage despite my pedagogical efforts – negatively. she had learned that she was a bad student of teaching. however, sometime later, she started seeing this disengagement positively as a sign that teaching was not her vocation. she had learned that acting and not teaching was her vocation. upon her reflection, her learning disagreement changed from being anti-educational to becoming educational. looking back, i perceived this student as a happy system crasher. she disrupted my teaching and her peers’ learning in class and, especially at the practicum, by distracting them and me. she was constantly a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e52 my pedagogical headache as i was searching for the pedagogical key to her heart and mind. meanwhile, she was happy and relaxed, having “an alienation vacation” (e. matusov & brobst, 2013). she said that she enjoyed listening to our interesting and profound classroom dialogic discussions and socializing with her peers and me in the classroom and at the afterschool center. she said that she liked to be among enthusiastic and dedicated people even though she did not share this enthusiasm and dedication. as she told me, her unhappiness mainly came at the end of the class, at the time of grading, when she realized that she was a “bad student.” the only pain i gave her was the c+ final grade, which she accepted as a “deserving” grade because she did not fulfill all the assignments that i designed for and imposed on my students. she was unhappy with herself. of course, now i regret giving her final grade pain for two major reasons: 1) her experience in our class was super educational, and 2) i have realized the antieducational functions of grades and the summative assessment in general (e. matusov, marjanovic-shane, & meacham, 2016). in sum, my dialogic, but not very democratic, classroom worked for this happy system crasher but barely, and not because of my conscious efforts to accommodate her. in another example of a happy system crasher, i, as a democratic dialogic teacher, was much more proactive in addressing this phenomenon10. for the first time, i am teaching an undergraduate course, “topics in education,” for education major and minor seniors. for most of them, it is their last semester before graduation. many of them were in the process of looking for a job during this semester. some had teaching practicum. before the class started, i developed a curriculum map of 11 topics i expected the students to be interested in discussing. by then, in the middle of the 15-week semester, the students added ten more topics they were interested in studying. the class had the following four pedagogical regimes to choose from by week 6 of the semester (the grace period): 1) open syllabus for “self-responsible learners,” where students could make all decisions about their own education: what to study, how, class attendance, grading, and so on. 2) opening syllabus for “other-responsible learners,” where i made the initial decisions about the organization of the class and then gradually transferred responsibility to the students. in this pedagogical regime, i pushed the students to study via mandatory assignments, points, and final grades. that was the default pedagogical regime at the beginning of the semester from which the students could switch. 3) non-traditional closed syllabus for credential students who just want to be certified by passing exams and getting the final grade, similar to receiving a driver’s license. 4) non-syllabus for “prisoners of education,” i.e., students who were forced to take this class by the university but felt that the class was unnecessary and painful. they were given a grade of their wish and said “goodbye” to avoid education being a “cruel and unusual punishment” for them (e. matusov, 2021c). lejan (pseudonym) is a chinese international student who has attended only the first class meeting so far (we are in the middle of the semester now). she is a marketing major and an education minor. when the grace period passed, her pedagogical regime, the opening syllabus, remained the default, but she did not sign it. only after the grace period for choosing the pedagogical regime expired did she ask me via email to meet to discuss what she should study. lejan asked me to switch to open syllabus, and she said she did not know (forgot? did not pay attention?) about the grace period, which passed two weeks ago. she also asked me to help her to choose what she should study “for the class.” her wording “for the class” bothered me because it suggested to me that lejan was not “a self-responsible learner,” as the open syllabus pedagogical regime indicated to me 10 this case was first published elsewhere (e. matusov, 2022). a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e53 unless it was a wrong choice of her words. i asked her why she wanted the open syllabus. she replied that she was busy searching for a computer programming job in china (not in marketing, not in education) as she is moving back there in june after she graduated from the university. also, she told me that she had lost her interest in education (and marketing), but she was ready to do her “job for the class” – this wording made me cringe because i felt it revealed her commitment to pleasing me and my imposed assignments, rather than her own educational desires if she had ones. i asked her why she was not considering switching to the prisoner of education pedagogical regime and just got an a without doing anything “for the class.” i reasoned aloud that since she had lost her interest in education, she did not need this class, and it might feel like an unnecessary burden (she nodded). why not choose this option and get out of the course at once? to my surprise, lejan replied that she saw herself as “a self-responsible learner” (the wording of the open syllabus). that is why she wanted to choose some topics to study in our class. then, she added, “i want to study… but just not education.” i asked what it would be. lejan said that she was actually using our course time to study python, a computer programming language. she asked a computer science professor to audit his course and lab sessions, and he agreed. she said that in the ideal world, she would switch from her minor in education and her major in marketing to a major in computer programming. but it was too late to do it institution-wise. i did not know what to do. i hesitated at first… and then i surprised myself by suggesting to her to make her open syllabus about studying python. her response was unexpected to me. she jumped and hugged me. i saw tears in her eyes while she was smiling. she exclaimed, “really?! you can’t imagine how much happy you made me! i was studying python, day and night, but our class constantly bothered me.” i told her that, although i have an ms in computer science, i did not know python, and i could not help her to learn it. she replied that she was ok because she was using other resources to study python at the university. she asked me why i was so different than other professors and how i came to this decision. i explained that the most important thing for me was my students’ education as defined by my students. computer programming and specifically studying python became her education now, and that was what mattered to me. however, i told her that if we had met several years ago, my response would be different – more like other professors. also, my actions pleasantly surprised me as well because i had not thought about these issues before. although my proposal to lejan was a surprise not only to her but to me too, so far, i like it. i remember when i interviewed nikolai konstantinov, a founder of democratic math education in the ussr; he told me a similar thing: genuine education is not defined by an academic subject but by helping people “fly” – i.e., being able to author their education and life (e. matusov, 2017). i think it was “the final exam” for me as a democratic teacher. i passed it… but with hesitation. i wonder if this hesitation reflects the residue of me being colonized by progressive education. a progressive teacher strives to fascinate all students with the subject they teach (e. matusov, 2021a). at the end of the semester, lejan submitted her open syllabus about studying python on our class web. she also sent me the printout of a cat using her python “cat pikachu.py” program. lejan engaged in figuring out what was best for her education. by offering her different options and going through them, i helped lejan make up her mind to legitimately use the course time and reflection resources to study the computer language python. i reconfirmed to lejan that she was truly a selfresponsible learner. a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e54 it was interesting that lejan found the development of her open syllabus focusing on studying python useful for her, as she told me in her email later on. she wrote that it helped her to think through the python topics she wanted to study that semester and kept her organized. planning the curricular topics and how she would study them made her a better autodidact than she was before. also, she mentioned that she deviated from her plan, which she considered to be ok (and i agree – i wrote in the guidelines to the open syllabus design that it should not be viewed as “a learning contract” but rather as the beginning of the unpredictable learning journey). lejan crashed my “system,” but i was happy about that because it made it a bit more democratic. it also revealed my role as “a benevolent dictator” in the classroom because the change happened via my autocratic rethinking of the system rather than via a democratic process (e. matusov, 2023). i wonder how much of what happened between lejan and me was structured by the oppressive nature of the foisted higher education institution we both were part of. without the educational bureaucracy aiming at credentialism, lejan could freely move to study computer science without even a need to talk with me and receive my blessing. i have noticed that i try to accommodate system crashers – happy or otherwise – in my pedagogical practice. for example, i have inbuilt the no-fault divorce for students who feel that the class, imposed by the university, is not helpful for them (non-syllabus for “prisoners of education”) or that they do not need me as their teacher or that they want to study only topics of their own interest (open syllabus for selfresponsible learners or the virtual attendance in the opening syllabus pedagogical regime). i always accept students’ requests to change their pedagogical regime even after the grace period has passed. one may ask why to have the grace period in the first place. because my students find it helpful for them. still, i have other system crashers. the most memorable disturbed system crasher was a native american racist undergraduate student who harassed all his peers but not me or my teaching assistant. i tried to talk with him to stop his harassment, but in vain. after he expressed his pity that the teenage daughter of one of his peers did not kill herself because of her race (she tried to commit suicide), i decided to expel him from our class. however, all his peers petitioned me not to do so because, despite their pains caused by his racist harassment, they learned a great deal from him and how to deal with him (for a more detailed description of the case, see e. matusov & lemke, 2015, pp. e14-e15). a few students chose the opening syllabus but did not fulfill its requirements, and thus, crashed the system i designed for them. some students who have chosen open syllabus or non-syllabus do not report their desired final grades at the end of the semester – another crash of my system. what do i do in these cases? i give the students an incomplete grade, which automatically turns into an f in a few months by the university registrar system. the latter usually forces the students to contact me and resolve the issue. some of these system crashers inform me about hardships in their lives that caused the transgression of my class regime: physical sickness, depression, being overwhelmed with other classes, work, or romantic relationships. most do not. i decided to return the power of (forced) decision-making to the student. however, in the absence of the university (oppressive) credential system, these problems would probably not exist. conclusion happy system crashers are children and students in general who inadvertently disrupt the educational system by being unapologetic authors of their lives. it is much more common to hear that children must be prepared for (conventional) school than that the (conventional) school must be prepared a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e55 for diverse, if not unique, children and students. the system of conventional schooling often tries to crash happy system crashers. however, i argue that a happy system crasher is an ideal prerequisite for becoming a participant in democratic education and dialogic education, especially if the participant freely chooses these types of education. genuine dialogue and participation in democratic governance require authorial agency (e. matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016) from their participants. when a person is not interested in being an author of their own life (aka an unhappy system crasher), the person might need therapy for their psychological and/or social depression rather than education (i.e., self-education) – i.e., “alienation vacation” (e. matusov & brobst, 2013) or “school detoxification” (llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960). the primary role of educators and schools is to support such students’ self-education when the students ask for such support. educators need to commit themselves to “pedagogical fiduciary duty” to their students to help them accomplish their own educational goals or form such goals (e. matusov, 2022). will the educators’ commitment to pedagogical fiduciary duty eliminate or, at least, minimize the phenomenon of happy system crasher or system crasher in general? no, i do not think so. actually, i think the reverse is true. pedagogical fiduciary duty invites and normalizes disruptions of the system, of the given from the students. this makes education unpredictable and, thus, eventful, based on the authorial agency of the participants. fighting system crashing and system crashers is a birthmark of conventional education and, probably, progressive education. authorial agency always involves creative and unpredictable transcendence and, thus, disruption of the given, demanding creative recognition and response from others. system crashing is not only unavoidable but desirable and welcome. system crashing must be recognized as the bread and butter – the dramatic life – of a collective educational enterprise. system crashing is a renewal of the system, which provides the necessary skeleton for the collective educational enterprise. however, some of these system crashes can be centrifugal, pulling the participants apart via voluntary leaving or expulsion of the participants. this also should be expected and normalized, regardless of how painful this process may be at times. the alternative to it is much worse: institutional imprisonment, violence, and abuse. even at its extreme, the end of the entire system – the terminal system crash – can be mourned, but its preservation is not always desirable and worth pursuing. references fendler, l. (1998). what is it impossible to think? a genealogy of the educated subject. in t. s. popkewitz & m. brennan (eds.), foucault's challenge: discourse, knowledge, and power in education (pp. 39-63). new york: teachers college press. foucault, m. (1995). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (2nd vintage books ed.). new york: vintage books. greenberg, d. (1991). free at last: the sudbury valley school. framingham, ma: sudbury valley school press. llewellyn, g. (1998). the teenage liberation handbook: how to quit school and get a real life and education (rev., 2nd ed ed.). eugene, or: lowry house. matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. matusov, e. (2015). legitimacy of non-negotiable imposition in diverse approaches to education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 3, a174-a211. retrieved from http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/110/105 http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/110/105 a happy system crasher at home and in conventional and democratic schools eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.626 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e56 matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings: special issue. journal of russian & east european psychology, 54(1), 1-117, doi:10.1080/10610405.2017.1352391. matusov, e. (2018). ideological and real socialism of my soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching: multiconsciousness. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 6, sc4-sc39, doi:10.5195/dpj.2018.240. matusov, e. 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(1981). learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs (morningside ed.). new york: columbia university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals microsoft word promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies, dpj layout with comments (proofread).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf29 promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck ambrose university, canada james (jim) cresswell ambrose university, canada abstract this commentary responds to claims eugene matusov makes about a student's right to the use of certain technologies in his or her education. we argue that the use, in particular, of adaptive technologies actually has the potential to inhibit a student's free choice (rather than facilitate it) and that through restricting certain technologies, genuine dialogic pedagogy may more successfully be promoted. we also engage matusov's concept of the radical freedom necessary for education. darren dyck is an assistant professor of english at ambrose university. his primary areas of expertise are shakespeare and renaissance literature, but he writes and teaches on a variety of subjects, including ancient and medieval literature, the works of j.r.r. tolkien and the inklings, and contemporary higher education. he also tweets @ambrose_en_prof. james (jim) cresswell is a full professor from ambrose university. theoretically, he is inspired by bakhtin and dialogism. the theory inspires community-based research aimed at using research to support community organizations. other areas of interest include: poverty; theoretical, historical, and philosophical psychology; cognitive science of religion; and immigration. he has a deep commitment to education and enhancing the student experience. he has won numerous awards, spoken at international events, and published a substantial amount. currently, he serves as a deputy editor at dialogic pedagogy, editor for the journal of theoretical and philosophical psychology, and sits on the editorial board of theory and psychology. ïïò introduction in january 2019, we (darren dyck, james cresswell) began teaching one course each in which we attempted to remove some forms of digital technology from our students’ pedagogical milieu. in particular, we prohibited students from communicating with us via email, except in rare circumstances (e.g. medical emergencies, student accessibility accommodations), and we took measures to eliminate powerpoint from the classroom. further, we did not provide any course materials to students using the online learning management system (lms)—materials, in other words, which they could access at their leisure—or allow them to use the lms to submit assignments digitally. we did not, to be clear, stop students from using their own technological devices (laptop computers, tablets, smart phones, etc.) as this seemed to us a clear infringement on certain freedoms they enjoy, but we did strongly encourage them to use hard copies of textbooks, paper, and pens or pencils when in class. issn: 2325-3290 (online) promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf30 darren’s class was a second-year undergraduate course called popular fiction, in which students read a number of works of fiction (short and long) that don’t typically get taught in university english programs because they’re deemed not literary enough or, if you like, “genre.” we read detective, science fiction, science fantasy, western, and horror texts. there were about 18 students in the class, about half of which were english majors, and what happened in the classroom varied from class to class. sometimes i (darren) lectured, sometimes there was discussion, once we engaged in creative group work, and a couple of times we had other faculty join us for a conversation. ultimately, the goals of the course were to familiarize students with fiction in the genres mentioned above, to teach critical reading and writing skills, and to have students interrogate (to some degree) the categories of “literary” and “popular” fiction. james’ class was a third-year undergraduate class on the psychology of religious experience. it looks at texts over the last 100 years: james (varieties of religious experience); freud (future of an illusion); maslow (religions, values, and peak experiences); barrett (why would anyone believe in god). the class is a seminar class that is quite unstructured (e.g., i, james, collect index cards at the beginning of class about the assigned reading and the cards contain concepts/ideas from the readings that the students want to discuss). it is capped to around 25 students. the focus is about being able to think through the different perspectives of the authors and then to reflect on one’s own spiritual experience (broadly conceived). the students are usually upper year undergraduate students in the social sciences, and i get a few theology/ministry students taking it as an elective. a number of them come from religious backgrounds, but not all. the class is reasonably diverse. james cresswell shared our rationale for removing some forms of digital technology from our students’ pedagogical milieu (which we also provided to our students in our syllabi) on the dialogic pedagogy journal facebook page, which, in part, prompted eugene matusov to write “a student’s right to freedom of education.” while matusov does slightly mischaracterize our actions in his paper’s acknowledgements, his argument nonetheless stands in opposition to some of the pedagogical ideas motivating these actions. what follows, therefore, responds both to (1) our sense of matusov’s critique of our actions and their implications for a student’s right to freedom of education, as well as to (2) more fundamental claims he makes about the nature of education and the essentiality of freedom for it.1 we argue, in particular, that because technology has in recent years undergone such a fundamental metamorphosis, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) for educators to view it simply in terms of what we or our students would make of it. technology has always been integrated with our thinking, perhaps especially so in educational contexts, but now certain adaptive technologies may create more problems for students than they solve; to put this in matusov’s terms, it’s possible certain technologies readily embraced by both educators and students actually infringe upon the freedom of education which, he maintains, students are entitled to, more than they facilitate it. it is our contention that matusov’s failure to account for this possibility arises, in part, from the conception of radical freedom of education he espouses. such a conception, we think, not only relies on certain unsubstantiated assumptions he makes about students’ free agency, it denigrates expertise, devalues (and thus disregards) a number of potentially positive educational outcomes, and ultimately makes it harder for students to experience genuine dialogic education. 1 the great irony of our attempts to remove some forms of technology from our students’ pedagogical milieu is that because of the covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to jettison our approach entirely and conduct the last five weeks of our courses by relying exclusively on digital and web-based technologies. promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf31 a student’s right to freedom of education matusov’s fundamental claim is that students should be free to “define their own education” (p. sf2). according to the principles for a student’s right to freedom of education enumerated in his paper (p. sf10 and following), a student’s freedom extends into all realms of learning, including the curricular, instructional, valuative, and ecological (among others). the principles of instructional and ecological freedom, in particular, seem to entail that students should be able to determine for themselves what role(s) technologies might play in their learning. as matusov writes, “learning activities cannot be imposed on the student but only offered” (p. sf12), and certainly by learning activities he includes those enabled by technological means. he asserts, additionally, that “a teacher can develop a list of possible diverse, rich learning activities and projects that the student can choose from, modify, or amend with their own” (p. sf12), and here, again, the implication is that instructors genuinely committed to a student’s right to freedom of education are obliged not only to offer but to develop such learning activities and projects as they are able given the technologies available. in delineating students’ rights to ecological freedom, matusov argues that students require “access to diverse, rich, and safe resources” (p. sf13), and these may include, according to the example of an afterschool program he cites in his paper, a “computer room” (p. sf13) where learners, free to define the terms of their own education, can play video games. central to matusov’s conception of a student’s right to freedom of education is choice—not simply the ability to choose (a subject we’ll return to later) but the number or ‘diversity’ of choices offered to students by instructors. as he suggests by way of his discussion of the “curricular map,” which he provides students at the beginning of his courses and which offers potential avenues for their learning to take (p. sf11), the greatest variety seems to entail the greatest freedom. even if a student chooses a path of his or her own, one not offered by the curricular map, or, ultimately, not to engage in the learning process at all, it is incumbent upon educators to provide choice. as there are already inescapable and circumstantial limits placed on students’ abilities to freely define their own education, matusov naturally sees the additional limits placed by us on our students as an unethical infringement upon their right—this being the case regardless of the rationale for our actions. we, however, would like to maintain that our decision to remove certain forms of digital technology from our students’ pedagogical milieu was not only ethically motivated but a decision made in light of an ontological commitment that privileges dialogue and, ultimately, has students’ freedom as its aim. we simply think that the use of certain technologies makes dialogue harder, and thus the aim of freedom more difficult to achieve. technology and education it is not really surprising that the use of certain technologies can subvert the aims of those who use them. neil postman (1993) argued that technologies can only naively be thought of as tools unproblematically subject to their users’ desires for them. in technopoly, he cites the myth of theuth and thamus (presented by plato in the phaedrus): theuth is an inventor credited with the establishment of, among other things, arithmetic and geometry, and he brings to thamus, a wise king, his newest invention: the written word. theuth tells thamus that the people who employ this new technology will benefit by becoming both wiser and having better memories. thamus, though, suggests that theuth is too fond of his own invention to see objectively and reveals that the use of this particular technology will actually have the opposite of theuth’s desired effect: it will prompt forgetfulness in learners because “they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources,” and they will “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant” (plato, p. 96; qtd. in postman, p. 4). of promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf32 course, pedagogues’ concerns with technologies are not new, but we argue below that there is a current qualitative shift that makes current discussions about technology unique. perhaps the most surprising thing about postman’s thoughts on the “surrender of culture to technology” (his book’s subtitle) is that he first offered them in 1992, just before the rise of the technologies we’re highlighting below as “adaptive.” also writing in 1992 with a similar capacity for foresight was albert borgmann. in crossing the postmodern divide, borgmann spoke about a qualitative shift in the nature of technology (especially as it relates to humans) and the resultant advent of what he calls “a technologically sophisticated and glamorously unreal universe, distinguished by its hyperreality, hyperactivity, and hyperintelligence” (p. 6). hyperintelligence, borgmann argues, relates to the extension of human minds through integration with the processing and storage capacities of computers. such integration enables humans to grapple with more, cognitively speaking, and, not surprisingly, their enhanced ability to process information engenders a faster pace of life, which in turn propels humans into hyperactivity. at the same time, human minds, despite having technologically enhanced abilities, actually grapple with less and less of reality, as “processors” provide enhanced and augmented representations of reality—a hyperreality that overcomes and replaces tangible reality, which, according to borgmann, is “dirty and interminably ambiguous” and “moves at the deliberate pace of daily, seasonal, and generation rhythms” (p. 100). hyperreality, by contrast, is a refined technologically mediated simulacrum that “can be played at any time” (p. 100). as humans become increasingly integrated with and shaped by their engagement with hyperreality, technologies become more adaptive, more responsive to the new desires and ways of thinking produced by this intermingling of mind and tech. in some ways, both postman’s and borgmann’s concerns seem like profound understatements given the technological milieu in which we find ourselves today. popular writers such as tristan harris (n.d.) and jaron lanier (2018), former tech industry insiders, write about the way application developers structure our experience in such a way as to maximize what the tech industry calls ‘engagement’ (basically, time spent on an application). further, according to wu (2017) and alter (2018), applications are designed to produce pleasure in order to harvest the most valuable resource we have: our attention. attention provides a stream of data that can be sold to advertisers and used to manipulate our desires. lanier writes about instagram, for example, tracking the dilation of users’ pupils and the flush of their cheeks to learn what can be presented to keep people engaged with the application. snapchat tracks use in order to anticipate when people will become bored with the application and then sends notes to users that preempt their decision to take time away from the software. facebook algorithms customize the information presented in a way that creates a filter bubble, stimulating emotions which prompt us to stay in the application. unlike, say, the technology of the alarm clock that goes off at 6:00 am regardless of one’s desire to sleep in, our current technological milieu is uniquely demarcated by being increasingly hyperreal and adaptive.2 two consequences of hyperrealism, according to borgmann, seem relevant for our purposes here: sullenness and methodological universalism. sullenness is produced when, having been compelled by the comparative untidiness and dullness of life to retreat into hyperreality (and thus isolation), people experience indolence at the prospect of ever coming to terms with the excess of information available to them. this ultimately leaves them lacking both concern for complexity and the tenacity required to pursue certain personal enterprises. interestingly, borgmann predicted not only the erosion of self-discipline we see emergent in many students, but also the self-righteousness that manifests in assertions like ‘it’s my choice’ or ‘i’m free to do what i want.’ these may sound like indicators of responsibility, but they actually 2 the example of the alarm clock, as will become clear later in this paper, is itself not entirely unproblematic. promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf33 express a sullen retreat from life amounting to a “refusal to discuss, explain, and justify a decision” (p. 10). communal ties in hyperreality become burdensome and dialogue almost impossible. methodological universalism insists upon the primacy of method in learning, which means that education becomes not about what is learned (i.e. substance) but, rather, the universally applicable need to rank or measure. to put it another way, hyperreality engenders a pedagogical milieu in which it makes less sense to ask if one has learned something than it does if there is a suitable token that may be taken to signify educational success. further, methodological universalism accords with a fragmentary approach to information where what is known is by necessity abstracted or divorced from context and life. to turn to our situation: while it would seem that the ability to email their instructors, to learn (at times) via powerpoint, and to access information or course materials through the lms could only benefit students, we think that each of the above technologies not only participates in but perpetuates our hyperreal pedagogical milieu and, in various ways, disinclines students from the embodied communication essential for dialogic education. email has the potential to direct both educators and learners away from rather than toward dialogue and the complexities it invites. i myself (dd) regularly receive email communications from students offering me a thought—often a tentative thesis statement for a paper—and then prompting me to respond in one of two ways: either yes, this is a good thought, or no, this is not a good thought. and despite my attempts to respond in nuanced ways (neither yes nor no), students tend to interpret any response other than a clear and definitive yes as negative. this perceived negative response is, for many students, alienating. the reasons for this are various, but certainly email itself might be seen as, first, encouraging simple-minded or categorically-reductive thinking, and second, by training students to expect answers that conform to their desires, prompting both their perception of rejection and the subsequent alienation they experience.3 additionally, email technology creates a pedagogical milieu that absents addressees from the consideration of senders. the student who sends an email asking for (and thus expecting) a particular kind of response either disregards the addressee or abstracts them from their embodied existence.4 email, like other technologies, is unnaturally—inhumanely, we might say—static: the addressee is always the same— name@emailaddress.domain—even though the person receiving the emails changes from moment to moment, depending on context, mood, thoughts, etc. finally, the accessibility and immediacy of email trains both educators and learners to treat addressees as though they, too, were always accessible and ought to be immediately responsive—treats them, in other words, not as humans but as the technologies with which they are increasingly integrated. powerpoint is also emblematic of our hyperreal pedagogical milieu. indeed, instructors are strongly encouraged to use the software just by virtue of the fact that it is (almost without exception) provided to them by their institutions; it is an integral part of their intellectual world. instructors are thus trained by a technology that by its very nature breaks things down into individual units to reduce their knowledge into easily consumable bullet-points. and these bullet-points, in turn, encourage students to anticipate knowledge being transmitted to them in a fragmentary way, disconnected from the whole. though borgmann had no knowledge of powerpoint technology, his claim that method would replace substance is, here, very much on display (pun intended). we see, too, the real, embodied educator absented—become 3 certainly, this alienation we identify is related to borgmann’s concept of sullenness, which is characterized by the same kind of withdrawal from dialogic engagement i have observed in students. 4 we see an extreme example of this phenomenon of absent addressees in the comments sections of popular news stories; there, readers, having very little sense or awareness of the people they’re addressing (either the writer of the article or, perhaps, subjects mentioned in the article), feel unnaturally free to express their vilest and hateful thoughts. they become disassociated from the human connections that underscore all ethical relationships. promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf34 the abstraction of a bright and seductive screen, which has itself become the measure of what’s significant or meaningful. but the seduction is not simply visual: powerpoint invites learners to desire a form of education that is disengaged from others (and thus comfortable) and entices them into thinking that learning occurs primarily in terms of the hyperreal (for these bullet-points often have little observable connection to their everyday experiences). learning management systems likewise become, in students’ minds, abstracted or distantiated versions of their instructors (or, in some cases, a given author being read in a course). if life is dirty, ambiguous, and slow, then the lms offers an appealing alternative. here, instructors can post their messages to students, powerpoint slides, assignments, rubrics, and other course materials; and students can access these at their leisure, whenever they desire it. like email and powerpoint, the lms has the effect of training students to conceive of their instructors in the same terms they use to think about the technologies they employ, in borgmann’s sense, as dispensable resources, able to be accessed with ease, but also, and more problematically, without much in the way of ethical obligation. a student misplaces his syllabus for a given course and, unable (for whatever reason) to access a digital version from the course’s lms, transfers his expectation onto the instructor. or, a student clicks the “completed” boxes for her assignments and thinks, as a result, she has done all her instructor desires her to do. it hardly needs to be said that the accessibility and reward of such a system are features designed, as those of instagram, twitter, facebook, to keep students engaged. a question, though, is engaged with what exactly? email, powerpoint, and lms technology may have the potential to be useful dialogic tools, but because they tend to create and feed particular kinds of desires and ways of thinking (in both learners and educators), they typically reduce opportunities for actual dialogic education rather than increase them. for students who have grown up surrounded by such adaptive technologies, to, say, email a professor with the intention of seeking dialogue requires a singular resistance to the tendencies of the medium itself. dialogue is already hard, so by allowing email to be a primary means of communication between educators and learners, we’re essentially asking those learners to do one thing when being passively encouraged by the medium to do another. additionally, having been habituated to certain technologies—having, in other words, had their thinking inextricably integrated with their environment—students may not actually be capable of enjoying a free relationship to technology. in his popular book the shallows, nicholas carr (2011) offers a good illustration of technology integrating with the performance of psychology: the invention of the clock. prior to the existence of the clock, humans thought differently about time. activities were not conceived of in terms of duration and rendezvous, for example, were not understood as occurring at fixed points in time. humans’ entire way of thinking about the movement of life throughout the day was completely different. technologies are integrated with human thinking, and so psychological activities like learning in a classroom are integrated with the technological milieu in which we all find ourselves. postman would argue that students are decidedly not free to think about time in the way that people prior to the clock’s invention did. central to dialogic pedagogy is the notion of dialogue rooted in the bakhtinian tradition. life is polyphonic—there is never a single voice expressed in a given utterance—and bakhtin, not surprisingly, is critical of attempts to be monologic. matusov picks up on bakhtin’s emphasis on freedom from monologic tendencies in education and, consequently, embraces variety and students’ freedom of choice as a means to disrupt these tendencies—to create the loopholes and parodies that prevent and subvert the hegemony of monologic utterances. there is a logic to his embracing of these, but also, as we hope we’re showing, a lack of consideration for both adaptive technology’s tendency to inhibit educators’ attempts to disrupt such monologic utterances and the fact (which will be discussed below) that dialogue requires more than simply freedom. indeed, our decision to remove some forms of technology from our students’ pedagogical milieu— promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf35 technologies we recognize as creating a certain uniformity of desire and thought in students, as well as a disinclination to dialogue—is an attempt to engineer a so-called rupture. we sought to push back against the alienation characterizing our students—an alienation many are entirely unaware of—and offer them a genuine experience of embodied dialogic education. matusov privileges student desire in advocating for a student’s right to free education, but his insistence on radical freedom relies on the assumption that students are actually free to choose. such a freedom would seem to entail, among other things, students’ free relationship with technology, but this, as we have suggested, is problematic. indeed, we might say that matusov’s whole conception of students’ freedom to choose needs to be reconsidered. matusov’s radical freedom matusov eschews all notions of instrumentality in education. one of the consequences of his position is that educator-determined outcomes become untenable, for in order to ensure a given outcome is fulfilled an instructor must by necessity make impositions on his or her students, whether these be curricular, valuative, ecological, or what have you. and, to reiterate, matusov insists that students “must have the exclusive right to freely define their own education” (p. sf2). we return to this familiar refrain because it bears thinking about where the legitimacy of students’ exclusive right comes from. what is it, specifically, that enables them to choose the course their education takes? from what does their authority—their ability to ‘author’ their own education—derive? while these may seem like questions posed in jest, there are at least two potential answers suggested by matusov that ought to be considered. the first is that students’ right to define the terms of their own education doesn’t derive from expertise. matusov is very clear that not having knowledge in, say, a given field shouldn’t disqualify students from choosing the course of their own education. indeed, he claims that instructors are often tempted to foist their own educational agenda on students in view of their ignorance, and that those who succumb to this temptation fail in their educational mandate; they effectively “table” their students “educational desires […] until […] school is over” (p. sf11). it is crucial to education, he insists, not to position students as objects but, instead, to facilitate their role as subjects of education. matusov goes so far as to suggest that “when the teacher selects and imposes the material that the student must learn to master and transcend, the teacher severely curtails the student’s creativity” and consequently “either destroy[s] or severely damage[s] their creative self-expression” (pp. sf7-sf8). this, in matusov’s terms, is “pedagogical violence” (p. sf6). we will return to the notion of pedagogical violence but, first, would like to consider matusov’s reference, here, to “self-expression.” this term points us, again, to the question of what legitimates students’ exclusive right to freely define their education. if the answer is not expertise, then it can only be some thing already in their possession, something which can be expressed. it is, again, not our desire to be playful or vague, but matusov is not at all clear about what this thing is, about what legitimates students’ intrinsic right to freedom of education or, more to the point, what enables them to so freely define their education. from matusov’s perspective, students simply have it, and imposed outcomes, like attempts to make “people […] good through education," ultimately “strip people of their agency to make their own moral choices” (p. sf6). our contention, to put it another way, is that matusov assumes, problematically, that students de facto have freedom, that they are, even before they formally enter into an educational context, capable of choosing the course or defining freely the terms of their own education. we’ve already tried to illustrate in our discussion of email, powerpoint, and lms technology that this is in no way a given. what if students, we would like to ask, aren’t free, and our removal of certain technologies serves to free them, if only a little? promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf36 matusov writes that if a student doesn’t take ownership of his own education, he will act “like a zombie […] without much spirit” (p. sf8), but (to borrow his metaphor) what if students enter our classrooms already zombiefied? the difference between matusov’s conception of freedom in education and ours should now be patent: whereas he thinks freedom is essential to education—for example, all of the educational paradigms he outlines “need a student’s freedom” (p. sf3, emphasis added)—we think freedom is more appropriately thought of as the end of education. a consequence of our position is that, while freedom is always a factor in education, it’s inevitably a limited rather than a “radical” freedom. certainly socrates, an emblem of dialogic education, not only exercised power over many of his interlocutors and sought to use that power for his own educational aims (i.e. outcomes), he engaged with others relying on an assumed epistemology and ontology. matusov’s characterization of the education paradigm of critical examination, wherein “[a]ny construction of knowledge […] is by-productive” (p. sf4), would be entirely foreign to socrates, for his goal was ever to move those he spoke with closer to a knowledge of the good, which would, in turn, free them. matusov’s characterization of radical freedom in education requires him to make a number of seemingly all-or-nothing type of statements. he says, for example, in his discussion of the training educational paradigm, that “foisted” education is “often irrelevant, insensitive, and not very motivating” (p. sf10). what is the basis of such a claim? our response to the problem of technology is to enable dialogue that is simply relevant, sensitive, and motivating. wouldn’t it rather be the case that the bulk of the content students receive in educational training is about paradigmatic situations that are quite relevant, but nevertheless seemingly irrelevant in their dirty and slow realism? even more egregious are the assumptions matusov makes about what can and can’t be meaningful to students. he says, in the “rebukes to objections” section of his paper, that “without a student actively raising a question important for the student, their teacher’s answer usually remains meaningless for the student” (p. sf19). again, usually meaningless? or, as is implied, lacking entirely in meaning? isn’t it possible for students to adopt the ideas of their instructors about what is meaningful, at least to some degree? can students respond only with slavish obedience when imposed upon by their instructors? isn’t it conceivable that students could oscillate between being objects and subjects of education, and learn from this very oscillation, this intermittent inequality? finally, when matusov, at the end of his paper, suggests that “a teacher can legitimately […] expose the students to alternative ideas and activities [and] challenge the students’ dear ideas and beliefs (at the students’ consent)” (p. sf15), isn’t it a very fine line between “impose” and “expose”? as we’ve already suggested, given the potential difficulty of freely defining the terms of their own education, isn’t the “consent” students give in this scenario highly problematic? it’s not like the consequences of a given educational choice can be easily explained to students who haven’t yet developed the critical vocabulary to understand that choice or consider its consequences. ultimately, our decision to remove some digital technologies from our students’ pedagogical milieu was founded upon a desire to create a rupture in the flow of what we see as their alienated praxis. (such a rupture may well create student agency where it previously didn’t exist.) we wanted them to have a genuine educational experience of real dialogue. but dialogue, in our view, involves not just freedom (as matusov insists) but an ontological given. when bakhtin writes about dialogue requiring “embodied meanings” that must come into “inner contact,” he is drawing attention to a certain ontological weightiness (see cresswell & sullivan, 2019), to the fact that in dialogue something important is always at stake. bakhtin writes: the weakening or destruction of a monologic context occurs only when there is a coming together of two utterances equally and directly oriented toward a referential object. two discourses equally and directly comment on text eugene matusov: darren and jim, this is a very important and helpful discussion. my reply is that i agree with it is impossible to ask for a student for a consent each other, an educator exposes the student to new ideas. in order to get an informed consent, a student must be exposed to the idea first, right? however, my solution is the following. by coming to the teacher, rather than being forced to attend a class, the student has trust in the teacher. this trust is conditional. if the student become increasingly dissatisfied with the teacher, the student has the right to move away from the teacher or, at least, to ask for some changes. my proposal is not to design a flawless educational practice, but rather self-correcting one. i remember a student of mine who proposed to study a new topic that was initially not on the class’s curricular map “issues of suicide in education.” her peers voted for this topic. however, the student contacted me telling that she was not planning to attend this class because the issue was too close to her. i affirmed her decision and asked her for a permission to share our conversation with the class, which i did. for me, this is a nice example of such a negotiation. promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf37 oriented toward a referential object within the limits of a single context cannot exist side by side without intersecting dialogically, regardless of whether they confirm, mutually supplement, or (conversely) contradict one another, or find themselves in some other dialogic relationship (that of question and answer, for example). […] two embodied meanings cannot lie side by side like two objects – they must come into inner contact; that is, they must enter into a semantic bond. (1984a, pp. 188-189, emphasis added). the notion of a “referential object” may seem like a curious idea given that bakhtin is well known to espouse a dialogical approach to epistemology that precludes naïve realism. his discussion of embodiment in the case of rabelais (1984b), his early aesthetics (1990), and the forgoing passage from his work on dostoevsky (1984) all highlight how language is embodied by those that express it. language constitutes the worlds that we experience with verisimilar objectivity and so speech genres are genres that constitute how we perceive and viscerally experience the world. dialogue, therefore, necessarily involves what we take as an ontological given. as such, where matusov insists upon the freedom of dialogue, we are inclined to insist upon dialogue’s ontological weight—dialogue that is about things that matter. the inhibitive force of adaptive technologies can undermine such weightiness, inclining students to remain alienated to the degree that there may well be nothing at stake for them, and they take no personal responsibility in their learning. in such cases, it is the educators who must bring something that matters for them as an ethical obligation— perhaps a concern for their very selves or a respect for the material they teach. if students feel discomfort at the prospect of such an imposition, at being forced out of their alienated praxis, then this may well be a form of pedagogical ‘violence’ we affirm. alexander pope wrote in his essay on criticism that “[a] little learning is a dangerous thing; / drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring” (ll. 215-6), and his sentiment is undeniably true. likewise, in daniel deronda, george writes, “it is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness” (bk. 5, ch. 35). such a sentiment obviously stands in stark opposition to the kind of education matusov champions; we cite it here only to suggest that for all the freedom matusov insists students should have, his insistence makes it impossible for them to experience what eliot describes. if education is a dance (and a dance where one partner leads, at least for some of the time), our current pedagogical milieu, characterized by adaptive technologies, is like a brick wall standing between the partners in the middle of the dance floor, limiting their free movement. references alter, a. (2018). irresistible: the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. new york: penguin. bakhtin, m. (1984a). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (c. emerson, trans.). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. (1984b). rabelais and his world (h. iswolsky, trans.). bloomington: indiana university press. bakhtin, m. (1986). the problem of speech genres (v. mcghee, trans.). in c. emerson & m. holquist (eds.), speech genres and other late essays (pp. 60-102). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. (1990). author and hero in aesthetic activity (v. liapunov & k. brostrom, trans.). in m. holquist & v. liapunov (eds.), art and answerability: early philosophical essays. austin: university of texas press. promoting dialogic pedagogy through restricting technologies darren dyck and james (jim) cresswell dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.359 | vol. 8 (2020) sf38 bakhtin, m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act (v. liapunov, trans.). austin: university of texas press. borgmann, a. (1992). crossing the postmodern divide. chicago: university of chicago press. carr, n. (2011). the shallows: what the internet is doing to our brains. new york: w. w. norton press. cresswell, j., & sullivan, p. (2019). bakhtin’s chronotope, eros, & discursive psychology: towards a richer interpretation of experience. qualitative research in psychology, 17(1), 121-142. eliot, g. (1986). daniel deronda. toronto: penguin. harris, t. (n.d.) https://www.tristanharris.com/resources. lanier, j. (2018). ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now. new york: henry holt and co. matusov, e. (2020). a student’s right to freedom of education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8 (2020), sf1-sf28. doi:10.5195/dpj.2020.356 plato. (1973). phaedrus and letters vii and viii (w. hamilton, trans.) new york: penguin. pope, a. (2018). essay in criticism. in stephen greenblatt & james noggle (eds.), the norton anthology of english literature, tenth edition. new york: norton & company. postman, n. (1993). technopoly. new york: vintage. wu., t. (2017). the attention merchants: the epic scramble to get inside our heads. new york: vintage press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word howe, classroom interaction and student learning, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a26 classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe university of cambridge, uk abstract analyses of classroom interaction have frequently spotlighted reasoned dialogue as beneficial for student learning, and research into small-group activity amongst students offers empirical support. however, the evidence relating to teacherstudent interaction has never been compelling, and one of the few studies to investigate the issue directly detected no relation whatsoever between reasoned dialogue and learning outcomes. the present paper outlines additional data from that study, together with evidence from elsewhere, with a view to interpreting the results relating to reasoned dialogue. account is taken of the generally positive evidence obtained from studies of group work amongst students. the key proposal is that it may be reasoned opposition that promotes learning rather than reasoned dialogue in general, and reasoned opposition is probably rare when teachers are involved. the proposal has implications for both the dialogic and the argumentation perspective upon classroom interaction, and these are discussed. keywords: classroom dialogue; student learning; dialogic education; argumentation; reasoned dialogue; reasoned opposition christine howe is professor of education (emerita) at the university of cambridge. her research has been at the intersection of psychology, education, and linguistics, with major interests including children’s communicative, linguistic and peer relational skills, child and adolescent reasoning in science and mathematics, and dialogue and learning during peer collaboration and teacher-led instruction. christine’s research has received more-or-less continuous funding from the economic and social research council of great britain for over 30 years, with research support also won from british academy, leverhulme, nuffield, and various governmental and local authority sources. she has published seven books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and has acted as editor for three academic journals while also serving on many editorial boards. she has held strategic appointments at the local, national, and international levels in relation to research and doctoral/post-doctoral training. she is a fellow of the academy of social sciences. acknowledgements this paper draws heavily upon research funded by the economic and social research council of great britain (grant: es/m007103/1), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. while the author is entirely responsible for the paper’s contents, she has benefitted enormously from discussions of the subject matter with professors sara hennessy and neil mercer and wishes to thank them both. ïïò issn: 2325-3290 (online) classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a27 introduction two theoretical perspectives have come to dominate research into the implications of classroom dialogue for student learning. one of these perspectives is aligned with the concept of ‘dialogic pedagogy’ (sometimes ‘dialogic education’ or ‘dialogic teaching’), a concept that was arguably first delineated by freire (e.g.,1970). in freire’s writings, the concept is anchored around student empowerment, and hence dialogue where students express and discuss their initial understandings of the issues at stake and, in collaboration with teachers, work gradually towards mutually acceptable and co-constructed analyses. whilst it would be overly simplistic to treat subsequent research from the dialogic perspective as homogeneous, the notion of empowerment remains central: 21 of the 47 chapters in the routledge international handbook of research on dialogic education (edited by mercer et al., 2020) offer a definition of ‘dialogic education’, and in 20 of those 21 chapters the definition revolves around creating space for, respecting, and building upon the multiple ‘voices’ that exist in classrooms. by contrast, the second perspective is rooted not in dialogue nor in student learning but in discourse, specifically the discursive moves that toulmin (1958) regarded as constituting an argument. these moves include making claims, supporting claims with evidence, and offering rebuttals, and are as possible in monologue, written text and individual imagination as they are in dialogue. nevertheless, from a review reported in asterhan and schwarz (2016), there is now an identifiable body of classroom-based research, which spotlights the argumentation that occurs during dialogue specifically, and examines its implications for what students learn (including their mastery of argument in written text – see, e.g., larrain et al., 2021; matos, 2021). typically, this research focuses upon claims, evidence, rebuttals, counterarguments and so on when opposing views are expressed during dialogue. often (but certainly not always), the interest is in dialogue where opposing parties attempt to persuade each other to change their opinions (felton et al., 2019; iordanou & kuhn, 2020; matos, 2021). research into classroom dialogue from these two theoretical perspectives has resulted in many potentially productive features being highighted, and prominent amongst these is the expression of reasons. at least 15 chapters in mercer et al.’s (2020) handbook endorse this feature from the dialogic perspective, usually viewing it as part-and-parcel of the resolution of differences needed to achieve co-construction. toulmin’s (1958) foregrounding of evidence (through his concepts of ‘ground’, ‘warrant’ and ‘backing’) has guaranteed the centrality of reasoned dialogue within the argumentation tradition, perhaps even more strongly than within the dialogic (rapanta & felton, 2021). certainly, the provision of reasons is so significant for van eemeren et al. (1996) that they locate this within their definition of what it means to argue, specifically, ‘argumentation is […] aimed at increasing (or decreasing) the acceptability of a controversial standpoint […] by putting forward a constellation of propositions intended to justify (or refute) the standpoint’ (p.5, my italics). reasoned dialogue also emerged as a key criterion in a validation exercise conducted during the study reported in howe et al. (2019). here, transcripts of the teacher-student dialogue occurring during five (roughly 60-minute) lessons were sent to eight experts in the field, including representatives of both the dialogic and argumentation perspectives. the experts were asked to rank the transcripts for what, from their own perspective, looked to be the value of the lessons for student learning. there was a high degree of agreement across the rankings (w=0.66, p<.001). moreover, of the two dialogue features that significantly predicted the experts’ mean rankings (rs=.76, p=.02), one was the ratio of reasoned turns at talking to what were called ‘non-dialogic turns’, the latter being turns that contemporary researchers would regard as non-productive regardless of their theoretical perspective. as they worked through the transcripts, six experts also noted features that struck them as relevant. there was variation over which features were classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a28 mentioned. for instance, some but not all experts referred to building upon student engagement and shared knowledge. however, all six accorded considerable significance to the expression of reasons. so, reasoned dialogue in classrooms is widely believed to be productive as regards student learning, but how firmly is this belief grounded in evidence? this question provides the starting point for the present paper, hence becoming the focus of the first of the sections to follow. research is summarized that documents positive consequences from reasoned dialogue when this occurs during group work amongst students, while at the same time indicating little impact from reasoned dialogue when teachers are involved. taking this to mean that reasoned dialogue may not in itself be sufficient to support student learning, a subsequent section explores what else is required and suggests that a key factor may be whether or not the reasons offered during dialogue are in opposition. while this suggestion is presented merely as a hypothesis to be tested in the future, it is not devoid of consistent empirical evidence, and this will be discussed. having spotlighted reasoned opposition, the paper will conclude by considering the implications for the dialogic and the argumentation theoretical perspectives. it will claim that while qualification of widely held views would be necessitated, the implications may, paradoxically, be closer to the ethos of both perspectives than those associated with reasoned dialogue in general. reasons and classroom learning starting then with contexts where students work together in small groups without immediate teacher involvement, there are, by now, no grounds for doubting that reasoned dialogue can promote positive learning outcomes. i have myself been directly involved in over 30 relevant studies here, covering mastery of general reasoning skills as well as learning in curriculum subjects like science, mathematics, the humanities, and the social sciences. child, adolescent, and adult learners were all involved (see howe, 2021, for the most recent summary of these studies). each study required students to collaborate over educationally relevant tasks about which they typically held differing opinions. while some studies were conducted out of class, a fair number took place in authentic classroom settings. in many cases, the relations between group dialogue and student learning were examined, and whenever this was done, the incidence of reasoned dialogue proved to be positively predictive of learning gain. reasoned dialogue also features prominently in mercer’s concept of ‘exploratory talk’, and numerous studies conducted within or inspired by mercer and colleagues’ thinking together programme endorse the value of such talk when this occurs during small-group interaction amongst students (see mercer & littleton, 2007, for a summary here). paralleling what my studies have shown, exploratory talk appears to promote both general reasoning and curriculum mastery. this form of talk is also closely related (including over reasoned dialogue) to asterhan and schwarz’s notion of ‘dialectical argumentation’, and asterhan and schwarz’s 2016 review outlines many studies conducted by themselves and others that demonstrate the value of dialectical argumentation for students outcomes. several of these studies pinpoint reasoned dialogue specifically (see asterhan & schwarz, 2016). nevertheless, for all the value of the dialogue it can stimulate, small-group work amongst students is not the major forum for teaching and learning in classrooms. the axis around which classrooms revolve is teacher-student/s interaction, yet while there have been numerous investigations of dialogue in that context (howe & abedin, 2013), conclusive evidence about the impact of reasoned dialogue is hard to detect. as detailed elsewhere (howe & abedin, 2013; howe et al., 2019), one reason is that many analyses of teacher-student dialogue have been descriptive rather than concerned with consequences. another is that when consequences have been addressed, it is typically the consequences of packages of features rather than features taken separately, thus, even when the package includes reasoned dialogue (as, e.g., classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a29 with alexander et al., 2017; o’connor et al., 2015; osborne et al., 2013), its contribution to learning outcomes cannot be isolated. however, one study that did isolate relationships is the one reported in howe et al. (2019). in brief (but see the 2019 publication for details), this study was conducted in 72 classrooms located in primary schools spread across england. all classrooms were year 6 or year 5/6 composites (students aged 10 to 11 years), while also being socio-economically and ethnically diverse (0-100% of students per class eligible for free school meals; 0-96% from minority ethnic backgrounds). lessons were video-recorded in each classroom, with the sample for analysis comprising two lessons per classroom (i.e., 144 in total). the sample was chosen to ensure that the lessons from each classroom covered two curriculum subjects, specifically any two from literacy, mathematics, and science. the 72 teachers who ran the lessons had been working with the students from the start of the school year, and consistent with uk policy which largely eschews subject specialism at the primary school level, covered most (and usually all) of the teaching throughout the year. all teacher turns at talking during the target lessons were coded using a scheme adapted from hennessy et al. (2016 – see also hennessy et al., 2020), as were those student turns that occurred during interaction with teachers. student-student interaction that occurred without teacher involvement, for instance, during group work, was not coded via the scheme, but as detailed below, it was taken into consideration. the coding scheme covered a wide variety of dialogue features in addition to reasons, but reasons were included, with turns regarded as reasoned when they addressed explanations or justifications of own or another’s contribution or speculated, predicted, or hypothesized with grounds given. initially, reasoned turns were sub-divided according to whether they invited or provided reasons and whether they were taken by the teacher or a student. however, the frequencies of these subcategories were so strongly inter-correlated that they were combined into a single ‘reasoned’ category, with two variables derived for purposes of analysis: the absolute frequency of reasoned turns across the two lessons in each classroom (taking account of variation in lesson length), and the ratio of the frequency of reasoned turns to the frequency of non-dialogic turns. using multi-level modelling to respect the nesting of students within classrooms, analyses explored whether variation across classrooms in the usage of the two variables predicted end-of-year measures of student outcome. five of the six outcome measures addressed student learning: 1) scores on three nationwide and statutory standardized achievement tests (sat), covering mathematics, reading, and spag (spelling, punctuation, and grammar); 2) scores on a specially designed test of conceptual and procedural knowledge in science; 3) scores on a specially designed reasoning test, covering the ability to differentiate facts from opinions and reasons from conclusions, to draw inferences, and to compare and evaluate reasons (see ahmed et al., 2021, for details of the latter). all five measures were wide-ranging in scope, and in covering both curriculum mastery and general reasoning, mirrored the subject matter of the afore-mentioned investigations of group work amongst students. modelling took relevant baseline attainment (assessed through start-of-year tests) into consideration, along with further factors (assessed through questionnaires or direct observation) that, by virtue of being related to both dialogue and outcome, could potentially confound interpretation of dialogueoutcome relations. coefficients were obtained, which indicated the extent to which the two indices of reasoned dialogue predicted each of the outcome measures, and table 1 reports the statistical significance of those coefficients. as is clear, there was no predictive relationship whatsoever. modelling also examined the predictive value of the two indices in interaction with other dialogue variables in howe et al.’s (2019) set, and once more the coefficients that emerged were consistently non-significant (ps=.12 to .88, m=.42). classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a30 overall then, the message from howe et al.’s data is that reasoned dialogue during teacher-student interaction does not predict student learning outcomes, and as such appears to play no role in supporting those outcomes. table 1: significance of the relation between indices of reasoned dialogue and measures of student learning reasoned reasoned: non-dialogic maths sat f(1, 59.17)=0.10, p=.75 f(1, 60.01)=0.15, p=.70 reading sat f(1, 67.34)=0.08, p=.78 f(1, 68.85)=1.42, p=.24 spag sat f(1, 64.88)=0.18, p=.67 f(1, 66.47)=0.61, p=.44 science f(1, 44.59)=0.28, p=.60 f(1, 44.29)=0.96, p=.33 reasoning f(1, 69.88)=0.26, p=.61 f(1, 70.07)=0.17, p=.68 when the results were so consistent, it is hard to dismiss them as artefactual. this is perhaps particularly the case given other features of the dataset. first, the dataset was substantial: 10,991 reasoned turns were identified across the 144 lessons. second, as detailed in howe et al. (2019) theoretically interpretable relationships were detected with other variables. specifically, the frequencies of elaboration (building on, evaluating, elaborating, or clarifying own or other’s contribution) and querying (doubting, challenging, rejecting, or disagreeing with a statement) were positively associated with some of the outcome measures, so long as levels of student participation were high. this resonates with the dialogic perspective’s emphasis upon empowerment and co-construction. third, there are grounds for thinking that, in contrast to teacher-student interaction, reasoned dialogue during small-group work amongst students was just as productive within the recorded lessons as it has proved in earlier studies. with the focus upon dialogue involving teachers, the quality of group work was not treated as a primary factor in howe et al.’s analyses but rather regarded as a potential confound and assessed with that in mind. reasoned dialogue was included amongst the factors contributing to the derived index of group work quality. howe’s (2021) follow-up study using the howe et al. dataset indicates that small-group work took place in 71 of the 72 classrooms, and the index of its quality was positively and significantly predictive of student performance on mathematics sat, reading sat, spag sat and the reasoning test. nevertheless, the howe et al. (2019) paper is a report of a single study, and questions must be raised about the representativeness of the results. are the results specific to that study, or are they indicative of something more general? such questions are critical when considering how deeply to delve into interpretation and implications, yet they are also hard to answer given the dearth of comparable research. as noted, research into teacher-student dialogue has seldom gone beyond description, and even when it has, the effects of specific features are hard to isolate. howe et al.’s systematic approach to broader confounds is also unusual. yet, even in the absence of complementary data, the size of howe et al.’s sample and its demographic heterogeneity provide some grounds for thinking that their results may be applicable across england, and arguably across the uk as a whole. as for other countries, the truth is even more elusive, yet i personally should not be surprised to find a degree of generalizability. there is certainly no evidence at present against the results being replicated elsewhere. moreover, the studies of dialogue during small-group work, with which this section began, are international. therefore, the fact that howe (2021) found howe et al.’s group-work data to be consistent with those studies suggests that their findings about teacher-student interaction may also resonate cross-culturally. so, while i accept unreservedly that classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a31 additional research is needed, the possibility that howe et al.’s findings about reasoned dialogue apply more generally seemed, to me at least, sufficiently plausible to warrant further analysis. the section to follow will summarize the results of my own attempts at such analysis. possible relevance of reasoned opposition i took the key issue not merely to be one of explaining why reasoned dialogue looks to be non-productive when this occurs during teacher-student interaction, but rather of ascertaining why this is the case when such dialogue is manifestly facilitative during small-group interaction amongst students. the issue is especially germane (and perplexing) when the subject matter of research in the two contexts overlaps, both examining curriculum mastery and general reasoning, and coupling howe’s (2021) follow-up study with the howe et al. (2019) research, the difference seems to be detectable within the same dataset. crucial to resolving the issue is achieving clarity over two possibilities, the first being that reasoned dialogue is inherently conducive to learning, but its potential can be blocked during teacher-student interaction, and the second being that reasoned dialogue is not in itself sufficient to trigger learning but rather depends upon some additional factor/s whose probability is greater during interaction amongst students than when teachers are involved. research with very young children points very strongly against ‘inherent conduciveness’, thus suggesting that the second possibility is the one to pursue. specifically, bloom and colleagues have established that most children start to express reasons shortly after their second birthday (see, e.g., bloom & capatides, 1987; hood & bloom, 1979), almost always when talking about actions. young children offer reasons for proposed actions (e.g., ‘get another one; it dirty’, ‘can’t do it; you do it’), ongoing actions (e.g., ‘i’m putting medicine on the lamb’s leg cause he had a boo-boo’, ‘take off my socks because it’s not cold’), and states stemming from past actions (e.g., ‘i don’t have any more tape; it’s all used up now’, ‘too stuck; i can’t do it’). importantly, five of these six examples (like most others in the hood and bloom article from which these six are extracted) were the initiating contributions to dialogues with adults. in other words, they were not used imitatively, defensively, or to clarify. equally, they were not in response to ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions. in fact, bloom’s team did not detect reasons in response to questions until several months after reasoned remarks were first observed: adults probably start to ask ‘how’ and ‘why’ because they realize that children can express reasons, not the reverse. in any event, when these early reasons typically lie within initiating contributions, there would appear to be two (and only two) possible interpretations of their function. the first is that they are purely declamatory, perhaps expressing children’s pleasure in newly learned linguistic constructions or their interest in causal connections. the second is that reasons are included to add force to requests and claims in order to boost their impact upon their recipients (and presumably to secure compliance). most likely, the use of reasons with both of these functions will be detectable across corpora of utterances from any individual child. with neither function, though, is the focus on the security of the child speaker’s own knowledge and understanding. since the latter focus is obviously required for any learning to occur, it becomes almost self-evident that when reasons are first expressed, their use cannot, in itself, be conducive to the learning of those who express them. assuming then that reasoned dialogue is not inherently conducive to learning but requires something additional for learning to be triggered, a plausible source for this additional factor is the opposition that children will sometimes encounter. requests and claims will sometimes fail to achieve their intended impact, even when supplemented with reasons, and failure will sometimes result in opposition. moreover, opposition may be coupled with reasons that contrast with those that the child has offered. ‘take off my socks because it’s not cold’ may trigger ‘but we’re going to the park, and it’s cold outside, so keep classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a32 them on’. ‘too stuck; i can’t do it’ may prompt ‘it’s not really stuck, just pull a bit harder’. sometimes such retorts will be summarily rejected (e.g., ‘it’s not cold’, ‘it is stuck’), but sometimes they will initiate a rethink (e.g., ‘i’d better keep my socks on then’, ‘well, i’ll try once more’) and here, in a nutshell, something will have been learned. moreover, because this learning will include material covered in the reasons (e.g., the weather, resistance to pull), the contrasting reasons will have contributed. of course, opposition without reasons (e.g., ‘take off my socks because it’s not cold’, ‘no, keep them on’) could, in theory, also trigger reflection on the contents of reasons and perhaps learning too, but with the focus firmly on the proposed action rather than the rationale, reflection and learning seem less likely. assuming then that reasoned dialogue is not inherently conducive to learning (with this ‘natural’ potential sometimes blocked), but rather dependent on something additional for any positive effects, the suggestion here is that this additional factor may be reasoned opposition. crucially in the present context, research from the argumentation perspective conducted by larrain and her colleagues indicates that the suggestion need not be limited to two-year-olds in informal settings but is also applicable with older children in classroom environments. this research includes a study (larrain et al., 2019) where students from eight classes were videotaped while they worked with teachers or in small groups on the topic of physical forces. dialogue coding differentiated arguments (where reasons and justifications were used to support claims) from counterarguments (where reasons and justifications were used to oppose arguments or to support claims that had previously been opposed). defined in this manner, arguments will not necessarily have been located within reasoned opposition, but reasoned opposition is inherent within the very concept of counterargument. larrain et al. found that the expression of counterarguments was positively predictive of student progress, but the expression of arguments was unrelated. in a subsequent case study focusing on the interaction amongst five students, larrain et al. (2022) examine relations between counterargument and the accuracy of group solutions. during the second of six sessions around the topic of natural selection, argumentation, in general, occurred with high frequency, and 71% of relevant moves included counterargument. argumentation was rare in the third, fourth and fifth sessions, and counterargument virtually non-existent, yet after a dip in performance during the third session, accurate group solutions were obtained in the fourth and fifth sessions. these results are consistent with the supposition that it was the reasoned opposition inherent within counterargument that drove growth, while also implying that the students needed time to reflect and consolidate before their gains were secure. the latter is further suggestive of the delayed benefits from small-group interaction amongst students that my colleagues and i have detected on many occasions (e.g., howe et al., 1992, 2005; tolmie et al., 1993), sometimes (anticipating recent evidence for ‘productive failure’ – see, e.g., kapur, 2008) after group solutions that were actually worse than those that participating students produced individually at pretest. the research of larrain and colleagues must be treated with caution: the 2019 work is relatively small-scale and the 2022 case study is open to alternative interpretations. nevertheless, the research does add credence in educationally relevant settings to the present spotlighting of reasoned opposition. thus, returning to what was flagged above as the key issue, this suggests merit in asking whether the focus here on reasoned opposition does in fact help to explain why reasoned dialogue can prove inconsequential in teacher-student interaction despite its well-documented relevance in small-group settings. is it possible, for instance, that despite the high frequency of reasoned teacher-student dialogue that howe et al. (2019) document, reasoned opposition is actually quite rare when teachers are involved? is it also possible that reasoned opposition is relatively frequent during small-group work amongst students? classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a33 certainly, there is no difficulty in seeing how classroom dialogue can be rich in reasons but nevertheless divergent over reasoned opposition. take the four extracts in appendix 1 for example, all recorded during previous studies of mine. reasons are plentiful in all four and extracts 1 and 2 contain repeated instances of the reasoned cut-and-thrust that characterizes reasoned opposition. however, extract 3 lacks reasoned opposition altogether, for while laura expresses reasons, her reasons are never explicitly opposed. cathy hints at the incompleteness of laura’s explanations, but she does not oppose these with reasoned contributions. in extract 4, jamie and sadie both express reasons, and their reasons (and proposed task solutions) differ. however, tara’s interventions mean that the contrast between jamie and sadie lacks immediacy, and when both students respond to tara rather than to each other, the contrast between them may scarcely have been noticed. here too then, it is hard to characterize the exchange as reasoned opposition. importantly perhaps, the participants in extracts 1 and 2 are all students, 17-yearolds in extract 1 and 10-year-olds in extract 2. however, cathy in extract 3 and tara in extract 4 are teachers, in both cases working with 10-year-old students. so, how accurately do the four extracts typify the contrast between interaction within small groups of students and interaction with teachers? certainly, the studies summarized earlier demonstrate that sequences like extracts 1 and 2 abound within productive student groups. however, the current absence of directly relevant research makes the typicality of extracts 3 and 4 as regards teacher-student interaction harder to judge. nevertheless, what is clearly a significant barrier to contrast of reasons within the two extracts can be assumed to be prevalent, namely the fact that student reasons in those extracts were mainly in response to teacher invitations. reasons were invited in howe et al.’s (2019) dataset at an average rate of one invitation every six minutes, with invitations usually involving ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions. in-depth analyses of a 50% sample of those invitations reported in vrikki et al. (2019) indicate that 94% were made by teachers. furthermore, as indicated already, there was a very high correlation (in fact r=.87, p<.001) between the frequency with which teachers invited reasons and the frequency of reasoned contributions from students, suggesting that a large proportion of the latter were in response to teachers. finally, the failure illustrated in extract 4 to spotlight contrasting reasons, even when these occur, must also be typical. howe et al. coded all instances where reasons were explicitly contrasted using a variable that they termed ‘reasoned co-ordination’. instances of this variable were extremely rare, with only 17 detected in 78,391 coded turns. all in all then, there is presumptive (although certainly not conclusive) evidence in howe et al.’s dataset that reasoned opposition is rare in teacher-student dialogue, when as noted previous research has shown it to be prevalent during productive small-group interaction amongst students. so, if opposition is genuinely required to make reasoned dialogue conducive to learning, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the scarcity of opposition during teacher-student interaction may underpin the inconsequentiality of reasoned dialogue within that context that howe et al. (2019) document and that may be found more widely. if the hypothesis is substantiated, one probable consequence would be a need to move the focus of research in the field from reasoned dialogue in general to reasoned opposition in particular. the next (and concluding) section discusses some of the wider implications of doing this, with emphasis on messages for the two theoretical perspectives with which this paper began. implications and further issues perhaps the first point to note is that even though the contemporary literature focuses upon reasoned dialogue, and not reasoned opposition, reasoned opposition may actually be closer to the ethos of both the dialogic and the argumentation perspective than its more general counterpart, at least as, from data presented above, the latter is commonly practised during teacher-student interaction. the dialogic perspective revolves around student empowerment and, as extracts 1 and 2 illustrate, reasoned opposition classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a34 involving students is clearly empowering. however, there is nothing self-evidently empowering about students offering reasons in response to chains of questions, which it is suggested may be the norm as regards reasoned dialogue involving teachers. indeed, such chains are tantamount to the first two moves in classic initiation-response-evaluation (ire) sequences (e.g., mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975), this time applied to reasons. most writers who adopt the dialogic perspective are extremely critical of teacher reliance upon ire, regarding this as inculcating student passivity rather than their empowerment. likewise, insofar as the argumentation perspective is focused upon dialogue, which, as noted earlier, is not necessarily the case, the spotlight is ostensibly upon difference and opposition, self-evidently present during reasoned opposition. moreover, as also noted, the concept of counterargument, which is widely emphasized from the argumentation perspective, is linkable with the notion of reasoned opposition. by contrast, and extrapolating from extracts 3 and 4, chains of ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions from teachers followed by reasoned responses from students look to inhibit the expression of difference, opposition, and counterargument rather than facilitate this. so, while it is easy to find researchers who align themselves with the argumentation perspective but champion reasoned dialogue in general and not reasoned opposition, it is the latter, and not the former, that may fit most closely with the perspective’s presumptions. however, even if the present emphasis upon reasoned opposition is accepted as resonant in principle, issues of relevance to the two perspectives remain to be resolved, which from the argumentation perspective, largely revolve around the precise relationship between the notions of reasoned opposition and counterargument. this is despite the obvious relatedness of the two notions. normally in the relevant literature (including the larrain et al., 2019, the study summarized above), a strong and essentially linear relation is envisaged between arguments and counterarguments; that is, arguments need to be clearly differentiated from counterarguments and the latter cannot occur until the former have been advanced. the presumption of linearity is a consequence of counterarguing being viewed characteristically not simply as advancing a contrary opinion but also as intending to disagree, in austin’s (1962) classic terms, as having the ‘illocutionary’ force of countering and not merely the ‘perlocutionary’. the trouble is that, while as noted counterarguments during dialogue necessarily involve reasoned opposition, the latter can in principle also occur within arguments. take for instance jenny’s first contribution to extract 1 and jonathon’s initiating contribution to extract 2. from the argumentation perspective, these contributions are arguments, not counterarguments, but from the perspectives of angela on the one hand and anna and chung on the other, they give reasons in opposition to those students’ own beliefs. thus, the contributions from jenny and jonathon (although arguments) are as validly coded as reasoned opposition as the subsequent (counterargument) contributions from angela, anna, and chung. this implies that the key distinction when the focus is upon consequences for learning is not arguments versus counterarguments, but arguments that are subsequently countered plus counterarguments versus other arguments, and it is this distinction that should be recognized and encapsulated in coding schemes. larrain et al.’s (2019) data, which seemingly endorse counterarguments but not arguments, are not inconsistent with this proposal, for given what has already been concluded about the typicality of extracts 3 and 4, the vast majority of arguments in their dataset will probably not have been countered. thus, the inclusion of the small number that were countered in the argument category rather than with counterarguments will not have distorted the results. nevertheless, the subtle difference highlighted here between the concepts of reasoned opposition and counterargument is significant, not least for evaluating classroom interventions that attempt to move away from invitation-reason chains, and for further analyses of small-group interaction amongst students. classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a35 researchers who adopt the dialogic perspective would probably not be unduly concerned by the fact that the concept of reasoned opposition cuts (to some extent, at least) across the argument/counterargument distinction. their interest would most likely lie with the role of teachers within the oppositional encounters that the concept spotlights. after all, as indicated earlier, the focus of the dialogic perspective is not simply upon encouraging students to express and discuss their opinions, but also upon promoting collaboration with teachers towards mutually acceptable and co-constructed understandings. thus, questions are raised like ‘can teachers productively oppose their students, or is this the prerogative of student groups alone?’ and ‘how can teachers build on oppositional dialogue when this occurs in groups that are restricted to students?’ piaget proposed a negative answer to the first question nearly a century ago (e.g., piaget, 1932), arguing that teachers’ authority is such that if they express views that differ from their students, those students will simply submit. this will result in short-term progress but because the students’ own views have been lost in the process rather than co-ordinated with what their teachers were saying and thought about in conjunction with this, there will be no longer-term gain. eventually, students will revert to what they started with. the line taken in this paper is consistent with piaget in many respects, because the emphasis has been upon reasoned opposition as potentially triggering reflection and reconsideration. akin to piaget, this implies that the views of both self and other must be brought together for change to occur. however, in contrast to piaget, it does not necessarily follow that when the ‘other’ is a teacher, co-ordinated consideration cannot take place. in principle, there must surely be ways in which teachers can introduce their own analyses and encourage students to reflect upon their initial beliefs. there is certainly a risk of teacher over-dominance, as piaget recognized, but perhaps this is not inevitable. if there is a route through which teachers can productively oppose, the implication (given what has been claimed above about teacher invitations) is that when teachers offer reasons, they may actually be providing more support for student learning than when they invite these. as for the question of how teachers can build on oppositional dialogue in which they are not directly involved (as with extracts 1 and 2), my most recent work indicates a potential role for what, in the aforementioned howe (2021) paper, was termed ‘beyond group sharing’, namely occasions where students who have engaged in group work report on group activity to non-participating students. data analyses presented in the 2021 paper indicate that beyond group sharing adds value to group work per se, simply because, of necessity, it forces students to reflect on and consolidate what they experience in groups. matos’ (2021) recent work indicates that similar processes can be activated when students record their experiences in writing. two types of sharing were considered in my 2021 paper, specifically sequences where students moved from one small group to another, reporting on what had happened in the previous group and plenary sessions where, under teacher orchestration, small groups took turns to tell the whole class what their group had been doing. both types were beneficial as regards student learning, but it is the latter, teacherorchestrated plenary sessions that are particularly relevant here. this is because, as the (lightly edited) extract in appendix 2 illustrates, they have the additional advantage of providing key information to teachers about reasoned opposition. specifically, the interactions that the featured teacher holds with saleem, ayesha and malala all include references to oppositional encounters that the teacher did not witness because they occurred during immediately preceding group work that was restricted to students. as for building on information obtained during teacher-orchestrated post-group plenaries, there are preliminary signs in the data i have been examining that the plenary context may help here too. specifically, teacher-student dialogue during plenaries seems to involve relatively high levels of elaboration and querying in contexts where student participation is, of course, necessarily high. in other words, plenaries appear to support the very features of teacher-student dialogue that, as mentioned earlier, howe et al. classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a36 (2019) showed to be positively predictive of student progress, and that, as also mentioned, are mappable onto constructs that the dialogic perspective regards as critical. in detail, scrutiny of the eight classrooms in the howe (2021) dataset that used post-group plenaries with high frequency indicates that during these plenaries, elaboration occurred with three or four times its average frequency across all classrooms in the dataset, and querying occurred with two or three times its average frequency. consistent with this, all student turns in the extract that appears in appendix 2 involve elaboration as defined earlier, and some involve querying. particularly encouraging is the way in which high frequency elaboration and querying in the extract is integrated with reports of small-group opposition, suggesting that the putative value of reasoned opposition during group work was being consolidated rather than undermined during subsequent interaction with the teacher. all in all then, the spotlighting of reasoned opposition in this paper carries a range of possible implications for both conceptual analysis and classroom practice. however, it is important to stress that all implications outlined in this section are no more than possibilities. all require further research, as of course does the proposal that underpins them that reasoned opposition in classrooms is much more likely to operate as a stimulus to student learning than reasoned dialogue in general. as emphasized already, the generalizability of the howe et al. (2019) results that raise questions about reasoned dialogue needs to be checked, although the association in this section of reasoned dialogue with teacher-led ire sequences gives grounds, beyond those presented earlier, for anticipating a degree of generality. after all, ire sequences have been shown to pervade classroom interaction in numerous studies across a multitude of countries (see, e.g., howe, 2010). similarly, the relevance of reasoned opposition for student learning needs to be examined systematically. assuming the spotlighting of reasoned opposition sounds promising, it may be useful to reflect in conclusion upon the howe et al. (2019) dataset that, in part at least, lies behind it, for that dataset is not aligned with either the dialogic or the argumentation perspective. rather its starting point was features of dialogue that both perspectives (together with research not discernibly associated with either) had pinpointed as potentially helpful for student learning. within the limits of manageability, the dataset was collected with a view to examining the relevance of all such features, and the scheme for coding the recorded dialogue was designed accordingly. arguably, the field has now reached a level of maturity that further research of this synthetic nature can be contemplated. in other words, perhaps the future, as regards exploring dialogue-learning relations, lies not with work from within the dialogic or argumentation tradition but from adopting a yet-to-be-named perspective that cuts across these. indeed, perhaps such work will identify further variables that, while not currently acknowledged within either tradition, are like reasoned opposition consistent with both traditions and also potentially associated with positive student outcomes. references ahmed, a., howe, c., major, l., hennessy, s., mercer, n., & warwick, p. 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(2019). dialogic practices in primary school classrooms. language and education, 33(1), 85-100. http://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2018.1509988 appendix 1: four examples of reasoned dialogue [all names are gender and ethnicity appropriate pseudonyms] extract 1 [earlier, jenny had indicated that, in her opinion, a ball dropped from a moving hot air balloon will initially fall vertically, but before hitting the ground, it will divert in the direction the balloon is moving. angela had plumped for vertical fall throughout the descent] jenny right next. okay it’s the heavy one, right? yeah. the balloon moves, it goes that way, so i’d say it…well it goes that way. angela but it’s heavy, it’s the heavy one. jenny yeah, so it goes straight and then in the end it would drift, you know? like i’d say the first goes straight, the second as well, and then it goes a bit like that. angela yeah, probably. jenny well, it’s moving in that direction, so it goes like that doesn’t it? angela well, it also goes straight down because it’s the heavy one. jenny i’d say there’s a slight move in the end because you know it’s moving. it should be left, shouldn’t it? extract 2 [each of the three participants has separately predicted the distance that a toy lorry will travel once it rolls down a slope and onto the floor. they are attempting to resolve the differences between these predictions] jonathon well, the lorry’s heavier, and it gives more. see, like it pulls down like. if it’s light, it just moves down in its own time, but if it’s got a lot of things, it’ll make it go faster. also, it’s on the higher peg. anna but say it was like going down a water slide, and there was a great, big, heavy person getting down. chung that’s different. skin’s different to rubber, and you slide down on water. anna i know, but cars are metal. chung it’s rolling on paper, so the lorry’ll hit it and it’ll stop. but it’s got weight to push it in the start, so i think it’ll go faster. extract 3 [in collaboration with cathy, laura has set up parallel and series circuits. they are predicting the consequences of each circuit for the brightness of an attached bulb once it is switched on] classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a40 laura that one would light up dimly that one, number 3, because there's only one cell. cathy so why would that make them light dimly then? laura because there's not enough energy to get both of them to light up fully. cathy because the energy's being..? laura split in two. why? are they conductors? cathy no, the bulb would light up very brightly. why? laura because there's more energy to make it cos one will make it light up whereas two will make it brighter. extract 4 [like extract 3, the topic is the consequences of type of circuit for bulb brightness, except that this time the focus is upon christmas tree lights] jamie a parallel circuit. tara right, you think a parallel, why do you think a parallel then? jamie because on a serious one if you're tara not on a serious! on a serious circuit, i hope they’re all serious today, jamie. a series, yeah? jamie on a series circuit, like, if one goes they’d all go and you’d have to test them all out to see one, which ones went but on the erm, parallel circuit, if one went, the others would still keep going. tara yeah, so if there is an incident with your bulb blowing, okay, it might stop the motor from working, however it’s on a parallel, the electrons can bypass the blown lamp, the blown bulb can’t it and go to the motor? sadie i think a serie because one tara serie? we’ve got a serious circuit and a serie circuit now! a series. sadie a series because we’re only using one bulb so there’s no, there’s no use to use a parallel one because we’re only using like one bulb, like more than one. appendix 2: example of teacher-orchestrated post-group plenary [all names are gender and ethnicity appropriate pseudonyms] [immediately prior to the whole-class plenary extracted below, the class of 10to 11-year-olds had been divided into small groups to discuss the statement ‘it was right for the dogs to be shot’ in the context of shackleton’s expedition to the antarctic. the extract comprises the first half of what, in full, was roughly a six-minute plenary] teacher right, it's time to summarize, get together the gist of your group, and then you need to report back. right, so, nice and clearly, and take on a point of everybody in your group, and then we'll see how the conversation went. ok, can we start with saleem? saleem in my group, angela, anna and mysha all agreed with it was right to shoot the dogs because, like in the book, they said they needed more space on the ships and they needed more food supplies. me and mysha agreed that it was right, and we agreed and also disagreed with the statement, because they could have used the dogs for guard dogs or something like... transportation. teacher ok. … ok, right, thank you for your point. who would like to add or build on what saleem's just said? ayesha. classroom interaction and student learning: reasoned dialogue versus reasoned opposition christine howe dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.549 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a41 ayesha building on what saleem said, i disagree because how will the guard dogs protect the stuff, because, say, for example, some of the men, they were hunting and polar bears came, then the guard dogs wouldn't be enough to guard their belongings. teacher ok. but what was the overall view, opinion? ayesha overall, we think that it was right for the dogs to be shot because, if they don’t shoot the dogs, then the humans would starve, and the dogs would starve as well because there wouldn't be any food left. so, if they shot the dogs, the humans would have the food. priority is that the humans survive. teacher survive, ok. thank you, ayesha. thank you. who would like to build on from what ayesha's just said? ok, tahira. tahira we agree with ayesha. the main priority was that it was right for them to shoot. if they hadn't shot the dogs, the dogs will die of starvation, and that's more painful than dying of a shot, because, if you die of a shot, it's only painful for like one second. teacher ok. ok. so tahira's table have just said it was better that the dogs were shot rather than left there to die of starvation, because that would have also been a long, painful death. i don’t know. malala, do you want to add to that? malala so, on my table, everyone, except for me, agreed on killing the dogs, and moien said that the dogs would be useful for meat and clothing. the clothing would be able to be used for warmth, and that's it. and the heat would give the crew members more energy and protein, and it would be healthy for them rather than starving. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 10. marjanovic-shane^j (layout) a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school^j (subm^n445)^j 2023-01-12.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.445 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a217 a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract in this article, i attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in norway, the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego). the clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. as they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence. their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the soul-searching assembly1. this four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (hem & remlov, 1969).2 in this article, i analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. the tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. the purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. these radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. the ego students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. 1 read more in depth about this meeting in two other articles in this special issue, marjanovic-shane (2023a, 2023b). 2 dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal was given a gracious permission to publish extensive parts of this transcript, which is a part of the book by hem & remlov, “forsøksgymnas i praksis” [experimental gymnasium in praxis], by the current owner of the estate of pax publishing house. issn: 2325-3290 (online) a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a218 learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. acknowledgment i want to thank my colleague eugene matusov for many deep and critical analytic discussions about the paradigmatic conceptualizations of the clashes of ideas that students seem to espouse in their dramatic meetings. i also greatly appreciate my colleagues in the educationalist club of the university of students, for their discussions of different early drafts of this article. ïïò introduction free children are not easily influenced; the absence of fear accounts for this phenomenon. indeed, the absence of fear is the finest thing that can happen to a child (neill, 1960, p. 9). alienation in education and the experience of a loss of dignity were the primary reasons motivating the young norwegian students in oslo in 1966 to create a school for themselves in which they will have equal rights in the decision-making (cf. marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2023). in the original leaflet by the three 16-year-olds, they expressed a strong critique of alienated learning in their rebellion against the foisted alienation in norwegian conventional schools. their piercing critique is loud and clear from the very first paragraph of the leaflet they sent out to all high school students and the adults’ educational community in oslo in the spring of 1966, many students feel that the authorities are pressuring them into despair. they feel that the old, wornout (wasted?) people deny them opportunities to develop, deny them friendship, deny them freedom, deny them sex, deny them the very youth (original leaflet quoted in jørgensen, 1971, p. 16).3 the problem of alienation in education is serious and deep in my opinion. it leads to stifling students’ joy in life and learning, and worse, it often creates a profound feeling of the lack or the loss of human dignity. alienation produced by foisted education is not only frustrating, hard to endure, and handicapping healthy development but ultimately anti-educational. in this respect, i agree with the founding students’ claim that the alienation in the traditional schooling is harmful: it transforms a supposedly educational practice into its own antithesis, an educational desert — out of which many students emerge with a mind that simultaneously resents and follows orders of an authority, a mind that often does not know the difference between an authoritative voice of dogma and one’s own authorial voice, and a mind that was strongly discouraged and even sometimes prohibited to enter genuine dialogues where one can critically evaluate diverse truths, perspectives, opinions, values, and views of the world. one might ask why, in the world, anyone would design education in such a way to produce students’ alienation, despair, and loss of agency in their own learning and development. in our study of the scandinavian experiment in the democratic education (marjanovic-shane et al., 2023), my colleagues tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski, and i discussed the paradoxical legacy of the enlightenment thinkers that set modern public education on its authoritarian ideological course. despite the 3 see also in the appendix to the article “a soul-searching assembly – a vignette” (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a219 enlightenment’s most important belief in human freedom and autonomy as the conditions for human dignity, the enlightenment thinkers, starting from kant, treated education as a practice in which students cannot be granted personal freedoms and autonomy in making decisions for themselves, especially not educational decisions. according to kant, only mature people who are rational and informed are able and can be trusted to make good decisions, good both for themselves and for society. such maturity and rationality can be achieved through education, but education itself cannot be for the students a matter of free choice and design. it needs to be enforced, i.e., “foisted on uneducated and undereducated, immature, irrational, uninformed, and ignorant people in order for those people to be able to achieve their autonomy and, thus, human dignity later on, when education is done on them” (matusov, 2021, p. e12). in our study, my colleagues and i further argued that in the foisted education, the student has a status of a recipient, i.e., an object of a pedagogical preparation by the others. in this enforced enlightenment by another, the students are denied authorship of their learning. they don’t have legitimate “equal rights of consciousness” (m. m. bakhtin, 1999, p. 6) to fully test their ideas, values, beliefs, and desires in a genuine ethical ontological dialogue. in my opinion, this is what the oslo students rebelled against, this alienated position of a person stripped of dignity, with no personal rights in following their learning interests and initiatives, the violence of the foisted education with its zombifying effect. gaining freedom and control of their own lives and education was their anti-alienating project. however, as my colleagues tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski and i described (marjanovic-shane et al., 2023), when the oslo students finally gained the right to open a school and launched the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego), they experienced a series of strong tensions and conflicts among themselves. they discovered that fundamentally diverse ways of understanding and approaching education existed among them. the deep disagreements about the meaning of education and practices in the school they now started to govern almost broke their school at the very start of its existence. mosse jørgensen, the first school leader, described the eruption of their internal conflicts that took place in a general assembly meeting on november 2nd, 1967, as “fireworks in a can.” later, the students referred to this fateful meeting as the “soul-searching assembly” or the “hell of an assembly”(hem & remlov, 1969, p. 22).4 mosse thought that the main problem lied in the fact that the traditional view of education still had a strong grip in the school. the conflict was not resolved. and it still is not resolved. but the problems became clarified, and emotions were vented out. […] and the following seems to have become obvious, once the great explosion was over: the new ways of schooling those the students created to satisfy their own needs, they worked. it was the old ways that had to be blown up by the fireworks of freedom. this explosion was necessary for us to start finding these new ways. what did we expect from school democracy and freedom? […] many people had obviously expected the following: after a few weeks, this would become a school with democracy and freedom of assembly, but with a traditional time-table, curriculum and exams, that would function organizationally exactly like any other school. if the students did not show up for class, they would have failed. if the school did not function "normally" then it would be proven that freedom under responsibility was impossible. but what is freedom then, if the result is exactly the same as before the freedom? if students sit at their desks out of loyalty to a cause, or to a teacher, we are back in almost the same situation as the one where they sit there in fear of expulsion, reprimands, or bad grades. they may have learned something about loyalty, but the system remains the same. 4 in norwegian “sjeleallmannamøtet” and “kjempeallmannamøtet.” a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a220 we can give people freedom, but don’t we panic when they actually start to use it? (jørgensen, 1971, p. 40). the issue ego students were faced with was to define what it means to be free to actually own and direct their education. proponents of democratic education and dialogic pedagogy approaches often claim that genuine, authorial education happens when the students legitimately own their learning and education (matusov, 2020; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017). here in ego, the students became the governors of their own school. and as such, they immediately confronted an unavoidable question: what does this ownership of education actually mean? or, better, what does it actually mean to them? who (or what) is and who can legitimately be, not merely a governor, but the true owner, the ultimate author of education, with all the rights of making educational decisions? who has a right to legitimately define educational freedoms and responsibilities? the ego students owned the democratic governance of their school, but their conflicts about defining the scope and the boundaries of each student’s personal educational freedoms, educational rights, and educational ownership pointed to deeper differences among their fundamental ideas about education, its nature, meaning, and its role in human life. the explosive confrontation in their soul-searching assembly unchained and let out the ego students’ paradigmatically diverse, mutually exclusive contradictory views, ideas, concepts, values, beliefs, and desires. conceptualizing their differences, finding the boundaries of the ideas along which they diverge or converge could illuminate some deeper existing paradigmatic differences in the ideological, ethical, and/or political worldviews that still pervade our contemporary educational theories, practices, and politics more than 50 years after this faithful meeting. the purpose of my analysis is dual: a) to find out what education could have meant to different ego students at the moment of the soul-searching assembly, in order to deeply understand what happened to their relationships during this event, as it seemed that they transcended their clash on some level, and although not agreeing, they were able to develop relationships in which their school could continue to exist, instead of completely breaking down; and b) to find out what worldviews and educational philosophies these students held, may promote cultural, political, and practical humanization of education, transforming education into an unalienated practice of the students’ own meaning-making. a praxis that is genuinely significant to the student by the student’s own evaluation. in the clashes of the ego students’ ideas, i look for the echoes of the collisions of the worldviews of our era at the beginning of the 21 century – the strife between the liberal vs. authoritarian paradigms of life (berlin, 2014); the trust in and the encouragement of the intrinsic search for truth, goodness and beauty vs. the (blind) trust in the higher ideals and the enlightenment by the wisdom of the generations who came closer to the ultimate truth, harmony, and perfection; the egalitarianism of the dialogic stance that meaning-making takes place among “a plurality of [unique] consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (m. m. bakhtin, 1999, pp. 6, italics are in the original) vs. the monologic trust in the hierarchy of the established powers among the people based on the merging of their consciousness into the pool of universal knowledge and rationality. rarely does one have an opportunity to closely examine and analyze ways in which concepts and ideas about democracy, freedom, education, etc., play against each other in an actual event dialogue in a group of people for whom these concepts are of vital importance on a day-to-day basis. the “soulsearching assembly” was one such event, and it was important enough to its participants to be recorded and later transcribed and published (hem & remlov, 1969; jørgensen, 1971). the existence of the transcript created a unique opportunity to analyze the students’ actual, unique, and ontologically significant personal positions, opinions, beliefs, and desires regarding the very concepts of “democracy,” “freedom,” “responsibility,” the “rights of consciousness,” and the nature of the “relationships among the participants” a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a221 in education. this dramatic meeting revealed complex disagreements and paradigmatic differences among the ego students regarding their concept of education and the meaning of educational freedoms and rights. i created three different analyses of the transcript5 of the soul-searching assembly. the analysis in this article is the third one – a conceptual analysis. i first approached the transcript through a dialogic analysis (cf. matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019). the result of this dialogic analysis is a vignette i wrote based on the transcript (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). in the vignette, i look at the soulsearching assembly as a relational drama of disagreements among “the friendly enemies” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015) in the course of the four and half hour meeting. what did they want for themselves, for each other, from each other? what were their urgencies in the clashes – as they addressed each other, striving to make their points meaningful and persuasive to the others, and to clarify, formulate, test, and potentially transcend their own deeply held cherished ideas, etc.? according to bakhtin, such events as the soul-searching assembly are the birthplace of ideas. the dialogic analysis in the vignette helped me understand the event in which different voices emerged and started to take shape. in other words, the soul-searching assembly event became my theoretical “unit of analysis.” looking at the whole event enabled me to construct and prepare the evidence for the emergence of several distinctly voiced worldviews, particular concerns, and the relationships among these worldviews out of the raw ethnographic data of the transcript. moreover, for bakhtin, “the idea lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. […] the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses” (m. m. bakhtin, 1999, pp. 87-88). by taking the floor in the soul-searching assembly meeting, the students confronted each other from the bottom of their hearts and minds, testing each other, both as ideas and as people. the ideas they tested were their embodied intentions, motives, reasons, and desires – what bakhtin called person-ideas (m. m. bakhtin, 1999). in order to summon the living urgency, the very pulse of the ego students’ ideas, to make them vividly true, i tried to (re-)construct them as four bakhtinian person-ideas, adding imagined internal monologues to the actual (transcribed) passionate speeches and comments, hints, and innuendos loudly expressed in the impassioned internally persuasive discourse of the soul-searching assembly. that partially fictional analysis-synthesis helped me, and hopefully, it could help you, dear reader, to step into each person-idea and look at the world and at others from the inside, as if through their own souls. i believe that these “living” person-ideas can deepen our understanding of the internal logic of abstracted ideological positions that i analyze in this article. the analysis-synthesis of the four person-ideas is published in a separate article in this special issue (marjanovic-shane, 2023a). in this article, i develop a conceptual analysis of the ideological positions the students held, and i try to map out relationships of convergence and divergence among their views. i look at the premises of their theories of education and their worldviews. i attempt to deconstruct the students’ conceptualizations of democracy in their school governance and their understanding of what and how should be governed in their educational practice as personal vs. collective rights. i try to infer how the students espoused the purposes of education and what guiding values they adhered to as they struggled to persuade each other to accept their visions. several points of divergence and contention emerged among the ego students’ conceptualizations of their education. in my view, these points of divergence represent the most important philosophical and ideological divides about education, not only among the students but throughout the 5 it should be more precise to say that i approached a translation of the original norwegian transcript into english. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a222 history of education until today. in this article, i discuss the students’ confrontations, clashes, misunderstandings, and struggles around the following three points of conceptual divergence: a) negative freedom vs. positive freedom in education, their implications for the legitimacy of the students’ educational ownership, and the meaning and scope of democratic decision-making. b) monist vs. pluralist worldviews in education and the question of guiding values in democratic education and schooling c) responsibility vs. accountability in education and their inherent contradictions. voluntary attendance and the meaning of freedom roar6: … we are all aware that now that the whole thing [the school spirit] is beginning to slip out of our hands. one can sit quietly and say: it is a transitional period when the first glowing enthusiasm is still high. [but] we have to be careful not to let this [spirit] completely slip out – while we just sit there … […] people sit in the hallways when they should be in classes… – as if they should not have classes. […] we should not be allowed to just sit on our asses – not give a fuck excuse the expression…. dag: the point is that we are allowed to sit on our asses that is what voluntary attendance is. so, we continue to do it … roar: of course, one is allowed. this is a free school. you can work at home. you can do anything. if a student prefers to sit in the library to work instead of in a class – of course – that's fine. but there is not just one thing called freedom – there also exists another term; it is called freedom under the responsibility [accountability]. i repeat, under the responsibility [accountability]7. we are responsible for our fellow students. we are responsible for our own schooling. (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 26, cursive in the original, bold by me).8 during the assembly meeting, many students appeal to the notion of freedom and responsibility/accountability. it seemed that the ego founders understood mandatory attendance as the primary source of the student’s alienation from education. they made sure that the first principle in their school be the voluntary attendance of classes and other educational activities. the principle of voluntary attendance legitimizes each student’s freedom of (non)-participation in any organized educational activities. it seemed that for them, having the right of voluntary attendance guaranteed each student freedom to be the owner of their education. in other words, it seemed that all students (and teachers) agreed that the right of voluntary attendance would protect the student from educational coercion. indeed, voluntary attendance seemed to be the most sacred principle that promised freedom, and it was probably the most significant for the ego students. 6 all the participants i quote here are students unless i indicate that someone is a teacher. their names were already changed in the original publication of the transcript by hem and remlov (1969), and i use the same ones. 7 “men det er bare noe som heter frihet og så et annet begrep som heter frihet under ansvar. jeg gjentar: under ansvar.” the word “ansvar” in norwegian means both “responsibility” and “accountability.” sometimes it is not clear whether it is meant in one or the other sense, and this has to be disambiguated by the context. in english, too, the term “responsibility” can be used as a synonym for “accountability” although the two concepts are very different. in translating the word “ansvar” from norwegian, i made different decisions in different contexts, using sometimes “responsibility” and sometimes “accountability” depending on a context. however, i use both terms in this instance, because i think it is also important to preserve the ambiguity of this term. this ambiguity, lumping the two concepts together, could perhaps explain how difficult it may have been for the students to understand precisely and deeply the roots of their lines of disagreement. i discuss this issue in greater detail later in the paper. 8 throughout this text, when quoting the transcript of the “soul-searching assembly” meeting on november 2, 1967, i use the original page numbers in the publication of the transcript in hem and remlov (1969). the bold parts of the text highlight the crucial evidence for my conceptualizations of the emerging issues that the students were arguing about. thus, in this particular excerpt i coded the issue of having unlimited freedom including legitimacy of non-participation in education vs. limited freedom of education where nonparticipation is not allowed. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a223 the freedom was magic! incredible, magnificent freedom for which everyone fought. the freedom consisted of being able to smoke wherever and whenever with no fear nor regard; of being able to spill and mess up things carelessly; of playing music loudly in front of doors behind which someone [else] is working and defending one’s right to do that. wasn’t the freedom voted on? isn’t freedom freedom for all? should it be possible to limit freedom because of such trivial things as the narrow hallways and the existence of other people? […] (jørgensen, 1977, pp. 41-42). but at the same time, freedom seemed to create problems, at least for some. once mandatory attendance was abolished, many students started to spend their time in the hallways, playing guitars, hanging out, not attending classes, and disturbing those who did attend them. this behavior was not welcomed by some, although not all, students. it was not easy for the teachers, creating problems for them even when they stood by the principle of voluntary attendance. jørgensen (1971) described great professional and emotional conundrums of teachers whose classes were not attended. teachers would come into the office, sobbing and in need of consolation when they had been to classes where no one, or just a small group of students, had met. … but why did we embark on all of this? why did we, as teachers, leave the safety of the old, smoothly polished system? because we didn't want to continue sacrificing young people, genuine knowledge acquisition, and our own humanity on the gray altar of security (jørgensen 1971, p. 99). most of the teachers who chose to remain supported voluntary attendance and started to search for innovative teaching approaches. tensions started to grow between different groups of students about the extent, the boundaries, and the very meaning of educational freedom. negative vs. positive freedom some students interpreted freedom in the sense of what berlin called “negative freedom,” while the others, mostly the founders and some of their close followers, conceptualized freedom as berlin’s “positive freedom” (berlin, 2002, 2014, 2017). berlin defined “negative freedom” as that “area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons” (berlin, 2017, p. 34). negative liberty is about the boundaries of a person’s sovereignty, autonomy, dignity, and privacy, within which no one else has a right to interfere, sanction, censor, or ban the person’s actions. according to the principle of negative freedom, unless something is prohibited by the law, it is legally allowed. negative freedom is “freedom from” – freedom from communal or societal control. if education is within this sphere of personal freedom, then the student’s voluntary attendance means freedom to decide about all aspects of their education, including both whether what and how to participate in the educational activities (marjanovic-shane & matusov, 2017, february; matusov, 2020). as one student, dag, said, “the point is that we are allowed to sit on our asses that is what voluntary attendance is” (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 26). if, however, education is within the sphere of societal control, then the student’s voluntary attendance means “positive freedom” to make “good, responsible choices,” where goodness and responsibility are defined by society. in contrast to “negative freedom,” “positive freedom” is predefined by some authority and specifies what the person is free to do. the question, according to berlin, is only “what, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (berlin, 2017, p. 34). for berlin, positive freedom is defined by a “wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a224 by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside” (berlin, 2017, p. 44). in other words, positive freedom is freedom for being and acting in some positively defined way, directed to some “good” end, which is defined by authority. for instance, freedom to make rational decisions, where what is “rational” is defined by some authority. when educational freedom is conceptualized as “positive freedom,” then voluntary attendance may mean freedom to choose among diverse but still “good” as defined by the school authority – the nannies, the department of education, and the taxpayers, – such as preparing for the national exams, studying academic subjects deeply, and so on. namely, positive freedom may mean that the students are free to decide only what to study from the predefined choices and how to participate in educational practice, but not to decide whether or not to participate in it. in positive freedom, the students are free to decide which classes or activities to choose to achieve the given legitimate educational goals predefined by the authority. but the students are not allowed to follow or create their own interests, purposes, and goals if they fall outside of the sphere of legitimate, predefined educational purposes and choices. their freedom is bound to a predefined practice and its legitimized goals. replying to dag, roar (another student) formulated this clearly, “but there is not just one thing called freedom – there also exists another term, it is called freedom with (under) responsibility [accountability]. i repeat, with responsibility [accountability]” (p. 26, italics in the transcript). in my view, the concept of “freedom under accountability to someone or something” may be a very good definition of positive freedom, according to berlin. this conceptual difference in understanding freedom had profound implications for all other issues the students raised in the assembly. the students, the teachers, and their principal, mosse jørgensen, all refer to “freedom” and its counterpart, “freedom under (with) responsibility.” some argued for “freedom,” the others for “freedom with responsibility.” it was deeply intertwined with the students’ understanding of responsibility and their approach to educational ownership and authorship. and significantly, it affected the relationships among the individual students regarding the way they envisioned their democratic governance of the school. in my view, this dichotomy became the most important watershed for all of their ideas because it seems that it had roots in much deeper and further-reaching conceptual differences that berlin saw as “… two views of life of an irreconcilable kind, the liberal and authoritarian, open and closed, and the fact that the word ‘freedom’ has been a genuinely central symbol in both is at once remarkable and sinister” (berlin, 2014, p. 73). i argue that the ego students, not only the concept of “freedom” was in the crux of their clashing authoritarian9 vs. liberal outlooks, but that they perceived all other aspects of education through these two ideologically opposing lenses. democracy vs. personal negative freedom in addition to these profound conceptual and ideological differences, there existed another source of tension in the school. this tension was generated by the very democracy as a form of governing the school. there are many definitions of democracy, its variants, its scope, and its ways of regulating the powers of diverse stakeholders. in principle, democratic governance protects the sovereignty and freedom of a group of people to make all decisions for themselves, by themselves, rather than being ruled by outside powers. in an educational democracy, the primary sources of power lie within the immediate educational 9 berlin uses the word “authoritarian” in a generic sense of legitimizing the hierarchical power of an authority over others, whether political, educational, within a family, a corporation, etc. he contrasts the “authoritarian” with the “liberal” outlook, that gives power equally to all members of a society, a group, or a practice. education has ostensibly been an “authoritarian” practice for most of the time, at least when understood as the right of an authority (of a parent, a society, an expert, etc.,) to impose or foist education onto a student, with or without the students’ consent. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a225 community, rather than outside of it. the power distribution in a democratic community should be horizontal, protecting the rights of input in decision making of all of its participants, regulating who can be a part of decision making. democracy is also about regulating ways and forms of the legitimacy of imposing decisions of the majority on the disagreeable minority without the use of violence, i.e., ways that impositions can be viewed as legitimate by a disagreeing minority. thus, democracy in education is both about the educational sovereignty of a group of people and about the internal relationships and power distribution within the group members. internally, democracy is about the equal rights of input for the participants in making all decisions (direct democracy), and externally it is about the right of a community to have sovereignty, i.e., not to be subordinated to any other outside authorities in making all critical decisions. however, as part of norwegian public education, ego was not completely sovereign and not free from the norwegian department of education. the ego agreed to follow certain curricular and other policies of the norwegian department of education so that the academically aspired ego students could be allowed to take the national graduation exam (artium), without which they could not continue their education at norwegian universities. this fact greatly affected the internal issues in the ego’s democratic governance10, leading to tensions between the students who had academic aspirations and others who came to school for other reasons. these tensions started to reveal to the students the fact that democracy, as a form of government, a form of power (“κρατία” in greek, like in democracy – literally “power of people”), i.e., a form of imposition, is not about personal freedoms, but about the limits of these freedoms based on the common rules, regulations and internal policies. having equal rights to input in the school’s democratic government does not automatically guarantee personal educational freedoms. in some cases, as we shall see, democratic governance may limit or even abolish personal educational freedoms altogether. democracy can be extremely oppressive to personal freedoms and rights (cf. “a tyranny of the majority”). in some cases, as we shall see, democratic governance may limit or even abolish personal educational freedoms. according to berlin, a democratic government, in itself, does not automatically guarantee personal freedoms: … liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source. just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom” (berlin, 2017, pp. 41-42, italics mine). as a form of governance, democracy is about the (semi) universal right to have an input in collective decision-making. but democratic governance does not guarantee that each participant would agree with all decisions all of the time. although habermas (1996) idealized consensus as a criterion for making rational democratic decisions, according to berlin (1990) and mouffe (2000), in principle, it is impossible to resolve the plurality of incompatible and incommensurable ideas, desires, values, beliefs, and personal circumstances. therefore, although the principle of democratic governance promises that everyone’s input will be allowed and taken into account (often literally, by counting votes), it does not guarantee that everyone’s interests, wishes, opinions, desires, freedoms, etc., may be fulfilled all the time, or even some of the time. in fact, democratic governance, a particular use of the power of imposition, almost certainly guarantees that some people’s opinions, positions, desires, and interests may be sometimes overturned. in that sense, some personal desires could be and would be impinged on. in that sense, democracy can 10 this issue is discussed in greater length in another article in this trilogy, “scandinavian experiments in democratic education” (marjanovic-shane et al., 2023). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a226 be liberal – with the protection of the minority rights, or illiberal – a tyranny of the majority. greek democracy in athens was illiberal (zakaria, 2003).11 like any other form of governance, democracy may create a larger or a smaller sphere of personal freedoms (“negative freedom”) by defining what aspects of life may or may not be publicly regulated. in other words, democratic governance may be more or less liberal – depending on what spheres and what scope of personal life it attempts to control. the difference between democracy and other forms of governance is in the rights of all the members to have an input in the decision-making. one of the cornerstones of democracy is freedom of speech and, with it, the protection of the freedom to express and stand for one’s opinions. and that means – the legitimacy of the dissensus of the opinion. thus, the two foundational principles of ego, the principles of voluntary participation in education, e.g., personal “negative freedom,” and the principle of democratic governance, don’t automatically go together. one does not guarantee the other. in fact, the two principles stand in conflict with each other. a tension exists between personal rights to educational freedom, i.e., negative freedom, and democratic decision-making when a decision may affect the scope of the student’s personal educational freedom. the tension lies in the question of personal educational rights: what should be considered a legitimate core of personal educational freedom, free from collective control? what is the sphere of guaranteed personal educational liberties? in my view, one of the primary sources of disputes in ego was the very question of what is that “certain vacuum around [a person that] has to be created, [that] certain space within which [a person] may be allowed to fulfill what might be called [their] reasonable wishes,” (berlin, 2014, pp. 55-56). what is the scope of the educational space where one has the liberty not to be impinged by another? what is education? should it be a matter of personal realm, free from collective control, or should it mostly lie in the provenance of society in some way? we could answer this question from a kind of relativist birds-eye point of view that understanding of education depends on the person’s overall worldview regarding the nature of truth and their leading ethical thoughts and systems of value that guide their relations to others, to the world, and to self. we could acknowledge the conceptual relativism by finding that the concept of education depends upon each person’s convictions and standpoints regarding what is good, necessary, and true about actions that are believed to lead the people (both the self and, more so, the others) to the truth(s) and values necessary for survival and achievement of a better life. however, education and beliefs about it are not just a game of academic exercise. both on the personal and the social level, education is an ethical endeavor, resting upon, … [the] beliefs about how life should be lived, what men and women should be and do, ... [these beliefs] are objects of moral inquiry; and when applied to groups and nations, and, indeed, mankind as a whole, are called political philosophy, which is but ethics applied to society (berlin, 1990, p. 2). but the acknowledgment of conceptual relativism, according to bakhtin, does not provide an “alibi in being” to an educationalist or, for that matter, to a student! the ethical question of education is the question not about concepts but about unique deeds, i.e., acts addressed to and affecting others, and personal “answerability” for one’s deeds in each particular, unrepeatable and unique situation. 11 i want to thank eugene matusov for this additional remark and reference. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a227 this fact of my non-alibi in being, which underlies the concrete and once-occurrent ought of the answerably performed act, is not something i come to know of and to cognize but is something i acknowledge and affirm in a unique or once-occurrent manner. the simple cognition of that fact is a reduction of it to the lowest emotionalvolitional level of possibility. in cognizing it, i universalize it: everyone occupies a unique and neverrepeatable place, any being is once-occurrent. what we have here is a theoretical positing which tends toward the ultimate limit of becoming completely free of any emotional-volitional tone. there is nothing i can do with this theoretical proposition; it does not obligate me in any way. insofar as i think of my uniqueness or singularity as a moment of my being that is shared in common by all being, i have already stepped outside my once-occurrent uniqueness, i have assumed a position outside its bounds, and think being theoretically, i.e., i am not in communion with the content of my own thought; uniqueness as a concept can be localized in the world of universal or general concept and, by doing so, one would set up a series of logically necessary correlations. (mikhail m. bakhtin, 1993, pp. 10-11). from bakhtin’s point of view, it is the monologic universalism, as a meta-belief, that leads to “moral relativism” (anything goes). and according to berlin, the main line of conceptual disagreement regarding the ethical issues could be framed in terms of the monist vs. pluralist worldviews (weltanschauung-s) – guiding each particular, unique ethical decision. in the next section, i explore the ego students’ monist vs. pluralist worldviews that seemed to underpin their conceptualizations of education and schooling as practices. monism vs. pluralism in the students’ worldviews monism monism, a belief in the “unity or harmony of human ends” (berlin, 2002, p. 4), can significantly impact one’s approach to education and schooling. a belief in the possibility of an ultimate single truth and a single set of values according to which one can judge all people leads to assuming that education can and should have these truths and values as its singular goals that need to be reached by each person. according to berlin, the monist dogmas entail, … the corollary that the realisation of the pattern formed by them is the one true end of all rational activity, both public and private. if this belief should turn out to be false or incoherent, this might destroy or weaken the basis of much past and present thought and activity; and, at the very least, affect conceptions of, and the value placed on, personal and social liberty (berlin, 2002, p. 4, italics mine). thus, monism in the approach to education means having obligations to act in manners derived from a single principle that unites all aspects of the educational practice. in a monist lens, educational activities are guided by the belief in the universality of the truth, which is not only knowable but presumed to be already known by the educators and unproblematic regarding its internal unity of compatible and commensurable values, rules, and norms. a monist approach to education is, thus, in principle, based on the notion of the transmission of known truths and values, socialization into socially reasonable and valued practices, and promotion of harmonious relationships, agreement, cooperation, and sense of belonging to the community. in ego, however, there existed two different and conflicting monist views. the two were guided by the students’ conflicting primary principles and values. these two types of monism can be called: a) epistemological monism; and b) relational monism. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a228 “epistemological monism” is a traditional form of educational monism. it focuses on the acquisition of valuable knowledge and skills as the primary goals and the ultimate purpose of education. in opposition to the traditional epistemological monism, there emerged a rather non-traditional “relational monism.” in this view, love for others was seen as the supreme guiding principle in their school that should prevail over all other ideological and pragmatic educational values, principles, purposes, and goals (like the acquisition of knowledge and skills or pursuit of social justice, etc.). below i discuss these two types of monism as they emerged in the soul-searching assembly. epistemological monism åge (student): … [sarcastically] of course, you should be able to do what you want! – [seriously] but when 150 people do what they want, or 100 people do what they want, they each go in their own direction in 100 directions. then, this will be no school there will be a place where 100 people meet and do what they want. so… you can't do that at this school. that [what you say] is just whining. this school leads up to the artium [graduation exam]! – [turning to reidar, who wants to accept diversity of the students’ goals] and i will strongly oppose what you say that we should tolerate deviants… (pp. 28-29, bold by me). the traditional epistemological monist view of education is based in berlin’s three dogmas12 applied to education: a) that the truth is universal, i.e. that there is in principle one answer to each genuine question, and thus that all students can be and should be given thus truth; b) that the answers to the genuine questions are in principle knowable and, thus, that education is about hard academic work to obtain the known truths, and c) that it is possible to imagine one harmonious educational sphere in which all students should be immersed to develop as ideal, “educated” people. thus, the educational traditional monism promotes a preset educational curriculum of learning the known and knowable truths and relies on educational experts to define and prescribe it. this traditional monist view of education as an epistemological endeavor of acquiring culturally, socially, ideologically, ethically, etc. existing body of knowledge, wisdom and values, was predominant in the founding students’ vision of their school. åge, apparently the most prominent “nanny” among the students, seems to think that educational practice in their school must be defined by a set of unifying principles, rules, and goals. for åge’s person-idea, the diversity in the students’ interests, desires, and purposes is at best irrelevant, and at worst, it must be suppressed, if not eliminated. several times, åge emphatically rejects any suggestion to accept diversity in the students’ educational interests and desires as legitimate (see above åge’s person-idea). epistemological monism is intrinsically related to understanding “freedom” in terms of berlin’s notion of “positive freedom” (berlin, 2017). in other words, for åge, the scope and the manner of one’s educational freedom must be limited and positively defined. for åge and other students who embraced epistemological monism, the students’ freedom of action [to do “what they want”] may be legitimate only within a well-defined unity of epistemological educational values, goals, and purposes. they define this positive freedom as freedom within the obligatory hard academic work to pass the national graduation exam (artium). so, åge declines to tolerate “the deviants” who ask for their “negative freedom” to do “what they want” – since this fundamentally clashes with his monist views: where freedom is only “freedom under responsibility,” i.e. berlin’s positive freedom (berlin, 2017). åge sees academic freedom not as a personal right, but as legitimate only if and when it supports and promotes the agreed upon, predefined and singular 12 for berlin, three unquestioned dogmas lie in the root of monism: (a) “that to all genuine questions there is one true answer and one only” – and that this applies equally to the “questions of value no less than to those of fact;” (b) “that the true answers to such questions are in principle knowable” and (c) “that these true answers cannot clash with one another, for one true proposition cannot be incompatible with another; that together these answers must form a harmonious whole” (berlin, 2013, p. 209). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a229 educational vision. although in principle, in their democratic school the students can participate in defining some aspects of this unified vision of education, the vision still has to fall within the monist scope of the socially, historically and ideologically known truth and ethics. in addition, once the students have defined their singular educational vision, all the students are then obliged (“responsible” in the sense of accountable) to abide by it and work hard to uphold it. roar, a student who introduced the phrase “freedom under responsibility” appeals to others to accept this self-imposed obligation to unquestioningly comply with socially known and accepted truths and values through his appeal to “be an adult.” roar (åge person-idea): … we call ourselves “adults,” – we've been adults enough to form a school – we've been adults enough to form our own rules – we've been adults enough to hire teachers – to plan our own teaching. we should also show ourselves as adults who can bring this [school] forward to success (p. 26). appealing to everyone to “be an adult” is a diplomatically placed, purposefully ambivalent phrase that can unite both the appeal to maturity and self-reliance and the appeal to the importance of being like other adults, i.e., to accept the existing cultural set of norms and values loosely defining an ideal adult into which they should strive to develop. “being an adult,” roar’s brilliantly placed “boundary object” phrase (star & griesemer, 1989), is aimed at calling for agreement and harmony among the participants, regardless how different they may interpret its meaning. thus, in the epistemological monist view, no student can be left entirely free to be what they want to be and do what they want to do. their freedom can only exist within the scope of the unified educational vision to which they must subordinate, i.e., “freedom under responsibility.” from the point of view of epistemological monists like åge, tone, sverre, anders, and others, “negative freedom” cannot be legitimate in their school. negative freedom would create a loophole for a diversity of the students’ educational truths, goals, and desires, and monism cannot allow for diversity in the pursuit of truth and values. pursuing some uncharted personal goals, purposes, and values would destroy their epistemological monist vision of education. “this will be no school,” as åge asserts. “this is a school and not a playroom, indeed!” (åge, p. 25). øyvind, a teacher, adds, “… we're not a youth psychiatric clinic… […] and those who […] find out that they are here because they think this must be a youth psychiatric clinic they should think of something else” (øyvind, p. 28). the epistemological monist view seeks to define rigorous boundaries of schooling as an organized educational practice with strictly one primary goal and purpose. thus, there should be a boundary between a “school” and a “psychiatric clinic13” (teacher øivind, p.28) or between a “school” and a “youth club” (teacher arne, p. 63). for anders, tone, and sverre, it was essential that all “agree on the ideas we have” (tone, p. 34) and then control their impulses, wishes, and desires. they need to sacrifice their wish “to go down the hall to play guitar” (anders, p. 34). in their view, it was important to have one (epistemological) purpose that would unite them all so that they “go in to get this [agreed upon] idea worked out…” (anders, p. 34). berlin’s concept of positive freedom was epitomized in tone’s notion of “the personal freedom of the school,” tone (åge person-idea): well, well personal freedom, and personal freedom. you can't just go for your own personal freedom. we have to have something called the personal freedom of the school. and then we all together have to agree on something so that not 13 øivind here refers to the fact that some students explicitly expressed their need to psychologically heal from the pressures of their other authoritarian schools. in addition, many of the newly admitted students struggled with issues of drug use (jørgensen, 1971). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a230 everyone keeps following their own head and constantly shoving personal freedom… (pp. 34-35). for the epistemological monists, dissent from their agreed-upon educational vision is illegitimate. for them, the very notion of responsibility is based on the idea of an obligation to subordinate oneself to this agreed-upon, unified set of values, goals, norms, and principles that define their vision of the educational practice. thus, in the epistemological monist view, the meaning of responsibility is about accountability to the predefined practice. in conventional schooling, epistemological monism is at the core of the authoritarian approach to education, where the authority is institutionalized and enforced on the students through various compulsory forms of power (mandatory school attendance, predefined curriculum, prescribed textbooks, standardized tests, national graduation tests, etc.). i think that it was the epistemological monism in their approach to education that guided åge and the like-minded student in their conceptualization of a democratic school. epistemological monism led them into a trap of becoming “nannies,” playing the role of authority and imposing their views of education on all the other students. in their daily nagging of others14, they tried to inflict on everyone their monist understanding of education in which the students’ freedom is considered legitimate only when they willingly subordinate their own educational judgments, interests, and desires to the power of the pre-planned, given authority of the nannies’ educational vision. in my view, this was the sense of the phrase “freedom with (under) responsibility,” where “responsibility” means accountability and subordination to the authority of the educational practice.15 although the students were involved in running a democratic school, the nannies among them who espoused epistemological monism did not see any contradiction in having everyone agree with their monist approach to education. and that, in itself, is not contradictory. we know from berlin that autocracy can tolerate liberal views, while democracy can sometimes curb personal liberties. in a particular sense of negative liberty as a sphere, of privacy itself, of the area of personal relationships as something sacred in its own right… liberty … is not: incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government. liberty in this sense is principally concerned with the area of control, not with its source. just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom (berlin, 2017, pp. 41-42) thus, the nannies tried to reduce the area of the students’ personal educational freedom (negative freedom), in the name of their epistemological monist approach to education. this authoritarian approach, espoused by the most vocal nannies (åge, tone, roar, sverre, anders, egil, etc.) was strongly opposed by many other students, who for the most part, came to ego because they wanted to run away from the conventional authoritarian schooling (jørgensen, 1971). many of them (inge, tom, fin, erling, elisabeth, torleif, dag, viggo, liv, etc.), were doubtful about the nannies’ insistence on “freedom with (under) responsibility,” which clearly felt as an attempt to curb their negative freedoms. it felt as the false promise of democracy. it was a “democracy” that would, nevertheless, require suppression of their subjectivities, their interests and desires. they heard anders saying that the mission of ego to improve norwegian education was worth controlling one’s impulse “to go down the hall to play guitar,” that it was worth 14 see particular examples and discussions of the “nagging” further below and in the marjanovic-shane (2023b). 15 i discuss the concept of “responsibility as accountability” in more detail below, in the section that focuses on the students’ views of the nature of the educational practice. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a231 renouncing something, it was worth a self-sacrifice on the monist altar of predefined truths and values. this left no room for personal uniqueness, diversity and, for them, the most important right of self-defined (“negative”) freedom to create, design and control their own education. they saw a fundamental contradiction between their right to educational freedom and the nannies’ epistemological monism that obliterates the noncomplying other, the deviants (“yes, call them ‘deviants’ or call them whatever you want,” åge, p. 29) to the point of “casting them off” (roar, p. 32) or “freezing them out” (elisabeth, p. 55). this was contrary to what they imagined a democratic school to be: a place where students can support each other in their personal growth and respect each other for who they are, “being able to be yourself” (torleif, pp. 58-59) and want to be. while most of the students opposing the authoritarianism of epistemological monism rejected monism in principle and moved to (or already held) a radical pluralist worldview (inge, tom, fin, erling, elisabeth, torleif, dag, viggo, liv, etc.), one student, torleif, started to develop a different type of monism – relational monism. i will discuss the pluralist approach later on, but first, i will analyze torleif’s relational monism. relational monism around love in developing his non-traditional, relational monist worldview, torleif focuses exclusively on the quality of interpersonal relationships – demanding harmony, unconditional acceptance of the other, and elimination of conflicts. he insists that the supreme guiding principle in their school should be love. “it is really one of the things that is fundamental for this school – [that] you only act [toward each other] with love…” (torleif, p. 46). according to torleif, love should be the determining principle in making all decisions, especially when it comes to differences in opinions, beliefs, interests, and desires. conflict among the students should be avoided. torleif insisted that there should be no place for the arrogance of those who have strong opinions and believe they know the truth belittling everyone who disagrees. he accused the nannies of silencing those who disagree with their views, pointing out that silencing others is not just a lack of humanness and love but, as suppression of subjectivity and agency might be detrimental if not anti-educational. “everyone bites here. it's so creepy. […] …we who are strong here at school – we hardly think of those not so strong, those who dare not rise up and say anything. those who may have to say [what they believe] in the hallways instead of here. how many are these? 100? 150? how many people dare to get up and say something really serious here, ah? they are afraid of being thrashed” (torleif, p. 45). although some other students (e.g., elisabeth, inge, tom, finn, etc.) also saw humanness as one of the most important educational values, they saw it as a complementary, even dominant value among other guiding principles, including serious academic work. torleif, however, insisted on a sharp, even irreconcilable contrast between love as the guiding value and the principle of serious academic work. for him, any reverence of “academic work” necessarily obliterates love and humanness in school, his primary and the only raison d’être. paradoxically, while accusing the nannies of their unanimity in their rigid epistemological monist approach to school, torleif seems to be as exclusive in his monist love approach to education. when anne points out that the school (as it is envisioned) cannot function “if the classes are empty. we need to get people to show up” (pp. 51-52), torleif cannot reconcile his own monist insistence on the principle of “love” with the principle of “academic work.” for him, the two cannot go together. this is why his view is not pluralist, even if he would allow for diversity of students’ personal goals. love as a principle, for torleif, eliminates judgment of others’ goals and others’ own responsibilities and accountability to these goals. love as the highest principle is unconditional and thus irreconcilable with demands of accountability for academic work. this makes torleif’s approach monism of its own kind. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a232 maybe because torleif was so uncompromising, his powerful critique helped to reveal an underlying link to the conventional alienated education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012) in the nannies’ epistemological monism: a disregard for the students’ subjectivity and interests and a tendency toward suppression of the students’ personal educational initiatives and authorship. torleif: if we agree that this school here should be a school that will make human beings … if so, this … does not fit with what the press and the department of education are expecting from us. what do we do then? if we all agree [with the department of education’s expectations] … […] we get to pull, jerk and tug ourselves, tug tug and tug, and eventually, we’ll become a regular high school. or, we oppose the department of education. if we oppose the department, then the school can be closed. well, it will be closed. [sarcastically] “we did a good job!” if we then repent, it will not be closed. – [but] then it will not be the school of love the school of humanity we had been praying for. that is the dilemma! should we hold on to love as long as we can, until the school is closed, or should we collude with the department and keep it open? i think that is very important. i don't want to compromise with myself i'd rather have the school shut down, than have it be a regular high school. it is very important (p. 60). other students did not exclude love and humanness as values their school should uphold. even when they sensed tension, they did not make them completely incommensurable to the academic work. students like, for example, elisabeth embraced love and humanness as part of their pluralist worldviews16 and critiqued torleif for being exclusive and monist in his approach to love. for instance, inge pointed out that “love” has no educational orientation nor content, “… it is very difficult to show love without somewhat thoughtful mind work. we simply can't sit day in and day out and just be loving and kind. and it is in the synthesis of these two concepts [love and academic work] that one finds true humanity” (p. 60). liv also thought that love and hard academic work are not exclusive of each other. “there are different ways of showing love and … […] those who […] [work hard] have as much love for the school and as much need for love…” (p. 59). on the other hand, the nannies sensed a sharp clash between their “epistemological monism” and torleif’s relational “love monism.” for instance, even when åge seemed to acknowledge the importance of “love” for their school, he, like torleif, thought that there was an inherent contradiction between these two principles in education and that you must choose one over the other, to the point of having to sacrifice love for the sake of the academic success. åge: but we can't just live on love. it is regrettable but you can't do this in the world, […] we can’t… […] and even if we are to promote understanding and tolerance, and be a school full of love, it must not come at the expense of artium. you can get to the artium and still be a good person… and still be able to keep your human and sensitive feelings. it is not necessary to let it come at the expense of each other (pp. 57-58). the clash between these two monist views produced one of the greatest conflicts in the assembly. my colleague eugene matusov commented, “of course, since monism does not know true diversity (i.e., outside of the preset unity), it cannot tolerate it [the diversity] – that is why, in my view, the personalideological fights (cf. bakhtin’s notion of “person-idea,” 1999) were unavoidable there” (cf. marjanovicshane, 2023b). 16 see more about the pluralist worldviews in the next section. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a233 radical pluralism as mentioned above, in contrast to the monists, students who expressed radical pluralist views in the school argued for the legitimacy of the diversity of students’ goals, purposes, values, and interests, even when conflicting with each other. for berlin, the idea of radical pluralism entails more than just an irreconcilable and often contradictory plurality of values, goals, purposes, and interests. radical pluralism is about the acknowledgment, acceptance, appreciation, and legitimation of the existence of often conflicting and contradictory ideas and values – impossible to unite, to transcend, or resolve – as inevitable. … the ideals of one society and culture clash with those of another, and at times come into conflict within the same society and, often enough, within the moral experience of a single individual; that such conflicts cannot always, even in principle, be wholly resolved (berlin, 1978). for berlin, “there is a diversity of values and ends in our moral world and […], there can be conflicts among these values. the values and ends that we pursue in our lives and that we, within our particular moral frameworks, consider as precious or ultimate, cannot always be combined into one harmonious whole” (aarsbergen-ligtvoet, 2006, p. 11). a radical pluralist worldview has substantial implications for education, especially for democratic education. like berlin, the radical pluralists among the ego students supported recognition of the students’ diverse and inevitably conflicting ideas, desires, and goals, which should be appreciated, and supported in one way or another. their recognition and support of diversity ranged from “tolerating” the deviants to rejecting any coercion that would force students to go to classes, to actively supporting the students in their own educational journeys, acknowledging and encouraging their diverse, even conflicting purposes, interests, and needs. for instance, roar (tom person-idea): …some others may argue, “let’s cast off the deviants” … but i think we are a school of 150 individualists [unique personalities]. we cannot expect everyone to have the same attitude [towards the school] … […] so, i would like us to, together… we start with ourselves… we start embracing people who have a slightly different attitude to this school we bring them in instead of casting them off. this [casting them off] would cause great dissatisfaction, i think (p. 32). tom, erling, and fin advocated for the recognition of the students’ personal educational rights to explore their own motivations and responsibilities and to critically examine and “try to find one’s own [authorial] opinions in all matters…” (tom, p. 37). at one point, tom came to a profound insight that others should be recognized and respected in principle, no matter how different, unknown and unknowable they may be. “[w]e cannot know how someone really thinks. we have to put ourselves in the situation that here is an entirely different human being… a very special human being… and not the one like myself, indeed – who cannot be judged based on the same moments [of my life] … and then just discarded and shitted on, and such… that's basically it (pp. 48-49). inge, the most radical pluralist in the school, in my view, argued that the apparent diversity of the students’ educational values, desires, visions, and goals should not just be tolerated and accepted but, most importantly, that the school should actively support the students’ critical examinations and reflections of their interests and desires, no matter how diverse and conflicting their desires and ideas might be. inge: we have been talking for a long time about whether one should be allowed or not to do what they want. but then, something i wonder is this: how is it that, really, so many people want a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a234 different things here at school? i think there are many people who do completely different things and conflicting things too. and this may partly come from the fact that there are many who… most… most of us don't have a big goal ahead of us. we are not visionary enough, i think. and here i think that øivind's proposal about… [writing a] new [mock] application [for this school] or something like that, could be… [an opportunity] that we can ask ourselves: what is it we want? [but] this, what øivind came up with, was later misunderstood. for many, this became the case for not tolerating the deviants. [in a paraphrasing tone] “this should not be a youth psychiatrist clinic.” [but] i think, you… that's just it! at this school here, we should be able to tolerate all people, from the most hopeless neurotics to the most hopeless fighters for freedom and love, maoists, and such (some talk and turmoil) (p. 36, bold mine). in her speech, inge suggested that the school should actively create opportunities for the students to examine their personal views, positions, interests, and desires. her view implied that, in fact, their school should be just the right place where the diversity and radical plurality of the students’ interests and goals could be appreciated and supported. this is why inge strongly criticized the nannies’ monistic attempts to dominate others and even coerce them to go to classes. for her, the essence of their schooling was based on radical pluralism that acknowledges and legitimizes diversity and internal incommensurability of values, interests, and desires. many other students were also opposed to coercion of their peers, seeing it as a lack of humanness, or a lack of appreciation, understanding of, and respect for each person, no matter how unique and different (tom, finn, erling, torleif, elisabeth, etc.). however, many of these pluralists still sought to find an ultimate “higher” unifying goal of education. their non-radical pluralism might be characterized as “pluralism with a monist horizon.” pluralism with a monist horizon social justice as “pluralism with monist horizon” some students, like tom, finn, elisabeth, and some others, were rather ambivalent in their pluralist views, trying to find some overarching, final unitary purpose of education. for instance, for tom and erling, one of the highest educational values, if not the highest one, lies in the intrinsic motivation for personal development, i.e., in educational ownership. what tom, finn, elisabeth, erling, and some others are suggesting is that students must have the right to educational freedom and exercise their educational activism. they recognize that this right of personal educational freedom – berlin’s “negative freedom” – legitimizes diversity of educational goals and values, i.e., that it means legitimization of educational pluralism. however, they still profess the belief that such educational freedom should also ultimately be in the service of becoming a valuable community member who helps improve the world – the final unity of all human values. for instance, tom claims, tom: … in that very moment [when you expel the deviants, you imply] that this school is not for the students to become responsible community citizens who are aiming for… not to study for the graduation exam, but [for] the knowledge to do something in the community they live in. to try to change their society, to become socially conscious, to have the freedom and free will and to be radical. it certainly is not some [comfy] sleeping pillow, indeed, but one of the hardest [things to do]. that is exactly what one should try to find, one’s own opinions in all matters. to work with the society and oneself, it’s as tough as nails. nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority. great. […] but the moment the school does not manage to convey that [other] sense of responsibility, the sense of that a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a235 you are a world citizen, and a sense of having a will to try to fix [the world], then [the school] is unsuccessful. (pp. 37-38, italics mine). it seems that tom’s pluralism has a monist horizon of social justice – that, their school should work on making sure that the students acquire values of social justice as the ultimate highest goal of education. it seems that not every kind of students’ intrinsic motivation would be acceptable for tom (or finn, erling, or elisabeth). the educational legitimacy of students’ intrinsic motivations is limited. unless the students are motivated to “become a responsible world citizen with a yearning to fix the world,” their intrinsic motivation might lie outside the institutional educational realm. in that sense, this view seems to still be founded on berlin’s “positive freedom.” it is freedom for becoming a “world citizen with a will to try to fix the world.” it would have been interesting to explore this “social justice” horizon of monism with tom and the other students at the time of their meeting. harmony of values as “pluralism with monist horizon” another type of pluralism with a monist horizon seems to be a view of a possibility of unity, harmony, and complementarity within the diversity and the uniqueness of the students’ interests, goals, purposes, and ways of being (held by roar, reidar, tom, finn). for instance, tom argued for legitimizing the deviants’ rights to have different educational purposes besides and instead of studying for the graduation exam. finn, on his part, tried to strike a balance between what seemed to emerge as two equally important educational purposes: personal development to become an independent, responsible member of society and academic work to acquire knowledge and skills. “i think… this […] school […] has obviously completely failed in the area of personal development and has only focused on an academic, knowledge-based approach to the case. but just like work is completely central to one's life later the life for which one is being prepared in school the academic work must be just as central in the ego. … equally important is responsibility. responsibility – an ability to take a stand an ability to get involved – an ability to take a stand on the things that are going on in society. this is [also] very important in the life that comes later and therefore, the preparation for it must be just as important in ego. so, i don't think you can … [prioritize one over the other, the academic knowledge-based approach over the development of responsibility approach]” (finn, pp. 4950). thus, for tom, finn, and a few others, a diversity of educational purposes and goals should be legitimate, but they still recognize just those purposes that are compatible and complementary to each other. in this sense, they potentially limit their pluralism of values, purposes, and goals – to exclude conflicts between the values, interests, goals, etc. one could argue that this view sets much, much broader limits than the extreme epistemological monism of one legitimate educational goal – to study for the graduation exam. they appreciated and supported the inevitable plurality of personal interests, purposes, and goals as the very essence of personal education as the examination of the self, the other, and the world sustaining the students’ agency (cf. matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016). however, in my view, their pluralist position had a monist horizon because, ultimately, all diverse students’ educational purposes, goals, and values had to be justified, compatible and harmonious with each other. in this sense, the liberties they were prepared to accept for the students were endowed with “positive freedom” – a telltelling sign of monism. i would say that their appreciation of the plurality of individual paths, which ultimately still lead towards socially and culturally valuable purposes, was a form of monism. students’ grappling with the contradictory implications of monism vs. pluralism was also reflected in their attempts to verbalize two opposing concepts of “responsibility” that lie in the core of the norwegian word “ansvar” – accountability to someone or something vs. critical responsibility. i discuss these two conceptualizations and their implication for the ego students understanding and legitimization of the students’ ownership and authorship of education in their democratic school. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a236 students’ approach to responsibility vs. accountability as discussed above, in the section on the concepts of freedom, the students disagreed about embracing freedom as berlin’s “negative freedom” or embracing freedom in terms of berlin’s “positive freedom,” which they called “freedom under responsibility” (see p. a227 above). however, throughout the soul-searching assembly, two distinctly different conceptualizations of “responsibility” emerged, causing further tensions. “responsibility” is a term that could be described as a “boundary object” (star & griesemer, 1989). star & griesemer define it as … an analytic concept of those […] objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds […] and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across [the users]. […] they have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. the creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds (star & griesemer, 1989, p. 393). “responsibility” is such a term, as it can be used to refer to two very different concepts: critical ethical personal responsibility on the one hand vs. accountability in terms of fulfilling an obligation to an authority.17 both conceptualizations emerged among the students in the meeting and were another point of disagreement among them. responsibility as accountability åge: but listen here: one must begin to realize that in a democracy, one must also have some rules that must be followed. it must be possible, for example, to meet up for a class… […] [the students who do not attend classes are completely indifferent to how the school works. (p. 24-25, bold mine). roar (åge person-idea): … we are all under obligation to the social milieu here… (p. 32). although the ego proclaimed voluntary class attendance, the most severe conflicts emerged around the meaning of “voluntary.” it seemed that the founders (nannies) assumed that “voluntary” attendance should be limited only to the choice of classes to attend. complete non-attendance of classes was inadmissible. it would deviate from the “spirit” or “vision” of the school they had in mind and could not be completely a matter of the personal decision of each student. rather, the personal decision of the students needed to be constrained in some way in order to “keep the vision.” they formulated this constraint as “responsibility.” in other words, they imagined “responsibility” as the students’ accountability to fulfill various obligations to the authority or authorities interwoven in their vision of education from the very start. it seems that they envisioned education as a preplanned practice with clearly defined goals – a poïesis in aristotelian terms (aristotle, 2000).18 such a practice would have the power of supreme authority over the students (and teachers), defining their roles and obligations. the authority of such a preplanned practice 17 even in english, “responsibility” is often used interchangeably for both, but in norwegian, there seems to exist only one term: “ansvar,” and its meaning must be disambiguated in context. 18 according to aristotle, poïesis is “an activity where its goal, value, form, and the definition of what constitutes its quality preexist the activity itself” (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019, p. 253). participants in a poïetic type of activity act within preset roles, subordinating their subjectivities to particular predetermined forms of participation geared to pursuing given goals, values, rules, and norms. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a237 would institute a set of evaluative norms to judge each participant’s compliance with its rules and norms. in the case of the experimental gymnasium of oslo, it seems that the particular vision developed by the founders was based on a modified conventional authoritarian approach to education. that hegemonic approach was supported by the norwegian department of education, the educational researchers of the university of oslo, the teachers union for high-school teachers, and some other teachers’ organizations (øygarden & svartdal, 1979). in other words, the students have the freedom to choose how to participate in this poïetically determined educational practice, but not whether to participate or not. the concept of the poïetic obligation to the practice itself led åge (and other like-minded students) to see a big problem in the principle of open voluntary attendance that lowered the overall class attendance to less than 50%. at some point, anne (a “nanny”) pleaded, anne (åge person-idea): i just hope that everyone will understand that we [the nannies] do not mean… we don't mean… that everyone should do as we say. but we will be very happy to be allowed to exist, too… we who want to work. but we can't work if the classes are empty. we need to get people to show up. we must get people to show up: for bodybuilding at the gym, for psychology, philosophy, and in all classes. everywhere! to make it a richer school environment than what you had where you went before (pp. 51-52). anne seemed to imply that students should find a way to fit themselves into the rich selection of the given classes rather than the education be left to the students to define. in other words, in the students’ poïetic approach to education, the term “responsibility” assumed the meaning of accountability to the authority of the established educational practice. when they discuss “freedom with/under responsibility,” åge, roar, anne, and others talk about having obligations to this particular poïetic vision – “the spirit” – of their school. they offer many arguments appealing to the students’ accountability: 1. being fair to and keeping the trust of the wider society, “the taxpayers,” who expect the school (i.e., the students) to keep its promise to deliver education as they know it. “… we are paid for by the public … there is a consideration for taxpayers …, there are, after all, very many people who sacrifice part of their income who work all day and have to sacrifice part of it its income for us to be here today and i mean that there is nowhere else in a society where anyone can sit down to do as little as we can that is” (tom, p. 27, bold mine). 2. being accountable for each other’s education. “… we are responsible[accountable] for our fellow students. we are responsible[accountable] for our own schooling…. if we all we start with the individual we start with [going to] the classes we can manage the school and we can manage to get it to become a good school” (roar, pp. 26-27, bold mine). 3. helping the school fulfill its mission to play a serious role in the educational experiment to improve the norwegian schools, “… we are an educational endeavor to try to change the current school system, the current one high school that's what the goal was, namely, and if it is to have any relevance at all, then one must think about: what is a school what is the norwegian school (tom, p. 27, bold mine). 4. an obligation and a duty to avoid the failure of the school as part of norwegian institutionalized education. “… this school is leading up to the graduation – […] when [the deviants] go here – then the school may expect to have a failure rate of 50%. yes, one cannot tolerate that” (åge, p. 29) and “… then we absolutely have to keep some record of what … is going on. we have to keep some production control like any other institution and so we have to run with subject tests instead so instead of attendance duty, then it becomes a duty to learn (arne, a teacher, p. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a238 33, bold mine). 5. an obligation to show solidarity in supporting the vision of the school. “it doesn't help to twirl around here at school and tolerate each other back and forth... it helps absolutely nothing – […] you have to show solidarity and responsibility (sverre, pp. 35-36). having such obligations to the practice itself limits and reduces the students’ ownership and authorship of education. when being obliged to the practice (and its different external owners), the student’s educational authorship is reduced to technological, to how to participate in the predesigned, preplanned given practice, rather than to be able to create and construct one’s own education. in other words, the students’ educational authorship cannot be fully based on their own values, interests, and desires. as torleif said, the students must constantly be “… playing someone else, […] constantly having to be [in a rat race] on a treadmill” (torleif, p. 58-59). responsibility as a critical dialogic ethical stance students who focused on humanness, self-guided personal development, and the concept of “negative freedom” as the highest guiding values of education and in their school were developing a very different conceptualization of responsibility. responsibility for them was something that must be viewed as personal development that requires freedom for critically evaluating one’s own positions and deeds in the relationship to society and the self. for instance, tom probably expresses this view when he argues that, tom: … this school is […] for the students to become responsible community citizens […] not to study for the graduation exam, but […] to have the freedom and free will and to be radical. […] that is exactly what one should try to find, one’s own opinions in all matters. to work with society and oneself, it’s as tough as nails. nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority (tom, p. 38). tom’s view was underscored by erling, who emphatically argued for legitimizing the emergence of the students’ own views as part of their self-defined responsibility in education, “i believe that, if one is to be educated for responsibility then one must be given this responsibility! – this must not be violated. one has to have this responsibility for oneself (erling, p. 38, italics mine). in their approach, responsibility is conceptualized as part of the student’s personal ethical development: as a transcendence that could take place when one is free to act according to one’s own conscience in a critical dialogue with oneself and society. according to bakhtin, responsibility is an integral part of one’s ideological becoming, which “refers to how we develop our way of viewing the world, our system of ideas, what bakhtin calls an ideological self” (freedman & ball, 2004, p. 5). when tom says that one should try to find “one’s own opinions in all matters,” instead of “just hanging under some authority” (p. 37-38), he seems to echo bakhtin’s view that “there is no alibi in being” (mikhail m. bakhtin, 1993, p. 40). in other words, according to bakhtin, ontological circumstances are not what defines people. “what people actively do with and in their ontological circumstances is defined by their responsibility” (matusov, 2009, p. 228). when finn says, “responsibility – [is an] ability to take a stand – an ability to get involved – an ability to take a stand on the things that are going on in the society,” he seems to focus on the responsibility defined as developing a critical ethical approach to oneself and the world, answering to challenging questions and taking into account alternative positions. all of that could lead to making critical judgments and decisions guided by internally persuasive discourse (mikhail m. bakhtin, 1991; matusov & von duyke, 2010). a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a239 tom and the like-minded students seemed to view educational practice, not as poïesis, a fully predefined practice with norms and rules “written in stone,” an authority to which the students’ have to subject themselves. on the contrary, they seemed to see the educational practice as an evolving and transcending way of being and acting, i.e., an aristotelian praxis.19 for tom, finn, erling, inge, and others, a student’s critical ethical responsibility cannot be predefined, nor can it be imposed by any authority. students’ personal responsibility can only be and should only be promoted, supported, and nurtured. there the very vision of educational practice should be built upon the notion of responsibility as a personal stance reached through critical dialogues, where each person can become an author of their own ethical position in the events of the moment (inge). i wonder whether the tension between the two different conceptualizations of responsibility – responsibility as accountability to an authority vs. personal (critical) responsibility, was what torleif had in mind when he pointed out the incongruity between åge’s expectation to subordinate oneself to the vision of ego as approved by the department of education, and the legitimacy (for torleif, “love”) of the idea of being oneself, having one’s own independent values and principles. torleif: … if we agree that this school here should be a school that will make human beings… if so, this … does not fit with what the press20 and the department of education are expecting from us. what do we do then? if we all agree [with the department of education’s expectations?] … […] we get to pull, jerk and tug ourselves, tug tug and tug, and eventually, we’ll become a regular [conventional] high school. or we oppose the department of education. […] that is the dilemma! should we hold on to love as long as we can until the school is closed, or should we collude with the department and keep it open? i think that is very important. i don't want to compromise with myself i'd rather have the school shut down than have it be a regular high school. it is very important (torleif, p. 60, italics mine). it seems that many more students (and not only among the nannies) approached the concept of responsibility as accountability than solely as a personal critical responsibility. the question is why that was the case in a school that was run by the students. an answer may lie in the fact that their school’s sovereignty from the norwegian department of education was problematic. at best, it was limited, and at worst, they had no sovereignty. not having full sovereignty might have made the founding students (and some others) highly anxious, limiting their desire to leap into unknown and non-experienced explorations in developing a liberal democratic approach to education – where they could afford to have “negative freedom” for each student and each teacher. these fears were expressed by teacher olaf, who, at one point, openly wonders “to what extent ego is a legislative institution” because it is “good to know where we stand right there […] it's absolutely crucial for my attitude to just about everything we talk about.” olaf further wonders … “do we have the authority to do that? or is … [what we can do] limited to […] loosening up some of the well-worn tracks in the old school, or have it been extended to a larger area. it is absolutely crucial for what i want to stand and vote for in all these things here” (olaf, p. 43). concluding discussion education, freedom, democracy, responsibility, and dialogue i started the overall project of this special issue to answer a question of the relationships between democracy and dialogue in education. what underlying ideas of democratic education foster and promote 19 for aristotle, praxis is “such an activity where its goal, value, form, and the definition of what constitutes its quality emerge in the activity itself” (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019, pp. 255-256). 20 the experimental gymnasium of oslo had a lot of media coverage in norway at the time of its opening. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a240 dialogism, and what kind of dialogism in education? which perspectives on democracy in education may potentially limit dialogism and promote monologism in education? of course, the students did not discuss “dialogism” as a topic per se in their meeting, but their explicit positions on freedom, democracy, education, and responsibility can be taken as implicit indicators of their understanding of dialogue in education and the nature of education as a practice. according to bakhtin, genuine dialogue takes place among “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [who] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (m. m. bakhtin, 1999, p. 6, italics in the original). such a definition of dialogue has several implications for education in general and specifically for democracy in education. these implications concern the understanding of freedom, monism/pluralism, and the understanding of the nature of responsibility/accountability. in a word, genuine dialogue needs an educational approach based on legitimate personal “negative freedom,” pluralism, and responsibility as a personal critical and authorial relationship to self and others. however, disagreements in the soul-searching assembly reveal that even in a school in which the students have legitimate power of decision about most of the issues of their schooling, and even in one of the potentially quintessentially dialogic meetings of “the plurality of consciousnesses with equal rights,” education was not perceived by all as a dialogic meaning-making process. one could argue that åge’s monist person-idea envisions education not as a practice of personal meaning-making but as a hierarchical process of transmission of cultural, historical, and scientific truths, knowledge, and skills deemed necessary for becoming a certified socially accepted “adult” through passing the national graduation exam (artium). it also might be that åge’s position comes from his progressivist views, i.e., that it is important to base education on the student’s meaning-making, yet, meaning-making that is heavily bounded by socialization into and the acquisition of the given culture.21 from that point of view, it seems that åge’s person-idea would oppose education based on genuine dialogue understood as an encounter of the consciousnesses with equal rights engaged in internally persuasive discourse. yet, at the same time, åge was one of the founders of the democratically governed school, where the students have equal rights of input in making decisions about their education. for åge, however, the democratic process of decision-making would place a limit on students’ educational interests, desires, purposes, and the full legitimacy of personal meaning-making as a basis of education. it would force uniform rules of education on all, rules that would enforce uniform purposes, goals, and predefined, given truths on all students. in other words, åge’s monism would grant the students only “positive freedom” (berlin, 2006) to study predominantly what the school had decided (albeit through a democratic process) to comprise good education. in that sense, åge’s educational democracy could be described as illiberal democratic education. in this kind of democracy, the student's personal educational rights would be significantly limited. in a certain way, the students’ democratic school governance could be seen as acting in a similar way as any other external educational authority, where students cease to be “consciousnesses with equal rights” participating in an internally persuasive dialogue. dialogue as a genuine meaning-making practice would be severely limited, distorted, and reduced to serving approved predefined purposes, preset-goals, and a hierarchical educational distribution of power, placed to ensure the transmission of knowledge, truths, and skills. in my view, this is what torleif’s person-idea was deeply rebelling against, trying to precisely annihilate this hierarchical power distribution and, instead, make place for students’ “negative freedom.” yet, torleif’s solution, his love-based monism, would also limit, if not completely omit, dialogue from 21 i am grateful to eugene matusov for this insight. a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a241 education. an educational practice that is rooted in unconditional love and acceptance, the way torleif attempted to formulate it, also eliminates meaningful dialogic examination of students’ diverse interests, opinions, positions, desires, purposes, and truths as a significant aspect of education. it empties education of any content. as inge pointed out to torleif, “… it is very difficult to show love without somewhat thoughtful mind work. we simply can't sit day-in and day-out and just be loving and kind” (p. 60). democratic education, however, can lend itself to supporting and promoting genuine dialogue as a foundation of education if and when it is based on a pluralist outlook, the legitimacy of the students’ rights of “negative freedom,” and conceptualizing of responsibility in terms of a personal, ethical, and dialogic process of “taking a stand.” these views were espoused by inge’s person-idea, and to a large extent, although not completely by tom’s person-idea. their view of democracy could be called liberal democracy in education. the school as a democratically governed entity would not only be based on the concept of the student’s rights of “negative educational freedom” but would actively support students in developing and reflecting on their own educational purposes, goals, and values and defining their own educational responsibilities in a critical dialogue. such school democracy would ostensibly create an educational ecology where critical dialogue would be welcome as an important meaning-making process of education. there is, however, one more consideration to be made about dialogue in democratic education: dialogue has at least two different purposes in democratically run schools. on the one hand, dialogue is an integral part of democratic deliberations in making decisions in the process of governance. on the other hand, dialogue serves another purpose in joint thinking through academic topics: deliberating truths and values, constructing positions and opinions, and exploring the world, others, and the self. in these two roles, dialogue has different purposes and aims that may be even contradictory to each other. as a part of democratic governance, dialogue must end in a decision that will have some sort of implication for all the members of the community. in this sense, dialogue is instrumental to some other purpose, defined by democratic governance and aims at agreement, or at least persuasion of the majority in one point of view. while in educational dialogue, no common decision is necessary, and dialogue as such is not an instrument but a medium for internally persuasive discourse to be born. in my view, it is possible to envision åge’s monist position valuing instrumental dialogue as being important not only to make school governing decisions but also for making decisions about good education for all, where once decisions are made about educational matters (curriculum, instruction, evaluation, participation, etc.), they need to be adhered by all because “this is a student democracy and not student anarchy...” (åge’s person idea). critical dialogue and democratic education … the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism [i.e., involving hostile adversaries who try to annihilate each other] into agonism [i.e., involving friendly adversaries, whose right of the existence is recognized by each side, if not even appreciated] … modern democracy’s specificity lies in the recognition and legitimation of conflict and the refusal to suppress it by imposing an authoritarian order. (mouffe, 2000, p. 103). the students could not completely resolve their conceptual and even paradigmatic disagreements in this soul-searching assembly meeting. they finally adjourned it after four-and-half hours, without making any decisions. they could not fully resolve their disagreements, either in this meeting or later, throughout the years of the school's existence (jørgensen, 1971; melheim, 2019). their differences were not reconcilable. there is no “middle point” between the paradigmatically distant points of view they held. seeing their practice from one paradigm could not “incorporate” parts of the other paradigm. each paradigmatic view captures the totality of all the relationships, giving each particular “element” a different a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.455 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a242 meaning. a good example is the paradigmatically different meaning of “responsibility,” either as a personal, human responsibility to take a stand for one’s beliefs and deeds vs. accountability, to fulfill an obligation to someone or some predefined practice. however, in my view, it was in the soul-searching assembly that the students were able to transform their antagonisms into agonisms – where in turn, their fights and clashes could be transformed into tense but productive dialogues among people willing to take each other seriously. traditionally, “[e]ither an agreement has to be reached (cf. the enlightenment project) or the dissensus will deteriorate into antagonism of ‘us versus them,’ where a weaker dissenting party is eliminated or expelled” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, pp. 211-212). however, the aim of democracy, according to mouffe, is to “‘limit and contest’ (mouffe, 2000, p. 22) violence and antagonism by accepting the unavoidability and desirability of power, authority, and politics” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 212) in a critical dialogic reflection. this democratic deliberation can be described as dialogue among “friendly enemies” or “agonistic dialogue” where one can appreciate a disagreeable other as “a potential source for one’s own unknown self-limitation of truths and values” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 212). in my view, tom’s person-idea brought up this point in the meeting: the realization that disagreement is not merely unavoidable but that it could be appreciated as a productive source of unpredictable truths that can only come to life on the boundaries of consciousnesses that are opaque to each other (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). i think that this realization made the soul-searching assembly the making-point of the experimental gymnasium of oslo, which enabled the school to survive and last for almost four decades.22 what made their school internally possible, what made it survive and endure in a rather hostile environment of norwegian conventional educational policies, was the students’ (and their teachers’) sense of respect for and appreciation of each other’s diverse viewpoints. they started developing a culture of respecting others’ disagreeable positions in this very assembly. it was the experience of the soul-searching assembly that created an educational culture where the ideological tensions could actually become a source of constant reexaminations of their ultimate educational desires and personal interests, reexaminations of the nature of the society and possibilities of freedom (hem & remlov, 1969). it was also possible because of their shared commitment to the idea of keeping the principle of voluntary attendance, i.e., the students’ personal right to join or to leave any educational activity – which is an ultimate condition for “negative freedom.” references aarsbergen-ligtvoet, c. 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(2003). the future of freedom: illiberal democracy at home and abroad (1st ed.). new york: w.w. norton & co. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc1 an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students: a bakhtinian perspective on dialogue and love atsushi tajima tokyo university of foreign studies, japan yingmin jiang beijing normal university, china abstract in today’s culturally diverse world, the ability to engage in effective communication with individuals from different backgrounds has become increasingly significant. in particular, overcoming emotional resistance when interacting with individuals from culturally distinct backgrounds is an important educational challenge. in this paper, we discuss the significance of educational practices that facilitate productive intercultural communication, drawing inspiration from the perspectives of the russian philosopher m. m. bakhtin, who valued “dialogues” between “others” who hold conflicting ideas about the same subject. bakhtin valued the “outsideness” of others, recognizing it as a means to reveal the multifaceted nature of ideologies, which have been unquestionably accepted by individuals within the same cultural milieu. additionally, he appreciated the positive atmosphere that could develop between speakers, which plays a key role in alleviating the emotional distress associated with reacting to perspectives from alien cultural backgrounds as a significant factor in promoting meaningful dialogues. based on bakhtin’s insights, we designed an experimental educational approach to mediate conflicting ideas between japanese and chinese university students by alleviating the emotional distress they experienced when faced with conflicting viewpoints. thus, the research question of the present study is how we can promote participants’ critical investigations on each speaker’s conflictive cultural view and develop their abilities to bridge the gaps in culturally divided worldviews. after an analysis of these theories and empirical data, we comprehensively proposed strategies to enhance the quality of tense intercultural communication while discussing conflicting themes. promoting positive emotions toward partners, consistent with the concept of “professional love” proposed in this special issue, is regarded as one of the most crucial elements of our educational approach. keywords: dialogue, intercultural communications, heteroglossia, carnival, estrangement, relativism ignorance, laughter, dialogic networking, emotion, professional love. atsushi tajima is an associate professor at institute of global studies at tokyo university of foreign studies, where he has been working since 2012. he received his ph.d. in psychology from the university of tsukuba in 2006. he has published papers and books mainly on theoretical investigations of the dialogic theories of m.m. bakhtin, with a particular focus on enhancing intercultural communication in school education. he has received an outstanding paper award (2007) and kido award (2009) from the japanese association of educational psychology for his contributed papers. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4878-1462, correspondence: tajima.atsushi@tufs.ac.jp dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4878-1462 mailto:tajima.atsushi@tufs.ac.jp an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc2 yingmin jiang is a professor at the institute of international and comparative education (iice) at beijing normal university, a position she has held since 2000. she earned her ph.d. in education from beijing normal university in the same year. her research and publications primarily focus on education for international understanding, with an emphasis on improving intercultural communication in primary, secondary, and high school education. she has been actively involved in developing international understanding dialogue courses in collaboration with china, japan, and south korea. https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6825-6933 acknowledgement this work was supported by kakenhi grant number 16k04310, 18k03060, 23k02886, 23k21871 and 23k25675 from the ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology (mext) / japan society for the promotion of science (jsps). ïïò introduction: overcoming “relativism ignorance” in intercultural communication recent studies have revealed that individuals tend to avoid affectional conflicts by disregarding unacceptable ideologies encountered during intercultural communication (bennett & bennett, 2004; oh, 2017; pian, 2017; sakakibara, 2017; takahashi & yamamoto, 2020; watanabe, 2017). individuals often perceive emotionally unacceptable ideas presented by their conversation partners as alien or unrelated to their own beliefs. the typical response of emotional resistance to such ideas often takes a relativistic form, such as, “i accept your idea because you’re a foreigner (although i don’t personally agree with it).” emotion, a fundamental human response, protects our physical and mental systems from external threats and invasions (de dreu et al., 2011; toda, 1993). thus, in tense intercultural communication, experiencing emotional distress and resistance to unfamiliar perspectives is expected because individuals instinctively protect their own ideas from ideological invasion. humans have the capacity to obtain novel insights from alien perspectives that belong to different cultural contexts by managing the inherent emotional discomfort associated with such encounters (matusov & sullivan, 2020; tajima, 2021b). however, if individuals accept conflicting ideas as foreign and irrelevant to their own lives to avoid emotional distress, their intellectual growth is stunted despite their efforts at communication. this approach to different viewpoints can result in disregarding diverse cultural perspectives (engeström, 2001, 2008; tajima, 2017). m. m. bakhtin, the russian philosopher known for advocating the value of “dialogue” – signifying communication between individuals with divergent perspectives – addressed similar problems in the early 20th century. he suggested that the tendency of speakers to avoid engaging with alien ideas may be a consequence of either “dogmatism” or “relativism.” he posited that “relativism” is as un-dialogic as “dogmatism,” which forcibly suppresses these ideas because “relativism” excludes the opportunity to understand alien perspectives and prevents speakers from revising their existing beliefs through interactions with external perspectives. “we see no special need to point out that the polyphonic approach has nothing in common with relativism (or dogmatism). but it should be noted that both relativism and dogmatism equally exclude all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism)” (bakhtin, 1963/1984, p.69). https://orcid.org/0009-0007-6825-6933 an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc3 consistent with bakhtin’s insights, we use the term “relativism ignorance” in this paper to describe the attitude of avoiding contact with the ideologies of communication partners who have alien perspectives in intercultural communications. previous studies about intercultural communications have not identified a method for educating students about effectively managing this form of relativism ignorance, which intends to avoid emotional distress against unfamiliar ways of thinking. to understand the challenges posed by relativism ignorance during intercultural communication, we examined bakhtin’s theoretical framework, often referred to as “dialogism.” furthermore, we analyzed the outcomes of our educational approach, which was designed to promote comprehension of culturally alien ideas among university students, thereby moving beyond the constraints of relativism ignorance from the perspective of bakhtin’s dialogism. the research question of the present study is how we can promote critical investigations on each speaker’s conflictive cultural view through overcoming relativism ignorance by alleviating their emotional distress. bakhtin’s ideas on “culture” and “relativism” in intercultural communication as the theoretical premises of his dialogism, bakhtin (1920-1923/1990, pp. 22–23) suggested that any perspectives of individual speakers regarding the external world are not agreed upon because the physical spaces they occupy are never matched. bakhtin referred to this inherent uniqueness of speakers’ views because of unavoidable disagreement as “excess (surplus) of seeing” (clark & holquist, 1984). “when i contemplate a whole human being who is situated outside and over against me, our concrete, actually experienced horizons do not coincide… cognition surmounts this concrete outsideness of me myself and outsideness-for-me of all other human beings, as well as the excess of my seeing in relation to each one of them, which is founded in that position of outsideness.” (bakhtin, 1920-1923/1990, pp.22-23) however, individuals can often experience a sense of “agreement,” particularly in everyday conversations with acquaintances (tajima, 2017; haye & gonzalez, 2020). they behave as if they share common ideologies and use shared jargon, a form of discourse that bakhtin termed “social language” (bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 275) or “speech genre” (bakhtin, 1979/1986, p. 60), which might represent socalled “culture” (min, 2001). this practical sense of agreement with ideologies enables speakers to automatically exchange their collective perspectives with minimal reflection concerning differences in viewpoints. consequently, the individual’s unique excess of seeing can become ambiguous and less distinct under such cultural circumstances. bakhtin placed significant emphasis on the importance of criticisms of existing collective worldviews by individuals who do not share the prevailing cultural agreement (min, 2001; tajima, 2017). he referred to these individuals as “others” who exist outside the boundaries of each cultural milieu. it is crucial to recognize that bakhtin regarded “dialogue” as the interaction between these others who vividly demonstrate each individual’s unique excess of seeing and outsideness (dafermos, 2018; tajima, 2017). through critical dialogues with these others, who bring novel and alien perspectives, individuals can find the multifaceted meanings of the target ideas. accordingly, they engage in a reciprocal exchange and assimilation of each other’s unique excess of seeing. bakhtin associated this dialogic phenomenon with the term “active understanding” (bakhtin, 1975/1981, pp. 282–283) or “estrangement” that was originally advocated in russian formalism (bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 402), which dismantles the one-sidedness of ideologies that have been automatically accepted within specific cultural milieus (emerson, 2005; tajima, 2017). drawing from his experiences as a schoolteacher, bakhtin provided concrete examples of this active understanding through a dialogic process of integrating scientific texts learned within school cultures and the practical knowledge gained from everyday experiences outside schools (laptun & thihanov, 2018; vasiliev, 2018). an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc4 “creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. in order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding-in time, in place, in culture.” (bakhtin, 1979/1986, p.7) the anxiety of being misunderstood by others, particularly during intercultural communication with others, can prompt speakers to engage in deep introspection regarding their own thoughts and their communication partners’ viewpoints, thus enhancing their self-awareness to identify methods for effective collaboration with these others (harvey et al., 2019; r’boul, 2021). bakhtin suggested that understanding one’s own culture can only be accomplished through dialogues with others living in different cultural contexts. “it is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly....a meaning only reveals its depth once it has encountered and come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures.” (bakhtin, 1979/1986, p.7) on the other hand, bakhtin also highlighted a phenomenon in which individuals automatically adopt the prevailing ideologies even when they engage in intercultural interactions. he illustrated this issue using a hypothetical example of an “illiterate peasant” who used various speech genres within different cultural groups. “languages” mentioned in the following excerpt represent the speech genres accepted within different cultural groups. “but these languages were not dialogically coordinated in the linguistic consciousness of the peasant; he passed from one to the other without thinking, automatically: each was indisputably in its own place, and the place of each was indisputable. he was not yet able to regard one language (and the verbal world corresponding to it) through the eyes of another language (that is, the language of everyday life and the everyday world with the language of prayer or song, or vice versa).” (bakhtin, 1975/1981, p.296) despite participating in multiple cultural groups, this peasant was unable to “regard one language through the eyes of another language.” consequently, he moved between different cultures automatically without critically examining the relationships between speech genres belonging to each culture. conversely, bakhtin envisioned an ideal form of intercultural communication in which speakers enhance their selfawareness, which indicates “internal dialogues” between culturally alien others’ estranging voices and their own. bakhtin referred to these interactions as “dialogically coordinate/implicate” because they open new layers of meaning within existing interpretations (brandist & lähteenmäki, 2010). when engaged in these dialogues, speakers strive to relate their ideas with others’ ideas and their pre-existing beliefs, both in their external interactions and internal dialogues. consequently, this dialogical coordination often manifests as wavers between conflicting perspectives that appeared in the speaker’s indecisive utterances, as typically displayed by characters in dostoevsky’s novels. “we are waving. we don't know how to behave. we begin to argue with ourselves and try to persuade ourselves that our decision is justified. our consciousness become as if they are divided into two independent and opposing voices.” (bakhtin. 2000, p.540) multicultural discussion accompanied by speakers’ dialogical coordination is also termed “heteroglossia-for-itself” (bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 400) or simply “heteroglossia,” in which speakers’ unique excesses of seeing become more distinct. within such heteroglossic situations, individuals can genuinely explore the differences between their own viewpoints and the viewpoints of others as their communication partners. furthermore, they can engage in reciprocal coordination of viewpoints during dialogues (hayes & gonzalez, 2020). an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc5 “relativism,” which was previously discussed, that indicates speakers’ tendencies to avoid engaging with alien ideas in dialogues, is also negated within this context of bakhtin’s dialogism. relativism involves conventional and intellectual strategies that harmonize one’s own perspectives with conflicting alien ideas (emerson, 1999). however, in bakhtin’s view, relativism was an inadequate way of communication because it hindered mutual analysis of ideas between others, thereby obscuring each other’s excess of seeing. in accordance with bakhtin’s discussion, emerson argued that the superficial egalitarianism promoted by relativism, particularly through legal agreements, should be rejected. this rejection is necessary because egalitarianism attempts to erase others’ transgressive outsideness between cultures, which is essential for dialogical coordination. “fools” who encroach on the borders of cultures in carnivals though speakers benefit from dialogical coordination, they might experience emotional resistance when others criticize their ideologies. this reaction is rooted in the instinctive human tendency to shield one’s existing systems from alien ideas that can potentially disrupt those systems (de dreu et al., 2011; toda, 1993). individuals who face criticism from others may experience anxiety as they find themselves wavering between their established ideas and the conflicting perspectives of others. our concept of relativism ignorance, the attitude of disregarding the ideologies of communication partners with alien perspectives encountered in intercultural communications, can be regarded as an intellectual but superficial response to these emotional challenges. this tendency gets individuals to avoid direct emotional distress by compartmentalizing their own ideas and distancing them from the thoughts of outside others in intercultural communication. bakhtin introduced conceptual tools for promoting dialogues beyond the hindrances like relativism: “fools” as dialogue promoters and “carnival” as the arena for fools to engage in heteroglossic dialogues (emerson, 1999). in european history, individuals later known as “wise fools” were often highly intelligent professionals who used humor to estrange cultural ideologies from an outsider’s perspective (kaiser, 1973; tajima, 2021a). during the middle ages, these fools used their intelligence to take the roles of festive kings who presided over carnivals, serving as temporary festive arenas, where these mock kings engaged in comical critiques of the authoritative and prevailing ideologies in various cities. based on the historical context of carnivals, bakhtin (1975/1981, pp. 402–406) positioned “rogue, clown and fool” as individuals who promote dialogues among citizens beyond their automatic adherence to their respective cultural ideologies. bakhtin emphasized the “ambivalence” of the criticism offered by these individuals (morson & emerson, 1990). in his view, the folly of fools involved both negating and playfully deceiving the ideologies held by citizens from an outsider’s perspective. however, they did not impose their own ideologies on others because they also negated views of their own ambivalently in the carnival play. fools were essentially rootless individuals who did not belong to any cultural group; they primarily facilitated dialogical coordination between speakers by estranging their ideologies via the cultural periphery of the fools themselves. the comical discourse utilized by fools created a lighthearted and joyful atmosphere among citizens, alleviating their emotional distress concerning alien perspectives. citizens could enjoy the criticisms of their ideologies by fools within the comical settings of the carnival and reflect on them from an outsiders’ perspective. bakhtin (1963/1984, p. 165) referred to this ambivalent form of estrangement as “laughter,” which promotes heteroglossic tendencies within dialogues (cresswell & sullivan, 2020; sullivan et al., 2015; tajima, 2017, 2021a). “together with the image of the rogue (and often fusing with him) there appears the image of the fool – either of an actual simpleton or the image of the mask of a rogue. the naiveté of a simpleton who does not understand pathos (or who understands it in a distorted way, wrong side out), is counterposed to a false pathos, which together with gay deception has the effect of “making strange” any pretensions to lofty reality a discourse an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc6 of pathos might have. this prosaic “estrangement” of the discourse of conventional pathos by means of an uncomprehending stupidity (simplicity, naiveté) had an enormous significance for the entire subsequent history of the novel.” (bakhtin, 1975/1981, p.402) bakhtin seemed to regard his carnival as frank and interdisciplinary academic discussions, for example, the dialogues between himself and his academic colleagues, often referred to as the “bakhtin circle,” who had diverse academic backgrounds (gratchev & marinova, 2019). the discourses typically introduced by fools during the carnival bear a striking resemblance to roleplay performances, in which participants engage with the roles and viewpoints of others both intellectually and emotionally, fostering an ambivalent dialogue with the fools present in the carnival (tajima, 2021a). in this context, individuals are not compelled to unilaterally defend their own ideas; instead, they revel in dialogues that explore the multifaceted external world. the joyfulness elicited by the presence of fools alleviates the emotional distress experienced by participants when confronted with perspectives from outside their cultural milieu. in this joyful atmosphere, participants become more open to alien ideas, allowing them to blend these ideas with pre-existing beliefs nurtured in their everyday lives. in this carnival setting, participants begin to realize that all opinions have inherent one-sidedness, which can be subjected to criticism in dialogues. this recognition could help them move beyond the stance of relativism, which involves avoiding contact with the views of another culture. in these contexts, billig (2008) connected bakhtin’s concept of laughter with freedom. this concept allows speakers to examine their ideologies from their own perspectives, detaching them from dependence on customs or authority while maintaining positive feelings. significance of bakhtin’s discussions in the development of educational programs to resolve relativism ignorance using bakhtin’s perspective, we focused on resolving relativism ignorance regarding conflicting themes in educational environments, which remained unresolved in previous studies. we proposed the research question: can we promote heteroglossic tendencies during tense intercultural communication by introducing a carnival-like situation where learners can experience the role of fools who can alleviate emotional distress owing to the differences in perspectives? we focused on techniques used by historic fools, referred to as “quid-pro-quo,” originally in greek and roman classic comedies and novels identified as carnival-like literary works by bakhtin. in these literary works, the characters incorrectly identify their communication partners (sullivan et al., 2009; tajima, 2021a) and engage in a switching of roles of heroes/heroines and outsiders who have alien perspectives (e.g., between slaves and masters, and between foreigners and citizens). each character gets perplexed by comical performances regarding his/her own social role from the partners who robbed their original status and expect to know strange criticisms of their original ideologies from the disguised outsiders’ alien views. such foolish deviation from original social roles is expected to create a comical situation that prompts individuals to estrange automatically accepted ideologies in their culture. through these comical dialogues, individuals could vividly experience the estranging wavers between his/her original ideologies and outsiders’ alien views of them. in addition to them, through the carnival-like dialogues, they are expected to enjoy a joyful air that alleviates the emotional distress often associated with conflicting ideas. we expected that research participants would come to waver in their utterances between culturally alien perspectives by taking partners’ roles, and this foolish quid-pro-quo situation would help them alleviate emotional distress during dialogues. through these encouragements, participants could overcome their an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc7 relativism ignorance by considering their own cultural ideologies from the outside perspectives of their alien partners. experimental educational model for communications between japanese and chinese individuals we focused on tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese individuals, considering the significant cultural gaps between these two nations, particularly regarding value judgments about using, lending, and sharing money within familiar relationships. these differences arise from diverse perspectives regarding human relations and economic systems (pian, 2017; takahashi & yamamoto, 2020). in such intercultural interactions, speakers often avoid emotional clashes by perceiving their partners' assertions as alien concepts unrelated to their own experiences (jiang, 2015). consequently, many individuals exhibit typical relativism ignorance, becoming indifferent to their communication partners’ viewpoints. our approach involves designing an experimental program aimed at enhancing students’ abilities to navigate the challenging perspective gaps that exist between japanese and chinese cultures, moving beyond relativism ignorance from bakhtinian viewpoints on dialogue and carnival. for this approach, we used performances similar to “forum theatre” (boal, 1983/1985) to enable participants to experience conceptual and emotional distresses during negotiations between incompatible perspectives. in the initial stages of the program, we cultivated a festive atmosphere among participants, with the goal of alleviating emotional tensions between them. subsequently, we instructed them to create short dramas that would serve as vehicles for expressing and addressing the emotional distress arising from negotiations between conflicting japanese and chinese perspectives. finally, we incorporated the carnival technique of quid-proquo into role-playing exercises. this involved asking participants to assume roles from the opposing culture – japanese students playing chinese roles and vice versa – with the aim of promoting dialogical coordination between the ideologies of others. through these practices, we anticipated expanding participants' wavers between conflicting value judgments, alleviating emotional distresses, and consequently disrupting their relativistic attitudes toward each culture. we summarize the concrete outline of our practice and propose a hypothesis based on our research question. first, we fostered a joyful atmosphere among students, in which speakers were allowed to examine each other’s ideologies safely. second, we instructed participants to play short theatrical exercises to resolve conflicts between each cultural perspective. third, we instructed participants to exchange their nationalities in the assigned foolish carnival-like role-plays. we hypothesized that we can observe the development of students’ attitudes toward partners’ opinions from relativism ignorance to heteroglossic ambivalent estrangement by alleviating their emotional distress against alien ideas through our carnival-like program. methods program setting: the program was conducted for 8 hours within a single day in january 2019 at the seminar room of the national university located in beijing. program design: the program was designed as an optional english lecture that provided no course credit. participants were required to express their ideas in english during the program. we designed the program according to the “action research” model that creates the method through interactions with interested parties in the targeted field (nakamura, 2008). we conducted a preliminary study conducted in 2018 in order to find out the cultural gaps that are difficult to solve between japanese and chinese. then, we invented the program intending to bridge the targeted gap according to these interviews. we also referred to the practical an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc8 methods of promoting communication between speakers with different cultural backgrounds (oh, 2017; pian, 2017; sakakibara, 2017; watanabe, 2017). targeted tense intercultural communication: our preliminary study found tense intercultural communication arising from differences in japanese and chinese approaches to “debt.” japanese people tend to avoid borrowing and lending money within private relationships to prevent potential strains on friendships resulting from financial issues. conversely, the chinese culture encourages lending and borrowing money among friends because it demonstrates intimacy and support during times of need. in the preliminary study, discussions among japanese and chinese students often concluded without agreement and with statements such as, “i understand your perspective as a foreigner’s viewpoint, but i do not emotionally embrace your ideas as applicable to my own life.” this response exemplifies typical relativism ignorance, which involves emotional distress and rejection of partners’ ideas as irrelevant to their personal way of thinking. participants: four chinese undergraduate students and two japanese graduate students participated in this program. of these participants, all except j1 spoke english at a b1 level, whereas j1 could also communicate in english. these participants were motivated to participate in this program as an opportunity to practice speaking english and understanding foreign cultures. the participants were divided into two groups, each with one japanese student and two chinese students (table 1). all of them except j1 had participated in preliminary study conducted in previous year. instructor: the first author of this study was the main program instructor, who developed and administered this program and was fluent in japanese and english. the second author was the sub-instructor who collaborated to design this program and was fluent in chinese, japanese, and english. program instructions: we explained to the students that this program was designed to enhance their conceptual and emotional understanding of alien ideas related to the japanese and chinese cultures. the participants were instructed to use their critical thinking skills during the performances and subsequent discussions. program task: in our educational experiment, we established a hypothetical scenario that was distinct from the participants’ real lives, allowing them to freely and safely express their emotional concerns. this approach was inspired by forum theatre concepts (boal, 1983/1985). we created a scenario in which two individuals work at a fictitious international company in china, where employees from various cultural backgrounds collaborate in english. within this scenario, one chinese colleague approaches his / her familiar japanese coworker to borrow money, citing the urgent need to pay for his/her sister's university admission fees in the united states. participants were tasked with enacting the dilemmas arising from differences in perspectives on debt and friendships, expressing their emotional discomfort with their partner's opposing viewpoints, and attempting to resolve these predicaments through their performances. c1 c2 c3 c4 j1 j2 nationality china china china china japan japan age 19 20 20 22 no data 38 sex female female female male female male status undergraduate undergraduate undergraduate undergraduate graduate graduate group 1 2 2 1 1 2 table 1: participant data an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc9 task stages: to create a carnival-like atmosphere and foster dialogical coordination between participants with differing cultural perspectives, we devised a three-stage process. during the first two stages, participants crafted their own scenarios and presented them in performances. however, during the third stage, they were encouraged to ad-lib without the use of prepared scenarios. after each stage, we allocated time for discussion to reflect on the performances. each group's performance lasted approximately 10–15 min. stage 1) a japanese student assumed the role of the japanese worker, and a chinese student played the role of the chinese worker. another chinese student acted as the supervisor, overseeing the entire interaction and narrating the episodes. participants were not compelled to find a resolution to the dilemma presented in the scenario, if they were unable to do so. stage 2) the role assignments remained the same as in stage 1. however, in this stage, participants were instructed to explore ways to resolve the conflicts between the japanese and chinese workers, if these conflicts had not been resolved in the previous stage. stage 3) japanese participants took on the role of the chinese worker, and a chinese assumed the role of the japanese worker. participants were expected to attempt to resolve the conflicts. ice-breaking: we initiated an ice-breaking session for participants before beginning stage 1, during which they were encouraged to introduce themselves to each other. this session provided an opportunity for participants to engage in conversations about their life experiences in both japan and china. evaluation meeting: in the following day of the main session, we had a 2 hours long evaluation meeting, in which all the participants reviewed their experiences during the program. ethical codes: we provided participants with a comprehensive explanation of the ethical codes governing our research. we made four key commitments to the participants as follows. first, we assured participants that our research would be conducted with the utmost consideration for human rights and the mental wellbeing of all individuals involved. second, participants were guaranteed that their involvement in the research would not result in any personal loss, including any impact on their academic records. third, the data collected during this research would be used in academic papers, presentations, and books while attempting to safeguard the participants’ personal information. fourth, participants were informed that all data, including sensitive private information, would be securely stored to prevent any potential loss or breach. these commitments were explicitly detailed in the letter of agreement, and every participant signed the agreement. data collection: in our study, data pertaining to participants’ verbal expressions and actions during the program sessions were recorded using two video cameras and two integrated chip recorders, with each set of devices dedicated to one group. the primary source of data was the audio recordings obtained from the integrated chip recorders, which were transcribed into text. video data were used to determine participants’ physical movements. additionally, the first author wrote detailed field notes throughout the instructional sessions. the statements from participants cited within this paper were reviewed for grammatical errors and extraneous fillers or repetitions; when necessary, the statements were corrected while considering the context of the discussion. main data analysis: though all the participants showed similar development, we mainly analyzed the data of chinese students c2 and c4, who showed more obvious change through our program. we additionally analyzed data from other chinese and japanese students. an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc10 results and discussion introductory ice breaking session the participants enjoyed ice-breaking session; we expected that this would enable participants to effectively bridge ideological gaps, thereby alleviating any emotional distresses arising from exposure to unfamiliar or alien ideas. stage 1: collision between alien perspectives however, contrary to our expectations, the emotional distress experienced by participants was still intense in our practice. in stage 1, participants exhibited impressive negotiation skills and effectively conveyed their emotional distress through verbal and physical expression. however, the participants encountered difficulties in reaching a resolution when expressing their thoughts in their role-play performances. they were ultimately unable to overcome the impasse arising from divergent views about the intersection of familiar friendships and financial debts in their performances. whereas chinese participants remained resolute in their stance that one should provide financial support to familiar friends in times of need, japanese participants continued to reject the notion of financial indebtedness within personal relationships. both groups adhered to their deeply ingrained ideologies shaped by their respective cultural backgrounds and showed their emotional distress (see case 1 below). case 1: conclusion of group 1 performance in stage 1 c4: would you please lend me 10,000 yuan? j1: what? (surprised) c4: i will pay you back by next month. ・・・you are the only friend who i can ask for help. my sister needs help urgently to go to the usa! (eagerly) ・・・ j1: i’m sorry to hear that, but you know, japanese people usually do not lend money. c4: but we are friends! friends should help each other in times of need. (angrily) j1: isn’t there any public loan system in china? you can borrow money there. (embarrassed) c4: i’m so surprised. you are so cold toward me.・・i think you do not treat me like a friend. (sadly) during the reflection period after stage 1, participants exhibited distinct perspectives concerning this dilemma. japanese students expressed concern about potential damage to their friendships in the event of repayment failure. conversely, chinese students maintained a firm belief that they could affirm the familiarities of their friendships by providing financial assistance to their partners (see case 2 below). intriguingly, although each student intellectually recognized their partner’s ideology, they reacted emotionally with anger or confusion when confronted with these differing viewpoints. they remained firm in their insistence on what they considered the correct answer, aligned with their individual sense of justice in terms of human relationships, which had been automatically accepted within their respective cultural contexts. consequently, all of them failed to find the solutions between conflictive perspectives. in this context, participants viewed the ideologies of others as unrelated to their own native belief systems. case 2: participants claimed each ideology in parallel while reflecting on stage 1 j2: ・・・what would you think about a friend who cannot repay money that you lent them? isn’t it no good situation? i mean, if you want to maintain a good relationship with them? c4: this is not a problem. i have a rich friend・・who has greater financial responsibilities, but we don’t think that our relationship is unfair. i tend to help him in other ways.・・ j1: if i borrowed money from a friend, i would feel too much pressure to avoid doing anything that they find offensive. an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc11 c3: ・・but in china, borrowing money indicates the depth of a relationship. i consider it to be a simple but effective way to strengthen our relationship. stage 2: blaming for the superficiality of ideas bridging the cultural gap (relativism ignorance) in stage 2, participants were tasked with finding concrete solutions to address the cultural gaps identified in their performances. the objective was to move beyond their tendencies toward relativistic discussions. participants eagerly engaged in discussions to develop scenarios that would resolve the issues at hand. they crafted stories that involved creative solutions, such as obtaining unexpected funds from a lottery (group 1) and creating a borrowing book to ensure repayment (group 2). through these scenarios and subsequent performances, they successfully managed to resolve the conflicts, at least within the context of their scenarios and enactments. during the reflection period after these performances, c4 expressed confidence in the ability to generate suitable solutions that can bridge the ideological differences. however, immediately after c4’s statement, c2 and c3 responded with anger, rejecting the notion that their performances had effectively resolved the problems. they insisted that one cannot change their deeply held beliefs in a short span of time, such as the span of this task (see case 3 below). case 3: c2 and c3 admitted that they could not resolve the cultural gap in stage 2 c3: on the stage of this lesson, the task was simple: we needed to demonstrate a resolution of our ideological differences within 20 min. however, in real life, this type of misunderstandings can happen, because we do not know the differences in cultural environments. ・・・ c2: i think that the cultural gap is challenging to overcome because everyone has different backgrounds.・ ・you cannot change such situations in such a short time. so, i just think, if such a situation develops in real life, chinese people would not be able to borrow from japanese people. in response to the emotional rejections from c2 and c3, c4 confessed to acknowledging the superficiality of his own opinion on bridging the cultural gap and conceded that the nature of the performance task did not align with real-world communication dynamics (see case 4 below). c4 admitted that the conflicts targeted in the task were largely fictional, contending that – in his view – best friends should inherently understand the nuances of chinese friendships. although participants had devised resolutions within the context of their performances, they found it difficult to reconcile the differences in ideologies, and they emotionally resisted the idea of harmonizing their divergent perspectives by critiquing the superficiality of their scenarios. this emotional resistance persisted although they had created resolutions within the framework of the assigned performances; therefore, the participants remained in a sort of relativism ignorance as “i intellectually integrate my perspective and yours in assigned performances, but i do not emotionally accept your ideas as applicable to my own life.” case 4: c4 criticized the task in stage 2 as hypothetical c4: i also agree that this situation is unlikely to happen in our real life. if i need to borrow money, i will initially ask my family members or chinese best friends. if i had a foreign best friend, they would be aware of the nuances of the chinese culture. in that sense, if we are best friends, we do not have such a gap. despite the resistance voiced during stage 2, participants began to immerse themselves more deeply in discussions surrounding the disparities in ideas between japanese and chinese cultures. they willingly devoted their break time to delving into these cultural differences. an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc12 stage 3: laughter connecting alien perspectives through carnival-like performance during stage 3, as a quid-pro-quo task, we instructed participants to swap nationalities within their assigned roles. they were willing to act their roles in a very realistic way and enjoyed responding to the actions of their partners who took inverted nationality. as a result of our interventions, participants demonstrated a heightened level of attentiveness towards their partners’ alien ideas. they connected these alien concepts with their own ideas more emotionally and were satisfied with their resolutions, despite the fact that these resolutions they ultimately reached were very similar to ideas they had initially devised during stage 2. chinese students who were assigned japanese roles found themselves in a funny predicament when they had to decline borrowing requests from their partners within the context of the task. their performances were characterized by visible embarrassment. for example, c4 in group 1 confronted a conflicting ideology presented by j1, who had taken on the role of a chinese individual. c4 was emotionally perplexed as he grappled with his partner’s insistent demands, which mirrored his the viewpoints he had insisted upon as a chinese in previous sessions. his candid portrayal of this conflict was conveyed through his vocal inflections and body language, eliciting laughter from both the audience and himself (see case 5 below). this comical situation inevitably placed c4 in a state of uncertainty as he wavered between his original chinese ideology and the prescribed japanese ideology within the quid-pro-quo performance. similarly, c2 in group 2 found herself in a state of waver during her performance, resulting in laughter from both the audience and herself. case 5: c4 puzzled at partner’s insistence in stage 3 c4: i think… j1: don’t worry. next month, i will get my salary, so… (eagerly) c4: you can pay back? (c4 laughed) j1: yes, i can pay back next month, so please. ・・we are best friends. (happily; audience laughing) c4: yeah, best friends. (audience laughed) c4: i can’t lend you money because i’m worried that you won’t be able to pay back. our relationship has many more aspects than this financial exchange. our relationship is pure. i consider it spiritual and sincere. (perplexed expression with a sincere tone of voice) j1: financial relationship isn’t sincere? sincere! (eagerly; audience laughing) ・・・ c4: i think we are best friends, but, because we are friends, i can’t lend you money. (embarrassed) j1: why? i cannot understand what you said. (sad and angry; audience laughing) ・・・ c4: i’m very confused; what can i do about her requests? (c4 acted like he was in trouble and laughed at his own situation) after finishing their performances, participants reflected on how to maintain sincere relationships beyond cultural and ideological differences (see case 6 below). in this stage, the participants exhibited greater sympathy toward the challenges faced by their partners. c4 admitted that he had a vivid experience of the challenging japanese emotional dilemma presented in the task, which revolved around the conflict between personal desires to maintain friendships and pre-existing cultural expectations. case 6: c4 reflected on experiencing the japanese dilemma in his performance during stage 3 c4: although i refused my partner’s request, i hoped to continue our friendship. it was very difficult for me. researcher: as a chinese person? c4: ・・if i did not lend money, not only our friendship might be broken, but also my life principle had to be challenged. it was a very difficult choice. maybe, when i faced this problem, the most important thing was an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc13 to consider why she became angry –because i thought people should lend money to their friends as a chinese. i did not lend her money (as an assigned japanese), it does not mean that i don’t want to help her.・・・ researcher: you recognized japanese conflicts? c4: (affirming laugh) c2 shared her experience, revealing that she had intellectually and emotionally struggled with the challenge of reconciling her original chinese ideology with the japanese role she was tasked with during her performance (see case 7 below). she admitted that, in a previous discussion in 2018 that revolved around the same theme, she had struggled to comprehend the japanese perspective regarding friendship and debt. however, her participation in the present exercise provided a unique opportunity, and she could now empathize with the emotional struggles faced by japanese people in maintaining a balance between being japanese and fostering strong friendships with chinese people. she articulated that this emotional conflict arose from the tension between her emotional views (“my heart”) and the tasked views she had been assigned within the japanese role. she revealed her internal wavers between this dilemma in her mind, and paid effort to seek a compromise in ideology with her japanese partner, who acted as a chinese throughout their performance. case 7: c2 reflected on experiencing the japanese dilemma during her performance in stage 3 c2: last year, i could not believe why the japanese do not lend money to their friends.・・・ researcher: how did you feel after switching your nationality on the stage this year? c2: i just told myself that i cannot lend money during the performance. my heart felt that i should lend him money. i understand why the japanese do not lend money. i partially compromised with him and so did he (japanese who took the role of a chinese individual). evaluation meeting: confessing the trust and respect toward others’ perspectives during the evaluation meeting held the day after the main program, c4 provided further insights into his evolving perspective. he explained that, during stage 2, he had predominantly acted in accordance with his personal sense of justice. he also expressed the emotional distresses that he experienced, which included feelings of anger as a form of emotional rejection in response to what he considered unacceptable japanese responses (see case 8 below). however, during stage 3, where he was required to respond to his partner’s unpredictable performances in the role of a japanese character, c4 found himself deeply contemplating japanese ideologies. he reported that he had inevitably laughed at his inverted situation, where the japanese role realistically conflicted with his original sense of justice, which led to waver in his emotional resistance against alien ideologies. case 8: c4 confessed his hesitation regarding his sense of justice in his performance during stage 3 c4: when i was in stage 2, i did just what i wanted. i was right, and i just expressed my direct emotions. in stage 3, however, i was performing the role of a japanese person, although i am not japanese, and i just tried to consider what japanese would think.・・i think j1 just acted similar to a real chinese friend. i did not know what j1 would say or respond. it was so hard (situation for me) and made me laugh. j1: the stages made you laugh. c4: yes.・・・i think the conflict was very real,・・it was also unpredictable.・・when they behave so real, ・・their behaviors make us imagine our lives.・・・we also experience serious conflicts, so that is why i laughed. the transformation in perspective was not limited to chinese students; it also extended to the two japanese students. for example, j2, who had participated in the preliminary research in 2018, shared his evolving viewpoint. he mentioned that, in the past, he had only understood chinese ideology as an an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc14 intellectual concept (e.g., solely in an informational context). however, during this recent session, he gained greater insight into the intricacies of chinese perspectives concerning debt (see case 9 below). intriguingly, j2 revealed that he had initially felt anger at his partner’s reactions, particularly when his partner assumed the role of a japanese person. however, he also expressed a sense of contentment about gaining a better understanding of chinese emotional perspectives on debt. this understanding was particularly valuable because it was acquired within the controlled context of the performance. case 9: j1 indicated his awareness of chinese perspectives concerning debt in the performance task j2: last year, we had a discussion, and i thought that we understood the chinese culture in my brain. i understood their viewpoint, but i could not lend money. but, this time, i played the chinese role in my heart and felt anger at the actions of the japanese person.・・this time, i’m really happy to play the role of a chinese person and felt anger when enacting this situation. during the discussion, c2 shared her profound experience of transcending differences in cultural backgrounds, describing it as “freedom of thought” (see case 10 below). she acknowledged that these differences in ideologies could not be erased, and a person could not compel others to change their way of thinking. however, she also emphasized that a person could achieve a sense of freedom of thought by respecting these differences, recognizing that each perspective had validity. other students agreed with her comments during the session, and especially c4 and j1, j2 also made similar comments. they explained how they had begun to comprehend the viewpoints of others emotionally and had even experienced moments of waver in their own beliefs when faced with what they initially considered unacceptable perspectives. importantly, all participants indicated that their sense of justice regarding debt had become more flexible. they had ceased to emotionally reject their partners’ ideas and instead had begun cultivating a sense of respect toward their counterparts beyond relativism ignorance, which appeared in stages 1 and 2. this would be the reason why they were satisfied with their final resolutions, which were almost the same ideas that they had emotionally refused at stage 2. then, they reflected a significant shift in their attitudes and a greater appreciation for the complexity of intercultural interactions. case 10: c2 proposed “freedom of thought” to explain her experiences c2: i think・・intercultural communication requires respect and freedom.・・freedom means that the viewpoints of individuals are unique and rooted in their cultural background. we should accept these differences. researcher: what is freedom? c2: i mean・・we have freedom of thought.・・・we have a right to have different ways of thinking. ・・・ researcher: does your freedom involve respecting the culture and background of others?・・ c2: i cannot change anyone’s mind, (because) we think differently. everyone is correct.・・we can have distinct ideas, but we should communicate respectfully・・・. summary of the results as expected, all students who participated in our educational program developed a more profound understanding of cultural ideologies beyond the realm of relativism ignorance. in stage 1, participants could only present their “right” ideas even when confronted with what they considered unacceptable responses from their partners. this phase was characterized by difficulty negotiating between their own perspectives and those of their counterparts. during stage 2, participants collectively devised solutions to bridge gaps between their respective ideologies within the context of their performances. however, they continued to experience negative emotions, doubting the practicality and effectiveness of these solutions in real-life situations after the an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc15 performances had concluded. the emotional distress against alien ideologies was not yet alleviated. thus, participants exhibited relativism ignorance by separating intellectual solutions found in assigned performances from their own judgements including emotional responses in their real lives. however, in stage 3, a transformative shift occurred. participants engaged in carnival-like quidpro-quo comical performances and gained a greater appreciation of the internal and emotional struggles experienced by their partners, who wavered between maintaining sincere friendships and adhering to cultural expectations. they began empathizing with the challenges of sustaining friendships from their partners’ perspectives. consequently, they began to transcend the constraints of their personal senses of justice, which had previously fueled their emotional resistance to alien ideas. although the conclusions formulated in stage 3 closely resembled resolutions conceived in stage 2, a profound transformation occurred in the students’ attitudes toward alien ideas. all participants expressed an understanding of their partners’ emotional distress within their respective cultural contexts, and they demonstrated a commitment to maintaining open communications that would preserve sincere relationships. participants began to intellectually and emotionally waver between their own ideas and those of their partners, particularly when faced with criticisms or disagreements. they actively sought mutually agreeable ways to address the dilemmas, as exemplified by c2’s description of this state as “freedom of thought.” this idea is represented in the statement, “everyone is correct, we can have distinct ideas, but we should communicate respectfully,” in case 10, which might allow them to transcend the boundaries of different cultures. consequently, they alleviated emotional distress against alien ideologies and found satisfaction with their resolutions reached by mutual investigations, progressing beyond the limitations of relativism ignorance. these accomplishments encompassed the ability to alien viewpoints, as well as the development of resilient attitudes that could navigate between incompatible ideologies. comprehensive discussion introduction the research question of the present study is how we can promote critical investigations on each speaker’s conflictive cultural view and overcome relativism ignorance by introducing a carnival-like situation where learners can alleviate emotional distress. we can now admit the effects of our program that promote the hypothesized developmental process of participants from relativism ignorance to heteroglossic ambivalent estrangement. we discuss the data analysis of the practice as the verification of our research question. “dialogical networking” promoting dialogical coordination beyond relativism ignorance when we consider our research question regarding our educational program through the lens of bakhtin’s dialogism, we discern significant development in their capacity for tense intercultural communication. in stage 1, where participants’ contrasting perspectives vividly clashed, we did not observe significant development in their ability to engage in dialogical coordination. they struggled to effectively reconcile their partners’ divergent comments and criticisms with their own ideologies, ultimately remaining entrenched in their own respective viewpoints. in stage 2, participants successfully resolved the assigned conflicts arising from their incompatible perspectives, but they also rejected the perceived unrealism of the program conditions, as illustrated in cases 3 and 4. the emotional resistance to an alien ideology remained intact because they criticized the contrived nature of the task. their core beliefs regarding individual ideologies remained largely unchanged an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc16 through these interactions. thus, they exhibited a relativism ignorance despite their intellectual success in resolving the assigned conflicts. at this point, the intercultural situation of the program had not yet become a true heteroglossia for the participants. indeed, in carnival-like stage 3, participants displayed a remarkable forward leap in their development. they effectively adopted swapped social roles that were expected within each cultural context under the quid-pro-quo task and accepted partners’ criticisms of their original ideologies from these swapped outsiders’ perspectives, as depicted in case 5. thus, they inevitably experienced the partners’ conflicting self-consciousness, a facet of internal dialogue hardly observable in typical real-life interactions. participants came to understand their partners’ internal dialogic struggles, representing their selfconsciousness, particularly the tension between the desire to maintain friendships and the commitment to cultural norms, as demonstrated in cases 6, 7, and 9. such ambivalent wavers that participants expressed in their performances or considerations alleviated their emotional distress against alien ideas, and they came to engage in dialogical coordination of different perspectives. these moments of waver can be regarded as instances of transcending the confines of relativism ignorance, solely adhering to their preexisting cultural frameworks. in this context, the intercultural communications during this practice evolved into a heteroglossia, characterized by the complexity of speakers’ critical reflections as they ambivalently wavered between their unique and incompatible excesses of seeing. the participants seemed to have “desires” to engage in the coordination of each other’s excess of seeing after experiencing their partners’ internal distressful dialogues during the quid-pro-quo performances. we term this motivation “dialogical networking,” which reflects the desire to promote dialogic coordination by maintaining connections with individuals who have alien ideologies. thus, participants realized their partners’ inner efforts as “he/she had struggled against his/her cultural contexts in order to maintain our friendship.” then, they came to respect their partners’ perspectives intellectually and emotionally, saying, “i want to reward their respectful efforts by admiring mutually negotiated resolutions.” although the resolutions formulated in stage 3 closely mirrored resolutions formed in stage 2, participants displayed greater attachment to their inventions in the process of nurturing this motivation, thereby illustrating dialogical networking based on respecting partners’ internal dialogic efforts inside their wavering self-consciousness. our results suggest that the motivation to respect and honor their partners’ commitment to maintaining relationships played a key role in sustaining complex dialogical coordination, particularly in the context of unstable value judgments. this motivation reflects a desire to preserve connections with individuals from different cultural backgrounds. the development of abilities that make intercultural communication heteroglossic, as indicated by our data, requires a tough process of reflection on existing ideologies. such internal dialogue would be crucial for effectively coordinating one’s own ideas with the alien thoughts of their partners in a dialogic manner. dialogical networking promotes this productive thinking, creating proposals that provide resilience when navigating incompatible viewpoints. conversely, without this motivation and the accompanying reflective process, individuals might resort to relativism ignorance, as observed during stage 2. “professional love” booted by dialogical networking in critical dialogues due to the cultivation of dialogical networking through quid-pro-quo performances, participants appeared to experience a significant reduction in emotional resistance during stage 3. they seemed to adopt a more playful and ambivalent attitude with relaxed manners, akin to intellectual “fools,” as they ambivalently engaged in critiquing each other’s perspectives during the inverted role play in the carnivallike situation. as expected, students were able to liberate themselves from their emotional distresses to protect their own cultural ideas, and they came to waver between ideological gaps with a sense of an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc17 happiness. participants came to enjoy the feeling of being unburdened by cultural restrictions, similar to intellectual wise fools in bakhtin’s discussions, and they playfully estranged (“laughed,” according to bakhtin’s definition) their thoughts ambivalently as they engaged with partners who had taken on inverted nationalities. this was a complete departure from their previous tendency to reject alien perspectives with negative emotions, as illustrated in case 8. through these dialogues, they appeared to foster a sense of respect toward their partners, enabling the achievement of “freedom of thought”, as described by c2 in case 10, which enabled speakers to confidently navigate the complexities of cultural dilemmas. these data remind us of bakhtin’s fragmentary references to affections simply “love” or “benevolence” toward individuals from alien backgrounds, transcending the borders of ideological communities. “love loves and caresses borders. borders have significance of getting new meanings.” (bakhtin, 1996, p.66) “the more demarcation the better, but benevolent demarcation. without border disputes. cooperation. the existence of border zones (new trends and disciplines usually originate in them).” (bakhtin, 1979/1986, p.137) inspired by these bakhtin’s fragmental discussions on love, gradovski and tajima proposed “professional love” in this special issue. professional love can be defined as a form of affection that enables individuals to foster positive dialogues with culturally alien others, particularly in the diverse and heterogeneous contexts of activities. this contrasts with “inborn love,” typically directed toward family members or familiar friends, based on shared and expected homogeneous ideological responses automatically within similar living environments (morson, 2004; tajima, 2021b; white & gradovski, 2018). the distinctive qualities of professional love can be encapsulated in the sentiment: “i trust and enjoy others’ alien criticisms of my opinions because i can discover the potential for developing my own worldviews through his / her critiques.” dialogical networking observed in our program should be the preceding motivation that boots this professional love. critical dialogues without a sense of love can degenerate into unilateral attacks and the rejection of the perspectives held by individuals from different cultural backgrounds (bakhtin, 1996, p. 66). thus, we should enhance professional love toward culturally alien others to promote respect for each other’s excess of seeing, thereby promoting a heteroglossic environment with a low risk of violence against incomprehensive cultural frameworks and ideologies. conclusions consistent with bakhtin’s dialogism, it is important to respect and embrace all related partners’ excesses of seeing, which fosters the generation of new ideas and the evolution of each other’s ways of thinking. our study's significant finding was that participants were able to alleviate their emotional distress when confronted with alien ideas. they also cultivated dialogical networking and professional love, which enabled them to navigate these ambivalent dialogues beyond the limitations of relativism ignorance through our carnival-like practice. in today’s world, in reality, individuals from various cultural backgrounds engage in regrettable and violent attacks against each other. we must equip ourselves with critical skills to identify the deceptive and one-sided narratives that seek to portray others as enemies who threaten our own culture. we need to foster a sense of love that enables engagement in sustained, patient dialogues with people from around the world. the carnival-like program that we have proposed in this paper can promote learners’ inclinations regarding the development of love toward alien others participating in future dialogues. our program has the potentials to offer the practical models to develop sophisticate educational systems that promote an educational program addressing tense intercultural communication between japanese and chinese students atsushi tajima, yingmin jiang dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.601 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc18 learners’ intellectual and emotional capacities to live together with people who bring incompatible ideas in the future. references bakhtin, m. m. 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(2018). untangling (some) philosophical knots concerning love and care in early childhood education. international journal of early years education, 26(2), 201–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2018.1458602 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2008.12.001 http://hdl.handle.net/10454/7392 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-017-9394-6 https://doi.org/10.7146/irtp.v1i2.128022 https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2018.234 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12124-017-9391-9 https://doi.org/10.1080/09669760.2018.1458602 https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals microsoft word social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r7 social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky mordovia state pedagogical institute, saransk, russia svetlana dubrovskaya mordovia state university, saransk, russia ekaterina chernetsova national research university higher school of economics, moscow, russia abstract a review of bakhtin in the fullness of time: bakhtinian theory and the process of social education, edited by craig brandist, michael e. gardiner, e. jayne white and carl mika. l.: routledge. 2020. 160 p. the review of the collection of articles bakhtin in the fullness of time: bakhtinian theory and the process of social education represents an analysis of the perspectives, main trends, and interpretations of key points, ideas, and concepts of m. m. bakhtin in the contemporary theory and practice of social education. the book’s nine chapters are grouped within three problem areas, researched by the book’s contributors. this is, in the first place, a re-establishment of those philosophical and sociological sources that trace back to the roots of bakhtin’s early views that had defined the nature of his responses to the challenges of his time in his early philosophical texts, books about dostoevsky and books about bildungsroman. another field of examination is bakhtin's late dialogue with his contemporaries. sometimes this dialogue is active and obvious, as it happens in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends in russia at the beginning of the 1920s. sometimes this dialogue turns out to be ambiguous, therefore researchers can only guess how to reconstruct it, basing their views on the complementarity of bakhtin’s ideas and lev vygotsky or paulo freire’s ones. an equally important aspect of this collection is a number of articles devoted to how bakhtin's theory is transformed into "classroom practice", whether it concerns the use of dialogue and its capabilities in interaction with foreigners, providing educational opportunities to the most economically vulnerable segments of south african society, or communication with preschoolers in kindergarten. the authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how bakhtinian theory is becoming one of the most important elements of contemporary theory and practice of education. at the same time, not only bakhtinian ideas, primarily the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival, and chronotope, are important, but also that free polyphony, which puts into effect any creative practice. keywords: mikhail bakhtin, dialogism, dialogic pedagogy, social education, carnival, polyphony, chronotope issn: 2325-3290 (online) social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r8 oleg osovsky works as a chief research fellow in pedagogical institute in saransk. he is a dr. of philology. professor osovsky is the author of several books on m. bakhtin’s ideas and their reception in angloamerican humanities, russian emigre school in europe. svetlana dubrovskaya is a professor in national research ogarev mordovia state university. she specializes in russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries, the scholarly legacy of m. m. bakhtin, particularly, a study of the functioning of ‘laughter’ in russian literary consciousness, and methods of teaching russian as a foreign language. professor dubrovskaya has more than 100 academic and methodological publications. ekaterina chernetsova is an associate professor in school of foreign languages at higher school of economics (moscow). she specializes in american studies and world literature, problems of teaching languages and literature. her research also focuses on contemporary american fiction, clash of paradigms in literature, and bakhtinian approaches to a literary text. her recent book is chernetsova e. (2018) after new journalism: history, myth, imagination in norman mailer’s novels of the 1980s – 2000s. ïïò it might seem that the 125-th anniversary of mikhail bakhtin’s birthday, one of the undoubtedly most established intellectuals of the modern humanities, should have become an occasion for a serious conversation both about the state of the field of humanities at the turn of the xx-xxi centuries, and about the main perspectives of their further development. a lot of new large-scale works about m.m. bakhtin has appeared in recent years. here, of course, it is necessary to mention recent collections edited by matthias freise (freise, 2018), gratchev & mancing (gratchev & mancing, 2019) and the monographs published in saransk (dubrovskaya, 2019; dubrovskaya, 2020) dedicated to the personality and legacy of mikhail bakhtin, and books by vitaly makhlin and natalia bonetskaya (see: osovsky, 2017; osovsky, 2018a, osovsky, 2018b). yet, the question of what bakhtin can still contribute to the modern humanities, what exactly of the great variety of his ideas, concepts and even terms is most adequately and most actively used by researchers today, is still relevant. even the well-known books by michael holquist (holquist, 1990) and caryl emerson (emerson, 1997), where each of the authors tried to define what bakhtinian dialogism is, how bakhtin's reception has been developing in recent years both in his homeland and in the united states, as well as in other parts of the world – from china to brazil – still do not fully answer the question of what is and where is bakhtin’s contribution in the contemporary academic knowledge. recent books do not give a clear answer to this question either1. it seems that one of the instruments for determining the direction of the bakhtinian contribution can be the notion of the “bakhtin's filter” that we proposed a few years ago. the view of bakhtin's ideas from the point of view of contemporary academic knowledge and the selection of the contemporary ideas most important for the development of bakhtin's theory constitute the essence of this "bakhtin's filter" (dubrovskaya, nesmelova, osovskiy, 2019), that is, the framework and boundaries within which bakhtin;s ideas and contemporary academic knowledge overlap and thereby the bakhtinian contribution can be realized. in this sense, a trend that has been taking shape for several decades could be quite revealing. from the late 1980s – to the 2010s, this trend is directly related to the use of bakhtin's ideas in education 1 the ongoing relevance of this issue can be evidenced by the 17th international bakhtin conference held in july 2021, among the participants of which were the authors of the book under review. as the speeches at the plenary sessions and panels demonstrated, the bakhtin studies community is increasingly striving to articulate their understanding of the bakhtin contribution to the contemporary academic knowledge, as v. makhlin, c. emerson, and k. b. m. golubitsky, g. tikhanov, g. tulchinsky, e. matusov, s. barbato, m. grodovsky, e. j. white and others spoke in their papers https://bakhtin-conf.mrsu.ru/bakhtin2020/english/. social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r9 (matusov, 2007; bibler, 2009; solomadin & kurganov, 2009). readers of dpj are acquainted with the concept of “dialogic pedagogy.” moreover, books and articles on dialogic pedagogy that have appeared since the end of 2000 (matusov, 2009; white & peters, 2011; matusov e., marjanovic-shane, gradovski, 2019.) greatly contributed to this. within this trend, the book under review is getting even more remarkable and appealing. before we start a discussion about how its authors, representing a wide variety of countries and continents (from great britain and canada to south africa, australia and new zealand) understand bakhtin's theory, let us turn our attention to the part of its title, the expression “in the fullness of time”, as it best reflects the specifics of the approach taken in this book. the very emphasis on the concept of “in the fullness of time” as applied to the thinker who has devoted a considerable part of his research to “forms of time and chronotope” is not only self-explanatory, but also productive. bakhtin's conception is presented in the book in its fullness, having been unfolded in time and space. and the swing to social education itself, is given in a quite bakhtinian way – in synchrony and diachrony, involving the widest range of problems (folklore, literature, language, politics, economics, social institutions, etc.). in the book, the temporality is presented in two dimensions: in the contemporary transposition of bakhtin's ideas into the language of pedagogy in the practice of modern education and in the historical reconstruction of the scholar’s relationship with theories of education, his own pedagogical activity. thus, "bakhtin in the classroom" discussed by some authors of the book is an issue related to the extent to which and how bakhtin's key ideas can be applied in the classroom, that is, at school, university, etc., – an educational environment in the wide sense. in that sense, the modern pedagogical theories and practices that accept bakhtin's ideas are mainly trying to raise this issue in one way or another. the advice that white & peters once suggested "to read bakhtin educationally" (white, peters, 2011, p. 1) underlies most of the articles in the volume. equally important here is bakhtin’s own biography and history as a real teacher in a real class, what he practiced intermittently from 1918 to the early 1960-s. several articles regarding this issue have already been published in dpj (osovsky, kirzhaeva, chernetsova, maslova, 2020; laptun, & tihanov, 2018; vasilyev, 2018). in the book under review, it seems that this aspect of bakhtin’s practice has been described too narrowly: it is limited mainly to the time of bakhtin's teaching in saransk since 1945. “while bakhtin's work has been widely received in educational studies in recent years, there is only one existing article on classroom practice that seems to have survived, and this does not really convey the sophistication of his cultural-historical works. this is probably because bakhtin was steeped not in institutionally positioned pedagogical practice (though he taught in a pedagogical institute in the post-war period), but in a more general philosophy of culture in which the educational process was embedded in the process of becoming in hegelian philosophy, generally known as bildung” (p.1). it should be recognized that chapter authors do not always draw clear lines. however, it should be noted that the global task to square the circle of bakhtin's contribution to the academic knowledge is not the goal of the book. it seems to us that it is more important for them to outline a possible movement toward a better understanding of the processes that take place in education today, how they relate to bakhtin's ideas, and where the routes to this understanding are . perhaps if the book had originally been planned as a single project, the common positions of the authors would have been declared more explicitly, but we think it is more interesting for the reader to discover commonalities and disagreements among different contributors’ interpretations of bakhtin's ideas as they read through the chapters of the book. social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r10 in this regard, at least a brief commentary would have been applicable to clarify the situation. why does this seem important to us? because, in our opinion, bakhtin's pedagogical experience was much more diverse than just his work in a soviet higher education during the “stalinist night” (emerson, 1997). we want to emphasize that the traditional idea that bakhtin’s pedagogical practice begun in a small provincial nevel in 1918 is not entirely accurate. the wife of bakhtin’s closest friend, philosopher matvey kagan, provided evidence about bakhtin's considerable reputation as a tutor, a reputation he developed in odessa even before the revolution, and that was further strengthened thanks to his tutoring practices in petrograd and vitebsk. in her interview, ninety-year-old sofya kagan recalled those days: “it happened that i had heard about mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin even before i met him. when i was young i had a friend, lelya sochevanova, the daughter of a very rich, very big merchant. their family had a tutor, teacher, coach – i don’t know how to put it more precisely – engaged in education – klebe, who came with the sochevanovs from germany. then they lived for some time in odessa, and this tutor met a very young 18-year-old mikhail mikhailovich, who was a tutor for lelia sochevanova’s cousin, the daughter of another wealthy merchant, rabinova. and so klebe very often remembered mikhail mikhailovich and said with delight: “this is a genius! this is a genius!” he was astonished by the independence of judgment and breadth of knowledge of mikhail mikhailovich. he used to repeat: “this is a genius! this is a genius! ”” (pankov, 1995, p. 166). other evidence includes the publication of the well-known lectures of bakhtin in the 1920s, as well as the materials of his training courses in 1937 and 1950s, the memoirs of former students and colleagues. all of these shape a multifaceted image of bakhtin as a teacher and mentor (see, in particular: yestifeyeva, 2000; klyuyeva & lisunova, 2010; laptun, 2020). there is no doubt that the moral imperative that underlies bakhtin's first published text, the article art and responsibility, represented views not only of bakhtin the philosopher of culture, but bakhtin the teacher and lecturer. in this respect, bakhtin's skepticism toward “pedagogical dialogue” as one of the most unsophisticated invariants of this form of communication, which manifested itself by the end of the 1920s in the text problems of dostoevsky's poetics, is all the more remarkable. the fact that bakhtin retained this skepticism and even strengthened it in problems of dostoevsky's poetics allows us to define this idea as one of the constants not only of the book about dostoevsky itself, but also of bakhtin's theory of dialogue: “in an environment of philosophical monologism the genuine interaction of consciousnesses is impossible, and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well. in essence idealism knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue” (bakhtin, 1984, p.81). obviously, bakhtin does not question the possibility of pedagogical communication, however, he considers it to be much more complex than a mere system of questions and answers between teacher and student. in fact, the authors of the book under review realize and acknowledge this “historical” side of bakhtin's legacy: it is implicit in some chapters. craig brandist, for instance, who has a deep sense of the historical evolution of bakhtin's basic concepts, and jayne white and michael a. peters, who refer to the cultural history of vitebsk in the 1920s, talk about it one way or another. but at the same time, bakhtin is much more important for them less as a figure embedded in intellectual history of the twentieth century, than as an effective interlocutor, whose ideas make it possible to find urgent solutions to the problems of the twenty-first century. as the authors of the foreword point out, “in the post-2008 era, during which financial crises have morphed into global recession and which characterize growing social inequities, widespread political instabilities and further environmental decline and resource depletion, what is needed more than ever is a twenty-first century bakhtin, one that is occupied with the distinct challenges our times present to all of us" (p. 3). social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r11 the third decade of the xxi century brings similar challenges. within the frame of the covid-2019 the crisis of the existing traditional educational institutions has come to a total collapse. what is noticeable with the introduction of the new educational technologies, is a necessity to assess the pros and cons of distance learning. we will not claim that these are confirmed intuitions and predictions, but to us the indisputable relevance of the book is obvious. to us, the justification of the authors' desire to place bakhtin's theory in the broadest possible context of western philosophy of culture and education is equally obvious. they are simultaneously emphasizing the fundamental principles of bakhtin's philosophy, while not forgetting the pioneering nature of his thought. accordingly, as stressed in the introduction, the book "takes bakhtin's work to central stage in a targeted and critical manner by exploring central philosophical ideas in contemplation of their potential for education today. the sources for such endeavors are complex and draw from a much wider philosophical and disciplinary base than bakhtin alone. this is necessary for at least two key reasons: first, because bakhtin was influenced by a range of philosophical sources throughout his long life of writing and his works are sourced from fragments over time. secondly, it is important to recognize that bakhtin was not known first and foremost as an educationalist in a contemporary sense, and his work does not seek to specifically impose pedagogical instruction or commentary. nonetheless, <...> dialogic philosophy has much to offer in the consideration of learning, relationships and what these aspects mean for contemporary society (p.1). it should be noted that the book has a complicated history: the chapters of the book were originally published as independent articles in the journal educational philosophy and theory from 2011 to 2017. since then the authors have been engaged in an extended dialogue, which is another sign of the "fullness of time," the chapters are now a collection of articles by a team of colleagues who have brought their texts together under one book cover. the result is a metamorphosis not often seen in publishing practice: the idea of making a collection of articles transformed a relatively disparate set of texts written at different times into a single whole, which noticeably strengthened the persuasiveness of the authors' common conception. the book's nine chapters reflect a variety of aspects of the "bakhtinian shift" in the field of education and culture. for example, craig brandist in his chapter bakhtinian bildung and the educational process: some historical considerations does not only identify the neo-kantian paradigm of german intellectual thought as the most important source of bakhtin's philosophy of culture. although, both hermann cohen and paul natorp are important for brandist, the views of human education that trace back to the postrevolutionary european ideas of the beginning of the 19th century, represented by herder, von humboldt and hegel, are much more important for him. the vision of the development of human thought and nature offered by these thinkers across the dialectic of language and culture becomes fundamental to the image of european man in the bourgeois age. this vision is echoed in bakhtin's arguments throughout his works on the novel of the 1930s. brandist's position is in many ways similar to that of norman franke. in his chapter chronotopoi of the good life and utopia: bakhtin on goethe's bildungsroman wilhelm meister and the carnivalesque goethe is quite reasonably added to the already mentioned range of thinkers. the german writer is one of the most important characters in bakhtin's history of the european novel of the enlightenment. moreover, goethe's novel about wilhelm meister simultaneously becomes a powerful means of european education and, along with his other works, is directly involved in the pedagogical process, shaping the minds and behavior of a huge number of europeans at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. it should be added that bakhtin's conception of a book on bildungsroman is extremely significant. it appeared in bakhtin’s most important biographical period, between the book on dostoevsky, his first work social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r12 on the novel, and the book on rabelais. here, bakhtin, as illustrated in the third volume of his collected works (bakhtin, 2012), articulates quite clearly his own view of personality development, which is much more consonant with the ideals of european pedagogical theory of the enlightenment, rather than with the stalinist pedagogy of the 1930s. the experience of linguistic sociology and even political science is presented in even more expressive form in michael e. gardiner, bakhtin and the 'general intellect.’ considering the importance of understanding the relationship between bakhtin's ideas and contemporary marxist theory, gardiner believes that the range of ideas and concepts outlined by bakhtin should find its place in the marxist interpretation of the state and problems of social development in the early 21st century. interpretation of bakhtin from the point of view of 'autonomist' marxism is all the more remarkable because bakhtin, as we know, was no stranger to the positions of christian socialism. in “big time” of bakhtinian social utopia, partly represented in his books on dostoevsky and rabelais, there was no place for reflections on economics, but the famous 1934 article experience of studying the demand of collective farm workers, written in the kustanai exile, can well be regarded as a kind of supplement to what gardiner writes about new forms of economy, including the economy of education. it is hard to say how far from bakhtin is michael e. gardiner in his understanding of general intellect and its role in changing the face of modern education, but the approach proposed in this chapter is quite in line with the trend of bakhtin studies which includes adapting key bakhtinian notions and models to the problems of the modern world. the forms of personalized dialogue not only with specific figures in the intellectual and educational history of the twentieth century, but also with whole movements are realized by the authors of this book in different ways. sometimes it is bakhtin's "indirect speech," revealed in his unvoiced dialogues with peers (like vygotsky) or younger contemporaries (like freire), sometimes with large-scale phenomena of which he himself was a witness or even a direct participant. this is precisely what e. jayne white and michael a. peters present in detail in their chapter bakhtin and the russian avant garde in vitebsk: creative understanding and the collective dialogue. as we know, having moved from provincial nevel to the provincial center, bakhtin found himself in the heart of the flourishing cultural life of the early revolutionary years. among participants of this life in vitebsk were artists marc chagall and kazimir malevich with their schools and followers. intellectuals, their communist opponents and other witnesses and contributors to this interesting process, were the ones who made up bakhtin's circle. this vibrant life, the polyphony of forms and methods and styles of revolutionary culture, with its searches and experiments in the theater, music, and pedagogy, and the active discussion of new discoveries in disputes and debates, could not but influence bakhtin and his circle's perception of the new post-revolutionary culture, as the authors suggest. let us clarify a few details: chagall had left vitebsk before bakhtin arrived, and malevich remained the main representative of the new art in vitebsk, with whom, as we know, bakhtin gave lectures in vitebsk at the launch of the union of art workers. one can strongly agree with the view of e. jayne white and michael a. peters that it was in vitebsk that bakhtin first encountered the whole variety of forms of the revolutionary avant-garde. however, we should not forget that bakhtin's experiences in petrograd (1915-1917) included his intensive contacts not only with symbolism and acmeism2, but also with the futurists and the future formalists. however, it was in vitebsk, in the relatively small space of a provincial town where everyone knew everyone and everyone was in contact with everyone all the time, that bakhtin was probably able to feel the new atmosphere of art in the fullness of time. this is hardly the main argument for bakhtin's rejection of formalism in his 1924 article and 2 “acmeism, or the guild of poets, was a transient poetic school, which emerged in 1912 in russia…” wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/acmeist_poetry social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r13 subsequent texts, but the experience nonetheless made a contribution. bakhtin's relations with russian formalism in the 1920s and early 1930s as well as with the soviet structuralism in the 1960s are complex and not limited to simply opposing them. towards the end of bakhtin's life, they transform into a kind of dialogue with viktor shklovsky, the formalist and the semioticians viacheslav ivanov and yury lotman (osovsky, dubrovskaya, 2021). from the dialogue with suprematism and formalism a reader flows logically to the dialogue between bakhtin's ideas and those of vygotsky and freire. needless to say, both of these names are quite expected in a book devoted to the educational dimension of bakhtin's theory. in the chapter bakhtinian dialogic and vygotskian dialectic: compatibilities and contradictions in the classroom? elizabeth jayne white considers the two researchers alongside, adding a grounded comment on the difference in their approaches to psychology, although the shared comparative-historical and cultural-historical background of both thinkers is unquestionable. in white's version, the protomodernist bakhtin opposes the pragmatist vygotsky, but their understanding of "inner speech" and their perception of dialogue, if not identical, still are not contradictory. "yet i conclude this article by suggesting that the consideration of both men's pedagogical provocations-both ontological and epistemological-have more to contribute to local and international schooling when interpreted against their philosophical origins" (p.87), white suggests, seeing in the consonances of this immanent dialogue an opportunity for a synthesis of bakhtin and vygotsky's ideas during class work. even more remarkable is the figure of paulo freire, author of his own version of dialogic pedagogy, which continues to play a significant role in the renovation of the educational paradigm in south america and africa. this is exactly what peter rule points out in his chapter bakhtin and freire: dialogue, dialectic, and boundary learning, where the scale of the consonance between bakhtin's dialogic theory and freire's dialectics of dialogue is so great that the author is not disturbed by the fact that the brazilian educator was most likely not familiar with the works of bakhtin and the very consonance described by peter rule is determined more by the general trends of the era. however, there is one more circumstance which, we think, allows us to explain the proximity of bakhtin's and freire's understanding of dialogue. it is not only a common philosophical, religious and cultural framework based on the appreciation of christian values and the traditions of european culture. obviously, bakhtin's understanding of dialogue, born on the material of dostoyevsky, with his acute sympathy for the "humiliated and insulted", was inevitably in tune with freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" based on "liberation philosophy". the chapters of the book directly related to pedagogical practice represent a noteworthy interest. dialogic ruptures: an ethical imperative by sonja arndt describes in detail a dialogue with another culture in the context of dealing with foreign students. the author's observations and the situations described are of undeniable practical value because they can easily be used in any other classroom with foreign students. the pedagogical potential of laughter, the carnivalesque possibilities of humor, as elizabeth jayne white shows in her chapter are you 'avin a laff? a pedagogical response to bakhtinian carnivalesque in early childhood education proves to be a reliable tool in working with children in kindergarten. the absence of hierarchical relations between the adult and the child, the inner freedom of the very young child, his willingness to play provide a special carnivalesque space governed by the laws of the carnival. despite the fact that considerable amount has been written about the pedagogical aspects of bakhtin's theory of laughter and humor in general, white manages to look at the problem in a new perspective. we can add that among the instruments of "carnival teaching" in kindergarten and elementary school, bakhtin's “word with a loophole” might well have found its place. the latter is echoed in the chapter tawhiao's unstated heteroglossia: conversations with bakhtin with the multivalent semantics of the word in maori. the analysis of the folklore utterances belonging to the legendary king allows carl te hira mika and sarah-jane tiakiwai social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r14 to speak about the internal polyphony of his sayings and about the possibility of their analysis, description and explanation in the work with students. bakhtin's theory in connection with the study of folklore texts is another recognizable trend in bakhtin studies. on the one hand, bakhtin himself was interested not only in european and russian folklore, but also in mordovian folklore (dubrovskaya, 2020). in conclusion, we note that the authors of the book have managed to create a convincing overview of how bakhtin's theory is becoming one of the most important forces in today's theory and practice of education. it is not only bakhtin's ideas themselves, most importantly the notions of dialogue, polyphony and carnival, but also the free polyphony necessary for any creative practice. references bakhtin, m. 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(2019) михаил михайлович бахтин: проблемы изучения биографии и научного наследия (mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin: problems of studying biography and academic heritage). saransk: mordovian university press, 2019. dubrovskaya, s. (ed.). (2020) михаил михайлович бахтин: личность и наследие (mikhail mikhailovich bakhtin: personality and heritage). saransk: mordovian university press, 2020. dubrovskaya, s., nesmelova o., osovskiy o. (2019) «литературоведение, в сущности, еще молодая наука…»: размышления над словарем русских литературоведов xx века ("literary study is a relatively young discipline still...": reflections over the dictionary of russian literary critics of the xx century) // filologicheskie nauki. nauchnye doklady vysshei shkoly (philological sciences. scientific essays of higher education). 2019. №6. pp. 60-69. emerson, c. (1997). the first hundred years of mikhail bakhtin. princeton. princeton university press, 1997. freise, m. (ed.). (2018). inspired by bakhtin. dialogic methods in the humanities. boston: academic studies press. gratchev, slav n. & mancing, h. (eds.), (2019). mikhail bakhtin’s heritage in literature, arts, and psychology: art and answerability. holquist, m. (2002). dialogism: bakhtin and his world. 2nd edition. l., n.y.: routledge. klyuyeva, i. v., & lisunova, l. m. (2010) м.м. бахтин – мыслитель, педагог, человек (bakhtin thinker, teacher, person). saransk, 2010. social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r15 laptun, v. & tihanov, g. (2018). pedagogical work of mikhail m. bakhtin (1920s –early 1960s) // dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.248 | 6, pp. 18-18. laptun, v. i. 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(устные воспоминания с.и. каган и ю.м. каган) (about the memorable, about the important, about the past... (oral memoirs of s. i. kagan and y.m. kagan)) //dialog. the carnival. chronotop. 1995. № 2. с.165-181. solomadin, i. m. & kurganov, s. y. (2009). the history of world culture as dialogue of cultures. middle and high school curricula journal of russian & east european psychology, 47(2), 3 – 29. vasiliev n. m. (2018) m. m. bakhtin as a university professor // dialogic pedagogy. vol.6. p. t1-t7. doi: 10.5195/dpj.2018.234 white e.j. & peters m.a. (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe. new york, ny: peter lang, 2011. xii, 272 p. yestifeyeva, v. b. (2000) воспоминания о бахтине (первое десятилетие в саранске) (memories of bakhtin (the first decade in saransk)) // dialog. carnaval. chronotop. 2000. №1. pp.127-151. social education through the lens of bakhtinian theory oleg osovsky, svetlana dubrovskaya, ekaterina chernetsova dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.440 | vol. 9 (2021) r16 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 3. rietmulder^j marjanovic-shane^j (layout) freedlom^j 2023-01-14.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a21 freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder the circle school, usa ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract this article is based on two interviews between jim rietmulder, the founder and lead staff at the circle school (in harrisburg, pa), and ana marjanovic-shane, an independent scholar and a co-editor of this special issue. we discuss and examine the daily practice and the philosophical approach of a particular democratic school as we discuss democratic education in general. the main purpose of these interviews has been to introduce democratic education and explore the place for dialogic pedagogy in a democratic school, where the students are free to choose what to study, when to study, in what ways they want to study, with whom they want to study, etc. what happens to dialogic pedagogy if the students are not engaged around the same topics together? the question is whether the students’ legitimate status of free persons with equal rights of opinion and decision-making also creates opportunities and conditions for the students to engage in the critical dialogic examinations of the world, of their life and learning, and of their desires, motivations, and values. jim rietmulder is a founder (1984) and current staff member at the circle school, a pioneering democratic school in harrisburg, pennsylvania, and the author of when kids rule the school: the power and promise of democratic education. at the circle school, students practice freedom and responsibility in a scaleddown version of the larger world, becoming experts at life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. among other things, jim tutors students to take college entrance exams, plays mixed-age soccer at every opportunity, and anchors a daily critical thinking discussion group. prior to, and overlapping with, the circle school’s early years, jim was a history magazine editor, software developer, and management consultant. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. ïïò issn: 2325-3290 (online) freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a22 introduction the purpose of this article is to introduce and examine democratic education as a philosophical approach and a daily practice. the article is based on two interviews between jim rietmulder, a founder and leading staff member at the circle school in harrisburg, pennsylvania, and ana marjanovic-shane, an independent scholar of dialogic and democratic education1. the main goal of these interviews has been to explore what is the place for dialogic pedagogy in a democratic school, where the students are free to choose to study whatever they want, when they want it, in what ways they want to learn it, with whom they want to study, etc. what happens to dialogic pedagogy if the students are not engaged around the same topics together? the question is whether the students’ legitimate status of free persons with equal rights of opinion and decision-making also creates opportunities and conditions for dialogues, and what kinds of dialogues? are there opportunities for the students and staff to engage in critical, dialogic examinations of the world, of their life and learning, and of their desires, motivations, and values? the interviews took place in the summer and fall of 2019. we examine the students’ educational freedoms, their participation in the democratic governance of their school, the meaning of democratic education, and, crucially, the role of dialogue in the everyday practices of the circle school. we start with a brief history of the circle school. after that, we recursively discuss the meaning of the concepts of democracy, freedom, sovereignty, self-education, and philosophical and educational pluralism. in our discussion of self-education, we compare and contrast democratic and progressive schools as we explore the difference between the democratic school focus on educational ecology and the conventional/progressive schools’ focus on educational instruction. we discuss pluralism as an ideological approach and its relevance to the change in the educational focus from instruction to ecology. in our exploration of the place of dialogue in this democratic school, we examine contexts, practices, and events in which dialogues of different kinds take place in the circle school, and we scrutinize the meaning of “dialogue” and of “pedagogy” within these contexts. at the end of the interview, we talk about the educational model of the scaled-down democracy and building a culture of democratic schooling as the possible support for the future of civic democracy. history of how the circle school became democratic ana: i think it would be good to start our interview with your first philosophy of education [in 1984]. what you wanted to do when you were starting the circle school in 1984, and how your thoughts evolved today. jim: well, life experience and having children affirmed our2 belief that everyone is born with an impulse to strive, thrive, and grow. so our hope was (and still is) to tap that impulse to drive education and development, to replace the top-down coercion of conventional schooling and its one-size-fits-all curriculum and methodology. over time, self-determination is better than an imposed standard program – better education and, more importantly, more conducive to personal fulfillment and constructive engagement in the world. in the early years, we didn't fully connect that belief to collective selfdetermination – democracy. but it really is connected – the idea that each individual has a perspective that can contribute to collective direction and societal fulfillment. so we came to believe that fulfilled 1 jim and ana met in 2003, through their involvement in an aclu (american civil liberties union) civil lawsuit against the commonwealth of pennsylvania law requiring every student to recite the pledge of allegiance to the us flag at the start of each school day. at that time, jim was leading the circle school in harrisburg, pa, that joined this lawsuit, and ana was a leading parent at the project learn school in philadelphia, pa, which also joined this lawsuit. later, in 2011, ana introduced jim and the circle school to a group of scholars she belonged to, interested in dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. since then, jim and the circle school have collaborated in many ways with this group of scholars. a leading member of this group of scholars has been eugene matusov, whose comments and questions are included in this article. 2 jim and beth l. stone, his wife, were co-founders of the circle school. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a23 individuals tend to lead to fulfilled society, and also that society’s role in individual development is crucial. and so, where the state, the society, has an interest in developing its citizens, there's no conflict between personal development and societal development. fulfilled individuals lead to elevated society. <<eugene (matusov), 2021-12-24: i disagree with his rosy statement. "#$ society may need people acting like smart machines, which is not necessarily good for personal fulfillment. jim, 2022-01-04: eugene seems to suggest that society, facing a labor shortage of “people acting like smart machines,” would be better off by impeding development of (at least some) individuals. can that possibly be true? it seems to me that maximizing each person’s capacity – fulfillment of personal potential – also maximizes society’s capacity to meet its challenges. in addition, “people acting like smart machines” may (as eugene says) “not necessarily be good for personal fulfillment.” but it might well be good for some individuals’ development at some stages of development. that is, i see no basis for assuming a conflict between maximizing individual fulfillment and “people acting like smart machines.”>> jim: the idea behind democratic schooling is that it's not about exaggerated freedom for children, it's not about emphasizing individual rights over community rights, or community rights over individual rights. in my view, if you emphasize either extreme of that polarity, then you’ve got a libertarian or socialist school. democratic education only works as “agency in community.” we don't want to raise kids in the wild, apart from community and society. <<eugene, 2021-12-24: yes, but this is not the same as claiming no tensions between the society and the ‘lichnost.’ [a slavic concept of a “person”] jim, 2022-01-04: i don’t know what “lichnost” means. there are always tensions between the individual and society. i’m surely not claiming no tensions there. i’d guess those tensions surface one way or another at nearly every session of school meeting!>> ana: when and how and why did you start defining the circle school [tcs] as a democratic school? jim: when we [the founders of tcs] visited sudbury valley school in framingham, massachusetts. at the end of our three-day visit, our conclusion was that they were implementing our philosophy better than we were. that was eight years into the circle school, seven or eight years into it. during those first few years, we had made one concession after another to parents and families that took us further from what we originally wanted to do. ana: what kinds of concessions? jim: well, we imposed studies of some subjects and more reporting to parents about their children than we wanted to do. and there was more focus on traditional academics, and less focus on playing outdoors. by the late 1980s, just four years or so into the existence of our school, we were pretty clear that this was not the direction we wanted it to go in, that we weren't satisfying our own intentions for the school's philosophy. then we saw an example of democratic schooling at the sudbury valley school that was persuasive. we were very much aware of the summerhill model. summerhill was a very influential source of inspiration and information for us, long before we opened the circle school. and we were aware that we were drifting further away from what summerhill was doing. and so, the combination of summerhill and our visit to sudbury valley school was not only a wake-up call, it also gave us direction. it was a galvanizing experience. ana: and you were primarily unhappy because there were more and more impositions on children or students? freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a24 jim: yes. it was clear that children were not resonating with what we were doing in a way that would let us know that we were on track. in our philosophy we said, “let's follow each child's lead and support them in their own development, in their own way, in their own time.” but we were doing less and less of that. and the feedback we were getting from kids didn't feel like what we would expect (see more in matusov, 2021). we believed in the wisdom of each person to know what's best for him or her. that was the philosophy we began with, and yet we were not doing that to the degree that we wanted to. and i think we did not anticipate that parents would push us in another direction. but that was a lesson we learned early and often – that there is a tension among parents’ diverse duties. parents' duties are to keep their kids safe. their top three duties and top three concerns are safety, safety, and safety. but that works against another parental duty, which is to help your children become independent of you, the parents. and so, knowing when to let go and when to rein in is a perennial challenge for parents, and parents naturally tend toward the side of keeping their children close to them. and yet that's not healthy for development; it's healthy to have good, solid, secure intimacy at home and also healthy for kids to have plenty of experience out in the world. and the school's job, as we saw it then and still do now, is to help with that latter piece, giving kids experience being apart from home and family. and so, in one sense, you could say that the feedback we were getting from kids was that separation wasn't big enough. and the feedback from parents, that separation was too big. or more precisely, not too big, but they wanted more control over their children’s education and life in school. so that was the dissatisfaction that we experienced in the first four or five years, and it took us eight years in before we were able to do something about it. ana: that’s when you visited sudbury valley school? jim: yes. and then we said, "okay, we gotta move in this direction." and so, then we began a process with our families in our school community. we tried to bring along as many people as we could. at about the same time we adopted a more democratic program, over two school years, we also relocated our school from a rural and geographically remote village to the city of harrisburg about 20 minutes away3. and in the process, we lost quite a few families. it's hard to say how many we lost for philosophical reasons and how many for geographical reasons. but we also gained a huge number of other families. and what we learned in that process was that if you grow too fast, that's not good. because, especially with a democratic philosophy of education, so different from the conventional educational philosophy, it takes families, especially parents, a couple of years to become familiar with it and comfortable with it. ana: it is interesting that they send their children to such a school when they're still not feeling very comfortable with it. jim: well, some families sent their children because of the intuition that this is the right thing, even though it's pushing their limits a little bit. and for other families, those who came to us in crisis, they've got a child who's alienated from school or otherwise unhappy. and then there are some who come because the school is geographically convenient, or for other very practical or logistical reasons. but still, we grew rapidly, and then fell back. we didn't retain newcomers as well as the old-timers, as people who had already been with the school or who understood the philosophy of democratic education. 3 harrisburg, the capital of pennsylvania, is a political and economic center, an urban community close to the predominantly rural environment in which tcs started, yet demographically, economically, politically and ideologically very different from the rural environment. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a25 a democratic school is a working democracy ana: so, what did it actually mean when you first changed to be democratic? what is democratic education? what is democratic education philosophy? jim: it's hard to say it better than what i wrote in my recent book, "in self-directed democratic schools, kids practice life in a microcosm of society, empowered as voters, bound by laws, challenged by choice, supported by community, and driven by nature" (rietmulder, 2019, p. 1). so, a democratic school is a working democracy. the school is a working democracy in itself, where the governed get to make the rules and decide policies that have to do with the general welfare. "a democratic school operates as a free society and democracy of staff members and students embracing student civil liberties, rule of law, due process, one person one vote, and absence of mandatory curriculum" (reading from his recent book, rietmulder, 2019, p. 10). so, in a democratic school, in our meaning, students and staff together manage legislative, judicial, and executive functions of the school in sort of a scaled-down version of american governments (federal, state, and local). in its legislative function, the school meeting adopts laws. our law book has over 200 laws in it at this point4. laws are carried forward from one year to the next. every one of those laws was adopted by majority vote of students and school staff. and of course, staff are greatly outnumbered by students, so it's clear that students hold significant authority in governing the school. most votes at weekly and special school meetings, including on legislative issues, are not highly contested. that is, the debate continues from week to week, and sometimes from month to month, until there's a pretty good consensus. we only require a majority vote to adopt something. but as in most small groups of people, most people want to hear all points of view and want to continue the dialogue until people are generally satisfied that they have been heard, whether or not they've been able to persuade the group. so, most of the laws in the law book have gotten far more than a majority to get in there. and of course, all of the laws in our law book could be repealed or amended any week. and every week, the school meeting, that's staff and students, is debating new rules, amendments to old ones, and repeals. even after 35 years, not a week goes by without school meeting considering, oh, i would say on average, half a dozen rules are in play. ana: so, what kind of laws, for instance? jim: well, let me ask that as a question for you now, ana. if you were coming to a community gathering every day, a place where for roughly 6-8 hours a day, you're gonna share the space with many other people, what are some rules that you think we should have? ana: okay. there would be, first of all, organization of the space, i guess, like who can go where, at what time, if there is any reason to believe that there [may be] some conflicts in the space. more importantly, probably about the rights of what you can do. like what’s [allowed] to do, and what's not [allowed] to do? what can you do? for instance, since i know a little bit about your school, can you run, or not run? or, let's say, from my own experience as a 10-year-old child [in a summer camp], can you go to swim on a particular beach or at a particular time of day? jim: we have rules along those lines. certainly, we have rules about how certain space is used, many rules about keeping order, many rules about safety. most of our rules are worded in the negative in order to maximize freedom. so, if you tell somebody what they can do and they can only do what they're told they can do, they have less freedom... than if you tell them, "you can do everything except the things that you're told you can't do." 4 the interview took place on july 15th, 2019 freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a26 ana: you know that there was a philosopher, isaiah berlin, who talked about positive and negative freedom (berlin, 2006), and said exactly that. a positive freedom is the “freedom for,” specifying that you can do something, and negative freedom is “freedom from,” where you can do anything except what is forbidden. jim: yeah, yeah. and i think we favor the negative version to maximize freedom. there is also an organizational theory of governance called policy governance associated with john carver (carver & carver, 1996), that advocates governing all organizations, basically, with policies that are worded in the negative so that management or whoever is implementing operations has maximum freedom to achieve desired ends by any [legitimate] means. so, we have rules. we have a rule that says, "no running indoors." we have a rule against “hostile, physical aggression.” a rule against “verbal assault.” a rule against stealing. a rule against damaging property or using people's property without permission. we have rules about where it's okay to eat, and where it's not. our eating rule basically says, "we can eat over one of the epoxy floors, but we can't eat in a room that has carpet." one of the most commonly violated rules, maybe the most commonly violated, is a rule that says, "clean up your own messes." if you make a mess... you've got to clean it up, you can't leave a mess, right. and we have a rule that requires everyone to do a daily housekeeping chore, a number of civic duties, and that would be one of them. you gotta do a daily housekeeping chore. some of our rules are common sense, and then some of them are not; they're things that you wouldn't think of. so, for example, we have a rule that says, "if you make a paper airplane, you must write your name on it before you fly it." and the reason for this... all of our rules have come out of experience and need, but that particular... ana: 'cause people don't take responsibility, they throw an airplane, hit somebody, and you're just like...?? jim: well, or not so much that it hits somebody. but paper airplanes tend to go in waves. so, someone makes a paper airplane and it's likely that 10 other people make paper airplanes, and they're all flying their paper airplanes, and then at the end of the day, there're a bunch of paper airplanes lying about, and oddly enough, they don't belong to anybody and nobody is responsible for them. [chuckle] and so, to solve that problem, school meeting said, "you gotta write your name on it first.” a similar rule was made after many trick-or-treat nights. we have a rule that says that for one week after halloween trickor-treat night, before you unwrap candy, you have to write your name on the outside of the wrapper. [chuckle] only for one week, but that solved the litter problem. ana: yes. okay, so there are many, many rules and regulations and they are constantly being debated and kept or not kept. what else is a characteristic of a democratic school besides rules and regulations? “corporations” jim: people are pursuing their own interests, and that can be one person alone, or it can be a small group. it can be formal or informal. as an example of a formal structure, we have groups called “corporations.” at some point in the past, these groups have been given responsibility for either some space in the school or certain kinds of activities or materials and equipment. and so, we have an art corporation, a music corporation, science corporation. we used to have a sewing corporation, we have a gardening corporation, cooking corporation… ana: why are they called “corporations” and not “committees,” let's say? jim: that's a tradition we picked up from sudbury valley school, the word "corporation." but there's a very clear distinction at the circle school between corporations and committees, and this distinction doesn't necessarily apply to other democratic schools. i've heard schools’ various definitions, distinctions. but our distinction is that a committee is an agency of school government. school meeting appoints freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a27 committees. so, we have a library committee, an aesthetics committee, office committee, pr committee, fundraising committee, social committee. the committees act with the authority of school meeting within their domain. a corporation is something different. a corporation is a semi-private organization; it has its own bylaws, its own officers, it makes its own decisions. it organizes the way it wants; it fundraises [for financing their own projects]. corporations have their own bank accounts with the school. so, they make their own decisions, and they enter into a deal with school meeting; in effect, the corporation charter gives them authority to govern some aspect of the school and in return, they make their domain available to everybody in the school. the art corporation, long ago, was given authority over the art room. and so, they get to decide what materials will be there, the rules for using the materials, they train people to use the materials, the finger paints, the tempera paints, the sculpting tools, and so on. they train people and certify them for various skills and materials and equipment. anybody can apply. the person, in order to become certified, has to learn the rules or demonstrate the competence necessary to use whatever it is they're applying to use. but once certified, then a person can go use that equipment, that space, or those materials, any time they want to, assuming it's available. and so, democratic schools have dozens or hundreds of what i think of as self-service systems. it's a self-service system, because you serve yourself. if you and your buddies wanna go and do finger painting, four-, five-, six-year-olds, for example, you can just go and serve yourself. ordinarily, or in other schools, they might be able to do that only when that activity is scheduled. at the circle school, they can get together or as a single individual, they can go into the art room as long as they've been certified for it. they can get out the materials, do their painting project, do the clean-up, put things away. someone who's certified by the science corporation can use one of the microscopes, pull it down off the shelf, use it for whatever they want to, and then put it away. there's help available for all of those, but you don't have to get help. and so, the corporations are an important part of the school. <<eugene, 2021-12-24: why does it need to be certification? why can’t it be covered by a general rule to clean after yourself? jim, 2022-01-04: because it’s not obvious how to clean the microscope slides, avoid damaging the equipment, and put stuff away. a general rule doesn’t do it. also, certs happen before use of the equipment – thus maybe preventing damage – but rules only kick in after it’s too late to protect the equipment.>> ana: so, the corporations organize activities or rule over certain types of activities. that's how i understand, i'm trying to conceptualize it. i really never thought deeper about that. i just thought of them as committees, but now i can see that it's something completely different, really. jim: yeah. so, if you go into the music studio, you have to follow the music corporation's rules. you can't use the recording booth or the sound engineering equipment unless and until you've been trained and demonstrated that you know how to use it properly. you can't touch the guitars or the keyboards until you've been trained or demonstrated your ability to use them properly. but once you have, you're free to use them any time. ana: so how do you know whether somebody's certified or not? is there any kind of physical badge they get, or something? or it's such a small community, then everybody knows? jim: well, no, i don't know who's certified for what. and i wouldn't generally need to, but each of the corporations keeps a list, most of them will post the list right on the wall so that if you wanna make sure you're certified for something, you can go check, or if you wanna find out if a certain person is certified, you can go check. the corporation membership is voluntary but open to anybody. the corporation freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a28 members who are the ones administering the space or the activity or the equipment are probably much more aware than others of who is certified. but the enforcement, it's basically an honor system. if you aren't certified to use a piece of equipment and you're using it, somebody might notice but maybe nobody would notice. i think it would get noticed. so, yeah, if i needed to know if somebody was certified, i could go look at the list, but i'm not thinking of a time when i needed to do that. ana: so basically, this is in place to enable people to have self-determined learning. jim: no, it’s self-determined activity – with or without “learning.” there’s no expectation that people intend to “learn” when they engage these self-service systems. they might do it for “fun” or to “be with friends.” they might or might not “learn” something from it that standards educators would identify or value. most kids most days don’t come to the circle school with an idea to “learn” something, but more often come to school with an idea to “do” something. sadly, the word “learn” has come to be overly associated with traditional academic subjects and instructional materials. i’d argue that all “doing” results in learning (without quotes), but even so, i feel a need here to call out the word “learning” if only to disavow that k12 schooling is justified by a need for curricular learning. i think k-12 schooling is properly about kids’ personal fulfillment and engagement in the world. that’s a lot bigger than “learning.” the ability to do something on your own without asking permission, without getting an adult to help, is a big deal in the life of a young child. it builds a sense of self-efficacy, it builds introspective skills, it builds intelligence, general intelligence. it's more demanding cognitively than when something is scheduled for you and now a teacher comes and tells you what to do and has you do it. it requires that you be aware of context in a way that isn't necessary if someone, if an adult is directing your activity. anyway, yeah, there's huge empowerment for young kids in self-service systems and also a huge stimulation of growth. ana: what if somebody… did you have such a situation? if somebody constantly wants to be guided and have help and not do anything wrong? jim: oh, that's an interesting question. ana: did you ever have any such situation, that they're constantly asking for help? jim: there are certainly kids who have come to us from adult-directed programs who will go through a transition period. i don't know if we've ever had a young child who came to us at, say, four years old in that mode. although some are very timid. but that's different than asking for, requiring, adult direction for everything. there are plenty of kids who will rely on their friends to provide leadership. but that's different, too. but yes, certainly, there are kids who have asked for more help than they need. they could be asking friends, or they could be asking older or more capable students, or they could be asking us adult staff members. if i detect that pattern, if a student comes to me and asks for help more than they need, then i'm probably going to still give them help. but also, for me personally, i would want to be pointing out to them that they don't need my help. and i would be holding back, knowing that they are capable, if i think they're capable. if they're not, then of course, i'm gonna help. but it's a rare human being who doesn't wanna be autonomous. democratic schools vs. progressive schools ana: right. so, i saw this belief in your book. the belief that every one of us has possibilities to be selfsustainable, interested and able to find resources. if you're not stopped in that growth and that development, it is like a force that leads us. so, from the point of view of the traditional and many other modern schools like montessori, or reggio emilia, waldorf, or other progressive schools, it seems that you see democratic school like a step up or a new stage in development of schooling? freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a29 jim: yes. i think of democratic schools as being alone in a new emerging category of schools. the schools you named, yes, i would call them all modern. and i'm lumping postmodern or progressive into that category as well, because i don't see a sharper distinction between them… ana: i would like to know more about what you call postmodern schools? jim: i think postmodern schools are just modern schools that are staffed with people who have values that might be classified as postmodern. the structure of a postmodern or a progressive school, i think is identical to the structure of modern schools, which is to say that it's hierarchical, with students at the bottom and administrators at the top and a curriculum that's imposed on students and teachers, and sometimes administration as well. that's imposed from some external source, and students have no choice but to go along with it. the categorical difference that places democratic schools in a category by itself – different from the traditional and from the modern schools – is that democratic schools have an entirely different structure. instead of the teachers and administration governing the school, it is the school meeting governing the school. and school meeting is made up of students, staff, and administrators. and i think that democratic schools are also in a category apart because all of the previous forms, all of the previous teaching methods and ways of learning, the modes of learning – traditional, modern, progressive, postmodern – are available in democratic schools. so, a student in a democratic school could follow a strict curriculum if they wanted to. they could do entirely independent study if they wanted to. they could abandon formal curriculum and teaching materials, learning materials, altogether if they want to. so, the democratic school is more like a venue able to host any learning mode or mechanism, which is not true in modern schools and even progressive schools. in the modern and progressive schools, what you're gonna learn, the subject matter, is dictated by a preset curriculum and the preset methodology of instruction. the curriculum and instruction are dictated by the philosophy of the teacher or the school. but students don't get to choose either the curriculum or method. in contrast, in democratic schools, both the curriculum and the methodology of instruction are open for students to determine for themselves. so, the factor of self-determination is what distinguishes democratic schools. ana: right. but i think it is a category in itself. i would say even more than just a category in itself, although you say there are methods from all of different types of schooling. still, democratic school is a venue where the students can choose. i would say that, what probably gives different meaning to everything else, is the different philosophy. and that is the philosophy of self-determination. jim: that's it. it's a good point. what the democratic school accommodates from traditional education are the techniques that were characteristic of traditional education, such as rote memorization, drill and practice. but what the democratic school can't and would not replicate from a traditional school is the authoritarianism. from modern education, democratic schools inherit, for example, the method of “guided discovery” – lesson plans intended to lead students to prescribed insights. you're right that in democratic schools, students retain choice. education in a scaled-down democracy as a pathway to a civil society ana: tell me more about the idea that your school is a scaled-down society or a scaled-down democracy. what shapes this scale-down? obviously, the school is not the american society. in scaling down american democracy, you shape it in a certain way. like certain things that are possible in the society, are not possible in the school. in other words, what makes this scaled-down democracy – education? jim: there are certainly legal differences. the school satisfies the state's compulsory school laws. i'm not sure what other shaping influences are relevant. the scale is one. in the world beyond school, the scale is larger, and anonymity is a piece of it. the circle school and all the democratic schools i know, and freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a30 maybe all schools at the primary and secondary level, are much smaller than the general society, which means that there isn't really a degree of anonymity. and certainly, at the circle school, nobody's anonymous, everybody knows everybody to some degree, and i'm sure that's a shaping influence. one of the shaping influences, of course, is the commitment to self-determination, individual selfdetermination, and collective self-determination. and so that certainly shapes things. and part of the circle school is an element of responsibility that is probably greater than the comparable element of responsibility in the world at large. so here, for example, our laws around aggression and bullying are such that in effect, there is no such thing as a bystander. in the world at large, if you see something significantly wrong, if you see aggression, hostility, violence, or if you see damage to property, you can walk away, and you won't be held legally responsible. that's not true at the circle school. at the circle school, if you fail to intervene in ways that are reasonable given your own abilities, then you may be breaking a rule that neglect is not allowed. so that's a shaping influence that has to do partly with scale. another big shaping influence would be that we're dealing with minors. we're dealing with kids from four-and-a-half-years-old right on up. so that's very different than in the world at large. it affects things about safety, regulation of safety. we have, as a school and as individual adult staff members, we have both a different moral duty and also a different legal duty to children. so that's a shaping influence. well, one thought is that a shaping influence is that we're dealing with immature human beings and therefore we might expect that our policy-making and our judicial actions are less sophisticated or are somehow inferior to those that are made in the world beyond school, but i don't think that's true, actually. [chuckle] ana: okay, that's a very interesting question that you probably get from other people who are not involved in democratic schooling. how can children, four-year-olds, and let's say up to maybe 13-14, be given a right to make decisions for the school? like what's good, what's bad, to participate in making laws, wouldn't they make laws that are somehow immature laws? [chuckle]. jim: our legislative processes and our judicial processes are certainly flawed and imperfect, and they're probably only a little bit better than those same processes in the world at large. ana: why do you think they're better? jim: well, i think that our legislative process is highly functional, and i just can't say that about state and federal legislative processes these days. i think part of democracy is peaceful co-existence of difference. i think that democratic schools generally, and i know that the circle school in particular, as a community, is able to work through differences in a civil way, and there's very little vilification of people who hold different opinions. i think that one of the reasons, one of the roots of our current national dysfunction in government, and one of the roots of the incredibly antagonistic divisions politically, is the way we have publicly educated children for several generations now. we train children how to get by in what is essentially a totalitarian regime, or at least an authoritarian regime. for 12 years, we tell them to sit down, shut up, and do what you're told. why on earth would we think that that's going to lead to good citizens in a democracy? why on earth would we think that that's gonna lead to people who are good at collaboration and good at negotiating with people who have vastly differing opinions? and so, i think one of the things that democratic schools represent is a pathway to a civil society. it is... to me, it's very strange that we have fashioned our public schools in a way that is so contrary to national ideals. and if we want people... if we want a functional government at the national and state levels, then our schools ought to be immersing kids in functional government at the school level. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a31 ana: that's true. but on the other hand, democratic schools are so scarce in the world. and there have been democratic societies that functioned as democratic much longer. and then, american democracy, no matter of its ups and downs, still exists with very autocratic schools. for several centuries. jim: the fact that the country has gotten by without democratic schools is not an argument in favor of the kinds of schools that we do have. it's just an observation… sovereignty, freedom, and democracy ana: what is the difference between freedom and democracy? in my research of the scandinavian democratic high schools, i find that they sometimes had a problem in defining and distinguishing between “freedom” and “democracy.” i think that that's very important to know, what is freedom in democratic schools? and what's the shape of that freedom? jim: well, i think it's comparable to the freedom that we have in our democratic nation, and i guess here, we ought to note that when we use the word "democracy," we're not talking about “majority rules”; we're talking... technically, we're talking about a constitutional democracy where the majority is limited in what it can impose on the minority. it almost always comes down to a balance between individual and society. ana: how much sovereignty students have as individuals or as corporations. so, it's kind of like... it's almost like finding out, as you say, where is the boundary of somebody's freedom. jim: yeah. and i think that's always in flux. i think that there's no crisp way of drawing a line between individual and society, between sovereignty and dictates from the community. and i think maybe one of the essential elements that democratic schools teach, and mass education does not, is that life in a constitutional democracy, or in any society, is a constant balancing of individual self-determination with collective self-determination. that there is no black and white; things change every day and no two people are alike. focus on ecology vs. focus on instruction ana: what i was intrigued with in your book (rietmulder, 2019), is the big difference that exists between all other kinds of schools that we know, on one hand, and democratic schools, on the other, regarding the focus that you have on the whole environment, the ecology of life and education on the level of the whole school, as opposed to the mainstream schools’ organizing education on the level of classroom, or on the level of instruction. so, can you talk more about that? i never heard of that before. jim: i think we're saying that in conventional education, there's this sense that it has to be driven from above, that it has to be imposed. somebody has to design how children are going to learn and grow. in contrast, we're starting from the premise that every child is born with an impulse to strive, thrive, and grow, and that impulse is what can more effectively drive education. it doesn't need to be driven externally, because the force that drives it is internal. so we don't need to design a particular curriculum program, and we certainly can't design one that is going to fit for everybody. we can't design one externally for anybody. i mean, who knows how a person is gonna change over time? so the idea of an imposed curriculum, we just reject outright. it's not... it's neither effective nor grounded. ana: but on the other hand, this idea is a little bit in contradiction with the idea that there always is a balance between the school and the society on the large scale. for instance, here we have the sats5 and college waiting somewhere. in a way, that is pushing people, some people, at some point of time, to go in a certain way, not in any other way. this fact penetrates the school environment. jim: well… there are lots of impositions on kids in democratic schools. 5 a nation-wide scholastic aptitude test – required by many usa universities as a condition for acceptance. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a32 ana: i think this is important to talk about – just from the point of view of somebody who doesn't know. so, what are the impositions? jim: well, the four-year-old walks in the front door on the first day of school and they're required to find their name on the sign-in board and write down the time that they arrived. they're required to sign up for a chore. if they can't find their name, they're gonna have to ask for help. if they can't tell time, they're gonna have to ask for help, but they're still required to do it. that's imposed. i think one of the differences is you can think of impositions in at least two categories: one is impositions because somebody thinks it's good for you, and impositions because the community or society that you're living in requires it of everybody or in certain circumstances, not because it's good for you, but because we need it to keep order in some way. and that's the sign-in board. we've decided as a community that that's the way we're gonna satisfy some state requirements imposed on the school. and so, that imposition is being passed down in that form. we have decided that everybody has to do a daily housekeeping chore because we've, in effect, we've decided that that is superior to raising tuition and hiring a janitorial service. but that's an imposition that the school community is imposing on each of its members. and there are hundreds of such impositions. you can't eat your lunch over a carpeted floor. that's an imposition, even though you want to, and it might be the most convenient arrangement. so, there are many, many impositions… ana: it's just the way of living in this community… jim: yes. yes, and so, it's a balance that is struck between individual sovereignty and community needs. but there is no... there's no way to do that in a way that is absolute or crisp. if you have 10 different democratic schools, they're probably gonna come up with 10 different solutions for how to keep the school clean… and some don't have any chore system at all, they do hire a janitorial service. so yeah, many different solutions. and the solutions change over time, too. and the influential individuals change. so, when one person graduates and new leadership develops in the chore committee, that may bring about changes in how chores work here. yeah, there's no permanent or absolute solution. ana: okay, so those are kind of life impositions. but what about actual, real educational impositions? jim: well, let's go back to the life impositions. there is an important piece to that, too. anybody who is aggrieved by those impositions can have their grievances addressed by the community. anybody has the right to go propose a change in a particular imposition or to create a new imposition. and so, i think that's an important difference, too, between democratic schools and other institutions. every institution, organization imposes something on its members, but in traditional and modern schools, the students who are subject to those impositions don't have much say, if any say at all. i think having a say makes a big difference, morally, practically and psychologically. and it makes a difference in education. i think educating somebody to be empowered over their own lives, over their own life, is a valuable thing. and when the system teaches people that they cannot change things, important things in their life, that's not a good thing for society. so, that's an important difference in the impositions: are they negotiable… ana: that's very important because as soon as they are negotiable, you become a co-owner of them. jim: and that, i think, is exactly the sense in which democratic schools or democratic communities of all kinds are intentional communities. unless you're born into it, when you come to the circle school, you're entering into a form of a social contract. you are intentionally coming into a community in which you know what those impositions are. and in a sense, you're agreeing to abide by those. in fact, it's an explicit agreement for kids at the circle school, at least the older kids. we have that conversation with them before they enroll, "are you willing to take on these duties as they exist today? are you willing to freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a33 abide by the self-determination of the community even if you disagree with the impositions that the community agrees on?" jim: coming back to your question of “instruction” and the “balance between the school and the society on the large scale” … by driving education internally rather than externally, self-directed democratic schooling avoids the problem of kids becoming dependent on that external teacher/leader and instead sets kids up to be highly self-aware and world-aware and truly “lifelong learners.” from an early age, typically without prompting, kids seek out the instruction they want and need, and their learning is more meaningful and enduring. as they get older, they see those large-scale societal impositions, such as the sats you mentioned, and how those things fit in their own lives, and they are better able to take action without waiting for or depending on teachers and prescribed curriculum. place for dialogue in the circle school ana: so, where is the place of dialogue? and i'm now switching a little bit toward that. and definitely there is a lot of dialogue, but how do you see... what types, what kinds of dialogues take place? when? jim: well, since this is having to do with dialogic pedagogy, i need to ask, from your perspective as a dialogic scholar, what is dialogue? ana: alright. a dialogue is a way to create meaning, something that makes sense between people in a certain time and place. … in a dialogue there are meaningful things going on. people make sense of their lives. so, in education, we're telling each other things that we are interested in, and they mean something to us in some sense. and we stand behind that what we say. or we get surprised. or i'm asking a lot of questions out of curiosity because i don't know exactly how something is working, or what does something mean to you? and then i'm telling you what does it mean for me or asking myself, what does this mean to me? in a sense, do i like it, do i don't like it, where i see the difference, maybe i see or maybe disagree partially. i see alternatives, or something like that. i think that educational dialogue is about examining the world. it's critical dialogue. this doesn't have to be something very strange that we don't do every day. in a dialogue, you start to question things, and to bring in potential examples to see what the boundaries and shapes are of whatever you're claiming about the reality. so, education is about how we understand reality, one part; another, how we understand each other; another part is how we understand what's good and bad. and so, all the spheres of life can be opened and examined in dialogue.6 jim: okay. and so the question is, where is the dialogue in democratic schooling? ana: yes. dialogue about existential issues jim: i would say that it emerges from existential needs and situational challenges. i think if a person's basic physical needs are met, food, shelter, security, and then... dialogue, you can't keep human beings from dialoguing. meaning making is really an essential part of human being. and democratic schooling throws people together in a community which necessarily leads to negotiation of one sort or another. 6 our colleague, eugene matusov, pointed out that the above was not a full definition of a critical dialogue. i agree. one of the most important aspects of the critical dialogue i missed to mention above, is that critical dialogue entails deconstructive testing of all participants’ differing ideas, which are valued for their diversity, and the potential to lead the participants to new internally persuasive truths making a difference in their personal outlooks, values, desires, etc., without necessary agreeing with the others or leading to collaboration. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a34 <<eugene, 2021-12-25: why? why can’t people just move away from each other? jim, 2022-01-24: tell that to the democrats and republicans! rules and policies apply to everyone, so separation isn’t possible.>> conflict, tension between differing meanings, and it's a stage on which existential needs are experienced and met or not met, but a venue in which people can pursue satisfaction of those existential needs. community generates, as i point out in the book (rietmulder, 2019), an endless stream of situational challenges that all require meaning-making, much of that meaning-making in dialogue with other people. dialogue in pedagogy as informal culture making jim: well, the highest volume of dialogue is probably in the informal culture making. like "let's go build a fort. okay. well, how should we do that? well, um, and why will this work? why won't that work?" so, that's not only dialogue, ontological dialogue, but there's also a significant amount of pedagogy going on there. if you accept the broader definition of pedagogy, it doesn't require the parties to be in the functional roles of teacher and student, that is. and both parties can be ignorant of the subject matter and you're still willing to call that pedagogy so, right. this is what i understand you accept as dialogic pedagogy. that reminds me of commerce as another area that stimulates lots and lots of dialogue. we have a free enterprise condition so that whoever wants to sell something can put it on one of the sales tables. at the circle school, we have two tables reserved for things that are for sale. lots of it is food, but lots of it is not food. and sometimes a small group of people, either a pair or usually not more than probably three or four people at once, although sometimes it could be a corporation. anyway, some group will decide to together enter into some kind of entrepreneurial venture. and so then there's dialogue within that group in order to do their thing. but then of course, just the sales transactions themselves, customers and sellers and buyers, getting together. the corporations themselves also produce lots of conditions that stimulate dialogue. and some of it is entrepreneurial. one of the groups, i think it's the gardening corporation, is selling quesadillas. the sale is on thursdays. and so, there's lots of organizing around that project. then, there are field trips. there's another whole area. we had a group do a field trip to the west coast. it took them two years to prepare for it. another group did almost two years in planning for a trip to europe, and all of that involved a huge amount of critical thinking and dialogue. ana: what were the things that they were discussing? like what was in the plans for the trip to europe? jim: well, for the trip to europe, one of the big early issues was, should they sign up for a tour or should they plan a trip independent of any agency? and they did a lot of exploration, learning about what's available and discussing the pros and cons of it. if we are with a tour group, then we must follow their schedule to predetermined ends; if not we can adapt our plans as we go. in a sense then, a packaged trip is less in the spirit of dialogue!… that kind of a trip involved a huge number of logistical and financial needs that needed to be addressed too. how are we gonna make the money to make this trip happen? and to what degree should we each pay from our independent sources and to what degree should the group pay? they visited denmark, sweden and germany, and they opted not for a tour group, but to plan their own itinerary, which made it a very, very different experience. but it was those discussions of what will the experience be like one way or the other. so, yeah, lots of fruitful ground for dialogue in that kind of project. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a35 so then, it's not only dialogue [that takes place], it's dialogic pedagogy as culture making in that informal setting. school judicial practice jim: and then there are institutions within the school that demand dialogue, such as the school's judicial system, the school's legislative processes, the corporation business. transacting business with any of the corporations' use of any societal space, equipment, supplies necessarily entails dialogue and dialogic process with others. but i think human beings are drawn to dialogue just innately. ana: oh, definitely. there's no mystery about that. jim: so, i think what democratic schools do is remove the barriers to dialogue that exist in conventional schooling. we're putting people together. there's very high social-cultural bandwidth in democratic schools, because there isn't a “sage on the stage”, there isn't a teacher standing in front of the classroom lecturing and there isn't a classroom of kids silent while they're working on worksheets. ana: mm-hmm. so, from that point of view, nobody is imposing some correct point of view or correct meaning or correct answer to life to the children or students. jim: we're not demanding that they absorb it. << eugene matusov, 2021-12-25: [could we consider this as an example of what bakhtin called] “[c]onsciousnesses with equal rights?”7>> ana: but on the other hand, let's say i don't see much dialogue about certifying children to use equipment in order to be in the art room. there are certain rules that are not questioned at that moment. it's true that at some other moment these rules could be opened up and dialogued about and changed. jim: oh, i meant dialogue during the process of certification. certainly, there's dialogue in creating them, but i was thinking of when you wanna go use something and you've gotta learn about how to do it. it's theoretically possible for someone to get certified by reading the documents and not engaging much with another human being, but that's pretty rare. i think more than 99% of the time, it involves at least a conversation, and it's pretty hard for that conversation not to enter into the realm of dialogue. there's always give and take, neither the presenter of the rules nor the document itself is in any way complete. and again, no two people are the same, everybody who comes to that table to do the certification has a different set of meanings to start with and will take different meanings from what they're presented with. and then in actual use of whatever it is, whether it's materials, equipment, or space, there's still great uncertainty, and it seems to me that uncertainty about meaning is often the beginning of dialogue. so i see dialogue in a... not just in the process of creating the certifications, but in transmitting them as well and in using them day-to-day. in contrast, judicial committee, it seems to me, is just loaded with dialogue that involves everybody in the school, some people more than others, but it's tremendously about meaning making from the rules. "why do we have this rule? if i do this, why does it violate the rule? or why doesn't it? or why doesn't this rule... why doesn't this rule say what we mean?" and that's a huge one. [chuckle] ana: can you... give any examples? jim: oh my, every rule in the law book! every time a law is proposed, what just absolutely amazes, and, i guess, delights me, too, is – someone will propose the rule. really, really simple rule, or at least looks simple on the face. and then, within minutes of when the discussion of it starts on the floor of a school 7 in bakhtin’s (1999) philosophical framework of ethical ontological dialogism, genuine meaning-making takes place among “a plurality of [unique] consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 6, italics are in the original). freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a36 meeting, you realize, "holy smokes! this does not say what i thought it said!" or it says something different to different people. and so, a rule that might have 10 words in it can be debated for two weeks before we've come to a common understanding, and a common understanding isn't good enough, because that common understanding has to be captured in words. so that a year from now, when someone who wasn't part of this discussion sees it, they may take the meaning we intend rather than some other meaning. and so talking about how to accomplish that, how do we write in words what we've now agreed on or understood together? how do we write in words something that's gonna convey that meaning to somebody who wasn't part of this discussion? and it will not, right. which is why rules are coming up every week for amendment or repeal or brand-new rules. and it gets so frustrating for so many people when we think we have a really simple concept and yet we've now talked about it for an hour, but we can't find... we haven't found the words that we all agree on [chuckle]. so, yeah, i think many of the rules, most of the rules that are in the law book, if we could trace the history of them to the original discussion, we'd probably find that. and of course, the original discussion never ends because everybody brings new meaning to it. ana: but the democratic school, has to make some decisions. jim: judicial committee has to bring finality, has to decide whether or not a rule was broken... ana: is that where the clash between dialogue and democracy may be? jim: so, where's the clash? ana: the clash is that you have to make a rule, whether you end the dialogue or not, you have to end on something that's tangible as a decision and captured in some words. at least, temporarily. jim: yeah, it's always temporary. and of course, judicial committee actions can be appealed, and then the dialogue keeps on going. and that's no different than any other kind of finality or decision-making. dialogue vs. “definitive” knowledge ana: what about when it comes to actually discussing some kind of academic material? something that is about math or physics or philosophy or aesthetics or literature. it's more obvious that people have different opinions, but what about these other areas that seem like... what is there to discuss about and to explore? or about new laws or something like that? jim: well, i do most of the sat math tutoring, which involves a large amount of algebra and geometry. in those sat tutoring situations, the dialogue is mostly about the sat and its meaning to the individuals who are working on it, and how and why the problems and multiple-choice answers are selected by the test makers. but if they’re interested in the math itself, well, then the focus is on doing and understanding algebra and geometry. in any case, the dialogue is about the meaning to the individuals who are working on it. it's not about some absolute meaning. ana: no. there probably is never an absolute meaning. jim: right. and so, anything that you point to, newton's laws, the dialogue may not be about the law per se; the dialogue is about what meaning it has to you and to me. another significant, substantial area of dialogue is the judicial system. it's not only about the law book and the laws; it's about the "facts," and i'm putting "facts" in quotes here. one of the things the judicial committee is required to do in each case is to compose a statement of findings, which is the statement of what the judicial committee believes "really" happened. and i'm putting "really" in quotes, too. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a37 and so, there's tremendous dialogic room in that. and one of the guidelines for doing that is to avoid language that... or distinguish between language that characterizes or interprets rather than language that is "purely," in quotes, purely descriptive. so, the finding is “that wall is light green.” even that, of course, is debatable. but that's better than saying, "that wall is greenish," or "that wall is an ugly color." okay, there's an interpretation. and so, this tremendous dialogue about what are the "facts" in a given case. again, “facts” being in quotes, as it almost always has to be. and then there's dialogue about that dialogue! that is, "well, how can we determine what happened? or how can we avoid characterizing?" because some laws have to do with the characterization. some laws get at intent. and of course, you can never know somebody else's intent; you can only know your own intent, and even that is sometimes debatable. ana: “what’s my intent?” “i don't know.” [chuckle] jim: right. "i don't know" is an honest answer. so, i think in the judicial committee in particular, dialogue can get to sort of second-, third-tier dialogue where it's dialogue about dialogue about dialogue, in effect... <<eugene, 2021-12-25: it is interesting how you, jim, shifted back to social justice dialogue from academic dialogue. jim, 2022-01-04: interesting observation! hmm… it’s interesting how you, eugene, equated judicial committee dialogue with “social justice”. j social justice is the focus of a small subset of judicial committee dialogue, but the examples i used are about finding “facts”, not about social justice. consideration of “social justice” may come later. it’s also interesting that you find importance in the distinction between “social justice” dialogue and “academic” dialogue. i suppose in our democratic schooling environment, taxonomies of knowledge and of dialogue are less prominent than in an “academic” environment. for example, i’m not thinking of important qualitative differences in my experience of dialogue in judicial committee and dialogue about traditional academic subjects and dialogue about legislative proposals. i suppose the absence of a credentialing function in democratic schooling may free us up to do a less constrained form of “academic” dialogue – for example, freedom to move from “algebra” to parallel concepts in school meeting’s parliamentary procedure or, say, a legislative proposal that will be voted soon. dialogue can lead anywhere, right? i wonder… i suppose “dialogic pedagogy” is a subset of pedagogy. but is “pedagogical dialogue” a subset of “dialogue”? or is it an oxymoron? >> ana: right. that's very interesting. jim: democratic schools’ legislative and judicial processes commonly engage all students, 4-year-olds right on up, in dialogue that, i believe, is more dialogically sophisticated, more personally meaningful, and more frequent than is common in traditional and modern schools. ana: so do you think that democratic schools are the only kinds of schools that actually enable and make room, better to say: freedom, for unlimited dialogue? jim: no, i don't. i don't think the democratic schools are a perfect or final form of schooling. i think that there are some very positive strengths about democratic schooling, and i think the values of democratic schooling and the values that we're talking about, values of dialogue, can absolutely... i shouldn't say “absolutely” [chuckle]. dialogic values can be implemented in programs that are structured in other ways. i think that those other ways, i'm inclined to think that there has to be something democratic about them. but to be democratic doesn't mean to be a democratic school, that is, democratic in the sense that there has to be some kind of rootedness in the value of each perspective. and i think that that's an almost inherently democratic value. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a38 ana: see, this is what i'm thinking as the main principle of the life together in democratic school like the circle school, is everybody's voice has equal rights to come out and to influence the life of the community. dialogue and “expert” knowledge ana: when it comes to education itself, not everybody's voice may be equal, because there are experts and there are novices. there are people who already know because it has been studied and concluded by the experts that “such-and-such a law of thermodynamics… states that…” especially in science, but also in history or maybe some other things. jim: democratic schooling does not imply rejection of expertise. having said that, i will say that there are many democratic schoolers who do reject expertise, but that doesn't make it... ana: when you say reject expertise, in what way, child's expertise? or... jim: in the sense that you're talking about it. that here is someone who has studied science and understands gravity or understands magnetism or electricity, and when they inform us about something that they regard as settled science that... that carries... that is more influential than if someone who has never studied it makes a claim about it. it doesn't... ana: in a sense, there is difference in the rights of the opinion. see what i mean? jim: yes, you talked about everybody having equal rights of voice. the way we say it in the circle school's formal statement of values (we call it "ends we seek") is that everybody's got equal rights to voice and vote. that doesn't mean we should regard everybody's statements as having equal truth value or equal objective correspondence... ana: and see, this is where i see the difference between dialogue and democratic schooling or democracy in itself. because in dialogue, in true dialogue, as you said, i would definitely be very interested in how a person could come to a conclusion that "two and two is one." or are there possibilities that “two and two can be anything” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018)? by the way, this is a true example. but it is also a metaphor for any kind of dialogue because there may be certain things that you will not agree that they're true but the person who is saying them has a right to and responsibility explain how they see that, or change their opinion, right? jim: yes. ana: so in that sense, even if you are a novice, it's a very important thing that you have a right to talk, right to say, right to say how you see, and right to start engaging with that material from your own point of view. so, no discovery would be made if people completely descended from what was expertise knowledge at the time. jim: sure. sure. ana: so maybe somebody tells you, "i really believe there are fairies." in a true dialogue, i wouldn't say, "you're just a kooky person. this is just your fantasy." but i kind of want to know all the evidence for that, all the logic behind that. and i don't have to agree with that at the end, but for the sake of the dialogue, we should value that. jim: well, okay, so two points i wanna make about this: one is that expertise is acknowledged in democratic schools, particularly in debates at school meeting. everybody's got an equal right to voice and vote, but not everybody's voice and opinion is regarded in the same way. i was elected as the school's legal affairs officer, have been annually for many years. when a question comes up in school meeting about how a proposed action or law relates to laws beyond the school, typically i'm the one who's asked, "jim, tell us, is this legal? is this not legal?" or "what does this do in terms of liability?" freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a39 what i say in response is likely to be more influential than what any five-year-old in the room is going to say. so, i have no right to speak any greater than the five-year-old, but it's likely that the school meeting collectively is going to regard what i say with greater weight than what the five-year-old says about legalities. so that's one point. expertise is not dishonored or ignored. and then second thing... we're trying to get at differences or conflicts between dialogue and democracy, but even where our democratic judicial system, where the rubber meets the road, where pushing comes to shove, or where it really... there's a lot at stake, when the judicial committee finalizes its findings by voting on it, when the judicial committee charges somebody by vote, when the judicial committee imposes a sentence, all of those are finalized in one sense, that is, at least on a temporary basis, it's declared an end of the dialogue. ana: exactly. jim: but that's not non-dialogic and it's not a conflict. decision-making is not in conflict with dialogue... what do i wanna say here? all of those decisions are still open. school meeting reviews all of those decisions, every week. and even a year later, if somebody said, "you know, i think i was falsely convicted in this case," they could bring it back to school meeting. i think one of the reasons i oppose capital punishment is because there is a finality to that dialogue. i think it's a denial of due process. so i don't object to... frankly, i don't object to a society killing somebody because they think an offense has been so great, but i do object to a society determining with that degree of finality that they should die. and so i oppose capital punishment for that reason. but i don't see any incompatibility or conflict between "finalizing" decisions, between finalizing anything and dialogue. dialogue doesn't imply openendedness, and democracy doesn't imply rejection of expertise. ana: no, i don't think that democracy denies it, but... let me see how i would explain it the best. jim: from an educational point of view, what we don't do in democratic schools is impose expertise. ana: that's what i wanted to say. jim: right. we don't say, "you must learn algebra from this person, and you must believe what they're saying, and you can't talk back. you can't argue with what this person says. when jd [a staff person in the circle school] tells you this or that about scientific laws, you're not allowed to dispute it." we don't do that, we don't demand an unquestioning acceptance of civil authority, and we don't demand an unquestioning acceptance of an academic authority. ana: so, you always question. right, right. where i see the opposite tendency is just more in practicality. because in what prevails on everyday level. in dialogue, you can never decide anything because as long as dialogue is dialogue, it's un-finalizable and goes on and on and on, but you wouldn't be able to eat your lunch because nobody was there to cook it, because nobody could agree about how to cook it, [chuckle] or whatever. so, in that sense, that's one of the senses how that dialogue can go against life, [chuckle] because you just gotta finalize many things in order to just survive. jim: all day long. ana: all day long. that's one sense. another sense is because it constantly opens up already accepted, or by majority accepted, or traditionally accepted values, understandings, opinions, that if you start to shake them, you may be shaking the whole society. dialogic education may be anti-social because it's... dialogue becomes risky, in that sense, because it can open up pandora's boxes that people are not ready or elementally, don't want them to be. jim: so dialogue may... there may be conflict between dialogue and life, but probably not between dialogue and education. i mean, dialogic pedagogy is not dialogic life. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a40 ana: yes, but dialogic pedagogy in itself is very non-welcome in traditional school where the student doesn't have a voice but has to accept and memorize, if you go by the litany. and even in progressive schools, the dialogue is limited as long as the students rediscover the same... what we want them to, and finally come to those exact answers. jim: you know, the conflicts... let's see, the issues around expertise and dialogue and expertise in democracy are probably more prominent in the university environment than in primary and secondary schooling. you are in the former, and i'm in the latter. but it would be the rare eight-year-old who wants to study a field in which there's highly developed expertise in a formal way. that's very common at the university level. ana: well, i'm just talking about that funny example with two and two, i just mentioned. there are a lot of things that we start teaching in school as common sense, but some kids don't even get interested in them because they don't make sense to them. jim: right, but i guess what i'm saying is expertise is less of an issue when the question is how much is two plus two, and more of an issue when the question is understanding quantum physics. it takes a lesser degree of expertise to settle some questions than it does to settle some others. it takes less training to be a medical responder at the circle school than it takes to be a brain surgeon at harrisburg hospital. ana: right. jim: and so the degree... ana: but let's see about just everyday issues. you wrote in your book exactly the same example that came up in a scandinavian democratic school in the late 60s, that i am studying. in a book that was written by the school leader or director of the school, she wrote about the new technologies that were emerging, that people in this democratic school were just discovering. and this is an example about the question of “who is an expert, and expert in what.” and so, as you know and you accept, that the kids could be experts about something that adults are not experts. the author of the book uses exactly the same example that you used: that one of the big fights they once had in their school assembly was about whether to buy a “mono-channel tape recorder” or a “stereo tape recorder.” you know, that was the '60s [chuckle]. the young people insisted that the stereo has to be bought. while the old people, who were still living in the past... those who had to spend the money or get the money, they could not see how the younger people were much more experts about these technologies than they (the older people) were. so, who has the right to that expertise? in that sense, it's not a denial of expertise, but the question is then who owns the expertise? sometimes it's not obvious. jim: mm-hmm. mm-hmm. ana: okay, maybe nuclear physics, yes. but there are many, many areas of life where adult people just because they are adult, think that they have more expertise than children. jim: yeah, yeah. yeah. and not just in technology, but there are many things about the school that kids know a whole lot more than i do. i mean, even young children will sometimes help me understand what's required to use certain materials in the art room. so, when i'm taking families on tours, it's not uncommon for some child to overhear my conversation and then correct me when i'm making a statement about what's required to use the finger paints, for example. and i may be generalizing in a way that they hear as being a false statement, and they'll correct me. so, i suppose we are each expert on the things that we have need or want to be expert in, and young kids are certainly capable of that kind of expertise. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a41 dialogues across age groups jim: one of the features of democratic schools is the mixed ages that we talked about a bit. i love the mixed ages as a subject all of itself. but especially as it relates to this conversation: the opportunities for dialogue, because it's mixed ages and because it's a relatively small group 88, we'll have 87 kids of all ages when we go back in january 2020. games like “capture the flag”8 or “pickle.”9 games can involve 20 or more people sometimes of mixed ages. and so, the selection of games and rules has to be such that it's fun and challenging for people of vastly different abilities. and that requires a lot of negotiation and planning and dialogue over time. i mean, you may, you may play a game 10 times and find that it's no fun for the little kids because whatever, and then the rules may evolve over time, through dialogue until you hit a winner. yeah. and as a little kid, you see, you encounter this culture that's there and you want to become part of that and play with everybody. and suddenly you are learning these new games, new rules, new songs or whatever goes on. and that's the source of new information. so, the question about where is the dialogue in democratic schools? maybe like, i guess where i'm coming to is, it's pretty much the same as in the world beyond school. i mean many of the same things that come up in the world beyond school that, that foster, cultivate, or require dialogue happen in democratic schools. dialogic pedagogy and democratic education jim: well, i guess i'm still curious, have we identified conflicts or incompatibilities between either dialogue and democracy, or between dialogic pedagogy and democratic schools? ana: well, coming back to what we were talking about... the focus on the pedagogy itself, which means the instruction, and the focus on life, i think, result in a completely different way of where a dialogue is taking place, how is it taking place, why is it taking place, etc. so, when it comes to the judicial committee, you are... it's life necessity to do certain things that creates that dialogue. dialogic pedagogy does not necessarily relate to an urgent life necessity. and i think that's where there is a difference. i still remember our talks from 10 years ago, when eugene [matusov] and i just visited you for the first time, and we just started dialoguing. and when you said, "i will not go and engage some child in critical thinking just because i think something is interesting and impose on that child." i remember it was some very interesting, playful thing that a child told you and you just did not use it as an opportunity for a dialogue. now, after reading your book, i think that it's because you're not focused on instruction. and dialogic pedagogy is focused on “instruction” – ways of learning about something. jim: okay. well, there are pockets of time and place in democratic schools when the focus is on direct instruction. and in those situations, whatever constitutes dialogic pedagogy can certainly take place but doesn't necessarily. but i think one of the important factors is that when direct instruction is taking place in a democratic school, there is still... it's within a dialogue, and the dialogue is how shall we approach this material? and that might be an explicit dialogue, but it might just be implied or part of the context. so, i might be sitting at this very table with a student and doing something that, to an outside observer, could not possibly be described as dialogic pedagogy because we're doing memorization, or we're doing recitation, or we're doing... or i'm the expert and simply conveying... just transmitting information to the student: there's a clear student and a clear teacher. an expert and a novice. and yet, i would maintain that that is different from the same actions happening in the context of another... of a non-democratic school. because here, if that's happening at this table, in this room, in this school, then the student and the teacher, the expert and the novice, both know that at any moment, either the "teacher" or the 8 see the rules here: https://www.verywellfamily.com/how-to-play-capture-the-flag-1257384 9 see the rules here: https://www.playworks.org/game-library/pickle/ freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a42 "student" can question the methodology itself and say, "i like this approach of you telling me the facts, and i am receptive to it." or saying, "you know, i don't like the way we're doing this, jim. let's do it a different way." or i could say as the person who's the teacher, or the expert, i could say, "you know, it seems like this isn't going well for you. you're not... there's something about this that's not satisfying or fulfilling for you. am i right about that? i think it's because maybe we could try a different approach." so, whether that actual conversation happens or not, the whole direct instruction thing is wrapped inside a dialogic context. ana: that's an interesting way to put it, because it's just a moment in a larger dialogically valued life, maybe. jim: yes, whereas in a different school setting, another kind of school, the dialogic context isn't present. and so, it becomes... it may become oppressive for the student, or even if it doesn't become oppressive, there's still there's still something absolute about it. ana: so if you said, "okay, let's try to do this to memorization, let's try it," and so, okay, that looks like he's trying to memorize whatever, a poem, and you are here to correct or not correct or help out or something like that, or multiplication table. and so, it looks like [a] drill, but it might not be, because it's a self... it may be a drill, but both of you decided on. but because you own that and you know why you're doing that, and the student knows why they're doing that. jim: another way of coming at that same issue is that in traditional and modern schools, the teacher, of course, has the academic authority, but the teacher also has civil authority over the students in the room. in a democratic school, i may be the person with the academic authority but not the civil authority. the civil authority resides equally in me and the student and in school meeting, and i think that makes a big difference. that separation of civil authority from academic authority is important. and by civil authority, i mean the authority to make rules and enforce rules and unilaterally find facts, the way the jc10 does. that's a civil authority, whereas the academic authority is that i do know algebra better than you do, and yes, i can tell you exactly what's what in that field, and if you don't believe me, you're dumb [chuckle]. that would be dialogic, even in the academic… no, that wouldn't be dialogic, but that would be the stance. ana: in dialogic pedagogy, your expertise is also open to yourself for questioning. jim: yeah, yeah. ana: so, you step into that dialogue with your student bringing different types of expertise in the same, but both of these expertises can be shaken. jim: yeah, yeah. ana: because they're both open for examination. jim: some things more than others, but yes. ana: right, because the student could say, "prove me that that's true. anyway, i don't believe you." jim: yeah. ana: they have that right, even if they don't have examples. jim: yep. ana: correct, so it would be your responsibility to find the proof or whatever. so that means you have to open up your knowledge and re-examine it again. 10 short for “judicial committee.” freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a43 what does “pedagogy” mean in “dialogic pedagogy”? jim: we had a long discussion earlier about pedagogy with primarily me asking. doesn’t the word “pedagogy” refer to direct instruction, in your view? my understanding was that when you use the word, or when people use the word pedagogy, they're talking about direct instruction. there's a teacher. and pedagogy is the teacher’s set of skills … delivering some information or, or training for skills. or cultivating mastery of a subject domain. but no matter which one of those it is, it's… it's about a teacher and a student (or students). and i think my question to you, if you have two people who are equally ignorant of a subject, can pedagogy still occur? ana: yes. because when you say equally ignorant, they may be ignorant, but in different ways! and their mutual differences will bring out some dialogue. one of them knows one thing more and the other one knows something else more, about the same subject. it's not the same type of ignorance. ignorance has different sides. that's one thing. another thing, i think, when i say pedagogy, especially dialogic pedagogy, i don’t mean direct instruction. [although, dialogic pedagogy may involve direct instruction it is not primarily about direct instruction]. in general, for me, pedagogy is creating, “arranging,” events through which people will learn intentionally [and unintentionally]. you can do it in a dialogic way, which is not to lead the students towards anything predefined. in fact, even if you don't know things, you can still arrange for the students to be creative in their learning. i don't even want to say “arrange” because it's manipulative. but to be always curious, and to know why, how, and for what purpose they want to know something. << eugene matusov, 2021-12-25: thanks for making this comment. i agree. but… what term would you use instead for the teacher’s or even student’s guiding efforts? ana, 2022-01-04: maybe it would be better to say, “your guidance could still have a purpose to support creativity in learning and teaching”?>> and a critical question is to involve the students in asking such questions. so, in that sense, dialogic pedagogy is creating opportunities for people to explore. and within that – the students’ own purposeful exploration – you may do some direct instruction. jim: but what if both parties are, are ignorant, substantially ignorant of the subject being explored? what's the source? there has to be some source or sources... ana: oh, yeah. the source of subject of exploration is not just in the immediate people. it's all over around us. they can together go and ask somebody or find resources: books or internet, or people who know. or a source that helps them decide how, “how shall we explore that?” jim: so dialogic pedagogy happens, if you have two people who are ignorant of a subject and they together explore it in engaged, in authentic, in ontological dialogue between themselves. right. then, maybe both are in the role of teacher, and both are in the role of student, but they're exploring together. maybe they get on a computer and they google information or maybe they go out and they try to build a fort and they discover that they can't build it the way they were imagining and they're talking back and forth. in your view, is that what constitutes dialogic pedagogy? ana: in my view, what is important is that the original question always comes from the student. somebody who wants to learn, who is interested in something, has the question. and that's the biggest difference from regular schooling, even progressive schooling where the teachers are those who ask the questions – and they ask them not to learn, but to check how well the students came to the preset endpoints. in dialogic pedagogy, it is the student who has a question. we can both be students, but we can, we can both be teachers, if we want to really create deeper opportunity for exploration. so, if there are two freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a44 kids playing in sand, building a fort and asking each other questions and you happen to be there... and, let's say, you are somebody who has more experience in it, and they ask you a question, you could teach both of them. but they're there, they're asking questions. you can get involved in their dialogue and deepen their questions. in a sense, you can show them possible alternative ways of looking at things that would never occur to them. but they're asking these questions. in that dialogue you can, you can open ways for them to explore further then they might do it themselves. obviously if there are two people equally ignorant and nobody else to turn to, they will trudge on their own and maybe… “rediscover america,” right? or maybe something else? but yet, as somebody who is an adult or just knows more, you can answer their questions. however, being dialogical is not because you know the right answer. you can create opportunities for more. you can actually enrich their alternative possibilities of exploration in such a way that their environment, then becomes richer. <<eugene, 2021-12-25: i think you are struggling here about a possibility of a true dialogue between a knowledgeable person and an ignorant person. i addressed this issue with my notion of the “collapse of knowledge”, with the idea that knowledge itself is a social construct. we know only with other people. an encounter with an ignorant person makes our knowledge (partially) collapse in us. what do you think? jim, it seems you struggle with (or puzzled by) the opposite problem: how dialogue among ignorant people is possible. jim, 2022-01-04: “struggle with … how dialogue among ignorant people is possible…“? not really; i’m quite content with ana’s point that people are ignorant in different ways and the space in between is where dialogue can happen. i think i struggle more with reconciling “dialogue” and “pedagogy”. see next comment…>> jim: so dialogic pedagogy or pedagogy period doesn't require a pedagogue. it requires information or knowledge from somewhere, but that doesn't have to come from the teacher pedagogue. okay. all right. <<eugene, 2021-12-25: no! jim, you don’t understand. you seem to focus on knowledge and not on meaning. for you, education is still transmission of knowledge. jim, 2022-01-04: i guess i think the education industry (sorry to say) is so overly dedicated to credentials and measurement of knowledge and technique that it’s hard for me to avoid those connotations in the words “education” and “pedagogy.” wikipedia says “pedagogy […] is the study of how knowledge and skills are imparted in an educational context…” sounds like transmission of knowledge to me. however, that sentence does go on to say “…and it considers the interactions that take place during learning.” so maybe there’s room for dialogic pedagogy after all. j >> pluralism of educational approaches jim: i think i said in our dialogue, different staff members will handle it differently. there are... i know some people who just get in other people's faces all the time, and they intervene in ways that i just... it just would appall me. but they get away with it somehow. and that's just the way they are. and they could say something to a kid who would brush them off, whereas if i say it, the kid might feel they have to do something about it. so, i don't mean to say that every democratic school staff member should handle situations in some uniform or even consistent way. what i do with one student might be very different than what i do with another, or what i do with one student on tuesday might be very different than the way i respond on thursday. people change, i change, they change, circumstances change. so, i think it's really important also to say that the... and this is also a difference between democratic schooling and certain other kinds of schooling, where it is either implied or explicit that a teacher should respond in a certain way, in a certain situation. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a45 and i think that's much less true in democratic schools, that the emphasis is more on community and community means no two situations are ever alike, no two people, no two moments, no two sets of circumstances. and so, there isn't any “party line”, there isn't any way that staff are supposed to be compatible with the school's philosophy. ana: well, that's another thing that i wanted to talk to about, this pluralism of... tolerance for the pluralism. and no party line, as you say, well, all other, i think, educational approaches have their party line, like, "this is the right way to do that." jim: and i would say our party line is at another level of abstraction. it's a meta-party line, maybe. by that, i mean the party line is that we have no party line. as i wrote in my book, the circle school represents a “theory of schooling” rather than a “theory of education” or “theory of learning.” the school is a venue rather a program or curriculum. so we aren’t bound to any particular methods of “education” or “learning” and the school can host any teaching/learning methods. our staff are free to be authentically interacting with children in a relatively unfettered way. now that i think about it in the way you mentioned earlier, i suppose that means all pedagogy at the circle school is dialogic in a sense, because the context and methodology are themselves part of the dialogue and not constrained by any curriculum, credentialing, or instructional modes. so a student could say “i want you to teach me algebra in a strict, authoritarian way with homework and grades and no choice of assignments.” after talking about why and so on, maybe i would agree to that, or not and we’d keep talking. but no matter what, at any time – for example, weeks later – either the student or i could say no, i’ve had enough. and then the dialogue about context and process would be re-opened and who knows where it would go? so maybe at the circle school dialogic pedagogy is inescapable in a sense, at some level, even though some classes and teacher-student interactions wouldn’t look dialogic. maybe, in that sense, non-dialogic pedagogy is impossible at the circle school? in any case, if we have a party line, it’s not apples-toapples with other schools. it’s meta. ana: it's a meta-party line, yes. jim: so, well, let's see, what do we expect of staff? we do expect staff to comply with the policies set by school meeting. we don't... we wouldn't tolerate, or we don't wanna tolerate civil disobedience in that sense, but those policies don't dictate interactions. ana: so, were any situations where staff was really unhappy about the policies of the school meeting and have to constrain themselves? jim: sure! ana: give an example. jim: well, i proposed the rule that would ban glitter from the school, and it got defeated. ana: and you were really unhappy about that? jim: well, if i was really that unhappy, i could propose the rule again and again, and then people would think that i am being really a pain in the butt, but no, not big policies. if a staff member has philosophical objections to giving kids a vote, then they're just not gonna be happy. they probably aren't gonna be on staff, but that is what we expect from staff. we expect staff to honor and uphold the system, the structures, of the school, but that's a different level of abstraction than expecting staff to behave in a pedagogical way with students. so, one staff member may employ traditional teaching methods, and another staff member may employ solely dialogic methods. and i don't see any problem with it. ana: no incompatibility about that. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a46 jim: yeah, there's no incompatibility with that. it may turn out that students prefer one over the other, or maybe students generally prefer one method in one situation and another method in another. but i think that the personal connection between the person who's serving as teacher and the person who's in a student role is more important than the teaching method in many situations, that relationship and the... the way it works or doesn't work for the student is likely to have a greater influence than the techniques. concluding reflections at the outset, we asked what is the place, in a democratic school, for dialogue, and for dialogic pedagogy. for me (jim), a newcomer to the study of dialogic pedagogy and an old hand at democratic schooling, the answers are now clearer. i want to comment on two aspects of those questions: (1) the scope of the pedagogical dialogue, and (2) the role of non-curricular dialogue. scope of pedagogical dialogue in modern and progressive schools, dialogue may be deployed by teachers aiming to have students reach curricular objectives. in my understanding, this is the most common form of “dialogic pedagogy.” the dialogue may be authentic, wide-ranging, and deeply rewarding for students and teachers, and may be effective as a way to reach curricular objectives. generally, in those settings, selection of content and methodology are outside the scope of the teacher-student dialogue, having been preset by the syllabus, the curriculum, the school, or the school board. the educational ends are thus set before the teacher initiates dialogue along the way. at times, that dialogue may wander away from curricular objectives, and, at times, the dialogue may help to achieve the teacher’s non-curricular objectives (to be discussed shortly). such excursions may be fruitful in various ways, but the teacher’s duty is to curtail dialogic excursions as necessary to reach the preset destinations. in contrast, in the circle school and other democratic schools, neither the school nor the teacher predetermines content or methodology. the school is a cauldron of dialogues – in pairs or groups, spontaneous or planned, unconstrained as to subject and purpose – from which may bubble up ideas for projects, activities, classes, book discussions, field trips, and so on. further dialogue might result in concrete plans for some sort of engagement, typically including a defined scope of study (content) and how to go about it (methodology). start to finish, throughout the engagement, all matters are open for further dialogue and re-negotiation. the content and methodology can change at any time. dialogic excursions may lead to “stepping-stone” inquiries, traversing subjects and methodologies as the dialogue evolves – over hours, weeks, or even years. thus, in democratic schools, the scope of pedagogical dialogue is greater – embracing not only the dialogue initiated by the teacher to reach curricular objectives, but also a selection of content and methodology to begin with, and also tracking the evolution of the inquiry. role of non-curricular dialogue in my (jim) experience, most teachers in most settings hold valued aims and ideals beyond the formal, explicit curricular objectives; typically, aims to promote the general development and well-being of their students, regardless of curricular content and methodology. sometimes these aims are skillfully integrated and thus pursued simultaneously with curricular aims. often, non-curricular aims are pursued in peripheral moments: digressions from curricular pursuit, or in the margins such as before and after class, in office hours, homeroom, study halls, or incidental encounters elsewhere. in any case, i think most teachers highly value this non-curricular aspect of their work, even though it’s usually unspoken and out of sight. for some, their non-curricular aims are their primary motivation for teaching, with curricular aims and freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a47 duties serving merely as the means by which their real lifework is enabled. despite its secondary institutional status in modern and progressive schools, non-curricular teacher-student dialogue is highly valued by teachers and usually, in my experience, also highly valued by students. in democratic schools, the role of non-curricular dialogue is primary, not secondary; and central, not peripheral. rather than curriculum generating dialogue, it’s dialogue that generates curriculum. as in other kinds of schools, there’s still plenty of space for the classroom practice of dialogic pedagogy to achieve curricular aims. thus occurs a repeating sequence or cycle: dialogic planning (selection of content and method) followed by content exploration (perhaps dialogic) followed by ongoing dialogic adjustment (or stepping-stones). we might say democratic schools feed students a curriculum sandwich on dialogic bread – dialogue above and below – except that the dialogue parts are just as meaty, if not more so, than the content parts. furthermore, large helpings of non-curricular dialogue that remain informal and non-curricular also provide abundant opportunities for those non-curricular aims of promoting students’ development and wellbeing – in settings that are primary and central in the school’s educational program. ultimately, then, the distinction between “curricular” and “non-curricular” may fade and vanish. in summary, i see both the scope and the role of dialogue being greater in democratic schools than in other kinds of schools. thus, the school itself and its students’ education might properly be characterized equally well as democratic and dialogic. answering our original question, i find that dialogue in democratic schools is pervasive and essential. life, freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school one of the primary drives of the progressive schooling is to return life into the deadening grind of the schoolish learning. “you have to find a key to each of your students’ minds and hearts, to teach them well” is one of the core mantra’s of the progressivist teachers’ desires (matusov, 2021). the emphasis here is on “to teach them well” – as the students in progressive schools are still regarded as subjects to a teacher’s pedagogical action, who need to be motivated, molded, or taught, rather than considered “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). bakhtin considered the equality of consciousnesses to be one of the main conditions for a genuine dialogue – where the participants are “not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse.” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 7). i (ana) think what i learned about democratic education is that the students and the staff in a democratic school, are first and foremost partners with equal rights of consciousness and personhood in creating their life in this “scaled-down” society, where “students and staff together manage legislative, judicial, and executive functions of the school, in sort of a scaled-down version of american governments (federal, state, and local)” (jim, above, pp 9-10). at the same time, it is also understood that learning and education belong to the bubble of the student’s personal (negative) freedom (berlin, 2006), where the student has the full right of evaluation and decision-making. in that sense, democratic schools do not have to “return life” into the school, they are based on and thrive on life itself. their purpose is not “to teach well,” but to create opportunities for the students to live well. and life itself belongs to students who have the freedom to search, examine, and deliberate, through endless dialogues what for each one of them uniquely means to live well. freedom, dialogue and education in a democratic school jim rietmulder, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.488 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a48 references bakhtin, m. m. (1999). problems of dostoevsky's poetics (vol. 8). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. berlin, i. (2006). two concepts of liberty. in d. miller (ed.), the liberty reader. (pp. 33-57). boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. carver, j., & carver, m. m. (1996). basic principles of policy governance: jossey-bass san francisco, ca. matusov, e. (2021). progressive education is the opium of the educators. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 1-34. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2018). teaching as dialogic conceptual art. knowledge cultures, 6(2), 9-27, doi:10.22381/kc6220182. rietmulder, j. (2019). when kids rule the school: the power and promise of democratic education. gabriola island, canada: new society publishers. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc21 “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging in two elementary classrooms lisel alice murdock-perriera sonoma state university, usa abstract elementary school children bring a rich diversity of language to classrooms, a richness that often goes undervalued in educational settings in which teachers feel they must and do emphasize dominant ways of using english. the ways in which teachers interact with children about their language use can influence the linguistic belonging of children from nondominant linguistic backgrounds—their sense of being loved, valued, included, and recognized in positive ways for how they use and understand language. this work addresses connections between dialogic pedagogy and the belonging of multilingual children in two california, english-dominant elementary classrooms. the manuscript centers on the following questions: (1) how did teachers view dialogic instruction and plan dialogically? (2) what did dialogic instruction look like when enacted in these two classrooms? (3) how did dialogic instruction–including professional care and love for multilingual children–relate to the linguistic belonging of multilingual children in these two classrooms? the study concludes that these teachers saw dialogic instruction and the belonging of multilingual children as connected and that they worked hard to find space for dialogic instruction within scripted and district-planned curricula. during dialogic instruction, teachers accepted answers that were not conventionally correct, honored and demonstrated care for students and embraced multiple, diverse ways of expressing answers from their students, including affirming multilingual student language use that did not conform to dominant english standards. dialogic pedagogy contributed to the belonging of multilingual children in these two classrooms. keywords: dialogic pedagogy, social justice, courageous conversations, literacy, multilingualism dr. lisel murdock-perriera is an associate professor at sonoma state university in the department of early childhood studies. she earned her phd from the stanford graduate school of education in 2019. her research is situated in social justice and early childhood, including how teachers can engage critically with the youngest learners about topics such as race, immigration, and gender. her recent publications focus on critical conversations and teacher expectancies. she has been invited to provide guidance to teachers locally (in california), nationally, and internationally with her colleagues at the university of hawai’i at mānoa as part of the courageous critical collective. she is passionate about working with her undergraduate and graduate student colleagues–including and especially first-generation college students and working students with caretaking responsibilities–in engaging in justice-oriented learning and action. acknowledgements: i would like to thank my family for their unwavering support of my social justice work with teachers, children, and families, and for creating an environment in which justice is at the heart of all we do. dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc22 ronan, i hope this writing will mean a better world for you. i am also thankful to my dissertation advisors for their support, and my colleagues in the courageous critical collective for doing the work with me. this piece would not be possible without the two teachers and their incredible secondand fourth-grade students. thank you for sharing your year with me in school. ïïò introduction and purpose we use language constantly—to communicate our desires, to show our competencies, and to present who we are to the world. in united states classrooms, white and wealthy ways of using language often dominate. yet u.s. elementary children bring a rich diversity of language to classrooms, a richness that often goes undervalued in educational settings where teachers feel they must, and do, emphasize dominant ways of speaking, reading, writing, and teaching english. the ways in which teachers interact with children about their language use can influence the linguistic belonging of multilingual children—their sense of being loved, valued, included, and recognized in positive ways for how they use and understand language. in the children’s book a different pond (phi, 2016), the narrator states, “a kid at my school said my dad’s english sounds like a thick, dirty river. but to me his english sounds like gentle rain.” this quotation sums up both the criticism and, alternatively, the love and care that can be conveyed as we consider language use. teachers have the option to show this same kind of disdain through correction, emphasis on dominant english, and criticism of children’s accents and language use; alternatively, they can engage in pedagogical choices that demonstrate respect, thoughtfulness, and care for their children’s use of language; recognition of multilingualism as an asset; and respect for children’s ideas, opinions, and contributions to classroom discussion. research has found that multilingual children often do not have access to some or all of the learning opportunities afforded to monolingual children in the u.s. (langeloo, 2019). pedagogies steeped in love and respect can offer multilingual children a sense of linguistic belonging in schools, a belonging that has the potential to impact children’s present and future (murdock-perriera, 2022) the belonging of multilingual children–their sense of having positive relationships with others (walton & cohen, 2011), the idea that the classroom is meant for them and that they can envision themselves in it (murdock-perriera, 2022)–is crucial to their well-being and school performance (murdockperriera, 2022, martínez, 2013; langeloo, 2019; snell & cushing 2022). how teachers work with children— the pedagogies they choose—inform teacher-student interactions about language use. a pedagogical approach known as dialogism or dialogic pedagogy offers opportunities for children to express competence and promotes children’s meaning-making and sense-making. dialogic approaches also improve educational outcomes and academic progress, especially for multilingual children (snell & cushing, 2022). this qualitative study addresses connections between dialogic pedagogy and the sense of belonging of multilingual children in two california, english-dominant elementary classrooms: a secondand a fourthgrade classroom. the author spent more than 400 hours in the two classrooms: observing, coming to know students and teachers, and interviewing teachers one-on-one about their plans and ideas. through this ethnographic process, ideas about language and belonging emerged organically as the researcher witnessed moments of love, care, and connection in which teachers engaged in dialogic approaches and, in doing so, promoted their students’ linguistic belonging. the study concludes that these teachers saw dialogic approaches and the belonging of multilingual children as connected, and that they worked hard to find space for dialogism within scripted and district-planned curricula. during dialogic instruction, teachers accepted answers that “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc23 were not conventionally correct, honored and demonstrated care for students, and embraced multiple, diverse ways of expressing answers from their students, including affirming multilingual children’s language use that did not conform to dominant english standards. literature review teachers interact with the children in their classrooms in countless ways throughout the school day, including one-on-one, in small and large group settings, and through providing feedback. how teachers and students interact with one another is a long-studied topic, initiating with scholars as early as the 1960’s and 70’s (barnes, britton & rosen, 1969; cazden, 1972). study of teacher-student talk throughout the ’80s and ’90s (reviewed by mercer and dawes, 2014) led to the development of two major areas of study in the 2010s: student-student interaction and collaborative learning and dialogic teaching (freire, 1994; alexander, 2006). in dialogic approaches, teachers and students interact respectfully and responsively, acknowledging and building on multiple perspectives (e.g., nystrand, 1997; kim and wilkinson, 2019; hennessey et al., 2023). dialogism offers an approach that gives space for listening deeply to what children are saying (nystrand, 1997) about particular topics, their experiences, and themselves. more than only interactions or speaking, dialogic approaches are about hearing one another, building on ideas, and acknowledging others’ existences, experiences, and perspectives. through privileging children’s thinking and background knowledge (aukerman, 2013), dialogic instruction offers an approach that differs from conventional understandings of rightness and wrongness of children’s ideas and language use. dialogic instruction makes students thinking about textual ideas central to classroom dialogue about text. it places more of the burden on learning, and less of the burden on “rightness.” aukerman (2013) states that within dialogism the teacher “treats … intellectual work as generative regardless of whether it aligns with her own thinking or ways of reading”, honoring student thinking regardless of dominant “correctness.” recent research in dialogic pedagogy indicates its potential relationship to issues of social justice, including language, within the classroom (murdock-perriera, 2022). dialogic approaches offer teachers the opportunity to validate and be equitable in dialogue with children’s ideas and their ways of expressing those ideas–the languages and linguistic qualities of how they present themselves. within dialogism, meaning-making is, “…fundamentally unfinished, contingent work that centrally depends on the refraction of multiple voices” (aukerman, 2013, p. a7). dialogic pedagogy privileges children’s textual ideas regardless of rightness but also expects readers to engage with each other’s often differing accounts of what texts say. teachers believe their students’ ideas can transform classroom discourse and consider how these ideas develop and collide. this element of negotiation in co-constructing meaning (teo, 2019; wenger, 1998) is key in considering the potential of dialogism in promoting linguistic belonging; when teachers give children the power to determine the meaning of text, they also empower the things children say and the ways they say them. but what can dialogic approaches mean for multilingual children? aukerman (2013) specifically highlights the opportunities for dialogic approaches to embrace multiple uses of language: “it is up to teachers to recognize that children’s existing frames of reference are the primary raw material for new learning, rather than some static predetermined academic language” (633). dialogic instruction offers opportunities for teachers to honor and recognize their students' frames of reference and ways of knowing. in dialogism, teachers take up student interpretations and question them in the process of making meaning (teo, 2019; nystrand, 1997), an approach that centers teacher interactive feedback on children and their construction of knowledge in ways that offer the opportunity to enhance multilingual children’s linguistic belonging—again, their sense of being loved, valued, included, and recognized in positive ways for how they use and understand language. beyond the idea of social belonging–the sense of having positive “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc24 relationships with others (walton & cohen, 2011) –linguistic belonging refers to children feeling cared for and included specifically in relation to their language: the ways they understand and the ways they express themselves. through dialogic approaches, teachers can engage in interactions that offer children positions of power. as they validate children’s ideas and opinions, teachers implicitly and explicitly value how their students use and understand language (author, snell & cushing, 2022). dialogic instruction constitutes authentic listening, which places children as conversational equals to their teachers, and in which teachers can simultaneously admire the way children present their ideas and the ideas themselves; cornelius and herrenkohl (2004) found that, “giving students higher positions of power … promotes the kinds of conversations in classrooms that help students challenge and refine their previous conceptions…” (490). dialogism places value in children and their opinions; encourages, allows, and gives space for listening deeply to children; and asks teachers to follow up on children’s thoughts; dialogism gives teachers the opportunity to show children that they value their ideas and their language use. recent work has found that dialogic approaches are relevant and effective for multilingual children (wilkinson, 2016), and support them in thinking creatively, performing well on standardized school measures, engaging in higher-order thinking, and succeeding as human beings (teo, 2019; snell & cushing, 2022). research clearly demonstrates the potential for dialogic approaches with regard to linguistic belonging, including of multilingual children, but what do teachers think about these ideas, and can enactment of dialogic approaches to embrace and enhance linguistic belonging be a reality? this study fills a gap in the literature in examining how teachers viewed dialogic approaches in relationship to their multilingual students, how they enacted dialogic approaches in linguistically diverse classrooms, and how multilingual children responded to such approaches. the study explores the relationship between dialogic approaches and the belonging of multilingual children in two classrooms (grade 2, ages 6-8; grade 4, ages 7-9) during and after such instruction, recognizing how the use of dialogism enhances the sense of belonging of multilingual children. through studying teacher plans and enactment and children’s reactions during and after dialogic instruction, the study finds a close, interwoven relationship between linguistic belonging and dialogism for multilingual children. the following research questions are at the center of this work: 1. how did teachers plan for dialogic instruction, including their thoughts about multilingual students in relation to dialogic approaches? 2. what did dialogic instruction look like in action for teachers and students? 3. how did multilingual students reflect on times when dialogic approaches had been taken, and in what ways did this relate to their linguistic belonging? methods i. timeline the data for this study was collected during the 2017-2018 u.s. academic school year (august 2017 through june 2018) as part of the author’s doctoral dissertation work. as described below, analysis for the data was ongoing and therefore began at the same time as data collection and continued through september 2018. member checks took place during october, november, and december 2018. ii. selecting teachers and the participant-observer approach the research for this qualitative study was collected in two ways: first, through approximately 400 hours of classroom observation in the second-and fourth-grade classrooms; and second, through one-onone interviews with students and teachers. the teachers were chosen via detailed interviews conducted with a class of graduating teacher candidates; as a doctoral student, the author served as a teaching “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc25 assistant (ta) for one of their 26 total classes. the author interviewed 20 candidates and selected these two teachers based on the following criteria: they were first-year teachers; they identified with dominant linguistic and racial backgrounds in the san francisco bay area; they were interested in student multilingualism; they were willing to have the author spend extensive time in their classrooms. although the author was not a teacher or co-teacher in either classroom, she was present two to four days each week for much of the school year, and teachers and students developed strong relationships with her. both teachers were novices. first-year teachers, on the whole, represent seven to ten percent of the teaching workforce (u.s. dept. of education, 2022), and students of color and low-income students— also the most likely to be multilingual—are even more likely to encounter novice teachers (clotfelter, et al., 2005). because of the author’s role as a former ta, these teachers sometimes asked her for advice, including around curricular and behavioral choices for students. through interviewing teachers repeatedly about their decision-making and thoughts regarding students’ language, the author influenced the choices they made in the classroom about interacting with children as a participant-observer (e.g., bronfenbrenner, 1995). the participant-observer role allowed the author to work collectively with teachers in building reasoning, justification, and space for dialogic interactions. interactions are defined as times when teachers and students traded talk turns in some format. an interaction could involve back-and-forth utterances, predominantly teacher utterances, or predominantly student utterances. of course, the author’s role in mentoring teachers meant that teachers in this study engaged in significantly more dialogic work, and work around supporting multilingual children, than typical teachers might. at the onset of the research, the author knew no one at either school, with the exception of the two teachers; by the end of the study, she was familiar not only with the teachers and their students but with other teachers, children, and many family members and school administrators. the initial goal of the research was to observe how dominant-background-identifying teachers interacted with multilingual children, including children who regularly used nondominant dialectical forms of english. the author searched for patterns in curricular choices that might promote the belonging of multilingual children. connections with dialogism developed over the course of the study, as described below. iii. the classrooms and teachers’ backgrounds and demographics the first focal classroom was a second-grade in a racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood in the suburban bay area of san francisco, usa. the teacher, connie, self-identified as asian american. while in many international contexts and in many physical locations within the united states context, asian-american identity is nondominant or minoritized, both according to local racial demographics and by her own definition, connie belonged to the dominant culture within her school context and her community. she grew up near the school where she taught in a vibrant chinese-american community. as a second-generation immigrant, she grew up speaking english and was surrounded by english speakers in and outside school. connie described her linguistic background as “dominant,” “english-dominant,” and “privileged,” and described her ethnic background as “majority” and “privileged.” as a home english speaker, she said she thought and planned in english and that she spoke predominantly english outside of school. since this was participatory research, the author committed to using participants’ own definitions of their backgrounds and experiences. therefore, connie’s background was dominant, privileged, and in the linguistic majority. in connie’s classroom, the children came from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including (in order of majority) asian (chinese, japanese, korean, thai, vietnamese, filipino) american, central american, mexican american, caribbean american, hawaiian, white european american, and african american. they used many languages, including multiple varieties of tagalog, “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc26 spanish, tongan, mandarin, olelo, and korean. three of connie’s 22 students identified as monolingual, and the rest as multilingual. the second classroom was a fourth grade in a racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood in the urban bay area. the teacher, ava, self-identified as white. she described her own racial and ethnic experiences and background as “privileged,” “dominant,” “white,” and “european,” and her linguistic background as “monolingual,” “dominant,” “majority,” and “privileged.” by her own definition, she was in the majority both racially and linguistically within her school community (which, notably, had different racial demographics from connie’s community, with a much smaller asian-identifying population and a much greater white european-heritage-identifying population). in ava’s classroom, the children came from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds as well, including (in order of majority), african american, white/european, afro-caribbean, caribbean american, asian (chinese, japanese, korean, thai, vietnamese) american, central american, and mexican american. they used many languages, including multiple varieties of english (both u.s.-dominant and nondominant varieties) and spanish, creole, mandarin, japanese, and korean. eight of ava’s 26 students identified as monolingual; and the rest as multilingual. importantly, in ava’s class, four african american students identified themselves as multilingual after reading and learning about varieties of language in school. the remaining three african american students identified themselves as monolingual. all afro-caribbean students identified as multilingual. the course in which the author initially observed the two focal teachers recruited for this study was taught by dr. maren aukerman, cited above, and included a specific focus on dialogism, including validating student interpretations and encouraging student sensemaking through non-evaluative, interactive feedback. through this course, both focal teachers practiced giving students “wait time” to express thoughts, asking open-ended, authentic questions with more than one correct answer, accepting multiple interpretations, and encouraging children to elaborate on these interpretations, as well as allowing conflicting interpretations from children to exist in cooperation and conflict with one another. while dialogism was not the original intended focus of the observations, connections between times when teachers engaged in dialogism and times when multilingual students stated or expressed that they felt loved, cared for, or as if they belonged quickly emerged. iv. recorded observations and interviews recorded observations totaled approximately 400 hours. in both classrooms, the author observed reading and writing instruction as well as english language instruction (a time when students were grouped according to school-administered assessments) and shared reading (defined below). the author also occasionally observed mathematics instruction. social studies instruction occurred within the context of literacy instruction in both classrooms. details about the transcription of the observations and how themes emerged, are described below. the author gathered qualitative information about teachers’ beliefs and plans through four formal interviews, each lasting between 60 and 140 minutes. informal interactions totaled 20 hours between both teachers. these interactions were driven by the author’s growing understanding of the classrooms. during the first two interviews, the author asked teachers questions specifically about how they thought about language and multilingualism; once dialogism emerged as a theme, the author also asked questions about their views and plans regarding dialogism. formally interviewing children was challenging; each child in both classrooms was formally interviewed twice. the author made a commitment not to detract from instructional time or to interview “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc27 students during unstructured times (e.g., recess). for this reason, interviews were primarily about memories: times children felt they belonged, felt their teachers were proud of them, or felt they were validated. unlike formal interviews, one-on-one interactions in which children shared their thoughts and feelings with the author were very common and occurred throughout the course of the study. the author had close relationships with every child–multilingual and monolingual–in connie’s classroom by the second month of study, and most children interacted with her whenever they were given opportunities to do so, such as in small group settings, during work time, etc. of course, especially valuable to the research were comments made by multilingual children. in ava’s classroom, the author developed close relationships with all but one of the students by the third month of the study. researcher-child interactions in both classrooms were primarily initiated by the children themselves. v. what is dialogic and what is not?: analysis and transcription every day after collecting data, the author re-listened and took voice-recorded notes. this was part of an initial interpretive phenomenological analysis (smith, et al., 2009) in which participants’ own words, thoughts, and actions drove meaning. as dialogism emerged as a theme in both interviews and my observations, the author developed a series of criteria to define dialogic interactions, informed by research in ethnographic transcription (bucholtz 2000, 2007; green, et al., 1997; ochs, 1979) and work by aukerman and boyd (2019): “authentic/open questions. questions that allow for a range of divergent authentic responses without a single “right” answer. uptake. follow-up questions or bids for information that seek to elicit elaboration, explanation, and/or justification. speculation and reasoning words. words such as might, if, because, and so that indicate a language of possibility and/or link to reasoning.” (p. 4) in addition to these specific cues, dialogic instruction centered on student sense-making and reasoning about texts. other orientations toward how language unfolds extant within dialogic research, such as teachers’ awareness of “socially engaged talk” (aukerman and boyd, p.8) as well as teachers’ value orientations toward unfolding thinking, were not considered. additionally, teachers’ awareness and enactment of more complex ideas surrounding how relationships and communities unfold around dialogic instruction, such as shared interpretive authority, were not explored. once dialogism emerged as a theme associated with the linguistic belonging of multilingual students, all the recorded and transcribed data was re-analyzed. interactions were coded as dialogic when in more than fifty percent of the total interactions, teachers: (1) accepted answers to comprehension questions that were not conventionally correct in terms of their content (e.g., “the earth is flat.”) or (2) asked children to follow up on their thinking in ways that did not push toward a particular, conventionally “correct” response or toward a response that a teacher herself viewed as correct. interactions coded as dialogic instruction were longer on average than other group interactions (described for contrast below in “dialogism in action”). additionally, once dialogism emerged as a theme of the study, the author directed some teacher interview questions at the topic. teachers additionally volunteered information about dialogic instruction. all of the information teachers provided about dialogism is described below in “planning for dialogism.” after identifying dialogism as a characteristic of the above moves, the author examined dialogic interactions specifically with multilingual students. using open, axial coding (corbin and strauss, 2014), the author mined data by listening for themes and commonalities in dialogic interactions. this resulted in the “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc28 recognition of the role of dialogic instruction in multilingual children developing a feeling of linguistic belonging. through examining interviews with children and teachers in each classroom in relationship to dialogic interactions, as well as through thematic examination of the interactions themselves (kvale and brinkman, 2009; seidman, 2013), the author recognized that, repeatedly, interactions that were dialogic were positively viewed by multilingual students. dialogism was associated with validation, belonging, pride, and love felt by multilingual children in these two classrooms and is explored extensively in the findings section. having defined and identified interactions that were dialogic in nature, and noting the relationship between these moments and positive interactions for multilingual students, the author made the decision to more closely examine the relationship between dialogic approaches and linguistic belonging through qualitative inquiry, leading to the development of the three research questions, which are also reflected in the organization of the study’s findings. identifying moments in each stage of the teaching process (planning, enactment, student reflection) and triangulating across these three categories allowed the author to reflect on exactly how dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging were related in these two classrooms. v. member checks the author led member checks (lincoln and guba, 1985) with both teacher participants to verify coding and to write about teachers in ways that were true to their own interpretations of their teaching. teachers are the experts of their own practice, and member checks enabled the author to determine whether she had perceptively identified and described patterns in their thoughts, feelings, and ideas, as well as to clarify misinterpretations in her understanding of their interactions. yet member checks also influenced her views of teachers and their classrooms. it was impossible to attempt an objective view of teachers, as member checks—and her general strategies of classroom involvement—led her to develop close and ongoing relationships. findings and discussion: dialogic approaches and linguistic belonging in plans, in action, and in reflection table 1.1 summarizes how teachers considered and planned for dialogic instruction, what interactions about children’s language use during dialogic instruction looked like in action, and how children described these interactions both during, shortly after, and in reflective interviews. the findings follow instances of dialogic teaching through three stages–teachers plans, enaction, and reflection, giving readers new insights into not just one part of the dialogic process, but all three stages–how teachers considered such interactions before they happened, exactly what they looked like in action, and how students responded and reflected. following the introduction to the findings, findings for each stage of dialogic interaction are analyzed, including general information and a basic summary of what interactions looked like, quotations from interactions, and analysis. while several numerical items are shared for the purposes of understanding findings–such as how much qualitative evidence was analyzed in each part of the study, these numbers accompany detailed qualitative analysis of statements, comments, and questions from interviews with the teachers, classroom observations and interviews with students. numerical summaries are presented to provide a portrait of the vast quantity of data gathered and to contextualize this data and not for the purposes of quantitative analysis. “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc29 table 1.1 dialogic instruction and linguistic belonging finding type of data total codes ava connie teacher plans: teachers viewed dialogic instruction as related to children’s language use interview answer when a teacher mentioned dialogic instruction or shared reading (prompted) 15 answers; included in 75% of interviews 13 answers; included in 55% of interviews pl-dialogic language one-to-one comments to researcher when a teacher mentioned dialogic instruction or shared reading in interviews (unprompted) 13 comments; included in 69% of interviews 7 comments; included in 57% of interviews pl-dialogic language enaction: teachers demonstrated value for their children’s language use during dialogic instruction interactions when teachers spoke with children in a group of 5 or more in a dialogic way (100% overlap with shared reading) 12 interactions 18 interactions int-public positivelang reflection: children described an increased sense of belonging related to their language use in relation to dialogic instruction number of children speaking nondominant varieties who mentioned dialogic interactions as times when they felt specifically valued based on teachers’ recognition of their language or the ways they used language 15 children; mentioned by multilingual students in relation to 67% of dialogic interactions 16 children; mentioned by multilingual students in relation to 50% of dialogic interactions lb-dialogic i. planning for dialogism the first two rows in table 1.1 contextualize the findings within both teachers' plans for dialogic interactions in their classrooms. 1. dialogism: a valuable yet difficult approach in analyzing interview utterances in which teachers described their plans for dialogic interactions, it is important to note that teachers had received training around dialogism (including leading mock conversations or rehearsals) in one teacher education course. their foregrounding in dialogic methods and approaches included reading research demonstrating the value of considering multiple responses as correct and in emphasizing children’s sensemaking during literacy instruction. for both of these teachers, their prior work with dialogism meant that they had an understanding of the practice developed through rehearsals, and that they believed in the effectiveness of valuing student sensemaking. past research has identified the use of professional development in dialogism as very effective in terms of increasing dialogic interactions in classrooms (teo, 2019; wilkinson et al., 2016), as well as finding that increased use of “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc30 dialogic approaches resulting from professional development is advantageous for children’s ability to defend their thinking and their success in school (cui and teo, 2020; teo, 2019; aerila et al., 2022). in all the interviews with both teachers, when asked to describe, discuss, or consider dialogic instruction directly, the teachers described dialogism as a “unique” or “special” approach, and one that was “worthwhile”, “worth it”, or “good for children”. their descriptions align with research that recognizes the value of dialogic approaches for children in elementary school and older (teo, 2019; lefstein & snell, 2013; reznitskaya et al., 2009). despite having read research around dialogism and connected theory to practice through rehearsals, every single time the two teachers in the study were asked about dialogism, they both talked about difficulties with implementing dialogic approaches, including dialogism in the curriculum, or with their own ability to engage dialogically with their students. indeed, teachers’ struggles with conceptualizing, understanding, planning for, and engaging in dialogic approaches in the classroom are widespread and well-documented in the research literature, and these teachers’ views align with past research (cui & teo, 2020; wilkinsen et al., 2016; sedova, 2021). past studies explore how teachers have little training in dialogic approaches overall and feel uncertain about dialogic approaches and unsure about how to enact them (cui & teo, 2020).similarly, the teachers in this study described feeling “unsupported”–by the school, district, and other teachers in their grade-level clusters–in their goals to engage dialogically with the children in their classrooms. neither teacher considered dialogism to be valued by district administration, officials, or within scripted curricula they were each given. ava, for instance, specifically said that she had to “work against” the administration and the curriculum she was “force-fed” to make room for dialogic instruction and approaches. connie described similar constraints around engaging dialogically: lmp: what do you take dialogic pedagogy to mean? connie: i think of letting the students drive what they think about the reading and the teacher going off of that and facilitating whatever conversations the students want to have. lmp: and how do you feel about dialogic pedagogy? connie: it’s really hard to do within the constraints we have and the curriculum the school provides. connie was interested in including dialogic approaches–she stated during interviews that engaging dialogically with students was “good for their identities”–yet the “constraints” of the curriculum the school provided her with made engaging dialogically difficult. connie couldn’t see dialogic approaches as related to district-prescribed student assessment–she believed that dialogism could not be located within the curriculum she was mandated to implement from her district, but that she must find time for dialogism outside of the school’s norms. it is common in the u.s. context for teachers like connie to work within systems in which nondialogic (teacher-centered or direct instructional) approaches are emphasized and considered most appropriate for multilingual learners. researchers document that frequently teachers, schools, and districts can be influenced by “macro-level” policies that suggest non-dialogic approaches are best for improving literacy rates of multilingual learners when, in fact, such approaches actively work against not only multilingual language development but multilingual children’s sense of belonging (snell & cushing, 2022). aligned with this work, researchers engaged in ethnographies in classrooms similar to this study but focused on dialogism rather than multilingualism have found that teachers feel the need to modify dialogic “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc31 approaches to make space for these practices in their classrooms (sedova, 2021). repeated engaging in dialogic practice is a challenge; the statements made by these two teachers align closely with these findings. for both teachers, dialogic interaction did not feel natural or easy and was wrought with challenges. nevertheless, as described below, both teachers saw dialogism as important to their students’ identities and planned for it in their classrooms. ava found ways to make dialogic instruction work within curricular constraints, including and especially during shared reading time, as described below in “enactment.” connie, too, used dialogic approaches during shared reading opportunities with her students. 2. dialogism and linguistic belonging in teachers’ plans and ideas both teachers saw dialogism as difficult yet important, but how did they view dialogic approaches in relation to children’s language use? both ava and connie identified dialogism as a space to prioritize children’s opinions and ideas, which they also saw as related to prioritizing and celebrating children’s language use; qualitative analysis demonstrates how they saw the concepts of children’s interests, opinions, and ideas and children’s language use as connected. ava described this relationship in a quotation from an interview: lmp: what do you take dialogic pedagogy to mean? ava: not forcing comprehension outcomes that are premeditated in what’s right and what’s wrong and allowing comprehension to mean a lot of things… lmp: do you see dialogic pedagogy in relation to ideas about student language in the classroom? ava: i feel like since student voice is so central to dialogic pedagogy, they go hand in hand…when i think about valuing student language it’s not only valuing the language that they’re speaking in, but just the fact that they have a voice and i want to hear it as much as possible… ava described her understanding of dialogic pedagogy and how she saw it as intertwined with children’s language use (“i feel like since student voice is so central in dialogic pedagogy, they go hand in hand”). she commented that she wanted not only to value the languages her students spoke, but the fact that they had a voice (“it’s not only valuing the language that they’re speaking in, but just the fact that they have a voice”). finally, she identified hearing children’s voices as much as possible as an explicit goal of dialogic instruction. in a second quotation from the same interview, ava further elaborated on the relationship between dialogism and language for her multilingual students: ava: it’s not important to me that students are speaking perfect english, it’s important that they know that’s a construct that somebody made up that they can choose to use or not—that someone might force them to use at some point—but i do see them going hand in hand. it can be a little bit tough; i’m thinking with reading in particular. if we’re reading a text that is written in a form of english or a language that students are not super comfortable with or flexible with, i can see that impeding their language use, like science texts in particular. ava identified that her students speaking dominant or standardized english was not the goal of dialogic instruction (“it’s not important to me that students are speaking perfect english”), and she saw dialogism as a potential opportunity to share this view with her students (“it’s important that they know that that’s [dominant english, or “perfect english” as ava describes it] a construct that somebody made up that they can choose to use or not”). she expressly describes dominant forms of english as “made up.” ava “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc32 does hint at issues of language and power (“that someone might force them to use at some point”), but she ultimately suggests that it should be up to her students to “choose to use” dominant english or not. yet ava also identifies a dilemma inherent within her wishes to help students recognize the role of dominant english and its limitations (“it can be a little bit tough, i’m thinking, with reading in particular if we’re reading a text that is written in a form of english or a language that students are not super comfortable with or flexible with. i can see that impeding their language use like science texts in particular”). concerns about what might be right or wrong dominated ava’s ideas about dialogism, particularly in relation to children’s views about their own language use. perhaps in relation to this, she planned for dialogism during times that were “low stakes”—times during which her students were not being measured or assessed by outside forces such as the district or even the school. the modification of dialogism to take place during specific times aligns with teacher’s historical approaches in making modifications to house dialogic approaches within their classroom practice (cui and teo, 2020; sedova, 2021), as ava did. connie also discussed the relationship between children’s thoughts and their language within dialogic interaction, drawing an explicit link between valuing children’s ideas and valuing their language use. she went on to note the importance of showing children both that they are allowed to share their opinions and that they are allowed to speak in ways that feel most comfortable to them: lmp: do you see the ideas we talked about related to dialogic pedagogy as related to language at all? connie: yeah, because i feel like that sets a certain perspective that the students have on how much their thoughts and the language they are using are valued. if it’s allowed—if they are allowed to jump in and give their opinion in whatever way they would like to—i think that shows them that what they think is important and the way they talk about it is important and that they’re allowed to speak in whatever way they would like to. here, connie is perhaps more explicit than ava in highlighting a relationship between children being allowed to share and to speak “in whatever way they would like to”–the relationship between children’s thoughts and their language. both teachers described dialogic instruction in their plans as an opportunity during which multiple ways of using language could be welcomed and accepted—when they could celebrate the ways their students spoke as students offered their opinions and ideas about a text. ii. dialogism in action the snapshot from table 1.1 contextualizes the findings related to this section, which discusses when and where teachers made space for dialogic interaction, what dialogic interactions looked like in action, and how teachers used this time to validate children’s ways of using language, their ideas, and their contributions. this data offers a window into what was analyzed qualitatively in relation to the broader set of data. finding type of data total codes ava connie enaction: teachers demonstrated value for their children’s language use during dialogic instruction interactions when teachers spoke with children in a group of 5 or more in a dialogic way (100% overlap with shared reading) 12 interactions 18 interactions int-public positivelang “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc33 1. when did teachers enact dialogic approaches?: shared reading in a qualitative analysis of their plans above, teachers described the struggle to find ways to include dialogic approaches within the constraints of teacher-centered, direct-instruction-heavy curricula, aligning with many teachers’ views and experiences that are documented in the research (sedova, 2021; cui & teo, 2020). yet, one specific practice–a time of the day that was required as a mandated curricular segment in both districts, allowed more flexibility for teachers. this was a time that i witnessed, on average, twice per week in each classroom and was called “shared reading.” shared reading is an element of the elementary curriculum that has become increasingly common in classroom schedules and is designated by districts and schools as a time when children and teachers share attention on a particular text (parkes, 2023). in these two teachers’ classrooms, this was both a time to share decoding (e.g., to literally read a text together aloud on the board or in books or to be read to from a text) and a time to share comprehension of a text, including re-reading, critical reading, and close reading of children’s literature. importantly, during shared reading, the goals of “learning to read” (e.g., decoding a text) were lightened for children, focusing on understanding and considering the content of the text. in both classrooms, the teacher read aloud (with or without children reading along) during shared reading, meaning that all children in the classrooms, including those who could not decode the text, had access to discussing and describing the text, as all children in both classrooms had full grade-level receptive english skills. during shared reading, the teacher in both classrooms always had a copy of the book being considered, and children followed along with their own copies of the book, with a copy of the book on the smartboard screen or by listening and/or viewing pictures in the teacher’s copy of the text. shared reading took place in each classroom one to three times per week, depending on the structure of other literacy instruction. there was no pattern as to whether shared reading occurred once, twice, or three times in a given week in either classroom, though instances of shared reading increased over the course of the academic year in both classrooms, specifically during the last month of the academic year, when shared reading occurred during every visit the author made to both classrooms. all present children participated in shared reading at all times. not all children spoke, but children were never told to sit out or asked to leave the room, and shared reading did not occur during times when some children were removed from the room for specific purposes (e.g., speech therapy). all multilingual and monolingual children who were present in school participated in all instances of shared reading. therefore, the ratios of monolingual to multilingual children were identical (or close to identical based on absences) to those of children in the class. participation was fixed with the exception of differences in absence patterns. one key difference distinguished shared reading from other times of the day. much of instruction during the rest of the day–whether math, social studies, literacy, or even creative arts was characterized by i-r-e patterns of participation (zemel & koschmann, 2011) and was primarily teacher-directed direct instruction (maciver & kemper, 2002). during this instruction, teachers initiated (i) interaction with students with close-ended test questions, i.e., questions with a single or discreet set of correct answers; students responded (r), and teachers evaluated (e) this response. two examples follow: connie: so when we subtract, what do we do with this 10? child: we regroup the ten. connie: right, we regroup it. “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc34 ava: so, what would be the correct way to say this sentence? child: we aren’t going to play basketball anymore. ava: correct. gonna is not a word. as in these examples, during the vast majority of instruction that was not shared reading, teachers led instruction with test questions, speaking more than children did and directing ideas toward their own (teachers’) understandings or standardized understandings and definitions. few exceptions occurred to this approach, other than teachers asking students for occasional opinions on non-academic topics (e.g., what color background would you like for your published story?). of course, i-r-e instruction was still defined as interaction since students still spoke, yet it was not dialogic interaction. two more examples illustrate the ire patterns characteristic of all classroom interaction that was not shared reading. importantly, other kinds of literacy instruction (e.g., reader’s workshop, book club) did not have the dialogic qualities of shared reading, as the examples below illustrate: ava: and what should we do during reading group? jason: read our books quietly. ava: correct. connie: how does the character feel? happy or sad? children: sad. connie: yes. you used the book to tell. connie: was it right or wrong to exclude the girl who just joined the school? amanda: that was mean. we shouldn’t do that. connie: that’s right. it’s not kind to exclude someone. shared reading thus differed from all other instruction throughout the day, both instruction in literacy and other subjects, when children were responsible for decoding any text to which they had access. in connie’s classroom, during spelling work, writing work, book club, and “reading,” children read to themselves or aloud to the teacher, with the exception of instructions themselves being read aloud. in ava’s classroom, children read almost exclusively to themselves during these times, including assignment instructions in math, reading, and social studies, as well as any text associated with these learning times. yet, during shared reading, students were not required to decode any text, and teachers focused their time on discussion about the texts that they read to (or with) children. as i analyzed moments students associated with belonging or feeling cared about and moments when they contributed most to classroom discussion, a significant pattern emerged. with the exception of public honoring (e.g., assemblies, certificates), these moments occurred during “shared reading.” i have established what did not occur during shared reading–a focus on decoding text and direct instruction–but what did happen? teachers read aloud to or with students, and they stopped to ask questions. some of these questions were test questions focused on conventional comprehension or attention (e.g., did you hear what i just read? so, who are the characters so far?), but many of the questions were different. they were open-ended, inviting children to respond, to defend their reasoning, and to bring their ideas into dialogue with one another and with the teacher. these questions positioned students as colleagues, as equals in shared meaning-making around a text. in short, these were dialogic moments. six questions from shared reading across six months in each of the two classrooms classroom illustrate the approaches characteristic of shared reading: “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc35 ava: how do you see your skin color? what do you think is going on inside the character’s head? black lives matter. that says a lot. what does it mean to you? this cover has so much going on. i look at it and it makes me think. what does it make you think? we use the word “unhoused” instead of “homeless”. what do you think is different about those two words? i love this part of the book! what do you love about it? connie: what do you see in this picture? what tells you about the character’s feelings? what does it mean to you to be proud? how can you tell that he wants to get those shoes? there’s going to be a big decision in this book. just look at the cover, what do you think the decision could be about? if you made a mural of your homeland, what would be on it? still more exciting, i identified an additional pattern during these dialogic moments: during shared reading teachers offered non-evaluative replies, brought children’s ideas into dialogue with one another, and demonstrated consideration of the content of children’s answers. replies that i only heard during shared reading included the following: ava: hmmm… what do you make of that tell me more i want to see inside your thinking connie: tell me what’s going on in your head wow, i’ve never felt that way i want to hear more about that can you tell me the clues that got you to this idea that seems really special to you/your family in essence, teachers found a space for dialogism during shared reading with their students. the organization of shared reading, exactly what some specific interactions during shared reading looked like, and the ways in which it facilitated both dialogue and linguistic belonging for students are described below. 2. what did dialogic approaches look like in action? in my qualitative observations, during dialogic interactions, teachers asked open-ended questions, inviting children to respond. teachers asked questions that started with “what do you think about…” “what do you see….” or “what can you tell….” “what do you notice?”. they pointed to specific places in the text (e.g., “what do you notice about this phrase?”), but instead of seeking a specific response (“why does the character say this?”), they were interested in hearing how their students made meaning of the texts. “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc36 during shared reading, teachers encouraged students to interact with one another and demonstrated valuing their students’ ways of using language. i counted talk turns during all shared reading interactions and compared them to a random sample of other interactions throughout the rest of the instruction; multilingual children had more talk turns during dialogic full-class sessions than during other times of the day. additionally, both teachers were more accepting of children’s choices around phrasing, word choice, and grammar during dialogic instruction. whereas during other times of the day, teachers stopped to comment on the varietal feature (e.g., we don’t say aint, gonna isn’t a word), or rephrased children’s use of spoken language to match dominant english norms (you should say “i am going to go to the park, not “i’ma go to the park.”), during shared reading, teachers welcomed children’s phrasing and ideas without comment or correction. as they described in their plans, during dialogic interactions in both classrooms, teachers’ interactions with children about children’s language use emphasized that teachers saw children’s ideas, opinions, and ways of expressing themselves as valuable. a dialogic interaction in connie’s class demonstrates her openness to children’s responses and interpretations during shared reading: connie: dr. martin luther king: what kind of person do you think he was? what was he like? was he good? was he bad? was he brave? was he not brave? scared, why?... amanda: respectful. connie: okay, he’s respectful because…. berni: he is respectful because he doesn’t judge other people by their skin color because, well, no one should even be judging people about their skin coloring. it’s not right for them to say that white and like… well in the past it sounds like they’re trying to just say that: white is good and black is like other people. and that’s why it makes me feel bad. connie: why does it make you feel like that? berni: because black skin coloring getting not treated—they should get treated the same as light-skinned people. it doesn’t matter. in this interaction, connie allowed her students to express their ideas in ways that did not align with the conventional answer she was seeking, asking follow-up questions regarding student thinking. when amanda told her that dr. king was “respectful,” despite the fact that connie herself would have been more likely to say “worthy of respect” or “respected,” she asked for clarification and explanation, just as she did for all the answers the children provided, moving past amanda’s specific phrasing. then, she invites berni into the dialogue. rather than evaluating or offering an answer herself, connie calls on berni. this was one of the longest talk-turns that berni had in my entire bank of transcribed data. he shares his reasoning around respecting people regardless of their skin color and offers a moralistic approach, which connie follows up by asking more about. yet while connie allowed and invited multiple perspectives, she did not necessarily bring them into dialogue with one another—even during dialogic interactions, comments batted between connie and her students. examining the qualities of dialogism within my coding scheme, these interaction fit definitions of dialogic instruction, but they did not necessarily possess all qualities of dialogism—connie didn’t ask for probing questions, and while she encouraged children to back up their reasoning, she didn’t provide supports for this reasoning. similarly, ava, in a dialogic interaction with her students about a bibliography of jesse jackson, allowed multiple student interpretations of the text, though, again, the interaction shifted between ava and the children rather than among children: “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc37 ava: eric, what’s your inference? eric: he doesn’t meet many white people. ava: he doesn’t meet many white people… george: i think jesse knows not as much white people. ava: mmhmm. ahmed? ahmed: jesse only knows people the same race as him. ava: and george. george: he never met a white person. ava: oh interesting. can you say more about how you’re drawing that inference? george: he wanted to invite jesse to his home but he didn’t. ava: so, you’re using what came right before these words to make that inference. you are more than welcome to do that. you can use all of the context that you’ve read in your book. anything that you know so far to make an inference about the kind of thing the character said. ava welcomed ways of offering answers and answers themselves that didn’t match the conventional “correct” answers to her questions (“oh interesting …”). she encouraged further student response rather than asking the children to match her interpretation of the text with nonevaluative phrases like “hmmm…” she brought the students into dialogue with one another by calling on george rather than offering her own interpretation or evaluation of what was being said. on one of the last days of school, ava presented a wordless picture book to her fourth graders, the text journey, and led a shared reading session–a dialogic interaction–around the text. an excerpt from the interaction and an analysis of ava’s approach follows: ava: and my other question is why is the book called journey. why is the only word in the book the word, “journey”?... george: the book is called journey because it’s like in the book they would be going to an adventure. ava: it’s like the girl going to? george: an adventure? ava: to an adventure. okay, let’s do randall and then ahmed and then lucas. randall: umm, i think it’s called journey because the little girl makes her own journey like…. ahmed: the book does have words. journey is the word! lucas: you can imagine what journey she’d be on because we can imagine using our imagination what’s gonna happen in the journey. unlike the instances of correction above, ava repeated a student’s prepositional use (“to an adventure”) that did not match dominant english phrasing (on an adventure) in her response. whereas throughout the day she emphasized learning and becoming fluent in dominant uses of english, during shared reading, she embraced her students’ own uses of english, leveraging them to get at students’ ideas. this short conversation includes another example–ava did not comment when lucas said “in the journey” rather than “on the journey”, instead she invited more students to share. notably, her students are excited about the text, exclaiming about the word journey and rushing to share their interpretations. the next section of the findings will focus on students’ reflections during and after shared reading and what these approaches meant to them. the findings in this section on enactment demonstrate that during dialogic interactions of shared reading, unlike during other times of the day, teachers were accepting of children’s linguistic variation, styles, and differences, including those that did not adhere to dominant english norms. some studies have “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc38 found that instruction like this is less commonly offered to multilingual children than to their monolingual peers (langeloo et al., 2019); in these classrooms, because of the shared nature of ‘shared reading’ time, multilingual and monolingual children both had access to instruction that was dialogic in nature. the interactions that occurred during shared reading were influential in children’s views of themselves and their language use, as described below. iii. reflections on dialogic approaches and linguistic belonging shared reading emerged through thematic analysis by re-listening to hours of recorded data as a time when children felt they could share about themselves and their cultural backgrounds. whereas no comments from multilingual or monolingual children (during or after shared reading or in interview-prompted questions) mentioned negative associations with shared reading, many multilingual children specifically offered comments about shared reading, demonstrating the sense that it was safe to be themselves and that ideas and values from their home lives were welcome in the classroom during these times. three examples follow in the “shared reading and children’s voices” section. when considering the relationships between dialogic practices and linguistic belonging for multilingual children, it is apparent that dialogic interactions were not solely responsible for enhancing their linguistic belonging during these times. rather than suggesting a causal relationship, my findings emphasize that during shared reading (a time when teachers used dialogic approaches), multilingual children spoke more frequently than during other times of the day, as demonstrated by comparing interactions during direct instruction and shared reading. multilingual children both identified shared reading as a specific time (in comparison to other times) when they felt they were included and welcomed and more commonly discussed positive associations with shared reading than they did with other interactions. multilingual children in both classrooms described ideas and feelings related to belonging when they discussed these interactions with me more frequently than in relation to other classroom activities. multilingual children cited feelings of belonging in relationship to 67% of dialogic interactions (during or after the interaction, referring directly to the interaction) in ava’s classroom and 50% of dialogic interactions in connie’s classroom, whereas during and following direct instruction, multilingual children only cited feelings of belonging 10% of the time in ava’s classroom and 21% of the time in connie’s classroom. again, rather than offering evidence, these quantitative data provide context for qualitative findings about shared reading and how children reflected on the shared reading experience. multilingual children shared treasured memories from these interactions, as evidenced in interviews sometimes months afterward. in fact, these findings align with contemporary researchers’ findings that dialogic approaches have the potential to enhance students’ sense of belonging (aerila et. al, 2022). details, quotations, and analysis of these findings are in each of the sections below, which all relate to children’s responses and reflections on shared reading. the snapshot from table 1.1 below contextualizes findings in this section: “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc39 finding type of data total codes ava connie reflection: children described an increased sense of belonging related to their language in relationship to dialogic instruction number of children speaking nondominant varieties who mentioned dialogic interactions as times when they felt specifically valued based on teachers’ recognition of their language or the ways they used language 15 children; mentioned by multilingual students in relation to 67% of dialogic interactions 16 children; mentioned by multilingual students in relation to 50% of dialogic interactions lb-dia logic 1. shared reading and belonging in children’s voices based on an analysis of all full-class sessions, children who spoke non-dominant varieties had more talking turns during dialogic full-class sessions than they did during non-dialogic sessions. the simple fact that their voices were more present during these interactions indicates the potential for enhanced belonging because of the role representation plays in belonging (langeloo et al., 2019). in addition to simply hearing their voices more, the lack of correction during dialogic interactions meant that children who spoke non-dominant varieties described feeling more included within the community, respected, and valued both during and after such interactions. they believed their teachers cared about what they thought, that they were proud of them, and were interested in their well-being. both ava’s and connie’s multilingual students mentioned looking forward to shared reading. as ava’s african american student, keyshawna, said, “when we do shared reading, we feel like we are all part of the class because no matter how we talk or how we say it, ava says it’s ok.” keyshawna specifically recognized that multiple varietal use (“how we talk or how we say it”) was accepted during shared reading. amanda, in connie’s class said, “we can say it how we think it. in shared reading, we don’t have to fix it.”. the idea of monolingual students not having to “fix” any part of themselves to be worthy of the shared reading conversation was pervasive during shared reading. this kind of sharing and openness meant increased responsiveness and attention to class material during dialogic instruction. these findings align with research that multilingual children benefit from instruction that is specific to them, that respects their ideas, and that honors their ways of thinking (ferrada, 2019; snell & cushing, 2022; karchava et al., 2018; aerial et al., 2022). berni, in connie’s room, said, “shared reading is like a time when we can talk about the language that we speak at home, like spanish.” aella said, “shared reading is like about us, like about our own home.” shared reading was not just a time when students’ use of language was accepted. ava’s student said, “shared reading tells us about all kinds of people, like unhoused people.” dayvon, an african american student in ava’s room, said, “in shared reading, it's really black lives matter.” during shared reading– children’s lives really did matter. this idea of mattering contributed to the greater sense of freedom, choice, and investment during shared reading as compared to other interactions throughout the school day. this is evidenced below in an interview with connie’s student, jacinda: lmp: do you have a happy memory of room 11 this year? jacinda: my favorite memory was when ms. connie got to read to us. lmp: read to you like directions or read to you like from a book? “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc40 jacinda: yeah. like a book, like shared reading. lmp: why was that special? jacinda: because she got to read to us and we got to listen and then we talked about it. as mentioned above, multilingual children talked about shared reading afterward in casual conversation in both classrooms, citing that the time was a space for having the opportunity to listen, to talk, to be heard, and to be themselves. 2. shared reading and belonging in teacher’s voices when i asked teachers to describe shared reading time, they talked about looking forward to this time, the children’s excitement, and the fact that they felt a greater sense of choice surrounding their curriculum and texts during shared reading. several examples illustrate this finding: lmp: can you talk about shared reading a little? connie: i really like that because it felt very natural to do…it didn’t feel so much like a lesson even though it was a lesson and they were always excited for shared reading like they always wanted to see what book they were reading. i liked hearing what the kids had to say, too. lmp: how did you feel about the books that you chose? connie: some of the books were in the curriculum i was using but some of the books i tried to change it and pick ones that worked and then kind of toward the end …just trying to read as many culturally relevant books as i could because there was no longer a teaching point it was just reading for the sake of learning about other people. connie commented that shared reading “felt natural” to her and her students, that her students were always excited about shared reading time, and that she appreciated hearing their ideas (“i liked hearing what the kids had to say, too”). connie also identified that shared reading allowed the opportunity to select “culturally relevant” books. she tied this to dialogic instruction as a space where children could learn “for the sake of learning about other people.” interestingly, connie identified “reading for the sake of learning about other people” as pedagogically distinct from the idea of a “teaching point,” perhaps alluding to the tension she described between the curricula mandated by her district and the curricular choices she herself might make, as well as those that might be most beneficial to multilingual and multicultural children in her class. ava understood shared reading as a time when children who struggled with dominant english language use and social status could feel they belonged to the class and when their language, contributions, and ideas were most valued. ava: i love it. i loved reading aloud. the only thing i had hesitations about was, “is this too babyish for them?” which was why i chose to read wonder over an extended period of time because i was like they’re gonna get sucked in—everyone loves this book. and they did love it… and i’ve talked about it with you before but really one of the few opportunities where a kid like camilla can contribute. oh yeah, it was an area where i had choice…i love read aloud. and i love also that along the same lines as the choice i didn’t have to follow someone else’s curriculum. don’t get me wrong i’m super thankful for units of study but just being able to do what i wanted and what i liked to talk about and what my kids wanted, what they were into and wanted to talk about. they were so into reading joelito’s big decision. they loved the book. they loved anything that talked about controversial stuff or anything that they saw as relevant. i’m glad that they brought it up. “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc41 like connie, ava described her feeling of choice surrounding curriculum during this time as freeing (“it was an area where i had choice,” “i didn’t have to follow someone else’s curriculum.”). she was interested in her students’ bringing up the importance of shared reading time in relation to their belonging in their interviews with me (“i’m glad that they brought it up”). she specifically described dialogic instruction as a time when she was able to privilege and bring forward the voices of camilla (“really one of the few opportunities where a kid like camilla can contribute”). ava recognized her students’ appreciation for reading aloud (“they loved the book”) and, similar to connie’s suggestion that she had more choice over curricula during shared reading, that she loved being able to “do what i wanted and talk about what my kids wanted”. finally, and again like connie, ava noted that shared reading was a time to work through complex issues related to social justice in her classroom curriculum (“they loved anything that talked about controversial stuff or anything that they saw as relevant”) and cited a text related to language, race, power, as well as to activism, read by her students during shared reading (“the were so into joelito’s big decision”). these findings align with research which finds dialogic approaches to be participative, characterized by collective approaches and to connect to children’s home lives (ferrada, 2019). conclusions, significance, and reflections: dialogic approaches and linguistic belonging the findings above examine dialogic interactions as they are planned by teachers, enacted in classrooms, and reflected upon by multilingual children in two u.s. classrooms. this ethnographic study examines the process of these interactions from start to finish with two groups of teachers and children. the research fills important gaps in the literature: it is both ethnographic and multi-staged; it offers a closeup, detailed view of dialogic interactions with teachers and their multilingual students from start to finish. the study is unique as well in its impact on teachers’ approaches. through repeatedly conversing with the author around dialogic approaches and finding space for dialogism in the fixed curricular confines of their settings, the teachers in this study were able to show respect and honor their multilingual students' ideas, voices, ways of thinking, and means of expressing themselves. dialogic approaches, including those intended to enhance the linguistic belonging of multilingual students, were difficult for both teachers to enact in the confines of the conventional curriculum structure imposed in both classrooms, yet shared reading made these approaches possible. since the author observed not just shared reading but entire school days, she was able to consider in detail the differences between the majority of the curriculum, which emphasized direct instruction, and shared reading. according to the criteria for dialogic interactions, the shared reading process was organized dialogically, with demonstrable respect for students’ ways of using language and their ideas. this environment of shared meaning-making, respect, and honoring of multiple ways of speaking and sharing ideas, including those that were familiar or comfortable for multilingual students, facilitated multilingual children’s linguistic belonging in comparison with the initiation-response-evaluation patterns the author observed elsewhere in the curriculum. whereas at all other times during the day, teachers evaluated their children from a fixed conventional perspective, guiding them toward correct or conventional answers, during dialogic interactions, teachers demonstrated respect for children’s own voices, ideas, and ways of thinking, being, knowing, and expressing themselves. these moments of respect were understandably described by the children as associated with a sense of belonging–an invaluable contribution to research on praxis when considering education in the united states’ multilingual, multicultural context. this perspective takes on international significance when considering multilingual classrooms across the world, in which the language, variety, or dialect children speak is not dominant. the study highlights a significant finding: the association between dialogic approaches used by dominant-language-identifying teachers and the feelings of respect, belonging, honor, and positivity experienced by their multilingual non-dominant-speaking “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc42 students. specifically, the reiteration of this finding across both classrooms throughout an entire academic year of ethnographic research speaks to the incredible potential for practical enactment of dialogic approaches that can be applied worldwide and across contextual and cultural barriers. a notable finding of the study was the alignment between the two classrooms in terms of the patterns around dialogic interaction. at the start of the process, the ways the two teachers talked about their plans aligned. both believed dialogism was connected to language and belonging, and both believed dialogism was valuable to include as part of the curriculum. both teachers wanted to engage dialogically with their students–they sought to value and honor both their students' voices and the ways they voiced their ideas and to allow for their students to interpret texts and to defend those interpretations. because of their shared training, both connie and ava had a sense of what strategies to enact when engaging dialogically. though connie had perhaps more curricular leeway than ava due to her district having fewer scripted timed sessions, she and ava both believed that including dialogic interaction as part of the regular school day was a challenge. when asked about including dialogism, both teachers described challenges around the practicality of finding time for action and engaging in the practice itself. fascinatingly, both teachers also made space for dialogic interaction–and both did so during the shared reading space. shared reading seemed to naturally support students' self-expression without teacher judgment despite the classrooms' different districts, demographics, and ages. when shared reading occurred, both teachers engaged dialogically with students, including placing student ideas in dialogue with one another, honoring student presentation of material, including in students’ own languages and dialects, and avoiding the back-and-forth i-r-e pedagogies that dominated the rest of the day in both classrooms. additionally, the dialogic conversations that occurred in each classroom centered around critical topics that were important to children. in connie’s classroom, the second-graders interacted dialogically during shared reading on the the topics of immigration, poverty, social assistance, colonization, language and language barriers, cultural affinity, and protests. in ava’s classroom, the fourth graders discussed the black lives matter movement, life as an unhoused person, inclusion, racism, immigration, and colonization. though the list of topics differed slightly, in each classroom the topics for shared reading were representative of the children’s affiliations and experiences. dialogic interaction during shared reading was critical shared reading–reading about crucial topics where children had the chance to be experts. during these times, teachers in both classrooms brought ideas about language dominance into conversation–and these were the only times observed by the researcher when such critical topics were broached. perhaps unsurprisingly, but even more significantly, multilingual children in both classrooms described shared reading in similarly positive terms. in ava’s classroom, in which more children spoke spanish, a variety of asian languages, and nondominant varieties of english at home, children reflected that they could “be [them]self ” during shared reading, that they were “accepted”, that it was “okay to say it how i say it”. in connie’s classroom, which had few children with varied dialects of english, but in which the vast majority of children spoke languages other than english at home, children shared about their own linguistic backgrounds and family history during shared reading, and afterward talked about feeling proud of their families and who they were. as ava once commented, “children often see and hear that ‘one of the easiest ways to tell whether or not someone is a “real american” is the language that you hear them speaking.’ ” in many classrooms, “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc43 the ways in which children use multiple languages–and how teachers respond to this language use–has major impacts on their feelings of belongingness–of being “real” students. this qualitative study finds that when teachers recognize all students’ contributions; accept and encourage multiple varieties of english use; and respect and honor children’s answers, these dialogic approaches are described by multilingual children as times when they feel care and love, a sense of belonging, and pride in themselves as members of their classroom and school communities. this work finds the use of dialogic instruction to be significant in forwarding, recognizing and highlighting the narratives of children who speak non-dominant languages and varieties of language. it centers us on the belonging of these children and offers a specific approach that—if the findings of this small study hold on a larger scale—has the opportunity to provide spaces to belong in classroom discourses for multilingual children across the world. limitations and future research despite filling a gap in the research in examining dialogism and linguistic belonging of multilingual children from planning, through enactment, and to reflection for both students and teachers, this study was limited in a number of ways. because it is not possible to ask secondand fourth-grade children about their views on linguistic belonging or dialogic approaches, nor is there a standardized quantitative measure of belonging for elementary schoolers, the study can only find associations between elementary school children’s feelings of belonging related to their language use and the use of dialogic approaches, rather than claiming causal relationships. the study demonstrates that when multilingual children engage in dialogic interactions with their teachers, they reflect on these experiences positively, including being able to articulate that their ways of speaking and using language felt respected, as well as their ideas honored. but the study cannot claim that dialogic approaches result in belonging for multilingual elementary students. as research in belonging is expanded, and continuing ethnographic studies examine translanguaging and languaging pedagogies and perspectives, approaches for ethnographic research with elementary schoolers in linguistic belonging may emerge. future classroom ethnographies, for instance, might examine translanguaging and linguistic belonging for elementary school children, reflecting on associations between the two. similarly, this study was limited in its scope. such an ethnographic work could not occur in thousands of classrooms across the country, and therefore the claims made here about associations between linguistic belonging and dialogic approaches apply only to a narrow scope: two classrooms with first-year teachers using dominant english in united states northern california schools. concurrent research suggests that approaches toward dialogism might have different effects in urban classrooms, or in classrooms in other environments and contexts (e.g. fujii, 2015). indeed, it seems certain that in an environment with differing language ideologies and patterns of dominance, dialogic approaches may have varied effects. future research might examine dialogism and linguistic belonging in with non-dominant-identifying teachers, or within environments in which students’ and teachers’ language identifications match. bounding dialogic interactions in this ethnographic context defied the very nature of these interactions themselves, and rendered quantitative comparisons less useful from the perspective of actionoriented research. since dialogic interactions have been bounded and compared quantitatively in past research (alexander, 2018)), such an approach might prove useful in future research within a different context, and could provide more conclusive causal results which could deeply enhance the ethnographic reflections and associations detailed here. “they go hand in hand”: dialogic pedagogy and linguistic belonging lisel alice murdock-perriera dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.606 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc44 nevertheless, this small study and the dialogic approaches enacted within found profound moments of belonging for multilingual elementary-schoolers, and deep-seated reflection and thoughtful attempts at enactment in their teachers' teaching. teachers planned thoughtfully for dialogic interaction with their students, despite the many barriers they faced; they enacted dialogic approaches–if not as often as they hoped, during a specific time throughout the year. this study answers a gap in the current research, offering portraits of dialogic interactions for multilingual children in three stages–planning, enactment, and reflection. it gives an ethnographic lens through which to view specific moments in which dialogism comes alive for multilingual children with their dominant-language teachers–a common pattern within united states schools–, and examines how these children reflect on and describe such moments in their own words and ideas. and this study examines this data in context: within the perspective of research informed by hours spent in each classroom. through documenting and tracking dialogic instruction, and studying both teacher plans and enactment and children’s reactions during and after, the research finds a close, interwoven relationship between linguistic belonging and dialogic approaches with multilingual children. it holds significance in highlighting the lives of multilingual children: their ideas, thoughts, experiences, and the ways in which they—and we as educators—make sense of the world and find their place within it. references aerila, j-a., kinossalo, m., siipola, m., laaksonen, p., lamminen, a, & 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(2017). toward a more dialogic pedagogy: changing teachers’ beliefs and practices through professional development in language arts classrooms. language and education, 31(1), 65-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2016.1230129 zemel, a., & koschmann, t. (2011). pursuing a question: reinitiating ire sequences as a method of instruction. journal of pragmatics, 43(2), 475-488. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12298 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2019.03.009 https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2016.1230129 https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals microsoft word dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils (layed out).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a58 dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki waseda university, japan abstract this paper argues that a teacher should and can be not only the organizer of a lesson as well as participant in a dialogue who has the equal right with pupils vis-à-vis the truth of the learning material in order to make lessons dialogic. to analyze such a teacher’s way of being in the lesson, the concept of a triadic relationship among pupils, learning material, and a teacher was introduced. the teacher can learn something new in the pupils’ learning material as the pupils can do. the teacher can discover an unknown question that she/he does not know its answer or even its existence in pupils’ wrong or irrelevant thoughts about the learning material. this sort of teacher’s learning makes classroom lessons dialogic as pupils and a teacher exercise the equal rights vis-à-vis the truth of the learning material in the lesson. here, pupils and teachers learn about the learning material from each other. the importance of this sort of teacher’s learning for dialogic lessons has been rarely emphasized in dialogic pedagogy research. these arguments are advanced in this paper based on the analysis of the japanese elementary teachers’ knowledge of practices. this paper focuses mainly on the pedagogical view named saitou pedagogy developed by kihaku saitou and his colleagues, and studies their thoughts and classroom lessons to investigate teacher’s work to make lessons dialogic. to provide a theoretical basis for the analysis, theories of dialogue, developmental psychology and dialogic pedagogy were reviewed to understand how these theories had studied the triadic relationship and were compared with saitou pedagogy. the result demonstrated that bakhtin’s perspective on the dialogic author was useful in analyzing the teacher’s way of being in saitou pedagogy. it was also suggested that saitou pedagogy’s view of the unknown question would give bakhtinian theories of dialogue a hint for new area of study. kiyotaka miyazaki is a professor at the faculty of human sciences, waseda university, japan. his research interest is examining the views japanese teachers’ knowledge of practice and making them encounter with theories of dialogism such as bakhtin, gadamer and other dialogic pedagogies to discover some universal principles of the dialogic education. ��� introduction the concept of a triadic relationship among individuals and their shared topic played an important role in the research tradition of dialogism in which the relations between participants of a dialogue and their shared topic is investigated in various forms (linell, 2009). in more empirically oriented studies, this concept has been emphasized in developmental psychology since the proposal of secondary intersubjectivity by trevarthen (trevarthen & hubley, 1978). in theories of dialogic pedagogy, a triadic relationship, particularly issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a59 among pupils, their learning material, and teachers, has been implicitly presupposed but not explicitly explored as a theme. this paper analyzes some japanese teachers’ thoughts and their classroom lessons to examine how and in what form a triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material, and teachers exists in dialogic lessons and how teacher work in a triadic relationship to make it dialogic. why is a triadic relationship among pupils, pupils’ learning material, and teachers problematized in this paper? the importance of “collaboration” has been rather common in studies on pupils’ learning processes, particularly after the vygotskian school of learning became popular (vygotsky, 1978). however, many researchers, particularly in developmental psychology (as discussed in “developmental psychology” of the next section), focus only on the collaboration among learners. even in dialogic pedagogy, the triadic relationship is often presupposed only implicitly. these research trends appear to indicate that teachers and their work are not appropriately featured in studies on learning processes. the fact that we can barely find any description about teachers in the handbook of learning sciences (sawyer, 2014), or that learning sciences present themselves as learning sciences and not teaching and learning sciences indicates the indifferent attitude toward teachers in studies on learning. furthermore, when researchers focus on teachers and their work, teachers are considered to be only the organizers of the lessons and not participants who learn pupils’ learning material (discussed in “dialogic pedagogy” of the next section). i believe that it is necessary to make explicit the triadic relationship that a teacher forms with pupils and their learning material. in particular, it is essential to focus on how the teacher relates to pupils’ learning material, that is, how the teacher learns pupils’ learning material to understand what occurs in the classroom lessons. this paper analyzes japanese teachers’ knowledge of practice and lessons as i learned the importance of a triadic relationship for dialogic lessons from teachers’ knowledge of practice and lessons. however, this knowledge, based on their practices and reflections about them, remains intuitive and is not yet fully theorized. although their lessons are dialogic, they do not use the term “dialogue” to characterize their own practices. therefore, a comparison of japanese knowledges of practice and studies on dialogism and dialogic pedagogy is necessary to position japanese knowledge of practice in the research traditions of dialogism and dialogic pedagogy as the first step toward theorizing the japanese knowledge of practice. in the japanese knowledge of practice, i focus on saitou pedagogy, developed by a practitioner named kihaku saitou (1911–1981) and his colleagues. the japanese government has imposed strict regulations on its public education systems in that the content and order of presentation of pupils’ learning materials are prescribed as strict national guidelines for educational courses. however, some teachers started developing their own perspectives on classroom lessons, particularly after the world war ii. they formed nongovernmental groups to discuss their lesson practices and develop their perspectives and methods regarding classroom lessons (shibata, 2009). saitou pedagogy was developed by one of many such groups, led by kihaku saitou. kihaku saitou became an elementary school teacher in 1930 and served as the principal of several elementary schools in the 1950s and 1960s. these schools became famous for their highquality classroom lessons in the japanese educational scene. in 1973, he organized a group named kyoujugakukenkyu-no-kai, or the pedagogical research group, after his retirement, which included many teachers and some researchers. his perspective was named saitou pedagogy (kasahara, 1991). today, more than thirty years after he passed away, there are certain teachers who still follow his teachings and worked toward developing saitou pedagogy. the paper comprises three parts. the first part reviews theories of dialogism, developmental psychology, and dialogic pedagogy to examine how triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a60 and teacher, and the relation between pupils’ learning material and the teacher have been treated. the second part examines saitou pedagogy. saitou’s writings are analyzed to examine how saitou pedagogy thinks about the triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material and the teacher and the relation between the learning material, and teacher. next, some of their lessons are analyzed to see how their view is materialized in classroom lessons. the third part compares saitou pedagogy’s view and theories of dialogism and dialogic pedagogy to examine the dialogic nature of saitou pedagogy and what it suggests to develop the theories of dialogic lessons. review of theories on triadic relationships dialogism first, i examine how the triadic relationships have been studied and how they are considered dialogic in the research tradition of dialogism. the concept of triadic relationship has a critical role in the dialogism studied under the influence of mikhail bakhtin, although the term has not been explicitly used in many cases, as observed by ongstad (2004). linell (2009), however, used the term triads explicitly and devoted a section in his book to explain the types of triads. linell began his arguments by introducing rommetveit’s proposal (2003) of a psychology of the second person. according to rommetveit, the monologic philosophy of epistemology leads to dichotomy between subjectivism (psychology of the first person) and objectivism (psychology of the third person). dialogism, as an antidote to monologism, requires the psychology of the second person, “which builds upon the interdependence between ‘i’ and ‘you/thou’” (linell, 2009, p. 89). however, linell added, “dialogue is about more than these two parties” (2009, p. 89), and introduced the concept of triads. linell inclusively named the concept semiotic triads and classified it into three subtypes. only one subtype is relevant to the discussion in this paper. the other subtypes include the situational triad, which refers to the relation among now-here-i (buhler, 1934). linell characterized the triad as coordinates of the communication system (2009, p. 92). this triad may indicate the subject or speaker’s location in the dialogue, but it does not refer to the dialogue’s structure. another triad is the abstract semiotic triad, which refers to the relation among word-concept-referent, such as the relation between word, interpretant, and object in peirce’s semiotics (1998). although this triad describes one aspect of the meaning of speech, it disregards the communicative aspect in which speech has meaning; thus, it is not relevant here. in contrast to these subtypes, pragmatic triad is the relevant subtype, which is the relation among i, you, and it—the relations in which i and you share the topic of the dialogue. in explaining this triad, linell referred to bühler (1934), markova (2003, 2006), du bois (2007), tomasello et al. (2005), and bakhtin. the next section discusses bakhtin to determine how triadic relations are positioned in his perspective of dialogue. bakhtin and the triadic relationship this discussion on bakhtin begins with the following quotation: the word (or in general any sign) is interindividual. everything that is said, expressed, is located outside the “soul” of the speaker and does not belong only to him. the word cannot be assigned to a single speaker. the author (speaker) has his own inalienable right to the word, but the listener also has his rights, and those whose voices are heard in the word before the author comes upon it also have their rights (after all, there are no words that belong to no one). the word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio) (bakhtin, 1986, pp. 121–122). dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a61 as bakhtin declared, the spoken word is not possessed only by the speaker, who has the right to it, but also by others, who also have the right to that word. here, others here include the listener toward whom the word is oriented and people who previously used and gave voice, or meaning, to the word in the culture before the current speaker used it. thus, there is a triadic relationship between the speaker, the spoken word, and others. as the third term of the triadic relationship, although the word is shared by the speaker and others, it has different meanings for both. thus, different meanings meet within the one word. bakhtin said that not two, but three characters participate in a drama, namely, the speaker, the listener, and the others who use the same word; thus, instead of a triadic relationship, it could be named a quad relationship. however, in this paper, i use the term triadic relationship to show that multiple participants encounter each other in the topic, or in the spoken word, in bakhtin’s quotation; thus, naming the structure bakhtin described above as triadic relationship presents no problem. bakhtin also stated that the word is a drama, indicating that the speaker gives variable meaning to the word according to whom it is oriented. furthermore, the meanings of the spoken word given by others in the past influence how the current speaker uses the word. the speaker appropriates how others used the word and generates her/his use of it. dynamic interactions occur between the speaker and the listener, and between the speaker and another speaker, and these interactions determine the meaning of the spoken word. in bakhtin (1981), the triadic relationship was described in a slightly different manner in that it is formed between the word, the object, and the other word (bakhtin, 1981, p. 277). in this description, the object that the word conceptualizes is the third term of the triadic relation in the drama. for bakhtin (1981), the other two triadic terms are the word and the alien word in place of the speaker and others. this structure of triadic relations is basically the same as provided by bakhtin (1986), considering that the speaker and the other speaker are behind the word and the alien word. triadic relationship and dialogue thus, when does the triadic relationship become dialogic for bakhtin? in bakhtin (1984), he presented the concept of hidden polemic. [t]he author’s discourse is directed toward its own referential object, as is any other discourse, but at the same time every statement about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the other's discourse on the same theme, at the other's statement about the same object (bakhtin, 1984, p. 195). in this excerpt, the author directs her/his discourse toward the referential object. the other directs her/his discourse toward the same object. the triadic relationship here is: the author–<the discourse >– object–<the discourse >–the other. these two discourses have different, opposing voices regarding the object; thus, they clash in the object. however, defining dialogic relation as that in which the speaker’s discourse strikes a polemic blow at the other’s discourse is not sufficient. bakhtin did not think that there was no dialogic relation if their opinions were in agreement and no polemic existed between the two parties. indeed, one important feature of the triadic relationship characterizes bakhtin’s dialogic relation. although this feature was already presented in bakhtin’s first quotation (1986, pp. 121–122), the following quotation describes it more clearly. a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of dostoevsky’s novels. what unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a62 consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event (bakhtin, 1984, p. 6; italics original). the dialogue’s notable feature for bakhtin is that the plurality of consciousnesses or participants in the dialogue has equal rights. however, equal rights in what? bakhtin answered, “what monologism is, in the highest sense. a denial of the equal rights of consciousnesses vis-à-vis truth (understood abstractly and systemically)” (bakhtin, 1984, appendix 2, p. 285). all participants have equal rights to what is true. one participant’s monopolization of that right results in a monologic relation. the important word here is event, about which emerson, the editor of bakhtin (1984), made the following comment. sobytie (event) and its adjective sobytiinyi (full of event potential) are crucial terms in bakhtin. at their root lies the russian word for “existence” or “being” (bytie), and —although the etymology here can be disputed— so-bytie can be read both in its ordinary meaning of “event,” and in a more literal rendering as “co-existing, co-being, shared existence or being with another” (emerson, in bakhtin, 1984, p. 6, footnote a). plural consciousnesses experience the event together and are united in doing so. however, plural consciousnesses do not fuse into one; instead, each retains its uniqueness and a right to what is correct about the event. to be dialogic, participants should retain the equal rights about how they understand the event. even when participants have the same view of the event and agree with one another, they are still in the dialogic relation if their agreement results from using each one’s right to know, and not from onesided use of one participant’s right. to briefly summarize bakhtin’s view thus far, the triadic relationship is among a consciousness, an event, and the other consciousness and becomes dialogic when two consciousnesses have the equal rights vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the event. bakhtin’s dialogic author bakhtin’s (1984) remarkable argument is that a novel’s author and heroes can have equal rights to the truth of an event. the author produces the novel; thus, giving equal rights to heroes along with the author who produced them seems improbable. bakhtin holds a contrasting view and distinguishes two types of authors: monologic and polyphonic, or dialogic. the polyphonic author can have equal rights with the heroes to know the events. bakhtin characterized the polyphonic author as follows. [t]he author’s consciousness does not transform others’ consciousnesses (that is, the consciousnesses of the characters) into objects, and does not give them secondhand and finalizing definitions. alongside and in front of itself it senses others’ equally valid consciousnesses, just as infinite and open-ended as itself. it reflects and re-creates not a world of objects, but precisely these other consciousnesses with their worlds, re-creates them in their authentic unfinalizability (which is, after all, their essence) (bakhtin, 1984, p. 68). for bakhtin, dostoevsky is a polyphonic, or dialogic author, and he compared dostoevsky with tolstoy as a monologic author to concretely show how the dialogic author can have equal rights vis-à-vis an event’s truth. as an example of a monologic novel, bakhtin cited tolstoy’s three deaths to illustrate how the monologic author treats the three heroes, namely, a rich noblewoman, a coachman, and a tree, by comparing these to dostoevsky’s imaginary case. as for tolstoy’s three deaths, bakhtin first mentioned the relations between the heroes, saying that each hero does not unite with or know anything about the others. only “the author knows everything about them [three heroes] …” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 70). the author dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a63 and heroes do not share the event. they do not have an equal right to know the event. how would that relation have changed if dostoevsky had written the same material? he would not have retained for himself any essential authorial “surplus” (essential, that is, from the point of view of the desired truth). he would have arranged a face-to-face confrontation between the truth of the noblewoman and the truth of the coachman, and he would have forced them to come into dialogic contact (although not necessarily in direct compositionally expressed dialogues, of course), and he would himself have assumed, in relation to them, a dialogic position with equal rights. the entire work would have been constructed by him as a great dialogue, but one where the author acts as organizer and participant in the dialogue without retaining for himself the final word (bakhtin, 1984, p. 72; emphasis added). a dialogic author presents all the information she/he has to the heroes, thereby abandoning her/his authorial surplus. this information involves information not only about the heroes but also their worlds and worlds the heroes cannot see. by sharing all information, the author loses the status of knowing best about the heroes. thus, the dialogic author cannot possibly anticipate what heroes do or think better than any others, including the heroes themselves. something new can always occur for the author, as for the heroes. bakhtin called this unfinalizability. in summary, the dialogic author exists in relation to the heroes and the world of the novel, in which both the heroes and the author exist. the dialogic author shares with the heroes the world of the novel, providing a different meaning than theirs. the dialogic author acts simultaneously as the organizer and participant of the dialogue. bakhtin described how the dialogic author’s two roles are performed more specifically. regarding the organizer, the dialogic author presents all information to the heroes, as mentioned before. other means such as “questioning, provoking, answering, agreeing, objecting” (bakhtin, 1984, appendix 2, p. 285) are also used to organize the dialogue. in the case of dostoevsky, bakhtin particularly focused on provoking. according to bakhtin, dostoevsky employed the adventure plot “combined with the posing of profound and acute problems…. it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions” (bakhtin, 1984, p.105). posing unexpected problems to heroes is an important part of the author’s work when generating the dialogue. the dialogic author is not a moderator or facilitator just sitting aside from the discussing heroes, assembling their points of view, and “completely denying his own point of view” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 105). regarding the author as a participant, bakhtin emphasized her/his ability to hear voices. he stated that dostoevsky had “an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of his epoch, or, more precisely, for hearing his epoch as a great dialogue, for detecting in it not only individual voices, their dialogic interaction” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 90, italic original). thus, dostoevsky could hear not only dominant voices, but also weak and not yet fully emergent ideas of heroes. developmental psychology in the 1970s, developmental psychology began focusing on the role of social relationships in children’s cognitive development. a study on secondary intersubjectivity by trevarthen and hubley (1978) showed that at approximately nine months of age, infants begin to integrate object awareness and person awareness, which until then had functioned separately, and live in secondary intersubjectivity, or personobject-person awareness. many studies have investigated secondary intersubjectivity’s role in children’s development of, for example, language (moore & dunham, 1995). the research tradition of trevarthen analyzes the triadic relationship among an infant, the world, and a parent, which is comparable to the triadic relationship among pupils, their learning object and a teacher; however, classroom lessons do not appear to have been focused on in this research tradition. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a64 another research tradition started in the same period is by perret-clermont and her colleagues. based on the piagetian research tradition, she argued that cognitive and social processes scaffold each other (perret-clermont, 2015). in perret-clermont (1980), she explicitly referred to the triadic relationship. she argued that knowledge should be seen as “a relationship of interdependence between the knowing subject and other knowing subjects, as well as between these and the object of knowledge” (ibid. p. 23). however, the knowing subjects in this triadic relationship appear to be understood as children in that the relation between two knowing subjects appears to be understood as the relation between children. their typical experimental situation was designed to observe how children from different developmental stages interact in a task on conservation of quantity. she did not refer to the teacher explicitly in these works. the final researcher i mention in this section is tomasello, who analyzed the development of the triadic relationship as the development of shared intentionality at the ontogenetic (tomasello, carpenter, call, behne, & moll, 2005) and on the human history (tomasello, 2014) level. a triadic relationship emerges during the stage of joint intentionality, in which people have perspectivity and can experience the world as their own and from another person’s social perspective; this is the first edge of the wedge between subjective and objective (tomasello, 2014). although tomasello’s research addressed learning and cognition in social relations, he focused on individual intentionality, and “the relations with others” are problematized only as perspectivity. tomasello did not focus on the teacher’s role explicitly either. in summary, the concept of the triadic relationship plays a critical role in these studies of developmental psychology; however, they do not focus explicitly on the triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material and the teacher. dialogic pedagogy to demonstrate the result of analysis in advance, all theories examined in this section assume the triadic relations between pupils, their learning material and the teacher, at least implicitly. the theories also insist that, in some form, the teacher is the learner. notably, there are varied options regarding what these theories assume about a teacher’s learning; thus, this analysis focuses specifically on how these theories characterize the teacher’s learning of the learning topic. researchers focusing on the rules for dialogue some researchers have argued that setting rules for conversation is the most important factor in making lessons dialogic. examples include mercer (mercer, 1995; mercer & littleton, 2007), wegerif (2007), and burbules (1993, 2006). mercer characterized a lesson as an intermental development zone (idz), based on and elaborating vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (1978). in this zone, “a learner can stay attuned to each other’s changing states of knowledge and understanding over the course of an educational activity”; to construct this zone, a teacher and a pupil “must use talk and joint activity to create and negotiate a shared communicative space, the idz” (mercer & littleton, 2007, p.21). mercer distinguished three types of conversation in the classroom lessons: disputational, cumulative, and exploratory. exploratory talk, in which pupils engage with each other critically and constructively, is dialogic. however, pupils do not necessarily learn this means of talking spontaneously. the teacher is responsible for guiding and modeling language use, as well as setting ground rules for the conversation to be dialogic. in mercer’s view, then, dialogic conversation in the classroom lessons follows certain rules, for example, sharing ideas, providing reasons, questioning ideas and so on. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a65 wegerif, in collaboration with mercer, added the concept of reflective dialogue as a dialogic talk, which elaborate exploratory talk “to include the non-verbal dimension and the reflection and creativity that was missing from the original concept” (2007, p. 190). although wegerif focused on interactive computer learning, he emphasized on setting ground rule for making lessons dialogic. how did these researchers determine a triadic relationship? the cue to thinking about this topic is how they characterized the teacher. mercer (2007) argued that the teacher should be the facilitator and colearner, instead of the instructor and transmitter. furthermore, he argued that pupils and a teacher should share the tasks or problems, or the learning topics, as referred to in this paper, to maintain intersubjectivity (mercer, 2007, p. 25). mercer implicitly assumed that a triadic relationship exists among pupils, tasks and problems or, more generally, the learning material and a teacher. mercer did not discuss what and how a teacher learns in tasks or problems. for mercer, the central characteristic of a dialogic lesson is the existence of certain rules of conversation and not how pupils and a teacher understand the learning topics. thus, we cannot expect mercer to discuss the teacher’s learning of the learning topic, although he used the term co-learner to describe the role of a teacher. we also cannot expect him to discuss about the teacher’s learning from pupils, because according to him, pupils are novices and a teacher is an expert. burbules is another researcher who considers the dialogue a conversation that follows certain rules, including rules of participation, commitment, reciprocity, and so on. he argued that both pupils and a teacher can learn from each other (burbules, 1993); however, he did not clarify what and how a teacher learns. burbules merely argued that a questioner can be questioned in turn, and this is a condition “that helps to create and maintain a dialogical relation of mutual respect and trust” (burbules, 1993, p. 89). as burbules did not make the third term clear, i cannot assert that he assumed a triadic relationship among pupils, the learning material and a teacher. community of learners rogoff developed the concept of communities of learners and argued that “learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity” (1994, p. 213). regarding the participants in the community of learners, she said that “both mature members of the community and less mature members are conceived as active; no role has all the responsibility for knowing or directing” (rogoff, 1994, p. 213). in these arguments, she stated that mature members such as teachers and less mature members like pupils share endeavors, thereby demonstrating an understanding of the triadic relationship among a teacher, the learning topic, and pupils. for rogoff, how is the teacher positioned? the teacher is responsible for guiding and supporting children’s changing participation in their shared endeavors (rogoff, turkanis, & bartlet, 2001). the teacher is also considered an active learner. unlike mercer and others, rogoff clearly emphasized that a teacher learns from pupils. in rogoff et al. (2001), a record of their practice of the community of learners, a teacher who participated in the project, said, “in a learning community, a teacher learns a great deal from students about how to chart the direction of the curriculum” (rogoff et al., 2001, p. 133). according to rogoff, a teacher learns how to teach the content material or the teaching method from pupils. some comments are in order on the other researcher, ann brown, who adopts the view of community of learners. in a community of learners, both pupils and a teacher own certain forms of expertise and work collaboratively to discover knowledge (brown & campione, 1994). consequently, she assumed a triadic relationship among pupils, knowledge and a teacher. regarding a teacher’s relation with learning dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a66 material, she pointed out the possibility that a teacher’s ignorance has possible implications on pupils’ learning: consider the case of the teacher who does not know the answer, or one who may share the students’ puzzlement or misconception. in this case, the teacher is first required to recognize this fact (which the teacher might not be able to do), and, after admitting puzzlement or confusion, find ways to remedy it, for example by seeking help (brown & campione, 1994, p. 262). brown appeared to have understood the importance of a teacher’s discovery of certain difficulties in the learning material and the resulting implication on pupils’ learning. notably, the discovered difficulties are not only of pupils but of a teacher her/himself. brown understood the importance of a teacher’s learning of pupils’ learning material and the discovery of her/his ignorance in them for pupils’ learning. similar to the researchers of community of learners such as rogoff and brown, wells’ view (1999, 2000) characterized a teacher as a co-inquirer into the learning topic with the pupils. starting from vygotsky’s (1978) zone of proximal development, wells expanded the idea to include teachers receiving “help and guidance from the questions and suggestions of learners” (wells, 1999, p. 312). compared with other researchers of community of learners, wells focused on teacher more explicitly and described in more detail what a teacher as a co-inquirer learns about the topic and how she/he works in the classroom. wells argued that the teacher has two roles: co-inquirer and organizer of lessons. as a co-inquirer, a teacher explores with pupils the topics she/he has chosen to investigate (wells, 2000, p. 65). a teacher does not necessarily understand everything about the topics, and it is important for her/him to say honestly, “i don’t know. how could we find out?” this response creates “an ethos of collaborative inquiry in the classroom and will make the teacher an excellent model for pupils” (wells, 2000, p. 65). the other role as leader and organizer of the community’s activities has two distinct levels. one is the macro level, in which the teacher is “the chief initiator and is responsible, among other things, for selecting the themes for curricular units and the activities through which they are to be addressed” (wells, 1999, p. 243). more specifically, the teacher presents pupils challenging activities, including thought-provoking questions (wells, 1999, p. 206). the other level is the micro level, in which the teacher responds to pupils’ activities in the classroom, including listening to them. to summarize wells’ view, he assumed a triadic relationship among pupils, the topics, and a teacher explicitly. a teacher is simultaneously the organizer and the coinquirer of lessons. like brown, he suggested that a teacher’s learning of learning of the learning material, in particular the discovery and admittance of her/his ignorance in it, was critical to pupils’ learning. freire’s “cultural–dialogic” pedagogy freire developed his dialogic pedagogy from his interest in the liberation of the oppressed. compared with the researchers discussed thus far, his theory more clearly described a teacher’s possible learning of the learning topics from pupils and equal rights vis-à-vis the truth of the learning topics for both a teacher and pupils. freire understood the importance of a triadic relationship among pupils, the learning topics, and a teacher. he states the following: [a]ny educational practice always implies the existence of (1) a subject or agent (a person who instructs and teaches); (2) the person who learns, but by learning who teaches; and (3) the object to be imparted and taught—the object to be re-cognized and cognized—that is, the content (freire, 1994, p. 93). dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a67 regarding the relationship between pupils’ learning material and a teacher and what a teacher is supposed to learn, he wrote, “here, in teaching, the teacher re-cognizes the object already cognized, already known. in other words, she or he remakes her or his cognizance in the cognizance of the educands” (freire, 1994, p. 68). a teacher as an adult already learns the learning topic and already has some “cognizance” about the topics. however, she/he “remakes” her/his cognizance anew when engaging with pupils. this implies that the teacher’s remade cognizance is possibly influenced by pupils’ cognizance of the learning topics, that is, the teacher learns about the learning topic from pupils. what according to freire could a teacher learn about the topics from pupils? answering this question clearly is difficult. although freire (1994) wrote much about his experience with peasants in brazil, i could not determine a clear illustration of his remaking his cognizance of something. regarding this topic, matusov (2009) argued that, for freire, a teacher’s learning from pupils is accidental. matusov characterized freire’s dialogic pedagogy as “cultural–dialogic.” freire’s version of dialogic pedagogy can be defined as cultural–dialogic because he believed that knowledge emerges dialogically but exists in culture (e.g., artifacts and historically established consensuses) (matusov, 2009, p. 92). according to freire, the phrase “knowledge exists in culture” implies that knowledge does not continue to be created anew in the dialogue but exists as finished in the culture, independent of the participants in the dialogue. this view applies particularly to the scientific concepts, shown as follows: by discussing dialogue every day with students, i am not changing every day my understanding of dialogue. we arrive at the level of some certainty, some scientific certainty of some objects, which we can count on. what dialogue educators know, nevertheless, is that science has historicity (freire & shor, 1987, pp. 101–102). although science itself has historicity and is constantly changing, as a learning topic in education, it has “some certainty” and is considered fixed outside of the classroom. this is what matusov meant when he wrote about freire that knowledge exists in the culture. for freire, knowledge is fixed outside of the classroom, and pupils and a teacher should make that fixed knowledge their learning’s endpoint. therefore, the teacher would not be able to make (or remake) knowledge anew in each lesson by learning from pupils or other sources. in summary, freire’s teacher is one who remakes her/his cognizance she/he once made in learning pupils’ learning material. he supposed that a teacher could not discover something really new in learning with pupils in the classroom. matusov’s authorial learning the central concept of matusov’s (2009, 2011) dialogic pedagogy is authorial learning. people have authorship, in which they can contribute uniquely and creatively to the community of which they are members. authorship develops through authorial learning, which is made possible in dialogic education. in matusov’s view, the teacher’s learning of the learning topic is vital for the teacher to help pupils’ authorial learning. he also argued that the teacher learns about the learning topic from pupils. matusov’s view of the triadic relationship among pupils, pupils’ learning material and the teacher is shown clearly in his concept of the “epistemological non-authority of teacher and students” (2009, p. 86, dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a68 italics original), in which the teacher and pupils are thought to have equal rights vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the learning topic. consequently, both teacher and pupils can surprise each other during dialogic lessons. that is, something unexpected can happen in the dialogic classroom, unexpected not only by pupils, but also by the teacher. thus, the classroom lesson in dialogic education is not a one-way path to the endpoint set by the teacher before the lesson, but a journey “into a curricular land”—a historically emerging discursive space on the subject matter (in a broad sense) (matusov, 2009, p. 86). how does matusov think about the relationship between the teacher and pupils’ learning material? according to matusov, the teacher promotes and supports pupils’ authorship. through dialogic provocation, the teacher engages pupils “in some inquiry through provoking responses that students are asked to justify and test against alternative responses” (matusov, 2011, p. 37) to promote the development of pupils’ responsive authorship and support their self-generated authorship. the teacher’s dialogic provocation, such as “mapping students’ ideas, providing alternatives, promoting the testing of ideas, and so on” (matusov, 2011, p. 39) cannot guarantee success. instead, success depends on whether the teacher can recognize and use the teaching–learning moments emerging during the lesson. this relates strongly to the teacher’s learning of the learning topic. only if the teacher challenges and aims to understand the learning topic, can she/he recognize and use the emerging teaching–learning moment in the interaction with pupils to help pupils learn. matusov wrote: this is possible only when the teacher him or herself is an active author of the culture..., which means that the teacher enthusiastically and seriously works on diverse curricular subjects as an active learner, scholar, and practitioner and “thinks aloud” with his or her students during the lesson (matusov, 2011, p. 39). matusov emphasized the necessity for a teacher to learn pupils’ learning material. it is authentic in that the teacher can discover something new in the material that she/he must have once learned and thought she/he understood, triggered by pupils’ responses. matusov called this phenomenon the collapse of teacher’s knowledge. matusov wrote as follows. this role of the teacher as an epistemological learner is possible because knowledge has a communal nature and collapses when the community does not support it. the teacher's knowledge often collapses in the classroom due to the students' unfamiliarity with and untestability of the knowledge (yet) (matusov, 2011, p. 39). why does unfamiliarity with and untestability of pupils’ knowledge cause the teacher’s knowledge to collapse? after all, once the teacher understands some knowledge, she/he would maintain that understanding even when engaging with pupils unfamiliar with that knowledge. to examine this topic, i draw on matusov’s (2009) case, in which the teacher engaged with pupils who became uncertain whether 2 + 2 could be represented by the summation of a pair of two lines. matusov argued that the teacher “has to suspend his or her epistemological certainty about this unconditional representation of integer numbers with lines until this certainty emerges in the students or it completely collapses in the teacher as well” (matusov, 2009, p. 89). that is, when the teacher encounters pupils’ uncertainty or incomprehensibility of the learning topic, she/he can doubt her/his certainty of knowledge of the learning topic and start thinking that the previous understanding of the learning topic was inadequate. this stimulates the teacher’s new learning, which develops new understanding that pupils’ uncertainty, or even misunderstanding, is possibly correct. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a69 in summary, matusov assumed the triadic relationship in which pupils and a teacher can have equal rights vis-à-vis the truthfulness of pupils’ learning material. a teacher can learn something new for her/himself in pupils’ learning material when pupils’ apparently peculiar responses are encountered. matusov differed from freire because matusov acknowledged that a teacher can discover something really new in the lesson. to sum up the discussion of the triadic relationship thus far, bakhtin’s view of his dialogic author was particularly relevant to the subject of this paper. bakhtin assumed a triadic relationship existed among the author, the world of the novel, and the heroes in the dialogic, or polyphonic novel. dialogic authors and heroes have equal rights vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the world of the novel. dialogic authors have two roles: organizer and participant of the dialogue. although the triadic relationship has been investigated in developmental psychology since the 1970s, i posit that the teacher’s role has not been a specific focus of these studies. regarding the studies of dialogic pedagogy, most researchers assumed the triadic relationship among pupils, pupils’ learning material, and a teacher. although many researchers considered the possibility of the teacher learning from pupils, not all researchers thought that the teacher can learn about something new in pupils’ learning material from pupils. some researchers, such as brown and wells, argued regarding the implication of teacher’s ignorance on pupils’ learning. freire argued that a teacher can have an equal right with pupils vis-à-vis the truthfulness of pupils’ learning material but did not think that the teacher could discover something new. matusov claimed that a teacher could learn something really new in pupils’ learning material when, in encountering with pupils’ apparently peculiar responses, she/he experiences her/his knowledge collapse. thoughts and classroom lessons of saitou pedagogy saitou’s thoughts on the triadic relationship this section analyzes saitou pedagogy’s view of the triadic relationship among pupils, pupils’ learning material, and a teacher, particularly on the relation between pupils’ learning material and the teacher. first, saitou’s writings are analyzed. regarding the triadic relationship, saitou wrote: it should be, in the classroom lesson, that contradiction, opposition, clash and conflict break out between the teaching material, the teacher, and the children, and both the teacher and the children discover and create something new, and move to the new dimension by overcoming these states1 (saitou, 1970a, p. 385.). teaching material is the technical term commonly used in japanese education to describe the pupils’ learning topic. terms such as contradiction and overcoming have a hegelian flavor, although saitou referred to neither hegel nor marx, at least explicitly. saitou’s use of these terms might be from their “circulation in the air” because marxism was highly popular in japan in the 1950s and 1960s. saitou asserted that both pupils and a teacher make their view anew by presenting their views on the teaching material, or the learning topic. in other instances, saitou used the word correspond for this situation. the teacher and the children, the teacher and the teaching material, the child and the child, the children and the teaching material. all these pairs should correspond, and resonate. a climax should come, explode and something new should be born as a consequence. the teacher’s thought and the children’s thought, the child’s thought and the child’s thought. these pairs should resonate so 1 the current author translated all the japanese texts used in this paper into english dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a70 that new views emerge, and the new views return to the teacher and each child, making them bigger and richer (saitou, 1970a, pp. 368–369). in one dictionary, the meaning of correspond is “match or agree” (pearsall & hanks, 2005). for saitou, however, the term’s meaning is completely different. corresponding necessarily produces something new. so, corresponding can mean confronting. resonating and confronting draw strength from each other, producing in each other something different and new (saitou, 1970a, p. 368). as these quotations show, the triadic relationship for saitou is the relation between two relations: the relation between pupils and pupils’ learning material, or how pupils learn and understand the learning material, and the relation between pupils’ learning material and the teacher, or how the teacher learns and understands pupils’ learning material. for saitou, the classroom lesson can be a place where the pupils and the teacher discover something new in the pupils’ learning material. their views on pupils’ learning material sometimes contradict, oppose, and clash and some other new will be produced. it should be noted that contradiction, opposition and clash in the above quotation do not necessarily mean a direct confrontation between pupils’ views and the teacher’s view about pupils’ learning material in the classroom. although such cases can actually occur, the majority are the cases such as when the teacher expects stereotyped views regarding the learning material from pupils; thus, she/he looks for new ideas in the learning material to stimulate pupils to think again their views. or there are cases such as when pupils present, intentionally or not, new ideas that oppose and overthrow the teacher’s old idea regarding the learning material. some of these cases are presented later in this section. teacher who learns pupils’ learning material saitou pedagogy asserts that the teacher can learn the pupils’ learning material authentically and the quality of learning is the important moment to make the lesson dialogic: first of all, a teacher should wholeheartedly encounter and confront the teaching material in all its respects as one person. understanding the material conceptually to make them explainable to others is not enough. the teacher should interact wholeheartedly with the teaching material, analyze it, have questions about it, ask her/himself, discover something, and create something—as one person. through these endeavors, the teacher should accumulate new thinking, new logic, and new development. (saitou, 1964, pp. 89–90) for saitou, notably, the teacher should learn the learning topic not as the one teaching it later, but as one person same as pupils. that is, the teacher’s learning of the learning topic should not be only to learn, for example, what errors pupils tend to make or how to teach the teaching material effectively. it should not be merely to increase knowledge either. teachers should generate questions, make new discoveries, and understand the material anew even for the learning materials for children which are apparently easy for and feel already understood by the teacher as an adult. saitou named such teacher’s learning of pupils’ learning material as kyouzai-kaishaku, or interpreting teaching material. such learning can be characterized by schulman’s (1986) two categories of teachers’ knowledge: subject matter content knowledge, the knowledge of the content of the subject matter, and pedagogical content knowledge, how to teach the subject matter content to the learners. schulman argued that pedagogical content knowledge is unique and important for teachers. by contrast, saitou thought learning subject matter content knowledge was vital for teachers. however, increasing the knowledge of pupils’ dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a71 learning material is not enough for saitou. what the teacher should and can do is discover new questions and something new in pupils’ learning material that is apparently easy for the teacher as an adult. this view of the teacher’s learning is not monopolized by kihaku saitou. other practitioners not under the direct influence of saitou have had similar views. this shows that saitou’s view was not an ideational concept produced from some theories but was based on the classroom practices in japan. although it was saitou who talked about it most explicitly, some practitioners also wrote about it. for example, harutoshi ushiyama, who for 40 years had been a teacher and principal of elementary and secondary schools and who mentored many teachers in nagano prefecture, stated the case as follows: what is critical here [preparing the learning material] though, is that the teacher should be the one who feels the material bodily and has direct experience with and exploration about the material. most important is exploration of the material. what is more important is to record in detail what occurs in the teacher’s (bodily) self when the teacher feels the material—what surprises her or him, what she/he is keenly aware, and what she/he starts thinking (ushiyama, 2013, pp. 151–152). ushiyama emphasized the importance for teachers to feel pupils’ material bodily and have direct experience with the material in their learning. people sometimes tend to believe that they understand a topic but actually only know the topic’s linguistic definition. to understand deeply, they must connect their linguistic understanding with their direct, bodily experiences with the topic. the teacher should do this in her/his learning of pupils’ learning material. this is what ushiyama argued. saitou wrote that understanding the material conceptually to make it explainable to others is insufficient in the previous quotation (saitou, 1964, pp. 89–90). ushiyama’s argument supplements this saitou’s view. during teachers’ learning of subject matter content knowledge, they should feel, directly experience, and explore the material—actions which are also expected to occur in pupils. in this sense, teacher’s learning does not differ from that of pupils. teacher’s learning of pupils’ learning material, or kyouzai-kaishaku, is first carried out by the teacher in the preparation phase of the lesson. although the teacher imagines what and how pupils think of their learning topic in her/his learning, pupils exist in the relationship only indirectly. however, kyouzaikaishaku can be carried out in the middle of the classroom lesson. in these cases, the teacher can learn something new in the learning material from pupils in the interaction with them of the lesson. the classroom lesson is not a practice in which the teacher teaches her/his fixed knowledge or the conceptual knowledge one-sidedly to pupils. it is a practice during which both the teacher and children transform incorrect or narrow and low-quality views they possessed so far about the learning material to new ones and transform their old ways of being to new ones by presenting and examining each other their views on which they stake themselves (saitou, 1975/1995, p. 7). saitou argued that not only pupils but also the teacher can make new their old and wrong understandings in the exchange of each other’s views between pupils and the teacher. notably, as shown before, the exchange of views does not necessarily take the form of direct confrontation between pupils’ views and the teacher’s view in the lesson. more important is the case in which pupils present, intentionally or not, new ideas that oppose and overthrow the teacher’s old ideas on the learning material. when the teacher notices the possibility of new ideas in pupils’ utterances, the teacher can learn something new regarding pupils’ learning material from pupils. in the section “discovering unknown questions in pupils”, i explain how this process occurs. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a72 discovering unknown questions in the preparation of the lesson thus far, i have presented saitou’s thought expressed in his writings. although these thoughts are based on saitou and other teachers’ practices, they show what satiou thought what teachers should do to create the ideal lessons in practice. how will these thoughts be materialized in the real lessons? in the following sections, some of the lessons by teachers of saitou pedagogy are presented and analyzed. based on analysis of saitou’s view and the classroom lessons developed under his influence, miyazaki (2005, 2009, 2014) argued that the important part of teacher’s learning, as the exploration of the learning topic to be learned, is to discover the unknown question, the existence of or the answer to which the teacher does not know before the lesson. of course, learning topics, in elementary schools for example, seem easy for adult teachers; there seems to be no possibility of the teacher encountering something unknown. nevertheless, the teacher should and can discover authentic questions even regarding apparently easy learning topics when she/he confronts those topics wholeheartedly. questions discovered during such learning can also be interesting for pupils and stimulate them to generate additional new questions. a lesson example from social studies one typical example is a social studies lesson exploring “what is a shop?” by katsuhiko sakuma (sakuma,1992; miyazaki, 2014). as a researcher of social studies education, sakuma learned saitou’s view and developed a classroom method he called fieldwork lesson, in which pupils learn about society not from books but from exploring questions in the field. to start this lesson, teachers should conduct fieldwork to discover an unknown question. such questions are the first step of the lesson. an example of this type of lesson is as follows. he has conducted this lesson using this topic in many classes, and the one introduced next was a lesson for a fifth-grade class of 31 pupils conducted in june, 2002 and observed by the author. at first, pupils were shown five photos and asked if each photo was a shop, a grocery store, a barbershop, a launderette, a vending machine and a peddler. in the observed class, 30 answered yes for a grocery, 16 answered yes for a barbershop, five answered yes for a launderette, one answered yes for a vending machine and no one answered yes for a peddler. next, pupils discussed for each picture if it was a shop. what follows is the record showing the discussion about a vending machine: teacher: next. the vending machine. who thinks that the vending machine is a shop? five of you. pupil: it is a shop because you can buy goods by putting coins in it. they have already learned that they had to pay money to buy service so that the barber is a shop when they discussed about the barbershop. pupil: because there is an owner of the vending machine. teacher: who thinks it is a shop? the number of pupils who said yes increased to ten, and the number of pupils saying no reduced to only a few. teacher: why isn’t it a shop? pupil: it doesn’t work when it fails, or after the company’s closing time. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a73 teacher: we cannot use shops sometimes even when there is a shop clerk. pupil: yeah. machines are more robust. pupil: (in the case of) sell out (you cannot use the vending machine). teacher: you can experience something being sold even in a grocery. more so than in the vending machine. the teacher did not conclude the discussion and moved to the next question regarding the peddler. after discussing about all five photos, sakuma listed up to eight features of the shop that appeared in the lesson and checked if each feature was applicable to each item. all eight features were applicable only to a grocery and a barber. next, sakuma told a short history of a shop to the pupils. he did not conclude if these phots except for a grocery and a barber were shop or not. at the end of the lesson, sakuma asked pupils to ask people around them if these phots except for a grocery and a barber were shop or not. this lesson was intended to be a demonstration of a fieldwork lesson for teachers of the school and the allocated time was only 100 minutes; thus, the lesson ended before pupils’ fieldwork started. nevertheless, the pupils must have learned a variety of knowledge in the lesson and one of piece of knowledge must be that a seemingly simple problem, in this case, if a vending machine is a shop, cannot be answered easily and can result in many topics for discussion. one third grader from a class sakuma taught on a different occasion wrote the following comment after the class: although i had thought that it was not a shop if there was no salesclerk, now i am not sure. although i did not think that a launderette was a shop though it was in a house and we paid a money for it, now i am not certain. (sakuma, 1992, pp. 37–38) this comment showed that the third grader had had some understanding and felt that she had known what a shop was before the lesson. the lesson experience had unfinalized her understanding and new questions had been generated. how did sakuma prepare for the lesson? i conducted an interview with sakuma to know his preparation process for the lesson (miyazaki, 2009). sakuma told me that it started with the vending machine because he heard someone ask if a vending machine could be defined as a shop in some occasion. sakuma then asked this question to a variety of people, such as owners of a nearby shop, and a salesperson of vending machines, and their answers differed. he also visited the chamber of commerce and industry of his city and the ministry of economy, trade and industry to obtain the answer but did not receive a clear answer. he also asked a jurist and learned that there was no explicit definition of shop in japanese commercial law. thus, sakuma’s fieldwork showed that the question regarding a vending machine had no definitive answer even academically, and the answer to this question depended on which aspect of a vending machine was the focus. for the lesson, sakuma added a launderette and a peddler as nontypical cases similar to a vending machine, a grocery as a typical shop, and a barber as an in-between case so that pupils could compare these different items to think about what is a shop. the question “what is a shop” appears easy to answer at first. however, this question becomes suddenly difficult to answer when asked if a vending machine is a shop. as sakuma knew from his fieldwork, there was no definitive legal answer. this question is a typical unknown question in the sense that it has no clear answer. this type of question can have different answers depending on the feature people focus on. the characteristics of this type of question make it attractive as a topic for the classroom lessons, dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a74 stimulate pupils’ interest, and bring out a variety of views for pupils to explore. in other words, this type of question could stimulate dialogic interaction among pupils. discovering unknown questions in pupils there is another type of unknown questions that the teacher can determine in pupils’ utterances during lessons. the teacher’s discovery of such questions occurs often when pupils’ answers to the teacher’s previous question seem wrong or irrelevant. in that case, possibly, a pupil has a question different from that of the teacher. the pupil’s answer to the teacher’s question might seem wrong or irrelevant, but the teacher’s expected answer is not an answer to the pupil’s actual question. this type of question is unknown to the teacher in the sense that the teacher did not know its existence before noticing it in pupils’ utterance. yukio tsukamoto, who had worked as an elementary school teacher and is developing his pedagogy under kihaku saitou’s influence, made this observation: the child interprets the teacher’s asked question, chooses one among many possible implied questions as her/his own, and answers it. sometimes, the child choses a question that differs from the teacher’s intended one. in that case, the child’ answer is not likely to match the teacher’s expected answer; the teacher thinks the answer is incorrect. however, if the child’s answer can be traced back to the child’s question which brought the answer, the teacher can become aware of a new view of the learning topic hidden in the child’s incorrect answer (tsukamoto, 2014, p. 25). notably, any question presupposes a horizon of the question (gadamer, 1975). gadamer wrote as follows: to ask a question means to bring into the open [omitted]. the openness of a question is not boundless. it is limited by the horizon of the question. [omitted]it becomes a question only when its fluid indeterminacy is concretized in a specific “this or that.” [omitted]it implies the explicit establishing of presuppositions, in terms of which can be seen what still remains open (gadamer,1975 p. 357). in summary, a horizon of the question is the presuppositions that the questioner takes for granted, defining the question’s meaning. when two people seem to share the same question, their questions actually differ if their horizons for the questions differ. the expected answers are different for these two people even though two questions are apparently the same. when the teacher asks a question, she/he unconsciously presupposes some horizon which, in turn, determines the expected answer. the pupil, however, does not necessarily have the same horizon as the teacher. in that case, the pupil seems to answer the teacher’s question with its horizon but actually answers a different question with the pupil’s horizon. consequently, the pupil’s answer might be wrong or irrelevant to the teacher’s question, but not wrong nor irrelevant to her/his own question. the pupil’s wrong or irrelevant answer can be a hint for the teacher to discover that the pupil has a different question with a different horizon from the teacher’s own question. because the pupil’s question is unexpected and unknown to the teacher, the teacher can develop new understanding of the learning topic when the teacher discovers the pupil’s question. in such cases, the pupil teaches the teacher something new about the learning topic. the teacher’s discovery of the unknown question in the pupil provides the pupil with an opportunity to exercise her/his right equal to the teacher vis-à-vis the truth of the learning topic. the pupil was also likely unaware that her/his question differed from the teacher’s. the teacher’s discovery of the pupil’s question makes it possible for the pupil to become aware of her/his question, to share it with other pupils and the teacher, and to conduct collaborative exploration of the question with dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a75 them. a teacher’s discovery of an unknown question in a pupil’s response can be a notable teaching moment that creates an opportunity for a dialogic lesson. an example lesson for a literature class 1: noting a new question in pupils’ wrong answers the example that follows is tsukamoto’s example in which the teacher discovers an unknown question in pupils’ wrong answers. unfortunately, the lesson did not unfold further from the question due to time limits. nevertheless, this example, a lesson observed by the author on december 12, 2008, illustrates that new questions can be discovered in wrong answers. in a sixth-grade class, the learning topic was a pre-world war ii poem titled “haru” (“spring”), written by japanese poet fuyue anzai (1898–1965). “haru” [“spring”] tefutefu ga ippiki dattan kaikyou wo watatte itta. [a butterfly has gone alone over the dattan strait] the poem is difficult because the word tefutefu(butterfly), written with four hiragana characters, or the japanese phonogramic characters te-fu-te-fu, should be pronounced cho-u-cho-u. today, however, younger people cannot pronounce and understand te-fu-te-fu as cho-u-cho-u because notational rules have changed; thus, it should be written with four hiragana characters cho-u-cho-u. at the beginning of the lesson, the teacher asked, teacher: it is ippiki. what do you think it is? ippiki means ichi-hiki or one-hiki, in which hiki is a counter used for many types of animals and bugs and, therefore, for a butterfly. in japanese, different counters are used for different things, like wa for birds. thus, tsukamoto focused on the counter when questioning the meaning of te-fu-te-fu. pupils’ answers were divided into three types. nine pupils correctly answered “butterfly,” eight answered “fish,” and seven answered “bird.” when tsukamoto asked why, the pupils who answered “butterfly” provided the following reasons. pupil: tefu is repeated twice in tefu-tefu like cho-u is in cho-u-cho-u. pupil: the title is “spring,” when butterflies start flying. pupil: it is a butterfly because it is ippiki. if it is a bird, it must be ichi-wa. tsukamoto asked again what tefu-tefu meant, and “a butterfly” became the majority of the 19 responses, compared with three for “bird” and nine for “fish.” next, tsukamoto asked for reasons why the pupils chose “fish.” pupil: because it has gone over the strait that a bird cannot go over. tsukamoto: oh, it is a good point. because it has gone over the strait. what is a strait? pupil: a border between nations. tsukamoto: that is a national border. pupil: a border between something? tsukamoto: so, the sound of the word makes you think that it is some type of border. a strait is a sea between two places, between an island and a continent or between an island and an island. for example, the tsugaru strait is between honshu island and hokkaido island. mamiya strait is between sakhalin island and the continent. as you are thinking about tefutefu, you are also thinking about the meaning of spring and strait as relating to tefutefu. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a76 next, tsukamoto asked the same question a third time and the result was surprising. the number of pupils who answered “butterfly” decreased to six, and those who answered “fish” became a majority of more than 20. the teacher later told me who observed this lesson, that he did not expect such answers and wondered what he should have done next. having the pupils discuss this topic was one possibility. instead, he provided the children with the correct answer because it was still early in the class and many topics remained in the poem that the class had to discuss. thus, he told the class, “this is not a fish but a butterfly.” but he did not stop there. he continued as follows: tsukamoto: the way you feel is great! bird, okay. fish, okay. but it cannot be a butterfly. although “bird” was simply wrong, tsukamoto not only told pupils the correct answer, but also evaluated their answers highly. why? when tsukamoto asked pupils what tefutefu was, he meant, “what does the written ‘te-fu-te-fu’ mean?” “fish” was clearly the wrong answer to this question. however, for pupils who answered “fish,” tefutefu was something that has gone over a strait that a bird cannot go over, as one pupil had answered. in other words, the question “what is tefutefu?” meant, for the pupils, “what is the tefutefu that has gone over such challenging strait?” tsukamoto and the pupils who answered “fish” apparently shared the same question. however, they had different horizons; thus, their questions were different. tsukamoto’s horizon was that pupils must have been interested in how to pronounce the word ‘te-fu-te-fu. ’ he also presupposed that pupils would develop the imagination of the poem’s world after they understood the word’s correct meaning. with this horizon, the question “what tefutefu was” meant “what does the written ‘te-fu-te-fu’ mean?” for tsukamoto and the correct answer was “a butterfly.” pupils, at least some of them, had a different horizon. their horizon was that some animal named ‘tefutefu’ had crossed over the harsh environment of the dattan strait. different from tsukamoto’s expectation, pupils had already imagined the poem’s world. with this horizon, the question “what tefutefu was” meant “what is the tefutefu that has gone over such harsh strait?” for pupils, and the correct answer was “a fish.” although apparently the same as tsukamoto’s original question, it had a different horizon compared with the question from tsukamoto. such questions discovered in pupils’ seemingly wrong or irrelevant answers can be the starting point for further exploring the learning topic (miyazaki, 2014). as previously mentioned, the discovered question was not discussed during this lesson due to a time constraint. thus, whether the discovered question was important to pupils remained undetermined. nevertheless, this interaction illustrates the importance of teachers’ understanding pupil’s answers not just as wrong or irrelevant, but as novel questions with different horizons. treating an answer simply as wrong or irrelevant exercises the teacher’s exclusive right vis-à-vis the truth of the learning topic. trying to discover some new question in pupil’s wrong or irrelevant answer is to learn something new about the learning material from the pupil. in doing so, the teacher recognizes the pupil’s equal right vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the learning topic. in this sense, this episode is dialogic an example lesson for a literature class 2: a pupil and a teacher learn from each other the next example is a sixth-grade literature class, in which a teacher named megumi arakida requested pupils to explicitly produce questions about the material. the teacher previously worked in an elementary school whose principal was tsukamoto, from whom she had learned a lot. the lesson was conducted in november 2013 and was recorded by the teacher (arakida, 2013). dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a77 in a question produced by one pupil, the teacher found out a new, possible question and presented it to the pupil. for the pupil, the question he originally produced seemed to be more meaningful; thus, he did not accept the teacher’s proposal and pursued his question. for the teacher, the question she found out in the pupil was appeared to be new and not known before; thus, the pupil’s question provided an opportunity for her to learn the learning material authentically. the material was a fantasy writing called a fox’s window, by naoko awa. a hunter chased a little, white fox, wandered into a beautiful bellflower field, and met the little fox who turned to an employee of a dye-house. the little fox dyed, at first, his own fingers, with which he formed a window. the hunter looked in the window and saw the mother fox, which had been shot. he wanted to have a window himself and asked the little fox to dye his fingers. looking in at the window made with his fingers, he saw a girl he once loved. he felt happy and gave the little fox his gun as a reward. on the way home, he formed the window again and looked in; he saw the house and the garden he loved and once lived in, heard his own and the dead sister’s voices, but he did not see his mother’s figure. one boy, masa, produced a question in a group discussion and wrote his question on his notebook: why did the girl appear in the window first. masa wrote the answer to his own question: because both the girl and his family are valuable to him. for masa, to ask why the girl appeared first was actually to ask whether the girl was more valuable than his family, to which his answer was that not the girl, not the family, but the both were valuable. when the teacher heard masa asking his question to the group, she said to masa at once, “oh, you can ask such a question that the hunter wanted to see which one.” she felt that there was something new in masa’s question for her. she was so excited thinking about how she would answer masa’s question as a learner. after the discussion was over, the teacher commented further on the notebook to masa as follows. teacher: it is great to focus on which one appeared first, the girl or the family. yes, both were valuable, but i think it significant that the family appeared in the window next to the girl, because the girl could have appeared repeatedly. here, the teacher discovered the possibility of a somewhat different question from masa’s original question and proposed it to him. for masa, the question focused on which one, the girl or the family, was valuable. masa’s horizon was that two figures, the girl and the family, appeared in the window and the order of appearance was not important. the teacher, on the other hand, focused on the girl not appearing repeatedly. the teacher’s horizon was that the order of appearance had notable implication. for the teacher, this implication suggested that although both were valuable and incomparable, they must still have had some qualitatively different values. the teacher had never thought of this idea before masa’s questioning; thus, she learned from him. masa wrote his response in a notebook. masa: i cannot choose which one the hunter wants to meet. it is the ultimate choice! although he did not change his view that both were valuable, he developed his own view from that both were valuable; thus, he could not choose one. in this sense, he learned something in the exchange with the teacher. in this case, the teacher discovered a new possible question different from the pupil’s original question in the pupil’s utterance. the teacher did not notice the question and the horizon behind it before dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a78 the pupil proposed his thought. the teacher learned a new view regarding the learning material from the pupil. on the other hand, the pupil was proposed a new possibility for his view, but did not accept that proposal, and chose his original question. nevertheless, the pupil developed his view in his own way. there was opposition between the teacher’s proposed question based on her inference and the pupil’s original question. the opposition was resolved but not in a manner such that one party won and the other lost. the teacher did not impose her thoughts on the pupil. the pupil, by contrast, did not merely reject but developed his own view. this case showed that first, even if the teacher’s inference regarding the pupil’s possible answer is incorrect, the pupil’s feedback can reflect the incorrectness, and second, that the teacher can learn something new regarding the learning material from the pupil by thinking about the pupil’s possible question, and the pupil can learn something new from the teacher to develop her/his original idea if not accepted according to the teacher’s view. both sides learned from each other in the exchange. in this sense, both sides exercise their rights vis-à-vis the truthfulness of the learning material. i summarize saitou’s pedagogical view as follows. the teacher is one component of the triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and the teacher. to make lessons dialogic, the teacher should learn the learning topic wholeheartedly as one person, even when the learning material appears easy for the teacher because the material is for young children. for saitou, the purpose of teacher’s learning of the learning material is not merely to accumulate new knowledge but rather discover something new in the material that she/he thinks she/he already understand. one product of such learning is the discovery of the unknown questions, to which she/he does not know the answer, or even of the question’s existence prior to the lesson. the unknown question can be notable to the pupils, stimulating their learning and helping them discover their new questions about the learning topic. the teacher can learn new questions from pupils by finding out them in pupils’ seemingly wrong, or irrelevant responses. the teacher can then share these questions and explore them collaboratively with pupils. comparing saitou pedagogy and theories of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy bakhtin and saitou pedagogy in this final section, i compare saitou pedagogy and theories of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy to elucidate saitou pedagogy’s characteristics. first, i discuss bakhtin’s view of dialogue. bakhtin’s view of the dialogic author is helpful to analyze the dialogic characteristic of saitou pedagogy. the dialogic author does not control and finalize heroes but unfinalizes them in the triadic relationship among the author, the world of the novel and heroes. likewise, the teacher in saitou pedagogy does not merely teach her/his thoughts to pupils one-sidedly but learns something new and discovers unknown questions from pupils in the lesson. the teacher is comparable to bakhtin’s dialogic author. for bakhtin, the triadic relationship becomes dialogic when the participants have equal rights visà-vis the truthfulness of the topic. a teacher of saitou pedagogy exercises her/his equal rights with pupils vis-à-vis the truthfulness of learning material while the teacher learns pupils’ learning material authentically to find out something new and unknown questions as pupils do, and the teacher not only teaches pupils about the learning material but also learns about the learning material from pupils. further, bakhtin asserted that the dialogic author has two roles: the organizer of the dialogue and a participant of the dialogue. teacher of saitou pedagogy also plays two roles. as the organizer, she/he dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a79 presents to pupils the unknown questions she/he discovered in the learning of the learning material to stimulate pupils to develop dialogic lessons. the teacher’s presentation of the unknown question is comparable to the dialogic author’s presentation of the adventure plot to the heroes, which bakhtin pointed out as the device for dostoevsky to develop the dialogic novels. as the participant, the teacher listens to pupils carefully to discover new, unknown questions in pupils. saitou pedagogy offers a new suggestion to develop bakhtin’s view of the dialogic author because it focuses on questioning, which bakhtin did not discuss much. although bakhtin rarely referred to the issue of questioning, he did not ignore the topic completely. in his later writing, he wrote the following: question and answer presuppose mutual outsidedness. if an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue and enters systemic cognition, which is essentially impersonal (bakhtin, 1986, p.168). thus, i assert that it seems possible that the mutual outsidedness of question and answer bakhtin wrote means the difference in the horizons of a questioner and an answerer (gadamer, 1975). as aforementioned in “an example lesson for a literature class 1,” pupils seemed to answer to the teacher’s question but actually answered their questions, which had the apparently the same form but different horizons from the teacher’s. in these cases, a new question is produced outside of the original question when the answerer answers the original one. bakhtin might suppose that there could be a new question in an answer to the old question, which is the same as in saitou pedagogy. this topic is worthwhile for further studies of bakhtin. theories of dialogic pedagogy and saitou pedagogy brown and wells: lack of concern for the teacher’s learning process as the theories of triadic relationship in developmental psychology reviewed here did not treat the teacher as one term of their triads, they are not mentioned hereafter, and only the theories of dialogic pedagogy are discussed. the most important argument of saitou pedagogy is that the teacher should and can learn pupils’ learning material authentically to produce new understandings and new questions regarding it. the theories of dialogic pedagogy i have already reviewed can be classified into two types based on whether they focused on the teacher’s authentic learning of pupils’ learning material. researchers focusing on the rules for dialogue such as mercer and, among researchers of community of learners, rogoff, did not focus on the teacher’s authentic learning of pupils’ learning material. hereafter, researchers focusing on the teacher’s authentic learning of pupils’ learning material are compared. among the researchers of the first type, some have not provided satisfactory descriptions of how the teacher’s authentic learning develops. brown and her colleague mentioned teacher’s ignorance, an important concern regarding teacher’s authentic learning. they argued as follows: even teachers are free to reveal their ignorance of certain topics and to model methods used to overcome that ignorance … (brown & campione, 1994, p. 261). however, they pointed out that the teacher’s ignorance is only overcome by consulting outside sources, and did not mention the possibility that the teacher becomes aware of her/his ignorance from pupils’ responses and overcomes the ignorance by learning the new, possible questions from the pupils’ responses. wells’ arguments have many similarities to the views of the japanese teachers. he argued that the teacher has two roles: organizer and co-inquirer. he stated the importance of the teacher’s questions to organize the lesson. his thought-provoking question is apparently similar to the unknown question which i observed in japanese practices. however, wells did not explain how and in what sense his thoughtprovoking question actually provokes thought, much less how the teacher discovers such a question. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a80 freire on the possibility of discovering something really new in the lesson among the aforementioned researchers, freire and matusov are examined in more detail in this and the next section. freire argued that teachers can learn something from pupils’ learning material from the pupils. however, he characterized this learning as the recognition of the object the teacher already cognized and did not suppose that the teacher can learn new things in the lesson. scientific knowledge is in the culture with some certainty; thus, both pupils and the teacher cannot create something new about science in the classroom lesson. for saitou pedagogy, however, pupils and the teacher can discover something new and significant even in science materials and, for the teacher, in the lesson preparation. in the lesson case of “what is a shop?” introduced before, for example, the teacher’s fieldwork in the lesson preparation showed that there was no academic answer to this question. as for pupils, they may have discovered something significant in the science lesson, but the teacher could not understand the implication of pupils’ thoughts at first. one such instance occurred in kazuyasu azegami’s sixth-grade math classroom. azegami, now a professor of education at shinshu university, was an elementary school teacher and had learned a lot from harutoshi ushiyama, as aforementioned. the class was held in may, 20012. the target problem was the division of a fraction by another fraction. 3 5 ÷ 2 3 although the pupils knew that the answer could be obtained by multiplying the divided fraction by the inverse of the dividing fraction, they did not know why and began a discussion. at that time, aki, a pupil, presented the following solution: 3 5 ÷ 2 3 = 3 × 6 5 × 6 ÷ 2 3 = 18 ÷ 2 30 ÷ 3 = 9 10 in the equation, 6 is the least common multiple of 2 and 3, the numerator and denominator of the dividing fraction. although the answer is correct, many pupils could not accept it because the method of solution was new and uncommon to them. next, aki developed the equation to show that he could demonstrate that the answer to the division by a fraction could be calculated by multiplying the divided fraction by the inverse of the dividing fraction. 3 × 6 ÷ 2 5 × 6 ÷ 3 = 3 × 3 5 × 2 after seeing aki’s demonstration and examining his solution for a different problem, by the end of class, many pupils approved of his thinking but thought his solution was too cumbersome. notably, the teacher was surprised at first and could not understand aki’s solution. at the same time, the teacher believed there must be some validity to aki’s solution and did not deny aki’s idea. instead, the teacher enjoyed aki’s idea and attempted to understand it. the teacher also showed the pupils the following equation to help them to understand aki’s thinking. 3 4 ÷ 2 5 = 3 × □ 4 × □ ÷ 2 5 2 k. azegami, personal communication, november 29, 2016 dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a81 still, the teacher felt there was something in aki’s idea beyond the teacher’s understanding. later, a mathematician found out about aki’s method and evaluated it highly by considering it notable (ueno, 2001). this instance is not exceptional. hosoya, one of the developers of the science education method named kyokuchi houshiki or the polar method, argued that not always but sometimes, scientists have difficulty answering questions posed by pupils (hosoya, 2001). therefore, freire’s view of sharply distinguishing scientific practice by scientists from classroom learning seems off the mark. classroom lessons are an arena in which authentic new questions and knowledge, notable even to professionals, can be created. matusov: necessity to focus on questioning matusov’ s view is similar to saitou pedagogy because he thought that the teacher could obtain a new understanding of the learning material when encountering pupils’ seemingly wrong thoughts. two views focus on the different aspects to explain this phenomenon. for matusov, the teacher became uncertain about 2+ 2 = 4 and started to examine a new possibility because the teacher was not supported by the pupils. the phenomenon is described as a collapse of communal knowledge. when new understanding emerges, it comes as “collective, communal knowledge of the classroom community” (matusov, 2009, p.90). matusov emphasized the communal nature of the phenomenon. this description is too coarse for saitou pedagogy to understand the phenomenon. as aforementioned, saitou pedagogy understands this phenomenon as the encounter between the pupils and the teacher who, although apparently shared the same question, has different questions with different horizons. it focuses on what occurs in each participant, namely, the pupil and the teacher in the encounter. for saitou pedagogy, the teacher experiences not a collapse of communal knowledge but the awareness of new, unexpected questions in pupils when she/he encounters with pupils’ wrong or irrelevant thoughts. the teacher also becomes aware of the horizon of her/his original question. pupils, by contrast, accept the teacher’s proposal and become aware of their implicit questions, or they do not accept the teacher’s proposal, as shown in “an example lesson for a literature class 2.” even in these cases, the pupils make explicit their original questions, which are different from the teacher’s proposal. in both cases, pupils can develop their questions further while collaborating with the teacher. in summary, saitou pedagogy focuses on how each individual, each pupil and the teacher, with each unique question with each unique horizon, develops each one’s question in their encounter, and this view contrasts with matusov’s view, which emphasizes the communal nature of knowledge. when encountering matusov’s case, the teachers who learned saitou pedagogy would think and behave in the following manner: the pupil becomes uncertain about 2 + 2 = 4 not because he did not have the correct knowledge. he must have some experience in which 2 plus 2 is not equal to 4. he must have thought about the question of 2 + 2 with that experience as his horizon, which differs from the teacher’s horizon. the teacher explores the pupil’s horizon, and discovers, for example, that the pupil might have experienced the case described by matusov, in which two friends and two other friends gather. then, the teacher understands that the pupil’s meaning of the question 2 + 2 is different from his own with the horizon that the equation should represent a purely arithmetic relation abstracted from real-world experience. thus, the teacher feeds back her/his understanding of the pupil’s question to the pupil and can discuss with the pupil topics such as what the difference between their views is or if there are other answers and reasons for these answers other than theirs. in summary, the teacher who learned saitou pedagogy strives to discover questions they have not previously known in pupil’s apparently wrong or irrelevant thoughts on the learning topic and share them dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a82 with pupils. sharing the new question initiates a new exploration of the learning topic by the pupils and the teacher. to be able to do so, the teacher should examine the learning topic deeply before and during the lessons. in matusov’s case, the teacher engaged in that process when he examined “a possibility that when two objects added to other two objects, they do not always (i.e., unconditionally) produce four objects” (matusov, 2009, p. 89). and the teacher discovered an unknown question: what is the sum of two objects and another two objects when these objects interact with each other? matusov’s view of the teacher as an epistemological learner is outstanding among theories of dialogic pedagogy because it clarifies that the teacher can learn from pupils’ wrong or irrelevant thoughts. however, matusov’s analysis of the teacher’s learning process remains an abstract argument in that knowledge is supported by the community. he does not understand that teacher’s learning is a process of becoming aware of what questions pupils and the teacher have about the learning topic. summary i examined how and in what form the triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material, and a teacher exists in dialogic lessons and how the teacher works in the triadic relationship to make lessons dialogic in this paper. the main target was the japanese pedagogical thought called saitou pedagogy and the classroom lessons produced in its tradition. to examine saitou pedagogy, theories of dialogue, developmental psychology, and dialogic pedagogy were reviewed regarding how these theories understand the triadic relationship. bakhtin’s view of the dialogic author was particularly useful to show the dialogic nature of the triadic relationship and the teacher’s role in saitou pedagogy. the dialogic author does not control and finalize heroes but unfinalizes them in the triadic relationship among the author, the world of the novel, and heroes. likewise, the teacher from saitou pedagogy does not merely teach her/his view to pupils one-sidedly. in the triadic relationship among pupils, their learning material, and a teacher, the teacher learns pupils’ learning material authentically as pupils do to discover something new and unknown questions. the teacher also learns the possibilities of new questions regarding pupils’ learning material from pupils. teachers of saitou pedagogy exercise their equal right with pupils vis-à-vis the truthfulness of learning material. in this sense, saitou pedagogy is dialogic. compared with the theories of the dialogic pedagogy, the author argued that saitou pedagogy is unique in its discovery of the teacher’s possibility to learn new questions in pupils’ learning material from pupils. saitou pedagogy’s focus on the teacher’s questioning can open new fields of research in the dialogic pedagogy. i focused on the relation between how pupils learn their learning material and how the teacher learns pupils’ learning material. in other words, i focused on the epistemological aspect of the classroom lesson and argued that the lesson becomes dialogic when the teacher does not teach pupils the learning material one-sidedly, but the teacher learns something new and questions she/he did not know about pupils’ learning material from pupils. on the other hand, we can focus not on the epistemological plane of the lesson but on the power relations in and surrounding the classroom lesson. regarding the power to control the event of the lesson, pupils and the teacher do not have equal power in defining the classroom situation (apple, 1979) because the teacher “holds most power” (apple, 1979, p. 49). teachers cannot execute their power freely, however. instead, they are under the strong control of administrators of educational institutions. as the curriculum contents are controlled strictly by, in japan, the central government, such power relations in the educational settings have some epistemological implications. dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a83 what does saitou pedagogy think of this topic? kihaku saitou considered the relation between education and politics. saitou’s view was that although teachers were helpless against political power, they could create something politics could not suppress. he wrote: both art and education might be helpless against the brutal force of politics. still, they can create something which the politics cannot suppress. that is why i have kept working as a teacher (saitou, 1970b, p.127). how would saitou pedagogy develop without the constraint of the strict government control? saitou pedagogy is not an application of any existing theory but a historical product of many practitioners’ struggles for good lessons in the socio-historical situations given to the practitioners. therefore, i posit that asking how it might develop in different socio-historical situations does not make much sense to ask. i cannot predict how the practitioners would respond in the different socio-historical situations and what kind of new characteristic would emerge as a result. however, asking such a question provides me with an opportunity to again consider the important characteristics of saitou pedagogy, even though the answer itself does not make much sense. thus, i present a brief discussion of this question. the strict governmental control on education in japan takes the form of the national guideline for course of study, which strictly determines which learning material is taught, in which grade, in what order. this strict control has been developing the mindset of teachers that the correct answers regarding the learning material are provided in a top-down manner. i found a notable example of this mindset in the faqs of the website of the national institute of information and communications technology (1989). in this episode which occurred some 45 years ago, one elementary school student had a question if noon was 12 am or 0 pm. it would have provided a notable opportunity for the class to explore the topic, but the event did not develop that manner. the teacher, who did not know the answer, asked the principal, who did not know the answer either. thus, the principal asked the town’s board of education, which did not know the answer. the town’s board asked the prefecture’s board of education. the prefecture’s board did not know the answer, so asked the ministry of education, science and technology (ministry of education in those days). however, the ministry did not know the answer and, thus, asked the national organization of clock companies, which collaborated with the horological institute to conduct an investigation and decided, temporarily, that 0 pm was better for the digital clocks than 12 am. saitou pedagogy has been struggling with this mindset of the teachers that supports, and is supported by, the strict guideline of the curriculum. in the struggle, it discovered that pupils can have their own questions, and the teacher can have her/his new question and discover pupils’ unique questions in any learning material, even if the material is received from the top down. these questions are new and unique in the sense that they emerge in the lesson and based on the pupils’ and the teacher’s unique understanding of the material, and not necessarily the same as the question set from the curriculum builders, which defines one “correct” answer. pupils and the teacher can have a deep and unique learning experience by exploring their unique questions during the lesson. in other words, saitou pedagogy’s criticism of the national curriculum guideline can apply to any educational system, even a system in which the curriculum is created by pupils and teachers when the lesson does not develop from pupils’ unique questions that have emerged, sometimes, from pupils’ wrong or irrelevant’ thoughts. how would saitou pedagogy develop without the constraint of the strict government control, then? my answer is: it would be basically the same as it is now. the teacher must create her/his curriculum by her/himself if no curriculum is provided. in this case, the new learning material is explored in an investigation of the unique questions that emerged in each unique lesson. the curriculum is not preplanned but the dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a84 product of pupils’ and the teacher’s learning activities. although it might be classifiable to the emergent curriculum, naming it so does not make much sense because it is not the product of an application of any theory of emergent curriculum and its actual form and characteristics are determined by the future teachers’ practices3. thus, what about the power relations between the pupils and the teacher? teachers certainly have more power to organize the classroom situation than pupils. thus, teachers have responsibilities to make the lesson dialogic for pupils. saitou pedagogy posits that teachers fulfil their responsibility by learning the learning material authentically from pupils and discovering new questions regarding the learning material in pupils. as aforementioned, pupils can generate their own questions even in the learning materials allocated by the government and educational institutions. however, pupils are in most cases unaware of their questions different from teacher’s or the curriculum’s. for saitou pedagogy, it is the teacher’s responsibility to discover new questions in pupils, to make them explicit to the class and to make lessons dialogic. there must be other means for the teacher to fulfill the responsibility to pupils. one means would be to set the ground rules for linguistic interactions in the classroom to secure the interpersonal relationship of mutual respect and trust, as mercer and wegerif have insisted. whether setting rules explicitly or not, creating an interpersonal relationship of mutual respect and trust is needlessly important for the teacher. what does saitou pedagogy think of this topic? does it ignore it? definitely not. for saitou pedagogy, the teacher’s ability to discover something new and significant in pupils’ apparently wrong or irrelevant responses play a critical role even to establish the interpersonal relationships. the teacher can garner an authentic feeling of respect and trust when she/he can discover something significant in pupils’ responses and say to pupils, “oh you are great!” such as in the example lesson of tsukamoto. although setting the ground rules for linguistic interaction might be the presupposition to produce such mutual respect and trust, the teacher exists in the lesson only as its organizer as far as she/he sets the ground rules. the teacher also should and can exist in such a relationship of mutual respect and trust as a participant in the dialogue. the respect and trust shown by teachers can result in pupils respecting and trusting other pupils and the teacher. one of the conditions for the teacher to be the dialogic participant is to discover something significant in pupils’ responses; to do that, saitou pedagogy posits that teachers should be an authentic learner. apple (1993) pointed out a tendency he called proletarianization of teachers, where teachers are deprived of their autonomy and skills as teachers. saitou pedagogy is teachers’ effort to resist to this 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(2013). kyoushi-kyouiku no jissenn kara mietekurukoto [what i learned in the practice of teacher education]. in t. inagaki, & h. ushiyama, zoku kyoushi-kyouiku no sozo [creation of teacher education, second series] (pp. 138–166). tokyo, japan: hyoron-sha. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind and society: development of higher mental processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wegerif, r. (2007). dialogic education and technology: expanding the space of learning. new york, ny: springer. wells, g. (1999). dialogic inquiry: toward a sociocultural practice and theory of education. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. wells, g. (2000). dialogic inquiry in education: building on the legacy of vygotsky. in c. d. lee, & p. smagorinsky (eds.), vygotskian perspectives on literacy research: constructing meaning through collaborative inquiry. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe dialogic lessons and triadic relationship among pupils, learning topic, and teacher kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2019.239 | vol. 7 (2019) a88 digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. microsoft word 4. matusov^j (layout)^j values in duberman's innovative pedagogy^j subm^n385^j 2023-01-05 nph.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a49 democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract my essay aims to develop my authorial map-account of martin duberman’s various educational paradigms manifest in his experimental seminars at princeton university, hunter college, and lehman college cuny, 1966-1971 (and beyond) that i abstracted from his claims about his innovative educational teaching. i tried to develop a terrain of educational philosophical paradigms that shaped his goals, judgments, definitions of success, frustrations, and so on, and engage in a dialogic analysis of this terrain. his innovative pedagogy was driven by diverse and often conflicting educational philosophies involving democracy, dialogism, and therapy, among other values. i discuss the synergies and conflicts of these values in duberman’s pedagogy. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." acknowledgment i am most grateful to my colleague robert hampel for introducing the pedagogical innovations of martin duberman1 (hampel, 2021) to me, engaging me in this project, enlightening discussions, and providing critical and supportive feedback on the early drafts of this paper. also, big thanks to my colleague ana marjanovic-shane for her discussions of the issues and feedback on the earlier drafts. i am grateful to martin duberman for the two wonderful meetings and his comments on my papers. thanks to christel hartkamp, peter gray, kevin curry-knight, and bryan campbell for their feedback and discussions of earlier versions of this paper. ïïò 1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/martin_duberman issn: 2325-3290 (online) democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a50 introduction my interest in martin duberman’s pedagogical experiment started on january 8th, 2019, with an email from my close colleague, educational historian bob hampel: yesterday i read a terrific chapter by historian martin duberman2. in the mid-1960s at princeton, he decided to drop grades and tests in an undergraduate seminar. he writes about coercion and authoritarianism in traditional education & yearns to escape those. the chapter focuses on how he and his 24 students (2 sections of 12 each) struggled with their new freedoms. the article resembles the book3 you and i admire so much by ira shor4. i paid attention to this reference because bob’s prior reading recommendations were super interesting. the timing of his email was also good because it was winter break for both of us (in early 2019), and i could freely pursue my scholarly and teaching interests. as an educational researcher, theoretician, and practitioner-innovator, i have frequently critiqued conventional education and developed deep research and teaching interests in progressive education (and its shortcomings), dialogic education, democratic education, and education for authorship (matusov, 2009, 2011, 2015b, 2015c, 2021a; matusov & brobst, 2013; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016, 2017; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; rogoff, matusov, & white, 1996). reading martin duberman’s (1969) chapter on his educational experiment and then his archives and other relevant writings, i immediately saw our affinity in some, but not all, educational concerns, innovations, struggles, emergent tensions, educational values, goals, trajectories of pedagogical experimentations, and pedagogical paradigms. duberman’s innovative pedagogical practice was complex, exciting, and inspirational for me, so i wanted to dive deeper to make sense of it. i also hoped that by examining his new approach, i would better understand my own practice and struggles. specifically, i hoped that it might allow me to rethink the complex relationship between democratic and dialogic education. the goal of my essay was to develop a map-account of martin duberman’s various educational paradigms manifest in his experimental history seminars at princeton university, hunter college, and lehman college cuny, 1966-1971 (and beyond) that i abstracted from his claims (espoused educational paradigms) about his innovative educational teaching (in-use paradigms). in other words, i tried to develop a terrain and tensions of educational philosophical paradigms that shaped his goals, judgments, definitions of success, frustrations, and so on. i briefly discuss each paradigm using his texts, the relevant literature, and my own pedagogical experimentation. i acknowledge that i only scratched the surface in my discussion here because each educational paradigm of martin duberman deserves a separate article, if not a book (see such a book: hampel, 2021). i wanted to engage in a dialogue with martin duberman, his pedagogical inspirations, challenges, discoveries, shortcomings, and failures to better understand them and inform my own internal dialogues and struggle for the development of my vision and practice of “authentic education.” i expect that i am not alone in this endeavor so other innovative educationalists may join and extend our dialogues. my primary sources were an article about his first experiment in the fall of 1966 at princeton university (duberman, 1969), a chapter about his spring 1969 seminar at hunter college, cuny, in his 2 duberman, m. b. (1969). an experiment in education. in m. b. duberman (ed.), the uncompleted past (pp. 259-294). new york: random house. 3 matusov, e., & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centaur failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. 4 shor, i. (1996). when students have power: negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. chicago: university of chicago press. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a51 book cures: a gay man’s odyssey (duberman, 2002a, pp. 144-161), several of duberman’s diary entries about his 1970 fall seminar in his book about black mountain college (duberman, 2009a, pp. 268-274), and recollections of his 1977 and 1991 seminars (duberman, 2002b, 2009b). i also read unpublished transcripts of his conversations with peter janney about his fall 1969 seminar at princeton university (pj, duberman papers, nypl archive), peter janney’s 1970 senior thesis about the 1969 seminar (janney, “history 308 revisited,” 1970, box 73, folder 4, duberman papers, nypl archive), duberman’s correspondence with princeton faculty, administration, former students, and other educators located in the new york public library (nypl archive) archive in several boxes titled “duberman papers.” finally, we met twice and engaged in email correspondence. as with any map, my map is static, not fully reflecting important transformations in martin duberman’s thinking. it also sought breadth more than depth. my goal was to start a discussion through these provocations rather than deeply examine each philosophical tendency in martin duberman and their often-complex relationships. by writing this essay, i wanted to make sense of and evaluate martin duberman’s educational philosophies, and indirectly my own, and address educational theoreticians and practitioners who wonder what duberman was trying to do and might want to affirm and/or critique some of his (and my) pedagogical ideas. i also wanted to explore the relationship between democratic education and dialogic pedagogy in a grounded way but studying a particular democratic dialogic pedagogy. my account is “interested” and authorial rather than “objective.” thus, i do not try to eliminate my subjectivity from my account. on the contrary, i embrace my subjectivity – the history and the present of my own pedagogical struggles, innovations, aspirations, and values – as a guiding force of my authorship to highlight features of duberman’s educational philosophy that might be visible only from my perspective. russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin shared an old joke relevant to my discussion here: “the ancient greeks did not know the main thing about themselves, that they were ancient greeks, and they never called themselves that” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 6). i hoped to notice many philosophical features in martin duberman that come from my particular theoretical and pedagogical vista and my relationship with his vista that he might not know. in other words, the fact that martin duberman or somebody else might disagree with my observations or judgments of his educational philosophies does not automatically undermine their or my depiction or analysis. as i take full responsibility for my observations and judgments, i also welcome challenges. i commit to open-minded and honest replies to these challenges, which may involve changing my mind when i see an argument collapse or staying by it when i feel my argument still stands. i believe that the worth of my observations and analysis, or lack of it, lies in the totality of an unfolding critical dialogue. this research is not “me-search” (nash & bradley, 2012) but rather “you-search” of my dialogue with martin duberman and his innovative pedagogy. i use a lot of quotes, some of which are prolonged, not only to ground my dialogic analysis in duberman’s texts and pedagogy but also no create heteroglossia (cf. bakhtin). in a dialogic tradition, i included martin’s and bob’s authorized comments on my paper (its earlier drafts), marked in brackets. my primary goal in this paper is to understand the philosophical struggles of an educator starting democratic education for his college undergraduates. i begin with a brief description of duberman’s innovative educational practices and their most salient features as i see them. this description is a composite — it combines variations across his seminars. my goal here is to give the reader a sketch of his innovations, so the reader can visualize this educational experiment. then i proceed to an abstraction of duberman’s espoused educational goals and his statements about what, from his point of view, constitutes meaningful education. my next and primary section is central to my essay as i focus on my description and analysis of martin duberman’s educational paradigms. in this core section, i consider tensions among these educational paradigms. in my conclusions, i offer several ruminations about martin duberman as a particular innovative educator. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a52 description of martin duberman’s innovative teaching practice the declared goal of martin duberman’s educational experiment in the second part of the 1960s was deceptively simple: “the chief purpose of this experiment, as i saw it, was to seek new ways of establishing the kind of emotional climate of trust and honesty (so absent in most seminars) which would, in turn, make possible an authentic exchange of ideas” (duberman, 1969, p. 294). on the surface, professor of history at princeton university duberman sought improvement of seminar teaching by turning his pedagogical attention to the “emotional climate of trust and honesty.” however, in reality, his experiment was a radical redefinition of education and teaching. before describing the substance of this redefinition, i will describe his class design. how: class design duberman’s class design involved what is often called “a rich learning environment” (grabinger & dunlap, 1995) and self-directed learning (gray, 2013) – i.e., providing opportunities for students’ self-study on their own terms. duberman apparently invented what i later created and called “a curricular map” in my innovative teaching practice – a list of options students can amend (matusov, 2015c; matusov & marjanovicshane, 2017). in each class meeting, in duberman’s and my classes, students decided what to study next class by deliberating and voting on the topics from the curricular map. the number of topics on the curricular map often exceeds the number of class meetings. duberman felt responsible for providing diverse readings for each topic with comments on each reading in his history class on american radicalism. “in order to preserve individual preference, i would make no assignment on any given subject, but would prepare lengthy reading lists, describe each book in detail, and encourage the student to choose that aspect or approach to a given topic which most appealed to him and to read those books which related to it” (duberman, 1969, p. 267). in his and my classes, students also could/can add new topics and readings. in my case, when a student proposes a new curricular topic, i ask the student if they are interested in searching for relevant literature or other instructional materials – some do, while some do not (i provide literature in this case). in both cases – duberman’s and mine – the curricular map was suggestive and inviting, providing learning choices for the students. it helped to develop the student-centered and student-chosen curriculum. “i hoped to accomplish both purposes-group identity and individual variety-through ‘open-ended’ reading lists. i had prepared in advance, i told them in that first session, about a dozen topics which i felt could concern us during the term: the abolitionists, the wobblies, the socialists, the populists, and so forth. none of these topics was mandatory; after each session, we would discuss, as a group, what we wanted to do the following week. i expected each group to reject some of my suggested topics, to deal with others only in passing, and to suggest alternative topics of its own” (duberman, 1969, p. 267). in other words, the readings on the curricular map were recommendations, not assignments. however, although duberman made non-reading legitimate in his class, he expected that the students would read at least something. for me, that assumption of students’ engagement with reading reflects a progressive educational philosophy tacitly adopted by duberman. i will discuss this point later when i describe duberman’s educational philosophy paradigms. the first meeting reviewed the course content and split the class into two smaller groups. duberman wanted to start the seminar with what he called an “authority void.” he believed that the teacher should not be the leader of the class (cf. smith, 2017). this authority void led to an ambiguity observed by peter janney, a senior psychology major who took duberman’s history seminar and was writing the senior thesis about it. in his senior thesis, janney described the authority void in the following way: “the first three formal sessions (9/23, 9/30, 10/7 [1969]) turned out to be a ‘shakedown period.’ there was a great amount of floundering; participants were not sure of themselves nor really sure of what was supposed to happen. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a53 this general insecurity created a sense of uneasiness which functioned to impede the group” (janney, “history 308 revisited,” 1970, pp.60-61, box 73, folder 4, duberman papers, nypl archive). the students had to decide who would lead them and what they wanted to accomplish in the class. sometimes students disagreed strenuously with each other when they had different preferences. duberman seemed to expect that the organization of the class would emerge from the students, by the students, and for the students5, without much prompting by the teacher. this initial process might involve chaos, ambiguity, disorientation, and fights among the students. from duberman’s point of view, it might be good for students to take ownership of and responsibility for their education. through this initial disorientation, duberman wanted to (1) shake up the students’ preconceptions and expectations about “normal class” and “normal education,” (2) encourage students to ask what they want from education – take ownership of their own education, and (3) engage in philosophical, pedagogical, and organizational shared decision making. it seems to me that this initial authority void might be the best example of duberman’s “unstructured education” (his term) as education where the organizational structure and pedagogical design emerge from and are designed by the students and not imposed by the teacher. after reading various descriptions of his innovative seminars, i visualize the “typical class” meeting in the following way. duberman came in advance and stayed until the end of the class. the students trickled in, some early and others late, and could leave the class at their will. depending on the meeting place, food and/or drinks could be available. at the beginning of the class, duberman kept quiet, waiting for his students to start a discussion on the suggested literature or the curricular topic the students selected in the previous class. on a good day, students became engaged in a passionate, deep, intellectual, and open-minded discussion with each other while duberman silently wrote notes, probably recording his impressions on their “group dynamics,” group leadership, emotions, reflections on emerging ideas, relations, how people felt about each other, and their psychological dysfunctionalities. we lack his classroom notes, but we get an idea of their content through duberman’s reflective conversations with peter janney that occurred after the class meetings. for example, i [duberman] think brian’s reaction is probably very complicated, and i can't pretend to know what all the elements that it consists of were. the way john challenged matt seemed to me very effective. and i don't feel that way about the way brian challenged matt. at the end, it seemed that john's frustrations were over matt's arguments, and it was on that level that he put his objection. brian put his objection on a level that i'm not at all convinced was the level that was actually disturbing him. … i don't know, for sure, what was actually disturbing him, but i don't think it was the fact that the course wasn't proceeding chronologically. which is one of the things he said. or the fact that we were devoting time to theory. something else i think was primarily bugging him, and i don't know what it. but whatever it is, i think he has the responsibility to try to find out what it is, and then to say it. i mean, to get it out. instead of complaining after the session (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 7, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). occasionally, some students addressed duberman, and he replied, at times, reluctantly (e.g., when he was asked by a student why he became a historian, he “cleverly”6 said that because he had attended graduate school). occasionally he jumped into the students’ discussion because it was interesting for him or painfully boring. sometimes he provided provocations for the students’ follow-up. at times, he joined the discussion because he wanted to introduce an alternative idea or provide the important missing information. 5 cf. abraham lincoln’s gettysburg address, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm 6 i put the word “cleverly” in the quotation marks to reflect that i think his answer might have sounded a bit condescending and disingenuous to some of his students. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a54 he also kept track of the students who were passive listeners, peripheral participants, or non-participants altogether (e.g., reading a newspaper during a class discussion). i did not find evidence that duberman tried to summarize or conceptualize a discussion by recapping students’ alternative positions. as the semester progressed, duberman often became increasingly dissatisfied with his students, the discussions, and the entire educational and interpersonal process7. duberman was seemingly frustrated and irritated (he often called himself “impatient”) when his expectations were not met. as expressed in his writing and in conversations with peter janney, duberman occasionally felt bored or upset with some of the students’ discussions, and he blamed his students for their passivity, disengagement, lack of preparation (readings), narrow mindedness, lack of curiosity and immaturity, irresponsibility for their own education and life, and dysfunctional dependency on professors. even more, duberman felt that the students’ personal and interpersonal psychological dysfunctionalities, developed by the students long before the seminar began, spilled out in the class through students’ egos, vanity, defensiveness, emotional and intellectual dishonesty, and so on. furthermore, some students complained to duberman about their perceptions of chaos, a lack of direction, other students’ bossiness, and so on. to address these problems, duberman introduced a periodic practice of “self-criticism” in his classes as an offshoot of his interest in group therapy. the practice involved a participant (often duberman himself) publicly sharing a concern or a grievance, analyzing it with the students, and developing proposals to deal with it. the self-criticism sessions interrupted regular discussions of the readings and curricular topics. often duberman defined the problem at hand as the students’ lack of responsibility for their education and their life. for example, during one session, duberman and mrs. green (a guest scholar) blamed the students for a poor discussion of “american pragmatism” – the topic that the students chose themselves at the previous class meeting and for which mrs. green, an expert on this topic, was invited. the students were visibly unprepared because they did not read the suggested readings in advance, and duberman admitted that the topic did not excite him. students agreed, reluctantly, that they were irresponsible. “mrs. green joined the discussion at this point. she said that the refusal to take responsibility for one's own life – or, as a subdivision of that, to assume direction for one's own education – was probably the single most characteristic trait of princeton (perhaps of all american) undergraduates. her remarks cut deep. a few admitted the indictment painfully. more protested it, though not with much conviction. later, with leisure to digest mrs. green's remarks and to confront them in privacy, others came to admit their validity” (duberman, 1969, p. 279). it seems that duberman wanted his students to internalize his concerns about their educational irresponsibility. often people (teachers, parents, other authorities) want the students “to take responsibility for their own learning,” – but they treat the students as if accountable to some other authority beyond the students themselves. the teachers or other authorities (parents, schools, bosses, etc.) still judge them on the fact that the students did or did not take responsibility. this very act – and its legitimacy – annuls the purpose of students owning their own responsibility, confusing responsibility with accountability. the students start to feel accountable to some other authority, rather than becoming responsible to themselves – where the students would be the sole legitimate authority to judge their own responsibility and the acts that fulfill or not this responsibility8. in my own innovative teaching in the past, i had recognized these types of “self-criticism” sessions (without naming them that) as important educational practices and even a form of a curriculum (e.g., see my description and critique of my "peanut butter sandwich" learning activity in matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). in one of my innovative graduate classes in 2007, in the middle of the semester, i 7 especially in his evening sections in fall 1966 and fall 1969. 8 i am thankful to ana marjanovic-shane for this point. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a55 refocused the class on blaming and shaming my students for their lack of responsibility for their own education, professional development, and life. for example, i asked my graduate students to give examples of their engagement in academic material of their interest beyond what was required from them by their professors. when they provided examples, i showed them that in all cases, these examples were embedded in the classroom assignments and not their self-initiated learning. later, in my book written with the help of one of the participants in the class, i labeled it “the blame-and-shame educational chronotope9” (matusov & brobst, 2013) – the teacher’s impatience with, irritation by, annoyance with, putting blame and shame on their students for them coming short of the teacher’s high expectations of the students. at times, it seems to me that duberman was also aware of this blame-and-shame chronotope that he promoted in his classes, yes ... yes, i was uncomfortable too. i felt it was maybe precipitous, brought out then, and also it was maybe too emotionally i myself was too emotional. that's not the right word – … things about my motivation for bringing it up were showing and were contaminating the discussion. like, my annoyance. you know – “come on, shape up!” – that was implied. and it shouldn't have been. because that just provokes guilt. it was tantamount to my saying, to the group, you know, you're a bunch of dullards. you're boring the shit out of me. do something! let's get a little action! and that's not constructive. because it makes people feel guilty. [peter janney, "yes'' under this several times] it makes people feel like dopes. you know. “we're not performing well. duberman is bored” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 31, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). analyzing post-class interviews with my own students, i concluded that this practice is extremely problematic and even irresponsible, professionally unethical, on the professor’s part. it is often disabling and might even, at its extreme, induce a sense of existential despair in some students (see matusov & brobst, 2013, for example). since 2007, i have abandoned this practice. i replaced it with a “mid-term town hall meeting” in which my students discuss what works and what does not work for them in our class. they make proposals for class improvements, and we vote to accept or reject them after collective deliberations on their pros and cons (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017). although the students’ educational desires are often a subject of our classroom public discourse (e.g., what kind of student they are to select a particular pedagogical regime to fit them), the issue of their (ir)responsibility remains private for my students unless they want to share it with the class and/or with me as their teacher. we address other emerging ad hoc issues in my classes, which cannot wait or occur after the mid-term, in the spirit of the mid-term town hall meeting. apparently, duberman paid a lot of attention to the therapeutic effect of his seminar on his students and himself, focusing on “group dynamics,” “t-groups,” “encounter groups,” and “sensitivity groups” fashionable in his time.10 duberman prompted his students to reveal their feelings (especially negative feelings) about themselves, other students, and him. these feelings were considered to be true, 9 russian philosopher of dialogism bakhtin defined “chronotope” as a unity of time, space, and axiology where events are tied and untied (bakhtin, 1991; matusov, 2015a). for example, in my classes with graduate students, i ask them the question, “what is 2+2?” out of the blue, and they all answer: “four,” even though my question did not make sense in the context of our ongoing discussion. even when i explain my experiment to them and repeat the question, the students report how difficult for them to resist and not say, “four.” i am always surprised by the ease with which my students reply: “four,” despite the fact that my question is out of context, and it is a known-answer question. however, when i asked this same question out of the blue when i bumped into them on the campus, outside the class, they become perplexed, “what?” “why?” “i’m sorry…” “hmm?!” in my analysis, in the classroom, the assignment chronotope of conventional is invoked – it forces the students to answer any question that the teacher asks without questioning the legitimacy or the purpose of the question. in contrast, everyday chronotope focuses people on searching for reason and purpose of questions that other people ask, assuming that the other people search for unknown information of their interest. 10 in the fall of 1970, duberman began to use encounter group techniques, such as the “hat game’ (whoever held the hat was the discussion leader), falling backwards to be caught by a classmate, or standing in the center of a circle for others to touch, followed by a discussion of the feelings evoked. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a56 unquestionable, and unjudgable – genuine and valuable feedback for a person to work with. duberman believed that these revelations promote not only intellectually honest dialogic academic endeavors but also personal growth in the participants, including himself, which seemed to be even more important for him than the former. in sum, duberman’s class design aimed to promote deep ontological critical discussions and his students’ ownership of their education (and life). at the same time, he struggled to see the students’ educational activism, passion, and depth of their contribution and commitment. to address these issues, he introduced self-criticism and group therapy. why: goals of the education defined by martin duberman reading duberman’s claims about his innovative pedagogy, i abstracted his notions of the ideal features of education. he proposed the following goals in his analysis of the 1966 seminar: • self-discovery: “who the hell am i?” what do i want to do with my life?” curiosity, self-exploration, and risk-taking (duberman, 1969, p. 262). • students’ self-evaluation and definition of their own educational goals and successes rather than pleasing the teacher. • students’ setting learning tasks for themselves (i.e., self-assignments, learning journeys) rather than the administrators and the teachers imposing their tasks, students’ ownership of their own education. • students taking “pleasure in their own lives.” • emotional and relational self-exposure: students should expose their deepest personal assumptions. • self-awareness. “the seminar should hold one and only one pursuit sacrosanct: self-knowledge through group interaction” (p. 281). • students’ “digestion and personalization” of the learned information (p. 265). • student’s personal life growth through group interaction. “the chief function of a university should not be, as is currently assumed, the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge, but rather the encouragement of individual growth. factual information can aid in that growth, but to do so it must be made relevant to the individual's needs; it must pose some problem, extend some challenge, answer some longing if it is to be incorporated rather than merely appended” (p. 289). • students become their own authorities in their education and life. • students are actively involved in self-studies and discussions through self-regulation and taking responsibility for themselves. • “we want students to ‘re-examine their beliefs’; that, we like to say, is the whole point of education. since those beliefs were first formed in a multidimensional setting, they cannot be successfully challenged in a setting that is one-dimensional” (pp.289-290). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a57 at the same time, duberman strongly criticized traditional pedagogy, separating cognitive and affective aspects of learning. “indeed, little important information can be transmitted if an emotional transaction is not simultaneously in process, for an individual will not expose his deepest assumptions nor be able to perceive those of another if their relationship is purely intellectual” (duberman, 1969, p. 261). philosophical paradigms i am amazed by the complexity of duberman’s pedagogical ideas, doubts, values, frustrations, and goals, as if there were many different martin dubermans, some in conflict with each other and some in temporary alliance or in deep affinity. their relationships changed over time. they differently populated the real martin duberman – the person he was and wanted to be. to capture martin duberman’s complexity, i abstract his diverse educational philosophical paradigms. i define an educational philosophical paradigm as an educator’s relatively cohesive and self-contained value-driven vision of desirable education. below i define duberman’s educational philosophical paradigms that i perceive, provide examples of them in his writing, and briefly comment on them from my own pedagogical vista. i was coming to these paradigms from his texts rather than imposing the paradigms in advance. of course, knowing some of the paradigms in advance helped me to recognize them in duberman’s texts. some of the paradigms were conceptually new to me. i am aware that my list of his seven paradigms might be incomplete and problematic, revealing not only martin duberman’s views (and struggles) on education but my own views and struggles. also, the order in this list is somewhat random, probably reflecting my own interests. i also briefly focus on the relationships among these paradigms and duberman’s philosophical struggles. i provide evidence of these paradigms in duberman’s espoused theories, class design, critique of conventional education, his goals and expectations, his frustrations, and so on. i consider how much duberman was aware of these paradigms. finally, i analyze the limitation of each paradigm in duberman’s practice and thinking. democratic education the democratic education paradigm requires an educator’s full faith that their students are the final authority for and authorial agency of their own education and life (klag, 1994; neill, 1960). the students have an unalienable right to define the purposes of their own education, their own curriculum, instruction, and organization of their education (with or without the help of a teacher or peers), including their decision to engage or not to engage in their education. essentially, democratic education is the affirmation of education as self-education (matusov, 2021b). when faced with conflicting choices for their collective education, the students have the right to make decisions democratically, which may include public deliberation, voting, delegation of a decision to others, flipping a coin, deliberative consensus, compromising, splitting the class into smaller groups, studying solo, and so on. democratic education rejects the imposition of curriculum on the students, teachers’ unilateralism, legitimacy of the institutional authority unsanctioned by the students, mandatory attendance, non-consensual assignments, unconditional obedience, pleasing the teachers and institutions, grading (unless asked by the students), and so on (gray, riley, & curry-knight, 2021; greenberg, 1991; holt, 1976; illich, 1983; llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2019). almost all these themes can be found in duberman’s experiment. he had no grades, no teacherimposed assignments, no mandatory attendance, and no imposition of the curriculum. to facilitate his students’ curricular choices, he introduced an open-ended curricular map, where the students could add new topics and vote on a topic for the next class.11 he was clearly trying to avoid the teacher’s unilateralism. 11 in the available texts, duberman did not mention if some of his students chose to do some other learning projects on their own even when a topic of their interest was not picked up for a class discussion. in my classes, some of the students reported doing that. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a58 he was sharing his and other students’ concerns and problems experienced with the class and the students. “i had played a more active role which, by the end of the session, left me uneasy, so i asked whether the group thought the meeting had been too structured in comparison with the earlier sessions, and my role too prominent” and encouraged a group decision making and searching for solutions (duberman, 1969, p. 271). duberman was familiar with the contemporary literature on democratic education and deliberately subscribed to this paradigm. he had developed his interest in democratic education around 1962 “when some students suggested that i read a. s. neill's summerhill. i did, and was moved by neill's candor and exhilarated by his demonstration that children flourish when they are allowed freedom. after discovering neill, i read paul goodman, edgar z. friedenberg, and, most significantly and most recently, john holt12 – in other words, the ‘romantics’ of educational theory, as they have been dubbed by their critics” (duberman, 1969, p. 260). at the same time, the paradigm of democratic education was internally challenged by duberman’s frequent frustrations, dissatisfactions, and impatience with his students’ lack of engagement in the academic material, their passivity in the classroom discussion, coming unprepared to class, skipping class, lacking commitment to the chosen topic, intellectual closed-mindedness of some students in some discussions, and lack of curiosity, self-discipline, and maturity. throughout his reflections on his innovative teaching practice, duberman was resentful when his students “abused their educational freedoms”: when, in his view, they were not capable of or were not ready for the educational freedoms and opportunities he provided. at times, during his reflective conversations with peter janney, he felt temptations to go back to traditional education because the quality of the academic classroom discussions had frequently been more satisfactory, in his judgment. but i did not find an example that he actually moved back. in my own innovative teaching and pedagogical experimentation, i have also registered similar resentment toward my students (matusov & brobst, 2013). i suspect this partly reflected the educators’ struggle caused by a competing educational philosophical paradigm, namely a paradigm of progressive education, which was very powerful but apparently invisible for duberman (and for me in the past). as i will discuss below, democratic education and progressive education paradigms are profoundly incompatible (matusov, 2021a). ontological dialogic pedagogy dialogic pedagogy involves educators’ appreciation of dialogue for education. i have conceptualized two major types of dialogic pedagogy: instrumental and ontological. instrumental dialogic pedagogy views dialogue as a tool/instrument/means for effective learning and teaching or promoting social justice. ontological dialogic pedagogy views dialogue as the main process, the quality of human relationships, and the main medium of human sense-making, understanding, and humanity itself (matusov, 2009; sidorkin, 1999). ontological dialogic pedagogy sees education as students’ development of their own authorship and voice in the practices of their interest. this dialogic pedagogy is called “ontological” because it is concerned about the “being of knowledge” – i.e., “why do i care about this particular knowledge?”13 12 in my reading, john holt represents a crossover of democratic education and anarchist education. i am thankful to christel hartkamp for pointing to an anarchist side of holt’s pedagogy. 13 this understanding of ontology as “being of knowledge,” highly developed in the existential philosophy of the 20th century, is directly opposite to the classic theological-philosophical tradition of defining the term “ontology” as “knowledge of being.” bakhtin articulated the difference between these understandings of ontology in the following way, “thought about the world and thought in the world. thought striving to embrace the world and thought experiencing itself in the world (as part of it). an event in the world and participation in it. the world as an event (and not as existence in ready-made form)” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). the ontology as “being of knowledge” (“thought in the world”) is concerned with the questions of “why and how i care about knowing” – “why bother and who cares.” in contrast, ontology as “knowledge of being” (“thought about the world”) is concerned with the questions of verification, “how you know that it is true.” democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a59 according to this educational paradigm, students study what concerns them here-and-now with their hearts and minds – what excites, puzzles, and troubles them in their lives – rather than as preparation for life in the future (matusov, 2018; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). according to the ontological dialogic paradigm, in genuine education, participants’ ideas are not just intellectual but also deeply ontological. similarly, duberman argued that, opinions, never shaped solely by reasoning, are always influenced by personal relationships and encounters, themselves freighted with emotion, and thus are most likely to be exposed and examined in an environment that contains an emotional dimension. we want students to "re-examine their beliefs"; that, we like to say, is the whole point of education. since those beliefs were first formed in a multidimensional setting, they cannot be successfully challenged in a setting that is one-dimensional (duberman, 1969, pp. 289-290). likewise, mikhail bakhtin insisted that “a person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. he participates in it not only with his thoughts [worldviews] but with his fate and with his entire individuality” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 293). as i suggested above, a part of duberman’s class design was driven by this ontological dialogic pedagogy. he organized his class as a discussion-based seminar of small groups (12 students) with no preset curricular endpoints. this small-size dialogic seminar reminds me of an insight by dialogic philosopher dmitri nikulin who insisted that a genuine dialogue is possible in a small group limited by the numbers of greek graces (3) and greek muses (9) (nikulin, 2010)14. duberman argued for earned epistemological and pedagogical teacher authority rather than for institutional teacher authority. he insisted on students’ critical self-evaluation of their education rather than summative assessment via grades, which often leads to students’ subordination to the teachers’ demands. he constantly asked his students for feedback on the class and his teaching; i also organized problem-solving of emergent issues in my courses through classroom dialogue. moreover, duberman welcomed surprises: “‘rituals of legitimacy,’ as one student put it, should not take precedence over the unorthodox and the unexpected, especially since the latter could often produce authentic experience” (duberman, 1969, p. 281). he wanted his students to challenge their own cherished ideas: “the special value of an unstructured classroom setting is that it throws together a heterogeneous group able to challenge rather than simply reinforce each other's views” (duberman, 2009a, p. 270). he expected, valued, and even actively promoted the messiness of the class discussions: talk, by its very nature, is spasmodic, discursive, repetitive, even at times incoherent. to try to trim it into neat, orderly packages is to drain it of life… human exchange is fullest when it operates on a variety of levels, including the emotional, the irrational, the fantastic. unfortunately, most educational situations concentrate on only one level of human interaction-the rational. in doing so, they try to make people into what they are notthinking machines-and end by turning the average seminar into an exercise rather than an experience (duberman, 1969, pp. 288-289). one of duberman’s consistent goals was the ontologization of education, uniting the study of academic content and the students’ lives. “opinions, never shaped solely by reasoning, are always influenced by personal relationships and encounters, themselves freighted with emotion, and thus are most likely to be exposed and examined in an environment that contains an emotional dimension” (duberman, 14 alternatively, duberman’s class design of having small-size groups could come from his interest in encounter group therapy (see below). also, it may have two sources: dialogic and therapeutic. in addition, as bob hampel shows in his book, small-size groups also reflect princeton’s tradition of precepts (hampel, 2021). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a60 1969, p. 289). as education gets ontologized, it attempts to transform life. “in about the fourth week, sherm and a few others suggested that since the seminar was studying radicalism and was itself a radical experiment in education, it followed that its members should take the lead in ‘radicalizing’ its own community-namely, princeton university. aside from the inherent value of the undertaking, it would, secondarily, enable seminar members to discover empirically the problems characteristic of all radical movements” (duberman, 1969, p. 281). the students proposed what my colleagues and i called an “open syllabus” (matusov, 2015c; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017) – students have the right to design their own syllabi. the princeton students’ “statement of principles” called for even more—students should be able to create the (ungraded) course and select the professor. shared with several administrators and faculty, the manifesto by itself changed nothing.15 according to duberman’s sensibility, a terrific classroom dialogue involves passionate drama of “person-ideas” (bakhtin's term, see bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009). duberman encouraged disagreements as a sign of genuine education and dialogue: at black mountain [college], everyone was constantly learning — at lunch, weeding the gardens, anywhere — and you had to get along. yes, people left and friends fought. it was hardly a peaceful environment. but conflict is an essential part of development, and that is another thing i find lacking in princeton. at black mountain, the whole person put himself on the line and dealt with other whole persons, which meant, inevitably, a great deal of confrontation and disagreement, much of which, if the spirit is right, can be educative. agreement should not be the highest value. but princeton prizes agreement, consensus, and moderation (interview with student “jeff,” spring 1969, the audiotape is in series viii, sr. 2781, duberman papers, nypl archive). a good example of that is the dramatic dialogue between two students in duberman’s history seminar on american radicalism at lehman college in the spring of 1977 in a class meeting on the topic of “utopias, past and present” (duberman, 2002c). according to duberman, the class had good chemistry of “trust among people of widely differing temperaments” where the participants could “risk disagreements without creating lasting dislike” (p. 238). “the basic disagreement throughout was between janet, strongly committed to radical feminist values and scornful of politics as an agency of change, and tony, a macho, twenty-year-old italo-american, furious at the "system" that had kept his hardworking family bound to a wretched tenement in the south bronx. tony had announced early that he thought he was a socialist… a strong woman and a strong man with differing outlooks on the world, … the discussion of utopias brought them into direct conflict” (pp. 238-239). janet experienced life in a commune, liked it a lot, and planned to join it after graduation. meanwhile, tony considered communal life basically as bourgeois frivolous escapism ignoring class-based structural inequality in the broader society. [tony to janet:] "how the hell can you go off and plant vegetables when the country's falling apart? for chrissake! unemployment's 40 percent in the ghettos, the corporations are getting bigger and fatter every day while the rest of us grub for rent money, ecological disaster is—" "—i can't solve any of that. nobody can." "you can damn well try." some sniper action started on tony's right: exceptions were taken to his figures (40 percent of teenagers in the ghettos), halfhearted interjections were made on the order of "where is it any better? russia? china? ha!" still, almost everyone bought tony's description of our society as one in which the privileged few 15 from bob hampel: one year later, a much tamer version began: up to ten student-initiated courses could be approved by princeton’s course of study committee. the requirements fell short of the freedom of open syllabus: at least eight students had to commit to take the class, and the proposal had to include the course readings and requirements. minutes of the committee on the course of study, october 26, 1967, in box 56, folder 4, office of the dean of the faculty papers, pua. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a61 exploit the many. janet bought it too. she simply reiterated her view that nobody knew what to do about it. the mess had gotten out of control. the only way to lead a decent life was to get the hell out, find some kind of meaning within oneself and with a few close friends. she didn't mean drugs, sex, and discos, but several nods of agreement in her direction seemed prompted more by visions of hedonism in the streets than asceticism in the woods. because tony himself seemed at an impasse at that point—unable to translate his anger into a set of political propositions — we decided to move directly into a discussion of "the theory and practice of socialism." it lasted a month. tony began it with a description and analysis of our assorted social ills that roused little opposition. since many lehman students come from low-income families and are also members of minority groups, they're well aware of the vast disparities of income and opportunity that tony pointed to, and even those students from more privileged backgrounds expressed dismay and discomfort over those disparities. nor was a large majority in the seminar slow to buy tony's argument that the blame for our assorted ills should be placed directly on the interlocking alliance of hereditary wealth, federal officialdom. pentagon brass, and multinational corporations. they were only a little slower in agreeing that the whole package could accurately be labeled "capitalism." it was when we tried to sharpen and extend tony's initial indictment that the seminar consensus broke down. some of the students (preeminently tony) argued that capitalism's defects were functional: the direct result of private ownership of the means of production. others thought the defects incidental: the failure of the government to curb the "excesses" of big business. the few conservative students preferred to cite the cosmos: "the poor always ye have with you." tony's insistence that only socialism offered the needed vision and tactics for change led to a prolonged squabble over definitions that fragmented opinion still further. was the chief identifying feature of "socialism" public ownership of the means of production and distribution? if so, wouldn't that make the soviet union the epitome of socialism— though it suppresses those basic freedoms of speech et al., which everyone agreed (no defenders here of the view that such freedoms are mere window dressing) were essential aspects of any society worth inhabiting? besides: public ownership by exactly whom and of precisely what? should the "public" be defined as on-the-job worker collectives, or as local communities, or as state and federal political assemblies? should "ownership" be of basic industries and utilities only, of small businesses as well, or of all private property? trying to cut through the thickening knot, someone suggested socialism might best be defined not in terms of outright ownership of production but as "increased social planning." that opened up a different, but no less difficult set of questions. who would do the planning? and to whom would they be accountable? wasn't there a danger of concentrating power—and the potential for its abuse—still further? of inflating an already swollen bureaucracy? of multiplying regulatory agencies that had long since proved their susceptibility to cooptation by the very special-interest groups they were meant to control? but perhaps it was possible, someone said, to accomplish planning on a local level, to decentralize decision-making. objections arose to that, too. many felt that such problems of national scope as racism, poverty and gender discrimination could not safely be left to local initiative, resources—and prejudice. yet another shift followed: perhaps socialism should be defined in terms of ends not means: that is, by its focus on the plight of the unfortunate, by its insistence that highest priority be given to the needs of the least privileged. that seemed to bring us back full circle: how to devise a strategy for achieving those goals? even if we succeeded, someone asked, what made us think that those in power would voluntarily relinquish it? and if they didn't, what then? should we rely on a process of reeducation? attempt violent overthrow? pursue the "long march through the institutions"? most thought the first tactic naive, the second immoral, the third impractical. discussion of the last unearthed additional complexities—and a further babble of discord. given the ethnic and racial divisions in the country and the average american's distrust of collective action, how could we hope to get the needed marchers? and even if we somehow managed, what would prevent outright government repression? as conundrums multiplied, spirits sagged. having run into my own roadblocks on these questions for a decade, i wasn't of much help. i told them that we'd recapitulated in a month the essence of a debate that has been in process for a hundred years and (putting the best face on it) that we had to accept the frustration of realizing that no easy answers were available. "you mean no answers," someone shot back—to a general, melancholy nodding of heads. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a62 "typical american impatience!" tony yelled impatiently. "if we can't get instant results, the hell with it! the revolution happens wednesday at 5:00, or it's down to the disco!" "yeah, keep on dancing! smoke more, think less!" "very funny," tony said morosely. "you're dancing on your own graves." "and what are you gonna do, karl marx?" "build a bomb shelter in the backyard." that bit of gallows humor wound up the month-long discussion, give or take a few pep-talk platitudes i felt impelled to throw in (mostly because tony looked so miserable) about this being "a creative period of dissolution . . . have to expect conflict over strategy . . . clarification emerges during the process of struggle . . . " i think i even said, "where there's a will there's a way," blanching less at the cliché than at the knowledge that when all ways seem blocked, the will atrophies. janet picked up the beat. there was a way, she said, but we'd been looking in the wrong places. "with typical male fanaticism, you've poured energy into a hyper-rational analysis of who has power and how to get it. even if you managed to come up with some blueprint for a brave new world, i wouldn't want to live in it." tony (angry): "meaning?" janet: "meaning you'd shift rulers, not values. any lasting social transformation has to be preceded by self-renovation." tony (angrier): "meaning?" janet: "as radical feminists have been saying for years, we have to reclaim the world of the senses and emotions. men—some women too—have to rediscover their capacity for tenderness and intimacy, a capacity now submerged under the patriarchal imperatives: tabulate, accumulate, dominate—imperatives perpetuated by the institutions of marriage and the nuclear family." an elegant summary, i thought to myself. before i could say so, tony jumped in: "more bourgeois subjectivism!" janet: "and what's your anger — objective?” tony: "you bet your sweet—!" janet (and ten others): "—sexist pig!" tony (and two others): "—self-indulgent child!" we got beyond the name-calling pretty fast. apologies were offered all around, and some ideological ground—but only some—given. tony declared his agreement with the feminist demand for "equal pay for equal work" and also his support for era—despite his feeling that "most women lacked the stamina and aggressiveness needed to perform well in certain fields." ("we're not interested in becoming professional football players," one of the women snapped back.) on her side, janet acknowledged that the classic socialist goal of ending material want should be high on everyone's list of social priorities. somewhat less readily, she conceded that where material deprivation was severe, it might be premature to talk of the need for a psychosexual revolution. these concessions aside, janet and tony remained fervently at odds. tony continued to insist that the radical feminist call for an end to traditional marriage and the nuclear family and its insistence that there were no innate biological (and thus psychological) differences between the sexes was "simply foolish." janet quoted marcuse in support of her view that the sexual liberation movements (feminist and gay) were the potential cutting edge of revolutionary change. tony blanched briefly at one of his heroes being used against him, but rapidly rebounded. with millions starving, he said, it was "irresponsible" to put primary emphasis on destroying sex-role stereotypes and downright "moronic" to think (janet had also quoted norman o. brown and wilhelm reich) that "resurrection of the body," "polymorphous perversity" or any of that "bisexuality/androgyny junk" could be a matter of even remote importance to serious people (duberman, 2002c, pp. 239-244). … the debate between tony and janet, ending as it did in minimal concessions or sympathy, exemplifies the obstacles to coalescence. like many male marxists i know, tony is a cultural conservative. he'll fight the establishment tooth and nail (yes, tooth and nail: the male style) on economic issues, but otherwise tends to share the reigning patriarchal values. tony believes in the importance of hierarchy, reason, authority (in his case, marx), democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a63 leadership, order, discipline. he tends to over-rationalize experience, is impatient with personal idiosyncrasy ("subjectivism"), inattentive to realities (like intimacy) that cannot be precisely measured. he wants to expand access to material goods, but not definitions of humanness. he wants to destroy distinctions between the classes, but is wary of challenging those that separate the sexes. reverse all the above, and we see the alternate strengths—and limitations—of janet's vision. most of the young in my seminars (and throughout the country) are not absorbed by tony's or janet's concerns. they don't raise (let alone dwell on) issues posed by socialist or feminist analysis. yet it would be inaccurate to say (as many have) that they're indifferent to them. during our discussions, janet and tony hardly had the floor to themselves. almost everyone joined in at some point, a nerve struck, an old allegiance challenged, a new option clarified. what surprised me wasn't the amount of passion (of which this generation is supposedly devoid) that got invested in the debate, but the extent to which opinion clustered on janet's side. i hadn't expected students from working class families that tend to stress traditional values to be drawn to an "extreme" feminist position. well, i thought, that's new york city—it is different. but then i read some surveys of campus attitudes elsewhere, and lehman didn't seem so atypical after all (duberman, 2002c, pp. 246-247). this long fragment illuminates duberman’s “theory-in-action” (argyris & schön, 1978) of his ontological dialogism. duberman’s ontological dialogue does not seek agreement at its “end” – production or reproduction of knowledge. it is not a habermasian, consensus-seeking dialogue (habermas, 1984; latour, 1987). rather, duberman’s classroom dialogue is a critical examination of deeply-hold, deeplycommitted, deeply-cherished personal truths (“pravda” in russian16) (cf. the concept of "person-idea" in bakhtin, 1999) – janet’s feminism versus tony’s socialism – through bringing evidence and counterevidence (e.g., about unemployment), alternative ideas, testing ideas, engaging in the big dialogue with ideas outside of the class (e.g., janet’s quotes of marcuse, norman o. brown, wilhelm reich), and so on. this dialogue is unfinalizable (bakhtin, 1999; nikulin, 2010), involving a heated drama of the ideas and of the people. this is “the final dialogue at the threshold” about “damn questions” (bakhtin, 1999) about the most desired and just society as well as the ways of approaching it. the dialogue focuses on finding the boundaries of the pravda-truths – their strengths and limitations. of course, knowledge also often emerges from this dialogic process, but it is by-productive, emergent, and almost accidental (matusov, 2009; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; nikulin, 2010). in short, duberman’s theory-in-action of ontological dialogism in education is surprisingly bakhtinian17, which is my bias as well. in the educational dialogue, duberman assumed a dialogic teacher orientation by facilitating, provoking, and deepening the dialogue, addressing the issue at hand from his own pravda-truth. finally, in his reflection on the dialogue, duberman engaged in a dialogic analysis of the classroom discourse by engaging his heart and mind in the discussed ideas and the emergent dramatic events. this contrasts with a typical discourse analysis when an educator or an educational researcher focuses mostly on structural-functional patterns of the classroom discourse (matusov, 2020a; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019). in contrast, when the princeton students’ discussions or contributions were losing their charge with the students’ ontology, duberman felt that those discussions became empty, shallow, and superficial, just an intellectual game without any stakes for the students: “i began to worry that people weren't being very direct and personal at this point, they were talking abstractly…” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 9, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). the students were not “presencing their self” to open it for addressing by others in such exchanges, using david sabey’s term (sabey, 2021). 16 pravda-truth contrasts with istina-truth in russian. istina-truth is the objective truth, existing independently of the human consciousness (cf. truth in positivism). 17 martin told me he never read bakhtin (personal communication, 2019-09-02). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a64 at the same time, i see several limitations of duberman’s ontological dialogic educational paradigm. first, like many educational dialogists (e.g., burbules, 1993), apparently, he confused the form of an instructional genre with its spirit. thus, throughout his writing, he rejected an instructional genre of the lecture as being too monologically passive for students and narcissistic for professors. he argued that even good lectures are problematic: in a ‘dazzling’ lecture, what turns on the listener is the theatricality, and that is usually at the expense of both truth and dialogue. it’s a performance. i’m a good lecturer. i’m theatrical. i often lecture without notes. but it’s bad for the students—i knew that all along. only belatedly did i realize it’s also bad for me. it feeds my narcissism [duberman added that princeton students often applaud at the end of a lecture they like] (interview with herbert livesey, 1974, tape 02785, series viii, duberman papers, nypl archive). however, as i argued elsewhere (matusov, 2009), lectures can be externally and/or internally dialogic. a lecture can be externally dialogic by being a long dialogic turn by the teacher in reply to students’ explicit or implicit inquiry, tension, question, or idea. it can be internally dialogic by including diverse voices, diverse ideas, diverse paradigms, and diverse approaches and inviting students to test them. nevertheless, i agree with duberman that the domination of lectures in education, especially monologic lecturing, is problematic and troublesome. another limitation was duberman’s struggle to find his role in ontological classroom dialogue. he seemed to alternate between: 1) withdrawing himself from the students’ discussions, concerns about “contaminating discussions” with his thinking, even not coming to the class meeting, and 2) jumping into a classroom dialogue as an interested learner and a passionate scholar equal to the students. the former was driven by a combination of duberman’s democratic education paradigm (see above) with his ontological dialogic paradigm. the democratic education paradigm often sees a teacher’s role as creating conditions, ecologies, and rich environments for students’ own self-studies to prevent impositions of the teacher’s ideas on the students. as to the latter, duberman’s desire to be equal to the students, in my view, can be rooted in duberman’s commitment to a strong version of ontological dialogism articulated by mikhail bakhtin: “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). alternatively, or in addition to the ontological dialogic paradigm, it might come from the hippie organic and the communitarian ecological educational paradigms (see below), rooted in political anarchism and egalitarianism, to which duberman was (and, in my observation, still is) attracted. duberman perceived ontological dialogue as participants’ exchanges that are verbal, passionate, intellectually deep, dramatic, no-nonsense, highly emotional, loud, openly judgmental, full of self-doubts, pushing ideas to the extremes, frank – even vulgar – brutally honest – even at the expense of hurting feelings at times (while not crossing a boundary of humiliation and betrayal). his vision and perception of the ontological dialogue were arguably very cultural18. raised in an eastern-european jewish19 environment in brooklyn in the 1930-1950s (duberman, 2002a), he was apparently socialized in jewish cultural discourse, sensibilities, and values, which reminds me of my own cultural jewish upbringing in the ussr20. non-verbality, indirectness, peripheral participation, dancing around the bush, listening rather than talking, intellectual calmness and emotional detachment, prolonged silence, and so on were apparently un or under -appreciated, -valued, and -recognized by duberman (and by a particular eastern-european jewish culture that i am familiar with). it seems that duberman was rarely aware of these cultural differences 18 i thank bob hampel for alerting me to this cultural sensibility of dialogue by martin duberman. 19 i use this term here and below as an ethnic rather than a religious term. 20 i grew up in the soviet union and immigrated to the usa in 1988 when i was 28. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a65 between him and his students in defining ontological dialogue and pushed these ethnocentric sensibilities on his students, who were not urban jews. on one of such rare occasions, he said to peter janney, “it's very hard for me, terribly hard for me to sit back and not talk. because i am a big verbalizer and i really get very uncomfortable myself when i feel i should sit there and not say anything. probably more uncomfortable than anyone in the room” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 10, box 73, folder 5, nypl archives). at times, in my view, duberman overlooked the link between the students’ ontology and the academic subject of his class, judging their conversation as off-topic, which he tolerated and even valued: “…when the group did wander off into a discussion of some peripheral matter which had come up-taking drugs, say – the lack of immediate relevance to the overall topic at hand was more than compensated for by its broader relevance to the lives of those involved” (duberman, 1969, p. 281). in the context of our era of gradual legalization of recreational marijuana and the political struggles around it (hari, 2015), it feels strange that martin duberman did not recognize the legalization of illicit drugs as a part of american radicalism, especially because he wrote a letter to the editor in the daily princetonian21 saying that most illegal drugs were harmless. however, a non-recognition of such curricular relations and missing some emerging teaching-learning opportunities are common to and expected from the ontological dialogic pedagogy (hammer & van zee, 2006; matusov, 2009). in addition, in my judgment, duberman struggled with how to define students’ ontology in education. what does it mean for students’ hearts and minds in the here-and-now to make their education relevant, meaningful, and deep? in my observation, duberman was attracted to three distinctive possible ontologies: 1) therapeutic, 2) political (social justice), and 3) academic. therapeutic student ontology is based on students’ psychological, personal, and interpersonal challenges. political student ontology is rooted in students’ passion for the politics of social justice and their embetterment of society (usually from leftist political positions). academic student ontology is rooted in students’ curiosities relevant to the academic material. although duberman embraced all these student ontologies, he seemed to prioritize the therapeutic one (see my description of the therapeutic paradigm below). here i sense the struggle between duberman’s ontological dialogic educational paradigm and his therapeutic group dynamic paradigm (see below). at times, duberman moved from defining education as an ontological academic dialogue to group therapy or, at least, group therapy leading the educational process (cf., kresge college at the university of california, santa cruz, in grant & riesman, 1978). finally, i think that duberman’s overall democratic dialogic educational project had severe limitations that probably were invisible to him. he firmly controlled the overall design of the class. although duberman encouraged and welcomed the students’ initiatives – his students could and did make proposals (e.g., considering radical reforms for princeton as a part of the class curriculum, where to meet, and bring beer in class); – at the end of the day, these changes often had to be compatible with duberman’s philosophical views to be allowed by him. apparently, he often dominated students whose initiatives often had to be sanctioned by the teacher (see a discussion of the issue of domination in pettit, 2014). when students’ educational goals or demands for change challenged duberman’s educational philosophies (e.g., asking for the teacher’s assignments or grades, see duberman, 1969)22, these requests were criticized and, what is more important, often blocked by duberman. bruffee characterized duberman’s lack of educational pluralism in the following way, “[duberman] gave [his students] ‘complete freedom.’ what this meant [in his practice] was that what the teacher refused to do, he refused to let the students do either” (bruffee, 1972, p. 463). there was no process for democratic decision-making to change the class design, its educational goals, and its educational philosophies, especially when the teacher might disagree with 21 thanks to bob hampel for directing me to this source. 22 by 1968, princeton gave students in ungraded experimental courses the option of requesting a grade – duberman could not say no to those requests or did not decide to sabotage them (i thank bob hampel for this point). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a66 these design ideas, goals, and philosophies. in my own pedagogical experience, i have realized that accepting decisions democratically made by my students, with which i personally and professionally disagree (e.g., cutting the class time, the reintroduction of grades and assignments for students who want that), is the final test of my commitment to democratic education and radical pluralism (kelly, 1978) it is based on. my initial class design, mostly developed in my collaboration with previous students, can always be altered if my current students agree to do so. progressive education in my interpretation of the history of education, a progressive education paradigm emerged in the enlightenment and was first articulated by the french philosopher and writer jean-jacques rousseau (17121772), the german philosopher immanuel kant (1724-1804) and further developed and publicized by the american philosopher john dewey (1859-1952) and his disciples. in my judgment, the progressive education paradigm is based on three major tenets (matusov, 2021a). the first tenet was articulated by rousseau in his pedagogical novel emile: a progressive teacher wants the student to want what the teacher wants the student to want without the student noticing that. rousseau wrote, take the opposite course with your pupil [in child-centered, proto-progressive, education that rousseau advocated in contrast to a conventional authoritarian teacher-centered education – em]; let him always think he is master while you are really master. there is no subjection so completed as that which preserves the forms of freedom; it is thus that the will [of the child] itself is taken captive [by the teacher’s hidden manipulation]. is not this poor child, without knowledge, strength, or wisdom, entirely at your mercy? are you not master of his whole environment so far as it affects him? cannot you make of him what you please? his work and play, his pleasure and pain, are they not, unknown to him, under your control? no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell (rousseau, 1979, p. 120, the italics are mine). the second tenet of progressive education was articulated by kant, who argued that in order to promote human destiny, which is autonomy, the irrational, ignorant, and immature students must be forced to engage in education designed by rational, reasonable, and mature people (kant, 1784). this is the principle of educational paternalism, when others decide what good education is for the student and have the right to impose this “good education” on the student (matusov, 2020c, 2020d, 2021b). american psychologist and educator jerome bruner developed the third tenet of progressive education: “...any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (bruner, 1986, p. 129). bruner gives educators hope that it is possible to find an “honest” way of teaching any curriculum for any student at any time, which my colleagues and i called the holy grail of the progressive education (matusov, 2021a; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). the democratic education paradigm rejects the three tenets of progressive education not only because they are unachievable (especially the third tenet) but also because they are pedagogically undesirable. as a founder of the first american democratic school, sudbury valley school, dan greenberg wrote about the main difference between progressive and democratic education: progressive education wants to make students like what they are supposed to do and to learn in school, but in the democratic school movement, students do and learn what they like to do and learn (greenberg, 1991, p. 101). i could not find any explicit statements by duberman embracing progressive education. however, i can infer duberman’s progressivism from his deep pedagogical desires, revealed in his frustrations, disappointments, and resentments when his students' behavior unmet these tacit progressive desires. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a67 duberman’s progressivism was also articulated in the “self-criticism” practice of blaming students for dependency and docility. duberman had progressive expectations that when his students selected a topic for the next class, each student would come well-prepared to the class and actively and passionately participate in class meetings. anything less than that was unacceptable and irritating for duberman. the progressive teacher orientation often creates irritation and burnout in progressive teachers. thus, professor of sociology of education david labaree notices that one of the most common reasons for (progressive) professors’ retirement is being tired of trying to be a good teacher: when professors decide to retire, they frequently give teaching as a key reason for the choice (another is faculty meetings). i know that was true in my case. it’s not that they dislike teaching; many talk about teaching as one of the most satisfying parts of the job. it’s that the stress of struggling to be a good teacher gets to them over time. the emotional wear and tear is considerable, hovering on the precipice of disaster in class after class. time to give it a rest. you can keep doing research in retirement; combined with release from the stress of teaching, this makes retirement a win-win situation (labaree, 2021). in my judgment, the source of this teacher stress and burnout of (progressive) professors interested in their good teaching comes from the nature of foisted institutionalized education. in foisted education, a teacher becomes a teacher only because the institution assigns them to teach a particular class and not because freely assembled students interested in studying something ask the person to help them with their studies. recently, i have been experimenting with “higher ed in the wild” (shugurova, matusov, & marjanovic-shane, 2022). as a result, i stopped feeling the type of stress and burnout that david labaree is talking about. in my view, the nature of the teaching stress is in failed progressive hope to find a holy grail of teaching that can successfully address the foisted nature of the institutionalized education (matusov, 2021a). the idea that students might have different interests, different intensities of participation, different modes of participation, different priorities, and so on troubled duberman-the-progressivist. it was almost a split of pedagogical personality in duberman: his democratic pedagogical mind told him that it was ok when students had diverse interests, and their non-participation was legitimate, but his progressive pedagogical heart told him that if students were responsible for their education and life, surely, they won’t want to miss the wonderful learning opportunities in his seminar. duberman’s progressive heart might be telling him, “yes, students have the freedom not to read, not to talk, not to write, and to have different goals for their education; but they better read, talk, and write, and have my vision of education, if they are responsible learners and people.” it was a bit of a schizophrenic “double bind” (bateson, 1987), sending the students two opposite messages at once. in progressive education, the academic freedom given to the students by the teacher reminds me of the famous statement by henry ford about his model-t car’s color, “any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” but “let him always think he is master while you are really master” (rousseau, see above). <<martin duberman: you're right: i can now see that i was in control of the overall design of the class, though i wasn't conscious of that at the time. but [here], i think you overstate the "double message" i sent the students.>> another problem seemed to push duberman into the progressive education paradigm: the ontological dialogue, which duberman apparently craved, required a critical mass of students who were genuinely interested in, prepared for, and actively engaged with their minds and hearts in the curricular topic of the day. however, at times, “they just won't participate, commit themselves. and that left a vacuum. that's a point at which the group almost broke down” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 118, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). without a critical mass, the class discussions were boring for democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a68 duberman and probably for other students, which even gave duberman a temptation to switch back to the “structured education” that progressive education requires. similarly, on september 7, 1970, duberman wrote to a former student in response to his comments on the 1969 seminar, “the very thing you suggested for this coming year has been much on my mind lately – that is, stressing early the necessity of commitment to the group. i’m toying with the idea of making attendance a requirement – though i hate to put it in those terms. ideally, each person would internalize this responsibility [nb! wanting what the teacher wants for them – progressivism!]. at the least i’ll emphasize how urgent continuity is; or, alternatively, how important not to run away when the going gets tough” (martin duberman to roger arrington, september 9, 1970, box 16, “a-b” folder, duberman papers, nypl archive). i think the problem of having a critical mass of engaged students for a quality dialogue is real. still, it should be addressed through a democratic process with the students and an initial class design (matusov, 2021c). fortunately, duberman did not require attendance in his year-long innovative seminar in 1971 at lehman college at cuny. his syllabus said, “the format, as well as the content of the seminar, will be ‘radical.’ the group members will decide what topics will be discussed, as well as all policies relating to the course procedures. there will be no requirements of any kind other than a commitment to the subject matter and to the group and a willingness to use one’s own experience and feelings in an effort to interact with the material and with the other members of the seminar as fully as possible” (box 74, folder 1, duberman papers, nypl archive). in my analysis, duberman’s concept of unstructured education23 was driven by the democratic education paradigm and the hippie organic educational paradigm in opposition to his hidden progressive education paradigm. as far as i know, during his 1966-1971 princeton-hunter experiment, duberman never wavered from the former, despite his strong doubts and apparent temptations to do so. instead, he blamed his students for their educational passivity, immaturity, and irresponsibility, with the acknowledgment that conventional elementary and secondary education rewarded these deficits in students long before they came to college. unfortunately, as far as i know, duberman never critically reflected on his progressive pedagogical desires. apparently, progressivism was duberman’s pedagogical blind spot. unfortunately, having a pedagogical blind spot of being colonized by pedagogical values that remain invisible to and unexamined by educators is very common to many, if not all, educators, except those who are actively involved in democratic education. that is why a professional forum for authorial educators is so important to reveal and examine these blind spots as much as possible. i feel that duberman’s attraction to the progressive education paradigm was invisible to him, occupying more his heart rather than his mind. this pervasiveness and invisibility of the progressive educational paradigm are not that surprising. in my view, the progressive education paradigm has been hegemonic in the education world for a long time, not because progressive educational practices are widespread –far from that—but because the progressive education paradigm makes conventional education bearable (matusov, 2021a). it inspires educators with a promise of the holy grail dream: searching for an “honest” way of teaching any required curriculum for any student at any time. paraphrasing karl marx’s famous statement about religion, the progressive education paradigm is the opium of 23 i suspect that the notion of “structured education” refers to the kantian educational paternalism (kant, 1784; matusov, 2020c, 2020d, 2021a, 2021b), according to which non-rational, uninformed, immature people must be forced to study what the rational and informed society chose for them to study. only informed rational mature people deserve their autonomy to be respected by society. although an ignorant student might complain and even resist foisted education, later they will be thankful for being forced to study the important curriculum. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a69 educators24. progressive education is a major enabler of conventional education, keeping progressive teachers from burnout longer by promising them hope of meaningful education without abandoning the conventional authoritarian pedagogical regime. it imposes the preset curriculum and education itself, so valued by the progressive teachers, on their students by exploiting the students’ subjectivities. like martin duberman, i have also been colonized by the progressive education paradigm so deeply that now i consider myself a progressive teacher who poignantly tries not to practice progressivism to avoid a possible paralysis and a feeling of betrayal of myself, as a democratic dialogic educator when occasionally i relapse to progressivism25 (matusov, 2021a). however, reading his book on black mountain college (bmc), i found duberman’s indirect disagreement with the progressive education paradigm. he ingeniously inserted his 1971 voice in the transcript of a 1936 bmc faculty meeting. on september 28, 1936, bmc faculty discussed the nature of teaching. the issue was whether the primary teaching role must be to excite, inspire, fascinate, and “infect” bmc students with the taught curriculum. elsewhere, my colleagues, bakhtinian educators, and i discussed this progressive pedagogical desire as creating an educational vortex that would “suck” all the students into a taught subject (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). the vocal majority at the meeting replied positively to this question, while duberman took an issue with it. albers [bmc professor, 1936]: a teacher has to have a definite point of view if he wants to infect. the democratic teacher is no teacher. he admits every point of view. … duberman [1971 insertion]: i'd agree that personally a man should know what he stands for. but the climate in a classroom should be such that others are free to express what they stand for (duberman, 2009a, p. 104) this is where duberman came close to a critique of the progressive education paradigm – at least in his texts that i read. in my judgment, his above critique of progressivism is a bit too vague and undeveloped as he did not directly challenge albers’ notion of the teacher’s role to “infect” the students with interest and strong intrinsic motivation to study the taught subject. personally, i feel that the teacher should not go beyond the exposure of a subject and provide a rich learning environment for the students. in my view, the progressive education dream of the “pedagogical infection” of the students with an interest in the taught subject is illegitimate (matusov, 2021a). hippie organic paradigm in the zeitgeist of the 1960s, there was an unprecedented struggle against authority in the us and elsewhere in western europe. the historical emergence of a new choiceand identitybased middle class (matusov & smith, 2012), the civil rights and civil disobedience movements against pervasive racism, sexism, and homophobia, and the antiwar movement propelled a rebellion against the establishment, its authority, and its suffocating order. those insurrections (probably, along with other things) gave birth to what i call the hippie organic, laissez-faire educational paradigm. according to this paradigm, students’ selfactualization, learning activism, sovereignty, and responsibility for their own education blossom when the oppressive societal and institutional authority is simply removed. at the same time, the absence of authority and rejection of soulless institutions naturally promotes the emergence of an organic, humane community. the trust in informality and the natural emergence of good human relationships are the birthmarks of a political anarchist movement that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, initially in the russian 24 “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. it is the opium of the people” karl marx, introduction to contribution to the critique of hegel’s philosophy of right (1845). 25 i borrowed this approach from the alcoholic anonymous (cf. “a dry alcoholic”). i also feel being deeply colonized by conventional education, considering myself to be a conventional teacher who tries to break with conventional teaching. in contrast, i could not find any traces of duberman being colonized by conventional education in his innovative seminar, although his “structured education” lecture courses were apparently conventional based on his syllabi. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a70 empire. duberman was very familiar with anarchist political ideas and credited them, in part, as responsible for his innovative pedagogy, i had also [i.e., in addition to pedagogical literature on democratic education that i discussed above], within the past two years, read a great deal about anarchism, in line with a play i was then writing on emma goldman. i strongly identified with anarchism's anti-authoritarian basis; it was the closest i had come to feeling at home in a philosophical tradition. (i'm aware that this effort – that all such efforts – at charting "influences" is a little foolish. for all i know, the true cause of my developing interest in unstructured education may have been familial – an unresolved authority problem? – or even metabolic) (duberman, 1969, p. 260). anarchists … had always stressed (as i argued in an article for partisan review entitled "the relevance of anarchy") that human aggression and cruelty were the products of imposed constraints, of authoritarian family structures, social curbs on nonconformity and a capitalist ethic that encouraged competitive zeal and greed, institutionalizing the warfare of each against all. according to the anarchist creed, i wrote, if people could be "economically freed from the struggle for existence, intellectually freed from the tyranny of custom, emotionally freed from the need to revenge their own mutilation by harming others," then quite different, no less "natural" human feelings of cooperation, fraternity, and mutual assistance would have a chance to emerge (duberman, 2002a, e-version). whatever its origin, duberman’s notion of unstructured education was driven by the hippie organic educational paradigm. duberman believed that the removal of teacher authority by itself would bring about the students’ organic, productive, free, and enjoyable learning culture, full of learning initiatives, and a healthy community, addressing personal and interpersonal yearnings. miracles of education happen not because of institutional arrangements, structures, and pedagogical techniques, but despite them – people’s natural and unrestrained virtues are the keys (duberman, 2002a). duberman believed that things are best in education when they happen naturally and spontaneously (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 64, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). in line with the hippie organic paradigm, duberman had faith in the naturalness that would automatically trigger the organic processes of self-organization and unleash students’ self-actualization, curiosity, self-discovery, and agency. a. s. neill, the founder of summerhill democratic school in the uk, even thought that freedom would cure most (but not all) children from all their neuroses: “more and more i come to the conclusion that therapy is not necessary when children can live out their complexes in freedom” (neill, 1960, p. 40) – although duberman might not go that far. this faith in naturalness was probably first articulated by rousseau and other romantic philosophers of the nineteenth century: “tolstoy26 repeats the lessons of rousseau's emile. nature: only nature will save us. we must seek to understand what is 'natural,' spontaneous, uncorrupt, sound, in harmony with itself and other objects in the world, and clear paths for development on these lines; not seek to alter, to force into a mould. we must listen to the dictates of our stifled original nature, not look on it as mere raw stuff upon which to impose our unique personalities and powerful wills“ (berlin, hardy, & kelly, 1978, p. 255). if the teacher and the students relax and let things go their natural course, many problems would be solved in a beautiful way: “if joe really wanted to talk about the cultural aspects of the new left, it doesn't mean that he would have to interrupt, or shift the whole group's gear suddenly. it would come in -if he were a participant, what was on his mind would come out in a very natural way” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 64, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive; italics mine). the hippie organic paradigm’s cult of naturalness reminds me of an old soviet joke 26 leo tolstoy – a famous russian writer and innovative educator of the nineteen century (see tolstoy's writings on education that might resonate with duberman's pedagogy, tolstoy, 1967; tolstoy & blaisdell, 2000). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a71 about communist dreamers of the soviet economy, "as soon as we place the train on the tracks, it will go by itself.” <<martin duberman: you're right about my underlying assumption that with restraints removed people are revealed as naturally "good." i still think so, and can argue the point from an anthropological point of view.>> to achieve this naturalness, duberman tried many things. he tried to create an “authority void” at the beginning of the semester to help an organic class structure to emerge through students’ own selforganization. he tried to stay away from the students’ discussions, however uncomfortable it was for him. “probably i should have just kept my goddammed mouth shut, and let it go on for a half hour or whatever. and next time i'm going to try but i get so uncomfortable. it's my problem, i should just you know shut up. and be uncomfortable” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 57, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). he tried to promote egalitarian relations with and among his students. at times, he even tried to avoid coming to the classes to eliminate his authority: peter janney: …i think it'd be hard for any of us to approach you on the same egalitarian position, that we'd feel we approach other students. this type of thing. i mean, there is this barrier, no matter how … you can't get over it. martin duberman: that's why -you know in some ways my not being there is better. really this group would probably function better if i wasn't there at all. i'm convinced that that's true of most learning situations. because i remain something of an authority figure, no matter how i try not to be. it’s just built into the situation. i'm the guy with the credentials and the status and all the – older, and all that stuff. i'm teacher, no matter what i do about it. and that really does impede the process of learning and discussing, controversy, give and take (pj-md conversations, 1969, pp. 38-39, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). in his 1969 article, he distinguished authoritarianism from authority and institutional authority from what can be called epistemological authority. duberman accepted authority over authoritarianism and epistemological teacher authority over institutional teacher authority. duberman wrote, “authoritarianism is forced to demand the respect that authority draws naturally to itself. the former, like all demands, is likely to meet with hostility; the latter, like all authenticity, with emulation. our universities – our schools at every level are rife with authoritarianism, all but devoid of authority” (duberman, 1969, p. 264). duberman recognized the teacher’s epistemological authority when the teacher’s knowledge, expertise, and experience helped the students’ own studies and learning. for him, the ideal teacher authority is one who masters the taught subject matter and himself, who is ready to be surprised by his students, and who knows his students’ experiences, needs, and interests relevant to the taught subject matter. for him, the goal of education is for his students to develop their own authority in education and life: “ultimately each man can, must, become his own authority. this is the one path to adulthood and democracy” (p.265). however, in his conversations with peter janney in fall 1969, again and again, he rejected the teacher authority as such (see the indented quote above)27. duberman worried that authoritarianism and unwanted authority would be there even if the teacher tried to avoid them. his mere presence could be a serious problem for the emergence of an organic egalitarian community. duberman’s attempts to eliminate formal teacher authority apparently created “pervasive informality” (rietmulder, 2019) – vicious social dynamics that generated its own unchecked and, at times, oppressive authority and “horizontal violence” (matusov & sullivan, 2020). at times, his students seemed 27 as martin duberman reported, the big issue for him in therapy was his resentment of and challenge to many people in positions of authority (including his own therapist) (duberman, 2002a). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a72 to engage in a power struggle, domination, backstabbing, suppressing oppositional voices, silencing, scapegoating, ostracism, and so on. peter janney provided the following snapshot of this process in his senior thesis, …"nate" appointed himself as leader and began to dominate the discussion, steering the focus away from the topic by talking about himself. though never expressed openly; there was resentment of this tactic. it was expressed by other members to allow the discussion to dwindle. but "brad" appeared an hour later, apologizing for his lateness. asking the group about where the discussion was headed, he began to stimulate it with his own thoughts. nate immediately became quiet when brad returned and in fact said nothing until duberman raised the question that there might be something in the climate that was making the group generally unrelaxed. nate took this chance to reject and defame the seminar, stating that "there had been no connectedness of thought. i don’t feel as if i’ve been challenged." his rejection of the group was, of course, a manifestation of the group's rejection of him. this was too uncomfortable an issue for the group to face at this time. there was no attempt to discuss it. at the next class, no one mentioned nate’s absence (janney, “history 308 revisited,” 1970, p. 66-67, box 73, folder 4, duberman papers, nypl archive). in my view, the main problem here is not that the students’ relations were disrupted by nate – this has to be expected in any community – but, in fact, there was no deliberate communal process to deal with situations like that. without any formal, well-thought, and communally approved process of deliberation to deal with public disruptions and personal grievances, the community was destined to deal with emerging tensions via “pervasive informality” (rietmulder, 2019). instead of a tyranny of the teacher’s hierarchical authority, pervasive informality predictably creates a tyranny of peer pressure, peer politics, and peer authority, which was not thought of and approved by the classroom society. i argue that the phenomenon of pervasive informality and its negative consequences is a consequence of the hippie organic paradigm. jim rietmulder, a founder of the circle school, a democratic school, describes this phenomenon in the following way: reflecting [on] the social movement [of the 1960s], many free schools sought to eliminate power, structure, and authority generally, sometimes tending not to distinguish the real targets of the revolution: abusive power, oppressive structure, and illegitimate authority. the result was not usually anarchy, but instead pervasive informality: informal power, informal structure, and informal authority. some free schoolers tended to gloss over or “not see” the presence of power, structure, and authority in their schools. in contrast, the democratic schools in this book are about formal structure and formal authority — meaning structure and authority are visible, valued, acknowledged, and documented (rietmulder, 2019, p. 15, the italics is mine). <<martin duberman: i've never heard of jim rietmulder but your quotes from his book greatly impress me. i must read it.>> the hippie organic paradigm resurrects the enlightenment assumption of the child as a noble savage who is later traumatized and distorted by oppressive civilization. at some point in his pedagogical experiment, duberman questioned this assumption, noticing that by itself, the removal of teacher authority and giving students freedom did not automatically result in students’ learning activism and self-actualization: “when the coercive power of the grading system is eliminated, can we rely on any alternative stimulus to motivate students to learn? quite a few seminar members felt that ‘natural curiosity’ was a sufficient motivating force for learning, but a number of rebuttals were and can be made to this assumption” (duberman, 1969, p. 285). however, at the end of the day, he still remained faithful to the hippie organic educational paradigm, explaining the observed failures by the system ingraining passivity in the students: democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a73 “all of which raises the pessimistic possibility that curriculum reform on the college level may be an enterprise of marginal value only. by age eighteen, it could be said, it is too late to salvage curiosity” (p. 286). moreover, the hippie organic paradigm apparently contributed to duberman’s blame-and-shame chronotope and his “self-criticism” pedagogical practice. each time students asked duberman to deviate from the hippie organic paradigm by bringing more or different guidance and leadership in the class, he blamed these students for lack of activism and not taking responsibility for solving the problems they observed, there are always people – too many people [i.e., his students] – who just sit on the outskirts of the discussion and they won't participate. and then they come up with various rationales for why they won't participate. sometimes they say it's boring. or, i don't have the information to participate. or, somebody's monopolizing the conversation all the time. there are endless variations on this, but i think – and always the excuse that they give has some realistic merit to it. there's always enough truth [unclear] as an excuse, you know. but i think basically what's behind it almost every time is that they really prefer to be passive and not get involved. they latch onto any excuse to allow them to stay passive (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 16, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). in his considering problems emerging from his commitment to the unstructured education, the hippie organic paradigm, with all his doubts and temptations to go back to his structured education, he rarely critically analyzed the paradigm itself but rather tried to go for some other explanations or another pedagogical twist “to prove the worth of my own experiment”: my level of expectation is also sometimes unrealistically high. i mean, roger [a student in duberman’s class] was asking -really what i was asking, in a way. or which i latched onto, anyway. what should you realistically expect from a group of 12 comparative strangers, in some cases total strangers, artificially gathered together to talk about topics of varying appeal to the 12 people. i mean, maybe that first hour of discussion was all you should realistically expect. but what happens to me in that kind of setting – i then start to get anxious about whether this whole thing is a good idea. because i can remember classroom discussions ten years ago, in a much more structured situation, which were far livelier and more impassioned than what we were going through. so i start to think, well maybe it's all a crock of shit. god, we had better discussions about radicalism at yale, when people were there for grades, and writing papers and taking exams, and you know, what the hell am i up to in this whole unstructured thing. maybe it is a crock of shit. that makes me very anxious. so then i feel the need to do something, to prove the worth of my own experiment. and so i become excessively provocative. you know, i'm determined to get this goddammed group going (pj-md conversations, 1969, pp. 32-33, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). however, on a rare occasion, analyzing problems in students’ discussion, duberman considered himself too withdrawn from the academic discussion and considered a more active guiding role for himself instead of discussing curricular meta-issues: “i think the better way to have done it would have been for me to join the discussion in regard to the subject matter. to raise a provocative question about the wobblies, instead of ‘why are we studying the wobblies?’” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 35, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a74 rejection of teacher orientation paradigm i define the notion of “teacher orientation” as a teacher’s desire to develop a particular design of a role (usually in advance of the teacher’s practice) that shapes the teacher’s relationships with students. teacher orientation is more than setting a particular teacher role per se because this concept also includes the justifications of this role. a good example of a perceived teacher orientation is when people notice “a professorial tone” in a person who tries to instill certain dogmas in their audience. of course, this is an example of the conventional teacher orientation of transmission of knowledge. progressive, dialogic, and other educators often have their own distinguished teacher orientations. in my view, there are two big pedagogical issues with the notion of teacher orientation. first is what kind of role the teacher may want to assume deliberately (and/or emerge) in their practice and why to assume that particular teacher role. a teacher role can be conventionally monologic, dialogic, progressive, constructivist, and so on (matusov & brobst, 2013). second is whether an educator wants to have any teacher orientation at all. rejection of teacher orientation means the teacher addresses the students and responds to emergent situations, issues, and questions at hand as a whole person without assuming any special role in the classroom (matusov & brobst, 2013). one of martin duberman’s strongest pedagogical desires was to drop his teacher orientation. he viewed it as a phony performance – he apparently wanted to be with his students as their peer rather than to perform on a classroom stage. the unnaturalness of having to talk about a given topic at a particular time of each week – that alone is so constrictive and so phony. to gather in a room, and to pretend that we are all interested in that moment in discussing the american right – it's just horseshit; we're not. we feel the pressure to, and that in itself is really fatal to any kind of naturalness. and exchange. not to any kind, but god knows it inhibits. [peter janney: oh yes. terrible.] to a terrible degree. plus – “teacher.” everybody has been brought up to regard the teacher in such a way that, no matter what you do, by getting rid of grades and authoritarianism, you can't get around the fact there's going to be a certain amount, and probably a large amount, of deference/paid to you as teacher (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 66, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). there could be many sources for his desire to reject teacher orientation. arguably the most important source is his commitment to the hippie organic paradigm with its obsession with naturalness – deeply down this anarchist paradigm is suspicious not only of any authority but also any role, which undermines the authenticity of unique people and unique situations. this second source, and this is my speculation, could be rooted in the fact that martin duberman was a gay man whose sexuality the society tried to “cure,” suppress, and destroy for most of his life but especially in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (martin described the societal "cures" and his "gay man's odyssey" in his book with the same title, duberman, 2002a). the fight for his publicly accepted authenticity and integrity as a gay man – to be out of the closet, out of any underground – might spill out in his pedagogical desire to be free of traditional and narrow expectations. the third source of his desire to drop teacher orientation might be rooted in his therapeutic group dynamic educational paradigm (see below), which might see any roles that people play in life as their personal, interpersonal, and societal dysfunctionality and, thus, illegitimate (of course, this a rough nonnuanced position). people should be equal and frank in healthy relationships with peers, friends, and comrades. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a75 …so many of the students in history 308 came away from the seminar feeling, as one put it, that "no course i have ever had in this university has challenged and changed my attitudes and views as much as this 'bull session.'" the term bull session is instructive; it was used by a number of the students to connote the sense of a discussion among friends, one more free of formality and constraint than most, one in which more of the person gets exposed and involved than it does in a seminar discussion narrowly confined to a selected topic or issue. to my mind, the frequent use of the term bull session to describe our meetings is a testimony to their success (duberman, 1969, p. 290). the fourth possible source of his rejection of teacher orientation could be rooted in martin’s jewish upbringing in the rather anti-semitic usa. i do not know how much pressure he felt being a jew in his childhood or later and whether he felt like an outsider. in his book cures, duberman described an antisemitic attack on him as an adult but commented that he was not vulnerable: “i told the bartender he would have to leave. he refused, yelling that i was ‘a dirty jew.’ (how bizarre, i thought with relief, he's attacking me where i don't feel vulnerable)” (duberman, 2002a, p. 114). finally, as i mentioned already, there is a particular cultural theme of frankness involving rejecting any role in jewish culture. thus, israeli social linguist tamar katriel described israeli sabra brutally straight and frank way of talking that is called dugri (katriel, 1986). of course, dugri has its own cultural specificity, and it is not identical to eastern-european jewish cultural ways of talking or sensitivities. still, in my judgment, there are certain common cultural themes there, including an interest in frankness and dropping any roles, including politeness or even concerns about other people’s feelings. innovative mit educator peter elbow rejected the teacher orientation because genuine learning starts and is rooted in the student and not in the teacher. until some kind of question or inquiry emerges in a student, teaching is impossible. nothing seemed worth saying in a classroom till a student had [his own] question he took seriously. … i refused to coax [the students’] interest. i also felt it as a refusal to pedal alone. if they won't pedal, neither will i. no source of energy seemed bearable except their motivation. and not only motivation but experience. if they are not talking from the experience of the text. read-even the felt experience of getting no experience from it-then count me out. these were troublesome feelings. giving in to them seemed to mean abdicating my role as a teacher. … so with respect to most of the leadership activities of teachers, i'd become by christmas a kind of drop-out, a conscientious objector, a giver-in to repugnance (elbow, 1971, pp. 743-744). i suspect that martin duberman might share many of elbow’s sentiments. my own pedagogical attraction to rejection of teacher orientation per se has been rooted in my interest in dialogic egalitarianism of treating my students “as consciousnesses with equal rights” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6), my distaste of patronizing students, rejection of the kantian educational paternalism, and deep distrust of any hierarchy and institutions that i view as a human mechanism – i.e., humans working as reliable smart machines controlled by rules, techniques, and procedures, often subordinated to a hierarchy (i.e., institutions). another source for my rejection of teacher orientation was a bit selfish – i wanted to be a full-time scholar, learner, and intellectual in the classroom with my students. i did not want to prepare for my classes but just be there. i suspect that martin duberman might share this selfish, if not a bit lazy, the temptation with me. at the same time, i have never been attracted to the hippie organic paradigm because, while loving improvisation, i do not believe in naturalness as the source of goodness. rather, i believe in sense-making and taking responsibility, which may involve rules and roles at times (above, which is still democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a76 critical dialogue among real people). that is why i am still rather ambivalent about the desirability of rejection of teacher orientation, leaning toward accepting rather than rejecting it (matusov & brobst, 2013). at the same time, in contrast to my colleague ana marjanovic-shane, i believe that rejection of teacher orientation is achievable. observing this tendency among different educators, including myself, i have noticed two major types of dropping teacher orientation: angry vs. calm. calm rejection of teacher orientation occurs in some democratic schools: “traditional and modern [i.e., innovative schools like montessori and progressive schools] models are mostly silent about structure-governance-rights-limits, and assume the familiar hierarchical school structure of administration, teachers, and students. in contrast, the democratic model is mostly silent about teaching-learning-curriculum-activities and assumes the familiar civil structure of democratic society” (rietmulder, 2019, p. 35). in jim rietmulder’s democratic school, the circle school28, adults are referred to as “school staff” and not as “teachers,” which apparently reflects the absence of the teacher orientation29. however, when their students ask them for teaching, the school staff can happily accept this teacher role, which does not totalize their relationship with their students in their school, where “kids practice life in a scaled-down society” (rietmulder, 2019, p. 222). duberman (1969) and matusov (2013) are examples of “angry” rejection, which emerges when students demand a teacher orientation from their professor. when such demands occur, reluctant teachers often blame those students for being immature, passive, dependent, and irresponsible for their own education. the teacher’s expectation is that the problems have to be solved together among equals. when students break this expectation, so cherished by the egalitarian teacher, by appealing to the teacher, it makes the teacher feel angry – betrayed by the students who the teacher tries to liberate from oppressive authority: …chief complaint [about the classroom discussions] centered on what was called ‘formlessness,’ or ‘lack of direction.’ only a minority viewed this as a deficiency, and no two people who did shared the same reasons for thinking it so. the most extreme statement came from a student who claimed to be "basically happy" with his seminar experience, but felt that he could have got still more out of it had the sessions been tightly organized. he suggested – and this, i feel, is yet another example of an endemic unwillingness or inability to exercise individual responsibility –that since ‘it would have been very difficult for any of us to impose this kind of discipline successfully,’ the solution was for me to impose it on them. he did not suggest how i could do this without inhibiting spontaneity and destroying "the relationship of complete equality between professor and student" that he himself felt had "contributed so much to making our discussions worthwhile (duberman, 1969, p. 288). yet, duberman’s rejection of teacher orientation was rather limited. he still controlled the overall class design: he tacitly imposed his progressive expectations on his students, he rejected students’ demands and proposals that did not match his philosophical values, and so on. also, at times, martin duberman seemed to feel that he had a special responsibility for challenging his students intellectually by providing alternative ideas, calling for critical examination of their ideas, engaging them in investigating their desires and responsibilities, and bringing ontological dialogic provocations in the class. in other words, at times, duberman assumed a particular teacher role of mixing dialogism and progressivism. 28 https://circleschool.org/ 29 interestingly, the greek original word “pedagogue” described a slave who was responsible for accompanying the free child to and from school and for making the free child’s learning at school possible. the greek pedagogue was not a teacher. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a77 finally, he clearly tried to break with the totality of teaching as the basis of his relationship with his students. the latter leads us to another educational paradigm that guided duberman, namely, the communitarian ecological paradigm. communitarian ecological paradigm according to this paradigm, teachers and students, living together in a small community and sharing food, chores, and space, promote the human relations necessary for personal growth and open-minded conversation. “classes” – a relatively intense discussion focused on a particular topic of shared interest and concern, facilitated by a trusted and knowledgeable person or people – should not be scheduled but should naturally occur in a natural environment, naturally emerge and naturally dissolve in a community in and around the participants’ need for education (cf. the black mountain college – a book, on which duberman worked in parallel to his experiment in education, duberman, 2009a). i wonder if socratic teaching in athenian agora (i.e., marketplace and civic place), aristotle’s peripatetics in the olive gardens of athens, and/or plato’s academia were also inspirational models for martin duberman. people constituting a community should come from diverse walks of life to bring very diverse ideas, values, and ontologies into discussions (cf. "socrates cafe," phillips, 2002). curricular topics are ontologically embedded in the communal and broader societal life, in which the participants are deeply engaged as activists. education and teaching must be entrenched in communal life, so “students” might know their “teachers” as whole persons rather than through a prism of one activity. martin duberman: if you live with the guy in the house, and you see what he's like and you see that he's just, you know, the usual human being with the usual … hangups and problems, then when you get to talking about an intellectual subject, you don't have to defer to him. you know he's just like you and everybody else. but in the university you don't know that, because you only see this guy in that setting. that's why i think education in universities is just… peter janney: dennison30 brings that out really well, too. that the teacher in the public schools relating on the teacher/student plane – he really doesn't relate to his students as people. but as “students.” just in that little enclave of that role. and you know, he says that's just – it would be more educational for the kid not to go to school at all. just wander about the city by himself. martin duberman: literally. that's where kids really learn things. they sure as hell don't learn much in the schools, except how to be frightened, and how to kill their curiosity, and how to be dutiful, and all the things that you don't want them, at least theoretically, to learn. that's what they're learning in the schools. nothing else. how to be competitive, how to defer, -and it's not very different in the universities, except there's an overlay of permissiveness here. and there's the rhetoric of equality. but when you strip all that away, there's still the goddam deference pattern. and the dutifulness and the passivity. and no matter how much you struggle, you can do something to diminish those qualities, but you can't do a hell of a lot. i'm more and more 30 “george dennison (1925–1987) was an american educator and author best known for the lives of children, his account of the first street school. he also wrote fiction, plays, and critical essays, most notably his novel luisa domic and a collection of shorter works, pierrot and other stories. although dennison devoted himself primarily to his art, he also taught school for a number of years, at all levels from preschool to high school. he trained at the new york institute for gestalt therapy with paul goodman and later worked with severely disturbed children as a lay therapist and teacher. he believed that relationships, not instruction, promoted real learning. as such, schools needed to be places where freedom of choice created the trust that allows for a full relationship between teachers and students. these ideas were considered radical because they questioned compulsory attendance and the focus on external student behavior to enhance student management. since the focus on controlling student behavior interferes with relationship, his work suggests a preference for small schools and an implied criticism of large schools, especially in their ability to be effective with high risk students. he believed teaching was an art, not a science and, as such, it was never technique that caused learning to occur, but rather the full complexity of individual relationships between students and teachers that were not reducible to the predictability of technique. further, he felt that much of significant learning occurs strictly within the student's individual motivation and between students, when the teachers are wise enough to stand aside and allow it to occur” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/george_dennison. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a78 convinced of it. it's just too damn late (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 67, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). of course, at princeton, martin duberman could not practice this dream. he tried to add food, informal meeting rooms, and other amenities to bring a bit of communal, ecological life to his classes. still, he often felt defeated by the machinery of his institution, colonizing his life and the lives of his students, “at some meetings only six or seven students showed up, and now and then a meeting would be called off entirely ‘because of midterm exams’ or the like” (duberman, 1969, p. 282). studying black mountain college (bmc), duberman (2009a) observed the occasional but pervasive, oppressive nature of a neatly aligned community based on informal “communal agreements” and “the community spirit.” “the community” – i.e., its most powerful and vocal members – often suppressed discussions about bmc students having sex, letting traveling black students stay on the campus, or accepting transvestite or homosexual students, or limiting these discussions to what punitive response must be applied to transgressors. duberman suspected – correctly, in my view – that often the primary concern was not only the issue of survival of the college in the hostile conservative southern environment of north carolina but also personal bigotry and prejudice of the “community” itself, especially its most powerful members. still, i could not find duberman’s reflection on that at the level of a direct critique of his cherished paradigm of communitarianism. reading between the lines (especially, reading the critique of the bmc for its "laissez-faire climate" promoting faculty authoritarianism by john wallen, a bmc faculty, to which duberman seemed to be both apprehensive and sympathetic, see duberman, 2009a, pp. 244-245), i suspect that martin duberman was leaning to accept that some aspects of a rule-based society – a place of systematic meetings of strangers (gesellschaft, in german) are needed to curb the corruptions and provincialism of an organic community – a collective of kin (gemeinschaft, in german) (see my discussion of "community" vs. "society" as a model of educational sociality, matusov, 2023, in press). alternatively, that might be my own bias projected on duberman. finally, despite his embrace of the communitarian ecological paradigm, duberman seemed to like communitarianism as an idea for others but not as a practice for himself. he remarked on his personal unfitness for a communal life because its excessive “calls on my time and energy far beyond my actual interest,” – a sentiment which might be viewed as “irresponsible” by the community, “which is one reason i've never joined a community" (p. 248). he also seemed to be somewhat sympathetic to john wallen’s critique of communitarianism that “life in a community can be ‘too total, with escape very difficult” (duberman, 2009a, p. 239). does this suggest a bit of his hypocrisy in promoting community at princeton? therapeutic group dynamic paradigm according to this educational paradigm, to be relevant and deeply meaningful for the students, good education must be rooted in and shaped by problems and tensions that the students have faced in their lives, especially problems and tensions resulting from the participants’ interpersonal and deep psychological dysfunctionalities (existing and emergent) and personal unhappiness31. thus, a good education must be therapeutic (neill, 1960). of course, individual and group psychotherapy was another 31 “the only curing that should be practiced [by teachers] is the curing of unhappiness. the difficult child is the child who is unhappy. he is at war with himself; and in consequence, he is at war with the world. the difficult adult is in the same boat. no happy man ever disturbed a meeting or preached a war, or lynched a negro. no happy woman ever nagged her husband or her children. no happy man ever committed a murder or a theft. no happy employer ever frightened his employees. … this book is the story of a place-summerhill – where children’s unhappiness is cured and, more important, where children are reared in happiness” (neill, 1960, p. xxiii). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a79 strong zeitgeist in the 1960s in the united states, and duberman actively participated in this zeitgeist for several reasons, one of which was his strenuous attempt to “cure” his homosexuality (duberman, 2002a). i cannot fully demonstrate why, but i feel that membership in a therapy group for the past three years may have been the most profound of the influences prompting me to re-evaluate my role as an educator. in the therapy group, i became aware of how many levels of the person can be "educated" simultaneously when a group is functioning well-that is, when an atmosphere of mutual trust and forbearance prevails. the willingness to suspend judgment of one another in the name of understanding, the tolerance of mistakes, the opportunity to reveal and examine one's inner self without fear of penalty-all encourage growth (duberman, 1969, pp. 260-261). <<martin duberman: you raise a largely ignored question: the relationship of my homosexuality to my professed anarchism. to be more precise: i grew up gay during the 1950s, the single most repressive decade of the 20th century in regard to homosexuality. the reigning "authority" was psychiatry: homosexuality was labelled an illness, arrested development. there's much to talk about here.>> reading martin duberman’s self-reflective texts on his innovative pedagogy, i found three versions that he considered and articulated along with his struggle with these versions. in its “soft” version, this paradigm calls teachers’ attention to the class participants’ emotional and relational dynamics and atmosphere to facilitate effective (traditional or dialogic) academic teaching: “mutual respect and trust were established among people of widely different viewpoints; this made it possible to expose feelings and to engage in debate without excessive fear of ‘being made a fool of’" (duberman, 1969, p. 269). in its “hard” version, this paradigm diverts the purpose of education from its academic subject to one of the delphic maxims “know thyself” or even entirely replaces intellectual education with straightforward psychotherapy. in summerhill school, education involved this hard version of freeing the child from neuroses: “curing a neurosis in a child is a matter of the release of emotion, and the cure will not be furthered in any way by expounding psychiatric theories to the child and telling him that he has a complex” (neill, 1960, p. 38). in its middle-ground version, this paradigm organically integrates the existing academic curriculum at hand with therapy, like in some versions of the “community of learners”32 pedagogical approach (matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012). for example, duberman was searching for a middle ground, what i'm aiming for is a way to bring ourselves to a topic; i don't think we should make ourselves the topic. i’d like to create a climate when in talking, say, about the anarchist movement, we would feel able to explore – and express – how our own reactions to authority influence our evaluation of those who have historically resisted all forms of authority. what i don't think is desirable is to concentrate exclusively, say, on our individual reactions to parental authority while growing up. that would be purely a therapy session (duberman, 2009a, p. 269, italics original). as to what kind of psychotherapy duberman had in mind and tried to practice in his innovative seminar, in his senior thesis peter janney mentioned: “sensitivity training/group,” “t-group,” and “encounter group”33 aiming at “the formation of trust and acceptance of self and others, the reduction of fear of self and 32 i am thankful to ana marjanovic-shane for applying this concept to characterize martin duberman’s middle-ground version of therapeutic education. 33 “a t-group or training group (sometimes also referred to as sensitivity-training group, human relations training group or encounter group) is a form of group training where participants (typically between eight and fifteen people) learn about themselves (and about small group processes in general) through their interaction with each other. … a t-group meeting does not have an explicit agenda, structure, or expressed goal. under the guidance of a facilitator, the participants are encouraged to share emotional reactions (for example, anger, fear, warmth, or envy) that arise in response to their fellow participants' actions and statements. the emphasis is on sharing emotions, as opposed to judgments or conclusions. in this way, t-group participants can learn how their words and actions trigger emotional responses in the people they communicate with.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/t-groups democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a80 of others, and the consequent growth of confidence” (janney, “history 308 revisited,” 1970, p. 50, box 73, folder 4, duberman papers, nypl archive). an atmosphere of openness and honesty, brutal at times, through sharing participants’ positive and negative feelings about themselves and each other, was encouraged throughout sensitivity training therapy; and the participants’ authenticity and self-actualization were prominent goals (gregory & zangwill, 1987; schutz, 1973). “usually by the end of the seminar we're feeling comfortable and close enough to take some risks with each other, to open ourselves up to possible challenge, acceptance, hurt, concern – to be vulnerable with each other” (duberman, 2009a, p. 269). in his 1970 diary entry, duberman characterized encounter group that he was interested in for his innovative seminar as “confrontational” (duberman, 2009a, p. 268). janney made a good point that duberman’s “history 308 was not a t-group or encounter group enterprise (although at times it moved to this level). it was an academic course with a goal – the focus of american radicalism, past and present. yet, after this point, there was very little external structure; so gibb’s34 modal [psychological] concerns eventually manifested themselves in one form or another” (janney, “history 308 revisited,” 1970, p. 51, box 73, folder 4, duberman papers, nypl archive). to get a flavor of this encounter group practice, let’s consider the following exchange between peter janney and martin duberman reflecting on their october 30, 1969 class session, duberman: …i had the feeling that brian – during the self-criticism part brian let himself feel momentarily his hostility to matt, – consciously or not, it crossed his mind that what was bugging him was matt. he never said it, but i think he got frightened by the realization, so when we shifted to the topic i think it was on his mind unconsciously to make it up to matt. [janney: yes]. i think he was so afraid of his hostility that he did what we all do. you do the opposite. you get especially friendly. you get so afraid of your hostility. and i think that he was so cordial to matt during the discussion that it was quite unreal. because matt in fact was being his most difficult self, i felt. more difficult than he had been in any other session. janney: he was totally against the self-criticism. he kept saying, "shall we begin? shall we begin?" in between reading the paper. duberman: yeah, he just was having none of it. he wanted to talk about marxism again. it may have been material basis of life. well i think part of it hasn't been – there for a few weeks (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 81, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). from my reading of the janney-duberman reflections on the class meetings, i feel that the seminar involved alternations between discussions of the broadly defined academic material chosen by the students for the day and informal encounter groups orchestrated by duberman. the informal encounter groups seemed to include self-disclosure, sharing positive and negative feelings about the self and others in class, evaluation and critique of the class and duberman, and occasionally duberman’s critique of his students for their immaturity, passivity, and irresponsibility. as the quote above reflects, there were tensions between the academic and therapeutic parts of the class. these tensions were motivational and conceptual. motivational tensions were coming from the fact that some participants of the seminar were mostly (or entirely) interested in the academic part of the class – namely, the history of the past and present of american radicalism in a broader sense and its derivative topics (like, apparently, brian). other students were mostly (or entirely) interested in t-group therapy, while some were in-between (like peter janney, according to his own account). duberman was often (but not always!) ready to scarify the academics for the therapy or for discussions of the students’ life issues and existential crises. in the conversations with janney, duberman revealed that he was in the 34 jack r. gibb was a pioneer in humanistic psychology and the originator of trust level theory http://www.healthy.net/biography/jack_gibb_phd_biography/233. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a81 middle of this professional crossover crisis, losing his interest in the study of history and doubting its value while gaining more interest in theater and therapy: “that in part my interest in unstructured education is a result of my disinterest in the subject matter [i.e., history] that i'm teaching. that's not the only reason i'm interested in it. but i increasingly distrust the study of history, for myself or anybody else” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 35, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). also, for successful therapy, participation in it seems to be voluntary and desired by the participants, “therapy for both adolescents and adults must be desired by the patient” (neill, 1960, p. 289). it was clear that some of the students were not interested in any therapy or discussions of their lives in duberman’s seminars. as duberman’s former student, eric, recalled, “i preferred to discuss personal matters with friends in the dorm rather than with (mostly) strangers in a seminar. since my senior thesis was ‘political ideology of the new left,’ i’m sure i chose the seminar for what i thought would be its substance.”35 the second type of tension was conceptual and pedagogical. duberman was aware that pedagogically and conceptually, the academic curricula and the therapeutic agenda also collided in his class, creating troublesome discontinuities and interruptions in the focus, goal, and meaning of the class meetings, the problem is still, for me – i can see, when the subject matter itself [in the classes, which academic curriculum is focused on] group process, or [on] organizational dynamics, how the subject matter and the group's own processes would so naturally tie together. but when group process is really not connected with the subject matter – like, american radicalism – the problem is, how do you then make the connection or the shift. because i find that more and more, that the group becomes so fascinated by the dynamics – by the encounter aspects - that they don't want to shift to something else. if you shift to the subject matter of group process you're not shifting to – something else. [janney: right.] if you shift to american radicalism, you're shifting from the very area that the group finds interesting. to something it doesn't find interesting. … “imagine people revealing things about themselves! ... [at] university! wow!” – that they just don't want to leave it alone. it's so intriguing and new. and to go back to that boring old stuff, talking about history!... the good question is [that] maybe we shouldn't go back to [the academics] (pj-md conversations, 1969, pp. 126-127, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). it is interesting that in this quote, duberman assumed that all students like him were interested mostly or entirely in therapy and not in american radicalism, which was not true based on many of his students’ accounts. however, the tension between the class’s focus on academics versus personal revelations is apparently common for the therapeutic group dynamic educational paradigm (see a description of this problem in the kresge college at the ucsc in grant & riesman, 1978). conclusion: martin duberman’s therapeutic unstructured education in conclusion, i want to characterize martin duberman as an innovative educator holistically – dialogically finalize him – as he appeared in his innovative pedagogical work at princeton university, hunter college, and (to a lesser extent because the evidence is less abundant) lehman college after 1971. also, i will summarize the professional lessons that i draw from studying martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy. after abstracting several educational paradigms in duberman’s pedagogy, i was challenging myself to characterize martin duberman’s overall pedagogy. in my judgment and formulation, it was therapeutic unstructured education, where the therapy dominated the academics. duberman was clearly struggling with 35 email to bob hampel, may 29, 2019. democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a82 the issue of the relationship between therapy and academics in his innovative pedagogy36. thus, in his account of his first pedagogical experiment, he said that group dynamics must serve the goal of teaching academics, implying the supremacy of academics over therapy. also, this formulation might have helped ensure his experiment would continue to be approved by his conservative department. in contrast, in his conversations with peter janney in the fall of 1969, duberman strongly wanted to give primacy to the therapy (in a broader sense, including discussions of students’ self-awareness of their lives)37, expressing his doubts about the academic. however, in the fall of 1970, martin characterized his 1969 pedagogical desire as a mistake – in his diary, he argued for organic integration of the therapy with the academics, september 17, 1970: at the first session of the seminar the members decided to stress form over content. it's the stress i prefer, but i’m worried that they see it as an either/or proposition – and have opted headlong for a full-blooded encounter group. i think i learned with last year's seminar that it's a mistake simply to convert an academic format into a therapeutic one; it's the combined form i’m searching for – not the straight informational nor straight confrontational. but like last year, i’m uncertain enough about what i’m heading toward so that when the ball is carried clearly into one court or the other, i have trouble clarifying what i sense is my justifiable resistance (duberman, 2009a, p. 268). nevertheless, taking into account the totality of his writings, i perceive the primacy of therapy over the academics in his 1966-1971 innovative pedagogy. my conclusion is based on the fact that in all his writing, the therapeutic drama in his seminars took much more space and much more emphasis than the drama of ideas about the history of american radicalism. besides, students rarely surprised, puzzled, or impressed him intellectually, at least in the 19661971 period. one memorable exception was his annoyance with some of sds38 students, apparently versed in marxism, who viewed history as unfolding the objective laws revealed by marx in the historical materialism framework. in contrast, martin duberman viewed history as unique events highly shaped by and rooted in the participants’ subjectivities that are often inaccessible by historians. at the time of his pedagogical experiments, he also doubted the value of history for the present and the future, which, apparently, he rarely shared his professional doubts with his students. yet, most of martin duberman’s reflections with peter janney were full of psychologizing his students and himself. the most striking psychologizing was his claim that for one of his students, the student’s desire to marry was a mistake affecting his life, education, and relationship with his peers. duberman overwhelmingly defined his students’ ontology in therapeutic and psychological terms. the second important aspect of duberman’s innovative pedagogy was “unstructured education,” rejecting the kantian educational paternalism where the teacher and educational institution knows better than the students what the students must study and how and for what purpose. martin duberman’s “unstructured education” was rooted in several educational paradigms: the hippie organic paradigm, the 36 martin duberman was not alone in this struggle back at the end of 1960s, the beginning of the 1970. thus, an innovative educator howard wolf, then an assistant professor of english at the state university of new york at buffalo, wrote, “i see my position as one committed to synthesis, not compromise. it is one kind of experience and does not take its value from the rejection of other experiences. under certain conditions i would like to participate in encounter experiences (as in fact i have over the past two years), but without an effort to be literary: without having to impose the role of teacher upon the role of encounter participant or leader” (wolf, 1971, p. 265, italics is original). 37 i wonder if martin duberman ever considered limitations of therapy as neill, the founder of summerhill, saw it: “no amount of personal therapy can abolish the evil of a bad home, a slum street, a poverty-stricken family” (neill, 1960, p. 280). 38 “students for democratic society”, https://rhamapush.wordpress.com/2019/05/31/students-for-democratic-society/ martin added, “sds was not to any extent ‘marxist’" (personal communication, 2019-09-02). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a83 democratic education paradigm, the ecological communitarian paradigm, and the rejection of teacher orientation paradigm39. the ontological dialogic paradigm might also contribute to his notion of “unstructured education” because both human ontology and genuine dialogue are often wild and messy. duberman’s interest in unstructured education was also rooted in his political views leaning toward anarchism. the strong countercurrent to his unstructured education was his hidden attraction to progressive education, revealed in his frustrations resulting in his blame for his students’ passivity, immaturity, and irresponsibility. the paradigm of progressive education powerfully called him back to structured education. however, so far as i know, to duberman’s credit, he seemed to resist this call, remaining faithful to his idea of unstructured education. in my judgment, the paradigm of progressive education colonized him without much of his knowledge or awareness. i was surprised that i could not find any traces of conventional pedagogy colonizing him. i am surprised because both progressive education and conventional pedagogy have strong grips on me as an innovative educator who tries to break with both of them. it can be said about many educators, including me, “i may be through with progressive education and conventional pedagogy, but progressive education and conventional pedagogy are not through with me.” when i feel time pressure in my class meetings, i often slip to rush to cover the lesson’s curriculum rather than continue the ongoing classroom dialogue. similarly, when i see a disengaged student, i feel immediately guilty for failing this student and wanting the student to want to learn the academic subject that we are discussing in the class at this moment, in accord with the progressive education paradigm. i wonder if duberman had similar guilt caused by progressivism. in a conversation with martin at the noisy empire diner in new york city on a hot day in august 2019, we, ana marjanovic-shane, bob hampel, and i learned that he seemed to achieve his teaching nirvana when he started teaching gay and lesbian history in spring 1991 (after a prolonged fight with the administration at the cuny who initially did not consider studies of sexuality as a legitimate academic subject) (duberman, 2009b, pp. 87-99). the seminar attracted lgbtq+ undergraduate youth. the students and martin created a natural community of learners with shared responsibility for their own learning and guidance, where the academic content of the seminar was inherently ontological for its participants. academics, ontology, and therapy coincided in those classes. according to martin, the class discussions were very lovely and dramatic. the students were deeply engaged. he continued using encounter group therapeutic techniques in his seminars on sexuality. at times, the discussions were even confrontational, but duberman loved it, “it was brutal! it was brutal! i’m not exaggerating!” (duberman, interview, 2019-0822) where some students challenged him and their peers of slighting new queer theories and sadomasochist practices: “their scorn for my ‘knee-jerk humanism’ had me grinding my teeth ... like all good students, they have to test whether i'm smart enough, progressive enough, tough enough, to warrant their trust and respect” (duberman, 2009b, p. 90). when martin told us this story, his eyes were shining with excitement. it seemed to me that martin finally found an academic subject and a type of students that perfectly fit his teaching approach, which suggests that his teaching approach is content and students specific, with the academic content being ontologically central, crucial, and urgent for both the teacher and the students. one lesson that i have learned from studying martin duberman’s journey into his therapeutic unstructured education is the importance of critical reflection on my own pedagogical desires that often reveal themselves in my pedagogical frustrations. are these desires and their underlying values really 39 it is interesting that for neill, the founder of summerhill, the relationship between therapy and unstructured education seemed to be reverse despite the fact that neill might be a pioneer of therapeutic education: “i gradually learned that my territory was [therapeutic] prophylaxis – not curing. it took me years to discover the full significance of this, to learn that it was freedom that was helping summerhill problem children, not therapy. i find that my chief job is to sit still and approve of all the things that a child disapproves of in himself – that is, i try to break down the child’s superimposed conscience, his self-hatred” (neill, 1960, p. 294). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a84 mine? are they good? do i really want them? am i colonized by oppressive values? what are alternative values? it is not the case that i had not thought about these questions before – i did, but in studying martin duberman’s journey, i have realized them more acutely. only once, i noticed that martin duberman came close to examining his own pedagogical desires, “i’ve thrashed about the last three years trying to make the classroom a more satisfying experience for other people and for me. but i'm not at all optimistic about the results. and some of that may be because of the confusing way in which i've set about trying to make it more satisfying.” <<bob hampel: eugene, your claim to “only once” see md examine his own pedagogical desires seems too harsh. isn’t the conversation with peter full of examination of his own pedagogical desires? [or perhaps the phrase pedagogical desires isn’t as clear as it might be]>> <<eugene matusov: yes, martin’s conversations with peter were reflective and critical, but they did not rise to the point of critical examination of martin’s own pedagogical desires and their underlining philosophical values – not in my judgment.>> and then martin duberman immediately blamed the institution, providing his “alibi-in-being”40 for himself, “but i think some of the confusion is built into the structure of the university. in other words, there's just so much you can do, clearly…” (pj-md conversations, 1969, p. 128, box 73, folder 5, duberman papers, nypl archive). <<bob hampel: unlike you, eugene, martin had no colleagues with whom he discussed his concerns. there was no center for teaching effectiveness at princeton. as i mentioned in my book, he could have discussed instruction with several colleagues, but he was on campus only twice each week. thus the candor with janney—it must have been a thrill to reflect on his teaching, at length, after 3 years of going at it alone.>> <<eugene matusov: i live in philadelphia and come to the ud campus also, usually twice a week. my colleagues at ud are mostly graduate students, except you. i do not see our center for teaching effectiveness as very helpful for me. in other words, i do not see much difference in our conditions.>> writing the word “journey” in the paragraph above, i realized that i was correcting martin’s own description of his experience. he consistently described it as an “experiment,” while i described it as a “journey.” was it the most important thing that martin, like ancient greeks, did not know about himself? or am i wrong? i view martin’s pedagogy as authorial rather than technological (matusov, 2011). authorial pedagogy involves constant transcendence of the given – the cultural, institutional, pedagogical, biographical, and psychological given – recognized by others and/or the author themselves. in contrast, technological pedagogy involves a sum of the proven instructional techniques (“research-based,” “evidence-based,” “best practice”) that more or less predictably secure desired learning outcomes. of course, authorial pedagogy might involve technological aspects, while technological pedagogy might include some creative mastery. however, in the former, the pedagogical technology is subordinated to the pedagogical authorship, while in the latter, it is the reverse: the pedagogical authorship is subordinated to the pedagogical technology. was martin duberman a traditional educational scientist who designed a pedagogical intervention as an experiment to see if it worked or not in order to spread it among all educators? did he try to abstract teacher-free pedagogical techniques that other educators, with the right training, could use to gain the same desired educational outcomes? 40 bakhtin’s term (bakhtin, 1993). democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a85 my immediate answer is “yes,” judging the technological language martin duberman often used to describe his practice as an experiment. in part, his use of the technological language might be political, aimed at winning his institutional approval – the technological paradigm of education has not been just hegemonic but also monopolistic in higher education. my further and more weighted answer is “no,” judging the spirit of martin’s pedagogical practice full of doubts and unexpected twists. if it was an experiment, it was a never-ending experiment – it was a journey without a destination, which rejects a technological approach to education. i sense that martin duberman viewed pedagogy and education more as an authorial art rather than as objective teacher-proof science and technology. also, educators he read and respected, such as holt, rogers, and dennison, clearly viewed teaching as an authorial art. but still, i am not completely sure. <<bob hampel: moreover, he turned down many invitations to “spread it among all educators” by speaking at other campuses. the duberman papers at nypl have dozens of his no thanks to both paid and unpaid invitations to lecture (and write) about his pedagogy. john holt urged him to be more vocal and visible, as jh was. md hated flying, so that was one reason he declined, but i also think he did not want to be seen as telling others the secret of good pedagogy.>> of course, martin duberman was an educational visionary, a pioneer of democratic anarchist education in higher education, who passionately argued not only for his ideas but for his overall pedagogical journey while strongly criticizing the omnipresent conventional education. but was he also a missionary who wanted to impose his educational truth on others? was he an authorial visionary or a missionary visionary (or a bit both, or entirely something else)? an authorial visionary inspires other pedagogical authors and induces critical responses from them while seeing their own authorship as unique. missionary visionary tries to scale up their pedagogical truth, proven by experience or research, to standardize their proven ideas by cleaning their innovative practice from their subjectivity as much as possible and implementing standardization across the entire sphere of institutionalized education. an authorial visionary is often an educational pluralist supporting other authorial pedagogies, even ones with which the authorial visionary disagrees. i did not find any evidence of martin duberman supporting a fellow pedagogical author or arguing for academic freedoms for pedagogical authorship in his institution. in contrast, he seemed to think a collective approval of his pedagogical innovations legitimate (although his proposed pedagogy indeed disrupted the institutional structures, he could have tried his innovations without the institutional approval, in the spirit of a good anarchist who does not recognize the institutional monopolist legitimacy, like me). a missionary visionary is always an educational monopolist, trying to impose their vision on the entire sphere of education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). was martin duberman an educational pluralist or an educational monopolist? i found a letter from martin duberman’s colleague from temple university, who raised this issue with him. on october 27, 1970, howard kirschenbaum charged duberman with a missionary approach in a presentation about his innovative teaching: i had one major concern. although you said near the beginning you weren't trying to decide the right teaching style for everyone, i thought you often tended in that direction. i sensed this is an unresolved issue for you – one part of intellectually believing there are several valid teaching styles, another part emotionally believing that your experiences point to some pretty definite directions for all teachers (there may be a lot of projection in that attribution.). i think this could get you in trouble in two ways: first, i’ve seen too many examples of traditional democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a86 teachers being very successful teachers in given situations to believe that student centered teaching is the only way to facilitate significant learnings. secondly, by trying to by trying to suggest one best methods, you can easily miss the possibilities for organizing university education so that it allows for diversity – good lectures, good learnby-discussion leaders, good encounter groups, formal and informal learning groups, etc. (howard kirschenbaum to md, october 27, 1970, in box 16, “k-l” folder, duberman papers nypl, archive). based on the spirit of his entire educational enterprise, i am leaning toward accepting that martin was an educational pluralist, despite some of his occasional slippages into missionary rhetoric. martin duberman was clearly a radical educational revolutionary and not a gradualist educational reformer. his authorial educational vision could not be tried piecemeal or gradually. it was all or nothing. of course, martin duberman was forced to compromise, especially about his ecological communitarian vision of education, where students and teachers must live together and unescapably experience each other in everyday communal life. but his core of the unstructured education – no grades, no mandatory attendance, no mandatory assignments, small class size41 – must be enacted fully and simultaneously, in his view. the uncompromised adoption of his innovation was a part of his vision for education. how do i feel about this uncompromised educational radicalism? ambivalent. i agree with martin that education is defined by values and goals that require a radical rethinking of the entire practice of education. however, in contrast to martin, i currently believe that the primary authorship of education belongs to the student and not to the teacher. students author their education by engaging in a critical examination of their own educational desires and lack of them. the teacher’s pedagogical authorship is secondary, aiming at helping the student during the student’s educational journey if and when it is needed for the student. in other words, martin designed an educational journey primarily for himself, “i had set up the seminar on an experimental basis… chiefly for my own sake” (duberman, 1969, p. 279), although i am sure a lot of exciting and deep learning occurred for his students. his ontological life project sought a good, meaningful, and fulfilling life for himself (cf. the notion of "taking care of the self as a practice of freedom," foucault, 1988) while overcoming dramatic events of “me-in-crisis” (duberman, 2009b, p. 207). his good life includes other people’s and his own concerns about their personal and collective well-being. it involves political, social, educational, and artistic activism. in education, he tried to discover how to build his own good life with his students. however, as to his students, martin rarely set up and legitimized students’ asserting their own ideas about their own education, ideas which might challenge duberman’s views of a good education. rather he discouraged this testing through criticism of encounter groups or expected that the students’ strong academic authorship, educational activism, and responsibility for their own education would naturally emerge when he gave them freedoms. and yet, letters from his former students testify how the history 308 seminar significantly changed their views of education and life – at least, some of them. again, the issue for me is how critically examined these transformations were by the students. recently, i tried to achieve students’ testing their own education by designing multiple pedagogical regimes42 that my students can try, modify, and choose for themselves (matusov, 2020a, 2021c). 41 small class size was achieved by splitting a class into two sections – by doing that, martin duberman actually doubled his teaching load. 42 here is a brief outline of the four pedagogical regimes: first, “open syllabus for self-responsible learners and lurkers” – students design their own syllabus (curriculum, learning activities, instruction, assessment) with or without my help and help of other students (this seems somewhat similar to what martin’s student sherm proposed in his first unstructured seminar in 1966). second, “opening syllabus for other-responsible learners” – my initial class design that involves curricular choices and my requirements that gradually open for the students’ revisions. third, “non-traditional closed syllabus for credential students” – a set of tests and exams with preparation materials for students to pass (similar to getting a driving license, where students are prepared for mastery, judged by an democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a87 one of the recurring themes in martin’s self-reflective writing was his impatience. i think impatience is not just a part of his psychological temperament or even pedagogical one (see the progressive education paradigm above) but also a part of his life philosophy. in my view, martin is impatient with the machinery of human life (matusov, 2020b). by the machinery of human life, i mean attendance to basic human necessities – income, shelter, social status, safety, survival, health, self-esteem, and so on for the person themselves and loved ones (cf. the pyramid of needs, maslow, 1943) – that has consumed a lot of human attention and effort since the dawn of the humanity. aristotle argued that a truly free person is one whose life is not dominated by his (sic!) attendance to necessities but rather dedicated to the pursuit of virtues and noble causes (arendt, 1958). it is not by chance that ancient greeks invented the notion of “school,” which in greek means “leisure.” however, education as a form of leisure is aimed at self-actualization, self-growth, creativity, and critical deconstruction43 – educational goals dear to martin’s heart – was only possible in ancient greece because of slavery, exploitation of greek peasants, artisans, women, and exclusion of foreigners. in other words, there was a special machinery of human life that made possible the ancient greeks’ ideal of education as leisure (for some). i sense that martin wanted to minimize the machinery of life – he often disregards it (and frequently feels ambivalent or even guilty when he does not). i can hear/imagine him saying, “damn this machinery! i don’t accept the machinery of life! i don’t want to be a part of this machinery! i don’t want my life, anybody’s life, to be shaped by this monster! machinery is oppressive! it’s conservative! it is suffocating! i don’t want to see it!” instead, he seems to view the main cause of the oppressiveness of conventional education in deeply-rooted tradition of authoritarianism – “this conservative, conformist country” (duberman, 1996, p. 70) – that can only be overruled by a strong collective will of the people. i sense voluntarism in his approach, which may come from his attraction to anarchism and rejection of the marxist sociological analysis. in my view, martin is definitely right that his vision of education is incompatible with the mainstream instrumental education aimed at serving this machinery of life (matusov, 2020b). i think he is right that intrinsic education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019), as an existential human need (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017), cannot be institutionalized or “structured,” using martin’s own words. rejection of the given, “being not from this world,” helps to envision a radically new possibility and shake yourselves from colonization by naturalized oppression (i.e., an oppression that is masquerading as being “natural” and thus unavoidable in principle). however, i think that in his years of teaching and even currently, our society is not ready to liberate itself from the yoke of the machinery of human life; a large majority of people must attend to their necessities. maybe with the emergence of global technological unemployment (keynes, 1963), when the economy starts requiring fewer and fewer people for its successful functioning, economic, cultural, political, and social conditions, backed by dignified universal basic income, for intrinsic education may emerge. until then, i believe that intrinsic education, to which martin has been so devoted, can be possible only in some temporary oases, here and there, on a very limited and compromised scale (matusov, 2020b). but martin was (is?) very impatient with this idea. i suspect that he might call my patience conservative, too much accepting the oppressive given. “the height of realism, i've often argued, is to recognize that what does not yet exist, what has never been tried, is nonetheless possible; to reject so expert). fourth, “non-syllabus for prisoner of education” – unconditional giving a passing grade (b minus) for students who are forced to take my course by the institution, but they find it irrelevant and useless for themselves (to avoid education becoming “a cruel and unusual punishment” for those students). the students have 5 first weeks of the grace period to make a decision about their pedagogical regime. 43 cf. socrates’ motto in the apology dialogue, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” democracy, dialogism, therapy, progressivism, anarchism, and other values in martin duberman’s innovative pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.385 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a88 called ‘historical necessity’ in the name of what is not yet known. in a real sense, that has been, and remains, the sum of my political philosophy" (duberman, 1996, pp. 82-83)44. <<martin duberman: yes, i finally found "nirvana" when i was able to shift my academic subject to the lbgtq world and to students for whom the material was essential to their being. yes, too, to your recognition that i do all that i can to minimize "the machinery of life." i'm a born scholar-hermit, happiest when alone and absorbed in an engrossing project. you've definitely got my number!>> i feel a huge affinity and kinship with martin duberman, the authorial educator of therapeutic unstructured education. first, i believe that martin was an author of his unique pedagogy and is thus a part of my professional society of pedagogical authors. second, i have been attracted to many of his educational paradigms (in the order of the significance for me): ontological dialogism, democratic education, attention to educational ecology, and rejection of teacher orientation (as my own philosophically unresolved struggle). i do not have much interest in therapeutic group dynamics, hippie organic paradigm, and communitarianism. and i reject progressive education. third, we have somewhat similar struggles with the hegemony of progressive education and the monopoly of conventional education based on foisted education and its ideology of the kantian educational paternalism (matusov, 2020c, 2020d, 2021b). fourth, i highly respect and admire the brutal honesty of his critical reflections on his innovative educational practice with its, at times, undesired, frustrating, and disturbing outcomes (e.g., students’ disengagement). martin faced his deep doubts without becoming paralyzed or retreating into conventional pedagogy. if he did not write about some negative aspects or consequences of his innovative practice that i might notice, it is because i believe he simply was not aware of them (or disagreed with me) but rather tried to hide them from others and himself. like him, i try to juggle my faith in humanistic pedagogy and my doubts about it. martin duberman is a huge inspiration and a source of professional learning for me and, i hope, for other authorial educators who might be interested in martin’s journey into his “therapeutic unstructured education.” <<martin duberman: reading your essay i felt in many instances that you understand the martin duberman of the late sixties better than he understood himself! sometimes i even felt that you still do have insights into my personality and perspectives on education deeper than my own. for all of which i thank you45.>> references arendt, h. 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(1971). the classroom as microcosm. college english, 33(3), 259-267. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word rapanta et al., authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences, (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a65 authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences: a pragmatic approach to classroom dialogue and argumentation chrysi rapanta universidade nova de lisboa, portugal fabrizio macagno universidade nova de lisboa, portugal abstract goal. the problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. in this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. method. we describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five european countries. the corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. we also coded students’ arguments according to toulmin’s elements and distinguished between lowand high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. findings. our findings show the predominance of the so-called discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. we discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes. keywords: authenticity, dialogue, argumentation, toulmin, walton chrysi rapanta (ph.d. in communication, 2011) works as a researcher in the field of argumentation and education at the institute of philosophy at the universidade nova de lisboa. she has coordinated national and international projects on argumentation and dialogical practices in education, closely collaborating with teachers from various contexts and educational levels. she has authored several papers on argumentbased teaching published on major international peer-reviewed journals such as review of educational research, educational research review, educational psychology review, teaching & teacher education, and learning, culture & social interaction. she is also the author of “argumentation strategies in the classroom” (2019, vernon press). fabrizio macagno (ph.d. in linguistics, 2008) works as an assistant professor in the departments of philosophy and communication at the universidade nova de lisboa. he has coordinated national and international projects on dialogical practices in different contexts, including education and medical communication. he authored several papers on definition, informal fallacies, argumentation schemes, and dialogue theory published in major international peer-reviewed journals such as journal of pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, argumentation, philosophy and rhetoric, informal logic, and pragmatics and cognition. his most important publications include the books argumentation schemes (cambridge issn: 2325-3290 (online) authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a66 university press 2008), emotive language in argumentation (cup 2014), interpreting straw man argumentation (springer 2017), and statutory interpretation: pragmatics and argumentation (cup 2021). ïïò introduction teacher questioning techniques have been the focus of extensive research since the last century, which showed a lack of authenticity and the predominance of a pre-defined, ready-to-use, and not an opento-dialogue pattern, known as initiation-response-evaluation, henceforth ire (lemke, 1990; mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975). although ire has served as a basis to represent the regularities and cohesion of moves in educational contexts (howe et al., 2019; khong et al., 2019; littleton & howe, 2010a), its use in educational research and classroom interventions and, more importantly, its limitations thereof, revealed the problem of a shared definition of what counts as a dialogical interaction (bohm, 1996; nikulin, 2010). can dialogues be analyzed and stimulated through discourse structures? how are participants’ dialogical dispositions and values related to dialogical engagement? what are the defining features of a dialogue, and is its outcome one of them? answers to these debated questions involve philosophical, linguistic, and pragmatic considerations that need to be woven together (bunt, 2000; ganesh & holmes, 2011; kecskes, 2017). these complex theoretical questions underlie a very practical problem in education, namely determining the conditions that affect the quality of classroom dialogues (howe & abedin, 2013). the general definition of productive dialogue as a dialogue in which students actively construct understandings from the possibilities presented (littleton & howe, 2010b, p. 6) leaves out an important dimension of dialogicity (hähkiöniemi et al., 2019; linell, 1998), which is students’ development of accountable thinking and reasoning (michaels et al., 2008). on the other side of the classroom dialogue research continuum, argumentation scholars emphasize the need to look for arguments-as-products of reasoning with others as an indicator of classroom discourse quality (see, for instance, kuhn, 2015; reznitskaya et al., 2008). although such approaches have often been characterized as highly instrumental (matusov, 2009), as they consider dialogue as a means to argumentative reasoning, they are proven useful when it comes to teaching teachers how to create and maintain a productive discourse classroom environment (see for instance, osborne et al., 2019; webb et al., 2008). the two fields, namely dialogic pedagogies, on the one hand (aiming, in general, at the creation of norms and conditions that foster genuine interactions and inquiries between teachers and students and among students alike), and argument-based pedagogies, on the other (aiming, in general, at the reasoning by-products of a productive classroom dialogue), are complementary in view of fostering classroom interactions that are both inclusive and sophisticated. one problem that cuts across the fields of dialogic and argument-based pedagogies is defining the type of questions-prompts that elicit high-quality student talk. the dialogic teaching efforts of performing dialogue facilitatory moves, such as uptakes, revoicing, mirroring, etc., are normally studied independently of the effect they may have on students’ talk. when the two aspects (teachers’ efforts and students’ talk) are studied together, the focus is on students’ dialogic learning outcomes, such as elaborations and queries (hennessy et al., 2021; howe et al., 2019; vrikki et al., 2019). moreover, most of the studies are dialogueoriented, in the sense that they focus on the process of developing arguments rather than the quality thereof. however, to understand how and to what extent students’ talk is of high quality – and thus whether the teachers’ moves actually affect students’ argumentative discourse – it is necessary to analyze the complexity of the reasoning manifested in their arguments. this paper focuses on the interrelationship between teachers’ dialogue prompts and students’ reasoning outputs. more specifically, our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a67 prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. to fulfill this goal, we propose the present exploratory study grounded on three different aspects of classroom dialogue analysis: (a) dialogue quality of whole-class dialogical sequences, defined as productive dialogues (as defined by the number of students participating with arguments), constructive dialogues (as defined by the higher complexity of arguments produced), or both productive and constructive dialogues (rapanta & felton, 2022); (b) types of dialogue prompts, based on walton’s (2010, 2022) argumentation dialogue types (explained below); and (c) types of student arguments, analyzed in terms of their structural complexity based on toulmin’s (1958) argument pattern. our work has three basic objectives. first, we intend to provide a dialogical classification of the questions used by the teachers to interact with students, operationalizing their detection and use and empirically identifying the types of prompts that can lead to and stimulate dialogues of higher argumentative quality. this analysis aims at operationalizing the concept of “authentic questions” normally used in education. second, from a practical point of view, this classification can become a useful tool for teachers to develop their dialogical activities in the classroom. finally, from an academic perspective, the use of argumentation theories for addressing a crucial issue in dialogical pedagogy (the use of questions) and the relationship between questions, dialogues, and arguments can show how the two fields of dialogical pedagogy and argument-based teaching can be considered as complementary to each other in some crucial respect. even though the former is focused on the process and the dialogical exchanges and the second on a specific product of dialogues (the arguments), the instruments and the perspectives of the two approaches are not incompatible – indeed, they can be integrated and developed for both practical and theoretical purposes. literature review research on the relationship between dialogical activities and learning has led to the development of the broad field of dialogic pedagogy (wegerif et al., 2020; wilkinson et al., 2017). different trends and currents characterize this area, as well as theoretical foundations (baktinian, vygotskian, freirian, habermasian, among others), so it is maybe more correct to speak about dialogic pedagogies rather than using one definition that fits all purposes. rather than focusing on the differences among dialogic pedagogy scholars, which is not among our goals (you may see asterhan et al., 2020; kim & wilkinson, 2019, for useful insights on such diversity), we will briefly overview some commonly accepted distinctions, which will serve as the basis for outlining our approach to classroom dialogue. after that, we will focus on a central aspect of it, which is teacher questions-prompts, and the problem of defining their authenticity. our approach to classroom dialogue the first distinction that characterizes research on educational dialogue is between classroom dialogue and classroom interaction. while dialogues are interactive, interactions are not necessarily dialogic: a teacher-students interaction, for example, can be authoritative (and not dialogic) when one meaning [the teacher’s one] is presented as true. this interactive scenario does not allow the expression of other points of view, and the students cannot make sense of the teacher’s discourse by setting their “own answering words to the words of the teacher” (mortimer & scott, 2003, p. 122). this distinction is successfully grasped by mercer’s (1995) distinction of three types of classroom interactions: the disputational, which is interactive but not dialogical, as participants do not share a common goal; the cumulative, which is dialogical but not interactive, as participants are not interested in interanimating their ideas; and the exploratory, which is both dialogic and interactive, as participants engage critically and constructively with each other’s ideas. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a68 a second difference is drawn between classroom dialogue and classroom talk. a talk is not necessarily a dialogue – only when it meets specific characteristics. an example is the “accountable talk,” which is defined by the participants’ use of certain talk moves that instantiate a culture of deliberation, therefore, a culture of dialogue (resnick et al., 2010). this talk instantiates reasoned, socialized discourse and thus manifests a high-quality dialogue. the disputational talk mentioned above is an example of a nondialogue, as certain dialogue norms are not respected. an example of cumulative talk is a low-quality dialogue, as the focus is not on the construction of shared meanings and their negotiation thereof, which is a key aspect of dialogue (banathy & jenlink, 2005). third, not all classroom talk/interaction events are dialogically the same, as authentic dialogue can be manifested in some events while in others it may not emerge or appear in lower degrees. certain moments are more productive or constructive than others, depending on the participants’ compliance with the implicit or explicit norms of discussion and reasoning. for example, participants may differently abide by discussion norms such as the conversational ground rules (mercer & howe, 2012), mirroring alexander’s dialogic teaching principles of collectivity, reciprocity, and supportiveness (alexander, 2018). also, they can apply – to different degrees – reasoning norms, such as the epistemological norms governing argumentative discourse and dialogue. these norms are gradually internalized while children and adolescents engage in dialogic argumentation. for example, students may use strategical meta-argument statements criticizing, defending, or just considering the merits of a specific argument (zillmer & kuhn, 2018). to understand which moments of dialogue are more dialogic than others, it is possible to distinguish between two different perspectives. from a dialogic vygotskian approach, certain moves are considered better than others because they result in a higher dialogue quality. in contrast, from a teleological vygotskian approach, certain moves are considered to be more productive than others because they lead to better dialogue outcomes (for the distinction between dialogic and teleological perspectives, see clarà, 2021). a common aspect between these two approaches is that dialogue quality/productivity is grasped by similar processes or outcomes such as the level of interthinking – or the development of a dialogue on previous contributions (littleton & mercer, 2013; mercer, 2002); the presence of sophisticated arguments – namely claims supported by clear evidential support and explanations of the links between the claim and the support (mcneill, 2011); or the manifestation of metadialogue or metatalk, namely the talk about the quality of the dialogue itself (krabbe, 2003; newman, 2017). in this study, we adopt a teleological vygotskian approach to classroom dialogue, focusing on those dialogue moves that are more productive or constructive than others because of their facilitation of students’ participation in the construction of arguments. we understand that other dialogue by-products, such as students’ uptakes or expansions of others’ contributions, are also important; however, we focus our attention on students’ arguments. these are defined considering the shared and common definition used in argumentation theory as “a social and verbal means of trying to resolve, or at least to contend with, a conflict or difference that has arisen or exists between two (or more) parties” (walton, 1990, p. 411). argumentative moves are thus captured by considering the disputable nature of the subject matter (labov & fanshel, 1977), and include any expression of a justification, reason, or comparison between arguments about an issue at hand, which moves the dialogue forward (see also hennessy et al., 2016; macagno et al., 2022). moreover, we adopt a pragmatic analytical approach to educational dialogue (see, also, rapanta & macagno, 2022), according to which for a dialogue to exist, participants’ shared goal should be manifested through discourse, so that a dialogue can be defined as a certain activity type (levinson, 1992), such as an inquiry, a negotiation, a deliberation, a persuasion, etc. (see walton, 2022, 2010 for a typology authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a69 of argumentation dialogues). for such a decision to be taken a posteriori, namely what is the participants’ shared goal in a classroom dialogue transcript1, analysts may look for specific dialogue moves that initiate a micro-dialogue on a particular topic and decide which dialogical intention of all parties involved predominates in discourse. in practice, this may mean that a participant, e.g., a teacher, initiates a sequence with the goal of having students persuade each other about an issue, but the other party, in this case the students, may have difficulty understanding the task, and therefore an information-seeking dialogue may be initiated instead (for more about dialogue shifts see walton & krabbe, 1995). the question of authentic questions although questioning is the most common teaching strategy for eliciting student responses, to be effective, they should stimulate high order thinking, such as analysis and inquiry, and encourage students’ reflective and creative answers (eadie et al., 2022; myhill, 2006). in the educational literature, authentic questions are usually separated from non-authentic ones on the basis of whether the question invites several often conflicting answers or only one pre-defined answer, i.e., the one that is “in the teacher’s head.” in other words, authentic questions are considered the ones “for which the asker does not maintain interpretive authority and does not indicate a pre-scripted answer” (levine et al., 2022, p. 194). therefore, the use of such questions implies a non-authoritative epistemological stance (boyd & markarian, 2015). the question that arises is: how can such a stance be manifested in discourse and, particularly, in dialogue? this question gets even more problematic to answer if we consider the growing interest in the field of education in analyzing the questions’ function rather than their semantic and syntactic form (myhill, 2006; schaffalitzky, 2022). from a communicative point of view, an apparently “closed” question (which semantically provides only a limited set of answers) may open the dialogue space, while an apparently “open” question (which can be answered in different ways) may close it. moreover, the vast majority of dialogic teaching researchers have focused on how to transform “the third turn” in the ire pattern by replacing the “evaluation” with other, more dialogic talk moves, such as revoicing, uptaking, mirroring, etc. (edwards-groves et al., 2014; nystrand et al., 2003). the “first turn,” namely the initiation part of a dialogical sequence, has been much less investigated. what kind of questions may serve as authentic dialogue initiation prompts, and what are the differences between them? based on other scholars (boyd & markarian, 2011; lefstein, 2010; levine et al., 2022) and expanding on our own work (macagno, submitted.; rapanta, forthcoming), we will try to look at questions as part of a dialogue, and not as isolated pieces of discourse. in other words, defining the “openness” or “authenticity” of a question only makes sense when it is situated in an authentic or genuine dialogue. in everyday contexts, “a true, meaningful dialogue requires (a) some common ground among participants (to escape dialogue-of-the-deaf), (b) some significant differences (to avoid echo-dialogue), (c) a willingness of both to be open to ‘the other’” (fishelov, 2008, p. 336), and (d) a “we intention” in dialogue, namely a shared dialogue goal among participants (weigand, 2010). in the next section, we will argue that these four conditions are met by the so-called argumentation dialogues. argumentation dialogues as authentic dialogues argumentation theory may offer a solution to the problem of classroom dialogue authenticity, as the epistemic and communicative goals coincide: participants engage in argumentation because there is always something they need to know more, better, or differently (unless they want to impose their own ideas, therefore leading to eristic argumentation). therefore, an argumentation dialogue is developed in classroom discourse when the participants (teacher and/or students) align to the goal of resolving an issue for which more than one perspective is necessary. in this sense, argumentation goals and dialogues are 1 we are aware of the trascription paradox of assigning certain intentions to participants without having direct access to them. for more about transcription as an interpretive act see bird, 2005. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a70 potentially authentic because the other’s perspective is genuinely searched for and considered. according to hadjioannou (2007), authentic discussions “are motivated by authentically dialogic purposes, and the participants’ objective is to reach new and more sophisticated understandings” (p. 371). therefore, when an argumentation dialogue goal is mutually pursued by the classroom discussion participants, we can infer that an authentic dialogue takes place. different argumentation goals may emerge, according to participants’ initial and final epistemic states, as argumentation theorist douglas walton (2022, 2010) suggests. among these goals, he distinguishes information-seeking (we rename it to information-sharing to make it more appropriate for classroom contexts), inquiry, negotiation, deliberation, persuasion, and discovery. the metadialogical dialogue is also included based on several authors (e.g., bereiter & scardamalia, 2016; hennessy et al., 2016; krabbe, 2003), which consists in negotiating the conditions for making dialogue possible. table 1 presents a synthesis of the different argumentation dialogue goals. table 1. types of dialogue goals type initial situation main goal participants’ aims side benefits 1. persuasion conflicting points of view resolving such conflicts by verbal means persuading the other(s) • develop and reveal positions • build up confidence • influence onlookers • add to prestige 2. negotiation conflict of interests & need for cooperation making a deal getting the best out of it for oneself • reach an agreement • build up confidence • reveal positions • influence onlookers • add to prestige 3. inquiry general ignorance increasing knowledge and reaching an agreement finding a “proof” or destroy one • add to prestige • gain experience • raise funds 4. deliberation need for action reaching a decision or an evaluation influencing the outcome • reach an agreement • develop and reveal positions • express preferences 5. discovery need to find an explanation of facts choose best hypothesis for testing find and defend a suitable hypothesis • develop and reveal positions • gain experience • reach an agreement 6. informationsharing personal ignorance spreading knowledge and revealing positions gaining, passing on, showing, or hiding personal knowledge • reach an agreement • develop and reveal positions • add to prestige 7. meta-dialogue unclear or unshared meanings or unshared purpose of the interaction reaching an agreement concerning the interaction establishing a more strategic meaning or purpose • clarifying concepts • acquiring knowledge • reach an agreement about the nature of task/type of dialogue authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a71 walton’s types of dialogues were intended to describe whole dialogues or sequences. however, they have also been developed partially or fully into coding schemes that capture how interlocutors propose different types of dialogue through their moves (bereiter & scardamalia, 2016; macagno & bigi, 2020; rapanta & christodoulou, 2019). under this latter perspective, adopted in this paper, the proposal of a dialogue type (usually by the teacher) may be manifested in an initiating question-prompt, which can be accepted and continued by the student, or rejected by ignoring it or shifting the dialogue to another type. clearly, this latter option is possible when the dialogue mirrors a real-life conversational exchange (such as in the aforementioned dialogue types); in the context of an examination or testing, opting out or negotiating the dialogical activity is much more difficult due to the authority of one party (the teacher). in case of the aforementioned dialogues, the students’ (adequate or inadequate) response to the prompt can be identified in two ways: (a) the dialogue sequence continues the dialogue and does not shift to another type (usually via a different type of prompt); and (b) as most of the dialogue types are argumentative (in the sense of promoting argument-as-process), arguments-as-products emerge within the discussion. this pragmatic, dialogical approach to questions as invitation moves within and for a dialogue (white, 1993, p. 30) can provide a theoretically grounded alternative to the classical dichotomy between “authentic” and “inauthentic” questions (nystrand & gamoran, 1991). as widdowson pointed out, a move (such as a prompt or a question) can be described according to two types of appropriateness: to the linguistic context and to the communicative situation. questions whose answer is already known by the teacher (the so-called “unauthentic” questions) are situationally unnatural as their communicative function does not correspond to the normal, ordinary one (widdowson, 1978, pp. 6–7). as pointed out above, “unauthentic” questions propose a dialogical activity (the examination) that is defined by a specific institutional setting (the school) and specific authoritative roles (teacher vs. student). however, this setting does not mirror real-life dialogical activities – and thus the ordinary joint verbal activities through which the interlocutors develop a shared understanding and construct their knowledge through the use of arguments. widdowson underscored that “unnatural” or inauthentic questions result in limited learning effects (widdowson, 1972, 1978, p. 18), as students learn only a narrow dimension of the subject matter, ignoring other crucial aspects. the distinction is thus not between the relationship between the teacher and the information requested from the students, but among the types of dialogue that a question proposes and that can promote in different degrees specific abilities or aspects of knowledge construction (bereiter & scardamalia, 2016, p. 14). on this perspective, the dichotomy between authentic vs. inauthentic questions can be interpreted as a difference between simulated (or testing) exchanges, and dialogues that mirror reallife learning situations, namely in which the participants are confronted with a problem, doubt, or lack of information, and they need to overcome it through the use of arguments. the present study in this study, we focus on teacher questions emerging in a large, multi-country and multi-age classroom discourse corpus (see data collection about details), and in particular, the questions-prompts that mark the beginning of a teacher-student argumentative interaction (therefore on initiation, rather than follow-up questions). in particular, our goal is to identify what types of teachers’ questions engage students in developing dialogues mirroring real-life learning and dialogical experiences and encouraging the coconstruction of knowledge (segal & lefstein, 2016), represented in the aforementioned argumentative dialogue types. our research question is: what types of teacher questions may function as prompts initiating argumentative whole-class dialogues that encourage more complex types of arguments? we follow a microanalytic approach such as the one used by o’connor et al. (2015) to research the use of “academically productive talk” in classrooms. in addition, we define dialogue quality in terms of argument construction, identifying three different types of whole-class discussion instances, namely: (a) teacherauthentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a72 mediated productive (at least three students producing arguments) but not constructive (level 1 arguments only, see data analysis below) sequences; (b) teacher-student constructive exchanges (at least two subsequent argument moves by same or different students on the same issue with the latter being of higher complexity than the former); (c) teacher-mediated both productive and constructive sequences (at least three students producing arguments, with at least one argument being of a higher complexity). data collection and analysis the data analyzed in this paper come from a large-scale educational study as part of a european project aiming at the development of cultural literacy learning skills among students from 5 to 15 years old. in particular, we focus on a corpus2 of transcribed interactions from 111 lessons distributed across five countries (uk, portugal, spain, cyprus and germany) and three age groups (preprimary, primary, and secondary). all lessons focused on cultural literacy discussions, defined as discussions around cultural literacy themes and dispositions such as tolerance, empathy and inclusion, essential as part of any civic education curriculum (see also rapanta et al., 2021). also, all lessons used a cultural text (pre-selected short animated film or picturebook) as a springboard for discussion. our micro-analysis took into consideration two types of moves: (a) teachers’ questioning prompts at the beginning of a dialogical sequence or exchange3; and (b) students’ reasoning moves emerging as part of the same sequence or exchange. we only considered sequences in which at least three different students participated with arguments, and exchanges in which teacher’s mediation resulted in an argument with a higher complexity (see below) than the one previously stated. as mentioned previously, our goal of analysis was to define the types of teacher initiating dialogue prompts – herein defined as proposals of dialogues – that can encourage students’ engagement in authentic dialogue, manifested in (a) students’ active participation in the sequence, and (b) students’ construction of arguments. coding of dialogue prompts we define initiating questions as dialogue prompts; therefore, we consider them not as isolated constructs but as intentional units manifesting a shared dialogue goal such as the ones presented in table 1. the following prompts initiating productive and constructive sequences and exchanges emerged in our corpus: (a) information-sharing prompts, aimed at promoting the expression of personal viewpoints and information but without establishing interpretative connections with the cultural text at hand; (b) inquiry prompts, aimed at encouraging the identification of textual information that can be used as evidence to support a pre-defined viewpoint; (c) discovery prompts, intended to elicit interpretations about certain aspects of the text; (d) persuasion prompts, aimed at encouraging students to adopt a perspective and justify it with evidence (either personal or found in the texts); (e) deliberation prompts, consisting in requesting taking up a stance as part of a dichotomous issue and justifying it with evidence (either personal or found in the texts); and (f) metadialogical prompts, encouraging a discussion on the nature and goals of dialogue itself. table 2 shows an example of each. 2 the corpus is available at rapanta, gonçalves, et al., 2021. 3 the corpus was segmented into sequences according to the topic and goal shift criteria described by schegloff, 2007. the identification of exchanges, as parts of sequences, was only done when a higher complexity reasoning structure was elicited at oneto-one level as part of teacher-student interaction. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a73 table 2. types of questions as dialogue prompts. type of dialogue prompt example information-sharing t and [the father] thought [boxing] was for girls ... and what's your opinion on the fact the father thought it was for girls? s i think it doesn't matter whether dancing is for girls or for boys, it's all the same, like football or rugby, they are all sports and hobbies are for everybody, there's not for boys or girls because we are all equal. inquiry τ he felt very sad. so how did you know he was so sad? s11. how did you understand it? s11 from the expression on the face. τ from the expression on his face. very nice. s1? s1 from the eyes. τ what did the ey s from the posture of his body. τ and from the posture of his body. yes, but what did his eyes have? s1 drops were falling. τ drops were falling. what were these drops s1? s1 his tears. discovery t2 the movie was showing the baboon on the moon. why did the sounds of the forest appear before the earth was shown? s23 because he wanted to go to the planet earth and could not… persuasion t shhh. let’s have a look, ok? the boy was…different. why did we say that he was different? s11 because he liked a specific thing, and the father wanted that he liked a different thing. t and why is he different if he likes – i can also like bananas and dislike apples, and i am not diff t and why is he the one who is different, and not his father? s6 because the father was a champion and … […] s1 for the father, it the son who is different, but for the son, the father is different! […] t and for society? […] what do you think? s7 nobody is different. because everyone does what they like, and for someone a specific thing is normal, for someone else it is not; someone likes it and others do not like it… deliberation t what would you do if you were the baboon [left alone on the moon]? s1 morse code. s3 morse code. t explain that. s3 well, since he can turn on and off the moon, then we’d do morse code to communicate with humans. metadialogical t what is home? s [i think home means {unclear} really nice people]. s5 that you live in. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a74 t what is home? somewhere you live? ok. i'll write that in here. (writing) some [...] where you live. s33. s33 it's somewhere safe. s23 it's where we sleep. s19 it's somewhere you buy it. coding of students’ arguments students’ arguments were first identified using a pre-constructed coding scheme that aimed at grasping dialogical discourse units. the “dialogicity” coding scheme is explained in detail in macagno et al. (2022). here, we only focus on students’ reasoning moves, defined as moves providing justifications in support of a viewpoint or advancing arguments against others’ positions, or synthesizing/comparing ideas. for simplicity, we call these reasoning moves ‘arguments.’ in order to grasp the quality of students’ arguments, we further identified their level of complexity, as explained below. arguments’ complexity. in toulmin’s (1958) model, the core structure of an argument (or “skeleton pattern,” as toulmin puts it) is represented by the triad data-claim-warrant, as they are the necessary parts of an argument. claim is the statement put forward by the arguer, data is the necessary premise supporting the claim, and warrant is the inferential rule through which data connects to the claim. toulmin further distinguishes three elements that increase the complexity of an argument, namely the qualifier, the backing, and the rebuttal. the first two concern the strength of one’s argument, which is protected against possible criticisms by limiting the generalizability of the conclusion or its certainty (qualifier) or defending it by providing evidence supporting either the warrant or the data (backing). the rebuttal is the anticipation of the possible conditions under which the argument is no longer acceptable. this model, also known as toulmin’s argument pattern, is represented in figure 1. figure 1. toulmin’s argument pattern (toulmin, 1958), divided into levels of complexity. data claim warrant backing rebuttal qualifier authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a75 the use of the distinct elements that are an extension of the skeleton pattern reveals different argumentative skills and, therefore, different levels of complexity. the use of backings and qualifiers mirrors the speaker’s awareness that his or her arguments are defeasible, and their premises can be questioned or attacked. in particular, the use of evidence as a backing to support a claim reveals students’ epistemological awareness (sandoval & millwood, 2005). similarly, the use of qualifiers (e.g., “most probably,” “to a certain degree,” etc.), largely corresponding to the epistemic modals (rocci, 2019), indicates an advanced knowledge of the epistemological norms guiding argumentation and in particular the defeasible nature of the conclusions that can be supported by natural arguments (walton, 1990, 2006). therefore, the presence of backings and qualifiers can be considered a higher level of complexity than the mere use of the core structure (claim, data, and warrant). the use of rebuttals is an even more complex capacity (foong & daniel, 2010), as it implies the anticipation and thus acknowledgment and representation of a possible or actual different perspective. the presence of this element manifests two distinct kinds of sophisticated argumentative skills, namely 1) a dual perspective – in which another’s opposing point of view concerning the subject matter under discussion is taken into account – or 2) an integrative perspective – i.e., the weighting of pro and con arguments in the presentation of a viewpoint (felton & kuhn, 2001; kuhn & crowell, 2011; kuhn & udell, 2007; nussbaum, 2021). for this reason, the use of rebuttals corresponds to the highest level of complexity. the increased complexity of arguments identified by the appearance of backings, qualifiers, or rebuttals was used as a criterion of the constructiveness of the argumentative interaction. the coding process the coding of the whole corpus, publicly available at (macagno et al., 2022; rapanta, gonçalves, et al., 2021), was carried out by the second author, while 20% of the coded data was double-coded by the first author for inter-rater agreement purposes. for the coding of teachers’ questioning prompts, the percentage of agreement between the coders was 82.5%, while for the coding of toulmin’s elements, upon which the arguments’ complexity was decided, the agreement was 90%. all discrepancies were resolved through discussion, and the second author’s coding was maintained in all instances. findings as previously mentioned, we segmented our corpus in sequences according to the productivity and constructiveness criteria, and we looked at the types of teachers’ prompts initiating each sequence (although we acknowledge that a student may also initiate a classroom discourse sequence, this was not the case for productive and constructive sequences). table 3 shows the distribution of types of prompts across types of sequences (n = 189)4. table 3. types of teacher prompts distributed across productive and constructive sequences. information sharing inquiry persuasion discovery deliberation metadialogical productive & constructive 24 12 23 43 5 5 only productive 12 3 6 26 1 3 only constructive 0 19 5 0 0 2 as shown in table 3, the productivity of teacher-student interactions relates to a type of prompt that we defined above as discovery because of the discovery dialogue goal it promotes. discovery moves 4 this number refers to number of sequences, consisting of several turns each, occurring in whole-class discussion activities. the total corpus also included small-group activities, not considered here. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a76 involve a request and provision of a reason of a specific type – namely, the best possible explanation of a fact, a text, an action, or an element that is at present unexplained. this type of reason is not simply an explanation of a personal perspective (information-sharing): in discovery moves, the speakers ask and provide an interpretation of an objective and external state of affairs, not of a personal perspective. while information-sharing moves cannot be objected to (i cannot reject the reason why my interlocutor came to hold a certain belief), discovery moves are open to discussion, as they concern an observable phenomenon. discovery moves are also different from persuasion moves. the difference lies in two aspects, namely, the overall dialogical goal and the subject matter. the goal of the participants in a persuasion dialogue is to change the opinion of the interlocutor – so that one view “prevails” over the other. discovery moves are intended to assess the force of a hypothesis and test the best possible explanation. moreover, while persuasion moves normally concern opinions – and thus they involve values, preferences, and decisions propositions that are generally accepted and not necessarily true (aristotle, rhetoric, 1357a 3032; walton 1990) – discovery moves address an observable state of affairs, which cannot be denied by the interlocutors. the interlocutors engage in finding the best possible (causal) relation that can explain it in a sort of “retroduction.” in discovery dialogues, it is expected that several students participate expressing their personal theories and interpretations about a specific concept or phenomenon at hand (note that personal opinions and viewpoints about general topics cannot be considered “theories”). an example of a discovery dialogical sequence is presented in table 4. table 4. an example of a dialogical sequence initiated by a discovery prompt (in bold). line speaker speech argument complexity 12022 t who's catching my attention {unclear}? right, any i want to bring this back to whole class now. so anybody who would like to share a thought about where they think the baboon belongs, and you can if you would like to make a connection where you think home is for the baboon and then to finish, we need to just unpack this idea of home a little bit more, like what it means for somewhere to be home. 12023 s22 well what i was thinking, that i think his home is on earth because he might have been of like long ago, i don't know, like 60s or something, nasa used to send animals to space like cats and dogs and monkeys and things like that. he may [...] he may have actually been on earth but he's been taken and tested to be put on a rocket, sent to the moon and then he may have lost power or something so he's lost signals with uhm earth, and then he may have just crash-landed onto the moon. and he's used the resources used from the rocket to build a home there and things like that. cdb 12024 t so you said to build a home on the moon. just leaving that out there a little bit. thank you, s22. and s7 had made that connection as well to kind of some of the nasa investigations using animals in doing so. so s7, can we come to you if you've got something to add? 12025 s7 i'm going to add on someone else on this. i agree with s22 and i'm thinking about something that s16 said 'cos uhm i think that [...] i think that his like home is the moon no no, his home is the earth and he's done something with like nasa to come from somewhere. he's done kind of like sent him up there and then his things like exploded or like shut down and that, like nobody knows how, and it goes crash-land onto the moon, and then he uses all of like his savings and i don't {unclear}, what he's got to help him survive. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a77 12026 t so in your view although he's living there, his home is somewhere else. so home's not so much necessarily to do with where you physically are. 12027 s7 like i could go and live in australia for a month, but that wouldn't be my home. my home is back here. b 12028 t ok. s18. 12029 s18 i'm adding onto s22's, because that well, i didn't know 60 years ago that nasa did do that or if it didn't, but if he does crash-land into space with the rocket, then he would use like the rocket parts. but then i'm also challenging s22 because i don't think that a rocket would have or would be made of like wood and have like paint in it like have like the square windows that you would normally have on like a house or [a door]. rb 12030 s12 [yeah, he could use the] glass or something [from the rocket]. r 12031 s18 [i know but there]but normally if you saw like a rocket, it would be like circles, not squares or lines. r 12032 t so you're saying that [although there's] 12033 s12 [this is all them years ago]. 12034 t this theory with some of you that it's a rocket that's crash-landed, you think from the visual we've had that that's not not a possibility based on what you know about what a rocket might have on it and look like, yeah? s25? 12035 s18 maybe. 12036 s25 i think that his home is on the moon and he was born on the moon, but his his mum and dad raised him, but they realised he got too old for them to stay with him so maybe they went back to earth and just left him there. cd 12037 t so they were initially from earth, but he was born on the moon and they've gone back again? 12038 s25 yeah. 12039 t so home home being home to him meant 'cos that's where he was born. 12040 s25 yeah. the excerpt above is from a primary school classroom in the uk. the class discusses a short animated film, ‘baboon on the moon’ (duriez, 2002), and the teacher’s initiating question is about where the baboon belongs to. five different students participate in the discussion, and all formulated arguments at some point. s225 starts with a medium complexity argument, composed of claim (c), data (d), and backing (b), which is then extended by s7 on line 12027. then s18 challenges s22 with an evidencebased rebuttal (rb), s12 adds to the challenge, and s22 replies back. finally, on line 12036, s25 expresses a different theory regarding where the baboon is from. in all these instances, the teacher is supportive, revoicing students’ contributions and making reformulations when necessary. this was considered a sequence that was both productive (as at least three students participated with arguments) and constructive (as there was at least one argument with a higher complexity). in our corpus we also had a relatively high number of discovery whole-class discussion sequences that were productive, but the level of students’ arguments remained low, meaning that the participant students did not feel motivated to go further in their theories’ construction and justification. an example of 5 all students were given codes for anonymity reasons; no pseudonyms were used due to the large size of the corpus. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a78 a low-argument (productive but not constructive, in the terms we used above) discovery dialogical sequence is presented in table 5. table 5. an example of a low-argument dialogical sequence initiated by a discovery prompt (in bold). line speaker speech argument complexity 7036 t (…) now, i'm going to say this again uhm is the baboon at home? now, let's turn this around and look at our earlier earlier on, i asked you about what is home or what is a home. this is what you said. (uncovers the board) now, is the baboon at home? 7037 s no. 7038 t put your hand up if you think yes. put your hand up if you think no (several hands raised). wow! noone thinks yes? goodness me. right, everyone thinks the baboon is not at home? 7039 ss no. 7040 t interesting. 7041 s12 no, i think he is at home. 7042 t because? 7043 s12 because uhm his home was there and i think […] his […] house got on was being rolled onto a rocket and taken to the moon. cd 7044 s6 i agree with s12 because, actually, the moon might be his home if 'cos he might have lived on earth but then he might have moved house and he wanted to go to the moon and that is where he might've wanted to live. but then he might've wanted to go back to earth and he might have wished he didn't move to the moon. cd 7045 t right. interesting. i'm coming to you in a minute (pointing to s11). 7046 s8 i agree with s12 'cos – cos the {tornado} might've picked up the house and moved it to the moon 7047 t right. so, we've got two different theories here. he may have accidentally ended up on the moon or he may have moved to the moon and realised, 'actually, i'm not sure if i like the moon anymore. i'd like to go home.' do you want what would you like to say (indicating to s11)? 7048 s11 well his actual home was actually over here, where earth is (indicating on floor). 7049 t right. 7050 s11 and then he probably got cut down 'cos someone might have took him from his normal house to the moon. cd 7051 t what got cut down? 7052 s11 cut down so he can't be with his family again. 7053 t so, what, what got cut down? 7054 s11 that they could never be together again. 7055 t what so like his house or? authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a79 7056 s11 well that well […] he probably didn't want to be cut down from earth all the way to the moon, which is over here (indicating on floor), but then he actually realised that his actual family wasn't on the moon. it's actually back where on the earth. 7057 t right. i'm gonna open this up one more time. so, i'm gonna let you talk when you like but try not to speak over other people, using that sentence stem (pointing to board) one last time. 7058 t so, who do you agree with s6, s12, s11? and then i'm gonna let you guys go {unclear} for a couple of minutes, ok? 7059 s24 i agree with […] s2 because a tornado could only be in one place. cw 7060 s5 [i agree with s8 it's because uhm if a tornado would suck up a person, it would maybe send him up into space and he would maybe [{unclear}]. 7061 s11 i disagree with s5 because […] a tornado a tornado can't fly and it can't barely fly. cd 7062 t i wonder if anyone's got any viewpoints that are not about tornados. 7063 s [i disagree with s8 because] you do know that tornadoes can only spin on land. cw 7064 t we have we've, we've talked about that, yeah. 7065 s they can't fly in the from the space from the moon to the earth. 7066 t we, we have i think we've established that. so, [as i said] 7067 t guys? we're thinking about whether the baboon feels he belongs on the moon or whether the baboon is at home or not. 7068 s i i disagree with s6 because, if tornadoes can go reach high and they can go up to the moon. i think s8's correct because tornadoes can go very high. cd 7069 t right. the excerpt above is about the same film (baboon on the moon), and the teacher’s initiating question (“is the baboon at home?”) is similar to the teacher’s question in table 4. the goal of the dialogue is for students to discover the most plausible theory regarding whether or not the moon is baboon’s home. at least six students participated (in some instances, it was difficult to identify which student was speaking, which is why the code s), formulating their theories. however, the level of argumentative reasoning remains low (at a “skeleton” pattern). no evidence from the film was used to support one theory or another, and no evidence-based rebuttals were made. moreover, it seems that students were “stuck” on one theory (the idea that baboon was moved to the moon by a tornado), which was not constructive as there was no evidence to support or rebut it. the teacher asks students to change to a different theory (line 7062), but with no success. both dialogues in tables 4 and 5 were prompted as discovery dialogues; however, only in the first one were students genuinely absorbed in the task of discovering the best explanation based on evidence. this difference was possibly due to different task interpretations and expectations by different participants (see, for example, richards & pilcher, 2015, for dialogical differences in what counts as “discussion”). clearly, other conditions that affect students’ reasoning quality may apply, for example, age. actually, the second, low-argument-quality excerpt presented above is from a younger age group than the first one. still, the problem remains about what the teacher in the second dialogue could have done to further prompt students’ argumentative reasoning. our further analysis reveals a possible answer: almost all teacher prompts leading to a higher level of argument complexity as part of teacher-student dialogical exchanges authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a80 were inquiry prompts, i.e., relating to the dialogue goal of identifying proofs to support a theory. this implies that a possible effective teaching strategy to use throughout a sequence is the use of inquiry prompts to expand on students’ reasoning. table 6 presents some examples of these prompts. table 6. examples* of constructive exchanges with the use of inquiry prompts (in bold). line speaker speech argument complexity 6395 t why was he playing the trumpet? 6396 s23 so his family knew where he was. d 6397 t do you think his family might have been able to hear him? how do you know his family weren't on the moon? 6398 s23 because there was only one. b 7635 t is he is he dying? 7636 s28 no, he's just missing his family. d 7637 t can you build a bit more on that, s28? how do you know he's missing his family, when thinking [about him]? 7638 s28 [because] he was crying in the film. b 8238 s2 i think he wanted to go go back to earth because his family lives there. cd 8239 t you think he wanted to go back to earth because his family lives there. that's right. he wasn't with his family on the moon, was he? 8240 s11 he was [all alone]. b *the examples are from different classes using the same lesson plan. all three examples of constructive teacher-student exchanges presented above show the passage from a low-complexity argument element (c, d) to a higher one (b). to achieve this, the three teachers use inquiry prompts, i.e., asking students to search for proof of what they say in the film, therefore substantiating their interpretations. moreover, in the third example, the higher-complexity argument (use of backing) comes from a different student, further adding to the dialogicity of the class discussion. in summary, our qualitative analysis of the corpus shows that the types of prompts can be related to the quality of the argumentative interaction. when teachers ask questions prompting a discovery dialogue, it is more likely that the following interaction is both productive (several students participating with arguments) and constructive (high-level arguments appear). however, for this to occur, students must understand what discovery is about (their theories need to coordinate with evidence that is available to all), and teachers need to recognize and intervene when students’ theories tend to be grounded on personal assumptions rather than on evidence-based reasoning. when the justifications used by students cannot be put under discussion because they remain at a hypothetical level, as in the example of table 5, then a lowargument sequence may emerge instead. the teacher, in that case, may opt for shifting the dialogue to a different type, for instance, an inquiry dialogue, which would remind the students to search for disputable evidence available to everyone, in that case, from the film they were shown, as in the examples of table 6. discussion the way teachers enact their questioning strategies is central to effective instruction (buchanan hill, 2016; eadie et al., 2022; wilen & clegg jr, 1986). as a consequence, examining how teachers actually formulate their questions, even in “dialogic” classrooms, is key to understanding how teacher-student communicative relations can be improved. in this paper, we looked at teacher questions as goal-oriented pragmatic units, which are aimed at proposing a specific dialogical activity. we classified these dialogue prompts based on walton’s dialogue type categories, summarized in table 1. then, we identified the authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a81 prompts leading to more complex student arguments and promoting students’ participation and reasoning (namely, productive and constructive prompts). our analysis was based on a large (approximately 53.000 turns) multi-country dataset (rapanta, gonçalves, et al., 2021) and revealed that the type of teacher prompt that is more productive and constructive is the so-called discovery prompt. discovery prompts are used when teachers invite students to interpret a specific concept or idea, formulating their own theories with the view of discovering the theory that best matches the available data. in addition, to scaffold students’ arguments at an exchange level, teachers in our corpus also effectively used inquiry prompts, explicitly asking students to use available evidence as a support to their theories. together, these two strategies were shown to be effective in terms of classroom dialogue quality. moreover, we concluded that shifting from one dialogue type to another can be an effective strategy for achieving classroom discourse sequences that are both productive and constructive. these findings can be used for teacher professional development purposes, as they root teacher questions’ authenticity in concrete dialogue functions rather than abstract or irrealistic ideas such as teachers’ genuine ignorance (long, 2018) or epistemological stance (lefstein, 2009). from a theoretical point of view, the paper contributes to a pragmatic operationalization of what authentic questions may look like in whole-class discussions, drawing on a multi-country and multi-age corpus (which adds to the generalizability of our findings). we defined authentic questions as prompts for authentic dialogues and authentic dialogues as verbal interactions characterized by joint goals that promote the development of knowledge through arguments. clearly, authentic dialogue is an activity that is negotiated among the participants, and for this reason, when an argumentation dialogue goal is initiated but not mutually pursued by the interlocutors and shifts to non-argumentative dialogues (such as in the example in table 5), then its productivity and constructiveness decrease. in these cases, the speaker may have missed opportunities for developing his or her dialogue prompt into an authentic dialogue. the difference between a prompt and the following dialogical sequences can be considered as a key difference between an “authentic” and an unauthentic dialogue. a prompt in authentic dialogue is not an imposition but a mere proposal extended to interlocutors equally responsible for the interaction. such an authentic prompt can be thus taken up, ignored, or rejected by the interlocutors in a negotiation of dialogical goals between free agents (kecskes, 2008). thus, the authenticity of a prompt needs to be distinguished from the authentic dialogue that follows, which can only be determined by looking at the dialogue sequence as a whole. in this sense, while in “unauthentic” dialogues – characterized by the request of recollection and repetition – the teacher can impose the dialogical goal without leaving room for negotiation (the authority can test the students, and students need to comply with the authority), authentic dialogues depend only in part on the teacher’s prompts. a prompt can be accepted when it is meaningful to students, who are invited to act as parties equally responsible for the success of the interaction. this characteristic of authentic dialogues can also explain the fact that in our analysis we have found no student-initiated authentic dialogue sequences, despite the presence of prompts thereof. this finding leads to the problem of determining to what extent teachers are able to grant dialogical agency to students: while they have been shown to grant them the agency to accept, continue, or reject a dialogue proposal – enabling them to be active co-constructors of an interaction –, it seems that granting the agency to propose a dialogue is more complex. future research may look at the proposals of authentic dialogues made by students and why/how those potential dialogues were dismissed by the teacher. the study also has some limitations that can suggest future work. for instance, we only focused on teacher prompts, leaving out prompts made by students. a comparison between teacher-guided wholeclass discussions and teacher-free small-group discussions is to be addressed in future research. authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences chrysi rapanta, fabrizio macagno dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.546 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a82 moreover, we looked at students’ reasoning as only being moderated by teacher talk, leaving out other conditions, such as age. a cross-sectional analysis of students’ arguments is also part of our future projects. finally, this approach is grounded on a specific definition of (educational) dialogue as a goal-directed activity whose purpose – at the macro, meso, or micro level – can be identified through discourse analysis. this view is not shared by other researchers who view dialogue as ‘unfinalizable’ (nikulin, 2010) and ‘potentially endless’ (matusov et al., 2019). references alexander, r. 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(2018). do similar-ability peers regulate one another in a collaborative discourse activity? cognitive development, 45, 68–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2017.12.002 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word dialogue about learning across the northern norway-russia border (layout).docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a43 dialogue about “learning” across the northern norwayrussia border: an analysis of textbooks in kindergarten teacher education elena merzliakova uit – the arctic university of norway, norway mikhail gradovski university of stavanger, norway elin eriksen ødegaard kindknow research centre, western norway university abstract this paper is the first in a series of three studies that explore the pedagogy used in the norwegian and russian early childhood settings by examining texts that are part of the syllabus in two early childhood teacher education programs that participated in our project with student international exchanges. the study explores how mikhail bakhtin’s notion of dialogue relates to the concept of ‘learning’ in the context of early childhood teacher educations in northern norway and northern russia. the data sources are textbooks used as syllabi for kindergarten teacher education in those countries. these national dialogues are understood as authoritative discourses on the concepts of learning to which the students in both countries have to relate. by being inspired by bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, we consider that the ideas in textbooks areas are in a dialogic relationship as they are parts of a regulating battle between centrifugal and centripetal forces. a constructivist perspective on learning and the division of the learning process into subject, knowledge and education areas are identified as the centripetal forces in the dialogue on learning. activities, tools, and the role of adults are identified as centrifugal forces. based on the hypothetical premise that textbooks influence practices and that practice may unfold as textbooks describe, we have created hypothetical discussions between educators and students in these countries. the study provides better insight on the premises for the dialogue about learning across international borders which can be useful in internalization and exchange programs in kindergarten teacher educations in different countries. keywords: learning, textbooks, early childhood teacher education, internalization, dialogism. elena merzliakova was born in nikel, rsfsr (russian soviet federal socialist republic). where she first graduated from the herzen state pedagogic university of russia in saint-petersburg with a diploma in early childhood teacher education. afterward, she moved to tromsø norway. to work as a kindergarten teacher and at the same time work on her master's at the university of tromsø. she graduated with her master's from the university of tromsø in pedagogy in 2000. now she works as a lecturer in pedagogy at this university on campus alta. where she is currently pursuing her first ph.d. in internationalization in higher education. her other research interest is found in understanding the different teaching concepts that issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a44 are used in the world today and finding ways to create a dialogue between them, to find the best practices to teach children. https://uit.no/ansatte/elena.merzliakova dr. mikhail gradovski is born in minsk, belarus. after graduation from the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim as a doctor rerum politicarum in 2008 with the thesis devoted to the norwegian dialogue pedagogy, gradovski has participated in both national and international research projects on doctoral supervision, professional supervision, use of dialogue in education, and mental skill development. currently, he is the main coordinator of an international eu horizon2020 project that focuses on the development of ph.d. candidates’ skills. he has supervised both postgraduate, graduate, and undergraduate students. as a teaching practitioner, he is using a dialogical approach based on an understanding of both teacher and learner as partners with equal rights to make judgments on what is relevant, important and true. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3098-1447 elin eriksen ødegaard is research director at 'kindknow centre for systemic research on diversity and sustainable futures', also called barnkunne in norwegian. she is a capacity builder with commitments to sustainability and equity in the early years. she researches in the areas of early childhood education and teacher education with particular attention to conditions for children's cultural formation and teachers’ transformative practices. keywords in her research are often: play, exploration, collaborative narratives and dialogic engagement. she produced the animated films “becoming, the first 1000 days of early childhood,” and “plum skum” youtube. elin eriksen ødegaard western norway university of applied sciences (hvl.no) acknowledgement we would like to acknowledge the funds received for the ph.d. study from uit—the arctic university of norway and additional support from the kindknow knowledge center of systemic research on diversity and sustainable futures, western norway university of applied sciences (hvl), the barents secretary and the national research school for teacher education (nafol). ïòò introduction the overall aim of this study is to shed light on the conditions for cultural transformation and dialogues across borders between russia and norway in the region of the barents, regarding teacher education of the early childhood pre-service teachers. moreover, the study brings forward a long-term pedagogical aim of nourishing dialogues and supporting friendship among the early childhood studentteachers and teacher educators across the border between norway and russia in the region of the barents. by scrutinizing how the concept of “learning” is conveyed in most syllabus textbooks in northern russia and northern norway, the rationale is to ground our understandings of the discursive conditions of the student’s professional development in these geographical areas. the barents is a cornerstone of regional cooperation in the far north of europe. due to the more interconnected and interdependent world in which we live, the idea of “region” is becoming more elastic and porous. regionalization is an evolutionary process that builds on existing realities and current initiatives. therefore, it is useful to understand the kindergarten teacher’s intercultural encounter as a dialogic and heteroglossia process (holquist, 1981; kirova et al., 2018). this study, following a bakhtin-inspired discourse analysis, begins with an assumption of difference and similarities as an integral part of cultural activity and its outcomes, such as textbooks in use dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a45 for professional education. in addition, we consider the co-created constraints, hypothetically locally situated that the students and teacher educators encounter while reading a textbook. studies situated in regional contexts have received increased interest, attracting more applicants to international studies in higher education (altbach & teichler, 2001). this is suitable when cooperation between educational institutions is part of an already-existing plan to develop a particular region (knight, 2013). this study was situated in the region of barents in the far north europe. the background for studying how the notion of children’s ‘learning’ is conveyed in textbooks across the national borders of northern norway and northeast of russia, was the existing memorandum of understandings between universities in barents; uitthe arctic university of norway and murmansk arctic state university. in addition, the study was connected to kindknow research center’s goal of sustainable futures which includes value orientation in research to global and local awareness. global awareness and resilience to conflict is emphasized in education for sustainable futures (unesco, 2016). studies anchored in regional development can encourage internationalization. exposing pre-service teachers to diversity and provoking them to rethink their taken-for-granted assumptions about their neighbors were central to the pedagogical program included in the research design. the pedagogical program followed up the norwegian policy on internationalization in higher education. it is stated that students should be introduced to and become a part of the international discourse on pedagogy to achieve a high international academic level. furthermore, irrespective of the level of its use. it should be in the curriculums of study programs rather than in the institutions (nmer, 2017, p. 63). internationalization is thus understood as a requirement for norwegian kindergarten teacher education (uhr, 2012). similarly, internalization is a part of a discourse on the modernization of higher education in russia (kukarenko & zashikhina, 2017). in this perspective, international cooperation has become a resource and driving force of russian university development. there is a general expectation that internationalization and exchange in higher education contribute to mutual understanding and problematizing taken-for-granted assumptions and practices (jones, 2017). yet, a wide range of factors will impact the experience of students when they study abroad or in other ways partake in the exchange, dialogue, and collaboration across borders. earlier studies point to the environmental factors arising from personal history, family context, institutional nature, country location of the study destination, and policy (e.g., jones, 2017). each of these has a role to play. however, this study aims to provide a premise for a more informed dialogue across the international borders of norway and russia on an epistemological level, in a much-needed area of research. driving our rationale for comparing the textbooks is the belief that comparison does not mean that one discourse is better than the other but rather the belief that by comparing the epistemological underpinnings of the concept of “learning” we can go beyond the surface of the understandings of what takes place in practice in the respective early year’s institutions. with this in mind, our aim is to open up discourses of learning in education. knowledge of nuances in epistemology across borders can shed light and facilitate reflection on our educational curriculum and contribute to a more culturally sensitive form of teacher education and later teachers’ practices. the main research questions in our study are as follows: what information on the concepts of learning is found in authoritative discourses on learning in textbooks used in kindergarten teacher education in northern norway and northern russia? and how can this information be used as the premise for crossdialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a46 border dialogue? the first research question will be addressed by answering the following two subquestions: 1. what discourses about children’s learning in kindergartens can be identified in textbooks in kindergarten teacher education programs? 2. what similarities and differences exist in the concepts of learning found in the textbooks in the two countries? the second research question will be addressed by, first, considering how the information about the concepts of learning in the two discourses relate dialogically to each other and then by discussing how these findings can be used to innovate the cross-border dialogue. these questions allow us to perform a literature review drawing on the inspiration from richard andrews (2010). we compare and relate the contents of different textbooks dialogically, revealing similarities and differences in the perception of children’s role in their learning and the positions of the organizers of learning situations in kindergarten. moreover, we identify various perceptions of the tools for children’s learning outlined in the textbooks. to that end, we recognize the centrifugal and centripetal forces (bakhtin, 2012) enabling a cross-border dialogue among educators. the study is relevant for teacher education regarding the perspective of international understanding in general and cultural exchange in the region. earlier research according to anders holmgren (2011), textbook research is not a separate field of research because it has not an internal structure and autonomy. today, it is a somewhat interdisciplinary research activity on the threshold between pedagogy and didactics. there is no agreement about what the core content of learning should be, neither in norway nor in russia. a study of the syllabus literature in the area of children’s development, play, and learning in norwegian kindergarten teacher education reveals that there is no canon of textbooks in norway (bjerkestrand et al., 2015; sataøen & fossøy, 2019). both the content and scope of the syllabus literature vary greatly from institution to institution, and the authors question the disparities of the findings and ask whether the syllabus literature is too scientifically uncritical. they suggest that the reason for this might be that, yet no common teacher educational culture in norway has been developed (sataøen & fossøy, 2019). in russia, the main disagreement is about what kind of knowledge textbooks should contain, “the true knowledge” or different opinions on study subjects of different researchers (galaguzova, 2018; mirskij, 2004). john bennett (2010) concludes in a comparison between russian and nordic curricula that the russian tradition of kindergarten has much in common with the nordic, despite a stronger focus on health in the russian kindergarten. in most regions, investment in young children remains high (bennett, 2010). when it comes to structural aspects, such as the pre-service training of educators and the number of children per staff, the russian kindergartens compare well with most western countries. he finds that russian kindergartens pay attention to the holistic development of young children. the curricula are childoriented and based on a strong tradition of research. while the russian tradition includes “a balanced mix of instruction, child-initiated activities and thematic work where adult purposes are foregrounded” (p. 21), the nordic tradition includes mostly the child’s own strategies for learning through relationships and through play and through educator scaffolding at the appropriate moment. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a47 in a study of how the concepts of play and learning were discussed and which of the two was the dominant concept in the national framework plans (curriculum) for kindergartens in norway, china, finland, and hong kong, aihua hu and elin eriksen ødegaard found that the concept of learning is clearly present and multifaceted in all framework plans (hu & ødegaard, 2019). nevertheless, the concept of learning was weighted differently and was given different connotations in the framework plans. “learning to know,” “learning to do,” and “learning to be” have different positions in the four frameworks. the two confucius frameworks pay more attention to “learning to know,” while the nordic gives more attention to “learning to do” and “learning to be”. the question as to how globalized concepts and discourses have a local impact in various local kindergarten teacher education programs was studied in three different kindergarten teacher training programs—a bachelor’s degree in namibia, part-time education in an indigenous region of colombia, and a workplace-based kindergarten teacher education for students having immigrant/refugee backgrounds in canada (kirova et al., 2018). this study showed how the expectations that the researchers describe as western and related, for example, to describing children’s development and learning became difficult and almost impossible for some of the students. in colombia, the students had a hard time comprehending how one could teach children something by playing with them. they described their own upbringing by adults who never played with children and how they had to change their attitudes and ways of being through education. they had to stop saying “no” to children and instead encourage them, and they had to unlearn the coercion of children. the researchers reflect on how some globalized, so-called correct kindergarten educational practices challenge or colonize local practices in several places in the world (kirova et al., 2018). ole erik klingle’s (2016) study on the construction of the professional identities of students studying to become kindergarten teachers who have spent one semester studying in nicaragua shows how students use traditional pedagogical discourses and concepts of play and teaching to construct dichotomies for their identities. the students used positively charged terms, such as recognition and participation, related to playing, and strongly identified with play as a learning method. the research on management documents for kindergartens in different countries also shows that children’s learning is an important concept (hu & ødegaard, 2019). however, there is disagreement over whether there are common kindergarten practices and discourses related to learning across countries. some researchers believe that diverse traditional pedagogy discourses exist (klingle, 2016), while others question whether there are globalized discourses and practices related to learning (kirova et al., 2018). another important finding in these studies is the difference between the discourse of learning to know, learning for school approach, on one hand, and that of learning to do and to be, on the other hand, a bildung approach, found in the nordic countries. of special interest here is bennet’s (2010) study showing that the russian and the nordic kindergartens are not that different. perspective, sample, and analytical approach the data sources for our study are the textbooks used as syllabi for kindergarten teacher education in northern norway and northern russia. the textbooks were chosen because they are information and knowledge channels that all students and professionals in the education programs use. such textbooks contain academic, authoritative ideas that are provided to all students through their education and to which they must relate. the textbooks always strive to convey a specific conceptual and value content (andreassen, 2008, p. 49). the concepts of the russian philosopher, literary scholar, and educationalist, mikhail bakhtin are central in the analysis. bakhtin (2012, p. 95) believes that the ideological becoming of the individual includes dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a48 the process of acquiring the ideas of others. it is important to understand that the process of ideological becoming does not only include the process of acquiring the ideas of others. for us, however, due to the research questions that we are focusing on in this article, it is this process, as an element of the ideological becoming, that we want to draw the attention to, as it represents the authoritative discourse. the authoritative discourse, which the textbooks’ texts represent, has an embedded authority that exists irrespective of the readers of these texts, the students. it is irrelevant for the content of this article whether the students recognize its authority or not. bakhtin (2012, pp. 95–97) describes this discourse as “a religious, political, moral, ancestral, teachers’, etc.” discourse and characterizes the meaningful structure of the discourse as motionless and dead since it is completed and unambiguous. furthermore, bakhtin writes: the authoritative word comes compactly into our linguistic consciousness in the form of an inseparable mass. one must either acknowledge this discourse completely or reject it altogether. [...] the authoritative discourse is not produced, it is conveyed. (bakhtin, 2012, p. 97) the students’ ideological becoming as professionals is possible thanks to the dialogue that occurs between the authoritative discourse and the inner persuasive discourse, the students’ own opinion on the subject that includes prior knowledge and understandings. this dialogue causes the students to make choices between the meanings these discourses bring forth, and thus a new understanding is generated. bakhtin (2012, p. 46) writes that the word makes sense only when we take it from the contexts created by others and make it our own. the russian concept of learning is different from the norwegian concept of learning. bakhtin calls the phenomenon of interdependence between concepts and contexts heteroglossia, the notion that every expression has different meanings in different contexts. a context means a set of conditions related to time and place that influence how utterances take on meanings. notions of learning are uttered in a universe of opinions that already consist of different and contradictory utterances. the new utterances make sense based on the relationships with the previously expressed utterances in which they are included. holquist explains the essence of utterances: at any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological – that will ensure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions, all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup. and therefore, impossible to resolve. (holquist, 1981, p. 428) any utterance is a response to someone or a response to something expressed in the past, and, at the same time, it has content created by the fact that it is aimed at a recipient (ongstad, 2004). we examine the textbook texts as the authors’ responses to the educational discourses in the students’ respective countries of origin. in the dialogue on learning, the utterances or ideas in the russian and norwegian textbooks will be considered as being in a dialogic relationship with the students as they are parts of a regulating battle between centrifugal and centripetal forces. it is important to understand that our understanding of discourse and the use of the analytical tool of the centripetal and centrifugal forces are bakhtin-inspired and not pure bakhtinian. bakhtin’s centripetal and centrifugal forces are socio-logical characteristics of a spoken language. the centripetal forces “unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought” and centrifugal forces are responsible for” the uninterrupted process of decentralization and disunification” (bakhtin, 1981, pp.270-272). the centrifugal forces make the utterances socially and linguistically different (bakhtin, 2012, p. 24), ensuring the affinity of ideas to different discourses in different dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a49 historical and social contexts, as well as for the potential to develop new ideas. these forces are in an unresolvable struggle that can only be experienced and studied. furthermore, this struggle is not a dialectical struggle of logical contradictions or a struggle of individual wills but a permanent condition of a language (bakhtin, 1981, p. 273). these forces are simultaneously present in any utterance and thus in a dialogue. to illustrate this struggle, we would like to cite the example from schuman: bakhtin is parsimonious with examples, but, on the simplest level, when i say “tree,” i invoke the centripetal force of a stable, unified concept that involves a trunk and branches. when i invoke this concept, i want to be understood in a particular way by the listener to whom i am speaking. that desire, conditioned by the listener’s expected response, is also centripetal, insofar as it depends on some agreement between us authorizing a meaning for the word in our particular situation. in tension with these centripetal forces are the centrifugal forces of hundreds of types of trees, specific trees, specific experiences of trees (romantic interludes, childhood escapades, escapes, lynchings, crucifixions), metaphorical possibilities (the tree of life, family tree), slang (“up a tree”), and the listener’s receptivity (hostile, agreeable, tuned out). the word “tree” carries with it at all times all these possibilities and many more, and while the centripetal force tends toward one meaning (or a particular meaning at a particular moment), the centrifugal force of language tends to fracture meaning in many directions. (schuman 2002, pp. 49-50) while bakhtin’s idea behind the forces was to use these to characterize any utterances from a socio-logical position on the level of words as they are dialogically both voiced and heard by particular people in particular situations (schuman, 2002), we, inspired by bakhtin, use the concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces as the concepts to describe the forces of authorized meanings (schuman, 2002). in this study, we are interested in the concepts of learning that the textbooks in our selection convey to a student. each concept of learning that each textbook contains is thus considered to be a force of authorized meaning. it is important to note that we do not analyze if these textbooks are written in such a way that they invite to a dialogue on learning and we do not doubt that there are countless struggles of the forces in a pure bakhtinian understanding of the centripetal and centrifugal forces in every utterance on learning in these textbooks. however, we are interested in a dialogue that appears when a learner reads the textbook’s authorized meaning of what learning is. this dialogue is the dialogue between the texts and a learner is not a speech dialogue with spoken and heard utterances that bakhtin’s concepts of centripetal and centrifugal forces were invented to analyze. we are interested in the dialogic relationships between a student and the discourses on learning represented in the norwegian and russian textbooks. we understand these relationships as relationships between the concepts with different ideologies and values. in relation to a student, each textbook’s concept of learning becomes an authoritarian monologic discourse that represents a centripetal force that pressures a student to believe in its message on what learning is and thus unite with it. this invitation to uniformity shared and common meaning, is met by the students’ meanings, that is a centripetal force towards diversity, as gíslason (2019) puts it. thus appears a dialogue on what learning is between the authoritarian discourse of the textbook and an inner persuasive discourse of a student. by scrutinizing how the learning concepts are dialogically related to one other, we are able to provide better insight on the premises for the dialogue about learning across international borders among the students in different countries. we will relate the findings, the authoritative discourses, to each other and then discuss how these apply/relate dialogically to the inner persuasive discourses that the students might have when they relate to the authoritative discourses. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a50 we have analyzed the textbooks used in kindergarten teacher education in russian and norwegian part of the barents region, finnmark, troms, and nordland in norway (the norwegian group) and in murmansk oblast, arkhangelsk oblast, the republic of karelia, and the republic of komi in russia (the russian group). our sample is limited to the books that have been used in the study programs in both countries since 2014. this choice was made due to political changes in kindergarten teacher education in both norway and russia. in norway, a new kindergarten teacher curriculum was adopted in 2013, while russia introduced a new educational standard for preschool teacher education in 2014. we have reviewed all the obligatory reading lists on the theme “children’s development, play, and learning” or similar courses in the kindergarten teacher education program in northern norway1 for the period from 2013 to 2017. then we selected the books that are on the reading lists in all these educational institutions. in addition, in our sample, we included books that we considered to be trendsetters in the norwegian study programs. our norwegian group consists of the following textbooks: askland, l., & sataøen, s. o. (2014). utviklingspsykologiske perspektiver på barns oppvekst (developmental psychological perspectives on children’s adolescence). gyldendal akademisk. rønning, g. s. (2013). rammeplan for barnehagen, hva så? (framework plan for the kindergarten, so what?). cappelen akademisk. glaser, v., solids, i., & drugli, b. (eds.) (2014). utvikling, lek og læring i barnehagen. forskning og praksis (development, play and learning in kindergarten. research and practice). fagbokforlaget. gunnestad, a. (2014). didaktikk for barnehagelærere: en innføring (didactics for kindergarten teachers: an introduction). universitetsforlaget. we sent requests for reading lists on children’s learning in kindergarten to all four higher educational institutions in northern russia2 and received responses from murmansk arctic state university and petrozavodsk state university. we selected the books used in both educational institutions. in addition, we used information on the reading lists that we found on the official websites of the russian institutions. the russian group consists of the following textbooks: mikljaeva, n. v., mikljaeva, y. v., & vinogradova, n. a. (2015). doshkolnaia pedagogika (preschool pedagogy). jurajt. moskva. turchenko, v. i. (2013). doshkolnaia pedagogika (preschool pedagogy). flinta. moskva. gogoberidze, a. g., & solnceva, o. v. (2017). doshkolnaia pedagogika s osnovami metodik vospitania i obuchenia (preschool pedagogy with a basis for methodology in upbringing and training). piter. saint-petersburg. galiguzova, l. n., & mesjerjakova-zamogilnaja, s. j. (2017). doshkolnaia pedagogika. uchebnik i praktikum (preschool pedagogy. textbook and practical training). jurajt. moskva. our analysis consists of three steps. the first step is a literature review of the concepts of learning’s contents in each group of the sample we describe. we make a narrative synthesis of the narrative kind which might be better described as “a blended account of differences rather than as complete synthesis” (andrews, 2010, p.405). in the second step, the results of the narrative reviews of the concepts of learning from the two groups are compared. the third step is a description of the dialogical relationships between the concepts. for the selection of the sub-concepts included in the concepts of learning, we combine knud illeris’s notion of learning (illeris, 2012) with vygotsky’s concept of learning (säljö, 2016, p. 112). illeris understands learning as an interaction between the individual’s acquisition process and the social process of the context 1 nord university (campus nesna, campus bodø, and campus levanger); uit norges arktiske universitet (campus tromsø and campus alta). 2 murmansk arctic state university (masu), northern arctic federal university (safu) in arkhangelsk, petrozavodsk state university, and syktyvkar state university. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a51 where this learning takes place. the acquisition process includes the content (what is learned) and driving force (what initiates the acquisition process). the idea that individuals develop their mental functions by engaging in communication with their surroundings and familiarizing themselves with languages, thinking, ideas and practices is central to the socio-cultural understanding of learning attributed to vygotsky (säljö, 2016, p. 112). the texts in the textbooks are analyzed and presented in our literature review based on the following sub-concepts posed as questions: learning activities: what are activities in which it is thought that kindergarten children learn? how should these be organized and implemented? tools: what tools are children supposed to learn to use? kindergarten teacher as an adult: what role should adults play in children’s learning? other children: what role should other children play in a child’s learning? the learning child: what role should the child play in his/her own learning? for that reason, we read books and highlighted all parts which could answer our questions. then we read those highlights and made a conclusion on the main meaning that those highlights tried to make. for example, answering the question of what role should adults play in children's learning in askland & sataøen (2014), we found followed excerpts: the adults have to understand the consequences of their actions, and their influence on children's development. their need for education to make an environment of high quality (with references to dalli et.al., 2011, p.17). the goal is to understand what is happening to the child right now, more than to guess what is going to happen. this perspective must be a grounded perspective, for all who work with children (p.22). the adults must react to an infant child, and structure the child’s relations to the environment (p.39). they must be able to understand child’s signals, initiatives, and reactions. (p. 51). these excerpts conveyed the role of the teacher as responsive to the child’s signals, initiatives, and reactions. an attentiveness to the ‘here-and-now’ moment and a moral obligation for attunement to the child is emphasized. we continued to write highlights until the end of the book. then we made a conclusion which became a part of the text below: “adults should actively try to understand the child’s way of expressing themselves, and their own professional ethical responsibility for the child." the second step in the analysis consists of an internal and external comparison of the various notions of the concepts of learning. in the internal comparison, we identify similarities and differences between the results of the analyses of the norwegian and the russian groups. the results of the internal comparison is the first step of our external comparison where we, drawing on the method of comparative inquiry proposed by david phillips (2006), contextualize the findings from the analyses of the concepts of learning of the norwegian and russian groups and discuss what contributions the findings can make to the understanding of conditions for children’s learning in general. in the third step, we relate the findings dialogically to each other by identifying the forces that can form the premises for the dialogue between the norwegian and the russian understandings of the concepts dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a52 of learning. we identify the authoritative discourses from two neighboring countries that interact with the students’ inner persuasive discourses. results and discussion what authoritative discourses about children’s learning in kindergartens can be identified in textbooks in kindergarten teacher education in northern norway? in the book by askland and sataøen (2014), the focus is on the following learning activities: interaction, communication, social interaction with the environment, and daily tasks in kindergarten. the authors pay a great deal of attention to the language and its development in children. in addition, emphasis is placed on the mastery of interaction with others. the child should also learn affect regulation, the importance of feelings, task solving, and useful strategies for problem solving. aksland and sataøen (2014) devote most of the pages of their book to discussions about the role of adults in children’s development. the adults should be active and engaged in communication and other types of interaction with the child. the adults should create a good emotional climate as such climate is a condition for the positive development of the child. the adults should actively try to understand the child’s way of expressing themselves and stay in certain situations somewhat removed to allow the relationships between the toddlers to appear and evolve. the adults should support the learning potential of all the children and perform scaffolding of tasks after the child’s zone of proximal development has been identified. the most important thing is that the educator be aware of their own psychological theoretical understandings, including their perspective on humanity. children should be encouraged to establish and maintain good relationships with other children, which is considered to be preventive regarding potential mental health problems. children’s peers can also play important roles in scaffolding. the child is described as active, competent, inquiring, and socially participative. moreover, aksland and sataøen (2014) believe that the child continuously constructs a story about him/herself, an understanding of oneself and one’s own knowledge based on one’s own experiences. rønning (2013) believes that children learn thanks to a multitude of opportunities that are found in everyday life. she believes that learning activities are part of the content of the kindergarten, which consists, according to rønning, of everything that takes place in kindergarten, including activities and the adults’ ways of being with the children. rønning’s book presents principles for choosing learning activities. the activities are chosen based on an interaction between children, adults, and the ideas expressed in various plans (the framework plan, the annual plan, and the monthly plan). to provide information on the content of the activities, reference is made to the subject areas in the framework plan for the kindergarten’s content and tasks. the adults should be receptive to the children’s input and interests. the employees of the kindergarten should ensure that the children are part of what is going on in the kindergarten and that they stay motivated. the employees shall have the competence to implement in practice the provisions described in the framework plan. the employees are expected to know how to facilitate learning for children in kindergarten. it is recommended that staff members agree on a basic view for the whole kindergarten. the child is referred to as a subject. one sees the child as a “human being” and considers all children as co-creators and participants in a knowledge production process. moreover, the child is considered as having agency in his own life and should gradually take responsibility for his own choices. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a53 rønning (2013) does not write about the tools children should learn to use or what role the other children should have in the child’s learning. gunnestad (2014) uses the word “methods” when describing learning activities and writes that methods may have to do with both how the teacher plans to present a topic or an activity and the means the child uses to acquire the knowledge about a particular topic or problem area. gunnestad (2014) specifies that the child uses an approach to process or capture a problem area and make it his own. this means that children’s learning activities are defined as approaches that are used to acquire knowledge about a field. moreover, gunnestad (2014) believes that kindergarten has a rich range of methods that can be used. these include play (both facilitated and free), storytelling, dissemination, dramatization, the use of toys, walks, conversation, experiments, models, one’s own activity, discovery learning, and demonstrations. in addition, music, arts and crafts, and other esthetic activities can be both methods (learning activities) and content. information about tools does not appear in the text. kindergarten teachers are considered interactive partners for children and are responsible for didactic planning. the adults can have both an asymmetric and symmetric relationship with children in the learning processes. this means that the adults can take on a range of roles that allows both instrumental manipulation and facilitation for a real i–you relationship in a dialogue. gunnestad (2014) believes that interaction with other children has a decisive impact on children’s development and considers children in general as active, inquisitive, and contact-seeking beings. the child should actively participate in his/her learning and acquire experience in socializing with both adults and other children and through experiences. in the book edited by glaser et al. (2014), the authors of chapters rarely recommend specific teaching plans for the development of a particular type of competence or skills. as a rule, reference is made to the framework plan (2011), and it is recommended that kindergarten teachers shall integrate activities that lead to development in play, experimentation, or everyday activities. the content of the chapters does not enable an answer to questions about tools that children should learn to use. the authors of the chapters believe that the learning activities in a kindergarten should be based on play. they mention both free play, which is important for emotional and social development, and facilitated play with the adult as an active participant, which is important for motor and linguistic skills development. for linguistic development, the importance of dialogic reading (reading in pairs or groups after each other) and facilitated play activities are emphasized. although the authors believe that skills training is essential for children to develop skills, it is pointed out that the training should not be imposed but proposed to the children surrounded by encouragement and positive attention. it is also recommended to use joint reading sessions, both in kindergarten and at home, to develop literacy skills. the development of numeric and other mathematicsrelated skills should happen through facilitated play, everyday activities, and experimentation. it is emphasized that adults should play an active role in children’s development and that adults should facilitate and lead play, everyday activities, and experiments. other children are considered to be especially important co-players when it comes to development and learning. the importance of friendship ties formed through participation in social interaction and different types of play is emphasized. throughout most of the book, children are referred to as participating agents who will learn and develop through play and their own experience. it is important to point out that the asymmetry of relationships between the adults (subjects), who facilitate, and the children, who participate in facilitated dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a54 activities, is not problematic. it is pointed out that a child shall participate as an equal partner, having real power to determine his/her own participation. internal comparison of the norwegian textbooks all the norwegian textbooks highlight exercises involving interaction in everyday life as important activities for learning. adults should be active, interacting partners and facilitators in children’s day-to-day lives. the child is referred to as an active actor (agent, subject) in their own learning. as the authors of the books mainly describe principles for choosing learning activities, it is impossible to draw conclusions as to what tools the children are supposed to learn to use. the differences between the contents of the books are mainly in the form of social interaction with the environment, such as language skills, play, and music activity and their importance for children’s development. there are also differences in how the other children’s role is discussed. in the book by rønning (2013) there is no mention of the role of other children. we conclude that different elements of the sociocultural view on learning are given varying levels of emphasis in the books. whereas askland and sataøen (2014) describe the role of adults in a straightforward and detailed way, rønning (2013) and gunnestad (2014) describe the role the adults play by pointing out their participation in determining the principles for choosing learning activities. glaser et al. (2014) emphasize showing how and in what way different learning activities can promote children’s development. what authoritative discourses about children’s learning in kindergartens can be identified in textbooks in kindergarten teacher education in northern russia? gogoberidze and solnceva (2017) use the term activity when describing learning activities. children’s learning activities are divided into different types based on the various forms of activity content, the kinds of activities that are dominant in relation to age group, and who organizes or initiates the activities. activities may have different content depending on the educational area with which they are affiliated. activities can be initiated and facilitated by either the educators or the children. adult-led activities consist of organized educational activities and routine situations. a detailed, age-group structured overview of the number of educational situations per week and length of the facilitated activities is provided. daily activities include free play, performing assignments and chores (e.g., covering the table), free communication between children, and that between children and adults. in these learning situations, children have their own experiences that can be used in organized educational activities. a child is also allowed to develop their own already-existing knowledge and skills in new situations as well as enhance their own independence and imagination. among children’s own activities, play is mentioned as the predominant activity. a detailed review of tools is provided for each area of education. the child should also learn to use tools when learning new knowledge or new skills. these consist of being able to observe, understand what the adults are saying, act on the utterances that the child receives from the adult, reflect the result of exploratory activities in language, and collaborate with peers. the adult has a leading and central position in the children’s learning processes. the adult is described as a subject who interacts and develops with the child. the adult should be able to help the child to systematize and elaborate on his/her own experiences and place these within a context. the adult must be able to plan the educational process and the developing environment based on the needs a particular child has to ensure that the education process has the desired effect on the child. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a55 the child needs other children to gain experience in social behavior, which means communication and mutual understanding with other people and on demonstrating moral skills. the child is referred to as a subject in his/her own activity. this means that the child has values, interests, and freedom to choose. the child is viewed as an independent and autonomous being. galiguzova and mesjerjakova-zamogilnaja (2017) believe that children learn through the activities that are predominant for their age (i.e., discovery and play) and through interaction with other people. play can include playing with objects and procedural play. procedural play is an activity in which the child can act as a make-believe adult. through this activity, the child can mirror the adult’s activity process and imagine the result of the activity. the activities that result in children’s learning can be facilitated using various methods of upbringing and learning. the activities that should be facilitated include language activities (activities in which an adult explains or talks about something); sensory activities (activities in which the child sees, hears, and tastes); practical activities (activities in which the children themselves do something about things); activities where an adult sets a goal and shows examples; and activities where an adult sets a problem objective without offering a solution. learning how society works and the instrumental use of objects the child is familiar with are mentioned as predominant for this age. the most important tools the child should learn to use are cultural ways of exploring objects and the social world. examples of these ways are observing, exploring, experimenting, solving problem situations, fantasizing, and communicating with adults and peers. kindergarten teachers are supposed to observe children’s personality growth and development and set educational goals and methods of realization based on the child’s individual interests. kindergarten teachers are partners, models for imitation, and experts in assessing the child’s skills and knowledge. furthermore, it is stated that the kindergarten teacher is to have verbal interaction with the child in everyday contexts. the adults should get the child interested in the learning activities, too. the teacher should gain the child’s trust, stimulate the child to participate in activities, and expand the child’s experiences in five areas of education according to the russian federal standard for preschool education. the child needs other children, as playing with other children has a psychotherapeutic function for young children. interaction with other children is a prerequisite for the development of an adequate selfimage. the child can consider other children in the same way as objects. it is adults who help the child to discover objects. the child should be active in his interaction with others and in activities with objects. according to mikljaeva et al. (2015), the goal behind the organization of the interaction and teaching for children in a kindergarten is to facilitate children’s physical, cognitive, social-communicative, ethical, and esthetic development. to promote physical development, it is recommended to use facilitated play. cognitive development should be encouraged by organizing activities in which the child can apply their own knowledge, skills, and experience. social-communicative and ethical development should be ensured by getting children involved in facilitated play; giving them opportunities for joint and independent work; introducing various forms of cultural expression (folk dance, music, movies); and excursions outdoors—in the micro-environment (the kindergarten itself, the surrounding streets), the meso-environment (the city, the region, the country), and the macro-environment (other nations, earth as a planet, space). esthetic development shall be ensured by involving children in various activities, including facilitated play; different types of work; teaching sessions where each child will be able to explore, use, and evaluate; the exhibition of children’s work; excursions; and drama and music performances with children as participants. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a56 mikljaeva et al. (2015) mention the use of tools only in connection with the use of a form or method of teaching and development. the tool that is mentioned the most is a toy (often dolls or toys that represent real objects) that the child is supposed to manipulate to demonstrate or explain something to other children. it is also recommended to use puppets to play a character when the child participates in a theatrical performance. adults play an important role in children’s learning and development. the adult is responsible for the organization and exercise of all learning and development activities. other children are described as important active agents in the relationship with the learning child (the learner). the role of the other children in the relationship with the learner is highlighted by the third stage of the knowledge style—self-control. it is recommended to encourage the children to provide feedback to each other on performance achievements. the other children are expected to contribute as learning subjects when they use visual and communicative learning methods and play. as a starting point, mikljaeva et al. (2015) believe that the child should be the subject, that is, be able to participate in his/her own decisions regarding the activities. both reading activities and all the developmentaland learning-associated activities around the child should be facilitated by adults. great emphasis is placed on the role of adults both in the kindergarten and outside the kindergarten. free play as a phenomenon and its role and features are not discussed. the children should be able to express themselves in ways they choose, but these expressions should take place within the framework determined by the adult. turchenko (2013) presents five different approaches to early childhood pedagogy. three out of five approaches allow for different levels of children’s own active participation. the first approach demands that children have their own time for free play that they themselves plan and participate in without adults being involved. in the other two approaches, it is expected that children have only limited opportunities to participate. the main activities promoting learning are facilitated play and organized sessions, both of which are led by an adult. the children are expected to actively use available toys and to be given opportunities to create their own objects. otherwise, tools should be used so that children can acquire different types of knowledge. the adult plays an important role. the adult is responsible for the organization, the implementation, and the outcomes of children’s development and learning. at the same time, the adult is also expected to be a partner. these expectations are described but are not discussed in relation to one another. other children also play an important role. they act both as triggers in each other’s development and as active, contributing agents in their own upbringing and socialization. although the role played by other children is indicated, the relationship between this role and those of the adults is not elaborated on. the child is referred to as an object of research and as a subject in regard to the processes of upbringing, education, and socialization. internal comparison of the russian textbooks we note that the contents in the russian textbooks are clearly structured and classified according to the national framework plan (curriculum) for kindergarten (federalnyj gosudarstvennyj obrazocvatelnyj standart doshkolnogo obrazovanija). gogoberidze and solnceva (2017) and galiguzova and mesjerjakovazamogilnaja (2017) consider children’s activities as a basis for structuring the content of learning in a kindergarten. in the book by mikljaeva et al. (2015), the child’s areas of development are emphasized. the main contents of the book by turchenko (2013) entail educational approaches that should be used to facilitate children’s participation. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a57 all these books mention all the basic elements in the concept of sociocultural learning. learning activities are described as adult-facilitated activities. the tools that the children will learn to use are mainly linked to the acquisition of different types of knowledge. other children play an important role in the child’s learning. the child is referred to as a subject in his/her own learning. the differences between the russian books lie mainly in the reference to the role of toys as tools in children’s learning. external comparison of the norwegian and russian textbooks comparisons between these two groups of books show that there are great differences between the books in each country. books in both countries contain references to the government and management documents for kindergartner’s where the concept of learning is clearly present (hu & ødegaard, 2019). the similarities and differences between the samples indicate that there are discourses that run across international borders, that is, traditional (klingle, 2016) or global (kirova et al., 2018) pedagogical discourses and local and national understandings of these. there are many similarities between the books. the child is referred to as a subject in both samples. the other children are referred to as important and necessary partners in the child’s learning. kindergarten teachers are referred to as active and responsible for facilitating learning activities. reference is made to the national steering documents for the kindergarten whenever the content of learning activities is discussed. this close link to the steering documents in both samples indicates a close connection to the professional field of work in kindergarten. the differences seem to lie in the role of adults in children’s learning and the focus on the tools that children should master. this means that the learning situation is understood differently in the two samples. in russian books, learning is understood as a process that takes place mainly thanks to adult-centered activities. the primary concern is what tools the kindergarten teacher will teach the child to use. learning activities in the russian textbooks are described very systematically in that each learning activity is described based on the importance it has for learning. in the norwegian books, learning should be woven into everyday life’s routine situations, and the main focus is on the children’s learning process, while the specific content the children should learn is arguably less important. this conclusion is in accord with børhaug et al. (2018), who point out the fact that in norway a holistic approach to learning is practiced, where the pedagogical practice is largely linked with everyday situations. based on illeris’ (2012) understanding of learning, we conclude that the russian books emphasize the content and the results of the learning process. the most attention is given to which tools the child should learn to master and which learning activities the kindergarten teachers should make provisions for. in the norwegian books, the emphasis is on the interactive dimension of the learning process (the interaction between the kindergarten teacher and the children and among the children themselves) and how the kindergarten teachers should create and maintain children’s motivation for learning (what the child is interested in and how to sustain this interest). the emphasis on the kindergarten teacher’s tasks related to children’s learning and on the systematic organization of learning indicates that the russian textbooks conceptualize children’s education as something that results from, first and foremost, teaching children rather than children’s own learning. ball and forzani (2009) define teaching as what the teacher does to cause someone to learn something. educators’ teaching includes planning, implementation, and evaluation. a description of children’s education that more or less resembles this russian understanding of children’s education can be found in only one book from the norwegian sample, in the book by gunnestad (2014). dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a58 it is interesting to note that all the russian textbooks in the sample are textbooks in early childhood pedagogy. the theme “children’s development play and learning” in the norwegian kindergarten teacher education is also dominated by early childhood pedagogy. the dissimilarity we see here may also be linked with different understandings of pedagogy as subjects in kindergarten teacher education. it seems that pedagogy in the russian textbooks is a subject primarily about teaching children in kindergarten—that is, more didactic oriented. in the norwegian textbooks, it seems that pedagogy is a subject pertaining to how children learn and develop and how all kindergarten employees can understand, support, motivate, and lead the children. how can the findings—the concepts of learning—relate dialogically with one other? our data represent two national dialogues on the concepts of learning. these national dialogues are authoritative discourses on the concepts of learning that the students in both countries have to relate to. thus, the concepts of learning as authoritative discourses can influence students´ concepts, and, in some cases, may even overpower, or “kill” any inner persuasive discourses in which the students could possibly participate. to find out how the concepts of learning expressed in norwegian and russian textbooks relate to each other dialogically, we can distinguish similarities and differences in the two authoritative discourses and, thus, understand better, what students in each country have to relate to, or not. this knowledge, in turn, will inform the practices for developing values of diversity and pluralism, the practices and contents of the activities for the cross-border exchange programmes in the activities where students from both countries participate. in all the textbooks that we have reviewed, learning is described as a process in which the child is an active player in a supportive or contributing environment of things and other people. these ideas belong to the constructivist perspective on learning (illeris, 2012). learning in kindergarten is divided into areas corresponding to their categorization in the governance documents in the respective countries. a constructivist perspective on learning and the division of the learning process into subject, knowledge, and education areas can be identified as the centripetal forces in the dialogue on learning. these are forces that can ensure that a common understanding is established and shared in terms of the discourses on learning in the russian and norwegian textbooks. according to bakhtin, there is’…neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogical context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future) (bakhtin, 1986:170). this means, for our study, that meanings found by students and educators in a textbook, can never be final once and for all. signs, as letters and words in the textbooks, alter the intertextuality in the cultural place and time, but they will be altered again by the readers. thus, the readers of these textbooks exercise centrifugal forces that situate this constructive perspective on learning. the results of this process may allow this constructive perspective to become a part of the shared meaning when a reader unites with the textbook and may evoke a reaction of critique and criticism and thus lead to the disunity with the authors of the textbook where this constructivist perspective is described. in both cases, there will be an alteration of the meaning, even in the case of unity as the reader always relates the message to their own previously acquired knowledge and meanings. activities, tools, and the role of adults are the categories in which differences are most evident in the textbooks. these ideas can be identified as the centrifugal forces in the dialogue on learning. to us, it seems that the adult has an indisputable role as leader and decision-maker in the russian textbooks, while the role of the adult in the norwegian textbooks varies between being responsive to children’s initiatives and interests in spontaneous events and one of a leader of pedagogical activities. to us, it seems that the tools in the russian books are one of the main issues and thus they are much discussed, while in the norwegian books, they hold a more peripheral position. there is a trend to prioritise the importance of the role of everyday activities and the importance of allowing the children to freely make decisions regarding these everyday activities in the norwegian textbooks, while there is a clear classification and typology of all dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a59 the activities in the russian books. both of these positions represent centripetal forces and invite the students to unite with their messages. if the differences of these discourses were to be addressed, their discussion could ensure that the dialogue between the discourses extends beyond the dialogue about both the constructivist perspective on learning and the division of children’s learning processes into areas of knowledge in kindergarten. we believe that such dialogues should be facilitated after the students are informed and aquired an understanding of both centrifugal and centripetal forces and their roles in the meaning making for a reader of a textbook. understanding the ways of meaning making and the role of the centripetal and centrifugal forces becomes, thus, an important premise for cross-border dialogues between the students. the common understanding of pedagogy as a subject matter about kindergarten practices conveyed in the textbooks in russian and norwegian discourses, creates opportunities for collaboration between educators across national borders in the barents region. based on the hypothetical premise that textbooks influence practice and that the practice may unfold as textbooks describe, we can create hypothetical discussions. educators from both countries may choose to emphasize the active role of both children and educators as agents of learning in the educational process. however, since ‘learning’ in the norwegian textbooks is conveyed as events that take place both in everyday and formal activities and in the russian textbooks as taking place in adult-led formal activities, the dialogue on these issues will probably result in arguments about the views on the child’s position as an agent in their own learning as well as views on how preschool teachers’ practices may enhance children’s learning. it can be anticipated that there may appear desires to discuss autonomy of a child in their own learning versus autonomy of a teacher as a professional practitioner. the questions may appear of how children’s autonomy can be maintained in situations where learning content and results are predefined by adults and how preschool teachers can secure children’s organized learning when the learning content is mostly defined by the child/children. the contradictions between the two different understandings of autonomy and the balance between them in practice may become issues of discussions both within these two national discourses and between them. in the light of heteroglossia, a collaboration between educators from different countries can be treated as a discourse within the same context or tradition with the presence of the unifying centripetal forces and the centrifugal forces that aim towards disunity of the meanings. there are always differences and similarities between understandings of pedagogy in different countries (bennet, 2010; hu & ødegaard, 2019). there will also exist internal differences and similarities in the discourses in the different countries. in order for the cross-border dialogue to take place, there must also be voices within the partner countries that respond to the ideas that are created due to the process of cooperation. it may be fruitful to organize a hypothetical dialogue on the issue of understanding of learning in preschool settings embedded in the sociocultural theory of learning. our comparison of the two discourses shows that all the basic elements of the concept of sociocultural learning are mentioned in the russian textbooks. however, the issues of tools (what children should learn to use) are almost nonexistent in the description of the theory in the norwegian textbooks. this can perhaps be explained by the fact that sociocultural theory of learning is understood and practiced differently in two countries, which is not surprising and is also documented in the earlier research (veraska & sheridan, 2018). if such dialogue is organized within the context of collaboration, it may provide good opportunities to discuss the relationship between the elements of the concept including the relationship between the child and the contents the child should learn during the preschool years. another tradition that may be fruitful for the development of a cross-border dialogue between educators is didactics. the russian authoritative discourse defines learning situations as the situations dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a60 where children are primarily subjects to didactics-related knowledge, while the norwegian authoritative discourse defines learning situations as situations where both teaching and learning contents are related to the area of the general didactics as described by alexander von oettingen (2017). von oettingen describes several models or directions in general didactic. thus, the ideas described in norwegian textbooks are identified as the formative theory model where questions about why and what one wants to teach are fundamental for answers to questions about how and by what means one wants to present the content. teaching that is offered in a norwegian preschool has to be strongly connected with the child's life outside, and thus teaching must be an integrated part of the child's life in a preschool. this calls for the priority of the knowledge about a particular child and the priority of thinking of teaching as integrated in everyday activities rather than considering teaching as as separate self-contained activity that is not necessarily connected to what happens in a particular preschool. the understanding of learning in the russian authoritative discourse can be characterized as an example of the learning theory model for didactics. within this model, the child's knowledge construction takes place in communication with the outside world in specially designed adult-led learning activities. thus, a dialogue about didactics’ role in preschool can be organized as a dialogue between different types of didactics where meaning is constantly negotiated. as we mentioned early, there is a difference between the discourse of learning to know, learning for school approach, and that of learning to do and to be, a bildung approach that is popular in the nordic countries. the first discourse can be understood as a discourse about teaching and education in preschool. the second discourse can be understood as a discourse about building. the idea of teaching subjects in preschool is not foreign to the norwegian context. the pedagogy as a scientific area in norway has been recently dominated by the tradition of educational science (brunstad et al., 2015). at the same time, there is opposition to this tradition. for example, herner sæverot (2017) believes that pedagogy with its basic value issues cannot be reduced to the understanding of this area suggested by the partisans of the science of education. marte eriksen (2018) also believes that the preschool pedagogy in early childhood teacher education should be a general subject embedded in the german bildung tradition, rather than the science of education. these discourses, in other words, are based on similarities and differences between the german tradition of bildung, on the one hand, and the science of education in the english-speaking world, on the other. it is possible to draw parallels here to a possible dialogue between russian and norwegian preschool educators where the formation theory and the learning theory of didactics in preschool are discussed. in the russian discourse, one can observe contradictions that can render fruitful ideas for the dialogue in the russian-norwegian cooperation in the preschool area. pedagogical practice based on the formation tradition at its core is also found in russia, but most of such practices are found in higher education areas (mayer & rakhochkine, 2018). although the current guidelines in the new standard for preschool education include an expectation that a preschool teacher should follow up the child's initiative (minobrnauka, 2013), the pedagogical practice in most russian preschools is strongly influenced by the practices based on socio-cultural theory (veraska & sheridan, 2018). thus, the ideas and results of the dialogues that may be organized as a part of the russian-norwegian cooperation may become sources for the development of ideas in the national discourses on preschool pedagogy both in russia and norway. from the dialogical perspective, the goal in any collaboration is to maintain dialogue, and use the centrifugal and centripetal forces in dialogues for creating opportunities for the voices to become unique. in our study, we have described authoritative discourses about the concepts of learning found in the higher educational preschool textbooks in the northern regions of norway and russia. we have outlined issues in our findings that can be used to organize the dialogues in the area of preschool as a part of cross-border collaboration activities. collaborations are always done by participants and influenced by environmental dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a61 factors like personal history (e.g., jones, 2017), pedagogical discourses and concepts which are traditional for the participants (klingle, 2016), and participants’ values. for a collaboration to be considered successful from the dialogical perspective, it is important to allow all the voices to be heard. conclusions we have analyzed a concept of learning presented in the textbooks used in preschool teacher education in northern russia and northern norway. this study contributes to the understanding of the concept of learning, one of the key concepts within the body of knowledge that can be found in the preschool textbooks in both countries and may be of value to those interested in the internationalization of pedagogical practices and the role of textbooks in the field of preschool education. we have 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(ed.). pedagogikkens spark. kunnskapsformer i pedagogikkvitenskap. gyldendal akademisk. dialogue about “learning” across the northern norway-russia border elena merzliakova, mikhail gradovski, elin erikson ødegaard dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.416 | vol. 10 (2022) a64 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.668 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e58 the merged methods and the dialogic research approach mikhail gradovski university of stavanger & western norway university of applied sciences, norway abstract the history of the merged methods started in 1949, more than seventy years ago (gobo, fielding, la rocca, & van der vaart, 2022). the introduction of the merged methods as the new group of methods in social science heralded a new era of research more than ten years ago. it is timely to ask why these methods should be of interest to the partisans of the dialogic approach and how the merged methods can be strengthened and developed by the existing tools from the arsenal of the dialogic approach. professor mikhail gradovski was born in minsk, belarus. after graduating from the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim as doctor rerum politicarum in 2008 with a thesis devoted to the norwegian dialogue pedagogy. gradovski has participated in both national and international research projects on doctoral supervision, professional supervision, use of dialogue in education, and mental skill development. he has supervised both phd candidates and graduate students to the completion of their theses. as a teaching practitioner, he uses a dialogical approach based on understanding both teacher and learner as partners with equal rights to make authorial judgments on what is relevant, important, and true. orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3098-1447 ïïò why should the merged methods be of interest to the partisans of the dialogic approach? gobo, fielding, la rocca, & van der vaart (2022) argue for the importance of the merged methods by pointing to the fact that their usage is preferable due to the methodological robustness of the methods. this is especially important because failures during the process of data gathering and interpretation are less likely to occur compared to the quantitative and qualitative methods due to the procedures employed. another argument why the merged methods are preferable to the qualitative and quantitative methods is the fact that the phenomena in the research focus will no longer be successfully understood if one uses the research methods based on the old dichotomy of the difference between the qualitative and quantitative methods. gobo, fielding, la rocca, & van der vaart write the following: “what is often missing or undervalued …is the performativity of the method itself, its capacity for constructing the data. that is, methods have an inner force: the data they produce to account for the social world are strongly inflected by the researcher, the participants, the research setting, the organizational and institutional constraints and opportunities (gobo, 2016). that is why data collected by survey interviews, discursive interviews, focus groups, ethnographies and so on, are often different, seldom overlap and often conflict (graffigna & gambetti, 2015). there is a strong (but non-deterministic) link between the type of data collected and the type of dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3098-1447 the merged methods and the dialogic research approach mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.668| vol. 12 no. 1(2024) e59 method: what a certain method captures another does not (see becker & geer’s (1957) comparison between participant observation and conversational interviews). for this reason, integration can be reached only at the level of specific methods (carefully considering and balancing their diversity), not at the (general) qualitativequantitative level” (gobo, fielding, la rocca, & van der vaart, 2022, p. 46) the research data that could allow us to understand our reality, if we are to believe gobo et al. (2022), should better be based on the merged epistemology. this epistemology is described by the researchers mentioned above as the genuine third approach, the network of assumptions, beliefs, and practices that guide a specific research community in selecting research questions and methods. this third approach merges the main principles of the qualitative and quantitative approaches, so they are treated as reciprocally compatible and integrable in a unique epistemological stance. the merged methods should be of interest to the partisans of the dialogic research approach due to the common understandings in the area of epistemology and a researcher’s methodological perspective. it is important to point out that the epistemologies of the dialogic research approach (for an example of such epistemology, see pp. 265-285 in matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019) and the merged methods are not the same but overlap in several areas. these epistemological areas include the understanding of the social environment as not an external fixed entity but as a reality that is selectively and continuously created through people’s capacities to interact with the world; the understanding of reality is meaningful only if we consider it in conjunction with people’s sense-making, through which they impose order on the chaotic flow of information and experiences that come from environment; the understanding of cognition as situated and embodied; and the claim that the aim of any inquiry involves taking the actors’ point of view, and the desire to avoid the determinism of predicting behaviour from socio-demographic features like class, gender, and race. as for the methodological perspective of the merged method researcher, the understanding in the following areas overlap with the dialogical approach: data are always relational and interactional outcomes; all social actors under study are participants (not objects or subjects); participants’ free expression and the researchers’ active listening are essential aims behind the use of the merged methods; and the understanding that the results/findings are interpretations, which should be transparent, i.e., showing how they were derived, the assumptions that were made and their limits. it is important to point out that the merged methods are not the methods that are suitable for everything that the partisans of the dialogic approach are interested in, and thus, the use of the classical qualitative and quantitative methodology and methods should not be entirely abandoned. the choice of any methodology and method for data collection should always start in the sphere of the researcher’s authorial subjectivity and be based on the research questions that should be answered. thus, there will be cases where the merged methods will not surface the goals of dialogic research. however, the common ground and understanding that both the dialogic approach and the merged methods methodology share calls for at least consideration of the use of the merged methods in a research project based on the dialogic approach. how can the merged methods be strengthened and developed by the existing tools from the arsenal of the dialogic approach? in my opinion, there are two methods among the merged methods that can be strengthened and developed thanks to the present-day insights of the dialogic approach. these two methods are the interway and the delphi method. the merged methods and the dialogic research approach mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.668| vol. 12 no. 1(2024) e60 the inter-way came as a result of merging a questionnaire and an interview. the classical interway is a method of collecting data when a researcher asks questions and registers answers during the course of the conversation between the researcher and the research subject(s). this method is an appropriate tool for data collection when one has to get data that is mostly quantitative in nature, as it is expected that the majority of the answers’ options will be known beforehand. the inter-way approach is preferable to a self-filled questionnaire as the way the data is collected allows room for far fewer mistakes than a self-filled questionnaire. it is important to understand that though the data collection process for the inter-way is mostly qualitative, as the answers are known beforehand, there is still room for respondents to express their own authorial judgments and for the researcher to investigate the meaning-making process. the possibilities for the former and the latter always exist as the researcher may and should register a respondent’s answers that were not available beforehand. the contribution of the dialogical approach to the development of this merged method can happen in the area of communication between the researcher and the research subject, and, in my opinion, should, first and foremost, target the way the follow-up questions are formulated to ensure the recognition of the research subject as an authorial subject and not as a research object which possesses the information needed. the eldest merged method, the delphi method, was developed in 1953 in the usa by norman dalkey of the rand air force corporation and olaf helmer from the institute for the future (boberg & morris-khoo, 1992). jeremy jones and duncan hunter (1995) define the delphi method as a formal consensus method and a systematic means for measuring and developing consensus among stakeholders. it was developed as a systematic method to structure group communication to increase the accuracy of forecasts for gathering and organizing a panel of expert opinions about a complex issue or problem. most researchers (dawson & brucker, 2001; humphrey-murto & de wit, 2018; patton, 1986; vázquez-ramos et al., 2007) define the following stages of the delphi method: 1) identification of a research problem, 2) selection of participants (also referred to as panelists), 3) development of a questionnaire of items or statements, 4) completion of anonymous iterative rounds to collect individual and group feedback, 5) determination if consensus has been reached, and 6) summarization of the findings. the dialogue in the delphi method takes place on three levels: between the researchers in the team in the first, second, and sixth stages; between panelists in the third, fourth, and fifth stages; and between a team of researchers and panelists in the stages three through five. concerning the delphi method, the dialogic approach can contribute to the insights on how to discern the presence of authorial interest and openness to the otherness among the prospective panelists concerning the theme that will be researched and thus better the quality of the selection results in the second stage. another important contribution from the dialogical approach can made in the fifth stage, determining if one has reached the consensus. the determination of the consensus can include an analysis of the meaning-making process in the feedback rounds from the fourth stage. this analysis can be made based on the tools and insights developed by the partisans of the dialogic approach that allows the authorial judgments of both the panelists and the team of researchers. conclusion the introduction of the merged methods as the new group of methods in social sciences provides the partisans of the dialogic approach an opportunity to ask research questions that require the collection of data in more ways than before. more importantly, the dialogic research approach can enrich the merged methods methodology, particularly the delphi method, with insights that could lead to the findings and allow room for authorial judgments of both participants and the team of researchers. the merged methods and the dialogic research approach mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.668| vol. 12 no. 1(2024) e61 references boberg, a. l., & morris-khoo, s. a. (1992). the delphi method: a review of methodology and an application in the evaluation of a higher education program. the canadian journal of program evaluation, 7, 27–39. dawson, m.t., & brucker, p.s. (2001). the utility of the delphi method in the mft research. the american journal of family therapy.29, 125-140 gobo, g. (2016). why “merged” methods realize a higher integration than “mixed” methods: a reply. qualitative research in organizations and management: an international journal, 11(3), 199-208 gobo, g., fielding, n.g., la rocca, g., & van der vaart, w. (2022). merged methods. a rationale for full integration. sage. graffigna, g. & gambetti, r.c. (2015). getting insight or getting lost? an integrated mixed-method approach to social media discourse and its impact on marketing decision-making. international journal of internet marketing and advertising, 9 (2), 103-120 humphrey-murto, s., & de wit, m. (2019). the delphi method more research, please. journal of clinical epidemiology,106,136 -139. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2018.10.011 jones, j., & hunter, d. (1995). qualitative research: consensus methods for medical and health service research. bmj. 311. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.311.7001.376 matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art. palgrave macmillan. patton, m.q.(1986). utilization-focused evaluation. newbury park, ca: sage. vázquez-ramos, r., leahy, m., & estrada hernández, n. (2007). the delphi method in rehabilitation counseling research. rehabilitation counseling bulletin. 50(2). 111–118. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2018.10.011 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.311.7001.376 https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals microsoft word miyazaki, questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a42 questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki waseda university, japan abstract this paper examines differences between bakhtin’s dialogic view and argumentation theories with respect to questioning and analyzes the significance of these differences for the theories of pedagogy. in argumentation theories, a question is thought to be shared among the parties in a discussion. in the fields of argumentation and education, in particular science education, not only is a question shared, but also an answer is integrated into one among the participants (schwarz and baker 2017). bakhtin’s view on questioning, advanced in his later writings, shows how new questions emerge continuously in answers to the previous questions so that a question is not shared by a questioner and an answerer. using the bakhtinian framework in the analysis of some japanese pedagogical thoughts and classroom interactions, it is shown that each student can develop her/his own unique understanding of the topic – not the shared, integrated understanding – by finding out a new question in seemingly wrong answers, or by discovering different questions in the same problem. finally, the reason why new questions emerge in question-and-answer exchange is investigated within a constructivist perspective from cognitive science. keywords: dialogue, questioning, bakhtin, deliberative argumentation, outsideness, personal history of understanding kiyotaka miyazaki is a professor emeritus at the faculty of human sciences, waseda university, japan. his research interest is examining the views of japanese elementary and early childhood education teachers’ knowledge of practice and making them encounter bakhtin’s view on dialogism to discover some universal principles of dialogic education. ïïò introduction this paper proposes an important difference between dialogue and argumentation that has been overlooked so far and examines its significance for pedagogy. we should first draw a clear difference between dialogue and argumentation and then explore how this distinction can be bridged. some researchers (schwarz & baker, 2017) argue that a conversation is dialogic when it is performed with interpersonal care and mutual respect. furthermore, such an inquiry becomes intellectual when it follows the rules of argumentation. for those researchers, the dialogue itself is not an intellectual inquiry but only refers to social regulation between the participants of the inquiring conversation for them. in opposition to these views, this paper proposes that dialogue is itself an intellectual and critical inquiry, although it is distinct from argumentation, and the difference between the two comes from their orientation toward questioning. in argumentation theory, the participants in an argumentative discussion share the issn: 2325-3290 (online) questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a43 same question. on the contrary, in dialogue, new questions continuously emerge in the exchange of questions and answers, and a focus on newly emerging questions makes a dialogic inquiry rich and fruitful. the problem of questioning is central to japanese pedagogies where the term hatsumon, or asking a question, has been and is popularly used as one of the teacher’s important teaching acts (toyoda, 2007). here the term “question” means the problem or issue in the learning material which the teacher presents to students to make them explore/discuss/think in the lesson. this act often appears as an i-term of the ire/irf sequence. the presentation of the problem or the issue in asking questions does not necessarily take an interrogative form. making a claim can be the presentation of the problem or the issue. in this case, making an affirmative claim, “it is an a”, is equivalent to asking a question about whether “it is an a or a non-a.” this paper uses the term “question” as the problem or the issue in the learning material and the term “questioning” as the generation and presentation of the problem or the issue in the learning material. in difference to the case of hatsumon, however, this paper supposes that questioning is not entirely an activity of teachers but also an activity of students. students generate and present the problem or the issue in the learning material, sometimes intentionally but other times unintentionally or rather unconsciously. theories of argumentation insist that participants in a discussion share the same question. for example, van eemeren et al. (2014) hold that participants have common starting points at the opening stage of a critical discussion (van eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529). this view is followed by pedagogical approaches based on argumentation theory. in science education, in particular, participants are not only assumed to share the same question but also expected to arrive at the single same answer at the end of the argumentative discussion. for example, schwarz and baker (2017) insisted that argumentation in the lesson has a dialogical and, at the same time, a dialectical aspect and the argumentation converges into one final answer because of its dialectical nature. the epistemological function of the argumentation depends on its dialectical nature, and the dialogical aspect works only on the interpersonal horizon, like having the respect to other participants. my view of dialogue is based on bakhtin’s views of questioning in his later writings (bakhtin, 1986, p. 168) as well as on the pedagogical thinking of certain teachers in japan. for bakhtin, the answer to a question always produces a new question. this would include even wrong answers to a question. when the participants in a dialogue do not adhere to the original question but identify a newly emerging question in a wrong answer and pursue it, a new inquiry can begin, in which each participant can develop her/his own unique understanding. the difference between the dialogical view of questioning and the argumentation theory is that, in bakhtin’s view, the question is not shared by the participants. although this characteristic seems to produce confusion in dialogue, it actually advances dialogue. as bakhtin wrote, a new question is always emerging in a dialogue (bakhtin, 1986, p. 168). in bakhtinian dialogues, the dialogue works not only on the interpersonal horizon, for example, respecting others, but also has the epistemological function of understanding the world. in a dialogic class, each student can develop his or her own understanding by becoming aware that she/he does not share the same question with the others. thus, students can discover the questions newly emerged in them by, for example, interpreting the teacher’s question and exploring it. each one’s answer different from others can be explored as the true answer to each one’s unique question and does not finally converge into one unified answer – which normally happens in a dialectical process. the dialectical process of convergence into one unified answer sometimes occurs in any class. what is important, though, is for participants to become aware of, objectify, and develop each one’s unique questions. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a44 the dialogic type of students’ understanding has been truly realized in the class lessons of some japanese teachers. these teachers listen to students’ answers and identify their unique questions or encourage students to formulate their unique questions for the given problems. these experiences make it possible for the students to develop their own, unique understanding. these, dialogic teachers have developed their pedagogical views by accumulating and reflecting on their practices. while they are not influenced by bakhtin or any other dialogic thinkers, their views approach bakhtin’s view, in particular with respect to their views regarding questioning. this paper describes the bakhtinian view of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy by problematizing the characteristics of questioning in bakhtin and bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy to compare them with theories of argumentation and the pedagogy based on them. in what sense and how do the participants of a dialogue develop their own unique understanding by realizing the new question that they have developed during the exchange of question and answer? what characteristics of human understanding allow new questions to be developed in question-and-answer exchanges? in the following section, the most relevant argumentation theories are analyzed to show that they all maintain that participants are supposed to share one question during their discussion. then, schwarz and baker’s (2017) view on pedagogy based on deliberative argumentation is discussed, in particular in the field of science education. next, bakhtin’s view of questioning is examined, considering three specific aspects: first, new questions emerge continuously in an exchange of questions and answers; second, the process in which such a new question does not emerge is monologic; third, new questions emerge due to the mutual outsideness of the questioner and the answerer. then, the dialogic pedagogical views – specifically on the topic of questioning – of some japanese teachers are introduced. then, the processes of students’ understanding within science education are examined from a dialogic perspective. the scientific context is particularly relevant because, in science, it is generally considered that only one correct answer corresponds to a given question, making it an appropriate field for testing the idea that new questions develop from wrong answers, making such answers in a way correct with respect to the newly emerged questions. finally, we return to the problem of why new questions emerge continuously in a question-and-answer exchange and examine this issue from a constructivist perspective. it is argued that the mutual outsideness of the questioner and the answerer is a result of each person’s unique history of understanding acquired from experience, which leads to unique questions and unique understanding resulting from such questions for each person. argumentation theories and the dialogic pedagogical thoughts based on them questioning in theories of argumentation according to some researchers (van eemeren et al., 2014; schwarz & baker, 2017), the theories of argumentation can be classified into two types: monological and dialogical. toulmin (1958) and perelman (1977) provide monologic theories, while van eemeren and colleagues (van eemeren et al., 2014; van eemeren & snoeck henkemans, 2017) and walton (2000, 2006) propose dialogic theories. this terminological distinction is not bakhtinian but only indicates whether a theory supposes only one (monological) or multiple (dialogical) participants in the argumentation. for example, schwarz and baker (2017, p. 66) claimed that toulmin diagrams are “produced by a single person rather than of interactive dialogue between different people.” walton clearly stated that “a dialogue is a type of goal-directed conversation in which two participants (in the minimal case) are participating by taking turns” (walton, 2006, p. 2). between the two schools, questioning is an explicit focus of the latter, for example, plantin (2005). according to schwarz and baker, plantin asserted that argumentation dialogue is a confrontation of discourses, from which a question to be debated emerges. the discourse and counter-discourse are justifications for the answers, either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 98). questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a45 questioning is also a central concept in walton’s theory (2006), even though his definition of the term is different and narrower than the one defended in this paper, which instead would correspond to walton’s issue. for walton, the issue is one of the five main characteristics of the dialogue and is defined as a “governing question” about what should be done (walton, 2006, p.188). the issue is made up of two statements, called the theses, whose truth (or rather acceptability) is unsettled (walton, 2006, p.3). plantin (2005) asserted, as shown above, that a question emerges from the confrontation of discourse and counterdiscourse. it shows that walton’s term “issue” corresponds to plantin’s “governing question”, and this paper’s term “question.” for walton, questioning is one of the moves to set and develop the issue, along with asserting a proposition in which something is asserted positively or negatively to set the issue. different from asserting a proposition, questioning sets the issue by raising “doubts about argument but not going so far as to rebut it by putting forward a counter-argument” (walton, 2006, p. 17). walton’s characterization of questioning is suggestive of grasping the important characteristic of questioning in this paper’s sense. walton asserted that questions have presuppositions, and such presuppositions should be shared by the questioner and the answerer. if we ask, “when will mr. yamada leave tokyo?” we presuppose that mr. yamada will leave tokyo, and this presupposition is shared by both the questioner and the answerer. when the answerer responds, “this afternoon,” s/he admits the presupposition. walton’s definition of a presupposition is “a proposition that a respondent becomes committed to in the dialogue in virtue of giving any direct answer to the question” (walton, 2006, p. 211). thus, a presupposition determines the meaning of a question. sharing a presupposition indicates that participants share the question. walton thought that the participants can commit to a fair argument to reach a collaborative conclusion by virtue of sharing a question. the concept of a presupposition is important for discovering illegal acts in an argument, such as posing a loaded question, namely a question that contains a presupposition not shared by the answerer. that is, a fair argument is possible only when the participants share and acknowledge presuppositions. walton’s statement that participants need to share the meaning of question is applicable to both his concept of an “issue” and our notion of “questioning.” other dialogic argumentation theorists adopt the assumption that a question should be shared by the participants in an argument, even though the term question is not explicitly used. for example, van eemeren et al. (2014) consider that an argumentation moves in stages: “a difference of opinion manifests itself through an opposition between one or more standpoints” (van eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529), at the confrontation stage, and then “the division of the discussion roles of protagonist and antagonist is agreed upon” (van eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529) at the opening stage. the opposing standpoints indicate the possible answers to one question, which shows that setting and sharing a single question is naturally assumed in this process. moreover, the rules of a critical discussion proposed by van eemeren and snoeck henkemans (2017) state that participants should accept a given presumption as the starting point of an argument. this can be taken to indicate the necessity of sharing a question. it should be added that the questioning’s characteristic of being shared by the participants does not imply that the question does not change in the flow of argumentation. it can, but it should be shared by the participants in each moment of the argumentation flow. dialogic pedagogy influenced by argumentation theories even though many types of research in dialogic pedagogy are based on argumentation theories (asterhan, et al., 2020; boyd, 2016; chin & osborne, 2008; duschl & osborne, 2002; felton & crowell, 2022; haneda, et al., 2017; howe, et al., 2019; omland, et al., 2022; rapanta & felton, 2021; resnick, michaels, & o’connor, 2010), this study focuses on andriessen, baker, and schwarz’s view (andriessen & questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a46 baker, 2006; baker, andriessen, & schwarz, 2019), and in particular on schwarz and baker (2017), in which the relation between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory was very clearly developed. schwarz and baker are developing a learning theory based on van eemeren et al. (2014)’s approach to argumentation. on this view, a type of discourse “in which differences of perspective are handled critically and at the same time collaboratively” (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 20) – named deliberative argumentation is claimed to be desirable for use in education. according to schwarz and baker, the theory of the processes by which students learn by engaging in argumentative dialogue does not exist yet and it is necessary to integrate theories of learning, communicative interactions, and argumentation to build the foundation for it (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 18). let us see their view more closely, considering first their perspective on questioning based on argumentation theories, particularly of plantin (2005), as noted above (schwarz & baker, 2017, chapter 3). for them, questioning is located at the center of argumentation, as arguments emerge when questioning produces a diversity of answers (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 79). they do not refer explicitly to the basic characteristic of questioning in argumentation theories that i pointed out above, namely, the participants’ sharing of the question. it seems that this is taken for granted by them, especially considering the fact that van eemeren et al. (2014) is one of their theoretical bases. one important point made by them on questioning is that questions can evolve into more theoretical or conceptual issues in the flow of argumentation, and this characteristic is of great importance for education (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 81). as noted above, the participants’ sharing of a question and the development of questions in the flow of argumentation are independent issues. as far as i understand, their assertion means that participants always share a question which is changing in the flow of argumentation. it does not assert that the shared question becomes not shared in the process. there seems to be one more important feature on questioning in their view in addition to the sharing of a question. they seem to think that, in science education in particular, participants’ answers to the shared question are finally integrated into one. from the perspective of this paper, this idea is quite different from bakhtin’s view on questioning. to clarify this issue, it is necessary to know the basic framework of their notion of deliberative argumentation. as already seen above, differences of perspective are handled critically and at the same time collaboratively in deliberative argumentation. that is, there are two aspects the critical and the collaborative one in this argumentation. these two aspects can be replaced by two terms: dialectical and dialogical, respectively. schwarz and baker thought that alexander’s (2005) view of dialogic teaching is not enough, and that there must be not only the dialogic aspect but also the dialectical aspect which should be integrated with the former. here, “dialectic” means an exchange between people to handle disagreement, and “dialogic” means multi-voicedness in language production (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 103). as schwarz and baker referred to the bakhtinian concept of multi-voicedness (bakhtin, 1984), their characterization of “dialogic” is not the same as the one used in argumentation theories – in which it means the conversation of two participants but it is more bakhtinian. however, it is necessary to investigate more to know in what sense their concept of dialogic is bakhtinian, and also the meaning of their concept of dialectic. schwarz and baker’s view can be observed most clearly in the discussion of the role of argumentation in the field of science education. these authors mention a critical discussion as the argumentative practice that can be used in the field of science education, which echoes van eemeren’s pragma-dialectical model of argumentation (van eemeren et al., 2014). in this view, there is no room for pluralism in science, as “arguments naturally lead to the public selection of strong arguments and the disqualification of weaker ones” (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 116). put simply, there is a single truth in questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a47 science, and propositions outside it are considered to be in error. thus, in the scientific argument, scientific truth should be supported and actually supported by the majority, and other thoughts are judged to be errors and belong to a marginalized minority. as a consequence, the minority who answered erroneously gets pressured and avoids participating in scientific discourse. the “only reasonable way” (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 116) to solve this situation is to add in a dialogic approach by “instilling dialogical norms through practices such as listening to each other’s contributions, respecting each idea put forward” (schwarz & baker, 2017, p. 116) and so on. in their view, arguing whether some assertion is reasonable, scientifically significant, or not, that is, exploring the understanding of the objects, belongs exclusively to the dialectical aspect of argumentation. the dialogic aspect of argumentation is to take an attitude of respect, consisting in avoiding situations in which interlocutors choosing erroneous, minority views drop out of the argument. having respect for the wrong views of a minority does not imply finding out, through collaborative reasoning, potential correctness in the minority’s seemingly wrong views. respecting others is only an interpersonal deed and not an epistemological deed of understanding the world. this characteristic is clearly shown in a study presented as an example (berland & lee, 2012) centering on a science lesson for fifth and sixth graders. in this lesson, children were asked to discuss what an animal that invaded a hypothetical ecological system would eat, using a simple computer simulation. in this study, the students who had wrong ideas felt more listened to by other students and were more comfortable in changing their positions when their ideas were legitimized by other students. note that “legitimization” only means making a concession. for example, students with the correct view might say to those with incorrect ones that their idea might be partially right. the authors explained making a concession as saving face (goffman, 1974) of the students with the wrong views. the students with the correct view here did not identify the actual correct aspects of the incorrect views of the other students. a concession is simply an aspect of regulating the interpersonal relationship. schwarz and baker (2017) considered dialogicality in deliberative argumentation detached from its epistemological function. the intellectual pursuit of the truth is given in the enacting of the dialectical aspect. they referred to the concept of multi-voicedness as noted above, but it only means for them to respect others in the interpersonal horizon. this view on dialogue is quite different from bakhtin’s views. the central idea of bakhtin’s dialogue is that the participants have equal rights vis-à-vis the truth of the topic (bakhtin, 1984). this idea is the core of the concept of multi-voicedness of bakhtin. this statement does not refer to saving face but to the epistemological right of the participants to understand the world. it might be said that in the characterization of dialogue, at least in the field of science education, schwarz and baker are correct, and bakhtin is not. as schwarz and baker argued, there is no room for pluralism in science, such that, in science education, students’ answers must ultimately be brought to exemplify a single correct answer, the one provided by science. on this view, bakhtin’s dialogic thought, according to which each participant has an equal right vis-à-vis the truth, would not be tenable. however, behind this view lurks a fundamental understanding of questioning, namely, that a given question is or should be shared by all participants in a dialogue. moreover, in science education, it is also thought that only one correct scientific answer to a shared question can exist. it is needless to add that this view does not mean that the argument goes straight from one shared question to one final answer. there will emerge many different views, sometimes funny and/or wrong, in the process of argumentation. however, argumentation in science education is thought to converge finally and be integrated into one view, which corresponds to the one that is – if not absolutely correct – at least the one that mirrors the temporary scientific majority view. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a48 however, as described above, bakhtin’s view of questioning is different from the common view. this makes it possible to apply his view on dialogue even to science education. in this view, a question is not shared by a questioner and an answerer: new questions continually emerge in the exchange of the questions and answers, and multiple correct answers can exist, whose “correctness” depends on the questions that emerge. in science education as well, students produce new questions that are unique to each participant and whose answer may be correct, even if it is not identical to the one provided by institutional science. in the next section, my interpretation of bakhtin’s views on the questioning is presented. bakhtin’s view on questioning what does it mean that question and answer are not logical relations? to the best of my knowledge, bakhtin explicitly discussed questioning in only two places. one place appears in toward a methodology of human sciences (bakhtin, 1986). though this document is a very short one, i believe that it has great significance for his thinking on dialogue. question and answer are not logical relations (categories); they cannot be placed in one consciousness (unified and closed in itself); any response gives rise to a new question. question and answer presuppose mutual outsideness. if an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue and enters systemic cognition, which is essentially impersonal. the various chronotopes of the questioner and the answerer, and various semantic worlds (i and other). from the standpoint of a third consciousness and its “neutral” world, where everything is replaceable, question and answer are inevitably depersonified (bakhtin 1986, p. 168). what does it mean to say that “question and answer are not logical relations?” when an answer connects logically to a question, whether the answer to the question is correct or not is determined logically. when there are no logical relations, in contrast, the answer will deviate from what the question logically requires. thus, the answer can no longer be classified as correct or wrong. how do non-logical relations between the question and the answer occur? before approaching this issue, let us look more closely at the case when the question and the answer do bear a logical relation. here, whether the answer is correct is determined unequivocally, including in cases where there is no correct answer, or there are multiple answers. the question finishes when the answer is determined. the questioner and the answerer become one “closed consciousness,” in the sense that they share a presupposition regarding what is the correct answer. in other words, they are in the same systemic cognition. for bakhtin, this means that they are in a monologic relation. in this way, the question and the answer form part of a single, unified consciousness, and each person’s uniqueness can only exist in the form of an error. on this point, bakhtin (1984) wrote, “idealism recognizes only one principle of cognitive individualization: error. true judgments are not attached to a personality, but correspond to some unified, systemically monologic context. only error individualizes” (p. 81). idealism is the most typical case of monologism for bakhtin (1984): “ideological monologism found its clearest and theoretically most precise expression in idealistic philosophy” (p. 80). in monologism, true judgment, or the correct answer, belongs to one unified consciousness, regardless of whether the answer is given by an individual or is the product of a group discussion. here, the question is not explicitly stated, but it must exist, corresponding to the judgment or the answer, which are part of the same, unified system. in fact, for the answer to be correct, it should belong to a single, unified system as the question. by contrast, individuality, or an answer that is unique to the individual and cannot be reduced to part of a system, can only appear as an erroneous answer to the question. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a49 question and answer are not logical relation: an example from a classroom lesson how do non-logical relations arise between a question and an answer? in this case, the questioner and the answerer do not share a unified systemic cognition. thus, the answerer understands the questioner’s question differently from how the questioner understands it. the questioner and the answerer do not share the same question. a new question emerges in the answerer that corresponds to the answerer’s answer, and thus the original question in the questioner and the answer in the answerer lose their logical relation. the answer deviates from the original question. let us make this more concrete by analyzing a classroom lesson in which a new question emerges in an apparently erroneous answer to a teacher’s question. the example below (discussed in miyazaki 2019) shows a typical instantiation of a process in which a new question comes into being in a student’s answer that differs from the teacher’s original intention. this appears in an early phase of a sixth-grade lesson on the poem haru [spring] by the poet fuyue anzai, as taught by yukio tsukamoto, whose pedagogical thought is shown below. haru [spring] chouchou ga ippiki dattan kaikyou wo watatte itta. [a butterfly has gone alone over the dattan strait]1 at the beginning of the lesson, the teacher wrote the poem on the blackboard and asked the students to read it aloud. here, the word “chouchou,” meaning butterfly, posed a difficulty, as it was written in the older notational system, and the students did not pronounce it properly, saying instead “tefutefu,” a meaningless word. so, the teacher asked students by saying, “this (chouchou) is counted as ippiki. what do you think this is?” the word “ippiki” is a contraction for ichi-hiki or one-hiki, where hiki is a counter used for many types of animals and bugs and, therefore, is appropriate for use for a butterfly. the students provided three answers: a butterfly, a fish, and a bird. tsukamoto asked the question three times. the second time, while some students say it was a fish, the majority answered that it was a butterfly. tsukamoto asked why they thought it was a fish, the students said that it passed over a strait that a bird could not pass over. the students and the teacher then discussed the meaning of “strait.” then, the teacher asked a third time, and the majority of students replied, that it is a fish. the teacher responded by telling them that it was a butterfly. however, he did not end there, adding “the way you feel is great! maybe a bird, and a fish would be able to go over the strait, but a butterfly cannot. it is really a good reading.” see miyazaki (2019) for details on this lesson. tsukamoto’s response was not provided for the students to save face for their incorrect answer, nor to prevent students with the correct answer from losing respect for the students with wrong answers. tsukamoto really discovered in the students’ wrong answers a new question. tsukamoto’s intended question here was: how is tefutefu pronounced? the students instead asked the question: what is tefutefu that can pass a strait? tsukamoto’s intended question and the students’ answer have no logical relation. the students’ answer deviated from tsukamoto’s intention. when planning the lesson, tsukamoto did not expect the students to think about the challenge posed by the strait in this early phase of the lesson. in this sense, tsukamoto did not share a unified systemic cognition with the students. 1 the current author translated all the japanese texts used in this paper into english questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a50 outsideness as shown in the previous two sub-sections, an answer deviates from a question in an exchange of question and answer, a new question emerges in the answer to the previous question so that a questioner and an answerer do not share the same question. then, how does the deviation of the answer from the original question occur? let us see how bakhtin answers to this question. as quoted above, bakhtin wrote of the chronotopes of the questioner and the answerer, and their various semantic worlds (i and the other). bakhtin appears to propose that the answerer’s response deviates from the questioner’s intention because the two live in different chronotopes, that is, different semantic worlds. chronotope is “a way of understanding experience” (morson & emerson, 1990, p.367) in which time and space are inseparable and are regarded “as forms of the most immediate reality”(bakhtin, 1981, p. 85). as it is a way of understanding experience, each person experiences it uniquely so that the questioner and the answerer each have a different chronotope. it is needless to add that this is opposed to the monologic case, in which true judgments are not attached to a personality (bakhtin, 1984). the answerer and the questioner in a dialogue are unique individuals who do not share the same systemic cognition, so the answerer’s response necessarily deviates from the questioner’s intention, and the answerer has a unique understanding of the original question. where the questioner and the answerer exist in the different chronotopes, they each exist outside of the other’s semantic world. outsideness is a key concept in response to a question from the novy mir editorial board (bakhtin, 1986), another essay in which he refers explicitly to questioning. the theme of this essay is creative understanding of a foreign culture. he argued against the view that it is necessary to enter the foreign culture and view the world through its eyes, criticizing this view as one-sided and untrustworthy. to understand a foreign culture, one should be located outside the object of understanding. “in the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 7). regarding questioning, bakhtin (1986) wrote in this essay that “we raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths” (bakhtin, p. 7). a person who belongs to culture b can have a question about culture a, which a person who belongs to culture a cannot ask. in other words, someone who exists outside of culture a has different questions from a person who exists inside culture a. in dialogue in general, as previously noted, a questioner and an answerer have different chronotopes, such that the answerer understands the question differently from the way that the questioner intended and creates a new question. the fact that a person from a different culture poses a new question that someone who belongs to the culture cannot is an example of a dialogic relationship between the questioner and the answerer. however, bakhtin did not investigate whether persons in different cultures are aware of their mutual outsideness. while he seemed to presuppose that outsideness is self-evident for both persons, this is not necessarily so. it is possible that individuals may not understand certain differences between both cultures, although they may know that they belong to different cultures. in such cases, the one who is being questioned may consider the question strange or wonder why it is being asked. alternatively, the one who asks may think that the response does not provide a real answer to the question. such responses are manifestations of what bakhtin described as the question and answer being out of logical relation. while questions from the outside produce a creative understanding, both those from the different cultures must recognize their mutual outsideness and learn of the existence of new, creative questions in seemingly strange questions. thus, in bakhtin’s view, question and answer are not logical relations, and new questions emerge in answers to previous ones, as the answerer understands the given question differently from the questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a51 questioner. this is because the questioner and the answerer are unique individuals, living outside of each other’s semantic worlds. at the end of this section, let me add how bakhtin thought about the dialectics that schwarz and baker (2017) emphasized in their view on the dialogic pedagogy, based on my understanding of bakhtin so far. from my understanding of bakhtin, their dialectics belongs to what bakhtin named monologic idealism. as noted above, bakhtin noted that only an error individualizes in idealism. this applies to their view on the dialectics, which shows another problem of their pedagogy. in this pedagogy, where the question and answer should belong to a single unified system, each person’s intellectual uniqueness is only allowed to exist in the form of an error. intellectual multiplicity, a definitive feature of the dialogue, is not allowed there. it should be added, however, that bakhtin did not deny the dialectics completely. in toward a methodology of human sciences, he wrote as follows. “dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). he apparently thought of the dialectics as one kind of dialogue. however, this dialogue does “return again to dialogue on a higher level” (bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). in hegelian dialectics, what the dialectics returns is the synthesis or the integration of the opposing terms. bakhtin asserted that there is no such integration here. bakhtin seemed to admit that there are oppositions between different views developing in the dialogical process, but it is only a component of the dialogue and not equal to the dialogue. as noted before, the existence of opposition between proposition a and proposition b means the existence of questioning, which is correct between a and b from the standpoint of this paper. it seems that what bakhtin asserted is not that proposition c is finally integrated from the opposition between a and b, but that the new question, which one is correct between a’ and b,’ emerges from the old question. in the former case, a, b, and c are in one unified consciousness. in the latter, the opposition between a and b and the opposition between a’ and b’ exist mutually outside of each other. from the standpoint of this paper, the emergence of the new question: “which one is correct – a' or b'?” – is the result of the deviation of the answer to the original question: “which one is correct – a or b?” when the questioner has the question: “which one is correct – a or b?” and the answerer has the question: “which is correct – a’ and b’?”, a correct answer for each of them cannot be the same. bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and the process of understanding in it a teacher’s view on questioning similar to bakhtin’s how do the differences between the views of questioning discussed so far lead to differences between the views on understanding what occurs in the classroom lesson? in schwarz and baker’s (2017) thoughts on dialogic pedagogy, the intellectual process of understanding is not considered to be a dialogic process but a dialectical one, in which a single correct answer for a single question collaboratively sought. how does understanding develop in bakhtinian dialogue, in which a new question emerges in the answer to a previous question? it would seem that only intellectual confusion would result when an answer deviates from what the questioner requests. however, this is not so. each participant not only encounters a different question in dialogue but also becomes aware of her/his own question through an encounter with the other’s. in this way, they do not develop one unified understanding in collaboration, but each develops his/her own, unique understanding. i examine this issue by analyzing pedagogical views developed in japan. while these were not drawn from bakhtin’s own works or thinking, they are dialogic in his sense. in particular, their views on questioning are quite similar to bakhtin’s, discussed above. though several teachers developed similar views independently, i introduce the pedagogical view of yukio tsukamoto, a retired elementary school principal, whose lesson on the poem haru is shown above, as he articulated unique views on questioning questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a52 most clearly. not only tsukamoto but also many other japanese teachers think that the teaching-learning process in the lesson consists of the triadic relationship between the students, the learning material, and the teacher. for them, the lesson becomes dialogic if the teacher is an authentic learner of the students’ own learning material in a triadic relationship (miyazaki, 2019; 2020). tsukamoto discusses the relationship between the students’ questions and the teacher’s questions with respect to the learning materials as follows: when the teacher asks the question to children, she/he has the expected answer. however, the teacher’s question has multiple meanings so that it contains various different questions other than her/his intended one. the child interprets the teacher’s asked question, chooses one among many possible implied questions as her/his own, and answers it. sometimes, the child choses a question that differs from the teacher’s intended one. in that case, the child’ answer is not likely to match the teacher’s expected answer; the teacher thinks the answer is incorrect. however, if the child’s answer can be traced back to the child’s question which brought the answer,… the teacher can become aware of a new view of the learning topic hidden in the child’s incorrect answer and can put this new view in the flow of the lesson. the child and the teacher become the inquirers of the same question. (tsukamoto, 2014, p. 25) his remarks feature three important points. first, he noted that students do not passively accept the teacher’s questioning as it is. tsukamoto considered that the student must interpret the teacher’s question in her/his own way and necessarily produces a new question in this way. thus, while the student’s answer seems to be an answer to the teacher’s question, it is in fact an answer to a question that the student produces her-/himself. this is the source of the deviance between the teacher’s intended question and the student’s produced answer. second, he pointed out that this deviance often presents to the teacher as a wrong answer. however, this answer is likely not to be incorrect with respect to the question that the student produces. these two points indicate that tsukamoto’s views on questioning are largely the same as those of bakhtin. tsukamoto adds another point that is important for the pedagogy. when the teacher can understand the student’s answer not as a wrong response to the original question but as a correct answer to the student’s own question and can make the student’s new question explicit for other students, a collaborative exploration can begin. the third point is particularly important for the development of understanding of students and the teacher in classroom lessons. while it is widely recognized that listening to children is important, what is important is listening to the students’ questions from the standpoint of dialogic pedagogy. the teacher should become aware of the new question within the student’s answer that differs from the teacher’s own question and presents it back to the student and to other students in the class. the student who has unconsciously generated the new question can become aware of her/his generated question through the teacher’s presentation thereof. likewise, other students can observe the new question or, rather, the new interpretation of the teacher’s question. the teacher thus becomes aware of the new meaning of her/his original question in encountering the student’s new question as well. the class can develop a new understanding of the learning material by exploring the new question. how tsukamoto’s idea is materialized in the class was shown partly in the case of haru above. in this lesson, the teacher pointed out to the students that their answers, which are seemingly incorrect, are not necessarily so, but reasonable on their own terms. the teacher discovered that his apparently easy question could have a different and unexpected but reasonable question. new question in the wrong answer: one example from physics let us examine the development of understanding through listening to a different question found in a wrong answer in concrete cases. here, the examples are taken from the field of science. as noted, the questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a53 argumentative dialogic pedagogy holds that the process of understanding is dialectical, which means that the same question is shared by students, and there is only one correct answer, in particular, in science lessons. thus, science is an important site for testing the universality of the idea that there are new, different questions within seemingly wrong answers. the first example does not come from a classroom context; it is a hypothetical case drawn from the field of physics. it is selected to show the process of understanding more clearly. it concerns a wellknown problem that has been studied for many years in the study of misconceptions in the field of cognitive science and the learning sciences (clement, 1982; mccloskey, 1983). a coin is tossed straight up into the air and is moving upward. which force(s) is(are) acting on the coin? many respondents select b among the three choices given: gravity and an upward force act on the coin simultaneously. this is incorrect: the correct answer is c – that only gravity is acting on the coin. the coin keeps moving upward even in the absence of any upward force due to newton’s first law, or the law of inertia. the coin starts moving upward when it is thrown upward and would continue with the same velocity if there were no gravity. as the coin is continually acted upon by gravity, which continuously adds downward acceleration, the upward motion slows and then is turned into a falling motion. while this is an elementary problem in newtonian physics, it is infamous in the study of the learning sciences, as many adults including students currently taking elementary physics answer it incorrectly. most people have learned the law of inertia in the middle school, but they do not apply it correctly even in such an easy problem. have they simply forgotten the knowledge they had from school? however, this story is not so simple. rather, this error has reasonable grounds. the law of inertia presupposes an ideal world in which there is no resistance among objects. however, in the real world, surrounding objects, such as air, do exert resistance, so that uniform motion does not continue without a force acting continuously on an object. when the experimenter, or the teacher asks the question: which force(s) is(are) acting on a coin that is moving upward, she/he presupposes that this event is occurring in the ideal world. however, many people who answer the question do not account for this added presupposition, even if they are explicitly informed of it and think about the question, presupposing that it is happening in the real world, in which the resistance has many effects. after all, the people who answer the question live in the real world, and it is natural for them to interpret this problem situation occurring in the real world. in the real world, motion stops soon if no force acts on continuously. thus, answer b, which considers an upward force as acting on an object moving upward, is correct if the question is understood which force(s) is(are) acting on the coin which is tossed straight up into the air and moving upward? a b c figure 1. force(s) on the coin questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a54 to refer to this case. in other words, answer b deviates from the question as intended. those who chose answer b produced a different question from the one posed by the experimenter/the teacher and answered their own question. b is incorrect for the question as intended, but it is correct for the answerer’s own generated question. how can class lessons be organized using this material? one, maybe common, use of this query and response is to bring students to understand why answer b is incorrect so that they can replace the incorrect answer with the correct one. however, the teacher could develop another type of lesson in response to becoming aware of the students’ own question, which is different from the one posed by the teacher or the textbook. in this type of lesson, the students and the teacher can collaboratively explore the difference between the real world and the ideal world that is presupposed by newtonian physics. by this means, the students and the teacher can examine collaboratively how, in the real world, the resistance of surrounding objects affects the appearance of the law of inertia. in exploring the differences between the two worlds, the students can become better aware of the hypothetical nature of the ideal world as an analytic tool used to understand the real world. new question in the wrong answer: analysis of a science lesson in an actual lesson, most of the students’ wrong answers are not the ones like in the above case, whose existence and implications are known publicly beforehand. the teacher must, on the spot, grasp a student’s unique question in the student’s unique wrong answer. let us examine a concrete science lesson regarding the re-crystallization of ammonium chloride. this concerns a fifth grade class at nagano elementary school attached to the faculty of education of shinshu university, taught by ken’ichiro seki (nagano elementary school attached to the faculty of education, shinshu university, 2010). as this lesson appeared in miyazaki (2020), only the outline of the lesson is given here. the students watched a movie in which a bottle of liquid ammonium chloride was immersed in cool water, after which white crystals emerged one after another in a transparent solution, and they conducted an experiment to reproduce this phenomenon. after the experiment, one group reported that when they put the bottle in cool water, the quantity of undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger. hideta commented that this means that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of the bottle were simply larger. the teacher confirmed hideta’s idea by asking whether he thought that the undissolved crystal expanded and the transparent part of the solution made no contribution to the expansion of the crystal. hideta acknowledged the teacher’s question, adding that the transparent liquid in the bottle was mostly water, although a small amount of ammonium chloride was likely dissolved in it. another student, taka, argued against hideta, saying that ammonium chloride was necessarily present in the upper, transparent part of the bottle, while hideta counter-argued that the upper layer was not salty in the case of the saline solution from a previous experiment. hideta’s answer was wrong, and taka’s was correct. nevertheless, hideta’s answer was understandable as it was based on his own experience with a saline solution. while the majority, including taka, asked why the crystal at the bottom of the container expanded, hideta’s question instead was something like why the crystal at the bottom of the container expanded when there was insufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution. the teacher could not grasp hideta’s question fully. nevertheless, he discovered in hideta’s response something that was correct in its way. on reflection, the teacher considered hideta not to be wrong, mobilizing all his previous experience to think in the way that he did, while his conclusion was not factual. the teacher recognized hideta’s unique way of exploring nature. thus, the teacher did not contradict hideta. he provided a schematic drawing of the molecules of the solution to the students and questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a55 asked them to think of the inner state of the solution. in discussing this, a new experiment was proposed to boil down the transparent part of the solution to identify whether there was ammonium chloride. the experiment was conducted, and the existence of ammonium chloride was confirmed. here, hideta’s answer was literally a wrong response to the question, as understood by most students and the teacher. however, hideta’s experience with a saline solution led him to think that there was insufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution to crystallize. thus, he posed a different question than the rest of the students, for which his answer was correct. the teacher could not grasp his answer fully but did not deny his idea. with the assistance of the teacher, the other students came to share hideta’s question on the quantity of ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution and explored it collaboratively in an experiment. hideta’s new question in his seemingly wrong answer advanced all students’ understanding. answer as the course of each one’s understanding process thanks to hideta’s unique idea, which differed from that of the majority and helped the class develop a novel experiment, the class reached the conclusion that the crystal at the bottom of the bottle includes precipitated ammonium chloride from the liquid. given this, should the intellectual process of this lesson be characterized as a dialectical one, in which different views are integrated into one, as the deliberative argumentative pedagogy argues? the class record, taken by the teacher, has no detailed record showing each student’s response, but it seems not unnatural to suppose that no one, including hideta, opposed the conclusion publicly. i analyze the lesson flow under that supposition. did all students’ ideas become the same, integrated one? my answer is no. even though the students’ thoughts appeared to be the same from the distance, each of them was unique if we take into account the full process of answering. after the first experiment, the majority of students, like taka, thought that crystal at the bottom of the container expanded due to the crystallized ammonium chloride from the transparent part of the solution, implicitly supposing that there was enough ammonium chloride in this part of the solution. they then met hideta’s view and were with the facts of the previous saline experiment, which they may have forgotten about. thus, they must have implicitly encountered hideta’s question regarding why the crystal on the bottom of the container expanded when there was not enough ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution. in response to this, hiro, another student, said the following. hiro: though it was not salty before stirring, it became salty everywhere after we stirred it. well, i was confused. hideta’s view undermined hiro’s confidence in his own thinking. we cannot know what hiro ultimately thought after the second experiment, as no explicit description was provided regarding the final phase of the lesson in the teacher’s record. it is probably that he would have returned to his initial answer before encountering hideta’s view. even so, hiro’s understanding in the final phase would have become different from the one he had held because it would have evolved through the fluctuation caused by the encounter with hideta’s view. his thought might ultimately have been strengthened due to this fluctuation. some students might have not fluctuated in encountering hideta’s view, so their final understanding must have been the same as hiro’s on a surface level. however, as they had not experienced the process of fluctuation and re-establishment, their understanding would necessarily have differed from hiro’s. hideta would also have understood that there was sufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent solution that crystallized on the bottom of the container from the final experiment. more specifically, he likely understood the following: there is certainly sufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent solution to crystallize on the bottom of the container, although i had thought it was not enough from my previous questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a56 experience of the saline experiment. in other words, his understanding must have evolved from reexamining his own experience. thus, he did not scrap the old idea and replace it with a new one but developed the new idea from a re-examination of what he had thought. hideta, hiro and others, thus, might have arrived at the same answer. however, they could only have done so through different routes. although their understanding can be summarized in the same words, that the ammonium chloride in the transparent solution crystallized, the content of their understanding could reflect a unique course of understanding, even though this would not be in their power to express in language. for example, it can be that one who experienced fluctuation of her/his own understanding finally had more robust understanding than one who did not experience. the students’ intellectual processes should not be considered dialectical, as understood by the deliberative argumentative pedagogy. instead, it is dialogic, in that each student evolved her/his unique understanding differently from the others in encountering with others’ ideas. different questions in the seemingly same understanding: analysis of another science lesson let us examine an episode in another science lesson where students seem to provide the same, correct answer to one question, although their own questions and answers are unique and different from each other if their processes of understanding are taken into consideration. this lesson took place in a third-grade class taught by kazuyasu azegami (elementary school teacher at the time of the lesson, currently at shinshu university) in 1990 at tamagawa elementary school, chino, nagano, japan (azegami, 1990).2 the topic of the lesson was a bamboo air pressure gun. this is a toy involving a barrel and a plunger. two balls of paper are put into both ends of the barrel, the plunger pushes one ball, and the ball at the other end is shot out by air pressure. the lesson unit consists of twelve classes. in the seventh lesson and afterward, the students discussed why the paper ball flew out based on their own individual exploration from the previous two lessons. at the beginning of the seventh lesson, the teacher asked aki to present her view. aki indicated that a paper ball flew when two wet balls were placed at the ends of the barrel but did not when only one paper ball was placed at the front end of the barrel. there were two possible reasons for this, and she was wondering which one was correct. it could be that the paper ball at the front end flew out because the plunger and the paper ball at the rear end worked together on the paper ball at the front end. the other possibility was that there was air in the barrel between two balls, and the paper ball at the front flew due to the power of the air. her friend sayaka took the latter view, and aki was not sure if the ball could fly due to the power of the air alone as the air was spongy. then, kazu spoke. kazu: sayaka said that there was air (in the barrel). i checked it and found out there really was. aki said that she could not understand why the ball flew as the air is spongy. i think that air is here (in the barrel), and as you push it (the plunger) hard and it collides with the rear ball, the air becomes narrow (sic), and (the front ball) flies due to its’ (the air’s) force. after speaking, kazu conducted the experiment to confirm the existence of air in the barrel. he put the bamboo gun in the water tank and shot it to see if air emerged from the barrel. he tried three times unsuccessfully and succeeded in the fourth trial. then masa spoke: 2 the following analysis is based on the materials that azegami prepared for presentation and the video record of the class. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a57 masa: i checked too as kazu did, using a different method, whether there is air in the barrel, and there was. masa also demonstrated his experiment, in which a film of soap was placed at the front end of the barrel in place of the front ball to see whether it would bubble when the plunger was pushed in. the teacher asked the class whether they accepted that there was air in the barrel, and many students answered yes. however, asa raised her hand, and the teacher asked her to speak after checking whether she wanted to speak about this topic or another one. asa told the class about the experiment that she performed in the previous lesson. asa: i put the barrel (of the bamboo gun) in a plastic bag, put the balls in the gun and sealed (the bag) with tape, and fired (the gun). the bag expanded, so there must be air in the barrel. after this, the class moved on to discussing the students’ thoughts regarding whether the ball flew out for other reasons than due to the air in the barrel. kazu, masa, and asa each presented an experiment to explore aki’s question. presenting and conducting the experiment in the classroom can be characterized as pursuing the question in two senses. first, posing the question is asking nature about some natural phenomenon. the result of an experiment can be thought as the answer that nature provides to the experiment. second, more important from a dialogic pedagogical perspective, presenting and conducting the experiment in a classroom means asking the question of other students and the teacher. the experimenter asks the class this question: “i am exploring nature in this way—what do you think?” it is needless to say, that questioning in this paper refers to the second one. what questions did the three children ask? broadly speaking, they were raising one and the same question: is air in the barrel? they used different methods, however. to specify the method in the experiment is to develop the question in a specific form. • kazu: does air come out of the barrel as a bubble if there is air in the barrel and if the bamboo gun is shot underwater? • masa: does a film of soap put on the front end of the barrel bubble up if there is air in the barrel and if the gun is shot? • asa: does a plastic bag in which the bamboo gun is placed expand if there is air in the barrel and if the gun is shot in the bag? the students’ understandings from these experiments are, broadly speaking, the same: there is air in the barrel. at a closer look, however, their understandings are clearly somewhat different, corresponding to the differences in their questions. we can describe their understandings schematically, as follows. • kazu: there is air in the barrel that becomes a bubble underwater. • masa: there is air in the barrel that pushes out a film of soap at the front end of the barrel. • asa: there is air in the barrel that can expand a plastic bag in which the gun is placed. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a58 they did not just propose their experiments independently. masa at least realized the similarities and differences between his experiment and kazu’s. masa noted this explicitly, stating that his experiment was the same as kazu’s, asking whether there was air in the barrel, but using a different method. kazu, who performed the experiment first, connected his experiment to those of the other two. at the end of the seventh lesson, the teacher asked whether there was something in the lesson that the students understood well. to answer the question, kazu referred to the experiments of masa and asa, saying, “experiments with the soap and the plastic bag. they made me understand.” though he did not say what exactly he had understood, it is likely the fact that there is air in the barrel. he must have understood it somehow before he saw these two experiments by masa and asa, as he showed his own experiment first. still, his understanding of the fact that there is air in the barrel must have advanced by addressing basically the same but a little bit different question. it is not accidental that these students posed similar questions in this class. the attitudes of the students were noted by the teacher, who shows a unique view of the experiment and the process of understanding. azegami reported thinking, even in childhood, that his understanding of something cannot really be his own unless he confirms it with the experiment that he himself performs (k. azegami, personal communication, july 27, 2021). for azegami, the experiment is not a device to make a final decision on which hypothesis is correct after possible hypotheses are formulated, like experiments in the hypothesisexperiment-class pedagogy (itakura, 2019). for him, to do an experiment is to ask a question about some phenomenon, exploring it from some direction and developing a novel understanding. thus, encountering others’ ideas of experiment in the class can lead to an improved understanding of the phenomenon by learning how others can explore them. therefore, he encouraged and helped students to think of and conduct their own experiments. this attitude is clearly shown in his interaction with asa in class. before asa spoke, many students appeared to agree, perhaps not on the cause of the ball’s flight but on the fact that there was air in the barrel. thus, it did not seem necessary to do an additional experiment to show this. however, the teacher allowed asa to describe her experiment after confirming that she would talk about an experiment to show that there is air in the barrel. this episode should not be understood to show how the teacher respects her right to speak in general but instead respects her desire to show her unique understanding to the class. the uniqueness of each person’s understanding produces differences in questions personal history of understanding finally, let me clarify why new questions continuously emerge in an exchange of questions and answers. in the section “bakhtin’s view on questioning,” i noted that bakhtin suggested that this is because of the difference between each person’s chronotopes. this answer is too broad and general, and it does not explain how a difference in the chronotopes results in the emergence of a new question. in this section, i present a view on learning developed in the cognitive sciences to explain this process: constructivism. this view is particularly important for the study of misconception and the development of the concept (disessa, 2006; inagaki & hatano, 2002; smith et al., 1994). the basic tenet of this view is that all learning involves the interpretation of phenomena, situations, and events, including classroom instruction, through the perspective of the learner's existing knowledge (smith et al., 1994, p. 116). this view rejects the tabula rasa conception of learning, in which new information is acquired by being written on the mind as onto a blank slate. additionally, new information cannot simply replace old information. so, confrontation with an old idea is not enough for a new idea to be acquired and understood. if new knowledge is to be acquired and understood, it should be connected somehow to an existing knowledge base. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a59 the knowledge base of each person is the product of her/his encounter with and experience of phenomena, situations, and events. this includes not only directly perceived experiences that are not mediated by the other persons but also those that are mediated by the other persons and symbols, as is typically the case in education. each person’s knowledge base is always changing and is renewed in the encounter with new phenomena, situations, and events in life. as a result, each person’s knowledge base is unique to that person. it constitutes the accumulation of each person’s experience in her/his life history and is different for each person. here, i call each person’s unique knowledge base the personal history of understanding, emphasizing the characteristic that it is continually changing throughout that person’s history. the uniqueness of each person’s knowledge base is not focused in the research tradition of the misconception and conceptual development. instead, these studies investigate the structure of knowledge (disessa, 1988, 2008; vosniadou, 2007). however, a novel research area has been emerging that is near to my research interest in the uniqueness of each person’s knowledge base. these studies focus on epistemic heterogeneity or the differences in knowledge base among people from different communities. for example, bang and colleagues (bang et al., 2015; barajas-lópez & bang, 2018; medin & bang, 2014) have been studying indigenous ways of knowing among the native peoples of the united states and around the world. likewise, rosebery et al. (2010) investigated how students come to understand the concepts of thermodynamics, such as heat and heat transfer, examining how scientific concepts and the everyday experiences relate to their understanding. in this work, they focused on students’ different everyday experience based on their original communities. as noted in the section “bakhtin’s view on questioning”, differences between communities and their cultures were discussed by bakhtin (1986). it is unnecessary to emphasize, however, that these differences are only a part of the source of individuals’ uniqueness. the research interests of researchers working on epistemic heterogeneity thus seem somewhat limited. questioning and the personal history of understanding how does the personal history of understanding function in asking a question? this paper characterized questioning as presenting a problem/an issue. something becomes a problem/an issue when that something is not understood, so presenting a problem/an issue or questioning is the act of coming to know and/or to understand something that is unknown and/or not understood. naturally, questioning on a topic relates to the questioner’s own history of the understanding of the topic. because someone’s personal history of understanding reflects what and how that person has understood things in life, it must influence what and how the topic or the meaning of a question about the topic is understood. what about the case where person a asks a question of person b? a’s question is understood by a, based on a’s personal understanding. b, on the other hand, must understand the meaning of the question before answering it, and b does so based on b’s personal history of understanding. the personal histories of understanding of a and b are unique to each person and different from each other. in consequence, the question that b understands is different from the question that a intended. thus, a new question emerges in b, and b does not answer the question a intended, but the one b has understood, causing b’s answer to deviate from a’s question. tsukamoto’s lesson on the poem haru described above is a good example of this. he asked his students: this (chouchou) is counted as ippiki. what do you think it is? tsukamoto’s intention was to ask how the word is read aloud. however, many students understood the question as follows: what is tefutefu, something that can pass a strait. consequently, these students provided an answer that was wrong with reference to tsukamoto’s intended question. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a60 what is the difference between the personal history of tsukamoto’s understanding and the personal histories of each student’s understanding? although all we can do is speculate, the reasoning might go something like the following. their understandings might differ not only with respect to the content of the poem but also with respect to the procedure of understanding the text in general. for tsukamoto as a teacher, it might seem natural to check the pronunciation of words first and then interpret the meaning of the sentence. however, it might be natural for students to begin reading by interpreting the meaning of a sentence, even if there are some words with uncertain pronunciations. the differences between tsukamoto’s question and the students’ question can also be characterized as follows. both tsukamoto and the students refer to the word tefutefu as their topic. however, the two sides interpret the topic differently based on their own personal histories of understanding, so their questions differ from each other. the structure of the questioning in cases from science education shown above is easily describable in this way. some situations are not well understood by the participants in them. these can be called problematic situations, following dewey (1938). it is the situation in which a problem/an issue is discovered. however, the participants do not share a question, even if they focus on the same problematic situation. participants interpret a problematic situation based on their own personal history of understanding and try to understand it in their own way. in other words, each one poses a unique question for the situation. in seki’s lesson, for example, the problematic situation was to determine why the quantity of undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger. hideta, who answered differently from other students, recalled and compared the result of the saline solution previously examined. based on his personal history of understanding, he interpreted this situation differently from other students and produced a question that was different from theirs, asking why the quantity of undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger if the ammonium chloride in the upper, transparent part of the bottle is thin and not dense enough to make the crystal at the bottom larger. let me return to bakhtin’s view, presented in the section “bakhtin’s view on questioning.” the chronotope, in bakhtin’s conception, at least one component of it, refers to the way of understanding the world. therefore, differences in the personal histories of understanding would be components of differences between individuals’ chronotopes. this section shows that the cultural differences that bakhtin discusses using the concept of mutual outsideness in response to a question from the novy mir editorial board (bakhtin, 1986) are the object of research as the epistemological heterogeneity caused by differences between communities. it is also noted that heterogeneity based on differences between communities are only a part of the difference of people’s personal histories of understanding. bakhtin’s idea of outsideness is caused not only by cultural differences but also by each person’s individual differences so that the personal history of understanding is at least a component that causes people’s mutual outsideness. concluding remarks this paper examined the differences between the bakhtinian dialogic view and the pedagogical thought based on it, on the one hand, and the theories of argumentation and the pedagogical thought based on them, on the other, by focusing on the characteristics of questioning for both of them. the theories of argumentation insisted that one question should be shared among the participants for an argument to develop. the bakhtinian view is that a question is not shared by the participants, and a new question emerges continuously in an answer to the previous question. for bakhtin, exchanges that stick to one and the same question are monologic. questioning in bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory kiyotaka miyazaki dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a61 new questions emerge in dialogue because those who participate in it have unique knowledge bases that are the product of the accumulation of their unique life experiences. this paper termed this knowledge base – the personal history of understanding. because of the uniqueness of the person’s personal history of understanding, each participant in the dialogue understands the same topic or the same problematic situation differently and so produces different questions unique to each. when a student’s answer to a teacher’s or other students’ questions seems to be wrong or felt strange in the lesson context, this may be the result of a new question implied in the answer that is unique to that student. likewise, when the same idea seems to be presented by different students, it may be that each student has a unique question, approaching the same idea from different directions. the lesson becomes dialogic as the teacher notices the new question and presents it to the class. that is, it becomes dialogic because the participants of the lesson understand that seemingly different, wrong, or strange ideas are actually reasonable, having equal rights vis-à-vis the truth to other ideas, when the questions in these seemingly wrong or strange ideas are discovered. by finding a new question in her/his seemingly different, wrong, or strange answer, the student can explore it further and develop her/his understanding. students who recognize the new question in the other’s seemingly different, wrong, or strange answer can investigate this new question and become aware of their own questions and develop them further. in this way, each student can develop his or her own understanding based on the personal history of understanding by exploring her/his unique question. in science and mathematics, there seem to be only one correct answer to any question. however, this paper showed that even in the field of science education, supposedly incorrect answers can still be correct for the question hidden in the answer. it also showed that, where participants’ thoughts seemed to converge finally into one, each one still possesses a different answer corresponding a different question, indicating each one’s different path to the final idea. this paper does not insist that theories of argumentation are without value. on the contrary, they are effective means to organize the methods for participants to reach one consensus, such as at a conference. however, education is not for consensus building but for individuals to develop their own understandings based on each one’s personal history. the participants might reach consensus on a topic in a lesson, but the consensus itself is not important. what is important is each student’s path to this consensus or the individual exploration that builds understanding. this exploration, which is unique to each person, is her/his questioning. encountering others in dialogue makes it possible to become aware of one’s unique questions. unfortunately, theories of argumentation ignore individual people’s uniqueness of understanding, so necessary in pedagogy, theories that should support unique individual paths to new questions and new answers. references alexander, r. j. (2005). towards dialogic teaching: rethinking classroom talk. london:dialogos. andriessen, j. & baker, m.j. (2006). arguing to learn. in r.k. sawyer, (ed.), the cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 2nd ed. new york, ny: cambridge university press. asterhan, c. s. c., howe, c., lefstein, a., matusov, e., & reznitskaya, a. 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(2010). how (well-structured) talk builds the mind. in d. d. preiss & r. j. sternberg (eds.), innovations in educational psychology: perspectives on learning, teaching, and human development (pp. 163–194). new york, ny: springer publishing company. rosebery, a., ogonowski, m., dischino, m. & warren, b. (2010). the coat traps all your body heat: heterogeneity as fundamental to learning. journal of the learning sciences,19(3), 322–357. doi: 10.1080/10508406.2010.491752 schwarz, b. b. & baker, m. j. (2017). dialogue, argumentation and education: history, theory and practice. new york, ny: cambridge university press. smith, j. p. iii, disessa, a. a. & roschelle, j. (1994). misconceptions reconceived: a constructivist analysis of knowledge in transition. journal of the learning sciences, 3(2), 115–163. doi:10.1207/s15327809jls0302_1 toulmin, s. (1958). the use of argument. cambridge: cambridge university press. toyoda, h. 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(2006). fundamentals of critical argumentation. cambridge: cambridge university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 357-article text-1622-1-6-20200817 -layout 2020-09-23.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf97 a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it: a reply to the commentaries eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract i feel honored to receive so many deep, critical, supportive, expanding, and thought-provoking commentaries on my original paper “a student’s right to freedom of education” from undergraduate university students, educators, and educational researchers. these commentaries involve different genres: on-the-margin contextual comments, theoretical essays, ethnographies of their pedagogical practices, reflective sharing of good and bad personal educational experiences, personal authorial opinions, critiques, students’ course evaluations, analysis of science-fiction literature, investigation of bakhtin’s biography, video replies, a list of questions, and so on. once socrates complained about the print text that it is impossible to ask the text new questions – the text won’t reply to these questions. in this special essay, we tried to overcome this problem by involving each other in address-reply commentaries on each other’s texts. we want to invite the readers of this special issue to join us in our dialogues of agreement and disagreement. in my reply to the commentaries, i want to focus on the issues raised by the commentators that most touched me. this focus is on the relationship between a student’s authorial education and a teacher’s authorial teaching, where “teacher” is understood on a range between an individual educator and the entire society. i want to apologize in advance if i left out important concerns that some of the commentators wanted me to address (feel free to raise it again on the margin) of if i severely misinterpreted their idea or point (please correct me on the margin). here i focused on the following six major issues raised by the commentators. the first issue is raised by several undergraduate students from canada, russia, and south korea about the possibility (and reality) of some students actively rejecting their freedom of education. isn’t it a case for rejection of my call for a student’s right to freedom of education? the second issue raised by many commentators is about imaginary and real cases when foisted education is effective and even, arguably, more effective than student-owned education. do these cases defeat my overall argument that student’s freedom of education is required by education itself? the third issue was introduced by my colleague and a proponent of self-directed learning kevin currie-knight when he asked a deceptively simple question of what i mean by “student.” usually, the role of a student is defined either by the institution or by the teacher, which implicitly goes against the spirit of my claim for a student’s right to freedom of education. the fourth issue eloquently raised by an ecuadorian undergraduate exchange student, juan francisco poveda, studying at the kyung hee university in seoul, about whether education must be subordinated to the needs of the society. fifth, i consider the relationship between the education-for-myself and the education-for-the-other, the new terms introduced by my russian colleagues. my overall vista in considering this relationship is authorship: the student’s educational authorship or the teacher’s pedagogical authorship. in a disagreement with some commentators and in an agreement with some other commentators, i argue that the teacher’s pedagogical authorship must be subordinated to the student’s educational authorship through the teacher’s pedagogical fiduciary obligation. finally, i will revisit the kantian educational paternalism by considering the two, arguably, most powerful and extreme cases for foisted education: foisted education for the survival of the society and foisted education for a student’s agency awakening. in my issn: 2325-3290 (online) comment on text jim rietmulder: i like your innovative way of overcoming the lament about the limitations of printed text! a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf98 conclusion, i will summarize the presented reasons for why a student’s freedom is needed for education and briefly discuss how to test my claims. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. acknowledgements i am thankful to ana marjanovic-shane, bryan campbell, xu wang, and shakhnoza kayumova for their feedback and discussion of a previous draft of this essay. ��� when students reject their freedom of education in at least three commentaries, undergraduate students reject their freedom of education. thus, in shelley price-jones’ commentary essay, her russian undergraduate student in a south korean university alina nedykhalova stated, …i don't think that freedom in education is a good idea for russian students. when i was in school, all my classmates didn't know what they wanted to do, and they didn't know what major they wanted to choose. therefore, i agree with a statement that was mentioned in the article that it would be like “a blind leads the blind.” i graduated from a school in russia. when i entered kyung university, i was in shock there because i have to choose what kind of class i want to explore. and this scared me because i don't want to make a big mistake and choose a wrong class or poor class. in conclusion, i want to say that maybe not all students want freedom in education, what if some student wants a system like in a russian university or in a russian school. soo-hyeon park, a korean student from the same university, brought the similar objection but directed it at students who might be too ignorant to know what is good for them, we should consider the fact that children have different kinds of personalities and characteristics. some might say that because everybody has different personalities, we should let them choose their own education curriculums. however, what about students who don’t really want that freedom? there are indeed students who are independent, know what they like and enjoy the freedom. on the other hand, there are also students who don’t actually know what they want to learn and want a curriculum that is already given out. letting students have freedom of choosing their own subjects can rather cause confusion, especially at a young age. similarly, mikayla benner, an undergraduate student of professor jim cresswell at the ambrose university, canada, wrote, a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf99 i do not believe education must be defined by the student, but neither do i believe that it must be defined by the state or by the teacher. i think that education is a system which is used for learning. there can be many forms of education. not all students learn the same way and we should try to help students learn in a way that suits them best. in my view, what unites two students – alina and mikayla (i am not so sure about soo-hyeon) – is that they articulate their desire for their own education. alina does not seem to trust her own judgment about what classes and curricula to have for her education to be good. she wants her education to be fully controlled by her teachers and educational institutions. in my reading of her commentary, mikayla wants her education to be designed somewhat collaboratively with her teachers and, probably, educational experts. i agree with mikayla and soo-hyeon that students are different – even more, student may have different desires, interests, and constraints at a different time, with different curricula, with different teachers. i know many students of mine (but not all!) who agree with mikayla and a few who agree with alina. yet, i argue that ironically, through their opinions about their education, both alina and mikayla have expressed their freedom of education. let me explain. when i argue for a student’s right for freedom of education, i do not mean that each and every student must design their own education in the full scale as i listed in the section on unpacking this right, in my original article. any freedom includes a possibility for delegation of some or all decisions to somebody else while the person reserves the right to change or revoke this delegation at any time. alina exercises her freedom of education by saying (in my paraphrase), “teachers and educational institutions, please design and control my education completely!” as far as alina has the right to change her mind in general or in a particular case, it is fine from the perspective of freedom of education. the problem starts when alina does not have this right or when she wants to impose her version of education on all “russian students” (or on somebody else). the same is true for mikayla. it is the expression of her freedom of education to demand collaboration with her teachers and educational experts. alina’s and mikayla’s freedom of education realizes itself when these students say, “i want this or that for my education.” as far as the student’s want rules their education, the student’s right to freedom of education is affirmed. the problem starts when a student finds that they cannot change this arrangement, previously favored by them, or when the student tries to impose their preferred vision of education on other students. finally, i want to comment on why a student may distrust their own freedom of education. of course, there can be many reasons for that: the peripheral nature of learning for the student, student being overwhelmed with other aspects of their life, the student’s contextual and conditional trust in a particular teacher, and so on. however, one reason for that may be the student’s past oppressive educational experiences. under educational oppression, a student must unconditionally submit themselves to the authority’s demands. in an oppressive institution, the student’s most common (but not exclusive!) learning experiences is either to learn how to most successfully conform to the authority’s unconditional demands – “guess and please” the teachers’ requirements (rostotsky & polonsky, 1968) – or to actively or passively resist the authority. in both cases (but in different ways), the student’s authorial agency in academic learning gets suppressed and/or remains unsupported (matusov, 2011). in other words, alina’s rejection of her educational decision making might be a result of her long socialization in the russian oppressive educational system: she might become “a good student,” knowing how to get good grades, but a poor learner whose educational desires became suppressed by the conventional school. oppressive educational systems often create a vicious cycle: it suppresses the educational authorial agency in a student while the student more and more distrusts their own underdeveloped and uninformed decision making and relies more and more on the authority to make these educational decisions for them. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf100 can foisted education be effective? in their own ways, many commentators – namely, raz shpeizer, amnon glassner, darren dyck, james cresswell, mikayla benner, david kirshner, belkacem taieb, jeff king, alina nedykhalova, soohyeon park, and kevin currie-knight (to a lesser degree) – challenge my argument that student’s freedom is needed for a good education. i appreciate their challenge and critique, and i want to clarify and deepen my argumentation. can foisted education be effective for a student’s learning? can a student make a poor educational decision about their education? can an educator or an educational institution can make a better decision about a student’s education than the student themselves? can a student resist now but will appreciate foisted education in the future? my answer to all these questions is “yes.” i know cases like that, and i appreciate some of the commentators bringing their own cases – real or imaginary. however, does this fact mean that students’ education must be patronized, as kant believed, and a student’s right to freedom of education has to be abandoned? my answer is “no.” my major argument for a student’s freedom of education is rooted in the authorial nature of education in whatever way to define it. a student authors their education. education is a based on a student’s authorial agency: the student’s want, need, interest, challenge, puzzlement, curiosity, necessity, creativity, reflexivity, criticality, authorship of their actions and ideas, a transcendence of the given culture, self-actualization, mistake-making, goal setting, value defining, and so on. when the student’s authorial agency is not legitimized, not supported, restrained, or oppressed, education gets withered to become learnification – learning without value and soul, using an educational philosopher gert biesta’s term (2010, 2015). on a larger scale, a student’s authorial agency of decision making about their education is more important than making a right educational choice. let me consider a radical example, i mentioned in my paper, from the uk democratic school “summerhill” about a boy, freer, who chose not to learn reading and writing in school: there was a boy at summerhill who never went to a single class and who left the school scarcely knowing how to read or write. freer, summerhill alumnus (apparently, in his 40s): i was one of the few pupils at summerhill that didn't attend lessons. i chose not to attend because i was not interested in it. i was very good at pottery carpentry those sort of things. i had a lot of confidence in my own ability to cope with the world through being able to do things with my hands. so, when i left summerhill at the age of 15, i could barely read or write, and i had no real idea what i was going to do or what i wanted to do. on leaving summerhill free, he spent five years hitchhiking around the world twice, after stay in europe, he sold jeans in turkey, his blood in kuwait, worked in a kibbutz in israel, was a film extra in india, worked in the mines in australia, happened across the carnival in rio, gave conferences on summerhill in california, went to prison in canada, and finally ended up taking part in humanitarian movements in pakistan and in india. in short, he visited over 90 countries without ever living through a single winter. freer: every time i crossed the border, i would have to fill out a rather large form that required my name and my address and my age and what language i spoke, what religion i was et cetera. and i learnt to do these forms, write these forms in such a way, in such bad handwriting. but nobody could actually… even if i had spelt it correctly, they wouldn't have been able to read it. and most customs officials because they were… [in] arab countries [they] couldn't read latin script anyway, it didn't make much difference. but that was my only real drawback [of not being able to read and write]. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf101 i had during this period taught myself how to read and write correctly. i suppose it first came home when i was in japan and i got a job being an english conversation teacher to scientists from a soap factory. … i was explaining what my family does, what my father does, and they couldn't understand what a caravan [was]. my father was a caravan manufacturer and so … they asked me to spell it for them. and at that point, i really got fed up. i thought, “god, i can't really spell this very well and i'm not sure how i could spell it.” so, that really made me think, made me decide that i would, you know, teach myself how to read and write. i found it quite embarrassing. so, after that... it wouldn't… it took me about three months. i got a dictionary and i started to read books. and just, just i did it myself. and by the time i got back to the uk, i was quite, yeah, normal, i suppose. interviewer: how do you feel now about neill [the summerhill school founder and principal] letting you go with such minimal qualifications? freer: yeah, i often puzzled about that, both to do with neill and my father in fact. i don't think… i would… well, i would be very worried if my own children grew up not reading and writing. so, i've often wondered [laughed] around about how they could have done that. i don't really understand it. but they, neither neil nor my father, seemed to have much concern about it. so, i think maybe they just felt that i would do it eventually. i think neil always said that i will learn eventually. freer now has a degree in economics and is an industrial consultant giving advice in many countries in the third world. he is also increasingly involved in the management of community-based projects in britain. freer: i think it took me a lot of confidence. i think, to sum it all, it gave me a lot of strength to trust in my own judgment and trust my own feelings1. did boy freer make an educational mistake of not learning how to read and write? arguably, yes, because then (and now?), reading and writing were practices that have been highly required in his society. was young adult freer angry at a.s. neill, the founder of summerhill, and his father for letting him out of school without learning these important skills? yes, he was. was freer, in his 40s, ambivalent now, at the time of the interview? yes, he was – as he said he might not let his children repeat his own educational experience. however, would it be better for freer to be foisted to learn reading and writing? the final words of freer suggest, no. at summerhill, boy freer had learned to direct himself on how to study what was important, interesting, and needed for freer at the moment. when, as young adult in japan, he faced the necessity to learn how to read and write2, he did it swiftly, deeply, and efficiently. it might be true that if freer was forced to learn reading and writing in school, he might have had less frustration as a young adult. but, also it might be true that freer would not be where and who he became – a deep, self-responsible, passionate, and self-directed learner. arguably, freedom of education made freer a more creative, more passionate, more adjustable, more resourceful, more inquisitive, more thoughtful, more responsible, and more open for life person. in short, education is not about reifiable learning outcomes – it is about people. both a student and an educational expert might make mistakes about what is important to study for the student. actually, with more and more accelerating pace of the changes in our society – technological, institutional, social, political, relational, – these mistakes are becoming more and more vast and severe. probably, the best solution to this educational problem is for the student to focus on studying what is needed, important, interesting, puzzling, and curiosity provoking curious to them for the student 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58xthgyziy 2 with proliferation of the internet, smartphones, and social media, the need for reading and writing might be stronger for children now than in the time freer grew up, at least in the developed countries (ana marjanovic-shane, personal communication, july 30th 2020) a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf102 here-and-now3, which is the only thing to be guaranteed to last in the future. the power of a student’s freedom of education is not that the student will be more right in choosing their curricula important for their future than an educational expert. rather, it is rooted in the student’s learning on the student’s terms and demand (collins & halverson, 2009). this on-demand learning promotes the student’s authorial agency, which is the best prep for the unknown future. in addition, in contrast to other practices, education thrives on the students’ mistakes. students’ mistakes create teaching-learning opportunities for the students and teachers. when a mistake is owned by a student, when the student makes it freely as the student’s own wrong decision, rooted in the student’s own desires, interests, needs, curiosities, challenges, and puzzlements, the owned mistake often provokes a self-initiated inquiry in the student. in contrast, when a mistake is not owned by the student but imposed on them by foisted education, the student often becomes interested mostly in how to please the authority through finding a pattern of their actions or discourse that satisfies the teacher. in my recent book (matusov, 2020a), i described a second-grade girl working on her math homework at an afterschool program where i met her. passing by, i noticed that in one of her math puzzles, she subtracted a number (48) from another number (57) but got a bigger result (78). when i attracted her attention to this “miraculous” result, the girl insisted that this was how the teacher taught them. she said that she would be punished by the teacher if she deviated from the teacher’s math procedure. although the girl might be wrong about what the teacher taught her, she was probably right that her math instruction was entirely focused on pleasing the teacher. it was clear for me that the girl was not interested in engaging herself in math but rather in pleasing her teacher and finishing her homework as fast as possible to go to play with other kids. to some degree, it would have been even worse when a student learns “correct” procedures through such soulless learning. as i wrote in the book, for me, the issue is not that the teacher taught a wrong mathematical procedure (i hope not!) or did not guide the girl the math well (which probably was the case). what is very important for me in this example is that the girl treats the (school) math reality as an authoritative procedural ritual (mclaren, 1993), in which she engages, which excludes any possibility for her own judgment and understanding. the student learned to recognized patterns of manipulation with numbers to please the teacher (matusov, 2020b). i argue that in this case, the teacher serves as a holy priest of epistemological divine authority to whom the student offers her servitude to avoid punishment and, probably, even to reap up some rewards in the form of praise and good grades (matusov, 2020a, pp. 37-38). the problem with the kantian educational paternalism, which promotes foisted education, where the teacher or other educational authority knows better what, whether, and how a student must study, is that it severely curbs, disables, postpones, or delegitimates the student’s authorial agency, on which education is based (and must be based). the educational paternalism zombifies a student’s learning, even when this learning is “effective” – predictably leading the student to the correct answer or action on the teacher’s demand or on an exam. 3 a student’s here-and-now interest, need, or puzzlement is not an individualistic notion. from the fact that people have different herean-now interests does not mean that education can occur only in one-on-one tutoring or via autodidact. people induce here-and-now interests in each other. all the time, people create here-and-now moments in each other. for example, i have successfully created the here-and-now interest in many of my commentators and hopefully in some of my readers by writing these papers on a student’s right to freedom of education. this shared here-and-now interest might have different intensity and meaning for the participants and can even be based on disagreements. in addition, for the sake of their participation in a critical dialogue with others, students may compromise on their here-and-now interests by joining topics that may not find fully or initially interesting. however, in some cases, a person’s here-and-now educational interest might not be shared – the person becomes an autodidact student or wants one-on-one guidance. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf103 if paternalism is not the principle of education, can it still be legitimate in education in some cases? my answer is yes. first of all, legitimate paternalism can provide safety in education. for example, a child may want to explore a poisonous mushroom by tasting it. a more knowledgeable person, the child’s teacher or a parent or an older sibling, might prevent the child from this learning experience, which can be deadly for the student. in this case, paternalism, ensuring safety, is legitimate. sometimes, safety (or something else) has to be prioritized over education. however, in this case, paternalism limits education rather than promotes it. it should be recognized that this safety is done at expense of education. education, like any practice, has its limits, and paternalism may help to set this limit for the sake of safety (or something else). second, legitimate educational paternalism can be based on the student’s trust in the teacher, who tells the student, “trust me, you may be benefited from that.” if the student grants the trust to the teacher, this paternalism is legitimate. if not, then not. this educational paternalism gains its legitimacy from the fact that it is conditionally consented by the student. the student has the right to give it, to withdraw it at any time, to require justification, and to negotiate it. the teacher’s epistemological, pedagogical, and organizational authority is based on the student’s constant evaluation of the usefulness, quality, and meaningfulness of the teacher’s paternalism for the student. there is nothing wrong for alina to demand full educational paternalism for her education when this paternalism remains consented by alina. the same is true for mikayla, demanding partial, collaborative, paternalism from her teachers. the student’s consent – a version of freedom of education – and not paternalism is what constitutes education. what is a student? along with belkacem taib (see appendix i in my original paper), in his thoughtful commentary, kevin currie-knight asks me a deceptively simple but actually very profound question, “what is a student?” to challenge my argumentation, kevin provides an interesting example of his infant-daughter with whom kevin and his wife were playing while apparently violating her right of freedom of education (roef), “regularly, we violate her roef by forcing her into ‘tummy time;’ we put her onto her stomach so that she can strengthen muscles necessary for crawling and gain necessary practice being on her stomach. her forceful cries during this process tell us that this educational experience (we’ve tried in vain to explain to her that it is an ‘opportunity’) is entirely against her will. the question is whether she is a student in matusov’s relevant sense.” kevin goes on to claim that in this example, his infant daughter was a student who does not need to have freedom of education. here i am not going to address the second part of kevin’s claim but rather focus on the first part: whether kevin’s daughter was a student and what makes a student. i think kevin’s question is fair and important to consider in the context of my paper. spoiler alert: i do not think that kevin’s daughter in this example was a student – not in a spirit of my argument about a student’s right to freedom of education. i see two major problems with kevin’s argumentation. first, it seems to equate learning with education. second, it equates education-fulness – i.e., having educational aspects, educational moments, or educational experiences – with education. not any learning is education. not any educational experience is education. for example, the phenomenon of learned helplessness – a person’s learned belief that a task cannot be completed because it is beyond the person’s control – doubtedly can be called education (or, at least, not always). but why? learning of a new attitude is genuinely present in this phenomenon. how is it different from learning how to cope with adverse circumstances? the latter learning feels like a good candidate for education, while the former does not. in my view, it is because education involves something in addition to learning: namely, evaluation of this learning – whether it is good or not for the person. good a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf104 learning becomes education4, bad learning is not. who makes this evaluation? in my view, it must be first and foremost “the student” – i.e., a person who learns. of course, other people might disagree. a teenager, who learns how to binge drink, may call this learning education, while his mother may disagree. education can be contested. kevin wrote about his infant daughter, “certainly, she is a learner.” maybe (although i doubt even about that), but she might not necessarily be having educational experience because i am not sure she got involved in the evaluation of her learning. i agree that she experienced learning, but i am not sure she experienced education. but there is another reason of why i doubt that kevin’s infant daughter was a student (or even a learner). the second problem in kevin’s argumentation is to equate playfulness with play, artfulness with art, having learning moments with being a learner, education-fulness with education. having aspects of play, art, learning, or education does not mean that the whole activity can be characterized as play, art, learning (as an activity), or education. as a sociocultural scholar jean lave convincingly argued, learning is ubiquitous, and it is an aspect of any activity (lave, 1992, april). a disengaged student sitting at a math lesson in a conventional school might learn that math is boring, and that math is not for her. or she might learn how to smuggle texting on her smartphone without getting in trouble. or she might learn how to make good a good grade by successfully guessing what the teacher wanted from them and pleasing the teacher. or she might indeed learn math. to live means to learn. however, at some point, a person may want to assume a particular stance, a particular role, a particular position, a particular orientation by dedicating their activism to specifically to learning or even to good learning. “i want to learn spanish.” “i wonder if cutting my hairs make them grow faster.” “i want to know why the sky is blue and not green, but the grass is green and not blue.” “how can i change the wallpaper on my smartphone?” “why can’t a face mask prevent from a nasty smell, but can help against the covid-19 virus?” “i want to learn to play this computer game.” these questions and statements reflect big and small learning that the person assigns to themselves as special deliberate learning activities. this self-assigned good learning makes a person an educatee (or a learner). furthermore, an educatee becomes “a student” when the person’s self-assigned learning is recognized by other people. of course, my definition of “a student” is different from the conventional one. in the conventional definition, “a student” is a person whom the society or an institution assigns education – i.e., good learning from the society’s point of view. whether the person also co-assigns this foisted education to themselves is not very important from the conventional definition. in contrast, in my definition of student, other people recognize an educatee and their academic rights that i listed in my original paper. so, in sum, why do i doubt kevin’s infant daughter is a student despite her obvious learning experiences? first, it is because i am not sure that she got involved in evaluation of her learning experiences. second, i doubt that she assigned any good learning to herself in this example. third, her parents apparently did not recognize her rights as a student. democratic schools like jim rietmulder’s the circle school (rietmulder, 2019), or dan greenberg’s sudbury valley school (greenberg, 1991), or a.s. neill’s summerhill (neill, 1960) created the leisure environment for the children and youth. this leisure has several forms: plays, friendship hangouts, hobby activities, and, yes, education (matusov, 2020a). in my view, education is only one of many leisure 4 at the same time, i do not think that education is equated with good learning or can be reduced to good learning. education is bigger than good learning. education also involves good non-learning, like, for example, “becoming a different person,” switching a paradigm – the personal discontinuity recognized by the person as good one (cf. epiphany, psychedelic trip, revelation, insight, keisaku - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/keisaku, mediation, “shock therapy,” paradigm shift). discussion of non-learning education is beyond this paper. comment on text jim rietmulder: yes, this is it. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf105 forms at democratic schools. not every activity in those democratic schools is education: plays, friendship hangouts, hobby activities (e.g., “corporations” at the circle school), assembly meetings for decision making, judicial committees. although these activities might have learning and even educational aspects and moments. in this regard, i respectfully disagree with jim r.’s comment on the margin of my original paper expanding education to play. i wrote in my paper: “…children prefer playing over voluntary attendance of classes (greenberg, 1991; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2019).” jim r. commented on the margin of my original paper yes, but this is exactly children’s choice to engage in intrinsic education (which is what you are addressing here), rather than the less effective and less valued foisted classes, which, by the way, are usually instrumental education. chapter 7 of my book [(rietmulder, 2019)] could be viewed as my assertion that ‘deep play’ is intrinsic education. also, in the last decade i believe there is a renewed recognition of the educational value of children’s play, among childhood scholars and education practitioners. i think it is a dangerous and unfortunate trend to reduce play to education and to exploit play for education because it diminishes play as an existential human (leisurely) endeavor along with education and other important existential endeavors. at the same time, i think that purification of education as a form of leisure – banning all other forms of leisure to push forward education – is both undesirable and impossible for a truly educational environment. different types of leisure feed on each other and create the ecology of “school” (in ancient greek’s sense) where education can have more chances to occur and be supported. also, the boundaries between education and other leisure and non-leisure activities are not always sharp and clear. personal education and society juan francisco poveda, an ecuadorian exchange student from the kyung hee university in seoul, asked me in his commentary, …i consider that education per-se could not be very individually defined. i believe that part of the goals of education is to serve as a guide to live within a community. on this regard, i have seen that you strongly agree with the self-determination of education, mainly when you mention that education is primarily the business of the student, not from the state, the public, the taxpayers or even not the business of teachers and schools. wouldn’t you consider that this extent of self-construction of the concept of education could affect the goal of constructing individuals able to live in a community? i have two answers to juan’s profound question. as an educational pluralist, i think it is up to a student to answer this question and not up to me or any other educator. if a student wants to subordinate their personal education in service to the society (or any other cause, limited by the law and morality), the student has a full right to do so. however, the student also must have a right to change their mind about the purpose of their personal education at any point. as an educational visionary, having a particular educational philosophy, i see the primary goal of personal education to be deconstructive, not constructive. a student should primarily critically examine the society rather to harmoniously socialize in it. the student should liberate themselves from their prior uncritical socialization in the society, from the colonization by their culture, by their language, by their community. personal education, in a way i envision it, helps the student to critically evaluate cultural, social, political, economic values in which they have been uncritically socialized: which of the existing societal comment on text jim rietmulder: i see a distinction between “play” and “deep play”. we have both conflated the two in this exchange. “deep play” as i discuss it in my book is, almost by definition, valued as “good learning” by the players, and recognized by others as such – thus meeting your definition of education. i agree that garden variety play doesn’t necessarily qualify. comment on text jim rietmulder: about learning vs education and what is a student. in eugene's definition, some learning counts as education and some does not. in order for learning to qualify as education, the learner must evaluate it and find that it is "good [...] for the [learner]" or else it is not education. also in eugene's definition, the learner can be called a "student" in some occasions of education but not all. to be a student, the education must be "recognized by other people." is there a problem of circularity here? if you only become a student when you have learned something you deem to be good and then others recognize it, and if your right to education freedom is attached to being a student, then is that a meaningful freedom? do you gain that freedom only when someone else recognizes your education? something's not adding up for me. it seems to me that one's right to education freedom does not depend on your education being "recognized by other people." for that matter, your education freedom doesn’t depend on your own finding of “good learning.” the freedom precedes your learning and other people’s recognition of it; precedes your student-ness. can we do away with the need to define student? would that clarify things? are we really talking about two freedoms of education? the first is the freedom to seek/accept or not to seek/accept education. and the second is the freedom to self-direct education. in distinguishing learning from education, or learner from student, is the learner's intentionality more fundamental than the learner's evaluation and other people's recognition? i think kevin's example -tummy time for an infant, even when the infant doesn't consent -is outside the scope of eugene's thesis. reasonable parents regularly deny their babies the education freedom that this paper addresses. and of course it's because their children's safety and wellness are higher priorities than their children's education freedom. survival beats learning in maslow's hierarchy. they aren't rejecting education freedom. they're just subordinating it to other fundamentals. i haven’t wrapped my head around this; doesn’t seem complete. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf106 values to accept and which to reject and why and/or which of new values be must be add. in short, personal education that i, as a particular educator, envision disrupts the society rather than harmonizes with it. it is not by chance that socrates – the first articulator of the deconstructive personal education, to which i subscribe, – was sentenced to death by the democratic athenian society for “corrupting the youth of athens.” at the same time, society can legitimately set demands on people who want to join important societal practices. for example, to become a jet pilot, the society and/or business might want to set the required skills, knowledge, and attitudes for a job candidate. if a person wants to become a jet pilot, they might be forced to learn these skills, knowledge, and attitudes to be accepted for a job or get a pilot license. it is important to emphasize that these demands, impositions, and summative assessments of whether the person is qualified or not must be outside of education itself. there must be a firewall between these impositions and education. educators must not participate in the imposition of the curriculum or in sorting their students based on their competencies and knowledge. rather, educators must be fiduciaries of the student’s desire to become a pilot (or any other practitioner) – see the next section where i expand this argument. educators must help the student who desires to join certain practice, which society or businesses defined. when a student feels to be ready, society or businesses can legitimately check if the applicant for the practice is competent. the relationship between the authorial education-for-myself and the authorial education-for-the-other my russian colleagues – oleg osovsky, vera kirzhaeva, ekaterina chernetsova, and elizaveta maslova – have introduced two very interesting and promising notions: “the education-for-myself” (loosely defined as self-study, autodidact) and “the education-for-the-other” (loosely defined as teaching). here i want to discuss the authorial nature of education-for-myself and education-for-the-other and their relationship. the authorial education-for-myself starts with a student’s “wants” or “don’t wants” with regard to their own education. for example, at a very basic level, alina demonstrated her authorial education-formyself by wanting to submit herself to the authorities making decisions about her education. similarly, mikayla concurred with her professor jim cresswell’s demand to ban the use of technology in their class. “i trust your pedagogical judgment. i like your demand,” – are realizations of the student’s authorial education-for-myself. of course, the authorial education-for-myself is rather limited in both examples of either surrendering to the authority (alina) or concurring with the teacher’s demand (mikayla). however, a sophisticated authorial education-for-myself goes much beyond a student’s desire to submit themselves to the authority or concur with the teacher. professor shelley price-jones’ korean undergraduate student hyunjung kim analyzed a science fiction novelette "fire watch"5 by writer connie willis to reveal a much more elaborate and sophisticated case of the authorial education-for-myself. in the novelette, hyun jung describes, a historian, mr. bartholomew, sets himself on a time-traveling educational expedition to observer and experience the fire of st. paul's cathedral in london as a result of the night air raid of 29–30 december 1940 as a part of the nazi-german bombing “blitzkrieg” campaign. when mr. bartholomew returns back to his time and attends a history exam about st. paul’s cathedral fire, his professor dunwoody asks very technical exam questions about the event like the number of bombs and casualties. mr. bartholomew “felt the anger inside and asked the professor. 'isn't there any question about what happened to people?' answers professor dunwoody. ‘mr. bartholomew, you're the one who answers 5 see the story here: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/firewatch.htm a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf107 the question, not the one asking questions’" (kim in price-jones, p. xxx). deep authorial education-formyself involves the student’s own interest, curiosity, puzzlement, asking questions, addressing a difficulty, assigning themselves a learning activity, and/or sending themselves on a prolonged learning journey. the teacher’s questions must be subordinated to the student’s questions. the teacher’s questions must aim at provoking the student’s interests, puzzlements, inquiries, positions, questions, and the development and testing ideas – the student’s own and alternative ideas. the russian colleagues analyzed bakhtin’s education-for-myself and education-for-the-other in their commentary. young bakhtin’s education-for-myself occurred mostly through homeschooling and his autodidact education. in their commentary, they provided a lot of evidence for bakhtin’s interests, inquiries, and learning journey into philosophy (especially in kantianism and neo-kantianism), literary critique, philology, history, linguistics, ethics, diverse foreign languages, sociology, and literature. bakhtin’s authorial education-for-myself lasted all his life. apparently, it did not include physics, math, chemistry, psychology, athletics, etc., although we should not be so sure because bakhtin’s notion of “chronotope” was borrowed from biology (and, maybe, physics) (bakhtin, 1991, p. 84)6. still, there was a strong vector of bakhtin’s educational authorship aiming at philosophy and philology. authorial education-for-myself is always selective, if not overtime, then at the given moment. academic freedom7 of the authorial education-for-the-other – the right of a teacher to decide what and how to teach – is more recognized for university professors, who are assumed to be active scholars and researchers than for teachers per se. however, even for professors-scholars, this freedom is often limited by faculty committees. interestingly enough, in their commentary, oleg, vera, ekaterina, and elizaveta report that bakhtin had to fight for his and other teachers’ right to teach sociology rather than a new study of socialism” in the soviet union in the early 1920s. the notion of the authorial education-forthe-other is at odd with the modern prevailing fashions in education such as “the educational standards,” “the common core,” “evidenceand research-based teaching,” etc. because in former, teaching is viewed as an art, while in the latter, teaching is viewed as a technology guided by the positivistic science (or by the official political ideology as it was in the ussr). i argue that a teacher has the academic right to define their own authorial teaching – what and how to teach – without an interference of the state, institutional administration, or their colleagues. academic freedom of the authorial education-for-myself – the right of a student to decide whether, what, and how to study – is not much recognized at all, in any society so far, beyond a few democratic schools and some homeschooling. in my original article in this special issue, i argue for this academic freedom to be recognized as defining education. the further question emerges, which is what the relationship between the teacher’s academic freedom and the student’s academic freedom should be. reading the commentaries, i abstracted at least three possible answers to this important question. first, darren dyck and james cresswell seem to argue for the priority of the teacher’s academic freedom over the student’s academic freedom or maybe even overruling the student’s academic freedom altogether. if a teacher feels that it is pedagogically prudent to impose the ban of technology in their classroom, the teacher has the right to do that. at least, this is how i read their commentary. 6 “in the summer of 1925, the author of these lines [30-year old bakhtin] attended a lecture by a. a. uxtomskij [a famous soviet biologist] on the chronotope in biology; in the lecture questions aesthetics were also touched upon” (p. 84). 7 “…scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/academic_freedom a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf108 in contrast, while james cresswell’s student mikayla benner wholeheartedly agrees with the teacher’s ban of technology, she argues for a more collaborative relationship between the teacher’s academic freedom over the student’s academic freedom, citing my pedagogical practice of curriculum map, where students can have a right to select a curricular topic for their next class listed on the map. mikayla envisions the equal power relations between the teacher and the student. the third type of relationship depicted by olga shugurova. in my interpretation, she seems to want to subordinate the teacher’s academic freedom to the student’s academic freedom. if it is the case, i agree with her. i think the teacher’s pedagogical authorship must serve the student’s educational authorship. the teacher has a fiduciary obligation8 to the student. there are two major pitfalls and challenges for the teacher’s fiduciary obligation to the student’s authorial education-for-myself: paternalism and slavishness. the teacher’s paternalism, articulated by kant, involves the teacher’s belief that by being ignorant, the student is incapable of making good decisions about their own education, and, thus, they must be subjugated by force or manipulation to the pedagogical experts. i have already discussed this educational paternalism in my original paper and in previous and following sessions in this reply-essay. the teacher’s slavishness is a belief that the teacher must follow the student’s will to the letter and try not to interfere with it in any way. in my observation, this pitfall is common among democratic and selfdirected learning educators. in my original paper, i quoted a.s. neill, the founder of the uk democratic school summerhill, who, in my view, came very close to the teacher’s slavishness by saying that an educator “should never influence the choices children make” (see also jim r.’s and my discussion of this quote on the margin – both of us disagreed with neill). some democratic educators try to stay away from any suggestions or exposures of new ideas or learning activities that might “impose” ideas or learning on their students. in their view, a student must explicitly ask them for it before such a democratic educator would share something new with them. in my perspective, even beyond obvious issues of safety, the slavish following the students’ educational desire (or the explicit lack of them) is arguably a violation of the teacher’s fiduciary obligation through negligence, using a legal term. let me explain why. the part of the social contract between the student and the teacher, the contract initiated by the student, is the student’s demand for and trust in the pedagogical otherness of the teacher (cf. jeff king’s commentary). the student trusts that the teacher can provide an interesting provocation, interesting alternative idea, interesting learning activity, interesting inquiry, important information that can be unknown to the student, but sensitive for the student’s educational needs and helpful for their educational authorship. but this “interesting” and “important” must be interesting and important for the student. the student’s educational needs, interests, and authorship are not fully known by the student internally or by the teacher externally. even more, all of them are dynamic and not static, constantly emerging, and transforming in the student. even-even more, this dynamism, emergence, and transformation can be inspired by the student’s educational authorship and by the teacher’s pedagogical authorship. the teacher must help to something (i.e., the student’s emerging authorship) that does not yet exist. it is a challenge for educators to support the diverse and changing educational desires of their students. that is why teaching is an art and not technology. the magic of the teacher’s pedagogical fiduciary obligation is to be sensitive to something that is not yet there. 8 cf. the legal notion of “fiduciary obligation” of “fiduciary duty” here: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042915/what-aresome-examples-fiduciary-duty.asp a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf109 i do not believe that there is a formula for a good fiduciary obligation of the teacher to the student. it is always in flux; it is always ready to break and does break its boundary of the legitimacy, and, thus, it requires authorial judgments from the teacher and the student. finally, it involves a negotiation of the boundaries of the legitimacy of what the teacher offers between the teacher and the student. this negotiation is never guaranteed to be successful. the negotiation’s breakdown might lead to “no-fault divorce” between the student and the teacher when the student withdraws their educational interest, need, and trust in the teacher. in this case, the student becomes either autodidact or has to search for another teacher. the kantian educational paternalism at its extremes: revisited here i want to consider two, probably, most extreme and strongest arguments for the kantian educational paternalism. the first extreme argument for educational paternalism comes from what can be called “education for survival.” according to this argument, education must be foisted in the name of survival for the student and/or the entire society. the second extreme argument comes from what can be called “education for awakening.” ironically, this argument comes in the name of the student’s self-actualization. the student’s consciousness has to be awakened by foisted education, so the student can engage in selfactualization. let me consider each of them. foisted education for survival i am thankful to my colleague and friend bryan campbell for the articulation of this argument as a part of his feedback on previous draft of this essay. bryan campbell: some educators justify foisted education as necessary for the safety of the student and/or the society. they claim that forcing students to learn about reading, writing, math, science, democracy, the country, etc., is about the personal safety of the student and the entire society. ignorance kills – they may say – or at least, harms. one can make the argument that one should learn and read and write for their own safety. one can extend that argument of safety into these other areas of education. one could extend it to an extreme like all of you need to learn biology and science and atmospheric things because of the crisis. we're facing is global warming and if all of us aren't equipped to deal with that crisis as it pops up. then we will see the apocalypse. so, that's to me like pushing those arguments to an extreme. and i think to some extent that maybe that's the basis of the mandated, foisted education that if our students don't know all of these things, it will create an apocalyptic crisis. so, this idea of safety and an extreme form might be the underlying sentiment or even the explicit justification for that mandated education. my rebuke to this argument is the following. foisted education for survival is, probably, the ultimate defense of the kantian educational paternalism and, arguably, one of the strongest counterarguments of my paradigm. since the enlightenment, education has been viewed as the universal solution for any societal problem. for example, the recent outcry about ubiquitous racism remaining in the american society is often responded by mandatory anti-racist training imposed on all members of many institutions and businesses, especially on white people since they are considered to be the root of the racism problem (e.g., see, for example, diangelo, 2018). i think this is an abuse of education. it confuses education with advocacy (or propaganda, with its strongest sense). advocacy is a social practice aiming at shaping people’s subjectivities – the object of advocacy – into a particular mold, predefined by the advocacy designers. i do not want to dismiss advocacy. comment on text jim rietmulder: bryan raises an argument justifying foisted education: without it, both individual and society face severe consequences -"an apocalyptic crisis" or "harms" to children because they won't learn certain essentials. i'm not aware of evidence in support of this claim that foisted education is necessary. where's the society that experienced an "apocalyptic crisis" because they didn't foist education? or the "harms" to children who were schooled in non-foisted education? in the absence of such evidence, what theory or line of reasoning dictates that foisted education is necessary to avoid disaster or harms? on the other hand, there are many examples suggesting the efficacy of non-foisted education. in my experience at the circle school (a self-directed democratic school in harrisburg, pennsylvania), children see the obvious need and value in reading and other basics for thriving in the world, and learn those things more durably and in ways that are more fulfilling. in conducive conditions, self-interest is sufficient to drive learning. in short, the argument that foisted education is necessary for the safety of the individual and the safety of society is disproven by the absence of evidence and reason, and the presence of suggestive evidence to the contrary. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf110 advocacy can be a legitimate and useful social practice. legitimate advocacy must be honest – factually true. it can take diverse forms like health warning labels on cigarettes, advertising (including political advertising), issue advocacy, political propaganda and agitation, and so on. advocacy training and advocacy exams can be a legitimate entry point for some practices. for example, at the circle school (tcs), a democratic private k-12 school near harrisburg, pennsylvania, safety and organizational training and exams are conditions for students and staff to join certain “corporations” that require such training and exams. if a student or staff member wants to join this corporation, they must pass the training and/or the exam, first (rietmulder, 2019). what, in my view, makes advocacy legitimate, besides being honest, is that it treats its targeted people with dignity, expecting them to be the final agency for making decisions about their own life. one can be informed about the health hazards of smoking but still chooses to smoke. a tcs student may decide not to join the corporation or demand to change its rules. illegitimate advocacy treats its targeted people as drones-in-making – any dissent is viewed as a crime, stupidity, and/or moral sin. why don’t i see legitimate advocacy as education? it is because, as i will argue in the above section, “what is student?”, education requires a student’s evaluative stance toward learning they involve. without the student’s freedom of such an evaluation, education is impossible, reducing education to learnification. advocacy, even legitimate advocacy, is not open for such freedom exactly because student’s free evaluation of advocacy may lead to consequences contrary to or different from the aim of the advocacy, including advocacy for safety and survival. foisted education for awakening argument: a student’s consciousness is often “put asleep” by the forces of oppressive societal hegemony, consumerism, institutional conformity, “false consciousness,” uncritical socialization in a culture, bigotry, self-interest, fears, colonization by an ideology, past traumas, disabling and hopeless circumstances, daily concerns about survival, and so on (cf. freire, 1986). left to their own devices, such a student would never be involved in either genuine education, based on evaluation of their own learning and personal transformation, or self-actualization, in which this genuine education is rooted. strong, forceful, if not even violent, push must be needed by foisted education to awake the student’s selfactualization, criticality, authorial agency, and creativity from this lethargic condition of the soul imposed by the society, oppressors, circumstances, and/or the student themselves. i agree with the argument’s basic observation that human consciousness can be, if not always, “colonized” by the given culture, our biology, circumstances, conditions, ideology, and so on. people often uncritically accepted communal and societal values and their own biases. even more, many of these values and norms are invisible to us. in my view, this condition is both universal and partial. it is universally spread across all people. and it has its own benefits of not overwhelming the human consciousness by constant evaluation of every action, every behavior, every pattern, every desire, every goal, every value. it is also partial because unless severely depressed, which requires medical attention, all people have particular and limited areas of criticality, creativity, authorial agency, and self-actualization. we all are in part asleep and in part awake. in other words, the totalization of the “asleep” human condition, presented in the argument for education for awakening, is wrong. i also agree that sometimes unpleasant, forced, painful, and even violent experiences can lead to the awakening of the human spirit and can be viewed as educational by the student. for example, in research with my colleagues, we interviewed a young female adult, whom we named alma, who told us about her horse-riding accident that made her paralyzed and bedridden for more than a year. for this young woman, that life-changing experience was deeply educational as she valued it so highly that she refused to imagine a hypothetical scenario of having her life without this accident while having “the same personal a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf111 transformations” (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). probably, even more extreme cases of foisted education for awakening are the stories of some holocaust survivors who reported about their educational experiences in nazi concentration camps. bruno bettelheim’s lessons about saving one’s own dignity in inhumane conditions are among the most dramatic (bettelheim, 1960). it is not by chance that many totalitarian regimes view their concentration camps as “re-education” (kotek & rigoulot, 2000), including the chinese authorities’ recent imprisonment of the muslim uyghur minority9. the theme of foisted education for awakening has been explored in the fictional literature after wwii. thus, in the hungarian novel “the fifth seal” (sánta, 1986), a character, named the photographer, reports four friends, he encountered by chance, to the hungarian gestapo-like secret police at the end of 1944, during the arrow cross terror, to awaken their consciousness through suffering and facing the existential and moral dilemmas of betrayal and death. in contrast to the totalitarian “re-education” camps seeking the political conformity and the loyalty to the regime, the photographer calls for “real awakening” in those four simpletons, philistines with the asleep souls, – this is how he sees those four friends he encountered. he wants them to stop preoccupying with mundane issues of their everyday life and instead to start contemplating about human destiny and self-sacrifice for higher ideals, at least, once in a while. the photographer seems to accept the notion of personal self-actualization as a goal of education. finally, the photographer was successful: arguably, all four friends passed the final exam of human dignity and moral virtue, although three of them were killed in the process by the hungarian arrow cross secret state police. again, in my view, foisted education for awakening is the enlightenment running amok. what is wrong with the foisted education for awakening? aside from the moral issues of sending people to physical and psychological pains, testing people’s morality and dignity, and sending them to secret police’s brutal interrogation, imprisonment, and death, the foisted education for awakening has its own educational problems. it robs a student from, at least, three important educational aspects: deciding if the student needs this particular awakening, what are limits of this awakening, and how this awakening has to be done. student’s awakening can be legitimately undesirable when it can disrupt the smooth flow of the important unconscious and subconscious processes (so-called “the centipede’s dilemma” or humphrey’s law10). self-awareness can create negative, distracting learning. even when awakening is desirable for a student, it might have important limits. for example, social relationships are based on trust – a belief in the benevolence of the actions by other people. a student’s attempt to test this belief without limits may lead to a breakdown of the social relationship. finally, not every means of awakening can be acceptable by the student. not every student would agree to be paralyzed and bedridden for a year to experience a cathartic educational transformation, alma did. exploring one’s own limits can be educational experiences in themselves. yet, was not alma, from the example above, foisted by the tragic circumstances of the horse-riding accident, resulting in becoming paralyzed and bedridden for a year, also robbed from these educational aspects? at the same time, she highly valued her transformative personal experiences, foisted by the tragic circumstances, as educational. why is it the difference between education foisted by blind circumstances versus education foisted by people, carefully designing the student’s experiences? the result can be the same: the strong awakening of the student’s human spirit. i argue against education for awakening both foisted by blind circumstances and foisted by people armed with careful pedagogical design because both types of foisted education rob students from important decision making and evaluation, constituting important aspects of education, as i mentioned above. 9 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-22278037 10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_centipede%27s_dilemma a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf112 however, i think that education for awakening foisted by people is worse than when it is foisted by blind circumstances. it has a different meaning. the former does not have any moral responsibility while the latter does. done by another human being, the intentional violation of human dignity adds insult to injury. i think education for awakening can be a powerful and legitimate form of education when freely embarked and designed by the student or consented or trusted by the student to design by a teacher. foisted education for awakening suppresses important educational aspects and brings the issue of its moral illegitimacy. conclusions: why education needs a student’s freedom finally, i want to summarize the reasons why education needs a student’s freedom that i tried to articulate in two of my papers in this special issue: 1. for learning or transformative experience to become education, it should involve a student’s free authorial judgment, evaluating this experience. 2. a student’s evaluation of their own education – what is good for the student to study, how, when, with whom, when to stop education and prioritize something else – is an important part of education itself. 3. studying on-demand what puzzles, concerns, excites, interests, needs, and bothers the student hereand-now is more consequential for the student’s authorial agency – the student’s creativity, critical thinking, self-actualization – in the future than forcing the student to study academic subjects preset by the authority because of their expected importance for the future. 4. education is deeper for the student – more critical, more meaningful, more accurate – when it is rooted in the students’ desires. 5. a student’s freedom of education makes the student more educationally active, initiative, passionate, and responsible than foisted education. 6. a student’s freedom of education recognized by the society and the teacher reduces a need for pedagogical violence so prevalent in foisted education (matusov & sullivan, 2020). all my claims are empirical (i.e., hypotheses to test), philosophical (i.e., values to examine), and moral (i.e., goodness to question). the empirical investigations help to establish if the listed claims are true or not: whether they exist in the given reality. for example, in our magic learning pill research, my colleagues and i empirically tested claim#1. we asked our research participants form three different countries, of different ages and educational experiences to list their past learning experiences for which they would or would not take magic learning pill – an imaginary pill that immediately and effortfully produces the same “learning outcomes” in people as their past learning experiences. in a way, we asked our research participants what kind of past learning they want to shorten and why. to test claim#1, we asked two blind coders to predict the research participants’ judgments by reading the descriptions of their past learning experiences. the two coders failed – there was a very low and statistically insignificant correlation between their prediction and the participants’ judgment of whether they would take the magic learning pill for their past learning experience (matusov, et al., 2017, pp. 466-467). thus, our findings have empirically supported claim#1, “we therefore conclude that participants’ attitude to learning is not grounded in the nature of experiences but in the participants’ own authorial evaluative judgment of them” (p. 466). i do not see a problem to turn the rest of the claim into empirical hypotheses for future empirical testing. the philosophical investigations help us critically examine the desirability of the values behind the listed claims. do we want to live in society, in which a student’s right to freedom of education is recognized and promoted? can we afford such society now, at some point in the future, or at all? at what expense, this right and described education is established? what and when other important values must be subordinated to a student’s right to freedom of education? what are the legitimate limitations of this right? a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf113 finally, the moral analyses question the goodness of the envisioned education. is the personal education of each student that does not guarantee any public good has to be supported by the public? is the pursuit of such personal education an important human right? should people scarify a part of the fruits of their labor to ensure this right of each student to freedom of education for all? references bakhtin, m. m. (1991). the dialogic imagination: four essays by m. m. bakhtin (c. emerson & m. holquist, trans.). austin, tx: university of texas press. bettelheim, b. (1960). the informed heart: autonomy in a mass age. glencoe, il: free press. biesta, g. (2010). good education in an age of measurement: ethics, politics, democracy. boulder, co: paradigm publishers. biesta, g. (2015). what is education for? on good education, teacher judgement, and educational professionalism. european journal of education, 50(1), 75-87. collins, a., & halverson, r. (2009). rethinking education in the age of technology: the digital revolution and schooling in america. new york: teachers college press. diangelo, r. j. (2018). white fragility: why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism(pp. 1 online resource). freire, p. (1986). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. greenberg, d. (1991). free at last: the sudbury valley school. framingham, ma: sudbury valley school press. kotek, j., & rigoulot, p. (2000). le siècle des camps: détention, concentration, extermination, cent ans de mal radical [the century of the camps: detention, concentration, extermination, one hundred years of radical evil]. paris: lattès. lave, j. (1992, april). learning as participation in communities of practice. presented at the meeting of the american educational research association. retrieved from http://www.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/lave92.htm matusov, e. (2011). authorial teaching and learning. in e. j. white & m. peters (eds.), bakhtinian pedagogy: opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21-46). new york: peter lang publishers. matusov, e. (2020a). envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective. new york: palgrave. matusov, e. (2020b). pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education (editorial). dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 8, e1-e24. doi:10.5195/dpj.2020.314 matusov, e., baker, d., fan, y., choi, h. j., & hampel, r. l. (2017). magic learning pill: ontological and instrumental learning in order to speed up education. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 51(3), 456–476. doi:10.1007/s12124-017-9384-8 matusov, e., & sullivan, p. (2020). pedagogical violence. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 54(2), 438-464. doi:10.1007/s12124-019-09512-4 mclaren, p. (1993). schooling as a ritual performance: towards a political economy of educational symbols and gestures (2nd ed.). london ; new york: routledge. neill, a. s. (1960). summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing. new york: hart publishing company. rietmulder, j. (2019). when kids rule the school: the power and promise of democratic education. gabriola island, canada: new society publishers. rostotsky, s., & polonsky, g. (1968). доживем до понедельника [we'll live till monday] [movie]. moscow: gorky film studios. sánta, f. (1986). the fifth seal: a novel (a. tezla, trans.). budapest: corvina. a student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2020.357 | vol. 8 (2020) sf114 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e1 why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract the purpose of the presented mixed qualitative-quantitative research is to examine college students’ diverse reasons for choosing the open syllabus, which allows students in a conventional university to define their goals for education, curriculum, instruction, assessment, ways of learning, and so on—what traditionally constitutes “self-directed education.” most of those students articulated their interest in self-education, which consists of self-directed and responsive education. keywords: open syllabus, self-education, self-directed education, responsive education, autodidact eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books include: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." acknowledgment i want to thank daniel borowski, the teaching assistant for the class studied, for discussing this research, providing his expectations for the findings, and providing feedback on an earlier version of the paper. i also want to thank bob hampel and ana marjanovic-shane for their feedback, editing, and suggestions. ïïò self-directed learning does not work well for university students several democratic educators committed to self-directed education reported that self-directed learning does not work well for many university students (e.g., duberman, 1969; holt, 1972, pp. 87-92). to promote self-directed education (sde) in their classes, these professors diminished their teacher authority, gave their undergraduate students the freedom not to follow their suggestive offerings – suggested reading and learning activities, free attendance, etc. – and encouraged the students to choose what they wanted to study in each class meeting, minimized or completely eliminated grades, etc. their version of self-directed education radically differed from the concept of self-directed learning used by conventional or progressive educators. for conventional education aimed at making all dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e2 students arrive at well-defined curricular endpoints preset by the teachers, administrators, state, employers, and so on, self-directed learning is the student’s own diligence, industry, self-discipline on the thorough and unconditional accomplishment of the learning task assigned by the teacher by “internalizing” the teacher’s learning tasks and goals (cf. deci & ryan, 1994). as my former student wrote in response to my chapter discussing the concept of self-education, “before reading this chapter, i always thought that it [i.e., self-directed learning] equals individual studying with the teacher's task. now, i believe my understanding was wrong” (matusov, 2024a, p. 134). the progressive education concept of self-directed learning is based on exploiting, hijacking, and manipulating students’ motivation, subjectivity, interests, desires, and needs through providing assignment choices, creating “learning contracts,” moralizing the student’s “responsibility to themselves," and so on (mercogliano, 1998). the guru of progressive self-directed learning, malcolm knowles, defined selfdirected learning: “in its broadest meaning, ‘self-directed learning’ describes a process in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes” (knowles, 1975, p. 18). although students seem to have a lot of freedoms, these freedoms are still channeled to the learning outcomes defined by the teacher. these learning outcomes can be ill-defined. the ideal of progressive education is to make students accept these overall learning goals as their own. as the father of progressive education, jean-jacques rousseau advised a progressive teacher, “…let him [the student] always think he is master while you are really master” (rousseau, 1979, p. 120). in contrast, the democratic education concept of self-directed education is about the recognition that the student is the final authority for their own education (klag, 1994) who defines whether to study, what to study, why to study, toward what goal to study, how to study, with whom to study, when to study, where to study, when to stop to study, how good was the study, and so on (matusov, 2021b). the student can make these decisions alone or with the help of peers and/or educators. for some reason, democratic education is much more established in k-12 education than at the higher education level. that is why the efforts and pedagogical experimentation of democratic higher educators like holt and duberman are so valuable. however, according to those democratic higher ed educators, most of their college students “abused” these freedoms by “doing nothing”: not reading the relevant academic literature, not engaging in any learning activities, and not attending class meetings. often, their students got angry at the professors for not forcing them to learn, for providing choices about what and how to study, and for lack of structure. according to these democratic educators, some of these undergraduate students used the given freedom to “grab easy credit” (holt, 1972, p. 90). in the eyes of the democratic professors, the students were immature, passive, dull, and hopelessly spoiled by their past experiences in conventional schools based on educational paternalism and foisted education: “all of which raises the pessimistic possibility that curriculum reform on the college level may be an enterprise of marginal value only. by age eighteen, it could be said, it is too late to salvage curiosity” (duberman, 1969, p. 286). being involved in democratic higher education for the last 14 years, i definitely recognize, share, and sympathize with the frustration of colleagues engaged in similar efforts (see, for example, matusov, 2023a; matusov & brobst, 2013). however, instead of blaming my students for immaturity and other deficits, which i also did initially, i gradually shifted to focus on myself, critically examining my own pedagogical desires heavily colonized by progressive education (matusov, 2021a) and the conventional institutional settings in which my innovative democratic efforts occurred (matusov, 2023b). why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e3 instead of following my sde ideology, i decided to pursue my pedagogical fiduciary duty to my students to see where it would lead me. in short, pedagogical fiduciary duty is the educator’s deep commitment to supporting the student's educational desires as well as helping to develop such desires when the student asks the educator for such help. the educator’s pedagogical fiduciary duty is based on the student’s conditional trust in the educator’s helpfulness perceived by the student (matusov, 2024b). this shift redefined my overall pedagogical goal: instead of implementing my favorite pedagogical ideas about democratic higher education (e.g., the introduction of the open syllabus in 2010, see below), i have concentrated on the student’s own educational desires – existing and emerging, – regardless of how much i approve of them. instead, my goal became to better serve my students’ educational desires, if they have any. to that end, i introduced the multi-syllabi pedagogical regime in my classes in 2018 (matusov, 2024b). for example, now before the semester starts, i send a survey to my upcoming students, mostly asking them what they want to study in our class and what kind of students they envision to be in our future class: what type of student do you expect to be in this course? (feel free to select a combination): 1. professionals who are involved in professional discourse about their own ongoing practice, who seek help from and provide help to each other — never-ending education enriching and supplementing their professional practice (53%1); 2. hobbyists who enjoy the targeted practice as a part of their non-professional life; life-long learners, learning as a way of life; there is no expectation of arriving at the end of their education — never-ending education enriching and supplementing their life (34%); 3. critical learners who want to evaluate the practice critically; test ideas, values, and truths against as many alternative ideas, values, and truths as possible; engage in critical dialogue and self-growth; play with ideas; or jailbreak the existing practices. education is viewed by them as an achievable goal in itself (rather than a professional aspect) with a potential exit point (66%); 4. novice practitioners who want to socialize into the targeted practice in order to be recognized by the relevant practitioners (and relevant others) as capable, joining a community of practice, apprenticing into the practice, getting a job involving the targeted practice, becoming skillful and knowledgeable practitioners, joining a professional discourse, worldviews, attitudes, orientations, networks, and knowledge, getting involved into legitimate peripheral participation, observing and lurking on the professional forums, playing with ideas, jailbreaking the existing practices. education is viewed by novice practitioners as successful socialization into the existing practice (38%); 5. credential students who want to get credentials established and recognized by society to prepare and pass exams, tests, and other summative assessments aiming at credentials, to follow the roadmap of assignments that will help them pass the credential summative assessments, to cooperate with the teacher who is helping in getting the desired credentials, to ask the teacher and all other participants for help. education is equated with getting credentials (e.g., diplomas, degrees, class credits, certificates, mark grades) predefined by society through curricular endpoints, tests, and exams. education is viewed as spaceand time-bounded (e.g., during a classroom meeting), having a clear end (e.g., course term, semester, degree term). credentials are viewed as a gateway to a desired profession and economically good life (50%); 6. uncommitted visitors and lurkers who want to observe a classroom practice of what other participants do there to see if one can enjoy the practice and learning, test one’s own commitment to the practice and learning, find and meet interesting people, and enjoy time spent online. education is viewed as exposure to something new and potentially interesting and as window-shopping (13%); 7. survivors (prisoners of education) want to survive (i.e., institutionally pass) the unnecessary class imposed on them with minimum efforts and expenses (0%); 8. dunno, i don’t have any idea as it is now (0%); 9. other (please describe below) (0%). 1 these are responses from the students in the undergraduate course on cultural diversity in education in the 2022 fall semester that i chose to study here. out of the 35 enrolled students, 32 students (100%) replied to the survey that i sent a week before the semester started. why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e4 to address the diversity of students’ attitudes, i developed a so-called “multi-syllabi pedagogical regime” in which my students can realize these and other options that may emerge (see below). one well-defined option of this multi-syllabi pedagogical regime for my students is “open syllabus,” which allows students to design their own syllabus: whether to study, what to study, how to study, where to study, with whom to study, why to study, how to assign the final grade for the class, and so on. in this research, i want to examine the students’ self-declared reasons for choosing the open syllabus option. by my pedagogical design, the open syllabus lets the students in a conventional university define their education, curriculum, instruction, assessment (the final grade), ways of learning, and so on – what traditionally constitutes “self-directed education.” however, the students who choose the open syllabus can redefine this option in whatever way they want, including “grabbing easy credit” or simply assigning a good final grade to themselves without any study (i.e., the “prisoners of education” option of the multi-syllabi pedagogical class regime). disclaimer: for this research project, i did not examine the students’ actual educational practice and their emerging attitudes to it (i.e., "theory-in-action," argyris & schön, 1978), but rather i focused on the open syllabus students’ “espoused theory” (argyris & schön, 1978) reflected in their declarative statements about why they chose the open syllabus before engaging in it. as scholars of organizational learning argyris and schön (1978) show that the relationship between the practitioners’ espoused theory and their theory-in-use can be complex and not straightforward. these scholars argue that both espoused theory – the reflective, deliberate subjectivity – and theory-in-use – the subjectivity shaping the actions – together characterize the practitioner’s practice. this study addresses skeptics (including myself) of democratic higher education who wonder if there is a demand for democratic higher education, understood as self-education, among conventional university students or not. design of the multi-syllabi class with the postponed open syllabus i try to run all my classes democratically by engaging my students in decision-making about their own education through dialogue as much as possible. one of these opportunities for decision-making was to let the class choose what to study: at the end of each session, the students decided what topic to study next from a list of curricular topics (“the curricular map”) that we created together (similar to what was described by duberman, 1969). a student would propose a topic from the curricular map and then try to convince their peers to choose it (among other topics proposed by other students). then, the students usually voted on all proposed topics to select the topic for the next class meeting. a second opportunity for decision-making concerned the “pedagogical regime” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2017) the students would prefer for themselves. the students have a choice of four pedagogical regimes that i provide to them, and they change according to their wants and needs: 1. open syllabus for “self-responsible learners and lurkers,” where students can make all decisions about their own education – what to study, how to study, with whom to study, and when to study – including their final grade. this option is not available and will not be seen until the 5th week of the semester to give the students the flavor of self-education. the reason for this postponement, which was initially proposed and insisted by my past students, was a concern that many conventional students, unfamiliar with democratic dialogic education, cannot make an informed choice about the open syllabus without experiencing this education for at least a few weeks – all other options below were available immediately at the beginning of the semester (matusov, 2023b). in the class i studied for this research project, 19 students, or 54%, chose the open syllabus out of the 35 total students enrolled in the class. 2. opening syllabus for “other-responsible learners,” where i made the initial decisions about the organization why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e5 of the class and then gradually transferred responsibility to the students. the students participating in this pedagogical regime can choose “virtual attendance” instead of attending the class meetings, which, in fact, generate possibilities for a variety of versions of the opening syllabus pedagogical regimes for the students based on their own choices, creativity, interest in the subject, and life circumstances. the students are required to submit at least one posting on the class online forum (webtalk) and complete the main learning project on the topic of their interest by the end of the class. that was the default pedagogical regime for all my students at the beginning of the semester, from which the students could switch later on. of the studied class, 14 students, or 40%, chose the opening syllabus after 5 weeks of the grace period. 3. non-traditional closed syllabus for credential students who just want to be certified via passing exams, similar to receiving a driver’s license. none chose this option in the studied class. 4. non-syllabus for “prisoners of education,” i.e., students who were forced to take this class by the university but felt that the class was unnecessary and painful. they were given any grade of their choice and said “goodbye” to avoid education being a “cruel and unusual punishment”2 for them. two students (6%) selected this option. the students have the first six weeks of the 15-week semester to decide on one of the four pedagogical regimes. however, after this grace period, i accept students’ requests to change their regime. third, the default opening syllabus pedagogical regime, which the students experienced immediately from the start of the semester, provided the students with the freedom and flexibility to attend the class face-to-face, via zoom, or study asynchronously via the class website that has many instructional resources for self-studies either on the topic of the class meeting or the student’s own. in the fall 2022 class that i chose to study, the attendance (face-to-face and via zoom) varied between half and two-thirds of the total class. most of the students attended face-to-face rather than via zoom. fourth, i try to turn any emerging problem or organizational question in the class into an opportunity for collective deliberation and democratic decision-making (e.g. should we have a break in our nearly threehour class meetings?). finally, the fifth area of decision-making was how to make collective decisions—by majority vote, consensus, flipping a coin, making individual decisions, delegating decision-making to me, splitting into groups having common curricular interests, studying solo, and so on. i used to believe that students’ decisions about their education would promote their learning activism and ownership of their education (matusov, 2015b). i was not afraid of their “bad” decisions because i expected that they would experience the consequences of these “bad” decisions and correct them through democratic decision-making. that was my philosophical belief in democracy in education (and elsewhere) (cf. hayek, 1994). however, my views gradually changed as my students, and i experienced the educational consequences of this approach (matusov, 2023b). at the end of each class meeting, i asked the attending students to write “exit reflections” on their class experiences. the exit reflections included the students’ discussion of what attracted their attention in the class and why, something new they learned in the class, the questions they did not ask in the class, what worked and what did not work in the class meeting, suggestions for improvements, and what they wanted to study next. the students frequently wrote that the class was very interesting and exciting. i think that the class was often interesting for the students because of the presented material, dialogic provocations, emergent controversies, and deep discussions. i often “recycled” the students’ questions, critical comments, reflections on the class, and suggestions for class improvements on the class online forum and/or in the next class. very few students skipped writing exit reflection either sometimes or systematically. 2 cf. the wording of the united states constitution. why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e6 however, in contrast to many of my past classes, the class online forum (webtalk) did not work in the researched class, in a striking contrast with all my previous classes. the students rarely submitted substantive online postings and rarely discussed those substantive postings. often, their postings were like: “i’m looking forward to our next class’s discussion!” or “the past class was super interesting and exciting. i’ve learned a lot of new things for me.” at the mid-term town hall meeting, the students discussed this phenomenon and decided to make participation in the online forum voluntary for the opening syllabus students. still, many kept participating with rather shallow, non-substantive postings. my hypothesis for their deep participation in the class and the exit reflection but shallow participation in the asynchronous online forum is that most of the participating students were responsive education students who needed intense guidance from me and their peers to generate their own deep opinions and formulate their thoughts. further research of this phenomenon is required. data collection and analysis to examine the students’ diverse reasons for their choice of the open syllabus – i.e., my research question – i selected a recent undergraduate class (discussed already above) i taught on cultural diversity for elementary school majors – the class that i have been teaching for the last 25 years. the class had 35 students majoring in education, except one student majoring in family studies. i had two male students. almost all students were caucasians, coming from middle-class suburban families. during the first class meeting, i asked my students who would take this course if it was not required by the institution in any way – including having the mandatory number of elective classes – and only 6 students raised their hands. when i started practicing democratic education in 2010, in the form of an open syllabus for all students, some of my open syllabus students complained that it was difficult for them to design their own studies in our class because they did not have an idea of how to do that. they said that they felt lonely. as a solution, they asked me to develop a public online space for them on our (closed) class website where the open syllabus students could share their initial open syllabus designs. initially, other open syllabus students and i objected to this idea. i told the open syllabus students that if they had trouble designing their own open syllabus, it might mean that this option was not for them. however, the open syllabus students disagreed, and i felt that i, as an educator, must follow their educational desire rather than insist on my own. the other open syllabus students opposed this public space because they had clear ideas of what they wanted to do and felt it was their private business not to share. however, the first group of the open syllabus students begged the second group to share their open syllabus initial designs to get inspired by the designs. the second group agreed. together we developed the following guidelines for the initial open syllabus design: please provide the following information about your initial open syllabus design: 1. open syllabus reasons: why did you choose open syllabus? what kind of student do you feel you are in this class? 2. curriculum: list the initial topics of your interest that are relevant to the class and that you plan to study. why are you interested in these particular topics? (when you find new topics, please post them in reply to your initial posting here). you can explore the curriculum map [the link to the curriculum map located on the class web was provided] to find good topics to study and to get inspired. feel free to add new topics of your interest which might not be on the list. 3. self-guidance: list your initial learning activities – readings, projects, practicum, writings, research, class attendance, self-exams, educational diary, internet searches, projects, and so on – that will help you to study the topics of your interests. when approximately do you plan to do this learning activity? 4. assessment: what are your initial educational goals for the course? why would it be helpful for your learning? what are you trying to accomplish? do you need grading for your self-directed education or not? if not, let me know what unconditional grade you want -unfortunately, i need to enter the final letter grade for you. if so, why do you need grading (summative assessment) for self-directed education? how is it helpful why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e7 for you as a learner? how do you want me to assign the final grade that the university requires me to assign? please provide detailed guidelines for your final grade if your grade is conditional (it can be unconditional). you may find the following essay on grading useful: eisenstein, c. (2006). “confession of a hypocrite.” retrieved from https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/confessions-of-a-hypocrite/; 5. help: list initial sources that can provide help for you: what, who, and how will provide this help? what help do you need from your instructor and peers? 6. any questions for eugene? 7. other? note: this is not a learning contract but a tentative beginning of your own learning journey. feel free to amend/correct the list in reply to your initial posting. when you make changes, please do not ask me for permission – in the open syllabus, you are the final authority for your education. however, feel free to contact me if you need my help or advice. initially, i planned to use only the first section of the students’ open syllabus design, reasons, as my research data. however, later, i noticed that the two other sections—curriculum and instruction—were often helpful in deducing the students’ reasons for choosing the open syllabus. in my data analysis, i abstracted emerging themes defining the students’ reasons. this was a grounded analysis inspired by the so-called “grounded theory” methodology (glaser & strauss, 1967). in contrast to the classical grounded theory approach, my goal was not to develop a (grounded) theory but grounded patterns of the students’ reasons for choosing an open syllabus emerging from the data. i defined each theme, operationalized it, provided an example, and counted how many students articulated this thematic reason. i also grouped some of the themes into major types of reasons. findings analyzing the data, i abstracted the five types of reasons, organized into three major groups, for the student’s initial choice of the open syllabus pedagogical regime. the first major reason is the student’s desire to engage in self-directed education, where they have the freedom to choose why, what, and how they want to study. those broadly defined autodidact students need freedom and flexibility to define their own education, and for that, they chose the open syllabus (see type#1). three out of 19 total os students (16%) articulated this type of reason. the second major reason for selecting the open syllabus (os) is the os student’s desire to define the conditions for their responsive education. responsive education is education emerging in the student’s response to “dialogic provocations” and “offerings” (i.e., learning activities) organized by the professor and/or peers that the student highly appreciates (matusov, 2015a). those students wanted to either limit their commitment to their responsive education due to their interests (type#2) or reduce their anxiety and stress and balance other demands of their lives (type#3). most of the students choosing the open syllabus pedagogical regime, twelve students (63%), articulated this second major type of reason. the first and second major reasons involve what i call “self-education,” where students define their own education but not necessarily completely or even mainly on their own (matusov, 2024b). the third major reason is that the student wants to ease the “education” foisted on them (types#4 and #5). four students (21%) articulated this reason. https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/confessions-of-a-hypocrite/ why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e8 self-directed education 1. autodidact learner who needs freedom, relevance, and flexibility definition: the student truly wants to study some particular, well-defined, class-related topics on her own or with peers, with or without the teacher, that the os student finds interesting, important, or needed for her personal and/or professional development. the os student selects the open syllabus because she needs freedom, relevance (to their particular interests), and flexibility to study what they want to study. operationalization: in the reasons section, the os student articulates their true interest in learning and the importance of learning choice. also, the os student emphasizes a need for flexibility, relevance, and balancing other demands. the curriculum section is clearly different from the self-guidance section, as it clearly lists the desired topics to study. in the self-guidance section, the os student explains how they plan to study the desired curriculum. often, there is an emphasis on the enjoyment, freedom, and excitement of learning throughout the initial design of the open syllabus. example: 1. open syllabus reasons: “i chose to do the open syllabus because i love how it gives me a lot of flexibility in choosing what i want to learn about. i will be able to balance my workload with my other classes, and allow me to enjoy what i am learning about.” 2. curriculum: “i am interested in learning about online teaching, school violence, face-to-face vs. online teaching, diverse family structure and its influence on education, what is bullying and why does it occur?, and race issues in education. i'm excited to learn about these topics because they relate to my career path and it will help increase my knowledge.” 3. self-guidance: “i enjoy posting and reading webtalks [online forum postings], they help me learn about what information my peers have found and they help me gain new knowledge as well. i will attend four classes a month, and for those classes, i'll be posting a webtalk and exit reflection for the topic of those weeks. for the other weeks, i will be posting a webtalk once a week about the current topic i am learning and researching, which will count as my attendance.” responsive education 2. responsive dutiful learner who wants to limit their commitment to their responsive education because of their interests or ways of learning definition: the os student is genuinely interested in the class subject and finds it attractive and important to them, although their interests might be ill-defined, emerging as a response to the offers and dialogic provocations by others (i.e., peers and the instructor), and not self-generated. the os student likes the class so far. they also see it as their duty to themselves to study. they want the open syllabus to find flexibility and reduce their workload while committing to their duties and interests. this duty can be toward themselves as a learner and as a future professional. operationalization: in the reasons section, the os student justifies the reduction of the assigned studywork. the curriculum section is different from the self-guidance section, but it is not specific, and it does not follow and trust the class choices. the self-guidance section alternates between the os student’s self-duty and interest in their studies (and the importance for their future). example: 1. open syllabus reasons: “i really enjoy how this class works and the freedom we have in it. however, there are a couple of things i want to change because i know myself best and what is going to work best for me. the first thing is the attendance requirements when missing class. the only times i will ever miss class will either be for religious reasons, emergencies or if i am sick. i believe it should be up to me to review the things i missed in class instead of having to write up a response to be submitted. i also do not plan to do the main learning project. personally, for me, i find it best to have no pressure to turn an assignment like that in but rather research in my own time and space. i also do not want points to be taken off if i forget to do an exit why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e9 ticket [i.e., exit reflection] or webtalk. i will still do my exit tickets and web talks; however, this is a new website, as i am used to using canvas3, so if i get confused or forget something, i don’t want to be punished for it.” 2. curriculum: “i plan to follow the same curriculum/topics as the class besides the attendance, main learning project and no points lost due to missing web talks and exit tickets [i.e., exit reflections].” 3. self-guidance: “i still need to come to class and be active in participation, as well as post my web talks and exit tickets. the only difference is that there is no loss of points or extra work for missing class or any assignments. since i am not doing the main learning project, i do believe it is my duty to still pick a topic and do the research on my own. i also plan to each week go over what we had learned in class and review anything i might find important for the future.” 3. stress-reduction for a responsive, peripheral, and responsible learner definition: the os student is a responsive learner but is concerned about the stress that class’s opening syllabus imposes on them. by choosing the open syllabus, they want to reduce stress to lower anxiety or to balance their workload and other demands of their life. also, they strongly feel like being a responsible learner. operationalization: in the reason section, there is a clear articulation of stress reduction. stress on being a responsible and active learner. however, there is not much enthusiasm for learning or the class in the curriculum section or otherwise. the “self-guidance” section focuses on responsibility, which is understood as duty and commitment. example: 1. open syllabus reasons: “i wanted an open syllabus because i do not want to have to stress and worry about my grade in this class. i am a person who gets very anxious about exams and stresses out about them so i do not want to have to worry about it. i feel like this is a discussion based class where we just discuss topics in class and reflect on them through the webtalks and exit reflections. i feel like i am an active participant in this class as i attend every class. even though i don’t normally speak, i participate in weekly webtalks, exit reflections, and in class activities on the classboard [i.e., shared online space for writing in class projected on the blackboard during the class meeting, similar to google doc] and in my group at my table.” 2. curriculum: “i will continue to follow and learn about the topics discussed throughout the class with other students and do the webtalks and exit tickets when in attendance because i do not want points being taken off if i accidentally forget to complete something because i was not able to attend class and am not used to the website. i will not be graded on attendance and/or make up work and i will not complete the final project. however, i will only miss class if i am sick or am away and if so i will try to make it over zoom.”\ 3. self-guidance: “although i will not be graded on attendance and make up work, i will still be responsible for weekly webtalks and daily class exit reflections as well as engaging in what we discuss with my table members as well as on the class board since i am more on the quiet side. additionally, unless i have a valid reason not to come to class, i still need to attend.” easing the foisted “education” 4. credential transactional student: negotiating efforts and gains definition: the os student wants to get a desired credit (e.g., final grade) for their assigned study-work that does not have any (or much) intrinsic educational value for themselves. by choosing the open syllabus, the student tries to reduce the assigned study-work while securing the highest credit for the class. operationalization: in the reasons section, the os student justifies reducing the assigned study work by referencing fairness. the curriculum section is equated with the (self) guidance section, listing assigned study work the student agrees to do for the credit. there is no listed curriculum that the student truly wants to study. however, there is a credentialism discourse focused on the fairness of the assignments’ load, punishments, and/or grading. 3 i use moodle-based web platform for my classes while my university uses canvas because i found moodle easier to modify for my pedagogical purposes. why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e10 example: 1. open syllabus reasons: “i really enjoy this class and how it is run, however, i feel the attendance requirements when absent are tedious, especially because for me, i will be in class unless i have a reason not to be, i.e.: holiday or emergency/sickness, so this seems unfair that i'd have to make work up, more so than what was done in class, if it is an excused absence by the university.” 2. curriculum: “truthfully i plan to continue doing class as is aside from the main learning project and the attendance make ups. the only other thing i would change is only one webtalk posting at the end of the week discussing the week's discussions.” 3. self-guidance: “attendance is still mandatory unless provided an excuse, and if unable to join the zoom no additional work is required. exit reflections at the end of class, one webtalk posting a week, and class/group participation.” 5. limiting an imposed chore definition: the os student perceives the class as an imposed chore, without much internal value for the student, that they want to limit by choosing the open syllabus. operationalization: in the reason section, the os student lists the part of the chore that they agree to do without any justification, which continues to the curriculum and the “self-guidance” section. almost everything feels technical and mechanical without any personal touch. example: 1. open syllabus reasons: “i really enjoy this class. however, there are some things for me that i know will work well and other things that i know that won't work well for me. the main reason why i'm choosing the open syllabus is because of the attendance. i plan on being at every class unless i'm sick, there's an emergency, or it's a holiday. i feel that for me it's best if i review the content i missed on my own, without the pressure of having to submit a response. in addition, i will still be doing exit reflections and webtalks, but i will not be doing the main learning project.” 2. curriculum: “i will follow the same curriculum as the class, i just won't need to do the attendance make up assignments or the main learning project.” 3. self-guidance: “my attendance is still mandatory unless i am sick, there's an emergency, or it's a holiday. if i am unable to join zoom, there is no additional work required and i will review the material i missed on my own time without needing to submit an assignment. i will not need to do the main learning project. i will still need to do one webtalk each week, exit reflections at the end of class, and participate in class/group discussions.” conclusions the qualitative analysis of the students’ initial reasons for their choice of the open syllabus pedagogical regime revealed the three major groups. the first group of reasons is the students’ commitment to self-directed education. the open syllabus – its freedom, relevance, and flexibility – allows those students to pursue what they want to study, how they want to study it – i.e., through which learning activities, – with whom, where, when, and so on. the second group of reasons is the students’ commitment to responsive education, where the students highly appreciate their emergent responses to the dialogic provocations and offerings created by the professor and/or peers for them. those students need the open syllabus to define the conditions and limitations for their commitment due to their interests, ways of studying, balancing life demands, and reduction of stress. finally, the third group of the reasons for the students’ choosing the open syllabus is their desire to ease “education” foisted on them by the conventional institution. as i argued elsewhere, genuine education is always self-education, when the educatee defines their own education with or without the help of other people (matusov, 2021b). in short, education differs from learning in terms of the educatee’s positive judgment about the experienced or designed learning. this positive judgment makes the educatee the author of their own education: it generates two major types why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e11 of educational authorship: the educatee’s self-generating authorship of self-directed education (sde) and responsive authorship of responsive education (re) (matusov, 2015a). the educatee’s self-generating authorship of self-directed education involves the educatee designing, engaging, and committing themselves to educational self-journeys and self-assignments such as learning projects; readings; designing and attending learning enterprises (e.g., classes, clubs, lectures); searching for peers, experts, and sources of information, critical dialogue, and guidance; active trying new things, and so on (matusov, 2015a). in contrast, the educatee’s responsive authorship of responsive education is defined by their creative contributions to “dialogic provocations” (matusov, 2015a) and “offerings” (cunningham, 2021) provided by the educator and/or peers, such as interest-generating lessons, exposures, sharing, critical dialogue, projects, questions/inquiries, and so on. the responsive educatee constantly assesses the others-designed and emerging dialogic provocations, offerings, and their own contributions to see how interesting, useful, helpful, exciting, important, thoughtsand feelingsprovoking they are for them. thus, the responsive educatee’s participation in responsive education is always conditional, based on their assessment of their own learning experiences – how educational they are for them. both sde and re educatees are genuinely interested in the studies. both are engaged in selfeducation. both can attend the class meetings. both demonstrate at least some elements of self-initiated and responsive educational authorship. even super sde educatees responsively learn from other people directly or indirectly (e.g., through texts, media, observations). even super re educatees still self-assign their own commitment to studies designed by others by managing their own attention, engagement, attendance, and so on. the difference is in the degree of these two educational authorship types that define a new quality. the sde educatees are often much more selective, specific, focused, and plan to actively engage in designing their own learning: they know well what and why they want to study much more than the re educatees. please note that in the curriculum sections, in type #1 of the reason for selecting the open syllabus, the student was highly selective about what she initially wanted to study, while in types #2 and #3, the students wanted to study whatever the class decided to study. both sde and re educatees wanted to have freedom and flexibility. however, the sde educatees wanted it for designing their own studies – educational journeys; in contrast, the re educatees wanted it to shape their commitment to responsive education in the contexts of their own (emerging) interests, life obligations, demands, and pressures. of course, i can envision an educatee, who can be between sde and re. the three major groups of reasons reflect the tension between the democratic dialogic spirit of the class that i tried to promote and the conventional institution where the class occurs. first of all, the students mostly did not come to the class and to me on their free will because they were very much interested in the subject matter of the class or attracted to me as a teacher, researcher, and educational practitioner. the class was required for elementary teacher educators and education minors, and it was an option for socalled “the university multicultural requirement.” some students reported that they might take this class even if it was not required at the beginning of the class, but it was a hypothetical question. it is unclear how many of my os sde and re students would follow their declared desire without the university pressure or in the absence of credits. the third group of reasons for the students’ choice of the open syllabus strongly reflects the effect of the conventional institution. the students tried to ease its oppression on them, as “education” did not seem to have much intrinsic value on them but rather was a transaction or a necessary chore. some of these students might be hidden prisoners of education who distrusted me and/or the institution so that they could get a good grade of their liking without doing any “work” (for the institution represented by me) in exchange for getting necessary institutional credentials (see the evidence for that in matusov, 2023b). alternatively, they might also feel that getting a good grade for nothing is unfair either morally or because they personally benefit from credentialism. further research is needed for that. also, another effect of the conventional educational institution on my students is that in the second group of reasons, some students why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e12 might want to reduce the stress coming from the educational paternalism of the opening syllabus and of the conventional institution (other classes) that takes their energy and time from their focus on genuine selfeducation. the quantitative analysis of the students’ initial reasons for their choice of the open syllabus pedagogical regime revealed that a large majority of the students who chose the open syllabus (79%) did it because of their commitment to self-education: either self-directed education (16%) or responsive education (63%). only 21% of the os-chosen students did it purely to ease the burden of the foisted education. i am highly satisfied that a high percentage of my students were interested in self-education: whether self-directed or responsive. my holistic sense of the entire class, including the students who chose the opening syllabus, supports this impression. however, i do expect that some classes might have a different composition. i think it is worth checking this for many of my multi-syllabi classes (undergraduate and graduate) for many years of my use of this overall pedagogical design. another issue worth checking in future research is whether the postponed open syllabus is better than the open syllabus available immediately as an option for the students with regard to the students’ initial reasons for choosing the open syllabus pedagogical regime. my major interpretation of these findings is that when students who grew up in conventional educational institutions are given a chance for democratic dialogic education, many of them (but not all!) are attracted and want to commit to it. granted, this study does not allow us to examine how many of those students follow through with their desire – another study is needed – but still, it reflects the students’ initial intentions. can it be that some of the intentions for the open syllabus (os) are fake – to please the professor (me) to tell me what i want to hear from them, to project the socially desired image of themselves, or just copy what people wrote before them? although i cannot completely discount these possibilities, i judge them as being rather unlikely. this is because the os-chosen students either announced that they were getting an unconditional “a” or self-grading, which turned out to be more or less an unconditional “a.” an unconditional “a” freed them from me and my supervision and surveillance. also, the first posted open syllabus design was quite frank about coming from the credential transactional student who articulated that she wanted to ease the burden of assignments (in a broader sense) without any value to her learning experiences. the other os students did not follow her in their os design. i see some evidence that the oschosen students, after reading her os design (there was some borrowing of the wordings), but most did not follow her reason. thus, this credential os student did not become “the role model” for many of them. finally, many of the os students followed through on their reasons for the open syllabus judged by their participation in the class either during the class meetings or on the class website, although, again, this should be studied more systematically in the future. what are the reasons why the students chose to commit to the opening syllabus? why did they choose the opening syllabus? why did they not choose the open syllabus? based on my discussion of these issues with some of my past opening syllabus students (not from this class), some of their decisions might be based on what i called “autopaternalism”: for some reason, they were not ready or able to organize themselves enough to conduct studies of their educational desire (matusov, 2024b). although engaged in a hybrid of self-directed education and responsive education, they needed me to force them to study what they wanted to study. also, they reported that they trusted me and liked my pedagogical design of the opening syllabus, which allowed them to fulfill their educational study desires. in addition, they appreciated the flexibility and possibility of tuning up the class organization (matusov, 2024b). also, based on my observations, some of the opening syllabus students might be credential students and prisoners of education who might not trust me that i would follow through with my promises or want to keep a socially desired image of themselves. future systematic research of the students’ choice for the opening syllabus why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e13 is needed. also, there is an interesting question of whether some of these opening syllabus students might choose an open syllabus later on if they had an opportunity to take more multi-syllabi classes. i have some evidence of that by observing students who attended several of my classes. in sum, the findings suggest that there are undergraduate students in conventional higher education institutions who have an interest in self-education when the professor follows the students’ educational desires. finally, i want to return back to duberman and holt’s critique of their students who “abuse their freedom” for self-education that they granted their students. i think these democratic university educators had the wrong pedagogical expectation that this granted educational freedom would make all their students immediately engage in self-education on the subject matter of duberman and holt’s courses. however, i have recognized that there are many challenges to my students’ self-education. first of all, the students' life outside their democratic classes in a traditional educational setting, as experienced by myself, duberman, and holt, is often characterized by significant stress, paternalistic dynamics, and a focus on survival. for instance, at the beginning of some class meetings, i practice inviting participants, including myself, to express their current feelings and reasons for them (for those who wish to participate). predominantly, students’ negative emotions are linked to school-related activities and their repercussions, such as test preparation, quizzes, exams, homework, assignments, deadlines, schoolinduced boredom, alienation, and the encroachment of school responsibilities on personal time. conversely, positive emotions frequently arise either from activities outside of school or the conclusion of school-related tasks (e.g., semester breaks and completion of midterm exams). second, the concept of self-education as an institutional practice is unfamiliar to many students. the influence of the traditional culture of paternalistic credential education is significant on my students and, to a lesser degree, on me. some students experience culture shock. one student noted in class that they previously needed permission from teachers for basic needs like asking their teachers' permission to go to a toilet but now have the autonomy to make decisions about their education and life. it takes time for students to adjust to this new culture of autonomy, life authorship, and self-education. i have observed that when some students take another democratic course with me, their engagement in self-learning increases significantly. they are more comfortable with multi-syllabus courses, trust my promises, engage deeply with the material, and often choose the self-designed syllabus option. these experienced students often guide newcomers to self-education. however, some novice students only fully trust the process by the end of the semester. for example, an open syllabus student recently emailed at the semester's end to check if they needed to post more online to maintain an "a" grade. this reflects her distrust in my promise of unconditional grading. despite aiming to empower students in their educational decisions, i sometimes remain a "benevolent dictator" due to my institutional authority (matusov, 2023b). i assured the student that she had the final say in her educational choices. the traditional educational system's paternalism and emphasis on credentials have significantly influenced my role as an educator. most of my students are not given the choice to select my classes or me as their instructor. instead, both the class and i have been designated to them by the conventional educational institution. my position as their teacher is not a result of their voluntary selection, based on a desire to learn about cultural diversity in education from me, or because of my commitment to pedagogical fiduciary duty (matusov, 2024b), but rather due to institutional assignment. in addition, many democratic educators, including myself, have observed “school toxification” and “school detoxification” in students transitioning from conventional to democratic schools. students from why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e14 traditional schools often lose their ability to act independently without authority’s pressure (llewellyn, 1998; matusov & brobst, 2013; neill, 1960). as one student remarked, “without school forcing me to do anything, i’d stay in bed all day waiting for my friends to return from classes.” these educators suggest a “detoxification” period where students do nothing to recover from the suppressed agency. a.s. neill of summerhill school noted that recovery might take about a month of inactivity for each year spent in conventional schooling. most of my students lack the necessary time for this process in my class, having experienced at least 14 years of traditional education. third, external factors distract my students from self-education. the main distraction is the need for educational credentials like diplomas, good grades, course credits, and school reputation, which are required by most employers and all graduate schools. although some major employers now hire based on competency rather than educational credentials, salary discrimination based on education still exists. as ivan illich wrote, …we need a law forbidding discrimination in hiring, voting, or admission to centers of learning based on previous attendance at some curriculum. this guarantee … would remove the present absurd discrimination in favor of the person who learns a given skill with the largest expenditure of public funds or what is equally likely has been able to obtain a diploma which has no relation to any useful skill or job (illich, 1983, p. 7). fourth, my challenge to the traditional educational approach of my university has had personal negative impacts. it results in stress and pressure, sometimes leading me to reconsider conventional teaching methods. for instance, when class attendance drops, particularly towards the semester's end, as students face pressures from other courses, i worry about my effectiveness as an instructor. in the past, colleagues have mentioned concerns about “grade inflation.” my position within the institution can be uncertain due to my deviation from the established educational practices and credentialing standards. in summary, instead of wanting all my students to engage in self-education on the course subject matter, as duberman, holt, and i previously wanted to do, i now wish to present my primary challenge as follows: how best can i offer my students a possibility for their transition from paternalistic education to selfeducation within one 3-month semester in the condition of a paternalistic educational institution constantly colonizing my students’ mindset, time, activities, emotions, values, and energy? i do not consider this objective to be paternalistic because my students have reported significant stress, anxiety, alienation, and suppression of their authorial agency due to the school environment. however, many students perceive these issues as a normal and unavoidable aspect of life. the students still have a choice to engage or not to engage in this transition. a major pedagogical dilemma i face is whether and to what extent the use of educational paternalism (beyond autopaternalism) is justified and legitimate when most students who are genuinely interested in my class view their interest as an unaffordable luxury within the context of perpetual survival. am i doing these students a disservice by abruptly introducing them to self-education? is this comparable to offering unlimited food to those who have experienced prolonged starvation? will the freedom of selfeducation cause more harm than good for these students, leading them to reject it due to their overwhelming survival concerns without even attempting it? would it be more beneficial for my students to impose a moderate level of educational paternalism for a longer period to provide them with a taste of dialogic education? moreover, how should i address the needs of other students (usually a minority) who are ready for self-education? what does a successful transition from paternalistic education to self-education within a 3why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e15 month semester at my american university look like, given the context of a paternalistic educational institution? currently, i do not have answers to these pressing questions. references argyris, c., & schön, d. a. 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(2024b). the teachers’ pedagogical fiduciary duty to their students. integrative psychological and behavioral science, 58, 1235–1260, doi:10.1007/s12124-022-09690-8. http://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/dpj1/article/view/110/105 why do students choose the option of the open syllabus in a conventional university? eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.695 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) e16 matusov, e., & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centaur failure: chronotopic analysis. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2017). promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 5, e1-e29, doi:10.5195/dpj.2017.199. mercogliano, c. (1998). making it up as we go along: the story of the albany free school. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. neill, a. s. (1960). summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing. new york: hart publishing company. rousseau, j. j. (1979). emile: or, on education. new york: basic books. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a16 discussion formats for addressing emotions: implications for social-emotional learning eran hakim ben-gurion university of the negev, israel adam lefstein hebrew university of jerusalem, israel hadar netz tel-aviv university, israel abstract scholars of social and emotional learning (sel) advocate discussion as a promising instructional method yet rarely specify how such discussions should be conducted. facilitating classroom discussions is highly challenging, particularly about emotions. furthermore, the sel literature contains contradictory discursive imperatives; it typically overlooks the gaps between students’ and teachers’ emotional codes and how these codes are shaped by culture, class, and gender. the current study explores different ways in which teachers facilitate classroom dialogue about emotions. we analyze data drawn from a two-year ethnographic study conducted as part of a design-based implementation research project aimed at fostering productive dialogue in primary language arts classrooms, looking in particular at two lessons centered around a story about crying. we found two different interactional genres for discussions about emotions: (1) inclusive emotional dialogue, in which students share emotions experienced in their everyday lives; (2) emotional inquiry, in which students explore emotions, their expressions, and their social meanings. both types of discussion generated informative exchanges about students’ emotions. yet the discussions also put the teacher and students in challenging positions, often related to the need to navigate between contradictory discursive norms and emotional codes. keywords: dialogic pedagogy, discourse analysis, ethnography, language arts, social and emotional learning. eran hakim is an anthropologist of education whose research focuses on the social and emotional lives of children in schools with a particular emphasis on school bullying and the overall wellbeing of children within educational settings.1 adam lefstein is the morton l. mandel director of the seymour fox school of education at the hebrew university of jerusalem. his research and teaching focus on pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning, and educational change. he is particularly interested in the intersection between research and professional practice and how to conduct research that is meaningful, rigorous, and helpful for educators. 1 eran hakim, department of education, ben gurion university of the negev, beer-sheva, pod 653, israel, eranhakim@gmail.com, phone: 972-(0)547-616-516. dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) mailto:eranhakim@gmail.com discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a17 hadar netz is a senior lecturer in the program for multilingual education at the school of education, telaviv university, israel. she is a discourse analyst conducting research across diverse educational contexts and genres. her areas of expertise encompass classroom interactions, children’s literature, and the dynamics of digital communication within social media platforms. (orcid id: 0000-0002-9315-5911). acknowledgments this work was supported by the israel science foundation [grant nos. 2693/17 and 984/18]. we wish to thank the teachers and students for generously opening the doors to their classrooms and allowing us to learn from their experiences. ïïò discussion formats for addressing emotions: implications for socialemotional learning social-emotional learning (sel) has been shown to improve students’ academic achievement, occupational attainment, mental health, and civic engagement and to reduce depression, anxiety, and risk behaviors (jones et al., 2017; domitrovich et al., 2017; heckman & kautz, 2012; although for a critical discussion, see effrem & robbins, 2019). advancing sel in classrooms requires the development of research-based tools and programs (elias & moceri, 2012; jones et al., 2017; harvard university, n.d.). classroom discussions have been advanced as a central method for achieving sel aims (assor, 2020; yoder, 2014). however, scholars advocating classroom discussions for sel rarely specify how such discussions should be designed and facilitated. furthermore, the sel literature contains contradictory imperatives: on the one hand, pupils are instructed to ‘not bottle things up’ (cameron, 2000) and to accept all emotions (wilce & fenigsen, 2016). on the other hand, sel promotes hegemonic positivity, that is, the expectation that pupils ‘feel good’ (smith, 2019) and exhibit positive motivation, hope, optimism (yoder, 2014), and even joy (gillies, 2011; stearns, 2017). we explore how teachers and students navigate discussions about emotional experience through close analysis of two case-study lessons drawn from a two-year ethnographic study of an intervention designed to foster productive classroom dialogue in the language arts. the teachers in the program were not trained for sel but rather were experimenting with ways to develop dialogic teaching and learning. in the paper, we use this data to gain insight into dialogue on emotions in relation to sel foci and aims. the two lessons were conducted in the same school, located in a mixed arab-jewish socio-economically disadvantaged israeli city. each case reflected a different interactional form for discussing emotions: (1) inclusive emotional dialogue – a form of dialogue in which participants are expected to share their emotions and to support others’ sharing of their emotions; (2) emotional inquiry – a form of dialogue in which participants are encouraged to explore emotions and how they and others experience and express them. in this paper, we capitalize on the contextual similarities within which the two discussions unfold to compare the characteristics of these two types of discussions and their affordances for fostering dialogue oriented towards social and emotional learning. social-emotional learning in classroom discourse: discursive imperatives the concept of sel and its promotion, like other educational trends, emerged within a certain cultural and historical context and should be understood as part of a broader therapeutic turn in education (cameron, 2000; ecclestone, 2012; shoshana, 2017). for present purposes, it is especially important to address (1) educational assumptions about how sel discussions should be conducted and (2) cultural assumptions about emotions that affect school sel discussions. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a18 educational assumptions regarding sel discussions we identify in the sel literature three main discursive imperatives: ‘don’t bottle things up.’ sel guidance emphasizes that pupils should learn how to express their emotions (collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning, 2013; jones et al., 2017; merrell & gueldner, 2010) and advocates sharing emotions as a desired practice (department for education and skills, 2005; merrell & gueldner, 2010). cameron (2000), however, critiques the imperative ‘don’t bottle things up,’ noting that its goal is limited to venting bottled-up feelings and does not include reflecting on those feelings: ‘to speak them so that they may subsequently be spoken about’ (p. 157; see also anwaruddin, 2016). inclusiveness. inclusiveness relates to the strong emphasis sel programs place on sharing emotions. students are guided to share their emotions, and teachers are expected to encourage such sharing without restricting them or further directing them (gillies, 2011). in their discussion of emotion pedagogies (a theoretical concept that includes sel), wilce and fenigsen (2016) conclude that ‘emotion pedagogies evince a need to recognize—and, often, fully accept—all emotions, including “bad” or “negative” ones such as anger or shame’ (p. 84). the authors point out that the idea of emotional inclusiveness is historically recent, as many cultures have traditionally tended to direct people toward desired emotions while avoiding and even condemning the expression of others. hegemonic positivity. sel programs tend to promote what stearns (2017) calls ‘hegemonic positivity,’ based on ‘an assumption that children should feel good in school and about school (p. 265). hegemonic positivity is expressed in sel by proclaiming the primacy of joy and by putting a strong emphasis on training pupils to regulate themselves, control their anger and rage, and stay calm. gillies (2011) calls it a ‘“feel good” language... that deflects argument and disarms criticism’ (p. 188). similarly, smith (2019) argues that the ‘feel good’ imperative sanitizes classroom discourse and distances the discussion from students’ real lived experiences. as dutro (2008) argues, ‘if wounds are not welcome, children will correctly sense that what school wishes to hear is the banal, the safe, the bland, and they will leave what matters most muted beneath a sterile, clean bandage’ (p. 18). hegemonic positivity is clearly in tension with inclusiveness and the call to accept all emotions. gillies (2011) shows how, despite a declared emphasis on sharing and accepting all emotions, sel activities are ‘structured by unspoken boundaries,’ thus limiting ‘the feelings and thoughts pupils [are] permitted to voice.’ teachers in a classroom observed by stearns (2017) explicitly told students that bad feelings ‘should only last for a certain amount of time’ (p. 277). stearns asserts that the directive to focus on positive emotions made teachers overlook students’ considerable interest in discussing ‘bad,’ difficult emotional states. cultural assumptions regarding sel discussions sel does not only expect and promote a certain emotional code; it also assumes a cultural world in which it wishes to operate, addressing and excluding social identities, discursive genres, and other cultural constructs. following stearns (2017), who identified a gap between the rare explicit mentions of race, class, and gender during sel discussions and their ‘ineffable presence’ in them (p.152), in what follows, we discuss how emotional dialogues interact with central identity categories. gender. numerous studies demonstrate that teachers' gender assumptions and expectations shape school life (e.g., jones & myhill, 2004; myhill & jones, 2006). in relation to sel, evans (2017) shows how perceptions of gender roles generate different expectations of boys’ and girls’ participation. girls are invited to ‘suspend affect, and to engage in the intellectual exercise of analysing and articulating emotions … in discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a19 contrast, boys [are] … permitted to passively participate, with their docile bodies serving as a signifier of success’ (evans, 2017, p. 198). similarly, wood and brownhill (2018) show how teachers evaluate pupils’ needs vis-a-vis gender, depicting boys, mainly those with anger problems, as having a crucial need for strong boundaries. race and class. hoffman (2009) criticizes the common sel demand that ‘children in the elementary grades should be able to recognize and accurately label simple emotions’, arguing that ‘not all cultures interpret emotional experience in the same way, nor do they assign the same kinds of regulatory or expressive responses (such as talk) commonly shared by the white, american middle class’ (p. 540). in shoshana’s (2017) ethnographies of two israeli schools serving different socioeconomic communities, while students from low socioeconomic communities expressed anger based on their own life experiences of racism and discrimination, their teachers strived to avoid such political discourse and attempted to promote psychological discourse and hegemonic interpretations instead. similarly, gillies’s (2011) ethnographic study exposes a multilayered gap between the everyday needs of underprivileged pupils and the values promoted by the influential social and emotional aspects of learning (seal) program. the students she studied often discussed difficult events, such as local teenage stabbings, in a ‘seemingly emotionless manner’ (2011, p. 200). from a sel perspective, such a response is ‘indicative of poor social skills and low emotional intelligence’ (ibid). yet gillies suggests the students used this emotional code to cope with a reality they could not affect or escape, and it ‘effectively worked to defuse difficult feelings while fostering supportive social bonds’ (ibid). gillies further shows how students diagnosed as having an ‘anger problem’, a problem teachers tend to associate with lower-class students (wood, 2020; stearns, 2017), were often personally invested in this diagnosis. moreover, students effectively used anger to ‘negotiate and renegotiate relationships inside and outside school’ mainly with respect to issues such as bullying and other kinds of violence (gillies, 2011, p. 198). this tension illustrates how children from underprivileged backgrounds are expected to conform to and adopt an upper middle-class emotional code with little regard to how it fits their everyday lives (figueredo, 2020). in sum, scholars call on teachers to use discussions to promote sel but prescribe different and often contradictory discursive imperatives. how are such discussions enacted in practice in classrooms in diverse cultural contexts? we addressed this question by analyzing different formats for discussing emotions in the classroom in light of sel goals, expectations, and assumptions about students and their emotional codes. dialogic pedagogy: a grounded approach this paper, and the study from which it emerges, are based on an approach to dialogic pedagogy that is informed by educational theory and research in dialogic education (e.g., burbules, 1993) and dialogic teaching (e.g., alexander, 2020; resnick et al., 2015) but that is grounded in and adapted to the actual conditions in which teachers and students interact (lefstein & snell, 2014). this approach recognizes that classroom discourse is often structured asymmetrically, such that the teacher’s voice and the official voice of the curriculum dominate the discussion, affording limited space for independent student thinking or heterodox ideas. making classroom discourse more dialogic means creating space for students to share their thinking, to engage critically with one another’s and the teacher’s ideas, and to construct together new meanings (alexander, 2008). that said, we are aware that this vision goes against the grain of traditional school structures and curricula, which teachers and students are not always capable of transforming. moreover, dialogic imperatives such as opening space for students’ ideas, affording multiple perspectives and voices, encouraging critique, and cultivating a safe and caring environment are in tension with one another, and discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a20 therefore no strategy or program can or should replace teachers’ professional judgment and agency. consequently, our approach is to share ideas about dialogic pedagogy with teachers and to facilitate them in adapting these ideas to their own goals and circumstances. often, the result of this grounded approach is not readily recognized by purists as “dialogic,” and indeed, the episodes analyzed below may seem out of place in this esteemed dialogic pedagogy journal. we argue, in response, that the dialogic education field can learn more from trying to understand what teachers and students actually do with dialogic ideas in the imperfect worlds of existing classrooms than by judging them as insufficiently dialogic. research context and methods of inquiry this comparative case study is based on data collected as part of a design-based implementation research project, in collaboration with the israeli ministry of education, designed to foster productive dialogue in primary language arts classrooms. the program goal is that participating teachers facilitate discussions that afford students opportunities to express their thoughts, build on others’ ideas, and reason about their own and others’ perspectives (alexander, 2020; barak & lefstein, 2022). data collection during the 2019-2020 school year, when the lessons analyzed in this study took place, the program included ten schools, most of which were located in underprivileged neighborhoods, including the school at the center of this paper, which we are calling prospects primary school. the first author conducted weekly observations at prospects primary school, documenting teacher team meetings and hebrew language arts lessons in miriam’s and osnat’s classrooms2. the data were collected by direct systematic observation. the observer, a trained ethnographer, arrived at the school two times a week for 6 hours each time. all lessons were videotaped and then transcribed. prolonged ethnography enabled personal relationships with students and teachers, which helped uncover the social dynamics within and outside the classrooms. since classroom discourse was video-recorded, the ethnographic fieldwork focused on gathering data that the camera could not capture, such as general class atmosphere, hidden interactions as well as contextual information such as students’ social relations and joint history. additionally, as part of the intervention program, a co-design team comprised of teachers and researchers met regularly to design the intervention and reflect on its enactment. osnat and miriam were both part of the co-design team. classroom discussions were usually meant to build on selected short stories, touching on more general issues such as social identities, israeli history, or, in the case of the lessons analyzed here, crying and emotions. in summary, data collection for this study involved a combination of diverse sources, including classroom observations, ethnographic fieldwork, and team meetings. we also shared our analysis with the teachers in order to take their perspectives into account. this multi-faceted approach enabled triangulation, thereby strengthening the validity of both the data and its analysis. participants and setting the two classes shared similar demographics: most of the 31-32 students in each class were mizrahi jews, several pupils recently emigrated from the former soviet union, each class contained one arab student, and 4-5 students were identified as having special educational needs. both classes had balanced distributions of boys and girls. most students were 10-11 years old (in miriam’s class, one student was 12 years old). most students came from lower-middle-class families and, according to the teachers, 2 all names are pseudonyms. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a21 some experienced financial difficulties and domestic violence. the two classroom teachers, whom we are calling ‘miriam’ and ‘osnat,’ were both highly respected veterans. data and methods of inquiry following the logic of the extended case method (burawoy, 1998; mitchell, 1983), we focus on two cases that shed light on how sel discourses expose and interact with diverse cultural codes and how this interaction produces different forms of emotional dialogues in classrooms. we chose our two case study lessons since, by focusing on the same story but adopting radically different approaches to teaching it, they bring into stark relief the pedagogical affordances and constraints of different ways of engaging in sel discussions. our cases, taught in the two fifth grade classes, were dedicated to a preparatory discussion conducted prior to reading the short story ‘the king who could not cry’. the story tells of a king whose kingdom is extremely prosperous and whose subjects are wonderfully happy. yet one thing bothers the king: he cannot cry. the story follows the king’s futile attempts to cry, helped by his advisers who try to make him cry mainly by showing him sad sights: a sunset, black clouds, dry thorns, colorless flowers, rude children, fish with eyes on their sides, a bird with a scary beak, a man with a gleaming bald head, and a lizard that has lost its tail. these attempts fail one after another. finally, after many years, upon reaching old age, the king sees a young couple in love; this reminds him of his youth and evokes his tears. we chose to focus our analysis on the lessons dedicated to ‘the king who could not cry’ as the classroom discussions revolved around crying and the emotional states related to crying, thus lending themselves particularly well to sel topics and aims. although sel was not the main objective of the lessons (the goal was the promotion of dialogue about the story), the discussions focused on crying, and the students expressed their thoughts and habits regarding crying. in this way, the discussion, de facto, revolved around sel contents by promoting students’ self-awareness (collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning, 2013; dusenbury et al., 2014; jones et al., 2017; the aspen institute, 2019) and, more specifically, their ‘emotion knowledge and expression’ (jones et al., 2017, p. 18). we analyze the data by applying principles and methods of linguistic ethnography (rampton et al., 2015), studying actors’ immediate actions, and asking how these interactions were embedded in wider social contexts (copland & creese, 2015). we repeatedly viewed the video-recorded lessons and associated transcripts and asked what was happening in them, what especially interested us, and why. we then slowly and closely examined the interactions. for each utterance, we asked: what is the speaker doing here and why? how does this utterance respond to the ones before it and lead to the next? what do the speakers’ lexical, tonal, and grammatical choices reflect? what else could have happened here but did not, and why (rampton, 2006)? finally, before teaching the story, the design team met to plan the lessons. in the analysis, we examined the relationship between teachers’ expectations expressed during the team meeting vs. the actual emotional understandings verbalized in class. we used the design team meeting, especially the teachers’ reasoning about emotion, to identify participating teachers’ preferred emotional codes. ethical considerations the study was approved by the chief scientist of the israeli ministry of education and our university ethics committee. teachers and all video-recorded students (and their parents or guardians) gave informed consent to participate in the study. pseudonyms are used to protect participants’ privacy. we shared our analysis with the teachers in order to take their perspectives into account. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a22 findings design team meeting before we present our analysis of the classroom discussions, we analyze data from the design team meeting that took place before the lessons. these data are relevant to the subsequent analysis of the classroom discussions mainly since they capture teachers’ expectations and ideas regarding pupils’ emotional worlds. competing guiding questions to prompt discussion. the meeting opened as the facilitator, a teacher herself, introduced the question with which she proposed to open the preliminary classroom discussion: ‘i have a wand here ... anyone i touch, with this wand of mine right now, which is like, in my hand, will never cry again … who wants me to touch him with my wand?’3 two of the participating teachers suggested an alternative question as a prompt for discussion: ‘what makes you cry?’ arguing that this alternative question would link the discussion to students’ lives, echoing a common sel notion that emotions should be related to personal experiences. this suggestion was rejected decisively by the more dominant team members. therefore, the question and the discussion it might have promoted were barely discussed during the team meeting. the prompt’s detractors embraced the ‘feel good’ imperative (smith, 2019), reasoning that the prompt would ‘take the discussion to this place of personal tragedies [disasters]’, and such a discussion would obscure an important lesson for the students: that crying can express a variety of feelings including ‘good’ feelings. eventually, most of the teachers, including osnat, used the magic wand question as their prompt. other teachers, including miriam, decided to use ‘when did you last cry?’ as their prompt for classroom discussion. the teachers respond univocally to the wand question. the facilitator opened the team meeting by presenting the question. this was followed by ten consecutive speaking turns in which six of the seven participants enthusiastically said it is very important to cry: ‘alas for those who do not cry’ ‘right, both of sadness and joy’; ‘crying is liberating’; ‘to take such a thing from a person is to punish him’ ‘right. because you also take the happy moments’; ‘can i get the opposite wand? is it possible to reverse it? do you have such a wand?’ note that their answers bridged hegemonic positivity and inclusiveness. they wanted to cry because crying is good. if emotional states that initially seem bad, such as crying, are ultimately deemed positive, we naturally need to accept and include them. the teachers’ answers reflect the white, middleclass emotional code hoffman (2009) identifies in sel programs. they evidently identify with this code or at least assume that it is valued by the design team members. they also likely learn from this meeting that this code should be promoted in their classrooms. the teachers surmise that children, boys, in particular, will respond differently. the facilitator explained the teachers’ univocal response, saying it is ‘because you are adults,’ thereby implying children’s reactions would be more diverse. this statement was affirmed by several participants. moreover, the teachers surmised that boys would reject crying. rachel thought boys would say ‘”no way,” to come out as—’ tami finished rachel’s sentence with ‘—men,’ thereby indicating agreement, and sara added ‘strong.’ their intuition is supported by the limited available data on crying in these age groups, which indicates that 3 the interactions examined in this research were conducted in hebrew. the data presented in the article have been translated into english. however, in the translation process, we made an effort to preserve the original forms and language choices as much as possible. for instance, unlike english, hebrew is a grammatically gendered language, so we have maintained the use of masculine forms in our english translation. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a23 girls report crying at rates 2 to 4 times higher than boys (madison et al., 2021). the teachers also expressed concern that this expected reaction could ‘halt the discussion.’ two genres of emotional dialogue we examined how two classroom discussions, prompted by the two different guiding questions, unfolded vis-à-vis teachers’ anticipations and sel goals, cultural assumptions, and contradictory imperatives. two types of discussion relevant to sel emerged in our analysis: (1) inclusive emotional dialogue, and (2) emotional inquiry. many sel scholars argue that participants in an sel discussion should ‘talk about how an sel theme relates to their own lives’ (jones et al., 2017, p. 19; see collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning, 2013; department for education and skills, 2005; jones et al., 2017; merrell & gueldner, 2010). in this view, all answers are accepted, and participants are encouraged to share their thoughts and feelings. following wilce and fenigsen (2016), we call this type of discussion ‘inclusive emotional dialogue.’ in the classroom, the teacher’s main role is to ensure the students are being heard and are respectful to others, and to approve students’ contributions by responding supportively and empathetically. we called the second type of discussion ‘emotional inquiry.’ the term ‘inquiry’ is drawn from walton’s (1998) classification and represents a type of dialogue in which ‘a group of people get together to collect and organize all the relevant evidence on some particular proposition, both for and against. then they assemble and organize this evidence … so that each conclusion can be definitely proved’ (walton, 1998, p. 69). this type of discussion is especially compatible with how scholars of dialogic pedagogy envisage classroom discussions (e.g., asterhan et al., 2020; reznitskaya & wilkinson, 2019). during inquiry, teachers are expected to use open-ended questions, afford opportunities for students to voice their ideas, probe students’ answers, and encourage them to draw connections between thoughts and ideas (asterhan et al., 2020; barak & lefstein, 2022). while emotional processes during dialogic pedagogy are increasingly attracting scholarly attention (e.g., asterhan, 2013; näykki et al., 2021), emotional learning through dialogue has rarely been investigated directly. the current study addresses this gap. each form of dialogue sheds light on different aspects of the challenges facing classroom discussion to promote sel. inclusive emotional dialogue is based on the imperatives to ‘accept all emotions’ and not to ‘bottle things up’. at the same time, however, this practice can challenge ‘hegemonic positivity’, the expectation that children should feel good in school and about school and express those positive feelings. emotional inquiry calls on students to theorize about crying. allowing children to theorize emotions through their own experiences and ideas entails the risk that their theories may conflict with the sel discursive imperatives of ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘hegemonic positivity’. both types of discussions ask students to share personal emotional stories or to theorize emotions and their expressions. therefore, their analysis may expose gaps between sel-preferred emotional codes and how students from diverse backgrounds experience, express, and understand their own and others’ emotions. furthermore, both discussion formats are driven by dialogic principles, which include creating opportunities for students to express their ideas, incorporating multiple perspectives and voices, encouraging critical thinking, and fostering a safe and supportive environment. however, as we demonstrate in the data analysis, the realization of each of these dialogic ideals varies between the two discussion formats, resulting in distinct pedagogical affordances and constraints. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a24 miriam’s case: inclusive emotional dialogue miriam conducted the classroom pre-reading discussion as an inclusive emotional dialogue. she opened the discussion by asking the class: ‘ok, is there someone who is willing to share when he cried last? and why?’ she thus opened a round-robin discussion in which students shared their personal experiences of crying in turn. each turn was followed either by clarification questions or empathetic approval. this discursive genre encouraged personal exposure, something less common in other group conversation genres. the ‘when did you last cry?’ question aroused the class. general excitement was expressed by indistinct chatter around the classroom. the first four students shared short anecdotes (customary among israeli pupils (netz & segal, 2021)), and miriam replied cheerfully, playfully bantering with them. she signaled to her students that their contributions were welcome. at this point, students were continuously involved in side discussions, whose topics related to but diverted from the main classroom discussion. for example, they enthusiastically shared stories of a time when they got hurt. letting go and being moved. yonatan, a fairly tough and popular boy, was the fifth to speak. ‘it’s a bit embarrassing’, he said. at the same time, a girl said, ‘boys cry because when they lose in something’. a boy commented, ‘i’ve never seen a boy cry’. yonatan told miriam that he cried on his birthday when he heard that his friend’s mother had a baby. the other students’ focus was elsewhere, however, as boys told stories about how they were hurt by being kicked or tackled. noa, the sixth student to take the floor, said she cried yesterday just to let things out. here, for the first time, miriam built on a student’s talk to express a general argument: you say that you had something, that was kept inside, very, very much, and you did not let it out. not by talking or by crying, and it just came out. because it was night. i can understand what she’s saying. at night, it’s quieter around us and we slowly, slowly gather into ourselves towards – towards the night and sleep and dreams, and then many thoughts well up within us. at this point, miriam went to yonatan: ‘wait a minute, i want to go back to what i heard yonatan say earlier. you [addressing the class] were at yonatan’s birthday party, right? and zohar was there, too, right? and then they told zohar his mother had given birth? so why did this make you cry?’ ‘it's moving,’ yonatan replied. in these two interventions, while abiding with the inclusive genre norms of sharing and approving, miriam accentuated ideas she wished to promote, that is, ideas that aligned with the emotional code she wanted the pupils to learn was desirable. the conversation with yonatan also demonstrated that while the conception that boys don’t cry was present in the discussion and was even being expressed directly, some boys, including tough and popular boys, talked about crying openly, even in the traditionally “feminine” context of a friend’s significant life event. this is an example of how a school environment, which is predominantly female, may at times promote looser gender role distinctions (keddie & mills, 2009). it also illustrates dialogic affordances as well as constraints. on the one hand, the classroom environment appears to be sufficiently safe and supportive, allowing students to express their voices and perspectives. on the other hand, the teacher tends to emphasize ideas that align with her own preconceived notions, which occasionally results in underdeveloped exploration of ideas that do not align with the teacher's perspectives. this pattern becomes even more pronounced in the subsequent interaction in miriam’s class. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a25 domestic violence and defensive teaching. liron continuously asked for the floor for seven minutes, starting as soon as miriam posed the ‘when did you last cry’ question. when miriam finally gave him the floor, the following exchange took place: excerpt 1 1 miriam yes, liron. 2 liron >i cried this morning.< 3 miriam why? 4 liron i get up in the morning, it’s my birthday and everything 5 miriam happy birthday, yes. 6 liron then, when i came out, my mother got upset with my brother because he kept asking her for money. 7 student exactly like me. 8 liron then my mother drove anxiously to work, and then i said to him ah (.) ‘dean why are you annoying her’, then h:::e grabbed me, and choked me ((rasoul: gasping loudly)) and told me, ‘you bug me again i’ll cut you with a knife.’ ((laughter, indistinct chatter)) and then he told me, and then i told him, ‘leave me alone already’ and (.) that's it. liron shared a story exposing violent familial relationships. perhaps this is what the design team teachers referred to when they feared students would share personal tragedies. as liron talked about the violence directed toward him, many of the students reacted, by talking to others around them but not to liron, the teacher, or the entire class. the content liron shared, in our eyes, was troubling. in class, rasoul was the only participant who explicitly signalled unease, gasping loudly to mark his bewilderment (in line 8, above, after liron said ‘choked me’). rasoul then looked around the classroom for clues on how to act. seeing no other student overtly express a similar reaction, he quickly went back to behaving ‘regularly’. at this point, miriam stepped in and, as if she were sel-trained, probed liron’s emotional state: excerpt 2 9 miriam so, was it out of anger or out of? … … … 12 miriam so basically 13 student i wouldn’t back down. ((a tune pupils sing to fuel disputes and fights)) 14 student out of anger. 15 miriam hush ((makes a silence gesture with her hand. the class keeps being noisy)). so basically, what we saw here, really, thank you very much for sharing, first of all, but what we saw here is actually that (1) crying can come from many reasons, it can be a matter of physical pain. 16 yali miriam, i cry every day. 17 miriam we got hit, it could be from excitement, enthusiasm, joy, frustration, nerves. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a26 18 yali from anxiety, out of anger. 19 miriam nerves, anger, there really are lots and lots, 20 lucy or you can cry with joy. 21 miriam wide range of emotions, a wide range of emotions following which we can, ah, a person can ah, come to cry. in our view, the most distinct aspect of miriam’s response was that she distanced the discussion from domestic violence, an obviously central element of liron’s story. she did this using two discursive moves. first, she focused on his abstract emotional state. this echoes one of the key principles of sel and emotional knowledge: focusing on naming emotions and reflecting on them. by so doing, miriam turned liron’s story into a story about his internal emotions as opposed to the external concrete events to which he was exposed. as smith (2019) argues, ‘the teachers end up addressing the students’ imagined, normative, and expected problems through discussions of abstract universals, not through the discourse of lived reality” (p. a133). this again shows how dialogue develops in relation to its immediate context and setting, i.e., school classroom, and also how actors hold differential power to shape dialogue and how it unfolds. miriam’s choice to divert the discussion away from violence was probably affected by the combination of violence being a complicated and threatening issue and her pastoral responsibilities toward the children in her care. this choice, in turn, shaped how the dialogue continued to unfold and the students’ understanding of what they should and should not discuss in class. when turning to his emotional state, miriam suggested liron was angry, and anger made him cry (line 9), not more passive emotional states, such as sadness, fear, anxiety, distress, or sorrow, which would reflect an innate helplessness. evans (2017) and wood and brownhill (2018) show how the construction of gender identities shapes sel implementation. miriam’s interpretation of liron’s emotional state as ‘anger’ might have been affected by a gender-based perception of emotions and their expression, which sees anger as an active masculine emotional response to getting hurt (although we cannot know whether miriam would have treated a female student differently). miriam built on her focus on liron’s emotional state to conclude the entire discussion by pointing to the range of emotions that may bring people to cry, one of the main goals the design team set for the preliminary discussion. turning a story about domestic violence into a discussion on the varied emotions that may evoke crying may be thought of as a form of defensive teaching (mcneil, 1982). in this case, it was not intended to create as little student resistance as possible (mcneil, 1982), but was aimed to defend the teacher, as well as the students, from public exposure of and discussion about students’ hardships. the defensive reshaping of liron’s story was also evident in how miriam thanked liron. other than liron, miriam explicitly thanked only the first speaker. to liron, she said, ‘really, thank you very much for sharing’ (line 15). we see this as a discursive substitute for addressing the content of liron’s story as if thanking him in this way counter-balanced the intensity of his words. an unintended consequence of this defensive move was that miriam either normalized liron’s story or signaled to her students that such stories do not belong in classroom discussions. the issue here is not miriam: she is a highly dedicated, experienced, and even brilliant teacher. similar dynamics have been identified in the sparse ethnographic literature on sel in other classroom discussions. coe and nastasi (2006) documented a similar interaction during a classroom discussion that was part of an sel intervention. in the discussion, a student told her classmates that her grandmother ‘sometimes used a stick or cable wire’ to beat her. the teacher replied by asking her if the situation was stressful and if she was upset. miriam was not trained for sel, but she used the same ‘name-yourdiscussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a27 emotional-state’ practice and by doing so, like the teachers documented by coe and nastasi, overlooked and perhaps even normalized a story about domestic violence (see also gillies, 2011; stearns, 2017). to understand why this happens, we need to examine the structural conditions of emotional classroom discussions; we return to this issue in the discussion. moreover, although miriam had not received specific training in sel, she was actively undergoing training to facilitate dialogic classroom discourse. the data gathered from miriam's class indicate that while her implementation of dialogic pedagogy successfully encouraged students to share personal life experiences netz & segal, 2021), the potential for these stories to evolve to include more productive dialogic elements was not fully realized. in conclusion, miriam facilitated inclusive emotional dialogue while enacting diverse teaching roles. she generalized and thematized some thoughts and ideas. she also used defensive teaching to avoid ideas and content she deemed problematic or irrelevant. between these two stances, there were more ‘neutral’ responses, such as supportively saying, ‘thank you’, or joking with the sharing students (e.g., by saying, ‘ouch’). these choices reflected and communicated to students a certain emotional code that miriam appreciated, taught, and encouraged: crying is a way to let things out (don’t bottle them up); crying expresses diverse emotional states, including good ones, such as enthusiasm and joy; boys cry, and it is good that they cry, but they usually cry because they have been hurt, physically or emotionally – it is an expression of anger rather than anxiety or fear. osnat’s case: emotional inquiry osnat prompted the preliminary classroom discussion using the question suggested in the design team meeting: ‘imagine that i have a magic wand and anyone i touch will never cry again. who wants me to touch him?’ students skillfully express the teacher’s emotional code. the question yielded eight responses, with students saying they did not want to stop crying. the students’ answers thus aligned with the design team teachers' answers when they enthusiastically said in the preliminary team meeting that they would never give up crying. as mentioned above, facing the design team’s consensus, the facilitator in the team meeting said, ‘it's because you are adults’, implying that children would respond differently. furthermore, the teachers assumed boys would deny that they ever cried because they would want to seem masculine, and this denial might hinder inquiry. osnat’s class showed that, at least in this case, the design team members’ expectations were erroneous. the students, including the boys, reacted in the same way as the adult teachers: they all said they would not want to give up crying. some students supported this position using the same logic employed by the teachers in the design team meeting. the first student who answered the question explained that we can cry because of joy or happiness. while she spoke, several students offered additional examples of positive experiences that generated crying. one said ‘laughter’, which the speaking student embraced and repeated, and at least two others said ‘emotions’. ‘crying out of emotions’ is vague and abstract. one possible interpretation for using such a formulation is that it enabled the students to avoid a more meaningful discussion, settling for something vague enough to meet the teacher's expectations. crying as a means of communication. students also offered original arguments that did not come up in the teachers' team meeting. they repeatedly addressed crying as a means of communication. the first speaker who promoted this line of thought said that if she did not cry, others would not understand how she felt. a boy who spoke after her said that when he cries, ‘everyone rushes to me and asks me what happened’, thus attributing a specific message to crying: it calls for and generates positive attention. this was supported discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a28 by other students. the next student (male) to speak said, ‘if someone does something to you then… crying says, like, leave me alone. i did not do anything to you, and… uff, crying saves us sometimes’. he emphasized a different message: crying is a socially legitimate way to stop a fight or a quarrel. once again, other students expressed support. although the students did not respond to one another directly, their answers built on each other’s content, thereby fulfilling the dialogic principle of cumulation (alexander, 2008; alexander, 2020). furthermore, they jointly portrayed possible communicative meanings crying may carry: it may generate caring attention, and it may signal to others that aggression has reached its limit and should be stopped. these answers indicate that children use crying in unique ways (junehui 2010). reflecting on students’ emotional tools is a central aspect of sel (collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning, 2013; jones et al., 2017), and the current case study suggests that emotional inquiry is an especially productive way to promote such reflection. a challenging line of thought. after eight turns of students indicating they would not want to stop crying, yotam, a student who often expressed provocative positions during classroom discussions, offered a heterodox response: excerpt 3 26 yotam i actually ((davka)) do want because 27 osnat to touch you? 28 yotam yes. because, 29 osnat okay, why? 30 yotam i am more sensitive. 31 osnat more what? 32 yotam sensitive. 33 student he is sensitive. 34 osnat you are sensiti:::ve. wait a minute, try, try explaining to me. 35 yotam like, when, when others insult me, i like, 36 student i have never seen you cry. 37 osnat wait a minute, but i cannot hear yotam. 38 yotam because let's say uh i'm just saying, let's say that when others insult me so hmmm (.) i kind of take it to heart, i think that maybe it is true. 39 osnat and then? 40 yotam and then i cry. 41 student oh::: 42 osnat okay (1) and you would not like to cry anymore? 43 student but if he won’t cry, 44 yotam let's say that discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a29 45 osnat wait a minute, wait a minute, one second, no, no, i cannot hear yotam. 46 yotam and let’s say, like hana and (.) ariel and may have said. i never, like, cried out of excitement or something like that like they have. 47 osnat oh so you don’t cry out of excitement or out of joy ((yotam shrugs his shoulders)), only out of pain ((yotam nods)) or insult ((nods again))? wow, that is really interesting what you say. yotam’s answer, as we understand it, touches on a fundamental question about the relationship between emotions and expression. yotam cries when two things happen: others insult him, and he takes it to heart and believes what they say about him to be true. although he mentioned crying after believing what others say about him to be true, his answer may suggest that for him, crying is a transformative act, part of an internalization process. this may entail that not crying indicates he did not internalize offending statements others directed at him, and he was able to defend himself. this echoes gillies' (2011) discussion on emotions vis-à-vis social class (discussed previously), and the need of some students from lower socioeconomic class backgrounds to suppress rather than express their emotions, as their structural position grants them limited power to affect their realities. gillies asserts that they use this ‘suppressive’ talk to defuse difficult feelings. yotam said his self-esteem was sometimes attacked when he was insulted, and the strategy he developed was trying not to cry. this was perhaps why one of the students indicated that he had never seen him cry (line 36). yotam first said he wanted osnat to touch him with her magic wand. but by using the word davka (line 26), he indicated that his choice contradicted something the atmosphere in the classroom or the generally expected answer (for an account of the ‘inherent counter-expectation’ nature of hebrew davka, see ariel & katriel, 1977). yotam also described himself as never crying ‘from excitement or anything like that,’ referring to what previous speakers had said and thus performing, for the second time, a rare act in classroom discussions, but one which aligns with dialogic principles: expressing a position which opposed a teacher-approved answer. osnat encouraged yotam’s voice, which differed from previous speakers’ voices and also from the dominant voices in the teachers’ meeting. this contributed to his emotional knowledge and to that of other students, as it brought to the discussion a different understanding of crying: crying is not positive and should, therefore, be avoided. it is plausible that osnat’s focus on dialogic pedagogy and her effort to promote its principles in classroom discussions contributed not only to yotam’s expression of a unique, heterodox understanding of crying but also to osnat's willingness to embrace unexpected responses that diverged from her own position. controversy over the social meaning of crying. iris, a student who tended to adopt yotam’s ideas and follow him when he spoke in class, particularly when he challenged osnat, raised her hand as yotam's turn ended. after getting the floor, she said: ‘i do want you (osnat) to touch me (.) because when you cry, i think it's not for good reasons, for example, for example, if you are shouted at, you cry, then it is something that also hurts you (.) and i do not want to be hurt.’ excerpt 4 59 osnat so, does this mean that if you would stop crying then you would not get hurt? 60 iris yes. 61 osnat you think it goes together. 62 iris yes, and i also discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a30 63 osnat so you are saying, iris is saying ‘osnat, i do want you to touch me because, usually, when i cry, it comes, usually, with things that are not always positive’. right? ok? and she thinks that if she would stop crying that the negative things would go away. 64 iris for example, you cry out of things, like, when people come and yell at you, or, and, and threaten you, so you are 65 osnat but we heard here something slightly different, that sometimes i cry also, that there are different types of crying. it is something we should think about. iris tried to follow yotam’s logic (64), but she left out the more complicated part of his argument, the focus on the internalization process. this resulted in what osnat might have heard as a logically inconsistent answer. perhaps this is why iris was the only student osnat did not respond to supportively: 13 out of 14 speakers, including yotam, received approving comments, and each short dialogue was closed by osnat saying ‘very interesting.’ osnat responded differently to iris. she transformed the generic second person singular ‘when you cry’ (line 58) into the first person singular ‘when i cry’ (line 63), thus denoting a personal feature. iris insisted on the generic form and meaning (line 64), describing harsh situations in which you cry. osnat explicitly opposed her, saying, ‘but we heard here something slightly different’ (line 65), thereby closing iris’s turn. anat, the fourteenth speaker, a student iris often mocked during classroom discussions, asked to respond to iris. this was the only instance when a student critically addressed a previous speaker during this classroom discussion: excerpt 5 80 anat can i address what iris said? 81 osnat yes. 82 anat so, she said that if she stopped crying, others would stop hurting her, but if she stopped crying, they would hurt her more because they would think she did not care. 83 rona most of the time it is the other way around. 84 anat she said 85 iris like, i will not get hurt. 86 anat in my opinion, if i stopped crying, people would hurt me and think that i do not care that they say things about me so they 87 osnat so with the help of crying what does she do? 88 anat she’s like, telling people ‘stop hurting 89 student like, she drags attention ((goreret tsumi)). 90 osnat attention maybe, maybe attention ((tsumat lev)), maybe this is how she manages to better express her emotions, in this way, with the help of crying. anat built on an understanding of crying that was already established in the discussion – a signal to others to stop hurting you – to refute iris’s argument. however, we want to focus on lines 83 and 89. rona turned to anat and said, ‘it is usually the other way around’ (line 83), meaning that usually if you cry when others hurt you, they do not leave you alone but bother you more. in a different classroom discussion in the same school year, rona told the class that in her past she was bullied and ostracized, and iris responded in a dismissive and disparaging manner. here, rona expressed a take on crying that was discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a31 possibly drawn from her experience of being bullied – if you cry, they harass you even more. this interpretation, like yotam’s, did not appear in the teachers' preliminary discussion, but it resonates with ethnographic data on students’ perceptions of and reactions to bullied students who cry (hakim, 2021; teräsahjo & salmivalli, 2003). anat continued her answer, treating crying as an action that signals to others to stop hurting you, but when osnat asked her, ‘so with the help of crying what does she do?’, one of the male students said, ‘she drags tsumi’ (line 89), a slang phrase that indicates something along the lines of pitifully asking for socially undeserved attention. although he did not address rona directly, his train of thought continued hers, thus establishing something similar to a counter script (gutierrez et al., 1995), as they together produced a coherent line of answers that were overlooked or even blocked by the teacher. osnat transformed tsumi, a derogatory phrase, into ‘asking for tsumat lev,’ a neutral phrase (sharing the same root) meaning ‘asking for attention.’ the case analysis shows how emotional inquiry produces authentic (schaffalitzky, 2022) valuable emotional knowledge. first, the students thought of crying as a means of communication, even a social request, but each student attributed a slightly different meaning to this request: making others react to how i feel, making everyone rush to me and ask me what happened, or signaling to others to leave me alone as ‘crying saves us sometimes.’ second, students highlighted the relationship between expressing emotions and feeling them when they said they preferred not to cry so as not to get hurt. third, the inquiry produced an opportunity to further discuss crying as communication while distinguishing legitimate and illegitimate social requests embedded in crying. these answers demonstrate that the students in osnat’s class see crying primarily as a means of interaction rather than as an expression of inner emotional states. as such, the children’s uses of crying differ from those of adults, who are expected not to cry in public arenas. furthermore, the case from osnat's class illustrates discourse that aligns more closely with dialogic principles. as demonstrated, the discussion format referred to as "emotional inquiry" fulfilled several dialogic principles (alexander, 2008), including ‘cumulation’ (teachers and students building upon their own and each other's ideas), ‘reciprocity’ (teachers and students actively listening, sharing ideas, and considering alternative viewpoints), and ‘support’ (students feeling comfortable to express their ideas without fear of being embarrassed by "wrong" answers). in addition, the discussion that ensued was arguably more ‘purposeful’ (i.e., leading to specific learning outcomes) than merely sharing anecdotes that engender very limited further reflection. discussion before discussing our findings, we remind readers that the teachers’ focus was on dialogue and literacy skills, and sel was not an explicit part of their agenda or their training. however, in both cases, students’ and teachers’ emotional knowledge was voiced and explored, and we identified opportunities, along with challenges, to contribute to students’ sel. in the subsequent discussion, we explore the varying degrees and manifestations of implementing dialogic principles and how they contribute to the facilitation of social and emotional learning. genres of classroom discussions about social and emotional issues within sel literature, discussion is seen as a favorable instructional method. however, we found the term ‘discussion’ to be somewhat ambiguous in the sel literature. in our data set, we identified two very different types of discussion, each with distinct goals, norms, affordances, constraints, and challenges. discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a32 in inclusive emotional dialogue, students were encouraged to narrate personal, sometimes difficult stories, thereby enabling students’ sharing of emotions as experienced in their everyday lives. the act of sharing personal experiences potentially aligns with principles of dialogic pedagogy, such as ‘reciprocity’ and ‘support’. however, as indicated by liron’s story of how his brother choked him on his birthday, this genre can put teachers and students in challenging positions. sharing personal stories entails exposing fears and hardships in the class plenum, an environment in which it is hard to ensure that students receive an appropriate response. yet if the teacher glosses over these issues, she implicitly conveys that it is either not important or not suitable for discussion, should be kept secret, are not the school’s business, and so on (dutro, 2008). moreover, since the objective of this genre is for each student to share their own experiences, without reference to other students’ experiences, the opportunities for fulfilling the dialogic principle of ‘cumulation,’ which involves actively engaging with and collectively constructing shared meanings, are relatively restricted. as such, this genre can expose participants to multiple voices and perspectives but is limited in its capacity to bring those voices into dialogue. emotional inquiry promoted the exploration of children’s understandings and expressions of emotions. it generated informative discussions about emotional states related to crying and its diverse social meanings and may thus be considered especially compatible not only with principles of dialogic pedagogy but also with sel goals. however, norms of hegemonic positivity can limit or silence the expression of emotions that deviate from official school expectations, thus sanitizing the discussion and distancing it from students’ lived experiences (smith, 2019). faced with these challenges, the teachers we observed reacted in various ways. one reaction was to casually acknowledge the content of students’ experiences by thanking them for sharing, indicating that what they shared was important, and modeling ‘appreciating others’ (morcom, 2015). in other instances, teachers playfully bantered with students, thereby suggesting that sharing was in and of itself the end goal of the discussion. however, when sharing does not lead to reflection, the dialogic potential is not realized and sel’s effectiveness is questionable (cameron, 2000; nils & rimé, 2012). a second reaction was to probe students’ responses, exploring together what made them cry or why they wished to continue or cease to cry. a third reaction was to emphasize, generalize or otherwise endorse certain answers. finally, in some cases, the teachers chose not to discuss sensitive issues such as domestic or school violence. to be clear: our analysis should not be taken as implying that emotional inquiry is the best practice for discussing emotions. rather, the findings show that diverse discussion approaches exist and that we can gain valuable insights by examining how different discussion formats influence how students and teachers engage in conversations about emotions. sel cultural assumptions reflected in the classroom discussions we found sel imperatives regarding emotions that some authors critically identify as a white, middle class cultural code, (hoffman, 2009), at times conflicted with students’ cultural codes. for example, the sel literature emphasizes inclusiveness (wilce & fenigsen, 2016). from this perspective, crying is encouraged. for yotam, however, crying entailed internalizing bad things others had said about him, which gave him a solid reason to refrain from crying (see also gillies’ [2011] discussion of anger). yotam was strong enough to insist on his perspective, and the classroom culture allowed him to take a critical stance on the teacher’s position. in other instances, students may learn that their emotional code is inadequate, even when it serves important functions in their lives. our findings also indicated that gender-based assumptions can interact with classroom emotional dialogues in multiple ways. in the design team meeting, the teachers argued that the boys would deny crying so as to appear manly. the conception that ‘boys don’t cry’ was present in the classroom discussions discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a33 and was even expressed directly. however, many boys actually reported having cried, and some even reported crying in stereotypically ‘feminine’ contexts, such as the birth of good friend’s baby brother. the findings thus demonstrate that while teachers may assume a stereotypical relationship between gender and students’ talk about their emotions, the dialogic sel discussions produce diverse manifestations of the relationship between gender, age, and the way emotions are expressed and discussed. since dialogue encourages students to voice their views it can helpfully expose gaps between teachers’ assumptions and students’ perspectives. we found the teachers were guided by hegemonic positivity (stearns, 2017; stearns, 2018), in that they avoided talk about negative experiences and emotions and attempted to (re)interpret these as positive or neutral events or feelings. this phenomenon was manifested in several ways. first, in the team meeting, the teachers unanimously agreed that they should refrain from discussing ‘personal tragedies’ in class. second, a teacher’s response to a student’s story about domestic violence, while aligned with the sel agenda of focusing on students’ emotional responses, did not touch on some disturbing aspects of his story his brother fighting with his mother over money and then choking the student for interfering. third, in an instance of teacher-pupil miscommunication (mcdermott & gospodinoff, 1979), a student’s description of crying as ‘asking for tsumi,’ a slang phrase that indicates pitifully asking for ‘socially undeserved attention,’ was reframed by the teacher as ‘asking for tsumat lev,’ a neutral phrase meaning ‘asking for attention.’ the contradiction between hegemonic positivity and inclusiveness was reconciled by the general insistence that crying is essentially good. teachers and students repeatedly addressed crying as desired using two main arguments: we also cry because of joy, and by crying, we ‘let things out.’ this may indicate a broader trend to affirm all emotions; if emotional states, which initially seem bad, are ultimately deemed positive, then, naturally, we need to accept and include them. when hegemonic positivity and inclusiveness were disregarded, the teacher took a negative position on a student’s stance (osnat and anat). this generated a classroom discussion in which students jointly inquired into the social meanings of crying. this finding suggests sel could benefit from taking into consideration the dialogic potential of encouraging conflicting voices when discussing emotions in the classroom (lefstein & snell, 2014; segal & lefstein, 2016). supporting teachers to discuss emotions miriam and osnat are both highly dedicated and experienced teachers who care deeply about their pupils. why didn’t miriam develop the discussion on liron’s story of domestic violence (much like the teachers documented by previous ethnographers, such as coe and nastasi, 2006; gillies, 2011; stearns 2017)? why did osnat miscommunicate with her students (mcdermott & gospodinoff, 1979) and transform tsumi into tsumat-lev? why didn’t miriam develop a cumulative discussion (alexander, 2020) about crying based on yali’s idea that he too cried out of anger (excerpt 2 lines 16, 18), perhaps referring to similar situations occurring in his house? dialogic classroom discourse, particularly discussions in which pupils express original and unexpected ideas, complicates the conventional teaching genre. dialogues increase uncertainty and reduce teachers’ control of discourse, as students’ thoughts and ideas are expressed in them, not just the teachers’ (cohen, 2011). in emotional dialogue, which aims to discuss students’ emotional codes, it is not only students’ thoughts and ideas but also the content itself that is determined by students. in these discussions, almost any topic can emerge. the study shows that emotional dialogue requires teachers to facilitate extremely challenging discussions while encouraging students to share, supporting them when they share difficult stories, and defending them from exposure to criticism, threats to their status, and other discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.558 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a34 social implications. to exploit the full potential of dialogic discussions, teachers also need to identify when students express emotional codes that differ from the teacher’s and to encourage these expressions. since each combination of teacher-class-story will likely yield different learning opportunities and unique challenges, supporting teachers to facilitate dialogic discussions requires that they develop their judgment by reflecting on their practice, their expectations, and their concerns. supporting teachers’ judgment involves discussion of teachers’ ideas and concerns – including ideas that, to colleagues and/or researchers, may seem like sub-optimal practice – in an open and non-judgmental discursive space. for example, in this study, some of the teachers in the design team had anticipated that students might share stories about personal tragedies. other members of the design team rejected such a discussion as irrelevant and unproductive. however, by rejecting these teachers’ ideas outright, the team missed out on the opportunity to consider and prepare for precisely the sort of challenging interactions that miriam eventually encountered. overall, the findings indicate that promoting sel through classroom discussions has many merits and may induce fascinating discussions to which students' knowledge and their everyday experiences are inherently relevant. however, the study also sheds light on some of the challenges and even risks of conducting whole classroom discussions on emotions and students’ emotional experiences while portraying a pathway to cope with these challenges. dialogic principles and social-emotional learning in the context of social and emotional learning, classroom discussions can take various forms. in the current study, we have identified two distinct formats for addressing emotions in classroom discourse: inclusive emotional dialogue and dialogic inquiry. at first glance, inclusive emotional dialogue may seem to offer significant potential for dialogue, particularly within the context of social-emotional learning, as it fosters the sharing of personal experiences—an aspect often lacking in classroom discussions. however, our study findings indicate that while inclusive emotional dialogue does promote sharing, it does not develop other crucial dialogic principles, such as 'cumulation' and 'purposefulness,' as teachers prioritize a 'feel good' imperative and avoid addressing challenging topics. conversely, dialogic inquiry, while not explicitly seeking to elicit personal experiences, frequently becomes intertwined with students' lived experiences. moreover, this form of discussion aligns more closely with dialogic principles such as ‘cumulation’ and ‘purposefulness,’ making it potentially more effective in promoting social and emotional learning within the classroom setting. appendix a: transcription conventions symbol meaning ! exclamatory intonation >increased< speech is delivered at a faster pace than surrounding talk (1) pause, timed (duration in seconds) (.) brief pause (less than 1 second) wor– truncated/cut-off word ((words)) analyst comment or hebrew transliteration in italics : elongated speech discussion formats for addressing emotions eran hakim, adam lefstein, hadar netz dialogic pedagogy: a journal for 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'absent fathers' and children's social and emotional learning: an exploration of the perceptions of 'positive male role models' in the primary school sector. gender and education, 30(2), 172-186. yoder, n. (2014). teaching the whole child instructional practices that support sel in three teacher evaluation frameworks. center on great teachers and leaders, american institutes for research. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals microsoft word matusov, the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue, 2023-01-06 [layout] nph.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e1 the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract many dialogue-oriented educationalists are attracted to the bakhtinian notion of dialogue. in this theoretical essay, i have abstracted five major features of the bakhtinian dialogue and considered what kind of educational regime emerges from these features. in conclusion, i problematize the notion of bakhtinian dialogue and its regime for education. the paper was presented and discussed at the 17th bakhtinian conference in saransk, russia, in 2021. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." acknowledgment i thank ana marjanovic-shane for discussing and editing a previous manuscript version. ïïò setting the problem my inquiry aims to figure out a regime of education that favors and facilitates the bakhtinian dialogue – a dialogue among characters in dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels, abstracted by philosopher bakhtin1. conversely, as bakhtin implicitly suggested in his choice of examples for his notion of excessive monologism, conventional foisted education suppresses dialogism: in essence [excessive monologism] knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical [exchange] (bakhtin, 1999, p. 81) 1 my position on the bakhtinian dialogue modeled primarily by the characters of the dostoevskian polyphonic novels is different from some other educationalists – namely timothy lensmire and kiyotaka miyazaki – who have defined the bakhtinian dialogue mainly as the relationship between writer dostoevsky and his characters in dostoevskian polyphonic novels (lensmire, 1997; matusov & miyazaki, 2014). issn: 2325-3290 (online) the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e2 although it is definitely true that the bakhtinian dialogue is possible under any oppressive condition (matusov, 2009), it might be helpful to search for its most, rather than its least, favorable conditions. from the very fact that plants are able to grow through cracks in the asphalt sometimes, it does not make sense to cover a garden floor with the plants’ seeds with asphalt and expect the garden plants to flourish. in contrast, it makes sense to search for types of soil that will be nutritious for the desired garden plants. similarly, i want to analyze the notion of the bakhtinian dialogue in bakhtin’s work, primarily his book on dostoevsky (bakhtin, 1999), to abstract its most important features in order to search for an educational regime that promotes such a dialogue. some innovative dialogic educationalists (see for some of them here: matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019) are highly attracted to the notion of bakhtinian dialogue. they have realized that for education to be meaningful for its participants, education must be dialogic and ontological. for education to be humanistic, it has to be based on dialogic relationships among the participants. for education to be deep, it must be unfinalizable and critical. these educationalists argue that genuine education must be voiceful, eventful, and full of heteroglossia, heterodiscoursia, pluralism, disagreements (including irreconcilable ones), “the final damned questions,” and polyphony. however, these dialogic pedagogy educationalists have also noticed that it is often difficult to practice bakhtinian dialogism in the context of conventional and even innovative foisted education (matusov, 2021a; matusov et al., 2019). a dialogic educator often has to smuggle the bakhtinian dialogue into their otherwise monologic institutional setting that forces the educator (and the students) to accept its monologism, smuggle dialogism into the underground, or be expelled from the monologic educational institution (or leave it “voluntary”). this observation begs for an inquiry of searching for the more, if not the most, favorable conditions for practicing bakhtinian dialogue in education. the title of my essay summarizing my inquiry, “the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue,” is full of apparent contradictions. to start with, the humanistic notion of “bakhtinian dialogue” resists the political notion of a “regime.” politics involves the imposition of actions, values, and views on people who disagree with them – the very act that arguably defines the bakhtinian monologism, not dialogism. further, as i argued elsewhere (matusov, 2007), it is not that clear that the notion of “education” is compatible at all with the notion of “bakhtinian dialogue.” as i said above, it was not by chance that bakhtin often used examples of education to illustrate his idea about excessive monologism (bakhtin, 1999). finally, some radical, innovative educationalists may oppose the idea of politics, intrinsically shaping education in any way (i think that dutch educators and founders of “sociocracy” and “dynamic governance” betty cadbury and kees boeke might be a good example of that, see shread & osόrio, 2018). instead, they might argue that genuine education must be based on bakhtin’s notion of “the internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1993) rather than on any “regime” imposing disagreeable actions and ideas on the participants of education. they might argue that education must be free of politics and its regimes – i.e., ways of organization of politics. yet, although i do not deny these contradictions, i view them as unavoidable and even fruitful (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015a). the bakhtinian dialogue for the purpose of my inquiry, i have abstracted the following five major features of the bakhtinian dialogue – or how i understand it (i.e., my authorial understanding of this concept). i am aware that it is legitimately possible to have other authorial understandings of the notion of bakhtinian dialogue different from mine, and also, it is possible to abstract more or different features of the bakhtinian dialogue within my authorial understanding of it. yet, these five features not only allow me to define the notion of bakhtinian dialogue but also help me think about the political conditions for promoting the bakhtinian dialogue. the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e3 a plurality of unmergeable consciousnesses with equal rights bakhtin started his book on dostoevsky where he was building his philosophy of dialogism grounded in his literary analysis of dostoevsky’s writings with the following note, a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of dostoevsky’s novels. what unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6; the italics original, the bold mine). i could not find bakhtin’s unpacking of what rights he was talking about with regard to consciousnesses, so i try to specify them here in how i understand them: 1. the right to be taken seriously by the other participants of the dialogue as a person on the whole and as the author of one’s own particular ideas expressed in the dialogue, however disagreeable or strange, ignorant or even absurd, these ideas might seem to the others. for the dialogue to be bakhtinian, the participants must be genuinely interested in both their interlocutors as unique people and as the authors of their particular ideas. this genuine interest, pregnant with a serious reply, constitutes “a community behind” for the interlocutor and, thus, contributes to the strength and the internal unity of one’s voice, taken seriously by relevant others (matusov, 2009). 2. the right to introduce one’s own ontological interests and concerns into the dialogue, and to change, interrupt, remain silent, drop a topic, or leave the dialogue temporarily or entirely at any time. in the extreme, the participants’ ontological interests constitute “the final damned questions” so central for many characters of dostoevsky’s novels. this right defines the ownership of the dialogue for its participants and promotes heterodiscoursia and heteroglossia in the dialogue. it also makes the above right to be taken seriously possible by focusing on what is interesting for each person in the dialogue. 3. the right to disagree and to remain in disagreement, or to be misunderstood, halfunderstood, misinterpreted, and/or to remain unknown. this right is based on the recognition of the unmerged and unmergeable voices and consciousnesses never fully transparent to each other (but never fully opaque, either). the genuine and sustained interest in each other in the bakhtinian dialogue cannot be possible when the consciousnesses are viewed as fully transparent (matusov, 2015). i think that this right is rooted in recognition of the plurality of unmerged consciousnesses mentioned by bakhtin. excessive monologism is the postulate of the possibility of fully transparent, finalized, and merged voices and consciousnesses. excessive monologism is an attempt to either merge the voices or to destroy unmergeable voices, “in the monologic world, tertium non datur: a thought is either affirmed or repudiated; otherwise it simply ceases to be a fully valid thought” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 80; the italics original). it may be interesting to consider other important rights constituting the bakhtinian dialogue that are not mentioned here. it is important to note that all these listed rights are not recognized in conventional and innovative foisted education based on kantian educational paternalism (kant, 1784; matusov, 2020a, 2020b, 2021a, 2021b, 2022b). the participants of the classroom discourse are often not only disinterested in each other as holistic persons and in each other’s contributions, but usually, they are also disinterested in what they the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e4 are saying themselves (sidorkin, 2002). the credential institution often imposes the school curriculum on the students while teaching this curriculum is usually imposed on the teachers. at the end of the successful instruction, the consciousnesses of the students and the teachers must merge and agree with the standardized tests’ correct answers for the students’ education and the teachers’ guidance to be institutionally credited. an author with the unique and unpredictable voice the bakhtinian dialogue is defined by authorial unique and unpredictable subjectivity of how a person authors the world and themselves in dialogue with themselves and others. it contrasts with objective universal or typified predictable subjectivity, existing independently of observers, that is often studied in social sciences and focused on by institutionalized foisted education. … the hero interests dostoevsky as a particular point of view on the world and on oneself, as the position enabling a person to interpret and evaluate his own self and his surrounding reality. what is important to dostoevsky is not how his hero appears in the world but first and foremost how the world appears to his hero, and how the hero appears to himself (bakhtin, 1999, p. 47; the italics original). the bakhtinian dialogue participants author their unique and unpredictable perceptions, tastes, judgments, ideas, and values about the world and themselves. their authorial subjectivities collide in the dialogue, which often produces critical examination and testing of their positions, ideas, and values. in foisted education, students are often viewed as objects of the teachers’ pedagogical and disciplinary actions aiming at the students to arrive at the curricular endpoints preset by the teachers, testing agencies, the credential institution, and/or the society (mediated by the state educational bureaucracies). in conventional foisted education, these pedagogical and disciplinary actions often involve the transmission of knowledge and a system of rewards and punishments. in innovative (progressive) foisted education, these pedagogical actions often involve hijacking students’ interests, manipulating the students’ consciousnesses, fascinating them with the interests chosen by the teacher, and so on (matusov, 2021a). the transcendence of the participants’ social roles, statuses, and identities in the problematic dialogue bakhtin contrasted social-psychological (and adventure) novels with dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels. bakhtin argued that in a social-psychological novel, relationships of family, of life-story and biography, of social status and social class are the stable alldetermining basis for all plot connections; contingency has no place here. the hero is assigned to a plot as someone fully embodied and strictly localized in life, as someone dressed in the concrete and impenetrable garb of his class or social station, his family position, his age, his life and biographical goals. his humanness is to such an extent made concrete and specific by his place in life that it is in itself denied any decisive influence on plot relationships. it can be revealed only within the strict framework of those relationships (bakhtin, 1999, p. 104; the italics original). i argue that both conventional and innovative (progressive) foisted education assign firm biographical, sociological, and institutional roles to the participants. students are of certain ages, grade levels, tracks, majors, socio-economic statuses, minority, disability, and immigration statuses, levels of academic performance (e.g., student-at-risk, a-student, failing student, honor student), popular or unpopular, the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e5 members of cliques, and so on. teachers are defined by their disciplines, experiences, backgrounds, competence, educational philosophies, certification, and so on. and, yes, students are always students, and teachers are always teachers. although the participants may transition from one role to another by changing a grade, growing up, changing their major, and so on, they remain defined by these firm peer, institutional, or societal roles. in contrast, in a dostoevskian polyphonic novel, in dostoevsky, the adventure plot is combined with the posing of profound and acute problems; and it is, in addition, placed wholly at the service of the idea. it places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea and the man of the idea, that is, for testing the “man in man2.”… a combination of adventurism (often of the boulevard-novel sort) with the idea, with the problematic dialogue,… is made meaningful and even surmounted in dostoevsky, through the consistent polyphonism of his work (bakhtin, 1999, p. 105; the italics original). thus, the bakhtinian dialogue requires the transcendence of and stripping from the participants’ social roles and identities to become naked and fluid in the here-and-now dialogue when their dear ideas and values and, thus, even their being itself – the established relationships with other people, who are relevant, important, and loved – is unrooted and tested. shatov comes to mind in dialogue with stavrogin in dostoevsky’s novel the possessed, “...we are two beings, and have come together in infinity. . . . for the last time in the world. drop your tone and speak like a human being! speak, if only, for once in your life, with the voice of a [unique person, unique human being]” (as cited in bakhtin, 1999, p. 177). bakhtin observed that this testing the person-in-person in a dramatic ontological dialogue where the participants’ deep personal truths (pravdas, in russian) collide is often facilitated by an encounter with strangers and a certain degree of alienation. this process often occurs at a marketplace (agora) where strangers meet in a public space for diverse reasons and diverse interests, where people are alienated from their communities, especially under the condition of capitalism. bakhtin called this process of stripping people of their finalized social roles, statuses, backgrounds, and identities as “carnivalization”: carnivalization is not an external and immobile schema which is imposed upon ready-made content; it is, rather, an extraordinarily flexible form of artistic visualization, a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things. by relativizing all that was externally stable, set and ready-made, carnivalization with its pathos of change and renewal permitted dostoevsky to penetrate into the deepest layers of man and human relationships. it proved remarkably productive as a means for capturing in art the developing relationships under capitalism, at a time when previous forms of life, moral principles and beliefs were being turned into “rotten cords” and the previously concealed, ambivalent, and unfinalized nature of man and human thought was being nakedly exposed. not only people and their actions but even ideas had broken out of their self-enclosed hierarchical nesting places and had begun to collide in the familiar contact of “absolute” (that is, completely unlimited) dialogue. capitalism3, similar to that “pander” socrates on the market square of athens [agora], brings together people and ideas (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 166-167; the italics original). 2 it sounds like bakhtin’s direct reference to martin buber (2002), if not a coincidence. 3 bakhtin also criticized capitalism for creating conditions of solitude, humiliation, objectification (“the materialization of man”, p. 298), and lack of recognition which often leads to excessive dialogism as another form of excessive monologism, capitalism created the conditions for a special type of inescapably solitary consciousness. dostoevsky exposes all the falsity of this consciousness, as it moves in its vicious circle. the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e6 the bakhtinian dialogue is not a dialogue of friends; it is not a kin dialogue, not a communal dialogue (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015b). rather, the bakhtinian dialogue is a dialogue of encountered strangers – alienated but not entrenched, stripped from their communal identities (matusov, 2022a). deconstructive critical dialogue of spoilsports bakhtin argued that, like in the genre of the menippean satire, in dostoevsky’s polyphonic dialogue, ‘‘truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable’’ (morson, 2004, p. 319) or in bakhtin’s own words, the most important characteristic of the menippea as a genre is the fact that its bold and unrestrained use of the fantastic and adventure is internally motivated, justified by and devoted to a purely ideational and philosophical end: the creation of extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea, a discourse, a truth, embodied in the image of a wise man, the seeker of this truth. we emphasize that the fantastic here serves not for the positive embodiment of truth, but as a mode for searching after truth, provoking it, and, most important, testing it (p.114). the testing of a wise man is a test of his philosophical position in the world, not a test of any other features of his character independent of that position. in this sense one can say that the content of the menippea is the adventures of an idea or a truth in the world: either on earth, in the nether regions, or on olympus. … the menippea is a genre of “ultimate questions.” in it, ultimate philosophical positions are put to the test. the menippea strives to provide, as it were, the ultimate and decisive words and acts of a person, each of which contains the whole man, the whole of his life in its entirety (bakhtin, 1999, p. 115). the bakhtinian dialogue is inherently deconstructive, positioning the participants of the dialogue as spoilsports – of each other’s dear and familiar truths, circulating ideological positions, persons’ uncritical beliefs, and desires often colonized by the existing culture. in contrast to many other practices, such as play, that require suspending one’s disbelief, the bakhtinian dialogue requires suspending one’s beliefs (marjanovic-shane, 2016). challenging beliefs and engaging in the deconstruction of accepted norms, rules, agreements, and beliefs are the commitments of spoilsports, but not trolls. a spoilsport is a dissident committing to a search for an alternative vision of goodness, truth, and beauty with other people. a troll commits to destroying the concepts of the person’s authorial voice, their sense of goodness, truth, and beauty as such, in order to gain power. in contrast to a spoilsport, a troll is not interested in testing truth, idea, and “the man in man” (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 31, 111): “the dialogic testing of the idea is simultaneously also the testing of the person who represents it” (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 111-112). a troll only camouflages to look like a spoilsport without committing to any idea and, thus, not committing to being tested themselves. thus, the cynicism of a troll is cowardly and manipulative. because of this deconstructive nature, the bakhtinian dialogue is also inherently educational when education is understood as socrates’ motto, “the unexamined life is not worth living” (plato & riddell, 1973). the moral-ontological nature of dialogue bakhtin argued that the nature of dialogue in dostoevsky’s works is not purely epistemological but rather moral and ontological, “dostoevsky neither knows, nor perceives, nor represents the ‘idea in itself’ in the platonic sense, nor ‘ideal existence’ as phenomenologists understand it. for dostoevsky there are no ideas, no thoughts, no positions which belong to no one, which exist ‘in themselves’” (bakhtin, 1999, p. hence the depiction of the sufferings, humiliations, and lack of recognition of man in class society. recognition has been taken away from him, his name has been taken away. he has been driven into forced solitude, which the unsubmissive strive to transform into proud solitude (to do without recognition, without others) (bakhtin, 1999, p. 288; the italics original). the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e7 31). rather, the characters of dostoevsky argue with each other through their pains, deeds, dreams, despairs, worldviews, actions, reputations, life experiences, and fates, some of which are articulated in words by the characters, but some remain raw, perceived by themselves and others. bakhtin argued that the person’s fate is part of their voice and, thus, the person participates in dialogue with their fate, “the definition of voice. this includes height, range, timbre, aesthetic category (lyric, dramatic, etc.). it also includes a person’s worldview and fate. a person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. he participates in it not only with his thoughts but with his fate and with his entire individuality” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 293). the bakhtinian dialogue occurs on the threshold, “in fact dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizableand unpredeterminableturning point for his soul” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 61). in this threshold of a final decision, in the personal crisis, the person’s ideas, values, dreams, and deeds – the personal truth (pravda), to which the person commits – are challenged and tested by alternative pravdas’ of others. the person’s commitment to seeking for and replying to challenges of their own pravda by themselves and others is the basis of the bakhtinian ethics as he articulated it in the notion of “responsibility” (bakhtin, 1993). thus dostoevsky portrayed not the life of an idea in an isolated consciousness, and not the interrelationship of ideas, but the interaction of consciousnesses in the sphere of ideas (but not of ideas only). and since a consciousness in dostoevsky’s world is presented not on the path of its own evolution and growth, that is, not historically, but rather alongside other consciousnesses, it cannot concentrate on itself and its own idea, on the immanent logical development of that idea; instead, it is pulled into interaction with other consciousnesses. in dostoevsky, consciousness never gravitates toward itself but is always found in intense relationship with another consciousness. every experience, every thought of a character is internally dialogic, adorned with polemic, filled with struggle, or is on the contrary open to inspiration from outside itself-but it is not in any case concentrated simply on its own object; it is accompanied by a continual sideways glance at another person (bakhtin, 1999, p. 32). the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue so, what can the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue look like? but what is an educational regime, and why may the bakhtinian dialogue be involved in it? in a political sense, a “regime” is a particular, relatively stable organization of politics. politics is an imposition of actions, values, and judgments on people who disagree with the imposed actions, values, and judgments but accept the imposition because they see the imposition as legitimate. for example, in foisted education, students may accept their classes’ curriculum imposed on them because they might believe the educational institutional authority knows better than them what they must study – in other words, the students might accept kantian educational paternalism. in contrast, in my democratically run classes, students vote on topics to study, and the minority accepts the topic imposed on them, voted by the majority. alternatively, when there is a draw, my students may choose to flip a coin, schedule the competing topics one after another, or ask me, their teacher, to choose the next topic. again, in each case, they see the imposition of a topic that they may not want to study or that was not their own choice as legitimate (a compromise). on the other hand, my students also have a choice to avoid politics by not coming to class meetings, focused on a topic that they do not like. instead, they can study a topic of their own interest alone on their own or with willing peers outside of our class meetings. in one of my classes, students split into two groups to study topics of their choice in the same classroom, calling on me to facilitate their studies or provide guidance on their demands (matusov, 2022a). assertion of freedom from imposition (i.e., granting rights) is a political act in itself because it imposes non-imposition on those who may otherwise want to the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e8 impose it. the establishment of legitimacy to stay away from politics – a legitimate imposition – is in itself a political act4. my students have the political right not to come to the class meetings – i, their teacher, cannot force them to come (i.e., so-called “free attendance”) (matusov, 2021c). as we can see from the above, the bakhtinian dialogue is based on certain rights of the consciousnesses. the right in itself is established by the organization of politics – a part of a political regime. by talking about “the consciousnesses with equal rights,” bakhtin used political language to define dialogue in his philosophy of dialogism. if the bakhtinian dialogue becomes the core of education, how its educational regime may look like? what are the political principles of the bakhtinian dialogue in education? self-education the first political principle of the bakhtinian dialogue in education is a student’s self-education. the student has a legitimate right to be the final authority to define their own education: whether to study or not to study, what to study (i.e., curriculum), how to study (i.e., instruction), with whom to study, when to study, where to study, why to study, and how to define education – its purpose and quality in the first place (matusov, 2021b, 2022b). this political principle of the right to self-education follows from the bakhtin’s defining his dialogue as “consciousnesses with equal rights.” modern education is predominantly foisted education (except for “democratic education,” which is based on self-directed learning). foisted education is justified by the kantian educational paternalism that denies the students’ political right to self-education. according to kant, ignorant and irrational people cannot make good decisions about their own fate – they need to be educated first, against their will if necessary, before their autonomy and dignity can be recognized by society (kant, 1784). paternalism, “interference with a person’s liberty for his own good” (dworkin, 1972, p. 67), is a form of monologism, and it contradicts the bakhtinian dialogue. this does not mean paternalism is always wrong because humans are not only authors of their perceptions, beliefs, values, ideas, and deeds but also physical, biological, psychological, and social objects. for example, my life was saved on several occasions by strangers who pulled me out of an upcoming car because i tried to cross a road by looking in the wrong direction in pretoria, the republic of south africa. at that moment, the last thing i needed was a bakhtinian dialogue. i appreciated the strangers’ paternalistic interference who forcibly (if not even violently) treated me as a physical object and not as a subject for dialogue to save my life. however, in education, especially in the bakhtinian dialogue education, the participants are arguably authorial subjects, not objects. that is why i have argued elsewhere that kantian educational paternalism is inherently anti-educational (matusov, 2020a, 2020b, 2021b, 2022b). although the political principle of a student’s right to self-education can be deduced from bakhtin’s definition of dialogue, the political principle of self-education is bigger than the bakhtinian dialogue. since the student has the right to define their own education, the student’s definition of education may not be based on the bakhtinian dialogue. instead, it may involve training – learning self-contained and decontextualized skills and bits of knowledge. or, it may involve the student’s uncritical but creative socialization in a student-desired practice (e.g., becoming a restaurant chef) and so on (matusov, 2020b). since the bakhtinian dialogue respects and legitimizes non-engagement in the dialogue as a participant’s right, the student’s choice not to define education as the bakhtinian dialogue is recognized in the bakhtinian dialogue education. the bakhtinian dialogue education is inherently pluralistic – it rejects the common tendency of demanding the monopoly on education in its own image (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). 4 for example, in some countries (e.g., brazil), people are punished for not participating in politics (e.g., elections). the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e9 symdidact recently, i have abstracted the following five forms of self-education (matusov, 2022b): autodidact (solo studying), symdidact (studying with peers), advisement (studying with the help of an advisor), odigόsdidact (studying with a teacher on the student’s approval), and autopaternalism (a student requiring a teacher to push the student to study). out of these five forms of self-education, only the symdidact – i.e., studying with more or less equal peers -fits the format of the bakhtin dialogue unequivocally, although not any symdidact may involve the bakhtinian dialogue. advisement, odigόsdidact, and autopaternalism involve stable roles of the participants and particular role orientations of being somebody who is not entirely the whole person (“the person-in-person5”) in the moment of the ongoing dialogue (cf., the discussion of "the teacher orientation" in matusov & brobst, 2013) – e.g., an advisor, a teacher, an enforcer of the student’s studies (on the student’s own demand), – which violates the principles of the bakhtinian dialogue listed above. the bakhtinian dialogue does not know special stable roles and their stable orientations. for example, let’s consider a case of the odigόsdidact form of self-education. in socrates’s dialogue with young meno, he came to socrates, his teacher, to ask to help him figure out the virtues’ origin: whether virtues can be taught or are inborn. this was a highly urgent political question in athens, where democracy was in a crisis at that time. namely, if the virtues could be taught, democracy was a good political regime. conversely, the aristocracy was a sounder political regime if the virtues were innate. however, socrates was interested in discussing the definition and nature of virtue. after a back-and-forward struggle, socrates recognized the priority of meno’s inquiry over his own: since it was meno who came to socrates with a question for help and not the other way around (plato & bluck, 1961, pp. 51-52, 85c-86e). thus, socrates realized that he had to have a teacher orientation, which he assumed (although not wholeheartedly, if not in an entirely cunning, manipulative way, see my analysis here: matusov, 2009; but this is another story). socrates, meno’s teacher/mentor, could not fully and legitimately be himself – i.e., to pursue his own deeply committed inquiries – in a dialogue with meno, his student/mentee. the teacher serves the student’s self-education rather than pursuing their own. beyond pedagogical orientation to self-education – how to teach the student better – the teacher’s own selfeducation is at best peripheral and accidental and at worst interfering with the student’s self-education. by definition, the teacher’s and the student’s consciousnesses do not have equal rights. teachers must sacrifice their interests and inquiries in the pedagogical fiduciary relationship (matusov, 2022b). the teacher commits to helping to develop the student’s unique voice and authorship stronger – this defines the teacher’s orientation. the student does not have a similar commitment to their teacher. the student does not have any orientation – they can be themselves in a dialogue with the teacher or peers. the teacher has to fulfill their pedagogical role of providing guidance. in self-education of the bakhtinian dialogue, a student is not a role but a particular form of the holistic being. the student attends to their own and other people’s perceptions, ideas, opinions, values, judgments, inquiries, puzzlements, etc., to make sense of them. in contrast, the teacher attends to the student’s blind spots and strengths – i.e., the pedagogical needs of the student. the teacher and the student are not equal-rights partners in a dialogue that violates the bakhtinian dialogue’s main principle insisting on the participating consciousnesses with equal rights. also, the bakhtinian dialogue does not know the special stable roles and stable orientations for its participants. as to an autodidact, who studies through dialogues with the self and with texts (and multimedia) and not with the alive people, in my view, socrates correctly challenged “dialogue with a text” as a genuine dialogue: 5 i tried to avoid the sexist translation in english as “man-in-man” (bakhtin, 1999). bakhtin’s russian wording is non-sexist (“человекв-человеке”), literally meaning "human-being-in-human-being.” the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e10 according to socrates (plato, 1952, pp. 156-162, 274b-277b), print literacy excludes readers from [the] production and negotiation of the text – the dialogue. the print text does not reply differently to the various audiences that engage with it. the print text cannot answer an audience’s questions, resulting in the audience considering the printed text to be incomprehensible or even fallacious. thus, [the] entire responsibility for an appropriate understanding of the print text lies with the reader. print literacy deforms speech into the dissemination of information from one to many. in contrast, in oral literacy (or more precisely, in dialogic practice) speaker and listener have very temporary and interchangeable roles and often are both symmetrically referred to as speakers in dialogue. in print literacy, the roles of the writer and reader are stable and asymmetrical. oral literacy involves embodied and situated production/consumption of the text, while in print literacy often production and consumption are disembodied and decontextualized from the immediate life flows of the participants – the printed text remains materially the same and does not respond to new arguments of the readers or new circumstances of the writer (the written text can “bite” the writer back when his or her life circumstances have changed) (matusov & st. julien, 2004, p. 203). except for the symdidact, all other forms of self-education distort and compromise the bakhtinian dialogue. moreover, it occurs even if the participants of such self-education may be attracted and deeply committed to the bakhtinian dialogue education. presencing self in dialogue in his doctoral dissertation, david sabey introduced the notion of “presencing self in dialogue,” meaning “becoming present to others as being addressable” (sabey, 2021, p. 75), as a way to address bakhtin’s demand for the ethico-ontological nature of dialogue. in his work with high school and college students, sabey noticed that his students (and, occasionally, he himself) were hiding behind typicality, decontextualization, universality, and abstraction (“theoriticisms” using bakhtin’s term, see bakhtin, 1993), even when they discussed topics which were controversial, ontological, and super important for themselves. sabey argues that the bakhtinian dialogue demands presencing self from its participants in the bakhtinian dialogue. the following prolonged excerpt and its analysis by david sabey illustrate both presencing and hiding selves in the dialogue: this excerpt comes from one of group 3’s discussions about toxic masculinity, after several students shared ideas and personal stories about how men and women are treated differently in certain situations. brandin talked about how his grandmother always asks him to take out the trash rather than his female relatives, aliyah talked about how her mother insists that her brothers carry heavy groceries in from the car, and carlos talked about how women sometimes got paid less than men for doing the same job. riffing on this theme, patience related the following story: transcript 7 patience yeah. my mom used to, well she still do make the boys, him [brandin] and my 1 brother cut the grass. [david6: mm-hmm.] and i used to like, go out there and 2 wanna help and stuff and she used to be like, nah, nah. and i’m just like, why 3 can’t i help like [david: mm] just ’cause i’m a girl, don’t mean nothing. i’m a 4 girl and i do a lot of stuff. [david: mm-hmm.] like i’m a girl and i lift a lot of 5 stuff and it just kinda irritating sometimes ’cause it’s like, you don’t see the 6 6 david sabey, the teacher. the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e11 value in what girls have. you just see that [david: right] men are supposed to 7 be like [david: hm.] more like aggressive or stronger, when that’s not the case. 8 [david: yeah.] i mean this is not a bad thing but like, i wish they would, they 9 would see that in women too. 10 david yeah. yeah so what i hear you saying this, like, i said, you know, it could be a 11 good thing to say men are brave and strong or whatever, but you bring up that, 12 the danger in that is, if by saying that, you imply that women are not that, 13 right? like if men are brave and strong, what does that mean about women? 14 and one thing that people could say is like, that means women are not so much 15 those things. right? 16 patience mm-hmm (affirmative). 17 david yeah. so, i’ve, i think that’s a, good point. 18 in her first turn at talk, patience begins by telling a story about how she, as a girl, was discouraged from mowing the lawn (lines 1-3). this portion is spoken in the habitual past (“used to”). although it is not entirely clear where the story stops, and if a younger patience ever explicitly resisted her mother’s gendered division of household labor, the verb tense shifts at the end of line 3 to the present tense. whether or not her self-quotation (starting with “i’m just like” on lines 3-4) is meant to be part of the story or to reflect her current thinking, it represents a response to her mother. note how the story makes patience’s mother addressable and how patience addresses her directly, using the second person (lines 6-9) to articulate her frustration and assert herself as a capable woman. as she concludes her comment (lines 9-10), patience broadens her response to a generic “they,” suggesting that the issues she encountered with her mother are prevalent beyond her household—that her mother is part of a vague collective that tends to see certain characteristics in men and not in women. following both patience’s lead and my own schooled inclinations toward the abstract, my response addresses this final comment and fails to address anything other than the supposed message of patience’s story. this comment takes what “i hear [patience] saying” (line 11) and translates it into a generalizable principle—that the danger of having a normative vision of masculinity is that it implies that women do not/should not have the characteristics ascribed to men. although i believe there is value in this kind of reflective listening, in this case, it cost the presence of patience’s mother. after patience confirms that this was what she was saying, i characterize the idea as a “good point” (line 18). indeed, it seems that her story became, in my mind, merely a vehicle for a message, and that, in the end, the message was all i heard her saying. consequently, i do not address patience as anything other than someone with a point to make in the discussion, as the owner of a certain idea, nor does it occur to me to address her mother. in this episode, [i] seem to fail to fully address two interlocutors who became newly addressable: patience and her mother. patience’s mother was, of course, not physically present, and was represented secondhand, but she is still a person with a particular point of view who could be presenced and rendered addressable in a variety of ways to the group. to be clear, i am not suggesting that we necessarily have the same ethical obligations to narrativized individuals as to those with whom we are physically present, but i think we do have some obligations and can mutually benefit from seeking to be in dialogue to the extent possible. in this example, by ventriloquating and addressing her mother, patience was able to articulate some of her own thoughts and feelings, but her final comment closes off her mother’s addressability, suggesting that her story is an example of a broader trend and, relatedly, that her mother need not be addressed as a unique individual—at least, not by anyone else in the group. perhaps this abstractive closure functions to protect her mother, or perhaps it is simply due to some schoolish sense that a comment should do more than tell stories—that it should have some generalizable message. whatever the reason, neither patience nor other members of the group address her mother further. and patience herself is addressed simply as someone with a “good point” (line 18), not as a young the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e12 woman who has felt that her gender excludes her from certain activities and makes other people, including her mother, view her as less capable than she considers herself to be. rather than dealing with any of the emotional or relational complexities of her story, the conversation proceeds based solely on an abstraction. this seems largely due to my response, which treats her story as a vehicle for her final comment, translating it entirely into an abstract plane. this episode reveals a pattern … namely, a tendency to translate stories into abstractions and to relate to each other as bearers of ideas, and not as embodied, thinking-feeling, storied selves. patience’s abstraction of her mother seems to manifest an emerging form of this pattern, while my response and the following examples show it in its maturity (sabey, 2021, pp. 101-104). agora the classical athenian agora, located in the olive gardens at the foot of the acropolis, was the center of the public life of the athenian polis. first of all, it was a marketplace where locals and strangers brought their merchandise for sale. it was also the judicial place. male athenians came to check if they were chosen to serve on a jury for some trial cases in the peristyle court. it was the political place of the polis for political assemblies to discuss public issues, hear arguments, and make decisions. it was a place of worship with several temples. it was the place to ostracize your fellow citizens by dropping a tag with the name of an offender in a special jar. it was the place of public gossiping and public festivity. and, yes, it was a place to eavesdrop, listen to, address, and discuss interesting political and philosophical issues with wise men of the day. this was the place where people came to hear socrates, his disciples, sophists, and other philosophers and go away from him as they wished. it was the place for serendipity: come for a buy, stay to listen to socrates7. agora was a place for encounters and mixing unmixable. it was a place for an encounter with strangers, kins, neighbors, and friends. it was a place for preplanned activities and serendipity, a place for on-task monologues and heterodiscoursia, and a place for poiesis and praxis. agora was the place for the sublime and mundane. agora was the place for work, duty, and leisure. it was a place that had a strict regimen and a frivolous, non-binding participation, eavesdropping, and observation. it was a place of nature and artifacts. it was a place of mixing the public design and the private intent, regulation and improvisation, strict ritual, and unbridled festivity. agora was ruled by apollo, the god of the sun, rational thinking and order, appealing to logic, prudence, and purity. and also, agora was ruled by dionysus, the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, appealing to emotions and instincts8. that is why athenian agora is the perfect metaphor for a place where the bakhtinian dialogue may occur at ease (bakhtin, 1999). i wonder what other aspects of the educational regime should be abstracted from the bakhtinian dialogue. conclusion my analysis of the bakhtinian dialogue and its educational regime raises at least two profound questions. first, do bakhtinian dialogic educators really want to fully commit to the bakhtinian dialogue with its focus on a plurality of unmergeable consciousnesses with equal rights; testing not only people’s ideas but people of ideas themselves; stripping people of their stable roles, identities, and orientations; focusing on ontologically charged, “final damned” questions; positioning participants of dialogue as strangers; and viewing education as essentially deconstructive? should this commitment by its participants (students, 7 to visualize the classical agora in athens, visit: https://youtu.be/uasvhbfyrgi. also, roman forum was another marketplace similar to the classical agora. 8 cf., alexander sidorkin’s “three-drink theory” of educational dialogue (sidorkin, 1999). the educational regime of the bakhtinian dialogue eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.561 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) e13 teachers) be partial and conditional? if the latter, why and what conditions? what should other types of dialogue and non-dialogue be included in addition to or instead of the bakhtinian dialogue, and why? second, do bakhtinian dialogic educators really want to commit to the educational regime emerging from the bakhtinian dialogue based on the principle of self-education (rather than on kantian educational paternalism), on symdidact (rather than on pedagogy), on presencing (rather than on hiding behind typicality and abstraction), and on agora (rather than on course and classroom)? will this commitment make educators (teachers, advisors) obsolete by transforming them into students? if not, should the educators’ commitment to the bakhtinian dialogue educational regime be partial and conditional? if the latter, why and what conditions? what other types of educational regimes should be included in addition to the bakhtinian dialogue educational regime and why? these questions are important because, as i showed, the bakhtinian dialogue is pregnant with relational, philosophical, and genre pluralisms. in addition, people’s self-determination in dialogue and in education demands the acknowledgment that participants in dialogue and in education should have the legitimate right to define and redefine dialogue, their own (self-)education, and their educational regime. references bakhtin, m. m. 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(2002). learning relations: impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. new york: p. lang. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word moate, vass, exploring dialogical spaces of discovery, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a39 exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate university of jyväskylä, finland eva vass western sydney university, australia abstract this paper revisits two teacher-education contexts which we independently researched. both contexts invested in teacher-professional transformation, presenting unique puzzles in our respective data analyses. bringing together bakhtinian dialogic theory and natural inclusionality (rayner, 2017), we return to these puzzles in a reflective dialogue. the paper unpacks two emergent themes. the first theme details our sense-making of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow as part of professional development, and the second theme captures our deliberations about the energy-filled spaces of the in-between that form part of teacher development in our contexts. the paper discusses key insights about the nature of teacher-professional transformation and opportunities for mutual enrichment: insights that would not be available to us in our independent analyses. given the non-conclusive nature of bakhtinian dialogue, we offer no closure and avoid definitive conclusions that enforce or imply the assimilation and homogeneity of perspectives. instead, we bring a polyphony of voices – our philosophies, contexts, professional orientations, and empirical puzzles – into a receptive-responsive relationship. we believe that the emerging dialogic problematisation has significant implications for teacher development as well as for ongoing theorisations of education. it responds to the pressing need to rethink the crucial relationship between educational theory and practice.1 keywords: dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow, interanimation, natural inclusionality, teacher education josephine moate is an international teacher educator and educational researcher based in the department of teacher education at the university of jyväskylä, finland. josephine's research interests include pre and in-service teacher development, the role of language and culture in education, as well as the philosophical values that underpin the practice, theorization, and research of education. eva vass is a lecturer in pedagogy and learning design with expertise in observational research and classroom ethnography. dr. vass’s earlier research includes studies on children’s collaborative creativity through analysing classroom talk, and her recent work addresses an embodied aesthetics of the mind with research engaging with the experience-centred music pedagogy of klara kokas, how imagination and creative insight emerge from active listening and movement improvisations, and alan rayner’s natural inclusional approach. ïïò 1please note that, due to the dialogic nature of the content, the distinction between first and second author is arbitrary, and does not capture our mutual engagement in its development. issn: 2325-3290 (online) exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a40 1. introduction as the council of the european union (2014) acknowledge, ‘in a fast-changing world, the role of teachers — and the expectations placed upon them are evolving too, as they face the challenges of new skills requirements, rapid technological developments and increasing social and cultural diversity, and the need to cater for more individualised teaching and special learning needs.’ this policy statement, however, does little to convey the grievances of teachers compromised by performative measures (ball, 2003), the tension between the rigidity of institutional structures and creative, improvisational pedagogies (sawyer, 2019), the lack of foresight imposed by current policies and practices (biesta, 2019) or the profoundly dialogic space of teacher development as an environment full of competing voices, visions and experiences (moate et al., 2015). there is a pressing need to rethink the profound relationship between educational theory and practice and review our conceptualisations of education as well as ways of acting within education (biesta, 2019). educational theorisations need to address how philosophically grounded values transform into and through practice. this involves the empowerment of teachers to be the catalysts of educational change from within their local contexts (sawyer, 2019) and bring pedagogic expertise back to the centre. our theoretical orientation to teacher education is based on the notions of mutually receptiveresponsive dialogue and mutual inclusionality. these notions highlight the give-and-take of self-other relationships and recognise you as part of me and i as part of you without assuming that we are the same. this theoretical starting point contrasts with contemporary, efficiency-driven, stratifying approaches and offers a new framing to teacher development as well as refining current understandings of dialogicality. current reappraisals of educational theory demonstrate that a reconsideration of dialogic principles for education provides an important corollary to the dialectic tendencies of vygotskian thought (e.g., wegerif, 2008; matusov, 2011; white, 2014). a topical issue is whether such dialogic practices should remain essentially instrumental – transforming learning through academically productive dialogue with anticipated aims and outcomes, or whether an ontological dialogic pedagogy is preferable where all educational aims, processes, and outcomes emerge from the collective dialogue, unconstrained by the teacher or the curriculum (segal & lefstein, 2016; matusov & wegerif, 2014). while instrumental dialogue within teacher education largely predefines what kind of teachers are desirable, ontological dialogue allows participants a level of open-endedness which can be deeply transformative. this paper builds on this problematisation and focuses on higher education (he) contexts as potential platforms for dialogic transformation generated contingently as participants responsively invest in the development of each other (van manen, 2016). our paper brings together studies from two distinct contexts which resonate in their overarching concern to invest in teacher-professional transformation (see moate et al., 2019 and vass, 2019 for details). in this article, we share the puzzles that initiated our collaboration and our professional dialogue concerning opportunities for transformative knowledge-building in our respective research contexts. the puzzles that brought us together include the seemingly premature dialectic closure in josephine’s dataset and the intensity of dialogic encounters in eva’s context.2 in our initial discussions, these puzzles could be more aptly described as troubles, sore points that called for further attention (sullivan, 2012). as we shared our troubles and different theoretical starting points, our individual troubles began to transform into researchable problems or shared puzzles that could be explored and better comprehended (shulman & elstein, 1975). figure 1 maps the timeline and key pieces of our puzzle from our first meeting in 2016. josephine was in the audience during eva’s conference presentation, in which eva showed videos of the participants’ 2 whilst deeply transformative, the carnivalesque nature of these encounters pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable within this educational setting, contrasting the personally transformative with the institutional expectations. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a41 embodied responses to music. eva shared the dilemma of trying to find a suitable theoretical lens to go beyond language as the sociocultural tool for sense-making, as illustrated in the observed musical encounters. josephine was working with bakhtin, seeking a better understanding of dialogism as a moral philosophy that, although often associated with language and discourse, is rooted in an embodied, architectonic self (emerson, 1995). in our initial conversations, we seemed to share a frustration with existing theorisations and a thirst to go deeper. the ‘sore points’ in our individual datasets provided us with concrete starting points to enter a shared dialogue. from our interest in embodiment, we began to question what it meant to be a community, to mutually enrich, but not be the same (e.g., bakhtin, 1986, p.7). as international researchers based on different continents, much of a dialogue sporadically continued via email. annual conferences gave new impetus as we submitted co-authored papers that required us to explicate our ideas, share our sources, return to our respective datasets and receive feedback from educational researchers. over the years, we have shared the responsibility for moving forward with our dialogic exploration, leading and encouraging one another in turn, co-authoring this study across a significant amount of space and time. figure 1: the timeline and key pieces of our shared puzzles our shared exploration of these puzzles enabled us to go beyond individual meaning-making to approach teacher professional transformation as a receptive-responsive dialogue and an opportunity for mutual enrichment. we hope that sharing the insights from our exploration helps pave the way towards the change we seek in teacher education and teacher professional development. we offer no closure and avoid definitive conclusions that enforce or imply the assimilation and homogeneity of perspectives. instead, we bring a polyphony of voices – our philosophies, research contexts, professional orientations, and empirical puzzles – into a receptive-responsive relationship. the paper represents a momentary ‘narrative knot’ in exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a42 our dialogic encounters3, with themes and voices ‘crossing paths to follow in the future’ (holdus, 2019, p. 244). we begin by outlining the dialogue between our philosophical orientations. 2 the dialogue of philosophical orientations through cycles of exchanges, we gradually brought dialogic theory (e.g., bakhtin, 1986, 1993) and natural inclusionality (rayner, 2017) together as our philosophical framing. although from different disciplinary fields, these philosophical approaches resonate in their commitment to the being and becoming of life (human, cultural, natural) as essentially co-creative and interanimated (white, 2014). the following section outlines the key points of resonance, leading us towards a philosophical reframing of dialogic education. 2.1 philosophical reframing dialogic encounters challenge participants to reorient to the ‘space of the in-between’ (buber, 1956). dialogic pedagogies build on the knowledge and experience of the ‘other’ and promote a collective, but not assimilative, journey towards complexity. wegerif’s (2013) discussion of the phenomenological roots of dialogism emphasizes that no real dialogue or learning is possible without a shared space of mutual resonance. however, we need to develop a more nuanced understanding of how this dialogic space opens and expands to avoid over-shadowing materiality and embodied dialogue or reducing dialogue to talk as a tool for developing expertise (white, 2014; vass et al., 2014). for bakhtin, the fundamental self-other relationship is based on a rich conceptualisation of dialogue (brandist et al., 2017) that, in addition to language, includes materiality (bakhtin, 1990), embodiment (bakhtin, 1984a) and temporality (bakhtin, 1986). bakhtin’s later manuscripts orient towards unpacking the role and nature of discourse, nevertheless continuing with, and enriching more embodied and experiential notions of dialogism (holquist, 1990; white, 2014). inspiration for bakhtin’s dialogic theorisations came from art, literature, and the natural sciences (bakhtin, 1981; holquist, 1983). we suggest that natural inclusionality (ni), rayner’s (2017) contemporary philosophical and methodological approach to the study of nature, can similarly inspire dialogic theorisations. natural inclusionality is based on the understanding of natural inclusion – the natural attunement between self and habitat – as a fundamental evolutionary process. whilst the binary logic of objectivistic science perceives the natural world as a world of definitive, static boundaries, ni proposes natural continuity instead. this continuity can be illustrated by redefining a tree as a ‘solar powered fountain’ with water drawn into and bursting from it through its natural relational habitat (rayner, 2011). ni perceives receptive-responsive relationships as the source of continuity between distinct entities, not (dis)connections between discrete or separate bodies. thus, boundaries do not isolate one from another but afford mutual inclusivity. simply put, we are not all the same, but we include each one in the other. ni works with this mutual inclusivity and receptive-responsive relationship to reframe evolution as the sustainability of the fitting in a ‘natural neighbourhood’ (rayner, 2011). this explanation is remarkably similar to the dialogic perspective in which binary oppositions of, for example, inside-outside are recognised as simultaneous, inclusive also/and relationships (bakhtin, 1993; holquist, 1990). from a dialogic perspective, boundaries are understood as places of encounter, not separation (e.g., bakhtin, 1981; emerson, 1996). what these two philosophical orientations (dialogicality & ni) share is, therefore, the understanding of these fluid boundaries as a source of mutual enrichment. yet, 3 the bakhtinian chronotope can be conceived as a narrative ‘knot’ or ‘spatiotemporal matrix’ for the situatedness of human action; making visible that which is often assumed or taken-for-granted and better understanding the formative potential of a historical moment. this ‘formally constitutive category’ or ‘form-shaping ideology’ suggests any change that takes place occurs within an already ongoing relationship. it draws on past experiences, voices, and authorities to anticipate appropriate action and development, whilst continually sensing, surmising, and responding to the immediate environment. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a43 ni goes beyond dialogic conceptualisations to boundaries as continuities between distinct bodies. the unpacking of the inside-outside relationships and the more nuanced explorations of the space in between have become central to our discussion and guided the structuring of this paper. 2.2 from intersubjectivity to interanimation research in artistic-improvisative contexts is rich in explorations of co-creativity, working with concepts such as empathetic attunement (seddon, 2004), collective entrainment (clayton, 2007) or group flow (sawyer, 2007). jazz musicians, for instance, model this buberian depiction of the space of the inbetween as they tune into one another and achieve a level of interactional synchrony that has a distinct form and yet remains unpredictable, even ambiguous (sawyer, 2005). this kind of profound responsivity involves constant listening and monitoring in anticipation of the slightest change that requires a different kind of answer (holquist, 1983). the emergent co-creativity is more than the mainstream instrumentalist take on the vygotskian notion of intersubjectivity. emergent co-creativity is better described as a form of interanimation, the sharing of breath, as something new with no finalizable outcome is created through this process (white, 2014). this is closer to the bakhtinian notion of polyphonic discourse (1981), ‘always containing both the old and the new and being forever in motion due to the strengthening or fading of forces…’ (holdus, 2019, p. 249)4. within this process, the other is of profound importance, for it is through the presence of others that a dialogical opening unfolds (bakhtin, 1986; 1990). dialogic openness, however, does not entail absolute submission or assimilation (bakhtin, 1981; 1986; emerson, 1996). instead, it signifies a collective journey towards complexity, whereby the dialogic space of knowing constitutes a burgeoning web of connectivity and potential (segal & lefstein, 2016; matusov & wegerif, 2014). the inherent dynamism of ni concretises these dialogic ideals as natural phenomena central to ecological sustainability. this can be observed in the receptive-responsive essence of the natural world that underpins healthy relationships within thriving communities (rayner & järvilehto, 2008). 2.3 dialectic closure or dialogic expansion this theoretical reframing can help us better understand the negative effect of authoritative pedagogical approaches which insist on the wholesale acceptance of a given way of thinking. it also urges us to challenge the narrow understandings of dialogicality as the means to unify and homogenise participants’ thinking, aligning it with, for instance, curricular objectives or expectations or opening up to the carnivalesque of ethical relativism (emerson, 1995). these narrow understandings short-cut the expansive process of mutual enrichment and prompt the premature closure of the dialogue: the undue finalising (or death) of the other (bakhtin, 1990). instead, bakhtin’s phenomenological approach sees the mind in perpetual, receptive-responsive dialogue with its particular physical, social or cultural environment (brandist et al. 2017). encounters with alterity, with a polyphony of voices coming together, involve creative struggle as new ideas and potential understandings are formed. the polyphony of voices avoids an artificial separation between truth as lived experience and truth as theorisation (bakhtin, 1993). this philosophical problematisation highlights the tension between dialectic closure and dialogic expansion. as josephine’s research data provoked us to consider, we must attend to the dialogic-dialecticdialogic flow to allow the expansive, mutually receptive-responsive relationships to unfold. this flow grants us moments of resolve, yet also anticipates the infinite, perpetual expansion of understanding (see figure 2) without a predetermined point of ultimate closure. dialectic resolve that fails to provoke further dialogue 4 in musical terminology, polyphonic musical texture combines more than one independent melody. harmonies emerge as a consequence, and not as the driving principle for the composition (vass, 2019). exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a44 and manifests in uniformity that ascribes little value to alternative perspectives will ultimately undermine this enriching and, in biological terms, life-giving, perpetual process. figure 2: the vortex of dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow (drawing by roy reynolds, used with permission) in our shared reflections on our respective research contexts, this tension between the perceived pedagogical need for a dialectic resolve and the ultimate pedagogical goal to maintain the dialogic expansion recurred regularly, to finally become a central theme in this paper. the unique, distinct experiences in our respective research contexts prompted us to jointly explore further. in our conversations around our data, we gravitated towards the following guiding questions: • how does the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow form part of professional development? • what kind of energy-filled spaces of the in-between are part of teacher development? as noted, these concerns are not purely philosophically driven. they have emerged from our professional dialogue about our key findings and puzzles in our research localities, which, in turn, we are using as platforms for the current dialogic explorations. we address the above questions through data from the two contexts before turning to the future vistas of the theory and practice of teacher education. 3. two teacher education contexts 3.1 context 1 – an international, intensive programme (ip) on cultural diversity this context is an erasmus+ 10-day intensive programme (ip) for pre-service teachers annually run for 3 years. the ip aimed to provide participants with opportunities to develop intercultural understanding and broader pedagogical repertoires in response to the increasing cultural diversity of european education. each ip involved 32 students from eight european universities with 1-2 accompanying staff members. the students included early childhood educators, primary school teachers, subject and language teachers, as well as drama and free-time educators. the ip included interdisciplinary lecturebased sessions, readings, and arts-based pedagogies to create spaces for intuitive and creative responses, as well as critical and intellectual thinking (e.g., holtham & owens, 2011) to explore notions of insideness and outsideness. in addition to studying together, the students stayed together in a hostel. the data include self-selected extracts from reflective sketchbooks (completed during the ip), video recordings of small-group presentations at the conclusion of the ip and written assignments submitted following the ip. the three subsets of data document participants’ reflections on the ip across time. the subsequent studies have primarily used a dialogical approach to qualitative analysis (sullivan, 2012) to explore the reflective sketchbooks as a place for reflection on and creative responsiveness to their ip exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a45 experience (moate et al. 2019), and study students' emergent pedagogical thinking as presented by small groups (moate, 2018) and in individual written assignments (moate, 2023). the findings highlight how students develop an understanding of notions of insideness and outsideness through embodied, material, social and intellectual experiences and resources. moreover, the multimodal dataset provides insights into participants’ experience, understanding and pedagogical development. 3.2 context 2 music teacher education master’s unit this he context is an elective master’s unit of a music teacher education programme on the kokas pedagogy, an experience-centred approach for the early and primary years. the aim of the unit is to immerse master students in pedagogy, making its core principles accessible through direct experiences (see figure 2). the sessions combine collective experiencing (active music listening) and shared reflection. the educational provocation is to depart from a language-based modality, to go beyond the science of music (students’ technical expertise of a musical instrument), and reopen to music somatically, with anticipated enrichment of the master’s students’ musicianship and music pedagogy. figure 3: the architecture of the kokas sessions the initial research explored the nature and significance of this pedagogy in music teacher education (vass, 2016). further research focused on the emergence of new, creative forms of perceiving, knowing and relating, and the transformative potential of students’ experiences personally, professionally and pedagogically (vass, 2019). our joint paper revisits the data from the third cohort: ten students with diverse specialisations in violin, cello, accordion, folk music, folk singing, singing, opera, and musicology. the data includes observation notes and video recordings of nine 3-hour sessions, visual documentation of creative products (paintings, drawings) and students’ self-reflective compositions. the video recordings were used for movement analysis (based on pasztor 2016, 2003). complementing this, constructivist narrative analysis (e.g., silverman, 2006) of spoken and written reflections was used to study students’ inner experiences as well as their outward-looking observations of what they witnessed around them. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a46 as noted earlier, this paper is a dialogue between the philosophical orientations we bring together, between our two distinct contexts and between us as researchers of these contexts (see figure 4). in our presentation of this complex dialogue, we focus on the unique dynamics of personal and professional transformation. figure 4: framing our joint paper as receptive-responsive dialogue (image of the vortex by roy reynolds) these complex dynamics have provoked us to distinguish between the notions of unity formation (dialectical unity), which we suggest is the underlying dynamic of historical and current educational systems, and dialogic polyphony (dialogical communion), a potentially transformative approach to education. our shared reflections took us towards a more complex understandings of this distinction (including considerations of different forms of dialectic resolve) and our explorations of the complexity of dialoguedialectic-dialogue flow. 4 exploring the puzzles: the erasmus project on intercultural understanding 4.1 the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow in the context of the erasmus+ project on cultural diversity and intercultural understanding, the three subsets of data are a witness to the range of thinking, experiences and reflections that belong to the ip. each subset highlights different forms of development. the sketchbooks developed by the pre-service student participants provided key insight with regard to transformative potentials. the entries point to the pedagogical thoughtfulness that had been part of the ongoing dialogue through the programme. in figure 5, pages from three sketchbooks provide examples of student reflections taking shape through motifs. motifs include ongoing exchanges between statements and questions (all is one? is all one?), geographical metaphors forming mindscapes (mainland, what i bring, water what i hope to gain; pedagogy walking with someone), eyes emphasizing the importance of re-viewing education and established exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a47 understanding. with these motifs, the participants are not reproducing but personally intoning, taking what has been and what is and allowing this to interanimate their own evolving intercultural and pedagogical understanding. the generative relationship, the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow, is shaped through the highlights and illustrations as participants listen to different voices, make choices about what to include, pause to develop and respond to ideas, and make connections and additions. figure 5: example pages from reflective sketchbooks (context 1) used with permission in the data based on sketchbooks, the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow seems most active as new questions arise and the participants look forward as well as back (reflecting on their intercultural understanding, especially notions of insideness and outsideness.) future pedagogical action, however, seems far removed in the sketchbooks, almost wistful as noted on the right-hand page, ‘i want to make a difference and really help people to find themselves…’. this wistful intonation perhaps indicates the challenge of converting pedagogical thoughtfulness into pedagogical resourcefulness, a pregnant moment of the in-between. the transformative nature of the programme experience is further highlighted in the small group presentations and final written assignments. the aim of the presentations was to share what participants (student teachers) had taken from the course and what they hoped to put into pedagogical practice. these presentations on small groups’ explorations and expressions of intercultural understanding and its pedagogic relevance most closely resemble pedagogical practice. as discussed elsewhere (moate, 2018), some groups invited contributions from the audience, anticipating particular words or actions in response. given the instrumentalist nature of the dialogue they planned for and anticipated, these groups struggled to weave different responses into a richer, multidimensional narrative. other groups managed to create space for contributions, and layers of meaning were added to the unfolding dialogue. the difference between the groups illustrates the challenge of transforming experience into pedagogical resourcefulness. they also show different orientations to the space of the in-between. groups trying to control responses seem to assume that the ip experience has a meaning for all in the same way, leading to homogenous thinking and the premature closure of the dialogic-dialectic flow. groups, however, that dared to risk exposure by sharing what had been personally meaningful, including what they still feared and valued, allowed the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow to continue provoking others (in the audience) to also risk rethinking and re-viewing their experiences and expectations. the third dataset (final reflective assignments, moate, 2023) required participants to re-view their pre-ip reflections and to consider their hopes for future practice. many participants shared surprise when re-visiting their notes which depict insideness as safe and comfortable and outsideness as uncomfortable and undesirable. through their journeys in the ip, participants questioned the security of insideness and the threat of outsideness and began to point to the generative, valuable nature of different positions. these exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a48 reflections illustrate the unfolding dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow as participants engaged with different ways of seeing, thinking and being and experienced moments of dialectic resolve as their understanding begins to take shape. the need for moments of dialectic resolve is highlighted by the reports of several participants that when they returned home, they were aware something significant had changed. participant 16 explains, ‘… i didn’t really feel like home anymore… part of me had change, and i’d learned and experienced things with people who weren’t surrounding me anymore, and this made me feel a bit as an outsider. this really confused me.’ these comments indicate a reorientation to the space of the in-between as established habits and assumptions are challenged and seen through fresh eyes. these experiences suggest an openness to dialogue, as well as the discomfort of genuine change (e.g., biesta, 2005). the pedagogical challenge of converting pedagogical thoughtfulness into pedagogical resourcefulness is most strikingly present in the closing statements of many of the written assignments. many of these statements espoused the view that their classrooms would create communities in which all are welcome. this view in itself is not problematic, but what is problematic is the way in which the earlier richness and complexity of thought (expressed in the sketchbooks especially) seem to disappear as they draw their pedagogical conclusion. it is unclear whether this is the dialectics that silences dissenting voices or the dialogue that temporarily resolves before again giving rise to questions. the missional tone of the declarations, however, rather seems to suggest a dialectic that closes down, perhaps as the students struggle to transform their own transformative experience into pedagogically useful understanding. it is as though they desire a positive outcome for their own students without the discomfort or disorientation of the experience. 4.2 yearning for a safe place therefore, a key overarching question is whether these student teachers were able to use these transformative experiences to develop their own pedagogical repertoires. this conundrum can be investigated further by looking at the participants’ relational experiences. the new relationships and community that formed through the ip was highly significant for many participants. whilst the sketchbooks acknowledged the value of seeing from others’ perspectives, the small group presentations and final written assignments were more public declarations of the value of the emergent community. in the group presentations, the participants acknowledged their insecurities regarding the future, but their newly established, yet deeply meaningful relationships provided a reassuring counterweight, a newly found treasure (fig. 6). in the written assignments, several participants wrote about the value of these newfound friendships and the importance of having a network that went beyond their immediate surroundings. however, i (josephine) wonder whether the emotional bounding of the group was potentially problematic – had former loyalties to the conventional school system been replaced by a new loyalty to idealized vision of education? and why has the experience of unity formation become so central to the participants of a programme about diversity and acceptance of/working with otherness? this puzzle can perhaps be usefully framed as whether the new relationships with others fed into the ongoing dialogue or prematurely brought it to a dialectical close by stripping out different voices (bakhtin, 1981). exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a49 figure 6: a treasure box circulated at the end of a small group presentation (context 1) [the mirror reflecting back the newly found treasure of community members] it may be that the experiences from the programme highlight the way in which dialogic activity can be vulnerable to the overriding strictures of conventional teacher education. perhaps the participants’ idealized notion of what kind of teacher they wish to be, closed down the new dialogue of what it means to engage with difference. perhaps the emphasis on community-building during the programme also overlooked the need to acknowledge the discomfort of dialogic engagement. the sketchbook reflections illustrate that the participants are able to challenge perspectives and develop personally intoned responses, yet this is a personal space with no preconceived ideal or specific instruction. here theoretical contributions and activities, as well as the voices and presence of others, are equal participants in an unfolding dialogue. if this dialogic approach can become part of the community dialogue, perhaps personal transformation can become a pedagogical resource. 4.3 the spaces of the in-between in context 1, several energy-filled spaces of the in-between are identifiable. one space is seemingly within the self – who i have been, am now and hope to be. this personal space brims with assumptions, reflections, questions, and experiences animated by the individual self and the experiences of others. as the participants listen, look for other perspectives, and consider the experiences of others, they are moved – energised – to think afresh and to respond. this is a dialogic interanimation across the permeable boundary of self and other. another energy-filled space is between the individual participants and the community formed through the ip. this community space seemed to constitute a safe space to ask questions in the present as well as an energy reserve to draw on in the future when as new teachers, they may encounter educational communities with different values and visions. the participants’ reflections describing a transformed relationship with their home environment suggest that the experience of the ip could be far-reaching, although to what extent cannot be said. a potentially problematic space, however, was between the participants and their future students. in their closing words, several participants express missional statements for their future development: ‘i wish to establish such an atmosphere in my classes where students feel [g]ood, whether they are more comfortable on the inside or the outside’ (participant 3), and ‘should not be the school a place where each exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a50 student gets the chance to consciously feel inside and home? i personally think so. that means our school system has to change dramatically. … our mission is to do anything to include them and make them feel inside’ (participant 29). these statements are, perhaps again, premature dialectic closures too distant from the concrete, social reality for the dialogue to continue with all its richness and struggle. these espoused visions of communities suggest over-energised spaces with little opportunity to be translated into and nourished by pedagogical action and experience. recognising these different energy-filled spaces of the in-between (past, present, and potential) brings a significant difference between the biological and social world to the fore as the human mind is able to transcend its immediate environment. on the other hand, this point also highlights the challenge of translating personal catharsis into pedagogical transformation. prior to this study with eva, i (josephine) had been concerned that the emotional bond of the new community undermined the dialogic struggles of engaging with alterity (bakhtin, 1986). having listened more closely to the voices of the participants, looked from different theoretical perspectives and considered the experiences eva shares, i see the dialogicdialectic-dialogic flow and the energy-filled spaces of the in-between in a different light. whereas context 1 highlights the challenge of premature dialectic closure, however, context 2 provides a different unfolding of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow and the spaces of the in-between through the polyphony of movement and imagination. 5 exploring puzzles in the music education context 5.1 dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow as i, (eva) followed josephine’s discussion about the potentially premature dialectic closure (the voice of homogeneity as a safe space) i was struck by the contrast between our contexts. i witnessed a very different journey of professional development in the music education context i was researching. one of the most perplexing aspects of the sessions i observed was and intensity and complexity of the dialogic encounters (vass, 2019). the multimodal dataset effectively captures a uniquely embodied route into dialogic expansion. as reported elsewhere (vass 2019), this cohort felt an immediate, deep otherorientation amongst participants as captured in the movement data and manifested in verbalised reflections. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a51 figure 7: deep cohesion in movement (context 2) i loved the beginning of the first session, focusing on getting attuned to each other. i think this is valid for all the sessions, and i believe that everybody who functions in groups (is engaged in group-based endeavours) would need games like these. they reveal a lot about a person, both holistically/generally and about their mood/state of mind in the present moment. (szilvi reflective essay) during the first few sessions i felt that people were a bit tentative, checking each other out from the corner of their eyes. after a few weeks, everything became more simple. in fact, sometimes it was enough just to think about particular people, and they came to partner up with me. there were more regular partnerships, but also, depending on the task, there were also other connections between people. once i knew my peers better, i tried to choose people whose character resonated with the qualities and the mood of the music we were given on the day. (norbert, reflective essay) the mutual attunement evidenced in the research was more than a social bonding process, rather a deliberate but unforced, systematic yet intuitive opening between the person and their learning environment. the body, bodymind, was central in this process. as a form of dialogic communion, participants learnt to relate to each other through musical encounters and built somatic musical knowledge through these evolving relationships. participants’ action, imagination and reflection intertwined within and across sessions; exploring and managing differences was key. participants often formed smaller groups, developing their own unique movement repertoire and narrative. these emergent subplots were often manifested in the nuances of movement and verbalised in the reflective phases. the images in figure 8 show the movement repertoire of smaller groups in a particular session, which were spontaneously formed. each group took a unique direction in action and imagination, whilst seemingly connected to other groups in fluid movement synchrony. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a52 figure 8: kokas session building on scarlatti’s sonata in f minor (466) (context 2) as the righthand side panel of figure 8 illustrates, participants’ reflections evidence where and how the narratives diverged and converged, ranging from a story about a fluttering butterfly and a flower to the dreamworld of newborn babies’ first encounters with each other or the mystical, magical experience of collective creation and artistry. participants’ reflections revealed how through musically-inspired movement patterns, they gravitated towards deep, overarching existential themes. the polyphony of movement afforded individual layers or dimensions of the shared imagination, which combined seamlessly into a cohesive story as students shared their reflections. participants’ expertise in musical polyphony may, to a certain extent, explain their openness towards (and pleasure in) seeking the difference and delving into the otherness of others. in this sense, their social encounters were embodied forms of dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow, which both invited and responded to difference. whilst movement patterns in the sessions showed increasingly fluid synchronicity (e.g. movementcoordination, mirroring, invitation-response sequences), students’ reflections revealed their recurring experiences of tension between the self and the other (or between the self and the collective). participants explained this tension with competing desires – the push-and-pull between following one’s own dreamworld exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a53 and joining in with others – or with falling out of synchrony with partners, or with a personality clash, the sense of rubbing against each other. nevertheless, both immediate and written-up reflections systematically identify this tension as a fundamental aspect of their learning. there is an almost stubborn insistence in students’ reflections on dismissing any need for assimilation or homogeneity in the cohort. instead, the reflections acknowledge these moments of tension as meaningful, legitimate, natural dimensions of the collective experience. they openly reject the necessity of consensus (to have the same ideas) or the value of homogeneous imagination (e.g., the categorical interpretation of the collective experience in one particular way or another). the pain of working with the more eccentric others is reflected on as an essential and paradoxically rewarding part of the journey: the tension becoming a source of energy, the initial point of a dialogic opening. at the same time, the sessions are rich in dialectic closures when we look at the abundant moments of profound togetherness, as signified in the closing gestures of communion in figure 8. i, (eva) interpret this as a subtle, perpetual movement between dialectical closure and dialogic opening: a dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow. as i look back at josephine’s example, what i see distinct here is the evidence of ongoing, perpetual tension. participants’ immersion in collective being and becoming in the moment is balanced with the open acceptance of the idiosyncrasies and individual distinctness of creative, felt musical experience. students’ reflections document this fluctuation between momentary dialectic resolve and dialogic tension and capture the constant shift between the first-person perspective (introspection, focusing on their own inner sensations and feelings) and a third-person perspective (looking outside, observing and interpreting the other’s actions and reactions). one could see the polyphony of movement and imagination as emerging from this dynamic interplay between the inner and the outer of the experience (see vass, 2019 for details). therefore, context 2 provides an embodied example of the dialogic unfolding exemplified by bakhtin (1984b), where the dialogic author is surprised by the contributions of characters in the development of a novel. in the music sessions, the polyphony is visually detectable and openly reflected upon. through the richness of imagination, inner sensing and outer explorations contribute to the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow, a flow arguably dependent on the energy-filled spaces of the inbetween. importantly, students in the cohort perceived their experiences of these musical encounters as deeply cathartic and fundamental for their musicianship and for their music pedagogy. when revisiting our respective research contexts, we see two distinct journeys into dialogical opening. these contexts afforded opportunities and spaces for dialectical resolve, with one a safe place (unity formation as central to the continued inner dialogue) and the other as a place for mutually receptiveresponsive encounters which embrace and openly build on the eccentricity of distinctness. the pedagogic foundations and processes in the two contexts incorporate dialogic tensions differently, which may explain our insights and reflections on participants’ journeys towards complexity. 5.2 the spaces of the in-between research on the kokas pedagogy in he notes the occasional incongruence between participants’ personal and professional sense-making (vass, 2016). for some music-expert participants, immersion in the pedagogy as learners can be limited due to perceived personal barriers. in such stories of ambivalence, participants discuss their growing pedagogic appreciation of experience-centred learning but express difficulties with ‘learning to learn differently’. the dialogic tension between the personal and the professional, carefully articulated by these participants, is a rich source of critical self-inquiry. nevertheless, ultimately in such cases of ambivalence, it does not result in a shift in these participants’ music pedagogy (vass, 2016). the cohort in focus did not present such personal challenges. as discussed by vass (2019), the participants’ readiness to play, their childlike inquisitiveness, and their curiosity surprised us (session exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a54 leaders and researchers). their immediate and retrospective reflections evidenced a deep congruence between the personal and the professional. the data from this cohort follow their transition from initial tentativeness towards a sense of freedom, manifested in experiences of ecstasy and collective trance. their movement data capture their boisterous bodily expression of collectivity towards the end of the semester, including hugging and wrestling. in contrast to context 1, in which the emerging safe environment generated questions, in context 2, openness to engage with the other seemingly allowed the space of the in-between to flood with an energy sufficient to animate new forms and expression of relationships between participants and to subvert the norms of the he context. figure 9: carnivalesque (context 2) exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a55 during the final session, students appeared to become unruly, madcap, rampageous kids. like in a medieval trance, their movement and action were an enactment of the carnivalesque of bakhtin (1984a) in which communities (temporarily) reform and subvert societal roles and relationships. students depicted this experience as a form of avalanche: a sense of overwhelming, overflowing joy and excitedness. their deep desire appeared to burst to the surface: the irresistible yearning to be a child. in this session, the boundaries between self and other, pedagogic hopes and expectations, the community and the he context seemed to dissolve in response to the condensed, energy-filled space of the in-between (see figure 9 for illustration). the teachers did not interfere during the session, although they openly reflected on their sense of risk in the follow up conversation. they linked their conflicted experience of the session to the fundamental pedagogic dilemma of structure vs freedom or safety vs. constraint. for the teachers the collapsed boundaries were less conducive to learning and teaching as expected in formal educational settings. the participating master’s students, however, were unanimous in their perception of this experience as a natural, conclusive experience in their learning. these student participants understood this avalanche as the rightful, well-earned culmination point. they saw their celebratory madness as a legitimate response in a learning context which set clear educational provocations for them: a response to ‘being invited to play’ and given the licence for freedom from more didactic and confined forms of learning. also evidenced in their reflections was the cathartic experience yearned for personally: the musically-inspired dreamworld of becoming the child, gathering and playing around a christmas tree. the different responses of the teachers and students suggest that, as the space in-between the student participants, the music and pedagogy was filled with energy, so the distance between the students and the teachers expanded. the dynamic nature of these spaces raises significant questions regarding the role of teacher educators in sustaining the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow and managing the spaces of the in-between. from my (eva’s) camera angle, however, new questions began to take shape: has the music become a backdrop to uninhibited play instead of a mediating force? the different positions (that of the teacher-participants, the student-participants, and the observer-researcher) remind us of the inherent contradictions between the underlying philosophy of these sessions and the institutional framing. 6 conclusion – expanding the dialogue this paper was inspired by puzzles in our studies of teacher development and the need to find a philosophical lens that resonates with education invested in the being and becoming of individuals and communities (biesta, 2017; 2019). our theoretical frame draws on bakhtin’s phenomenological approach to dialogism in which the self is in an unceasing, receptive-responsive dialogue with its physical, social, or cultural environment (e.g., bakhtin, 1986). we found this further enriched by rayner’s (2017) natural inclusionality, which recognises the vital presence of the ‘excluded middle’ and the natural, mutual inclusionality of self and other (or self and context). this inspirational fusion offered us a rich space from which dialogue between us, researchers, between our research contexts, and between our research puzzles could arise. the emergent questions explored in this paper were: how does the dialogic-dialecticdialogic flow form a part of professional development? and, what kind of energy-filled spaces of the inbetween are part of teacher development? we believe that the dialogic problematisation presented in the paper has significant implications for teacher development as well as for ongoing theorisations of education. an important insight gained was how our two contexts elucidate the dialogic-dialectic relationship (wegerif, 2008; matusov, 2011; white, 2014) in different ways. in context 1, the safe environment generates meaningful questions and reflections from participants to the extent that the relationship with home communities is transformed. many participants, however, struggled to translate this personally exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a56 transformative experience into pedagogical envisioning, seemingly stymied by a premature dialectic closure, rather than allowing new questions to arise (bakhtin, 1986). context 2, on the other hand, illustrates the potentially generative dynamic of encounters with the eccentricity of difference. the extreme positioning of the dialogic in this context, gradually gravitating towards the carnivalesque, was a concern as the student teachers struggled to critique the power unleashed (bakhtin, 1984a; emerson, 1996). our joint deliberation of these distinct features of the dynamics helped us recognise that both contexts, in effect, embody different forms of dialectic resolve. we suggest that assimilation and the intense, unbridled outward expansion of space are limiting and potentially destructive. to frame this problematisation in bakhtinian terms, both centripetal and centrifugal forces are needed to temper each other (bakhtin, 1981). in his breakthrough natural inclusional approach, rayner also reverses our ways of thinking about the dynamics of mutual enrichment through mutual inclusion. moving the emphasis away from the centrifugal motion, rayner reverses the flow and makes the centripetal, inward-moving spiral central: inviting the presence in, to the centre. in context 2, further questions follow from this, such as: what distinguishes collective flow (e.g., a collective rave or trance) and the complete unravelling of a shared experience? how to manage the incongruence between personally/professionally transformative learning experiences for the self and the institutional/cultural expectations and norms about what learning is? how to embed or legitimise carnivalesque learning opportunities in the context of institutional education? and how can students and educators manage the intensity of cathartic experiences, which may include the deep discomfort of liminal space and conflict? it is at this point that we turn to the he environment and theorisations of education, where our shared unpacking of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow provided further insights. the pedagogic foundations and processes of our two contexts are built on dialogic tensions differently. this may explain our insights and reflections on the extent of participants’ journeys towards complexity. both contexts, however, emphasize the generative nature of the dialogic-dialectic-dialogic flow and the spaces of the inbetween as a mediating presence for personal transformation. nevertheless, further puzzles remain, such as what is prioritised in formal educational contexts and how this prioritising potentially limits the dialogic expansion of knowledge. the converging forces of technical education and governance through tests (sharples, taylor & vavoula, 2007) force participants to a form of dialectic resolve that silences other voices and resists the generation of new questions (bakhtin, 1986). we recognise that promoting dialogic approaches to education is no easy alternative, although we contend with others that it is worthwhile (wegerif, 2008; white, 2014; brandist et al., 2017). pertinent questions about the inherent contradictions between the underlying philosophy of these sessions and the institutional framing need to be addressed. it is fundamental questions, however, that emerge from lived experience that call for richer theorisations of education (brandist et al., 2017). in this paper, we have outlined what we believe to be a richly generative coupling between dialogic theory and natural inclusionality. natural inclusionality provides a concrete instance of a healthy biological community based on diversity and responsive-receptivity espoused in dialogic theorisations (vass & rayner 2022) the social nature of human communities, the transcendence of time and space through imagination and creativity, the complexity of cultural environments as well as the dynamic nature of individuals-in-relationships requires the dialogue to continue. bringing our studies together, however, with our multimodal datasets and the courage to face disconcerting puzzles, opens up new vistas and possibilities for further exploration. whilst this contribution can be considered as a momentary dialectic closure, we look forward to the continuation of the dialogue on a higher level as more voices enter in. exploring dialogical spaces of discovery josephine moate, eva vass dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.504 | vol. 11 no. 1 (2023) a57 references bakhtin, m. m. 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(2014). bakhtinian dialogic and vygotskian dialectic: compatabilities and contradictions in the classroom? educational philosophy and theory, 46(3), 220-236. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00814.x new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word 5. marjanovic^j kullenberg^j gradovski^j (layout)^j scandinavian experiments in democratic education^j 2023-01-07.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a93 scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa tina kullenberg kristianstad university, sweden mikhail gradovski university of stavanger, norway abstract this article is the first of four articles exploring democratic schools co-founded by teenage students in norway and sweden. our larger project explores the relationship between democracy in education and educational dialogism. both democracy in education and educational dialogism are partially rooted in the idea that education should be a personal meaning-making practice where the participants can create and organize their lives in ways that make sense to them and explore their interests, values, and desires. we describe the processes of founding two schools – one in oslo, norway, and the other in gothenburg, sweden – in which students practiced the right to democratic governance. we describe the process of the founding of these schools against the background of the students’ movements in the late 1960s and the 1970s and the social and political conditions in norway and sweden at that time. we explore the students’ perspectives on the possibility, desirability, and legitimacy of the students’ voices in ethical-ontological dialogues in which the participants jointly examine their relationships with the world, with others, and with themselves. further, we explore the forms of democratic school governance that norwegian and swedish students created and identified tensions that appeared between the legitimacy of individual students’ rights to ownership of their learning, teachers’ ownership of teaching, and the conventional normative educational policies in norway and sweden. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g., mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: shugurova, o., matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2022). the university of students: a place for joint self-education. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 10, e1-e42; marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. issn: 2325-3290 (online) scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a94 tina kullenberg holds a doctor of philosophy in education, currently working at kristianstad university (sweden) as a lecturer in teacher education programs and postgraduate courses in educational science. her research focuses on pedagogical communication, applying dialogic and sociocultural perspectives on teaching and learning. lately, she has been especially engaged in bakhtin-inspired approaches to education. she also has a special interest in addressing democratic issues with a relational lens, for example, exploring the intricate dynamics of power-relations in educational dialogues between teachers and students or peers, premises for student agency, and other institutionally embedded dilemmas or opportunities in schooling. moreover, she has a background in the area of music education, in theory, and practice. dr. mikhail gradovski is born in minsk, belarus. after graduating from the norwegian university of science and technology in trondheim as doctor rerum politicarum in 2008 with a thesis devoted to the norwegian dialogue pedagogy, gradovski has participated in both national and international research projects on doctoral supervision, professional supervision, use of dialogue in education, and mental skill development. currently, he is a main coordinator of an international eu horizon2020 project that focuses on the development of ph.d. candidates’ skills. he has supervised both postgraduate, graduate, and undergraduate students. as a teaching practitioner, he is using a dialogical approach based on an understanding of both teacher and learner as partners with equal rights to make judgments on what is relevant, important, and true. ïïò prologue in the spring of 1966, three high school “dropouts,” jon lund hansen (age 16), ingrid kviberg (15), and knut boe kielland (16)1, wrote a leaflet to all high schools, the university of oslo, and some prominent intellectuals of the time. they issued a call to the students, teachers, and educators to create a new gymnasium in oslo. the leaflet started with the following words: many students feel that the authorities are pressuring them into despair. they feel that the old, wornout (waisted?) people deny them opportunities to develop, deny them friendship, deny them freedom, deny them sex, deny them the very youth (original leaflet quoted in jørgensen, 1977, p. 12).2 they strongly condemned the very foundations of norwegian education, its strict authoritarian philosophy and practice, in which the students are subordinated and cannot develop as people with full, strong, and healthy subjectivities and agency. they outlined a vision of a school they hoped to make: concretely that means that we want to work on establishing a new gymnasium in oslo as soon as possible. in that [high] school, the teachers and the students would have equal rights. together, they will determine the necessary rules and act as judges when these rules are broken. in that school, there will be no grades and no traditional homework. attendance will be as much as possible voluntary, and the students will not have to bring excuse notes for missed classes. the teachers and the students will together establish the 1 these are the actual students’ names published in several books about the beginnings of the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego) (hem & remlov, 1969; jørgensen, 1971). later in the text, synonyms are used for all the students. 2 this is ana’s translation to english from the serbo-croatian translation of the original norwegian book. the book “fra skoleopprør til opprørsskole [from a school rebellion to a rebel school]” by jørgensen (1971), was translated into eight languages in the 1970s, but not into english. section iii of the book, “the people,” was translated into english and is being published in this special issue of dialogic pedagogy journal. in this article, many of the quotations from this book are my translations from the serbo-croatian edition (jørgensen, 1977). however, i, ana, have also used the original book in norwegian with the help of google translate and, in some places relied on it to make the quoted paragraphs clearer and potentially more precise. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a95 curriculum. freedom will be limited only by the student’s desire to finish school through a formal graduation exam and non-traditional subjects the teachers feel competent to teach. they will together create and plan the syllabi. we hope there will be more room for individuality, development, tolerance, and working constructively in such a school (original leaflet quoted in jørgensen, 1977, p. 13, italics in the original)3. introduction norway, sweden, and denmark, three scandinavian countries, experienced a strong movement of high-school students demanding academic freedoms in the 1960s. the students wanted to democratically run their schools, participate in shaping their education, and have equal rights in making educational decisions about their schooling together with their teachers and other educational authorities. like in many other western countries, these student movements were a part of the broader new radicalism movement that scandinavian countries experienced in the 1960s. it was a time when large groups of university and high school students in the usa and western europe engaged in protests against the social and political establishment, the existing social, racial, and gender injustices, and the wars (especially the american war in vietnam). the youth demanded equal rights and equal powers over their destiny, not only for themselves, but first and foremost for all disempowered groups: the poor, the ethnic and racial minorities, the women, sexual minorities, etc. (anderson, 2008). in scandinavia, the new radicalism included a movement for the emancipation of youth (the teens and young twenty-year-olds) who demanded equal rights with adults in decision-making about their own lives and education. one of the active participants in the movement, norwegian educationalist and peace activist birgit brock-utne (1986), writes that those who criticized the traditional, established pedagogy were conceived under the same magnificent rainbow that stood over the same stormy sea; they were the children of the same protest and came out of the fight against the vietnam war and the authorities; they fought against the same paternalism in domestic relationships and the unequal societal place of the youth. the organized movements of the high school students seeking democratic participation in school governance in norway, sweden, and denmark, were in some ways, and to some degree successful.4 they were able to establish a few democratically run high schools. the first school established in 1967 was the experimental gymnasium in oslo5 (henceforth: ego). similar schools were soon opened in bærum, norway; gothenburg, sweden; and copenhagen, denmark. the ego existed for 27 years, closing in 2004. in this article, we focus only on the early years of two of these schools: the experimental gymnasium of oslo, norway (ego) and the experimental gymnasium of gothenburg, sweden (egg). our study of these educational uprisings is based on historical data (see below), recent memories of former students, teachers, and researchers (in published collections of memories and oral interviews), and a few scholarly publications (books and articles). in addition, for more historical description, parts of the original book “from a school rebellion to a rebel school” by mosse jørgensen have been translated and published in this special issue (jørgensen, 2023). i (ana marjanovic-shane, the first author) learned about the experimental gymnasium in oslo long ago, in the 1970s, when i still lived in yugoslavia. the school was described in a book by mosse jørgensen (1971), its’ first “principle.”6 the book was published in translation to serbo-croatian in 1977. it immediately 3 see the full translation of the leaflet in the appendix to the “conscience assembly – a vignette” (marjanovic-shane, 2023c). 4 we discuss in our conclusion in what ways creation and existence of these schools could be seen as a success (success of what, and success for whom). 5 “forsøkgymnaset” – a norwegian name, that can be translated as experimental gymnasium 6 the title “principle” was used by the norwegian department of education. internally mosse was a part of the democratic government of the school and known as the “school leader.” scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a96 became a source of considerable influence on some yugoslavian educational practitioners and researchers.7 my curiosity about the experimental gymnasium in oslo and its sister school in sweden was recently renewed as part of my focus on the relationship between dialogic pedagogy and democratic education. the second author, tina kullenberg, contributes to the investigation of an extensive collection of archival materials and official reports from the experimental gymnasium in gothenburg (egg), sweden, in the gothenburg archives. these materials included a variety of surveys and other documents reporting on the students’ and the other school participants’ perspectives on various challenges and tensions they faced in their democratic school practice. tina has also conducted interviews with three of the former egg students whose voices are included in this study. we included tina’s analyses of the swedish schools in the hope that they will help us sharpen our examinations through comparison and contrast of the two schools. in some cases, the difference in the perspectives between the norwegian and the swedish students helped us to better understand them. but without a more extensive study of the archival materials left by both schools, we cannot be sure that these comparisons helped us to the full extent. mikhail gradovski, the third author, has been researching norwegian dialogic pedagogy, its context, and its development since 2000 (gradovski, 2008). in this article, based on the historical approach, he particularly contributes to the development of the methodology behind this study and the description and discussion of the social and political contexts behind the start and development of ego and egg. the problem like the three dropout high school students whose leaflet sparked the creation of democratic schools, we see alienation in conventional institutionalized education as one of, if not the gravest student problem of contemporary authoritarian education. in that sense, we are not the first nor the only educators who searched for changes in educational practice that could promote students’ subjectivity, agency, and dignity. in fact, the whole progressivist educational movement in the education (bruner, 1990; dewey, 1902; kant, 1784; rousseau, 1979) has been motivated by the realization of the same educational problem: the students feel oppressed, demotivated, disinterested, disgusted, and depressed by the demands of the educational authorities, their teachers, the whole educational system. the progressivist movement sought solutions based on “students’ intrinsic motivation, interest in the subject matter we taught, and the deep understanding through our students’ construction of knowledge guided by the teacher” and a desire to turn the whole students’ life into an educational experience, the so-called “‘learnification’ of the students’ life – totalized transformation – totalized reduction – of the students’ everyday experiences into learning (cf. biesta, 2013; biesta, 2017)” (matusov, 2021b). however, the progressivist solution was only to soften the oppressive and alienating nature of education by designing ways to make the non-negotiable, mandatory practice of education less oppressive and more engaging. we claim that alienation in education is a symptom of a much deeper human problem – a problem of the human right of freedom of consciousness, a right to be a legitimate author of one’s own views of the world, the others, and the self. 7 interestingly, although the book described a movement of the high school students, it had the strongest impact on preschool education scholars and practitioners. this pedagogical area was not closely politically regulated by the yugoslav state, leaving more freedom to preschool educators, practitioners, and scholars to envision and practically try out diverse more open, child-centered educational approaches. in the views of several yugoslav preschool educationalists, open education involving democratic decisionmaking could promote students’ agency (beljanski-ristić, 1983, 1999; marjanović, 1987a, 1987b, 1987c; pešić, 1989, 1998, 2002, 2008). several alternative preschool centers were opened in belgrade, yugoslavia7, at the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. i (ana, the first author) was involved in these movements in the early 1980s. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a97 namely, we claim that education is a complex personal meaning-making praxis. when personal meaning-making practice is suppressed, thwarted, or even forbidden, a person experiences alienation – a loss of sense, purpose, meaning, and motivation – a veritable intellectual death. one of the most important aspects of human personal meaning-making is that it takes place in continual, never-ending dialogues with others and the self. inspired by the bakhtinian philosophy of dialogism, we claim that the most important characteristic of specifically human meaning-making is that each participant can test their own ideas, views, values, and desires against multiple alternative views, ideas, opinions, values, and desires of other people. we further claim that such dialogue of freely testing one’s own and others’ ideas, opinions, values, and desires can only be fully realized when the participants relate to each other as “a plurality of [unique] consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 6, italics are in the original). we call this an “ethical-ontological dialogue” since the participants treat each other as people with dignity who take each other’s opinions seriously. in ethical-ontological dialogue, participants acknowledge each other’s diverse ideas, interests, positions, values, and desires as legitimate alternative positions worth examination without aiming to agree unconditionally, but with an intention to jointly think through a multitude of alternatives and where, in such a discourse, each participant aims to arrive at, what to them are self-conclusive, i.e., self-persuasive truths, values, and positions. in bakhtin’s words, such dialogue can become an internally persuasive discourse (ipd) (bakhtin, 1999; matusov & von duyke, 2010). according to matusov, “the bakhtinian dialogue is inherently deconstructive, positioning the participants of the dialogue as spoilsports – of each other’s dear and familiar truths, ideological positions, beliefs and desires” (matusov, 2021a). therefore, bakhtinian dialogism points to the necessity of the students’ educational freedom as an integral condition for education to be not merely a meaningful, purposeful, and motivated practice but also a reflective practice of selfexamination and self-evaluation leading to each participant taking responsibility for one’s own ideological becoming (bakhtin, 1999). in other words, “to be authentic, [education] must be decided by the student, not by the teacher, by the school, or by the state. learning becomes educational only when it is appreciated by the learner” (matusov, 2021c, p. e3). the problem is that in most public and private schooling, education has been established and organized as a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian (or at best authoritative) practice, in which the teachers are tasked to transmit predefined, normativized, and mostly uniform ready-made truths. at the same time, students are expected to accept and memorize these already known truths – without questioning, deconstructing, or attempting to make personal sense of the given curriculum. such practice is, at its core, dogmatic. the students have little or no freedom nor the right to examine and question the mandated curriculum, instruction, and evaluations that are foisted on them. furthermore, in the conventional and progressive educational approaches, dialogue, if it exists, is mostly seen as an instrumental educational technique (method) known to increase student’s engagement and interest, often leading to better outcomes in the form of the quantity and perhaps the duration of the retained curricular information (cf. lefstein & snell, 2013; nystrand, gamoran, kachur, & prendergast, 1997; skidmore, 2000). a rare exception to the authoritarian and authoritative nature of contemporary schooling can be found in democratic schools (in the wide sense of the word), in which the students, by default, participate in making almost all decisions (greenberg, 1991; matusov, 2020b, 2020d; neill, 1960; rietmulder, 2019). for a. s. neill, the founder of the first democratic school in our times, summerhill8, education is meant to promote and support students in fully developing their interests, opinions, values, and desires, which can only happen when they can be free, and they know and feel that they are free. neill claimed that “at summerhill, it is … approval and the freedom to be true to oneself” (neill, 1960, p. 40). thus, it seems that democratic schools can create an educational environment that may promote genuine dialogues among 8 a.s. neil founded summerhill school in 1921 in germany and soon moved it to england in 1923. see more about its history here: http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/history.php. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a98 the people with equal rights to their opinions. this is why it became important to us to explore the potential of democratic schools to promote and support bakhtinian ethical-ontological dialogism, as well as the potential limitations and barriers that democratic schooling may create for that kind of educational dialogue. our conceptual approach to dialogue in education dialogic pedagogy is not a monolithic educational approach. it entails at least two major approaches: a) an instrumental approach, where dialogue is a tool or a method for better transmission of preset curricular goals; and b) a non-instrumental approach “where dialogue is viewed as the [educational] medium, in which and through which meaning-making and truth live” (matusov, 2018, p. 274, italics ours). in contrast to the currently prevailing instrumental approach that sees dialogue as an instructional technique, the bakhtinian concept of dialogue in education focuses on the students’ ontology (issues of their existence), subjectivity, and the relationships among the dialogic partners. in other words, it can be characterized as an ethical-ontological dialogism (marjanovic-shane, 2021; matusov, 2021a). for bakhtin, an important aspect of dialogues in dostoevsky’s novels was their ethical and ontological character. “dostoevsky neither knows, nor perceives, nor represents the ‘idea in itself’ in the platonic sense, nor ‘ideal existence’ as phenomenologists understand it. for dostoevsky there are no ideas, no thoughts, no positions which belong to no one, which exist ‘in themselves’ (bakhtin, 1999, p. 31). on the contrary, people participate in dialogue with their whole beings, putting their beliefs, fate and reputation at stake” (matusov, 2021b). in our study of ego and egg, we focus on the ways their democratic and educational practices support and promote, or limit and hinder ethical-ontological dialogism and, with it, the student’s personal, educational, and ideological becoming. thus, we particularly focus on the evidence of the students’ voice in and authorship of their educational and democratic practices. for bakhtin, voice is not merely about its physical properties, like “height, range, timbre, aesthetic category (lyric, dramatic, etc.). voice is first and foremost about a person’s worldview and fate. a person enters into dialogue as an integral voice. he participates in it not only with his thoughts but with his fate and with his entire individuality” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 293). voice is about taking a personal stance in spoken or written dialogues. hence, voice is a concept that embodies individual values, opinions, feelings, attitudes, and so on, based on their cultural existence in which they are intricately embedded in interrelated layers of speech genres, discourses, and social activities (bakhtin, 1986; linell, 2009). for bakhtin, to be human is to have a voice – to be a voice. furthermore, according to nikulin, this means that “every voice that speaks is meant to be heard, and every voice that is heard is meant to be responded to, and thus every voice craves dialogue” (nikulin, 2006, p. 39, italics ours). in that sense, although belonging to each unique person, voice is inherently a dialogic concept – as it only exists in dialogue. furthermore, bakhtin claimed that a personal stance and the worldview it expresses exist in dialogue as a “person-idea.” for bakhtin, “the idea lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness – if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. […] the idea is a live event, played out at the point of dialogic meeting between two or several consciousnesses” (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 87-88). moreover, a person-idea is a “fusion, […] of personal life with worldview, of the most intimate experiences with the idea. personal life becomes uniquely unselfish and principled, and lofty ideological thinking becomes passionate and intimately linked with personality (bakhtin, 1999, pp. 78-79). a person-idea lives through their voice in dialogues with others.9 9 i (ana) further rely on bakhtin’s concept of “person-idea” in my dialogic analysis of the events that transpired in one of the critically essential assemblies in the ego, published in this special issue (marjanovic-shane, 2023a). scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a99 authorship refers to the student’s voiced agency – an authorial agency (matusov & marjanovicshane, 2014) emerging in ethical-ontological dialogues (bakhtin, 1999). the concepts of “authorial teaching” and “authorial learning” (matusov, 2011, 2020a) lead us to envision the participating students and teachers as critical and creative authors of the educational events and educational paths. as authors, students develop authorial agency to purposefully and deliberately seek out ideas, values, and knowledge that transform both them and their social contexts, rather than exist as compliant and conforming individuals who focus on pleasing the teacher. “authorial agency” is not merely a competence or a tool for reaching strictly rational goals, but rather, the authorial agency is “the individual’s unique culture making activity on both larger, more recognizable, and smaller, less recognizable, scales.” (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016, p. 18). culture making implies unique, new, unpredictable, and unforeseeable contributions in dialogues with others. the idea of authorial agency implies socially recognized and positively valued personal transcendence of the culturally given. thus, a fully owned, authorial, intrinsic education in which the student’s voice gains legitimate authority both for the student and for the others “demands an important educational right – the right of the student to define his/her own curriculum, instruction, and valuation (what to value in his/her education)” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019, p. 32). democracy and freedom in education what does democracy, the governance of the “common people,”10 mean for education envisioned as meaning-making in critical and creative dialogues among the “common people?” bakhtinian concept of the ethical-ontological dialogue implies that the people relate to each other as equals in terms of the powers and authority they have in their relationships. this seems to imply freedom to voice one’s own opinions and be taken seriously. importantly, it implies a personal right to freely draw one’s own conclusions in such a dialogue, i.e., a right to freely arrive at personally constructed truths in an internally persuasive discourse (ipd) (bakhtin, 1999; matusov & von duyke, 2010). it is a right not to be coerced in any way, nor by anyone to accept others’ views and beliefs, but rather, a right to freely form one’s own views and positions. ethicalontological dialogism implies freedom in the sense of what isaiah berlin called “negative freedom” (berlin, 2006, 2014). “negative freedom” is a sphere of personal freedom from imposition, limited only by explicit and concrete prohibitions. for instance, “do not kill” is such a biblical limitation. it is “negative” because it does not define nor describe what a person is allowed to do. it only describes the boundaries of personal freedom, leaving the person free to act in any undefined and unknown way, except regarding killing. berlin defines “negative freedom” as that “area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons” (berlin, 2006, p. 34). for berlin, as soon as freedom is defined in any way, it turns into an entirely different concept, a concept of “positive freedom” or “freedom for.” however, just like a mathematical concept of “degrees of freedom,” any definition that specifies what freedom should be, what it should be used for, or what it should mean immediately limits the degrees of freedom the person has. thus, whenever freedom is defined as something, it falls out of the unpredictable, undefinable personal sphere of negative freedom. it can be defined by others, thus taking a chunk out of the person’s negative freedom. ethical-ontological dialogue, i.e., dialogue that critically and creatively deliberates and deconstructs topics of its focus, can be realized to its fullest potential and scope when personal meaning-making is unlimited, free, emergent, undefinable, and untamable. in other words, personal meaning-making emerges from the participants’ (negative) freedom from explicit or implicit coercion, compliance, or obedience. the 10 greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratia), "popular government," from δημος (demos) "common people," + kratos "rule, strength" scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a100 smaller the sphere of negative personal freedom, the smaller the reach, the breadth, and the depth of ethical-ontological dialogue. but what about “positive freedom?” one of the reviewers of our early drafts asked: “the ethicalontological dialogism emerges from negative freedom (berlin), but can we think that it takes the form of positive freedom? can the tensions between individual rights to educational freedom and democratic decision-making be analyzed and explained by referring to the concept of the ‘common good?’ or in the ‘best interest’ of a child? why is the concept of ‘positive freedom’ unsatisfactory?” in our view, and according to berlin, positive freedom has to do with “the answer to the question 'what, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?'” (berlin, 2006, p. 34, italics ours). without going into a deeper discussion that would take us in a different direction, we think that ‘positive freedom’ limits and possibly distorts genuine dialogue by introducing authoritative discourse (bakhtin, 1991), which imposes predefined (monologized) views, goals, and beliefs, like, for instance, the concept of ‘the common good’ or ‘the best interest of a child.’ in other words, not only the boundaries of the sphere of personal freedom are more limited, but also the positive definition of what freedom is for introduces a voice of authority, an authoritative, magisterial discourse, thereby limiting the free dialogical pursuit of the internally persuasive discourse. in that sense, positive freedom limits the students’ “ideological becoming,” defined in terms of “how we develop our [own] way of viewing the world, our system of ideas.” according to bakhtin, a person’s ideological becoming takes place in a transformation from participation in authoritarian to internally persuasive discourse (freedman & ball, 2004, p. 5). for us, the main question is whether any kind of educational democracy promotes personal negative freedom and, with it, genuine ethical-ontological dialogue for the students’ educational and ideological becoming. following berlin’s definition, one might assume that such personal negative freedom has more chance to be realized as an educational right in a liberal democracy than it would be the case in an illiberal democracy with guided by authoritarian, monistic values. thus, it became important to us to explore ways the two scandinavian democratic schools, ego, and egg, promoted and supported personal rights of education, in which education legitimately belongs to the sphere of personal “negative freedom,” i.e., where each person can define and author their education. furthermore, we were interested in the nature of the barriers and limitations the two school democracies might have imposed on personal negative freedom. research questions two related overarching research questions define our research: a) what kind of democratic governance was emerging in these experimental democratic schools? what impact did it have on the relationships among the students, teachers, and other participants? and b) what aspects of this new, student-owned, educational democracy promoted or limited ethicalontological dialogues in which the student’s voice and educational authorship could freely emerge? in other words, what was the nature of the students’ ownership of their own education? to answer these questions, we explore both the larger social, historical, and cultural context in which these schools were founded and the evidence of the students’ voices and their emergent authorial agency. we look for the circumstances, events, and leading ideas in education in scandinavia of the 1960s that influenced the ways in which these schools could operate, creating specific conditions in which the students had opportunities to transcend their old studentship defined by conformism, submission, and alienation of the authoritarian schools, against which they rebelled in the first place. at the same time, we explore ego and egg students’ voices and authorial agency as we examine the ways they searched for, defined, designed, and practiced their democratic school governance. we attempt to infer their personal approaches to education and the philosophical, ideological, and conceptual positions that guided them in scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a101 creating their new schools. we are interested in the implications of the dramatic shifts in the students’ experience of changing the school regimes: from conventional, authoritarian schooling to having legitimate participation in decision-making, not only regarding their own learning but also regarding the pedagogical and organizational issues of their schools. sources information about the two democratic schools – the ego (norway, 1967–2004) and the egg (sweden, 1969–1975) – comes from several sources. we originally found a lot of information about ego in a book by mosse jørgensen, “from a school rebellion to a rebel school,” written in 1971, just four years after the ego was founded. mosse jørgensen describes the dramatic and eventful start of the school and the diverse difficult issues encountered by the students, teachers, and others in the first year of its operation11. lars hem and tom remlov’s12 book “experimental gymnasium in praxis,” published in norwegian in 1969 (hem & remlov, 1969), provided us with invaluable data, including a full transcript of one of the vitally important general assembly meetings, the so-called “soul-searching assembly.”13 we also used other sources about ego, including some published academic studies and an interview with a former student. most of the information about the experimental school in gothenburg (egg) was found in the contemporaneous observations, transcripts of important meetings, school newsletters, surveys, reports, evaluations, etc., which were a part of the city archive14 of gothenburg (stadsarkivet) and in the official state reports about the school. additionally, tina kullenberg interviewed three former students and analyzed reports and other publications in her study of the egg. methods of investigation in our bakhtin-influenced approach, we believe that socio-cultural phenomena are a matter of spirit and interpretation rather than given, immutable, static objects. a bakhtinian scholar, mikhail epstein, wrote, “since the very object of the humanities embraces the free will and spiritual activity that escapes mathematical or naturalistic definition, the humanities elaborate their own criteria of precision and challenge [a reduction to positivist] scientistic approaches to culture as a system of informational codes” (berry & epstein, 1999, pp. 16-17). furthermore, as subject to heuristic interpretation, cultural and social practices are better studied using multiple lenses, generating a plurality of visions, each providing unique opportunities for insight. thus, in our study, we use a mixed qualitative research method, combining historical analysis of the primary and secondary data sources, i.e., actual artifacts (transcriptions of meetings, school journals and newsletters, photographs and video recordings), and previously published articles and books and recent interviews, reports, studies memories and books. we construct our interpretations and assumptions not introspectively but rather in a dialogic analysis (matusov, marjanovicshane, & gradovski, 2019; matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019), trying to join the long past dialogues in which the students and teachers grappled together to make sense of their schools, 11 parts of the book “from a school rebellion to a rebel school,” are published in this special issue 12 tom remlov was one of the founding students of the experimental gymnasium in oslo, who later became a very prominent dramatic artist (actor, director) of norway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tom_remlov). lars hem was a young scholar and a research assistant to dr. harriet holter, from the university of oslo who led an extensive study of the school. “i was part of a research group lead by the late professor harriet holter, which followed the school. we conducted several surveys and systematic interviews and audiotaped most of the meetings. i also did a two-month participant observation in the classes. my ph.d. from the university of stockholm was my main contribution to the research group (hem, lars: forsøksgymnaset. oslo university press 1971), but we published several other reports.” (personal correspondence, october 6, 2019) 13 an in depth analysis of this meeting is contained in two other articles in this special issue, “soul-searching assembly – a vignette” and “a paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting” (marjanovic-shane, 2023b, 2023c). 14 they are housed in the “city archive” in gothenburg [stadsarkivet i göteborg]. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a102 themselves, their society, and their lives. moreover, we also address you, the unknown reader, inviting you to make your own interpretations and new transcending points of view. contexts of the founding of the two democratic schools the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego) the experimental gymnasium of oslo (ego) was conceptualized in the spring and summer of 1966 by three young people, jon lund hansen (16), ingrid kviberg (15), and knut boe kielland (16), high school “dropouts” who were mainly inspired by a.s. neill’s school “summerhill,” (neill, 1960) as well as the ideas that stem from the works of plato, jean jacques rousseau, and a norwegian reform educator olav storstein (jørgensen, 1977). in the spring of 1966, they wrote a leaflet calling oslo students and educators to change the existing deadly education (see the prologue). they distributed the leaflet throughout oslo, sending it to the high schools as well as to the most prominent educational experts and public persons they knew. these three students invited interested people to join them in creating a new kind of school, where the students can participate in its governance. several enthusiastic educators, culturally prominent intellectuals, and people related to education,15 together with about 60 high school students and some of their parents, replied to their leaflet. they held a meeting in the fall of 1966. about 20 students, together with a few university professors and some other prominent oslo intellectuals, started working on the conceptual plans for the new school. after a very dynamic and dramatic year of preparations (øygarden & svartdal, 1979), and two rejections of the proposals by the norwegian board of education, they received conditional approval to start a new experimental gymnasium. the approval came on july 14, 1967, and their school started to work in september 1967. the school lasted until its formal closure in 2004. we believe that the founding of the ego can be seen as a part of an overall “student radicalization of the 1960s,” which in turn was closely intertwined with the general intellectual trends in norway (jarning, 1997) and wider, known as the new radicalism movement in scandinavia. the new radicalism was a movement that can be defined as a set of certain values and issues discussed in norwegian society during the 1960s and the first part of the 1970s of the twentieth century16 that took place under certain economic, social, and cultural conditions. gradovski (2008) (the third author of our paper) describes the norwegian new radicalism to be a phenomenon where the main questions on the social agenda were: centralization versus decentralization, depopulation versus urbanization, internalization, cultural minorities, language, commercialization, and environmental problems. gradovski (2008) points out that the movement of new radicalism in norway manifested itself in a number of social uproars: the social movement against membership in the eec17, the student revolt, the youth revolt, the feminist movement, the minority rights movement, the environmental movement, and the periphery revolt. these movements left their mark on political and social life not only during the 1960s and 1970s but also in the 1980s and 1990s. and not only in norway but also throughout the western world, including europe and the usa. gradovski (2008) points outs that the values of the new radicalism movement were not entirely new: equality, the right to speak one’s own dialect, populism, and love for the motherland with its deep fjords and high mountains had been debated, discussed and fought about in the norwegian society long 15 e.g. arne næss, professor of philosophy at the university of oslo; jo vogt, the wife of the rector of the university of oslo, helped in the practical organizational problems, lent her home for the initial organizational meetings, acted as the financial officer in the first fundraisings, and gathered other important educators; her husband, the rector of the university of oslo; philologist and novelist carl hambro, arne stai, a magister from the university of oslo; august lange, a former director of the teacher college; and about 50 other educationalists (jørgensen, 1977, pp. 17-18). 16 different historians and social scientists define the time of new radicalism differently. alfred oftedal telhaug defines new radicalism between 1965 and 1975. berge furre speaks of the time between 1961 and 1973, although not using the term new radicalism at all. øystein rottem considers the years between 1965 and 1980 to be the golden years of the youth revolt and left radicalism in norway, see beyer, edvard (ed.) (1997) norges litteratur historie, vol. 7, j. w. cappelens forlag, p. 13. 17 european economic community scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a103 before the movement appeared. the initiators of the ego brought in a new interpretation of these values: they reinterpreted them in accordance with the needs and realities of their generation, thus suggesting a new way of understanding them. gradovski (2008) claims that the new radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s had its precursors in the 1950s. the two main events in the norwegian cultural life of the 1950s that chimed in, as the norwegian historian stig werner forsberg (2000, p. 14) writes, the things that were to happen were the rock revolt (rockeopprøret) triggered, among others, by the film ‘rock around the clock’18 shown in norway right after it was made in 1956, and jens bjørneboe’s novel jonas that was published the same year. the rock revolt was a cultural protest of teenagers against parents and a society where only adults could make decisions19. jonas was a protest against the authoritative nature of the educational system and the society that gave life to it. the main character is a school child named jonas, who has dyslexia. being unable to bear the pressure of the school environment that considers him an idiot, he ran away from home on a boat. given the national outcry these two events had in the norwegian society, we think that the actions and values of freedom, and the demand to be respected just the way one is, inspired the high school students who initiated the oslo gymnasium. in our view, the creation of the ego in 1967 and other democratic high schools in sweden (1969) and denmark was one of the crucial sparks that ignited the movement of alternative pedagogy, which was a scandinavian phenomenon with followers in norway, denmark, iceland, sweden, and finland. erling lars dale from norway, gert z. nordstrøm from sweden, and knud illeris from denmark were considered by many the founders of the movement (foros, 1981; mathiesen, 1981; vaage, 1981). gradovski (2008) writes that the expression “alternative pedagogy” was used to define many different approaches with one common element: protest against the hierarchical, authoritarian educational thinking, which was in accord with the student and youth movements in europe and north america of the 1960s. these alternative pedagogical approaches included phenomena known as dialogue pedagogy/dialectical pedagogy/emancipatory pedagogy (dialogpedagogikk /dialektikk pedagogikk/ frigjørende pedagogikk), critical pedagogy (kritisk pedagogikk), pedagogy of awareness (bevisstgjørende pedagogikk), polarised pedagogy (polariserende pedagogikk), alternative didactics (den alternative didaktikk) and marxist pedagogy (marxistisk pedagogikk) (foros, 1981; mathiesen, 1981; vaage, 1981). gradovski (2008) defines the alternative pedagogy in norway as a movement that appeared at the end of the 1960s as a result of a protest movement against the established pedagogy. another norwegian author, birgit brockutne (1986), in her analysis of the criticism of the established pedagogy, singles out three main areas where the representatives of the alternative pedagogy criticized the established pedagogy: a) the scientific area (protest against positivism and promotion of neo-marxism) b) the area of educational practice (the criticism was directed not only towards the understanding of children and the way they learn but also the area of research on children in general), and c) the area of students’ rights and participation in the teaching process gradovski (2008) writes that representatives of the alternative pedagogy in norway wanted to promote a pedagogy founded on the picture of reality as it was understood and experienced by children in their social situations. such an understanding led to the introduction of the following elements in the process of teaching: learning projects, where teachers and students are considered equal with respect to making decisions, the flexibility of the teaching process (flexible timetables, flexible choice of subjects, cooperation 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djo428iavj0 19 note by ana, a member of the same generation of the youth of the 60s as the scandinavian students: in my opinion, calling the rock-an’-roll music and culture, a “rock revolt” and a “cultural protest” is only partially true. this era was not just a revolt. in many ways, it was also a wave of hope for many young people, hope that the tensions between the values of individual liberties and the social justice can be reconciled. it was a belief and a hope that these are not opposing values, but, on the contrary, that they can and do go hand in hand. for many of young people of the time, hope, optimism and egalitarian values, were as important as “the protest” and “the revolt.” in my view, belief in the good will of all (youth and elders) to acknowledge both the uniqueness of each individual and the right to be equal with the adults in making political and educational decisions about their lives, were crucial for taking initiative to both demand and design education that answers the youth’s interests and needs. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a104 between teachers in projects), the introduction of open areas in schools or completely open schools (both physical and material) (foros, 1981). for instance, in his description of the curriculum and instruction of mathematics in the ego, bjørn damsgaard, the math teacher, highlights the importance of the studentcentered pedagogical approach where “[f]rom the teachers' point of view, [math topics] are only loosely outlined in what we see is essential: that the entire work is discussed gradually and develops in collaboration between students and teachers” (damsgaard, 1969, p. 120, translated by google and improved by ana). the experimental gymnasium in gothenburg – egg the experimental gymnasium in the swedish city of gothenburg (egg) was opened in 1969 and existed until 1975. it was a radical democratic high school, an upper secondary school for students aged between sixteen and nineteen. the first leader of the school, a so-called “experimental leader” who served as a school principal, had 12 teachers in his team and 200 enrolled students in total. this school was initially promoted by the committee of primary and secondary school students, candidates for the future school who were engaged in politics, interested particularly in socialism in theory and practice. three of these young students authored a document with recommended guidelines for a new alternative democratic school where the students were allowed to exert influence, i.e., considerable democratic decision-making in their school life. soon, they became assisted by the local liberal politicians20 and some educators in gothenburg, who also believed that the students should have a right to influence their own schooling. these educators had the ambition to work for alternative pedagogies that strongly promoted students’ agency in schools organized as democratically governed environments. based on interviews with former students and the school board reports (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980, [school board report]), a small group of students, who initially fought for a radical high school alternative, have already been involved in educational issues that the teachers let them continue to influence the organization of the school. their experience of educational issues of the time came from their participation in a national student organization called seco (an acronym for “the swedish students’ central organization”). seco took the initiative to produce alternative schoolbooks/texts: for example, a textbook for history, as well as other educational materials in which the students were rethinking pedagogy and ideology according to their extremely left marxist political interests. despite the divergent ideological motives between the extremely leftist, marxist young students, the local politicians leaning to the liberal right, and liberally minded educators, several former students said that it worked out quite well in practice. however, interestingly, the interviewed former student ove sernhede, now a professor in sociology specializing in youth cultures, deliberately dropped out from the egg for ideological reasons soon after its opening. he argued that too many well-informed students with political awareness were, as he put it, “gathered together on an isolated island” and, hence, he preferred to inspire others. this means to study in the middle of the ‘normal’ society (the swedish city of gothenburg), in a traditional upper secondary school. as anderson (2008) writes, in contrast to the american universities’ campuses in 1968, where the police were often called to break up the students’ protests, causing considerable violence, scandinavian politicians actually supported the students in their endeavors to reform education. the liberal nordic establishments acknowledged that they needed to encourage the youth’s initiatives and genuine interest in the world, as well as the youth’s activist visions, dreaming of a less authoritarian education and their strong desire to gain more general and practical influence in decision-making about their education. we think that the ideas of these liberally minded politicians and educators might explain their open-minded eagerness to 20 as bo ranman, one of the former students, and now a teacher said in a recent video, the students’ proposal got political support from the right-wing parties, especially the folkpartiet which was the biggest one. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a105 try out new schooling models that allowed for individual freedom from the perspective of the students and not only ‘from above.’ this might also explain their tolerance and even support for the initiatives of the politically left students, members of the radical left (marxist) swedish students’ central organization seco, who were among the prominent founders of the egg. inspired by ego in norway, in spring 1968, three of these seco-proponents proposed a vision for a new democratic school: in a leaflet to the schools, they explained that they wanted to create a school where the students and the teachers decide together. all decisions of importance should be taken at a common public meeting where students, teachers, and the school leader have one voice each [in decision making]. grades should not be given – the school based on competition, and the pressure of being graded should thus disappear. students and teachers should plan the studies together, studies that were aimed to be carried out in a very self-dependent way. the mandatory attendance would be abolished. the school would be open both evenings and saturdays, and sundays [in addition to monday – friday]. there were students and teachers with clearly articulated political values of socialistic nature, which regarded the experimental gymnasium as a part of, and a means for, the struggle for a socialist society; due to their intense activity, they came to form a part of a dominating group. there were teachers who, in this attempt, saw a new opportunity to try out their methods and models for teaching. there were students who, within the organization of study, saw a chance to get through the gymnasium education in a shorter time than usual and with greater opportunities to get high grades (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980, p. 2f, translation by kullenberg). of note is that grades and assessments of student achievements were largely eliminated in the school system of the egg. only in the last semester, in conjunction with the endpoint of the education, do the students receive grades in order to have the possibility to continue studying at the university. as for the issue of teaching methods and the role of the teacher in teacher-student relationships, the teachers (with support from the school leader) were expected to organize non-traditional forms of schooling, and so they did. however, as with every aspect of pedagogic practice in this school, the proposed teaching methods were continuously dialogized and, thus, dynamically in the making in ways the participants could not grasp initially. the opinions varied. for instance, a survey about teaching conducted by the school’s psychologist and the school leader shows that only 7 out of 61 participants (students and teachers) thought that the teachers were “experimental enough” (experimentgymnasiet, 1974). however, it is hard to distinguish between the students’ vs. teachers’ opinions since both responded to the same surveys. one salient result of these surveys was that many students criticized the teaching for not being “experimental” enough. in contrast to their earlier, traditional schooling, here, the students were expected to reflect on the teaching, bringing in their own ideas as co-organizers. they had several options for legitimate protests and dialogues about change, such as discussions at open meetings where all participants were gathered (e.g., the teachers, students, and school administration) or writing freely in the school journals. in one such essay, peter rundkvist, a student, wrote the school lessons are many times orderly events where not many words are uttered, except by the teachers. /…/ eg has, for many of us, become final salvation, a green oasis in a grey school desert filled with grading rush, teacher pressure, oppression, dictatorship, and so on. so, let us do what we can to nurture this oasis and its increasing liberty that we actually experience in many ways (rundkvist, 1970, kullenberg's translation). scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a106 the critique of the partial changes in the overall organization of the instruction can also be discerned in another essay from the egg school journal: we have now abolished the classes, and we have divided into groups instead. but this is just an ostensible change of the system in an ordinary school – it is the teacher-led teaching we have to free ourselves from! (starke & hansson, 1970, translation by kullenberg, underline in original). on the other hand, some students complained about the creative ways of organizing teaching and learning, mainly due to the fact that their highly valued study time was consumed by the democratic meetings on how to organize the school. this was one of the primary tensions that i, tina, recognized in the overall analysis of the documents of this particular school: the time-based tension between studying vs. democratic organizing. this tension further reveals not only a fundamental conflict between the collective voice and the individual voice but also a conflict between diverse conceptualizations of learning and education. we will come back to this issue. generally, despite being critically oriented from the students’ perspective, these significant dialogues between students and teachers were accepted as an organic part of the experimental nature of this experimental school by definition: experimental gymnasium. hence, both dialogues, teaching, and learning gained a tentative character or, speaking with bakhtin (1986), attempted to create a schooling approach based on ‘unfinalizing’ and dialogizing. guiding principles and challenges in the two democratic schools the two democratic schools, ego and egg, were opened in the historical context of the late 1960s in norway and sweden, the 60s that represented both similar and yet rather different political and ideological “chronotopes” (bakhtin, 1999). both schools were founded in the spirit of the students’ desires to liberate themselves from the educational and ontological alienation they experienced in conventional authoritarian public schooling of the times. the students wanted to create schools in which education could be meaningful to them. to paraphrase matusov (2021c), it seemed that their desire (at least for the founders) was to create a school in which their learning would be educational, not as defined by the external authorities (state, society, etc.), but which they themselves could recognize and appreciate – education that would have significance for their own learning transformations and changes in their relationships with others, with themselves, and with their life. in other words, it seemed that the students desired to be the authors and the owners of their education. to that end, they had to change almost every parameter of the traditional conventional schooling. in conventional education (in the 1960s and now), almost all aspects of education are in the hands of the various authorities – the ministries of education, the school boards, the district administrations, the principal, and the teachers. these authorities make almost all educational decisions ranging from the pedagogical, organizational, technical, and operational to the various political, financial, economic, cultural, and religious matters. at the bottom of this hierarchy are the students, whose position is to subordinate to their teachers’ pedagogical actions and to work hard to fulfill the innumerable educational tasks imposed on them, without many possibilities for questioning, deconstruction, or examination of these tasks and their contents. the students have little to no legitimate freedom of decision-making about any aspects of their education. their freedoms are mostly limited to making limited choices regarding their individual or group assignments, e.g., having a choice of themes within the structure of already preset and predefined curricular endpoints, forms of instruction, assignments, policies of enforcing these assignments, evaluation norms, and standards. the school curricula, instruction, and evaluation are often dictated by the authorities outside scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a107 of local school settings (e.g., national, federal, state, or municipal boards of education) (dahlberg & moss, 2005). one of the master keys to enforcement of the conventional, authoritarian education is the state legislated and enforced mandatory school attendance. it is the mandatory school attendance that enables educational powers to foist preset curricula, instruction, assignments, and evaluation onto the population of students without their consent.21 mandatory attendance in all contemporary societies is part of the educational laws and regulations and is strictly enforced through punishments of truancy that could involve not only the students but their families, too.22 almost everything about the current functioning of the public and many private schooling depends on mandatory attendance. and thus, an important key to overthrowing conventional authoritarian education is for the students to gain the freedom to make educational decisions for themselves and create their own rules and principles of conduct, including the legitimacy of abolishing mandatory attendance. indeed, both the ego and the egg made sure that the first principle in their schools was voluntary attendance. the principle of voluntary attendance is meant to guarantee each student freedom of participation, including non-participation in the educational activities. it is the condition for the legitimacy of the student’s negative freedom in education. when education is in the student’s sphere of negative freedom, they can freely make decisions about almost all educational aspects: the curriculum (what to learn), instruction (how to learn it), what learning has been or would be important and good (evaluation), whether to engage in organized educational activities (participation), what kind of student the learner wants to be in any particular situation (role), etc. (matusov, 2020c; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). the second, equally important key to creating student-owned schooling is the democratic governance based on the principle of the students’ equal rights of input in decision making, together with other educational participants: teachers, other school staff, etc. however, and crucially, although democracy guarantees equal rights of input to all, it does not guarantee that these democratically made decisions will always uphold the students’ “negative freedom” of personal decisions about their own educational matters. in extreme cases, there is nothing to prevent a school’s democratic government from making rather illiberal rules where decisions about education would be placed outside of the sphere of the student’s personal negative freedom. in fact, according to berlin, “just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberalminded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom” (berlin, 1969, p. 7). in that sense, a school’s democratic governance may or may not legitimize curbing individual educational freedoms. coming from different sources and different considerations, these two principles – voluntary attendance (coming from the student’s negative freedom) and democratic governance (coming from the collectively imposed definitions of freedom, e.g., positive freedom) can be and often are in conflict! it is these tensions that the founders and other members of the ego and egg schools experienced and often discussed in their clashing ideological and political orientations to education and democracy. we describe these tensions below. tensions between individual and collective rights facing these contradictions between individual rights of educational freedom and the democratic decision making at the very start of their school in 1967, the students and teachers in the ego were plunged into a situation of growing tensions deeply rooted in their diverse visions of education, diverse life 21 this is true for the teachers too! in many cases, the curriculum, instruction and evaluation are also imposed on the teachers by the higher educational authorities in schools, districts, and states. 22 see more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/truancy scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a108 philosophies, guiding values and purposes of education. the tensions were progressively intensified in dayto-day clashes, expressed daily in the name-calling between two fast-forming and strongly opinionated groups of students. the first was a smallish group of about 20+ students, most of whom were the school founders, working hard to keep the school running and urging all others to do the same. in their year-long work on the preparation and conceptualization of the new school, they have already formulated the school’s basic principles, rules, and laws, and now they urged everyone to abide by them. they were soon labeled the “tantene” (“nagging nannies”) by a large group of newly admitted, “rebellious” students. the founders resented being called the “nannies.” they perceived the new coming rebellious others as rule-breakers and, in turn, started calling them the “avvikere” [deviants].23 they perceived the rebels, the “deviants,” as defying their (the nannies’) original educational project in almost everything: not attending any classes and refusing to do other school chores (jørgensen, 1977, p. 47). jørgensen thought that these tensions indicated persistent lingering of traditional educational conceptualizations, values, and beliefs, clashing with the school’s new paradigm. in our view, these tensions and clashes were about the nature of educational freedom: i.e., is it a collectively defined – positive – freedom, equal for all, or the students’ personal – negative – freedom to decide what education means to each one of them (see our discussion below). the internal conflicts among the ego students were heightened by additional external pressures of the educationally conservative norwegian ministry of education, which scrutinized every formal and visible aspect of their school practice, and used traditional criteria of educational assessment, threatening the possible immediate closure of the school (jørgensen, 1977). tensions between individual rights of educational freedom and democratic, collective decisionmaking also existed in the swedish experimental gymnasium of gothenburg (egg). in sweden, however, these tensions were especially prominent in regard to the nature of the democratic governance itself and its relevance for the student’s involvement in making decisions. we found a strong political divide between the students and the teachers in egg: the students, inspired by the students’ movements throughout europe and the usa, leaned toward marxist ideas on the political left (makko, 2012)24, while the swedish school authorities, who launched the school in cooperation with the local politicians, were mostly leaning toward the liberal political right. the same political division also existed among the students: the tension between liberal and collectivist views, placing education on different sides of the positive-negative freedom divide. this created tensions regarding the meaning of personal vs. group decisions. for instance, one of the interviewed former students of the egg, ilona (pseudonym), explained massive peer pressure regarding which personal ideology was legitimate to reveal in public. according to her the pressure came from the leftist students and their collectivist visions of school independence and the realization of idealized political values. additional pressures came from the fact that, like the norwegian ego and possibly even stricter, the egg was also controlled by the swedish educational laws and ministry of education in terms of the imposed curriculum and the control of the educational achievement as defined by the authorities. the tensions and conflicts the ego and egg students experienced right from the start of their schools opened for them the issues of who owns education, who has the legitimate power, and the authority in making decisions regarding different aspects of running the school. these tensions concerned, on the 23 “avvikere,” as described at the beginning of the paper, is a harsh word, meaning literally “deviants.” i (ana) thought it could be translated best as “punks” or “lazy punks” – to preserve its hard, insulting punch. øystein gullvåg holter was actually slightly taken aback when i quoted it from the published transcript of the general assembly meeting on november 2, 1967. “was it that hard word used?” øystein was not sure if translating it as “punks” would be good, because he associated it with the punk rock, which was nonexistent at the time, and the expression “punk” was not known to the norwegian teens in the 60s. 24 for instance, “the early half of the 1960s in sweden had been a time of transition, of intense societal and political changes. driven by the redefinition of standards of morality (as exemplified by the sexual revolution and debates on gender quality), the influence of western popular culture, and a keen interest in the vietnam war, the younger generation shifted toward the political left” (makko, 2012, p. 68). scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a109 one hand, the issues related to the outside pressures of the state educational authorities (departments of education in norway and sweden), and, on the other hand, the tensions concerning the schools’ internal power distribution and organization of decision making. below we present both types of tensions and concerns. decision-making processes and organization of the school governance being free from external institutional pressures and powers (at least to a degree) does not automatically mean that the tensions and disagreements among the democratic school members could be eliminated. on the contrary, freedom from external authorities demands defining the internal organization of powers in decision-making, including what counts as a legitimate authority in the face of disagreements and conflicts. in this sense, democratic schooling brings another dimension into the educational horizon – an exploration of one’s own, as well as the diverse and conflicting other views and values that guide important decision-making. we acknowledge that conflicts of opinion may create conflicts of power. and in dealing with conflicts of power, it is important to define ways of decision-making, especially the boundaries between formal and informal types of decision-making. we agree with rietmulder when he writes that “reflecting the social movement [of the 60s-70s era of social revolution, counterculture, and liberation movements], many free schools [in the usa] sought to eliminate power, structure, and authority generally […]. the result was not usually anarchy but instead pervasive informality: informal power, informal structure, and informal authority. some free schoolers tended to gloss over or ‘not see’ the presence of power, structure, and authority in their schools” (rietmulder, 2019, p. 15). in ego and egg, we see both tendencies: a) to create a more formal organizational and governance structure and b) to promote a more flexible, ad hoc, even “chaotic” environment. here we discuss the organizational aspects and issues of decision-making in the two schools and try to infer their meaning for the students. ego in norway the highest school authority in ego was the general assembly, which they called a “control organ.” “[the general assembly – allmannamøte] is a meeting of all people present in the school – the students, teachers, and any others who happen to be in school at that moment (such as an office assistant, caretaker, janitor)” (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 19). they gather to deliberate and make decisions about all school matters. the general assembly meetings are prepared by a five-member steering board that includes four students and one teacher elected each semester. besides the general assembly, explicitly named the “control organ,” ego formally institutionalized other controlling forms of governance as well. among them was a “council” as an “executive authority. it consists of three teachers and four students elected by the general assembly, the school's head (= "principal"), and a representative of the friends association [“venneforeningen”]. the council establishes the broad guidelines of the school's activity and decides on all possible practical and educational, and academic issues in collaboration with each class as far as possible. the council answers to the general assembly meeting, where minutes from the council meetings are read. council meetings are held twice a week.) they are usually open but can be closed if special reasons warrant it. (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 19). the ego organizational chart (see hem & remlov, 1969, p. 20) seemed to represent a highly formalized and hierarchically organized decision-making process rather than a horizontal direct democracy in which every participant had equal rights of input in every single decision. the general assembly at the top seemed to control the other subordinated councils and steering committees. hem and remlov actually had a critical remark about the school’s organization, characterizing it as governance that “may seem complicated, perhaps bureaucratic. and we need to admit: the danger of bureaucracy is imminent in such scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a110 a scheme. […] it might be that direct democracy is just an illusion and perhaps not at all a viable in practice” (hem & remlov, 1969, p. 21). the issue of “direct democratic” vs. a “bureaucratic” organization in decision-making was discussed by mosse jørgensen, who seemed to echo an awareness that existed in school – that realizing “direct democracy” may not be without complexities. the experimental gymnasium does not have to be ashamed that it has not invented forms of administration suitable for direct democracy. as far as i know, no one has so far – neither in school nor industry. but it is an important task for us to develop such forms (jørgensen, 1971, p. 149).25 the ego students seemed to experience two potentially interrelated problems in governing their school, at least in the first years of the school's existence. the first problem was the fact that the general assembly meetings were not well attended, which raised the questions of responsibility for school governance and what did it practically mean (see more in marjanovic-shane, 2023c). the second interrelated problem of the governance in ego lay in the profound differences and disagreements among the students regarding the purposes, the meaning of, and the approach to education (cf. marjanovic-shane, 2023b; marjanovic-shane, 2023c). egg in sweden the organization of decision-making in egg was somewhat different from the ego. in the egg internal publications, e.g., the school journals and newsletters, tina kullenberg (the second author) found that all the egg students had a direct power to prepare the agenda in the context of their general assemblies (in swedish: allmänna möten, e.g., general, open meetings26) referred to as “ams.” in contrast to ego’s more hierarchical, bureaucratic regulations of administrative powers, in the egg, the meetings were organized more freely and spontaneously (and, perhaps, also more chaotically). there did not exist a “control organ” nor any other social group with a pre-given mix of elected teachers and students with a specific area of decision making, as was the case of ego. rather, the immediate student needs were at the center of each meeting’s decision-making. when the students needed to declare certain issues and announce things, they took the initiative and summoned all the other students and leaders (as they called the teachers). moreover, the swedish egg leaders, with support from the national school board, openly welcomed chaos as an inevitable consequence of the experimental education and the initial nature of the school’s organization in progress. in this sense, uncertainties and chaos were legitimately viewed as a potentiality rather than as an obstacle to the organizational development of democratic education (carlsson & lundgren, 1976; skolöverstyrelsen, 1980). despite the freedom and spontaneity of the prevailing form of democratic decision-making in the egg, it was also repeatedly subjected to critique by the students, teachers, the school board inspectors, and other social and political groups and institutions. in practice, the low attendance of the common general assemblies made them function more as some kind of ad hoc representative democracy rather than as a direct democracy the founders originally envisioned. this was a problem for many students who commonly believed and complained that the decision-making was taking place somewhere above most students’ and sometimes even teachers’ heads and that it was done, to a large extent, by the administrative leaders. this 25 we want to thank eugene matusov for his remark about direct democracies in education. he disagreed with mosse jørgensen, adding that “she probably did not know about quakers or sudbury valley school [the first democratic school in the usa], which(barely) existed at that time. also, ancient athens had [direct democracy] as well.” 26 similarly to the norwegian “allmannamøte”, in swedish, it is “allmänna möte” – where “allmän” means public and general, as in “all men”; and “möte” means meeting.” scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a111 was perceived as undermining the ideal democratic role of the ams. paradoxically, carlsson & lundgren claimed that this was a result of the very low attendance of the ams, so it left the teachers (leaders) and a small number of students to make most of the decisions. as they put in their assessment: the attendance frequency at the general meeting was, as mentioned, low, and the dissemination of information via notes rarely reached everyone. direct democracy has brought about certain disadvantages since the concentration of all decision-making into the ams is considered to have left little room for individual measures and, in addition, inhibited personal initiative (carlsson & lundgren, 1976, p. 25, translation by kullenberg). in a school journal, chris, an egg student, candidly concluded that “am is just a glorious mask we project outward pretending to maintain the idea that we have democracy, in which we, after all, have the right to be engaged.” another former student i (tina) interviewed, johan öberg, also doubted that the school democracy was genuine. “ultimately, i think it all was in the hands of the leader,” he said. in this sense, democracy was somewhat illusory in his and other students’ eyes. we suspect that there may have been three major causes for what the egg students perceived as malfunctions of the democracy. first, like the ego in norway, the egg lacked full educational sovereignty from the swedish educational authorities (see more below in the section on the limited sovereignty). this is confirmed in the national school inspector’s report, bringing up precisely this dilemma regarding power. furthermore, this might be the reason why the school leader became a target of the students’ critique: the [students’] relationship with authorities was sometimes tense. this could be linked to high expectations as many initially imagined eg as a free upper secondary school, that is, a self-governing unit assigned full freedom. then it is quite natural that every time you experience restraints to that freedom, you perceive it as an imposition by the authorities. one group that was subject to criticism was the administration, which is the school leader and his assistant. as their function was to also serve as experts in accordance with the authorities’ rules and decisions, especially the school leader appeared to be the primary obstacle to the freedom, [the students] thought was possible (skolöverstyrelsen, p. 52, translation by kullenberg). second, there existed a tension between the individual students’ needs and rights of personal educational freedom and self-determination on the one hand, and the collective pressures from the school authorities and some peers to actively participate in school meetings’ collective decision making, on the other. according to a 1974 survey27, out of a total of 59 egg students, three declared that they never participated in the ams, and 18 declared that they “rarely” participated. thus, 21 students out of 59, i.e., 36%, barely participated in the decision-making. explaining their choice not to participate, some of the students declared that the ams were irrelevant, insignificant, and boring for them. for instance, one of the students remarked, “there is a lack of debate questions and questions about our studies.” other 16 students declared that the am forum entailed “not intriguing issues, [was] generally boring, [and it was] a waste of time.” six students wrote: “too much shit talk; only a few [students] talk all the time and claim they know everything.” for four other students, the reason for non-participation was “the feeling of insecurity: you get booed or stared down if you say something.” other responses include statements like “am is a fake.” consequently, some students regarded this institutional way of engaging in democracy as a waste of time and had no reason to participate. at least one-third of the egg students did not feel that collective decision-making about the school issues mattered in their lives or in their education. for some students, participating in collective democratic decision-making was in conflict with their studies. 27 this survey and its results are part of the archival materials found in the gothenburg archive of the egg school. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a112 third, in the egg, there existed an implicit distinction between the so-called “organizational” and “pedagogical” areas of practice. the “organizational area” [referred to as the “social area” in the archived school documents] pertained to the decisions regarding school governance, i.e., running the school as an institution and organizing the social aspects of school life, for instance, making decisions about the physical maintenance of the building (furniture, equipment, resources), about the time schedules, extracurricular activities, trips, etc. on the other hand, the so-called “pedagogical” area of practice referred to the educational aspects of practice, including teaching and learning, creating curricula, deciding on the forms of instruction, educational duties and obligations, evaluation, etc. these two areas of practice, the “organizational (social)” and the “pedagogical” areas, were often counter-positioned, creating inherent tensions. for instance, some students faced a dilemma about what to prioritize: being active in democratic decision-making processes (i.e., the social area) as a member of the organizational collective or engaging in one’s own studies as an individual student, at one’s own pace, according to one’s own desires, (i.e., the pedagogical area). these two kinds of engagement, the two perceived forms of students’ agency, competed for precious time and for recognition, working at the expense of each other.28 in addition, it seemed that the students’ governance was potentially limited in scope. my (tina’s) impression (based on the documents left in the archives) is that the swedish school authorities, including the egg administrative leaders, perhaps considered “the social-organizational area” of decision making to be a more legitimate field of students’ engagement in governance than the so-called “pedagogical area” that was often referred to as “mainly the teacher’s area of practice” (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980). in other words, the egg students were not given full sovereignty over their education, even when they were granted rights to make various decisions regarding their schooling. lack of full sovereignty from the national educational authorities both the ego in norway and the egg in sweden were officially regulated through their state’s public-school policies. they were not completely independent private schools – like the summerhill in great britain or the sudbury valley school in the usa. this meant that both schools had limited sovereignty within their respective state educational laws and regulations and in the eye of the larger society. however, there existed differences in the ways these limitations were played out in practice and, in turn, how they interfered with the student's decision making, educational rights, and their own understandings of and approaches to education. ego in norway the ego had to adhere to the state-recommended guidelines regarding curriculum, instruction, and some other educational areas. still, the norwegian authorities provided rather wide curriculum guidelines for ego, as it seems that the students had a lot of opportunities to make specific decisions regarding all areas of their education and school organization (see below). nevertheless. the partial sovereignty often led to the students’ and teachers’ disorientation and fears, which had an impact on the students’ interpersonal relationships, as some students pressured their peers to attend the “obligatory” classes despite the school’s proclaimed principle of voluntary attendance (see more in marjanovic-shane, 2023b, 2023c). however, it must also be highlighted that the ego teachers and the students were not completely deterred by the norwegian educational authorities. actually, they continued to experiment with the curriculum and instruction, changing them in different ways and constantly applying to the authorities for 28 xto paraphrase an alleged saying by oscar wilde or george bernard shaw: “the trouble with [democracy] is that it takes up too many evenings.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/06/03/evenings/ scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a113 the new permissions, and sometimes even getting them approved. as we describe below, the students’ voices in creating the curriculum were relatively strong. egg in sweden like in norway, the egg was also bound by the national curricular imperatives and dependent on the national school board regulations and its judgments, coupled with regular school inspections. egg had to follow the state-defined curriculum, assessments, final grades, and other educational regulations. this led to the limitations of the students’ voices in decision-making about the “pedagogical area” of practice. tensions between the students’ voices and the actual practice of education were noticed by danish lector maria sommer when she visited the school in gothenburg. in a school newsletter, sommer reveals how puzzled she became while observing the swedish teachers at this school (sommer, 1971). while the egg students attempted to engage eagerly in self-initiated student-led learning, the teachers adhered to the imposed state-based curriculum. according to sommer’s impression, unlike the norwegian teachers, the swedish teachers did not, or perhaps could not, interpret the national curriculum freely and were teaching or were forced by the state to teach this curriculum uncritically, word for word. sommer was concerned about the students’ academic freedom as perceived by students in the light of the teachers’ conventional approach to teaching and learning. the egg students shared sommer’s concern for their democratic education, as it is evident from the testimony of a student, rundkvist, we quoted above, we sat there, silent, and shy, and only the teacher talked. from time to time, he/she threw out a question that after, like five minutes, finally was answered in a shy whisper. ‘well,’ one thought, ‘it will soon be better when everyone knows each other. the spontaneous work pleasure will probably emerge.’ but it never did. and when the school day was over, all had to rush home. today, we still stand in the same place. the lessons are, in many ways, silent performances where not many words are spoken, except by the teacher (rundkvist, 1970, translation by kullenberg). the egg students were fully aware that their school lacked full sovereignty from the swedish educational authorities. in the archival documents of the school, tina kullenberg found lots of examples in the students’ texts where the students referred to the greater society outside school as an enemy: a threat to their freedom to practice radical democracy in school and a threat to the personal educational freedom of its diverse participants. the lack of sovereignty contributed to the students’ growing discontent and frustration with what they saw as fake democracy. as a counterstrategy that potentially further undermined the school democracy, carl gustav, the egg’s “experimental leader,” and other administrators in the school tried to re-direct the students from focusing on the school’s lack of sovereignty to their own irresponsible attitudes to participating in the school’s democratic governance. carl gustav articulated the issue of low participation in democratic governance in his letter to students published in the egg’s school newsletter. he framed the problem as the students’ subjective issues causing their low participation, we know by now that our self-determination has certain limits. if you want to express it head-on, you can say that we decide on our environment and on our study situation. /…/ if democracy now means that everyone has the right to participate in the decisions, then we have democracy. if, on the other hand, democracy means that everyone must participate in the decisions, then we have a bad democracy. now i think it is irrelevant how we define the concept of democracy. the only thing that matters is that we have what we want scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a114 or that we accept what we currently have as the best until we find something else that is even better. the urgent question then becomes: do we have it like we want it to be? a follow-up question will then be: what are the causes that have contributed to the current situation [of low participation in the school general meetings]? [is it that] we are not interested in decisions about the [school] environment? should we leave the right of decision with joy and confidence to those who want to own it? are the issues [that we discuss here] boring? is the reason [for non-participation in the ams] the lack of time? is it perhaps irrelevant to us where the walls are, whether we have carpets or not, whether they are yellow or green or if we have curtains? it is very possible that all this is true. none of us know it. we should, therefore, find out how it is through a survey (sundén, 1970, translation by tina kullenberg, italics and highlights are ours). in the continuation of this letter, carl gustav addressed a potential need for transforming the school’s social order because of what he saw as problems with the school’s existing distribution of power. he highlighted the vital role of the general assembly forum, am, as an organ of democratic governance, but only if the members of the school found it important and interesting enough to participate in. his premise was that they should together aim at achieving the agreed view that collective decision-making really matters to all of them. this was a recurring critical element of the school’s democratic nature: the necessity of imposing collective principles on individual freedoms. this paradoxical equation of individual and collective freedoms rested on the unresolved tension between the individual and collective needs and was continuously contested throughout the everyday life of the school. in students’ opinion, carl gustav acted as an extended arm of the department of education rather than protecting the egg’s sovereignty and supporting the students in their claims for more freedom and full ownership of their education. by rather cynically blaming the students for the lack of interest and engagement in the school governance, carl gustav elevated his and other school leaders’ (the teachers and the school administration) authoritarian powers. the egg students were well aware of that, as we witnessed in their multiple publications in the school’s newsletters and journals, in the surveys and interviews with the school psychologist, and in the interviews with tina (the second author). they started to perceive the school democracy as illusionary rather than a full-fledged genuine democracy. they had a feeling that they had just tasted something delicious that they dreamt of and worked hard for, unparalleled in their school history, but were not quite allowed to have. they wanted their full freedoms and ownership of education to blossom forth, freely and abundantly. the outer societal authorities and the in-school leaders who assisted these authorities were, understandably, viewed as obstructive to the realization of the student agency. finally, these authoritarian pressures that undermined students’ agency might have intensified conflicts and tensions among students with different educational interests and goals: those who were more interested in the school governance itself and those who were not actively participating in it (for many different reasons). for instance, some students wanted to spend more time on their academic studies, which left them less time to engage in school decision-making. however, they were chastised by other politically left-leaning students for the lack of solidarity. the school board noted: “some students abstained from attending the public meetings [ams] in order to gain time for studies, which others experienced as acts of non-solidarity” (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980, p. 48, translation by kullenberg). * * * in our opinion, there was a profound difference in orientation to their respective state educational authorities between the two school leaders. it seemed that mosse jørgensen, the ego leader, tried to scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a115 shield the fledgling students’ democratic school from the open pressures of the norwegian department of education. on the other hand, carl gustav, the egg leader, sometimes seemed to act more as an extended arm of the swedish educational authorities than as an egg democratic member with equal rights. this is not to claim that there were no other problems with mosse jørgensen’s seemingly patronizing and authoritarian educational streaks, known to us from other sources (melheim, 2019). however, a detailed discussion of that sort is out of the scope of this article. although the ego and egg seized to exist due to multiple external and internal reasons, some of which have been discussed above, the very fact of their existence left a lasting mark on the educational systems in the two countries. first and foremost, the requirement to allow the students to voice their opinions on all the conditions of the educational process the students are involved in became a must and was embraced on the political level as it has been stipulated in various forms in different documents, including the national laws that regulate the secondary parts of the educational systems and national curricula from the 1980s on. thus, it is safe to conclude that the existence of the two schools, together with other educational establishments where alternative pedagogy had been practiced in both countries, indirectly contributed to a higher level of students’ participation in the decision-making processes in education in both countries. further, the very fact that such educational establishments could appear and exist made such experiments possible in the future. in norway, the most visible mark of the educational epoch that these two schools represent is the existence of amphitheaters in some schools and higher educational establishments. it might be that the main reason behind the end of the schools was a new set of requirements for educational systems that appeared in connection with the economic development trends in both sweden and norway in the 1980s. the internal aspect of such educational establishments that was criticized a lot was the level of individual freedom that these schools allowed and the lack of a systemic approach to leadership practices (gradovski, 2008). students’ voice, authorship, and the ownership of education in this section, we explore how the newly emerging democratic school governance supported, promoted, or limited and suppressed opportunities for ethical-ontological dialogues where a student could be a legitimate author of their own ultimate truths, values, and desires. we explore our second question: what aspects of the ego and egg democratic governance created educational ecologies that legitimize ethical-ontological dialogism in which the students can test their ideas and author their truths and subjectivities? in other words, what did the democratization of their schooling mean for the students’ authorial agency? conceptualizing learning as authorship of one’s relationships to the world, to others, and to oneself has particular implications on the notion that decisions about education belong to the personal sphere of negative freedom – i.e., that “area within which the subject is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons” (berlin, 2006, p. 34). however, this educational right of negative freedom has been either denied or extremely limited throughout the history of education. even the enlightenment thinkers starting from kant, who insisted on human autonomy as the condition for human dignity, denied such autonomy in the matters of education to children, the immature, ignorant, and irrational people. this kantian paradox has its roots in the belief that not everyone should be given autonomy (personal negative freedom) in making important decisions, including about themselves, especially educational decisions. the rationale was that only those people who are mature, rational, and informed are able to make good decisions, good both for themselves and for society. in other words, education becomes a liminal practice of enlightenment by another, imposed and “foisted on uneducated and undereducated, immature, irrational, uninformed, and ignorant people in order for those people to be able to achieve their autonomy and, thus, human dignity later on, when education is done on them” scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a116 (matusov, 2021c, p. e12). in other words, education stays outside of the personal bubble of “negative freedom” and the learners cannot be considered as responsible authors of their relationships. in terms of ethical-ontological dialogue, positive freedom implies that there is an extrinsic authority (other people, established beliefs and values, etc.) that independently defines what is good for the learner) that overpowers the learner, abolishing “equal rights of consciousness,” and thus the dialogue itself. learning from the “positive freedom” becomes accomplishing predefined “good and true” end-goals. in contrast, conceptualizing learning as an authorial endeavor and education as a matter of the students’ own evaluation of their learning authorship (matusov, 2021c) puts education right back into the sphere of the students’ personal negative freedom. elsewhere matusov and i claimed that authorial intrinsic education is fully socially promoted and realized through the emergent ethical-ontological dialogues in which the learner legitimately has multidimensional academic freedoms which include the following negative freedoms: a) freedom to decide what to learn (curriculum); b) freedom to decide how, when, where, and with whom to learn and ask for guidance (instruction); c) freedom to engage or disengage, freedom to learn or not to learn (participation); d) freedom to determine what is or is not important for the learner to study or to do, the quality, and the purpose of his/her education (valuation); d) a right to have access to and opportunity for a rich educational environment, pregnant with and supportive of diverse discourses, practices, and values (ecology); e) freedom to define one’s own approach to learning for particular areas of knowledge and skills, i.e. whether to engage in learning as a critical learner, a credential student, a creative learner, an autodidact, an apprentice, etc. (role); and f) freedom of necessities, e.g. needs such as hunger, sickness, concerns about shelter, concerns about safety, concerns about future well-being, and so on (having leisure) (adapted from matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019, p. 32). we want to especially stress here that having legitimate rights of personal negative freedom in education does not mean that education can exist in a vacuum, without and apart of the others, the society, and the culture in which it takes place. on the contrary, we argue that the right of personal academic freedom is a necessary condition for genuine ethical-ontological dialogism, in terms of being taken seriously in the relationships with others, society and culture, as a “consciousness with equal rights” of the critical and creative production of new and unique cultural and social meanings. the question is, what kind of ownership of education did the ego and egg students seek, and consequently, what kinds of freedom the students had and/or wanted to have. in this section, we investigate the multidimensional boundaries of the personal educational “negative” freedom that the ego and egg students (and teachers) negotiated as they democratically governed their schools. in other words, we try to infer students’ (and teachers’) diverse conceptualizations of education out of their (recorded and described) discussions, their demands, and their critiques of their own democratic governance. overall, it seems to us that in both schools, at least some students and teachers may have begun to be more accepting and support the students’ right to bring their own political and ideological explorations into the school discussions. the members of these schools became more open to including students’ political and ideological activism (“student power”) in their formal education, as well as the students’ subjectivity, educational desires, values, and needs. for instance, in the swedish egg, the students could freely express and discuss rebellious leftist political ideologies not shared by all teachers and thus, in these matters, act as equals to all others. for instance, in the egg school newsletters and journals, one can find highly idealized and romanticized ideas of marxism and russian-influenced socialism illustrated with pictures of moscow or citations of russian poems. at the same time, in both ego and egg, there existed considerable disagreements among the participants regarding what aspects of their academic freedoms mentioned above could legitimately belong scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a117 within the sphere of the students’ personal authorial (negative) freedom, i.e., within the sphere of personal agency. the tension between democratic governance and personal educational freedoms what seemed to surprise many students at the very start of their schools was the fact that the democratic governance of a school in which they were expected to freely participate did not necessarily promote students’ personal freedoms to pursue and realize their individual educational projects. in the case of sweden’s egg, one of the major tensions that penetrated the school activities, and, above all, the students’ school existence was the clash between the collective norms, values, and ideology they tried to establish and the students’ individual desires. the students experienced pressure to establish uniform, collective values, interests, and views. these pressures came not only from the state educational authorities or the school administrative leaders but were especially strong coming from the idealistic, socialist-minded peers who often staunchly demanded collective solidarity at the price of the individual voice. that implied prevalence of the value of a single-voiced, monologic discourse, a monistic view characterized by consensus-oriented calls for loyalty, unity, and making decisions as a tightly bound community of like-minded individuals. in practice, that ended up with significant compromises when coming to students’ individual preferences for their studies, corrupting and undermining the students’ sense of ownership of education, as well. perhaps the most salient and frequent example in practice, found in the egg archived documents (e.g., local surveys and school papers) and interviews, were constant collective appeals to the individuals pressuring the students to participate in all kinds of school governance meetings; the unrelenting summons to uphold the democratic functions of the school organization itself. however, as mentioned above, the problem for some involved students with high ambitions in their comprehensive studies was that participating in public meetings indeed stole their individual, precious time for studying. at least, this is how the problem was experienced among several students. relentless meetings became a time-consuming endeavor in many students’ eyes, and this conflict was not easy to solve in the psychological sense. hence, there existed high tensions and conflicts between the students’ rights and needs to fully engage in their personal educational journeys and the pressures of the imposed obligations to actively participate in the collective ownership of and decision making about the educational practice. the tension between the obligation to democratic governance and the rights of personal academic freedoms has another important dimension. as the first author (ana) discovered in the analysis of the crucial soul-searching assembly in ego that took place only two months after the school was opened, “[h]aving equal rights of input in the school’s democratic government does not automatically guarantee [decisions that support] students’ personal academic freedoms. in some cases, … [democratically made decisions] may limit or even abolish some or most of the educational freedoms” (marjanovic-shane, 2023b(p. ?)). in that sense, democratic decisions, just like the decisions of authoritarian governance, can be extremely limiting to personal freedoms and rights (cf. “a tyranny of the majority”). as discussed above, in belin’s words, “just as a democracy may, in fact, deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberalminded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom” (berlin, 1969, p. 7). in that sense, the concept of the students’ “ownership of education” is not identical to the concept of democratic school governance. in fact, tensions between the collective and the personal rights and obligations both in ego and egg indicate that the students’ authorial agency expressed and examined in ethical-ontological dialogue may be better supported and promoted when the educational democracy is liberal, making the “bubble” of the personal negative freedom big enough to legitimately include diverse aspects of education. limiting personal educational freedoms also limits the width, depth, and scope of the ethical-ontological dialogism in education by imposing the pre-given, non-negotiable truths and values considered as the untouchable and immutable guiding principles and rules in such educational ecology. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a118 in the next section, we explore the ways several aspects of education in ego and egg were democratically deliberated and negotiated in terms of the boundaries between the spheres of students’ negative and positive freedoms, as well as the reasons and rationales provided (when available) for different positions. freedom of participation – collective and personal perspectives ego in norway one of the greatest disagreements among the ego students at the very beginning of their school erupted around the issue of the promised (and seemingly guaranteed) voluntary attendance of classes. namely, the school founders made voluntary attendance one of the school’s main principles, but in the span of just a few weeks from the school opening, this led to more than a 50% drop in class attendance. this became a problem for some students and teachers, many of whom were the school founders. they decided to raise this issue as the problem at a general assembly held on november 2, 1967 (hem & remlov, 1969). the heated discussion started with a debate on the meaning and the rights of educational participation, but it quickly triggered passionate confrontations among the students (and teachers) about the meanings of students’ personal freedoms, responsibilities, rights, and obligations – an examination of their diverse and conflicting views of the purpose of education and the principal life values. the debate lasted more than four hours, as the students deliberated and revealed vastly different conceptualizations of education they held, and many voiced strong disagreements with the founders’ pre-adopted approach to education and schooling. it became apparent that there existed different, opposing, and even mutually conflicting views of the freedom of participation. negative and positive freedom of participation in ego the ego students' disagreements about participation could be conceptualized as the tension between two views: a) each student has a right to personally decide both whether to attend the teacher prepared classes and how to participate in them (which classes to pick, which ones not); and b) the students are only allowed to make decisions on how to participate in classes – which classes to pick, as long as they pick some. there was also a debate on whether it would be enough to pick any classes the student wanted to pick or whether some classes were implicitly mandated (those with academic content) while others were truly elective (swimming, dancing, etc.). when the school opened in september 1967, a rule of “voluntary attendance” was explicitly formulated. soon it became obvious that this can have different interpretations. some incoming students immediately interpreted the principle of voluntary attendance as their personal “negative freedom.” many rarely attended classes, if at all, staying in the school hallways, playing music, and socializing. some attended only “bodybuilding or swimming,” but it turned out that the founding students considered these classes to be “extra-curricular” rather than the primary classes. the founding students, “the nannies,” realized that this was not really what they meant by “voluntary attendance” in planning their school. for them, it became a problem of the very possibility of the school's existence. in the soul-searching assembly, åge, one of the leading “nannies,” formulated this problem as the tension between personal freedom – i.e., negative freedom; and collective responsibilities/obligations and values – i.e., positive freedom. åge viewed complete non-participation in classes as illegitimate, and those students who systematically stay out of classes as indifferent toward the school and its community. åge: one must begin to realize that in a democracy, one must also have some rules that must be followed. it must be possible, for example, to meet up for a class… […] yes, [those students who do not attend classes] are completely indifferent to how the school works. […] scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a119 – should those students be allowed to go here? ... does our school have an interest in having students who are entirely unmotivated to [be in] our school? […] i'm hoping that people will realize that – this is not a school where you can be completely indifferent. it is a school… that is serious! a serious educational endeavor […] there is no place for people who can do what they want. this is a school and not a playroom, indeed! (pp. 24-25). the problem was conceptualized as the existence of “two kinds of freedom” by another student, roar, roar: … but there is not just one thing called freedom – there also exists another term, it is called freedom under [with] the responsibility. i repeat, under the responsibility. we are responsible for our fellow students. we are responsible for our own schooling (pp. 26-27) … personal freedom! of course personal freedom! – … [but] we are all under obligation to the social milieu here, because we're all human, and that milieu consists of [the opinions of all] people (p. 32). roar and åge interpreted freedom of participation in education as the “positive freedom,” in their words, “freedom under responsibility” to the socially and culturally predefined educational rights, what roar called “social milieu” already described, defined, and accepted educational policies, values, and rules. even if the school “milieu” (approach to education) could be negotiated, “freedom under responsibility” is definable in principle, and it should be defined as the unifying educational approach to which all the participants can be held accountable (responsible). in this view (held by many founders), “voluntary attendance” means “positive freedom” of how to engage in education and excludes personal rights to decide whether to participate or not. but åge, roar, and other like-minded students were opposed by others who argued for the student’s personal right to freely decide about their educational participation. according to this opposing view, ego should protect each student’s right of (negative) freedom of participation, namely their freedom to deliberate, define and make their own decisions regarding all matters of their own educational responsibility. in other words, students’ right to define what they want to do for their own personal development, how, and why. tom, also one of the prominent founding students, realized that it is negative freedom that is an absolutely necessary condition for a person to become both a self-responsible and a socially-responsible person: tom: … [if you say that you want to expel the “deviants”], … in that very moment, [you imply] that this school is not for the students to become responsible community citizens who are aiming for… not to study for the graduation exam, but [for] the knowledge to do something in the community they live in. to try to change their society, to become socially conscious, to have freedom and free will, and to be radical. […] that is exactly what one should try to find, one’s own opinions on all matters. to work with society and oneself, it’s as tough as nails. nothing is as easy as being conservative and just hanging under some authority… (pp. 37-38). ego students conflicting views about the negative and positive freedom of participation revealed (both to themselves and to me ana) their deep paradigmatic differences regarding the very nature, purpose, and value of the education they wanted to practice in their school (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). i (ana) delve deeper into the students’ paradigmatically different and conflicting ideological and conceptual views in the article “paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis” in this volume (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a120 at this point, we want to bring to the attention the fact that the students’ differences regarding freedom of participation might also have been amplified by the pressures of the norwegian department of education, from which the school was not completely independent. namely, norwegian educational policies (both then and to a certain extent now) include a gatekeeping condition for enrollment in norwegian universities by requiring that the students pass a pan-norwegian high school graduating exam – the artium.29 but even applying for this exam was conditioned on having taken certain “advanced level” predefined academic courses in high school. this educational policy strongly affected the considerations and views of the more academically oriented students in ego. mandated by the department of education, this policy limited the student's personal (negative) educational freedom. educational freedom of participation under their rules becomes “freedom under responsibility,” i.e., positively defined freedom. in our view, once accepted, positive freedom limits the scope of the ethical-ontological dialogue regarding participation, narrowing it to the deliberations of “how” to participate, and thus, potentially leaving legitimate space only for deliberating the “electives,” as some students’ remarks indicated (see more in marjanovic-shane, 2023c). egg in sweden the egg students’ participation in democratic governance directly affected the relationships among the participants, their rights, voices, and agency, and their freedoms of education. what decisions are passed depends, of course, on whose voice and opinions will prevail. non-participation in making decisions means not having a voice and power. but, it means much more. democracy ceases to be “democratic” if people stop raising their voices. when just a small number of group members participate in democratic decision-making, democracy itself is eroded. the governance becomes the rule of a small group – an oligarchy, if not a straightforward dictatorship. the necessity of hearing all or most voices in democratic decision-making was recognized already in ancient athens. in some periods in the athenian democracy, participation in making decisions (voting) was not only a citizens’ right but an obligation, too30. they could be fined or otherwise punished for non-participation. people who stayed away from participating in the politics of the athenian governance were called “idiots,” a patronizing label meaning pejoratively people who have no skills or interests but “one’s own.”31 the practical challenge to direct democracy can come from a lack of opposition to the opinionated voices of a small but loud minority. decisions made by a minority may become imposed on the whole group, potentially limiting personal liberties by creating predefined “positive freedom” by defining what is “good for all.” thus, the question for democratic education becomes the question of having personal rights and liberties in general and of the boundary between positive and negative freedom of participation, in specific – both in the educational and in the legislative aspects of the school. as we mentioned above, the leftist-oriented students exerted considerable pressure on everyone to participate in the decision-making am meetings. in our view, they considered participation in the democratic process as a matter of the students’ positive freedom, shaming those who would not come to the meetings. however, the egg school leader, carl gustav, addressed the problem in his letter to the egg students that we quoted above – from the position of the students’ negative freedom to make their own decisions regarding participation in the general public meetings (ams) where voting and decision 29 “examen artium was the name of the academic certification conferred in denmark and norway, qualifying the student for admission to university studies. examen artium was originally introduced as the entrance exam of the university of copenhagen in 1630. […] in norway, examen artium was formally discontinued after the 1982 class (but the term is still sometimes used informally to denote the diploma from today's "videregående skole").” – wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/examen_artium, retrieved on july 29, 2021. 30 see more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/athenian_democracy 31 the online etymological dictionary gives the following definition: “greek idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill" (opposed to writer, soldier, skilled workman), literally "private person" (as opposed to one taking part in public affairs), used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own" scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a121 making was at stake. the fact that many students chose non-participation in the ams puzzled carl gustav and forced him to further problematize what school democracy is or should be. despite the dangers of the low am meetings attendance, carl gustav framed the problem in terms of voluntary participation in the school governance rather than forcing the students to participate. “if democracy now means that everyone has the right to participate in the decisions, then we have democracy. if, on the other hand, democracy means that everyone must participate in the decisions, then we have a bad democracy” (sundén, 1970). in the face of such a dilemma, we can see here how carl gustav implicitly approached the dialogic problems of voicing – as the perpetual tensions between individual and collective preferences. in this case, it also seems that carl gustav placed the participation in the democratic governance in the sphere of the student’s negative freedom, leaving it to the student to freely decide. freedom of curriculum, instruction, and evaluation – tensions between students’ ownership of learning, teachers’ ownership of teaching, and the state educational policies while the meaning of freedom of participation in education seemed to be often debated in terms of the students’ negative and positive freedoms (at least at the start of both ego and egg), freedom of curriculum, instruction, and evaluation was a different story. we claim that the students’ freedom in the matters of curriculum, instruction, and evaluation was debated mostly as a matter of the scope of their positive freedoms, i.e., in terms of degrees of freedom for navigating an already preset curricular and instructional sphere and the norms set by the overall state gatekeeping exams like the norwegian artium or high grades in relevant school subjects in sweden. although there existed some students (in ego) with pluralist views on education, who argued for the students’ complete negative freedom to decide the purpose of their education, even if that meant a conflict with the existing predetermined curriculum, their number was small, and their ideas were not always clear to the others.32 to us, it seemed that in both schools, ethical-ontological dialogues around curriculum, instruction, and evaluation were promoted only as a matter of the positive freedom within the positively defined curriculum and the teachers’ creativity and mastery of instruction. ego in norway the experimental high school has not been granted permission [by the department of education] to conduct curriculum experiments. we have been desperate about that. eager students and teachers with lots of ideas have their wings slashed. we submitted piles of experimental proposals to the department of education, but all we received back were rejections. at best, we were allowed to “try out” only what others had done first. there is a state monopoly on [educational] pioneering activities in norway (jørgensen, 1971, pp. 78-79). students’ voices and agency in the norwegian ego were promoted by organizing small group dialogues (not more than 13 students per group) either about some organizational decisions or regarding matters of the curriculum and instruction relevant to the group. for instance, jørgensen wrote, just before the summer break [of 1967], after a long discussion with both the old and the new students, we decided to start the next school year in the area of social studies, with the exploration of the problems of the developing countries. during the summer break, i [the teacher] read three books about these problems, and i felt considerably prepared. when the new school year started, and we came to the first class, i hardly, so to say, 32 see detailed analysis in the paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: a conceptual analysis (marjanovic-shane, 2023b). scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a122 opened my mouth when ulf [a student] said: “do we really have to talk about the developing countries? i am so bored by constantly being fed information about them that i can’t stand it anymore.” others agreed with him. it turned out that all of them were fed up with this topic because all of them had heard a lot about it in their [previous] schools. developing countries are currently a hot political issue, and it is commonly thought to be an important topic in education. so, what should we do? we started to discuss this. we talked for several hours, touching on a lot of topics. some students wanted one thing, another wanted another, and there was always someone who had strong opposing reasons. in the end, we found a topic we were all interested in – school and education. then we argued for a long time about how to organize the work. we split into four smaller groups to look for the literature (jørgensen, 1977, pp. 152-153, translation by marjanovic-shane). it seemed that in small study groups, students had the freedom to develop dialogues about curriculum and instruction within several larger curricular areas. namely, although ego and egg were obliged to follow the prescribed state curriculum, the students and teachers together decided to group all the prescribed subjects into fewer larger areas that could be explored in more creative ways. these small groups of students and teachers would look for resources both in the existing official textbooks and in other publications like paperbacks, popular books, and journals. for instance, in one of these smaller groups working in the area of social studies, the students became interested in educational theories based on freud’s psychoanalysis. in another group, students decided to interview people from different social classes and walks of life about their own understanding of education. the study was a long-term project at the end of which their teacher, mosse jørgensen, had to leave for a 10-day trip. the students continued to work on the project without her, wrote reports on their findings, and distributed copies of their reports to each other. based on that, it is possible to believe that some of the students actually made this research experience their own educational project. jørgensen also reports that in the course of a reflexive discussion of this project, the students have already started to plan a study of the next topic of interest, which they defined as the “means of mass communication” (jørgensen, 1971, pp. 121-122). there existed other collaborations among the students and teachers in defining the curriculum of the students’ own interests, but for each curricular innovation, they had to apply to the department of education. in some cases, the school would get permission, and a new area of studies would be opened. this was the case with the computer and data processing studies. when they received permission, the students and their math and science teacher, herman ruge, worked on designing a mini-computer “benjamin.” they jointly prepared three seminars in computer data processing for other high school teachers who wanted to teach this subject in their own high schools (jørgensen, 1971, p. 80). thus, although students’ initiatives in the curriculum and instruction were supported, the final word of approval and evaluation was outside of their legitimate rights, i.e., their negative freedom. the impact of the students’ ownership of education on teachers when the students have the right to decide about their participation in education, including the right of non-participation in academic practices, and when they have the right to influence curriculum and instruction, it leads to enormous changes in the way teaching and teachers’ roles are conceptualized33. this was potentially the most shocking discovery for the teachers in both schools. in a democratic school, 33 at this point, we do not discuss the kinds of instruction and the overall evaluation of the kinds of pedagogy, and especially dialogic pedagogy in the democratic school. here we want to focus only on the change in the teachers’ and the students’ roles regarding the choice of the curriculum and the legitimacy of the student’s choice to prevail over the teachers’ choice. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a123 the value and the importance of the teachers’ guidance may be freely determined by the students rather than by the wider social and academic communities, educational experts, or the teachers themselves. for the teachers, this change of placing the power and authority in the hands of the students is both valuable and risky! it may provide the teachers with the important and necessary feedback about their teaching from those who matter the most – the students! but precisely because of that, it exposes the teachers to a real risk of failure in their traditional role of unquestioned and unchallenged authority. in a recent interview, former ego student, øystein, said: i think, also as a sociologist, that i venture to say [that the issue of who owns the education] was the main cause of this conflict, you know. the main principle for the pupils was that they were to be treated like, almost like the [university] students34. meaning they would choose if they showed up or not. right. very radical. … yeah. all right. and then come the teachers, right? and then comes a mechanism that i don't think anyone had anticipated: how many persons are in your class. yes? so, if it's three pupils, it reflects badly on you, even though you [may agree with] these principles of freedom… so, it's a very… a quite natural reaction in a sense. … i can remember very well teachers going around and saying: "don't sit here in the corridor playing guitar. please come to the classes. yeah, we know it's up to you… [you are the ones] that have [the rights] to decide. but please come." and you could feel sorry for them almost. (from the interview with øystein gullvåg holter, october 15th, 2019). we read a similar report in jørgensen’s book: the encounter between the teachers and the students in the experimental gymnasium was turbulent and difficult – if we even met each other. without an obligation to attend the classes, students mostly did not attend them. exactly this was the main domain where they could thoroughly test their freedoms. the teachers would return to the teacher’s lounge crying and looking for consolation when they experienced entering a classroom in which there was no one or in which there sat a very small group of students. this was a very hard experience for young teachers because their self-confidence could be shaken. it was pretty hard, even for us who had a lot of experience. was our work in the past possible only because the students were forced to listen to us? to endure [and overcome] this anguish, we needed a lot of self-confidence and faith in the cause we fought for (jørgensen, 1977, p. 121). the new democratic regime in the ego threw many teachers into an existential crisis, an urgent need to find a new meaning of being a teacher. without the well-known institutional scaffold of the old school, the teachers “… needed a deeper examination of ourselves and our professions… we could not hide behind any new barrier to protect our own safety. we had to uncover our whole personalities, including all our weaknesses, in the open… and that was very difficult! because if we showed ourselves openly, what if it revealed that we had no ability to be teachers. it could have been a shock! although, in the long term, such a shock would have been lucky for both sides (jørgensen, 1977, pp. 125-126). when we look at the teachers’ dilemmas from the point of view of what it means to promote ethicalontological dialogues, it seems the very concept of a teacher in the traditional sense is based on the assumption of a hierarchical relationship to the student. there is no actual equality between the teachers’ and the students’ consciousnesses. the students’ educational freedom of curriculum, instruction, and 34 in many european languages the term “students” is commonly reserved for the university students only, e.g. the more adult, more mature people. children and youth attending elementary, middle and high schools are commonly referred to as the “pupils” – always subordinated to the adults. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a124 evaluation can only be conceptualized in terms of positive freedoms – where the teacher is the one who defines what this freedom is good for and the scope of its legitimacy. students’ right to non-participation in the teacher-defined curriculum denies the very role of the teacher in creating a real existential crisis. egg in sweden similarly, the swedish teachers in the egg had to learn the hard way about what the students’ freedoms meant for transforming their teacher role directed by this new school regime: its democratic framing that allowed the students to mobilize their power according to their own desires regarding teaching matters. an interesting case of such a teacher dilemma is described in carlsson & lundgren’s analysis of what happened to the pre-planned school semester in 1972. a schedule for all activities that were included in the introduction semester was made up, and a followup group was appointed. perhaps one had made too hard efforts, perhaps the goals were too ambitious. complaints were immediately heard, and in late october, the whole organization of the activity was canceled. this could be seen as one example of how difficult it might be to carry out an experimental activity in a school that allows influential students to overthrow the planning. (carlsson & lundgren, 1976, p. 24, translation by kullenberg). nevertheless, the swedish teachers seem to have been able to adapt to the ongoing circumstances with an open-minded attitude, aware of the inevitable challenges of launching a new democratic school system like this. also, they engaged democratically in the teacher-student relationships, in the sense of respecting the students’ choices and expressed needs and preferences regarding what and how to study or how to be taught. both the former students of the egg that i [tina] interviewed and the authorities’ reports (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980) give the impression that the expected teachers’ role in this school was to engage as equals with the students in stimulating dialogues. their role was to engage in education “as curious co-learners,” according to what a former student, ilona (pseudonym), told me (tina). ilona, who thought that the teachers were influenced by freire35, added that what transpired could be characterized as a kind of freirean dialogic pedagogy. the formal evaluation of the egg school by the national school board noticed that teaching tended to be personalized for the individual students. the school board provided an interesting reason for what might have facilitated what they saw as instrumental dialogic teaching. it was the absence of conventional classroom teaching as it happens in big classes, teaching in big classes did not exist; rather, it was group work to a large extent. in many cases, the groups were so small that the teaching changed to individual supervision instead. the teaching thus became more intense, the discussions livelier, the speech exercises in language more effective, and the adjustment of learning content and method for the individual’s needs and ability improved. so did the contact between the teacher and student (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980, p. 7, translation by kullenberg). however, despite this open-minded teaching attitude, ilona further reflected that “the teachers were permissive but not creative.” her opinion is supported by the results of a 1974 survey of the students’ opinions about the teachers. for instance, in answering the question “are our teachers enough 35 paolo freire’s educational ideas became known in scandinavia long before his influential and much discussed book “pedagogy of the oppressed” was translated into the scandinavian languages. already in the 1960s freire’s ideas and methods of education of illiterate populations became known and widely discussed in scandinavia. as i (tina) understood ilona, freire was the name she associated with the kinds of dialogues in egg. she wanted to give me an idea of the dialogic spirit in general, and the fact that the students were seen with agency/voice in the dialogues with their teachers. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a125 experimentally oriented?” the majority of students, 61% (36 out of 59), gave negative answers, and 30% (18 out of 59) of them responded with “i do not know.” only 12% (7 of 59) of students answered “yes.” the follow-up question asked those who answered “no” to specify what they really missed. the most prominent answer given by ten students was that they missed alternative forms of study.36 the language used by the national school board provides indicators supporting the students’ feeling that their education had not much changed in the new school and that the teachers retained their conventional educational approach guided by the goal to achieve transmission of the pre-set curriculum. in our opinion, transformations in teaching may have come from the emerging progressivist educational approach, where the imposition of the pre-set curricular end-points is softened or hidden by the attempts to engage students’ subjectivities. for instance, the teachers regarded small group dialogues as a tool to make their instruction “more effective” and to achieve students' “improved abilities” with the given frame. still, there were some changes in the student-teacher relationships. for instance, many students challenged the teachers’ ideological views to the very limits, especially if they expressed opinions that were considered ideologically too conservative. the teachers generally tried to be responsive in thoughtprovoking ways, with strong voices of their own. in some cases, we know that the teachers challenged the students’ leftist ideas and had interesting discussions and provocations (from tina’s interview with johan, a former student). johan described the teachers as extremely interesting and well-educated persons. he also appreciated the change in the students-teachers relationships. the teachers started to appear to him and the other students as unique persons rather than as empty institutionalized role figures, as was common for teachers in the conventional schools at that time. in some instances, teachers were also seen as co-learners (skolöverstyrelsen, 1980). however, in support of our suspicions about the teachers’ conventional educational approaches, it is also notable that the lessons were said to be teacher-led, at the expense of the students’ own voices, according to a school newsletter from the egg. in peter rundkvist’s article in the school newspaper, we can see how he experienced his school in this respect: today, we still stand in the same place. the lessons are, in many places, silent performances where not many words are spoken, except by the teacher (rundkvist, 1970). in their rebellious call, the young authors and former students starke and hansson (1970) argued for the suspension of teacher-led teaching in a volume of the school journal “kritstrecket” [the chalk line]. the reason was students’ impatient disappointment with the existing pedagogical state of affairs, that is, the moderate change of pedagogical regime that was argued not to be radical enough. in this respect, they even explicitly accused the egg school leader carl gustav of introducing what only seemed to be teaching reforms, but that in practice worked only on the surface level. in this context, the students encouraged what they termed “free studies” as the ideal alternative. they do not leave the reader with any doubt about how such free studies should be defined, stating: “free studies mean that each group, regardless of the decisions of other groups, designs their studies. the most important thing, however, is that we free ourselves from the authoritative teacher-led teaching” (starke & hansson, 1970). i (tina) also noticed one more interesting aspect of this definition: the former students are explicitly talking in terms of the group level, not the individual level, and, thus, the individual needs are expressed more implicitly (sometimes 36 on another note, when i (tina) analyzed the surveys from the archive i was very surprised by the fact the same questions were asked of all participants, including the teachers and the students. to me, this means, they were asked to engage in the same shared school issues but from different perspectives. my reaction stems from the experiences i have from schooling in our current age, where everything is bureaucratically separated into the distinct teacher vs. student roles. at least today [in 2022] here in sweden, it is quite unthinkable to let students and teachers answer precisely the same set of questions about their shared organization. scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a126 deliberately subordinating the individual needs for collective goods, according to the cultural norms at that time). conclusion: democracy and dialogue in ego and egg the experimental democratic gymnasiums in oslo and gothenburg were projects of passionate, educationally, and politically engaged teens and youth. they sought to establish control over their school lives, demanding the right to make decisions about all aspects of their education. we were able to glimpse their struggles as they started to examine and take hold of the social, cultural, political, pedagogical, and ideological complexities of educational practice. creating a democratic school was, for all the involved, a project in which they grappled with defining and redefining diverse aspects of their own beliefs and philosophies of schooling and education. in our view, this entailed dialogues of reconceptualization, critical deconstruction, and potential transcendence in at least two important and closely intertwined spheres: a) in the sphere of decision-making, as a part of the school governance, where the students took the role of the stewards of education in their school. b) in the sphere of their intrinsic personal education where the student acts in the role of a learner. in this sphere, ethical-ontological dialogues together with the co-learning teachers are a medium of meaningmaking where the learners can test their ideas, values, beliefs, desires, visions, etc., focusing on matters of their own interests. ethical-ontological dialogue in the sphere of democratic governance gaining the rights to participate in educational governance opened for the ego and egg students a whole new sphere of life and learning, exposing their personal unexamined ideological positions, familiar truths, beliefs, and desires about education (cf. matusov, 2021a) to the scrutiny of testing them against multiple contested practical, ideological, cultural, political, etc., issues and positions involved in designing an educational ecology in their schools. in the role of the stewards of their own education, suddenly, they could deliberate important issues of their school. they approached the governing practice from the position of equal rights in direct democracy where all members participate in decision making, and decisions are brought by a simple majority (e.g., jørgensen, 1971, p. 56). the students had the freedom to express and discuss their positions, tensions, and conflicts as people with equal rights of consciousnesses to be taken seriously. it is precisely the legitimacy of their freedom of consciousness that drove and energized their numerous, passionate ethical-ontological dialogues (cf. marjanovic-shane, 2023b; marjanovic-shane, 2023c) ideological differences regarding democracy the ideological differences among the students regarding the form, shape, and participation in the school governance itself were frequently and clearly voiced on various occasions: in school general assemblies, school newsletters and journals, etc. (carlsson & lundgren, 1976; hem & remlov, 1969; jørgensen, 1971; melheim, 2019). we found, both in ego and in egg, vast differences among the students in terms of their personal involvement in and relationships to the school’s democratic governance: from being extraordinary passionate and opinionated about designing and governing their school, to the almost complete abstinence and disinterest in the matters of school governance, to the outright rejection of being governed by anyone and anything. the more involved students in both schools accused the others of being irresponsible, indifferent, uncaring, and rule-breakers. in ego, the non-participating students were exposed to shaming and threats of being expelled. in egg, similar intimidations also had ideological overtones of the politically scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a127 left values of collectivism and common good above personal freedoms, needs, and interests (i.e., the collectivistic expectation to participate in decision-making meetings at the price of time for individual indepth studies). on the other hand, the less involved students had diverse reasons for non-involvement in the governance itself: from preoccupation with their own learning interests and finding school governance boring and irrelevant; to considering the whole practice of the school governance rather disingenuous and fake since the school had no full sovereignty from the national departments of education. they felt that real decisions are ultimately made “somewhere above.” ethical-ontological dialogue in the sphere of the learners’ intrinsic education on the other hand, the situation was more complex when it came to the students’ personal rights and negative freedom in learning. we wonder what domains of learning were considered to belong to the personal negative freedoms of the students as learners – which would potentially open a path for them to enter into dialogues from the positions of the equal rights of consciousnesses with their teachers (staff)? and vice versa, what learning domains were regarded as falling into the students’ positive freedoms – in which the hierarchical difference of consciousness between the teacher (an expert) and the student (an ignorant novice) is still preserved? we don’t know directly about dialogues that took place within their educational activities (class meetings). but we suspect that in both schools, ethical-ontological dialogues about the matters of the curriculum were not always supported. as we reported above, the matters of the academic curriculum were largely preset by the departments of education, and the learning activities were planned and prepared by the teachers. in that sense, it was the outside authority who defined what is good for the students, and the so-called “educational content” was (positively) defined, placing it within the students’ positive freedoms. as soon as there is an authority that is outside of the student, an authority that has the power of judgment over a person, a genuine ethical-ontological dialogue is suppressed since this person is not in the position of having equal rights of consciousness. of course, ethical-ontological dialogues focusing on testing opinions about curricular issues probably happened anyway. we suspect, however, that if and when ethicalontological dialogues happened, they emerged by chance and, at least in ego, not always as a result of the overall school stewards’ educational approach. there are some indices that such dialogues might have emerged within a non-traditional curriculum that was equally novel for the teachers and the students, such as the novel computer science. we also think that such dialogues might have emerged in educational activities where the students had legitimate negative freedom to determine and plan the curriculum and instruction; and, most importantly, to freely evaluate their learning (what it meant to them, how useful it was to them, etc.) without having to follow any known standards and norms. * * * many questions remain. for instance, what was the relationship between having the role of the steward of education and the role of the learner in education (a student)? did the way the students could relate to each other and to the teachers and other authorities as the educational stewards influence their voice and agency as the learners? to us, it seemed that some students-as-stewards of their school tried to limit or even embrace limiting the right of negative freedom of the student-as-learner. they pressured others to comply with some predefined “responsibilities” regarding (traditionally required academic) classes (ego), or they ideologically shamed those who wanted to focus only on their own studies and not participate in studying certain political and ideological curricula (egg). we wonder what the reasons for their (illiberal) decisions were, decisions that potentially limited a learner’s right to negative educational freedom. to what extent did the students make decisions pressured by the fact that their schools were not completely sovereign from their respective departments of education scandinavian experiments in democratic education ana marjanovic-shane, tina kullenberg, mikhail gradovski dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.477 | vol. 11 no. 2 (2023) a128 dictating conditions for graduation and entering universities? were they pressured by the social and cultural expectations of the prevalent traditional views of what a school must be? to what extent do these, sometimes illiberal, decisions result from the students’ own views, understandings, and visions of education? we don’t really know. what we know is that the educational ecologies in the two schools differed in their cultural, social, ideological, and political aspects. we suspect that some of the egg students’ illiberal views were potentially more ideologically driven by the radical socialist ideology, embracing collectivism and cooperation as an unexamined and unreflective bias to subordinate their educational negative freedom to follow their own ambitions and dreams. and we suspect that some of the ego students’ illiberal views resulted from their fears of being closed by the norwegian department of education, and, from the fact that some of them seemed to hold the traditional philosophical and cultural understanding of education as a praxis of enculturation into the existing social milieus. to answer some of these questions, ana (the first author) undertook a deeper analysis of the ego students’ underlying concepts and worldviews they passionately discussed with their hearts and minds in a particular crucial general assembly meeting they later referred to as the soul-searching assembly. this multifaceted analysis is presented in the next few articles in this special issue (marjanovic-shane, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). references anderson, t. h. 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(2000). studentopprør? studentradikalismen ved universitet i bergen 1964 – 1974 sett i et nasjonalt og internasjonalt perspektiv. hovedfag i historie, universitet i bergen. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word matusov, the relationship between education and learning, 425.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e1 the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract education is often viewed as formalized learning. i argue that the relationship between education and formalized learning is more complex and profound. in this conceptual essay, i examine the relationship between education and learning. specifically, i discuss the cases when learning is not education and education is not learning. i argue that learning becomes educational when the person, the learner themselves, appreciates their learning. when learning is not appreciated by the learner, it does not constitute that person’s education. thus, education is an ephemeral subjective construct, prone to appear and disappear as the person’s attitude to their learning changes. also, education can be non-learning-based when it involves insights – abrupt, discontinuous changes of the person’s subjectivity – which are not caused by and rooted in the person’s experiences. like learning, for an insight to be educational, it has to be perceived and appreciated by the person. i argue that human life consists of the flow of learning and insight. noticing learning and insight by the person involves discontinuity of the person’s subjectivity, participation in activities, and other people that is recognized by others and the person. i discuss diverse forms of the person’s appreciation of learning and insights that constitute education. these forms vary from the behaviorist appreciation, as its lowest form, to the critical appreciation through critical dialogue as its highest form. finally, i consider the consequences of defining education through a person’s appreciation of the transformation of their subjectivity for dialogic pedagogy. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. acknowledgments i am very thankful to ana marjanovic-shane and je’anna clements for their discussions and editing prior drafts of the essay. ïïò introduction education is often viewed as formalized, institutionalized, well-defined, and preset learning, limited in time. through educational learning, a society passes on the important knowledge, values, and skills from issn: 2325-3290 (online) the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e2 one generation to another (e.g., resnick, 1987). from this perspective, learning is a process through which education – defined as the student’s acquisition of the knowledge, values, and skills pre-selected by the institution, society, or teacher – occurs. from this perspective, education differs from learning because education is an institutional process, while learning is a psychological process. thus, self-education is a misnomer because it is only the society, through its institutions, that can preset important curricula that define education. only instruction – i.e., a form of guidance toward the important curricula, preset by the society – can be self-promoted, not education itself. furthermore, from this point of view, education involves a societal judgment of what is good for students to study. “education is something that one gets from a school or university; education is related to classroom learning, and some other set standards. on the contrary, learning evolves at the personal level, for which there are no set standards.”1 according to this conventional paradigm, learning becomes educational only when it is appreciated by the society. of course, “the society” is an abstraction – politicians, educational bureaucrats, educational experts, school administrators, teachers, and parents often talk on behalf of “the society.” the “voice” of the “the society” is not always coherent2. nevertheless, the hegemony of this paradigm is a powerful social and educational phenomenon in its own way. the realness and power of a social construction do not require it to reflect the “out-there” reality. but there is another, not less important, view of education. here i want to bring this different understanding of education in focus through the following example. when i ask my undergraduate students, future teachers whether the notions of “a good student” and “a good learner” are the same or different – all my students claim that they are different. from the conventional perspective described above, ‘a good student’ and ’a good learner’ must be, or, at least, can be the same. in contrast, my students say that “a good student” is one who gets good grade marks, succeeds on exams and tests, follows the teachers’ instructions, answers correctly the teacher’s questions, submits all homework on time, punctual, good behaving, polite, accurate, often raises their hand ready to answer on the teacher’s question, pleases the teacher, and so on. in short, “a good student” meets the institutional expectations. in contrast, according to my students, “a good learner” is one who learns what is interesting for them, who initiates their own learning, who chooses what to learn and what not to learn, is very active, brings learning initiatives, can disagree with the teacher, is knowledgeable and skillful much beyond what school requires (and even what the teacher knows), can be difficult for the teacher, can refuse to study what the teacher wants them to study, can be disruptive in the classroom, etc. in other words, “a good learner” is self-directed, defining education for themselves. many of my students are ambivalent about who is preferable for them as future teachers: “a good student” or “a good learner.” they like “a good student” for being cooperative but dislike them for being somewhat dull. they like “a good learner” for being passionate about their own learning and studies, but my students are frightened a bit by “a good learner” for being potentially uncontrollable and “too knowledgeable.” as one student of mine said, “’ a good student’ is easy, but ’a good learner’ is more interesting.” 1 i found this interesting short article by an unknown author on the internet summarizing rather well the relationship and the contrast between education and learning from the conventional perspective: http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/differencebetween-education-and-learning/. 2 i am thankful to je’anna clements for raising the issue. she wrote on the margin of the previous draft, “there's a problematic hidden premise here in that it assumes that there is such a thing as a 'society' which can have coherent values by which to 'appreciate' something or not 'appreciate' something in a definable way. in my experience there is no clear 'societal judgment' of what is good to study. huge majorities grumble about why do we teach our kids pythagoras but not tax returns etc. i do not agree that the curriculum is set by 'society' except in that the majority will expect what they have seen before, so that once a curriculum is set, future cohorts expect it to look similar to what it did before. it is initially variously set by politicians, academics and other very small but powerful niches that have managed to monopolise it.” the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e3 in one of my past classes, a student raised a very interesting question, “can ‘a good learner’ be ‘a good student’?”3 initially, many of my students replied affirmatively, “oh, yeah. it’s possible when the teacher’s curricula coincide with the learner’s interests.” i remember a student who said that for ‘a good learner,’ school studies are the bare-bone minimum. ‘a good learner’ often studies a lot outside of school. nevertheless, ‘a good learner’ can be ‘a good student’ by doing well on the school tests and exams because they usually know more than the rest of the class. this makes school studies a bit boring for ‘a good learner’ who is also ‘a good student.’ however, as our discussion progressed, some students led by the student who raised the original question started to disagree. that student argued, “‘a good learner’ can only pretend to be ‘a good student.’ but ‘a good learner’ cannot truly be ‘a good student.’ because ‘a good learner’ decides by herself what to study, while ‘a good student’ submits to the teacher who decides what to study. ‘a good learner’ thinks for herself [what to study, what is education], while ‘a good student’ delegates it to the teacher.” another student continued that for ‘a good learner’ to pretend to be ‘a good student’ is always painful because they have to do something that goes against their nature to look like ‘a good student.’ she remembered how in her past school, she had to do boring class and home assignments instead of doing exciting activities she truly wanted to do to the point that she stopped wanting to do them. “when i was in elementary school, i loved to write poems and stories. but in my middle school, i learned to hate writing. i received an ‘a’ in english throughout all my school career, but i do not like to write anymore, except, maybe, for my diary and social media.” she said that she still felt sad that she betrayed herself as an emerging writer for getting good grades in school. she ended up her story by admitting that she pretended to be ‘a good student’ so well she eventually became one – “a school zombie,” as she put it. yet, some other students in the class disagreed, arguing still for a possibility of “a happy marriage” between these two positions: ‘a good learner’ and ‘a good student.’ they could not provide good examples that could survive the scrutiny of the other group and, thus, admitted that this “happy marriage” was difficult to achieve, and it remained an uneasy one – a happy but uneasy marriage. it took me years to realize how profound this discussion was. together with my two colleagues – renee depalma and mark smith – i studied students from an innovative, progressive k-8 school who went to conventional high schools (depalma, matusov, & smith, 2009; matusov, depalma, & smith, 2010). many students reported this dilemma to us about how to pretend well to be ‘a good student’ without losing their own soul of being ‘a good learner.’ they used many creative strategies to achieve that – “smuggling learning into school context” – but still, as one student eloquently put it, “they suck life out of you” (depalma et al., 2009, p. 945). education to be authentic must be decided by the student, not by the teacher, by the school, or by the state. learning becomes educational only when it is appreciated by the learner (matusov, 2020c, 2020d): good learning becomes education, bad learning is not. who makes this evaluation? in my view, it must be first and foremost “the student” – i.e., a person who learns. of course, other people might disagree. a teenager, who learns how to binge drink, may call this learning education, while his mother may disagree. education can be contested (matusov, 2020c, pp. sf103-sf104). 3 at the lesson, i missed a teaching-learning opportunity to ask my students the reverse question, “can ‘a good student’ be ‘a good learner’?” i think this reverse question problematizes the notion of ‘a good student’ much more dramatically than the original question raised by my student. however, i sense that her original question was more important for them – ontologically, existentially,– than my reversed question. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e4 when learning is and is not education not all learning is educational. learning can be anti-educational – for example, so-called ‘learned helplessness’ – a sense of powerlessness that a person learned through many, usually traumatic, experiences of failure to achieve something important for the person. the american behaviorist psychologists martin seligman and steven maier coined this term in 1967 when they tried to make sense of their experiments on dogs who learned that they couldn’t escape the electrical shock stopped trying in subsequent experiments, even when it became possible to avoid the shock by jumping over a barrier (maier & seligman, 1976, 2016). learned helplessness has been found in humans and associated with such unpleasant conditions as low self-esteem, self-worthlessness, anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder. however, the critical review of the concept and numerous studies of learned helplessness by the educational psychologist sandra mark revealed, among many other flaws, an assumption uncritically accepted by many researchers of learned helplessness that a person’s perseverance in the face of difficulties is always good while giving up is always bad: “learned helplessness” is not a term one would use to describe a person being recommended or praised, nor is the term “underachiever.” it has been assumed that learned helplessness and underachievement are behaviors that need to be changed because they are detrimental to the individual and thus are maladaptive. this assumption may not be entirely valid in all situations because it has not been investigated. one can just as well assume that if a person exhibits learned helplessness or underachievement, then it is for reasons that bring a degree of relief and is therefore adaptive. the relief may be from competitive strivings, from family pressures, from the need for peer acceptance and approval, from the need for social acceptance by the opposite sex, etc. maladaptiveness may be a construct in the eye of the investigator only! (mark, 1983, p. 9). in one of my past undergraduate classes, i had a student, a future teacher, who i had thought had “learned helplessness.” she was disengaged in my class on cultural diversity in education despite my diverse pedagogical approaches to engage her and despite her own public pronouncements in the class that she wanted to learn to be a good teacher. although it might sound a bit disrespectful, the student can be compared with seligman and maier’s dog, who wanted food but stopped trying to get it. for example, during our practicum at a local community center, i used to send little children to her to ask for help with their playful activities, but this student rejected those children – she continued texting on her smartphone or distracting her peers from working with children. to my big surprise, a year after, while bumping into each other on the campus, this student admitted that our class was the best thing that happened with her at the university. “how come?!” asked i. she explained that in my class and through my efforts to engage her in studies and in working with kids and through her negative, “learned helplessness” response to that, she painfully realized that she did not want to be a teacher. instead, she changed her major to acting, and she felt happy there. she concluded that it was important for her to listen to herself rather than always force herself to engage in educational studies. giving up teacher education was the best learning that happened with her. in her case, “learned helplessness” – a lack of the student’s study action, engagement, and motivation aimed at becoming a good teacher, despite the student’s own learning desire – was educational because she, the learner, came to appreciate it. “learned helplessness” was how she and i framed her experiences in the class and immediately after (see below). nevertheless, later, the student’s “learned helplessness” to study how to become a teacher became educational because the student’s reluctance to study was reinterpreted as having a wrong learning desire in the first place. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e5 as her teacher, i learned that my pedagogical role was not always to engage my students in the studies – even if they had chosen these studies – but, importantly, also to test their motivation and commitment to it. the lack of motivation and commitment might be an important sign that their initial educational desire might be wrong. the presence of education is defined by the value the learner attributes to their learning. if this value is negative or neutral, the underlining learning is not educational for the learner (a neutral value), or it even can be anti-educational (a negative value). only when the learner attributes a positive value to their learning, the learning becomes educational for the learner. for the student i described above, the value of her “learned helplessness” apparently changed from seeing herself to be “a poor, unmotivated, preservice teacher” (as she told me. see below) to finding her own calling as a future actress. her subjective attitude to her learning disengagement has changed. in our class, she apparently saw her disengagement with the class studies and children – her learning how not to engage despite my pedagogical efforts – negatively. she had learned that she was a bad student of teaching, however, sometime later, she started seeing this disengagement positively as a sign that teaching was not her vocation. she had learned that acting and not teaching was her vocation. her “learned helplessness” changed from being anti-educational to becoming educational. similarly, my colleagues and i got a similar finding in our cross-cultural study of “instrumental learning”4 and “ontological learning”5 based on important learning experiences reported by our research participants (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). to simplify the study a bit, “instrumental learning” is one where the outcome and not the process is most important for the learner, so a person would be happy to shorten this learning experience as much as possible. in contrast, “ontological learning” is one that the process is more important for the learner than its outcome – the person would not want to shorten the learning experience. the researchers hypothesized that the nature of the learning – whether it is instrumental or ontological – is defined by its content of the learning. for example, learning mechanics of photography would be perceived by the learner as “the instrumental learning,” while learning the art of photography would be perceived by the learner as “the ontological learning.” to test this hypothesis, we abstracted the descriptions of the participants’ learning experiences, cleaning them from any judgments by the participants, and asked two “blind” coders to judge if it were “instrumental” or “ontological” learning. if our hypothesis had been correct, we would have gotten a high, statistically significant degree of agreement between the coders and our research participants. to our big surprise, the agreement was very low. thus, it appears that the nature of the learning experiences is not defined by the learning content but rather by the participant’s subjective attitude to it (matusov et al., 2017). for example, for one participant we interviewed, learning the technical aspects of photography was instrumental, while for another participant, this technical learning was ontological: [would you shorten learning the technical aspects of photography?] i do not think so because [otherwise if i shorten it then] i could know nothing in high school and pick up a class and know all this technical information but i would not have a natural progression because photography gives you this progression i would have the same results but not the sense of accomplishment because i would not be able to see the progress of it (anne, us, young adult, hs diploma +) (matusov et al., 2017, p. 465, bracketed insertions are mine). in sum, education is an ephemeral, changing, subjective construct of the learner’s positive evaluation of their own learning. 4 je’anna clements: “corresponds to autonomous extrinsic motivation.” i respectfully disagree with the equivalency of our terms because it is not the local of the motivation was at stake but its quality: the focus of the learner’s appreciation of the product or the process. 5 je’anna clements: “corresponds to autonomous intrinsic motivation.” see my comment above. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e6 non-learning education through insights i started reading when i was two months short of becoming a 10-year-old. with a high probability, it was a case of undiagnosed dyslexia. my son, who was formally diagnosed with dyslexia, started reading around 10-year-old as well. i remember vividly that i went to sleep not being able to read – it was a homework poem that we were supposed to read out loud in the class the next day – i anticipated another torture of me publicly messing up the poem words in the classroom. i woke up and looked at the text, and oh, magic, i could hear the voice of the poem. i leafed through the pages of the textbook to check other texts – the magic was still there. i could hear the voices of the texts just by looking at them. before that memorable morning, “reading” was a difficult process of deciphering alien symbols. actually, it wasn’t even that… let me share our family lore that made my parents cry, laugh, and be frustrated. my mom, dad, and seven-year-old me were sitting around a family-room table and taking turns to “read” aloud the fairytale “puss in boots.” my mom and dad read a page while i had to read a paragraph – the shortest on the page, i loved stories and storytelling, but i hated this torture by “guided reading” (i was reading in russian, my native language, this is a compatible translation): my mom: dear, with what letter does this word start? me (nailing the letter “h” with my index finger): “aich.” my mom: good. here it reads as “kh.” and the next letter? what’s the sound? me (i’m thinking, how does mom know that this time it reads like “kh”?! strange. moving my finger to the letter “a” ): “ai.” my dad: hmmm, “æ.” me (focusing on the letter “a,” thinking: “why ‘æ’? – how does dad know that? but whatever.” ): “æ.” my dad: so, what will it be together? me: “aichai?” my dad: no, remember it is “kh” and “æ.” what will it be together? me: “khæ.” my mom: good, sweaty. and the last letter? how does it sound? me (shifting my finger to “t” ): “ti.” my dad corrected me: “t.” and what you will get together. add together “kh,” “æ,” and “t.” what will you get? me (with a great effort): “kh,” “æ,” and “t”… – together is… “coat.” my dad exploded: where do you see “coat”?!!! “kh,” “æ,” and “t” together is “hat”! not “coat”! my mom (hysterically): he is mocking us! i look at them with a puzzle. what makes them so angry? back then, i suspected that people lied to me that they could read “texts” – they just memorized stories so well that they could point at the correct “word” – a combination of meaningless, alien symbols. it was all pretense. i just had a bad memory, so i could not do what they could do. but on this memorable morning that all was gone! i could hear voices by looking at texts. well, this might be a bit exaggerated. sometimes the voice stumbled at a difficult word that i had to decipher or simply skip and guess what it might be. but after the deciphering or guessing, i could start hearing the voice again. what happened during the miraculous night? did i learn reading? i can only guess that my neural network had reorganized somehow in my brain during my sleep. was it learning? i do not think so. it was the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e7 not learning. of course, i might learn something important before that night. the miracle that happened with me might have been prepared by my past learning. but this miracle itself was not learning. this abrupt change that happened to me, which i call “insight,” was mostly caused by and rooted in my biological change, not in learning per se. but what is learning? coming from a sociocultural tradition, i see learning as a transformation of a person’s participation in social practice (lave, 1988, 1992, april; lave & wenger, 1991; rogoff, matusov, & white, 1996). however, in my view, this definition is a bit too broad. a transformation of a person’s participation in social practice may be not rooted in and caused by learning but by other factors like changes in other participants, technology, materials, the person’s body, weather, mood change, and so on. learning involves a particular transformation of participation, but not any transformation of participation. for example, losing a leg in a car accident would transform the person’s participation in many social practices, but in itself, this transformation won’t be learning, although it might spark a chain of learning in the person of how to cope with this challenge. so, i have to clarify the initial definition in the following way. learning is a person’s transformation of participation in an activity or practice that is mostly caused by and rooted in the person’s experience. based on this definition of learning, the miraculous transformation of my neural network that made me read texts on that memorable morning was not learning because it was not mostly caused by and rooted in my experience. of course, any learning probably requires and is based on a transformation of the neural network in the brain. but the reverse is not necessarily true that any transformation of the neural network is mainly caused and rooted in learning. insights – an abrupt transformation of a person’s subjectivity, not caused by and rooted in the person’s experiences – can take many forms: epiphany, psychedelic trip, revelation, keisaku6, meditation, “shock therapy,” paradigm shift, truth dream, throwing yourself in a dramatically different place or situation, awakening, and so on. one can try quickly to experience insight through the so-called “magic eye” – “the art of the eye puzzle is the ability to diverge. this means you look through the image with your eyes, not directly at it. your eyes move differently if you try to ‘look through’ a picture. it’s an illusion of depth perception that allows a 3d image to suddenly appear in the 2d image”7: 6 “in zen buddhism, the keisaku (japanese: 警策, chinese: 香板, xiāng bǎn; kyōsaku in the soto school) is a flat wooden stick or slat used during periods of meditation to remedy sleepiness or lapses of concentration. this is accomplished through a strike or series of strikes, usually administered on the meditator's back and shoulders in the muscular area between the shoulder and the spine. the keisaku itself is thin and somewhat flexible; strikes with it, though they may cause momentary sting if performed vigorously, are not injurious“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/keisaku 7 https://www.cleareyes.com/eye-care-blog/201802/magic-eye-puzzle-illusions/ the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e8 picture 1: “behind” this colorful ornament, there is a 3-d picture of the sea world: https://www.magiceye.com/ although one can learn how to diverge their eyes, the successful divergence from the 2-d ornament that leads to seeing the 3-d picture sea world is not learning, in itself, but rather an insight. for some reason, our (“western”) modern culture does not recognize these abrupt changes of insights and instead focuses mostly on learning. hijacking the term coined by the educational philosopher gert biesta, this cultural phenomenon of totalizing learning can be called “learnification” (biesta, 2010, p. 5)8. insights are not recognized, understood, appreciated, and pedagogically and culturally mediated. not all insights are educational, but only those that are appreciated by the person experiencing the insight. for example, in our research on instrumental and ontological learning, a young american woman reported her accident of falling down from a horse and being paralyzed for one year bedridden. her life turned upside down. yet, according to her, it led to her awakening and important revelation about her life. she claimed that she would not shorten this life-threatening painful experience because it made her what she was now. this insight was educational for her (matusov et al., 2017). in contrast, in the fictional hungarian novel and movie “the fifth seal” (fábri, 1976; sánta, 1986), a character named photographer 8 “i argue that measurement of educational “outcomes” can never replace answering the question of purpose in education, although at times it seems as if this is what those who are engaged in measurement seem to do or seem to aspire to. i relate the marginalization of the question of good education to a phenomenon that i refer to as the ‘learnification’ of education, by which i have in mind the tendency to replace a language of education with a language that only talks about education in terms of learning. i argue that while learning obviously is one of the central concerns of education, a language of learning makes it particularly difficult to grapple with questions of purpose—and also with questions of content and relationships” (biesta, 2010, p. 5). however, biesta argued that it is the teachers, and not learners, who must legitimately define education as appreciation of learning, “what is distinctive about education is not learning — which can happen anywhere, with or without education—but teaching. and the basic gesture of teaching is that of trying to catch and direct the attention of another human being… the teacherly gesture here tries to say no more than ‘look, there is something there that i believe might be good, important, worthwhile for you to pay attention to’” (biesta, 2020, p. 2). i respectfully disagree with him about defining education through teaching. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e9 anonymously reports on four strangers he encountered, to the hungarian analog of nazi gestapo during wwii in order for these “simpletons” to experience an awakening from their mundane and simplistic life (of course, in photographer’s judgment). the only survivor of this “test” was clockmaker, who did not appreciate the insight organized for him by photographer. this insight was not educational for clockmaker. recognition of the personal discontinuity let me summarize my discussion so far. first, i discussed the actor of education – i.e., who legitimately defines what education is and what it is not. in contrast to the conventional mainstream perspective (if not paradigm), i argue that the actor of education is the person themselves, one who is involved in education, and not the state, the institution, the teacher, the parent, the educational expert, and so on. the locus of educational control is internal and not external. second, the content of education is not just the person’s learning but also the person’s insight. here, in this section, i will consider the condition of education: when, why, and how the transformation of the person’s subjectivity or participation becomes noticed by the person who undergoes this transformation. according to the conventional views on learning, heavily influenced by particular school learning, the occurrence of learning is problematic, while its content is not. for example, a student may or may not learn the addition of fractions with different denominators. to check if this learning occurred, usually, a test or exam is administered. at the same time, the content of this learning -the addition of fractions with different denominators -is not problematic. it is known, given, and set in advance of the learning process itself. in contrast, the sociocultural anthropologist jean lave, who studied learning in the wild, has found that the occurrence of learning is not problematic, but its content is (lave, 1992, april). people learn all the time: the question is what exactly they learn from their experiences. for example, during the math lesson on the addition of fractions with different denominators, mentioned above, some students may learn the addition, some learn a pattern of actions to please the teacher, some learn that math is boring and not for them, some learn how to smuggle fun activities in the classroom without the teacher noticing it, and so on. the occurrence of this diverse learning is not problematic, but what exactly this learning is about is problematic and has to be investigated. to expand lave’s point to the insight, transformation of the person’s subjectivity is a constant flow, whether noticed or not noticed by the person and other people. but it becomes an insight when the person notices this transformation. as i argued above, education involves the person’s appreciation of the transformation of their subjectivity and participation. however, in order for this appreciation to become possible, the person has to notice the transformation of their subjectivity, then evaluate it, and finally evaluate it positively. thus, education is based not only on reflection of their actions but also on self-consciousness and self-awareness of breaking their identity by becoming a slightly or very different person than before. only when this awareness of breaking self-identity occurs for the person, evaluation of learning and/or insight can happen. learning and insight flow is ubiquitous; education is not. people experience education through their desire (e.g., a person wants to learn car driving) and their recognition (e.g., i recognized that i could read in the example above), or both – through their educational desire and recognition. the latter can be exemplified by the case of my student who changed her mind from becoming a teacher to becoming an actress, see above. initially, she wanted to learn how to become a good teacher. that was her educational desire. however, later, through her disengagement in our class, she realized that, actually, she did not want to be a teacher, but rather an actress. even more, during our encounter on a campus street, she praised our class and me as her teacher as a contribution to her education. i could not understand it and asked her to explain. we went to a nearby campus café – my favorite back then. the student told me how she saw our class, her peers, and me. she said that in contrast the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e10 to all other education-major classes of hers, in our class, her peers and i discussed what was on the mind of the students. the class meetings involved a discussion of dialogic provocations that i brought to the class that provoked questions and inquiries in the students, which we pursued. also, the students brought questions, inquiries, dilemmas, and exciting and troublesome experiences that occurred with them at the practicum at a local boys’ and girls’ club, where the students played, interacted, and engaged in various activities with minority kids of different ages. at the boys’ and girls’ club, the students had full freedom to act and interact with the children, except forcing the children to do what they did not want to do. my student saw how i tried to help her peers and her develop their interests, questions, and inquiries related to education and working with the kids. she saw excitement and interest in her peers. she said that she had felt the questioning gazes by her peers and me, “why are you not excited?! why are you not interested?! what is wrong?!” she became increasingly puzzled, frustrated, and even cried as to why she was disengaged and disinterested in studying how to become a good teacher. she told me in the café that in her other educationmajor classes, it was required to say what the professor wanted the students to say. she reluctantly complied, as did many of her peers. the focus, she said, was on guessing and pleasing the professor – the old game that she had learned to play relatively well. so, her experiences in other classes were not problematic to her. in contrast, in our class, she said, the students were free to explore their own interests in becoming teachers. the problem was that she suddenly felt that she did not have an interest in teaching, and because of that, she was very different from her peers. that recognition led her to challenge her initial educational desire. “but why do you see me as your teacher?” asked i. she replied that at first, it was because i designed this type of course focusing on provoking and pursuing students’ interests rather than on transmission of “the correct answers” to the students. secondly, it was because i tried my hardest to encourage her to reveal and pursue her interests in becoming a teacher, which helped her realize that she had none. as i was sitting in the café and listening to my student’s reflection on her experiences in our class, i had my own insightful realizations – four to be exact. the first realization was that a student’s disengagement in their learning could be educational. the second realization was that the goal of my course was not only for my students, future teachers, to learn how to become good teachers within my narrow academic subject of cultural diversity, but also to help my students explore their educational desire of becoming a teacher. my third realization was that my pedagogical practice of grading – summative assessment in education – was professionally unethical (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & meacham, 2016). how could i give this student a c?! it felt like pedagogical violence to me, for which i was responsible (matusov & sullivan, 2020). finally, i realized that by sharing her experiences and reflections involving our class with me, my student became my teacher – i had to actively seek such sharing with my students. i was in a professional and personal crisis – i could not teach as i did before. it felt both very exciting and scary to me back then. however, recognition of education can occur without an initial educational desire in a person. this recognition is not a trivial event because people are always embedded in the ubiquitous and inescapable flow of learning and insight. when, as a 10-year-old boy, i woke up being able to read, i vividly remember experiencing a strange phenomenon: as far as i looked at a text, the text immediately generated a voice telling me something. it was effortless on my part. well, almost effortless – until occasionally, i bumped at a word-obstacle (which i often skipped back then). in other words, i did not feel that “i” was reading – rather, reading happened to me. i did not feel like an actor in the reading activity. i did not have agency beyond the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e11 choosing to look or not to look at a particular text. instead, i was a prisoner – granted, a willing prisoner – of reading. i caught reading like people catch the flu or fall in love. this was a typical phenomenon of the powerful life flow of insight. but, at that moment, it was not education yet. why not? as a boy, i did not recognize any change in me. i was the same eugene, but now texts were talking to me. education involves a person’s perceived (and then, more, appreciated) discontinuity of one’s identity. in contrast, i felt the same. eugene-boy with or without candy, eugene-boy with or without flu, eugene-boy with or without reading felt to me as the same eugene-boy. but, not for long. other people around me – my teachers, parents, brother, and peers – noticed the change. my school grade marks dramatically improved, literally overnight, in almost all academic subjects from f-c to b-a, except in music (always an a for my efforts) and (russian) writing (always a c because of my terrible spelling). my parents found themselves in an awkward situation. a few months before my reading miracle, they reluctantly promised me to buy a puppy if i finished an academic quarter without any “c.” my older brother, who overheard my nagging and begging to buy a puppy and my parents’ counteroffer, said with sarcasm, “you can even promise him to buy an elephant!” that was how hopeless i was academic-wise. but to everybody’s surprise, i finished that quarter without any “c” because, as my mom told me later, the school principal managed to twist my russian teacher’s arms to give me a “b” for writing in order to improve the school academic standing in the district. now my parents had to buy me a puppy or convince me to get something else. they managed to convince me to get a microscope instead against protests of my older brother, who also wanted a puppy. i had diverse friends, some of which were f-students like me, some were academically ok students, and one of my best friends was an all-a student. before my reading miracle, my parents asked rhetorically, “i don’t understand what he (i.e., the all-a friend of mine) finds interesting in you. why is he your friend?!” now they started raising different questions about my friends, “why are you a friend with those nogoodniks?! they are a bad influence on you.” my teachers similarly changed my sitting arrangement, moving me from sitting with academic underachievers to academic overachievers. i started experiencing changes in my relations with other people. i stopped begging my older brother to read my favorite books to me. also, my parents started using me as a role model for him, which disrupted our relationship. i started spending less time playing and watching tv and more time reading books. i had really started “binge reading” – reading non-stop for many-many hours without rest, eat, or even sleep or going to the toilet as if i tried to make up for my time of non-reading all of the past years. from their initial praise and approval, my parents gradually shifted to alarm. they started telling me that i would hurt my eyes and soon would have to wear glasses, which happened a few years later. the nature of my improvisational storytelling with my yard buddies changed from being mostly tv movie-based to book-based. reading opened doors to other activities that were not available to me before – i got into building radio-equipment based on reading electronic schemas. this changed my friendships – i was getting increasingly nerdy friends. i noticed that my teachers started liking me, praising me more and more. bullies in school also noticed the change – they learned that they could exploit my new academic successes by demanding to copy my homework or asking me for tutoring. i was increasingly presented with new choices, new values, new relational breakdowns, new temptations, new dilemmas, and new friendships that disrupted the flow of my life. “am i smarter now than before when i was not reading, as some people around me say? should i brag about my excellent grade to my older brother? should i leave behind my friends with whom i feel more and more alienated, or should i put extra effort to keep them? should i push back when my new friends started dissing my old friends? how should i balance my old, nonthe relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e12 reading, and new, reading-based, interests?” and so on. the choices, dilemmas, relational breakdowns, and the gazes of people around me demanded from me to take stands on the changes that were thrown on me by reading. i started feeling the discontinuity of me: before and after the reading miracle that happened to me. the realization came to me: i-reading became a different person than i-non-reading. i mostly appreciated this discontinuity between eugene-without-reading and eugene-with-reading, although not without some ambivalence9. education as recognition and then appreciation of personal discontinuity is both a gift from others and a personal internal work of self-reflection. the penetrating gazes of other people awake self-reflection on the personal discontinuity on which education-as-realization is based. now i will turn to a discussion of the diverse forms of appreciation that cause a person to perceive learning or insight as educational. the fifty shades of educational appreciation apart from democratic schools, the mainstream and innovative schools heavily rely on foisted education. in those schools, students cannot choose whether to study or not to study – education is foisted on them. in addition to that, what students should study and even what they should learn is designed for the students and imposed on them. although, in some progressive and dialogic schools, what is learned by students can be emergent and not predesigned. even in many democratic schools, as soon as students choose to study and ask a teacher (usually called “staff”) for help, it is expected that the students must surrender their educational agency and authority on what exactly to study, how to study, and what should be learned (e.g., greenberg, 1991, pp. 15-17). a german philosopher immanuel kant introduced the concept of “educational paternalism” without coining this term (kant, 1784). while defining human dignity through autonomy, kant argued that education must be foisted on uneducated and undereducated, immature, irrational, uninformed, and ignorant people in order for those people to be able to achieve their autonomy and, thus, human dignity later on, when education is done on them. his follower, another german philosopher johann gottlieb fichte went even further, proclaiming that this foisting of education is education in itself, “compulsion is also a kind of education” (cited in berlin & hardy, 2002, electronic edition). i have critiqued kantian educational paternalism, foisted education, and education with preset curriculum elsewhere (e.g., matusov, 2009, 2020c, 2020d). here i want to discuss how educational appreciation is normatized in mainstream, progressive, and democratic schools. in mainstream conventional schools, there are two major types of students’ normative appreciation of their learning (the non-learning, insight-based education is usually not recognized in modern institutionalized education). the first type can be called “behaviorist appreciation,” which involves a system of punishments and rewards for the student so they can appreciate their learning. this system involves grade marks, praises, reprimands, scolding, humiliation, corporal punishment (mostly in the past), disrupting relationships with parents and friends, money payments, diplomas, and so on. the behaviorist normative appreciation completely excludes the student from the substantive and, thus, conditional evaluation of the learning foisted on them by the school. the substantive evaluation is when a student considers whether the content of education is good for them or not. the substantive evaluation is always conditional because sometimes the student judges a particular content of learning to be good and sometimes to be bad or irrelevant. behaviorism guides educators on how to create a conditional reflex in students. successful conditioning leads to a projection of pleasure or pain by an organism onto an unrelated 9 later, when i was 14 i moved to live with my illiterate grandma, who was a very wise woman and the center of our big extended family, my ambiguity increased as i started appreciating the orality and the oral civilization more and more (matusov & st. julien, 2004). the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e13 stimulus. for example, a famous russian behaviorist ivan petrovich pavlov successfully conditioned his dogs to produce saliva in response to a bell-ring in anticipation of food. the dogs had a pleasure response to the ringing, similar to the one they had to food. similarly, in the successful behaviorist appreciation, the pleasure associated with the reward, and psychological or physical pain, associated with the punishment, has become projected on the academic learning foisted by the school. the student appreciates the school academic learning because it becomes either pleasurable for the student or because it helps the student avoid pain. thus, like in the case of the pavlovian dogs, the successful behaviorist educational appreciation must start working even without rewards and punishments when the conditional reflex is firmly established. a student must have pleasure in any school academic learning imposed by the school authority or, at least, appreciate this learning because it helps to avoid pain. the second type of normative educational appreciation in conventional schools can be called “postponed appreciation” (matusov, von duyke, & kayumova, 2016). a german philosopher fichte, mentioned above, articulated it in the following way, education, says fichte quite consistently, works in such a way that “you will later recognise the reasons for what i am doing now.” children cannot be expected to understand why they are compelled to go to school, nor the uneducated – i.e., the majority of mankind – why they are made to obey laws which will presently make them rational and so retrospectively justify such coercion as they may have suffered. this is the task for the state. … if you … do not understand your own interests as a rational being, i cannot be expected to consult you or abide by your wishes in the course of making you a rational being. … i force you to be protected against smallpox though you may not wish it (berlin & hardy, 2002, electronic edition). the postponed appreciation is also unconditional for the students, but this time it involves the student’s agency because it is based on students’ unconditional trust in educational authorities. the student appreciates the school's academic learning because the student unconditionally trusts the school authorities that this learning will be helpful for the student in the future. there are, at least, two major problems with the conventional normative educational appreciation: its effectiveness and its desirability. first, let’s consider the issue of effectiveness. the behaviorist appreciation has rather limited success. very few students become conditioned to have pleasure or become attracted to any school learning without the presence of a reward-punishment system. most of the students appreciate the pleasure of rewards and the avoidance of pains of punishments but not school learning associated with the rewards and punishments. even more, some other students do not buy it at all. they ignore or actively reject the rewards-punishments system altogether (sidorkin, 2002). behaviorism can be successful in making many students learn but not appreciate this learning. it can be concluded that the behaviorist appreciation is ineffective in making students appreciate school learning. thus, school learning becomes non-educational, if not anti-educational, since many students dislike it – i.e., appreciate school learning negatively. thus, yazzie-mintz (2006) found that 50% of us high school students are bored every day in their classes. hart (2006) reported that 82% of californian ninth and tenth graders perceived their overall school experiences as “boring or irrelevant” (p. 2). in our own research of alumni of an innovative school who went to conventional high schools, the alumni reported on this suppression of their academic agencies, as they could compare the regimes of their past innovative and current conventional schools— as one alumni reports, “[the new, conventional] school sucks the life out of you” (depalma et al., 2009, p. 950). the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e14 the effectiveness of the postponed educational appreciation can be judged by 1) how much students unconditionally trust the school authorities and believe that school learning imposed by the school authorities will be useful for them in the future and 2) how much school alumni find their past school learning useful in their current lives. as the cited research above shows, many students see their school learning as “irrelevant.” also, i do not know of one conventional school that would rely on students’ trust in school authorities to appreciate the imposed school learning. thus, despite its rhetoric, the conventional school itself does not trust in the postponed appreciation as a major form of students’ appreciation of the imposed school learning. instead, the reliance on behaviorist appreciation is omnipresent in conventional schools. i could not find good research on alumni’s perception of the usefulness of their past school learning (cf. hartman & schmidt, 1995; snijders, wijnia, rikers, & loyens, 2019), but my observation suggests that their perceptions are mixed. in the rapidly changing society, technology, economy, etc., it is very difficult for the state, educational experts, politicians, and teachers to predict what can be useful for a particular student in their future. but, what if the behaviorist and postponed educational appreciation of conventional schools had been 100% effective? would their imagined efficiency have been desirable? what if the behaviorism of the rewards-punishments system could successfully condition all students to love the imposed school learning even without the rewards-punishments system? what if all students had deeply trusted the school authorities that the imposed school learning would be very useful in their future? is it good for the students’ education, as i discussed above? my answer is mostly no. both behaviorist and postponed appreciation are unconditional – it is expected that all students must like all school learning, regardless of its content. the unconditionality contradicts the inherently selective nature of appreciation – appreciation is a positive bias, existing in the context of a possibility for negative and indifferent biases. when negative and indifferent biases are impossible, as the unconditional normative appreciation of conventional schooling implies, appreciation stops being authentic. it becomes pseudo-appreciation. genuine appreciation involves a possibility for a person to dislike the experienced learning or to remain indifferent to it. conventional school denies the legitimacy of such options for their students. in progressive, innovative schools, students’ appreciation of their learning is expected to be rooted in their intrinsic motivation. the pedagogical goal of progressive instruction is to expand the students’ genuine interests to cover the imposed curriculum that is designed by the educational experts. this expansion of the students’ existing interests can be done through “double psychologizing” the imposed curriculum (dewey, 1902), exploitation of the student’s ignorance (rousseau, 1979), incorporation of the students’ “funds of knowledge” (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzález, 1992), application of “culturally relevant pedagogy” (ladson-billings, 1995) or “the strength model” in contrast to “the deficit model” used in conventional education (cline & schwartz, 1999), and so on. “the holy grail” of progressive education is to find “the honest way of teaching” that can make any chosen/imposed curriculum intrinsically motivated for any student at any time (matusov, 2021, submitted; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019). this is a paraphrase of the famous motto by a famous american psychologist and educator jerome bruner, “...any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (bruner, 1986, p. 129). the intrinsic motivation appreciation also has problems with its effectiveness and desirability (matusov, 2021, submitted). “the honest way of teaching” can be achieved for some students, in some curriculum, sometimes. also, the intrinsic motivation appreciation is normatively unconditional. in progressive schools, students are supposed to love everything that is taught indiscriminately (greenberg, 1991, p. 101), which contradicts the essence of authentic appreciation, as i discussed above. what makes the normative educational appreciation in the conventional and progressive schooling pseudo-appreciation is its unconditionality and non-selectivity. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e15 free from unconditionality, the behaviorist, postponed, and intrinsic motivation types of appreciation can become authentic. when students have a choice to study or not to study, what to study, and how to study, behaviorist, postponed, and intrinsic motivation types of appreciation can become authentic. for example, a child can be bribed by parents with candy to try a smoked fish that looks unappealing for the child. after the child overcomes the repulsion and tries the smoked fish to get the candy, the child may find out whether they like the taste of the smoked fish or not. if the child likes the smoked fish, they can start eating it out of the pleasure of the fish – thanks to the bribe by the candy. but, if the child does not like the taste of the smoked fish, the bribe helped the child to realize that. in this case, this behaviorist appreciation becomes authentic (matusov, 2020b). in democratic schools, several types of normative educational appreciation are expected. the first type is affective appreciation. students study what they like to study. as a founder of the sudbury valley school, dan greenberg pointed out, the difference between progressive schools and democratic schools is that in the former, students must love what they study, while in the latter, the students study what they love (greenberg, 1991, p. 101). the second type is curiosity and interest appreciation. students study what is interesting for them and for what they find their curiosity. interest and curiosity are the basis of the students’ appreciation of their learning and insight (when the latter is recognized). in both types of appreciation, the learning process has an intrinsically positive value for the student. the third type is socialization appreciation. students learn because they want to socialize in the desired activity or practice or community (e.g., gaming community, a community of practice). the fourth type is problem-solving appreciation. students study to solve a problem that they are faced with in some activity important to them. they appreciate this learning because it is useful. the fifth type of appreciation can be called jumping-through-hoops appreciation. students learn because, in order to reach something desirable for them, they have to learn how to jump through hoops – often bureaucratic hoops set by society. for example, many american teenage students in democratic schools choose to prepare for sat to get to a college of their desire. these students often know that sat is a waste of their time, but still, it is important for the students because it opens the door for their dream professions (rietmulder, 2019). in the fourth and fifth types, the product of learning is more important than its process. in the third type of appreciation, the socialization appreciation, students can prioritize the process or product of learning or their mixture. there can be more types of appreciation in democratic schools. in contrast to normative appreciation in conventional and progressive schools, in democratic schools, educational appreciation is conditional and selective for the students, which makes it authentic. finally, critical dialogic education offers another type of appreciation – a critical examination of the student’s educational desires. the student’s appreciation itself becomes the subject of educational investigation. as i described in the case above, my undergraduate student engaged in a critical examination of whether she really wanted to be a teacher and learn about teaching practice or not. similarly, in studying the issue of how to suppress bullying in school more effectively, my students can be provoked to study what is their true pedagogical desire in addressing bullying in their future classrooms: should their future students avoid bullying their peers because they are afraid of punishment or because they feel that bullying is wrong, or something else. some of my students realize that their initial educational desire that they wanted to pursue was wrong. critical dialogic education rooted in socrates’ motto, “the unexamined life is not worth living” (plato & riddell, 1973), makes educational appreciation itself the subject of its critical examination. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e16 conclusion: education and dialogic pedagogy the role of dialogue and pedagogy in the student’s educational desire, organization, guidance, and reflection are very important. educational desire involves the student’s desire to study something that the student feels is important for them. however, as i discussed above, a particular educational desire can be problematic for the student. in the case above, my student thought that she had wanted to become a teacher and, thus, to study teaching. however, her experience of disengagement in our class, based on promoting authorial dialogic learning in the students, convinced her that her original educational desire was wrong. although she did not engage in a dialogue about that with me or her peers in the class, she told me during our meeting in the café that she discussed her feelings and doubts with her friends and parents. after our conversation in the café, i decided to incorporate big and small critical dialogues about my students’ educational desires, including doubts and changes, in my classes. some students know rather well what they want to study – at least with what to start to study – how to study, with whom, when, and where. some students need help from a pedagogue to provide them with inspirational choices for what to study and how and with whom. some other students want the teacher to make all these decisions for them and even push them to study. the latter case is still different from widespread foisted education common in conventional and progressive schools because those students have the right to withdraw their trust-based consent to submit to the teacher’s educational design at any moment (matusov, 2021, in press). as i argue here and elsewhere (matusov, 2020c, 2020d), foisted education is often nonand anti-educational because it excludes the students from the evaluation of their own learning and insight experiences. a critical dialogue among and with students on the organization of their educational activities, facilitated by the teacher when this facilitation is needed by the students, can be an important part of the students’ meaningful education. as i wrote elsewhere (matusov, 2020a, 2020b), the teacher’s genuine guidance starts with the student asking the teacher for help with their difficulties, questions, and inquiries that the student genuinely owns. from this point of view, there is usually very little genuine guidance occurring in conventional schools because either students do not ask for help or they ask for help about difficulties that they do not own, but rather are foisted on them. in conventional schools, it is often the teacher who asks the students questions – the testing, pseudo-questions, because the teacher knows the answer (lemke, 1990; mehan, 1979; sinclair & coulthard, 1975). yet, in genuine guidance, even when the student asks the teacher for genuine help, it is usually unclear about what kind of help is needed, exactly about what, and how much help the student really needs from the teacher (who can also be the student’s peer). this is what a true pedagogical dialogue is about10. another important role of the teacher (who again can be a peer) is to help the student to recognize a discontinuity of the student’s subjectivity and participation in an activity when and if this help is needed by the student. this recognition is a precursor of educational appreciation. the discontinuity may be important to be evaluated by the student because of the new choices the student might be faced with. when i was a 10-year-old and found myself suddenly able to read, people around me – my parents, my teachers, my friends, my peers, and even my new activities – tried to impose their choices on me. i wish i had had somebody who would have helped me make sense of the changes and pressures imposed on me by the newly emerged reading ability. i wish there had been somebody, whom i trusted at the time, who engaged me in a critical dialogue about the discontinuities and relational disruptions my newly emerged reading 10 here, i am using the term “pedagogical dialogue” very differently from mikhail bakhtin, a russian philosopher of dialogism. bakhtin used this term descriptively and almost sarcastically to capture the monologic nature of the teacher-student exchanges in conventional schooling (bakhtin, 1999; see also: matusov, 2009; skidmore, 2000). in contrast, i use this term normatively and prescriptively as a genuine dialogue about the teacher-student genuine guidance. the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e17 ability brought down on me and helped me sort out tensions and temptations i had found myself in. this dialogic help would have made my reading insight much more educational than it actually was. finally, dialogic pedagogy can help to promote the critical educational appreciation of the student’s learning and/or insight. for example, my studies and dialogue with my colleagues about literacy and orality helped me develop ambivalence, if not, at times, apprehension about my own and other people’s literacy (matusov & st. julien, 2004). dialogue can promote a critical examination of the student’s learning 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(1986). the fifth seal: a novel (a. tezla, trans.). budapest: corvina. sidorkin, a. m. (2002). learning relations: impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. new york: p. lang. sinclair, j. m., & coulthard, m. (1975). towards an analysis of discourse: the english used by teachers and pupils. london: oxford university press. skidmore, d. (2000). from pedagogical dialogue to dialogical pedagogy. language and education, 14(4), 283-296. snijders, i., wijnia, l., rikers, r., & loyens, s. (2019). alumni loyalty drivers in higher education. social psychology of education, 22, 607-627. doi:10.1007/s11218-019-09488-4 the relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.425 | vol. 9 (2021) e19 yazzie-mintz, e. (2006). voices of students on engagement: a report on the 2006 high school survey of student engagement. retrieved from http://letsgetengaged.wikispaces.com/file/view/hssse_2006_report.pdf new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a1 the (im)possibility of education: theory and method in paolo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed and gayatri spivak’s righting wrongs fredrik svensson gävle university, sweden abstract postcolonial critics paulo freire (1921–1997) and gayatri chakravorty spivak (1942–) have both made attempts at offering pedagogical formulas that take into account the student’s experiences in order to oust oppressive tendencies from the classroom, and at first glance, many of their ideas seem close to identical: freire speaks dismissively of “banking” education (75), and spivak rejects rote learning (“righting” 551); freire argues that a reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction is a prerequisite for proper education (all participants need to be “teachers and students” simultaneously [53]), and spivak exhorts the educator to “learn to learn from below” (548). in other words, both scholars advocate a pedagogy whose “very legitimacy lies in…dialogue” (freire 109), and they both undertake what this text labels a methodological leap from theory to practice. the aim of this article, then, is to find out how or to what extent freire and spivak render their pedagogical theories practicable and whether they manage to circumvent the danger of transference, of imposing the educator’s agenda on the learner. the article’s response to this question is no, in freire’s case, and yes, but only provisionally, in spivak’s. when freire puts his teacher in charge of deciding what voices in the classroom should be heard and what voices should be gagged, he leaves the door open for renewed oppression and a mere turning of the tables, clearly against the grain of his own line of argument. spivak, on the other hand, leaves no loopholes for oppressive tendencies in her methodology; however, as she usually shuns “the production of models [of practice] as such,” withdraws her own formulas, and uses deconstruction as a “safeguard against the repression or exclusion of ‘alterities,” her settling for a certain praxis can only be temporary and provisional (“can the subaltern” 103, norton 2110). fredrik svensson received his phd from karlstad university, sweden, but spent one of his doctoral years as a fulbright visiting student researcher at university of california, santa barbara. exploring how critics have realized the affordances of american author cormac mccarthy’s ambiguous ecocentric prose, svensson’s dissertation, ideology and symbolism in the novels of cormac mccarthy (2020), seeks to answer the question as to what these realizations reveal about current views of human-world relationships. a certified senior high school teacher with experience in teaching all ages from six-year-olds to adults, svensson works at gävle university, sweden, where he teaches everything between didactics and literary theory. contact: fredrik.svensson@hig.se. ïïò dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) mailto:fredrik.svensson@hig.se the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a2 “i mean your analysis…no, better call it ours—aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor man—in analysing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh?” (dostoevsky 236). for more than two millennia, well-balanced dialogue has been a highly respected means of stimulating awareness and critical thinking in students. the responsive pedagogue who learns from their learners is often elevated as an obvious good, antithetical to the self-absorbed lecturer. as admirable as this idea may be, however, it raises some questions, not least the methodological question of how any teacher might be able to avoid the risk of imposing ideas and ideals on students and what didactic methods may facilitate the kind of dialogue that allows for contributions from all participants. unfortunately, as the supposedly praiseworthy practice of the dialogical educator is seldom challenged, questions of this kind often remain unanswered. postcolonial critics paulo freire (1921–1997) and gayatri chakravorty spivak (1942–) have both made attempts at offering pedagogical formulas that take into account the student’s ‘reality’ in order to oust oppressive tendencies from the classroom, and at first glance, many of their ideas seem close to identical: freire speaks dismissively of “banking” education (75), and spivak rejects rote learning (“righting” 551); freire argues that a reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction is a prerequisite for proper education (all participants need to be “teachers and students” simultaneously [53]), and spivak exhorts the educator to “learn to learn from below” (548). in other words, both scholars advocate a pedagogy whose “very legitimacy lies in…dialogue” (freire 109)—and, as i will argue, they both undertake what this text labels a methodological leap, from theory to practice, from thought to action. the impulse that prompted this text was to find out how and to what extent freire and spivak render their pedagogical theories practicable and whether they, in doing this, manage to circumvent the danger of transference, i.e., of imposing the educator’s agenda on the learner. these inquiries can be taken to pose the question if it is possible for any pedagogue to initiate a didactic model based on dialogue without establishing a ‘fixed’ itinerary for the student to follow. in other words, the problems described above concern not only freire and spivak but all reflective practitioners. thus, a scrutiny of the methods advocated by the scholars in question has an indisputable value for the general field of pedagogy. my review of the theoretical ideas that undergird freire’s and spivak’s pedagogies will demonstrate that although freire displays an awareness of the risk that his pedagogy will merely reproduce and reverse the logic of oppression, his attempt to address the student’s internalization of the oppressor’s voice falls prey to precisely this risk. it will also be argued that even if spivak is more successful in shunning authoritarian tendencies, her corollary mistrust of formalized methods makes her pedagogy appear more impracticable. the article will thus conclude that the merit of freire’s and spivak’s work might not lie so much in their respective methodologies but in their confidence in teacher and student alike and in their recognition of teaching as an indispensable but incredibly difficult and contextually sensitive task. background although freire’s and spivak’s texts might have general significance, the very specific contexts in which their respective pedagogies were founded must not be ignored. freire’s life and career, firstly, was marked by circumstances that compelled him to use the terms “oppressed” and “student” interchangeably, and spivak’s pedagogical aphorisms, secondly, revolve mainly around the education of the “subaltern.” for spivak, this term denotes a subject who is removed “from all lines of social mobility” and exists outside power, “subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule, never adopting the dominant point of view or vocabulary as expressive of its own identity” (“scattered” 475, norton 2111). this is the subject, then, whom the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a3 spivak refers to when she speaks of the “student” or the “learner,” and this is the subject her didactic examples primarily concern. yet, as spivak puts it, “in the hope that [her] words will be read by some who are interested in comparable work elsewhere, [she is] always pushing for generalization” (“righting” 551). encouraged by this invitation, i will take the opportunity to juxtapose spivak’s generalizations with those of paulo freire in the hope that this will yield valuable results for teachers wishing to learn both with and from their students. the first step will be an attempt to place freire and spivak in their respective theoretical contexts. freire although the theoretical differences between freire and spivak abound, there are also important similarities between the lines of reasoning that constitute the foundations of their pedagogical programs. one of these correspondences concerns ideology as a phenomenon that needs to be charted and understood before a liberating pedagogy can take place. drawing on karl marx—and heirs as diverse as herbert marcuse, györgy lukács and louis althusser—freire discusses the ideologically constituted myths that check the liberation of the oppressed, such as “the myth that the oppressor order is a ‘free society,’” “the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur,” and “the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university” (freire 120). due to a fatalistic false consciousness (66, 111), freire has it, the oppressed fail to unmask not only these myths but also, on a more general level, the fact that there “is no history without humankind, and no history for human beings… [,] only history of humanity, made by people and (as marx pointed out) in turn making them” (111). a reified view of history, then, makes change appear as an impossibility. freire is a devout dialectician, and this manifests itself not least when he attempts to disclose the “true” world hidden behind the veils of ideology. in freire’s understanding, this world tends to be structured according to a binarist logic. for instance, the oppressed are antithetical to the oppressor, “problem-solving” education finds its opposite in “problem-posing” education, and science is diametrically opposite to magic (giroux 19). in pedagogy of the oppressed, binarisms of these kinds often block out any nuances that may exist in between oppositions. critiquing this limiting logic, henry a. giroux suggests that, in his struggle against colonialism, freire “often reverses rather than ruptures its basic problematic” (giroux 19). giroux juxtaposes the “elements [in freire’s later work] of a criticism that shows an affinity with emancipatory strands of postmodern discourse,” on the one hand (19), with the repression of heterogeneity in the “‘monolithic figures and stereotypes of colonialist representations’” that arguably haunt pedagogy of the oppressed, on the other (parry qtd in giroux 20). this dichotomy is compelling, especially since the progression would be in keeping with postmodern times; unfortunately, however, it is also almost as reductive as the binary thinking that giroux objects to. though it is true, for instance, that freire contends in pedagogy of the oppressed that “[r]evolutionary praxis must stand opposed to the praxis of the dominant elites” because “the latter constitute” the antithesis of the people, he also warns his readers by suggesting that if the oppressed rise to power as dual beings—the oppressor and the oppressor logic still housed within themselves—they will only have imagined to have ceased power (freire 107–108, 112). their “existential duality,” freire writes, “may even facilitate the rise of a sectarian climate leading to the installation of bureaucracies which undermine the revolution” (108). this duality, in its turn, then, will very likely result in a mere reversal of the “terms of the contradiction” (38). and this is not enough. for the people to become “fully human,” freire argues, a “[r]esolution of [this] oppressor-oppressed contradiction” and a “new social consciousness” are absolute necessities (38, 124). this idea of a new kind of consciousness could be understood as freire’s adherence to “certain problematic elements of modernism,” focused on the production of new languages and “new spaces of the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a4 resistance” (giroux 18): some form of a programmatic modernist utopianism, in other words. however, “freire’s own belief in the diverse ways in which the oppressed struggle,” which giroux, too, acknowledges (18), is also evident in pedagogy of the oppressed. in a footnote, for instance, when discussing the necessity of interaction between different communities, freire points out that “[t]his requirement implies the consciousness of unity in diversification” (freire 123, my italics)—a term strikingly similar to donna haraway’s notion of unity via affinity, which was presented at least in part as a critique of dialectics as a “dream language,” and which suggests that it is not necessary for the oppressed to all speak and resist in the same way, as long as there is there is “political kinship” (haraway 2213, 2197). at any rate, the fact that pedagogy of the oppressed shows an awareness of the risks associated with a totalizing language, but still to some extent speaks it, is significant (cf. clarence w. joldersma, who argues that “freire's constructivist epistemology, based in freedom, is at its root an attempt to relate to the world by a totalizing relation, grasping it by means of naming” [136]). the author wants to map, to systemize, to educate, and to transform, but soon seems to realize that the only means he has at his disposal are flawed. however, his decision to try anyway is an important feature of his own pedagogy, and it provides an apt link to this article’s other focal point. spivak ideology is for spivak as central as it is for freire; yet, much has obviously happened in this line of reasoning when the former enters the academy. this means that she must position herself in relation to ideas that were still in their infancy when freire wrote his magnum opus. in “can the subaltern speak?,” for instance, spivak criticizes gilles deleuze and michel foucault for ignoring “both the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor” in their respective works (spivak, “can the subaltern?” 84). introducing this argument, spivak writes of foucault that his “commitment to ‘genealogical’ speculation…has created an unfortunate resistance to ‘mere’ ideological critique” (68). for foucault, spivak notes, this results in a number of theoretical failures. one of these, she contends, is the tendency to regard the masses as “undeceived” (69). explicating this idea, in one of spivak’s quotations, foucault proposes that “‘the masses know perfectly well, ‘clearly’…they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well’”; thus, these people need no intellectual spokesperson (69). spivak diagnoses this notion as the symptom of the idea of a “mechanical relation between desire and interest”: the masses know their interests because they know their desires, and “‘interest always follows and finds itself where desire has placed it” (68). “an undifferentiated desire is [here] the agent,” spivak explains, “and power slips in to create the effects of desire: ‘power…produces positive effects at the level of desire—and also at the level of knowledge’” (69). this “parasubjective matrix,” then, “cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed subject” (69). what worries spivak here, it seems, is the restoration of a sovereign subject who is always capable of speaking for itself. she also notes the irony of the fact that this restoration is executed by those who purport to be its most severe critics: the advocates of poststructuralist theory (72–74).1 this restoration bothers spivak because she believes that the imperialist “constitution of that other of europe…was in the interest of a dynamic economic requiring that interest, motives (desires) and power (of knowledge) be ruthlessly dislocated”; differently put, that desires and other driving forces were rearranged so as to contribute to the fulfillment of certain goals predicated on the ideology of colonialism (75). the point here is that the success of the colonial project proves that the masses cannot always speak “for themselves” since ideology is capable of rearranging their desires (73). thus, a theory of ideology becomes indispensable for 1 for a sustained discussion of this disagreement between spivak, foucault, and deleuze, see sharon stein and vanessa de oliveira andreotti’s “complicity, ethics and education: political and existential readings of spivak’s work” (33). the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a5 intellectuals interested in the relationship between all global divisions of labor, as well as in the relationship between teacher and student. responsibility and complicity are two keywords in spivak’s critique of deleuze and foucault. the intellectual, she declares, has an “institutional responsibility,” and this responsibility is evaded if one masquerades “as [an] absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (75, 87). the intellectual’s task, of course, is not to speak for the other but to find out and demonstrate why the other cannot speak. in other words, the intellectual should not attempt to represent the other but to represent how the other is represented and how ideologically conditioned representations silence the very object of representation. ignoring this task—by “abstain[ing] from representation” altogether—makes the scholar more than necessarily complicit in the incessant obliterating of the voice of the oppressed, of the culturally and materially damaged “[o]n the other the side of the international division of labor” (80). therefore, spivak argues, one should instead address the major problem “that the [other’s] itinerary has not [yet] been traced as to offer an object of seduction for the representing intellectual” (80). the question, then, is how this kind of sketch could be drawn. one of the most essential works for scholars trying to make sense of “can the subaltern speak?” as well as spivak’s ideas on education is pierre macherey’s a theory of literary production, written four years after freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. influenced by althusser’s concept of “internal distantiation,” macherey argues that, by endowing ideology with a form, literature illuminates “ideology’s contradictory relation to real history” (eagleton “macherey and marxist” 151). ideology is here seen as unitary and, thus, an illusion sustained only by silences that, if spoken, would reveal the ideology as a “structure of absences” (150). to unmask ideology, the critic needs to interrogate the “unconsciousness” of the investigated texts to look for significance in the margins (150). adopting and modifying this method of interpretation, spivak sets herself the task of reading “the social text of imperialism” to find out “what it cannot say,” what is repressed (“can the subaltern?” 82). this “‘measuring [of] silences,’” then, for spivak, becomes synonymous with an investigation and description of “the…deviation’ from an ideal that is irreducibly differential” (82). from a pedagogical point of view, these ideas are tremendously valuable, since a tracing of ideological absences potentially brings to our attention why certain voices speak while others are silent. consequently, spivak’s pedagogical program—and its dialogical character—is a logical continuation of her critique of ideology. in her pedagogy, spivak combines her machereyian marxism with derridean ideas (which she tries to render more practicable) and applies this line of thought onto the world of education. like freire, spivak shows an awareness of the many pitfalls that threaten an undertaking of this kind; nonetheless, however, she, too, suggests that we must take the risk of severe failure, that we must “acknowledge complicity and yet walk the walk” (xi outside). the methodological leap: tactics although respect for the learner is an obvious cornerstone in both of the pedagogies discussed here, it should be acknowledged that this respect does not go so far as to suggest that either the student or the teacher is a “complete” human being; on the contrary, freire, for instance, states first that hope is a prerequisite for dialogical education, and then that hope, in its turn, “is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search—a search which can be carried out only in communion with others” (72). furthermore, as previously implied, this notion of “unfinishedness” regards not only people but their world as well: reality is constantly transformed into something that cannot be foreseen, and this “process of becoming” is key (65). because supposedly, this mindset—which renders the present dynamic and the future uncertain—is meant to function as a safeguard against the oppression of what is fixed and the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a6 predetermined, and against this background, it becomes necessary for freire to stress that education must be an “ongoing activity” that is “constantly remade in the praxis” (65). this is yet another junction where freire crosses paths with spivak, who, similarly, espouses a “humanities to come” and addresses the very problem that gives rise to the research question of this paper (“righting” 526); to wit: the question as to how it might be possible for educators to develop methods for an activity that is supposed to be spontaneous, uncoercive, and dialogical, and how a method that has been written down (and is thus fixed) can remain versatile and responsive to a dynamic present. as mentioned earlier, one of the main objectives of freire’s pedagogy is to reveal ideologically conditioned myths as false representations of reality. this is achieved by focusing on concrete situations and joining the people in an analysis that goes so deep as to force the latter to either “divest themselves of their myths, or reaffirm them” (freire 138). the former option is, of course, a painful undertaking, as it involves the tumbling of a world that for its ‘inhabitants’ seemed real just a moment ago. freire exemplifies with details from an educational program called “full circle,” which took place in new york city in 1968: a group in a new york ghetto was presented a coded situation showing a big pile of garbage on a street corner—the very same street where the group was meeting. one of the participants said at once, “i see a street in africa or latin america.” “and why not in new york?” asked the teacher. “because we are the united states and that can’t happen here.” beyond a doubt this man and some of his comrades who agreed with him were retreating from a reality so offensive to them that even to acknowledge that reality was threatening. for an alienated person, conditioned by a culture of achievement and personal success, to recognize his situation as objectively unfavorable seems to hinder his own possibilities of success. (138) for freire, this passage illustrates how the participants do not “talk and act for themselves as active subjects of the historical process” (139). rather, we must assume they are subject to the historical process. to change this, to make people “considerers” of the world, carefully prepared methods must be used (120), and these methods need to operate so that they relate directly to the “felt needs” of the students and to the situations that limit their agency. beyond these limit-situations—made up of social contradictions—lie “untested feasibility” and “potential consciousness” (94). untested feasibility is the antithesis to “perceived practicable solutions” and “presently practiced solutions”; in other words, it represents a new way of life, free from the oppression which is always manifest in limit-situations (94). attaining this new life, however, is no easy task: even problem-posing educators might fail to guide their students to a perception of the “untested feasibility lying beyond the limit-situations which engender […] their needs (97, italics mine). here, a parallel may be drawn to spivak’s argument that colonialism managed to dislocate the “interests” and “desires” of the other in a way that facilitated the global and exploitative division of labor (“can the subaltern?” 75). to elaborate on this comparison: for freire and spivak both, what people covet is not always the result of some innate and incorruptible desiring-machine: sometimes, ideology and its limitsituations will generate and rearrange peoples’ desires, and thus, these desires do not necessarily tell us what political action, or lack thereof, that would improve the lives of the masses. freire’s antidote to corrupted needs is “thematic investigation” and “codification” (freire 98–99). the student’s relationship to reality must first be investigated by an interdisciplinary team working with the students, and then, thematic findings that are believed to have generative potential are codified in the form of photographs, sketches, or oral presentations (98, 95). the next step is the decoding process, which may look as follows: in one of the thematic investigations carried out in santiago, a group of tenement residents discussed a scene showing a drunken man walking on the street and three young men conversing on the corner. the group the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a7 participants commented that “the only one there who is productive and useful to his country is the souse who is returning home after working all day for low wages and who is worried about his family because he can’t take care of their needs. he is the only worker. he is a decent worker and a souse like us… there are two important aspects to these declarations. on the one hand, they verbalize the connection between earning low wages, feeling exploited, and getting drunk—getting drunk as a flight from reality, as an attempt to overcome the frustration of inaction, as an ultimately self-destructive solution. on the other hand, they manifest the need to rate the drunkard highly. he is the “only one useful to his country, because he works, while the others only gab.” after praising the drunkards, the participants then identify themselves with him, as workers who also drink—‘decent workers’ (99). “in contrast,” writes freire, “imagine the failure of a moralistic educator, sermonizing against alcoholism and presenting as an example of virtue something which for these men is not a manifestation of virtue” (99–100). it is significant here that the teaching situation and the teaching material build on the students’ perception of reality and that the students themselves partake in producing the lesson. furthermore, and finally, it is also crucial that the form of the lesson is permissive, that everyone gets to speak, since this promises to bestow on the seminar an openness that, in turn, paves the way for a nascent type of critical thinking. drawing implicitly on the unfinished or indeterminate character of freire’s pedagogy, peter mclaren touches on the difference between strategies and tactics. strategies, mclaren notes, quoting michael shapiro, “belong to those who have legitimate positions within the social order and consequently are part of ‘a centralized surveillance network for controlling the population,’” whereas tactics “‘belong to those who do not occupy a legitimate space and depend instead on time, on whatever opportunities present themselves’” (mclaren 161). the tactical educator, accordingly, is a teacher who “seizes the space of the classroom to engage in a dialogue about issues not on the formal curriculum” (161). this teacher’s pedagogy, mclaren declares, inevitably takes place in the terrain of the other, and the tactics that inform it are “dispersed,” “nomadic,” and “difficult to administer because they cannot be pinned down” (conquergood qtd in mclaren 162). it is tactics rather than strategies, then, that govern freire’s pedagogy: the freirean seminar should be devoid of determinate itineraries but charged with an openness toward the unexpected. even as freire works with reasonably concrete pedagogical formulas, in other words, “faith” in the students and their voices makes for a tactic that is “difficult to administer” but that also renders the teaching less vulnerable to the logic of the oppression it seeks to overthrow. while spivak’s pedagogy as a whole may not be easily summarized, few first-time readers probably fail to note that a relatively small number of keywords frequently recur in her texts. for instance, nouns such as “humility” and “imagination”—accompanied by verb phrases like “‘open ourselves to an other’s ethic’” and “learn from below”—inform spivak’s writing and sketch a pedagogy that cannot be definitely planned, and that will not work unless teachers check their will to dominate (simmons 141). the pedagogy is also explicitly focused on the importance of working with the culture of the students and with desires as a productive force. one should also note that at least some of the teacher’s openness to the students’ experience hinges on the ability to acknowledge non-realist perceptions of time and space. whereas realist modes of thought espouse an objectively observable linearity that supposedly helps authors and theorists produce politically productive accounts of cause and effect, the rationale for embracing other temporalities and other experiences of reality would be that even things that are not objectively observable or causal can still be felt—by students, for instance.2 2 for a helpful discussion of this feature of spivak’s pedagogy, see snaza (52–56). the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a8 again, desire is for spivak no self-evident indicator of what people really need. more specifically, she suggests that it “is wrong to think that [the people ‘below’] would have a clear intuition of the public sphere and know exactly what they need and want” (spivak qtd in shaikh 183). put even more bluntly: “[y]ou don’t oppress people for centuries and then expect that their intelligence somehow remains unscathed” (183). building on statements such as these, spivak introduces the idea of education as “an uncoercive rearrangement of desires” (simmons 141). if global capitalism “deceives” us into desiring certain products and a particular way of life, education, too, must operate in a similar fashion: the “‘developed postcapitalist structure’ of today’s world must ‘be filled with the more robust imperative to responsibility which capitalist social productivity was obliged to destroy’” (kitcher qtd in spivak “righting” 24, italics mine). as the word “uncoercive” suggests, however, an educational rearrangement of desires “is not imposed by the teacher but takes place in a manner analogous to the reading of texts, not as ‘analyzing’ and ‘diagnozing’ but as a ‘no holds barred self-suspending leap into the other’s sea—basically without preparation’” (simmons 141). as a theoretical concept, spivak’s leap without preparation brings to mind the unfinished tactics mclaren finds in freire’s pedagogy. this becomes even clearer when she adopts the term “telepoiesis” from derrida. in spivak’s hands, this term signals an activity focused on “creating toward a distant future with a ‘distant other’” (simmons 142). like freire’s pedagogical theory, spivak’s rearrangement of desires “‘is never accurate and must be forever renewed’” (142), and as a practice, spivak argues, it leads to an awareness of the distance “between the ego and the other [a gap that ‘will never be bridged’]”. this awareness, then, in turn, vouches for “humility and suspension of certainty” (simmons 142), which, again, in turn, helps us recognize, in linda alcoff’s words, the “‘impetus to always be the speaker and speak in all situations…for what it is: a desire for mastery and domination’” (alcoff qtd in kapoor 56).3 commenting on this line of thought, william paul simmons notes that spivak tries to “imagine a learning that requires turning off [one’s] own voice” (simmons 142). he also observes that this kind of learning, this “leap into the other’s sea,” this rearrangement of desires, will only be possible in a “humanities to come”—a teaching and a learning that can never be given a determinate itinerary, lest it loses its entire potential (141). two highly related prerequisites are here of great importance: the imaginative ability in both student and teacher, and the latter’s learning to learn from below. “learning from below,” writes ilan kapoor, “is a tried and tired formula”—and for spivak, he continues, “it results mostly in more of the same. serious and meaningful learning from the subaltern requires an anterior step: learning to learn. i have to clear the way for both me and the subaltern before i can learn from her/him” (kapoor 56). the “on-the-ground application” of this learning, then, as construed by kapoor, is “suspending my belief that i am indispensable, better or culturally superior; it is refraining from always thinking that the third world is ‘in trouble’ and that i have the solutions; it is resisting the temptation of projecting myself or my world onto the other” (56). spivak herself has previously described this process of suspension and resistance as the unlearning of one’s privileges; recently, however, this has changed: “you cannot fully unlearn your privileges,” is the new deal (spivak qtd in shaikh 182–183). the closest we can get, according to spivak, is seeing our privilege as “instrumental more than anything else,” as something that can be used as a means of change (183). to sum up, whether one calls it “learning” or “unlearning,” the point here is that we should strive to “open ourselves” and imagine the other “through the other’s eyes as much as possible” (simmons 141–142). as the close-to-literary metaphors above indicate, spivak’s ideas on education are not easily put into practice. the theorist herself even goes so far as to call teaching in groups “[n]ecessary but impossible tasks—like taking care of health even though it is impossible to be immortal; or continuing to listen, read, 3 this can be compared with freire’s notion that the “antidialogical individual, in his relations with others, aims at conquering them” (119). the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a9 write, talk and teach although it is impossible that everything be communicated” (“righting” 575). similarly, spivak often writes of the “(im)possibility of cultural studies” (outside x): an utterly ambiguous notion suggesting both that the humanities are an impossible project that never fully succeeds in reaching its noble goals, and that this project—with its obvious focus on the imagination—is the best possibility there is to understand ourselves and one another. furthermore, as stated before, spivak tends to repeat that the western cultural studies intellectual is always complicit in constituting the other; yet, again, however, in lieu of better options, s/he must “walk the walk” (xi). as nathan snaza has pointed out in one of his readings of spivak, though, this ‘walk’ must be crutched by the realization that western humanism is not self-evidently ‘good,’ but something that needs to be critiqued—even when it is used—because of its pretenses “to universality” and its implication in “humanizing” or “civilizing agendas” (snaza 58). in an interview with nermeen shaikh, spivak touches on the question if the above-mentioned complicity can ever be transformed into something relatively benevolent and productive. the answer is yes: “if you can think of com-plicity as being folded together, you begin to work at the other’s textile much more carefully,” spivak argues (spivak qtd in shaikh 184). the role of the teacher is here the role of the suturer or the “invisible mender,” someone who learns “the weave of the torn cultural fabric” of the other “in unexpected ways”—remember spivak’s espousal of a “humanities to come” (“righting” 546, 548). in other words, to exit the textile metaphor for a moment, the task spivak assigns the pedagogue is to gently look for collective habits that have been lost and superseded by new ones, and then render these habits instrumental. this pedagogical move could consist, for instance, in trying to “access and activate the tribals’ indigenous ‘democratic’ structures to parliamentary democracy by patient and sustained efforts to learn to learn from below” (548). to clarify: the object in this procedure would be to activate ways of life that belong to a “cultural fabric” that has been pushed aside after “centuries of oppression and neglect,” and to put these “ways” to influential and liberative use in contemporary society (548). this is a design that may look as if it affirms the current administration of late capitalist western style parliamentary democracy, but that actually tries to alter it from within (see other spivakian concepts, such as ‘affirmative sabotage’ and ‘hijacking’), by way of suturing it to pre-existent societal structures that were not imposed from above. the supposed result is liberation from below, via indigenous democracy. the influences from macherey and derrida are here evident. the “indigenous ‘democratic’ structures” in spivak’s comment constitute that which has been repressed in the cultural text of imperialism; it is what is now silent—it is an absence. what remains less evident, though, is how these ideas may be put to pedagogical use. as mentioned earlier, and as suggested by her metaphorical language, spivak usually refrains from offering methodological instructions or concrete political plans of action. in “righting wrongs: accessing democracy among the aboriginals,” however, she makes one of few exceptions. here, the idea of “a new pedagogy” is substantiated by a reference to an indian schoolbook, published in the mid 1800s. the author, iswarchandra vidyasagar, spivak explains, “fashioned pedagogic instruments for sanskrit and bengali that, if used correctly, could suture the ‘native’ old” with the “new”—which at this time was represented by lord thomas babington macaulay’s “minute on indian education” (44). in spivak’s view, vidyasagar’s primer is an extremely helpful tool for undermining rote learning and triggering the child “to locate meaning without a teacher” (45). the key to this efficacy lies in the fact that the book nudges the pedagogue to “jumble the structure” of the teaching and thus, to encourage students to think on their own (44). “the first part of the book,” spivak writes, is for the active use of the teacher. the child does not read the book yet—just listens to the teacher, and learns to read and write by reading the teacher’s writing and writing as the teacher guides. reading and writing are not soldered to the fetishized schoolbook. in very poor rural areas, this is still a fine way to teach. (if you have been stumped a hundred times in a lot of places by both teacher and student producing some memorized bit from the textbook when asked to ‘write whatever comes to mind,’ you are convinced of this.) halfway through the book, the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a10 the child begins to read a book, and the title of that page is prothom path, [i.e.,]‘first reading,’ not ‘first lesson.’ what a thrill it must have been for the child, undoubtedly a boy, to get to that moment. today this is impossible, because the teachers, and the teachers’ teachers, indefinitely, are clueless about this book as a do-it-yourself instrument. well-meaning education experts in the capital city, whose children are used to a different world, inspired by self-ethnographing bourgeois nationalists of a period after vidyasagar, have transformed the teacher’s pages into children’s pages… (45) in other words, as formerly used in rural bengal, vidyasagar’s primer vouched for independent reading and thinking and thus differed from top-down schoolbooks that are construed as objective due to the fetishization that obscures the labor and thereby also the values involved in the material’s production. retrieving this old and ‘correct’ way of working with vidyasagar’s primer, then, spivak tries 1) to bring to the reader’s attention a piece of social weave that has been forgotten, 2) to understand it and work with it gently, and 3) to suture it onto the current pedagogical practices in rural west bengal. the “generalizable significance” of the current misguided use of primers, spivak states, “is that, at the onset of colonialism/capitalism, when the indigenous system of teaching began to be emptied of social relevance, there had been an attempt to undo this. the discontinuity between the colonial subject and the rural poor,” however, “is such that the instruments of such undoing were thoughtlessly deactivated” (45). to now activate one of these instruments again means entering into dialogue with the other, thoughtfully, and with the intention of recognizing the point of methods that were not imposed ‘from above.’ the methodological leap: freedom and practicability clearly, both freire and spivak firmly reject pedagogies that somehow project one world onto another or that silence rather than activate voices other than the teacher’s. it is just as clear, moreover, that, in spite of the risk of becoming what they critique, they both make attempts at launching methods for a liberating pedagogy. a common objection to conservative conceptions of freedom is that the liberty of the few—to own land, for instance—often rests on the oppression of the many. and unsurprisingly, since freire conceives of freedom rather as a condition for “human completion” (freire 29) and “the capacity to go beyond present knowledge to change the current perceptions of reality” (joldersma 134), he cautiously takes into consideration the risk that the oppressed equate freedom with landownership and, in turn, the privilege to oppress (freire 28). thus, he attempts to immunize his methodology against any tendencies that might simply reverse the oppressor-oppressed binary. this attempt, however, is not entirely convincing, which becomes clear when freire gives the reader an account of his views on confidence, a concept that is thoroughly discussed in pedagogy of the oppressed. “a real humanist,” freire explains, “can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust” (42). this idea of confidence permeates pedagogy of the oppressed via a number of different phrasings; for instance, the reader learns that “trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change,” that “faith in the people is an a priori requirement for dialogue,” and that whoever lacks this “will fail to initiate (or will abandon) dialogue, reflection, and communication, and will fall into using slogans, communiqués, monologues, and instructions” (42, 71, 48). to use a spivakian metaphor, it stands beyond any doubt that the ability for a teacher to have confidence in the students is the warp and woof of freire’s pedagogy. yet, there is a caveat. the oppressed often internalize the oppressor: this confidence should not, however, be naïve. the leaders must believe in the potentialities of the people, whom they cannot treat as mere objects of their own action; they must believe that the people are capable of participating in the pursuit of liberation. but they must always mistrust the ambiguity of oppressed people, mistrust the oppressor ‘housed’ in the latter (150). the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a11 here, one of the saving clauses that make freire’s methodology work comes into effect. as the teacher in pedagogy of the oppressed not only initiates dialogue but also supervises it, s/he can make sure that it does not transmute into something undesired, and this arbitrary distinction between the true voice of the student and the internalized voice of the oppressor is, of course, a considerable threat to the pedagogical indeterminacy that freire values so highly, even if the purpose of this indeterminacy is very likely to foster in students what bakhtin would call “internally persuasive discourse”: the capacity to think in “an independent, experimenting and discriminating way”—in short: to be free, epistemologically speaking (bakhtin 345).4 giroux gets close to this problem’s core when he inquires how one can “explore the contradiction between validating certain forms of ‘correct’ thinking and the pedagogical task of helping students assume rather than simply follow the dictates of authority, regardless of how radical the project informed by such authority” (giroux 19). pedagogy of the oppressed never answers this question; rather, it makes the need for a response seem even more urgent. this contradiction raises issues of practicability that are indeed pertinent also to spivak’s pedagogical formulas. ilan kapoor homes in on this problem by way of noting that, as explained by spivak, “the ethical encounter with the subaltern” needs to happen at a “face-to-face” level in order not to be exploitative (kapoor 58)—snaza, by the way, traces the levinasian logic of this position and writes that the teacher must ‘let go’ and “dwell with the students as equally faced beings” (58). although kapoor agrees with spivak, he is discomforted by her reticence to find out if this idea is practicable on a larger scale: “not attending to issues of do-ability,” kapoor asserts, “gives [spivak’s] work a romantic, utopic dimension” and “endows her discussion of the ethical encounter with the subaltern with a quasi-mystical, ecstatic character…” (58), perhaps somewhat symptomatic of the deconstructionist’s unwillingness to indulge in the practical and concrete.5 reviewing one of spivak’s major works, terry eagleton, too, objects to her supposed failure to consider practicability and social change. it is the notion of “complicity,” eagleton maintains, that blunts the critical potential: “spivak,” eagleton argues, “is logically mistaken to suppose that imagining some overall alternative to the current system means claiming to be unblemished by it” (figures 166). moreover, eagleton combines his critique of spivak’s aloofness with the concept of factual change with a questioning of her “pretentiously opaque” language (159). although post-colonial theory “makes heavy weather of a respect for the other,” he notes, “the reader, its most immediate other, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity” (159). important to note here is that what eagleton finds wanting in spivak is not theoretical simplification; rather, he argues that she is guilty of the commonplace “mistake of supposing that the concrete is simple and the abstract is complex” (how to read 142). questioning this “misconception,” eagleton contends that it is not until a phenomenon is inserted into its “complex social context…that we can construct a ‘concrete’ concept of it”—and this, one might argue, is a far greater challenge than indulging in vague discussions that are really nothing but rough sketches, nothing but “preliminary outline[s] of the actual reality” (142). this critique of spivak’s “simple” abstruseness is arguably in keeping with kapoor’s delineation of spivak as a romantic utopian without political potential. for a number of reasons, spivak herself would, of course, plead not guilty to these allegations. the concept of utopia, to begin with, is understood and valued quite differently in spivak’s own writing. for her, to be utopian is not to neglect to think or discuss that which is difficult to imagine; rather, it is to be concrete when one should not—it is to practice a mode of thinking that “allows us to figure the impossible” (“righting” 575). simply put, in spivakian theory, it would be a mistake to endow complex matters with concrete and 4 furthermore, freire also declares that some “restraints…must be imposed on the former oppressors so they cannot restore the oppressive order” (39). this statement is arguably informed by the same logic that assigns freire’s pedagogue the task of deciding what voices that should be listened to. freedom for all is the goal, but before it is achieved, the suppression of some detrimental attitudes is inevitable. 5 as derrida puts it: “deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one” (derrida qtd in royle 4). the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a12 simple formulations (because “plain prose cheats” [spivak qtd in morton 6]). thus, spivak explains that she remains a “consensus breaker among metropolitan activists, who feel they can know everything in a nonvague way if only they have enough information, and that not to think so is ‘mystical’” (548). implicitly contesting this claim, spivak suggests that, when it comes to teaching, we can only speak about the “form” (shaikh 175). “the substance of teaching,” she continues, “informs or is informed by this form. i am not talking about ‘what’ because that is the problem: people think that just giving a lot of ‘what’ actually does work as teaching. the trouble to learn is no longer undertaken” (175). even speaking of form, however, is to spivak a risky undertaking, and this is most likely due to the constant threat of simplification. it should be possible, though, to second eagleton’s critique of spivak’s jargon while still defending her inclination to shun concretization. whereas academese is often the result of overproduction and a reluctance to revise, abstract thought can indeed be an attempt to acknowledge actual complexity (and to speak once again with haraway: we do not all speak the same, resist the same, even when we have recognized the same problem). in the case of pedagogy, moreover, abstraction may also be a sign of confidence, not only in students from different contexts but also in the teacher’s professional ability to determine what methods that meet the needs of a given classroom. spivak’s formulas despite her aversion to deceivingly simple formulas, spivak does not refrain completely from producing them herself. in this article, two examples, “learning to learn from below” and “unlearning one’s privileges,” have been mentioned. “strategic use of essentialism,” to offer one more example, is yet another formula that has gained enormous popularity among scholars across the globe. as demonstrated by the quotation below, this is a fact that fills spivak with great discomfort: once i started really getting into doing something about this, about unlearning my privilege, i took it away. it is ‘learning to learn from below,’ if you want a formula. i have also become extremely suspicious of the fact that people seem to like my little formulas: to take another example: ‘strategic use of essentialism,’ i have put that to rest many times, but people have not given it up. (qtd in shaikh 183) the takeaway here is that as soon as a formula is put to use, it must be put to rest because, as a mere formula, it will unavoidably be invalidated by reality and context. in this retraction of formulas, this reversed methodological leap, lies spivak’s solution to the problem that, if received uncritically and practiced without any respect to individual and situational specificity, all methodological instruction is oppressive. by annulling her own ideas as they—one by one—prove insufficient or faulty, spivak implicitly tells her reader that didactic methods are invariably provisional and context-bound and that, for her, the ongoing quest for pedagogical knowledge is the main virtue. in other words, the search for a way to teach and learn is indispensable, but its findings can never be universal or everlasting. this ‘fact,’ spivak herself would probably label a “success-in-failure,” typical of deconstruction, which—in vanessa de oliveria andreotti’s words— “always falls prey to” itself, but which can still pose questions and cause doubts and thereby “lead to better practice” (74). in other words, as the deconstructionist constantly problematizes established notions, s/he, too, eventually ends up deprived of the possibility to offer any universalisms. yet, by scrutinizing the production of the taken-for-granted, deconstruction can act as a corrective device that helps people resist their impulse to believe that ‘i’ always ‘know better’ than ‘them.’ when harnessed in spivak’s thoughts on education, then, this theoretical approach becomes a means of circumventing the danger of methodological oppression, of avoiding the instilling of one’s own ideas on proper education in students and teachers. the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a13 drawing on marx to substantiate the idea that educational programs are never universal, spivak claims that “working hands-on with teachers and students over long periods of time on their terms without thinking about producing information for [her] academic peers is like learning a language ‘to be able to produce in it freely’” and hence “‘to move in it without remembering back to the language rooted and planted in’” her—“‘[…indeed] forgetting it’” (“righting” 548). spivak proposes, then, that non-oppressive teaching is only a possibility when pedagogues divest themselves of the idea of theorizing and instead focus all attention on the classroom. if this operation is completely successful, it seems, it is not necessarily translatable into academic language; if teachers have managed to “leap into the other’s sea,” this is because they have suppressed the impulse to scrutinize, analyze, and lecture (in other words, the inclination to produce new scholarly knowledge [spivak qtd in simmons 141]). when education for once works, it is beyond the scope of scholarly language, and therefore, inaccessible to the academy. for spivak, this is arguably a very convenient conclusion, allowing her to leave many difficult questions unanswered. and whereas this evasive move is what immunizes spivak to demands that she needs to concretize her theory, it is also indeed what justifies kapoor’s accusations of mysticism and romanticism. yet, one could also argue that spivak’s pedagogical usefulness is to some extent up to the reader, who could choose to either reject the whole pedagogy because of its supposed impracticability or consider adopting certain elements as the basis for a tactic. conclusion freire and spivak both agree that ideology exerts an influence on felt needs, that people consequently do not always know what measures would improve their lives, and that this lack of selfknowledge calls for the intervention of a pedagogue who is aware of these problems. freire’s line of reasoning builds on the idea of the teacher as a person in the know and the student as a subject whose consciousness needs to be raised, and even though spivak is somewhat more careful in relation to such matters, by subscribing to the idea that the masses are deceived, her reasoning, too, implies that the successful teacher is able to effect the falling of scales from the student’s eyes. somewhat ironically, then, by posing as epistemic rescuers, spivak and her pedagogue risk constituting the other as destitute of all kinds of non-ideological knowledge. the danger of this critique, of course, is that it makes for a deadlock where no pedagogic action at all is possible, and this risk of complete paralysis is very likely what makes both freire and spivak try anyway, as i have called it—what makes them both leap from theory to practice. spivak, for one, is evidently aware of her own complicity (norton 2110), and, moreover—in spite of her concept of an “uncoercive rearrangement of desires”—she contends that “education [, after all,] inevitably is coercive” (lee and mascarenhas). in other words, spivak acknowledges that without any guidance or leadership, the idea of education (a liberating pedagogy no less) would go down like a house of cards. to answer the main inquiry of this article, which posed the question if freire and spivak manage to present pedagogical methods that are immune from “the danger of transference,” the reply must be “no” in freire’s case, and “yes,” although only provisionally, with regard to spivak’s work. when freire puts his teacher in charge of deciding what voices should be heard and what voices should be gagged, he leaves the door open for renewed oppression and a mere turning of the tables, clearly against the grain of his own line of argument. spivak, on the other hand, leaves no loopholes for oppressive tendencies in her methodology; however, as she usually shuns “the production of models [of practice] as such,” withdraws her own formulas, and uses deconstruction as a “safeguard against the repression or exclusion of ‘alterities,” her settling for a certain praxis can only be temporary and provisional (“can the subaltern” 103, norton 2110). as stated before, this refusal to offer a lasting alternative is both spivak’s problem and her solution to methodological oppression. the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a14 to further clarify these differences between freire and spivak: it is clear that freire’s dialectics inform his pedagogical methods and that this results in rather rigid dichotomies, but also that the synthesis of freire’s dialectical reasoning allows for “alterities,” diversification, indeterminacy, and openness—at least in theory, until his methods ban the “internalized voice,” as if to ensure that the teacher’s agenda is implemented. were it not for this last move, freire and spivak could painlessly have joined forces in the same curriculum. as should be evident by now, however, spivak does not validate the kinds of saving clauses freire eventually resorts to. although she, like most scholars, has an agenda, and a fairly concrete idea of what the world needs politically, this does not corrupt her pedagogical creed, which is protected by her avoidance of firm positions, her investigations of ‘stories in between,’ and her constant moving from one subject position to another. thus, pedagogy emerges as an “impossible task,” and yet also the best possibility there is for mutual understanding (and love, as freire would have put it). in other words, the combination of teaching and learning is a most necessary (im)possibility for which the perfect and completely satisfactory form can never be found. while spivak is the one who explicitly gives voice to this idea, freire, too, is evidently aware that the theoretical language with which he constructs his pedagogy is far from perfect. but in conclusion, although this article has laid bare a few potential problems in the respective methodologies of freire and spivak, it has also shown that the most valuable lesson to be learned from these pedagogues may not concern a certain methodology, but an attitude that acknowledges the student as an intelligent, faced being, and that checks the teacher’s self-assumed superiority. tactics rather than methods, perhaps, but no less valuable for that. references primary sources freire, paolo. pedagogy of the oppressed. london: penguin books, 1970. lee, fiona, & mascarenhas, kiran. http://www.kyoolee.net/reorientale-2010-11-19-summary-fiona-leeand-kiran-mascarenhas.html, accessed april 3, 2023. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. “can the subaltern speak?” from c. nelson and l. grossberg (eds.), marxism and the interpretation of culture, pp. 271–313. macmillan education: basingstoke, 1988. ---. “scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular.” postcolonial studies, 8:4, 475–486. ---. outside in the teaching machine. new york: routledge, 2009. ---. “righting wrongs – 2002: accessing democracy among the aboriginals.” other asias. malden: blackwell publishing, 2008. shaik, nermeen. the present as history: critical perspectives on global power. new york: colombia university press, 2007. secondary sources andreotti, vanessa de oliveira. “an ethical engagement with the other: spivak’s ideas on education.” critical literacy: theories and practices, vol. 1, no. 1. july 2007. bakhtin, m. m. the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin: university of texas press, 1982. dostoevsky, fyodor. the karamazov brothers. hertfordshire: wordsworth editions limited, 2010. eagleton, terry. figures of dissent. london: verso, 2003. the (im)possibility of education fredrik svensson dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.578 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) a15 ---. “macherey and marxist literary theory.” royal institute of philosophy supplement 14 (1982): 145– 155. cambridge up, 1982. print. ---. how to read a poem. oxford: blackwell publishing ltd, 2008. giroux, henry a. “paulo freire and the politics of postcolonialism.” journal of advanced composition, winder 1992, vol. 12, no. 1 (winter 1992), pp. 15–26. joldersma, clarence w. “the tension between justice and freedom in paulo freire's epistemology.” the journal of educational thought (jet) / revue de la pensée éducative, august, 2001, vol. 35, no. 2 (august, 2001), pp. 129-148. haraway, donna. “a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980’s.” the norton anthology of theory and criticism. 2nd ed. ed. vincent b. leitch. new york: norton & company, inc. 2010. print. kapoor, ilan. the postcolonial politics of development. new york: routledge, 2008. leitch, vincent b. (ed.). the norton anthology of theory and criticism. 2nd ed. ed. vincent b. leitch. new york: norton, 2010. print. macherey, pierre. a theory of literary production. london: routledge, 2006. print. mclaren, peter. “paulo freire and the academy: a challenge from the u. s. left.” cultural critique, no. 33 (spring, 1996), pp. 151–184. minnesota: university of minnesota press, 1996. royle, nicholas (ed.). deconstructions: a user’s guide. new york: palgrave, 2000. simmons, william paul. human rights law and the marginalized other. new york: cambridge university press, 2011. snaza, nathan. “class time: spivak’s ‘teacherly turn.’” critical literacy: theories and practices, vol. 9, issue 1, pp. 49–61, 2015. stein, sharon & andreotti, vanessa de oliveira. “complicity, ethics and education: political and existential readings of spivak’s work.” critical literacy: theories and practices, vol. 9, issue 1, pp. 29–43. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx http://www.upress.pitt.edu/upressindex.aspx microsoft word sabey, relational becoming, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a1 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey equipo academy, las vegas, usa abstract this paper draws on bakhtin’s ethico-ontological vision of dialogue to theorize “relational becoming” on a micro-level. to do so, it introduces three “ethical dimensions of dialogue” (responsibility, responsiveness, and capacitation) and develops the interrelated concepts of addressability and presencing as analytical lenses. drawing on transcript data from a series of high school and college students’ discussions about controversial political issues, the analysis examines how interlocutors made themselves addressable, addressed each other, and were “presenced” in dialogue. it also discusses the ethico-ontological potential of these interactions, identifying a problematic tendency among interlocutors to not “show up” in verbal discourse in a variety of ways, including, in particular, reliance on abstractions. key words: dialogue, ethics, ontology, classroom discussions, dialogic pedagogy david sabey completed his doctoral studies at vanderbilt university. as a teacher-researcher, he approaches questions about classroom discourse and education more generally in ethical terms. he currently teaches high school english, where he appreciates the opportunity to continue exploring these issues in practice. ïòò introduction in this paper, i approach classroom dialogue from an ethico-ontological perspective, that is, in terms of how interlocutors are involved in a social process of becoming certain kinds of people, both collectively and individually, for better or worse, in response to each other. i refer to this as “relational becoming.” relational becoming is an ontological process because it affects the nature of the world, at least insofar as it is accessible to humans. the world, from this perspective, does not exist neutrally as the pre-existent background to an interaction but is, instead, dialogically co-authored by the interlocutors. in bakhtin’s (1993) terms, it is not simply “given,” but “posited” (p. 18). this is not to say that the human world is entirely emergent, created ex nihilo with each new interaction, but, to some degree, the quality of one’s being in the world is at stake with every response. as bakhtin (1984) muses, “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free” (p. 166). our existence unfolds in response to a dynamic world populated and partly authored by actual and potential interlocutors. in short, human ontology is always already dialogic. it follows that the quality of my responses to my interlocutors and their responses to me affect our mutual being in the world—and, therefore, have a profoundly ethical import. this is why i refer to relational becoming as an ethical, in addition to an ontological, process. to be clear, i intend the word “ethical” here issn: 2325-3290 (online) relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a2 and throughout this essay to mean “having to do with ethics” or “relating to the quality of interpersonal relationships,” rather than “morally good.” in this sense, relational becoming can always be understood in ethical terms but is not necessarily good. although this is a relatively straightforward observation, it has rarely been addressed head on in educational research and theory. even educationalists working in dialogic pedagogy seem to shy away from the question of what makes a given response more or less ethically optimal (see sabey, 2021 for a fuller treatment of this tendency, and matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2018, for a notable exception). this widespread hesitance may stem from an understandable wariness of moral absolutes, but the specter of oppressive dogma does not change the fact that our responses are ethicoontologically consequential, nor does it excuse us from the work of conceptualizing and pursuing better responses. the primary purpose of this paper is to articulate and employ a framework for conceptualizing such “better responses.” i refer to this framework as the ethical dimensions of dialogue1. for me, this framework is an attempt to take seriously both the weighty ethical obligation to respond well to one’s interlocutors, and the unfinished, dialogic nature of the good. in conceptualizing and articulating the ethical dimensions of dialogue, i have been largely inspired by bakhtin, particularly his early, explicitly ethical writing, but i do not see this framework as a direct application of bakhtinian thought. instead, it is my synthesis and distillation of several themes that resonate across bakhtin’s work, as will be described below. the ethical dimensions of dialogue are premised on the understanding that humans exist in the world dialogically and that all meaning-making is the byproduct of that dialogue. the great dialogue of the ages has produced important understandings, including ethical ideals such as justice. but, having emerged in the unruly reality of human relations, these ideals are shot through with the perspectives, biases, and partiality inherent in human life. any ideal, however defined and articulated, remains an imperfect standard, incapable of adequately directing one’s ethical behavior in every situation. i think, for example, of martin luther king jr.’s letter from birmingham jail, in which he laments the way white moderates invoked the ideal of “peace” to justify their lack of support for the civil rights movement. although peace is certainly a worthy ideal, what it actually means in practice is not self-evident but is always a matter of perspective—and one’s understanding of peace may be in tension (or even opposition) with another’s, as was the case with dr. king and the white moderates. we cannot escape the perspectival nature of meaning-making and, consequently, ethical action. with no extra-discursive and transparent ideals upon which we can always rely, we are left with the fundamental truths that we exist in response to others, each of whom has a unique perspective and voice, and that our world is the byproduct of our responses. ethical dimensions of dialogue the ethical dimensions of dialogue are an attempt to approach dialogic ethics as a never-ending process of relating to the other rather than having to do with some predetermined outcome. in this processual perspective, what might it mean to respond well? put simply, i believe that, at any moment of responding, there are at least three different dynamics that have positive ethical potential2. i refer to these as 1) responsibility, which has to do with how one speaks as oneself, from one’s own unique perspective, and with one’s own voice, 2) responsiveness, which has to do with how one attends to and is moved by one’s interlocutor(s), and 3) capacitation, which has to do with how one affords one’s interlocutor(s) opportunities to respond. as i will explain, although i believe each of these ethical dimensions of dialogue has positive ethical potential, i do not believe that they are inherently good, but rather that determination of 1 for the sake of simplicity, i have used the term “ethical” instead of “ethico-ontological,” though i see ethics and ontology as interrelated. the ethical qualities of a given response have to do with its effect on the relational becoming of persons-in-dialogue. 2 i phrase this in terms of potentiality because there is no guarantee that any of these ethical dimensions of dialogue will necessarily turn out to be good in a given interaction. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a3 their value is a matter of open or implied dialogic negotiation. in what follows, i will describe these ethical dimensions of dialogue and briefly discuss how i see them in relation to bakhtinian concepts. responsibility the ethical dimension of responsibility, which has to do with speaking as oneself, from one’s own unique perspective, and with one’s own voice, derives from the ontological fact that each person is unique. bakhtin (1993) writes, “i occupy a place in once-occurrent being that is unique and never-repeatable,” adding that this uniqueness is “compellently obligatory” (p. 40). the spatial language bakhtin uses here affords an ocular metaphor (see bakhtin 1993, p. 62-63): from my particular vantage point, i see the world in a way that no one else does. in a sense, i am the only eyewitness of some aspect of reality, and this fact obligates me to be a witness, to share what only i have seen. bakhtin (1993) refers to this obligation as a “non-alibi in being” (p. 40). because i occupy a unique place in existence, i can never claim that someone else was in my place or that i was elsewhere. i never have an alibi and, therefore, must act responsibly. expounding on this idea, bakhtin compares a responsible way of being to signing one’s name to a document, writing that life lived without this sense of obligative uniqueness is like “an unsigned document…[or] a rough draft.” he goes on to say that “only through the answerable participation effected by a unique act or deed can one get out of the realm of endless draft versions and rewrite one’s life once and for all in the form of a fair copy” (p. 44). i take “a unique act or deed” to mean that the act is one’s own, performed without an alibi, from one’s particular place in existence. “answerable participation,” then, is taking part in life in this way—as oneself, with skin in the game, with one’s name on the line, being willing to take responsibility for what one does and what one is uniquely capable of doing. it is to respond to the concrete particularity of each moment as oneself, uniquely positioned and obligated by that uniqueness. this is no easy task. indeed, writing at the end of his life, bakhtin (1986) returned to these ideas, saying, “the i hides in the other and in others, it wants to be only an other for others, to enter completely into the world of others as an other, and to cast from itself the burden of being the only i (i-for-myself) in the world” (p. 147), echoing his earlier recognition that people are not always disposed to shoulder the burden inherent in their uniqueness: “i can try to prove my alibi in being, i can pretend to be someone i am not. i can abdicate from my obligative (ought-to-be) uniqueness (bakhtin, 1993, p. 42). as bakhtin implies, responsibility entails risk: there is some risk in signing one’s name, taking responsibility for one’s words and choices, and relinquishing the chance to claim an alibi. sensing some possible embarrassment, discomfort, or liability, one might understandably protect oneself by avoiding accountability, but doing so may withhold from one’s interlocutors a potentially beneficial perspective. indeed, the potential benefit one’s perspective may provide an interlocutor is the reason why responsibility, in the sense i am using it here, is one of the ethical dimensions of dialogue. this benefit derives from what bakhtin (1990) calls the “excess of my seeing in relation to another human being” (p. 24). given that each individual is uniquely situated in existence, no one’s field of vision ever entirely overlaps with another’s; each can see what others cannot. in bakhtin’s view, this simultaneous surplus and lack bind self and other together in a state of interdependency and complementarity. in this light, bakhtin’s (1986) discussion of how great literary works “outgrow what they were in the epoch of their creation” (p. 4) can be seen as parallel to what happens to the other when one shares aspects of one’s excess of seeing. referring to the way shakespeare’s plays continue to generate new insights, bakhtin explains, “the author is a captive of his epoch, of his own present. subsequent times liberate him from that captivity” (p. 5). analogously, each individual is a captive of their own place in existence and can be “liberated” by someone who stands elsewhere, with an excess of seeing relative to them. seeing things that others cannot, my unique perspective may help my interlocutors beyond their current field of vision. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a4 responsiveness i characterize responsiveness as a dynamic openness and careful attention toward the other which entails an ongoing cycle of attuning to the particularities of one’s interlocutor(s) and adjusting accordingly. responsiveness can be understood as the flipside of responsibility because it involves viewing the other as a unique and answerable self for whom oneself is an other who stands to benefit from their unique perspective. without this recognition—without tempering responsibility with responsiveness—there is an ethical danger in simply speaking from one’s own place in the world. this is because one’s excess of seeing can fuel the assumption that the other is entirely transparent, knowable, and judgable —“finalizable” is bakhtin’s (1984) term (p. 61). thus, rather than finalizing the other, one must seek to “consummate” them (bakhtin, 1990, p. 14), offering a unique outside perspective that supplements their current understanding, but respecting their “holy of holies” (bakhtin, 1984, p. 59), their potential to transcend categorization, resist definition, and respond differently than expected. meditating on this in relation to dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel, which he seems to view as a model of ethically optimal self-other relationships3, bakhtin (1984) writes, [t]he author's consciousness does not transform others’ consciousnesses…into objects, and does not give them secondhand and finalizing definitions. alongside and in front of itself it senses others’ equally valid consciousnesses, just as infinite and open-ended as itself. it reflects and re-creates not a world of objects, but precisely these other consciousnesses with their worlds, re-creates them in their authentic unfinalizability (which is, after all, their essence) (p. 68). this is the key—to speak as a unique self while simultaneously responding to one’s interlocutors with the recognition that they are just as unique and open-ended. bakhtin (1993) notes that one way to “finalize,” rather than “consummate,” one’s interlocutors is “to see in every other, in every object of a given act or deed, not a concrete uniqueness which participates in being personally, but a representative of a certain large whole” (p. 53). recognizing that “man-in-general does not exist; i exist and a particular concrete other exists” (bakhtin, 1993, p. 47), one must seek to understand and relate to one’s interlocutors in their particularity, not simply because they are unique, but because they are always in the process of becoming something else. in the author and hero essay and later in the dostoevsky book, bakhtin discusses this in terms of (non)coincidence: as everyone occupies a unique location in being, nobody “coincides” with anybody else (1990, p. 13), and as each person is also always in a state of becoming, nor do they ever entirely coincide with themselves (1984, p. 59). in carefully attending to the other, one must never lose sight of their radical alterity and unfinalizability. recall that responsiveness entails both a careful attention and dynamic openness toward the other. i appreciate the adjective “careful” as a modifier of the noun “attention” because of the way it implies thoroughness, but also suggests a certain benevolence. indeed, bakhtin (1990) goes so far as to suggest, “what i must be for the other, god is for me. what the other surmounts and repudiates within himself as an unworthy given, i accept in him and that with loving mercy as the other’s cherished flesh” (p. 56). bakhtin who was by all accounts a faithful, if somewhat unorthodox, believer sees in christ a divine example of what he calls vzhivanie or “live entering” (sometimes translated as “living into” or “active empathy”), in which the self (christ) addresses the other from a position of both outsidedness and love—the kind of love that 3 there is some debate about how analogous dostoevsky’s authoring of novels is to the way interlocutors “author” each other—or if authorship is an appropriate metaphor for describing interpersonal relationships. although i think it is obvious that there are significant differences between the relationships of authors and their characters and those of living interlocutors, i am comfortable with the idea that our responses to each other shape and constrain our being in the world and are, therefore, a kind of authoring with some analogy to other forms of authorship, including dostoevsky’s novel-writing. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a5 allows one “to make serious extended incursions into the depths of the other, to take seriously its unfinishedness” (emerson, 2000, p. 18), to deeply understand but never to determine, to live alongside but never to merge. in addition to carefully attending to one’s interlocutors, one must also open oneself to them. a part of this involves being open to the possibility that one has not entirely understood the other, that there is more to understand; one might even deliberately approach the encounter, expecting to be surprised (matusov et al., 2016). another kind of openness has to do with willingness to adjust in response to the other, to change as a result of one’s encounter with the other. this is what warnick, yacek, & robinson (2018) refer to as the “responsibility to be moved” (p. 36). referring to understanding a work of art, but with ethical implications, bakhtin (1986) writes, “the person who understands must not reject the possibility of changing or even abandoning his already prepared viewpoints and positions. in the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment” (p. 142). in order for a self/other relationship to be mutually enriching, the self must be willing to be responsively moved. capacitation the third ethical dimension of dialogue has to do with how one’s responses to the other enable them to respond in certain ways, bridging the gap between self and other in their ongoing interrelations. in a sense, this is an aspect of “live entering,” in which, after empathizing with the other and returning to one’s own place in being, one replies to the other in a way that combines the perspectives of outsideness and empathy, offering to the other a unique and potentially enriching perspective. morson & emerson (1990) describe the process thus: “without trying to finalize the other or define him once and for all, one uses one’s ‘outsideness’ and experience to ask the right sort of questions. recognizing the other’s capacity for change, one provokes or invites him to reveal and outgrow himself” (p. 242). in bakhtin’s (1984) account, dostoevsky developed a method to author his characters in a way that renders them capable of responding. he explains that “the author's discourse about a character is organized as discourse about someone actually present, someone who hears him (the author) and is capable of answering him” (p. 63). indeed, one of the things that makes dostoevsky’s writing so remarkable to bakhtin is that the characters do not seem predetermined and entirely subject to the author’s vision; rather, dostoevsky enables his characters to respond to him, something that is evident in his creative process: dostoevsky did not first work out a structure, plan, or overall plot of the work. rather, he first imagined specific ‘voices,’ that is, integral personalities with their own ideas and sense of the world…dostoevsky then…contrived situations that could provoke these people into dialogue with each other and with his own views. characters join in dialogue, dostoevsky himself may in some form participate, and the characters (perhaps also the author) outgrow themselves in the process. sometimes dostoevsky continues the dialogue in new scenes; at other times, he leaves preliminary dialogues in his notebooks and starts anew with characters recently made more complex (morson & emerson, 1990, p. 245). although most interactions between people look very different from dostoevsky’s drafting, there are ethical principles that are applicable across these situations. like dostoevsky, one ought to view (and author) one’s interlocutors without predetermined notions of who they are and what they will do, and must provide space and develop processes through which to enable the other to respond movingly, in ways that will enrich both self and other, rendering them capable of ongoing and potentially enriching interactions. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a6 clarification before continuing, let me clarify a few items: first, while i think it is useful to describe these ethical dimensions of dialogue separately, in practice, they are very much interrelated. still, even though they are interrelated, each dimension can help us attune in different ways to our interactions. second, i am not suggesting that speaking responsibly, responsively, and/or capacitatingly is necessary good at every moment. although each of these ethical dimensions of dialogue has potential to be generative and enriching, each interaction is unique and calls for particular responses that cannot be predetermined. the challenge for the ethically minded interlocutor is to discern in the particularities of the moment how best to respond. the ethical dimensions of dialogue are not an alibi; they are not the criteria of an ethically optimal response. instead, i see them as sensitizing concepts that can help us attune to the ethical potential of certain kinds of responses and, over time, become more discerning of how best to respond at any given moment. addressability and presencing as analytical lenses any moment of dialogue is ethico-ontologically significant, and the ethical dimensions of dialogue help us attune to the relational becoming of interlocutors. in other words, they help us notice patterns in how interlocutors respond to each other (and, consequently, become certain kinds of people in relation to each other), and to imagine alternatives. this is what i attempt to do in the following analysis. for the purposes of this paper, i consider the relational becoming of interlocutors at a micro-level, regarding interactions that lasted between several seconds and several minutes. i do so with the assumption that these small-scale moments of relational becoming are consequential (see, for example, wortham’s (2008) discussion of how durable identities emerge across multiple interactions, as interlocutors address and respond to each other in similar ways over time). one way to examine the relational becoming of persons-in-dialogue is by attending to their addressability. whenever we speak, we make certain aspects of our thinking, personality, identity, and/or history salient and available to others for address; we make ourselves addressable in certain ways. interlocutors’ relational becoming is a function of how they render themselves addressable and how they address (or not) that which each other makes addressable. both prior to and in the process of making oneself addressable and/or by being addressed in certain ways, interlocutors become present to each other in certain ways, or, at least, they potentialize that presence, becoming presence-able in certain ways. from this perspective, one’s presence is not a given, but is dynamically authored in dialogue with one’s interlocutors. in other words, we are not simply present, but are “presenced” to each other as we are rendered addressable in certain ways. this is not only the result of actual interactions, but is shaped by our sense of the genre of activity we are engaged in. a discussion, for example, affords certain kinds of presencing, predisposing interlocutors to co-author each other in certain ways. for example, if i were to find myself in a classroom teaching situation, i would likely make myself addressable as a teacher either explicitly or implicitly (“can i get your attention? we’re about to start class.”) and address my interlocutors as students (“what did you think about last night’s reading, bryan?”). if bryan were to say, “what reading?” i might consider him to be addressable as a disorganized student or a class clown, especially if we had had similar interactions in the past, and i would likely address him accordingly. if bryan were to explain that he had played in a championship soccer game last night and had not had time to complete the reading, he would make himself addressable as, among other things, an athlete. perhaps another student would address bryan as such, saying, “yeah, tough luck, bryan. but you guys played hard. it was a good game.” this would make bryan addressable as having lost and, likely, as being disappointed, and the speaker as someone who had watched the game. the way in which we navigated these moments of addressability would affect the way various members of the classroom community were presenced to relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a7 each other, and largely determine our relational becoming over the course of the class. if we repeatedly had similar interactions, these kinds of addressability would likely become more durable over time. for the purpose of this paper, i will define addressability as the ways in which interlocutors are rendered addressable to each other, and presencing as the dialogic process of becoming present to one’s interlocutors in a certain way. both dynamics are subjective—how my interlocutors consider me to be addressable and how they perceive my presence are a matter of perspective that may not be entirely shared—though aspects of addressability are evident in discourse. while presencing is harder to empirically examine, i appreciate the way it attunes us to the ethico-ontological dynamics of dialogue: any interaction is constituted by interlocutors who are becoming certain persons-in-dialogue; they are not simply present for the discussion but are being presenced in the discussion. the stakes are not simply interlocutors’ conceptual understandings, but their being in the world. in the following examples, i will draw on these lenses to analyze the relational becoming of certain groups of students involved in a series of discussions; that is, how, at a micro level, students were made addressable, subsequently addressed, and presenced in the process of discussing. to be clear, while many aspects of addressability are evident in verbal discourse, it is impossible to empirically verify every way in which interlocutors understand each other to be addressable. relatedly, how someone is presenced in a certain situation is perspectival and subjective. we are always presenced and rendered addressable to someone, and different interlocutors may have varying senses of our presence/addressability. in the subsequent examples, my analysis will rely on my own retrospective perspective. in many cases, i believe this perception was shared by others, but it is entirely possible that this is not the case. additional analyses that considered how multiple interlocutors understood each other’s addressability/presence would be illuminating but are beyond the scope of this paper. research context the examples below come from a study in which, as a teacher-researcher, i facilitated a series of discussions and meta-communicative activities with three different groups of students, the first, a group of undergraduates (mostly freshmen, around 18 years old), and the second and third composed of 9th graders (around 14 years old). my purpose in each of these groups was to explore how i might pedagogically cultivate ethically optimal dialogue in the context of classroom discussions about controversial political issues. all students who participated in the discussions were aware of my intent, though they had different understandings of what that means and varying degrees of investment in that goal. the group of undergraduates had enrolled in a one-credit elective course i taught about talking across political differences, and the high school students voluntarily participated in the discussions with me during their “personalized learning time,” a daily ungraded study hall period supervised and occasionally directed by a teacher. in both cases, the academic stakes were relatively low. the topics we discussed were proposed by group members and selected through a vote, but it would be inaccurate to claim that the groups were entirely democratic. i was admittedly an authority figure, directing the groups and facilitating the discussions. my approach to facilitation changed over time both within and between groups, as my understanding of ethically optimal dialogue and the needs of my studentinterlocutors evolved. at times, i facilitated the discussions with a light hand, letting the discussion flow organically, sometimes even explicitly removing myself from the conversation, while at other times, i took a more heavy-handed approach, intervening to preempt or repair what seemed to me to be problematic interactions or asking students to practice certain discursive moves. the students in the three groups represented a variety of backgrounds, as summarized in the following charts. the undergraduate students attended a prestigious private university, and the 9th graders relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a8 attended a diverse urban public high school. some of the differences in their social background and academic achievement are evident in their verbal discourse. although i will provide some additional commentary about these students in my subsequent analysis, for the purpose of this paper, i simply want to posit that the participants in the study are relatively diverse on a variety of dimensions and, thus, that the interactions i will be analyzing are not unique to any particular demographic—that the lenses of addressability and presencing are broadly applicable and that the tendencies i document are likely to manifest in a variety of contexts, especially in school. group 1 (undergraduates) david* white m keith* white m liam white (germany) m makenzie black f anand asian american (india) m brodie white m ted white m jane white f savannah white f joe** black m *instructors/facilitators **joe was makenzie’s brother, a college senior, who was invited to the final discussion of the group. group 2 (9th grade) david* white m jabari black m ivan white (ukraine) m sandy white f jimena latinx f amala asian american (vietnam) f jared latinx m yvette black (kenya) f rosa latinx f group 3 (9th grade) david* white m patience** black f brandin** black m luis latinx m noemi latinx f derya kurdish f cody white m laura latinx f adriana latinx f aliyah black (sudan) f graciella latinx f *facilitator **patience and brandin were step-siblings. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a9 most of the discussion below is the result of my retrospective analysis in which i examined the transcripts from our meetings and sought to understand them in terms of ethically optimal dialogue. with my interest in the ethical dimensions of dialogue, i was initially drawn to moments in which students seemed to “show up” in their comments or, conversely, when they seemed to be “hiding” in some way as being related to responsibility. consider, for example, the difference between saying, “i disagree” and “some people might disagree.” in the former, the speaker “shows up” more clearly than in the latter. this is not to say that simply using “i-statements” is necessarily responsible, nor that it is irresponsible to not make oneself explicitly present in a comment, but the way interlocutors make themselves addressable certainly affects their relational becoming. attending to how my student interlocutors made themselves addressable led me to notice how others addressed them, which i have come to see as one aspect of responsiveness. again, i do not necessarily think that it is always ethically obligatory to address one’s interlocutors in every way they make themselves addressable, but the way in which we address our interlocutors does affect the kind of person they become within the context of the interaction. as i examined these moments, i came to see them in terms of addressability and presencing. furthermore, i came to see that the way interlocutors were made addressable and presenced in the group was a joint accomplishment—not the result of any individual’s comments. the way interlocutors make themselves addressable, which affects how they are presenced in the group, is itself a response and, thus, a joint accomplishment of the group. in other words, i came to see that the whole group was responsible to some degree for the ethical quality of the discussion. data analysis in what follows, i analyze six different episodes of varying lengths from all three groups. i hope that applying the lenses of addressability and presencing to this variety of examples will both show their usefulness and help readers attune to some of the ethico-ontological dynamics of the interactions in light of the ethical dimensions of dialogue. as readers will see, my analytical methods are very much akin to traditional discourse analysis of interlocutors’ positioning, though i find the notions of addressability and presencing, which emerged in my initial study of the transcripts, to be a productive lenses for this kind of analysis. however, i am not merely interested in documenting discursive patterns in these groups’ discussions, but in considering their ethico-ontological qualities and potential. thus, in light of the ethical dimensions of dialogue, i hope that my analysis of addressability and presencing will raise questions about how we could have responded differently and how we ought to respond in the future. this aspiration exceeds the scope of traditional empirical analysis, as it has to do not only with discernable historical reality but with subjective values and potentiality. this approach may be aligned with what matusov et al. (2019) call “dialogic analysis.” in that vein, after analyzing each of the episodes and providing some commentary, i imagine how some of the episodes could have gone differently. the purpose of this reimagining is to raise questions about which kinds of responses might lead to different and perhaps more generative and enriching forms of relational becoming. i do not pretend to have final answers, but i think asking these questions is vitally important and i hope the conceptual and analytical tools i develop in this paper will help us ask good questions and, perhaps, arrive at some preliminary responses. episode #1: sidestepping a certain address (group 3) this first example comes from group 3’s discussion on racism. the speakers in the following transcript are me (david) and noemi, who in our discussion group was always rather reserved. she selfidentified as shy and that is, indeed, how i came to see her and respond to her (i.e., that is how she was presenced to me), as we will see below. in the course of this discussion, several students, including noemi, indicated that their parents had immigrated to the united states, and, in response, i had invited them to relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a10 share their stories with the group, if they would like. after each of the other students did so, the following exchange took place: david noemi, do you want to share? 1 noemi it’s a long story but like, i don’t know like the full story because like usually i never like, listen to my, [david: mm-hmm] my mom say it, [david: mm-hmm] but like when she tells my other siblings. 2 3 4 david do you want to share anything you do know or? you don’t have to. 5 noemi i, i don’t know the full story, so. 6 david okay. 7 i begin by addressing noemi as possibly wanting to share her family’s story (line 1). in her response, she sidesteps this address and instead makes herself addressable as not knowing the full story (line 2), as generally not listening to her mother’s storytelling (lines 2-3), and as having siblings who do listen (line 4). although i conceivably could have responded by addressing her in any of these ways, i mostly repeat my initial address, asking once again if she wants to share the part(s) of the story she knows, and reiterate that she does not have to do so (line 5). again, she sidesteps this address and makes herself addressable as not knowing the full story (line 6), which i interpret and accept as a bid to be excused from comment (line 7). notice how noemi’s presencing is dialogically co-authored, particularly in how i address her in ways that do not align with the ways she makes herself addressable. this is not to say that, had i addressed her otherwise, she necessarily would have responded differently, but a different address may have opened up other possibilities of relational becoming. as it was, this interaction simply presenced noemi as a shy student who did not really want to participate in the discussion. episode #2: obscuring addressability (group 1) the following exchange took place during a discussion about abortion among the undergraduate group. brodie, the primary speaker in the exchange, was the most outspoken liberal in the group and often the person who spoke the most in our discussions, both because he had strong opinions and because he tended to be rather verbose in articulating them. he was aware of this tendency and attributed it to his upbringing in a conservative state where he often found himself in situations in which he was the only liberal and had to defend progressive politics single-handedly. what is particularly interesting to me is how different brodie’s participation in our discussions was from noemi’s, but how, when viewed in terms of addressability, both seem to be “hiding” in some ways. the extended transcript included below begins as brodie responds to a brief discussion among other students about the comparability of a human fetus to a non-human animal, indicating that he largely agreed that a fetus need not be considered human. brodie i do kind ofi'm interested by this notion that the humanistic quality of life, like often people disassociate humans as like a species, or like an animalistic species, but like the humanistic quality of life, i don'ti would agree. i don't think it's found as a fetus. i think there is something about a shared human experience that gives you a sense of humanistic life, and ii don't know if i would've went so far to like name examples, but i agree with the theory, i guess. i guess, um something else that i've heard raised a lot recently, people often when they talk about abortions will say that they're worried the baby or fetus will suffer. a baby will suffer if born. something else that i've heard 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a11 raised recently is people having a very philosophical and ethical debate is, what world am i bringing a child into? not that the child might necessarily suffer when it gets here from like anything physical or biologically wrong with it, but um, this idthis notion that maybe you're bringing into a child, a child into a world that is not fit for it to be prosperous or live a healthy, good life, whatever standards you want to set to it. this notion that just because a child is born, does not, or a baby is born, it is not instantaneously guaranteed the same equal human experience that every other baby is. so maybe there has to be this ethical question of what life am i bringing a person into? and i think that's just something that, it's been very recently talked about. but i don't think that most people are acknowledging like there are different qualities of life that may impact this decision. 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 liam would youwould you sign your name to that? (laughter from group) 20 brodie i personally believe, yeah. at some point you have to consider it's inethical for you to think, i can have a child, we'll figure it out after it happens. like we'll figure out if this was a life that this child deserved or if this is the life that any human deserved, like i don't think, i feel like that's very inethical as a parent, which would be like, oh, okay, well let me accidentally get pregnant, whatever the situation may be, and then have a child. i feel like that's an inethical situation to bring them into like a very, if there are situations that it's not fit for a person to live in, including yourself. if you feel like you're in a situation that's unfit for you, to bring another person into that situation seems very inethical and irresponsible. 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 liam right. 30 ted you gotta ( ) 31 anand can i ask a question? 32 brodie please 33 anand so, what you were sayingso, um, so like how would you view it if, let's say, someone who's born in a rich family and had a teen pregnancy and they were at high school, or whatever, and they decided to get an abortion. compared to someone who was like, in a actually a very difficult situation, where they could not raise the baby in a healthy environment. would you seewould itwould one be more okay than the other? 34 35 36 37 38 brodie i'm very pro choice, i think either's fine. 39 anand so okay, so40 brodie but i, but i think that is something that a lot of, um, a lot of people and, very, including myself, there's a actually a film that raises this notion to me, it was called, it was called a private life. it's about a couple that's trying to have a baby and they have to do it, not like naturally, i do not, it's like a sperm don-, they get a sperm donor. but um, while she's like filling out the papers, 41 42 43 44 45 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a12 she goes to this kind of like a meta-level philosophical like struggle with like, what am i doing to this child? like they're coming into a world that is not in a good place right now. and then she goes off on this tangent about all the issues in the world that she's bringing a child into. and until i saw that, i was like, wow, i never thought of it like that. i always thought of it much like you all are thinking, or most people think about it as like, am i bringing a child into a place where they are going to suffer physically or for whatever biological reason, where it's like, at some point there's like a moral question of like suffering too. 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 david so when you talk about the world, you're not talking about thelike the family's socioeconomic status. 53 54 brodie i thinki think you can go to both. i think there are situations where it's just the socioeconomic status and other situations you look atin the tangent, she's like, what am i bringing it out into? and then she goes off, she's like climate change and war and famine and disease and all the, and she just goes off on a tangent about everything that's wrong with the world, and while i didn't necessarily agree with all of that, i still found it interesting that like this is something that is interesting to think about, and like a lot of countries are sharing like a very similar like philosophy of like how like aside kind of but like they're saying some similar philosophy, like they want a negative population growth because they're so overpopulated and that terrifies them as like a government, that they're encouraging, like very heavily, like negative population growth. like a lot of western european countries, and like china is like very crazy about how speclike, like crazy's the wrong word, but very, very restrictive on their population growth. but like it is something that like, is not like an americanized concept yet, which i just find interesting. 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 liam um, so there, so it's either the, so there are two two like kind of points here as i see it. it's one of them is the um, like the world we live in due to like stuff like climate change and stuff is becoming so horrible that potentially every child might not like have a good life. and the other one is depending on your situation, your child mightdepending on your socioeconomic or whatever situation, that your child might not have a good life. thoseso those are the two possible like arguments. 69 70 71 72 73 74 brodie i don't know if it's limited to just those two. i just, i thought that question that was raised was very interesting and i was just, it, what i won't sign my name to is that i agree that that's a probable cause for an abortion. i'm very pro-choice for the first two trimesters. i don't feel like you need a reason that you don't want to have a child don't have a child. uh third trimester, i think it has to come down to viability or if it's going to harm or kill the mother. but i don't know if i'm uh willing to sign my name to, oh i wouldn't have a child right now because of climate change, but i do mean that it's something that people have to start asking, is like, what is, what is the environment they're coming into? 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 liam so you're, you're just stating this argument, but you don't necessarily even believe in its validity. 83 84 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a13 brodie i don't agree with every facet of the argument. i agree with raising the questions. 85 david you would say, it could be the ethical choice to choose to abort a baby given world conditions. [brodie: yeah] that that is a defensible argument. 86 87 brodie i thinkyeah. i think it's defensible and itand to say, but yeah, i can't, i don't agree with every facet, but i would, i wouldn't judge someone who made that argument and that was their defense for having an abortion. 88 89 90 liam you wouldn't judge anybody for having an abortion. 91 brodie uh, if a mother was, we used, what was it, 40 weeks if it was 39th week and that the fetus was in every scientifically provable way viable outside of the womb, had an abortion. i don't know if i could see a moral reason for that. 92 93 94 liam okay, gotcha. 95 after responding to an idea brought up by his classmates, brodie maintains the floor and pivots to “something else that i’ve heard raised a lot recently” (lines 6-7). he goes on to introduce two different ways people talk about abortion, one having to do with suffering (lines 7-8), the other having to do with quality of life (lines 8-13). though the distinction between the two orientations is not entirely clear, he seems to align with the latter perspective, but does so obliquely. in goffman's (1974) terms, he acts as the “animator” of other speakers rather than revealing himself as the “principal” and/or “author” of these ideas, a documented means of achieving discursive neutrality (clayman, 1992). although this is likely more habitual than deliberate, he does a lot of discursive work to obscure where exactly he stands relative to the ideas he introduces. in this initial turn, the closest he gets to self-revelation, to making himself addressable as having a particular opinion, is when he says, “so maybe there has to be this ethical question of what life am i bringing a person into?” (line 16). immediately afterwards, however, he creates some distance between himself and that question, saying, “and i think that’s just something that, it’s been very recently talked about” (lines 17). with this comment, he makes himself addressable as someone who has heard this idea but not necessarily as the bearer of that opinion—as a hearer, not a believer. if his opinion is that the quality of life a newborn would inherit is a legitimate criterion when considering abortion, he discursively inserts other people between himself and that idea, saying “i don’t think that most people are acknowledging like there are different qualities of life that may impact this decision” (lines 17-19). in terms of what brodie makes explicit, he becomes addressable only as someone who has heard other people talking about abortion and who has some “meta” understanding of how they are (not) discussing it. in the moment, my sense was simply that brodie was verbose, but i have come to see this tendency as also functioning as a kind of self-protection. perhaps brodie participates in the discussion in this selfprotective way simply because he is exploring these ideas, or perhaps because he is wary of the consequences of taking a hard and potentially controversial stand. in response, liam calls brodie out, asking, “would you sign your name to that?” (line 20), a remark that invokes a bakhtinian concept (i.e., “name signing”) we introduced to the class and seems intended to prod brodie to put himself on the line, to make himself directly addressable in relation to these ideas. the laughter this question elicits may suggest that other students also sense how brodie’s comments obscure his addressability. in lines 21-29, brodie responds, speaking more directly as himself and explaining that he considers it unethical to bring a child relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a14 into a situation that is unfit for human life, leaving open, however, the question of what qualities make a given situation more or less “fit.” anand picks this up and asks if brodie sees two different scenarios differently—if abortion would be “more okay” in one (line 38)—implicitly searching for the criteria brodie has in mind. brodie responds by identifying as “pro-choice” and saying that “either’s fine” (line 39). anand seems poised to further examine brodie’s stance when brodie continues. echoing some of his earlier animation of other voices, he begins by referring to “something that…a lot of people” (line 41) presumably are saying; he adds himself to the group (“including myself” line 34) but then, rather than directly sharing what he thinks, defers to the film a private life, giving voice to its protagonist as she considers using a sperm donor to become pregnant. at line 42, the comment becomes autobiographical, as brodie narrates how the movie changed his perspective. he explains, “i always thought of it much like you all are thinking, or as most people think about it” (lines 49-50). i take the revision from “you all” to “most people” to indicate a recognition that it might not be appropriate to label the entire group as having a certain opinion; in either case, however, brodie seems to address a seemingly homogenous group of people and not any person(s) in particular. apparently, in brodie’s mind, the perspective held by most people, including his most proximate interlocutors, has to do with physical suffering or biological concerns, whereas his new perspective concerns the “moral question of…suffering” (line 52). still seeking clarity, i ask another follow up question. as he begins answering, he seems to approach his own opinion, saying, “i think there are situations where it’s just the socioeconomic status and other situations you look at” (lines 55-56), when he breaks off and once again begins to give voice to the film’s protagonist (lines 56-59). done referencing the movie, brodie initially hedges, saying, “i didn’t necessarily agree with all of that” (line 59) and then takes an ambiguous stance: “this is something that is interesting to think about” (line 60). after referring to “a lot of countries” who have a similar philosophy (lines 60-67), he concludes, saying, “which i just find interesting” (lines 67-68). brodie’s repeated ventriloquations and ambiguous stances make it hard to identify where exactly he stands in all this; he makes himself addressable to the group as someone with interest in and familiarity with ethical questions about abortion, extant conversations, and certain national policies, but not really as a unique individual with a particular opinion on the matter. liam in particular seems frustrated with brodie’s obscure addressability. in lines 69-74, he offers two possible arguments having to do with “a good life,” implicitly asking brodie to identify which one he is talking about. brodie resists the binary choice, saying “i don’t know if it’s limited to just those two” (line 75), and reiterates his ambiguous stance: “i thought that question that was raised was very interesting” (lines 75-76). echoing the terminology of signing one’s name which liam used in his first question (line 20), brodie then says that he does not necessarily agree that “that’s a probable cause for an abortion” (line 77). i take this to mean that he does not necessarily believe that the possibility that a child will inherit a bad life should preclude someone from giving birth. as he explains this, he notes that he is “very pro-choice for the first two trimesters” (line 77) and does not think that someone needs any particular reason to abort a pregnancy within that time frame (lines 77-78). in the third trimester, however, he believes that abortion should be limited to cases related to fetal viability and the health of the mother. concluding this turn at talk, brodie returns once again to the name-signing metaphor, saying that while he would not necessarily approve of someone choosing not to have a child because of climate change, he thinks that people have to start considering the environment their children will inherit. it may be that brodie’s position is that, during the first two trimesters, people can choose to have an abortion for any reason they see fit, and the likelihood of their child inheriting a good life is a valid reason—one that prospective parents should take into consideration; but brodie does not explicitly connect his pro-choice stance during the first two trimesters with his other musings, and he only indirectly states his opinion in terms of what he will not sign his name to. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a15 once again, in lines 83-84, liam pushes for brodie to make himself more directly addressable in relation to the ideas he is raising. this opens a series of questions in which liam and i, speaking in the second person, characterize brodie’s opinion for him: “you’re just stating…” (line 83), “you would say…” (line 86), and “you wouldn’t judge…” (line 91). perhaps tired of brodie’s repeated obscurations, we speak for him, providing him words that he can either accept or reject. he responds, repeating that, while he does not agree with every facet of the argument, he thinks people should be raising these questions (about the quality of life a child will inherit) and that such considerations could provide a legitimate reason to get an abortion. when pressed, he ultimately says, “i don’t know if i could see a moral reason for” aborting a pregnancy of a viable child at the 39th week (line 94). although, as i read it, there remain several loose ends in this exchange, brodie’s answer seems to satisfy liam, his most insistent questioner, and the conversation moves on. one way to read this episode—which, in fact, reflects my original orientation to brodie’s mode of participating in our discussions—is to blame brodie for his loquacious and circumlocutory discourse. however, from a dialogic perspective, his utterances must be viewed as a joint accomplishment and not simply as brodie’s fault. this is because, first, brodie’s previous and imagined interlocutors play some role in shaping how he tends to speak, not simply because of habits he has developed, but because, in many ways, he continues to respond to them – rather, it sometimes seems, than those he is physically present with – and, second, the other members of the group (myself included) were complicit to some degree in brodie’s utterances. in making ourselves addressable, asking questions, listening, and, most obviously, facilitating the discussion in certain ways over time, we allowed for and jointly co-authored certain responses. consider, for example, how all of the follow-up questions and assertions seek to render brodie addressable in terms of his opinion while not actually offering any particular addressability themselves. though they invite a certain response, the questioner is not made explicitly present in the asking. when liam tries to clarify brodie’s point by outlining, as he sees it, the two possible arguments brodie might be making (lines 69-74), brodie’s response, “i don't know if it's limited to just those two. i just, i thought that question that was raised was very interesting” (lines 75-76) might be understood as an attempt to side-step a potential trap. unsure of what liam thinks, which of the options he and other group members might be more sympathetic to, and how they might respond, brodie plays it safe with an ambiguous stance. although, in terms of amount spoken in our discussions, brodie was the opposite of noemi, like her, he struggled (in dialogue with the rest of the group) to become addressable as an individual with a unique voice and perspective. despite his many comments, the group often did not really encounter brodie himself; instead, we encountered brodie the ventriloquist as he gave voice to a variety of different people. this affected the quality of our relational becoming in part because it was unclear who we were responding to and how we might address brodie. as i consider my own experience, i think, regrettably, that brodie was presenced to me primarily as a problem—as a verbose and sometimes convoluted interlocutor who tended to monopolize the discussion. attending myopically to this aspect of my student interlocutor limited the possibilities of our relational becoming. episode #3: overlooking a possible address (group 2) the next example comes from one of group 2’s discussions, and it features rosa’s only unsolicited comment. rosa only attended seven out of the twelve sessions that took place between october and november 2019. she was classified as an english language learner and was rather reticent during the discussions but was often talkative and giggly in the time before and after, especially with yvette, her closest friend in the group. on the day of this discussion, as we walked to our meeting place in the library, i told rosa and yvette that i would love to hear their thoughts about toxic masculinity during our discussion. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a16 yvette responded, saying, “but you always ask questions to go deeper” (memo 11/20/2019). i responded, saying that i was not planning to intervene much during the discussion, so she would not have to worry about that. the portion of the discussion from which the following excerpt is taken was largely a response to a youtube video we watched, in which a female narrator argued that the use of the term “toxic masculinity” discouraged masculine behaviors that are actually beneficial to society. several students, jimena and sandy in particular, had taken issue with this argument, drawing on their lived experiences to speak back to the narrator. the group had discussed how, contrary to the argument of the video, women (including jimena’s and jabari’s mothers) are perfectly capable of raising children on their own, though they amended this stance slightly by saying that it was still important to have a father figure of some kind. subsequently, jimena had introduced a new idea about how the video we watched had implied that it was bad for men to be effeminate—an idea she disputed. during this time, yvette and rosa had been whispering and writing in rosa’s notebook in what seems to be preparation for the following comment. it is not entirely clear in the video, but it seems that yvette wrote out “i don’t need my father for be happy” for rosa. after jimena spoke, rosa said: rosa i... 1 david yeah? 2 rosa i feel like for me like, i don't need my father for be happy. i can be happy with my mom, [throws hands up] only me and her. [throws hands up] like that's... 3 4 amala [raises hand] [david: nod] so, adding on to what she [pointing to sandy] said about how she [the female narrator] made women seem weak, she like used stereotypes of women and men. like, men should be strong, like this type of thing and then, women need a strong man, but she should've like made them both seem equal. 'cause she... yeah. 5 6 7 8 9 by volunteering this comment, rosa made herself newly addressable as a willing participant in the discussion (something i was eager to support) and by alluding to her relationship with her parents, she made herself addressable as someone who believes she does not need her father to be happy. this allusion had the potential to flesh out her physical presence, making her addressable in at least these two new ways. however, rather than responding to this newly addressable rosa, amala returned to an idea that had been brought up previously. perhaps it was rosa’s accent combined with her previous reticence which, for amala, may have raised questions about her willingness and ability to elaborate in english; perhaps it was the possibility that the story would be intensely personal and uncomfortable for the group to discuss; or perhaps it was the fact that rosa’s comment did not follow directly from the preceding comment or add much conceptually to the discussion; whatever the reason, amala’s comment does not address rosa at all. though rosa theoretically remained addressable as someone with a potentially fraught history with her parents, the group never addressed her as such, and her presence in the group was largely unchanged, despite the self-revelation explicit and implicit in her comment. rather than addressing rosa, amala addressed the video’s narrator as someone who uses problematic gender stereotypes. as other students responded to this critique, the narrator was presenced to the group perhaps more than rosa. amala’s response is understandable in the context of a classroom discussion. in some ways, it fits better in the flow of the conversation than rosa’s comment because it more directly advances the relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a17 conceptual discussion and more clearly follows jimena’s comment. understood conceptually, rosa’s comment does not add anything new to the conversation, but from the perspective of relational becoming, it opens up the possibility of encountering rosa and her parents as individuals with unique voices and perspectives. because rosa only alludes to the story, she leaves much of the work of addressability (of herself and her parents) to her classmates who do not seem to notice or respond to her newly addressable and storied self. as a result, her presence in the group remained largely unaffected. episode #4: presencing and addressing potential interlocutors (group 3) this excerpt comes from one of group 3’s discussions about toxic masculinity, after several students shared ideas and personal stories about how men and women are treated differently in certain situations. brandin talked about how his grandmother always asks him to take out the trash rather than his female relatives, aliyah talked about how her mother insists that her brothers carry heavy groceries in from the car, and carlos talked about how women sometimes got paid less than men for doing the same job. riffing on this theme, patience related the following story: patience yeah. my mom used to, well she still do make the boys, him [brandin] and my brother cut the grass. [david: mm-hmm.] and i used to like, go out there and wanna help and stuff and she used to be like, nah, nah. and i'm just like, why can't i help like [david: mm] just 'cause i'm a girl, don't mean nothing. i'm a girl and i do a lot of stuff. [david: mm-hmm.] like i'm a girl and i lift a lot of stuff and it just kinda irritating sometimes 'cause it's like, you don't see the value in what girls have. you just see that [david: right] men are supposed to be like [david: hm.] more like aggressive or stronger, when that's not the case. [david: yeah.] i mean this is not a bad thing but like, i wish they would, they would see that in women too. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 david yeah. yeah so what i hear you saying this, like, i said, you know, it could be a good thing to say men are brave and strong or whatever, but you bring up that, the danger in that is, if by saying that, you imply that women are not that, right? like if men are brave and strong, what does that mean about women? and one thing that people could say is like, that means women are not so much those things. right? 11 12 13 14 15 16 patience mm-hmm (affirmative). 17 david yeah. so, i've, i think that's a, good point. 18 in her first turn at talk, patience begins by telling a story about how she, as a girl, was discouraged from mowing the lawn (lines 1-3). this portion is spoken in the habitual past (“used to”). although it is not entirely clear where the story stops, and if a younger patience ever explicitly resisted her mother’s gendered division of household labor, the verb tense shifts at the end of line 3 to the present tense. whether or not her self-quotation (starting with “i’m just like” on lines 3-4) is meant to be part of the story or to reflect her current thinking, it represents a response to her mother. note how the story makes patience’s mother addressable and how patience addresses her directly, using the second person (lines 6-9) to articulate her frustration and assert herself as a capable woman. as she concludes her comment (lines 9-10), patience broadens her response to a generic “they,” suggesting that the issues she encountered with her mother are relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a18 prevalent beyond her household—that her mother is part of a vague collective that tends to see certain characteristics in men and not in women. following both patience’s lead and my own schooled inclinations, my response addresses this final comment and fails to address anything other than the supposed message of patience’s story. this comment takes what “i hear [patience] saying” (line 11) and translates it into a generalizable principle—that the danger of having a normative vision of masculinity is that it implies that women do not/should not have the characteristics ascribed to men. although i believe there is value in this kind of reflective listening, in this case, it ignored the presence and addressability of patience’s mother. after patience confirms that this was what she was saying, i characterize the idea as a “good point” (line 18). indeed, it seems that her story became, in my mind, merely a vehicle for a message, and that, in the end, the message was all i heard her saying. consequently, i do not address patience as anything other than someone with a point to make in the discussion, as the owner of a certain idea, nor does it occur to me to address her mother. in this episode, we seem to fail to fully address two interlocutors who became newly addressable: patience and her mother. patience’s mother was, of course, not physically present (though she was certainly presenced in significant ways to patience), and was represented secondhand, but she is still a person with a particular point of view who could be presenced and rendered addressable in a variety of ways to the group. to be clear, i am not suggesting that we necessarily have the same ethical obligations to narrativized individuals as to those with whom we are physically present, but i think we do have some obligations and can mutually benefit from seeking to be in dialogue to the extent possible. in this example, by giving voice to and addressing her mother, patience was able to articulate some of her own thoughts and feelings, but her final comment closes off her mother’s addressability, suggesting that her story is an example of a broader trend and, relatedly, that her mother need not be addressed as a unique individual— at least, not by anyone else in the group. perhaps this abstractive closure functions to protect her mother, or perhaps it is simply due to some schoolish sense that a comment should do more than tell stories—that it should have some generalizable message. whatever the reason, neither patience nor other members of the group address her mother further, and her presence in the group quickly wanes. likewise, patience herself is addressed simply as someone with a “good point” (line 18), not as a young woman who has felt that her gender excludes her from certain activities and makes other people, including her mother, view her as less capable than she considers herself to be. rather than dealing with any of the emotional or relational complexities of her story, the conversation proceeds based solely on an abstraction. this seems largely due to my response, which treats her story as a vehicle for her final comment, translating it entirely into an abstract plane. this kind of response was the result of how patience (and her mother) were presenced to me, and this presencing was shaped by our discourse, the quality of my attention and attunement to patience’s comments, and, relatedly, my sense of the discussion genre. this episode reveals a pattern that will be evident in the following two examples, namely, a tendency to translate stories into abstractions and to relate to each other as bearers of ideas, and not as embodied, thinking-feeling, storied selves. patience’s abstraction of her mother seems to manifest an emerging form of this pattern, while my response and the following examples show it in its maturity. episode #5: reducing a story to a moral (group 1) the following example comes from group 1’s discussion of physician’s assisted suicide (pas) in which liam, after telling a personal story, immediately translates it into an abstract principle. remember that this group was composed of undergraduates studying at a prestigious university, something that is evident not simply in their diction, but in their fluency with abstractions. my growing sense is that this discursive move is the kind of thing that is cultivated and rewarded in school and, consequently, something that successful students like liam are well-practiced in. while this kind of abstraction is not inherently bad, relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a19 it comes at a cost. notice how, in the following example, it forecloses certain forms of presencing and addressability: liam okay, so this is pretty intense and extreme but... so, okay. my stepdad, he has this kind of... he's got this muscle disease, and that means his muscles are slowly degenerating. and, there might come a time where he just won't be able to move, and will be tied to a bed, because... he just won't be able to do anything else. and he's very adamant about not wanting to live anymore at that time. and since, i think, in germany, i don't think it's legal, so what he wants... he basically has this plan where there's this procedure where we could bring some kind of poison to his room, we would have to leave the room, so that we're not culpable, and then he can just ingest it himself. so that's what he says. it's intense. and he doesn't want to do it now, he's fine right now. but, what i'm saying is it's certainly possible to commit suicide without a physician's assistance. so what are the arguments that it's so necessary? why would... i don't understand why you would go to the trouble of moving to a different state and doing all this legal application, when you canthere are other ways to end your life. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 joe i mean, i think part of that might just be... i'm trying to be super careful. maybe the way that suicide is viewed in this country, and in society... i don't know. i just feel like if somebody was struggling with something, with an illness or something, and i said, "hey, why don't you just go kill yourself?”, that probably would not be received, i think, as well as if, kind of saying to them, "how about you kind of go talk to your physician and kind of see what kind of options are available?" and i just think maybe it's kind of... i don't know. the culture, or the connotation of just committing suicide, kind of on your own, that kind of prevents people from wanting to do that. because, i mean, i think you're right. there's no reason that these other people can't commit suicide. but i do think it's kind of just that... i don't know, culture connotations kind of associated with it on its own. 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 in his comment, liam makes his stepfather addressable, prefacing his comment with the acknowledgement that “this is pretty intense and extreme” (line 1). after telling about his stepfather, he concludes, saying, “so that’s what he says. it’s intense” (line 10), adding as an assurance, “and he doesn’t want to do it now, he’s fine right now” (lines 10-11). as i read it, these are the only moments in this exchange in which liam’s stepfather is addressed (along with liam himself), albeit tangentially, as an embodied, thinking-feeling being; everywhere else, his story is represented and responded to merely as an illustration of a principle. after telling the story and assuring the class that his stepfather is not currently contemplating suicide, liam says, “but, what i’m saying is it’s certainly possible to commit suicide without a physician’s assistance. so what are the arguments that it’s so necessary?” (lines 10-12). this comment not only translates the story into a concept (i.e., that suicide does not require a physician) but explicitly invites a response on the same plane of abstraction, making his stepfather addressable merely as an example of a concept, subsumed within a broader whole, and limiting, in the process, his unique presence in the group. and indeed, joe responds on this plane of abstractions, even conjuring up a hypothetical person “struggling with...an illness or something” (lines 18-19), rather than addressing liam’s stepfather. his comment, “i think you’re right” (line 25) is revealing in this regard, implying that he understood the comment, story included, as nothing more than a defensible point in an argument and not the revelation of newly addressable others. this simplifies the story to a moral and, in the process, limits the presence of its characters (who have simply functioned as vehicles for the moral). relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a20 as noted, this is the kind of response liam invites; joe complies, and together they jointly accomplish the abstraction of liam’s stepfather. in the end, the living reality of a person facing the prospect of a bedridden life and a stepson asked to endorse and perhaps even play a complicit role in a suicide has been replaced by a hypothetical somebody and an abstract principle. liam acknowledges the intensity of his story, but otherwise makes himself addressable simply as someone familiar with his stepfather’s plans and who sees them as evidence of the idea that suicide is already accessible to anyone willing to carry it out. by telling the story, liam makes himself addressable as a stepson of someone with suicidal contingency plans related to his muscular degeneration, but by translating the story into a specific principle and inviting abstract responses, he is presenced simply as a knower—as someone with a particular stance in the ongoing discussion. and, predictably, this is how joe addresses him—and there is no further mention of liam’s stepfather. example 6: approaching (and retreating from) different kinds of presence and addressability (group 2) my comments in this final example manifest a similar pattern, though i think they also show a nascent sense of a potentially more ethically optimal mode of facilitating discussions. this episode took place during group 2’s third and final discussion about abortion, in which jabari shares with the group that his mother had aborted a pregnancy “a long time ago.” this was particularly notable to me because, up to this point, jabari had generally argued for positions that would be considered “pro-life.” in our very first discussion, for example, after sandy suggested that a family without the means to provide for a child would be justified in getting an abortion, jabari said, “if they’re like poor and stuff, and don’t have enough money to take care of the baby, then can’t they just like put it up for adoption instead of killing it?” he seemed to view abortion as a form of homicide and consequently struggled to justify it as an alternative to adoption, so i wondered if learning that his mother had had an abortion would be disturbing and disorienting. on the day of the final discussion, i had asked the students to write in their journal about the abortion policies they would institute if they had the chance. this admittedly simplistic prompt was designed to elicit and concretize students’ opinions in order to help them take a stand and engage with the implications of each other’s ideas. jabari volunteered to begin the discussion by paraphrasing his journal entry, saying that he thought abortion was justifiable in some situations (e.g., in the case of rape), adding, “but like if you're getting pregnant like with your husband and then you guys just like don't want the baby at all, then that's when i think you should just have the baby and put it up for adoption.” noting some exceptions, he still positions himself as generally opposed to abortion, focusing his attention on a hypothetical situation in which adoption would be preferable to abortion. following jabari, jimena explained that she would permit abortion “if like you don't have the funds,” comparing her ideal abortion policy with the way the government provides health insurance for people below a certain income level. jabari seemed to appreciate this idea, remarking affirmatively, “yeah, it just depends on the situation.” when jimena finished explaining her idea, the following exchange took place: jabari another thing is thatwell, this has really nothing to do with like, [gesturing to what he had written in his notebook] this whole thing, but i asked my mom about it and it turns out she actually had an abortion a long time ago and she was actually supposed to have twins, another set of twins, and i guess she didn't decide to have them because she didn't have enough funds at the time, and that was like a while back. so we wouldwe would have like, six people in our house. [david: hmm.] which would've been a lot. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 david interesting. well, so what do you think about that? 8 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a21 jabari um, i think it's understandable. she told me why she couldn't really have them, and i wasn't like angry at her for that or anything, so... like, yeah i guess it's really just situational, really. yeah, that's all i have. 9 10 11 david interesting. how doesso i'mif you don't mind sharing, how does yourdoes your mom feel like that was the right thing to do? does she 12 13 jabari she said she kinda like... she says theshe kinda like... well, she said it would've been hard to raise like all six of us, because she was a single mom for like most of her life, and she had like her first baby in her senior year, so she kinda just likeshe never really had like, a personal life. she's always had to like, take care of, us the entire time, and i guess she just didn't wanna, have that many people to deal with, ‘cause she would've still had like way more kids, and by the time we were all grown up, she probably would've passed away or would've been like, super old by now. she hasn't really had any time to herself, really, because she's been taking care of all of us, so. 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 david interesting...so far i'm hearing people are saying there are situations when abortion is okay. we seem to agree that rape is one of those. do we all agree that uh poverty is another reason for [students “mm-hmm” affirmatively]... does anyone disagree? would anyone say that's not a good enough reason?...i guess i'm thinking about ivan, yvette, and jared. you've tended to be more on the pro-life side. would you say if someone's poor, they should be able to get an abortion? 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 in his first turn at talk, jabari begins by separating the story he is about to tell from the journal entry and, by extension, his earlier comment, saying, “this has really nothing to do with like...this whole thing” (lines 1-2). this seems both to create space for him to tell a story that may not align with the stance he has generally taken in our discussions, and to set the story apart from the ongoing discussion. he proceeds to tell the story, which is both autobiographical (“i asked my mom about it,” lines 2-3) and biographical (“she actually had an abortion a long time ago and she was actually supposed to have twins, another set of twins,” lines 3-5), a tension that lingers throughout this episode. with the basic narrative told, he says, “i guess she didn't decide to have them because she didn't have enough funds at the time” (lines 5-6). i suspect that this is his own commentary more than the continued retelling of his mother’s story both because he begins with “i guess” and because he uses the term “funds,” which jimena introduced. this latter point is significant because, in the context of the discussion, the word invokes a situation in which abortion would be considered permissible. as he makes his mother addressable to the group, he introduces her as someone who meets the criteria jimena introduced for justifiably aborting a pregnancy. the comment concludes on a similarly sympathetic note, as jabari imagines what it would have been like to have two additional people in the house (lines 6-8). in response, i simply say, “interesting” (line 9) and ask what he thinks about that. this is a pedagogical move oriented toward responsibility, a response to the sympathetic but noncommittal quality of his storytelling. i seem to want him to reconnect the story and “this whole thing” (line 2)—our discussion about ideal abortion policies. he responds first somewhat vaguely in terms of his emotional reaction, saying that his mother’s choice was “understandable” and he says, “i wasn't like angry at her” (lines 10-11). describing his reaction in negative terms implies an audience that might have expected an angry response, relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a22 suggesting again that jabari is aware of the possible discrepancy between his mother’s choice and his own previously stated opinions. perhaps sensing this and, relatedly, that i want him to take some kind of stand, jabari restates the idea he formulated in response to jimena’s proposal with an ambiguous stance, saying, “i guess it’s really just situational” (line 12). in this moment, jabari’s ambiguous stance seems to provide him some space to process and withhold judgement on his mother’s story which, as i learned in a subsequent interview, she may have told him only the night before this conversation. given this context, an ambiguous stance of this kind is certainly understandable and seems indicative of jabari’s evolving understanding. it also indicates something about what he thought i intended with my question. although the question “what do you think about that?” could yield a wide variety of responses, he seems to interpret it as a request to take a stand that can be articulated in terms of a general principle. given my orientation toward abstractions evident in my response to patience’s story and at the conclusion of this episode, jabari’s interpretation seems reasonable. his comment “yeah, that’s all i have” (line 12) can be read as a bid to be excused not simply from further comment, but from this kind of comment, as if to say that he does not necessarily want to subject his mother’s story to this kind of schoolish scrutiny. sensing that jabari may not be comfortable opining on his mother’s choice but also wanting to continue discussing the story he shared, i change tack and ask him to speak on his mother’s behalf. the question i initially begin to articulate asks how she feels about her choice, but i ultimately narrow the question to whether she thinks it was the right thing to do (lines 12-13). this narrowed question resonates with my broader tendency toward abstract concepts and limits the responses available to jabari—in fact, it affords a yes/no answer—but it also represents a moment of seeking to address an interlocutor: jabari’s mom, who has been made newly addressable through storytelling; it invites her voice into the discussion. jabari struggles at first to speak for her (line 15), but eventually finds a rhythm, imagining what it would have been like to be a single mother of six kids. perhaps the struggle is to respond to my narrowed question (something he never actually does) or to share something so personal and still somewhat unprocessed, but it also seems to reflect jabari’s simultaneous search for both his mother’s voice and his own. as he remembers what his mother told him, imagines her choice and retells her story, we see him dialogically portraying her not only for the group, but for himself. a twin himself, jabari seems to identify with his imaginary unaborted siblings, using the first-person plural (“all six of us,” line 16) and entering into the timespace of this alternative reality (“she probably would’ve passed away or would’ve been like, super old by now,” lines 22-23). indeed, by the end, this imagined world and the present are blurred, as he speaks in the perfect (“hasn’t really had any time to herself,” line 23) and perfect progressive (“been taking care of all of us,” line 24) tenses, suggesting that this is not purely hypothetical. in other words, jabari is not simply imagining how his mother would justify her choice; he has begun to “translate” the story from her point of view into his. he is not merely giving voice to her but is retelling and reworking her story in his own voice and from his own perspective. i think this is also evident in the tonal shift that begins at lines 19-20, when jabari begins to speak in a less formal, more hyperbolic, and less fragmented style. in doing this, jabari renders his mother addressable as a single mother of four whose first child was conceived in her senior year (of high school, i presume); a woman who at one point in time was struggling to take care of both herself and her children, who decided that, rather than bearing another pair of twins, it would be best to abort her pregnancy. although i have never met jabari’s mom, i began to imagine her, a woman making complicated choices in a world that surely has not always been hospitable to her. there are obviously dangers of stereotyping and other forms of assumption-making in this kind of characterization, but it represents how jabari’s story presenced a potential interlocutor to me—someone i might address, whose voice i might, to some degree, hear and respond to. while jimena’s proposal was an interesting thought experiment, jabari’s story introduced us to a person who was actually in a position to decide between pregnancy and abortion. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a23 of course, by telling the story and responding to my questions, jabari did not simply make his mother addressable, but also made himself addressable in new ways to the group, particularly with regards to his upbringing, family situation, and evolving perspective on abortion. in a sense, the constitution of the group had changed, as jabari became jabari-with-a-mother—this particular mother who had also, in a way, joined the group. although she was certainly present for jabari in significant ways throughout this episode, her presence in the group was limited by the ways we responded to her story. all of this is ethicoontologically consequential because it makes group members capable of new and different responses to differently addressable and presence-able interlocutors. by telling the story, jabari invited us all, himself included, to grapple with his mother’s complicated choice, to hear her voice (as well as his own), and to respond. it also invited us to understand abortion not merely in terms of abstract principles, but as a thing in the world which is made meaningful in particular ways to diverse individuals in unique situations. in other words, it afforded us the opportunity to encounter a new interlocutor (or a familiar interlocutor in a new way), a person for whom abortion has some particular meaning, and to respond to them from our unique place in being. in that light, the final move i make as a facilitator in lines 25-31 strikes me as a failure to tap much of the ethico-ontological potential of jabari’s story, to address the interlocutors that had become newly or differently addressable. perhaps because jabari had already made a bid to be excused from further comment (line 12), perhaps due to the sensitivity of the topic, perhaps simply in an effort to involve other students in the discussion, particularly those who tended to be more pro-life, i shift the focus away from the story, summarizing the group’s preliminary consensus, and asking if anyone disagrees with the idea that being poor is a sufficient reason to abort a pregnancy. while there may be nothing inherently wrong with this move, in this instance, it does two problematic things: it translates jabari’s story into an abstraction, something he never does, and removes all reference to his mother. the former imposes my reductive interpretation of the story and the latter depersonalizes the idea. although i implicitly ask students to respond to jabari’s story, i seriously constrain the kinds of responses they might give; rather than inviting them to respond to jabari or to his mom, i ask them to respond to my depersonalized abstraction of their story, limiting the possibilities of relational becoming. discussion what can we learn from these episodes about addressability, presencing, and ethically optimal dialogue? looking across these examples, one pattern that stands out is our schooled tendency to address each other on the ideational plane—with regards to our ideas, opinions, reasons, and beliefs—even when other forms of address are available. indeed, as i expect is the case in many classrooms, there was a clear tendency to relate to each other in terms of abstractions. this is evident both in how group members made themselves and narrativized others addressable to the group and in how they responded to each other. in a variety of ways, we failed to relate to each other as unique persons with a particular perspective—as uniquely embodied, storied, relationally enmeshed, thinking-feeling persons-in-dialogue. instead, we addressed each other and narrativized others as ideaand opinion-holders, and instances of principles. this both stemmed from and affected the ways in which we were presenced to each other. for those who are familiar with bakhtin’s (1984) insistence that speech is always addressed to interlocutors and, consequently, contains “a thousand reservations, concessions, loopholes and the like” and “cringes in the presence or the anticipation of someone else's word, reply, objection” (p. 198) may not find my analysis of addressability and presencing in these discussions particularly surprising. it is to be expected that interlocutors would, anticipating possible responses, conceal or protect themselves discursively. i agree. what my analysis adds to this insight is, first, documentation of particular kinds of “loopholes” that seem widespread in classroom discussions and, second, the concern that the widespread relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a24 use of such loopholes may limit the relational becoming of the interlocutors. this concern is not so much that individuals are failing to speak responsibly but that the genre of classroom discussions does not afford certain kinds of responsible speaking. there is nothing inherently wrong with addressing someone on the ideational plane, but if that is the predominant way that they are addressed, only certain kinds of relational becoming are possible. assuming that the patterns i have documented here are similar to those in other settings, it is likely that interlocutors’ relational becoming in these contexts is driven primarily by their articulation of abstract ideas, opinions, beliefs, and reasons, rather than any number of other possibilities. this limits the kinds of becoming that are likely to occur and excludes some interlocutors from certain kinds of presence, participation, and validation. as i consider the discussions i facilitated in retrospect, i am not satisfied. in my judgement, my student-interlocutors and i would make ourselves addressable in ways that now seem somewhat irresponsible and address each other in ways that do not seem particularly responsive, rendering each other capable of only certain kinds of responses, including silence. our relational becoming was significantly limited. while there were moments of generative vulnerability and vitality, by and large, we tended to approach each other guardedly, as if our interlocutors were somewhat dangerous or antagonistic. to the extent that this is characteristic of classroom discussions more broadly, it suggests that the genre constrains some of the ethical dimensions of dialogue and, therefore, may not be ethically optimal. although these tendencies are partly due to the conventions and systems of schooling which are resistant to change, perhaps, newly attuned to our discussions in light of the ethical dimensions of dialogue and addressability/presencing, there are small steps researchers and educators might take to relate to students differently and tap some of the latent potential in many of their comments. reimagining our interactions in considering how, in the course of a discussion, my responses might foster different kinds of relational becoming, i return to two interactions analyzed previously and draw on the ethical dimensions of dialogue to imagine how i might have responded to my student-interlocutors more responsibly, responsively, and capacitatingly. the first example is the simple exchange between noemi and me, previously discussed as episode #1: david noemi, do you want to share? 1 noemi it’s a long story but like, i don’t know like the full story because like usually i never like, listen to my, [david: mm-hmm] my mom say it, [david: mm-hmm] but like when she tells my other siblings. 2 3 4 david do you want to share anything you do know or? you don’t have to. 5 noemi i, i don’t know the full story, so. 6 david okay. 7 how might i have responded differently, in ways that might have fostered different kinds of relational becoming? one possibility, informed by responsibility, is to make myself more explicitly present in how i invite noemi to share. as it is, my repeated question “do you want to share?” places the onus of ethical accountability on her. an alternative would be something like, “i would like to hear your story too, noemi.” phrasing the invitation in this way renders me addressable as someone with an interest in her story, while the original question only renders me addressable abstractly as the one asking the question. the ethicoontological potential i see in making myself more explicitly addressable as myself is that it might make it relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a25 more likely that my student interlocutors would respond to me-myself rather than to me in my role as the teacher/facilitator—i might become presenced to them differently. while there is no guarantee, it is possible that this shift in my presence/addressability would yield a different response from noemi. of course, there are dangers in this alternative, most notably in asserting the authority of a teacher to compel students to speak, and this should be taken seriously. however, dialogue is never entirely safe, so the fact that some versions of speaking responsibly entail some risk does not necessarily mean that it would be better to avoid that particular risk entirely. as always, what is at stake in this interaction is who we understand ourselves and our interlocutors to be, and what we understand ourselves to be doing in dialogue with each other. shifting the ways in which we make ourselves addressable may alter, however slightly, the possibilities of relational becoming. a second possibility, informed by responsiveness, is to pay more careful attention to and to be moved by the ways noemi makes herself addressable. in the transcript, after noemi sidesteps my initial question, i respond by asking an only slightly adjusted question. acknowledging that she does not know the full story, i ask, “do you want to share anything you do know?” although this question accommodates noemi’s concern about the partiality of her knowledge, it does not change direction at all but simply reiterates the invitation to share her story. perhaps by being moved more radically, my response would yield different possibilities of relational becoming. for example, in response to her comment that she does not listen when her mom tells the story to her siblings, i could have said, “so you never listen to your mom tell the story? that’s interesting. why is that?” this is not to say that noemi was deliberately offering to speak about her family; as noted, i think her comment is best understood as a bid to be excused. assuming that to be the case, however, the comment was, crucially, a bid to be excused from the discussion—from the genre of activity as she understood it. allowing myself to be radically moved by how she makes herself addressable is not a way to trick her into participating in the activity as i understand it; it represents, instead, a willingness to suspend my understanding of the nature of the activity as it unfolds and to allow my interlocutors to be presenced differently in the group. the final ethical dimension of dialogue, capacitation, invites us to consider how we might render our interlocutors capable of different and potentially better responses. recognizing that the prospect of sharing her family’s story on the spot might be daunting to noemi, i could find ways to facilitate her response. one way to do this would be to ask, “noemi, is your family’s story similar to the ones the other students shared?” a question like this might provide a kind of steppingstone to help noemi begin telling her story. there are, of course, other, more extensive ways to do something similar. i could, for example, respond by saying, “would you like to take some time to talk to your mom and prepare to share your story in our next meeting?” a response like this would alter the temporal/spatial (in bakhtin’s terms, “chronotopic”) scale of the activity from one typical of discussions (i.e., taking place in a single sitting over tens of minutes) to one that spans home and school and stretches across multiple days, perhaps providing noemi alternative ways to respond and become addressable and presenced in the group. the next example i will consider is the exchange between patience and me previously discussed as episode #4: patience yeah. my mom used to, well she still do make the boys, him [brandin] and my brother cut the grass. [david: mm-hmm.] and i used to like, go out there and wanna help and stuff and she used to be like, nah, nah. and i'm just like, why can't i help like [david: mm] just 'cause i'm a girl, don't mean nothing. i'm a girl and i do a lot of stuff. [david: mm-hmm.] like i'm a girl and i lift a lot of stuff and it just kinda irritating sometimes 'cause it's 1 2 3 4 5 6 relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a26 like, you don't see the value in what girls have. you just see that [david: right] men are supposed to be like [david: hm.] more like aggressive or stronger, when that's not the case. [david: yeah.] i mean this is not a bad thing but like, i wish they would, they would see that in women too. 7 8 9 10 david yeah. yeah so what i hear you saying this, like, i said, you know, it could be a good thing to say men are brave and strong or whatever, but you bring up that, the danger in that is, if by saying that, you imply that women are not that, right? like if men are brave and strong, what does that mean about women? and one thing that people could say is like, that means women are not so much those things. right? 11 12 13 14 15 16 patience mm-hmm (affirmative). 17 david yeah. so, i've, i think that's a, good point. 18 in my response to patience, i make myself addressable as having said that it could be good to associate certain characteristics with men, and as considering her response (or at least my ventriloquation of her) which problematizes that idea to be valid. once again, i render myself addressable as merely the bearer of certain ideas and opinions. if i were to try to speak more explicitly as an embodied, storied, and relationally enmeshed person, i might explain something of where my idea comes from and why it is meaningful to me personally. i might, for example, explain that i discipline my son when he is physically aggressive toward my daughter more than i discipline her when she is physically aggressive toward him partly because he is male and will, in all likelihood, end up physically bigger and stronger than her and other women in his life. i want to make sure that from a young age he understands that it is inappropriate for boys to hit girls. this parenting approach is based on the understanding that boys and girls are different and that those differences may justify different treatment in certain situations. by making myself addressable as a person for whom these ideas are meaningful in my relationality, i might become presenced more holistically and not merely as the bearer of certain opinions and ideas. this imagined response, i realize, would also follow suit with most of patience’s own turn at talk, rather than shifting the discussion away from storytelling and back toward abstractions, which is what i did in the original exchange. as always, my response to patience stems from how i attend to her and, specifically, how i recognize the ways in which she is rendered addressable. although in the moment, i attended mostly to the conceptual substance of her comment, in retrospect, i realize that her comment renders her addressable in several other ways: as someone who is frustrated by her mother’s gendered division of labor, as a capable and physically strong girl, and as someone who wishes that “they” would see traditionally masculine qualities in women too. in other words, as i have studied the transcript of our discussion, patience has become presenced to me differently than she did in the moment. if i had been more attuned to other ways of addressing patience, instead of reverting immediately to abstractions, i might have said, “you seem especially irritated with the idea some people have that boys are stronger than girls. i’d be interested to hear more about that.” or perhaps, noting that she seems drawn to address her mother, and sensing that this may be particularly significant for patience, i could have responding by saying, “you said, sort of speaking to your mom, ‘you don't see the value in what girls have.’ can you say more about that and about what your mom might be missing?” in both of these cases, my imagined responses would address patience on dimensions other than the abstract point i understood her to be making, allowing both her and her mom relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a27 to be presenced differently in the group. though there are no guarantees, this may have engendered different and perhaps better forms of relational becoming among the group. recognizing that patience had rendered her mother addressable, i could also have tried to capacitate this narrativized other of fuller presence and voice in the discussion. for example, i could have invited patience to sympathize with and ventriloquate her mother by asking, “why do you think your mom has the boys cut the grass and stuff like that? what would she say if she were here?” in this way, perhaps, we would not only encounter patience’s mother more fully, but we would relate to patience more fully in her relationality. conclusion if we want to cultivate different kinds of relational becoming in classroom discussions, we must be willing to reimagine what might happen in a discussion. one way to do this is to consider alternative ways we might respond to our student-interlocutors and help them respond to each other more responsibly, responsively, and capacitatingly—to explore the kinds of relational becoming that such practices afford. each interaction that pushes the envelope with regards to the discussion genre influences, however slightly, how students will understand what it means to participate in a discussion, at least as it relates to that particular class. and, little by little, different kinds of interactions will yield different kinds of relational becoming, as interlocutors become presenced and are rendered addressable to each other in different ways. as i have tried to understand and respond to bakhtin’s ethico-ontological vision of dialogue, i have come to appreciate more fully the fact that we exist and live “in response”—to our interlocutors past and present and to our various senses of the “kind(s) of thing” we are doing together. this includes not simply the ideational material of these interactions, but all their embodied, relational, and storied baggage. we are inextricably entangled in these relationships, always already responding to something or someone beyond ourselves. to take this seriously requires us to rethink assumptions prevalent in schooling, including the mind/body dualism that allows us to respond to each other in a discussion as if what ultimately matters is that which can be abstracted from our stories, experiences, and relationships. furthermore, if we assume from the start that our student-interlocutors exist “in response,” we must acknowledge that we are implicated in their relational becoming and have an ethical obligation to respond to them in ways that are likely to be generative and enriching. this is no easy task. it is challenging enough in a one-on-one interaction to discern which ethical dimension of dialogue should be prioritized and how it should be manifest in a given moment. multiply that complexity by the number of students in a classroom and we arrive at an impossibly complex situation in which there are sometimes contradictory obligations and any number of possible responses that could be beneficial but might be harmful to certain students and/or to the group as a whole. there are no clear answers and no guarantees, and yet we must respond with the knowledge that each response is an act of partially co-authoring the world and our places in it, with implications for who students will understand themselves to be and who they will become relative to us, the disciplines we represent, their classmates, and their future. as we seek to foster generative and enriching forms of relational becoming, the ethical dimensions of dialogue and the notion of addressability can help us sense ways in which we might respond differently, perhaps better, to our student-interlocutors. although i have no final answers, i can offer, in conclusion, some questions that may be useful as readers consider the relational becoming among their own interlocutors and seek, in their own interactions, to foster more ethically optimal dialogue: relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a28 responsibility how do i make myself addressable? to what extent am i speaking as myself, from my own unique perspective, and not merely as the bearer of certain ideas/opinions? how am i being presenced to my interlocutors? responsiveness how do my interlocutors make themselves (and others) addressable? how might i be moved in response to them? how are they being presenced to me? how else might they be presenced to me? capacitation how can i help my interlocutors speak as themselves, from their unique perspectives, and not merely as the bearers of certain ideas/opinions? how can i help my interlocutors be more responsive to each other? how are they being presenced to each other? how else might they be presenced to each other? references bakhtin, m. m. (1984). problems of dostoevsky’s poetics (c. emerson, ed. & trans.). university of minnesota press. bakhtin, m. m. (1986). speech genres and other late essays (c. emerson & m. holquist, eds.; v. w. mcgee, trans.). austin: university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1990). art and answerability: early philosophical essays by m. m. bakhtin (m. holquist & v. lipunov, eds.; v. liapunov & k. brostrom, trans.). university of texas press. bakhtin, m. m. (1993). toward a philosophy of the act (v. liapunov & m. holquist, eds.; v. liapunov, trans.). university of texas press. clayman, s. e. (1992). footing in the achievement of neutrality: the case of news interview discourse. in p. drew & j. heritage (eds.), talk at work: interaction in institutional settings (pp. 163–198). cambridge university press. emerson, c. (2000). the next hundred years of mikhail bakhtin (the view from the classroom). rhetoric review, 19(1/2), 12–27. goffman, e. (1974). frame analysis: an essay on the organization of experience. harvard university press. king, m. l. (1963). letter from birmingham jail. retrieved from https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf matusov, e., & marjanovic-shane, a. (2018). beyond equality and inequality in education: bakhtinian dialogic ethics approach of human uniqueness to educational justice. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 6(2009), 1–38. matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., kullenberg, t., & curtis, k. (2019). dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 7, 20–62. matusov, e., smith, m., soslau, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & von duyke, k. (2016). dialogic education for and from authorial agency. dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal, 4(2016), 162– 197. morson, g. s., & emerson, c. (1990). mikhail bakhtin: creation of a prosaics. stanford, ca: stanfor university press. relational becoming: considering classroom dialogue in ethico-ontological terms david sabey dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.459 | vol. 10 (2022) a29 sabey, d. (2021). the meaning and practice of dialogue: an ethico-onto-epistemological re-reading and exploration of bakhtinian dialogue. http://hdl.handle.net/1803/16608 warnick, b., yacek, d., & robinson, s. (2018). learning to be moved: the modes of democratic responsiveness. philosophical inquiry in education, 25(1), 31–46. wortham, s. (2008). the objectification of identity across events. linguistics and education, 19(3), 294– 311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2008.05.010 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word unis a place for joint self-education, draft#5, 2021-12-30, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e1 the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova university of manitoba, ca eugene matusov university of delaware, usa ana marjanovic-shane independent scholar, usa abstract in this article, we explain, explore, and problematize the formation, organization, leadership, and daily educational life of the first (to our knowledge) international democratic university of students (unis) in the 21st century. unis is run by the students, for the students, and with the students for their diverse purposes, desires, interests, and needs. a student is anyone who freely chooses to study something for whatever reason. everyone can become a student at any time without any high school credits, fees, bureaucracy, tests, or any other form of human suffering. but what exactly is unis? why students? what if…? how can one visualize unis, which is “so vague, so bizarre, so unnecessary to me!” what are its philosophical principles? who are we? what does the university of students look like? in the spirit of curiosity, wonder, leisure, fun, freedom, and love for learning, we invite the reader to attend and connect with two working edu-clubs of unis: a movie club “schooling around the world and time” and an “educationalist club.” in addition, we discuss some of the main issues, limitations, and challenges, including the civilization of the necessities, colonization of the human spirit by the economy, a lack of genuine leisure, and toxification of the human by foisted education. the open-ended, poetic conclusion lets the readers form their own interpretations, ideas, questions, and answers about unis. what is the future of unis? and only time will tell, 10, 100 years later or 100 light-years from now. keywords: university of students, international, democratic student-led university, democratic higher education, joint self-education, self-realization, freedom acknowledgment: we are thankful to all members of the university of students and especially its organizers: artyom fyodorov, viktor perminov, tatyana yastrebova, abram de bryun, and alina sharova. thanks to ann qui, tara ratnam, tina kullenberg, and bob hampel for their feedback, editing, and comments on the early versions of the manuscript. some of these comments are included in the manuscript on the margins. olga shugurova graduated with a ph.d. from the schulich school of education at nipissing university in 2017. her arts-based research focus was on a cultural and historical context of learning without schooling. since 2015, olga has been teaching as a sessional and distance course instructor in the faculty of arts and education at the university of manitoba. during this time, she has developed a keen interest in dialogic issn: 2325-3290 (online) the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e2 pedagogy in teacher education and interdisciplinary learning environments. her current research focus is on innovative, creative dialogic pedagogy of freedom and education as art. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2017). nikolai n. konstantinov’s authorial math pedagogy for people with wings, matusov, e. & brobst, j. (2013). radical experiment in dialogic pedagogy in higher education and its centauric failure: chronotopic analysis, and matusov, e. (2009). journey into dialogic pedagogy. ana marjanovic-shane is an independent scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaning making in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. her articles in english and serbian were published in various journals (e.g. mind, culture, activity journal, learning, culture and social interaction, dialogic pedagogy journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. two recent publications include: marjanovic-shane, a., meacham, s., choi, h. j., lopez, s., & matusov, e. (2019). idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. learning, culture and social interaction, 20, 68-79, and matusov, e., a. marjanovic-shane & m. gradovski, (2019). dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators, palgrave macmillan. ana lives and works in the usa. introduction question: university of who?! answer: students. q: why “students”? a: because in the university of students, it is the students who decide whether to study, what to study, how to study, why to study, when to study, with whom, what is education, and so on. q: but how do you decide the learning program (the curriculum) for your students? a: “we,” the organizers of the university of students, don’t. students decide for themselves what to study based on their wants and needs defined by themselves. q: hmmm. what if the students do not want to study anything? a: then they are not students. we define students as those who want and/or need to study something. also, they are aware of their desire and need, and they are ready to commit themselves. of course, some people may join the university of students as potential students to explore if something in the university will attract or spark their desire to study. potential students are welcomed. what is not welcomed, however, is foisted education – education against the student’s will. q: what if a student has only a very slight idea of what they want to study? how can this student decide what to study and how to study it? isn’t it like “the blind leading the blind”? will the students leading themselves “fall all into a pit1” of ignorance? 1 reference to the idiom and metaphor with a long and diverse history with multiple roots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_blind_leading_the_blind the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e3 a: a student can ask for help from their peers, or us (or somebody else) for advice, or seek the help of a teacher. a student also can wait until a particular educational club or a specific onetime educational event resonates with them. q: what if a student does not know that they need some guidance or help? what if a student does not know what kind of guidance they need? a: good question. but who else will know or notice that the student needs some help? if it is the teacher, whom the student chose in the first place, expressing their trust in this teacher. the teacher might want to share their observation or concern with the student, since the student has expressed their trust in this teacher by choosing the teacher. if it were a peer, again the peer can share the observation or concern. of course, it is up to the student to accept or reject the observation and offered help by the teacher or the peer. alternatively, a student may wait longer until they realize a need for guidance. the university of students provides a space for students to explore possibilities and seek guidance if they want/need it, to discover or formulate their own learning interests, desires and needs. q: how do you credit students who successfully learned something or successfully accomplished a course? how can an employer trust that your graduates have been successfully educated? a: we don’t provide any credentials. the university of students is not a certifying or accrediting body. however, if a student needs to receive a credential, they can search for an appropriate agency that provides such a credential. the university organizers, or peers, or teachers can help such students find these agencies if a student needs this help. as to the employers, we think that assessing job candidates’ competence is their responsibility, not ours. actually, we think that the job candidates’ educational background and history should be irrelevant for the assessment of their competence. who cares how and where a job candidate acquires a skill or knowledge or experience or competence? – the only thing that matters is that the job candidate is competent and ready for the job now, according to the employer. q: so, your university of students is a kind of prep school, isn’t it? a: not necessarily. it can be a “prep school” for those students who want to prepare for getting credits. but for the students who are not interested in getting credits, it is not a “prep school.” people can pursue their own interests, curiosities, passions, socialization in desired communities of practice, critical examinations, needs, and wonders. they can stay in the university of students forever if they wish to do so. q: can a teacher join your university? a: yes, if this teacher finds students who want to study with them. the students’ conditional consent for having a teacher who provides guidance is what defines the teacher role – be so a stable and well-defined role or a dynamic, interchangeable, and fuzzy one. q: in this case, why is the university of students needed at all? any person can study whatever they want to study without any university! why is it needed? what for? a: true. however, some self-directed students may want to study in a group with peers. some other self-directed students may need a teacher. other students may need advice or a shortor long-term adviser who may help the students to figure out what they want to study, how, what the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e4 for, and with whom. some students may need somebody who will push them to study – what we call “autopaternalism” (see below). some students may want to develop a hybrid of these well-defined types of studies or a dynamic mixture of their ill-defined types. the university of students is an educational social media that helps students find each other, teachers, and advisors all over the world. q: why do you call this medium “university” and not “school”? a: conventional schools are defined by learning programs imposed on the students. definitely, we are not defined by the imposed curriculum. in contrast, the greek original word “school” literally meant “leisure,” -education as a form of leisure. students’ self-education at the university of students can be a form of leisure, but also it can be a form of a necessity for some students. we like the term “university” because it reflects the vastness, interconnectedness, diversity, and infinity of the universe of the educational aspirations of the students. q: sorry, but i still cannot visualize your “university of students”! it sounds so vague, so bizarre, so unnecessary to me. a: the university of students is unnecessary like art and play are “unnecessary,” while at the same time, humans existentially crave for art and play. we believe that people’s existential craving for the university of students emerges when the life necessities get more or less satisfied. but we can be wrong... please read the rest of this article – we hope it will help you to clarify your understanding of the university of students and raise new questions. q: but for whom is your article? who is your targeted audience? potential students? is it advocacy for your university for people to enroll? what is the purpose of this long manuscript? a: of course, we cannot predict by whom and how our word will be responded2. our goal here is to provide an academic reflection on a fly – a dialogic analysis – of the historically given and emerging phenomenon of the university of students enterprise, in which we have been involved. we are trying to comprehend for ourselves what we are doing, why, what its values are, what our challenges are, what attracts us to it, what our historical roots are. our goal is to engage in a critical dialogue rather than to persuade. we want to start a reflective dialogue – dialogue-agreement and dialogue-disagreement – with whoever is interested. in this sense, this is not an enrollment pamphlet, but we do not mind if it may have this function for some readers. what is the university of students? our manifesto the university of students (unis) is the first3 democratic, international university in the world that is run by the students, for the students, and with the students for their diverse purposes, desires, interests, and needs. a student is anyone who freely chooses to study something for whatever reason. everyone can become a student at any time without any high school credits, fees, bureaucracy, tests, or any other form of human suffering. the concept of a “student” is very broad, creative, fluent, and self-determined without a specific presupposed label; it is personal and powerful. to become a student, a person should have a unique, self-authored idea: “oh, i have an idea…! i would like to explore it, venture into it, develop it….” “oh, there is something i have always wanted to learn but never had a chance.” “oh, i wonder!” 2 this is a paraphrase from a poem by the famous russian poet fyodor tyutchev, written in 1869: https://ruverses.com/fyodortyutchev/we-can-not-divine/8631/ 3 the question of how first our university is can be contested – see our historical section below. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e5 alternatively, a student may need, rather than want, to study something. “or, i have to study this because it will help me to get from point a to point b in my life.” in any case, it is a student's choice. unis is an educational wonderland; it is a different worldview through a looking glass of freedom, curiosity, wonder, socialization in the desired communities of practice (lave, 1992; wenger, 1998), critical examination of the self, life, world, and society (cf. socrates, apology4), or need. at unis, everything is possible to imagine and, therefore, to learn. everyone is welcome, all the time, without any hierarchical gatekeepers (unless a student requires this hierarchy from the authority of the student’s own choice). there are infinite possibilities of becoming a student at unis. basically, it is up to each person how to define themselves as students and how to design their learning. at unis, students are the leaders and authors of their learning. everybody interested in their self-education is welcome to become a member of the university of students regardless of their age, place of living, or educational interests. unis promotes students’ encounters and dialogues through edu-clubs, one-time events, and other educational forms, organized by the students, where students are the leaders of their own learning. there are no pre-planned courses, learning programs, assignments, exams, grades, credits, diplomas, units, periods, terms, bureaucracy. a particular edu-club or teacher may want to charge students a fee or tuition but not unis itself. unis students author all aspects of their self-education whether this is completely self-directed, peer-directed, or trusting expert/teacher support, or autopaternalistic, or any imaginative combination they find meaningful. unis is not about credentials, standards, preset curricula, exams, teacher assignments, or teachers. at the same time, a teacher or anyone else can offer students a preplanned or an emergent course, a talk, workshop, etc. at the university of students. however, it is up to the students themselves to accept this course and the teacher’s requirements or reject them at any time. unis is a new post-scarcity, post-credential, post-institutional socio-educational media where students study what they want or need, how they want, and with whomever they want. unis with its planetary-scale and diverse, multilingual, international student body responds to the current social, economic, cultural, geopolitical, and environmental challenges. the recent covid-19 pandemic has created a world of increasing uncertainty, vulnerabilities, and unknowns. and it has also shown new ways, forms, and possibilities of education. most importantly, it has opened, more than anything else, a glimpse into the promises and possibilities of self-education. unis is its students in the dialogic encounter. we believe that the age of information – the age in which education is understood as acquiring knowledge and skills preset by society, the age of information scarcity and inaccessibility, the age of foisted education – is almost behind us (we hope!). the age of selfeducation is coming. unis takes students’ self-education to the next evolutionary level of social media as educational media (socio-educational media) – the digital agora, where people can come and go, encounter each other on purpose or by chance, for educational and other purposes. the socio-educational media allows people to develop their own self-studies, find, and invite other people who want to join them. unis offers the first, one-of-a-kind, socio-educational media space. people from all walks of life participate in a leisurely inquiry in search of self-actualization, self-realization, imagination, creativity, critical examination, and self-determination. they author their life, their education, and their future in the increasingly unknown and uncertain world pregnant with new challenges and new exciting possibilities. 4 “the unexamined life is not worth living.” the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e6 the philosophical principles of the university of students the university of students is based on the following several philosophical principles: self-education (in contrast to kantian educational paternalism of foisted education), negative freedom (in contrast to positive freedom), student-trusted guidance (in contrast to imposed guidance), dialogic encounter (in contrast to monologic transmission or inducing knowledge and skills), and agora (in contrast to the sterile on-task educational environment). self-education philosophers of the enlightenment, most notably jacques jean rousseau, immanuel kant, and johann gottlieb fichte, probably for the first time in human history articulated and justified the need for universal foisted education based on the philosophical principle of educational paternalism (berlin & hardy, 2002). ironically, they justified the need for foisted education through the enlightenment recognition and prioritization of human dignity, freedom, and autonomy in their struggle against the authority of the church and king. they argued that people are dignified only when they are free and autonomous to make all decisions about their own life. however, there was a caveat there. not all people deserve their full autonomy but only those who are reasonable, rational, well-informed, knowledgeable, sounded, responsible, selfcontrolled, and well-intended. left on its own device, irresponsible, unreasonable, irrational, ill-informed, ignorant, unsounded, impulsive, immature, and ill-intended autonomy leads to disaster. the autonomous device of people must be formed first, and only then people can be and must be granted their dignity of autonomy. since, according to kant, the moral, epistemological, and aesthetic truth is universal, all reasonable, rational, well-informed, knowledgeable, sound, responsible, and well-intended people will eventually reach a consensus when they are given the autonomy and freedom to explore truth by themselves. even more, a growing agreement among those reasonable people provides a proxy for the universal truth. the more reasonable people become, the more mutually replaceable they are, bound by the universal truth. according to these philosophers of the enlightenment, there are two major obstacles to human dignity, rooted in the phenomenon of “tutelage.” “tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another” (kant, 1784). one is external tutelage: political oppression that has to be remedied by political means. the other one is internal (“self-incurred tutelage”): personal ignorance that must be cured by institutional education imposed on the ignorant masses by the state. in his famous 1784 treatise “an answer to the question: what is enlightenment?”, kant argued that foisted education has to be designed carefully to give the students, forced to education, the freedom to reveal, exercise, and explore their imperfect reason, emerging rationality, misconceptions, and ingrained ignorance. according to kant, the teacher must not force the truth on the students (except in religious education) but carefully guide them toward the universal truth through a public dialogic exploration of the students’ errors and shortcomings. the teacher’s power of persuasion must be based not on their epistemological or institutional authority, nor a system of rewards and punishment, nor on brutal force but rather on the power of reason, rationality, and the universality of the truth. only through this self-persuasive process of the students’ free exploration of their own imperfect reasoning, rationality, and knowledge, argued kant, can the students’ own rational device be formed. in foisted education, continued kant, the students must have the freedom to reason, however imperfectly it might be, but not the freedom from reason. the curriculum and education itself must be carefully chosen and then forcefully imposed on the students by reasonable and knowledgeable people through the power of the state. fichte argued that “compulsion is also a kind of education” (cited in berlin & hardy, 2002). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e7 however, rousseau (1979) insisted that good education must make compulsion invisible to the student. the student should be manipulated by a skillful teacher into an illusion that their education is voluntary: the student should want what the teacher wants them to want. rousseau advised a teacher, “take the opposite course with your pupil; let him always think he is master while you are really master. …. no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell (rousseau, 1979, p. 120, the italics ours). the instruction, argued kant and rousseau, has to be co-constructed by the students’ imperfect reason and the teacher’s pedagogical mastery to reveal to the students their own shortcomings. kant criticized the conventional education of his time, which can be also applied to the conventional institutional education of the modern time, which imposes truth and correctness on the students at any price. at this point, these enlightenment philosophers articulated the principles of the progressive education (matusov, 2021a): educational paternalism, imposed curriculum and education, but also coconstructed guidance, and the freedom of students’ reason. the enlightenment saw the panacea to all personal shortcomings and societal ills in education after the political oppression is resolved, while ignorance remains the root of all problems. elsewhere matusov (2020d) criticized this enlightenment project for robbing people of their agency and making them slaves of natural laws and rationalism. conversely, education is self-education (gadamer, 2001). education differs from learning because for learning to become transformed into education, it must be positively appraised by the learner; the learner must make an authorial appraising, a judgment about their learning or insight/satori (matusov, 2021b). that is why genuine education is always self-education. the philosophical principle of self-education is based on the notions of radical pluralism, contextualism, and unique authorial agency. according to the notion of radical pluralism introduced by the jewish-russian-british philosopher isaiah berlin, human values and virtues often cannot be fully known and united harmoniously in one non-contradictory principle: ... [berlin’s radical pluralism] rejects the [monist] view that all conflicts of values can be finally resolved by synthesis and that all desirable goals may be reconciled. it recognises that human nature is such that it generates values which, though equally sacred, equally ultimate, exclude one another, without there being any possibility of establishing an objective hierarchical relation between them. moral conduct therefore may involve making agonising choices, without the help of universal criteria, between incompatible but equally desirable values (kelly, 1978, p. xv). a person morally defines themselves of what kind of person they are by how they judge, act upon, prioritize, and make “agonizing choices” about competing and often irreconcilable values and virtues in a given unique situation in their own unique authorial way and how this person responds to the challenges of other people and their own about their authorial judgments, deeds, agonizing choices, and prioritizations. from this philosophical perspective of radical pluralism, education is another unique, personal, authorial endeavor – another deed – that a person embraces, taking responsibility for themselves. that is why education is always a personal, unique, and authorial act. genuine education is always self-education. although society – economy, governance, state, citizenship, democratic participation, health care, welfare, nationalism, patriotism, military, local communities, family, etc., – can benefit from a person’s selfeducation, society cannot legitimately take over, define, impose, and control a person’s education. society the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e8 can legitimately dictate its needs to a person, but it is up to the person how to respond to these needs and the dictates through their own self-education (or not respond at all). but what is (self-)education? what are its goals, content, and quality? this is a tricky question. we cannot answer it for other people. as soon as we define education for other people, we will kill genuine education, self-education. defining education is the sole prerogative of the author of their own self-education – namely, a student. one student in a given situation may define their own education as solving a particular problem they faced in their life. another student may define their own education as passing the sat to enter a college of their choice or getting a driving license. a third student may define their own education as learning a musical instrument to enjoy playing it. a fourth student may define their own education as acquiring a particular profession or vocation. a fifth student may define their own education as addressing their own curiosity, puzzlement, and interest about the social or natural world and/or the self. a sixth student may define their own education as a particular form of leisure for their selfactualization (literally “school” – σχολή – in greek). a seventh student, following socrates’ motto, may define education as a life-long commitment to critically examine the self, life, society, world (and education itself). and so on and so forth – people creatively define their self-education. they can switch from one type of definition to another or combine them at times. the university of students does not define education for its students but rather facilitates the students’ self-education and its pursuit. at the same time, self-education is not necessarily equal to the autodidact, when the student defines and organizes their own education solely, without the involvement of other people. an autodidact is a form of self-education but there are other forms. matusov (2022, submitted) has abstracted, at least, five major forms of self-education, including the autodidact. the second form is the symdidact of studying together with more or less equal peers. the third form of self-education is the autodidact with advisement, when the student asks a trusted person for advice about their own self-education. these three forms of self-education are more or less self-directed. the following two are not. that is why we do not equate selfeducation with “free education,” or “democratic education,” or “self-directed education.” the fourth form of self-education is the odigόsdidact – studying under the direction and guidance of a trusted teacher while the student remains the final authority for their own education. finally, the fifth, and probably the most controversial, form of self-education is a student’s autopaternalism, when the student demands a trusted person (e.g., a teacher) to force and motivate them to study what the student wants to study. matusov argues that a student can combine or dynamically move from one form of their own selfeducation to another. in self-education, all relationships of trust are conditional: as soon as the educatee stops their trust, their relations with the advisor or teacher will legitimately stop. this is how self-education is different from foisted education. the university of students aims at creating possibilities for diverse forms of self-education defined and chosen by the students. negative freedom self-education is based on a premise of a human right to have freedom – a bubble of sovereignty, autonomy, and privacy – in the sense of what isaiah berlin called, “negative freedom.” in this bubble of negative freedom, the student has a legitimate right to define and practice their own self-education without asking permission from any educational authority or peers. this bubble of personal negative freedom can be quite limited and even suffocatingly small, or, alternatively, it can be very big. in any case, within the bubble, a student can think, speak, and act without any interference and domination of asking permission or need to coordinate with someone else (pettit, 2014). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e9 berlin defined “negative freedom” as that “area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons” (berlin, 2017, p. 34). negative liberty is about the boundaries of a person's sovereignty and privacy, within which no one else has a right [to interfere and] to define for this person what to be, do, or think. unless something is prohibited by the law, whatever the person desires, does, says, or thinks is their own business. negative freedom is “freedom from” (marjanovic-shane, 2022, in press-a). self-education belongs to this sphere of personal negative freedom. it means personal negative freedom and the right to decide all aspects of one’s own education including whether to participate, how to participate in the educational activities and to judge whether and to what extent these activities are personally meaningful and/or useful (matusov, 2020c, 2020d). the university of students (unis) offers the protection and assurance of self-education and personal negative freedom of making all educational decisions and evaluations. the primary educational negative freedom is for the student to define their own education, whether they want to engage in education or not, what to study, how to study, with whom, when, where, under what conditions, and so on. the student may or may not make all these decisions by themselves, but, in any way, we insist that the student remains the highest authority of their own education at any time. this is why the university of students delegates all educational and organizational questions to the students themselves. for example, students can decide themselves if they want to charge a tuition fee for their educational clubs or courses or whether they want to have teachers or not. teachers can design and announce their courses to potential students in the way they like to run, except to impose the curriculum or instruction without the students’ consent – always a conditional consent that each student can withdraw at any time. in contrast, conventional institutional foisted education and even many innovative (usually progressive) instructional foisted education rely on the concept of positive freedom, “freedom toward.” conventional institutional foisted education channels the students’ freedom toward the successful acquisition of the pre-set knowledge and skills that society wants them to have. innovative progressive institutional foisted education channels the students’ desires and motivation toward studies of the curriculum (in a broader sense) desired by the society or the teachers. in both cases, education is based on the non-negotiable imposition of education, the definition of education, curriculum, instruction, and organization of the education on the students (matusov, 2015). when students have their own initiatives and desires, they must ask the educational authorities for permission to enact their own initiatives and desires (cf. the notion of domination, pettit, 2014). student-entrusted guidance by others except in the autodidact form of self-education, where the students themselves find and define selfdirected guidance, all other forms of self-education are based on the student-entrusted guidance provided by other people: peers, advisors, and teachers. matusov (2022, submitted) argues that student-entrusted guidance is based on the guide’s fiduciary duty to the student (the beneficiary). he unpackages the fiduciary responsibility in education by the following list: 1. the [student] is bonded with the [guide] by the relationship of trust, good faith, safety, candor, and fairness (grierson, 2018; rumel, 2013). 2. the [guide] promises to provide help and act in the best interests of the [student]. “the fiduciary [guide] must forsake all self-interest and conflict of interest, and the making of secret profit in performance of the duties” (grierson, 2018, p. 205). 3. the [student] is recognized by the [guide] as the highest authority to define their own best interests and act upon them. 4. however, the [student] does not always know well what their best interests are because of a lack of information about alternatives or because of having blind spots. when it is the case, the [guide] must inform the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e10 the [student] and help [the student] find out their best interests, at the best of the [guide]’s ability and competence. 5. the [guide] must search for and learn about the limitations of their abilities and competence and, when needed, direct the [student] to others for help. 6. the fiduciary relationship is consensual, initiated by the [student]. it can be terminated by the [student] or by the [guide] at any time for any reason. ... the biggest tension among the items is between items #3 and #4. while item #3 affirms the primacy of the beneficiary (e.g., student) over the fiduciary (e.g., teacher) in defining their best interests and acting upon them, item #4 entrusts the [guide] with freedom, authorship, activism, and responsibility to inform the [student] about alternatives and issues unknown or invisible to them. item #4 assures that the [the guide] is not a “slave” of the [student] to follow their potentially uninformed and even harmful desires. at the same time, the [student] remains in charge of accepting or rejecting the new alternatives and visions presented or induced by the [guide], including acceptance or rejection of the entire guidance initiated by the [guide]. in some cases, the [student]’s rejection of the [guide]’s guidance might lead to a breakdown of their consensual relationship (item#6) (matusov, 2022, submitted). facilitation of the students’ self-education can take many different paths and forms. the unis mission is to: a) create opportunities for the students’ encounters with other students; b) help connect students with experts in their areas of interest (who are open to teaching at unis); c) organize critical dialogues that can help students discover and define their desires, interests, next steps, etc.; what else? dialogic encounter of unmergeable consciousnesses with equal rights the heart of the university of students is a dialogic encounter of students. a russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin5 defined the dialogic encounter as an event of a meeting of unmergeable – never fully transparent to each other – consciousnesses with equal rights, “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of [a dialogic encounter]. what unfolds in [in a dialogic encounter] is ... a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event [co-being, transformative being together] (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6; the italics original, the bold ours). matusov and marjanovic-shane (2015) have abstracted at least three types of dialogic encounter in education: 1) an agonistic encounter of frenemies, 2) an encounter of strangers for authorial self-growth, and 3) a hanging-out encounter of friends. an agonistic encounter of frenemies based on the work of a belgian political theorist chantal mouffe (2000), matusov and marjanovicshane (2015) described an agonistic dialogic as transformation of hostile, antagonistic relationships of enemies, based on paradigmatic, irreconcilable differences, and competition for power, into an agonistic relationship of appreciation the differences “as a potential source for one’s own unknown self-limitation of truths and values” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 211). whereas the enlightenment project seeks ways of eliminating violence, power imposition, authority, hegemony, antagonism, and politics from human life through deliberative rationality (cf. habermas), mouffe argues that the aim of democracy is to “limit and 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mikhail_bakhtin the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e11 contest” (mouffe, 2000, p. 22) violence and antagonism by accepting the unavoidability and desirability of power, authority, and politics. violence, hegemony, repression, and antagonism should be curbed by dialogic reflection (i.e., critical dialogue): “[political decisions] entail an element of force and violence that can never be eliminated and cannot be adequately apprehended through the sole language of ethics or morality. we need a [dialogic] reflection of the political proper” (mouffe, 2000, p. 130). the notion of “friendly enemy” implies an appreciation of dissensus as a permanent productive force (rancière, 2004). mouffe argues that this appreciation is rooted in the fact that truth exists on the boundaries of unmergeable consciousnesses that are essentially (but not fully) opaque to each other6 — nobody can claim a monopoly on truth: … for democracy to exist, no social agent should be able to claim any mastery of the foundation of society. this signifies that the relation between social agents becomes more democratic only as far as they accept the particularity and the limitation of their claims; that is, only in so far as they recognize their mutual relation as one from which power is ineradicable. the democratic society cannot be conceived any more as a society that would have realized the dream of a perfect harmony in social relations. its democratic character can only be given by the fact that no limited social actor can attribute to herself or himself the representation of the totality. the main question of democratic politics becomes then not how to eliminate power, but how to constitute forms of power which are compatible with democratic values (mouffe, 2000, pp. 21-22). the goal of this agonistic dialogue is not to convince the other side of your own truth, but to invite the friendly enemy to help yourself test the limits of your own truth in your own paradigm to create what bakhtin called “internally persuasive discourse” (bakhtin, 1984; matusov & von duyke, 2010). the counterarguments introduced by a friendly enemy from an oppositional paradigm may help a student deepen or transform their own perspective through responding to these counterarguments and challenges, reinterpreted within the student’s original paradigm. this reply to the hostile paradigmatic reinterpreted challenges does not need to be persuasive for the friendly enemy. rather, the targeted audience for the student is the community of the student’s own paradigm, bystanders, important powerful outsiders, and newcomers who can be recruited by the new intellectual twist. the goal of agonistic dialogue is the student’s personal self-growth within the original paradigm that involves deepening one’s own paradigm, finding its limits, and, thus, bringing power to it (i.e., winning over important others—mostly third parties and occasionally even opponents—and strengthening existing alliances). the benefits of agonistic dialogue are pragmatically and ethically mutual for both oppositional paradigms, which are rooted in their self-growth due to these mutual challenges and responses to them and in tolerance and even in appreciation of each other (i.e., the ethic of engagement with an agonistic irritating other). there is no expectation for a consensus. when agreements eventually occur, they remain “conflictual agreements” (cf. mouffe’s “conflictual consensus”). although an action of a friendly enemy can be destroyed (e.g., by a democratic vote), neither their idea nor the friendly enemy itself is destroyed in the agonistic relationship. the paradigmatic positions of friendly enemies engaged in an agonistic dialogue — “the internal territories” of the paradigms — cannot be understood as self-sufficient positions. their paradigmatic and ideological meanings and truths emerge and can be understood only in dialogic relationships to each other’s charges and counter-charges. to understand a position of one is to reconstruct historically unfolding agonistic dialogue among them (matusov, 2007). the oppositional paradigms help to reveal the boundaries of each other’s truths that are invisible from within. 6 cf. “… [a] person in his/her essence is untranslatable in principle. but there is a hope for [partial] translatability. and this is what is the hope for the encounter/meeting” (lobok, 2014). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e12 an encounter of strangers for authorial self-growth this type of dialogic encounter has been developed by a russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin and a russian dialogic educationalist alexander lobok. unlike political or paradigmatic friendly enemies, who fight for domination over resources and people, friendly strangers are not involved in a relationship of competition and dominance — the relationship with a friendly stranger is not agonistic or antagonistic in its nature (although competition and domination can be dynamically intertwined into the complexity of the friendly stranger relations, of course). in a dialogue with a friendly stranger, the other provides inspiration, nutrition, support, provocation, joy, and growth for one’s own subjectivity, which is not necessarily expected in the agonistic relationship with a friendly enemy, the encounter/meeting is the ultimate opportunity to hear [myself] in the other. this other can be a physical interlocutor or it can be an encounter with a text or with some phenomenon of culture, which forces me to make that very effort. the encounter/meeting, which i am talking about, is what presupposes my great effort to encounter the other who is not overlapping with me (i.e., opaque to me), but who is interesting for me. [this meeting generates] a point of puzzlement/surprise and at the same time it is a point of some kind of unusual joy of discovery of myself in the [other] unexpected for me. this is as if [the other] talks about something that is deeply intuitively clear to me. and at the same time, [the other] creates the space, in which these deep intuitions of mine begin to live and begin the fireworks of my own creative thinking … [the other] capture[s]/hook[s] something in me, which is essential about me. to “capture/ hook” something in me, means to provoke, spark, self-actualize, and initiate some kind of my own activity. and this situation of the encounter/meeting that i am describing here is, as a matter of fact, an educational situation. genuine education unavoidably involves an element of provocation. what is important ... is that my encounter with the [others] is the space of my own personal self-growth, my own self-actualization. the encounter with [others] is the process of my own self-making/self-creation/selfbecoming and, thus, my own self-education (lobok, 2014; the fragments are from two video conferences, cited in matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 216). lobok’s dialogic position can be characterized as a critical dialogue of friendly strangers aiming at self-growth. people are viewed as authors of their own ontological growth. others are regarded as provocations for the author’s personal self-growth. an author can also provide a “review” (i.e., dialogic finalization) of another author as a provocation for his/her authorial personal self-growth. the focus here is not so much on “getting it fully” and/or “getting it right” — i.e., getting the exact subjective position of the other, which is both impossible and undesirable—but on being dialogically provoked for self-actualization. interaddressivity — interest in another — is about dialogic provocations for the authorial self-growth. lobok’s framework is deeply authorial and ontological. it focuses on authorial transcendence of the given — in a genuine encounter with the other, “the person transcends (getting bigger) him or herself” (lobok, 2014). it is about life experience and life itself and not about the (re)production of knowledge. it is about authorial culture-making: for me, the biggest issue is what dialogic pedagogy is for. if dialogic pedagogy is for production of new knowledge in students—i’m not interested in such dialogic pedagogy. if it is for something that i, as a teacher, don’t know yet, then i am interested in this dialogic pedagogy. i don’t want to get stuck in the horizon of the new knowledge that i have to acquire … life is not a means for something, let’s say, for getting new knowledge. life, for me, has its own self-sufficient and intrinsic value. the highest truth of life is not rooted in some kind of results, at which i arrived or which i acquire, but in that i get goose bumps on my skin because i feel that i have been living a wonderfully authentic life. i am taken by a feeling of the authenticity of the experience of my life in the moment, and this is the highest truth of life. and, it doesn’t matter whether i get new knowledge or not, whether i the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e13 write a new book or not, [rather it is] this result of living an authentic life. i know that, if in my life the situations of authenticity have occurred, the state of final feelings and final experiences (perezhivanie, in russian) — that means that life has been realized. if i live an authentic life, i am happy (lobok, 2014; cited in matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015, p. 217). this type of dialogic encounter provides respect for the students’ authorial agency based on them treating each other as dialogic provocations for each other’s authorial self-growth—i.e., critical selftranscendence. education is viewed as a self-forming unique universe. a “hanging-out” encounter of friends in contrast to mouffe’s agonistic dialogue among political and paradigmatic friendly enemies and lobok’s dialogue among friendly strangers for authorial self-growth, matusov and marjanovic-shane view another possibility for a good dialogue in education — a “hanging-out” critical dialogue among friends (nikulin, 2010). friendship is a relationship that is not defined by any specific event or discourse, or topic, or goal; rather, it is the enjoyment of being together across many diverse events, discourse, topics, genres, and goals — it opens up spaces for many overlapping possibilities (i.e., heterodiscoursia, see matusov, 2011). friends’ interest in each other is self-contained and intrinsic — it is not reducible to anything nor does it need any particular reason, including their authorial self-growth and agonistic dialogue. the basis of friendship is mutuality without reciprocity. friendship is not so much based on the exchange of favors to each other — doing something to please the other, expecting in return that they do something they otherwise may not want to do — but on intrinsic pleasure from being together and engaging with each other (matusov, smith, soslau, marjanovic-shane, & von duyke, 2016). agonistic and self-growth dialogues are task-oriented and self-oriented (i.e., one’s own paradigm or self-growth) whereas hanging-out dialogue creates a joint living space and is relationship-oriented. in this sense, friends have meta-interaddressivity— overall interest in their own involvement with each other across vastly diverse life contexts. critical dialogue among friends is about being together through a deep interest in, and enjoyment of each other’s subjectivity and taking care of each other. the subjectivity of the friend is accessible but never fully known in the tension between a genuine question and a serious answer. it is metainteraddressivity driven by the relationship and interest in the other and not primarily by authorial selfgrowth. thus, the opaqueness of consciousness is preserved in friendship relationships because it is defined by a deep, unconditional, and sustained interest of friends in each other across contexts and discourses, rather than the like-mindedness and mind-reading as vygotsky (1986) and some other scholars assume (see matusov, 2011, for more discussion). friends sacrifice for each other rather than for an idea or a cause. in contrast to aristotle who claimed, “amicus plato, sed magis amica veritas” (“plato is my friend, but the truth is a better friend”), in friendship, we can say, “amica veritas, sed magis amicus plato” (“truth is my friend, but plato is a better friend”). a friend is the final cause of friendship. other types of the encounter at the university of students as the enterprise of the university of students unfolds, we expect to observe and capture other forms of dialogic and non-dialogic encounters among the students (and between the students and the teachers/advisors). non-dialogic encounters may involve instrumental encounters when a student may not be interested in a unique consciousness of another participant (e.g., a fellow student, teacher, advisor) or even their own consciousness, but rather in a particular knowledge or a desired skill. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e14 agora: the classical and the digital the classical athenian agora, located in the olive gardens at the foot of the acropolis, was the center of the public life of the athenian polis. it was, first of all, a marketplace where locals and strangers brought their merchandise for sale. it was also the judicial place. male athenians came to check if they were chosen to serve on a jury for some trial case in the peristyle court. it was the political center of the polis of athens’ government – the boule (legislative and executive parliament) and the prytaneis (a standing committee for immediate ruling) – and political assemblies to discuss public issues, hear arguments, and make decisions. it was a place of worship with several temples. it was the place to ostracize your fellow citizens by dropping a tag with the name of an offender in a special jar. it was the place of public gossiping and public festivity. it was a place to meet lovers (mostly male). and, yes, it was a place to eavesdrop, listen to, address, and discuss interesting political and philosophical issues with wise men of the day. this was the place where people came to hear socrates, his disciples, sophists, and other philosophers, to freely come and go away from him as they wished. it was the place for serendipity: come to buy goods, stay to hear socrates or the stoics7. agora was the place for encounters and mixing the unmixable. it was the place for an encounter of strangers, enemies, opponents, lovers, and friends. it was the place for preplanned activities and serendipity, the place for on-task monologues and heterodiscoursia, the place for poiesis and praxis. agora was the place for the sublime and mundane. agora was the place for work, duty, and leisure. it was the place that had a strict regimen and frivolous, non-binding participation, eavesdropping, and observation. it was the place of nature and the artifact. it was the place of mixing the public design and the private intent, regulation and improvisation, strict ritual, and unbridled festivity. agora was ruled by apollo, the god of the sun, of rational thinking and order, appealing to logic, prudence and purity. and also, agora was ruled by dionysus, the god of wine and dance, of irrationality and chaos, appealing to emotions and instincts8. that is why we think agora is the perfect metaphor for the university of students. we envision the digital agora as a social media meta-platform serving diverse functions for diverse people with diverse goals, desires, and aspirations. there should be a possibility for one point of entry for a person (with one account) that allows the person to access and organize diverse platforms for shopping, art, political participation, gossiping, news, clubs, vr-, video-, audio-, textchatting in real-time, worship, dating, entertaining, secluded meeting places for friends and families, games, one-time events – like presentations, and so on. there should be possibilities for the focused organized activities and for the serendipity for a person to bump into something unexpected and interesting. there should be possibilities for central and peripheral participation. there should be possibilities for public, semi-public, semi-private, and private activities and events. there should be notifications for the chosen activities, announcements, feel overwhelmed and distracted by all these notifications. of course, the person should have many choices of how to configure these notifications. we think that the creation of such a user-friendly digital agora is probably the biggest challenge for our university of students. the alternatives to the university of students the university of masters the university of masters is a professor-led authorial education. this can take many forms, but it amounts to the same thing: teacher-defined education. master (in a medieval sense – e.g., professor 7 to visualize the classical agora in athens, visit: https://youtu.be/uasvhbfyrgi. also, roman forum was another marketplace similar to the classical agora. 8 cf., alexander sidorkin’s “three-drink theory” of educational dialogue (sidorkin, 1999). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e15 expert) defines the nature of education for their students (apprentices): what is education, what to study, how to study, with whom, where, when, how to assess their students, when to stop to study, when to expel a student, when and how to reward and punish a student, and so on. master is an acclaimed virtuosopractitioner and an authorial educator. here are examples of such masters: leonardo da vinci, michelangelo di lodovico buonarroti simoni, lev vygotsky, jean piaget, maria montessori, dmitry bykov, mikhail bakhtin, vladimir bibler, cornel west, barbara rogoff, jean lave, richard feynman, aristotle, alexander lobok, paulo friere, dmitry vrubel, and so on9. students (apprentices) usually voluntarily, but unconditionally, submit themselves to their master and the master’s demands. the master rules: “my way or the highway!” “if you don’t like my teaching – leave!” students can make suggestions, but it is up to the master to accept or reject them. sometimes masters may organize themselves in loose teaching guilds for coordination, sharing resources, gatekeeping, and mutual support, which, however, usually do not limit their pedagogical and practical authorship and creativity. there are several major related differences between the university of masters and the university of students. the university of masters is based on the kantian principle of educational paternalism and foisted education; while the university of students is based on students’ self-education and voluntary participation in education on the students’ terms. in the university of masters, education is fully defined by the masters – i.e., by the teachers: what is the purpose of education, what is its curriculum, how to guide, when, where, with whom, and so on. in contrast, in the university of students, education is defined by the students, with or without the involvement of other people. the student remains the final authority for their own education. the university of masters totalizes the odigόsdidact form of education – i.e., teaching – as the main and only form of education. meanwhile, in the university of students, the odigόsdidact is one of many forms of (self-)education. finally, the odigόsdidact itself is different in these two universities. in the university of masters, the odigόsdidact is unconditionally defined by the master. in contrast, in the university of students, the odigόsdidact is always conditional, based on the student’s consent, which student can legitimately withdraw at any time. at the same time, both the university of masters and the university of students define education as authorial. in the university of masters, it is the master who is the sole and main author of the student’s education. the master authors the goal of education, its curriculum, its instruction, and its organization. in the university of students, it is the student who is the primary and final author of their own self-education. however, in the university of students, a student can conditionally accept their master’s authorial guidance, organization, and even imposition of the education. at this point, the university of masters and the university of students differ from the university of credits. the university of credits the university of credits has mainly emerged from the university of masters at the dawn of the nineteenth century and by now it has almost a complete monopoly on (higher) education. the university of credits is based on the standardization of education, where education – its goal and quality – is defined in advance by some bureaucratic and/or expert authorities via preset criteria and benchmarks. the educational preset criteria and benchmarks can be defined by a set of particular courses needed to be successfully taken by a student, a number of “credit hours,” by passing exams and tests (standardized or not), by getting good grades, by achieving high enough “grade point average,” approval by the instructor, and so on. when these preset criteria and benchmarks are met the “taken” education is credited to the student. two equally credited students are considered to be “the same” by the credentialed educational system in terms of their “learning outcomes” and their educational status. 9 see an incomplete list of modern universities of masters here: https://universityofstudents.org/kin the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e16 there are several birthmarks of the university of credits as the logical consequence of the standardization of education. the first is educational paternalism and foisted education that we discussed above. this feature of the university of credits is akin to the university of masters. the second is institutionalism of education – a belief that any educational problem can be solved by an educational institution, specifically its institutional organization and policy. educational institutionalism views education as a system, an educational system (rather than an authorial practice by a student or a teacher/professor). the third is educational standardizationalism – a belief that the quality of education and its distribution (i.e., fairness, justice) can be achieved only or mainly through standardization of all aspects of education: its curriculum, instruction, organization, assessment, teacher qualification, classroom management, and so on. it views teachers as mutually replaceable, and it defines education as making students mutually replaceable. recently, this ideology of standardizationalism has become increasingly rationalized by so-called “research-based practice” or “best practice” borrowing these terms from the medical practice (hargreaves, 1996, 1997). critics of standardizationalism argue that educational practice is essentially praxis and not poiesis, i.e., a preplanned practice amenable to standardization (carr, 2006; hammersley, 1997; matusov & brobst, 2013). aristotle (2000) defined praxis as an activity, which goal and quality emerge in the activity itself. conversely, in poiesis, the definition of the activity’s goal and quality pre-exists (i.e., is preset) the activity itself. the fourth is summative assessment – it is a practice of sorting people for the purpose of determining their access to some social goodies, such as employment, contracts, desired education, occupation, election (in the past), etc., based on their competence with some predefined practice and criteria (e.g., passing an entrance exam). summative assessment has had a long history and legitimacy outside of educational institutions, but with the rise of credential education, summative assessment penetrated the educational practices itself. critics of educational summative assessment raise a question (among many others) of what the person’s history of institutionalized education has to do with the person’s current competence (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & meacham, 2016). finally, the fifth feature of the university of credits is credentialism itself – a belief that the quality of education and students’ competence can be fully or somewhat accurately measured and defined by educational credits (e.g., grades, test scores, portfolios, diplomas, degrees, credit hours, a list of taken/passed courses). educational credit signals competence (caplan, 2018; labaree, 2010). critics of educational credentialism argue that ubiquitous and omnipotent credits distort education by distracting students from the focus on their educational process to obtaining credits (labaree, 2010). even more, educational credit becomes more important than actual education in the eyes of students and even some employers: imagine this stark dilemma: you can have either a princeton education without a diploma, or a princeton diploma without an education. which gets you further on the job market? for a human capital purist, the answer is obvious: four years of training are vastly preferable to a page of paper. but try saying that with a straight face. sensible versions of the signaling model don’t imply the diploma is clearly preferable; after all, princeton teaches some useful skills. but you need signaling to explain why choosing between an education and a diploma is a head-scratcher rather than a no-brainer. … the main objection to the “guerilla education” argument, though, is simply, “almost no one takes advantage of it.” that’s precisely my point: the fact that almost no one grabs a free elite education shows human capital purism is false. for the signaling model, in contrast, the freebie is a mere illusion. universities don’t card the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e17 because they don’t need to. unofficial education is vanishingly rare because it sends employers an invisible signal—also known as no signal at all (caplan, 2018). the educational credentialism, on which the university of credits is based, should not be confused with the practice credentialism. in the practice credentialism, the practice safeguards establish the criteria of the minimum requirements for safe and competent practice and certify a person based on these criteria. a good example of the practice credentialism is a driving license. a prospective driver must prove to the driving authority that they can drive safely enough and know traffic rules sufficiently. in contrast to educational credentialism, the person’s educational history – where, what, and how the person studies to achieve their competence – is unimportant for the practice credentialism. the university of students can accommodate both the educational credentialism and the practice credentialism, if and when a particular student commits to any of them. the educational credentialism can be a part of the student’s autopaternalism as a particular form of self-education, when the student does not fully trust themselves to pursue desired education, described above. in this case, the student voluntarily and conditionally copes and submits themselves to the forms and organization of education from the university of credits. as to practice credentialism, a student can define their own goal of education as the preparation for acquiring the practice credentials (e.g., driving license, passing a job interview, getting skills and knowledge required by a derided job). of course, at the university of students, students are free to choose their own educational goals and change them or quit their education at will at any point. the history of the university of students in ancient athens in ancient athens, the university of students was probably represented the best by socrates’s gatherings and plato’s academy – at least, based on the description of their practices that survived (dancy, 1991; plato, 1997; xenophon, 1994). theodora penny martin reported about “women’s study clubs back to periclean athens and the home of aspasia, where, it is said, women met weekly for ‘intellectual improvement’” (martin, 1987, p. 4). people, mostly rich free citizens of athens (although there were some foreigners), mostly men (although there were a few women attending plato’s academy10), came to socrates and plato to discuss their inquiries (e.g., meno: what is the origin of virtues), or ask for advice (e.g., aristarchus: how to take care of his numerous relatives who took refuge from a war in his household), or just listen to their conversations with other people. at times, socrates and plato initiated discussions of the inquiries of their own or even gave a speech (e.g., plato’s monologue “on the good”). the attendance was free of charge. some people sought these meetings and came intentionally. some bumped into them. some joined via serendipity. anyone could join or leave at any time, jump into a conversation, interrupt with a new comment, topic, or question, eavesdrop on the conversation, or attend and observe silently while being a part of the group. despite clear admiration (or aversion by some participants, e.g., anytos who was meno’s friend) to socrates or plato, the role between the teacher and the student was flexible and situational. participants were viewed by each other as “consciousnesses with equal rights” to be taken seriously (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6) with their own legitimate final judgment for the truth. the overall nature of this education was a form of leisure (literally, “school” in greek) in pursuit of a good life and self-growth (self-actualization). the ancient athenian universities of students declined with the decline of the athenian democratic state. 10 http://www.hackettpublishing.com/philosophy/women-in-the-academy the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e18 in the middle ages historians of the medieval universities report that the first university of students (aka “studentcontrolled university”) emerged in bologna, italy, at the beginning of the thirteen century as a result of complex political and economic struggles among foreign students, citizens of bologna, masters (professors, mostly citizens of bologna), the church, the state, and the holy roman emperor (cardozier, 1968; cobban, 1980). to protect themselves from bologna citizens’ abuse, violence, and exploitation, foreign students organized themselves into “nations” (later “colleges”) based on the country of their origin. the students’ “nations'' were organized into a congregation with the elected legislative council representing all “nations.” the council elected the rector of the university with executive power. the rector had to be a student of at least 24-years, having at least five years' study of law, unmarried and designated as a secular clerk by the church. the student-based university council, rector, and the students’ power as such were legally recognized by the state, the church, and the bologna magistrate. bologna students were coming from wellto-do aristocratic families with powerful political connections, relatively old (18-30 years old), with rich past experiences, organizational and even military skills, and money. they brought money and prestige to the city, state, and church and provided theological, legal, medical expertise both while at the university and later. the students collectively hired their masters (professors), rented houses, and bought food, services, and goods from locals. they could threaten to leave the city and they did leave when their collective or personal demands were not met. they made collective bargaining agreements and collectively boycotted businesses that they did not like. finally, they presented an exigent organized military force when needed. the student-elected congregation of the university established rules and regulations that applied not only to themselves but also to professors and, indeed, to the servants, landlords, and others who did business with the students. the professors (masters) must take an oath of obedience to the student rector. they did not have voting rights. all issues of academics were decided by the students: the curriculum, the instruction, the organization of the course, and so on. the professors entered with their prospective students into a contract which dictated to the professors what subject they would teach, which books they were allowed to use, how many students they should have and keep (usually no less than five), in which order they should read and discuss the books, when they would start and finish, where they would teach (it could be at the professor’s home), how much the students would pay to the professors, and so on. the contracts specified many regulations for the professors. not only the professor’s teaching was regimented but also, at times, their private life if it might affect their teaching. for example, the length of the honeymoon was limited to one day for the professors to minimize the disruption of the teaching by their wedding. when these regulations were violated by the professor (e.g., by missing a class or by having less than 5 students attending a given lecture), he would be fined or even dismissed from the job without pay or with only partial pay. in anticipation of the fines, before starting their teaching, the professors must deposit some money in a bank to pay fines. however, when a professor was popular among his students, the teaching job was very lucrative, competing well with income from their professional trades. medieval universities of students defined education mostly as a pursuit of vocation -e.g., in theology, medicine, arts, law: “as vehicles for community needs, the medieval universities were largely vocational schools training students in the mastery of areas of knowledge and analytical skills which could be utilised in the service of the state or church, in teaching or in the secular professions of law and medicine” (cobban, 1980). historians argue that the first student-controlled university, the university of bologna “evolved naturally from the circumstances under which the university developed” (cardozier, 1968, p. 944) without any ideological, philosophical, pedagogical, economic, or political design guiding this process. however, following student-controlled universities used the university of bologna as its model: the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e19 the student-university [at the university of bologna] emerged as an attempt to solve empirical problems: it was not advanced as a visionary thesis of european university organisation. but at padua student power in the early fourteenth century bore the stamp of a conscious imitation which embodied the assumptions on which the bolognese system was based. the paduan model expressed the belief that the form of university which had evolved at bologna should serve as a prototype for university organisation in southern europe. the planned adoption of the bolognese structure helped to promote the idea that the core and essence of a university was the student guild (cobban, 1980). the student-controlled universities (i.e., the university of students) spread throughout europe alongside with the university of masters and their hybrids. the example of the latter is the university of prague, where, in being an overall university of masters, law students “insisted on privileges comparable to those at bologna and were permitted to withdraw and form a university of their own” (cardozier, 1968, p. 945). historians have noticed that whether a medieval european university was a university of students, or a university of masters, or a hybrid of two depended on the following conditions: foreign vs. local students, professors paid by students’ fees vs. by salary issued by the city (or the state), older (18-30 yearolds) vs. younger (13-16 year-olds) students, social class and wealth of the students (aristocrats vs. burghers), student major in law vs. arts, the strength of masters’ guild, local politics, and so on. universities of students were more spread in the south of europe while universities of masters in the north. the university of bologna finally lost its student-controlled status in 1796 when bologna became occupied by napoleon's troops and the university was closed. when it was reopened two years later, in 1798, the rector was no longer a student elected by the student congregation but an appointed professor. the end of the university of students model was both economic and ideological. “the establishment of the salaried lectureship as the normal method of academic payment sounded the death knell of student power“ (cobban, 1980). university education, defined as vocational in its nature and overwhelmingly orientated towards the professional needs of society, became increasingly reflective of the establishments which they served. in addition (or even because), the medieval european student-controlled universities were increasingly criticized for their corruption, nepotism, manipulation, academic inefficiencies, abuse of power, exploitation of professors, and so on. however, historians of medieval universities observed similar, if not worse, shortcomings in the medieval universities of masters: “the extent of academic irresponsibility and corruption and how it was apportioned between the students and their lecturers [i.e., masters] in the middle ages cannot be assessed by any quantitative means” (cobban, 1980). organizing self-education in recent history in the early 19th century in the united states, there was a growing proliferation of informal selfand mutualeducation events, circles, study-clubs, and educational societies, involving discussions of issues of mutual interest and urgency, books, and lectures. “a circle of friends meeting at home would engage a lecturer of an evening paid for by ticket sales to friends” (martin, 1987, p. 7). these events, circles, studyclubs, and educational societies involved “cultured” men and women, mostly of the middle and upper classes. however, by the end of the 19th century, this movement became increasingly gendered as many thousands, if not millions, of women formed exclusively women’s “study clubs." in the united states, “by 1906, five thousand local organizations had joined the general federation of women’s clubs, and it has been estimated that they constituted only five to ten percent of the clubs in existence” (martin, 1987, pp. 34). martin argues that because women were oppressed and discriminated against and, thus, often could not participate formally and publicly in the economy and politics, they turned their energy and attention to self-education in study clubs for self-realization. some involved of these clubs were based on voluntary attendance, but some demanded mandatory attendance, where unexcused absences were meticulously recorded in the minutes. the main purpose of this selfand mutualeducation was “cultivation and the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e20 improvement of the mind” and included both very conservative, radical, and politically indifferent women and their interests, “to the conservative woman, federation brings the gradual breadth of mind; to the radical woman it brings the knowledge of the individual point of view, the best lesson ever learned; to the lonely woman it brings friend and fellowship; to the unhappy, useful work and forgetfulness of self; to the rich woman it has brought knowledge of the obligation entailed by her possessions; to the poor, it has brought genuine help and uplift in multitudes of cases" (winslow, 1912, p. 127). it seemed that these women’s study clubs were based mostly on the symdidact form of self-education. another powerful form of self-education in the 19th century was the "lyceum" movement started by josiah holbrook in 1826 in the united states, after its success in the united kingdom two decades before. lyceum was originally designed for (male) artisans and farmers interested in mechanics, practical applications of science, and newly emerging machines. later it diversified its curriculum to include history, travel, biography, foreign affairs, the art of living, which also diversified its studentship to include women and middle-class folks. it offered a series of lectures and public forums, organized in standalone events, lecture courses, or regular study/discussion evening meetings on diverse topics of the public’s interest (except religion and politics – controversial subjects). the lyceums also promoted the establishment of public libraries. the lyceum movement was financed by students’ fees (rather by the gentry) and run democratically by the students’ majority vote on the advice of lord henry brougham, a co-founder of the lyceum movement in the uk in the early 1800s (bode, 1968, p. 6). holbrook defined the purpose of lyceum as self-education, “self-education is, in all the departments and all the operations of the lyceum, its most prominent feature” (bode, 1968, p. 68). he provided a list of 11 specific items of the lyceum’s public benefits, starting with “1. the improvement of conversation” and ending with “11. state collections of minerals” (pp. 24-26). still, the appeal of the american lyceum was highly vocational and practical, offering upward social mobility for lower classes, while it also tried to address the public’s curiosity in diverse cultural spheres. after 4 years of the first american lyceum, 16 states and 3 thousand towns and villages had lyceums (martin, 1987, p. 33). the highly institutionalized culture of the american lyceum involving appointed curators who were hunting for popular lecturers suggests that it was probably a hybrid of the university of students, based on the odigόsdidact and symdidact forms of self-education, and the university of masters, where masters, the lectures and curators, dictated the students what they must study, – more investigation is needed about the nature of this type of education. the later, after 1848, the american lyceums relied exclusively on lectures and, perhaps, increasingly become the university of masters. however, the american lyceums provided the impetus for the establishment of public libraries, which promote both solo reading autodidact and reading circles symdidact. according to bode (1968), the civil war put an end to the american lyceum movement probably because vocational education became highly credentialed and institutionalized on demand of the employers. after the civil war, the american lyceums were replaced with the chautauqua educational societies mostly aiming at the participants’ self-refining by studying the high culture (kett, 1994). however, by the end of the nineteenth century, the chautauqua educational societies also disappeared. the rapid industrialization put forward the university of credits (credentialism), utilitarianism focused on employment and foisted education (kett, 1994). thus, the twentieth century became a decisive turn from self-education to credentialed foisted education, “no longer dedicated to imparting a way of life, social educators of the twentieth century would try to tailor specific types of knowledge to the educational interests of those diverse subpopulations. they necessarily would come to rely on bureaucracy, for now, they would have to identify prospective students, discover their ‘reading interests’ and ‘educational needs,’ and guide them to appropriate courses” (kett, 1994, p. 222). even adult “education for yourself” became institutionalized in the 20th century and presented as a student’s choice of classes and courses in the form of extended, uncredentialed higher education (i.e., without granting a certificate, degree, license, or diploma), with the curriculum and learning activities preplanned for the students. adult learners of the 20th the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e21 century could freely choose a course for themselves in their extended adult education (e.g., the university extension) but not its curriculum, organization, learning activity, or instruction. beyond a student’s selection of the uncredentialed predesigned courses, self-education remained private, marginalized, and underground in the 20th century. at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, christopher phillips and his colleagues organized “socrates café” for discussions of philosophical issues emerging in common people (phillips, 2002) and “the constitution café” for discussions of political issues and political philosophy (phillips, 2011). he tried to spread this movement to different countries (http://socratescafe.com/?page_id=74). however, observing youtube records of the meetings (e.g., "is doping cheating?", 2013, https://youtu.be/jtsg486p7uc; "free will? a socrates cafe at harwood union high school in vermont with christopher phillips", 2015, https://youtu.be/99xbla_qcjw), it is not clear how much these educational practices involve genuine self-education. there was a peripheral but important exception – the emergence of democratic k-12 schools in the late 1960s in the us (greenberg, 1991), norway (jørgensen, 1971; marjanovic-shane, 2022, in press-a, 2022, in press-b), sweden (marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & gradovski, 2022, in press) and probably elsewhere as the offshoots of the uk democratic school “summerhill” (neill, 1960), launched in 1921. although, perhaps, counting less than 100 around the world by the end of the 20th century, k-12 democratic schools (and some types of homeschooling, see llewellyn, 1998) were a proof of the concept for schools that support full-scale students’ self-education. the situation for the opportunities and expansion of self-education drastically changed at the threshold of the 21st century with the development and proliferation of internet and especially its search engine designed by google. dissemination of knowledge, skills, opinions, values, news, fictions, intentional and unintentional falsehood, debates, forums, art, science, dialogues, fights, propaganda, ai manipulation, entertainment, shopping, dating, sex, religion, semiotic violence, philosophy, advertisement, games, communication, etc. has skyrocketed on the internet. social media, blogging, and webpage-making allow almost everyone to create the internet content and, thus, to publicly participate in the creation of culture. knowledge and access to knowledge became very cheap, while the spread of smartphones literally makes knowledge available at any time at users’ fingertips. the guidance also moves online, available any time on-demand, serendipity, and on purpose defined by the learners: the khan academy, wikihow, the youtube “how to do,” “how to make” video channels, help forums, ted shows, podcasts, wikipedia, video and movie streaming, and so forth. educational philosopher alexander sidorkin argues that “the difference between the educated and the uneducated persons is now in their knowledge about what kinds of knowledge exist, where to find it, and how to understand and use it” (sidorkin, 2009, p. 185). the internet shifts the educational focus from a student’s acquisition of knowledge under the watchful guiding eye of a teacher to the student’s development of their own interests in desired knowledge, internet searching skills, assessment of the quality of the found knowledge on the internet, and dialogic understanding and authorial transformation of the knowledge. the latter – the dialogic understanding of broadly defined knowledge (i.e., dialogic social assemblies) and the authorial transformation of it – also becomes possible via the internet: participation in forums, video and audio conferencing, and creation of new media-rich content. education shifts from knowledge-centered to authorship-centered. the internet creates a possibility for a transformation from the institutionalized credential-based foisted mass education of the 20th century to the informal authorship-based voluntary mass self-education of the 21st century. smuggling a university of students into a conventional university of credits some university professors have been trying to smuggle a university of students into a conventional university of credits when they become disenchanted with the zombified nature of foisted the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e22 education and recognize that genuine education is self-education. some even entertain the idea that the student is the final authority for their own education. they may feel that their conventional or even progressive teaching is a betrayal of their educational professionalism. this disturbing feeling pushes them to introduce and smuggle a university of students into their conventional university of credits, alas, in some compromised form. we are familiar with exciting efforts to smuggle a university of students – the students’ selfeducation – into a conventional university of credits that are mostly done in the united states, probably due to its decentralized and collegial nature of higher education. professor of history martin duberman, the 1960s-1990s (duberman, 1969, 2002, 2009; hampel, 2021; matusov, 2022, in press), professor of english ira shor, the 1980s, (shor, 1996; shor, matusov, marjanovic-shane, & cresswell, 2017), “open syllabus”11 professors of education scott richardson (matusov, 2015), eugene matusov (2021c), ana marjanovic shane (2016), leslie gates (2020), angela kost, olga shugurova (2019), from the 2010s until now, are some of the most known examples for us12. a smuggled university of students involves invitation and legitimatization of students’ diverse decision-making: what they want to study in each class, whether or not they want to come to the class (free attendance), whether they have grades or not (and if so, how they are graded), what learning activities they want to commit (if at all), what type of pedagogical regime they want for themselves (e.g., "open syllabus," "opening syllabus," "credential student," "prisoner of education," see their description in matusov, 2020a), democratic decision making about the organization of the class, a choice to drop from the class with a grade of their choice (aka “prisoner of education”), and so on. these attempts should not be confused with progressive education (matusov, 2021a), which involves professors giving students curricular, organizational, and instructional choices, open-ended assignments, portfolios instead of grades, and so on. the core of progressivism is to hijack the student’s authorial agency to make them work enthusiastically and with initiatives on the assignments that the progressive professor wants them to work on, “… let [your pupil] always think he is master while you are really master. …. no doubt he ought only to do what he wants, but he ought to want to do nothing but what you want him to do. he should never take a step you have not foreseen, nor utter a word you could not foretell (rousseau, 1979, p. 120, the italics ours). in contrast, a smuggled university of students involves the professor’s recognition and appreciation of their students’ educational goals and desires, which can be different from and even disagreeable with the professor’s one, but still legitimate. to affirm the spirit of the university of students, the students’ educational goals and desires have to be above the professor’s ones. this is usually a tough lesson for many professors who have gotten on a path of a smuggled university of students (matusov, 2022, in press). colonization by progressive education often leads these professors to blame their students for passivity and conformity when they do not meet the professors’ expectations in educational activism (see such complaints in duberman, 1969; holt, 1972; matusov & brobst, 2013). besides the professors and students both being colonized by the conventional and progressive foisted education values, there are many other challenges for the professors and students in a smuggled university of students. at the university of credits, students often attend a course not because they desire to learn something important for them, but because the course is required or because it is a lesser evil for meeting some university requirements (e.g., full-time student). this institutionalism undermines a student’s focus on self-education. also, the organization of education in scheduled termed courses does not always 11 the open syllabus pedagogical regime makes students the solo designers of their education in the class: the curriculum, the instruction, the organization, the assessment, and so on. 12 we can add efforts to incorporate students’ self-education at the dawn of the university of california at santa cruz in the 1960s and 1970s (grant & riesman, 1978; reti, vanderscoff, & rabkin, 2020) and at mit in the 1960-1980s (elbow, 1971, 1986; valley, 1974). smuggling self-education in a traditional university also documented by an english professor jane tompkins 1960s-1990s, teaching at yale, temple university, duke university, and the university of illinois at chicago (tompkins, 1996); and by english professor granville h. jones at the carnegie-mellon university in the late 1960s (jones, 1971). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e23 fit a student’s self-education (cf. educational clubs, one-time events, autodidact, etc.). a student’s life outside of the course organized as a smuggled university of students is often (over)burdened with conventional assignments, deadlines, and work, distracting the student from self-education, leaving little energy and time for it, and putting the student into a survival mode. the course term of the smuggled university of students is often too short for a student to recover from a culture shock, detoxify themselves from conventional schooling, trust to the professor’s emphasis on the students’ self-education, and start exploring their own educational interests and desires which might be outside of the predefined course. for professors at the smuggled university of students, there are pressures to stay under the institutional and collegial radar. the professors are often institutionally required to have preset curriculum, rigid and unilaterally pre-designed syllabi, exams, grades, forced attendance, surveillance of the students’ compliance, a set of assignments, rigid schedules for the class meetings, forced assessment, deadlines, etc. – i.e., the core components of the university of credits. the university of credits is full of bureaucratic domination and forced collectivism that does not recognize the rights to the students’ authorial learning and the professors’ authorial teaching. pedagogical and educational “innovations” and “experimentations” often must be approved by the professors’ colleagues, institutional committees, and often the university administration. the university of credits does not respect the students’ and professors’ negative freedom. these institutional and collegial pressures generate fears, distrust, underground mentality, hiding their practice (and mistakes), and oppressive rationalizations in the professors at the smuggled university of students, who are afraid for the security of their jobs and promotions. the success of the smuggled university of students in promoting the students’ self-education and ownership of their life is often mixed and limited. many students still seek the permission of their benevolent professor for approval of their educational initiatives (matusov, 2021c). when a professor smuggles a university of students into a conventional university of credits, the professor inherently becomes a benevolent dictator in the eyes of their students – this relationship of domination is always in the air. students’ freedom, which is based only on the goodwill of the professor, is a rather weak one and often under suspicion by the students. and rightly so! when freedom is granted by some authority, it can be taken away by the same authority. freedom granted at the grace of the authority is always half-freedom. the act of empowerment and liberation of somebody by someone is always pregnant with domination unless it is the act of self-empowerment and self-liberation. genuine freedom, as an unalienated right of the person, cannot be given but only assumed, affirmed, and protected. that was why some of us, namely eugene matusov, increasingly became interested in moving his efforts to create the university of students outside of the university of credits. in 2020-2021 september 24th, 2020: daria belovol to eugene matusov13 and artyom fyodorov; subject: new university (in russian, translation to english is ours) hello eugene. i would like to introduce you to artyom fyodorov. artyom is the founder of the democratic school in tver, here is their website http://sovum.ru/. artyom is very interested in and looking for formats for creating a university based on the same principles as self-directed democratic education at the school level. i thought you might have something to discuss. 13 daria belovol and eugene matusov “met” electronically through jim reitmulder, a founder of the circle school, a democratic school near harrisburg, pennsylvania, usa. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e24 perhaps we could record an interview with a zoom or just chat online about this topic in order to post the recording here svsmodel.ru or in a group on facebook, where we collect a variety of information about self-directed education. here it is https://www.facebook.com/groups/322045761927259 please tell me if it would be interesting for you and at what time would it be convenient for you to meet online? daria september 26th, 2020: artyom fyodorov to eugene matusov and daria belovol (in russian) ready [to meet] at any time. september 26th, 2020: eugene matusov to artyom fyodorov and daria belovol (in russian) hello, daria and artyom. i'm very interested. ... i'm running to the zoom of my democratic extraordinary class "school around the world and time through the prism of cinema." i will write in essence later. yes, i’d like to have a zoom meeting with artyom to learn and share ideas about a democratic student-centered university. as a higher education practitioner, i have been experimenting with this concept for the last 13 years, mostly within the conventional authoritarian institution such as the university of delaware. however, i have also been experimenting with a “free-range” democratic student-centered education outside of the institutional grid. as a theoretician of democratic education, i recently have published the following special issue on students’ freedom of education in the dialogic pedagogy journal https://dpj.pitt.edu that you may find interesting and relevant: special issue: students’ freedom of education [see it at https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/issue/view/12] what do you think? eugene october 9th: eugene matusov to artyom fyodorov and daria belovol (in english) dear artyom and daria— here is the record of our zoom-meeting with artyom on monday, october 5th: <<url of the zoom record>> artyom and i were discussing the next steps for the establishment of an international democratic student-centered university (idscu, a tentative title14). here are the steps: 1. prepare the meeting agenda 2. hold a meeting at sovum with democratic educators, students and alumni of the democratic school, and parents of those students 3. hold a meeting at the circle school (jim rietmudler’s democratic school near harrisburg) with democratic educators, students and alumni of the democratic school, and parents of those students 4. publicize these meetings among the interested democratic educators and students around the world by creating an international website 5. something else? here are provoking questions for the upcoming meetings with my brief replies (feel free to provide your brief answers, which may be different from mine or ask me questions): 14 later it became “the university of students.” the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e25 1. do we need an international democratic student-centered university [(idscu)]? if so, why? a. eugene: yes. diverse people may need to have a place for a meeting and dialogue to pursue their education. this place is embedded in a rich learning environment with opportunities for guidance as needed. “university” provides the richness of diversity for the people’s educational pursuits, interests, learning journeys, educational goals, domains, levels of depth, and so on – this diversity will provide synergy for particular educational endeavors. 2. what are the major principles of the idscu? a. eugene: a student’s right to freedom of education. the student has the right to decide the nature of their education (e.g., instrumental, intrinsic), whether to pursue or not to pursue their education, what to study, how, with whom, and when; including the student’s freedom to conditionally surrender to a chosen educational authority (e.g., teacher). b. eugene: when disagreements and conflicts emerge among the participants about their rights, these disagreements have to be solved democratically via dialogic persuasion, compromise, and/or democratic voting of all parties involved in the disagreement c. eugene: the idscu governance should be democratic (see item 2.b) d. eugene: the idscu must be open for all regardless of age, knowledge level, skills, educational goals, etc. unless restricted by a student volunteer association or the idscu government body 3. how may the idscu look like? a. eugene: a combination of diverse media: face-to-face, online, hybrid. students can organize into “classes” with or without a teacher (or teachers), they may want to invite and hire, or pursue their education solely or ad hoc basis. teachers can solicit their offers to prospective students. educational long-term clubs and forums can emerge. the existing educational sources (e.g., khan’s academy) can be incorporated. 4. how can the idscu be financed a. eugene: fundraising, donations, endowments, tuition, and/or fees – stay away from the government funding as it has a tendency to interfere and corrupt the major principles 5. what are the limitations of the idscu a. eugene: it has to be decided via democratically 6. other questions? our next meeting about the new university will be .. via zoom: <<address>> what do you think? eugene ps i highly recommend you watch the following movie “accepted.” (“нас приняли!”) it is a comedy about a democratic university. from october 5th 2020, artyom and eugene met every week until june 2021, when we switched to monthly meetings. eventually, we created an email survey15 to check people’s interest in the endeavor and invited people to join the organizational committee of the university of students (a new title of our enterprise). some people come and go but some get stuck with the org committee. for example, olga (the first author) joined on november 30 and has attended all weekly meetings (except for one) and generated many innovative ideas for the development of unis during these meetings. the organizational committee was formed in january 2021, and the committee members have had weekly meetings until june 2021. by now, july 2021, we have the following members of the organizational committee: ● artyom fyodorov, moscow, russia, sovum democratic school 15 https://delaware.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/sv_0fegjxcqph8fntt; 89 people replied by july 15th 2021. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e26 ● eugene matusov, philadelphia, usa, university of delaware ● tatyana yastrebova, angarsk, russia, psychologist-consultant and leader of psychological groups ● ana marjanovic-shane, philadelphia, usa, independent scholar ● victor perminov, israel, student of business & cognitive science, university of minerva school ● olga shugurova, toronto, ontario, canada, educator and researcher ● abram de bruyn, new york city, usa, graduate student, new school for social research ● ann qiu, shanghai, china, med & msc, founder of iskool learning company ● alina sharova, moscow, russia, educational consultant, the creative foundation islands we created the university of students website in three languages – english, russian and chinese: https://universityofstudents.org. we designed the it support for the edu-clubs on the google domain: calendar of events, email groups, google forms, google docs, and their automatization on zapier.com. we developed automatized processes for enrollment in the unis and edu-clubs and for creating edu-clubs and educational events through the unis website. we have a database of the people interested in the unis and created a unis facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theuniversityofstudents. we conducted successful fundraising for the university of students to provide financial support for its it, raising about $600. yet, we have faced challenges in the development of the user-friendly, fully automatized, digital agora, where any person can create an edu-club or an edu-event without our help (or with minimal help). so far, all 7 acting edu-clubs have been created by the unis organizers, however, some edu-events were initiated by rank-and-file members – still with our organizational help. the university of students exists outside of the unis through people’s own organizing themselves in edu-clubs and edu-events. however, often they need help that the unis is aimed at providing. for example, we encountered the following post on facebook (written in russian, translation is ours): friends, who knows in kiev a philosophical circle [club] with a free visit (i mean, what are you happy about new participants)? maybe at universities or something else. so that not lectures namely circles where we prepare to read and then discuss the material at the meeting. i want to study kant, hegel, russell, marx, engels, and others in the circle of like-minded people, not just by myself16. our discussions at the unis org committee are often intense, critical, frank, and friendly (including becoming friendly enemies – frenemies – at times). here are two accounts about the unis org committee work: katherine petrova (russian-english translator and staff of sovum democratic school): i think, i can name two important meetings, that helped me make my mind about participation in unis. the meeting, that got me into the movie club, was some open meeting (i can’t find the invitation to this meeting and watch the recording of it, but i guess it was about unis itself) in the beginning of may, where in the 16 august 2, 2021: https://www.facebook.com/anastasia.kotlar/posts/4466961833323201?__cft__[0]=azvxox3fgkxjz-lgj1ori9qoxyvihvzl6st0euo0s3kxtcmkqdsgaazcnxvyzdls_wxosccc35s39cvdlgtthmj2rf5ex5muxxbyhpjvu_cku6sfrrdxfan7qvntjzvoi&__tn__=%2co%2cp-r the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e27 end olga (if i’m not mistaken) talked about how much she liked being in this community and what it did for her. something in her speech got me and i felt strong urge to become part of this community. and also during that meeting you scrolled through pages with themes of movie club meetings and it made this club more real to me. <<see below in the next section>> the question, that i could ask myself and anyone who doesn’t like the way traditional education works, is how democratic education work should, but i’m still not sure about the answer. as i see it, one of the biggest problems not only in teaching, but also in every profession that is doomed to work under capitalism, is lack of actual will to work in chosen field. i hear all the time that people choose their major, job and many other things in their life according to the potential of these things, or simply because they have to choose even if they don’t like it, and it raise a lot of frustration in them. this frustration with wrong or hard choices can often find its way to the work itself, and in case with education we see teachers who are deaf to the pain of other people, both students and colleagues, so it only grows bigger. to bring changes into this vicious circle people need to have trust in those, who surrounds them and see everyone as equals, and i want to hope that we (as a society in general) are getting there. i think, unis is a great place to start these changes. it probably won’t work as we are picturing it, and the changes won’t be as big as we want them to, but it still worth to try. olga shugurova: i received an email from eugene about the university of students and the invitation to participate in the survey and facebook. i was attracted to eugene’s explanation of the university and felt very excited to become a part of it. also, i was very interested in the possibility of speaking russian there and of being a part of the international, democratic society of the unis. at the very beginning, the idea about unis reminded me the soviet film “guest from the future” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwyvrt4jfg, and i thought that the unis project is like a cosmic guest-idea from the future. each meeting is memorable in its own way. the most exciting discussion was about our collective writing about the unis and how it may become like [“the letter” episode from the three from] prostokvashino17. the most disagreeable discussion was the dialogue with the russian colleagues about our mission and how problematic the concept of culture was. specifically, the emotional intensity of this dialogue was unexpectedly problematic to understand, translate, and counter argue at the same time. i remember that i forgot many emerging, innovative ideas while i was trying to translate artem’s and alina’s speech while also trying to understand them and also trying to disagree with them. in this entanglement of emotions and translations, the new ideas vanished like the cheshire cat in through the looking glass. what does the university of students look like? diverse forms of practice currently, we have two major forms of the university of students operation: 1) educational clubs (edu-clubs) and 2) one-time educational events. we have seven acting edu-clubs in english and russian languages meeting over zoom: https://universityofstudents.org/clubs. so far, all acting edu-clubs were organized and have been maintained by organizers of the unis. however, we have already had occurrences when one-time educational events were organized by rank-and-file members of the unis. we are waiting for a moment when an edu-club will be started by a student who is not an organizer of the unis. anyone can enroll in the unis or subscribe to the unis facebook group, create or join a unis edu-club or organize a unis one-time event, or support the unis via a donation 17 in this episode a 7-year old boy, called uncle fyodor, his cat, and his dog, write a letter to fyodor’s parents in a sequential manner, without any coordination with each other, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2x8rlf5hru (in russian). the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e28 (see https://universityofstudents.org/#action). what does an edu-club look like? below are two accounts from two edu-clubs: the movie edu-club’s “objective” account of a discussion and the educationalist club’s “subjective” account. movie edu-club discussion the educational club “schooling around the world and time" was started at the university of delaware in early september 2020. by the end of 2020, it moved to the university of students. eugene matusov decided to try “higher education in the wild,” by inviting educationmajor and minor undergraduate and graduate students at the university of delaware to watch and discuss movies about education – documentaries and fictions of different countries and times. as a result of building the university of students, eugene moved the edu-club away from the university of delaware. it was easy to do because the weekly meetings of the club were on zoom due to the covid-19 pandemic. in past, we watched and discussed such movies as "captain fantastic," "summerhill at 70," "the hole in the wall," "please vote for me," "hindi medium," "accepted," "detachment," "socrates cafe," "the class," "sociocracy: school circles," "the prime of miss jean brodie," and more. this is how one of the edu-club participants, katherine petrova from russia, describes the importance of the movie club for her: ...and the other meeting that felt special to me was the first meeting of the movie club that i attended on the 14th of may. we discussed the french teacher/musician18, who seemed progressive [teacher] in comparison to other teachers in the school, but actually he was quite manipulative, and it would be wrong to call his way of teaching “democratic.” during that conversation something just clicked for me, because i finally understood what felt so wrong about all the good teachers in my life — none of them was really democratic, and their goodness usually disappeared as someone didn’t respond to it the way they wanted. and this understanding made it clear how i see myself in pedagogy (which is democratic, cooperative and as non-judgmental as it’s humanly possible). also, i felt grateful to find people who can confirm my thoughts about the system that is indeed wrong and that it’s not me being crazy and/or lazy. to give a reader the sense of the edu-club discussions, we provide the following fragment from one of edu-club’s discussions. the “schooling around the world and time” movie club gathered on friday, december 4th, 2020 (our 14th meeting since starting the club) at 10 am est to discuss the british movie “the prime of miss jean brodie” (1969, 1h56m, all-girl high school, progressive education, drama). seven people were present: diana (usa), olessya (canada, born in kazakhstan), daria (russia), scott (usa), sonia (romania), ana (usa, born in yugoslavia), and eugene (usa, born in the ussr). all but sonia watched the movie in advance. as usual, we started the club meeting by selecting the next movie about education to watch (it became the documentaries “educating peter” and “graduating peter” about the beginning of special education inclusion in the usa). then we watched selected fragments from the movie “the prime of miss jean brodie” of our interest and split into two groups to discuss them (group#1: ana, daria, and sonia; group#2: diana, eugene, olessya, and scott). after the group discussions, we reunited and discussed the movie altogether. below is the beginning 15-min fragment of the 42-min total discussion. at some point, 18 french fictional movie “les choristes” “the chorus” in english, 2004. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e29 people started leaving the zoom meeting and the last two people closed the zoom room. the record was lightly edited for readability. ana (the facilitator of the meeting): we are interested to hear what you were talking about [in your group] then we'll tell what we're talking about [in our group]. so, what were you talking about? dana: hmm, i guess we were talking about the progressive movement and, um… eugene: and sex [laughing] diana: [smiling] and sexist views of women, um, and the violence of the movie. eugene was telling us how [pedagogical violence] was very characteristic of the early philosophers or beginners of the progressive movement in education and how the students were at the center [of progressive education]. you give [the students learning] experiences. but manipulation is not off the table for the progressive movement. and so, all of that was very negative and violent to me, um, because it's not quite, my view, of what it means to be student-centered, but, uh, but i don't know. does anybody want to add what else we talked about? eugene: one thing that's important, diana, what you brought in [our group’s discussion] was this idea of “listening.” i think it's very interesting that progressive education emphasizes listening to the students, but that listening, very careful listening, is directed towards [successful] manipulation [of the students] in order to ignite them, to create their interests, to bring them to the [taught] curriculum: the poetry or history or art – [you name it]. [for that,] you will need to carefully listen to [the students in order to] manipulate them [well]. so, we raised that question, "what's other [non-manipulative] type of listening? what alternative types of listening students can be?” we also discussed [pedagogical] violence, sexual violence, and sexism. we talked about this sexism in the thirties and [sexual] violence versus in the sixties. [we wondered if the movie presented a critique] of sexism in the thirties [from] the sixties’ [perspective], or was it a problem of the sixties as well? this idea that for men to be passionate, they have to be [sexually] abusive -is very [disturbing.] and also dana has a similar [feeling] that i have... like we watched that movie a long time ago and we didn't remember being so disturbed [by the movie]... ana: me too. eugene: …uh, just by this sexism and sexual violence as now. and it's interesting, the change [of our sensibilities] happened in our time. that's a very interesting... ana: i think also in the… eugene: olessya, do you want to add anything because i think you also made some interesting?... olessya: yeah. well, for me it was the first time watching it [laughing]. i think i didn't read the description [of the movie] too carefully, or maybe, i read it and then forgot about it. so, for me, everything was a surprise because for some reason i expected something a bit more positive, but then all of this started happening, and i was more and more shocked, and as eugene said, "disturbed," so [i was] highly disturbed. and so, yeah, it really left me feeling kind of unsettled and, maybe, unsatisfied when i saw this. it was mentioned that [the movie was based on the] actual book. i really want to read this book now to see what actually her [miss jean brodie's] motivation was because i think we haven't really learned much about her motivation [from the movie]. [in the movie, her motivation] was on [the] very surface, i mean, the level of explanation, – other people [were] talking about that, but ms. brodie never admitted anything of this. like why was she doing this? what was [her own] motivation? yeah. i'd really like to learn more about that. but overall, the movie was really disturbing, yeah. it raises so many questions and so many uncertainties. yeah. i have really mixed feelings from our group's discussion. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e30 ana: yeah. [in our group] we were talking about very similar [issues], but we didn't go into the sexist part. we were talking about that fine line between really engaging people's lives so deeply and staying outside of outright manipulation, selfish manipulation, and immoral manipulation. [we also discussed] all that kinds of what you called "listening" or i would call "engaging in other people's deep ontology." [it] opens the door for very abusive manipulation. [in contrast to the movie,] i had the luck to have a teacher who was very, very charismatic, but she never manipulated us. she really stayed very much on the line to not really take away our possibility to, to, to make good choices for ourselves. we discussed that the road to hell is [often] paved by good wishes. eugene: but i want to ask you guys, is it actually good wishes in the first place? ana: that's what we discussed because even fascism itself, uh, people who were fascists, they saw beauty there. they saw culture like [miss jean brodie] does, uh, uh, what's his name, il duci? eugene: mussolini. ana: he came from a very, very [refined] place of italian culture of art, of passion, of love. all those wishes were, in his eyes, good and, in the eyes of people, who joined him. and they, they fought [for] something they saw good, [for] good wishes. [but] it turned into a monster. [in our group,] we actually were discussing the parallel between fascism and what she's doing in this movie. so, is it good wishes? maybe it looks like that to the people who have [these wishes]. eugene: so, daria, what you're… daria: um, yeah, it was my point actually about her obsession with perfection. only it has to do maybe what olessya – olessya? [people nod] – said. uh, what's [miss brodie’s] motivation? i feel like she looks at her life as [a kind of] canvas, and she wants everything to make sense for her. like this idea that she parallels herself to jenny and the way, she wants to replace herself with jenny because she thinks that it's a beautiful development. and i think everything she does, it's all about this beauty and perfection. she's so cold about it because she doesn't really care about those individual people because they're more like paints for her on this canvas. she, she just really doesn't care. she just can't understand that they're human beings too. scott: yeah. they're like extensions of herself.she's using them, manipulating them, and creating a cult of personality around herself. and i think that a part of the author's intent was to demonstrate how fascism may seem benign. like there's this person who is progressive and [who is] giving the students all of these wonderful new experiences. and [initially,] she comes across as a very sympathetic character. in fact, i thought that in particularly... when this movie came out in the sixties, being a sexually open woman and fighting against the system of sexual oppression for women would have made her more sympathetic to the audience. so, you're right. it was the men who were sexually manipulative [in her time] but she was creating this situation where she could still get what she wanted. i thought from that perspective, she was a really sympathetic character. and then all of a sudden, she starts embracing… well, not all of a sudden, i guess she kind of embraced fascism from the start, but like you see it more and more as it goes on, and you start to question her: her values and what she's been doing from the start. and it is about creating a situation where these girls were loyal to her as opposed to educating them. that's what i thought the premise of the movie was: how fascism can take hold in, in spite of it being this idea of progressivism. eugene: sonia. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e31 sonia: yeah. i feel like i'm missing a lot from not being able to see the movie. but, i asked ana earlier, if [the teacher, miss brodie was] similar to the music teacher [from the previously watched and discussed hungarian movie "sing"], not allowing kids [with imperfect voices] to sing and making them think that they are extremely bad, and she's making them a favor by keeping them there [in a school chorus]. i understood from ana how this teacher [miss brodie] is like; and at that moment, i reflected on the fact that for some years i dreamed to be a progressive educator. and now i see this with totally different eyes. and, um, for example, in my country, progressive education is still something extremely new that some love, but the majority hate [it] because they think [it] is related to conspiracy theories. and, this united states wants to control us. in romania, we have lots of stereotypes. yeah. scott: interesting! sonia: … so, [the discussion of this movie] makes me realize how long my journey was and how much i still need to learn. i didn't consider this [before]. [while listening to you] i was writing [your points about progressive education] down. for me, this is an icebreaker. this talk tonight, i do not know the movie, but i'm breaking the ice on my own understanding of some concepts and my own understanding of my dreams. and i'm really [learning] fast [because now] i'm going to something totally, totally different from progressive education that was a big part of my life. so, for me, that was the tricky part, "knowing the kids inside out gives you power." that was my quote for tonight. educationalist club educationalist club is an online synchronous zoom space where researchers and practitioners of education discuss problems, excitements, puzzlements, and findings of their research and teaching at any stage of the progress. this club was originally created by eugene 20 years ago at the university of delaware (ud). initially, it was a “professional inquiry group” (pig) -essentially a research group. it consisted of ud faculty and graduate students. later, it focused on the critical reflections on innovative dialogic and democratic teaching by the participants as well. in the 2010s, the pig weekly meetings became internationalized afforded by its hybrid, face-to-face, and online (zoom), nature. in march 2020, due to the covid-19 pandemic and the university of delaware lockdown, the weekly pig meetings became entirely online via zoom. in fall 2020, the educationalist club moved to the university of students. participant’s subjective perspective: as a new club member, i [olga shugurova] come to the educationalist club without any preplanned ideas and projects; i come open-hearted and open-minded. so i write from this embodied, situated place of the participant. perhaps, i am still puzzled by the complex and enigmatic term “educationalist.” according to eugene, the term educationalist involves educators, practitioners of education, (in a very broad sense), and educational researchers. am i an educationalist? to me, the club is a dialogic solace of wonder and surprise after a busy, anxious day of working from home during the pandemic. every time i open our tuesday 5 pm est zoom, i enter a different world where everything is unexpected, unpredictable, and unfinalized. this world is what bakhtin (1984) calls a great dialogue or “an unclosed whole of life itself, life poised on the threshold” (p. 63). this threshold is between the worlds: the past, conventional schooling, the institutional world of suffering, and the future educational, imaginative world of becoming free. what does this freedom mean? i wonder and feel exciting emotions, abstract feelings, unexpected enthusiasm, and the spiritual vulnerability of free learning. how can i talk about being there, in and with this educationalist club? i talk from a subjective place of being there when i had just become its member for the first time. i feel as being a stranger, wanderer, speculator who can come and leave at any time without any fear of judgment, punishment, forced obligation, institutional repercussions for absence, or presence. nevertheless, i feel welcomed as a stranger. as eugene eloquently explained, the idea of ‘stranger’ “constitutes civilization and society in contrast to community, family, or kin; it implies respect for the other, rather than the expectation of mutual understanding. it is the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e32 important for a dialogue to happen. a dialogue is based on the idea of strangers, not on the idea of familiarity. the sense of familiarity erases a difference between you and someone else. you almost don’t need that person because you can read their mind. this strangeness is very important” (unis educationalist club, may 29, 2021). as ana explained, strangeness is a “dialogical quality and not a personal quality. in a dialogue, we are suddenly strangers… we drop all other considerations and obligations for that dialogue and become strangers in that dialogue… [estrangement] is a dialogical concept, rather than a role of a person. <<ana, 2021-07-16: olga asked whether this is actually what i meant. in fact, i am developing an idea that it is possible for a person to assume this kind of a stance of a friendly stranger, for the sake of the dialogue, even with people with whom you are not a stranger in other ways” (unis educationalist club, jun 23, 2021).>> being a stranger inspires curiosity, difference, novelty, spontaneity, imagination, and, consequently, a great dialogue. the club is the imaginative threshold between being and becoming. wegerif et al. (2019) wrote that a dialogue takes place between people and the infinite other, “the unbounded horizon. . .” (p. 2). as the threshold between worlds, the club is an open, holistic window onto this horizon, one of many windows into the life of future possibilities and potentials. i open my zoom; i am late; eugene, ana, brian, a.j., and olessya are talking. aj is talking about her future comps and proposal and her interest in non-traditional dissertations. i feel an impulse to jump in and share; i wrote a non-traditional dissertation. eugene: any other advice? olga: i don’t know if it is a good advice...uh...i did a non-traditional dissertation; it feels like it was yesterday; i was in a similar situation. anyway, in my last course, i focused on my proposal, on my vision, of course! i would talk about it all the time, all the time, in class, to process my idea. [i pause, look at my empty notebook, trying to remember, sip my tea, thinking about meaning, look at the screen. everyone is listening] i would bounce my ideas back and forth with my classmates, my teachers, we had two teachers in our last seminar course: a dialogue about us, researchers. my classmates would ask me: why? what was i getting at? why was it even significant? my intention was to envision what i was going to do, but it turned out to be very different. i was presetting myself, creating a proposal in my mind. then, i went into the field, and it turned out to be very different; everything i envisioned had to be put aside, yield to life... my proposal with all details went onto a shelf, in pieces. this is when my ethics [ireb] came into place, this process became contested. so, i guess my advice… the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e33 [...] eugene: no, no. can i ask, olga? please continue before advice and.. what it turned out to be? it was your plan, right? olga: yes, this was the plan. eugene: what happened later? tell us.. olga: [i hesitate, look at the screen, feel touched by the sincere interest in me, in what happened; feel reluctant, excited to share, be free from forced fears of speaking back to superiors, to ireb; feel for a moment fierce memories, pulsing in buried words, unasked stories.] ok…., -i say in a quiet voice. [kindness fills our shared screen] i’ll tell you... secrets, secrets from being in the field. so… [i pause, keep silence, look within myself, remembering] i wanted to do a pilot, kind of a pilot entry into the field… ok, this is… [i begin to feel my inner tyrant; feel inner tears; i cover my mouth with my hands, laugh, smile, think about my fears ...think again for awhile] i wanted to talk to people without any formal procedures, develop connections, do it informally, go to that region, without all these papers that the ireb had given me: thousands, piles of forms, not thousands, many forms...for the mountains, for my future participants. . . to sign.. i thought, no, how am i going to do this? i am going to speak to places, strangers… to people on the street, the himalayan mountain ranges. it’s like, “can you sign this paper, then we’ll talk?” no, nobody was going to do this! i was just going to walk… the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e34 off the beaten tracks through the places endangered; nobody knew me there, and i was just a stranger… * * * all of a sudden, i started speaking with so many people, crowds. ok, they were telling me stories, thousands of stories… in strange places such as bus stops-stones, remote stores, the people were so interested in me…they asked, “why are you doing this at this time? there are no tourists…” “why would you come to ask these stupid questions?” “maybe the government asked you to do this; so strange.” i said, “no, actually nobody asked me ...i wanted to know.” “oh, maybe you have the bible, you are a missioner, you wanna teach us something...like english?” “no.” …. then, the ireb told me to stop… and to get official permission, certified translations. this was the end of my ethical, human relations with local people! the bureaucratic, cruel rupture! the end of data-collection, my living adventure, beginning of zombie dread, the institutionalized torture… bryan: basically, ethics made it impossible to do research. olga: [i feel bryan’s compassionate truth] yes, they ruined it, they ruined my research… uh…ah… [i breathe, feel pain, past anguish, sigh, search for fresh air…] in this cumbersome speech flow, i recall my institutional experience of becoming a doctor of philosophy in education. specifically, i delved into the silenced and subordinated memories of my fieldwork in the himalayas and the interference of the institutional review ethics board (ireb) in this intricate, initial research process. i re-create my speech, as i was sharing, remembering my story in the club. more specifically, i interweave my feelings, emotions, thoughts. in doing so, i represent my speech in a free verse style to invite the reader into my experience of reliving, retelling, remembering this past tragedy. according to kirkland and davies (1986), free verse is the easiest of all poetic forms because “it places no real restrictions on the poet; it allows the writer more freedom in choosing words, using sounds, and arranging lines for effect” (p. 76). likewise, i did not want to place any restrictions on my speech and its representation, so that a sense of freedom and free learning can resonate with the reader as well. moreover, free verse has an adventurous shape and style of writing that is open to unexpected turns and surprises, spontaneous patterns and unfamiliar repetitions (andrews, 2017; dobyns, 2003). often, i feel like the educationalist club itself is a free verse in the making, in becoming, in unfolding meanings. hence, the spirit of the club and my spirit of sharing in this club are free in oral dialogues and in my representational verses of these dialogues. this club invoked a free spirit of storytelling in me. also, free verses in and as research “provide the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e35 greater insight into the lived experience of the author” (willis & bishop, 2014, p. 12). in my free verse, i embody the speaking rhythm and spirit, through which i was sharing my experiences without any preplanned structure or objective. i hope that the reader can become a co-participant of my storytelling experience. interestingly, i did not plan to share my experience, nor did i plan to mention these layers of secretive meanings about my encounters with the ireb. i was lingering in the zoom threshold of remembering and being in the club; i felt nebulous feelings of timelessness. i felt like i was in the wilderness, off the grid in a warm log cabin with good people around me, near a dancing fire in a handmade fire pit. when eugene asked me to share what happened, i felt inspired to share the living truth because everyone seemed to be genuinely interested in listening and hearing me. the club has this uncanny ambiance of therapeutic healing and recreation, intensity and immediacy. i felt that my speech was an act of self-revelation in the wild spirit of the club, of being on the threshold between the past, present, and future of learning. secretive? i wondered why i thought of these past, schooled, traumatic moments as secretive. i remembered how we were taught to respect and to follow the ireb in all of their questions, forms, and procedures; the ireb was this bastion of official morality and normal righteousness in my mind. in fact, i thought of the ireb as the gatekeeper of good research; without its approval, i could not conduct my field study, i could not proceed further in my learning journey. in reality, the ireb was not a gatekeeper but a gatelock, the lock which was closed off; its keys were kept in the hands of brutal bureaucracy without any human face. even today i don’t know who i was addressing in my communication with the ireb. this board never personally signed any correspondence with their full name, even with their first name. all emails were signed off with an anonymous, mechanical signature “romeo system” (i.e., research management system). yet, this faceless kafkaesque communication was so vital in my research that i spent sleepless nights, agonistic days looking for the right, correct answers to their endless requests for clarifications. i had to obey their demands for official permissions; i had to follow these and abandon my fieldwork completely; i had to become submissive to the oppressive, authoritarian regime of ireb and, consequently, to the government of nepal, its numerous agencies, ministries. without these dangerous, life-threatening situations of submissions, i could not obtain any of the permissions. despite the deep tragedy of the ireb’s enforcement of its rules and my dreadful journey of clarifications, i thought i could not openly share these abhorrent and absurd experiences in my final dissertation narrative. the template of a phd dissertation did not have a chapter or a section dedicated to any opposition, resistance, and disagreements with the ireb. i felt it was dangerous even to mention how anti-human and anti-educational they had been to me on my research journey. that is why i decided to silence these traumatic stories in myself and in the final publication of my research. despite all of the obstacles that were put by the ireb on my research journey, i successfully defended my dissertation and was awarded an unconditional pass for my oral defense in 2017 (shugurova, 2017). why was it even significant to share with researchers all this nonsense, dreadfulness, and real dangers that the ireb had imposed on me? i was the only one to blame, i assumed. yet, why was i sharing these stories as a novice member of the educationalist club? what was i learning? was i learning or unlearning? what was i learning from talking, from my speech act? ana once eloquently said that unis is the encounter of its students. the educationalist club is one of these encounters. to me, the club is the unstructured, unfinalized, and unregulated space of encounters as free learning. bakhtin (1999) wrote that dostoevsky’s encounters “always take place. . . ‘in infinity’ and for ‘last time’ (in the ultimate moment of crisis), that is, they take place in carnival-mystery play space and time” (p. 177). the covid-19 pandemic has intensified the moment of a personal crisis of being in this world; the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e36 the club appeared as the mystery play in infinity and, perhaps, for last time. i felt this sense of infinity in the way the club is run; everyone can share something without any predetermined, righteous form or normal structure. everyone has a voice, space, and time to speak. the club is a genuine dialogue among people who come there to learn and to share. that is why there are infinite possibilities for learning in and through this club; it is always there, in infinity. i never know who i can speak with and about what; learning never stops there; it is an ever-ending dialogue of life itself. when i think of my being in this club and my speech about the ireb, shatov comes to mind in dialogue with stavrogin in dostoevsky’s the possessed, “...we are two beings, and have come together in infinity… for the last time in the world. drop your tone and speak like a human being! speak, if only, for once in your life, with the voice of a [person, human being]” (as cited in bakhtin, 1999, p. 177). likewise, being in the club feels like this. it inspires me to speak like a human being in infinity, not with a tone but with my voice, the living voice with all of my challenges, weaknesses, struggles. i don’t filter my voice through the correct, institutional tone; i speak through my raw voice, mixing languages (russian, english, ukrainian, the inaudible hybrid of all of the above). i am no longer worried about my accent, about being misunderstood, being othered. in contrast, the conventional educational institutions force me to speak with a teacher’s tone, the all-mighty, the all-knowing tone of an “expert” with the repressed, feared, anxious accent. the club does not force me to do anything and to be anyone; i am a human being here, i speak like a being in infinity, in encounters with listening, speaking human beings. i still wonder what was so special about this encounter, this moment of being, in which i was ruminating, remembering all the institutional struggles and battles that i had to suffer in my conventional, institutional learning. these mysterious questions reverberate in my educationalist space of infinity with a new sense of freedom in being human and in free learning. the current issues, limitations, and challenges for the university of students currently, we see at least four major obstacles for the university of students: 1) the civilization of the necessities, 2) colonization of the human spirit by the economy, 3) a lack of genuine leisure, and 4) toxification of the human by foisted education. the civilization of the necessities unis paves a path to a new, future civilization that is not merely based on imposed necessities and needs, but on free time, dignity, respect, kindness, justice, negative freedom, how things are supposed to be, hopes, inventions, desires, humanness, and, ultimately, love. interestingly, sauer (1969) wrote, “the saying that necessity is the mother of invention largely is not true. the needy and miserable societies are not inventive, for they lack the leisure for reflection, experimentation, and discussion” (pp. 20-21). the mother of invention seems to be the surplus over the necessary resources for people -the surplus that allows those people to imagine, experiment, dialogue, and create. the civilization based on necessities and anti-human needs has created a miserable society of conventional schooling and institutionalized education, where many people are zombified and alienated from their own desires, goals, talents, learning, being, and becoming to become and act like “smart machines.” in contrast, unis is a leisurely space of reflection, experimentation, and great dialogue. that is why inventions can easily grow and develop in and through diverse unis spaces, encounters, clubs, events, and moments of enlightenment. unis students are the authors of this emerging new civilization of innovativeness, creativity, and genuine humanism. hopefully, unis becomes a cradle of future civilizations, like the fertile crescent of the 21st century. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e37 the economy unis came into being during the tragic pandemic of covid-19 and its devastating impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods. ironically, the pandemic has created a possibility for an economic quantum leap to a new system of social sustenance and self-sufficiency. the old economic systems are on the verge or in the process of global collapse (barlow, van schalkwyk, mckee, labonté, & stuckler, 2021; lynch, 2020, june 24; waitzkin, 2021). since the beginning of the pandemic, a new system of universal basic income (ubi) has been emerging from the grassroots political organizations, researchers, and the public worldwide. in a nutshell, ubi is a state-based provision of regular income to all citizens regardless of their work, education, and social location (forget, 2011; haagh, 2019; hasdell, 2020). generally, ubi has 6 main components: 1) universal payment to each and every individuals, rather than specific, target groups; 2) unconditional payments without any requirements or restrictions; 3) cash payments; 4) individual basis rather than households; 5) monthly or periodic payments, rather than once in a lifetime; 6) the sufficient enough amount of the regular payments for a dignified and secure life for each person (hasdell, 2020; matusov, 2020b). according to forget (2011), ubi recipients improve their mental and physical health as well as invest in education; also, ubi helps people establish successful and meaningful long-term careers and, which is probably more important, dignified and secure life and a possibility for genuine leisure. as zuckerberg said, “we should have a society that measures progress not just by economic metrics like gdp, but by how many of us have a role we find meaningful. we should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure everyone has a cushion to try new ideas” (as cited in forget, 2020, ch. 4). however, there are no empirical studies on the significance of ubi to self-educators and the relation of ubi to self-education; hence, future research can fill this gap. at this time, we believe that the ubi and unis share a commitment to collective self-actualization, self-education, and wellbeing. also, forget (2018) found that “in general, people who find the kind of job arrangement that they want are happier than those with full-time employment. presumably, self-employment gives them the opportunity for greater autonomy and control over their time” (p. 82). we also believe that ubi will lead to a more meaningful, genuine, creative, and leisurely selfeducation since it is based on personal autonomy and control over one’s time and learning. overall, ubi may serve as a potential economic base for the university of students. at the same time, unis is not connected to any political or economic organization. unis does not act in favor of any economic regime since it is not governed by economic rationality. unis students can author and lead their economies any way they see fit. genuine leisure often leisure is defined by a person having free time or having a rest to recharge for future work. many scholars of leisure insist that this is not enough to define the phenomenon of leisure (e.g., de grazia, 1962; gorz, 1997; seabrook, 1989; veblen, 2007). they argue that leisure is a state of mind in addition to having time free from the person’s worries and sickness. in this leisurely state of mind, the active process of doing or being is more important than the products of these activities: “leisure activities... are pursued as ends in themselves. they are unplanned and unrequired. leisure is primarily action, directed generally toward self-development” (atchley, 1971, p. 13). matusov (2020b) has abstracted at least the following four major forms of leisure: 1) playing, 2) hanging out with friends, 3) hobbies, and 4) intrinsic education. the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e38 people engage in extrinsic education because they value the outcomes of their education much more than its process. often the participants in extrinsic education want to shorten it as much as possible (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). the university of masters supports mainly extrinsic education while the university of credits supports exclusively extrinsic education (see above). in contrast, people engage in intrinsic education because they value the process of their education much more than its outcomes. the participants in intrinsic education do not want to shorten it because they view their intrinsic education as an essential part of their life – shortening education means shortening their life for them (matusov et al., 2017). intrinsic education often focuses on promoting creative and/or critical authorship in the students (matusov, 2020b; matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). although the university of students supports both extrinsic and intrinsic education, it is intrinsic education that can flourish at the university of students. detoxification from the conventional schooling of foisted education foisted education of the university of masters and especially of the university of credits traumatize students by suppressing, paralyzing, and even robbing them of their authorial agency. some educators of the democratic school and homeschooling movements (greenberg, 1991; llewellyn, 1998; neill, 1960) have noticed a phenomenon of some students’ “toxification” by conventional foisted education. when impositions of education are removed from these students, the students are paralyzed to do anything meaningful to them. they either demand impositions from the adult authority, try to imagine such demands and re-impose the imagined demands on themselves, or do literally nothing -apparently, suffering from mild or even severe depression. these democratic educators suggest letting students go on these “alienation vacations” (matusov & brobst, 2013) of doing nothing for a while as a necessary process of school detoxification, when you quit school, do nothing academic for at least, at the absolute minimum, a week. if you wish, however, write stories or journal entries about your past and your future. dream, dream, dream. if you crave tv, watch it. if you crave sleep, indulge. allow yourself to go through withdrawal. pass no judgments. if you want to “work” on anything, work on forgiving and forgetting. forgive yourself for everything. forgive your teachers for everything. forgive your parents for everything. forget the lies school taught-forget that learning is separate from your life, that you can’t teach yourself, that you are defined by your grades, and all other such nonsense. detoxify. purge (llewellyn, 1998, p. 126). it may take months and even years before full school detoxification and recovery occurs for some students as neill, the founder of a british democratic school summerhill, reported in one case: “the recovery time is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them. our record case was a girl from a convent. she loafed for three years. the average period of recovery from lesson aversion is three months“ (neill, 1960, p. 2). like some democratic schools and homeschooling, the university of students presents time (patience) and resources for the students’ detoxification from foisted education. in contrast to these democratic schools and homeschooling, the university of students supports autopaternalism as a form of self-education. conclusion: the future of the university of students what is the future of unis? have we started it at the right historical time? are we up to the challenge? will our endeavor succeed, will it be claimed by people, will it overcome the current pressures the university of students: a place for joint self-education olga shugurova, eugene matusov, ana marjanovic-shane dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2022.497 | vol. 10 (2022) e39 of scarcity, institutionalism, and credentialism? the questions will be answered by those people who find the university of students helpful for themselves and who join us. and only time will tell, 10, 100 years later or 100 light-years from now. references andrews, r. 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(1994). memorabilia. london: cornell university press. new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. microsoft word nussbaum et al, bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions, layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a7 bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum university of nevada, usa ian j. dove university of nevada, usa leann g. putney university of nevada, usa abstract this article explores the relationship between argumentation theory and dialogic pedagogy. arguments made in everyday discourse tend to be enthymematic, i.e., containing implicit premises. thus, dialogue is often necessary to uncover hidden assumptions. furthermore, evaluating logical arguments involves dialectical and dialogic processes. we articulate the role of critical questions in this process and present the critical questions model of argument assessment (cqmaa) as a (mostly) comprehensive framework for evaluating arguments. students can be taught to ask and discuss these critical questions. yet to facilitate and sustain discussion of these questions, teachers need additional tools drawn from dialogic pedagogy. we draw on robin alexander’s conceptual framework for this purpose as well as michaels and o’connor’s work on academically productive talk. alexander’s framework includes six pedagogical principles and eight repertoires of talk. we focus specifically on teacher and student talk moves and propose that critical questions should be considered an important subset of productive talk moves that can bring rigor and purpose to classroom argumentation. other talk moves are also needed to help students construct arguments, listen and engage with one another, and help sustain discussion of the critical questions. the cqmaa provides both a theoretical and practical link between (1) logical analysis and critique and (2) dialogic teaching. keywords: dialogic teaching, argumentation, argumentation theory, logic, critical questions, critical thinking. e. michael nussbaum is a professor of educational psychology at the university of nevada, las vegas. he holds a bachelor’s degree in political studies from pitzer college, a master’s degree in public policy analysis from the university of california, berkeley, and a ph.d. in psychological studies in education from stanford university. he specializes in research on argumentation in education, including science and social studies, with an emphasis on the use of critical questions in oral and written argumentative discourse. ian j. dove is an associate professor of philosophy and director of critical thinking and logic at the university of nevada, las vegas. he received his bachelor’s degree from northern arizona state university, a master’s from the university of wisconsin, milwaukee, and a ph.d. from rice university, all in philosophy. his research focuses on argumentation (especially in science, mathematics, and visual reasoning) and the development of new argument schemes and critical questions. issn: 2325-3290 (online) bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a8 leann g. putney is a professor emerita in educational psychology at the university of nevada, las vegas. she holds a bachelor’s degree focusing on both spanish and english from indiana university, a master’s in multilingual education from the california state university, stanislaus, and a ph.d. in language, culture, and literacy from the university of california, santa barbara. her interests include ethnographic research on discourse and learning communities from a vygotskian perspective, as well as teacher selfefficacy and collective classroom efficacy. she co-authored the book, a vision of vygotsky, which relates sociocultural theory to classroom practices. acknowledgment we are grateful for the intellectual input to the ideas expressed in this paper provided by sarah michaels, jim minstrell, and ruth anderson and for sarah’s detailed feedback on the manuscript drafts. an earlier version of the paper was presented at the biennial meeting of the argumentation, discourse & reasoning special interest group (#26) of the european association for research on learning & instruction, university of utrecht, utrecht, the netherlands.1 ïïò bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions there have been several notable successes documenting the educational utility of argumentation (asterhan & schwarz, 2009, 2016; larrain et al., 2021; nussbaum, 2008a). teachers need to know how to build dialogic learning environments that contain rich and productive student discussions (andriessen & baker, 2012; jonassen & kim, 2010; osborne et al., 2010) and that promote students’ agency, contribute to sensemaking and knowledge-building, and develop students’ critical thinking and argumentation skills. many who research argumentation in education draw on frameworks from philosophy (dove & nussbaum, 2018; macagno & rapanta, 2019) or dialogic pedagogy (alexander, 2020; resnick et al., 2015; wegerif et al., 1999). however, the dialogue between those researchers who most closely identify with argumentation and those who identify with dialogic pedagogy could be strengthened. furthermore, the diverse conceptual frameworks used by the different communities could be productively synthesized to further both theory and practice. the goal of this article is to explain how two seemingly very different bodies of work, (1) argumentation theory (relating to formal and informal logic) and (2) dialogic pedagogy (specifically work by alexander and by michaels and o’connor), can be connected. we explain the conceptual underpinning of each and show that logical analysis, at its core, is dialectical and dialogical. we then propose that a practical connection between these bodies of work can be made by using critical questions, which are evaluative questions from argumentation theory, as “talk moves” in classroom discussions. philosophical perspectives on argumentation and discourse although argumentation studies involve social, psychological, and pedagogical aspects, we focus here specifically on the logical evaluation of arguments, which is a subset of the broader domain. in 1 correspondence concerning this paper should be addressed to e. michael nussbaum, department of educational psychology, leadership, and higher education, box 453003, university of nevada, las vegas, las vegas, nevada, usa 89154-3003. email: nussbaum@unlv.nevada.edu bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a9 philosophy, the field of logic is the study of correct reasoning. as such, philosophical perspectives are concerned with what makes an argument valid and sound if deductive or strong and cogent if inductive. an argument is a claim (i.e., a conclusion) that is supported by reasons (the premises). o’keefe (1983) distinguished between two senses of the term argument: argument as a product (“argument-1”), such as syllogisms that are constructed, and argument as an activity (“argument-2"), as in “having an argument with my friend.” the latter has been labeled by some scholars (such as kuhn et al., 2013) as argumentation. argumentation is dialectical in that it involves a contest, so to speak, of opposing ideas. (the idea of thesisantithesis dates back to the ancient greeks, specifically zeno, socrates, and aristotle)2. argumentation is also dialogic because it is embodied in the discourse among human beings regarding the meaning of something (idea, event, argument). (the term dialogic is defined more fully later in the article.) in this section, we begin from the perspective of arguments as products, then show that the evaluation of argument products is dialectical and dialogic. the concept of critical questions is then introduced, which provides an important theoretical and practical linkage to dialogic pedagogy. because our specific list of critical questions is based on formal and informal logic, it is important to understand basic logical concepts. basics of logical analysis as noted, arguments involve a conclusion inferred from one or more premises. arguments with two premises are known as syllogisms. for example, consider the syllogism, loosely based on an argument made against a bill co-authored by senator taft in 1947 by the national association of real estate boards: all democrats support public housing. all socialists support public housing. therefore, all democrats are socialists. logical analysis shows this (deductive) syllogism to be invalid because it is possible for the premises to be true while the conclusion is false, i.e. inconclusive. the premises do not connect the categories in a way that forces the conclusion to be true. the validity of an argument depends on its structure, not on the truth of the premises. a sound argument is an argument that is (1) valid and (2) also has true premises, thereby establishing the truth of the conclusion. as was noted by aristotle (ca. 350 b.c.e./1960; smith, 2020), and later by toulmin (1958) and others, many arguments are inductive (i.e., probabilistic). inductive arguments are judged by the criteria of strength and cogency, not validity and soundness. strength refers to whether the conclusion is highly probable given the premises, and cogency as to whether the premises are true (e.g., are the observations on which the argument is based accurate). cogency is the inductive analogy of soundness for deductive arguments. asyllogistic and enthymematic arguments. arguments can be asyllogistic, having three or more premises. for example, there might be a chain of reasoning or multiple reasons why a conclusion is true. for instance, giving multiple reasons for why a particular course of action is desirable might involve listing four advantages, two disadvantages and then arguing that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. arguments can also be complex if they contain counterarguments or rebuttals of opposing arguments. nevertheless, arguments with complex structures can be broken down (i.e., analyzed) into parts that consist 2 the term “synthesis” was later introduced by fichte in the eighteenth century (and mistakenly attributed to hegel; schnitker & emmons, 2013). we do not use the concept of synthesis here, because it is not well defined, but dialectic does require continued evaluative responses to opposing ideas, up to the point where the dialectic ceases. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a10 of syllogisms and/or induction of a general premise from a series of particular observations. the individual parts can then be evaluated. arguments can also have premises where some are left implicit. these are known as enthymemes. for example: lincoln was the 16th president of the u.s. therefore, lincoln was born in the u.s. the implicit premise is that all u.s. presidents must be natural born citizens (according to article ii. of the u.s. constitution). many informal arguments in everyday discourse are enthymematic, having one or more implicit premises. anderson et al. (1997) documented the enthymematic quality of arguments made by 4th graders during small-group literature discussions. the argument about lincoln works if the implicit proposition is known by the audience, that is, if it is part of their common ground (the shared and agreed upon knowledge of the parties involved, see clark & brennan, 1991). if not, the argument could be judged as invalid, but those who cannot follow the argument should first ask, “what does lincoln being a u.s. president, have to do with where he was born?” the proponent of the argument should then make the implicit premise explicit; if they cannot do so, only then should the argument be judged invalid. (hitchcock, 1998, has maintained that the missing component is really more a rule of inference than a premise per se, but this is a technical point that does not affect our overall argument.) this example shows how the evaluation of arguments is dialogic. a key point is whether gaps in the argument can be filled in. consider the argument: joe biden was elected the 46th president of the u.s. therefore, the election was stolen by the democrats. this argument should be judged as invalid (a non sequitur) because the conclusion does not follow from the premise. there is an inferential gap. however, if someone were to inquire about the relevance of the premise, the proponent might be able to fill in the gap by providing an additional premise, such as: most people couldn’t possibly support biden for president because he is a terrible candidate. this move makes the argument stronger, but the question then becomes whether it is cogent, i.e., based on true premises. thus, questions should be posed regarding the evidence, if any, supporting the additional premise. what did the polling data say? how reliable is the polling data? are there other possible reasons that trump could have lost his bid for reelection, such as his denial of the seriousness of the covid-19 pandemic or widespread perceptions that he was racist and corrupt? these evaluative questions are known as critical questions (hastings, 1962). these questions probe an argument's attributes, such as strength, validity, cogency, and soundness. critical questions and argument schemes the study of critical questions in argumentation theory has traditionally been linked with the concept of argument schemes. an argument scheme is a type of argument with a particular type of semantic content for both the general and particular premises. for example, the existence of dark clouds is evidence that it is likely to rain (nussbaum & dove, 2022). this is known as an argument from sign; very dark clouds are a bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a11 sign of rain, just as bear tracks are a sign that a bear may be nearby. there are particular critical questions that should be asked in a dialogue to evaluate an argument from sign, specifically: 1. what is the strength of the correlation of the sign with the event signified? 2. are there other events that would more reliably account for the sign? (questions from walton et al., 2007). very dark clouds are a sign of rain, although the correlation is not perfect. in a similar vein, if we reframe the argument about senator taft as an argument from a sign (because supporting public housing could be taken as a sign of being a socialist), the argument can be judged as weak because the correlation is weak (there are many nonsocialists who support public housing), and there are also other events that could account for senator taft’s support of public housing. (after investigating the issue, he saw that public housing met a need that private industry would not meet and that it strengthened the family and improved the poor’s standard of living; davies, n.d.). other argument schemes require different critical questions (or cqs). for example, in an argument from expertise (a proposition “a” is likely true because an expert said so), the cqs are: 1. is the expert a genuine expert in the domain? 2. did the expert really assert a? 3. is a relevant to the domain? 4. is a consistent with what other experts say? 5. is a consistent with the known evidence in the domain? although it does have roots in aristotle’s notion of topoi (the source of the form and legitimacy of an argument), the notion of argument schemes in contemporary philosophy and rhetoric was first proposed by perelman and olbrechts-tyteca (1958) in their book, the new rhetoric: a treatise on argumentation. for example, they discuss such themes as an argument from example or from dissociation of concepts. the same year, toulmin (1958) proposed that arguments in everyday life consist of six parts: claims, data (later termed grounds), warrants linking data to the claim, backing for the warrant, a rebuttal, and a modal qualifier in the conclusion (such as probably, presumably, necessarily, etc.). many of these parts are left implicit and only provided when a question is asked, such as “what have you got to go on? “what is the relevance?” (as in the lincoln example above), “are there exceptions?” and “how do you know the warrant is true?”).3 these can be considered general cqs, but the term critical questions and the link to specific argument schemes was formally made by arthur hastings (1962) in his doctoral dissertation, where he classified different types of warrants into schemes. other philosophers have subsequently proposed additional schemes and cqs. walton et al. (2007) presented a compendium of 96 schemes, each with its own set of critical questions. in the subsequent sixty-plus years since toulmin introduced his model, the argument scheme and other approaches have in philosophy superseded the toulmin model in importance, whereas the toulmin model became the dominant one in the fields of education and communication. the toulmin model was popularized in communication studies (including forensics, rhetoric, and literacy) through a textbook written by ehninger and brockriede (1963), because it provided a convenient alternative to formal logic. it was further simplified in education into a claim-evidence-reasoning format by mcneill and krajcik (2006). the toulmin model is rarely used by contemporary philosophers, however, as the terms used are somewhat 3 the toulmin model does not contain standards for evaluating the strength and cogency of arguments, other than whether a component of the model could be produced on request. (toulmin recognized that other than grounds, the various other components were enthymematic.) toulmin proposed the model to make a philosophical argument that different fields of argument use different types of backing (empirical, legal, arguments for ethical principles, etc.), and that arguments should be judged by field-dependent standards relating to what counts as good evidence. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a12 vague and the argument schemes approach provides better conceptual tools for analyzing and evaluating arguments and identifying fallacies. argument scheme theory was, in part, developed in response to the issue of what makes an argument fallacious. fallacies can be formal or informal. a formal fallacy relates to a flaw in the structure of an argument (as was the case with the public housing syllogism), whereas an informal fallacy relates to the use of ambiguous terms or irrelevant factors. for example, just because an authority figure says something is true does not make it true. the romans called this fallacy argumentum ad verecundiam. however, as pointed out by hamblin (1970), arguments that appeal to authority are not always fallacious; sometimes, expert testimony makes a proposition more likely to be true. authority is only irrelevant from a deductive point of view, but many if not most arguments are not purely deductive. the cqs allow judgments to be made about when a particular argument is or is not fallacious. walton and others have analyzed various “fallacies” (walton wrote a number of books on individual ones); this work has contributed to the list of argument schemes and cqs (see nussbaum, 2011, for a summary). cqs help participants in an argumentative discussion evaluate arguments given in the discussion. the relationship between the participants is dialectical and rooted in dialogue; a participant forwards an argument, others ask (or should ask) critical questions, and then the proponent responds. if the response is deemed satisfactory, the argument can be judged as strong and cogent; if not, the argument can be judged as weak or fallacious. sometimes, rather than asking a cq, the other parties may make a rebuttal. for example, rather than asking “what is your evidence?” a critic might just argue “you have no reliable evidence” and then let the protagonist respond. in either case, the dialogue should then proceed until the goal of the dialogue is reached. walton (1998), in the new dialectic, proposed seven types of dialogue, each with a different goal. the goal of a persuasive dialogue (what other scholars called a critical discussion, van eemeren & grootendorst, 1992) is to resolve a difference of opinion, but other types of dialogue might relate to inquiry, interrogation, negotiation, deliberation, or emotional catharsis and the airing of grievances. the critical questions model of argument assessment (cqmaa) the type of argumentation discussed above is normative; it addresses how people should argue, including how they should evaluate arguments, but not how people actually do argue and make these judgments. there are other conceptual frameworks in the field of argumentation studies that address the latter (e.g., jacobs & jackson, 1982; kuhn et al., 2013) as well as pedagogical frameworks for how students can learn to argue more critically and effectively (nussbaum et al., 2019; reznitskaya et al., 2008). from a pedagogical perspective, nussbaum and dove (2018) noted that it is unwieldy to teach students to recognize argument schemes, not only because there are so many but also because many actual arguments do not perfectly fit a scheme or may fit two or more schemes. however, noting similarities in the cqs across different schemes, dove and nussbaum (2018) therefore proposed a set of quasi-general critical questions that could be posed by teachers and taught to and used by students. the list is similar to evaluation criteria independently developed by reznitskaya and wilkinson (2021), but ours is specifically based on yu and zenker’s work on complete argument evaluation (2020). yu and zenker posed the question of whether there is a procedure for generating all the cqs that could be asked about a particular scheme. yu and zenker showed that there are only a few ways an argument can go wrong. first, though, there needs to be an argument and the terms of the argument need to be welldefined, not vague or ambiguous, second, individual syllogisms can go wrong because (a) the major (or general) premise is false (including in need of qualification), (b) the minor premise is false (including in need of qualification or more evidentiary support), or (c) the conclusion does not follow from the premises bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a13 because there is an inferential gap that remains unfilled after discussion. finally, there may be counterarguments that work against the conclusions, such as disadvantages to a course of action or counterevidence to a scientific theory, and which outweigh the argument. yu and zenker turned these potential flaws into meta-cqs, such as “is the major premise true?” the particular cqs associated with specific schemes are just instances of these meta-cqs. we contend that the meta-questions can also be used to generate more specific, quasi-general cqs that can be taught to students. dove and nussbaum (2018) proposed a list of cqs that composed what they call the critical questions model of argument evaluation (cqmaa). the list has been slightly modified over time to make some of the cqs clearer and more student-friendly and to address explanations as well as arguments.4 the current list is: 1. structure: is there an argument or explanation here? can we identify the conclusion? can we identify the supporting reasons and evidence and how they relate to one another? 2. meaning: what do the terms/concepts of the argument mean? can i (or you) explain the meaning and give an example? does the explanation make sense? 3. evidence quality: is there evidence? how good is the evidence? is it reliable? 4. soundness: are any of the reasons or assumptions untrue or incorrect? does the argument use or connect with accepted scientific principles or facts? 5. coherent reasoning: do the parts of the argument make a path that you can follow, or are there missing steps? 6. alternatives: are there other explanations, models, or conclusions that also fit the evidence? can you rule out other or competing explanations or conclusions? 7. completeness: what is missing or weak in the argument or explanation? are there missing factors? 8. trade-offs (for engineering design or socioscientific arguments): are there trade-offs (getting something at the expense of another)? are any of the reasons on one side more important than those on the other? is your design realistic? 9. overall quality: given the answers to the previous questions, is it rational to accept the conclusion of the argument? note that the cqs can be asked in any order, except for the “bookend” questions (#1 and #9). there first must be an argument or explanation to analyze, and of course closure must come at the end. there is a rough parallel between the first and last questions and walton’s opening and closing stages of argumentative dialogue. the order of the other cqs should be determined by the participants in the dialogue, who can also ask more specific, follow-up cqs, such as what constitutes “good evidence?” these cqs are only examples of how these various categories (e.g., meaning, evidence) can be probed. the questions can be worded to make them more transparent to students at specific grade levels. (this is also why we named #4 “soundness” while it technically should be “cogency and soundness,” but the phraseology of the latter was awkward.) we contend that although the list of cqs is partial, the categories are comprehensive, as they relate to all the meta-cqs identified by yu and zenker (2020). in the spirit of bakhtin (1981), we do recognize that all knowledge is provisional, and someone might come along with an argument for an additional category, pointing out a mistake in our reasoning. but the categories are intended to be comprehensive. 4 an “argument” is a claim (i.e., conclusion) supported by one or more reasons (i.e., premises). there should be some uncertainty and disagreement about the truth of the claim. an argument attempts to reduce this uncertainty and gain consensus. while an explanation also has a conclusion inferred from one or more reasons, in an explanation there is initial agreement that the conclusion is true (govier, 1987). for example, it is agreed that “the moon has phases” (this is the conclusion, also known as the explanandum), and the moon has these phases for the following reasons (these reasons are also known as the explanans, see hempel & oppenheim, 1948). people can generate arguments about which alternative explanation of a phenomenon is correct, for example by appealing to evidence or theory, so both arguments and explanations are important in science. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a14 we view critical thinking as involving the asking and discussing of critical questions. it is hence dialectical and often dialogical. pedagogically, it is important for students to engage in a critical discussion where cqs are asked and answered so that critical thinking and argumentation skills can be learned and developed; this is learning to argue. scholars in argumentation studies in education use the terms collaborative or deliberative argumentation (andriessen & baker, 2014; asterhan & schwarz, 2016; osborne, 2010) to emphasize that argument-oriented discussions need not be adversarial, with winners and losers (as in a debate), but can involve other goals (e.g., knowledge building, finding “truth”5 through inquiry, resolving differences of opinion). these discussions can still be dialectical, involving counterarguments and rebuttals, but parties in the argument also can make concessions and change sides (keefer et al., 2000). nussbaum (2021) defines collaborative argumentation as participants “working together to construct and critique arguments,” a definition that was informed by mercer et al.’s (1999) notion of “exploratory talk” (vs. cumulative or disputative talk) in work on dialogic pedagogy, discussed below. it is often a complex task for teachers to foster meaningful and productive argumentative discussions. sometimes if teachers remain silent and just give the students freedom to talk, students will argue with one another meaningfully and collaboratively, but it depends on the topic and on the age, interest, history, and background knowledge of the students, and a host of other factors (see asterhan & schwarz, 2016). the scenario is likely the exception rather than the rule. furthermore, students will probably not be using or learning about cqs, so some teacher scaffolding may be necessary. finally, raising a cq about an argument may initiate a discussion about an argument, but teachers likely need tools to facilitate and maintain the discussion, as well as how to bring the discussion to a meaningful conclusion. for these reasons, we next explore the tools and conceptual frameworks provided by scholars of dialogic pedagogy. dialogic pedagogy and academically productive talk this work draws on several decades of research on “dialogic pedagogy” (across a variety of content areas, grade levels, and societal contexts). we first explicate a framework developed by robin alexander’s (2020) in some detail, as it is perhaps the most fully explicated and encompassing conceptual framework for dialogic teaching and learning and against which other approaches are often compared (kim & wilkinson, 2019). we then describe michaels and o’connor’s framework of academically productive talk, which is closely aligned with alexander’s but is more specific. alexander’s framework alexander’s framework for “dialogic teaching” draws on the work of vygotsky (1978) and bakhtin (1981), and also on alexander’s (2001) seminal study comparing classroom dialogue in england, france, india, russia, and the u.s. dialogic teaching and the dialogic stance. alexander (2020) defines dialogue as “the oral exchange and deliberative handling of ideas, information and opinions'' (p. 128) and dialogic teaching as a “pedagogy of the spoken word that harnesses the power of dialogue…to stimulate and extend students’ thinking, learning, knowing and understanding, and to enable them to discuss, reason and argue” (p. 128). the framework draws on vygotsky (1978) to justify dialogic teaching because vygotsky showed how talk is central to thinking, learning, mastery, and communication. it involves a dialogic stance6 toward knowledge as something negotiated and recreated and toward understanding as “a product of encounters between 5 there are various conceptualizations of “truth” in philosophy; a productive one for our purposes is putnam’s (1981) notion of truth as the propositions believed to be true by intelligent beings like us who have reached a limit of inquiry. inquiry can be endless, as bakhtin (1981) suggested; we may never know the “truth” absolutely, but our beliefs can approximate it. 6 alexander also argues that a dialogic stance fosters acculturation and democratic engagement. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a15 different ways of arguing, knowing, and making sense” (alexander, 2020, p. 129). these may include oral, cognitive, social, epistemic, and cultural ways of making sense, along with the underlying values of different methodological perspectives. forming connections among different perspectives and methods reflects kristeva's (1981) notion of intertextuality--forming linkages between different types of texts and, more broadly different forms of discursive practices--and bakhtin's (1981) concept of heteroglossia--accounting for different languages or perspectives within a speech community. while bakhtin also viewed dialogue as being theoretically unending because answers lead to more questions (wegerif, 2007), alexander (2020) notes that in real classrooms, there are time limits in which students must gain mastery and understanding of specific ideas. still, part of the dialogic stance is to view knowledge as tentative, evolving, and open to revision. for example, in learning about the nature of science, students should learn that even well-established scientific theories, such as newton’s laws, can be replaced by new theories, such as einstein’s theories of relativity. in regards specifically to argumentation, alexander notes that not all arguments need to end in consensus and that even when consensus is reached, the agreement should be considered provisional. likewise, philosophers consider arguments as defeasible, meaning that even a consensus that an argument is strong can be diminished in the future if new evidence, alternative theories, or rebuttals are encountered or raised (pollock, 1987). principles of dialogic teaching. alexander (2020) articulated six principles of dialogic teaching which can be used for planning and reflection and for judging how dialogic a particular classroom environment is (alexander, 2020, p. 131). the principles hold that authentic dialogue should be (1) collective (teachers and students work, learn, and inquire together, in groups or as a class), (2) supportive (students feel free to express ideas “without risk of embarrassment over contributions that are hesitant or tentative, or that may be judged ‘wrong’“), (3) reciprocal (the classroom is a site of joint learning and enquiry, and whether in groups or as class students and teachers are willing and able to address learning tasks together); (4) deliberative (“participants discuss and seek to resolve different points of view, they present and evaluate arguments, and they work towards reasoned positions and outcomes”), (5) cumulative (“participants build on their own and each other’s contributions and chain them into coherent lines of thinking and understanding”), and (6) purposeful (“classroom talk, though sometimes open-ended, is nevertheless structured with specific learning goals in view”).7 in our view, learning environments need to reflect all these principles for students to have meaningful discussions of critical questions. cqs clearly relate to principle 4 on presenting and evaluating arguments. cqs also contribute to purpose (principle 6) by providing subgoals (i.e., resolving specific cqs) that contribute to the overall goal of the dialogue, as suggested by walton (1998, 2013), and to gain closure (walton’s last stage), the discourse should be cumulative (principle 5). alexander uses the phrase cumulative talk differently from mercer and wegerif (wegerif et al., 1999). the latter define cumulative talk as students building on one another’s ideas but not disagreeing with one another, while alexander views cumulative talk as discourse that is productive, leading to an overall (but tentative) conclusion and achievement of a learning goal. repertoires. teachers who effectively facilitate dialogue reflecting these principles use a “broad and flexible repertoire of teaching strategies, modes of interaction and forms of both student and teacher talk” (alexander, 2020, p. 164). these modes and forms can include direct instruction, when appropriate, but not as the dominant form of instruction. the repertoires fall into eight different categories, such as questioning, extending, or norm building. the last repertoires are “discussion, deliberation, arguing.” 7 this process may involve disagreement. alexander reports that teachers find that principle #5, making the talk cumulative, is the most difficult, as there are a lot of ideas and arguments that teachers need to keep track of while simultaneously attending to the other principles. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a16 alexander distinguished between argumentation and discussions, viewing them as separate categories of discourse. specifically, discussions can serve a broader array of goals, such as exploration, creativity, etc. this distinction seems forced; we instead think of argumentation as a subcategory of discussions that encompasses critical discussions, inquiries, deliberations, etc. (van eemeren et al., 2002; walton, 1998). nevertheless, we agree with alexander that argumentation requires a different repertoire of norms and talk moves than do (other types) of discussions, although there is overlap between the two. argumentation involves a forward momentum that other types of discussion may not require. (some discussions might just be about sharing ideas and experiences.) academically productive talk (apt) alexander (2020) writes that an overall approach to dialogic teaching that aligns well with his own is the one reflected in academically productive talk (apt). apt emphasizes productive talk moves, strategic talk formats, and tools for building a classroom talk culture that supports intellectual risk-taking, reasoning, and equity (michaels & o’connor, 2012; 2015). michaels and o’connor developed apt along with colleagues such as robin alexander (2020); courtney cazden (2001), and lauren resnick (resnick et al., 2015, 2018). apt was influenced by, and to a large degree grew out of, the work with resnick on “accountable talk” (sohmer et al, 2009). apt is most well-known for its focus on a small set of well-designed “productive talk moves” - simple statements or questions that teachers (or students) can use to open up the conversation, position students as thinkers, and promote equitable participation and collaborative knowledge building. these are moves made by teachers (or students) that follow up on student contributions and replace the “evaluation” move in the initiation-responseevaluation “default” pattern of classroom talk (cazden, 2001; mehan, 1979). these alternative “third-turn” moves (park et al., 2017; scott et al, 2006) can open up the conversation, creating space for expanded student reasoning, explication of complex ideas, or critique. examples include a “say more” move (“say more about that?”), a revoicing move (“so, are you saying…? do i have what you said right?” leaving space for the student to agree or not with the teacher’s reformulation), and moves that press for reasoning (“why do you think that?” “what’s your evidence?”) or counterexamples (“does it always work that way?”). all these moves are designed to create space for student ideas to emerge and to be developed collaboratively and equitably and to shift the “game” from “getting the right answer” (or “doing school”) to one where students are positioned as thinkers, reasoners, and collaborative knowledge builders, building on and critiquing the ideas of their peers. here, using a different third-turn move can open up the conversation, creating space for expanded student reasoning, explication of complex ideas, or critique. alexander calls these alternative third-turn moves “extending” moves, referring to them as “ingredient x,” the special element that can shift the conversation from “recitation to reasoning” (alexander, 2020). alexander based his repertoire for extending discourse with alternative third-turn moves directly on the work in apt. the set of talk moves specified in apt have been shown to support four goals that are critical for powerful sensemaking to occur -helping all students: (1) make their thinking public, so others can build on it, (2) listen with focus to their peers’ ideas, (3) dig deeper into reasoning, evidence, models and argumentation, and (4) build on, critique, and synthesize the thinking of others so that the community can work towards shared understandings (michaels & o’connor, 2012, 2015, 2018; moon et al., 2014; reiser et al., 2017). talk moves are tools that are relatively easy for teachers to pick up (and can be used in any content domain or grade level). but they require practice and need to be used strategically in order to foster alexander’s principles of dialogic teaching, to promote supportive, equitable, cumulative, and purposeful discussion, argumentation, and learning. bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a17 critical questions as talk moves we propose that cqs should be considered an important subcategory of talk moves. in this way, we can join the work on academically productive talk (apt) and dialogic teaching with the cqmaa. teachers or students can ask the cqs orally during a dialogue to press for evaluation of students’ reasoning. although cqs can be part of written discourse, such as when students are filling out a graphic organizer that contains cqs, they are nonetheless discourse moves in the dialectical evaluation of arguments. we simply expand the notion of talk to include written discourse. cqs add to the toolkit of talk moves that can help students think deeper and collaboratively (apt goals 3 and 4) and, of course, more critically. cqs open up a particular portion of the dialogic space, but a cq still must be adequately discussed, and that is where the use of the other productive talk moves identified by michaels and o’connor (2015) and other discourse moves (see cullen, 2003) are especially important (although some talk moves should also be used before asking cqs, for example, to elicit student ideas or foster discussion norms). as an example of how cqs could be used during a discussion as talk moves, consider the phenomenon of lunar phases. many students believe the moon’s phases are caused by shadows cast by the earth (brunsell & marcks, 2007). as evidence, students might cite a video showing how celestial bodies block the sunlight during an eclipse, reasoning that because the moon orbits the earth, at some point, the earth will block the light falling on the moon. using critical questions, this argument could be critiqued based on coherence, i.e., “does the argument make a path that you can follow or are there missing steps?” (how does the earth cast a half moon shadow, with a straight line, when the earth is round?), the relevance and quality of the evidence (“the evidence is about eclipses, not lunar phases''), the presence of alternative models (i.e., “do other students have different models?”) and are there factors or facts that we haven’t considered? (e.g., such as the orbital planes--the moon orbits the earth on a different plane than the earth orbits the sun). these critical questions can be raised by either teachers or students and should ideally result in discussions that clarify what is right or problematic about various conceptions. throughout, the teacher should use other talk moves to make sure students listen to one another, stay on topic, fairly evaluate what is said, and summarize the conclusions reached. this example also illustrates how the cq categories, covering the various ways that arguments can be critiqued (structure, meaning, evidence quality, etc.), can be useful for teachers in both planning lessons and facilitating discussions. the categories can attune teachers to different areas of the “problem space” that have been or could be explored by students’ discussions. also, when facilitating a discussion, the categories are “back pocket” tools that can help teachers generate responses on the spot that can move a discussion in a potentially productive direction. cqs fit directly into alexander’s argumentation repertoire, and he does list questions suggested by reznitskaya and wilkinson (2021) that contain many of the cqs that we have proposed. these questions, however, are not specifically labeled as critical questions or explicitly tied to the philosophical framework that we have proposed. also, the sequence of questions is different, addressing alternative perspectives first, then clarification, then evaluation of reasons, facts, and values, and then structure and connectedness. reznitskaya and wilkinson’s intent was not to have teachers ask these questions in a specific order, of course, nor do we suggest that our cqs should be asked in any particular order (except for the bookend questions), but the set of questions is important conceptually for teachers and students to have a coherent framework for how arguments can be evaluated systematically. some such coherent framework (grounded in contemporary philosophical theory) is needed as an alternative to the overused, antiquated, and philosophically problematic toulmin model (1958) or models derived from it (mcneill & krajcik, 2006; see nussbaum & dove, 2022 for a critique). bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a18 to achieve the goals of a dialogue effectively, it must be emphasized that cqs and other talk moves should be used strategically, in combination with other repertoires, a dialogic stance, a supportive classroom culture, content knowledge, and alexander’s six principles. although perhaps necessary initially to learn some of the cqs, answering cqs should not be used as just another task for students to complete but rather discussed in a purposeful manner. extended example of using critical questions as talk moves we present one extended example of a discussion facilitator using cqs as talk moves. it is an argumentative discussion over whether taxes on gasoline should be increased to address global warming. the discussion was facilitated by the first author in a seventh-grade social studies classroom (as described in nussbaum & edwards, 2011). the class contained many emergent multilingual learners and was ethnically diverse. the researcher was allowed to lead a discussion of a current event in this classroom once per week. the students had read a newsweek article on the topic and discussed it the prior week. at the beginning of the lesson analyzed here, students completed a graphic organizer, known as the argumentation vee diagram (nussbaum, 2008b), where they described arguments and counterarguments on the proposal, responded to five cqs, and then wrote a paragraph justifying their own position. the topic was then discussed in a whole-class discussion format with ten students participating (only the portion of the class with parental consent to take part in the research). 1 facilitator: did anyone take the argument side?...thomas, go ahead and repeat your paragraph. 2 thomas: the arguments are right because global warming is much important than cars. to prevent global warming we should recycle, we should take risks, and help everyone. if global warming was starting right now, few of us would die, because of drought. we need water to live because without it we can't hydrate. 3 facilitator: guadalupe, want to read yours? 4 guadalupe: i’m not sure it will make sense to you or not. 5 facilitator: why not? 6 guadalupe: i think arguments is stronger. it’s stronger because global warming is more important than holiday presents. like if people want presents instead of their life, they can at least help us raise money or something. although we might not be able to raise money, people still care about the world we live in. 7 facilitator: so you really saying that it’s more important 8 guadalupe: than holiday presents. 9 facilitator: that’s a good use of that critical question. the facilitator is here referring to a cq related to category # 8 on trade-offs (are any of the reasons on one side more important than those on the other?). these arguments are in favor of a carbon tax. the facilitator then tries to solicit opinions on the other side of the issue, initially unsuccessfully. (discourse continues on next page) bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a19 10 facilitator: so you took the argument side too. did anyone take the other side of this?…anyone think the counterarguments were stronger? 11 [no response] 12 facilitator: no one thought the counterarguments were stronger. don’t be shy. did anyone think of counterarguments? anyone see any problems with the arguments or counterarguments? [pause] 13 facilitator: did anyone think, let’s take a vote. how many people think we should raise taxes on gasoline so people would drive less? 14 : [four students raise hands.] 15 facilitator: how many people think we should not raise taxes? 16 [three students raise hands.] 17 facilitator: dulcinea, tell me why you think we should not raise taxes. 18 dulcinea: we can just make a car that runs on water….they could just make it sunlight run. 19 facilitator: does anyone have a question about this? guadalupe? 20 guadalupe: i was going to say something about what she said. i think if we ran the cars on water, then we’re wasting water. like, we shouldn’t start wasting water. we’re going to die if we don’t have water. 21 thomas: if we waste more water, there will be less water in lake mead [source of the region’s water supply]. 22 benny: i disagree with that. because you can use it so it evaporates. 23 facilitator: why aren’t we wasting the water? it would fall back down as rain? 24 thomas: yeah. 25 facilitator: the question i would ask, is it practical to make cars that run on water? do we have the technology now? [many students indicate no.] you don’t think so, guadalupe? 26 guadalupe: [shakes head no.] 27 facilitator: someone saw an article about cars running on water. how much would that cost? for one car? 28 unidentified: hundreds of thousands of dollars. 29 facilitator: hundreds of thousands of dollars. 30 telma: it doesn’t cost that much to get a car. 31 thomas: i kind of disagree with that because like you had a lower price…if it’s cheap, that means it’s not so good. in this excerpt, the facilitator uses cqs at several points to move the discussion forward. at turn 23, he cannot follow the logic of benny’s argument at turn 22, implicitly using cq #5 regarding missing steps (an implicit revoicing move -"so are you saying, “ 'it would fall back down as rain?'"). he suggests a possible implicit premise, that evaporated water would not be wasted because it would return as rain. after confirmation by thomas that this is what he meant, the facilitator uses a cq from the trade-offs category (#8) to ask if the proposal to use cars that run on water is practical, and what the cost would be. the students then argued about the latter question, concluding that it would cost a lot because cheap cars would not be any good. (there was more discussion of this question that followed, which is not shown in the above excerpt.) the cqs used by the facilitator were successful in getting the students to think more deeply and to think together, as in turns 20, 22, and 31 (two goals of apt). the class was exploring the counterargument that alternative types of vehicles that did not run-on fossil fuels could be used as an alternative to raising taxes (relating to cq #6 on alternatives), but this option was refuted by the argument that alternative vehicles might cost a lot and were therefore not practical. the dialogic inquiry ended here because time ran out, but with more time, the class could have productively explored using solar powered cars (which a student briefly bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a20 alludes to at turn 18) and electric powered cars, and that these alternatives are not really competitors to a carbon tax but would complement it. conclusion this article has addressed some of the areas of overlap between logical assessment and dialogic pedagogy. according to contemporary philosophical theory, logical analysis and critique involve posing and discussing critical questions, which may or may not be tied to argument schemes. we have proposed a (mostly) comprehensive set of cqs. the cqs can be used as talk moves by teachers and students to promote productive discussions, especially when learning environments (1) reflect the dialogic principles espoused by alexander (2020), (2) are supplemented by other talk moves, and (3) are used strategically and flexibly to promote the goals of the dialogue. one issue that we did not have space to address is the overlap between the discussion norms articulated by dialogic theorists and the normative rules of critical discussions formulated by argumentation theorists (e.g., van eemeren & grootendorst, 1992). another issue is how collaborative argumentation can promote deeper conceptual understanding (see asterhan & schwarz, 2016, and larrain et al., 2021 for evidence), although this is hinted at in our example on eclipses. in our future work, we hope to integrate work on conceptual learning (i.e., by minstrell, 2001, and others) into the frameworks articulated here and to develop additional tools to assist teachers in facilitating productive discussions. although cqs have both dialectical and dialogic features, there is tension between these two concepts. dialectic implies movement toward some resolution between a thesis and antithesis, whereas dialogic does not necessarily require this. specifically, bakhtin (1981) viewed the dialogic as involving heteroglossia, or the recognition of multiple voices and perspectives, without necessarily resolving the inconsistency. however, there should be dialogue between diverse perspectives. interactions that mayer et al. (2019) refer to as polyphonic encounters. polyphonic encounters require recognition of all voices and dialogue between them. now, cqs are primarily dialectical in nature, in that arguments can be defeated, and the strongest arguments are those that are ultimately undefeated (pollock, 1987). they also reflect established academic tools and norms. using talk for the socialization of students into established practices can be considered dialogic, but a dialogic perspective aligned more with vygotsky than bakhtin (mayer et al., 2019). nonetheless, cqs can be used dialogically and with provisions for equitable participation in the discussion. in fact, language-minority students have been found to use cqs, such as why? or how do you know? to better participate in dialogues dominated by language-majority students (nussbaum, 2002). students can also be given more agency if all their ideas are taken up in a critical discussion. in addition, student agency can be enhanced by allowing students some input into how the cqs are written and in forming a class’s collective list of cqs. for example, in the nussbaum and edwards (2011) study, the facilitator introduced cqs with a long list of examples and gave students an opportunity to voice which ones they thought should be placed on a graphic organizer. students were also allowed to articulate additional cqs during a discussion, such as “who will pay for it?” there is a connection to vygotsky as well as bakhtin here. as wink and putney (2002) point out, “vygotsky theorized that through dialogic and collaborative practices, learners personally reformulate a problem and then formulate a possible solution in their own words” (p. 102). the problem of how to critique arguments can become a collaborative one. the critical question model of argument assessment (dove & nussbaum, 2018) provides a philosophically grounded framework for critiquing arguments. cqs are primarily for the critique, not the bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions e. michael nussbaum, ian j. dove, leann g. putney dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.548 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a21 construction, of arguments, but they can contribute to the formulation of counterarguments and the discursive and dialectical improvement of arguments. by using cqs as teacher talk moves, teachers can model their use for students and then guide students, both individually and collectively, in the construction of better arguments. understanding the contribution of argumentation theory to dialogic pedagogy, however, has been hampered by the widespread use of the toulmin model (1958) and a misperception that it is the dominant philosophical model of argumentation used in philosophy. nothing could be further from the truth. the toulmin model is not dialogic in nature, nor does it articulate standards for how to evaluate arguments properly. nevertheless, its widespread use outside of philosophy has tended to obscure other productive ideas in argumentation theory from dialogic theorists, especially the work on critical questions and argument schemes. dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory have operated in separate silos for the most part, although there are some exceptions (e.g., anderson et al., 1997; lipman, 1988). the idea of using cqs as talk moves, while practically important, is also a theoretically important step in bringing together philosophical perspectives on logic and argumentation with sociocultural and sociohistorical ones (e.g., alexander, bakhtin). hopefully, the dialogue between these two different scholarly traditions will be productive. references alexander, r. j. 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(2020). schemes, critical questions, and complete argument evaluation. argumentation, 34, 469–498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09512-4 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . microsoft word ferrada et al, the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy, 2023-08-24 layout.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a108 the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada centro de investigación en educación para la justicia social (ciejus), universidad católica del maule, chile claudia jara espinoza centro de investigación en educación para la justicia social (ciejus), chile alejandra seguel briones centro de investigación en educación para la justicia social (ciejus), chile abstract dialogic pedagogy of the "linking worlds" is characterized by forming community classrooms incorporating a diversity of community agents who join to transform the official school curriculum in chilean public schools. the participatory action research we report in this article was developed in two of these classrooms, one in the cultural context of a mining community and the other in a rural cultural context. the action research project aimed to make their local cultures visible in the school curriculum. our objective was to systematize the knowledge and practices of the people who are part of community classrooms and determine whether these contributions managed to challenge the official curriculum structure. we achieved our objective in a four-year study involving 76 participants in dialogical conversations and collective dialogues. throughout the study, we collected audiovisual records. we identified two areas of knowledge and practices that transform the official curriculum: the corporeality-affectivity and community areas. in addition, it was possible to verify that although the themes nominally coincided, the curricular transformations differed depending on the local characteristics of each classroom. these local curricular transformations promote the advancement of dialogic pedagogy because in such decisions and through egalitarian dialogue, debates, disputes, etc., different participants’ voices are heard in each community classroom. in addition, these transformations keep the debate and interpretation of school curricular contents open.1 keywords: education for equality, formal education, school culture, community education, inclusive education. donatila ferrada, associate professor at the universidad católica del maule, chile. phd in philosophy, university of valladolid, spain (1998). founder and member of the social movement for educational equality "enlazador de mundos" (2005) through which she promotes the development of dialogic pedagogy in chile, having implemented experiences in schools in ten of the sixteen regions of the country thus far. founder and member of the center for research in education for social justice (ciejus) together with researchers from twelve national and international universities (2017), installing the line of dialogic pedagogy for social justice in this research center. she has taught in undergraduate and postgraduate teacher training programs since 1994 to date. lead researcher for numerous competitive grant programs at national level 1 sponsor: fondecyt regular project n° 1221159 issn: 2325-3290 (online) the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a109 and a collaborator to several international projects. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0942-4320, donatila.ferrada@gmail.com claudia jara espinoza, elementary school teacher (2015), universidad santo tomás. principal of hornillos school (2015-2022), curepto, maule region. in this school, she implemented dialogic pedagogy "linking worlds" since her arrival at the school. she currently works at marina rojas sandoval school, in the same commune, where she continues developing dialogic pedagogy. in addition, she is a member of the research line "dialogic pedagogy for social justice" of the center for research in education for social justice (ciejus) of the universidad católica del maule, chile. she has been part of research projects on dialogic pedagogy from 2018 to date. klaudiss.j@gmail.com alejandra seguel briones, elementary school teacher, universidad de concepción (1980). classroom teacher since 1980 at colegio ángel de peredo, lota, biobío region, chile. she began with experiences of dialogic pedagogy, "linking worlds," in this school in 2009 and has continued to the present. that same year, she joined the social movement for educational transformation, "enlazador de mundos." in time, the transformation of her classroom into a dialogic and community environment would become a reference for other teachers in the country and an inspiration to work with dialogic pedagogy. as a result of the above, in 2018, she obtained the national prize for pedagogical recognition "viola soto" for outstanding teachers in transformative and critical classroom practices awarded by the national teachers association of chile. aleseguel50@gmail.com ïïò introduction and problem statement in previous publications, classroom experiences with the dialogic pedagogy of linking worlds in chile have been consistent with a polyphony of voices, including those of teachers, schoolchildren, mothers, grandmothers, artisans, and external and voluntary cultural/social agents (del pino & ferrada, 2019; ferrada, 2020), typical of the bakhtinian pedagogy (bakhtin, 1981). also, these experiences of dialogic pedagogy linking worlds include the idea of the emancipatory agency of people in their own contexts to achieve joint liberation processes, typical of freirean dialogic pedagogy (freire, 1970). these classroom spaces bring together a dialogue between people who are different from each other, not only in age, gender, level of education, etc., but above all in terms of academic training and the “ideological future” of each participant. ideological becoming, according to bakhtin (1981), is understood as the recognition of how personal knowledge is related to community knowledge and the unequal power structures that affect such interaction. on this count, ward (1994) affirms that it is a concept of relational rather than personal knowledge that refers to an internal struggle with a discourse that is in part foreign and in part one’s own. in the words of bialotosky (1991), the ideological future is about assuming belonging not only in the community defined by the authority of a given scientific discipline, religion, or class and its language but in the entire community where those languages are in dispute within and between the voices of the speakers for whom they are internally persuasive. from this understanding, in the dialogic pedagogy linking worlds, the polyphonic groups that convene themselves to transform traditional classrooms into community classrooms enter a communicative interaction where the “mainstream” formal voices (teachers, academics, and university students) coexist with the voices of popular culture (mothers, grandmothers, and artisans) and schoolchildren’s voices, who try to find communicating vessels between the popular voices of their own culture and the formal voices imposed by the school. although all these voices also entail power structures anchored to the cultures of origin, gender, and ethnicity, that is, to the ideological evolution itself, these community classrooms try, through dialogic relationships, to transform these hierarchical relationships into symmetrical relationships the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a110 based on the full participation of each of their members in the pedagogical decisions. in this scenario, those who participate feel free to express, justify, argue, and negotiate knowledge and practices since they join in making curricular, didactic, and evaluative decisions in each of the participating classrooms. thus, curricular decisions are related to the knowledge and practices they consider the most significant to be taught in those classrooms. subsequently, the didactic decisions are related to how these knowledge and practices should or can be taught in the classroom. therefore, the people who participate not only speak about it, but are part of the complete classroom’s didactic process. finally, the participants ’ evaluative decisions consider the legitimacy and status of the knowledge and practices taught in the classroom, as well as what to evaluate and how. in this way, through decision-making and pedagogical actions, by the diverse agents in the community classroom, the dialogic pedagogy linking worlds provides a public and political character to these educational issues. from this scenario, and from a participatory perspective, two research communities (described in the methodological considerations) were formed in two chilean schools with this type of experience. according to the research methodology assumed in this study, both communities problematized what knowledge and what practices are included in the community’s school curriculum and whether the contextual differences have an impact. this questioning led to agreement on the objective of this research: to identify the knowledge and practices of the participants of dialogic pedagogy linking worlds, in order to understand how they contribute to understanding of the specificity of their contexts. frame of reference a review of the literature on dialogic pedagogy allows us to trace its origins back to the socratic dialogues (almost 2,500 years ago; matusov, 2009). since the 20th century, the most influential references are to mikhail bakhtin and paulo freire. currently, both authors inspire numerous variants of dialogic pedagogy, but how do contemporary researchers define dialogic pedagogy? although the literature in this regard is vast, a glance at it allows us to visualize said conceptualization. according to matusov (2009, p. 1) “pedagogy is always dialogic,” because it implies dialogue in human interactions that seek to give meaning to their practices—meaning that, according to allen (2000, p. 19), “dialogue is always dialogic”, that is, its “sense and logic” always depend on “what has been said previously and how it will be received by others.” thus, “dialogic encounters are confrontations with contexts and society. they represent an exchange of elements (histories, stratifications, interpretations, and ideological positions) in the time and place in which they are created…they are unpredictably complex, alive and never neutral” (arndt, 2017, pp. 909–912). other authors even more descriptively affirm that a dialogue begins when the students think aloud about a concept, make a finding about a problem, are puzzled by a finding, etc. in this line, resnick et al. (2015) affirm that the dialogic process occurs in the classroom when the students try to make their incipient ideas, questions, and half-formed explanations public, while others “take up the statements of their classmates: they question or clarify a claim, add their own questions, reason about a proposed solution, or offer a counterclaim or alternative explanation” (p. 6). in the words of daniels (2012), it would be a pedagogy that consists of an infinite chain of questions and answers between students and teachers. instead, for snell and lefstein (2018) it is a pedagogy that requires the following conditions: (a) students and teachers address authentic problems and both are agents in the joint construction of knowledge and in the negotiation of meanings; (b) students are empowered to express their voices, resulting in the interaction of multiple perspectives in the classroom; (c) students and teachers take an open and critical stance toward knowledge claims; and (d) the classroom community is characterized by being respectful, supportive, and affective and as having norms of inclusive and reciprocal participation (p. 42). similarly, alexander (2019) states that it is a democratic education that requires a critical commitment to four imperatives: language, voice, argument, and truth. in a similar line, andal (2019) points out that it is about promoting critical thinking and the reevaluation of the dialogue conducted in each of the educational the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a111 instances. meanwhile, kim and wilkinson (2019, p. 70) state that it is “a pedagogical approach that capitalizes on the power of speech to promote student thinking, learning, and problem solving.” de lissovoy and cook, (2020, p. 18) state that “dialogue is not simply a technique, a way of speaking, or even a value. rather, it is the indispensable enactment of dialogical intersubjectivity, an insistence on the possibility of mutual recognition, and it is a crucial interruption of violence in words and actions that deny relationship and emancipation.” the influence of bakhtin and freire can be perceived in these definitions, although with differences in their respective nuances. as an example, the influence of bakhtin’s thought is clearly seen in the ideas of matusov, allen, arnd, daniels and resnick et al. because they share the idea of a dialogic pedagogy linked to the generation of meanings that are disputed in spaces of interaction where dialogue is always open and in permanent movement. on the other hand, freire's thought is clearly observed in the work of de lissovoy and cook where dialogue always leads to the search for emancipation from situations of capitalist oppression. other authors such as alexander, andal snell & lefstein and kim & wilkinson, offer a reading of dialogic pedagogy that rescues both authors. another revealing aspect of the literature review corroborates the statement of resnick et al. (2015) that there is growing evidence that dialogic pedagogy improves students' knowledge, understanding, and reasoning and that the benefits are sustained over time. this same idea is supported by authors such as snell and lefstein (2018), daniels (2012), alexander (2019), and hardman (2019) when they affirm that dialogic pedagogy represents an effective proposal to improve the teaching-learning processes. in effect, alexander (2018) showed that after 20 weeks of dialogic teaching, the students in the intervention group were two months ahead of their peers in the control group in tests of english, mathematics, and science. research on dialogic pedagogy also confirms other important findings, such as “changes in pedagogical practices and higher levels of student participation in the classroom” (hardman, 2019, p. 12); development of critical thinking skills (fulmer & turner, 2014; marks, 2000); “creation of a math-positive learning environment” (parr et al., 2019, p. 655); “the creative co-construction of ideas in the geography subject” (cook et al., 2019, p. 217); “the promotion of student conversations with a significant dialogical component and high frequency of elaborate and reasoned talk” (vrikki et al., 2019, p. 85); “relationship networks that favor the articulation of operational learning processes with subjective development processes” (martins-do-carmo-de-oliveira & massot-madeira-coelho, 2020, p. 116); “an intensified pedagogy of cultural sensitivity, collaboration, and dialogism has resulted in notably greater and more responsive engagement on the part of students with reading, writing, and listening comprehension (mendelowitz & lazar, 2020, p. 38); and finally, that dialogic pedagogy “has the power to break the cycle of low demand/low performance that is too often experienced by children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, children belonging to ethnic minorities, and/or those who do not master the dominant language” (resnick et al., 2015, p. 5). finally, previous research on dialogic pedagogy linking worlds has revealed that it substantially improves learning outcomes in language, mathematics, english, biology, and history (astorga, 2017; ferrada, 2014; george-nascimento, 2015; riquelme, 2013). these findings are consistent with those of alexander (2018) and hardman (2019), with improvements also observed in low-performing students and in a context of high vulnerability, in accordance with what was found by resnick et al. (2015). other studies have concluded that it strengthens projects with a collective sense, favors relationships that equalize positions of power among its participants (ferrada, 2020; ferrada & del pino, 2021), and promotes polyphonic classrooms that integrate people, school cultures, and indigenous worldviews in participatory parity with the dominant culture (del pino & ferrada, 2019; ferrada, jara and seguel, 2021). it also favors the creation of affective environments that positively predispose students to learning (ferrada, 2009), findings that agree with those of parr et al. (2019) and mendelowitz and lazar (2020). the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a112 background of dialogic pedagogy in chile in 2005, a social movement was formed to promote dialogic pedagogy as a response to the profound educational inequalities of the chilean public education system. this group is comprised of people from diverse academic, cultural, ethnic, gender, age, etc. backgrounds. among them are mothers, grandmothers, schoolchildren, professionals, researchers, artisans, indigenous and non-indigenous people, etc. this group called itself linking worlds, and therefore the pedagogy adopted the name of dialogic pedagogy linking worlds. this movement began with the practice of dialogic pedagogy in a single school; however, today, more than 60 experiences have been documented throughout the country. some of the founders of this movement are the authors of this text. the lead author is a university researcher and the founder of the movement; the second and third authors are classroom teachers who implement the dialogic pedagogy linking worlds in their schools. the authors of this text, throughout these almost two decades of the movement, have been, at times, apprentices and practitioners of the dialogic pedagogy linking worlds. from this context, it should be noted that both the researcher and the teachers permanently rethink the theoretical assumptions from their own experiences in these community classrooms, together with the daily task of the struggle to break the power relations between the people who participate in these dialogic classrooms who come from a diversity of cultural, ethnic, social, academic, generational contexts, etc. another remarkable learning is that the cultures of the communities in which the schools are located (peasant, mining, fishing), previously absent from the school curriculum, after the experiences with dialogic pedagogy linking worlds are made visible and seek to equate status with the official school culture. methodological considerations in full correspondence with the nature of the experiences of the dialogic pedagogy linking worlds, this study opted for a participatory research paradigm (gayá wicks & reason, 2009; guba & lincoln, 2012; heron & reason, 1997). accordingly, the methodology chosen was the dialogic-kishu kimkelay ta che educational research (ferrada & del pino, 2018; ferrada, 2017; ferrada et al., 2014). this is a type of participatory action research that not only seeks to value dialogue as a source of the construction of knowledge but also to recover people’s historical legacy, as reflected in the expression kishu kimkelay ta che, which, in the mapuche language,2 means “no one learns alone,” no one knows reality by themselves, but rather with others and from the historical legacy of their ancestors. this methodology has as its main focus the construction of knowledge, the leveling of epistemic hierarchies between researchers and those being researched, and a configuration of an equality of positions between participants based on the assumption that each one contributes from their own expertise, whether from their own life experience and wisdom and/or from academic training. this requires accepting that their contributions may be criticized by the other participants (habermas, 1987). to account for this epistemic leveling, research communities are built, understanding them as a group that decides what, how, and why to investigate, and constituted by both formal researchers and a diversity of agents who participate in community transformation processes without previous research training, all of whom voluntarily and freely decide to participate (ferrada et al., 2014). from this perspective, this study established two research communities in two chilean public schools that develop community classroom experiences through dialogic pedagogy linking worlds. the first research community, located geographically in the north-central zone of the country and characterized by high rurality, was comprised of 15 members; but it was 25 people in total that were considered in their study (table 1). this research community is located in a single-teacher public school with a total enrollment 2 language of the indigenous people with the largest population in chile, present in the study area the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a113 of 9 students, hereafter called the “peasant community.” the second research community, geographically located in the south-central zone of the country and characterized by a recent past focus on a coal mine on the pacific ocean’s coastal edge, comprised 14 members, who considered a community classroom consisting of 51 people in total in their study (table 1). this research community is contextualized in a public school located in a highly urbanized area with an enrollment of close to 1000 students, hereafter called the “mining community.” both classrooms officially “work” with the plans and study programs established in the national curriculum, that is, they do not have their own plans and programs approved by the state. this is relevant since the curricular transformations they carry out persist through time due to the praxis of their groups and not by official decrees—so much so, indeed, that the peasant classroom has been in existence for 6 years and the mining classroom has 12 years of experience in linking worlds dialogic pedagogy. both research communities agreed to use the dialogic-kishu kimkelay ta che as a knowledge construction methodology, known as collective dialogues and dialogic conversation, in addition to audiovisual records (table 1). collective dialogues consist of conversations between different people who are considered key in a particular topic and from which a collective interpretation of the subject of study is generated after considering all the arguments raised (ferrada, 2017). on the other hand, dialogic conversation refers to a dialogue between two people on a topic considered by the group as needing further investigation, whose arguments would likely be challenged by other arguments considered more meaningful in and of themselves. in the case of the audiovisual records evidenced two key events, the first corresponding to the preparation of the classes, a space in which the entire group (teacher, mothers, grandmothers, artisans, etc.) decides what to teach (they debate and propose topics contained in the official curriculum and topics of local culture, etc.) and how to teach it (they select and prepare activities and teaching materials); the second corresponds to the development of the classes by the same group that prepares them, bringing these community classrooms to life. table 1. characteristics of the research communities and procedures used research community members considered in the study procedures rural community made up of 15 members: 1 teacher responsible for the classroom, 8 students, 3 artisans, 1 technical staff, 1 classroom assistant, 1 researcher complete community classroom composed of 25 members: 1 teacher responsible for the classroom, 1 classroom assistant, 9 schoolchildren, 3 artisans, 5 grandmothers, 1 agricultural worker, 1 nutritionist, 1 physical education teacher, 1 differential educator, 2 teachers (from other schools) 20 dialogic conversations 18 collective dialogues 60 audiovisual records (30 class preparation and 30 class development mining community made up of 14 members: 1 teacher, 1 classroom assistant, 1 assistant, 5 mothers, 1 grandmother, 4 students, 1 researcher. complete community classroom composed of 51 members: 37 schoolchildren, 7 mothers, 2 grandmothers, 1 teacher, 1 classroom assistant, 1 assistant, 1 technical staff, 1 researcher. 27 dialogic conversations 34 collective dialogues 85 audiovisual records (40 class preparation and 45 class development) all these procedures were conducted for four years, were recorded and transcribed, and then analyzed by each research community identifying the knowledge and actions contained in them. for the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a114 analytical purposes, it was agreed among all the participants to understand the category knowledge as being comprised of all those opinions and arguments from which to identify thematic nodes (axes) previously considered to be taught and/or included spontaneously in the development of the classes. furthermore, the category practice was comprised of the observed practices and/or those narrated by people when they participated in the community classroom. once knowledge and practices were identified, they were organized into matrixes of categories according to the similarities and differences between them and prior agreement between both research communities (peasant and mining). the same participants raised the categories from the review of the transcripts and selected the most representative fragments of each of them, given the large amount of material collected. as support for the analysis and organization of information, we worked with the qualitative analysis program nvivo 12.0. finally, each research community held three annual work sessions (9 in total during the 4 years) to validate the findings with all the members of each community classroom studied. the coding used in the data was a: grandmother; m: mother; ar: artisan; d: teacher; s: student; ra: audiovisual record; cd: dialogic conversation and dc: collective dialogue. in addition, it should be noted that all ethical safeguards were conducted through informed consent and assent. finally, ethical safeguards were applied, signing informed assents and consents by each of the participants involved in this study. in terms of limitations, this study considers only two community classrooms out of a universe of more than sixty present in the country. this limitation is due to the type of participatory research performed, whose demands consider, among others, the extended time (in this case, four years), the establishment of trust, the permanent disposition to self-criticism, and the formation of collectives mobilized by change in the school. similar studies are currently underway in eight other community classrooms. results the research communities organized the results into two areas. the first, called corporealityaffectivity knowledge, and the second, cultural knowledge. 1. corporeality-affectivity knowledge and practices built by the peasant and mining research communities. the corporeality-affectivity knowledge corresponds to all those knowledge and actions of affectivity and human development that enter the community classroom because of the contributions made by the people who form them (children, teachers, grandmothers, mothers, artisans, etc.) and that are not previously present in the official curriculum. they are dialogic because they are the result of processes of discussion, debate, argumentation, and permanent revision by the collective. as such, they are always open to new interpretations. the research communities found both knowledge and actions present in the two community classrooms, each with six theme nodes, 5 of which were shared and 1 different (figure 1). in general, analytical terms, the incorporation of this type of knowledge and practice implies a curricular transformation because they were not present prior to the formation of the community classroom. the common nodes found were a) body care, b) containment and emotional support among the entire participating group, c) inclusion of differences, d) emotion as the basis of teaching, and e) gestures as a story. on the other hand, there are differences between these classrooms: the peasant community classroom is characterized by the body-mind relationship node, and the mining classroom by the incorporation of home practices into the learning space. these nodes highlight the specificity of each educational project built by distinct groups in different contexts. the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a115 figure 1. corporeality-affectivity knowledge and practices in the peasant and mining community classrooms in specific terms of analysis, the research communities manage to demonstrate that each community classroom follows its own orientations and particularities, even in the common theme nodes (table 2). among the common nodes, we find body care, and it is interesting that the peasant classroom addresses it transversally by means of formal curriculum workshops (yoga, nutrition, and sports) focused on knowledge and practices that seek body-mind harmony, and based on training schoolchildren in quality nutrition, biology of the body, and appropriate ways to achieve states of muscle relaxation. conversely, for the mining classroom, body care is present as an emerging content within the pedagogical work, with a focus, on the one hand, on advice on the need for a healthy diet, and on the other, on the safeguards that schoolchildren must maintain regarding their own bodies against the potential threats that they may be exposed to. table 2. theme nodes in corporeality-affectivity knowledge and practices in community classrooms theme node peasant community classroom (some excerpts from the data) mining community classroom (some excerpts from the data) body care inclusion of a nutrition workshop with content on biology and chemistry to train in healthy eating (ra23; ak-2). inclusion of a sports workshop that takes place in nature with contents of physiology and elongation for stress management (ra12 ) “… we insist on the importance of a healthy diet, that junk food can make them sick” (cdm5); “…they learn to take care of their body from possible abuse, from violence against them” (cd-m7) the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a116 containment and emotional support among participants “...my son didn’t like the other school, but here he found friends, he feels happy because everyone helps each other” (cd-m2); “the entire community (dem, police, etc.) worked to achieve z’s dream [boy with down syndrome], he wanted to be a carabinero [police officer], and the ceremony was held just for him, it was very exciting” (cd-d1). e17: no, my mom is sick. i1: she couldn’t come? e17: no. i1: and when do the other moms come? a: i feel like my mom is here” (cd-e2); “every day someone arrives sad, we hug, listen, and contain them, and soon after they are integrated and happy with the others” (cd-d2); “i have had bad times at home, but the teacher has helped me so much” (cd-m5). “she was lonely when she arrived, she was shy, she didn’t speak!!, and now she talks a lot! that’s good, that’s good!” (ar-4). inclusion of each participant’s differences naturalness is observed in the relationships between neurotypical participants with respect to those who are not (ra-4,7,10). sports activities are observed without distinction of gender (ra-8). culinary activities are observed without distinction of gender, age, or education (ra-6). “this classroom presents many girls and boys with special educational needs (sen), but here we make no difference” (cd-d2). integration is observed without distinction of treatment between neurotypical schoolchildren and those with sen (ra-12, 14, 23). basic emotion of teaching “… work begins by connecting with everyone’s emotions, which is channeled with yoga” (cd-d1). “…the first thing we consider before starting work is what state of mind they arrived in” (cd-m3). “every day we talk with them about their emotions before starting the class” (cd-d2). it is observed that boys and girls express their emotions as part of the content (ra-7) gesture as a classroom story the use of gestures and motor demonstrations is observed when learning clay work (ra-2). the use of gestures and motor demonstrations is observed when learning how to weave coirón (ra-5). use of gestures is observed when learning cooking recipes (ra-14). a lot of gesticulation is observed in the creation of stories by mothers and schoolchildren (ra-17). it is observed that they use gestures to remember a norm, commitment, or contribution and to solve mathematical calculations (ra-32). “m. why do you like moms to come? e2: because they tell us stories. e5: and they ask us questions. e21: because my mom takes care of me and my siblings. e30: and she gives us affection” (dc-e). everyday home practices in the classroom not observed inclusion of a daily breakfast for boys and girls as a practice of social integration and camaraderie between schoolchildren, teachers, and mothers (ra-21). maintenance of medicinal herbs in the classroom to treat minor ailments of students (ra-2). the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a117 mind-body relationship inclusion of a yoga workshop with daily practice at the beginning of the day (ra-3). “we include yoga as a form of healing, a form of stress management for children, as a practice of mind-body relationship” (cd-d1). not observed the containment and emotional support among the participants as relational practices (actions) constitute the main space of emotional socialization for the schoolchildren, as well as for the collaborators in both classrooms. schoolchildren themselves and the other people of the community that form the community classroom expressed, interpreted, re-signified, etc., these themes. in the opinion of the research communities, it is equal rights among the voices of the minors and adults in decision making dialogues – that gives the dialogic character to this curricular change. in the peasant classroom, the school’s external support network stands out as capable of mobilizing numerous institutions to meet the needs of any of its students, as well as the internal support network that welcomes and integrates the newly enrolled students who previously experienced failures. the mining classroom, on the one hand, is configured as a space for the protection and care of children, with a strong role in dealing with the schoolchildren’s affective deficiencies, and on the other, it constitutes a support for the relief and orientation of their mothers. both classrooms play a fundamental role in containment and emotional support for the community as a whole. the inclusion of the participants’ differences is another node that is expressed as a relational practice (action), that is, it is observed in the participants’ social relationships, although it can be appreciated that the inclusion in the classrooms is not something explicit, but rather it is part of the naturalness of the relationships. whereas in the peasant classroom, the inclusion of diversity in gender, age, level of education, and special educational needs was evidenced, in the mining classroom, the naturalness of integration of children with special educational needs is highly remarkable since the classroom has a high percentage of students with such a diagnosis (30.6%). emotion as the basis of teaching constitutes another relational practice found in both classrooms. the peasant classroom focuses on the consideration of the emotional state of the schoolchildren at the beginning of the pedagogical work, while the mining classroom applies emotion as a constant in all developed activities, forming a determining base of the social relations maintained by those who participate in this group. the last node shared between both classrooms is gestures as a classroom story, which is widely observed in the mining classroom. the mothers bring this type of language and use it as a daily form of communication with schoolchildren during the activities programmed by themselves, such as puppets and immitation, to express states of mind, concepts, and behavior regulation. on the other hand, in the peasant classroom, gestures and manual demonstrations are present mainly in the craft and gastronomy workshops; both activities take place outside the school, either in the homes of grandmothers or mothers who teach their recipes or in the participating artisans ’ workshops. consequently, in both cases this language enriches communication, and is a contribution of the people who enter these classrooms and who bring with them their own knowledge and practices. finally, the nodes that are specific to each classroom are characterized by becoming formal curriculum activities, that is, they occupy spaces and times in the official curriculum. in the case of the mining classroom, a breakfast financed by the teacher, mothers, and grandmothers that make up this community is integrated into the daily curricular activities, introducing daily home practices in the classroom, the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a118 and creating a meeting space over a cup of hot chocolate that allows the group to know more about each participant: how do you feel?, what are your expectations today? what do you think you can contribute?, etc. in short, it is a period in which one tries to build a space for an open and sincere dialogue among everyone while at the same time planning the activities of that day. in the case of the peasant classroom, the yoga workshop is integrated into the school curriculum, also as a daily practice that aims at a comprehensive self-understanding of people through the body-mind connection awareness, as a way out of the traditional mind-body separation characteristic to the western thought. this workshop is incorporated into the curriculum as a result of the diagnosis of the relationship between the school and the community, in which, in the words of its teacher, “the relationship between the school and the community was damaged, the community did not want to know anything about the school, nor the school about the community, there was also a lot of stress, lack of emotion management, and failure to communicate between people” (cdd1). 2. cultural knowledge and practices included in the school curriculum of the community classrooms cultural knowledge corresponds to all knowledge and actions that enter the school curriculum that are typical of the local culture in which the community classrooms are located. these are contributions of the people who form these classrooms (children, teachers, grandmothers, mothers, artisans, etc.) that were not previously present in the official curriculum. they are dialogic because they are the result of the discussion, debate, argumentation, and permanent revision by the community classroom as a whole. as such, they are always open to new interpretations. the research communities found both knowledge and actions present in the two community classrooms. in the peasant classroom, five theme nodes were identified, and in the mining classroom, four, one common to them and the others different (figure 2). in general analytical terms, the incorporation of this type of knowledge and practice implies a curricular transformation that is expressed in the theme nodes found in both classrooms. the only common node for the two communities was animal care. in the peasant community classroom, the nodes that differed were horticultural practices, local gastronomy, peasant customs, traditions, and local crafts, while in the mining classroom, they were mining culture, local green market, and religious rites. the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a119 figure 2. knowledge and cultural activities of the community in the school curriculum a more specific analysis of the nodes allows us to clearly identify the particularities of each of these classrooms, even in the nodes they share (table 3). animal care, in the case of the mining classroom, is limited to the care and responsible ownership of pets from activities created by mothers to strengthen these values in schoolchildren. however, in the case of the peasant classroom, pet care is a daily practice at school since they have one. the schoolchildren take turns taking home the pet for a period of a week and fulfilling the basic needs of feeding, caring for, and loving the animal. in addition, the participants frequently go on excursions to the countryside, where they interact with domestic animals and livestock and get to know more about the animals from the locals as experiential knowledge, allowing them to distinguish working animals from those for food and companionship. table 3. nodes common to both community classrooms c o m m o n n o d e peasant classroom (data log excerpts) mining classroom (data log excerpts) the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a120 a n i m a l c a r e it is observed that schoolchildren and adults from the community explore the countryside and interact with domestic animals, livestock, and their young (dogs, cats, chickens, horses, pigs, cows). adults teach schoolchildren how to approach, pet, and feed them (ak-3-6). “w: go very quietly and approach it, in silence [the foal]. she was born on sunday morning, be careful, the mare can kick her” (ra-6). “the children have a rabbit, it is a pet, they take turns every week to take it home and take care of it, feed it, provide affection, and bring it back in perfect condition. because the values they must achieve have to be demonstrated in their actions” (cd-d1). mothers schedule an activity to make schoolchildren aware of the care and responsibility of owning pets (ra-12). “m4: i am going to tell you why responsibility with pets is necessary, the benefits that having a pet in the house also brings, especially for children. d2: do you think so? m2: here in lota we have another issue, we see dogs and cats that roam, abandoned, especially at the fair. m4: so, it is important that children know that if they have animals at home, they have to feed them, vaccinate them, clean them, take care of them, take responsibility” (ra-8) in this way, the animal care node in the case of the mining classroom is categorized as one of knowledge, since it is limited to the activities that the mothers prepare to develop values linked to responsible ownership. on the other hand, in the case of the peasant classroom, it is categorized as both knowledge and practice, first, because caring for animals is a permanent programmed activity (knowledge) that involves the experience of caring for a pet (action); and second, because it is configured as an emergent (knowledge) and experiential (action) curriculum during field trips carried out by schoolchildren. 2.1. the cultural knowledge and practices of the peasant classroom undoubtedly, the rural context of this classroom is decisive in the knowledge and practices that are incorporated into the school curriculum (table 4), on the one hand through the inclusion of formal activities within the study plan, as well as two workshops: gastronomy and crafts, and programmed activities in coordination with other educational institutions that recover peasant customs and traditions; and on the other hand, through the spontaneous and valuable emerging knowledge of horticultural practices, promoting the permanent interaction of schoolchildren with relatives and neighbors dedicated to horticulture. table 4. nodes of knowledge and cultural practices typical of the peasant classroom nodes peasant community classroom (data log excerpts) horticultural knowledge and practices [dialogues in the homes of grandmothers and mothers] “a: …now we are going to need some peppers to flavor it, and also coriander, who knows chili? who knows coriander? students: me, me. a: go find them in the garden, open the door carefully. e3: how long do the peppers take to be ready to eat? a: they need to be planted first, in august, we plant them here, then they are transplanted to fertilized soil, watered almost every day, then you monitor them. e2: and now they are ready to eat, right? a. yes, these are the first ones, later there will be many more. e4: in my house we plant tomatoes. a: we plant them here too, and do you know how it’s done? e4: yes, i learned from my mom, she taught me. a: let’s see, tell us how is it done? e4: you look for the best plants, the largest ones, a hole is made in the fertilized soil, and it is planted and then watered. a. that’s it! e6: i also know how to sow. e1: i do not yet, i’m just learning” (ra-4). the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a121 local gastronomy and its concepts “we included a local gastronomy workshop led by mothers and grandmothers from the community aimed at rescuing traditional recipes typical of the peasant culture. the workshop is held in their homes” (cd-d1). [dialogues in the homes of mothers and grandmothers] “a: you have to mix it well, i’m going to leave it just over here, you have to take turns. e1: kneading it? m: yes, unifying the ingredients. a: and if you give them a little piece, mrs. m.? m: you have to unify it, then you have to flatten it with the rolling pin and cut [they distribute small portions of dough to each student]. a: then, the kids take turns, whose turn is it now? student: mine, mine…, e1: do it like this [some students teach others]” (ra-1). [dialogues at school] “d1: what concepts had we named with the letter a? e4: azúcar florpowdered sugar. m: azúcar sugar, what else? student: alfajores – sweet buiscuits, aliños dressings. m: good, what else? e1. ají peppers. m: okay, what else? e2: ajo garlic. e5: aceite oil. e3: alcayota marrow squash. d1: in order to build our word puzzle game, we have to provide a definition for each of these concepts. first, define it according to what you understand, without looking at the dictionary, it is about recovering what we know about our culture, based on what we learn at home. then, look up the definition in the dictionary (ra-205). d1: very good, so now together, we are going to create a concept to put in the dictionary that we are structuring. m: yeah, chuño alfajor. v, can you read it? e5: it’s a sweet. m: good, what else could we add to this definition? e2: it is a snack. e3: the chuño’s cover is made up of farascas. m: how many do you need? e3: two. m: how are they cooked? e1: in a clay oven. m: now we are going to start writing, how could you start, v? e5: it is a snack. m: is it a sweet or savory snack? students: sweet. m: is this sold in stores? students: no. e4: homemade preparation. composed of two farascas, stuffed with chuño” (ra-209). local crafts [dialogues in craft workshops] “ar: if you want to make a little glass, you have to do something like this and put the thumb in the middle here to start enlarging it like this, so that a glass will be formed. m: it will be easier to do it there. ar: sure, that’s a plaster cast. e5: what is that? ar: it is a mold to work the clay, they are made of silicone. this little turtle mold is made like this, you pour the clay on it, and it expands, my idea is to let your imagination run wild and work with your little hand... do you want a spoon? make it like this, use the finger to create the shape. e3: it’s good…ar: the clay needs to be cooked, the fire is put over here, the wood is added, over here, look, the oven is loaded over there” (ra-5). national and latin american festivities “the festivities typical of the peasant community are now celebrated at school, for example, typical games, such as hopscotch, wrestling, sack race, as well as national holidays. everything is organized by time, the community sees the school as one more space that belongs to them” (cd-d1). the schools belonging to the network of rural schools of the commune also join the peasant community classroom initiative and develop a series of coordinated activities, such as national dance meetings and latin american dances (ra-21). in the first node, incorporation of knowledge and horticultural practices in the peasant classroom’s school curriculum, emerging knowledge, and practices is observed in the context of the local gastronomy workshop, since the ingredients required to prepare a recipe are grown by the teaching grandmother the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a122 herself. in the interactions, it is evident that the grandmother spontaneously asks the schoolchildren to recognize aromatic herbs and vegetables, and when they respond they are then asked about their cultivation. the grandmother initiates a dialogue where she provides information about the crop and the schoolchildren, but also uses the question to prompt girls and boys to share what they know about it. this is conducted in an environment of dialogue free of pressure and attending to the schoolchildren’s curiosity about the emerging theme. in the second node, unlike the first — incorporation of local gastronomy and its concepts into the school curriculum—this is part of the curricular transformation implemented by this classroom, since it is a formal workshop included in the study plan. this workshop, on the one hand, focuses on specific home practices (actions) that mothers or grandmothers share, such as ways of kneading and molding, times, sequence and characteristics of the ingredients; and on the other hand, on what happens back in the classroom, where the aim is to recover and systematize the knowledge and practices thought at home. this is based on linking the knowledge, as shown in the example record in table 4, namely, by constructing vocabulary based on what the schoolchildren know and validating it by means of official dictionaries so that they build a new definition incorporating both sources of information; thus, there are no previous fixed conceptualizations, and the dialogical character is clearly recognized. the third node has the same character as the second, corresponding to the classroom’s curricular transformation workshops. in this way, the incorporation of the local craft theme node focuses mainly on the teaching and learning process that the schoolchildren develop in the workshops of the artisans who participate in the community classroom. it is the artisans who assume the teaching role in this workshop, and the schoolchildren learn the art of weaving and clay from lived experiences, whose practice implies the free creation of the craft they choose: there is not a single product or mold to use, but instead their imagination is promoted. the fourth and last node, incorporation of national and latin american celebrations, can be classified as extracurricular activities, because although they have not been formalized as part of the school curriculum, they are part of the formally programmed activities with school time dedicated to them; that is, they also achieve a curricular status, although with less impact than the previous ones since they are sporadic. 2.2. the cultural knowledge and practices of the mining classroom in the mining classroom, three theme nodes are characteristic, namely, the mining culture, the folk culture, and the religious rites included in the school curriculum (table 5). in general terms, the first two theme nodes are categorized as emerging curriculum, since they are not formally included in the school curriculum and their presence depends on the proposals made by mothers and grandmothers in their classroom interventions, while the third—religious rites—is not a formal activity in the school curriculum but is rather a practice established at the beginning of each school day; therefore, it is not an emerging curriculum. table 5. nodes of knowledge and cultural practices typical of the mining classroom n o d e s mining community classroom (data log excerpts) the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a123 m i n i n g c u l t u r e “m2: [in the mine] the mice seem to have played a role. e3: when the mice left the place running, it was due to the gas from the mine that kills the miners, so they knew they shouldn’t be around. m. yes, because if they stayed in the mine, they would die, so they had to run as fast as possible.” “m5…any town may want to be like us, we are a fighting town, we know the history of the miners, how they worked, how many of them died young. i am going to tell you my experience, i lived in pavilion 83, which is now a monument. m2. the house of culture. m5. yes, i lived in that pavilion, my husband was a miner, so that pavilion had three floors. when i came to live there, a visitor came, we were newlyweds, the first time forming a family and they told me that the bunnies that i had were pretty, and i had a son, i had no pets, nothing. they were the huarencitos [large mice] that were in the pavilion, then the cats were the salvation, all the “bunnies” left because the cats came to the house. in the pavilions there were always rodents. a2: the cat, apart from being a companion, helps to clean the ecosystem. well, if there were no rodents, the food chain would end, and the cats would not be able to live” (ra-3). f o l k c u l t u r e m1. “i take what she said about the fair, at the fair there are also mice, and abandoned cats. e23: and they also have cats to take care of the place. e3: yes, because at the fair there are rodents, i’ve seen them. e31. and the cats they have are to eat the mice that are around. m1: many do that, others are the stallholders’ pets” (ra-16). m3. “let’s remember when we sell at the fair, we have to know how to add, subtract, read, write, all that, and we have to be fast. e12. i know that with a 10,000 bill you have to give back 5,000. e5. but it’s not always going to be like that, if something costs 1,000 and they pay you with a 1,000 bill, you don’t have to give change. e8. and if they pay you with a 10,000 bill and it’s worth 1,000, how much do you have to give back? e. hmmm. i don’t know, neither do i. e21. it is 9,000 because 10 minus 1 equal 9, so it should be 9,000 [second grade children]” (ra-16). r e l i g i o u s r i t e s “every morning a prayer is said here by a mother or a child, because their religion is very important to them, and that is respected here, just as in other aspects, such as the family culture which is also present, life around the coal mine and the fair” (cd-d2). “…we ask for the health of all, of the children, of the families. it is reinforced in what we believe, because we are believers” (cd-m5). the first node of the mining culture focuses on the assessment of the living and recent history of the city’s mining past. in the example, the role of the animals in the work of the mine is crucial, since the lives of the miners depended on them, on the one hand, and because the role that animals play in maintaining the ecosystem stands out as a complementary meaning tied to the domestic and work experience of families, on the other. from this perspective, it is also observed that in the grandmothers’ stories the different pieces of knowledge are fully integrated with each other. the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a124 in the second node, folk culture, the first dialogue reinforces the contribution of mothers and grandmothers in the classroom on caring for animals and their role in the ecosystem, also found in the previous node. in the second dialogue, the mathematical application made by schoolchildren regarding the introduction offered by the mother is particularly interesting. the experience of these boys and girls at the fair allows them to compare their own knowledge of economic transactions with that of the basic mathematical operations that they develop at school, highlighting the capability of calculating a change by extrapolating their knowledge to much higher numbers than those expected of them at the second-grade level: “count numbers from 0 to 1,000” (mineduc, 2018, p. 231). in the third and last node, the incorporation of the families ’ religious rites by saying a prayer in the classroom every morning as the first action reflects the strength of belonging to the religious community. in addition, it reveals the position of the teacher regarding the importance of incorporating practices of this nature and emulating it with other cultural aspects, especially since it is a public and secular school. discussion and conclusions the research communities manage to verify that the curricular changes happen at various levels, while in the mining classroom, there is no formal curricular intervention, in the peasant classroom, it is possible to modify the curriculum. the curricular transformation seems deeper in the peasant classroom than in the mining classroom due to the formal character it acquires within the school curriculum (yoga, crafts, gastronomy, and nutrition workshops). however, the mining classroom has managed to maintain itself for more than a decade based on the emerging curriculum not formalized in the school curriculum, which mothers and grandmothers maintain by regularly participating in curriculum design and development (preparing and developing the curriculum permanently in the classroom. from this perspective, the curricular transformation offers different paths from which to dispute the pre-established knowledge of the official curriculum with the local knowledge carried by the members themselves who mobilize the changes. thus, the peasant classroom mobilizes to modify both the structure of the curriculum (adding four workshops) as well as its contents (body care, mind-body relationship, inclusion of differences, gastronomy, horticulture, crafts and peasant customs and traditions). on the other hand, the mining classroom focuses its action only on changes in content (body-mind relationship, home practices in the classroom, containment and emotional support, body gestures, mining culture, local market, and religious rites) this finding problematized the following questions. which of these transformative processes of the curriculum was more profound? does the change in the curricular structure and contents promote higher status and visibility of local cultures? or, can the change in contents beyond the structure of the curriculum promote the pursued curricular territorialization? the research communities do not yet resolve these questions. this, which could also be a limitation of the study, maintains the dialogical character sought. we believe that these differences between both classrooms constitute complex, living and never neutral emancipation processes, coinciding with the approach of de lissovoy & cook, (2020). on the other hand, the liberating and emancipatory character of the dialogic pedagogy of these community classrooms seems clear, especially at the curricular level, but how dialogical can they be? according to resnick et al. (2015), allen (2000) and matusov (2009) one of the most distinctive characteristics of this type of pedagogy would be that, in a community of learners and teachers, there would be bewilderment, novelty and surprise in the face of a meaning that is constructed in common. this seems to be reflected very well in the peasant classroom, in its gastronomy and craft workshops, because these areas are open to build new, creative and unexpected meanings, there is no fixed place or predetermined the transformation of the curriculum in the linking worlds dialogic pedagogy donatila ferrada, claudia jara espinoza, alejandra seguel briones dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.536 | vol. 11 no.1 (2023) a125 objective to reach, but it opens to the surprise that the dialogue brings (craft workshop: "i prefer that they let their imagination fly and make their own creation") in the mining classroom, this is also observed with the emergence of the free-market fairs culture and in the mining culture (advanced mathematical processes due to the knowledge of the fairs; valuing of the care of animals linked to the culture of survival of the mine). these records can also be good examples of the concept of ideological becoming proposed by bakhtin (1981) and the idea of liberation proposed by freire (1970); regarding the ideological becoming, because it positions personal knowledge (imagination, creation, etc.) with the knowledge of communities (mathematics applied at the fair) and unequal power structures (animal-miner relationship); regarding liberation, because it positions the person in its local reality (mining culture, peasant culture) to "read" the world (subalternity of mining and peasant cultures versus hegemonic culture). similarly, arndt (2017) argues that dialogic encounters are an exchange of stories (grandmothers who recover the recent history of the mine in the mining classroom and artisans who recover ancestral practices in the peasant classroom) in the time and place in which they are built (re-signified, reinterpreted in the present). for mendelowitz & lazar (2020), dialogicity in the classroom is characterized by its high cultural sensitivity, collaboration, and receptive commitment on the part of students. in the case of the mining and peasant classrooms, it is like the field of corporeal affective knowledge and actions that denote a sensitive, caring, and protective education of childhood expressed in the nodes of body-mind relationship, emotion-affectivity, care-protection, and support-collaboration. however, these classrooms are not limited to the students’ experiences. they also include the entire community that participates in them (grandmothers, artisans, mothers, teachers, etc.), that is, they express the polyphonic character (bakhtin, 1981). in this same line, the nodes of containment and emotional support, affectivity and welcome between mothers/grandmother-schoolchildren, and harmonious relationship body-mind-emotionality-nature coincide with what was proposed by martins-do-carmo-de-oliveira & massot-madeira-coelho (2020), when they affirm that the networks of relationships of a dialogic classroom can articulate operational processes of learning with subjective processes. however, continuing with the question of how dialogical these community classrooms can be, the nodes of national festivities in the peasant classroom and the religious rites in the mining classroom are powerful symbols of the local identity of those who form the community classroom and seem to be the most difficult areas to find dialogicity. these symbols of identity are not open to novel and surprising interpretations in terms of the demands of dialogic pedagogy. rather, these nodes seek the conservation of meanings that embody traditional values that these groups find fundamental to maintain. it should be noted that this research does not intend to conclude on the levels of depth reached by dialogicity in these community classrooms, for which a study that addresses this aspect is necessary. finally, we believe that the main lesson learned is related to the possibility that these research communities, being composed mostly of people from the community itself, are themselves who put in knowledge, debate, and criticize their own culture. therefore, they go from a stagnant culture to a culture of dynamic change. these experiences of dialogic community classrooms allow the possibility of making visible the forgotten local cultures in the official school curriculum, while they also allow a new reading about themselves in the light of new reinterpretations and resignifications, only limited by those who form the community of co-authors. references alexander, robin (2019), whose discourse? 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science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation using teacher roles of questioning and communicative approaches jonathan kilpelä university of jyväskylä, finland jenna hiltunen university of jyväskylä, finland markus hähkiöniemi university of jyväskylä, finland kaisa jokiranta jamk university of applied sciences, finland sami lehesvuori university of jyväskylä, finland pasi nieminen university of jyväskylä, finland jouni viiri university of jyväskylä, finland abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers use different types of discourse to support dialogic argumentation. dialogic argumentation is a collaborative process in which students construct arguments together and examine arguments presented by their peers. science teachers can use argumentation as a vehicle to help students gain a working understanding of science content and the nature of science and its practices. whole-class closing discussions from video-recorded lessons are analyzed to study the discourse used to support argumentation by two physics teachers in lower secondary schools. analysis of discourse includes coding of communicative approach at the episode level and coding of teacher roles of questioning at the level of speaking turns. student argumentation is also assessed on the basis of dialogicity and complexity of arguments. findings characterize different ways of orchestrating argumentative discussions. authoritative episodes were characterized by the presence of the dispenser role, with teachers retaining ownership over ideas and classroom activities to emphasize the correctness of a justification. dialogic episodes of classroom interaction showed openness to student perspectives, but teachers’ use of questioning roles revealed different ways of orchestrating argumentative discussions. the moderator role granted ownership of ideas to students to either pursue a single student’s argument in more depth or to directly contrast opposing justifications. less commonly used were the roles of coach and participant, which teachers used to elicit student justifications in more depth or support students in examining the arguments of their peers. examination of discourse issn: 2325-3290 (online) analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a89 using multiple frameworks revealed differences in teachers’ values and the impact of the use of teacher questioning roles on student contributions to argumentative discussions.1 keywords: argumentation, dialogic argumentation, science education, teacher questioning, whole class discussion jonathan kilpelä is a teacher-researcher who graduated with a master of arts in educational sciences from the university of jyväskylä. after working as a research assistant in the department of teacher education at the university of jyväskylä, jonathan currently teaches secondary science at the international school of helsinki. jenna hiltunen is a project researcher at the finnish institute for educational research, university of jyväskylä. her research interests include mathematics learning, international assessment studies, and dialogic argumentation for mathematics learning. markus hähkiöniemi works as a senior lecturer in the department of teacher education at the university of jyväskylä. his research interests include inquiry-based mathematics teaching, technology enriched mathematics learning, classroom interaction, and argumentation. kaisa jokiranta is a specialist at likes in the university of applied sciences in jyväskylä. she is currently studying support of university students' wellbeing and physical activity. sami lehesvuori works as a senior lecturer in the department of education at the university of jyväskylä. his research interests include dialogic teaching, classroom interaction in science teaching, argumentation in science teaching, and science teacher education and professional development. pasi nieminen works as a senior lecturer in the department of teacher education at the university of jyväskylä. his research interests include differentiation in inquiry-based science learning, argumentation in science and mathematics education, assessment in science and mathematics education, and multiple representations in physics learning. jouni viiri is a professor emeritus at the department of teacher education at the university of jyväskylä. his research interests include classroom interactions in science teaching and learning, simulations in science teaching and learning, assessment, models and representations, eye-tracking studies, and automated speech recognition. ïïò science teachers should make it a central aim to foster student argumentation skills (mercer, 2009; osborne, 2010), as emphasized in the national curricula (finnish national agency for education, 2016; ngss lead states, 2013). although student argumentation is supported by many factors, including task design, curriculum, and cultural factors (asterhan & schwarz, 2016, berland & mcneill, 2010), teacher questioning strategies play a critical role in this process (simon, erduran, & osborne, 2006). facilitating opportunities for learners to engage with argumentation practices requires teachers to use diverse forms of discourse, including dialogic discourse. by describing discourse used in science lessons, this research seeks to clarify how teachers can support or hinder dialogic argumentation using teacher roles of 1 acknowledgments: this study was funded by the academy of finland (project number 286576) and the finnish cultural foundation (fund number 00160353). the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a90 questioning (chen, hand, & norton-meier, 2017) and their communicative approaches (mortimer & scott, 2003). according to some studies, argumentation skills are vital for forming a deep understanding of science content and learning about the nature of science (osborne, 2010). rather than acquiring isolated fragments of scientific knowledge, learners should interact with the process of scientific argumentation and move through the steps of inquiry, gathering data, and constructing and negotiating arguments (chen & steenhoek, 2014). when students listen to their peers and critically evaluate how other arguments compare with their own ideas, it offers “a means for improving the quality of the student experience, the depth of student thinking, and the learning of science itself” (osborne, 2010, p. 466). engaging in these practices mirrors, to some extent, the practices of the scientific community and allows for the essential experience of students to authentically contribute with their own unique voice to a community of practice, as highlighted by matusov and von duyke (2010) in their discussion of internally persuasive discourse. in this way, argumentation is not an isolated goal but rather serves as a “vehicle to drive students in the whole process of inquiry” (chen, hand, & park, 2016, p. 280). whereas argumentation is an essential part of scientific communication, there is still a call for highlighting the social aspect and the role of interaction in facilitating non-disputatious and constructive participation in educational dialogue (mercer et al., 2009). accordingly, in this study, we explore how argumentation and related interactions can be enriched through dialogicity. in general, dialogicity refers to the mutual consideration of different voices, views, and ideas (bakhtin, 1986). when drawing specifically on dialogic argumentation, nielsen (2013) describes this as “a specialized way of arguing in which the participants not just defend their own claims, but also engage constructively with the argumentation of their peers” (nielsen, 2013, p. 373). structurally, an argument consists of a claim and evidence, reasoning, or data that supports the claim. dialogic argumentation, however, specifically addresses the language processes in which students examine and present claims and evidence. importantly, it focuses on the interaction furthering critical thinking and reasoning (lehesvuori et al., 2017). dialogic argumentation then requires not only the implicit or explicit presentation of the structural elements of an argument but also that students engage with each other’s ideas and examine the reasoning brought up by their peers. dialogic argumentation relates to the broader social construction of knowledge (vygotsky, 1978), as the relationships between claims and evidence are discussed, examined, and modified on the social interpsychological plane, then internalized on the intrapsychological plane. however, whereas the social construction of knowledge approaches the learning process in general, dialogic argumentation specifically addresses the extent to which the reasoning leading to claims is made clear and the extent to which participants respond to others’ justifications. an example may illustrate this best: the social construction of knowledge could include the social sharing and comparison of knowledge, building to a broader shared understanding. within that knowledge may lie implicit understandings or justifications that are not clearly stated. dialogic argumentation, however, entails specifically the social aspect of examining not only what is known but how that knowledge relates to a conclusion or justification of a claim (hähkiöniemi et al., 2022). promoting dialogic interactions in classrooms has been described as a prerequisite to developing argumentation (berland & mcneill, 2010, lehesvuori et al., 2017, mcneill & pimentel, 2010). however, pedagogical approaches facilitating dialogic interactions are difficult for teachers to master, as they require “the ‘know-how’ of being able to engage students in dialogic interactions” (scott, mortimer, & aguiar, 2006, p. 624). at the core lies a tension: teachers must implement communicative approaches that give students a chance to ideate and explore but also scaffold students in the meaning making processes (ford & forman, 2015; mortimer & scott, 2003). the orchestration of questioning routines that are open to a wide analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a91 range of potential student responses presents a challenge to teachers due to the unpredictable nature of student responses. this, in turn, may even lead teachers to discourage over-enthusiastic intellectual engagement as a means of limiting the scope of discussion (kennedy, 2005). these challenges highlight the need to further understand how teachers orchestrate dialogic discussions in which they grant partial ownership of ideas or activities to their students. teacher questioning and orchestration of discussions should not be considered the only factors that influence student argumentation. students’ questions are also seen to have a clear impact on the thinking processes of their peers (chin and osborne, 2008), and the quality of questions formulated by students was linked to productive oral argumentation. the nature of the initial question driving a line of inquiry was shown to play a part in orchestrating the type of dialogic argumentation that followed (chin and osborne, 2010). basic information questions presented by students (which include both factual and procedural questions) do little to stimulate further discussion or critical analysis. in contrast, wonderment questions include comprehension, prediction, anomaly detection, application, and planning or strategy questions (chin, brown, & bruce, 2002). these wonderment questions were seen to “stimulate students to generate explanations and propose solutions to problems” (chin et al., 2002, p. 540). while the questions generated by students undoubtedly have an effect on the nature of argumentative discussions, the focus of this study, however, remains on examining the teacher’s questioning role. mercer (2008) calls for analyses of classroom interactions which include a temporal element to supply better ways of analyzing classroom interactions as a continuing, social mode of thinking. in relation, chen et al. (2017) advocate for research on appropriate contexts and sequences for teachers to use different roles of questioning. this requires reaching a deeper understanding of how teachers use authoritative and dialogic communicative approaches (scott et al., 2006). the focus on promoting dialogic interaction is rationalized by continuously prevailing authoritativeness in science classrooms, often characterized by transmission modes of teaching and little allowance for alternative viewpoints and extended dialogue (mercer et al., 2009; lehesvuori et al., 2018). the aim of this study is to build an understanding of how teachers can orchestrate classroom interactions in science and support dialogic argumentation in whole-class discussions. literature dialogic interactions in science the term dialogic has been widely used in the field of research on classroom interaction. for example, definitions of dialogic pedagogy (matusov, 2009), dialogic communicative approach (scott, 2006), and dialogic space (wegerif, 2010) draw on bakhtin’s (1986) idea of equal consideration of different voices and ideas. in slight contrast, alexander (2006) highlights the purposefulness and cumulativeness of joint construction of knowledge in descriptions of and principles for dialogic teaching. in this study, these two aspects are considered equally important, on one hand by highlighting the importance of equal consideration of different voices (dialogue with authenticity) and on the other hand by highlighting the importance of purposeful discussion of subject content (dialogue with purpose). enabling student exploration of ideas and reasoning is considered to be an essential part of the meaningful learning of science (barreto et al., 2021). although the nature of science is fundamentally dialogic (ford and forman, 2015), teachercentered authoritative approaches dominate science teaching (hiltunen et al., 2016; lehesvuori, viiri, rasku-puttonen, moate, & helaakoski, 2013; osborne, 2010). teachers who view themselves as experts in the learning community maintain ownership over learning activities (donnelly et al., 2014), stifling dialogic analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a92 argumentation. teachers frequently hold to a direct transmission model of knowledge transfer (scott et al., 2006), especially when encountering less familiar content areas (nurkka, mäkynen, viiri, savinainen, & nieminen, 2012) and when attempting to convey correctness or emphasize the scientific perspective (lehesvuori, ramnarain, & viiri, 2018). due in part to overly dominating teacher-directed and authoritative interactions, mcneill and pimentel (2010) observe that students view the goal of science as simply getting the right answer rather than a process of persuasion. likewise, watson, swain, and mcrobbie (2004) found that students construct arguments with low frequency and of low quality. even if dialogic interactions are emphasized, it remains a challenge to ensure that students are authentically engaging and not performing a sterile “procedural display” (bloome, puro, & theodorou, 1989, as cited in ford & forman, 2015, p. 150). although dialogicity is also about a shared and collective endeavor between teachers and students (alexander, 2006), the decision to pursue dialogue remains in the control of teachers (mercer, 2009). students have little motivation to share their ideas if the teacher actively exercises power as the subject authority (davies, kiemer, & meissel, 2017). in order to promote critical thinking and reasoning, teachers must grant their students “constrained intellectual authority” (ford & forman, 2015, p. 146). ford and forman (2015) discuss a paradox in which “instruction must be constraining and directive in some sense, but also provide opportunities for students to develop a deep understanding of scientific concepts and investigations” (p. 144). science itself as a practice is fundamentally dialogic, so to implement this “constrained intellectual authority,” a science teacher must take some ownership of whole-class discussion but also let the students practice the skills of listening and responding to other ideas in a dialogic setting. teacher orchestration of whole-class discussion the interaction in science classrooms has been shown to follow a traditional triadic initiation-responsefollow-up (irf) pattern (lemke, 1990; sinclair & coulthard, 1975). when a teacher's follow-up turn is more probing by nature, the irf structure may evolve into an extended irprp-pattern2 (scott et al., 2006). whereas the dominance of the irf-pattern implies prevailing authoritativeness, extended dialogues are potentially linked to dialogic interaction. a teacher initiation turn, i.e., often a question, is essential when opening up the space for student thinking (chin, 2007). flexibility in questioning routines is essential when the goal of teacher questioning is not simply to evaluate what students know but rather when the goal is to build upon student ideas to construct joint understanding and stimulate productive thinking (chin, 2007). teacher orchestration of whole-class discussions has been studied from a variety of perspectives, including question types (mcneill & pimentel, 2010), communicative approaches (scott et al., 2006), and pedagogical practices (simon et al., 2006). chin (2007) describes the functions of teacher questions, emphasizing the role of revoicing student ideas to make connections between student ideas. chin described teachers using questions in a very purposeful way to weave together student ideas and bridge the gap between a student’s knowledge and the questions posed in classroom discussion. teacher questioning is situated by chin in four main categories: a) socratic questioning, b) verbal jigsaw, c) semantic tapestry, and d) framing. the purpose of socratic questioning is to guide students' thinking using a series of questions. verbal jigsaw helps students to understand the relationships between specific scientific terminology and how they can be used in relation to one another. semantic tapestry serves to integrate concepts to create an overall conceptual understanding of the connections between topics, and framing is used to clarify “the relationship between a question and the information that it addresses” (chin, 2007, p. 823). other studies classify teacher talk using over a dozen types of teacher talk (soysal, 2018; vrikki, 2 an irprp-pattern would take the form of initiation-response-prompt-response-prompt and may continue for several turns. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a93 wheatley, howe, hennessy, & mercer, 2019). specifically, soysal (2018) describes teacher discursive moves such as probing, challenging, prompting, and affirming. these are used to track long-term trends and are linked to different stages of argument-based inquiry. scott (1998) also categorizes teacher discursive moves, labeling them as “forms of pedagogical intervention” (p. 56) based on the major strands of the teaching narrative: developing scientific knowledge, supporting student meaning making, and maintaining the narrative. in this study, we approach the concepts of teacher discursive moves and teacher questioning using two frameworks that succinctly capture two essential properties of teacher-student interaction in a wholeclass discussion. first, the communicative approaches framework can be applied to classify the resulting discourse along two dimensions, as shown in figure 1. within the vertical dimension, an authoritative communicative approach is restricted to a single point of view, while a dialogic communicative approach values multiple perspectives. in the horizontal dimension, interactive or noninteractive talk refers to how many speakers participate in the discourse. combining the two dimensions creates four communicative approaches: authoritative/noninteractive, authoritative/interactive, dialogic/noninteractive, and dialogic/interactive (mortimer & scott, 2003). shifts in the communicative approach imply a shift in teaching purpose (lehesvuori et al., 2013). scott and ametller (2007) describe cycles in which teachers use a dialogic communicative approach to open up topics, allowing students to make connections to prior knowledge of a topic, followed by an authoritative communicative approach to close down the discussion, acting as a seed for further dialogue. figure 1. four classes of communicative approach (scott et al., 2006, p. 611) defining the dominant communicative approach of an episode of talk requires firstly interpreting if the teacher considers a range of ideas (dialogic) or focuses on a singular perspective (authoritative). for the second dimension, the framework describes talk that includes multiple participants (interactive) or only a single participant (noninteractive) (mortimer & scott, 2003). although this framework creates 4 distinct categories, it must also be recognized that both the dialogic and interactive components exist along a continuum (symbolized by the arrowheads in figure 1), that is, some episodes may include more strong dialogic elements than others, and the amount of interaction can vary from completely noninteractive, to slightly interactive, to a high level of interaction with frequent exchanges between students and the teacher. however, the communicative approaches framework alone does not offer a detailed picture of how a wholeanalyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a94 class discussion unfolds on a turn-by-turn basis. instead, the intention of the framework is to analyze whole episodes of classroom talk. in order to bring a greater level of detail to individual speaking turns, this study also utilizes the teacher roles of questioning framework (chen et al., 2017), which categorizes teacher utterances into four categories, as seen in figure 2. these categories approach the concept of dialogic talk from a different perspective than the communicative approach framework. specifically, in the teacher roles of questioning framework, a distinction is made between the ownership of ideas and the ownership of classroom activities. this recognizes that although discourse may include students’ ideas, students may not necessarily have ownership over the classroom activity. for instance, a teacher may recognize students’ ideas but dictate who may speak and when, in which case the student has ownership of the ideas, but the teacher has more ownership of the activity. as shown in figure 2, ownership of ideas and ownership of the activity are plotted in separate dimensions, creating four teacher roles of questioning. within each role, several sub-categories are identified, which correspond to some degree with teacher discursive moves (scott, 1998; soysal, 2018). this framework orients these discursive moves along 2 independent axes. the name of the framework seems to suggest that only teacher questions are analyzed, but the framework is used by chen et al. (2017) to describe a variety of teacher utterances used within a questioning routine or whole-class discussion, so in reality, the framework applies to other statements made by a teacher, not just questions. figure 2. framework for teacher questioning roles (chen et al., 2017, p. 384). subcategories are combined to create four roles, arranged by ownership of ideas and activity. the most teacher-centered teacher role is the dispenser, in which the teacher retains ownership of ideas and activities by presenting information (utterance coded as ‘lecture’) or directing ideas and activities (‘direct’). the most student-centered teacher role is participant, which grants ownership of ideas and activities to students. in the participant role, the teacher and students can openly share ideas (‘exchange’), or the teacher may encourage students’ ideas (‘encourage’). the other two roles exhibit more of a shared sense of ownership. in the moderator role, the teacher ‘recognizes,’ ‘compares,’ and ‘integrates’ student ideas into the whole-class discussion. importantly, the teacher refrains from acting as an authority on the subject matter and allows students’ ideas to take precedence. conversely, when the teacher is in the coach analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a95 role, students have ownership over turn-taking norms and the flow of whole-class discussions, but the teacher challenges students’ reasoning (‘challenge’) and works to make student reasoning more explicit (‘elicit’). to further clarify these categories, table 1 includes specific examples analyzed in this text to illustrate each code in more detail. table 1 teacher questioning roles (chen et al., 2017) teacher questioning role and subcategory description example dispenser -lecture -direct -an exposition of a given subject intended to present information and conceptual relationships -any response or instruction used to lead the direction of students’ ideas and activities -now of course we could consider this fact card f, because it says the same as g, but in different words, that there is no horizontal section of the graph. -there aren’t [any places on the graph], or it doesn’t look like it. but there should be how many of them, emilia? -what did card g say? read that one again. moderator -recognize -compare -integrate -any response used to identify students’ ideas or arguments -any response used to examine ideas or arguments in order to note similarities and differences -any response used to synthesize or incorporate students’ ideas as a whole -[pointing at graph, after statement shared by student] these should be parallel. -and then you, jenna, had that same [card] g, that the other groups had used quite a bit. it says that the temperature doesn’t change. -okay, now we have two different opinions. leevi can start, then jesse follows. -the boys claim that this graph is wrong. it doesn’t show the situation where water is heated from ice to steam. does fact card g support the boys’ claim? coach -challenge -elicit -any response used to critique students’ ideas or arguments -any response used to make students’ implicit ideas more explicit -but are they the correct temperatures? -[but] it’s right here, 100 degrees. -so two phase changes. how do you know the temperatures, are there cards that help with that? participant -exchange -encourage -any response used to share ideas with students -any response used to inspire students’ ideas -well that makes two of us who are unsure, then! -okay, those were good comments! how should that go? note. descriptions of categories are definitions presented by chen et al., 2017 (pp. 399-401). examples are taken directly from the transcript presented in this manuscript, except for the examples for the role of participant, which are selected from johanna episodes 1 and 2, which were not included in this manuscript. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a96 similarities can also be seen between the teacher roles of questioning framework and teacher questioning strategies3, as described by chin (2007). a question-based prelude may fit into the role of dispenser or moderator, depending on how the teacher controls the activity. socratic questioning strategies such as pumping and reflective toss align to some extent with the role of moderator, as might a verbal jigsaw. a constructive challenge could likely fit into the role of coach, and the semantic tapestry strategy of focusing and zooming may fit into the role of participant and moderator. however, in all of these cases it would depend on the context of the question and how it is used. attributing the ownership of activities and ideas in the teacher roles of questioning framework relies on looking back at the historical aspect of talk (mercer, 2008) throughout the thread of a discussion. the communicative approaches framework and teacher roles of questioning framework were chosen due to their ability to describe a wide range of discourse. they are versatile because they rely on two independent dimensions to produce the categories of talk instead of selecting from a list of nominal categories. in both frameworks used in this study, the dimensions span from one extreme to another and could theoretically include any content-related classroom discussion. moreover, each framework depicts a continuum of control between students and teachers, aligning with the reality of classroom interactions, as ownership and control of ideas or activities are shared between students and teachers. chen et al. (2017) discuss the “tension between ownership of both ideas and activities” (p. 395), presenting discourse as a negotiation between parties rather than recognizing only separate, dichotomous types of communication. the models can complement each other in analysis, as the communicative approaches framework offers a broader, episode-level view of classroom discourse, while the teacher roles of questioning gives a more detailed picture of individual speaking turns. specifically, using the teacher roles of questioning framework to consider how the ownership of classroom activities is shared between the teacher and students may offer clarification into the specific “moves” that teachers use to gather and steer student ideas in wholeclass discussions. in turn, this may reflect how teachers grant students “constrained intellectual authority” previously discussed by ford and forman (2015). figure 3 shows a theoretical visualization of how these two frameworks could interact in episodes of whole-class discussion. the episodes in figure 3 represent theoretical examples and are not tied to the analysis of data. in these theoretical examples, the communicative approach moves from authoritative/interactive in episode a to dialogic/interactive in episodes b and c. within each episode, the dominant teacher roles of questioning are circled, and arrows represent shifts between different teacher roles of questioning. in episode a, a teacher uses the roles of dispenser and coach in an authoritative/interactive episode. episodes b and c show a teacher primarily using the role of moderator in dialogic/interactive episodes but include some shifts between the other three roles. these theoretical examples show how episodes of talk could be classified from the perspective of two independent frameworks, with the communicative approach framework offering a holistic episode-level overview, and the teacher roles of questioning showing how ownership of ideas and the activity shift back and forth between the teacher and students within these episodes. 3 chin (2007) describes four holistic questioning-based approaches: socratic questioning, verbal jigsaw, semantic tapestry, and framing (p. 823). within each approach are more specific strategies. the strategies referenced here include (a) question-based prelude: posing a question to frame a topic of discussion, (b) pumping: asking students to share more about their ideas, (c) reflective toss: following up a student statement with a reflective question, (d) verbal jigsaw (includes two strategies: verbal cloze and association of key words and phrases): co-constructing statements with students when using new terminology, (e) constructive challenge: questions intended to guide students in addressing misconceptions, and (f) focusing and zooming: guiding students to think at both the smaller, microscopic scale and the larger, macroscopic scale. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a97 figure 3. visualization of types of discourse present in theoretical episodes of whole-class discussion from the perspective of communicative approach (scott et al., 2006) and teacher roles of questioning (chen et al., 2017). analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a98 student contributions in argumentative discussion this study focuses not only on the ways that teachers contribute to whole-class discussion, but also analyzes the arguments created by students. one way to analyze logical components of argumentation could be to use toulmin’s argument pattern, which breaks arguments down into claims, warrants, data, rebuttals, and/or backing (toulmin, 1958, in osborne, erduran, & simon, 2004). for example, chin and osborne (2010) created an analytical framework to assess the quality of oral argumentation between students. however, methodologies that rely on deconstructing arguments into these elements often lack in transparency. as nielsen (2013) observes, “what tend to remain invisible are the numerous decisions the analysts must make to match specific pieces of data to the toulminian codes, as well as the negotiations among coders over different possible applications of the model” (lunsford, 2002, in nielsen, 2013, p. 384). as an alternative, this study uses a coding scheme developed by hähkiöniemi et al. (2022). this coding analyzes if students back up claims using justifying moves, divided into describing support (ds) and articulating reasoning (ar), as shown in table 2. this analysis does not require identifying specific components of arguments but instead compares arguments with predefined criteria for ar based on the type of reasoning used. thus, this coding scheme places higher value on arguments where students transparently articulate reasoning. however, it does not attend to dialectical features and thus is not used to assess the dialogicity of argumentation sequences. finally, in order to assess if student argumentation qualifies as dialogic argumentation, we examined if students engaged with other students’ justifications by using actions like challenging, elaborating, questioning, or any other responses that directly refer to the justifications or evidence presented by other students. as this study focuses more on the actions of the teacher, we did not produce codes to examine the dialogic elements of student argumentation separately, as described by hähkiöniemi et al., 2022 as “dialogic moves.” table 2 coding of student argumentation using justifying moves (hähkiöniemi et al., 2022) justifying move description articulating reasoning (ar) student explicitly explains why a claim can be concluded from what is known. in other words, a student explains the line of reasoning leading to a claim, making the reasoning visible. describing support (ds) student presents facts, calculations, observations, figures, etc. to support the claim without articulating reasoning. the support must be related to the content of the lesson. research questions as demonstrated in our review of literature, previous studies have focused on describing communicative approaches used by teachers (e.g., scott, mortimer, & aguiar, 2006), teacher questioning roles (e.g., chen et al., 2017), the quality of students’ written questions and oral arguments in small groups (chin & osborne, 2010), the functions of teacher questions in scaffolding student thinking (chin, 2007), and different types of student dialogic and justifying moves (hähkioniemi et al., 2022). this study focuses more specifically on a multi-layered analysis of communicative approaches, teacher questioning roles, and student dialogic argumentation. we aim to characterize different ways of orchestrating discussions and to examine how teacher questioning roles impact students’ contributions to discussions. a critical theme in analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a99 our analysis borrows from the teacher questioning roles framework (chen et al., 2017), specifically examining how ownership of ideas and activities can shift from the teacher to students. accordingly, the guiding research questions for this paper are: 1. how can teacher roles of questioning and communicative approaches be used to characterize different ways of orchestrating argumentative whole-class discussions? 2. how does the use of different teacher questioning roles affect students’ contributions to argumentative discussions? research methods context this study is part of a broader research project targeting dialogic argumentation for learning. the project includes a 2-year professional development program focusing on dialogicity and argumentation practices for math and physics teachers in finnish lower secondary schools (see lehesvuori et al., 2017). researchers work alongside teachers to design lessons promoting argumentation. after lessons are implemented, researchers and teachers discuss and reflect on video recordings from the lessons. for this study, two teachers, maria and johanna, were selected because both employed a base level of dialogicity. specifically, observations from lessons with these teachers showed that classroom discussion in their lessons more frequently exhibited a mutual consideration of multiple ideas without direct evaluative feedback. in this way, these two teachers were sometimes “open” to a range of ideas, drawing a contrast to other teachers who participated in the professional development program, who rarely strayed away from a more traditional irf pattern (lemke, 1990). both teachers teach the same age group in the same region, and classes were similar in terms of size and gender ratio (13–15 students, 62–67% boys). thus, the educational context in each class is comparable. data collection participating teachers implemented the lessons, which were video recorded and transcribed. both students’ and teachers’ names have been replaced with pseudonyms. for data collection, a researcher positioned at the rear of the room recorded each lesson with a handheld video camera, and teachers wore a lapel microphone. stationary video cameras with internal microphones were also positioned at student workstations. the lesson selected for this study lasted for one class period and included an argumentation task using fact cards. student groups were given a temperature/time graph and discussed if it correctly represented ice being heated and turning into steam. for reference, the fact cards and graphs used in the lesson are included in appendix a. students worked in small groups, prepared written arguments, and participated in a teacher-orchestrated whole-class discussion. only the whole-class discussions are analyzed. in these discussions, teachers were advised to encourage students to share the reasoning that they had included in their written arguments. the argumentation task presented in this lesson (using fact cards to evaluate the accuracy of graphs) is an adaptation of a similar task presented by chin and osborne (2010) in their research on the quality of students’ written arguments. whereas chin and osborne focus on students’ written arguments, the questions that students generate, and the quality of oral arguments in small groups, this study uses a similar task but analyzes the role of the teacher in supporting these discussions in a whole-class setting. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a100 data analysis at first, open notes from videos were made to become familiar with the data. the communicative approaches framework (mortimer & scott, 2003) was then used to code whole-class discussion at an episode level. each video was transcribed with all speakers identified, but to protect the anonymity of participants, pseudonyms have been assigned to them in the transcripts. all coding was done by the primary researcher. the transcript was utilized as the primary data source. video data were used to gain context of speaking turns. episodes of whole-class discussion were defined by the topic of discussion, e.g., discussing if graph 4 is correct. for each episode, the dominant communicative approach was assessed by determining if the talk included multiple speakers (interactivity) and if the teacher was open to and non-evaluative of student ideas (dialogicity). the teacher roles of questioning framework (chen et al., 2017) was used to analyze teacher talk. all verbal utterances were included, as even direct statements may elicit a response. an utterance is defined as a “unique idea contributing to the discussion” (chen et al., 2017, p. 382). thus, one turn can contain multiple utterances, for example, if there is a clear transition from one idea to a new topic, or a single utterance can span across multiple turns in the case of a speaker completing the thought of another. however, the majority (94%) of speaking turns contained only one utterance, so the term turn is substituted for utterance to improve the readability of the transcript. disciplinary measures taken by the teacher and talk unrelated to the scientific discussion were coded as irrelevant, for example, discussing at what time the class ends or correcting a misbehaving student. each relevant utterance was coded as a subcategory of the framework and subsequently combined into the four teacher roles of questioning. the teacher roles of questioning framework was adapted to account for moments when teachers intentionally give students space to speak. although these instances lacked a teacher utterance to code, the teacher’s decision not to speak can be more significant than the decision to speak. deliberate teacher silence implies that students have ownership of both the ideas and the activity. to address this, any time students took a minimum of four speaking turns without teacher input, a new sub-category of the participant role was created, labeled wait. several of these episodes included longer pauses in which students waited for teacher input, but the teacher allowed student discussion to continue without adding their own input. the final stage of coding assessed student argumentation. all student utterances were considered as a contribution to the whole-class discussion and analyzed to determine if they constructed arguments during these utterances. any arguments created by students in this lesson were coded, making no distinction between arguments that were presented on their own or those that were produced as a challenge to another student’s claim, that is, a counter-argument. all of the arguments presented in the analysis of this study related directly to the science content of the lessons, but this framework could also be used for a variety of other arguments. when students constructed arguments, these instances were analyzed to identify if students offered a justifying move. justifying moves were coded as ar or ds, using criteria presented in table 2. in addition, it was examined whether students addressed the justifications presented by their classmates or merely presented their own isolated reasoning with no reference to arguments presented by their peers. in order to aid in this assessment, a visual representation of the whole-class discussion was used, including arrows to signify when a speaking turn responds to or refers back to a previous speaking turn. in order to portray discourse in greater detail, teacher roles of questioning and student argumentation are superimposed in a graphical representation (see figure 4 below and figures 8-11 in the findings section), similar to hiltunen et al. (2016) and lehesvuori et al. (2013). the dominant communicative approach in each episode is noted. arrows highlight the development of student analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a101 argumentation sequences and portray the individual speaking turns as part of a chain of communication (scott, mortimer, & aguiar, 2006). arrows show when a speaking turn refers to or responds to any previous turn. the arrows point backward to illustrate how discourse unfolds in response to preceding turns. the transcript for these episodes is included in quotations alongside the graphical representation to illustrate the progression of the discussion. due to space limitations, the transcript is edited for readability. for example, a few sentences have been summarized by phrases written in parentheses, and stutters and most false starts have been edited. figure 4. extract from visual representation used to illustrate teacher roles of questioning and student justifying moves. reliability to assess reliability, a second researcher also coded teacher roles of questioning using a sample consisting of approximately 20% of the data. inter-rater agreement was measured using cohen’s kappa. substantial agreement was found for a set of 33 teacher utterances, κ = .684, with 79% agreement, interpreted using criteria discussed by landis and koch (1977). a third researcher also coded student argumentation to assess reliability. almost perfect agreement (97%) was found for a set of 192 student turns (κ = .882) in determining whether or not a student turn included a justifying move (includes both ds and ar). designating turns as ds or ar involved deeper interpretations of discourse. of the 27 turns coded as justifying moves, moderate agreement was found in designating turns as ds or ar (κ = .516), with 82% agreement. after comparison, researchers negotiated all disagreements. findings overview of the whole-class discussions the whole-class discussion from maria’s lesson lasted 11 minutes and was divided into five episodes based on topics of discussion. in each episode, maria asked student groups if their graph was correct, and groups supported their claim. maria closed the lesson with a summary of the discussion. johanna’s whole-class discussion lasted 25 minutes and consisted of nine episodes. during the first eight episodes, johanna guided students to focus on supporting arguments from student groups, breaking the discussion into smaller pieces. johanna also closed the lesson by summarizing the main points. figures 5 and 6 show each teacher’s use of communicative approaches throughout the entire discussion. in the graphs, the most teacher-centered communicative approach is positioned at the bottom of the vertical axis, and the most student-centered communicative approach is positioned at the top of the analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a102 vertical axis. the other two categories of communicative approach are placed in between, but it should be noted that there is no clear basis for the ranking of these other two, that is, the graph is not intended to convey that a dialogic/noninteractive approach should be considered to be “ranked more highly” than authoritative/interactive. although both teachers were directed to have the same lesson objectives, maria used an authoritative communicative approach more often than johanna did. as shown in figure 5, dialogicity was present in the middle of the discussion, but maria opened and closed with sequences of authoritative talk by asking closed questions and reformulating student contributions. as shown in figure 6, johanna used a dialogic/interactive communicative approach for the first eight episodes and closed with an authoritative/noninteractive communicative approach. both teachers used some amount of dialogic/interactive communicative approach to encourage students to share their ideas and engage in critical discussions with other groups. both teachers also used an authoritative/noninteractive communicative approach to emphasize the scientific perspective when closing the discussion. figure 5. the dominant communicative approach used by maria during episodes of whole-class discussion. the vertical sorting of communicative approaches is not intended to signify that they are ranked quantitatively and is used only to visualize shifts between communicative approaches. figure 6. the dominant communicative approach used by johanna during episodes of whole-class discussion. the vertical sorting of communicative approaches is not intended to signify that they are ranked quantitatively and is used only to visualize shifts between communicative approaches. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a103 shifting the focus to teacher roles of questioning, all four roles were observed at some point in both lessons. this is represented in figure 7, which shows the frequency of questioning roles used by each teacher during dialogic or authoritative episodes. the dispenser role dominates authoritative episodes but is rare in dialogic episodes. in dialogic episodes, the moderator role was most common for both teachers, accounting for over half of teacher utterances. the use of the coach and participant roles varied slightly between teachers. in dialogic episodes, maria used the coach and participant roles sparingly, combining to approximately 15% of teacher utterances (n = 34). in slight contrast, the coach and participant roles accounted for over 30% of teacher utterances (n = 100) in dialogic episodes in johanna’s lesson. figure 7. relative frequency of teacher roles of questioning, grouped by teacher and communicative approach. data labels indicate the number of utterances within categories. figure 7 also shows how the teachers used roles of questioning in conjunction with communicative approaches. in this study, authoritative episodes are characterized by the dispenser role, while dialogic episodes include all roles. this implies that while staying within the bounds of a single communicative approach, a teacher can use a variety of roles of questioning to serve different functions. this is exemplified later in this text in figure 11, where johanna utilizes four roles within a dialogic/interactive episode. from these general observations of the lessons, we can see that a variety of teacher questioning roles can be used within both dialogic and authoritative episodes. simply describing an episode as authoritative or dialogic does not provide sufficient nuance to describe the types of questioning routines that a teacher may be using. similarly, depicting the frequency of teacher questioning roles tells very little about how these roles were used and how these may have impacted students’ contributions. episode-level analysis for further analysis of discourse, we examined individual episodes of classroom discussion with a greater level of detail, utilizing the teacher roles of questioning framework (chen et al., 2017), presented in figure 2 and table 1, and the coding of student argumentation using justifying moves (hähkiöniemi et al., 2022), previously presented in table 2. overall, this study revealed some instances of students sharing analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a104 articulating reasoning (ar), but more often, students only provided describing support (ds) for claims. the following episodes of discussion in figures 8–11 are used as examples to examine how teachers used different roles of questioning to support student argumentation and dialogic aspects of argumentation. these episodes were selected to highlight different aspects of how teacher questioning roles could be used in argumentative discussions. in each graph, teacher roles of questioning were plotted along the left, and student argumentation was plotted along the right. quotations were included for turns contributing to the content-related discussion. for reference, see the fact cards and graphs used in the lesson in appendix a. in order to focus on the content-related ideas, some speaking turns have been rephrased for brevity, but the content and purpose of the speaking turns remain true to the transcript. arrows highlighted instances when a turn refers back to or responds to a previous turn. the dominant communicative approach was noted for each episode. figure 8. maria episode 1 demonstrates an authoritative/interactive communicative approach. arrows indicate instances in which turns refer to or respond to previous turns. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a105 the first episode (figure 8) from maria’s lesson was coded as authoritative/interactive, exemplified by teacher turns emphasizing the teacher’s ideas interspersed with limited student responses. maria used the moderator role (turn 4) to invite niklas to verbally present his group’s argument (turns 6 and 12). although she retained control of turn-taking, maria supported student argumentation at first by showing explicit interest in students’ ideas in the moderator role. however, maria’s use of the dispenser role to follow up on niklas’s argument did not support further development of the argument. in turns 13 and 16, maria substantially reworded and transformed ideas presented by niklas in turns 12 and 15. in these turns, maria added new information and presented the argument as her own without approval from niklas. specifically, niklas made no reference to the graph itself and stated that a change in temperature was required for a (phase) change. maria corrected that statement by restating that heating, or the addition of energy, is required for a phase change to occur. due to our observation that the teacher was taking ownership of the ideas by focusing specifically on this additional information and controlling the questioning routine, these turns have been coded as dispenser. in turns 19 and 21, maria used closed questioning to present the relevance of fact card g in support of the claim that the graph was incorrect. by the time other students were invited to evaluate the argument (turn 25), the teacher had taken ownership of the claim that the graph was incorrect, shutting down divergent thinking. in this context, turn 25 was just a rhetorical device to close the discussion. in summary, this episode showed a mostly authoritative/interactive communicative approach with an emphasis on confirming one justification. at the beginning of the episode, we saw an invitation for student ideas as the teacher used the role of moderator, but then upon recognizing the elements of a correct answer, the teacher took ownership of the ideas with the role of dispenser to emphasize this correctness. although niklas constructed a well-supported argument, maria used the dispenser role to focus on clarifying the scientific perspective rather than prompting dialogic argumentation. instead of immediately bringing this claim forward to the rest of the class for it to be further evaluated, justified, or challenged, the teacher focused on confirming one specific justification. prompting dialogic argumentation, in this case, would not have been limited only to finding students who disagree with this claim. it could also have included finding students who agreed but found other ways of justifying their claims. in this way, the teacher could have allowed students to directly compare their arguments with niklas’s argument, drawing out argumentation that is more dialogic in nature. in episode 3 of maria’s discussion (figure 9), maria used a dialogic/interactive approach to explore jenna’s group’s arguments. although there is not a high level of student-student dialogic interaction present, the teacher was frequently non-evaluative of jenna’s statements. therefore, this episode, on the whole, was considered somewhat dialogic and coded accordingly. following maria’s invitation (turn 71), jenna shared ar (turns 72–74). these turns were coded as ar because jenna explicitly stated the reasoning leading from her observations to her claim. in turns 73 and 75, maria used the coach role to elicit a further element of jenna’s argument. however, jenna’s response did not match maria’s expectations, so maria used the dispenser role (turns 77 and 81) to make the point. in turns 80 and 82, jenna was no longer constructing her own argument but instead was filling in the blanks of maria’s questioning routine. in these turns (77 and 81), maria took control of the ideas, as well as the activity of the questioning routine, matching with the role of dispenser. these turns also illustrate the challenges in coding the teacher roles of questioning. superficially, it may seem that this exchange would fit the role of moderator (specifically the subcategory of recognize refer to table 1), as it has the surface-level features of asking for student input. however, upon further consideration, it was our interpretation that maria was not recognizing a student’s idea, but rather maria was the one who had recognized that there is indeed another fact card that could have been used to support this claim. upon recognizing this, maria prompted a student to read this fact card aloud for the class. this case may also reflect that true ownership of the analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a106 activity or idea is never solely possessed by one party or another and that the reality of classroom discourse is that there is a degree of shared ownership, reflected by the continuum represented in both figures 1 and 2. figure 9. maria episode 3 demonstrates a dialogic/interactive communicative approach. arrows indicate instances in which turns refer to or respond to previous turns. in turn 84, maria returned to the moderator role, which supported jenna in sharing more arguments. maria’s question at the end of the episode in turn 96 was again more of a token gesture, as she moved on analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a107 after receiving brief confirmation from students without waiting for further input. similar to the first episode from maria’s lesson (figure 8), the teacher engaged mainly with one student. although this episode contained ar, indicating a higher level of argumentation, no other students further elaborated on or challenged jenna’s idea, revealing a low level of dialogicity between students in relation to the justifications or evidence used in jenna’s argument. thus, this episode showed student argumentation but did not show a good example of dialogic argumentation because it was mostly one student constructing and justifying their claims. this serves to illustrate how student argumentation can occur in the broader context of a dialogic episode, but the argumentation itself may be more monologic rather than dialogic. in this episode, maria supported precise arguments using the roles of moderator and coach but shifted to the dispenser role and focused on having only one student participate in the discussion. the episode as a whole was considered dialogic because the teacher was mostly non-evaluative of the students’ claims and used probing questioning in the role of moderator and coach to further open up a student’s argumentation. this episode showed the teacher pursuing a deeper justification of a claim of an individual. by using a dialogic communicative approach in a purposeful manner, maria invited student ideas and, more specifically, used the roles of moderator and coach to make these ideas more explicit. the teacher did not immediately confirm these ideas but remained neutral. this helped to elicit reasoning and supported the student in sharing their justifications. in summary, in this episode, we saw the roles of moderator and coach being used to help support one student to further justify their claims and share justifications with the class. figure 10 illustrates episode 4 of johanna’s lesson featuring a dialogic/interactive communicative approach. in this specific episode, johanna avoided the dispenser role altogether and employed the moderator role frequently, directing turns from one student to another. the first instance of argumentation (turns 121–124) was supported by the teacher’s open invitation to share (turn 120) and neutral tone when echoing elias’s ideas (turn 123). leevi then shared a related claim with ds in turns 128, 136, and 138, partly supported by the teacher’s use of the coach role. in turn 127, johanna used the coach role to draw elias’s claim into question, inviting critical evaluation of the claim. this turn was coded as “coach”, as the teacher’s contribution was used to make elias’s implicit idea more explicit, exemplifying the “elicit” category of the coach role (refer to table 1). in turn 137, johanna used the coach role again to challenge leevi’s idea, prompting further ds. in turn 147, johanna used the moderator role to draw out two contrasting student ideas. in figure 10 we can visually see how johanna created links between two students’ statements. by juxtaposing opposing claims, johanna created an opportunity for students to engage directly with each other’s arguments, supporting dialogic argumentation through the examination of a counterargument. throughout the episode, johanna refrained from taking a stance in relation to any arguments, which may have encouraged more students to participate. johanna frequently referred back to previous turns, creating an interconnected chain of argumentation and explicitly presenting links between student ideas. students primarily maintained ownership of the ideas presented in this discussion, but johanna inserted clarifying questions and corrections alongside the students to further connect their ideas. johanna’s use of the pronoun “we” in turn 127 (figure 10) may indeed signify co-ownership of the ideas and frames this discussion as a joint venture in argumentation constructed by multiple participants. by combining multiple individual arguments together, johanna was able to enrich the argumentation of the students by requiring them to further inspect the links between their claims and evidence. adding this additional purposeful dialogic component onto their argumentation process created a genuine opportunity for students to exercise critical thinking and practice further explicating their arguments. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a108 figure 10. johanna's episode 4 demonstrates a dialogic/interactive communicative approach. arrows indicate instances in which turns refer to or respond to previous turns. note: turn 153, which features a brief confirmation from leevi, is omitted to limit the size of the image. this episode drew some similarities to maria’s episode 3 (figure 9), in the sense that both teachers used the role of moderator to make student claims more explicit, and both episodes would be considered dialogic/interactive. however, in this episode, the moderator role was used to interanimate multiple student ideas rather than focusing on one justification of the claim. the moderator role was characterized by analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a109 teacher control of the activity, and in this case, we saw johanna acting as an expert moderator by intentionally piecing together multiple contrasting student ideas. this created an opportunity for more dialogue between students and supported multiple students to contribute to dialogic argumentation. figure 11. johanna's episode 3 demonstrates a dialogic/interactive communicative approach. arrows indicate instances in which turns refer to or respond to previous turns. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a110 figure 11, showing a portion of episode 3 of johanna’s lesson, depicts how the participant role can support students in engaging with each other’s arguments. after matias presented ds in support of his claim in turn 93, the teacher played the role of a silent participant, allowing students to carry the conversation for six turns. this unrehearsed argumentation included ds and a high level of student-student dialogicity, representing dialogic argumentation. in figure 11, this unbroken chain of student-student discussion is represented by the arrows, which stay for several turns on the side of the students. of note, the moderator role seems to have been required to initiate this sequence, but the participant role allowed it to continue. johanna used the dispenser role (turn 100) to limit the scope of the discussion, but the students quickly regained ownership of the discussion. johanna then used a 10-second period of wait time before asking a question (turn 102), giving students ample time to respond directly to each other and allowing students to retain ownership of the activity. of all of the episodes analyzed in these lessons, this episode (johanna episode 3) showed perhaps the best example of students directly engaging each other in dialogic argumentation. many structural elements of arguments were presented, including claims, evidence, and rebuttals. more importantly, students were engaged in critical assessment of the claims and evidence presented by their peers. students in the class were motivated and willing to critique their classmates in a constructive manner, but the teacher also played a role in supporting this. in this episode, johanna maintained a dialogic/interactive communicative approach and used the participant role to allow students to carry on the discussion without the need for further evaluation or direction from the teacher. as the teacher remained more of a passive participant in this episode, we can characterize some moments in this episode as examples of dialogue with authenticity, given the lack of explicit direction from the teacher at times. the absence of teacher evaluation or explicit teacher orchestration of this discussion gave ownership of the ideas and activity to the students. the students, in turn, used the opportunity to listen to each other and challenge the arguments presented by their peers. discussion the first research question explores how the teacher roles of questioning and communicative approaches can be used to characterize different ways of orchestrating argumentative whole-class discussions. at the episode level, this analysis revealed some similarities to cycles of opening up and closing down classroom talk, as discussed by scott and ametller (2007). this is exemplified by episodelevel analysis of maria’s lesson, which showed a period of opening up from authoritative/interactive talk to dialogic/interactive talk, followed by a period of closing down to authoritative/interactive and authoritative/noninteractive talk (see figure 5). similarly, johanna used dialogic/interactive talk for the majority of the lesson and also closed down the lesson with authoritative/noninteractive talk. transitions between types of communicative approach aligned with changes in teaching purpose (lehesvuori et al., 2013), as dialogic discussions served argumentation-related objectives while closing explanations clarified content-related objectives. by analyzing these episodes with multiple lenses, we were able to characterize some episodes as more clearly authoritative, featuring the role of dispenser, in which the teacher maintained ownership over classroom ideas and activities (e.g., maria episode 1, figure 8). using these frameworks also enabled us to characterize a variety of dialogic episodes. these included maria episode 3 (figure 9), showing a dialogic episode in which the teacher used the moderator and coach roles primarily to pursue one justification in more depth, and johanna episode 4 (figure 10), in which the teacher used the moderator role to bring together multiple opposing viewpoints to support dialogic argumentation. in both of these episodes, we have characterized the teacher using dialogue with a clear and sometimes limited purpose. in contrast, we have characterized johanna episode 3 (figure 11) to represent dialogue with greater analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a111 authenticity, as johanna used the role of participant to remain passive and allow a chain of student-student dialogic argumentation to develop. these different ‘flavors’ of dialogicity, in turn, supported different kinds of student-student interaction and argumentation. the interaction between the communicative approach and teacher roles of questioning in these episodes is also generalized below in figures 12-13. these visualizations show the dominant teacher roles of questioning (circled), as well as movement from one role to another, represented by arrows between quadrants. figure 12. communicative approach and teacher roles of questioning present in maria episodes 1 and 3. figure 13. communicative approach and teacher roles of questioning present in johanna episodes 4 and 3. analysis using the teacher roles of questioning framework revealed that teachers played multiple roles but used the moderator role most to orchestrate discussions. teachers may see the moderator role as the safer alternative to the roles of coach or participant, which both entrust students with ownership of the activity. thus, as also reported by chen et al. (2017), the roles of coach and participant were less common than moderator. during authoritative episodes, teachers primarily used the dispenser role, but episodes included some dialogic moments supported by the moderator role. the second research question focuses on how different roles of teacher questioning can affect students’ contributions to argumentative discussions. specifically, our main focus was on dialogic argumentation formulated by students and the questioning roles used by the teacher to support this. this study illustrated how teachers can support argumentation by using roles besides that of the authoritative analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a112 voice in the classroom (mcneill & pimentel, 2010). the most authoritative dispenser role did very little to support students in elaborating on their justifications or engaging with one another’s arguments, in fact, it stifled this (e.g., maria episode 1, figure 8). the moderator role allowed ideas to be shared and supported a basic level of student argumentation, in which students presented their claims and offered some justification (e.g., maria episode 3, figure 9). in episodes that featured dialogic argumentation with students responding directly to elements of other students’ oral arguments, teachers used the moderator role to allow students to make connections between their claims and the ideas of others and supported them in defending their ideas or scrutinizing the claims of others (e.g., turns 148-150 in johanna episode 4, figure 10). this created opportunities for dialogic argumentation, as opposed to a single student explaining their justification in isolation. when teachers used the role of coach to bring students’ ideas up for scrutiny, students frequently responded by providing more evidence for their claims. students also may have used the teacher’s critique of a classmate’s idea as an invitation for further exploration, but our analysis presented here cannot directly support that claim. although uncommonly used in these episodes, the role of participant allowed students to engage freely with each other’s ideas (johanna, episode 3, figure 11). as discussed by davies et al. (2017), students have low motivation to share ideas if the teacher exercises power as the subject authority. in a study of the quality of students’ oral arguments in small groups (chin and osborne, 2010), there were some moments when teachers intervened in students’ small-group discussions, resulting in an oppressive effect on the quality of arguments created by students, as the students began simply responding to teacher questions and no longer carrying on their own discussion. thus, students may lack some motivation to critically evaluate or respond to each other’s arguments if the teacher controls the activity. by giving students ownership of the ideas and the classroom activity in the participant role, the onus is put on them to carry the discussion rather than simply filling gaps in a teacher’s rhetorical sequence. although we have very limited examples of the use of the participant role in this study, we observed it being used to allow dialogic argumentation to continue once a strand of discussion has already begun. however, this demands that students readily engage in discussion, requiring a classroom culture in which student-student interactions are encouraged (mcneill & pimentel, 2010). in summary, within authoritative episodes, the dispenser role was used to clarify and communicate the scientific perspective. the moderator role was also present in authoritative episodes but used in a limited amount and followed up by the dispenser role. this was interpreted to hinder dialogic argumentation. in dialogic episodes, the other three teacher questioning roles were used more frequently to encourage students to elaborate, compare, and continue challenging each other’s ideas, which supported dialogic argumentation. however, due to a limited data set, generalizations should not extend beyond describing discourse in the episodes analyzed in this study. specifically, the minimal occurrence of the role of participant leads to further questions of how teachers might use this questioning role in other settings other than whole-class discussions. analysis of discourse in this study also supplies insight into teachers’ values, which in turn, affected student argumentation and dialogicity. maria used questioning roles that frequently rephrased student contributions to create precise explanations, reflecting values of correctness. johanna used questioning roles that allowed for the tension of uncertainty to build, placing value on student contributions and critical thinking. due to her use of the dispenser role, students in maria’s class may have viewed the goal of discussing to be getting the right answer, as noted by mcneill and pimentel (2010). maria’s rigid questioning routines placed high value on correctness, while johanna’s balance between dialogue with authenticity and dialogue with purpose placed value on sharing reasoning. student argumentation reflected this foundational difference in values, as argumentation strands from maria’s lesson involved only a single analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a113 student sharing a refined argument, while johanna’s lesson included up to four students engaged in dialogic argumentation. our multi-layered analysis enabled broad interpretations of the whole-class discussion as a whole while also revealing the effects of individual speaking turns. firstly, we characterized the overall communicative approach of episodes within the discussion. this allowed us to see the flow of the discussion as a whole and highlighted the overall differences between the two teachers. using the teacher roles of questioning framework revealed that even within episodes that had the same communicative approach, the ownership of ideas and the activity traded between the students and teacher to varying degrees. this allowed us to further characterize episodes on the basis of questioning roles. for example, both maria episode 3 and johanna episode 3 were categorized as dialogic/interactive, but maria predominantly used dialogue with more of a clear purpose (alexander, 2006), shifting mostly between moderator and dispenser, while students in johanna’s class were afforded a greater opportunity to follow up on each other’s claims. specifically, johanna’s use of the role of participant may serve as a useful indicator to characterize moments of dialogue with more authenticity and equal consideration of ideas (bakhtin, 1986). analyzing the justifying moves that students used in their arguments further revealed that individual turns by the teacher sometimes further supported individual students in explicitly sharing the reasoning leading to a justification. lastly, considering student justifications in the context of other student turns showed how teacher roles of questioning could support students in challenging or elaborating on justifications that had already been shared, revealing some instances of dialogic argumentation. a major limitation of this study is a small set of data, limited to only 2 whole-class discussions from 2 teachers. the teacher roles of questioning framework could specifically be utilized further with a greater variety of lessons, including lessons where the teacher works alongside students in practical learning tasks or student investigations rather than analyzing whole-class discussions only. in our data set, the teachers frequently maintained ownership of the activity in whole-class discussions, and the roles of coach and participant were quite rare. however, it seems likely that teachers would use the roles of coach and participant more frequently when supporting students in individual tasks or group work when students inherently possess more ownership of the activity. these more informal 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(2004). research report: students' discussions in practical scientific inquiries. international journal of science education, 26(1), 25–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950069032000072764 appendix a. graphs and fact cards used in the lesson activity graphs analyzed by students: analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a117 statements written on fact cards: ● fact card a: at a temperature of 0 °c, the solid structure of ice breaks down and ice melts into water. ● fact card b: at a temperature of 100 °c, the bonds between water molecules are broken, and water boils into steam. ● fact card c: the device used to warm water, for example, a water kettle, works using a constant power output, in other words, for the entire time, it uses the same amount of energy for heating. analyzing science teachers’ support of dialogic argumentation jonathan kilpelä, jenna hiltunen, markus hähkiöniemi, kaisa jokiranta, sami lehesvuori, pasi nieminen, jouni viiri dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2023.547 | vol. 11 no. 3 (2023) a118 ● fact card d: energy is required in order to break the bonds between molecules. ● fact card e: if there is a rising section on a graph, the temperature of the substance increases. ● fact card f: if there is a horizontal section on a graph, the temperature of the substance does not change. ● fact card g: during the time of a phase change, the temperature does not change. ● fact card h: when the bonds between molecules are formed or broken, the thermal energy is not left over to change the temperature. ● fact card i: during the time of a phase change, the bonds between molecules are broken or are formed. ● fact card j: when a substance is heated, its molecules begin to move faster. ● fact card j*: the density of water is greatest when water is at a temperature of 4°c. ● fact card k: the boiling point of water is 78 °c. *the lesson materials supplied to teachers accidentally included two fact cards labeled “j.” new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. . dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc47 dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions: the use of mederu to understand moyatto experiences itsuki sano nagoya university, japan mariko morishita kyoto university, japan hiroshi nishigori nagoya university, japan abstract this study discusses professional love in the context of online sessions where healthcare professionals employ a dialogic framework to reflect on or explore how discomfort arises in their interprofessional practices. the goal of this study is to provide frontline practitioners and educators with insights into what constitutes professional love in dialogue and to suggest avenues of support for the development of continuous health profession education through such dialogue. we took a reflective writing approach based on observations of dialogic practices. this essay represents a reflective writing conducted by the first author as he explored, in his own practice, love in dialogic interactions among professionals in online sessions. he established a study group in 2014, aiming to improve interprofessional collaboration through dialogue on moyatto, which is defined as emotional, cognitive, and physical distress experienced when individuals face conflicting communication with people who have different viewpoints and interests. we describe actual events that occurred in sessions and interactions that continue even without direct conversations after the conclusion of the session. the results indicate that the first step for professionals to experience love in their professional practice is to share the moyatto experiences without any quid pro quo in response to the other’s narrative. even after the session's conclusion, the participants continued to feel something that could not be verbalized because of the other’s alienness. therefore, the interactions comprising the exchanging of moyatto experiences can continue even without direct conversations, and such experiences can motivate participants to inquire about perspectives hitherto unknown to them. we postulate that this process can be regarded as mederu, a japanese sense of loving used by people to willingly observe and care for the diverse elements of others or materials. this transitional learning that transcends professional and disciplinary boundaries may need to recur at various points in a professional’s career, requiring more sustainable and stable educational resources. keywords: health professionals, love, interprofessional collaboration, interprofessional education, continuing education, dialogue, online meeting dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc48 itsuki sano graduated from sapporo medical university in 2005 and became a fellow of the japanese society of psychiatry and neurology (2007) and a designated physician of mental health by the minister of health, labour and welfare (2011). he is now a chief psychiatrist at the mie prefectural mental care center in japan and a visiting researcher at the center for medical education, graduate school of medicine, nagoya university. he is involved in several projects concerning the implications of interprofessional (interdisciplinary) and social justice education on the practice of health professionals. his research interests include continuing professional development, social justice education, interprofessional education, and dialogical education. he is also a cartoonist and works on integrating textual and visual language in dialogue. mariko morishita is a medical education researcher and a family physician. she has been interested in an analogical relationship between anthropological fieldwork and building knowledge in doctoring through medical practice. her interests originated from phenomenological understandings of subject matters she has encountered through her medical practice and education. after obtaining her phd in medical education at kyoto university (2023), she started her career as a faculty member at the department of patient safety, kyoto university hospital, with the hope of understanding medical practice in depth. she is also a teacher at the faculty development program for physicians, foundation course for medical education at the center for medical education, nagoya university (japan). during her sessions in the course, she encourages participants to narrativize their experiences and enhance their dialogues. professor hiroshi nishigori is a professor at the center for medical education, nagoya university graduate school of medicine. he graduated from nagoya university school of medicine in 1998 and became a fellow of the japanese society of internal medicine (2004) and a diplomate in primary care with the japan primary care association (2011). he obtained a master’s degree in medical education from the university of dundee in 2008 and completed a ph.d. in health professions education at maastricht university in 2020. his research interests include culture and medical professionalism (especially work ethics), hypothesis-driven physical examination (hdpe), and teaching and assessing behavioral and social sciences. he is currently the president of the japan society for medical education and an advisor to the ministry of education, culture, sports, science, and technology. ïïò introduction this paper discusses healthcare professionals’ experiences of love in their professional practice with other professionals in the context of interprofessional dialogue and collaboration (education). this love is shared among healthcare professionals rather than between patients and their caregivers. healthcare professionals’ main goal in their practice at a university or medical institution is to implement interprofessional collaboration for the benefit of patients or to teach trainees. little is known about dialogue and love in interprofessional collaboration, which is considered important but difficult to achieve in healthcare settings. specifically, we discuss professional love and dialogue in the context of online sessions in which healthcare professionals employ a dialogic framework to reflect on or explore the emergence of discomfort (moyatto in japanese) in their interprofessional collaboration or education. through this article, we share our insights into what constitutes professional love in interprofessional dialogue. the goal of this study is to provide frontline practitioners and educators with insights into what constitutes professional love in dialogue and to suggest avenues of support for the development of continuous health profession education through such dialogue. for that purpose, the reasons for discussing professional love and dialogue are first presented using the first author’s experience. second, we discuss the concept of love and examine previous literature dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc49 about how the concept of love has been explored in healthcare settings. the reviewed literature clearly showed that several studies consider professional experiences of love between healthcare professionals and patients (novick, & novick, 2000), but there are no studies of professional experiences of love among healthcare professionals. third, we describe the methods used to analyze the interactions of the dialogic online sessions among healthcare professionals. we adopted a reflective writing approach in this paper; reflective writing refers to writing for reflection and is a widely used method of considering things or seeking a deeper understanding of something (jasper, 2005). we illustrate specific examples of the online sessions with vignettes and examine what was happening there, using the perspectives of professional love and dialogue. finally, we discuss how the experiences of professional love and dialogue described in this paper can contribute to the education and practice of professionals, with reference to the norms of conventional healthcare ethics. the current situation in healthcare growing demand for interprofessional dialogue recently, it has been reported that 50% of the general population in developed nations live with chronic conditions, and their needs are numerous and complex (boersma, 2020; public health agency of canada, 2020). a similar situation can be seen in japan, where this study was conducted (mitsutake et al., 2019). furthermore, in mental healthcare settings (where the first author works), professionals must often deal with not only health issues but also social issues, such as interpersonal problems (bullying, abuse, violence, etc.) and controversial issues (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) (lalande et al., 2023). the patients’ needs are often amplified because cases are dealt with simultaneously in several branches of the welfare system involving a variety of actors. in other words, collaboration with “alien others” from different disciplines and professions is essential to address a range of issues (tajima, 2020; tajima, 2021). as a psychiatrist, the first author (is) routinely encounters patients with complex needs in hospitals that provide adult psychiatric care. the following case is one of the examples showing the complexity of care and the necessity for collaboration among healthcare professionals: patient a., a depressed man in his 40s, was admitted to is’s psychiatric hospital. a’s father said the mother couldn’t live with a because she was worried, anxious, and depressed all the time because of a’s problems. a’s partner, on the other hand, was willing to move in with him, hoping to eventually marry him once his condition improved. additionally, she understood that her support played an important role in the mental health treatment journey, but said it was not feasible. she has two children with her ex-husband. while raising them, she also cared for her elderly father at home. she also ran a boarding house for college students in her home to make a living. patient a. had also been helping with the boarding house, which was very helpful to her. however, she stated that while she could provide him with housing, she could not afford to pay him a salary or hire anyone else. when a. was discharged from the hospital, he woke up at 5:00 a.m. to make lunch boxes for the college students at the boarding house, even though he had not fully recovered from his illness. he also had to provide three meals every day to the college students. his partner was distressed, “i feel sorry for a., but i have no choice but to ask him to work at the boarding house.” on the other hand, she preferred traditional medicine and was adamantly opposed to putting a. on western medications, saying it would “rob him of his fertility.” when he lived with his partner, he often became depressed due to chronic fatigue. he had repeatedly interpreted his depression as being caused by his medications and discontinued them, which further exacerbated his condition. if various healthcare professionals are involved in this case, we could imagine how each specialist interprets this case from their own perspective. for example, psychiatrists focusing on neurobiology may attribute a’s poor antidepressant response to dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex. psychologists with an dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc50 emphasis on cognitive science may suggest that certain cognitive processes exacerbate a’s negative mood. pharmacists may want to know why patients choose to deviate from drug treatment. family therapists would say that family therapy is particularly helpful when family distress is present as a component of depression, as in the case of a. social workers may use a public health approach, looking at structural social factors (class, gender, poverty) rather than individual ones. on the other hand, a and his partner may focus on the realm of existence, personal meaning, and spirituality, which professionals tend to leave aside. all of these methods and approaches can be useful but may not be appropriate in every situation. the problem itself can change, and new aspects of the problem may emerge. if these practitioners do not collaborate to share information and expertise, they cannot obtain all relevant information to meet patient’s needs. preventable errors will continue to occur at a high rate and cause patient harm, unwanted hospitalisation, longer stay in the hospital, and even fatality (sassoli et al., 2020). furthermore, interesting and creative solutions for complex problems usually come from combining insights, information, and challenges that these different professionals have. professionals need to clarify how to understand and approach various aspects in different conditions and different circumstances through ongoing dialogue. in summary, we believe addressing patients with such complex needs requires a dialogic collaboration among specialists across different fields (geese et al., 2023; thistlethwaite et al., 2013). difficulties in initiating dialogue notably, it is difficult to initiate such dialogue in healthcare settings (reeves & lewin, 2004; reeves et al., 2009). the healthcare settings are busy environments, and many obstacles hinder interprofessional engagement. moreover, there is no time or space for professionals to get to know each other and engage in dialogue. for example, is often has experiences like the following: is is a psychiatrist with 18 years of experience, working in a 318-bed psychiatric hospital in central japan. in addition to himself, 15 doctors and 150 nurses are engaged in inpatient and outpatient services, including psychologists, pharmacists, nutritionists, occupational therapists, social workers, radiologists, and laboratory technicians. patients receiving inpatient services had a variety of acute medical problems; some were treated and discharged, while others were treated ineffectively and stayed longer. physicians working at this hospital also provided outpatient care. in other words, discharged patients were treated by the physician as outpatients, and if hospitalization was deemed necessary, the same physician was also in charge of inpatient care. therefore, with about 20 patients in seven wards at any given time, is treated about 100 outpatients a week. the hospital was divided into zones to include seven wards and an outpatient zone. the outpatient zone includes offices for professionals, such as physicians and psychologists. is frequented three of the seven wards; two of them housed acute patients, while the other housed subacute patients. each ward had retained a traditional arrangement of 50 beds. about 10 patient rooms were single-bed rooms, and the remaining 10 were multi-occupancy rooms (mostly four-bed rooms). the nurses’ station was located near the wards’ entrances. it was separated from the ward by a large clear acrylic window that enclosed a small space containing chairs, desks, and equipment. valuables and medications were also stored there, and the entrance and exit were locked to keep patients from going in. the nurses’ station was used as the meeting place for the concerned professionals, where they talked, wrote records, and made phone calls. at the nurses’ station, nurses often talked about non-work topics, for example, their families. the ward included two patient day rooms, several seclusion rooms, three examination rooms, a utility room, a family waiting room, bathrooms, toilets, washroom corners, and a laundry. each ward was staffed with 15 to 20 nurses, with half of them present in the ward at all times. in dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc51 is’s hospital, the attending doctor was in charge of each patient. each doctor had patients in various wards, and patients under their care were admitted wherever a bed was available. therefore, many doctors regularly visited each ward to see their patients, mainly in between outpatient visits. psychologists, pharmacists, and social workers were similarly stationed in offices located in the outpatient zone. sometimes, they would visit the wards in response to requests from the patients or the nurses. one morning, is entered the ward to check on his patient. she stayed in one of the patient day rooms and requested to be seen in an examination room; thus, is took her there, talked with her for about 15 minutes, and entered his notes in the electronic medical record. her symptoms improved, and she wanted to be discharged, so is went to the nurses’ station and informed b. nurse, who was in charge of her discharge. b. inquired about a post-discharge outpatient appointment, and is explained that he had already made one for the patient. however, during this conversation, b’s cell phone rang, and she answered it. is, therefore, sat down next to her, waiting to complete the discharge paperwork, but soon, another nurse called him to ask if he would come to the outpatient zone to handle a disturbed outpatient. at that time, b. was at the counter handling inpatients. is then spoke to another nurse who happened to be standing next to him (she was new, and is didn’t remember her name) and handed her the discharge papers. upon receiving the papers, the nurse stated that she would meet with the family of the newly admitted patient and leave the nurses’ station. by this time, a young physician had entered the nurses’ station and was checking with b. about the condition of the patient in his charge. while interprofessional dialogue is important, several barriers impeded its occurrence in the case described above. first, the wards are busy environments (reeves et al., 2009). at any given time, a wide variety of people (patients, family members, and many professionals) can be in or pass through the ward. interprofessional collaboration in this environment comprises simple and formal task-related interactions, usually initiated by a doctor providing information or instructions to a nurse (reeves & lewin, 2004). these interactions are business-like, focus on the patients’ matters, and provide few opportunities for professionals to express their expertise. many exchanges are initiated abruptly and without social niceties, such as addressing others by their name/designation or greeting them, and there is little emotional interaction. sometimes, professionals interact without knowing the other person’s name or specialty. in other words, if they have a query, they usually look around the ward and ask professionals who are performing other tasks but might be able to answer it. interprofessional interactions rarely include small talk; social interactions occur only when the ward is quiet, that is, when it does not delay the completion of tasks. several studies have reported that these terse, task-oriented interactions between physicians and nurses are central to interprofessional exchanges in hospital wards (reeves & lewin, 2004; reeves et al., 2009). in comparison, the exchanges among the nurses are quantitatively and qualitatively richer (reeves & lewin, 2004). emotional exchanges are relatively frequent within the nursing group, particularly in nurse stations where there are no patients (reeves & lewin, 2004). a second possible explanation for the difficulty in initiating interprofessional dialogue is differences in professional roles. professional roles are prescribed sectorally, shaping the identities of professionals who practice different tasks. for example, the training culture of physicians differs from that of nurses and focuses more on actions and outcomes than on relationships (hall, 2005). therefore, in physicians’ work practice, they prioritize methods of work that are task-oriented, have clear outputs, and separate the public and private (fletcher, 1998). conversely, tasks such as interprofessional dialogue and team building are often coded as private-sphere feminine activities that are outside the definition of work and competence (fletcher, 1998). for this reason, nurses may find it difficult to dialogue with physicians, even though they can do so with other nurses (reeves & lewin, 2004). dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc52 third, neoliberalism, which has been the dominant ideology in healthcare settings since the 1970s, is considered one of the factors that redefine professional roles and impede the expansion of interprofessional dialogue (laguardia & oelke, 2021). neoliberalism is a form of capitalism characterized by deregulation, austerity, and individualism, on the assumption that if markets were allowed to function without restraint, they would be able to serve all economic needs and generate full employment for all those who wish to work (harvey, 2005). neoliberal reforms in healthcare have led to more direct surveillance and performance evaluation of frontline practitioners by senior managers and increased competition within and outside organizations (moth, 2020). in addition, frequent service restructuring has led to staff reductions and colleagues competing for fewer posts. some reports indicate that neoliberalism has contributed to competition, inequality, and oppression rather than collaboration and dialogue between healthcare professionals (cohen, 2016). as a result, interactions in the wards are dominated by “conversations” limited to technical terms among peers who mutually believe they share task-related knowledge and experience. bakhtin called these mental states “automatization” (bakhtin, 1979/1984). automatization refers to mental states in which speakers exchange their intentions without a conscious sense of controlling language with partners whom they believe share knowledge with them (tajima, 2021). automatization does not make people aware of the ambiguity of language, and conversations may become superficial. such a conversation is reported as a common mechanism in complex, busy hospital environments because it allows work to be performed efficiently and is not interrupted by unrelated topics of conversation (reeves & lewin, 2004). however, in recent years, reports have emerged about the unintended harm caused by prioritizing professional conversations about complex problems that essentially require a dialogue with others (humphris, & hean, 2004; laming, 2003; the bristol royal infirmary inquiry, 2001). in exchanges where professionals are expected to communicate without critiquing existing ideologies, the uniqueness of each perspective is less likely to be respected. consequently, such professional groups are prone to groupthink, which can lead to a lack of diversity and innovation or rare but fatal accidents (kaba et al, 2016; janis, 1991). healthcare professionals require dialogic collaboration where they work together at a deeper level to address the complex needs of patients in the healthcare field. in collaboration with other professions and institutions, one’s ideas or ideologies may be criticized or denied. such criticism is needed to encourage professionals to think differently about the ideologies that are automatically accepted in comfortable environments (tajima, 2017). theoretical frameworks and the literature review in the following sections of the paper, we explore what it means for professionals to “show love in professional settings” to other professionals in the context of online sessions that require the use of a dialogic framework. first, we define the concepts of dialogue and love in this essay. based on the definition and previous literature on love in healthcare settings (novick & novick, 2000), we develop a theoretical lens for analyzing the interactions of dialogic online sessions among healthcare professionals. the concept of love is discussed in various contexts and disciplines. there is some overlap between english and japanese understandings of love, but not in all cases. therefore, we review the types of love in dialogue, the discourse on love in japan (research setting), and then explain the significance of discussing love in healthcare. dialogue according to the russian literary researcher and philosopher bakhtin, dialogue is a form of communication with others (bakhtin, 1979/1984). it refers to critical communication with others that allows participants to investigate fixed and opposing ideologies from various perspectives to create a new ideology for coexistence (tajima, 2021). this process of dialogue, which bakhtin calls “estrangement,” involves dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc53 bilateral investigations of authoritative ideologies rather than unilateral attacks on them (bakhtin, 1975/1981; tajima, 2017). speakers criticize others’ ideologies but also welcome others’ criticisms of their own thinking ambivalently in the context of bakhtin’s use of estrangement. in conversations with peers, on the other hand, it is expected that speakers will understand each other without the need for deliberate verbalization because they share ideologies and values (tajima, 2021). speakers in dialogue need to verbalize meanings that could be omitted as shared knowledge among their peers, clarify responses to criticism, and be conscious of linguistic expressions deemed acceptable by the other party (tajima, 2021). only then can the profession examine ideologies from each speaker’s ambivalent perspective, independently of their affiliated communities, and gain novel perspectives on complex issues (tajima, 2017). therefore, professionals who seek to collaborate effectively need to shift from an automatizationbased conversation to an estrangement-based dialogue. the shift from automatization-based conversation to estrangement-based dialogue requires participants to assume that others are criticizing them (tajima, 2021). bakhtin states that dialogue with others inevitably causes emotional pain because the speaker’s view may be criticized or negated (bakhtin, 1990). participants must manage negative emotions related to criticism, which is easier said than done. when overwhelmed by negative emotions, participants may struggle to contain themselves and appropriately deal with their emotional load. they may also find it difficult to divert their attention away from the source of their emotional upset. the inability to reign in automatic negative thoughts and anxieties can lead to a lack of openness and creativity, disrupting the participant’s dialogue. they have to leave the situation if they are overly emotional. in such stressful situations, verbal exchanges between speakers require the following type of affection. love love in this paper is referred to in the context of dialogue, which excludes love that is idealized religiously1 or considered psychopathological2. moreover, this section does not aim to review the vast amount of research on love but to introduce existing discourses and studies on love that are relevant to the objective of this research and to clarify its academic contribution. the objective is to provide frontline practitioners and educators with insights into what constitutes professional love in dialogue. during a dialogue, a safe and familiar environment for the speaker is often invaded by the external world. bakhtin used the word “transgression” to refer to outsideness, suggesting an invasion of safe and familiar environments from the outside world (bakhtin, 1990). in addition, bakhtin proposed acquired emotions such as love as factors for overcoming the pain accompanying the critical transgressions that inevitably arise in dialogue with others (bakhtin, 1990). according to tajima (2021), “love” in this context refers to the affection that accompanies the verbal exchange between speakers. he further argued that enabling critical self-examination may require a relationship based on mutual trust in which both parties can enjoy exchanging criticisms in a way that makes each other wiser and is more beneficial (tajima, 2021; tajima, 2023). it may also be helpful for individuals to listen without jumping to conclusions, easily 1 religious types of love describe the relationship between god and human beings. for example, a distinction of the love which has been taken for granted in many christian contexts worldwide is drawn from anders nygren (1953). he argued that eros is the term for platonic, self-centred love that strives for union with the divine realities, while agape, denoting the christian concept of love, is the free, divine movement towards human beings (tollefsen, 2021). agape is unselfish and is not motivated by any value in the recipient. 2 pathological love is the uncontrollable behavior and attitude of caring for a partner that results in neglecting the needs of the self (stravogiannis et al, 2018). romantic relationships provide a variety of positive effects, such as companionship, passion, and intimacy, but they can also be a source of great sorrow and suffering. the psychopathology of love and romantic relationships has historically received attention in psychiatry and clinical psychology because of its potential to lead to significant impairments and distress (berscheid, 2010). in these fields, many love scholars define love as an attitude, a predisposition to think, feel, and behave in positive ways toward another. however, most laypersons and some love scholars, including us, prefer to think of love as an emotion (berscheid, 2010). dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc54 interpreting what is heard and immediately believing that they are correct. these behaviors allow for listening while acknowledging that the other party may be right in some areas. bakhtin discussed two types of love in dialogue (bakhtin, 1990): (1) domestic love, which involves monologic interactions that transfer existing ideologies from parents to children without any critique, and (2) love toward non-family members, which involves dialogue comprising mutual critiquing of each speaker’s perspective. he tended to be critical of the automatic acceptance of ideology, which could lead to fixed conventional identities in each group (tajima, 2021). children are offered love and care by their parents, but they have difficulty separating them from parental ideology. of course, no family relationships exist without authority, although overly authoritarian parental love sometimes creates an oppressive environment for children. however, moderately authoritative discourse provides a basis for autonomous self-consciousness. healthy young people can question the ideologies fostered by their parents as their own consciousness develops. they come into conflict with domestic love. tajima called this natural affection for one’s family “homophonic love” (tajima, 2021). the other is an acquired affection for the alien other, and tajima referred to it as “polyphonic love” in relation to “philia,” that is, the greek concept of friendship love (tajima, 2021). the latter helps us overcome the pain accompanying the transgression in the online sessions. critical discourse without polyphonic love may result in unilateral attacks and the rejection of others’ perspectives. polyphonic love is discussed in this paper. the discourse on love in japan in japan, people often avoid saying the word “love” directly (yamane, 2008). expressions such as “i love you” are rare, not only among friends but also between partners. indeed, love is a key attribute of god in christianity. in the new testament, god’s love for humanity or the world is expressed in greek as agape (ἀγάπη) (tollefsen, 2021). however, japanese culture, which is polytheistic, does not assume an absolute and unchanging existence. consequently, the use of the word “love” in japan makes the people feel strongly about the existence of only one christian god (yamane, 2008). the word “love” has been deified and idealized as an attribute of god, and the japanese word love (愛 ai) has come to imply ostentation and seriousness. therefore, when this word is used in everyday interpersonal relationships, it can appear as a superficial and insubstantial lie, or have an eerie seriousness that often makes the listener suspicious (yamane, 2008). however, this does not imply that the japanese do not feel love. the expression “affection” (愛情 aijou or 情 jou) is often used to refer to the same feeling. second, the japanese word for love connotes an emotion (desire) that a person has for an object. it is often considered to be a longing or craving for something that is not one’s own. when japanese people use the word affection (情 jou)—an everyday term for love—they express it as “affection comes up in me (情が湧く jou ga waku)” or “affection is transferred to the other person（情が移る jou ga utsuru）” through interactions. it does not mean that “i” as the subject “love” the object, but that “i” as one of the components of the system is affected, and “affection” dwells within “me” or is transferred to others and affects them. affection (情 jou) embodies this dynamic japanese view of the system, but love (愛 ai) does not. hence, in japan, we say “affection (情 jou) comes up in me,” and not “love (愛 ai) comes up in me.” people tend to perceive themselves as components of a bigger system, that is, as within nature or as a part of the cosmic tide of time, where one influences and is influenced by many other components (togashi, 2009). this way of perceiving oneself may prevent everyday use of the word “love.” however, the reasons for the daring to use the theoretical lens of love in this study are discussed below. previous research on love in the healthcare field in the healthcare field, some people have a sense of responsibility, are high performers, and display proper behavior. in addition, such people are resilient, passionate, have a sense of initiation, and are described as loving their profession (bolandian-bafghi et al., 2022). some studies have discussed this love dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc55 for one’s profession (adib-hajbaghery et al., 2021; bolandian-bafghi et al., 2022). particularly, in japan, “the state of wellbeing that arises from devotion to activities one enjoys, which also brings a sense of fulfillment” is called ikigai, which means “purpose in life” (kumano, 2018). among life’s activities, workspecific happiness and fulfillment are called yarigai, and nishigori (2020) introduced this as a necessary component of a physician’s professionalism. how to love the physician’s profession and make it ikigai or yarigai has become an important topic for many physicians. however, when it comes to the love that physicians have for people rather than their profession, the discussion becomes more delicate. as mentioned earlier, in healthcare settings, emotions such as love have been disparaged as illegitimate forms of knowledge (seen as both gendered and unscientific) in contrast to reason (mcnaughton, 2013). consequently, there have been fewer contributions from perspectives beyond the biosciences and psychology in medical education, further diminishing the visibility and feasibility of emotions in educational and professional contexts (mcnaughton, 2013). of course, discussions about emotions such as love are not absent in the medical field (emakpor et al., 2010; rykkje et al., 2015; watson, 2003); love in the doctor-patient relationship has been examined in detail by psychoanalysts, such as freud (chatterjee, 2022). however, even though there is much discussion about the patient’s love for the physician, there is little discussion about the physician’s love for their patients/colleagues (novick & novick, 2000). according to novick & novick (2000), in psychoanalysis, love from the patient for the doctor has historically been considered the object of analysis. some patients create a “false connection” between their desires and the physician, placing the physician at the center of emotions that belong to the patient’s past. freud called this phenomenon transference (freud, 1961). in these cases, the physician can focus directly on and work with the conflict in the “here and now” of the therapeutic relationship, thereby allowing the patient to immediately confront his or her emotions. additionally, by working in and with transference, the patient and the physician can gain differentiated insight into the essential issues of the extratherapeutic relationship (hobson & kapur, 2005). by contrast, love from the doctor to a patient is conceptualized as relatively negligible (novick & novick, 2000). love was unavoidable and intense in therapy and plagued most analysts, and some female non-medical analysts found therapeutic significance in it (szasz, 1956; shulman, 2016). however, the dominant view was that the doctor’s reciprocal response was understood to be as unreal as the patient’s, cast as the doctor’s transference to the patient, and this countertransference was to be excluded from the analysis and instead examined through self-analysis or a return to personal treatment (novick & novick, 2000). this idea of transference and countertransference provides physicians with theoretical and technical tools to withstand the temptations inherent to all situations of power and authority. however, the love that physicians had since freud’s era has been, at best, illegitimate, outside the realm of debate, and often considered an ethical breach, and most physicians have been unable to express such love, for reasons linked to medical ethics (lothane, 2000). the most famous example of a doctor–patient relationship in the history of psychoanalysis is that between sabina spielrein (1885–1941) and carl gustav jung (1875–1961). this relationship included sexual intercourse, which is unthinkable today. for many years, this case has been considered a prime example of an ethical breach of the boundary between healthcare providers and patients during the treatment process, which may have influenced the subsequent taboo on the topic of love among healthcare providers (lothane, 2000). reasons for discussing love in healthcare settings there are several reasons for discussing professional love. first, there has been little research on the kind of love that professionals, especially medical professionals, have. only specific aspects of the categorization of love as a form of countertransference have been examined (novick & novick, 2000), and dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc56 within a limited doctor–patient relationship. to our knowledge, this is the first paper to discuss healthcare professionals’ experiences of love in their professional practice with other professionals. second, given the assumption that such healthcare providers have a need for love, there is even less discussion on how these needs are to be met. the reciprocal needs of healthcare professionals may be met directly by patients, but others may be met by colleagues (shapiro et al., 2019). moreover, it is not sufficient for the need for love to be met for a limited period. interprofessional dialogue on any one complex issue is not the endpoint of the patient care journey. professional love may be needed at various points in a professional’s career. for example, medical students and junior postgraduate trainees are already aware of the complex and ambiguous nature of healthcare settings (khatri et al., 2020; neve et al., 2017). small reflective groups might help students navigate these challenges that essentially require dialogue and love with others (collett et al., 2017). however, it is not clear what kind of dialogical place professionals need and how they incorporate love and develop mutual trusting relationships through dialogue. we do know that senior clinicians also experience uncertainty and complexity following their transition to independent specialty practice (smith et al., 2018). this study aims to discern love in dialogic interactions among healthcare professionals by describing the pain that accompanies transgressions and emotions in mutual interactions during online sessions. moreover, we explore and describe our study group regarding interprofessional distress (moyatto in japanese) and consider how such a group is being used to inform interprofessional practice (education). our overall goal is to provide frontline healthcare practitioners and educators with insights into what constitutes professional love in dialogue and to suggest avenues of support for the development of continuous health profession education through such dialogue. method context we developed online sessions as a strategy to facilitate open dialogue by reducing or removing some barriers. we found that the online sessions provided a sense of separateness that allowed professionals to detach themselves from the barriers in official healthcare settings (e.g., busy environments, neoliberalism). furthermore, online sessions create a dialogic space that requires professionals to temporarily move into a different role or identity from their official one (kumagai et al., 2015). participants had to agree to remove themselves from professional roles and identities to some extent. under these circumstances, the dialogic space is defined not by physical locale, time spent, or even physical isolation from other activities (kumagai et al, 2015). instead, it is defined by the intention to designate this time, this place, and this conversation as involving reflection and dialogue about the professional’s experience of themselves in the context of interprofessional collaboration. the first author, is, began such online sessions in 2014, aiming to improve interprofessional collaboration through dialogue on discomfort in healthcare settings. a project designed to articulate the theoretical underpinnings of its educational interventions ran from february 2022 to september 2023. this was a unique opportunity to explore love in interprofessional dialogue. is participated in the project and took reflective notes during and after the online sessions. in this study, these notes were used as information sources. nine multidisciplinary professionals participated in the project. through practice in healthcare settings, is had considered that interprofessional discomfort could facilitate dialogue and provide an opportunity for improved collaboration. is, therefore, decided to call the discomfort moyatto, a japanese adverb (or noun) representing distress that cannot be simply described by its discrete cause, an accompanied sense, and an emotion (sano et al., 2021). in the interprofessional practice, professionals experience moyatto when something taken for granted from a professional perspective is criticized or denied by a professional from other disciplines. moyatto (or moyamoya) originally dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc57 means “misty, foggy, or murky,” and is often used to describe a sense of uncertainty (iida & nishigori, 2021). this word also has positive connotations, suggesting a situation full of anticipation before the fog lifts and a new world arrives. when a conversation suddenly goes awry among peers who mutually believe they share knowledge and experience in the healthcare setting, they are keenly aware that the person in front of them is an alien other and may feel moyatto. in other words, moyatto offers a turning point for professionals who seek to collaborate effectively and need a shift from an automatization-based conversation to an estrangement-based dialogue. studying the phenomenon of moyatto provides an opportunity to understand different perspectives and views through dialogue and to learn from each other by accepting critical evaluation. the first author called the group, which was established in 2014 and studied the phenomenon, a study group on moyatto (sgm) (sano et al., 2023). the dialogue in the sgm focused on group members’ experiences at work. throughout 2024, during the process of writing this manuscript, nine multidisciplinary professionals from several institutions continued to meet once a month for a one-hour online session after work. professionals who have participated in sgm are nurses, psychiatric social workers, physicians, pharmacists, and medical clerks, and they work in a variety of settings, including educational institutions (colleges, universities), medical institutions (clinics, hospitals), and government organizations. they were encouraged to temporarily leave their workplaces and participate in one-hour online sessions once a month (sano et al., 2023). after the online sessions, the first author continued to make sgm accessible and responsive to participants: when participants consulted the sgm with questions or concerns, each would be invited to use social media to respond in a timely manner and with a thoughtful response that addresses their issues. additionally, the sgm hosted recurring in-person events (organizing workshops, attending trips, meals, and conferences) and actively encouraged participation to create a strong sense of community among participants. according to the 2023 data, the average duration of participation in the sgm was 2.7 years (sano et al., 2023). in the actual online sessions, each participant shared their moyatto experiences, which were mindfully viewed by all and reconstructed by using a new perspective that was provided by a member from another discipline (sano et al., 2023). for example, a doctor who interprets patients’ poor antidepressant responses from a neurobiological perspective may be at odds with pharmacists, nurses, and social workers in a healthcare setting but can gain new perspectives from members in the online session. in addition, participants can enjoy exchanging criticisms of each other’s professional culture (e.g., values, beliefs, attitudes, customs, behaviors) in a way that makes them wiser and more beneficial to each other. the online session began with the facilitator inviting a participant to share a moyatto experience. those willing to share their experiences went first and invited other participants who have had similar experiences to share their stories. each participant then shared a relevant experience so that the session provided a multifaceted view of the experience. the goal behind such sharing of experiences was not to solve the problem described in the shared moyatto experience but to help the participants to understand the situation in which the problem that led to the moyatto experience occurred, gain new insights and perspectives, and reconstruct their own experiences. in sgm, when a speaker shared their moyatto experience, listeners tried to understand the entire experience in a climate of openness so that the speaker felt welcome to share. they made a conscious effort to hear the speaker’s words and absorb the complete experience being communicated. they attempted to walk in someone else’s shoes and gained a good understanding of how the speaker had experienced moyatto and how they had felt. this method of understanding the individual differs from that which occurs during consensus-building skills, where participants ask clarifying questions and paraphrase what they have heard to ensure understanding. these skills involve “who–why” questions and are often used to investigate causal relationships analytically and linguistically; this method is not suitable for understanding moyatto, which could not be simply described by its discrete cause, accompanying senses, or emotions. in contrast, sgm participants often attempted to react to one another through responses, such dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc58 as gestures and onomatopoeias, that evoked certain images in the speaker’s mind. the synchronization of images and body movements among participants and the use of onomatopoeias and gestures that evoke certain images have been vigorously studied in fields such as traditional japanese dance (douglah, 2021; keevallik, 2015; yasui, 2023). according to these studies, using imagery and body movements to build connections between people strengthens the intimacy between speakers and listeners or between listeners and serves as the basis for subsequent loving relationships. data collection and analysis to analyze the interactions of the dialogic online sessions among healthcare professionals, we took a reflective writing approach. reflective writing refers to writing for reflection and is a widely used method of considering things or seeking a deeper understanding of something (jasper, 2005). the strength is in the capacity for reflective writing to develop the writer’s critical thinking and analytical abilities, contribute to their cognitive development, enable creativity and unique connections to be made between disparate sets of information, and contribute to new perspectives being taken on issues (jasper et al., 2005). this method was adopted in this study because it can help the writer develop an understanding of how an idea or theory, such as professional love in dialogue, works in practice from an “insider” source. using this method, the first author began the research in 2022. a total of nine professionals affiliated with the sgm (see appendix a) were recruited for the research study. all agreed to participate in the study and carry out the project to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of sgm. they were six nurses, two social workers, and one doctor (the first author) working in colleges, universities, hospitals, and national government organizations. all had more than 10 years of professional experience, including one ward manager, two professors and one chief physician. the first author reflected on his own experiences of activities, made notes, and collected data from february 2022 to september 2023. the notes were analyzed using the concepts of love and dialogue described in the section “theoretical frameworks and the literature review,” and relevant parts were identified for further reflection and analysis. to ensure that the research findings were trustworthy, we used member checks, made thick descriptions of our data to ensure the solidity of our findings, and maintained a detailed research record. to avoid self-indulgent reflection, is deliberately interacted with others throughout the research. he held seven in-depth conversations with the research team (mm and hn, both co-authors of this article) and worked in collaboration with them on the data collection and interpretation, as well as the writing of this paper. we also show the position is has chosen to adopt within this research study for the reader to assess the effect of the researcher’s identity on the research process and results. is is an experienced psychiatrist working towards completing a phd degree in critical reflective dialogue. is’s clinical experience has guided the choice of his research topic and research question. as a medical student, is participated in an experiential learning course in community medicine. remarkably, the collaborative work between the physicians, nurses, therapists, clerks, and care coordinators consisted of interactions that were generally more friendly, less rushed, and often involved a more in-depth discussion of patient care than it is common for interactions of such nature in hospital settings. the interactions that is participated in during the abovementioned collaboration also often included information on patients' social problems, humor, and laughter. these interprofessional and social interactions provided the involved professionals with an opportunity to understand different perspectives and views through dialogue and to learn from each other by accepting critical evaluation. being individual agents, the healthcare providers appeared to conduct everyday resistance to the institutional environment in municipal healthcare sector, which bakhtin called “automatization.” is became a psychiatrist but sometimes felt it difficult to initiate such a dialogue in hospital settings. over time, in these clinical settings, is became frustrated with the lack of opportunity to explore the institutional environment of healthcare and critically reflect on the social structures due to an emphasis on practicing under professional control. is decided to establish the sgm in 2014, with the aim dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc59 to enhance interprofessional dialogue provision and thereby improve clinical decision-making and staff wellbeing. is's clinical and personal background has continued to shape the research he is undertaking. findings this section includes six cases from representative episodes that were drawn from the reflective writing notes and reconstructed as vignettes to exemplify the themes in each subsection and share various dialogic practices with the reader. we then highlighted areas where the realities of love in dialogic interactions among professionals were more nuanced than the research team initially anticipated based on reading the existing literature. we were interested in exploring is’s experiences of love in online sessions and how emotions such as love may work as factors for overcoming the pain that accompanies the critical transgressions that inevitably arise in dialogue with others. we also focused on identifying is’s and other participants’ reactions and attitudes to these pains and processes through is’s perspective. the following three subsections describe the sgm participants’ attempts to understand others in online sessions. these attempts could serve as a basis for loving relationships between participants and encourage them to overcome difficult emotions, such as anger and pain, that were generated by their dialogues. after these subsections, we discuss how the participants separated their experiences from others’ experiences. they were in tension between standing their ground on their own experiences and being profoundly open to others and other experiences. in other words, they were able to choose their level of involvement in the dialogue, engaging fully in it or not listening too much. their own experiences could be given to other participants without any quid pro quo. in this situation, they just presented their experiences and did not immediately seek solutions. finally, this study showed that the interaction in such online sessions had a long-lasting impact on the participants’ professional experience. the following six cases have been chosen as they allow us to explore how love and dialogue among healthcare professionals with different backgrounds emerged. the comprehensive discussion following the six cases deepen our understanding of love and dialogue in interprofessional collaboration and education. attempts to understand others first, we present a typical scene from one online session as representative of this study's findings. this scene illustrates how participants attempt to understand others; such repeated attempts to understand others are interpreted as providing the basis for a loving relationship. in the interprofessional dialogue, sgm participants attempted to walk in someone else’s shoes and gain a good understanding of how the speaker experienced moyatto and how they felt. figure 1: is’s gestures and body movements at the sgm dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc60 social worker c. shared her experience. is responded with gestures (fig.1) and onomatopoeic moyatto: “oh, really? it (c’s story) was exactly an experience of moyatto!” onomatopoeias, in this case, are “sensory words” that evoke vivid, visual, and perceptual images in an imitative fashion; they are also known as mimetics or ideophones, such as bang or splash in english (akita, & dingemanse, 2019; dingemanse, & akita, 2017; kita, 1997). in this study, these onomatopoeia often co-occurred with gestures and other body movements (fig.1), and similar results have been shown in several studies (dingemanse, 2013; hosoma, 2012). we also observed “active responsive understanding by the listener (bakhtin, 1986)” involving gestures and onomatopoeia. bakhtin (1986) said “from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actually created. as we know, the role of the others for whom the utterance is constructed is extremely great. . . from the very beginning, the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. the entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response (bakhtin, 1986, p.94).” therefore, we interpreted the direct cognitions of the listener’s active response through gestures and onomatopoetic expressions as promoting the sense of trust, which in turn promoted critical dialogues. furthermore, these methods not only allowed the participant to show the speaker that they were listening but also avoided defining the other’s experience externally or appropriating their words. onomatopoeias and gestures could give the receiver the power and freedom to create, allowing participants to accept unexplainable things as they are. in other words, they evoke images in an imitative fashion, but it is the receiver, not the user, who creates this perceptual image. communication in sgm was always unfinished, fluid, and shape changing. therefore, it was always at the borderline between that which participants can control (or explain) and that which they cannot. communication in sgm was a process that shaped the participants as much as they shaped it. therefore, sgm participants avoided communication that overly shaped others or externally defined their experience, especially at the beginning of the dialogue. bakhtin held that people have a unique and irreplaceable perspective and interpret the external world from that perspective (bakhtin, 1979/1984). he also called this uniqueness of perspective “excess (surplus) of vision” and pointed out that no other person can fully define it. thus, we interpreted the sgm participants as creating a dialogic space by permitting candid criticism of each ideology arising from the unique “excess of vision.” the synchronization of images and body movements as a basis for loving relationships second, we show that these repeated attempts to understand others cause images and body movements to synchronize. this study suggests an attempt to understand others eventually encourages participants to feel several emotions related to love through the synchronization of images and body movements. we describe the impact of the images and body movements of sgm participants on interpersonal connections and love. nurse d. said listeners perceive moyatto when they hear about the speaker’s experience of moyatto. nursing faculty e. agreed and stated that just listening to others’ experiences makes her feel as if she is experiencing the other person’s moyatto. indeed, is observed they often said things like, “it makes my body hot” or “i am burning up!” furthermore, is found that when listeners respond with gestures and onomatopoeias, they often evoke specific images and body movements, not only for the speaker but also for other participants. nurse d. pointed out that such interaction is common in sgm and described it as “moyatto being contagious,” as images and body movements related to moyatto spread from person to person. d. and e. expressed their excitement and moyatto through the metonymies of increased body temperature and stated that these images and body movements related to moyatto spread from person to dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc61 person. therefore, we interpreted the sgm participants as having felt several emotions related to love, such as linking, friendship, and respect, through synchronizing images and body movements. however, is does not always feel these positive emotions. like most meaningful interactions, interactions in sgm are often characterized by a complex mix of emotions, which can include both positive feelings and negative ones, such as anger and pain. the pain accompanying the critical transgressions in the sgm, participants share their own experiences, but most of the session time is spent listening to other participants’ experiences. when listening to others, is sometimes felt as if he was being affirmed or criticized for his shared experiences and himself (even though others have no intention to do so). we describe this as a moment of what bakhtin called transgression when the speaker (who becomes the listener after speaking) feels that their safe and familiar environment has been invaded by the outside world. in is’s experience, a situation that is difficult to overcome in interprofessional dialogue relates to professional “guises.” for example, in an online session, nursing faculty f. stated that once some doctors judged that an elderly patient had cognitive decline, they often did not ask the patient to make treatment decisions. indeed, doctors tend to choose not to disclose a diagnosis of dementia if the diagnosis is uncertain or effective treatment is lacking. of course, there is a general consensus among physicians that patients have a right to know and understand their diagnosis and treatment. however, many doctors do not inform dementia patients of their diagnosis because they do not want to cause the patient emotional distress. doctors then tend to focus on the “outcome” rather than the “process” of communicating a diagnosis and consider themselves “out of a task” if they find the diagnostic disclosure or treatment ineffective. they do not express their own guilt of not being able to do anything because they believe it is their “official” role to do so. this faculty member was not directly criticizing is’s behavior. however, when is thought she criticized his way of working as a physician, which is task-oriented, has clear outputs, and is split between public and private, is experienced pain due to the transgression; he thought he was being denied the guise of a physician. interestingly, nursing faculty f. seemed completely unaware that is was experiencing such distress. she did not comment on is’s reaction. she mentioned the doctor’s guise to share her experience, and as a result, she accidentally caused is distress. furthermore, the pain that accompanied these transgressions often triggered a variety of emotional responses. at times, is almost dismissed other professionals’ displays of emotion as unprofessional behavior or tried to hide his experience of pain accompanying a transgression. despite his efforts, the distress lasted for some time, and as one participant after another shared their experiences, his emotions changed abruptly. it was an entirely accidental change. is felt a connection and respect for the experience of nurse g., which diverted his attention from the pain. but is again felt anger and pain for social worker c. the pain changed, but another pain was created and then disappeared. after a while, is became obsessed with the idea of sharing the experiences he had recalled. professional roles, identities, and practices are a part of the professional guise, and the pain accompanying the transgression is more likely to intensify when criticisms in the dialogue are directed under these guises. however, physicians are not always accustomed to dealing with emotions, such as anger and love, which are usually hidden under their professional guise. in this study, is felt as if he was personally being affirmed or criticized by nursing faculty f. and social worker c. this may be partly due to the medical education that is received. in medical education, cartesian dualities, such as mind/body and reason/emotion, are partially perpetuated (mcnaughton, 2013). dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc62 furthermore, with the added effects of scientific and technological developments, physicians discover early on that “emotion is a corruption of reason that needs to be transcended” (mcnaughton, 2013, p.72). therefore, physicians tend to think: to be a good doctor, one must evacuate emotion from reason. expressions of emotion are to be avoided, and if they cannot be avoided, they must be disguised (macleod, 2011). such individuals may be so preoccupied with suppressing emotions that they may have difficulty investigating and critically examining their guises. “not listen too much” in a session, three participants, c., f., and is connected with participant e. through imagery and body movements and strived to walk in each other’s shoes, sharing their own experiences. in this section, we describe this process. in the session, nursing faculty e. described her experience of moyatto in a psychiatric ward when she accompanied a student as a practical training supervisor. that ward housed a patient with borderline personality disorder. the ward nurses were supposed to consult with a specific nurse when they were approached by that patient rather than making decisions by themselves. the students seemed to question this rule. the student wondered why most nurses did not make decisions since she believed that an ideal team would be one in which all team members know how to respond and provide the same nursing care no matter who responded. asking the student more specifically, the nursing faculty member learned that the student wondered why each role was determined and why the nurse did not listen to the patient kindly when requested to do so. this student seemed to see the role of the nurse as offering kindness, compassion, love, and respect with all her being to the needy person in front of her. in response to these narratives, social worker c. in sgm offered the following team perspective: “the ward nurses are not just sharing information, they are sharing the responses. this is a form of team response, in my opinion. does this mean that it was not sufficiently “team-like” for that student to have one person making decisions? the student assumed that the nurses should be an ideal team, but in reality, the ward nurses had already developed the usual team. what does it mean to be sufficiently team-like?” nursing faculty f. spoke about professional boundaries and pointed out the following: “professionals think they are being helpful by taking on patients’ problems, even though they are the patients’ problems, not their own. then, they cannot refuse all requests. they are at the mercy of their sense of duty to listen. and by overstepping their boundaries as nurses, they disrupt the team.” in addition, from the perspective of the professionals’ vulnerability, nursing faculty f. expressed the following opinion: “the ability to maintain professional boundaries depends on one’s awareness of personal vulnerabilities. strategies that aim to understand patients and families from the professional’s personal perspective often end in excessive attention to the professional’s reactions, thereby impairing the professional’s ability to help. the question is whether we have the strength not to overstep boundaries. it is necessary to be aware of one’s vulnerability, which is at the mercy of the patient.” is was reminded of another moyatto experience. the topic of professional boundaries and vulnerability triggered him to recall his own experience with the handling of death in his medical education. medical education separates life from death, often pushing death into the private sphere. of course, it does deal with “medical death.” conceptualizing death as biomedical death, separate from the professionals themselves, allows physicians to maintain an “appropriate” distance from death. as a result, physicians learn how to handle death medically, but not how to handle death in their personal lives. yet, like love, death is clinically unavoidable and intense, and it haunts most physicians. the difficulties in dealing with a dying patient seem to be intensified when the patient reminds them of someone close to them who has died. is shared his memory dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc63 of when one of his psychiatric patients committed suicide. “there was little opportunity in medical education to consider how death in the healthcare field affects physicians or their personal side. i was unprepared for the emotional toll of a patient’s suicide. i was heartbroken by my patient’s suicide; i mourned him. but as a physician, i could not do it publicly. i wanted to attend the funeral, but my supervisor stopped me. i was not allowed to do that.” in the sgm, participants c., f., and is experienced a sudden urge to share their own experiences, and they did so, one after another, while simultaneously trying to understand nursing faculty e. when these participants recalled their moyatto experiences elicited by others’ narratives, they tended to leave their experience as it was without pondering its nature. they did not consider whether the experience was useful to others. in education for health professionals, attentive listening rather than impulsive assertion is implicitly valued as assertions are seen as more confrontational (fook & askeland, 2007). we interpreted sgm participants as focusing both on attentively listening, and on not listening too much so that the session does not end up being just one person’s shared experience. the key point here is that participants resist the dominant ideologies in healthcare settings, such as problem-solving and attentive listening. as individual agents, sgm participants conducted everyday resistance to ideologies automatically accepted in accustomed environments, which bakhtin called “automatization.” if more time and effort are devoted to one person, the other participants strive to play a role in helping the speaker solve a patient-related problem. if all participants aim to solve the problem, they come to regard situations where the problem remains unresolved (moyatto) as abnormal; they also become preoccupied with eliminating only the prominent parts of the complex problem. however, that problem is moyatto because it cannot be solved immediately. if the problem can be solved in a short time, it is less moyatto. hence, in the sgm, the speaker impulsively starts and continues speaking, whether the participants are listening or not. the goal is not to solve the problem but to understand the situation in which the problem occurred, gain new perspectives, and reconstruct one’s own experiences (sano et al., 2023). this one-sided attitude often gives the listener freedom to choose whether to listen or not. participants can listen hard to put themselves in the other’s shoes, or they can surrender themselves to the urge to share their experiences. in other words, the implicit rule, “not to listen too much,” removes the burden and role of listening and problem-solving for one person from the participants. giving without expecting anything in return as previously mentioned, love in japan is generally defined as a longing or craving for something that is not one’s own. in other words, love is the motivation to acquire something owned by another person, but sgm participants express a different kind of love. is initially attended this session with the intention of sharing his moyatto experience prepared in advance. however, once other participants shared their experiences, is became obsessed with the thought of sharing the experience of patient suicide that he had recalled at that very moment. in other words, is unintentionally tried to respond to the narratives and cries of others. however, the thoughtlessness of this crying seemed to go beyond what was acceptable. as for moyatto, is did not cause that nursing faculty e. distress. is was not obligated by legality or common sense to help her. is had no supervisory relationship with the nursing student or a therapeutic relationship with the patient. is was not to be blamed or punished for sharing another experience that he had prepared for in advance. however, as much as is tried to shake off his responsibility, is was compelled by the cry to share that very obsession. in other words, is shared his experiences of the patient’s suicide for the sake of others. levinas described this impetus to action as “compulsion” when the other makes me, and only me, ethically responsible for the other’s moyatto (levinas, 1974/1981). for levinas, responsibility is bestowed dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc64 on us, unasked. it is a sort of scream, a cry, that cannot be denied, even if one wants to (welten, 2020). is responded to the narratives and cries of others and shared his moyatto experiences. more precisely, he was compelled to share. this finding suggests that it is love that forgives, even if a part of themselves is taken away. in this way, the first step for professionals to experience love in their professional practice is to give without expecting anything in return. the participants who were given love may have liked others’ experiences and gained insights from them. according to nurse d., this situation is described as “having their experience drawn out by others,” “leaving one’s own experience ‘there’ without knowing how it will be used and by whom,” and “taking from ‘there’ any experience of others that one favors as well.” the term “there” does not simply refer to a physical online space but to a specific place named by certain people (in japanese, “ba”). a ba connotes the transformation of space into a different place, depending on the participants and the experiences shared at that time (kajimaru et al., 2021). each participant shares their own experiences and perspectives, and they take away whatever they resonated with from that ba. however, rather than “sharing” one’s experience, it is more accurate to describe it as “giving away” a part of one’s self because experiences are “drawn out” and “taken” by others. “loving” in sgm at the end of this section, we describe other participants’ experiences that is loved for a long time after the sgm. in the sgm, is shared his experience of one of his patient’s suicide in response to nursing faculty e’s narrative. once is began talking about his own experiences, the other’s alienness (which levinas calls altérité) that had been compelling and obsessing him so strongly suddenly became less palpable. now the experiences of the nursing faculty became “his,” which he used to share his experiences. they became tools for his activities and temporarily lost their alienness. however, the others’ alienness that haunted him during this session was very impressive. the impressive alienness was, in levinas’ words, an “enigma,” and it left him with the sense that he had encountered an unprecedented intelligence (levinas, 1987). is could understand some of the words spoken in the sgm, but still could not understand most of them. then, suddenly, seven months after the session, is finally understood the meaning of the experience shared by nursing faculty e. it was an experience wherein is was guided by the facts pointed to by nursing faculty e’s alienness, and is’s experience illuminated the depths of nursing faculty e’s alienness. six months after the sgm concluded, the experience first manifested in the healthcare setting, where is also works. it occurred when one of the young residents suspected the onset of a new physical illness in a patient admitted to the psychiatric ward. he delayed in referral to another physician, and the patient’s condition worsened, prompting the ward nurse to complain. is happened to overhear two ward nurses at the nurses’ station saying, “what the hell! it’s too late to write a letter of referral now, isn’t it?” and “he’s wishy-washy.” indeed, this resident had a strong sense of responsibility and believed that he alone was ultimately responsible for his patients. furthermore, he was ashamed of his lack of knowledge and was not good at seeking advice from others. as a result, he sometimes made decisions on his own and missed opportunities to intervene. this resident seemed to be struggling with the gap between “what he should ideally do as a doctor” and “what a doctor actually does in the field.” from the perspective of this gap, is was suddenly reminded of the experience shared by nursing faculty e. regarding the nursing student: it could be understood as a gap between “what she should ideally do as a nurse” and “what a nurse actually does in the field.” yet, “something” more seemed to “appear without appearing” in the moyatto of the resident and nursing student. according to levinas, “enigma” is dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc65 like this something: “a way for the other to call for my recognition while preserving its incognito” (levinas, 1949/1998, p.209). the second was when is attended a conference seven months after the sgm’s conclusion. again, “something” was on the tip of his tongue, but is was puzzled and at a standstill, not knowing what that “something” was. haruta and his colleagues made the following points at the conference (haruta et al., 2023). healthcare professions students are allowed to review and renew their stereotypes of professionals (e.g., doctors as superheroes) after entering school (green, 2015). this gives students a realistic understanding of the profession but little opportunity to understand the professional conduct and practice expected by specific others (haruta et al., 2023), in part because medical and other healthcare students are rarely directly observed and given feedback during their clinical placements (burgess, & mellis, 2015). in addition, students, especially in their early years, do not fully understand their profession (tong et al., 2020). according to bebeau and monson (2011), during this period, most healthcare students conceptualize their professional identity as meeting concrete profession-specific role expectations. for example, first-year nursing students may view their nursing identity as only carrying out nursing-specific duties correctly. in comparison, students in their later years develop a greater understanding of how the roles and responsibilities of their own and other professions contribute toward client-centered care, which aligns with the purpose of interprofessional education. as they mature, they come to self-define the profession by understanding the professional conduct and practice expected by specific others (rees et al., 2019). from this perspective, the nursing student may have been allowed to rethink their nursing identity, which had been viewed as only carrying out nursing-specific duties correctly. on the other hand, the resident, though troubled, was already at the stage of going out into the clinical field and understanding what was expected of them as physicians by specific others, such as ward nurses. from the perspective of professional identity formation, is got a better understanding of the experiences of the nursing student and resident. thus, even after the conclusion of the sgm, is kept recalling others’ experiences that they favored. here, the feeling of “favored” is a positive evaluation of others and/or others' experiences and cannot be distinguished from the temporary feeling of “liking” (i.e., fondness). furthermore, positive evaluations of these may continue after the sgm, such as “the experience shared at that session was good,” and so on. however, such “continuous liking” and “loving” seem to be different. the former is merely an ongoing evaluation of others and/or others' experiences, whereas the latter refers to the process in which the emotional experience persists. in other words, the process itself is the emotional experience of love, such that one’s evaluation becomes positive or negative because they are no longer sure what this positive or negative experience is about but they still decide to remain committed to this experience (yamane, 2008). the process by which is remained committed to something was, indeed, a loving experience. consequently, is was able to exchange his moyatto experiences through interactions without direct conversations after the conclusion of the sgm. the other’s alienness that is experienced during the sgm mandated that he leave a part of himself behind, and after the sgm’s conclusion, it continued to give him something that might always be an enigma. it took seven months after the online session for that something to turn out to be related to professional identities. initially, is thought he was giving, but he was actually receiving. at the beginning of the sgm, is shared his moyatto experience without any quid pro quo. perhaps this is because this kind of enigma gave is something. similarly, other participants might have been able to give without seeking something in return because they were given something else by someone else. without that something, it would have been difficult to continue giving love through selfsacrifice. dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc66 discussion in this study, we explored the experiences of love in online sessions and how emotions such as love may work as factors for overcoming the pain, which accompanies the critical transgressions that inevitably arise in dialogue with others. furthermore, this section focuses on areas where the realities of loving moyatto experiences in dialogic interactions among professionals were more nuanced than the research team initially anticipated based on reading the current literature. the research question here is whether love as a factor in overcoming the pain accompanying the critical transgressions that inevitably arise in sgm dialogue can be explained by polyphonic love, and if not, what can explain it. this study revealed that participants used their body gestures or onomatopoeia and understood others through trying to avoid defining the other’s experience externally or appropriating their words. in other words, participants permitted candid criticism of each ideology arising from the unique “excess of vision.” this attempt to understand others could serve as a basis for loving relationships between participants and encourage them to overcome difficult emotions, such as anger and pain, that were generated by their dialogue. moreover, we discussed how the participants separated their experiences from others’ experiences. they were in tension between standing their ground on their own experiences and being profoundly open to others and other experiences. in other words, they were able to choose their level of involvement in the dialogue, engaging fully in it or not listening too much. by focusing both on attentively listening and on not listening too much, participants routinely resisted the dominant ideologies in healthcare settings. their own experiences could be given to other participants without any quid pro quo. in this situation, they just presented their experiences and did not immediately seek solutions. this had a longlasting impact on the participants’ professional experience. furthermore, the analysis of the interaction in the sgm revealed the appearance of love through which the professionals forgive, even if a part of themselves is taken away. participants c., f., and is responded to the narratives and cries of others and shared their moyatto experiences. in other words, the first step for professionals to experience love in their professional practice is to share their moyatto experience without any quid pro quo and in response to others’ cries. when participants recalled their moyatto experiences elicited by others’ cries, they tended to leave their experience as it was without pondering its nature. participants c., f., and is experienced a sudden urge to share their own experiences, and they did so, one after another, while simultaneously trying to understand nursing faculty e. they did not consider whether the experience was useful to others. participants may have liked others’ experiences and gained insights during the session. even after the session was over, the other’s alienness continued to give is something that could not be verbalized, referred to as “enigma.” it took seven months after the online session for that something to turn out to be related to professional identities. therefore, the interactions comprising the exchanging of their moyatto experiences could continue even without direct conversations, and those experiences could motivate participants to inquire about perspectives unknown to them. this process may be partially explained by polyphonic love as a factor for overcoming the pain accompanying the critical transgressions that inevitably arise in dialogue with others (bakhtin, 1990; tajima, 2021). indeed, sgm participants felt several emotions related to love through the synchronization of images and body movements. three participants, c., f., and is connected with participant e. through synchronization; they strove to walk in each other’s shoes while sharing their own experience, a process that can be explained by polyphonic love. such polyphonic love, that is, acquired affection for the other, helped sgm participants overcome the pain accompanying the transgression in the online sessions. in contrast, there were no situations that required homophonic love or monologue interactions in which professionals transferred existing ideologies without criticism. dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc67 in this study, however, professional love is not a longing or craving for something that is not one’s own, but something that comes up in response to others’ cries, as in the case of affection (情 jou). this type of love does not take away but instead forgives even if a part of the individual is taken away. furthermore, while bakhtin believed that estrangement originated in communication, the sgm participants focused on something that caused estrangement both in the dialogue between speakers and in the recalled narratives. nursing faculty e’s alienness was experienced by is during the sgm and continued to give him something related to professional identities after the sgm’s conclusion. the process of remaining committed to such something was, indeed, a loving experience, but it is difficult to explain the process only in terms of polyphonic love. the process of these actions can be regarded as mederu, a japanese sense of loving with which people are willing to observe and take care of the diverse elements of others or objects with passion. it is a sense that comes up in response to others or objects in the same way as affection (情 jou). is's mederu also began by responding to the narratives and cries of others and sharing his experiences. is observed nursing faculty e's alienness that is experienced during the sgm and continued to do so for seven months after the sgm’s conclusion in an attempt to gain something (enigma) from its diverse elements. mederu ( 愛でる) is a japanese verb meaning “to adore a person, animal, plant, or other object” or “to admire its beauty or loveliness.” the kanji for 愛 ai is identical to the character for aisuru (愛する), meaning to love (verb), and the two have very similar meanings. however, while aisuru connotes taking a part of others as one’s own, causing them to lose their alienness (levinas calls this “possession”), mederu has a different meaning. instead, it is a way of loving that maintains their alienness, keeping a certain distance from an object and observing or watching its various aspects. this seems consistent with the practice of sgm, which aims to understand others without appropriating their words, but gaining new perspectives on their moyatto by keeping a certain distance even after the sessions are over. unlike loving, mederu allows us to perceive the fleeting beauty in an experience that cannot be identified or denoted by a single moment or image. the other's alienness in sgm was so impressive that it had compelled and obsessed is but was so fragile that once it became “his,” it suddenly became less palpable. this kind of fragile beauty is called “mono no aware” and creates a powerful experience for the observer because it must be fully enjoyed in a specific period (prusinski, 2012). we can also feel “wabisabi” by admiring (mederu) the object (prusinski, 2012). wabi-sabi depicts a crude or often-faded beauty that correlates with a dark, desolate sublimity. nursing faculty f. noted that there is a hidden sense of duty in the unprofessional act of crossing professional boundaries. she also argued that such awareness of one's vulnerability can lead to strength in not overstepping boundaries. in this way, moyatto experiences often shine a light on both the dark and desolate side of healthcare and on the sublime professionalism and commitment of the professionals who work there. according to prusinski, japan has always been a nation focused on beauty in all realms of culture, such as poetry and calligraphy, manifesting through rituals such as ancient tea ceremonies (prusinski, 2012). indeed, the oldest extant collection of poetry in japan, man yoshu, also describes mederu, the act of admiring beautifully colored landscapes (vovin, 2017). even today, people in japan admire (mederu) flowers and pop idols (fumio, 2023; kakin, 2019). here, beauty does not lie in the object itself but in the entire experience, transformation, and timespan in which the object is present and changing (prusinski, 2012). nursing faculty e’s alienness that is experienced during the sgm continued to give him something (enigma) for seven months after the sgm’s conclusion. during that time, unexpected encounters with young physicians and researchers in clinical and academic settings revealed that this something was related to professional identities. in other words, the object of beauty that is admired (mederu) was present and changing. is admired (mederu) the beauty of the whole experience, transformation, and timespan in which the enigma was present and changing. in this way, the view of beauty as temporary and unstable rather than eternally fixed and spatial. it cultivates the japanese sensitivity to beauty, which is called situational dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc68 beauty (takashina, 2018). such long-term admiring (mederu) for situational beauty may be possible because the sgm participants continued their dialogue with the same participants for several years, even if it was for an hour each month. finally, we discuss how the sgm, as a place to admire (mederu) experiences, can contribute to health profession education. we argue that the sgm provides dialogic places where people can be receptive to and responsible for others through sharing moyatto experiences. the responsibility here is a sort of cry that requires us to respond to other’s alienness and to share our moyatto experiences. the sgm can provide an ideal opportunity for critical reflection on the context of patient care, the busy healthcare environment, professional attitudes towards collaboration, educational backgrounds, and the dominant ideology in healthcare. we have little opportunity for critical reflection on these social structures, and rather than viewing the current state of healthcare as non-dialogic (e.g., “in our society, health services are increasingly run for profit and that society makes dialogue difficult”), we seem to have already internalized non-dialogic beliefs (e.g., “a person’s success in life is determined by his or her personal rather than by society and dialogue is not helpful to its success”) (card & hepburn, 2023). in contrast to the worldview of healthcare, which often divides emotions and pains into separate categories and refers to them as something that must be overcome logically and objectively in the private sphere, the sgm emphasizes a dialogic framework that deals with professional love for overcoming the pain accompanying the critical transgressions. the sgm can provide more sustainable and stable educational resources, as this professional love may be needed at various points in a professional’s career. moreover, the sgm can facilitate the transitional learning across professional and disciplinary boundaries that is necessary for excellent patient care (sano et al., 2023). we suggested that the online sessions allowed professionals to detach themselves from preexisting professional roles, identities, and practices in the “official” healthcare settings. specifically, the following rules were created and adopted to make it easier for participants to take a break from their professional roles. 1) keep the group size appropriate; sgm participants are recruited for the workshops when needed. 2) the participants decide the content and timing of the workshops. 3) each participant is free to withdraw or suspend membership. 4) other healthcare providers can participate in sgm only once, but in this case, all members of the sgm must approve the participation. 5) each person is referred to by the name that they wish to be called. however, honorific titles such as “sir” that create a hierarchical relationship should be prohibited. 6) the lead author assumes the role of the organizer, but everyone takes turns as the facilitator and secretary of each meeting. 7) information on interprofessional collaboration (education) is shared via social media or e-mail. these educational designs may have allowed sgm participants to take a break from the “official” healthcare field and engage in a cycle of giving and receiving each other’s experiences as they interact with others and the environment. the professional self is also born as a dynamic entity within this cycle and is, therefore, both interdependent and dependent on developmental pathways. in other words, the self appears differently depending on who and how individuals meet. this is not a view that assumes a rational self and pushes an aspect of the self into the private sphere, but one in which people have more than one “self:” one self in the healthcare field, one self in the sgm, and one self at home. consequently, there is no contradiction between being a doctor who does not express emotions in the healthcare field and a participant who speaks enthusiastically about moyatto in the sgm. ikegami (2005) referred to the “publics,” i.e., communicative sites that emerge at the points of connection among various networks and argued that they are places where these various “i’s” can grow. during the edo period (1603–1868), japan already had many publics wherein multiple people gathered to create art forms such as poetry (tanaka, 1986). people from various social backgrounds from commoners to retired emperors could participate in these group gatherings regardless of status. individuals participated in these publics using multiple names and, thus, mastered the talents of embodying multiple “i’s.” the sgm can also be regarded as a publics that is free from official dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc69 order, where people of various backgrounds can associate on an equal footing, engaging in a dialogue characterized by mederu. to create an estrangement-based dialogic place, we argue that participants need to be given freedom and power by other participants. participants are only freed from their professional guise by leaving not only the healthcare practice but also the specific other who expects them to wear it. by using onomatopoeia and gestures, participants can give the recipient the freedom and power to create various perceptual images. they can create loving, safe, and familiar connections by exposing vulnerable bodies that are often excluded in healthcare settings and synchronizing their images and first-body movements. participants release themselves from the attentive listening that is valued in education settings for healthcare professionals and engage in impulsive assertions that are seen as more confrontational because participants respond compulsively to other people’s narratives and cries. however, participants share their moyatto experiences because they accidentally happen to be there, and they are specifically free to share or not. such freedom and empowerment can foster multiple i’s: “i” who blame myself for not being able to prevent my patients’ suicides as a psychiatrist, “i” who wanted to go to a funeral that would allow me to properly mourn and grieve over the loss of my friend, and “i” who should follow the advice of the supervisor closely as a supervisee. each “i” has different emotions: anger, sadness, and respect. the conflicts (moyatto) between the multiple i’s are specific to the person. furthermore, the “i” then and the “i” now are not necessarily the same. even when performing the same act of talking about a patient’s suicide, the first author transforms into a very differing ‘i’ and have very different emotions based on the situation. this accidental and collective engagement of these highly unstable multiple “i’s” creates an estrangement-based dialogue (bakhtin, 1979/1984). for professionals who intend to step into the estrangement-based dialogic place, the japanese concept of the publics and the mederu japanese way of loving presented here will be helpful. limitations and further research the use of reflective writing brings forth both limitations and advantages of the study (jasper et al., 2005). we acknowledged at the outset that what is presented relates and purports to the experiences and perceptions of the first author. reflective writing is, by its very nature, written in the first person and is, therefore, essentially subjective. this nature draws attention to the fact that there is no one objective reality that every presentation is a construction of that reality, according to the writer (jasper et al., 2005). it can also be seen as an asset for the use of reflective writing in research in that it makes visible aspects of the researcher that might otherwise be hidden, such as emotional pain and dialogue with oneself. however, to properly understand dialogue and love as a mutual act, it may be necessary for further research to know what they are for the participants. all data types must be triangulated within the process of constructing understanding to enhance credibility (scanlon et al., 2002). for example, ethnomethodology aims to study the ways people coordinate and make sense of their everyday activities, including dialogue and love (ten have, 2004). it could produce significant knowledge about how professionals interact in online sessions, clinical settings, and everyday life and how these interactions are constituted as being dialogue and love. according to ten have (2002), “by following professional practices in detail, ethnomethodology can show that and how a professional practice is embedded in quite ordinary competences, and also elaborate that and how it is special, in the sense of being part of a particular local version of a more generalized professional culture.” unfortunately, this study only covers reflective data during and after the online sessions and does not follow professional practice in detail. dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc70 concluding remarks this study revealed the love of healthcare professionals for colleagues, while previous studies talked about the love of patients for doctors. through this study, we argued that the love of healthcare professionals for colleagues could be considered and discussed more. although the love between patients and doctors has been one of the topics in medical education, the love among healthcare professionals is a new perspective to the field. in addition, our study could provide a new perspective and new knowledge about how we could explore ways of relating and communicating with others. the japanese concept of the publics and the mederu japanese way of loving will be helpful, especially for professionals seeking to step into the estrangement-based dialogic place. to develop a community into this dialogic place, we argued that professionals need to detach themselves from preexisting professional roles, identities, and practices and give freedom and power to each other. acknowledgments we would like to thank the graduate students and faculties at the center for medical education, nagoya university, for providing insightful comments and feedback. we are immensely grateful to all those who provided assistance and constructive suggestions during the completion of this essay. we extend our thanks to current participants in a study group on moyatto (sgm) who reviewed our manuscript and provided helpful comments. the sgm was established in 2014 by the first author with the aim of improving interprofessional collaboration through dialogue on moyatto (japanese). moyatto is defined as distress experienced when individuals face conflicting communication with people who have different viewpoints and interests. we also appreciate the editorial team and reviewers for their valuable comments. we thank editage for their english editing service. most importantly, we are grateful to health professionals nationwide who have made our work better through their time and contributions references akita, k., & dingemanse, m. 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(2020). in the beginning was violence: emmanuel levinas on religion and violence. continental philosophy review, 53(3), 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-020-09491-z yamane, i. (2008). phenomenological psychology of love. the japanese journal of human relations, 6, 67–79. yasui, e. (2023). japanese onomatopoeia in bodily demonstrations in a traditional dance instruction: a resource for synchronizing body movements. journal of pragmatics, 207, 45–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.02.002 new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by pitt open library publishing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2023.02.002 https://library.pitt.edu/e-journals dialogic interactions among multi-professionals in the context of online sessions itsuki sano, mariko morishita, hiroshi nishigori dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2025.607 | vol. 13 no. 1 (2025) plc77 apendix a: demographic characteristics of research participants participant gender age profession institution status years in professional (faculty) career*1 c female 66 social worker ngo*2 staff 28 d female 54 nurse hospital ward manager 20 e female 46 nursing faculty university staff 21 (14) f female 63 nursing faculty college professor 42 (21) g female 37 nurse hospital staff 16 h female 50 social worker hospital staff 17 i female 50 nursing faculty college professor 25 (21) j female 56 nursing faculty college staff 35 (2) is*3 male 44 physician hospital chief physician 18 *1 “years in professional career” refers to the period from professional qualification to the present (september 2022), while those in faculty career refer to the period during their working life in an educational institute. *2 ngo: national government organization, *3 is: first author microsoft word rodriguez, the new heresy and the modern inquisition (layout)fx.docx dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a74 the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez syracuse university, usa abstract in this paper, i look critically at a new trend on college campuses regarding the banning of certain words, especially the biggest racial taboo word in the usa. i contend that these new bans impede the rise of a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament, ultimately promoting and legitimizing violence as good and necessary. amardo rodriguez (ph.d., howard university) is a professor in the communication and rhetorical studies department at syracuse university. his research interest is in postcolonial theory. his most recent book-length monographs, communication: colonization and the making of discipline and notes from the margins: reflections on regimes of knowledge and power, were published by public square press. he has also published papers in such journals as, journal of race & policy, journal of latino/latin american studies, cultural studies/critical methodologies, and international journal of discrimination and the law. prof. rodriguez teaches in areas related to communication theory and inquiry. he is also the book review editor for the journal of race and policy. ïòò many college students are increasingly demanding the banning of certain words from campuses. professors and instructors who utter these supposedly offensive words, or allow students to do so, even in a pedagogical context, now face either investigation, suspension, or termination. we commonly view these cases as free speech issues. colleges are supposedly violating our free speech rights by punishing us for using words like “cunt,” “fag,” “retard,” and “nigger” in our classrooms. however, in this paper, i contend that the banning of words on campuses, especially “nigger,” represents a much larger problem. it impedes the forging of a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament that is vital for the prosperity of any modern society, threatens the flourishing of human diversity and all that comes with this flourishing, and reinforces the belief that violence is good and necessary. ultimately, i contend that banning words, like the banning of many other things that college students are calling for, such as films, songs, books, speakers, objects, and topics, represents a politics that limits our moral, ideological, and epistemological imagination. the word “nigger” is often referred to as “the nuclear bomb of racial slurs.” no doubt, it is all but impossible to separate this word from over 350 years of slavery, black codes, and jim crow. if communication is all about context, then there is no separating this word from this historical context. those who decide to utter this word in the classroom would do well to show regard for this context and proceed carefully and sensitively. however, to claim that the word is inherently offensive and that there should be no regard for intent or context is to assume that the world is inherently monologic, that is, things in the world lend for only one meaning, and that human beings can reliably command these meanings. history reminds us again and again that these two things are false. instead, the world is inherently dialogic. that is, everything in the world lends for diverse and multiple meanings, and human beings will never be able to issn: 2325-3290 (online) the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a75 reliably command these meanings. so whereas monologue fosters an autocratic temperament, dialogue fosters a democratic temperament, one that is always making moral, ideological, and epistemological space for perspectives different from our own. thus, i contend that the banning of words like “nigger” on college campuses speaks to much larger issues about what kind of world are our institutions of higher learning cultivating and legitimizing. why are such institutions choosing to create a world that values monologue over dialogue, conformity over diversity, autocracy over democracy? why do we assume that the banning of things naturally makes for the rise of better things? in the following sections of this paper, i attend to the implications of our choosing monologue over dialogue. the paper begins with a presentation of a few recent cases involving the use of the word “nigger” on college campuses. in all these cases, as with nearly all the other cases, professors and instructors were either investigated, suspended, or terminated for using the word in a classroom setting, such as quoting a passage in a book by a black author or reading out loud a judicial opinion written by a black judge that contains the word. i then present and discuss seven major problems found in the framing and handling of these cases, such as the violation of many key tenets of communication theory. the paper ends with a few thoughts on how i try in my own teaching to embody a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament in an age where college students, especially those who identify as progressive, are increasingly demanding the banning of supposedly offensive words and phrases and the punishing of teachers who are seen as either encouraging or tolerating the uttering of these words and phrases, regardless of intent or context (flaherty, 2021). on being investigated, suspended, and terminated recently, a professor at the university of windsor uttered the word “nigger” in a class setting to warn students about the offensive language they would encounter in an assigned book (alice walker’s the color purple) for the class. still, many students said that what the professor did was “egregious,” “appalling,” and “hurtful and violent to black students.” in a letter addressed to the president of the university, many students and faculty also expressed “grave concerns” over what the professor did (la grassa & aziz, 2020). in an apology, the professor said, last night in class when i was giving a content warning for the sexual and racial violence depicted in the book we are preparing to read, alice walker’s the color purple, i used the n-word as an example of the racist language that will appear throughout this book. hearing that word come from my mouth filled students with pain, fear, anger, and disappointment. rather than read the word that walker uses throughout the book, i should have left it as “n-word” because the racist weight of that word carries with it generations of trauma and harm. to all of my students, i apologize for setting a poor example and undermining my own content warning for the text that we are reading. to the students who were directly harmed by this, i apologize for bringing this pain into this course for you. one student who refused to accept the professor’s apology said that the word “nigger” is attached to a “long history of dehumanizing, vilifying, violating, harming and killing black people,” and for that reason alone, it is “deeply unacceptable for non-black people to use it” (la grassa & aziz, 2020). for this student, the meaning of words supposedly has nothing to do with intent and context. human beings supposedly have no capacity to control what words mean and even to alter the meaning of a word. in another recent incident at the university of ottawa, an instructor was suspended after a student complained that the instructor used the word “nigger” during a class as an example of a word that a community has reclaimed. after faculty came out in support of the instructor, saying in a letter that using the actual word in the classroom can have educational value and that a classroom is a place for debate, the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a76 many students expressed outrage over the letter. in a statement, these students said that using the n-word in a classroom constitutes “racial violence” and will always be “offensive, hurtful and reprehensible to members of the black community.” other students said that the word should be banned, even in classrooms, to protect black students. “we do not believe that there is any appropriate setting which this word can be used because it is directly harmful to all of the black students on campus” (glowacki, 2020). at duquesne university, the dean of the school of education recently fired an instructor for using the word “nigger” in a classroom setting (news staff, 2020). in a letter apologizing to the students in the class where the word was used, the dean thanked the students for sharing the “troubling and disturbing language” used by the instructor. the dean also said, to be clear, i believe that there is never a time, pedagogically or otherwise, for a professor to create a hostile learning environment. i know this from my experience as a student, a professor, and now as interim dean of the school of education. using the ‘n word’ or seemingly encouraging students to use that word is not in keeping with the mission of the university, the school of education, or the pennsylvania department of education. as a professor in the leading teaching program here in the school of education, i often speak about teachable moments. this is one of them. as an educator, you should always be mindful of the impact of your actions on the students you are obligated by the profession to teach. your intentions are of no consequence when a student’s learning is disrupted by what you believe to be okay. your actions are what students will remember. (news staff, 2020) timothy boudreau, a professor at central michigan university, was recently terminated for using the word “nigger” when discussing a 1993 case in which a central michigan basketball coach was also fired for using the full word when addressing team members (schneider, 2021). although no player on the basketball team was offended, and the coach did ask permission before using the full word, he was still fired. the coach eventually prevailed in court. prof. boudreau was using this case in a classroom lecture 17 years later to make the point that even ugly speech is constitutionally protected. in discussing the case, prof. boudreau uttered the full word. “i quoted the exact language from cases because it’s accurate and complete, which is essential in a journalism course,” prof. boudreau told a student newspaper, the college fix. “i quoted the basketball coach’s words accurately. he used the complete word, not the euphemism. i am extremely reluctant to censor language in a legal case. doing so neuters the language, misrepresents the facts and raises a lot of questions. media law, or any course that focuses on the first amendment, is certain to involve words that offend all sorts of listeners for all sorts of reasons — lgbtq, black students, christians, jews, and many others. which terms should i censor? why those and not others?” (schneider, 2021). however, one student, who recently graduated, posted a video condemning prof. boudreau for using the full word in his classes. “since we are exposing racists, let me introduce you to @cmuniversity professor tim boudreau who freely uses the n-word in class whether it be providing examples or quoting an individual. i know i wasn’t the only student of color who felt humiliated and uncomfortable by his racially insensitive statements” (schneider, 2021). the university then posted a statement on instagram vowing to investigate prof. boudreau’s “racist conduct” and apologizing to the student for what transpired in prof. boudreau’s classes. in full, the statement reads, thank you for bringing this to our attention. we are sorry this happened. at cmu, we are committed to building an inclusive environment where every person feels welcome and valued. racist conduct by any member of our university community violates that commitment as well as our core values. we have forwarded the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a77 your message to the appropriate campus offices so they can be properly reviewed. please know that cmu takes these types of reports very seriously and investigates them to the full extent possible. (schneider, 2021) the university subsequently offered prof. boudreau the chance to publicly apologize and promise to never again use the word in the classroom. after prof. boudreau refused, he was quickly suspended and an investigation set in motion. he was also instructed “to stay away from campus” and “from students.” the university eventually released a report criticizing prof. boudreau for, among other things, creating a hostile learning environment by failing to offer students a “trigger warning” before using the full word. however, one student told a student newspaper that prof. boudreau did provide a warning early in the semester that he would be using racial slurs when discussing the case involving the basketball coach. “i know that such language upsets some students, so i always warned my students that we would occasionally use words that might offend them. call it a trigger warning or just common courtesy, but i routinely alerted them to that possibility” (schneider, 2021). greg greubel, prof. boudreau’s attorney, said that the university’s decision to terminate prof. boudreau for “accurately quoting” the actual words “in a judicial opinion is as unconstitutional as it is ridiculous” (schneider, 2021). in fact, the judicial opinion that made for prof. boudreau’s troubles was written by damon keith, an african american, and uses the actual word (“nigger”) 19 times. in a letter of support for prof. boudreau to the president of central michigan university, a group of prominent law professors from outside the university wrote that judge damon keith “could have exclusively used an expurgated version of the word. but he chose not to, and we think not by accident. rather, judge keith likely (1) thought it important to accurately quote the facts, even when the facts include offensive words, and (2) drew a sharp distinction between wrongfully using a word as an insult (or perhaps even as an odd compliment, as coach dambrot may have misguidedly intended it), and properly mentioning it as a fact. judge keith knew the case would be read . . . and doubtless discussed by many people of all races—in future oral arguments, in law firm conversations about how best to use the precedent, and in classrooms. yet he precisely and repeatedly discussed the facts, and counted on people to understand that there is a world of difference between factual mentions and insulting uses” (scales et al., 2020). the letter also noted that the full word “appears in nearly 10,000 court decisions (and those are just the ones available on westlaw) since 2000 alone. these include opinions from supreme court justices including justices sotomayor, thomas, o’connor, ginsburg, and a six-justice per curiam signed on to by chief justice roberts and justices kennedy, ginsburg, breyer, sotomayor, and kagan. they include opinions from illustrious federal appellate judges and state court judges, including liberal luminaries who yield to no-one in their desire for racial equality” (scales et al., 2020). moreover, “prof. tim boudreau was teaching a class about law, in which doubtless some students wanted to become lawyers and all wanted to learn about the legal system. he was discussing an important case—the earliest appellate precedent on campus speech codes. the case sheds important light on general first amendment debates . . . . governs the rights of (among others) student newspapers and students on social media . . . . by following the norms of the legal profession in accurately quoting the case, prof. boudreau acted entirely properly” (scales et al., 2020). the letter also said that prof. boudreau was “following practices that are standard in the university more generally for pretty much all other words, and that remain standard among many professors for this word as well. the university, like the courtroom, is supposed to be a place where people accurately and unflinchingly discuss the truth. that some people find certain facts to be offensive, whether facts about the world or facts in a court opinion, cannot require professors to expurgate those facts (just as it does not require judges to expurgate those facts)” (scales et al., 2020). the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a78 prof. boudreau eventually settled with the university. “i taught the course to about 1,500 students over some 15 years and never once received a complaint about the language until a single student posted to social media last year,” prof. boudreau told a university newspaper. “apparently most of them heard my frequent warnings. it’s unfortunate at least one missed them” (schneider, 2021). philip adamo, a professor of history and medieval studies at augsburg university, and director of the honors program, was recently suspended for using the word “nigger” when discussing the appropriateness of using the full word when discussing james baldwin’s the fire next time. according to an account of the case by colleen flaherty (2019), a student in the class quoted in full a section of the book containing the word (“you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”) recognizing that some students were shocked, prof. adamo asked the class whether it is appropriate to use the word the way an author does. he uttered the full word once when posing this matter. (“in an academic context, quoting from an author’s work, was it appropriate to use the word nigger if the author had written it that way? wasn’t substituting the euphemistic phrase ‘the n-word’ in these cases, in fact, a disservice to baldwin’s prose?”) after a lengthy discussion it was unanimously agreed that the word was too fraught to use going forward. after class, prof. adamo sent an email to the class with links to two articles by black writers (andre perry and ta-nehise coates) discussing the use of the word. some students told prof. adamo that he sent the articles to “defend the use of the n-word” (flaherty, 2019). several nonenrolled students then showed up in prof. adamo’s next class session, saying they were there to observe as leaders within the honors program. students then asked prof. adamo to leave so they could discuss the situation. prof. adamo told the students that there was work to be done, but eventually left the room. the nonenrolled students told the students that they were there to make sure that “you guys felt safe” as they have “a right to always feel safe” in class, “especially first generation college students.” students in the class also said that there was another n-word in the book (“negro”) that is also offensive and should be replaced with the n-word. one of the nonenrolled students filmed prof. adamo discussing the word with students. he was cordial and deferential. soon after this class, prof. adamo told the provost what transpired. she suggested that prof. adamo send a letter to all the students in the honors program. the letter said, in part, that the classroom “is a place where any and every topic can be explored, even those topics considered to be taboo. this is how i understand academic freedom, which is a precious thing to me and other professors. it is the currency that allows us to speak truth to power.” prof. adamo also sent a separate letter to the nonenrolled students praising them for their defense of the program’s values, but also his concerns about them showing up unannounced and filming him without his permission. however, after the incident, the provost removed prof. adamo from the classroom and ended his directorship of the honors program. prof. adamo subsequently went on medical leave due to stress. the university then began a formal review and extended prof. adamo’s suspension for the spring semester. prof. adamo’s suspension letter said that students raised several issues that fell into the following categories: bias and discrimination, respect for students, teaching competence, and program leadership. the american association of university professors (aaup) sent a letter on prof. adamo’s behalf to the university saying that the suspension “appears to have been primarily based on classroom speech that was clearly protected by principles of academic freedom” (flaherty, 2019). in a column in the chronicle of higher education defending prof. adamo’s use of the word, randall kennedy (2019), a black professor of law at harvard university, described the case as a “dispiriting farce” that “undermines augsburg’s claim to be a serious institution of higher learning.” according to prof. kennedy, “this is not a case of a professor calling someone “nigger.” this is a case of a professor exploring the thinking and expression of a writer who voiced the word to challenge racism. this is not a case of a the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a79 professor negligently throwing about a term that’s long been deployed to terrorize, shame, and denigrate african-americans. this is a case of a professor who, attentive to the sensibilities of his students, sought to encourage reflection about their anxieties and beliefs.” he also said that the president and the provost “have most betrayed academic ideals” at augsburg university. “they are the ones who punished adamo. they are the ones who allowed a perfectly acceptable pedagogical decision to be turned into an academic crime. they are the ones who have . . . neglected to say anything critical about the students who encroached upon a professor’s classroom. they are the leaders who, in a moment of crisis, have failed miserably to educate their campus about the aims and priorities, freedoms and limitations that should be part and parcel of life at a serious university” (flaherty, 2019). in a statement about the controversy, the president of the university, paul c. pribbernow, said, “we know that the work of fostering an inclusive learning environment is ongoing, and we are fully committed to it. we are grateful to the students, faculty and staff who have spoken courageously to raise campus awareness, who have engaged in actively listening to the issues being expressed, and who have called for changes that advance our equity work. augsburg will address this important topic like it has many other critical issues in our 150-year history: we will acknowledge and engage the topic, not shrink from it, and work together to make the university better.” at rutgers university, a group of black law students recently demanded that prof. vera bergelson, a law professor, publicly apologize for supposedly allowing a white student to say the full word when quoting a court case with the full word. in discussing a legal opinion, a white female law student repeated a quote from a defendant which was used in an opinion written by a past state supreme court judge, alan b. handler. the student said, “he said, . . . and i’ll use a racial word, but it’s a quote. he says, “i’m going to go to trenton and come back with my niggers" (tully, 2021). a petition calling on the student and the professor to apologize began to circulate after a white student told a black classmate about the incident. the petition reads: “at the height of a “racial reckoning,” a responsible adult should know not to use a racial slur regardless of its use in a 1993 opinion. we vehemently condemn the use of the n-word by the student and the acquiescence of its usage.” prof. david lopez, co-dean of the law school, said in a statement, “i share the views of several of our faculty members who understand and express to their students that this language is hateful and can be triggering, even in the context of a case, and ask that it not be used.” prof. bergelson said she never heard the word being used by the student. it was a virtual class. she told the new york times that she was only made aware of the concerns months later when the petition began circulating (tully, 2021). prof. bergelson added, “i wish i could go back in time to that office hour and confront it directly. i would never use the word in class.” however, she believes that other professors and students should be free to make their own choices. within days, she convened a meeting with the criminal law class and other first-year students to discuss the incident and to offer an apology. the student also apologized during the meeting. in another statement, co-deans david lopez and kimberly mutcherson said, “as the co-deans of rutgers law school, we recognize the hurt that our students experienced following this incident, and we know that none of the involved parties acted with any ill intent. we are committed to doing better for our community moving forward. this experience raised critical issues about law school pedagogy and provided us with a welcome opportunity to talk as a community of faculty, students, staff, and administration committed to antiracism about productive ways to teach about race in our classrooms” (fruen, 2021). adam scales, a black professor at rutgers law, who signed a statement supporting prof. bergelson, told the new york times that he opposes even voluntary limits on speech (tully, 2021). he also said that using euphemisms like “n-word” to avoid saying the full word obfuscates its repugnant history. “there is something extremely antiseptic about the term n-word. there is something that softens the the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a80 impact.” gary l. francione, another law professor who signed the statement, said “although we all deplore the use of racist epithets, the idea that a faculty member or law student cannot quote a published court decision that itself quotes a racial or other otherwise objectionable word as part of the record of the case is problematic and implicates matters of academic freedom and free speech.” however, in a column in the washington post about the rutgers controversy, jonathan capehart (2021), an editorial board member of the newspaper, contends that the full word should never be used under any circumstances, and hopes that one day white people, especially, would come to realize why. “for african americans,” writes capehart, “the n-word is not a rorschach test. it’s a stress test, the intensity of which rises and falls depending on one’s mood and sense of charity in the moment it tumbles from non-black lips.” however, for randall l. kennedy and eugene volokh (2021), also writing in the washington post about the rutgers controversy and others involving professors saying the word “nigger” in classes, banning words in classrooms is dangerous. “we believe that the campaign to make certain words taboo—literally unsayable—dangerously encroaches on academic freedom and freedom of expression. it also diminishes the opportunity for students to learn lessons useful to their future professional careers and to their roles as citizens. (that is true both of racial slurs and of other slurs.) any word emerging in court proceedings should be repeatable in a law school classroom. as for other university departments, any word that appears in a historical document, novel, film or song should be mentionable for the purpose of study.” as for complaints from students that hearing or even reading the word “nigger,” regardless of context, interferes with their ability to learn, profs. kennedy and volokh offer three counter arguments. “first, feelings of hurt are not unchangeable givens untouched and untouchable by the ways in which institutions respond to them. the more that schools validate the idea that such hurt is justified, the more that emotion will be embraced, and the more there will be calls to broaden and harden linguistic taboos. . . second, complaints of distress cannot suffice to bar teachers from teaching about the facts, whether related to specific words, or to upsetting subjects, such as rape, genocide or slavery. that is especially so when teachers are training students to become professionals who must often deal with awful facets of human nature.” finally, “all of the recent controversies over mentions of the most controversial racial slur in classrooms have involved speakers who are white. those calling for apologies and punishments often expressly demand an asymmetrical rule that black speakers are given leeway, while non-black speakers are held to a rigid, strictly enforced injunction. we oppose such discrimination. the one of us who is black and has had racial slurs hurled at him on numerous occasions rejects the dubious racial privilege that this rule would offer. the other of us who is white rejects the intellectual disablement that this rule would entail.” for profs. kennedy and volokh, “prohibiting some teachers, on the basis of racial identity, from saying a word that others are permitted to say violates anti-discrimination laws, and it certainly violates sound academic practice.” we could also add to profs. kennedy and volokh’s list the argument that the authors of books that contain the word nigger who are now deceased never give any person, black or white, permission to change the words in their books and would even support any changes. as michiko kakutani (2011) explains, “authors’ original texts should be sacrosanct intellectual property, whether a book is a classic or not. tampering with a writer’s words underscores both editors’ extraordinary hubris and a cavalier attitude embraced by more and more people.” this attitude assumes, among other things, that “readers are entitled to alter [any text] as they please” and “that the very idea of authorship is old-fashioned.” instructors are also being suspended for saying words in other languages that merely sound like “nigger.” case in point, the university of southern california recently replaced prof. greg patton, a professor of business communication, with another instructor in one of his graduate classes for saying a chinese word that merely sounds like “nigger.” according to an account of the incident by colleen flaherty (2020), prof. patton was teaching a lesson on “filler words” in other languages in his graduate course on communication for management. “taking a break between ideas can help bring the audience in,” prof. the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a81 patton said. “in china, the common pause word is ‘that that that.’ so in china it might be ne ga, ne ga, ne ga.” prof. patton never mentioned that 那个, or ne ga, (alternatively spelled nà ge and nèige) sounds like the word nigger. some or nearly all of the black students across three sections of the course wrote a letter to geoffrey garrett, dean of the marshall school of business, saying that they were offended by what prof. patton said and described him as insensitive and incapable of teaching the three-week intensive communications course. “the way we heard it in class was indicative of a much more hurtful word with tremendous implications for the black community,” wrote the students. “there are over 10,000 characters in the chinese written language and to use this phrase, a clear synonym with this derogatory n-word term, is hurtful and unacceptable to our usc marshall community. the negligence and disregard displayed by our professor was very clear in today’s class.” the black students also wrote that “in light of the murders of george floyd and breonna taylor and the recent and continued collective protests and social awakening across the nation, we cannot let this stand.” a few days later, dean garrett sent students an email saying that prof. patton was being replaced as instructor of the course, effective immediately. “it is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students,” garrett wrote. prof. patton “repeated several times a chinese word that sounds very similar to a vile racial slur in english. understandably, this caused great pain and upset among students, and for that i am deeply sorry.” however, prof. patton’s suspension angered many other students and alumni. one petition calling for prof. patton’s reinstatement had over eleven thousand signatures. nearly a hundred alumni of the business school, many of whom are chinese and now live in china, also sent a letter to the dean and other administrators expressing support for prof. patton. “all of us have gained enormous benefit from the academic leadership of prof. patton. his caring, wisdom and inclusiveness were a hallmark of our educational experience and growth at usc and the foundation of our continued success in the years following. we unanimously recognize prof. patton’s use of ‘na ge’ as an accurate rendition of common chinese use, and an entirely appropriate and quite effective illustration of the use of pauses. prof. patton used this example and hundreds of others in our classes over the years, providing richness, relevance and real world impact.” the letter also invoked china’s cultural revolution, which some signers said they and their parents lived through. “the current incident, and marshall’s response so far, seem disturbingly similar to prevalent behavior in china at that time—spurious accusations against innocent people, which escalated into institutional insanity.” in various blog posts in china, the incident was referred to as “a contemporary version of the literary inquisition.” another post asked, “is it now forbidden to speak chinese in the united states?” cc chen, a student at the usc, defended prof patton, saying that it was “clearly an academic lecture on communication” and the professor was “describing a universal mistake commonly made in communication.” “for him to be censored simply because a chinese word sounds like an english pejorative term is a mistake and is not appropriate, especially given the educational setting. it also dismisses the fact that chinese is a real language and has its own pronunciations that have no relation to english.” chengyan wu, co-president of usc chinese student and scholar association, said that “restating the rights of one minority group should not be at the expense of violating the other. we have the right to use our own language” (allen, 2020). the school said in a statement that “we acknowledge the historical, cultural and harmful impact of racist language,” and that the university is “committed to building a culture of respect and dignity where all members of our community can feel safe, supported and can thrive.” in a letter to the marshall graduate student association’s executive board, prof. patton offered “another deep apology for the discomfort and the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a82 pain that i have caused members of our community. my intent has always been to provide a dynamic, diverse and supportive learning environment and i recently learned this has not always been the case” (flaherty, 2020). he also said that he has taught the course in question for 10 years and the chinese fillerword example he used “was given to me by several international students several years back.” the inclusion of other languages in the course is “part of a deep and sustained effort at inclusion as i have reached out to find and include many international, global, diverse, female, broad and inclusive leadership examples and illustrations to enhance communication and interpersonal skill in our global workplace.” prof. patton also said that when he read in his preliminary course evaluations where three students wrote they were troubled by his particular illustration, his “heart dropped” and he has “felt terrible ever since.” he said he emailed the entire program the next morning to apologize profusely. “i was willing to look at whatever i could do, personally and organizationally, to help the students and their classmates heal” (flaherty, 2020). the controversy at usc resembles one that also recently occurred at the university of illinois law school where a law professor was suspended for using “n___” in place of the word. according to a report of the incident by andrew koppelman (2021), the professor, jason kilborn, gave an examination in “civil procedure ii” that had a question that included a hypothetical in which a company, sued for discrimination, had obtained evidence that damaged its own defense. the question was whether the company must disclose that evidence to the plaintiff if requested. in the scenario described on the exam, a former employee told the company’s lawyer “that she quit her job at employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at plaintiff, calling her a “n____” and “b____” (profane expressions for african americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her.” this is the exact wording and symbolizing found on the test. prof. kilborn never used the word nigger or even the n-word. still, a black student said that upon seeing the sentence with “n____” she became “incredibly upset” and experienced “heart palpitations.” (koppelman, 2021). the black law students association complained to the dean of the law school and central administration, demanding that prof. kilborn be stripped of his committee assignments (“someone who exhibits such poor judgment should not be able to hold an additional position of power” (koppelman, 2021). it denounced him on instagram, linkedin, and twitter, and filed a complaint with uic’s office for access and equity. in a petition, the black law students association said that, the slur [“n____”] shocked students [,] created a momentous distraction and caused unnecessary distress and anxiety for those taking the exam. considering the subject matter, and the call of the question, the use of the “n____” and “b____” was certainly unwarranted as it did not serve any educational purpose. the question was culturally insensitive and tone-deaf. it lacked basic civility and respect for the student body, especially considering our social justice efforts this year. the integration of this dark and vile verbiage on a civil procedure ii exam was inexcusable and appropriate measures of accountability must be executed by the uic administration. we cannot ignore the history and violence the n-word represents and the psychological impact, and mental trauma students were subjected to. the implication of such vile and gratuitous verbiage on a civil procedure ii exam demonstrated a lack of respect, decency, and civility. (koppelman, 2021) the dean of the law school subsequently placed prof. kilborn on indefinite administrative leave and removed him from all his committee assignments. he was also instructed to stay off campus and barred from all faculty communications. in a statement, the law school said that, before winter break, dean dickerson apologized to the students who expressed hurt and distress over the examination question. the law school acknowledges that the racial and gender references on the the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a83 examination were deeply offensive. faculty should avoid language that could cause hurt and distress to students. those with tenure and academic freedom should always remember their position of power in our system of legal education. the law school is working with uic’s office for access and equity to conduct a thorough review of this matter, and dean dickerson and other law school and university leaders have scheduled a meeting with student leaders. we remain committed to ensuring that all of our students have a safe and supportive environment and that all members of the law school community live up to our shared values. (koppelman, 2021) these are only a few of many recent incidents where instructors and professors have either been investigated, suspended, or terminated for using the word “nigger” in a classroom setting and in ways that many, including prominent black scholars, view to be pedagogically sound, such as warning students that the word will appear in an assigned reading or refusing to censor the word when it came up in a discussion about a reading by a black author. let us also note that the word “nigger” is merely one of the words that is resulting in professors and instructors being investigated, suspended, and terminated. finally, besides calling for the banning of words, the banning of books, the banning of classes, the banning of songs (such as toto’s africa), the banning of costumes, the banning of topics, the banning of certain kinds of relationships, the banning of objects (such as black and indigenous students at the university of wisconsin recently demanding that university administrators remove a rock from campus), and the banning of speakers, students and faculty are also now calling for the banning of films that supposedly make them feel “unsafe” and “unwelcome.” the university of michigan cancelled (and then later rescheduled) the showing of the film american sniper after students complained in a letter to university administrators that “watching this movie is provocative and unsafe to [middle eastern and north african] and muslim students, who are too often reminded of how little the media and world values their lives” (new, 2015). upon first cancelling the film, the university said in a statement “we deeply regret causing harm to members of our community and appreciate the thoughtful feedback provided to us by students and staff alike. . . . while our intent was to show a film, the impact of the content was harmful, and made students feel unsafe and unwelcome at our program.” after the university’s decision to cancel the film was met with protest, the university said in a new statement that the film would now be screened in a “separate forum that provides an appropriate space for dialogue and reflection” (new, 2015). students at other colleges have also called for the banning of american sniper and other films. the many problems with banning words we can all appreciate the need to create classrooms and campus environments that are devoid of hostility and animosity, especially towards people who have too long been marginalized and brutalized. but there is much about the politics of banning words that is troubling and even dangerous. below i present and discuss a few of these concerns. #1 no power in words human beings are narrative beings. we are “homo narrans”—storytellers. we make sense of the world, ourselves, and each other by the stories we create, share, and consume. many narratives begin with a set of beliefs that often have no basis in science, evidence, or knowledge. for instance, who made god, or what was the bang that set off the big bang? the banning of words is a narrative within a much larger narrative. this much larger narrative assumes that words have power, thus hateful words supposedly have the power to do hateful things. however, this narrative never tells us how words come to have power. we are, again, simply to assume that words have power. also, why do only certain words have power? further, if certain words do have the power to do hateful things, why are so many immune to the supposed negative and debilitative effects of this power? further, who is willing to publicly bear witness to the claim the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a84 that words have power, as in being willing to publicly admit that another person’s words can change what they believe and value without their consent? for example, “yes, i did once love and admire jews. but after listening to speeches by hitler for the past few months, i now feel differently. evidently, words have power!” finally, many contend that the word “nigger” acquired its power from history. but how do we even begin to explain that process in ways that are empirically verifiable or at least coherent and consistent? after all, when does anything in history ever lend for one meaning? in other words, to say that the word “nigger” acquired its power from history is to suggest that it did so through a process devoid of interpretation. history supposedly shaped the meaning of the word, giving it a fixed meaning that that human beings cannot alter. however, as much as the word “nigger” has a torturous history, it is always human beings in the end who determine what words mean. also, because our own histories, ideologies, geographies, and temporalities are different, regardless of the fact that we all identify as black, the meanings we attach to this word, and thus how we respond to it, will always be different. the pervasiveness of the belief that words have power reflects an important point that is at the center of william j. bernstein’s (2021) book, the delusion of crowds: why do people go mad in groups, “humans understand the world through narratives. however much we flatter ourselves about our individual rationality, a good story, no matter how analytically deficient, lingers in the mind, resonates emotionally, and persuades more than the most dispositive facts or data.” in this case, the notion that words have power makes for an easy way to make sense of things. it neither threatens nor challenges us. on the other hand, this is a problem that narratives tend to present. narrative, writes roy scranton (2019), “is the enemy.” it is “a trick to seduce the mind into making sense of reality, a way of structuring the unknown that presumes we already know how things will end. … narrative is how we reassure ourselves everything’s going to be ok.” in many instances, such is no doubt the case. a narrative can stop us from dealing with what is real and binding, such as the fact that our actions and decisions are destroying the planet. a narrative can also stop us from doing what is morally hard and difficult, such as forgiving those who trespass against us. in such instances, writes scranton, “narrative seduces. narrative misunderstands. narrative confuses. narrative lies. narrative is the enemy.” however, on the other hand, “narrative is inevitable, for without narrative, human existence is absurd.” but no narratives can account for every truth. in order for narratives to achieve coherence, truths have to be twisted, distorted, and omitted. this is what narratives do. we never make sense of things by merely looking at one thing. we make sense of things by merging and converging things, which always involve bending, suppressing, and distorting other things. in this case, what is being suppressed in calls for the banning of words are the many things, like intent and context, that shape what words mean to us. if narratives are creatures of words, then no narrative will ever lend for one interpretation. #2 meaning is in us no doubt, the word “nigger” has a torturous legacy. however, “nigger” is a word. its meaning is determined by us. we have the power to control what the word means and how it affects us. as volosinov (1994) notes, “there is no reason for saying that meaning belongs to a word as such. in essence, meaning belongs to a word in its position between speakers; that is, meaning is realized only in the process of active, responsive understanding. meaning does not reside in the word or in the soul of the speaker or in the soul of the listener. meaning is the effect of interaction between speaker and listener produced via the material of a particular sound complex” (p. 53). this important point is discussed early in nearly every introductory communication textbook. “the important point to remember,” writes lee thayer (2011) in explaining things: inventing ourselves and our worlds, “is that nothing we encounter in the world—including words and images—contains or conveys meanings. it is we humans who provide that in every instance. what something means is not what that something means, but what it means to the person making the interpretation of some aspect of the world” (p. 104). thus, for thayer (2009), “communication is first of all the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a85 about interpretations. nothing comes to us with its meaning inscribed on its back. what something means to you or to me is found in interpretation” (p. 21). for virginia p. richmond and james c. mccroskey (2009), “the idea that meanings are in words is perhaps the most common misconception about communication… no word has any meaning apart from the person using it. no two people share precisely the same meanings for all words. meanings are in people, not words. therefore, we must realize that what we say to others ... might not convey the meaning we intend” (p. 17). in introduction to communication, sheila steinberg (2006) writes, “words are arbitrary signs that members of a culture agree to use to represent the things they sense and experience. it is because meaning does not reside in words that different cultures can also agree that hond, chien, injha, mpya, and dog can be used to talk about the same animal” (p. 49). however, because all human beings are of different experiences, different backgrounds, different resources, different tribulations, and different perspectives, our meanings will always be different. in this case, “nigger” will never have only one meaning. moreover, that meaning is found outside of words means that no language is inherently and objectively anything. what constitutes offensive, derogatory, and even hurtful language is subjective and interpretive, determined by all kinds of human forces and practices. to honor human diversity is to respect our right to name, describe, and experience things differently, meaning in ways that reflect our different backgrounds, circumstances, tribulations, ambitions, and so forth. so as much we should respect the rights of some to interpret a word a certain way, we should also respect the rights of others to interpret the same word differently. when we are deprived of this kind of rhetorical agency, diversity means nothing. #3 context matters as gregory bateson (2000) correctly notes, “without context, there is no communication” (p. 408). in other words, meaning and context are bound up with each other. meanings shape contexts, and contexts shape meanings. to know our meanings of things involves knowing the context that is situating and locating our meanings. in short, without context, determining meaning is impossible, ultimately making communication impossible. thus, for students and faculty to insist that a white professor using the word nigger in a classroom is always wrong, regardless of intent or context, is simply false. indeed, as seen in these college incidents, many communication problems arise from our failure to properly understand the context that is locating our meanings. but determining any context is difficult. as corey anton (2007) observes, “we speak of words as if they help to establish context while we nonetheless speak of them as gaining their meaning from their context; people are said to take words out of context and we often use words to create context. this range of understanding reveals how context, (or that to which that word supposedly refers) is anything but clear, distinct, or generally agreed upon” (p. 88). for jacques derrida (1977), “a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather . . . its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated” (p. 3). the reason being that there are different kinds of contexts. there can be a racial context, a relational context, a cultural context, a historical context, a pedagogical context, and even a personal context. there is no way to know exactly what context is in play. also, what i conceive and perceive to be the proper context can be different from what you conceive and perceive to be the proper context. contexts also mean that what i find to be appropriate can be different from what you find to be appropriate. finally, contexts are fleeting and always changing. because contexts are always changing, meanings are always changing. in this regard, context presents many challenges to communication with regard to knowing what a person means. we attend to communication by attending to context. for example, in many places in the south, black civil rights activists organize what is now called reenactment history, which mostly involves reenacting the lynching of african americans. in these reenactments, black civil rights activists demand that the white actors use the full word, nigger. for the black activists who direct these reenactments, white actors using the full word is important as regards fully and accurately capturing the incident. as cassandra green the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a86 recently told a group of white actors involved in one of these reenactments, “i know it’s hard on you guys, cause when you have to stand up there and say nigger and a lot of these things, it’s not easy, and that’s why it’s so hard to get people to do it” (ford & haney, 2018). evidently, the black civil rights activists who direct these reenactments understand well that context is important in terms of understanding how and where words are used. #4 no group is a monolith banning the word “nigger” on college campuses assumes that all persons of a certain group, in this case black folks, support these bans. there is supposedly no significant diversity within the black community. but as seen in the writings of black professors who oppose these bans, such as john mcwhorter (2019) from columbia university, randall kennedy (2003, 2020) from harvard university, vershawn young (2020) from the university of waterloo, henry louis gates (1993) from harvard university, and david bradley (2014) from university of oregon, this is false. andre perry (2018), an education consultant, writes, “teachers must teach the n-word, particularly in literature and music, in the context of the history of white supremacy, lynching, economic suppression as well as segregation and discrimination. . . . there is no escaping the fact that teachers must use the n-word. pretending the word doesn’t exist because it makes you uncomfortable is . . . an act of delusion.” john ridley, a black author and filmmaker who has written extensively about the word “nigger,” told the new york times that efforts to ban the word are insulting because they suggest that black folks can be cowed “by six letters and two syllables.” he also said, “i honestly think that with everything that’s going on in america, that the idea of trying to ban a word to solve a problem is just ridiculous. and for people of color . . . for us to be worried about this word is ridiculous” (o’connor, 2007). evidently, no black person has the right to say that using the word “nigger” in a classroom setting “is directly harmful to all of the black students on campus.” neither does the dean of education at duquesne university has any right to say that using the full word in a classroom setting always creates a hostile learning environment. there is always diversity—diversity of thought, diversity of feeling—in any community. diversity is the constant in human affairs. however, these new bans on supposedly offensive and hateful speech suppress and diminish diversity by demanding conformity under the threat of investigation, suspension, and termination. #5 no proof in banning things besides calling for the banning of words, college students and faculty are also calling for the banning of books, the banning of speakers, the banning of classes, the banning of songs, the banning of films, the banning of conferences, the banning of costumes, and the banning of relationships (such as those between faculty and students). we no doubt like the idea of banning things. we believe that banning things is good. it fixes things. but how is the banning of things by progressives any different to the banning of things by conservatives, such as the banning of abortions, the banning of certain kinds of immigrants, the banning of transgender people from bathrooms, and the banning of any teaching of critical race theory? how can new social worlds become possible when both sides are employing the same politics? what becomes of audre lorde’s (1984) notion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”? (p. 122). to believe in the efficacy of banning things is to assume that there are things outside of us that can harm and hurt us. to ban things is remove those things from our environment, thereby removing any threat those things can possibly pose to us. in this way, banning things is about expelling things and walling off ourselves from supposedly dangerous things. it is about erecting a wall between us and these harmful things. so in a world that values banning things, walls abound, physically and discursively. there is always division and separation. just like how every list of banned words aims to create an ideal campus, every the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a87 border wall seeks to keep out those human beings who supposedly threaten our ideal country. in both instances, the goal is to protect us from things that threaten us. in both instances, the goal is to create a safe space for us. but do such protections work? in fact, are such protections even healthy for us? we need look no further than the study of living systems to understand why the politics of banning words is dangerous. there are no impermeable walls in the natural world. for sure, there is division and separation, with different species and ecologies thriving in different places and under different conditions. however, species and ecologies that deliberately isolate themselves from other species and ecologies die. in other words, closed systems perish in the natural world. species and ecologies only thrive in open systems, meaning systems that are permeable and vulnerable to all manner of forces and influences (capra & luisi, 2014). there is also no hierarchy in open systems, meaning that there is no one entity unilaterally imposing a set of rules and regulations on any system. instead, open systems succeed by encouraging and demanding that all things confront and reckon with other things, in the process changing and evolving in ways that promote cooperation. all species and ecologies have to respond transactionally to the needs and challenges that other species and ecologies present. no one entity ever gets everything it wants. to say that there is no hierarchy in open systems is to also say there is no autocracy in open systems. our prosperity is purely dependent on our ability to get along well with others. banning words makes us closed systems. it stops us from confronting and reckoning with things we personally and subjectively judge to be abominable. it thereby stops us from acquiring new capacities and capabilities that come from facing new challenges. we come to falsely believe that we are better off in banning things than confronting things. indeed, many of our neuroses and psychoses come from us being closed systems, walled off from all things that challenge us to change and evolve. it is therefore no accident that the age of banning nearly everything is also the age of college students dealing with unsurpassed levels of mental health problems. recent surveys find that in the us three out of five students now experience “overwhelming anxiety,” and two out of five students are “too depressed to function” (roy, 2018). finally, analysts now tell us that banning supposedly bad things only makes those things more persistent and virulent. it does so by turning things into closed system, saving these things from inquiry and criticism. in this case, there is no research showing that banning words is ending the rise of hate. in fact, analysts—pointing to the rise of hate groups across europe—contend that laws that aim to ban words contribute to the rise of hate by driving the hate underground and in the ballot boxes. indeed, hitler’s rise occurred when germany had hate speech laws and was also vigorously enforcing such laws. as flemming rose explains after studying that period of germany’s history, the assertion that nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. but to claim that the holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-semitic speech and nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. leading nazis such as joseph goebbels, theodor fritsch, and julius streicher were all prosecuted for anti-semitic speech. streicher served two prison sentences. rather than deterring the nazis and countering anti-semitism, the many court cases served as effective publicrelations machinery, affording streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate. in the years from 1923 to 1933, der stürmer [streicher’s newspaper] was either confiscated or editors taken to court on no fewer than thirty-six occasions. the more charges streicher faced, the greater became the admiration of his supporters. the courts became an important platform for streicher’s campaign against the jews. in the words of a present-day civil-rights campaigner, pre-hitler germany had laws very much like the anti-hate laws of today, and they were enforced with some vigor. as history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it. (news desk, 2015) the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a88 what then is the value of banning words on college campuses when there is nothing empirically or historically to support doing so? #6 no accounting of harm the politics of banning words assumes that words can cause harm and injury, just like how weapons can cause harm and injury, and that “nigger,” being the most hateful of words, can cause the most harm and injury. we are always hearing and reading about the damage the word inflicts, regardless of intent or context. faculty who opposed prof. adamo at augsburg university said in a statement that prof. adamo’s “repeated use of the n-word has caused harm to our students. this term, the most violent and racially charged word in american culture, has historically been used in the u.s. by white people to dehumanize and humiliate black people. we also acknowledge that this harm was intensified when adamo defended his use of the n-word multiple times against the objections of students of color” (the echo, 2018). moreover, asserting “academic freedom in defense of language that harms students turns the very principle that makes true learning possible into a mechanism for enforcing institutional racism. the incident illustrates the urgent need for many of our faculty to be more self-critical in their positions of power and racial (as well as gender and other forms of) privilege. furthermore, it underscores the very real power of words to cause damage and trauma. we believe that further conversations about academic freedom can only take place after we acknowledge that harm has been done to these students.” the statement makes further mention of how language “inflicts harm” and “denies a student’s humanity.” for these faculty, intent and context have nothing to do with how the word was used in prof. adamo’ classroom. merely uttering the word is enough to inflict harm and injury. thus, for these faculty, intent and context supposedly have nothing to do with communication. however, to hold this to be true would meaning rejecting everything that is found in communication theory as regard the vital role that agency plays in shaping how we respond to things. it would also mean rejecting everything found in choice theory, which has long been effectively guiding many recovery programs. we are therefore to believe from these incidents on college campuses involving the word nigger that black people are devoid of agency and merely passive victims of language. glenn loury (2021), a prominent black scholar at brown university, contends that it is “morally offensive” to impute that black folks are devoid of agency. for loury, “it infantilizes them, makes them mere puppets at the end of strings being pulled by others. in the extreme, it robs them of their human dignity. and perhaps worst of all, it robs a community of the ability to make social judgements. it undermines the capacity to clearly delineate right and wrong ways of living and to urge individuals to live rightly.” similarly, john mcwhorter (2021) contends that white university administrators refusing to push back critically on black students’ many demands to ban things represents a new kind of racism. there is also no research that supports the notion that simply being exposed to certain words causes harm. psychologists contend that what is happening reflects a self-fulfilling prophecy—if you believe that speech can harm you, then speech will harm you. research also shows that persons respond differently to hate speech. as jesse singal (2017) points out, “there’s no evidence that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus is harming students in some deep psychological or physiological way (with the exception of outlying cases involving preexisting mental-health problems). this is a silly idea that should be retired from the conversation about free speech on campus.” in fact, social scientists contend that being exposed to hate speech can actually be good for us by pushing us to develop new social skills, new temperaments, and new ways of thinking about things (lukianoff & haidt, 2018). this thesis is emerging from a lot of research that is now consistently revealing that human development is about becoming resilient and divergent. we become so by confronting things that are difficult, demanding, and even impossible. the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a89 #7 violence is a problem finally, what is especially troubling about these incidents on college campuses involving supposedly offensive words is how faculty, students, and university administrators appear to have no qualms about employing and demanding violence and vengeance to deal with transgressors, even those who never had any intent to do any kind of harm. i define violence as the deliberate use of force and social forces to impose one’s will on others without any consent. from how students and faculty are demanding that professors be punished for using certain words in the classroom, we are to assume that in order for the classroom to be a safe and inclusive safe, violence is necessary. those who offend our own sensibility, rationality, and modality must face violence and vengeance. according to a recent report, the targeting of faculty by college students has increased exponentially since 2015, with nearly three out of four cases resulting in faculty being sanctioned for speech that is constitutionally protected (fire, 2021). even when instructors and professors who are accused of offending students apologize again and again, students still demand that they face dire consequences. apparently, mercy and forgiveness have nothing to do with becoming learned, educated, and enlightened. what then becomes the value of studying the lives and teachings of persons like martin luther king, jr., bayard ruskin, desmond tutu, martin buber, and so many others who sought to teach us about the recursive and debilitative nature of violence and vengeance? were these persons all wrong about the nature of violence? why are all these calls for violence from students, faculty, and administrators going unchallenged? why must the words of fyodor tyutchev’s (“it’s not given us to foretell how our words will echo through the ages, but sympathy is given us as grace is given us.”) mean nothing to us? integration and discussion i share the view that violence begins in a monologic temperament—assuming that the world is singular rather than plural, such as believing that any use of the word “nigger” by a white person is always wrong, regardless of intent or context. again, that many prominent black professors oppose this position, reminds us that diversity is the order of things, regardless of how hard we try to pretend otherwise. however, when we believe that the world is singular rather than plural, then anything that is different becomes vulnerable to violence. it is why the enemy narrative is the most popular narrative in the western world (marshall, 2014). in a singular world, there can only be one truth, one view, one meaning, one god, one true religion. in other words, in a world of a monologic temperament, diversity, in all its complexity, fecundity, and possibility, is impossible. that the world is plural rather than singular means that no truth is ever final and perfect. there is always moral, ideological, and epistemological space for a new truth or new version of a truth. this is the space that diversity represents and thrives on. so human beings will always be of different passions and convictions. rather than with difference, our problem is with violence. our way out of violence resides in cultivating a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament that assumes that the world is plural rather than singular. such a temperament would find support in an observation made by physics nobel laureate freeman dyson (2000), “i do not claim any ability to read god’s mind. i am sure of only one thing. when we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that god loves diversity. perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity. the principle of maximum diversity says that the laws of nature, and the initial conditions at the beginning of time, are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible.” the goal of a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament is to save difference from violence. we do so by recognizing how we bring violence into the world by cultivating monologue, that is, by insisting that things lend for only one meaning, one truth, one perspective. in this way, violence comes from our determination to violate the natural rhythms of life and the universe. but as history makes plain again and again, our determination to do so will always end disastrously. what then to make of the fact that the new push to violently suppress human diversity is happening on college the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a90 campuses, places that are supposed to represent enlightenment and higher learning? how could these institutions be so complicit in bringing so much violence into the world, and especially under the pretext of promoting diversity? no doubt, human diversity is about race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. but human diversity is also about our different temperaments, different backgrounds, different circumstances, different sentiments, different ambitions, different resources, different prejudices, different values, different belief systems, different fears, different ethics, different politics, different struggles/tribulations. it is also about our different rationalities, different sensibilities, different spiritualities, different modalities, different pedagogies, different ideologies, and different epistemologies. this is the problem with claiming that the word nigger is offensive and “directly harmful to all of the black students on campus.” it obliterates human diversity. it promotes the illusion of uniformity for the sake of saving us from the hardwork that comes with reckoning with our diversity. that something is offensive to us is merely that, something that is offensive to us. the universe has no law mandating that because something is offensive to one person it should be offensive to others. neither does the universe have any law mandating that we should all react similarly to the things one person or group finds offensive. diversity makes communication possible and valuable. communication has meaning only to the extent that speaker and listener have different thoughts. communication is about recognizing and engaging another perspective. these new bans on presumably offensive speech suppress and diminish diversity by demanding conformity under the threat of investigation, suspension, and termination, that is, under the threat of force and violence. in other words, in limiting and diminishing communication, these bans limit and diminish diversity. the flourishing of diversity is bound up with the flourishing of communication. only through communication can our full diversity appear in all its fecundity, complexity, and possibility. this is why rules and regulations will always diminish diversity. both do so by limiting and strangling communication. for with rules and regulations, nothing is open for negotiation and deliberation. there is only submission. finally, that diversity is bound up with communication means that communication demands vulnerability—owning the limits of what we can understand. that we are physically incapable of understanding most things completely and absolutely means that we must always allow for the possibility of a view or position that is different to our own. these new bans end this possibility. we are to assume that there is only one course of action that is correct when dealing with certain words. there is supposedly no need to listen compassionately to others. in this way, the politics of banning words makes for less diversity by making for less communication. final thoughts i understand well that “nigger” is no ordinary word. it is impossible to separate it from over 350 years of slavery, black codes, and jim crow. thus, as much as i believe that no word or subject matter should ever be off limits in a classroom setting, i also believe that this particular word should always be handled carefully and sensitively. so when used or uttered in a classroom setting, especially by a person who is not black, it should always be clear to all that the word is only being used for pedagogical reasons. in fact, even though i, in being of black ancestry, have racial permission to use the word nigger outside of a classroom setting, i personally never do. it never comes out of my mouth well. in fact, i would prefer to live in a world devoid of the word. however, as a teacher i have devoted my life to the conviction that knowledge is our most viable path to a better world. so as much as i personally oppose this word, i believe we will only bring about its complete disuse when we arrive at that place when we are ready to so. i therefore believe that teaching is about embracing the notion that “the only way out is through”—we get pass things by confronting things in our classrooms honestly, courageously, and compassionately. this means modeling for my students modes of being that honor dialogue over monologue, knowledge over the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a91 violence. in other words, this means embodying teaching as a mode of being that promotes no kind of violence, as in i refusing to coercively or insidiously impose my view of anything on my students. there are different ways to teach and discuss dialogue. we can teach and discuss dialogue in terms of deliberately refusing to harm and diminish others. this view is about cultivating awareness of the consequences of how we name, frame, and describe people and situations. the writings of martin buber figure prominently in this view. buber contends that violence begins in our naming of things. how we name things will shape how we engage things. we can also teach and discuss dialogue in terms of the nature of language. this view is about showcasing how the nature of language is dialogic, meaning that there is no stable relationship between words and meaning. as such, our descriptions and explanations will never be complete and absolute. our interactions thus demand a lot of grace and generosity. the writings of mikhail bakhtin figure prominently in this view. bakhtin contends that because language is always shifting and changing, everything that language makes possible is also always shifting and changing. he also contends that language and meaning live between people. we can also teach and discuss dialogue in terms of perspective. we become dialogic by expanding what we are willing to understand. this involves, among other things, ridding ourselves of our egotism and narcissism. our perspective becomes larger only when we become smaller. persons who adopt this view will often refer to the writings of david bohm, beginning with on dialogue. bohm contends that the most egregious error we make as human beings is assuming that we know things when in fact we can do no more than assume things. however, in believing that we know things, we become dogmatic and autocratic. in my own classes, i draw upon all the different traditions on dialogue. however, in my dialogue class, dialogue and experience, i focus on dialogue as perspective (bohm). the reason being that our perspectives reflect our minds, and, as buddhism teaches, “mind is everything.” according to the buddha, “what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.” he also says, “what we think we become.” we nearly always have the power to control how we respond to things by reclaiming our power to control how we view things. to change the way we view things is to change how we think about things. in my own teaching of dialogue, i am about demonstrating how we can always alter and expand how we view and understand things, and subsequently control how we respond to things. this involves learning how to detach ourselves from things, such as all those things we casually value and believe, like our believing that power resides in words and symbols. our minds become open to new things through detachment. in buddhism, detachment is the path to enlightenment. conversely, attachment is the cause of our misery. according to the buddha, being attached “to present views as if they were absolute truth will only prevent us from realizing the truth. humility and open-mindedness are the two conditions necessary for making progress on the path. (hanh, 1991, p. 451). suffice it to say, the banning of words has no basis in buddhism. just as much as we make for our own suffering, we can also stop doing so. but first we must own the fact that we make for our suffering rather than our suffering coming from outside of us, such as hearing a person use a certain word in a classroom. for as the buddha teaches, “when the mind exists undisturbed in the way, nothing in the world can offend, and when a thing can no longer offend, it ceases to exist in the old way” (kononenko & kononenko, 2010, p. 146). as for what i do about students in my classes who may find my teacherly use of the word “nigger” offensive in the classroom, i always begin with revealing how i personally feel about the word and why i would prefer to call a person “brother” rather than “nigger.” then i discuss how language is political. we are always fighting over language, as in who can use what language, what language is appropriate in what context, what language belongs to whom, what language should govern the public square, what language best describes a situation, and so forth. because language is always political, it is always about power— the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a92 as in, who decides whether to call a person a terrorist or a freedom fighter? so as i am working on this paper i am also now learning about a new movement in the native american community to stop capitalizing words so as to undermine the hierarchy and oppression that the english language engenders and sustains (manyguns, 2021). the word “nigger” is about power. it is about black folks, after 350 years of slavery, black codes, and jim crow, finally having any power to impact how white folks use language. for this reason, many black folks have no intention of giving up this newfound power. however, is the struggle over this word ultimately valuable for black students? indeed, many of my own bright and beautiful black students remain convinced that hearing a white person utter the word, even in a classroom setting, is hurtful. to this i often say, “if words have power, then what do you have? it means you have nothing. i now have power over you. i can do with you as i please. for if i can hurt you with my words, then i have power over you. i can hurt you at will. but why would you want to be in such a weak and powerless place? why would you want to give this kind of enormous power over to someone? so when you give up your power to control what words mean and how they land on you, you are choosing to be powerless. but again, why would you want to be powerless? how can you transform the world for the better from such a position? the reality is that giving away your power robs you of mental strength and the ability to control your life (morin, 2017). it is a very debilitative thing to do. so why do you want to do it?” i also remind my students that becoming learned is about fostering a dialogic, democratic, and pluralistic temperament. it is something you become by enlarging what you can perceive, experience, and imagine. so today you want nigger to be banned because you find it offensive. you also want students and instructors who use the word in your classes to be punished. but what about those other students in your classes who find your support of abortion in the classroom to be just as offensive and hurtful? what about those students who also claim to be traumatized by the language of pro-choice? what also of those students who oppose any discussion of any reading that deals with abortion? what about those students who demand that any student or instructor who expresses support for abortion be punished, just like how the university punishes those who say nigger? indeed, why should colleges that claim to be about making all students feel safe, welcome, and valued have no obligation to also make these students who oppose abortion feel safe, welcome, and valued? why should these students have no claim over what words come out of your mouth in the classroom? why should only your concerns matter? why should only your feelings matter? how does any university justify defending only your concerns? why should religious diversity be valued less than any other kind of diversity in the classroom, especially when there are religious denominations with long histories of discrimination and persecution? so let us always remember that human diversity means human diversity. your truth is merely one truth. if you want us to respect your truth, you need to respect ours. in other words, if you believe it is wrong for others to impose their truths on you through force and violence, then recognize that it is wrong for you to do likewise. finally, i remind my students that there is a reason why i never define or frame anything only one way. the reason being that dialogue has no interest in how we define things. instead, dialogue is about how we engage things. are we doing so with empathy and compassion, sensitivity and vulnerability? are we speaking to declare and announce, or to listen and understand? what implicit biases and prejudices are we harboring that can limit and distort our understanding of things? what will it take, as many native americans say, for the words of others to enter our hearts? that dialogue is about flow means that it is about the process. if we do the process well, meaning if we meet each other with open hearts and minds, the outcome will be fine. ultimately, i embody teaching from the standpoint that no human being can command a complete and absolute truth. there are always other versions of the truth that reflect our different experiences, the new heresy and the modern inquisition amardo rodriguez dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2021.422 | vol. 9 (2021) a93 different circumstances, different tribulations, different ambitions, different values, different beliefs, and so forth. in a word, there is always diversity—diversity in description, diversity in interpretation, diversity in rationalization, diversity in conclusion. moreover, there is always dark matter and dark energy, meaning that all truths have the potential to change and evolve in ways that are outside of our control. thus, teaching, like learning, demands enormous humility and vulnerability. we must be willing to suspend all that we believe and value so we can be genuinely vulnerable to truths, experiences, and perspectives that are different to our own. we deliberate and meditate because the world will never allow us to have complete and absolute truths. thus, of all the deeply troubling things about schools and colleges now investigating, suspending, and terminating instructors for using certain words in classes is the reifying and concretizing of the falsehood that human beings can possess a complete and absolute truth. besides making diversity impossible, this falsehood makes communication impossible, and, in doing so, makes violence inevitable. such is the threat that reifying and concretizing this falsehood poses to us. that schools and colleges are now complicit in deepening this threat is simply surreal. references allen, k. 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(2011). explaining things: inventing ourselves and our worlds. new york, ny: xlibris. the echo (2018, november 30). faculty respond to professor’s use of n-word by calling for institutional change around racial justice. the echo. retrieved from https://augsburgecho.com/2018/11/30/faculty-respond-to-professors-use-of-n-word-by-calling-forinstitutional-change-around-racial-justice/ tully, t. (2021, may 3). debate erupts at n.j. law school after white student quotes racial slur. the new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/nyregion/rutgers-law-school-nword.html volosinov, v. n. (1994). language and ideology. in janet maybin (ed.), language and literacy in social practice (pp. 44-57). tonawanda, ny: multilingual press. wood, p. (2017). the article that made 16,000 ideologues go wild. minding the campus. retrieved from https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/10/the-article-that-made-16000-profs-go-wild/ young, v. a. (2020, october). banning the n-word on campus ain’t the answer—it censors black professors like me. caut. retrieved from https://www.caut.ca/bulletin/2020/10/commentarybanning-n-word-campus-aint-answer-it-censors-black-professors-me new articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 united states license. this journal is published by the university library system, university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e1 the stand on dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war: my perspective on december 12, 2022 eugene matusov university of delaware, usa abstract this essay represents the publication of my keynote address at the first dpj online conference on december 12, 2022. in my speech, i defined how i perceive “our times” and how dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war may try to address these challenges or even if we should do so. i continued developing the concept of ontological dialogic education. what is the role of ontological dialogic education in addressing the challenges of our times, and is it relevant at all? why and how can it contribute to a vision of a liberal democracy, if at all? this questioning let me introduce a key post-enlightenment notion of education based on students’ self-determination and dignity. eugene matusov is a professor of education at the university of delaware. he studied developmental psychology with soviet researchers working in the vygotskian paradigm and worked as a schoolteacher before immigrating to the united states. he uses sociocultural and bakhtinian dialogic approaches to education. his current research and practice focus is on democratic dialogic education. his recent books are: matusov, e. (2020), "envisioning education in a post-work leisure-based society: a dialogic perspective." matusov, e., marjanovic-shane, a., & gradovski, m. (2019), "dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: bakhtin by and for educators." ïïò introduction initially, i wanted to turn my oral keynote address into a conventional academic essay based on my oral presentation at the dialogic pedagogy journal online conference. however, listening to my talk, i decided to publish it as an edited transcript. i chose to be respectful and faithful to eugene matusov circa december 12, 2022. therefore, i did not update the ideas presented in this address. i cleaned the text of its orality that may disturb some readers, added necessary references, clarified some ambiguous points, and addressed the critique that was kindly provided by the conference audience after my presentation. i am very thankful to mariëtte de haan, ana marjanovic-shane, alexander sidorkin, and bridgette redder for their helpful and thought-provoking critique and support of my address. also, i want to thank mikhail gradovski for organizing the conference, inviting me, and facilitating my session. finally, i want to express my gratitude to bob hampel, ana marjanovic-shane, and mariëtte de haan for providing feedback, editing, and very helpful suggestions on a previous draft of this article. thanks a lot, ana marjanovic-shane, for her careful and thoughtful editing of my previous text as a co-editor of the dialogic pedagogy journal. dialogic pedagogy journal for studies of dialogic education issn: 2325-3290 (online) the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e2 our times good morning, good day, good evening, and good night! whatever fits you! today, i just want to present my half-baked ideas that will hopefully lead to a bigger project. let me start with the statement that i really love the title of our conference: “dialogic pedagogy in the times of war or peace and war.” i think it is useful to reflect on our times now and the role of dialogic pedagogy in it. therefore, i decided to share with you what i think about our times and dialogic pedagogy. what i’m presenting is not the perspective on dialogic pedagogy – rather, it's my perspective as it is today, on december 12th, 2022, because it might change tomorrow, if not even this evening. i will present my understanding of dialogic pedagogy, our times, and the place of education in society as it is right now, at the time of the key address. finalizing this manuscript at the beginning of 2024, i tried to resist the temptation to update my key address, mentioning world events that occurred in the last year since my address. it is enough to say that, unfortunately, my arguments only got stronger, especially after hamas genocidal attack of israel on october 7, 2023. i first want to talk about “our time.” after that, i will talk about what i think about dialogic pedagogy, and then i will dive into the relationship between education and society. my disclaimer is – i want to repeat it one more time – that “our times” is defined from my personal vista, here and now. this is how i see our times. i am aware that you may see “our times” in different ways. let me zoom in on “our times.” what do i see? i see many alarming challenges. the retreat of liberal democracy first of all, i see a retreat of the liberal democracy (zakaria, 2003), a retreat that has been happening probably for, i don't know, the last 15-20 years or, maybe, starting even earlier. liberal democracy is characterized by tolerance, pluralism, respect for minorities, human rights (i.e., political liberalism), and governance by people (i.e., democracy). by the way, democracy can be illiberal, and nondemocratic governance can be liberal (zakaria, 2003). i see the retreat of liberal democracy from geographical and ideological perspectives. geographically, more countries have increasingly become illiberal and/or undemocratic. some of these countries have become illiberal democracies, some have become completely autocratic, and some have even become totalitarian. according to the varieties of democracy project, the percentage of countries governed by liberal democracy dropped from its historic peak of 24.9% in 2009 to 18.0% in 2022, which roughly corresponds to 1989 when liberal democracy was on the rise (herre, ortiz-ospina, & roser, 2023). the global index of liberal democracy is getting more and more alarming year by year. from an ideological point of view, the appeal to liberal democracy has become less and less strong, less and less persuasive, at least up to this year. maybe it will change soon, and there is some possibility of these changes in the air. specifically, i'm talking about the promising results of the congressional elections in the united states this year, november 2022, when the trumpist red wave did not emerge. maybe it is a change for the good, hopefully. but maybe not. maybe it's only a temporary “statistical noise.” but, for some time, liberal democracy has become less and less appealing ideologically, while illiberal democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian regimes have become more appealing to people worldwide. of course, the geographical retreat and ideological crisis of liberal democracy go together, hand in hand, feeding each other. let me give an example of an offensive of autocratic and totalitarian regimes on ideological fronts. if you look at the, let us say, problem of how different countries have addressed the covid pandemic, an the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e3 important debate about which political regime handled the pandemic better is revealing. which political regime -liberal democracy or its alternatives – did better in dealing with the covid pandemic? what does it mean “better”? you can look at different things like, for example, covid-caused deaths per million people in the population. and you can see that some authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, like, for example, china, look pretty appealing to some so far (chen, 2022). their statistics look good. well, we know that right now, there is an ongoing covid-related unrest in china1. however, that's another story. if you look at it from the point of view of the people who died, even if chinese statistics may not be fully trusted, it's very impressive in terms of the number of deaths per million: 4 deaths per million in china compared to 3,315 deaths in the usa2. it is true that the covid-related mortality statistics are probably not reliable, and the story has not ended yet. still, it is still unclear who handled the covid pandemic better: countries with liberal democracy like the us (3,315 deaths per million of its population), germany (1,895), the uk (2,887), italy (3,027), france (2,438), israel (1,278), sweden (2,075), new zealand (688), australia (631), south korea (606), japan (413), norway (816), etc., or authoritarian and totalitarian countries like china (4), singapore (287), hungary (5,032), turkey (1,186), vietnam (436), saudi arabia (265), russia (2,693), iran (1,682), and so on. the jury is still out. anyway, i'm just giving one example of these debates, ideological debates, about political regime effectiveness. there is no clear-cut answer to what political regime is better right now. it used to be clear in the 1980s and 1990s when the soviet union empire and its satellites collapsed. some scholars claimed “the end of history” because they believed that liberal democracy decisively and conclusively won once and for all (fukuyama, 1992). however, now we think of a new history without a conclusive victory of liberal democracy – the painful drama of history continues. oops! the normalization of wars another ugly thing that has emerged just this year is the normalization of wars. of course, it's not the case that there have been no wars before this year, but the new issue, a new normal, is the normalization of wars in the global world of the 21st century, including a major war in europe. before this year, wars were viewed as an aberration from the global trend toward perpetual world peace, as a historical atavism, as a tragic but annoying nuisance, and as overcoming our sad, savage past (pinker, 2011). there was a hegemonic post-wwii consensus that wars must be prevented as much as possible. it's not the right policy to launch wars, especially territorial wars of annexation and imperial colonial wars. we thought that wars, especially imperial, colonial, and conquest wars, were behind us, mostly. however, suddenly, after the beginning of the full-scale russian invasion of ukraine on february 24, 2022, we have learned that not only are wars not behind us, but some countries, like russia, accept the normalcy of such wars. another thing is, again, that since the collapse of the soviet union and the end of the cold war, people fear and panic again about global nuclear armageddon and a new world war. after the collapse of the soviet union in the early 1990s, we felt that this existential fear was behind us. today, some say we are already experiencing world war four – the cold war being the third world war. so, these threats and worries suddenly become more acute and global. this is part of the current trends. the powerful ideal that maybe we can reach an idea of peace, perpetual peace, which was considered to be a viable possibility not so long ago (pinker, 2011), is fading. now, it feels less and less possible. there is less belief in the progress toward a warless world. 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_covid-19_protests_in_china 2 see the world meter covid statistics on december 12, 2022, here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221212215106/https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_covid-19_protests_in_china https://web.archive.org/web/20221212215106/https:/www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e4 the kafkaesque oppression by positivism: ai, big data, patternocratia, measurement, accountability another interesting but troubling thing marking our times is what i would call the kafkaesque oppression by positivism. i mean the perpetuation of numberization, patternization, measurement, and artificial intelligence in diverse spheres of our social life. management of the population by big data, what i call patternocratia, has become ubiquitous. this is my new word in my contribution to the english language, digital patternocratia: the power of the patterns. people see patterns everywhere, trying to discover them, create patterns, etc. they think patterns can explain, control, constitute, or replace everything, including emotions, meaning-making, biases, desires, goals, and values. this is a structuralfunctional formalism i wrote about in the past (matusov, 2020b; matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019b; matusov, marjanovic-shane, kullenberg, & curtis, 2019). patternocratia is also manifested in the widespread of measurement: we're trying to measure everything from love to pain, to learning, to everything. furthermore, the notion of accountability is another sign of patternocratia. let me tell you a personal anecdote about the arrival of the new brave world of patternocratia. i was recently banned from facebook for two weeks. in a facebook discussion of the origin of lynching with my friends and colleagues, i added the link to a wikipedia article about lynching, and facebook banned me for “violating communal norms.” i don't know what community they are talking about. is facebook a community governed by communal sensibilities in the first place? or is it a society governed by democratically established laws (matusov, 2022a)? why facebook considers itself as a community is a good question. anyway, they banned me because of this link to the wikipedia article on lynching3. why? because when you go to the article on lynching on wikipedia, you will see a very graphic picture of lynching. hello!!! it’s lynching, for god’s sake! it was a postcard that the lynch mobs were sending their friends and family as a kind of greeting card. and, because of this disturbing picture on wikipedia, facebook banned me. of course, it was done by the algorithm of artificial intelligence. in the email to me, the artificial intelligence lord of facebook informed me that if i disagreed with their decision, i could appeal. they provided the link to a text window where i could write my appeal. i wrote my appeal in the text window and clicked the submit button. an error message popped up saying, “sorry, we cannot accept your appeal right now for technical reasons. try to do it later.” two days later, i gave up on that. interestingly, you don't even know you're talking to artificial intelligence, but, of course, you do. but you are not informed. moreover, if facebook technology of the submit button worked well, if i could submit my appeal, artificial intelligence would probably review my appeal. thus, one artificial intelligence monitors another artificial intelligence. this is the world we're increasingly living in. that is why the writings of franz kafka come to my mind when big data, ai, measurements, accountability, and patterns rule the world. of course, patternocratia has also penetrated education. patterns increasingly rule people. for example, as some of you may know, as a part of educational reform the race to the top in the united states under president obama, educational bureaucrats have been trying to create a value-added accountability system for teachers. based on big data, this accountability system tries to assess whether the teachers increased learning – “added value” – in their students by comparing the before and after exam scores. as a result of these value-added assessment systems, some otherwise excellent teachers were fired from their jobs (o'neil, 2016). sadly, this is becoming increasingly common in the world we live in now. finally, on a much more sinister note of the oppression by patternocratia, i was teaching in china in the fall of 2019, just before covid. two cameras were on the ceiling in my university classroom: one faced me, and the other faced my students. there was probably constant monitoring of what was going on during my lessons: the possible political discourse, loyalties or, at least, neutrality to the chinese 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lynching the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e5 communist regime, a lack of critical political thinking, the accord with the party’s line, and so on. i saw these two cameras hanging on the ceiling in each classroom at this newly renovated university building where i was teaching. and, again, with a high probability, our political loyalties were monitored and assessed not by real people but by artificial intelligence. post-truth and collapse of institutional positivism on the other hand, from the opposite side of that, we have the post-truth: the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy theories, the shameless spread of “alternative facts,” and the collapse of institutional positivism. by institutional positivism, i mean expert-based institutions trusted with establishing and checking facts on very consequential and publicly important subject matters like vaccination, global warming, overpopulation, history, health, and many, many, many other important things. the public trust in these institutions has been collapsing. moreover, on the one hand, this trust is eroding because of the academic critique of positivism claiming that the truth is a social construction and a weapon of power (see, for example of such academic critique, denzin, lincoln, & smith, 2008). on the other hand, attacks on the institutions of truth can be pure and cynical political manipulation and rejection of the notion of the truth as such. for example, the russian oppositional politician and world chess champion garry kasparov charged putin’s regime with intentionally overloading the public with a flood of alternative hypotheses of tragic events in russia (e.g., russian criminal shooting the malaysian passenger aircraft down in the ukrainian sky in 20144) to exhaust critical public thinking. indeed, russian propaganda argues, “if you are so open-minded and critical, you must be obligated to investigate each of these numerous hypotheses before drawing your conclusion!” (cf. the discourse among earth flatters, in mcintyre, 2021). similarly, putin’s former spokesperson, vladislav surkov5, argued that since all media manipulates, russian media rejects the fake pretense of objectivity, professionalism, and fairness and instead manipulates openly rather than hypocritically. the rejection of positivistic truth leads to its replacement by the shameless power of manipulation and lies. the powerful have the right to construct whatever they want and enforce it on the rest because they can. and, because of that, what is the truth? the truth becomes a success in manipulation, lying, or brutal force. whatever is successful in manipulation becomes the truth. the might is right. power is truth. in the united states nowadays, the power fight for who owns the truth in institutionalized public education occurs through the so-called “cancel culture,” where the political right-wing and the political left-wing banned books from school libraries6. in sum, on the one hand, the total acceptance of positivism oppresses via its mindlessness and heartlessness – i.e., via its deadliness. on the one hand, the total rejection of positivism also oppresses us of its groundlessness, mysticism, and authoritarianism/totalitarianism (matusov, marjanovic-shane, & gradovski, 2019b). rejection of truth leads to, of course, politicization and polarization of societies. almost everything becomes polarized and politicized, as we see in the recent example of the covid pandemic. that's the kind of world we live in now. i can continue on and on, but i will stop there. so, this is how i saw our times. it's rather disturbing, but, probably, each historical time is disturbing in its own way; this is how our world is disturbing in our historical times from my point of view. there are also periods of hope and renewal! also, crisis is also a time of new opportunities. we should not forget that! 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/malaysia_airlines_flight_17 5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/vladislav_surkov 6 https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/book-ban-pennsylvania-left-huckleberry-finn-20221025.html https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/book-ban-pennsylvania-left-huckleberry-finn-20221025.html the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e6 and now i will turn to a discussion of dialogic pedagogy. what is dialogic pedagogy? how can it address our times? or should education even address troublesome issues of our times and societies? is it the legitimate demand on education to ask for? dialogic pedagogy (dp) what is it? okay, so what is dialogic pedagogy? before answering this question – how i understand the field of dialogic pedagogy today – let me talk about richard handler's account of quebecois nationalism (handler, 1988). this story helps me define dialogic pedagogy. handler’s study of quebecois nationalism was commented on by anthropologist daniel linger (1994), who was my teacher at the university of california at santa cruz back then. this story is very interesting and instructive. at the end of the eighties, the beginning of the nineties, there was a series of referenda in the french part of canada, quebec, about its separation from canada. probably because of that, anthropologists did exciting research studying quebecois’ national identity: what constitutes and defines it. for that purpose, richard handler interviewed french canadians and asked them what it meant to be quebecois. respondents provided different answers like, “being born in quebec, speaking french, eating typical foods, sharing a history, manifesting certain joie de vivre. taken at face value, these characteristics seem thin reeds upon which to suspend a definite sense of identity, and not everyone cites the same criteria” (linger, 1994, p. 304). by crossing these definitions of the quebecois identity together, handler got near zero of what was in common with all of them that define the quebecois identity. it appears that the quebecois could not agree on what quebecois identity means. and then, anthropologists mahmood and armstrong (1992), who reviewed handler’s study, made a wonderful conceptual twist in their discussion of handler’s findings. they said the content of the publicly constituted quebecois identity is not zero. instead, they claimed its meta content. this meta content was in the very fact of people’s deep interest in trying to define the perceived quebecois nationalism, which defines quebecois identity – which was what it meant to be a quebecois for the quebecois people. in other words, the very searching for what it means to be quebecois is the common ground for all this quebecois nationalism. so, based on that research, i defined the field of dialogic pedagogy by educationalists’ interest in dialogue in pedagogy or even broadly in education. when we started building our journal of dialogic pedagogy in 2012, we had to write a statement defining what dialogic pedagogy is. i proposed this type of meta-content definition, coming from that research about french canadian nationalism. thus, dialogic pedagogy is defined by the educationalists' interest in dialogue in pedagogy or education: we loosely define “dialogic pedagogy” as any scholarship and pedagogical practice from educational researchers, philosophers, and practitioners that values and prioritizes “dialogue” in learning/teaching/educating across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional learning settings. at this point, a variety of approaches to dialogic pedagogy have emerged. this includes but is not limited to instrumental, interactional, epistemological, ecological, and ontological approaches to dialogue in education. we embrace diverse perspectives despite their possibly irreconcilable contradictions, disagreements, and dualisms. juxtaposing conflicting ideologies and dialogic pedagogy practices allows authentic questions and tensions to emerge as scholars across various settings for learning and cultural/historical practices provide rich perspectives on the problematic dialogue in education. we believe that the journal on dialogic pedagogy has to promote a public discourse on what dialogue and dialogic pedagogy is and means rather than provide gatekeeping, censorship, or silencing of other approaches in the name of “true dialogue,” “true dialogic education,” “authentic education,” or “true dialogic the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e7 pedagogy” (although this assertive discourse is welcome as well). indeed, a journal on dialogic pedagogy should not censor ideas or develop an (impossible) consensus. instead, the journal is founded on the idea that the scholarly community should engage in dialogue about the meaning of dialogue in pedagogy, that is, to practice what it preaches. through dissemination of scholarship in the journal, scholars will have an invaluable opportunity to engage in an international debate about what “dialogic pedagogy” means across a diverse range of ideologies, values, settings (e.g., formal institutional and informal), histories, countries, social groups, and cultural practices (https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/about)7. whoever says dialogue is important in pedagogy means this person commits to dialogic pedagogy. the field of dialogic pedagogy has a huge umbrella, a very open umbrella that allows different people to claim their commitment to and ownership of dialogic pedagogy. it's a collective concept, not an individual or universal one. it is not based on or requires a consensus. dialogic pedagogy means different things to different educationalists. so, everyone who is interested in dialogue in education is welcome, regardless of how they understand “dialogue,” “pedagogy,” or “education.” talking about patternocratia [speaks ironically], let me provide how i see the terrain of dialogic pedagogy now. like what i see, what landscape is there, which patterns – again, i'm making patterns of dialogic pedagogy right now! – which patterns i have recognized for now. again, i want to emphasize and warn you that these are my subjective patterns at this moment. in the past, i saw these patterns of dialogic pedagogy a bit differently (matusov, 2018). other people might recognize the patterns of dialogic pedagogy differently from me. also, some people disagree about the boundaries of my patterns. finally, i may see different patterns in the future. so, after all these disclaimers, what are the diverse types of dialogic pedagogy for me today? types of dialogic pedagogy currently, i see two major types of dialogic pedagogy: instrumental and ontological, each having several subtypes. the instrumental approach views dialogue as an effective tool for achieving non-dialogic educational goals. in contrast, the ontological approach views dialogue as the heart of education or pedagogy. instrumental the first pattern i see is what i call “instrumental dialogic pedagogy.” instrumental dialogic pedagogy is a pedagogy in which dialogue is seen as a tool for achieving some educational and noneducational non-dialogic benefits. so, what might these benefits be? one such benefit of instrumental dialogue pedagogy is learning achievement. achievement-based: learning outcomes some educationalists committed to instrumental dialogic pedagogy think that dialogue can help to increase students’ academic achievement, which is often, but not always, defined as learning outcomes. these learning outcomes are usually, but not always, based on the test score results. an illustrative example of such an achievement-based instrumental approach to dialogic pedagogy is clarke, resnick, and rosé (2015) research. this research was done in a classical positivistic way of pretest-posttest using control and experimental groups. both groups had more or less the same pre-test outcomes. then, the control group was taught conventionally without dialogue (understood by the researchers as a particular pattern-based social interaction), while the experimental group was taught the same curriculum based on dialogic instruction. the researchers operationalized “dialogic instruction” by a set of specific 7 recently, this text has been updated in part based on my criticism presented in this address. https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/about the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e8 decontextualized communicative structures and rules that, according to the researchers, defined “dialogue.” finally, after finishing the instructions, the researchers compared “the learning gains” based on the difference between the posttest and pretest scores of the participating students in both groups. according to the results of the comparisons, the experimental groups that experienced dialogic instruction showed higher learning gains than the control group. the difference was statistically significant. thus, let’s scale up dialogue in education! epistemology-based: a deep understanding of curriculum i called another instrumental approach to dialogic pedagogy “epistemology-based” (matusov, 2018). it is aimed at using classroom dialogue to deepen understanding of the taught curriculum. usually, it's a preset curriculum, but not always – the emerging curriculum also can be part of that. however, the teacher or researchers must value and approve this emerging curriculum as important and educational. an example of such an epistemology-based approach is research by lefstein and snell (2013). in this approach, dialogue is usually defined as what they call “productive dialogue.” productive of what? – of deep understanding of the desired curriculum in the students. moreover, again, like in the case of the achievement-based instrumental approach, this deep understanding is judged by the teacher or the researchers, who define what this deep understanding of the curriculum means, why this curriculum is valuable, and whether the students' understanding is deep or shallow. however, in contrast to the achievement-based approach, where the teacher’s (and/or the researchers’) judgments about learning outcomes precede the students’ contributions in the instructional dialogue, in the epistemology-based approach, the teacher’s (and/or the researchers’) judgments can emerge in or after the dialogue. the teacher can think with the students, engaging their minds and heart. still, the last word about the quality of dialogue and students’ learning remains for the teacher/researchers. engagement-based: increasing the student’s engagement in the preset academic subject the third type of instrumental dialogic pedagogy is an engagement-based approach (matusov, von duyke, & han, 2012). it uses dialogue in the classroom to induce and deepen the students’ engagement with the curriculum preset and taught by the teacher. in his dissertation, my colleague and former doctoral advisee mark smith documented and analyzed the two-stage instruction by a middle school science teacher in a progressive private school. in the first stage, which the science teacher called “warm-up,” he tried to provoke his students’ interests relevant to his targeted curriculum by organizing an ontological dialogue leading to the students’ ontological engagement. then, after the students got actively engaged in the broadly defined targeted curriculum, the teacher tried to steer them to the curriculum he wanted to teach while suppressing their “annoying” activism that emerged in the first stage. the teacher was ambivalent about the ontological dialogue that, on the one hand, deeply engaged the students in what the teacher wanted them to engage. however, on the other hand, this ontological dialogue interfered with his guidance during the second stage of his instruction (smith, 2010, pp. 270-340). social justice based: the betterment of society the fourth type of instrumental dialogic pedagogy is the social justice-based approach (matusov, 2018). it utilizes dialogue in order to improve society. educationalists who commit to this approach often use educational dialogue for noble causes like liberation from oppression, building a just society, ecological sustainability, healthy lifestyle, eating vegetarian food, anarchism, communism, nationalism, patriotism, antiracism, religion, etc. i think the classic proponent work on social justice-based instrumental dialogic pedagogy is presented by paulo freire (1986), a brazilian educator. again, like in all other types of instrumental dialogic pedagogy, the educationalists define and control education and dialogue as the struggle with oppression for empowerment and liberation. because of that, instrumental dialogic pedagogy the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e9 represents a form of progressive education (matusov, 2021a). education and its fruits are viewed nondialogically. dialogue is instrumental and temporary there. dialogue is exploited for non-dialogic outcomes. ontological now, let me turn to the ontological approach. the term “ontological” in application to dialogic education was independently coined by sasha sidorkin (1999), who is present here, and by me, (matusov, 2009a; matusov & pease-alvarez, 2020), but sasha publicized it before me, so he should be rightly credited for it. the philosophical and theological term “ontology” is polysemic (see my footnote 1 in matusov, 2009b, p. 14) – at times, it may mean almost the opposite things like “the knowledge of the being” vs. “the being of the knowledge.” let me give the word to sasha sidorkin, who nicely defined the concept of “ontological dialogue” in his book: …this whole chapter attempts to establish the notion of dialogue as a central fact of human existence, as an ontological concept. the word ontological does not refer to just any kind of being, neither does it deal with the existence of dialogue; it refers specifically to human existence. this may not be the most conventional use of the term, but from my point of view, it is the most accurate one. the ontological concept of dialogue explores the place of dialogue in the human way of being. one of the reasons for using the adjective ontological is a need to distinguish between what i propose and a number of nonontological concepts of dialogue. in the context of this book, the very existence of a human being in his or her human quality is a result of dialogue. in the nonontological conception of dialogue, this relation between dialogue and human existence is reversed: dialogue is treated as secondary to human existence, mainly as a form of communication (sidorkin, 1999, p. 7, italics original). the ontological approach insists that dialogue is not an instrument for achieving something valuable, but it's a value in itself – it has a self-value defining human life. it's a special quality of human life. ontological dialogue is the final cause of human existence. dialogization of human life defines the human way of being and the quality of human relations – i.e., humanization of human life (buber, 2000). you can look at ontological dialogue from an ethical point of view, as dialogic relations are human relations, maybe the human relations. also, russian philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin pushed forward the idea that the meaning-making process is dialogic, involving asking an interested question by one person and providing a serious answer by another person (bakhtin, 1986, 1999). many other arguments can be built for dialogic ontologism or ontological dialogism. now, let me turn to the discussion of two major types of ontological pedagogy that i’m aware of: conservative and democratic. i have experienced and promoted both of them in the past. conservative: student responsive authorship, dialogic provocations, dialogic pedagogy i call one of them conservative. i used to think that i defined the term "conservative" descriptively, simply as a label because this approach preserves the conventional educational institution. however, the more i think about that, the more i realize that this label also involves my judgment of it, which i will discuss later. the conservative ontological approach to dialogic pedagogy is mainly based on student-responsive authorship (matusov, 2015). the teacher ontologically provokes the students who contribute to the dialogue through their authorial responses. students’ puzzlements, questions, inquiries, curiosities, and wonders emerge in their response to the teacher’s dialogic provocations and push the ontological dialogue in the classroom and/or on the class online forum. in the classroom, the teacher creates a lot of dialogic provocations that jumpstart ontological dialogue in the students. as an ontological dialogic teacher, i used the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e10 to like to create dialogic provocations. i was genuinely interested in my students’ emerging responsive authorship, and with all my mind and heart, i tried to provoke and reply to my students’ contributions. going to teach in my classroom, i was thinking, “how are my students going to surprise themselves and me today?” the emergence of ontological dialogue in my classroom was never guaranteed – i always treated its successful emergence as magic and as my students’ gift to themselves and me. this ontological dialogue did not always stay on the topic. instead, it involved what bakhtin called “heterodiscoursia” (matusov, 2011b) – a dramatic collision and juxtaposition of diverse discourses, goals, values, topics, etc. it was the magic of the birth of a new life (see, for example, matusov, st. julien, & hayes, 2005). at times, the students moved completely away from the initial topic they chose. why do i call it conservative? it's because, in a way, it accepts, mostly accepts, if not benefits from, the existing conventional educational institutions that predictably send captive students to an ontological dialogic educator. the only demand this conservative ontological dialogic approach has for conventional institutions is to provide space for the teacher’s dialogic provocations, the students’ responsive authorship, and the emergence of ontological dialogue. oh, yes, it also demands freedom from the imposed preset curriculum and exams. and grades? not so fast. however annoying grades are for ontological dialogue, they guarantee the students’ physical presence and engagement in the teacher’s dialogic provocations, their own responsive authorship, and ontological dialogue. but this ontological approach does not deeply question the foisted nature of education it preserves – i.e., conserves – the main conventional vision of education as patronizing and imposed on the students. i consider the conservative ontological dialogic pedagogy as a form of progressive education (matusov, 2021a). progressive education seeks a “holy grail” of teaching all students, all the time, and with all academic subjects in an authentic way in conventional institutional settings (matusov, marjanovicshane, & gradovski, 2019a). in this case, “holy grail” is an ontological dialogue organized by the teacher. democratic: student authorship of self-education, dialogic education in opposition to the conservative ontological approach to dialogic pedagogy, what i would call “democratic ontological dialogic education” (not “pedagogy”!) focuses primarily on student authorship of self-education and, especially, of self-determined education,8 aka deliberate self-education. education differs from learning by a dialogic evaluation process of this learning, among other things (matusov, 2023a). a student is truly involved in education only when they evaluate their own learning in a dialogue with themselves and/or others. when only other people have a right to evaluate the student’s learning, they rob the student of their education. for education to be genuine education, it is the educatee – not teachers, educational researchers, educational bureaucrats, parents, the general public, taxpayers, or the state – who primarily evaluates learning and defines education and its goals. that is why genuine, authentic education is always self-education. deliberate self-education, aka self-determined education, involves the educatees in determining their own education by making decisions about whether to engage in studies, what to study, why to study, how to study, when to study, with whom to study, whether the experienced learning is valuable for the educatee and if so, why, and so on. the educatee can make these decisions alone, with the help of others, or in collaboration (matusov, 2022b). 8 my notion of self-determination is very different from, if not opposite to, the self-determination theory common in psychology, focusing on how extrinsic control becomes intrinsic: “extrinsically motivated behaviors become self-determined through the developmental processes of internalization and integration” (deci & ryan, 1994, p. 5, italics original). in a way, deci and ryan, co-founders of the self-determination theory in psychology, describe how culture and society colonize the person with their values, goals, obligations, and motivations. in their article, they described “self-determined education” as the one in which students “find interest and valuable” in doing their homework assigned by the teacher. also, “self-determination” is defined as a person’s activism and enthusiasm in doing what the authorities want the person to do. in contrast, my notion of self-determination is based on a person's authorship: transcendence of the given: culture, norms, society, and so on (matusov, 2011a, 2020a). the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e11 in deliberate self-education, the educator’s focus shifts from organizing dialogic pedagogy to promoting students’ dialogic self-education. when our journal of dialogic education started in january 2013, we discussed the journal’s title. by the way, next month, in january 2023, we'll celebrate ten years of our dialogic pedagogy journal. congratulations to all of us! if you were at the birth of our journal, you might remember this debate, one of our first debates about the title of the journal. correct me if i'm wrong, but the two most significant options were dialogic pedagogy and dialogic education. unfortunately, at that time, i was a conservative ontological dialogic educator. because of that, i was leaning toward dialogic pedagogy, not dialogic education. if it had happened now, i would push for dialogic education as the title of our journal. nevertheless, i guess it's too late, ten years too late9. back then, i offered to define dialogic pedagogy heuristically: “we loosely define ‘dialogic pedagogy’ as any scholarship and pedagogical practice, from educational researchers, philosophers, and practitioners, which values and gives priority to ‘dialogue’ in learning/teaching/educating across a wide range of institutional and non-institutional learning settings” (https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/about). i want to draw your attention to the fact that educatees, students, and learners were missing from our definition of dialogic pedagogy’s audience, authors, and addressees. on the one hand, this omission is legitimate because of the journal’s primary focus on pedagogy. but on the other hand, it is illegitimate because pedagogy serves education and not vice versa: educatees can exist without educators. educators cannot exist without educatees, but educatees can exist without educators. growing up and working in conventional institutions of foisted education, i have realized this noticeable distortion only recently. now, i will dive into my discussion of the relationship between society and education from dialogic pedagogy and dialogic education points of view. and i would say these two approaches, instrumental and ontological (especially democratic ontological), provide two completely different visions of the relationship between society and education. so first, i will talk about society and dialogic pedagogy from the instrumental vista. from the instrumental vista, it's very important, in my view, to see the connection or relationship between society and dialogic pedagogy or dialogic education in general as coming from the enlightenment. society and dialogic pedagogy: enlightenment enlightenment: education is a tool for the betterment of society specifically, i want to focus on the contribution, terrific contribution, great contribution to defining the enlightenment and the role of education in the enlightened society by the german philosopher immanuel kant. i’m talking about the article kant (1784) succinctly called "what is enlightenment?” his concise, 6-page article is freely available on the internet. i envy and admire kant for saying so much in such a short article. kant was looking at the development of society in which human dignity would be realized. kant claimed that authority must be rooted in human dignity, defined as autonomy, not as a religious dogma or a capricious sovereign. it must be rooted in people’s autonomy of reasoning and decision-making about people’s personal lives and public affairs. kant saw two big obstacles to realizing such an enlightened society. the first one is an external obstacle of political oppression by an autocratic state restricting people’s public use of their reason. and for that, kant proposed an external political struggle to establish this type of (republican) regime in which human autonomy of reason can be realized. by the way, it's important to acknowledge that kant was writing under political pressure in the prussian empire that was on the move of expansion in germany. saying what kant said was dangerous, but kant dared to make this point. 9 recently, because of the reasons articulated here and some other reasons, the editorial board has changed the title of the journal from “dialogic pedagogy: an international online journal” to “dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education.” we also updated the about page on the website. https://dpj.pitt.edu/ojs/dpj1/about the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e12 however, argued kant, it is much easier to deal with an external obstacle to achieving a dignitybased society than with an internal one. this internal problem is rooted in the fact that many humans are not rational, reasonable, informed, mature, strong character, and well-intended. that's a much bigger problem, according to kant. “enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another” (kant, 1784). only after people are freed from the yoke of their self-incurred tutelage and, thus, become “reasonable people” can they be trusted to recognize their dignity. while for everybody else who is not “reasonable” yet, compulsory education is the solution. dialogue-agreement: reaching consensus among reasonable people as a proxy of truth and morality before focusing on kant’s vision of enlightenment education, i want to discuss the enlightenment society a bit more: how kant envisioned it. according to kant, this society would be run by the public dialogue of agreement (i.e., "dialogue-agreement," kurganov, 2009). of course, in a dialogue-agreement, people can and do also disagree – even more, they should have the right to disagree freely. disagreement is very important in enlightenment society, but disagreement is temporary. that's why freedom of speech – public reasoning – is a very important right. however, the purpose of this disagreement is to establish an agreement through public and free reasoning, which creates a basis as a proxy of truth and morality from the point of view of kant, in my interpretation. so, well-informed, mature, rational, strong-character, and well-intended people (aka “reasonable people”) eventually and unavoidably arrive at a consensus due to the universal nature of objective truth and morality (cf. kant’s categorical imperative, kant, 2013). a person’s reason does not need to be perfect, but it must be correctable through this dialogic reflective process of searching for a consensus among reasonable people. this consensus not only helps to achieve the truth and morality but also establishes who reasonable people are to be trusted with their dignity of autonomous decision-making. of course, in a way, it's a little bit of circular construction: reasonable people establish the truth and morality through reaching a consensus in a free public dialogue, while this dialogic consensus establishes who should be considered as “reasonable people” who have the legitimate right to think for themselves in the enlightenment society. kantian educational paternalism now, what about not-yet reasonable people who are, for one or another reason, not able or do not want to make their own understanding without the direction of others? if you're not “reasonable,” if you do not belong to the group of “reasonable people,” if you live under the yoke of “self-inflicted tutelage,” you become a problem in the enlightenment society. you cannot be trusted with your understanding, judgment, and decision-making. you are not autonomous. and thus, you are not dignified – you do not have the right to have your dignity recognized by society. yet, in the ideal enlightenment society that kant called “an enlightenment age,” eventually, everyone should have this dignity, which must be earned. how can the imperfect enlightenment society break the yoke of not-yet reasonable people’s self-inflicted tutelage? his answer was paradoxical. kant suggested addressing self-inflicted tutelage with… – guess what? – with compulsory tutelage, called “education.” fight the fire with fire! to liberate not-yet reasonable people from the oppressive yoke of their self-inflicted tutelage, autonomous, reasonable people must impose a compulsory tutelage of education on them. people can be trusted with their own reason, decisionmaking about their own life, and governance of their society only if they're rational, well-intended, informed, have strong character, are mature, and so forth. if they're not, and most people are not, then they need to be moved into this state of autonomy forcibly and, if they resist, violently. forced moving people into the position of “reasonableness” is enlightenment education. it is based on educational paternalism: limiting the freedom and rights of non-reasonable people yet for their own benefit. the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e13 what do paternalism and educational paternalism specifically mean? paternalism is when somebody knows better what you need and even what you want and has the right to impose this good on you. paternalism is a limitation of your freedoms for your own good (dworkin, 1972). so, in my summarizing, kant essentially says, "in order for people to be free, to be autonomous, they must be forced into that freedom; they must be unfree until they can be trusted with their freedom." kant was aware of this paradox. unfreedom now is freedom in the future. his later disciple johann gottlieb fichte formulated the paternalistic nature of enlightenment education with the ultimate clarity: “compulsion is also a kind of education” (cited in berlin & hardy, 2002, electronic edition). thus, for the enlightenment based on kant and fichte, the forceful action of the imposition of education on the students is education in itself. it is both revealing and disturbing that in the universal declaration of human rights, the compulsory nature of education is presented as a human right: “everyone has the right to education. education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. elementary education shall be compulsory. technical and professional education shall be made generally available, and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit” (article 26.1)10. forcing people to study is declared as their right! in this sense, education is a unique sphere of human life where enlightenment paternalism has reached its highest. enlightenment education based on paternalism segregates people into the “educated,” who are the designers of education, and the “students,” who are the objects of education (cf. bibler, 1976). the former has the right to force their image of education on the latter. the former people have the right to form the latter in their image. the former are adults, teachers, politicians, scientists, bureaucrats, the state, the powerful, the mature, the moral, the strong, the pure, the straight, the good, and the people of solutions. the latter are children, students, the ignorant, minorities, savages, criminals, the handicapped, the powerless, the immature, the immoral, the weak, the polluted, the deviant, the evil, and the people with problems. i argue that kantian educational paternalism is embraced by instrumental dialogic pedagogy and, to some degree, conservative ontological dialogic pedagogy. these types of dialogic pedagogy are very much concerned with creating pedagogical regimes that promote the conditions in which good pedagogical dialogue, dialogue-agreement, occurs. these favorable conditions involve the formation of dialogic attitudes, dialogic spaces, and dialogic rules in the classrooms and students. let me illustrate the dialogic pedagogy’s embracement of kantian educational paternalism, the enlightenment education, through my analysis of mariëtte’s chapter (see below). thanks, mariëtte [de haan], for attending this conference and sharing your chapter in preparation with me. dialogic pedagogy: the embrace of the enlightenment educational project i'll analyze the following three quotes from mariëtte’s wonderful chapter (de haan, 2023, in press). it's very fresh and is still a work in progress for the book that will hopefully be published next year. it is incredible that in her chapter, mariëtte was working almost precisely on the central theme of our conference. at least, this is how i see it. mariëtte, feel free to disagree with my interpretation. nevertheless, i see your chapter in the spirit of our conference to consider how dialogic pedagogy can contribute to our difficult times defined by political and ideological polarizations, the phenomenon of post-truth, and so on. in your chapter, you focused on how dialogic pedagogy can help to deal with this situation. i think it is a program paper for dialogic pedagogy. 10 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e14 thus, mariëtte raises three research questions in her chapter, which i thought were terrific. her first research question is: “[do] the [dialogic] spaces we have designed for dialogue, in schools, and in our society at large, […] mediate between different voices, function appropriately to accommodate newcomers, or to address issues between polarized groups[?]” (de haan, 2023, in press). this research and practice question addresses “us,” the representatives of “the community of autonomous reasonable people” (e.g., dialogic pedagogy educators and researchers). how should “we” create dialogic spaces for “them,” not-yet reasonable people oppressed by the yoke of self-inflicted tutelage (e.g., students, lay people in general). it also predefines what is good – namely, appropriately functioning dialogue mediating different voices is good – and what is evil – for instance, group polarization is terrible11. finally, it assumes the legitimacy of the forceable action of designing dialogue in schools and our society. these are all birthmarks of kantian educational paternalism and enlightenment education. the second research question is: “[will] dialogue still work between parties that represent world views that are or are considered to be incompatible[?]” i believe this question also implies “us,” educationalists, i.e., members of the reasonable autonomous community acting on “them,” not-yet reasonable people. it is “us” who will define if the dialogue is “working” or not and whether worldviews are considered compatible or not, for whom, why, and why it might be important or unimportant for them (and within what framework)12. finally, the third research question, “…how [does] intersubjectivity, as the step-by-step process of creating understanding and bridge individual perspectives through interaction function in polarized settings[?]" achieving intersubjectivity (i.e., agreement, common understanding) among not-yet reasonable people (e.g., students) and between them and reasonable people (e.g., teachers) is the goal of pedagogical dialogue as the way of bringing those people into the community of autonomous reasonable people and the elimination of harmful political, ideological, and epistemological polarization. also, education is viewed as the tool for solving problems of our times (e.g., post-truth, polarization, the proliferation of conspiracy theories, and mistrust)13. so, my point is that if you look at the three research questions, they are aimed at the realization of kant’s enlightenment project, which is how to make education an effective tool to make our society better. we have the problem of societal polarization, so – boom: education can help eliminate this problem14. the central research question is how can we create such an education? can dialogic pedagogy help to solve this problem of polarization in our society? if so, how? again, in my view, these questions and desires behind them are a continuation of the enlightenment project. hallmarks of enlightenment education here, i want to summarize the main features characterizing enlightenment education, its birthmarks, and how i understand them: i. education and dignity vs. paternalism 1. society is segregated into two unequal groups: 11 mariëtte de haan commented in her feedback on an earlier draft of my essay: “i agree that it is assumed that dialogue is good, and that dialogical spaces should accommodate a variety of voices” (personal communication, august 11, 2023). 12 mariëtte de haan disagrees with my interpretation and analysis here as she wrote in her feedback comment to my previous draft: “however, i don’t see there is one reasonable group of people assumed in this question, but multiple reasonable people – who according to their own judgment are all ‘reasonable’.” 13 mariëtte de haan commented: “it is correct i start to define intersubjectivity as the step-by-step process of creating understanding and bridge individual perspectives through interaction (more of an enlightenment version), but in the rest of [my] paper, such a vision is criticized.” 14 mariëtte de haan objects: “i agree [my] paper assumes that education should try to contribute to this problem. it does not assume education can do this in any easy way. so i object to this interpretation.” the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e15 a. fully reasonable people who have the right to be autonomous and b. not-yet-reasonable people whom fully reasonable people must paternalize. 2. human dignity based on autonomous decision-making, self-governance, and governance of society is conditional, not universal – it is recognized only in and by the reasonable people who are proven to deserve it. 3. the goal of education is the liberation of unreasonable people from the oppression of the yoke of their self-inflicted tutelage. 4. compulsory, foisted education is the means of such liberation. 5. education must be based on educational paternalism: a. education practice consists of: i. the designers of education (e.g., educators), coming from the reasonable community, and ii. the objects of education (e.g., students), coming from the not-yetreasonable community. b. the education designers define education – what learning is good for the students, – its goal, and its quality – what constitutes achieving this goal – for the students. c. the education designers have the legal right to force the students to engage in education. d. the main responsibility of the students is to cooperate with education designers unconditionally. 6. paternalism and compulsory themselves are a form of education (fichte). ii. education and society 1. disciplinary society: fears, anxieties, credentialism, societal needs, worst-case scenarios, and necessities often drive educational decisions by the educational authorities (foucault, 1995). 2. there is deep distrust in the students’ judgments and decisions about their own education and life. 3. education is primarily a societal business controlled by the autonomous reasonable community (e.g., the state). 4. education is one of the major tools for the betterment of society. education can and must be used to solve emerging societal problems. 5. there is a fight for the monism of the educational approach in which the opposing sides use the state to create a monopoly on an educational philosophy in compulsory (and generally foisted) education. iii. education and learning/guidance 1. pedagogization of education: the primary concern of education is with pedagogy – the design of the teacher’s guidance. “one way of highlighting the categorical difference of integral [democratic] schools is to notice that traditional and modern paradigms in education, such as montessori and progressive [i.e., enlightenment education], prescribe aspects of the classroom milieu: teaching, learning, curriculum, and activities. in contrast, the democratic model [i.e., post-enlightenment education] prescribes aspects of the school milieu: structure, governance, rights, and limits. traditional and modern models are mostly silent about structure-governance-rights-limits, and assume the familiar hierarchical school structure of administration, teachers, and students. in contrast, the democratic model is mostly silent about teaching-learning-curriculum activities and assumes the familiar civil structure of a democratic society. the difference in focus — school versus classroom — the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e16 places democratic schools alone in a new category of schooling paradigms. [d]emocratic schools thus represent more a theory of schooling, and less a theory of education, teaching, or learning.” (rietmulder, 2019, pp. 34-35). 2. learnification of education: the primary goal of education is the production of the learning desired by the educators in the students (see matusov, 2021b, for more discussion and critique). iv. education and monologism 1. excessive monologism: “in essence [excessive monologism] knows only a single mode of cognitive interaction among consciousnesses: someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error; that is, it is the interaction of a teacher and a pupil, which, it follows, can be only a pedagogical dialogue” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 81). 2. the primary human relationship: agreement as the proxy of the truth and collaboration as the main social instrument to solve shared problems. 3. others’ consciousnesses: transparent to use and manipulate, the bird’s eye view. society and dialogic education: post-enlightenment education now, let me turn to considering society and dialogic education from a democratic ontological point of view. and let me start from not a big picture about society but from a small picture about learning. i know that it's probably not the best way to do that [laugh]. at least, some people say that. i’m not sure that this is true. so, i’ll start with a small picture about learning and move to the big picture about post-enlightenment education and then post-enlightenment society. learning is ubiquitous but not necessarily dialogical the small picture is that learning is not necessarily dialogic or educational. according to a sociocultural theory of learning articulated by the american educational anthropologist jean lave (1992, april), learning is ubiquitous and inescapable. to live means to learn. we live in and through the learning flow. the vast amount of this learning is invisible to us. even less is intentional or planned by us or others. most, if not all, learning has an emergent property. as jean lave argued in her seminal aera presentation in april 1992, the occurrence of learning is non-problematic – it always happens in any setting. learning is naturally happening to people (and other animals), like breathing. however, the content of this learning – what exactly the person learns (lave called this content “the emergent curriculum)” – is problematic, according to lave. although emergent learning may involve conscious deliberation, it is not always predictable or even known what a person learns even when the person promotes and desires certain learning themselves (lave called the content of desired or planned learning “the teaching curriculum”). learning does not require self-awareness, especially when it is emergent. in contrast, conventional institutionalized education assumes that the planned learning content (“the teaching curriculum”) is not problematic because it is present by the educational authority, but the occurrence of this learning – whether the student learns the preset teaching curriculum – is problematic. that is why learning tests and exams are so important in conventional schooling (lave, 1992, april). by the way, it's a very misleading modern trend to equate learning with education. in my view, education involves the educatee’s value judgment about their noticed learning embedded in a dialogue with self and/or others. and as i claim in my recent paper, education may be based not only on learning. education is a value judgment not only about learning but also about insight, often not well-recognized in modern western civilization. however, this matter is beyond my current talk (see, matusov, 2021b, for more discussion of this point). the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e17 learning is not necessarily dialogical. even more, often, learning is not dialogical. learning can be based on pattern-recognition and pattern-production and not necessarily on meaning-making, which is dialogic in nature (matusov, 2020b). in contrast, education as a process of value-judgment-making is mostly dialogical. however, education may involve non-dialogic parts, such as, for example, noticing one’s own learning or insight. but, again, mostly, education is dialogical. education is dialogical as the person’s value-judgment about their learning (and insight) in a dialogue with themselves and/or others why is education dialogical? because unlike learning, which is the ongoing transformation flow in a person’s life, education is the person's value judgment about the person's learning or insight embedded in a dialogue with themselves and/or others. i'm not going to discuss here what insight is or why insight is different from learning – i’ll refer you to my 2021 essay (matusov, 2021b). in other words, people make a value judgment about whether the noticed learning is good or bad or neutral for them. making value judgments involves meaning-making and, thus, is dialogical. people make a value judgment about their learning or insight that has occurred to them or that they plan to induce in themselves. that's why education is always ephemeral because it's about the person’s judgment about their learning or insight, – the judgment, which may change with time. people may change their value judgments about their learning and insights – what they think is good for them today may not be their judgment tomorrow. most importantly, education is self-judgment about the value of their own learning or insights, and, thus, it is embedded in dialogue with the self and/or others. because of that, education is always self-education. self-education i define self-education as an educatee’s positive value judgment of their own learning and/or insight. i can distinguish two major unequal types of self-education: spontaneous self-education and deliberate self-education. spontaneous self-education involves an educatee’s recognition of the learning and/or insight that occurred or is occurring to them and making a positive value judgment about it. spontaneous self-education is pastor present-oriented. in contrast, deliberate self-education, aka “selfdetermined education,” is when an educatee plans their own education by making decisions about their future actions aiming at inducing desired learning and/or insight. deliberate (self-determined) self-education is future-oriented. in practice, spontaneous self-education always accompanies deliberate (selfdetermined) education; however, it is not true the other way around. deliberate self-education thus, anyone who tries to impose this value judgment – what good learning is – on another person robs this person of education. educational paternalism robs students of their authentic education. deliberate, authentic education is always self-determined, even when others facilitate and participate in it. deliberate self-education involves the educatee making various decisions about their own education with or without the help of other people. these educational decisions involve whether the educatee wants to study, what to study, why to study, how to study, with whom to study, when to study, with what kind of help to study, whether this study is good for the educatee, and so on. all these reflective value judgments and decision-making can be done solely by the educatee themselves or with the help of other people who may assume different roles: co-educatees, teachers, advisors, navigators, mentors, tutors, coaches, etc. i won’t go over that (for more discussion, see matusov, 2022b). paradoxically, self-determined education (aka deliberate self-education) may include “self-inflicted tutelage.” it does not limit itself to the educatee’s autonomous studies, self-directed learning, also known as an autodidact. self-determined education may involve collectively directed learning with fellow educatees. it may involve advisement from professional educators. it may involve teacher-directed learning. the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e18 finally, it may even involve autopaternalism, when the educatee asks their teacher to force them to study what the educatee wants to study. however, in contrast to enlightenment compulsory or foisted education, in post-enlightenment education, the educatee’s submission and trust in their peers, advisors, and teachers is conditional, based on the educatee’s overall value judgment of how this submission and trust are helpful for them. the educatee has a legitimate right to seize their cooperation, trust, and submission and move away from their peers and educators at any time (matusov, 2022b). my next point is that education is primarily the personal business of the educatee and not societal as it is assumed in enlightenment education. why? because authentic education is about the educatee’s value judgment about a transformation that has happened or will happen to the educatee, how it’s desirable for the educatee, and why. take away this freedom of the value judgment-making, and authentic education evaporates. educators’ pedagogical fiduciary duty toward their students of course, educators, who might help this process of their educatees’ self-determined education, must commit to the fiduciary duty to their educatees. fiduciary duty is a term that has been developed chiefly outside of education, which is symptomatic for education based on paternalism. doctors, lawyers, and financial advisors are supposed to commit to fiduciary duty toward their patients and clients. what does fiduciary duty mean? it's actually a very peculiar notion because, on the one hand, educators have to serve students and their own educational goals. however, the problem is that students sometimes do not know what is good for them. and in this case, educators can help the students figure out what's good for them if they ask for their help. although, it doesn't mean educators always know what's good for the students, either. if you think about that, that's very similar to what's going on in the health field, for example, when doctors commit to medical fiduciary duty. the doctors try to help their patients find out what’s good for them healthwise without making medical decisions for them, except in some emergency cases. similarly, pedagogical fiduciary duty involves the educator’s commitment to helping the student find and realize what is educationally good for the student while accepting that the student is the highest authority for their own education (and life) (klag, 1994; matusov, 2022b). the final educational decision and value judgment about the student’s learning and insight remain in the student's hands, again, except, possibly, in some extreme cases, even if the educator might disagree with the student’s decision and judgment (see matusov, 2022b, for more discussion). whose business is education? in post-enlightenment education, educatees, not educators, have the legitimate right to decide for themselves what the purpose of their education is. the educatee may see their purpose of education as intrinsic, existential, or ontological education (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019), critical or uncritical (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2012), or instrumental education such as training or even drill (matusov, baker, fan, choi, & hampel, 2017). either way, it’s acceptable and legitimate as far as it is the educatee’s choice. in post-enlightenment education, an educatee is seen as self-determined in defining their own education. education must not serve primarily for the betterment of society, as it is the enlightenment project. like many other fields, such as, for example, art, education has its own realm of autonomy. must art always serve to make society better? well, some people think that way, and some people disagree with that. it's an even bigger question about science. there is a joke with some grain of truth that science is the satisfaction of the personal curiosity of a scientist at public expense. there is disagreement about science as well. some people think it is up to artists and scientists (and their audiences) to decide. however, it can the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e19 be safe to admit that art and science have intrinsic and instrumental realms. intrinsically, art and science exist as the existential needs of each human and humanity as a whole. instrumentally, art and science provide their fruits for other spheres of human life. similarly, my colleague and i also argue that education has both intrinsic and instrumental realms, and it is up to the educatees to decide which realm to prioritize in their educational endeavors (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2019). society, leave education alone! but for some reason, for a long time, education has been under the yoke of the enlightenment project that education must serve primarily, if not solely, as a tool to make society better. that education is primarily public, societal, and not personal business. in contrast to art and science, where the value of the contributions is assessed collectively through public discourse, educational practice is based on the value judgment of the educatee about their own learning and insight, which is embedded in dialogue with others. and that's why i want to say: "society, hands off my education! hands off!" society – through its representatives such as teachers, parents, educational scholars, politicians, state bureaucrats, and so on – does not have the legitimate right to define education, its goals, and its curriculum. the legitimate role of society is to facilitate addressing the existential needs of its members. of course, practice, institutions, workplaces, and so on can create “natural” demands and pressures on self-education, but these pressures can be accepted, rejected, interpreted, transformed, resisted, or transcended by the educatees who will take responsibility for or have to live with the consequences of their responses to these pressures for them. this is what i call the post-enlightenment attitude to education. from this post-enlightenment perspective, education mustn’t be used to address the challenges of our time unless a particular educatee chooses to do so. pluralism of educational philosophies for the first time, i started developing this idea of education as a personal business of the educatee with ana marjanovic-shane, who is here at our conference, in our article “the state’s educational neutrality: radical proposal for educational pluralism” (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). we thought about how to democratize education and how to make it pluralistic rather than monopolistic. except for democratic education, all other educational philosophies fight with each other for a monopoly on compulsory public education, using the state as the primary tool to enforce this monopoly. according to the jewish-russian-british philosopher isaiah berlin, radical pluralism involves recognition of the fact that many good values are often irreconcilable – justice vs. mercy, friendship vs. truth, freedom vs. wellbeing, etc. (kelly, 1978). in education, radical pluralism means that i must tolerate and accept different educational philosophies, not necessarily because i think they're good, but because i commit to pluralism. there is also the dialogic argument for pluralism. my dialogic position exists on the boundaries and in response to alternative dialogic positions (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, smith, candela, & lilu, 2007). that is why alternative and even hostile dialogic positions must be tolerated and affirmed (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2016). finally, the third and probably the most crucial reason for educational pluralism is rooted in the fact that genuine deliberate education is always self-determined. selfdetermination of education inherently leads to the pluralism of educational philosophies. paternalism and human dignity in my view, the enlightenment project generates an over-paternalistic society. it is driven by concerns of necessities, fears, anxieties, reduction of risks (risk management), protection, control, distrust, and so on. the problem is not so much with the content of these concerns but with the totalization of these important concerns. enlightenment prioritizes the protection of life over life itself. we exist to live, not to live in order to exist. that is why enlightenment is defined by overprotection and overpaternalism. the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e20 paternalism in itself – i.e., deciding what is good for other people and limiting their freedom in the name of this good, i.e., “positive liberty” (berlin, 2017) – is not necessarily a bad thing. one of the important biological peculiarities of the human animal is rooted in the fact that it is born super immature and incapable of surviving on its own. paternalism as defining good for another human being and protecting and enforcing this good is biologically inbuilt in us, especially concerning our youngsters. the biological immaturity of newborns and the in-built paternalism of their caregivers allow our bodies to mature within a particular human culture. this makes our body and our brain shaped by culture. without this biologically rooted paternalism, our species is not viable. however, i argue that paternalism must be strategically, globally, and in the long run, subordinated to human dignity. aristotle (2000) defined human dignity as a person being the cause of their own deeds for which the person takes responsibility rather than being determined by the necessities, traditions, orders by others, and so on. human dignity is the societal recognition that a person is the highest authority for their own life even when society (i.e., other people) might not agree or fully understand the person’s authorship of their own life (and, of course, of their own education since education is a part of one’s life). thus, the notion of human dignity is always relational, based on recognition, and pluralistic, based on the recognition of “negative liberty” – a bubble of freedom where the person can legitimately make decisions for themselves without the need for permission or approval from others (berlin, 2017). society or community (matusov, 2022a) can legitimately limit the sphere of human dignity, i.e., unconditional acceptance of a person’s authorship of their own life. this acceptance is always limited. also, human dignity cries for dialogic personal responsibility (see the next section below). kant reduced human dignity to autonomy. in contrast to kant, i think human dignity is not necessarily based on autonomy, although it may sometimes include it. for example, a person may reject the concept of autonomy for themselves temporarily, contextually, or permanently and universally as a part of the authorship of their life, as the person’s choice. in self-education, an educatee may choose to submit themselves to the authority of the teacher, even asking the teacher to force them to study what the educatee wants to study. however, this dignified submission is conditional: the educatee constantly evaluates the teacher’s action and can divorce the teacher at any time when the educatee stops seeing the teacher’s guidance or the teacher’s paternalism – i.e., paternalism allowed by the person, autopaternalism – useful and helpful for themselves (matusov, 2022b). strategically, human dignity must beat paternalism. however, tactically, locally, in the short run, paternalism can and even must be legitimately prioritized over human dignity. the post-enlightenment proclaims that paternalism must serve human dignity; human dignity must not be sacrificed for paternalism enforced on the not perfectly reasonable or perfectly agreeable ones. paternalism must serve human dignity and not the other way around. enlightenment must be appreciated and credited for putting a high value on human dignity. for the last three hundred years or so, this value has been gradually extended to more and more groups of people. it started with male adult aristocracy, then extended to rich adult males, then included poor males, then spread to non-white males, then incorporated women. still, many categories of people have been left out undignified: felons, youngsters, non-citizen immigrants, etc. some want to extend the recognition of dignity to non-humans, like some or even all animals. still, in enlightenment, not-yet-reasonable people and creatures are viewed with distrust that justifies the application of total or near-total paternalism. in contrast to enlightenment, which has granted respect for human dignity only to the few, only those who deserved it – i.e., “the reasonable people” – post-enlightenment extends the recognition of human dignity to all people unconditionally. the enlightenment sees “full people,” “reasonable people,” as the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e21 universal beings united by their universal reason, universal rationality, universal maturity, universal knowledge, universal solid character, and universal maturity, however imperfect this universality might be. in contrast, the post-enlightenment sees all people as unique and, thus, as full-beings and imperfect, unfinalized and unfinalizable (bakhtin, 1999), an open being capable of transcendence and unpredictable change. their human dignity of being the final authority for their own life is being both affirmed and problematized (i.e., questioned, asked for responsibility). post-enlightenment does not know the segregation of people as “reasonable,” whose dignity is recognized by society, and “not-yet-reasonable,” who are the objects of paternalism by the reasonable people. human dignity is a universal and unconditional right in the post-enlightenment. if enlightenment is the age of paternalism, postenlightenment is the age of dignity. birthmarks of post-enlightenment education here are the main features characterizing post-enlightenment education, its birthmarks, and how i see them for now: i. education and dignity vs. paternalism 1. human dignity is based on recognizing each person as the highest and final authority for their own life (and education, of course), self-governance, and governance of society. human dignity is recognized for all people, regardless of their age, maturity, knowledgeability, etc., unconditionally. 2. even when paternalism is accepted as necessary at times, it must be strategically subordinated to the recognition of human dignity. 3. paternalism, however necessary and legitimate it might be at times in non-educational spheres, in itself is not education. 4. defining and imposing education for and on others is robbing others of their education. 5. the only legitimate form of educational paternalism is the educatee’s autopaternalism, when the educatee grants temporary and conditional power to the educator to force the educatee to study what the educatee wants to study (matusov, 2022b). 6. deliberate, organized education is self-determined education in which the educatee makes decisions about their own education with or without the help of other people. such decisions involve whether to study, why to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, when to study, what constitutes a successful study, and so on. ii. education and society 1. education is exclusively a personal business of the educatee. education is not a tool for the betterment of society unless the educatee defines their own education as such. 2. society must acknowledge and respect educational pluralism and the diversity of educational philosophies practiced by willing educatees and educators. 3. the main responsibility of society is to provide conditions, opportunities, and resources to all people for their personal (self-)education. iii. education and learning/guidance 1. collaboration with peers, advisement, guidance, and autopaternalism are conditional on the educatee’s consent and approval. the educatee has a legitimate right to move away from their educational peers and educators at any moment when their consent and approval are withdrawn (i.e., “no-fault divorce”). 2. learning and insights are omnipresent in the flow of life. 3. education involves the educatee’s value judgments about their recognized learning and insights, embedded in dialogue with the self and/or others (matusov, 2021b). the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e22 iv. education and dialogism 1. dialogism: “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of dostoevsky's novels. what unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event [i.e., encounter, co-being]” (bakhtin, 1999, p. 6). 2. the primary human relationship: encounter, my interest in other’s consciousness which is different from mine, dialogue. 3. others’ consciousnesses: opaque for me, to be addressed and replied to. in sum, since what i call post-enlightenment education must not be viewed as a societal tool to solve the societal problems of our times, i'm rejecting the central premise of our conference of considering how dialogic pedagogy can help address the challenges of our times. still, i think it is worth considering what the ontological dialogic framework – not dialogic pedagogy or education! – can offer to our times. what can the ontological dialogic framework offer to our times? raising challenging questions to provoke societal dialogues in my view, one thing that the ontological dialogic framework can offer to help address the challenges of our time is to raise questions to provoke societal dialogues challenging common sense and hidden assumptions about contemporary hot issues. such provocations may involve the creation of searches for contextual and authorial boundaries of the truth. for example, let us consider the challenges of our times, such as positivism, polarization, war, patternocratia, etc. where are the boundaries of their truth? when each of them can be helpful? when each of them is not helpful? where can gray areas be? what?! can war be helpful? can polarization be helpful?! how can war be helpful? how can polarization be helpful? how can positivism be helpful? my search for contextual and authorial boundaries for truth: when is positivism/polarization/war helpful, not helpful, or in a grey area, and why, in my view? let me give you one example using this terrible ongoing colonial war in ukraine that russia started. you might be surprised, but one of the concurrent slogans of putin's propaganda machine is, “let's reduce polarization.” russian propaganda claims: "it's not that all clear!" or, in russian: "не всё так однозначно!" – which basically means, "let's not polarize! let's look at the complexities of the events." like, “what's going on in ukraine is a very complicated issue." you know, "there’s no black and white, right or wrong!" and it's precisely in opposition to this putin’s claim that the ukrainian discourse, political discourse says: "no! it's exactly black and white. it's a fight between good and evil! it is a fight between ukrainian liberal democracy and russian fascist totalitarianism." moreover, as soon as you're saying, "не всё так однозначно," it's now the indicator that you actually are colonized by putin's ideology and support russian imperial aggression. okay? another issue is about war being a good thing in some contexts. i don't know how much you follow what's going on in the ukraine war, but now, putin's regime calls for peace talks between russia and ukraine, "let's have peace negotiations. let's have peace negotiations. let’s stop fighting!" and the ukrainian side says, “let's have a war to decide that.” the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e23 and that's, in my view, a very interesting thing that, you know, all these seemingly humanistic ideas are formulaic: "war is bad, polarization is bad. negotiations are good. peace is good." let's review them – not so fast! not always! sometimes it is not true, and we need to admit that. for example, as was historically proven in the case of the british prime minister, chamberlain, who negotiated peace with hitler about czechoslovakia in november 1938. peace negotiation with hitler was not good! it is up to us to find these contextual boundaries and make authorial judgments when war is bad, good, or a gray area. these authorial judgments will define what kind of people we are. we should go away with the search for the correct formulae that remove personal responsibilities from us. when are dialogism and authorship helpful, not helpful, or in a grey area, and why, in my view? the same is true about such apparently nice things as dialogism and authorship. they sound like great things, but not always. not so fast! there can be interesting contextual boundaries requiring our authorial judgments when they can become actually bad things. again, let me give a political example to illustrate that seemingly nice things can become bad. let’s consider the role of dialogism, authorship, and creativity in creating conspiracy theories and “alternative facts.” one of the things about conspiracy theories is a rejection of positivism and positivist institutions of establishing the facts by the consensus of experts (weinberger, 2011). engaging with conspiracy theories involves a lot of dialogism, authorship, and creativity. people engaged in conspiracy theories are often extremely creative and very dialogic (mcintyre, 2021). they are engaged in so many dialogues. they generate a lot of creative alternatives in defense of their conspiracies. their critical thinking spins like crazy to undermine the hegemonic worldviews and facts. also, it's just fascinating to consider the conspiracy theories themselves. often the term “conspiracy theory” sounds like a diagnosis of some mental illness: if you are committed to a conspiracy theory, you are cuckoo; you are crazy. it implies that conspiracies are always wrong, which is, of course, not true. sometimes, conspiracies do exist. moreover, the question is when a conspiracy is true or reasonable and when it's not. just let me tell you woody allen's famous joke: "from the fact that you are paranoid, it doesn't mean that the world is not going to get you." the fact that a person is a conspiracy theorist does not mean that the person is wrong, even when the person is indeed crazy <laugh>. you see? so, wanting to be responsible and smart requires rejecting the formulaic thinking that conspiracy is always bad, politicization is always bad, war is always bad, peace is always good, dialogue is always good, creativity is always good, or authorship is always good. not always. we need to make an authorial judgment and take responsibility for it by defending or abandoning it in each particular case. and this process will define our fate and our reputation (bakhtin, 1999). the ontological dialogue values the freedom of non-dialogue in education: no-fault divorce this approach leads to what i call “ontological dialogue values” – values that support ontological dialogue in society. one such value is paradoxically the freedom of non-dialogue. this is especially important in schooling because conventional and progressive institutionalized education is so obsessed with forcing students to engage in “good dialogue,” considering how to create “good dialogue,” how to bridge polarized social groups, and so on. modern institutionalized education, except democratic one, often doesn't appreciate and doesn’t respect non-dialogue. it doesn’t respect a student’s right not to engage in the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e24 dialogue with the teacher and/or peers. i think we need to problematize our pedagogical desire for dialogue at all costs. after being a progressive educator for a very long time, i have finally realized what was wrong with my pedagogical desire to force “good dialogue” on my students. good dialogue is freedom, including the freedom of non-dialogue – forced dialogue is a misnomer. the insistence on “good dialogue” leads to forced collectivity and imprisonment of a student. each of my students should have a legitimate right to move away from me, their peers, the classroom, and/or the course itself. this is what i call “no-fault divorce.” this term comes from the legal sphere of marriage, where it has become recognized that the absence of no-fault divorce often leads to domestic abuse and violence. similarly, non-recognition of the students’ freedom of non-dialogue and non-faulty divorce often leads to pedagogical violence and abuse (matusov & sullivan, 2020). non-dialogic aspects of education another ontological dialogue value, which is also somewhat paradoxical, is the recognition of nondialogic aspects of education. as i already argued, learning and insights are non-dialogic in nature; although they can be dialogic, they are mostly not. and that part, we need to consider that as well. and again, i hope sasha [sidorkin] will do that, or maybe not, later in his keynote address. and, if it's not, that's fine as well. another non-dialogic aspect of education is an educatee’s noticing their own learning and insight. this notice may or may not be embedded in dialogue. learning and insight might not necessarily be dialogical, based on pattern-recognition and pattern-production (matusov, 2020b). finally, the way the educatees define their own organized education may or may not be dialogical. for example, if the educatees define their education as drilling, memorization, pattern recognition, training, and even socialization, it may not be very dialogical. however, suppose the educatees define their education as the critical examination of life, self, the world, and society. this type of education is highly dialogical (cf. socrates' motto: "the unexamined life is not worth living," plato & riddell, 1973). i want to remind you that what makes education highly dialogical is the educatee’s authorial value judgment about their learning and insight embedded in dialogue with the self and/or others. dialogue-disagreement: agonism i want to stress the third ontological dialogue value here: the focus on dialogue-disagreement rather than on dialogue-agreement. chantel mouffe, a belgian political scholar, examines liberal democracy. she introduced this notion of agonism (mouffe, 2000). it's kind of a relationship between friendly enemies, frenemies. mouffe sees that the task of liberal democracy is to turn antagonisms into agonisms. this task involves an appreciation of the opponent as an important contributor to their own position without necessarily agreeing with them, rather than annihilating this opponent. the primary focus of this agonistic challenge is not to annihilate the opponents or force them to agree with you but rather for you and them to reveal blind spots in each other’s positions that lead to self-growth. you are addressing your opponent’s challenge not necessarily to convince your opponent or to move them (and the political undecided) to your political camp but mostly to promote self-growth in yourself by making your position stronger for yourself, your proponents, and bystanders who may join your camp. i think mouffe’s political theory applies not only to liberal democracy but to scientific practice as defined by thomas kuhn (1996) – his idea of “scientific paradigms.” agonism is a targeted relationship between scientists from different paradigms constantly challenging each other. agonism is basically what dialogue-disagreement is. in dialogue-disagreement, the participants aim to explore their disagreements to promote self-growth and the growth of their positions. they do not the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e25 search for an agreement (matusov & marjanovic-shane, 2015). this term was introduced by ukrainian scholars from the school of dialogue of cultures in kharkiv, ukraine (kurganov, 2009; osetinsky, 2009; solomadin & kurganov, 2009; solomadin & matusov, 2009). unfortunately, i just want to tell you that my heart is bleeding because their school called "ochag" (meaning "hearth") was destroyed by the russian bombing, forcing many ochag teachers and students to move away to too many places, too many countries. some ochag teachers, students, and administrators remained in kharkiv; some people had to move to europe. they try to continue running the school online across different countries. the notion of dialoguedisagreement was coined by sergey kurganov (2009), one of the founders of ochag and the school of dialogue of cultures. it is based on the philosophical ideas of the soviet philosopher vladimir bibler (berlyand, 2009; bibler, 1988, 1993, 2009), who was influenced by the soviet philosopher of dialogism mikhail bakhtin (bibler, 1991). dialogization of antagonism: dialogue with evil the fourth ontological dialogue value i want to recognize is the dialogization of antagonism. as mentioned above, mouffe defined the democratic liberal project as transforming antagonisms into agonisms. i want to remind you that antagonism is just zero tolerance for another’s position, another’s paradigm, to another’s being because antagonism views the opponent as the evil obstacle to be destroyed. dialogization of antagonism reminds me of sasha [sidorkin]'s book, the title of a chapter in one of his books, “dialogue with evil” (sidorkin, 2002). “dialogue with evil” is probably the final formulation of the problem of the dialogization of antagonism. is it possible? is it always possible or even desirable? of course not. <<at the end of my talk, sasha sidorkin provided a historical anecdote about the impossibility of dialogue with evil, told him by haim gordon (1988), who was a student of martin buber, a philosopher of dialogism: “haim told me that buber actually had this fantasy when nazis came to power, that he would enter dialogue with himmler, the chief of ss. he was quickly disabused of that notion and had to flee [nazi germany], of course.>> however, dialogization of antagonism must be tried against all the odds. let’s consider the dialogization of war itself, which sounds bizarre: how systematic killings can be dialogized, but nevertheless, it’s necessary. because if you think about all these international war conventions about “civilized war,” “noncriminal war conduct,” “ethics of war,” and so on, which sound kind of crazy, but nonetheless, they’re very important. which war conduct is legitimate, and which is not? what weapons are legitimate to use, and under what conditions? what constitutes war crimes? who is the combatant? how to treat combatants and non-combatants? how can the international community make a legal judgment about war crimes? how should the international community investigate war crimes and punish war criminals? what if one side of the war conflict systematically violates the laws, norms, and traditions of war conduct – how the other side can legitimately respond without losing the war? and these debates are going on about this war, about any particular war. there have been so many debates about particular war events: whether they are legitimate or not legitimate and why from a moral or legal point of view. i think this is part of this dialogization of the war. and i think that's the important thing that is happening. demand for the responsibility of my authorship in a dialogue the fifth ontological dialogue value important to consider, in my view, is the authorship as a responsible deed (postupok, поступок, in russian). the authorship of my relationships with other people, my worldview positions, and my value judgments is the center of my life, to which i must respond when facing challenges of my authorship from others and myself. this is especially true when i'm standing by my authorship. why is that? what is important? why is it especially important in the age of post-enlightenment? the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e26 this is important because post-enlightenment is responding to the enlightenment project’s flaws. the enlightenment project constantly tries to find objective, thus desubjectivized, formulae of morality, truth, good judgment, etc. while kant tried to find universal formulae, some other people (e.g., sociocultural scholars) right now are trying to find contextual formulae, conditional formulae, sociocultural formulae, but still non-personal, objective, positivistic formulae, rather than an authorial dialogic response (matusov, 2023b). an authorial dialogic response consists not of objectivity but responsibility – taking personal responsibility for my deeds and my authorship in dialogue with the self (i.e., conscience) and/or others. taking personal responsibility is always risky for my fate, my prestige, my relationship with other people, my credibility, possible punishment of me, and so on. i must accept the demand for my responsibility in dialogue. what does it mean “to accept the demand for my responsibility in dialogue?” i think it means that my authorship and especially my deeds – my values, my judgments, and the consequences – will be challenged by myself and others in dialogue. and taking responsibility, in this case, means for me to engage in that dialogue in a serious and honest way. this is my understanding of bakhtin's notion that "i don't have an alibi in being" (bakhtin, 1993) and that i must commit myself to reply to the dialogic challenges of my deeds: my actions, inactions, words, and silence. avoiding impersonal bird’s eye views finally, i think the biggest challenge for me and whoever wants to join the post-enlightenment project is to decolonize myself from the hegemony of this enlightenment project rooted in paternalism, necessities, objectivities, distrusts, fears, anxieties, shackles of the given, and so on, while not to commit myself to the opposite pitfall of mysticism, rejection of truth, fake news, alternative facts, manipulations, rejection of objectivity and positivism, and so on, which, i suspect, are the shadows of the enlightenment project. the enlightenment project is also based on the idea of a constant impersonal bird's eye view of everything. rejection of impersonal bird's eye-views is extremely important for post-enlightenment education. by the way, the beautiful work of benedict anderson about “imagined communities” just comes to my mind (anderson, 1991). in this book on the origin of nationalism, anderson argued that the enlightenment project had generated a new type of narrative involving the bird's eye view of everything. in his book, anderson analyzed the people's accounts of traveling to exotic places before and after the age of enlightenment. he showed that from the beginning of the age of enlightenment, people’s travel narratives were structured by these powerful, ubiquitous impersonal bird's eye-view descriptions. before enlightenment, travelogues were personal, subjective, overly biased, and very particular observations and commentaries of the lives of others. very, very interesting. the post-enlightenment framework guides us away from the enlightenment grand narrative. it moves back to more person-centered dialogic accounts, personal responsibility, centered-in-the-world grounded perspectives, etc. let me finish with my traditional question: what do you think? thank you. conference discussion i included only a part of the conference discussion here, challenging some of the points from my keynote address. the charge of individualism mariëtte de haan: thank you, eugene, for a wonderful presentation. i indeed need more time to think. i just wanted to say that i think it's very thought-provoking, but i can't really figure it out. i mean, i agree with a lot of what you say, but i struggle with your perspective. when you come up with a personcentered perspective on education or learning, i struggle with that because i think i agree with the basic ideas that you share on learning and everything. but somehow, i also think that we need the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e27 collectives in order to solve these very complex problems. so, it seems that you try to solve these issues too much at the level of the individual's cell. so, where are the collectives? so, this is one of my thoughts, but i really like your lecture, and i want to think more about them and hopefully dialogue more about these ideas. and i've really enjoyed it. eugene matusov: thanks a lot, mariëtte! i want to make two comments in response to your charge of my post-enlightenment paradigm in individualism. first, i feel a little bit handicapped by using english for my presentation because, in russian, it would be very different. english is caught in a bad dualism between the individual and the social. in english, there is either one or another. individual means indivisible. it’s an indivisible entity, atomistic. and, of course, that's the last thing that i want to imply about the atomism of humans. the russian or slavic term is ‘lichnost,' which can be loosely translated in english as “personality,” “personness,” or “personhood.” lichnost’ is neither the individual nor the social. lichnost’ is a unique universe constituted by dialogue with other lichnosts. you value your children, spouse, friends, and family not because they are similar but because they are special and unique to you. lichnost’ is authorial, constantly transcending the given: given culture, society, biology, technology, values, etc. lichnost’ is committed to the responsibility of seriously answering to other people and/or themselves who challenge its deeds and words. because they are lichonsts to you. lichnost’ is social, but nevertheless, it cannot be reduced to sociality. the postenlightenment paradigm focuses on the issue of dignity as the primary lichnost-relationship with other people. that's one comment. my second comment is about my autobiographical groundedness. i came to the united states from the soviet union, where the biggest problem i experienced, one of the biggest oppressions that i experienced, was forced collectivism. of course, when i came to this society, alienation and loneliness were one of the biggest problems. thus, we – you, mariëtte, and i – are kind of moving in the opposite direction culturally. i don't know how you, mikhail [gradovski, who also came from the ussr], ana [marjanovic-shane, from yugoslavia], and sasha [sidorkin, from the ussr] feel about it because you, too, were coming from this kind of culture and history of forced collectivism. but i feel like "society, leave me alone, please" – that's my biggest desire. yes, i don't care much about this loneliness. i don't have this loneliness. i want the opposite thing. i still experience forced collectivism even in the united states, this oppression of forced collectivism. that's probably legitimate cultural and autobiographical tensions, mariëtte, between us. these tensions might lead to philosophical differences driven by different concerns and sensibilities. i think our differences are valid, coming from different histories of us. mariëtte de haan: yeah. i think this is super interesting. i just want to [consider it] from the other side, thinking from the other side. i don't believe that getting together is a bad force in humanity. because i think that we also need a collective and we need each other to build these utopians, so i do agree with the danger of utopia – utopia can become dystopic, et cetera. i mean, the issue is very complex, of course. but to break it out to individuals and autonomy, i don't think this is the only answer. i think that has its own problems of loneliness and, you know, we are very social beings. so, an ideology of a better world should be built from that nature – we are stronger together, you know? so, i don't think this is the right direction, really. i think you know what i mean. so that is a little comment that i wanted to make, so we need to think more. but i really like the ingredients that you brought in, eugene; it was super interesting. thank you very much. eugene matusov: the enlightenment’s primary human relationship is a collaboration among people who try to solve their common problems together, amplify and complement each other, and achieve oneness (matusov & pease-alvarez, 2020). the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e28 the post-enlightenment’s primary human relationship is dialogue, inextinguishable interest in others, in others’ uniqueness, opaqueness, authorship, disagreement, and principled disunity. the dialogic relationship is the relationship of dignity. i’m not against collaboration occasionally, but i see it as the primarily instrumental relationship among people. i argue that human excitement is not to solve important problems together but to dialogue with one another through authorial self-actualization. why is dialogue so difficult to achieve in education? sasha sidorkin: thank you, eugene. i’m pleased that, like myself, you've begun contemplating the constraints of a dialogical worldview. understanding this is crucial, i believe. i was a student of haim gordon, who was in turn, a student of martin buber. haim told me that buber nurtured a fanciful thought of initiating dialogue with himmler, the ss chief when the nazis seized power. he was rapidly disillusioned and had to escape, understandably. however, i think what you're alluding to is the societal ideal that dialogical thinking proposes, correct? it's evidently not classical liberalism, where autonomy is the focus. yet it isn't what one might term progressivism, structuralism, or what i would refer to as a neo-marxist approach, where personality and personhood, or 'lichnost’,' are defined by social structures. living in california, many of my colleagues and friends are progressivists who believe everything is about the structures. i often have to intervene, reminding them that a significant number of russians have been traumatized by such a marxist outlook on life. i don't subscribe to that ideology, namely progressive neo-marxist structuralism. however, i believe the contemporary political strife can provide a midpoint where there's an emphasis on both freedom, as you mentioned, and engagement with others, or 'being-with-others'. ontologically, being with others, i feel, does a more effective job in abstract terms. but once you delve into practical issues, such as the types of schools we want to establish, the dialogical relationship becomes significantly more complex and harder to realize. i'm unsure of the reasons behind this. i don’t have a definitive answer. it’s just an observation that what you’re suggesting is that the theory of dialogue creates an incredibly attractive ideal. however, it struggles to realize it within the realities of our world. it's a beautiful icon, yet reaching it appears exceptionally challenging. i'm intrigued to hear your thoughts on why this might be the case. eugene matusov: thank you, sasha. again, being grounded in bakhtin, i don't know if it’s a metaphor or, maybe, a conceptualization of lichnost' as authorship. bakhtin was interested in the author. it's like people authoring their lives, authoring their relationships, authoring their education, and authoring their responsibility. these processes of authorship define this notion of the lichnost' for me. paradoxically, as the famous german writer thomas mann pointed out, sigmund freud insisted that a person is defined not so much by their past but by their vision of the future – i’d add their authorial vision of the future: ”the free folk are the people of a future freed from fear and hate, a ripe for peace” (mann, 1956/1936, p. 115). and in terms of that, sasha, i can sense a very interesting tension in your question about why it’s so difficult to achieve dialogue in educational practice. mikhail [gradovski], ana [marjanovic-shane], you, and i, we all came from the places of a failed utopia. the communist utopia turns out to be a kind of dystopia. the relationship between utopia and dystopia is very important. our autobiographical and historical trauma of the communist dystopia leads us to a temptation to avoid any utopia, to limit ourselves to the given, to the given practice, given institutions, given values. pardon its sexism and classism, but i want to remind you of a memorable quote from a terrific novel, the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e29 “a gentleman in moscow,” “a gentleman seeks dignity in undignified circumstances” (towles, 2016). a gentleman preoccupies with the given present. on the other hand, i want to remind us of the work “the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity” by david graeber and david wengrow (graeber & wengrow, 2021). unfortunately, david graber, who was an anthropologist, anarchist, and a leader of the leaderless occupy movement (graeber, 2013), recently died of covid 19 in his academic prime. graber defined freedom in three aspects. imagining and trying for a better life is one of them. thus, imagining and trying utopia is an important and necessary part of freedom. many of us, people of eastern europe, have developed utopia-phobia. according to graeber, this trauma makes us unfree. of course, our historical and autobiographical experience teaches us, people from eastern europe, that we need to be extra careful to avoid an uncritical acceptance of a beautiful utopia, this attractive paradise, which might end up us in hell. but i agree with david graeber, that if we stop imagining utopia, our better life, we will become unfree. what is utopia? ‘utopia’ is a very interesting greek word. i wonder if it has at least two meanings (matusov, 2020a). one, it means “a better place.” “utopia” is a compound word. it consists of the word "eu,” which is latinized greek “ev,” meaning “noble” or “good.” it is like in my first name: eugene (literally, “born noble” in greek). the second word in the compound “utopia” is “tope,” meaning “place.” thus, “utopia” means “a better place.” i’d call it "evtopia" to distinguish from the second meaning. the second possible meaning is “u-topia." “u-topia” is denying the place, this current place, "not from this place." both imagining and trying a better life and rejecting the oppressive given are important, especially in the context of dialogue, as defining the desirable human relationship. rejection of evtopia and u-topia is an imprisonment trap of unfreedom. without utopia, we would hang over the cliff of the given, being afraid of change because things might get worse if we try to change them. it’s like in russia now; many people feel that there is no alternative to putin and that changing putin may make things worse. or, like in the time of slavery, unslavery was unthinkable because slavery had accompanied humanity for several millennia and probably felt like being the necessary evil forever from the dawn of humanity. back then, at the end of the eighteenth, beginning of the nineteenth century, sober realists, like thomas jefferson, tried to humanize15 slavery, while radical utopists, like john brown16, tried to abolish it here and now. i wonder if similar tension between diverse tranformationist approaches goes on in education now. let me provide a more recent example relevant to social sciences. sociologist will van den hoonaard wrote a terrific book titled “the seduction of ethics: transforming the social sciences” and published it in 2011. in this book, van den hoonaard provided a deep and grounded critical analysis of the institutionalized practice of institutional review boards17 (irb) that consider the ethics and, based on this review, permit or forbid social science research in anglo-speaking countries, mainly in canada, uk, usa, and australia. the author concludes that the irbs distort and undermine research practices and science itself, paternalize both social science researchers and their research participants, lead to “a homogenization of research methods and the pauperization of the social sciences” (van den hoonaard, 2011, p. 286), do not provide any evidence that the irbs fulfill their mission, trivialize and hijack the ethic research issues to allow institutions to cover “their ass,” and 15 i don’t use quotation marks for “realists” and “humanize” here to represent their historical sensibilities. 16 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/john_brown_(abolitionist) 17 these boards have different names in different countries (van den hoonaard, 2011). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/john_brown_(abolitionist) the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e30 so on. while reading this book, i impatiently waited for the last chapter, where the author promised to suggest how to “puncture the gloom.” and yet, he started his chapter with this disclaimer: while lamenting the particular effects of research-ethics codes on social science research, one cannot take a stand on whether ethics codes should be either retained or dismissed. to hope for, or to engineer, the collapse of ethics codes (because they do not serve the social sciences well) is unrealistic. the codes express the temper of the times and are here to stay (van den hoonaard, 2011, p. 287). the lack of bravery, lack of authorial agency, the lack of creative imagination – not giving oneself the permission for the creative and critical imagination of addressing research moral issues with irb gatekeeping or ethics codification, – the acceptance of oppressive “realism,” – in short, the acceptance of one’s own unfreedom often leads to the one’s platitude, if not, to plain stultification. thus, the author, will van den hoonaard, ended his otherwise super informed and thoughtful brilliant book by providing very unconvincing, dull, and, if not, bureaucratic suggestions of how to reform the irbs: provide more resources to the irb, make researchers know the ethic policies in advance of their research proposals, commit the universities to the goodwill of following ethics rather their egoistic interests, etc. (van den hoonaard, 2011, pp. 289-292). in my judgment, van den hoonaard’s proposal is much more unrealistic than considering going away from the irs and coded research ethics in the sense of the goals of the research ethics reform that van den hoonaard wants to achieve. elsewhere, i called the sad phenomenon of a thoughtful person’s hanging on to oppressive realism for dear life an “awareness without responsibility” (matusov, 2009a, pp. 261-263). the phenomenon of awareness without responsibility involves a person being fully aware of the oppressive reality but refusing to address it, refusing to dream of how to transcend this oppressive reality because of hanging on to the person’s dear ideas (e.g., “realism” in the case of van den hoonaard). the awareness without responsibility is another birthmark of enlightenment, as well as being guided by the worst-case scenarios and paternalism embedded in the irb institutional practices. my warning to myself is that the ideology of dialogue can create a terrible dystopia. the history of the twentieth century is a huge cemetery of people who were sacrificed to these utopias turned to be dystopias: communist, fascist, antiracist, and religious. and, unfortunately, this history has not been over for us. we need to constantly be aware of that. and that's why, by the way, sasha, i so much like your writings because you constantly warn us against this dystopia. in the name of utopian dialogue, we can surely create a terrible dystopia. but, at the same time, this warning should not make us paralyzed, and unable to take our freedom and responsibility to imagine and to try a better world to live. elsewhere, i argued that to avoid utopia becoming dystopia, there must be an inbuilt open path out of this utopia when it starts feeling oppressive to its participants (matusov, 2020a). utopia must be humble rather than dogmatic and fanatical. back to your question, sasha, of why dialogue feels so impractical in education. in short, i think it is because current educational practice is very undialogical, if not antidialogical. it was not by chance that bakhtin used conventional institutionalized education as his example of extreme monologism (bakhtin, 1999; matusov, 2009a). educational practice based on paternalism driven by enlightenment robs its students of both genuine education, which can be only self-education and genuine dialogue. so, i want to redefine your question from “what kind of schools do you want to build?” where a “you” is an educator, school administrator, parent, politician, government bureaucrat, the stand of dialogic pedagogy in our times of peace and war eugene matusov dialogic pedagogy: a journal for studies of dialogic education | http:dpj.pitt.edu doi: 10.5195/dpj.2024.598 | vol. 12 no. 1 (2024) e31 taxpayer, employer, etc., to where “you” is a student, learner, or educatee. or, should it even be called “school”? references anderson, b. 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